Styles of Thought: Interpretation, Inquiry, and Imagination

Styles of Thought

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Styles Styles of ofThought Thought Interpretation, Inquiry, and Imagination

DAVID WEISSMAN

State University of New York Press

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2008 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Production by Marilyn P. Semerad Marketing by Fran Keneston Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Weissman, David, 1936– Styles of thought : interpretation, inquiry, and imagination / David Weissman. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7914-7261-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Interpretation (Philosophy) 2. Inquiry (Theory of knowledge) 3. Imagination (Philosophy) I. Title. B824.17.W45 2007 121'.68—dc22

2007001917 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In memory of Paul Weiss

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Contents Introduction Chapter One. Two Styles of Explanation: Interpretation and Inquiry Interpretation / 8 Inquiry / 14 Different Tasks / 19 Perspective / 22 Contrary Responses: An Example / 29 Mixed Modes / 31 Applications / 32 Values / 35 Morality / 36 Politics / 38 Chapter Two. Interpretation: Self and Society Origin and Context / 45 Distortion / 50 Emotion / 51 Assumptions for a Taxonomy / 51 Stories / 52 Socialized Interpretations / 53 Eliding Fact and Value / 56 Magic, Myth, and Metaphor / 57 Faith and Fantasy / 59 Philosophic Rationales / 60 Tolerance / 64

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Chapter Three. Inquiry: Practical Life and Science Context and Objectives / 67 Meaning / 73 Truth / 76 Animadversions / 80 Engaging Other People and Things / 91 Aims / 94 Ideals / 95 A Choice / 96

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Chapter Four. A Disputed Question Ontological Alternatives / 97 The Dialectic of Untestable Ideas / 107 Reconciliation / 111

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Chapter Five. Imagination Construction / 115 Construction Rules / 117 Variation / 119 Discipline / 120

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Chapter Six. Leading Principles Priority / 123 Precedents / 124 Use / 126 An Inventory of Leading Principles / 130 Values / 164 When Practical Life and Science Disagree / 164 Categorial Form / 169

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Afterword

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Notes

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Index

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Introduction Every man and woman is located in two ways. One is stolidly physical: each human body has a unique address and trajectory. Clifford Geertz credits Max Weber with this précis of the alternative: “Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself spun.”1 These are opposed responses to a salvo of questions: Who, what, and where am I? What are my relations to other people and things? Some answers locate us in contexts where pertinent information and practices make us efficient and safe. Others ascribe significance to me, my family, religion, or state; they tell a story that locates me within a world of purpose and value.2 Neighbors feel and valorize their lives as I do, so our story spreads to dominate a people or an era. One procedure favors realitytesting and truth. The other bestows meanings that appease vulnerability or glorify believers. These ways of construing one’s self and circumstances may be distinguished as interpretation and inquiry. Ignoring the precedent of writers who use hypothesis and interpretation interchangeably,3 I use the words to distinguish these different styles of thought. Interpretation construes the world in ways prescribed by the interests and values of the interpreter: we project significance into things thought or perceived. Inquiry is sometimes urgent, but more detached. It formulates and tests hypotheses: are they accurate; do things stand as they say? Construing matters in either way, I know what or where I am. But know is ambiguous: things are known as interpreted, or known as inquiry tests its claims about them. Which has priority? Provoked by danger or need, we look for means to secure or satisfy us. Or interpretation overrides inquiry when a story endows me and my context with overriding significance. Hunger seems less urgent if religious belief prescribes a fast. Both styles of thought resolve uncertainties that are constants of human experience. Inquiry is obligatory, because practical life is unsustainable without encounters that require hypothesis and experiment. Interpretation is pervasive, because interests and values shape the more or less explicit, self-justifying story that each person formulates as he 1

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positions himself within the ambient world. How much to inquiry, how much to interpretation? Are we practical creatures, opportunists who master circumstances as best we can, or interpreters who contrive the stories that invest our private or social “worlds” with meaning? There is another option, too, for inquiry divides: we sometimes address the world with no motive but the desire to understand it. This is science as it exceeds the interests of practical life. This way of distinguishing beliefs clarifies issues that are otherwise obscure. We sometimes say, for example, that all beliefs are hypotheses, and that some are false. Or we treat every belief as an interpretation, and say that truth is relative to the standpoint of the believer: true for you or true for me. But this tolerance is misleading if beliefs vary in the way proposed. For interpretations and inquiries are not appraised in the same ways. We may regard creationism as a hypothesis while disqualifying it on evidentiary or logical grounds, but doing so misconstrues it. Its role—see reality as the work of a beneficent designer—is valorizing: better a life created by a thoughtful God than one that evolves by chance. The many beliefs loosely described as opinions are also clarified. Some differ because there are many perspectives from which any state of affairs may be perceived and described: the glass seen as half full or half empty. These are hypotheses. They compare to differences that express personal or social interests. Those are interpretations: they aren’t true or false. The difference between interpretation and inquiry sometimes hardens into the contrast of idealism and realism: the world as thought contrives it or the world as it is. But their opposition is evidence that philosophical dialectic has made contraries of a simple though easily confused difference. My concern is the softer, pre-dialectical inclination to do two things: secure and satisfy oneself, while making sense of the world in one’s own terms or those of one’s community. How much to inquiry, how much to interpretation? There may be little conflict between them: we happily subordinate animal needs—for food or clothing—to its demands. But sometimes conflict is overt and irreconcilable. That happens whenever interpretation affirms “truths” that no empirical inquiry can certify. Hence these questions: Which procedure supplies reliable answers? Or is truth equivocal: does “true to me or us” have a sense different from “true”? Dewey and Foucault believed that there is no clean break between these notions of truth. Putnam argues that “ ‘Every fact is value loaded and every one of our values loads some fact.’ ”4 There may seem to be little philosophic purchase in the difference between the savvy required to live a busy day and the pleasure of living it when my city’s team

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defeats every other. But the difference is significant within the context of philosophical anthropology, the study of what humans do as we make sense of our circumstances and selves. It matters, too, within contemporary American public life: which claims are reliable when both sides—interpretation and inquiry—declare their truths? Writing of values as though there were no significant differences among them, Dewey, Foucault, and Putnam conflate inquiry’s procedural values—economy and consistency, for example—with the needs, interests, or biases that drive interpretation and practical life. Is value an undifferentiated sump, so no pertinent differences remain when all thought’s instruments are suffused with value? Saying that it is promotes confusion, because it elides religion, plumbing, meteorology, and physics. All are value driven, but methodological standards used to appraise the truth claims of the latter three are incidental to the values impelling practical life and interpretation. Testability, hence falsifiability, is another benchmark for distinguishing them. Inquiry is reality-testing; its hypotheses are empirically falsifiable. (Verifiability is critical to this difference. Quine’s strictures against it are considered below.) Interpretations are not falsifiable, whatever the evidence and whatever their inconsistencies. This is not to say that interpretations are tautologies hence necessary truths (those whose negations are contradictions), but instead that evidence is incidental to reasons for believing them. Interpretations are compelling if they satisfy attitudes that motivate, defend, or glorify us: I believe we humans are the apogee and aim of creation, because believing it justifies my self-regard; you believe in fashion or the Red Sox. Everyone’s beliefs about his or her prospects, other people, and things are mediated by attitudes. Some are repressed as need or interest requires; all are hard to discount because every hope and encounter is warped in ways they prescribe. This doesn’t imply that attitudes are an additional kind of mental furniture. Each is a complex of beliefs, habits, and feelings that frighten or appease; its only foundation is a network of neural facilitations and inhibitions. No one inspects his or her attitudes: they are known, even to those having them, by their effects. Interpretation is equilibrating: security seems enhanced if we control a situation by propitiating or reconciling ourselves to it; well-being is intensified if we identify ourselves with a dominant power, whether a state, team, or religion. These are ways of bestowing meaning. Inquiry is often more deliberate. Its expositions—especially those of scientific method—are widely available, but they often suppose that science emerges from the fog of prejudice or the ad hoc hit-and-miss of practical life. I suggest that science is a refinement of practical life. Each is systematic;

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both satisfy conceptual and experimental requirements that are alien to interpretation. The detail is ordinary. Ignoring it explains some wrong turns that often distinguish philosophy’s history since Protagoras and Nietzsche. My account—chapters 1–5—shadows the fourfold bases for belief described by Peirce in 1877.5 It would be unreasonable to hope that science could displace either practical life or interpretation. Many people and cultures thrive without science though none lacks either the finesse of practical life or stories that reconcile its members to nature, one another, or themselves. Yet few of us live without all three,6 because each is useful in its way and because stories expressing interpretations are indistinguishable from inquiry’s hypotheses at their point of origin. This was Kant’s insight: imagination is the effulgent source of art, plans, stories, and hypotheses.7 Each construct is pervaded by rules—of grammar, cause and effect, or symmetry, for example—that differentiate and integrate its content. How do we choose among these constructs—confirming their applicability to actual states of affairs—when “Harry did it” and “God, the creator” have the same form? An answer is implicit in the rules used to differentiate and organize imagination’s constructs. Each rule is also a procedure for testing their truth: using the causal rubric to hypothesize that Sam is the crook, we also use it as a leading principle to search for confirming evidence.8 Inquiry’s hypotheses invite such tests. Interpretation abjures them, because its aim is different. Vulnerable or secure, we tell stories that justify our respective points of view. Reality-testing is incidental or averse; we don’t want our stories disconfirmed. No matter the evidence, they vindicate our attitudes. We may suppose that leading principles are merely procedural rules used to organize thought: like Kant’s categories or empirical schemas, they tell us nothing of reality itself. I demur, because Kant’s idealism can’t survive the discovery that mind is the activity of bodies able to secure and satisfy themselves within the material world.9 This immediately implies a question about inquiry’s leading principles: what is their status? Why is it that hypotheses constructed under the direction of these principles, then used as maps or plans, are often effective guides to action? There are likely to be two reasons: first, that nature has a complex but decided form; second, that rules used to differentiate and organize hypotheses represent nature’s deep—categorial—features. Accustomed to finding things within the clutter of papers on my desk, I look for a missing page, using a hypothesis about spatial relations— here within this area—as my context-setting rule. Practical life doesn’t consolidate its many rubrics (fire burns, batter rises, ice melts), but

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reflection integrates them after generalizing each principle from the diversity of its applications. The set of categorial principles thereby refined is a metaphysical framework, a toolbox of rules suitable to finding one’s way in the near world. Science uses many of the same principles, but it modifies some and replaces others. Its reasons for proposing changes are sometimes moot. Is it sure, for example, that anomalies intimated by the experiments of quantum theorists justify replacing principles repeatedly confirmed in practical life and many sciences: no action at a distance, never something from nothing, for example? I suggest a conservation rule: revise rather than replace accepted principles when feasible; affirm that the coherence of principles often confirmed and long applied is a model and norm for any list of principles formulated to replace those we have. The unexplained anomalies discovered by quantum physicists may require the formulation of new leading principles. Though currently we have the anomalies, but no principles that explain them. This ambiguity is congenial to interpretation. Using or extrapolating from leading principles commended by practical life or science, it welcomes scientific conjectures about action at a distance or entities that pop into or out of existence from nothing. They supply a gloss of plausibility to stories that would otherwise be perceived as illogical or fantastic: didn’t God create the world from nothing? There may be no style of theorizing so rigorous that it precludes every whiff of illogic or fantasy: any rule or procedure barring it would likely preclude advances due to novel ideas. The distinction between interpretation and inquiry is, nevertheless, as fundamental as their respective aims: one valorizes our lives, the other ascertains the character of things themselves. One is a topic for psychology, the other for reality-testing and ontology. Chapter 6 is the aim and point of reference for all the preceding argument: it distinguishes empirically justified contentions about reality’s categorial features from speculations that are empirically unverified and conceptually moot. These are principles formulated for the purposes of inquiry, then tested as we engage other things. They are not correctly formulated or appraised until interpretation’s distortions are acknowledged and discounted. These opposing scruples and concerns distinguish interpretation and inquiry from Plato’s Euthyphro and the Enlightenment to our time.10 Little is new, but these ways of settling belief still need disentangling, hence philosophy’s role: it defends public health by distinguishing whatever is separable.

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Chapter One

Two Styles of Explanation Interpretation and Inquiry

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hat explains the schism that divides the sciences from the humanities? Their tasks are different: one inquires, the other interprets. Truth and significance are different values; interests they serve are sometimes opposed. Explanations vary accordingly. Science explains phenomena by formulating, testing, and revising hypotheses that cite pertinent causes or laws: citing methane explains coal fires; F=ma explains the velocity of falling apples. Humanists explain phenomena by embedding words or ideas in networks of appraising relations: parenthood is honorable, piety is good. The procedural values of scientific method— simplicity and consistency, for example—are regulative principles that restrict the formation of scientific hypotheses without determining their content. Hypotheses are value-free in the respect that causes or laws they specify obtain or not, irrespective of human concerns; interpretations are suffused with values that determine content, some explicit, others disguised. Science’s opposition to the humanities is clarified once and for all if each side is distinguished from the other by reference to these opposed explanatory styles. Thinkers who challenge this program say that facts and values are inextricably entangled. But they conflate interpretation with inquiry.1 Practical life is the middle term that binds these two. Needy and vulnerable, we interpret and inquire. Inquiry starts when need provokes action: What to eat? Where to sleep? Rabbits survive by following a few hardwired clues or by imitating a parent. Humans, too, associate sensory clues, but practical life would be simpler than it is if doctors and 7

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auto mechanics only tallied symptoms. We do better, because we map our circumstances while deliberating about alternate ways to engage them. Maps represent the structures and processes—the densities and responses—of relevant things. Plans sequence imagined engagements with other things: do this, wait for a response, then, given the anticipated effect, do that. Every cook and mechanic knows the means available and ways to exploit them. Interpretation subordinates practical skills and activities by locating them within a network of meanings. Every aspect of life may be construed in ways that give it significance; every act may express a devotion. Why add this layer of thought and value to effective practices? Because interpretation expresses hopes and fears. It appeases us by making circumstances intelligible in terms that are reassuring and safe. It makes them controllable, if only in the respect that they are understood. INTERPRETATION Interpretation categorizes phenomena by situating ideas of them within a conceptual network. I see the world from my point of view, my interests and entitlements confirmed. Or I lie back watching clouds, seeing faces here, animals there. I point them out to you, but you see other things and don’t see mine. People reading books also disagree. Each organizes selected incidents or portions while arguing that his or her reading is the right one, perhaps the only plausible or moral way to construe the text. Every such reading expresses three aspects of interpretation. First is orientation, second is the projection of orientation’s interests and values onto things perceived or encountered, third is the narrative—the story told—when an orientation is formulated in words and justified. Musicians or actors interpreting a score or text acknowledge that many readings are possible. We are less tolerant of people whose orientations differ from our own. Each filters available data or ideas in ways appropriate to his or her valorizing perspective, though many are opaque: one doesn’t know their interests or fears. Actors experiment with new ways to play a character, but each person lives stubbornly within his or her point of view. He or she may describe it as “living within the truth,” but this is an odd sort of truth, one born of the confusion between assertion and evidence. Ask an interpreter how to confirm that his story is true, and he fulminates or fumbles, though an answer is available. Interpretations are orientations. Some, but not all, are expressed by stories that make sense of the world and our place within it. All express the interests and values of the interpreter. None is

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true—as the preference for chocolate or vanilla is a preference, not a truth—because the values that infuse an orientation have no basis but personal history, needs, and the attitudes of one’s community. Hypotheses are formulated so they may be tested, hence falsified or confirmed. Interpretations are not falsifiable, because they resist every surprise; we can reconfigure or reinterpret their claims to accommodate any outcome, including disappointments and disasters. Nothing is settled, everything is adjustable: any apparent fact—favorable or not—can be digested and made to disappear. So, death is unreal if one believes in eternal life. This is interpretation as it expresses thought’s alliance with piety, will, and conscience. A potent story—one that reconciles or vindicates believers—spreads like contagion through a society. I believe it, and tell it to you; you believe it, too, and tell it to others who confirm my belief by repeating it to me. Religion, movies, and advertising are sources for many shared persuasions, some that are open and subject to criticism, others that escape notice because they are disguised and insidious: one thinks of Thrasymachus and Machiavelli and of stories used to regulate and dominate other people.2 Contemporary thinkers in every discipline are happy to tell us that interpretation is all the knowledge we have of nature, culture, or ourselves. Philosophy is party to this consensus: it chronically confuses interpretation with inquiry, telling us that phenomena have no character or autonomy apart from ideas or conceptual systems that differentiate and relate them. Kant is interpretation’s principal sponsor in modern times. Abductions—inferences from phenomena perceived to their conditions (causes or laws)—often exceed the immediate data of experience. They are speculations about things-in-themselves: the hand that conditions the look of a hand, for example.3 Kant argued that interpretations knitting sensory data into networks of coherent experience are all that understanding can achieve. Why schematize sensory data in one way rather than others? Because something valued—a need, interest, desire, or ideal—prompts us to create a satisfying experience. Piety is a sponsoring value of this sort. It operates within interpretations by calibrating and integrating their parts. So, prayer, ritual, and good works are suitable to a religious outlook, because all are expressions of piety. Or the value is patriotism, so loyalty and service—“my country right or wrong”—are its expressions. Hegel socialized this account, saying that the conceptualizations used to create a thinkable world are common to a community’s members. Bound to one another by history and need, they create and communicate about a common world and shared desires.4 Marx emphasized the economic interest that provokes a dominant group to impose its

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story on a society’s other members.5 Foucault argued that various interests—not only economic motives—determine the bias and detail of interpretations that shape social worlds and the conduct of their members.6 Carnap constructed systems that would integrate and explain phenomena of every sort; Quine endorsed his program, but disagreed about the logic of conceptual networks.7 Their guiding intention is fixed and clear: let no thinkable difference or relation elude a system of sentences or ideas. Or, conversely, affirm that no phenomenon is conceivable—hence that none exists—if there is no place for it within a conceptual system. Truth for these thinkers is the relation of sentences within a system, not the relation of a sentence to an extra-systemic truth-maker. Value— utility—is the conceptual driver and integrator. Carnap argued that the use of conceptual systems—pragmatics—is coequal with their syntax and semantics.8 His inspiration was likely Kant’s Critique of Judgment: I have been reproached . . . for defining the power of desire as the power of being the cause, through one’s presentations, of the actuality of the objects of these presentations. The criticism was that, after all, mere wishes are desires too, and yet we all know that they alone do not enable us to produce their object. That, however, proves nothing more than that some of man’s desires involve him in self-contradiction, inasmuch as he uses the presentation by itself to strive to produce the object, while yet he cannot expect success from it.9 “Presentation by itself” is mere appearance, the given. This is the materiel thought forms—schematizes—when perceptual objects are made to satisfy parameters fixed by desire. Interpretation so dominates modern thinking that writers vindicate inquiry in terms appropriate to interpretation. Dewey wrote with conviction about problem-solving and its biological, cultural setting. Yet, he succumbed to the Kantian style when detailing his notion of inquiry. Every system that satisfies his description is an interpretation, not a hypothesis: it lays down—prescribes—the differences and relations that may be ascribed to the phenomena differentiated and organized within it. Inquiry, as Dewey described it, is “the construction of a new empirical situation in which objects are differently related to one another, and such that the consequences of directed operation form the objects that have the property of being known.”10 There is less clarity but more detail when Dewey elaborated: Were it not that knowledge is related to inquiry as a product to the operations by which it is produced, no distinctions re-

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quiring special differentiating designation would exist. Material would merely be a matter of knowledge or of ignorance and error; that would be all that could be said. The content of any given proposition would have the values “true” and “false” as final and exclusive attributes. But if knowledge is related to inquiry as its warrantably assertible product, and if inquiry is progressive and temporal, then the material inquired into reveals distinctive properties which need to be designated by distinctive names. As undergoing inquiry, the material has a different logical import from that which it has as the outcome of inquiry. In its first capacity and status, it will be called by the general name subject-matter. When it is necessary to refer to subjectmatter in the context of either observation or ideation, the name content will be used, and particularly on account of its representative character, content of propositions. The name objects will be reserved for subject-matter so far as it has been produced and ordered in settled form by meanings of inquiry; proleptically, objects are the objectives of inquiry. The apparent ambiguity of using “objects” for this purpose (since the word is regularly applied to things that are observed or thought of) is only apparent. For things exist as objects for us only as they have been previously determined as outcomes of inquiries. When used in carrying on new inquiries in new problematic situations, they are known as objects in virtue of prior inquiries which warrant their assertibility. In the new situation, they are means of attaining knowledge of something else. In the strict sense, they are part of the contents of inquiry as the word content was defined above. But retrospectively (that is, as products of prior determination in inquiry) they are objects.11 Dewey’s summary is concise: “The idea that the intelligibility effected by scientific or controlled inquiry proves the antecedent existence of an a priori rational world puts the cart before the horse.”12 Inquiry so conceived is very close to the notion described here as interpretation: There is, accordingly, an element of evaluation involved in appreciation. For such objects are not ends in the sense of being merely termini, but in the sense of being fulfillments: satisfactions in the literal sense in which that word means “making suf–ficient” something de-ficient. Consequently, judgments of appreciation are found wherever subject-matter undergoes such development and reconstruction as to result in a satisfying, complete whole.13

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This is interpretation rechristened inquiry. Situations are problematic: they are, in Dewey’s terms, indeterminate. They are made satisfying and determinate by the ways we develop and reconstruct them. Dewey used the language of problem-solving, interaction, and inquiry to produce a distinctly Kantian result: objects are made not discovered.14 The effect is similar when organizing words creates interpretations similar to novels: they tell comprehensive stories where nothing excluded has reality in situations they prefigure. We may suppose that life resists: circumstances and our limited abilities confound the stories we tell of ourselves. But is that so? Quine denied that there are indigestible data. Every interpretation can be revised to integrate or ignore them, because the network of constituent sentences or beliefs is plastic and adaptable: it reconstrues the data or yields just enough to incorporate it. Inquiry is less flexible. Consistent hypotheses represent possible states of affairs. Tested against a reality they do not make, they are falsified or confirmed. This is an odd dilemma for philosophy. Its claim to authority is founded in the belief that truth is unqualified: sentences or beliefs name their truth conditions; they are true if those conditions obtain. Truths of this sort are impersonal. Not your truths or mine, they obtain or not because of circumstances distinct from sentences they confirm. Truth is two things for interpretation: the story expressing an orientation is true, because it satisfies the interests and values of the interpreter, be it a person or society; the story’s sentences or ideas are true because they substantiate—cohere with and support—one another. This second criterion is very loose: incoherence, even contradiction, may seem appropriate to a credible story: the omnipotent God tolerates evil and free will; pantheism is odious, though God is said to be infinite, hence omnipresent. People are reasonably confused: what is philosophy’s vocation? Are philosophers interpreters—storytellers, like novelists and playwrights—or merely their accountants and bookkeepers, their logicians and meta-theorists? Or is philosophy, too, an inquiry? Philosophy is troubled, either way. Novelists are not obliged to tell the same story; their books are more interesting for their differences. But reality, presumably, has one form, however complex. Truth-telling would seem to require that comprehensive hypotheses should converge on a single theory that correctly specifies this form or at worst on a set of theories that are translational equivalents. Yet, nothing oppresses philosophers so much as agreement. Every powerful thinker accepts the responsibility for making sense of reality in his own terms: his account is an expression of intellectual integrity, depth, and vision: it shouldn’t be elided with others. But it should be measured against other accounts, if reality has

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a settled character of its own, one that is accurately, if partially, mapped by several or many others. Philosophers evade this measure because of the peculiar turn that distinguishes Western philosophy from Plato and Descartes to the present, namely, philosophy’s dedication to the formula of Protagoras: man is the measure of all that is that it is, and of all that is not that it is not.15 This is the claim that the character and existence of things is a function of the ways we conceive them: anything that falls outside an interpretive framework is not. Philosophy’s affinity to literature is all but explicit: there are many possible novels, and many ways to conceptualize the world before us, a world that includes us. What comes of truth? Call it his or her truth, then add the social authority that comes with the status of the thinker. Give the thinker high status, and his truth spreads through the ranks of all who defer to him. That it quickly loses persuasive power with his death is evidence that the theory was an interpretation used prescriptively. But what is the alternative? Restrict philosophy to hypotheses, and its claims have no privileged authority: they may be false. Error is an embarrassment to thinkers who want to commend their values, often surreptitiously in the guise of a favored theory. Emphasize testable hypotheses, forgo a valorizing orientation, and philosophy loses its authority. Philosophy’s response is alternately righteous and defensive: Leave us alone, is the gist. Our aims and practices are different from the ones of practical life or science. If that implies a retreat into hermetic, self-justifying interpretations or merely the logic of value-driven conceptual systems, so be it. This choice would be innocuous, but for the identification of philosophy with truth and the popular conflation of ideas, ideals, and ideologies. Peace is an idea. It may be considered by comparing it to war, without an expression of preference. But peace is preferable, hence ideal. More, it may become an ideology, an aim and recipe for transforming circumstances to achieve it. Most philosophic ideas are too fragmentary or abstract to pass into ideals or ideologies, but some do. Those are usually ideas about social or political organization, morality, or ideas that lend themselves to religious practice or belief. Descartes’ dedicatory letter avers that his Meditations will prove the soul’s immortality. This promise, coming from a philosopher who was never slow to affirm the truth of his views, was sure to attract the support of people who also believed that a soul judged and rewarded by its maker is present in each of us. How many pagans were forcibly converted because of an ideology supported by evidence no firmer than Descartes’? This conceit is philosophy’s latent power, and the excuse for its ambiguity: declare that philosophic theses are interpretations, and they— with regimes they inspire—lose authority; require that they be testable

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empirically, and we reduce them to the (disreputable) contingency of hypotheses common to practical life and science. But this is not the zero-sum game of mutually annihilating choices. Philosophic inquiry is impelled by vital questions: What are we (who am I)? What is the world about us? What is our place there? These are empirical questions, questions about actual states of affairs known by the empirical differences they make. Interpretation—storytelling—is the poor substitute when we can’t determine or don’t like the factual answers. INQUIRY The character of inquiry is long obscured by two biases that dominate modern philosophy. One is the intuitionist, Humean claim that reality extends no farther than the phenomena—sensory data, ideas, words, sentences, or conceptual systems—set before inspecting minds. The other is the apriorist, Kantian persuasion that reality is identical with the inspectable content mind creates by using rules to differentiate and organize sensory data. These two perspectives—data versus the rules for differentiating and organizing it—share an implication. For inquiry is precluded, if, as Hume and Kant agreed, no legitimate inference exceeds the domain of actual or possible data. The tension between their skepticism and the demands of practical life are apparent in the ambiguity of the word hypothesis. It suggests that inference is tentative, though there are different reasons for caution. Evidence of sparrows reduces to data that have the look of sparrows, with only this possible addition: we extend the domain of our judgments by introducing inductive hypotheses. Seeing one thing or a few, we generalize, fallibly, to some or all. Or—curve-fitting—we formulate equations that track previous observations while entailing others that test and confirm the equations when data predicted are observed. So, Newton and Einstein generalized from a small sample of observations to law statements that represent the dynamical relations of all phenomena. But inferences of both sorts could be mistaken, and are often revised or replaced: black swans, chicken-sized sparrows. It may seem that nothing we might want to know requires an alternative explanatory method: why try to do more when the laws of motion have no other basis? We want and have a different method because we often use sensory data as evidence of their conditions: causes, constituents, or laws. Seeing an effect, we infer—abductively—to one of them. There may be ample data justifying an abduction (the apple one sees, holds, and tastes), or scant data garnered from instruments (canaries) that register the effects of their causes (methane). Either way, we

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mitigate philosophy’s skeptical instincts and speculate that features of a face cause (hence explain) the look of the face. And sometimes, we infer from observed effects to their unobservable conditions: from falling apples to F=ma. Abduction has four steps. Provoked by data, one infers its condition or conditions. This is the abductive hypothesis. Next, one deduces the prediction that specific consequences do obtain or could be provoked if the hypothesis is correct. Such consequences—regularities conditioned by laws, for example—are ideally observable, for there is no way to test the hypothesis if they are not. The third step is inductive, though now induction is the activity of looking for or experimenting to produce the effect predicted. Induction of the other, generalizing kind does not occur, until, fourth, we find the data anticipated. We then infer that all or most data of this sort have the condition specified by the hypothesis in the circumstances tested. This last step is a mix of positive or negative feedback. Hypothesize correctly, and nature yields to our expectations; we get what we look for, perhaps again and again. Hypothesize incorrectly, and the evidence is a reproach: do it again, differently. We use the word hypothesis to signify abductions, inductive generalizations, and curve-fitting, though this critical difference is plain if we compare their utility as explanations. Inductive generalizations often make accurate predictions, but their explanatory power is weak: we explain an event merely by citing the law that covers it. This explanatory style is circular, because the law statement has been generalized from just such events as those it explains: we speculate that this bluebird will be blue, because we generalize after seeing several that all are blue. Such explanations succeed, because they rely on a condition they ignore or deny: namely, the natural kinds they specify. Abductive explanations affirm rather than suppress their material assumptions, and they are not circular. We infer from regularities observed to their constraining constituents, causes, or laws. Curve-fitting hypotheses fall between these stools: they explain adjacent phenomena by representing them as contiguous points on the curve traced by a covering equation. Predictions derived from such equations may be all but infallible, yet the equations are deficient explanations. Like music lovers who sing along without knowing how to play the song, they escape the circularity of inductive generalizations but fail to specify the material conditions for their success. Induction and curve-fitting skim the surface of phenomena, emphasizing similarity or correlation. Abductions identify a phenomenon’s generating conditions; they express the assumption that phenomena have depth, that data affecting us are the leading edge—the effects—of states

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of affairs whose bulk and efficacy are independent of mind and its empirical sensibility. The differences among these kinds of inference are consequential ontologically across the range of situations to which they apply. Laws are an example, because their status is ambiguous: are they sentences reporting correlations or constraints operating upon or within material processes? Inherent constraints seem disreputable, given our reluctance to speculate about extra-mental states of affairs or their conditions, and the prejudice that strips nature of its modalities, be they parochial necessities specific to particular worlds because they satisfy its laws of motion or universal necessities applicable within all possible worlds because they satisfy the principle of noncontradiction.16 Suspend these dogmas, and we are free to consider the possibility that laws are more than generalizations: we infer from a particular event or effect to the intrinsically constraining relationship it embodies. Consider, for example, the surmise that every right triangle embodies the Pythagorean theorem, and that each represents its kind.17 We confirm this by substituting values for the theorem’s variables while observing the result: does the sum of the squares of the sides equal the square of the hypotenuse for each particular right triangle? Granting that the effect may be accidental in any single case, we substitute other values for the variables. Repeated successes are evidence that the theorem applies to all right triangles. Still, the point of reference is every single right triangle. Each exhibits the constraining effects signified by the theorem. They inhere within all the individuals of a domain because they inhere within each: cosmic laws in a falling apple. Newton specified these laws as best he could, given the scales of space and velocity known to him. Einstein did it again, more accurately. This account of physical laws seems carelessly speculative to those who prefer the notion that laws are phenomenological, meaning that law statements signify the observable, functional relations one sees and tests by altering values for their variables. We test an inverse square law for magnetism by moving the iron filings farther and farther from a stable magnet. There is no need to infer a cause or condition that exceeds the observables: they behave as the law reports. But here as above, something is wanting. An event is explained by citing a law that generalizes or abstracts from just such cases: we explain the cycle of night and day by observing that one always succeeds the other. Abduction promises more. It specifies conditions for the effects observed: namely, Earth rotating while turning about the Sun. This complex state of affairs is a condition for the effects observed. Citing it explains them. Phenomenological laws, like inductive generalizations of all sorts, are

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much less ambitious: they are verbal or conceptual generalizations— strings of words or mathematical symbols—that extrapolate from observed regularities to all instances of a kind. Researchers of every sort construe the laws they formulate in these phenomenological terms, because this is a way of discovering laws and because Humean skeptics have convinced them that anything additional— abductive inferences to causes, constituents, or laws—is uselessly excessive. Abduction obliges theorists to formulate models of factors that may condition data mapped by their equations, though it is the equations—we are to believe—not such models, that carry all the force of scientific explanation, prediction, and control. Worse, abduction is profligate: it may generate any number of models that support the same equation. We could choose among them—discounting some, promoting others—if there were testable differences among them. But some or many may not be empirically distinguishable. Why not agree that curvefitting—formulating equations that generate the values observed—is a sufficient explanation for phenomena that concern us? This question encapsulates an agenda framed by Cartesian skepticism, Humean empiricism, and the operationalism learned from Kant: garner what you can from the data, organize and use it, but don’t speculate. This project is often successful, because there is significant information in the data and because we organize it in ways that provoke additional, useful data. But this result is less than knowledge can be. For the project satisfied has limited itself to the effects of things on our instruments or sensory organs. It ignores the natural processes and structures that cause the data. The language used to differentiate and organize sensory data may be replete with theoretical terms—words that apparently signify those causes—but we are cautioned repeatedly that the word flute, for example, is shorthand for a rule that organizes data; it doesn’t signify the source of the notes. Abduction annoys skeptics, because saying that we may identify the extra-mental conditions for sensory effects violates their warnings not to speculate. Skepticism has become so routine that we hardly notice the difference between caution—always or often appropriate— and dogmatic doubt: assume that we never know, because we are never certain we know. This is the ancient Platonic prejudice: distinguish knowledge from opinion in the manner of Descartes’ first Meditation, then discount opinion. Make sure that every candidate for knowledge—be it sensory data or scientific theory—stands directly before the mind’s eye. Practical life and many sciences know better: many abductions are justified by myriad data collected in various ways (wet clothes, wet feet), no disconfirming evidence, and no plausible alternative hypothesis.18

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Explanation is empowered by cycles of advance and consolidation. Sometimes, we know a structure—the vermiform appendix, for example—but not its function. Other times, we observe pertinent behavior, but not the structures or laws engaged. Respiration was familiar, but its conditions were a mystery until the relation of heart and lungs was discovered. Imagine observant people in a culture ignorant of physiology. They explain breath by reducing it to the data observed, then by generalizing: breathing repeatedly is good evidence that we shall breathe many times more. This works for a time, though no explanation is forthcoming when breathing stops. Physics, too, is incomplete until it specifies the entities, processes, and laws that condition matters observed. This is ideal. Pertinent factors elude us, because of their scale (large or small) or because they are unobserved and perhaps unobservable given their nature and our sensory powers. Still, the errors of previous formulations don’t obviate the intention or diminish the partial success of previous abductions. Experimental and mathematical techniques evolve; theorists learn to exploit them. Differences among the several kinds of hypotheses entail different accounts of theoretical terms. Induction generalizes from observables. It sometimes introduces theoretical terms, but they are analyzable—reducible—to terms that cite the observables: electron is said to be an economic way of signifying pointer readings and other data pertinent to the generalizations—the theory—where electron appears. Theoretical terms introduced by curve-fitting equations are justified in the same way. Theoretical terms introduced by abductive inferences are not reducible to the data from which we infer. Electron, on this telling, signifies negatively charged particles. Gravity, too, is introduced by an abductive inference, not by generalizing from the observation of falling apples. Specifying this notion functionally, we speculate about its material basis. Is it a particle with a field force, or the effect of motion in a curved space? Either way, inference exceeds the observables explained. Having a testable answer would enable us to mount experiments, and ultimately a technology. One would confirm the abduction; the other would exploit it. Social scientists, too, think abductively. Sometimes, the conditions to which they infer are observable indirectly (as faces are), other times the conditions inferred are not observable. Market forces—competition, scarcity, and demand—are observable, though repression was unobservable when Freud inferred it. That is changed: neural inhibition— repression’s cash value—makes it observable in our time. Still, repression would not be the mystery alleged by Freud’s critics if its mechanics were unknown. For explanation is partly successful when it identifies a function, but fails to specify its generating mechanism. Aristotle used this

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inferential style when he ascribed dispositions or potentialities to things whose behaviors were observed, though their mechanical properties were unknown. Having more information about such things, we use abduction to identify the structures and processes responsible for such effects. Notice that abductive explanations are not essentially value laden. Interests or needs motivate them; procedural values—simplicity, consistency, and fruitfulness—regulate their formulation. But there is no residue of motivating values in the inferences from phenomena to their conditions or in the empirical tests that falsify or confirm them. Alchemists hoped that turning brass to gold would make them rich, but they didn’t succeed and knew they hadn’t. DIFFERENT TASKS Practical life is inquiry that seeks well-being and safety for partners and oneself. Imagining what to do and how to do it, we test our ideas in the ambient world or revise them to do it better. Interpretations satisfy values rooted in the likes, fears, or aversions of attitudes. Confused interpretations express conflicted attitudes, hence schizoid values. Some such conflicts are never resolved, though stable, coherent attitudes dominate in people whose orientations are focused and viable. Interpretation’s task is plain from infancy. Every newborn is distinctively active, reactive, or inert. All are raw, unformed, and vulnerable. One imagines that babies experience their vulnerability as hunger, discomfort, or uncertainty. Many caretakers do their best to reduce all three, so their babies feel and are secure; rarely frustrated because their expectations are satisfied, they are confident, curious, and playful. Others don’t fare as well. Sick and apprehensive because their bodily rhythms haven’t stabilized, these babies are scared. Early orientations stabilize, because one or another style of human caretaking is dominant and because infants have primitive but quickly evolving cognitive and affective systems. First reactions are automatic, because visceral and innate: the baby is quiescent and responsive, or edgy and anxious. These responses are qualified when caretakers and circumstances are construed as favorable or adverse. For a query is all but explicit in a baby’s eyes, posture, and gestures: “What goes on?” The question is urgent in situations gone awry where fear and vulnerability are consuming. But one infers it, too, in the eyes of intense but contented babies: they want to understand. Their curiosity is a precursor to inquiry, though this other motive is also impelling: distinguish people or events that effect security or vulnerability from those indifferent to both. The child construes his or her circumstances, fixing attitudes—anxious or confident—that form

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as he or she responds. These core attitudes are known by the behavior or intrapsychic feelings they provoke, and later by way of a justifying story that explains one’s attitudes. Interpretation’s task—its regulative aim—is the equilibrium achieved when circumstances are construed in ways that satisfy attitudes. Achieving and sustaining this equilibrium—by appreciating, propitiating, or reconciling ourselves to the ambient world—we control anxiety by construing circumstances and ourselves in ways that seem to reduce the exposure that makes us vulnerable. This is a posture, an orientation, that enhances self-perceived mastery and well-being. It expresses itself in defenses and entitlements that are decisive for personal identity and safety: loyalty and status, for example. Endowing life with significance, it defines a circle—a private space—of valorizing light. The aim is satisfied trivially by everyone having an established orientation, an effect consolidated in childhood when each person construes his or her circumstances as attitudes prescribe. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I expressed this achievement in song: “Whenever I feel afraid, I hold my head erect and whistle a happy tune so no one will suspect, I’m afraid. . . . The results of this deception are very plain to tell. For when I fool the people I fear, I fool myself as well.” Vulnerability makes us anxious. Interpretation reduces anxiety by construing situations that are dangerous or uncertain in ways that make them seem viable. Salving worry and pain, it makes life supportable. Imagine the alternative: circumstances are so adverse that they defeat every attempt to construe them in a reconciling or propitiating way. Equilibration fails. Numbing oneself to insensibility is the principal alternative. Speculations about early childhood may seem too shallow a basis for claims about interpretation. But adult experience adds nothing but complexity, detail, and more elaborate stories to this simpler rubric. Consider the opposing sides posited by Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals: the self-directed artist versus the herd. Members of the herd loathe the artist’s vanity and bohemian ways. They believe that differentiating himself from them is his principal aim. They would destroy him— Socrates, for example—merely for not wanting their approval. But the artist is mostly oblivious to them and their values. Comfortable in himself or fiercely uncomfortable because he cannot succeed in his own terms, he reworks some part of the world—its notes, paint and canvass, other people, words, gestures, or stone—in ways fixed by his will, skills, and imagination. The artist may be a painter or musician but also a rock-climber, carpenter, statesman, athlete, or cook. Other people suppose that climbers are foolish or crazy, but self-perception requires that they test themselves against sheer walls. There is equilibrium—elation

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and contented exhaustion—when a climb satisfies attitude’s expectations or demands. Artists and writers are also stubborn. Infirm or close to death, they struggle to finish a task because attitudes that fix selfperception won’t let them stop. Members of the herd don’t understand the artist’s persistence, but their behavior is similar. They won’t violate social norms, because core attitudes are a principal point of self-identity and a bulwark against vulnerability: think of believers who risk death by refusing a forced conversion. Why refuse? Because losing—rejecting—a defining portion of oneself is alienating and shameful. Like Socrates, they face extinction in either way: self-betrayal or bodily death. Is this gravity excessive in a culture where identity is worn lightly by people who assume and relinquish roles and styles with every year’s fashion in cars, clothes, or ideas? No, this is evidence that certain bases for identity—religious beliefs, for example—are less compelling than before. The implication for core attitudes is unclear: are we more confident, hence willing to change the trappings of life at will, or is the pleasure and relief of change evidence that we are less secure, more vulnerable, as we sort frantically through successive ways to interpret our selves and circumstances? Nietzsche didn’t know people of this chameleon sort, or he didn’t mention them: no one in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals—no artist or member of the herd—changes his or her orientation: attitudes make them belligerently autonomous and selfsecuring, or socialized because dependent on the recognition of others. What explains the herd’s immobility? What binds its members? The temperaments and developmental histories of individual members are surely different. Why do they adopt routinizing laws, rituals, and a common story? One reason is complexity, and the need for coordination. But that interest is satisfied without a tribal story: by traffic laws, for example. What additional need explains their uniformity? Principal factors are vulnerabilities they share, plus dominating social pressure and the availability of a homogenizing story. The story valorizes, justifies, protects, and intimidates. Who could oppose it, given its many believers, without making him or herself more vulnerable? The story’s credibility is variable: passionate believers read it literally, others give it lip service while grateful for the cover it supplies. Believers root their security in a glorious narrative lovingly told, but they could have been equally defended by any tale learned early and believed. This is the odd contingency of one’s commitment to a tribal story; allegiance is a historical accident. Born and raised in Cleveland, Boston, Los Angeles, or New York, one identifies osmotically with a local team: its successes and failures are one’s own. Believers address one another within the circle of their “truths.” But truth is equivocal.

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Does it signify a belief passionately held, or one whose material truth conditions are satisfied: ‘There are birds on the roof’ is true, if there are such; “true believers” are distinguished by the intensity of their commitment, not by the truth of their beliefs. No one likes being told that his “truths” aren’t true or false, though interpretation’s claims are affirmed for various reasons—affiliation and loyalty, for example—not because of their truth. Hence the implication that any story may satisfy us if it gratifies or reconciles us to our circumstances. Is it a fantastic story replete with contradictions? Do we avow it in the absence of confirming evidence, or despite evidence that the story is false? No matter: we are motivated by needs, fear and attitudes, not by truth. The issue would be less confused if we didn’t err by thinking that beliefs of every sort are truth-claims. For beliefs are commitments of various sorts: truth is one interest among others. We believe in someone despite having no evidence for our confidence: we believe that loyalty is its own reward while knowing that often it isn’t. Divers occasions promote belief—including affiliation, social suasion or status, culture, convenience, and fear—though we wrongly suppose that belief’s causes are incidental when every belief should also be justifiable as a truth-claim. There is confirming evidence for some beliefs sponsored by attitudes: we rightly believe in the uses of learning and health. But truth is often incidental both to belief and to the reason or reasons for it: many beliefs expressing attitudes (including affiliative expressions and directives: “Believe in yourself”) have no other basis. They are not candidates for truth however closely they resemble the propositional forms of truth-claims. Interpretation resists this view of its conflict with inquiry, because truth is an honorific: surrendering claims to truth invites the judgment that interpretations are false. But this is the implication scouted above: interpretation doesn’t challenge inquiry as the source of truths, if we distinguish truth-claims from beliefs that satisfy attitudes. Conflating beliefs of these two sorts is, nevertheless, an all but inextinguishable imperative. No fervent ideologist, religious or political, agrees that his beliefs aren’t true. None is appeased by the news that beliefs sponsored by interpretation serve a different interest. PERSPECTIVE Perspective is often situational: here or there, myself or others, rich or poor. These are complementary matters of fact, though difference sometimes hardens into contrariety: male if not female, here if not there. Contrariety is mutual exclusion. It pervades thought and provokes

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hostility when one side is favored, the other deplored. What explains the transition from an easy tolerance for situational differences to the intolerance of contrariety? A principal reason is the fact that perspective is often evaluative, not situational: we disagree because of our values, not because we see things from different angles. Conflating perspectives of these two kinds subverts the distinction between interpretation and inquiry. For we may infer that every situational difference is also an evaluative difference. I see things as I do because my perspective expresses my values: my entitlements versus your obligations. Does inquiry resolve such differences in ways that identify things as they are, or is inquiry irrelevant because competing values declare congenial “facts” in the absence of an objective standard? Physicists have equations for translating measurements of motion made in one frame of reference into measurements made in frames moving uniformly or at rest relative to the first: a body moving ten miles an hour in your frame of reference has the same measured velocity in mine. But there are no comparable equations when differences of perspective express different interests. A stock market crash is good for those who short the market, bad for those invested in shares. The values are opposed, though this example leaves a space for inquiry because these responses didn’t create the state of affairs that gratifies some and disappoints others. There are, however, many occasions when inquiry has no comparable leverage. There may be no neutral facts relevant to the quarrels of spouses or friends: each alleges the indifference of the other, and both deny the charge. Their conflict is evaluative, not situational: inquiry—fact-finding—can’t settle the dispute because each insists that the other’s attitudes—hence values—are intolerable. Inquiry is forever distinguished from interpretation because of this difference: belief is dominated by facts on the ground or by values that organize perception and behavior. One inquires because of wanting to understand a quarrel better, or one insists on the legitimacy and superiority of his or her attitudes. The second is often more significant for human concerns than the first: something that comforts you, threatens me. Shall I see the world as it is—to the degree I can—or do I see it in ways congenial to my attitudes? The paths are distinct; the means are different. People lean one way or the other: they are secured and satisfied by information about their circumstances or by stories that construe a situation in ways favored by their values. This is a delicate issue for inquiry, because the preference for interpretation or inquiry is itself an intention: attitude is favorable to one or the other. This preference affects every subsidiary determination with the effect that disputes are barren among those who choose differently. People

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oriented by beliefs that sustain hope or reduce fear are not cordial to those who believe that gratifying stories are trumped by sober truths. Most every smoker in the West reads and ignores the block letter warnings on cigarette packages. Addiction explains some. But a value— raffishly attractive me—motivates others. These are alternative ways to be: interpret or inquire. They don’t coalesce at the extremes. But very few people can ignore every relevant fact; few or none are self-effacing to the degree that they never subordinate facts to attitudes. Everyone in the middle does both. Interpreting and inquiring, sometimes at once, we express our ambiguity: I rightly perceive the organization within which I work: knowing its inequities, feeling aggrieved, I want satisfaction. Does this muddle imply that inquiry is compromised by its sanctioning values: does it follow that its claims, too, are appeasing stories? This is not implied, because the discipline of inquiry precludes it. Inquiry is provoked by needs or interests and the values they express, but intention alone cannot formulate or test, let alone confirm, its hypotheses: wanting something, I do what I can to have it, knowing all the while that desire is no guarantee of success. Inquiry is exploration: we hypothesize and experiment. Interpretation won’t save us from a dog that bites. The distinction between interpretation and inquiry nevertheless risks collapse. Everyone gathers and uses information about himself and his circumstances many times in the course of every day, because effectively engaging other people and things is a condition for safety and well-being. Yet, these discrete encounters are jejune: they lack integration and in most lives significance: nothing in them bestows meaning and worth. Understanding wants more. Interpretations provide it by locating us within the integrated, valorized worlds they prefigure, usually on terms that comfort and secure us. The political party I favor tells a story that justifies my interests; a different story reconciles me to my sex or describes my relation to the god who looks after me and my interests: I live as it prescribes. Interpretation fills every problematic space with a conceptualization that propitiates, rectifies, justifies, or explains. Whether my circumstances are treacherous or benign, I know where I am. Probably everyone has a story that reconciles the ragged parts of his or her life, a story that excuses, extenuates, or affirms yesterday’s memories, today’s conduct. Novelists make art of these reflections; not content to make sense of their own lives, they knit invented lives into a coherent story. Daydreams and fantasies do as much for us. Nor is this something we could easily stop doing. Unlike creatures that merely react, we justify and anticipate. Moving back and forth between action

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and reflection, we want the coherence and significance interpretations supply. We barely notice the contrary implications of practical life where maps, plans, and hypotheses direct our engagements with other people and things. This is reality testing, not interpretation. Hume and Kant acknowledged the inclination to distinguish them, but dismissed it as unjustifiable. Conceptual relativists agree. Believing that scientific explanations are interpretations, not hypotheses, they tell us that every differentiation, relation, and state of affairs is posited by the conceptual system used to think it. Doing Kant’s work in our time—rejecting hypotheses that infer from data to their extra-mental conditions—they say that everything is text and that texts have no integrity—no fixed sense—apart from the readings made of them. Foucault is emblematic: There is no difference between marks and words in the sense that there is between observation and accepted authority, or between verifiable fact and tradition. The process is everywhere the same: that of the sign and its likeness, and this is why nature and the word can intertwine with one another to infinity, forming, for those who can read it, one vast single text. 19 But though language no longer bears an immediate resemblance to the things it names, this does not mean that it is separate from the world; it still continues, in another form, to be the locus of revelations and to be included in the area where truth is both manifested and expressed.20 What shapes a reading? Just our way of construing phenomena of any sort, including words, sensory data, or marks of any sort. Textual critics displace authors; scientists displace nature. For nature, like a book, has no essential character of its own. All its differences and relations derive from the theories—the interpretations—used to think it. No matter that this denigrates reality, frustrates practice, and stunts thought. Is it true, nevertheless, that the realist assumptions of naïve practice are correct, implying that the idealism bred of skepticism or caution is wrong? Suppose that engineers or neurologists dispute the belief that conscious mind is a distinct substance. Saying that mind is the activity of a material system, the brain especially, they build mechanical models that duplicate mental functions. But they are challenged: materiality is a concept or notion, one that has a succession of different meanings through the course of scientific reflection. It has no application apart

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from interpretations that use it to organize and construe sensory data. For we have the dicta of Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant that nothing known exceeds mind’s power to differentiate and organize the data inspected as they stand before it. Materiality, no less than talk of the gods, is the projection of a value-satisfying conceptual system. This notion of mind’s power is a weapon. Anyone who supposes that thought reaches beyond itself—fallibly but responsibly, in practical life or science—is shamed into silence by the simple remark that nothing can be known of extra-mental things. But is that so? Meeting someone new, I am better able to anticipate her responses with every subsequent encounter. Sometimes mistaken, I correct my assumptions. But what of this acquaintance: is she the creature of my thinking or its measure? And if the latter, why isn’t materiality, too, a control on what we say of it? Interpretation spreads a conceptual net, one that distinguishes and valorizes disparate things for the mind that thinks them as one. But this is not mind’s only activity. We also infer from data to their extra-mental conditions, then experiment to justify hypotheses that specify them: smoke because fire. We are prudent in many ways, because wellinformed about the material effects of many things: no one swallows thumbtacks because of having an interpretation that construes them as a delicacy. Every such thing is known as we infer from its effects to its extra-mental properties. Hypotheses are necessarily speculative, because we never have direct—unmediated—access to things inferred, though we test our speculations by constructing correctible maps or models while searching for collateral evidence that they are as we describe them. Suspecting mice, we lay traps. Fearing coal gas, we expose canaries. One is observable, the other is not. Both are inferred. Inquiry is selfcorrecting: large mice require bigger traps. Inquiry’s methodological values are subject to criticism and revision if there is evidence that reality is more complicated than was thought. Compare interpretations that rationalize our conduct by way of stories infused with value: all our projects are blessed, because we are a virtuous people. No confirming experiment is required. Practical life also idealizes its objectives, but it depends on ventures directed by hypotheses. Science embellishes practical ideas, generalizing, extrapolating, and analogizing to formulations that simplify and extend that understanding. In one as in the other, values—needs or interests—provoke actions (experiments, for example), though the existence and character of things engaged are independent of our values. Water slakes thirst, but wanting it, searching for it, is incidental to this effect: thirst motivates; testability is a procedural value.

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Procedural values discipline the formation of hypotheses by focusing attention on the states of affairs used to test them. Every procedural value is subsidiary to this overriding question: which empirical effects need obtain if hypotheses (including those implicit in maps and plans) are true? Truth is the principal value because practical life is distorted by fantasy. Many hypotheses may be true—they are possible because consistent—but the only ones reasonably affirmed are those supported by empirical data. Compare interpretations. They are organized to express the concerns of those who promote them. Truth is truth-for-me or truth-for-us. Contrary interpretations oppose one another, though neither is tested against reality, itself. Two examples illustrate these opposed interests. Consider several parents: each looks at photographs, most of them pictures of unknown children. All respond in two ways when told that one is the photograph of his or her child. Each looks through the pictures searching for the beloved face. This is inquiry: there is a hypothesis—one of these photos is important to me—and a search for the data predicted, my child. There is also interpretation: all seek the vital picture, and each enfolds it in a web of valorizing thoughts, memories, and feelings. This is interpretation as it satisfies attitude: the valorized world as it looks to me. Now this other example. Citizens answer the question: What does America mean to me? There are many answers, some mention important dates, great achievements or occasions to which inquiry could testify. Many others are effusions of gratitude, pride, pleasure, or disappointment; they dispense with supporting references, or any reference is subsumed by valorizing thoughts and feelings. This America has no ascertainable properties apart from the character ascribed it by interpretations. For America so described is not like the photographs considered above: it has only the character assigned it by valorizing attitudes. There may be predictable uniformity to some answers—because of patriotism, for example—but the America they signify is an effusion, the creature of an interpretation, not a thing disclosed by inquiry. Answers of a different sort require an inquiry: cite the actual nation, its history and people. One may join the two perspectives by using inquiry to supply backing for an interpretation, explaining an evaluative response by citing conditions that provoke it. But circumstances are typically unspecified—they may be unknown—when feelings are expressed. For this is interpretation—the affective expression of valorizing attitudes— not inquiry. These examples illustrate interpretation’s power across the range of human pursuits and commitments. Inquiry is fully appropriate to the

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intrinsic properties of texts, music, and art, though interpretation often dominates our reactions to them because such things are known principally by way of responses they evoke, not for technical details known only or best to specialist critics. Philosophers sometimes emphasize these valorizing responses when they argue that all thought is interpretation: they would have us believe that attitudes subordinate every state of affairs by fixing its ascribable properties in ways prescribed by one’s values. So, a poem or text acquires meaning within the network of discriminations and referents sanctioned by a reader’s attitudes. America is construed—“constructed”—by affective reactions to questions about its meaning: it acquires identity, hence history, character, and moral standing by way of distinctions and relations sanctioned by each person’s valorizing responses to it. Things engaged, things that provoke our attitudes, all but disappear in the tide of our projections, whether conceptual or affective. Reality then seems to be our product, not something encountered and known. History, too, is a preferred venue for those who argue that reality is constructed in ways prescribed by attitudes. For claims about it are a litmus test of ones’ overriding bias: to inquiry or interpretation. That is so, because history is inferred from residues, never by engaging it directly. Those who favor interpretation say that history lived is always subordinate to history written: its character and complexity—even the events ascribed to it—are prescribed by the sense we make of it, hence by the interests—the values and attitudes—of the historian. But this is implausibly grandiose if it implies that single authors, all of them ephemeral and narrowly constrained by their information and interests, are empowered to “construct” the past. For the perspective appropriate to history is situational, not evaluative. Available information is often meager. This occluded window may be further restricted by a historian’s scholastic emphasis (political or economic, for example) or by his theoretic bias (great men or the tempo and detail of everyday life). But only Berkeley and his phenomenalist heirs suppose that the Statue of Liberty reduces to the impression of people moving about New York Harbor. Grant the obstacles to determining the actual shape of events long past (even recent), then consider that history too has an integrity undiminished by our difficulty ascertaining it. Situational perspectives are not reduced to valorizing perspectives for want of information: think of past events as bridges obscured in darkness or fog. This opposition—interpretation or inquiry—is an abiding tension in human thought. Experience is ambiguous in a way that expresses their difference: it signifies data (percepts, thoughts, words, sentences, and theories) organized “before the mind’s eye” while infused with

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value. Or it denotes explorations in the ambient world. Interpretation is expansive, value-laden, and unfalsifiable. Inquiry requires that motives and interests be left at the door: its claims are falsifiable; its method is a discipline for exposing error. Thought is comfortable with both— we ignore their incompatibility—because each is gratifying in its way. Inquiry is exigent, because practical life demands it. But interpretation is likely to be as ancient as the evolutionary changes that enabled humans to reflect on questions that dominate our quest for personal and social meaning: what and where am I, what do I like or fear, what can I hope? Modernity—the early sixteenth century (Copernicus) to the present—recalibrates the balance. Before, interpretation dominated practical life in the respect that its conduct and meaning were subordinated to an interpreting story: church and state imposed their views without risking challenge from superior explanations. They are superseded, because science, technology, popular sovereignty, and a market economy require that we find our way in a world that resists us. Interpretation is still the way of self-understanding, social identity, fiction, and daydreams, but stories embroidered with fantasy and myth are poor directives apart from sects where belief is a condition for participation. Hypothesis and experiment is the method preferred as we move through strange rooms at night. There will never be a time when sobriety reduces interpretation to nil, though frustration and error intimate that reconciling interpretations have their limits. Adherents can whistle Berkeley’s tune—nothing is like an idea but another idea—but they, too, trip in the dark. CONTRARY RESPONSES: AN EXAMPLE Imagine a seminar where each of ten people reviews the same novel. The author is allusive, the story line is complicated, there are many characters. Five of the reviewers are inquirers. The book has a form, however imperfect: they will find it. The other five are interpreters: each sees the book as an opportunity to tell his or her story. How does discussion go? The inquirers make hypotheses and marshal supporting evidence. Fellow inquirers criticize them in two ways: they say the evidence is equivocal or that their hypotheses explain it better. These disputes puzzle the interpreters. Postmodernism has taught them that texts have no settled form; the inquirers are looking hard for something that isn’t there. Interpreters construe the book on analogy to a Rorschach test: make what you can of it. Disputes are much less heated, because each

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sees another’s reading as an expression of his interests and perspective. Alternative interpretations are generously received: why resist them if none is true or false? Everyone goes to dinner after the seminar, but only the interpreters are amiable and pleased. Each embroiders his or her story and listens to the other four with the bemused tolerance of people exchanging pictures of their pets or children. The inquirers aren’t speaking. Each is annoyed by the rejection of his hypothesis. All are distressed by the show they have made of themselves: what could inquiry be worth if no hypothesis is better than another? But then, the interpreters, too, are suddenly quiet. Each has realized that his account reveals biases he would rather not expose. No one is happy when dinner is over, and the bill is called. This isn’t the end of the matter, because literature is puzzling in ways that nature is not. There is much to know of my cat, but every hypothesis concerning it is decidable. Authorial meaning isn’t as sure. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., hopes to minimize the difference by citing “authorial intent” or “will”:21 “The aim of my exposition will be to confirm that the author’s meaning, as represented by his text, is unchanging and reproducible.”22 Authors typically believe that this is so: they would have readers hypothesize, in ways Hirsch describes, to determine a book’s “whole meaning.”23 But does this obviate the plain difficulty of agreeing about a text’s meaning? Is a diversity of readings merely an expression of partial or shallow readings or the conceit of readers who prefer their interpretations to the text? Hirsch knows the ambiguity of texts; the difficulty is elsewhere. Three considerations are decisive: i. States of affairs and all their relations are determinate in every detail. (Quantum theory denies this of phenomena at the scale of electrons. This view is contested in chapter 6. Just now, I assume the truth of this surmise.) Books, too, are determinate in every detail: there are so many pages and so many words. But characters in a novel are sometimes barely sketched. Premises in the arguments of philosophers are often merely intimated: there may be many ways to justify conclusions that are affirmed or implied rather than argued. ii. Many poems, novels, and plays are read for the feelings they evoke. An author’s choice of words is easily settled; one may also discern his or her intent. Mood’s relation to words is nevertheless uncertain: it depends very much on the author’s choice of words, the reader’s situation, and his or her state of mind. Readers can’t be faulted for responding to provocative words in whatever ways they do. iii. The whole of a text is known to its author in the way a complex city is known to its residents. Each knows streets regularly traveled, but not

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the routes of other people. For there are many routes, so many that no one could know all of them. Routes are analogues for the “implications” of which Hirsch writes.24 It’s surely true that readers may want to know the implications drawn or assumed by the author. Yet, why foreclose the possibility that a reader may concern himself with inferences prefigured but otherwise ignored in the text? These considerations have varying implications for the difference between interpretation and inquiry. The first—the indeterminacy of texts—is an open door to interpretation: make of the text what you can. One might think it sufficient to note a text’s ambiguities. But why shouldn’t an imaginative reader supply details, motives, or arguments ignored by an author, but appropriate to the reader’s inclinations? The second point—the affect provoked by texts—also speaks for the prerogatives of the interpreter. An author may have expected readers to laugh, but his intention is irrelevant if one, several, or many feel irony or pain as they read him. It is incidental to the third point—alternate routes through a test—that the author was oblivious to implications important to a reader who cites textual evidence sufficient to justify them. But this, too, is easily turned to the purposes of interpretation. Readers may aim to do no more than report the ambiguous implications of Hegel’s Phenomenology, but that is work for a book report. Inventive readers elaborate his themes in ways suitable to themselves, only incidentally to him. Hence this slippery slope: inquiries—finding implications the author ignored—culminate as interpretations if, for example, Marxists or theists appropriate Hegel for their purposes. It would be useful to reconvene the seminar, listening again as participants justify their responses: Does the book describe characters or incidents that invite completing detail because they are merely sketched by the author? Do words or sentences rouse feelings that vary with readers and their circumstances? Does the text prefigure implications that are otherwise ignored? Life, itself, provokes these alternate responses— interpretation or inquiry. It isn’t surprising that books do it, too. MIXED MODES Science is replete with experiments calculated to falsify or confirm a surmise. Personal or social interests may motivate either hypotheses or the experiments they promote—blind tests of a promising drug, for example—but those concerns are incidental to the outcome. Practical life is less sanitized: needs and interests direct every intervention; reality-testing is everywhere buffered in ways congenial to attitudes. The will to believe is nevertheless constrained. The woman who rejects a suitor may

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refuse every inducement: she’s not interested, and no act or attitude of his changes her mind. But this can’t happen if Kant is right, because such women have no being apart from the experiences schematized by their suitors. Still, these experiences are puzzling: why these men populate their worlds with women who reject them is a mystery Kant doesn’t and can’t explain. For his idealist view is everywhere confounded by the errors and frustrations of everyday life. Is the dog that bites me the figment of my schematizing imagination and its directing attitudes? A rich enough story implies moral judgments, and the promise that breaches will be punished. Construe the bite as a judgment, and the story seems confirmed. The dog is the instrument of a story that vests it with moral purpose: deserving punishment, I accept it. But I didn’t create the dog, and I might have noticed, before reaching thoughtlessly to pet him that he wasn’t friendly. Fact-finding—inquiry—could have warned me, as usually it does. For sobriety, too, is an expression of attitude, one learned as we seek information while controlling impulses. Practical life is often disappointing, partly because of circumstances, partly because attitudes have these contrary vectors: some calibrate needs to circumstances, others satisfy attitudes with fantasy. Making attitudes pertinent to our circumstances is a discipline we never quite master, though there is often a rough but reconciling balance. Needing traffic laws, we regulate after gathering information— inquiring—about road use. Attitude—the aesthetics of road design—may prescribe a favored solution, but it is more likely that the choice of laws will be justified by information about the likely effects of regulation. The result is different if we consider beliefs fixed by attitudes that are incidental to their circumstances. Many people pray sincerely when buying lottery tickets or batting with the bases loaded. Attitudes valorize the act, but they can’t vindicate losing tickets or strikeouts. APPLICATIONS Participants in my imaginary seminar easily distinguish interpretations from inquiries, though the difference isn’t always clear because some of the language used is ambiguous. Critical theory is a principal example, because it signifies both interpretation and inquiry: theorists analyze and construe the meaning of novels, plays, or poems, or they distinguish what is from what ought to be in social or political contexts.25 The ought expresses a reader’s value-bestowing interpretation or it signifies the finding that a system diverges from its internal norms: a state and its constitution, for ex-

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ample. The postmodernist literary critic tells what he would have intended had he written the book; the critic of social organizations diagnoses their structures or practices, and tells how and why they should be altered given some generic conditions—private and social—for human well-being. These versions of critical theory have different origins. The style appropriate to literature derives from the hermeneutics of biblical exegesis.26 This is interpretation: we read texts in ways fixed by attitudes. The style for curing social ills or for remaking them to realize an ideal derives from Plato, Marx, and Freud: distinguish what is from what ought to be given some assumptions about the conditions for human flourishing, then specify a procedure for repairing the harm or realizing the good. Or the motive is pedestrian but commonplace and urgent: pollution threatens public health, so we establish procedures and laws to control it. This is planning, the version of inquiry that joins realitytesting to a program for altering a situation to create a desired outcome. Many laws have no other basis. Strategies are mixed if we investigate to secure a personal aim, because attitudes and preferences are no less critical than information. But pure cases—those in which either side excludes the other—are also familiar: ideologies versus weather reports. This is contentious given the preference for sunshine, but one can determine what is or is likely to obtain without an encumbering bias. Nutritionists specify the least requirements for healthy diets; physiologists say as much about exercise. Both name deficiencies in personal and social practices. Nothing in this comparison implies that inquiry eliminates every interpretive bias as it solves practical or theoretical problems: there is always a perspective and interest that directs our engagements with other things, though usually we do or can appraise our circumstances without regard for this distortion: wanting a suit or tie, I like the one I see, but see, too, that it doesn’t look good on me. Nietzsche averred, to the contrary, that pure inquiry—untainted by motivating biases—is a delusion. History was his preferred example, because of its elusiveness: having no way to engage it directly, we infer from its effects to their conditions. Interpretation is constructive and value laden, hence Nietzsche’s claim that historical events are indeterminate until interpreted: they acquire specificity and valence from the interpretations used to construe them.27 But is this so: is the character of the past decidable by something we do when thinking it? This might be an evidentiary question: do we have enough information to know what happened days or centuries ago? But that is not Nietzsche’s question.

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He supposed that events are indeterminate as they occur, and that none has a settled form until and unless it is thought and reported. We provide for the first consideration—Is there evidence of things past?—and avert the second—Are events formless in themselves?—by specifying one determinate event for which there is evidence. Suspend Cartesian doubt and acknowledge that there are people additional to oneself, or apply it and acknowledge that there is at least one person, oneself. When and how the many or one were created is a separate issue. We need only a single, determinate historical event to refute the claim that everything past is determinable: the coming to be of one or many persons is that fact. But you say, Nietzsche wasn’t proposing miracles. It isn’t the reality of the past, only its details—how, what, and when—that are in question. Alleging many comings-to-be doesn’t entail that they were determinate in any of these respects; their determinability is an invitation to historical imagination: let historians tell us—let them imagine—what happened. But we do have detailed information—private memories and public records—of many births. Their dates, times, and sites are not uncertain or determinable to any significant degree. Many events are known with the same degree of confidence. Nietzsche ignored the evidence for a moralizing reason. Concerned that freedom is impaired by the weight of the past, he proposed to liberate us: supersede your past by interpreting it in ways congenial to your aims; don’t be sabotaged by inquiries—cold and detached—that discover your fate in a trajectory no one could alter. But Nietzsche understood that freedom is always constrained by character and circumstances, and reduced by will-full ignorance of both.28 Excuse his romantic excess, then consider that illiteracy, poverty, and sickness are impediments to freedom. Inquiries that identify these factors are a condition for liberating people they disable. Aesthetics, too, is clarified by distinguishing interpretation from inquiry. Imagine an erotic film, beautifully crafted and emotionally provocative, then compare it to hearing one of Bach’s sonatas for violin or cello. The music, too, is affecting, but the response is cognitive: what am I hearing; let me hear it again to perceive it better. Music stirs us, but the tension resolved is sometimes an expression of intellectual appetite: we are drawn to hear things as they are. This is inquiry, not interpretation. Nothing is lost if aesthetic experience has these two expressions, but practical life and science are sabotaged by their confusion. Need and interest guarantee their survival, though metaphysics is more vulnerable because practitioners and critics alike often believe that fantasy is its only sponsor. Distinguishing interpretation from inquiry (chapter 6) is its principal defense.

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VALUES Values are intrinsic to interpretation in the respect that they motivate and integrate the stories we tell. They warp every situation experienced through interpretive lenses. But truth, too, is a value, one that interpretation values highly. We know it does, because no one gladly concedes that views strongly held are false. The vigor of this response compares to the flexibility required of interpretations: organize an orienting story in any way that satisfies your values and—if this concerns you—the credibility of your story to favored people. My team always loses, but nothing convinces me that it is less than best. I extenuate its failure by describing games it would have won but for bad luck to other members of our fan club; all agree. This is value’s role as it insulates us from frustration, and failure: interpretation says that we are safer and better than we seem. Inquiry’s discipline is more severe. Values that motivate it—a need or aim—are incidental to results, though procedural values—consistency, economy, and testability—are critical to success: the maps and plans of practical life are worthless if they misdirect us; no hypothesis is verifiable if inconsistent and untestable. Leading principles—rules regularly tested and confirmed—are also procedural values: they direct formulation of individual plans and hypotheses. But their value, too, is extraneous to interests that motivate their use. There is evidence that buildings have architects—cause and effect—but none for the inference that nature is designed. Augustine and Descartes agreed that a different value—self-love— is especially prominent: self-affirmation—I am, I exist—expresses it. Valuing myself, I tell a story that accords with my sense of identity, worth, grievance, or entitlement. Interpretation ascribes intrinsic value to the self and, by extension, to systems with which it identifies. “A man’s home is his castle” is a précis of this view. For a proper castle has a moat that defends it from intruders. Other people—retainers of every sort—have instrumental value only. They, too, may have castles, but every such dwelling has walls that make residents opaque to neighbors. Each person and every established system—team, sect, business, or state—has a more or less explicit self-justifying story. Why did you do it, we ask; how could you do such a thing? There is usually an answer that seems rational and plausible within the context of the respondent’s interpretation. This difference between private and public—each person or system’s rationale versus the judgments of others—is vigorously defended by a fortuitous accident: idiosyncrasy is invisible. Impenetrable others have interpretations that dovetail with ours at the margins, but commonalities

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explained by socialization obscure differences that abide. Idiopathic tastes are disguised; we establish a community of shared values by defending practices that are publicly approved. The Internet is useful evidence that much of the private survives: there is profitable trade in ideas and things that others regard as perverse. Interests that few would acknowledge are openly expressed when anonymity is assumed. Science as we know it was impossible until people could differentiate values motivated by self-love and tribal loyalty—values that distort hypotheses or experiments to favor an interest or need—from inquiry’s procedural values. Economy and consistency are internal to the maps and plans of practical life and the hypotheses of science, but inquiry isn’t compromised by them. A scientist obsessed by the issues he investigates knows that his passion has no place in his hypotheses. No interpreter feels this constraint: it is my god, team, or state I celebrate; mine is better than yours. One might see this difference in evolutionary terms: reality is conflated with our aims before we learn to distinguish them from circumstances that alternately satisfy or frustrate them. The inference is reasonable, because science and effective practice are unachievable until we distinguish what we want, including what we want to know, from circumstances for getting it. But it isn’t true that interpretation is always superseded by inquiry. For there are some domains of belief—the demand that life have purpose—from which interpretation is never displaced. MORALITY Interpretation shares several of its moral assumptions and virtues with inquiry—honesty and loyalty, for example—but each construes them differently and embeds them in assumptions that are alien to the other. Honesty in inquiry is truthfulness about relevant facts and straight dealing with one’s partners. People can’t do their work with faithless— unreliable—partners, or without the accurate information partners supply. Interpretation construes honesty as forthrightness; loyalty is fidelity to a belief or to a community of believers. Consistency—stubborn belief—is a virtue, because we are disoriented rather than located if the beliefs endowing life with significance are threatened or altered. Fidelity to a belief is a condition for one’s psychic stability, but also a condition for the ease of fellow believers. Their affiliation is a strength, but also a vulnerability, for there is the perpetual risk of conflict, betrayal, or a change of heart. Unable to sustain beliefs that make me a trusted communicant, I have this choice: remain intelligible to them at cost to being unintelligible to myself. Endorse a life that is significant in their terms or significant in mine; be loyal to them or loyal to oneself. Babe Ruth

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and Johnny Damon could move from Boston to New York faster than any Red Sox fan could root for the Yankees. A salary is a contractual obligation; loyalty—self-identity—isn’t for sale. These different ways of construing moral virtues are symptomatic of structural social differences. Interpretation favors affiliation; inquiry is appropriate to the differentiated but complementary tasks of organizations. Friendship is affiliative; schools, businesses, and teams are organizations; families are both. Affiliation requires mirroring, because bonding is intensified among an ideology’s partisans or a team’s fans when each believes, feels, and responds as other members do. Organizations are cooler. Having a complex task, they divide it among their reciprocally related members; each receives the information and resources required to do his or her part. Styles of cooperation and the norms appropriate to systems of these two kinds—churches or teams—vary accordingly. One prizes solidarity in belief and feeling. The other wants efficacy, though cooperation is sabotaged in organizations—broken marriages, businesses, and teams are the effect—when partners who share an aim are unable to collaborate because their interpretations diverge. Suppressing these differences while agreeing about pertinent facts is a condition for working effectively together, though incompatible attitudes sometimes preclude it. We acknowledge this obstacle to cooperation in our personal lives, but fail to realize that it also stymies political, social, and economic organization. Autocratic interpretations were a potent obstacle to social cooperation, until modern societies pushed sectarian ideologies to the margin. Separating church and state—by declaring that there shall be no established religion—enables a state’s citizens to create a viable public space for cooperation across chasms of ethnicity, race, religion, and gender. Cooperation to achieve shared or complementary aims generalizes when religious views become incidental to business, education, and all the other domains where inquiry dominates interpretation. But there is no simple, definitive solution; countervailing influences are discouraged rather than eliminated, so nations struggle recurrently to purge sectarianism from public life. Differences once eliminated or suppressed reemerge when special interests militate for laws that would enshrine sectarian values in marriage, abortion, education, taxation, or immigration. This is a critical issue in every European nation where immigrant communities challenge the secular mores and views of longtime residents. They are less urgent in America where disparate attitudes and worldviews are softened, because a vigorous economy and Constitutional defenses promise private spaces and well-being to most citizens. We cooperate, usually, despite schismatic differences, because practical

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good sense identifies objectives we organize to achieve. The result is affiliating, because health and safety, living together wisely and well are aims that supersede divisive interpretations. Or cooperation breaks down, because sects respond to secular demands by recoiling from practices that are abhorrent to them. Tribal identities are emphasized: remember who you are; don’t betray us or yourselves; salvation in our terms is worth many times more than any secular advantage. These are disputes about norms that regulate belief and behavior. Should a society commend or command particular social or spiritual values, or is it sufficient that it favor norms appropriate to inquiry and the reciprocities that promote individual and public welfare? The status of norms—whatever their content and role—is controversial since Hume and Kant taught that all are stipulated, none is discovered. Attitudes more than efficacy were to determine the choice of norms: sacralized marriage or the Ten Commandments, for example. Yet many norms— logical and natural laws, health, and parameters for the proper maintenance and functioning of any machine—are natural, not conventional or divine. Inquiry, not interpretation discovers and specifies them. Distinguishing these origins—norms stipulated when we interpret our circumstances versus norms inquiry discovers and applies—is critical when a norm is disputed. For attitudes and conventions change, but natural norms are hard to displace. This difference is obscured when interpretations cite divine origins for norms that naturalists describe as conventional: norms regulating sexual relations, for example. These disputes are clarified if conditions for the cogency of interpretations and the validity of inquiries are firmly stated: claims about natural norms, like all hypotheses about matters of fact, are empirically testable; interpretation’s norms—no divorce, no sex until marriage—satisfy no condition but the attitudes of people who affirm them.29 POLITICS Politics is a competition for the control and management of social life. Interpretation and inquiry are alternative bases for disputing or exercising control. Each interpretation justifies its author’s claim to govern in the name of values he or she commends by describing the world valorized in its terms: sanctity, justice, or the proletariat, terror, or the general will. Inquiry agrees that values direct our engagements with other people and things, but these are practical interests satisfied by work, health, study, family, and governance. Religious scruples may restrict one’s diet, but then inquiry inherits the task of determining how to satisfy nutritional standards in ways consistent with that regime.

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Political deliberations may be focused by the demand that they be satisfied in the style favored by one or another interpretation or by a material interest susceptible to practical solutions. Interpretations intimate or formulate systems of rules for managing every such interest. Inquiry agrees that there are a hundred ways to skin a cat, but ever pragmatic, it wants evidence that any particular way serves individual or public welfare by solving specific problems. Given the many languages, we restrict ourselves to one or a few for the practical motive of wanting a society’s members to be mutually intelligible, not because interpretation alleges that one or another is the language of God. The cleavage that sets domineering ideologists or tyrants against the public of responsible, deliberating citizens is always cogent, though it is superseded in our time by another idea of democracy. Our tolerant culture supposes that democracy is better expressed by slogans: let a thousand flowers bloom, don’t make judgments, let each person or community live within his, her, or its truths. This is democracy tailored to three concerns: first, interpretation’s demand that no one external to a circle of interpreters should appraise its truths and values; second, the principle that every interpretation is tolerated if organizing in its terms is not inimical to a civil society’s other members; third, the demand that each interpretation’s values be respected in the arena of public policy. The last requirement is unrealizable given the first and second. For if abortion is favored by some but detested by others, we cannot require that every person be made responsible for both, though we can allow each person, family, school, or sect to decide among practices that do not violate generally accepted norms. This conflict is the energy that translates the tolerant democracy of difference into a struggle for domination: let our interpretation—our values—dictate practices to all. Inquiry resists this political outcome for several reasons. We may not believe the stories interpreters tell because they aren’t falsifiable and because they are, so often, transparent ways of controlling vulnerable people. Interpretation’s rules—do it this way or that—are unnecessarily dogmatic. For there are many ways to satisfy life-securing interests. Some are invisible when interpretations foreclose our options, though many are viable and consistent with the interests of people served. Think of traffic laws: people go their separate ways with private aims and chosen companions while observing laws that facilitate movement and prevent harm. An ideology insisting that driving on one side or the other should be favored for ethical or divine reasons would be silly, given inquiry’s confirmation that we get both effects from either. Democracy puts its faith in inquiry: we experiment to know the effects of alternative policies, then toss a coin or choose.

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Democracy requires a public, one created when citizens accept responsibility for the task of corporate self-regulation. They or their representatives establish the constitutional, institutional structure that makes laws, administers public policy, and adjudicates conflicts. But critically, it is the public—not only government—that deliberates. For government is ineffective if citizens fail to understand or respect the conditions for an open playing field, meaning freedom of action, mutual respect, and defense against harm. It is democracy’s citizens, not only their representatives, who do or should dispute and articulate shared values, tasks, and priorities: they, too, know the obstacles and challenges to public and private welfare. The alternative is a bureaucratized state, one that goes its way for reasons of habit or ideology without regard for the interests and circumstances of its people. We often suppose that democracy is an ideology, so a preference for it is an interpretation expressing an attitude. But this is moot, if government by the people is predicated on these salient facts. First is Descartes’ “I am, I exist,” and the fact that this is everyone’s perception. Second is each person’s affirmation that his or her life is valuable to him or her and that his or her well-being is, for him or her, a good in itself. Third is the fact that no one is self-sufficient so we need and desire to cooperate with others if we are to achieve personal and collective well-being. Fourth is each person’s ability to make rational calculations that enhance the wellbeing of him or herself and partners. Only the third point—a desire for cooperation—may seem moot, but that is so only if we imagine that it requires cooperation everywhere and always with everyone. Start, instead, from the standpoint of small groups—families, friends, neighbors, or a tribe. Cooperation is a commonplace within them. The public is a larger tribe, one requiring an act of imagination from all its members. For we wear two hats, one private, the other public. It is usually the private hat that shows, though we wear the public hat when deliberating about impediments, aims, and policies vital to all citizens. Imagine a Vermont town meeting, then consider that the properly informed, effectively joined citizens of every community must deliberate lest they be diverted by interests that oppose communal self-regulation. The alternative is the sclerosis of the public, its manipulation, and death, then the tyranny that justifies itself with a reconciling interpretation. Individuals may resist the task of public deliberation; each may be oblivious to others because he or she is self-concerned, but this is a correctible failure. For every person is, to some degree, self-responsible. All can realize that regulations distorted by the interests of other people or their sects are inimical to them, and that there are common interests, hence choices that affect the well-being of all. Shall we favor individual

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wellfare or the interests of the community, this generation or its heirs? These options can be discussed without the distortions introduced when deliberation is only an exchange of ideological verities. For the prime interest—a shared interest—is the well-being of the citizenry, individually, in their core systems, and together. Democracy as described here is both an expression of corporate inquiry and a condition for individual inquiry. It is corporate inquiry, because citizens join to consider alternate policies, then to test the alternatives. Conceding failure—Prohibition, for example—the public alters course. Laws are replaced; judges apply old laws to altered circumstances by reconstruing them in terms that are apposite. The corporate public adapts: it alters the terms of self-regulation to make itself viable in altered circumstances. It has, however, this enduring aim: defend the open playing field in which citizens make their private choices and lives. Let them take charge of their lives while making the families, businesses, and schools that give substance and meaning to their lives. This is democracy as the enabling condition for the experiments of private citizens and the systems they form. For joining other people in a shared project is an inquiry of a practical sort: we undertake to work together for benefits and costs that are only partly foreseen. The work may continue well past the time when it is reasonably described as an experiment—in marriage, for example— but this impression confuses habit or familiarity with commitment: it ignores the ineliminable contingency that qualifies every relationship. We engage old clients or companions in new ways or—given means and opportunity—they find other partners. Suppose it true that democracy is an expression of corporate inquiry and a condition for the inquiries of private life and its affiliations. For this blurs the distinction between reality testing inquiry and significance bestowing interpretation. Life is valorized in both ways: we construe it in terms prescribed by an interpretation, projecting significance into the ambient world, or we discover significance as we accommodate our circumstances or affiliate ourselves to valued others. So, children learn moral virtues—honesty, loyalty, reliability—in the context of their families, friendships, schools, and neighborhoods. It is these engagements—the trial and error of relating to other people—that teach moral lessons, irrespective of the interpretations invoked to justify moral virtues. Think of early friendships, and the experimental attitudes they require: what does this new friend need and want, what do I want, how I can be sure of his or her attention? The process is an inquiry; stabilizing intimacy is the result. Interpretations crystallize and rationalize these values, but it is inquiry rather than those stories that achieves viable relations to other people.

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There is a contrary view. It avers that political affairs are morally neutered until interpretation projects animating values and aims into them. But this is a deception: interpretation is frosting on the cake, not the reason or impetus that motivates every political dispute: many are factual, empirical, and practical, not ideological. The issue is confused, but an example is clarifying. Political parties are the epicenter of ideology, hence interpretation. Suppose we limit attention to those right or left of center. They disagree, currently, about the degree to which social interests—health and education, for example—should have market-based solutions. These disagreements are often expressed without regard for the evidence that comes with pursuing one policy or another. But sometimes when policies are tried experimentally, debate turns on questions of evidence, efficacy, and the trade-offs that go with one or another policy. Is fungible labor—few restrictions on hiring or firing workers— a condition for a dynamic economy, or is worker insecurity an unacceptable personal and social cost? One may see these alternatives in the light of ideology, hence interpretation, but this other emphasis is more elusive but appropriate: there are alternate perspectives on the complexity of modern economies; one may emphasize the effects on individual workers, the costs or benefits to business, or the long-term conditions for growth. These are distinct practical concerns, each justified by the actual features of markets. People who study or legislate for them may start with an allegiance: workers, businessmen, or a viable economy. But this is partiality—loyalty to and support for one of the participants in a complex process—not interpretation. Politicians who take one perspective or another properly defend themselves by saying that the side they favor deserves their concern. All concerns are justified, because there is no business without workers, no workers without business, and neither without an economy that sustains both. Why say that each of these perspectives is more congenial to inquiry than interpretation? Because inquiry considers the effects suffered and caused by market participants. Each has value for the others so that significance emerges as they engage one another in the process of making the food, clothing, or shelter all require, but also the pollution that makes them sick. Partisan politicians emphasize effects that disadvantage one side or the other, but their charge is testable: does the market have these effects. Evidence for or against their claim doesn’t end discussion, because the next question—are these effects a worthwhile tradeoff for its benefits?— invokes the loyalties of the contesting sides. But here too, the solution is inquiry, not interpretation. Interpretation would impose a solution: favor this side or the other for reasons it affirms. Inquiry asks this other question: how can circumstances be adjusted so that benefits are en-

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hanced or costs diminished on both sides. Democratic governments study and compromise, tinker and accommodate on most issues that engage them. Democracy is remarkable among political systems, because it tolerates different perspectives on complex phenomena then sanctions the many perspectives by giving each person a voice in policies that affect his or her topics of concern. This was Dewey’s emphasis: policies are tested by their effects; none is reaffirmed merely because an ideology commends it.30 Even the worth of democracy needs occasional reconsideration and vindication. For its value is never uncontested. Inquiry— including historical studies and thought experiments that inform us of alternatives and their effects—supplies the evidence confirming its value, not least for the permission to inquire. This tolerance for experiment and diversity seems laborious and time consuming: trying alternative policies to see and appraise their effects—think of the FDA testing candidate drugs—requires patience and mutual forbearance. Interpretation aborts this process in the name of values, rules, or a story appropriate to us and our circumstances. It feigns an urgency that rarely obtains. There may be no situationally appropriate practices that cannot be tried and justified by the combination of experiment and a universal respect for the welfare of individual persons and their communities: someone restricted to a vegetarian diet because of allergies quickly learns to cope. This doesn’t preclude interpretations: most vegetarians choose their diet because of attitude, not allergy. It does suggest that experiment promotes viable alternative solutions to pressing issues, be they personal or social. Politics is an argument about authority: who should determine the policies that organize and regulate a community? There may be several or many disagreements about every policy considered. But democracy is unique among forms of governance, because it is an expression of selfregulating inquiry and a condition for the personal inquiries of its members. Democracy can tolerate sects that construe themselves in the terms of a favored story, if the sects are privatized because denied access to governmental authority. Interpretation, less tolerant, declares its truths, then closes the door on further information and experiment. We have these choices: legislate regulation, dogmatically affirming one or another set of rules and meanings—“truths”—or acknowledge that circumstances and our self-understanding may evolve and that we may learn new ways to accommodate our circumstances while improving ourselves. Public discourse is often a competition between these two kinds of power. One is ambitious, but fallible and sober. The other is expansive, romantic, dogmatic, and irresponsible; its claims are untestable,

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so inquiry is its enemy. Their merger is nevertheless possible. Credulity dominated experiment for centuries, though it wanes wherever science, technology, and abduction are ascendant. But this is a two-edged sword, because successful inquiry is instrumental to effective control. We risk trading fantasy and mythology for greater manipulation and less freedom. This is the likely effect when a successful technology intrudes on personal life. Imagine biomolecular engineering joined to a cult of discipline and efficiency, and to drugs that “correct” rogue interpretations. That is too much sobriety.

Chapter Two

Interpretation Self and Society

I

nterpretation embeds us in webs of meaning: hero of the revolution, beloved by God, or dear to me. Meanings that depend on the attitudes of individuals have little currency, until their influence is regularized within a neighborhood, society, or culture. Yet socialization is polarizing: we resist it, because interpretation is essentially private. Like a fingerprint, it is yours or mine. Think of merchandise arrayed in store windows to seduce passersby. There is a fact of the matter—things of a kind recognizable to all who see them—but passersby respond differently; one is attracted by everything, something, or nothing because of his or her interests. Cognition is biased by values; interpretation is the medium that joins them. ORIGIN AND CONTEXT Imagine arriving, for the first time, in a foreign place. Disoriented because local practices and beliefs make no sense, we perceive the gap between things seen raw and the significance bestowed by interpretation. The difference is intolerable, because the uninterpreted world seems alien and dangerous. Local residents are oblivious to having this orientation, but they recognize its absence in visitors obliged to choose: learn the local ways or leave. For here, in this strange place, the accepted interpretation is one of the facts to learn. This imperative is a commonplace of religious practice, but it obtains as well for the members of every community: all use a valorizing conceptual framework to perceive 45

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the world and themselves. The framework is normative: it tells us what we ought to be and how to be it: think of a bride finding her way in a new family or children adjusting to a new school. I once met two neighbors on the street shortly after returning from a country where men shake hands all around when meeting others. Both stepped back when I extended my hand. They eyed it and paused, until one reluctantly offered his hand saying, “OK, if you want to.” My neighbors weren’t callous or hostile, but they didn’t recognize this gesture as the expression of an emotional and civic bond. Both are New Yorkers. The density and scale of the city, the need for distance and autonomy make residents less open and available than people from towns where life is less fraught. One allows others to enter one’s space: they don’t assume a right to cross that barrier unless invited. This is interpretation as it penetrates and shapes the simplest gestures and responses. Hopeful, cautious or afraid, we interpret events in ways that make life seem coherent and safe, though doing this distorts understanding. For nothing is quite as it seems when everything is construed from a valorizing perspective. Compare the mindless cows described in Nietzsche’s On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life: lacking a conscious past or future, they chew thoughtlessly through sun or rain, making no sense of themselves or their situation. We can’t do as little short of anesthesia or brain death. For each person anticipates obstacles and integrates anomalies, all the while construing his or her circumstances and self in ways prescribed by an evolving interpretation. Sometimes consciously, more often not, each contrives a network that valorizes and integrates the separate bits and pieces of life. The logic of the network is loosely associational, not axiomatic, because there are always new interests or data to integrate; incorporating them would be clumsy if the network were too rigorously organized. Terrible events sometimes exceed our ability to comprehend them in its terms, but we try. Interpretation evolves: socialized later, its beginnings are resolutely singular, because of the distinctive way that people resolve two contrary urgencies: we are vulnerable and afraid because needy and dependent, but also resilient, hopeful, easily excited, and pleased. A third factor mediates, but complicates these two: requiring the goodwill and help of others, wanting companions, reconciling hope and fear, we embed ourselves in relationships (families, friendships, religious communities, and states) that confirm our well-being or expose our vulnerabilities. Pleasure and pain are often described as the primary axis of human struggle, but they are place-markers—symptoms— for well-being and excitement or vulnerability and fear. This alternation is primitive and abiding: other variables—relations to other people,

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gender identity, and status, for example—are contexts where the tension between them is resolved. Both factors are decisive for attitude formation, and each is apparent in the responses of infants. I infer (there is no testimony) that babies are alternately anxious and uncomfortable or quiescent and satisfied, and that they begin to correlate these feelings with the responses of their caretakers: are they engaged and reliable, or is the baby desperate because they are not? The child responds with confidence or fear. (Mixed cases—caretakers who are mostly but not always good or bad—are more common, but I ignore them because they complicate description.) Learned expectations crystallize as core attitudes. Embodying cognition and feeling, favoring some outcomes, dreading others, they establish the parameters for belief, choice, and action. Having an attitude, one sees things of a kind as threatening or securing, and one fears or welcomes the experience. These first, orienting attitudes are hard to change once formed. Other needs emerge, but children retain the expectations chiseled into memory by early experiences of deprivation and vulnerability or security and well-being. The effect is apparent at twelve months when an infant’s style of attachment to primary caretakers has formed: the baby is confident and secure, firmly attached to one or a few caretakers, or disoriented and so lacking in affect that he or she responds listlessly to everyone encountered.1 Some contented adults were content already as babies. Others construe things as malign and out of control, or believe that one can pacify uncertainty with power, understanding, or prayer. All use interpretation to convert alien facts into comprehensible situations. These accommodations are fragile, but never passive. For interpretation is the cognitive power that locates us within the ambient world on our terms: knowing where we are—or imagining we do—makes being there more tolerable. Joyous praying surged among people marooned in the Louisiana Superdome after Hurricane Katrina. Homes, jobs, and lives were lost, but believers could steady themselves by exalting their God. There is no disaster, no vulnerability or failure that cannot be construed passably if facts are discerned in ways congenial to one’s attitudes. Interpretation progresses with the learned repertoire of practical skills and with enhanced facility for conceptual housekeeping: introduced to new tasks and situations, gratified or embarrassed, we instill these circumstances and our responses with significance: more than practical, they are meaningful. Every such interpretation is evidence that attitudes have formed, and that they mediate between stimulus and response. Ephemeral attitudes are superseded; core attitudes stabilize. The overall effect is an orientation—a perspective—that construes the world in ways

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that justify and explain whatever practices secure and satisfy us. We are serene and passive (because circumstances are mostly gratifying) or anxious and active (because they are inimical if undefended). Ask a person to describe his or her values, and the answer is fragmentary and uncertain. He tries to present and explain himself with economy and coherence, but there is more complexity and conflict than self-inspection can reveal. He cites things valued, but this is reflected light, choices that survived when filtered through his attitudes. There may be no other, more direct way of addressing conflicted attitudes, because we see and feel their effects, but not those drivers themselves. Preferring cigars to cigarettes or a pipe, I may abstain from tobacco of every sort for the sake of health. Prizing health, but committed to my habit, I sacrifice one for the other. Priorities are ranked, but the order is more plastic than fixed: a dominant aim today was subsidiary before and will be again. Core attitudes fix the parameters for attitudes acquired later, those tied more closely to shifting circumstances and opportunities. But all this is backstage, and all is inferred from the choices made: no meat for vegetarians, no pork for Muslims and Jews. Attitudes focus and direct these expressions of value, but they in turn are a function of these two more fundamental motives: wanting excitement and well-being expresses the positive, hopeful side of us; vulnerability is the fragile, fearful side. Control of our circumstances and selves mitigates fear while empowering us to do or be as we choose. Pleasure or pain, relations to other people, gender identity, health, status, and religion are six domains (there are many others) where interpretation is an expression of control. i. Relief from discomfort or pain, promoting pleasure and excitement are two effects of having control. Despair is evidence that we fear having no control. ii. Relations to other people are chronically vexed because of this ambiguity: which has priority, their interests or mine? Most needs cannot be satisfied without the fellowship and support of partners who ask the same question. But who controls me—myself or others—when I need them to secure or satisfy me? iii. Gender identity, learned in the first year or two of life, is an early step in the self-perception consolidated by socialization: one is confirmed by seeing him or herself as others do. Yet gender identity is also a point of vulnerability: Am I sufficiently manly or feminine? How do I control my responses to people of the other sex or theirs to me? iv. Impaired health entails a lack of control; good health is a power to exploit. v. Status is an early discovery: the beloved child thinks better of himself, and controls others’ responses to him or her. Compare the morale of resentful conscripts: no status and no control. vi. Religions speak to the meaning of life. They focus its enthusiasms and defend its

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vulnerabilities. Skeptics are solitary and exposed, but faith is strength: there is optimal control in precarious circumstances, because belief dissipates the illusions of status and appetite or because life has a design and aim defended by its maker. Attitudes express each person’s ways of negotiating contrary impulses across these many variables. For vulnerability and fear, selfassertion and excitement are global conditions that achieve resolution as attitudes in all the domains where people are exposed or empowered. Interpretation assembles these interests and establishes an orientation that expresses one’s hierarchically organized attitudes: safety is more urgent than status and significance, or one ignores risks and disappointments that would be paralyzing if God’s love were not the guarantee of his care. Anxieties and enthusiasms pervade every domain of thought, feeling, and activity, but they are not all of life. Engaging other things— because we want to or must—we acquire information or cultivate talents that are narrowly attuned to practical, intellectual, athletic, or aesthetic interests. Yet these are the occasions where interpretations, hence attitudes, are decisive. How does an athlete construe the games or teams in which he participates? Does he play to enjoy the company of others or test himself against the best of his competitors; does he see fellow players as hostile or benign? Skill and appearances may differ, but the dynamic is similar when an otherwise placid accountant uses games to express frustrations he barely acknowledges. Even specialized attitudes remote from the opposition of fear and pleasurable excitement may express this opposition. Think of debates between philosophic idealists and realists. One side is content to describe the world as it appears; truth is coherence or the certainty that things are as perceived. The other prizes resistance and affirms that truth is correspondence: things we engage have an existence and identity we alter but do not make. No empirical evidence falsifies one view while confirming the other: all the data may be construed either way. Their ontological assumptions are radically different: one favors Protagoras, Berkeley, or Hume; the other prefers Aristotle or Peirce. But this is incidental, for each interpretation is congenial to those who defend it. Should we explain this difference as an expression of the refined taste appropriate to an arcane intellectual dispute? Or is it another expression of the primitive opposition considered above: fear of vulnerability versus an exuberant welcome to a reality we don’t make but can enjoy? My realist view opines that idealism short-circuits vulnerability by denying its existential conditions: idealism strangles fear—we control ourselves—by crafting an experience that eliminates its extra-mental causes.

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This claim about motives is, of course, incidental to the dialectical question of truth: coherence, correspondence, identity, or disquotation? Can we decide among these alternatives? We can, because realism cites data—cooperation, efficacy, error, frustration, and death—that idealism ignores, and because it alone explains the character and relations of data idealism favors—colors and shapes, ideas, and conceptual systems—by citing their extra-mental, sometimes intrapsychic, neural conditions. DISTORTION Every interpretation is paradoxical: each is a way of construing reality, yet reality itself is incidental to the orientation adopted. For interpretations aren’t tested against reality: that would be inquiry. Why interpret situations when inquiry would be less distorting, more straightforward? Because interpretation enables us to control ourselves by construing the world in ways that console or justify us. It would be good if reality, itself, were safe and congenial, but often it isn’t, so we contrive and project a complementary or substitute world onto the facts known to practical life. Sharing this orientation with other people, convincing ourselves that the world is structured as construed, we are reassured. Gaps between circumstances themselves and circumstances construed are the spaces obscured by, power, propaganda, or merely discretion. Someone living comfortably within a socialized interpretation may not wish to know the gaps, but interpretations used ideologically deserve the skepticism deconstructionists encourage.2 What would we expect to see if people were deprived of their interpretations? More anxiety, less confidence that all is or will be well. Circumstances may be hard to distinguish from properties ascribed to them by an interpretation, though we need disinterested inquiry to specify those properties if we are to perceive the distortions thereby created. One imagines epistemological arguments that deny the possibility of knowing states of affairs in themselves once their features have been obscured by interpretive fog. But this isn’t always the barrier to a clearer view. Imagine two people jostling for space and advantage. Each wants something only one can have, and each rationalizes his claim by citing considerations that justify it (inheritance, desert, or the divine right of kings), though neither claim has standing apart from desire, power, and will because inquiry reveals that none of the alleged facts obtains. Or we promote the idea that Earth is the center of the universe and that we are its raison d’être, but then concede—despite the implications for self-importance—that neither is true.

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EMOTION Someone annoyed or frustrated when a plan misfires is humiliated and angry when others question his religious beliefs. Emotions may be keen in either case, but their focus is different: everyone knows situations he can’t control, but no one enjoys being told that his way of construing himself and others is silly. Emotion’s pitch and intensity are likely signs that an interpretation is insulted or affirmed. A subtle phenomenology would distinguish these contexts and their ways of shading anger and pleasure. It would distinguish humiliation from the anger of frustration or intimidation, the pleasure of effective accommodation and initiative from smug conviction. The emotional life of inquiry rises and falls with success and failure; we expect both. The emotional life of interpretation is steadier, because more cocooned and because one believes unless challenged. Skeptics are ignored or flattered, until they threaten self-respect and well-being. Suppressing the challenge is urgent, so we reply with aggressive anger. Or others indulge us: seeing the world as we do, they confirm the impression that everything worth notice is as we perceive it. ASSUMPTIONS FOR A TAXONOMY It may seem that interpretations vary unsystematically: one can plot the different attitudes and habits they express and their different uses of information, but there is no explanation for their distinguishing patterns. That isn’t so: interpretation is disciplined; its formations have predictable effects. Start with a specific psychic constitution—a more or less quiescent baby—and situations to which it responds. The developmental result is a set of core attitudes weighted toward confidence and pleasure, or fear and aversion. This is character: the intrapsychic condition for initiatives and reactions. We are altered by contingencies of all sorts, but inferences that track the evolution of this early formation are a sound basis for estimating a person’s likely responses to situations that frustrate or satisfy this acquired psychic structure. These five considerations are its principal determinants. i. What is the infant’s dominant somatic tone (is he or she colicky and anxious or sunny and contented)? ii. How does the child control anxiety in order to enhance perceived security; is he quick or slow to panic when feeling vulnerable? iii. What makes the child feel good or bad? iv. Which situations enhance or diminish self-esteem? v. Which attitudes form as the tensions between vulnerability and security, distress and pleasure are tested and resolved by experience? Values

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for these factors are responsible for effects we observe: treat an anxious child capriciously and you create a sullen, fearful, and suspicious adult; always gratify a contented baby and you are more likely to have an entitled adult. These are probabilities, not necessities: other factors— intrapsychic or social—will intervene to confirm or divert the outcome. Interpretation reliably accommodates either situation. It justifies the convergence of circumstances and expectations (we deserve what we have), or it compensates—with propitiating ritual and prayer—when circumstances frustrate the desire for safety and well-being. STORIES Stories—orientations made articulate and expressed—are the betterknown aspect of interpretations. They are told as we explain ourselves or declare our political or religious beliefs. Unformulated orientations are global—they warp every perception, idea, and encounter—but categories and valorizations they prescribe are determinable and loosely organized. Every such interpretation is a set of templates for evaluating the individuals and situations encountered. Their behavioral expressions are often inconsistent (repressive sexual morals with a taste for prurient films), but variability is tolerable until one is asked to articulate his or her interpretation. Then, order, simplicity, and consistency become priorities. Satisfying this format is complicated by the need to identify attitudes that organize an interpretation, though core attitudes are elusive. Acquired during childhood, they never appear fully formed in conscious awareness: one is vulnerable or secure for developmental reasons that were beyond our control and mostly unknown. Take care not to formulate your way of construing things, and you may never be asked to justify it: you have the comfort of your attitudes; others notice and take pleasure in biases they share or they work around them.3 Someone asked to explain himself typically expresses his beliefs by emphasizing a small array of more or less integrated factual claims congenial to his attitudes. These are beliefs expressing attitudes that direct practice and justify the storyteller’s orientation. They are a broad brush rendering of the world in which he or she lives, though live—like location—is ambiguous. It signifies the world in which we suppose ourselves to be—the world to which we are reconciled—however much or little it overlaps the physical, biological, and social domains of the natural world. Narrating an interpretation is, therefore, an adaptation to two exigencies: the world as I perceive it, and myself as I struggle to understand, valorize, and control my circumstances. My story comforts

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me by supplying the context in which I rationalize and extenuate my failures while pursuing my desires. There are many variations. Feeling diminished, I tell an aggrandizing story or one that explains my bad luck. Or luck is good, and my story emphasizes the virtue that justifies it. A story that provides for all the domains of human experience would be unusual. More often, stories are partial. Each begins as the rationale for an individual life: my way of construing who and where I am. Then, as people share a perspective, their interpretations have a common emphasis, one focused by class, religion, race, ethnicity, history, politics or authority, economics, gender, or vocation. So, intelligent design satisfies the idea of a first cause and the hope for generous oversight—a benign presiding creator—while responding to the fear that nature would be insecure—an unstable house of cards—if complexity had emerged randomly from mixtures of simpler components. A smart, munificent designer assures that nature will not come unstuck; he wouldn’t let that happen given his special affection for us humans. We are invited to live in this circle of interpretive light. SOCIALIZED INTERPRETATIONS The need to tell one’s story implicates people to whom one answers. They want an explanation for one’s attitudes or behavior; the speaker wants vindication. Telling one’s story is awkward; we hardly know where to begin. Or we start with a feature that seems important as we try to assemble and formulate a rendering of the whole. But much of the story has never been expressed in words, partly because much of it expresses attitudes and feelings for which there are no words. Socializing our separate stories is always problematic, because each is different, and because we don’t welcome people who challenge our idiosyncrasies. Less comfortable with one another when differences are explicit, we suppress them by tacit accord. Wanting confirmation—in talk and action—that much of one’s story squares with others, we choose friends who can (usually) be counted on to reveal only those parts that cohere with ours. Telling one’s personal story seems precious or portentous, however bold the person struggling to reveal it. Stories are halting and oddly neutered, ironic, incomplete, or dishonest as interpreters discover interests or biases that are better suppressed. For there is always a discrepancy between the orientation recounted and factors passed over in silence. We tolerate this difference in the self-presentation of others, because we are shamed by some of our biases and skeptical that others would candidly expose all theirs. But a consensual story does emerge, and it

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becomes a mantle and shield, a point of reference that is simultaneously personal and objective for a family, tribe, or nation. Many people are uncomfortable if others fail to endorse their stories, if only by repeating them. This is sometimes the gentle demand that an interpretation be shared with partners in valued systems: friends or teachers, for example. Such relationships may be as intimate as marriage or as vast as a religion or state, with adjustments appropriate to the difference. Spouses in viable marriages agree about many things. Citizens need only agree about basic rules and practices. Governments and cultures are less permissive: they often require allegiance to a dominant, homogenizing narrative, one that reconciles people to a regime of beliefs and practices that satisfies the interests or desires of a powerful despot or despotic bureaucracy. Heresy is the sin of rejecting this persuasion: the dissenter should bend; others should tremble. But heresy is problematic: Who is betrayed if I refuse an alien story? Are others shaken and sabotaged if I fail to see the world as they do? Or is heresy the greater sin of repudiating the interpretation that makes sense of me and my circumstances? This opposition is never resolved, though individual orientations are subordinated to interpretations that are socialized, announced, and more or less subtly prescribed. Every society or culture has its storytellers or ritual occasions when someone is elected to recount the tribal epic. Expressing shared hopes, anxieties, and loyalties in ways that resonate with other members, they are its public poets, conscience, or enforcers. Their interpretations are often expressed in the style of someone dressed for dinner, but their aim is practical: the tribal myth infiltrates every personal story to the degree that telling it is a way of reaffirming a shared identity; or we tell it to enforce identity when we fear diversity. Why are we so easily captured? Four reasons are decisive. i. Idiosyncrasy makes us vulnerable: we fear being unintelligible and alien to people on whom we depend for support and recognition. ii. Attitudes are paradoxical: seemingly rooted and uncompromising, they may be defenseless against influence because of being unconscious, hence beyond the reach of critical scrutiny. Not knowing one’s self-generated attitudes, unable to justify or defend them against the weight of social pressure, we quickly surrender. Not everyone capitulates, but the tolerance for isolation is rare. iii. We need to coordinate personal views with partners in core and other systems. Each of us participates in many systems; changing worldviews from system to system would be clumsy and unconvincing. An ample view with enough ambiguity for individual preferences is a more efficient solution. iv. Fearing difference because

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other worldviews are reproof to one’s own, we offer a carrot and a stick: join us in the circle of true believers, or suffer ridicule, exile, or worse. This is socializing interpretation as an expression of control: each of the many controls his or her anxiety by obliging others to construe the world in terms congenial to him or her. These socializing motives are a tidal wave; those who resist usually drown. Conscientious objectors are the survivors. Their stubbornness is heroic, whether or not one thinks them misled. One reason for the dread aroused by Orwell’s 1984 was its implication that personal interpretations would be unsustainable because tyranny joined to technology would preclude the ruminations where private interpretations are codified and affirmed. This account of socialization—each person coerced by the monolithic, generalized other—is too oppositional, because consensus is not always monolithic or stable. There may be no consensus, because contending centers of power dispute the right to establish a dominant story. Altered circumstances—climate change, war, or a discovery such as evolution—fracture and re-center the accepted story, or all follow when influential people revise it. Edicts are sometimes pronounced by authorities to whom everyone defers, but more often, each person’s interpretation is inflected, not superseded, by the consensual view. A people’s interpretations do, nevertheless, converge on a mean. Each man and woman opens his or her front door onto a square where biases and practices are shared by all the residents. Interpretation takes this neighborhood into itself: it prescribes what is passable or profane, what is or is not to be said, believed, or done. Persuasions overlap, because all have learned and each is affiliated to others by way of attitudes that are standard among them. There is a common narrative, but variations are tolerated because the story is secondary when people construe their circumstances in similar ways. These considerations emphasize the opposition between vulnerable privacy and secure sociality. But there is also a different basis for socialization, one that engages people without oblating their individuality. Socialization of this other sort is local. Attitudes are socialized, isolation is mitigated, when private fears and aspirations are focused and intensified by successes and failures in core systems: family, friendship, work, or school. Here, socialization is the effect of attachment, cooperation, shared hopes, ideas, and ideals, not, as above, the effect of an orientation and story everyone learns. Why say that this, too, is a kind of interpretation? Because each person’s orientation is manifest in affiliations that are voluntary or inherited and affirmed. Every such system is construed by members as an appropriate context and focus for themselves. Each reminds us that practical life and inquiry compete with

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interpretation as generators of purpose and meaning. For orientations— attitudes—forged in core systems are life-sustaining: we are reliable members of vital systems—we identify with their aims and other members—because they secure and satisfy us. These two modes of socialization are contraries. One homogenizes, the other particularizes: I see myself in terms of the story prescribed by church or state, or my aims and attitudes express my loyalties and perspectives: this family, that team. Interpretations of the first sort are regimented and generalized; one or a few orient believers. Interpretations of the other kind are particular and distinctive, because each is generated in a valued social system; there are several or many, because every man or woman participates in several or many systems. Responsibilities sanctioned by these two perspectives sometimes conflict: personal conviction or God and country. There may be nothing but coercion to reconcile the opposed interpretations of, say, conscientious objectors and their government. ELIDING FACT AND VALUE Interpretation elides facts with values when facts are warped to satisfy values. Inquiry elides them, too, when maps and plans are designed to satisfy interests or needs. But the two elisions have different conditions and implications. Facts and values relevant to inquiry are complementary: facts are represented by maps and the causal relations signified by plans; values are fixed by the needs or interests plans may satisfy. They merge in the respect that facts are valuable because instrumental to our aims. Making and using many plans in the course of any day, we come to believe that integrating facts (or the words signifying them) under the aegis of value—utility or aim—expresses their essential bond: food, clothing, and shelter fuse with the merit of having them. This is the instrumentalism that reduces other things (including other people) to utilities: meaning, values or disvalues for us. We thoughtlessly generalize from this practical fusion to interpretations that construe facts as having no identity apart from their value. There are, for example, the many people who see their political or religious beliefs as the essential context for personal identity and significance. But fusions of these two sorts are different. Goods that supply warmth and nourishment are life-sustaining, but their value for us typically exploits properties we don’t create: sunlight, for example. Other things are made to a standard that serves our purposes, but they don’t lose those properties because—like blankets in the tropics—their use has lapsed. People, too, have identities indepen-

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dent of interpretations; those assigned by our valorizing stories may have little or no bearing on who and what we are. MAGIC, MYTH, AND METAPHOR Myths in Plato’s hands were inspired riffs of speculative thinking. The figure of the divided line, the allegory of the cave, the myth of Er: each is the graphic representation of a complex possibility, one that is easily lost in the verbiage of philosophic argument. Plato’s myths succeed because they use the conceptual rubrics of practical thought (levels, passage, or transformation) to illustrate supersensible claims. Dispensing with “proofs,” they startle us with metaphor and economy. Yet Plato’s literary gift is easily abused. For there is no limit to the structural analogies invented by fertile minds. The cycle of the seasons suggests the birth, death, and rebirth of souls; describing order as design implies all the assumptions required for a “theory” that postulates a designer. Myth and magic are especially challenging to thinkers who contrive experiences or theories of things “re-presented” while dispensing with their extra-mental referents. Mythical Thought, volume 2 of Ernst Cassirer’s The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, addresses the issue without acknowledging that he, like every Kantian, is vulnerable to the charge that no objective test distinguishes “veridical” thought and experience from competitors sponsored by myth and magic.4 How should we choose between them if neither experience nor theory can be tested against a reality that is independent of both? Cassirer responds by discounting the belief that myth and magic are pathologies cured by logic and experiment; there is, he argues, a natural evolution to our thinking. Certain rubrics persist throughout its course, though their specific form and implications evolve. Myth construes cause, for example, as a holistic influence or effusion, not as an action having a specific effect: God’s benign influence versus a bullet. We outgrow our mythic thinking when its holism is superseded by scientific analysis, but why is one version better than another when neither can be tested against extra-mental states of affairs? Cassirer ignores his Kantian dilemma: he doesn’t try to convince us that values motivating scientific theories—universality and necessity (on his telling)—are superior to the imagined virtues of mythic stories: significance, understanding, salvation, or control. We are to see the difference and benefits because they are apparent and incontrovertible, though the Kantian predicament is confounding if reality has no character apart from schematizations that satisfy a system’s motivating values. Choose your values—if birth and culture haven’t already decided them—then live within the reality they conjure. Mythology or science: discount Cassirer’s developmental story,

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and you are free to choose. Disputes are referred to the court of attitudes. Or authority makes it choice, and we live and believe as it prescribes. Construing myths as hypotheses shifts the burden from allusive figures of speech to empirical tests: is there evidence of the states of affairs myths postulate? But this is tricky, because the allegory of the cave and figure of the line imply the reality of entities—Forms—that are not empirical. Wanting to explain how they might be known, we ask these additional questions: is there evidence of Forms independent of Plato’s myths; are there alternative, testable hypotheses that explain thought and its content without reference to Forms?5 All the plausibility of most myths derives from the myths alone: there is no additional evidence to justify them. Hence this conclusion: untestable myths are usually fiction. Magical thinking is fiction that ignores natural processes or violates natural laws: cycles of death and rebirth, for example. Many or all interpretations are infused with magic, myth, or the metaphoric use of leading principles. The sober physicist is a Cubs’ fan; every disaster is “divine justice.” Telling a piecemeal story about ourselves, the world, and our place there, we fill gaps with magic, myth, and analogy. No one purges every excess: Fantasy is, in general, the medium of infinitization. It is not a faculty like other faculties—if one wishes to speak in this way, it is the faculty instar omnium [faculty of faculties]. What feelings, understanding and will a person has depends in the last resort upon what imagination he has—how he represents himself to himself, that is, upon imagination.6 This is Kierkegaard’s gloss of Kant’s idea that atomic sensory data acquire character and relations by virtue of the conceptual system used to think them. There are two ways to construe this effect: an interpretation may be an associative network where fragments of experience acquire sense and significance, or a rule or rules that bind the fragments. An interpretation’s truth claims may express either standpoint: they affirm that data are related coherently within a conceptual network, or they affirm the network, hence the logic of its construction. Both readings tolerate myth and magic, because there is no restriction on the choice of construction rules and networks. Even consistency is dispensable if myth and magic are approved: terrible things happen but God, the creator, is benign; he is all-powerful, but we humans have free will. Such beliefs are passionately held, but all are mythic because inconsistent or because they are untestable stipulations: there is no evidence to support them and no thinkable way to create an experiment that would produce it.

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This harsh judgment is consequential, because interpretations affect the self-understanding and the morale of believers, teams, schools, religions, and states. Imagine people dedicated to a team and its fan club. Each member’s self-perception is intensified by loyalty to the club, its rituals, and other members; principal offices go to passionate devotees. Relations are familial; members excite or console one another when their team wins or loses. Their ecstatic loyalty evokes the magical powers of a self-exalting tribe. Should we sabotage them by insisting that their interpretation is empty posturing; must they justify themselves by satisfying inquiry’s empirical truth tests? Why lay down a standard that self-valorizing people and groups cannot satisfy when so much they do satisfies them while harming no one? There would be no reason to object if there were no alternate basis for self-valorization, and if these passions were always or usually innocuous. Many systems—friendships, families, and businesses—are valuable because of fellowship they promote, talents they educate, and work they do, not because of selfexalting myths. But no conflicts are more inimical than those that pillory detested others while glorifying the interpreters. How shall we detoxify pernicious interpretations without discrediting every other? Education and sobriety sometimes mitigate, but never quash every pernicious interpretation, because myth and magic supply power, virtue, or access to entities and events that violate nature’s cloying restraints. Conversation with the gods, our pride, their shame: there is no tinge of vulnerability in us, if contingency and doubt are vanquished by a story firmly believed. Interpretation is reckless. It liberates imagination while implying that consistency and testability are the self-imposed restraints of trivial minds or feeble wills. We resist, because imagination is untrustworthy. Testability and consistency are its essential controls. Many hypotheses may be true—many things are possible—but there is no way to sort plausible candidates for truth without evidence that matters obtain as described. Yet repeating this anodyne formula never slows the tide of fantasy. People relish the stories it promotes and resent killjoys who insist that belief be sober. Remember James’s “Will to Believe”: a belief may be considered true if it provokes good feelings and conduct that generates desired effects. FAITH AND FANTASY Everyone has beliefs infused with positive or negative feelings and the attitudes they express. All of us want them vindicated by reality. Should we believe an appeasing story because it encourages hope or reduces fear? Is it contemptible that attitudes set parameters for the equilibrium

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of feeling, belief, and desire? Many people emphasize the intensity of their belief, speak of faith, and want it respected. Everyone responds— skeptics too—by stepping lightly. But respect for people of faith doesn’t entail believing that their interpretations are true. Hypotheses are testable. Faith is a determination to believe irrespective of evidence. Interpretations are validated to the degree that needs—for security, pleasure, significance, gender identity, and control—are appeased by affirmations they express. Believers call them true, but this is an honorific use of a word whose core sense requires the consistency and testability that are incidental or alien to interpretations. Their aim is different: reconcile us to events we cannot otherwise understand or control, justify our deeds or inclinations. Exemption from the standards of inquiry is often innocuous: faith in the Red or White Sox was mythic but not magical. No laws of nature were suspended so they might win a World Series. Interpretations laced with magic cross that threshold. Socrates died for implying that there is myth and magic in religious and political thinking. We are indebted to Marx and Freud for saying that both are pervasive in the habits and postures of secular society. Advertising succeeds, because it stirs attitudes felt as needs in target audiences: repair your deficiencies, realize your better self. But fast cars and shaving lotion don’t turn old men into boys. Thinking otherwise is fanciful, but useful: our consumer economy would shrivel were everyone sober. This advantage doesn’t expunge the difference between what I am or suspect myself to be and the myth of what I might be. Interpretation is magical wherever fantasy closes this gap by imagining that natural laws are violated. PHILOSOPHIC RATIONALES Many stories that express and justify interpretations use myth and magic to make difficult transitions (from death to eternal life), integrate anomalies (punishment with forgiveness), or violate natural laws (miracles). Philosophers are more careful. Prizing clarity and rigor, we say that no belief is compelling if there are no systematic arguments to justify it. Many such arguments propose to transform the mythology of interpretation into the currency of sober discourse: philosophers “prove” the reality of God, unconditional freedom, or innate human rights. Their a priori arguments are apologies for beliefs already held: they rarely culminate in testable hypotheses or in truths whose necessity is more than the validity of conclusions derived from stipulated premises. This a priori style characterizes philosophic conclusions since Plato. It became the only legitimate style when Kant scotched inquiry by arguing (in the style of Berkeley’s “nothing is like an idea but another

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idea”) that human understanding cannot exceed the domain of schematized sensory data. Nothing beyond experience is thinkable, if experience is a barrier to the extra-mental world, for then nothing of its character can be inferred from the data mind differentiates and organizes. This first claim obscures another, more often implied than expressed: mind and matter are categorially different so properties known by way of experience cannot be identical or like the properties of material things. Mind’s qualifications—sensory properties constitutive of experience—are, therefore, no basis for inferences concerning the character of extra-mental things. We should infer that inquiry has no extra-mental referent: there is nothing the other side of experience, or nothing we can think or know. Kant’s heirs amend the details of his argument, but not its point. Cassirer argued that conceptual systems are forever revised as science progresses, but that empirical objects are never more than phenomenal posits of the conceptual system used to think them. Empirical data are not a check of hypotheses, because the character of the data alters with the depth, integration, and range of the theory used to generate hypotheses. The trajectory of conceptual revision probably has no end—though its trace may be asymptotic—because there may never be a time when every contingent datum is locatable within a system whose applications are universal and necessary. Carnap had little patience for Cassirer’s historicism, but he agreed that questions about objectivity are “internal” to the conceptual system used to think them. “External” questions are unthinkable, because meaningless. Every such claim uses different words to repeat with Kant that objects lying the other side of sensory data are unthinkable “negative noumena.”7 Quine added decisive final touches: “Theory as a whole . . . is a fabric of sentences variously associated to one another and to nonverbal stimuli by the mechanism of conditioned response.”8 “Conditioned response” seems to presuppose things that provoke responses. Yet the character of such things is unknowable because unthinkable when every property that might be ascribed to them acquires character and relations from the theory used to think it. This raises a first ambiguity: What is a hypothesis tested against: an extra-conceptual, extralinguistic phenomenon, or observation sentences that re-present that alleged state of affairs? Quine’s account of objectivity—objects are schematized by theories whose quantified sentences ascribe properties to things9—rejects the first and affirms the second: a sentence is true or false because of its relations to a theory’s other sentences. Quine argued that theories should be construed holistically for the purposes of meaning and truth: each was said to be a system of interanimating sentences:10 “The problem of relating theory to sensory

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stimulation may now be put less forbiddingly as that of relating theory formulations to observation sentences. . . . What this means is that terms embedded in observation sentences recur in the theory formulations.”11 Alleging error in any of a theory’s sentences is, therefore, significant for the theory as a whole. It is defended—error is eliminated—by rejiggering several, many, or all its constituent sentences: the sentences or their relations are altered. Inferential relations are revised, for example, so one sentence is weakly implied by another, not, as before, strongly implied: “We will prefer the possibility of correction which ‘disturbs the total system as little as possible.’ ”12 The possibility of a definitive—up or down—empirical test is vastly reduced, because we are barred from testing sentences one at a time, eliminating those falsified. For suppose an experiment seems to threaten a hypothesis. We respond by altering that sentence or its relations to others in ways that reduce the pressure of this apparently disconfirming experiment, or we distrust the experiment and ignore observation sentences that report it. Quine’s holism is consequential, because the freedom it promotes— tinker until you have eliminated any empirical challenge—implies that no consistent property ascription is falsifiable. Hence the conclusion that no consistent theory is falsifiable: none addresses data it cannot make or remake to suit itself. Inquiry loses its essential leverage, because confounding data are no longer evidence that a characterization needs revision or a substitute. And there is more: consistent thought— imagination—has carte blanche: The truths that can be said even in common-sense terms about ordinary things are themselves, in turn, far in excess of any available data.13 To call a posit a post is not to patronize it. A posit can be unavoidable except at the cost of other no less artificial expedients. Everything to which we concede existence is a posit from the standpoint of a description of the theory-building process, and simultaneously real from the standpoint of the theory that is being built. Nor let us look down on the standpoint of the theory as make-believe; for we can never do better than occupy the standpoint of some theory or other, the best we can muster at the time.14 The passage following this one invokes the discipline of scientific theory: What reality is like is the business of scientists, in the broadest sense, painstakingly to surmise; and what there is, what is real,

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is part of that question. The question how we know what there is is simply part of the question, so briefly contemplated . . . of the evidence for truth about the world. The last arbiter is socalled scientific method, however amorphous.15 This appeal to scientific method is quixotic and lame, because Quine has deprived it of the indispensable condition for confirming or disqualifying hypotheses: namely, the data used to test them. Indeed, Quine dissolves the tension between interpretation and inquiry by reducing the second to the first, though he denies that this is reckless: Have we now so far lowered our sights as to settle for a relativistic doctrine of truth—rating the statements of each theory as true for that theory, and brooking no higher criticism? Not so. The saving consideration is that we continue to take seriously our own particular aggregate science, our own particular world-theory or loose total fabric of quasi-theories, whatever it may be. Unlike Descartes, we own and use our beliefs of the moment, even in the midst of philosophizing, until by what is vaguely called scientific method we change them here and there for the better. Within our own total evolving doctrine, we can judge truth as earnestly and absolutely as can be; subject to correction, but that goes without saying.16 Quine is permissive, indeed: “Our own particular world-theory or loose total fabric of quasi-theories” is his imprimatur for any and every consistent conceptual system. Interpretation has all the sanction required, for Quine has said that any system is satisfactory if it enables one to differentiate and organize sensory data—stimulations—in ways appropriate to a conceptual system that is consistent, fruitful, and economical in its use of theoretical terms.17 This, the Duhem-Quine thesis, is defended by many thinkers who recoil at the idea of defending interpretations laced with myth or magic. Quine the “naturalist” (hard to square with his ontological relativism18) would be equally adverse, though his formulation scuppers empirical inquiry for the benefit of storytelling. One of Quine’s last books acknowledges that his thesis obscures a theory’s relation to confirming or falsifying evidence: “My concern has been with the central logical structure of evidence. . . . Science does stay responsive somehow to sensory stimulation both early and late, but its mode of response . . . eludes my schematism.”19 Quine never revised his account of theory formation and confirmation to tell how science might use sensory data in ways that eluded him. Yet, this admission is gravely

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compromising, because the untestability of science’s “central logical structure” is a fault it shares with every consistent but empirically unfalsifiable interpretation, be it a religious story or political ideology. Why choose one conceptual system rather than others? Quine cites scientific method, implying that it can choose among them. But he was also dubious of its rigor, and sure that several theories, each capable of embedding all possible data, would survive its application. It is relevant, too, that Quine’s ontological relativity should have obliged him to acknowledge methods other than that of science: it has no sanction, he implied, apart from the claims of enlightened habit. Why choose one method or theory from the array of alternatives absent that habit? Quine doesn’t say, though emotivism has a plausible answer he might not have scorned. Is chocolate better than vanilla? People who say it is voice a preference, not a truth, hence the link to interpretation. People willingly hear that their choices express preferences, not truths, but they are scandalized if told that their interpretations—religious beliefs, for example—are not true or false, because untestable. Positivists often say that empirically untestable beliefs are meaningless, but we needn’t offend believers by requiring that thought submit to that higher standard of rigor. It isn’t too great an extrapolation to imagine gods on Mount Olympus or a forest alive with spirits. More disturbing because it compromises every claim to material truth is the fact that interpretations are not falsifiable: one may persist in believing them whatever the evidence. Interpreters may suppose that this is a great strength. But which is more plausible: beliefs are irrefutable or reality (including evidence of reality) is irrelevant to belief? A posture that defends fantasy against evidence that would confirm or refute it is odd. What motive commends it? Emotivists have told us: the choice of interpretations is a preference. Each person construes life in a way that satisfies his or her attitudes. Saying this doesn’t imply that preferences are capricious, that one could have chosen otherwise. The implication is narrower: each person construes his or her circumstances in one of many ways that are possible. Preference signifies something preferred, not freedom to choose. One prefers to make sense of oneself and others things in terms of a religion one has learned, not chosen. Why call it a preference? Because one resists other ways to construe them. These are some reasons for saying that Quine’s formulation, true to the tradition that passes from Kant through Cassirer to Carnap and Quine, eliminates the difference between interpretation and inquiry. TOLERANCE Could we avert conflict among people espousing contrary interpretations in the way we discount differences of taste? Treat them generously

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as preferences, and concede that they aren’t disputable. We are often comfortable with people whose tastes differ from our own: why not regard differences of interpretation in this tolerant way? One reason is the partisan conviction that one’s interpretation is true. But this is problematic when everyone makes this claim of contraries, all supported with the same passion though all or all but one are false. One might tell believers that contrariety is a distraction, because interpretations are not true, false, or falsifiable, but that would surely be a waste of time. Why would they resist this simple point? Because it is insulting. Each person’s values—and psychic identity—are sanctioned by an interpretation. Descartes’ formula, I am, I exist, each time I think or perceive it, would be more accurate if “think or perceive” were replaced by “value or appraise.” Vulnerability and fear, pleasure and excitement are the two axes of experience and the point of inception for one’s attitudes. These sensibilities and expectations define me. Perceiving other people and things through the scrim of my attitudes, I see comfort and risk, sectors or shades of good and bad, right and wrong. Partners endorse some of my appraisals, but none has an orientation that maps perfectly onto mine; some offend me, many are unintelligible. I acknowledge that others are free to interpret their circumstances in ways appropriate to themselves. But respecting their choices doesn’t imply that my interpretation is a taste that might have been different: this interpretation defines me; its values express my attitudes, the world and myself as I know them. More than a preference, this is my psychic posture, the outcome of my developmental history, my beliefs, hopes, and fears: simply me. And often, it is enforced—secured—by a tide of social thought, preference, and feeling. Truth is cogency, the sanction and permission, for all I value and believe, the final honorific. Strip interpretation of its truth and self-esteem deflates like a punctured tire. Tolerance is respect or patience for difference, or difference is tolerated because we turn away and ignore it. There is no tolerance for interpretations different from one’s own without recognition that interpretations are developmentally rooted orientations, not truths. Nor can we save the dignity of interpretations by calling them preferences. No one prefers to see things as he or she does; nothing but reeducation— intimate contact with people having other orientations, psychoanalysis, or a crisis—enables one to see them otherwise.

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Chapter Three

Inquiry Practical Life and Science

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n interpretation is validated by construing the ambient world in ways that satisfy motivating attitudes. Friends and associates substantiate its claims by construing other things and themselves in similar ways. Or we contrive an ever richer story by adding dollops of fantasy. Nothing but the hard edge of practical life—the disaster no prayer averts—obliges us to moderate beliefs the story sponsors. Unable to reconcile ourselves to harsh circumstances, having no way to propitiate them, we surrender to panic or depression. Anxiety is evidence that an interpretation fails to appease the need provoking it or that attitudes are charged with dread. Plato advised us to turn away from fantasy and seek reality,1 but this existential dilemma is all but unresolvable if we are restricted to interpretation alone. It valorizes core systems and oneself, but distorts self-perception and plans that engage us with other things. Inquiry is the necessary cure. Quine and Putnam have made inquiry problematic: Quine because he eliminated falsifiability as a test of truth; Putnam because he describes fact as a function of value. Joining their claims entails that interpretation is the only style of systematic thought. Establishing their error is a necessary condition for reaffirming the difference between interpretation and inquiry. CONTEXT AND OBJECTIVES Imagine descending unfamiliar stairs in the dark. Uncertain about the width and depth of each stair, the height of the staircase, or the angle 67

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of descent, one grasps the railing and guesses that the reach of every next step will be no more than the last. But this is a staircase built to confuse: steps are often narrow, their heights unequal, the angle of descent is variable, stairs go on forever. There is sometimes a run of steps, each like the one before; but expectation is frustrated—one falls— when a step is larger or smaller, deeper or closer than the one before. We could sit down refusing to go forward, but few of us do. Flooded with anxiety or coolly deliberate, we gingerly reach below in ways that extrapolate from the feel of steps above. Every such hypothesis would be useless in a world of random conjunctions, but not in our world where there are runs of order and chunks of stability. We speculate about the conditions for these effects, test our speculations, then use the surmise to leverage our initiatives. For there is no alternative, no viable way to estimate the shape and scale of things by ruminating perpetually on our ideas of them. Protons could withdraw into reverie, because they embody energy sufficient to sustain them indefinitely. We who lack that advantage find companions and resources by exploring our circumstances. Descartes’ first two Meditations—a narrative of doubt, withdrawal, and self-discovery— face the other way, but they are a conceit. Philosophers often ignore situations where action is exigent but circumstances are known imperfectly, because his account of mind’s isolation and autonomy is their point of reference. But we are neither alone, nor self-sufficient. Think of a master pianist in the first moments of a recital. Something is awry: unable to play as he practiced because the piano wasn’t voiced, he plays speculatively, listening to the music as he produces it, moderating what he does to achieve effects he wants. He plays as the rest of us act, with competence tempered by uncertainty. For there is an abiding contingency to our interventions: How will things respond? What changes need be made to produce an effect closer to the one desired? Plans and hypotheses direct what we do, as scores direct musicians. But scores are implacable—finished and fixed. Plans and hypotheses are always revisable; frustration and error guarantee that they are often revised. Planning and theorizing are evolutionary afterthoughts, the fortuitous effect of brains that have grown beyond the challenge of enabling bodies to find their way in a world that mixes stability with uncertainty. It is often said that inquiry begins when belief is problematic. An opinion is disputed, or an action it directs doesn’t work: uncertainty provokes reflection. But belief is also tested when someone tired of hearsay—all the banalities of everyday life—wants to know the truths it carries or obscures. This was Descartes’ motive in the first Meditation, and sometimes, as when Einstein considered conventional beliefs about perspective and simultaneity, it is still entrée to unknown terrain.

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Exploiting information for practical aims requires hypotheses of three sorts: perceptual judgments, maps, and plans. Looking for a friend in a crowd, I make a number of mistaken judgments—similar gait, hat, or face—before finding him. Maps and plans are mutually implicative. A plan is tailored to its circumstances, but, reciprocally, the emphases and scale of a map imply the plan to be enacted. Emphasis is limited by our aims and circumstances: drivers map a terrain by exaggerating the prominence of roads; pedestrians emphasize sidewalks, paths, or trails. The accuracy of perceptual judgments is assumed when maps and plans are made and used, though mistaken judgments are a principal reason that maps are inaccurate and plans misfire. Maps are typically accurate to the degree appropriate to plans. But “appropriate” is the slippery slope that carries hypothesis into interpretation. Suppose one dresses for an occasion where the style isn’t prescribed: how shall I present myself? The circumstances tolerate many variations, but the event has certain features—of place and time, scale and purpose—that are not in dispute: call these the facts of the matter. Individuals acknowledge the same facts, but construe the complex—meon-this-occasion—differently and dress accordingly. What shall I wear? The decision turns on one’s sense of self. The answer is an interpretation, one that locates me in the situation for which I prepare. Some have nothing to decide: they always dress the same way. Others believe that every occasion requires a new decision, because each is different. The easy comfort of the first compares to the nervous vanity of the second; but this difference is incidental to a point they share: each construes— interprets—the meaning of the occasion for him or herself. Idealists and romantics see their advantage and pounce: maps are formulated in ways appropriate to plans; plans always express the peculiar bent and interest of the planner. Neither is testable independently when interpretation has spread the net of purpose and value over all it surveys. But this reading wrongly conflates two things. Agents of the American Automobile Association help members plan trips. Members choose their destinations; the AAA supplies maps and information about possible routes. The difference is secure and plain. Surveyors don’t prescribe the sorts of roads or houses to build; they do inform us about the circumstances to which plans will be adapted. Someone who stubbornly builds on quicksand can’t say he wasn’t warned. The exigencies of practical life make it plausible that perceptual judgments, maps, and plans were the principal or only expressions of hypothesis in the early history of mankind. Its extended applications were perhaps delayed until leisure and language enabled our ancestors to speculate about themselves and their circumstances. We have a rightly exalted idea of science, one justified by its explanatory and predictive

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power. But science was already only a step beyond the hunters, smelters, and farmers of those bygone times. They, too, generalized, predicted, and explained. But there was much they didn’t know, so interpretation was their principal device for integrating bits and pieces of practical information. What concerned them more: practical success and the information it supplied, or interpretation’s stories? We don’t know, and shouldn’t pretend we do. Reconstructions—fables—that emphasize the irrationality of ancient peoples don’t square with the evidence of their art, agriculture, and astronomical tables. Cities constructed on plans dictated by religious beliefs don’t obscure the genius of their architects and builders. They exploited hypotheses (additional to perceptual judgments, maps, and plans) that were speculations of the three kinds mentioned in chapter 1: inductive generalizations (to all crows from a few), curvefitting (testing a formula or equation against an array of data), and inferences from effects to their conditions (whether constituents, causes, or laws). Pre-Socratic philosophers—probably their ancestors, too—did all three. They generalized, predicting that seed of a kind would produce the same grain that flowered in previous years; they applied a formula—the cycle of seasons—to the evidence of shorter and cooler, then longer and hotter days; they inferred from the properties and behaviors of things that all were made of earth, water, fire, or air or that all could be explained as expressions of attraction and resistance— love and strife. We, too, make hypotheses of these three kinds despite skeptics who object that the third is gratuitous and dogmatic. They say, rightly, that the best possible abductions—they would accurately predict every sensory datum—could be mistaken: they might correctly specify every perceived effect while mistakenly identifying its conditions. This proviso precludes discovery that such a hypothesis is mistaken. Grant this outcome is not a contradiction, then consider that an abduction capable of explaining every empirical difference, whatever its complexity, would need to be a very competent surmise. Is it more than vanishingly likely that predictions derived from such abductions are repeatedly confirmed, though the abductions themselves are mistaken? Critics respond that Newton’s laws fit the example perfectly—they are maximally confirmed though false—but his equations do not predict every possible effect; their error is their partiality, the restricted domain to which they apply. Improving an abduction, locating a partial truth within one more ample is evidence of a more powerful successor, not evidence of failure in the hypothesis subsumed.

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A more qualified skepticism emphasizes that the conditions specified by an abduction express the limited information and historical perspective of the hypothesizer.2 Even successful predictions can’t overcome these limitations on one’s ability to conceive the processes and structures specified by hypotheses, then engaged experimentally. But notice that this response expresses the practical caution appropriate to knowing things remote or complex, not skepticism. One quickly identifies shoes too large or small by wearing them. Electromagnetic fields are less accessible. We can’t try them on; they are harder to model. Many intermediate examples confirm that we do know the structures of things, absolutely (in a sense), not perspectivally. Architects design and build very complex buildings. Seeing a finished structure, they can say, accurately, that it does or does not embody its model. Physicists don’t have the architects’ advantage—confirm a model’s applicability by using it to build the structure studied—but experiments confirm, after successive tests and revisions, that abductions converge or not on matters they specify. Why else say that abductions including Newtonian space and the Bohr atom are superseded? The principal motives for arguments disputing the cogency of abduction are philosophic, not practical or scientific. One fulcrum is the persistent assumption that well-substantiated belief is deficient because it falls short of certainty. Insist on this distinction, as do Plato, Descartes, and their successors,3 and we disqualify every belief that speculates about the conditions for sensory effects: none is certain. Another motive is dialectical: what can we know of an extra-mental reality, one whose existence and character are independent of the ways we perceive, think, engage, or talk about it? Berkeley’s dictum, esse est percipi, converts Descartes’ method of universal doubt into a dogma: there is nothing apart from mind and the contents of awareness.4 These two points converge: the direct presentation of content—its presence before an inspecting mind—is the only guarantee of knowledge. Anything less is opinion: it could be mistaken. Every claim about the extra-mental world is unreliable in this way. All are subject to Cartesian discipline: unable to know things as they are in themselves, we renounce every reference to them. Knowledge shrinks to the circle of directly inspectable phenomena, including sensory data, words, ideas, and theories. Skeptics demand rigor, but fail to do what their argument requires: explain in detail the presentation or generation of the systematically related data that naïve common sense ascribes to our interactions with other people and things. Hume cites the data, but never tries to explain their origin. Kant tried to explain the differentiated qualities

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and relations of experience, its unity and stability, but who believes that the content of experience is the product of transcendental synthesis rather than the effect of data generated by our interactions with other people and things, then processed by our sensory organs and brain? Experience might be synthesized by the mind that thinks them—as dreams are—but it seems odd indeed that I am the inventor of the speech or sonata to which I listen or that my thinking stabilizes the Manhattan skyline. There is a clock on my desk: the case and face are stable, but the hands move; how do I manage both effects at once? Should I marvel at the subtlety of my transcendental self or concede that minds cloistered in skulls accurately register and report their experiences of the ambient world. Though notice the habit learned from Descartes, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant: they encourage the impression that mind is passive to data received and inspected. This misconstrues most experience, because it emphasizes one side, but ignores the other half: we perceive other things in the course of engaging them. “A dollar,” says the clerk; you pay it, and take your newspaper: there is perpetual reciprocity in our relations to other people and things. Why deny that the extramental world is often understood and controlled? How do we plausibly deny it, given cooperation, conflict, and the technological culture that proves its skill every time one flicks a light switch? There would be less argument if this were not the bone skeptics love to chew.5 Deny that true belief requires certainty, locate adaptable, smart animals (human beings) in the cities, swamps, and savannahs of the physical world, then consider likely conditions for the efficacy of practical experience: do all this, and you remove the bone. Skeptics refuse to yield, but they are obliged to explain that esse est percipi—that all reality is in us—and that, miraculously, separate minds coordinate their experiences. Leibniz’s Monadology—each mind a shard bound harmoniously (without mutual access) by divine apperception—should be everyone’s preferred explanation. It isn’t, because there is no evidence of the entities and relations cited by this cosmic abduction, apart from claims it makes. We choose between a simple hypothesis that explains everything—God does it—and the many inferences that explain particular practical effects by citing extra-mental causes. Science adds explanations that are more generic, but it never displaces reciprocities it explains: people answer voices they hear, because they rightly believe that others are speaking to them. Proud of modern science, thinking that this is abduction’s principal achievement, we ask why there was no science in the early history of cultures. But this question is better rephrased: why wasn’t there better science in cultures that successfully used abduction to master

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various practical techniques? Preliminary answers are apparent: partial information and no theory to integrate it, no consistent or sufficiently subtle standards of measurement, primitive mathematics, poor technology (no microscopes, thermometers, or telescopes), misleading or mistaken metaphysical assumptions (distinct qualitative natures—Aristotle’s quiddities—rather than discrete or continuous values for a few variable types or qualities). These were severe impediments to systematic knowledge. There was little chance of displacing them in the West as long as inquiry was suppressed by the dominant interpretation of a church convinced that it and Aristotle knew everything worth knowing. MEANING One may think of empirical meaning in the terms of ostensive definition—say or think “red” when seeing red—but this is too simple for most cases. A more ample account proposes that thoughts or sentences are meaningful if they signify possible states of affairs and true if those states of affairs are instantiated: the state of affairs prefigured is actual; it has a determinate location in spacetime. Meaning has three conditions: the thought or sentence satisfies logical laws (it is consistent), it has subjectpredicate form or a permitted relational form (its syntax), and its individual words (other than logical constants and rhetorical uses of words such as By golly) signify properties, processes, relations, people or things, relationships, or events. The third of these considerations—semantics—has three constituents: words or phrases that signify properties, entities, processes, or relations; rules that bar solecisms (“round-square”); and organizational rubrics (cause and effect) that signify structures or relationships. The semantics of these rubrics (explicit in the role Kant ascribed to empirical schemas6) is distinct from the syntax of grammatical form, though the two elide when a sentence’s subject-predicate form expresses an organizational form: ‘Fire burns.’ Empirical meaning is problematic in this respect: does an empirically meaningful sentence signify all the observable effects that could be educed if it were true though most such effects are unconsidered or unknown when the sentence is affirmed? It is a contingency, for example, that dogs are known by their shapes, noses, and barks, not their DNA. Should we count all these features as properties signified by dog? Saying no raises questions about the cogency of evidence: can properties not implied by dog count as evidence of a dog or dogs? No one could have known before the discovery of canine DNA that its structure is one of the features signified by dog. Nor would anyone have said that evidence of it was evidence of dogs. But this restriction is problematic:

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reject extended semantic coverage and we hobble thought and language by implying that dog as currently used signifies all the properties dogs may someday be shown to have. The alternate, extended notion of meaning regards sense as a target: the target is a complex of properties (existing perhaps as a logical—eternal—possiblity7). Some of its constituent properties are known or conceived, others not. It may be incidental that the speaker knows less of dogs than he or she realizes, but it is not incidental that this extended notion of meaning—call it implicit or Platonic meaning—is psychologically and morally false: a speaker’s responsibility extends to the consciously acknowledged sense of his or her words, not to the denumerably infinite set of features that a word may come to signify. These opposed interests require two notions of meaning: one appropriate to the extended sense, another that limits semantic meaning to the set of features currently associated with the thing signified. This difference is significant in practical life, because of our inclination to restrict semantic meaning to properties directly perceived (colors and sounds), rather than relationships discerned or inferred. This is satisfactory when words are defined ostensively: red signifies the color seen. It fails when words, phrases, or sentences signify complex structures or relationships that are not or cannot be observed directly or altogether. Imagine that a consumer calls customer service with a complaint. Speaking to the first person to answer the phone, she expresses her concern and waits for help. Getting none, she speaks to successive superiors until (perhaps) the issue is settled. The caller infers, without directly seeing it, that authority in this company is organized hierarchically. Or, a simpler case, magnetism signifies a field-effect, not merely the behavior of polarized nails. These examples illustrate the philosophically problematic difference between observables and their sometimes unobservable but inferred conditions: perceived radiation emitted from otherwise unperceived black holes, sound waves heard as different notes. This difference— between sensory data and their conditions or ground—is the focus of an interminable debate among empiricists: is there more to reality than the data by which it is known? We assume that the ambient world reduces to sensory data if we agree with Berkeley that reality comprises mind— the Cartesian cogito—and these data, its qualifications. But this is the lingering shadow of a skeptical ontology: it affirms that there is no extra-mental world or no way to know it. The more likely alternative avers that mind is the activity of a material agent, one embedded within and perpetually engaged by other material systems. Every such agent has multiple properties, usually—in our experience—some that are

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observable, and others (their energy, for example) that are not. Saying, “Careful, red light,” we signify that things have properties of both sorts. Joining these considerations, we say that meaning has a double thrust: surface and depth. Some words and phrases signify properties perceived; others signify properties, things, or relationships inferred. Some of those inferred—DNA or the shapes of large irregular structures, partially seen—are properties inaccessible to direct observation. The referents for other words, phrases, or sentences are discovered when thought uses its leading principles (listed and elaborated in chapter 6) to organize hypotheses, maps, or plans. Applying the rule that effects have causes, we see bites and look for mosquitoes. Both terms of a relationship—bugs and bites—may be observable, but science has learned to exploit the looser requirement that we be able to confirm one or more of a relationship’s terms by way of its other terms: heat and molecular motion, for example. Or we make a relationship accessible by way of theories that generalize, extrapolate, or analogize from things better known. Observables are still critical if a hypothesis is to be confirmed. But access to them may be steeply mediated by a lengthy string of intermediaries: the radiation of black holes and the Big Bang are intelligible because ideas credited by studying the Sun are applied to them, and because of evidence that would be inaccessible without theory and instruments more subtle than the eye. The liberties taken are, however, problematic. Interpretation, too, can analogize and extrapolate in circumstances where no direct observation is possible. Radiation is perceived; the black holes from which it allegedly emanates are not: cosmic design is perceived (or conceived), the cosmic designer is not. The extended, implicit meaning of black hole signifies (among other things) its radiation; the extended, implicit meaning of cosmic intelligence signifies (among other things) effects intrinsic to its nature, including the cosmic design. Our inability to perceive the designer is a minor disability if natural order presupposes a divine intelligence. Why demur; why flatter inquiry at cost to interpretation? Because the creationist inference is a step too far: thinking beyond the possibility of direct confirmation doesn’t excuse us the requirement that a claim have empirical meaning. Creationism applies the principle that effects have causes, but this is only a first step: it remains to establish the link between effects and their alleged causes. For it needs to be shown that the effects of a process are continuous with the mechanics of the process. It makes little sense (no sense if we discount familiarity) to say that an immaterial process—unextended Cartesian thinking—can generate the experience of extension. The mechanisms responsible for radiation are specifiable; the process of divine creation is not: we speak

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of God’s “thinking” with a familiarity that betrays our entire ignorance of his existence or activity. Creationist stories are empty rhetoric without that further specificity. Chapter 5 argues that both imagination and inquiry use leading principles—rubrics such as cause and effect—to create phrases or sentences that represent inferred states of affairs. These structural affinities are nevertheless superficial if they extend no deeper than thoughts or sentences that express them. For using the rubrics to couple thoughts or words is easier than justifying inferences they promote. A dimensionless mind thinking space, a thinking God creating an orderly, material universe: these mysteries are not self-authenticating. The phrases or sentences expressing them are provocative, but not more meaningful than recommending that someone take an umbrella, because: “It’s raining ghosts and numbers.” We don’t know what this means or how to make it meaningful. TRUTH Hypothesis is sometimes hard to distinguish from interpretation if truth is honorific. True grit is real grit; true friends are reliable. But we are encouraged to believe that the doctrines of a “true” religion are correct, not that they are resolute or reliable. Maps are accurate or not, so sentences reporting the relative placement of features represented on a map are true or false; it is also true or false that the instrumental— causal—relations invoked by a plan do obtain. But practices—driving on the right, shaving one’s head, or worshiping in a favored way—are not true or false in the respect that hypotheses are one or the other. Nor is a doctrine true merely because believers affirm it. Distinguishing inquiry from interpretation requires a firm notion of truth. But what is truth: identity, coherence, disquotation, or correspondence? What are its terms and what should count as evidence of truth? Are there degrees of truth and, if so, how much of it need there be to justify saying that a thought or sentence is true? Truth of the sort appropriate to interpretation is always and only a combination of coherence and identity: a network of thoughts or sentences is true because it satisfies the attitude or attitudes—hence values—that promote it. The story believed may be inconsistent, its contradictions may be glaring, but it is true to the believers whose values it affirms. Coherence is a weak requirement (logic may be incidental), because any jumble of beliefs may seem coherent when attitudes are its measure. Truth as identity is founded in self-perception. I know triangularity as it is, because a determinate figure (or the generic idea of closed three-sided figures) is inscribed in my awareness and

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inspected. There is no gap between awareness and its object, hence no distance or intervening medium to distort my view of it. Affirming such truths is also a way of affirming myself. For every thing qualifying my awareness is known directly as a qualification of myself. (Recall Plato’s theory of Forms. Each Form stands plainly before the mind’s eye, and is seen as it is; a mind inscribed with the Forms sees them as qualifications of itself.) This is my special—unmediated—connection to a team, tribe, or any other thing or event known to interpretation. I am one with it either because I think or imagine it or because I identify with it, thereby affirming myself. 8 These convictions, elaborated in the context of self-inspection, are intensified when socialized. For loyalty and conviction are greater when others validate my interpretations by affirming them. Think of the intensified conviction aroused in comrades who cheer as one: your affirmation coheres with mine and confirms it. Now add that mind is “in the truth” or “true to itself” when its way of construing the world satisfies its attitudes, hence its moral and emotional imperatives: I know who I am, and know that this posture—these beliefs and feelings—satisfy my needs and pacify my fears. These concerns are alien to inquiry. Phone calls are everywhere familiar; some are generated by machine, but put them aside to consider the others. Does anyone believe that coherent messages from a spouse, child, or creditor reduce callers to the voices heard? There is better evidence that there are various modalities of transmission, each reliable in itself though information distorted by one may be corrected by information from another. We listen carefully, or, seeing poorly, we wear glasses or turn up the light. We want information about things as they are, to the extent they are accessible. Inquiry doesn’t identify such things with the act of thought (except for the rare case of thinking about one’s own brain states), nor does it represent them in ways that appease us. Which theory of truth is appropriate to inquiry? Philosophers distrust correspondence for a reason that commends identity: the gap between knower and known breeds error. Never grasping and inspecting the thing known, we rely on surrogates: the thoughts, sensory data, or sentences that represent it. Kantians suppose that experience is an impenetrable barrier to the extra-mental world: we can’t see beyond percepts and ideas in order to compare them to the matters allegedly represented. Generations of thinkers have responded by telling us that a surrogate world—the one presented in sensory data, theory, or language—satisfies every description otherwise reserved to things-inthemselves: it, too, is differentiated, organized, and transparent, hence intelligible. Coherence binds the thoughts or sentences that express or exhibit this world: each is true in the respect that it couples to others

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within the narrative mind tells of the world and itself. Now add coherence to identity in recognition that the experience and world presented by way of the narrative is mine. We say, indifferently, that I am in the truth, or truth is in me. Interpretation would have us believe that mind is the measure, though each thinker construes reality in a way peculiar to itself. But is this plausible? Is reality nothing but mind’s qualification or construction? Is experience a barrier to knowledge of the external world, or a source of filtered but reliable information? Is the prospect of error so intimidating that we retreat into the double relation of identity and coherence? Are we made secure merely by creating a surrogate world, one that uses fantasy to disguise error and disappointment? These are philosophic postures; discount the skeptical arguments and they seem a mix of grandiosity and fear. The retreat to identity—each thinker’s selfaffirmed view of the world—is the weakest sort of truth: universal selfpleading promotes universal distortion. Add that coherence is a test of truth, not truth itself; a coherent, repeatedly tested and well-confirmed theory is likely to be a good representation of relevant states of affairs. Contradiction make us question an interpretation, but coherence isn’t sufficient: we don’t achieve truth by telling any consistent story. Truth as correspondence is the only alternative standing if we deny that mind conjures all reality to suit or spite itself. Correspondence is the relation of a thought or sentence—meaningful because of the possible state of affairs it signifies—to the actual state of affairs that instantiates the possibility. Truth requires that my reading of another’s speech should accurately represent it. You speak, wait for my rendering, and hear it as irrelevant or wrong before replying that I have misunderstood you. “It’s raining” is false on a clear, dry day, but meaningful because of signifying a possibility. We say that thoughts are meaningful and sometimes true, but we translate this into a claim about sentences, because thoughts lack perspicuous structure. Sentences are meaningful (as above) when they satisfy syntactic and semantical rules. Syntax is a constraint on word order: s is p, for example, or a gives b to c. Logic, too, is syntax, so no sentence violating its rules—no contradiction, for example—is meaningful. Semantics correlates substantive words—nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs—to the extra-linguistic phenomena they signify: cat to cats. There are also semantic rules for combining words: these are the rubrics that create organizational form: cause and effect, here and there, before and after, for example. Two additional conditions for correspondence are the speaker or writer’s intention, and the context of thought or communication. Think-

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ing of my father, my intention and lineage secure reference. Speaking of our agreement, I invoke you and an accord to which you too may testify. “Pass the butter” implies three: you see it, I see it, and you see that I can’t easily reach it. The list of sentential types that are or may be true by correspondence is contestable. Does it include counterfactuals and complex sentences using and, or, or if-then? I suggest it does,9 though the evidence for truth as correspondence requires no examples additional to thoughts, sentences, or theories that signify individuals, their existence, properties, and relations. I say truly that roses are red when they are. You tell me rightly that I have ignored the thorns. We agree that material truths are partial: there is usually or always more to say. It sometimes happens that the same data—indeed all the available data—justify two or more abductive hypotheses. Detective stories thrive on this ambiguity when any of five suspects could have murdered the victim. Philosophy hesitates, because the same evidence justifies physicalism and its phenomenalist contrary: one enlarges the domain of sensory experience by citing its extra-mental conditions; the other contracts reality to mind and its sensory qualifications. Science, too, is sometimes confounded, as happened when the same evidence justified Ptolemaic and Copernican descriptions of celestial motion. How do we decide when empirical data fail to disqualify one or more contending hypotheses? Looking for evidence that confirms or disqualifies standing candidates, we extend the domain of relevant data and their conditions. Murder mysteries progress when suspects are successively discarded; science extends the domain of relevant evidence, from Sun, Earth, and moon to other planets and the fixed stars. Philosophy looks for evidence that mind is not self-sufficient: inferring error or death from the sensory data, it asks if a self-sufficient mind could commit one or suffer the other. Alternative explanations complicate inquiry without altering the conditions for presumptive truth: we consider predictions that would distinguish competitors, then look for evidence of the effects predicted. Inquiry advances as contenders fall away; it stalls if there is no evidence that confirms one while disqualifying every other. Truths tested and affirmed are often partial, hence the belief that there is more or less truth by correspondence. Saying correctly that something is a tree is less specific than calling it an oak of a certain height, location, and age. The latter formulation is more detailed, but not more true than the first. Both are more accurate than saying that this is a dead oak, because the conjunction, oak and dead, is false. But this, too, is closer to the truth than calling it a dead frog. Degrees of truth is a puzzle we avoid by listing the alleged properties of things, one at time in the style of Russell’s theory of descriptions.10 Such thoughts

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or sentences are true, unqualifiedly, if things signified have all the properties ascribed. They are partial truths if two conditions are satisfied: the nonexclusive or is substituted for the and of Russell’s theory, and one or more but not all property ascriptions are correct. A sentence is false, categorically, if the item signified has none of the properties ascribed. No thought or sentence is false in this categorical respect, because we can add a universally ascribable property to the list of disjuncts: thinkable without contradiction, for example. But this trivializes an otherwise viable criterion: we do not include or imply one or an indefinite laundry list of contrived properties when signifying this dog, that fireplug. Things have some, all, or none of the properties ascribed to them. ANIMADVERSIONS How do we confirm that a hypothesis is true? Or, rephrasing the previous sentence to cover several contested points, how is it confirmed that the possible state of affairs signified by a syntactically and semantically correct hypothesis does obtain? One expects that the perceptual stimuli provoking thought stand against it as a control on thought’s response. Seeing chocolate, I’m wrong to describe it as vanilla. Yet Quine has argued that all the characteristics ascribable to these provocations originate in the system of thoughts or sentences—the theory— used to differentiate and organize them. Stimulations provoke observation sentences,11 but this is not the simple relation of a datum to the sentence that correctly reports its character. For the direct link between them is buffered and diffused when observation sentences are integrated into the tissue of interanimating sentences. They have no thinkable character apart from the properties and relations it prescribes. This has the perverse consequence that no datum can falsify any hypothesis. Every test is compromised, because adjusting the relations of a system’s thoughts or sentence is sufficient to save every consistent hypothesis from empirical disconfirmation. You bought an orange shirt having asked for blue? No problem: every datum acquires its identity from the theory or hypothesis it tests. Adjust the relations of sentences within the conceptual network that differentiates your perceptions and you’ll say that what you see is blue, or more radically it will look blue. This formulation deprives theory of an external, empirical control on thought’s claims about extra-mental states of affairs. One thinks of Protagoras: man is the measure of all that is that it is, and of all that is not that it is not. Quine’s account is vulnerable in two respects. The first—no external, empirical control on thought—is falsified many times a day. Traffic

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lights turn red, drivers stop: the effect is imposed and recognized whether or not it was anticipated. Many data are perceived in ways determined by context and expectation—pleasure or pain, for example—but many others—noise and sunlight—are not. The second—thought’s determining effect on data perceived—overstates mind’s role. For thought and theory are often neutral regarding the character of effects perceived, even when they rightly anticipate the range of possible effects. So, litmus turns red or blue, but only the solution tested—not anything in our structuring theory—prescribes that a test result be one or the other. There are many such experiments. All confirm that ensembles of theoretical assumptions—distinguishable conceptual precincts or Quine’s holist network—mediate and focus experiments without determining or extenuating effects perceived. It’s also relevant that either of two postures is appropriate when testing theories or hypotheses, and that Quine ignored one while emphasizing the other. He supposed that a theory’s posture is defensive, and that empirical tests are challenges theories resist. Thinking defensively, we incorporate, redescribe, or ignore the evidence. This attitude, prevailing when a theory is well established, suits the many times when its encounters with the ambient world are routine exchanges, not experiments. The other posture regards a theory’s every encounter with things appropriate to it as a test. For tests imply vulnerability and a question: do things have the character a theory signifies? Quine’s emphasis is odd, because disabling. We often make theories vulnerable, because error provokes better theories. Specifying a range of confirming values is an invitation to experimental failure, theory revision, and progress. Peirce emphasized error’s importance to self-correcting inquiry.12 Quine scorned it.13 I suppose that a true theory specifies its truth conditions: ‘The cat on the mat’ is true, if there is a cat on the mat. But why neglect a viable alternative: why not say with those who favor disquotation that truth is an excrescence, one that adds nothing germane to the assertion that roses are red? I ignore disquotation, because this is a rhetorical version of Kant’s notion that a transcendental judgment has complementary effects: synthesis creates both an object—red roses—and an empirical judgment expressed as a thought or sentence affirming that the roses experienced are red. Kant eliminates thought’s representational character by dispensing with the extra-mental or -linguistic state of affairs represented; the thing-in-itself. Yet he preserves the appearance of representation by pairing the object schematized to an empirical judgment—typically expressed as a sentence—that reports this product of transcendental synthesis. Notice, however, that the schematized state

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of affairs is not the truth-maker of the sentence, for this is the magic of transcendental synthesis. These are judgment’s correlated products: creating one, it also creates the other. The disquotational argument takes a further turn. For why do we need both of judgment’s effects? Kant assumed we do, because he argued from the appearances—the experienced object and our judgment that it is as it appears—to its transcendental conditions. Disquotationalists are more economical: they dispense with the state of affairs while emphasizing that “Snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white. Naïve readers believe that the second iteration of snow is white signifies white, fluffy crystals of ice. But that reading misconstrues the sentence in which the phrase twice appears, the first in the meta-language, the second in the object language (English). That complex sentence affirms, from the standpoint of the meta-language, that the sentence in the object language is true. Three questions arise: First, why say that the sentence in the object language is true? Because it coheres—deductively or inductively—with other sentences of an established theory. Second, what has happened to the object schematized as the complement to the sentence in the object language? It has been eliminated in favor of the sentence that reports it. (The elimination of phenomenal objects, and inversely the emphasis on language and judgments, is characteristic of Marburg Kantians in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.14) Third, what is signified by saying that the theory used to derive the sentence in the object language is “established”? Is this a disguised way of saying that the theory is true of a subject matter distinct from itself? Is it tacit recognition that the theory is or could be used to direct behavior that successfully engages this extra-theoretic state of affairs? Neither is correct, because either would imply the existence of things whose character and existence are independent of the conceptualization that makes them intelligible. Kant tells us that such things are “negative noumena,” unthinkable things-inthemselves. Disquotation makes them eliminable. This is the radical—eliminative—disquotational posture. Truth is a function of identity and coherence. It is truth as identity, because sentences derived from established theories are qualifications of the thinker who uses them to make experience thinkable. It is truth as coherence, because the object sentence is described as true in the metalanguage if it coheres with the other sentences of an object language, more specifically, an established theory. This confabulation might be criticized at several points, but one is sufficient. Affirming that something has or lacks properties it lacks or has, we err. But no object falsifying such ascriptions is paired with a false

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thought or sentence, because Kant’s transcendental theory of judgment is tailored to explain the synthesis of objects and, concurrently, the generation of sentences that accurately affirm them. Kant did not provide a complementary theory of error, one that describes the generation of false empirical judgments, those having no paired object. Disquotationalist versions of truth are equally impaired. They think it pleonastic to add “is true” when one says “Roses are red.” They don’t tell us how or why to resist saying “is false” after “Roses have teeth.” We require both locutions—“is true” and “is false”—if thoughts or sentences signify or represent states of affairs that are not created by our affirmations or denials. My account of meaning and truth is deemed speculative and naïve by every thinker indebted to Kant. All agree that mind constructs the only reality we can think or experience, and that inquiry—reality-testing— is a delusion. But there is considerable diversity in the emphases and history of that tradition’s several strands: hermeneuticists differ from scientifically oriented thinkers of the Marburg school—including Cassirer, Carnap, and Quine—because of their distinct history and emphases. First devoted to texts, hermeneutics affirms that it best describes the character and conditions for knowledge in all its domains. Joseph Margolis and Tom Rockmore elaborate its claims in their jointly edited issue of Metaphilosophy, entitled “The Philosophy of Interpretation.” Interpretation, they say, is conceptual and “constructive” (after Kant’s talk of schematization and synthesis), not attitudinal. Rockmore declares that Any theory of interpretation needs to take into account the lessons of Kant’s much-neglected Copernican revolution. . . . Kant makes two points that should structure all discussions of knowledge, hence our understanding of interpretation. On the one hand, as Kant points out, we do not know that we know the way the independent world is, since there is no way to know that we know independent objects. . . . On the other hand, the condition of knowledge is not that we discover what is already there, but rather that we in some way “produce” or, perhaps better, “construct” what we know.15 The nerve of Rockmore’s argument is his claim that “there is no way to know that we know independent objects.” We could know them were we to step outside ourselves, seeing things as they are before comparing them to our representations, but no one argues we do this. Intuitionists have supposed that things—including states of affairs, sensory data, ideas, or

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systems of sentences (scientific theories, for example)—appear before the mind and are seen as they are. But this claim, too, deserves no credit if mind, the activity of a material system, has no power to inspect matters set before it. I know the time by reading the hands of my watch, but it is light reflected from the watch to my eyes that generates this stable image by affecting my neurons. These are conditions for transmitting information about a distant object. The alternative hypothesis—content set before the mind’s eye and inspected—is a gloss of the apparent experience. It credits minds with powers that no material system can have while ignoring the generating conditions for experiences we do have. Rockmore demurs. There is, he believes, no alternative to construction: unable to know things as they are, we make thinkable surrogates. But there is an alternative Rockmore neglects. It seems strange to him—naïve rather than irrational—that philosophers since Parmenides assume that knowing requires knowing the way the world is: “Foundationalism,” he remarks, “founders on the representationalist reef, or the inability to show that representations really represent.”16 But this is an odd characterization of our practical lives, where we regularly justify beliefs about states of affairs represented by our percepts, maps, plans, and hypotheses. Think of the malpractice suits dentists would face if they couldn’t accurately locate the teeth they extract. The alternative Rockmore ignores is also conspicuously absent from Kant’s analysis: we engage other people and things, then infer their properties from the character of their effects on us. Rockmore supposes that these sensory effects have no identity apart from conceptualizations that prescribe their context, determinate properties, and relations. But is that so? I go to the dentist rather than an accountant to check my teeth. He looks, probes, takes X-rays, and reports his findings. Ah, thinks Rockmore, just one of the many ways to construe a situation: What we mean by “objectivity” can no longer mean the grasp of the independent object. It cannot simply mean the verification of such claims, for instance, by testing them against further experience, construed as providing an empirical restraint, since claims to know can always be verified in at least a minimal manner for the obvious reason that the particular framework invoked also generates evidence for them.17 This suggestion is tantalizing, but incomplete: which of the accountant’s readings generates evidence that competes with data that justify a dentist’s diagnosis? The dentist’s claims are more “fruitful,” but what does this imply, if not the fact that his hypotheses are accurate to the state of

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affairs examined, while the accountant’s response is incidental or incompetent? Nothing Rockmore says or implies concedes that thought directs human engagements with the ambient world. Indeed, his remarks have the contrary sense: they emphasize mind’s passivity to data it construes. This bias is apparent in his emphasis on history: we reconstruct the past, but never encounter it: “What we call knowledge is no more than a reading, construal, or interpretation, in effect, a theory of what is given in experience.”18 This is the aestheticizing, intellectual distance that deprives all Cartesian-Kantian thinkers of the clue they nominally seek: things we engage are the constant control on perception and behavior, hence on every cognitive activity vital to efficacy, cooperation, survival, security, and satisfaction. Rockmore is a Cartesian exiled from the world of other people and things. He reflects and construes. Certain that he exists, he is less sure of other things: “Claims to provide a correct representation of the independent world either rest on a misunderstanding, feature a different understanding of the object of knowledge, or are asserted dogmatically.”19 Dogmatically? The dentist supplies a bill with a code that satisfies my insurance company. Is the insurer foolishly credulous: the dentist didn’t do the specific thing claimed? We do not know that we know the way the independent world is, though we have very good evidence of what it is by way of our focused engagements with it. Cartesians—terrified by skepticism—prefer worlds they construct to a world known fallibly to hypotheses tested in action. The word hypothesis does not appear in Rockmore’s essay, but the complex activity of making and testing hypotheses is the unmentioned solution to his question, how to know that we know the existence and character of the mind-independent world. Sensory data are not content for a daydream or aesthetic reverie. Generated by our engagements with other things, they are explained by hypotheses then tested when predictions about the likely effects of additional, specifiable engagements are predicted and confirmed. We always risk being mistaken, but error is instructive: we revise our hypotheses to make their predictions more accurate. Rockmore defers to Kant’s “Copernican revolution” as though it were the point of reference for all reasonable philosophic thinking. But this begs the question. For there are two choices: we humans live within and engage a world we do not make, or we have isolated lives within single minds or minds socialized by a culture and history. The idea of a world known to testable hypotheses is speculative, but not foolish: each person confirms it all day every day as he or she successfully engages other people and things. Rockmore’s alternative is mysterious: How do self-sufficient minds create thinkable worlds? How do they

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stabilize the experience of those worlds, including all their particularities and details: the lives of other people, for example? How do they generate both sides of a conversation? Rockmore’s argument turns circular: human perspectives are historicized (“there is no escape from relativizing our knowledge claims to the historical moment”20), implying that we are creatures of a history that has no integrity apart from our ways of interpreting it. Rockmore supposes that every vehicle for expressing knowledge and every knowledge claim is a construct. Margolis defends this thesis against its realist critics: Here are six theorems that I claim to draw from post-Kantian first considerations: (1) Intransparency: No realism can escape the inherent paradoxes and contradictions of “Cartesian realism” . . . if it does not reject the a priori standing of a rational account of cognizing subjects and “independent” cognized objects (or intermediary representations of same) intended to ensure an undistorted correspondence between belief and world. Hence (2) Constructivism: Whatever realism we are able to defend (regarding the “independent” world) must be constituted in the logically trivial sense of affirming (1) and must, as a consequence, construe the cognizing relation between subjects and objects (presupposed and entailed in admitting truth-claims) as a critical and revisable artifact internal to the “space” of that construction, precluding thereby all possibility of privileged or apodictic access to the “independent” world or to the conditions for knowing same. (3) Symbiosis: The “independence” or “mind-independence” of physical nature is not compromised by (1) or (2), but the ontic independence of anything said to be real is, on pain of contradiction, epistemically dependent on, or inseparable from, whatever may be affirmed and confirmed “objectively”—which, therefore, must itself be similarly constructed in accord with (2). Hence, also, (4) Holism: There is no principled priority or separability of metaphysical, epistemological, semantic, logical, or psychological (mental or subjective) analyses bearing on realist or legitimative questions; but that is benignly compatible with a constructivist and “internal” account of relationships between subject and objects. But if that is so, then (5) Presuppositionlessness: Whether a bivalent or a relativistic logic (or any other logical provision) suits our realist claims best or adequately in this or that sector of the world depends on what we take to be the actual nature of the phe-

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nomena of that domain. If we assume elementary coherence and consistency, there can then be no a priori disqualification of relativism, incommensurabilism, historicism, or similar doctrines from any vantage that presupposes the falsity of (1). And finally, (6) Constructive realism: The argument that runs from (1) through (5) is not tantamount to idealism (the supposed “mind-dependence” of the “real” world) but only the denial that there is any valid a priori disjunction between the sense of “realism” and the sense of “idealism” that accords with the “Cartesian” tradition.21 This passage uses “Cartesian” in contrary ways: one implies Descartes’ realism (objectionable), the other indicates that he founded the idealist lineage of Kant and Hegel (approved). Other considerations—one for each of the six points—are more telling: i. “Intransparency” is said to foil the a priori claim that there is an undistorted correspondence between belief and world. There are some naïve realists: the world as they describe it is set directly before their inspecting minds. But representational realism needn’t make the assumptions here alleged. The existence of a mind-independent reality is a hypothesis justified by our nearly perpetual encounters with it. Realists attentive to the material conditions for perception—the structure and physiology of brain, eye, and ear, for example—agree that its content is never undistorted. Nor does realism postulate the literal correspondence of belief and world. It does affirm that beliefs are often refined and improved when tested and that many signify their truth conditions: believing that this is a friend’s telephone number, I dial and speak to her. Was I mistaken: was there a mismatch between the belief, the conventional signs and physical processes (complex electrical signals initiated when numbers are dialed), and its object? ii. Margolis would have us believe—his “Constructivism”—that the relation between subjects and objects is internal to the “space” of the construction. Its intrapsychic contents are a mix of the natural (percepts) and the contrived (our styles of reference and grammar). These signs— percepts, thoughts, and words—are the instruments used to discriminate and probe differences and relations encountered in practical life or particle physics. There are a few iconic signs (perceived shapes, principally), but it is rare that like knows like: red-looking roses aren’t red. We make bread, but telephone other people using numbers we haven’t made. Imagine telling one’s number—123–456–7890—to a class of six-year-olds. All thirty (sixty, a thousand) repeat the number when asked. Why this consensus? Why suppose that they construct the number

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rather than hear it? Because Margolis, like every Kantian, regards perception as an impenetrable brick wall, not as the filter of discernible, reliable information: Gibson’s “information in the light”22 has no cogency for him. But how does one select and “construct” a correct number from the myriad possible ten-digit numbers? Margolis doesn’t tell us; he rejects Kant’s transcendental synthesis, but offers no alternative. Using signs to direct action—one right number, many that are wrong—challenges Margolis, because he insists that his relativism sanctions an infinity of accounts—degrees of right, degrees of wrong, neither right nor wrong—each anomalous with some or all others, and no way to choose among them if all are consistent. (Even consistency too narrowly constrains his relativism if, as Margolis hints, we may dispense with the principle of noncontradiction.23) He requires a multivalent logic rather than one that is bivalent (implying right or wrong numbers and statements that are true or false). This consideration may explain his failure to detail the activities signified by “construction”: why bother to describe them if none of the infinite possible formulations can be discounted? This assumption is confounding, because it entails that we have and can have no definitive explanation for any effect: each is multiply explicable, however anomalous the explanations. The same effect can be redescribed and explained in infinite ways. Though “same” splinters: every thing is what it is given its constitution under one or another description. Rockmore also speaks to the claim that there may be multiple interpretations of the “same” state of affairs: It would be a mistake to infer that if different interpretations are possible, none of which is true, all interpretations are on the same level, since none is better than the other. . . . It does not follow . . . that all are equally plausible. To rank interpretations we require criteria allowing us to choose between them, such as explanatory richness, or the capacity to account for more rather than fewer items in a given text or series of events. In principle, the absolutely best, fully adequate interpretation, a regulative idea probably never achieved in practice, would not only be better than its competitors, but would finally, wholly adequately, and fully explain everything to be explained.24 Yet, we have it from Margolis and Rockmore, too, that every referent is constructed by an interpretation, thereby precluding the comparison proposed when Rockmore postulates referents (“items in a given text or series of events”) common to disparate interpretations. How is it possible

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that an interpretation is more or less adequate to its referent if each referent is constructed by its interpretation? Rockmore may reply that some interpretations are not “plausible.” Why not: doesn’t an interpretation lay down the terms for its own plausibility, given that there is no common measure (perhaps including consistency) for appraising it? Margolis and Rockmore may disagree about details (consistency, for example), but their tolerance for diverse, self-serving interpretations makes error impossible and thinking too easy. They frustrate action by generating anomalous directives (one or more for each way of construing a situation), or they guarantee success by “constructing” states of affairs appropriate to every aim and way of achieving it. Why this flux? Because neither Margolis nor Rockmore acknowledges the difference between things and the many constructs—some accurate, many not— used to represent or signify them. Historicism justifies them, for as they see it stability is only the shadow of social prescriptions that narrow and fix the domain of constructions intelligible to thinkers of an era. Things change with a society’s interpretive framework: the world, including Earth and Sun, was different after Copernicus.25 This version of stability is dangerous to thinkers who misconstrue the plasticity of thought and meaning as an escape from circumstances having a decided character: a busy highway doesn’t become a sidewalk because we rethink it. More, their vision imposes an intolerable burden on every thinker: it isn’t enough that we find our way in a world we don’t create; they demand that each thinker construct the complex world to which he or she accommodates. Is this done piecemeal or at once? Margolis and Rockmore don’t tell us. They may prefer a simpler response, saying with Descartes, “I am, I exist.” That would be an authentic response within a tradition that ambiguates everything but minds known to themselves. iii. “Symbiosis” requires that the “ontic independence of anything said to be real” be “epistemically dependent on the linguistic or conceptual vehicles used to affirm or confirm it.” But your telephone number doesn’t depend epistemically or otherwise on my way of thinking about or using it. I don’t construct your number: Verizon or BellSouth does that. Much more compromising is Margolis’s claim that the “ontic independence of anything said to be real is . . . epistemically . . . inseparable” from whatever is affirmed or confirmed. If this means that remembering or repeating the number is my way of knowing it, nothing exceptional is implied. But there is much to object if Margolis supposes that the number exists by virtue of being constructed, hence known, by me who uses it. This is true to the Kantian spirit of his views, but vulnerable to the objection that I repeatedly get a wrong number, because I have

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misdialed. Here, as above, Margolis has no way to distinguish things from our re-presentations (his “constructions”) of them. iv. “Holism” is to be understood as the notion that all relationships between subjects and objects are to be construed by way of Margolis’s constructivism. But this principle is subverted by all the mindindependent items one doesn’t construct: other people, their histories, and circumstances, for example. v. All our thinking, metaphysical or otherwise, is to be “Presuppositionless,” for then we shall have no reason to disqualify the relativism Margolis favors: every consistent story will be as good as any other. But thinking is not presuppositionless for a reason Margolis ignores: people do not merely think and talk about an external world: they perpetually engage it. Formulating maps, plans, and hypotheses that direct and refine our engagements with other people and things, we secure and satisfy ourselves by using these conceptual instruments to control our circumstances. Feral chickens—hardwired to their circumstances—don’t speculate about the conditions for their success. We explain our successful accommodations by formulating and confirming a simple abductive inference: reality has a decided form. vi. Margolis denies that his points i through v are “tantamount to idealism,” for there is no valid distinction between realism and idealism that accords with the “Cartesian” tradition. Read “Cartesian” as one would read “Kantian,” and there is no doubt that Margolis’s idealism is the only sort of realism his tradition acknowledges, but this is not the realism of those who believe that one uses telephone numbers and beliefs of all sorts without constructing their referents. Margolis does acknowledge one external control on our constructs and their truth: namely, the “cultural conditions under which our “data” are (interpretively) constituted.”26 But he does not sufficiently specify those conditions, including the technology that generates telephones and telephone numbers. Margolis might reply that telephones derive their character from ways they are construed by people of the culture in which they are created. This is surely true about the importance of telephones to their users, but not at all true of the fact that telephones are made to send and receive signals carried by electromagnetic fields we exploit but do not make. Wrong numbers are a constructivist’s embarrassment. Why do we err? We need a standard for measuring error, but what could it be when Kantians of every stripe, logical constructivists or hermeneuticists, deny the reality of a world that resists us, one whose character and existence are independent of our ways of representing it? Cultural relativists and historicists may suggest that we err by opposing the standards of our

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people or time, but this limit is flouted by those visionaries and stubborn people whose “errors” are successfully tested against their circumstances. Hermeneuticists want a different solution, one that doesn’t commit them to a stable, extra-mental reality. They find it in the personal or socially sanctioned attitudes—the values—that regulate belief. Margolis and Rockmore don’t mention this control on interpretation: there are, says Margolis, “no large categories of interpretive activity comparable in importance” to the activity of constituting or amplifying sense.27 Kant said otherwise: construction is always motivated by “the power of desire.”28 Desire has various determinants, but attitudes are overriding: one may starve or die of thirst rather than violate them. Ideas enjoy some degree of favor if they satisfy attitudes; those opposed are intolerable and “false.” This would seem to be the only notion of error available to Rockmore and Margolis, but also the closest they come to a notion of truth. True-to-me, true-to-my-tribe, or true-to-my-era: interpretations are true to the degree that they satisfy attitudes.29 ENGAGING OTHER PEOPLE AND THINGS The apparent dialectic of interpretation and inquiry often disguises their complementarity. Marriage is my aim, and I imagine finding someone whose attitudes square with mine: the world as we construe it shouldn’t be so different that we agree about little or nothing. Interpretation determines the range of possible or likely orientations. Yet, inquiry is critical, too, because I need hypotheses appropriate to my circumstances, including a map of situations where I may find a possible mate and a plan for meeting one. A marriage broker never confuses these interests. She doesn’t want to marry my possible partners, but she does need a map and plan of circumstances where she could find partners acceptable to me. The complexity of an inquiry directed by interpretation (mine) reduces for her to inquiry only. Knowing that she will make less money if the people coupled are badly suited, she differentiates her financial interest from the work itself. One is self-concerned, the other more careful, and “scientific”: she takes no payment from clients until bonding is accomplished (they pay-one third after the first year of marriage, two-thirds after five). She is at least as careful as the chemists whose salaries at pharmaceutical firms are calibrated to the success of drugs they invent. Practitioners of both sorts distinguish their motives— money, curiosity, or status—from the work at hand. Inquiry is the practice of formulating, testing, and revising hypotheses. Do matters stand as hypotheses represent them? We consider the effects that would obtain if a hypothesis were true, then look for them.

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A hypothesis and supporting assumptions are confirmed—they are more likely to be true—if the effects are perceived, but disconfirmed if they are not. There is give and take; we engage the extra-mental world on our terms, then appraise the effects produced: do they falsify or confirm the hypothesis that directs us? The procedure may be as simple as looking for evidence of rain or as theoretically complex and mechanically subtle as testing to determine the deviation of light in Mercury’s perihelion. We are often misdirected because hypotheses mislead or because data is misconstrued, but hypotheses are corrected or replaced and experiments repeated, until successful experiments confirm that this part of the world is accurately mapped. Nothing in this account is unfamiliar, but the comfort of knowing it obscures the practical discipline—mapping circumstances, designing experiments—that eludes intellectualizing idealists when they reduce truth to webs of sentences. Interpretation disciplines ideas by requiring that they satisfy attitudes. Inquiry is disciplined in three ways: by procedural values that include consistency, economy, coherence, and fertility; by rubrics (cause and effect, for example) that direct thought and experiments; and by states of affairs that test maps, plans, and hypotheses. Procedural values imply consistent hypotheses tested for differences they entail, then revised or replaced if they fail their tests. Rubrics are leading principles that shape and direct the formation of testable hypotheses: seeing smoke and looking for fire. States of affairs that satisfy or confound hypotheses include every thing or event that stands against thought as a test of its claims. Saying that such things are unknown apart from thought and perception is surely true (and tautological). Saying that every such thing is a function—the construct—of our thinking is offsettingly false, given error, frustration, death, and every other sign of an ambient world we challenge and alter but do not make. Interpretation struggles to digest the everyday obstacles that confound us. Inquiry addresses them, and yields. Unable to prescribe, it acknowledges the unforeseeable, accommodates, and describes. Idealists distrust perception, because it is sometimes misleading. Inquiry prizes this steady, reliable, though mediated contact with other things. Riding a bicycle requires thoughtless sensitivity to changes of surface, direction, wind, or speed: imagine staying upright if there were no perceptual clues. How much efficacy or cooperation could there be without them? Plato and Descartes agreed that sensory experience is vague and unreliable, until differentiated and fixed by ideas. Their heirs agree. Quine’s “stimulus meanings” are quickly subordinated to “occasion” and “observation sentences” in Word and Object, never to reappear as an independent control on inquiry.30 This is a characteristic bias in the

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Marburg tradition. Preferring talk of “observation sentences” entailed by the higher-order sentences of theories, these Kantians say very little about the data with which theories are tested. For the data are plastic; they accept whatever form is received from the concepts, the theories, used to differentiate and organize them. Thought’s principal task is elsewhere: to exhibit the rational structure of the thinkable world to minds that inspect it—as re-presented—within themselves.31 Indeed, the very notion that we encounter extra-mental things is an idea of reason, an intellectual pathology that recurs whenever we stretch imagination to specify conditions for experience,32 hence, the impulse to say, with Cassirer, Carnap, and Quine, that understanding subordinates—absorbs— all of materiality, perception, and existence to itself. Affirming that sensory data have no character or relations but those ascribed them by the conceptual system used to differentiate them, they make existence a function of truth: something perceived is said to have the character assigned it if the thought or sentence affirming it is true. Yet, truth, as they understand it, is the coherence relation binding sentences within a conceptual system. Hamlet and atoms exist if Shakespeare’s play and physical theories say they do. But everyone stumbles in the dark, and no one thinks his tripping is the effect of misconstruing a conceptual system. Yes, one’s map of the terrain was misleading or vague, but, no, we didn’t create the obstacle (Carnap and Quine), and don’t wait for theory’s serial perfection to encounter it (Cassirer). Inquiry is the practice of engaging other things under the joint direction of thought and interest. Imagine bees searching for honey. Cerebration is richer in our case, searches are more subtle and effective, but no beekeeper thinks he makes the honey he gathers. Thinking and willing are the principal activities Kant acknowledged, though thought’s original and still primary role is that of directing our encounters with other people and things. Reflection and deliberation neatly conform to the notion that mind is an illuminated sanctuary and theater beyond which all the rest is terra incognita or nothing at all. But this model cripples thought, because of denying its extra-mental referents. For cognition—understanding—is only a first step in the exchange of energy, materiel, and information with the other people and things that nourish, secure, and inform us. Maps, plans, and theories—all of them hypotheses—are formulated, tested, and revised. When sensory data mediate between hypotheses and the states of affairs they signify. Kant taught us to believe that the decisive cognitive relation has two terms—data and conceptualizations that differentiate and relate them—but there are three terms: sensory data falsify or confirm hypotheses about states of affairs that cause the data in us. Hearing the snatch

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of a tune, I may fill in the gaps by humming all of it to myself. But this is not the standard paradigm for using sensory data. Feeling a bite, I scratch. Dewey’s paper on the reflex arc—published in 1896—is still cogent.33 It describes mind’s intelligent direction of body’s adaptations to other things. This is inquiry, the most cognitively refined of activities that direct our responses to the ambient world. Accommodation is perpetual. Walking down an uneven street, we correct every last step with the next. A sleeping partner pulls the sheet; suddenly cold, we pull it back. Every such action implicates a map of one’s circumstances, and a plan, however primitive. Achieving a proximate aim, one terminates the sequence; failing to achieve it provokes one or more additional acts, until a satisfactory state is achieved. Bodily accommodations are often subtle: think of the inner ear as it controls balance. Maps and plans are subtle, too: evolution empowers us beyond the requirements of our primitive vulnerability; we secure and satisfy ourselves in ways that exceed the least requirements of surviving to breed. Inquiry complicates these responses and initiatives, because thought is overreaching: its maps are extended and detailed; its plans often direct us through foreseeable sequences of action and response, error, surprise, and revision. Recognize thought as a probe— a better white cane—and inquiry seems less abstract. AIMS It may seem that inquiry’s distance from interpretation is compromised by some of its directing aims. The scientific objective—know things as they are—is hard to achieve but straightforward: there is a discernible history of theories tested and reformulated for accuracy and experimental control. Thomas Kuhn emphasized paradigm shifts and incommensurable theories; others see continuity in successful theorizing.34 We bootstrap ourselves to greater insight and generality when crude ideas are refined then tested with experiments that are ever more subtle. A scientist’s motives may be impure: patents or status may be his principal aim. But motives are incidental to the procedures, both logical and social, for making and testing theories. Cheaters ignore the rules, but their exposure doesn’t stop inquiry’s momentum: it shudders, reconsiders its assumptions, then moves on. It is practical life that seems to compromise inquiry. Many plans are impelled by needs—hunger or thirst, for example—but many others have interpretation as their principal or only driver. Their motivating beliefs may be testable hypotheses, but more likely they express atti-

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tudes no test could alter: rain correlates badly with prayer and rain dances, but believers dance anyway. What are the implications for inquiry? Its procedures are uncompromised if the motive is abstracted from the map, plan, or hypothesis tested. For a test’s disinterested appraisal is, in principle, no more difficult for hypotheses motivated by interpretations than for those expressing science’s desire to know. Aims, alone, are innocent (in the respect at issue); it is our inability to discount them that threatens the integrity—the testability and bivalence (true or false)—of practical inquiries. Kantian constructivists say the threat is deeper: the very characterization of maps, plans, hypotheses, and data they predict is warped by values that organize the interpretations directing inquiry: every characterization of any state of affairs projects these values, however surreptitiously. But is this plausible? Having what looks to be water in the basement, I call what seems to be a plumber. He comes, all the while treating me in an equivalent as if manner, and earns his money by fixing the leak. There is no ambiguity separating my aim from the steps required to achieve it. Inquiry isn’t hobbled by its link to interpretation, unless the interest expressed by an interpretation confines inquiry’s initiatives: ailments an interpretation won’t acknowledge won’t be diagnosed or cured. IDEALS It may seem that interpretation, not inquiry, is the natural source of ideals, given that preferences express attitudes. Doesn’t inquiry look the other way, to reality? Disinterested inquiry—science—finds things as they are, without distorting aims or ideals, though science, too, has directing attitudes and an overriding ideal: provide a disciplined rendering of things as they are. Attitudes and ideals are all the more conspicuous in practical life where accurate maps and plans defend us against vulnerability or secure well-being. Isn’t practical life barren if conceived only in terms appropriate to inquiry, for then focus is restricted to needs, means, satisfactions they achieve, or pains they avert? It is not, because this idea of inquiry is a parody of activities that give life its meaning. Freud spoke (allegedly) of love and work appropriate to one’s talents. The cooperation required to satisfy these values creates families, schools, work teams, and states where ideals measure every transaction. Like water quenching thirst, these core systems satisfy needs appropriate to our nature. Creating, sustaining them completes us as we are. Find venues for talent, renew the possibilities for affiliation. Reduce the need, and fantasy may be satisfied with novels and films.

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A CHOICE Inquiry discovers many truths and sometimes formulates hypotheses that subordinate several or many others. Yet its findings are much less integrated than ideologies that indict and explain every social pathology or religions that credit every contingency to divine necessity. There may be no way to integrate every reasonable practice or well-confirmed hypothesis in a way that satisfies the discipline of testable inquiry. Can we tolerate this irresolution? Morris Cohen described the anxiety it provokes: Without philosophic breadth of view, specialization defeats itself, losing sight of the woods for the trees, or developing a world where everyone is a specialist and no one can understand his neighbor. Granted that a perfect synthesis of all the sciences is beyond the power of any individual, yet the ideal of it is indispensable for everyone who wants to live a rational life. As rational beings we must all form some provisional plan or picture of the world in which we live and of the goal of our human effort, and this is precisely where philosophy alone can be of direct help. . . . This argument involves a psychologically true, but logically dangerous, admission, viz., that the actual synthesis of philosophy is not carried on rigidly according to the rigorous canons of science, but is actuated rather by the myth-making faculty and the need to dramatize our picture of the world.35 Cohen’s solution is anathema to interpretation: “We become intellectual free men, free from the dead hand of the past and the blind acceptance of the accidental, only through philosophy as the rigorous effort to come to grips with fundamentals and to evaluate their true claims.”36 Inquiry establishes many truths, but often fails to integrate them. Interpretation comforts us more, because the significance it bestows is expressed and justified in the rounded coherence of an integrated story. But no story is credible if its claims are untestable. We are gratified but deluded, or sober but distressed.

Chapter Four

A Disputed Question

ONTOLOGICAL ALTERNATIVES

P

lato, Descartes, and Kant are high points in a tradition that is oddly paradoxical. Mind clarifies its ideas and uses them to differentiate and organize sensory data, but thought loses its way or merely its conviction when ideas are made to track differences and relations in the extra-mental world. This program is consolidated on the back of a supporting argument that joins epistemology to metaphysics: nothing is better known to mind than mind itself. Indeed, nothing else can be known. More, mind—nous, the cogito, or the transcendental unity of apperception—is the fundament on which all other realities are founded. They exist only to the degree that their existence is perceived, constructed, or affirmed by minds they qualify. Elaborations of this tradition are distinguished by six marks, some more prominent than others: first is skepticism about the possibility of knowing extra-mental states of affairs; second is the complementary dictum that esse est percipi, nothing is if it eludes thought or perception, hence presentation to an inspecting mind; third is the demand that mind tell a comprehensive story about the reality it inspects or constructs; fourth is the apriorism implicit when mind prescribes the differences and relations constitutive of any content it schematizes and inspects; fifth is the role of interests or attitudes—values—as they determine the choice of concepts or rules used to schematize sensory data; sixth is mind’s exploration—by inference or direct perception—of itself. Together, these claims promote the idea that great philosophy is both skeptical, systematic, and psycho-centric. Nothing can be known of matters that stand apart from mind, yet everything thinkable can be 97

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differentiated and related within a single conceptual system. Hegel and Carnap are encyclopedists of this sort, though their styles differ. One fills his system with detail; the other argues programmatically that there is a place for every thinkable difference and relation within a conceptual system. Hegel believed that only one system is possible as thought moves from particularity and contingency to the universality and necessity that distinguish the perspective of the Absolute. Carnap was a pluralist: every system is an interpretation formed to satisfy values that may be implicit or apparent. He didn’t emphasize, as he might have, that conceptual systems are vulnerable, because there are alternative impelling values, hence alternative possible systems. Deconstruction seizes the opportunity implied by diversely motivated systems: distinctions projected by a favored system seem natural, until critics argue that these are shadows cast by preferred values.1 The dialectic of intellectual systems is usually a sterile exercise: each challenges the plausibility or capacity of the others, though each is consistent so all are left standing. Jousting is violent when political or religious ideologies compete for authority. For there is no neutral way to adjudicate among conceptual systems formulated a priori to justify and express their authors’ values; why bother to test them empirically if sensory data are formless until differentiated and organized in ways a system prescribes? This is the congenial ambience where interpretations thrive. For they, too, are conceptual systems animated by values. Valorizing the lives they inform, weaving significance into every postulated difference and relation, they satisfy attitudes while setting the agenda for belief. Interpretation is nevertheless implausibly naïve. It pretends to tell us what and where we are, though its motivating attitudes occlude or distort beliefs about others or ourselves. The fantasy of thought’s autonomy distracts us from inquiries that tell who and where we are, what the world requires or threatens, and what we might do to secure and satisfy ourselves. Inquiry is fallible but effective reality-testing. We know it firsthand because everyday practice requires it, and because experimental science extends understanding by extrapolating from tendencies known to practical life to laws of various depths and scales. Practical requirements are, nevertheless, contemptible in the self-valorizing, mindcentered tradition Plato inspired. His allegory of the cave2 is a miniature of circumstances that generate interpretations. People chained to a bench see coherent images in shadows visible on the cave’s rear wall, because each construes them in ways that make sense to him or her. Comparing and reconciling stories, they establish one that is canonical, hence a test of truth or falsehood: do you see what we see? People in the community

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thereby established are comforted: their stable, shared interpretation locates them firmly in the world it depicts. But this is a first step, one twice superseded when someone’s chains are removed. Turning away from the shadows, he sees that they are made by statues carried past a fire, and then in sunlight, beyond the mouth of the cave, he sees things represented by the statues. Somewhat distorting the point of Plato’s myth, we say that interpretation is superseded by inquiry: interpretations are reconstrued as hypotheses, then tested empirically. Answers to the deep and grand questions are unreliable if confirming evidence is only piety, consistency, and coherence, or the demand that we believe because others do. Interpretation is, nevertheless, the dominant style of popular thought, because the desire for significance—meaning—guarantees its survival. Kant’s reading of Descartes’ Meditations confirmed it as the appropriate style of philosophical thinking. Consider this figure: B

A

X X

Figure 4.1. The Cogito A is first-order awareness. The internal X—sensory data, an idea, or sentence—is its object. The external X is the state of affairs represented by the internal X. B is second-order awareness—self-consciousness. The first Meditation argues that we believe but cannot know that the internal X is a correct representation of the external X. Wanting knowledge, not opinion, we discount beliefs that cannot be confirmed as necessary truths, those whose negations are contradictions. This has an additional consequence: we doubt the character, even the existence of the external X. For we who know nothing of the external world reasonably infer that there may be nothing beyond the boundaries of awareness. There is, however, one thing known with certainty: namely, that I exist when thinking.3 I know this by an act of self-perception. And, by extension of this same principle—esse est percipi—no other thing exists if it doesn’t qualify my awareness: it exists when and as perceived. First-order awareness, A, has the internal X as its content. Secondorder awareness, B, ascertains mind’s own structure and acts. This happens

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as sensory data provoke mind’s recollection of appropriate innate ideas, ideas used projectively to differentiate and organize otherwise obscure sensory data: seeing a hat and cloak moving down the street, I identify the bearer as a man. Descartes described this activity without reference to values other than the demand that ideas be clear and distinct and that ideas coupled propositionally—as potential truth bearers—be consistent. These were to be the procedural, quasi-mechanical values of a mind working effectively, not the individuating values of a mind motivated by need or desire. This implies a value-neutral style of interpretation: mind uses ideas or rules to create a coherent and consistent conceptual system, one that differentiates and organizes data, be they percepts, words, or sentences. Descartes favored ideas ordered deductively. But other logical structures are also congenial to his notion that mind is a luminous arena where sensory data are construed and subordinated to systems of ideas or sentences. These include the interanimating sentences Quine described: networks of thoughts or sentences linked, as a whole, to nonverbal stimulations. Each stimulus excites the system at some point, but thoughts or sentences are so bound to one another that the pressure on any one may be construed in either of two ways: as confirmation that spreads through the system, or as a rebuff that dissipates when the system adjusts to discount it.4 Both responses are commonplace in the cosmologies of religious belief and the reconciling stories people tell of themselves. The value-neutrality of conceptual systems was challenged when Kant wrote (as quoted above) that the choice of interpreting conceptualizations is rooted in needs and desires. Interpretation creates a gratifying experience by using rules—empirical schemas—to do two things: first, differentiate and organize sensory data, words, or sentences; second, do this in a way that creates the experience of the desired state of affairs. Steady or uneasy, we make sense of the world by construing it in ways that justify our confidence or fear. Does it matter that these stories be true? James’s “The Will to Believe” is emblematic.5 Motivating our actions, explaining our circumstances, soothing our disappointments, interpretations are validated by our persistence. Error and frustration—faulty predictions—are rarely or never a reason to abandon an interpretation, for such stories cannot be falsified. Any story may be tweaked to extenuate every disappointment. Descartes’ cogito and its derivative, Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception, are the ontological fortress where interpretation thrives. Their heirs would have us believe that thought is principally the activity of using conceptual systems to construe words or data in ways prescribed by interests and desires, whether they be practical and urgent or

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cooler, scientific, and refined.6 Everything is text; science is a genre of literature, one more story with which to construe experience; every fact loads some value. This is the consistent response of the apriorist tradition that Descartes personalized—I am, I exist—and Kant embellished. But there is the new information cited above, all of it converging on the fact that thought is principally an adaptation—in perception, memory, planning, and action—to the ambient world. Our cognitive faculties originated, we reasonably believe, in the evolutionary processes where human precursors explored their circumstances, then adapted or died. Engineers mimic some of these activities in machines. Memory, calculation, perception, the use and formation of schemas, and mind’s hierarchical reading of its own lower-order states (self-awareness) are activities of the brain and body. This hypothesis about mind’s exclusively material character doesn’t yet explain the perceptual qualities of experience—colors, tastes, and sounds, for example—but dualism isn’t vindicated merely by citing them or by the current impasse to explaining them. Life and mind’s other activities also seemed intractable to physical explanation. It would be premature to assume that the qualitative data of consciousness will not be explicable in similar terms. For we have no idea what a dualist mind might be, and no idea of its relations to body: this, despite the several hundred years in which dualists embroidered their descriptions of conscious experience with speculative inferences about mind’s unity, spontaneity, and immateriality. This alternative hypothesis—mind’s materiality—eliminates their speculations in a stroke. But this proposal is not one more dictum. Fallible but correctible, it is steered by data generated by physiological research and by models and machines that duplicate mental functions by other means: silicon, not protein. This use of empirical data is a commonplace in science and practical life, but a sea change in philosophic thinking. Philosophers are unaccustomed to testing their claims against states of affairs known empirically. Systems they construct or scientific theories they appropriate specify what shall count as facts; empirical data are parsed or judged by their consilience with these a priori specifications. (See Quine, quoted above, Carnap, Kant, or Descartes.7) An example that illustrates this habit has three steps: it characterizes a material state of affairs, before specifying established, philosophic ways of construing it: namely, atomism/individualism and holism. These two theories are often assumed to be comprehensive accounts of reality. But neither formulation is adequate to the example, because each is an interpretation formulated to do the a priori work prescribed by values. Third is an alternative, the systems theory better known in its humanist form as communitarianism. It accounts for the

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example, and explains one of its striking features: the emergence of higher-order properties and relationships. Here, to begin, is the matter of fact that provokes inquiry. Consider the change from quarks to atoms, molecules, cells, tissues, organs, and bodies, then beyond to families, tribes, and states:

1

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3

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7

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Figure 4.2. A Progression of Orders

The difference in height suggests that each new step is one of aggregation and size, as molecules are aggregates of atoms. But this misses a critical point: molecules, bodies, and families are not merely bigger than atoms, organs, or family members; they are energy-efficient terminations—attractor states—within the sequence. Accordingly, we modify Figure 4.2:

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Figure 4.3. A Progression of Orders with Energy-Efficient Termination Points

This design more accurately represents the matter at issue. Quarks and atoms are typically unstable in themselves, though stabilized when related to form molecules, the next higher-order entities, because molecules are least-energy systems. Stabilized by the energy exchange of their atoms, they cannot be disrupted without the expenditure of more

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energy than the quantity required to sustain them. Bodies are more stable than their tissues and organs, because of the energy exchange of their parts and because of ways they couple to external sources of energy: bodies, but not their tissues, have access to food. Why duplicate numbers at points 3 and 7 of the diagram? Because they signify the trajectory’s attractor states, the stable systems that are energy efficient and relatively autonomous. Change goes up and down this trajectory— systems form and dissolve—though flux is most conspicuous between termination points 1 and 3, 3 and 7, and 7 and 10. Life emerges in the bodies of plants and animals, then dissipates when bodies are reduced to their molecules. Sociality rises from individual human bodies to families, tribes, and states, but then, in chaos, it reduces to single persons. Philosophy traditionally explains matters of every sort—this one too—in either of two ways. Atomism/individualism supposes that there are things of two kinds: aggregates and their simple parts. Its materialist origins are in Democritus and Aristotle, one who wrote of atoms, the other who emphasized free-standing particulars—primary substances— stabilized by their matter. Other examples are immortal souls, each endowed with free will and responsible for its salvation (Augustine and Luther), individual minds, each affirming its existence (Descartes), and individual persons (Locke and Mill), each free from constraint and free to act as he or she chooses. Either way, relations are incidental to the character and existence of things. For bodies, souls, minds, and persons are alleged to be self-sufficient. Holism values unity, because of the harmony it implies. Its exemplars are organic or political: the unity of animal bodies, for example, or—in Plato’s Republic—the idea of the state. Alternative origins are physical, theological, or psychological. All contingent beings are unified in spacetime or God. Or consciousness is the One; everything else is its qualification. Some formulations used to advance these theories—including Democritus on atoms, Aristotle on primary substances, and some versions of the One (spacetime)—are hypotheses, hence true or false on material grounds. Other justifications are values the ideas satisfy. So, Aristotle’s primary substances include the autonomous human agents who are most like God when making laws; Luther’s souls are directly related to the God whose commandments they know and satisfy; Locke’s persons are citizens responsible for managing themselves and their state. Theological holism reminds us of our contingency by affirming that God is one while each of us is a conscious shard of his infinite mind: we do or should defer to him. The several motives on both sides are mixed, but values—theological, moral, or psychological—are determining in all but the few cases decidable empirically.

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Individualism and holism are the acknowledged alternatives in the millennial dialectic of contending interpretations: each promises to gather every discernible reality within itself. But does either succeed: does one or the other explain the difference between Figures 4.2 and 4.3 above? Atomism makes no sense of it. Why duplicate the numbers 3 and 7 in Figure 4.3, if these are successive steps in aggregation: every next step is larger than its antecedent, smaller than its successor, but so is a stone larger than a pebble and smaller than a brick. Does this miss the point: 3 and 7 signify entities that have functions differing from those of their antecedents? Yes, atomists respond, but functional differences, too, are effects of aggregation. Think of the human brain. It does more than bird brains, because more neurons entail more synapses, hence many more interactions. Nothing more consequential is implied: Figure 4.2 is applicable and adequate; the other is merely repetitious. Aggregation would be a sufficient explanation for its greater power and speed if a larger brain differed from a smaller one as a larger set of computers working in parallel differs from a smaller set. Size alone would enable a larger set of distinct cell assemblies to multiply the tasks performed at any moment. But the analogy fails: the larger brain is not a larger set of disconnected cell assemblies. Neurons in different regions of the brain are multiply connected and mutually affecting. The condition of several, many or all—inhibited or excited—is a function of their causal relations to others. Atomism has no explanation for the modules created by causal reciprocity when atoms, cells, or people bond as molecules, cell assemblies, or friends. Holism isn’t embarrassed by causal relations and mutual affects: it emphasizes them. It isn’t surprised that an entity, considered across the arc of its trajectory, should repeatedly achieve distinct orders of selforganization. But holism fails, because of its assumption that everything affects and is affected by every other: it would have us believe that tadpoles and caterpillars mature because they are mutually affecting and because each is affected by distant stars. The doctrine of universal internal relations—everything affected by everything else—is nevertheless false of every property and relation beyond the baseline of gravitational relations, because modularity is pervasive in nature. Things of all sorts are relatively autonomous because of their internal organization and individual sources of energy. Each is affected by its circumstances to a degree that approximates gravitational affects: influence declines with the square of the distance. But this is a generous measure, too generous because some mutual affects are zero from the start. Apples and oranges mature on separate trees without affecting one another; the next number in a

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telephone directory has no effect on those preceding it. There is no empirical evidence for the comprehensive internal relations holism postulates. This result eliminates the two principal ontological theses of the philosophical tradition, though it was never likely that hypotheses formulated for the diverse reasons mentioned above would be universally applicable to natural processes. Aristotle and Descartes would have said that their claims were testable; Democritus might have said that, too. The other atomists and holists were motivated by considerations—religious, philosophical, or political—better suited to interpretation than inquiry. Can we do better? Is there an alternative thesis that fits Figure 4.3, one that accounts for progressions in which structural and functional properties emerge? Systems theory is the conspicuous alternative. This hypothesis, too, derives from Plato’s Republic. It is sometimes resisted, because political authority is attenuated if successive orders of organization are interposed between individual persons and the state. So, the French loi Chapelier passed by the Committee of Public Safety in June, 1791, decreed that there is no power between the sovereign— the state—and the individual. We, nevertheless, establish the credibility of this hypothesis by showing its relevance to Figure 4.3. Quarks are unstable in themselves, the evidence being that we never find them separated from others. Some atoms are self-sufficient, but we suppose for purposes of illustration that atoms are ions having one or more (too many or too few) electrons, and that they are unstable, until bound to atoms having a complementary deficit or excess. The molecules hereby formed are stable, hence the last term in the progression from 1 to 3. The number 3 is a termination point, but also a beginning, because molecules, not atoms or quarks, are the proper parts of cells. (We know this, because a decomposing cell reduces to the next lower order of stable parts: namely, its molecules.) Some cells—unicellular animals, for example—are stable, but again, Figure 4.3 dictates our trajectory. We advance from cells through tissues and organs (each unstable in itself because it lacks access to a sustainable source of energy) to human bodies. They are stable internally, because of the organization and reciprocal causal relations of their parts and because they can or do command energy sufficient to sustain them. We, nevertheless, move on from human bodies to families, tribes, and societies or states. For single persons are not sustainable: we are mutually dependent, as Plato said, for the satisfaction of all or most needs. Partnership—friendship, for example—would be sufficient to prolong life, though families are a better solution because they serve the purposes of friendship, support, reproduction, and education. Yet families are vulnerable, until buffered by tribes that fight until reconciled within states.

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Each number from 1 to 10 signifies orders of complexity, from quarks to nation-states. Numbers 2 to 10 signify systems created by the reciprocal causal relations of their parts. The numbers 3, 7, and 10 are termination points. They signify systems stabilized by the reciprocal causal relations of their parts, and by virtue of containing or having access to energy sufficient to sustain them. Complexity is also significant in this other way: every higher-order number of Figure 4.3 signifies an entity having properties that differ from those of its immediate antecedent. These are structural or functional properties called emergent. Emergence is often but mistakenly thought to be mysterious. Imagine three parallel lines, then join them to form a right triangle. Its angles, the space enclosed, and the Pythagorean theorem are three emergent effects, none requiring the introduction of any factor additional to joining the lines. This result generalizes: every emergent property, including those of life and mind, results from the dynamics and organization of antecedent orders. Dynamics implies the reciprocal causal relations of a system’s parts; organization creates sites—the knife’s edge—that qualify for causal relations. Accordingly, reductionist physicalists are half right: nature comprises nothing but atoms or more elementary particles, moving and energized, in spacetime. Their story is incomplete, because atomist formulations ignore the reciprocal causal relations that create modules and hierarchically organized systems. There is, also, this question about laws: are there different laws for every emergent order, including laws for physics (atoms), laws for chemistry (molecules), laws for biology (cells), laws for psychology (single human bodies), and laws for sociology (families and societies)? There are distinctive regularities occurring at each higher order of organization. Birds of a feather flock together; their behavior is regular, hence lawful. The generalization describing them enables us to predict what individual birds will do. But law statements reporting these regularities are descriptive: they tell what things do, not why they do them. Explanatory laws do both: they specify generative conditions for regularities they describe. Let the Pythagorean theorem be our example. We may regard it as a descriptive law appropriate to the domain where triangles are made from disconnected line segments: the theorem emerges with the formation of right triangles. There is, we say, no way to have predicted either triangles or the theorem, given line segments only. But wait: imagine a law that specifies the permissible ways of combining line segments. For then every figure generated and every law describing them is anticipated by this combinatorial law. That may be the situation in nature: a very small set of laws may constrain all combinations that result from the

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dynamic relations of physical elements the laws assume: strings, quarks, or atoms, for example. Nature may comprise distinct orders of complexity and emergence, but not different ontological orders of inert materiality, life, and mind. Nature is complicated, but not mysterious. Systems theory— communitarianism—accurately describes it. But systems theory is notably a hypothesis, one formulated as we try to make sense of the ambient world. It is testable, fallible, and contingent, not a priori or prescriptive. Hence this last question: how is philosophy different from science if both use testable hypotheses to determine the character of things? I suppose that philosophy, metaphysics especially, is oriented by three questions: What are we? What is the world? What is our place within it? Systems theory is an answer. It is an ontology that specifies nature’s categorial form: meaning, the generic character and relations of actual states of affairs. Categorial form is the template of a possible world. Like an architect’s design, it is general and determinable: many structures may have this design though they differ in appearance and details. Science describes the various expressions of categorial form in our world, though the order of discovery is, as Aristotle said, contrary to the order of being. This is so, because categorial form establishes the context within which practical life and science proceed, though we, who have no a priori way to know what form this is, infer its character from the results of particular inquiries. THE DIALECTIC OF UNTESTABLE IDEAS Philosophy is lavishly inventive. Exploiting meanings, implications, generalization, analogy, extrapolation, myth, and metaphor, it uses all the resources of language to create and embroider ideas that vastly exceed the practical demands of everyday life. Its questions sometimes provoke answers that lead in contrary ways: is there free will, are there universals? Other times, a metaphor (Plato’s allegory of the cave), a distinction (knowledge or opinion), or a discovery (mind aware of itself) dominates generations of thinkers. The ideas are gorgeous (Leibniz’s Monadology, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind); the dialectic is inconclusive. Each side tests the other by disputing the consistency or cogency of its ideas, but there is no way to stop the cross-talk of debate when all sides satisfy these conditions. For dialectic is tolerant: each contender preens itself while faulting its opponents; none tests its claims against the extramental world. This tradition encourages conceptual embroidery and the hermetic isolation that comes with stories that have no life apart from a determination to elaborate them. What experiment could legitimate a

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trajectory—the Phenomenology—that construes Plato’s cave as a selfliberating Cartesian mind? Empirical confirmation is ignored, principally, for two reasons. First is the conviction that literality and experiment are irrelevant to thinking that locates us in the world: let metaphysics devote itself to ideas that ennoble minds or secure immortal souls.8 This motive expresses philosophy’s traditional affinity to interpretation; no matter that the aim is practical and personal or theological and cosmic, let belief be a function of attitude. So, holism and atomism are recipes, not hypotheses, when each is used to organize personal life or social relations. Holism secures us by affirming that each finite mind is a shard in the mind of God; atomism would have us liberate ourselves from intrusive constraints in order that we be free to choose. But there is no empirical evidence of God’s activity, nature, or existence and no evidence that freedom is useful in a void. For there is no freedom without the character and context that leverage choice: no piano playing without practice and a piano. Demanding testability for philosophic claims is often condemned as scientism or positivism, hence one more expression of the scourge that strips life of meaning and purpose. We should resist, because empirical evidence is incidental—trivial—when the basis for interpretation’s claims is as palpable and sure as conviction itself. But these objections are misplaced. Practical life—the work and loyalties of family, friendships, work, school, and state—guarantees meaning and purpose in most lives. Interpretation’s stories are an appeasing afterthought. Evidence alleged to confirm them reduces to the strong feelings evoked by their motivating attitudes. This small circle—attitudes provoking stories that satisfy these attitudes—isn’t self-justifying. A second reason for ignoring empirical testability is the persuasion that analyzing systems of sentences or individual concepts and their embedding conceptual networks is philosophy’s essential task. The relations of a theory’s sentences are clarified when formalized; a universe of discourse is mapped by charting the relations—the logical geography—of its words or concepts. Analyses of both sorts are conducted without regard for the entities and relationships to which words and concepts nominally apply. The idea of virtue is clarified by specifying its relations to ideas of law, personality, or desert, not by considering the developmental histories, character, and contexts where virtues are acquired and tested. It is these analytic projects, not a broadly shared metaphysical or theological interest that drives the greater part of current philosophic activity. Their justification is Kantian and “transcendental”: thought’s concepts and conceptual systems prefigure the

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differences and relations ascribable to every thinkable domain, logical, moral, or material. Conceptual analysis has various subject matters and emphases, including puzzles and paradoxes, ordinary language, and the logic of conceptual systems (whether scientific, religious, moral, or political). It prizes accuracy, rigor, and the inventive play that embellishes ideas or makes new connections. Some conceptual analysts discern the weight and implications of related words or ideas by considering the everyday use of words. Many others are undeterred by having no way to test their claims empirically. Indeed, they propose arguments that all but eliminate the demand for confirming empirical evidence. Data are never more than suggestive if, for example, they are over-determined by theory (elementary particle implies more than the flash on a cathode ray tube); they are insignificant for any task if we agree with Quine that theories cannot be empirically falsified. The flight from testable hypotheses is a principal symptom of philosophy’s ambiguous relation to inquiry. This is partly a loss of nerve: how could philosophy compete with science or practical life as an authority regarding matters of fact? Philosophy responds by carving out a domain—the “logic” of concepts, words, or sentences—exempt from their intrusions. The analyst’s posture is well expressed by the words used to signify it: we speak of meta-ethics and meta-philosophy, implying a perspective once removed from concepts, words, and conceptual systems (scientific theories, for example) and twice removed from states of affairs they signify. The self-sufficiency ascribed to concepts and theories recalls the autonomy of dictionary definitions (their words are inter-definable) and the Platonic-Cartesian emphasis on ideas clearly and distinctly perceived. Emphasizing words and dictionaries gives a plausibly empirical ring to investigations that aim to expose the a priori structure of the thinkable world: nothing unthinkable is possible; everything actual instantiates differences and relations prefigured or prefigurable in thought or language. The work of analyzing such things may be described as inquiry, but it is better described—true to its philosophic origins—as an a priori reflection on matters set before our inspecting minds: we consider conceptual differences and relations as they prefigure any perceivable or thinkable state of affairs. Conceptual analysts sometimes say that their work is a propaedeutic to empirical inquiries. But neither science nor practical life waits on philosophy to articulate its conceptual landscape. Linguistic philosophers were nervously commending mind-body dualism—mind and body are used differently—when physiologists and engineers established that principal

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aspects of thought—memory, calculation, and invention—are the activities of physical systems. Studying words or concepts—lexicography and etymology, for example—is sometimes an empirical inquiry. Testing the consistency, meaningfulness, and coherence of practical or scientific ideas is surely a necessary step in every thorough inquiry. Yet, the “transcendental” role claimed for these philosophic investigations betrays their prescriptive aims. Analysts prescribe categorial schemes for mapping a conceptual domain; they reformulate—reconstruct—scientific theories in ways calculated to emphasize ideas, relations, or values favored by the analyst; or they criticize the concepts and nodes of alternative frameworks proposed to study topics such as morality, spacetime, or aesthetics. Their quarrels resemble disputes among accountants: the material context where clients do their work is merely intimated through the scrim of reports, spreadsheets, and receipts. The dialectic that generates contending ideas is nevertheless indispensable. Some are testable hypotheses: the ideas of systems theory, for example. Others are valuable for reflections they encourage: Why is there something rather than nothing: how should we understand the beginnings of a universe that must be eternal if something cannot derive from nothing? Philosophy sometimes earns esteem by asking precise questions that are meaningful but unanswerable, because their truth conditions—the matters at issue—lie beyond the frontiers of testability; it makes itself indispensable by discerning what ideally we could be— mutually respectful, cooperative, and healthy, for example—given our nature and circumstances. There are, of course, some countervailing faults: we feign answers for unanswerable questions, confuse persuasions with ideals, or mistake embellished ideas for pertinent truths. Our talent for spinning ideas requires a countervailing sobriety: thought shouldn’t promise more than it can deliver. We satisfy this demand first by distinguishing inquiry from interpretation, then by requiring that the products of philosophic dialectic be tested empirically: truth claims require confirming empirical evidence; ideals are moot without a specification of benefits that would accrue if they were realized. Testability establishes that philosophic ideas are pertinent to our circumstances and, inversely, that there is no content but rhetoric when testability is derided as “scientism” or “positivism.” Many sentences or ideas are meaningful because they specify their truth conditions, but not all truth conditions are ascertainable: “Ghosts have ears” is meaningful, though we can’t specify the empirical data that falsify or confirm it. Loosen the standards of testability: acknowledge that body language is evidence of good or bad faith; agree that strong feelings—anger, for

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example—may be cognitive. Include everything that may be plausibly counted as pertinent evidence, but then concede that passionate commitment to an ideology or belief is no evidence of its truth. This conclusion is resisted or regretted by everyone who lives in the shadow of the many centuries when philosophy was subordinate to theology. The criteria for truth were different then, because Neoplatonism was adapted to the aims of faith. Bonaventure, for example, said that the demand for confirming empirical evidence inverts the order of knowledge. Things known empirically are vestiges that intimate their higherorder causes. Knowledge that begins when faith bows to revelation and Church authority is fulfilled when intuition grasps the One, God, or ideas (Forms) in the mind of God. Reason can only explicate and justify these truths of faith. Bonaventure would have us ground all life’s aims and values in this Neoplatonic vision, though the story expressing it has no credibility if thought is the activity of brains locked in bony skulls. That which was lowest and last—the materiality neo-Platonists denigrated as shadow of shadows—is now first. This volte-face is mistakenly heard as indifference to everything that is more than basic or base. Beauty is experienced, morality is learned as we engage other people and things: neither requires the sanction of transcendental truths. Ordinary truths, including those of practical life and science, are disciplined by the presence or absence of the empirical data they predict. RECONCILIATION Perceptions of the ambient world are overlaid by our ways of construing it. Interpretation speaks for one’s hopes and fears; inquiry acknowledges that reality has a shape of its own, one to which we accommodate. These two styles of thought don’t always cohere, but the fit is often close enough to be viable. I find my way in a world that is only partially or badly mapped by my interpretation. The balance sometimes shifts in either direction: one likes birds, even imagining the pleasure of being one; but fantasy stops at the window ledge. We usually suppress interpretations that are mad, or merely ineffective. This choice is crystallized by two questions and the order of their priority: Who am I? What do I need? The first is a brake on the second. Or the second is an agenda for the first. Sobriety disciplines inquiry without suppressing interpretation, because differences of gender, taste, obligation, and ability crystallize as different orientations. Their different aims sometimes explain the distorting fantasies—fearful or grandiose—that make interpretation hostile to inquiry: I plan for an after-life, because this one is intolerable. But there is the middle ground implied

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above: sometimes the particular values for a determinable such as gender explain the inclination to construe reality in the parochial terms of one’s sex. Or a single person is unfazed by the anomaly of his commitments: the religious physicist, the righteous environmentalist who drives an oversized truck. There is a point of least friction. It comes when the sobriety of inquiry is matched by attitudes that favor reality to fantasy. Realistic about circumstances and ourselves, we cultivate the mean: wants are appropriate to our situation; needs and satisfactions require no more than well-being demands. Volkswagen’s chief executive scandalized his share holders by saying that no one needs an expensive car, including those his company makes: safe, comfortable passage is supplied by cheaper models. Commentators agreed, but spoke of other reasons for paying more. Many people pay up: profitable but tiny Porsche purchased twenty percent of Volkswagen’s stock. Why this imbalance? Because fantasy is a pump that promotes fun and inflates status. We believe car ads, whatever their distortions, when desire perverts need. Sober interpretations—they make no unverifiable claims about reality or humankind’s place within it—are the viable alternative, because everyday life is inherently pragmatic: its tasks are urgent and plain. But we are sober, not inert: imagination is a counterforce that enlivens every routine. Novelists and politicians, painters and cooks won’t take instruction from dieticians or the periodic table. They needn’t, because inquiry alone cannot prescribe our choices. The human nature known to biologists and anthropologists is determinable within limits: nutrition is a condition for life, but cultures differ in ways they satisfy it. There is ample space for divers attitudes, orientations, and choices. What shall we say when Nietzsche prefers an imagined world to any we discover? Think of cobblers. They make shoes in many styles and colors, but all are shaped and proportioned to the scale of human feet. Sometimes, when imagination over-rides prudence, people wear shoes too high for walking or too small for their feet. They usually think again just short of hurting themselves. This is the balance for which we aim: interpretation embellishes the reality inquiry explores; neither is sufficient in itself. The answer to a question outstanding is more uncertain: are there activities or venues where attitude and interpretation, not intellect and inquiry, are the principal creative force? Much great art, music, and architecture was inspired by religious excitement: could we have done as well without it? Interpretation is often the spur to great art, though notice this difference in emphasis. Before the issue was truth—are interpretations true merely because believed—now, the concern is efficacy

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and the fact that interpretations motivate their believers in the way of James’s “Will to Believe.” The issue is clarified if we distinguish these four aspects of an artist’s work: an occasion (a feast day), a vehicle (music, a painting or building), content appropriate to the occasion (a patriotic anthem, religious image, or building appropriate to ritual practices), and the work’s quality. Interpretation sometimes determines expressions for the first three considerations, though it is often incidental to quality. Bach’s oratorios—intensely felt by him—aren’t better than his keyboard music. Palladio’s churches were fine because he did them, not because the task of designing them impelled him to a higher standard. Notice, too, that every such activity is a practice, and that quality is a function of inquiry and skill; one knows how to build when he has designed for actual sites and worked with wood, stone, or steel. Here, too, interpretation is parasitic on inquiry.

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Chapter Five

Imagination

I

magination is often described as a power for inventing, mixing, or reshaping images (seeing faces in clouds, imagining golden mountains), though these emphases obscure its role. For imagination is the wholesale generator of thought’s content.1 Each of its products—image, plan, or idea—is a construct. Each is content for variation, generalization, extrapolation, analogy, or idealization. Art, interpretation, and inquiry have this common source. CONSTRUCTION Descartes wrote of clear and distinct ideas while intimating that ideas are rules for construing percepts: the idea of man is used to elaborate the percept of a hat and cloak seen moving down a street. Leibniz also used the language of “clarity and distinctness,” but he, too, acknowledged that some ideas—space and time, for instance—are rules used to organize perceptual or conceptual content. Kant generalized their insight: content is constructed when rules differentiate and organize the data of sense or thought. Some rules apply universally (phenomena ordered spatially or temporally); others are specific to a domain (those of harmony or grammar). Peirce endorsed Kant’s insight, but redescribed rules used to organize thought and practice as guiding or leading principles. They direct thought by prescribing forms that sequence percepts, thoughts, words, or actions. Calling them a priori means only that they are applied, more or less mechanically: logicians and cooks know how to use pertinent rules without having to consciously think a rule when applying it. 115

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Leading principles are formal or material. Syntax is formal. Logical laws—identity, noncontradiction, and excluded middle—are usually said to be formal, though this is contestable: no material thing violates the principle of contradiction, because each satisfies the one of identity.2 Other principles are more conspicuously material. Some apply to everything: effects are caused; each thing is distinguishable from others by way of its properties or position. Specialized rules—applicable within a domain—are determinate versions of universal rules: a musical score is a rule for sequencing notes through time. Baseball uses cause and effect as a directive: hit the ball and run. Imagination is a faculty of rules. Kant adds this detail: Imagination is the faculty of representing in intuition an object that is not itself present. . . . [I]magination is to that extent a faculty which determines the sensibility a priori; and its synthesis of intuitions, conforming as it does to the categories, must be the transcendental synthesis of imagination. . . . In so far as imagination is spontaneity, I sometimes also entitle it the productive imagination, to distinguish it from the reproductive imagination, whose synthesis is entirely subject to empirical laws, the laws, namely, of association, and which therefore contributes nothing to the explanation of the possibility of a priori knowledge.3 Reproductive imagination is routine: it organizes sensory data in ways prescribed by rules of association that are naïvely learned and applied: smoke when fire, for example. Productive imagination, inventive and plastic, inscribes space or time with forms that mutate and evolve. These forms are placeholders for content subsequently applied: think of uninterpreted mathematical equations or free-form geometers making designs for architects. Imagination is provoked in many ways; anything dreamed, thought, or perceived may supply its materials. Construction begins in either of two ways: we play, at the margins of consciousness, with malleable forms lacking specific content, or need is urgent so sensory data, ideas, or steps in a plan are organized to satisfy a specific interest. Organization is sequential whatever the content and whatever the domain of its application: space or time. Plans are organized and enacted step by step; seeing a façade, then walking through a building, we elaborate our idea of its form as we advance. Its architect may have started from a more or less distinct idea of the whole, but design requires that he reduce the idea to its elements before elaborating them sequentially.

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Sequencing may be directed by either of three factors: content, an objective, or a leading principle. Content has determinate character; it can be varied, but its character limits variation. Objectives set tasks: produce a plan, tune, or essay. Leading principles determine the organization of the materials sequenced and, liberated from the constraints of particular materials, they generate possible forms in space and time. These three—content, aims, and rules—are imagination’s resources. Many of its products—music, logical proofs, or designs—may be whole and articulate—complete—without material realization. But productive imagination often stutters or stops when reduced to thought’s cramped space: think of writers or composers stymied because of having no desk or piano. CONSTRUCTION RULES Construction is directed by rules of two sorts. Only the rules of logic— identity, noncontradiction, and excluded middle—apply universally, hence, to imagination’s activities and products. Identity prescribes that everything is what it is and not another thing; noncontradiction and excluded middle protect identity from the intrusion of identity-destroying difference. Every other rule—of grammar or harmony, for example—has restricted application: a competent speaker avoids solecisms and speaks grammatically; composers write music that is more than noise. Some rules having restricted domains—meter and symmetry, for example— also apply directly to complexes that imagination constructs; other rules don’t apply until signs—thoughts or words—are construed as having application to their referents. Causality, for example, is ascribed to the relations of things signified, not to the relations of their signifiers: “barking dogs” signifies its referent, not the causal relation of the words. Imagination’s products differ accordingly: melodies and designs are complete as imagined, seen, or heard, though an additional step is required when the items arranged are words because they don’t represent possible or actual states of affairs until construed as signs of properties, entities, or events. Semantic rules supply their referents. Leading principles organize all the domains—art, plans, games, interpretations, hypotheses—where imagination is active, those complete in themselves (music and designs) and those construed (signs). Art considered generically signifies every activity that uses form and matter to create objects that are or may be experienced aesthetically. These are things thought or perceived in themselves without regard for their use: tools—hammers and tongs—perceived and enjoyed because of their mass, shape, and textures, for example. Art’s expressions include architecture, painting, film, poetry, music, literature, and practical arts

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such as textiles and gardening. Each format has distinctive rules, or it uses generic rubrics—spatial or temporal position, part–and–whole—in ways appropriate to its medium and aims. Forms perceived directly in an architect’s buildings or designs exploit proportion and symmetry or contrast and broken symmetry. Poetry and literature, by contrast, are layered: rhythm and contrast in the surface movement of words and sentences intimate qualities of the states of affairs represented: Lear betrayed by his daughters resonates in Shakespeare’s style. Style is a complex rule, one that mixes artistic or authorial idiosyncrasies with the dominant practices of a time. One man’s habits are a reliable standard for his heirs: light, subject, and palette identify Dutch still lifes; film music often broods in a minor key. Each has rules that direct its formation. Plans are focused by a motivating aim; one imagines a sequence of intermediary steps (actions), required materials, and ways to use them. The plan is a rule for sequencing actions, each a cause or condition for the next; its likely efficacy is a function of imagination’s sensitivity to constraints imposed by the causal powers and relations of things to be engaged. A cogent plan is a strategy for satisfying or evading these constraints. Flexible because circumstances and the effects of action are imperfectly foreseeable, it may have a tree-like structure: frustrated on one limb, one retreats to another. Or a plan is flexible, because it informs without prescribing: recipes are directives to beginners, but merely suggestive to cooks who know how to vary preparation, ingredients, and proportions. Games challenge imagination in two ways. Inventing games is similar to making plans: both anticipate one or a sequence of tasks though games prescribe a criterion for winning or losing. Imagining a strategy for winning a game already invented requires coordinated ways of satisfying the rules that anticipate an opponent’s response. Imagination plots an ideal offense or a prudent defense, but games are plastic, their contingencies unpredictable, so strategies are revised in the midst of their application. The force of rules varies with games imagined and played: cricket and chess have rules more explicit and confining than those of love or business; criteria for winning or losing are plainer. But any activity may be perceived as a game if competition or pleasure is a principal aim. Interpretation embeds experiences that frighten or secure us within networks of meaning and value. Anxious or confident, we tell rationalizing stories about our circumstances and selves. Attitudes establish their contours; leading principles generate content and constrain its formulation (imagining an effect, we picture its cause).

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Hypotheses are constructions assembled from thoughts or words that signify actual or possible states of affairs. They are provoked by the exigencies and tasks of practical life—what to do, how to do it, with whom—or by fascination with nature and its ways. Like interpretation’s stories, they owe their coherence to associations prescribed by leading principles: both are elaborated when alleged entities, actions, or states of affairs satisfy rubrics such as part–and–whole or cause–and–effect. All five products—art, plans, games, stories, and hypotheses—are created, as Kant said, when imagination schematizes content within limits established by its leading principles. VARIATION There is contingency in things imagined, because personal circumstances and history determine their character: this hope, that fear. But rules, too, are responsible for variability. There are two considerations. Rules are determinable: inapplicable without specific values, they tolerate a range of values. Cause-and-effect, alone, is empty; imagination prefigures specific effects of particular causes. The other consideration is incidental to the character of rules, but critical to the use made of them. Their applications are extended in five ways: we generalize, idealize, and extrapolate, or we use metaphor and analogy to enhance or extend the domains of their application: “All’s fair in love and war,” “Money talks,” “Beauty is as beauty does.” One supposes that games—bound by rules—preclude embroidery, but few would play if that were true. Think of poker: simple rules but endless strategies. Poetry, literature, and painting are all the more anemic without possibilities for analogy and metaphor. Religion—“God, the Creator”—needs it too. Science is more judicious. What joins quarks? Loosely bound when contiguous, quarks are harder and harder to separate as the distance between them increases. A likely hypothesis construes the force binding them on analogy to rubber bands, ever more tensed as they stretch. Every content can be reworked and reformed in such ways. Street talk is exemplary. Grammarians rail at mixed metaphors and category mistakes, but people relieve boredom by expressing banalities in different ways or they breach the rules given something new to say. All the modes of variation are regularly applied, though several are rarely acknowledged. Generalization is familiar: every wave like every other. Idealization is perfection in performance or craft. It subjects practices and their effects to standards that are conceived if never achieved. Analogy projects relations from one subject matter into apparently

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unrelated domains: from combustion to metabolism, computers to brains. Extrapolation converts qualitative differences into magnitudes: human fallibility is extrapolated and inverted to become divine omniscience. We live in rigid houses on rigid streets hardly aware that imagination extends conceptual neighborhoods by exceeding conventional limits. It presses out from one side of a dialectic where discipline is the contrary, equilibrating motion. DISCIPLINE Imagination’s output is unreliable if untested. Tests vary with the constructions tested. Beauty is the test of art, pleasure is the measure of games, efficacy and legality discipline plans. Interpretation’s stories satisfy attitudes. What of truth: which of imagination’s constructs have truth as their test? Truth is usually restricted to thoughts or sentences satisfied by their truth conditions (states of affairs they signify obtain). But this formulation seems arbitrary: it doesn’t provide for paintings or photographs that accurately represent their subjects. We avoid this impasse by extending truth’s domain to include propositions (thoughts and sentences), visual representations, and those novels, dramas, and poems that accurately signify some aspect of things. Which of imagination’s products satisfy the notion that truth is representation? Or—given that my characterization of truth is formulated to include painting, sculpture, and literature—which of imagination’s products elude it? Truth may seem extraneous to plans—they work or not—but this is mistaken: causal relations they prefigure and maps they presuppose must be accurate representations of the pertinent terrain if a plan is to be effective. Truth is relevant even to games: they aren’t be played without accurate maps of the playing field and opposing pieces or players. And, surely, hypotheses are disciplined by the requirements of logical consistency and material truth. Interpretation’s stories are the only constructs to which truth is irrelevant. This is surprising because hypotheses and stories are constructed in the same ways. Rules organize thoughts or words construed as signs of possible or actual states of affairs. The same rules organize content in both: each locates things and events in space, time, or beyond; both describe alleged causes and effects. Yet, much is different. Interpretations assign status; hypotheses merely describe it. Stories, unlike hypotheses, needn’t be consistent: God is omnipotent but not responsible for evil; the State embodies the general will but persecutes its citizens in the name of the Good. Stories exploit all the variations promoted by metaphor, analogy, or extrapolation without making themselves test-

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able. Every such difference has this simple root: hypotheses are tested against states of affairs known empirically; the stories of interpreters express and satisfy their attitudes, including attitudes that make them submissive to authority and other believers. These opposed disciplinary conditions are usually ignored, because interpretation’s stories so much resemble the hypotheses of inquiry; choosing between them is confusing. Why isn’t creationism as good a surmise as evolution? We have an answer in the measures used to appraise imagination’s constructs. Each is disciplined in ways appropriate to its purpose. Hypotheses and plans are tested against the reality to be known or engaged. They are rejected or revised if tests they imply are falsified: we don’t perceive the data predicted and can’t find an experimental error or conceptual confusion to explain our failure. Interpretation’s stories have a different trajectory: they express the orientations—the hopes and fears—of their creators. Stories may be vigorously affirmed in response to an opposing claim, though no one has evidence for either. Or they are revised or replaced because attitudes change or because neighbors reject us if our beliefs offend them. Why are we confused? Because discipline is an afterthought, one that distinguishes interpretation from inquiry after imagination has constructed its hypotheses and stories. Imagination has no way to distinguish the two, though a procedure for distinguishing them is implicit in its leading principles. Rubrics used to generate associations—imagining smoke, think fire—are also directives to action: seeing smoke, look for fire. Experiment—hypothesize and test—is the core of the difference between these styles of thought. Interpretation is satisfied by orientations and stories that satisfy attitudes. Hypotheses are testable, because formation rules—rubrics such as cause–and–effect, part–and–whole—organize the experiments that search for confirming evidence. Theories are sometimes tested virtually—with computers or thought experiments—but these are propaedeutics: they predict the effects of engaging things modeled. More is demanded: every hypothesis, including the most abstract scientific thinking, requires translation into directions for conducting and interpreting experiments. Practicality is speculation’s essential complement and guarantor. Leading principles are its probes and directives.

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Chapter Six

Leading Principles

PRIORITY

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oes their generation in imagination imply that interpretation and inquiry are mutually entangled and dependent? Or is dependence unnecessary because the same data supply content for either and because leading principles are equally available to both? Suppose water shimmers in morning sun and that imagination takes notice, plays with the experience, and elaborates as interpretation or inquiry requires: homage to the Sun god, a test for theories of light, or time to sail. Each response seems independent of the other if a thinker’s predilections explain these disparate responses. There is, nevertheless, an order of priority. For content that provokes interpretation or inquiry is not a neutral source of data for each. Interpretation’s orientations and stories are valorizing responses to the effects—success, frustration, or fear—of practical life’s inquiries. Resonating with effects others have on us, remarking our effects on them, we recoil from these engagements to construe them. An orienting posture rights and stabilizes itself while absorbing the encounter. Or one adapts to altered circumstances (or an altered perception of an unaltered situation) by reformulating the story that reconciles or justifies him. He spreads meaning—the same, altered, or new meaning—where practical life and inquiry see need and effort, success or disappointment. This surmise is easy to test: how many stories recast human encounters and relations in mythic forms: good intentions sabotaged by luck, bad luck redeemed by divine intervention? What is their relation to accounts— like the police report of an accident—that inventory pertinent facts? 123

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Facts precede palliating stories. This conclusion isn’t obviated by the fact that each person usually or always inquires from the perspective of an interpretation. Wanting something, feeling entitled to it, I may nevertheless perceive a situation that precludes my success: I distinguish circumstances from my ways of valorizing them. This order of derivation—first the inquiries of practical life, then interpretation, later science—establishes the agenda for discussion. Six questions direct us: i. Are there precedents for the idea of leading principles? ii. How are the principles used: are they a priori prescriptions or hypotheses? iii. What are inquiry’s leading principles? iv. Do these principles project values into constructs they structure or states of affairs the constructs represent? v. Which has priority, which defers when practical life and science disagree about leading principles. vi. What do leading principles tell us about nature’s categorial features, its categorial form? PRECEDENTS Inquiry responds to the exigencies of practical life: we need information about our circumstances if we are to satisfy our needs, individually or together. Wanting information, we search for it in ways directed by leading principles. Opening a box or container, we use a knife or key, and, equally, these principles make the ambient world accessible to understanding by anticipating differences or relations thought, perceived, or engaged. This interest is explicit in maps and plans that direct our encounters with other people or things. For truth is inquiry’s principal aim, though the motive is practical rather than theoretical: maps or plans are ineffective if they misrepresent a terrain or procedures for engaging it. What is thought’s posture: passive scrutiny of data received, differentiated, and organized or the executive activity of a body engaging other things in pursuit of its aims? A passive mind correlating percepts—first this then that—could invoke an innate causal principle, but it couldn’t explain correlations it perceives. Compare the minds of bodies that are active as they engage other people and things. Innateness is less certain now, because these thinking bodies learn and understand the causal principle as they apply it. Imagine someone trying to play an oboe. Squeaks and bulging eyeballs are the only effects as he blows. Physics scorns the idea that we might generate an adequate idea of causality from such examples, but it isn’t irrelevant that the small differences made are the effects of disproportionate effort. Better technique gets more from the instrument, but—beginner or master—both know that causality is more and other than the correlation of data.

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Should we conclude that categorial leading principles—causality, for example—are learned rather than innate? That would be premature, because of this other consideration: how much experience would be required to infer the causal principle by engaging other things? An infant has no time to infer it from a history of interactions before responding to other people and things in ways that presuppose it. Hence the surmise that some leading principles (the percentage is moot) are innate heuristics passed on, because they are adaptive: infants who think causally have a better chance of surviving to reproduce. Thought ruminates in order to explore, and probably it doesn’t ruminate until it explores. Innate heuristics facilitate initiatives and are in turn confirmed by them. What are the precedents for leading principles in philosophic thinking? Hume and Kant are useful guides. Kant’s categories prescribe that every phenomenon encountered shall have quality, quantity, and relation. Quality is character, hence difference: something is red, not green. Quantity is intensity of character, magnitude (size), or number. Relation is relative position in space or time, or the efficacy of causes. Is each an essential feature of things, or, more narrowly, a condition that must be satisfied by anything thinkable? Thought sometimes dispenses with quality—one may count the letters of a word or conceive a network of relations without signifying the character—the quality—of items counted or related, but there is no sensory experience without all three. Sensation presents qualities of specific magnitude and number arrayed in space and time: these notes, those colored shapes. Sensory experience was Kant’s point of reference, hence his inference that quality, quantity, and relation are transcendental categories of understanding: one cannot think anything sensible without applying them. But this is not the only possible way to interpret their applicability: necessities Kant ascribed to the transcendental conditions for experience may be ascribed to the extra-mental things perceived. For nothing is perceived if it does not exist, and none exists if it does not have properties that constitute its identity (quality), shape, size, and number (quantity), and spatial, temporal, and causal relations to other things. Quality, quantity, and relation are necessary conditions for existence, hence features of every thing that exists. The extra-mental basis of these elemental differences—quality, quantity, and relation—is matched by the implications of Kant’s empirical schemas. He understood them as rules for assembling things of a kind from sensory data. We may regard them as rules for construing the evidence of things mind encounters: the schema for dog is a rule for distinguishing dogs from cats, not a rule for making dogs. Distinguish

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the categories and schemas from Kant’s story of transcendental worldmaking, and we have the rudiments of the topic at hand: namely, rules that organize our thoughts about or encounters with other things. Kant objected that Aristotle’s categories are a rainbow, a mere inventory of underived, elemental differences.1 But quantity, quality, and relation feature as qualifications of substance in Aristotle’s list. Kant’s categories are tailored to minds that report their observations— we perceive quality, quantity, and relation—but never interact with things perceived. Aristotle’s categories emphasize capacity and causality; they anticipate and rightly ascribe dynamism to the natural relations of things including our ways of engaging them. His catalog is the more salient precedent for the leading principles Peirce named but didn’t fully list. USE Hume emphasized that “natural” relations are simple. Surveying sensory data, we perceive them as contiguous, successive, or similar.2 Succession is temporal, while contiguity may be spatial or temporal. There are degrees of resemblance, from similarity in respect to a generic property to identity in quality and quantity (identical in respect to intensity and magnitude, but not number). Hume proposed that these are the only relations discernible within sensory data before arguing that relations interpolated by “philosophical” relations have their basis in our ways of thinking about the world: ideas of causality and causal powers, for example, are introduced by thought or language rather than discerned within sensory data. Hume’s characterization of relations inherent in sensory data is accurate: there are contiguities, successions, and similarities—correlations of these three kinds—but nothing more. Music is a conspicuous example: notes played and heard exhibit succession and contiguity, then resemblance when melodies are heard again. Philosophic relations make unjustified interpolations into experience if reality is nothing apart from sensory data, but this assumption—affirmed on page 1 of Hume’s Treatise—is never justified in his text. Philosophers often suppose that it is justified, because they confuse skeptical arguments regarding our knowledge of matters independent of experience with a justification for Hume’s elision. But one doesn’t vindicate the other. No one who dwells alone in Hume’s stripped-down version of the cogito should worry about efficacy, cooperation, error, frustration, and death, but all of us do.

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The value of Hume’s philosophic relations is plainer if we deny that reality reduces to the flow of sensory data and ideas. Like Aristotle and Peirce, we track correlations within the data in order to construe them as evidence of relations in things perceived: the Sun sets because Earth turns. Hume named seven philosophic relations: resemblance, relations in space or time, identity (through time), degrees of quality or quantity, contrariety, and cause and effect.3 Only the contrariety of existence and nonexistence is a relation of ideas, not a way of construing data as evidence of a difference in things. The principle of causality is Hume’s prime example of thought’s reckless ways. But are we deluded? Grant (as I do) that sensory data exhibit no relations but correlations of data. It doesn’t follow that natural relations are not richer than those exhibited by the sensory data produced in us when things and their relationships are perceived. Two steps confirm that there is more to reality than perception reveals: the first is a more thorough characterization of the data, second are inferences justified by reflecting on correlated data. Hume’s characterization of natural relations is significantly biased by his claim that spatial and temporal relations are accidental: the character of related percepts is unchanged by altering their spatial or temporal relations, as hands are unchanged by moving one across the other. This claim applies Descartes’ first rule for analyzing ideas: distinguish obscure ideas from their clear and distinct expressions, then separate the latter from one another so each may be discerned in itself. This, in Hume’s parlance, is the principle that everything distinguishable is separable. Correlates that are contiguous or successive—impressions of causes and effects, for example—satisfy the rule: each can exist, its character intact, in the absence of the other. The accidental character of relations is an invitation to ignore them while attending to their terms: the terms are distinguishable and distinctive; relations are contingencies incidental to their character. But one must be very careful about the examples chosen to defend this claim. It is true of numbers drawn at random, but false when said of music or speech: the order of notes or words is critical to hearing a sonata or comprehending talk. Consider, too, the faces we recognize, each feature distinguishable and separable from the others. Police departments use an inventory of model facial parts to assemble pictures of suspects. But a collection of features is not the look of a face, all its parts configured in a distinguishing way. Hume ignored the information communicated by the relational structure—the complexity or configuration—of matters perceived. His atomism—separable if distinguishable— made him oblivious to forms that give sense or significance to otherwise

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accidental conjuncts. Accordingly, we acknowledge these two factors within every correlation: organization—relations—and the things related. Sometimes (buttons in a drawer), relations are adventitious; other times (faces and seasons) pattern is essential. Specifying the first patterns discerned is speculative—babies can’t tell us how they process information—but one imagines that the relations distinguished are spatial and temporal: fed when hungry. We discern the difference of things that are before, after, or concurrent, up or down, left or right. Perceiving motion, we discover the spatial depth of things near or far. These perceptions and persuasions are a first structured context for expectation: we anticipate that relations to other people and things—satisfying or frustrating—will occur within a matrix of spatial and temporal relations. The “Transcendental Aesthetic” opens Kant’s first Critique for these or similar reasons: anticipating our relations to other people or things, we acknowledge the freedoms and constraints enabled and imposed by space and time. There is more to say of relations, though Hume and Kant made an assumption that precluded saying it: they started and stopped with a characterization of rules used to organize data presented for inspection: the shapes and colors of a painting, for example. Carelessly assimilating conversation with listening to music—ignoring practical life—they described correlated percepts from the standpoint of observers, not participants. This is the difference remarked above: observers note sequences; participants provoke and wait for responses. It may be said that the second is only a version of the first: I don’t know what you will say in response to any speech of mine. But this ignores the give and take of conversation: I encourage you, often inviting the answers received. Collaborators of all sorts—improvising musicians, spouses, and actors— provoke the responses of their partners. The difference between relations perceived and those requiring one’s participation is vital leverage as we move beyond correlations in data inspected to the dynamic relations intrinsic to states of affairs known by way of their sensory effects on us. This is the step from aesthetics to inquiry, from data presented and appreciated to agents related causally. For each of us is, and believes himself to be, the cause of myriad effects in things engaged. Experiencing oneself as an agent is an early discovery: I cry, and help arrives; I smile, and someone smiles at me. This realization separates the ordinary, practical man, woman, or infant from Hume and Kant. Their information about correlates is restricted to data presented (Hume), or organized then presented (Kant). None of us feigns their detachment, because we need goods we lack. Inquiry is a condition for

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life: wanting information, nourishment, and companionship, we search for people and things that supply it. Leading principles are critical to inquiry because they accomplish two of its conditions: they organize thought and sensory data while directing the searches provoked when organized thought or data reveal that one of a principle’s variables has a value: we move away from hostile faces, but toward a friendly face; seeing fire or smoke, we search for smoke or fire. This account of leading principles is challenged by the argument that these rubrics are conventions, stipulations that have no play beyond thought or perception, however effectively they organize their content. Some rules are arbitrary in the respect that material states of affairs are incidental to relations they prescribe: the rule for sequencing letters of the alphabet, for example. Many such stipulations—including those which establish units of measure or the rules of poker—could be different and have alternatives. Every such rule has no force but the tenacity and authority that Peirce described when he listed methods for fixing belief.4 Yet, the stipulative character of rules does not establish their irrelevance to practical life or science, hence to our engagements with other people and things. Baseball’s rules are stipulated, but they have application; the game is played. Traffic laws, too, are stipulations, but good laws facilitate traffic flow; bad laws cause accidents. Hence this criterion for stipulations pertinent to reality and our ways of engaging it: those sensitive to the character of nature and practice facilitate activities that are efficacious because responsive to our circumstances. Stipulations fail this standard if they are insensitive to the categorial features of circumstances in which they apply: no decrees laced with fantasy, no games that require levitation. What status should we ascribe to leading principles: are they arbitrary stipulations, stipulations that are pertinent, like traffic laws, to our circumstances, or rubrics applicable to nature because they prefigure its categorial features? Philosophy after Wittgenstein and Quine rejects harsh oppositions: why not survey and distinguish the uses of thought or language, remarking each one’s purport, expressing no preference? We discriminate and choose, because our circumstances and nature force a choice; regard experience as an aesthetic exercise—enjoy it as best you can—or act to secure and satisfy others and yourself. One is passive, the other active. Generalizing from the experience of seeing art or hearing music, we celebrate the many ways of organizing color, shape, or sound. Valuing truth and efficacy, we say that leading principles represent differences and relations in the states of affairs signified by maps, plans, and hypotheses.

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AN INVENTORY OF LEADING PRINCIPLES Both interpretation and inquiry are rooted in practical life, though for different reasons. Inquiry begins when vulnerability and need impel us to engage other things. We learn our way in local streets and alleys. Interpretation acknowledges practical life, because it cannot do otherwise—basic needs require satisfaction—and because endowing everyday life with significance is its principal task. Both exhibit the leading principles used to construct their stories and hypotheses. It is vital that these rubrics be made explicit, and that they be revised or rejected as new information—practical or scientific, empirical or dialectical—alters our understanding of the circumstances or relationships they signify: a discrepancy tolerable in everyday life is intolerable if our objective is accuracy and depth. Their accurate and economical formulation may be welcomed; their revision is contentious, because we resist altering principles confirmed in practical life and acquired during our evolution in the near world of middle-sized things. Yet, it wouldn’t be surprising that principles acquired in circumstances of human scale distort our understanding of nature. Eighteen leading principles make substantive claims about our circumstances: i. Nature has a decided form. ii. The ambient world is a complex of distinct, sometimes related particulars, each a center of distinct powers. iii. Each particular is a whole of parts. iv. Every thing, whole or part, is constituted of its properties and their dynamic or static relations, some stable, others more fleeting. v. Each state of affairs— every particular and complex of particulars—is determinate in quality and quantity, because each of its properties is determinate in these respects. vi. Space is a continuous medium having three dimensions. vii. Time has two dimensions; things related temporally are contemporaneous or successive. viii. Motion is a continuous trajectory through space, over time; change is not saltant, it doesn’t jump. ix. Agents endure through time, some because of stolid materials and rigid form, others because they are live and self-sustaining. x. Action requires an agent: there is no motion without something that moves. xi. Changes—alterations of quality, quantity, or relation—are caused. No changes occur in the absence of agents sufficient to produce them. xii. There are degrees of freedom in assembling causal conditions; different causes may have the same or similar effects. xiii. Causality is local. xiv. The relationships in which agents may participate and changes they suffer or cause are limited by their structures. Things are qualified—disposed—to participate in some relationships but not others because of their structural properties. xv. Causal relations and regularities they generate are lawful.

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xvi. Mutually affecting causes sometimes establish stable, reciprocal relations, hence systems and hierarchies of systems. xvii. Systems have an inside and an outside and an internal, self-regulating economy. xviii. Systems evolve, each is a process, and each has a history. The sense of these eighteen principles, with justifications and proposed amendments, follows: i. Nature has a decided form, a form that is changeable—it can be altered—though it is definite at each moment. This is the master principle; every one subsequent is its more determinate expression. No principle is more likely than this to be an innate heuristic acquired as our successful ancestors made this assumption while testing their circumstances. But learned or innate, this principle is a hypothesis, not an a priori truth. There is confirmation every time we engage the ambient world. Our expectations are often vague: nature is not. ii. The ambient world is a complex of distinct, sometimes related particulars, each a center of distinct powers. Wanting one effect or another, we learn to engage agents having relevant powers. Practical life is appropriately selective: go here for coffee, there for tea. But this formulation is cruder than the principle it expresses. For practical life easily distinguishes structure and function. This urn, that teapot are simply located; their functions are a complex of widely distributed actual or possible interactions: the urn doesn’t work without electricity, there is no tea without hot water. Urn and pot are points of summation— convenient referents—for the complex of functions and relationships on which they depend. The transitional conclusion affirms that structure, but not function, is simply located. Yet structure, too, is relational in the respect that apparently self-sufficient, free-standing things are functions of their constituent materials and external environment including the heat, air pressure, and gravitation that tolerate and sustain them. Attention to dynamical, relational matrices extends to the formation of mass itself: its self-sufficiency dissolves with the discovery that the quantity of mass is a function of motion in a curved space. Aristotle’s primary substances were never so self-sufficient as he believed. The original claim, now amended, nevertheless stands: there are many centers of distinct powers: heat or light, relief or pleasure. Practical life is directed accordingly: we learn what we need, where and how to get it. iii. Each particular is a whole of parts. What creates a whole by integrating its constitutive properties? Aristotle said that matter is the unifier; properties are its qualifications. This is the everyday look of things, this shoe, that clock, but it is problematic. For matter, itself, is derivative, given mass’s generation in spacetime curvature. This implies

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myriad regional wholes—masses—integrated statically—by position— and dynamically—by gravity—in a global whole: spacetime. Notice, too, that Aristotle’s proposal is only half the story, as he would have agreed: it entails that a painting is unified by its canvass, though this is true of every picture whether it be coherent or not. Unity is hierarchical: it requires an integrating condition at every level and integration of levels. Matter, as mass, cannot be the sole integrator, because it needs integration and because it integrates its properties only to the extent of bearing them. But there is an alternative integrator: namely, relations. A human body is a whole, not because of being carved from a single block of protoplasm, rather because it incorporates layers of integration: molecules to molecules, cells to cells, organs to organs. This whole— like families, businesses, and states—is a hierarchically organized complex of parts. iv. Every thing, whole or part, is constituted of its properties and their dynamic or static relations, some stable, others more fleeting. Each thing is a complex of properties. We may formulate this differently, saying that things have properties. But we never discover bare particulars; each is a structured array of properties. Aristotle catalogued the diversity of things and properties, distinguishing some as essential—“substantial forms,”5 he called them—others as accidental. Practical life relies on the stability of kinds: there wouldn’t be time to rejigger all our expectations if there were no sharp qualitative boundaries to things or if their dispositions or behaviors changed capriciously. The periodic table confirms that the stability of elementary physical kinds is firm; the multi-generational biological changes of species are mostly incidental to practical life because they exceed a human life-span. Kinds are more fluid in the case of artifacts and circumstances: they often change, though usually at a pace to which people adapt. Descartes’ rejection of substantial forms is misconceived if understood as a repudiation of natural kinds. He argued that qualitative diversity emerges with quantitative or organizational variations in a smaller set of variables. His variables were geometrical forms, relations, and trajectories, but music illustrates his point: each song is irreducible to every other, but all are created by organizing several or many notes. How far can resolution go: how small a set of variables provides nature’s qualitative complexity? We aren’t sure, though current estimates are low. So, the qualitative diversity of phenomenal experience is generated within brains that receive information in a format that has few variables: the frequency, intensity, and duration of electric signals, for example. All the differences of color, sounds, taste, and touch occur when signals are passed through neurons that vary little among themselves.

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The simplicity of the means compares to the diversity of the result. But diversity is our point of reference. Practical life doesn’t care that bitter and sweet are functions of small differences in values for one or a few variables. The difference is considerable if either is a sign of danger: scientific insight would be incidental if green tomatoes were nourishing though red were noxious. v. Every state of affairs—every particular and complex of particulars—is determinate in quality and quantity, because each of its properties is determinate in these respects. Determinate quality and quantity make properties perspicuous. These discriminations are critical to interest and need, because their different satisfiers are known by way of differences we perceive. But practical life does more than discriminate: we expolit property determinations by way of the causal relations that generate them. A traffic light shows color (red or green); a timer determines that it is one or the other. Causal relationships are leverage: we identify, activate, or inhibit a cause to make a desired difference. Does the specificity of properties lapse into determinability when unobserved? Are there particular clothes in the closet—or merely clothing—when we aren’t seeing them? It might be our good luck that the same things reappear ready to hand each time we look for them, though we infer that they abide as we leave them. Quantum mechanics responds that this formulation may be appropriate to things of middle or large scale, but not to the scale of electrons. They are determinate only when observed, meaning that their interactions with other things are recorded by sensors (whether mechanical or human). Their existence at other times is indeterminate, as described by the changing probability densities generated by the Schrödinger equation. Extrapolate (illegitimately) to scales of greater magnitude, and the implications would be troubling. “Do you know where your children are?” would translate as the scarier question, “Do you know the probability density that prefigures what you may find if you look for them?” One interpretation of quantum theory proposes that this implication—that properties are assignable to things only when observed—is reason for saying that nothing but probability densities exists between observations of particles. This claim is sometimes construed epistemologically as the inability to measure two or more variables at once (position and momentum, or the three spatial variables of spin) because measuring one alters the other or others. But quantum theorists often construe quantum uncertainty as the more dramatic claim that particles have no definite properties until or unless they interact with a sensor. Imagine the indecision of extemporizing musicians as they hear a partner’s last note before calculating the probability of the next. There is no

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continuity of sound in the interval between notes, so this case seems paradigmatic for the one of unobserved particles: both suppose that nothing but probabilities fill the intervals between observations. Is this claim about particles generalizable to all properties? For middle- and large-sized things—thimbles and stars—are assemblies of the smallest. Wouldn’t indeterminacy at the lowest scales apply as well at larger scales? One may answer that interactions—hence observations— are unavoidable and all but perpetual at larger scales, but not at or near the bottom. This is moot if every particle is perpetually related electromagnetically or gravitationally to all or many others. For interactions with them and background conditions—the structure of spacetime—would seem to provide determining conditions for the values of its determinable properties: position, charge, and spin. We normally suppose that measurement requires dials or other devices, but these interactions, too, are measurements, in the extended sense that each particle takes the measure of others by the manner of its responses to them. One may resist the simple conversion of a restricted theory— however extraordinary its predictions and applications—into an ontology that substitutes probabilities for things unobserved. Why suppose that quantum theory is a comprehensive representation of elementary particles when, on its own telling, it has nothing to say of them between observations, except for the evolving probabilities it estimates? Why not concede that a theory unable to characterize things unobserved—except in terms of probabilities—can never be more than agnostic about them? Reducing them to probability densities—insisting that they cannot be fully determinate—is an additional, illegitimate step. Nor does the issue dissolve into meaninglessness—an old positivist dodge—when quantum physicists cannot describe particles between observations. Things that are fully determinate at middle and larger scales while having particles as their only constituents encourage the inference that electrons and photons, too, are fully determinate when unobserved. Uncertainty, this implies, is epistemological, not ontological. vi. Space is a continuous medium having three dimensions. This principle is a generalization from two kinds of experience: we see things approach or withdraw, move up, down, or sideways (birds in flight); and we observe our relations to other things as we move, or are moved by them (turning the pages of a book, embracing a friend). This, too, is contentious for reasons considered below. vii. Things related temporally are contemporaneous or successive. We generalize from experience: both music and conversation progress sequentially.

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Space and time are often presumed distinguishable and separable: dates or addresses, music or architecture. This assumption, appropriate to many practical interests, testifies to the relative integrity of matters that concern us, though its emphases are misdescribed as ontological truths. For space and time are conditions for a phenomenon—motion—that requires both. Motion is pervasive—nothing natural is static, though many dynamic relations are stable—so these two are distinguishable but not separable. We acknowledge this link by replacing space and time by spacetime. The parallel ontological claim is an instance of reduction, not substitution.6 Substitution would require wholesale reinterpretation of terms introduced by this and other leading principles: when and where, for example. That isn’t required, because space and time are integrated, not eliminated. This point, too, needs qualification, because integration in our world does not entail that their inseparability is a universal and necessary truth: there are possible worlds where nothing moves, nothing changes; time in them is duration, not the measure of motion. Equally, it is no contradiction that there be time—celestial music, perhaps—but no space. The assumption that space, time, or spacetime is a unitary, continuous swath is contentious. “Presentists”—in the tradition of Berkeley’s esse est percipi—believe that existence reduces to the awareness and content of a present moment. This would deny reality to the continuous skein of temporality, some of it past, the rest still to come. Say that each moment of experience is point-like (with no lapse of time), and you entail that there is no motion, or that motion is an atemporal series.7 How the series might be known to an atomized mind (reduced, as in Hume, to the series of its discrete perceptions) is uncertain. A momentary awareness lacks scope sufficient to present an infinite series. An alternative—alien to our experience of time—reduces the series to the mathematical equation from which it allegedly derives. There are also theologically minded philosophers who deny the reality of time because God would be imperfect if his knowledge were incomplete, as it would be if he didn’t know future events. Neoplatonists would have us believe that God integrates more tightly than humans can do: we perceive things separately though God comprehends them as one.8 Time, they say, is our confused perception of a reality that God sees, exhaustively, at once. Space, too, is an illusion, because the apparent separability of things spatially adjacent implies the divine failure to integrate them better. Kant begs these questions, or answers them obliquely by arguing that space and time are merely forms of intuition, not extra-mental domains or organizational matrices.

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The implications of evolution and adaptation go the other way: effective interaction with one another and other things suggests that experience is a sound basis for inferences that space and time have the principal features known to experience: including extension, duration, and the relatedness of here and there, before, now, and later. Deny spacetime these features, and we make little sense of action and its effects. You prepare for a storm that occurred yesterday; I advance toward you on a flat surface, though you stand behind me. Suppose that features of spacetime are correctly represented by our ways of construing them. This isn’t implausible: we wouldn’t secure or satisfy ourselves if our readings of space and time were mistaken in these or parallel ways. It doesn’t follow that spacetime has no features other than those we perceive or that features known to us are undistorted by the restricted vantage point of thought and perception. There are many familiar questions: Is the Euclidean space of our circumstances a limited region of curved space? Is spacetime open or closed? Are there three spatial dimensions, or several more? Is time essentially directional, or is it only thermodynamical processes that have an arrow? Could spacetime be empty? Are space and time joined more intimately than required by the fact that motion requires both? The questions may be poorly formed. Most answers are opaque. But some would alter practical life. We could make better choices if, for example, inquiry were to show that spacetime so turns on itself that we could perform low-risk tests, seeing future events as they occur before fully committing ourselves to a course of action. Time travel—backward—would transform the working lives of historians and archaeologists. These are probably hopeless fantasies, but they expose the contrary interests of interpretation and inquiry and the divergent interests of practical and scientific inquiries. Interpretation is expansive. Questions that open the door to speculation and metaphor are gladly exploited: credit God with knowledge of the future or an instantaneous perception of eternity. Interpretation ignores the demand for a coherent conceptualization and evidence of its truth, because no one who believes the story asks for proof. Cosmologists want evidence for their claims, but the scale of their concerns so exceeds the span of human life that one is little germane to the other. Quantum theorists suspect that spacetime is granular, not continuous, at bottom, but this, too, is anomalous with practical experience and paradoxical in itself: it invites the inference that motion is discontinuous because this hypothesis fails to specify an integrating matrix for the granules. One thinks of fracture lines in a glass that coheres or color lines that differentiate a surface without breaking it, but these are metaphors for the unspecified matrix. Science may some day resolve these issues, but

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current notions of space and time will be reduced, not replaced, if here and there, before and after, later, now, and before have a legitimate if clarified place within its formulations. viii. Motion is a continuous trajectory through space, over time; change is not saltant, it doesn’t jump: Continuity and saltation aren’t always contraries. Apparent continuity is consistent with real discontinuity: the continuous look of films versus their successive frames. Jumps that violate this leading principle would occur as motion repeatedly starts and stops, though interruptions that meet this description seem precluded by the conservation of energy and by the principle (below) that no thing comes into being spontaneously from nothing. For jumps would imply that the energy responsible for every span of motion terminates so each subsequent span is energized from nothing. The granularity of motion would be entailed by the granularity of spacetime, and equally the continuity of motion presupposes the continuity of spacetime. Practical life ignores the lurches and jumps sometimes postulated by ideas about motion, because they seem to have no practical support or implications and because these speculations are so far incomplete and unconfirmed. Subways lurch, but the fault is mechanical. ix. Agents endure through time, some because of their materials and rigid form, others because they are live and self-sustaining. This principle amplifies the idea of agency by directing attention to structural properties that give an agent character and stability. Stability implies structural integrity, but also continuity through space, over time. Continuity is ephemeral for some particles, or, like the universe, it endures. Living things are self-stabilizing: they store or capture and metabolize sources of energy sufficient to sustain them. Alternative accounts are possible. One might say that each material thing has the continuity of a sinuous melody: notes succeed one another; they cohere within a phrase as phrases cohere with one another, but continuity is only the succession and coherence of the notes. The analogy is odd from the standpoint of practical life: nothing there confirms that things—structures—dissolve into episodes. The movie of a footrace reduces it to frames, but the race isn’t a series of moments such that runners spring in and out of being, always in a posture appropriate to the last frame and the next. This issue is complementary to questions about the continuity of motion: does it jump? Practical life distinguishes episodic things or events (semesters in a school year, innings in a game) from structures that endure continuously, whether live or inert, static or in motion. What is continuity and what are the implications if materiality is discontinuous? Discontinuity is surely consequential for living things—

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it seems to imply a succession of terminations, deaths, from which they immediately and mysteriously recover—and consequential, too, for morality: am I responsible in subsequent episodes of life for behavior committed in those previous? Practical life doesn’t have answers: it acknowledges life’s transformations, but assumes their continuity. This might be a crude and mistaken impression; finer ones might show that things allegedly continuous are episodic. But are they—could they be— episodic given questions about the continuity of motion and spacetime, the conservation of energy, and sufficient reason? We expect a definitive solution from mathematicians, but they introduce considerations one remove from the question: it isn’t answered by saying that every interval between numbers is covered by overlapping sets of infinite numbers. Is there also empirical evidence for one conclusion or the other, and if not are there dialectical reasons for a preference? Hume was certain that perceptual evidence speaks for his bundle theory.9 Minds—agents par excellence since Descartes—must be episodic, because momentary impressions and ideas are the self’s only content: each episode is discrete, it exists when perceived, so the idea of the self must be the idea of an aggregate. This is only half of the answer required, because Hume should also have justified his assumption that the ideas and impressions of a bundle are related temporally. He didn’t, because time cannot be the integrating medium, given Hume’s assumption that esse est percipi. The only content to his idea of time is the duration of momentary impressions or ideas; these are the things perceived. There is no content for intervals between impressions and ideas, hence nothing—including no duration—perceived. There is, consequently, no impression or idea of the time required to integrate Hume’s bundles: no bundle without a binder. Bundles disintegrate if resemblance is the only relation associating constituent impressions (memories resembling percepts, for example). The issue is clarified by reformulating a question asked above. Suppose that every agent’s constituents—its atoms and molecules—are in motion, but that motion is episodic: it jumps. How could motion jump; what would be sufficient to propel it across the void between granules? Nothing propels it, you say: it jumps spontaneously. Through which medium? Notice that the binder must do more than aggregate bricks or generate a collage: it must facilitate motion and energy transfer. That can’t happen if space and time are granular with nothing to bind the granules. For granularity entails that every material thing is a bundle of disconnected episodes. Motion’s integration is, nevertheless, a claim to be confirmed and explained, so let’s not assume that there can be no integrator other than space, time, or spacetime. Put it instead as a challenge: specify an alter-

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native integrator for the alleged transient episodes of materiality; confirm that they entail no violations of critical principles. Metaphysical tradition proposes two such integrators, consciousness and God. But consciousness is not a viable answer, because it no more than heartbeat or digestion explains body’s integration. It is disqualified, too, because mind is an activity of material bodies, especially their brains: body’s integrator cannot be one of its neural activities. Claims about God are disqualified because there are no empirical tests of his existence. It may be said that every empirical difference is evidence of God’s power, so nothing can disprove his role as creator and integrator of all differences. But this is question begging. We want empirical evidence of integration and evidence that this is God’s work, not an argument that stipulates both his existence and the impossibility of controverting the stipulation. Alleged evidence is compromised if, for example, God’s agency is mediated by other things—spacetime, for example—while God himself is otherwise unknown and unknowable. All this is backdrop to the question at issue: do agents have continuity? They do not if spacetime and motion are granular, because these assumptions preclude integration of the episodes. Why speak of one agent rather than several or many? Why credit the collection of episodes with the unity—the identity—of an agent? Episodes would likely share overlapping sets of properties or memories, but this would confirm similarity, not identity. Aristotle provided for identity through time by siting it in the materiality of primary substances: meaning, bodies of every sort. The granularity of space and time would reduce matter to episodes of materiality; Aristotle’s criterion would fail. Is there a way to provide for the continuity of matter and for its presupposition, the continuity of spacetime and motion? The ideas so far considered imply that space and time are passive backdrops, the containers, within which material things—each separable from the others and self-sufficient—are arrayed. Practical life justifies this belief each time we pack a suitcase or move a car. But general relativity theory eradicates the difference between container and contents by entailing that the quantity of mass (materiality) is a function of motion in a curved spacetime. Spacetime may be run through and bound by the intrinsic geometry and dynamic that constrains motion and matter’s formation. This, if so, provides for the continuity of material agents, while acknowledging the dynamic that explains their transformation (dust to dust). It also precludes the separability of space, time, matter, and motion. All may be features, aspects, of a continuous, dynamic manifold. The appearances of practical life are saved: like global weather, there is cosmic process with local formations. Material things appear separable from one another and from their spatiotemporal positions

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when every middle-sized object (to the scale of human environments) moves at relatively low velocities. Taking socks from a drawer produces no visible difference in them, because it doesn’t significantly alter the values of their contextual or constituent physical variables. This leading principle of practical life is, nevertheless, qualified. The distinction of content and container—abiding material agents located within a spacetime indifferent to them—is replaced by the idea that values for mass—content—are a function of values for motion in spacetime, the container. x. No action without an agent: This principle has many applications, some more defensible than others. Its moral implications are apparent: “I did it” makes me—not a disembodied action—responsible for the effect. Descartes argued in a similar way from thinking to a thinker, though he added more problematically that the thinker must be immaterial because he could make no material sense of its thinking. Proponents of intelligent design also use this principle, though their argument begs the question by skipping a step. They argue from order to its designer, though there are three steps: phenomena considered orderly, an ordering process, and, more speculatively, the claim that the ordering could not occur without an orderer. Descartes and cosmic design suggest the ease of adapting the idea of agency to satisfy other motives. We need only transform a verb into a noun: thinking presupposes a thinker, design a designer. The verb of each pair describes an action or condition; the noun specifies the responsible agent. Interpretation is satisfied, because inference produces a congenial result by mating grammar to a highly confirmed leading principle. But these are abusive uses of the principle. Others are only provocative: we infer from undulating light waves to the medium in which they move—the ether—but then substitute spacetime, a different medium. Applications fail, but the principle is saved. Viable applications require that the inferred agent be material and observable (fires inferred from smoke), or a material condition (electrical fields) inferred from material evidence (wireless computing). Aristotle’s use of the principle is familiar: every activity or quality is referred to primary substance or, more contentiously—if qualification counts as activity—to prime matter. Indeed, this principle, if activity then an agent, is a specific version of a more general principle: if qualification, then something qualified, where activity is one sort of qualification. Does this principle have thinkable exceptions? Particles thought to be massless are likely candidates, but are not for the same reason that a substitute was inferred when the ether was rejeced: here, too, an electrified spacetime is the likely medium and agent.

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Should we suppose that this principle signifies a necessary feature of reality, one so fundamental that its negation is unthinkable because a contradiction? For there seem to be no thinkable counterexamples: no action without agency, no motion without a medium, no light waves without an ether or spacetime. There may be no counterexamples for a reason independent of the grammatical principle, no verbs or adjectives without nouns. General relativity theory is a deep integration of all the relevant factors: no motion without spacetime, no mass without motion, but conversely no motion without mass. Motion and mass are the qualifiers; spacetime is their dynamic ground. There is no activity without an agent and no qualification without something qualified, because action is motion, hence a qualification of mass, and because there is neither mass nor motion without spacetime. Every property other than mass is its qualification or a qualification of motion or spacetime, so this schema comprehends every material difference and relation. xi. Changes are caused: Wanting food, a baby cries and gets it; wanting information, I question someone who knows. Receiving either, one is satisfied in two ways: because of having nourishment or information, and because of a response that confirms the causal principle. Infants act spontaneously, without deliberation and without formulating the principle. But they quickly get its drift, and experience themselves as agents who make a difference. This rubric—properties, positions, and velocities are altered by causes—is the intermediary of three related principles: causality elaborates covariation, while being an application of sufficient reason. Covariation requires that changes for the values of two or more variables should track one another—F=ma, for example—though it is mute about the material relation of variables that satisfy it. Sufficient reason expresses the claim that there are no effects of any kind—logical or material—without conditions sufficient to produce them: effects have causes, conclusions have premises. Covariation is less problematic than causality or sufficient reason, because it is observationally correct and metaphysically neutral: it anticipates correlations we observe, while making no claims about the character of their material relations. This skeletal version is all that Hume approved. Causality is the material expression of sufficient reason, hence his aversion to both. For what is the basis and character of a relation that is allegedly material, but necessary, too? An early answer was theological: nothing exists, nothing changes without the agency of God. This is likely to have been Leibniz’s motive when he invoked sufficient reason.10 Yet, Leibniz believed, too, that deep, intermediary truths of nature are analytic a posteriori: first seeing correlations that

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look contingent, we use inference to discover their necessity. Aspirin cures headaches. The connection seems loose, until we discover that the geometry of aspirin’s molecules is complementary to that of dendrites to which they bond. This is the more demanding version of sufficient reason. It implies that every change has a condition sufficient to produce it, and that the character of the condition necessarily determines the character of its effect: the effect could not be other than it is, given the cause. The weaker version affirms only the first half of this claim: a change has a condition sufficient to produce it. Causes of a kind may invariably have effects of a kind, but this version is agnostic about their correlation: not knowing why particular causes have specific effects, it postulates that the condition sufficient for an effect’s occurrence may not be sufficient to determine its character. Understanding often advances, as with aspirin, from the weaker to the stronger version. Water boils at one hundred degrees Celsius, because heat causes turbulence in water molecules, but water’s relation to heat was exploited long before people understood its mechanics. Aristotle distinguished four sorts of cause: efficient, formal, material, and final. Efficient causation is energy exchange or its inhibition. The result is a change in the causes, or a change averted: a telephone number is dialed and answered or it isn’t because the line is busy. The number of efficient causes for any current state of affairs is vast. Each is a moment in a process that is continuously energized, self-transforming or -sustaining; each participates in a focused process that stretches back to the beginning of time. Yet effective practice would be impossible if the number of pertinent conditions were not relatively small, a fact exploited by Mill’s method of difference.11 We augment or reduce causes for a current states of affairs in order to produce a different one. The factor added or subtracted is the difference; it establishes a new trajectory by deflecting the old one. Formal cause is organization. A bag of parts is not a clock, the notes of a scale are not a song. Organization supplies the tracks through which energy passes. Stability is evidence of organization that exploits available energy to preserve the design. Aristotle supposed that material cause is stuff organized, then energized when pushed. Artisans know that there are materials of many kinds and that each can be worked in some ways but not all. These qualitative differences were thought to be fundamental, until Descartes argued that they express a small set of elementary, geometrical relationships. This implied the reduction of material cause to spatialized formal cause, a hypothesis confirmed by the finding that the quantity of mass is the function of formal and efficient causes: namely, motion in a curved spacetime. The idea of final

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cause is scorned nowadays, though it is partially vindicated (if only metaphorically) by the idea that systems evolve toward attractor states because of efficiencies in mechanical processes that produce them and because those states use or control energy efficiently when achieved. Attractor states imply finality without teleology: systems don’t strive to achieve an ideal; the attractor doesn’t have a magnetic effect drawing systems to itself. So, living bodies are attractor states for their fertilized germ cells; infants contain or acquire energy sufficient to sustain processes that stabilize them. Intermediate states—embryos at two weeks— are less stable. Genes are the formal, efficient, and material causes that direct these transformations. Hume has paralyzed thinking about causality for two and a half centuries. That should change as three points are reconsidered. First is an error in the demand that there be evidence of causal necessity. Hume argued there can be no necessity in a cause and effect relationship if there is no contradiction in the idea that a cause might have a different effect. But this wrongly conflates logical necessity with the causal necessity local to worlds where action and change are constrained by one or another set of causal laws: gravitation’s inverse square law might be an inverse cube law in another world. Every such law is contingent in the respect that laws are different in other possible worlds. But this doesn’t preclude necessity: meaning, the parochial necessity obtaining when events in a world satisfy its laws. Second is Hume’s demand for empirical evidence of causal efficacy: we perceive correlation, but not causal power. Correlations are sometimes mistaken as causal though they are merely accidental, but this is far from proving that no correlation is causal. Children learn to speak the language of their caretakers: one sees the correlation and infers a cause. Adults struggling to learn a foreign language turn their mouths all but inside out trying to make correct sounds. Hume would advise them not to try so hard. Correlations obtain or not; all is explained by the accident that we live in this routine world, not one that is orderly or chaotic but different. But this is a conceit, a hypothesis falsified by data ready to hand. For there are many occasions when efficacy is fully observable: scissors cutting paper, for example. Many other causes—including light, gravity, and electromagnetic fields—are not more mysterious for being known, inferentially, by way of their effects. Third are Hume’s dogmatic postulates: ideas are copies of impressions, no new ideas can be inferred, existence is only the vivacity of impressions, distinguishable impressions or ideas are separable. Why are these claims about mind and its contents pertinent to causation— energy transfer—between and among material agents? Contemporary

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Humeans defend themselves by agreeing that Hume’s psychologizing arguments are not defensible: it is his point they defend; causality is only correlation. Reformulating his skeptical notion of cause in the language of formalized but interpreted scientific theories, they would have us deduce “Irma gave birth” from an empirically confirmed theory of reproduction. For birth is the correlate of labor, not its effect. Never mind that the appeal to hypothetico-deductive systems is circumlocutious double-talk for the many practical cases where causality is not in doubt: Irma, for example. Contemporary challenges to sufficient reason are usually expressed as objections to the causal principle. Quantum theory is their principal source. No action at a distance (no medium to carry the impulse or signal), nothing comes from nothing, and every effect is caused are challenged, respectively, by violations of Bell’s inequalities,12 particles that come into being “from nothing,” and electrons that jump orbits when their energy is “spontaneously” augmented or reduced. Practical reason resists these inferences, because nothing in its history makes them intelligible. All birds fly was a reasonable surmise, until the discovery of some that do not. Quantum exceptions are more puzzling. They may be evidence that nature is radically different from the claims made of it by Aristotle or classical physics, and this, if so, requires a theory that explains generation and complexity without sufficient reason. But there is no theory having the required scale and detail. We have, instead, a shortlist of experimental results that violate sufficient reason. Why is the citation of possible exceptions enough to establish that sufficient reason doesn’t apply universally? One reason is the modest condition—any exception—required to negate a universal truth. Another is deference to Hume’s claim that we habitually misconstrue correlation as causation. Exceptions to the principle are, on this view, stark evidence that causality and sufficient reason are thought’s distorting inclinations. A different reason is the status of physicists. It seems daft to challenge people who revolutionized science. Let them question any assumption or describe any anomaly and humbler minds defer. But phlogiston and the ether were not their best ideas. Action at a distance was a dogma of Newtonian theory until Maxwell’s electromagnetic field theory; then, it seemed a foolish lapse from conceptual discipline. Disregard for sufficient reason may not be better, given this principle’s overwhelming empirical support. Doctors report symptoms they can’t explain; they don’t infer that these are events without causes. Why this caution? Because careful investigation always discovers, it seems, a previously unknown trigger and because these successes support the persuasion that sufficient reason applies universally.

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We know that current understanding is partial and that principles apparently sufficient for the ambient world of human experience may be amended or replaced by those which apply to the world at large: we no longer believe that Earth is flat or the cosmic center. This may be one of the times when old ways of thinking are superseded. But is it? How should we construe quantum theory’s informal characterizations of quantum effects: electrons change energy states spontaneously and pass in and out of being? Are these signposts marking limits to sufficient reason? Unable to demonstrate the principle without assuming it, unable to explain exceptional phenomena observed or inferred, we assume that the principle may be violated: it may not apply universally. Still, the language used to challenge it is hyperbolic: no available conceptualization enables us to understand exceptions occurring at the margins where experiment discovers or theory predicts phenomena that are unexplained. We wait for physics to do either of two things. Produce a theory— a substitute metaphysics of nature—that tells where, when, and why sufficient conditions fall away. Or acknowledge that alleged exceptions to sufficient reason are evidence that current theory lacks the subtlety required to specify conditions that are unknown because they are too fine for current theory or its experimental procedures. This second option heartens critics who believe that current theory is incomplete. Those who insist that classical thinking be reformulated to make the exceptions paradigmatic—the first alternative—are more severely challenged. They propose that a complete theory (the current theory or one to come) will justify saying that some phenomena are unconditioned; it will confirm that all higher-order complexities emerge from and embody lowest orders where chance and spontaneity are pervasive. Proving this requires a condition we may never achieve: namely, an exhaustive specification—perfect knowledge—of circumstances where individual particles come to be from nothing or jump from one energy state to another. For there cannot be irrefutable evidence of spontaneity, unless such particles are isolated from every possible physical influence. It isn’t plain this can be done. No, you say, unachievable isolation is not required. Theory need only specify circumstances in which spontaneity occurs, then explain and predict the generation of higher-order complexity. Accurate predictions would be evidence confirming the theory. There is precedent in the claim that material things would move uniformly in rectilinear motion were there nothing to stop or make them deviate. That idealized condition is never observed, yet the Galilean-Newtonian postulate generates accurate descriptions of inertial and vectorial motion. But is this a good analogy? No, because the odd exceptions alleged by quantum

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theory are neither postulates on which a theory is constructed nor effects it explains.13 We abandon sufficient reason, if we have both a comprehensive physical theory that correctly predicts its violations without begging the question and a compelling logical argument that exceptions to sufficient reason would not violate the principle of noncontradiction. This would confirm Hume’s belief that sufficient reason is excessive and rhetorical, so correlations it specifies and sports it ignores are all the content required of accurate theories. Do we have either theory: one of science, the other from philosophy? We do not. Science will do its part, to the extent it can. The dialectical, philosophic task is easy by comparison. Is it true that there is “no reason in nature or metaphysics why any event need have an antecedent or successor.”14 Assume that everything is constituted of elementary particles, then consider: if particles can come into and pass out of being “spontaneously,” why shouldn’t that also be true of every thing composed of them, however complex? There are many banks and many more deposits. Wouldn’t it be probable, if only to some small degree, that bullion or bills in some vault would occasionally evaporate in ways quantum theory postulates? But why should the probability be low? If sufficient reason does not hold in every case, why does it ever obtain? And if it does not, why is there any regularity or stability in our world? For suppose that no thing exists or has a particular character because of its generative conditions. Why don’t we have the world Hume anticipated: why doesn’t nature resemble an array of lights, each going on and off—in and out of being— without regard for its neighbors or antecedents? The issue is clarified to a degree if we distinguish two ways of regarding sufficient reason, one inductive, the other abductive. Sufficient reason may be nothing more than a generalization from observation: things have and have had antecedents that seem to have produced them while determining their character, but this generalization is based on nothing but constant conjunction. Observing so many couplings has created a habit that prompts us to misconstrue the data: they show correlation—conjunction—not the productive relation of effects to causes. The alternative, abductive reading infers from conjunctions observed to their conditions. This alternative covers both versions of sufficient reason described above: the weaker affirms that conditions generate an effect or event without determining its properties; the stronger affirms that particular conditions generate effects having a specific character. Sufficient reason, on both accounts, is a constraint intrinsic to natural processes, not our observational gloss of them.

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Which of these options is more likely to be correct: the principle is sometimes or always suspended, it is a well-founded inductive surmise, or sufficient reason is a generative principle (weak or strong) inherent in nature? The first option is Humean, the third is Aristotelian. The second option could fall either way: an induction appears well founded because of an extended run of heads or tails in an honest coin (constancy that looks causal but is not), or the coin isn’t honest and the run is evidence of an internal constraint. Mixed worlds, too, seem possible: some changes are conditioned; others not. Which of these is our world? What counts as evidence for a solution? This reductio implies an answer. Suppose no event has conditions sufficient to produce it or its specific character (the stronger version of sufficient reason). This has several implications, all unsettling. There are myriad regularities in nature, but they are unlikely because inexplicable and miraculous if sufficient reason does not apply. Someone reliably speaks English or Chinese in a familiar voice. Why doesn’t she use words from randomly different languages in a voice and timbre that vary with every syllable? Why doesn’t she, too, change continuously—“spontaneously”—from woman to man, termite to frog? Reality should be a blooming, buzzing confusion. There might be occasional regularities, like honest coins that come up heads or tails over a run of tosses. There might, miraculously, be a run of a trillion heads or tails, but that fragile skein would always risk breaking. (The odds that a coin will come up heads on the first toss after a long run of heads, is one-half. Odds of a trillion heads from the first toss are all but incalculable.) These implications frustrate an observer: he can’t discern the order in things, or he fears that order he sees may come unstuck. A different implication unnerves the practical man or woman. For if some events may occur in the absence of sufficient conditions, why does any event require them? Why is anyone motivated to do anything, if intention, effort, and activity are pointless because no event has conditions sufficient either to produce it or determine its properties? Planning and effort are a delusion if sufficient reason does not obtain. Or we are lucky: we live in a world that has no inherent ordering principle, though it seems to reward planning and initiative, because such order as it has coheres with human intentions. This is only partly reassuring, because we humans are made of the same stuff as other, randomly occurring things. Coronary arrhythmias are possible but unlikely; one worries if nothing is intrinsically stable. I have been considering this reductio in the context of nature as we have and observe it. But suppose we imagine its implications for the

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cosmos—a complex, self-transforming process—at its inception: we suppose that sufficient reason does not obtain, then consider the task of constructing a world such as the one we have without it. God, we assume, is a deist. Having read Aquinas, believing that nothing comes from nothing and that every contingency requires a necessary ground, he produces Adam and Eden, then watches and waits. What does he see? Only this eternal starting point. For it lacks an intrinsic generative principle: nothing in it is productive, so no change occurs. Now consider this altered state of affairs: God declines to intervene on the ground that anything he does at the start makes him complicit later. Standing aside, doing nothing, he watches but sees nothing. For there is a double liability to overcome: nothing exists—there is no self-differentiating material from which to begin—and a fortiori no generative principle within it. This is true for Aristotelian and Humean worlds. Humean worlds seem possible when first described: each is a montage or skein of events. But there is no way to get them started, unless we say, as Hume did, that something can come from nothing. Existence, he says, is only the vivacity of our impressions, so an idea signifies a possible existent if it embodies no contradiction. Now burnish the idea, brighten it for the sake of vivacity, and we have a new existent, one whose emergence has no conditions. But this is recklessly shallow. It presupposes, without justification, that anything conceived as actual can exist as conceived. But also, ironically, it vitiates Hume’s aim—prove that sufficient reason doesn’t obtain—by affirming that new existents have three jointly sufficient conditions: impressions, ideas that derive from them, and the thinking—the imagining—that raises the intensity of ideas to the vivacity of impressions. Ignore these question-begging assumptions to consider only the implications of Hume’s objections to sufficient reason. We know the sense of coming to be from something that already is, but no one has ever made sense of coming to be from nothing. For nothing signifies no state or condition, and coming to be from nothing signifies no process. Quantum theorists explain that the void of which they speak is the vacuum, a high-energy state that is far from nothing. Hume, like religious thinkers who favor this idea, is more literal: the nothing he intends lacks all properties and powers. Only God is up to this challenge: he proves his omnipotence by creating our world from nothing. (Anything less— needing something with which to start—would imply that God has limited powers.) Hume and his heirs avert having to duplicate God’s achievement by starting from an ample, historically differentiated state of affairs, not from an imagined void. The reductio is evidence that people who think as he did have not asked plausible questions about

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the conditions for processes they see. Let them imagine nature at time zero, and the problem is inescapable: this starting point—an elementary something or nothing—lacks resources sufficient to bootstrap itself to dynamic complexity. Hume believed that he had anticipated this response by proposing that analysis should strip the dross from our ideas of reality; separable if distinguishable is the razor that reduces traditional ontological rhetoric to a skein of clear and distinct, properly formed ideas. But nature is not a skein of separable ideas, though conflating the two is a condition for arguing that nothing binds effects to causes. Why is his conflation plausible; why are clear and distinct ideas (or their ancestor, ideas of Platonic Forms) surrogates for existing states of affairs? Do we generate ontological truths by analyzing clear and distinct ideas? A priori science is scorned. Why is a priori ontology better? Hume’s method derives from Descartes’ Rules for the Direction of the Mind: discern clear and distinct simple ideas amidst the confusion of badly formed complex ideas, then reconstruct better ideas by assembling these simples. Hume’s analysis of causation is a reflection on ideas rendered clear and distinct. Yet, this program misdescribes our ideas: they are hypotheses that signify complex phenomena and their relations, not inspectable jewel-like simples. Cartesian philosophers—still a majority—suppose that their apriorist scruples trump critical empirical experience, whether practical or scientific: sentences and theories, like percepts and ideas, must be disciplined. But their Humean analysis of causation and sufficient reason is incidental to the phenomena represented: colliding vehicles, for example. Where is the collision, and where the energy transfer when ideas or percepts of the cars have been distinguished and separated? I infer that a principle of sufficient reason intrinsic to natural processes—something from something, not something from nothing—is a necessary condition for the self-differentiating, self-organizing nature we have. Why accept the principle? Because it explains regularity, first in general terms, then in terms appropriate to specific causal sequences: locks and keys, aspirin and neurons, for example. Nature is, in this respect, Aristotelian, not Humean. Is this alternative more compelling? Suppose that sufficient reason applies at middle and larger scales, but not always at the scale of quantum effects. Why? We can’t yet tell. Should we be satisfied that we may, someday, understand where and why the principle’s application starts and stops? No, because the reductio above is pertinent: nothing happens in the absence of a condition sufficient to produce it. Add that sufficient reason is itself subject to this condition, so nothing would be sufficient to restart it were it suspended.

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It applies from the beginning—at every scale—or not at all. Its generative condition, material or formal, is unknown. Notice that establishing the applicability of sufficient reason is similar to proving the applicability of the principle of noncontradiction. Noncontradiction, too, cannot be proven without assuming it, though we can cite the absurdities that follow from denying it—that we both do and do not deny it. We also remark its efficacy. For there are no material entities or events that violate the principle, round-squares, for example. (Its only exceptions are created by joining thoughts or sentences.) The evidence for sufficient reason is nearly parallel, if we suppose that there are no exceptions to its universal application in nature. The parallel is inexact, because suspending non-contradiction is inconceivable, though we can conceive—as Hume did—that sufficient reason does not obtain. Accordingly, there is no direct proof that sufficient reason applies necessarily, though we have considerable empirical evidence of its application and no coherent account of circumstances where, allegedly, it fails. We infer its necessity without being able to prove that there is no other way to generate the world we have. Defending the principle is a middle step for inquiry, not the last. For sufficient reason is an obscure window into the categorial nature of things: it explains, generically, correlations we observe, but fails to specify the glue that binds effects to their conditions. The properties of things and events seem determined to every degree of specificity by their sufficient conditions (red not merely colored, scarlet not merely red); but what makes their causes sufficient? General relativity theory suggests an answer by superseding the difference between container and contents. The determinism observed may be the consequence of the topological, geometric, and dynamic features of spacetime, hence the material things that embody those properties, including keys that open locks of complementary shape. Specificities of every sort may be determined by these formal, material, and efficient causes. This hypothesis is well short of confirmation as regards the ordinary features of practical life: pleasure or pain, for example. It doesn’t preclude a margin of determinability such that conditions fix the boundaries within which change occurs, but not all or every determinate value. This would be space for the “spontaneity” of quantum events, though we would need to consider such examples very carefully: is it incontrovertible that they do not have sufficient conditions? xii. There are degrees of freedom in assembling causal relationships. This principle may be assimilated to the previous one, because explicating causality should clarify the degree of freedom that obtains

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in a world laced with causes. The current principle is, nevertheless, useful for its contrast with the implication that causality creates a lockstep world, one that suffocates strategy and flexibility. For there are three sites of contingency or slippage in worlds structured by the principle of sufficient reason: initial conditions do or could vary; the set of interacting causes sufficient to produce an effect allows substitutions (vacuum tubes or transistors in radios); and the unpredictability (or merely the lack of foresight) when conditions accidentally assemble (signal failure at a level crossing as cars and a train converge). Astute and flexible planning uses this principle when aims are achieved with inferior resources. It may seem that the statistical character of physical laws is a more significant opportunity for liberty and choice: some people moot the possibility that the indeterminism of quantum theory is expressed as free will. But is it plausible that all mid-sized entities and processes behave classicially—deterministically—but for the human brain? The statistical character of classical laws isn’t more encouraging: the gas molecules of statistical mechanics move deterministically. It is the complexity of their interactions and the singular behavior of things aggregated (people or molecules) that warrants the statistical methods used to describe them. Freedom from causality reduces, therefore, to the factors listed above, and to the relative autonomy of modular systems. (See Principle xvi.) xiii. Causality is local: Practical life is irrevocably local: everything we are and do is dated and addressed. Engagements with other people and things are everywhere constrained by finite velocities, trajectories, and the mechanics of interaction. No action at a distance—motion makes no jumps—is a précis of this principle. Locality was assumed to be a universal feature of nature until the publication of John Bell’s theorem in 1964. Bell argued that local causation could not account for the unexpectedly high correlation of values for particles prepared at a source, projected in opposed directions, then passed through polarizers at an arbitrary distance (limited only by practical constraints on experiment). Quantum theory predicts a higher rate of correlation for the tested values of the polarized particles than does local causation with hidden variables. Its predictions are experimentally confirmed, implying spontaneous action at distances that could be infinite. Physicists do not claim to understand how distant particles affect one another. Instead, they take exquisite care to eliminate loopholes that might compromise experiments confirming apparent action at a distance.

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No amateur can challenge Bell’s theory or these experiments, but reservations are appropriate. Why are some physicists unconcerned by the mystery that testing one particle reveals a property instantly propagated to a remote other in violation of the stricture that light’s velocity is finite? Why is locality a condition for causal relations in things of middle and large scale (including the experimental apparatus for these experiments) if it is regularly violated at the smallest scales? Why isn’t the effect cumulative in larger things comprising particles? One can declare that anomalous effects wash out at larger scales, but this is arm waving: why isn’t the effect apparent at larger scales? We can’t have a responsible answer if we don’t understand—as physicists do not understand—how mutual entanglement occurs spontaneously at a distance. Are there possible physical explanations for the effect, explanations that are currently ignored? Could it happen that particles are affected by the medium through which their trajectories pass, and that these effects explain the correlations? Imagine that one of a car’s wheels spins when it hits a pothole. Now suppose the car passes over railway tracks, and that both wheels vibrate in the same way, because of a common cause, not because a signal passes instantaneously from one to the other. Could it happen that space is crisscrossed by electrified furrows—strings—such that distant particles are affected in the same or complementary ways when crossing them? Could the “strings” be the edge of an otherwise unknown and additional spatial dimension through which the particles communicate? Such proposals are crude and merely allusive. They need translation into cogent material variables, numerical values, tests to determine if there are measurable effects, and comparison of these effects, if any, with those predicted by quantum theory. Finding a structural explanation for the correlated values of particles measured at a distance would vindicate local causality. Having no explanation leaves us puzzled. We want a model that would explain the anomaly, one that identifies an unknown material condition. Relativity theory also seems anomalous given classical assumptions; its experimentally confirmed implications would be intolerably odd without the theory’s account of motion, light, and spacetime. Quantum theory discovers strange effects without explaining them. xiv. The relationships in which agents may participate, and changes they suffer or cause are limited by their structures. Things are qualified—disposed—to participate in some relationships but not others because of their structural properties. There are knives, forks, and spoons, not only one of the three, because each has distinctive uses. The uses seem all but inscribed in the shapes, hence the idea that dispositions are

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second-order properties qualifying structures for participation in causal relationships. This characterization looks backward and forward: backward to the structures in which these second-order relational properties reside, forward to causal relationships and their effects.15 Dispositions were a principal target for Hume. The myth of causation implies that causal powers, too, are mythic: there is no percept of causal efficacy (energy exchange), and usually none of the structural properties, hence the dispositions that qualify things for causal relations. Yet practical life is drenched in the assumption that causes are efficacious, and that things vary in their possible effects. Are we deceived: perhaps we “see” a knife’s power to cut merely because we expect bread to separate as a blade presses into it. Or is it true that human agents know causality, because we repeatedly engage other things, altering them while suffering change as they affect us. How else should we account for work and training that qualify us for particular tasks? Does swimming or surgery reduce to constant conjunction? It is incidental to the answer that worlds differ in respect to their defining geometries and physical laws: spoons cut bread in one possible world, knives do it better in this world. Seeing them perform in either world is information about its causal processes, powers, and laws. Hume misdescribed causal relationships because he wrote as an observer, not as a participant, and because his Cartesian perspective and method distorted his conclusions. Wanting clear and distinct, simple ideas, Hume made the egregious assumption (following Berkeley) that nature reduces to a string of clarified ideas. Hume’s conceptual analysis is responsible for the rest, including claims that everything distinguishable is separable (so relations are incidental), and that causes are temporally prior to their effects. The newspaper is delivered in the morning after one subscribes, but bread divides as—while—the knife cuts, words flow as one speaks. Causality is a conditional, not a temporal relation, though effects sometimes survive their causes. Hume’s positivist successors prefer syntactic and semantic analyses to his preoccupation with impressions and ideas, but they share his aversion to (causal efficacy and) dispositions. Inferring the powers of a rigid key cut to the shape of its complementary lock is easy enough, but there is no comparable point of reference for most other structures: we don’t know their capacities until we see them perform. Aristotle is the butt of this skepticism, because he regarded dispositions as states or properties of primary substances, meaning bodies of every sort. Someone sitting has the potential for standing, an ascription confirmed when he or she stands. This formulation is objectionable empirically, if “potentiality”

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is construed as an odd state of being, not as shorthand for the inference to an unknown structure and its qualifications for interacting with others: a knife qualified to cut because of its fine blade. The positivist solution—counterfactual conditionals—ignores internal structure (and sometimes all structural properties) while emphasizing behavior and its consequences. Counterfactuals specify correlated data, acts, or phenomena: the event that would occur if another were to occur. So, it is true that I can speak Italian if I would on appropriate occasions. Truth conditions for the counterfactual don’t include my internal states. For this is a prediction of what I would do, given what I have done. Never mind that I may frustrate every such description: I learned the language by listening to Italian radio programs, reading Italian grammar books, and singing Italian songs; no one has ever heard me sing or speak, because all my practice is sottovoce. Go into any music store, notice the thousands of disks, each differently labeled. Why this difference, if the capacity is only in the playing? Could it be that the music heard is inscribed on the disk, and that disks differ accordingly? Most structures have an inside and an outside; there are dispositions on both sides. This internalist view is contentious, because phenomenalists have conflated the factual with the empirical, and the empirical with surfaces. Anything deeper is suspect, though hypotheses about internal states are empirically testable: we show our habits and tastes by things we choose, say, and do. Behaviorists can answer that taste is in the choices made, but this is too much like saying that the disposition for red hair reduces to having it. Critics who prefer the counterfactual analysis of dispositional language will demur: inhibit the idea that dispositions are qualifications for relation founded in the structural, often internal, properties of material things; realize that this inclination expresses a persistent cognitive tic, an abuse of reason like those deplored by Hume and Kant. This defensivenes is odd. For there can be no confirming evidence of an ability—no confirming behavior—without the ability. Knives wear their capacities on the outside: they are sharpened or not. Brains, nerves, and muscles aren’t directly perceived, but there is little doubt that their dispositions, too, are founded in structural properties. Why else does anyone go to school or apprentice himself to craftsmen whose own skills were slowly refined? The counterfactual conditional analysis of dispositions was proposed with all the gravity of foundationalist epistemology: we are to believe that its analyses leave no greater depth to plumb. But this style of philosophical analysis had its complement in behaviorist psychologies. Cognitive psychology was scorned. Its computer analogies were

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primitive, and unconfirmed; the structure of DNA was unknown. But then, in a wink, computer programs were the paradigm and DNA was a window into the mechanics of heredity and a physical basis for dispositions: it could plausibly be said that dispositions are second-order properties founded in material structures and that structures qualify for specific causal relationships because of their dispositions. The appearance of double-talk is better described as a small circle. Structural properties are the constitutive properties of things. They qualify—are disposed for—causal relationships because of these properties. Founding dispositions in the structural properties of things implies a lingering problem: is a disposition’s character fixed by the structure or is the structure merely its carrier? Suppose the latter, noticing this consequence: having capacities presupposes having a structure, but the character of one makes no difference to the character of the other. Why shouldn’t it happen, given this assumption, that a thing’s capacities change though its structure is unaltered? Accounting for the stability of a thing’s dispositions—same structure, same capacities—requires a tighter relation between them. Keys open locks, because each has a shape that grounds their complementary dispositions: one turns, the other opens. Is this too good an example, because it depends not only on structure but also on the geometry of lock and key? There are several advantages to supposing that the topology and geometry of structures are, with velocity, the critical properties determining a structure’s dispositions. But saying this duplicates Aristotle’s quandary: he ascribed capacities to things—calling them potentialities—when he couldn’t determine their basis in structural properties. There is no current way of establishing that the differences among one’s habits—sloth or initiative, for example— are founded in the geometry of one’s dendrites, though recent science provides a framework for the missing detail. Matter is mass. General relativity theory affirms that the quantity of mass is a function of motion in a curved spacetime. The direction ahead is clear: unpack the hierarchical ordering of things and their properties—bodies to cells, cells to molecules, molecules to atoms—then discern the topological, geometrical, or dynamical properties that determine capacities at each level of complexity. Dental appointments and taxes seem remote from these considerations, though we have precedent for thinking they are not: Descartes replaced Aristotle’s substantial forms with a much smaller set of mathematical—essentially geometrical—ideas. The implications of general relativity elaborate and justify his surmise. xv. Causal relations and the regularities they generate are lawful. Many regularities are accidental: everyone breathes when I do. Yet, many are lawful, for a reason supplemental to the principle of sufficient

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reason: effects recur, because conditions sufficient to produce them are pervasive or recurrent. Practical life requires that we distinguish accidents from laws if we are to discount one while searching for the other. Philosophers often describe law sentences as laws. This is sometimes shorthand, though it often expresses the idealist assumption that laws have no status apart from mind’s determination to use its ideas or theories to differentiate and organize sensory data. This surmise is one of those refuted when mind is identified as an activity of body: minds don’t invent the laws constraining their bodies. Practical life never assumed otherwise. For accidents are unreliable; efficacy and predictability come with maps and plans that correctly specify the laws shaping natural processes. This is progress, but not all we require, because it leaves the status of laws undeclared. What is their place within or among the particulars arrayed in spacetime? Laws float, somehow, over things constrained, or they inhere within them: they are forms ante rem or laws in rebus. Philosophers typically go one way or the other, though one may affirm both. We provide for forms existing ante rem—prior to and apart from their instances—by distinguishing an actual state of affairs of any scale from possible alternatives unrealized in our world. Baseball has nine players a side in our world, but more or less in other worlds. Each style is possible, because none embodies a contradiction. Now suppose the game is no longer played on Earth, so our version too—now reduced to a set of rules—is a possibility, no longer an actuality. And equally, sets of possible laws prefigure actual worlds where those laws would constrain physical processes: F=ma is the signature for one such world; variations such as 3F=ma and F=2ma distinguish others. These sets of possible laws populate logical space, the domain comprising all simple properties and every complex property that embodies no contradiction.16 Uninstantiated properties exist, this implies, as possibilities: possibility is their mode of being, hence the claim that they exist ante rem.17 This modal Platonism has its complement in the idea that natural laws exist in rebus. For suppose a possible world is instantiated. Natural laws—its form—inhere within its actual states of affairs. Games are still a helpful analogue, if we compare one designed but not yet played to games that embody their rules when played. So, baseball was always a logical possibility, but now its rules constrain the brains, muscles, and nerves of its players. Where are natural laws? Where is their anchor in nature? Likely answers are restricted to material factors that have the effect of natural laws: they limit change. There is only one plausible candidate: namely, physical structures, hence dispositions that qualify structures for some relations rather than others.

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This suggestion recalls the ambiguity of founding dispositions in structures: are structures the material basis for dispositions that could change from moment to moment, or is their character fixed by the properties of their embedding structures? We infer an answer from nature’s stability, though same cause, same effect is the inductive generalization that provoked Hume. He described it as a generalization from the past into an unforeseeable future. Inductions could wander in any way, at any moment; it’s our good luck they don’t.18 But there is an explanation for stabilities we observe: suppose, as above, that dispositions qualifying structures for participation in a range of causal relationships are founded in the topological, geometrical, or dynamical properties of those structures: shape and velocity, for example. This, if correct, implies that natural laws are as stable as the current forms of motion, mass, and spacetime. What stabilizes them? We don’t know. xvi. Mutually affecting causes sometimes establish stable, reciprocal relations, hence systems and hierarchies of systems: The causal principle—a affects b—has a reciprocal when b affects a. Reciprocities are often ephemeral, people recoiling as each brushes past the other, for example. But sometimes, the give and take of reciprocity creates enduring causal relationships. Knowing and exploiting the negative feedback mechanisms that sustain relationships within viable bounds, we stabilize conversations and stop quarrels that would destroy a friendship. Systems are pervasive in nature. Quarks may be elementary in the respect that they embody no causal reciprocities, but quarks are always bound to one another within the protons and neutrons that are first-order systems. Atoms, molecules, and cells—higher-order systems—relate to other systems in either of four ways. First are systems that are mutually independent. Systems related in this way may sometimes affect one another, but the effect—however damaging or benign—is not the consequence of a stabilized reciprocity. Think of the fellow subway passenger who steps on a foot and stays there: the relationship and effect are sustained, but there is no reciprocity and no system. Second are systems that establish and stabilize reciprocal causal relations: atoms that bond as a molecule, the cells of a tissue, or people in a friendship. Third are the hierarchical relations established when a new system forms: its parts are lower-order; the new system is higher order. Fourth is the overlap that occurs when one of a system’s parts is shared with one or more other higher-order systems: the family, business, and friendships that share a member who participates in all of them. Notice that every higher-order system is constituted wholly of its parts; it differs from them in the single respect that it is created by their reciprocal relations. Those relations are responsible for properties that

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emerge with the formation of higher-order systems, as the properties of a triangle emerge when its sides are joined. A hierarchy of systems is, nevertheless, a construction, one that analysis resolves to its constituents and their relations.19 Reciprocity and systems it forms are well known to practical life, but philosophy and science often defer to the bias that makes relations accidental to the character of things related. They reduce relationships to their terms: Jack is taller than Jill, but the relation is incidental to both; neither is altered by it. Morality follows suite: we often abstract people from their circumstances to praise or blame them without regard for effects they suffered in relationships they couldn’t control. Yet things acting in ways appropriate to their roles in systems are sometimes rightly considered without regard to their partners: the batter advised to change his stance at the plate; a parent seeing her oculist. We consider a system’s reciprocal relations and corporate effects or one of the parts: all the family or one of its members. xvii. Systems have an inside and an outside, hence behavior under the direction of an internal regulator: Seeing my behavior modulated and directed by my thoughts and desires, expecting the same of others, I infer that they, too, have an inside and an outside: meaning, choice and control of their actions. Applications of this schema are nuanced in ways appropriate to things considered: apples have an inside that determines their behavior—when planted, for example—though they lack the control that comes with choice. Some things don’t have an inside. A Möbius strip is ambiguous in this respect, but games, discourse, and music are not: they have complexity, but not an inside. And, conversely, not everything with internal content has an outside: spacetime, for example. This principle incites people who enjoy taking things apart, though inquiry is deterred by inner complexity, or by having no access to the matters inside. Methodological quarrels among psychologists are often disputes about access: what should count as evidence of inner states, which theoretical terms and inferences does evidence justify? The core of the Sun is better known than the physiology of human brains. xviii. Systems evolve; each is a process, and each has a history. Systems form, stabilize, and dissipate; higher-order systems—cities and nation-states—achieve and sustain identity while changing continuously. The process may be brief (particles that disintegrate as quickly as they form) or extended (the lifespan of protons). The claims of history lived versus those of history written is often resolved in ways that favor the interpretive interests of the living. But the past isn’t altered by forgetting or redescribing it. No one imagines

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that geological history could be reduced to the interpretive interests of contemporary geologists. Why isn’t it equally foolish to suppose that personal history or the evolution of peoples, states, or living things can be remade by contriving a story suitable to a current interest? The present is an evolutionary expression of the past. This intrinsic dynamic—in continental plates, human institutions, or personal life—is obscured, not effaced by self-serving stories. Mythology may sometimes be good for morale—we’re better than we look—but it doesn’t quash factors that will evolve beyond their current expressions in ways that myths can only obscure. Should we suppress information about human evolution to celebrate our creation in the image of God? Or do we study the DNA of humans and close relatives to understand ourselves better? This inquiry is critical to the significance of human life. No interpretation cuts deeper. These eighteen principles are a disciplinary matrix. Framing our maps, plans, and hypotheses as they prescribe, we know, generically, where we are and what to look for. Most people use these principles many times a day, though physics has elaborated several in the controversial ways indicated. Four other principles have science as their principal sponsor: xix. Some phenomena are best described statistically or probabilistically. Practical affairs are largely restricted to assembling individual things in accord with a plan. But we do boil water, and we often estimate probabilities: how many bills, how much rain? The mechanics of gasses and traffic flow is statistical, because large populations have predictable corporate effects distinct from the behaviors of their constituents: individual cars lurch left or right, though traffic flow is the fact that concerns us. Or individual events are subordinated to frequencies and treated probabilistically, because the causes are unknown, because their complexity precludes advance knowledge of single events, or because random variations in individual behavior have a common effect. It doesn’t follow that frequencies—implying large samples—are always required for probability estimates. The size of the sample is incidental when, for example, a coin has equally weighted sides. Probability and statistics are joined in many of the phenomena studied by the sciences, but also when practical life is raised to the complexity of engineering. Imagine a flock of pigeons wheeling in flight. Individual birds regularly change their relative positions as the flock rises, twists, and dives, but the flock is coherent all the while. Its corporate property—a shape that is relatively stable despite the changing relative positions of individual birds—is statistical in the way of a heated gas pressing on the walls of a vessel. The likelihood that any single bird

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will move from one position to another or that the flock will veer one way or another is a topic for probability estimates. Engineers tracking enemy drones should study pigeons. xx. Nature is simple: all its qualitative differences express differences among a small set of variables and their relations, F=ma, for example. Reflecting on the information gathered by applying the principles surveyed above, we realize that the diversity of things and events may express a small set of variables. This isn’t a novel discovery: resolving myriad processes and properties to love and strife, or earth, air, fire, and water is an old program. Descartes refined it: discount apparent qualitative differences by showing that these are determinate values for a smaller set of geometrical variables. Think of nature as a simple machine, describe its design, then show that qualitative differences result from altering values for a small set of variables. This is the simplicity and homogeneity ascribed to nature. Neither quality is violated by hierarchies that generate new properties—of living spaces, life, or mind, for example. Their emergence is only the effect of relations, whether static relations among furnishings that create character in a previously empty room or the dynamic relations that bind atoms, molecules, or cells, people or their communities. Emergence is the expression of complexity, not the mysterious effect of new orders that somehow infuse their material conditions. xxi. The essential simplicity of natural relationships qualifies them for mathematical expression, hence the surmise that nature is exhaustively representable by interpreted mathematical equations. We refine the accuracy of hypotheses and reduce the apparent complexity of phenomena studied by showing that they instantiate a few quantifiable variables and relations. Many scientific results—the discovery of DNA, for example—are not expressed mathematically. But this principle expresses the surmise that nature is exhaustively mathematicizable: we speculate that an equation signifying the relationship of a small number of variables can represent nature’s complexities at any moment, and that such an equation might track nature’s evolution from its beginning. These are ambitions rather than achievements; the order of discovery is opposite the order of nature. Starting with mathematical formulae appropriate to distinct domains, we may integrate them—by way of the deductive relations familiar to mathematical proof—under higher order equations of greater generality. But this leading principle is no less potent if that aim is never achieved: mathematicizing phenomena is clarifying and empowering whether or not every such equation is deducible from a theory of everything.

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This leading principle is sometimes misconstrued: it does not imply that reality comprises only numbers or the functional relations of numbers. It affirms instead that each of a small number of properties is variable within a quantifiable range and that each variable relates to others within a stable range of variations. Mathematics expresses the quantitative values of these properties and functional relationships in deterministic, statistical, or probabilistic terms. Leading principles of two additional kinds—formal and moral— are also pertinent. Formal principles: Every leading principle satisfies formal criteria that include grammatical rules and the laws of logic. Grammar constrains the formation of sentences or equations in both natural and artificial languages: English and mathematics. No sentence or formula is meaningful, valid, or true if they are violated. The status of logical principles is less agreed. Are they conventions applicable to thought and language only? Or do they apply universally and necessarily to every state of affairs? Contemporary thinkers usually say that the principles of identity, noncontradiction, and excluded middle have no application beyond thought and language. But this is a recent persuasion, one often motivated by the persuasion that reality, itself, extends no farther than the limits of thought or consciousness. We may credit Descartes with this assumption, but he believed that God could have suspended the principle of noncontradiction, creating worlds in which it doesn’t apply.20 Kant’s remarks about general logic (distinguished from transcendental logic) are the more likely cause of logic’s constriction to syntax.21 Rethinking his crabbed view of reality is an opportunity to consider other accounts of logic. Leibniz, for example, thought that noncontradiction is the necessary condition for possibility; even God could not violate it.22 Morris Cohen naturalized this realist persuasion: The principle of contradiction . . . asserts something in regard to existence and not merely in regard to thought. . . . Logic may thus be viewed as the simplest chapter in ontology, as a study of the exhaustive possibilities of all being. Its laws are not derived from our intentions but express the fact that as regards determinate being or existence certain combinations are possible and others impossible. A world in which everything was possible, and nothing impossible, would be a chaos; and science and common practice cannot proceed without assuming a world in which definite or determinate relations are discoverable. From

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the laws of logic we cannot deduce any specific matters of fact; but, without assuming that the laws of logic are relevant to existence, no inquiry can be launched, much less concluded. Logic, indicates necessary, but not sufficient determinants of empirical existence.23 Aristotle remarked that we can’t suspend the principle of noncontradiction without contradicting ourselves: applying its negation—both a thought or sentence and its negation—entails that the principle both is and is not suspended.24 Yet, this implication doesn’t prove that noncontradiction has application beyond thought and language to things themselves. We confirm it does by starting from the principle of identity. It applies to everything that exists: everything is what it is, and not another thing.25 Each satisfies Butler’s dictum by virtue of its identity determining, constitutive properties, including its spatial and temporal position: every soup can is different from those having the same properties but other locations. Being what they are by virtue of their properties, such things cannot be other than themselves. The principle of noncontradiction incorporates the principle of identity, while expanding to affirm its entailment: not both the thing having this identity (these properties), and not this thing (a set of properties that differ from the first in respect to one or more members). The principle of excluded middle is also entailed: either a thing is constituted of these (its) properties or it has other properties and is not this thing. Critics object that no empirical evidence confirms that logical principles apply to the material world, though the evidence is overwhelming: identity is a material principle; everything satisfies the principle, nothing violates it because everything is what it is and not another thing. But is this inference too permissive? There is no evidence for spirits of all sorts; is that proof of their existence? It isn’t, because there is no separate justification for acknowledging them. We have a justification—Butler’s—for the principle of identity and its derivatives. A last objection might have come from Zeno: does identity’s material application entail that the universe should be static, perpetually stuck at its point of inception, because everything is what it is, and not another thing? Is change precluded, because nothing can gain or lose properties without losing its identity, thereby violating the three principles? Nothing in these principles bars change, though they entail that identity alters as properties are lost or acquired. We speculate—thinking of sufficient reason—that the dispositions and energy for every altered state are in the state previous: the properties constitutive of identity

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embody powers that resist or yield to change. Bread resists some knives, and yields to others. Hence: xxii. The principles of identity, noncontradiction, and excluded middle apply throughout nature. Some additional leading principles—look for proportion or transitivity, for example—are also counted as formal, though these, too, are material relations. So, symmetry is proportion, and confirmed hypotheses about the right hand easily translate into hypotheses about the left. Or—the Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen experiment26—we infer without experiment that either of two charges is positive, if we know the other is negative. Transitivity is a condition for continuity, and it, too, has material applications: knowing that A causes B, I reasonably do A if my goal is C caused by B. So, xxiii. Expect to find proportion and transitivity. Moral principles: Moral principles express the corporate intention of societies that regulate themselves to achieve equity and civil peace. Moral sense emerges in core systems—families and friendships, for example—before rules are formulated to govern relationships too complicated for individual decisions alone (traffic laws). We articulate these principles, and use them as directives: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” “Give everyone his or her due,” “Don’t trip elderly people carrying groceries.” A competing principle, “Serve (satisfy, save) yourself,” is also familiar, though practical reasons—cooperation and respect for others—mitigate its appeal. Every such moral principle has a consequentialist justification, though Kant argued that regard for allies or oneself is never an appropriate basis for moral choice: our rational nature obliges us to will no maxim that cannot be universalized without contradiction. Kant’s program is quixotic when every person is devoted to his or her self-interest or to the interest of partners in core systems. Someone committed to universalizable maxims may lament that these are primitive, tribal commitments, but prioritizing them—feeding one’s children while ignoring the neighbor’s children—is not demonstrably irrational or immoral. That behavior isn’t justifiable if the neighbor’s children starve while those at home are stuffed to bursting. But this is not typically so: most people’s resources are spread thin as they try to do justice to those for whom they are responsible. Which is our primary obligation: all humanity, or the set of core systems that is home to each of us? It may seem odd that moral principles—whatever their origin— were not listed with the fundamental leading principles. But those are categorial principles. Moral principles, with all the other more specific principles of practical life, are their more determinate expressions. So, “Give everyone his or her due” and “Do unto others as you would have

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them do unto you” instantiate causality and reciprocity. Showing that a moral principle is not an instance of one or another of the twentythree categorial principles would prove that the list is incomplete. VALUES Is inquiry biased by its leading principles? Motivating values—interests and aims—organize practical life and science, too. Do they infiltrate leading principles, corrupting their applications, distorting the information acquired when we engage other things? Each leading principle specifies considerations pertinent to itself, but none appraises or judges situations to which it applies. Some people do terrible things; the relevant principle only labels causes and effects. People having little or no freedom may enjoy their lives less, but this is a consequence of their circumstances, not the result of using this principle to specify them. Inquiry also has procedural values, including economy, consistency, coherence, the flexibility of plans, and the fertility of hypotheses. We apply these values when organizing maps or directing plans and experiments, because they enhance the prospects for success and truth. But self-critical and self-correcting, we are careful not to project them into the states of affairs studied or engaged. Reality is a phantasm, all its thinkable differences and relations shaped and colored by values, if fact and value are inextricably tangled.27 But are they mixed and joined as this implies? Inquiry and its leading principles are directives—spotlights—that anticipate significant differences in the ambient world. They discriminate, but don’t appraise; discriminating falsely, they are corrected. Fact’s entanglement with value is a charge appropriate to interpretation, not inquiry: it construes every relevant factual difference or relation in terms appropriate to valorizing attitudes. Inquiry is the sober antidote: distinguishing truth and utility from appraisal, it warns us not to conflate them. WHEN PRACTICAL LIFE AND SCIENCE DISAGREE The evolution of categorial leading principles is evidence that practical life takes instruction from science. Principles formulated for the purposes of one are reformulated or replaced because of discoveries by the other. But practical life is not supine to every scientific innovation. It, too, has reliable evidence of the ambient world. The next step requires more thought than we normally give it: is it sure that oddities physicists discover or infer (action at a distance, electrons that pop in and out of

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existence, the indeterminacy of particles between observations) oblige us to revise the leading principles of practical life? Truth is a divisive interest within inquiry. An end-in-itself for science, it has instrumental value for practical life. Both locate us in a world that inquiry affects, but does not make. Yet, their aims differ. One is satisfied if nature is known and accurately represented: its theories are true if satisfied by states of affairs they signify. The other directs our engagements with people and things that secure or satisfy us. Truth is an intrinsic good for science, but the accuracy of maps and the efficacy of plans is a utility for practical life. This difference sometimes justifies a difference in the leading principles used: correlation rather than causality, for example. Engineers exploit F=ma for practical reasons—when cars accelerate or corner—but its causal applications are incidental to correlations that provoked its discovery. This difference between science and practical life—neutral or engaged—is troubling when it sets them against one another. Truth wouldn’t be served if, for example, the principle of sufficient reason were qualified because physicists had explained and confirmed quantum indeterminacy, though their findings were rejected for want of evidence that there is indeterminacy in everyday experience. Disparities of this sort aren’t shocking: the empirical success of scientific theories and the technology they support justify believing that practical life is an island in a luminous sea. We don’t travel at the speed of light or suffer anomalies that characterize some quantum effects, so values assumed or crudely calculated in practical life safely ignore phenomena at either end of the spectrum: large and small. But quantum effects are puzzling. Spacetime may be discontinuous at bottom, like a film of water reduced to drops as it evaporates; sufficient reason may not apply at the scale where energy levels spontaneously rise or fall. But how could things of human scale be generated from conditions such as those? Practical thinkers don’t know, though we thank our good luck for living in prosaic, predictable circumstances. Aristotle supposed that everything, near and far, has the categorial features discerned close at hand, but he was unreasonably naïve. We half expect that leading principles confirmed at the scale of human experience may bend and give way when applied at the extremes; confidence in them is always tentative given the history of ideas superseded when science revises its claims and assumptions. Better science should enable us to correct distortions in leading principles formulated for the purposes of everyday life. But are we premature? Should we concede that leading principles confirmed at our intermediate scale have no application or merely a limiting one at the extremes of size, time, and distance? Practical life is

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not devoid of intelligence and information. It, too, tests natural processes engaged many times over the course of days and years. Thinking that directs practical inquiries may also be a reliable source of information about the world. Dogmatic affirmation of principles used successfully would be foolish; careful appraisal of the scientific alternatives is not. Why not look skeptically on revisions supported principally by unexplained anomalies, the various indeterminacies, for example? For it is odd that these anomalies are discovered using apparatus whose construction and use are directed by determinist principles quantum theory would revise. There are, for example, no indeterministic sensors: one couldn’t distinguish the sensors’ random effects from quantum effects they would be used to detect. Hence this question: which side should capitulate when science and practice disagree? Practical life should and does yield to arguments and information sufficient to alter its assumptions. It should yield to an ample theory that explains the quantum anomalies observed while showing that the apparent determinacies of middle- and large-scale phenomena are generated from the indeterminacies of the small. It needn’t yield short of having that theory. Everyday experience may be systematically misleading. The leading principles it seems to vindicate may be false to the world at large, however effective the actions they direct. But conceding this is premature short of a theory that explains the exceptions to familiar leading principles. Many of the slogans that denigrate practical experience for being myopic—action at a distance, the indeterminacy of untested particles, something from nothing, large-scale determinism from quantum indeterminacy—fail this test. Aggregation—the standard explanation—doesn’t explain the transformation from indeterminacy to determinacy: particles that lack determinate properties don’t acquire them by virtue of being tightly packed, unless we add that each is a measure of the others, hence always determinate, because of their perpetual interactions. There is rude and reliable integrity to practical life and its findings. It makes little difference to practice that our leading principle is geocentric or heliocentric: one can use either to organize the day’s business. It is more consequential that Earth is round rather than flat, but the latter assumption, too, is viable for people remote from the edge. More subtle material conflicts—those of quantum mechanics and relativity theory—are also incidental to practical life, but vastly significant for the leading principles that direct it. For the phenomena alleged by quantum theory, especially, are strange and exceptional. We could reformulate those principles, conceding that folk ontology isn’t likely to be more accurate than folk psychology. But what changes should we

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make; better, what evidence justifies them? For what do we know of the conditions for odd correlations at a distance? How well do we understand the quantum vacuum and its ways of generating particles? There may yet be theories that locate anomalous data or ideas within ample explanatory networks. Why is practical life derided as stubborn and stupid merely for demanding that there be such theories before endorsing every idea mooted by physicists or their journalist interpreters? Does quantum indeterminacy presuppose that there are multiple possible worlds represented by the probabilities of the Schrödinger equation? Is it true that esse est percipi, so every such possibility takes life because perceived by a mind or minds whose only task is apprehending it?28 Quantum anomalies will be vindicated in more responsible ways when an experimentally verified theory has explained them. They are currently unexplained. Why do we require a theory? Because anomalies discovered by experiment or implied by statistical theories invite explanation. Are they artifacts of theory or experiment, or features of reality? Is it sure that we don’t have such theories? Yes, it is. Complementarity, for example, is a word signifying an observed difference: particle or wave. It doesn’t explain the difference, and doesn’t pretend to explain it. Emphasizing the word affirms a philosophic doctrine—operationalism—which avers that there is and need be no explanation for or resolution of experimental differences: we merely specify the operations that expose them. This is a halfway house, one having precedents, a notion about mind’s relation to body, for example. Here, too, a word—parallelism—signified an observed difference and regularity without explaining it. But parallelism is lame now that mind’s activities—all but the awareness of qualitative data such as color and sound— are shown to be the activities of physical systems, including living bodies and some machines. A word once proposed as a theory is now perceived for the empty shell it was. Why do such words seem sufficient? One reason is the difficulty of replacing them with detailed and systematic, empirically confirmed theories that explain—rather than report—phenomena signified by their words. A different reason is the philosophic climate since Descartes, Locke, and Kant. Descartes made all of us skeptical: what can we validly claim to know rather than believe? He made error costly, and belief conservative: we don’t speculate. Locke taught us to live within the ample swathe of sensory experience: enjoy the data we have when their causes—real essences—are unknowable. Kant dispensed with the unknowable, but promised an experience laced with stabilities guaranteed by categories and schemas that differentiate and organize sensory

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data. We inherit their emphases: skepticism, experience, and rules or procedures for producing a reliable, rationally accountable experience. Now consider Bridgman’s operationalism, the doctrine that the meaning of a sentence is the method of its verification.29 Complementarity and parallelism are exactly the stripped-down claims that Bridgman commended. Dispensing with abductive hypotheses, they report the results of experiment and infer that the processes or entities observed are different because of a difference in the procedures for observing them: waves or particles, introspectable mental events or neural activity. But engineering (computers and robots), cognitive psychology, and physiology violate operationalist scruples by using different techniques to confirm that mental activities are exclusively physical. The categorial difference once ascribed to mind and body was a fantasy. Let physicists resolve their anomalies by seating them in a comparable theory. Philosophy inhibits speculations required to create such a theory, because the skepticism that terrifies us discourages the abductive thinking that might create it. We are fond of saying that there are, in principle, an infinity of possible conditions for any effect; better not to waste time speculating about them when science can use its equations to represent and predict observable effects. But is this true: are we lost in the conceptual woods when trying to explain or control every phenomenon? Do dentists throw up their hands when patients complain of toothaches: so many things they could be? Why is practice efficient, if every symptom may have so many possible causes? Plumbers, chimney sweeps, dentists, and surgeons don’t do curve-fitting. Given an effect, they locate its likely cause within a map that represents the salient terrain. Physics is conceptually and experimentally harder, but there, too, the likely or plausible conditions for phenomena are relatively few. What should we do while waiting for this ample and deeply explanatory physical theory: abandon well-established leading principles because of unexplained experimental results or cringe each time a physicist remarks that the principles are artifacts of “classical”—antiquated— thinking? Science typically overcomes every conceptual objection when experimental results are grounded in systematic theory. But sometimes— when no theory of that quality is available—passivity in the face of its onslaught is a mistake. Practical life, too, is evidence of nature’s constraining principles. Thinking bodies engage other things, learn, consider, and refine principles that shape processes and relations in the near world. Such things may come to be perceived as limiting expressions of principles that operate within nature at large. But practical life is not always deluded. Someone who challenges the many (sometimes wild) readings of quantum theory is not the pre-Copernican farmer who stands

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in his fields, stubbornly affirming that Earth is flat. The dialectical refinements of principles learned in practical experience—determinate values for all properties, causal determinism, no action at a distance— are at very least a challenge to the shallow readings of anomalies that contravene the principles. Nature may be as strange as quantum effects suggest, but nothing alleged to this point enables us to understand how that might be. A physicist colleague observes that “quantum reality is very odd; quantum physicists have learned to think in the odd ways it confirms.” This is not so different from using a white cane effectively while being unable to describe the things encountered. Einstein was derided for being stubborn. He didn’t believe that principles justified experimentally and dialectically are properly neglected. Physicists who ignore dialectical considerations and philosophers wowed by physics adore the exceptions and ignore the vastly greater evidence for the disputed principles. Both capitulated to action at a distance, until that violation of sufficient reason proved mistaken. Neither explains the anomaly of principles that work in the large but not in the small. This isn’t to say that Einstein was right merely because he was prudent. Our understanding of significant leading principles may be mistaken: the reductio above may disguise an error; sufficient reason may not obtain universally. But we require, if this is so, a conceptualization that justifies new principles while subordinating or explaining away the old ones. That conceptualization would embody, ideally, a model that tells how the observed anomalies occur, not only that they occur. General relativity describes the structure of spacetime and gravity in ways that explain phenomena it correctly predicts. Quantum theory doesn’t do as much. CATEGORIAL FORM Metaphysics describes the categorial features of things while proposing to integrate those features within an account of nature’s categorial form.30 Practical life and science provide most of the details. Metaphysics surveys their sometimes fragmentary results before suggesting alternative ways to integrate them. Shrinking from excesses that make interpretation dramatic and appealing, it says yes to imagination, but no to slogans and fantasy. For Western metaphysics guards its autonomy after centuries when it deferred to Church authority. Political and cultural regimes have also demanded that philosophy abase itself, though metaphysics—or the idea of it—is incorruptible because nature’s categorial form is unaffected by any story interpreters propose. That design may be fixed or fluid—it may evolve—but either way, inquiry, not interpretation,

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is the method for discerning it. Leading principles are critical to the task, because these are hypotheses or innate heuristics repeatedly confirmed as we use them as rules directing practice, theory formation, and experiment. The positivists who reviled metaphysics needn’t have looked far to discover evidence of its persistent effect on our understanding of the world and our place there. For leading principles—rules that direct inquiry—are, collectively, our best estimate of nature’s categorial features. How close are we to having a comprehensive theory of categorial form? We are near if the anomalies of quantum theory can be resolved within a “classical” theory; far if leading principles formulated for middlesized things radically mislead us about the character of elementary particles and, by implication, middle- and large-sized things comprising them. Yet, the leading principles we have—principles detailed above— direct successful inquiries at all scales: mind is only material; there are no entelechies, no final causes; nature is an array of systems established by the reciprocal relations of their parts. Should we infer that the principles are merely enabling, so these results are all the content metaphysics could have or want. A cogent answer distinguishes two sources of information: leading principles and the processes and laws discovered by practical life and science. Leading principles are very general hypotheses that function as inquiry-directing rules. They are more general than the laws and other material claims formulated and tested by applying them. General relativity, for example, is claim of great generality. No hypothesis is more consequential for categorial form, or for the many inquiries that discover values for its variables in more specialized domains. Integrating gravity, mass, and motion with spacetime makes it a radical conceptual advance in metaphysics. But general relativity is less general than the leading principles of categorial form: it supplies values for several of the categorial leading principles, including sufficient reason and the principle that space time is continuous, its positions mutually accessible. Hence this distinction: Categorial form comprises nature’s most general organizing principles. The metaphysics of nature is more concrete. It includes both categorial form and a characterization of its specific but still general expressions: not only spacetime but a specification of our world’s distinguishing spacetime, not only cause and effect, but specificity regarding energy and its transmission, not only hierarchy but the complexity that emerges with life and mind. A metaphysical theory devoted only to the specification of categorial leading principles is partial but not empty or useless. It invites analogy to the difference between an architect’s sketch and a blueprint: one roughs out a structure’s form while anticipating none of the texture and

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detail provided by the other. My inventory of leading principles has three merits: it cites principles used in practical life and science, its principles are amply confirmed, and the principles together are a coherent model of the reality known to practical life and most sciences. These three advantages are also significant in a fourth way: they lay down conditions for a substitute model, one that integrates the discoveries of quantum theory with those of practical life and other sciences. It, too, should be a coherent specification of nature’s categorial features, and it, too, should supply viable directives to practical life and other sciences. Resolution will come with a theory that integrates spacetime and motion as described by general relativity with the quantum vacuum and particles it generates. That theory will incorporate the quantum anomalies, dissolving whatever paradoxes they imply. Or it will purge them because information about unknown dimensions, strings, or fields vindicates most or all of the disreputable classical notions, the leading principles cited above. It will explain the smooth emergence of the middle-sized phenomena of practical life and the larger ones of cosmology while invoking these or other empirically tested principles. Having neither version—anomalies made reasonable or eliminated—we mark time.

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Afterword

Inquiry uses leading principles as reliable probes: nature has yielded to them in the past; we test again to see the effects. Interpretation is more equivocal. It uses principles confirmed in everyday practice, because they are hard to deny and because principal interpretations commend themselves by locating the needs and interests of ordinary people within a narrative that makes sense of human life. Religions valorize life; social-political ideologies describe the history and structure of circumstances from which they will redeem it. A meaning-bestowing narrative is more credible if its structure exhibits relationships—cause and effect, part and whole—prefigured by leading principles. These two—interpretation and inquiry—are oil and water; they resist amalgamation lest something essential to both be compromised. Interpretation satisfies attitudes, not logic or the demand for testability. Like an opera cobbled together from several librettos, it tells a story that often violates continuity, causation, contradiction, and identity. People in the audience don’t care that myth and magic are mock explorations: they want vivid images and strong feelings. Inquiry is the sober witness. It may be true that no one wants the unvarnished truth about himself or his situation, but inquiry isn’t trying to reconcile us to all that is dismal in life. Its aim is consistent from practical life through science to metaphysics: enhance well-being or understanding by discovering and describing the character of other things and ourselves. Is this too scrupulous an aim? That would explain the urgency of interpretation: make more of us than we are. Philosophy is the soggy ground where interpretation and inquiry struggle for allegiance and belief. Their strategies are inverted. Interpretation tells gratifying stories, then spreads the news so that social suasion makes criticism dangerous: challenge an interpretation—How would we determine that this claim is true?—and the response is more likely anger than evidence. Inquiry starts unpretentiously in the reactions and 173

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initiatives that sustain life by securing or satisfying us. It assembles maps of the nearby ambient world, then theories that explain the phenomena observed. The narrative affirmed is ever more comprehensive, because technology and imagination extend the range of testable hypotheses. Inquiry justifies conviction, never dogmatism. Ask for evidence of its claims, and the response is specific and nuanced: confidence is moderate, high, or low. There are procedural values and discipline but no rituals, significant works but no holy books, people of great achievement but no seers. Inquiry convinces by the power of its method, not by the force of psychological or political power. Its great buildings are laboratories and libraries, not places of incantation or revelation. This difference has truth as its focus. What is truth? How is it achieved? Interpretation promotes truths validated by intense feelings. It declares stories true because they gratify us or because we have power sufficient to require that others believe as we do. Squadrons of thinkers affirm that truth is protean: truth for you given your attitudes and beliefs, truth for me given mine. Laissez-faire and freedom collaborate to justify any truth one cares to affirm. We conflate inquiry with interpretation after ignoring the difference between stories that square with attitudes and hypotheses tested by evidence. Inquiry is reality-testing. No one survives without it, but no one lives well without prizing him or herself and the associations that give purpose to life. Interpretations that express this valorizing aim may be ascetic or baroque, portentous or spare. Does one prefer an interpretation consistent with the hypotheses inquiry formulates and confirms, or one that ignores them? Philosophy once argued that this decision is a measure of character: grasp the solace interpretations provide, or embrace the evidence that we are fallible, contingent, and ephemeral. Refusing the choice, imperfectly coherent, we do both.

Notes INTRODUCTION 1. Glifford Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 5. 2. Significance as value or valorization is distinct from significance as E. D. Hirsch, Jr., describes it: “any perceived relationships between construed verbal meaning and something else.” E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), p. 140. 3. Ibid., passim. 4. Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 201. 5. Charles Sanders Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief,” in Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols. v–vi, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935), vol. v, paras. 5.377–5.387, pp. 233–247. 6. Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, in On the Improvement of the Understanding, The Ethics, Correspondence, trans. R. H. M. Elwes (New York: Dover, 1955), prop. X, pp. 252–254. 7. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s, 1965), pp. 142–143. 8. Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief,” paras. 5.365–5.369, pp. 226–229. 9. David Weissman, Lost Souls: The Philosophic Origins of a Cultural Dilemma (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2003), pp. 81–92. 10. See Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 11. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1987), p. 355.

ONE. TWO STYLES OF EXPLANATION: INTERPRETATION AND INQUIRY 1. See Ernest Nagel, The Structure of Science (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961), pp. 473–502.

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2. Plato, The Republic, trans. Francis M. Cornford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945), pp. 18–21; Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. George Bull (New York: Penguin, 2005). 3. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 74, 87, 149. 4. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (New York: Harper, 1967), pp. 514–589. 5. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage, 1973). 6. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1973), pp. 236–243, 344–387. 7. Rudolf Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World, trans. Rolf A. George (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969); W. V. O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960), pp. 65–72, 272, n. 2. 8. Rudolf Carnap, “On Some Concepts of Pragmatics,” Philosophical Studies, vol. 6, no. 6, December 1955, pp. 89–91. 9. Kant, Critique of Judgment, pp. 16–17, n. 18. 10. John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty, ed. Jo Ann Boydson (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), p. 70. 11. John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, ed. Jo Ann Boydson (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), p. 122. 12. Ibid., p. 524. 13. Ibid., p. 177. 14. See Ernest Nagel’s introduction to Dewey’s Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, pp. xix–xx. 15. G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield, eds., The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 411. 16. David Weissman, The Cage: Must, Should, and Ought from Is (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2006), pp. 26–31, 36–37. 17. Plato, Meno, in Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New York: Pantheon, 1961), 97b–99a, pp. 381–382. 18. Charles Sanders Peirce, “Pragmatism—the Logic of Abduction,” in Collected Papers, vol. v., paras. 5.171–174, pp. 105–107. Notice that abduction contains, as a fragment of itself, a style of thinking— deduction—that has a history and applications different from the concerns of this book. Abductive inferences explain the data provoking them by citing alleged constituents, causes, or other conditions (laws, for example) for the phenomena explained. Testing an abduction requires deducing a specification of effects that would obtain were it true. Anticipated effects may be derived from one, several, or many assumptions, each redescribed for the purposes of deduction as an axiom or premise. Deduction’s emphases—consistency, validity, and its rules of inference—are well known. Its origins are more obscure, though its inspiration could have been an analysis of abductive arguments, especially their second step. Plato distrusted geometrical demonstrations, because their premises were declared, not proven. His objection was averted by showing that its axioms are necessary truths, hence another reason for deduction’s alleged integrity as an a priori discipline. My suggestion warrants a different explanation for the alleged deficiency

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of deduction’s premises: abductions are explanatory hypotheses; their truth is measured by effects they predict, not by proving that they are necessary truths. 19. Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 34. 20. Ibid., p. 36. Also see Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos (New York: Bantam, 1984), pp. 225–226: “One of the reasons for the opposition between the ‘two cultures’ may have been the belief that literature corresponds to a conceptualization of reality, to ‘fiction,’ while science seems to express objective ‘reality.’ Quantum mechanics teaches us that the situation is not so simple. On all levels reality implies an essential element of conceptualization.” Yes, but their conceptual styles and aims are different. 21. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation, p. 68. 22. Ibid., p. 216. 23. Ibid., p. 64. 24. Ibid., pp. 61–66. 25. Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory (New York: Seabury, 1982), pp. 264–272. 26. See Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad, 1955), pp. 153–154. 27. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, trans. Peter Preuss (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1980). 28. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Geneaology of Morals and Ecce Home, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1969), pp. 120–136. 29. Ibid., pp. 73–200. 30. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1991), pp. 59–65.

TWO. INTERPRETATION: SELF AND SOCIETY 1. See John Bowlby, Attachment, second ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1982); and M. Ainsworth and J. Bowlby, “An Ethological Approach to Personality Development,” American Psychologist, vol. 46, no. 4, 1991, pp. 333–341. 2. See Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (New York: Routledge, 2004). 3. Ignoring this point is a principal failure of the empiricism that derives from Berkeley and Hume. Esse est percipi (something is as thought or perceived) would preclude us from explaining or even acknowledging these psychic formations, though interpretation is most potent—individually and within societies at large—when unacknowledged. Hume does notice these effects, ascribing them to habit. But they should be invisible to him, given his assumptions that all ideas derive from impressions, and that there is no power to infer from something perceived to its otherwise unknown cause or ground. 4. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 2: Mythical Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955). 5. David Weissman, Eternal Possibilities: A Neutral Ground for Meaning and Existence (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977), pp. 17–56.

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6. Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Edification and Awakening, trans. A. Hannay (New York: Penguin, 1989), pp. 60–61. 7. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 3: The Phenomenology of Knowledge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957); Rudolf Carnap, “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology,” in Semantics and the Philosophy of Language, ed. Leonard Linsky (Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1966), pp. 31–33; Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 257–275. 8. Quine, Word and Object, p. 11. 9. “To be is to be the value of a bound variable.” W. V. O. Quine, “On What There Is,” in From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), pp. 13–15. 10. Quine, Word and Object, pp. 9–13. 11. W. V. O. Quine, Theories and Things (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1981), p. 25. 12. Ulrich Gahde and Wolfgang Stegmuller, “An Argument in Favor of the Duhem-Quine Thesis: from the Structuralist Point of View,” in The Philosophy of W. V. O. Quine, ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn and Paul Arthur Schilpp, (Chicago and La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1986), p. 118. 13. Quine, Word and Object, p. 22. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., pp. 22–23. 16. Ibid., pp. 24–25. 17. Ibid., p. 23. 18. See W. V. O. Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), pp. 26–68. 19. W. V. O. Quine, Pursuit of Truth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 18.

THREE. INQUIRY: PRACTICAL LIFE AND SCIENCE 1. Plato, Phaedo, in Collected Dialogues, 65a–65d, pp. 47–48. 2. See Ronald N. Giere, Scientific Perspectivism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 3. See, for example, René Descartes, Meditations, in Discourse on the Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, ed. David Weissman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 58–63. 4. Weissman, Intuition and Ideality (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1987), pp. 109–156. 5. See Drew Khlentzos, Naturalistic Realism and the Antirealist Challenge (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2004). 6. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 180–187. 7. Weissman, Eternal Possibilities, pp. 237–290. 8. Weissman, Intuition and Ideality, pp. 88–95; and Truth’s Debt to Value (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 160–169.

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9. Weissman, Truth’s Debt to Value, pp. 226–260, 272–285. 10. Bertrand Russell, “On Denoting,” in Logic and Knowledge, ed. Robert C. Marsh (London: Macmillan, 1964), pp. 39–56. 11. Quine, Word and Object, pp. 5–8. 12. Charles Sanders Peirce, “Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man,” in Collected Papers, vol. v, paras. 5.234–236, 5.257, pp. 146, 152. 13. Quine, Word and Object, p. 23. 14. See Michael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (Chicago: Open Court, 2000). 15. Tom Rockmore, “Interpretation as Historical, Constructivism, and History,” Metaphilosophy, vol. 31, nos. 1–2, January 2000, p. 185. 16. Ibid., p. 186. 17. Ibid., p. 197. 18. Ibid., p. 196. 19. Ibid., p. 189. 20. Ibid., p. 198. 21. Joseph Margolis, “Relativism and Interpretive Objectivity,” Metaphilosophy, vol. 31, nos. 1–2, January 2000, pp. 207–208. 22. J. J. Gibson, “The Information Contained in Light,” Acta Psychologica, Amsterdam, vol. 17, January 1960, pp. 23–30. 23. Margolis, “Relativism and Interpretive Objectivity,” p. 210. 24. Rockmore, “Interpretation as Historical, Constructivism, and History,” p. 193. 25. Ibid., p. 188. 26. Margolis, “Relativism and Interpretive Objectivity,” p. 213. 27. Ibid., p. 218. 28. Kant, Critique of Judgment, p. 16, n. 18. 29. Error is awkward for every Kantian, because it implies a mind out of step with itself: how else to explain the incoherence of its constructions? Marx, writing in another context, explained this embarrassment with an aside: “this is characteristic of the philosophic consciousness—for which conceptual thinking is the real human being, and for which the conceptual world as such is thus the only reality.” Marx, Grundrisse, p. 101. 30. Quine, Word and Object, pp. 31–46. 31. Weissman, Intuition and Ideality, pp. 157–196. 32. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 297–570. 33. John Dewey, “The Reflex Arc in Psychology,” Psychological Review, 3, 1896, pp. 357–370. 34. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); Pierre Duhem, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, trans. Philip P. Wiener (New York: Atheneum, 1962), pp. 295–298. 35. Morris Cohen, The Faith of a Liberal (New York: Henry Holt, 1946), p. 411. 36. Ibid., p. 412.

180

Notes to Chapters Four, Five and Six

FOUR. A DISPUTED QUESTION 1. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press), 1953, pp. 129–160. 2. Plato, Republic, pp. 227–235. 3. Descartes, Meditations, pp. 58–70. 4. Quine, Word and Object, p. 12. 5. William James, “The Will to Believe,” in The Writings of William James, ed. John J. McDermott (New York: Modern Library, 1968), pp. 717–735. 6. Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World, pp. 98–121; Quine, Word and Object, pp. 1–25; Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History, pp. 134–135; Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. 141. 7. Carnap, “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology,” pp. 208–228; Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 162–175; René Descartes, Rules for the Direction of the Mind, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, ed. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 12–56. 8. See, for example, the theological disputes chronicled in Amos Funkenstein’s Theology and the Scientific Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).

FIVE. IMAGINATION 1. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 142–144. 2. Weissman, Eternal Possibilities, pp. 131–132; The Cage, pp. 26–31. 3. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 165

SIX. LEADING PRINCIPLES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 113–114. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, p. 11. Ibid., pp. 14–15. Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief,” paras. 5.377–5.381, pp. 233–238. Aristotle, Metaphysics, in Basic Works, 1028a10–1041b33, pp. 783–

811. 6. Marshall Spector, Concepts of Reduction in Physical Science (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978). 7. Bertrand Russell, “On Order in Time,” in Logic and Knowledge, ed. Robert C. Marsh (London: Macmillan, 1964), pp. 347–363. 8. Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna (London: Penguin, 1991), pp. 534–549.

Notes to Chapter Six

181

9. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, pp. 635–636. 10. G. W. V. Leibniz, Monadology, in Monadology and Other Philosophical Essays, trans. Paul Schrecker and Anne Martin Schrecker (Indianapolis, Ind.: 1965), pp. 153–154. 11. John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, 33 vols., ed. J. M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963–1991), vol. vii, p. 391. 12. J. S. Bell, Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 14–21. 13. It is, nevertheless, odd that an assumption violating the principle of sufficient reason—unexplained “natural,” uniform rectilinear motion—is a presupposition for every calculation that explains deviations from rectilinearity. Energy exchange or inhibition—efficient causation—seems to be condition for every change of motion. Why are there no extrinsic conditions for rectilinear motion? A standard response is that the idea of uniform rectilinear motion is a postulate required for Galilean explanations of motion, not a principle that specifies an actual physical condition for motion. A different answer describes the postulated rectilinear trajectories as the shortest distances in this worlds’ dynamic and geometrized spacetime, but this suggestion only defers the question: what is the material, generating ground—the sufficient condition—for such motions? Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, pp. 177– 178, considers historical and methodological justifications for the assumption. 14. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, p. 172. 15. David Weissman, “Dispositions as Geometrical-Structural Properties,” Review of Metaphysics, vol. xxxii, no. 2, December 1978, pp. 75–97; Weissman, The Cage, pp. 41–50. 16. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), para. 1.13, p. 7. 17. Weissman, Eternal Possibilities, pp. 8, 57–107. 18. Nelson Goodman, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, third edition (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1973), pp. 59–83. 19. Weissman, A Social Ontology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 54–64. 20. Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 291–294. 21. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 93–94. 22. Liebniz, Monadology, p. 155. 23. Morris R. Cohen, Studies in Philosophy and Science (New York: Henry Holt, 1949), pp. 150–151. 24. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1005b12–20, pp. 736–737. 25. Joseph Butler, Sermons, in British Moralists: 1650–1800, ed. D. D. Raphael (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1991), para. 384, p. 335. 26. A. Einstein, B. Podolsky, and N. Rosen, “Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?” Physical Review, 47, 1935, pp. 777–780.

182

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27. Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 28–45. 28. See David Albert, Quantum Mechanics and Experience (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 128–129. 29. Percy Bridgman, The Logic of Modern Physics (New York: Macmillan, 1927). 30. David Weissman, Hypothesis and the Spiral of Reflection (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1989), pp. 17–61; Weissman, The Cage, pp. 9–23.

Index

Abduction, 14–19, 70–71, 149, 170, 178n18 Absolute, 98, 105 Addiction, 24 Advertising, 60, 114 Aesthetics, 20–21, 29–32, 34, 85, 112, 119–122, 130, 131 Affiliation, 37–38 Agents, 105, 130, 139–143, 155–158 Aggregation, 106, 169, 175 Aims. See Objectives Albert, David, 183n28 Analogy, 121–122 Aquinas, Thomas, 150 Aristotle, 18–19, 49, 141, 147; categorial forms of, 109, 128, 168; on causality, 145, 149, 150, 152; Descartes and, 158; Metaphysics, 134; on noncontradiction, 164; on potentiality, 156–158; primary substances of, 105, 107, 143, 156; quiddities of, 73 Art. See Aesthetics Atoms, 18, 68, 71, 104–108, 134, 140–141, 154, 158–160. See also Quantum theory Atomism, 105–107, 110, 129–130, 137 Atran, Scott, 177n10 Attitudes, 3–4, 19–24, 37–43, 45– 60, 110, 120, 123, 175; anxiety and, 67; ideals and, 95; pertinent, 32–33; preferences and, 64–65;

realistic, 114; truth and, 76–77, 81, 176; valorizing, 27–28, 91, 95, 97–98, 167. See also Interpretation(s) Augustine of Hippo (saint), 35, 105 Authority, 12–14, 43–44, 54–55, 58, 73, 98, 122–123, 168 Automobiles, 114, 167 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 115 Baseball: fans of, 3, 35–37, 59; rules of, 60, 118, 131, 158–159. See also Games Behaviorism, 156, 157 Belief(s), 2, 65, 123, 175–176; William James on, 59, 100; magical, 57–58; Charles Peirce on, 4; testability of, 64; truth of, 21–23, 39, 113, 176. See also Values Bell, John Stewart, 146, 154 Berkeley, George, 26, 28, 29, 49, 179n3; Hume and, 155–156; Kant and, 60–61; skepticism of, 71, 74; spacetime and, 137 Bias. See Prejudice Big Bang theory, 75 Black holes, 74, 75 Body language, 112 Bohr, Niels, 71 Bonaventure (saint), 113 Brain. See Neuroscience Bridgman, Percy, 170

183

184

Index

Bundle theory, 140 Butler, Joseph, 164–165 Carnap, Rudolf, 10, 61, 64, 83, 93, 98 Cassirer, Ernst, 57–58, 61, 64, 83, 93 Categorial forms, 5, 109, 128, 166, 168, 172–173 Causality, 73, 106, 121, 123, 127, 142–155, 171; Aristotle on, 128, 145, 149, 150, 152; degrees of freedom in, 153–154; Descartes on, 145; Hume on, 129–130, 144–147, 152, 155–156; Leibniz on, 144; reciprocity and, 159–160, 175; regularities and, 158–159; rules and, 118–119, 164–166 Cells, 104–107, 134, 144, 145, 158, 160 Chapelier law, 107 Choice, 96, 153, 156 Cognition, 45, 47, 86, 94, 113, 157 Cognitive psychology, 157, 170 Cohen, Morris R., 96, 164 Coherence, 5, 48, 92, 166; identity and, 50, 76–78; schemas of, 9; truth and, 82 Colors, 73, 74, 81–83, 87, 127, 130, 153 Communitarianism, 103–104, 109 Complementarity, 169–170 Complexity, 161 Conceptualization, 110–111, 171–172 Consciousness, 99, 105, 141, 163 Consistency, 7, 12, 36, 73, 76, 89, 92, 166 Constructivism, 83, 86–91, 117–121, 181n29 Context, 45–51, 67–73, 160–161 Continuity, 139–141, 165 Contradiction. See Noncontradiction Contrariety, 22–23, 29–31, 129 Cooperation, 37–38, 40, 43, 50, 130, 176 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 29, 79, 83, 85, 89

Correlation, 49–50, 144–149, 153, 155 Counterfactuals, 79, 156–157 Covariation, 144 Creationism, 2, 75–76, 123 Critical theory, 32–33 Damon, Johnny, 36–37 Deconstruction, 50, 98. See also Postmodernism Deduction, 15, 60–61, 70, 82, 87, 99, 117–118, 151–152, 178n18 Democracy, 39–44 Democritus, 105, 107 Derivation, order of, 126 Derrida, Jacques, 179n2, 181n1 Descartes, René, 34–35, 63, 65, 97, 107, 162–163; on agency, 142– 143; Aristotle and, 158; on causality, 145; clear and distinct ideas of, 117, 129; Kant and, 99– 101; Meditations, 13, 17, 68, 99–100; Plato and, 93, 111; realism of, 86–87, 90; Rules for the Direction of the Mind, 151– 152; skepticism of, 17, 68, 71–74, 85, 170; substantial forms and, 134–135 Desire, 10, 40, 91, 102 Detective stories, 79 Dewey, John, 2–3; on ideology, 43; on inquiry, 10–12; on reflex arc, 94 Dialectics, 2, 109–113, 148 Discipline, 62–64, 95–96, 122–123, 152 Dispositions, 155–157, 159 Disquotationalism, 50, 81–83 Diversity, 43, 64–65, 134–135 DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), 73, 75, 157, 163 Doubt. See Skepticism Duhem, Pierre, 63, 181n34 Einstein, Albert, 14, 16, 68, 165, 171

Index Emergence, 108–109, 162 Emotivism, 64 Epistemology, 50, 83–84, 97, 135– 136, 148; Bonaventure, 113; foundationalist, 84, 157; Kant’s, 83–86, 91, 97; Rockmore’s, 83–91 Error, 13, 29, 50, 81, 100, 123; constructivism and, 90–91, 181n29; heresy and, 54 Euclidean space, 138 Evolution, 29, 36, 75–76, 94, 123, 144, 161, 167 Excluded middle, 118, 119, 163–165 Exegesis, 33 Facts, 125–126; attitudes and, 24; inquiry and, 32, 104, 111; values and, 2–3, 7, 45, 56–57, 167 Faith, 9, 37, 48–49, 54, 58–60, 113–114, 121 Fantasy, 58–60, 95, 114, 138. See also Imagination Fear, 20, 49, 65, 67 Feedback mechanisms, 159 Food and Drug Administration (FDA), 43 Foucault, Michel, 2–3, 10, 25 Foundationalism, 84, 157 Freedom, 105, 110, 153–154, 166, 176; Cohen on, 96; Nietzsche on, 34; Quine on, 62 French Revolution, 107 Freud, Sigmund, 18, 33, 60, 65, 95 Friedman, Michael, 181n14 Friendship, 37, 41, 106, 159, 160, 165–166 Funkenstein, Amos, 182n8, 183n13 Gahde, Ulrich, 180n12 Galileo, 148, 183n13 Games, 2–3, 35, 118, 120–122, 159–161. See also Baseball Geertz, Clifford, 1 Gender identity, 37, 47, 48, 60, 114 Generalization, 14–16, 70, 117, 121, 149, 159

185

Gibson, J. J., 88 Giere, Ronald N., 180n2 Goodman, Nelson, 183n18 Grammar. See Syntax Habits, 158 Hammerstein, Oscar, II, 20 Health, 48 Hegel, G. W. F., 9, 31, 87, 98, 109– 110 Heresy, 54 Hermeneutics, 33, 83, 90–91 Hierarchies, 103–109, 125, 134, 148, 158–162 Hirsch, E. D., Jr., 30–31, 177n2 History, 28, 121, 161, 175; Cohen on, 96–97; Nietzsche on, 33–34; Rockmore on, 85 Holism, 105–107, 110; Margolis on, 86, 90; Quine on, 61–62, 81 Humanities, 7–8, 109–113, 179n20 Hume, David, 17, 49, 179n3; Berkeley and, 155–156; bundle theory of, 140; on causality, 129– 130, 144–147, 152, 155–156; on generalization, 159; Kant and, 14, 25, 26, 130, 157; on norms, 38; skepticism of, 14, 17, 71–72, 156; spacetime and, 137; on sufficient reason, 148–152; Treatise of Human Nature, 128–130, 140 Hurricane Katrina, 47 Hypotheses, 1–5, 9, 70–71, 85, 90, 121, 176; inquiry and, 14–19, 92– 97, 166; leading principles and, 121, 173; myths and, 58; scientific, 7, 94–96, 109; truth of, 12, 76, 80, 166–167. See also Testability Ideas, 93, 97, 140, 146, 152; clear and distinct, 117, 129, 156; mathematical, 138, 153, 158, 162–163 Idealism, 33, 95, 117, 158; realism versus, 2, 25–26, 49–50, 87, 90; romanticism and, 69

186

Index

Identity, 21, 37, 80, 118, 119, 161; coherence and, 50–55, 76–78; gender, 37, 47, 48, 60, 114; Hume on, 129; principles of, 163– 165; tribal, 38, 54, 166 Ideologies, 13, 22, 33, 37–43, 98, 113, 175 Imagination, 4, 114, 117–125; definition of, 117; discipline of, 122–123; Kant on, 4, 93, 118; Kierkegaard on, 58; principles of, 76; Quine on, 62; rules of, 117– 121. See also Fantasy Indeterminacy, 29–31, 136, 167–169 Individualism, 105–107 Induction, 70, 82, 149, 156, 159 Inquiry, 14–19, 67–97; context and, 67–73; cooperation and, 37–38; definitions of, 92, 93; Dewey on, 10–12; discipline and, 92; honesty in, 36–37; hypotheses and, 14–19, 92–97, 166; interpretation versus, 2, 23–24, 31, 33, 34, 95, 175– 176; leading principles for, 125– 126, 131–166, 173–176; Nietzsche on, 33–34; politics and, 38–44; reality-testing and, 98–99; selfcorrecting, 81 Internet, 36 Interpretation(s), 7–14, 45–65, 99, 121; affiliation and, 37–38; context and, 45–51; definition of, 1; exegesis and, 33; hypothesis and, 1–5, 9; inquiry versus, 23– 24, 31, 33, 34, 95, 175–176; Kant on, 9; literary, 29–33, 57– 59, 98–99, 120–123; politics and, 38–44; preference and, 64; Rockmore on, 88–89; socialized, 53–56. See also Attitudes Intransparency, 86, 87 Intuition, 138 Inverse square law, 16 James, William, 59, 94, 98, 100, 115 Judgment, transcendental, 71–72, 81–83

Kant, Immanuel, 9–10, 32, 64; Berkeley and, 60–61; categories of, 4, 127–128, 170; on cognition, 94; “Copernican revolution” and, 83, 85; Critique of Judgment, 10; Descartes and, 99–101; on desire, 10, 91; epistemology of, 82–86, 91, 97; Hume and, 14, 25, 26, 130, 157; on imagination, 4, 93, 118; on intuition, 138; Kierkegaard and, 58; on logic, 163–166; on norms, 38; Peirce and, 117; perception and, 88; schemas of, 83, 121, 127–128; semantics and, 73; spacetime and, 138; “Transcendental Aesthetic,” 130; transcendentalism of, 71–72, 81–83, 110–111, 127, 163 Khlentzos, Drew, 71 Kierkegaard, Søren, 58 Knowledge. See Epistemology Kuhn, Thomas, 95 Language, 112, 149–150, 163–164; acquisition of, 146, 156; dispositional, 157; Foucault on, 25; meta, 82; philosophy of, 111–113, 131. See also Sentences Leading principles. See Principles Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm: Monadology, 72, 109, 144; on noncontradiction, 164 Literary interpretations, 29–33, 57– 59, 100–101, 120–123 Locke, John, 26, 105, 170 Logic, 78–79, 119, 145–146; laws of, 118, 119, 145–146, 158–159, 163–166; multivalent, 88; ontology and, 164 Luther, Martin, 105 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 9 Magic, 57–59, 175 Magnetism, 16, 74 Maps, 8, 13, 76; partial, 113; plans and, 36, 56, 69, 90, 93–95, 122, 126, 166–167, 173

Index Marburg school, 82, 83, 93 Margolis, Joseph, 83, 86–91 Marriage, 37–38, 91–92, 130, 165– 166 Marx, Karl, 9–10, 33, 60, 181n29 Mathematics, 138, 153, 158, 162–163 Maxwell, James Clerk, 147 Meaning, 1–5, 48–49, 73–76, 95, 99, 109; empirical, 73–74; Hirsch on, 177n2; Platonic, 74; semantics of, 73; “stimulus,” 93 Memory, 47, 103, 112, 140 Meta-language, 82 Metaphor, 57–59, 100–101, 120– 121, 123, 138 Metaphysics, 90, 109–111, 141, 147–148, 172–173 Middle, excluded, 118, 119, 163–165 Mill, John Stuart, 105, 145 Möbius strip, 160–161 Morality, 36–38, 41, 112, 160, 165– 166 Motion, 130, 139–143, 148, 155, 159, 173, 183n13 Music, 8, 15, 34, 115, 119, 128– 131, 136, 156, 161, 175 Myth, 54, 57–59, 70, 96, 99, 125, 161, 175 Nagel, Ernest, 177n1, 178n14 Narratives, 9–13, 52–56, 122–123, 161, 175–176 Neo-Platonism, 113, 137 Newton, Isaac, 14, 16, 70, 71, 147, 148 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 4, 114; on freedom, 34; Genealogy of Morals, 20–21; on history, 33–34, 46 Noncontradiction, 12, 118, 119, 148, 152, 158–159, 163–166 Norms, 37–38, 43–44 Objectives, 11, 37–38, 94–95, 119 “Objectivity,” 84–85 Ontology, 49, 89, 97–107, 151–152; logic and, 164; relativity and, 63–64, 169; skeptical, 74–75

187

Operationalism, 170 Orwell, George, 55 Palladio, Andrea, 115 Parallelism, 170 Parmenides, 84 Parts/whole, 121, 134–135, 160, 175 Patriotism, 9, 27, 54, 56 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 4, 49; “Fixation of Belief,” 131; Kant and, 117; leading principles of, 128; on self-correction, 81 Plans, 8, 76, 103, 120; maps and, 36, 56, 69, 90, 93–95, 122, 166– 167, 173; testability of, 122–123 Plato, 13, 33, 67, 71, 97, 159; Descartes and, 93, 111; Euthyphro, 5; meaning and, 74; myths of, 57, 58, 98–99; Republic, 9, 105, 107, 109–110; theory of Forms of, 58, 77, 151. See also Neo-Platonism Pleasure principle, 46, 48 Plotinus, 182n8 Podolsky, B., 165 Politics, 38–44 Positivism, 64, 112, 156 Possibility, 159, 164, 170–171 Postmodernism, 29–30, 33, 50, 100 Potentiality, 156–158 Practical life, 47–48, 74, 110, 114, 125–126, 134, 139–142; locality and, 154; morality and, 165–166; science and, 3–8, 31–32, 36, 69– 70, 152, 167–173 Precedence, 126–128 Preferences, 9, 48, 64–65, 156 Prejudice, 3, 10, 30, 33, 53–54 “Presentists,” 137 Pre-Socratics, 70 Presuppositionlessness, 86–87, 90 Prigogine, Ilya, 179n20 Primary substances, 105, 107, 143, 156 Principles, leading, 4, 35, 119–121, 125–176; categorial form and, 172–173; formal, 163–165;

188

Index

Principles, leading (continued) hypothese and, 173; inventory of, 131–166; moral, 165–166; motivating values and, 166–167; precedents for, 126–128; priority of, 125–126, 167–172; use of, 128–131 Priority, order of, 125–126 Private life, 35–36 Probability, 149, 161–163, 169 Proportion, 165 Protagoras, 4, 13, 49, 80 Psychology, 30, 157, 161, 170. See also Neuroscience Ptolemy, 79 Putnam, Hilary, 2–3, 67, 183n27 Pythagorean theorem, 16, 108 Quality/quantity, 127–129, 135–136 Quantum theory, 30, 136, 146–149, 152–155, 171, 179n20; indeterminacy and, 167–169; nothingness and, 151; relativity versus, 155, 172; spacetime and, 138–139, 172, 173. See also Atoms Quarks, 104–105, 107–108, 121, 159–160 Quine, William Van Orman, 3, 10, 12, 67, 81, 131; Marburg school and, 83; on scientific method, 62– 64; theory of sentences of, 61–62, 80–81, 93, 100 Realism, 114, 164; Cartesian, 86–87, 90; idealism versus, 2, 25–26, 49– 50, 87, 90; naïve, 87 Reality: testing of, 24–25, 98, 123, 176; values and, 28, 36, 166–167 Reason, sufficient, 144, 147–153, 157–158, 167, 183n13 Reciprocity, 106–107, 130, 159–160, 166, 175 Reflex arc, 94 Relativity theory, 2, 142, 143, 153, 158; Margolis and, 90, 91;

ontological, 63–64, 169; quantum versus, 155, 172; spacetime and, 171–173 Rockmore, Tom, 83–91 Romanticism, 34, 69 Rorty, Richard, 182n6 Rosen, N., 165 Rubrics, 4, 73, 92, 120, 123, 131– 132, 144 Rules, 38, 60, 117–122, 131–132, 145–146, 151–152, 158–159 Russell, Bertrand, 79–80, 182n7 Ruth, Babe, 36–37 Saltation, 139–141 Schematizations, 4, 9–10, 32, 102, 121, 127–128; Kant on, 83, 121, 127–128; Quine on, 61–62; values and, 97 Schrödinger equation, 135, 169 Science(s), 121, 148, 151, 162; discipline of, 62–64, 95–96; humanities versus, 7–8, 109–113, 179n20; hypotheses in, 7, 94–96, 109; mythology and, 57–58; practical life and, 3–8, 31–32, 36, 69–70, 152, 167–173; values and, 36, 102–103 Scientism, 112 Self-interest, 165–166 Self-love, 35 Self-regulation, 40, 150, 152 Self-sufficiency, 40, 107, 139 Self-understanding, 59, 89, 101 Semantics, 73–75, 78–80, 82, 121, 156. See also Syntax Sentences, 16, 31, 73, 82, 110–113, 152, 158, 163–164; Bridgman’s theory of, 170; formation of, 79, 110, 163; interanimating, 100; Quine’s theory of, 61–62, 80–81, 93, 100. See also Language Shakespeare, William, 93, 120 Significance. See Meaning

Index Skepticism, 17, 25, 49, 68–71, 168– 171; Cartesian, 17, 68, 71–74, 85, 170; Humean, 14, 17, 71–72, 156; ontological, 74–75 Socrates, 20–21, 60, 70 Spacetime, 105, 112, 134, 137–145, 158–161, 168; determinism and, 153; quantum theory and, 138– 139, 172, 173; relativity theory and, 171–173; sentences in, 73 Spector, Marshall, 182n6 Spinoza, Benedict de, 177n6 Sports. See Baseball Statistics, 149, 161–163, 169 Status, 47–49, 92, 114 Stegmuller, Wolfgang, 180n12 Stengers, Isabelle, 179n20 String theory, 154–155, 173 Structural properties, 155–159 Symbiosis, 86, 89–90 Syntax, 73, 78–80, 87, 118–119, 121, 143, 156, 163–164. See also Semantics Systems, 103–109, 158–162; evolution of, 145, 161; reciprocity and, 159–160 Taxonomy, 51–52 Ten Commandments, 38 Testability, 3–4, 9–14, 24–28, 70, 95, 98, 176; atomism and, 107; dialectic of, 109–114; of imagination, 122–124; Quine on, 63–64; Rockmore on, 84–85 Theology, 113 Time. See Spacetime

189

Tolerance, 43, 64–65. See also Diversity Traffic laws, 32, 39, 131, 161–162, 165 Transitivity, 165 Transparency. See Intransparency Truth, 12–13, 76–80, 93, 175–176; attitudes and, 76–77, 81, 176; of beliefs, 2, 21–23, 39, 113, 176; coherence and, 82; of hypotheses, 12, 76, 80, 166–167; literary interpretations and, 29–33, 57–59, 100–101, 120–123 Universals, 109 Use, 128–131 Values, 9–10, 24, 35–36, 40–41, 48, 165–167; attitudes and, 27–28, 91, 95, 97–98, 167; cognition and, 45; determinate, 171; facts and, 2–3, 7, 56–57, 167; hermeneutic, 91; humanistic, 7; motivating, 36, 100–101, 166–167; schematization and, 99; schizoid, 19. See also Belief(s) Variation, 119, 121–122 Verifiability. See Testability Weber, Max, 1 Whole/parts, 121, 134–135, 160, 175. See also Holism Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 131, 183n16 Zeno of Elea, 165 Zero-sum game, 14

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PHILOSOPHY

Styles of Thought Interpretation, Inquiry, and Imagination David Weissman Every man and woman is located in two ways. One is stolidly physical: each human body has a unique address and trajectory. The other comes with beliefs that locate us by answering a salvo of questions: Who, what, and where am I? What are my relations to other people and things? Answers come with either of two emphases. Beliefs critical to practical life and science require that we engage familiar things or find our way in strange cities and streets. Such beliefs supply meaning and security. Ascribing significance to myself or my family, religion, or state, I tell a story that locates me within a world of purpose and value. Neighbors feel and valorize their lives as I do, so our story spreads to dominate a people or an era. One procedure—inquiry—favors reality testing and truth. The other—interpretation—uses meaning to appease vulnerability and glorify believers. Beliefs of these two kinds are sometimes joined, but they are often opposed and mutually hostile. Both philosophy and culture at large confuse these ways of thinking. Styles of Thought distinguishes and clarifies them. “Like all of Weissman’s work, this book sparkles with clarity and wit. He takes on one of the major issues facing contemporary thought and culture. What are we to do with the idea that all life is simply interpretation? Weissman’s response restores the tradition of American pragmatism to its proper place. He argues that inquiry is not interpretation and that the workings of the world judge the truth of inquiries. He puts interpretation in its proper place in human culture: the function of interpretation is to shore up beliefs, rally our spirits, and make us more confident about our sense of ourselves and our position in the world.” — Joseph Grange, President, Metaphysical Society of America “Weissman’s description of inquiry and its relation to science and the practical side of life, and of interpretation in relation to values and the development of a holistic point of view are important steps in understanding these two concepts.” — Jorge J. E. Gracia, coeditor of Philosophy and Literature in Latin America: A Critical Assessment of the Current Situation David Weissman is Professor of Philosophy at City College of New York and the author of many books, including Lost Souls: The Philosophic Origins of a Cultural Dilemma and The Cage: Must, Should, and Ought from Is, both also published by SUNY Press.

State University of New York Press www.sunypress.edu