How a Leaf Thinks Its Root: Continuity, Experience, Thought

This is a study of the implications of continuity for experience, where “continuity” and “experience” have the significations given to them in the American tradition of philosophy in such thinkers as C.S. Peirce, John Dewey, and A.N. Whitehead. Rather than define these terms as I have done many times before on this blog and in my glossary, I will instead exemplify them through their use in am example that should indicate the unusualness of their denotation.

The leaf becomes “aware” of its root, for example, through the capillary actions that bring it sustenance. It need not “know” what its root is; it needs no idea that mirrors the facts of roots. It needs only the continuous connection and the ability to make use of it. Yes, this implies that the leaf’s being aware of its root is multiply realizable; the root could in fact be many different things, but the only thing that matters in this sense of “awareness” is a functional identity, not an essential one.

Likewise, a human becomes aware of the world through a continuous connection with it. Knowledge is not a matter of ideas mirroring facts and is more than a formal system of justifying a belief. Knowledge is demonstrated through the ability to use one’s connection with the world to produce an anticipated effect; all knowledge is a form of abduction. Yet, going deeper, Dewey claims that all reflective thought is abduction in How We Think. We encounter something in the world, and the encounter is felt as a pervasive quality of the situation, we might become drawn to the encounter and experience or think it as a meaning. To experience something as meaningful is to anticipate how to interact in the encounter, whereas familiarity with an encounter implies a richness of meaning. However, the more familiar something is, the less aware we are of this richness, as its novelty has been bled and absorbed into habitual actions rather than careful and curious ones.

In the leafy and human cases, there is no need for the correspondence of an idea to its reference. Experience is informative not because of some mirroring, but because the occurence of an event may be taken as a sign for the future. The reliable ability to recognize an event as a sign for the future is the basis of meaning and how an experience become one of knowing rather than mere experiencing. This is a non-representational and non-cognitivist understanding of experience that is not exclusive to humans, since anything that can transact or interact in nature can “experience.” Given that definition, in principle everything that exists can “experience,” and this definition places the human conscious experience in continuity with the rest of nature. It is no longer a mysterious, unexplainable, or dualistic notion.

Object-Oriented Philosophy and Politics

I have been watching the blogosphere debates between OOP and its detractors on the issue of politics for the last two months. For the most part, I have been at the sidelines, since I felt I had nothing to contribute. Finally, I do have something to note now that things have calmed down.

Why do I get the feeling that OOP is being hit with a beloved cudgel? You know, those common attacks that any tradition of philosophy enjoys leveraging against its opponents. Onto-theology. Correlationism. Dualism. Under/Over-mining. Lack of clarity. Unsupported by science. Honestly, I really cannot comment on those debates, but it has become obvious that the beatin’ stick is being wielded by many. Does OOP deserve it? I’m not sure, but I always get a little wary when your opponent selects their favorite petard before they hoist you up the flagpole.

There is the issue of valuation. I have brought that up, because it is unclear how OOP can speak of normative value without either merely asserting it, or running into the naturalist fallacy. I leave the issue to scholars with axes to grind.

What’s the take home point? Be skeptical when anyone leverages their favored critique, as they likely have spent more time wielding it than in identifying proper targets of their ire.

The Experience of Truth

Below I discuss the basics of truth and experiencing truth in John Dewey. While reading it, I think it best to keep in mind the modern empiricist tradition, its culmination in Kant, and the alternative solution to Kant proposed by Husserlian phenomenology. Dewey takes another route via Peirce.

The denotative method is Dewey's mature method for understanding experience. It articulates a phenomenological attitude in which we ask how things are experienced, as being what. It opposes overlaying an experience with a theory of experience. The attitude notes experience in its immediacy, which is not primordially true or false, since experience becomes true through operations upon it that integrate the prior experience into a new one. If the truth of an experience is sought, the inherent indeterminateness of the situation leads it to be questionable, and this contextually unique quality guides the development of inquiry. The denotative method is not a Cartesian procedure that determines the truth of experience by external criteria; truth and falsity must be internal to experience to be experienced as such. Though this might sound like idealism, wherein truth is a mental category as opposed to a worldly one, Dewey redefines “experience” to mean the transaction of things in nature. The experience of truth is neither an internal phenomenon of a subject nor a metaphysical description of an object, but a product of human and environmental interaction. A true idea is one that proposes how to act in a situation to produce the anticipated effect, which is to be a demonstrated abductive hypothesis, and the question of whether the idea is like what it represents is not immediately relevant.

Must Phenomenology Remain First-Personal?

Is the logic of the phenomenon fully contained in the experience of it?

A friend asked me a very pointed question today. It was a fantastic and clear question. In short, he implied that I was using the word “phenomenology” in a very strange way. He is absolutely right. As I have been using the term, it has almost no overlap with “phenomenology” of the Husserlian tradition. Why? Not only are the methodologies incompatible, but they are not even aimed at studying the same thing. Wait, what?

Phenomenology is the study of conscious phenomena. In continental philosophy since Husserl, that is almost always understood to mean that the phenomenologist takes a critical first-person standpoint. Given the experience of a conscious event, it can be analyzed in the present or from memory as the analyst focuses a ray of attention on the event.  Yet this is not how I have been using the term.

If phenomenology is the study of conscious phenomena, we need not always take only the standpoint of first-person or immediate experience. Given an immediate experience, we can ask the question of the conditions that transcend that experience. Rather than as a classic transcendental question, we can ask that as an abductive and scientific question. This is precisely what I mean when I talk about the “unification of metaphysics and phenomenology.” It is really a unified method for speculative process metaphysics that ask how this phenomenon might have come to be experienced. It is closer to a Heideggerian or existential phenomenology, except that it admits methods that he would never condone.

Why should be only study conscious phenomena from an immediate perspective? I offer an alternative and complementary analysis; I do not think that “phenomenological pragmatism” is truly offering the same thing as the phenomenologies of the Husserlian tradition. I do not think that it can and retain a robust living connection to classical pragmatism.

Ennis Critiques OOO and Levi Bryant

Paul Ennis of AnotherHeideggerBlog posts a script of a critique of object-oriented ontology given in person to Levi Bryant at a Dublin conference. It's really interesting and provocative reading.

Thanks to Adam Robert for the link.

How Nature Thinks: New Introduction

I have rewritten the introduction to my book, How Nature Thinks, since it moved too slowly while being insufficiently direct and clear. I share with you the first paragraph.

Tradition teaches that intelligence and impulsive desire are contraries, wherein intelligence must subjugate desire. However, studies over the last century have established that we are bodies first and minds second. Believing that intelligence must conquer desire is akin to expecting the tree to conquer its roots. It is an absurdity, but one that we are still trying to comprehend, since our intuitions lead us to believe that we cannot be responsible individuals if we cannot control our desires. John Dewey insists that we have misunderstood the problem. Intelligence and agency arise from well-ordered desiring, such as a moral character that bends impulse to productive purposes. We should improve the soil from which individuals grow, because the roots of a good character are the environment, culture, and community. Terroir gives us our characteristic intelligence, and a bad ground can twist and corrupt it. Dewey approached the problem as an educator, a champion of democracy, a philosopher of culture, and a scientist.

To recap, the topic of my dissertation is the interrelation of "desire," or motivated human purposiveness,  and experienced meaning. In truth, the whole theory is analogous to a Freud's theory of repression, although without the notion of a subconscious, etc.

What You Don't Get about Process Philosophy

Today I will talk about probability, because most philosophers interpret “probability” in logical rather than mathematical terms. When most people think “probable,” they have such a narrow definition in mind that they are foreclosed from comprehending the deeper implications of some philosophical theories. I hope that readers might forgive me for the presumptuous title of the post, but this has been a communication-stopper for discussions of process, emergence, time, continuity, and teleology for far too long.

For instance, a friend of mind, when hearing that I planned to write this, quipped that A.N. Whitehead has frequently been misunderstood--and I would add C.S. Peirce as well--because he was writing as a mathematician, an algebraist especially, and thus readers not trained in mathematics may misunderstand the subtleties of concepts of a mathematical origin. For example, "continuity" is a mathematical concept that most misinterpret as meaning "discrete continuum." Process philosophy cannot be understood unless one has the mathematical concept of continuity, else they do not fully grasp what it means for a process or time to be continuous. Moreover, in my own work, John Dewey describes an event in terms of frequency structures in Experience and Nature, and I wonder if one reason that reviewers seem puzzled over my articulations of Dewey is perhaps because they do not realize the pertinence of probability structures.  Last, but not least, those interested in emergence would have a deeper insight into "emergent teleology," which is a form of probable causation, is they realized that a telos may be described through a probability function. In my exchanges with Levi Bryant, he appeared to miss this point entirely, as he accused myself and others of Platonism.

In philosophy, there are three common definitions of probability: logical, physical, and technological or practical. A proposition is logically possible if it does not violate the laws of logic, which conventionally include the law of non-contradiction, law of excluded middle, and law of identity. Different logical systems may include more laws or modify standard interpretations of the three basic laws. A proposition is physically possible if it does not violate the laws of physics, which are not logically necessary, but are often understood to pertain necessarily in the actual world. A proposition is technologically or practically possible if it is physically possible, and its realization is merely a matter of knowledge, technique, materials, etc.

None of these three common philosophical definitions of possibility pertain to mathematical possibility in anything other than a trivial and uninformative way. Mathematical possibility is about the structure of possibility regardless of whether it pertains in any actual world, and is a species of logical possibility. Mathematical possibility, or more commonly denoted “probability” is about the frequency of an event given some axiomatic assumptions that define a “space” or what philosophers might call a collection of “possible worlds.”

Assuming that we are talking about a continuity of events (a “continuous distribution” in math-speak), we can visual a “structure” of possibility by graphing it. The most well known such graph is the “bell curve,” which might also be called a Gaussian or normal distribution. What the graph tries to communicate is that that most events occur and display whatever traits are being measured around some normal range indicated by the peak of the graph. The further something is from normal, whatever that is, the far less likely it is to occur, which is included by the rapidly declining slope or “tails” of the graph.

However, this is not the only kind of probability distribution. Consider a poisson distribution. The graph is skewed. In a poisson distribution, it is not necessary that the frequency of events be symmetrically “balanced” around some point or common occurence.

My point is not to teach a lesson in probability. My point is to indicate that most people unfamiliar with mathematics think “uniform” or “normal” probability distributions when asked to think about probability. They think in terms of coin-tosses or of the one-time odds of their favorite football time winning a match. But those are singularly calculated events. If we were to model the likelihood that a team wins any given match against various opponents, the graph is not likely to look uniform. Probability has a structure. In mathematics, one way to capture and visualize that structure is through graphing probability distributions as shown. Moreover, the more conditions that are added, especially erratic conditions, the more gnarly a probability distribution may become—very far from intuitive. Many commonly recurring probability distributions have names, as do the examples I give, wherein to name a probability structure is to indicate what the structure is, e.g., the relative frequency of events.

How does this compare to logical possibility? Logical possibility says nothing about the structure of probability, e.g., the frequency of an event occuring given certain conditions. Only the mathematical concept of possibility indicates anything about structure, e.g., a function represented as a probability distribution.

When I write about “probability structures,” peer interlocutors, reviewers of my articles, etc. rarely have any idea what I mean by it. It took me quite awhile to realize that knowledge of probability and statistics, and thus working knowledge of probability structures, is uncommon among philosophers. We should change that and require some discussion in any advanced logic class, I propose, else it is likely that only philosophers in certain subfields will have very valuable concepts at their command.