01
Burrowed somewhat deep in the human ocular globe lies what will, for the sake of this essay, be called a bottleneck or a gate which functionally delimits the liminal zone between thought and cognition, between self and alien, between globularity and planetarity, between being and worlding. Punctum caecum is the scientific name of that which is befallen by such great metaphorical responsibility – the blind spot. An obscured area of the retina, by virtue of lacking photoreceptor cells, given it is the place through which the optic nerve penetrates the globe in order to connect its endings to the multitude of rods and cones which bed the inner surface of the mammallian eye. Such local avisuality is merely nominal, for the brain takes care of interpolating visual information presumed correspondent to that area in the visual field, based on proximate detail provided by the companion eye. This primary co-alienation, this still unreasoned cooperation, is our point of departure.
1
So much for dialectical materialism and a seed of intersubjectivity, as well as a dream of groundedness narrated by physicalism: right here, lurking, read from a pair of very familiar organs, Plato’s algebraic mixture of what is and what is not2 (here or there), the very possibility of thought, itself the dialectic, the non-being that is linguistically reasoned in being. Such positive constraint can never be proven nor ascertained – nor do we want to do so. It may only be modelled as the most fruitful commitment, which precedes positing being and time, and must not be considered a necessary condition – instead, a structuring logical primitive upon which to describe a plurality of worlds of the understanding, contingent upon that other globular form, the hollowed planet3 – of which we humans are the eligible blind spot. Picturesquely known as the cognoscenti – hence, upon whom rests the normative responsibility of eliciting intersubjectivity as well as the ongoing (a-temporal) practical structuration of the space of possibilities, in order to navigate the depths of representation.
As a task, planetarity can only be attained as the set of norms which can elicit itself as a model bearing intelligibilities from beyond the flatness of liberal animism and humanist pseudo-modesty. As such, it can be seen as a planet which now sets on a diaspora to be understood as orthogonal to itself. To be clear: planetarity must be an epistemological emancipatory project ( a sheer embarrassment of intelligibilities), ever a-temporally supported4 by the confirmation of its results.
Such visual, and, at the fore, spatial vocabulary, begs for demystification. There is only such an extent to metaphor. Having in mind the necessity of precautions against ideological libidinization or blandification (as has happened in the past to the concept of the Global), we propose that, in such a self-declared normative project as that of the Planetary, we must set out by proposing some conceptual norms with regard to the constitutive claims which the spatial could use to (inadvertently) obviate the possibility of intelligibility at the planetary scale.5
To answer the question of how, then, does planetary self-knowledge arise,6 we must step aside the phenomenological qualms evoked by our opening paragraphs in order to avoid unnecessarily cumbersome discussions on idealist or materialist stances, and take the Carnapian via media, which, along his life project, envisaged uniting the physical(ist) approach to the geometrical (at large, the mathematical). Physicalism here must not be read as a restrictive ‘scientism’ or hard eliminative materialism, but explicated as a consensus-attractor, a pedagogical model in which physics “is not like geometry, for in it there are no definitions and no axioms,”7 but, via Thomas Moynihan:
“because science turns the entire world to theory: [removing] any of the mythical immediacy of pure phenomenal topicality and replaces it instead with the mediations of increasingly multilayered webs of theoretical inference, artefactual models, and unobservable entities. Because of this, we must artificialize in order to naturalise (such that, so too, we must globalise in order to truly localise).”8
And, as well, in such a conception of physicalism, geometry is to be considered in its logicized stage, “a theory of certain structural relations. Thus [as a] field of application for the axiomatic method and for the general theory of relations” in order to create the conditions for these two epistemological methods, characterized as fulcral “for the development of logic itself, and thereby again for the scientific world-conception.”9
2
The first scientific models from which we learned about human vision were based on the camera obscura – an instrument for the synthesis of space which is, itself, a space – or, for that matter, the conditions of the possibility of even more than one said space. It is this modelling of circumstances which possibilitates a worlding – by placing a threshold between fore and aft, as well as perforating this division with a small hole or even a lens, we get a picture. Bear in mind such a picture is not gratuitous – once we remove the obscuring threshold or occlude the hole, the picture either vanishes, ever-more-flattened into its non-descript surroundings, or into uncognizing darkness. The projected representation is, thus, inalienable from its mixed state. By analysing how the picture forms as well as studying it, we can model diverse conjectures as to the workings of that which it is a picture of. For without the picture and the positive constraints which elicit our theorizing, we’d have no way of worldmaking.
It is important to note that such visuality-dependent locutions do not conscript the camera obscura model to the senses. We are proposing it as a metaphor grouping complex neurobiological models of cognition, a model for models, which we intend to be able to translate as what Wilfrid Sellars has developed as ‘picturing’, in trying to show which positive constraints could be implemented in Wittgenstein’s pictural metaphor for the limits of language10 in its capacity for representing the world, by wresting the representational from the semantic and fine-tuning the physical grounds for the former and the intersubjective lines of flight for the latter.11 Such pictures are not necessarily visual, but merely a representation of one’s surroundings, via sensorial input.12
Having established an agent’s hopefully multi-scalable physicalist13 model of representation, again, not as a ground, but as the realizer, the construct which is condition of possibility for an n-dimensional framework – we can proceed, but with the proper safeguard which beckons us to remember the fulcral blind spot: that this picture is, in a certain manner, formed – and can only be acknowledged, recognized, let us say, reflected – by its screen.
Aware that a philosophical project – a set of questions about norms – whose surface may be that of the re-engineering of the spatial, and so, an apparently aesthetic enterprise, it is convenient to recall J.-P. Caron’s description of philosopher Nelson Goodman’s notion of ‘world-making‘:
«The term encapsulates the “theory ladenness” of our knowledge and judgments, meaning that there’s no such a thing as a framework-independent world. This implies that much of how we understand the world is the result of conceptual contraptions of our own making.»14
Provisionally, an aesthetic ground for philosophy is possible – that is certain, but not sufficient for the all-encompassing and generative program which epistemology purports to be. Such a ground is simultaneously shaky – if philosophy remains exclusively dependent on an immediate influx of the senses, with what tools can such multiverses of bountiful meanings be abstracted, recognized, understood? – and sticky – for such grounding on the senses would simply impede the fine-tuning of reality which can only be elicited via the management of alienation; space and place only exist because we find and recognize ourselves in it. Such restriction is, clearly, a mere ground, an immediate stoppage which allows for infinity, but only above zero, for upon this intuited autophagic realm of immediacy, no language would ever be intelligible; all would merely be all, and not one difference would ever occur.
In mediation, then, in the long trip toward the conceptual contraptions of our own making, what occurs is a compression – it’s not only that the lens of the camera obscura filters out arbitrary wavelengths, it’s also that in our species there is a much documented tendency to alienation, to project ourselves.15 Namely, in language.
3
Following linguistic studies by Claude Vandeloise as glossed by R.W. Langacker,16 we would like to focus briefly on the study of spatial prepositions, their many valued meanings, and the structures on which such semantic specifications are contingent upon. The contemporary prevailing consensus in cognitive linguistics agrees that prepositional semantics depend upon two kinds of complexity: the preposition «exhibits a range of conventional senses or established uses», extensions which revolve around a main central case, which, interestingly, has been named ‘conceptual schema’ or ‘logical impetus’; and «a given value – especially the central one – is complex in that its characterization involves multiple, coexisting factors», for example – visual, motor, force-dynamic images, the topology of objects, motion and force in interaction, as well as function (in, on), physical and perceptual access (under, behind), order of potential encounter (ahead), and direction, based on general and lateral orientation (in front of, to the left).
Vandeloise encapsulates the group from which these examples were extracted as being anthropomorphic, for they consistently «pertain to human interaction with the world at the physical, perceptual, and purposive levels». Langacker proposes this as «roughly comparable to what cognitive linguists refer to as embodiment».We should retain this proposal for our model; not by positing embodiment as necessary – quite the contrary -, but to merely perceive the genesis of spatiality not ‘in’ or from ‘space itself’, but in what may be defined as an anthropomorphic conceptual projection.
Proceeding: Vandeloise centered the value of a spatial (linguistic!) element – what he termed its (logical) impetus – in a ‘complex primitive’.
«This is a primitive in the sense of being pre-linguistic, and complex in the sense that numerous propositions are needed to describe it exhaustively. Despite their complexity, these primitives are readily grasped as wholes due to their anthropomorphic nature; they are “unified by their function in our survival in the world.»17
Such a claim is consistent with our via media proposal that an axiology of spatial elements – thus, a thoughtful recognition of such meanings, even previous to their conceptual engineering – depends upon the picturing which we exert, and not vice versa. As we will see, what we gradually learn to cognize along our socialized infancy, are the representings, not the representeds – to borrow a Sellarsian idiom. Such socially enhanced learning is, through what can be modelled as positive feedback, an acquisition of conceptual tools which only then allow the infant agent to bootstrap sensory input to the realm of intentionality. Langacker describe such tools as ‘conceptual archetypes’:
«experientially grounded concepts so frequent and fundamental in our everyday life that we tend to invoke them as anchors in constructing our mental world with all its richness and levels of abstraction. Since they pertain to many diff erent aspects of experience, and archetypal status is a matter of degree, there is no fixed inventory. (…) Conceptual archetypes represent salient, essentially universal aspects of everyday experience, as determined by the interplay of biological and environmental factors and play a significant role in language.»
It is important to remember Sellars’ original claim that sensing is pseudo-intentional18. In this case, his later distinction of the ‘seeing of’ and the ‘seeing as’19 may be helpful to further our point: from my apartment window, I see a muddy yard replete with construction materials facing a shrubbery; but I don’t see the whole of it – I see it framed by my window, and as it is getting dark, I barely see even the details which I took care to insert in my description. This construction is a ‘seeing as’ – what I see is a ‘seeing of’. The former is informed by a voluminous conceptual baggage stored in my memory and recalled for this linguistic fabrication, as well as by the bundle of sensings I did see – it is ‘theory-contaminated’;20 the latter but equipped with much leaner concepts – only the barely necessary to give shape, to locate, to formalize what my optic nerves sorted as visual input. Such leanness could only be elicited by conceptual archetypes such as those that give meaning to ‘from my window’ as being at a certain remove, and ‘facing’ as meaning ‘in front of’. It is the feedback between these two images, like the camera obscura, which constitutes picturing. We conceive of picturing as a very thin reflective, refractive, and translucent membrane (to give it a biological connotation) between the personal scientific and manifest images, a sort of a screen which does indeed picture and help to constitute experience, but can only be known to picture to itself if sociality – transpersonal cognition – informs it with the concepts for that which it pictures.
Cognitive grammarians propose that such leanness of the ‘seeing of’ may lead us to a locus where the syntactic meets with the semantic, where the picturing can become worlding in an intentional ascent. A minimal list of universal grammatical notions may entail noun, verb, subject, object and possessive – semantically realizable at the prototype level, as experientially grounded, and thus, mapped closely onto the ‘seeing of’; and the schema level, which depends on basic cognitive abilities «immanent in the corresponding archetypes which provide the basis for structured experience and are thus responsible for the archetypes emerging in the first place»21 – the ‘seeing-as’.
For the sake of clear encapsulation of our aims regarding the place of space in thought (and in intentionality) and vice-versa, it is worth quoting Langacker at length:
«These notions are central to a unified account of the development and relationship of conceptual and linguistic structure. At all stages and levels of organization, structure is seen as dynamic, residing in patterns of processing activity. The account begins with conceptions that emerge through embodied experience as we interact with our surroundings in the manner afforded by basic cognitive abilities. From this basis, some very general processes – occurring repeatedly, over a long period of time, at many successive levels – make possible the construction of our mental world in all its richness and complexity. Through recurrence, common experiences are progressively entrenched, coalescing into established cognitive routines readily activated and executed as pre-packaged wholes. Of course, since every experience is unique at the level of fine-grained detail, any commonality that is reinforced and established as a routine is bound to be coarse-grained relative to the specific conceptions giving rise to it. The abstraction (or schematization) which thus occurs can in principle be carried to any degree. Another general process is simulation (or disengagement), whereby abstracted routines are executed independently of the circumstances in which they originated.”22
This is, to our eyes, the best explanation of how the learner can bootstrap pictures into the realm of intentionality – and importantly, with our practical, promethean attitude in view, vice-versa. That is, the task of understanding how a world of commonalities is structured, of knowing one’s way about it,23 through the conceptual/conventional buoys furnished by historical and critical intersubjectivity in the boundless ocean of possibility,24 as well as creating, re-arranging them, and fine-tuning them, according to contingent needs which arise from collective emancipation.
4
We can now envision philosophy – or at least a nascent planetary of multi-scalar epistemology – as a structure which learns how to shape itself. For the specific purposes of thinking worlds which may be formed onto or elicited from a planet, we are describing a task which goes beyond a mixture of space and thought. Having made clear that we are suspicious of space as an affirmative ground for thought,25 we may follow Carnap in distinguishing three different meanings to the term: formal space (an abstract system, constructed in mathematics and more precisely in the logic of relations, therefore our knowledge of formal space is of a logical nature); intuitive space (independent of contingent experience, with certain topological properties), and physical space (strictly empirical, in its geometry and three-dimensionality).26 There may be a certain polemic as to the delimitation of the latter two meanings, but we may even abuse that confusion to stress our point: any possibility of thought regarding space is not gestated on the physical, empirical picture, but on its mixture with the formal. Having conceded that we are equipped with a primitive logic (the much maligned cold, sadistic, survivalist reason), we must see that the logic of relations, that upon which the formal – the Commons – is structured, can only be so through the feedback loop performed by the co-picturing of intentionality. The where- and what-aboutness of the worlds we picture and want to propose as co-pictures can only take shape in its communication. Space – thought about it, and knowledge about it, takes place in linguistic cohabitation and its injunctions to praxis. Thus, we defend that space has no ontological primacy to thought – and that such quarrel is unwarranted, for it must not, in order to make way for the collective task of conceiving the former as the dynamical structure – at last, this essays’ finishing and starting line, the planetary self-knowledge – which may host the latter, among whole cosmologies.
Against any theological essentialism searching for a momentous epiphany, a revelation of the whole in the one by obfuscation of their constitutive relation, we propose it is through the constraints of thought that the structure can be understood and virtuously manipulated. In this epistemological endeavour, our choice of a favoured term – structure – fastens itself to the concept’s allowance of a methodology of pluralist design, instead of a merely descriptive architectonics which would foreclose the latter’s purchase on the empirical testing – and thus, pedagogical – realm.
5
After splitting hairs so thin in this transcendental-realist (but still world-making at heart!) vein, it is clear we have inserted ourselves among those who propose that thought must be the orthogonal departure from cognitive groundedness.27 Such impertinence must be defended as the necessary apology for a method – the establishing of a view from nowhere, articulated as more than the brutish pseudo-rational managerial governances of the present. Borrowing a practical solution from contemporary philosophy of mathematics, the planetary mode of thought becomes an ‘as if‘ synthetic structure,28 the illuminating model of models which we evoked when we departed. In addition, with regard to the above mentioned fallible modes of governance, we underline the importance of the view from nowhen: a non-linear intelligibility of time, in order to counteract facile and fatalist probabilism as the pretensely legitimate purchase to collapse all possible worlds into time-honed and vindicated ideology, and so, recognize the ‘as if’ dynamic structure as the generative locus of knowledge, where science can harness the productively possible/necessary from the merely probable/contingent, as well as describing such narratives’ implications at all scales. In the ambit of such nevertheless context-sensitive practices, parrhesia as parturition of theory and truth is given free rein in the analytic realm, a Playground of the Commons, where it can be studied before turning into (definitely not underdeveloped) praxis.
A planetary pedagogy suggests that eliciting an unimpeded feedback loop between co-picturing and class-less intentionality takes all accounts into account; as such, the universal – let us habituate ourselves to modesty: the planetary – won’t be that which completely maps over or flattens, equates and de-hierarchizes ontology, but that which can handle every exception, making it a root for a new world which may cohabit the planet.
After Sellars’ fruitful rehabilitation of Wittgenstein’s picturing as a scientific – thus, multi-scalar and transpersonal – treatment of Stan Brakhage’s ‘cinema for‘ or ‘of the untutored eye‘, as well as Carnap’s break from Wittgenstein’s semantic grounding of worlds, by cooking the meta-language solution to colour the fatalist palate, from which even new languages – new modes of understanding the world – come to fruition, being is now liberated from imposing on the limitations of the empirical.
Learning, now, gains traction as the positive constraint for the fruition of intelligibilities – both at the personal or collective scale -, a program which bootstraps adaptive behaviour into a nourishment of mutually reinforced autonomy and self-control, and foments the recognition of our species as the true alien subjectivity of the planetary.
Along the ungrounding of being must be developed an almost concomitant pedagogy for the right to disembodiment – alienation, for the faint-hearted – and the acquisition of conceptual tools to develop norms-as-forms for such new varieties of scientific experience. With it comes the need to accept that it is through abstraction, and in establishing, nourishing, and tuning the positive feedback between it and what it is not – our alienation – that planetary thought can provide norms and understand its space for self-regulation and the emancipation that that process feeds into. Such an extension of our current predication, seen as a diaspora of Geist at the planetary scale, may gain from a renewed effort into establishing learning institutions both as laboratories – ‘as if’ realms – as well as purveyors of tools for meta-language acquisition, with an aim towards facilitation and structuration of intersubjectivity, thus placing intentionality, a micro-epistemology of the quotidian, at the forefront of learning.
Such granular politics can only be exerted if we remove humanist cosmetic thought from all scales and inner and outer surfaces of the planet. Otherwise, the planetary will be as quickly subsumed by humanism as other categories have been by systems of thought which did not commit to put themselves into methodology, having been contented with mere axiology under egotistic theophanical prejudices. In order to put such programs to practice, we must go beyond democracy – necessary as a realizer of thermodynamical justice, but not sufficient for a systematic approach with aims to effect a large-scale specious present. For such an endeavour, the planetary must, first and foremost, engage in the non-deterministic feedback loop commonly called learning: embedding that it can picture, know and make itself, with the demand of how to picture, know, and make itself.
_____
Notes
1 The present essay was first drafted as a combined response to two seminars at the New Centre for Research & Practice: Philosophical Topology & Planetary Politics, instructed by Lukáš Likav?an, and Cybernetics and Psychology in Wilfrid Sellars’ Scientific Image of the Mind, instructed by Carl Sachs. The author wishes to thank both instructors for their feedback and corrections, which allowed for this slightly revised version.
2 Plato. Sophist 250d-e, in Complete Works, ed. J.M. Cooper. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 272-273
3 Notable among many theories of a hollow earth blooming in the XIXth century is John Leslie’s immodest proposal: «Our planet must have a very widely cavernous structure. We tread on a crust or shell whose thickness bears but a very small proportion to the diameter of its sphere.» Very much like the human mind, «The vast subterranean cavity must be filled with some very diffusive medium, of astonishing elasticity or internal repulsion among its molecules… the only fluid we know possessing that character is LIGHT itself.» – Sir John Leslie, Elements of Natural History: Including Mechanics and Hydrostatics. (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1829), 452
4 By deliberately avoiding the use of “ground” in our main body of text, we are here electing Lorentz Puntel metasystematical positive perspective of “grounding as confirmation or support is thus the final step in the theoretical undertaking, and not – as in foundationalist grounding – an initial step.” – Puntel, Lorentz, & White, Alan. Structure and Being, (University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press 2008) – 68.
5 Interpreting the positing of a libidinally charged Space, such as Châtelet’s intent to, seems to us merely positing a libidinally charged intuition of space onto ontology as a condition for the possibility of thought, but for free. The issue then would – will! – be how to guarantee thought the capacity of re-modelling space, if arrested to such grounds. It may be more fruitful to read a mathematically structured concept of ‘auto-spatiality’ as the circumstance for myriad contingent space‘s, than a given, barely, if intersubjective at all, space as the locus solus for the confection of new worlds. – See Chatelêt, Gilles, Interlacing the singularity, the diagram and the metaphor, ed. Charles Alunni, in Virtual Mathematics: The Logic of Difference, ed. Simon Duffy. (Clinamen Press: Manchester, 2006), 38
6 We are not at ease to propose an historical account to reply to such question, but Moynihan’s does illuminate the stance of our essay in such capacity: «By the latter half of the eighteenth century there is, embodied in the form of an emerging transcontinental news network, a nascent planetary self-consciousness. Relentless rises in press volume, circulation, and connectivity between nations facilitated by this early-stage ‘global sensorium’, piggybacking off the catallactic webbing-together of markets and capitalist trade relations across prior centuries, which first provided an arena for humanity to reflect upon itself as a planetary collective. Yet what is important here is that, ever since, our ‘here and now’ has irreversibly been mediated by foci that utterly outstrip any delimitable locale. We all inhabit multiple perspectival layers and are irreversibly focalised by planetary vistas. From this point on, to be a fold was also to be globally unfolded. In so far as I am anything, I am just an implex of the global. Again, individuation is always ex situ. (…) We thus (come to) know ourselves from outside in. This is all just a long-winded way of saying there truly never was any originary or primordial inhabitation or dwelling.” Moynihan, Thomas. ‘But it’s Only Late If…’ A Belated Anticipation of Hydroplutonic Kernow in Hydroplutonic Kernow (Falmouth, Urbanomic 2020), 17.
7 A quip by an anonymous physicist, quoted by Rudolf Carnap in his Autobiography, in The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (La Salle, Open Court 1963), 36
8 Moynihan, Thomas. ibid, 21
9 Hahn, Hans; Neurath, Otto; Carnap, Rudolf. Der Wiener Kreis, in Empiricism and Sociology, ed. Marie Neurath and Robert S. Cohen (Dordrecht-Holland/Boston-USA, D. Reidel Publishing Company 1973), 313-14 – emphasis mine.
10 Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. M. Lourenço (Lisboa, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian 2016)
11 We’re following Wilfrid Sellars’ accounts present in Being and Being Known and Mental Events, in In the Space of Reasons: Selected Essays of Wilfrid Sellars, ed. Kevin Scharp & Robert B. Brandom (Cambridge, Harvard University Press 2007) as well as in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, Harvard University Press 1997)
12 One need not rummage for caveats in such a sensory-centric model, given there are various historical examples of ‘picturing’-enabling in persons born simultaneously avisual, speechless, and hearing impaired. On the other hand, unfortunately, persons born without these senses and, importantly, if also afflicted by hereditary or degenerative sensory and autonomic neuropathies, i.e., the sense of touch, show no sociality dependent on any type of language acquisition. That said, only a fortunately rare group of exceptions would lay our intentions of structuring a model for intersubjective, language-mediated planetarity to waste.
13 Elsewhere, we have tentatively proposed ‘physicist’ against the eliminative materialist or ‘right-Sellarsian’ conventional connotation of ‘physicalism’. Here: https://evenprometheusstartedsmall.wordpress.com/2021/08/09/what-is-to-be-done-for-the-playground-of-the-commons/
14 Caron, J.-P. On Constitutive Dissociations as a Means of World-Unmaking: Henry Flynt and Generative Aesthetics Redefined, in e-flux Journal #115, last accessed 06/16/2021 – emphasis mine.
15 But not absolutely, or else Entfremdung would allow us to realize a topological feat, reversing our interior and exterior surfaces.
16 Langacker, Ronald W. Reflections on the Functional Characterization of Spatial Prepositions, 2010, last accessed in 06/16/2021 at https://journals.openedition.org/corela/999
17 Vandeloise, Claude. 2006, 150, quoted in Langacker, Ronald W. ibid.
18 Sellars, Wilfrid. Being and Being Known in In the Space of Reasons: Selected Essays of Wilfrid Sellars, ed. Kevin Scharp & Robert B. Brandom (Cambridge, Harvard University Press 2007), 214
19 Sellars, Wilfrid. Is Scientific Realism Tenable, quoted in O’Shea, James. Wilfrid Sellars: Naturalism with a Normative Turn (Malden, Polity Press 2007) 100-101
20 Sellars, Wilfrid. Ibid.
21 Langacker, Ronald W. ibid.
22 Langacker, Ronald W. ibid. – emphasis mine
23 Sellars, Wilfrid. Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man in In the Space of Reasons: Selected Essays of Wilfrid Sellars, ed. Kevin Scharp & Robert B. Brandom (Cambridge, Harvard University Press 2007), 369.
24 Appropriating Carnap’s idiom, as translated by A.W. Carus and Steve Awodey in From Wittgenstein’s Prison to the Boundless Ocean: Carnap’s Dream of Logical Syntax, in History of Analytic Philosophy: Carnap’s Logical Syntax of Language, ed. Pierre Wagner (Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke 2009), 70
25 «The scene of nature is a picture without depth of substance, no less than the scene of art; and in the one case as in the other, it is the mind which, by an act of its own, discovered that colour and shape denote distance and solidity. (…) There is a mask of theory over the whole face of nature, if it be theory to infer more than we see.» – Whewell, William. The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (London: J.W. Parker, 2 vols., 1840) vol. 1, 24
26 Carnap, Rudolf. idem, 36
27 Thus conceding «There is nothing particularly special or privileged or indubitable about our inbuilt sense of our surroundings; allowing that the world can be grasped better through ‘artificial’ reason is to admit that there is nothing perspicaciously ‘natural’ about our intuitive picture of the world: it is to realise it has always been just another manufactured model and is thus revisable and subject to replacement.» – Moynihan, Thomas. idem, 24
28 Landry, Elaine. As-ifism: Mathematics and Method without Metaphysics March 26, 2021, last accessed 06/15/2021 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4dlamySLuE&ab_channel=CenterforPhilosophyofScience