Yes, but plenty of people know the use and context of 'God' (implying, among other things, omniscience, omnipotence & benevolence) as opposed to 'mortals.' But once you start thinking deeply about the concept, all sorts of problems crop up. We know very well what it means, we think, to talk about the earth rotating around the sun even when there is no conscious being remaining. (I personally believe such rotation *will* occur in these circumstances, don't get me wrong.) But, as I tried to show with my thought experiment, it's actually very very difficulty to imagine what this would be like without smuggling in a human-like observer.

The problem with relying on 'ordinary use and understanding' is that ordinary use and understanding changes drastically over different eras and between different groups. That many readily understand the distinction between God and Mortal does *not* mean we ought to accept their claims about God.

(also note that reducing the distinction between for-us and in-itself to linguistic use echoes the Hegelian reduction of for-us and in-itself to a conceptual distinction, implying that the distinction itself is internal to the conceptual, as Brassier carries on about in this paper.)

If we think our experience is 'for-us', this is always already a case of presuming our limited access. This presumption is based on a (Cartesian) belief in the infallibility of introspection, that what thoughts and concepts and perception are is somehow transparent to us, so that we can understand what it means for something to exist for us, but cannot possibly understand what it means for something to exist 'in itself'

This seems like a cognitive-sci-phi talking point misplaced. I don't disagree that we can be mistaken during introspection, but I don't see what bearing our introspective fallibility has on our capacity to understand objects as they'd be outside human perspective.

No doubt we do think the in itself in counterfactual terms of 'what we would experience'; but I think this is mischaracterized as any kind of illegitimate "smuggling in". All I want to emphasize is that we all know just as well what it means for the tree to be there on the other side of the hill when no one is looking at it as we know what it means for the tree to be there in front of us when we are looking at it.

I don't claim that all concepts are genuinely coherent. 'God' is either a coherent apophatic concept understood in terms of what it is not (for example 'not mortal'), or it is an incoherent faux-entity.

I think the ordinary use and understanding of distant unseen objects would be more or less universal. and based on the counterfactual. 'The mammoth is just the other side of the hill, we will see him when we reach the summit'.

While I would say that the distinction between 'in itself' and 'for us' is "internal to the conceptual" I would also say that what that 'internal to the conceptual' means, the implications of that, is not transparently obvious to us, as we are wont to think it is.

This seems like a cognitive-sci-phi talking point misplaced. I don't disagree that we can be mistaken during introspection, but I don't see what bearing our introspective fallibility has on our capacity to understand objects as they'd be outside human perspective. — csalisbury

The point I wished to make was that what is meant by 'for us' is not given to us as an introspective understanding, as we are 'naturally' (naively) led to imagine. We do not introspectively know what it is to think something, to conceptualize, to imagine and so on, in other words. So our understanding of the 'for us' is given in terms of the term's contextual uses, just as the understanding of 'in itself' is.

Also, I want to say that our linguistic understandings of existence represent deeper 'embodied' understandings of existence that are themselves not by any means naturally conceptually transparent to us.

@John

Sorry to respond so briefly and to such a small portion of what you've written, but I don't have enough time to mount a full reply tonight.

All I want to emphasize is that we all know just as well what it means for the tree to be there on the other side of the hill when no one is looking at it as we know what it means for the tree to be there in front of us when we are looking at it. — John

What's important to note about this example - as opposed to full-bodied conscious-less circumstances - is that our world, with its temporal and spatial scales, is still in full operation, with the concealed tree representing a sort of blind spot within that world. Thus, though the tree remains unexperienced, it does so in a certain place in our world and for a certain duration of time, all of which rest nicely within the spatiotemporal scale of the world we inhabit (i.e. we 'know just as well what it means for the tree to be in unexperienced space x" because we implicitly understand the space and duration of this tree's unexperienced existence as unfolding in the same way as experienced space and time around it. This is precisely why Meillassoux draws our attention to ancestrality and Brassier draws our attention to the post-human future. They recognize how adroitly the correlationist can account for exactly the type of thing you describe. (If you want, I can look up and cite the passage in After Finitude in which Meillassoux addresses this in order to show why it is necessary to find different examples to counter to correlationist. He explains it much better than I can.)

Thanks for your reply csalisbury. I did read After Finitude, but it was at least five years ago. However I still remember thinking that his notion that, for example, the situation vis a vis prehuman or "ancestral" entities is really different in principle from that of entities that are currently merely extremely distant to us in space or distant within 'human' time doesn't make sense.

I mean if we say that humans have been around for 1 million years, just for argument's sake, would it follow from Meillasoux' standpoint that objects more than 1 million light year's distant enjoy a different ontological status, because the light we are receiving from them was emitted prior to the advent of humans, compared to objects less than a million light year's distant?

(Fwiw, your view strikes me as Heidegger in Fregean Clothing) — csalisbury

Yes, that's a fair characterization. You can also say that it's a form of strong correlationism.

Your main question to me concerns the the 'existence' of sortal concepts in time, and whether those concepts pre-exist the objets that instantiate them. One might ask the same question regarding secondary quality concepts and the answer would be similar. (I'll single out relevant differences in the last paragraph below). For something to be red just is for it to look red to us in standard conditions. "Look" is here understood dispospositionally, as a passive power that red objects have to affect our sensibility in a specific way. Hence an object currently not looked at (or never looked at) still is red because it still has the relevant power. Even though optical properties of surface reflectance may be part of the explanation of this power, the concept of redness is nevertheless inseparable from the structure of our sensibity since only some specific (to us) features of reflectance spectra are visually salient to us (owing to both physiology and culture). When we conjecture that Triceratops might have been red this means that, for instance, had we been around before they went extinct, then they would have have looked red to us.

There is a pseudo-problem generated by the question whether red objects still would be red in a universe where there are no observers. This is a pseudo-problem because there is no such thing as "a universe" that we can refer to from the outside, as it were. As regard the question whether red objects still would exist in our universe if we became extinct, or never came about, the answer is simply yes. Bus then this is just a simple counterfactual modal claim similar to the claim about currently unobserved or far away red objects. It still refers to *our* universe and *our* concept of redness. (Kripke's possible-world model for modal logic -- as used in Naming and Necessity -- unlike Lewis' own counterpart theory, respects this point, I believe -- See Gregory McCulloch, The Game of the Name, a book worth its price for the title alone). We are thus merely inquiring about the hypothetical causal impact of our specific extinction, and not any 'impact' from stripping away, as it were, our conceptual scheme from the world.

The 'lol-planet' pseudo-sortal concept is pointless, as is Nelson Goodman's 'grue' pseudo-secondary quality concept, because it resists being integrated into a conceptual scheme intelligible to us. A conceptual scheme intelligible to us isn't an arbitrary formal construction, but rather is a way of talking (shaped by the specific human form of our embodiment and enculturation) that enables us to disclose objets in the world that answer to our interests and rationally justified existential commitments (from the point of view, ultimately, of practical reason). The existential commitments of the scientific community, for instance, ground the justification for some definition of a 'planet' over another because this definition enables the scientists to sustain or increase the intelligibility of the empirical domain of astronomy. The domain itself isn't circumscribed independently from the interests of the community, so long a the historically situated scientific practice has a point, and responds to some pragmatic interests including the fulfillment of explanatory, predictive and/or technical aspirations. This leaves room for some amount of contingency and arbitrariness (hence the occasional need for a vote).

The main difference between general sortal concepts (that single out objects and incorporate our understanding of their conditions of persistence and criteria of individuation) and general property concepts (among whose secondary quality concepts are paradigmatic, and primary quality concepts (so called) are derivative abstractions) is that the general property concepts are valid across several empirical domains. There are red finches, red tables, and red planets. But there are no planet fruits or planet tables. Sortal concepts have more restricted scopes because they single out objects not just in respect of specific causal powers that those objects have to affect us (and their surroundings) but in respect of the way those objects are constitutively individuated in a manner essentially tied up to the empirical domains that they belong to (and hence also to the conceptual schemes within which those domains are disclosed). Individual pants and animals are conceptually tied up to the self-perpetuating life forms that they belong to (which determines their norms of health and behavior) while artifacts are tied up with the human practices within which they are brought into existence. Scientific objects are likewise tied up to scientific practices within which they serve explanatory purposes.

There would be more to say regarding the relatively higher grade of autonomy (with respect to our conceptual practices) that belongs to life forms compared to the sortal concepts that single out human artifacts, socially constituted object (e.g. currencies) or 'scientific objects' such as planets or electrons.

Let me apologize again for putting you on the back burner. I'll likely be back to you before the next 48h.

Thanks for the reply. I think I'm much more familiar with your general position than I thought I was; your analytic philosophy references and turns of phrase primed me to assume you had a much different stance than you do.

There are two primary reasons accounts of the sort you lucidly present here leave me dissatisfied:

(1) Ancestrality (as discussed by Meillassoux)

(2) "Worldless" experiences (of the sort TGW often likes to discuss.)


I'll only address the first reason in this post.

I'm not sure if you're familiar with Meillassoux's discussion of ancestrality. I think it shows shows how the quasi-idealism you espouse is not all that 'innocuous.' Since I'd already gestured toward the relevant passage in my last exchange with @John, it seems worth discussing. I'm going to take the lazy path and mostly just quote Meillassoux.

As regard the question whether red objects still would exist in our universe if we became extinct, or never came about, the answer is simply yes. Bus then this is just a simple counterfactual modal claim similar to the claim about currently unobserved or far away red objects. It still refers to *our* universe and *our* concept of redness. — PN

[Meillassoux speaking as a hypothetical correlationist] It is not difficult to conceive the status of the un-witnessed in the context of a datum which must be essentially considered as lacunary. All that is required in order to re-insert this type of occurrence within the correlationist framework is to introduce a counter-factual such as the following: had there been a witness, then this occurrence would have been perceived in such and such a fashion. This counterfactual works just as well for the falling of a vase in an empty house as for a cosmic or ancestral event, however far removed....

...[Meillassoux speaking as himself]The objection against idealism based on the distal occurrence is in fact identical with the one based on the ancient occurrence, and both are equivalent versions (temporal or spatial) of what could be called 'the objection from the un-witnessed', or from the 'un-perceived'. And the correlationist is certainly right about one thing - that the argument from the un-perceived is in fact trivia and poses no threat to correlationism. But the argument from the arche-fossil is in no way equivalent to such an objection, because the ancestral does not designate an ancient event - it designates an event anterior to terrestrial life and hence anterior to givenness itself...

....Let us be perfectly clear on this point. The reason why the traditional objection from the un-witnessed occurrence - it being a matter of indifference whether the latter is spatial or temporal - poses no danger to correlationism is because this objection bears upon an event occurring when there is already givenness. Indeed, this is precisely why the objection can be spatial as well as temporal. For when I speak of an event that is distant in space, this event cannot but be contemporaneous with the consciousness presently envisaging it. Consequently, an objection bearing on something that is unperceived in space necessarily invokes an event and a consciousness which are considered as synchronic. This is why the event that is un-witnessed in space is essentially recuperable as one mode of lacunary givenness among others - it is recuperable as an in-apparent given which does not endanger the logic of correlation. But the ancestral does not designate an absence in the given, and for givenness, but rather an absence of givenness as such. And this is precisely what the example of the spatially unperceived remains incapable of capturing - only a specific type of temporal reality is capable of capturing it; one which is not ancient in any vague sense, nor some sort of lacuna in that which is temporally given, but which must rather be identified with that which is prior to givenness in its entirety. It is not the world such as givenness deploys its lacunary presentation, but the world as it deploys itself when nothing is given, whether fully or lacunarily. Once this has been acknowledged, then one must concede that the ancestral poses a challenge to correlationism which is of an entirely different order than that of the unperceived, viz., how to conceive of a time in which the given as such passes from non-being into being?. Not a time which is given in a lacunary fashion, but a time wherein one passes from the lacuna of all givenness to the effectivity of a lacunary givenness...

...So the challenge is therefore the following: to understand how science can think a world wherein spatio-temporal givenness itself came into being within a time and a space which preceded every variety of givenness. — Meillassoux

Schopenhauer was perfectly willing to countenance the paradox of ancestrality by doubling down.

But the world as idea, with which alone we are here concerned, only appears with the opening of the first eye. Without this medium of knowledge it cannot be, and therefore it was not before it. But without that eye, that is to say, outside of knowledge, there was also no before, no time. Thus time has no beginning, but all beginning is in time. Since, however, it is the most universal form of the knowable, in which all phenomena are united together through causality, time, with its infinity of past and future, is present in the beginning of knowledge. The phenomenon which fills the first present must at once be known as causally bound up with and dependent upon a sequence of phenomena which stretches infinitely into the past, and this past it self is just as truly conditioned by this first present, as conversely the present is by the past. Accordingly the past out of which the first present arises, is, like it, dependent upon the knowing subject, without which it is nothing. It necessarily happens, however, that this first present does not manifest itself as the first, that is, as having no past for its parent, but as being the beginning of time. It manifests itself rather as the consequence of the past, according to the principle of existence in time. In the same way, the phenomena which fill this first present appear as the effects of earlier phenomena which filled the past, in accordance with the law of causality. Those who like mythological interpretations may take the birth of Kronos (χρόνος), the youngest of the Titans, as a symbol of the moment here referred to at which time appears, though, indeed it has no beginning; for with him, since he ate his father, the crude productions of heaven and earth cease, raid the races of gods and men appear upon the scene. — Schopenhauer

The problem of ancestrality seems very real to me, though I've no idea how to deal with it (Meillassoux's answer has all sorts of problems, imo). But Schopenhauer's explicit affirmation of what the correlationist only implicitly avers - it just doesn't work for me. I can unpack that not-working, if you like.

That Schopenhauer passage is classic. I think you can divide philosophers roughly into the ones that 'get' that passage and the ones that don't.

I "get" it. I'm just not convinced by it. (I'm torn between a (humanly inconprehensible) in itself and a (humanly incomprehensible) panpsychism.)

I also think it's worth noting that Schop explicitly says this formulation deals with world as idea and that alone. The "will" aspect, left out here, is what really interests me, tho i'm left unsatisfied by both schop's account and his terminology.

You're leaving out a fifth option: the it-in-itself is nothing. A feature which has no element to describe or phenomenological manifestation to talk about. Something humans can understand perfectly well because there is nothing more to say about it. A logical feature which isn't more than "the thing itself' and so does not manifest as any sort of chainlink (which we might describe as steel, strong, long, grey, etc. etc., ) between the objects and language/experience.

This seems like a cognitive-sci-phi talking point misplaced. I don't disagree that we can be mistaken during introspection, but I don't see what bearing our introspective fallibility has on our capacity to understand objects as they'd be outside human perspective. — "csalisbury

The point is they are not, in the relevant sense, outside human perspective. Everything in existence is linked in causality. Human perspectives are stuck connected to everything else. Any state of the world is X.... to a human perspective. "Introspection" is a problem because it slices the world into what is "for us," things of human perspective, and that which is not, things which cannot have anything to do with human perspective. The interconnection of causality shows this separation incoherent. Our world cannot be split into what is "for us" and that which is "outside us." The error of introspection and correlationism is not to demand the rest of the world is connected or meaningful in relation to us. Rather it is in its use of the dichotomy of "for us" and "outside of us." In thinking in terms of the world being "for us," we use the dichotomy of separation which forms incoherence around ancestrality.

(2) "Worldless" experiences (of the sort TGW often likes to discuss.) — csalisbury

Philosophy has trouble with this because tends not to think of things-in-themslves. It attempts to make them a matter of correlation to language. Supposedly, we must be able to encompass an experience in language for us to have felt it or understand something.

The reference of "the thing itself" the the only way we have to think and speak about wordless experiences in language. We can say: "I felt something, but I cannot put it into words" and actually communicate to others about the worlds experience. In some cases, our reference to the object (as any experience is an existing object) even causes them to understand this wordless experience, despite language not describing anything about it.

The "wordless" is not hard to describe. We know it doesn't, in words, have one. Whatever the "wordless" might mean (which we may well know), we know it can't be given in words. The correlationist project, where everything about any object is linked to a form significant in language, fails spectacularly. Our experiences and the world are not limited to the concepts we use in language.

I agree that time is a kind of veil of Maya, and that life as experienced is timeless. Not eternal or immortal, but timeless, and time is a kind of projection born from a 'momentary' or timeless suffering. Schop. seems to think that individual acts of the will are experienced in time, though, and so we can never feel the thing in itself as totally removed from the veils of perception. On this point, I think he also should have stuck to his guns: we don't experience our individual will as acts succeeding one another in linear time. We might try to place it in time, but that is in retrospect.

Schopenhauer's idea that time begins with givenness just doesn't work with current cosmology and paleontology. This is one aspect of the problem Meillasoux identifies. It is phenomenological or lived time that begins with givenness. On what grounds could it be insisted that there is no other time than the phenomenological and the measured time that it gives rise to?

There is nothing in the passage you quoted from Meillasoux that seems to offer any reason to think that the advent of givenness should make an ontological difference to that which remains ungiven. I mean there seems to be no suggestion that at the arising of givenness everything is suddenly given all at once. For me the problem of the ungiven is simply the problem of the ungiven, whether distant, ancestral or simply hidden; the 'status' of the ungiven is that it must be guessed at.

As Hume pointed out causation is not a given but it certainly seems to work for us in every sphere of activity and understanding. We 'get it', although as with all things, including what we think of as 'given' and as 'ungiven', if pressed to give an exhaustive account or explanation, we find we cannot.

I am open to the possibility that I am missing a real problem that Meillasoux has identified. Since you say you can see the problem, perhaps you could give an account of it in your own words?

We don't experience our individual will at all, it is merely a post hoc idea, I would say; but we do experience our individual acts (insofar as we consciously experience them at all) as intelligible within a temporally ordered sequence.

I more or less agree with TGW here. The temporally ordered sequence is a new experience which happens after the event. So, I think, is spacial significance. We don't see or think of the room in the moment we first see a letter on a screen. We don't see or think what comes after or before the latter we are looking at. All those things happen later. They are different experiences.

Our acts of individual will (in the sense of a moment of experience) are always distinct form and proceed us placing that experience in space and time. Intelligible in a temporally ordered sequence they might be, but there is no moment of our lives which is also the moment of us placing that moment in space and time.

I don't disagree with you here, Willow. To the degree that we do consciously experience our acts though, they must surely to that degree be intelligible, and hence part of a temporally ordered sequence. Perhaps we can be said to consciously experience our acts only after the fact.

I agree that we are never, except in thought about our experience ( which must necessarily be after the fact), "placed in a moment in space and time". If that is what TGW meant, then I agree with him. The question is whether experience that is not at all thought about can be meaningfully be considered to be experience at all; I would say it can, (in the same kind of sense as we might say "the rock experienced the warming effect of the sun") but that such 'experience' definitely should not be considered to be any kind of conscious experience; which means it must be outside the ambit of what is given to us to consider as a fully coherent part of analytic discourse. To say that such experience is timeless, though is merely to say that it does not partake of measured time, not that there could be no sense of phenomenological time attending it. Such things cannot be analyzed, but may only be alluded to.

Thanks for your reply csalisbury. I did read After Finitude, but it was at least five years ago. However I still remember thinking that his notion that, for example, the situation vis a vis prehuman or "ancestral" entities is really different in principle from that of entities that are currently merely extremely distant to us in space or distant within 'human' time doesn't make sense.

I mean if we say that humans have been around for 1 million years, just for argument's sake, would it follow from Meillasoux' standpoint that objects more than 1 million light year's distant enjoy a different ontological status, because the light we are receiving from them was emitted prior to the advent of humans, compared to objects less than a million light year's distant? — John

John, I think there is a missing 'not' in your first para here - 'is not really different in principle' - and if so I agree with you. I don't understand Meillassoux's distinction, in the quote csalisbury cites, between inferences from distant objects (purportedly because the consciousness of them is now) and distant events-in-time (purportedly because such events are antecedents of the onset of givenness). In both cases - far-flung parts of the cosmos, and long-ago events - the inferred events precede the onset of givenness, and in both cases the consciousness of them is now. Either the ancestrality problem should apply to both, or neither.

(accepting the term 'givennes' to be going on with)

Maybe the others who think Meillassoux is on the button here could explain?

@mcdoodle
I'll reply in full probably tomorrow. Yeah, the experience of light whose source is lightyears away *does* work just as well as the archefossil precisely because the scientific explanation of the former brings up *temporal* considerations (of a time antecedent to the emergence of consciousness) Distance is involved for sure but its what this distance means in terms of time that makes it relevant.

You're leaving out a fifth option: the it-in-itself is nothing. A feature which has no element to describe or phenomenological manifestation to talk about. Something humans can understand perfectly well because there is nothing more to say about it. A logical feature which isn't more than "the thing itself' and so does not manifest as any sort of chainlink (which we might describe as steel, strong, long, grey, etc. etc., ) between the objects and language/experience. — TheWillowOfDarkness

This reminds me vaguely of how Sartre treats the "being" of an object in the opening of Being and Nothingnes. (The opening is all I've read of the book.) But, as your characterization of the in-itself as mere "logical factor" already implies, this ultimately cashes out as the in-itself being an in-itself for-us; it remains a species if strong-correlationism.

Actually it's probably because of my cumbersome expression that you read the need for the 'not'.

Basically the sentence says "I remember thinking that his notion that the situation with (regard to) ancestral entities is really different from that of (other) entities doesn't make sense.

For me it cashes out as the in-itself being nothing for us; and that is what "in itself" precisely means.

Of course in the trivial sense that it is being called 'in itself' it is 'for us', but this stands in opposition to what the name signifies. The idea is for us, to be sure, but what the idea purports to signify is not.

The other aspect is that the in itself (as noumena) is for us not merely as the conceived, but also as the perceived.

The in itself is for us but not insofar as it is in itself.

We may quickly become entangled in ambiguity and even contradiction when attempting to talk about this situation but what alternative is there other than Wittgenstein's silence? I believe we can more or less grasp the issue even if we cannot speak positively and coherently about it. Of course I cannot prove that; it is something (apparently) that one either accepts or doesn't, more a matter of taste than anything else.

But is there some point, the advent of givenness say, where the 'distance as time ' ceases to be problematic?

Of course we could never know when that change in ontological status occurred or how we could possibly make sense of it. That's essentially the problem I see with Meillasoux' 'ancestrality' issue.

@John
I cautiously agree with you regarding the "in-itself" but I think it's incumbent on us to think through the difficulties close examination of the concept presents. And man are those difficulties tough.

I'll lay my cards on the table and say I lean toward a panpsychist stance.

But is there some point, the advent of givenness say, where the 'distance as time ' ceases to be problematic?

Of course we could never know when that change in ontological status occurred or how we could possibly make sense of it. That's essentially the problem I see with Meillasoux' 'ancestrality' issue — John

First and foremost I think it's important to remember M is arguing against the correlationist so *he* isn't claiming different ontological statuses for this object or that; he's seeking argumentative fulcrums.

Secondly, I'm not quite sure what you're asking. Can you expand or reword?

I think the worries about distant light and the ancestral problem show that the Schop. passage hasn't really been 'gotten.'

On the contrary it is in a way all we experience. We tell stories about it in refracted light because like the sun, you can't look at it too long. So we think our desires and strife are 'out there,' and that there are 'things,' which we come along and perceive the qualities of. What we take to be inquiry (science, philosophy) is actually just a frustrated shifting about of these struggles, usually to no end.

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.

The phenomenon which fills the first present must at once be known as causally bound up with and dependent upon a sequence of phenomena which stretches infinitely into the past, and this past it self is just as truly conditioned by this first present, as conversely the present is by the past — Schopenhauer

To defend Meillassoux (though I don't agree with him in the end, but to be fair) it seems to me that one can 'get' this Schopenhauer sentence and yet disagree with it. It's an imaginative statement about a particular way of re-living the beginning of knowledge. But there might be knowledge to come which would bring the feeling of that moment into question.

But is his argument that the arche fossil poses a different problem than the merely distant or even simply unseen object not based on the notion of an ontological difference between anything originating in the 'time' of pre-givenness, and things originating in the time of post- givenness?

I don't think the mere appeal to prehistory suffices, though, which is all these criticisms ever amount to.

The past, if you like, is like a rule of thumb: it's a schema for extending the way something can be manipulated 'backward.' It's projected by experience, not something that was 'really there' as if before it.