I think I understand what you're trying to say, and I think it's been something I've been grappling with in my own musings. I think one answer to what you're after is to look at the operation of entropy. We tend to think about entropy in terms of the dissolution of order, but one curious fact about entropy is that 'local' negentropy - hollowed out zones of order among the generalized tendency to cosmic disorder - tends to ultimately be in the service of entropy: highly ordered (negentropic) systems - which are another way of speaking about identities or what we're in this discussion calling 'necessary processes' - require a great deal more work to maintain - and thus churn through the available free energy in the universe - than minimally ordered or unordered systems. Which is just to say that the more (local) negentropy there is, the more efficiently (global) entropy functions.

Now, it seems to me that entropy functions as, as it were, the 'ground' that we're looking for. Although not a process in the sense of the term we're using (i.e. a (minimally) self-sustaining, negentropic system), it plays the role of something like a 'pre-process'. The running down of the cosmic entropic gradient motivates - although it does not direct or oversee, in the mode of a program or blueprint - the formation of localized currents of 'necessary processes'. Now, clearly entropy is not enough to furnish us with something like a principle of individuation, but it does provide the 'kick', the motor that would set things going in the first place.

Individuation proper, on the other hand, requires something more than just the waning out of entropy: it requires a linkage or articulation between two heterogeneous orders of magnitude. This is something that's incredibly hard to explain, but I'll try my best, as I'm working though it myself. Recall that negentropy is an ordered resolution of an energy gradient: an attempt to bring a ∆X to 0 (where ∆X = the difference in energy within a bounded space). Now, if we bring together two separate gradients together and put them into communication such that one disrupts or interferes with the efficient flow (of energy) of the other, as it were, we can set off a process of individuation. John Protevi gives the basic example of hurricane formation, which "involves differential relations among heterogeneous components whose rates of change are connected with each other. [In] hurricane formation... it is intuitively clear that there is no central command but a self-organization of multiple processes of air and water movement propelled by temperature and pressure differences. All hurricanes form when intensive processes of wind and ocean currents reach singular points... triggering updrafts, eyewall formation, and so on." (Protevi, Life, War, Earth)

In the formations of hurricanes, we have two separate differential orders (temperature and pressure) put into 'communication' with each other, requiring a resolution in the form of a hurricance, which most efficiently dissipates the potential energy involved. Gilbert Simondon puts it's programmatically as follows: "The true principle of individuation is mediation, which generally presumes the existence of the original duality of the orders of magnitude and the initial absence of interactive communication between them, followed by a subsequent communication between orders of magnitude and stabilization. At the same time that a quantity of potential energy (the necessary condition for a higher order of magnitude) is actualized, a portion of matter is organized and distributed (the necessary condition for a lower order of magnitude) into structured individuals of a middle order of magnitude, developing by a mediate process of amplification." (Simondon, The Genesis of the Individual). In other words, individuation is the resolution of a differential field polarized between two orders of intensity.

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Now, when you speak of a 'transference mechanism' by which a contingent process becomes a necessary one, what is at stake is how this process of articulation/resolution comes to bear upon itself. In other words, what is at stake is life itself. As Simondon notes, life differs from non-life to the extent that living beings are not merely the outcome of individuating processes, but individuate themselves. He calls this self-individuation a matter of attaining 'internal resonance': "In the domain of living things... individuation is no longer produced, as in the physical domain, in an instantaneous fashion, quantum-like, abrupt and definitive, leaving in its wake a duality of milieu and individual - the milieu having been deprived of the individual it no longer is, and the individual no longer possessing the wider dimensions of the milieu. ... [The living being] is matched by a perpetual individuation that is life itself following the fundamental mode of becoming: the living being conserves in itself an activity of permanent individuation. It is not only the result of individuation, like the crystal or the molecule, but is a veritable theater of individuation. Moreover, the entire activity of the living being is not, like that of the physical individual, concentrated at its boundary with the outside world. There exists within the being a more complete regime of internal resonance requiring permanent communication and maintaining a metastability that is the precondition of life". (GI)

What Simondon here calls 'internal resonance' is another name for the way in which - pertinent to our discussion - things, or in this case, living beings, engender their own operation: "The living being is also the being that results from an initial individuation and amplifies this individuation, not at all the machine to which it is assimilated functionally by the model of cybernetic mechanism. In the living being, individuation is brought about by the individual itself, and is not simply a functioning object that results from an individuation previously accomplished, comparable to the product of a manufacturing process. The living being resolves its problems not only by adapting itself which is to say, by modifying its relationship to its milieu (something a machine is equally able to do) - but by modifying itself through the invention of new internal structures and its complete self-insertion into the axiomatic of organic problems. The living individual is a system of individuation, an individuation system and also a system that individuates itself. The internal resonance and the translation of its relation to itself into information are all contained in the living being's system" (GI)

Now the key here is that the internal resonance proper to living beings is not of a different order to individuation process of non-living things. Instead of resolving a differential field once and for all - as with a hurricane, which eventually dissipates once the tension between temperature and pressure is normalized - the living being sustains itself as a differential field of continual resolution. This is how Simondon links his notion of individuation back to perception itself: "Both the psyche and the collectivity are constituted by a process of individuation supervening on the individuation that was productive of life. The psyche represents the continuing effort of individuation in a being that has to resolve its own problematic through its own involvement as an element of the problem by taking action as a subject. The subject can be thought of as the unity of the being when it is thought of as a living individual, and as a being that represents its activity to itself in the world both as an element and a dimension of the world. Problems that concern living beings are not just confined to their own sphere: only by means of an unending series of successive individuations, which ensure that ever-more preindividual reality is brought into play and incorporated into the relation with the milieu, can we endow living beings with an open-ended axiomatic. Affectivity and perception are seen as forming a single whole in both emotion and science, forcing one to take recourse to new dimensions" (GI)

In other words - and here we can finally turn back to the OP - perception is itself no less subject to a process of individuation; to perceive is to 'resolve' a differential field involving body, world, movement, evolutionary and developmental history, surface texture, light, temperature and so on. This is why illusions are 'objective'; the perception of an illusion tends to resolve itself in similar manners to people who have similar evolutionary-developmental histories to us. Anyway, the main takeway here is that metaphysically speaking, what primary here is not an unmoved mover, but simply movement as such. The running down of a difference which is itself productive of differences (i.e. individuation). We can have our univocal cake and eat it too (If you get the chance, read Simondon's article (itself only an introduction to a larger book-length work). It is, I'm starting to be convinced, perhaps the most important piece of philosophical writing published in the last century).

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Also see a recent blogpost by Levi Bryant where he makes some similar points: " The most elementary model of the thing should not be the rock, nor the hammer, but rather the vortex as in instances of whirlpools, tornadoes, and hurricanes. Everywhere being is composed of vortices. There is, first of all, the field that is everywhere populated by turbulence. Here we encounter a very delicate and intricate a-theological issues: motion, turbulence– which is to say, the formation of form –does not come to being or the universe from without, but is always-already immanently operative within being. Being, the universe, requires no prime mover in order for motion to take place. Rather, everywhere there are flows of turbulence. Occasionally those flows come together and a vortex emerges. These vortices arise from these fields of turbulence and continuously draw from these fields of turbulence. Even vortices like rocks require turbulence to continue. This is why rocks are folds of a field that exceed them, while nonetheless being distinct from these fields (conditions of temperature, pressure, etc). If they depart too far from the field out of which they grow and live, they dissipate like so much morning mist.

A vortex is thus a particular organization, as ongoing process, of a field of turbulence. It is turbulence that has attained rotary motion. Yet in attaining rotary motion, vortices do not simply withdraw into themselves. Rather, they rebound back on the field of turbulence out of which they have grown. The field is reconfigured as a result of their rotary motion, creating circumstances in which different forms of turbulence and other vortices come into being."

@Jamalrob: I think you're right that what's interesting about the paper is that while it ultimately ends up laying the groundwork to undermine the functionalist perspective that underpins it, it does so nonetheless from within that very perspective. That is, without invoking any sort of 'external' thesis, it sort of performs an immanent critique of it's own foundations - albeit without acknowledging this 'deconstruction' so performed. I wasn't entirely joking when I said that the authors come very close to the spirit of Derrida in their approach to the mind here.

I thought section four lacked a bit of rigor; you should have cited the studies done by Chicken (1984) and Chicken (2003) to substantiate your thesis a little more. It's a fine paper to let roost among your achievements otherwise.

if it's already granted that we're dealing with some notion of what was once contigent [an affordance web being historically-evolutionary conditioned) becoming necessary ( an affordance web being historically-evolutionary stable), how are we to derive any speculative claims about the transference from one to the other given the contingency (particularity?) of the transference? The devil is in the details. — fdrake

I think this question, right here, is perhaps the philosophical question par excellence for our age. Ever since the post-structuralist onslaught against essentialism - and hence necessity - , the tide has once again been turning in favour of a qualified essentialism wherein what is necessary is that which has become so, where the questions to be asked involve querying "how 'essences' [are] entailed, made proper, installed 'as such' and naturalized within our thought and our being? How [they] congeal into a corporeal reality?" (Vicki Kirby, Telling Flesh). It is a question of asking what kind of reality would allow for the 'becoming essential of the accident', or the 'becoming necessary of the contingent' (these phrases belong to Catherine Malabou). This becomes especially pertinent when it comes to political issues insofar as, to quote Kirby again, "essentialism is the condition of possibility for any political axiology: the minimal consensual stuff through which political action is engendered is already essentialism's effect."

In other words, the question is: what kind of reality must it be such that emergent, contingent strcutures can attain the status of necessary ones? And what is the status of this 'necessity' itself if necessity is an outcome of a process rather than a principal that underlies process? Gilbert Simondon, for example, notes that the search for a principle of individuation (first causes, transcendental conditions, etc) presumes a teleology in which the individual is fixed in advance as a necessary outcome of that process - a teleology which is nowhere warranted. And if this is so, we ought to revise our understanding, or, in this case perhaps, our expectations of metaphysics - not as a science of first principles, but as the tracking down of what Foucault once called 'historical a prioris'.

I'm more or less in agreement that the idea of moral principles (understood in terms of 'rules') are exactly the wrong way to go about thinking morality, and are more or less a religious hangover from a time when ethics became conflated with 'commandments' and the like. To follow a rule is not to act morally but to be something like a bureaucrat or a moral pencil-pusher, as it were, merely 'applying' universals that do not implicate me in the situation when morality is called for. This is the minimal trace of truth in Kant's idea that one shouldn't simply act in conformity to duty (a situation which conflates ethics with legality) but also because of duty. I ought to be in some sense responsible for my acts, invested in the situation in which I am called upon to act morally, rather than being a mere spectator who, from the safety of the stands, as it were, can simply hide behind rules instead of recognising the part I play in being a moral agent.

On the other hand, I'm not convinced that what you might call moral particularism is in a much better position to address these issues. Just as morality cannot be an abdication of responsibility to the universality of law - without ceasing to be morality - I am equally suspect of any attempt which might subsume morality to the rubric of 'practicality'; as if the moral thing to do is dictated by the most practical thing to do - a position which once again leaves me 'outside' of the ambit of the moral responsibility, allowing me once again to 'hide behind' practicality so as to claim my morality. One must be careful, I think, in any attempt to 'shut down' the space of morality by aligning it once and for all with a set of 'moral criteria' be this the universality of law or the dictates of practicality - morality, my intuition tells me, must be something that remains 'open', that cannot be 'closed' and parsed neatly without struggle. One must inhabit morality, live it in a way that puts oneself in question even as we strive to do the 'right thing'.

@jamalrob: that's an excellent quote actually. I've been struggling over trying to frame the idea that memory is created in real time - while still respecting the specificity and 'pastness' of memory - and that fountain metaphor is a really nice way to think about it.

Woah, end of en era indeed. I'm going to stay on for a bit to clean up spam and so on, but I've lessened my contributions to the forum for a while even before the announcement of the sale, and with this new shiny forum and a frank lack of ability to pay sustained attention to more than two places on the internet at the same time (I waste enough time on PF as it is, lol), I'll probably try and wean myself off in a few months to hang around here instead. A part of me is still keen to keep up the quality of discussions over there, but with this exodus, I'm not sure it can be saved no matter what I do. Ah well. Welcome Un : )

Thoughts on rereading the paper:

It strikes me that the paper is somewhat incongruously named with respect to the actual analysis that takes place in it. On a close reading, what seems to stand out is that Chalmers and Clark might have better named the paper: The Arbitrary Mind. After all, what is at issue in the paper is the fact that any attempt to institute a divide between outside and inside is in fact an arbitrary one. In the analysis of the the role of memory in Otto and Inga for example, the whole point is that they cannot in fact locate a dividing line which would be 'categorically' placed. There is, in other words, a seeming arbitrariness with respect to where both 'inside' and 'outside' might be located (their 'deconstruction' of such a line is, interestingly enough, a move right out of the Derrida playbook... but that's something else entirely).

Anyway, part of the problem here, it seems to me, has to do with the implicit and unstated ontology that actually underpins the terms of the paper. In a word, the paper presupposes what we might call a static ontology. A static ontology deals in parts and wholes. In such an ontology, the identity of a given 'unit' - say, Otto or Inga - is presupposed as an already constituted entity. Otto has an identity, and the notebook forms part of this identity. Taken together, Otto and the notebook constitute a 'whole' identity. But as the paper itself demonstrates, this talk of wholes and parts is hopelessly confused. Any attempt to demarcate a part over and against a whole - and correlatively an inside and an outside - inevitability falls into arbitrariness. Chalmers and Clark end the paper by proposing that such a consequence calls for a renewed understanding of the mind as extended - extended, precisely, from the 'skull and skin.'

But such a proposal ultimately names a problem, and not a solution: the fact that the mind must be 'extended' out from the skull and skin designates an issue with the very manner in which the very notion of 'extension' is posed in the first place. Ultimately, the problem lies with the static ontology that underlies the the paper's argument. What is needed is a revision of the very terms in which the problem is posed, one which would do away with the idea of already-constituted entities, and instead conceive of identities as a matter of becoming. What is needed is a dynamic ontology which recognizes an individuating process by which 'inside and outside' are continually and unceasingly forged without calcifying into static borders. To nick a passage from Renaud Barbaras:

"The individuality of the thing [In our case, someone like Otto - SX] makes sense only to the extent that it is situated just short of or beyond every principle that would gather it together. The sensible thing is between quantity and quality or, rather, beyond this distinction; its individuality is actual only if it does not go all the way to the numerical nor all the way to the specific. The individual exists, then, only as pre-individual, general, in the course of or on the way to individualization. Individuality is essentially next to the point where one seeks to fix it: always already beyond the atom, yet never essence; it sustains itself only by escaping identification." (Barbaras, The Being of the Phenomenon).

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One way to think about this is to note a curious fact about the examples of 'the extended mind' that Chalmers and Clark use: all of them in fact involve memory. There is, in other words, a temporal dimension to each of the examples used to argue for the extended mind. Although implicit in all of them, the authors pass over this and construe 'extension' almost entirely in spatial terms: as a matter of inside and outside, "biological organism and external resources." They briefly speak about socially extended cognition - and thus open the door to the entire realm of narrative, myth, culture, history and evolution - as well as role of language (itself a diachronic system) - but quickly resort to spatial terms in speaking about them anyway: "Words and external symbols are thus paramount among the cognitive vortices which help constitute human thought" (emphasis mine).

Now, the importance of memory - and thus temporal extension - is that in a dynamic ontology, identity must be understood as that which takes place across time. An identity must be unified not only in space but also in time. An identity must be a ongoing activity of unification. Now, by (implicitly) acknowledging memory as the vector that in fact places the mind 'outside of itself', Chalmers and Clark - in an equally implicit manner - recognize that the process of identity in fact takes place according to a circuit that runs between self and world, one that in fact constitutes the very demarcation between self and world in the process of crossing it. To put it programmatically: memory is a vector of individuation. It is not the case that a self-contained and already fully-formed identity reaches out in order to 'recall' a memory 'stored' somewhere in the brain/environment/body. Rather, the very act of memory recall feeds-back upon the identity of very person who called upon it in the first place, contributing to his or her individuation in time (which, we recalls, never reaches anything like an 'end point').

Another symptom of the static ontology that underlies the paper is, in fact, in the treatment of memory as itself a static 'thing', an object to be retrieved or discarded at will. Despite recognizing the cognition takes places 'outside' of the brain, the authors, curiously enough, do not make the same concessions for memory, which itself is always 'local': memory 'resides' 'in the brain' or 'in the notebook', and is not treated as an event that itself takes place. Yet a phenomenology of memory will recognize that memory always belongs to the order of an encounter: memories impose themselves upon us as we encounter events and occasions in the world. Even the most fleeting of daydreams are brought about wandering trains of thought sparked, perhaps, by subtle modulations in the smell of the cafe about one, a certain sheen or glint of familiar light, even only subconsciously recognized.

When the authors write that Inga's belief regarding the location of the museum "was sitting somewhere in memory, waiting to be accessed", one has to wonder if, had Inga's friend not mentioned the exhibition, whether or not 'memory' would have come into it at all. Anyway, the point is that by construing extension in wholly spatial terms, Chalmers and Clark more or less foreclose even the possibility of rethinking the static ontology that underlies their paper. In keeping memory as a localized 'unit' of data - and thus also construed in spatial terms - they further shut down any attempt to introduce a temporal dimension into their analysis, and with it, any thought of individuation as a process.

Nonetheless, the merit of the paper - and it is still one of my favorite papers ever written - is to show, more clearly than ever, the problems encountered when conceiving cognition in a static manner - even if they don't necessarily recognize the fact that they're pulling the rug out of under themselves, and leaving a space for much more interesting approaches to take it's place. The paper's failure, is, in some sense, it's very success. Anyway, I wish I could say more about memory, but a study of memory is something I've been sorely lacking; these thoughts are more provocations to myself than anything, and I thought it'd be fun to throw them out there for a bit of provocation and feedback.

@fdrake: Yes absolutely is it a question of the the very conditions of affordances. What's important here is that this ties perception right back into an evolutionary-developmental history, showing that perception is itself historical and environmental through and through. We perceive things the way we do because of the sorts of bodies we are: front facing, upright, motile, with hands for grasping and manipulating things, etc. Different bodies would have different phenomenologies. Morris has a nice thought experiment involving spherical beings, who would not have a sense of directionality (up/down, front/back), in the sense that we do:

"Imagine an intelligent creature whose body is a sphere with eyes and arms distributed evenly across its surface, that respires and ingests through diffusive processes distributed across its surface. We would not imagine that this creature would have evolved neural networks that would duplicate Lackner’s results [on body orientation in zero gravity - SX] —it could not have, because it has neither the neck nor the postural possibilities of the human body. Human astronauts report discomfort in weightless conferences if their heads are pointing in different directions; sphere-creature astronauts would not have this problem. Even if we could identify some neural network that produces Lackner’s results, we would not be explaining anything unless we understood why that network had evolved, and that would mean attend- ing to our body not as an isotropic sphere, but as having certain symmetries and asymmetries, as being articulated by a neck, as evolving through a life in which the way one faces the world matters quite a bit."

One of the things I've been thinking about recently is how speaking about perception in terms of 'embodiment' is not enough. It is not enough to point out that perception takes place in embodied beings. What matters too is the type of bodies involved, and the way in which those bodies are simultaneously shaped by, and shape the environment in which they evolved and developed in. 'Embodiment' names a problem to be worked through, rather than a solution to the impasses of thinking about perception (what, after all, is not embodied?). Illusions testify to the historicity of our bodies, of our envelopment in the world among which it co-originates in a dynamic reciprocity of becoming.

This view upon things has all sorts of philosophical implications. One among them, off the top of my head, is giving lie to any sort of panpsychic thesis. The kind of body that rocks are, say, would not require of them any need of perception; rocks are not motile, they do not manipulate things with any degree of agency, they do not avoid predators, seek out sustenance in the form of sunshine, water or flesh, etc. Lacking a metabolism or any sensory apparatus there is simply no 'need' for rocks to experience things. There would be no occasion for a genesis of perception. And then there's the anti/realist debate, but that's another story...

Is the geometrical length to be privileged here, as the "as is"? While wieldiness, and illusion, are objective in just the way you describe, is measurement more objective? Or is it maybe just a different kind of objectivity? Doesn't the contrast between on the one hand perception as part of the way we are implicated in the world, and on the other hand the measurement of the "as is", invite the kind of thinking that leads us to the idea that perception is but a distortion of reality? But clearly these are different fields, viz., the perceptual field and the geometrical field, so how do we avoid this hoary old appearance-reality dichotomy that always seems ready to jump out from the next corner? — jamalrob

Yeah this is a good point actually - a need to be careful with language. To thematise it though, Morris for instance frames the geometrical field as an augmentation of the real: "Things are not illusory because they fail to match up with our own transcendental standards of truth, things are illusory because they are at odds with themselves; the Müller-Lyer’s figure itself is odd, since it invites further explorations that reveal that if you look at it one way the arrows do not match, if you look at it another way, they do. Internal tensions of this sort prompt augmentation of perception, by constructing instruments like rulers and balances that let us return to perception and transform it. This transformation amounts to discovery of new standards immanent in the phenomena, and against these standards phenomena like the Müller-Lyer’s figure can be interpreted as involving errors—but not of perception, of measurement."

I like this way of putting it because it doesn't ratify a hierarchization of reality so much as a lateral expansion of it; geometrical measurement opens up new possibilities of enworlding (I don't want to say 'interacting with the world'), allowing fields like science, for instance, to operate as an autonomous realm. I guess the idea is that perception and measurement belong to two different 'universes', and it is something of a category error to try and make direct comparisons between the two.

So, to sharpen up the concern that led me to the OP: what is it that leads people to write histories of X? This is a personal decision; in theory, the historian has absolute freedom. But there must be some common trait or traits between salt, clothing, mammals, France, science, the West, the Universe and childhood; these are the stuff about which histories are written of.

The answer certainly points up to some movement of the historian's being towards the preservation (or, the bolstering up) of something cherished. People write histories because (a) they thing the subject is meaningful, (b), they want other people to know about it, and (c) they think that, by telling other people about it, they are participating in the life of the subject. The historian creates and enters the history he writes. — Mariner

This seems to be on the right track, and I'd suggest that what ties the sorts of things you've listed together is the 'mark' that they've left on the world. To have a history is to have made a dent in the run of things, to have altered, to have made significant - to some field, context, place or time - the impact of 'one's' existence (and this is the case when the 'one' is question is something like salt). This is what I meant when I said - perhaps too cryptically - that histories attest to the way in which things texture the world.

That the historian enters into the history he or she writes is to have the presence of the past extend it's texture into the present in the form of the historian. One of my favorite historical quips was Zhou Enlai's
answer to the question - 200 years after the event - of the significance of the French revolution: "it's too early to tell". History does not end in the past; The very event(s) themselves fade and amplify in modulation with the temporal rhythms of the present of which they are a part of. To take up your turn of phrase, history is not a dead past but a 'living' echo; the 'life' in question belongs not simply to the historian but the past that makes itself felt in him or her. The life of rain, salt, bananas, France, science and planets.

Here's how Morris explains the Muller-Lyer illusion:

"The line segments are welded into arrow structures the visual expanse of which bulges outward or pinches inward. In the visual field, the line segments are therefore of neither equal nor unequal size, since the eye is neither abstracting line segments nor comparing their size, it is seeing and comparing arrows that each constitute their own standard of expanse. It is as if, Merleau-Ponty writes, the one line 'did not belong to the same universe as the other.' Since the figure gives no basis for comparing objective size, it is misguided to call the phenomenon an error of size perception, an illusion (PP 12/6). On the moon, with its weaker gravitational field, an apple will feel lighter than the same apple on earth; does this mean you are in error about the apple, since its mass remains the same? No, your perception is correct. With respect to perceived weight, the apple on the moon and the apple on the earth are not quite the same apple. It is as if they belong to different ‘universes’ of weight.

...Comparison across these ‘universes’ does not really give a basis for comparing objective weights, rather (granted other knowledge that the apple’s mass remains the same) the comparison indicates differences between the lunar and terrestrial perceptual fields: things feel lighter on the moon. Similarly with the Müller-Lyer’s figure. The unaided (or untrained) eye can no more escape the visual ‘weight’ of arrows that each constitute their own ‘gravitational field,’ leaping to a measure of the optical ‘mass’ of line segments, than the unaided body can escape the gravitational field in which it weighs the apple, leaping to a measure of the apple’s mass. Indeed, these fields with their ‘distorting’ influence are the condition for perceiving the things in question (arrows with a visual expanse, an apple with a weight) and are thus intrinsic to perception". (The Sense of Space, p. 21-22)

To take up an old saying of Leibniz, the OP is right in what it denies, but wrong in what it affirms. I think it's more or less uncontroversial that there need not be a 'mind-independent apple' for one to talk about an apple, just as there need not be a 'mind-independent Shoggoth' to talk intelligibly about Shoggoths. Reference in both cases works by inculcating a sense of significance with respect to words and their use in a context: as the OP writes, to speak about apples just is to use the word apple in conversation.

But significance, of course, is trans-linguistic. There are plenty of things in the world which have significance - are meaningful - that do not belong to the order of language. A stovetop reddened by heat would be recognised as a danger to touch, just as a door in a passageway may have significance as a barrier to movement and vision. Language of course, is no different: words are no more special than stovetops and doors, their particular sonorous or graphic presence occasioning responses in no different a way than non-linguistic signifying elements.

What's important here is that while it's true that language does not consist of a doubling of the world (having to 'refer to things out there' in order to have meaning), it is equally untrue to think that this entails any sort of anti-realist conclusion whatsoever. Rather than instituting a divide in which language and the world would occupy two opposing sides, the whole point is that language is of the world. Realism does not require that language refer to 'things out there': it requires instead a recognition of the reality of language, that language is itself an empirical instance like any other, that it's 'self-referentiality' belongs wholly to a worldly order with respect to it's very status as language.

The point is not to look for a realism 'inside of language' - all you will ever find is more language - but to recognise that language as such is already 'worldly'. To "recognise... the relationship between words and either other words or empirical situations" is to respond in a certain way to a linguistic event, just as to move in a certain way to avoid the heat of the stove is to respond in a certain way to a culinary event. Language in this sense is continuous with the world of which it is a part of, and a 'realism' has no need to explicate any mysterious link between sounds and things in order to substantiate itself as realism. Instead, to put it baldly: sounds are things.

One of my favorite papers, am keen to contribute when I can :)

@Pneumenon Anytime buddy :D

I like mircohistories of things - like the history of salt, bananas or rain.

Histories in general attest to the autonomy of things, how things, people, ideas, nations, objects, natural phenomena and so on attain consistencies of their own, how they texture the world with a significance which bleeds into and shapes space(s) and time(s) of their own accord. History is the record of the traces that the world-in-becoming leaves upon itself, the way that thing en-world the very environment in which they are a part of.

This is quite a snazzy little nook here. Nice find jb.