TripleAmpersand Journal (&&&)

Due to spatial constraints, the foregoing essay will be published in two installments.—Ed.

Introduction

For picturings to picture the pictureds; at the very least, for descriptions to index the world, the framework of picturing or the descriptive language of the sciences have to be committed to a worldly ontological complexity, causal uniformity, or an immutable¹ “dimension of givenness that is not in dispute.”² However, the dubious presupposition of causal uniformity, ontological form, or a processual reality as the differentia of the world is not an accidental but a necessary requirement for any picturing or description. While not only more overdrawn than any instance of picturing or description could instantiate, such presupposition is also in tension with Sellars’s counterpart theory of conceptual role semantics in which categories are construed as metalinguistic sortals. 

This paper will argue that transfecting the world with the categories of causal uniformity, de re modality, and real patterns as relational-structural registers of self-constituted presences of the ontological order and difference of the world, commits us to Platonistic transcendental structures, Aristotelian categories or ontological forms—an ontological preformationism or categorial realism. Sellars commits himself to two distinct varieties of transcendental invariants or categorial structures: ontological forms and nature-non-neutral existence, both viewed as trans-framework categories above and beyond any functional role that could be ascribed to them. 

The second part of this investigation will mediate the polemic between Alfred Sohn–Rethel’s conception of real abstraction and some form of Sellarsian “social pragmatic functionalism” without assuming the former has fallen prey to the myth of the Given—as the slayer of the Given is already committed to the genus of “categorial forms,” of which “real abstraction” is the most benign species. Furthermore, the claim about the transmission of abstraction from the act of exchange to the mind in the practice of exchange can be seen as the naive pathos of any reifying cosmization, one that plagues not only Sohn-Rethel`s philosophy but also that of  many Sellarsians, as we will see below. 

It will be suggested that this can be avoided through a resolute reconceptualization of the conceptual form in terms of a new Hegelian-Brandomian account, in which conceptual contentfulness is redefined by a non-psychological-cum-non-linguistic account. The paper’s dénouement takes a pan-relationalist shape with an anti-descriptivist, expressivist heart.  

1. A Desperate Humean’s Attempt

It is no news that Copernican-inspired scientific deanthropocentrization has led to a gradual disenchantment in which all ‘levels’ of reality are purged of meaning and order in a piecemeal yet circumspect manner. The upshot of this radical suppression of meaning, order, and difference is a fatal complacency with a teleological necroptosis ³ for which the world is nothing but an “ineffable lump, devoid of structure or order.” ⁴ In this guise, the scientific mind bows to the inevitable and ultimately vacates its ordered and meaningful constructions to nihility. However, this classical Humean perspective seems to be impervious to a fundamental paradox. Namely, the mind—itself a part of this structureless lump as something that “goes on in nature, in itself meaninglessly,”⁵ rendering the last intracranial sparkles of order, meaning and difference perversely vacuous, and virtually flattening its every kinematic and dynamic parameter. The upshot of this second conceptual contraption—the transposition of worldly unstructuredness onto the mind—is a compulsive immanent critique of reason in which the ostensible necessities of the mind are exposed as contingent superfluities; a primordial indeterminacy’s reign of structural nihilism beckons.

Kant rejected this rapacious evacuation of the mind’s substantive structures and provided elaborate transcendental machinery in order to save it from Humean claws and heal its ontological fracture. Nevertheless, this remedial approach proved too high a price. Kant’s gallant but doomed engagement resulted in a duplicity of problematic consequences that any minimally ‘sane naturalism’ would find inscrutable: by “conceiv[ing] the meaning-yielding operation of mind transcendentally rather than as a part of nature,”⁶ Kant falls prey to a mythopoetic supernatural account with a concomitant volte-face approach that reversed the classical conceptions of the mind-world and moved from a self-sufficiently subsistent reality to a world-constituting or world-constructing mental capacity. The mind now tenaciously seizes upon all necessary order, difference, relation and structure, to the detriment of an unknowable noumenon. But how can the mind monopolize all necessity and order while “frictionless[ly] spinning in [its] void,”⁷ yet claim to know something, anything (structured) beyond its purview? McDowell argues that Kant’s transcendental idealism is nothing more than an attempt of “a desperate reactionary”⁸ to carry out the impossible: to save the ostensibly structured mind in a structureless universe. 

How does Sellars’s sophisticated philosophical machinery—for our purposes, his conception of picturing and description—fit into this debate? A perusal of Sellarsian philosophical tour de force against the background of four licit distinctions (the order of knowing: the order of justification and the order of explanation, and the order of being: ontological forms and nature-non-neutrality) will play a pivotal role in the arc of this journey. In 1981’s “Mental Events”⁹ Sellars thickens up his methodological wherewithal—as a stepwise unfolding of his tools—and makes a battery of valuable distinctions by “highlight[ing] the methodological point that in the domain of the mental, language is primary in the order of knowing.” ¹⁰ The priority-of-language thesis is perhaps the most significant philosophical achievement within the confines of the analytic Linguistic Turn for Sellars: It is meant to underwrite a substantial level of epistemic disunity between the binary dialectic of being—whether mental or material—and language. That is to say: any conceptual thought or activity whatsoever about any “level” of reality will depend on the mastery of language.¹¹ Furthermore, the overall upshot of the linguistic priority thesis is the semantic liquidation of the problematic pantheon of meaning, order, and difference (morals, modals, mathematicals, and mentals) and a sapping of the foundation of any object-naturalist/realist camp “given a linguistic conception of the origin of [these] problems,”¹² 

This thoroughgoing linguistic liquidation of semantic discourse is called the “negative thesis” because it proscribes the relevant bits of the problematic language from invading illegitimate territories: “[morals, modals, mathematicals, and mentals are not] descriptive’, ‘truth-apt’, ‘fact-stating’, ‘propositional’, ‘representational’, or something of that kind.”¹³ Not only the ostensible pantheons of meaning and order should be investigated according to an anthropological-linguistic or subject-naturalist perspective, but also the descriptive vocabulary of the sciences is put on a par with them, hence rejecting the alleged “bifurcation” that separates the descriptive and the non-descriptive segments of language.¹⁴

Rejection of this bifurcated or dimorphic conception of linguistic practice propitiates a “metaconceptual approach to the nature of ontological categories […] to interpret and reconstruct [them] in terms of […] ‘meaning as use’ or norm governed inferential role semantics,”¹⁵ for which meaningfulness requires no “meanings” and conceptual contents of any segment of language need no cartography of ontological truth-makers or falsity-makers, traditionally purported to give content to thinking and acting—the positive thesis. This ingenious transposition of “meaning” as “use” compels us to “construe […] universals, propositions, and other ‘metaphysical’ constructions as reifications of conceptual norms, and thus as representations of the very forces – i.e., institutionally upheld canons of correctness – to which the pragmatist grants primacy.”¹⁶

Linguistic functional role deflation of causal/modal “meaning” is called causal/modal expressivism because it defines causal categories and modal contentfulness as operated by non-descriptive metalinguistic sortals, prescriptive reifications of norms, non-empirical framework-explicitating devices, or something of that sort. This version of expressivism leads to another, new version of ontological structural nihilism: in it, causality and modality transmigrate from reality to humanity, or to linguistic practices. The impetus behind this causal/modal expressivism, as I understand it, is the erasure and abatement of the misbegotten idea of the “Given”—namely, “the idea that the space of reasons, the space of justifications or warrants, extends more widely than the conceptual sphere.”¹⁷ That is to say, the critique of the myth of the Given implies an epistemic or justificatory conceptualism in which only concepts (or concepts-like items) or conceptually structured items can play the irreducible epistemic roles of justification and warrant in bearing on our rational adjustments to the world. The conceptual sphere, prima facie, includes the menagerie of shared human comportments residing within the space of reason and warrant—including the causal vocabulary we use to justify our causal claims and describe/explain the causal/modal transactions that we happen to engage in and with the world. This, however, seems quite anachronistic: causal transactions and explanations of those are not the targets of the Myth of Given—its aim is at their justification. 

By decoupling the order of justification from the order of explanation,¹⁸ we thereby avoid the conflation of causal claims acting as truth-makers and causal claims as posits within the descriptive vocabulary and explanatory resources of the sciences. The potential for causal explanations to be inherent in causal language is precipitated only with this distinction within the order of knowing or signification itself. The reason why Sellars thinks this distinction is an intra-signification distinction is multifaceted, but basically boils down to a two-stage argumentative strategy of firstly juxtaposing description and explanation: “The descriptive and explanatory resources of language advance hand in hand”;¹⁹ and then explicating explanations (and specifically causal/modal explanations) as shadows of norms, normative commitments, and linguistic correctness. It is therefore important to realize that the presence in the object language of the causal modalities (and of the logical modalities and of the deontic modalities) serves not only to express existing commitments, but also to provide the framework for the thinking by which we reason our way (in a manner appropriate to the specific subject matter) into the making of new commitments and the abandoning of old. ²⁰

The overall upshot of this is that counterfactual dispositions and causal modalities, or the specific linguistic tributary we use to express the “iffyness,” as Sellars calls them,²¹ are “shadows cast by the norms themselves.”²² Hence causal modalities are repatriated to their original niche by making functional-role linguistic correctness or incorrectness their truth-makers or falsity-makers: “language of modality is […] transposed language of norms.”²³

If this causal/modal expressivism with its premise of meaning-use functional role semantics is correct, then how can we “defend […] a domain-specific, naturalistic […] causal theory of empirical reference and of representational correspondence to the world (or ‘picturing’)’?²⁴ Since this use-theoretic approach to meaning and content of causal/modal claims seems to be in continually entangled relations with a deflationary stance towards ontological commitments about causal/modal claims, then it is a far cry from any avowed realist ontology that purports a mind-independent reality.²⁵ This meritorious recognition of an absolute functional similitude between the descriptive (categorial/causal/modal) ontological language and the expressivist use for the ostensible pantheons of meaning, order, and difference, leads to an unvarying creed of deflationism about categories and specifically of causal categories which would turn out to be of paramount importance for any purportedly non-signifying picturing relation between mind and world, or even for any natural-scientific descriptiveness überhaupt.

A Sellarsian order of being would be a minimal yet positive characterization of being. To disentangle being from its order, we need to distinguish between two ontological categories: ontological form and nature-non-neutrality. Ontological form “is not the form of symbols, but the form of entities—which may be represented by symbols in virtue of their form (the structure of such representation being the purview of semantics).”²⁶ Form is usually understood as the relational “manner” in which an entity x exists: “[…] as numerically distinct from y, x exists as ontologically dependent on y, x exists as a whole of y and z and x exists as a proper part of y.”²⁷ For Sellars, the ontological form will amount to the episodic “uniformities.”  Specifically, causal/modal uniformities extant within the scheme of things. In this vein, causality and modality will signal reality. Causal-relational uniformity will do so for the order of actuality. 

This is the centralizing assumption: There must be certain uniformities in sets of natural objects that can be viewed as an isomorphism between two sets of such natural objects.²⁸ Once we adopt the causal framework, we can embrace the ontological (form of the causal) uniformity in the order of being. However, to assume this “Axiom of Uniformity” is to commit oneself to the unquestionable assumption of a univocal ontology “that some one basic pattern pervades the universe”;²⁹ that “[at] the ultimate level, the universe has a common structure throughout.”³⁰ Yet these causal uniformities and patterns are the real ontological categories that need to be at least one step removed from any conceptual articulation or predicative determination of both the cognitive-theoretical-descriptive permutations and the prescriptive-normative variations that are the bread and butter of conceptual role semantics. Hence in the order of being, there is no liberation from the manacles of a preconceptually fixed common structure of an ontologically real kind. This order is the true Sellarsian “Ariadne’s thread to the labyrinth of [the pictured or described world.]”³¹ Furthermore, nomos, nomological statements, counterfactual dispositions, and law-like generalizations like “all A’s are B’s,” which index the very ordered furniture of the world are semantically derivative of an inference or rule—a rule that takes us from A-claims to B-claims, or licenses us inferentially in an unidirectional way. That is to say, nomological permutations between states of affairs and counterfactual transmutations amongst properties make sense to us only by virtue of the role they play in inference and explanation. Hence even natural nomos becomes the shadow and reification of norms: “[W]here the object language does not permit us to say ‘If a were f, it would be y’ we can achieve the same purpose by saying[:] ‘ya’ may be inferred from ‘fa’.”³²

To opt for an ordered being is to be causally/modally relationalist-structuralist in one’s ontological commitments, and to posit the pictured or the described world in terms of a causal isomorphic realism. For picturings to be isomorphic to the pictureds or describings to be isomorphic to the describables, both relata must be permeated with an ontological form and be construed as ordered-cum-differentiated ensembles. Hence, any picturing or description of reality will always be in tension with any version of ontological structural nihilism implied by the  conceptual role semantics sketched above—as it is inconceivable to picture or describe a recalcitrant primordial indeterminateness. Therefore, for any picturing or descriptions of the world to hold, we have to presuppose a dialectical, formal-ontological character of natural processes in terms of causal patterns and nomological modal relations. 

However, these causal patterns and nomological modal relations would not count as conceptual framework-relative categories: For any Sellarsian “picturing” or scientific description to be instantiated, we have to assume the manner of a transcategorial/ontological form of relationality that purportedly pervades the universe; the relation being “an actual relation—an empirical relation between two relational systems in the natural world.”³³ But if the Sellarsian dictum of conceptual role semantics prohibits such framework-transcendence of causal uniformities—namely, if every category, including the category of episodic causal uniformity, ontological form, and nomological modal patterns is “[..] essentially classificatory, a matter of classifying conceptual items,”³⁴, then we have to reverse the often-hailed Sellarsian methodological principle that “transcendental structures must be realized in causal structures.”³⁵ That is to say, the reversal of this methodological principle of the framework-transcendence of causal uniformities is to put the transcendental cart before the causal horse. That is exactly what O’Shea does, as he argues the Sellarsian categories of categorial ontology such as causality, which on “Sellars’s view […] is clearly a conceptual framework-relative notion.”³⁶ This renders the uniformitarian model of causal relations, ontological form and nomological modal patterns as secondary excrescences that need to be reflected in the uniformities of the transcendental project—and not vice versa, as the aforementioned Sellarsian methodological principle enjoins. 

Thirdly, Sellars has a further transcategorial ontological premise at his disposal that does not acquiesce to conceptual framework-relativity: a nature-non-neutral conception of being. If “nature-neutrality is neutrality on, or indifference to, the non-relational character of entities,”³⁷ then Sellars’s distinction between “existing simpliciter” and “existing as represented”³⁸ seems to be parasitic upon a nature-non-neutral conception that grants an independent hegemony to a being that is relentlessly prior to any ”-ing/-ed” distinctions. That is to say, being’s existence is not only not conceptual framework-relative, but also transcendent to the pictured or represented or described itself. Given this thesis, it is evident that this version of realism as an ineluctable ontological commitment is even ruthlessly anterior to the causal uniformities, ontological form and nomological modal relations required for the picturing/pictured or describing/described relation itself. This is basically what Sellars’s particularism or ontological nominalism of pure processes amounts to, in this author’s opinion. But if “[A]ll awareness of sorts, resemblances, facts, etc., in short all awareness of abstract entities—indeed all awareness even of particulars—is a linguistic affair,”³⁹ then how we can make sense of Sellars’s particularism or ontological nominalism apart from the mastery of language and conceptual role semantics?

In a nutshell, Sellars’s account of both picturing and description relies on a series of interpositions that starts from an ontological preformationism or categorial realism—one which is predicated on various notions such as existence simpliciter, causal uniformities, ontological forms and nomological modal patterns, and ends in normativity and the space of reasons—while his conceptual role semantics rehearses the cascade of the following sequence in the reverse direction:

Nature-non-neutrality, Uniformities, Forms, Processes, Causality, Modality;

Picturing, Description, Causal Explanation⁴⁰;

Normativity and Sociality.

So far we have argued that Sellars is an expressivist about causal modalities, ontological forms and counterfactual dispositions, because this homogenous treatment of all conceptual and categorical tributaries of language as functional classifications within the framework of reasons is a buffer against the Myth of the Given—that is because a naturalism that starts with categorially given registers of intelligibility or causal truth-makers would “rest […] upon a metaphysical or ‘Platonist’ conception of content that is recalcitrant to naturalistic forms of explanation” Hence in his conceptual role semantics about causal modalities, ontological forms, and counterfactual dispositions, he construes causal relations as intra-framework roles within a given causal language that we happen to adopt—roles  which are inferentially and functionally expressive locutions, rather than referential tokens or representational-descriptive denotations. However, Sellars invented a picturing relation as a desperate, reactionary attempt to save the world from the ineffable lump of structural nihilism entailed by his functional role semantics. For picturing or even description to work, we need to put categories of causal-modal-nomological uniformities, ontological form, or “existing simpliciter” particulars back into nature to instantiate worldly relations imbued with their own conditions of possibility. 

If that is correct, picturing as an ostensible disenchanting device always comes with re-enchanting and re-mythologizing presuppositions: The pictured or described world then becomes an intra-material soliloquy where matter imbued with order talks to matter in the sense of some meaning-constituting, order-constituting, and difference-constituting power. A power that, prima facie, only should belong to the order of signification or the space of reasons. The presupposition of causal-modal-nomological uniformity, ontological form, counterfactual dispositions, or “existing simpliciter” particularism is then seen as a quintessential arrogation of a mongrel Platonism, and a fatal vice of preconceptual representational picturing proponents and of descriptivists in the right-wing Sellarsian camp—because it is ultimately incompatible with inferential or conceptual role semantics.

[To be continued in Part II.—Ed.]

Notes: