A God that’s useful for pastoral purposes is different from the theologian’s God

I recently had a long conversation with Claude that started with the anthropic principle and worked its way through Copernicus to cosmology in general to the idea that we live in a generative universe and that led to this question, which I presented to Claude:

So how has the Christian concept of God changed from rank to rank? In the medieval world there was a whole population of angels and archangels doing real conceptual work. And all those higher beings, up to and including God, seemed to have been conceptualized, at least in part, in some contexts, as “compact” beings existing in some higher “space.” Both heaven and hell we real places out there somewhere. I’d think that started dissolving after the Reformation and then with the Higher Criticism of the 19th century I’d think a lot of that fell away, at least for the more sophisticated theologians.

That Claude’s answer then led around to this:

What's left for sophisticated 20th century theologians like Tillich or Rahner is remarkably thin compared to Aquinas — God as “the ground of being” or “the horizon of transcendence.” Almost entirely evacuated of content, performing a kind of minimal structural function. Keeping the word while the referent has become nearly unspecifiable. Which is either profound apophatic wisdom or the last gasp of a framework that's lost its generative capacity, depending on how you look at it.

However useful such a conception might be for theological purposes, it struck me as being all but useless in the practical business of ministering to a congregation. So I asked Claude about that. I’ve placed the ensuing conversation below the asterisks. My prompts are set in bold; Claude’s replies are plain face.

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Sermons and Counseling

Tillich’s “ground of being” may be useful in theological discussion and in the education of clergymen, but I’m not sure how useful it would be in the practical business of ministering to a congregation. It might be of some value in counseling someone who’s wrestling with their faith in a basic and abstract way, but I don’t see that it would be much use in counseling someone who is grieving the death of someone close or in counseling a teen who is beginning to deal with their sexuality. Nor do I see it of much use in sermons, maybe here and there as an aside or a framing device, but you couldn’t carry much of a sermon on it.

I’m thinking, for example, of Chester Wickwire, who was chaplain at Johns Hopkins when I was there. I mention him in a document I’ve just uploaded to the project, “Beyond Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Diverse Thoughts on Religion.” I’m pretty sure he knew Tillich, and other theologians as well. He went to Union Theological in New York. But he didn’t preach sermons. He did something rather different on Sundays.

Or consider the Priest-in-Charge at All Saints in Hoboken, where I’ve been attending services. She’s black and has some of the theatricality inherent in vernacular black preaching. She’s very direct in her style, stands close to the congregation, and often looks people in the eye. But she has a Master of Divinity Degree from Duke Divinity. I’d be surprised if she weren’t literate in contemporary theology, but that’s not how she preaches.

What you're describing is a real structural feature of religious institutions — they operate simultaneously at multiple levels that can't substitute for each other. The academic theology at the seminary level and the practice of ministry in a congregation are doing fundamentally different things, even when the minister is fully literate in both.

Wickwire is a striking case because he essentially abandoned the conventional form entirely — no scripture, no sermon, no choir — and replaced it with something that did the same communal work through entirely different means. Jazz, civil rights speakers, anti-war activism, a soul review from a local prison. He was practicing what the Social Gospel actually meant in the flesh rather than preaching about it. The sacred space remained but what filled it was immediate, particular, alive. That's a kind of genius — understanding that the function of Sunday morning is community formation and orientation to what matters, and then finding ways to do that function that didn't require the inherited theological vocabulary at all.

The priest at All Saints represents the other solution — carrying the theological training but deploying it through an embodied, vernacular mode that operates at a completely different register. The Duke Divinity background presumably informs her framework for what she's doing and why, but what actually reaches people is the proximity, the eye contact, the theatricality. She's working the attractor that actually moves people rather than the one that satisfies the academy.

And your observation about grief and adolescent sexuality is exactly right — those pastoral situations require presence and witness more than they require correct metaphysics. "The ground of being holds you even now" is not what a grieving parent needs to hear. What they need is someone who can sit with them in the reality of the loss without flinching and without false comfort. That capacity doesn't come from Tillich. It might come from having genuinely wrestled with Tillich and arrived somewhere beyond him — using the ladder and then throwing it away, which is precisely what your Wittgenstein title is about.

So, for pastoral purposes Tillich’s ground of being becomes the idea that Christ is within each of us. That’s something we can work with.

Yes, and that's a translation that actually has ancient roots — it's not a modern softening of doctrine but a retrieval of something that was always there. Paul's "Christ in you, the hope of glory" (Colossians), the Johannine tradition of indwelling, Meister Eckhart's "the ground of the soul is the ground of God and the ground of God is the ground of the soul" — Eckhart is almost doing the translation in reverse, taking the experiential reality and pushing it toward metaphysics, while what you're describing goes the other direction, taking the metaphysics and pulling it back into something liveable.

What makes it pastorally workable is that it relocates the sacred from out there to in here — which is exactly what you need when you're sitting with a grieving person or a confused teenager. You're not pointing them toward a distant abstraction; you're pointing them toward something they can actually find in their own experience. The ground of being becomes accessible as an inner reality rather than a cosmological posit.

It also handles the theological diversity of a congregation gracefully. People sitting in those pews have wildly varying metaphysical commitments — some genuinely believe in a personal God who intervenes, some are essentially humanists who find value in the ritual and community, some are like you, drifting in and out of the service with a complex and hard-won relationship to all of it. "Christ within" can land differently for each of them without being dishonest to any of them. It's capacious enough to hold the range.

And for someone like yourself, sitting at All Saints and thinking about what you can contribute — that framing might actually be more available than the external God it ostensibly derives from. You've spent a lifetime attending to what's generative in human experience. That's not so far from what the tradition is pointing at with that phrase, even if you'd reach for entirely different language to describe it.

Latour’s Modes of Existence

I think Bruno Latour has something useful to say. I’m thinking of his little book, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (2010), where he talks modes of existence. Each mode has its own “felicity conditions,” as he calls them. The felicity conditions for science are quite different from those for religion. Here’s a passage from a blog post I’ve written about that book:

Felicity conditions (p. 100):

Truth production in science, religion, law, politics, technology, economics, etc. is what I have been studying, over the years . . . Systematic comparisons of what I call “regimes of enunciation” or “modes of existence” are what I am after, and if there is any technical argument in what follows, it is from this rather idiosyncratic comparative anthropology that they will come from. In a sort of weak analogy with speech-act theory, I’ve devoted myself to mapping out the “conditions of felicity” of the various activities that in our cultures are able to elicit truth. . .my problem concerns how to become attuned to the right conditions of felicity of those different types of “truth-generators.”

I take it that truth here does not (necessarily) mean a Tarskian correspondence between some proposition(s) and some state in the world, though it may mean that for this or that mode of existence. The point is that there is no ONE mode of existence with one TRUE DISCOURSE devoted to it (along with many untrue ones). There are many modes of existence, each with its own discourse (or perhaps no discourse at all?). Each mode has its own felicity conditions, its own indices of validity. This is a PLURALIST view of the world. [...]

Latour Modern, Not: A Prolegomenon to a Rhetorical Analysis

I'm bumping this post, from April of 2012, to the top of the queue as it is relevant to my current thinking about AI, as expressed in this recent post: Human+machine ensembles.

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I am reading Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern. And, yes, it is, as Graham Harman has often said, a remarkable book. But what KIND of a book is it?

An answer from Latour, p. ix: “Having written several empirical books, I am trying here to bring the emerging field of science studies to the attention of the literate public through the philosophy associated with this domain.” So it is philosophy. I guess I expected that, as Harman says Latour is a philosopher, considers himself to be one, and wishes others to think him one. But it is like no philosophy I’ve read, a statement, not an opening for critique. And the level of generality and scope—the relations between humans and things in the world—is of philosophical caliber.

It is for the “literate public”—so this is not, then, a book for specialists. Of philosophical caliber, but not (necessarily) for the professional philosophers. In fact, one has the impression that Latour feels that all too many professional philosophers have covered themselves in such shame that their arguments should not be given the dignity of detailed consideration. Which is perhaps one reason why the book is so short, less than 150 pages.

Philosophy, but not for philosophers. Nor is it a journalistic popularization or a textbook exposition. This is basic stuff, original exposition and argument. New ideas here, never before published in the technical literature of whatever discipline: anthropology, sociology, history, political science, philosophy.

* * *

I can imagine another reason for the short book, an active reason, a rhetorical one. Perhaps Latour thought the ideas would hold together more effectively if you could read through them expeditiously. 

Think of your mind as a pond. Reading an idea is like dropping a pebble in the pond. When the pebble crosses the surface it sets up a wave that propagates across the pond. In time, the wave will die out. If a second pebble drops before the first wave has dissipated, then the two waves will interact. And a third, a fourth, and so on. If a book is short, there is a better chance that the first wave will still be active when the final pebble drops, allowing for all the ideas to interact together in real time.

Perhaps that is why the book is short. To have written a longer book, with more detailed arguments, more detailed examples, would have stretched the ideas beyond the breaking point. Rending the book incomprehensible.

(In which case I am, alas, in trouble, as I am reading it slowly.)

* * *

And then there is the conceit with which Latour names Chapter 2, Constitution. The whole book is staged as a constitutional convention. We have the humans, and their society, and we have the things, in nature. The constitution is about the relations between the humans and the things, the translations that connect them through ever longer networks and the purifications that pay the bills. The Moderns inaugurated a certain Constitution and that Constitution is now in tatters.

Largely as the inevitable result of the success of the Moderns’ various endeavors. It seems that the above ground monuments they burnished so brightly required the support services of underground tunnels running every which way. Now the ground is so riddled with tunnels that the monuments are leaning and falling.

This Convention, of course, is nothing less than the philosophically venerable conceit of the social contract. Sometime in the past, so we pretend, the ancestors got together, talked, told jokes, jawboned, chewed the fat, ate some knishes, smoked a couple of pipes, sang the old songs and danced the old steps and, in time, drew up a compact according to which they bound themselves into the future.

The Moderns, of course, didn’t actually do this. But that’s Latour’s conceit. And it helps, I suppose, that one of his star barristers, Thomas Hobbes, is a major theorist of the social contract, named after an Old Testament beast, Leviathan.

But what’s the point of using this conceit? What’s it allow Latour to do? If he didn’t have this conceit available, how would he have written the book? Would it have become a 600 page tome? Of would it have become impossible?

* * *

In courts of law, so I’m told, exhibits are introduced through testimony by witnesses. Witness, of course, are humans. They can speak, or otherwise communicate ideas and judgments. In courts of law, of course, they do so under oath.

Exhibits are things, anything: articles of clothing, weapons, photographs, meter readouts from scientific instruments, sound recordings, clumps of dirt, what have you. The things cannot talk, but their testimony may strike deeper than the words of the humans.

Such language of witnessing and speaking comes naturally to Latour, it’s of a piece with the legalistic fiction of the constitution. Evidence, of course, is as much a scientific as a legal notion.

* * *

You know the method of loci, the memory technique? First you memorize a path through a large and complex building, a temple was often recommended. Along this path would be many places, the loci, such as wall niches, doorways, corners, and so forth.

To memorize a list of items one calls up this prepared path and starts walking through the building. When you get to the first locus, you place the first item (to be remembered) there; you move to the second locus and deposit the second item there; and so forth until everything has been placed in its own locus. To recall the list, simply enter the temple and walk the path, retrieving each item from its locus.

Well, Latour’s Constitutional conceit is analogous to the path through the memory temple. It’s a device. His task is more complex than that of memorizing a list, and so his device is more complex.

Still, it’s a device. In the language of J. J. Gibson, the father of ecological psychology, what affordances does this device have?

As I see it, it’s as though this virtual Constitutional Convention is mostly a conversation among humans about how they’re going to talk and think about relations among humans and non-humans. In the end, though, in that Parliament of Things that Latour leaves to his successors, does he not want the Things to be among the constitutional conveners?

* * *

I am thus suggesting that a rhetorical analysis of We Have Never Been Modern would be useful. But we must be careful, as the tools of rhetoric have, in recent years, been commandeered by devotees of critique and linguistic turning. And it is not critique that I have in mind.

I simply want to know: What’s going on?

Human+machine ensembles

This is a coda to a discussion I just had with ChatGPT. It ties a lot of my current thinking to the dive I took into Latour and object-oriented-ontology over a decade ago. ChatGPT did the illustration, of course.

* * * * *

One last speculative remark. Bruno Latour worked hard to collapse the distinction between the human and the natural. It seems to me we’re extending that to the distinction between the human and the computational.

Yes — that’s a sharp way to put it.

Latour’s project, especially in We Have Never Been Modern, was to show that the neat separation between Nature (objective, external, “out there”) and Culture (subjective, human, “in here”) was always a fiction. His actor–network theory insisted that humans and nonhumans (technologies, microbes, texts, rivers) are entangled in networks of agency.

What you’re suggesting is that we’re now seeing a parallel collapse:

• Just as Latour said there’s no “pure Nature” apart from human mediation, there may be no “pure Computation” apart from human entanglement.
• The new hybrids — human+machine ensembles — aren’t simply tools on one side and users on the other. They’re actor–networks in which agency is distributed, recursive, and hard to disentangle.
• In the Fourth Arena, intelligence is enacted in between humans and machines, just as for Latour science was enacted in between humans and nonhumans.

That’s where your metaphysical structure idea dovetails: we can’t step outside and separate the human from the computational any more than we can separate the human from the natural. Both distinctions dissolve into recursive, lumpy entanglement.

And — here’s the speculative push — perhaps play is the mode best suited to this new collapse. Just as ritual, experiment, and negotiation mediated the nature–culture entanglement, play may be the practice that makes the human–computational entanglement livable, creative, and abundant.

Fecundity and Implementation in a Complex Universe

I'm bumping this post from October 2011 to the top of the queue for two reasons: 1) in its discussion of abundance it contains seeds to the idea of arena, which I have made one of my fundamental philosophical concepts, and 2) it employs chess as a metaphor.

 

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Or, Compositionism in the Pluriverse

As I’ve indicated several times before, one of the reasons I’m finding object-oriented ontology (OOO) and Latour so congenial is that I’ve had similar ideas, often in conjunction with the late David Hays. But we arrived at those ideas, not through immersion in continental philosophy and thought, but through the cognitive and neurosciences. In that we have been a bit like Latour in that we’ve mostly been trying to figure out how things work out there in the world, not trying to do philosophy. But we did some, if not philosophy, philosophy-like thinking.

Thus we came to believe that reality is inherently complex and that, consequently, the way to empirical truth was not through dispersing phenomenal complexity in favor of a deeper underlying simplicity. We came to talk of a universe that not only has spawned multiple Realms of Being, but that might well spawn more of them. Had we known William James’ term pluriverse I’m sure we would have adopted it.

We didn’t and so we couldn’t. Instead we talked of the universe as being fecund (Hays proposed the term), with later Realms of Being implemented in ones that had evolved earlier. Our notion of implementation, which derives from computer science, seems kin to Latour’s notion of composition. Objects of one kind can be said to be implemented in, composed of, objects of some other kind. But the implemented/composed objects cannot be reduced to the objects of which they are composed/implemented.

We never attempted a systematic exposition of this notion, but I did outline it briefly in a review of John Horgan’s The End of Science. You can download a PDF of the complete review from my Academia page, here. I have reprinted the discussion of fecundity and implementation below.

Note that it is not at all clear that where Hays and I talk of Realms of Being that we are talking of Being in the sense of object-oriented ontology. Most likely we’re not. But this is a matter of mere terminology, not fundamental conceptualization.

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A New World: The Fecund Universe

One of the people Horgan talked to is Paul Feyerabend, the well-known philosopher of science. At the time Feyerabend was working on his autobiography (Killing Time) and on another philosophy book, one he was unable to complete before he died.

Tentatively titled The Conquest of Abundance, it addressed the human passion for reductionism. “All human enterprises,” Feyerabend explained, seek to reduce the natural diversity, or “abundance,” inherent in reality. “First of all the perceptual system cuts down this abundance or you wouldn't survive.” Religion, science, politics, and philosophy represent our attempts to compress reality still further. Of course, these attempts to conquer abundance simply create new abundances, new complexities.

This has the feel of the emerging world view, especially the line asserting that “these attempts to conquer abundance simply create new abundances.” That abundance is what the new view is about. It is a topic the late David Hays and I discussed under the rubric of fecundity—Hays suggested the term—and that is the word I shall use. I have no particular reason to believe that our discussions paralleled Feyerabend's ideas in any detailed way, but “abundance” and “fecundity” share a thematic similarity.

Let us start with an analogy. Consider the game of chess. It has a finite number of pieces and is played on a board which is finite in size; the rules governing play are finite in number and restrict each move to a finite number of steps; and all games must end in a finite number of steps, though it is possible for a game to end in a draw. Thus described chess is an inherently simple game. And yet it is rich enough to tax the abilities of very intelligent and creative people who devote their lives to playing it. A substantial community of people devotes a great deal of time and effort, not only to playing chess, but to studying it and teaching it, writing books and articles and, in the last half-century, programming computers to play the game.

The devotees of the simple world are like those who think that, when you know the rules of chess, you know all there is to know about the game. All the rest is either mere appearance, mere contingency, or mere engineering; whatever it is, it is only merely so. To the devotees of fecundity the rules are only the starting point and all the rest, that is what we must understand. And, more to the point, that is what we can understand, if not just yet, and not necessarily exhaustively and finally.

Of course we need to look beneath the surface of things. But there is no reason to think that what we will find will be simple. On the contrary, I believe that complexity inheres in the basic fabric of nature (Benzon and Hays 1990a). That complexity is necessary and not contingent. It is that inherent complexity which makes the universe so fecund, so full of abundances.

Fecundity is about the capacity of one Realm of Being to give rise to another Realm. In a fairly standard version—see Horgan's account of the views of physicist Philip Anderson, one of the founders of the Santa Fe Institute (pp. 209-210)—the inorganic gives rise to the realm of life; life gives rise to mind; and mind perhaps gives rise to culture. Culture may well give rise to something else, and that something else will in turn give rise to something yet all-together new, and so forth. The laws of a higher realm must be consistent with those of the lower realms, but they are not derived from those laws. Each realm has its own laws, and there is no inherent limit to the number of realms. Hence there is no reason to believe that the universe is inadequate to our cognitive needs. [In The End of Science Horgan argued for a mismatch between the universe and our minds such that the latter could not, in principle, fully know the former.]

The relationship between a higher realm and the one(s) which gave rise to it can be said to be one of implementation. The term is from computing and designates a phenomenon which is ubiquitous there. A computer is, of course, a physical device, a complex bit of engineering. The nature of these devices has changed considerably in computing's short history, from mechanical relays and vacuum tubes in the 1940s and 1950s to transistors and integrated circuits in the 1960s and 1970s to ever denser microchips starting in the late 1970s and continuing to this day and on into the future, though not very far into the future--just what technologies will supplant microchips is not at all certain, but many things are in the works. In order for these circuits to compute anything they must implement certain logical functions. The nature of those functions is quite independent of the medium in which they are implemented. Nor can one in any meaningful way reduce the logical function of a circuit to the physical laws of the device implementing the circuit. Those physical laws tell you what will happen at a certain point Q when the voltage goes above a certain value, but they tell you nothing about why Q is connected to O and P and R and S in a certain way. That pattern of connections is dictated by logic, not physics.

The implementation of logical functions in physical circuits is only one side of implementation, the hardware side. Most implementation is on the software side. High-level languages are implemented in assembly language and end-user programs are implemented in high-level languages. Currently one of the most popular languages is one called C, with a sibling called C++. It requires one implementation to run on a “Wintel” machine, one for the Macintosh, another for a Sun Sparcstation, and so forth. The C language is the same in each case; it has the same nouns and verbs. But the assembly language which implements those nouns and verbs is specific to the machine it runs on. Further, the assembly language for a given machine can implement the nouns and verbs of other high-level languages, such as Basic, Pascal, Fortran, or Cobol. The fact that one language is used to implement another is not the same as asserting that the high-level language is reducible to the lower level language. Each language establishes its own domain, its own realm; implementation is the relationship between one realm and another.

Of course, it is one thing to explore implementation in the world of computing. It is rather different to assert that the relationship between biology on the one hand and physics and chemistry, on the other, is one of implementation. That requires an argument which I am not prepared to make, though some practitioners of artificial intelligence and artificial life seem to take it as a matter of faith. Given the work that Hays and I did on natural intelligence (Benzon and Hays 1988) I feel a little more confidence about the relationship between psychology and neurobiology; for that article proposed five principles governing the implementation of mind in brain. The most ambitious research program under the aegis of AI is about the implementation of mind in computer. However doubtful I am about what AI has so far achieved—Horgan quotes Marvin Minsky as asserting that consciousness is a trivial matter he resolved long ago (p. 184)—that goal doesn't seem to be inherently problematic. However mind operates, it is a realm unto itself. Its laws are not reducible to those of biology or those of computing, though it may well be possible that they can be implemented in either. Beyond mind, David Hays and I have speculated in personal conversation that the phenomena of social role (Linton 1935) and double-contingency social interaction (Parsons 1951) are the seeds of a new realm which we might as well call culture. We could then say that culture is implemented in mind, though explicating that is another matter entirely.

If this is how the universe operates then the closest one could come to what Horgan calls The Answer would be to understand how one realm could give rise to another. That is perhaps where Ilya Prigogine’s work comes into play (Horgan, pp. 216-221; Benzon and Hays, 1990a, pp. 36-37). However, while Horgan's Answer is complete unto itself, the Answer implied by Prigogine’s work assures us only that the universe generates yet further fundamental questions.

Latour's Modes of Existence [the return of LSD to discourse]

I'm bouncing this from 30 May 2012 to the top of the queue because the subject came up today in the Twitterverse, more or less.  

LSD should be legal, but IMO many people overrate it. It seems like a typical trip creates "insights" that can't be communicated and don't have much effect on the world afterwards

— Alyssa Vance (@alyssamvance) June 21, 2022

FWIW I've recounted my own adventure in Touchstones • Strange Encounters • Strange Poems • the beginning of an intellectual life.

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Ornstein's Tart's State-Specific Sciences, and a Note on Work, Love, Play, and Adventure

Graham Harman has just posted a link to a Latour draft: Biography of an Investigation: On a Book about Modes of Existence (PDF).

An Ethnographer from Mars

Here's one passage, about his days in Africa:

In the Abidjan of 1973-75, I discovered all at once the most predatory forms of capitalism, the methods of ethnography, and the puzzles of anthropology. And one puzzling question in particular that has never left me: why do we use the ideas of modernity, the modernizing frontier, the contrast between modern and premodern, before we even apply to those who call themselves civilizers the same methods of investigation that we apply to the “others” – those whom we claim, if not to civilize entirely, then at least to modernize a little? ...

There was a flagrant asymmetry here: the Whites anthropologized the Blacks, yes, quite well, but they avoided anthropologizing themselves. Or else they did so in a falsely distant, “exotic” fashion, by focusing on the most archaic aspects of their own society – communal festivals, belief in astrology, first communion meals – and not on what I was seeing with my own eyes (eyes educated, it is true, by a collective reading of L’Anti-Oedipe): industrial technologies, economization, “development,” scientific reasoning, and so on: in other words, everything that makes up the structural heart of the expanding empires.

Whence the idea of applying the methods of the social sciences, ethnography in particular, to the most modern practices.

Indeed, why not? Why not, in effect, take up the role of the mythical Martian ethnographer and use it as a vehicle to study the Modern World at the very heart of Modernity and height of its Powers?

 

Of his mid-70s work in the neurological laboratory of Roger Guillemin at the Salk Institute:

How could one explain that, here too, the appeal to an abusive transcendence had been able to dissimulate the layer of texts, of documents, that had to be continuously rewoven in order to produce a truth that could not be based, try as one might, on a firmer foundation? Was it possible that scientific veridiction was as far away from Double-Click information as the latter is from religious truth – in which case we would find ourselves faced with three types of veridiction, each entirely distinct from the others and true in its own genre and its own fashion?

Peak Experiences and Alternate Realities

At roughly the same time a rather different group of investigators was attempting to make sense of the experiences afforded by psychedelic drugs and by meditation. One of them, a psychologist named Robert Ornstein Charles Tart, talked of "state-specific sciences"–alas, the book in which he used the term is no longer on my shelf and I cannot remember its name, much less a page number. The idea was this: When you take a psychedelic drug you (may well) have a (so-called) peak experience in which deep truths are revealed to you. Those truths often seem like trite nonsense to those who've not experienced a psychedelic peak. Let's posit that those deep truths are, in fact, specific to one's biochemical neural state and can ONLY be judged and appreciated from within that state. Those who've not taken the drug, and had the trip, are in no position to pass judgment on the truths revealed in the trip. They don't know what they're talking about.

Work, Love, Play, Adventure

I don't remember when I read Ornstein Tart, but it was probably in the early 1970s. While I didn't take his notion of state-specific science at face value, I did feel it pointed at a truth that needed to be worked out. And I've been working at it off and on ever since. David Hays and I often talked of Work, Love, Play, and Adventure as specific and more or less independent modes of human action, each in effect having its own modes of veridiction, to use Latour's word. We never saw our way to writing these thoughts out in a systematic exposition, though bits and pieces managed to show up here and there. My various posts on behavioral mode contribute to this line of thinking, in particular, see Q. Where’s Reality? A. Which One?

* * * * *

It does seem to me that Latour is following the same scent, though perhaps though a different territory. We shall see. At this point I'm only on page 6 of a 20 page article, and there's his book to come: An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence. We shall see.

More later.

ADDENDUM: A link to a summary of Latour's modes-of-existence project. Website for the digital version of the project, with short characterizations of the fifteen modes.

Living with Abundance in a Pluralist Cosmos: Some Metaphysical Sketches

Bumping to the top to mark the profusion of creativity pouring out of machine learning and deep learning. We're heading into the 4th Arena!

 

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You can download a PDF of the main exposition of my pluralist metaphysics from my online  repositories:

• SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2197108
• Academia.edu:  https://www.academia.edu/4066568/Living_with_Abundance_in_a_Pluralist_Cosmos_Some_Metaphysical_Sketches

The PDF, of course, includes the introduction which I published here a few days ago: From Literary Criticism to Pluralist Metaphysics, an Introduction. You can also download PDF's of secondary documents. I've listed the currently available ones after the eight propositions in the main document.

Eight Propositions in a Pluralist Metaphysics

This main exposition sketchs a pluralist metaphysical system variously inspired by the ideas of Bruno Latour, Paul Feyerabend, Graham Harman, J. J. Gibson and William James.

1. Objects: Individual entities of many different scales are the ultimate stuff of the cosmos.

2. Abundance: These entities enter into relations with other entities but are never exhausted by any of their relations or even by the sum of all possible relations.

3. Realms of Being: In the large objects exist in patterns of relatively stable interactions among multiple objects. These are relations of indirect or vicarious causality. Analytically, we need to separate the roles from the entities that assume them. This is the core of what will become a distinction between culture and society.

4. Unity of Being: Humans desire the ability to access and reflect on memories of events in one’s life. The extent that that is achieved is called Unity of Being.

5. Life Way: A Latourian collective, with human and non-human members, is considered to participate in all the Realms in which any member of the collective plays a role. The ‘envelope’ of those Realms is called a Life Way.

6. Latourian Negotiation: Collectives having different Life Ways have been interacting through a process of negotiation in which differences among Life Ways are resolved and commonalities created or not depending on the desire to extend the boundaries of the larger more inclusive collective. The outcome cannot be predicted or foreseen.

7. Realms of Abundance: Realms of Being are organized into Realms of Abundance, of which three have appeared to far: Matter, Life, and Culture.

8. The Fourth Arena: The current global Latourian negotiation brings us to the edge of a fourth Arena of Abundance. If it goes well, that’s where our successors will dwell.

Pluralism Papers

Literary Criticism 21: Academic Literary Study in a Pluralist World

Abstract: At the most abstract philosophical level the cosmos is best conceptualized as containing various Realms of Being interacting with one another. Each Realm contains a broad class of objects sharing the same general body of processes and laws. In such a conception the human world consists of many different Realms of Being, with more emerging as human cultures become more sophisticated and internally differentiated. Common Sense knowledge forms one Realm while Literary experience is another. Being immersed in a literary work is not at all the same as going about one's daily life. Formal Literary Criticism is yet another Realm, distinct from both Common Sense and Literary Experience. Literary Criticism is in the process of differentiating into two different Realms, that of Ethical Criticism, concerned with matters of value, and that of Naturalist Criticism, concerned with the objective study of psychological, social, and historical processes. Note: Most, but not all, of the pieces in this document are in the main pluralist exposition. There is a introduction specific to this set of documents and a four-part 'program' for literary studies.

Harman’s Tables and Abundance

Abstract: By substituting Paul Feyerabend’s rhetoric of abundance for Graham Harman’s rhetoric of withdrawal one can establish the basis for pluralist ontology organized around Realms of Being. This paper traces the steps by which I made that substitution. The crucial step involved J.J. Gibson’s account of how one can determine whether or not one is perceiving real objects: Real objects yield more information upon further scrutiny; imaginary objects do not.

Reading Latour: Reassembling the Social

Abstract: Notes on Bruno Latour, Reassembling: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory, with some consideration of compositionism. These ideas are developed with ideas and concepts from cognitive science, literary studies, music, and extensive examples from the world of contemporary graffiti.

Ontological Cognition

Ontological cognition is about the cognitive apparatus we use to organize the world into different kinds of things according to their powers and capacities: animal, vegetable, mineral; living, non-living; human, non-human; etc. As such it differs from the philosophical discipline of ontology, which is about the world itself, not our thoughts about the world. As ontological cognition snakes through many disciplines these reflections run from Wittgenstein through literature and the Great Chain of Being to computation and knowledge representation (KR).

Reading with Graham

Abstract: Graham Harman has proposed a counter-factual literary criticism based on his object-oriented ontology. I argue: 1) that this proposed practical criticism collapses into the existing process of literary culture and is therefore empty, 2) that it implies a Platonic conception of the literary text, 3) that it follows from a rejection of Lévi-Strauss’s empirical work on myth that dates back to the mid-1970s and 4) that that rejection defended an intentionalist conception of the text, rather than a mechanistic one. As a counter-proposal I examine Pandosto and The Winter’s Tale using a method inspired by Lévi-Strauss, arguing that the differences between the plots of these two texts can be attributed to different cultural constructions of the family.

Vitalism

Abstract: The contemporary conception of mere matter that we have from quantum mechanics is so very different from that available to Descartes and so many others that the distinction between living and non-living that they in part founded on the distinction must be re-thought. The purpose of such a rethinking is not to assert that difference between a rock and an acorn, for example, is not so great as it once was. In this new dispensation they are still very different kinds of things, but the whole conceptual world in which that difference is inscribed and traced is itself a new and by no means complete one.

I plan to issue three more sets of supporting documents, one on the explicit construction of spirits (directed at Jane Bennett), a miscellaneous set of posts, and one collecting some of my criticisms of Levi Bryant.

Of Factish Gods and Modes of Existence

Angus Fletcher's odd argumentation on computers and reading (see my recent post, Can computers do narrative?) has gotten me thinking about Latour's notion of felicity conditions, so I'm boosting this post to the top of the queue as it is the first post where I discuss them. Perhaps my problem with Fletcher's argument is that I don't know what his felicity conditions are.

* * * * *

Including a brief excursion into the Black Church and concluding with a sighting of the nature/culture riff(t), the cosmic background radiation of our intellectual tradition

 

Bruno Latour (2010) On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods. Duke University Press.

A short book in three chapters. From the back cover: “In this concise work, Latour delves into the ‘belief in naïve belief,’ the suggestion that fetishes, objects invested with mythical powers, are fabricated, and that ‘facts’ are not. . . While the fetish-worshipper knows perfectly well that fetishes are man-made, the Modern icon-breaker inevitably erects new icons.”

In the first chapter Latour discusses an animist ceremony and so forth and so on, but I want to skip over all that and look at some passages in the third chapter, for that leads us to the modes of existence Latour promises in his next book. They’re what I’m interested in. What does Latour have in mind here?

Felicity and Truth

p. 100:

Truth production in science, religion, law, politics, technology, economics, etc. is what I have been studying, over the years . . . Systematic comparisons of what I call “regimes of enunciation” or “modes of existence” are what I am after, and if there is any technical argument in what follows, it is from this rather idiosyncratic comparative anthropology that they will come from. In a sort of weak analogy with speech-act theory, I’ve devoted myself to mapping out the “conditions of felicity” of the various activities that in our cultures are able to elicit truth. . .my problem concerns how to become attuned to the right conditions of felicity of those different types of “truth-generators.”

I take it that truth here does not (necessarily) mean a Tarskian correspondence between some proposition(s) and some state in the world, though it may mean that for this or that mode of existence. The point is that there is no ONE mode of existence with one TRUE DISCOURSE devoted to it (along with many untrue ones). There are many modes of existence, each with its own discourse (or perhaps no discourse at all?). Each mode has its own felicity conditions, its own indices of validity. This is a PLURALIST view of the world.

 

It would, presumably, be a mistake to attempt to interrogate or inhabit one mode using the rhetorical forms crafted for a different one. Would this be a category mistake, or an error even deeper? Are these modes ontologically different, without any, however, having privilege over others? Or is talk of ontology beside the point?

Latour talks of religion in this chapter and tells us that he is writing as though delivering a sermon. I’m glad he told us for otherwise I wouldn’t have guessed. His point, though, is that in thus writing he is DOING something rather than POINTING AT something.

Religious Sentences

Of religious talk Latour says (p. 102):

. . . such sentences are judged, not by their content—their number of bytes—but by their performative abilities. These are mainly evaluated only by this question: do they produce the thing they talk about, namely lovers? I am not so much interested here in love as eros, which often requires little talk, but in love as agapè to use the traditional distinction. In love’s injunction, attention is redirected not to the content of the message, but to the container itself, the person-making. One does not attempt to decrypt the sentence as if it transported a message, but as if it transformed the messengers themselves.

And so the felicity conditions of such language are not those of science, nor history, nor journalism, each of which aims to transport a message that corresponds to the world, a world somewhere over or out there, or perhaps just around the corner.

[For extra credit, compare this to Jakobson’s discussion of the six functions of language. Does it align with any of the six? Why or why not?]

p. 103:

...what happens to you, would you say, when you are addressed by love-talk? Very simply put: you were far away, and now you are closer...This radical change concerns not only space but also time: you just had the feeling of inflexible and fateful destiny...and suddenly, a word, an attitude, a query, a posture, a je ne sais quoi, and time flows again, as if it were starting from the present, with the capacity to open the future and reinterpret the past...

So religious talk aims at transforming the listener and, I presume, the speaker as well. It is not about informing, but about changing. And it warps both time and space—a Wordsworthian spot in time, perhaps?

Next, some words of clarification, explaining why he uses this love talk (remember, he’s performing his argument) that seems so strange in talk of religion (though it is well to remind ourselves that the medieval poets of courtly love drew upon religious rhetoric for their secular ends), pp. 104-105:

I use the template of lovers’ speech in order that we may rehabituate ourselves to a form of religious talk that has been lost, unable to represent itself again—to repeat itself—because of the shift from religion to belief.

Thus reminded, we may continue on.

Double-Click, Modal Degree Zero

Now Latour introduces the notion of double-click communication (p. 106):

...it wants us to believe that it is feasible to transport, without any deformation whatsoever, some accurate information about states of affairs that are not present to us. In most ordinary cases, what people have in mind when they ask “is this true,” or “does this correspond to a state of affairs,” is just such a double-click gesture, allowing immediate access to information: tough luck, because this is also what undermines ways of talking that are dearest to out heart.

This would seem to be something of a mode of communication degree zero, “the benchmark by comparison with which all the other modes are shown to lie” (see below). The name itself derives, I believe, from mouse-clicking and perhaps connotes the off-hand and apparently direct nature of the action. You click and SHAZAM! it happens.

Sketches After Latour: A Working Paper

Title above, abstract, contents, and introduction below. Download at:

Academia: https://www.academia.edu/48804595/Sketches_After_Latour_A_Working_Paper.
SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=3841042.
Research Gate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351365024_Sketches_After_Latour_A_Working_Paper.

Abstract: Thirteen various observations on the thinking of Bruno Latour, from We Have Never Been Modern through Reassembling the Social and up to modes. Excursions into Stanley Fish, Paul Feyerabend, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Topics: religion, history, social organization, culture, mind, language, truth and felicity. Thread running throughout: Latour’s “flat ontology”, in which everything has agency, has fruitful, perhaps even substantial and revelatory, implications. COI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.15423.64164

Contents

Introduction: Latour in the bushes 2
Latour Modern, Not 5
From Fish to Latour, Really 8
Latour's Modes of Existence 12
Lévi-Strauss and Latour: Transformations of a Myth? 14
Presuppositions and Conclusions: Some Comments on Latour 16
Ontology and Epistemology: gone, together? 18
Some Latour Litanies from Feyerabend 19
The Living Cosmos 20
Chapter 1 of the New Latour Available, Apocalypse Awaits 22
Latour and the End of the End of History 24
Latour and Culture 26 Of Factish Gods and Modes of Existence 27
Latour, Language, and Translation 33

Introduction: Latour in the bushes

Just yesterday, May 5, 2021, I was looking through my hard-drive for something-I-forget-what and I came upon this, an all but complete draft of a working paper on Latour. It was from late November of 2017. All I had had to do was complete the front matter, this introduction plus the abstract, and I would have been done.

Why’d I drop it? I haven’t the foggiest idea.

In any event, I’ve now completed it. This working paper collects posts written between April 1, 2012 and August 12, 2015. I’d started blogging about Latour on August 17, 2011, with my first post on Assembling the Social; that project continued until October 11. I issued those posts as a working paper two days later, Reading Latour: Reassembling the Social. And I suppose that my engagement with Latour reached its peak when I issued Living with Abundance in a Pluralist Cosmos: Some Metaphysical Sketches in January of 2013, which is what its title implies: I’d taken Latour’s ideas, sifted them through my own work and coughed up an outline for a metaphysics. Surprised me, but there it is.

In some way, reading Latour was a return to my intellectual roots, in philosophy, in Continental thought. But a strange return. Figuring I wanted his recent thinking, I deliberately began reading him with a late work, Reassembling the Social, which turned out to be a high-level methodological manual rather than a systematic exposition of a philosophical position. It was only some months afterward that I took Graham Harman’s advice and read We Have Never Been Modern. I found it strange, a segment from an ongoing-conversation where I missed the beginning. Graham Harman thought it was easy, I thought it was tough. I marked it up quite a bit, a habit from my undergraduate days, and continued on. The posts I’ve collected here represent some of that continuing on.

* * * * *

Some of these are little squibs, some are longer.

Latour Modern, Not: In the process of reading (three chapters in) We Have Never Been Modern: “...this virtual Constitutional Convention is mostly a conversation among humans about how they’re going to talk and think about relations among humans and non-humans. In the end, though, in that Parliament of Things that Latour leaves to his successors, does he not want the Things to be among the constitutional conveners?”

From Fish to Latour, Really: Stanley Fish talks about ideas as though they are just out there in the ether. Latour seems them as embodied in a vast meshwork of intersecting networks: “While I can’t imagine Fish denying the existence of such networks, I don’t see that they’re uppermost in his mind either. It’s not what drives his intuitions. It’s like the Gestaltist’s duck-rabbit. Fish and Latour may look at the same state of affairs, but one is driven by the intuition that it is a rabbit while the other sees a duck.”

Latour's Modes of Existence: For Latour, each mode of existence has its own characteristic type of veridication. Charles Tart advanced a similar idea in the 1970s: “When you take a psychedelic drug you (may well) have a (so-called) peak experience in which deep truths are revealed to you. Those truths often seem like trite nonsense to those who've not experienced a psychedelic peak. Let's posit that those deep truths are, in fact, specific to one's biochemical neural state and can ONLY be judged and appreciated from within that state.”

Lévi-Strauss and Latour: Transformations of a Myth?: Lévi-Strauss had a tremendous influence on me early in my career. Latour has an interesting passage about him in We Have Never Been Modern. And so: “...are the two thinkers so very different as Latour’s little critique aims to suggest? There would seem to be at least one major difference, one at the center of Latour’s thinking, and at the center of Lévi-Strauss’s. Both talk a lot about the opposition between nature and culture. Latour aims to undermine it while Lévi-Strauss would seem to be enmeshed in it, as Derrida argued in ‘Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.’”

Presuppositions and Conclusions: Some Comments on Latour: Latour talks of risk-taking rocks and networks of humans and everything else. But he’s rather thin on how people think and reason.

Ontology and Epistemology: gone, together?: Once you allow for multiple modes of existence, things get tricky.

Some Latour Litanies from Feyerabend: Allies in pluralist syntax.

The Living Cosmos: In an oblique way, consider this squib an homage to the John Cage of Silence.

Chapter 1 of the New Latour Available, Apocalypse Awaits: I’m all of three pages into the just-released English translation of An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence. Latour talks of climate science; I remember Hurricane Sandy. I conclude, “The weird aliens have come home to roost.”

Latour and the End of the End of History: Fukuyama was wrong about the end of history, an idea born out of washed up Hegel/Marx. “...lurking in Politics of Nature [...] are the seeds of a philosophy of history as a process of negotiations beyond the boundaries of society, of existing institutions, negotiations of collectives in dragon territory.”

Latour and Culture: He’s missing something. He fails to distinguish between society, conceived as a group of people oriented toward and interacting with one another, and culture, the beliefs, practices, a mores of those people. A tricky distinction to be sure: “Still, it changes how I think about Latour to realize that, in effect, those actor networks are important because they are the genetic substrate of culture. Finally, I’ve thought from the beginning that Latour is missing a psychology. He has little to nothing to say about the mind, and yet it is the mind that holds those actor networks together.”

Of Factish Gods and Modes of Existence: About Latour’s modes of existence, each with its own “felicity” conditions, with an excursion into a sermon delivered by a local preacher in a Black church. Religion is one mode. Science, waaayy over there, is different (Reference perhaps?). I conclude, however, that “Latour is missing some modes. He’s flattened a bunch of them into this single mode, Reproduction. Thus he’s giving us a scheme that bears an echo of that old nature/culture distinction he’s worked so hard to replace. His scheme has 14 modes which center on human activity and this one mode that, while humans as physical beings must participate in it, seems to be a single mode only in contrast to, by comparison with, the other fourteen.”

Latour, Language, and Translation: Language, whether written or spoken, is a double system in which a string of signifiers carries or encodes a string of signifieds, to use Saussure’s terms. The signifiers are physical events in the public domain, vibrations in air, marks on a page, while the signifieds exist within the privacy of individual minds and brains. In Latour’s terms, signifiers act like intermediaries while signifieds are mediators. In translation from one language to another, intermediaries must function as mediators.

Reality is not perceived, it is enacted

Reality is not perceived, it is enacted – in a universe of great, perhaps unbounded, complexity.

David Hays and I published that in a little article, we called it a note, we published over thirty years ago (see below). It was Hays’s formulation, but I liked it then. And I still like it?

But what does it mean? Forget the stuff after the dash, it’s that first part I’m thinking about. It clearly implies that without actors there’s no reality. Since we humans are the actors does that mean that before us, there was no reality? That’s absurd. The earth and the universe existed before we did, no?

Yes. Perhaps it means that they weren’t real. You mean they were imaginary, or illusions? No, more like the difference between the real and the not-real had no meaning.

That seems a little better. Let’s try something else. Let’s go the Latour route and say that everything is an actor, not just us humans. That leaves plenty of actors to enact reality prior to us.

That’s beginning to make sense.

It seems to me that we’re haunted by an old picture that we might as well attribute to Descartes, though it’s likely older. In this picture we are over here and the (external) world is way way over there somewhere. Our problem is to figure out what that’s like. How do we do that? By perception.

But that’s never really worked out. There’s always the problem of figuring out whether or not perception really matches the world. It never does or, what amounts to the same thing, there’s no place where we can stand to verify the match. The only way out of that bottle is to stop playing that game. We drop the convention of assigning agency only to humans and all the creatures get to enact reality.

We still have to verify our perceptions and theories, etc. But we accept that they’re always going to be provisional. But as long as we can use them to act effectively in the world, we’re OK.

Where does that leave the foundations of physics, with all that fancy mathematics and no way to test it with empirical observation? It means that the foundations of physics is no longer enacting science, which requires empirical verification. It’s doing something else. Ironic science, as John Horgan has it?

Let’s consider a very different example, “The Rite of Spring” from Disney’s 1941 Fantasia. It depicts an enactment of the solar system and the earth prior to human habitation. It’s certainly not a perception. You can call it an artistic imagining, with considerable license taken, if you will – for example, the T. Rex and the Stegosaurus couldn’t have fought because they lived a hundred million years apart (and Disney knew that). But that’s an action, no? Yes. Disney isn’t doing science, though it obviously interests him a great deal in this episode. He’s doing art.

Science and art are two different ways of enacting reality. Two different modes. Which brings us back to Latour again, who has advanced a theory of modes. Note, however, that I have decided to take a somewhat different view of modes and have offered a preliminary sketch: Living with Abundance in a Pluralist Cosmos: Some Metaphysical Sketches, Working Paper, January 2013,
https://www.academia.edu/4066568/Living_with_Abundance_in_a_Pluralist_Cosmos_Some_Metaphysical_Sketches.

I could go on and on, and probably should. But not now. Later. Meanwhile here’s the paper where Hays and I offered that formulation along with the immediate context.

* * * * *

Issues in Cultural Evolution 1: Cultural Stability in the Mesh

Once again I'm thinking this stuff through. Hence another bump. (Previous bump was on 4.13.17.) As I'm thinking about cultural evolution these days, I thought I'd bump this post to the top. It's from January of 2015.

This is the first of a series of three posts – I hope it’s only three – in which I explore the relationships between my views on cultural evolution and the views of more orthodox thinkers. The number of thinkers is in fact quite large, but I don’t intended to be exhaustive, just indicative. For the most part I’ll be working with reference to two sources:

1.) Alex Mesoudi, Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory Can Explain Human Culture & Synthesize the Social Sciences, Chicago: 2011.

2.) An online report of a workshop that Daniel Dennett convened at the Santa Fe Institute that included the following evolutionary thinkers: Susan Blackmore, Robert Boyd, Nicolas Claidière, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Joseph Henrich, Olivier Morin, Peter Richerson, Dan Sperber, Kim Sterelny. Note that while most of these thinkers have special interests in cultural evolution, two of them are more generally interested in evolution, Godfrey-Smith and Sterelny.

In this first post I’m concerned with a general framework in which to think about culture and its evolution. In the second post I’ll examine the micro-scale mechanisms of cultural evolution, the cultural analogues to the biological gene and phenotype. In the third post I’ll look at the large-scale dynamics of cultural evolution. And, who knows, maybe there will be a fourth post to put things together. We’ll see.

Stability in the Mesh

Let me start out with a standard distinction, between culture and society. A society is a group of people and culture is the attitudes, ideas, customs, and practices through which they interact. Thus I will not be using the term “culture” to refer to a society, a common usage.

In the simplest societies people lived in relatively small bands of hunter-gatherers and had relatively few material possessions. Whatever they possessed they had to carry with them from one place to another. Everyone knew everyone else and they were, as well, acquainted with those living in neighboring bands. Those people were, after all, their friends and relatives.

When I talk of the mesh I mean those people and their relationships among one another, among and with their material goods, and with the features and creatures of their environment. That is where human culture arose, in that mesh. Culture provides a means of enriching those relationships, both by introducing new entities into the mesh – whether handcrafted objects, new activities, or various abstract entities, and so forth – and by establishing new kinds of relationships among entities in the mesh.

It is only to the extent that these entities and relationships are stable that the group can be said to have a coherent culture. Dawkins makes that point with respect to biology in the second chapter of The Selfish Gene (p. 12):

Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ is really a special case of a more general law of survival of the stable. The universe is populated by stable things. A stable thing is a collection of atoms that is permanent enough or common enough to deserve a name. It may be a unique collection of atoms, such as the Matterhorn, that lasts long enough to be worth naming. Or it may be a class of entities, such as rain drops, that come into existence at a sufficiently high rate to deserve a collective name, even if any one of them is short-lived. The things that we see around us, and which we think of as needing explanation–rocks, galaxies, ocean waves–are all, to a greater or lesser extent, stable patterns of atoms. Soap bubbles tend to be spherical because this is a stable configuration for thin films filled with gas. In a spacecraft, water is spherical globules, but on earth, where there is gravity, the stable surface for standing water is flat and horizontal. Salt crystals tend to be cubes because this is a stable way of packing sodium and chloride atoms together. In the sun the simplest atoms of all, hydrogen atoms, are fusing to form helium atoms, because in the conditions that prevail there the helium configuration is more stable. Other even more complex atoms are being formed in stars all over the universe, and were formed in the ‘big bang’ which, according to prevailing theory, initiated the universe. This is originally where the elements on our world came from.

Dawkins then goes on to argue that stability in the biological world depends on molecules he will call replicators (p. 15). At first these replicators were free-floaters in the primeval biomolecular soup. In time they became (p. 20) “genes, and we are their survival machines.” I understand that there is some controversy within biology as to whether or not Dawkinsian replicators are in fact the source of stability in the biosphere (see Peter Godfrey-Smith, The Replicator in Retrospect, Biology and Philosophy 15 (2000): 403-423), but that is secondary to my current purpose.

What’s important is Dawkins’s plea for stability as the necessary precursor to meaningful change. That is as important in culture as in biology. Without stability there is no chance of accumulating cultural innovations.

With this in mind, let’s go back in time. Here’s a passage from my review of Steven Mithen’s book on music (“Synch, Song, and Society”, Human Nature Review 5, 2005, pp. 66-85):

Obviously we have no record of these utterances, but the archeological record does have indications of cultural conservatism. The repertoire of stone tools was both limited and unchanged between 1.8 and 0.25 million years ago; Mithen gives particular emphasis to the constant form of hand-axes (164). Mithen suggests that, because their finely wrought form exceeds the practical demands of butchery, wood-working, and cutting plants, these hand-axes may have been fitness indicators in the sort of sexual selection regime Geoffrey Miller has advocated.

Beyond this, I note that Ralph Holloway (1969, 1981) long ago suggested that strongly conserved hand-axe form was an indicator of social norms. Those forms could not be conserved from one generation to the next unless there was a deliberate intention to do so. One has to note the significant features of an existing axe and discipline one’s knapping motions to produce that result. That is considerably more exacting than simply producing an axe with a sharp edge and appropriate heft. The motivation behind such exacting form, then, is not practical. Nor can it be merely aesthetic, which would allow for considerable individual variation. That leaves us with a desire to conform to social norms. Given the importance of such norms, that may in itself be a sufficient motivation for their form, to serve as a visible token of social solidarity. In any event, Holloway’s observation does not contradict Miller’s, and now Mithen’s hypothesis. Norms are norms, regardless of their specific purpose and norms that serve multiple ends are likely to be particularly strong.

My point is a simple one: the oldest evidence we have of specifically human cultural norms is of something that can be seen and therefor copied, those stone axes. Of course, we know little of the lifeways that those creatures lived. The oldest, of course, were not human. Since we cannot observe them we do not know exactly how they made those axes, but archaeologists have experimented and so we know something of the likely techniques.

Whatever those techniques were, exactly, those no particular mystery about how they were passed on from one person to another as the crafting would have been fully observable. As they saying goes, hominid, hominid do. What we don’t know is just what neuro-motor advances made this activity possible, nor why they did it. What we see in the fossil record, however, is stability, norms. That’s what we need to get started.

Once again, Latour [in the NYTimes] – "the traditional image of facts was never sustainable to begin with"

Ava Kofman, The New York Times Magazine, Oct. 25, 2018:

The election of Donald Trump, a president who invents the facts to suit his mood and goes after the credibility of anyone who contradicts him, would seem to represent the culmination of this epistemic rot. “Do you believe in reality?” is now the question that half of America wants to ask the president and his legion of supporters.

“I think we were so happy to develop all this critique because we were so sure of the authority of science,” Latour reflected this spring. “And that the authority of science would be shared because there was a common world.” [...] “Even this notion of a common world we didn’t have to articulate, because it was obvious,” he continued. “Now we have people who no longer share the idea that there is a common world. And that of course changes everything.” [...]

But Latour believes that if the climate skeptics and other junk scientists have made anything clear, it’s that the traditional image of facts was never sustainable to begin with. “The way I see it, I was doing the same thing and saying the same thing,” he told me, removing his glasses. “Then the situation changed.” If anything, our current post-truth moment is less a product of Latour’s ideas than a validation of them. In the way that a person notices her body only once something goes wrong with it, we are becoming conscious of the role that Latourian networks play in producing and sustaining knowledge only now that those networks are under assault.

This, in essence, is the premise of Latour’s latest book, “Down to Earth,” an illuminating and counterintuitive analysis of the present post-truth moment, which will be published in the United States next month. What journalists, scientists and other experts fail to grasp, Latour argues, is that “facts remain robust only when they are supported by a common culture, by institutions that can be trusted, by a more or less decent public life, by more or less reliable media.” With the rise of alternative facts, it has become clear that whether or not a statement is believed depends far less on its veracity than on the conditions of its “construction” — that is, who is making it, to whom it’s being addressed and from which institutions it emerges and is made visible. A greater understanding of the circumstances out of which misinformation arises and the communities in which it takes root, Latour contends, will better equip us to combat it.

The traditional division between facts and values is not, alas...

"In a formulation that was galling to both sociologists and scientists, he once argued that Louis Pasteur did not just, as is commonly accepted, discover microbes; rather, he collaborated with them."

...so simple as we might wish. 

While finishing his dissertation Latour was working in the Ivory Coast and found himself tasked with finding out when French companies in postcolonial Abidjan were having trouble finding suitable black executives.

It took less than a day for Latour to realize that the premise was flawed. “The question was absurd because they did everything not to have black executives,” he told me. In the French-run engineering schools, black students were taught abstract theories without receiving any practical exposure to the actual machinery they were expected to use. When they were subsequently unable to understand technical drawings, they were accused of having “premodern,” “African” minds. “It was clearly a racist situation,” he said, “which was hidden behind cognitive, pseudohistorical and cultural explanations.”

In Abidjan, Latour began to wonder what it would look like to study scientific knowledge not as a cognitive process but as an embodied cultural practice enabled by instruments, machinery and specific historical conditions.

And so it goes, especially if you're not familiar with Latour.

The more socially “networked” a fact was (the more people and things involved in its production), the more effectively it could refute its less-plausible alternatives. The medical revolution commonly attributed to the genius of Pasteur, he argued, should instead be seen as a result of an association between not just doctors, nurses and hygienists but also worms, milk, sputum, parasites, cows and farms. Science was “social,” then, not merely because it was performed by people (this, he thought, was a reductive misunderstanding of the word “social”); rather, science was social because it brought together a multitude of human and nonhuman entities and harnessed their collective power to act on and transform the world.

Come clean, guys:

Latour believes that if scientists were transparent about how science really functions — as a process in which people, politics, institutions, peer review and so forth all play their parts — they would be in a stronger position to convince people of their claims. Climatologists, he says, must recognize that, as nature’s designated representatives, they have always been political actors, and that they are now combatants in a war whose outcome will have planetary ramifications. We would be in a much better situation, he has told scientists, if they stopped pretending that “the others” — the climate-change deniers — “are the ones engaged in politics and that you are engaged ‘only in science.’ ”

The machinery behind the curtain:

At a meeting between French industrialists and a climatologist a few years ago, Latour was struck when he heard the scientist defend his results not on the basis of the unimpeachable authority of science but by laying out to his audience his manufacturing secrets: “the large number of researchers involved in climate analysis, the complex system for verifying data, the articles and reports, the principle of peer evaluation, the vast network of weather stations, floating weather buoys, satellites and computers that ensure the flow of information.” The climate denialists, by contrast, the scientist said, had none of this institutional architecture. Latour realized he was witnessing the beginnings a seismic rhetorical shift: from scientists appealing to transcendent, capital-T Truth to touting the robust networks through which truth is, and has always been, established.