Logos Read online

  Sense-making is not the product of the individual mind, although this is where it has ultimately to be registered or indeed realized. It is fashioned in the boundless community of minds, woven out of the explicitly joined attention we pay to the world, shared through a trillion cognitive handshakes, overwhelmingly mediated by the languages – words, non-verbal signs, and artefacts – that constitute the fabric of intelligible, known reality.

  The present volume is not an exercise in Cartesian “systematic doubt” or in Cartesian certainty, but in surprise; in cultivated, organized, even systematic surprise. It does not provide many answers: it is closer to “Oh!” than to “QED”. The exploration will in many places merely be reminders of what we all know about our knowledge. While it will be structured, the structure will be imposed on something that is intrinsically unstructured. What is on offer is not an explanation but merely a description one of whose chief aims is to reinforce resistance to an unsurprised reductionism. The inquiry into how it is we make sense of things seems always to lead on to higher-order sense-making that requires explanation.

  Chapter 1 “Seeing the Sense-Making Animal” attempts to scope the territory. I will trace some of the paths between sense-experience and the higher sense-making Einstein felt to be mysterious. The chapter shall not follow the conventional curriculum of theories of explanation and philosophies of science. I shall not separate and adjudicate between teleological (“to what end”), functional (“serving what function”), reductive (“A boils down to B”), and psychological explanations of phenomena. Nor shall I examine the relations between the invocation of causes, laws and entities such as elementary particles and forces, as instruments of sense-making. Nor, again, shall I discuss the relationship between the explanatory power and truth of explanations, or the contrast between anti-realist and realist accounts of explanation. This is not only because I have nothing original to say about these matters but also (and more importantly) because the purpose of this chapter is to dig into the many layers of cognitive soil out of which particular and general explanations arise.5

  In the next chapter, “Logos: A Brief Backward Glance”, I will glance at a few of the most influential prescientific stories humans have told themselves in their endeavour to make sense of the fact that the world is to an astonishing degree intelligible to us. My potted, potholed, history will be anchored to a term that seems to gather up much that is central to our inquiry in its voluminous denotative and connotative folds: Logos.

  The next two chapters look at two ways of accounting for our ability to make sense of the world. In Chapter 3 “Deflating the Mystery 1: Putting the World Inside the Mind”, I examine the idea, most closely associated with Immanuel Kant, that we understand the natural world because the laws of nature that structure our experience originate within our understanding. In Chapter 4 “Deflating the Mystery 2: Logos as Bio-Logos” I offer a critical examination of the contrary view: that the world is amenable to our understanding because understanding has been shaped by the material world in such a way as to ensure our survival.

  Having set aside these attempts at demystification I return to the task of clarifying the challenge of making sense of the fact that the world makes sense. Chapter 5, “The Escape from Subjectivity”, highlights the perspectival and parochial nature of the awareness from which understanding necessarily takes its rise, given that we are embodied, and the miracle of our transcendence of those limits. This sets the scene for the examination in Chapter 6, “Thatter: Knowledge”, of the essential nature of knowledge and the realm of “thatter”, in which we are immersed and in relation to which we conduct much of our lives. The very nature of knowledge presupposes, at least on a realistic account, that it is about something other than, and independent of, itself. Consequently, there has to be an irreducible gap between our minds and the universe of which we are mindful. The gap is between two relata: the knower and the known. Chapter 7 “Senselessness at the Heart of Sense” examines the necessary residual opacity in the two protagonists. The final chapter “Towards a Complete Understanding of the World?” gathers up several threads of the inquiry. It problematizes the idea of progress in understanding and addresses the inescapable limits to the intelligibility of the world. The question of whether humanity cognitively advances by some absolute criterion remains vexed.

  There are addenda to some chapters. Whether they are necessary elaborations, clarifications, or simply digressions will be for the reader to judge. The truth is that the topic does not have natural boundaries. As with other philosophical inquiries, its limits are imposed rather than intrinsic.

  Two things will be apparent. The first is that it is not a work of scholarship, although it enters areas in which the primary, secondary and tertiary literature is enormous. Secondly, its aim is the relatively modest one of removing some of the barriers to seeing the mystery of our capacity to make sense of things and the mysterious fact that we pass our individual lives steeped in knowledge and understanding that, albeit incomplete, nevertheless far exceeds what we are or even experience; and, that collectively, we seem to have grounds for believing that we understand more of the world than those who came before us and who lived, as we still do, in a patchwork of ignorance and knowledge, confusion and clarity, nonsense and sense.

  CHAPTER 1

  Seeing the sense-making animal

  In what follows, I will trace a path from everyday observations which may generate or solve local puzzles, transitions from events that are clues to other events, against the background of already-made sense, to scientific sense, in a naive way that would make philosophers of science and historians of human cognition reach for the smelling salts. My primary aim is to make the richness, the complexity, and the multi-dimensionality of human sense-making more visible. There is no intention to retrace the actual path that humanity and individual human beings have taken in progressing from pre-scientific gawping (and reacting) to a scientific world-picture whose success may be measured in part by the extent to which it has marginalized the natural world in favour of a landscape of technologies. Nor will I give an adequate account of the collective cognitive journey from seeing patterns to seeking them by means of reliable methodologies. My aim is merely the more modest one of highlighting the scale of the long and winding intellectual journey to our present mode of comprehending the world in which we live, that Einstein celebrated. We shall be dipping our toes in deep and muddy waters.

  When we try to take the measure of the extraordinary fact that we make (partial) sense of the world, we run into a thicket of connected and overlapping terms: “understanding”, “explaining”, “figuring out”, “grasping and solving”, “recognizing”, “interpreting”, “classifying”, “generalizing”, “detecting patterns”, “seeing order”, “observing structures”; various modes of a “because” that invokes causes, reasons, and other ways of registering intuitions of necessity; noting connections, observing law-like behaviour, uncovering fundamental reality (or realities) or general truths. This is just some of the foliage in the lexical shrubbery. Any exploration of the “sense-making” animal seems obliged, however, to begin with sense experience.

  There are many reasons for thinking of the deliverances of our senses as “the ground floor” of our awareness, the platform of all cognitive ascent, the basic stuff out of which sense must be made. Admittedly, almost from the beginning, there is a shaping of experience into a structured world, a nexus of significance. World-building, and learning how to be in the world, are products of an iteration between sense experience and sense-making. Even so, it is reasonable to think of sense experience as basic. If, to modify Kant, experiences without ideas are blind, ideas without experiences are empty,1 without sense experience, there would be nothing to make sense of. They are traditional starting points of philosophical theories of knowledge, particularly those influenced by the empirical tradition associated in anglophone philosophy with John Locke and David Hume. And Kant started with the assumption that all knowledge
begins with experience.2

  There has been an equally strong tradition – beginning in European philosophy with Parmenides and Plato – according to which sense experience was a barrier to apprehending truth and reality. The latter would be seen only when intelligence burned away the sensory mist. This was not, however, the path to the kind of sense-making that so justifiably astonished Einstein.

  Our senses, after all, are our fundamental connection with that which is “out there”. Arguably, they are that in virtue of which there is an “out there”: the material world does not, of itself, have either inside or outside, here or there. Sense experience is our exposure to what we might call a “proto-epistemosphere”. They offer a revelation of a reality manifested as handy or distant, populated with the presences or absences of elements basic to our health, well-being and survival: food and predators, threats and promises, friends and adversaries, or more globally daylight or weather. The “out there”, felt on our body, experienced inside our body, revealed to seeming immediate awareness, straddles what we are and where we find ourselves.

  Even this basic “outsideness” of (the) “out there” – the given into which we are pitched, our primary situation, the locus of our starting points and our destinations – is more complex and mysterious than might at first appear (and we shall return to it in Chapter 3). There is the far from simple truth that whatever we are aware of as “out there” has somehow to be inside or part of us and yet at the same time be posited as distinct from us, in-itself as well as for-us.

  Contemporary theories of this basic aspect of sense-making try (vainly) to resolve the tension between our sense experiences as items that are within us and as items that are “of” something outside of us. A currently popular approach among philosophers attempts to do so by postulating that sense experiences are material effects within us (specifically our brains) of the objects we are aware of as being outside of us. The passage from Quine, quoted in the Overture, which speaks of “our meagre contacts with the physical world” and “the mere impacts of rays and particles on our surfaces and a few odds and ends such as the strain of walking uphill”3 beautifully encapsulates the idea that our knowledge begins with experience and that the latter is due to a causal interaction between our own bodies and those that are outside of it. The gap between the sensor and the sensed that holds open the “outside” is thus apparently bridged at the same time as it is maintained.

  The reasons why this causal approach does not work are more interesting than might initially appear and will figure in the chapters to come, particularly Chapter 4. If I mention it at the outset, it is to pre-empt any suggestion that the mystery of making sense begins only at a higher level than sense experience, and that the latter is straightforward. On the contrary, that mystery pervades all our consciousness.

  Moreover, sense experience is not a pure substrate upon which sense-making operates, in innocence of what happens at higher levels. As already noted, except perhaps in the very early days of life, our sensory awareness of the world is pervaded by something that goes beyond it. That characteristic is what makes awareness “of” – x, y, or z. In short, there isn’t a basic state of consciousness in which we are bathed in a sea of pure sensation. Our experiences are organized and ascribed to things in a world. The experienced world is structured; otherwise what is “out there” would be slop and the mind would be delirium. The world is not first served up as a blizzard of unprocessed sensory experiences arising from inside or without the body which is then gathered up into sense-making categories.

  This is one of the fundamental truths that prompted Kant’s focus on the synthetic power of the mind.4 We do not piece together the objects of perception, the things we locate “out there” and engage with, out of showers of discrete sense experience, then classify them, and then see what we might do with them, and finally explain them with reference to other items similarly built up. As many philosophers have pointed out, our experiences are not atomic, sequins of uncategorized bits of sound, luminosity, tingles, and the like. They belong to a field, to a continuum of what we might call “disclosure”, and this field is not merely a network of physical spatiotemporal relations but a nexus of significations – of meaningful “whats” laid out before us connected with one another by means of visible and invisible “whys”. A blizzard of flashes and tingles, etc., would not add up to “surroundings” – to an outside. A huge literature testifies to the effort that has gone into observing how, and in what ways, sense experience relates to a world.

  Our consciousness of what is “out there” – even imagined as an instantaneous time-slice – is not (just) of a sphere of material elements belonging to a succession of present moments. It is also an unfolding realm of possibility, and consequently a theatre of ongoing, past, future, or potential action. We are not, after all, merely, or even primarily, spectators. Our spectatorial self is a luxury self and, even then, is caught up in ongoing agency. Even flâneurs must continue doing all those things that are necessary to keep them alive and safe – in order to be able to be intrigued, or bored, caring or careless as they turn their supposedly disinterested gaze on the world.

  A “ground floor outside”, constructed out of pure sensory experience of what is out there (or of our own bodies as the most proximate layer of out there), is therefore a myth. Sentience is impregnated from the outset with higher-order sense-making. The obverse is, however, also true: higher-order sense-making is tethered to more basic experience.

  Take a paradigm case of higher-order sense-making: the scientist making a measurement. She must handle the apparatus, having seen that it is in front of her and, indeed, near to her. And she is not protected from the world accessed directly by her senses. Preoccupied by the light from distant stars, she trips over a loose cable.

  Consider another case. The reader following a novel harvests light off the pages on which the story is written, pages that have other physical properties, shared by the material objects of the room in which the book is being read, and carrying many characteristics – such as creases – that are irrelevant to the sense being extracted from the written word. While we may lose ourselves in a book, in a space of abstract meanings, we never leave behind the realm of basic sense experience. The weight of the book in the hand is mingled with the sensations associated with our anxiety as to what might happen next to the character for whom we are concerned. I may be following the hero down a street in Moscow but I can still be made to jump by the cleaner suddenly appearing at the window with his cloth. We are always available for, or exposed to, the connectedness of the material world that physically surrounds us. We never entirely vacate the spaces of nature and sense experience for those of discourse and reason.

  All of this can be accepted but, nevertheless, the endeavour to distinguish and unpack the many layers of sense-making can fruitfully begin with sense experience, and the no-longer and not-yet, the undisclosed and the manifestly hidden, with which our sensory fields are dappled. It is here we enact the basic modes of “sussing out”. We look to see what is around the corner, under the stone, behind a wall, beyond the visible beyond. We immediately identify or slowly realize the nature of an object we encounter, recognizing it as an instance of a type. We see, or look to see, why something happened, identifying a cause.

  What discrete acts of (explicit) understanding have in common is that they are triggered by an interruption in sense or discontinuity of an encircling horizon. The interruption is typically registered by surprise, by puzzlement, by the overturning of an expectation that might only then become explicit. Sense-making takes the form of a search for local answers to “What?” that gives the clue to “Why?”. There is a dawning in a local darkness.

  While, sniffing, palpating, tasting may yield answers to “What?” or even “Why?”, it is the distance senses – vision and hearing – that are most associated with the primordial search for sense prompted by an interruption in the continuum of sense. We walk round an enigmatic item to see what
it is or what we might do with it, what makes it tick, or how it came to be here. We listen actively: “What is/what caused that sound?”. Active sense-making is even more apparent in the case of sight, where heightened and even trained awareness turns seeing into scrutinizing or peering or some other mode of active, disciplined, attention. Even in these rather homely instances, the resultant understanding draws on prior sense-making that itself goes beyond sense perception: the classification of items; and a sense of how items of a certain sort hang together. Elementary and advanced sense-making are mingled in moment-to-moment awareness of what is happening, of what is out there.

  Making unfolding sense of the unfolding experienced world is not always active; it is sometimes just a matter of waiting – to see what happens next, what is disclosed. Or not even waiting: “this” is followed by “that” in some meaningful succession, even if the connection is naked conjunction, with “and” dominating over “therefore” and “because”, the staccato of disconnected events or the legato of process, as simultaneous happenings compete for our attention. The ringing in my ears, the tap of the keyboard, the steady chugging of the washing machine below, and the occasional cough from the next room, fill my unawaiting ears, unsurprised by the downpour of happening. Even (seemingly passive) waiting, however, can be active and attuned, shaped by expectations that may be evident only in retrospect when the unexpected surprises us. The temporal relation between waiting and sense-making may be complex or even back to front, as when I look out for another flash of lightning to confirm that the rumble I have just heard was that of thunder.