But isn't it the case that the material asymmetries of the set up, like all asymmetries, are the result of entropy, or even better, isn't it the case that they just are entropy? The more I think about it, it seems to me that asymmetry and entropy are the same. Also, as I said, if entropy is asymmetrical (and hence directional and temporal) energy flow, then all efficient causation (being directional energy flow) would seem to be simply entropy at work. — John

I confess, I don't know what it would even mean to say that 'asymmerty and entropy are the same'. Asymmetry is a characteristic of material states (a DNA helix, a particle distribution) or a process (like entropy, or Bennard cell formation), but to say that 'asymmerty and entropy are the same' makes about as much sense as saying 'blue' and 'cow' are the same; blue may be a property of cows, but blue is not cow!

All apparent order is really the result of entropy... — John

This is not quite it. Think of entropy as a very general - perhaps the most general - imperative: "things need to get from here (inhomogeneous distribution of energy) to there (homogenous distribution of energy)". I refer to it as 'general' however, but 'it' is indifferent to the question of how things get from 'here' to 'there'. This is why Salthe refers to it simply as 'propensity'. So order is not, strictly speaking, the 'result' of entropy. If you take two boxes, fill one with gas, then connect them up, the gas will simply redistribute equally between the two boxes without any kind of 'ordering' happening. So there's no sense in which entropy can be called the 'efficient cause' of organization.

As I said, what you need, in addition to an entropic drive, are material asymmetries, chiral structures, which allow for the general entropic process to get 'stuck', so as to need to organize in order to disperse more easily. Again, my favorite example are Benard cells in boiling water - 'upward' rolling hexagonal structures - which form once the energy in a heated beaker passes a certain threshold; the cells form as a means to more efficiently dissipate the energy through the boiling water, and they do so spontaneously (they self-organize) thanks to a) the bonding qualities of water (it's specific material qualities) and b) the asymmetry of heat and weight distribution in the water (the heated water rises, which makes the top of the beaker more dense, which shifts the centre of gravity, which in turn causes the water to 'fall' again). Entropy alone doesn't drive this process: the specific material asymmetries of the beaker/heat/gravity set-up themselves 'force' entropy to expend itself in the particular self-organizing manner that it does.

Recall that this whole discussion began in order to make sense of what we were calling a 'third type' of telos: one neither purely immanent nor purely transcendent, but one embodying qualities of both. The point was to put forth entropy as naturalist candidate to satisfy this condition: It's clear that entropy isn't 'external' to the system (whatever that would even mean), nor does it necessarily 'arise'; entropy exists as soon as there are energetic inhomogeneities.

I still don't see why an asymmetrical universe might not simply dissipate chaotically without producing any order. It still seems to be the case that order, in terms of the invariant behavior of matter/energy in its various forms must be inherent, for entropic dissipation in the form of ordered complexification to occur. — John

The most basic answer is that asymmetry means that things will clump together in ways that will accelerate more clumping - hence the formation of local negentropic eddies. It's a matter of feedback: tiny asymmetries in the otherwise homogeneous energy soup of the universe tend to feedback upon themselves to create larger (local) asymmetries. Apo's account is a far better one than I can give - biology is more my shtick, rather than cosmology - but the same principles are operative all throughout nature.

So rather than speak about the sub-atomic realm, which I'm not as familiar with, one can think about the analogous situation at the level of planet formation: planets begin their life as nebulous clouds which, thanks to gravity, begin to clump together at the centre. Because the gravitational forces are generally not uniformally spread - they are asymmetrical! - some parts of the cloud become more dense than others, eventually causing a 'tipping' effect which means that the cloud begins to spin along one axis of rotation rather than another. The angular momentum then engenders a centripetal effect, where matter is drawn into the center of the spinning disk. The end result of this process is a planet.

The point is that while the mechanisms are different at the subatomic level (the Higgs, etc), the actual principles of formation are the same; asymmetrical differences driven by entropic necessity begin to feedback upon themselves after having (contingently) 'tipped over' certain thresholds. So the short answer to your question is this: if you couple feedback with asymmetry in a closed system subject to entropy, you get negentropic eddies of organization. The exact details of the system under consideration will depend on the qualities of the matter in question (i.e. whether you're dealing with dust nebulae, subatomic particles, living populations, etc), but whatever scale of the universe you pick out, the same morphogenetic principles (principles which preside over the generation of 'form' (morphe)) tend to be at play.

What's key however, is that the above is an immanent account of morphogenesis. Planents don't form they way they do because of any 'external' Idea of Planethood; rather, planets are the way they are because of the processes which engender them, processes which abide by the play of necessity and chance at work in all morphogenetic processes. The trick is in extending these naturalist principles down to the level of ontogeny (development of the individual organism) and phylogeny (evolution of the species) as well.

It's not even that genes can be 'turned on and off'; it's that even when they are 'on' they can do 'different stuff'. In some ways, even speaking about 'the gene' is a kind of outdated manner of speaking; more and more, what is important is the very process of gene expression itself, a process in which the gene plays a necessary but differential role. Here is Fox-Keller again (writing before the human genome was fully sequenced - but vindicated all the more so after we realized how preliminary such sequencing actually is for our understanding of biology) :

"The prominence of genes in both the general media and the scientific press suggests that in this new science of genomics, twentieth-century genetics has achieved its apotheosis. Yet, the very successes that have so stirred our imagination have also radically undermined their core driving concept, the concept of the gene. … Now that the genomes of several lower organisms have been fully sequenced, the call for a new phase of genome analysis—functional genomics rather than structural genomics—is heard with growing frequency … For almost fifty years, we lulled ourselves into believing that, in discovering the molecular basis of genetic information, we had found the “secret of life”; we were confident that if we could only decode the message in DNA’s sequence of nucleotides, we would understand the “program” that makes an organism what it is. And we marveled at how simple the answer seemed to be. But now, in the call for a functional genomics, we can read at least a tacit acknowledgment of how large the gap between genetic “information” and biological meaning really is".

Sorry, but in reality, information flows in one direction only:

DNA -> RNA -> Proteins. And there is no mechanism for the reverse. — tom

This is true, but it paints a misleading picture of the complexity of gene expression. First of all, the process of gene expression is multi-final. That is, the same DNA codon can produce different proteins, depending of the state of the cell at any one time. Moreover, proteins themselves also function differently depending on the environment in which they are themselves found in. John Protevi puts it as follows: "So we've gone from "one string of DNA = one gene = one protein = one function" to "one string of DNA (structural / hereditary gene) = many (functional) genes (many mature mRNA transcripts) = many proteins = many functions. ... gene formation and expression depends on cell dynamics which are part of larger networks."

So while the central dogma remains inviolable - in ontogenesis, neither environment nor phenotype can alter genotype - the idea that DNA simply codes for a protein in a simple, unambiguous manner is incredibly misleading. This is why Jablonka and Lamb, and West-Eberhard are not Lamarckians. It's not that the environment acts directly upon genotype, but rather, to quote Eberhard: "a new phenotype develops (developmental plasticity) by being induced via a genetic mutation or an environmental difference. What has happened here in the latter case is that the new environment has brought forth an untapped potential of the pre-existing genetic variation." - the 'potential' here being the differential manner in which genertype can code for different proteins which in turn can function in different manners. the simple picture of DNA -> RNA -> Proteins paints a picture of equifinality (same starting point = same results) whereas the actual process of gene expression is multi-final.

Try as I might I cannot begin to grasp how it could be that entropy "prompts" the formation of local negentropy. This may well be due to my lack of proper education in these matters, and I would certainly appreciate any help in understanding this that anyone might be able to offer. — John

It's one of the more counterintuitive facts when it comes to entropy, but the idea is actually quite simple: local negentropy accelerates - and thus increases - global entropy. Think about it: any sort of organisation (your bedroom, a city, an ecosystem) requires that work be constantly put into sustaining that organization; without work, organization dissipates (thanks to the second law: the total entropy of an isolated system always increase over time). Thus, there is a price to pay for any local organization. The interesting point however, is that any work put in to sustain local organization generally ends up producing more entropy at a global scale - think waste products, waste processing, energy expenditure, etc. This is especially evident when it comes to living systems, which sustain their local organization at the price of dissipating the energy gradients available in the immediate environment. Hence: local negentropy accelerates global entropy in a way that doesn't violate the second law.

In truth however, this is only half the story. While the above explains how it is possible for organizing systems to arise in the first place, the question remains how such self-organizing systems actually arose. Why did the energy gradient that existed at the beginning of the universe not simply 'wind down' without creating all the 'intermediary' self-organizing structures that accelerated it? The answer has to do with the lack of symmetry in the universe - the universe - and life especially - is full of asymmetries. From the abundance of matter over anti-matter, to the curious exclusivity of 'left-handed' neutrinos in nature, to the 'right-handedness' of the DNA helix and the asymmetries of animo acids, these asymmetries basically 'force' organization to happen. An entirely symmetrical universe would dissipate symmetrically, foreclosing any sort of self-organizing capacities. The exact source(s) of cosmic asymmetry are hotly debated, but it's these asymmetries which account for self-organizing tendencies which do not violate the second law.

Taking it back to evolution, the point is that entropy, together with cosmic asymmetry - provides the base of 'propensity' that drives organization in the universe. The argument is that together with the right conditions - one of the leading being the environment created by hydrothemral vents at the bottom of the ocean - life - and with it evolution - becomes a quite likely outcome of these initial conditions. Anyway, I'm trying to pack alot of info - the beginnings of life and the cosmic development of the universe! - into a few paragraphs, but I hope it provides an understandable, if very basic picture, of how a telos might arise naturally based off of entropic principles.

This is a useful distinction, between teleology and teleonomy, between the transcendent, logos and the imminent, nomos. But, a third possibility, I think, is that of a telos that is "pre-existent" and yet not "external to the system", not transcendent but nonetheless infinite and eternal, and yet a fully immanent telos.

This conception could be somewhat along the lines, for example, of Whitehead's process philosophy, where the "direction" is seen not as "generated from within the system", an idea which suggests that it is generated from scratch from the brute, so to speak, but is understood to be immanent from the beginning and evolving right along with the system. It would be a kind of heart, mind and soul, as well as spirit, of the system. — John

This is a point well taken, and I appreciate you pointing it out. That said, the only way I know how to make sense of a telos in this 'third' sense you mention here is through the notion of entropy, where the (necessary) cosmic dissipation of energy prompts the formation of local (contingent) negentropic eddies - one of which is life with it's concomitant processes of evolution. The article by Salthe that Apo cites introduces a third term, teleomaty, which he correlates to 'propensity', which more or less characterizes the entropic drive of the universe - the full hierarchy, which Apo also quoted, is:

{teleomaty (propensity) {teleonomy (function) {teleology} (purpose)}}.

Perhaps another way to put this is that entropy is a necessary question to which local (self-)organization are the (contingent) answer(s).

I meant to add that there is also Stan Salthe's hierarchical approach to a definition here that recognises various grades of telos, ranging from the brutely physical to the complexly mindful. — apokrisis

Mm, I have Salthe's Evolving Hierarchical Systems sitting on my shelf where it's been for about a year now, but it hasn't yet found it's way into my reading schedule. Hopefully I'll get to it by the end of the year, but so much else on the priority list right now.

Emergent purpose... that would be a big deal. Future historians of science would want to pinpoint exactly how and when scientists started thinking in those terms. — Mongrel

Most accounts - 'the future' is already here: they've already been written! People just need to read them! - begin with Kant's third critique, where he recognizes the inability of mechanism to account for organization in nature, but ended up domesticating his own insight by putting it down to a matter of (human) judgement rather than nature itself. For Kant, the experience of the sublime was nothing but the experience of purpose in what ought to be 'purposeless things' in nature. Here is Alicia Juarrero, who has written plenty about this too:

"Although organisms cannot be explained mechanistically because of this strange kind of recursive causality unknown to us, Kant concluded that the impasse is due to a limitation of reason. His solution: relegate teleology and purposiveness to the "regulative judgment" by virtue of the self-organization that is their hallmark. By appealing to the critical turn, Kant thereby avoided an antinomy between mechanism and finality while allowing that mechanism and finality can perhaps be reconciled in the supersensible, a reconciliation, unfortunately, that we will never know. The assumption that only external forces can bring about change thus continued to deny causal efficacy to nonlinear feedback loops, and there- fore to self-organizing processes, which were accordingly dismissed as a form of causality unknown to us.

Even though Aristotle's Posterior Analytics was the first systematic attempt to examine the concept of cause, modern science summarily dismantled his system of four causes, and it is since mentioned for the most part only with a certain embarrassment. Despite opting in the end for a mechanistic understanding of causal relations, at least Kant recognized and addressed the problem of self-cause. Philosophers since, however, have for the most part ignored Kant's third Critique, the Critique of Judgment. By discarding Aristotelian appeals to formal or final cause while at the same time retain- ing his prohibition against that unknown form of causality, self-cause, modern philosophy of action effectively boxed itself into a corner". (Dynamics in Action).

Evan Thompson's Life in Mind - again about the same ideas - similarly begins it's history with Kant: "My starting point is to examine the theory of autopoiesis in relation to Kant's classic treatment of organic nature in his Critique of Judgment, first published in 1790 (Kant 1987). Kant gave an original and visionary account of the organism as a self-organizing being, an account close in many ways to the theory of autopoiesis."

So again, all the resources are there! We know all about this stuff, in detail, with plenty of scientific backing. People just need to read them, take them up, and digest them.

I agree with your point about Dawkins (his gene-centrism irks me to no end!), but I only mention him to show that even the most hardcore of old-schoolers need to admit such views into their frameworks. As for Rosen, I'm referring to his point that biology contains entailment structures far richer than physics, which renders it a far more general science, to the degree that it's subject of study - life - is more formally generic than physics, making it a mistake to say that biology is a 'branch of physics' (also, filler?? No way!). But that's off topic.

No, I simply imagine that the facts of nature don't care for the whims and fancies of 'cultural alterations' and 'prevailing views'. If not Jablonka and Lamb, or Turner, or West-Eberhart, or Wager, perhaps you can try Pigliucci and Muller's The Extended Synthesis - an edited collection with more than just 'a few imaginative scientists', or Sean Carroll's Endless Forms Most Beautiful, for a nice pop-science overview of this stuff. And for the mistaken view the biology is a branch of physics, you can try something like Robert Rosen's Life Itself. Alternatively, one can appeal to the general cultural consciousness which is about twenty or so years behind the actual science itself, although that, more than anything, seems like the far graver mistake.

--

Even Dawkins, that doyen of evolutionary ‘reductionism’ is all too happy to admit that natural selection does and can in fact favour certain ‘directions’ of evolution: “A title like ’The Evolution of Evolvability’ ought to be anathema to a dyed-in-the-wool, radical neb-darwinian like me! [Yet ]…there is a sense in which a form of natural selection favours, not just adaptively successful phenotypes, but a tendency to evolve in certain directions." (Dawkins, "The Evolution of Evolvability").

It's not at all startling if you're versed in some of the more recent developments in evolutionary theory. That evolution is simply a matter of 'random changes' is now a bit of an outdated notion, although it still serves well in serving as a bulwark against creationist or theological views, which is why, perhaps, it is so often repeated. In any case, there's a ton that could be said here, but I'll take as representative this statement from Jablonka and Lamb's magnificent book, Evolution in Four Dimensions:

"Contrary to current dogma, the variation on which natural selection acts is not always random in origin or blind to function: new heritable variation can arise in response to the conditions of life. Variation is often targeted, in the sense that it preferentially affects functions or activities that can make organisms better adapted to the environment in which they live. Variation is also constructed, in the sense that, whatever their origin, which variants are inherited and what final form they assume depend on various “filtering” and “editing” processes that occur before and during transmission.

Some biologists have great difficulty in accepting this “Lamarckian” aspect of evolution. To them it smacks of teleology, seeming to suggest that variations arise for a purpose. It appears as if the hand of God is being introduced into evolution by the backdoor. But of course there is nothing supernatural or mysterious about what happens—it is simply a consequence of the properties of the various inheritance systems and the way they respond to internal and external influences."

Elsewhere you can check out the work of Mary Jane West-Eberhard on developmental plasticity, or Wanger's Arrival of the Fittest, or Scott Turner's The Tinkerer's Accomplice.

To say that genetic mutations are random could mean .... that they are not directed by anything. There is no telos. The genetic mutations may still, on this view, be either causally determined, or not. However the condition that there is no telos operating requires that there be no causal determination beyond merely efficient causation. There must be no direction, of either formal or final cause, in nature, on this view — John

One way to think about this is to make the distinction between teleology and teleonomy. The difference is between a telos which is in some way 'pre-existant' and 'external' to the system, and a telos which is generated internally by the system itself. A difference between transcendent and immanent telos. Evolutionary processes, to the degree that there is 'directedness' involved, involves teleonomy, and not teleology. Thus Apo is perfectly right to note that the necessity of survival itself 'makes' the contingencies involved 'matter', and that it is the interplay of necessity and chance that drives the evolutionary process as a whole (Why he thinks I somehow deny this is beyond me, then then again, confrontation and disagreement is simply his modus operandi).

In any case, the question is about the modality of these necessities themselves. Are they themselves necessary ('pre-programmed' and thus teleological) or contingent (a result of process and thus teleonomic)? This is complicated territory because it involves modality to the second degree, but it is here that the question over telos is settled. And the answer, as far as we can tell, is that we can account for the generation of necessity without any appeal to any transcendant teleology. Teleonomy is engendered within the process of evolution's unfolding without it having been 'put there at the beginning'. To the degree that evolution entails necessity - and it does - it does so without design.

Absence of design <> discoverable cause. You're working with an incoherent notion of chance.

Why would you call this "chance", something which has deterministic causes. — Metaphysician Undercover

What are 'deterministic causes' even supposed to mean? As distinct from 'non-deterministic causes'? Just another example of why your OP seems so confused to me. Then again, this is perhaps why you're making the claims you do - 'chance' is not opposed to causality (as if chance simply means 'uncaused' or some such nonsense); chance is a modality of causality - contingent causality, to be contrasted with necessary causality. The whole success of the theory of natural selection is precisely in it's ability to give an account of the kind of causality at work in evolution - it specifies one of the mechanisms by which evolution takes place. One of it's corollaries is that it says that there is nothing necessary about the evolutionary advantages conferred upon the peppered moth, say; the causes themselves are contingent.

As for the idea that it doesn't 'make sense' to assume that 'a non-random process evolved form a random process', all I can do is point you to the evolutionary modelling that says not only does it make total sense, but that it can and in fact has happens. Again, I refer you to the Fox Keller quote where she says that the studies done confirm that selection for mutability is not only possible, but incredibly likely. So if it doesn't 'make sense' to you, then what you require is a renovation of your sensibilities.

Finally, mutability does not 'minimise randomness' - it does almost the exact opposite: it encourages variation for the sake of proliferating differences. Again, if you can't get these simple facts right, its hard to take much of what you say serioisly.

Hmm, the discussion on this thread seems confused so far. Here's an attempt to clear things up. There are at least three sources (but not only three) of 'chance' or contingency with respect to evolution. The first is what we might call external chance, and bears on natural selection, which is one of the mechanisms of evolution (but not the only one). 'External chance' is what happens when an environment changes. The case of the peppered moth is the most famous: thanks to the pollution of the industrial revolution, dark colored moths gained an evolutionary advantage because they were better able to blend into the background and thus avoid predators - their population subsequently exploded, especially with respect to lighter colored moths. With the cleaning up of industrial pollution around the world, this trend has steadily declined. This is perhaps the best example of the way in which chance operates in natural selection: the evolutionary advantage of the back peppered moth was totally contingent on it's environment. The role of chance at this level cannot be disputed.

The second source of chance in evolution has to do with genetic mutation. We can call this internal chance. In this case, changes at the level of the geneotype occasionally produce evolutionary advantages at the level of the phenotype (and sometimes evolutionary disadvantages). The question to is what degree 'chance' is at work here. In the classical view, these changes were put down to random coding errors during the processes of transcription (DAN to RNA), splicing and editing (RNA to mRNA), and translation (mRNA to protein). Modern evolutionary theory today however recognizes that these changes aren't all entirely random; that in fact, there are mechanisms of mutability that in certain circumstances, force or otherwise increase the chances for variation. Another way to put this is that evolution has evolved mechanisms to increase evolvability; it's the ability of evolution to feedback upon itself that accounts for the relative 'rapiditiy' of evolution.

At this level, the role of chance is of the second-order. While part of the capacity to produce variation is not 'random' (it is a result of evolution), this mechanism itself is. In fact, we're able to simulate this 'evolution of evolvability' without 'pre-progamming' it in. Here is Evelyn Fox Keller: "New mathematical models of bacterial populations in variable environments confirm that, under such conditions, selection favors the fixation of some mutator alleles and, furthermore, that their presence accelerates the pace of evolution. Recent laboratory studies of bacterial evolution provide further confirmation, lending support to the notion that organisms have evolved mechanisms for their own “evolvability. ... 'Chance,' as one of the organizers of a recent conference on “Molecular Strategies in Biological Evolution” puts it, 'favors the prepared genome.'"

Third and finally, there are the contingencies involved in sexual selection, which account for another level of 'chance' operative in evolution. I confess I can't made heads nor tails of the OP - which doesn't seem to actually discuss any science whatsoever - but hopefully this contributes to clearing up some of the discussion here.

Arkady Plotnitsky - In The Shadow of Hegel: Complementarity, History, and the Unconscious

The average thing can be either a subject or an object. It just depends on the story that's being told, right? For instance, "The ball hit the window." We all know the ball isn't supposed to have agency or any other unnatural qualities... but that's how we speak of it.

"Karen hit the window." Here we need to know more about the story to see what kind of action-maker Karen was. Was she conscious when she hit the window? Does it matter in regard to the distinction you're drawing between subject and object? — Mongrel

The average thing? Surely the 'average thing' can be a lot more than subject or object? Perhaps 'the average thing' is a movement, a threat, an environment, a look of joy, an unfolding process, an atmosphere, a game, a set of relations, etc. And if so, subject and object are just heuristics which we use to organize experience according to certain ends every once in a while. That the world itself has object-like or subject-like qualities might well be - and I'd in fact suggest it - an epistemological abstraction read 'back into' nature.

I would also agree that the very fact that we can see our way to such a meta-philosophical conclusion hints at either a different way of thinking, or that we should be somewhat reticent in putting too much weight in our conclusion (as you clearly are). — photographer

Ya - perhaps it's just semantics, but I've always been more of a 'rejig metaphysics' guy than a 'destroy it' kinda guy.

The old sense of 'object' also survives -- to objectify someone is to reduce them to what you make of them. You can't objectify someone without looking at them, and trying to assimilate them into yourself, and so deny their independence (their substance, their 'subjectivity'). — The Great Whatever

This is a good point actually, another way of rounding out the picture. One of the lessons to draw from this I think is that 'objectivity' is simply not a very good metaphysical bulwark to rest our picture of the universe on. Or rather - from a naturalist perspective anyway - that the appeal to 'objects' over and against 'subjects' isn't a very good strategy to the degree that objectivity itself isn't exactly 'natural'. There ought to be 'a different way of thinking'. This is all rather 'mythological' of course - one could actually look at the tenets of the model-theoretic science where predictions are really 'predictions-in-a-model' which are then projected back upon nature to see if those predictions - and hence the models - pan out. There remains something very Kantian about modern scientific epistemology.

As for Kant himself, it's true that he did in fact keep up the notion that an object is an object for a subject, but his novelty was perhaps to introduce the notion of the 'Thing-In-Itself', which pretty much gets completely overlooked or rather intentionally erased in the post-Kantian tradition that followed him up (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel...).

Yeah, this is kind of where I wanted this discussion to head actually - the 'objective', even today I think, remains profoundly correlated with 'subjects': if we accept that objectivity today amounts to a kind of reproducibility of results, it refers in fact to a product of teche or human proclivity. There's a kind of artifice that is inherent to any notion of the 'objective' which is not often recalled when we associate objectivity with empiricism or materialism or whatever 'hard nosed' scientific enterprise. Math for example, can be entirely ideal - and hence objective - to the extent that it is almost entirely self-referential. I want to say something like: objectivity is a much 'thinner', 'insubstantial' notion that we tend to give it credit for.

@Mongrel: Yeah, Heidegger was one of the few modern scholars who understood this quite well I think, which is one of the reasons he so studiously avoided employing the notion of the 'subject' and instead turned to 'Dasein' to ground his existential analytic. As someone after the 'Destruktion of Metaphysics', he tried to leave the baggage of the 'subject' with all it's overtones of 'fundationalism' and 'presence' at the phenomenological door.

Interestingly, the metaphysical notion of the Idea (Eidos) also stands for - surprise surprise - the words 'Image' and 'Species'. One might think perhaps that the Idea - or the image - is situated at a point 'prior' to the bifurcation between object and subject. And in fact, the notion of the 'image' - which has a rich philosophical history itself - has in fact always played the role of the third terms between subject and object. (Here is Emanuele Coccia: "the image makes itself known as what stands opposite to bodies and subjects, to matter and soul; as that which is simultaneously external to the bodies of which it is the image and as external to the subjects to whom it gives the possibility of thinking these very bodies" Coccia, Sensible Life)

One thing I left out in the history above is that the notion of the 'intentional object' was not always correlated with an observer. It became so - thanks to Scotus - but belonged, before Scouts, to a kind of intermediate realm that is neither 'real' or 'ideal' - this in fact is precisely what made it 'objective'. Here is Bains (recalling again that the intentional object acts on the intellect and accounts here for knowledge): "That which is known acts on the intellect in an 'intentional' way with- out modifying it entitatively (the scholastic adage: 'When I look at a' stone I do not become a stone'). The received form remains distinct and objective. It exists for the knower not subjectively but intentionally. This intentional or objective existence is neither in the thing as a physically existent subject, nor in the knowing subject; it is strictly suprasubjective."

Anthony WIlden - System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange
Emanuele Coccia - Sensible Life: A Micro-Ontology of the Image

Ha, I see where you're coming from but there's a darker side to abundance than 'joie de vivre' which the Lingis quote doesn't quite get across - think here of obsession, wastefulness, libidinal pathology (of the Kantian stripe), envy, jealously, neuroticism, eroticism of the Sadeian kind and so on (all the things Bataille liked to go on about) - the Freudian death drive, properly speaking. It's these features more than anything that the primacy of scarcity can't even begin to capture. To be able to squander kisses is equally to be able to squander time, to be unproductive, to be consumed and haunted by our infatuations. Scarcity simply comes off as paper thin as a motivation when we consider the full range of human behaviour.

The point about fatigue is more that it's simply a weird extrapolation to say something like 'the Sun fatigues'. The Sun has no emotion, it is far more uncaring than that. If we're going to talk about the sun, far better to do so in terms of Bataille's solar excess: "The origin and essence of our wealth are given in the radiation of the sun, which dispenses energy - wealth - without return. The sun gives without ever receiving. Men were conscious of this long before astrophysics measured that ceaseless prodigality; they saw it ripen the harvests and they associated its splendor with the act of someone who gives without receiving. In former times value was given to unpro­ductive glory, whereas in our day it is measured in terms of production: Precedence is given to energy acquisition over energy expenditure. Glory itself is justified by the consequences of a glo­rious deed in the sphere of utility. But, dominated though it is by practical judgment and Christian morality, the archaic sensi­bility is still alive: In particular it reappears in the romantic pro­test against the bourgeois world; only in the classical conceptions of the economy does it lose its rights entirely." (The Accursed Share, Vol. 1).

Interestingly, fatigue, as a physiological condition, is a kind of regulative emotion that sets in to protect the body from overexertion: it is a kind of check on corporeal excess that is not a result but a mechanism that aims to sustain oneself (see: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3323922/). So to the OP one ought to oppose a Nietzschian vision in which being is not defined by lack, but by excess, abundance and gratuitousness:

"A living organism is not an abyss; it is a dynamo. In being healthy, in being alive, our organisms generate energies in excess of what we need to satisfy our hungers and thirsts. In so much of what we do, awakening because our body is recharged overnight, dancing in the morning sunlight, going for a mountain hike on the weekend, we give without expectation of return. ... To feel healthy is not to have the essentially negative notion of no debility, no sickness that we shape from the doctor’s (or our own, amateur doctor’s) examination but to feel exultant energies to burn. The exclamation “How happy I am!” catches up a surge of exhilaration within, intensifies it, and makes it flare outward.

....The vision in us—I am a dancer! I am an adventurer! I am a revolutionary!—calls forth, intensifies, and consecrates the productive and sacrificial powers in us. The forces mobilized by a vision are not oriented toward pleasure nor the excessive and monstrous excesses of pleasure in pain; they aim at a work or an artwork, a revolution or a transfiguration. We know inwardly that we have kisses and caresses to squander on someone, have a tenderness and an excitement to give someone such as no lover has ever yet given anyone. We have the conviction felt in exhilaration of having the strength and the spirit to train and to inspire our body to dance as no one has ever before danced; we feel inwardly we have the heart and the nerves to endure all the risks, disasters, failures, and savageries of the revolution. The forces mobilized by a vision in an individual may well intensify the Promethean and reptilian strengths to endure the unintelligible and absurd destiny of a body born for or imprisoned in pain. Trapped, caged, straitjacketed, we know a will that shall not bend and the terrible force of our curses." (Alphonso Lingis, "My Own Voice").

Yeah L&J's 'Metaphors We Live By' is one of the books I'm planning to pick up. That said, part of what's at stake in the OP is the idea that there is no clear dividing line between the literal and the figural -'understanding' is a sort of evolving capacity that is never established once and for all but shifts relative to both the inherited background of understanding that we have, and to the novelty that every encounter with something new affords. The entire structure of understanding is mobile, as it were: language, which always involves a degree of novelty through metaphor, slips back into literality which in turn retrojects the illusion that literality came first.

This is where one must be careful with language: it's not just that we notice similarities between pre-established domains and draw connections - by way of metaphor - across them. One must instead think of metaphor as helping to establish the sense of those very domains to begin with. So perhaps a rejigging of the OP's imagery is in order: metaphors don't simply 'extend' sense (as if from a pre-constituted 'core' of sense), but also involve a certain involution or ingression of sense which reworks what counts as the 'boundaries' of the literal.

Jack Reynolds's Chronopathologies: Time and Politics in Deleuze, Derrida, Analytic Philosophy, and Phenomenology is a well written, synoptic look at various account of time ('analytical', phenomenological and poststurcutalist) that might be of interest if you want a sort of 'broad brush' look at different perspectives on time.

David Couzens Hoy's The Time of Our Lives is also an excellent introduction to various 'continental' takes on time, and it really goes through everything.

Some personal favourites, although they are more targeted/specific works are Martin Hagglund's Radical Atheism and Dying for Time (which elaborate on a roughly Derridian approach to time), and William James's Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy of Time.

P-N's recs might be more in line with what you're after though I think!

Finally started on this, and my first, quick impression is that Haugeland is trying to perform a phenomenological reduction of patterns, suspending the 'natural attitude' - which he refers to as the 'mathematical definition' as opposed to the 'operational definition'. No wonder this bloke wrote a book on Heidegger.

@csalisbury Heh, not really, not at this point anyway, because I still feel like I'm learning things that I hadn't known before, and that I'm still pursuing questions whose horizons are still strewn wide. I'm still hungry, basically. It helps that I read thematically too: I take up a theme, read four or five things on it, and move on to another theme, which is usually related anyway. That's why I'm happy to do so much secondary reading: my interest is in problems and their implications, and much of the reading I do is about extending insights into other fields, finding cross-fertilizations with other thinkers, ideas, and so on. I like finding resonances, building bridges, and building 'webs', as it were. I think my reading reflects that.

Next three...

John Protevi - Political Physics: Political Physics: Deleuze, Derrida and the Body Politic
Helen Palmer - Deleuze and Futurism: A Manifesto for Nonsense
Donald Landes - Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression

For further months:

J. P. Sartre - Existentialism is a Humanism
Michel Foucault - What Is Enlightenment?
Daniel Dennett - Intentional Systems Theory
Hilary Putnam - Meaning and Reference
John Searle - Minds, Brains, and Computers
George Lakoff and Vittorio Gallese - The Brain's Concepts: The Role of the Sensory-Motor System in Conceptual Knowledge

Last call for votes!

Bluntly: our understanding of things would remain 'correlationist' since those scales and perspectives are, indeed, for-us. (Spatial or temporal) 'Perspectives' and their accompanying scales can only be introduced metaphorically into a conception of a sentience-less world. (I know some latch onto the theory of relativity to try to show how perspectives are indeed part of space-time itself, but I take it we both understand the misunderstanding at play here and can safely pass it over.) — csalisbury

Taking off my Brassier hat for the moment (and putting on my Deleuzian one), I'd say the best way to go about addressing this is to note that those scales and perspectives are 'pre-individual' in the sense that they are not simply 'for-us' but rather of us. Pace Spinoza, we simply are a particular sustained ratio of movement and rest, rhythm and periodicity, and to utilize these scales is already in some sense to tap into the so-called 'in-itself' to the degree that they were never 'ours' to begin with.

Now, where B. diverges sharply is in his commitment to truth. His problem - among others - is that the conceptual resources provided by Deleuze and - most especially Latour - cannot countenance truth (Deleuze might reply with a hearty 'but truth isn't interesting...', to which B. would reply that if one is to be a realist, one needs to deal with truth). Anyway, in order to deal with truth, Brassier has to turn to a conception of naturalized rationality, not unlike the kind found in Brandom and the post-Sellarsians. This is most clearly set out in his paper That Which Is Not. Here's some relevant snippets:

"Rationality is not a psychological faculty but a socially instantiated linguistic artifact—language and sociality being taken to be interdependent here. To invoke the normative character of conceptual discourse is simply to point out the inferential nexus which renders propositional contents mutually interdependent and conceptual commitments reciprocally constraining. This inferentialist formalization of rationality leads to an understanding of philosophical theory as the formal explicitation of the (sociolinguistic) conditions of conceptualization. To articulate the formal infrastructure of thinking and speaking is to render explicit what was already implicit in conceptual practice. It is to set out the preconditions for knowing how to think and to speak. This shift from implicit know-how to explicit knowing-that involves a kind of reflexive “self-consciousness” on the part of cognitive agents, but one which does not operate at the level of phenomenological presentation: it is not a matter of self-consciousness as presentation of presentation, but rather of the explicit representation of latent representational mechanisms.

... Truth is semantically correct assertability, which is to say optimally justified assertion. Yet truth involves a transition from implicit warrant to explicit endorsement: to know that something is true is also to recognize that one is obliged to assert that it is the case, that one should move from assent to endorsement, where endorsement is the theoretical explicitation of practical inferential assent. Philosophy is the explicitation of truth, understood as the formal manifestation of latent content carried out via the representation of representation."

This, ultimately, is what Brassier understands by 'tracking' the real via conceptuality. Invoking Deleuze once more though, the idea - or at least how I'm trying to charitably read it - is that just as the periodicity of our bodies is pre-individual, so too is 'conceptual practice' just that - a practice, which is to say, it too is of the world and not just about it, as if separate from it. To the extent that rationality is discontinuous with the real though, it is on account of it's rule-bound, normative dimension, which constrains, in a 'top-down' manner, as it were, the flux of the sensuous, allowing for one to speak about truth - which is how B. will cash out his realism. Personally, I think this is a rather 'thin' constural of realism, but I've said enough here and hope that this is some grist for the mill in any case.

Hey @Pierre-Normand, I'm thinking about putting the Haugeland reading on there, but does it require familiarity with Dennett in order to read? Might it be worth putting Dennett up there instead?

But if your concern is whether Quine does or does not in principle limit the question of being to what's said, I'd say that in this article he does not, perhaps because that possibility doesn't occur to him, perhaps for other reasons. — Ciceronianus the White

Here's an argument: if Quine does in fact want to limit ontology to the 'semantical plane', then he makes language in some manner otherwordly: no longer naturalized as one manner of acting or doing among others, language acquires a status that is somehow discontinuous with the rest of the world and everything in it. The onus would then be on Quine to justify this discontinuity of language with the rest of the universe, a move that would in fact be metaphysical - in the pejorative sense - through and through.

I don't think "being" is involved in any significant sense in such issues, unless it is defined in such a fashion as to mean something which presumes existence and includes other considerations, ethical, legal and political. In that case, though, it would seem ontology isn't a distinct area of study or inquiry. — Ciceronianus the White

I'm not entirely concerned about what you do or don't think. The question remains: is there anything in Quine that in principle limits the question of being ('what is') what is said? And if so, what would motivate what I suspect is an arbitrary line in the sand? Note that none of this is to say that acknowledging the ontological implications of social or political acts in some way may or may not be 'beneficial to an issue's resolution'. Rather, it's a question of the bearing of the political or the social on the question of being: if what "is" cannot be limited to what is said, then do social and political acts (for instance) feed back into the question of what it is to be?

At this point you might not even be nothing...

I don't think it's a one way street, either from representation to material conditions or vice versa. The point is more that each feeds back - or rather forward - into the other. Is there a disproportionate focus on representation, given the relatively meager way in which it effects the day to day life of ordinary people? Certainly. But as far as 'tactical' politics goes, the politics of representation is low hanging fruit: it widely visible and easy to engage with. Asking to be represented in the Oscars is alot easier to do - and achieve - than advocating for funds for ramps and elevators. Not to mention sexier. But once you've cleared that hurdle, then you've got a foothold to say, "hey, we're really are everywhere now, how can you not install ramps? How can you get away with you rampant sexism? This is no longer what people do: watch a movie sometime!" We can't even do that at this point.

Yep.

They matter to the degree that people think they matter (Quine would agree!).

It appears that "ontology" may be defined rather more broadly than the study of what there is, but I question whether a city can be said to commit itself to a particular ontology when it makes land use decisions; or whether it's at all useful to characterize such a commitment as ontological in nature. In what sense is the city committing itself to an ontology by doing so, instead of or distinct from something else? It would seem it would be making a value judgment, or acting out of a desire for revenue through property taxes, for example, or due to prejudice of some kind. Do such things depend upon a particular ontology beyond an acceptance of, e.g., the existence of people, dwellings, money? — Ciceronianus the White

In what sense wouldn't it be doing so? Call it a value judgement if you like: this would just to be say that our ontologies are based on value judgements; call it a desire for revenue through property taxes: this could just be to say that a particular ontology is motivated by such a desire. When Quine simply defines 'the ontological problem' as 'what is there', nothing in the question motivates a response in terms of our saying 'such and such is'. When, as a disabled person, a city doesn't build the ramps and elevators required to access otherwise "public" space, is not your very existence (or being, as Quine is wont to say) being in some way denied? When, as a gay person, your ability to express your desire is curbed by draconian laws that make "sodomy" a felony, is not the same at work? Perhaps you think this is overwrought, but some of the largest political movements in history - over race, over gender, over class - have been born from just this impulse to wring social and cultural existence out from systems which do not acknowledge them to exist in some way or another.

Quine, at the end of the paper, speaks of how our differing conceptual schemes might enable or disable our ability "to communicate successfully on such topics as politics, weather, and, in particular, language." But why construe 'communication' so narrowly, to our 'saying' things? Is protest not communication? Are petitions not communication? When the population took to the streets in the Ukraine at freedom square, they weren't just hanging around for a bit of fun. I don't think anything in principle limits 'ontology' to a practice conducted by (what tends to be) old white men writing about other, deader, old white men and the philosophical tracts they produce. It seems to me perfectly intelligible to speak about 'the ontology of modernity', or 'the ontology of capitalism' and so on, as is in fact the case in many areas of study.

I think modern 'liberal' politics has taken this on as an explicit belief, that representations of things somehow precede their existence: thus we need to raise awareness, and grant representation. There seems to be a genuine fear that if you do not see yourself in a movie, you will cease to exist (where 'yourself' means someone of your color or whatever it might be: sublimation of the individual's suffering into an abstraction). And there is also the notion of self-identity: there is some quasi-magical means by which committing oneself to being a certain thing, ~*identifying*~ as it, means that you are that thing: ontological commitments in the form of desires or choices to represent those things in public or in the media make the things we talk about real, and so we are all collections of acts of ~*identification*~ and not whatever we were supposed to be before. — The Great Whatever

Yeah, this sort of 'identity politics' has been disparaged for quite some time, where identification and recognition is construed to be the sort of be all and end all of politics. I agree that when taken as such it's generally pretty fucking disastrous for all involved, but on the other hand, it does make for a good starting point. When the Oscars executive governing board looks like this:



And you have white actors nominated across the board for two years running for best actor/actress, you do have to wonder what the actual fuck is up (Stallone over Idris Elba? Please...). But of course these are only gestures, and they ought to feed back into material conditions, which themselves ought to be the subject of political action just as much as representation and and so on.

Thanks Pierre! Yeah, I did fumble over that a little, and in hindsight I would probably phrase that differently. Anyway, some initial commentary: among the things I like here - apart from Quine's wonderful writing style - is Quine's implicit 'autonomizing' of language, as it were, construing it as a domain unto it's own without needing to 'mirror' the world. To have ontological commitments to some kind of thing or another is just to say that some kind of thing or another is. Ontology is relativized to 'the semantical plane', which, in turn, becomes decoupled from 'things' in order to operate autonomously. This impulse will also be taken up by Davidson - and, independently, by much of the 'continental tradition' - who will try to do away with 'representational' function of language, treating it on it's own terms.

I do wonder, though, about the 'voluntarist' - or perhaps better, rationalist - terms in which Quine frames this autonomy. In the following passage for example, the common denominator is that our ontological commitments follow as a result of our saying that such and such 'are': "We commit ourselves to an ontology containing numbers when we say there are prime numbers larger than a million; we commit ourselves to an ontology containing centaurs when we say there are centaurs; and we commit ourselves to an ontology containing Pegasus when we say Pegasus is." But if - and I am inclined to make this move - 'saying' is simply one type of action among others, can we not implicitly commit ourselves to ontologies in our ways of acting? Can one say, in a political vein, that a city commits itself to an ontology of home owners when it chooses to ignore the building of facilities to accommodate the homeless (or even, implement 'anti-homeless' features, like spikes on flat surfaces, as has been done in certain cities?).

To make a move like this of course is to once again 'substantialize' ontology in a way that Quine would probably find unpalatable, relativizing ontology not to language, but to a broader realm of 'significance' more generally. One consequence of making a move like this would also be to relativize language itself as one type of sense-making apparatus among others (which might include, to continue with our example, the structuring of movement and rest by our architectural and planning decisions, which can in turn structure the intelligibility of the populations who reside in a certain territory). Anyway, the point is: do our ontological commitments need to operate at the level of explicit enunciation (at the level of 'saying' that such and such is), or can they operate also at the level of implicit commitment, at the level of behavior, action, habit, and practice more generally? And if there is indeed a reason to make such a distinction, what in Quine would authorize it?

I also want to say that the above is in some way a response to @Ciceronianus the White's question about why questions about being can matter so much. If the above is correct, and being cannot be delimited to the field of language alone, it might will be the case that our "ontological commitments" are normative through and through, not at the level of what we say, but at the level of what do. One rather disastrous effect of 'deflationary ontologies' like Quine's might in fact be to disavow the fact that ontology operates in a manner that goes beyond mere intellectual debate, and flows right into the way in which power is both sustained and exercised across various domains of life, in which what one 'says' is not at all the issue. It's a nice, 'respectable' exercise of course, to confine questions of being to the parlor where we debate about Pegasus and so on, but some debates take place on the streets, conducted in a key other than language - perhaps sometimes violence.