Sense Cert & Perc Lect Notes 08-9-10 e
September11, 2008
Lecture Notes on Sense Certainty and Perception
1) Now we start the actual book.
a) Hegel is the philosopher above all who has written about and made us sensitive (I would claim, too sensitive) to what has come to be known as the “problem of the beginning” in philosophy. Once one has resolved to be critical (at a minimum, methodologically self-conscious), and not dogmatic, where can one start, and what possible justification could one give for starting there?
b) This is the third beginning of the book, after the Preface and the Introduction. The Preface, I have suggested, serves quite another purpose: offering a bridge from the Phenomenology to the Science of Logic and the system of the Encyclopedia. But the Introduction really does serve to introduce the topic and the method in a way that motivates a starting-place.
i) The topic is consciousness and its experience.
ii) Though he hasn’t told us this (it would have been nice to finish the Introduction by doing so), the plan is to talk first about its three basic aspects:
· discursive entries in perception, and the content and process of theoretical cognition,
· selves and self-consciousness, the normative force of concept-application, and
· discursive exits in purposive action, and the content and process of practical activity.
· Then talk about the whole of Spirit, of which those three aspects are aspects, in its tri-partite development.
Cf. this passage, from the Religion chapter of the Phenomenology:
The moments are consciousness, self-consciousness, Reason, and Spirit --Spirit that is, as immediate Spirit, which is not yet consciousness of Spirit. Their totality, taken together, constitutes Spirit in its mundane existence generally; Spirit as such contains the previous structured shapes in universal determinations, in the moments just named...Only the totality of Spirit is in Time, and the 'shapes', which are 'shapes' of the totality of Spirit, display themselves in a temporal succession; for only the whole has true actuality and therefore the form of pure freedom in the face of an 'other', a form which expresses itself in Time. But the moments of the whole, consciousness, self-consciousness, Reason, and Spirit, just because they are moments, have no existence in separation from one another. [M 679]
And
Thus while the previous single series in its advance marked the retrogressive steps in it by nodes, but continued itself again from them in a single line, it is now, as it were, broken at these nodes, at these universal moments, and falls apart into many lines, which, gathered up into a single bundle, at the same time combine symmetrically so that the similar differences in which each particular moment took shape within itself meet together. [M 681]
(I take it that the inclusion of immediate Spirit along with consciousness, self-consciousness, and reason in the first passage is explicitly to mark the role of the community, which is the other side of individual self-consciousness.)
iii) The aim is to present a science of the experience of consciousness.
iv) And the method is to start with what we find in actual empirical consciousness.
c) The criterion of adequacy motivated in the Introduction is what I’ve called the Genuine Knowledge condition: that we must make it at least intelligible that it is possible to know things as they really are, in themselves, and not just as they are for consciousness. The natural place to start, then, is with cognition that is most immediate, where our cognitive faculties have done the least work. In particular, since the issue raised by consideration of the model or metaphor of cognition as an instrument or a medium is whether conceptualizing must be understood as always in some important way falsifying, we want to begin by looking at the purest form of receptivity we can find, with as little conceptualizing (spontaneity) on our part as possible. The attitude of natural consciousness with which we begin is that “that mind knows best which does least.” [cf. “He governs best who governs least.”] We want to think about states of consciousness that just take in how things are, without doing anything, or interfering in any way with what is given, what is presented. These are direct, immediate, sensory experiences.
d) Starting here is also motivated by the Genuine Knowledge condition on semantics, in particular as motivated by the image of the mind as having to conceptualize the unconceptualized (the mind as instrument, or refracting medium). The trouble there is that anything the mind does to reality to get it into graspable, intelligible shape (into shape where it can be used as evidence to draw conclusions, that is, as premises for inferences) must count as falsifying it: as leaving something out, adding or something.
e) The idea for a positive response will be that a broadly hylomorphic account will see two different forms of one content. Thus both the difference and the identity are respected. (This means we need a special account of this kind of identity-in-difference, and that we will get, in spades.) But the common content must be understood as already in conceptual shape: we do not have a single content first in nonconceptual, and then in conceptual shape. That, the thought is, would make it impossible to satisfy the Genuine Knowledge condition. This is a big structural divide, even within the hylomorphic strategy. Q: What motivates and justifies going the one way rather than the other? A: The lessons of the Consciousness section. That is, one upshot of the argument that takes us from Sense Certainty to Perception is that we must think of the underlying content as through-and-through conceptually articulated, on pain of being condemned to treat it as completely indeterminate.
f) So the picture is something like this:
g) Note that Hegel’s particular version of the hylomorphic strategy for combining identity and difference (by having two different dimensions, one of which is that along which identity is secured, the other along which difference is secured—note that we must also be able to have two different contents in the same form) will be distinctive in insisting that form and content are nonetheless not conceptually independent of one another.
Sense Certainty:
2) As I read Sense Certainty, Hegel makes two large-scale philosophical points, and along the way starts a third line of thought that is taken to the next stage in Perception. The first is the distinction between immediacy of content and immediacy of origin. The second is between particularity of representing and representing of particularity.
a) The first at its most general is a (indeed, the) rationalist point: no experience is intelligible as cognitively significant—as making a contribution to our knowing or understanding anything—unless it involves the application of concepts.
i. More specifically, Hegel makes the distinction (familiar to us from Sellars) between the sense in which sense experience can, and the sense in which it cannot, be understood to be ‘immediate’, that is, non-inferential. This critical point will be with us throughout the discussion of Consciousness. Sense experience that can be cognitively significant, that can count as knowledge, cannot be immediate, which is to say noninferential, in the sense of not standing in inferential (and incompatibility) relations. For then it would be cognitively idle: unable to serve as evidence to justify further claims. It must be inferentially articulated at least in that it can serve as a premise in inferences. More deeply, unless it stands in relations of material incompatibility (indeed, as we shall see, relations of strong difference = exclusion, and not just weak or mere difference), the deliverances of sense (the content for the hylomorphic strategy) will not be intelligible as determinate. So: if determinate, then standing in relations of material incompatibility. Further, if standing in relations of material incompatibility, then standing in relations of counterfactually robust material inference (=mediation). And standing in relation of determinate negation and (so) mediation is what it is to be conceptually contentful (conceptually articulated, in “conceptual shape”), according to Hegel’s non-psychological definition of the conceptual.
ii. The sense in which the deliverances of sense can be immediate or noninferential concerns not their content, but the process whereby we come to endorse them. That process need not be an inferential process. [In a recent paper on my approach to observation (for Weiss and Wanderer’s Reading Brandom), John McDowell takes issue with this notion of noninferentiality. He suggests as a replacement that judgments should count as noninferential if their justification does not depend on exhibiting them as conclusions of inferences from something else.]
b) Second, in general Hegel appreciates the significance of deixis and indexicality for empirical knowledge. He sees them as the conceptual form of immediacy.
i. More specifically, he investigates (in the critical spirit of Kant) the conditions of the intelligibility of demonstrative and indexical deliverances of sense. Here his great discovery is that—as I put the point in Making It Explicit—deixis presupposes anaphora.
ii. The question here how unrepeatable events (one sense of ‘particulars’) can contribute to repeatable conceptual content (conceptual content repeatables). Sorting out the distinction between particular representing and representing of particulars should be laid alongside the sense in which perceptual judgments can, and the sense in which they cannot be immediate in the sense of noninferential.
3) It is not a small thing that Hegel is the first modern philosopher (the medieval scholastic philosophers of language had, as usual, already done significant work in the area) to address the topics of deixis and indexicality. [Is this the place to talk about how these are different?] This is a central topic in contemporary philosophy of language—indeed, bone-dry, hard-assed technical philosophy of language—but most people working in the area (I mean to be slandering Kaplan and Stalnaker, among the giants, but also people such as Salmon, Almog, and Soames) are sufficiently ignorant of its history that they would be astonished to be told that Hegel had opened up the field. (I’m reminded of what someone said about one of my teachers, Gil Harman: that it was a calumny to accuse him of being unhistorical. In fact he is steeped in the history of philosophy, and everything he does is deeply rooted in a reading of it. It’s just that he thinks the history of philosophy started with Quine.) They would accord that honor to Frege (in “The Thought”). (Those who insist that Frege be thought of not just in the first instance, but exclusively as a philosopher of mathematics and of logic should be given pause by the realization that he explicitly discussed a whole range of topics that have become canonical, defining topics in the philosophy of language, even where they do not occur in logical or mathematical discourse: prominent among them, propositional attitude ascribing locutions, demonstratives and indexicals, pragmatic force, and the relations between artificial and natural languages.) The more knowledgeable might mention also Peirce, before moving on to Russell and Reichenbach. They are unlikely to mention Scotus and Ockham (though David Kaplan has made some use of Scotus on haeccieties—Calvin Normore has not lived in vain!). We need a good history of the philosophical and linguistic discussion of demonstratives and indexicals.
4) Hegel considers demonstratives and indexicals (this-here-now) because they express particularity and unrepeatability.
a) It is for good reason that he looks to the use of linguistic expressions. It is not that he thinks all thought must be linguistic. It is that his general principle is that we can understand the implicit only in terms of its explicit expression. (Remember: “Language is the Dasein of Spirit.”) [I claim that this expressivism is compatible with his pragmatism (see Ch. 2 of ASoT: “Some Pragmatist Themes…”), which in a certain way privileges the practical (implicit) use of expressions over their (explicit) content. But the relations and interactions between them are complex and subtle.]
b)
i) Kant was very good on the distinction between representations of relations and relations of representations. That is the point of the 2nd Analogy of Experience. In the example there, we the temporal sequential relations of representations in two cases: walking around a house, say, clockwise, on the one hand, and watching a boat drift downstream, on the other. These give rise to two different representations of relations. The ordering is represented as subjective in the first case, and as objective in the second, in the sense that responsibility for the relations of the representations are assigned to the subject in the first case, and to the object in the second. The difference in assignment of responsibility is a reflection of implicit modal differences in the representations of relations. It is possible for me to have walked around the house counter-clockwise, in which case there would have been different temporal sequential relations among my representations. But it is necessary that the drifting boat present the temporal sequential relations of representations that it did. Being able to move from relations of representations of the same temporal sequential sort to representations of relations of these two quite different kinds is an essential structural element of what it is implicitly or in practice to take what I have as representations, by a subject, of an object, which is to say, as representings at all. Their representational purport is unintelligible apart from the modal articulation of the representations of relations. Thus that representations of relations exhibit modal features explicitly expressed by the use of concepts of possibility and necessity is an essential structure of intentionality.
ii) Note that just this is left out of the Tractatus. One of the dimensions along with its logical picture is pure and crystalline is that there is nothing about time, and nothing about modality (other than logical possibility and necessity) in it. Kant is much more sophisticated here. And Hegel will insist, as Kant would have, too, that apart from considerations of time and modality, one cannot make sense of semantic representational relations. On their conception of experience and representation, the Tractatus account (which in this semantic respect belongs in the empiricist tradition, in spite of its lack of attention to epistemological matters) must fail.