Spinoza’s Dream: On Nature and Meaning 9783110479812, 9783110477924

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction
1. Nature
1.1 An analogy
1.2 Categorial form
1.3 Selves
1.4 Society and culture
1.5 Summary
2. Silent Conditions
2.1 Conditions that elude observation
2.2 Examples
2.3 Rationales
2.4 Appraisal
2.5 Attitudes
3. Existence Proofs
3.1 Self-perception
3.2 Ephemeral conscious data
3.3 Percepts
3.4 Material objects and constraints
3.5 Emotion
3.6 Intuition
3.7 A priori existence proofs
3.8 Remarks
4. Other Ontologies
4.1 Illusion
4.2 Construction
4.3 Theism
4.4 Ontology and value
5. Meaning, value, and truth
5.1 Problematic
5.2 Context
5.3 Meaning
5.4 Significance
5.5 Value
5.6 Value’s relation to meaning and significance
5.7 Truth
5.8 Meaning/significance or truth
5.9 Is science indifferent to meaning and value?
5.10 Mysteries and mythologies
6. Practical Life
6.1 Overview
6.2 Needs and wants
6.3 Action
6.4 Error
6.5 Systems and their meanings
6.6 Two perspectives
6.7 Ethical practice
6.8 Culture
6.9 Innovation/Distraction
7. Mental functions
7.1 Meaning
7.2 Valuation
8 Last thoughts
8.1 Contingency
8.2 Spirituality
8.3 A paradox
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

David Weissman Spinoza’s Dream

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Edited by Roberto Poli (Trento) Advisory Board John Bell (London, CA) Mark Bickhard (Lehigh) Heinrich Herre (Leipzig) David Weissman (New York)

Volume 7

David Weissman

Spinoza’s Dream

On Nature and Meaning

ISBN 978-3-11-047792-4 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-047981-2 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-047925-6 ISSN 2198-1868 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

| For my brother and sister

Acknowledgment Writing is hermetic. My wife, Kathy, makes it possible.

Contents Introduction | 1  1  1.1  1.2  1.3  1.4  1.5 

Nature | 16  An analogy | 16  Categorial form | 17  Selves | 40  Society and culture | 46  Summary | 48  

2  2.1  2.2  2.3  2.4  2.5 

Silent Conditions | 49  Conditions that elude observation | 49  Examples | 50  Rationales | 51  Appraisal | 55  Attitudes | 58  

3  3.1  3.2  3.3  3.4  3.5  3.6  3.7  3.8 

Existence Proofs | 60  Self-perception | 60  Ephemeral conscious data | 65  Percepts | 65  Material objects and constraints | 65  Emotion | 66  Intuition | 66  A priori existence proofs | 67  Remarks | 83 

4  4.1  4.2  4.3  4.4 

Other Ontologies | 85  Illusion | 85  Construction | 88   Theism | 99  Ontology and value | 102 

5  5.1  5.2  5.3  5.4 

Meaning, value, and truth | 104  Problematic | 104  Context | 105  Meaning | 109  Significance | 115 

X | Contents

5.5  5.6  5.7  5.8  5.9  5.10 

Value | 116  Value’s relation to meaning and significance | 118   Truth | 120  Meaning/significance or truth | 122  Is science indifferent to meaning and value? | 125  Mysteries and mythologies | 127 

6  6.1  6.2  6.3  6.4  6.5  6.6  6.7  6.8  6.9 

Practical Life | 128   Overview | 128   Needs and wants | 130  Action | 134  Error | 135  Systems and their meanings | 136  Two perspectives | 138   Ethical practice | 139  Culture | 142  Innovation/Distraction | 145 

7  7.1  7.2 

Mental functions | 147  Meaning | 147  Valuation | 159 

8  8.1  8.2  8.3 

Last thoughts | 171  Contingency | 171  Spirituality | 176  A paradox | 177

Bibliography | 179 Index | 183 

Introduction Meaning (significance) and nature are this book’s principal topics. They seem an odd couple, like raisins and numbers, though they elide when meanings of a global sort—ideologies and religions, for example—promote ontologies that subordinate nature. Setting one against the other makes reality contentious. It signifies workmates and a coal face to miners, gluons to physicists, prayer and redemption to priests. Are there many realities, or many perspectives on one? The answer I prefer is the comprehensive naturalism anticipated by Aristotle and Spinoza: “natura naturans, natura naturata.”1 Nature naturing is an array of mutually conditioning material processes in spacetime. Each structure or event—storm clouds forming, nature natured—is self-differentiating, self-stabilizing, and sometimes self-disassembling; each alters or transforms a pre-existing state of affairs. This surmise anticipated discoveries and analyses to which neither thinker had access, though physics and biology confirm their hypothesis beyond reasonable doubt. Aristotle argued that mind is the activity of a body having a certain complexity; he saw no evidence of mental stuff entangled in body or brain. Yet materiality seems incidental to beauty, significance or purpose: like elegant wallpaper, they stand apart from their material conditions. Three obstacles, all broadly psychological, resist a comprehensive materialism: i. consciousness and its qualifications (sights and sounds); ii. mental activities essential to the conduct of practical life (judgment and intention, for example); and iii. interpretations (religions, histories, or ideologies) that project meaning and value into everyday life and the cosmos. Clarity about mind’s foundation is deterred by our inability to explain how consciousness and its contents are generated within the brain. Mental activities essential to practical life, meaning and value are less daunting. Specific functions require careful specification and analysis; misdescribing them—construing mind as a theater, for example—is a trap that guarantees dualist conclusions. I argue that all the functions responsible for practical life, including those essential to meaning and value, are performed by material systems: bodies with brains. My principal target is the third of these obstacles: naturalism can’t be a comprehensive ontology if reality as we construe it is replete with entities and powers stipulated by the meanings and values of a preferred ideology or culture. This

|| 1 Benedict de Spinoza, On the Improvement of the Understanding, the Ethics, Correspondence, trans. R. H. M. Elwes (New York: Dover, 1955), p. 68.

2 | Introduction

overlay—material character superseded by an interpretation—is familiar when the first is suppressed or ignored while used as a platform for the ontology of the second. This was Heidegger’s inversion when he observed that things characterized as present-to-mind are abstracted from their presence ready-to-hand.2 His remark conflates being with valuation. It confirms that meaning is a distorting lens: round metal bands are perceived by people wearing them as wedding rings. This isn’t a mistake, though it is evidence that meaning has biased perception. Why does that matter? Because some meanings reach beyond the natural world into imaginary domains. Wedding rings express commitment to a partner; church spires are a gesture in the direction of the divine. Mixing fact and fantasy has three effects we may want to resist. One is self-deception: do we know who and where we are if beliefs about ourselves and circumstances are laced with distorting values and assumptions. Another risk is the chance that we shall behave badly because of believing, for example, that women who float when others try to drown them (Salem, Massachusetts, 1690’s) really are witches. Last is the desire for an applicable and adequate metaphysics of nature. This is my focus, a concern requiring that we suppress sentiment and fantasy when they postulate entities and processes having no verifiable place in the natural world. Meaning came to dominate philosophic ideas of reality after Locke distinguished nominal from real essence: reality as experienced from reality in itself.3 This distinction discredited metaphysics, once celebrated for its understanding of reality, because it entailed that things in themselves are unknowable because inaccessible. Yet Locke’s distinction implies a mystery: how shall we explain the order and detail of experience? Is it a coherent rendering of the extra-mental world, one that cannot be checked for accuracy because we can’t escape our minds to compare sensory data to things they represent? Or is it coherent because each person creates the orderly experience he or she inspects? Kant favored the second alternative. He described experience as mind’s creation; organized sensory data are a barrier to knowing things that affect us, not a window securing an unobstructed view of them. Conditions for making experience were said to include forms of intuition (space and time), rules for organizing data in space or

|| 2 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 104. 3 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, vols. 1 and 2 (New York: Dover, 1959), vol. 2, p. 27.

Introduction | 3

time (rules of geometry, music, or speech, for example), and concepts (schemas for organizing data in particular ways: cat or dog).4 Kant also cited this condition: I have been reproached… for defining the power of desire the power of being the cause through one’s presentations, of the actuality of the objects of these presentations. The criticism was that, after all, mere wishes are desires too, and yet we all know they alone do not enable us to produce their objects. That, however, proves nothing more than that some of man’s desires involve him in self-contradiction. Experience is meaningful because steeped in aims and values, not because it accurately represents things in themselves.5

This emphasis annuls the once acknowledged difference between the orders of knowledge and being: first in being, latter or last in knowledge; or first in knowledge (a pain), later in being (its cause). Nature once implied that the experience of other people and things has the backing of real people and things. Nature, as Kant described it, is an idea of reason, his phrase, for a regulative idea. It connotes the steady backing ascribed to the world perceived, though there is and can be no evidence for this inferred stability when every such thing has fallen into the abyss of things characterized alternately as “negative noumena” or “things-in-themselves.”6 Such “things” are indescribable and unthinkable because no properties can be ascribed to them. Meanings disguise their loss because inquiry—discovering how things stand in the world—is transformed. We ignore ontological (existence) questions while organizing ourselves as personal or social meanings prescribe. (Babe Ruth was a personage, but so are Harry Potter, Mr. Spock, and the Tooth Fairy: all are fixtures in the experience of some people.) Or we construe experience in the ontological terms projected by favored meanings: principally, ideologies or religions. So, “God” is one ontological idealization; progress and justice are two more. These ontologies warp experience in either of two ways. One favors piety and deference; the other imbues the pragmatism that sees reality as a projection of human interests. Karl Mannheim’s formulation is an example of the latter: In every concept … there is not only a fixation of individuals with reference to a definite group of a certain kind and its action, but every source from which we derive meaning and

|| 4 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1929), pp. 41–296, 5 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett 1987), n. 18, p. 16. 6 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 172–173.

4 | Introduction

interpretation acts also as a stabilizing factor on the possibilities of experiencing and knowing objects with reference to the central goal of actions which direct us.7

Follow two people into a shop as they look for things of interest: products significant to one are incidental to the other. Follow them again, this time as they separate, one to Fenway Park, the other to Yankee stadium, one to church, the other to a mosque. Much of secular life is unruffled by these differences, though each person inhabits a world of loyalties, fears, and expectations unknown to others. World has turned equivocal. Some “worlds” are perspectival and parochial, as a child’s world differs from that of adults. Others differ as a spirit world compares to one of stone. This is an ontological difference—one of being or beings— not the quotidian difference of perspectives. W. V. O. Quine’s ontological relativism is consequential in this pragmatic way: The quality of myth … is relative; relative … to the epistemological point of view. This point of view is one among various, corresponding to one among our various interests and purposes.8

Quine assumed that the character of a world is determined by the semantics and quantifiers (“There is…”, “All are…”) of the language used to think it. Values determine the choice of semantics; a semantics with quantifiers entails an ontology. Every ontological commitment is radically contingent because interests vary and change. What do we want: stability or progress; peace or war? Reality seems altered with every choice of organizing interests, ideas, and values because it has, after Locke and Kant, no grip apart from purposes and ideas. These are our world-makers; they change as we respond to circumstances. Hence the several ways of construing reality, the contraries generated as we express successive points of view: Hegel’s epoch-making ideas, Foucault’s cultural histories, Kuhn’s paradigms, Quine’s ontological relativism. Compare inquiry: assuming that reality is accessible and intelligible, it promises a halting but steady progression of ideas measured against the stable reality whose character and existence are largely independent of ways we think about or engage it. Inquiry is a probe: using hypotheses to characterize states of affairs, it derives predictions that test their accuracy. (Seeing smoke, guessing fire, we look for evidence that would falsify or confirm

|| 7 Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1936), p, 20. 8 W. V. O. Quine, From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952), p. 19.

Introduction | 5

the surmise.) Interpretation displaces inquiry when features of the world are construed in terms prescribed by a meaning. They acquire identity and status when drawn into a web of attributes—differences, relations, and values—having no reality apart from the meanings used to construe them. One is a man or woman by virtue of anatomy, but a sergeant, priest, or saint because of meanings and the behaviors they prescribe. My use of interpretation—construing people, situations, or texts in terms prescribed by invalidated assumptions about reality or value—is narrower than other established uses. Interpretation is innocuous when playing music, reading allusive poetry, or construing body-language. It is still benign when lowering clouds are perceived as the likely sign of rain, though not when these same clouds are perceived as evidence of a god’s rage. The first is standard and innocuous because its appeal to natural processes is unproblematic; the other is mythic, misleading, and characteristic of metaphysically weighted interpretations. Meaning, too, has other senses. Sometimes meaning is interpretation: construing someone’s words or gestures when speculating about her intentions. There is also the innocuous reading implied when meaning signifies the sense made of oneself when stitching memories to present attitudes, aims or circumstances: what am I doing; why? And there is meaning as symbol: the flag. Meaning in all these respects is usually benign, though easily turned: the beneficent god, the Nation. Inquiry’s hypotheses are confirmed, tested again when revised, or discarded. What is the status of myths and stories that are never confirmed? Some shape expectations, mutual understandings, and intentions; they embroider reality as we perceive it, despite having no basis there. Does it matter that reality is disfigured or merely disguised by stories that are fantastical, incoherent, or inconsistent? Children’s stories are innocuous; the heroes of religious and nationalist legends are more consequential. The reverence they command identifies a sect where feelings and behavior are decreed; failure to comply, want of respect, is blasphemy. Restrict yourself to a single orthodoxy and all is clear. But there are many competing stories, each with its loyalties and idealizations. Piety or wealth; self-regard or social responsibility: which do my gods prescribe? The diversity of one’s interests and rationales is disorienting: we live here or there, while having news and commitments everywhere. One has family, friends, and work: obligations to them are stabilizing. But clarity dissolves beyond this horizon. Some of us are intimidated; everyone is confused: how many anomalous meanings, how much fantasy, is tolerable before local anchors slip from view? We aren’t surprised that religions affirm contrary “truths” about the world. But science, too, shows the influence of interpretation as it deploys alternate

6 | Introduction

ways of construing reality: organicism or mechanism is affirmed as true, then displaced when its contrary becomes the “paradigm” dominating scientific thinking. Carlo Rovelli resists the idea that science advances by promulgating successive contraries: In my own field of research, theoretical physics, a ‘vulgata’ of Kuhn’s incommensurability thesis has a strong hold. According to this vulgata, advance in science is marked by discontinuity, the greater the discontinuity the stronger the advance, and not much more than the phenomena survives across the discontinuity. This has fostered a style of research based on the ideology of discarding past knowledge as irrelevant and working by ‘guessing’ possible theories. In my opinion, this ideology is one of the reasons for the current sterility of theoretical physics.9

Discontinuity is the effect when interpretation displaces inquiry. Interpretation is a way of construing thoughts, feelings or percepts—of organizing and explaining them—without confirmation that things signified have the properties ascribed to them: is Mrs. Santa Claus an entrepreneur, dentist, or cook? There is no truth of the matter, because the integrity of a consistent story doesn’t require actual referents. Inquiry assumes to the contrary that reality is the stable backdrop to theory. It supposes that successive hypotheses or plans, tested and revised under the press of experiment, have a stable target or context: namely, some aspect of the natural world. Having a toothache, I go to the dentist. Relieving the pain by fixing the tooth, he confirms my inference that there are extra-mental solutions for my intra-psychic or bodily needs. Practical life, like science, inhabits a reality where the existence and character of things are independent of ways we think about and engage them. Compare the successive contraries formulated when topics or phenomena are interpreted: each is self-sufficient but unverifiable or falsifiable. Belief persists as long as partisans affirm it. We may suppose that interpretation in its primary sense is a noun signifying the conceptual device used to construe a thought or phenomenon, but that sense of the word is secondary. The primary sense, given Kant’s emphasis, is that of a verb: interpretation is the activity of infusing thoughts or data with form. It creates the world as we know it, the experience beyond which there is no appeal. Hence, the successive contraries generated as we search for a “paradigm” that will make the world intelligible in terms appropriate to our interests. Inquiry promises an asymptotic convergence on truth: formulating and testing hypotheses, maps, and plans, we make accurate representations and effective contacts.

|| 9 Carlo Rovelli, “Aristotle’s physics: a physicist’s look,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association, vol . 1, issue 1, Spring, 2015, p. 36.

Introduction | 7

Interpretation is modest by comparison. For there is no way to confirm experiences schematized by interpretations, though they have other virtues: their consistency, coherence, cogency, fruitfulness, and social approval are the principal values weighed as we appraise them. We create disparate paradigms, each for a purpose, many that display an inner conceptual tension, a gestalt or identity that resists intrusions. Some are rigid and closed. Others, like novels, Galilean physics, or Quine’s fields of sentences invite conceptual tinkering. But these are refinements, not empirical tests of an interpretation’s truth: they amplify or clarify the design used to create a thinkable experience. Truth falls by the wayside, though we invoke coherence10 or disquotation11 to save the illusion of truth in a guise congenial to Kantian skepticism. This posture has agreeable social consequences, including tolerance for alternate interpretations in science, practical life, art, and religion. Think as you like; assemble your various interests; live your values and the complex “world” of your choice. Consistency might seem to be the single over-riding principle, but we restrict consistency to propositional domains. We don’t say that a religious physicist is inconsistent given domains that are separable if distinguishable: religion or physics. Integrate them as best you can, but don’t worry about anomalies because we’re respectful of contrariety in democratic societies where freethinkers go several ways at once. Do or say as you like, up to the point of incoherence or harming others. Misgivings are epistemological rather than ethical or political. Kantian experience (with Hume’s strictures against inference,12) is a barrier to hypotheses purporting to signify extra-mental states of affairs; there is no escaping this barrier, and no way through it. Nothing distinct from experience can be known or thought; all of it, if any there be, is inaccessible. Think of the Flying Dutchman: usually at sea, always frustrated on land. Plato thought of contraries in a more systematic way: they impel thought to rise beyond its preoccupation with language and competing conceptualizations until it grasps the Forms. That achievement is truth by participation, truth construed as mind’s identity with Forms known to rational intuition.13 Plato’s solution is little use to science because thought’s evolution in an individual thinker isn’t a plausible analogy for the evolving community of independent, often competing scientists. They don’t supersede hypotheses and experiments by rising to

|| 10 David Weissman, Truth’s Debt to Value (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 128– 160. 11 Ibid., pp. 169–186. 12 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 97. 13 Ibid., pp. 160–169.

8 | Introduction

the unitary illumination of a trans-historical Absolute discerning things as they are. Science is more piecemeal and pedestrian: it extends its depth and explanatory range, then integrates its findings by testing hypotheses against a mostly stable reality, a reality accessible at every moment, given appropriate techniques for engaging it. Let me summarize the last several paragraphs: Kant reduced every conceptualization to interpretation, though we liberate science from the impasse of contrariety by distinguishing the three constituents of experience: perceived natural processes and structures; cultural meanings; and personal urgencies. Discount the second and third, then use inquiry’s principal tools—hypothesis, perception, and experiment—to investigate nature as it affects human practice in ways that are elementary or arcane (burnt toast or underground cisterns used to trap neutrinos). We gather and integrate the categorial—ontological—information science has acquired, but then we segregate it: we put those findings aside while appraising ontologies postulated by personal and cultural meanings. These are the contraries—native principally to religions, ideologies, or everyday life—that dominate experience. One or another of their meanings is a constant backdrop to the experience of many or most people. Untestable in themselves—neither verifiable nor falsifiable—they stand or fall with the passions, sensibilities, or personal advantages of those who think as they prescribe. Believers take them for granted because, like breathing, they seems unproblematic. But meanings are globally consequential; they dominate aims and actions, one’s experience of other people, things, and oneself. Ramifying, like volleys of buckshot, telling us where and who we are or ought to be, they invoke ontology as the justifying backdrop to culture and society. Their effects are often creative—Jewish law; Christian art and music, Moslem architecture—but their wars are a blight. Think of priests competing for God’s sanction as they bless their troops before a battle. Enhancing the quality of life is a human priority. But success requires delicacy or luck. Ideals—health and civility, for example—are critical. Fantasies are subverting because we’re diverted or deluded. Hegemonic religions and ideologies have both effects. Each has its stories to tell and partisans or bureaucrats to defend them. Both insist that their understanding of reality is incontestable. Yet there are many religions and competing ideologies: Marxists and markets. Each affirms itself while emphasizing its virtuous effects on those who participate in communities it organizes. But each is also responsible for the ontology justifying the morality and politics it defends: fidelity to a god is a plausible basis for communal solidarity, though the burden is greater if death or expulsion is the penalty for anyone ignoring a priest’s interpretation of the god’s edicts. Are there neutral criteria for appraising the practical efficacy of competitor religions or ideologies:

Introduction | 9

do they enhance the well-being of practitioners? Is there reason to agree that any is ontologically valid? This demand, and doubts about likely answers, are familiar since Plato’s Euthyphro and the evidence that mythic ontologies disfigure our understanding of reality. Socrates’ skepticism is commonplace among people familiar with science and unconvinced by utopian or spiritual stories, yet skeptics are a minority in societies where most people believe that reality has the categorial form prefigured by their religious, cultural, or political beliefs. Their credulity is regrettable when self-perception is distorted by fables; it is pernicious when myths promote torture and war. This is ontology’s burden as it affects civil societies. Many people ignore its effects because there seems no credible relation between ontology and those effects when metaphysics is considered a pretentious language game. It is, citing one critic, “a stinking corpse.”14 But this is an odd response to pogroms and decapitations impelled when gods are vindicated by exterminating dissenters. It ignores the ontological burden of Cartesian-Kantian assumptions about autonomous minds and their world-spinning powers. There are many creeds: a Dodger fan born in Chicago would have rooted for the Cubs. Why declare fidelity to one rather than another? Kant would have said that there may be a practical basis for choosing among world-views, though there is no logical basis if each sect’s beliefs are consistent. He is largely responsible for the ontological relativism prominent in Foucault, Kuhn, and Quine. Yet mythic answers obscure material truths. Something critical is missing in the account of experience shared by Kant and these relativists. Ignoring our focused responses to events and their effects (the pain dentists relieve), they describe us as patient observers free to organize our sensory data in alternate ways. But our posture is active, not passive: we are not human anemones waiting for whatever wafts our way. Alert to challenge or opportunity, we probe and test. Baffled or frustrated because results disappoint us, we try again. We can’t eliminate the mediators—sights and sounds—that separate us from things perceived; we can improve our sensitivity to natural signs (with spectacles or hearing aids) or multiply the instruments used (sniffer-dogs and cameras). Notice that people walking in crowded streets rarely run into one another: effective behavior joins an accurate reading of circumstances to good muscle control. What do efficacy and inhibition confirm? That experience is a window into nature, not a confabulation and not a barrier to knowing who, what, and where we are.

|| 14 Hilary Putnam, Ethics without Ontology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 85.

10 | Introduction

There is, however, this qualification: we distinguish inquiry from interpretation in order to liberate one from the taint of the other, though practical life is a mix of the two. Looking for shade on a hot day, seeing it in a mosque (inquiry), we don’t enter out of respect for a faith we don’t share (interpretation). Hunger requires that we find nourishment; interpretation fixes appetites and inhibitions: we won’t eat ants or worms, or anything on days when religion prescribes a fast. Could experience derive from either to the exclusion of the other: interpretation or inquiry? The question invites an experiment in the style of Robinson Crusoe, an Englishman obliged to live as a natural man. Practical life, stripped of mythology, engendered its meanings: the time and style of his meals; the choice and priority of his tasks. Living alone on the island, he mapped it in ways that suited him. Crusoe’s Bible didn’t compromise his practical sense, though it was a source of moral strength. Making sense of his isolation, it gave him hope. Compare the monads of Leibniz’s Monadology: each is a shard of God’s mind, an obscure, distorted perspective on the infinite whole. Each is a percipient, none is an actor, one whose experience—including meanings values, and biases—expresses its vantage point within the totality of finite souls. Monads resemble people locked in place at the back of Plato’s cave, except that none consults with others when trying to make sense of shadows dimly perceived. Some or all may, nevertheless, grasp the idea of a transcendent reality when the clarity and distinctness of mathematical truths intimates a condition that exceeds them. Monads interpret; they don’t inquire. There is no way, within an interpretation, to discount its distortions. Human inquiry averts this trap because it’s selfcorrecting. Its hypotheses are forcibly disciplined by circumstances, by the interests provoking inquiry, and by the oversight of fellow inquirers. Perception isn’t a veridical copy of the world perceived but it does give us access to the ambient world when controlling experiments in practical life and science. Dewey emphasized nature’s accessibility: These commonplaces take on significance when the relation of experience to the formation of a philosophic theory of nature is in question. They indicate that experience, if scientific inquiry is justified, is no infinitesimally thin layer or foreground of nature, but that it penetrates into it, reaching down into its depths, and in such a way that its grasp is capable of expansion; it tunnels in all directions and in so doing brings to the surface things at first hidden—as miners pile high on the surface of the earth treasures brought from below….There is no evidence that experience occurs everywhere and everywhen. But candid regard for scientific inquiry also compels the recognition that when experience does occur,

Introduction | 11

no matter at what limited portion of time and space, it enters into possession of some portion of nature and in such a manner as to render other of its precincts accessible.15

Experience signifies two things: our ways of engaging other things; and the sensory, affective, and intellectual effects of those encounters. We have the second because of the first: stubbing a toe, I feel it. Interpretation is inevitably the complement to inquiry because we construe the simplest of things in terms prescribed by our interests and beliefs. But there are these distinct interests: experience is pervaded with meanings and values—pain stops me from playing the game I love—but what is it that tripped me? Locating ourselves in the world demands more than interests and values; it also requires an accurate idea of reality. Accommodating these two sides—rushed, but prudent when driving—is critical to practical life but hard to sustain when urgency or despair makes us vulnerable to mythic solutions. Can we tolerate Nietzsche’s discipline? He remarked that philosophy’s telos makes it averse to deception: discover the world as it is, not merely as one hopes: The real world, unattainable, indemonstrable, cannot be promised, but even when merely thought of [is] a consolation, a duty, an imperative.16 It is by being ‘natural’ that one best recovers from one’s unnaturalness, from one’s spirituality….17

Naturalism is deflating. There is space within it for all our pretensions, but they lose conviction when reconsidered. Can we secure our self-esteem without salving or aggrandizing myths? The issue is uncertain because we don’t easily suppress the stories that sanction vanity or justify fear. Freud counseled a modest therapy: “love and work.”18 Engage other people while having a vocation that challenges your talents. The community formed by work and partners will occupy you. Participate in a viable civil society: you won’t need more. Chapter One is a sketch of nature, with emphasis on the emergence of societies and their individual members. These higher-order systems seem mysterious: do they embody a process or principle that is other than natural? This chapter argues that nature is self-differentiating (disparate properties), self-individuating, and self-stratifying (things inert or live). Normativity and emergence are as || 15 John Dewey, Experience and Nature (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1925), pp. 2–3. 16 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Gods, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1968), p. 50. 17 Ibid., p. 33. 18 Often attributed to Sigmund Freud, without written evidence.

12 | Introduction

natural as motion, though these are features scorned by those who believe, with Hume, that nature is best understood and described by inspecting percepts or the words used to signify them. Chapters Two and Three test the claim that material nature exhausts reality as we do or can know it. Chapter Two considers factors that would extend our understanding of nature were we able to clarify and confirm our hypotheses about them. These conditions are alleged, but silent; confirmations are incomplete or unconvincing. (This chapter is an edited version of “Silent Conditions,” Metaphilosophy, vol. 42, issue 1–2, 2011.) Chapter Three examines a range of existence claims, asking if there are things whose existence might be established by a priori proofs though they elude empirical tests. This chapter cites one of the three conditions considered, but judged unconvincing, in Chapter Two. Reality, I argue, extends beyond nature—actuality—to eternal possibilities, their existence confirmed by an a priori proof. The form of the argument confirming their existence is paradigmatic for such other proofs as may be proposed. Chapter Four describes and evaluates three additional hypotheses about reality: illusion, construction, and theism. It argues that factors promoting these proposals are meanings and values, and that none is substantiated by logical or empirical evidence. Chapter Five is an account of meaning and value as they energize belief and practice. Chapter Six describes sobriety in the conduct of practical life. The passage from Dewey, quoted above, is my point of reference: values explicit in needs, purposes, and efficacy are legitimate sponsors of meaning. These motives are plainly distinguishable from those promoting ontological fantasies; songs and stories can rouse enthusiasm without implying mysteries. Chapter Seven considers the mental functions responsible for meaning, valuation, and ancillary activities. These functions are contentious because it’s often supposed that meaning and valuation require an immaterial mental agent or, still mysteriously, the supervenience of immaterial acts on material processes. My first seven chapters are an extended defense of a materialism qualified only by the claim that existence has two modalities: actuality (material nature) and the logical space of eternal possibilities. This persuasion is several speculations too far for people convinced that a radical naturalism is philosophically unnatural: why strain so hard when metaphysical theories centered in consciousness are an ample alternative? This was John Findlay’s response:

Introduction | 13

It is not an empirical accident that minds arise in the world; minds represent, we may say, the world’s deep unity asserting itself over the world’s attempted dispersion, an attempted dispersion as essential to the deep unity as the latter is essential to the former.19

Findlay explained by citing Plotinus: Each thing holds all within itself, and again sees all in each other thing, so that everything is everywhere and all is all, and each all, and the glory infinite.20

Materialists resist Findlay and the tradition he embodied because its principal assumptions—the unity of consciousness and mind’s intuitive powers—are idealized readings of self-awareness: If, per impossible, the mechanistic views of a barbarized science should turn out to be the provable truth of things, this would be a truth by which we, as practical, inventive, valueand pattern-oriented beings, could not live, and on which we should have, in all but the lowest instrumentalities, to turn our backs. Truth of this type would neither be worth knowing or applying, and the suasions of a Nocturnal Council might not be too much in order to secure its suppression. These suggestions need not, however, be taken too seriously. For the science which sees all things in terms of manipulative mechanisms is arguably the product of a transient manipulative phase of human society, which, even as we think and write, is busily in process of destroying itself, and creating an order in which the unified and the purposive will have as irreducible and as firm a place as the mechanically conditioned and the manipulable. In the infinitely well-ordered, stably progressive societies of the future, something like Platonism may well dominate science and practice, and the figure of Plato, with his index finger pointing skywards, and the Timaeus under his arm, may very well occupy the same central place that he takes up in Raphael’s Schools of Athens.21

This history, grand though it is, confuses mind’s centrality in human experience with its standing in nature: [P]hilosophy should understand that its content is no other than actuality, that core of truth which, originally produced and producing itself within the precincts of the mental life, has become the world, the inward and outward world of consciousness.22

This was Hegel’s summary of the posture dominant in philosophy since Protagoras, Parmenides, and Plato. They, like him, never surmised that consciousness is

|| 19 J. N. Findlay, Ascent to the Absolute, (London: Allen and Unwin, 1970), p. 246. 20 Ibid., p. 247. 21 J. N. Findlay, Plato: the Written and Unwritten Doctrines (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 412. 22 G. W. F. Hegel, Logic, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: at the Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 8.

14 | Introduction

adventitious, an evolutionary effect that would not have emerged if other contingencies had obtained. Its alleged ontological status has no support apart from our inability to explain its generation within the brain. Self-awareness is less mysterious: it occurs as the brain monitors its conscious states. Consciousness and the qualities of perceptual experience elude explanation, but they may have simple conditions, given the small number of relevant neurological variables. Their resolution would be a fatal wound to the metaphysics they inspire. Nothing will annul idealism’s glories; this explanation would preclude its revival. Findlay, most exasperated, once remarked that materialists want to “think of themselves as bicycles.” We are that and more. Yet nature, as signified by our most successful theories, may not be all there is; its scale and content may be greater than we know or suspect. Is this a multiverse, rather than a universe; is possibility a mode of being complementary to actuality; is there a God? What drives these speculations; are they fantasies or disciplined extrapolations from plausible hypotheses? There was a time when religions were the principal source of unverified speculations: lean and ascetic or luxuriant and excessive, they were reckless in extending our ideas of reality. Now it’s often science, its journalists, and the Internet that challenge credulity: is reality created from nothing; do particles hang, unaffected, in limbo before being observed when they interact? We disseminate ideas of all sorts, often for no better reason than the excitement they provoke. Chapter Eight responds to his challenge: how do we reconcile our taste for mythologies, secular or religious, with the practical interest in having an accurate idea of our circumstances and prospects? Can we acknowledge our place in nature without resorting to fantasy or despair? Socrates, Spinoza, and Hume were unblinking. What should the rest of us do? These eight chapters can be read in several ways: continuously or for one or more of three emphases. i. Chapters One through Three are essays in the metaphysics of nature: what reality seems to be given information supplied by science and practical life. ii. There is no use for a single metaphysics of nature if reality, in itself is unthinkable and unknown. For there are as many accounts of its categorial features as there are ways to read and construe human experience. Section 2 of Chapter Three, Construction, is an appraisal of post-Kantian views about knowledge, especially their preference for interpretation over inquiry. Should we interpret reality in ways favorable to our aims and values, or use testable plans or hypotheses to investigate it? iii. When is doing both appropriate? Chapters Four through Eight are devoted to meaning/significance, realities they postulate, practical life, and the mental activities responsible for creating meanings. We

Introduction | 15

have reconcilable interests: asserting our interests and values, while accommodating a reality we alter but don’t make. The first dominates the second when exuberant interpretations oblate prudent inquiries: one lives in a “world” construed as ideal or sacred. This is the world-view Socrates contested in Plato’s Euthyphro. These chapters oppose meaning to metaphysics in a dialectic they might have approved.

1 Nature 1.1 An analogy A passage from Plato’s Republic directs us: Imagine a rather short-sighted person told to read an inscription in small letters from some way off. He would think it a godsend if someone pointed out that the same inscription was written up elsewhere on a bigger scale, so that he could first read the larger characters and then make out whether the smaller ones were the same….We think of justice as a quality that may exist in a whole community as well as in an individual, and the community is the bigger of the two. Possibly, then, we may find justice there in larger proportions, easier to make out. So I suggest that we should begin by inquiring what justice means in a state. Then we can go on to look for its counterpart on a small scale in the individual.23

State and soul, Plato argued, are isomorphic. We should strive for harmony among the three parts of each: leaders, guardians, and artisans in the state; reason, spirit, and appetite in souls. The harmony of parts in soul or state is justice. Justice in each is a condition for justice in the other: a productive state promotes the education and maturity of individual persons; their competence enables the state’s formation and assures its stability. Nature’s relation to societies and their members differs from the relation of souls and states because nature and society aren’t bilaterally conditioning: nature doesn’t need society as states need their members. The alignment of Plato’s analogy is applicable, however, to this other pair: society’s form is better understood when nature’s form is specified because society is one of nature’s expressions. Nature’s categorial features are exhibited in the structure, function, and evolution of societies and their members. There is, however, one plausible qualification to this surmise: human subjectivity is an obstacle to declaring that humans fit tidily into nature without remainder; we need conclusive evidence that humans are exhaustively material agents created by material processes. Later chapters consider that claim and reasons for affirming it. This chapter anticipates those remarks. It describes nature’s categorial form at large, then in its application to human societies and individual persons.

|| 23 Plato, The Republic of Plato, trans. Francis MacDonald Cornford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945), ii. 368, p. 55.

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1.2 Categorial form Nature is on one view whatever science says it is. This needs qualification because there would be more to say of nature if science were able to predict and explain its every detail. For science is often casual about notions assumed by its methods and claims. Its essential adjunct is a metaphysics of nature, one that subsumes the results of scientific discoveries while ascertaining the character and objective basis for its organizing ideas: cause and normativity, for example. This section is an essay of that kind: it considers some of nature’s principal categorial features and their relations. Categorial form is the template comprising the determinable (generic) features exhibited by a world’s phenomena. Every such feature—spatiality, causality, or law—has more specific (determinate) expressions in actual states of affairs: this acre, that impact. Others are signature features having specific values (the velocity of light). We estimate our world’s categorial form by surveying aspects of reality known to practical life or science. We describe, analyze, and extrapolate, then integrate the several claims. Results are provisional because it isn’t likely that a formulation will be applicable and adequate: some of its ascriptions may be mistaken or badly drawn; the ensemble may be incomplete. Yet there are some categories that are indispensable to any plausible schema: cause, law, space, time, process, and stability, for example. Every list of features proposed is, nevertheless, contentious. Witness these assumption common to positivist (Humean) philosophers of science: that natural laws are nothing distinct from the law sentences in accepted theories; that efficient causation is constant conjunction rather than energy transfer; that normativity has no reality apart from the application of rules. A cautious metaphysics of nature is the step-child to our anxiety that any formulation will seem reckless or retrograde. One does more knowing that details and balance won’t be definitive or agreed. Engaging other people and things, we notice their solidity and separability; nature seems an assembly of durable material objects. But consider this other possibility: imagine a world where gravity and other forces are so weak that every material formation is vaporous: no discrete and stable entities form. Or individuality and stability are exemplified by water spouts and tornados: they visibly evolve while forming and dissolving. We perceive lumpen materiality as the elemental, default position for everything real—Democritean atoms or Aristotle’s primary substances—though everything stable in our world is more water spout than primary substance. Things are often stable over the relatively short times we observe them, though stable doesn’t entail static: every structure, every relation-

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ship of parts (whether system or aggregate), is only apparently stable when internal processes are disguised by changes that reproduce an established form. Stability is a contingency founded on both the sustaining relations of a system’s parts and supportive or permissive circumstances; it marks the middle of trajectories that start in assembly and terminate in dissolution. Protons are stable since the temperature and pressure of the Big Bang subsided, but they too would alter if subjected to those greater intensities. Nature construed as whole is a self-differentiating, self-stratifying process that creates complexity under constraints. Its essential variables are energy, matter, spacetime, and motion. Energy seems mysterious. It is known by the work it does, or when stored as matter. Spacetime is itself energic and traversed by energy waves. Understanding these four terms and their integration is the Holy Grail of physics and the metaphysics of nature. Every natural phenomenon is an emergent expression of them and only them. Things at every scale greater than quarks, from atoms to cities and galaxies, form, stabilize, then disassemble. Nature’s emergent products are events, properties, individuals and their couplings, regions, lineages, and strata. Observation and experiment suggest that this diversity is unified in two ways. One is corporate: nature is a whole, constructed, differentiated, and organized in spacetime. The other is the unity-in-diversity occurring when generic constraints shape individuals or societies: many people doing different things communicate in the same language or observe the same laws. This difference applies as well to subordinate unities: each state has a corporate identity distinguished by a territory, constitution, and government while having distributed unity in the activities of people expressing its distinctive ways. Figure 1 represents these successive emergents. 1.2.1 Elements: There is no comprehensive theory of nature as a whole because there is no integration of science, practical life, and cosmological speculations with an applicable and adequate account of categorial form. That theory would cite these ten considerations: i. Spacetime is a dynamic multi-dimensional plastic medium. ii. Motion binds space and time; iii. Process—changes impelled by motion and energy—is spacetime’s content; iv. Process is causal; v. Causality is local or mediated. vi. Process generates properties, structures (individuals or modules), strata (inert or live), regions, and lineages that emerge, then dissolve; vii. Complexity is aggregative or organized. viii. Nature is constrained by inherent laws and dispositions—hence normativity and regularity—at every order of complexity; ix. Nature as a whole, and its differentiations qualify stability with some degree of evolution; x. Properties, organization, and laws make nature intelligible. Here are these ten points detailed:

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1.2.1.i Spacetime is a plastic medium: Spacetime is a dense, multi-dimensional plastic medium, not a static void. It is dense because electrically charged; dynamic because motion and energy exchange are inherent; plastic because its geometry (if not its topology) is perpetually deformed by the material, energic processes occurring within it. One assumes that these processes express the dynamics of the overlaid fields constitutive of spacetime (gravity, for example), and that they are distinguishable but not separable in our world (though separable perhaps in others). The traditional assumption—that space and time are passive backdrops to content and change—is mistaken: spacetime is not distinguishable from, because altered by, the processes it embodies. Is spacetime continuous or a montage of fragments or points? One may speculate that spacetime is quantized at a scale lower than the Planck length: 1.61622837×1035 meters. But this entails a difficulty for which there seems to be no answer. A quantized spacetime entails that motion too is quantized, that it repeatedly stops and starts. But what binds the moments of spacetime? Is there an unknown but continuous medium, an ether, in which its moments are embedded? For if not, successive moments of spacetime (with emphasis on time) come into being from nothing (from the gap between spacetime moments). This would be a paradox because nothing (the absence of space, time, and motion in the gap) is propertyless and powerless, and because coming to be from nothing is not a process. Why is this a constraint? Because motion is constitutive of process, and because spacetime continuity is a necessary condition for motion. Or we say that motion, too, is quantized, thereby implying the same impasse: how is motion regenerated after each full stop? Our world’s geometry is apparently three-dimensional. String theory’s speculations—requiring coiled spaces and many more dimensions—answer to the spatial variables of its equations, not to empirical observations. Space’s topology is “open,” according to its set-theoretic formulations; but there is also this simpler way to represent it: we describe space as an overlay of regions that are mutually accessible because adjacent. Adjacent regions of a torus, for example, are those covering its surface. Time’s direction, as best we can determine, does not loop back on itself. Whether this is an essential feature of time or the effect of thermodynamic processes—the direction of expended energy—is undecided. 1.2.1.ii Motion binds space and time: Spacetime is often perceived as a neologism that ignores the distinct, though sometimes converging domains of space and time: street plans are only spatial; music is only temporal. Yet maps are abstractions that ignore motion and change; there would be no music if sound waves

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weren’t propagated in space before being registered by ears. Motion is fundamental in nature: space and time are its necessary conditions. There are anomalies: the velocity of light is fast but finite, and slower than the rate of space’s expansion since the Big Bang. 1.2.1.iii Processes, impelled by motion and causality, are spacetime’s self-generated content: Motion is the activity of an energized spacetime. Process is the productive form of that activity. It has two principal effects: motion, creating content, alters spacetime. 1.2.1.iii.a Motion driving process creates content distinguished in three ways: as matter, modularity, and patterns. Matter was created and sustained in the early universe when elementary particles with mass were formed in the furnace of high heat and pressure. Particles aggregate and organize, with effects that run from stones to storks and societies. Higher strata have emergent properties but the same elementary constituents as lower ones. Tables representing elementary particles depict the constituents of, or conditions for creating more complex entities. So, the periodic table prefigures possible molecular combinations. DNA, a culture’s prohibitions, and personal aversions further restrict the possibilities. Things of every scale have limited capacities for bonding with others: none is a universally viable partner, except for spatiotemporal and gravitational relations. Modularity is apparent across the trajectory of emergent entities. Individual cells and bodies are conspicuously walled and self-regulating. Galaxies are stars massed and organized by internal forces. Cities, too, are modular, because selforganizing, self-sustaining, and sometimes self-limiting. Modules (molecules, cells, bodies, and tribes) form when their proper parts (atoms, organelles, organs, or human bodies) are bound by reciprocal causal relations, hence the negativefeedback enabling each cause to control the behavior of its partners. Patterns are generated as matters, modules, or events assemble. We often suppose that a “theory of everything” would enable us to explain all of nature’s phenomena: each effect would have specifiable causes or conditions. Day and night; the seasons; birth, maturation, and death: each explicable, given its generating conditions. This is contentious because of the alleged indeterminacy at the scale of quanta. But there is a different indeterminacy closer at hand: are the complex patterns created by iterative functions—snowflakes, for example—prefigured in the algorithms they embody? Do the formulae “foresee,” so to speak, patterns that emerge as processes evolve? Cooks accurately imagine a recipe’s outcome, as neophytes cannot. But is every configuration predictable given the

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rules or laws and causal processes that create it? Universal determinism affirm that there are sufficient conditions for every effect. It doesn’t entail that citing those conditions enables us (or God) to foresee the effects of their satisfaction. He, too, might be unable to predict the outcomes to applying his own construction rules. Why would he fail? Because rules prescribe successive steps without envisioning the completed series: applying a rule, step by step, doesn’t entail a power for discerning its outcome. Could God have both powers? Yes, though the powers are distinct. Humans are also capable of applying rules for creating wholes, though we are often unable to foresee the complex designs—the patterns—constructed. One imagines Mozart unwinding complex music as it flowed through him: could he have stopped short, conceiving all of a piece at once, while only half way to the end of creating it? Perhaps not. This obstacle has a curious inverse: we recognize gestalts (faces or flowers), while having no information about the rules controlling their generation. 1.2.1.iii.b Spacetime is sculpted by motion and process. For process, more than an occupant, differentiates, extends, and limits spacetime. This happens because spacetime’s geometry and the shapes of bodies qualifying it are altered by accelerated motion: its shape is compressed in the direction of motion. Everything experiences accelerated motion, so all—spacetime and all its constituents—suffer compression. We don’t know and can’t imagine or construct the “shape” of spacetime (multiply distorted by the gravitational effects of accelerated motion) in any way comparable to seeing a face. There is, of course, no perception, no gestalt, for all of spacetime. Time, too, is affected. Rather than imagine it as a trajectory stretching indefinitely into a currently empty and unknown future, we infer that the time of process—time up to all current nows—is all of time. Yet process continues, thereby generating more time. What is time’s status if the future is an extrapolation from the present while having no reality beyond the leading edge of process? Literal talk of world-lines implies that cosmic processes are already complete, whatever the local illusions of perceivers trapped somewhere short of a terminus. These are graphic representations of trajectories extended beyond local realities as they have evolved to some current state. They are misrepresentations when construed literally, though the error doesn’t entail that time has stopped. It doesn’t stop because cosmic expansion and local processes are impelled by spacetime’s intrinsic energy. It is very likely that we shall have a future (short of universal entropy or an inexplicable collapse), and likely, too, that its character is prefigured in the distribution of matter and energy as they are at any moment of our trajectory. But that future—both of time and events to occur—is prospective, not yet real.

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This idea of time’s future is troubling because it subverts our established beliefs about time and the future. But there are other uncertainties, too. The current distribution of matter and energy is an internal constraint determining the evolution of spacetime. But is it sufficient to stabilize the inherent forms of space and time? Do they evolve, smoothly or erratically? There is also this question: is there a background container in which spacetime is embedded? What could that backdrop be if there is no space beyond nature’s spacetime, and no time beyond its fractured leading edge, the many non-contemporaneous nows perpetually generated within it? We construe every entity and event as having a context: houses on a street; our planet in its solar system. We also apply this rubric when supposing that the bounded cosmos may be located in a domain more comprehensive than cosmic spacetime (our bubble in a multiverse). But this may be one extrapolation too far: there may be nothing beyond the cosmos. Or we surrender to mathematical imagination, saying that the cosmos has a temporal direction on the inside (for thermodynamic or other reasons) though it is, from the outside, one of many complex but dimensionless points (simple Leibnizian monads24) in an eternity that resembles Hegel’s good infinite:25 they have neither extension nor duration. This solution makes no material sense, perhaps because no idea is compelling if it exceeds imaginations honed on material examples. 1.2.1.iv Process is causal: Aristotle cited four causes: efficient, formal, material, and final.26 His distinctions are often ignored, though nothing supersedes them: 1.2.1.iv.a Efficient cause is energy exchange under the constraint of least energy: the minimum required to produce a specific effect. Hume pilloried efficient cause after construing it as the idea that there is a necessary productive link between causes and effects.27 His principal objections reduced to three: first, there is no necessity in the link that allegedly binds cause and effect, given that no contradiction is entailed by thinking either in the absence of the other; second, no link is perceived when inspecting the contiguous impressions or ideas of cause and effect; third, the separability of our ideas of cause and effect entails that neither

|| 24 G. W. Leibniz, Monadology and Other Philosophical Essays, trans. Paul Schrecker and Anne Martin Schrecker (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill), 1965), para. 1, p. 148. 25 G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, trans. T.F Geraets, W.A. Suchting, H. S. Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), p. 106. 26 Aristotle, Metaphysics, Collected Works of Aristotle, ed, Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 1013a24–1014b16, pp, 752–755. 27 Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, p. 69.

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is affected by the other. Hence, Hume’s conclusion: efficient causation is only constant conjunction. Neither cause nor effect owes its character or existence to the character or existence of the other. There is also this corollary: no event need have an antecedent or successor. This reduction is a dogma of philosophic discourse, though faulty in each of two respects. First, Hume construed necessity in the strict logical sense entailing that the negation of a necessary truth is a contradiction. But that is not the appropriate sense when one says that, necessarily, gravity falls off with the square of the distance. This is a claim about necessity in our world: call it parochial. Parochial necessities are less restrictive than necessities obtaining in all possible worlds—Hume’s test. Why describe them as necessities? Because these are the signature norms of a particular world or set of worlds. This is not a strange idea: there are many card games, each distinguished by its rules; moves necessary in one are meaningless or precluded in others. Causality in our world satisfies its intrinsic constraints, not those applicable in every possible world. Second, Hume mislocated the issue: causality is a material process, not a relationship of percepts or ideas. He thought otherwise after identifying reality with the “force and vivacity” of our percepts.28 This was his commitment to the principle that esse est percipi. Having no percept of energy (but only of the work it does) entailed, for him, that energy has no reality, hence no power to link causes and effects. These are, accordingly, parallel phenomena: a knife cuts butter; there are percepts of the event. The knife and butter are causes; butter dividing is their effect. The percept of the knife applied to butter isn’t a cause of the butter’s division; the impression of butter divided is the effect of seeing the knife cut but not the effect of the cutting. Hume conflates these domains, and begs the question. Popular opinion thinks otherwise because he, with Descartes and Berkeley, installed esse est percipi as the unassailable test of reality, though perception supplies access to many things without supplying direct and comprehensive information about their constituent properties. Consider how much we know of our physiology while suffering a headache. There is an impression—pain—but no percept of a cause. Do we infer that it has no cause? Because if so, why take aspirin? Efficient cause is critical below when couplings—modules—are the point of reference. Causality in them is reciprocal causation under the control of feedback. Each of a system’s members or parts controls the other by responding in ways

|| 28 Ibid., pp. 66–68.

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that inhibit behavior that would disrupt their relationship: friends are reproving if either is careless. 1.2.1.iv.b Formal cause is easily understood because the forms of prominent examples—squares, circles, or triangles--are conspicuously restraining. But Aristotle applied the notion more loosely to things of every kind distinguishable by their structures and functions: elephants or engines. Descartes recovered the simplifying power of paradigmatic shapes when he reduced Aristotle’s myriad qualitative forms to elementary geometric forms. He anticipated the discovery that DNA is the molecular signature explaining inheritance, and that cells are activated when their receptors couple to stimulants, like lock and key. Qualitative forms survive because particulars of the same kind are often distinct: identical twins dress differently; novels and poems written in English satisfy the same grammatical rules, though each has a distinguishing form. 1.2.1.iv.c Material cause marks the difference between building houses on rock or sand. Every artisan chooses materials appropriate to his craft and aims; yet material causes, like substantial forms, yield to the insight that material cause is a partially disguised version of formal cause: materials vary because of constituent molecules and their organization. This generic point doesn’t minimize the qualitative virtues or vulnerabilities of different materials: glass houses, for example. 1.2.1.iv.d Final cause is often construed as the projection of human intentions or developmental aims into history or nature: Manifest Destiny, caterpillar to butterfly. But Manifest Destiny was a mix fueled by aspiration, lust and power; butterflies satisfy genetic determinants without an aim that hovers and directs their development. Final cause nevertheless lingers at the margins of recognition because least energy is an efficient constraint on mechanical processes: energy transfer settles on a level of intensity sufficient to sustain an effect. Adjustments are mechanical, in metabolism as in death, while regulated by it. Why isn’t this an authentic expression of final cause as it works through the mechanisms of efficient and formal cause? 1.2.1.v Causality is local or mediated: Impact is immediate; telephone calls are mediated. Entanglement implies that locality is violated when signals to one sensor are simultaneously registered at others, near or remote. This is mysterious because it confounds the assumption that no transmission is faster than the velocity of light, (though the stretching of space during cosmic expansion is faster).

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Perhaps, a comparable mechanism also applies in cases of entanglement. Three alternatives come to mind: worm holes (spatial connections more direct than the distances assumed by measuring the distances covered by light rays), and two others. One suggests that space is traversed by long electrified creases or strings. Imagine that vibrations go left and right when a car crosses railroad tracks; sensors at opposite terminals are affected by the motion of the car and rails, not by their unmediated and mysterious relation to one another. Or we eliminate the need to infer that an effect in one sensor is communicated instantaneously to others by supposing that everything contemporary bears the marks of effects induced in the cramped quantum vacuum that preceded the Big Bang. Perhaps all the current universe was long ago tuned in the same way or ways, with the result that testing anything in ways sensitive to those abiding effects gets a response that could be had by testing anything else. This, if true, would oblige us to identify the limits of this primordial marking. We notice, for example, that two people conversing don’t already know one another’s responses? 1.2.1.vi Process is a complex or aggregate of events. It generates properties, structures (individuals or modules), strata (inert or live), regions, and lineages that emerge, then dissolve: No feature of social life is more apparent than human bonding in families, for work, or civic order, and their emergent effects: children, education, culture, and civil society. The figure below represents bonding as it generates successive organizational levels: 10– 9 8 7–7 6 5 4 3–3 2 1 Figure 1. Successive emergent orders.

Levels emerge across the trajectory from elementary particles to animal bodies and human social systems. Quarks, for example, are the simple (uncompounded) elements from which higher orders are generated. Every higher order is a complex whose parts are the emergent entities of the order below. The orders pertinent to human societies are signified by 7, human bodies; 8, families; 9, tribes or

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villages; and 10, cities. Isolated families are harder to sustain than families receiving the mutual support of a village or tribe; tribes are harder to defend than people living in a walled city. The mutual causal relations binding a city’s residents are, of course, looser than those binding a body’s cells or the molecules bound in cells.29 The figure plainly intimates that the sufficient conditions for life, consciousness, and society are lower-order materials organized in ways suitable to the emergence of these higher-order phenomena. The specificity of 8, 9, and 10 is illustrative only: 8 could signify workshops, 9 factories, 10 corporations. Every such interpretation is appropriate if it illustrates successive entities having emergent properties because of greater complexity. 3, 7, and 10 signify the trajectory’s self-stabilizing plateaus: cells, bodies, and states. These are organizations that embody or are able to obtain energy or other resources sufficient to sustain them. I ignore, for purposes of illustration, that some unicellular organisms are self-sustaining. Consider, instead the cells of human bodies: they, like human tissues and organs, are not naturally sustainable apart from bodies having the skills and wherewithal to obtain sustaining resources. Failure to sustain these higher orders reduces them to the next sustainable lower order: states to individual bodies (anarchy); bodies to molecules; molecules to their constituent atoms. One may equivocate when describing successive steps on the forward trajectory: is it emergence or supervenience? They are different. Novel properties emerge with organization; supervenience is the idea that properties or events are imposed, inexplicably, on a material base: consciousness on brains, for example. Not knowing how brains come to be conscious, we say that consciousness “supervenes,” though the “explanation” is a rhetorical evasion. Emergence, too, seems rhetorical, given our inability to explain qualitative features of experience (consciousness, tonality, color, and taste) in physiological terms. But these are stubborn outliers: we know their material conditions but can’t explain their generation. Simpler examples of emergence are ready to hand: complex properties are easily produced if, for example, we create circles by bending straight lines. Geometricals are, however, imperfect illustrations of emergence in living systems because bodies require material parts, form, and causal relations: points and lines aren’t enough. This is easily fixed. A bag of parts is not a sewing machine; rabbit parts are not a rabbit, a point confirmed in this stronger way: we intervene. Reattach the rabbit’s nerves, muscles, and blood vessels, give it time to recover; see it

|| 29 David Weissman, A Social Ontology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 69.

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run. Hegel marveled that changes of quality are the result of altered quantity; he could have explained the effect by citing spatial or temporal relations (form) and causality. Consider now the a. events; b. properties; c, individuals/modules; d. strata; e. regions; and f. lineages that emerge, then dissolve: 1.2.1.vi.a Events: Events are processes under the sign of duration. They include the forming, functioning, or disassembling of matters or modules, and the conflicts or integrations occurring when processes or things have merged. Where nature is globally a process in spacetime, events are its constitutive episodes: a fire is an event; something burns. Events are sometimes signified by a date or location—the Fourth of July; a circus, here, tomorrow—but these references reduce events to incidents, while implying nothing of their character as processes. Wanting more, we say that every event is measured temporally (diachronically) by its causal history, while distinguished synchronically by its constituents, context, and space-time locale. Each is a complex whose constituents interact principally with one another, though also, less conspicuously, with their environment. Individuating events is complicated because they resonate: the motion and altered shape of individual water droplets expresses the environment created by drops massed as fog. Is any event isolable without loss, hence accurately abstracted from all others, when all participate in the globally integrating effects of spacetime and gravity? It may seem that every event risks being swallowed by the whole, losing, thereby, any distinctive mark of its own, but we avert that result by distinguishing an event’s local character (water boiling) from its all but universal causal conditions. (“All but universal” acknowledges that factors having no effects on an event’s backward light cone—those currently occurring at the edge of the universe—are not counted among its global conditions). Accordingly, events are individuated by their distinguishing features, not by conditions shared mediately or directly with most every other event. Conspicuous stabilizers are an event’s constituent matters or forms (raising one’s children). They distinguish one or a class of events from those embodying different stabilities (other children) or those, more ramshackle, that come and go (yesterday’s noise). 1.2.1.vi.b Properties: Every event comprises one or a complex of properties: the sound of a peeling bell, or the complex of properties constitutive of those hearing the bell. This formulation appears excessively abstract because it seems to reduce the properties of any thing or event to an aggregate of abstractions: namely, ideas of properties. That impression is the effect of a conceptual style common to Plato

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and Hume: both espoused the principle that everything distinguishable is separable, hence Plato’s Forms, and the ideas which, according to Hume, are copies of discrete impressions. Both extract properties from their generating circumstances, though colors and sounds (favored examples of manifest properties) are generated by brains in bodies responding to physical stimuli. Acknowledging their generation relieves the impression that talk of process is anomalous with talk of properties, as if the two were ontologically alien because native to different styles of discourse. Suspend that assumption and consider that every thing or state of affairs is a complex of properties, one that seems too light or ephemeral for substantial existence, though its generation is simple: stacking properties creates the complexity ascribed intuitively to physical objects or events. This effect is apparent when the properties of a right triangle emerge as its three line segments are connected. Is there an impediment to stacking in Aristotle’s assumption that matter is the stolid ground of qualification, but not itself a property? No, we appropriate particularizing matters into the order of properties by saying, for example, that bells comprise properties organized by orders of priority. Matter—iron or brass, for example—is the first order; shape is second; natural color, paint, or inscriptions are third order. Sound is a relational property consequent on the matter and form of the bell, the motion of its clapper, and properties of the ears and brains of those hearing it. Properties, this implies, are concrete expressions of difference. Each is formed in material circumstances, then further qualified in ways appropriate to its character: silk is tied; sand is piled. 1.2.1.vi.c Individuals/modules: The first individuals are the effects of overlaid ripples in the quantum vacuum, spacetime’s primitive condition. Each particle is a stability achieved, we suppose, because of reinforcing coherence in the waves agitated within the vacuum’s constitutive fields. Individuality so construed has three principle features: a position in spacetime; a constitutive property or properties; and stability (endurance). Individuality is, all the while, the product of its context: coherent ripples in a field. Spacetime differentiates itself by producing individuals having successive degrees of complexity: first elementary ripples, then particles with mass, (hence matter), then their couplings—systems—created by causal reciprocities that bind particles and successor complexes: atoms, molecules, or cells. We often distinguish individuals from the complexes formed by joining them: teams from their members: true individuals, we imply, are simple. Yet, everything identified as individual, down to entities having the least possible complexity is already a dynamic complex, hence a system of mutually affecting parts. There is a range of

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such things, from protons and electrons to complexes of great scale but loose internal bonds: societies and the cosmos, for example. Every such individual is a module whose internal bonds are stronger than the disintegrative forces within or outside it. Each complex is dynamic because its parts are bound by the positive or negative feedback relations intrinsic to reciprocal causality. Causal reciprocity is energy exchange under the constraint of least energy: enough energy to create and stabilize the couplings created. So, loyalty is intensified when each of two friends expresses gratitude for the other’s response; quarrels stop when each signals that the other’s behavior threatens their friendship. Birds are often wind-blown, but not blown apart. Is everything a module? No: there are lowest order simples (quarks, perhaps). There are also collections and aggregates: complex entities whose relations are spatial and temporal but not causal (gravity apart). Modularity implies autonomy: one of us turns grey while others lose their hair. Will and consciousness attest to the independence of stubborn people. It is pertinent, for example, to uncertainties about free will. Having it doesn’t imply that choice is unconditioned; rather that its conditions are internal to mind (softdeterminism). For there, determination is restricted by information or impulses that are one’s own. Modularity is, nevertheless, porous: tastes change as information is acquired and opportunities arise. One freely chooses options, people, or things that would once have been rejected. Modularity is, nevertheless, ontologically troubling, given the holism of our cosmological beginnings: how could nature diversify so successfully that its individuals are exempt from mutual influence? They don’t escape it. Modularity is the outcome to a process having three effects: dynamic relations binding a module’s parts are stronger than forces opposing them; the module stores or has access to energy sufficient to sustain its constitutive relations; these relations are a barrier and filter to external forces. The barrier may be a shell (snails), a language (unintelligible to other speakers), or a religion’s beliefs and practices. But the barrier isn’t always fixed, and it isn’t impermeable: one learns to hear messages— information or feelings—that would once have been unintelligible. There are also the physical circumstances in which modules form: many of them have long histories shared by all. It may be, as remarked above, that everything is marked by that common beginning. There is a lingering question of priority: events, properties, or individuals? The question is provoked by our grammatical habit of ascribing predicates to subjects, though Aristotle, as much as Russell and quantification, make it easier to think of individuals as stacked levels of properties: matter, then form, other attributes, and accidents. Now add events: how do they change the calculation?

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For there are neither properties nor individuals if causes haven’t initiated activities responsible for producing them. One solution proposes that the three are cotemporal: no individuals without properties; no properties without the events— the causal processes—wherein they are generated. No birthday party without a cake; no cake or party if there is no one to bake or organize it. Or we reduce the essential conditions to two: events generating properties have co-temporal priority. They are necessary and often sufficient for the formation of individuals stabilized by their internal causal relations and supportive circumstances. 1.2.1.vi.d Strata: Aggregation and organization are sometimes sufficient to create entities, processes, or relationships having properties distinct from those of their material base. The emergents of Figure 1 are strata created by the reciprocal causal relations of their lower-order parts: proteins from molecules, families from their members. Emergent strata are usually co-terminus with their respective material bases, though some are sharply distinguished from them: Earth’s mantle and core, bishops and their parishioners. It’s often the strata of human life and society that obscure our materiality: are they co-terminus with their base? Show that hope, love, and charity have necessary and sufficient material conditions; explain how the tastes and manners of a religious ceremony reduce to neural signals or reactions. Complexity is a deterrent in each of these challenges, though the procedure in the case of manners is complicated but not obscure: what is socially required; what was learned; what habits were established when neural pathways were altered? Consciousness is not as easy: we know its neural conditions; people knocked too hard on the head don’t have it. We can’t go the additional step to tell how it’s generated. But this doesn’t imply an immaterialist solution: no one has ever confirmed that human minds are immaterial agents or explained how such agents might relate to human bodies. Kant’s description of autonomous minds creating stable experiences without the aid of an unthinkable external world is heroic but unconvincing. Descartes’ appeal to the pineal gland is rightly perceived as a concession, for if everything cognitive must be encoded by the pineal gland, why couldn’t that gland be an originator rather than a mere translator? Why should cogitation require an extra-mental ground? 1.2.1.vi.e Regions: Modularity extends beyond individuals, their couplings and networks to regions that may be cosmological (galaxies); geological (mountains, ocean currents, and estuaries), or city neighborhoods. Ecosystems are regions; each is an assembly of mutually adapted niches; big fish eat little fish, but there are many little fish. Regions of culture sustain systems or interests of a kind, while

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excluding others: there are Internet sites for anarchists and sites where all communications are written in Greek. Each has integrity because of binding internal relations and a permissive or supportive environment (no censors). The practical benefits are familiar: needing a job, one moves to a thriving city; wanting community, one looks for congenial neighbors. Regions of mixed strata (cities and oceans) are frequent. Minds, societies, and cultures are the regions (or strata) whose ontology is most disputed. One may agree that materialism is sufficient to account for mere practical needs (hunger and thirst, for example), but resist when asked to concede that “high” culture’s values are equally explicable. But neither exceeds us. Schools of music or dance are regions. Consider the anomaly implied when one of their teachers is challenged to defend his or her taste in materialist terms. Grace, tone, rhythm, phrasing: how are they to be explained? By indicating the physical regime—scales, a floor bar, or master classes—to which students subject themselves. Think of the beauty ascribed to Greek statuary. Why is human grace more mysterious, and immaterial, than the harmony perceived in figures sculpted in marble? What is it that needs explaining: proportion in stone or human sensibility? 1.2.1.vi.f Lineages: Lineages are regions distinguished by their temporal, sometimes causal extension (democracy before oligarchy). They may be long or short, while comprising antecedents and successors. Most lineages contain others of several smaller scales—Russian-doll like—within them: England is a lineage comprising Churchill and the Reformation. Relatively static lineages—geography and geology—endure; others—cities renewed—are transformed. Lineages seem ephemeral. One supposes that they aren’t stabilizable as easily as modules or geographic regions, though every “primary substance,”30 every cup and saucer, every module and region is a lineage, hence a process stabilized by electrical bonds so well coordinated that we see nothing amiss: dinner plates stabilize for a long time; animal bodies less well. Lineages fail because of internal conflicts; because of exhausting the energy or resources required to sustain them; or because they’re disrupted by external forces. Does any part of them survive? Something does, given the conservation of energy, but what of their more specific formations or attributes? Civil wars are events—processes—that begin and end, but the damage and disquiet they provoke have enduring effects. Vital centers of activity end but their identities and

|| 30 Ibid., 1017b10–1017b25, p. 761.

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life-spans are partly nominal: we specify them by naming their central episodes. We then speak of “influence” when acknowledging their persistence. Plato was a lineage, but so is Platonism. These are nature’s six emergent precipitates. Each is a singularity, a differentiation that stands against others of its kind: an event, property, module, strata, region, or lineage. 1.2.1.vii Complexity is aggregative or organized: Aggregation implies that the character of things amassed is unaffected by their relations, gravity apart. Altered character is the complexity resulting from causation: parents and children affecting one another. There are also intermediate cases where apparent aggregation is the effect of complexity: collateral effects of the same cause (night and day, the seasons). All three forms of complexity—aggregation, organization, and intermediate cases—are commonplace when nature seems especially confusing: cars on a crowded road (aggregation) skid individually during a snow storm (intermediate) before crashing into one another (mutually determining organization). 1.2.1.viii Nature’s evolution is constrained by inherent laws and dispositions— hence normativity and regularity—at every order of complexity. 1.2.1.viii.a Normativity: Normativities are universal, local, or personal: 1.2.1.viii.a.i Universal: The law of identity, p if p and its derivatives, the laws of non-contradiction and excluded-middle, are universal. Vagueness is served by dispensing with excluded middle, but this is an expression of our uncertainty. Where everything is what it is and not another thing (it has these properties and relations, not others), p or -p is an elemental feature of reality. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics disputes this conclusion on the grounds that a particle has no decided place or character until measured, but this reading ignores the fact that every particle is constantly “measured” by its interactions with other particles and its embedding fields.31 Every particle is, therefore, determinate in every respect, though Heisenberg uncertainty precludes knowing concurrent values for its position and momentum. These logical laws have unqualified universality. They compare to restricted universals: nothing in our world

|| 31 H. D. Zeh, “There are no Quantum Jumps, nor are there Particles!,” Physics Letters A172, 189 (1993).

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exceeds the constants of nature or violates the laws of motion. This is the parochial necessity that distinguishes possible worlds; restrictions in our world don’t apply in worlds having different signature constants or laws. Nature isn’t a jumble: the stock market may be a random walk, but that isn’t so of the seasons or tides, night or day. The prejudice against natural normativity is, nevertheless, a mystery enshrined in philosophic dogma. Is it so, pace Hume, that ought isn’t derivable from is?32 Should Earth orbit the Sun? Must it? It is the Sun’s planet. Does it have a choice? Because if not, it does what it must. This won’t always be so, but it is so given the current distribution of bodies and forces. Physical law statements are of three kinds. Some describes properties and behaviors native to a level, domain, or scale without explanation: rabbit gestation is thirty-one days. This is explanatory for someone who didn’t know, but it states a regularity without explaining why it occurs. Other laws, those of generation or construction—laws for creating elements from molecules—are explanatory. Geometry affords simple examples of both: descriptive laws specify the properties and tolerances of circles or squares. Or, given a specified surface (flat, convex or concave), explanatory laws prescribe the conditions and steps for constructing any possible figure on that surface from points, angles, or lines. What are the form-constraining steps that create amoebae, chickens, or stars. We want, but don’t yet have, laws sufficient to trace the formation of every entity or event from its constituent parts. What grounds the normativity of explanatory laws? Clues are suggestive without being definitive: general relativity implies that geometrical constraints may always be a sufficient basis for the order we perceive, but this is speculative rather than established when so many qualitative aspects of experience resist Cartesian reductions to geometrical forms and relations. Yet what basis could there be for the force laws—gravitation, electromagnetism, strong, and weak—if geometric or topological constraints are insufficient? Normativity’s determinant may be obscure; it isn’t likely to be arbitrary. Laws of the third type—the laws of motion, principally—are a world’s distinguishing signature: they apply universally within it. Applications of these laws are more than descriptive but less intelligible than construction laws because they seem arbitrary. Construction has intelligible steps: elements, then complexes are successively joined to create forms of greater complexity. Compare the

|| 32 Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, p. 469.

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laws of motion and the alternate possible worlds where values for F=ma’s variables are doubled, halved, or squared for no reason we know. Is its form in our world arbitrary? Probably not, though we don’t know why that is so. Are laws of these kinds—explanatory, descriptive, and unexplained constants—intrinsic to phenomena they regulate? Or should we say with Hume that nature is an array of accidental conjunctions where laws are merely regulative ideas useful for thinking about phenomena perceived? His skepticism is the effect of a simple strategy: conflate reality with percepts; affirm that everything distinguishable is separable; then infer that everything conceived without contradiction (all simple, separable, ideas) can exist as conceived. Things dropped needn’t fall; they may levitate in other worlds, but why is that pertinent to normativity on Earth? Non-contradiction is a necessary condition for any world’s laws, but not a condition sufficient to differentiate worlds from one another. Their normative differences express the parochial necessities consequent on each world’s signature laws, laws that obtain in one or some, but not in every possible world. Can Humeans explain the order we see and successfully predict? We live by chance, they suppose, in a world that looks self-regulating but isn’t. Do people professing this view know that laws are not inherent regulators? No, they believe an assortment of things, including Hume’s account of causation and the dictum that is doesn’t entail ought. This claim is often cited as an irrefutable truth, though one needs be careful about the domain of its application. It is correct of incidental duties: your socks should match. But these are regimented inclinations, not the norms relevant to natural processes: planetary rotation and the fact that keys open locks of complementary shape. Why did Hume believe that there are no inherent constraints on change? Because he discerned no connection between is and ought—they are distinguishable and separable—and none but contiguity between impressions or ideas of cause and effect. Feeling pain when bending a broken finger suggested nothing to him but the error of post hoc ergo propter hoc. There is an alternate strategy: infer its possible conditions when observing an effect. Predict other effects that should obtain if these conditions obtain, then search for evidence of them. Is there a reason that an effect never occurs in our world in the absence of its cause? Earth always circles the Sun: is that merely another adventitious event? Does it have a status like the regularity of taking a breath each time a factory hooter blows? Or is Hume’s account an obstacle to understanding nature when Peirce’s method of abduction is the method for making

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pertinent distinctions?33 Abduction is an inferential power exploited by practical life and science when we infer from something thought or observed to its possible conditions: we infer, for example, that natural phenomena are constrained by laws and that laws are expressions of natural normativity. Abductions mislead us occasionally, but they are correctible and often confirmed. For we don’t have a priori foresight: no clear and distinct ideas blink insistently to emphasize their cogency. Parochial necessities are discovered by sorting through the many contingencies. For some conjunctions couple things or events that are not mutually independent. Prove that by asking any woman who has just given birth: just an accidental conjunction? 1.2.1.viii.a.ii Regional: Societies and cultures are distinguished by their conventions: “Thou shalt not kill,” “No elbows on the table” aren’t universally constraining. People of other cultures are useful because they see our norms as strange addictions. They remind us of alternate solutions for common problems: behavior judged immoral in one may be obligatory in others. Normativity is, nevertheless, common to societies everywhere. There are principally three kinds of regulations: rules or laws; the causal reciprocities that bind a system’s members; and self-control. Self-control is personal; discussion here is reserved to rules or laws and causal reciprocities. Regulation is idealized, but always a response to complexity, cooperation, or conflict. It operates, principally, in four ways: i. Regulation is often didactic. Being conventional, it must be taught: use a fork, not your fingers; drive on the right. ii. It is formalized by laws and procedures. iii. Breaches are punished, though punishments are graded: from jail or fines to scowls. iv. Every effective partnership, however large its membership, is regulated by causal relations informed by the negative feedback that controls cooperation: marriages and businesses are saved when partners object to reckless behavior. Positive feedback is also regulative: a gold rush is sustained by commerce that assembles around the site where ore was discovered. But positive feedback usually dissipates; regulation falters as excitement cools. This is true whether the occasion is an external condition—available wealth—or one internal: the emotional or intellectual intensity provoked by a new friend or job.

|| 33 C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols. 5 and 6, eds. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934, 1935), vol. 5, paras. 195–205, pp. 121–127.

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1.2.1.viii.a.iii Personal: Normativity often has its basis in social relations or societies that require adherence to a rule or standard. Traffic flows equably as every driver obeys local conventions: we drive on the right or left as society prescribes. Accord is no more mysterious than stopping at red lights when compliance is expected and usually satisfied. How is accord explained when no electric eye couples each driver to a police controller? By citing two factors: each driver knows the laws; each is self-regulating. Self-regulation is self-control, the least expensive style of law-enforcement. It exploits a mechanism common to living creatures of all sorts: each takes readings of its circumstances and modifies its behavior accordingly. This is normativity as a discipline under personal and environmental control: having it is critical to focus and purpose, and to the solidarity required for efficacy in traffic, sport, and the army. Think of starlings as they wheel across the sky, dipping here, pivoting there while most hold their places within the moving flock. Their cohesion is remarkable given the absence of a rule learned by every bird, though we infer that birds have a hard-wired strategy for maintaining position. Humans are more flexible, but also more vulnerable to discord and anarchy: we require rules and habits that make us predictable and penalties that make laws enforceable. City people take for granted that fellow subway riders and neighbors are devoted to meanings and values different from theirs. Yet diversity has its limits: there are least requirements for public order, and sometimes an evocative story that promotes affiliation. Thanksgiving is critical to the American narrative; May lst or July 14th have a similar effect in other places. One can’t be a society’s credible member without acknowledging its regulative idealizations. Personal motives may be harder to discern, though their force is easily inferred when someone persists at a task most others would decline. Minds controlled by ideals resemble thermostats: we are activated or appeased as an ideal is pursued or achieved. Or the aim isn’t achieved, so we try again, lower our standards, or look elsewhere. How are these norms fixed? Some are established by deliberation, others by socialized practice. Many are unconsidered: my father was a Marine; that’s also my desire. But some ideals are chosen: one becomes a conscientious objector for reasons of one’s own. Why call this choice a self-driven norm? We say that conscience is our moral center, the selfregulating gyroscope within us; one exhibits its control while knowing the likely costs. Yet this emphasis on self-determination is over-drawn when conscience is so often co-opted by early teachers: their attitudes define us; we’re proud to act as they prescribe. Personal control is an amalgam: social demands shape the forms of one’s self-control. Knowing the traffic laws isn’t enough to make one a good driver, though motorists with a socialized conscience are a society’s reliable

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drivers. They defer to its conventions without always knowing that their force is contingent: other norms would also be effective. Driving on the left is an alternate policy, not heresy in a society where all drive on the right. Why is it that socialized scruples are hard to change; why stifle initiative if— like Gyges—one could “seize the advantage and escape the harm”?34 A plausible answer locates us on the trajectory from personal lust to socialized habit. Seeing it from the middle, we accept the need for public order but resist affirming it as a sufficient rationale for quashing personal desire. Our ambivalence expresses the complexity of good conscience: let people do as they wish up to the point of harming others. Or acknowledge that an old solution is perverse. Shake loose from old ways while learning to think and act as new understandings commend; persist until condemned by others or look for friends who are similarly disposed. There are sometimes more allies than anticipated, so a tentative initiative becomes a wave of reform. Meanings change because attitudes, practices, and communities have altered. We go through cycles of liberation and constraint: do as you like or only what all accept. 1.2.1.viii.b Dispositions: Disposition is usefully distinguished from capacity and power. Capacity is the more general term; it signifies a qualification for action, hence latent abilities, dispositions, or skills, but also the power to express them. Uses of disposition are usually more specific: it can imply the posture or position of a regiment prepared for battle, the inclination to speak French. More fundamental here is the idea that dispositions are second-order properties of structures, properties qualifying structures for participation in causal relationships: brains can think because of neural organization; projectiles break glass because of their shape and momentum. Power implies the energy and motion required when causes interact: bicycle wheels are disposed to turn because of their shapes and axels, but they aren’t powered, they don’t turn unless pedaled or spun. Descriptive laws report regularities without citing their basis; explanatory laws explain their regularizing effects by citing or implying the dispositions that enable pertinent causes. So, fine blades and neural organization are structural properties that enable their structures to perform in ways having specific effects. Other things being equal in specified domains (butter, not brick; humans, not bees), any rigid blade will cut; instructed neural networks will think. Every such case is an instance of organization or procedure hence form, be it the form of the

|| 34 Plato, Republic, 358e-359e, pp. 44–45.

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structures acting or the form of their activity. Either way, the normative, regularizing condition is a structure’s ability to perform in the relevant way when relevant supplementary conditions are satisfied. Those conditions are satisfied when locks open to keys of complementary shape; it is inferred when people who can’t formulate a grammatical rule nevertheless speak grammatically. Descriptive laws usually defer to structural forms, hence their dispositions, without citing them. Is every disposition and all their causal effects explained by the geometry of the causes? No, because momentum, too, is a condition for causal effects: hail stones breaking windows. Is a run on the stock market the effect of massed neural geometry—interlocking molecules—in panicked buyers and sellers? That is plausible but hard to prove. 1.2.1.ix Stability-in-evolution: Spacetime evolves in the respect that there is steady transformation—individual, social, and holistic—in the energized ensemble of things created by its self-differentiation. Random changes (caused by chance interactions) come and go; or things capture one another, then stabilize and evolve because of occurring in supportive environments. Evolving stability seems to be the inclination of our cosmic economy. Hume might have predicted that changes would always dissipate, never consolidate, but that is not our world. Changes here are (roughly) as likely to create order and stability as disorder. Where motion is perpetual, stability is a defense against change. Stable societies are created and sustained by reciprocal causal relations. They create and stabilize individual systems and their networks: the Sun and its planets, families, and governments. Positive feedback creates stable systems when calculating partners hive to one another for a desired resource or advantage, until benefits are exhausted. Negative feedback is the critical regulator: one or another of a system’s constituents strays too far, until the other or others respond by affecting it in ways that draw it back to their system’s self-sustaining rhythms. Control is usually effective when friends fall out and sometimes when democracies turn autocratic or oligarchic. Feedback is counter-productive (in either form) if it renders a system or society static and immobile when supporting circumstances have altered in ways that threaten its stability. Change is resisted in societies having as few as two members. Neither can pass through a narrow door if both go at once; rules determining right-of-way are a stable solution that averts conflict. Why accept this compromise? Because safety in a complex society requires order, hence the rules and discipline that enforce it: marriage, property, and tax laws evolve in similar ways from strategies that facilitate cooperation and safety by reducing conflict. Societies they defend, those stratified by religion, class, wealth, or gender, are defensive whenever their

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stabilizing rudder is attacked. Yet rigidity makes them vulnerable: disparities inimical to large parts of a society eventually submit to other forces or to the hostility they provoke: hierarchical religious authority yields to a flourishing economy, education, and democratic politics. Traditionalists worry that social fluidity threatens stability; their critics respond that people or systems having wealth and status are always opposed to mobility and always quick to suppress it. Evolution is the effect of changes that may be internal or external to a system. They are internal when members or parts alter in ways that enable or disable them as partners: marriages that work better with time; teammates in a sport they are too old to play. Evolution is external when circumstances reduce a system’s viability: farming cooperatives in a drought, fishermen in a port where no one eats fish. We resist change, find ways to survive it, or welcome the rewards for innovation. But these perspectives are haunted: global warming enriches innovators but makes Earth uninhabitable for many species. Stability is conservative wisdom: hold on as best you can. 1.2.1.x Intelligibility: Intelligibility may seem incidental to nature or so apparent as to require no comment, but notice is required because there is no accord about its source: is nature intelligible in itself or intelligible because we construe it by way of rubrics that differentiate and organize experience in terms that make sense to us? Kant proposed that nature seems intelligible because we perceive it by way of the experiences mind schematizes.35 This idealist rendering sneers at experiment because experimental data of many kinds can be accommodated within the conceptual networks used to create a thinkable experience; no single theory or schematization is privileged when an infinity of those embodying no contradiction can be used to create a thinkable experience. It is, therefore, a matter of some import that nature is intelligible globally and locally. Processes are intelligible generically if we can formulate, test, and confirm laws or rules they satisfy. Individual phenomena are intelligible if we can discern their organization—their patterns—whether or not we could have predicted their formation given the rules or laws that explain their production. (Knowing an iterative law enables us to predict every step of a construction without enabling us to predict the look of the pattern formed.) Intelligibility requires perception as the necessary adjunct to understanding. Thought prefigures the states of affairs we expect to observe; perception confirms (or not) our expectations: we read a musical score, then hear it played.

|| 35 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 92–95.

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These ten points are the principal attributes of a reality that is both process and product. They are disputed by those who believe that nature is a ragbag of accidental effects. For there are an infinity of possible worlds, some chaotic, others not. Living in an orderly world is, they believe, our good luck, not evidence that order implies nature’s inherent constraints: [T]he necessity of a cause to every beginning of existence is not founded on any arguments either demonstrative or intuitive….There is no absolute, nor metaphysical necessity, that every beginning of existence should be attended with such an object.36

An orderly sequence is either the contrivance of our inclination to see order in disorder or an accident. We might respond with terror because reality may diverge momentarily into chaos, though our science describes its regularities and intervenes occasionally to confirm that the present is like the past. We settle calmly into the good fortune of living in a world where accidental order persists. This is Hume’s conviction, but not, I think, the character of our world. Consider now the three expressions of process that are most conspicuous in human lives: selfhood, culture, and society. The analogy from Plato’s Republic is our guide: specific values for nature’s categorial features are their only determinants.

1.3 Selves Individuality comes in two styles. Individual sand piles are aggregates; gravitational and electrochemical relations bind the grains but there is no additional organization to give them modularity and some degree of autonomy. Individuals of the other sort—from atoms to people and cities—are modules bound by the reciprocal causality of their parts. Modularity implies a boundary that filters inputs or prevents intrusions while the system is sustained by its internal dynamics and by circumstances that are supportive (supplying resources) or not inimical. This is modularity but not yet selfhood: it emerges when the negative feedback inherent in all modules is directive as well as stabilizing: the module is an agent able to control and correct its trajectory and encounters with other things. Does this formula imply that selfhood is already present in amoebae and paramecia? It does because the capacity for monitoring and directing engagements with other things extends to the branches and roots of the phylogenetic tree. But there is a caveat

|| 36 Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, p. 172.

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because most of those responses are generic, not individualized. They don’t intimate the selfhood of those whose behavior is regulated by personal aims or idealizations. Selfhood of that specialized human kind has four principal features: character, interiority, roles (in a family, business, or civil society), and a more or less coherent narrative of one’s history and aims. Character is the set of habits, attitudes, and sensibilities that form as we satisfy personal needs or social demands. Its distinctive attributes are cognitive, affective, or practical responses to circumstances: confident in some, we’re clumsy or fearful in others. Some of its qualities—persistence and initiative—are likely innate. Others are teachable skills acquired in families, school systems, or armies where personal idiosyncrasies acquire a social sanction. Interiority is the sanctuary to which each person has immediate access; meaning, perception, memory, sensibility, and purpose are there. This is the quiet center one hopes to recover or sustain. Its features and the mental structure they presuppose are traditionally the justification for saying that mind must have an ontological status distinct from body. Interiority is, however, no impediment to skills that link perceptual content to mechanical skills: learning to speak or drive, for example. Behaviorists ignore it, though its neglect is foolish given that this is the site of interpretation, deliberation, judgment, plans, and hypotheses. The evidence of their materiality is the difference that physiology, engineering, and philosophy have made to the study of mind. Each of these powers is plausibly construed as the activity of a material system, though the partiality of our understanding is implied by our inability to tell how the brain generates them. This failure is more than a detail, yet it doesn’t detract from the global character of our success. Who cares about me; what are my pleasures and fears, my aims and obligations? Selfhood is acquired as one negotiates answers to these concerns with one’s family, neighbors, and workmates. The effect is a singular version of society’s duties and permissions, one that adapts them to the scale of personality. The result is specific: the French-speaking Belgian is Belgian, not French. Selves created by the tension of interiority and accommodation are social pivots. Describing them requires two perspectives: one of effects, the other of causes. Nodes are both. They are effects having causes, but they, too, are causes, once formed, of effects in other things: children formed by their parents affect parents and playmates. Causal symmetry is everywhere because everything effects others while being affected by them (or others). Each person radiates his thoughts and style while acknowledging those of his neighbors and partners. Roles exploit one’s skills while defining one’s tasks, duties to the systems in which we participate, and duties to their other members. They also prefigure or

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condition the extent of our liberty in each of the domains in which we are or could be active: the carpenter who builds houses for others could build one for himself. Personal narratives are more often fractured than whole because coherent stories elude us when we acknowledge the mix of passions, guilt, and vanity in ourselves. There are, principally, narratives of two kinds. Some are short-term because focused by problem-solving or emotionally loaded situations. These situational narratives are often impelled by tasks, hopes, or responsibilities. They often express a sense of urgency or anxiety, while dominated by four variables: aims, allies, resources, and obstacles. What is to be done, how, and with whom? Other narratives are longer, somewhat abstracted and deliberate; they’re often dominated by a desire for justification or reconciliation. The history recounted in these longer narratives is episodic rather than continuous; events they highlight may be out of order. Credit and blame are likely exaggerated; feelings and attitudes are the blinking neon that distorts focus and anything intimated. Every such narrative is a source of information about the narrator, though biography is more likely to be accurate than these reflections. For each is the context and rationale for all that is still to be attempted, refused, or done. The story is backdrop: the narrator lives its valences while telling it. Selfhood is so ample and complex that its ontology would seem to exceed speculation. Is there an account of interiority congenial to a materialist reading of its constituent states and activities? Descartes didn’t think so: nothing, he said, is better known to mind than the mind itself.37 The look, feel, or taste of things is better known because directly perceived. This model construes mind as a theater where events occur on a stage perceived by an audience of one. We recognize the presentation because innate ideas differentiate the perceptual or cognitive data. But there is a question to answer: what is it that stabilizes the content of perceptual awareness? Is it the stability of things perceived; mind itself; or a god? Berkeley deferred to God, Kant to mind. Mind stabilizes thought; it stabilizes memories and dreams momentarily. The task of stabilizing the complexity of phenomena perceived during waking life exceeds mind’s powers; the stability of things perceived explains it better. They are steady sources of information about the character, organization, stability, or change in things perceived; we see them as stable because they are stable, given the durations at issue and the invisibility of most changes occurring within them. We distinguish, accordingly, between the two

|| 37 René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. ll, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 22–23.

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senses of experience: experience as the content of awareness versus the perceiving of things experienced. The passage by Dewey cited in the Introduction is relevant again because it poses two stabilities against one another: the states of affairs engaged and the material agent who makes his or her way by using or adapting to them. This double sense has its parallel in the idea of intentionality. Franz Brentano construed the notion analogically: as bows and arrows have targets, so is consciousness focused on its contents. Roderick Chisholm revived interest in Brentano, then argued that intentional language is anomalous with the semantics of physical objects and processes.38 But there is a parallel here to Frege’s distinction between sense and reference: the “Morning star” and the “Evening star” signify the same planet.39 Dualism is averted by regarding intention as a directive construed from complementary sides: conscious content and purpose on one side, action in pursuit of an aim on the other. Suppose one’s focus is the approaching bus one waits to enter and ride: this is intentionality—purpose—construed from the standpoint of practical life. It shapes both attention and actions calculated to engage us appropriately with things relevant to our aims. Conscious intentions are, sometimes, a first condition for efficacy; purposive action is the other half. Steps can be automatic when taking a walk, but walking stops because, as Aristotle would have explained, stopping is our natural state: pushed out of our natural place, we move to recover it. There is also this alternate persuasion: we humans are forward-sequencing machines. Intentions direct us while anticipating situations that are more or less favorable to our aims. Sensitive to desires, not always rational or prudent, we often change our minds. Intention is persistent whatever its object, because we, like sharks, are naturally in motion, always looking ahead. What do we know about our aims; how do we know it; and what difference does knowing make? Intentions are often determined by habit because most situations are familiar; responses are habitual because satisfactory (they would otherwise be extinguished). But circumstances are sometimes confused because novel or complex; we respond by stopping to consider the way forward. Imagination intervenes: intentions are vectors in the spaces it prefigures. A plan emerges when deliberation has resolved indecision: we estimate our chances, choose a way forward and proceed.

|| 38 Roderick Chisholm, Perceiving: A Philosophical Study (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1957), pp. 168–185. 39 Gottlob Frege, The Foundations of Arithmetic (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1980), pp. 26, 112.

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Brentano’s emphasis was incomplete because his subjectivism was hermetic. But interiority, more than the vector in a private space, is a function: a way of aligning animals having it to environments they need master to survive and thrive. Brentano’s subjectivist emphasis abstracts from these practical aims. Pilots are a useful analogue: they train in flight simulators, cages that duplicate the experience of flying a plane. Working in a simulator resembles the experience of brains in a vat: the tasks and context mimic reality; the experience of water, land, or sky is mediated by dials, levers, and screens. But preparation has an aim; we train for possible eventualities by anticipating them. Pilots don’t spend all their time in simulators; the rest of us aren’t always trapped in Cartesian isolation. Why not acknowledge both perspectives—one subjective, the other practical and behavioral? Living with uncertainty; always fearful that our needs won’t be satisfied, we learn in order to act, then act to satisfy a need or interest. Always vigilant, we anticipate obstacles and opportunities; having many interests, we plan and act to satisfy them. This is intentionality construed from the standpoint of expectations that project us into the ambient world. Abstract thinking seems harder to explain than practical thought because it isn’t tested by the engagements it provokes. This difference is likely the benefit of our evolutionary history: practical life has always been exigent; facility with abstractions is the effect of powers enabled when brains and languages evolved beyond the needs of utility. Now, when words are surrogates for perceptual data, we have the grammar and the logic of specific topics to supply thought’s organizing rules. Their products—poetry, narratives, and testable theories—are not more surprising than effective plans, though we’re content if fantasy has no test but coherence. Every animal is self-directing and self-regulating, yet our autonomy is greater than others. Our aims are chosen, not always imposed; self-regulation implies the specificity and precision with which we engage other things, and the inhibitions that avert undesirable effects by suppressing ineffective behavior. Too late to avoid a mistake, we avert doing it again. The range of our powers is well-summarized by Aristotle’s triad: thinking, doing, and making. We think when hypothesizing, inferring, or constructing systems of ideas, when evaluating aims or proposing means appropriate to an aim. Doing and making are also variable: we paint houses, solve problems, and fix teeth; we make dinners, plans, and stories. There is rough parity among these powers, but the three are more integrated than distinct when mathematicians solve equations and musicians interpret a score. Deliberating about one’s intentions is reality-testing: where are we going and why; how shall we get there? Plans and hypotheses incorporate maps of the relevant terrain because we can’t act or experiment if we don’t know where we are.

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Initiative or accommodation is constrained by two variables: limit an aim out of regard for laws and contingencies, then proceed in a way or ways appropriate to the terrain, one’s objective and resources. Is all of this explicable in material terms? An exhaustive naturalism seems defeated by the range and plasticity of our powers. A kitchen’s ovens, plates, and raw materials are made of natural products; most of a restaurant’s meanings—its tablecloths and manners—are something else, for we live in a world where material states of affairs are overlaid by interpretations expressing our interests. We don’t look for or want the same things. Tasks, hopes, and needs trigger actions consistent with sanctioning values. Some fall to the side of truth: water is valuable because of being a necessary condition for life. Others are embedded in meanings fixed by one’s situation, class, or church; they supply a rationale for all one thinks or does. Nothing in these riders precludes the genetic explanation of habits acquired then provoked by social causes and clues. Afternoon tea is meaningful in some social circles: one is warmed by sharing it with friends. Does this require a spirit or soul? Why isn’t body, cold or lonely, enough to explain it? Interiority is often ignored when materialist accounts of human nature are considered because self-awareness isn’t a window into its material and social conditions. Yet mental functions other than awareness and the presentation of perceptual data are understood if only by analogy to the functions of machine intelligence. Locke’s remark—God could have enabled matter to think40—is justified by machines that perceive, calculate, and remember. Robots with selves— happy or depressed—may not elude us forever. Materialists press this advantage with others: no surgeon rummaging through human bodies finds any trace of a bridge that might be the soul’s point of access into its body (a pineal gland). They eliminate the motive for inferring its presence by using brain imaging to locate specific centers of activity. Ideas sometimes emerge, as though from nowhere, when distracted or sleeping, but this is an effect explained by citing the associative cortex and the day’s preoccupations. Dualism is recast. Experience doesn’t require powers that no physical system could have (intuition, for example) if it can be generated without them. The difference implied by interiority is perspectival, rather than ontological: inner or outer, rather than mind or body. Objectivity seems arid when subjectivity introduces meaning, sentiment, and value, hence orientation. Yet nature is ever more supportive when intelligence makes practical life as gratifying as it is effective. Habits carry us most of the time; conscious attention intervenes when initiative

|| 40 Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, vol. two, p. 193.

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or disruption requires it. Dentists look for cavities when patients indicate the site of a pain; brain surgery sometimes requires that patients be conscious (without pain) in order that patients may describe and control the uncertain effects of a surgeon’s probing. These are first and third person perspectives on a single material process. There may come a time when people reading instruments will be able to tell what a subject is feeling or thinking. They may be able to intervene, altering beliefs, aims, or feelings. These are liabilities of our material nature: its integrity is vulnerable. Embarrassment is, nevertheless, keen when philosophy and physiology affirm the tight relation—the identity—of mind and body while unable to explain the emergence of consciousness and its content from the electrochemistry of neural activity. We persist because dualism ontologizes a difference without otherwise clarifying it, and because mind’s inscrutability is partly the effect of its complexity. Imagine the Martian who discovers a working radio. He doesn’t understand how vacuum tubes generate sound, but he knows transistors and uses them to make a working radio. Is he still mystified by the immateriality of the voices he hears? Rather less.

1.4 Society and culture A society’s constituents are individuals and the systems—the families, schools, and businesses—that establish networks of friendship, family, government, or religion. There is also considerable aggregation: individuals, systems, and networks share a social space with their equivalents while having no relations additional to those incurred by falling under the same governments or laws. This complex, part aggregate, part higher-order system (a society), is a region with strata: it occupies a terrain and has an ecological footprint (from which it draws resources). Large societies comprise several or many overlapping regions, each with its signature interests, loyalties, or stories. Participants are subject to some or all of the same laws; their sensibilities are tuned and aligned by local ambience. The use of society is, all the while, somewhat arbitrary. One imagines stretching its sense to justify ant societies, but not molecular societies. We reserve the word for human societies or those similar enough to merit its use because cooperation and coordination are idealized when construed by meaning and passion. Work teams fuse when loyalty and idealization are conditions for efficacy. Commitment to their society and one another is a devotion; conflict is mitigated by laws or rules that facilitate movement or proscribe dangerous behavior.

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A society’s topography is mapped by its cultural meanings, some universal, others local to its regions or sects. Cooperation and regulation are critical to the well-being of people everywhere, though it is the perceived valence of local practices and meanings that create the psychic and social spaces where people live productively. Elementary needs antedate meanings, but meanings prescribe the tasks and aspirations where needs are satisfied: food is a need, but taking it with prayer is a meaning. The gap between the specificity of needs and the meanings of their satisfiers should rouse more curiosity than it does. Needs and interests are local and finite, though meanings apply willy-nilly to things of all scales: God blesses marriages, births, wars, and the opening of Congress. Consider the implements required for dinner: fingers, forks, chop sticks, or spoons. People accustomed to one are clumsy with others; our ways seem right; theirs are exotic. The French, étranger, means foreigner or stranger. The foreigner is odd because his expectations and reactions betray an understanding of himself and circumstances that makes little sense to us: he does things we wouldn’t do and fails to respond as we would. Is he criminal or mad? Neither, we say: merely strange. But incomprehension is dangerous when generalized. It becomes the tribal excuse for righteous solipsism. Ours is the genuine religion; yours is fatuous; our stories are “true,” yours are pagan heresies. We worry that diversity subverts our claim to authenticity and authority: my socialized identity can’t be secure if the variety of possible identities entails the contingency of all. How is it secured? By insisting that mine is “true,” while others are illegitimate because false. We may believe that society’s functional essentials—safety, cooperation, and productivity—are exposed when the meanings of local culture and history are stripped away, but no society is grimly functional because unrelieved by a valorizing story. This idea—society as an expression of essential needs—is appropriate when considering ants or beavers; but not with humans. Meanings supervene; each person, coupling, or society is perceived through meanings that over-ride hard wiring and Spartan practice. Hence this question: which has social priority, meaning or truth? Which tasks require accurate specifications of one’s circumstances; when is truth unwelcome because superseded by meaning? Dogs and cats know their surroundings as a palette of attractions and repulsions: safety, reward, or threat. Hume argued that his conclusions about cause and effect could be generalized from animal to human experience.41 Animals have successive impressions but they don’t ascribe necessity to their relations:

|| 41 Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, pp. 176–179.

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why do we claim to see more? Would he have said as much of meanings: that attitudes preceding perception don’t warp our reading of the data? Severely rational but sick, I don’t want to know how sick I am. This gap—between sobriety and evasion—seems dysfunctional: why prefer illusion to effective reality-testing when I need to make important decisions? Selfhood, like society and cultures, straddles this divide; animal needs, commerce, and crowding require efficient solutions, though individually and socially, we avert our eyes. Embedding every public occasion and every personal urgency in one or more layers of mythic significance, we only acknowledge the values we dare affirm. Peoples know the critical signs, and take care to align their beliefs and practices with the public standard. Yet societies evolve: people born to immigrant parents live in cities where cultures meld. Conflicts are resolved when the practices and values of the new culture have supplanted the old. For then, as before, meaning—being-in-the truth—supersedes the demand for truth. There may be confusion for a time when things are seen as they are, undisguised by either culture—clothes as cover, not as costumes—but that passes when “truth” reacquires its mythic role: we are comfortable with ourselves when enjoying the company of those who believe and act as all have learned to do. When is meaning excessive? When it obscures the reality valorized. Marriage is often a blessing, but not always.

1.5 Summary Our idea of nature has changed: no longer in thrall to commonsense and Aristotle’s primary substances, we construe it as a cauldron of soup on slow boil. Selves and societies are modules that rise to the surface, stabilize, then dissolve: they have short histories in longer cycles. The longest cycle is nature itself. How did it start; where is it going? We probably can’t know. What of these speculations? One might date them, looking back sometime in the future to see which parts survive.

2 Silent Conditions Empirical inquiry tests and confirms hypotheses about many things, yet imagination would have us say more. This chapter considers several directions it goes. Describing a door we rarely enter, it pushes the door lightly, citing requirements that any claim—theological, scientific, or philosophic— must satisfy if we are to avoid entering carelessly. It supplements Chapter One by testing inferences intended to supplement or enlarge our understanding of nature.

2.1 Conditions that elude observation Imagine Aristotle explaining why things move: earth and water sink because they’re heavy, fire and air rise because light. These are reasons justified by observation, though something is amiss because they say nothing of gravity, a silent condition. Silent conditions expose the gap between understanding or perception and reality: they would make a difference to a comprehensive inventory of nature’s constituents, though there is no role for them in explanations that seem complete because they cite all the pertinent observables: impacting billiard balls or colliding cars. Their status is confusing because some conditions once regarded as silent become observable as theory and technology evolve. Atoms, once silent, were identified by theory; their observable effects were predicted and confirmed, then atoms themselves were perceived with electron microscopes. The status of other conditions is more ambiguous: gravity and electromagnetic fields become observable to the degree that we predict their effects, including those produced by manipulating them. But some things or processes may elude us: evidence that would reveal them is inaccessible or they have no observable effects. There may be several or many such conditions internal or external to nature. Normativity, for example, is arguably inherent but silent: is regularity an inexplicable accident or the expression of immanent constraints, nature’s laws? Dialectic moves in contrary ways because of our inability to leverage a decisive answer using empirical data: events occurring in the orderly ways laws prescribe may be nothing more than regularities. Hence the circle where regularities are explained by citing laws whose only empirical support is the regularities they explain. Science bars the door to conditions that are irreparably silent by restricting its hypotheses to those empirically testable. Practical life, too, has no access to or patience for silent conditions: it wants direct evidence of a condition (no sunshine) or evidence from which the condition (heavy clouds or midnight) may be

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inferred. Religion and theology, even science, are less circumspect. Deists infer that our cosmos was kick-started by an extra-natural cause; cosmologists speculate about the origins of the universe, though features described by savvy hypotheses may never be confirmed because evidence is meager or equivocal. People defending claims unsupported by evidence say that the absence of evidence isn’t evidence of an absence but their dictum has a complement: absence of evidence isn’t evidence of existence. We avert overstatement if we affirm that there may be silent conditions for observed phenomena that otherwise seem well understood. For there is no contradiction in supposing that natural events, even nature itself, may have one or more such conditions.

2.2 Examples What might nature’s silent conditions be? Three that come to mind—God, the multiverse, and eternal possibilities—illustrate the difficulties of affirming that nature has or lacks such conditions. My account of each is brief because these examples shouldn’t detract from the point they illustrate: namely, silent conditions and our limited access to any there may be. God, for the purposes of this discussion, is the being postulated by Aquinas when he averred that a contingent world presupposes a necessary ground. (This is the third and arguably strongest of his five arguments for God’s existence.42) The multiverse is said to be the entity in which our world is a bubble or pod.43 There may be many bubbles, each having a distinctive spacetime and laws. Eternal possibles are a modal version of Plato’s Forms: every property existing as a possibility may have one, many, or no instantiations.44 Each of these alleged conditions for our world is silent, with the exception that gravity generated in one bubble universe may infiltrate others. This effect would entail that other bubbles and the multiverse are not silent: there is or may be empirical evidence of them. But a feature common to these many bubbles could not do more than prefigure some generic features of other bubbles and the range of their values. Bubbles and the origin from which all inflated would likely have several or many properties that are undetectable and uninferable from gravitational forces passing among the bubbles.

|| 42 Thomas Aquinas, A Shorter Summa, ed. Peter Kreeft (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 58–64. 43 Alan Guth, The Inflationary Universe (Cambridge: Perseus, 1997), pp. 163–165. 44 David Weissman, Eternal Possibilities: a Neutral Ground for Meaning and Existence (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977), pp. 68–72.

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2.3 Rationales How could we affirm that one or more of these silent conditions obtains, given the restriction that there is no empirical evidence of their character or existence or (for the multiverse) no evidence sufficient to determine some of its principal features? Here are three justifying arguments and their flaws: 2.3.1 Aquinas’s third argument for God’s existence: Imagine a small child in a heavy wind: one holds her hand lest she blow away. Aquinas had a similar perception of nature: existing by God’s wisdom and will, nature would vanish if unsupported. The support must be stronger than the thing supported, for no contingency is strong enough if, like nature, it needn’t have existed and perhaps did not exist some time past. The world has come to be and doesn’t founder because it was created and is sustained by a necessary being, one whose stability is assured because its nonexistence would be a contradiction. That being is God, a sustaining condition we finite creatures don’t perceive. Grasping God’s nature requires our understanding of two kinds of existence: necessary and contingent. Materiality, location, even spacetime itself, are contingent: here today, gone tomorrow. Existence is necessary if something having it cannot not be. We may explicate this understanding of necessity by saying, for example, that a necessary being persists forever, though this implies a God of process, one diminished by the paradox that it exists within the time it creates. Is there also a way to construe the necessity of a God outside created time? Mathematics informs us of many relations that are eternal, a circle’s relation to its center, for example. Yet examples of necessary relations add no additional or clarifying content to the idea that necessity (or contingency) qualifies existence. Having only abstract or practical ideas of existence (properties instantiated in spacetime, or fallen trees blocking the road ahead), we lack content for these alternate ways of existing. How is existence inflected, if at all, by the difference between these modes? The likely answer is allusive, and largely inferred. We explain that God’s necessary being entails his eternity because of other properties ascribed to him: God is eternal because his infinite power precludes any diminution of his being; contingent beings are inferior—spineless and feeble—because of lacking his infinite, spontaneous and irreducible power. But why do we assume that these ascriptions are valid; why say—deference apart—that contingent being is fragile or that God’s being is necessary? We do it because of starting from the assumption that God is perfect and that necessary existence is one of his perfections. Not-being would be

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contrary to his nature, while finite beings, perpetually dependent on their creator, lack his perfection. The difference is considerable, but we exaggerate it in order to glorify the necessary being while minimizing ourselves. These are ascriptions, not arguments based on evidence of any sort. Assume, nevertheless, that our world is contingent in character and existence: it could have had other properties; it needn’t have existed. Its character is evidence of God’s goodness; its existence is evidence that God perpetually infuses our finite world with being. But notice that these two expressions of contingency—character and existence—are mutually independent: neither entails the other. Aquinas’s third argument concerns the world’s existence, not its character. That is also my focus. Consider the alleged contingency of this world’s existence, hence its alleged frailty. This characterization is moot: perhaps our world could not fail to be. For there seems no way to prove that our cosmos is not a necessary being. Aquinas couldn’t agree, given his belief that God is the only necessary being and the argument that we can imagine without contradiction that our world needn’t exist. Yet this may be a failure of imagination, evidence that we fail to grasp the manner of nature’s existence. Worlds of many kinds are possible though our world may be the only one actualized, an exception explained if its existence is necessary. The contingency of created things would be irrelevant if the world’s existence were necessary; suppose, however, that its existence is contingent: Does it follow that the world would be annihilated but for God’s support? Aquinas affirms this for no stronger reason than the alleged frailty of contingent beings: they would be annihilated if God were not perpetually infusing them with being. But there is another way to understand contingency: our world may be stable and secure though it isn’t necessary. A deeply rooted oak stands for many years. The existence of the cosmos may be equally stable for reasons unknown. There might be an infinity of possible worlds (hence each a contingency), all instantiated, and all perpetually stable. A simple argument confirms our world’s stability without proving its necessity (no contradiction is entailed by considering that it might not have existed). We sometimes consider the idea that something may come into being from nothing, though this proposition acquires all its plausibility from the grammatical rules that sanction its formation: no thing comes into being from nothing, because nothing lacks power—it is not a cause—and because coming into being from nothing is not a process. There is, instead, this converse principle: anything coming into being derives from something already in being. For if no thing comes into existence from nothing and if something exists, then it follows that it and all its antecedents derive from prior beings. This argument is empirically grounded,

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for some things—ourselves, for example—do exist. Accordingly, we and every other existent are moments in an infinite series, products of the self-transforming being— nature—that has always existed.45 This argument doesn’t prove that nature is a necessary being, only that nature has existed throughout the perpetual past: every state of affairs has had generating antecedents. Will nature always exist? Yes, if every next state is a transformation of one previous; yes, if there is no creator to annihilate it; no, if all the energy inflating spacetime, hence nature, dissipates (inexplicably) or bleeds into other bubble worlds (a transformation in the complex that connects our bubble universe to others, not the annihilation of being). It is true, nevertheless, that perpetuity doesn’t entail necessity. The idea of nature’s annihilation is not a contradiction, perhaps because of a deficiency in our understanding of cosmic energy. Understanding what it is and how it comes to be would supersede speculations about its annihilation. These suggestions avert the inference from the world’s existential contingency to a sustaining God (Aquinas agreed that no argument for God’s character or existence is probative). They don’t foreclose the possibility that a god of some kind is a silent condition. 2.3.2 The multiverse: Inflationary cosmologists propose that our world is a bubble generated when a high-energy plasma was subjected to intense negative gravitational pressure and high temperature.46 And, they suppose, conditions favorable to one bubble may have favored the inflation of many others. Empirical evidence for models describing the inception of bubble worlds reduces principally to the character and disposition of the low-temperature background radiation discovered by Penzias and Wilson. This radiation, originating approximately three hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, is both a clue to its early formation and a barrier that occludes a direct view of its inception. Is our world a bubble universe? The affirming hypothesis requires the support of empirical data gleaned to test it. What, for example, is the tested value of the cosmological constant (the rate of spacetime expansion)? Are there other bubble universes, for if so their existence may be evidence for relevant features of ours? Their reality might be inferred if the total quantity of gravitational effects were estimated for our world (given assumptions about its total mass and the shape of spacetime), and if there were evidence that gravity from our world has leached into others or that some of theirs has penetrated our world. || 45 Aristotle, Physics, Basic Works of Aristotle, 250b11–267b26, pp. 354–394. 46 Guth, Inflationary Universe, pp. 253–269.

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Estimating these quantities is doubly complicated: first, by the difficulty of measuring the total gravitational effect internal to our world; second, by the uncertainty introduced (by possible leaching) if the measured amount were more or less than theory predicts. Making these estimates, then interpreting their equivocal implications makes any conclusion problematic. Nor can one affirm a particular model of the early universe if alternate models explain all observable phenomena with equal facility. There may be lurking empirical evidence that enables us to choose among competing theories, but every such theory is a model describing structures and processes that exceed the data. Deciding among competing theories by duplicating the origin of the universe in a laboratory requires more energy than we are likely to create, though having it would only push back questions about conditions obtaining when our world’s expansion began. Those conditions will likely remain silent and unknown. 2.3.3 Eternal possibilities: Possibility is troubling ontologically because we are puzzled by its status as a mode of being. Possibilia seem a fairy tale to everyone convinced that observation, and resistance are the best evidence of other people and things. We defer to the subtler entities of microphysics, but only if they show themselves to devices of our middle-sized reality. Nothing we can’t perceive or engage is acknowledged, though skepticism about silent conditions can’t be justified without a proof that humans are the measure of all that is or can be. Error, frustration, and death are some reasons for thinking we lack this authority. Possibilities of one kind—those called logical or eternal—exceed us in the respect that all are unobservable as possibilia. Logical possibilities differ in this respect from material possibles: knives cut, for example, because of capacities— material possibilities—founded in their structural properties, their sharp blades. Eternal possibilities are the array of simple or complex properties sanctioned by the principle of plenitude: whatever is not a contradiction is a possibility. A small subset of possibles are instantiated as our world; the great majority are uninstantiated, unobserved, and unobservable.47 Are logical possibilities mere phantoms, shadows cast by the words and grammar used to express them? Imagine an Inuit language that makes discriminations unavailable in other languages before it goes extinct: does its disappearance entail that differences it signified no longer obtain? Suppose, too, that all the varieties of snow have evaporated, so none remains anywhere in the universe.

|| 47 Weissman, Eternal Possibilities, pp. 57–107.

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The material possibility no longer exists, but does this entail that logical possibilities for snows of various sorts are also defunct? That inference is mistaken if the array of possibles—Wittgenstein’s logical space48— requires no sanction additional to the principle of noncontradiction and its derivative, the principle of plenitude: not both p and not-p; either a contradiction or a possibility. We use language to signify properties whose existence as possibles is prior to and independent of the words and rules used to mark them. The inverse—that linguistic meaning, signification, is a vacuum cleaner that deprives logical possibilities of autonomy by sucking them into the web of language—is an indefensible prejudice. For there are more possibilities—an infinity of shapes, patterns, and organizations—than words signifying them, and a dearth of words for the instantiated possibles we regularly perceive and recognize. Consider the many familiar faces: each has a name but no words specify their distinguishing shapes. There is more to say about possibles, but details are incidental when eternal possibles, like God and the multiverse, are considered as plausible examples of silent conditions.

2.4 Appraisal Arguments for these examples share two principal features: each characterizes a silent condition in a way or ways appropriate to its hypothesis before construing observable phenomena in ways congenial to itself. Success is elusive because of one or both failures: the claims are conceptually flawed, or they lack empirical support. Conceptual flaws deprive a hypothesis of its logical thrust: Aquinas’s third argument falters because contingent existence doesn’t have the enfeebling implications he alleged. The want of empirical evidence is disabling in three ways: i. It deprives us of contact with the alleged state of affairs; we lack confirming information and a basis for additional inferences (I believe I’ve dialed the right number because someone with a voice like yours answers the phone); ii. It deprives us of evidence that would disconfirm our hypothesis or redirect us (no one answers—no contact—hence no evidence that I have the wrong number). iii. An apparently meaningful and logically consistent statement is not falsifiable if we can’t specify an empirical difference that would test its truth. All three of the hypotheses cited are faulted for speculating about states of affairs for which there is either no evidence or no dispositive evidence.

|| 48 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), para. 1.13, p. 7.

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Repeating the demand for evidence makes better sense when we recall its motivation: we humans are adept story-tellers. We distinguish fantasies from true stories by making contact with the ambient world: true stories predict the effects perceived; stories predicting other effects are false. Those making no predictions are untestable. Or they are unfalsifiable, hence nominally credible: we dare to believe them for social or personal reasons, despite the want of evidence. Critics of verification point out its alleged disqualifications: data may be construed in several ways or ignored; hypotheses may be rejiggered to accept or reject the data at hand.49 Do we need empirical confirmation when coherence is an alternative notion of truth? We do, because fairy tales aren’t true merely because coherent. Nor would they become true if embedded, like the squares of a quilt, in a comprehensive story about everything. Criteria for coherence are very hard to formulate, though we do recognize incoherence, fatuity, and error. There are occasions when contrary theories—phenomenalism and physicalism, for example—have radically different implications, though they are tested and apparently confirmed by the same sensory data. There are, however, reasons for preferring one of the two, as tripping in the dark make little sense to phenomenalists but considerable sense to us. Add that practical life is a perpetual challenge to plans and hypotheses: Why don’t my keys open this door? Because this isn’t my door. Life without testability is unimaginable or clumsy, frustrating, and short. Each of my three illustrations would seem less vulnerable if there were empirical evidence of its efficacy. So, God and the multiverse are said to be efficient causes of our world’s features and existence. Eternal possibles are allegedly its formal conditions, though their efficacy is obscure: how are actual states of affairs conditioned by their antecedent possibilia (red by the possibility for red)? Efficient causes are more readily identifiable, given that effects provoke inferences to their causes. There should be additional, independent evidence of God’s creative force if we are, for example, his creatures. There is evidence, you say: every blade of grass has God as its cause. But other hypotheses—dirt, seed, and water—are simpler. They are also sufficient in the absence of information that would implicate an extra-natural cause. Efficacy is a rubric that may apply to our world’s relation to the multiverse in which it allegedly participates and to the plasma from which our universe may have emerged. But background radiation mediates our access to that cause; it isn’t a window through which to observe or infer all its vital features. Available evidence is insufficient to falsify or confirm

|| 49 W. V. O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), pp. 21–25, 73–79.

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the various hypotheses currently proposed. More decisive evidence may be discovered, but choosing among the surviving theories will be impossible if all are consistent and none is empirically testable. Our world will have had a silent condition, but we won’t be able to do more than speculate about its identity. Does a tide of inferences ever entail the existence of conditions it specifies? Courts bring indictments and defendants are convicted on the basis of hypotheses justified by circumstantial evidence. Speculative hypotheses unsupported by empirical data cannot do as much, with the one exception cited above: we resist the idea that possibles foreshadow the substantial entities of our world, though there is little wiggle-room with the principle of plenitude; either a contradiction or a possibility: whatever is not a contradiction is a possibility. There are, this implies, as many possibles as there are simple and complex properties that embody no contradictions. But here, unlike examples of efficient causation, there need be no dynamic relation between a possible and its instantiations. Still, the inferred isomorphism of actuals and possibles fails to specify an efficient cause responsible for making one exemplify the other. (No known efficient cause instantiates the possibility for red, thereby creating its actual expression: red.) We might assign the task of aligning actuals with possibles to God.50 Or we infer without evidence that possibles are self-instantiating, though we do better to admit that we have only a partial explanation for the fact that some possibles are instantiated. We explain that the possibility for fire is instantiated by citing a material possibility: fire started with matches and paper. But consider that the logical possibilities for paper and matches are (or may be) eternal: how might they have been instantiated in the absence of their material conditions? There is no answer however far we retreat from current causes to their ancient antecedents; there is no bridge from logical possibility to actuality in the absence of relevant material conditions: paper and matches. How did actuality ever begin without a power for converting some first (seed) possibles into actuality? The answer proposed above—it never began; there has always been something actual, hence transformable—averts the question while begging the question: is there an agency or process—a prime mover—that started this temporal process, perhaps working out of time, as it instantiated reality’s first material conditions? This makes little sense, though we complicate the solution by assigning the task to God, our deus ex machina.

|| 50 Leibniz, Monadology, para. 53, p. 156.

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These issues are perplexing for the reason Kant perceived: the ability to speculate outruns the logic and empirical data required to test and confirm our hypotheses. Caution discourages us from populating reality with conditions for which there may be empirical clues but no decisive empirical evidence. That prudence can’t suppress the excitement of realizing that the discipline of empirical science (which locates causes for phenomena within the domain of their occurrence) doesn’t preclude the reality of extrinsic conditions—entities or processes known as God, the multiverse, or eternal possibilities—for nature itself. There may be no such conditions (though the multiverse and eternal possibles are strong candidates); but equally, we may never know or imagine other conditions that affect us though silent. Some people look for ways to ascertain that one or another such condition does obtain and may be known, though validation should concern them. How are such claims justified in the absence of confirming sensory data? We do it by trying an end run around the assumption that untestable hypotheses are searchlights in the dark. We say, for example, that a God capable of all things is a presence known by the intensity of our feelings or holy books. But this is an explanation for belief, not evidence or an argument for the truth of one’s beliefs.

2.5 Attitudes Which attitudes are appropriate, given the prospect that our world may have silent conditions within or external to it? Consider first the words used to express our options. Atheism is too narrow because it signifies skepticism about God, not about the multiverse, eternal possibles, or other silent conditions. Belief or disbelief, agnosticism, and skepticism are appropriate, though all require nuance. One believes because there is empirical evidence or because inference is justified by empirical data, not because the story one tells gives life its meaning or because a story justifies the practices on which social cohesion depends. But doubt is qualified: stubborn denial is foolish in the rare circumstances where an alleged condition is well-specified but unsupported by evidence: strings, perhaps, in higher dimensions of spacetime. Caution is prudent in general and specifically as regards theology. Dogmatic atheism is no more reasonable than dogmatic theism: no evidence supports the theist; the absence of evidence doesn’t entail the absence of the silent condition or conditions intimated by the idea of God. These are off-setting constraints: one can’t prove the truth of a consistent negation; we

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can resist the temptation to say more of silent conditions than inference or empirical evidence suggests or defends. Is our God the projections of anthropomorphized virtues? That isn’t likely to be a god appropriate to the cosmos. Inquiry is a battleground for competing philosophic dicta: “To be is to be the value of a [bound] variable’’51; ‘‘Truth is that concordance of an abstract statement with the ideal limit toward which endless investigation would tend to bring scientific belief.’’52 Quine reduced reality to the conceptual systems used to navigate within it; Peirce supposed that disciplined inquiry will eventually minimize the array of things unknown. Silent conditions are a rebuke to both sides: conceptual systems address a reality they don’t make; some aspects of reality may forever elude us. The door resists when we push against it, but it isn’t closed. Positivists used the empirical meaning requirement to prune theses having no testable—empirical—consequences. But why terminate inquiry by declaring every such hypothesis meaningless? Extrapolate from structures or relations observed; use analogy to bootstrap understanding to the characterization of unobserved structures or functions. But distinguish truth from a thirst for meaning; let these stories fail as truths without damning the urge to speculate. For there is always the chance that one or another proposal will identify a silent condition we consider while unable to prove its existence. It’s no disgrace that we speculate in the dark.

|| 51 Quine, From a Logical Point of View, p. 15. 52 Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. V, para. 565, p. 394.

3 Existence Proofs Each of the hypotheses considered in Chapter Two—concerning God, the Big Bang, and eternal possibilities—is troubled by the absence or inaccessibility of confirming evidence. Hypotheses about God and possibilities challenge the belief that nature is autonomous; they and the hypothesis of cosmic expansion founder at the outer limit of explanation. Could we extend our knowledge of these or other putative referents by exploiting a priori existence proofs? Are there examples of such proofs; what is their form? Existences are distributed along a trajectory from things immediate and perceived to those remote and inferred. A matching trajectory starts in self-certifying immediacy before running through perception and testable hypotheses to inferences that exceed their grounding sensory data. This matching trajectory is, prospectively, an inverted parabola: from one necessary truth—I am when thinking—through more or less testable and probable existence claims to those, if any there be, which are necessary because their negations are contradictions. Where along this trajectory is empirical evidence superseded by inference? Or is inference, even an a priori argument for necessary existence, always grounded by empirical data?

3.1 Self-perception Commentators have argued that Descartes’ self-affirmation in the Meditations, “I am, I exist,”53 is the conclusion to a logical argument. Descartes, no beginner in logic, saw it differently: It is true that no one can be certain that he is thinking or that he exists unless he knows what thought is and what existence is. But this does not require reflective knowledge, or the kind of knowledge that is acquired by means of demonstrations; still less does it require knowledge of reflective knowledge, i.e. knowing that we know, and knowing that we know that we know, and so on ad infinitum. This kind of knowledge cannot possibly be obtained about anything. It is quite sufficient that we should know it by that inner awareness which always precedes reflective knowledge. This inner awareness of one’s thought and existence is so innate in all men that, although we may pretend that we do not have it if we are overwhelmed by preconceived opinions and pay more attention to words than to their meanings, we cannot in fact fail to have it. Thus when anyone notices that he is thinking and that it follows from this that he exists, even though he may never before have asked what

|| 53 Descartes, Meditations, p. 17.

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thought is or what existence is, he still cannot fail to have sufficient knowledge of them both to satisfy himself in this regard.54

Existence is directly perceived if one is active or affected and aware or able to be aware of being one or the other: “I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived by my mind.”55 Descartes’ variation in the “Introduction” to the Discourse—“I am thinking, therefore I am”56—seems to justify construing the remark as a deduction. But both formulations express the same realization: awareness of myself while aware of something else. Descartes supposed that nothing can be said to be for want of evidence that it exists: “I am, I exist—that is certain. But for how long? For as long as I am thinking. For it could be that were I totally to cease from thinking, I should totally cease to exist.”57 Reference to awareness, simpliciter (first-order consciousness), is, therefore, four-times incomplete: one is aware of being qualified by perceptual or conceptual content; aware, however obscurely, of the data’s character; aware that awareness of content is monitored; and aware (second-order consciousness, self-awareness) that the monitor is oneself. Descartes supposed that these four are mutually implicative because mutually conditioning. No awareness unless consciousness is “awakened” by sensory or conceptual content; but no awakening unless the content is recognized to some (perhaps slight) degree. No first-order awareness without the second-order awareness that certifies its existence; no second-order awareness without the provocation of first-order awareness. Descartes’ requirement that there be evidence sufficient to establish existence seems to entail that self-awareness, too, can’t be said to exist without a confirming higher-order perception, though this further step would entail the regress denied in the passage quoted above. We have, instead, the awareness of both content and awareness when self-aware. Could this be a compressed series of awarenesses? That could be true, though there is no sensible evidence of it. Instead, the four-fold distinction signifies only the difference between consciousness of content (first-order awareness) and the monitoring awareness of content and first-order awareness by second-order self-awareness. This distinction implies the hierarchy of functions specified when Kant distinguished the empirical

|| 54 Descartes, Objections and Replies, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. ll, p. 285. 55 Ibid., p. 17. 56 René Descartes, Discourse on the Method, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) p. 127. 57 Descartes, Meditations, p. 18.

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and transcendental egos (the experience of me again that attends perceptual content versus the agent that creates experience by differentiating and organizing sensory data). But there is also this less ontologically freighted way of characterizing the two orders: we identify second- order consciousness (self-awareness) with the feedback loop established when a neural system monitors itself. A limited regress may not violate naturalistic assumptions; it may, for example, be, the structural relation of one center reading another. Or the threat of a regress might seem launched by a residual neural resonance, one resembling the effect of two facing mirrors: each reflects the other and images of itself to infinity. Even this analogy is excessive if the regress gets its life from two mistakes. First is the assumption that successive higher-order awareness are or may be experientially differentiated. For there is no skein of awarenesses: no perceivable difference between a first order self-awareness and those said to be successively higher-order. The first two orders seem unproblematic: I know where I am and what I’m doing. Introspecting while searching for evidence of a regress provokes vertigo when we try but fail to discern it. Second is the misleading sequence of words—“awareness of an awareness of an awareness”—used to signify the regress. Content for the alleged experience is a projection of the reiterated words: “aware of myself, when aware of myself, when self-aware.” This sequence would seem odd to anyone speaking a language without a reiterative function. French has that power, though Descartes didn’t agree that the cogito entails a regress. His reason is apparent in the experience of self-awareness. I am aware of myself when aware of sensory or conceptual content: having a toothache, I observe it as me or mine. But this is not the experience of a sequence; instead, these pronouns signify that the ache is experienced as having a context: it occurs in me. I might have said: I resonate—my wiring resonates—with this pain. Many of sensibility’s qualifiers provoke recognition of their context, though one is sometimes attentive to an effect—an intense color or sound—but not to the resonance perceived as me. First and second-order consciousness (awareness and self-awareness) are critical features of the interiority cited above when describing the self. Yet, selfcertainty falters when mind’s self-discoveries exceed the existence claim warranted by this first Cartesian moment: I couldn’t be self-aware if I did not exist. How rich is this self-perception; how much information is or may be present in moments of indubitable self-affirmation? Elaborate characterizations of mind’s acts and structure—understanding, will, and memory, for example—are controversial. Our powers for self-inspection are all the more subject to debate. For selfhood is a corporate state acquired over time (during childhood), as one accumulates experiences, memories, and ideas about one’s body, its history, skills,

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sensibility, and social roles. Selfhood incorporates a frequently updated, but always partial or distorted self-narrative; one may be certain of consulting it, but uncertain of its content. Self-certainty is always constrained. Yet there is latitude for information exceeding phenomenalist examples (“red, here, now.”) even before an ample idea of selfhood has formed. The most resonant of these experiences resemble listening to music in a concert hall: we hear both the music and the reverberant shape and scale of the hall. Or we extend the domain of Cartesian self-discovery when knowing what we’re doing while doing it for a purpose. I am, I exist as a thinker, doer, and maker; activity and efficacy, as much as thought and perception, are evidence of my being. We are sometimes most effective (sewing lace, for example) when attention is focused by tasks that require self-control. This is disciplined attention. We have it when active in ways that are inconspicuous (listening to complex music, feeling pleasure or pain, writing or deliberating). We don’t ask someone active in either way to identify the actor because the question is pointless: we know the answer. The emphasis on this more ample self-discovery—a self embodied and active—is a point of divergence from Descartes, one remarked by Merleau-Ponty.58 Descartes’ list of mind’s self-discovered activities doesn’t mention bodily action or control: But what then am I? A thing that thinks. What is that? A thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, is willing, is unwilling, and also imagines and has sensory perceptions.59

Merleau-Ponty was more expansive: he emphasized mind’s awareness of embodiment and bodily control, though the feeling of having a body is not the same as having one. Embodiment is a step beyond self-awareness: phantom limb effects (veridical-seeming sensations after amputation) preclude saying that perception of one’s bodily states or actions is incontrovertible evidence of existence rather than a typically valid inference. But something more elementary than embodiment is confirmed. For there is no doubting that I am when thinking because there would be no thinking if I, the thinker, were not. Yet this is not the strait forward claim of an existential logic: no thinking without a thinker; no walking without a walker; no action without an agent. Self-inspection is more nuanced and strange because the “thinking” at issue is an awareness confirmed by the co-

|| 58 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald Landes (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 129–140, 143–145. 59 Descartes, Meditations, p. 19.

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presence of self-awareness, not by an inference. Accordingly, I know that I exist while the ontology of my being—embodied or not—is undetermined. Hence the concession that the only existents confirmed by acts of awareness are these more or less structured mental acts with content. This isn’t evidence against materialist naturalism, but instead the rare occasion when knowledge of existence includes no information about the being of the existent: matter, a spirit, or something else. Which of these options is Descartes likely to have favored? Granting the dualist emphasis of the Meditations, he seems never to have doubted his embodiment (reading the first Meditation as a didactic argument against naïve belief). For I may know myself as a thinker, while having good (though still falsifiable) reasons for believing that I am an embodied self. Descartes was in his middle forties when the Discourse and Meditations were published, long past the time when self-perception had matured in him. Isn’t it plausible, even likely, that the reference to “I” in the phrases “I am, I exist” and “I think, therefore I am” expressed his firmly constructed idea of a self-monitoring embodied thinker: a self? The mixed ontology of mind and matter, thinking substance and extended substance, were problematic, but the self’s apparent embodiment would have been a conspicuous aspect of its self-discovery. (Or Descartes’ first two Meditations expose the schizoid beginnings of modern philosophy.) Now, these centuries later, this ample idea—that mind is a complex function of body—is not, by itself, bewildering. There is also this prospective complication. Each of us inhabits, feels, and controls his or her body, but no other; toothaches are inaccessible to bodies other than those directly affected. But this may not always be the case: “Bluetooth” for brains might create an organism of massed consciousness, one that disseminate each body’s experiences throughout a network. (This would vitiate arguments about the possibility of private languages.). No individual might be sure of its origin when all have the same experience. There might also be sensory evidence—a characteristic feeling or the static of an open line—when experiences are shared: each thinker might affirm that all exist if it exists. Descartes’ existent claim is distinctive among existence proofs in this respect: a single momentary awareness—me, here, now—confirms existence. The mediated existence claims of practical life and science require two or more confirmations for reasons explained below.

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3.2 Ephemeral conscious data Does an ache or twinge exist when the ephemerality of conscious experience precludes a single confirming self-inspection? Suppose that we distinguish having a datum from noticing, recognizing, and identifying it. Having a datum isn’t confirmed if it isn’t noticed. A brain scan may testify that a suspected excitation occurred, but that isn’t inspectable evidence. It accrues as mind notices being affected. But noticing, with or without recognition, requires sustained or repeated self-inspections. Looking through a window to confirm that it’s raining lightly we look again. Why? Because confirmation needs repetition: we could be misconstruing the evidence. So, too, with ephemera.

3.3 Percepts Suppose that percepts are steady, not ephemeral: pain, for example. Is awareness of their presence and character definitive? One reads that context may be decisive when construing percepts. Color changes with light and shadow; pain is more intense if one isn’t dominated by another pressing concern. Yet there are many occasions when the presence and character of perceptual content seems unimpeachable; it may change momentarily, but this is what it seems just now. Or we restrict ourselves to saying that awareness is suffused, beyond doubt, with a strong pain, sound, or bright light, without risking the faulty identification of either its character or source.

3.4 Material objects and constraints Self-perception is infallible because no gap separates the knower from the known, and because I, both subject and object, am aware of being aware. Both points are implied when Descartes remarks, “I am, I exist is true each time I think or pronounce it.” Neither point obtains when the states of affairs at issue are contingencies independent of those observing them (today’s weather). Perceptual judgments affirm the existence and character of such things, but perception is often misleading: they may not be as one perceives them; they may not exist. Their character is discerned after repeated testing: uncertain of having seen a friend, we look again. Existence is confirmed in two ways. One is Peirce’s

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“secondness,”60 meaning the shock of physical encounters: we may be mistaken about the character of the thing that trips us, but not (usually) about having tripped. But here too, repetition is critical: we confirm existence claims by repeatedly testing hypotheses that predict them: is there something that could trip me again; do I see the cord? Hypotheses alleging the existence or character of contingencies thought or perceived are always tentative because always fallible (however confidently affirmed). They require two or more confirmations because no a priori argument proves their existence, because no single perception confirms their existence or character, and because repetition reduces the likelihood of error when affirming one or the other.

3.5 Emotion Emotion is often a primitive response to circumstances. Why couldn’t perception of an existent or its character begin as an inarticulate but accurate emotional response to its presence? Some feelings—love, fear, and trust—have referents; why not concede that God, too, may be known by way of feelings? Because a single moment of awareness may be sufficient to confirm the existence and quality of the feeling that suffuses it (steady, exuberant, or depressed) but not what it signifies. Feelings are protean; interpreting them is tricky. Their character isn’t always plain; their referents, if any, are often less so. Add that we have emotional responses to many things real or imagined, and that feelings are often hormonal rather than cognitive. Emotion is too often an unreliable measure of things present or engaged: she loves me, she loves me not. Like percepts, but more urgently, confirmation of their referents needs repeated confirming tests.

3.6 Intuition Conversation is affecting; seeming to converse with God or a distant friend has powerful validating effects. Or there is no conversation, but one has the kinesthetic and emotional sense of a sublime presence. It’s the existence claim, not the feeling, that is suspect. “I’m speaking to Queen Victoria” requires evidence: how do we establish that such experiences confirm a presence rather than a fantasy? What is she saying? Can anyone join the conversation?

|| 60 Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. iv. para. 32. pp. 25–26.

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Intuition is notable because people claiming it are certain that its revelations are immediate and incontrovertible, though conviction, alone, is never reliable when perception or feeling is allegedly evidence for the existence or character of something other than oneself.

3.7 A priori existence proofs A priori existence proofs are this chapter’s principal target. They are scorned because of seeming to prove too much with too little. They purport to establish the necessity that a condition obtains if a contradiction results when that claim is negated: 2+2=4 is necessarily true because every other value for 2+2 entails a contradiction, given accepted ways of reading the numbers and connectives. Could a priori arguments enable us to vault beyond tautologies to ascertain material truths that are necessary, though untestable empirically? Three such arguments are considered: Anselm’s ontological proof for God’s existence; Robert Neville’s argument that reality is created from nothing; and an argument for the existence of eternal possibilities. There are few a priori existence proofs to consider because few are proposed. Opinion is nearly universal that none are valid. The necessary truths of logic and mathematics enlarge the domain of a priori proofs, but all of them are alleged to be materially—existentially—empty. Prospects are meagre, though a successful proof would be notable. Are there as many as one? Could we exploit it or its format to establish the existence of conditions described in Chapter Two as “silent”? Reality, if so, is more ample than the nature known to empirical inquiry.

3.7.1

Anselm’s ontological argument

Anselm’s two formulations of his proof are straightforward: [A] fool, when he hears of … a being than which nothing greater can be conceived … understands what he hears, and what he understands is in his understanding.… And assuredly that, than which nothing greater can be conceived, cannot exist in the understanding alone. For suppose it exists in the understanding alone: then it can be conceived to exist in reality;

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which is greater.… Hence, there is no doubt that there exists a being, than which nothing greater can be conceived, and it exists both in the understanding and in reality.61 God is that, than which nothing greater can be conceived.…And [God] assuredly exists so truly, that it cannot be conceived not to exist. For, it is possible to conceive of a being which cannot be conceived not to exist; and this is greater than one which can be conceived not to exist. Hence, if that, than which nothing greater can be conceived, can be conceived not to exist, it is not that, than which nothing greater can be conceived. But this is an irreconcilable contradiction. There is, then, so truly a being than which nothing greater can be conceived to exist, that it cannot even be conceived not to exist; and this being thou art, O Lord, our God.62

The first argument refers, simpliciter, to God’s existence; the second exploits God’s allegedly necessary existence. The arguments fails in several respects. i. The principal assumption of both formulations is their claim that existence in thought and the world is greater than existence in one or the other alone. But this is odd: is anyone less rich or tall or good because others don’t know how rich or tall or good he or she is? Is God diminished if unknown to infants and atheists? ii. Both arguments assume that existence is a perfection and that God is the most perfect of beings, though existence is not always one of perfection’s essential attributes: non-being would be a perfection-completing attribute if it entailed the elimination of evil. iii. Anselm’s notion of greater than requires—in his first argument—the uncountable infinite, though the argument invokes only the limitless but countable (n+1) infinity. One imagines a perpetual game of can-you-top-this: God exceeds our notion of greater than, only to be exceeded by our idea of a still greater being, and so on, ad infinitum. iv. A being greater than any (previously) imagined is possible, though its non-being is also possible, so no contradiction results from affirming both that such a being exists in possibility and that it does not exist in actuality. v. The second formulation emphasizes the idea of God’s necessary existence while assuming that necessary existence is a greater perfection than contingent existence. But why is that assumption more than honorific and rhetorical: would a contingent but eternal God fear his vulnerability as we fear ours? Anselm’s a priori format, like self-perception and intuition, promises a onestep existence proof. I confirm my existence whenever I am aware of myself as active or affected; Anselm’s ontological proof would succeed if God’s existence were proven necessary for the reason that its negation would be a contradiction. || 61 Anselm, Prosologium; Monologium (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 2000), p. 22. 62 Ibid., p. 23.

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Additional information about God’s character would be significant in itself but incidental to the existence proof. Are there any successful one-step a priori existence claims other than Descartes’?

3.7.2

Creation from nothing

Robert Neville has an ambitious agenda. He argues that many religions rightly seek an “ultimate” explanation for the existence of our finite and contingent world, one implied by their resort to the figurative “broken symbols” that each uses to signify it. Neville describes the determinate, contingent, and finite world as a mutually conditioning array of “essential and conditional” properties. Essential properties are constitutive of actual states of affairs; each exists amidst circumstances that are conditioning. This array—the cosmos—comes into existence from nothing, having been spontaneously and continuously created by an act having no properties of its own: The complex metaphysical hypothesis to be elaborated…is that the ultimate reality of the world consists in its being created in all its spatiotemporal complexity by an ontological act of creation. Everything determinate in any way is part of the world so created. The ontological creative act is a making and its only nature comes in the determinate character of what it makes. Apart from creating the world, the ontological creative act is indeterminate, that is, nothing, not something rather than nothing nor something rather than something else. Without creating, the act is not an act. The ontological act cannot be modeled in any literal sense because a model supposes some isomorphism with what it models. And the creative act as such has no form to model save in its terminus. Making cannot be modeled except in what it makes, which of course prescinds from the making itself. But human cultures have taken familiar elements and transformed them so as to serve as tentative or “broken” symbols of the ontological creative act.63 The principal hypothesis…argues for the ultimate reality of an ontological act of creation through an analysis of determinateness. To be a part of the world, any part of the world, any part of any world, is to be determinate. Determinateness is the most basic and universal characteristic of what it is to be. Therefore, the transcendental traits of determinateness are ultimate conditions of the world and of the ultimate ontological act of creation as creating a determinate world.64

|| 63 Robert Cummings Neville, Ultimates, Philosophical Theology, vol. 1 (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2013), p. 1. 64 Ibid., pp. 2–3.

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One assumes when reading Neville’s argument that reality is both created from nothing and sustained by it. Why think so? Because (as in Aquinas’s third argument) the fragile-because-contingent cosmos would return, spontaneously, to nothing were it not sustained. Metaphysics, like physics, would like to identify the initial and sustaining condition for the energy that pervades and propels our universe. Neville proposes that three contraries—contingent-necessary, determinate-indeterminate, and finite-infinite—satisfy that desire because they carry an explosive dialectical power. Identifying a feature as determinate is, he believes, sufficient evidence that it was created by or from the indeterminate nothing: The infinite side of a finite/infinite contrast is the recognition that, without the finite side, some basic world-defining trait would be missing, or would be indeterminate, infinite. The infinite side defines the finite side as being a boundary condition, a world-making condition.65

Neville’s use of the three pairs of contraries is questionable five times over: i. What are the semantics of his argument? ii. What are the pertinent implications if the contingency of character is distinguished from the contingency of existence? iii. Does Neville’s appeal to contingency justify his notion of cosmic creation? iv. What insight or motive provokes this a priori argument? v. What is the argument’s form? 3.7.2.i Semantics: Neville uses infinite and indeterminate as though the words were synonymous, though they are not. The infinite may be determinate throughout its span (cardinal numbers, possible worlds). Its boundary is not indeterminate: it has no boundary. The indeterminate may be finite but undifferentiated (tomorrow). Neville imputes indeterminacy and infinity to non-being, though non-being—nothing—isn’t indeterminate or infinite. Having neither properties nor powers, it is neither vague (indeterminate), nor unbounded (infinite). 3.7.2.ii Character and existence: Neville fails to distinguish the contingency of character from that of existence. He emphasizes the latter, but ignores the former. 3.7.2.ii.a Start with character: there are an infinity of possible worlds, hence two questions: First, why is this world, in all its specificity, the one created. Second, is the world’s character fragile, once created?

|| 65 Ibid., p. 33.

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First, is there something about the character of the creative act that explains its creation of this world, rather than a world of more or less different character? (Change any constituent law, thing, or event and the result is a world different in character from ours.) Neville doesn’t answer this question: his emphasis is the existence of the created world, not its character. He might have said that this is the best of all possible worlds, though it isn’t evident that this consideration would have been available to its creator (nothing). We would avert the question— why this character rather than some other—were it proven that no other world is possible (because every other candidate world embodies a contradiction). Or we could avert it if there were reason to believe that each of the infinity of possible worlds is instantiated (all created from nothing?), for then the contingency of character would be just the diversity of worlds, each different from others because of its form and/or constituents. But we don’t know that all possible worlds are instantiated, so Neville needs to explain the character of the world we have: why is this the character of the world that comes into being from nothing? Is our world’s mix of order and instability the effect of its creation, or a feature incidental to its creation but nevertheless inherent? Second, Neville supposes that the contingency of character entails its fragility, hence the possibility of immanent disorder. But that concern is mitigated by this other perspective: Some possible worlds are inherently chaotic from their inception; each resembles a random series of numbers. Other worlds embody an orderly evolution from their initial conditions, or they evolve through successive phases of order or disorder. (Many such worlds are possible, instantiated or not.) Accordingly, order and disorder are the marks of distinct possible worlds, whether or not these worlds are instantiated. One might fear disorder in an actual world that embodies a perfectly stable possible world, but anxiety would be misplaced. 3.7.2.ii.b Now existence: a world whose existence is contingent (its non-existence is not a contradiction) may, nevertheless, be ontologically sturdy: it may not require perpetual existential support. What sustains the energy of our world, hence its matter and spacetime? Physicists may eventually supply a compelling solution by citing a factor or factors internal to nature. Neville’s explanation cites an external condition: “…a pluralistic world is radically contingent and…the only thing on which it might be contingent is an ontological creative act.”66 This claim is not implausible in itself: there may be an unknown sustaining condition for the

|| 66 Ibid., p. 211.

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energy on which our world depends. But Neville’s surmise is only semantic. He invokes the contrariety of necessity and contingency, averring that the former is ground of the latter: contingent being falters; it would not exist without its ground in the necessity that it be created from nothing. Neville doesn’t consider the possibility that the world has had no beginning. This is very hard to imagine, because we construe process as requiring a start. But there was no beginning, if every state of affairs is the persistence or transformation of its antecedents. 3.7.2.iii Contingency and cosmic creation: It may seem to practical life and science that process—energy exchange, cause and effect—is the engine driving physical change: meaning, for Neville, the continuous adjustment of essential and conditional properties. But appearances, he supposes, are misleading. The array of essential and conditional properties is always insufficient to sustain itself; its existence requires a perpetual act of creation from nothing. The uncertainty evoked—a single kick-start or perpetual sustaining creation—is resolved in favor of the latter. Whitehead was correct: change occurs in pulses; every previous state of the world is contiguous with the next, but not its cause.67 Descartes, too, is vindicated: “causes,” like the terms of any orderly series, are powerless.68 So, music is an extraordinary array of differences, but its notes don’t play themselves. Nature, like music, is impotent. Its animation requires its sustaining creator. Music has its musicians. Or their role is illusory because the creative act having nothing as its ground is the only creative principle and efficient cause. God alone, meaning the cosmic act of creation, is responsible for every change. This is semantics in the place requiring an argument. Neville reduces his critical words to the play of contraries: the definite is generated at every moment from the indefinite; the finite from the infinite; the contingent from the necessary. 3.7.2.iv Motive or insight: Neville has heard many objections to his idea of cosmic creation. Christian Wolff spoke for all of them:

|| 67 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Free Press, 1978), p. 77. 68 René Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 1, para. 42, p. 243.

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[I]n natural theology, we must first demonstrate that God is a being who contains the sufficient reason of the contingently existing universe....We must first establish the divine attributes, and then we can deduce that creation is the act of producing something from nothing.69

Neville denies himself the “divine attributes,” preferring to derive the contingent existence of the world from nothing, though nothing lacks sufficient conditions for producing anything. Why does Neville persist when the dialectical arguments opposing him emphasize that non-being—nothing—has no power for transforming itself and that coming-into-being-from-nothing is not a causal process? He believes, I suggest, that reality is insecure because contingent; its stability and persistence presuppose a perpetually sustaining necessary ground. Given that the cosmos is contingent, determinate, and finite, that ground must be necessary, indeterminate, and infinite. Neville is indebted to Aristotle’s notion that reality requires a prime mover, an idea he merges with Thomas’s claim that no finite, hence contingent being can exist without first receiving an act of being from God, the necessary being. Individual souls require it; so does the cosmos. But Aristotle didn’t suppose that the prime mover is nothing; the God of Aquinas is a necessary being having all perfections. Granting that we have no direct knowledge of God, we can understand, if only allusively, how such a being could create a world. Benevolence, alone, might explain it; God could otherwise have remained content in himself. Neville’s creative act is harder to understand because the act is groundless. Having neither properties nor power—nothing—its efficacy is incomprehensible. Neville acknowledges the difficulty of understanding his claim: [T]he creative act as such has no form to model save in its terminus. Making cannot be modeled except in what it makes, which of course prescinds from the making itself.70

This characterization of making is not quite right. We do have models for making and doing: recipe books describe both the ingredients for making cakes and the sequence of required tasks. But look beyond this quibble to Neville’s aim. He reaches for the “ultimates” promised by Aquinas and the “finalities” of Paul Weiss,71 but then confounds us by insisting that all of reality comes from nothing.

|| 69 Christian Wolff, Preliminary Discourse on Philosophy in General, trans. Richard J. Blackwell (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), p. 72. 70 Neville, Ultimates, p. 1. 71 Paul Weiss, Modes of Being (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1958), pp. 22, 230.

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Neville has allies but their metaphors are misleading: Buddhist scripture is only allusive. Journalists are unhelpful when misdescribing the emergence “from nothing” of particles created in the quantum vacuum, a bath of high energy destabilized by inherent waves. There is also an incongruity: Neville’s ambitious theology disguises its skepticism, for there is no provision in it for a creator—a God—distinct from the act that creates the world spontaneously from nothing. Neville is indebted to Spinoza: nature as he understands it is unaffected by anything apart from itself,72 except (vacuously) for the relation to nothing, its creator. Neville’s theology turns on its ecumenical “cosmology,” its emphasis on ‘broken symbols” and the diverse ways of understanding creation. His creation story subordinates their metaphors with his own: no God is required because determinate contingent being comes necessarily from indeterminate nothing. The simple argument cited above predicts his failure. Everything that is comes into being from a previous something, never from nothing: each is the persistence or transformation of a previous material state. But is there something? There are many things, each the effect of transformations stretching from the infinite past. There was no first, no initial, existent because any one specified would have come to be from something or nothing. Denying the latter, entails the former: there has always been something. Why is this so; why is there something rather than nothing? We don’t know. Appealing to a world-creating act only defers the question by introducing a function whose efficacy needs explaining. We spin solutions that are neither empirically testable nor logically conclusive. Hegel supposed that contraries have remarkable creative energy, as they do when labor and management argue about costs or profits. Contingent-necessary; determinate-indeterminate; finite-infinite are contraries that detonate in Neville’s thinking. But their only effect is a trompe de l’oeil window into obscurity. 3.7.2.v Form: Suppose the aim and content of Neville’s argument are distinguished from its form: is it a viable form for a priori existence proofs? His argument has three critical steps: a. It starts from an empirical assumption: there is an array of mutually relevant, sometimes mutually affecting properties distinguished as essential or conditioning. Essential properties are constitutive of things or states of affairs; conditional properties relate a thing’s essential properties to other organized centers of activity (though this relation is not causal, given

|| 72 Spinoza, Ethics, p. 55.

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the assumption that everything determinate comes from nothing, not from its antecedents or contemporaries). b. Next is his emphasis on contrasts supplied by the three contraries: determinate-indeterminate, contingent-necessary, and finite-infinite. Reality is determinate and finite; nothing is indeterminate and infinite. Nothing, reality’s necessary condition, contrasts with the contingency of its product. (Neville is precluded from arguing that nothing is, itself, a necessary being because, as nothing, it doesn’t exist.) c. Last is the inference that determinate reality comes into being from indeterminacy—nothing—for the reason that contingency requires a creative ground. This bare schema is subject to the simple test appropriate to every alleged a priori existence proof. Does it prove that the truth of this assertion—reality is created from nothing—is necessary because its negation is a contradiction? The argument fails because no contradiction results from negating it: none is entailed by denying that reality is created from nothing or that anything comes from nothing. This standard—the demand that a contradiction be generated by negating a candidate proposition—is the decisive difference between a priori and a posteriori existence proofs. Successful a priori proofs have three steps. i. They confirm their factual relevance by starting with a premise that cites observable states of affairs. These are the matters to be explained: “principles which are derived from experience provide the foundation of demonstrated truth.”73 ii. They specify an allegedly necessary property, relation, or condition for the matters observed, telling what difference it makes. iii. They demonstrate that this factor cannot be denied without contradiction: the matters specified in the first premise would not exist or exist as they do in its absence. A posteriori existence proofs also begin with an empirical premise: i. This is the way the world or a part of it stands. (Observability may be heavily mediated: as in particle physics or astronomy.) ii. They add a hypothesis alleging that some property, relation, or condition (a cause or law, for example) explains the observed state of affairs. iii. We infer that some alternate empirical difference should obtain if the hypothesis is true. Or we cite the difference that would result if the specified factor did not obtain (the roof that would fall if a beam were removed). iv. We search or experiment for evidence of those effects. Confirmation requires two or more tests that are successful and repeatable. (More than one to minimize error.) Failing to observe predicted effects, we experiment again, revise the hypothesis, or abandon it. A priori proofs don’t require searching for additional confirming empirical evidence; hence they have

|| 73 Wolff, Preliminary Discourse on Philosophy in General, p. 18.

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one step less than a posteriori proofs. But both start with a premise intended to establish their empirical bona fides. Logical positivists supposed that analytic arguments could only be tautological and empty.74 Quine scorned the analytic-synthetic distinction when arguing that fields or webs of sentences are the appropriate point of reference when considering the uses of language: allegedly analytic sentences are merely those we would be most reluctant to alter.75 His persuasion is itself a contemporary dogma, one faulted for its inability to account for the analyticity of examples such as this: space and time are necessary conditions for motion; it is a contradiction that there be motion in the absence of either. Is the converse also necessary: do space and time presuppose motion? They do not, given the Humean principle—separable if distinguishable76—and our usually casual impressions of them, but those responses may obscure a deeper truth: there may be neither space nor time without energy and motion. The conditional relation of cause to capacity makes a similar point: no cause unqualified by a disposition for making the relevant difference. Analytic propositions are sometimes informing, though these regarding space, time, and motion, or cause, and capacity confirm necessary relations within a complex of properties. Neither is an a priori existence proof. Robert Neville’s aim is admirably ecumenical: identify the ontological idea motivating the many disparate religions, each distinguished by its “broken symbols.’’ But his solution—creation from nothing—is neither demonstrable nor meaningful. The nothing he postulates is propertyless. The powers he assigns it are an invitation to mysticism and devotional meaning. They don’t clarify our understanding of reality.

3.7.3 Eternal possibilities Eternal—logical—possibilities are properties, simple or complex, whose existence and character are independent of the fact that we think about or have words to signify them. There are infinite possibles; our world instantiates a small subset. Their ontology is distinct from that of material possibilities situated within the world as dispositions qualifying structures for causal relationships. The possibility for opening a locked door is founded in the complementary geometries of its lock and key.

|| 74 A. J. Ayer, Logic, Truth, and Language (New York: Dover, 2012), p. 16. 75 Quine, From a Logical Point of View, pp. 37–46. 76 Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, p. 27.

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Which considerations certify the reality of logical possibilia? There are two points of entry. First is the principle of plenitude, mentioned in Chapter Two: whatever is not a contradiction is a possibility. We formulate this principle after substituting possibility for not a contradiction in the tautology, either a contradiction or not a contradiction. Why load the argument by substituting a substantive— possibilities—for non-contradiction? Because the two expressions are mutually implicative: contradictions are sentences signifying states of affairs that cannot occur; non-contradictions signify those that may occur. Second is the consideration that many states of affairs are actual, and that none would be actual if it were not possible. This second point is justified by the first, with the added empirical claim that we have access, by way of action, perception, or inference, to many instantiated possibles: we see red and green. 3.7.3.i An a priori argument for possibilia: These remarks are premises for an a priori argument that proves the existence of eternal possibilities. It has the threestep form prescribed above: i. empirical reference (to establish a factual point of reference); ii. inference to an alleged unobservable condition; iii. a reductio establishing that contradiction is entailed if the alleged condition is denied: 3.7.3.i.a Many simple and complex states of affairs—hence many simple and complex properties (red and red squares)—are actual and observed. 3.7.3.i.b Nothing is actual if it is not first a possibility. Why? Because that which is not possible cannot be actual. Which things are barred from actuality? There are two constraints. One is an absolute bar: nothing that embodies a contradiction is instantiable anywhere. The other is a local constraint: nothing that violates the signature laws of a possible world is instantiable in that world: no perpetual motion machines in our world. There are also these additional conditions for instantiation: material conditions qualified by their capacities to act in ways that would realize the possibilities (eternal, but also here, material) and that convergence of circumstances that would cause their realization by bringing these material conditions together. Rain and snow are possible (the laws are permissive, their material conditions exist), though neither is occurring at the moment because the required conditions for producing rain or snow haven’t converged. 3.7.3.i.c Suppose that nothing is eternally possible. What does this entail? A conclusion that contradicts the empirical premise with which the argument begins: that many things are actual, though none would be actual if none were possible.

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Many properties and relations exceeding those perceived in our world are conceivable. All that embody no contradiction are, therefore, logical, eternal possibilities; all are instantiable in some possible world, if not in ours. This argument, an a priori existence proof, has seemed definitive to me since an earlier book, Eternal Possibilities. But the inference is vulnerable to an ambiguity: are the terms contradiction, non-contradiction, and possibility appropriate to ontology or exclusively to the modalities of language? Modal logicians and philosophers of language believe that they have no application beyond language. But that is doubtful. Suppose we consider any thing or state of affairs in the light of Bishop Butler’s dictum: Everything is what it is and not another thing. This is the principle of identity: p if p. Everything is as it is because constituted of its properties, their constitutive relations, and spatial-temporal relations. Identity entails the principle of excluded middle—p or -p—either something with its specific identity or not that thing; then the principle of non-contradiction, -(p and p), a simple transformation of excluded middle. Possibility doesn’t appear in these inferences; it replaces non-contradiction, a phrase whose ontological reference it confirms. Logical possibilities are the entities acknowledged by the principle of plenitude: whatever is not a contradiction is a possibility. 3.7.3.ii Possibilia: Eternal possibilities are puzzling in three respects: i. How do they exist; ii. What can we know of them; and iii. Is anything ascribed to them relevant to actual states of affairs? 3.7.3.ii.a How do possibles exist? The plausible answer is a surmise proposed on the basis of comparing actual with possible states of affairs. Actual states of affairs are determinate in every detail of quality, quantity, and relation; all have specific locations in spacetime. Quantum theory sometimes disputes this characterization when interpreting the status of particles during the period that the “wave packet” of probabilities represented by the Schrödinger equation has not “collapsed” due to interactions that create a particular effect and a specific reading. I ignore this alleged indeterminacy because dynamic tensions in the quantum vacuum guarantee that every particle interacts with its environment at every instant: there is no moment when any particle does not have a determinate position and momentum, granting the obstacle that precludes determining their values simultaneously. Eternal possibilities come with varying degrees of determination, from the generic to the specific. There are, for example, the possibility for color and possibilities for each of its lowest-order determinations, possibilities for red or green,

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then possibilia for each of their specific shades. All are determinable or determinate qualitatively. Each is determinable in quantity (the possibility for a property of some range of sizes or scales, and some number of instantiations). Each is relatable or not to other possibilia: no possibility for singing numbers. The only exception to indeterminacy is the possibility for a specific qualitative difference. The possibility for red of a specific shade is not more determinable qualitatively, though it remains quantitatively and relationally indeterminate: it is relatable to many other possibles, and may have many, one or no instantiations. It may seem odd that the possibility for red isn’t red. One recalls Plato’s emphasis: the Form for large isn’t large;77 the possibility for size or weight has neither size nor weight. It occupies no space and exists eternally because properties or complexes of properties that embody no contradiction are atemporal: they exist out of time in the respect that temporality—duration and change—makes no difference to them. The barrier to understanding is our figurative sense of being: everything that is must have, we assume, properties that would make it perceivable. This is a prudent assumption in practical life, but not always a cogent assumption in ontology. Why say that it isn’t relevant? Because possibility implies what may or will be, not what is: the possibility for winter isn’t cold; the possibility for red isn’t red. 3.7.3.ii.b What can we know of possibles? Quine was skeptical: Pegasus, Wyman maintains, has his being as an unactualized possible. When we say of Pegasus that there is no such thing, we are saying, more precisely, that Pegasus does not have the special attribute of actuality. Saying that Pegasus is not actual is on a par, logically, with saying that the Parthenon is not red; in either case we are saying something about an entity whose being is unquestioned.78 Wyman’s overpopulated universe is in many ways unlovely. It offends the aesthetic sense of us who have a taste for desert landscapes, but this is not the worst of it. Wyman’s slum of possibles is a breeding ground for disorderly elements. Take, for instance, the possible fat man in that doorway; and, again, the possible bald man in that doorway. Are they the same possible man, or two possible men? How do we decide? How many possible men are in that doorway? Are there more possible thin ones than fat ones. How many of them are alike? Or would they’re being alike make them one?79

|| 77 Plato, Parmenides, Collected Dialogues of Plato, trans. F. M. Cornford ( New York: Pantheon, 1961), 132a-132e, pp. 926–927. 78 Quine, From a Logical Point of View, p. 3. 79 Ibid., p. 4.

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The possible men are differentiated by the possibilities they prefigure: fat or thin. How many possible men are in the doorway? None: eternal—logical—possibilities don’t have temporal or spatial location. Here is Quine again: Possibility, along with the other modalities of necessity and impossibility and contingency, raises problems upon which I do not mean to imply that we should turn our backs. But we can at least limit modalities to whole statements. We may impose the adverb ‘possibly’ upon a statement as a whole, and we may well worry about the semantical analysis of such usage; but little real advance in such analysis is to be hoped for in expanding our universe to include so-called possible entities.80

Quine’s skepticism is an expression of the hermeneutic gospel: anything real is only a postulate of the linguistic forms or styles used to signify or express it; “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”81 Where sentences are allegedly prior to the words they organize, possibility can never be more than a modal sentential operator. But consider an example that fails Quine’s test: “Possibly, there are possible but uninstantiated worlds.” He didn’t like referring expressions, but wasn’t able to eliminate all of them: possible in the phrase “possible but uninstantiated worlds” isn’t eliminated or accounted for by the first modal operator, possibly. One can hope to hide the ontological force of the second by embedding it in the first: Possibly, there are worlds possibly having no instances. But this is grammatical play: it obscures a question—the status of possibility— without answering it Instantiation, too, is confounding. Nothing is actual if not eternally possible, yet nothing we infer of possibilities implies or entails that they are self-actuating. What accounts for instantiation? We don’t know. Is this the moment to introduce the Leibnizian god who chooses from among alternate possible worlds when creating our world? That would be a fairy tale. A different surmise defers the question without solving it. Think Giordano Bruno: there may be parity between actual and possible worlds, so each set of organized possibilities has its counterpart actual world. Cosmic expansion predicts that many worlds may have formed from the Big Bang. There may have been infinity of Big Bangs, and an infinity of actual worlds, each the instantiation of a possible world. This, too, may be a fable, though there may be the hint of an explanation in an argument proposed above: given that something exists and can’t have come from nothing, we infer to the infinite skein of transformations from which it emerged. This implies that our

|| 80 Ibid., pp. 4–5. 81 Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, para. 5.6, p. 115.

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world and, perhaps, an infinity of others didn’t need a jump start from possibility to actuality: they have always existed. Why? We probably couldn’t know. 3.7.3.ii.c Is anything ascribed to possibilities useful to understanding actual states of affairs? Inference moves principally from actuals to possibles. For there is no information about uninstantiated properties but for inferences analogizing or extrapolating from thoughts or sentences signifying those instantiated. This is useful in three respects: a. the status of dispositions. b. structural features in the relations of properties; c. the status of mathematicals. 3.7.3.ii.c.i Dispositions: Eternal possibilities amplify reality in significant ways. Most are averse to our cosmos because their instantiation would require natural laws and material conditions laws different from those obtaining here: no violations of the laws of motion; no duck-rabbits for want of material conditions able to create them. Material possibilities—a small subset of all those eternal—prefigure reality’s evolution (what may happen any next moment) because they are stored, so to speak, in its dispositions. Dispositions are second-order properties of structures, properties that qualify the structures for causal relations: people who can speak Italian, whether or not they do. Some dispositions are realized by motion and causation, hence energy exchange; unschooled capacities—she had the ability—are latent and unachieved. These are, in either case, materializations of the eternal possibles instantiated in an actual world. The principle of sufficient reason affirms that nothing happens if there are no causes qualified and sufficient to create it. Causes are qualified for production and change by their dispositions; production occurs when causes qualified for an effect are joined without interference. These are the occasions when eternal possibles are instantiated by virtue of their mediating material possibilities. 3.7.3.ii.c.ii Relational structures in actuality, hence in possibility: Consider that properties have determinable values—color may be red, blue, or green—and that generic properties are made determinate by functional—causal—relations: a fence will have some color; painting it determines its specific color. Where nothing is actual if not logically possible, we infer that this triadic relationship is fundamental to relations among properties existing as possibles: the smallest possible world is not, as Peirce imagined, the possible smell of rotten cabbage but

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rather the complex of a determinable, a determining condition, and its lower-order, determinate effect.82 Hume would reply that there is no evidence for determination among properties of either sort, actual or possible. But this is odd: the length of the hair on one’s head is a specific value for a determinable for which a barber is a determining condition. The possible world instantiated here—this actual world—like every possible world is a more or less complex web of causal relationships. Imagining a simpler world—a steady tone—suppresses the complexity it embodies: namely, its generic determinable and a determining condition. The tone is the determinable’s lowest-order expression and the effect of its determining condition. Determining conditions in actuality are causes: determining a note by pressing a piano’s key. 3.7.3.ii.c.iii An ontological backing for mathematics: A sentence is true if the possibility it signifies obtains. This formula is appropriate to sentences signifying actual states of affairs, for there, it economically differentiates true from false sentences or utterances. But much of mathematics is cogent without having application: actual states of affairs can’t vindicate more than a part of it. We respond by retreating from truth to validity: mathematical formulae are valid when deducible from axioms or other propositions accepted as valid. But there is an alternative: possibilia supply an objective foil for meaning and truth. Mathematical notation is meaningful when it signifies these properties; its propositions are true when argument or demonstration confirms their consistency for then, they adumbrate the necessary relations of two or more possibles (prime numbers, a closed line and its center). Possibles exhibit some conspicuous mathematical values. They comprise a denumerable infinity (n +1). Each has quantity (a range of sizes or scales and a degree or range of intensities); all are relational because relatable to others properties in possibility or actuality. All intimate space and time because a space, time, or spacetime is, plausibly, the necessary condition for instantiating a possible world. The webs of complexity described above—a determinable, its lowerorder determination, and determining condition—can be individually mapped, or mapped when joined twice or more to other triplets (assembled like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle). Or they are mapped when a determinable is shown to have alternate determining conditions, or when the same possible determines more specific values for alternate determinables. This array of mathematicizable properties doesn’t liberate mathematicians to do anything they aren’t already doing.

|| 82 Weissman, Eternal Possibilities, pp. 109–140.

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It does supply backing for the myriad applications of mathematical thinking, and relieves, thereby, the mystery and constriction of supposing that mathematical theses are at best formal deductive systems: tautologies. Possibilities supply this backing whether or not they are instantiated, though their support is more apparent when those signified are instantiated: we can measure or twist the spaces in houses built to an architect’s design. A priori existence proofs are tendentious because they add clutter to ontologies disciplined by Ockhamite scruples. Yet possibilities aren’t less real for violating that sensibility. Nor does Quine’s scorn save him from providing for possibility in this other way. Each quantified language limits the possibilities expressible within it; but there are an infinity of possible languages, hence an infinity of possibilities expressible within them. Which is the greater clutter: the infinity of possible languages or the logical space of properties (including properties of languages)? There is an infinity of possibles, many or most of them inconceivable to us. Expressing them requires grammatical rules and vocabularies that exceed anything currently imaginable. Hence this choice: eternal possibilities with their sanctioning principles, or an interminable program for creating the unknown, currently unthinkable quantified languages required to express them.

3.8 Remarks The three arguments of Section 6 share a common logical structure having three requirements: i. At least one of an a priori existence argument’s premises must be the empirically testable claim that something exists. ii. The argument specifies a property, relation, or condition that is unperceived or unperceivable, though, allegedly, a necessary condition for the factor signified in the empirically testable premise. iii. The argument ends with the affirmation that the factor observed could not exist or exist as it does in the absence of the cited property, relation, or condition: no actualities, for example, in the absence of the eternal possibles thereby instantiated. Necessarily, this implies, the factor inferred obtains wherever or whenever observables like those specified in the first premise obtain. The argument fails (this is repetition), unless it is demonstrated that the state of affairs cited in the first premise could not be—it is a contradiction that it occur—in the absence of the property, relation, or condition specified. So, no actuality anywhere without the eternal possibilities it instantiates. Could there be an a priori existence proof for a first or universally sustaining cause: a god, for example? There is no telling what may come, though all our

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inventiveness has failed to produce a viable a priori argument for a god’s existence. Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, but this is a slogan, not an argument for a being and power unsubstantiated and unknown. The argument for eternal possibilities is, nevertheless, sobering. It extends the notion of reality beyond that of material nature; nature floats in the space of these two ontological modalities: possibility and actuality. Is there more? We don’t know.

4 Other Ontologies Three interpretations of nature, society, and selfhood differ from the bi-modal ontology—nature (actuality) and possibility—proposed above. One supposes that nature is an illusion projected as real by our desires, anxieties, and frustrations; all its apparent complexities and stabilities dissolve in time. Another affirms that mind—self or soul—is elemental and that nature and society are constructions having no reality apart from the minds thinking them. A third asserts that nature is infused with the intellect, energy and intentions of a higher power; a god or demon creates and sustains it by thinking and acting in ways analogous to, though infinitely greater than human ways. Buddhism asserts that all reality is an illusion. Subjective idealists promote the view that everything is mind’s projection or construction. Theistic religions exemplify the third: God is said to be the omnipotent creator of all that is or can be. These interpretations challenge the claim of Chapter Two that most speculations about nature’s conditions are unverifiable or incoherent. Each alleges that there is evidence within experience sufficient to justify its claims: faulting Aquinas, for example, doesn’t exhaust reasons for believing in God. This chapter considers these alternatives, their justifications, and reasons for discounting them.

4.1 Illusion Life is frenetic. Its feelings and intentions, achievements and disappointments are distracting but insubstantial, for nothing that changes is real. Reality is either of two things: the confabulation that each mind projects beyond itself, or a void having no purpose or value, no beginning, middle, or end. We believe otherwise because need and fear impel us to misconstrue stabilities imagined as things perceived. Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations upbraids the idea of private languages.83 Buddhism has a different perspective. It acknowledges public language as the fragile socializing norm at the periphery of myriad private spaces, each a domain of meanings inaccessible to others. Socialization is construed in the way of streets that organize a neighborhood: Buddhism emphasizes idiopathy in the private lives and homes that line the public streets. How many times, in ways

|| 83 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953), paras. 243–315, pp. 89–104.

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large and small, does disappointment or success in your world have no parallel in mine? Others see our responses to circumstances; they don’t know the spasms of doubt that mediate every new effort. Looking resolute to others, we tremble within. Stubborn selfhood is an illness; liberty and health require a purge. Understand that reality as we construe it is merely the projection of our hopes, fears, and plans. We struggle to divest ourselves of them in order to breathe freely within the undivided whole. This characterization of Buddhist attitudes is mine. The following are lines from the Surangama Sutra: Thus from that which was beyond both identity and diversity arose all differences. When the differentiating subject confronted its differentiated objects, the resultant diversity led to identification. Identity and diversity further led to that which was neither the same nor different. These conflicting disturbances resulted in troubled (perception) which in time gave karmic activity and so suffering.84 Therefore, the basic causes of continuous karmic retribution are three: killing, stealing and carnality. Thus... these three evil causes succeed one another solely because of unenlightened awareness which gives rise to the perception of form and so sees falsely mountains, rivers and the great earth as well as other phenomena which unfold in succession and, because of this very illusion, appear again and again, as on a turning wheel.85 Due to their delusion and perplexity, living beings turn their backs on Bodhi and cling to sense objects thereby giving rise to troubles,...with the resultant appearance of illusory forms. (As to me), my uncreated and unending profound enlightenment accords with the Tathagata store which is absolute. This wipes out the concept of unity-with-differentiation. This ends the Buddha’s teaching on the unhindered intermingling of noumenon with phenomenon...and ensures my perfect insight into the Dharma realm where the one is infinite and the infinite is one; where the large manifests in the small and vice-versa; where the immovable...appears everywhere; where my body embraces the ten directions of inexhaustible space; where the kingdom of treasures (i.e., the Buddha-land) appears on the tip of a hair; and where I sit in a speck of dust to turn the wheel of the Bodhi, I have realized the nature of the absolute Enlightenment of the Bhudatatathat.86

Is the whole an undifferentiated Parmenidean One, such that appearance of otherness—other people and things—is always a deception? Buddhists disagree among themselves. The “reality” known to individuals is the montage of illusions

|| 84 Surangama Sutra, trans. Upasaka Lu K’uan Yu (Tullera, NSW, Australia: Buddha Dharma Education Association, n.d.), 127–128. 85 Ibid., pp. 131–132. 86 Ibid., pp. 135–136.

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generated by assembling the many private illusions (though there is no assembler). Reality, itself, could be either of several things: a spare material space deficient in all the values that animate private lives; an unknowable thing in itself lying beyond the scrim of illusions; or nothing at all, a characterless void. The latter is the alternative implied in the passages quoted above. Change is the factor provoking unease when Buddhists of all confessions construe it as evidence of imperfection. Things change when incomplete; never ceasing to change, they never achieve the perfection that would entail finality, stability, and rest. These emphases are conspicuous in Plato’s allegory of the cave. He distinguished Being from Becoming on similar grounds: the perfection of the Forms defeats change. Darkness at the back of the cave is a void where imagination’s shifting intimations of the Forms are mind’s only content, and the vague context in which cave-dwellers believe themselves to live. Orienting themselves to one another, creating a “world” by coordinating by their stories, they err by supposing that their fantasies have substance beyond this circle of belief. Buddhists of the Surangama Sutra diverge from Plato regarding this ambiguity: are cave-dweller imaginings projected into the void—as though onto a screen—or is the void something more: a medium susceptible to degrees of intensification. Shadows at the bottom, Forms at the top? This Sutra avers that the flux of illusions is the effect of our perpetual striving, hence its evanescence, its lack of substance. Reality, itself, is empty; our shifting desires are the only source of its apparent content. The Buddhist dialectic of change has a logic reminiscent of the Western persuasion that change is a contradiction leavened by history and time: matters or events that would preclude one another, because contraries (love and hate, war and peace), defeat their inner tension by occurring sequentially. This dialectic opposed Heraclitus to Parmenides before its resolution in Hegel’s Absolute: the One embodies all differences when the history of ephemera is gathered and ordered within it.87 They shared this problem: what limits change, how is it controlled? Or is change so recalcitrant that we do better by construing it as illusion? These are options clarified when regulated by dialectic’s three forms: either-or (Plato); both-and (Hegel); and neither-nor (Parmenides and Zeno). Find the better contrary while rejecting the rest; find a middle term that integrates contraries; or emphasize contradiction and reject them all. Each of Buddhism’s disparate schools anticipates one or more of these styles. The Surangama Sutra stands with

|| 87 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. J. B. Baillie (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), pp. 789–808.

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Parmenides and Zeno: everything you say or thinks traps you in paradox. Better to want and say nothing. Buddhism is therapy by way of ontology: impatience with over-valued impulses is expressed as skepticism about the realities they postulate. Buddhists would cure our obsessions by renouncing the lure. This, too, is a point of affinity between Plato and the Buddhists: his emphasis on pernicious appetites; their conviction that abnegation and inner tranquility are the only defenses against cycles of passion and frustration. They share the belief that meanings—stories, advertisements, fantasies—valorize things, activities, or conditions that are valueless or inimical in themselves. Wealth is good if it supplies the requirements for elementary well-being. But what shall count as “elementary”? Status is good if it supplies opportunities for well-being and a defense against abuse, but does it require royal titles and exemptions? Buddhism is convinced that deception is addictive: nurtured on wealth and status, we mistake ourselves by identifying with their advantages. Glorying in our entitlements, consolidating our illusions, we yield to needs that make us vulnerable. Founded at a time when medicine and other technologies were primitive, Buddhism affirms that no attachment—to children, partners, or purposes—is reliable if all are vulnerable to appetites or things unforeseen. Why not put one’s trust in benevolent gods or personal inhibition? Because there are none, and because self-control is usually overwhelmed by fads and advertisers that promote tawdry goods. Inhibition is a defense against appetite; Buddhism liberates selfcontrol by denying the reality of everything appetite craves. Plato separated the issues that Buddhists conflate: ontology versus the conduct of practical life. Most of the Republic’s citizens could live well without knowing the Forms. Many would have satisfied, prudent lives while living deep in the cave.

4.2 Construction Constructivism is the idea that autonomous minds create all the reality known to thought or perception: all the structure and vitality of the world is located within experience, not somewhere beyond it. There is no reality independent of human consciousness, or none we can know or conceive. Four considerations direct us: i. What is the history of modern constructivist thinking? ii. Which tasks accrue if mind is to construct reality within itself? iii. What are mind’s alleged powers and structure? iv. Does constructivism justify mind’s alleged autonomy?

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4.2.1 History: This tradition’s thinkers use different words for different emphases, but their intentions are similar. Protagoras declared that “Mind is the measure of all that is that it is, and of all that is not that it is not.”88 Quine updated this formulation with one better suited to an era when people believe that access to reality is restricted to language and its propositions. The choice of conceptual systems and quantifiers varies, he said with human aims: “To be is to be the value of a bound variable.”89 Why is language our point of reference? Because Quine believed with Wittgenstein that, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” The intervening history is dominated by Descartes, Hume, and Kant. Descartes supplied the inspiration for construction when he doubted the extra-mental existence of everything but mind. He conceded (by failing to doubt) that experience is all the while coherent. But is it also free-standing? Descartes posited a God to create and support it,90 though he failed to prove that God’s non-existence is precluded because a contradiction. These considerations entail the possibility that coherent experience is free-standing. The question remaining is mind’s ability to create and sustain it. Having a purpose and plan, we construe reality in ways appropriate to our aims. Descartes insisted that this use of ideas requires their clarity and distinctness and, he implied, their truth, though his rigor was qualified by successors motivated by interests such as patriotism, status, or piety. He emphasized the logical integrity of the individual thinker, but knew that the choice of experience making ideas or stories is often socially agreed or commanded. Five steps were and are critical: i. Descartes’ cogito is the constructivist point of reference; mind’s autonomy, conceptual power, and will are its principal resources; ii. Minds clarify their ideas until they, like Platonic Forms, are perceived with clarity and distinctness; iii. Descartes intimated a point that Kant later exploited; ideas sometimes function as rules for assembling sensory data (the hat and cloak seen as a man; the small disk seen as the Sun91). Construction occurs as rules differentiate and assemble sensory data, thoughts, or words. iv. Mind has two distinct modes: it is passive to content, but active (Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception) when using rules to assemble and stabilize the complexities of experience. v. Descartes said that will is the faculty for affirming or denying one’s ideas, hence the

|| 88 Protagoras, A History of Ancient Philosophy, eds. John R. Catan and Giovanni Reale (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1987), p. 157. 89 Quine, From a Logical Point of View, pp. 15, 102–103. 90 Descartes, Meditations, p. 50. 91 Ibid., p. 27.

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power for choosing the character of the experience (the “reality”) it schematizes. This point, much overlooked it seems to me, is critical to philosophy’s subsequent history. For if the limits of my world are signified by the limits of my conceptual system or language, then meaning (significance) and value are the progenitors of ontology: my world is prefigured by my choice of meanings and values. They determine the character of my experience and the purposes that give it traction. This was Kant’s emphasis, as remarked in the Introduction, but this was not a line of thinking available to Descartes’ immediate successors: their piety and deference to God’s will precluded it. They took advantage of a different opening: a world of material particulars is a dispensable excrescence if God can intervene directly to establish the coherence and stability of experience. This idea was common to Malebranche, Leibniz, and Berkeley. Hume, too, was central to this project, though he, contrary to them, emphasized mind’s responsibility for the stability of experience by citing its habits of association: perceiving the succession of nights and days, we expect one when seeing the other.92 Hume’s formulation was problematic in two respects. First was his failure to explain the source of sensory data: he acknowledged its presence without further explanation. Does mind create it? He didn’t say. Second was his inability to explain the coherence or stability of experience: there is, he said, no reason that any sensory datum need have an antecedent or successor.93 Habits of association incline us to expect smoke when seeing fire, but this, like all coherence, is a miracle: we should expect, given the odds against repetition, that every next sequence of data will differ from any sequence foregoing. Or continuity might dissolve: experience might resemble a film that irregularly skips successive frames. Kant explained why this doesn’t happen. Mind assures the continuity of space and time by exploiting imagination’s power to create and sustain these seamless forms of intuition. It creates coherence by distinguishing and organizing sensory data in patterned ways. The complexity perceived is testimony to the stabilizing rules—“categories” or “schemas”—that mind applies when creating experience.94 Why is experience repeatedly schematized in a particular way rather than randomly in successive ways (each possible because not contradictory)? Remember Descartes’ description of the will: mind affirms or denies its ideas, but withholds judgment when regarding ideas that are neither necessary nor contradictory (they aren’t clear and distinct). Kant is less demanding: let

|| 92 Hume, Treatise, p. 172. 93 Ibid. 94 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 180–187.

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mind organize sensory data using any conceptualization that embodies no contradiction. Which conceptualization do we choose from the myriad available? One that creates an experience meaningful to its author: wanting a French experience, I sing the Marseillaise, thinking British, I listen for a different anthem. But we could be experimental and feckless: a different movie every day; serial experiences, each modeled on the day’s film. Choosing a consistent set of experience spinning schemas was Kant’s answer to the second of Hume’s failures: the threatened breakdown of coherence and stability. What of the first: how does he explain the inception of unprovoked sensory data? Kant waffled. His primitive Lockean insight—mind responding to the external world—implies that percepts are the effects of our physical encounters with thing whose existence and character are independent of the ways we perceive them. But that assumption violated Kant’s critical scruples: we don’t and can’t know anything of the world as it lies to the other side of experience. Imagination was Kant’s fallback option: mind supplies the data. Yet this isn’t a wholly compelling solution because data imagined are the residual content of memory and perception, hence the Lockean trap: how shall mind acknowledge data coming from an unthinkable source with a character of their own; how is that character to be discerned given the overlay of mind’s own rules? Worse, perhaps, how does this stubborn identity frustrate mind as it creates an experience appropriate to its interests or needs? (Wanting to go left, I see a road that is only open to the right.) Kant’s response was partly affirmed, partly implied. He distinguished two kinds of imagination: productive and reproductive.95 The latter reproduces content from memory, content acquired by way of perception. Explaining mind’s production of content by way of the reproductive imagination would be circular: perception to memory to imagination, and back to perception. Productive imagination is, therefore, the better way forward. It creates an elementary array of forms by applying the a priori categories and schemas of understanding to the forms of intuition, space and time. It then uses these forms to differentiate and organize the sensory data of experience. Which data are these? Data somehow received but then reconfigured in ways suitable only to mind, is rules and aims. Accordingly, Kant was relieved of having to identify an extra-mental source for sensory data by a shaky tour de force. Why shaky? Because productive imagination allegedly strips data of any residual evidence of their extra-mental origins,

|| 95 Ibid., pp. 142–143.

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first, by locating them in its forms of intuition space and time (all the while ascribing them to that speculative other place: the external world); second, by assuring that they have no identity or relations other than those prescribed by the conceptual system—the rules—used to differentiate and organize them. Accordingly, data “received” resemble prime matter: they are the essential stuff of perceptual experience, but a stuff having no character but that acquired when conceptualized. Kant’s first Critique adopts the principal feature of Leibniz’s Monadology: every monad, most significantly those which are apperceptive (self-perceiving), is a perspective on the world.96 But contrary to Leibniz, no God supplies these agents with a stable experience. All the differentiations and order within the sensible world are mind’s products; anything beyond experience is unthinkable, hence unknowable, because no property manifest in experience is verifiably ascribable beyond it. Or there is nothing beyond it: we can’t confirm that apples are as they look or even that there are apples apart from the look and feel of them. Why do we seem to perceive and engage the same things? What factors regularize and socialize experience? Hegel, Marx, and the sociologists explained that the schemas used to create experience are learned, and that we use them in similar ways because of having learned to apply them on similar occasions. There is social accord about reality, though perhaps nothing that corresponds to our ideas of it. These ideas were elaborated by Kant’s successors, then exploited in our time by Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Foucault’s cultural histories. Each describes successive eras in the manner of Hegel’s claim that every epoch has a sponsoring idea that organizes thought and action until sabotaged and replaced by a successor.97 Imagine that an era has its distinguishing cuisine and that there are transitions from one era to another for reasons that may be rational or arbitrary (health or a drought). People living within the span of one epoch regard its signature style as definitive; they don’t imagine an alternative. Those living through a transition are bewildered before habits stabilize; they realize, if only briefly, that there is a difference between natural needs and conventional satisfiers. But then regularizing ideas, styles, and tastes are reestablished: everything seems up-to-date. What explains the succession of organizing ideas? Every era makes discoveries that subvert confidence in a dominant idea; each has fads that sabotage confidence in reigning values and ideas they sanction. There is,

|| 96 Leibniz, Monadology, para. 62, p. 158. 97 G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of History, trans. Charles Hegel (New York: Dover, 2004), pp. 79– 103.

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however, a rhythm to dominance; its cycles are long enough to stabilize beliefs and practices within the span and context of an era’s projects. But these are, all the while, Kant’s heirs: they agree that reality is a mental/social construct: none of it should exceed the current or possible experience of the minds responsible for creating it. Why this emphasis on socialization? Because experience will fracture among the diversity of minds if there is no access to the things that would stabilize perception and constrain action: each will perceive a world peculiar to its needs and desires. Socialization breeds uniformity and stability: we look for, see, and want the same things. These effects explain the possibility of communication and cooperation among a society’s members, but they raise questions. How is it possible that individual constructors, each a monad isolated by its consciousness from every other, become intelligible to one another? Why isn’t every other thinker unthinkable and unrecognizable, more akin to negative noumena than capable of empathy, communication, or cooperation? This question is never answered. How is it, conversely, that socialization leaves air and space for the likes of Marx and Nietzsche? Those who resist socialization’s benefits are typically dismissed as threats to public order: are they criminals, or merely incapable of learning the manners and truths familiar to the rest of us? These heretics are usually no more than a moderately disruptive minority; there were very few communists when Marx and Engels wrote their Manifesto, boasting of the fear they provoked across Europe. Descartes supposed that innate ideas make the world intelligible to everyone capable of understanding geometry. Kant resisted the relativizing implications of his own system; he didn’t agree that each mind is an unassailable fortress or that its experience might be destabilized by fickle tastes. He believed that mind’s categories are innate; though empirical schemas are learned. He assumed that most everyone could be expected to learn the local rules for schematizing the familiar things of one’s work or neighborhood (sheep or goats). Learning the local argot and morality would be socialized. The practicalities of everyday life, much the same for everyone, would do the rest. Plato had reduced the isolation of people chained at the back of his allegorical cave by allowing them to coordinate their experiences by speaking to one another. This was also the preferred solution of Hegel and the Marburg Kantians: let the formative power of logic, language, and scientific theory exceed the incommunicability of sensory data. Science in the constructivist style is an expression of imagination, one that explores the infinity of thinkable world-stories. We celebrate our freedom to theorize; there is no limit but contradiction on the range of thinkable hypotheses.

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Yet these narratives—from Aristotle and Dante to ghost stories—differ categorially from one another: how shall we test and choose among them? Fruitful theories, like a novelist’s ideas, are explored and elaborated within, then (unlike fiction) tested against realities they purport to represent. Yet imagination is less encumbered: it violates scientific integrity for want of experiments that discipline theory. Thinkers in the tradition of Kuhn and Quine minimize the relevance of verifying or falsifying experiments. Experimental results are ambiguated or suppressed when theorists tinker with the relations among a theory’s sentences; a disconfirming result can be ignored when it or the tested theory is reinterpreted. This reckless way with experiments ignores the care taken when designing them because its motivating metaphysics has eliminated the extra-mental backdrop used to test the validity of the hypotheses tested: never mind that science without validating experiments is indistinguishable from science fiction. This scorn for experiment implies an ambiguity for which constructivists have no solution: what is the methodology of science, interpretation or inquiry? Inquiry implies the formulation of hypotheses tested against a reality whose character and existence are independent of our thinking. Interpretation is a more or less ample and coherent reading. Its emphases express the interests and values of the interpreter, not necessarily of the domain for which it is designed. Indifference to experiments enables it to gloss reality or disguise it while rationalizing its practices and ignoring their distortions. Inquiry exploits imagination when formulating its testable hypotheses and plans; constructivists liberate imagination to construe reality as their interests prescribe. Their initiatives are innocuous and often pleasing in the hands of artists. Painters and novelists do this best when playing with the tensions created within a style. Representation required similitude between a painter’s subject and canvas, but capable artists rebelled:98 impressionism, abstraction, and Duchamp intervened. This is constructivist freedom. Predating Descartes and Kant, it flourishes wherever religions satisfy the frustrated demand for meaning and value, rather than testable truth. Wanting direction, security, or salvation, we believe the doctrines of a church that guarantees it. There is, however, a cost when constructivists burden mind in ways it can’t support or defend. Most of us distinguish triangles from circles, but why are all of us seeing sheep, not goats, just now? Why this extraordinary coordination? How is it that minds saying little or nothing to one another create coherent and

|| 98 Wassily Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane, trans. Howard Dearstyne and Hilla Rebay (New York: Dover, 1979), pp. 17–21.

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stable experiences that are all but indistinguishable (confirmed when photographs taken by each percipient are compared). Is it irrelevant that they are looking at the same flock? Constructivist answers must avoid that simple response; they require an answer consistent with mind’s monadic character. Look within to discern your values; interpret your situation in ways consistent with them; look for allies—people who share your aims and world view—hoping to convince them that your story satisfies their aims. Realists do half as much. Their perceptual experience is stable because the structures and processes perceived are relatively stable; they communicate effectively because they use a common language to express similar or recognizable responses to their circumstances; they satisfy their aims by cooperating to change a world they alter but haven’t made. This difference—interpretation or inquiry—also has a cost, one that’s rarely mentioned. Carlo Rovelli describes it in the passage quoted in the Introduction: “According to this vulgata, advance in science is marked by discontinuity, the greater the discontinuity the stronger the advance, and not much more than the phenomena survives across the discontinuity.” Interpretations—in religion, history, or ideology—are often incommensurable. Like different styles of design— fussy or modern—each has an internal logic, one sometimes prescribed by an idea—of oligarchy or democracy, mechanism or animism—that controls an interpretation’s form and evolution. Mixing elements from two or more interpretations produces a mishmash, a result that’s comfortable in casual clothing but incoherent in art or thought. Compare inquiry: successful inquiries favor ideas having evolutionary histories: they survive—though altered—when successively tested and revised. For error is useful in the minds of thinkers or builders provoked to look for conceptual or material solutions. Coherence is an aesthetic value for interpretation, but a practical (accounting) value for theories tested against phenomena of disparate properties and scales. Imagine finding your way in a foreign city without a map. The streets are a jumble; one is often lost but able to assemble, with trial and error, a viable intuitive map. Baffling complexity gives way to comfort as one negotiates narrow lanes and alleys. Now consider interpretation as it makes a city unintelligible. That happens if one tries learning its streets by using a succession of different maps: those of Chicago, Quito, or Cairo when finding one’s way in Venice. All should work if one believes, like Quine, that reality has no character apart from the conceptual systems used to explore it,99 though the only constant effect of using them would be the certainty that one is lost. || 99 W. V. O. Quine, Ontological Relativity and other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), pp. 53–68.

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The Kantian hermeneutic—reality determined by the conceptual system used to think it—guarantees discontinuity. Why can’t a critic pick and choose: correcting one system’s failures by importing bits from another? Because each system is holistic: a gestalt. Its practitioners may do experimental research that sharpens its distinctions while exploring its conceptual limits. But those limits—partly intuited, partly articulate—provoke seismic conceptual resistance when breached. Heresy and solecism signify violations of coherence when conceptual systems are alleged to be holy or merely grammatical. Think of paintings that don’t quite work; they aren’t improved by interposing elements from one or several others. Conceptual integrity is apparently a virtue, though its effect is perverse in the case of interpretations. For alternative interpretations are contraries; none informs another; each precludes its competitors. Plato used the dialectic of contrariety to boost reflection to deeper understanding, but that is not the effect of the hermeneutical thinking derived from Kant. It emphasizes the global applicability and adequacy of its formations; none needs commerce with another when each is self-sufficient because comprehensive. Interpretation offers two choices, with discontinuity as the effect Rovelli describes: persist in using a system that doesn’t always work, or abandon it for one that seems to work better in some ways, however deficient in others. This is the context for his remark that interpretation cripples physics. A settled inventory of structures, values, and processes “re-presents” the world-rendered-thinkable. We don’t need more or we do, but can’t have it within the story that dominates us. Why generalize from ontology-postulating stories to Kuhn’s “paradigms” and the hermeneutical renderings of science? Because these are versions of the same mental habit: construe reality as having values, structures, histories, or ontologies prescribed by an interpretation; minimize experiment or discount it. Yet the same questions persist: is an interpretation applicable and adequate to the ambient world? If yes, why do we think so? Does investigation confirm its application? Or does “confirmation” express our determination to construe reality as our story describes it? Kantian, Kuhnian—hermeneutic—versions of science are not different generically from religious accounts of reality: Aristotle, Newton, or Einstein; Christianity, Islam, or the Buddha. We should wonder when our accounts of reality are immiscible: is the confusion internal to reality or the effect of telling contrary stories? 4.2.2 Tasks: Construction’s principal task is the creation of an experience, hence “world,” that satisfies the maker’s aim. A stable and coherent aim wants a stable and coherent experience. Multiple, diverging aims require a compromised “world,” one giving modest or minimal satisfaction to each. The burden is greater

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when people having common or complementary aims coordinate their world making; the most congenial partners disagree about their world’s furnishings and how best to communicate their differences. Advertisers and autocrats settle these differences by commanding the terms for which all are responsible: their worlds are grey but mostly unambiguous. Coordination is, nevertheless, a perpetual challenge if myriad centers of activity create spasms of mutual incomprehension: I don’t live in your world; why require that I believe as if I did. We should expect that social relations would be controlled by intimidation rather than understanding and accord. Multiple schisms—each “world” different from every other—should make prediction difficult or impossible. Imagine two people conversing; each knows what he or she wants to say, but not what the other will say. Yet, paradoxically, each mind is said to create both sides of their conversation. Neither should ever be surprised by the other’s responses, though both are surprised. Construction is individual, as in Kant, or we do it collectively when minds share their projects. But either way and ironically, the world resists us despite our having made it. Why we create obstacles to frustrate us is a separate question, but there is no doubt that controlling nature is as much a challenge as creating an amiable and effective civil society. Imagine builders frustrated by anomalies in an architect’s design. Could they suspend construction while awaiting a better design; could we construct better worlds with wiser plans? Or is the emphasis on construction a generalization from the experience of those favored actors whose plans rarely go awry because they live and act in congenial circumstances? Jonathan Edwards promised “vehemence” in making circumstances favorable to his plans;100 William James seems to have expected that commitment would be sufficient. Neither seemed anxious that reality might frustrate them. 4.2.3 Mind’s structure and powers: Construction implies mind’s aims, initiative, materiel, and power. Purpose supplies aims and initiative; imagination provides data—content—and rules to organize it. There is power in the will to create experience and in the activity of making it. Purpose, plans, and will drive schematizations into the future. Mind learns from its mistakes: successive constructions transform their antecedents while embodying some parts of them. Variation, generalization, analogy, and extrapolation are imagination’s techniques for refreshing traditional thinking and practice: Balanchine learns from Petipa; Britten from Strauss. || 100 Jonathan Edwards, Jonathan Edwards’ Resolutions (Phillipsburg, N.J.: P and R Publishing, 2001), pp. 35–49, Resolution 22.

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We needn’t worry that construction exceeds mind’s abilities, given Kant, then Fichte, and Schelling’s elaboration of Descartes’ perception of mental structure. Most critical is the difference between awareness and self-awareness, first and second-order consciousness. “I am, I exist” is a report of first-order awareness made from the standpoint of an observing self-awareness. Kant expressed this difference by distinguishing the empirical and transcendental egos.101 The first is the awareness of content, be it the moon or oneself. This content reduced, for Kant, to the experience of “me, again.” The other—self-awareness—is a power having three expressions. First is oversight: I perceive myself while aware of hearing the weather report or seeing the moon. Second is mind’s activity as it unifies experience while using its ideas, rules, or schemas to synthesize content supplied by imagination. This is mind’s creative power for determining the character of content’s parts while relating them spatially, temporally, and causally. Why are they schematized one way rather than another of the many that are possible? Because mind is self-interested: it wants and creates an experience suffused with meanings that satisfy values that are only personal or socially sanctioned. Third is the critical attitude that oversees the first and second of these postures. Oversight is regulation: more than satisfying an aim by constructing content, I appraise my aims, motives, and products. Listening to music played from habit, hearing the banality, I play it again, differently. 4.2.4 Justification: Walking across the Brooklyn Bridge from east to west, one has an unobstructed view stretching from Staten Island and the Statue of Liberty across all of southern Manhattan. Water, sky, and an occasional bit of greenery are the only bits of nature in the sweep of this perspective; the rest is concrete, brick, or steel. People able to create all of this might be world-makers. But there is a missing term in this reverie: building sites require manual labor. Constructivists groan but don’t sweat. Constructivism is testimony to the initiative of thinkers turned skeptical when Locke distinguished real from nominal essence. Kant and his successors drive us ever deeper into isolation as each thinker maximizes his ideas about mind’s autonomy while minimizing reality’s complexity and resistance. Each of them has misconstrued Locke’s challenge: his skepticism is a reproof to naiveté, not an excuse for world-making. Is it mysterious that people board the same bus for different reasons and destinations? Constructivism promises too much and delivers too little.

|| 101 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 135–161.

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4.3 Theism Theism, like materialist naturalism, affirms that reality is our context, not our construct. Theistic religions are the principal source of transcendental ontologies: they affirm that materiality is a derivative reality created by the God whose intellect, will, and benevolence are intimated by those human qualities. Yet God, is said to be infinite and necessary, not finite and contingent. This apposition— finite or infinite, contingent or necessary—is the dialectical engine that supplies theism’s conceptual and moral justification. For human life without divinity would be a mechanical event, one among the multitude of incidental contingencies. Our lives acquire significance because they express God’s creative power and valorizing aim. We prove ourselves worthy of divine care by the gratitude that acknowledges our creator, a being finer than ourselves in every respect. Theist ontology has several appeasing implications: i. It answers a principal question: which force created and sustains the material world? “God does it” is an all-purpose response to every question, with the exception that bad effects are ascribed to freewill or God’s malign adversary. ii. Every human life is valorized by the conviction that all are made in God’s image. Let each person achieve the dignity appropriate to this finite expression of divinity. iii. Societies risk disorder and conflict, but want the peace and stability achieved when they observe God’s laws. iv. Order alone is a reliable effect of crowd control. Community requires that people care for one another out of respect for the divine expectation that we acknowledge the vulnerability and worth of our fellow creatures. v. Mutual care makes us worthy of divine benevolence. vi. Suffering is better tolerated if one believes that it expresses a divine judgment, or that suffering is a test of one’s resolve, a test rewarded by eternal life. vii. Spirituality is the breath of divinity as it enlarges sensibility. Cured of ego and coarse appetites, we find quieter satisfactions. No longer singular and isolated, we think, feel, and worship as one. Living in a sacralized world, we humans are evidence of the divinity that creates us. Our first obligation is deference; our principal opportunity is the blessedness that comes with recognition of our exalted origin and the debt it entails. Apostasy is its own punishment because the apostate denies the only element within him that promises divine approval and eternal life. These allusions defer to Judaic or Christian attitudes, but they resonate, too, in other theistic expressions of spirituality. Lakota beliefs and rituals invoke many gods; the Judaic tradition postulates one. The ontology of its Christian version derives from Augustine’s reading of Plato’s allegory of the cave: nature is the flux of shadows at the back of the cave; intelligibility lies outside it in Forms created and illuminated by the Good. “Materiality,” hence nature, is our name for the story used to project

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stability and order into formless shadows. We would live happily within our deception but for a contrary force: the Good is telic; it draws us from ignorance and illusion toward itself. Christianity recasts Plato’s Good as the God whose beneficence explains his creation of the contingent world; moral agents exit the cave— a pilgrim’s progress—when prepared for salvation by the beliefs and practices of the Church. Awareness is intensified and liberated—it becomes spiritual—as believers realize that piety, not pleasure or wealth, is their virtue and proper destiny. Should religious doctrines be construed as theories or as stories? Consistent theories may be true, though empirical evidence is required to confirm them. Allegories are often effective because believers are content to locate themselves within the spaces they prefigure; they ignore anomalies—immaterial souls in animal bodies—when meaning and emotion trump evidence and truth. But these are the effects of story-telling, not evidence that stories are true. Theism responds to vital questions—How did the cosmos begin; how is it sustained?—but it adduces no evidence to support its allusive answer. Why are its stories credible? Because belief is often impelled by meaning and emotion. Every religion answers the first four of philosophy’s five motivating questions: what are we; what is the world; what is our place within it; what is it good or bad to do or be? There is, ideally, no tension between the truth of religious beliefs and the meaning of a practice or the bonds of community. One prays because of believing that prayers are heard and answered by an attentive God; congregants express their mutual loyalty by singing and praying together. But no religion stands or falls by its ability to answer philosophy’s fifth question: how do we know that our answers to the first four questions are valid? Each affirms itself the “true religion,” though none presents the logical or empirical evidence required to validate its truth claims. This failure isn’t disqualifying in the minds of adherents because their community’s formation and stability depend on six variables: i. beliefs; ii. attitudes: iii. practices; iv. community; v. organization; and vi. tradition. Belief has disproportionate weight among these variables, though one can be religious without belief or a believer who ignores the other five. Imagine someone who moves to Boston. Once loyal to Cleveland and its teams, he becomes a Red Sox fan after joining neighbors at a game. He continues to wear a cap with the Indians’ logo; he hums their songs, though friends in Cleveland don’t appreciate his new loyalty. Fidelity to meaning and the tribe that embodies it is more elemental than truth; this renegade has betrayed his origins. Loyalty to church or team are, in this respect, almost the same. What is their difference? Just a religion’s assumption that the truth of its beliefs justifies satisfaction of the other religious variables, or that satisfying them should entail belief.

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But this is a fragile link, given that religious claims are unsupported by evidence other than the meanings that infuse believers’ lives. Dispense with the claim to “truth;” substitute the experience of “being in-the-truth,” for then fidelity to a city, team, or cause is a passion that satisfies the same variables as identification with a religious creed. Why is truth the dispensable variable? Because practice, conviction, and loyalty persist without it. Personal identity is shaped and consolidated by one’s participation in communal meanings; the autonomy we prize is the qualified independence of those who locate themselves within communities where rights and duties are acknowledged by fellow believers. Tribal loyalty confers safety and the right to move freely within the community, though freedom is a conditional right, one annulled if a member affronts tribal attitudes by neglecting its rituals. Many adherents practice a faith with ardor while doubting its beliefs because of loyalty to their community and respect for its hierarchy or tradition. For beliefs may be feigned. They aren’t probed by other members if one’s attitudes and practices are those expected of believers. Six variables entail seven hundred twenty variations, all of them likely to be common among skeptics in a religion’s large communities. Beliefs explain and justify meanings, but meanings are the engine that propels loyalty, action and, identity: truth is incidental. Exchanging identities—Cleveland for Boston, Boston for Dallas—alters loyalty but not these variables. Religious zeal sees these conversions as betrayals: one of us has come to believe and practice as no right thinking person of our tribe could or should. For one is skeptical about the beliefs and practices of other religions: they lack empirical or logical evidence for their claims. Why isn’t this test used to challenge one’s own religious beliefs? Because of the understanding (often tacit) that meanings sanctioned by one’s beliefs are conversely their motivators and justifiers: doubt the truth of your beliefs and you risk exposing doubts about those meanings. Personal histories justify this assumption. Most people acquire religious identities while living as children in families and communities where personal and social identity is a function of religious meanings. We notice that religious converts are often more rigorous than people born into a religious community: but that is partly the effect of wanting to prove oneself worthy in the eyes of traditional believers. They know that professing new beliefs doesn’t entail that one shares tribal meanings. For meanings that determine one’s self-perception, loyalties, and world-view aren’t easily transposable; one may acknowledge the contingency of formative meanings without intending or being able to change them. Meaning is psychologically foundational, hence the merely rhetorical value of truth. Truth is rightly construed as correspondence: a thought or sentence is

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true if the possibility it signifies obtains; “There is a cat on the mat” is true, if there is a cat on a mat, here or somewhere. We may also say, for skeptical epistemological reasons, that truth is coherence: a sentence is true of it coheres with an array (loosely or rigorously bound) of sentences regarded as true. Yet there is no apparent empirical or logical evidence that religious truths fare better than fairy tales when appraised by the standards of coherence or correspondence. Accordingly, we reconstrue the notion of truth to better establish its relation to meaning: The correspondence sought for truth should not be that of a proposition or mental entity to some objective reality. An interpretation, engaging reality as it does, includes its object within itself, not as something external to be mirrored. The question of truth is whether the interpretation determines the interpreter’s experience to correspond to the object so that the interpreter can relate to the object appropriately.102

This passage is reminiscent of William James. Truth for him was a measure of significance: the difference a belief makes to my attitudes or actions if I regard it as true.103 That emphasis is conspicuous in the last sentence of the quoted passage: truth is not the relation between a thought or sentence and “something external to be mirrored,” but rather the relation of experience to an “object” construed in two ways: one responds appropriately to the object when discerning it within an interpretation. We grasp the interpretation’s meaning, then defer to it by acting or intending as it prescribes. This is the generous idea that truth is, more accurately, the condition of being in-the-truth. I am in Boston’s truth if a Red Sox fan, in Stalin’s truth if a Bolshevik, in Jerusalem’s truth if Jewish, Muslim, or Christian. Truth, on this reading, is ecumenical because responsive to our tribal differences. But there is a cost: truth is only self-pleading when invoked as truthfor-practical-life, truth-for-the-science-that-concerns-me, or truth for-(my)-religion.

4.4 Ontology and value Each of these three ontologies—illusion, construction, and theism—has its sanctioning value. Illusion is a strategy, a discipline, calculated to relieve us of frustration. Its motivating value is psychic comfort: relief from the cycle of appetite

|| 102 Robert Cummings Neville, On the Scope and Truth of Theology (New York: t&t clark, 2006), p. 35. 103 William James, Writings of William James, ed. John J. McDermott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 431.

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and false hopes. Construction is equivocal: is it a reaction to fear and vulnerability, or the excessive expression of confidence and entitlement? Are we repeatedly surprised because reality isn’t as it seems, or smug because, mostly or always, we get what we want? Life is enhanced in either case if we’re able to construct a world reliably congenial to our interests. Theism, too, mixes hope with fear: fear that reality is alien and adverse; hope that a generous creator values mercy as much as justice. Materialism—naturalism—is no exception. Its generating values are truth and accommodation: where are we; what need we do to survive and thrive? It may seem odd that ontology—the science of being—should take its impulse from hopes or fears, but that motive isn’t trivializing if hypotheses are true to this aim: live better by knowing who and where you are.

5 Meaning, value, and truth 5.1 Problematic One imagines that ontology is ground zero for categorial claims about reality. A single hypothesis having several variables may prefigure all the kinds and relations, the things and events that can or do exist in our world. Notational or stylistic differences would be the only factors distinguishing its alternate formulations, each translatable into all the others. This hope—an ontology of everything—expresses a representational ideal: a theory whose variables and relations are a schematic mapping of our world’s categorial features. It promises both a landscape mapped by a theory and, conversely, a theory confirmed by the successful predictions of practical life and science. Saying that Hell freezes over, one finds no evidence that it does; looking for processes that stabilize as entities—animal bodies or hurricanes—we see them. Could these same observations be used as evidence for several or many incommensurable theories? That is possible, though it’s odd that this variability rarely eventuates in contraries that share the same observational data. Phenomenalism and physicalism, radically opposed ontologies, are two such examples— all the data confirming one also confirm the other—yet there are additional considerations. Phenomenalism assumes that mind is the theater and consciousness the stage on which data appear; physicalism vindicates its claim that minds are themselves activities of a physical system: the body. We confirm that reality has no place for immaterial minds by stimulating bodies in ways that predictably alter their self-perceptions or behavior: people with headaches take aspirin. Critics object that a simple theory-of-everything can’t represent the world’s layered diversity, from quarks to human aims; they reject the assumption that its conventional signs may correspond, in the style of Wittgenstein’s picture-theory,104 to the reality signified. But is that so? We acknowledge laundry and grocery lists but suspect that the idea of an economical mapping relation seems naive. Why is that caution inhibiting, given the accuracy and applicability of F=ma and e=mc2? Ontological theories share this spare ideal, one they struggle to meet. Conceptual relativists are convinced that reality has no settled form or that there is no definitive way to choose among theories that are both logically consistent and applicable to available empirical data. But many alleged sports

|| 104 Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, para. 4.26, p. 63.

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(Goodman’s “grue”105) are contrived. Plausible contraries to established theories aren’t easily invented: Newton had no serious competitors until his equations were superseded by those of Einstein because complexity defeats shallow solutions. Solving it requires depth, range, and evidence. Confirmation is the middleterm verifying that theories are applicable and adequate. Why is it decisive? Because there are only three alternatives as we locate ourselves within reality: the hard wiring of mice and squirrels, light bulbs going on and off in our heads— intuition or innate ideas—or sensory data and the hypotheses used to construe them as we engage the ambient world. Hypothesis and confirmation—speculation and engagement—are the critical backdrop to this chapter because of the opposition between ontological hypotheses applicable and adequate to reality versus stories that use figurative language to tell compelling fantasies. Shakespeare’s plays express complex ideas in styles that make them quickly perceived by a cultivated audience, but there is a further test: are the ideas reformulable as literal, testable propositions? Is there evidence that sensitive young men are uncomfortable when they suspect their ambitious mothers of having married men who killed their fathers? Many stories are evocative without being able to satisfy this additional test. Ontology is sabotaged when invaded by entities or processes conjured by the myths driving fear or desire; valuing life or progress doesn’t validate tales of an after-life or the better world to come. Mythology has two effects: it sanctions ontologies having no basis but the meanings from which they derive (heaven and hell, minds and souls); it warns the credulous that apparent obstacles to naturalism require careful study. Is the psychological apparatus of everyday life—intentions, reasons, and norms—extra-natural? Is there a reason for thinking so, one more compelling than the opacity that deters analysis and understanding?

5.2 Context Interpretation embeds words or ideas signifying material states of affairs in webs of meaning. The meanings are often excessive but benign: our city is better than yours; we’re bigger than we seem when our team beats yours. But sometimes, the values alleged are parasitic on mythic entities promoted by grandiosity or fear: our god, rather than our team. Excess is commonplace because ideas of circumstances and ourselves are so easily affected by interests and needs, hopes and

|| 105 Nelson Goodman, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 74.

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anxieties. Here are nine markers of local reality, each vulnerable to distortion: i. One’s body, health, and skills. ii. Physical locale is decisive when living in a city or fishing port because it explains many of one’s skills and expectations. iii. Roles—in family, friendship, or work—establish one’s duties, practices, and skills: parent or friend. iv. Gender determines perceptions and possibilities. v. Government establishes modes of personal and social regulation, including rules or laws that facilitate behavior: schooling for literacy is prescribed; traffic laws ease movement; vi. Economy supplies work and fixes one’s tasks and roles. vii. Culture controls much that is done, and the manner of doing it. People using the same language (French, Quebeckers, and Walloons) use it differently. viii. Tradition shapes behavior and self-perception. ix. Individual perspectives are ensembles of needs, attitudes, and aims: the world of the previous variables as one sees and addresses it. Additional variables are amalgams of these nine: status, for example, is fixed by one’s gender, roles, speech, or tradition. Only three of the nine—one’s body, locale, and animal needs—have a material status distinct and separable from the web of interpretations established by personal, social, or cultural meanings. But they, too, aren’t exempt from interpretive contexts where meanings fix values and behavior: there are loyalties, rights, and duties, but also holy sites and dietary laws. These considerations anticipate distinct foci for discussions of meaning: those are practices essential to everyday life and the webs of interpretation that locate believers in circles of value, duties, or privilege. Dinner and marriage are practical solutions to animal needs, each sometimes construed as a devotion. Prayer, more confessional and abstract than practical, is access to a beneficent power. Meanings of these two sorts are mutually calibrated when interpretation locates the needs and interests of practical life in ennobling or transcendental contexts: it’s only a game (or war) but God is on our side. Pairing these two bases for meaning is problematic in ways considered in Chapter Six: how do we valorize practical life without locating it within an indefensible ontology. One sees already that the character or significance of anything may be embellished in terms that exceed it. Religious mythology is extravagant, but distortion is equally prevalent wherever we’re provoked by passion or vulnerability. We respond by construing ourselves and our couplings symbolically: marriage is forever; pregnancy is a duty. These are idealizations or constraints read as prescriptions: they tell us who we are and how to behave. Some—fashion magazines and old movies—are modest extrapolations from reality. Meanings are so far innocuous: they say or imply little that can’t be justified by reference to actual needs, interests, or pretensions. Others excite us with stories of patriotism or ethnicity: We’re encouraged to do what loyalty or propriety commends, though we

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risk losing sight of reasonable loyalties, aims, or motives. Ideologies and religions are more excessive. More than a gloss on practical virtues and concerns, they prefigure communities controlled by maps and aspirations having no basis in human needs or material processes. Believers learn these stories from birth, or find their way into them, somewhat like tourists who choose to live where they had only intended to visit. Needing protection from the cold we respond to a material vulnerability. Wanting a dress appropriate to a church wedding has a different status: cover plus significance. Reality acknowledges the difference by expanding to accommodate practices sanctioned by its meanings. Each implicates an actual state of affairs: old churches are cold in January but people expect the bride to be dressed for her wedding. But how much can reality grow to accommodate meaning’s demands? Dresses are made of fabrics sometimes specified on labels sewn into seams. Ideals and divinities are harder to track; why say that claims about them are true? Because believers conflate truth with customary practice or assertion, though truth is reduced to a corrupted expression of meaning when ideologies or religious doctrines are affirmed in either way. Newspapers are a reliable source of popular sentiment. The Guardian recently published an essay by Peter Ormerod, entitled “Of course the Christmas story is a fairytale. But that doesn’t make it untrue.” The essay “garners” truths from the story without distinguishing truths from homilies: are they truths about sentiment—British Christmas—or something more ontological? That ambiguity saves the author from declaring the uncomfortable implications provoking his essay: we like the values projected by our stories while fearing that we can’t idealize them if we forsake their sanctioning myths. Why not declare ourselves? Because we’re embarrassed by the credulity required to affirm the myths, though this is our established way of expressing the values and feelings they promote. But this is lame: are there no other ways to avow them. Surely, the feelings and values are common to other cultures where myths are different and perhaps less ontologically loaded: one imagines that atheist Martians also enjoy mulled wine with friends on cold days. Mythology works for and against us: it presents critical values, then discounts them because their justifying story isn’t credible. Physicists speak of light-cones; we live in the backward light cone of all the physical processes impinging on us. Value-cones are an analogue: sensitive to all the meanings affecting us, whether personal, social, or cultural, we favor some and ignore the rest. We can formulate the “truths” espoused by every such meaning—telling how they affect us and the agencies responsible for the effects—but this doesn’t entail the existence of the states of affairs postulated. Dreaming of the Tooth Fairy is meaningful to many people; true-for-them doesn’t entail that

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she exists. We need clarity about meaning, significance, value, truth, and their relations. Wilhelm Dilthey would have characterized my distinction as the relation of lived experience to its material base. I am supposing that nature makes constant demands on people, and that we satisfy its demands in terms that are effective in our circumstances while congenial to our culture. His order of priorities was the opposite of mine because he regarded nature, in the style of Kant, as mind’s construction. Accommodation is the wrong word when the “world” is a construction created by schematizing sensory data: Images emerge from a continual flux, they are referred to objects, these objects fill and occupy empirical consciousness, and they form the object of descriptive natural science…The concepts through which this happens are auxiliary constructions that thought creates for this purpose. Thus nature as foreign to us, transcending the apprehending subject, is elaborated by auxiliary constructions based on the phenomenally given.106

This constructed world—layered by the successive application of ever more specialized concepts—compares to the “human world” of lived experience: palpable life versus a complex abstraction. Dilthey wasn’t in doubt about their relative priority: “Thus we come upon the category of meaning. It provides the relation that determines and articulates the apprehension of the course of our life.”107 Life’s trajectory is also plain: The expression of this is autobiography. It is an interpretation of life in its mysterious combination of chance, destiny, and character. Wherever we look, our consciousness is working to come to terms with life…The same relation between the meaning of particular lived experiences and the sense of the whole course of life holds in poetry. But here it displays an entirely new freedom, for the imagination can release events from the constraint of reality and shape them based on the consciousness of their meaning for life.108

Nature is everywhere the constrained product of the rules used to construct it; life rises to freedom as imagination creates meanings unforeseeable in nature. Which is the better choice: locate humanity and all its projects in a reality we alter but don’t create? Or say, with Dilthey that nature is the creature of the concepts and rules used to think it, though the reality we engage supplies tasks, content, and purposes for practical lives informed and liberated by imagination? His

|| 106 Wilhelm Dilthey, The Formation of the Historical World in the Human Sciences, eds. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 111. 107 Ibid., p. 95. 108 Ibid., p. 96.

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account of lived experience is purged of religion’s transcendental aspirations, but it is no less misleading for being innocuous. For Dilthey, despite his subtlety and care, seems unruffled by occasions when nature is surprising because disruptive. Why ignore these events and their explosive effects in lived experience? There is, perhaps, a reason: Dilthey contrasted the human sciences to natural science, not to nature as it opposes or supports practical aims and interests. He remarked that sciences fractionate as rules differentiate or construct separate ever more specialized domains or their objects. These many sciences are, for him, parlous; they compare to the depth and mass of the practices constitutive of experience. Dilthey’s emphasis on nature as construed by the sciences, rather than nature as confronted in practical life, may be explained by an assumption common to people influenced by Marburg Kantians. They emphasized that schematizations of nature advance with scientific thinking; better theories expose previously unsuspected phenomena or relations. There is, on this view, no better appeal to nature than the one sciences provide, however specialized they are. Yet this is still puzzling: one doesn’t wait on science to acknowledge that nature often disrupts practical life. Deferring to it intellectualizes storms that floods the streets.

5.3 Meaning Peirce explicated meaning as the three-term relation of a sign, its interpreter, and referent:109dog signifies dogs to English speakers. This formulation was appropriate to his realism: mind construes its thoughts or words as signs of entities or events distinct from the signs. Those are usually extra-mental states of affairs, though we also refer, when deliberating or speaking with others, to hope, ideas, or pains. We typically lose the specificity of Peirce’s three-term relationship— signs signifying their referents—when meaning is significance rather than signification: signs that are meaningful because they evoke memories, feelings, or things imagined or perceived. So, heaven signifies a state of mind (rather than a place) or the advantages of living there: “I’m in heaven (happy, serene, relieved).” This transition—from signified to significant—seems to resemble the emergents represented in Figure 1: Hollywood names a place, but then it’s reconceived to signify all that’s out-of-scale in American life. But there is a difference: every next step in Figure 1’s trajectory is secured within the ontology of its antecedents:

|| 109 Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. 6, para. 347, p. 237.

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atoms to molecules, molecules to cells. Meaning’s trajectory implies, to the contrary, that successors rise to a condition categorially different from their antecedents. Imagine Betsy Ross sewing the first American flag. She takes ordinary threads of three colors, weaves and knots them, until—eureka—we have the symbol of a nation, a standard so exalted that insulting it is a crime. Why does this newly revered object come to be treated as though it were ontologically different from its material constituents? Because we invest it with meaning: it symbolizes— summarizes, embodies—our ideals and self-regard. This, too, is emergence, though not the emergence of Figure 1. There, novel properties emerge with successive levels of organization and activity; here, novel properties are assigned to a state, affairs, or an event when it is construed in terms prescribed by a meaning (a priest is ordained, a president installed). We respond as if a chasm had opened in reality, though attitude and subsequent behavior, nothing ontological, are the only factors changed. Meaning’s pliability—the transition from signifiers to significance—is consequential for truth. The correspondence view holds that thoughts or sentences are true if the possibilities they signify are instantiated; the alternative appropriate to meaning affirms that practices or beliefs are true if enacted or affirmed. Every life is distinguished by its commitments; each of us lives in-the-truth when faithful to whatever is significant in our lives. But this is truth in an extended sense, truth as fidelity to one’s practices, beliefs, or stories. Peirce’s rendering of the sign process is cool and distant: an interpretant uses signs to signify or intend their referents.110 His account is well suited to meanings that are iconic or indexical: signs having the same form as their referents (portraits and their subjects). It works as well with conventional signs (using rat to signify rats) and with signs commanding an action (“Stop!”). It is less cogent when the relation of meanings to beliefs, feelings, or practices is uncertain: “Blondes to the right; brunettes to the left.” We perceive that sense and significance are overlaid, though we’re queasy about a meaning unexplained by its referents but intimated by their difference. Commitments generated by meanings evoke rules, norms, or expectations implied by anchoring referents familiar to their partisans. They may be saturated with idealizations—“The Queen!”—or shrouded in hopes or terrors that are personal or social: “To the barricades.” We are comfortable with meanings favorable to well-being but aroused by intimations of conflict and risk. Audio equipment makers talk of “surround sound,” music that wraps around a listener. We strive

|| 110 Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. vi, para. 347, p. 237.

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to center ourselves in coherent webs of meanings that are safe and approving. We retreat, if disrupted, to their benign fragments: at home, with friends. Peircian signs are first-cousins to roadmaps; they enable a community’s members to signal one another about local topography, instruments, and tasks (do this, with that). Meanings of this other sort—social, cultural, or personal—valorize tasks or their instruments: holy books or swords. Their product is a resonant space, one whose significance is perceived by people who enter or perceive it: your prayer beads, my shotgun. People asked about the meanings in their lives specify islands of association, some connected, others that seem autonomous. One’s religious beliefs or practices seem irrelevant to tolerant friends or fellow workers; or a culture is hegemonic and commanding, so people genuflect to authorized meanings. This difference—responsive, indifferent, or hostile—distinguishes situations whose meanings are congenial, neutral, or alien. Entering their spaces, we announce our credentials (we fit), or suppress the alien part of us while hoping to be ignored. People anxious about their heresies treasure the anomie of big cities because cities invert the intimacies of a village: all feel safe if none are recognized. Now extrapolate to religious meanings and the associations they evoke. Some are shallow because merely cosmetic (religious jewelry); others intimate the deep structure of the cosmos to which a creed promises access. Believers asked for evidence of their God’s existence have an easy and immediate response: join us in rituals, learn their meanings, and you, too, shall have ecstatic evidence of his presence. What is that evidence? A web of associations more cohesive than any argument, associations so intense that we know God—in feeling, thought, practice, and desire—as surely as we are sentient. This is the best kind of knowledge, knowledge by acquaintance. Why is it best? Because there is no gap between one’s conscious self and the thing known; its character is manifest—its presence is certain—rather than inferred from signs (words or paintings) that characterize or represent it. Descartes used these resources to put his existence out of doubt; Plotinus was confident of having had ecstatic—unmediated—encounters with the One.111 Practices and beliefs transfigured by meaning have both advantages: elated while confirming the existence of the thing revered, we struggle to embody its luminous energy. This intimate mix of knowledge and desire impelled Descartes’ Third Meditation and Paul Tillich:

|| 111 Plotinus, Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna (London: Penguin, 1991), V, 3, 4, pp. 364–390.

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To overcome the ambiguities of cognition the divine Spirit must conquer the cleavage between subject and object even more drastically than in the case of language. The cleavage appears, for example, in the circumstances that every cognitive act must use abstract concepts, thus disregarding the concreteness of the situation; that it must give a partial answer, although “the truth is the whole” (Hegel); and that it must use patterns of conceptualization and argumentation which fit only the realm of objects and their relation to each other.112 Within the structure of subject-object separation, observation and conclusion are the way in which the subject tries to grasp the object, remaining always strange to it and never certain of success. To the degree in which the subject-object structure is overcome, observation is replaced by participation (which includes observation) and conclusion is replaced by insight (which includes conclusions). Such insight on the basis of participation is not a method which can be used at will but a state of being elevated to what we have called the transcendent unity. Such Spirit-determined cognition is “revelation,” just as Spirit-determined language is “Word of God.”…Wisdom can be distinguished from objectifying knowledge (sapientia from scientia) by its ability to manifest itself beyond the cleavage of subject and objects.113

Like Plato describing the soul’s direct acquaintance with the Forms and Descartes’ self-perception, Tillich supposed access to God comes by way of revelation: The word “revelation” (“removing the veil”) has been used traditionally to mean the manifestation of something hidden which cannot be approached through ordinary ways of gaining knowledge…A revelation is a special and extraordinary manifestation which removes the veil from something which is hidden in a special and extraordinary way. This hiddenness is often called “mystery”….Whatever is essentially mysterious cannot lose its mysteriousness even when it is revealed.114 Revelation is the manifestation of what concerns us ultimately. The mystery which is revealed is of ultimate concern to us because it is the ground of our being….Revelation always is a subjective and an objective event in strict interdependence. Someone is grasped by the manifestation of the mystery; this is the subjective side of the event. Something occurs through which the mystery of revelation grasps someone; this is the object side…Revelation is not real without the receiving side, and it is not real without the giving side. They mystery appears objectively in terms of what traditionally has been called “miracle.” It appears subjectively in terms of what has sometimes been called “ecstasy.”115

|| 112 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), p. 255. 113 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), p. 256. 114 Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 1. pp. 108–109. 115 Ibid., pp. 110–111.

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Tillich’s idea of revelation exploits a little discussed but classic idea of truth: different from truth as correspondence or coherence, this is truth as identity: “Subject and objects must be united in a theonomous creation of the Spiritual Presence through the aesthetic function.”116 Identity requires that there be no gap between knower and known, no disconnection where error might breed. So, God dominates sensibility, to an unthinkable scale, as music invades the listener. Tillich’s theism requires that he ambiguate the notion of truth. Asking him for confirming evidence of the sort appropriate to questions about the boiling point of water disables his theology. It doesn’t have that effect because the idea of empirically testable, propositional truth is, to his mind, paltry. Meaning invites an alternative: it justifies the intuitions and identifications that exemplify beingin-the-truth: “Ecstasy” (“standing outside one’s self”) points to a state of mind which is extraordinary in the sense that the mind transcends its ordinary situation. Ecstasy is not a negation of reason; it is the state of mind in which reason is beyond itself, that is, beyond its subject-object structure…This is the state mystics try to reach by ascetic and meditative activities. But mystics know that these activities are only preparations and that the experience of ecstasy is due exclusively to the manifestation of the mystery in a revelatory situation. Ecstasy occurs only if the mind is grasped by the mystery, namely, by the ground of being and meaning. And, conversely, there is no revelation without ecstasy. At best there is information which can be tested scientifically. The “prophet’s ecstasy” of which the hymn sings and of which the prophetic literature is full, indicates that the experience of ecstasy has universal significance.117

Tillich would likely have said that the circular reasoning conspicuous in this passage is a consequence of the prosaic logic that defeats us as we try to rise above it. But there is also this other way of reading him: Tillich was captured by a story. He uses circularity to vindicate a myth for which there is neither empirical nor logical evidence. The superior reason to which he alludes is better described as his willingness to suspend rational criticism in deference to sacred “mystery.” Other religious thinkers are less confident that we have ecstatic access to God, though meaning, they say, elides with truth in stories whose depth exceeds rational argument or analysis. This was Richard Taylor’s emphasis: The power of a religion lies in its stories, not simply as stories, but as vehicles of truth and, sometimes, profound truth. It is superficial to say, on whatever grounds that scriptural accounts of events long past are false, and it is no less superficial to say that they are, as they

|| 116 Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 3, p. 257. 117 Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 1, pp. 111–112.

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stand, true. Some, at least, have a deeper meaning, overwhelmingly important to human understanding, and the task should be to try finding those meanings. Viewed this way, we can see that secularists, who dismiss religion as simply false, and fundamentalists, who insist on literal truth, both miss the point….A myth, like a poem or a work of art, might embody different truths. The myth of Sisyphus…has in fact been variously understood, and it would be in vain to contend that one interpretation is the meaning. The same is surely true for religion, and it is well that it is so. While proclaiming the often precious insights of religion, we can at the same time concede that they are buried in mystery, some more and some less, and we are liberated from the kind of dogmatism that makes any other person’s understanding of religion an adversarial one. Literalism, and the urge to reduce religious myth to clearly and rationally understood claims, always amounts to trivialization. Truths that are perfectly clear and unambiguous to reason are not the truths of religion, while myth and mystery, which are never clear and unambiguous, are.118

Myths embellish life with hopeful stories about an afterlife or resurrection (Plato’s myth of Er, for example). Their scenarios violate physical laws and, sometimes, the principle of non-contradiction. But they relieve our distress and give us hope for a better life in another place or protection in this one. All this, while supplying no information about the mysteries they invoke. Taylor, undeterred by lacking that information, conflated meaning with truth: What, indeed, is belief in God? Many assume that this means simply a belief in the existence of a god. That, by itself, however, has no more significance to religion than a belief that there is life on Mars. It is only an opinion about what happens to exist. What a Christian professes is not merely that there is a god, but rather, belief in God, which is a vastly stronger statement. And this is something not easily comprehended. It can be seen through story or myth, but it cannot be stated. The story of Abraham gives us a sense of its meaning, as does the story of Job, or, above all, the manner in which Jesus dealt with his suffering on the cross. Here a Christian sees, dimly, what it means to believe in God, but not even the wisest theologian or philosopher can say what it is. They should not even try.119

Meaning, this implies, is the principal or only access to deep truths. Taylor made a virtue of mysteries: postulate them, say that myths are their principal or only points of access, then aver that each myth discloses several or many truths. Never supply evidence independent of myths for these alleged states of affairs; supply no criteria for culling false “truths.” Never concede that interpretation’s depths may be wholly analogical: we see something of ourselves in mythic stories. That is, indeed, a principal motive for contriving them. || 118 Richard Taylor, “Religion and truth,” Philosophy Now, vol. 47, August/September, 2004, p. 10. 119 Ibid., p. 11.

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How does this posture justify cosmologies postulated when imaginary tales are institutionalized? For there is no limit to the “truths” created when imagination is coupled to socialization, uncertainty, and power. Many regimes, political as well as religious, have their pathos and self-justifying myths. How shall we know which mythologies are reliable entree to deep truths? Myths of the sort Taylor favored use true-to-life imagery to imply the reality of states of affairs for which there is, otherwise, no confirming evidence. Given stories intelligible by virtue of their figurative meanings, Taylor inferred that the stories, alone, are sufficient evidence for the mysteries they intimate; there is nothing amiss when people declare that their beliefs are true merely because confirmed by stories and feelings shared with other believers. Is that enough to establish their credibility? A religiously schooled editor once told me that she had stopped believing in “Easter bunny stories.” Would Taylor have counseled her to try again: find better stories, reach for the depths, affirm the mysteries revealed? Myths are powerful as they take imagination to places otherwise unknown; their meanings often prefigure vital possibilities. My favorites are Plato’s figure of the divided line and his allegory of the cave; nothing is deeper or more systematic in all the books of philosophy. But some meanings aren’t relevant to our circumstances. Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène describes the trials of “the world’s most beautiful woman.” Is there such a creature? The idea of her is surely meaningful. It promotes fantasies on all sides and rings up the profits of those who sell unguents in small tubes for high prices. But here as in religion, meanings express our values without signifying any actual state of affairs. There are said to be billions of exoplanets in our galaxy, given an extrapolation from the small sample photographed. The laws of motion confirmed on Earth seem applicable throughout the galaxy: do we suppose that “truths” sanctioned by our meanings are also cogent wherever there’s life on those other planets?

5.4 Significance Reality is perceived through the scrim of attitudes, each an encapsulated response to personal or social history, each a focus for relief or aversion. Where are we vulnerable; who acknowledges our worth? Measure a person’s baseline heartbeat or blood pressure, notice when it rises or falls, then ask him or her what provoked the change. The likely answer will be a significant feeling, thought, or encounter; one is threatened or appeased. Sensibility—reactivity—is the internal register of this history: each person responds to stimuli with biases that seem natural and appropriate given circumstances, history, and his or her intentions. We address other people and circumstances from inside this battery of preferences

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and aversions. What is significant; what is arousing? Action or inhibition reveals us. Significance is measured in either of two ways. One state of affairs is significant for another because of being, objectively, its cause, effect, or collateral cause or effect (effects of a common cause). Or the effect is subjective: things are perceived as significant because they affect (or seem to affect) one’s aims, behavior, or concerns. The first measure is relevant to practical life and science: an act or event is significant for another if one is cause or effect of the other. The second measure expresses the perspective of people responding to circumstances as they pursue an interest or plan. Is the weather propitious? That depends: what were you planning to do? Significant and meaningful are often used synonymously. A significant moment in one’s life is also meaningful: either word may be allusive or specific; both may evoke the same array of associations. But there are also occasions when significance is uncertain—a lure—while meaning is specific. Gestures, for example, are tantalizing when their meaning isn’t plain: what is it we’re seeing; is it significant; do we need to know? The new wife, feeling her way into a clutch of meanings, doesn’t know all the signs that provoke her in-laws. Comfort is achieved when there are no surprises: she learns the responses significant to them, though not always how they’re interpreted (what they mean to those construing them). Other contrasts are also familiar. Labels meaningful to me have no interest for you, though my response to them is significant to you as evidence of my values. Your passion for the monarchy makes no sense to me, though a marker when thinking of you. Significance, when distinct from meaning, implies a figure-ground experience: something stands out because it’s an obstacle or sign pertinent to a current interest or activity or because its meaning is a lure. Significance is most subtly linked to meaning, while distinguished from it, when it functions as a measure of the priority that Tillich or Taylor ascribe to “ultimate” religious meanings. Significance is external: it announces the ultimate. Meaning is internal: it embodies the ultimate.

5.5 Value Values are intrinsic (things allegedly valuable in themselves, art or justice, for example), or instrumental (laws that assure health or civility). Or they are good versions of a kind (a good violin). Instrumental values can’t be faulted—eyes are good for reading, feet for walking. Goods-of-a-kind is an essentialist but innocu-

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ous characterization of things well-made: fresh flowers, clothes that fit, performances that exhibit a work’s structure and rhythm. Intrinsic values are problematic: is anything good or bad in itself? The question disguises the complexity of my answer: this or that is both a good-of-its-kind and something desired or preferred. Those who like chocolate or wine suppose that its best versions are goodin-themselves, though (in a paraphrase of Bishop Butler) they are what they are. Their goodness or badness is a measure of two things: they are well-made, hence goods-of-their-kind, and they satisfy, to some degree, our taste for them. Imagine unanimity after a piano recital: surely, the pianist’s skill and the music played are goods in themselves, given that her playing was superlative. But consider this response from a distracted connoisseur. He or she knows the musical and pianistic variables, heard them satisfied, but didn’t respond. Was it good, we ask? Yes, in the respect that it did everything well: but, no, says the expert, I wasn’t moved. But was it good? To the first degree, not the second. Ascriptions of inherent value require satisfaction of the variables pertinent to being well-made, and positive response from listeners whose cultivated sensibility qualifies them as connoisseurs. Nothing is good in itself; “inherent” value conflates, then misconstrues these two considerations: a good-of-its-kind and a connoisseur’s evaluation. Evaluation is sometimes satisfied by desire, though desire is impulsive and not, in itself a measure of the thing desired. That happens when anything is made desirable because heavily advertised. For status often explains us: imagination and desire impel us when valuations are justified by norms prescribed by prestigious meanings. But this is not always our posture: we’re often deliberate. Addressing the near world with a hierarchy of tastes, attitudes, interests, and motivations, we look to confirm that things of interest are goods of their kinds. Do they work; are they well-made? Valuation is selective: yes to this, no to that. Appraisal is effective when the standards for goods of a kind are stable, though judgments are fraught when critics, ordinary people or connoisseurs, lack agreed standards for appraising new ideas, styles, or commodities. They recognize the old, but are confused by the new: is it well made; do they like it? Artists, too, are confused, though eventually a new style expresses itself in ways that are intelligible to them and critics, too. Is the style good in itself? Music created in twentieth century university departments was often flattered for satisfying scholastic requirements. It was good by those standards, but hard to like. Very few people described it as intrinsically good. Intrinsic values are dismaying because we don’t want to believe that some things are not essentially good or bad, or good or bad to some degree, just by

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virtue of what they are. Goods-of-a-kind is not the same idea; pure cyanide satisfies this standard without being good or bad in itself. We escape this tangle by considering the analogy to intrinsic goods when seeing something red. We don’t hesitate making this identification when seeing the color in good light, though nothing seen as red is red in itself; we say things are red, though “seeing them as red” is more accurate, hence the parallel. And equally, we credit things with intrinsic value when satisfying these two conditions: they are good examples of their kinds while satisfying us (music well-played). “Intrinsic value” is, in Locke’s terms, a secondary property ascribed to things because of their effects on us. One conspicuous value—human worth—hovers beyond the ordinary, if only because we create beauty and knowledge or because we are moral or aspire to be. But there is an ambiguity: are individual lives said to be intrinsically valuable because unique or because of capacities that include consciousness, conscience, thought, feeling, or will? Does each person have intrinsic worth because being human and alive, or because of his or her ways of using these powers? There are two points of view. One alleges that individual human lives are the apotheosis of being; the richness of our capacities for awareness, productivity, and enjoyment elevates us to a scale inaccessible to other beings. Destroying such a creature— ignoring its essential capacity for goodness—is the ultimate impiety. The other argues that there are no reasons but sentiment, self-love above all, for the idea that human life is inherently good. We are more or less admirable and valuable for what we do, not merely for being. Let ascriptions of goodness or badness satisfy a consequentialist standard: lives are good or bad because of their effects. Nothing transcendental (super-natural) qualifies this judgment. There is a middle-ground: people are sometimes transformed by experience or reflection. This is perhaps the strongest reason for opposing the death penalty: life is an opportunity for change, one denied by capital punishment. But this, too, is a consequentialist standard: people reformed are judged by their altered effects or for their desire to cause them.

5.6 Value’s relation to meaning and significance Many things are goods of their kind or good instrumentally, but nothing is good in itself. This realization should extinguish the idea that value is essential to things said to have it, though meanings have the contrary implication: they explode with hyperbole, construing otherwise neutral states of affairs—whether people, customs, attitudes, practices, occasions, cities, or states—as intrinsic goods. Beliefs and attitudes postulate rules and realities otherwise unknown: Friday or Saturday or Sunday is sacred; alternatives are violations.

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Things acquire meaning—they are valorized—in either of two ways. Some values construed as intrinsic are manifest. Labels—on shirts or cars—are examples: they bespeak the status of the articles labeled. A monarch’s crown is a label, one whose authority speaks for itself. Are labels merely signs of the value ascribed? Yes and no. Yes, because such things have additional value-making properties (as shirts and cars do). No, because the label is itself construed as a deep pool of significance, both a symbol of value and its embodiment. Values of the other sort are the ritual practices—at wedding, funerals, or courts—sanctioned by meanings. Each participant and gesture has its specified role; actors and observers affirm a practice’s meaning while sensing their personal value as participants. Which sort of value is realized? Meaning would have us suppose that marriages blessed by God, like souls newly arrived in Heaven, are intrinsic goods. One may object that these are instrumental goods; evidence is required if we’re to believe that God has infused them with value that is qualitatively, though not quantitatively like his own. Meaning demurs, because God has no reason to justify himself to us. His perfection is unqualified, ample, and infinite: its effects emanate from him as light radiates from the Sun. We shiver, but discount the metaphor. Things having value acquire it relationally by virtue of their effects on others. Weddings and funerals consolidate social systems—churches, marriages, and civil societies—by intensifying the conviction and loyalty of their members. Their value is instrumental, not intrinsic. This is diminished value from meaning’s point of view, because the relative efficacy of alternate instruments is always disputable. It wants clarity and authority; its ascriptions of intrinsic value have that effect in believers. Many things are construed as meaningful because of their instrumentality or because they are goods of a kind. My grandfather’s pipe is meaningful to me because it was his; because it was made in a village I know and like; because its maker was also a war hero (on the side I prefer); because its smell recalls the tobacco of the company in which I’ve invested; because it’s well-made; and because the burl of its wooden bowl pleases me. These disparate meanings are usually suppressed when I’m pleased by seeing the pipe on my desk, but their associations provoke conflicting attitudes: I regret the war, and don’t favor companies whose products sicken their customers. Anomalies are frequent: love thy neighbor; fight a righteous war. One of Quine’s remark about fields of sentences also applies to meanings that point several ways:

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Beneath the uniformity that unites us in communication there is a chaotic personal diversity of connections, and, for each of us, the connections continue to evolve. No two of us learn our language alike, nor, in a sense, does any finish learning it while he lives.120

Quine doubted that sentences have unambiguous referents; and, equally, one cannot directly infer the value or values signified or expressed by a web of meanings. This impasse doesn’t entail total incommunicability if people who disagree about a situation and its implications for meaning and value (a failed partnership, for example) deploy the same small set of motivating values. Emphasizing them—vanity, embarrassment, and fear, perhaps—prevents quarrels from getting out of hand if the aggrieved parties can be made to perceive these concerns in one another. Values are often considered anomalous with a materialist ontology when they are construed as idealizations or norms, hence alien to actual states of affairs. But this assumption founders if, for example, norms are the recipes for making good cakes or pies. Nor is valuation mysterious if it reduces to one’s taste in music or a squirrel’s preference for nuts, one the effect of cultivation, the other of hard wiring. Why does my daughter’s old room have value for me? Because it reminds me of her. None of these examples has other-worldly implications.

5.7 Truth Truth’s character is much disputed, but well understood. Correspondence is mocked because the skeptical tradition after Descartes, Locke, and Kant insists that things may not be as percepts, thoughts, or sentences represent them. Better find an alternative theory, one that bridges the gap between thought and its referents so claims may be tested and affirmed. This is tacitly the desire for transparency: let nothing stand between us and the states of affairs we address. Coherence is the principal option because it satisfies Plato’s intuitionist hope that the truth of our ideas might be established as they stand before the mind. We need only confirm that joining two or more thoughts or sentences is not contradictory but is coherent, and that the truth of any constituent sentence or story may be inferred from those to which it has inductive or deductive relations. But coherence is problematic: imagine that all the names in a telephone directory are replaced by sentences that are, like the names, mutually irrelevant. Call the book

|| 120 Quine, Word and Object, p. 13.

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a novel: is it coherent? Is it more coherent if the sentences are listed alphabetically? No, because coherence requires a stronger bond, though it’s hard to formulate a logical test adequate for the mutual implication of thoughts or sentences in a story or conversation. Formalizability—deductive form—is an available alternative, though much too strong for most ensembles of thoughts or sentences. We’re left with informal criteria: seems coherent to me. Or we use social criteria: we regulate the narrative of our national history by emphasizing virtues while striking references to embarrassing episodes or practices. Discrediting coherence as an adequate theory of truth doesn’t imply that it isn’t an essential tool for assembling complex representations of reality. Progress in practical life and science is piecemeal: we master one bit before moving on to another, or we assemble several bits of uncertain footing to create something firmer. Confident that advertisements for your slippers are accurate, I buy your shoes, though it’s your performance—your reliability, not the coherence of your ads—that makes them credible. An outlier, called truth-as-redundancy or deflationism is popular among academic philosophers, though unknown to others: Isn’t it a truism that “X” refers to X? Is this merely the referential analogue of the fact that “Snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white?...If we begin with Quine’s deflationary semantic notions, in other words, then talking about the referent of the term “X,” or the truth of the sentence “X is F,” is just another way of talking about the object X. So if our original question was really about language, and we rephrase the issue in these semantic terms, we’ve simply changed the subject. We haven’t traversed the semantic ladder [from words to things], but simply taken up a different issue, talking in what Carnap called the formal mode about objects, rather than talking about language. On this deflationary view, then, object naturalism commits a fallacy of equivocation.121

We use words, then sometimes talk about them. In the first case, we speak in an object language: we use “X,” apparently signifying an object, X. In the second, we use a formal mode of speech—rising to a meta-language—while speaking about “X” in the context of the sentence where it appears. But in neither case, do we escape language by exceeding it on the way to addressing X directly. What would the author of this passage—Huw Price—likely do if warned of an on-coming truck? Would he ascend the semantic ladder and ignore the truck? This is the subtlety of a philosophy that seems never to have heard of practical life or Peirce’s

|| 121 Huw Price, “Naturalism without representationalism,” in Naturalism in Question (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 77.

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secondness: raw, unmediated contact with a world that resists us. Language enables us to communicate about the world; it isn’t a barrier that deflects every attempt to engage it. Assigning or testing for truth is unnecessary in ordinary discourse; we don’t interrupt every speech or conversation to ask if assertions are true because veracity is usually assumed. But what if this is the conversation of witches or warlocks where many things said are false? What if the speaker is known to lie? The redundancy theory is a philosophic conceit: the polite deference by a tribe’s consensual members to one another’s speeches. It describes social assent, not truth. Why this naiveté? Because the meanings that establish webs of shared values make us credulous when our tribe’s members, especially its seers, share their beliefs. Truth as redundancy favors assertion; truth as coherence wants an integrated narrative. Truth as correspondence is never less than implicitly tentative: assertions could be false. Peirce coupled his realism to the requirements of experiment and testable hypotheses: rather than satisfy ourselves that ideas are true because amplified and coherent, we predict the sensory difference anticipated by their truth. Confirmation’s critics deride this emphasis; science, they tell us, is too busy theorizing to have time for tests that are easily over-ridden by adjusting the relations of a theory’s sentences. But how else would these critics have us distinguish fairy tales from truths? I assume that correspondence is the correct theory of truth, that percepts are natural but imperfect signs of their causes, and that words are conventional signs (cat and dog don’t look like cats and dogs). Thoughts (nerve excitations) are natural signs but they, too, are unlike their referents. Actions that enable us to operate successfully with or upon other people and things confirm that signs of both sorts are used accurately.

5.8 Meaning/significance or truth Truth is sometimes a luxury or annoyance; we’re often happy with meanings that ignore it. Imagine that buttons are wealth and that a fairy queen exchanges marks or rubles for buttons, at an even rate of exchange. Coherence commends the narrative, until banks reject a deposit. Correspondence acknowledges the fable’s meaning but concedes failure for want of confirming evidence. Fantasy is sometimes comforting; it isn’t truth, though attitudes informed by myths are socialized when neighbors have them too. Why fault the neighbors’ conviction when feelings and intuitions are also aspects of experience? Where is the deficiency in evidence construed as truth-in-feeling or truth-in-presence? We’re skeptical because the experience of divinity or a dead uncle’s presence may have either of

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several causes, and because there is no independent test of either claim. Rain dances are prayers of a kind; they don’t confirm the existence of rain gods. The critical difference between meaning and truth intimates the methodological difference of interpretation and inquiry. Interpretation tells an ontological story, then construes all or some part of reality in its terms. Inquiry describes and explains states of affairs by formulating and testing hypotheses: do they predict phenomena that are observable and observed? Stories can’t be refuted—falsified—because one can always ignore disconfirming facts or phenomena or redescribe them in ways congenial to the story. Disconfirmed hypotheses are revised or discarded: evidence or the lack of it is a corrective to belief. Thinkers who favor interpretation ignore inquiry because they don’t believe that reality stands against belief as a control on thought and practice. These are Kantians who have accepted the master’s decree that anything ulterior to schematized experience is an unknowable, unthinkable negative noumenon. Here, for example, is Hans-Georg Gadamer: Language is not just one of man’s possessions in the world, but on it depends the fact that man has a world at all. For man the world exists as world in a way that no other being in the world experiences. But this world is linguistic in nature. This is the real heart of Humboldt’s assertion, which he intended quite differently, that languages are views of the world. By this Humboldt means that language maintains a kind of independent life over against the individual member of a linguistic community and introduces him, as he grows into it, to a particular attitude and relationship to the world as well. But the ground of this statement is more important, namely that language has no independent life apart from the world that comes to language within it. Not only is the world ‘world’ only insofar as it comes into language, but language, too, has its real being only in the fact that the world is represented within it. Thus the original humanity of language means at the same time the fundamental linguistic quality of man’s being-in-the-world.122

Gadamer’s version of hermeneutics has no use for inquiry because it makes no sense of the idea that reality is thought’s test, not its creature. Language and the stories it is used to tell aren’t value-neutral: their meanings and values are written into the very texture of the realities they express. This account of language is, nevertheless, odd for implying that everything thinkable derives its intelligibility from language. One may be thoroughly versed in music, painting, nature, games, or innumerable practices while having no words for describing most or any of their significant details. Consider Tannhäuser or any simple tune; now find words to express or represent all its notes and phrases. Concede that your success is barely partial, then ask: does it follow that neither opera nor tune is real? What is || 122 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad, 1985), p. 401.

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implied about language’s relation to reality if many phenomena are inexpressible or unsignifiable in our most flexible languages? Is it still plausible that reality in itself, reality as experienced or known, is the creature of the languages used to construe it. For if not, we’re properly cautious when construing ontologizing meanings as accurate representations of reality itself. Popularized versions of hermeneutics are familiar to religions’ apologists. Timothy Keller postulates that all belief is predicated on faith, hence that religious fantasies are no less secure than Newton’s laws: [B]elievers should learn to look for reasons behind their faith, skeptics must learn to look for a type of faith hidden within their reasoning. All doubts, however skeptical and cynical they may seem are really a set of alternate beliefs. You cannot doubt Belief A except from a position of faith in Belief B….Every doubt, therefore, is based on a leap of faith.123

Keller doesn’t acknowledge the difference between interpretation and inquiry. He has no reference, therefore, for the difference between faith and confidence: faith in a preferred story, or confidence in hypotheses justified by the empirical data confirming them. Keller invokes faith without defining it, though a definition is close a hand: faith is belief without evidence. Its meanings are self-fulfilling and self-promoting. Faith in them is affirmation: tell the story, believe it. Don’t worry about skeptics because their doubt is just the posture of those who question one unfalsifiable story from the safety of another. Keller can’t acknowledge, he doesn’t see, that many doubts are based on the absence of evidence. Science, like practical life, isn’t just a story one stubbornly believes while imbued with its values or waiting for the salvation it promises. Science is self-correcting inquiry; its doubts are based on error and the absence of evidence, not on faith. How closely should meaning track truth, given that experiences imbued with meaning don’t need truth to earn their significance? There is a simple statue fourteen inches high poised over a post in a local shop. It has opposed but identical faces on a single head carved from a block of wood. The proprietor tells me it was made in Gabon in the 1920’s. This statue may have been emblematic of a god, though its only current power is the shock and calm provoked by seeing it. The sculptor might have said that reality is shifty—he found these faces in a log—and that anyway, the disorientation expressed by identical but opposed faces is a provocation for whatever confusion you feel when seeing them. Let art sabotage the fussy prerogatives of practical life and science where reality-testing is more

|| 123 Timothy Keller, The Reason for God (New York: Riverhead, 2008), p. xviii.

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severe. They require a plan or hypothesis that works, one that accurately maps a terrain while sequencing actions calculated to produce an effect. Romantics believe that knowledge of a terrain is less urgent than a daring plan and strong will. Or they substitute a story for a plan, then ignore the terrain and proselytize: convince or compel others to endorse your story until the mass of believers is large enough to give the impression that the myth is true. Though meanings propagated among credulous believers are not like plans tested by several agents. There tests for successful recipes, but none for stories detailing the rebirth of souls. Plato’s “Myth of Er” was labeled a myth. How shall we respond to those who say that myth is irrelevant because transcendence is sometimes manifest in the clarity and intensity of immediate experience: that nothing is plainer than God’s intimate presence. We remark that having an experience is distinct from the claims made on its behalf. Is there independent confirmation that a deity exists or makes itself known in this way; is there no alternative way of construing the experience of divinity? Skeptical responses don’t entail that religious meanings aren’t personally inspiring or socially binding. We like our tribal stories and the loyalties they create. But thoughtful fans know that rooting for their team is an acquired loyalty; moving to Boston might justify becoming a Red Sox fan. Disparate meanings are acknowledged without prejudice where friends and colleagues worship differently or not at all. We fear that values are hostage to meaning, but is that so? Many people need songs or stories to move them along, but personal and social prudence require self-control and a degree of rational sobriety. Is anarchy the likely effect if values aren’t stabilized by religious or other global meanings? It isn’t. Civil order is a condition for worthy social projects and personal well-being; no one committed to them wills the latter without willing the former.

5.9 Is science indifferent to meaning and value? Stephen Jay Gould argued that science is descriptive, not prescriptive; values are normative, hence no issue for science.124 This is a strategy for eliminating a challenge to science, though it misstates the situation at hand. The laws of motion are normative in our world: they apply universally, having no exceptions because they are regulative principles inherent in the structure and dynamics of natural processes. Accordingly, normativity is an issue for science. Do its laws also express or embody norms relevant to human life? Some do: almost no one objects

|| 124 Stephen Jay Gould, Rock of Ages (New York: Vintage, 2002), p 68–69.

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when traffic engineers prescribe traffic laws to avert anarchy or traffic jams. People who have or want physical well-being should learn its physiological conditions. This is an Aristotelian practical syllogism: its first premise lays out a general condition; the second makes it applicable to humans; the third tells us what to do to achieve the desired result. This is science adapted to practical directives. It requires nothing additional to physiology except the recognition that we humans are the organisms of which it speaks, and a desire to optimize well-being. This persuasion is annoying to people convinced that bodies are an encumbrance better shed if souls are to achieve their destined purity; it is cold sobriety for those who believe that bodies are the only animators we have. And it is somber. Suppose that testable hypotheses confirming the materiality of qualitative experience and consciousness are formulated: would they enable us to program brains to compose music as good as the best we have? Notice that the second of these conditions is satisfied in other domains: many architects use computer programs to design their models. Much of the output is excessive; better designs await the careful modeling of contexts (building sites, zoning, neighborhoods, and urban priorities). But computer programs will write designs as good or sometimes better than human competitors. This is a challenge to ingenuity, not a reproof. It is threatening: will human engineering compete? Scientism is the charge that science is mistakenly regarded as the only legitimate cognitive activity, though none suggest that painting and playing the trombone aren’t cognitive or that either is science. Scientific understanding confirms our materiality across the spectrum of human activity; every art engages the brain and body, including stylistic and creative conditions encoded in muscles and nerves. Proof is incomplete because we lack ideas that would expose the materiality constitutive of perceptual experience, yet this failure isn’t evidence for body’s debt to soul. Arguments for dualism never do more than concede that we don’t understand the brain’s generation of consciousness and its contents. This isn’t an argument for dualism or anything additional to the fact that ideas about immaterial minds are always generalized reports of one’s own mind. Science is progressive, but, as Peirce argued, asymptotic.125 It can’t supply comprehensive explanations or predictions for all reality because of silent conditions (conditions for which there is no unequivocal evidence); complexity (including three body problems, and the behaviors of individuals in a statistical array); Heisenberg uncertainty (position or momentum, not both concurrently); or

|| 125 Peirce, Collected Papers, vol. v., para. 407, p. 268.

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probabilities (the future). These are constraints, though science regularly exceeds limits that yield to mathematical ingenuity, better technology, or better theories. Science isn’t indifferent to meaning and value; it often responds to our interests: health and medicine, for example. But science is shy of ideology and usually self-critical when hypotheses or research have been captured by stories, such as creationism, having no empirical basis. Meanings sometimes dictate the direction, even the findings, of an inquiry (scientists working to vindicate the coal or tobacco industry); but “research” of this kind is scorned when exposed. Or we concede that scientific practice is impelled by fears or values (anxiety about specific diseases), but insist that inquiry’s results be untainted by these motivators. Success is partial because we don’t always know the meanings that impel us; heirs to a conclusion discover biases never discerned by self-scrutiny. But we know the duty to rigor and satisfy it with repeatable experiments and peer review. Competition is perhaps the best defense: others don’t hesitate to test suspicions that inquiry has failed.

5.10 Mysteries and mythologies Sensible people believe in mysteries and insist on their ability to discern the truths in supporting mythologies. This is not, they say, naive confidence that tribal meanings are valid but, rather, their belief that practical life and science aren’t the whole truth about reality. There may be more; believers claim to discern it, if only imperfectly. They elide a belief in silent conditions with the persuasion that imagination and figurative language are sufficient to identify it. It isn’t irrelevant that people typically share these beliefs while living since childhood in communities where dissent is heresy. Outsiders don’t feel the same urgency.

6 Practical Life 6.1 Overview Practical life is a stylized response to needs and wants. It exploits the near-world of food, shelter, and companions with tastes that are simple or refined and methods that are crude or technically informed. Its concerns are private but accessible to others because personal meanings have public resonance; we learn a socialized practice (dressing as others dress), then alter it in ways that suit us. Practical experiences are suffused with meanings and values, some that attract, others that repel. Many are clearly one or the other (sickness or health); but there are degrees of both and many things that do both (sugar to diabetics). Choices often differ radically from person to person because tastes and contingencies differ among us. We avert friction by subordinating personal tasks, values, and meanings to activities that are socially emblematic; let imagination embroider reality in ways that excite us, in fashion, sport, or marriage. Some practices are cyclical and nondescript; but tastes and attachments give life its vitality. Songs and chatter are social currency. None of us cares that fans in other cities wear different colors and sing different songs; we sing louder because their singing is an affront. Much is routine, but this is live, different, and ontologically innocent. Why would skeptics in politics or religion dedicate themselves to a local team? Because it supplies an external point of reference and distraction: last season’s disappointment, next season’s hope. Describing practical life in the context of this essay requires that need and techniques be distinguished from meanings, and that meanings provoked by sentiment, loyalty, or enthusiasm be distinguished from our appetite for ontologizing fantasies. Acknowledging needs and the alternate ways of satisfying them (water or wine) is straight forward. Stripping meaning from principal needs and satisfactions is less so; discerning the moment when those tasks acquire mythological meanings is harder still because we are inclined to embed the simplest practical interests (diet and death) in transforming webs of fantasy. The meanings and values of practical experience sometimes resemble frosting: it overlays a cake while seeming to be no part of it. Meaning’s density convinces us that human life is irreducible to its material conditions: molecules and cells are indifferent to Bach or friendship, winning or losing. We correct this impression by specifying each task’s aim, circumstances, and significance. For every personal or social virtue implicates its material conditions. Baking bread symbolizes competence and care while using material means to satisfy a material need; its meanings express human wants, but nothing transcendental. Losing

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ourselves in complexity and allusion, in buildings, theater, or music, we resist believing that experience is the natural effect of a material process. Yet symbols are sometimes demystified. Weber and Tawney, describing the trajectory of a principal cultural story, observed that God was revered as the supreme being and final cause, until obeisance to him came to signify a rationale for economic and personal discipline.126 “God” was still cited as a final cause, but all the energy of the cause was exhibited in the vigor of lives that embodied the new regulative idea. This change tracks an altered reading of the great chain of being. Its culmination for Plotinus was the One, for Jews, Christians, and Muslims it is God. Humans are located in the middle of the trajectory: above dogs and cats, below angels. Thought and conscience make us superior to one, but finite, contingent, and corruptible, so inferior to the other. A secular bias cuts the chain in two, then rejects the higher part. We who were least among thinking beings are now first among all creatures because no others think and affirm themselves. But we are also different from our material cousins in the respect that we appraise ourselves from the standpoint of meanings we create. Given the option of meaning or truth, we choose both: truth in practical affairs, meaning as their valorizing context. Practical life requires efficacy and resources, though self- and social-understanding often require that we control behavior out of regard for meanings. Imagine a formal dinner for three. All are hungry, but each has a superseding interest. One is a food chemist; vitamins and calories are her principal concerns. Another cares more about the table setting and guest list; is everyone properly dressed? The third believes that dinner is sanctified; he accepts each course as evidence of a god’s benevolence. Meaning and well-being sometimes diverge, but they are usually aligned because life would otherwise be unsustainable: all the guests are fed. There is, however, a perpetual tension as we test reality to discern its tolerance for fantasy: which meanings will it support? Why this nervous search for a middle ground. Because a dose of magic leavens our reality; answers are unbalanced if one goes too far in either direction: meaning or truth.

|| 126 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Dover, 2003), pp. 155–184; R. J. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1998), pp. 316–317.

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6.2 Needs and wants Needs have satisfiers that vary with circumstances or cultures: farmers need rain. Wants are less restricted; they range over the diversity of needs while extending in every dimension of meaning and value: dignity and autonomy, but also beauty and faith. Wants become needs: believers need prayer books. Their diversity convinces us that human life and society can’t be understood in material terms alone: how could we be altogether material if wealth, status, and eternal life are our principal aims? Elementary needs are familiar and mostly agreed: people everywhere need and want food, clothing, shelter, safety, health, education, significant autonomy, cooperation with others, and a vocation—a job—to secure them. But this array is incomplete; an extended list includes social recognition and dignity. These moral needs come to be seen as entitlements: God decrees them; others should defer. But interpretations vary: are we exalted because made in the image of God or merely because of status and a bespoke suit. The difference between needs and wants seems elementary. Human bodies and societies would be unsustainable in the absence of food, water, and cooperation, though wants are often extravagant. One thinks of Plato’s Republic where the rudiments of well-being are distinguished from luxuries that provoke “inflammation”: know that refined sugar is pernicious, then settle for nuts and berries. The relation of needs and wants is, nevertheless, more tangled than this implies. Imagine that peaches have the same nutritional value as oranges, though peaches are sweet, oranges bitter. Or both are sweet, though people won’t settle for oranges unless priced out of the market for peaches. This inversion—wants before needs—has strange effects when desires are provoked without a motivating need. That happens frequently and in several ways: wanting infinite wealth or eternal beauty, for example. Nor is the inversion mysterious, given suggestibility and ambiguous desires made determinate by poverty, fear, and socialization. Culture transforms determinable needs (for shelter) into determinate wants (houses or caves) or it uses fantasy to create wants beyond any need (fashion and cosmetics). Plato was consciously ahistorical—the Republic was to be made from scratch—because existing cultures were corrupted by excessive wants. Yet every need is determinable: all are satisfiable by alternate means. Taking one’s satisfiers as culture or society affords them, we find that distinguishing needs from wants is complicated in three respects. One is the difficulty of recovering the identity of a need in order to distinguish it from its culturally appropriate satisfiers. The answer is obvious when water satisfies thirst, but not when fashion disputes the appropriate number of buttons on a sleeve. Another is our uncertainty about

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the choice of approved wants. How are they acquired: by wealth, luck, hard work, or education? Last is the rigidity of acquired habits and their resistance to other choices. Alter your desires, we suggest; try water when you want whiskey. I can’t, you say: this has always been my way. A culture justifies its solutions—determinate satisfiers for determinable needs—by surviving in the habits of its people. Life is steady; people rarely discern anything disreputable in their signature practices and aspirations. This global effect makes members careless: we defend practices that satisfy wants while having no basis in need. Wanting a local team to win at all costs, we’re also zealous in defense of national and religious aims. “Manifest destiny” names the attitude, beyond criticism, that captured need. Which mechanism projects wants beyond the domain of material satisfiers? Cognition isn’t the principal impulse because missteps and failure make us prudent; we often don’t want more than we can safely reach. Vulnerability is elemental; never eluding it, we live with hope modulated by anxiety. Imagination and boredom are the principal drivers: they embellish our circumstances with meanings that secure or distract us. Their effects are prominent in a poem by Robert Frost: With what unbroken spirit naïve science Keeps hurling our Promethean defiance From this atomic ball of rotting rock At the Divine Safe’s combination lock. In our defiance we are still defied, But have not I, as prophet, prophesied: Sick of our circling round and round the sun Something about the trouble will be done. Now that we’ve found the secret out of weight, Ah, what avail our lofty engineers If we can’t take the planet by the ears, Or by the poles or simply by the scruff And saying simply we have had enough Of routine and monotony on earth, Where nothing’s going on but death and birth. And man’s of such a limited longevity, Now in the confidence of new-found levity

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(Our gravity has been our major curse) We’ll cast off hawser for the universe127

This poem, published in 1962, is self-consciously clumsy: we’re astonished, as engineers fulfill our wildest dreams and ambitions. The poem exhibits its analogous virtuosity with a display of grammatical and rhetorical conceits. Its nodes, linked schemas, affirmation and negation, and three modes of inference—analogy, extrapolation, and generalization—create the narrative within which Frost locates us. There is also this implicit claim: meaning is constrained by practical realities. We go only as far as engineers can take us. Linked schemas contrast life’s restraints on Earth to the liberating implications of science and engineering. We are the principal nodes—consequential centers of purpose and activity—with emphasis on human attitudes or vocations. Frustrations are shared by all, though scientists and engineers will liberate us. Defiance is negated—sabotaged by naiveté (our ignorance)—though we exceed the cycles of birth and death by affirming our “new-found levity.” Analogy takes “poles…by the scruff;” there is extrapolation in casting off for the universe, and generalization in “circling round and round.” What is imagination’s role? It creates spheres of meaning. Are they fantasies only or windows into domains to which we have only symbolic entree? Answers depend on one’s reading of the trajectory that goes from practical needs and solutions to wants that exceed any material satisfier. Frost’s allusions are celebratory but never extra-natural: we’re no longer Earth bound; rocketry is now an aspect of practical life. But this is an expanded horizon, not the door to a different reality. Imagination is our principal resource if we deliberate when stymied. Embellishing mental maps in ways that are cogent or plausible, considering alternate plans, then choosing and acting on one, we’re rewarded or frustrated by the ambient world. Imagination’s role is transformed when the incitement is emotion, magic, or utopia, for then it creates scenarios that may have no bearing on reality. Its tests are also different: hypotheses about the road ahead are checked by going left or right around a barrier. Fantasies are tested by experiencing the effects of their provoking impulses: does morale rise or fall with the fortunes of my favorite cause? Do other people sing as I do; do they share my beliefs and fears? Here, too, action is often enabled: one is happier, vitalized, or newly reliable because of making peace with others within a shared confession. Yet responses are less and

|| 127 Robert Frost, Robert Frost Reader: Poetry and Prose (New York: Macmillan, 2002), pp. 511– 512.

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less sensitive to material circumstances and practical life if a meaning’s apologetics is their rationale. How shall we explain utopia’s relation to the fallen world or deity’s relation to the created world? Our quandary is provoked by antithetic interests: efficacy and transfigured meaning. Effective solutions to wants and needs require disciplined actions allied to viable plans or accurate hypotheses: ideology and religion are satisfied when ordinary practices (dress and nutrition) are transformed by attitudes, signs, or understandings. There is also this middle ground: mitigate anxiety and disappointment with cultivated sensibility and moral luck. Guarantee a productive economy in a stable civil society, then add poetry, fashion, film, nature, sport, and proscenium arches. Explain the addiction to mythology by citing the breakdown or absence of these material conditions (as Marx did128). But the middle ground isn’t stable; plans aren’t always successful, however accurate our maps, however well we prepare. What are we to do when disappointed, defeated, or scared? We listen for meanings that will secure or redeem us. Are they fantastical because anomalous with reality as we encounter it? Yes they are, if nothing in them is confirmed while going about our affairs. But they seem plausible if we’ve learned to address the world from their perspective. For then, our encounters are always buffered by this extra-worldly reading of our circumstances. Many people believe that reality is not altogether what practical life shows it to be. And that is surely true. Yet what part is missing? Is reality better known by deferring to a cosmic story? The grit of life is a defense against wishful thinking, yet extra-natural readings are learned early. A private fantasy, like a private language, would be isolating; a story having regulative force within a community sanctions practices, rewards, and punishments, while making other believers and their projects accessible. Our tolerance is revealing: children are obliged to outgrow their fantasies; adults often cleave ever more passionately to theirs. Why this difference? Because children are merely diverted; adult life is better tolerated if wrapped in meanings that make us better regimented, less afraid. Is there an antidote for fantasies that infuse practical life with meanings incidental to human materiality? One can’t enjoy novels or theater without suppressing practical instincts. We don’t know any cherubs or anyone like Lear, but verisimilitude doesn’t matter when there is no practical interest or risk. Suspend-

|| 128 Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right,’ trans. Annette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 131.

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ing judgment is a source of pleasure but also a point of vulnerability: we are credulous. Forgetting the stage, often grateful for the meanings implied, we believe too easily. Or we don’t believe, but do capitulate.

6.3 Action We normally suppose that needs and wants can be satisfied because perception supplies a multi-dimensional representation of resources and opportunities in the near-world. Thought, like a zoom lens, focuses near or far when creating the maps and plans that direct us. It makes plans for engaging the near-world in ways calculated to satisfy needs: surveying the perceived or imagined terrain, it prescribes a series of actions likely to succeed. But thought addresses real or likely circumstances through a scrim of meanings. Send two people shopping: a man and woman to a cosmetics store; a Christian, Sikh, or Jew to a butcher shop; a vegetarian or carnivore to a supermarket. Each member of both pairs perceives the same things, but chooses differently. What comes of our preparation? Action is the test: do its effects confirm our expectations or show them flawed? This is the pragmatism essential to all the part of life that exceeds reverie: are we in touch with anything distinct from our fantasies? Judgment isn’t always reliable: wanting evidence that ours is the better team, we settle (when they lose) for the chants of its fans. This is meaning in its role as reconciler. Its effect is counter-intuitive, if we’ve supposed that actions testing well-conceived plans and hypotheses are the only efficient test of our circumstances. We’re obliged to concede that intelligibility and access are less simple than taking what one needs and sees. For meaning intervenes when interpretation supersedes inquiry because realities meaning postulates extenuate inquiry’s failure. Parents typically give enormous emotional weight to caring for their children, while having no comparable interest in other children nearby. These are disproportions we excuse, though we should be alarmed as they intensify: my team, my country, my gods. Unvarnished reality is ever harder to discern when nothing is better known than the world rendered thinkable by a self-defining story. This is a challenge: how to control a preference for the story and attitudes that shape perceptions, choices, and actions. The challenge is critical when we turn away from failure, not wanting to address faulty choices or judgments, because a meanings excuses us while promising better days. Control is vital to perception, thought, and action when each person is tested by a reality he or she doesn’t make. A hypothesis or plan is corrected—revised or abandoned—when it makes faulty predictions; actions are corrected to avert regretted effects. Suspecting that perspective biases perception, we move, then

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look again to check that the bias has disappeared or shifted in a predictable way. Only meaning is resolute, standing its ground however misleading or pernicious its beliefs or practices. How does it survive tests that confirm its conflicts with reality? By invoking a new dimension: we over-ride thought and perception because meanings introduce implacable moral rules or because they affirm an ontology of powers inaccessible to empirical tests but ever more powerful than the obstacles encountered. Yet this is make-believe, an indulgence, if meaning’s postulates are untestable. It is also moral blindness, a fault that makes us vulnerable to perpetual danger: why credit fantasy as an accurate representation of our circumstances given anthropological evidence that there are many alternate stories and a power—imagination—for creating many more? What is there but habit and social pressure to justify a preferred story? Is it a better story because so many friends believe it?

6.4 Error Is there is a basis for distinguishing plans, maps, and hypotheses from the speculations more or less explicit in meanings? Surely, there is: the former are falsifiable and often erroneous; meanings are never mistaken and never falsified. Hypotheses, maps, and plans are held to empirical tests: each is the basis for predications that certain effects would be perceivable if matters stand as they anticipate. Failure to observe those effects might indicate a failure of procedure— being unable to read the newspaper because of having misplaced one’s glasses— though stubborn, chronic failure probably indicates an error in the representations tested. Meanings are never embarrassed in this way because they are invoked rather than tested. Santa Claus is never seen, but always gets the benefit of the doubt: never seeing him, we never expect to see him. He’s elusive: supple and fast. Or we don’t give reasons because children satisfied by his gifts don’t want explanations. Occasional skeptics challenge patriotic or religious myths but they usually encounter a sullen public. People quick to change their habits when warned about sugar, tobacco, or inactivity assume that faith without evidence is no risk to their health. And they’re right to think so, if health in an afterlife depends on faith, not exercise or diet. This is the place where error is decisive, though its effects are obscure. Why suspect doctrines that seem to preclude error merely because they aren’t falsifiable? Why not construe this as evidence that they indubitable because necessarily true? Because their negations aren’t contradictions— the doctrines would be contingencies if they were true—and because every contingent claim about material states of affairs is falsifiable. Is it raining, have I paid

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this month’s bills? Answers are yes or no, not always yes. Beliefs for which there is no evidence, doctrines to which there is no possibility of evidentiary resistance, are likely to be mythic. “Likely to be” concedes the possibility that evidence might yet be forthcoming, but this is a small window of consolation. Children who are very spoiled are said to develop the illness of their entitlement: never frustrated, they have no conscience. (“Affluenza,” it’s called.) Their lives are poisoned by indulgence, not fantasy, but the consequences are the same: neither teaches that resistance to one’s hopes, plans, or actions is evidence of error. Everyone else learns the need to think again when confronting an alien reality. Or one doesn’t think again one is exhausted and disabled by one’s mistaken. Practical life is an obstacle course for most people: expectations are disappointed; doors close when they should have been open. Why not seek relief in meanings that seem to locate us in circumstances more benign? There is no faulting the motive, though it subverts the clarity that comes with failure. Action has falsified one’s maps or plans; one is temporarily lost.

6.5 Systems and their meanings Systems are the couplings established when people are joined by reciprocal causal relations. They are fellow Masons, spouses, workmates, or parishioners. Their system is an organization where roles are different but complementary (an orchestra) or an association where roles are undifferentiated (neighbors). Systems of both sorts satisfy an interest or need; both are appraised for their success but also for their acquired meanings: a restaurant feeds its customers but also, sometimes, their vanity. Reality, as we know it, is two things: the physical world (cold wind, wet streets) and the social world. We move, more or less comfortably, through both. The first is Peirce’s secondness: the initial shock of encountering other things. Or we’ve encountered them before and know what to do, given our aims. Reality in this second guise is the structure to which we accommodate when satisfying needs and wants. This is reality as the context for roles, opportunities, duties, entitlements, and status. Social meanings are inevitably pluralistic because each person has multiple alliances and allegiances: family, friendship, school, team, work, neighborhood, city or town, state, or religion. Some have totems, all have meanings that warp a participant’s role and perspective. Funerals are telling because one struggles to understand the meaning of a particular life and its sequel: what was done; for better or worse; are their traces? Believers or not, every participant wants meaning because all are ephemera without it.

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Salvation comes with the interplay of talent or purpose within social systems, be they associations (neighborhoods) or organizations (businesses or the army); these are the context for significant activity. Their rationale is a need or valued activity. Meaning is their collateral benefit because each is a source of identity, an opportunity for talent and exploration, and sometimes a vocation. Each favors the idealizing of its roles: more than a function, motherhood is sacred, leadership is inspired. We ride an escalator to ever more extravagant appraisals, until exaggeration bursts the limits of materiality. We don’t notice because meaning is intoxicating; it disguises bare needs, duties, and tasks. This other reality—ample, ennobling, and persuasive—suits us better. Enthusiasm makes us reckless: innocent features of social life are successively misconstrued. Let nations be our example. Most tyrants owe their authority to intimidation or inheritance; democracy’s rationale is the idea that all adults subject to a state’s laws should have a voice in approving either the laws or the selection of people authorized to make them. Both justifications are transformed as these elementary facts are idealized. The autocrat is, first, a Cesar Chavez or Kim Il Sung, later a divinely sanctioned father of his people, eventually a deity in himself. Monuments honor or commemorate his virtues, but subjects understand that statues can do no more than intimate his mastery; they imagine that he still presides, sagely advising successors whose good judgment is assured by his counsel. Democracy has a parallel route to sanctity: its people are first construed as rude sinners, then as autonomous thinkers worthy of places in the Kingdom of Ends. One might argue that governments of each sort have their better days (peace or war), but these concerns are incidental when the issue is our inclination to ontologize our organizational styles. Policy and practice seem insubstantial: they waver and fail for lack of a stabilized economic and political order. Wanting stability and the security it would ensure, we construe our sociality in transcendent terms: let God secure us. It’s only a step from lesser divinities—idealized citizens or the saintly autocrat—to the narrative of a world God creates and sustains. But this isn’t an irresistible trajectory. Only the most rabid fans deify their winning team; longtime spouses and partners are wryly tolerant, not reverential. Each of us participates in myriad systems; deifying all of them requires a polytheism that exceeds us. The array of meanings is, all the while, a shield, a defense against the bare materiality of our lives. Which better describes us: “going for a work,” or “communing with nature”?

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6.6 Two perspectives People overwhelmed by practical life often realize, without formulating it, that there are two problems: too much to do with too few resources, and the conflict of obligations to others versus those to oneself. No conceptual legerdemain solves the first obstacle; the second is usefully clarified. Duties to oneself are apparent and often satisfied privately with skills learned early or with friends. They’re simple, or complex in the ways of cultivated passions: painting, music, or mathematics. We know that nourishing ourselves is gratifying and that opportunities for doing it are critical to well-being. Yet people responsible to others or systems they share are obliged to choose: them/us or me. Ideally, one is satisfied in the midst of shared systems and others; members of a winning team feel the rewards of personal discipline while enjoying victory with teammates. But the hassled parent of young children can’t celebrate their satisfaction when overwhelmed by loneliness and fatigue. Many situations oppose self-concern to one’s duties to an employer, partner, priest, or other workers. In worst cases, personal identity has lapsed under the press of duties to one or more of them: I am as my roles define me. How is this altered identity justified? By noting that one is spouse or friend to someone sick or frail; parent of small children; teacher in an over-crowded classroom; single physician in a remote community; priest in a neglected parish. These situations and the duties assumed are common and familiar; but a different focus is relevant here. For lost identity has a persistent rationale: namely, meanings that make self-regard a cause for embarrassment. The loyal spouse, loving parent, committed teacher or employee: these are mythic personalities projected onto the public screens of social life: their idealizations are directives to people assuming these roles: don’t despair; yours is a noble task accepted, even enjoyed by others having your strength. One doesn’t have to be Ayn Rand to notice the appeal to virtue when the real demand is self-denial. These postures—self-effacing or self-affirming—are opposed. Each has its graded paragons: from recognizable neighbors through heroes and minor divinities to gods. Jesus is surely the best example on the side of sacrifice; Mother Teresa, was beatified. Genghis and Gesar Khan were deified. Naming people who have avoided both extremes while integrating duties to themselves and others is challenging because those who succeed are less acclaimed and harder to imitate. Thinking that they must be accidents or creatures of rare talent, wealth, and luck, we ignore them out of preference for the contraries: self-regard or -sacrifice. Vulnerable to our duties or merely our oppressive circumstances, we recognize martyrdom and admire those who escape it. But not because we dare imitate them.

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Gender is the turf on which these antitheses are most keenly disputed: autonomous men; self-effacing women. But these are cameos drawn from anomalous sources: women afflicted by poverty, little education, violent men, and too many children; men working as doctors or bankers, consulting with presidents, marrying or remarrying women the age of their daughters. The men are effective at work, while thinking principally of themselves; the women think only of others while supported by friends and extended families. These characterizations are the residual meanings of times past. They remain cogent in many place, but don’t match the reality of educated women working in modern cities or the lives of less educated, unemployed men. Dominant meanings lag social evolution. Thinking of ourselves in their terms retards changes that would allay the resentments stored in these paradigms. For there are no visible limits on the roles women play in urban centers; where some men choose to stay home looking after their children. Working at home closes the gap between self-regarding personal tasks and one’s working life in systems. This is apparent in the lives of writers, but equally so if work is done on the Web. There may come a time when there is no predicting who leaves home for work: women or men. This says nothing useful to those whose lives are parodied by these changes: women responsible for children they can’t educate or feed; men enslaved by lives in factories, fields, or mines.

6.7 Ethical practice The Kingdom of Ends is an idea, not a place. Its location is a moral theory, though it is revered and invoked as if it filled an accessible moral space. One shouldn’t park in spaces reserved for police cars or fire engines, and, similarly, one should make way as each person takes his or her place in the Kingdom. Saying that its occupants deserve respect illustrates moral directives entailed by meanings. But consider: does this recourse entail that there would be no ethical practice in the absence of the moral directives and sanctions imputed to meanings? That inference is false because there is a morality of prudence and cooperation implicit in circumstances where people in need (everyone) desire satisfaction while coordinating their actions or mitigating conflicts. This is a description of ethical behavior, not an ethical theory, though theory properly begins by specifying morality’s practical origins. There are three points of reference: i. personal needs and the actions taken to satisfy them; ii. behaviors, freedoms, and duties appropriate to systems (families, friendships, businesses) and their members; and iii. The organization, rules, and aims of societies considered as wholes (states or other autonomous corporate

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entities). These are the ethical dimensions affecting individual and group behavior. One or another may be more prominent at a moment but, usually, all are in play. 6.7.1 Persons: An individual has self-regarding duties, including self-care and the cultivation of his or her sensibility and capacities. There are also duties to one’s systems, including local systems (family and work-teams) and the state, and duties to their other members (partners, children, friends, and other citizens). The trajectory beginning in childhood has moral character as its aim. For each point of reference implies a moral discipline requiring skill, self-control, and judgment: what to do, when and how to do it. These are skills acquired as one engages adults or other children in tasks that satisfy their interests while satisfying one’s own. Life is more complicated later—there is a greater range of interests and duties, and often limited material resources—but the moral challenges of adulthood are different in scale but not in kind from those of late childhood. Solutions appropriate to others and oneself are easier if learned then. Young parents worry that they won’t know how to care for a newborn child; how could they know, given that neither has done it before? Yet most parents succeed—they are responsible and effective—because they’ve already cared for others and because taking care of themselves and one another is training for the task. Principal ethical theories—consequentialism, Kantian morality, and virtue ethics—converge on these elementary features of moral training. One may emphasize their theoretic differences, though training that eventuates in character and moral behavior is their common ground. 6.7.2 Systems: Systems are created by the reciprocal causal relations of their members. They are sustained—given resources and stable external circumstances—as long as members share an aim, perform in ways appropriate to their roles, and coordinate their work with other members. Many systems are ephemeral (greetings exchanged with neighbors one regularly sees but doesn’t know). They compare to the core systems that dominate one’s skills, attention, and care. One may participate in many core systems: family, friendships, schools, neighborhoods, businesses, one’s religious circle, teams, the civil society, or state. But no one can be everywhere doing everything at once, hence the requirement that time and energy be prioritized as one satisfies diverse commitments. Participating in too many core systems explains the sense that people are overwhelmed by their responsibilities. Prudence requires that one be sensible when balancing responsibilities inherited with those chosen. Each person is

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duty-bound to other members for work appropriate to a role, yet there is this compensating liberty: each of a system’s members is free to some degree within a role (how and when to fill it) because all may satisfy their duties in ways congenial to themselves. This moral posture is summarized by a homily: do your own work; don’t do someone else’s; don’t let others do yours. This is self-defeating if too literally construed: one may always give help, or need and accept it. And it assume the ample spaces that go with ample roles. It ignores roles (on production lines or in the small carrels of large offices) where there are no excuses for ignoring tightly scheduled routines. 6.7.3 The whole: The many individuals and systems create managerial problems in large complex systems; and the whole. Active in circumstances where space or resources are scarce, people and their lower-order systems (doctors and nurses in a ward, states in a federation) have three principal needs: resources proportionate to their tasks; freedom of movement as they act to fulfill them; and ways of avoiding or mitigating conflicts that result when individuals or systems impede one another when competing for space or resources. (I ignore the problem of convincing people and subordinate systems that corporate aims, values, and management style are efficient or appropriate.) These managerial issues are common to every large firm. Government is the institutional expression of a society organized to adjudicate them. Taxes support governments which supply, in turn, protection and services that individuals and systems cannot supply for themselves: public streets, laws, police, courts, an army, and water. A government and its citizens have reciprocal duties: each sustains the other and, ideally, each has earned (by its behavior) the support of the other. These are skeletal bases for a morality native to settled communities having viable economies, stable governments, and peaceful neighbors. Those societies pair cooperation and duty to personal freedom and initiative. Character, happiness, and the rules appropriate to cooperation and coordination are proper topics for ethical reflection, though moral complexity is inevitably distorted by ethical theories that emphasize one or several virtues to the detriment of others. Societies fighting perpetual tribal wars generate other moralities. But there, too, moral virtues—heroism and sacrifice—emerge in justifying contexts. For moralities and their virtues are evolutionary responses to circumstances; preferring a morality is a more or less explicit preference for situations that promote and justify it (Athens and Aristotle’s Ethics, Hobbes’s Leviathan and the English Civil War).

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This conclusion would be dangerous if it implied parity between moralities emerging in disparate situations: Nazi barbarism versus the live-and-let-live tolerance of a liberal society having a strong middle-class. That isn’t implied, because of a regulative idea common across the diversity of societies: do they satisfy the universal desire for individual well-being. Its expressions vary among cultures and societies but its generic conditions aren’t disputed: health, safety, education, cooperation, and coordination. Many societies consistently violate wellbeing for cultural and situational reasons: their class structure penalizes the poor; their men are entitled, their women illiterate. But these are moralities that have no justification apart from the fact that their accommodation to circumstances was partly successful: they survive while embodying historical, now habitual dysfunctions. Moralities are improved, if only theoretically, by considering each society as one appraises a broken watch: what is each part’s function; how are the parts organized; what is the function of the whole? How can the requirements of the three dimensions cited above—individuals, systems, and the whole—be satisfied in the circumstances at hand? These are complex calculations. They usually exceed our ability to make them, though some failures or anomalies—in health, wealth, or education—may be reparable. Or nothing is fixed or fixable, so a reforming morality is diminished: once a policy directed by a plan, it lingers as an idealization. We excuse ourselves from implementing it by telling a salving story: God or fate will do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.

6.8 Culture Everyday practices are usually predictable because circumstances are stable and habits are reliable. Imagination seems incidental to ordinary dress and diet, though it isn’t because there are many solutions to the same needs: pants or skirts. Culture is imagination frozen by regularity, efficacy, and tradition. Some of the spaces it prefigures are abstract—equal rights—others are stabilized by the habits of practical life. A society’s members pay its taxes, sing it songs, enjoy its ways, and fight its wars. Citizens asked to explain their loyalty, are slow to cite their culture because its ways are mostly invisible to participants. For culture is an odd elixir: learning it by osmosis during childhood, we think, feel, value, and act in ways it prescribes without acknowledging its constraining forms. Cultures that ban reckless ontologies are commonplace in university laboratories, but they seem spitefully ascetic in other places. People more credulous affirm stories that rally and explain their culture’s energizing core. Their allegiance is critical because all goes flat when beliefs reduces to a respectful nod in

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the direction of traditional loyalties: flags, monuments, titles, status, robes, and books remain, but a culture’s propelling energy is lost. “Give me that old-time religion” is the first line of a gospel song and a sentiment often shared by those singing it. For we sometimes regret the sobriety that makes us skeptical of our culture’s founding myths. There is, however, this difference between credulity and deference to ancient meanings. Iceland has one of the lowest rates of church attendance in the West. Yet its sagas—tales of Norse pioneers—preoccupy many people. Would local culture survive without them? Mostly it would, though why eliminate this focus for memory. Are Iceland’s children corrupted by learning tales about outof-scale heroes? They’re impressed but not ruined because people learn to discount myths that enlarge sensibility while provoking imagination. For there is a difference between belief and suggestibility. One is the result of indoctrination; the other sanctions curiosity. Compare the lock-step quality to cultures for which discipline, dogma, and control are marks of success. Authority and authenticity become principal points of contention: preserve it; don’t change it. Imagination created its forms, but rigidity prevails so imagination is quashed. These are alternate cultural styles. What is required for social coherence: habit, conviction, and authority—hard wiring—or sensibilities that tolerate difference and reverie while skeptical or ironic about rigid beliefs? Do we teach ritual or curiosity and invention? A powerful culture affects a society’s principal functions: diet, family life, business, laws, and wars. These interests are sometimes subordinated when rationalized by its myths, an effect intensified when a single myth informs public perception of a people’s ethnicity, their state, and religion. This simplicity has the primitive advantage that solidarity is enforced by spirituality: people are joined by the conviction that a power oversees the integrity of their community and state. Effects proliferate in personal and social life: everything is controlled and explained by a story whose elements are known to the culture’s children. But are these ethnic-statist-religious stories true? Metaphysics wants simplicity. With Ockham in its ear, it eliminates excess. The myths informing cultures are a principal example. Solidarity explains the corporate response to a local team: we’re exalted when it wins; heartsick when it fails. Spiritualize our solidarity and you have the Crusades or towns and neighborhoods agitated by passions once roused by amulets, songs, and processions. This book’s intention—eliminate the bogus ontological accretions postulated by personal or social meanings—would entail the deflation of many prized traditions. Those are cultures that construe all or most of life’s details as expressions of mythic powers: gods,

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beauty, the Good. What would survive? Icelandic sagas, Bach’s chorales; many things we prize while rethinking the motives of their creators. There are secular cultures in the principal cities and suburbs of industrial societies. Most of their educated citizens aren’t rich, but they are secure. Children are educated; the elderly get decent care. Diverse restaurants and shops make every city an exotic island. There are museums and concert halls, but here the good news falters. For much of the art and music and many religious centers no longer stir popular imagination. Bach is heard, but not as he intended. Nor could we duplicate what he did. Does imagination go sterile when deprived of fantasy? Skepticism and irony are creative but not to the same effect as mystery and passion. Beethoven’s effects are only secular. That’s also true of Shakespeare, some of Wagner’s operas, and dozens more. We can translate or revere the desirable effects of ontologizing traditions without exalting their origins. We can strip every cultural feature of its misleading implications (if any there be) while enjoying them as before: we have no trouble resting on a seventh day while ignoring the Commandment that requires it. Yet we live in the shadow of creations inspired by mythologies we distrust. Rousseau made himself ridiculous by inventing holidays to compensate for his agnosticism. Could we trust contemporary Paris to replace its churches? Practical life is more than an accommodation to needs and humdrum personal wants. It plays out in in a context structured by established social relationships and the thick environment of information, attitudes, rituals, and provocations. The local café is more than a business; sitting there is more than commerce. Which combination of leisure, attitudes, and entitlements enables this mix of sanctuary and theater? Why prefer the café on a public street to the privacy of a church cloister? The choice seems personal, though the option is social. Monks usually choose differently because an interpretation controls them: they can’t repress the discipline—the resistance to indulgence—learned with their vocation. These are values embodied in meanings essential to their vows. One might not know the meaning that justifies or motivates an attitude, but we shouldn’t expect that there is no motivating attitude or that it doesn’t have a justifying rationale. Nor can one hope to repress productive mythologies. For this tension—imagination liberated or sanitized—isn’t resolvable in any final way. Myths will often overshoot, yet we like our psychic spaces enlarged. Science is mostly free of this inclination: it wants testable hypotheses, but shuns fantasies. Practical life is their natural venue. Hence this cycle of historical eras: fantasy, then restraint, then more, probably different fantasies. This is not the sequence described by

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Hegel—each featuring a different energizing metaphor—but rather a cycle expressing imagination’s alternate postures: florid invention, then discipline. Never quashing imagination, we affirm, then limit its excesses.

6.9 Innovation/Distraction Computers and the internet attenuate our experience of things and one another. We go everywhere, hear music, see films, read archives, talk to people near and far, buy fresh food, clothes and luxuries, all without leaving our machines. There is no interaction with suppliers apart from fingers on keys, and the images or data that flicker on a screen. Opportunities seem everywhere enhanced because immediately accessible, but sensibility is dulled, duties languish. We are one remove from brains in vats: could technology close that gap? The brain is an electrochemical engine with receptors. Could it incorporate all a computer’s network connections and powers, until reality collapses, so far as we can tell, to Berkeley’s esse est percipi? “Music-minus-one” was a collection of recordings that eliminated one part: musicians played along on the missing instrument. Anticipate signals from Software Central; it loads brains with extended vacations in places one “goes” without needing cars or airports. But don’t tap keys, because blinking eyes has the same effect. Imagine atrophied muscles, but large heads and electrodes. Theology will adapt. There will be speculation regarding a first cause (the switch that charged the net) and the necessary being (the net, itself) responsible for supporting contingent subscribers. There may be a god resembling Hegel’s Absolute, a rational consciousness whose self-awareness is distributed among network subscribers. This god will seem benign and tolerant, given the many destinations and contents available within it, but there will be perpetual anxiety that malign participants or competing suppliers cripple access or bias information. Practical life will be radically changed: no more getting dressed in the morning to go for milk and the paper. Why take walks in the rain; you might slip and hurt yourself? Better to waft through space behind the eye of an all-seeing Google lens. Simplicity will make us forgetful: materiality will seem dispensable, absent headaches or signals interrupted by sun spots. But there is more to come, all of it less fantastic because its materiality will repress mythic speculation. The technology that advanced from revolutions in steam or electric power through the numerical control of production and services will have a new day in the integrations wrought by physics, biology, and artificial intelligence. Robotic intelligence—the affable teacher or caretaker—will surpass the speed and sometimes the flexibility and creativity of human agents. We shall

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often be embarrassed by the superior imagination of self-reproducing machines. Industrial materiality will have reversed evolution’s trajectory: once first in nature, we shall be no better than second in speed, power, initiative, and control. We shall need redeeming stories to restore our self-regard. It’s hard to imagine what they might be.

7 Mental functions Meaning and valuation challenge the materialist project because both seem remote from anything matter can do. Proving otherwise requires that we specify the mental functions at issue and, schematically, how brains perform them. There are several ways to account for mental activity: impressionistically— phenomenologically—by describing the activity experienced; by using brain imaging to trace neural pathways; or by subsuming one’s self-observations under a model or theory of mental/brain processes. All three accounts are appropriate to many activities, though introspection ignores all that is unconscious. Brain imaging correlates with introspectionist discoveries without, so far, clarifying them. Associationism, with organizing heuristics (rules/directives/constraints), is plausibly our best theory of mental activity. It doesn’t suffer the introspectionist failure; its hypotheses specify the uninspectable activities responsible for cognition or coherent experience. Associationism is also advantageous in this other way: it identifies pertinent mental functions in advance of specifying the responsible neural processes. This is enabling (as faculty psychology has always been) for those who aren’t neurologists: knowing what’s done, we eliminate dualist excesses without knowing exactly how it’s done.

7.1 Meaning Meanings are embodied as attitudes: each is a way of addressing other people, things, or oneself. Verbal expression formulate and sometimes justify a meaning but each can be expressed in either or all of four ways without words and without knowing that they direct us: as biased thoughts or perceptions; behavioral responses or inhibitions; feelings; or beliefs. Meanings are conjured; imagination— our transporter—is the power they implicate, though fantasy is not its principal role in waking life. Its function there is practical: imagination is radar with a difference. We rise imagining the day ahead; we start conversations imagining their likely topics. Imagination anticipates possible experience using three resources common to everyone, and three that are personal. The common resources are: i. Data remembered or perceived. ii. Heuristics that associate data perceived or remembered: principally cause and effect (anticipating rain when seeing black clouds), and spatial or temporal relations. iii. Powers for varying the spatial, temporal, or causal relations of fragments remembered or perceived, or for extrapolating, generalizing, or analogizing from them: to angels and witches from birds. Personal

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resources are: iv. Situational variables that include aims, the weather, local rules, and the availability of possible partners. v. Information about personal taste and talents, including preferences and habits relevant to a vocation (teacher or tradesman); vi. Understanding the local cultural style, including its forms and materials (in dress, work, or painting, for example). These resources lend themselves to maps of two sorts. One is a map of circumstances. It prefigures the more or less likely but possible experiences of the many people to whom a situation is common (a busy subway station). The other is distinctive because tailored to the aims, interests, and capacities of the person making it. Maps of these two sorts largely cohere, though misfits are chronic because, for example, we over-estimate our ability or want to do more than circumstances would support. Imagination’s contribution to thought and understanding is disputed since Plato: ideas it generates are misleading; they crystallize at the back of the cave when people who can’t decipher shadows cast on the walls agree to contrive and tell a standardized story. Nietzsche pilloried these distortions as the realities and values of the herd. Kant was more respectful. His A Deduction (the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason) acknowledged imagination’s critical role in the synthesis of experience. Perceptual data, whether current or remembered, are steadily configured when mind produces a coherent and stable experience by applying its a priori schemas. Imagination largely disappeared from the B Deduction (the second edition of the Critique) when Kant had come to doubt that qualities and relations manifest in experience are intrinsic to the sensory data received. Instead, data’s qualities and relations were said to be determined a priori by mind’s rules, its schemas for organizing the data. Kant’s B Deduction is essential to the a priori bias of much subsequent thinking (including the conceptual relativism that distinguished the influence of Marburg Kantians on the understanding of science in the latter half of the twentieth century). It makes little sense in practical life. Poets or composers use words and tones as dictionaries and pianos supply them. Words change their senses over time; timbre changes, too, because some instruments can be tuned to scales different from the one currently favored. But these are possible transformations, not an invitation to suppose that current words or sensory data have no determinate sense or character. Things colored red look differently as natural light changes, but not yellow or green. There are radical constructivists—often ideologists—for whom reality in all its variables is mind’s work; they affirm its power for creating a coherent society or experience from materials having no fixed character. But this is the story of imagination gone berserk, a paean to freedom rather than an accurate description of its power or authority. Grapes at my local market are black, red, and green. Color’s production in the brain is imperfectly understood,

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yet these perceived differences represent actual differences in the grapes, not merely contrasts generated by my choice of experience-schematizing rules. Could one get different effects by choosing different rules: see the red as green, the black as yellow? I’ve tried without success: night or day, summer and winter, the grapes look black, red, or green. Imagination creates reliable effects because it, like perception, usually works with material having an established character in familiar situations; its interpolations are typically consistent with the circumstances engaged and the expectations of perceivers. But imagination is also something more: it enhances experience with meanings, plans, and hypotheses that extend thought and expectation into domains that would otherwise be unknown or obscure. Living with complexities we don’t control, it steers us toward possibilities desired or predicted, even as it interprets the vague sense of events behind one’s back. We live with one foot planted, the other raised but hesitant because of uncertainty about the footing below. Art and literature play with this contingency: where shall we go; how do we get there? Imagination is the provocateur; it fills the spaces prefigured by questions for which there are no definitive answers: Why is there something rather than nothing? Is there an afterlife? Religion is liberating because it has cosmic pretensions, but little embarrassment: silly or grave, its answers are declared. Yet religion is more affecting than cosmology because the issues it raises are those of “ultimate concern.” Mostly incidental to the details of practical life, its meanings are easily construed as the indispensable context for all we do and are. Personal and social commerce is conducted in those psychic or social spaces, though Nietzsche, like Thrasymachus, advised that we be suspicious of realities projected and controlled by our story-tellers. Pit two cults against one another, each with its world-spinning mythology, then understand that each must annihilate the other to justify itself. Their hostility is, nevertheless, odd because each could understand that its creed rationalizes and defends core interests—safety, health, education, cooperation, and efficacy—shared by the other. There might also be satisfaction in knowing that a desire to subordinate reality by understanding it is common to them. Yet convergence is invisible when each side struggles to defend its God from heretical beliefs and defiling rituals. Faithful to our meanings, we imagine the shame of losing a war to defend them. There is all the while evolution’s unintended irony: a faculty for elaborating and integrating sensory date (data current with data past and data to come) is appropriated to describe powers and worlds for which there is no evidence.

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Artists invent their forms and meanings; the rest of us learn them by imitation. Joining a dance, one hears the rhythm and tries the steps. Partners are explicit: I’ll do it, you do it after me. This is schooling; it educates sensibility while teaching skills. It requires perception, discrimination of relevant cues, memory, habit formation, and motor control; others start singing, and one sings along. Companions expect that a learner will participate; he or she feels the pleasure of having a settled place among them. This also works when learning a game or praying with fellow congregants: one watches or listens while doing as they do. Belief comes easier if reasons are incidental because belief requires only that one assent to the practice in which one participates. A church’s communicants expect an avowal; strangers are asked—do you believe?—because a congregation is wounded—betrayed—by skeptics who pretend. But some activities dispense with belief as a condition for affiliation. Poker doesn’t require an affirmation, though people playing it are often committed. There are also marginal cases: An agnostic friend is so enthralled by Italian religious paintings that she professes herself credulous when seeing them. She doesn’t convert. Her vulnerability is evidence that rationality is labile, not fixed. Plato or Kant would have said that its standards are universal, however irrational we are when passionate or afraid. This friend’s response is evidence for a different claim: meanings prescribe criteria of rationality intrinsic to themselves. A secularist sees the logic of transfiguration and divinity when comfortable in the logic of the story affirming it. Why this variability? Because rationality is usefully construed in the terms of figure and ground: a dominant meaning is figure; all the rest is deplored, or ignored. If medieval church art is figure, skeptical doubts are heretical or insulting; flip the order of priority and the religious story loses credibility. Why is one standard established as correct? Because it consistently makes sense of practical life and science, while others have little or no application beyond the small circle of meanings that commend them. Meanings are usually acquired with little or no conscious awareness. Learning comes with immersion and imitation: its effects are soaked up like heat on a humid day. Attitudes essential to adult life—deference and prerogatives, for example—are acquired in childhood when there are no considered alternatives and no realization that those learned are self-defining. What are the criteria learned when evaluating beliefs or practices? What sorts of evidence or reasons are accepted as cogent? Which is the over-riding attitude: credulity or doubt? These are questions resolved before a child has the choice of meanings. Their answers are quickly learned, sometimes before one has acquired skills enabling a believer to participate in a meaning’s social rites: think of students learning the professional attitudes of the doctors they choose to be. Adult choice is more complicated than

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childhood learning because it demands an act of will and the conscious acquisition of attitudes that may be alien. More than demanding that we memorize an anatomy textbook or inscrutable language, choice requires thinking or feeling one’s way into the attitudes and sentiments of the sponsoring culture: spouses converting to a mate’s religion, for example. Consider that meanings are not like clothing replaced by something more stylish: we see the ambient world as they prescribe; losing them implies losing that world. One forgets much that was meaningful in an old school or neighborhood, but meanings aren’t easily renounced. People who grow to maturity in a religion retain the meanings embodied in its attitudes when they have long ago rejected its doctrines. Why pray in difficult moments; why hope for an afterlife when nothing in your biology class justified expecting it? Because these were touch stones in a childhood one remembers, fixtures in a culture one still shares. Recall the two senses of experience: one as conscious content, the other as the activity of engaging other people and things. Experiences of both sorts are intentional, but the first seems passive: we intend the content presented merely by attending to it. Experience of the other sort is active: we address our circumstances with complementary questions: what is there; can we achieve our objectives, given what we find? Imagination is provoked by both questions. Foresight is sometimes detached from exigency and action, but daydreaming is a gift to brains enlarged beyond the exigencies of practical life: we imagine doing what we don’t have to do. Planning anticipates our engagements with other people and things. It maps the terrain, while searching for opportunities that would enhance the likelihood of success. Imagine being locked in a closet: the door handle has fallen off; there is no light; one is alone without a phone. Panic is suppressed as we imagine alternate solutions: break the door; or use something accessible to replace the missing door knob. Reaching for a wire hanger, one bends, inserts, and turns it until the door opens. This is imagination as it enlarges the array of options for exploring the near-world. No one lives well or long without this finesse. But there is more to practical success, more that comes as imagination embodies the rationality entrained when meaning establishes a focus for one’s beliefs and practices. This might be a video game of gods and gangsters, a punishing morality, or a practical logic viable in most situations. We have evidence of this posture in the fact that circumstances rarely surprise us: we’re ready for them whether or not we’re able to prevail because imagination anticipates their evolution. Like a miner’s lamp it lights the road ahead, sometimes tentatively but usually in ways relevant to our choice of situations. This account is incomplete if there is a per-

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sistent gap between situations where imagination is activated and our actual circumstances. We’re steady, expecting that matters will conform to our expectations, until they don’t. Wanting, working for this reassuring effect while fearing others, we go back and forth between hope and anxiety. Imagination intervenes; it defends equanimity by enlarging the domain of significant meanings: wanting control when probably we can’t have it, we buy a lottery ticket. Meaning’s interventions would be better understood if we could interpret its role in material, mechanical terms. Doing that requires that we specify its psychological functions and neural processes. Neural effects are the associations established when data or signals are organized and transformed under the direction of controlling rules. Percepts, memories, and words are coded electrochemically, stored, and activated for association when cued by environmental or intra-psychic stimuli. The data are organized by heuristics that apply across all the domains of experience while achieving the specificity appropriate to particular clusters of content or interest: percepts, memories, or thought pertinent to law, family, or business. Association is the principal resource when memory makes rain the sign of moods, and sunlight a metaphor for understanding. Many thinkers are convinced that language throws minds into a different gear, one ill-suited to naturalizing explanations. But this belief requires more justification than it gets. Primitive vocabularies likely signified things or events in the ambient world (people, weather, food, or danger). Primitive sentences may have signified relationships bound by spatial or temporal proximity, or because one factor seemed caused by or instrumental to another. Language has become an economical way of organizing one’s thoughts and an efficient way of signifying one’s interests or aims to others. But rules for assembling sentences aren’t more mysterious than association itself. Semantic coherence was likely achieved when primitive sentences communicated information by linking signs in ways that mimicked things perceived (cats on mats) while satisfying spatial, temporal, or causal heuristics for relating data or signals. These rules would have enabled language to vary the relationships signified: first, combinations of things familiar; then, combinations imagined but unencountered. If the first sentences always paired apple to apples, more complex sentences could signify apples with oranges, then apples with emblematic cities. Language would have acquired autonomy: signs could be mixed to the point of solecism: only the affirmation that something exists and doesn’t exist or has and lacks the same property would have seemed precluded. Imagination would be liberated to vary its mixtures of things signified, then to generalize, extrapolate, or analogize up to this formal limit. Testability would be incidental; truth would be superseded by semantic fantasy. Once the literal shadow of the

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near world, it would become a power for autonomous meanings or unfettered play. Say what you like, short of contradiction. Believe what you say merely because saying it is semantically coherent. Language reduced to a tool enabling practical life is spare and ascetic. It is vivified when mind’s reading of the world incorporates factors distinct from daily chores. That happens when people respond emotionally and cognitively to their satisfactions, vulnerabilities, and opportunities. Meanings that seem banal acquire resonance when embellished by these experiential interests. There is, for example, no way to know the associations an interjection such as “Stop!” may have for a stranger. We find out by interviewing drivers who yield to a stop sign. How do they construe it? One cites habit: seeing the sign he stops. Anything else? Well, he’s seen accidents when people don’t stop. Another driver is often fined, and offers that as his reason. A third mention rules and prudence; a fourth explains that two times three are seven. And so on, until it’s plain that reasons for stopping reduce to five: habit (inhibition), associations, fines, anxiety, and reasons unclassifiable. There will be other explanations, too, but all will likely cite these or other simple considerations. “Stop!” might also signify that we risk violating a divine commandment, but this, too, doesn’t require inhibitions that are more than bodily and mechanical. We don’t need mysteries to explain the wash of meanings suffused by forceful but idiosyncratic thoughts or feelings. Which mental functions are active when reality is subsumed by meanings and their values? Seven are determining: i. schematization (mind’s power to organize sensory data or ideas in coherent patterns); ii. emotions thereby satisfied or provoked; iii. attitudes; iv. intentions; v. normativity; vi. beliefs; and vii. reasons: 7.1.1 Schematization: Like decorators choosing drapes or rugs suitable with furniture, minds assemble coherent narratives while barring features that would be alien to those ensembles. The rules employed organize data, ideas, and directives in ways that are sensitive to their character and to the coherence of the whole. But there is also this overriding concern: meanings prescribe their satisfiers. Dominated by attitudes that supersede practical choices, we want gratification in terms they prescribe: something, please, other than water. 7.1.2 Emotion: Anger, fear, happiness, desire: these are states of an animal caring for itself while aroused by circumstances. Why be surprised that feeling’s intensity exhibits its force by determining the story—palliative or punishing—that shapes experience? What does your god promise? Don’t resist when it’s provided; wait until it is.

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7.1.3 Intention is often synonymous with attention: one attends to a thought, feeling, person, or action. It may also signify an aim or the orientation of a plan. Some of its referents are situational: we look ahead while walking or driving; we seek things needed or favored. The intentions driving behavior are often predictable because their sanctioning attitudes are inflexible. This is so whether actions are habitual or calculated for the effect they have on a particular occasions (swerving to avert an accident). Philosophic regard for intention is often narrow: it registers Brentano’s concern for the arrow of attention when focused by things perceived, remembered, or imagined. It often ignores the complexity of deliberation as it plans an action, then oversees it while revising the plan as obstacles are encountered. One remembers Wittgenstein’s waiter: he drops a tray of dishes, tripping on something unforeseen, while preoccupied by wanting to carry it safely. Intention is less bewildering if we consider that each person embodies a hierarchical system of initiatives and controls: think of birds and sharks, all moving or poised for action. Like them, our principal orientation is external. Internal focus, whether deliberating or day-dreaming, relates to behavior as the harpist’s fingers are to the notes she plays. Spiders are effective because choice is superfluous when intentions are hard-wired. Human intentions are less effective without plans whose variability makes them vulnerable to failure. Flexibility and choice imply the gap between aims and success, hence the impression that intentions are primarily intra-psychic, related only precariously to successful behavior. Cameras are focused by setting the shutter speed, and the focal distance between sensor and lens. Particular subjects, ambient light, and a photographer’s aim determine the settings. Imagine cameras that are autonomously intentional (those in satellites and space capsules, for example). Registering their surroundings, setting these variables automatically: they take photos of this rock, that chasm. Human intentions are more complicated because of conflicted aims, altered plans, and changing circumstances, but why suppose that their material conditions are more puzzling? 7.1.4 Attitudes: These are the psychic postures created when meanings determine the orientation—the biases—of one’s plans, behaviors, expectations, and aversions. 7.1.5 Normativity: Having capacities is a condition for acquiring habits or skills. Most are inactive: someone knowing one language is capable of having learned others. Habits are normative: given the impulse to act, one does it in ways

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learned. Careless or sloppy actions are corrected, for there are two points of reference when judging a performance: is it done well; does it satisfy social norms? Do you handle the car efficiently; do you drive as traffic laws prescribe? Normativity is doubled: a habit enables actions of a kind, while inhibiting others; it embodies rules that specify the limits of acceptable practice. These aspects of normativity are additional to the pervasive physical necessities of our world: the normativities of spacetime, motion, and their intrinsic laws. There are also the standards of rhythm, clarity, and grace available to all. Every dancer is distinctive as he or she satisfies these constraints in ways specific to him or herself. This is one set of norms—a personal discipline—embedded in a hierarchy of others. Is normativity conventional in the case of human tastes and actions? Yes and no. Yes, because there is cultural, social, personal, and historical variation; no, because certain of its aspects are constant across these variables. Joy or sadness are irresistible when standing with others in moments of celebration or loss. That easy response is risky in an angry crowd or when deliberating with others about matters of common concern: liking the same beer, wearing similar clothes, must I also prefer the same candidates or enjoy the same music? Answers vary with one’s society or culture. Does sensibility submit to social regulation? Is it tolerant of norms specific to the idiosyncrasies of individuals who regulate themselves? Normativity is also the stable posture of thought or sensibility as they embody norms of coherence or consistency. Hearing an argument or discussion, I find it illogical. Asked to explain, I cite transitions that seem incoherent to me. Challenged for more detail, I propose thoughts or sentences that would bridge the gap, though my candidates—“three times two are eleven,” “go upstairs to the basement”—are rejected. This is puzzling: has the majority acquired bad habits or have I breached an elementary scruple? Conflict isn’t easily resolved because coherence is somewhat impressionistic: links in thought or performance are often no tighter than context and style require. Yet permissiveness isn’t viable if the two parts of a fractured narrative suffer the illogic of contradiction. What psychic standard is this: how is the logic of non-contradiction embedded in the mechanics of the brain? This question conflates two others: the brain embodies non-contradiction in the way common to every state of affairs, actual or possible: nothing is both p and -p. The brain is, however, able to couple thoughts or sentences that represent or express both p and -p. Hence, the question at hand: how or why do we recognize a coupling as contradictory or as the juncture of contraries? Is mind innately hostile to contradiction or contrariety? Is it imprinted when instructed (trained) as we engage things that never violate noncontradiction or learned when we’re frustrated by contraries: love or indifference, wealth or debt? Either would explain that our intolerance for solecism is a norm

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for educated thought. How is the norm embodied? As a mental/neural setting, an inhibition that prevents violations or a warning light that makes it easier to discern and repair them. Is the principle learned or innate? It is almost certainly innate. Consensus would likely be mixed if non-contradiction were learned; people sometimes dispute an alleged instance but they don’t usually violate it. Those who do are usually quick to correct themselves. Are they embarrassed by a social gaffe or by something deeper, an innate logical constraint in the neural pathways responsible for processing information? 7.1.6 Belief: We think of beliefs as assertions defensible with arguments or passions. But belief also expresses itself in this more fundamental way: it differentiates and organizes experience in ways that exhibit beliefs: I express my belief in the value of roses or pinochle by growing one or playing the other. I can give more or less compelling reasons for doing one or the other, but that is after the fact and less convincing than actions or practices that show my beliefs. “I believe in you” is more than cant when the belief is expressed by a parent or friend. Some things we do are incidental to our beliefs: we sleep and breathe whatever we believe. Other behaviors express one’s attitudes when done without forethought or conscious beliefs, though they have belief’s support when challenged. There are, for example, the small gestures of religious people: bowed heads, quick prayers. We know that these are expressions of belief when a person challenged to explain himself responds more defensively than the question seems to warrant: of course I believe; why else would I pray as I do? Beliefs of this sort are meanings enacted. They compare to thoughts entertained and affirmed, to doctrines consciously believed. This opposition—thought or performance—is a point of reference for those who distinguish the “space of reason” from the “space of placement in nature.” John McDowell, after Wilfred Sellars (and Wilhelm Dilthey), believes that the first isn’t reducible to, and can’t be understood in the terms of the second: When the machinery in the head is in good working order, that is not to say that its states and changes of state are related by sorts of relation that constitute the space of reasons, any more than the states and changes of state in, say, a healthy kidney…”Mechanical rationality” (so called) cannot ensure semantic rationality, but it is semantic rationality that structures the space of reasons.129

|| 129 John McDowell, “Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mind” Naturalism in Question (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 102.

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One is a physical space, the other a space of meaning (semantics) and warrant. The space of nature, as McDowell construes it, is lawful and structured; the space of interacting neurons. The space of reasons is one of mental functions: intentions, references, and reasons. McDowell thinks it anomalous—a category mistake—to suppose that functions in the space of reasons are performed by structures in the space of nature. Consider a useful analogy: a piano, all wood, brass, and ivory, is the ensemble of parts whose structure and movements are regulated by laws. These materials wouldn’t seem to justify the expectation of intellectual stimulus or aesthetic pleasure when hearing a piano played. But this is a player-piano; load it with a piano role, turn the crank, and listen. Nature’s space is suddenly alive with tonality, rhythm, dynamics, and form. There is also intentionality, for the piano roll simulates the phrasing, tempos, and dynamics of the pianist whose performance it records. Who would have believed it: all this from wood, brass, and ivory? The piano is, of course, still deficient in one respect. It doesn’t refer beyond itself because of missing something critical to the “space of reasons”: namely, semantic reference. We begin to provide for reference by supposing that perceptual organs are critical to those natural agents whose semantic skills are provoked by things perceived, then signified in memories and words. Adding such organs to a piano seem outlandish, so imagine instead that the perceiver is a thing of flesh and blood: a bird. Here, too, hopes of semantic reference shouldn’t be strong, given its material constituents. But birds, like pianos, sing: they, too, use tonality, phrasing, rhythm, and dynamics to express themselves. Moreover, they do it intentionally (whether hard-wired or voluntarily). This is apparent when birds use different vocalizations to warn of predators or attract a mate. It happens, too, when they sing together, apparently for the pleasure of socializing. Now consider us humans. Like pianos, we’re only material; like birds, we’re perceivers able to associate bodily and linguistic responses to perceptual inputs. Analogous to birds and pianos, we exploit our physical powers to represent, refer, warrant, and explain: our thoughts and words have semantic reference. Naturalism’s critics are quick to say that everyday talk—of intentions, feelings, or plans—is out of keeping with the mechanics of our physical nature. Why are they surprised, given that self-understanding—consciousness—obscures its material base? But ignorance isn’t restricted to self-understanding: people don’t know, merely by listening, that radios make sound by using tubes or transistors to convert electromagnetic signals. (One imagines natives, unfamiliar with such things, shaking radios to dislodge their animating souls.) But these anomalies— colloquial speech versus machine design—are not the basis for a sound ontology.

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McDowell reifies the “space of reasons” without considering its physical conditions. Why not concede that physical systems may have unforeseeable effects? 7.1.7 Reasons: Each belief or practice has its logic; all have their reasons. Reasons are justifiers: they explain what we do or justify doing it. Some are the disciplined reasons for everyday behavior, scientific experiment, or legal procedures: umbrellas when it’s raining; evidence when choosing among alternative hypotheses; laws cited when judging that actions are infractions. These are reasons within a practice, reasons that explain an action or judgment by contextualizing it. Going out during a storm, one uses an umbrella to avoid getting wet; challenging an action, we cite the law breached. Other reasons are ulterior: assuming a detached posture from the generic characterization of a practice, they cite its condition or conditions. Good laws, fairly applied are the guarantors of a stable civil society; science is practiced because it improves our understanding and control of nature. Reasons pertinent to meanings fall to both sides of this difference. Some are motivators within the context of an application: support the union. Others specify conditions for a practice: union solidarity empowers its members. Justification is usually easy within a practice valorized by a meaning because reasons cited typically specify causes for desired effects: pay your dues. Reasons are problematic when used as ulterior justifiers when used to motivate people who reject the sanctioning meaning: businessmen hostile to unions. Practices of all sorts need ulterior justifiers, but so do the piety and loyalty required by tribal identities. Complexity ramifies because there is a difference between the external justifiers for everyday practice, science, or law on one side, religion or ideology on the other. Practicality, science, and law answer to the interests of people and societies concerned to secure themselves in circumstances that are sometimes viable but often precarious: the reasons for air and water are disputable. Religion and ideology defer to these existential concerns, but their practices have an additional rationale: their sanctified meanings. The cause of a mythic practice are the feelings and insecurities that provoke its formation; its justifying reason is the persuasion that powers it evokes have a decisive influence on personal life and the life of the tribe. Yet those meanings obscure their contingency: doing as a story requires is pacifying, though we would be pacified by other beliefs and practices had we come of age in other cultures. Tribal loyalty is, nevertheless, unqualified when meaning and affiliation seem no less critical than air and water. Compare the elation of a winning team’s fans to the despair of the losers.

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Reasons differ accordingly. Some express the pragmatic character of human activity: we act for a purpose and respond with thought and feeling to our successes and failures. Or we organize ourselves and our plans in ways that express the attitudes and values sanctioned by our meanings. These are ulterior reasons; they function as ulterior motives. There is, ideally, a convergence between reasons of these two kinds: that happens when plans are successful because they sustain or establish states of affairs congenial to our meanings: we went to a game, cheered for our team, and, maybe, we’re part of the reason they won. Pascal’s wager has a similar logic. Participate: believe because it may win God’s good will.

7.2 Valuation Valuation is a mix of things: impulse and desire; appraisals—judgments—of means and ends; attitudes, largely unconsidered, expressing meanings that are also, usually, unconsidered. Need, impulse, and desire are easiest of the three to understand: seeing water when thirsty, valuation expresses our desire for it. Appraising means and ends is equally straightforward in principle. Wanting a measure appropriate to a choice between alternatives, we set one of two contested things against the other: a Mercedes is the measure of a Ford. Either may function as a standard for appraising the other when they are no less than generically similar. Why choose one as a measure? The choice is usually pragmatic: which side is appraised? Are we testing for objective differences—which is the better car—or subjective preferences: which can I afford. Justification—reasons—can go either way. Alternatives are weighed; a judgment is made. The valuations sponsored by meanings are my principal concern; they infiltrate the other two. Impulse and desire are usually constrained and driven by meanings, a fact exploited by advertisers: what would a Porsche do for my selfesteem? Options considered when deliberating are only those tolerated by one’s dominant meanings: I don’t consider a Trabant. Telling why this so requires attention to meanings as they orient one’s encounters with other people and things. Viable aims require the mating of achievable objectives with available means (pens that write). Deliberation is judgment in the context of prudent oversight: its valuations express the tension between hopes or desires, risks, aversions, and resources. It mates aims to means: what can I do, given what I have; what do I see or hear, given what I believe? Its judgments change with altered motives: is it need or want that impels me? Priority isn’t always clear. Do we want marriage because we need its advantages, or need it when we want its advantages? The first posture makes us anxious about failing: the need would be frustrated. The

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second justifies failure by construing it as evidence that want was misplaced: marriage was wanted when it wasn’t needed. A meaning directed me, but I was confused; its implications weren’t clear. Some radical choices seem voluntary but are not, because meaning has intruded. There are many candidates for places on the first spaceship to Mars, though applicants know that they will never return to Earth and likely die shortly after arriving on Mars. Why do they apply? Because accommodation to local (Earthly) prospects suffocates them. Trading safety for opportunity, they’re desperate for purpose. Frustration isn’t always acknowledged because our democratic fable emphasizes freedom from constraint but often ignores the barriers to choice. It avers that opportunities and resources are ample, we have only to weigh our talents and aims before choosing among them. Success is confirmed when a self-willed entrepreneur (a Henry Ford) has become a node—a center of efficacy—responsible for a cascade of desirable effects. There were many workers, just one Henry Ford. He was the magician whose imagination structured their lives; meanings dominated him, as he dominated them.. They had fewer choices and made fewer judgments. Someone as messianic as Ford might have sought elevation to sacerdotal authority in the hierarchy of a church, but he was devoted to his factories, industrial plan, and cars. Other motives mostly eluded him, though he retains the mythic status of a node; the entrepreneur whose organizing ideas swept everything before him. Valuing Ford as a node seems to imply that he was a good-in-itself. For value is often construed as prior to valuation in roughly the way that finding is the aim of searching: value is the diamond-in-the rough, the partner we seek but haven’t yet found. Some things, this implies, have intrinsic value, for valuing is the judgment, more or less informed and accurate, that particular aims or means are valuable. Though goods justifying this impression are instrumental, not intrinsic. Some ends—wanting an education for the person I shall be—are also justified but they, too, like good scissors and every object or aim, are nodes. We sequence resources to create them, expecting that nodes will stand their ground when achieved, radiating effects. But that is characteristic of nodes: they are richly instrumental, desirable and desired for their effects on others and themselves. Is instrumentality generalized to the nodes postulated by meanings? For surely, the God or secular Heaven postulated by our religions or ideologies has the promise and allure of an intrinsic good. But consider: do we ascribe them inherent value or only the instrumental value of being stable sources of effects that are desired or feared? Are there no intrinsic goods, no values that endure across eras, situations, or cultures? Is there no limit to the relativism implied if all are nodal because instrumental? There is a limit because human lives have needs—

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nourishment, cooperation, partners, and health—fixed in human nature and pervasive across places and times. Fulfilling them is a condition for well-being; finding means to satisfy them is inevitably an aim. Their satisfaction is a principal aim but also a point of dispute because the manner of achieving it (Hobbes or Kant) is all the difference between bare animality and something finer. Yet here, too, the aim achieved is no less instrumental than the means of its satisfaction, for well-being, the rightly exalted condition of one who enjoys his or her instrumentality, is nodal. Think of a night where all is obscure beyond the perimeter of stadium lights: my needs and interests, duties, and culture versus everything else, all of it immured in darkness. Making choices relevant to the social good seems incidental to most plans or calculations, for we do many things that make no social difference. Yet fertile nodes enhance other people and systems as well as themselves. Willing this aim entails a severe discipline: do some things that make no social difference, but take care to minimize the adverse effects of differences you make. Utility seems to stretch in every direction: ahead, collaterally, and behind. One is supported but trapped in a web of causes and effects; nothing seem resolved in itself if everything is appraised for its effects on other things. Sensibility is the saving qualification because the intensities experienced may have little or no direct effect beyond their power to nourish their subject’s well-being. The banker has no time for art. His secretary paints and sings in a choir; she extends the range of things valued, from food, sleep, and a salary to Buxtehude. She has judgment acquired while immersing herself in the arts important to her, not by making choice a consequence of deliberation. This is taste refined by cultivation. Its satisfiers are meaningful in the respect that they attract because they gratify. These are the meanings deeper than judgment; choosing as taste prescribes, she is different because of them. This is taste as an expression of desire and judgment. Judgment is several things. It implies authority, maturity, and rigor; someone having it makes good choices or has good taste. But the word is ambiguous. Judgments about plans and instruments are tentative; there are always obstacles: things don’t work; objectives are less desirable than they seemed. These estimates compare to the severity of moral judgments, and the finality implied when courts declare their decisions. Judgment feigns certitude when positivist judges deduce their decisions from appropriate covering laws, though judgment is revisable when meanings are ambiguous, means are unreliable, or aims are disputed. Judgment as an evaluation of desirability or of means and ends is properly tentative: one may not have relevant information; tastes change. Meaning’s judgments are dogmatic: their power to instruct or coerce whole populations would be di-

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minished if they or authorities speaking for them were tentative. So, Marx’s dialectical materialism is deterministic (partisans know that its outcome is assured); no religion encourages members to dispute its doctrines. Attitudes sanctioned by meanings are self-assured; deliberation is unnecessary because one already knows the answer. This is usually the developmental effect of values that insinuated themselves in various ways, some apparent—family, culture, the neighborhood—others not. Deliberation is shallow when acquiescence and habituation signify the same effect: we’re saved or sabotaged by established meanings, unconsidered attitudes, and habits; we want and do the same things irrespective of reasons or altered circumstances. What does my society or culture value; what are its preferred aims and means? Born or educated within it, I prize them too. This is meaning as it forecloses deliberation: One doesn’t need to think—thinking is discouraged—when meanings are promulgated, learned, and enforced. Painting in the West was once dominated by Christian religious themes. It gave palpable entrée to faith for believers ignorant of Latin because principal doctrines could be expressed as visual art. But painters abandoned spiritual themes, then representation. Stained-glass windows have a similar trajectory: they’ve lost the inspirational power of medieval churches and the ethos of beliefs that were naïve and literal. Visit a contemporary church; notice that its modern windows, however pretty, do little or nothing to promote confidence in its doctrines: once established meanings have lost their force in the structures meant to celebrate them. But some of a faith’s motivation abides. What do we say when asked to justify belief or a religious vocation? Judgment—calculation—seems incidental. One assents when “called”; ambience and meaning explain it. A culture’s meanings feed imagination, though sometimes the two are inimical. Are we habituated to forms imposed or liberated to create styles of our own? A stolid culture blights imagination, provoking a Nietzsche or Kokoschka. They resolve the difference with character and luck. Culture supplies possibilities they relish; or they cultivate sensibility with tastes and judgments that are stubbornly their own. There are, accordingly, these three perspectives on meaning’s valuations. Some are acquired osmotically, given meanings learned from one’s family, schools, religion, or workmates. Other appraisals, consequent on meanings that emerge with one’s choices (the reliable friend, the annoying car), are unforeseeable. Last in this list, but not in their effects, are valuations made as one explores opportunities available to people having a relevant talent: one manages a store, writes laws, sings or dances. Loyal to the town of my birth, knowing its ways, I live there; surprised by my children, I admire them; gratified by a talent, committed to a vocation that requires it, I devote myself to both. Most people do their

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valuing under the first two rubrics, though meanings establish parameters for judgment in all three modes. How shall we describe the psychic processes constitutive of valuation? Science often shuns questions about values, though valuation should be less contentious. So, information about the physiological variables of aesthetic response may one day enable us to say that some art gratifies or appeases sensibility better than others; the results of encouraging people to enjoy one rather than another might confirm this surmise. But scientific advice has limited aims: it tells us the parameters for health, and explains the chemistry that makes chocolate compelling. It identifies with our interest in well-being when explaining alternate processes and their effects, but it doesn’t, qua science tell us what to do or like. The science of mind is, from one perspective, an inquiry into functions that culminate in experience. We ask Kant’s question but answer by citing material processes, rather than transcendental operations. Here, where the issue is meaning and valuation, the relevant function is more narrowly specified: the valuations embodied in meanings are expressed as attitudes, hence by choices and actions that attitudes prescribe. People are typically unselfconscious when expressing their attitudes. For attitudes mark out domains where all is seen in their light, favored or not; we don’t acknowledge, unless challenged, that people with other attitudes might see them differently. There are inconsistencies when things of a kind are viewed as falling into several camps at once (one liked, the other shunned), but cases of this sort are handled with ad hoc measures that aren’t to be generalized: yes, we can have him to dinner this time, but no others. Meaning’s determination of attitudes is sedulous and stubborn. We feign passivity while perceiving, though the emotion with which we respond when perception is challenged intimates attitude’s determination to perceive and value as before. Interrupt someone rushing to fill a deadline, ask what he’s doing, then notice the attitude that explains his annoyance. For attitude is thought and will under the sign of emotion. This is meaning as the bias and inclination that drives imagination, thought, and action: the world as I perceives it, the reality I suffer, tolerate, or struggle to change. Yet attitudes bias perception, understanding, and intention while giving no direct evidence of themselves. We know them by comparing our experiences to those of people having other responses to the same states of affairs. Even then, we often discount the difference as a bias in others, one absent in ourselves. Is attitude something additional to the functions it warps, or is it just the bias imparted to these other functions? Having no use for one more complexity, it seems plausible that attitude is only the bias that meaning imparts to thought, perception, feeling, and purpose.

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Consider again that valuation has three principal expressions: something is valued when desired; means and ends are appraised; or meanings determine attitudes that express one values. These ways of valuing exploit some of the same mental functions: namely, the selective character of awareness, intention, and will: 7.2.1 Selective awareness: Consciousness and its qualitative contents (the look, feel, and sound of things) are the last obstacle to a comprehensive understanding of how bodies work. This is true when awareness is regarded in either of two ways. One construes it as the workplace or laboratory for deliberation: ideas are formulated or clarified; decisions are made. The other analogizes it to hot wax: awareness takes impressions that alter with the force and form of the stamp. The first requires that valuations be justified by their consequences, a principle, or meaning; the other subordinates justification to a sanctioning meaning: this is how things are seen and done because this is what we believe and do. Either way, meanings differentiate, organize, and prioritize the reality known to me. All the rest is backdrop. A system’s members share some attitudes—loyalty to their system and one another—but also complementary attitudes: those appropriate to coordinating their separate roles. Members of a society may share similar meanings and attitudes, though their referents (your family or mine) are different. How can we explain the selective character of awareness—its bias when focused by a meaning’s valuations—in material terms? Hume is a useful point of reference. He defended his analysis of causality by pointing out that animals operate successfully—satisfying their practical needs—when constant conjunction is their only information about causality.130 If that much information is good enough for them, why do we require more? This is surely an odd point of reference for an argument making a significant claim. Forget that it invites many extrapolations: why do we need language to communicate if beavers work well together without it; why, if animals don’t need clothes, do we? Notice, however, that Hume’s analogy is pertinent in the present context. For animals, too, have selective awareness; their nervous systems enable it when feeding or mating. Why suppose that ours are less capable? Acknowledging this capacity in ourselves would explain its role when valuation is expressed as desire, and when appraising means and ends. For other animals have appetites and desires, and some are capable of appraisal: chimpanzees choose sticks to gather honey. They focus and appraise; we focus and

|| 130 Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, pp. 138–139.

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appraise. Only the evaluations expressed by attitudes elude this explanation because, we’ll suppose, no creature other than humans is capable of addressing the world by way of its meanings. But is that so? It’s easy to say that a dog’s view of her world is only a matter of stimulus and response, for she has no language in which to imagine. Yet that disability isn’t evidence that she doesn’t address her circumstances with an array of attitudes expressing her expectations and appraisals. Some of the people with whom she lives ignore her; she expects nothing from them. Others are indulgent; she goes to them. And she will notice and respond appropriately if people of either sort alter their responses to her. Why suppose that our neural capacities are less sufficient than hers, given the greater range of our representational capacities? We cite meanings when explaining our attitudes; she can’t do that, but we don’t do it either unless challenged. Meaning has these two sides: the responses it promotes, and the rationales it provides. Why do this rather than that; why go here? We explain. Should we suppose that the first part is neural, while the second—the rationale—requires a faculty more transcendental. Why would we believe that when the neural pathways and centers responsible for thought and language are well marked? Selectivity is set in animals of every sort as a piano is tuned: striking a key determines a tone and its character when a string has been tightened or relaxed or when a hammer’s felt surface has been softened or scoured. Why is one aware of the note selected? Because it occurs in a nervous system whose principal functions are responsiveness and discrimination when stimulated. A signal to a comes to awareness as a quality or event. Words are heard; the setting fixed by meaning and attitude determines that reception is cordial or hostile. We can also complicate mind’s functions in this other way: by reverting to Descartes’ belief that the awareness of content presuppose the possibility of a higher-order awareness having a lower-order awareness as its content. This is oversight, a function critical to deliberation, though most living things don’t have it. Nor is it important to meaning and valuation unless perceptions, thoughts, or actions are subject to review. For otherwise, we, too, address reality as attitudes prescribe without realizing our biases. Selective awareness is audited when activity in one sector is registered— read—in connected sectors. Effects in a communicated to b may come to awareness in b as a read in b. The signal to a (reported in an oculist’s office) is reported as “Red.” The signal from a to b is reported from b as: “I see red.” The connection is not always bilateral: signals that go from a to b, may not also go from b to a. But sometimes they do: b might be the order to close one’s eyes. One might say that there is no difference in experiential content between the reports from a and

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b, though there is a difference between reacting quickly to something seen without self-awareness (swerving a car when a child runs into the street), while having it when self-consciously prudent. There are also two functional differences. Reports from a or b signify different brain centers; effects in one sector may be registered and read in some centers but not others (a difference qualified by synesthesia). This distinction—a to b—invites another: we distinguish brain topography and inter-neural dynamics from brain function. All the brain’s neural processes may affect others (by pressure, heat, blood flow, or vibration)—this is neural dynamics—though most are incapable of reading those reading them. Functional talk uses “higher” and “lower” to signify, for example, that center b is higher than center a in the respect that b reads a, though a doesn’t read b. Information about these functional relations is, accordingly, additional to information about neural dynamics. We use it, for example, when meditation is used to control pain: b affecting a, rather than b merely reading a. There are very few physical variables (neural structures and the frequency, speed and intensity of electrical signals) conditioning these effects. Their physiological explanation may be very simple when finally it comes. Self-awareness is also problematic in another way, incidental to the alleged regress. We know that other people see us and themselves from perspectives different from ours; would we see ourselves as they do if biased by their meanings? We feel ourselves to be full-sized; they see us as tall or short. Other peoples’ views of us are ignored when we’re self-absorbed because attention to one’s meanings and values is typically free of self-doubt and this dialectic. But there is a question: why don’t we integrate alternate perspectives into our self-awareness given our preoccupation with meanings and values? Doesn’t socialization or anxiety force them upon us? The likely answer is that other attitudes (real or imputed) are already inventoried in one’s personal appraisals and habits. Like people habituated to spectacles or hearing aids, our posture is principally naïve and unreflective. We have already internalized imagined views of how we dress, speak, or think; or we never cared. Doubt isn’t provoked until one is asked to consider or defend attitudes or postures thoughtlessly expressed. Why use spoons and forks rather than chopsticks? Because that is what we do: I tried the other way, but I was clumsy; I stopped when people laughed. This distinction—selective awareness in a, with or without b reading a—clarifies a point left obscure in Chapter Three, Existence Proofs. I argued there, supporting Descartes, that awareness is sometimes accompanied by self-awareness. This is the perspective of the infallible existence claim made from b when a’s qualification by content is communicated to b. The experience has a character

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and authenticity that puts it (almost) beyond challenge. Many contents provoke it: including tooth aches and occasions when eyes are blinded by bright light. These experiences aren’t explained by their neural conditions at the moment when b affirms them because they are unknown to b. But now, we can cite the causal conditions that explain their validity: a is read by b when both are sites in the same neural system. There are, principally, two possibilities: b does read a, or b responds as though reading a though no signal from a has been transmitted to b. The first case is the one considered in Chapter Three, but the second is equally infallible because b, while alone or with content imagined, is self-affirming. Misconstruing the information available to it, it nevertheless affirms its existence. Yet notice the implied anomaly: infallible existence claims, made from b regarding a, acquire their infallibility from the contingency that they are states of a material system, one whose principal function is its sensibility to stimulation. Affect a living healthy brain to a sufficient degree and it will infallibly register and sometimes report its activation. But now this step into ambiguity: suppose that b reports content, with or without a: one experiences the vivacity that was—for Descartes and Hume—the sufficient measure of existence, though a theoretically infallible brain imager finds evidence of neither a nor b The report from b, with perceived or imagined content, was an infallible existence claim, yet we have no evidence for either. Should both existence claims be rejected while reclassified with unexplained ephemera? That’s unsettling because it subverts confidence in every self-affirmed existence claim: each may be doubted until its content is checked for confirmation by a brain imager. Finding no evidence wouldn’t entail that a subject didn’t exist when claiming that he or she did, merely that the introspected evidence of his or her existence at the moment of affirming it wasn’t sufficient to warrant the affirmation. This is the price of identifying all mental states with brain states: machine readings will sometimes supersede the evidential authority of awareness. Dualists will have a different explanation: brain imaging’s failure to confirm an awareness will be construed as evidence that awareness sometimes eludes machine detection because minds aren’t perfectly coupled either to brains or to machines that track brain processes. They will say that imaging machines register correlated signs of mental activity—electrified brain states—without directly tracking mind itself. Only direct awareness is qualified to do what imaging machines have, in this case, failed to do. Yet this defense is costly to dualism in this other way. It succeeds at the price of shifting the evidentiary basis of the original self-affirmation. It reported that existence is known by the vivacity of awareness in a as registered in b, or in b with imagined (or perhaps, without) content. Now,

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that observation report is corrected: it becomes the inference that activity—however uncertain its character—presupposes its existence: doubting, thinking, and affirming presuppose their existence. Descartes sometimes lent himself to this inferential reading—he went farther; doubting presupposes the existence of the agent that doubts—but that is not his posture in the third paragraph of the second Meditation or in the quotation from his response to a critic cited in Chapter Three. There, existence is manifest experientially. Let’s go back to that point of reference. Descartes’ claim—I am aware of myself, hence my existence, when auditing my awareness of content—is fragile. What is the evidence of my existence? Just the vivacity of the complex content of awareness: content audited as it affects the resonant something construed as me. This is the existential experience familiar to everyone, though its material conditions are unknown all the while to people having it. Physiology informs us about those conditions: the brain, a neural information processor, is sensitive when affected. It resonates when stimulated, as happens when an effect in a is recorded in b. Brain imaging and the mind’s materiality enable us to explain the neural conditions for such experiences. That information explains the validity of most affirmations, though experience alone seems a secure basis for them. But what if a question is raised about the occurrence of a, perceived or imagined? What if the imaging machine finds no evidence—b—of the erroneous affirmation? Look again at the recording of brain activity made at the moment of the affirmation. Evidence will be there because the brain doesn’t act without leaving a measurable trace of itself. 7.2.2 Intention: Intention in this context is purpose, hence the difference between purpose and mere inclination or bias. Attitude is bias, active and focused or stolid; deliberation eventuates in purposes acceptable to attitudes. This is often purpose without conscious intention. For many actions and perceptions require no thought, given meanings established as attitudes and habits. But there are occasions when choice is required. Which objectives are suitable; what are the viable means? Deliberation considers options appropriate to one’s needs or wants, attitudes, resources, and circumstances. Perception supplies information about the ambient world; understanding classifies what we perceive, predicts what we may perceive, and estimates the enabling conditions or likely disruptions. One is selectively aware and often self-aware during deliberation as ends are considered and their means calculated. This happens on the side of interiority; action is inhibited while a plan is devised. Or monitoring scrutiny is essential to close attention—one checks and rechecks, counts and recounts—but this is care

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without requiring self-awareness. People competent at a task quickly sort the options, then work without it. Too much self-awareness—in a pianist or dancer— assures a clumsy performance. Meaning’s determinations reverse the order of priority: intentionality shows itself in what we do and our ways of doing it, not as an intra-psychic preparation. That isn’t required because attitudes are typically stable; we exude our meanings without having to think about them. This is somewhat ironic given Cartesian views of mind: often self-aware, we are oblivious to attitudes that determine what we do and how we do it. This is so even as we consider meanings that direct our attitudes: being male or female and aware of it, we express attitudes toward women or men that are visible to others, though largely unknown to us. Which meanings have determined our attitudes: we may not know. This apposition changes on the infrequent occasions when attitudes are the matters considered. People deliberate when emigrating, divorcing, or leaving a church. Principal meanings and values change with circumstances: what shall we do; who shall we be? Nothing in this is mysterious or an obstacle to the oversight of a system or circuit that reads and appraises itself—me, again—while responding to new situations and these queries. Though it will likely be altered circumstances, not deliberation, that changes our attitudes. 7.2.3 Will: Will is often construed as the power to initiate and sustain or inhibit action. Or will is the power to direct, divert, or inhibit action in agents that are always active to some degree. Will is critical for deliberation because deliberation without will is daydreaming: why deliberate if you can’t act in the way prescribed? Objections to free will emphasize that mental activity can’t escape the nexus of universal causality if mind is a bodily activity: will, it would follow, isn’t free. Quantum indeterminacy (the allegedly brief moment before an ambiguous particular is made determinate by its contact with an obstacle) is occasionally proposed as a leaven to universal determinism, but it isn’t plausible as an explanation for the freedom experienced while holding one’s breath or raising an arm because quantum indeterminacy occurs (if at all) at an order of magnitude much lower than deterministic neurological or muscular processes, and because provoking quantum indeterminacy as the effect or expression of choice makes little sense. There is no way to calibrate scales so that free will—when choosing chocolate rather than vanilla—is conveniently enabled by a moment of alleged indeterminacy. Does ambivalence make particles hang in limbo; do they interact with one another or a barrier as we choose? “Free will” is, all the while, ambiguous. It is often construed as exemption from determination, though its essential point is the difference expressed by the

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phrases freedom to and freedom from. Freedom to choose is the effect of being freed from external determinants; it doesn’t imply that free choices are uncaused. Soft determinism argues that their sufficient causes are intra-psychic. It doesn’t dispute that internal causes are late events in trajectories running backwards through an infinite train of anterior events. The cycles, hierarchy, and modularity of internal complexity enable me to alter my beliefs, attitudes, or actions irrespective of things external to me; it doesn’t liberate me from universal causation. Why count will among the mental activities decisive for deliberation and meaning? Because we mistakenly assimilate attitude to will. We make people responsible for their attitudes, though the manner of their acquisition—osmotic and unconscious—often makes attitudes invisible to people having them. Will doesn’t explain the acquisition of attitudes. It’s hard to imagine one acquired merely by willing to choose it; why should it be sufficient to renounce attitudes, given its marginal role in acquiring or suppressing them? Lots of attitudes and addictions would be altered if that were true. Knowing this makes us canny: we don’t buy the things we can forget or ignore; we don’t put ourselves in situations where embarrassing attitudes are likely to be revealed. Experience is sometimes a purge: we learn to do things we couldn’t do before without exposing attitudes we regret. But this is rare. Massed social relations would be gentler than they are if altering attitudes were as easy as willing them away. These seven mental functions challenge the assumption that meaning and value preclude an exhaustive materialist account of mental activity. Naturalism is incomplete because consciousness still resists us: we know its basis in neural activity, but not how brains produce it. There are, nevertheless, no mental functions that are not traceable to our material nature: altogether or, conceding the status of consciousness, to a degree that is still undetermined. Aristotle was prescient: mind is the activity of an agent having a certain complexity. Naturalism stumbles, not because its ontology is categorially incoherent but rather because comforting myths—mind and body, God and man—don’t cohere with our material nature. Add the frustration of having to concede that we humans are more complicated mechanically, though not ontologically, than other creatures. How do we compensate? By telling stories that displace us: given reality as it is or reality imagined, we sometimes prefer deception.

8 Last thoughts 8.1 Contingency Our experience of other people, things, and ourselves is buffered by meaning, value, and ambiguity: Meaning is found solely by him who seeks it. Into one another flow dream and waking, Truth and falsehood. Certainty is nowhere. We know naught of others, nor of ourselves. We are forever at play—he who knows that is the wiser!131

Meaning impels belief, until conviction fails. For if belief is only play, neither true nor false, then certainty is a conceit. Meaning is a dream, yet waking is intolerable, so dream and disillusion elide. One thinks of Wittgenstein’s ladder: climb, then kick it away; jump or fall, then climb again into this or another persuasion because life without meaning is a void. Why does meaning bind us tightly though we suspect its stories and conventions? Because it promises intelligible routines and desirable selves. We may imagine stripping ourselves of every illusion because of wanting to see things as they are—no artifice—though unmediated encounters are rare. Drinking cool water on a hot day is a raw, limiting case: an unembellished need. Wanting Perrier has other implications. Meaning is insidious and expansive; little we value eludes it. Self-deception is its first success; the social world is second: much is obscured or disguised when meaning sets the terms for status, transactions, affiliations, thoughts, ideals, and needs: 8.1.1 Status: Status is social hierarchy: to whom do we defer? It stratifies social castes, entitling some at cost to others. A class systems hangs like a pendant from a monarchy: titles are awarded, respect is shown, all genuflect in the direction of the throne. The fantasy is sustained by its pillars: a desire for order; the cynical advantages it bestows; and the mindless passivity of untitled classes. They could

|| 131 A quotation from Arthur Schnitzler’s Paracelsus, 1898, by an unknown translator, mounted on a wall in the Albertina Museum, Vienna. The passage, in a different translation, appears in Paracelsus and Other One-Act Plays, trans. G. J. Weinberger (Riverside, Ca.: Ariadne Press, 1995), p. 36.

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rebel or vote to annul a system that affirms itself as their cost, but many enjoy the romance of a monarch brushed by the gods. 8.1.2 Transactions: Transactions are inter-personal engagements that serve practical or symbolic aims, while founded in essential needs: food, companionship, safety, and work. These interests may seem least vulnerable to cosmetic fantasies. Yet each is a center of contention when eating or dressing is less critical than the restaurant at which one dines. How knowledgeable is the sommelier; how perceptive the customer? Complexities ramify. There is no way to ascertain a transaction’s meaning for partners until its context is clarified: how does each construe it; what are their objectives and collateral interests? A negotiation may be simple: here’s my dollar, please sell me the newspaper. But exchanges are often vexed until participants coordinate their meanings: “Why can’t I buy it today?”; “Because we’re closed; it’s a religious holiday.” Misunderstanding is exacerbated by the overlay of meanings. An individual having personal aims and tics, a cultural, gender, and regional identity, participates in several or many systems (as family member, friend, or employee), while covered by local rules and laws. Think of a lunch shared with friends, each distinguished by a religion and its dietary rules; imagine the volley of queries as the waiter responds to questions for which he has no answers. Incomprehension is all the more likely when no participant knows which of another’s meanings dominate his or her concerns: which of your loyalties have I offended? Compare the advantages of societies where confusion is averted because idiosyncrasies are repressed by dominant meanings. Every personal encounter has two unknowns: which interest is satisfied or provoked in the participants; is it a personal interest or the interest of his or her role in a system (a business, family, or the state)? This may be clear, though not when the tax collector’s uniform is a distraction because his interest is personal: he wants a bribe. This complexity illustrates the ramifications of society’s threepart structure: individuals, systems formed by the causal reciprocities of their members, and the government formed to regulate a society in its totality. Meanings ricochet among these three: individuals plan to marry; the state demurs because both are men or women. Confusion is averted by distinguishing among these conflicting prerogatives. Other solutions fail because they favor one interest over competing ontological commitments: one god is to be acknowledged on dollar bills, the better to instruct our leaders. Will it be yours or mine? 8.1.3 Affiliations: Affiliations (organizations or associations) promote solidarity; meanings are the glue that binds their members. Heidegger wrote extensively of

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Nietzsche, perhaps because Nietzsche’s aversion to tribalism was the inverse of his own. Zarathustra is the perpetual outsider; the artists Nietzsche esteemed ignored tribal fashions while perfecting styles of their own. Heidegger preferred communities where members share rituals, everyday lives, and destinies: “beingwith” was his standard of authenticity.132 Nietzsche called this “herd morality,” the morality sanctioned by the meanings to which a tribe’s members defer.133 But tribalism is odd: A may relate to B without personal knowledge of him or her, but rather because each is faithful to C, meanings they share. Meaning supersedes difference, even to the point of intensifying loyalty to unknown others or hostility to those who challenge a shared story. Righteous armies don’t need friendship or histories of shared struggle: flags, songs, and the meanings they signify are the only bonds required. 8.1.4 Thoughts: Thoughts characterize the world as we construe it, most often in the consensual terms of a common language. Foucault’s illustrations—mental health, prisons, and sexuality—leave no doubt that meanings supervene on our understanding of elementary human conditions and activities. Is every function disfigured by willful misunderstanding? Science or mathematics is our standard for activities that elude this trap. But that, if true, leaves a swathe of interests distorted by meanings. 8.1.5 Ideals: Ideals—justice, dignity, and truth—are both the moral environment for all we do and the measure of what is done. These are our moral beacons: who I would be and the lights, the rails, for being it. Parents and companions are critical moral teachers, but citing them deflects responsibility for one’s moral core: what is required of me, irrespective of them? Is honesty my response to fearing God or something closer to an idea of myself? This is conscience as it expresses the individualism of Jewish-Protestant ideals. There are other, more forgiving possibilities: consciences socialized so that guilt is never localized in the person who fails a moral test. Alternate meanings and histories explain the attraction for one or another of these rationales. Or we offer both rationales while expecting people to sort out the story and ideal pertinent to likely roles or situations: is it hierarchical, transactional, or affiliative? Meanings establish the terrain. Learning their rules, regularizing our behavior and selves, we adapt.

|| 132 Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 113–130, 149–168. 133 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1969), p. 135.

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8.1.6 Needs: Needs for food, clothing, shelter and companions would seem to be the least compromised of our interests, though each seems infinitely susceptible to distortion by the foregoing variables. Anthropology would be less interesting if that weren’t so. The many cultures and their variable satisfiers for elementary needs confirm that each person addresses the world through the scrim of commitments prefigured by his or her meanings. Some features are reliable: water quenches thirst; others—water’s ritual uses—are mythic. Yet people who bathe in the Red Sea or the Ganges believe one as firmly as the other. Wanting to dispel such confusions is perceived as a personal assault. For every challenge exposes our vulnerability to Nietzsche’s “metaphysical comfort,” meanings that are reassuring though banal. We go from one set of meanings to another—last year’s style to a successor—without remarking that each projects magical significance into neutral facts. Schnitzler diagnosed our irresolution—we often know we’re deluded—but offered no cure. Still, the diversity of ontological loyalties encourages reflection: why so many competing realities, each an embellishment of elementary needs and satisfiers? Why prefer one to another if all are conceits? We sometimes pry mythic or bloated meanings from arid facts when reality breaks through our meaning-saturated perceptions. These are the rare occasions when critical self-scrutiny—What am I doing? Why?—is liberating. Or we purge inflated wants—“unguents and perfumes”—in order that needs be seen as they are. It misses the point to say that fantasies and deceptions are a part of reality, as of course they are. The target is different: wanting ontological clarity, we puncture the allure of meanings misconstrued as the face of reality. Many are superficial, but others are thick; most everything we think or touch seems overlaid by them. We can’t have hard-nosed reality-testing because many initiatives (personal or social) are motivated by meanings alone (choosing a restaurant for its aura when none are hungry), and because this project would cripple imagination. Still, the objective is over-riding: distortion (fashion or haircuts) is tolerable; mythologized ontologies are not. Why? This is partly an ascetic response: cluttered ontologies offend the desire to know reality and our place within it. There is also homage to dignity when dignity is more than truth: we are debased by gas chambers and beheadings. A race evolved from salamanders wants to think better of itself. Does our self-understanding have a proper norm and goal? We exhibit, individually and socially, the range of differences known to anthropologists. Should our focus be the contingency of local meanings: pull down the shades live only as your people prescribe? Or should we enjoy local ways but acknowledge the

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universal conditions for human well-being: All are vulnerable to hunger, illness, isolation, or assault. All need bodily integrity, safety, health, satisfaction of animal needs, education, work appropriate to their talents, and companions. All want respect: everyone should have self-regard of such a degree that he or she can ignore affronts. These are essential elements in the complex of aims that all pursue; morality, economy, politics, and government are their facilitating conditions. Systems that satisfy basic interests are a social core. They are everywhere the context for whatever degree of well-being a society’s members achieve. Yet elementary needs are satisfied in disparate ways. Their alternate satisfiers are challenged because some serve well-being better than others. Families aren’t always effective; states aren’t always prosperous or well-ordered. Cultures strong in some ways are weak in others: they like sport, but no one reads. This opposition—contingent or core—reduces rancor among those who discern it. Acknowledging our different ways of satisfying basic needs, we may learn tolerance, even affection for idiosyncrasies different from our own. This isn’t true of every differences because some—geronticide or infants left to die by exposure—express seismic moral differences. Alternate ways of satisfying common needs—diet, dress, even worship—are acceptable. But there is an underside to this dream: complexity defeats us. Mythology is, at least in part, the cure for personal and social failure: we take comfort when imagining that things are better than they are. Which meanings would remain if mythic excesses were disciplined? Three contraries are prominent: true or false; efficacious or not; beneficial or harmful. We don’t go wrong by favoring truth, efficacy, and means or ends that are beneficial. Yet consensus stops with this generality: there is little accord about acts or conditions that should count as one or the other. Sickness and death would seem to be unalloyed harms but one imagines situations where these, too, might be construed as beneficial: the sickness that justifies early release from prison; the death that terminates excruciating pain. Even catastrophic religious wars seem justified to each side’s priests. No formula is universally accepted because circumstances introduce unresolvable complexities and because solutions are further obscured when people construe their lives and societies through the valorizing lens of untestable myths. It is unlikely that we shall control the inclination to mythologize so long as meanings effectively distract us from simple truths about our nature, circumstances, and prospects; we’re grateful for imagination and its dissimulations. A society’s quiet skeptics disguise their irony. Living in a charmed world where myths are commonplace, they, too, pretend. Should trousers be straight legged or flared, lapels narrow or wide? Buy the wrong style and you’re mocked; put it a closet, wait for the cycle to turn, and you’re up to date. Some other practices have

176 | Last thoughts

a sounder footing: love and work are principal motivators for all we do. They create communities whose members have partners, skills, aims, and dignity. Would we need more if this were achieved? There are neighborhoods in some large cities where strong economies support residents who enjoy the diversity of local cultures. One can buy their newspapers, enjoy their restaurants, and see their films, These are societies where scientific learning is influential because of the technology it promotes and because many residents are well-educated. They know, for example, that the materials of human life have cosmic origins: its heavy metals were forged billions of years ago in supernovas far from Earth. Dust to dust is more than a metaphor: who knows what will become of us?

8.2 Spirituality Personal accommodations to a meaning’s ontology may be automatic: one observes its rituals and performs them mechanically out of respect for committed neighbors. But immersion may be conscious and deep: knowing local meanings and values, one feels their resonances and believes that reality is shaped as they characterize it. This is spirituality, the intellectual persuasion powered by emotional arousal. There is, however, a degree of equivocation in this word’s sense. Spirituality may signify belief in a domain inhabited by creatures (gods or souls) who are morally or aesthetically sensitive but bodiless. This is deference to the sacred, a reality (like Plato’s Forms) said to exceed the span and substance of our paltry material world. The word is also used to signify emotional or cognitive appreciation for whatever qualities are prescribed by a culture’s dominant meanings. Or more ascetically, it signifies the intellectual, moral, or aesthetic experience of a refined sensibility. This is a descending scale of ambitions: from rapport with gods or spirits through intensified acculturation to pleasure in receptivity. People who acknowledge evolution sometimes worry that prosaic origins entail the loss of principal virtues. There is little fear that materiality would disable us for mathematics, but considerable anxiety that it would diminish our spirituality: does it abide if there are no spirits? For religion’s beliefs and rituals—its meanings—are a principal entree to strong feelings of divine presence. Does sensibility lapse—are we unresponsive to symbols that were once provocative—if there is no spirit, no soul? That happens: religious painting is less affecting to those without faith. But there are other satisfactions: cultivated sensibility is interiority made responsive to nature, people, art, or the vocation of one’s choice. Mythology loses its power if these are enough. Where is hope in this calculus? People endowed with imagination but living blighted lives aren’t happy with brutal realism; they don’t want to hear that the

A paradox | 177

goods in hand are all there is or will be. Do they hope for deliverance within life or for consolation later? There is no single answer. Spirituality, for many people, is the promise of redress. Marx promised this reward in days or generations, but always as the outcome to a historical process having exhaustively material conditions. His expectation isn’t fulfilled. We don’t expect it later.

8.3 A paradox Hamlet’s Polonius was uncompromising: “To thine own self be true.”134 His advice is commanding, but equivocal: which of my aims reconcile me to reality and myself? There are more answers than thinkers; evasion is easy. Socrates’ phrase— “Know thy self”135—is better focused, though we’re stymied because the bases for selfhood—autonomy and privacy, for example—are uncertain. Is it founded in self-awareness and self-control? Or is autonomy a conceit because thoughts and tastes are everywhere socialized? Self-knowledge is all the more frustrated by our nature. Neural feedback explains self-awareness, but neural complexity generates consciousness, the mental light that obscures its neural conditions. Now add the uncertainty created when bodies seem ephemeral because mythology posits eternal souls. Inquiry corrects this persuasion but unsettles us in another way: we can know what we aren’t while learning what we are. Why isn’t that compelling? Because wanting illusion, we dislike the cure.

|| 134 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, The Oxford Shakespeare, 2nd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 23. 135 Plato, Charmides, Collected Dialogues, 164e6, p. 111.

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Index A a posteriori existence proofs 75–76 a priori bias 148 a priori existence proofs 67 Anselm’s ontological argument 67–69 – creation from nothing 69–76 – eternal possibilities 76–83 – requirements 83 abduction 35 abstract thinking 44 action 134–135 actual worlds 80 actuality 12, 77, 78, 81–82 adulthood 133, 140, 150–151 affiliations 172–173 affirmation 124 affluenza 136 aggregation 30, 32, 46 allegories 100 allegory of the cave 87, 99, 115, 148 analogy 97 analytic propositions 76 Anselm 67–69 appraisal 159 164–165 acquiescence 162 Aquinas, Thomas 50, 51–53, 55, 73 Aristotle 1, 22, 24, 44, 49, 70, 73 association 90, 111, 152, 172–173 associationism 147 atoms 49 attention 154 attitudes 154, 163, 164, 165, 168, 170 – and meanings 147 – and reality 115 Augustine 99 autocrats 137 autonomous minds 30 autonomy 29, 44 awareness 61–62, 63–64, 65, 98 – selective 164–168 B Bach, Johann Sebastian 144 Beethoven, Ludwig 144

belief 1–2, 9, 100, 150, 156–158, 171 – versus suggestibility 143 see also faith bias 2, 115, 134–135, 148, 163, 166, 168 bodily action 63 body 1 bonding 25–26 boredom 131 brain imaging 45, 147, 167, 168 brains 1, 14, 26, 145, 155, 166 Bruno, Giordano 80 bubble worlds 50, 53 Buddhism 85–88 Butler, Bishop 78 C capacity 37, 154 categorial form 17–18 causal reciprocity 29 causal symmetry 41 causality 18, 22–24, 24–25, 164, 169 causation 17, 34–35 causes 72, 81 cave allegory 87, 99, 115, 148 change 38–39, 72, 87, 118 chaos 71 character 41, 70–71 childhood 62, 101, 127, 140, 142, 150–151 children 133, 134, 136 choice 150–151, 154, 160 Christianity 100, 162 church 143 circular reasoning 113 citizens 141 coherence 95, 155 – social 142 – and truth 56, 102, 120–121, 122 – violations of 96 complexity 18, 30, 32, 126 computers 145 conceptual relativism 104 conditional properties 69, 72 confidence 124 confirmation 65, 66, 105 conflict 99

184 | Index

conscience 36, 173 conscious experience, ephemerality of 65 consciousness 1, 13–14, 26, 30 see also awareness consistency 7, 155 constants, unexplained 33–34 constructed world 108 constructivism 88, 103, 148 – history 89–96 – justification 98 – mind’s structure and powers 97–98 – tasks 96–97 constructivist freedom 94 content 98 contingency 71–72, 135, 171–176 contingent existence 51–52 contradictions 54, 55, 57, 77, 78, 135 see also non-contradictions contraries 7, 8, 70, 75, 87, 96, 105 control 36, 63, 134–135 conventions 35 see also customs; practices conversation 66, 96–97 Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics 32 core systems 140, 175 correspondence view 110, 122 cosmic creation 72–74 cosmos 22, 52 creation from nothing 69–76 Crusoe, Robinson 10 cults 149 cultural meaning 111 culture 1–2, 35, 106, 107, 142–145 – and imagination 162–163 – and needs 130–131 – and society 46–48 customs 107 see also conventions; practices D dance 31, 155 data 65, 90, 91–92, 108, 147, 148 death penalty 118 deductive form 121 deflationism 121–122 deliberation 159, 162, 168–169 democracy 137, 160

Descartes, René 30, 42, 60–64, 89–90, 93, 111, 168 descriptive laws 33, 37–38 desire 117, 159 determination 78–79 determining conditions 82 determinism 20–21, 169–170 Dewey, John 10 difference 18 Dilthey, Wilhelm 108–109 discontinuity 6, 96 disorder 71, 99 dispositions 37–38, 81 disquotation 7 distraction 145–146 diversity 18, 47 divinity see God dominant ideas 92–93 dominant meanings 139, 150, 159, 176 dualism 45–46, 167–168 duties 138–139, 140–141 E economy 106 effects 23, 34–35 efficient causation 17 efficient cause 22–24 elementary needs 130, 174, 175 elementary particles 20 elements 18 embodiment 63, 64 emergence 26, 109–110 see also successive emergent orders emotion 66, 153 see also feelings empirical ego 61–62, 98 empirical evidence 55–58, 75 energy 18, 23 energy exchange 22, 29 energy transfer 24 engagement 105 engineering 132 entanglement 24–25 entitlement 136 ephemeral conscious data 65 epochs 92–93 error 135–136

Index | 185

essential properties 69, 72 eternal possibilities 12, 50, 54–58, 76–83 see also possible worlds eternity 51–52 ethical practice 139–142 ethnicity 106–107 events 27, 29–30 evidence 50, 55–58 evolution 32, 38–39, 139 exchanges 172 excluded middle, principle of 78 existence 12, 51–53, 68, 71–72 existence proofs 60, 166–167 – Anselm’s ontological argument 67–69 – creation from nothing 69–76 – emotion 66 – intuition 66–67 – material objects and constraints 65–66 – percepts 65 – a priori existence proofs 67 – self-perception 60–64 experience 2–4, 9, 10–11, 90–91, 92, 125, 148 – lived 108–109 – two senses of 42–43, 151 experiments 94, 122 explanatory laws 33, 37 extrapolation 97 F faith 124, 135 see also belief fantasies 8, 56, 122, 132, 133–134, 135 feedback 35, 38 feelings 66, 107 see also emotion fidelity see loyalty final cause 24 Findlay, J. N. 12–13, 14 flexibility 154 Ford, Henry 160 foreigners 47 formal cause 24 formalizability 121 Forms 87, 99 Foucault, Michel 173 free will 29, 169–170 freedom 94, 101, 160 see also liberty Frost, Robert 131–132

funerals 119, 136 future 21–22 G Gadamer, Hans-Georg 123 gender 106, 139 general relativity 33 generalization 97 geometry 19 God 3, 73, 89, 90, 125 – access to 112 – and determinism 21 – as final cause 129 – see also theism; theology God’s existence – Anselm’s ontological argument 67–69 – Aquinas’s third argument 50, 51–53, 55, 56 good infinite 22 good-in-itself 160 goods-of-a-kind 116–117, 118 government 106, 137, 141 gravity 49, 50 Guardian, The 107 H habits 36–37, 122, 154–155 habituation 162 Hegel, G.W.F. 13, 22, 27, 87, 92 Heidegger, Martin 2, 172–173 Heisenberg uncertainty 32, 126 herd morality 173 heresy 96 hermeneutics 80, 96, 123, 124 human autonomy 44 human bonding 25–26 human selfhood see selfhood human societies 25–26, 38–39, 46–48 see also society human subjectivity 16 human world 108 human worth 118 humans 16 Hume, David 22–23, 28, 34, 47, 82, 90, 164 hypotheses 5, 66, 94, 105, 122, 135 I idealism see subjective idealism idealization 138

186 | Index

ideals 36, 173 ideas 89, 92–93 identity 18, 101, 138 – principle of 78 – truth as 112–113 ideologies 1–2, 3–4, 8–9, 107, 133, 158 illusion 85–88, 102–103 imagination 91, 94, 131–132, 147–149, 151–152 – and culture 142, 143, 162–163 imitation 150 imperfection 87 impulses 88, 159 indeterminacy 70, 79 individual perspectives 106 individuality 40 individuals 28–30, 140 infallible existence claim 166–167 infinity 70 influence 32 inherent values see intrinsic values inhibition 88 innovation 145–146 inquiry 3, 4–5, 6, 8, 10, 94–95, 123 instantiation 80 instrumental values 116, 119, 160–161 intelligibility 39 intention 168–169 intentionality 43–45, 154, 157, 169 interior reasons 158 interiority 41, 42, 45, 62 internal focus 154 internet 145 interpretation 5–6, 7, 11, 94–95, 96, 105, 106, 123 intrinsic values 116, 117–118, 119, 160 intuition 66–67 irresolutions 174 J James, William 102 judgment 134, 159, 161–162 justice 16 K Kant, Immanuel – empirical and transcendental egos 61–62 – experience 2–3

– hermeneutics 96 – imagination 148 – mind 30, 90–92, 93 – nature 3, 39 Keller, Thomas 124 knowledge 3 – by acquaintance 111–112 L La Belle Hélène 115 language – analytic sentences 76 – limits of 54–55, 78, 80, 89, 90 – meta-language 121 – object language 121 – public language 85 – and semantics 4, 152–153 – use of 106 – and values 123–124 learning 150–151 Leibniz, G. W. V. 10, 92 liberty 141 see also freedom light-cones 107 lineages 31–32 lived experience 108–109 local meaning 174, 176 local reality 106 locale 106 locality 24 Locke, John 2 logical positivism 76 logical possibilities see eternal possibilities loyalty 100–101 M manifest destiny 131 Mannheim, Karl 3–4 maps 135 martyrdom 138 material cause 24 material objects 65–66 material possibilities 54–55, 81 materialism 1, 12, 103, 130 materiality 1, 17, 41, 45–46, 99–100, 126 mathematics 82–83 matter 20 McDowell, John 156–157, 158

Index | 187

meaning 1, 5, 8, 109–115, 171 – and culture 107, 162–163 – and ideologies 3, 133 – and judgments 161–162 – and language 90 – local 174, 176 – and mathematics 82 – and mental functions 147–159 – in practical life 128–129 – as reconciler 134–135 – and science 125–127 – and significance 116 – of systems 136–137 – tribal 101 – and truth 48, 102, 122–125 – and values 88, 118–120 see also interpretation; significance Meditations (Descartes) 60, 64 men 139 mental activity 1, 139, 147 mental functions – and meaning 147–159 – and valuation 159–170 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 63 meta-language 121 metaphysical comfort 174 metaphysics 2, 9, 14, 17, 18 mind 1, 13, 30, 42 see also constructivism modal logic 78 modal operators 80 modularity 20, 29–30, 40 monads 10, 92 moral blindness 135 moral needs 130 moral training 140 moralities 141–142, 173 see also ethical practice motion 18, 19–20, 21 multiverse 50, 53–58 music 31, 63, 72 mysteries 127 mythic ontologies 9 see also ideologies; religions mythic personalities 138 mythic practice 158 see also religions mythology 105, 107, 127, 133, 149 myths 5, 114–115, 122, 125, 143–144

N narratives 42 natura naturans, natura naturata 1 natural laws 17 natural normativity 33–35 naturalism 1, 11, 12, 45, 103, 157, 170 see also materialism nature 1, 3, 16, 72, 108–109 – accessibility of 10–11 – Aquinas’s perception of 51 – categorial form 17–18 – necessary existence of 53 – space of placement in 156–157 – theory of 18–39 necessary existence 51–53 necessity 23, 72 needs 47, 128, 140, 160–161, 174, 175 – and wants 130–134 negative feedback 35, 38 negative noumena 3 neural effects 152 Neville, Robert Cummings 69–76 newspapers 107 Newton, Isaac 105 Nietzsche, Friedrich 148, 149, 173, 174 nodes 41, 160, 161 nominal essence 2 non-being 70, 73 non-contradictions 77, 78, 155–156 see also possibilities normativity 17, 49, 125, 154–156 – personal 36–37 – regional 35 – universal 32–35 norms 35, 85, 117 nothing, creation from 69–76 noticing 65 O object language 121 obligations see duties observation 49 Offenbach, Jacques 115 ontological loyalties 174 ontological relativism 4 ontologies 3–4, 174 ontology of everything 104–105

188 | Index

order 71, 99 organization 30, 32 organizations 172–173 Ormerod, Peter 107 oversight 98 P paradigms 6, 7 Parmenides 87–88 parochial necessities 23 particles 20, 32, 78 patriotism 106–107 patterns 20–21 Peirce, C.S. 65–66, 109, 110, 111, 121, 122, 136 perception 10, 65, 134–135, 148–149, 168 percepts 65 perceptual data 148 perceptual experience 14 perfection 87 performance 156–157 personal encounters 172 personal histories 101 personal identity 138 personal meaning 111 personal narratives 42 personal needs 140 personal normativity 36–37 phantom limb effect 63 phenomenalism 104 physical law statements 33–34, 37–38 physical locale 106 physical work 136 physicalism 104 physics 7 pineal gland 30 Planck length 19 planning 151 plans 135 Plato 88, 96, 99, 120 – allegory of the cave 87, 93, 99, 115 – contraries 7, 96 – Republic 16, 130 plenitude, principle of 54, 55, 57, 77, 78 Plotinus 13, 111 pods 50 political systems 137

positive feedback 35, 38 positivism 17 possibilities, eternal 12, 50, 54–58, 56, 76– 83 see also possible worlds possibility 78 possible worlds 33, 34, 40, 52, 70–71 see also eternal possibilities; multiverse possibles 82 power 37 practical life 1, 6, 10, 44, 128–129 – action 134–135 – culture 142–145 – error 135–136 – ethical practice 139–142 – innovation/distraction 145–146 – needs and wants 130–134 – and a priori bias 148 – social duties 138–139 – systems and their meanings 136–137 practical syllogism 126 practices 111 predictability 20–21 present-to-mind 2 Price, Huw. 121 principle of excluded middle 78 principle of identity 78 principle of plenitude 54, 55, 57, 77, 78 principle of sufficient reason 81 private lives 85–86 process 18, 20, 21, 72 – as causality 22–24 – as a complex or aggregate of events 25–27 productive imagination 91–92 progress 121 properties 27–28, 29–30, 81 see also dispositions Protagoras 89 protons 18 public language 85 purpose 168 see also intention Q qualitative forms 24 quantifiers 4 quantum indeterminacy 169 quantum mechanics 32 quantum theory 78

Index | 189

quarks 25 Quine, W.V.O. 4, 76, 79–80, 89, 119–120 R rationality 150 reactivity 115 ready-to-hand 2 real essence 2 reality 1, 2, 4, 88, 133, 136, 174 – as created from nothing 69–76 – as illusion 85–88 – local reality 106 reason, space of 156–158 reasons 158–159 redundancy theory 121–122 regional normativity 35 regions 30–31, 46 see also lineages regress 61, 62, 166 regulation 35, 98 relational structures 81–82 religions 3, 8–9, 85, 107, 133, 149, 151 – external justifiers 158 – and physics 7 – stories in 113–114 see also Buddhism; Christianity; theism; theology religious identities 101 religious meaning 111–112 repetition 65, 66 reproductive imagination 91 Republic 16, 130 responsibilities see duties revelation 112 ritual practices 119 robotic intelligence 145 roles 41–42, 106, 136, 137, 138–139, 140–141 romantics 125 Rovelli, Carlo 6, 95, 96 S sacrifice 138 schematization 153 Schnitzler, Arthur 174 schooling see learning science 5–6, 8, 93, 109, 124, 132, 144 – and interpretation 5–6 – of mind 163 – philosophy of 17 – relationship to meaning and value 125–127

– and religion 7 scientism 126 secondness 66, 136 secular cultures 144 selective awareness 164–168 self-affirmation 60 self-awareness 13, 14, 61–62, 63–64, 98, 166–167, 168–169 self-certainty 62, 63 self-control 36, 63 self-deception 2 self-discovery 63 selfhood 40–42, 62–63 self-inspection 63–64, 65 self-perception 60–64, 65 self-regulation 36, 44 self-sacrifice 138 self-stabilizing plateaus 26 selves 40–46 semantics 4, 152, 157 sensibility 115, 155, 161 sensory data 90, 91–92, 108, 147, 148 Shakespeare, William 105, 144 significance 109, 110, 115–116 – versus truth 122–125 – and values 118–120 see also meaning signification 109, 110 signs 109, 110, 111 silent conditions 49–58, 126, 127 situational narratives 42 skepticism 9 skeptics 9, 124, 125 social coherence 142 social core 175 social duties 138–139, 140–141 social evolution 139 social life 25–26 social meaning 111, 136 social systems 136–137, 140–141, 164, 175 social values 162 socialization 93 socialized habits 36–37, 122 socializing norms 85 societal norms see norms societies 38–39 society 25–26, 38–39, 46–48, 141–142, 172, 175

190 | Index

– and nature 16 – and needs 130–131 Socrates 9 soft determinism 170 solecism 96 solidarity 143 soul 16, 45 space 19 space of placement in nature 156–157 space of reason 156–158 spacetime 18, 19, 21–22 spacetime continuity 19 speculation 105 see also hypotheses Spinoza, Benedict de 1, 74 spirituality 99, 143, 176–177 see also religions stability 17–18, 38–39, 42–43, 52 stability-in-evolution 38–39 states 16 status 88, 106, 117, 171–172 stories 5, 56, 105, 113–114, 115, 123 see also narratives story-telling 100 strata 30, 46 string theory 19 subjective idealism 85 see also constructivism subjectivism 44 subjectivity 16 successive emergent orders 25–26, 109–110 suffering 99 sufficient reason, principle of 81 suggestibility 143 supervenience 26 Surangama Sutra 86, 87–88 systems 136–137, 140–141, 164, 175 T Tawney, R.J. 129 Taylor, Richard 113–114 technology 145–146 theism 85, 99–102 see also Buddhism; Christianity; God theology 145 theory of nature 18–39 theory-of-everything 20, 104–105 things-in-themselves 3 thought 134, 155, 156–157, 173

Tillich, Paul 111–113 time 19, 21–22, 51 tolerance 7 tradition 106 see also culture transactions 172 transcendental ego 62, 98 transformation 118 tribal loyalty 101, 158 tribal meaning 101, 127 tribalism 173 true stories 56 truth 7, 100–102, 107, 120–122 – as identity 112–113 – versus meaning 48, 110, 114–115, 122–125, 129 truth-as-redundancy 121–122 tyrants 137 U ulterior reasons 158, 159 understanding 49, 168 unexplained constants 33–34 unity-in-diversity 18 universality 32–35 universe 22 see also multiverse utility 161 V validity 82 valuation 159–170 value-cones 107 values 1–2, 116–118 – intrinsic 160 – and language 90, 123 – and meaning 88, 118–120 – and myths 107 – and science 125–127 – social 162 variation 97 W wants 128, 130–134 wealth 88 Weber, Max 129 well-being 129 will 29, 90, 169–170 Wolff, Christian 73 women 139

Index | 191

world-lines 21 worlds 4, 96–97, 108 possible 33, 34, 40, 52, 70–71. see also eternal possibilities; multiverse

world-views 9 worm holes 25 Z Zeno 87–88