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Comment by Aaron Snell

November 28, 2006 @ 3:07 am

I think the crisis is worse than that, because our society is fractured in its metaphysical understanding – into Schaeffer’s two storey schema, or as Nancy Pearcey has said, into a fact/value, public/private dichotomy, and I fear the tension can only be sustained for so long. I wonder which way the shift is going to go?

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November 28, 2006 @ 3:13 am

The Case for Metaphysical Realism

Comment by Jeff G

November 28, 2006 @ 8:51 am

You have slain but a strawman version of your adversary. The post-modernist isn’t committed to their being no independent, objective reality. Rather he simply states that there is no one, God’s-eye classification scheme by which reality can objectively be classified. Furthermore, the relativist doesn’t need to make any positive assertions about reality at all. They can simply deny, deny, deny without falling prey to the somewhat cheap self-refutation tactic.

Comment by Jeremy

November 28, 2006 @ 9:24 am

Jeff, I don’t see how any strawman was slain. He defined metaphysical realism as the belief that we can be objective and have knowledge because “there is an independently existing reality to which our true utterances correspond.” He only defined postmodernism as a denial of this claim, and it seems to me like the sort of a claim that postmodernists would deny. As far as being self-refuting, I suppose that a relativist could just deny and deny, but his point was that they rarely do. They often make positive claims about their postmodernism and in so doing make claims about how the world is. In fact, even in denying it seems one is making a claim about the world (that is true for more than that person herself) and is thereby subject to self-refutation.

(PS – your site looks interesting. I look forward to perusing it more when I get a chance)

Comment by macht

November 28, 2006 @ 2:01 pm

I tend to agree with Jeff G but it is difficult to respond to this post because you don’t actually engage with what any of these postmodernists have written. The only quote you give is from Rorty and in that quote he is denying what you say he believes. Perhaps if you gave another quote where Rorty says something along the lines of “I don’t believe any view is any better than any other view” then you might have a point. Regarding this quote:

Objectivity and truth are possible because there is an independently existing reality to which our true utterances correspond.

I don’t think Christians should accept that position. Christians can surely accept that truth and knowledge is possible but we should reject modern notions of objectivity. The reason we should deny objectivity is exactly what Jeff G said, we can’t have a “God’s eye view” of reality. We can’t get outside of our humanness or our finiteness. As Christians we should argue that our interpretation of reality is the best one, but it would be wrong to argue that it isn’t an interpretation (and thus objective).

Comment by Aaron Snell

November 28, 2006 @ 2:35 pm

Macht,
Are you speaking of our humanness and finiteness, our inability to “have a ‘God’s eye view’ of reality”, objectively, or as an interpretation of the real human situation?

Comment by macht

November 28, 2006 @ 2:55 pm

It’s an interpretation and a very good one at that.

Comment by Jeff G

November 28, 2006 @ 3:34 pm

(Thanks about the site.)

There are two problems which I see with that quote.

1) The metaphysical realism which Searle argues for in his book, if I remember correctly, is somewhat trivial. He simply demonstrates that there is an objective world out there which exists and has a particular structure independent of what any body thinks of it. Most Post-Modernists fully accept this. It is the objectivity of conceptual schemes which the Post-Modernists deny, and Searle doesn’t convincingly refute this.

Keeping this distinction in mind really helps engage Post-Modernism in a responsible manner, for the objective reality is what prevent an “anything goes” attitude toward conceptual schemes. While we cannot get outside of a conceptual scheme so as to evaluate it against the objective reality, not all conceptual schemes will work equally well. Thus, Post-Modernism does not entail a free-for-all relativism.

2) Many philosophers are unhappy with the correspondence theory of meaning and truth which Searle seems to presuppose, or even argue for. Words do not have a kind of disembodied, objective meaning which corresponds to the objective reality. Rather, our conceptual schemes play a significant role in both the meaning of words and our construal of reality.

The main point is that even thought there is an objective reality, we can never have access to it because we only have access to reality by way of interpretation and construal. There is no way around this.

Comment by Aaron Snell

November 28, 2006 @ 5:02 pm

Macht,
How do you determine that it is good?

Comment by macht

November 28, 2006 @ 5:42 pm

I generally determine if interpretations are good or bad based on arguments, evidence, criticism, how well they fit in with my other beliefs, etc. How do you determine if interpretations are good?

Comment by Aaron Snell

November 28, 2006 @ 8:08 pm

Much the same way, I think. The point of my question is that, unless you are judging an interpretation solely on how well it fits in with your other beliefs, it seems that you would need access to some sort of objective reality against which one could measure said interpretation (for validity of arguments, evidence, criticism, etc.).

My second point (from my first question to you) is that if you are claiming that I cannot get outside my “humanness and finiteness” to grasp any kind of objective knowledge, that seems to be a claim to the objective nature of human capabilities – specifically, mine – which you can’t make, on your view. The claim that “we don’t have access to the world as it is” seems to be a claim about how things really are.

Or maybe we’re equivocating on the term “objective”. Please clairfy for me if I have misunderstood. I guess my main concern is that I fail to see how a denial of our capacity for a “God’s eye view” of reality is any kind of argument against truth as correspondence. Further, I’m not convinced that said schema actually stand between the individual and reality – rather, there seems to be a more immediate contact that is then cognitively processed by our interpretive maps. If I am right (i.e., my claim corresponds to the reality of the situation, which reality you admit exists), then truth as correspondence, which seems intuitively true to me, would work.

If you’ll humor me one more question: if, as you and Jeff G seem to admit, objective reality does in fact exist independent of myself (realism), and I make claims about it, regardless of if I could ever know for sure whether they corresponded or not, could they in fact be accurately describing said reality?

Comment by Jeff G

November 28, 2006 @ 9:26 pm

Well, I think there are a couple of ways of looking at it.

1) Perhaps there is some conceptual scheme which is true, and perhaps we actually have this perceptual scheme. The problem is that we could never get beyond this scheme to judge it’s truthfulness or not. This, to me, is a pretty weak form of post-modernism.

2) The more probable response from the post-modernist is that truth is itself a category or concept. We can only begin to reason about or understand nature by imposing categories upon it, and to judge a conceptual scheme as being more or less true than another one is to entirely get the cart before the horse. Outside of a conceptual scheme, true and false have no meaning at all.

I should also mention that there are two forms of metaphysical realism at play here. One is the idea that there is an objective independent world which exists in a certain form regardless of what we think of it.

The other form is that the categories by which we conceptual understand and structure the world are actually “in” nature; that we discover them rather than construct them.

The post-modernist strongly denies the second form. As to the first, they grant that there is an objective world out there, but to speak of it having an objective structure independent of us is already to impose categories on nature. Thus, they accept that there is a world which exists independent of everything we think, but that there is not objective structure to it; there is no one true and objective way to carve up this objective world.

Comment by macht

November 29, 2006 @ 12:07 am

I actually am not sure what most people mean by “objective.” People rarely define what they mean by it. I’ve taken it in this post (Searle’s initial quote) to mean something like “free of interpretation.” I’m not sure what you mean by “objective reality” and how it would differ from “reality.”

I agree we need access to some sort of reality in order to distinguish good interpretations from bad interpretations but this “access” still needs to be interpretted. It seems to be a common view that in order to have knowledge or know the truth we need to get rid of interpretations. Interpretation is seen as something that distorts what we are trying to look at. I’m not sure why people believe this, but it seems to be a common view.

As for correspondence, I don’t deny truth as correspondence, I just don’t think it is the whole story. See here for what I mean by that.

Comment by Kevin Winters

November 29, 2006 @ 9:43 am

I see two problems here: first, the supposed distinction between interpretation and truth/reality. At least from a Heideggerian perspective, every interpretation polarizes the world in some way. According to our practices, intentions, and motivations, the world appears in a certain way. One example that Hubert Dreyfus uses is the following: you are walking in a woods at night. On most days this is an enjoyable experience: you walk with little care beyond enjoying it. But on this particular night you heard that a tiger escaped from the local zoo that is but a few miles away from this forest. All of a sudden the world appears differently: things are not seen for their esthetic enjoyment, but as potential threats. You notice things that you never noticed before: how the tree limbs make some shapes that occasionally look like tigers, how much noise your footfalls make, and you jump at every sound of scurrying that you would usually wouldn’t notice.

Which of these is the “objective” truth in the scenario? Both ‘interpretations’ are partial: in one beings appear in a markedly different way than the other, but both bring beings to light in a thoroughly contextual. Now, John Haugeland, in his Having Thought, considers both objective because, quite simply, they deal with objects: both are interpretations or, if you prefer, articulations of beings. But neither is the passive observer of traditional objective thought: the one who simply looks and describes/explains what is happening. The problem, Heidegger would say, is that all articlations–including science–are interpretations. Does this mean that they do not in some way ‘connect’ with reality? Not at all, for in each beings do appear, though only partially. But does it ‘correspond’?

This is the second point: the correspondence relation has, since its inception, never been made explicit. For example, how on earth does the proposition, “The snow is white,” correspond with the snow’s whiteness? In other words, how can two unlike things–a proposition and a thing–be “compared”? Correspondence theorists try to bypass this problem by simply saying, “A proposition corresponds when it describes things as they are,” but we still have a number of problems: under what framework do we understand the “are”? Do we accept a scientific framework, where what is real is reduced to particles in motion? Do we accept an artistic or poetic framework, where the real is inherently flexible: it can be brought to light in various ways according to the use of metaphors, myths, or association. Do we accept the traditional metaphysical framework, where beings appear as substances with discrete properties? For Heidegger it is not so much an issue of “comparing” a “proposition” with a “reality,” but in co-inhabiting a world and sharing a mode of interpretation whereby beings can appear. If the beings do not appear, the interpretation may be suspect, but this is not always an easy task. It is, in fact, a fundamental problem in hermeneutics in relation to the sharing of horizons whereby beings appear ’similarly’ to multiple subjects. But that is what we have to work with.

It is this incomensurability of frameworks of interpretations that so-called postmodern thought attempts to elucidate: there are various ways in which a given being can be brought to light, and these ways are not derivable from some common, fundamental mode of interpretation. We cannot reduce the artistic framework to the scientific mode of interpretation or the traditional metaphysical mode of interpretation; every attempt to do so will fail miserably. Furthermore, the scientific framework has no priveledged position in relation to truth: as an interpretation/articulation of beings, it is on equal footing with other modes of disclosure. But here a distinction needs to be made: each inherently is geared towards some purpose/motivation, so one cannot “do” science with poetry. But you cannot priveledge one above the other in relation to “truth.” Hence, there is no “objectivity” in the traditional sense, though we are intimately related with beings.

Comment by Aaron Snell

December 1, 2006 @ 6:19 pm

Thank you, guys, for your thoughts. I really appreciate the dialogue.

Kevin, I am confused about your objection to comparing unlike things (e.g., a proposition and a thing). Why exactly is this a problem? It seems we compare unlike things all the time. To answer your question, I would posit that a proposition and a thing can correspond because of an aspect of reality that both share identically – meaning. Though I suppose this is the metaphysic you are rejecting. Moreover, in describing your Heideggerian metaphysic, are you not positing a description of how things actually are that is somehow identical in meaning to the actual case?

Comment by Kevin Winters

December 2, 2006 @ 9:25 am

Aaron,

Meaning is exactly the problem. A thing’s meaning, or intelligibility, depends on the context in which it is brought to light. Consider a baseball bat: when understood within the context of baseball–which includes the rules of the game, the actual field and ball, the motivations behind playing, the aims of using the bat, the bat’s physical constitution (can’t have a cork core), the embodiment of the players (which, if different, would also change the game) etc.–it is a baseball bat; its context is part of its essence as a baseball bat.

But when taken in a different context–say it fell into an indigenous African tribe that didn’t know about baseball (think The Gods Must Be Crazy, except with a baseball bat)–its essence would be different. Perhaps it would be brought to light within the context of cooking–could be used for crushing corn–or fighting–given the embodiment, needs, and motivations of the tribesmen, it affords itself for weaponality–or perhaps even an erotic toy. In each of these contexts the bat is something different: its intelligibility itself depends on the context in which it is found.

The usual counter-response (I think Searle uses it) is that in all these cases the bat is the same, we just project different meanings on it. This counter-response always includes scientific accounts of the bat’s weight, density, mass, etc., in short the “primary properties” posited by philosophers in the modern era. But even these require a context in which to be meaningful: not only does it require a context of interrelated equipment and historically changing understandings of the terms themselves (with the dominant metaphors that inform those terms), but even certain valuations that make science itself possible and viable as a discipline (Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self is invaluable in elucidating this aspect of the essence of things; just finished a paper on it, if you are interested). So even this account, in order to be meaningful, requires a context.

But when we understand the above in terms of bringing beings to light, rather than defining them propositionally, we cannot say that meaning is ‘in me’ and ‘outside of me,’ hence the meaning is what the proposition and object share in common. Meaning only occurs in the in-between of man and being. An object, apart from man’s contextualizing, is meaningless; we cannot say anything about it, we cannot make propositions about it because any attempt to speak non-contextually will necessarily do so within a context.

Yet each contextualization of the baseball bat does bring it to light: it can be meaningfully brought to light as a baseball bat, as a cooking utensil, as a weapon, as an erotic object, as an object of physics, as a work of art, as a museum piece, as a door stop, as a paper weight, as a toothpick (if the being bringing it to light is big enough), as firewood, and on and on indefinitely. The excessive number of ways that the baseball bat can be articulated, according to context, motivation, and embodiment is massive and to favor one articulation over others (i.e. physics or the substance/property ontology) is to misunderstand both how meaning is constituted and to severely limit (do violence to) the being in question.

As I said earlier, it is the incommensurability of the contextualizations/articulations that is at issue, not realism in general. I say that poetry gives us truth–it brings beings to light in often unconventional but wonderful ways, partially because it understands metaphor’s importance in intelligibility/meaning (I wish ‘hard’ science types would understand that)–to which the traditionalist might agree, but the real truth, the really real truth, the REALLY really real truth is physics and the substance/property metaphysic; all truths can be reduced to either (or both, depending on your take on naturalism). But if the baseball bat’s essence does depend on its context and the ‘bringing together’ of various beings in terms of man’s motivations, projects, and such, then neither can be true (or fundamental; Heidegger does believe that even substance/property ontology does reveal beings, just that it is not radical enough): essence is not ‘in’ the bat, but ‘in’ the bat within a context of articulation and found within the gathering together of beings that is man (sorry for the jargon rush in this sentence).

I hope this answers both of your questions: the metaphysic you are proposing, where meaning is ‘in’ the proposition and ‘in’ the object, rests on an inadequate understanding of meaning that ultimately rests on your substance/property metaphysic that ignores (covers over, to use Heidegger’s term) the ontological import of human context. But this is indeed a realism. In fact, this is a hyper-realism (to borrow from John Caputo’s discussion of Derrida) in that the ‘real,’ beings, are ultimately extraordinary, uncanny: they exceed any given articulation within a context and their possible meanings are essentially limitless.

Let me know how that sits with you.

Comment by Aaron Snell

December 2, 2006 @ 3:11 pm

Thanks for the book

Seriously, I appreciate the time and thought you put into your response. There’s a lot to chew on here. Let me just say that I agree that meaning is contextual by its very nature – it is a cognitive/communicative function of a mind, I think, and so is bound up in context. Let me also say that I think the (Searle-y) counter-response is valid, minus the contextualized physical descriptors – without an account of its weight, size, etc., the bat is still (and will always be) that physical object to which I refer (whether by pointing if it is in front of me, or by nominal reference). Unless you want to get into issues of nominalism (which I am as happy to avoid as quicksand).

One other thought: the bat is a made thing and, regardless of possible contexts, has an original meaning and context determined by the intention of the creator. Granted that we both believe in a creator of the “heavens and the earth” (in Hebrew, Hashamayim we ha’erets, or the totality of the physical universe), would it not follow then that everything has some ultimate, or original, meaning?

Comment by macht

December 2, 2006 @ 5:03 pm

“that physical object to which I refer”

Why is it not “that aesthetic object to which I refer” or “that economic object to which I refer” or any other number of ways of looking at it. The “physical object” is an abstraction that, unfortunately, modern science has made into a whole. The only reason we can talk about “the physical” is because we isolate “the physical” from “the aesthetic,” “the economic,” etc.

On a related note, the subject of “technological functions” has recently (the last 10 or so years) become a hot area of research in philosophy of technology. Many who write on the subject talk about the “dual nature” of technological objects – a physical nature and a functional nature. While I think this points to the problem of viewing things as “physical objects” ultimately I think it fails for similar reasons to what Kevin talked about above.

Comment by Kevin Winters

December 2, 2006 @ 11:45 pm

Taylor’s Sources of the Self has won a number of awards and, for me, stands as one of the better books that I’ve read (not the best, but still very valuable). I wish more so-called ‘analytic’ philosophers would deal with more of Taylor’s stuff, just like I wish they would work with more Ricoeur. But I guess you can’t ask any self-respecting analytic to interact with such quasi-Continental stuff. P

On the Searle-ish response, by the very act of removing the “contextualized physical descriptors” you are not giving the Searle-ish response: the response itself depends on a notion of objectivity that simply is not compatible with the contextualized approach that I have been giving. Even mentioning the bat as a “physical object” might be assuming too much Western scientific culture. I will readily admit that I’m not very well versed in the nominalism-realism debate, but I’m uncertain whether nominal reference is possible without some reference to ontology, to what is. At least it is something-I-know-not-what; it is, in short, some thing, not a merely valueless name. Perhaps we could say that its value is privative, but such is possible only in relation to positive valuations–i.e. the lack of a valuation is to be unvalued, not to be valueless. But I’m not certain if this connects very strongly with the nominalism debate…so I’ll stop there.

As for your last question, what does it mean to have an “ultimate…meaning” when meaning is, to use the same terms, ultimately contextual? There seems to be no warrant for saying that, while the bat can be brought to light in a certain way, “ultimately” it is a “baseball bat.” I should also correct you: I do not accept creatio ex nihilo. Yes, God is the creator, but he organizes matter, he does not create it by divine fiat. My view of God is much more in line with Open Theism or Process Theism, if you want general categories from which to start. But I should also add that this is a secondary topic to this thread. So, my question: why should we try to find an “ultimate…meaning”? Seems like a pointless endeavor to me; what we should be trying to find is perhaps the ‘appropriate disclosure within the given context’ rather than some overarching, ultimate, immutable meaning.

Comment by Aaron Snell

December 3, 2006 @ 5:57 pm

Macht,
I don’t think “that physical object” is an abstraction, but a concrete referent. More later if I have time.

Comment by macht

December 3, 2006 @ 10:48 pm

Okay. So you know where I’m coming from, you might want to read this blog post where I discuss an article that Feyerabend wrote about Brunelleschi. I think the following quote by Feyerabend makes an important point:

“Brunelleschi examined his painting by checking it against something else. This “something else” was not a building; it was a building as seen with a single eye in a precisely defined place or, as I shall say, it was an aspect of a building, an aspect (of an object) being defined as the effect (of the object) on an individual, or a group, or a device (a camera obscura, for example) that approaches, uses, views, analyzes, or “projects” it according to more or less clearly describable, though not always clearly recognized, procedures. Brunelleschi chose an aspect that suited his purpose. His experiment involved two artifacts, not an artifact (the painting) and an art-independent “reality.”I think that quote is highly relevant to all the comments here. If we want a painting to “correspond” to reality, how is it supposed to do so? Brunelleschi tried to make his painting “correspond” to the physical reality of the building, but doesn’t art just as often “correspond” to non-physical** reality (e.g., love, human nature, etc.)? The problem Feyerabend poses here for the correspondence theory of truth is a big one, I think. Above, Kevin uses the word “connect” instead, which I think is a better. I like the term “contact” too, which is a term Polanyi used. When a scientist performs an experiment, she is not primarily testing her statements to see if they correspond to some objective reality. Rather she is intimately involved in controlling reality – staging it – so that she can make contact with reality from a certain point of view so that she can understand it.

** – By “non-physical” I don’t mean “without the physical” or “in the absence of the physical” or anything like that but rather something more along the lines of “not concerned with the physical.”

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