Towards an Ecological Epistemology

Wrote this real quickly for an assignment that required I create something that was related in any way to the environment, completely open ended. This article came out. The environmentalism stuff is sort of fluffy and tangential to the epistemological stuff, and not really something I’ve thought about too deeply, but I thought it turned out pretty good regardless. It was nice not having to cite anyone for once.

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In this article, I aim to first critique the standard epistemological situation as given in traditional philosophical frameworks as being radically hostile to ecological perspectives on the human situation. Then, utilizing philosophical work done in the 20^th century, I will lay out an alternative sketch of our epistemological relationship with the environment in which our knowledge concerning the external world is direct and relational. I will then argue that this perspective on epistemology can help frame the environmentalist perspective and give credence to the notion of ourselves as being deeply embedded into the particular environments we inhabit; socially, cognitively, and emotionally.

The Standard Framework and its Problems

If you look at the history of philosophy, you will see a long tradition of separating our essential human nature from the external, physical environments we live in. By proposing that, epistemically, we are shut off from the real world, and subsequently have to build up a systematic mental representation from “given” sensory inputs, philosophers have barricaded themselves within a “veil of ideas.” From this epistemic situation, it follows naturally that there is an internal realm different in kind from the external world of physical worlds and public behavior. To account for the difference between inside and outside, philosophers constructed the notion of a mind that is distinct from the physical environment.

In my mind, this stipulation of mental life as distinct from physical life has created a philosophical atmosphere that breeds contempt for environmentalist endeavors. If we take this standard framework seriously, it alienates our true nature from the ecological niches we inhabit. If, so goes the standard theory, we are epistemically shut off from the external world, then whatever makes us essentially human – be it mind, soul, spirit – is not of the world, and our humanity becomes defined in terms of thinking and not being; that is, being in a physical world. This, at least, was Martin Heidegger’s great critique of cognitivist philosophical schemes: they cut us off from the environment and stipulate a go-between mental representation in its stead, and then from this axiom, go on to conclude that what makes us human is not the fact that we are embedded in a familiar world, but rather, separated from this world by our thoughts.

The Ecological Alternative

The epistemic alternative to the standard framework involves a perceptual theory in which the knowledge we have concerning the environment is much more direct. Not direct in the sense that perceptual knowledge somehow avoids going through different brain filters, but rather, in the sense that there is no representational mediation between the environment and our perception of it. In contrast to this representational framework, the ecological perspective is much more pragmatic in that our perception is tied up with behavior and opportunities for behavior. For example, when perceiving a chair, we do not have a sensation input and then infer that the chair is for sitting, but rather, we directly see that the chair is available for sitting. James Gibson, considered the founder of ecological psychology, dubbed this aspect of perception affordances.

Thus, according to this ecological theory of perception, we are not estranged from the environment epistemically, but rather, intimately entangled with it due to our pragmatic orientation with our ecological niches. In our homes and our cars, our offices and our places of play, we are at home epistemically. Our knowledge concerning the external environment is immediate and direct; it guides us toward different behaviors which enable pragmatic know-how. So in the case of perceiving a chair, our epistemic situation – due to developmental learning and years of experience – is that of familiarity. We know what a chair affords, and this knowledge guides our behavior so that we may cope with the environment sufficiently.

Implications for Environmental Philosophy

The philosophical implications of this ecological framework can be extended from philosophy of mind to philosophy of the environment. While this new epistemological framework provides a clear motivation for abandoning traditional dualisms between mind and world, subject and object, it also provides a backdrop for modern thinking in regards to issues surrounding the environment. When perceptual theories take seriously our epistemic embeddedness within an environment, we arrive at a position readily adapted for environmentalist concerns. By placing the essence of humanity into an ecological niche cashed out in terms of pragmatic coping, we get rid of the traditional bias against seeing ourselves as somehow tied up with the physical world. This philosophical perspective enables a conception of humanity that is intimately connected with the surrounding environment.

Subsequently, once a philosophical system takes into account the profound interrelationship between ourselves and the environment, the philosophical problems surrounding environmentalism fade. Thus, from the ecological perspective, a motivation to preserve the environment naturally emerges. Because we no longer feel estranged from the environment, but rather, wrapped up in it due to our everyday coping, the environmentalist urge to reach out and protect the environment becomes another way of reaching out to ourselves, or at least, to an aspect that is just as important to defining humanity as humanity itself. In other words, the ecological perspective implicitly incorporates a conception of humanity that is at odds with the idea that what makes humans human is not our attachment to the environment, but rather, our detachment form it.

By divorcing itself from this theory of detachment, ecologically oriented philosophy offers a reconceptualization of humanity that has the potential to change the way we perceive ourselves as related to the environment, allowing for a newfound enthusiasm concerning environmentalist issues. By taking our minds out from the abstracted space of Reason, ecological theory puts humanity right back into the social, cultural, pragmatic milieu that structures our experience and guides our behavior. This conception of ourselves is at odds with our traditional Western intellectual heritage, but I believe that our species as a whole is ready and waiting for just such a theory to come along and encourage rampant environmentalism as a way of protecting something that is not just apart from ourselves, but profoundly intermingled with us as humans: the environment.

Thoughts on qualia and phenomenology

It seems to me that the only way qualia can emerge as a legitimate philosophical question is for there to be an assumption of dualism. For qualia to make sense conceptually, there needs to be a subject, as apart from the world, experiencing the incoming flux of sensory data. This seems obvious since the whole idea of qualia sprung out of the phenomenology of subjects looking out upon the world, with a particular first-person perspective.

In the same vein, even the notion of intentionality, the directedness of mental life towards objects, depends upon the subject being distinct from the object. Without this metaphysical gap, there could be no epistemological intuition guiding our inherited supposition of dualism between subject and object. Spelled out in such plain terms, one might feel this is a strawman, but nevertheless, the metaphysical implications of such language are clear.

But, hear me out, if the fundamental division between self and world rests merely on a philosophical assumption, why should we not explore the implications of an alternative ontological framework? Historically, this alternative has been called “being-in-the-world.” I won’t go into the details right now, but I think I’ve discussed it elsewhere several times. Nevertheless, important for my purposes here, the human being is still capable of separating himself from the world, despite his fundamental orientation of ontological familiarity, through the use of conscious thought – which is representational. The ontology of thoughts seems clear: subject and object. According to the Heideggerian perspective, the ontology of people is not so clear cut.

So, with this alternative ontological framework of being-in-the-world in mind, what sense can we still make out of the notion of qualia? There is an experience of the world. We can strip this experience of its existential import through deliberation. We can think to ourselves about our own experience and contemplate what it is like to see the world. In such deliberation, we might think of ourselves as a separate – mental – entity that stands alone in the world of objects and people. After such contemplation, we might try our hand at constructing an ontology that includes ourselves as separate mental entities, and the world of objects that we reach out to through intentional consciousness. We would be basing our ontology, supposedly, on the phenomenology of experience – gathered through our very own cognitive contemplation upon experience as philosophers.

The mistake here would be to take this contemplation-driven ontology and immediately claim, “This is it! This is the way things are!” From a Heideggerian perspective, one could just as well claim from the start that there is no ontological wedge between subject and object, saying that instead, subject and object are replaced by being-in-the-world. If you fail to do this, and instead press on with a dualistic ontology, the language of phenomenology results in a subject intentionally directed towards an external world, which impinges its sensory data upon our minds, giving us the famous first-person experience of “qualia.”

By challenging the ontological assumptions implicit in this representationalist perspective, we can dismantle the philosophical scaffolding which supports the very notion of qualia, and subsequently, all of the derivative non-sense which has swollen contemporary philosophical journals.

Perhaps, if we are interested in spelling out the ontology of our total personality, and not just the conceptual web of belief in our heads, we should attempt to do phenomenology from a non-Cartesian perspective. After all, why should we expect an analysis of cognition, as distinct from a phenomenological understanding of absorbed coping, to reveal to us an ontology that gives due justice to the total phenomenon of our embodied, enacted situation?

Atheism and Faith

[Note: This is the first post I've written for this blog in many months due to a lack of philosophical creativity and post-worthy ideas. Now that the fall semester has started and I've begun to read philosophy again, I will try and update this blog semi-regularly, but don't hold your breath if I don't.]

I am taking a class this semester called “faith and reason” and we are exploring the relationship between truth, rationality, and faith. The first book we read for the class was Christian existentialist-theologian-philosopher Paul Tillich’s The Dynamics of Faith. In this work, Tillich provides an existentialist definition of faith that I believe is compatible with atheism. How is this possible? Allow me to elucidate on Tillich’s refreshing idea.

Tillich essentially defines faith as an “ultimate concern with the infinite[or unconditional. I prefer "infinite."]“. Thus, if you are an atheist you can still have “faith” granted that you are ultimately concerned with something that is not finite. What does this seemingly mystic definition mean? Surely, it is too abstract and mystical to be of any relevance to a scientifically oriented atheist such as myself (that, granted, has many philosophical leanings) What does Tillich mean here?

First of all, in order to understand what Tillich means by faith, it is important to understand what he doesn’t mean. He doesn’t equate faith with a cognitive belief structure or propositional knowledge-based faith, such as “I believe in God because I have faith that God exists.” This is not true faith for Tillich because only the cognitive aspect of the human being is concerned in such a faith. As an existentialist, this is unacceptable because “ultimate concern” deals with the total personality and not just a limited aspect of the human being, namely theoretical and reflective cognition.

Utilizing Heideggerian terminology, I think ultimate concern can be conceptualized in terms of ontological comportment by a Dasein. That is to say, as ontologically oriented creatures, human beings comport themselves towards that which defines their being, which is their own individual existence. I am a life to live. Such a conception of humanity differs from the Cartesian tradition’s emphasis on self-consciousness and mental gymnastics, instead focusing on how we are engaged with the world in our own personal lives. Furthermore, we care about our lives: our being is an issue for us and in this sense, Tillich seems to be echoing Heidegger in his insistence that the most critical aspect of our total personality is our ultimate concern with the infinite.

So what is the infinite if not some metaphysically abstract mumbojumbo? Well, ultimately its a metaphor so take it as you will, but I think its useful to view the infinite in terms of the reductionist/holist debate. I see the infinite as that which can’t be reduced to the finite, i.e. the infinite is wrapped up in that which can only be captured in holistic vocabulary. Such as what? Well, for one, our ontological being, which is social in nature, can’t be reduced to the physical motions of matter which supports our constitution, but rather, resides in an existential matrix that is spread out ontologically amongst a community of involved and engaged language users. It is this matrix which provides the significance missing in crudely naturalistic conceptions of the human world.

So, the infinite, is transcendent in that it goes above and beyond the concrete realm holistically, but nevertheless, remains grounded in the physicality of reality. It is this conception of infinite that I think is useful for the atheist in coming to terms with Tillich’s existentialist theology.

So how does an atheist utilize Tillich’s definitions to provide existential perspective to his life? Well, for starters, one can appreciate that mostly everyone is ultimately concerned with something, whether that something is a child, their work, or a nation/idea/etc. However, for Tillich, all these concerns are idolatrous in that they aren’t concerned with the infinite. How does Tillich get around this? Well, as a Christian he is concerned with the religious symbolism of God as an unconditional infinite Ground of Being. While I can make this work in my own mind, I fear that in our day and age, such terminology will never be socially useful because it would be annoying to try and explain in existentialist terms what you mean by “ultimate ground of being” everytime you mention that you have faith in God. So what should a good philosopher-atheist do? Take the Heideggerian path: situate your ultimate concern in terms of what you are already concerned with as an ontological being: your own being, your own life and how you live it, engaged and embodied in the world.

[To be continued]

Being human: take two

In an earlier post, I tried to get at a Heideggarian “definition” of the being of humans. I don’t think I did a very good job, so I am going to try again, taking some cues from William Blattner’s excellent reader’s guide on Being and Time.

Proximally and for the most part we are immersed in the word. The importance of this observation is hidden from the philosophical tradition, because it has been focused on the self-consciousness and moral accountability, in which we experiences ourselves as distinct from the world and others. Heidegger’s phenomenological approach to the self focuses first on a basic form of self-disclosure: I am what matters to me. Seen thus, I cannot disentangle myself from those around me and the world in which I live. In a phrase, we are being-in-the-world.

Thus, according to Heidegger, the philosophical tradition since Descartes has been fundamentally misguided on what it means to be a human. We are not res cogitans, locked behind the theater of our head, looking out at the world from behind a subjective veil, but rather, we are fundamentally familiar with the world. This familiarity is the basic constitution of being-in-the-world, and thus, the basic constitution of humans. If I understand Heidegger right, self-consciousness, intentionality, and all those phenomena of modern philosophy are, if anything at all, residual and derivative from the more basic familiarity with the world. They result when we are in a reflective mood, stepped away from the world, utilizing the modern cognitive faculties evolution has given us. Otherwise, we “reside amidst” the world.

This might all sound like phenomenological mumbo-jumbo, and I agree that it can sound kind of arbitrary, but if you understand Heidegger’s reaction to the western “History of being”, as he calls it, you will realize that this mumbo-jumbo is really a sophisticated methodology for getting at the root phenomena of human activity. By dismissing the subject-object paradigm as irrelevant for phenomenology, Heidegger recasts the subject matter of philosophical inquiry and sets the stage for fruitful hermeneutic interpretation. And that is all Heidegger essentially is, an interpretation. He didn’t really “get at” the phenomena in any systematic way, due to the circular constraints of interpretation, but I feel like that merely makes his philosophical project open and dynamic, as opposed to stale and rigid. He acknowledged the circularity involved in trying to uncover the ontology of being, but this is no matter, because humans already have a “pre-ontological” understanding of being. It is the goal of phenomenology to articulate this pre-ontological understanding into a conceptual form in order to uncover the salient features of the phenomena of being.

Heidegger is satisfied with mere “descriptive phenomenology” for a simple reason: to look for anything else, would be to presuppose a form of psychologism, which states that the structure of meaning is a real, causal property of minds and/or the world. However, if this isn’t the case, and meaning isn’t going to be uncovered in any “deep structures”, or combinatory semantics, then all that can be done with meaning is description. To do otherwise, would be to try and complete some form of constructive theorizing. Meaning isn’t something “produced” by minds, which can be understood by general theorization, but rather, meaning-structures are latent in experience, and the only proper way to get at their ontology is through some sort of interpretation. That interpretation doesn’t necessarily have to be Heideggerian, but Heidegger did a pretty good job of laying down the essential phenomena of being, at least when it comes to human Daseins. And for that I am grateful.

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Berkeley, Idealism, and Heidegger

In his Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues, Bishop Berkely famously argued that matter did not exist. Only ideas in the mind. Idealism was born. What was he arguing against? He was primarily arguing against the representationalist dualism of Descartes and Locke, that claimed that the mind consists of representations of the external world. He thought that such a representationalist paradigm leads to skepticism because it is possible that our representations don’t correspond to any reality. Berkeley had several arguments against this representationalist philosophy, but what is more interesting is his argument against those who deny the premises of representationalism. To this, Berkeley offered what is sometimes called the “master argument”:

… I am content to put the whole upon this issue; if you can but conceive it possible for one extended moveable substance, or in general, for any one idea or any thing like an idea, to exist otherwise than in a mind perceiving it, I shall readily give up the cause…. But say you, surely there is nothing easier than to imagine trees, for instance, in a park, or books existing in a closet, and no body by to perceive them. I answer, you may so, there is no difficulty in it: but what is all this, I beseech you, more than framing in your mind certain ideas which you call books and trees, and at the same time omitting to frame the idea of any one that may perceive them? But do not you your self perceive or think of them all the while? This therefore is nothing to the purpose: it only shows you have the power of imagining or forming ideas in your mind; but it doth not shew that you can conceive it possible, the objects of your thought may exist without the mind: to make out this, it is necessary that you conceive them existing unconceived or unthought of, which is a manifest repugnancy. When we do our utmost to conceive the existence of external bodies, we are all the while only contemplating our own ideas. But the mind taking no notice of itself, is deluded to think it can and doth conceive bodies existing unthought of or without the mind; though at the same time they are apprehended by or exist in it self.

So, while this argument was designed to work if you are a direct realist, what happens when you deny the framework of direct/indirect realism? I can’t help but view this argument through a Heideggarian lens and wonder what Philonous would say to someone who denied the subject/object distinction and thus the perceiving ego altogether. I think Heidegger would have denied the premises upon which Berkeley’s argument stood. If you deny that humans have subjective minds that perceive the world, then it doesn’t matter whether the “world” perceived is immaterial or not. Heidegger would still go with the parsimonious, scientific materialism but what matters is that the world of humans is imbued with significance through the pragmatic interactions of everyday life. The subjective mental realm that Berkeley works with is primarily a metaphorical holdover from the popular philosophy of the times. Berkeley couldn’t help but frame his philosophy in terms of a mental subject interacting with the world, either material or immaterial. However, thanks to 20th century thinkers like Heidegger giving us a new vocabulary to work with, the philosophical problems of the 17th century seem antiquated in the same way that ptolemaic astronomy is outdated to modern astronomers.

So, it isn’t that Berekey’s argument are wrong per se, it is just that the philosophical framework that they rest upon has been cast aside in favor of new metaphors and vocabularies.

Heidegger: Life and Philosophy

This is an interesting documentary mainly on Martin Heidegger’s life, with a little bit of his philosophy thrown in.

Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6

What does it mean to be human?

NEW HOSTING: See here for an update at my new hosting address.

What does it mean to be a human? What is being? What is the difference between the being of humans and the being of non-humans?

These are all important and difficult to answer questions. Martin Heidegger was one philosopher who took it upon himself to attempt to answer some of these questions. His aim was to work out the general meaning of being and to do so concretely. Did he succeed? Some would say yes, others no. In this post, I’d like to sketch out a part of his answer, focusing on the the last question: the difference between the being of humans and the being of non-human animals i.e. the ontological difference.

The distinction between being and beings is there, latent in [humans] and [their] existence, even if not in explicit awareness. The distinction is there; that is to say, it has the mode of being of [humans]: it belongs to existence. Existence means, as it were, “to be in the performance of this distinction.” Only a soul that can make this distinction has the aptitude, going beyond the animal’s soul, to become the soul of a human being…we call the distinction between being and beings, when it is carried out explicitly, the ontological difference.

I’d like to concentrate on the part I made bold. This is crucial to his definition of what it means to be a human being[Dasein]. Essentially, humans comport themselves toward their own being. Another way of putting this awkward phrase is that humans take a stand on their own being. This is what “being in the performance of [the ontological difference]” means. Through the particular ways in which humans act within the world, we make this ontological difference a part of our existential mode of being. This means we always perceive/conceive and act in the world in terms of the difference between being and beings, between the the ontological being of ourselves and the entities which make up the physical world. There is something-it-is-like to be us, and that something has to do with how we already pre-ontologically make a distinction between being and beings.

Whether or not you think of all this is useless metaphysical mumbo-jumbo or an historical attempt to answer one of the most important questions in philosophy is up to you, but hopefully I made it clear that Heidegger was at least an original thinker.

edit: I have updated the original post to fix the inconsistencies pointed out by Roman.

UPDATE: What does it mean to be human: take two

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Dewey and the Existential Matrix, pt 2

In my last post, I gave a brief summarization of John Dewey’s paper concerning the existential matrix of culture. In this post, I’d like to relate Dewey’s ideas to the imminent 20th century philosophers Heidegger and Wittgenstein.

Dewey’s pragmatic approach to philosophy is closely related to the philosophical enterprise of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, in which Wittgenstein analyzes language in terms of use. Dewey and Wittgenstein both see language as stemming from cultural activity. Both philosophers attempt to step aside from the traditional picture of language as a correspondence of words with objects. Instead of directly arguing against such a conception, they instead take the time to actually look at how language is used in order to give an existential analysis of the phenomena. Some might say this is merely a crude form of sociology or anthropology, but both Dewey and Wittgenstein see their work as therapeutic for philosophers who are caught in conceptual muddles.

Wittgenstein famously analyzes language use in terms of different language games, a concept that “brings into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life.” Wittgenstein uses this term in order to emphasize that the meaning of words is dependent on how they are used in a particular cultural context, or game. The great German philosopher Martin Heidegger, in his seminal world Being and Time, also helped the 20^th century appreciate the importance of context. Heidegger, like Dewey, uses the example of equipment to illustrate the fact that the significance or meaning of the human world is not dependent on one-to-one correspondence, but instead depends on a “referential totality” that is “disclosed” upon the world by communal activity. For example, a hammer is not just the physical conglomeration of a wood-block with a metal-block, but rather, an object that has a particular mode of being, or significance, imbued upon it by the fact hammers are existentially related to an entire “matrix” of nails and other equipment. In other words, like Dewey, Heidegger thinks it is a drastic philosophical mistake to separate hammering, and almost every other human activity, from the totality of meaning given to it by the community of language-users.

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Modes of Being

Martin Heidegger, best known for his seminal work Being and Time, was the german philosopher who attempted “to work out the question of the sense of being and to do so concretely.” Many would say he succeeded.

In Being and Time, Heidegger sets out to establish concretely three modes of being. The first mode of being, Dasein, is the mode of being of humans. This mode is characterized by having a stance on the question of being i.e. making being an issue. By this, Heidegger means that humans, whether they know it consciously or not, take a stand on their own being by having particular roles that they fall into holistically, such as “being a mother” or “being a teacher”. These roles cannot be defined outside of the contextual, existential matrix that is formed through communal activity.

The next two modes of being are presence-at-hand and readiness-to-hand. The latter can be characterized as the mode of being of human equipment. According to Heidegger, equipment has a mode of being because you can’t separate a tool from the holistic environment of its usage. He uses the example of a hammer. You can’t properly talk about hammers outside of the entire contextual matrix of nails and other equipment related to the act of hammering. Entities that do not have readiness-to-hand and are not Dasein are present-at-hand, meaning that they are “just there” in the environment.

Heidegger’s task in Being and Time was to take beings and their being seriously. If you are interested in learning more about Heidegger, Hubert Dreyfus, who I talked about two posts ago, has posted his entire Fall 2007 Heidegger lectures online. I highly recommend them.

Heidegger and AI

Why Heideggerian AI Failed and How Fixing it Would Require Making it More Heideggerian

This is a really interesting paper. In it, Hubert Dreyfus, known for his books What Computers Can’t Do, goes over why some of the more well-known AI projects have failed and also explores some worthwhile avenues where AI can succeed.

[In the 1960s] AI researchers were hard at work turning rationalist philosophy into a research program.

Dreyfus is referring to the Physical Symbols Theory of Newell and Simon that strove to empirically show that what is “really going on” in minds is the shuffling of symbols in a systematic way. By setting up the framework of AI in terms of this input>>processing>>output “boxology”, AI researchers attempted to demonstrate that the brain is really a very complicated information processor that could in principle be replicated on a silicon medium. After all, if all that matters is the “function” of information processing, then the actual substrate of the mind is irrelevant. All that matters is the algorithms, or “software”, running over-top the “hardware”. Notice that the entire research paradigm of AI, derived from cognitive science, is based on the metaphor of the computer. It is this metaphor that Dreyfus wants to combat and instead replace it with a more phenomenologically accurate account of what goes on when humans with minds interact with the environment.

Dreyfus uses the “frame problem” as a prime example of why this traditional symbol-shunting, representationalist program was doomed from the beginning. The frame problem is simply the problem of knowing the relevant context for a particular problem. AI programs need to know what particular knowledge is relevant to the the situation in order to realistically cope with the world. As Dreyfus is apt to point out, the human world of meaning is saturated with significance precisely because we are immersed in a “referential totality”. So for example, modeling the human use of tools can’t be done with “brute force” because whenever we use a hammer, the referential totality of nails and what-we-are-hammering-for comes into use. There is a particular way of being of hammers because they are embedded in a cultural “existential matrix” that is imparted onto the human world through the communal use of language.

Dreyfus concludes that in order for an AI to get past this crucial problem of contextual relevance, they would need to be imbued with particular “bodily needs” in order so that the AI could “cope” with the world. In other words, these AI need to be embodied and embedded in the world so that there is a particular significance for the program, or else it will never be able to act intelligently in the world. You can’t develop a truly artificial intelligence based on pure symbol shunting because the significance of the world stems not from our brain “processing” symbolically, but rather from the entire referential totality of culture. We can’t escape from the fact that our intelligence results from persons coping with an environment.