363. The causality of concepts

In preceding items in this blog I adopted ideas from ‘object-oriented ontology’ (3O). An object has an inside, of components that cohere in some way, with a certain endurance in time and across conditions, and it has an outside, where it has effects and from which it draws influence.  

In the dynamics of change of objects, in the interaction between what ‘is in them’ and what ‘they are in’, for interactions in which humans are involved I use the multiple causality of Aristotle, with its efficient cause (actors), final cause (goals), material cause (things used), formal cause (method, knowledge, theory, technology), conditional cause (circumstances), and exemplary cause (such as role models). 

Are concepts, universals, abstractions objects? Platonic ideas are eternal and identical across contexts. Do they have components? For universals, presumably the components would be its particulars. What is their coherence? One might say: by an essence of the universal, but I don’t believe in such essences. The particulars have overlapping connotations. New particulars can arise, and they may shift the universal, in a shift of connotations, which raises some doubt about its endurance. For an example I used the case where someone used a stuffed cow for a chair.

Concepts do take part in causality. They produce effects. They can act as an efficient cause: playing a role in an argument. As a final cause, a goal: a concept to be analysed. As a material cause: the stuff of discourse. Formal: the method of investigation. Conditional: effects from the educational system, symbolic order/ideology. Exemplary: act as a paradigm.

According to Harman events are also objects. He gives the example of a collision between two airplanes. First there are two objects: the planes. Then a third object: the collision. Then a fourth object: the consequences of the crash. That seems odd. Yet there may be some argument for it. It does satisfy the criterion for an object of having components, with coherence in the form of succession in a causal process. But the coherence is hardly stable.

Take a stumble on the stairs. What are its components’? The initial loss of balance, bumps along the hobbling down, the final smack on the floor, the sprained ankle and a broken arm? What is their coherence? Stages in a process of causality? How stable is that coherence?  

The crux of an object is (relative) stability of composition. It does allow for change at some ‘lower’ level, of the components, but not their structure. For example, a body that stays the same while changing its cells.

By contrast, the crux of an event is change, of the structure of an object (its ‘inside’) or of its relation to its ‘environment’ (movement, metabolism, effects, phenomenology). A train is a coherent object that moves in space.

Acts are also events, and in them actors can create objects, demolish them and affect them even while they retain their identity. If I say something to someone, and he/she understands and learns from it, he/she is affected while staying the same person. So, here again, there must be a way of affecting objects while they retain their identity, and for that I employ the notion of a script, as described in the preceding item in this blog.

Is a book an object, as 3O claims, or only a node in a network of sense, as Foucault claimed? I can be both at the same time, like an object as a node in a script as an object. But the network of meanings in books seems tenuous, as an object. What is the coherence of sense? Two books will share many words, but if sense varies with the context, those words have many different meanings across books. They do share grammar, within a language. Coherence will increase in a genre of books, or as an item in the oeuvre of a specific author. But the coherence within a book is much stronger: in spatial continuity (the book), coherence in a plot, continuity of characters, or line of argument, lettertype, font size, paper, authorship, readership, publisher, bookshop/website, reviews.

Is Alice wonderland an object? I think she is. What are her components and the coherence between them? They are not empirical. To investigate them you have to ask the author, who is likely to say that whatever is not mentioned in the book you would have to imagine yourself. Could she appear in a book as a cosmonaut?  Perhaps. As a sausage? Hardly. Outside relations are with other characters in the book, the red Queen, for example, who tells her that you have to run to stand still. Coherence in fiction might be logical, though that does not always apply, not in the Snark, for example, who is probably hunted precisely to dodge logic. Whether it ‘works’ is a literary or dramatic matter, judged by critics. It has real effects, such as a reader buying the book, or being spired to write one him/herself.

362. Relational ontology

I argue for a dynamic, relational ontology, where objects develop in relations with other objects that form, enable, object and oppose each other, in relations.

Andrew Benjamin also argued for a relational ontology[i]. He posited that the relation is primary to the singular object, because the individual object arises from the relation. I find it difficult to claim which is primary, since the relation between the object and the relation is circular: singulars produce relations, which produce singulars.

One thing is clear: the ‘thing in itself’ that has produced so much debate in philosophy, does not exist..

Relational ontologies arose before, among others with Alfred N. Whitehead and Bruno Latour. With the latter, the human being is constituted in networks. Against such ontology, two opposite objections have been raised.

The first objection is that relations change constantly, and if a human being is determined by those relations, then he/she no longer has a stable identity. And when they thus adapt to circumstance, they lose their role as opposing objects.

The second objection is that if all objects are formed by relations with all other objects then that also applies to those objects, so that there is only one all-encompassing object.

According to the first objection there is no identity, and according to the second there is only one single identity.

These objections are easily waved aside. The first assumes that with a change of relation an object changes entirely. The second assumes that there are relations with all other objects. Both can be untrue. A relation may affect only parts of an object, and most relations concern only some, not all other objects.

The question then is how an object can change only partly, not entirely or essentially. Is there, then, an essence that remains the same? As I argued earlier in this blog, I don’t believe in essences. How, then, can it work? How can an object change under a change of relations and yet maintain an identity, without having an essence?

According to Tristan Garcia the identity of an object is determined by what goes in and what goes out, in particular the difference between them. That reminds of the notion of added value of the added value of a firm, in economics: the difference of value of sales and value of purchases, as a measure of production (and the basis for VAT). But I want to open up the black box that transforms inputs into outputs.

That can be elucidated with the concept of a script that I discussed before (see the preceding item in this blog). I used it in my studies of innovation, and it is useful here also. A script is a network of nodes, connected by lines that can represent succession in time, causal effect, inference, or sharing of things (resources, ownership, legal identity, …). The structure constitutes identity, without need for any notion of essence.

The system is recursive, i.e. the nodes are themselves also scripts (subscripts), and the whole is embedded in a wider script (superscript). Take the example of a restaurant. That has a script of nodes of entry, seating, ordering, eating, paying and leaving. Paying itself has a script, or a collection of scripts, such as paying cash, by card or an app on the phone. The restaurant is embedded in a wider script of location, parking, supply of goods, monitoring by health authorities, insurance, safety measures, …

This yields an operationalization of the idea, adopted from ‘object-oriented ontology’,  that an object has two dimensions: of what is in it, here the the nodes and their subscripts, and what it is in, the superscript. The script can change in several ways: in its component nodes, e.g. a novel method of payment, in the restaurant script, where the basic character of the script, its overall structure, remains the same. Or it can change in its structure, the composition, say, in the transformation into a self-service restaurant, with a different sequencing of nodes: first selection of food, then payment, then seating and eating. Note that this has consequences for the nodes and their subscripts:  selecting food now entails carrying a tray. Note also that it changes with many things, but not with everything: consumer tastes, new dishes, regulations, but not ice skating, mountain climbing, or elections.

Is there an essence? Eating, perhaps? But the service and self-service restaurants would then be essentially the same. And one can also eat at home. Is the essence ‘eating out’, then? That also applies to a picnic.

Does this solve the philosophical puzzle, and with that the criticism of relational ontology?

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[i] Andrew Benjamin, 2015, Towards a relational ontology, Suny Press. 

361. Incomplete specification

In the preceding items in this blog I have been following Graham Harman (and Tristan Garcia) in the idea that a thing has two dimensions: ‘what is in it’ (components), and ‘what it is in’ (its use, effects). In item 358 I followed Harman in the claim that one cannot completely specify anything. How ‘deep down’ would you go ‘inside’? Down to molecules, or further ‘down’ into ‘strings’? ‘Outside’, use, effects and experience are relative to context and to users, and open-ended, with new possibilities and uses emerging. I also mentioned the notion of ‘tacit knowledge’, where one can be competent in some practice without being able to catch it in complete protocols. That applies to bakers, engineers, doctors, comedians, and politicians.

In the literature on business and organization there is a stream of literature on ‘communities of practice’, where this is studied. To master the practice, people must engage in such a community for a time to master the tacit knowledge involved.

Often, one should not even TRY to specify something as much as possible, but leave it unspecified, in part, on purpose. That arises in the Aristotelian notion of the exemplar and the notion of the enthememe, discussed by Harman[i]. One form of the exemplar is the role model. Rather than even trying to give a complete specification of an activity one gives an example to imitate. The advantage of that is that it leaves room for interpretation, style and improvisation, which enhances motivation.

This is related to the notion of trust, which entails giving room for action, not imposing everything, accepting the risk of error or misunderstanding involved.

The implication, not widely known, or ignored, by regulators, is that the practice cannot be caught in closed protocols to eliminate error and fully codify best practices. Some slack must be allowed to deal with the tacitness of knowledge, the richness of professional practice, its variability due to the creativity of practitioners, the emergence of new problems and opportunities.

The exclusively analytic view, with the pretense of full paraphrase, specification, yields an atomization of work, organization, and communities, the loss of a sense of properties of the whole, emergence, of what is added in the whole, which is part of intrinsic value of action and participation.

In my discussions of meaning, in his blog, I proposed the notion of sense as the way in which one classifies, sees an object, as a chair, say. It entails a set, a repertoire, of connotations that are largely personal, subjective, collected along one’s individual path of life.

The enthememe gives a mere pointer that triggers one to pick one’s own choice of connotations. That gives more room, more freedom, an appeal to one’s own signification, as a trigger to select from one’s own repertoire of connotations, bringing the intended point ‘closer to home’, which is agreeable. A joke is no fun when you explain the point of it. Art mobilises creativity of signification rather than giving a specification or explanation.     

Harman gives Socrates as an exemplar. I have long been irritated by his unwillingness to commit himself to an answer to the riddles he poses (in Plato’s dialogues), acting only as a midwife (in maieutics) helping to give birth to ideas or assumptions by the interlocutors. After Harman, I see the point of it: there is never a final, correct answer.

In the practical wisdom, phronesis, of Aristotle, one cannot supply universal moral recipes since moral judgement depends on contingencies, where different virtues have to be weighed against each other depending on the specific context. There also one can only learn from the exemplary mastery and tacit knowledge of an experienced judge.  

When I was teaching at universities, students demanded recipes, and I had to explain that such universal recipes don’t exist and at a university students had to learn to make their own recipes depending on the situation at hand.

In this blog I want to offer an ontology which takes change and variety, needed for change, as the crux of existence. This is in line with my arguments throughout this blog, in my discussion of the change of meaning along the hermeneutic circle, my approach to universals and their particulars, and the cycle of discovery that I proposed. In this area, I have also used ideas from Wittgenstein (the later, of the Philosophical Investigations), such as meaning as use and language games. However, the shortcoming here of the game as a paradigm is that games have fixed rules, while here rules may change. How that can be is the central challenge.  

What does all this do to the proposals, in this blog, for truth as warranted assertibility, and debatable ethics? The warrant, of a proposition or ethical judgement, consists of such considerations as relevance, intent, available information, perspective, and enabling and constraining conditions, which all depend on the context. This includes arguments of fact, logic, meaning, workability, plausibility, and metaphor. Plausibility is coherence in a wider whole. Metaphor serves to loosen thought, to see something from a different perspective.     

The analytic, scientific perspective can appear as an ingredient in the pragmatic whole. Mathematics can help to contribute rigour of argument, given basic assumptions or axioms whose relevance and adequacy depend on the wider warrant of the context. Philosophy can help science in its embedding in a wider whole. The pragmatic, the consideration of what ‘the thing is in’, is primary, to decide what is relevant in the potential of the analytic, in ‘what is in it’.

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[i] Graham Harman, 2018, Object-oriented ontology; A new theory of everything, Penguin.

360. Do objects have an essence?

I have taken the ‘absolute’ to mean two things: it is universal, applying everywhere, regardless of conditions, and it is fixed, applying forever. That is how I read Plato. For Hegel, the absolute spirit is not absolute in that sense. It is moving, in a historical process of self-realization. 

Does the universal have an essence? In my view, an essence is absolute: universal across all contexts, and fixed. An essence that varies with context, as I heard Harman claim, to me is a contradiction in terms. I do allow for some property of a thing to have salience, or to be characteristic, depending on the context. Of all the features of a thing, or manifestations of a universal, one is of particular salience at that place, context and time. It may be called essential, but only in and for that context. It also depends on whom you ask.

To connect with the idea, discussed in preceding items, that a thing is to be seen from two perspectives, of what ‘is in it’ and ‘what it is in’, especially the latter depends on context, on where it is in.   

For example, would Amsterdam, where I live, still be Amsterdam if all the main canals, seen as characteristic of the city, were filled up? That depends on whether you live on one of the canals, or are a tourist, or a film maker. In Amsterdam, the Waterloo square offers a market for second-hand goods and tourist trinkets. It is somewhat anarchic, formed by independent-minded traders, indulging in traffic of mostly soft drugs, and a certain amount of stolen goods. The municipality is now planning a revised, more orderly, clean and planned market, without consulting the traders. There is now a rebellion brewing, with people chanting that the square is now ‘losing its soul’.   

But if there is no fixed, context-independent, objective essence, how, then, to account for the phenomenon that there is continuity of identity (of a boat, a person, a city) in combination with variation of qualities across context and time? First, I think that eternal identity is too much to expect: identity is at most stable relative to the change of features or qualities that vary most with context and perspective.

I am reminded of Neurath’s story of the boat that one repairs, replacing plank by plank, while staying afloat in it. The planks are new, the boat retains its identity. Cities remain the same while having structures, streets, etc. replaced. People age, get sick, learn and forget while staying the same people. This suggests that there is a whole with replacement of parts. The whole retains its basic logic, design, or composition. This relates to the notion of ‘emergence’ mentioned before: the whole has features that the parts ‘in it’ lack. Parts may continue to contribute to that even when replaced.

To proceed, I think here of the notion of a script that I used at several places, in discussions of meaning and innovation (item 35 in this blog), as a logical, causal or sequential ordering of components called nodes. Then a restaurant retains an identity in the ordering of nodes of entry, seating, food selection, payment, eating, and exit, while a component node may change its identity, such as, say, the method of payment, which in turn has a lower level script, a subscript. Now, in the transformation into a self-service restaurant, the order of the nodes changed, with selection and payment preceding the seating and eating, and that may be seen as a change of identity.

The change of the composition of the script often requires a change in the nodes, the subscripts. Seating now includes carrying a tray of food, and the node of exit now includes the dumping of trash from the tray.   

This also yields an example of emergence: A restaurant has a legal and a fiscal identity which its components don’t have.

On no level can the activities involved be completely specified. To quote an example from Searle: the node of eating does not specify that food is to be put in your mouth, not your pocket, though doggy bags are sometimes allowed (in the US).

So, what would be the essence of  a restaurant? If it is eating, a self-service restaurant would be essentially the same as a service restaurant. And one also eats at home. Is it eating out, then? That also applies to a picnic.

359. What things?

I follow Tristan Garcia and Graham Harman in adopting a very liberal, wide ranging notion of things, as I did in he preceding item in this blog. Things are anything one can think or talk about, be it dikes, dogs, dreams or delusions. Objects, somewhat more restrictively, I take as things one can interact with, and that can resist us, literally objecting to what we say, think or do. That notion of an object is still very wide, but does seem to exclude things like dreams and delusions.

What different kinds of objects are there? Heidegger distinguished ‘Sein’, non-human things, and ‘ Dasein’, human things, which are different in having thought, self-consciousness, awareness of death, etc. Similarly, Sartre talked of things ‘in themselves’ (‘en soi’) and things ‘for themselves’ (‘pour soi’), again non-human vs. human. Garcia objected to this.[i] The difference between human and nonhuman is not absolute: Humans are also animals, some animals have something that looks, in part, like language, self-awareness, a sense of death, and altruism.

Nevertheless, this difference matters, even if it is not absolute. Humans do have features that animals don’t, such as a language with a grammar.

Another customary distinction is that between material and abstract things. Garcia questions that also. If one accepts his view, discussed in the preceding item, that there are two aspects to any thing: what ‘is in it’ and ‘what it is in’, then a chair is not only something with legs, seat, armrests, made of wood or metal, but also something subject to use, or to discussion, generating experience. And the latter is mostly immaterial. Conversely, an abstract thing, such as an idea, is expressed by way of speech or writing, which are material.

Yet, here again, though not absolute, the difference is still important. Garcia proposes that things can be more or less spatially and temporally ‘continuous’; ‘chunky’ and ‘durable’. That also is not absolute, and depends on scale or perspective. Take a piece of slate, the example Garcia uses. When you look at it on a microscopic or submicroscopic level, continuity in space falls apart: you see molecules hanging more or less separately, non-continuously, in mostly empty space. The slate is durable but in the very long run that also will erode.

However, what is relevant to human experience is how continuous an object is on that scale, in human experience, between the microscopic and the macroscopic, and between the instantaneous and the long run. Sufficiently continuous in time and space, as seen by humans, to be relevant to activities like foraging, fighting, building, fleeing, attacking, etc. 

And here the difference is important, as I argued earlier in this blog. Objects that are continuous, in human experience, behave differently, in important ways, from objects that are not. As I said in an earlier item, if you move a chair from one room to another, it remains the same. If you move a word from one sentence to another its meaning changes. Continuous objects were salient for survival in the long period of the evolution of humans as hunter-gatherers. Spatial discontinuity of an enemy in a group of enemies is a very different matter from a single enemy, a spear that can at any moment dissolve in the air is not of much use.

The salience of continuity was such, I propose, that it became defining for objects in general, imprinted as such in the evolution of the human mind, in its construction of concepts and language. And now we treat abstractions, such as meaning, happiness, identity, culture, democracy, and so on, by analogy to continuous objects, while the crux of them is that they are subject to differentiation between people, contexts, and moments. I have called this an ‘object bias’ in conceptualization, which is now putting humanity and society on the wrong foot, jeopardizing the current evolution and survival of humanity.

Garcia discusses how the intuition of ‘substance’ used to dominate old ontologies, such as those of Aristotle, Spinoza, and Descartes. I propose that this also was due to the salience of continuity in human experience. Substance is the pinnacle of both continuities.

    

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[i] Tristan Garcia, 2014, Form and object; A treatise on things, Edinburgh University Press.