Author: gnox

To make the reflection that many of the things which appear certain to us are probably false, and that there is not one which may not be among the errors, is very sensible. But to make believe one does not believe anything is an idle and self-deceptive pretence. Of the things which seem to us clearly true, probably the majority are approximations to the truth. We never can attain absolute certainty; but such clearness and evidence as a truth can acquire will consist in its appearing to form an integral unbroken part of the great body of truth. If we could reduce ourselves to a single belief, or to only two or three, those few would not appear reasonable or clear.

Peirce, CP 4.71 (1893)

Much of our consensus may be confabulated, embodied in fables which, like our intentions, are sustainable insofar as they are not in open conflict with the truth. But until we reach the end of experience, the evidence isn’t all in. We can never be sure that the cognitive bubble will never pop. We can however be sure that it will always be complex.

Every attempt to simplify the bubble is likely to lead to greater complexity. When a new guess (hypothesis) appears, we’re better off knowing that it’s false than relying on it as provisionally true (which is the nearest we can get to knowing that it’s true). The scientist therefore is eager to pop any bubble that can be popped, especially one we are partial to.

A hypothesis is something which looks as if it might be true and were true, and which is capable of verification or refutation by comparison with facts. The best hypothesis, in the sense of the one most recommending itself to the inquirer, is the one which can be the most readily refuted if it is false. This far outweighs the trifling merit of being likely. For after all, what is a likely hypothesis? It is one which falls in with our preconceived ideas. But these may be wrong. Their errors are just what the scientific man is out gunning for more particularly. But if a hypothesis can quickly and easily be cleared away so as to go toward leaving the field free for the main struggle, this is an immense advantage.

Peirce, CP 1.120

Whenever we are confronted by surprising facts or unintended consequences of our actions, we are presented with a learning opportunity. But since we like to feel ‘in control’ of our lives, we often avoid or ignore these opportunities, choosing instead to defend our beliefs against the facts. We are so good at selecting the facts that confirm our beliefs, and ignoring or denying the others, that we have developed an enormous capacity for self-deception. If we keep it up long enough, we can no longer see the difference between fact and opinion; argument becomes a battle of competing opinions, where the strongest (or loudest) wins. Unless we have a healthy respect for truth and a deep sense of our own fallibility, we have no defense against this kind of self-deception. Nor do we have any defense against those who would manipulate our beliefs for their own purposes.

Truths can be expressed only with symbols – and our ability to use symbols gives us the ability to lie. ‘A symbol is defined as a sign which is fit to serve as such simply because it will be so interpreted,’ but since our actual reading of any linguistic symbol is crucially governed by our language-using habits, symbols are ‘particularly remote from the Truth itself’ (Peirce, EP2:307). How informative symbols are for us depends on how they relate to the reality beyond our habits. When we recognize patterns in nature well enough to anticipate (with some degree of accuracy) what will happen in a given situation, we are tuned in to the habits of nature itself – of which human habits are a small and subordinate part, though crucial for humans. Our most systematic way of arriving at common beliefs about natural patterns is the communal quest we call science. But scientific method is just a more rigorous and public version of our common-sense way of critically assessing our own beliefs about the world.

It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which distinct societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.

— Edward Sapir, 1929 (1949, 69)

The worlds in which distinct language-using individuals live are also ‘distinct worlds.’ But by recognizing others as living in distinct worlds, we acknowledge a meta-world which includes all those worlds and the distinctions between them, and we acknowledge the reality of that more inclusive world – the world in which it is true, independently of anyone’s acknowledging the fact, that those worlds are distinct. And at every level of the holarchy, the unexpected can punch its way through the language-woven bubble of a personal or ‘social reality’ from outside that holon, that network of habits. When that happens, no one really doubts the reality of the intruding fact (though some may choose to ignore it). The only question is whether the language can incorporate it into the personal or ‘social reality’ or not, so that the holon can adapt to the more inclusive reality.

Unquestionably, highly complex environments belong to the conditions of possibility for forming communication systems. Above all, two opposing presuppositions must be secured. On the one hand, the world must be densely enough structured so that constructing matching interpretations about the things in it is not pure chance; communication must be able to grasp something (even if one can never know what it ultimately is) that does not permit itself to be decomposed randomly or shifted in itself. On the other, there must be different observations, different situations that constantly reproduce dissimilar perspectives and incongruent knowledges on precisely the same grounds. Correspondingly, one can conceive of communication neither as a system-integrating performance nor as the production of consensus. Either would imply that communication undermines its own presuppositions and that it can be kept alive only by sufficient failure. But what, if not consensus, is the result of communication?

— Niklas Luhmann (1995, 171-2)

The result, according to Luhmann, is to make the system more sensitive to ‘chance, disturbances, and “noise” of all kinds.’ Communication ‘can force disturbances into the form of meaning and thus handle them further.… By communication, the system establishes and augments its sensitivity, and thus it exposes itself to evolution by lasting sensitivity and irritability’ (172).

Communication then presents challenges to the integrity of the social system – challenges which open its collective cognitive bubble to chaos and thus enable it to grow by incorporating matter from outside. The system informs itself by turning noise into signal, enabling it to modify its own habits. But the whole process depends on representation of ‘dissimilar perspectives’ on the same object of attention.

We use words to sort out the world, or carve it up, by naming the types or parts. Is there a difference between discovering and inventing the order of which we speak? You have to believe the difference is real, and act accordingly, in order to find out whether the order is real or not. Whether you call it ‘making a distinction’ or ‘seeing a difference,’ the practice is the same.

In a 1908 letter to Victoria Welby, Peirce defined a ‘true man of science’ as ‘belonging to a social group all the members of which sacrifice all the ordinary motives of life to their desire to make their beliefs concerning one subject conform to verified judgments of perception together with sound reasoning’ (SS 75). As Peirce goes on to explain, acting in this way shows that the scientist implicitly believes in a universe ‘governed by reason,’ i.e. one guided by principles which can be discovered and understood. If her reasoning is really sound, she will be aware that all of her beliefs (and those of her social group) are fallible. Yet in order to carry out her role of questioning, her investigative practice must be governed by those implicit beliefs which are not currently subject to doubt. The pure scientist is the one who devotes himself “religiously” to the quest for truth.

Speaking from experience could mean either speaking from the primal truth or speaking toward the final truth. The primal truth, the very Firstness, can be neither expressed nor questioned within a conventional symbol system. We approach the final truth by means of the public dialog called science, but can never know how close we are to arriving at that ideal end of inquiry. Can the wholly authentic expression of primal truth penetrate the realm of public discourse? Can the public discourse incorporate the intimate on its critical path toward the ultimate?

Man’s destiny on earth, as I am led to conceive it, consists in the realization of a perfect society, fellowship, or brotherhood among men, proceeding upon a complete Divine subjugation in the bosom of the race, first of self-love to brotherly love, and then of both loves to universal love or the love of God, as will amount to a regenerate nature in man, by converting first his merely natural consciousness, which is one of comparative isolation and impotence, into a social consciousness, which is one of comparative omnipresence and omnipotence; and then and thereby exalting his moral freedom, which is a purely negative one, into an aesthetic or positive form: so making spontaneity and not will, delight and no longer obligation, the spring of his activity.

Henry James the elder (1863, 6)

James was the father of Henry James the novelist and William James the philosopher and psychologist. Later (p. 10) in his book Substance and Shadow, he refers to the ‘perfect society, fellowship, or brotherhood among men’ as ‘the Social principle’ – which Peirce identified as the foundation of logic. Peirce also expanded on this theme in ‘Evolutionary Love’ (1893):

… We are to understand, then, that as darkness is merely the defect of light, so hatred and evil are mere imperfect stages of ἀγάπη and ἀγαθόν, love and loveliness. This concords with that utterance reported in John’s Gospel: “God sent not the Son into the world to judge the world; but that the world should through him be saved. He that believeth on him is not judged: he that believeth not hath been judged already.… And this is the judgment, that the light is come into the world, and that men loved darkness rather than the light.” That is to say, God visits no punishment on them; they punish themselves, by their natural affinity for the defective. Thus, the love that God is, is not a love of which hatred is the contrary; otherwise Satan would be a coordinate power; but it is a love which embraces hatred as an imperfect stage of it, an Anteros—yea, even needs hatred and hatefulness as its object. For self-love is no love; so if God’s self is love, that which he loves must be defect of love; just as a luminary can light up only that which otherwise would be dark. Henry James, the Swedenborgian, says: “It is no doubt very tolerable finite or creaturely love to love one’s own in another, to love another for his conformity to oneself: but nothing can be in more flagrant contrast with the creative Love, all whose tenderness ex vi termini must be reserved only for what intrinsically is most bitterly hostile and negative to itself.” This is from Substance and Shadow: an Essay on the Physics of Creation.

— EP1:353-4, W8:184-5

What James calls ‘morality’ seems equivalent to Peirce’s ‘self-control,’ which enables taking responsibility for one’s actions. That this ‘moral freedom’ should ideally be ‘exalted’ into the form of ‘spontaneity’ and ‘delight’ sounds more like Blake than Peirce, but is reflected in Peirce’s classification of the ‘normative sciences,’ where ethics depends on esthetics, just as logic depends on the Social Principle.

Recognition of others as experiencing subjects is essential to the nature of the human animal (and probably other social animals as well: see for instance de Waal 1996, chapter 2). Michael Tomasello (1999) found the uniquely human way of life to be based on our ability to identify with other selves: through ‘joint attention’ you understand that other people use things to realize goals just as you do. He offered this account of what happens when humans deal with artifacts such as texts:

An individual confronts an artifact or cultural practice that she has inherited from others, along with a novel situation for which the artifact does not seem fully suited. She then assesses the way the artifact is intended to work (the intentionality of the inventor), relates this to the current situation, and then makes a modification to the artifact. In this case the collaboration is not actual, in the sense that two or more individuals are simultaneously present and collaborating, but rather virtual in the sense that it takes place across historical time as the current individual imagines the function the artifact was intended to fulfill by previous users, and how it must be modified to meet the current problem situation.

— Tomasello (1999, 41)

These imaginative acts of assessment need not be self-conscious acts – in fact they are often no more conscious than the act of constructing a sentence in conversation. In order to carry cultural traditions forward in this way, the subject must be conscious of the situation in a (perhaps) uniquely human way, but not necessarily meta-conscious of her acts as such. In some cases of ‘sociogenesis’, as Tomasello calls it, the collaboration is not virtual but actual, with two or more individuals interacting in ‘real time’. This is in fact the prototypical situation; virtual collaboration does not develop at all if a child is deprived of real-time collaboration with caregivers.

This is the essence of the human dialog which generates cultures and persons. Our collaborative practices of guided and guiding interaction with each other, or with artifacts as described above, are what i call intimologies. They weave the network of connections that we call a community.

Outside of specialist/esoteric circles, consensus about the meaning of general and abstract language is hard to establish. When the objects of joint attention are invisible and intangible, and we need to believe that we have consensus, we are likely to confabulate in order to ‘keep the party going’ – just as a patient with severe memory loss or agnosia, unable to recall his history, will invent a story to cover up the deficit. Such patients have no idea that they are confabulating, and may refuse to admit that they are doing so even when the evidence is obvious to all.

On a purely perceptual level, the brain does the same thing when it ‘fills in’ the blind spot which is inherent to the structure of the retina. Just as there is no blank area in your visual field, even when you close one eye, no discontinuity in the consensual world appears to you: the sense you make of the world must on the whole appear seamless. To the non-participating observer, it is clear that the construction of consensus is hard work and the results dubious and impermanent. It is not surprising then that an established order tends to rely on unquestioned and unquestionable authority as a short cut through, or substitute for, the hard work of consensus-building. An authority figure offers an anchor, a point of stability, when the world of experience threatens to slide into chaos.

Human beings, fearing their own transience, have always associated value with permanence and preferred to put their trust in those who were ready to claim an unchanging truth.

— M.C. Bateson (2000, 135)

But the value attached to permanence is ever at odds with the value attached to life and consciousness, for these are dynamic and impermanent.