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The Entity Fallacy in Epistemology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Edmond Wright
Edmond Wright
Affiliation:
Swedish Collegium for the Advanced Study of the Social Sciences, Uppsala
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Extract

In order to entertain the argument to be presented here, you have to begin by casting away a presupposition. The ultimate aim will be to restore it again as a presupposition, but the immediate aim will be to test for and make clear its undoubted worth and usefulness by imagining what happens to our knowledge-system when we remove it.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 67 , Issue 259 , January 1992 , pp. 33 - 50
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1992

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References

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8 Unless one is a ship's captain who comes to disagree with the weathermen who have told him he is beyond the periphery of ‘the’ hurricane.

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13 If a Connectionist account of neural architecture can be linked to the pleasure-pain/desire-fear system as providing a guide to success or failure, then it looks much more hopeful a theory than the serial-digital one. Most interesting is Ullin T. Place's recent advocacy of the Connectionist position, for in one part of his argument he champions PDF for being able to track the ‘continuous slow modification’ [my italics] of objects ‘as a result of the shaping of linguistic usage by the experience of success and failure in establishing reference’ (p. 81), which would dovetail well with the position being maintained here, but then later he cannot resist speaking of ‘the’ referent being either ‘an individual’ or ‘a natural kind’ (p. 86) (Place, Ullin T., ‘Towards a Connectionist Version of the Causal Theory of Reference’, Acta Analytica, 5 (1989), 71–97).Google Scholar

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15 If anyone bridles at what he believes to be subjectivist (or phenomenalist or dualist or relativist) implications in the ‘four-module’ proposal, a recent defence of it can be found in my article ‘New Representationalism’, Journal of the Theory of Social Behaviour, 20, No. 1 (1990), 65–92.Google Scholar

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17 Helmholtz, ibid., 141.

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19 It has been precisely phrased by the psychologist Ragnar Rommetveit: we must ‘take perfect intersubjectivity for granted in order to achieve partial intersubjectivity.’ Rommetveit, Ragnar, ‘On negative rationalism in scholarly studies of verbal communication and dynamic residuals in the construction of human intersubjectivity’, in The Social Contexts of Method, Brenner, Michael, Marsh, P. and Brenner, Marilyn (eds) (London: Croom Helm, 1978), 16–32Google Scholar. For the use of the term ‘updating’ in this context I have to thank Karl Hammarling.

20 There is an echo here of John Cook Wilson's distinguishing between the logical subject and the grammatical subject of a sentence (say, ‘The cat is on the mat’ as a statement in real use, containing real information for the hearer) by means of considering what question the hearer is or is deemed to be asking: if he has asked ‘What is on the mat?’ then its having a cat on it is being predicated of the mat; if he has asked ‘Where is the cat?’, then its being on the mat is being predicated of the cat (Wilson, J. Cook, Statement and Inference, 2 vols (Oxford University Press, 1926), 123–126Google Scholar). One can add that if he has asked ‘Which cat is on the mat?’ then what is being mutually idealized as referent perfectly in common is a cat being on the mat, and the updating of the hearer's concept that is made by the speaker is that it was the cat, namely, the one they had mentioned before (the definite article here being the sole adjuster of the hearer's selection from the continuum, the actual subject here moving further away from the grammatical subject than Cook Wilson took it). The fact of there being a special intonation available for this use of the sentence is further evidence of this.

21 If mutual knowledge is not defined as this fuzzy intersection of differing perspectives, there is a vicious regress of mutual knowings. Stephen Schiffer's Grice-inspired definition of mutual knowledge, through missing Alfred Schutz's notion of it as the ‘idealization of reciprocity’, does not escape this regress. ‘I know that you know that p’ is a presupposition that two differing interpretations are in fact one; it is only taking the presupposition for gospel that sets up the infinite regress (Schiffer, Stephen, Meaning, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Schultz, Alfred, Collected Papers, Vol. I: The Problem of Social Reality (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 3–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar). It must be clear that the argument goes through as much for Grice's definition of meaning as depending on hearer's ‘recognition’ of speaker's intention (Grice, H. P., ‘Meaning’ in Philosophical Logic, Strawson, P. F. (ed.) (Oxford University Press, 1967), 39–48.Google Scholar

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24 Notice the same statement of belief disguised as assumption in a Gibsonian: ‘Instead of thinking that the perceptual system encounters isolated atoms from which a meaningful object is created or imagined, we can assume that at a certain level of description the perceptual system is sensitive to the object’ [my italics] Ben-Zeev, Aaron, ‘Explaining the Subject-Object Relation in Perception’, Social Research, 56, No. 2 (Summer, 1989), 511–542 (See p. 537)Google Scholar. But Ben-Zeev is not merely ‘assuming’ that there are objects, as of course one should: he—and his allies the ecological psychologists—believe that there are.

25 Habermas, Jürgen, The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols, London, Heinemann, 1984, 1987Google Scholar. See his reliance on ‘unconstrained mutual understanding’, Vol. 2, p. 2.; he actually says (here partly echoing Wilhelm von Humboldt) ‘Any explicit agreement thereby has something of the nature of a disagreement that has been avoided, excluded.’ What he does not say is that the disagreement has not been excluded, only hypothesized away. Humboldt was nearer to the true state of the case: ‘All understanding is simultaneously a noncomprehension; all agreement in ideas and emotions is at the same time a divergence’, Linguistic Variability and Intellectual Development, trans. Buck, George C. and Raven, Frithjof (Coral Gables: Florida, 1971) p. 43.Google Scholar

26 Popper, Karl, Objective Knowledge (Oxford University Press, 1972), Ch. 3Google Scholar. One can add—on Jacques Lacan's terms, from the Imaginary we have to project a Symbolic in order to cope with the Real. Or, in Jacques Derrida's, we need to enact a fictitious logocentricism in order to take advantage of différance. Or on Cornelius Castoriadis's, we need to act out an ‘identitary-ensemblist logic’ (legein) in order to carry through our ‘social doing’ (teukhein). (Lacan, Jacques, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Sheridan, Alan, (London: Tavistock, 1977)Google Scholar; Derrida, Jacques, ‘Différance’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Bass, Alan (Chicago University Press, 1982), 3–12Google Scholar; Castoriadis, Cornelius, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Blamey, Kathleen (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), Ch. 5.)Google Scholar

27 Jennings, Richard, ‘Scientific Quasi-Realism’, Mind, 98, No. 390 (04, 1989), 225–245CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Jennifer Trusted's attempted criticism of Jennings, that his theory will not work because it would have to be extended to the ordinary objects of daily life, is now seen to be a statement of what is in fact the best solution (Trusted, Jennifer, ‘Scientific Quasi-Realism’, Mind, 99, No. 393 (01, 1990), 109–111 (See p. 110))CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Her accusation is really the same one that Ian Hacking makes of those who are ‘anti-realists about muons but are realists about meatballs’; the point is that one can be quasi-realist about both, (Hacking, Ian, Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science (Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 95CrossRefGoogle Scholar). It is noteworthy here that the Polish sociologist Piotr Sztompka is now arguing that individuals are best regarded as ‘virtual’ (Stzompka, Piotr, ‘Society as Social Becoming’, unpublished manuscript, 1990Google Scholar; see his The Theory of Social Becoming (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992)).Google Scholar

28 Davidson, Donald, ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’, in Enquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford University Press, 1984) 183–198 (See p. 197).Google Scholar

29 Davidson, ibid., p. 198.

30 See V. N. Vološinov's (Mikhail M. Bakhtin's) recurrent emphasis upon irony as a basic feature of all language, a ‘double focus’ which is the basis of its ‘dialogic’ nature: ‘A word is a territory shared by both addresser and addressee’ (Vološinov, V. H., Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Metejka, Ladislaw and Titunik, I. R. (New York: Seminar Press, 1973), p. 86Google Scholar). See also his discussion of the antics of the carnivalesque in Rabelais and his World (trans. Iwolsky, Helene (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1968))Google Scholar: ‘The image of the contradictory, perpetually becoming and unfinished being could not be reduced to the dimensions of the Enlighteners' reason’ (p. 118). Compare Fritz Mauthner: ‘the unconsciously comparing wit which created the first concepts and the consciously comparing joke is one and the same mental activity’ (Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, 3 vols (Frankfurtam-Main: Ullstein Materialen; 1982) (orig. 1901–2), II, p. 467.Google Scholar

31 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, La phénomenologie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967), 41–46Google Scholar; Discours, Figure (Paris: Éditions Klincksieck, 1978), p. 9Google Scholar. Lyotard speaks of ‘une foi originaire’ which matches the mutual idealization presented in the present argument: ‘[Votre phrase] présente [l'univers] comme étant là avant toute phrase’ (Your phrase presents the universe as being there before all phrasing) (Le différend, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1983, p. 50.Google Scholar

32 Adorno, Theodor W., Negative Dialectics, trans. Ashton, E. S. (New York: Continuum, 1973) (orig. 1966), p. 106. (See also p. 102).Google Scholar

33 Wiggins, David, ‘On Singling out an Object Determinately’, in Subject, Thought, and Context, Pettit, Philip and MacDowell, John, (eds) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 169–180 (See p. 180).Google Scholar