Living among small announcements
or, singularity in a connected world
1. Big headlines: Holistic powers
Powers – potentialities, potentia – can be found everywhere. An ontology of powers can be a perfect companion, if not a compulsory travel mate, for a conception of thoughts as abilities. It seems in fact that powers constitute a network of connections that run from thought - taken to be radically holistic and understood in an externalist way – to a pan-dispositionalist conception of the world as made of powers of different kinds. Thoughts are both interconnected and unseparable from reality and therefore should not be accounted for in terms of their contents, but rather in terms of what they afford us to do. The world itself is made of modally connected parts that should be accounted for dispositionally. Powers – encompassing both thought and the rest of the world – offer the elements for a network of modally connected elements where every item seem to be tie to all the others. However, we live among singularities. Singularities seem to invoke insulation, external relations, difference and what cannot be determined but only experienced. The danger is that an ontology of powers can machine gun singularities at birth. We want to claim, however, that powers can do better: they cannot be part of a totalizing structure bringing together thought and world. This is because powers are to be understood as both holistic and singular, both connected to the rest of the world and local, both directed towards what is outside and pinned to its own constraints. A world that is filled with possibilia is one where what is wide-open lives hands in hands with what is unique. This double-sided nature of powers can provide a way out of a distinctively 20th century philosophical preoccupation: how to put together the singular and the all-embracing structure of thought and ontology.[1]
First, how we come to see thought and world as powers. It is not always obvious that a power-based metaphysics of thought should be accompanied by a general ontology of powers. Both an ontology of powers and an understanding of thought as powers (as well as the holism that goes with them) can be seen as developing a broadly Spinozist view. While one could characterize Humean metaphysics as fully devoid of modal commitments (being these no more than a projection of reason into nature), the ontology that we embrace takes the idea that possibilities and necessary connections are at the very core of nature. We believe that the influence of Humean metaphysics has been enormous in the history of philosophy and is still strongly felt. One of the main culprits of this lasting legacy is Kant’s attempted solution to Humean scepticism: by placing the focus on normativity rather than on modality and by insisting on the idea that necessity and possibility are properties of thought rather than of the world, Kant bites the Humean bullet. As far as conceptual thought is concerned, the world such as it is both unreachable and modally inanimate. In a sense, Kant hardens the problem: it is not only by limiting our access to the world to what we obtain through the senses that lose access to the multiplicity of connections between what there is.
Some manifestations of the quest for categorical and stable items in the world can be found in the domination of discussions about the nature of intentional content that forgets the idea of thought as intentional acts. This is the case for representationalist conceptions of the mind, but can be equally found in the debate between defenders of the conceptual character of empirical content and defender of its non-conceptual character. The idea that some contents are non-conceptual attempts to instil some fixity within thought: some contents are present independently of any other, just as a mere effect of a bare presence of an item in the world. So, for example, the bare presence of pain would be enough to make us a have a related content that bypasses the need for any concept. The immediate, or the given, is, in general, an appeal to ready-made contents that are indifferent to any disposition. Representationalist accounts of thought and knowledge take contents to be pure acts, unrelated to what else is present. Surely, we take contents to be representations much in the same way as we take properties to be categorical; however, pure actuality is a consequence of dispositions being directed to prototypes. In order to, say, predict something based on a conditional such as “if this salt is put in water it will dissolve” we need to assume that other powers are not affecting the salt. Such assumptions enable nomological statements to be predictive – and explain their failures; we can individuate connections between parts of the world and without them, prediction is impossible as each item of the world is subject to an indefinite number of powers. To some extent, a device to introduce ceteris paribus scenarios is the only way we can focus on particular connections. They introduce an element of modal inanimateness capable of separating a particular connection from the others. In a pan-dispositionalist ontology of powers, actuality, we submit, comes from such devices to create ceteris paribus scenarios and it is completely indexical. It is about what is maintained fixed for some power-related reason. We shall come back to this.
To counter such tendencies we will invite the reader to consider the idea that an ontology of powers, where the world is not constituted by representable objects and properties but rather by “affordances”, by possibilities offered to thought and to other powers in the world, may preclude any temptation to see the mind as an independent variable always short of full contact with the world. As a complement to the idea of a world constituted by affordances, powers in the same sense in which thoughts are powers, we will claim that the open-ended character of thought also demands “resistances”, it demands that there should be things that don’t fit any given conceptual repertoire, that forces the thinker to constantly revise and modify her approach to the world, to create and recombine her concepts and, by such to acquire new powers and discover new possibilities in the world. This brings a way to think of experience in a deeply non-Humean way, not as a foundation for knowledge, but as part of a biggest ontology of powers that extends far beyond any cognitive realm. [2]
We believe that a consequence of this move is that neither the idea of an “end of enquiry” nor versions of holism that countenance the possibility of absolute knowledge, of knowledge of the “whole”, can be given any sense. Against them we will recommend what could be called Spinozian humility (or, alternatively, Davidsonian humility or Deleuzian humility). We contrast such form of epistemic humility to what has been called Kantian Humility (Rae Langton xxxx). To our mind, Kantian humility, the recognition that we cannot warrant our knowledge of how things really are, invites the postulation of all-embracing abstractions such as absolute spirits, ends of enquiry or of history and ideal communities of communication with little room for singularities. From Spinoza we learn that being modest about our powers is a consequence of realizing the complexity of relations between what there is and also between what there can be, not of ignoring it and also a consequence of coming to terms with the idea that not everything is up to us, that even when we can be said to be acting the world has to collaborate. Davidson inherits this line of thought from Spinoza and also teaches us, explicitly, that in order to detect error and disagreement we must assume a large basis of truth and agreement and, implicitly, that it is a condition of possibility of thought that points of view may differ and that different angles on things may be compared and improve each other. Finally, Deleuze makes it clear that no conceptual exercise could achieve a complete organization of the world because forcing identities into reality is as much in the essence of thought as recognizing that something is always left out, that nature simultaneously offers us similarities and differences, allows us to intervene and resists our intervention.
A metaphysical holism without the whole could be used to characterize Spinoza as well as other outsiders to the stream that goes from Hume to Hegel via Kant (such as Davidson or Deleuze, but also Nietzsche). And the cognitive holism that opens a path between scepticism and epistemic dreams of grandeur could be put to a similar use.
A further consequence of pairing what, for short, could be called thought holism and world holism with an understanding of thought and the world in terms of singular, indefinitely interconnected powers is an image that avoids situating thought in a different plane from the rest of the world. Thought is a power amongst powers that can both affect them and be affected by them, that can take advantage of what they afford but also find resistance from them. Our strategy to place thought in the same level doesn’t merely follow from quasi-transcendental considerations regarding its externalist and holistic nature. It is also a consequence of the commitment to a modally animated view of the world, one where powers can be identified by their relations to other powers but where they are also elusive inasmuch as we always need to ignore some relations, some possibilities, some of the other powers which could potentially interfere, in order to achieve such identifications. Thought can now be seeing a device amongst many to make identifications possible, a device capable of incorporating possibilities only to the price of ignoring many others.
If we see the intentionality of thought as a necessary condition for its normativity, but not as a sufficient one, if we are prepared to recognize instances of intentionality where no conceptual, linguistic or cognitive capacities are in view, if we understand the realm of the intentional not as the realm of what is governed by rules or norms, but as the realm of interaction between possibilities, some mysteries that have dominated philosophy from Plato (and, with renewed force, from Descartes) may lose much of their centrality. Once again, Spinoza appears as a lonely and towering beacon. His approach makes the similarity between thought and other powers manifest: there is much that our bodies can do that escapes our knowledge, but there is also much that we know that escapes our consciousness. We are simultaneously full of powers that we ignore and full of knowledge of which we aren’t aware. The picture is both invigorating and humbling and could not be further from the Cartesian attempt to treat the mind as an (admittedly special) object that struggles to relate to the realm of the physical and that is characterized by its unfailing self-awareness, by its complete access to itself. A lot is ignored by the Spinozian mind and a lot is known without knowing that is known. It would be a hard task to find in contemporary theory of knowledge a stronger and better grounded form of epistemological externalism and of fallibilism.
First, the intentional character of our acts of thinking is a form of what has been called physical intentionality (Molnar 2003: 60-66). Physical intentionality could be a starting point to consider thought as part of the world. Molnar argues convincingly that the four features normally associated with Brentano’s account of intentionality can be only slightly modified to characterize an item with physical intentionality: i. it is directed to something beyond itself, ii. it could be directed towards something nonexistent, iii. it is disposed towards exemplars and prototypes rather than specific items and iv. it is sensitive to the way the intended item is presented. (We mean by physically intentional what satisfies this Brentano-Molnar characterization.[3]) Thoughts have a dimension of physical intentionality. Acts of thinking and contents of thoughts are directed to other thoughts centrally because of their power to produce new thoughts and evoke new contents. Thoughts introduce fixity while producing new powers. The introduction of fixity – of ceteris paribus scenarios – is arguably not an exclusivity of conceptual activity (and of our sovereignty over our world-view). Many physical and biological powers depend on a fixed environment: the frog (physically) intends a fly and is not geared to an environment full of fly replicas; salt will not dissolved under extreme temperatures, the bee goes for a flower-looking object and not towards a flower pill that might contain everything it needs, etc. Features iii. and iv. of the Brentano-Molnar characterization of physical intentionality suggest that other powers have the capacity to produce a ceteris paribus scenario around them: iii. the capacity to be directed towards exemplars and prototypes of an item and assume its specifics have irrelevant powers and iv. the capacity to be directed to something in a specific mode of presentation assuming that other powers could not affect the presentation of the directed item. We call these devices that act on the assumption that some powers are indifferent to others ceteris paribus devices (CPD for short). Thought – and arguably mental intentionality – is a CPD but we claim that they are not the only ones. CPDs are grounded on physical intentionality. Our capacity to project fixity in the world – in contrast with the capacity to project modality postulated by Humeans – is shared by other CPDs in the world. Our own projection can then be understood on the light of CPDs in general that, in its turn, can be understood in terms of physical intentionality.
That thought has correctness conditions is not central for its intentional nature. Thought can be seen as a power to take advantage of possibilities offered to it by the world, and in this it is not alone. These considerations do not amount to a solution for one of the hardest problems in contemporary philosophy, that of naturalizing normativity, but they certainly simplify the task (or, at the very least, clarify it): it is not the intentionality of the normative realm that needs naturalizing because intentionality can be found in areas of reality that are not subject to norms.
Establishing a separation between problems related to the nature of what is governed by norms and problems related to the nature of intentionality allows a fresh reading of Kripke’s take on Wittgenstein’s rule following considerations. Kripke (1982) finds in the Investigations a novel form of scepticism, more radical than any of its predecessors. Wittgenstein, according to Kripke, in highlighting that we cannot account for error or correctness either by appealing to self-standing, pre-existing, practice-independent rules or by interpreting general rules in a way that establishes the correctness or not of specific practices or (crucially) by spotting some grounding “fact” (say, a disposition to say or think something rather than something else, an inclination to answer one way or another), leaves us in a situation where we cannot even warrant the very idea of content or meaning. Traditional sceptical challenges question our entitlement to make claims of knowledge (about the world, about the meaning of our utterances). Wittgenstein’s pre-empts such challenges with a mightier one: we even lack the resources to identify contents capable of aiming at correctness. The detachment from reality is more than epistemological, it is transcendental. Kripke’s reading of Wittgenstein has been interpreted either as hopelessly sceptical as well as unfaithful[4] or as an invitation to communitarism[5]. However, if intentionality is seen as a feature of capacities that cannot be characterized in terms of rules (and, hence, the nature of intentionality cannot be accounted for in terms of our preferred view on normativity), inclinations (and, more generally, dispositions) don’t need to be put into question as a consequence of the irreducibility of norms to facts. The pupil’s inclination to answer 1002 when asked to add 2 to 1000 cannot ground the correctness of the answer (for once, she could be equally inclined to answer 1004 and there seems to be no way to distinguish systematic errors from occasional ones), but it already constitutes an intentional act and, hence, is an intentional enabling condition for the normativity of language that remains immune to Kripke’s form of scepticism. Semantical and modal scepticisms could be more harmful than their epistemological relative, but they are also easier to preclude with a holistic ontology of powers.
The previous insight may also serve to separate Millikan’s from other projects of naturalizing meaning and intentionality. While most authors in the field (such as Fodor or Drestke) set themselves to fit intentionality within a nomological conception of the world (where necessity is canonically related to the existence of laws in nature and, in particular, to the allegedly exceptionless laws of physics), Millikan reconstructs the emergence of full-blown intentionality by focusing on biology rather than on physics, and by using the heavily intentional notion of Proper function. While physicalist attempts at naturalizing normativity toy dangerously with the naturalistic fallacy (and fall into the Cartesian trap of treating the mind as an object as much in need of prediction and control as other natural objects) by seeing norms in terms of laws, a biologically inspired naturalism is in a much better position to view mental intentionality side by side with other natural forms of intentionality.[6]
Furthermore, the idea that normativity introduces an ontological gulf with respect to the rest of nature can be neutralized by means of a line of thought inspired by a recent paper by Bjørn Ramberg. Ramberg answers to Rorty’s claim that Davidson should abandon any separation between a normative realm and a physical one (both Rorty and Ramberg talk about intentionality, but the point should be made in terms of normativity if the ideas of the previous paragraphs are taken into consideration) because the distinction between physical underdetermination and mental or linguistic indetermination only makes sense if we give pride of place to the explanations offered by the natural sciences (as Quine often does and Davidson refuses to do). If the physical is submitted to similar constrains than the mental, Rorty argues, no reason remains to keep them apart. As far as intentionality is concerned we fully agree with Rorty. However, Ramberg offers a reading of Davidson’s work that highlights a deeper motive in his philosophy not contemplated by Rorty. The title of the paper (“Rorty vs. Davidson: post-ontological philosophy of mind”) already offers a suggestion of this motive: Davidson’s rejection of the idea that the mental is amenable to the kinds of explanations canonically offered by the natural sciences is not a consequence of an ontological prejudice but it rather responds to the most subversive strand of his philosophy, a refusal to treat speakers and thinkers much as the objects of the natural science, i.e., as subject to prediction and control rather than to understanding, interpretation and charity.[7] The avoidance of the naturalistic fallacy becomes a minor issue in comparison with the rejection of the Cartesian category error of treating the mind as an object, by far a longer lasting heritage than immaterialism (as it was already noticed by Ryle; the ghost in the machine is a two-faced monster: both the ghost and the machine are problematic).
The idea of a post-ontological philosophy of mind does not enter in conflict with the kind of ‘ontological turn’ involved in arguing for the continuum between mental and physical intentionality. Rather the opposite: the philosophy of mind has much to win by realizing that traditional ontological issues such as the mind-body problem may not even arise if discussion about the place of minds in the world replaced by a focus on questions regarding the nature of thought.
One of the matters that has deserved more attention in recent debates is that of accounting for the constraints needed for thought to be objective. Even though it is not our purpose to enter into detailed exegesis of contemporary literature on this topic, we would like to make two related points about the main traps awaiting most conceptions of thought that fall short of a full acceptance of holism. A very illuminating way of setting up the problem is that offered by McDowell in his influential book Mind and World. According to McDowell, modern philosophy has witness an oscillation between two equally attractive but ultimately unsatisfactory explanations of the possibility of knowledge and objectivity. On the one hand, some philosophers have claimed that thought’s responsiveness to the world (openness to the world is another expression used by McDowell) cannot come but from empirical content, not yet conceptually articulated but still capable of giving justification to conceptual thought and of granting objectivity to it. This proposal manages to offer the friction supposedly needed by thought but only to a very high price, introducing elements that are externally given, and, as such, of a very different nature than the contents of judgments and other beliefs. Their immediacy is both their most attractive feature and the most dubious one. The question that motivates the move to the other side of the oscillation is how can they play any form of epistemic role if they themselves cannot be subject to justification. If they are not conceptual, they cannot be part of the kind of inferences that constitute the standard of epistemic justification. That appealing to them is bringing an unsustainable dogma into our conception of thought is a theme that can be found in authors such as Hegel, Wittgenstein, Sellars or Davidson, it is the myth of immediacy, of the given, of bare presences, or pre-conceptual empirical contents.
On the other hand, a common reaction to such forms of foundationalism has been to sit of objectivity within the network of thoughts. Only beliefs can justify other beliefs, justification can only come from conceptual items. Belonging to a coherent network of thoughts is the only way to be objective and to receive justification. The resource to anything given to thought from outside is avoided, and with it the idea that content could be non-conceptual but, McDowell concludes, thought ceases to be constraint epistemically by the world. The world can at most cause thoughts, but their justification cannot come from the world but only from inside, from other thoughts.
McDowell believes that both sides make the common mistake of ignoring the possibility that experiential content may be both conceptual and imposed by the world on the thinker, and argues that this is a version of the position defended by Kant regarding the role of sensibility. The faculty of experience, unlike those of judgement and understanding, is receptive and passive but can play a role in the epistemic economy of thought because it shares with them the very concepts that articulate judgements and beliefs.
We have developed at some length McDowell’s approach to the question because it relies heavily on two ideas that our proposal to compliment a view of thoughts as powers with a ontology of powers wants to avoid. First, McDowell thinks that objectivity and epistemic justification call for a sphere of thought characterized by its passivity: to him this is the only way for the world to have a saying. Once that we isolate a part of the mind and make it responsible for the acquisition of empirical content it is of little us to insist that the concepts that articulate such content must also be available for fully active thinking exercises. Making a judgement or holding a belief may only be understood within a holistic network of other judgements and beliefs, but when perception is the issue, the holistic network remains inert and waits for specific contents to be provided by experience. Experiential content is partially independent from the network of beliefs. Passivity brings with it an element of atomism but it also brings the possibility that areas of thought may be intelligible and yet untouched by the world (after all, McDowell starts out by giving plausibility to the idea that thought is in need of worldly constraint, as if the very idea of thought didn’t already imply being fully situated in the world). The postulation of a passive sphere of thought also invites a partially atomistic conception of the world. After all in experience we receive specific messages from the world, messages with a form that echoes the modally independent facts of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. An ontology of powers such as the one that we favour depicts an active, modally interconnected world. And our conception of thoughts as powers, as capacities to respond to the possibilities that the world affords while also limited by the world’s resistance, doesn’t make a separation between active and passive conceptual exercises, but rather recognizes that activity and passivity are present in every act of thinking.
While his commitment to cognitive states that are fully passive puts him at odds with Davidson (the philosopher that appears as the main representative of the “coherentist” approach within McDowell’s dialectics), the second assumption that we find suspect in the debate inaugurated by him finds Gareth Evans (who is the central player of the myth of the given team) as his opponent. The idea is that what is at stake in our understanding of thought is the nature of intentional content. Fifteen years after McDowell denounced some uses that have been made of the notion of non-conceptual content (introduced by Evans in the early eighties and popularized by authors such as Peacocke) as a contemporary version of the myth of the given, the confrontation between conceptualist and non-conceptualist doesn’t seem to have move very far. While defenders of non-conceptual content still insist on its need to explain the fine-grained character of perceptual content or to make room for non-linguistic or non-conceptual creatures having contentful states, conceptualists keep rehearsing variations of McDowell’s original accusations. It is hard to see how both sides could cease on their obstination as long as they concentrate on the issue of content. Non-conceptualist are surely right in their refusal to accept that any set of concepts can do justice to the richness with which the world presents itself to the subject of experience. But there is as much strength on the conceptualist point that such richness cannot play a role for thought if it cannot be accommodated by concepts, its defining tools.
However, our conception of thoughts as powers opens a new avenue by viewing thoughts not primarily as thought’s contents but instead as acts of thinking. The idea that thoughts are capacities, abilities, powers entails that thinking is already being situated on the world, being capable of acting on it by interacting with some of its powers. But every act of thinking also contains the seed of a failure, as we learn from Deleuzian humility. Every attempt at interacting with the world through concepts runs the risk of crashing against the unknown, of seeing something as what is not, of finding oneself powerless in the face of unpredictable possibilities, of bypassing the unfitting. Finding oneself without the concepts needed to deal with a novel situation is no less an act of thinking than smoothly coping with the most familiar scenario (only linguistic creatures can experience their lack of words to describe an event, only thinkers can feel that there are circumstances where their concepts are insufficient). A world of powers is a world where no power is limitless, where no power has itself as its ultimate grounding. Thoughts are powers because they carry some capabilities but also because they preclude some others.
There has to be room for thought to find resistance, for singularities to escape conceptual exercises, because the power of thought, like all powers, is not infinite. While thinking brings with it unique powers, opens up exclusive possibilities, it is on the very nature of thought that it reacts to stubborn circumstances, that it attempts to create new concepts and to modify existing ones in view of a world that constantly challenges it. It is not that some of our contents are non-conceptual, it is rather that some of our thoughts need to be rethought. The world constraints our thought not by providing contents, conceptual or not, but by eluding full incorporation into them.
To embrace an ontology of powers is to embrace an ontology of affordances, a notion that brings more active resonances than the notion of properties, better suited to describe an inert ontology that only receives life through the operation of laws. Thought’s engagement with the world always involves an active aspect, the actualization of a possibility, the activation of a power.
Experience is no different in this. We deal in powers all the time, a world of powers that makes contact with us by means of the affordances and resistances within thought. Those affordances and resistances can only be understood in a thoroughly holistic manner, but holism involves not only contents but acts of thinking, required for contents to be understood. Experience comes always with acts of thinking. This placing of experience, and of acts of thinking in general, against an ontological, rather than epistemological background, such as the one offered by the notions of affordance and resistance, as we have already highlighted, removes the need to concentrate on issues related to the nature of content (in contrast with both a representationalist conception of thought and a metaphysical outlook centered on properties) to see the subject of experience from the outset as actively interacting with other powers in the world. We have already argued that such an interaction should be not be seen as lacking any limits, given that the world’s powers not only afford the experiencer to do things but also keep escaping her best attempt at understanding. But the limitation is far from having a negative character: the world’s resistance to being fully embraced by thought and experience feeds acts of thinking into new directions and it is the foundation of its creative and powerful nature. Experience is creative because it is open-ended. Thought is powerful because it brings new possibilities into the world, but also because it is constantly pushed by the world into new directions. In this sense, experience, and acts of thinking, deals with singularities – what is not determined before the act of experiencing. Singularity may seem to be anathema to holism, but if we embrace an ontology of powers, we can see it as the other side of the same coin: what acts of thoughts and affordances in the world converge to.
2. Small announcements and the metaphysics of some
Deleuze and Guattari hold that singularities are best expressed by indefinite expressions, a structure of small announcements. They say:
Car si le plan de consistence n’a pour contenu que des heccéités, il a aussi toute une sémiotique particulère qui lui sert d’expression. [...] Cette sémiotique est surtout composée de noms propres, de verbes à l’infinitif et d’articles ou de pronons indéfinis. [...] Em troisième lieu, l’article et le pronon indéfinis ne sont pas des indetermines [...] ils ne manquent de rien lorsquíls introducent des heccéités, des evenement don’t l’individuation ne passe pas par une forme et ne se fait pas par un sujet. Alors l’indefini se conjugue avec le maximum de determination: il était une fois, on bat un enfant, un cheval tombe… […] C’est pourquoi nous nous étonnons devant les efforts de la psychanalyse qui veut a tout prix que, dernière les indéfinis, il y a un défini cache, un possessif, un personnel: quand l’enfant dit <
How can an indefinite description – rather than a definite one or, rather, a Russellian proper name[8] - be the best expression in language and thought of a singularity? Other expressions are considered to have the capacity to depict individual objects and bring them to the fore. Russellian proper names, for example, are expressions that allow de re thought about particular objects – where roughly defined borders are available, even when unbeknown to the thinker. The singularity depicted by a name (or definite description in referential use[9], or another expression rigidified[10]) is in some sense inanimate even though it could be animated by properties and relations. What the expression of singularity depicts is often a substratum that is fixed, inanimate and indifferent to its properties.
When singularities are not objects but rather powers or events, another kind of expression could be on demand. Singularities become what happen to things, instead of being bearers of properties and relations (and events) – singular is what happens, not what grounds many happenings. properties and powers are pin to. When we move from an ontology of singular objects to an ontology of singular transitions, we need a suitable change in our expression of singularities – they ought to express that feature of singular free-floating elements.
When discussing the transferability of power tropes, Molnar (2003: 43-44) considers a view he calls non-ownership trope-theory according to which tropes have no bearers – it is an ontology of properties with nothing but bundles of properties (and relations). Tropes would be floating in bundles with no substratum to rely on – no grounding object to be underneath whatever happens. Molnar sets this view aside by considering it a version of Platonism: “It allows the existence of properties without bearers just as Platonism allows universals not instantiated in any object.” Such a trope theory is not relevantly akin to Platonism as it postulates no universals and could not conceive of objects bearing them. Non-ownership trope theory is an ontology where singular items are floating powers: a metaphysics of indeterminacy. Indefinite propositions are therefore the basis for a metaphysics of the indefinite, borderless, vague and yet singular. We claim that an ontology of powers is the right setting for a conception of the world such that there is no definite determinations – like powers floating non-instantiated and not being further actualized in anything other than powers.
We claim thought is irremediably holistic – as is its capacity to respond to whatever is external to it. Surely, we can say that the world it is responding to is well-determined and atomistic (and even modally inanimate) but, in the process of contacting it, thought looses the determination as its contact with each part of the world is elusive. The picture would be that of us knowing something about the world but we cannot pinpoint at what we know. Indeterminacy as to what there is in the world is a product of our sovereignty. We don’t know which of our thoughts are true because we are limited in our access to the world. We are proposing to reject this picture in favour of an ontology of indetermination – a metaphysics of some. The world is such that some of the things we think are true, but nothing specific. The world is made of small announcements. The world is made of “a red thing passes by”, uninstantiated, “a child is beaten”, associated to a child different from the one we think, “there are some tables”, without any determination as to what are tables. Surely, the indeterminacies of the world don’t have to fit those of thought – thought approximates world’s indeterminacies by thinking further and increasing the critical mass of beliefs that are to contain truth. The metaphysics of some is a rejection of the picture according to which indeterminacy cannot be more than projection or ignorance. It is the rejection of the view that there are alls and eaches and as in the world – but there cannot be somes.
Powers vindicate a metaphysics of some. Physically intentional states are about prototypes: some water to dissolve the salt, some pollen, some food, some car passing by. The reach of our knowledge is the reach of what can affect us and affordances (or resistances) are always presented in the form of indefinite descriptions.
[1] The worry, in different ways, is arguably common to philosophers like Russell, Adorno, Lévinas, Derrida, Deleuze, Kaplan, Evans and
[2] The notion of affordance (introduced by J. J. Gibson xxxx) has been put to a lot of use in the cognitive sciences in their attempt to overcome the idea that thought and, more generally, intelligent action demands representations (Wheeler xxxx, Brooks xxxx, etc.). We believe that linking powers to affordances is a neat way to highlight the externalistic commitments of the TH that we favour, as well as the active nature of thought. Conceptual exercises aim at taking advantage of the possibilities of the world, of the things that the world afford us to do. In parallel, the image is not one of thought’s holistic network projecting itself over the world and reorganizing it, but rather one where thinking is itself a power. A power to incorporate possibilities offered by the world as if they were a gift. Even though we will not rehearse in this paper considerations regarding the quasi-transcendental demand for singularity that lies at the bottom of many contemporary understandings of thought (from Russell to Levinas, from Deleuze to Kaplan or Evans), we would like to quickly mention that an ontology of affordances is also an ontology of “resistences”, of singular aspects of the world that do not easily let themselves be embraced by any established conceptual repertoire to the point of forcing thought towards conceptual change and creation. Most discussions of thought concentrate on content and its conceptual or nonconceptual nature. We believe that a change of focus from thoughts as contents to thoughts as acts of thinking could be a much liberating consequence of the WH that we are recommending. However, in section three we will explore other reasons to link WH to TH.
[3] The characterization is in fact only Brentano’s, but Molnar made it, contrary to Brentano’s original purpose, a characterization of physical intentionality.
[4] See, for instance, McDowell (1986) interesting suggestion that what Wittgenstein proposes is the idea that individual instances of following a practice are as normatively important as any general interpretation of the rule could ever be. Or, to put it differently, that no principled separation between instituting a rule and applying it is possible.
[5] Crispin Wright’s (xxxx) defence of the idea that the community within which the rule is learned has the last word on the correctness of its application comes to mind. MORE
[6] Still, there are strong reasons to question Millikan’s success in accounting for the specifically normative character of thought and language in biologically inspired terms, but it is her remarkable merit that she avoids a conflation of normative issues with intentional matters as a starting point.
[7] It is only fair to also mention that Rorty, in his answer to Ramberg, recognizes with outstanding modesty his failure to fully understand Davidson and quickly makes Ramberg’s point his own. It is also important for us to stress an aspect of Davidson’s philosophy that is not put into question either by Ramberg or by Rorty and that makes it compulsory for him to retain a strong separation between physical and intentional explanations: his commitment to the nomological character of causality. This strand of his thought may well be the most difficult to retain after accepting an ontology of powers. Reasons of a very different nature to abandon such a commitment can be found in McDowell 1985 and Hornsby xxxx.
[8] Cf. Evans (1982: xx)
[9] Cf. Donellan (1966)
[10] Cf. Kaplan (xxxx)
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