This is, in a logical sense, a prequel to yesterday’s post, Reality 1: Kuhn and Harman. In that post I asserted an analogy between Thomas Kuhn’s treatment of the relationship between Newtonian and Einsteinian mechanics and Graham Harman’s treatment of Eddington’s two tables, the phenomenal table and the quantum mechanical table. The purpose of this prequel is to put some conceptual scaffolding between the perceptual activity of examining an object and the rather more abstraction activity of scientific reasoning about objects. We begin by first considering Heidegger’s account of the object, as given by Harman (for I’ve not myself read Heidegger) and then move on to the ecological psychology of J. J. Gibson. That will create an “epistemological bridge” to yesterday’s treatment of Kuhn.
Tool Being and the Phenomenal World
Let us begin with some passages from Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object, where he recounts Heidegger’s analysis of the tool (p. 35):
His famous tool analysis in Being and Time shows that our usual way of dealing with things is not observing them as present-at-hand (vorhanden) in consciousness, but silently relying on them as ready-to-hand (zuhanden). Hammers and drills are usually present to us only when they fail. Prior to this they withdraw into a subterranean background, enacting their reality in the cosmos without appearing in the least. Insofar as they recede into the depths, tool-beings tend to coalesce into a system of equipment in which it is difficult to distinguish between individual beings.
I note, without further commentary, that Heidegger chose a tool as his object of philosophical contemplation, that is, something artificial.
I note further that one sort of psychologist would say that we become habituated to tools while a different psychologist would observe that we assimilate tools to our sensory-motor schemas. I provide this psychological framing to ease the transition to J. J. Gibson, a psychologist, but also, simply, as a possible matter of interest.
Harman elaborates (pp. 38): “Heidegger says that we generally notice equipment only when it somehow fails. An earthquake calls my attention to the solid ground on which I rely, just as medical problems alert me to the bodily organs on which I silently depend.” When the tool breaks, our habituated responses fail, our accustomed sensory-motor schemas no longer work. In that ‘void’ the tool slips from being ready-to-hand to being present-at-hand. Harman continues (38-39):
But entities need not “break” in the literal sense of the term, as if due to failing bolts, wires, or engines. For there is already a failure of sorts when I simply turn my attention towards entities, reflecting consciously on my bodily organs or the solid floor of my home. But even when I do so, these things themselves are not yet within my grasp. There will always be aspects of these phenomena that elude me; further surprises might always be in store. No matter how hard I work to become conscious of things, environing conditions will remain of which I never become fully aware.
In thus appears to be a feature of reality that we can never become fully habituated to it, that we can never fully assimilate it to our sensory-motor schemas. Things always exceed our grasp, always outrun us.
At this point we are at the very edge of an observation made by J. J. Gibson. But before we go there we need to explicitly note that Heidegger and Harman are concerned about being, about ontology. Gibson’s concern is epistemological. I invoke Gibson, not because I want to return to epistemology, but because I need to go through epistemology to return to ontology at the level of Kuhn’s paradigms.
Ecological Psychology and the Real
J. J. Gibson called himself an ecological psychologist because he was interested in how perception works in the wild, as it were, rather than in the psychological laboratory, where subjects were often tested with stimulus situations that bare little resemblance to tasks performed in the wild. Gibson saw the world as replete with ‘information’ that the sensorium could readily ‘pick-up’ as it moved about the world.
Late in The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979, pp. 256-257) he took up a question that vexed Descartes: How can you tell a veridical perception from an illusion (say, projected into your mind by a malignant being)?
A surface is seen with more or less definition as the accommodation of the lens changes; an image is not. A surface becomes clearer when fixated; an image does not. A surface can be scanned; an image cannot. When the eyes converge on an object in the world, the sensation of crossed diplopia disappears, and when the eyes diverge, the “double image” reappears; this does not happen for an image in the space of the mind. . . . No image can be scrutinized — not an afterimage, not a so-called eidetic image, not the image in a dream, and not even a hallucination. An imaginary object can undergo an imaginary scrutiny, no doubt, but you are not going to discover a new and surprising feature of the object this way.
That is, we know that something is real because it exceeds our attempts to comprehend it. In Harman’s terms, we know an object is real because it withdraws from us.
Heidegger/Harman and Gibson are considering the same situation, someone examining an object. But they frame it differently. Heidegger/Harman assume the object is real and note that it always outruns scrutiny. Gibson doesn’t know whether the object is real or not, but notes that, if it is real, it will outrun scrutiny. Though I’m not aware that Gibson knew of Heidegger’s ideas – he worked in a rather different intellectual tradition – his treatment of Descartes’ epistemological problem presupposes something rather like Heidegger/Harman’s analysis of real objects.
Now we’re ready for a return to Kuhn, using Gibson’s observation as a criterion for the real: Something is real to the extent that it exceeds our attempts to scrutinize it. Notice that this criterion DOES NOT attempt to match the realm of ideas with the realm of things, as though one could hold them out in front and look at the side-by-side. That’s what makes it a useful criterion, as side-by-side comparison is impossible, implying, as it does, a transcendental point of view.
Science and the Real
Kuhn distinguished between normal science and revolutionary science. Normal science proceeds within a paradigm, assimilating phenomena to the paradigm in a systematic and orderly fashion. If we think of this as roughly analogous to the perceptual examination of an apple, a lake, the moon, a millipede, or a fireworks display, then we can invoke Gibson’s criterion. If we keep turning up something new, if ever more phenomena line up for consideration, then we conclude that we must be examining the real, albeit in an abstract way.
And so it goes with Newtonian dynamics, as one realm of the real, but also with Einsteinian dynamics, as another realm of the real. Each version of dynamics finds itself facing an endless array of phenomena for which it can account.
But what of the gap between the two, what of the scramble to arrive at Einsteinian dynamics from Newtonian, a scramble that Kuhn called revolutionary science? What OF it indeed?
Yesterday I suggested that that gap too is an index of the real. It is not simply that the Einsteinian realm exceeds the Newtonian, but that THAT excess suggests the possibility of realms that exceed the Einsteinian. The search for a physical theory that encompasses the relativistic world of gravity and the quantum world of electrodynamics is a search for such a realm.
It would seem that the more we understand, the more the world recedes from our understanding. That’s progress.
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