Mind-independent Reality Research Articles

Prolegomenon to a Differential Theory of Narrative

Prolegomenon to a Differential Theory of Narrative Ridvan Askin (bio) The object of study of this article is narrative.1 My aim is to sketch what exactly constitutes the necessary and sufficient building blocks of narrative as such. The article’s concern is thus with the ontological build-up and status of narrative. In this, it argues against narratology’s prevalent anti-metaphysical Kantianism and for a Deleuze-inflected metaphysical conception of narrative. My account unfolds according to the following trajectory: first, I stage a critique of narratology’s default Kantianism; second, I formulate an alternative Deleuzian program; third, I present short exemplary readings of three literary narratives, two contemporary novels and a nineteenth-century short story. The concept of narrative that ultimately emerges from this trajectory is differential, immanent, univocal, unconscious, and non-human. 1. Narratology and Metaphysics But why Kant and why Deleuze? In which sense is it possible to claim that narratology defaults to a Kantian anti-metaphysics? And why should Deleuze be particularly suitable as an alternative? It all starts with Kant’s limitation of the field of reason’s legitimate inquiry to reason itself inaugurated by his (in)famous Copernican Revolution: in Kant, everything plays out within the human mind. This is true of both the empirical, the realm of experience, and the transcendental, the realm of the conditions of experience. Kant conceives of both realms as immanent to consciousness and thus relegates things in themselves to an inaccessible outside. With Kant, even though things in themselves are thinkable, they remain unknowable. Kant’s transcendental idealism fundamentally constrains the powers of thought, limiting its legitimate field of enquiry to itself: for thought, there is no outside of thought. While Kant himself does not demolish the realm of the in-itself, he exorcizes it: ever since Kant, any in-itself turns out to be always already for-us. Kant achieves the all-pervasiveness of consciousness. In fact, he effectively facilitates the reign of experience and of representation—despite, or, as we will shortly see, because of his transcendental. It is not hard to see how this philosophical program underpins most narratological explanatory frameworks that cast narrative precisely as representational and experiential with no purchase on any mind-independent reality whatsoever.2 This is exemplarily manifest in the current paradigm [End Page 155] of cognitive narratology. This exemplarity of cognitive narratology with respect to Kantian anti-metaphysics is no coincidence since Kant basically “founds cognitive science as we know it today” (Dunham, Grant, and Watson 98). In this vein, narrative is taken to be fundamentally grounded in human experience and consciousness dealing in mental representations only. Narrative is thus always correlated to human consciousness. It is this “nexus of narrative and mind” (Herman, Basic 137) that is deeply troublesome and unsatisfactory. There are two reasons for this: one has to do with Kantianism’s intrinsic deficiency, the other with actual literary narratives’ anti-Kantian performance. As to Kantianism’s intrinsic deficiency, it goes by the name of Quentin Meillassoux’s recent coinage of “correlationism” (5). Correlationism precisely names the essentially Kantian operation of turning things into the correlate of consciousness. In a recent essay, Ray Brassier formulates an exceptionally clear characterization of the correlationist argument. In the words of Brassier, correlationism is “that form of argumentation that slides from the true claim that we need a concept of mind-independent reality in order to make claims about the latter to the false claim that the very concept of mind-independent reality suffices to convert the latter into a concept, which is by definition mind-dependent. This is the fatal non-sequitur at the root of every variant of correlationism” (64). With respect to narrative, we could then say that while a concept of narrative is necessarily mind-dependent, narrative in-itself is not. The question, of course, is whether there is any good reason to think that narrative is extra-mental. Indeed, such a claim seems to be absurd. How could human consciousness not be decisive for the being of narrative? In narratives, surely, some consciousness is telling something to some other consciousness. How not to speak of consciousness? Yet narrative cannot be limited to the workings...

‘Real’ information is not flat – and why it matters

We consider Luciano Floridi's proposal for a structural realism based on an Informational Structural Realism which, as he describes in his book (p. 339): ‘As a form of realism … is committed to the existence of a mind-independent reality addressed by, and constraining knowledge’. In doing this, we inform and reform aspects of the argument within a mathematical and, specifically, computability theoretic context.

Despair and the determinate negation of Brandom’s Hegel

In this paper, I contend that Brandom’s interpretive oversights leave his inferentialist program vulnerable to Hegelian critique. My target is Brandom’s notion of “conceptual realism,” or the thesis that the structure of mind-independent reality mimics the structure of thought. I show, first, that the conceptual realism at the heart of Brandom’s empiricism finds root in his interpretation of Hegel. I then argue that conceptual realism is incompatible with Hegel’s thought, since the Jena Phenomenology, understood as a “way of despair,” includes a critique of the philosophical framework upon which conceptual realism relies. Finally, I offer the Hegelian critique of Brandom that results from these textual infidelities.

Between Naturalism and Theism: Johnston and Putnam on the Reality of God

The essay compares mark Johnston’s and Hilary Putnam’s approaches to the philosophy of religion in the framework of Charles Taylor’s claim that in modernity ‘intermediate positions’ between theism and naturalism become increasingly attractive for a growing amount of people. both authors show that intermediate positions between naturalism and theism are conceptually plausible without having to deny that the conflicting worldviews are about a mind-independent reality. Johnston bridges the gap between naturalism and theism by developing a panentheistic worldview, Putnam denies the necessity of bridging it by choosing an attitude toward the world that allows for the coexistence of at least partly incommensurable conceptualizations of what there is. In both cases the conceptual exploration of intermediate positions is fed by the authors’ commitment to intellectual integrity in coming to terms with the tension between scientific explanation and religious interpretation in the age of applied sciences.

Do we (seem to) perceive passage?

I examine some recent claims put forward by L. A. Paul, Barry Dainton and Simon Prosser, to the effect that perceptual experiences of movement and change involve an (apparent) experience of ‘passage’, in the sense at issue in debates about the metaphysics of time. Paul, Dainton and Prosser all argue that this supposed feature of perceptual experience – call it a phenomenology of passage – is illusory, thereby defending the view that there is no such a thing as passage, conceived of as a feature of mind-independent reality. I suggest that in fact there is no such phenomenology of passage in the first place. There is, however, a specific structural aspect of the phenomenology of perceptual experiences of movement and change that can explain how one might mistakenly come to the belief that such experiences do involve a phenomenology of passage.

Passionate Epistemology: Kierkegaard on Skepticism, Approximate Knowledge, and Higher Existential Truth

In this article, I probe the extent of Kierkegaard’s skepticism and irrationalism by examining the nature and limits of his “objective” and “approximate” knowledge. I argue that, for Kierkegaard, certain objective knowledge of contingent being is impossible and “approximate” knowledge of the same is funded by the volitional passion of belief. But, while Kierkegaard endorses severe epistemic restrictions, he rejects wholesale skepticism, allowing for genuine “approximate” knowledge of mind-independent reality. However, I further argue that we cannot ignore his criticisms of such knowledge because of its intrinsic dangers, and because epistemic limitations are crucial in developing religious selfhood before God.

Passionate Epistemology: Kierkegaard on Skepticism, Approximate Knowledge, and Higher Existential Truth

In this article, I probe the extent of Kierkegaard's skepticism and irrationalism by examining the nature and limits of his “objective” and “approximate” knowledge.1 I argue that, for Kierkegaard, certain objective knowledge of contingent being is impossible and “approximate” knowledge of the same is funded by the volitional passion of belief. But, while Kierkegaard endorses severe epistemic restrictions, he rejects wholesale skepticism, allowing for genuine “approximate” knowledge of mind-independent reality. However, I further argue that we cannot ignore his criticisms of such knowledge because of its intrinsic dangers, and because epistemic limitations are crucial in developing religious selfhood before God.

‘Ontological’ arguments from experience: Daniel A. Dombrowski, Iris Murdoch, and the nature of divine reality

AbstractDombrowski and Murdoch offer versions of the ontological argument which aim to avoid two types of objection – those concerned with the nature of the divine, and those concerned with the move from an abstract concept to a mind-independent reality. For both, the nature of the concept of God/Good entails its instantiation, and both supply a supporting argument from experience. It is only Murdoch who successfully negotiates the transition from an abstract concept to the instantiation of that concept, however, and this is achieved by means of an ontological argument from moral experience which, in a reversal of the Kantian doctrine, depends ultimately on a form of the cosmological argument.

Luhmann's Ontology

Although Luhmann rejects ontology as a pre-modern artifact of “Old Europe,” his constructivist epistemology must presuppose a “reality that remains unknown.” Such an unknown and unknowable reality can neither be represented nor serve as the immediate cause of knowledge production, even if it remains as a posited condition of possibility. This paper investigates Luhmann’s reliance on second order cybernetics, especially Gotthard Günther’s reading of Hegel, in his abbreviated critique of ontology and in his advocacy of constructivist epistemology, while also comparing his results with Bernard d’Espagnat’s philosophical interpretation of quantum physics. To understand the consistency of Luhmann’s “ontological commitment” (despite his denials), it is crucial to distinguish between a mind-independent reality (that remains unknowable) and the empirical reality of observations (not entities), as explicated by d’Espagnat.

Reading Derrida on Mathematics

This article engages with the claims of Anne Brubaker that “[n]ow that the dust has settled after the so-called ‘Science Wars’ […] it is an opportune time to reassess the ways in which poststructural theory both argues persuasively for mathematics as a culturally embedded practice – a method as opposed to a metaphysics – and, at the same time, reinscribes realist notions of mathematics as a noise-free description of a mind independent reality.” Through a close re-reading of Jacques Derrida’s work I argue, in alliance with Vicki Kirby’s critique of the work of Brian Rotman, not only that Brubaker misunderstands Derrida’s “writing” but also that her argument constitutes a typical instance of much wider misreadings of Derrida and “poststructuralism” across a range of disciplines in terms of the ways in which her text re-institutes the very stabilities it itself attributes to Derrida’s texts.

Quantum Physics and Reality

Contrary to classical physics, which was strongly objective i.e. could be interpreted as a description of mind-independent reality, standard quantum mechanics (SQM) is only weakly objective, that is to say, its statements, though intersubjectively valid, still merely refer to operations of the mind. Essentially, in fact, they are predictive of observations. On the view that SQM is universal conventional realism is thereby refuted. It is shown however that this does not rule out a broader form of realism, called here 'open realism', restoring the notion of mind-independent reality.

Knowledge and Error in Early Chinese Thought

Drawing primarily on the Mozǐ and Xunzǐ, the article proposes an account of how knowledge and error are understood in classical Chinese epistemology and applies it to explain the absence of a skeptical argument from illusion in early Chinese thought. Arguments from illusion are associated with a representational conception of mind and knowledge, which allows the possibility of a comprehensive or persistent gap between appearance and reality. By contrast, early Chinese thinkers understand mind and knowledge primarily in terms of competence or ability, not representation. Cognitive error amounts to a form of incompetence. Error is not explained as a failure to accurately represent the mind-independent reality due to misleading or illusory appearances. Instead, it can be explained metaphorically by appeal to part-whole relations: cognitive error typically occurs when agents incompetently respond to only part of their situation, rather than the whole.

<i>The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations: The Philosophy of Science and its Implications for the Study of World Politics</i> (review)

Reviewed by: The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations: The Philosophy of Science and its Implications for the Study of World Politics Daniel McArthur (bio) Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations: The Philosophy of Science and its Implications for the Study of World Politics. New York: Routledge, 2011. 288 pp. ISBN13: 978-0-415-77627-1. $35.00 (pbk.) Book reviews in this journal usually proceed by considering the value of the book in question for Dewey scholarship. In this case I would rather say that this book is of interest to Dewey scholars. Jackson’s general project is heavily informed by Dewey’s pluralistic brand of pragmatism. As Jackson notes “Dewey’s Logic . . . stand[s] firmly in the tradition leading to this book” (216). Dewey scholars will greet Jackson’s extension of this approach to the study of international relations warmly. Over the last thirty years, international relations specialists have debated the merits of a variety of methodological and philosophical options while at the same time a dominant theme has been to make the field as “scientific” as possible. Philosophers will, of course, find much in this debate familiar as it mirrors many of the controversies that have taken place in the philosophy of science over the same period. International Relations (IR) theorists find themselves disputing, along with their philosophical counterparts, the nature of the scientific method and the merits of scientific realism versus its empiricist, historicist, and social constructivist rivals. Jackson’s project is a worthwhile attempt not only to trace out the philosophical disputes that are of importance to IR scholars, but also to learn from the debates and to provide a coherent approach to methodological questions. I think IR theorists will find Jackson’s book a useful place to start when approaching the [End Page 97] philosophical issues in their field, and they will find Jackson’s recommendations congenial. Jackson’s most important conclusion is that no single methodology or philosophical understanding of the scientific method ought to dominate the field. The goals of the particular IR study in question and the context of the research need to be considered when deciding on the appropriate approach. In this Jackson proposes that competing methodological proposals be considered and negotiated in a pluralistic philosophical context. To help the IR theorist do this, much of Jackson’s book takes up the task of laying out a neat (if sometimes controversial) taxonomy of the various options, each one associated with various philosophical traditions, ontological commitments and epistemological proposals. Jackson proposes four main categories: neopositivism, critical realism, analyticism and reflexivity. Neopositivism, according to Jackson, is the dominant approach but it is faced by lively rivals. Neopositivism has its origins in empiricist philosophy stretching back to Hume and before, leading through Compte to the logical positivists of the twentieth century. In IR, this school of thought seeks to discover covering laws that cover cases of international relations (an example is the hypothesis that genuinely democratic states do not resort to warfare in settling disputes). Since experiments are impossible, similar cases are compared against one another (varying only in the key variables under study, such as the presence of democracy). This is done in order to determine if the cases obey postulated laws. Neopositivism is associated with ontological commitments to an objective reality, a strongly empiricist epistemology and an aversion to theoretical posits or entities that cannot be observed. Critical realism reflects the recent postpositivist philosophies of science that have been critical of the antimetaphysical attitude of positivism. It seeks not just covariant laws but the genuine causes of phenomena as well. While similar in many respects to neopositivism in her commitment to empirical methods and a mind independent reality, the realist wants to go beyond the directly observable. While a positivist might agree that salt dissolves in water, a realist will want to claim that salt always has the unobservable disposition of solubility, even when it is sitting dry on the table. Reference to such dispositions becomes important in realist IR case studies. Analiticity and reflexivity have their origins in idealist and various other non-empiricist philosophical traditions. Key features include their rejection of dualist distinctions between mind...

IV-Kant's Argument for Transcendental Idealism in the Transcendental Aesthetic

This paper gives an interpretation of Kant's argument for transcendental idealism in the Transcendental Aesthetic. I argue against a common way of reading this argument, which sees Kant as arguing that substantive a priori claims about mind-independent reality would be unintelligible because we cannot explain the source of their justification. I argue that Kant's concern with how synthetic a priori propositions are possible is not a concern with the source of their justification, but with how they can have objects. I argue that Kant's notion of intuition needs to be understood as a kind of representation which involves the presence to consciousness of the object it represents, and that this means that a priori intuition cannot present us with a mind-independent feature of reality.

The rationality of metaphysics

In this paper, it is argued that metaphysics, conceived as an inquiry into the ultimate nature of mind-independent reality, is a rationally indispensable intellectual discipline, with the a priori science of formal ontology at its heart. It is maintained that formal ontology, properly understood, is not a mere exercise in conceptual analysis, because its primary objective is a normative one, being nothing less than the attempt to grasp adequately the essences of things, both actual and possible, with a view to understanding as far as we can the fundamental structure of reality as a whole. Accordingly, it is urged, the deliverances of formal ontology have a modal and epistemic status akin to those of other a priori sciences, such as mathematics and logic, rather than constituting rivals to the claims of the empirical sciences, such as physics.

NEO‐KANTIAN PHILOSOPHIES OF SCIENCE: CASSIRER, KUHN, AND FRIEDMAN1

In some recent writings, as well as in the article published here, Michael Friedman offers a fascinating account of how Thomas Kuhn’s groundbreaking work in the history and philosophy of science is related to—and even explicitly indebted to—an important strand of Neo-Kantianism. Friedman shows that Kuhn’s talk of “shifts” between paradigms, in particular, is influenced by the Neo-Kantian conception of the exact sciences as evolving by way of a series of massive structural transitions which do not aim at “convergence to a final truth about a mind-independent reality” (p. 242). Kuhn takes a step beyond the NeoKantians, however, in giving up not just convergence towards things-inthemselves but also any sort of convergence at all. According to Friedman, this final step of Kuhn’s is in fact a misstep—an unfortunate result of the fact that he followed Alexandre Koyre and Emile Meyerson in assuming that any convergence in mathematical physics would have to be “substantial.” Substantial convergence, roughly speaking, involves a series of theoretical structures having the same “physical referents” but accounting for them (descriptively and predictively) in an increasingly adequate way. And this, as Kuhn himself points out, is not the way the history of the exact sciences has actually gone. Instead, the physical referents of, say, the Einsteinian theory are essentially and substantially different from the physical referents of the Newtonian theory.

Revisionary and Descriptive Metaphysics

The goal of formal ontological inquiry is to reveal the categorial str ucture of the mind-independent reality. In the first part of this article, I criticiz e t wo popular ways to study the categorial structure, Strong and Weak Modelling. In the second part of the article (secs. 3-5), I present my positive account. The systematic description of the different kinds of entities ass umed by our commonsense conceptions (Descriptive Metaphysics) forms a starting-point of the study of the categorial structure of t he world. However, it is the task of Revisionary Metaphysics to see k for the best conception of the categorial structure. Revisionary Metaphysics proceeds as testing alternative c onceptions of the categorial structure (different categorial schemes). The main new contribution of the article is to propose certain general principles for the comparison of such alternative conceptions.

What Should a Correspondence Theory Be and Do?

Correspondence theories are frequently either too vaguely expressed – ‘‘true statements correspond to the way things are in the world,’’ or implausible – ‘‘true statements mirror raw, mind-independent reality.’’ I address this problem by developing features and roles that ought to characterize what I call ‘‘modest’’ correspondence theories. Of special importance is the role of correspondence in directing our responses to cases of suspected non-factuality; lack of straightforward correspondence shows the need for, and guides us in our choice of, various kinds of reconstrual projects. This, I argue, is in contrast to the approaches suggested by deflationism and coherence, and thus modest correspondence theories are appropriately distinct from rivals.

RORTY ON REALISM AND CONSTRUCTIVISM

Abstract: This article argues that we can and should recognize the mind dependence, epistemic dependence, and social dependence of theories of mind-independent reality, as opposed to Rorty, who thinks not even a constructivist theory of mind-independent reality can be had. It accuses Rorty of creating an equivocation or “dualism of scheme and content” between causation and justification based on various “Davidsonian” irrelevancies, not to be confused with the actual Davidson. These include the Principle of Charity, the attack against conceptual schemes, the linguistification of social practice, intersubjectivism, and causal naturalism. It follows that realists and constructivists need neither follow Rorty's mischaracterizations nor succumb to his internal paradoxes.

Perceiving Particulars: A Buddhist Defense

Perceiving Particulars:A Buddhist Defense Mark Siderits In a recent article in this journal, Monima Chadha claimed that the position of certain Buddhist philosophers concerning the perception of particulars is incoherent.1 Her defense of what she calls a "Nyāya-Kantian" position raises interesting questions concerning how we have knowledge of mind-independent reality. While the view that she subscribes to may well be right, I shall try to show that her arguments against the views of the Yogācāra-Sautrāntika Buddhists fail to undermine their position. But some of the issues involved here intersect with underlying themes in the recent debate between Arindam Chakrabarti and Stephen Phillips over the status of indeterminate perception in Nyāya,2 so I shall have something to say about that as well. The basic position I shall seek to defend has the form of a conditional: if we wish to maintain anything like the broadly metaphysical-realist stance that is fundamental to both Yogācāra-Sautrāntika and Nyāya (as well as to Kant), then we need to hold that in at least some cases of perception it is individuals as such that are the objects of our cognitive states. Chadha's discussion leads her to the conclusion that we never perceive particulars as such. Instead, she says, what are cognized in perception are always universal features, so that what are ordinarily thought of as the particulars [End Page 367] that figure in perception are such only relative to a context. Now, I am sympathetic to such a view, since it may be compatible with the sort of antirealism advocated by the Madhyamaka school of Buddhism.3 But this should tell us that something has gone awry here, since the "Nyāya-Kantian" and the Mādhyamika make for uneasy bedfellows. My diagnosis will be that Chadha has misconstrued those realist intuitions that stand behind the Yogācāra-Sautrāntika position. A proper appreciation of these will also turn out to play a role in the defense of indeterminate perception in classical Nyāya. 1 Let me begin by attending to some terminological matters. In the preceding paragraph I applied the label "metaphysical realist" to the Yogācāra-Sautrāntika school of Buddhism, to Nyāya, and to Kant. Few will question my calling Nyāya realist in any sense of that term, but eyebrows may well go up over my calling Yogāca ¯ra Sautrāntika (or at least the Yogācāra wing of this syncretic school) by the same name in the same breath. Yogācāra is, after all, aptly called a species of subjective idealism, for it denies the existence of physical objects. Metaphysical realism is usually understood as the view that truth is determined by the nature of mind-independent reality (by "what is there anyway"), and do not subjective idealists deny the existence of all mind-independent entities? But "mind independence" here does not mean being independent of cognition, but rather being independent of the concepts that we happen to employ. The metaphysical realist is thus one who holds that there is a quite determinate way that things ultimately are apart from any and all schemes of conceptualization. Understood in this way, metaphysical realism is something that is subscribed to by such subjective idealists as the Yogācārins and Berkeley.4 While they maintain that nothing exists apart from mind or the mental,5 they also hold that this fact is quite independent of the ways in which we or any other cognizers conceptualize reality. Subjective idealism is but one of a large number of ontological views that might properly be called realist in the present sense. But, then, what of Kant? Surely Kant is rightly thought of as maintaining that all of the phenomenal world is in some sense the result of processes of conceptual construction, so how can he be called a metaphysical realist? It is true that much of what is currently called antirealism has a distinctively Kantian pedigree. But to read Kant himself in this way, one must either disregard or else reinterpret much of what he has to say concerning the thing-in...