TripleAmpersand Journal (&&&)

The line of thought common to Blumenberg, Nietzsche, Freud and Davidson suggests that we try to get to the point where we no longer worship anything, where we treat nothing as a quasidivinty, where we treat everything – our language, our conscience, our community – as a product of time and chance.

— Richard Rorty ¹

1. Introduction: Setting The Stage

There is a common objective world. Is it hierarchically structured, or is it a mere dedifferentiated amorphous blob of heterogeneity? Are we, by some sort of transcendental necessity, obliged to presuppose our worldview with such a metaphysical question or worse –premise? William Lycan (1987) starts with what can be called the “continuity thesis”—the idea that there is a metaphysically hierarchical structuration of the “levels of nature.” Each level of nature is quintessentially characterized by its own causes, patterns, regularities, and “nomic generalizations.” Lycan postulates this thesis counterposing a bipartite metaphysical presupposition inherent in the standard functionalist conception of the mind. When we view:

“Nature as hierarchically organized [then] the ‘function’/’structure’ distinction [of functionalism] goes relative [given each level]: something is a role as opposed to an occupant, a functional state as opposed to a realizer, or vice versa, only modulo a designated level of nature” (Lycan 1987, p. 38 emphasis added)

Hierarchies, pace Lycan, are transposed into a metaphysical primitive register to function as an unexplained explainer—a family resemblance of Grounding metaphysical subsumables in which lower-level primitives ground (or perhaps make true) all the statements at a higher-level of description. Levels—given the thesis of hierarchically continuous nature—are inherently present within the scheme of the things, which—before being differentially coupled with the nomic vocabularies of the sciences—function as Grounds or truthmakers for those vocabularies:

Levels are nexus of lawlike generalizations, and are individuated according to the type of generalizations involved. (ibid. p. 38)

Although Grounding and truthmaking are coupled together here, they are not isomorphic or analytically equivalent. In respect to the metaphysical thesis of hierarchy and continuity of levels of nature, the truthmakers of a higher-level functional vocabulary would be the physical nomic-level of nature that does away with the functional vocabulary writ large. In contrast, Grounding can maintain the truth of functional vocabulary with a concomitant presupposition that the given truth of functionalism is grounded in the truth of sub-functional realizers. It is clear that Lycan advocates the Grounding presupposition because he defends functionalism vigorously as a “positive” thesis (ibid., p. 37).

 […] On the truthmaking approach, the physical character of the world makes true all higher-level truths that have truthmakers, while on the Grounding account, all higher-level truths are Grounded in truths that describe how things are in Reality, which for the physicalist consists in how things are physically.²

Lycanian musings expounded here are excellent propaedeutic reconnaissance for us to distinguish between three broad philosophical perspectives. These perspectives are subsequently nominated as the World-first, the Language-first, and the Straddling perspectives. Within the bounds of Copernican-inspired scientific deanthropocentrization guise of the World-first perspective, we begin at the very beginning, and we begin with the world—where else we could possibly begin? We could begin with minds or language—for how could we know that there is a world out there if it were not for our mental and linguistic endowments? There is a dialectical opposition between these two approaches. To begin with the world is to preface one’s worldview, perforce, with certain transcendental subsumables about that world. To begin with the mind (or language) is to swirl within the immanent conditions inherent in the mind and discursive practices.

Lycan clearly starts with the world. The “continuity thesis” premises one’s worldview with a metaphysically transcendental thesis of a hypersegmented yet interlaced structuration. This structuration, in turn, harbors hidden subsumables under that perspective: it assumes that the world is out there (mind-independence subsumable); the positivity of hierarchies (that there are ontological ruptures within the scheme of things); that the levels of the hierarchies are interdigitated (the ontological interdependence subsumable); the Grounding or truthmaking subsumable; the access Givenism subsumable. A series of five subsumables or presuppositions are required for a Lycanian World-first perspective to lay out a tidy catalogue for the metaphysical furniture of the world.

The first subsumable (the mind-independence) seems quite innocuous. It is shared by any Language-first Weltanschauung as well that starts with the mind or language. Consider, for example, Habermas’ attempt at detranscendentalization of the Kantian noumena. The Kantian unknowable noumenon is lowered from a transcendental avowal and transformed into a regulative ideal of discursive practices. It is because Habermas starts with a Language-first perspective that his approach dances within the constraints of immanence –constraints within language itself. Because we have started within the immanence of language, within this approach “the profane lifeworld has usurped the transmundane place of the noumenal.”³

The noumenal is deflated into a formal pragmatic register for the Language-first perspective and is transformed into the sameness of reference to a common objective world. By formal, Habermas refers to the form or the immanent ‘idealization’ within communicative action. This idealization is a “formal anticipation if it is to ensure that any subject whatever—rather than just a given community of speakers at a given time—be able to refer to a common system of possible referents and to identify independently existing objects in space and time.” (ibid., p. 33)

Thus, the commonality of reference thesis is a subsumable that makes discourse, discursive acts, and the Language-first perspective itself possible. The common objective world, on this perspective, has an explanatory priority in our account of a transaction with something beyond us because for any speaking or communicating being or community of beings to be able to talk, argue or disagree about anything in the world have to presuppose that there is a common objective world in their pre-conceptual and pre-philosophical innocence. For a social-linguistic agent to have any perspective or view about how things stand in their scheme of things—because of the social nature of discourse—one’s view on how things stand in the scheme of things is pregnant with a prefiguration of a plurality of views or vocabularies. One’s view or vocabulary is one amongst many other views or vocabularies carried out against a backdrop of an intersubjective language game that, nonetheless, presupposes a common objective world.

My perspective i.e., the way things appear or seem to me –is a partial perspective on a world that transcends that perspective, and we are aware of this because we are aware that there are other perspectives on the same world.⁴

That is to say; it is language and language usage that makes both the other views as well as the common objective world possible. Here, the common world becomes a mere accouterment added to our discursive acts. However, this addition is just a pathologically autoreferential annexation to language, in language, and for the sake of language itself. The purpose, the process, and the place of this addition are provided by language and language alone—language as a marvelous deus ex machina. Looking backward on the second and third subsumables (positivity of hierarchies and their interdigitation), it is easy to see how a Language-first perspective would model these two subsumables into linguaformal registers with a resultant account that assents to segments of a compartmentalized language and the indeterminate number of immanent relations that could obtain between each level of structuration viz., the relations of reductibility, analysis, mediation (to take only a few) between different linguistic compartments.

Strong philosophical expostulations occur between the two approaches apropos of the two aforementioned subsumables –namely the positivity of interdigitated hierarchies. The World-first perspective commences with a cataphatic or positive characterization of the second and third subsumables: that not only is there a common objective world, but also, there are mutated outbursts and structural permutations with intervening intertwinements within the worldly scheme of things. Contra Lycan, for the Language-first perspective, the “continuity of levels of nature” is not a metaphysical thesis but a formal pragmatic presupposition: it assumes that there is continuity at the matrix of variegated tributaries of language (logical vocabulary, indexical vocabulary, intentional vocabulary, modal vocabulary, normative vocabulary, etcetera) that indexes an interdigitated discursive holism in which different vocabularies inform, revise, or explain each other through some salient relations. The presupposition of the structuration of levels of nature into different scales of stratification is just a presupposition of our language and structures only belong to the linguistic space of reasons and the communicative order of signification. Here, language becomes the locus of an autorhythmicity: language generates the structural rhythms allegedly found in the world. However, the common objective world does not become a formal pragmatic presupposition of language only; the very characteristics of that world, their occurrence of which, cannot be imparted a substantive import of any kind, resulting in a structureless world. Hence, the only premise that a Language-first perspective can start with apropos of the ontological furniture of the world ab initio would be apophatic or negative: there are no hierarchies, structures, or levels of nature:

Just as there is no structure in the world without the structuring mind, there is no mind and no unrestricted world without the structuration of language and its unrestricted universe of discourse wherein everything can be questioned or subjected to systematic theorization.⁵

In an importantly similar manner, David Papineau’s conceptual dualism argument against Frank Jackson’s Knowledge Argument against physicalism can be read as another instance of a Language-first perspective. When Mary—the fictional future neuroscientist; colorblind; who happens to know everything there is to know about the physical and structural features of color perception—comes to perceive something red in front of her, it is not the case that a new parcel of nature has been discovered and deciphered. What she gains is another propositional content encapsulated within the bounds of a newly discovered phenomenal vocabulary communicatively articulable with phenomenal terms that are about the same old world. Mary’s much-heralded discovery is just another added fragment to the discursive activity within the bounds of sense or the linguistic-semantogenic sphere:

Consider what happens when the dentist’s drill slips and hits the nerve in your tooth. You can think of this materially, in terms of nerve messages, brain activity, bodily flinching, facial grimaces, and so on. Or you can think of it in terms of what it would be like, of how it would feel if it happened to you.⁶

A truthmaker subsumable describes where disputations deepen even further. The World-first perspective opts for a referentialist or representationalist premise to account for the problematic of semantogencity in the guts of a correspondence theory of truth –that it is the objective world that makes true or gives meaning to our conceptual/propositional and cognitive indices. Tractarian Wittgenstein would be a quintessential exemplar of this posture by considering facts as the building blocks of the world. Here, meaningful and propositionally structured items are metamorphosed into a menagerie of complicated ontological entities which, in turn, capable of making true and providing content and meaning to our linguistic keys by a nexus of correspondence relations between mind/language and the world. The argument takes its starting point at 2.0201 in what Wittgenstein at one point called ‘the theory of the complex’: “The idea here seems to be that if a proposition is true, there is something in the world in virtue of which it is true, and hence a complex entity that makes the proposition true. So that if the cat is sitting on the mat, there exists the cat-is-sitting-on-the-mat complex” ⁷. Here the world is fundamentally characterized as having a generative semantogenicity by virtue of ontologically thingified entities called facts—a generative capacity or a “hocus-pocus which can be performed only by souls” (§454) as later Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations would ironically demur.

Some philosophers understand facts as things. Some of them take facts to be true propositions. In this sense, facts are things which have the property being true—because they are propositions which have this property—and so they are just truths in the first way of speaking. Others, like Armstrong, take facts to be metaphysical entities, substances in their own right which are the fundamental constituents of reality. On this view, reality is made up of objects like the ball’s being red, which are real objects, involving a particular, a property, and a tie between them. Armstrong calls these states of affairs.⁸

Conversely, Language-first perspectives utilize Peirce’s categorical distinction between reality and the world (T&J, p.90). Peircean reality is the artefactual semantogenic-cum-truthmaking sphere –it is the niche within which all the semantic, truthmaking, and epistemic activities or vocabularies foothold. Hence it is practices, particularly linguistic practices and activities, that engender both truth and meaning, not the world. The reason why this perspective ascribes to an inferential semantics (to account for the problematic of horizontality relations between concepts and semantic contents) with a concomitant prescription of a coherentist theory of truth (that the problematic of verticality—the word-world relation much heralded by the World-first perspective—is collapsed into horizontality in the sense that what fixes truth or reference are smooth and consistent intralinguistic moves) as opposed to a referentialist-correspondence schema (in which fixation of both meaning and truth are in virtue of the vertical relations with the world our conceptual items singularly or conceptual systems globally can instantiate) is that the latter is bedeviled by the fundamental problem of treating truth and meaning as presuppositionless primitives while in actuality—as proponents of Language-first perspective would lament—are just later interpolations into a discursive practice. Facts, truths, and meanings can only be baked into the dialectical structure of discursive practices of meaning-giving, reason-providing activities. To assume otherwise, the Language-first perspective would evince, is to put the worldly cart before the linguistic horse: like all truth-conditional semantic machinations, it has to deny that the very conceptual and socially linguaformal machinery of intersubjectivity and sociality that makes meaning überhaupt possible comes before the allegedly self-authenticating objectural or processual worldly objects and events.

Rorty makes this point abundantly clear when he says:

We need to make a distinction between the claim that the world is out there and the claim that truth is out there. To say that the world is out there, that it is not our creation, is to say, with common sense, that most things in space and time are the effects of causes which do not include human mental states. To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that human languages are human creations.⁹

The Myth and The Horror

[…] thought and language meet in the realm of sense.— John McDowell (qtd. in Tim Thornton, 2004, p.14)

If epistemicity, semantogenecity, and truth-talk are just linguistic dances, conceptual moves, and praxiological transformations within the logical space of Peircean reality, then a series of myths are generated by assuming the contrary. Taking off from our five subsumables, the myth of the Categorical given, for example, is generated by the hybridization of the second, third, and fifth subsumables –namely the positivity of hierarchies, their ontological interdependence, and the unmediated access to them. The myth of unmediated access is:

[…] the idea that the categorial structure of the world – if has a categorial structure – imposes itself on the mind as a seal on melted wax¹⁰

Within the bounds of the World-first perspective, the mythical access to the Categorial structure of the world can be paraphrased as such:

 the idea that the hierarchically interdigitated structure of reality directly imposes itself on the mind as a seal on melted wax.

Pace Sachs (2014), any myth in the Sellarsian sense has both an efficacy thesis and an independence one: the former claims that a given subsumable is efficacious if and only if it plays a non-trivial role—be it an epistemic or a semantic one—in our semantogenic sphere; while the latter thesis claims that that role is sui juris in the sense of being realized in a self-authenticatingly autonomous way. In the truthmaking business of a World-first perspective, ‘being true’ is a property presumed to be realized by the objects in the world. ‘Being true’ acts as a free-floating extralinguistic complex (in the Tractarian sense) that is both efficacious and is divorced from any epistemic, semantic, and praxiological indices or activities. It is a given apropos of truth –an alethic given.

The epistemic given has both epistemic efficacy (it plays a justificatory role in our inferences) and epistemic independence (it does not depend on any other justified assertions). Analogously, the semantic given is both efficacious and independent with regard to cognitive semantics, which differs from epistemology by being concerned with having the right form and content to be playable in that game, whereas epistemology deals with assessment of warrant, evidence, justification, and so on.¹¹

It is no news that the alethic given discussed above is just one version of the epistemic/semantic givens since truth is both a semantic concept and an epistemic one. Nevertheless, its invention is necessary for a deflationism whose impetus is to do away with truth and truthmaking while maintaining a role for Grounding without throwing the epistemic/semantic baby out with the water of Alethia (truth). We shall try to canvass a story that revolves around the problematic of normative-semantic significance, not truth.

To complete the story, it is evident from the preceding discussion that only the referential-representational accounts of truth (as correspondence to the extralinguistic world) fall prey to the myth of the alethic given (hence arguably any relation could be amenable to this line of critique if it rests, fundamentally, on a premise of correspondence as a truthmaking homologue). Yet truth-talk as an intralingusitic semantic undertaking—as a coherentist would emphasize—is a venerable way to evade the myth of alethic given, yet because truth-talk functions only as an expressive or intersubjective justificatory tool and not a register of vertical “friction” or anchorage to the world, therefore there is an inherent yet non-ameliorable frictional lacuna within the conceptual and intelligible order that cannot be merely filled up by more of the same: more conceptualization, more reason, more layers or fragments of vocabularies because that simply would result in a linguistic idealist picture:

[…] no appeal to semantics or phenomenology can satisfy our need for ‘cognitive friction’: our need to guarantee that our thoughts are constrained by the world such that when we change our concepts.¹²

For a Language-first perspectivalist, meaning überhaupt is fabricated only in a narrow semantogenic sphere, which is analytically equivalent to the discursive sphere and hence any prelinguistically fabricated meaning or significance is a myth. But this relocating of semantogenicity to the order of propositional acceptations of language alone is consumed by the pathos of a linguistic idealism which is bedeviled by a “frictionless spinning in the void.” ¹³ But if prefabricated worldly meanings, categories, structures, and reasons are considered mythical Givens for the simple reason that there ain’t no semantic, epistemic and categorial free lunches, then prefabricated natural meaninglessness, structurelessness, and arationality—which are the direct apophatic attestations on the part of the linguistic idealist—are also to be considered as mythical Givens to conceptual rationality. That is to say, Language-first perspectives which ascribe meanings, categories, structures, and reasons only to conceptual rationality are trapped in a whirling about of the conceptual sphere and frictionlessly spinning in the linguistic void are, nonetheless, burdened with a heavy Tantalean punishment –the Tantalean apple-object is forever out of reach of the conceptual category of the apple-concept. Nevertheless, that does not falter our linguistic Tantalus, who is equipped with a garden-variety of apple-concepts to happily claim that the object-apple (which he happens to have no access to except through his own creation –concepts) has no value or significance and is with no structures because meaning, significance, and structuration for him apodictically, alone and only, belong to the linguistic realm. Hence the natural meaninglessness, structurelessness, and arationality are also presuppositionless Givens tout court; they are the ultimate free lunch for our conceptual Tantalus who is forever chained to the intramural Hell of linguistic Tartarus. His conceptual vandalism destroys the world as we know it. One can imagine Tantalus playing his harp, his music sharp yet atonal; his body floating without reaching the ground below nor the ceiling above; his mind earnestly wandering about in an imperturbable soliloquy; a tongue with no gustatory feel for the blossoming rich diversity of fruits in the garden; a hand with no tactile latch on the receding branches above. His attempts are not just locally failing when he falters to reach for the fruit in a particular circumstance, but globally shuddering to a stop—a marvelously futile spinning in a void sensus literalis.

These rhetorical theatricalities and dramatizations of linguistic idealism are not meant as a pun. There is literally a horror, a metaphysical horror that comes with idealism, coherentism, and frictionless spinning in the conceptual void. The existential horror is not the only concern here. What we can call the philosophical law of diminishing marginal frictional principle is a law that attests to the fact that for each subsidiary conceptual gain added to our philosophical repertoire, we receive less of a friction and more escape from a concept-independent objective world. Each additional concept that infiltrates our coping with the world results in more loss of the world –in other words, more worldly deregulations of the conceptual in which the world ultimately becomes a bloodless abstraction. More formalization and proceduralization of rationality, on the other hand, paradoxically is the Hamartia of Reason—that reason is supposed to give an account of an independent world, yet it is ultimately trapped in its own coherentist skin for which the ultimate criteria is the horizontal consistency amongst its own concepts rather than a vertical friction with the Other –the world.

The Missing Link

To the despisers of the body I want to say my words. I do not think they should relearn and teach differently, instead they should bid their own bodies farewell—and thus fall silent.
—Friedrich Nietzsche ¹⁴

Aren’t we forever cut-off from the constraints of the world, especially if we go full anti-representationalist when we give rational accreditation only to the activity of addition to our discursive pursuits many layers of complexity, no matter how frustratingly protean? It seems that there is no via media between the Scylla of linguistic idealism with its creeping anti-representationalism-frictionlessness and the Charybdis of referential semantics with its spooky semantogenicity-alethic given.

What is lacking in the tradition of the Language-first perspective is friction or objectivity because, for them, objectivity is ultimately reduced to intersubjectivity. When “spirit” (Hegel) or “Being” (Heidegger) or simply lifeworlds or linguistic frameworks are given too much constitutive authority, the result is linguistic determinism. … Situating transcendental features of experience in local forms of life raises the problem of how to theorize an objective world existing independently of our conceptual schemes or practices … If these languages furthermore are regarded as incommensurable, the concept of objectivity loses all bite and we are left with relativism. (T&J, Translator’s Introduction, p. 5)

To give a substantial spin to the idea of objectivity is to go beyond the mere intersubjective game of giving and asking for reasons inherent in the Language-first approaches. That there is more to the reality of objectivity than meets the eyes of linguistic doings is alien to the Language-first perspective. What the Language-first perspective does, is to elegantly account for the intersubjective horizontal relationship between subjects and concepts. Nevertheless, this emphasis on horizontality frequently comes at the cost of eliding the verticality relations between language and the world, or mind and nature. There is no shortage of systematic proposals to give an account for a genuine story behind friction. But can we usher in a kind of transaction which does not merely acquiesce to the moves made within a discursive framework and without any recourse to conceptual and linguistic explanatory resources –i.e., a worldly transaction which is guaranteed not by self-conscious knowings and conceptual–inferential moves within certain segments of discourse:

[…] the idea of objectivity –the idea that we are answerable to the world in addition to other subjects… [is] the very idea of human answerability to the world. (POE., p.2)

This disinterment of a frictional or contentual objectivity is a pressing issue because it is the only way to “avoid” the pathos of “idealism.” Without a proper account of a friction that constrains thought and action, the prospects of remedying the concomitant Tantalean horror that comes with linguistic idealism is vanishingly improbable: “the question here is not one directly about truth, but about whether one can avoid idealism by developing an account of thought or judgment in which it is constrained by something that stands apart from it … this is a difficult question because [we] think that our access to the world is always mediated –by signs, concepts, habits, purposes, and interests” (ibid., p. 9).

There are two (usually regarded as being diametrically opposed) attempts to revitalize the notion of objectivity and “human answerability to the world”—to use a Rortyan turn of phrase. Whereas most […] think that objectivity is best rehabilitated solely in communicative-theoretic terms –i.e., in terms that can be cashed out exclusively by capacities that agents gain through taking part in linguistic communication – [others] argue that rehabilitation can best be achieved through experiential-theoretic means (ibid., p. 3).

The proximal reason why the communicative-theoretic species of the genus Language-first perspective cannot genuinely account for a frictional transaction with the world is (as sketched above) because they are vitiated by the problematic of “more of the same”: it is too perilous a pace to make as what is seen prototypically in their account of friction is just more conceptualization, more reason, more vocabularies and more layers or fragments of our overall discursive and meta-conceptual tool-kit—a mere recrudescence of a non-frictional linguistic idealism. Conversely, an experiential-theoretic means can be preferentially used as an account of friction because if we can have a story about how a non-empiricist version of experience or receptive confrontation with the environment can be wedded, in an interactive way, to embodied actions and together be interspersed with bouts of implicit norms that testify to their significance and rationality, then the upshot of this will be a Straddling perspective (straddling between Language and World) –a perspective which is defined by the promise of practicalization of friction that avoids both the Myth and the Horror.

This practicalization of friction comes with a revised account of the myth of the Given. Consider McDowell’s characterization of the myth of the Given:

The idea of the Given is the idea that the space of reasons, the space of justifications or warrants, extends more widely than the conceptual sphere (M&W, p. 7).

On this construal, the corpus delicti of the myth of the Given is manifest when we are involved in the business of extending the bounds of sense and the borders of the semantogenic sphere because the only players that are allowed in the game of giving and asking for reasons are concepts (or concepts-like items) which are imbued with a full-blown determinate propositional or conceptual content. But the Straddling perspective sketched here claims that the bolts and nuts within the tumultuous domain of bodily comportment can be actants within the order of signification because they are not “mere happening[s]” (M&W., p.89) the way the empiricist sense impressions are, nor beleaguered again by the problematic of spooky semantogencity, those actants are not “hocus-pocus which can be performed only by souls.” What we need in this account is how natural capacities of embodied copings, although natural, are nonetheless structural as well as functional; physical as well as contentual; bodily as well as rational; contemporaneous and historical, an intermediate lamina that straddles in limbo between nature and reason. This is the crux of the Straddling perspective. It posits neither a profound caesura nor an ontological rupture within the history of being but claims that certain natural capacities—natural biological copings with the environment—are able to solidify and coagulate normative significances. However, to account for and explain the numerous ensembles of these embodied copings, one has to go too far afield. Therefore, we will try only to adumbrate the fact of friction in the embodied act of receptive encounter with the environment in the ostensive guise, which—on the orthodox construal—is considered merely natural and causal. As the story unravels itself, we will argue that they nonetheless have normative significance and a rational import. This practicalization (defining an act in a sensorimotor or bodily register) of friction through certain natural ostensive modes of engagement does not fall short of a rational import because they have their own implicit norms and are self-corrective and self-convictive processes. The self-correctiveness comes into view for an embodied act of ostension when the implicit corporeal norms within a given practice of ostending—which is directed at a given goal—are violated, and the restitution of those bodily acts to a state of implicit normality is carried out through implicit invocation of those norms immanent within the ostensive acts themselves. Self-conviction occurs when a bodily act of ostension is in a state of functio laesa with respect to de novo environmental challenges that cannot be amended by the already extant norms but requires augmentation by supplementary extra-corporeal resources of language and conceptualization –doxastic updating of the ostensive acts in question. Hence an embodied act of ostension is not a hermetically sealed irreformable activity without any regard for conceptual rationality. These three ostensive features provide a normative significance that avoids the problematic of mythical givenness.

 Ostension

As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten–-a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!

—Helen Keller¹⁵

The most far-reaching and illuminating line of work that tries to avoid the overly metaphysical (the deanthropocentrized World-first perspective) as well as the overly intellectualist (hyper-conceptualism of the Language-first perspective) pitfalls while maintaining a de-epistemized thoroughgoing pragmatism is the idea of intersubjective receptive experience premised on the notion of ostension or ostensive practices developed by Mark Lance and Rebecca Kukla in their paper “Intersubjectivity and Receptive Experience.” For this Straddling perspective, the way forward is not to start with the metaphysical ecstasies of “hierarchies of levels nature” nor within the Tantalean hell of idealism, but from the practically bleak activities of ostension or pointing –capacities that can guarantee a kind of frictional significance that are bedeviled neither by the Myth nor the Horror. At this level, the concern is shifted from epistemic objectivity (encapsulated in the skin of mere intersubjectivity) and truth (faithful replica of the environment or the world), which are accounted for by Language-first perspectives of various kinds, to objectivity at the level of content or frictional content:

[…] objectivity at the level of content… is [about] how potentially knowledge-bearing thoughts or judgments can have contents that are rationally answerable to the mind-independent world. (POE, p. 8, emphasis added).

A frictional content or significance that is both de–epistemized (decoupled from epistemic explanations) as well as desemanticized (disentangled from alethic and conceptual registers of our discursive practices). Friction is guaranteed, on this construal by the practices of directing one another’s attention to objects and features of the world and the distinctive role they play in making us jointly beholden to how things actually are.¹⁶

Ostension is a species of the genus of disclosing practices which are generally construed as the receptive confrontation with worldly features and objects (ibid., p. 22). Ostension comes into view for an embodied agent when the quantity of environmental bombardment proves too much to be receptively taken in as a qualitative whole or as a complete picture. What ostension (as an embodied receptive bodily act) does—because of its continued entangled relation with perception—is to classify the inroads from the environment into relatively discrete and stable units. Hence, innumerable environmental inroads become one of the multitudes of environmental infiltrations. The upshot is that the relatively stables units engendered by this non-propositional lower-level classificatory capacity of ostensive acts is, in itself, the activity of carving the environment at its joints—it brings into the view, for a receptive activity, a relativity determinate structure from those environmental inputs to the detriment of hazy ones. This carving of the environment into relatively discrete and stable units is goal-directed and is inextricably tangled with a multiplicity of purposes and goals –a teleological pruning of the environment. Consider the example of pointing one’s finger at or gazing into a particular subsection of the environment. What we do when we are engaged in these activities is to instigate a series of sensori(perception)-motor(action) machinery that allows us to direct our finger or gaze at a particular region of the environment. That particular region becomes a relatively differentiated segment ready to assuage one’s practical and perceptual hunger—perhaps to direct the attention of another person or to cherish in the beauty in front of one. However, these classifications and structurations do not come for free—there are implicit norms and rules followed by embodied agents to consummate ostensive acts. These are norms of correctness and incorrectness when it comes to pointing one’s finger at the-now-ostensively-classified-X or gazing into the-now-ostensively-classified-Y. When person P asks person Q to gaze into an already-ostensively-classified-segment-of-environment-for-P, Person Q will be considered to have failed to effectuate the very purpose of that act if she looks the other way—hence the norms invoked in the activity of imploring another person to stare at a given object are both implicit (not in need of explicititation through self-conscious discursive acts for their enactment) and intersubjectively followed. The norms implicit in our bodily activities signify the fact that our bodies do not just hither and thither in indeterminate directions—there is a right way or a wrong way to direct one’s attention to a particular object, a correct way to gaze autoptically, to gesticulate corporally, to wave carpally. In a word, there are norms for the full panoply of our sensorimotor activities. The implicit norms extant within ostensive acts can be recapitulated by what is called the “norms of optimality.”

The particular sense of correctness and incorrectness… is centred on what, following Merleau-Ponty, we could call a “norm of optimality” – a norm that pertains to whether our sensorimotor responses are organized in a sufficiently optimal way to engage uninterruptedly in the action at hand. (POE, p. 58) That is to say, optimality sets a standard that becomes a benchmark for consigning an executive significance to the embodied actions if everything goes smoothly in a goal-directed activity and a dysexecutive one if things go sideways in the given act. Hence looking the other way is a functio laesa because it fails to comply with the norm of optimality and the specified teleology. When the immanent norm of optimality and the concurrent teleology are corporally violated, the result is an impoverished and anomalous act to the detriment of the embodied agent or the specified goal. When person 1 shouts to person 2 to dodge the incoming rock, failure to optimally prognosticate the rock’s spatial trajectory with expedient bodily maneuvering and consequently avoiding the approaching rock (the telos) will not go unpunished. The corporal maneuvering contains within themselves the seeds for self-correction: by moving a few steps back, flexing one’s neck, or jumping, one is able to dodge the imminent threat. However, these specific prognostication powers and the seeds for their self-correction used in corporal maneuvering require no mastery of language or conceptualization. This is what is meant by the practicalization of ostension –defining an act exclusively in a sensorimotor or bodily register. The specified acts of ostension (pointing, gazing, and gestures) harbor no concepts of pointing, gazing, and gestures. This eschewal of concepts and conceptualizations is properly understood as the implicitness of the norms and the acts of ostension. It will be considered a pointless excursus for person Q to, when asked by person P to gaze into an already-ostensively-classified-segment-of-environment-for-P to analyze a concept of pointing, gazing, and gesticulation or to follow an explicit, self-conscious norm for the foregoing acts of pointing, gazing, and gesturing instead of just accomplishing the task at hand. It is at this juncture that we can say the normative significance of ostensive acts are “ratification-independent” doings in the sense that their

[N]orms do not depend on the ongoing judgements of rule-followers to create, for example, what should count as the correct continuation of a mathematical series. Rather, the series itself determines what rule-followers ought to judge is the correct next number in a particular case.¹⁷

Once ostensive acts are given the pride of place in our classificatory capacities (classifications carried out by implicit norms with a telos), it follows that classification and structuration occur not only in the conceptual and linguistic sphere but through embodied prelinguistic acts of ostension as well. An ostensively–classified region of an environment as a relatively discrete and stable unit is pregnant with implicit norms and carries with itself a menagerie of other norms as well –the norm of fidelity, for instance. It is the environment that is being pointed to, gazed into, or gestured on, not a concept of an environment nor a true replica or copy of the environment (as the correspondence theories of truth would have it). There is a friction between ostensive acts and the environment because it is the environment that constrains what kinds of ostensive practices are possible, not a representational picture of the environment. The bleak darkness of the night is immense duress for an autoptical friction just as the smallness of the dust particles in the air results in an impetuous dismissal of our tactile grasp. Hence, ostensive practicalization is already a practicalization of a friction with the environmental constraints provided to the acts of ostension.

At a more intimately embodied level, imagine trying to move your fingers in the way one does when shelling peas, without peapods being present. The skill is not one of moving hands through airspace while contingently sometimes doing so in the presence of a pea-pod, but rather a skill of responding to the mass, volume, inertia, and structural resilience of the pea-pod (IRE, p. 25).

Ostensively-classified bits of an environment—because of their implicit norms of optimality and fidelity—carry a normative significance and, therefore, can be inserted into the logical space of reasons. In this regard, this insertional act is warranted and the extension of the sphere of semantogenicity beyond the linguistic realm is justified without falling into the myth of the Given. In the same vein, environment-involvingness and its constraints on the ostensive acts betoken a non-conceptual, non-discursive friction with the environment.

Two objections for ostensions are in order: that pure ostension is causal, and unobservable entities and events like the superposition of particles cannot be ostended to. The first altercation assumes that pure ostension is just another regressive fall toward givenism, and the latter portends an anti-realism. If pure ostension is just primitive in the sense of being an auto-veridical causal worldly impression, then it will be left without the proud possession of normative significance and semantogencity in itself. This proximal difficulty facing pure ostension is of determined aetiology –that a “mere happening” fails to enter into the semantogenic sphere because “… nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except another belief.”¹⁸ Usage of “belief” or any other locutionary acceptation is problematic because this simply collapses meaningfulness or significance to propositional and conceptual content.

Note, as elucidated above, an ostensive act normatively—in the sense of implicitly-followed norms—unearths myriad environmental bombardments that enter, then gropes for a few while neglecting others. The selected ones are organized from an indeterminate state to a normatively calibrated one and put into use with a significance or meaning within a given goal-directed activity. Why this ostensive act—because of its naturalness—is not a mere happening the way empiricist sense-impressions are, is because of the mechanics of intolerance characteristic of the latter. This intolerance metaphor as our guiding trope is of paramount importance because empiricist sense-impressions—if they are any—are distinguished by their same unalterability and by their quiescence. Sense-impressions are quiescent because they are inert and only await the worldly causal blitz to make them manifest. The same unalterability abhors change in the sense that a modified or modifiable sense-impression would be an impaired one— a defective and stultified sense-impression. While the sensorimotor intentionality at the heart of an ostensive act is fed into by its receptive encounter with the environment is characterized by its fluidity–”the fact that bodily movements are integrated and able to adjust flexibly to variations in circumstance without the intervention of distinct acts of reason” (POE., p.55).

This graceful fluidity is operose at two distinct levels. Firstly. The embodied sensorimotor intentionality of ostensive acts harbors significance (normatively-engendered classifications and structurations) not only because they can be upregulated by perception and other actions, but because this type of intentionality—with its implicit norms of optimality and fidelity—is stored in the form of habits. Successful habits of ostension are the result of past modifications of embodied doings` encounter with the environment: “the habits [which has been] acquired… [are] all the organic modifications [one] has undergone” (John Dewey, qtd. in PEO, p. 187). Storage of successful ostensive acts is the very act of implicitization of those acts. Because these stored successes were ab initio the result of implicit rule-following of the norms optimality and fidelity, and afterwards stored in the form of habits, therefore, habits are the personification of those implicit rule-followings and possess a rational-normative significance that can be called upon in an operose manner in subsequent acts.

Secondly, imagine person A who encounters a computer for the first time in her life. While she would prod her ocular and hand musculature to rummage through the unfamiliar-yet-ostensively-classified object, she still implicitly follows the norms of optimality and fidelity to gaze head-on and to manipulate only within the ostensively-classified contours and borders of the given object. Yet unbeknownst to her, the brightness of the screen is adjusted to the lowest level, which makes certain shades of color in the pictures to escape her attention. There comes person B, who knows everything there is to know about how computers work. Person B has learned the know-that propositional knowledge through cognitive and reflective labor and teaches person A how to simply increase the brightness of the screen following a few simple steps. The propositionally structured and deliberatively learned know-that of person B becomes part and parcel of the receptive practices of person A stored in the form of habits. The former’s ostension—which is a passive activity—becomes infiltrated with previously-actively-and-deliberately learned acts and now is stored in the guise of habits and skills. The labored act of increasing one’s brightness turns into a preconscious skill—the computational steps and buttons required for the execution of that act will be reconfigured in her ostensive machinery in the guise of habits. Hence the executive learning of ostensive acts could live off, in matters of practical necessity and not logical necessity, the doxastic updating that occurs in the conceptual and communicative sphere:

communicatively articulated meanings that are utilized by intelligence in reflective experience have a downward influence on the habits and bodily skills that organize primary experience, and that these habits have an upward influence on meanings (POE, p. 205).

Hence the countervailing reasons supplied by communicatively articulated meanings—because of the fluid nature of sensorimotor endowment—act as downregulating or limiting factor(s) in forcing us to change the reticent habits in the background or ready-made ostensive practices in the foreground. Perhaps learning something new about the dynamics and kinematics of the muscles of ocular machinery will help person A to focus more, or perhaps learning something about ergonomics will help her maintain a healthy posture while sitting in front of the computer the same way a weightlifter’s know-that anatomical knowledge can inform the correct manipulations of weights and objects. Moreover, these conscious know-thats about a healthy posture, for example, are subsequently stored in the form of habits that can be called up for whenever a hitherto unknown or a disconcerting problem is encountered, or with enough repetitions, they can be automatically installed within one’s preconscious corporal economy. This is the hallmark of what we have called the self-convictiveness of ostensive practices. A corporal functio laesa—which has resulted from an extended period of unhealthy posture in a crooked chair—can be amended by extra-corporeal factual resources of the science of ergonomics –a doxastic updating of the ostensive act between the body and the chair. The now-remedied posture provided by the factual and conceptual resources of a science is now installed within the corporal economy of our unfortunate subject. Here the facade of the so-called pure ostension turns out to be rich in normative significance, not only from within (as implicit norms for self-correctiveness are called upon) but also from without (being responsive to explicit norms in matters of practical necessity). Ergo, ostensive acts are both norm-engendering and norm-responsive, which gives them inherent flexibility—unlike sense-impression in which any perturbations would result in an unrecognizable phenotype.

These banal examples of applied sciences informing our ostensive practices will not automatically result in a total repudiation of the second objection, viz. that it portends anti-realism about unobservable entities. However, we will argue for the following proposal. Because ostensions and embodied actions are responsive not only to their implicit norms but to the explicit norms of cognition and language, then there is no a priori reason to assume that the former cannot be responsive to the manifestation of explicit norms of any segment of language whatsoever (we have specifically in mind the modal vocabularies of natural and scientific languages.). Consider person N, who has never seen an electron cloud chamber before, and by sheer luck, he finds himself in the midst of a particle physics lab and happens to encounter an electron buzzing through a cloud chamber receptively. The discrepant and dissonant information provided by the ambient environment is ostensively classified for him by gazing into it, pointing to it (if he is accompanied by another layperson), touching the contours of the unfamiliar object—a relatively stable object appears in front of him through these ostensive acts. He seems very curious; hence he decides to study particle physics for good. As time passes by, our initiated physicist learns everything there is to know about the mathematical formalism of particle physics and is discombobulated by spooky action at a distance of quantum entanglement and the superposition of particles. This view about what an electron means and how it reacts is enriched by de novo propositional predicates that purport to describe certain aspects of the phenomena that were not prefigured in his pre-conceptual innocent act of ostension. Previously he encountered a naïve classification of the object in question, but now he sees more than that. Upon changing the background lighting conditions, he discovers that—as his mathematical formalism indicated to him—only when a specific lighting condition is realized, certain thin and faint trails plus thick and wide trails are possible (thenceforwards dubbed as alpha and beta particles). This physical fact then enters into his preconscious autoptical and corporal repertoire—again in the form of habits. Whenever he plans to repeat the given experiment, these stored habits are preconsciously called upon by his acts of ostension without the help of his labyrinthine cognitive machinery. This story indicates that a complete expurgation of ostensive acts for the physicist is not possible. When the now intellectually advanced physicist again receptively encounters the electron chamber, he has no choice but to implicitly use the norms of optimality and fidelity, preconsciously, before engaging in the speculations about the possibility superposition of particles. He has to look this way and not the other direction; he has to instigate a series of sensorimotor machinery that, in a goal-directly way, peers into the trails in front of one. One must direct one’s gaze in this or that orientation in order for the trails to make themselves manifest. Moreover, even the particles of physics—within the goal-directed activity of observing an electron trail—constrain what is possible for the given ostensive act of gazing under a specific lighting condition. Environment-involvingness and frictional content are saved once more.

Following the steps of this example, we have tried to show that there must be a “continuity and isotropy at the levels of normativity”: the thesis that any normative practice whatsoever—because it is normative and has a rational import—can be wedded to and is influenced by any other normative practice. If that is the case, then the physicist’s implicit-yet-factually-informed ostensive act can be happily wedded to the propositional and factual knowledge of the sciences with all their diversity and variance. From now on, the trail in the electron chamber signifies something more: that this particular trail means that it is a gyrating electron; that it evinces a superposition of states; it may be in an entangled relation with another particle (as his mathematical formalism auspicates). Propositional physical facts can join forces with a factually-informed ostensive practice. This wedding is achieved by a quiescent-yet-rational mediating vector, viz. normative habituation and habit-formation.

All the previous examples showed that there is an uninhibited flow from an ostensive environmental structuration to a habituation and a finalization in conception. Nevertheless, this flow is a reversible feedback loop that can go backward: from conception to habituation and end in ostensive environmental structuration—all admitting their own implicit or explicit normative significances. The thesis of continuity and isotropy at all three levels of normativity (ostensive environmental structuration, habituation, and conception) implies that there are thickets of normatively interlocking loops between banal activities like pointing and sophisticated theoretical or discursive cognition that could contain quirky concepts like modality—possibility and necessity. Hence these activities rationally constrain, guide, and change one another. Constraints, on this construal, should be understood as Grounding, which was expounded at the very beginning of this piece. There is a sense in which ostensive acts—although relatively veridical but only in the loose sense of being verisimilitudinously so as they are not a true replica of the environment; authenticating only within in a goal-directed activity because of their implicit normativity—do not require conceptual embellishment by discursive activities for a warrant to their own normativity. The physicist’s` factually-informed acts of ostension didn’t provide the norms of optimality and fidelity—there were already immanent and will remain so even in the case of the factually-informed act of ostension. Yet, at the same time, these acts of ostension do not make true the propositions of a discursive activity. As the example of person N and electron chamber shows that they only ground them in the manner of being a necessary and not a sufficient condition for propositional endeavors—ostensive norms of optimality and fidelity will always remain in the background. Ocular sensorimotor intentionality is necessary for any rational being to be able to enter the formal-mathematical-physical game of giving and asking for reasons that are about particles and atoms in the electron chamber, but to claim that they make them true is a claim too-far-fetched. “Copyings” or “Representings” with a high burden of propositional content are not just full-blown embellishment of “copings,” again to use a Rortyan turn of phrase. The implicit normative elements of fidelity and optimality, and teleology coupled with the structural element of fluidity of ostensive acts implies that this kind of Grounding is not an unexplained explainer or a groundless ground or a presuppositionless presupposition, nonetheless, an embodied activity that is accounted for and explained by the relation an embodied agent has with an environment.

It is at this juncture that we can go full-blown deflationism about truth and reject the myth of the alethic given in our resuscitative attempt to resurrect friction with the environment through prelinguistic acts of ostension which does not represent or purport to represent the world but only classifies it into relatively stable units for a particular goal. However, anti-representationalism in the frictional business of ostension does not in any way imply a global anti-representationalism (to use Brandom’s terminology) in all domains of thought and action. The anti-representationalism endorsed here is only locally deflationary in an account that prompts to explain the fact of “human answerability” to the environment in a non-conceptual yet normatively rational register. That truth and representation are not necessary for friction, and hence there are no alethic givens in any accounts of friction.

We finalize with another significant distinction that should be concocted to end this escapade that had started from eye movements to quantum superpositions. As we said earlier, Peirce made a categorial distinction between reality and the world. But because of the linguistic connotation that reality intimates, we have followed Dewey’s footsteps in using “environment” in lieu of reality. Hence the world, reality, and the environment would correspond to the subject matter of the three main approaches of World-first, Language-first, and the Straddling-perspectives, respectively. The importance of this distinction is, as sketched above, an embodied being who starts with the ostensively-classified-environment can maintain a positive substantive posture in regards to the content of both sides of the straddling. Crucially, since the revivification of skeptical anxieties about the objective world was—in a linguistic idealist picture—generated by too much conceptualization that elided our prelinguistic ostensive frictional grip on the environment (and by extension on the world), we can argue that any philosophy which admits of a single prelinguistic ostensive data is sufficiently equipped to ameliorate the radical denial of a mind-independent world. We can placate the skeptic with a single fact of ostension because, as Sellars would put it, echoing Kant, that “a skeptic who grants knowledge of even the simplest fact about an event occurring in Time is, in effect, granting knowledge of the existence of nature as a whole.”¹⁹

To paraphrase Will Durant, the manifest reality has not guarded its secret well after all. The environment (and by extension, the world) is neither a metaphysical presupposition nor a formal pragmatic presupposition—”it is [just] there—like our life.” ²⁰

Conclusion
The architectonic of this picture, in a nutshell, starts off with as an anthropocentrized perspective on the practice of ostension as a prelinguistic embodied doing and coping that reduces environmental indeterminacies into relatively stable and singled-out regions of the environment without any negotiations from our intellectual, conceptual and discursive wherewithal—the latter guise would imply semantic and epistemic self-consciousness, which on this construal are just later interpolations. Disclosing practices, in the guise of ostensive acts, are sui generis practices that straddle and provide friction between the linguistic space of reasons and the worldly realm of law. These receptive practices—insofar as they provide a gateway to environment-involvement in their confrontation with the material features of that environment—make-available any object, and nothing is lost if it can be ostended to or can be normatively wedded to a nexus of other non-ostensive yet normative practices; be it an edible fruit or an electron buzzing in a cloud chamber. It is this straddling practice that decorticates the allegedly impenetrable layer between norms (explicit full-blown conceptual capacities) and nature. They are normative practices insofar as they involve embodied actions that are saturated with implicit norms—those implicit rules in ostensive acts guide their correctness and incorrectness in the goal-directed activity of the relative determination and structuration of the environment. This implicit normativity bespeaks of the fact that correctness or incorrectness, classification, structuration, and environment-inolvingness is not only relegated to discursive acts, and rationality (in the sense of being a self-corrective norm-governed activity) is not only the purview of cognition and language.

This approach does not imbue the material features of the world with semantogenicity—the world has never and never will provide us with reasons and meanings. It is we who can suffuse things with normative significance through our embodied acts of ostension, given the leeway that the environmental constraints put on these embodied endowments and practices. Furthermore, this leeway provided by the environment is not up to us— this is the “[…] essential feature of objectivity –namely that thought and perception that is objective is constrained by something that is beyond our control.” (POE., p. 41).

Habits are formed by both successful ostensive acts as well as cognitive ones. This tripartition of our normative machinery into ostension, habit, and reflection—because of their normativity and semantogencity—implies a trialectic complicity amongst them, and in turn, bespeaks of a continuity and isotropy at the levels of normativity. Habits, in this story, become the normative-rational-mediating vectors between pre-language and language.

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