File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1996/96-12-14.144, message 10


From: "Tobin Nellhaus" <nellhaus-AT-biddeford.com>
Subject: BHA: The ecneirepxe of pipes and dogs
Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1996 15:16:48 -0400


Howard--

Many thanks for your re-analysis of my argument.  You have summarized it
almost completely accurately--there are just a couple of spots that go off,
but these are critical.  To explain these, however, let me backtrack a
little.  It's occurred to me that I probably would have made a clearer
argument if I'd discussed the path that led me into this analysis to begin
with.  So let me talk about that for a minute.

My "field" is theater studies and cultural theory.  In working with
Bhaskar, and attempting to see how his philosophy could elucidate
theatrical performance, I discovered that while he talks about theory and
ideas as part of the transitive dimension, and reasons as causes, nowhere
does he identify the ontological status of ideas and meanings.  Now, it's
very clear to me that ideas and meanings are real, in the sense of being
causally efficacious.  That must be so if reasons are causes.  They are
also actual; an isolated sign may be considered a site of
meaning-potential, which obtains a more specific, actual meaning (or range
of meanings) when used in a particular discourse.  Meanings must also be
experiences, since they occur in human consciousness.

Okay: now at this point, ontologically speaking, meanings are the same as
experiences, which are also empirical, actual, and real (as Bhaskar's table
shows).  But does this mean that meanings *are* experiences (or perhaps I
should say, solely empirical)?  This seems difficult to maintain.  The fact
that I can learn or choose to understand a perception in a new way, and
that historically societies have construed the experience of actual events
(like your example of the sunset) in different ways, tells me that there
has to be a distinction between perceptions and their meanings.  So does
the fact that I can interpret something *wrongly*.  In this sense, a
perception may have a potential to become meaningful, but the meaning
itself is something else.  (The theory of referential detachment is I think
implicit here.)  There is an additional difficulty: let's say I watch a
sunset, and thus experience it.  What happens afterwards?  The experience,
strictly speaking, is *gone*: what remains is a *memory* of the experience,
and memories consist only of *signs.*  This is one reason why I think
experiences are in fact a subset of events.  But then what is the sign's
mode of existence?

Now I'm faced with a choice: either I stick to the letter of Bhaskar's
text, insist that signs are merely empirical, and hope for some escape from
the difficulties this raises; or I say that it's an issue that Bhaskar
hasn't explicitly dealt with, but before I give up on him, let me see if I
can follow his path and fill in the gap that way.  Even better if I can
find some concepts in him elsewhere that clarify the matter.  So my first
move in dealing with the problem of signs' ontological status was to invent
a new domain, consisting of meanings, signs, representations; this domain
provides the conditions of possibility for interpretive validity,
interpretive error, and interpretive choice.  Later, when I read
*Dialectic*, I realized that the concept of emergence strengthened and
simplified my case.  Eventually I ended up stratifying reality into the
domains of the real, the actual (now including the empirical), and the
meaningful.

Okay, now I'll turn to your discussion and make clarifications there.

> Now take my experience of a sunrise and Ptolemeus' experience of a
> sunrise.  Assume we're close enough in time to be 
> contemporaries.  There is the physical event of the sun rising with
> two conscious pieces of matter, me and him, together with trees and
> rocks, etc., present at the event.  This is the domain of the
> actual, including the human interaction present.  One event.  But
> there are two different experiences.

Yes--accepting "experience" as meaning interpreted perception, not the
bodily process of perception.

> As I understand you now, you would not challenge this.  You would
> not challenge that the experiences are different because of the way
> they have been socially produced.  What you would challenge is the
> idea that, even if experience is socially produced, it should be
> accorded special ontological status.
>  
> For example, life emerges from inorganic matter.  But we do not
> establish a different ontological domain as a consequence.  So
> consciousness emerges from life, and with it meaningful social
> interaction, including facts and experiences.  But what warrant do
> we have for establishing a separate ontological domain?  This is
> how I understand your basic argument now.

Almost.  The emergence of life doesn't establish a new ontological domain,
but it *does* establish a new *ontic* realm--a new stratum of actual beings
(a Bhaskarian intrastructure).  However (and here I'm following Doug's
suggestion), some of these beings use *signs*--and that definitely
establishes a new *ontological* domain.  In this sense, consciousness *is*
a new ontological domain (or more accurately, a subdomain within a new
ontological domain, since humans aren't the only creatures to use signs). 
Experience is a subdomain of the actual, demarcated by contact between the
sign-using consciousness and actual events, and resulting (one hopes!) in
new signs.  That's a process of production, by the way; and a specifically
social one, at least where human consciousness is concerned.

> Continuing with my effort to state your position, suppose that we
> return to those beings from another planet we discussed a couple of
> months ago.  Suppose that they did not have sensory organs, but
> apprehended the world in some way unimaginable to us.  Lets say
> where we experience the world and have experiences, they ecneirepxe
> the world and have ecneirepxes.  Now we observe them.  What we
> observe would be phenomena in the domain of actuality and we would
> not feel compelled to create a separate ONTOLOGICAL category
> because of the special way in which they apprehended the world,
> though we would appreciate that ecneirepxe was necessarily emergent
> from their emergence as beings in the universe.  Is that the idea?

Basically, yes, though with a little clarification.  Both species--the
aliens and the humans--use signs, produce meanings.  The signs/meanings
belong to an ontological domain distinct from actuality.  The aliens'
meaning-structures presumably belong to an ontic region different from
ours, though both are within the same ontological domain (that of signs). 
In other words, these are distinct subdomains within the semiotic. 
Likewise for the signs used by ants, whales, etc etc.

> So you would argue that although you are, with Bhaskar, prepared to
> treat society as real, you would not assign it any special
> ontological status.  You might say, in fact, that this conclusion
> is necessary if we are to be thoroughgoing about the process of
> deanthropomorphizing our relationship to the world.
>  
> On the other hand, just as it isn't wrong to reify things, maybe it
> isn't wrong to anthropomorphize human experience.

I agree with all of this (and thanks for emphasizing the point about
deanthopomorphizing!).  I would add, however, that even though the social
doesn't have a unique ontological status (insofar as the usage of signs is
not uniquely human), it does have a special *ontic* status, *for us*. 
We're humans, we belong to human society, we use human signs, and only
through human signs can we experience anything occuring in the domain of
the actual.  So yes, I see nothing wrong with anthropomorphizing human
experience, and indeed insist upon it.  (Which, by the way, is a major
reason why I'm adamant about the importance of images in human thought.)

> I have used in my explanations of the three Bhaskarian domains (in
> a draft I have prepared) the example of a straight straw in a glass
> of water.  I realize from this discussion that this can be
> mishandled.  The appearance of the straw as bent, is in the
> ontological domain of actuality, including the way in which the
> image presents itself to the physiology of my vision, ie the light
> waves are bent by the different refractive powers of the different
> media, air and water.

Yes.

>                      What characterizes, Bhaskar presumably would
> say, a different ontological domain is the fact that I apprehend
> the straw as BENT.  That is, the concepts of straight and bent are
> concepts of meaning.  These are social products.  

Yes to all of this.

>                                                    You would say
> that the fact that the world is meaningfully apprehended does not
> entitle it to separate ontological status.

I'm unclear what the "it" here refers to (the world? the actuality? the
apprehension?), but my argument is that the meanings have a separate
ontological status from the actuality.  So the apprehension (as a set of
meanings and interpretations) has a different ontological status from the
actual circumstances.  And for humans, apprehensions are socially produced
(a process that involves underlying social structures, actual conditions,
and whatever already-existing systems of meaning.)

> As I recall in the passages I excerpted from SRHE in my last post
> I left out some stuff about the DISCOVERY of facts.  Because facts
> can be discovered, Bhaskar called them potentialities.  Consider
> his example of you or I looking through a microscope at a cell as
> compared with a trained biologist looking through the same
> microscope.  The biologist will see a cell.  I won't.  But, through
> a social process of training, I could learn to.  Thus I may
> apprehend a world of potential meanings without discerning those
> meanings.  It is hard for me to see how it could be a postulate of
> science that there are meaningless experiences.  There are
> experiences we don't understand.  There are also experiences where
> the meaning is only potential.

Essentially, yes.  But since an experience for which meaning is only
potential doesn't yet have a meaning, I don't see why we can't call it
"meaningless."  To me that doesn't mean the experience can't *become*
meaningful, only that it hasn't any meaning *yet* (or in some situations,
that it has or has been given no meaning for the questions at hand).  As
far as I know, *all* experiences can *become* meaningful, but it's
contingent whether they actually do.  Once more, this contingency shows the
ontological distinction between experiences and meanings.  But I'm quite
willing to hear counterarguments on any of this.  (Again, one of the
difficulties is how one defines "experience."  In this passage, we are both
using "experience" to mean a present bodily perception, and not to mean the
fuller interpreted sense such as the Ptolmeic vs modern "experience" of the
sunrise.)

> Anyway I have to rethink what I wrote in a draft I have prepared
> about using the straw example to explain the three domains.  It is
> not that light is differentially refracted to create an appearance
> different from how the straw is that distinguishes domains.  The
> differential refraction after all is an actual event.  What
> distinguishes the actual from experience is that I apprehend the
> straw as BENT.  That is "bent" as distinct from "straight."  These
> are meanings.  In that sense my experience of the pen on the table
> as STRAIGHT or SOLID is as distinct an ontological domain from the
> actuality of the pen lying there.  Maybe I could come to apprehend
> it sensorily as I am taught it really is,  filled mainly with empty
> space.

Right--though here you're using "experience" to mean or include
interpretations again.

> Anyway once more, if I have understood you correctly, I am
> sympathetic to the fact that from the perspective of yet another
> alien being, there wouldn't seem to be much difference
> ontologically between my experience and the first alien's
> apprehension of the world through ecneirepxe.  But I am not another
> alien being, but human, and while I may not anthropomorphize the
> trees or the clouds, perhaps I may legitimately give special status
> to my own experience.  It seems I need to.  It seems the whole
> enterprise of science turns on finding precisely meaning in the
> world.  Experience mediates between the intransitive and the
> transitive and for that reason has a separate ontological status. 
> The actual performs no such function.  Life doesn't.

I'll agree that experience mediates between the transitive and intransitive
dimensions; however, it is not experience as an embodied process that
involves a separate ontological status from the actual, but experience as a
set of meanings derived from that act of mediation.

I think we basically understand each other, it's mainly a matter of being
careful and consistent in how we mean "experience."  In fact, I'm still
struggling with the best way to define it, but to repeat what I said above,
it involves an interaction between meaning-systems and actuality, an
interaction that occurs within or through living embodied consciousness and
can result in the production of new signs and meanings--maybe we should say
that consciousness *is* this interaction.  We (sometimes, maybe often) have
choices in how this process occurs (as in your effort to see the sunset in
a particular way), but much of the process is conditioned by underlying
social structures, and we have *no* choice but to experience in a human and
social manner, and to do so through (socially-produced) meaning-systems. 
This is why all experience is socially produced, yet not wholly society- or
consciousness-dependent (experience being an emphemeral interaction with an
actuality which is, at least at that instant, intransitive).

Perhaps I can make my point sharper through an analogy.  A painting by
Magritte shows a pipe, underneath which is written (in French), "This is
not a pipe."  Quite correct, it's *not* a pipe: it's an image, sign, or
representation of a pipe.  It's a "pipe," with the quotes.  For
convenience's sake (if for no other reason) we usually will say that it
*is* a pipe, but this is in fact an error.  Just as Magritte would have us
distinguish between an actual pipe and its painted representation, I would
have us distinguish between an experience (an actual interaction in a
present moment) and the "experience" as its representation in signs and in
memory; and more broadly, between actuality and representation in general,
as ontological domains.

Or, as I like to joke, some day I'm going to get a dog and name him
"Concept"--because the concept "dog" cannot bark, but the dog "Concept"
can!

Again, I fully recognize that I have departed from the letter of Bhaskar's
philosophy (and, to be honest, have been very nervous about doing
so--hubris is not my forte), but I believe I have merely corrected and
improved one aspect of it, and that the outcome remains fully consistent
with the premises of critical realism.  If not, I trust you'll all let me
know; and if so, likewise.

(PS: I'll be out of town for several days starting Thursday.  I'll respond
to whatever I catch before then; otherwise, I should be back on line
Tuesday.)

---
Tobin Nellhaus
nellhaus-AT-biddeford.com
"Faith requires us to be materialists without flinching": C.S. Peirce


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