David Weissman Styles of Thought

Styles
Thought
of
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Styles of Thought
Interpretation, Inquiry, and Imagination
DAVID WEISSMAN
State University of New York Press
Styles
Thought
of
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2008 State University of New York
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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'.68dc22 2007001917
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In memory of Paul Weiss
Contents
Introduction 1
Chapter One. Two Styles of Explanation:
Interpretation and Inquiry 7
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 45
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
viii Contents
Chapter Three. Inquiry: Practical Life and Science 67
Context and Objectives / 67
Meaning / 73
Truth / 76
Animadversions / 80
Engaging Other People and Things / 91
Aims / 94
Ideals / 95
A Choice / 96
Chapter Four. A Disputed Question 97
Ontological Alternatives / 97
The Dialectic of Untestable Ideas / 107
Reconciliation / 111
Chapter Five. Imagination 115
Construction / 115
Construction Rules / 117
Variation / 119
Discipline / 120
Chapter Six. Leading Principles 123
Priority / 123
Precedents / 124
Use / 126
An Inventory of Leading Principles / 130
Values / 164
When Practical Life and Science Disagree / 164
Categorial Form / 169
Afterword 173
Notes 175
Index 183
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 prcis of the alternative: Man is an ani-
mal 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 reality-
testing and truth. The other bestows meanings that appease vulnerabil-
ity or glorify believers.
These ways of construing ones 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 ambigu-
ous: 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 sig-
nificance. 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 unsus-
tainable 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
2 Styles of Thought
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 disquali-
fying it on evidentiary or logical grounds, but doing so misconstrues it.
Its rolesee reality as the work of a beneficent designeris valorizing:
better a life created by a thoughtful God than one that evolves by
chance. The many beliefs loosely described as opinions are also clari-
fied. 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
arent true or false.
The difference between interpretation and inquiry sometimes hard-
ens 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 ones own terms or those of ones community. How much to
inquiry, how much to interpretation? There may be little conflict be-
tween them: we happily subordinate animal needsfor food or cloth-
ingto its demands. But sometimes conflict is overt and irreconcilable.
That happens whenever interpretation affirms truths that no empiri-
cal 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 citys team
3 Introduction
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
sidesinterpretation and inquirydeclare their truths?
Writing of values as though there were no significant differences
among them, Dewey, Foucault, and Putnam conflate inquirys proce-
dural valueseconomy and consistency, for examplewith the needs,
interests, or biases that drive interpretation and practical life. Is value
an undifferentiated sump, so no pertinent differences remain when all
thoughts instruments are suffused with value? Saying that it is pro-
motes 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 distin-
guishing them. Inquiry is reality-testing; its hypotheses are empirically
falsifiable. (Verifiability is critical to this difference. Quines 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 inci-
dental 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. Everyones 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 doesnt 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 facilita-
tions 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 con-
trol 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 expositionsespecially those of scientific
methodare 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;
4 Styles of Thought
both satisfy conceptual and experimental requirements that are alien to
interpretation. The detail is ordinary. Ignoring it explains some wrong
turns that often distinguish philosophys history since Protagoras and
Nietzsche. My accountchapters 15shadows the fourfold bases for
belief described by Peirce in 1877.
5
It would be unreasonable to hope that science could displace ei-
ther 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
inquirys hypotheses at their point of origin. This was Kants insight:
imagination is the effulgent source of art, plans, stories, and hypoth-
eses.
7
Each construct is pervaded by rulesof grammar, cause and ef-
fect, or symmetry, for examplethat differentiate and integrate its
content. How do we choose among these constructsconfirming their
applicability to actual states of affairswhen Harry did it and God,
the creator have the same form?
An answer is implicit in the rules used to differentiate and orga-
nize imaginations 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
Inquirys hypotheses invite such tests. Interpretation abjures them, be-
cause its aim is different. Vulnerable or secure, we tell stories that justify
our respective points of view. Reality-testing is incidental or averse; we
dont want our stories disconfirmed. No matter the evidence, they vin-
dicate our attitudes.
We may suppose that leading principles are merely procedural
rules used to organize thought: like Kants categories or empirical
schemas, they tell us nothing of reality itself. I demur, because Kants
idealism cant 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 inquirys 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 natures deepcategorialfeatures. Ac-
customed 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 areaas my context-setting rule. Practical life doesnt
consolidate its many rubrics (fire burns, batter rises, ice melts), but
5 Introduction
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 ones 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 some-
thing 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 extrapolat-
ing 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: didnt 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 ad-
vances 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 them-
selves. 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 preced-
ing argument: it distinguishes empirically justified contentions about
realitys 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 interpretations distortions
are acknowledged and discounted.
These opposing scruples and concerns distinguish interpretation
and inquiry from Platos Euthyphro and the Enlightenment to our time.
10
Little is new, but these ways of settling belief still need disentangling,
hence philosophys role: it defends public health by distinguishing what-
ever is separable.
7
Chapter One
Two Styles of Explanation
Interpretation and Inquiry
W
hat explains the schism that divides the sciences from the hu-
manities? Their tasks are different: one inquires, the other inter-
prets. Truth and significance are different values; interests they serve are
sometimes opposed. Explanations vary accordingly. Science explains phe-
nomena by formulating, testing, and revising hypotheses that cite per-
tinent causes or laws: citing methane explains coal fires; F=ma explains
the velocity of falling apples. Humanists explain phenomena by embed-
ding words or ideas in networks of appraising relations: parenthood is
honorable, piety is good. The procedural values of scientific method
simplicity and consistency, for exampleare 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; interpreta-
tions are suffused with values that determine content, some explicit,
others disguised. Sciences 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 sen-
sory clues, but practical life would be simpler than it is if doctors and
8 Styles of Thought
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 processesthe densities and
responsesof relevant things. Plans sequence imagined engagements
with other things: do this, wait for a response, then, given the antici-
pated effect, do that. Every cook and mechanic knows the means avail-
able 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 re-
spect 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 dont 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 in-
terpretation. First is orientation, second is the projection of orientations
interests and values onto things perceived or encountered, third is the
narrativethe story toldwhen 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 ori-
entations differ from our own. Each filters available data or ideas in
ways appropriate to his or her valorizing perspective, though many are
opaque: one doesnt 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
9 Two Styles of Explanation
trueas the preference for chocolate or vanilla is a preference, not a
truthbecause the values that infuse an orientation have no basis but
personal history, needs, and the attitudes of ones 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 factfavorable or notcan be
digested and made to disappear. So, death is unreal if one believes in
eternal life. This is interpretation as it expresses thoughts alliance with
piety, will, and conscience. A potent storyone that reconciles or vin-
dicates believersspreads 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 in-
sidious: 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 knowl-
edge we have of nature, culture, or ourselves.
Philosophy is party to this consensus: it chronically confuses inter-
pretation with inquiry, telling us that phenomena have no character or
autonomy apart from ideas or conceptual systems that differentiate and
relate them. Kant is interpretations principal sponsor in modern times.
Abductionsinferences 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 valueda need, interest, desire,
or idealprompts us to create a satisfying experience. Piety is a spon-
soring value of this sort. It operates within interpretations by calibrating
and integrating their parts. So, prayer, ritual, and good works are suit-
able to a religious outlook, because all are expressions of piety. Or the
value is patriotism, so loyalty and servicemy country right or
wrongare its expressions.
Hegel socialized this account, saying that the conceptualizations
used to create a thinkable world are common to a communitys mem-
bers. Bound to one another by history and need, they create and com-
municate about a common world and shared desires.
4
Marx emphasized
the economic interest that provokes a dominant group to impose its
10 Styles of Thought
story on a societys other members.
5
Foucault argued that various inter-
estsnot only economic motivesdetermine the bias and detail of in-
terpretations that shape social worlds and the conduct of their members.
6
Carnap constructed systems that would integrate and explain phenom-
ena 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 conceivablehence
that none existsif 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
utilityis the conceptual driver and integrator. Carnap argued that the
use of conceptual systemspragmaticsis coequal with their syntax
and semantics.
8
His inspiration was likely Kants Critique of Judgment:
I have been reproached . . . for defining the power of desire as
the power of being the cause, through ones 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 mans
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 ma-
teriel thought formsschematizeswhen perceptual objects are made
to satisfy parameters fixed by desire.
Interpretation so dominates modern thinking that writers vindi-
cate 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 downprescribesthe differences and rela-
tions that may be ascribed to the phenomena differentiated and orga-
nized 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-
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 re-
veals distinctive properties which need to be designated by dis-
tinctive 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 subject-
matter 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 situa-
tions, 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 prod-
ucts of prior determination in inquiry) they are objects.
11
Deweys 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 ap-
preciation. For such objects are not ends in the sense of being
merely termini, but in the sense of being fulfillments: satisfac-
tions in the literal sense in which that word means making
sufficient 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
This is interpretation rechristened inquiry. Situations are problematic:
they are, in Deweys 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 inter-
pretations similar to novels: they tell comprehensive stories where noth-
ing 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 storys sentences or ideas are true because they substanti-
atecohere with and supportone another. This second criterion is very
loose: incoherence, even contradiction, may seem appropriate to a cred-
ible 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 philosophys vocation?
Are philosophers interpretersstorytellers, like novelists and play-
wrightsor 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, pre-
sumably, 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 shouldnt be elided with
others. But it should be measured against other accounts, if reality has
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, philosophys 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. Philosophys affinity to litera-
ture 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 valo-
rizing orientation, and philosophy loses its authority. Philosophys re-
sponse 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 interpreta-
tions 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 trans-
forming 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 souls immor-
tality. 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 be-
cause of an ideology supported by evidence no firmer than Descartes?
This conceit is philosophys latent power, and the excuse for its
ambiguity: declare that philosophic theses are interpretations, and they
with regimes they inspirelose authority; require that they be testable
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, ques-
tions about actual states of affairs known by the empirical differences
they make. Interpretationstorytellingis the poor substitute when we
cant determine or dont 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 phenomenasensory data, ideas, words,
sentences, or conceptual systemsset 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 perspectivesdata versus the rules for
differentiating and organizing itshare 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 cau-
tion. Evidence of sparrows reduces to data that have the look of spar-
rows, 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. Orcurve-fittingwe for-
mulate 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 observa-
tions 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 inferabductivelyto one of
them. There may be ample data justifying an abduction (the apple one
sees, holds, and tastes), or scant data garnered from instruments (canar-
ies) that register the effects of their causes (methane). Either way, we
mitigate philosophys 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 consequencesregularities conditioned by
laws, for exampleare ideally observable, for there is no way to test the
hypothesis if they are not. The third step is inductive, though now induc-
tion 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 circum-
stances 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 gen-
eralizations, 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 explana-
tory style is circular, because the law statement has been generalized
from just such events as those it explains: we speculate that this blue-
bird 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 expla-
nations affirm rather than suppress their material assumptions, and they
are not circular. We infer from regularities observed to their constrain-
ing 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. Predic-
tions 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, em-
phasizing similarity or correlation. Abductions identify a phenomenons
generating conditions; they express the assumption that phenomena have
depth, that data affecting us are the leading edgethe effectsof states
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 ne-
cessities 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 em-
bodies the Pythagorean theorem, and that each represents its kind.
17
We
confirm this by substituting values for the theorems 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 theo-
rem 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 speci-
fied 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. Abduc-
tion 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
much less ambitious: they are verbal or conceptual generalizations
strings of words or mathematical symbolsthat extrapolate from ob-
served 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 lawsis uselessly exces-
sive. Abduction obliges theorists to formulate models of factors that
may condition data mapped by their equations, though it is the equa-
tionswe are to believenot such models, that carry all the force of
scientific explanation, prediction, and control. Worse, abduction is prof-
ligate: it may generate any number of models that support the same
equation. We could choose among themdiscounting some, promoting
othersif there were testable differences among them. But some or
many may not be empirically distinguishable. Why not agree that curve-
fittingformulating equations that generate the values observedis a
sufficient explanation for phenomena that concern us?
This question encapsulates an agenda framed by Cartesian skep-
ticism, Humean empiricism, and the operationalism learned from Kant:
garner what you can from the data, organize and use it, but dont
speculate. This project is often successful, because there is significant
information in the data and because we organize it in ways that pro-
voke 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 termswords
that apparently signify those causesbut we are cautioned repeatedly
that the word flute, for example, is shorthand for a rule that organizes
data; it doesnt 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 cautionalways 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 knowl-
edge from opinion in the manner of Descartes first Meditation, then
discount opinion. Make sure that every candidate for knowledgebe it
sensory data or scientific theorystands directly before the minds eye.
Practical life and many sciences know better: many abductions are justi-
fied by myriad data collected in various ways (wet clothes, wet feet), no
disconfirming evidence, and no plausible alternative hypothesis.
18
Explanation is empowered by cycles of advance and consolida-
tion. Sometimes, we know a structurethe vermiform appendix, for
examplebut not its function. Other times, we observe pertinent be-
havior, 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 physi-
ology. 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 ob-
served. This is ideal. Pertinent factors elude us, because of their scale
(large or small) or because they are unobserved and perhaps unobserv-
able given their nature and our sensory powers. Still, the errors of
previous formulations dont obviate the intention or diminish the partial
success of previous abductions. Experimental and mathematical tech-
niques 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 analyzablereduc-
ibleto terms that cite the observables: electron is said to be an economic
way of signifying pointer readings and other data pertinent to the gener-
alizationsthe theorywhere electron appears. Theoretical terms intro-
duced 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, infer-
ence 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 forcescompetition,
scarcity, and demandare observable, though repression was unobserv-
able when Freud inferred it. That is changed: neural inhibition
repressions cash valuemakes it observable in our time. Still, repression
would not be the mystery alleged by Freuds critics if its mechanics were
unknown. For explanation is partly successful when it identifies a func-
tion, but fails to specify its generating mechanism. Aristotle used this
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 abduc-
tion 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 valuessimplicity, consis-
tency, and fruitfulnessregulate their formulation. But there is no resi-
due of motivating values in the inferences from phenomena to their
conditions or in the empirical tests that falsify or confirm them. Alche-
mists hoped that turning brass to gold would make them rich, but they
didnt succeed and knew they hadnt.
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 domi-
nate in people whose orientations are focused and viable.
Interpretations task is plain from infancy. Every newborn is dis-
tinctively active, reactive, or inert. All are raw, unformed, and vulner-
able. 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
dont fare as well. Sick and apprehensive because their bodily rhythms
havent 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 affec-
tive systems. First reactions are automatic, because visceral and innate:
the baby is quiescent and responsive, or edgy and anxious. These re-
sponses are qualified when caretakers and circumstances are construed
as favorable or adverse. For a query is all but explicit in a babys eyes,
posture, and gestures: What goes on? The question is urgent in situ-
ations 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 attitudesanxious or confidentthat form
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 ones attitudes.
Interpretations taskits regulative aimis the equilibrium achieved
when circumstances are construed in ways that satisfy attitudes. Achiev-
ing and sustaining this equilibriumby appreciating, propitiating, or
reconciling ourselves to the ambient worldwe 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 circlea private spaceof valorizing light.
The aim is satisfied trivially by everyone having an established ori-
entation, an effect consolidated in childhood when each person construes
his or her circumstances as attitudes prescribe. Rodgers and Hammersteins
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, Im 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 Nietzsches Genealogy of Mor-
als: the self-directed artist versus the herd. Members of the herd loathe
the artists vanity and bohemian ways. They believe that differentiating
himself from them is his principal aim. They would destroy him
Socrates, for examplemerely 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 worldits notes, paint and canvass,
other people, words, gestures, or stonein 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 sup-
pose that climbers are foolish or crazy, but self-perception requires that
they test themselves against sheer walls. There is equilibriumelation
and contented exhaustionwhen a climb satisfies attitudes expecta-
tions or demands. Artists and writers are also stubborn. Infirm or close
to death, they struggle to finish a task because attitudes that fix self-
perception wont let them stop. Members of the herd dont understand
the artists persistence, but their behavior is similar. They wont 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 losingreject-
inga 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 years
fashion in cars, clothes, or ideas? No, this is evidence that certain bases
for identityreligious beliefs, for exampleare less compelling than
before. The implication for core attitudes is unclear: are we more con-
fident, 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 didnt know people of this
chameleon sort, or he didnt mention them: no one in Nietzsches Ge-
nealogy of Moralsno artist or member of the herdchanges his or
her orientation: attitudes make them belligerently autonomous and self-
securing, or socialized because dependent on the recognition of others.
What explains the herds 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 coordina-
tion. 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, justi-
fies, protects, and intimidates. Who could oppose it, given its many
believers, without making him or herself more vulnerable? The storys
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 ones 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 ones own. Believers address
one another within the circle of their truths. But truth is equivocal.
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 commit-
ment, not by the truth of their beliefs.
No one likes being told that his truths arent true or false,
though interpretations claims are affirmed for various reasonsaffili-
ation and loyalty, for examplenot 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 evi-
dence 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
didnt 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 con-
fidence: we believe that loyalty is its own reward while knowing that
often it isnt. Divers occasions promote beliefincluding affiliation, social
suasion or status, culture, convenience, and fearthough we wrongly
suppose that beliefs 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 doesnt 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 arent 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 some-
times hardens into contrariety: male if not female, here if not there.
Contrariety is mutual exclusion. It pervades thought and provokes
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 situ-
ational 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 stan-
dard? 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 didnt 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 situ-
ational: inquiryfact-findingcant settle the dispute because each in-
sists that the others attitudeshence valuesare 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 supe-
riority 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 isto the degree I canor 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 sat-
isfied by information about their circumstances or by stories that con-
strue a situation in ways favored by their values.
This is a delicate issue for inquiry, because the preference for inter-
pretation 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
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 warn-
ings on cigarette packages. Addiction explains some. But a value
raffishly attractive memotivates others. These are alternative ways to
be: interpret or inquire. They dont 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 ag-
grieved, 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
wont 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 effec-
tively engaging other people and things is a condition for safety and
well-being. Yet, these discrete encounters are jejune: they lack integra-
tion 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, usu-
ally 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 yesterdays
memories, todays 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
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 Kants work in our
timerejecting hypotheses that infer from data to their extra-mental
conditionsthey say that everything is text and that texts have no
integrityno fixed senseapart 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 infin-
ity, 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 theoriesthe interpretationsused to
think it. No matter that this denigrates reality, frustrates practice, and
stunts thought.
Is it true, nevertheless, that the realist assumptions of nave prac-
tice 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
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 minds 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 minds power is a weapon. Anyone who supposes
that thought reaches beyond itselffallibly but responsibly, in practical
life or scienceis 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 isnt 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 minds 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 well-
informed 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 directunmediatedaccess 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 canar-
ies. One is observable, the other is not. Both are inferred. Inquiry is self-
correcting: large mice require bigger traps. Inquirys methodological values
are subject to criticism and revision if there is evidence that reality is
more complicated than was thought. Compare interpretations that ra-
tionalize 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 ven-
tures directed by hypotheses. Science embellishes practical ideas, gener-
alizing, extrapolating, and analogizing to formulations that simplify and
extend that understanding. In one as in the other, valuesneeds or
interestsprovoke actions (experiments, for example), though the exist-
ence 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.
Procedural values discipline the formation of hypotheses by focus-
ing 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 truethey are possible because
consistentbut the only ones reasonably affirmed are those supported
by empirical data. Compare interpretations. They are organized to ex-
press the concerns of those who promote them. Truth is truth-for-me or
truth-for-us. Contrary interpretations oppose one another, though nei-
ther 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 hypothesisone of these photos
is important to meand 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 in-
terpretation 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 impor-
tant dates, great achievements or occasions to which inquiry could testify.
Many others are effusions of gratitude, pride, pleasure, or disappoint-
ment; 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 interpre-
tations. 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 answersbecause of
patriotism, for examplebut 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
unspecifiedthey may be unknownwhen feelings are expressed. For
this is interpretationthe affective expression of valorizing attitudes
not inquiry.
These examples illustrate interpretations power across the range
of human pursuits and commitments. Inquiry is fully appropriate to the
intrinsic properties of texts, music, and art, though interpretation often
dominates our reactions to them because such things are known prin-
cipally 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 ones
values. So, a poem or text acquires meaning within the network of
discriminations and referents sanctioned by a readers attitudes. America
is construedconstructedby 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 persons
valorizing responses to it. Things engaged, things that provoke our
attitudes, all but disappear in the tide of our projections, whether con-
ceptual or affective. Reality then seems to be our product, not some-
thing 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 complexityeven the
events ascribed to itare prescribed by the sense we make of it, hence
by the intereststhe values and attitudesof the historian. But this is
implausibly grandiose if it implies that single authors, all of them ephem-
eral 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 historians
scholastic emphasis (political or economic, for example) or by his theo-
retic 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 undimin-
ished 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 oppositioninterpretation or inquiryis 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 minds eye while infused with
value. Or it denotes explorations in the ambient world. Interpretation
is expansive, value-laden, and unfalsifiable. Inquiry requires that mo-
tives 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 incompatibilitybecause 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 hu-
mans 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?
Modernitythe early sixteenth century (Copernicus) to the
presentrecalibrates the balance. Before, interpretation dominated prac-
tical 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 day-
dreams, but stories embroidered with fantasy and myth are poor direc-
tives 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 re-
duces interpretation to nil, though frustration and error intimate that
reconciling interpretations have their limits. Adherents can whistle
Berkeleys tunenothing is like an idea but another ideabut 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 isnt
there. Interpreters construe the book on analogy to a Rorschach test:
make what you can of it. Disputes are much less heated, because each
sees anothers 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 interpret-
ers are amiable and pleased. Each embroiders his or her story and
listens to the other four with the bemused tolerance of people exchang-
ing pictures of their pets or children. The inquirers arent 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 isnt 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 isnt 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 authors 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 books
whole meaning.
23
But does this obviate the plain difficulty of agreeing
about a texts 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 deter-
minate 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 authors choice of words is easily settled; one may also
discern his or her intent. Moods relation to words is nevertheless un-
certain: it depends very much on the authors choice of words, the
readers situation, and his or her state of mind. Readers cant 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
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 implica-
tions of which Hirsch writes.
24
Its 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 infer-
ences prefigured but otherwise ignored in the text?
These considerations have varying implications for the difference
between interpretation and inquiry. The firstthe indeterminacy of
textsis an open door to interpretation: make of the text what you can.
One might think it sufficient to note a texts ambiguities. But why
shouldnt an imaginative reader supply details, motives, or arguments
ignored by an author, but appropriate to the readers inclinations? The
second pointthe affect provoked by textsalso speaks for the pre-
rogatives 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 pointalternate
routes through a testthat 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 implica-
tions of Hegels 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: inquiriesfinding
implications the author ignoredculminate 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 isnt 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 promoteblind tests of a promising drug, for ex-
amplebut 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 be-
lieve is nevertheless constrained. The woman who rejects a suitor may
refuse every inducement: shes not interested, and no act or attitude of
his changes her mind. But this cant 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 popu-
late their worlds with women who reject them is a mystery Kant doesnt
and cant 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 didnt create the dog,
and I might have noticed, before reaching thoughtlessly to pet him that
he wasnt friendly. Fact-findinginquirycould 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 bal-
ance. Needing traffic laws, we regulate after gathering information
inquiringabout road use. Attitudethe aesthetics of road designmay
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 valo-
rize the act, but they cant vindicate losing tickets or strikeouts.
APPLICATIONS
Participants in my imaginary seminar easily distinguish interpretations
from inquiries, though the difference isnt 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 readers
value-bestowing interpretation or it signifies the finding that a system
diverges from its internal norms: a state and its constitution, for ex-
ample. The postmodernist literary critic tells what he would have in-
tended had he written the book; the critic of social organizations diag-
noses their structures or practices, and tells how and why they should
be altered given some generic conditionsprivate and socialfor hu-
man well-being.
These versions of critical theory have different origins. The style
appropriate to literature derives from the hermeneutics of biblical ex-
egesis.
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 reality-
testing 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 casesthose in which either side excludes the otherare 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 re-
quirements 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 doesnt look good on me. Nietzsche averred,
to the contrary, that pure inquiryuntainted by motivating biasesis
a delusion. History was his preferred example, because of its elusive-
ness: having no way to engage it directly, we infer from its effects to
their conditions. Interpretation is constructive and value laden, hence
Nietzsches claim that historical events are indeterminate until inter-
preted: 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 Nietzsches question.
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 considerationIs there evidence of things
past?and avert the secondAre 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 wasnt proposing
miracles. It isnt the reality of the past, only its detailshow, what, and
whenthat are in question. Alleging many comings-to-be doesnt entail
that they were determinate in any of these respects; their determinability
is an invitation to historical imagination: let historians tell uslet them
imaginewhat happened. But we do have detailed informationpri-
vate memories and public recordsof 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: super-
sede your past by interpreting it in ways congenial to your aims; dont
be sabotaged by inquiriescold and detachedthat discover your fate
in a trajectory no one could alter. But Nietzsche understood that free-
dom is always constrained by character and circumstances, and reduced
by will-full ignorance of both.
28
Excuse his romantic excess, then con-
sider 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 Bachs 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 ap-
petite: 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 confu-
sion. 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.
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 interpre-
tation 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 andif this concerns youthe
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 values role as it insulates us from
frustration, and failure: interpretation says that we are safer and better
than we seem.
Inquirys discipline is more severe. Values that motivate ita need
or aimare incidental to results, though procedural valuesconsis-
tency, economy, and testabilityare 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 principlesrules
regularly tested and confirmedare 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 architectscause and effectbut none for the inference
that nature is designed.
Augustine and Descartes agreed that a different valueself-love
is especially prominent: self-affirmationI am, I existexpresses 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
mans home is his castle is a prcis of this view. For a proper castle has
a moat that defends it from intruders. Other peopleretainers of every
sorthave 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 systemteam, sect, business, or
statehas 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 respondents inter-
pretation. This difference between private and publiceach person or
systems rationale versus the judgments of othersis vigorously defended
by a fortuitous accident: idiosyncrasy is invisible. Impenetrable others have
interpretations that dovetail with ours at the margins, but commonalities
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 differen-
tiate values motivated by self-love and tribal loyaltyvalues that distort
hypotheses or experiments to favor an interest or needfrom inquirys
procedural values. Economy and consistency are internal to the maps and
plans of practical life and the hypotheses of science, but inquiry isnt
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 circum-
stances that alternately satisfy or frustrate them. The inference is reason-
able, because science and effective practice are unachievable until we
distinguish what we want, including what we want to know, from cir-
cumstances for getting it. But it isnt true that interpretation is always
superseded by inquiry. For there are some domains of beliefthe demand
that life have purposefrom which interpretation is never displaced.
MORALITY
Interpretation shares several of its moral assumptions and virtues with
inquiryhonesty and loyalty, for examplebut 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 ones partners. People cant do their work with faithless
unreliablepartners, or without the accurate information partners sup-
ply. Interpretation construes honesty as forthrightness; loyalty is fidelity
to a belief or to a community of believers. Consistencystubborn be-
liefis 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 ones 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 com-
municant, 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
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; loyaltyself-identityisnt 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 organi-
zations. Friendship is affiliative; schools, businesses, and teams are or-
ganizations; families are both. Affiliation requires mirroring, because
bonding is intensified among an ideologys partisans or a teams fans
when each believes, feels, and responds as other members do. Organi-
zations 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 kindschurches or teamsvary
accordingly. One prizes solidarity in belief and feeling. The other wants
efficacy, though cooperation is sabotaged in organizationsbroken mar-
riages, businesses, and teams are the effectwhen partners who share an
aim are unable to collaborate because their interpretations diverge. Sup-
pressing these differences while agreeing about pertinent facts is a condi-
tion 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 stateby declaring that there shall be no
established religionenables a states citizens to create a viable public
space for cooperation across chasms of ethnicity, race, religion, and gen-
der. 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 resi-
dents. They are less urgent in America where disparate attitudes and
worldviews are softened, because a vigorous economy and Constitu-
tional defenses promise private spaces and well-being to most citizens.
We cooperate, usually, despite schismatic differences, because practical
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; dont 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 normswhatever their content and roleis 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 main-
tenance and functioning of any machineare natural, not conventional
or divine. Inquiry, not interpretation discovers and specifies them.
Distinguishing these originsnorms stipulated when we interpret
our circumstances versus norms inquiry discovers and appliesis criti-
cal 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;
interpretations normsno divorce, no sex until marriagesatisfy 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 exercis-
ing control. Each interpretation justifies its authors claim to govern in
the name of values he or she commends by describing the world valo-
rized 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 ones diet, but then inquiry inherits the task of determining how
to satisfy nutritional standards in ways consistent with that regime.
Political deliberations may be focused by the demand that they be sat-
isfied in the style favored by one or another interpretation or by a
material interest susceptible to practical solutions. Interpretations inti-
mate 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 lan-
guages, we restrict ourselves to one or a few for the practical motive of
wanting a societys 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, dont make judgments, let each person or
community live within his, her, or its truths. This is democracy tailored
to three concerns: first, interpretations 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 societys other members; third, the demand that
each interpretations 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 domi-
nation: let our interpretationour valuesdictate practices to all.
Inquiry resists this political outcome for several reasons. We may
not believe the stories interpreters tell because they arent falsifiable and
because they are, so often, transparent ways of controlling vulnerable
people. Interpretations rulesdo it this way or thatare 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 inquirys confirmation that we get both effects from either. De-
mocracy puts its faith in inquiry: we experiment to know the effects of
alternative policies, then toss a coin or choose.
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 publicnot only governmentthat 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 democracys citizens, not only
their representatives, who do or should dispute and articulate shared
values, tasks, and priorities: they, too, know the obstacles and chal-
lenges 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 govern-
ment by the people is predicated on these salient facts. First is Descartes
I am, I exist, and the fact that this is everyones perception. Second is
each persons 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 persons ability to make rational calculations that enhance the well-
being of him or herself and partners. Only the third pointa desire for
cooperationmay seem moot, but that is so only if we imagine that it
requires cooperation everywhere and always with everyone. Start, in-
stead, from the standpoint of small groupsfamilies, 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
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
interesta shared interestis the well-being of the citizenry, individu-
ally, 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 alter-
natives. Conceding failureProhibition, for examplethe 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 play-
ing 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 experimentin 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 orgiven means and
opportunitythey find other partners.
Suppose it true that democracy is an expression of corporate in-
quiry and a condition for the inquiries of private life and its affiliations.
For this blurs the distinction between reality testing inquiry and signifi-
cance bestowing interpretation. Life is valorized in both ways: we con-
strue 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 virtueshonesty, loyalty, reliabilityin the context of their
families, friendships, schools, and neighborhoods. It is these engage-
mentsthe trial and error of relating to other peoplethat teach moral
lessons, irrespective of the interpretations invoked to justify moral vir-
tues. 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; stabi-
lizing 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.
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 ideol-
ogy, hence interpretation. Suppose we limit attention to those right or
left of center. They disagree, currently, about the degree to which social
interestshealth and education, for exampleshould have market-based
solutions. These disagreements are often expressed without regard for
the evidence that comes with pursuing one policy or another. But some-
times 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 laborfew restrictions on hiring or firing workers
a condition for a dynamic economy, or is worker insecurity an unac-
ceptable 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 complex-
ity 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 partialityloyalty to and support for one of the participants
in a complex processnot 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, be-
cause there is no business without workers, no workers without busi-
ness, and neither without an economy that sustains both. Why say that
each of these perspectives is more congenial to inquiry than interpreta-
tion? 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 doesnt end discussion, because the
next questionare 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-
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 tol-
erates 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 Deweys emphasis: policies are
tested by their effects; none is reaffirmed merely because an ideology
commends it.
30
Even the worth of democracy needs occasional reconsid-
eration and vindication. For its value is never uncontested. Inquiry
including historical studies and thought experiments that inform us of
alternatives and their effectssupplies 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
effectsthink of the FDA testing candidate drugsrequires 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 combina-
tion 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 doesnt preclude inter-
pretations: 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 self-
regulating inquiry and a condition for the personal inquiries of its mem-
bers. 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 meaningstruthsor 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 expan-
sive, romantic, dogmatic, and irresponsible; its claims are untestable,
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 free-
dom. This is the likely effect when a successful technology intrudes on
personal life. Imagine biomolecular engineering joined to a cult of dis-
cipline and efficiency, and to drugs that correct rogue interpretations.
That is too much sobriety.
45
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 atti-
tudes of individuals have little currency, until their influence is regular-
ized 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 matterthings of
a kind recognizable to all who see thembut passersby respond differ-
ently; 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 be-
cause local practices and beliefs make no sense, we perceive the gap
between things seen raw and the significance bestowed by interpreta-
tion. The difference is intolerable, because the uninterpreted world seems
alien and dangerous. Local residents are oblivious to having this orien-
tation, 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 common-
place of religious practice, but it obtains as well for the members of
every community: all use a valorizing conceptual framework to perceive
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 werent callous or hostile, but they didnt recognize this ges-
ture 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 ones space:
they dont assume a right to cross that barrier unless invited. This is
interpretation as it penetrates and shapes the simplest gestures and re-
sponses. Hopeful, cautious or afraid, we interpret events in ways that
make life seem coherent and safe, though doing this distorts under-
standing. For nothing is quite as it seems when everything is construed
from a valorizing perspective. Compare the mindless cows described in
Nietzsches 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 cant 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 reso-
lutely 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 good-
will and help of others, wanting companions, reconciling hope and
fear, we embed ourselves in relationships (families, friendships, reli-
gious communities, and states) that confirm our well-being or expose
our vulnerabilities. Pleasure and pain are often described as the pri-
mary axis of human struggle, but they are place-markerssymptoms
for well-being and excitement or vulnerability and fear. This alternation
is primitive and abiding: other variablesrelations to other people,
47 Interpretation
gender identity, and status, for exampleare contexts where the ten-
sion between them is resolved.
Both factors are decisive for attitude formation, and each is appar-
ent 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 be-
cause they are not? The child responds with confidence or fear. (Mixed
casescaretakers who are mostly but not always good or badare
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 chis-
eled into memory by early experiences of deprivation and vulnerability
or security and well-being. The effect is apparent at twelve months
when an infants style of attachment to primary caretakers has formed:
the baby is confident and secure, firmly attached to one or a few care-
takers, 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 inter-
pretation 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 areor imagining we domakes being there more
tolerable. Joyous praying surged among people marooned in the Loui-
siana 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 pass-
ably if facts are discerned in ways congenial to ones 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 orientationa perspectivethat construes the world in ways
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 ac-
quired later, those tied more closely to shifting circumstances and op-
portunities. 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, sta-
tus, and religion are six domains (there are many others) where inter-
pretation 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 pri-
ority, their interests or mine? Most needs cannot be satisfied without the
fellowship and support of partners who ask the same question. But who
controls memyself or otherswhen 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
49 Interpretation
vulnerabilities. Skeptics are solitary and exposed, but faith is strength:
there is optimal control in precarious circumstances, because belief dis-
sipates the illusions of status and appetite or because life has a design
and aim defended by its maker.
Attitudes express each persons ways of negotiating contrary im-
pulses across these many variables. For vulnerability and fear, self-
assertion 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 ones hierarchically organized attitudes: safety is more
urgent than status and significance, or one ignores risks and disappoint-
ments that would be paralyzing if Gods love were not the guarantee of
his care.
Anxieties and enthusiasms pervade every domain of thought, feel-
ing, and activity, but they are not all of life. Engaging other things
because we want to or mustwe acquire information or cultivate talents
that are narrowly attuned to practical, intellectual, athletic, or aesthetic
interests. Yet these are the occasions where interpretations, hence atti-
tudes, 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 intellec-
tual dispute? Or is it another expression of the primitive opposition
considered above: fear of vulnerability versus an exuberant welcome to
a reality we dont make but can enjoy? My realist view opines that
idealism short-circuits vulnerability by denying its existential conditions:
idealism strangles fearwe control ourselvesby crafting an experi-
ence that eliminates its extra-mental causes.
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
datacooperation, efficacy, error, frustration, and deaththat idealism
ignores, and because it alone explains the character and relations of data
idealism favorscolors and shapes, ideas, and conceptual systemsby
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 interpreta-
tions arent 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 isnt, 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 possibil-
ity of knowing states of affairs in themselves once their features have
been obscured by interpretive fog. But this isnt 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 dtre, but then concededespite the impli-
cations for self-importancethat neither is true.
51 Interpretation
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
cant control, but no one enjoys being told that his way of construing
himself and others is silly. Emotions 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 chal-
lenged. 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 pat-
terns. That isnt so: interpretation is disciplined; its formations have
predictable effects. Start with a specific psychic constitutiona more or
less quiescent babyand situations to which it responds. The develop-
mental result is a set of core attitudes weighted toward confidence and
pleasure, or fear and aversion. This is character: the intrapsychic con-
dition 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 estimat-
ing a persons likely responses to situations that frustrate or satisfy this
acquired psychic structure. These five considerations are its principal
determinants. i. What is the infants 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 secu-
rity, distress and pleasure are tested and resolved by experience? Values
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 socialwill 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 compensateswith propitiating ritual and prayerwhen
circumstances frustrate the desire for safety and well-being.
STORIES
Storiesorientations made articulate and expressedare the better-
known aspect of interpretations. They are told as we explain ourselves
or declare our political or religious beliefs.
Unformulated orientations are globalthey warp every percep-
tion, idea, and encounterbut categories and valorizations they pre-
scribe are determinable and loosely organized. Every such interpretation
is a set of templates for evaluating the individuals and situations en-
countered. Their behavioral expressions are often inconsistent (repres-
sive 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 for-
mat is complicated by the need to identify attitudes that organize an
interpretation, though core attitudes are elusive. Acquired during child-
hood, 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 storytellers orientation. They are a broad
brush rendering of the world in which he or she lives, though livelike
locationis ambiguous. It signifies the world in which we suppose
ourselves to bethe world to which we are reconciledhowever 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
53 Interpretation
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, his-
tory, politics or authority, economics, gender, or vocation. So, intelligent
design satisfies the idea of a first cause and the hope for generous
oversighta benign presiding creatorwhile responding to the fear
that nature would be insecurean unstable house of cardsif complex-
ity had emerged randomly from mixtures of simpler components. A
smart, munificent designer assures that nature will not come unstuck;
he wouldnt 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 ones story implicates people to whom one answers.
They want an explanation for ones attitudes or behavior; the speaker
wants vindication. Telling ones 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. Socializ-
ing our separate stories is always problematic, because each is different,
and because we dont welcome people who challenge our idiosyncrasies.
Less comfortable with one another when differences are explicit, we
suppress them by tacit accord. Wanting confirmationin talk and ac-
tionthat much of ones story squares with others, we choose friends
who can (usually) be counted on to reveal only those parts that cohere
with ours.
Telling ones 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 inter-
ests or biases that are better suppressed. For there is always a discrep-
ancy 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
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 domi-
nant, 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 per-
suasion: 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 storytell-
ers 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 some-
one dressed for dinner, but their aim is practical: the tribal myth infil-
trates 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. Idio-
syncrasy 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 be-
yond the reach of critical scrutiny. Not knowing ones self-generated
attitudes, unable to justify or defend them against the weight of social
pressure, we quickly surrender. Not everyone capitulates, but the toler-
ance 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
55 Interpretation
other worldviews are reproof to ones 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 Orwells
1984 was its implication that personal interpretations would be unsus-
tainable because tyranny joined to technology would preclude the rumi-
nations where private interpretations are codified and affirmed.
This account of socializationeach person coerced by the mono-
lithic, generalized otheris too oppositional, because consensus is not
always monolithic or stable. There may be no consensus, because con-
tending centers of power dispute the right to establish a dominant story.
Altered circumstancesclimate change, war, or a discovery such as
evolutionfracture and re-center the accepted story, or all follow when
influential people revise it. Edicts are sometimes pronounced by au-
thorities to whom everyone defers, but more often, each persons inter-
pretation is inflected, not superseded, by the consensual view. A peoples
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 neigh-
borhood 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 social-
ization, 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 inten-
sified 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 orienta-
tion and story everyone learns. Why say that this, too, is a kind of
interpretation? Because each persons orientation is manifest in affilia-
tions that are voluntary or inherited and affirmed. Every such system is
construed by members as an appropriate context and focus for them-
selves. Each reminds us that practical life and inquiry compete with
interpretation as generators of purpose and meaning. For orientations
attitudesforged in core systems are life-sustaining: we are reliable
members of vital systemswe identify with their aims and other mem-
bersbecause 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. Interpreta-
tions 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. Respon-
sibilities sanctioned by these two perspectives sometimes conflict: per-
sonal 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. Mak-
ing 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
valueutility or aimexpresses their essential bond: food, clothing,
and shelter fuse with the merit of having them. This is the instrumen-
talism 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 dont create: sun-
light, for example. Other things are made to a standard that serves our
purposes, but they dont lose those properties becauselike blankets in
the tropicstheir use has lapsed. People, too, have identities indepen-
57 Interpretation
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 Platos 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. Platos myths succeed
because they use the conceptual rubrics of practical thought (levels,
passage, or transformation) to illustrate supersensible claims. Dispens-
ing with proofs, they startle us with metaphor and economy. Yet
Platos 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 Cassirers
The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, addresses the issue without acknowl-
edging that he, like every Kantian, is vulnerable to the charge that no
objective test distinguishes veridical thought and experience from com-
petitors 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: Gods 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 nei-
ther can be tested against extra-mental states of affairs? Cassirer ignores
his Kantian dilemma: he doesnt try to convince us that values motivating
scientific theoriesuniversality and necessity (on his telling)are supe-
rior 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 systems motivating values. Choose your valuesif birth and
culture havent already decided themthen live within the reality they
conjure. Mythology or science: discount Cassirers developmental story,
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 entitiesFormsthat are
not empirical. Wanting to explain how they might be known, we ask
these additional questions: is there evidence of Forms independent of
Platos 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 our-
selves, 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 facultiesif one wishes to speak in this way,
it is the faculty instar omnium [faculty of faculties]. What feel-
ings, understanding and will a person has depends in the last
resort upon what imagination he hashow he represents him-
self to himself, that is, upon imagination.
6
This is Kierkegaards gloss of Kants 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 interpre-
tation may be an associative network where fragments of experience
acquire sense and significance, or a rule or rules that bind the frag-
ments. An interpretations truth claims may express either standpoint:
they affirm that data are related coherently within a conceptual net-
work, 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 in-
consistent or because they are untestable stipulations: there is no evi-
dence to support them and no thinkable way to create an experiment
that would produce it.
59 Interpretation
This harsh judgment is consequential, because interpretations af-
fect the self-understanding and the morale of believers, teams, schools,
religions, and states. Imagine people dedicated to a team and its fan
club. Each members self-perception is intensified by loyalty to the club,
its rituals, and other members; principal offices go to passionate devo-
tees. 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 inquirys 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 systemsfriendships,
families, and businessesare valuable because of fellowship they pro-
mote, talents they educate, and work they do, not because of self-
exalting myths. But no conflicts are more inimical than those that pillory
detested others while glorifying the interpreters.
How shall we detoxify pernicious interpretations without discred-
iting 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 natures cloy-
ing restraints. Conversation with the gods, our pride, their shame: there
is no tinge of vulnerability in us, if contingency and doubt are van-
quished 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 truemany things are possiblebut 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 Jamess 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
of feeling, belief, and desire? Many people emphasize the intensity of
their belief, speak of faith, and want it respected. Everyone responds
skeptics tooby stepping lightly. But respect for people of faith doesnt
entail believing that their interpretations are true. Hypotheses are test-
able. Faith is a determination to believe irrespective of evidence. Inter-
pretations are validated to the degree that needsfor security, pleasure,
significance, gender identity, and controlare 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 in-
nocuous: 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. Inter-
pretations laced with magic cross that threshold.
Socrates died for implying that there is myth and magic in reli-
gious 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 dont turn old men into boys. Thinking
otherwise is fanciful, but useful: our consumer economy would shrivel
were everyone sober. This advantage doesnt 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 anoma-
lies (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 interpre-
tation 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 cul-
minate 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 ar-
guing (in the style of Berkeleys nothing is like an idea but another
61 Interpretation
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 orga-
nizes. This first claim obscures another, more often implied than ex-
pressed: mind and matter are categorially different so properties known
by way of experience cannot be identical or like the properties of material
things. Minds qualificationssensory properties constitutive of experi-
enceare, 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.
Kants 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 hypoth-
eses. The trajectory of conceptual revision probably has no endthough
its trace may be asymptoticbecause 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 Cassirers
historicism, but he agreed that questions about objectivity are inter-
nal 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 non-
verbal stimuli by the mechanism of conditioned response.
8
Condi-
tioned 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 ambi-
guity: What is a hypothesis tested against: an extra-conceptual, extra-
linguistic phenomenon, or observation sentences that re-present that
alleged state of affairs? Quines account of objectivityobjects are
schematized by theories whose quantified sentences ascribe properties
to things
9
rejects the first and affirms the second: a sentence is true or
false because of its relations to a theorys 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
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 theorys sentences is, therefore, significant for
the theory as a whole. It is defendederror is eliminatedby 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 definitiveup
or downempirical 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 experi-
ment and ignore observation sentences that report it.
Quines holism is consequential, because the freedom it promotes
tinker until you have eliminated any empirical challengeimplies 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, be-
cause confounding data are no longer evidence that a characterization
needs revision or a substitute. And there is more: consistent thought
imaginationhas 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 expe-
dients. 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 stand-
point 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,
63 Interpretation
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 so-
called 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 dis-
qualifying 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 rela-
tivistic doctrine of truthrating 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 seri-
ously 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 con-
sistent 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 datastimulationsin ways appropriate to a concep-
tual 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 onto-
logical relativism
18
) would be equally adverse, though his formulation
scuppers empirical inquiry for the benefit of storytelling. One of Quines
last books acknowledges that his thesis obscures a theorys relation to
confirming or falsifying evidence: My concern has been with the cen-
tral logical structure of evidence. . . . Science does stay responsive some-
how 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
compromising, because the untestability of sciences 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 ca-
pable of embedding all possible data, would survive its application. It
is relevant, too, that Quines 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 doesnt 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 interpretationsreli-
gious beliefs, for exampleare not true or false, because untestable.
Positivists often say that empirically untestable beliefs are meaningless,
but we neednt offend believers by requiring that thought submit to that
higher standard of rigor. It isnt 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 inter-
pretations is a preference. Each person construes life in a way that
satisfies his or her attitudes. Saying this doesnt 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 Quines 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 interpreta-
tions in the way we discount differences of taste? Treat them generously
65 Interpretation
as preferences, and concede that they arent 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 ones interpretation is true. But this is prob-
lematic 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 persons
valuesand psychic identityare 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 ones 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 doesnt imply that my interpre-
tation is a taste that might have been different: this interpretation de-
fines 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 enforcedsecuredby 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 ones own without recognition that inter-
pretations 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 crisisenables one to see them otherwise.
67
Chapter Three
Inquiry
Practical Life and Science
A
n interpretation is validated by construing the ambient world in
ways that satisfy motivating attitudes. Friends and associates sub-
stantiate 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 lifethe disaster no prayer
avertsobliges 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 one-
self, 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 de-
scribes 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
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 frustratedone 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
Meditationsa 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 imper-
fectly, because his account of minds 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 wasnt 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 contin-
gency 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
implacablefinished and fixed. Plans and hypotheses are always revis-
able; frustration and error guarantee that they are often revised.
Planning and theorizing are evolutionary afterthoughts, the fortu-
itous 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 opin-
ion is disputed, or an action it directs doesnt work: uncertainty pro-
vokes reflection. But belief is also tested when someone tired of
hearsayall the banalities of everyday lifewants to know the truths
it carries or obscures. This was Descartes motive in the first Medita-
tion, and sometimes, as when Einstein considered conventional beliefs
about perspective and simultaneity, it is still entre to unknown terrain.
69 Inquiry
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 judgmentssimilar gait, hat,
or facebefore 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 in-
terpretation. Suppose one dresses for an occasion where the style isnt
prescribed: how shall I present myself? The circumstances tolerate many
variations, but the event has certain featuresof place and time, scale
and purposethat are not in dispute: call these the facts of the matter.
Individuals acknowledge the same facts, but construe the complexme-
on-this-occasiondifferently and dress accordingly. What shall I wear?
The decision turns on ones sense of self. The answer is an interpreta-
tion, 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
interpretsthe 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 pe-
culiar 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 dont
prescribe the sorts of roads or houses to build; they do inform us about
the circumstances to which plans will be adapted. Someone who stub-
bornly builds on quicksand cant say he wasnt 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
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 didnt know, so interpretation
was their principal device for integrating bits and pieces of practical
information. What concerned them more: practical success and the in-
formation it supplied, or interpretations stories? We dont know, and
shouldnt pretend we do. Reconstructionsfablesthat emphasize the
irrationality of ancient peoples dont square with the evidence of their
art, agriculture, and astronomical tables. Cities constructed on plans
dictated by religious beliefs dont 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), curve-
fitting (testing a formula or equation against an array of data), and
inferences from effects to their conditions (whether constituents, causes,
or laws). Pre-Socratic philosophersprobably their ancestors, toodid
all three. They generalized, predicting that seed of a kind would pro-
duce the same grain that flowered in previous years; they applied a
formulathe cycle of seasonsto 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 abductionsthey would accurately predict every
sensory datumcould 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 out-
come 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
Newtons laws fit the example perfectlythey are maximally confirmed
though falsebut 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.
71 Inquiry
A more qualified skepticism emphasizes that the conditions speci-
fied by an abduction express the limited information and historical
perspective of the hypothesizer.
2
Even successful predictions cant over-
come these limitations on ones 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 iden-
tifies shoes too large or small by wearing them. Electromagnetic fields
are less accessible. We cant 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 dont
have the architects advantageconfirm a models applicability by using
it to build the structure studiedbut experiments confirm, after succes-
sive 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? Berkeleys 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 contentits presence before an
inspecting mindis 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 phe-
nomena, including sensory data, words, ideas, and theories.
Skeptics demand rigor, but fail to do what their argument re-
quires: explain in detail the presentation or generation of the systemati-
cally related data that nave 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
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 themas dreams
arebut 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 clois-
tered in skulls accurately register and report their experiences of the
ambient world. Though notice the habit learned from Descartes, Berke-
ley, Hume, and Kant: they encourage the impression that mind is pas-
sive 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 extra-
mental 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 percipithat
all reality is in usand that, miraculously, separate minds coordinate
their experiences. Leibnizs Monadologyeach mind a shard bound
harmoniously (without mutual access) by divine apperceptionshould
be everyones preferred explanation. It isnt, because there is no evi-
dence of the entities and relations cited by this cosmic abduction, apart
from claims it makes. We choose between a simple hypothesis that
explains everythingGod does itand the many inferences that ex-
plain particular practical effects by citing extra-mental causes. Science
adds explanations that are more generic, but it never displaces reci-
procities 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 abductions princi-
pal achievement, we ask why there was no science in the early history
of cultures. But this question is better rephrased: why wasnt there
better science in cultures that successfully used abduction to master
73 Inquiry
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 technol-
ogy (no microscopes, thermometers, or telescopes), misleading or mis-
taken metaphysical assumptions (distinct qualitative naturesAristotles
quidditiesrather than discrete or continuous values for a few variable
types or qualities). These were severe impediments to systematic knowl-
edge. 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 defini-
tionsay or think red when seeing redbut 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 subject-
predicate form or a permitted relational form (its syntax), and its indi-
vidual 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 considerationssemanticshas
three constituents: words or phrases that signify properties, entities, pro-
cesses, or relations; rules that bar solecisms (round-square); and organi-
zational rubrics (cause and effect) that signify structures or relationships.
The semantics of these rubrics (explicit in the role Kant ascribed to
empirical schemas
6
) is distinct from the syntax of grammatical form,
though the two elide when a sentences subject-predicate form expresses
an organizational form: Fire burns.
Empirical meaning is problematic in this respect: does an empiri-
cally 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 ex-
ample, 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:
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 logicaleternalpossiblity
7
). Some of its con-
stituent 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
meaningcall it implicit or Platonic meaningis psychologically and
morally false: a speakers responsibility extends to the consciously ac-
knowledged 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 incli-
nation to restrict semantic meaning to properties directly perceived (col-
ors 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 struc-
tures or relationships that are not or cannot be observed directly or
altogether. Imagine that a consumer calls customer service with a com-
plaint. 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 hierarchi-
cally. Or, a simpler case, magnetism signifies a field-effect, not merely
the behavior of polarized nails.
These examples illustrate the philosophically problematic differ-
ence between observables and their sometimes unobservable but in-
ferred conditions: perceived radiation emitted from otherwise unperceived
black holes, sound waves heard as different notes. This difference
between sensory data and their conditions or groundis 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 cogitoand 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, usuallyin our experiencesome that are
75 Inquiry
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 inferredDNA or the shapes of large irregular struc-
tures, partially seenare 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 chap-
ter 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 relationshipbugs and bitesmay be observable,
but science has learned to exploit the looser requirement that we be able
to confirm one or more of a relationships terms by way of its other
terms: heat and molecular motion, for example. Or we make a relation-
ship accessible by way of theories that generalize, extrapolate, or analo-
gize 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 obser-
vation 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 mean-
ing 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 doesnt 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 processunextended Cartesian thinkingcan
generate the experience of extension. The mechanisms responsible for
radiation are specifiable; the process of divine creation is not: we speak
of Gods 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
principlesrubrics such as cause and effectto create phrases or sen-
tences 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 ex-
pressing them are provocative, but not more meaningful than recommend-
ing that someone take an umbrella, because: Its raining ghosts and
numbers. We dont 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
causalrelations invoked by a plan do obtain. But practicesdriving
on the right, shaving ones head, or worshiping in a favored wayare
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 in-
quiry 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 attitudeshence
valuesthat 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 inci-
dental), because any jumble of beliefs may seem coherent when atti-
tudes 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
77 Inquiry
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 Platos
theory of Forms. Each Form stands plainly before the minds eye, and
is seen as it is; a mind inscribed with the Forms sees them as qualifi-
cations of itself.) This is my specialunmediatedconnection 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 con-
viction 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 emo-
tional imperatives: I know who I am, and know that this posturethese
beliefs and feelingssatisfy 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 infor-
mation 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 doesnt identify such things
with the act of thought (except for the rare case of thinking about ones
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 inspect-
ing 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 cant 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 worldthe one presented in sensory data, theory, or lan-
guagesatisfies every description otherwise reserved to things-in-
themselves: 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
within the narrative mind tells of the world and itself. Now add coher-
ence 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 minds qualification or construc-
tion? 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 identityeach thinkers self-
affirmed view of the worldis the weakest sort of truth: universal self-
pleading 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 isnt
sufficient: we dont 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 sentencemeaningful because of the
possible state of affairs it signifiesto the actual state of affairs that
instantiates the possibility. Truth requires that my reading of anothers
speech should accurately represent it. You speak, wait for my rendering,
and hear it as irrelevant or wrong before replying that I have misunder-
stood you. Its 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 per-
spicuous structure. Sentences are meaningful (as above) when they sat-
isfy 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 rulesno contradiction, for exampleis meaning-
ful. Semantics correlates substantive wordsnouns, adjectives, verbs,
and adverbsto 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
writers intention, and the context of thought or communication. Think-
79 Inquiry
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 cant
easily reach it. The list of sentential types that are or may be true by
correspondence is contestable. Does it include counterfactuals and com-
plex 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 dataindeed all the available
datajustify 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 physi-
calism and its phenomenalist contrary: one enlarges the domain of sen-
sory 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 hypoth-
eses? Looking for evidence that confirms or disqualifies standing candi-
dates, 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 evi-
dence 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 Russells theory of descriptions.
10
Such thoughts
or sentences are true, unqualifiedly, if things signified have all the proper-
ties ascribed. They are partial truths if two conditions are satisfied: the
nonexclusive or is substituted for the and of Russells 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 crite-
rion: 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 pre-
vious sentence to cover several contested points, how is it confirmed
that the possible state of affairs signified by a syntactically and seman-
tically correct hypothesis does obtain? One expects that the perceptual
stimuli provoking thought stand against it as a control on thoughts
response. Seeing chocolate, Im wrong to describe it as vanilla. Yet
Quine has argued that all the characteristics ascribable to these provo-
cations originate in the system of thoughts or sentencesthe 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 systems 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
youll say that what you see is blue, or more radically it will look blue.
This formulation deprives theory of an external, empirical control on
thoughts 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.
Quines account is vulnerable in two respects. The firstno exter-
nal, empirical control on thoughtis falsified many times a day. Traffic
81 Inquiry
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 expectationpleasure or pain, for examplebut many
othersnoise and sunlightare not. The secondthoughts determin-
ing effect on data perceivedoverstates minds 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, lit-
mus turns red or blue, but only the solution testednot anything in our
structuring theoryprescribes that a test result be one or the other.
There are many such experiments. All confirm that ensembles of theo-
retical assumptionsdistinguishable conceptual precincts or Quines holist
networkmediate and focus experiments without determining or ex-
tenuating effects perceived.
Its also relevant that either of two postures is appropriate when
testing theories or hypotheses, and that Quine ignored one while em-
phasizing the other. He supposed that a theorys posture is defensive,
and that empirical tests are challenges theories resist. Thinking defen-
sively, 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 ex-
periments. The other posture regards a theorys 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? Quines em-
phasis 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 errors 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 Kants notion that a transcendental judgment has complementary
effects: synthesis creates both an objectred rosesand an empirical
judgment expressed as a thought or sentence affirming that the roses
experienced are red. Kant eliminates thoughts representational charac-
ter by dispensing with the extra-mental or -linguistic state of affairs
represented; the thing-in-itself. Yet he preserves the appearance of rep-
resentation by pairing the object schematized to an empirical judg-
menttypically expressed as a sentencethat reports this product of
transcendental synthesis. Notice, however, that the schematized state
of affairs is not the truth-maker of the sentence, for this is the magic of
transcendental synthesis. These are judgments correlated products: cre-
ating one, it also creates the other.
The disquotational argument takes a further turn. For why do we
need both of judgments effects? Kant assumed we do, because he ar-
gued from the appearancesthe experienced object and our judgment
that it is as it appearsto 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.
Nave 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 coheresdeductively or inductivelywith
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-in-
themselves. Disquotation makes them eliminable.
This is the radicaleliminativedisquotational 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 meta-
language 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
83 Inquiry
thought or sentence, because Kants transcendental theory of judgment is
tailored to explain the synthesis of objects and, concurrently, the genera-
tion 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 dont tell us how or why to
resist saying is false after Roses have teeth. We require both locu-
tionsis true and is falseif thoughts or sentences signify or rep-
resent states of affairs that are not created by our affirmations or denials.
My account of meaning and truth is deemed speculative and nave
by every thinker indebted to Kant. All agree that mind constructs the
only reality we can think or experience, and that inquiryreality-testing
is a delusion. But there is considerable diversity in the emphases and
history of that traditions several strands: hermeneuticists differ from
scientifically oriented thinkers of the Marburg schoolincluding Cassirer,
Carnap, and Quinebecause 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 Kants
talk of schematization and synthesis), not attitudinal.
Rockmore declares that
Any theory of interpretation needs to take into account the
lessons of Kants much-neglected Copernican revolution. . . . Kant
makes two points that should structure all discussions of knowl-
edge, 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 Rockmores 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 thingsincluding states of affairs, sensory data, ideas, or
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 hypothesiscontent
set before the minds eye and inspectedis a gloss of the apparent expe-
rience. 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 con-
struction: unable to know things as they are, we make thinkable surro-
gates. But there is an alternative Rockmore neglects. It seems strange to
himnave rather than irrationalthat philosophers since Parmenides
assume that knowing requires knowing the way the world is: Founda-
tionalism, 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
couldnt accurately locate the teeth they extract.
The alternative Rockmore ignores is also conspicuously absent
from Kants 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 verifica-
tion 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 accountants
readings generates evidence that competes with data that justify a dentists
diagnosis? The dentists claims are more fruitful, but what does this
imply, if not the fact that his hypotheses are accurate to the state of
85 Inquiry
affairs examined, while the accountants response is incidental or in-
competent? Nothing Rockmore says or implies concedes that thought
directs human engagements with the ambient world. Indeed, his re-
marks have the contrary sense: they emphasize minds passivity to data
it construes. This bias is apparent in his emphasis on history: we recon-
struct 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, coop-
eration, 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 dogmati-
cally.
19
Dogmatically? The dentist supplies a bill with a code that
satisfies my insurance company. Is the insurer foolishly credulous: the
dentist didnt 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.
Cartesiansterrified by skepticismprefer worlds they construct to a
world known fallibly to hypotheses tested in action. The word hypoth-
esis does not appear in Rockmores essay, but the complex activity of
making and testing hypotheses is the unmentioned solution to his ques-
tion, 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 Kants 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. Rockmores alternative is mysterious:
How do self-sufficient minds create thinkable worlds? How do they
stabilize the experience of those worlds, including all their particulari-
ties and details: the lives of other people, for example? How do they
generate both sides of a conversation? Rockmores argument turns cir-
cular: human perspectives are historicized (there is no escape from
relativizing our knowledge claims to the historical moment
20
), imply-
ing 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 ratio-
nal 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 consti-
tuted 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 condi-
tions 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
objectivelywhich, therefore, must itself be similarly con-
structed in accord with (2). Hence, also, (4) Holism: There is
no principled priority or separability of metaphysical, epistemo-
logical, semantic, logical, or psychological (mental or subjec-
tive) 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-
87 Inquiry
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 doc-
trines 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 considerationsone for
each of the six pointsare 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 nave realists: the world as they describe it is set directly before
their inspecting minds. But representational realism neednt 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 perceptionthe struc-
ture and physiology of brain, eye, and ear, for exampleagree 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 friends 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 believehis Constructivismthat 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 wordsare the instruments used to discriminate
and probe differences and relations encountered in practical life or par-
ticle physics. There are a few iconic signs (perceived shapes, principally),
but it is rare that like knows like: red-looking roses arent red.
We make bread, but telephone other people using numbers we
havent made. Imagine telling ones number1234567890to 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
rather than hear it? Because Margolis, like every Kantian, regards percep-
tion as an impenetrable brick wall, not as the filter of discernible, reliable
information: Gibsons 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 doesnt tell us; he rejects
Kants transcendental synthesis, but offers no alternative.
Using signs to direct actionone right number, many that are
wrongchallenges Margolis, because he insists that his relativism sanc-
tions an infinity of accountsdegrees of right, degrees of wrong, nei-
ther right nor wrongeach 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 dis-
pense with the principle of noncontradiction.
23
) He requires a multiva-
lent 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 formula-
tions 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
89 Inquiry
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: doesnt an interpre-
tation 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 constru-
ing 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 constructssome 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 societys interpretive framework: the world, in-
cluding 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 doesnt become a sidewalk
because we rethink it. More, their vision imposes an intolerable burden
on every thinker: it isnt enough that we find our way in a world we
dont 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 dont tell us. They may prefer a simpler re-
sponse, saying with Descartes, I am, I exist. That would be an au-
thentic 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 concep-
tual vehicles used to affirm or confirm it. But your telephone number
doesnt depend epistemically or otherwise on my way of thinking about
or using it. I dont construct your number: Verizon or BellSouth does
that. Much more compromising is Margoliss claim that the ontic in-
dependence 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
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 relation-
ships between subjects and objects are to be construed by way of
Margoliss constructivism. But this principle is subverted by all the mind-
independent items one doesnt construct: other people, their histories,
and circumstances, for example.
v. All our thinking, metaphysical or otherwise, is to be Pre-
suppositionless, 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 ig-
nores: 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 chickenshardwired to their circum-
stancesdont 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 Margoliss 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 (interpre-
tively) constituted.
26
But he does not sufficiently specify those condi-
tions, 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 constructivists 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
91 Inquiry
people or time, but this limit is flouted by those visionaries and stub-
born people whose errors are successfully tested against their circum-
stances. Hermeneuticists want a different solution, one that doesnt
commit them to a stable, extra-mental reality. They find it in the per-
sonal or socially sanctioned attitudesthe valuesthat regulate belief.
Margolis and Rockmore dont 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: inter-
pretations 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 shouldnt
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 doesnt want to marry my possible partners, but she does need a
map and plan of circumstances where she could find partners accept-
able 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 statusfrom the work at hand.
Inquiry is the practice of formulating, testing, and revising hypoth-
eses. Do matters stand as hypotheses represent them? We consider the
effects that would obtain if a hypothesis were true, then look for them.
A hypothesis and supporting assumptions are confirmedthey are more
likely to be trueif 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 mechani-
cally subtle as testing to determine the deviation of light in Mercurys
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 disciplinemapping circumstances, designing
experimentsthat 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 experi-
ments; 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 lead-
ing principles that shape and direct the formation of testable hypoth-
eses: 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 functionthe constructof our think-
ing 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 acknowl-
edges 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.
Quines 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
93 Inquiry
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. Thoughts principal task is
elsewhere: to exhibit the rational structure of the thinkable world to
minds that inspect itas re-presentedwithin 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 subordinatesabsorbs
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
Shakespeares 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, ones map of the terrain was
misleading or vague, but, no, we didnt create the obstacle (Carnap and
Quine), and dont wait for theorys 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 acknowl-
edged, though thoughts original and still primary role is that of direct-
ing 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 cognitionunderstandingis 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
theoriesall of them hypothesesare 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 termsdata and conceptualizations that differentiate and relate
thembut there are three terms: sensory data falsify or confirm hypoth-
eses about states of affairs that cause the data in us. Hearing the snatch
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.
Deweys paper on the reflex arcpublished in 1896is still co-
gent.
33
It describes minds intelligent direction of bodys 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 ones circum-
stances, 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 be-
yond the requirements of our primitive vulnerability; we secure and
satisfy ourselves in ways that exceed the least requirements of surviv-
ing to breed. Inquiry complicates these responses and initiatives, be-
cause thought is overreaching: its maps are extended and detailed; its
plans often direct us through foreseeable sequences of action and re-
sponse, error, surprise, and revision. Recognize thought as a probe
a better white caneand inquiry seems less abstract.
AIMS
It may seem that inquirys distance from interpretation is compromised
by some of its directing aims. The scientific objectiveknow things as
they areis hard to achieve but straightforward: there is a discernible
history of theories tested and reformulated for accuracy and experimen-
tal control. Thomas Kuhn emphasized paradigm shifts and incommen-
surable 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
scientists 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 doesnt stop inquirys momentum: it shudders, reconsid-
ers its assumptions, then moves on.
It is practical life that seems to compromise inquiry. Many plans
are impelled by needshunger or thirst, for examplebut many others
have interpretation as their principal or only driver. Their motivating
beliefs may be testable hypotheses, but more likely they express atti-
95 Inquiry
tudes no test could alter: rain correlates badly with prayer and rain
dances, but believers dance anyway. What are the implications for in-
quiry? Its procedures are uncompromised if the motive is abstracted
from the map, plan, or hypothesis tested. For a tests disinterested ap-
praisal is, in principle, no more difficult for hypotheses motivated by
interpretations than for those expressing sciences desire to know. Aims,
alone, are innocent (in the respect at issue); it is our inability to discount
them that threatens the integritythe 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 direct-
ing 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 isnt hobbled by its link
to interpretation, unless the interest expressed by an interpretation con-
fines inquirys initiatives: ailments an interpretation wont acknowledge
wont be diagnosed or cured.
IDEALS
It may seem that interpretation, not inquiry, is the natural source of
ideals, given that preferences express attitudes. Doesnt inquiry look
the other way, to reality? Disinterested inquirysciencefinds things
as they are, without distorting aims or ideals, though science, too, has
directing attitudes and an overriding ideal: provide a disciplined ren-
dering 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. Isnt practical life barren if
conceived only in terms appropriate to inquiry, for then focus is re-
stricted 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 ones talents. The cooperation required to satisfy these values cre-
ates 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 affili-
ation. Reduce the need, and fantasy may be satisfied with novels
and films.
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 pathol-
ogy 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 it-
self, 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 pic-
ture 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
Cohens 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. Inter-
pretation comforts us more, because the significance it bestows is ex-
pressed 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.
97
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, mindnous, the cogito, or the transcendental unity of
apperceptionis the fundament on which all other realities are founded.
They exist only to the degree that their existence is perceived, con-
structed, 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 attitudesvaluesas they determine the
choice of concepts or rules used to schematize sensory data; sixth is
minds explorationby inference or direct perceptionof 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
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 didnt emphasize, as he might have, that con-
ceptual systems are vulnerable, because there are alternative impelling
values, hence alternative possible systems. Deconstruction seizes the
opportunity implied by diversely motivated systems: distinctions pro-
jected 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 interpreta-
tions thrive. For they, too, are conceptual systems animated by values.
Valorizing the lives they inform, weaving significance into every postu-
lated difference and relation, they satisfy attitudes while setting the
agenda for belief. Interpretation is nevertheless implausibly nave. It
pretends to tell us what and where we are, though its motivating atti-
tudes occlude or distort beliefs about others or ourselves. The fantasy
of thoughts 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 first-
hand 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 require-
ments are, nevertheless, contemptible in the self-valorizing, mind-
centered tradition Plato inspired. His allegory of the cave
2
is a miniature
of circumstances that generate interpretations. People chained to a bench
see coherent images in shadows visible on the caves 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
99 A Disputed Question
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 someones 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 Platos
myth, we say that interpretation is superseded by inquiry: interpreta-
tions 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 significancemeaningguarantees its
survival. Kants 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 Xsensory data, an idea, or
sentenceis its object. The external X is the state of affairs represented
by the internal X. B is second-order awarenessself-consciousness. The
first Meditation argues that we believe but cannot know that the inter-
nal 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 principleesse est percipino other thing exists if it doesnt
qualify my awareness: it exists when and as perceived.
First-order awareness, A, has the internal X as its content. Second-
order awareness, B, ascertains minds own structure and acts. This happens
as sensory data provoke minds 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 propositionallyas potential truth bearersbe con-
sistent. These were to be the procedural, quasi-mechanical values of a
mind working effectively, not the individuating values of a mind moti-
vated by need or desire. This implies a value-neutral style of interpre-
tation: 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 struc-
tures 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 stimu-
lations. 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 re-
ligious 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 con-
ceptualizations is rooted in needs and desires. Interpretation creates a
gratifying experience by using rulesempirical schemasto do two
things: first, differentiate and organize sensory data, words, or sen-
tences; 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? Jamess The Will to Believe is
emblematic.
5
Motivating our actions, explaining our circumstances,
soothing our disappointments, interpretations are validated by our per-
sistence. Error and frustrationfaulty predictionsare rarely or never
a reason to abandon an interpretation, for such stories cannot be fal-
sified. Any story may be tweaked to extenuate every disappointment.
Descartes cogito and its derivative, Kants 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 pre-
scribed by interests and desires, whether they be practical and urgent or
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 tradi-
tion that Descartes personalizedI am, I existand Kant embellished.
But there is the new information cited above, all of it converging on the
fact that thought is principally an adaptationin perception, memory,
planning, and actionto 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, calcu-
lation, perception, the use and formation of schemas, and minds hier-
archical reading of its own lower-order states (self-awareness) are activities
of the brain and body. This hypothesis about minds exclusively mate-
rial character doesnt yet explain the perceptual qualities of experi-
encecolors, tastes, and sounds, for examplebut dualism isnt
vindicated merely by citing them or by the current impasse to explain-
ing them. Life and minds other activities also seemed intractable to
physical explanation. It would be premature to assume that the quali-
tative 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 du-
alists embroidered their descriptions of conscious experience with specu-
lative inferences about minds unity, spontaneity, and immateriality. This
alternative hypothesisminds materialityeliminates 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 unaccus-
tomed 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 estab-
lished, 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
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, tis-
sues, organs, and bodies, then beyond to families, tribes, and states:
Figure 4.2. A Progression of Orders
The difference in height suggests that each new step is one of aggrega-
tion 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 termina-
tionsattractor stateswithin the sequence. Accordingly, we modify
Figure 4.2:
10
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
10
9
8
77
6
5
4
33
2
1
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 re-
lated to form molecules, the next higher-order entities, because mol-
ecules are least-energy systems. Stabilized by the energy exchange of
their atoms, they cannot be disrupted without the expenditure of more
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
trajectorys attractor states, the stable systems that are energy efficient
and relatively autonomous. Change goes up and down this trajectory
systems form and dissolvethough 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 fami-
lies, tribes, and states, but then, in chaos, it reduces to single persons.
Philosophy traditionally explains matters of every sortthis one
tooin 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 particularsprimary 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, orin Platos Republicthe 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 theoriesincluding
Democritus on atoms, Aristotle on primary substances, and some ver-
sions of the One (spacetime)are hypotheses, hence true or false on
material grounds. Other justifications are values the ideas satisfy. So,
Aristotles primary substances include the autonomous human agents
who are most like God when making laws; Luthers souls are directly
related to the God whose commandments they know and satisfy; Lockes
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 valuestheological, moral, or psychologicalare determin-
ing in all but the few cases decidable empirically.
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 condi-
tion of several, many or allinhibited or excitedis 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 isnt embarrassed by causal relations and mutual affects: it
emphasizes them. It isnt surprised that an entity, considered across the
arc of its trajectory, should repeatedly achieve distinct orders of self-
organization. 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 inter-
nal relationseverything affected by everything elseis nevertheless false
of every property and relation beyond the baseline of gravitational rela-
tions, because modularity is pervasive in nature. Things of all sorts are
relatively autonomous because of their internal organization and indi-
vidual 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
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 for-
mulated 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 considerationsreli-
gious, philosophical, or politicalbetter 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 func-
tional properties emerge? Systems theory is the conspicuous alternative.
This hypothesis, too, derives from Platos 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 stateand 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 cellsunicellular animals, for exampleare 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. Partner-
shipfriendship, for examplewould be sufficient to prolong life, though
families are a better solution because they serve the purposes of friend-
ship, support, reproduction, and education. Yet families are vulnerable,
until buffered by tribes that fight until reconciled within states.
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 signifi-
cant in this other way: every higher-order number of Figure 4.3 signifies
an entity having properties that differ from those of its immediate an-
tecedent. 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 join-
ing 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
systems parts; organization creates sitesthe knifes edgethat 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 organiza-
tion. 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. Ex-
planatory laws do both: they specify generative conditions for regulari-
ties 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 forma-
tion 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
dynamic relations of physical elements the laws assume: strings, quarks,
or atoms, for example. Nature may comprise distinct orders of com-
plexity and emergence, but not different ontological orders of inert
materiality, life, and mind.
Nature is complicated, but not mysterious. Systems theory
communitarianismaccurately describes it. But systems theory is nota-
bly 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 natures
categorial form: meaning, the generic character and relations of actual
states of affairs. Categorial form is the template of a possible world.
Like an architects design, it is general and determinable: many struc-
tures 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, gen-
eralization, 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 univer-
sals? Other times, a metaphor (Platos allegory of the cave), a distinction
(knowledge or opinion), or a discovery (mind aware of itself) dominates
generations of thinkers. The ideas are gorgeous (Leibnizs Monadology,
Hegels 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 extra-
mental 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
trajectorythe Phenomenologythat construes Platos cave as a self-
liberating 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 ex-
presses philosophys 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 hypoth-
eses, 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 Gods activity, nature, or existence and no evidence that
freedom is useful in a void. For there is no freedom without the char-
acter and context that leverage choice: no piano playing without prac-
tice 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, be-
cause empirical evidence is incidentaltrivialwhen the basis for
interpretations claims is as palpable and sure as conviction itself. But
these objections are misplaced. Practical lifethe work and loyalties of
family, friendships, work, school, and stateguarantees meaning and
purpose in most lives. Interpretations stories are an appeasing after-
thought. Evidence alleged to confirm them reduces to the strong feelings
evoked by their motivating attitudes. This small circleattitudes pro-
voking stories that satisfy these attitudesisnt 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 philosophys essential task. The re-
lations of a theorys sentences are clarified when formalized; a universe
of discourse is mapped by charting the relationsthe logical geogra-
phyof 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 ac-
quired and tested. It is these analytic projects, not a broadly shared
metaphysical or theological interest that drives the greater part of cur-
rent philosophic activity. Their justification is Kantian and transcen-
dental: thoughts concepts and conceptual systems prefigure the
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
philosophys 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 domainthe logic of concepts, words, or sentencesexempt
from their intrusions. The analysts 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 con-
ceptual systems (scientific theories, for example) and twice removed
from states of affairs they signify. The self-sufficiency ascribed to con-
cepts 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 pos-
sible; 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 describedtrue to its
philosophic originsas 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 ner-
vously commending mind-body dualismmind and body are used dif-
ferentlywhen physiologists and engineers established that principal
aspects of thoughtmemory, calculation, and inventionare the activi-
ties of physical systems.
Studying words or conceptslexicography and etymology, for
exampleis 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 reformulatereconstructscientific theories in ways cal-
culated to emphasize ideas, relations, or values favored by the analyst;
or they criticize the concepts and nodes of alternative frameworks pro-
posed 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 indis-
pensable. 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
conditionsthe matters at issuelie beyond the frontiers of testability;
it makes itself indispensable by discerning what ideally we could be
mutually respectful, cooperative, and healthy, for examplegiven our
nature and circumstances. There are, of course, some countervailing
faults: we feign answers for unanswerable questions, confuse persua-
sions with ideals, or mistake embellished ideas for pertinent truths.
Our talent for spinning ideas requires a countervailing sobriety:
thought shouldnt promise more than it can deliver. We satisfy this
demand first by distinguishing inquiry from interpretation, then by re-
quiring 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 real-
ized. 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 cant 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 feelingsanger, for
examplemay be cognitive. Include everything that may be plausibly
counted as pertinent evidence, but then concede that passionate com-
mitment 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 knowl-
edge. Things known empirically are vestiges that intimate their higher-
order 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 lifes 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 lastthe materiality neo-Platonists deni-
grated as shadow of shadowsis now first. This volte-face is mistak-
enly 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. Ordi-
nary 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 constru-
ing it. Interpretation speaks for ones hopes and fears; inquiry acknowl-
edges that reality has a shape of its own, one to which we accommodate.
These two styles of thought dont 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 inter-
pretations 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 differ-
ent aims sometimes explain the distorting fantasiesfearful or grandi-
osethat make interpretation hostile to inquiry: I plan for an after-life,
because this one is intolerable. But there is the middle ground implied
above: sometimes the particular values for a determinable such as gen-
der explain the inclination to construe reality in the parochial terms of
ones sex. Or a single person is unfazed by the anomaly of his commit-
ments: 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. Volkswagens 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 pur-
chased twenty percent of Volkswagens 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 interpretationsthey make no unverifiable claims about
reality or humankinds place within itare the viable alternative, be-
cause 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
wont take instruction from dieticians or the periodic table. They neednt,
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 truthare inter-
pretations true merely because believednow, the concern is efficacy
and the fact that interpretations motivate their believers in the way of
Jamess Will to Believe. The issue is clarified if we distinguish these
four aspects of an artists 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 prac-
tices), and the works quality. Interpretation sometimes determines ex-
pressions for the first three considerations, though it is often incidental
to quality. Bachs oratoriosintensely felt by himarent better than
his keyboard music. Palladios churches were fine because he did them,
not because the task of designing them impelled him to a higher stan-
dard. 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.
115
Chapter Five
Imagination
I
magination is often described as a power for inventing, mixing, or
reshaping images (seeing faces in clouds, imagining golden moun-
tains), though these emphases obscure its role. For imagination is the
wholesale generator of thoughts content.
1
Each of its productsimage,
plan, or ideais a construct. Each is content for variation, generaliza-
tion, 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, acknowl-
edged that some ideasspace and time, for instanceare rules used to
organize perceptual or conceptual content. Kant generalized their in-
sight: 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 Kants insight, but redescribed
rules used to organize thought and practice as guiding or leading prin-
ciples. 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.
Leading principles are formal or material. Syntax is formal. Logi-
cal lawsidentity, noncontradiction, and excluded middleare 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 every-
thing: effects are caused; each thing is distinguishable from others by
way of its properties or position. Specialized rulesapplicable within a
domainare 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 synthe-
sis 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 pro-
ductive 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 navely 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. Organiza-
tion 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 faade, 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.
117 Imagination
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 orga-
nization of the materials sequenced and, liberated from the constraints
of particular materials, they generate possible forms in space and time.
These threecontent, aims, and rulesare imaginations resources. Many
of its productsmusic, logical proofs, or designsmay be whole and
articulatecompletewithout material realization. But productive imagi-
nation often stutters or stops when reduced to thoughts 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 middleapply universally, hence,
to imaginations activities and products. Identity prescribes that every-
thing is what it is and not another thing; noncontradiction and excluded
middle protect identity from the intrusion of identity-destroying differ-
ence. Every other ruleof grammar or harmony, for examplehas
restricted application: a competent speaker avoids solecisms and speaks
grammatically; composers write music that is more than noise. Some
rules having restricted domainsmeter and symmetry, for example
also apply directly to complexes that imagination constructs; other rules
dont apply until signsthoughts or wordsare 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: bark-
ing dogs signifies its referent, not the causal relation of the words.
Imaginations products differ accordingly: melodies and designs are com-
plete as imagined, seen, or heard, though an additional step is required
when the items arranged are words because they dont represent pos-
sible or actual states of affairs until construed as signs of properties,
entities, or events. Semantic rules supply their referents.
Leading principles organize all the domainsart, plans, games,
interpretations, hypotheseswhere imagination is active, those com-
plete 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: toolshammers and tongsperceived and enjoyed because of
their mass, shape, and textures, for example. Arts expressions include
architecture, painting, film, poetry, music, literature, and practical arts
such as textiles and gardening. Each format has distinctive rules, or it
uses generic rubricsspatial or temporal position, partandwholein
ways appropriate to its medium and aims.
Forms perceived directly in an architects 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
Shakespeares style. Style is a complex rule, one that mixes artistic or
authorial idiosyncrasies with the dominant practices of a time. One
mans 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 condi-
tion for the next; its likely efficacy is a function of imaginations sen-
sitivity 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 begin-
ners, but merely suggestive to cooks who know how to vary prepara-
tion, 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 opponents response. Imagina-
tion 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 rational-
izing 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).
119 Imagination
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 lifewhat to do, how to do it, with
whomor by fascination with nature and its ways. Like interpretations
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 partandwhole or causeandeffect.
All five productsart, plans, games, stories, and hypothesesare
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 prefig-
ures 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: Alls fair in love and war, Money
talks, Beauty is as beauty does.
One supposes that gamesbound by rulespreclude 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 ane-
mic without possibilities for analogy and metaphor. ReligionGod,
the Creatorneeds it too. Science is more judicious. What joins quarks?
Loosely bound when contiguous, quarks are harder and harder to sepa-
rate as the distance between them increases. A likely hypothesis con-
strues 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 meta-
phors 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 prac-
tices and their effects to standards that are conceived if never achieved.
Analogy projects relations from one subject matter into apparently
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
Imaginations output is unreliable if untested. Tests vary with the con-
structions tested. Beauty is the test of art, pleasure is the measure of
games, efficacy and legality discipline plans. Interpretations stories sat-
isfy attitudes. What of truth: which of imaginations 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 doesnt provide for paintings or
photographs that accurately represent their subjects. We avoid this
impasse by extending truths domain to include propositions (thoughts
and sentences), visual representations, and those novels, dramas, and
poems that accurately signify some aspect of things. Which of
imaginations products satisfy the notion that truth is representation?
Orgiven that my characterization of truth is formulated to include
painting, sculpture, and literaturewhich of imaginations products elude
it? Truth may seem extraneous to plansthey work or notbut 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 arent be played
without accurate maps of the playing field and opposing pieces or play-
ers. And, surely, hypotheses are disciplined by the requirements of logi-
cal consistency and material truth. Interpretations 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. Interpreta-
tions assign status; hypotheses merely describe it. Stories, unlike hy-
potheses, neednt 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-
121 Imagination
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
interpretations stories so much resemble the hypotheses of inquiry;
choosing between them is confusing. Why isnt creationism as good a
surmise as evolution? We have an answer in the measures used to
appraise imaginations constructs. Each is disciplined in ways appropri-
ate 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 dont perceive the data predicted and cant find an
experimental error or conceptual confusion to explain our failure.
Interpretations stories have a different trajectory: they express the ori-
entationsthe hopes and fearsof their creators. Stories may be vigor-
ously 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 distin-
guishes interpretation from inquiry after imagination has constructed its
hypotheses and stories.
Imagination has no way to distinguish the two, though a proce-
dure for distinguishing them is implicit in its leading principles. Rubrics
used to generate associationsimagining smoke, think fireare also
directives to action: seeing smoke, look for fire. Experimenthypoth-
esize and testis the core of the difference between these styles of
thought. Interpretation is satisfied by orientations and stories that sat-
isfy attitudes. Hypotheses are testable, because formation rulesrubrics
such as causeandeffect, partandwholeorganize the experiments
that search for confirming evidence. Theories are sometimes tested virtu-
allywith computers or thought experimentsbut 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 speculations essential complement and guarantor. Lead-
ing principles are its probes and directives.
123
Chapter Six
Leading Principles
PRIORITY
D
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 be-
cause 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 thinkers predilections
explain these disparate responses.
There is, nevertheless, an order of priority. For content that pro-
vokes interpretation or inquiry is not a neutral source of data for each.
Interpretations orientations and stories are valorizing responses to the
effectssuccess, frustration, or fearof practical lifes inquiries. Reso-
nating 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 situ-
ation) by reformulating the story that reconciles or justifies him. He
spreads meaningthe same, altered, or new meaningwhere 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 accidentthat inventory pertinent facts?
Facts precede palliating stories. This conclusion isnt 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 nev-
ertheless perceive a situation that precludes my success: I distinguish
circumstances from my ways of valorizing them.
This order of derivationfirst the inquiries of practical life, then
interpretation, later scienceestablishes the agenda for discussion. Six
questions direct us: i. Are there precedents for the idea of leading prin-
ciples? ii. How are the principles used: are they a priori prescriptions or
hypotheses? iii. What are inquirys leading principles? iv. Do these prin-
ciples 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 natures 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 inquirys 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 thoughts posture: passive scrutiny of data received, differ-
entiated, and organized or the executive activity of a body engaging other
things in pursuit of its aims? A passive mind correlating perceptsfirst
this then thatcould invoke an innate causal principle, but it couldnt
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 isnt irrelevant that the small differences
made are the effects of disproportionate effort. Better technique gets
more from the instrument, butbeginner or masterboth know that
causality is more and other than the correlation of data.
125 Leading Principles
Should we conclude that categorial leading principlescausality,
for exampleare 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 doesnt ruminate until it
explores. Innate heuristics facilitate initiatives and are in turn confirmed
by them.
What are the precedents for leading principles in philosophic think-
ing? Hume and Kant are useful guides. Kants categories prescribe that
every phenomenon encountered shall have quality, quantity, and rela-
tion. 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
qualityone may count the letters of a word or conceive a network of
relations without signifying the characterthe qualityof items counted
or related, but there is no sensory experience without all three. Sensa-
tion presents qualities of specific magnitude and number arrayed in
space and time: these notes, those colored shapes.
Sensory experience was Kants point of reference, hence his infer-
ence 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 applicabil-
ity: necessities Kant ascribed to the transcendental conditions for expe-
rience 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 differencesquality,
quantity, and relationis matched by the implications of Kants empiri-
cal 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
the categories and schemas from Kants story of transcendental world-
making, 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 Aristotles categories are a rainbow, a mere
inventory of underived, elemental differences.
1
But quantity, quality,
and relation feature as qualifications of substance in Aristotles list.
Kants categories are tailored to minds that report their observations
we perceive quality, quantity, and relationbut never interact with
things perceived. Aristotles categories emphasize capacity and causal-
ity; they anticipate and rightly ascribe dynamism to the natural rela-
tions of things including our ways of engaging them. His catalog is the
more salient precedent for the leading principles Peirce named but
didnt fully list.
USE
Hume emphasized that natural relations are simple. Surveying sen-
sory data, we perceive them as contiguous, successive, or similar.
2
Suc-
cession is temporal, while contiguity may be spatial or temporal. There
are degrees of resemblance, from similarity in respect to a generic prop-
erty 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 rela-
tions 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 dis-
cerned within sensory data.
Humes characterization of relations inherent in sensory data is
accurate: there are contiguities, successions, and similaritiescorrela-
tions of these three kindsbut nothing more. Music is a conspicuous
example: notes played and heard exhibit succession and contiguity,
then resemblance when melodies are heard again. Philosophic rela-
tions make unjustified interpolations into experience if reality is noth-
ing apart from sensory data, but this assumptionaffirmed on page
1 of Humes Treatiseis 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 Humes elision. But one doesnt vindicate the other.
No one who dwells alone in Humes stripped-down version of the
cogito should worry about efficacy, cooperation, error, frustration,
and death, but all of us do.
The value of Humes 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, contrari-
ety, and cause and effect.
3
Only the contrariety of existence and nonex-
istence is a relation of ideas, not a way of construing data as evidence of
a difference in things. The principle of causality is Humes prime example
of thoughts reckless ways. But are we deluded? Grant (as I do) that
sensory data exhibit no relations but correlations of data. It doesnt fol-
low 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.
Humes 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: distin-
guish obscure ideas from their clear and distinct expressions, then sepa-
rate the latter from one another so each may be discerned in itself. This,
in Humes parlance, is the principle that everything distinguishable is
separable. Correlates that are contiguous or successiveimpressions of
causes and effects, for examplesatisfy 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 de-
partments 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 structurethe complexity or configura-
tionof matters perceived. His atomismseparable if distinguishable
made him oblivious to forms that give sense or significance to otherwise
accidental conjuncts. Accordingly, we acknowledge these two factors
within every correlation: organizationrelationsand the things re-
lated. Sometimes (buttons in a drawer), relations are adventitious; other
times (faces and seasons) pattern is essential.
Specifying the first patterns discerned is speculativebabies cant
tell us how they process informationbut one imagines that the rela-
tions distinguished are spatial and temporal: fed when hungry. We dis-
cern 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 struc-
tured context for expectation: we anticipate that relations to other people
and thingssatisfying or frustratingwill occur within a matrix of
spatial and temporal relations. The Transcendental Aesthetic opens
Kants first Critique for these or similar reasons: anticipating our rela-
tions 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 inspec-
tion: the shapes and colors of a painting, for example. Carelessly assimi-
lating conversation with listening to musicignoring practical lifethey
described correlated percepts from the standpoint of observers, not
participants. This is the difference remarked above: observers note se-
quences; participants provoke and wait for responses. It may be said
that the second is only a version of the first: I dont 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 sortsimprovising musicians, spouses, and actors
provoke the responses of their partners.
The difference between relations perceived and those requiring ones
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
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 principles 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 be-
yond 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 stipulationsincluding
those which establish units of measure or the rules of pokercould 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. Baseballs 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 engag-
ing 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 ar-
bitrary stipulations, stipulations that are pertinent, like traffic laws, to
our circumstances, or rubrics applicable to nature because they prefig-
ure its categorial features? Philosophy after Wittgenstein and Quine
rejects harsh oppositions: why not survey and distinguish the uses of
thought or language, remarking each ones purport, expressing no pref-
erence? We discriminate and choose, because our circumstances and
nature force a choice; regard experience as an aesthetic exerciseenjoy
it as best you canor 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 prin-
ciples represent differences and relations in the states of affairs signified
by maps, plans, and hypotheses.
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 other-
wisebasic needs require satisfactionand because endowing everyday
life with significance is its principal task. Both exhibit the leading prin-
ciples 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
informationpractical or scientific, empirical or dialecticalalters our
understanding of the circumstances or relationships they signify: a dis-
crepancy tolerable in everyday life is intolerable if our objective is ac-
curacy and depth. Their accurate and economical formulation may be
welcomed; their revision is contentious, because we resist altering prin-
ciples confirmed in practical life and acquired during our evolution in
the near world of middle-sized things. Yet, it wouldnt be surprising that
principles acquired in circumstances of human scale distort our under-
standing 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 particularsis 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 contemporane-
ous or successive. viii. Motion is a continuous trajectory through space,
over time; change is not saltant, it doesnt 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. Changesalter-
ations of quality, quantity, or relationare 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 qualifieddisposedto partici-
pate in some relationships but not others because of their structural
properties. xv. Causal relations and regularities they generate are lawful.
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 pro-
posed amendments, follows:
i. Nature has a decided form, a form that is changeableit can be
alteredthough it is definite at each moment. This is the master prin-
ciple; 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 cir-
cumstances. 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 doesnt work without electricity, there
is no tea without hot water. Urn and pot are points of summation
convenient referentsfor 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. Atten-
tion 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. Aristotles 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. Prac-
tical 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 masss generation in spacetime curvature. This implies
myriad regional wholesmassesintegrated staticallyby position
and dynamicallyby gravityin a global whole: spacetime. Notice,
too, that Aristotles 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 integra-
tion: molecules to molecules, cells to cells, organs to organs. This whole
like families, businesses, and statesis 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 particu-
lars; each is a structured array of properties.
Aristotle catalogued the diversity of things and properties, distin-
guishing some as essentialsubstantial forms,
5
he called themothers
as accidental. Practical life relies on the stability of kinds: there wouldnt
be time to rejigger all our expectations if there were no sharp qualitative
boundaries to things or if their dispositions or behaviors changed capri-
ciously. The periodic table confirms that the stability of elementary physi-
cal 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 under-
stood 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 natures
qualitative complexity? We arent 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 vari-
ables: the frequency, intensity, and duration of electric signals, for ex-
ample. All the differences of color, sounds, taste, and touch occur when
signals are passed through neurons that vary little among themselves.
The simplicity of the means compares to the diversity of the result. But
diversity is our point of reference. Practical life doesnt 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 affairsevery particular and complex of particu-
larsis 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 prop-
erty 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 closetor merely
clothingwhen we arent 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 exist-
ence at other times is indeterminate, as described by the changing prob-
ability densities generated by the Schrdinger 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 implica-
tionthat properties are assignable to things only when observedis
reason for saying that nothing but probability densities exists between
observations of particles. This claim is sometimes construed epistemo-
logically 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 partners
last note before calculating the probability of the next. There is no
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 thingsthimbles and starsare assemblies of the
smallest. Wouldnt indeterminacy at the lowest scales apply as well at
larger scales? One may answer that interactionshence 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 electro-
magnetically or gravitationally to all or many others. For interactions
with them and background conditionsthe structure of spacetimewould
seem to provide determining conditions for the values of its determinable
properties: position, charge, and spin. We normally suppose that mea-
surement 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 applicationsinto an ontol-
ogy 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 unobservedexcept
in terms of probabilitiescan never be more than agnostic about them?
Reducing them to probability densitiesinsisting that they cannot be
fully determinateis an additional, illegitimate step. Nor does the issue
dissolve into meaninglessnessan old positivist dodgewhen 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 succes-
sive. We generalize from experience: both music and conversation
progress sequentially.
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 phenomenonmotionthat requires
both. Motion is pervasivenothing natural is static, though many dynamic
relations are stableso 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 substitu-
tion.
6
Substitution would require wholesale reinterpretation of terms
introduced by this and other leading principles: when and where, for
example. That isnt 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 timecelestial music, perhapsbut
no space.
The assumption that space, time, or spacetime is a unitary, con-
tinuous swath is contentious. Presentistsin the tradition of Berkeleys
esse est percipibelieve 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 momen-
tary awareness lacks scope sufficient to present an infinite series. An
alternativealien to our experience of timereduces 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 didnt 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 ob-
liquely by arguing that space and time are merely forms of intuition, not
extra-mental domains or organizational matrices.
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 isnt implausible: we wouldnt secure
or satisfy ourselves if our readings of space and time were mistaken in
these or parallel ways. It doesnt 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 prac-
tical 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 our-
selves to a course of action. Time travelbackwardwould 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 prac-
tical 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 con-
tinuous, at bottom, but this, too, is anomalous with practical experience
and paradoxical in itself: it invites the inference that motion is discontinu-
ous 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
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 doesnt jump: Continuity and saltation arent
always contraries. Apparent continuity is consistent with real disconti-
nuity: 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 ter-
minates so each subsequent span is energized from nothing. The granu-
larity 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. Con-
tinuity 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 mate-
rial thing has the continuity of a sinuous melody: notes succeed one
another; they cohere within a phrase as phrases cohere with one an-
other, 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 thingsstructuresdissolve into episodes. The movie of
a footrace reduces it to frames, but the race isnt 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, in-
nings 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
it seems to imply a succession of terminations, deaths, from which they
immediately and mysteriously recoverand consequential, too, for
morality: am I responsible in subsequent episodes of life for behavior
committed in those previous? Practical life doesnt have answers: it
acknowledges lifes 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 theycould 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 isnt 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
Mindsagents par excellence since Descartesmust be epi-
sodic, because momentary impressions and ideas are the selfs 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 didnt,
because time cannot be the integrating medium, given Humes assump-
tion that esse est percipi. The only content to his idea of time is the
duration of momentary impressions or ideas; these are the things per-
ceived. There is no content for intervals between impressions and ideas,
hence nothingincluding no durationperceived. There is, consequently,
no impression or idea of the time required to integrate Humes 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 agents constituentsits atoms and moleculesare
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 trans-
fer. That cant 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.
Motions integration is, nevertheless, a claim to be confirmed and
explained, so lets not assume that there can be no integrator other than
space, time, or spacetime. Put it instead as a challenge: specify an alter-
native integrator for the alleged transient episodes of materiality; con-
firm 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 bodys integration. It is disqualified, too, because
mind is an activity of material bodies, especially their brains: bodys
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 Gods 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 Gods work, not an argument that stipulates
both his existence and the impossibility of controverting the stipulation.
Alleged evidence is compromised if, for example, Gods agency is me-
diated by other thingsspacetime, for examplewhile God himself is
otherwise unknown and unknowable.
All this is backdrop to the question at issue: do agents have con-
tinuity? 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 unitythe identityof 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; Aristotles 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 contain-
ers, within which material thingseach separable from the others and
self-sufficientare 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 matters formation. This, if so, pro-
vides for the continuity of material agents, while acknowledging the
dynamic that explains their transformation (dust to dust). It also pre-
cludes 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
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 doesnt 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 containerabiding material agents located within a
spacetime indifferent to themis replaced by the idea that values
for masscontentare a function of values for motion in spacetime,
the container.
x. No action without an agent: This principle has many applica-
tions, some more defensible than others. Its moral implications are
apparent: I did it makes menot a disembodied actionresponsible
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 re-
sponsible agent. Interpretation is satisfied, because inference produces a
congenial result by mating grammar to a highly confirmed leading prin-
ciple. But these are abusive uses of the principle. Others are only pro-
vocative: we infer from undulating light waves to the medium in which
they movethe etherbut then substitute spacetime, a different me-
dium. 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 (electri-
cal fields) inferred from material evidence (wireless computing). Aristotles
use of the principle is familiar: every activity or quality is referred to
primary substance or, more contentiouslyif qualification counts as
activityto 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 mass-
less are likely candidates, but are not for the same reason that a sub-
stitute was inferred when the ether was rejeced: here, too, an electrified
spacetime is the likely medium and agent.
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 adjec-
tives 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, be-
cause 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 informa-
tion, and because of a response that confirms the causal principle. In-
fants 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 rubricproperties, positions, and velocities are altered by
causesis the intermediary of three related principles: causality elabo-
rates covariation, while being an application of sufficient reason. Covaria-
tion requires that changes for the values of two or more variables
should track one anotherF=ma, for examplethough it is mute about
the material relation of variables that satisfy it. Sufficient reason ex-
presses the claim that there are no effects of any kindlogical or
materialwithout 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 an-
ticipates 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 rea-
son, 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 Leibnizs 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
look contingent, we use inference to discover their necessity. Aspirin
cures headaches. The connection seems loose, until we discover that the
geometry of aspirins 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 ef-
fect: 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 effects 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, be-
cause heat causes turbulence in water molecules, but waters relation to
heat was exploited long before people understood its mechanics.
Aristotle distinguished four sorts of cause: efficient, formal, mate-
rial, 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 isnt 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 Mills 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 trajec-
tory 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
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 dont strive to
achieve an ideal; the attractor doesnt 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 pro-
cesses that stabilize them. Intermediate statesembryos 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: gravitations 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 doesnt preclude necessity: meaning, the parochial necessity
obtaining when events in a world satisfy its laws.
Second is Humes 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 lan-
guage 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 causesincluding light,
gravity, and electromagnetic fieldsare not more mysterious for being
known, inferentially, by way of their effects.
Third are Humes dogmatic postulates: ideas are copies of impres-
sions, 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 transferbetween and among material agents? Contemporary
Humeans defend themselves by agreeing that Humes 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 chal-
lenged, respectively, by violations of Bells 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 intel-
ligible. All birds fly was a reasonable surmise, until the discovery of some
that do not. Quantum exceptions are more puzzling. They may be evi-
dence that nature is radically different from the claims made of it by
Aristotle or classical physics, and this, if so, requires a theory that ex-
plains 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 doesnt apply universally? One reason is the modest
conditionany exceptionrequired to negate a universal truth. An-
other is deference to Humes claim that we habitually misconstrue cor-
relation as causation. Exceptions to the principle are, on this view, stark
evidence that causality and sufficient reason are thoughts 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 Maxwells electromagnetic field
theory; then, it seemed a foolish lapse from conceptual discipline. Dis-
regard for sufficient reason may not be better, given this principles
overwhelming empirical support. Doctors report symptoms they cant
explain; they dont 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.
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 theorys 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, un-
able 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 naturethat 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 excep-
tions paradigmaticthe first alternativeare 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 em-
body lowest orders where chance and spontaneity are pervasive. Prov-
ing this requires a condition we may never achieve: namely, an exhaustive
specificationperfect knowledgeof 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 isnt
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 predic-
tions 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 con-
dition is never observed, yet the Galilean-Newtonian postulate gener-
ates accurate descriptions of inertial and vectorial motion. But is this a
good analogy? No, because the odd exceptions alleged by quantum
theory are neither postulates on which a theory is constructed nor ef-
fects 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 Humes 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 every-
thing is constituted of elementary particles, then consider: if particles
can come into and pass out of being spontaneously, why shouldnt
that also be true of every thing composed of them, however complex?
There are many banks and many more deposits. Wouldnt it be prob-
able, 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
dont we have the world Hume anticipated: why doesnt nature re-
semble an array of lights, each going on and offin 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. Suffi-
cient reason may be nothing more than a generalization from observa-
tion: 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
correlationconjunctionnot 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 rea-
son 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.
Which of these options is more likely to be correct: the principle
is sometimes or always suspended, it is a well-founded inductive sur-
mise, 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 isnt 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 be-
cause inexplicable and miraculous if sufficient reason does not apply.
Someone reliably speaks English or Chinese in a familiar voice. Why
doesnt she use words from randomly different languages in a voice and
timbre that vary with every syllable? Why doesnt she, too, change con-
tinuouslyspontaneouslyfrom 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 cant 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 suffi-
cient 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
cosmosa complex, self-transforming processat its inception: we sup-
pose that sufficient reason does not obtain, then consider the task of
constructing a world such as the one we have without it. God, we as-
sume, is a deist. Having read Aquinas, believing that nothing comes from
nothing and that every contingency requires a necessary ground, he pro-
duces 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 existsthere is no self-differentiating material from
which to beginand 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 Humes aimprove that sufficient reason
doesnt obtainby affirming that new existents have three jointly suf-
ficient conditions: impressions, ideas that derive from them, and the
thinkingthe imaginingthat raises the intensity of ideas to the vivac-
ity of impressions.
Ignore these question-begging assumptions to consider only the
implications of Humes 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 startwould imply that God has
limited powers.) Hume and his heirs avert having to duplicate Gods
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
the conditions for processes they see. Let them imagine nature at time
zero, and the problem is inescapable: this starting pointan elementary
something or nothinglacks 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 rheto-
ric 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 condi-
tion 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?
Humes 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 assem-
bling these simples. Humes 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 philosophersstill a ma-
joritysuppose 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 repre-
sented: colliding vehicles, for example. Where is the collision, and where
the energy transfer when ideas or percepts of the cars have been distin-
guished and separated?
I infer that a principle of sufficient reason intrinsic to natural
processessomething from something, not something from nothingis
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 cant yet tell.
Should we be satisfied that we may, someday, understand where and
why the principles application starts and stops? No, because the reduc-
tio 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.
It applies from the beginningat every scaleor not at all. Its genera-
tive 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 itthat 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 sen-
tences.) The evidence for sufficient reason is nearly parallel, if we sup-
pose that there are no exceptions to its universal application in nature.
The parallel is inexact, because suspending non-contradiction is incon-
ceivable, though we can conceiveas Hume didthat sufficient reason
does not obtain. Accordingly, there is no direct proof that sufficient
reason applies necessarily, though we have considerable empirical evi-
dence 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 suf-
ficient 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 comple-
mentary 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 ordi-
nary features of practical life: pleasure or pain, for example. It doesnt
preclude a margin of determinability such that conditions fix the bound-
aries 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 relation-
ships. This principle may be assimilated to the previous one, because
explicating causality should clarify the degree of freedom that obtains
in a world laced with causes. The current principle is, nevertheless,
useful for its contrast with the implication that causality creates a lock-
step world, one that suffocates strategy and flexibility. For there are
three sites of contingency or slippage in worlds structured by the prin-
ciple 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 classiciallydeterministicallybut for the human brain? The
statistical character of classical laws isnt more encouraging: the gas
molecules of statistical mechanics move deterministically. It is the com-
plexity of their interactions and the singular behavior of things aggre-
gated (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 distancemotion
makes no jumpsis a prcis of this principle.
Locality was assumed to be a universal feature of nature until the
publication of John Bells theorem in 1964. Bell argued that local cau-
sation 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 prac-
tical 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 experimen-
tally 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 loop-
holes that might compromise experiments confirming apparent action
at a distance.
No amateur can challenge Bells theory or these experiments, but
reservations are appropriate. Why are some physicists unconcerned by
the mystery that testing one particle reveals a property instantly propa-
gated to a remote other in violation of the stricture that lights 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 isnt
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 isnt the effect apparent at larger scales? We cant have a
responsible answer if we dont understandas physicists do not under-
standhow mutual entanglement occurs spontaneously at a distance.
Are there possible physical explanations for the effect, explana-
tions 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 cars 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 fur-
rowsstringssuch 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 compari-
son 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 assump-
tions; its experimentally confirmed implications would be intolerably odd
without the theorys 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 quali-
fieddisposedto 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
second-order properties qualifying structures for participation in causal
relationships. This characterization looks backward and forward: back-
ward 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 cau-
sation 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 rela-
tions. Yet practical life is drenched in the assumption that causes are
efficacious, and that things vary in their possible effects. Are we de-
ceived: perhaps we see a knifes 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 inci-
dental 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. Humes conceptual analysis is re-
sponsible 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 aswhilethe knife cuts, words flow as
one speaks. Causality is a conditional, not a temporal relation, though
effects sometimes survive their causes.
Humes 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
dont 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
is construed as an odd state of being, not as shorthand for the inference
to an unknown structure and its qualifications for interacting with oth-
ers: a knife qualified to cut because of its fine blade.
The positivist solutioncounterfactual conditionalsignores in-
ternal structure (and sometimes all structural properties) while empha-
sizing 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 dont 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 dif-
ferently labeled. Why this difference, if the capacity is only in the play-
ing? 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 lan-
guage 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
abilityno confirming behaviorwithout the ability. Knives wear their
capacities on the outside: they are sharpened or not. Brains, nerves, and
muscles arent 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 pro-
posed 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 psycholo-
gies. Cognitive psychology was scorned. Its computer analogies were
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 dis-
positions: 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 appear-
ance of double-talk is better described as a small circle. Structural prop-
erties are the constitutive properties of things. They qualifyare disposed
forcausal relationships because of these properties.
Founding dispositions in the structural properties of things implies
a lingering problem: is a dispositions character fixed by the structure or
is the structure merely its carrier? Suppose the latter, noticing this con-
sequence: having capacities presupposes having a structure, but the
character of one makes no difference to the character of the other. Why
shouldnt it happen, given this assumption, that a things capacities
change though its structure is unaltered? Accounting for the stability of
a things dispositionssame structure, same capacitiesrequires 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 structures dispositions.
But saying this duplicates Aristotles quandary: he ascribed capacities to
thingscalling them potentialitieswhen he couldnt determine their
basis in structural properties. There is no current way of establishing
that the differences among ones habitssloth or initiative, for example
are founded in the geometry of ones 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 hierar-
chical ordering of things and their propertiesbodies to cells, cells to
molecules, molecules to atomsthen discern the topological, geometri-
cal, 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 Aristotles substantial forms with a much smaller set
of mathematicalessentially geometricalideas. 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
reason: effects recur, because conditions sufficient to produce them are
pervasive or recurrent. Practical life requires that we distinguish acci-
dents from laws if we are to discount one while searching for the other.
Philosophers often describe law sentences as laws. This is some-
times shorthand, though it often expresses the idealist assumption that
laws have no status apart from minds 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
dont invent the laws constraining their bodies. Practical life never as-
sumed otherwise. For accidents are unreliable; efficacy and predictabil-
ity 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 remprior to and apart from
their instancesby 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 toonow reduced
to a set of rulesis 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 contradic-
tion.
16
Uninstantiated properties exist, this implies, as possibilities: pos-
sibility 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. Natu-
ral lawsits forminhere 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.
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
natures stability, though same cause, same effect is the inductive gen-
eralization 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; its our good luck they dont.
18
But there is an
explanation for stabilities we observe: suppose, as above, that disposi-
tions qualifying structures for participation in a range of causal rela-
tionships 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 dont know.
xvi. Mutually affecting causes sometimes establish stable, recipro-
cal relations, hence systems and hierarchies of systems: The causal prin-
ciplea affects bhas 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 endur-
ing 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 cellshigher-order systemsrelate to other
systems in either of four ways. First are systems that are mutually inde-
pendent. Systems related in this way may sometimes affect one another,
but the effecthowever damaging or benignis 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 systems 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
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 constitu-
ents 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 couldnt 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 systems
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 behaviorwhen planted, for examplethough they
lack the control that comes with choice. Some things dont have an
inside. A Mbius strip is ambiguous in this respect, but games, dis-
course, 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 systemscities and
nation-statesachieve 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 isnt altered by forgetting or redescribing it. No one imagines
that geological history could be reduced to the interpretive interests of
contemporary geologists. Why isnt 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 dy-
namicin continental plates, human institutions, or personal lifeis
obscured, not effaced by self-serving stories. Mythology may sometimes
be good for moralewere better than we lookbut it doesnt 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 contro-
versial ways indicated. Four other principles have science as their prin-
cipal sponsor:
xix. Some phenomena are best described statistically or proba-
bilistically. 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: indi-
vidual 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 complex-
ity precludes advance knowledge of single events, or because random
variations in individual behavior have a common effect. It doesnt follow
that frequenciesimplying large samplesare always required for prob-
ability 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 cor-
porate propertya shape that is relatively stable despite the changing
relative positions of individual birdsis statistical in the way of a heated
gas pressing on the walls of a vessel. The likelihood that any single bird
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 differ-
ences among a small set of variables and their relations, F=ma, for
example. Reflecting on the information gathered by applying the prin-
ciples surveyed above, we realize that the diversity of things and events
may express a small set of variables. This isnt a novel discovery: resolv-
ing 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 re-
sult from altering values for a small set of variables. This is the simplic-
ity and homogeneity ascribed to nature. Neither quality is violated by
hierarchies that generate new propertiesof 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 com-
plexity, 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 exhaus-
tively 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 resultsthe discovery of DNA,
for exampleare not expressed mathematically. But this principle ex-
presses the surmise that nature is exhaustively mathematicizable: we
speculate that an equation signifying the relationship of a small number
of variables can represent natures complexities at any moment, and
that such an equation might track natures evolution from its beginning.
These are ambitions rather than achievements; the order of discovery is
opposite the order of nature. Starting with mathematical formulae ap-
propriate to distinct domains, we may integrate themby way of the
deductive relations familiar to mathematical proofunder 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 de-
ducible from a theory of everything.
This leading principle is sometimes misconstrued: it does not im-
ply 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 kindsformal and moral
are also pertinent.
Formal principles: Every leading principle satisfies formal criteria
that include grammatical rules and the laws of logic. Grammar con-
strains 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 moti-
vated 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 doesnt apply.
20
Kants
remarks about general logic (distinguished from transcendental logic) are
the more likely cause of logics 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 neces-
sary 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 pos-
sible 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
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 cant suspend the principle of noncon-
tradiction without contradicting ourselves: applying its negationboth
a thought or sentence and its negationentails that the principle both
is and is not suspended.
24
Yet, this implication doesnt prove that non-
contradiction 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 Butlers 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 prop-
erties but other locations. Being what they are by virtue of their prop-
erties, 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) prop-
erties 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 over-
whelming: identity is a material principle; everything satisfies the prin-
ciple, 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 isnt, because there
is no separate justification for acknowledging them. We have a justifi-
cationButlersfor the principle of identity and its derivatives.
A last objection might have come from Zeno: does identitys
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 prin-
ciples? Nothing in these principles bars change, though they entail that
identity alters as properties are lost or acquired. We speculatethinking
of sufficient reasonthat the dispositions and energy for every altered
state are in the state previous: the properties constitutive of identity
embody powers that resist or yield to change. Bread resists some knives,
and yields to others. Hence: xxii. The principles of identity, noncontra-
diction, and excluded middle apply throughout nature.
Some additional leading principleslook for proportion or tran-
sitivity, for exampleare also counted as formal, though these, too, are
material relations. So, symmetry is proportion, and confirmed hypoth-
eses about the right hand easily translate into hypotheses about the left.
Orthe Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen experiment
26
we infer without ex-
periment 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 inten-
tion of societies that regulate themselves to achieve equity and civil
peace. Moral sense emerges in core systemsfamilies and friendships,
for examplebefore 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,
Dont trip elderly people carrying groceries. A competing principle,
Serve (satisfy, save) yourself, is also familiar, though practical rea-
sonscooperation and respect for othersmitigate 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. Kants 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
themfeeding ones children while ignoring the neighbors childrenis not
demonstrably irrational or immoral. That behavior isnt justifiable if the
neighbors children starve while those at home are stuffed to bursting. But
this is not typically so: most peoples resources are spread thin as they try
to do justice to those for whom they are responsible. Which is our pri-
mary obligation: all humanity, or the set of core systems that is home to
each of us?
It may seem odd that moral principleswhatever 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
them do unto you instantiate causality and reciprocity. Showing that
a moral principle is not an instance of one or another of the twenty-
three categorial principles would prove that the list is incomplete.
VALUES
Is inquiry biased by its leading principles? Motivating valuesinterests
and aimsorganize practical life and science, too. Do they infiltrate
leading principles, corrupting their applications, distorting the informa-
tion 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 rel-
evant 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 experi-
ments, 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 directivesspotlightsthat anticipate significant differ-
ences in the ambient world. They discriminate, but dont appraise; dis-
criminating falsely, they are corrected.
Facts entanglement with value is a charge appropriate to interpreta-
tion, not inquiry: it construes every relevant factual difference or relation
in terms appropriate to valorizing attitudes. Inquiry is the sober anti-
dote: 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 pur-
poses 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
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 sci-
ence, 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 theo-
ries 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 rea-
sonswhen cars accelerate or cornerbut its causal applications are
incidental to correlations that provoked its discovery.
This difference between science and practical lifeneutral or en-
gagedis troubling when it sets them against one another. Truth wouldnt
be served if, for example, the principle of sufficient reason were quali-
fied because physicists had explained and confirmed quantum indeter-
minacy, though their findings were rejected for want of evidence that
there is indeterminacy in everyday experience. Disparities of this sort
arent shocking: the empirical success of scientific theories and the tech-
nology they support justify believing that practical life is an island in a
luminous sea. We dont 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
dont know, though we thank our good luck for living in prosaic, pre-
dictable circumstances. Aristotle supposed that everything, near and far,
has the categorial features discerned close at hand, but he was unrea-
sonably nave. 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
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 unex-
plained 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 couldnt
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 show-
ing that the apparent determinacies of middle- and large-scale phenom-
ena are generated from the indeterminacies of the small. It neednt 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 conced-
ing 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 myopicaction at a distance, the indeterminacy of
untested particles, something from nothing, large-scale determinism from
quantum indeterminacyfail this test. Aggregationthe standard expla-
nationdoesnt explain the transformation from indeterminacy to
determinacy: particles that lack determinate properties dont 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 per-
petual interactions.
There is rude and reliable integrity to practical life and its find-
ings. It makes little difference to practice that our leading principle is
geocentric or heliocentric: one can use either to organize the days
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 conflictsthose of quantum mechanics and
relativity theoryare also incidental to practical life, but vastly signifi-
cant 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 isnt likely to
be more accurate than folk psychology. But what changes should we
make; better, what evidence justifies them? For what do we know of the
conditions for odd correlations at a distance? How well do we under-
stand 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 endors-
ing every idea mooted by physicists or their journalist interpreters?
Does quantum indeterminacy presuppose that there are multiple pos-
sible worlds represented by the probabilities of the Schrdinger equa-
tion? 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 dont have such theories? Yes, it is. Complementarity, for
example, is a word signifying an observed difference: particle or wave.
It doesnt explain the difference, and doesnt pretend to explain it.
Emphasizing the word affirms a philosophic doctrineoperational-
ismwhich avers that there is and need be no explanation for or
resolution of experimental differences: we merely specify the opera-
tions that expose them. This is a halfway house, one having prece-
dents, a notion about minds relation to body, for example. Here, too,
a wordparallelismsignified an observed difference and regularity
without explaining it. But parallelism is lame now that minds activi-
tiesall 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 explainrather than reportphenomena 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 dont speculate. Locke taught us to live within
the ample swathe of sensory experience: enjoy the data we have when
their causesreal essencesare unknowable. Kant dispensed with the
unknowable, but promised an experience laced with stabilities guaran-
teed by categories and schemas that differentiate and organize sensory
data. We inherit their emphases: skepticism, experience, and rules or
procedures for producing a reliable, rationally accountable experience.
Now consider Bridgmans 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 com-
mended. Dispensing with abductive hypotheses, they report the results
of experiment and infer that the processes or entities observed are dif-
ferent 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 physiol-
ogy violate operationalist scruples by using different techniques to con-
firm 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 think-
ing that might create it. We are fond of saying that there are, in prin-
ciple, 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 phe-
nomenon? 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 dont 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 ex-
planatory physical theory: abandon well-established leading principles
because of unexplained experimental results or cringe each time a physi-
cist remarks that the principles are artifacts of classicalantiquated
thinking? Science typically overcomes every conceptual objection when
experimental results are grounded in systematic theory. But sometimes
when no theory of that quality is availablepassivity in the face of its
onslaught is a mistake. Practical life, too, is evidence of natures con-
straining principles. Thinking bodies engage other things, learn, con-
sider, 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
in his fields, stubbornly affirming that Earth is flat. The dialectical
refinements of principles learned in practical experiencedeterminate
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 didnt 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 ex-
plains the anomaly of principles that work in the large but not in the
small. This isnt 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. Gen-
eral relativity describes the structure of spacetime and gravity in ways
that explain phenomena it correctly predicts. Quantum theory doesnt
do as much.
CATEGORIAL FORM
Metaphysics describes the categorial features of things while proposing
to integrate those features within an account of natures categorial form.
30
Practical life and science provide most of the details. Metaphysics sur-
veys their sometimes fragmentary results before suggesting alternative
ways to integrate them. Shrinking from excesses that make interpreta-
tion 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 meta-
physicsor the idea of itis incorruptible because natures categorial
form is unaffected by any story interpreters propose. That design may be
fixed or fluidit may evolvebut either way, inquiry, not interpretation,
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 experi-
ment. The positivists who reviled metaphysics neednt have looked far to
discover evidence of its persistent effect on our understanding of the
world and our place there. For leading principlesrules that direct in-
quiryare, collectively, our best estimate of natures 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 middle-
sized 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 haveprinciples 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 prin-
ciples are merely enabling, so these results are all the content metaphys-
ics 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 rela-
tivity, for example, is claim of great generality. No hypothesis is more
consequential for categorial form, or for the many inquiries that dis-
cover 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 prin-
ciple that space time is continuous, its positions mutually accessible.
Hence this distinction: Categorial form comprises natures 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
worlds distinguishing spacetime, not only cause and effect, but specific-
ity 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 architects sketch and a blueprint: one
roughs out a structures form while anticipating none of the texture and
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 coher-
ent 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 natures 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 anoma-
lies, dissolving whatever paradoxes they imply. Or it will purge them
because information about unknown dimensions, strings, or fields vindi-
cates most or all of the disreputable classical notions, the leading prin-
ciples cited above. It will explain the smooth emergence of the middle-sized
phenomena of practical life and the larger ones of cosmology while in-
voking these or other empirically tested principles. Having neither ver-
sionanomalies made reasonable or eliminatedwe mark time.
173
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 circum-
stances from which they will redeem it. A meaning-bestowing narrative
is more credible if its structure exhibits relationshipscause and effect,
part and wholeprefigured by leading principles.
These twointerpretation and inquiryare 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 dont care that myth and magic are mock explo-
rations: 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 isnt 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. Interpre-
tation tells gratifying stories, then spreads the news so that social sua-
sion makes criticism dangerous: challenge an interpretationHow would
we determine that this claim is true?and the response is more likely
anger than evidence. Inquiry starts unpretentiously in the reactions and
initiatives that sustain life by securing or satisfying us. It assembles
maps of the nearby ambient world, then theories that explain the phe-
nomena observed. The narrative affirmed is ever more comprehensive,
because technology and imagination extend the range of testable hy-
potheses. Inquiry justifies conviction, never dogmatism. Ask for evi-
dence 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 inter-
pretation 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 interpreta-
tion 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 em-
brace the evidence that we are fallible, contingent, and ephemeral.
Refusing the choice, imperfectly coherent, we do both.
175
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. vvi, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1935), vol. v, paras. 5.3775.387,
pp. 233247.
6. Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, in On the Improvement of the Under-
standing, The Ethics, Correspondence, trans. R. H. M. Elwes (New York: Dover,
1955), prop. X, pp. 252254.
7. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith
(New York: St. Martins, 1965), pp. 142143.
8. Peirce, The Fixation of Belief, paras. 5.3655.369, pp. 226229.
9. David Weissman, Lost Souls: The Philosophic Origins of a Cultural
Dilemma (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2003), pp. 8192.
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 (In-
dianapolis, 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. 473502.
2. Plato, The Republic, trans. Francis M. Cornford (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1945), pp. 1821; Niccol 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. 514589.
5. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage,
1973).
6. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1973),
pp. 236243, 344387.
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. 6572, 272, n. 2.
8. Rudolf Carnap, On Some Concepts of Pragmatics, Philosophical
Studies, vol. 6, no. 6, December 1955, pp. 8991.
9. Kant, Critique of Judgment, pp. 1617, 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 Nagels introduction to Deweys Logic: The Theory of
Inquiry, pp. xixxx.
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 (Al-
bany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2006), pp. 2631, 3637.
17. Plato, Meno, in Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and
Huntington Cairns (New York: Pantheon, 1961), 97b99a, pp. 381382.
18. Charles Sanders Peirce, Pragmatismthe Logic of Abduction, in
Collected Papers, vol. v., paras. 5.171174, pp. 105107.
Notice that abduction contains, as a fragment of itself, a style of thinking
deductionthat 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. Deductions emphasesconsistency, validity, and its rules of infer-
enceare 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 deductions alleged integrity as an a priori dis-
cipline. My suggestion warrants a different explanation for the alleged deficiency
176 Notes to Chapter One
177 Notes to Chapter Two
of deductions 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. 225226: 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. 6166.
25. Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory (New York: Seabury, 1982), pp.
264272.
26. See Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad,
1955), pp. 153154.
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. 120136.
29. Ibid., pp. 73200.
30. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Athens, Ohio: Ohio
University Press, 1991), pp. 5965.
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 Person-
ality Development, American Psychologist, vol. 46, no. 4, 1991, pp. 333341.
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 per-
ceived) would preclude us from explaining or even acknowledging these psychic
formations, though interpretation is most potentindividually and within soci-
eties at largewhen 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. 1756.
178 Notes to Chapter Three
6. Sren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychologi-
cal Exposition for Edification and Awakening, trans. A. Hannay (New York:
Penguin, 1989), pp. 6061.
7. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 3: The Phe-
nomenology of Knowledge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957); Rudolf
Carnap, Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology, in Semantics and the Philoso-
phy of Language, ed. Leonard Linsky (Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois
Press, 1966), pp. 3133; Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 257275.
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
10. Quine, Word and Object, pp. 913.
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 Philoso-
phy of W. V. O. Quine, ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn and Paul Arthur Schilpp,
(Chicago and La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1986), p. 118.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., pp. 2223.
16. Ibid., pp. 2425.
17. Ibid., p. 23.
18. See W. V. O. Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1977), pp. 2668.
19. W. V. O. Quine, Pursuit of Truth (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1990), p. 18.
THREE. INQUIRY: PRACTICAL LIFE AND SCIENCE
1. Plato, Phaedo, in Collected Dialogues, 65a65d, pp. 4748.
2. See Ronald N. Giere, Scientific Perspectivism (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2006).
3. See, for example, Ren Descartes, Meditations, in Discourse on the
Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, ed. David Weissman (New Ha-
ven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 5863.
4. Weissman, Intuition and Ideality (Albany, N.Y.: State University of
New York Press, 1987), pp. 109156.
5. See Drew Khlentzos, Naturalistic Realism and the Antirealist Chal-
lenge (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2004).
6. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 180187.
7. Weissman, Eternal Possibilities, pp. 237290.
8. Weissman, Intuition and Ideality, pp. 8895; and Truths Debt to
Value (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 160169.
179 Notes to Chapter Three
9. Weissman, Truths Debt to Value, pp. 226260, 272285.
10. Bertrand Russell, On Denoting, in Logic and Knowledge, ed. Robert
C. Marsh (London: Macmillan, 1964), pp. 3956.
12. Charles Sanders Peirce, Questions Concerning Certain Faculties
Claimed for Man, in Collected Papers, vol. v, paras. 5.234236, 5.257, pp.
146, 152.
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. 12, 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. 12, January 2000, pp. 207208.
22. J. J. Gibson, The Information Contained in Light, Acta Psychologica,
Amsterdam, vol. 17, January 1960, pp. 2330.
23. Margolis, Relativism and Interpretive Objectivity, p. 210.
24. Rockmore, Interpretation as Historical, Constructivism, and His-
tory, 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 consciousnessfor which conceptual think-
ing is the real human being, and for which the conceptual world as such is thus
the only reality. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 101.
31. Weissman, Intuition and Ideality, pp. 157196.
33. John Dewey, The Reflex Arc in Psychology, Psychological Review,
3, 1896, pp. 357370.
34. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1962); Pierre Duhem, The Aim and Structure of Physical
Theory, trans. Philip P. Wiener (New York: Atheneum, 1962), pp. 295298.
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.: Northwest-
ern University Press), 1953, pp. 129160.
2. Plato, Republic, pp. 227235.
3. Descartes, Meditations, pp. 5870.
5. William James, The Will to Believe, in The Writings of William
James, ed. John J. McDermott (New York: Modern Library, 1968), pp.
717735.
6. Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World, pp. 98121; Quine,
Word and Object, pp. 125; Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History, pp. 134135;
Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis, Minn.: University
of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. 141.
7. Carnap, Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology, pp. 208228; Kant,
Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 162175; Ren 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. 1256.
8. See, for example, the theological disputes chronicled in Amos
Funkensteins Theology and the Scientific Imagination (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1986).
FIVE. IMAGINATION
1. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 142144.
2. Weissman, Eternal Possibilities, pp. 131132; The Cage, pp. 2631.
3. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 165
SIX. LEADING PRINCIPLES
2. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, p. 11.
3. Ibid., pp. 1415.
4. Peirce, The Fixation of Belief, paras. 5.3775.381, pp. 233238.
5. Aristotle, Metaphysics, in Basic Works, 1028a101041b33, pp. 783
811.
6. Marshall Spector, Concepts of Reduction in Physical Science (Phila-
delphia: Temple University Press, 1978).
7. Bertrand Russell, On Order in Time, in Logic and Knowledge, ed.
Robert C. Marsh (London: Macmillan, 1964), pp. 347363.
8. Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna (London: Penguin,
1991), pp. 534549.
181 Notes to Chapter Six
9. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, pp. 635636.
10. G. W. V. Leibniz, Monadology, in Monadology and Other Philo-
sophical Essays, trans. Paul Schrecker and Anne Martin Schrecker (Indianapo-
lis, Ind.: 1965), pp. 153154.
11. John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, 33 vols., ed.
J. M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 19631991), vol. vii, p. 391.
12. J. S. Bell, Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 1421.
13. It is, nevertheless, odd that an assumption violating the principle of
sufficient reasonunexplained natural, uniform rectilinear motionis a pre-
supposition for every calculation that explains deviations from rectilinearity.
Energy exchange or inhibitionefficient causationseems 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 ques-
tion: what is the material, generating groundthe sufficient conditionfor
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. 7597; Weissman,
The Cage, pp. 4150.
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, 57107.
18. Nelson Goodman, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, third edition (India-
napolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1973), pp. 5983.
19. Weissman, A Social Ontology (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2000), pp. 5464.
20. Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II, trans.
John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge
22. Liebniz, Monadology, p. 155.
23. Morris R. Cohen, Studies in Philosophy and Science (New York:
Henry Holt, 1949), pp. 150151.
24. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1005b1220, pp. 736737.
25. Joseph Butler, Sermons, in British Moralists: 16501800, 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. 777780.
182 Notes to Chapter Six
27. Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 2845.
28. See David Albert, Quantum Mechanics and Experience (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 128129.
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. 1761; Weissman, The
Cage, pp. 923.
183
Index
Abduction, 1419, 7071, 149, 170,
178n18
Absolute, 98, 105
Addiction, 24
Advertising, 60, 114
Aesthetics, 2021, 2932, 34, 85,
112, 119122, 130, 131
Affiliation, 3738
Agents, 105, 130, 139143, 155158
Aggregation, 106, 169, 175
Aims. See Objectives
Albert, David, 183n28
Analogy, 121122
Aquinas, Thomas, 150
Aristotle, 1819, 49, 141, 147;
categorial forms of, 109, 128,
168; on causality, 145, 149, 150,
152; Descartes and, 158; Meta-
physics, 134; on noncontradiction,
164; on potentiality, 156158;
primary substances of, 105, 107,
143, 156; quiddities of, 73
Art. See Aesthetics
Atoms, 18, 68, 71, 104108, 134,
140141, 154, 158160. See also
Quantum theory
Atomism, 105107, 110, 129130,
137
Atran, Scott, 177n10
Attitudes, 34, 1924, 3743, 45
60, 110, 120, 123, 175; anxiety
and, 67; ideals and, 95; pertinent,
3233; preferences and, 6465;
realistic, 114; truth and, 7677,
81, 176; valorizing, 2728, 91,
95, 9798, 167. See also
Interpretation(s)
Augustine of Hippo (saint), 35, 105
Authority, 1214, 4344, 5455, 58,
73, 98, 122123, 168
Automobiles, 114, 167
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 115
Baseball: fans of, 3, 3537, 59; rules
of, 60, 118, 131, 158159. See
also Games
Behaviorism, 156, 157
Belief(s), 2, 65, 123, 175176;
William James on, 59, 100;
magical, 5758; Charles Peirce
on, 4; testability of, 64; truth of,
2123, 39, 113, 176. See also
Values
Bell, John Stewart, 146, 154
Berkeley, George, 26, 28, 29, 49,
179n3; Hume and, 155156; Kant
and, 6061; 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
184 Index
Bundle theory, 140
Butler, Joseph, 164165
Carnap, Rudolf, 10, 61, 64, 83, 93,
98
Cassirer, Ernst, 5758, 61, 64, 83, 93
Categorial forms, 5, 109, 128, 166,
168, 172173
Causality, 73, 106, 121, 123, 127,
142155, 171; Aristotle on, 128,
145, 149, 150, 152; degrees of
freedom in, 153154; Descartes
on, 145; Hume on, 129130,
144147, 152, 155156; Leibniz
on, 144; reciprocity and, 159160,
175; regularities and, 158159;
rules and, 118119, 164166
Cells, 104107, 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, 7678; schemas of, 9;
truth and, 82
Colors, 73, 74, 8183, 87, 127,
130, 153
Communitarianism, 103104, 109
Complementarity, 169170
Complexity, 161
Conceptualization, 110111, 171172
Consciousness, 99, 105, 141, 163
Consistency, 7, 12, 36, 73, 76, 89,
92, 166
Constructivism, 83, 8691, 117121,
181n29
Context, 4551, 6773, 160161
Continuity, 139141, 165
Contradiction. See Noncontradiction
Contrariety, 2223, 2931, 129
Cooperation, 3738, 40, 43, 50,
130, 176
Copernicus, Nicolaus, 29, 79, 83,
85, 89
Correlation, 4950, 144149, 153,
155
Counterfactuals, 79, 156157
Covariation, 144
Creationism, 2, 7576, 123
Critical theory, 3233
Damon, Johnny, 3637
Deconstruction, 50, 98. See also
Postmodernism
Deduction, 15, 6061, 70, 82, 87,
99, 117118, 151152, 178n18
Democracy, 3944
Democritus, 105, 107
Derivation, order of, 126
Derrida, Jacques, 179n2, 181n1
Descartes, Ren, 3435, 63, 65, 97,
107, 162163; 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,
99100; Plato and, 93, 111;
realism of, 8687, 90; Rules for
the Direction of the Mind, 151
152; skepticism of, 17, 68, 7174,
85, 170; substantial forms and,
134135
Desire, 10, 40, 91, 102
Detective stories, 79
Dewey, John, 23; on ideology, 43;
on inquiry, 1012; on reflex arc,
94
Dialectics, 2, 109113, 148
Discipline, 6264, 9596, 122123,
152
Dispositions, 155157, 159
Disquotationalism, 50, 8183
Diversity, 43, 6465, 134135
DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), 73,
75, 157, 163
Doubt. See Skepticism
Duhem, Pierre, 63, 181n34
Einstein, Albert, 14, 16, 68, 165,
171
185 Index
Emergence, 108109, 162
Emotivism, 64
Epistemology, 50, 8384, 97, 135
136, 148; Bonaventure, 113;
foundationalist, 84, 157; Kants,
8386, 91, 97; Rockmores, 8391
Error, 13, 29, 50, 81, 100, 123;
constructivism and, 9091,
181n29; heresy and, 54
Euclidean space, 138
Evolution, 29, 36, 7576, 94, 123,
144, 161, 167
Excluded middle, 118, 119, 163165
Exegesis, 33
Facts, 125126; attitudes and, 24;
inquiry and, 32, 104, 111; values
and, 23, 7, 45, 5657, 167
Faith, 9, 37, 4849, 54, 5860,
113114, 121
Fantasy, 5860, 95, 114, 138. See
also Imagination
Fear, 20, 49, 65, 67
Feedback mechanisms, 159
Food and Drug Administration
(FDA), 43
Foucault, Michel, 23, 10, 25
Foundationalism, 84, 157
Freedom, 105, 110, 153154, 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,
165166
Funkenstein, Amos, 182n8, 183n13
Gahde, Ulrich, 180n12
Galileo, 148, 183n13
Games, 23, 35, 118, 120122,
159161. See also Baseball
Geertz, Clifford, 1
Gender identity, 37, 47, 48, 60, 114
Generalization, 1416, 70, 117, 121,
149, 159
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, 9091
Hierarchies, 103109, 125, 134,
148, 158162
Hirsch, E. D., Jr., 3031, 177n2
History, 28, 121, 161, 175; Cohen
on, 9697; Nietzsche on, 3334;
Rockmore on, 85
Holism, 105107, 110; Margolis on,
86, 90; Quine on, 6162, 81
Humanities, 78, 109113, 179n20
Hume, David, 17, 49, 179n3;
Berkeley and, 155156; bundle
theory of, 140; on causality, 129
130, 144147, 152, 155156; on
generalization, 159; Kant and, 14,
25, 26, 130, 157; on norms, 38;
skepticism of, 14, 17, 7172, 156;
spacetime and, 137; on sufficient
reason, 148152; Treatise of
Human Nature, 128130, 140
Hurricane Katrina, 47
Hypotheses, 15, 9, 7071, 85, 90,
121, 176; inquiry and, 1419, 92
97, 166; leading principles and,
121, 173; myths and, 58; scientific,
7, 9496, 109; truth of, 12, 76,
80, 166167. See also Testability
Ideas, 93, 97, 140, 146, 152; clear
and distinct, 117, 129, 156;
mathematical, 138, 153, 158,
162163
Idealism, 33, 95, 117, 158; realism
versus, 2, 2526, 4950, 87, 90;
romanticism and, 69
186 Index
Identity, 21, 37, 80, 118, 119, 161;
coherence and, 5055, 7678;
gender, 37, 47, 48, 60, 114;
Hume on, 129; principles of, 163
165; tribal, 38, 54, 166
Ideologies, 13, 22, 33, 3743, 98,
113, 175
Imagination, 4, 114, 117125;
definition of, 117; discipline of,
122123; Kant on, 4, 93, 118;
Kierkegaard on, 58; principles of,
76; Quine on, 62; rules of, 117
121. See also Fantasy
Indeterminacy, 2931, 136, 167169
Individualism, 105107
Induction, 70, 82, 149, 156, 159
Inquiry, 1419, 6797; context and,
6773; cooperation and, 3738;
definitions of, 92, 93; Dewey on,
1012; discipline and, 92; honesty
in, 3637; hypotheses and, 1419,
9297, 166; interpretation versus,
2, 2324, 31, 33, 34, 95, 175
176; leading principles for, 125
126, 131166, 173176; Nietzsche
on, 3334; politics and, 3844;
reality-testing and, 9899; self-
correcting, 81
Internet, 36
Interpretation(s), 714, 4565, 99,
121; affiliation and, 3738;
context and, 4551; definition of,
1; exegesis and, 33; hypothesis
and, 15, 9; inquiry versus, 23
24, 31, 33, 34, 95, 175176;
Kant on, 9; literary, 2933, 57
59, 9899, 120123; politics and,
3844; preference and, 64;
Rockmore on, 8889; socialized,
5356. See also Attitudes
Intransparency, 86, 87
Intuition, 138
Inverse square law, 16
James, William, 59, 94, 98, 100, 115
Judgment, transcendental, 7172,
8183
Kant, Immanuel, 910, 32, 64;
Berkeley and, 6061; categories of,
4, 127128, 170; on cognition,
94; Copernican revolution and,
83, 85; Critique of Judgment, 10;
Descartes and, 99101; on desire,
10, 91; epistemology of, 8286,
91, 97; Hume and, 14, 25, 26,
130, 157; on imagination, 4, 93,
118; on intuition, 138;
Kierkegaard and, 58; on logic,
163166; on norms, 38; Peirce
and, 117; perception and, 88;
schemas of, 83, 121, 127128;
semantics and, 73; spacetime and,
138; Transcendental Aesthetic,
130; transcendentalism of, 7172,
8183, 110111, 127, 163
Khlentzos, Drew, 71
Kierkegaard, Sren, 58
Knowledge. See Epistemology
Kuhn, Thomas, 95
Language, 112, 149150, 163164;
acquisition of, 146, 156; disposi-
tional, 157; Foucault on, 25;
meta, 82; philosophy of, 111113,
131. See also Sentences
Leading principles. See Principles
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm:
Monadology, 72, 109, 144; on
noncontradiction, 164
Literary interpretations, 2933, 57
59, 100101, 120123
Locke, John, 26, 105, 170
Logic, 7879, 119, 145146; laws
of, 118, 119, 145146, 158159,
163166; multivalent, 88; ontol-
ogy and, 164
Luther, Martin, 105
Machiavelli, Niccol, 9
Magic, 5759, 175
Magnetism, 16, 74
Maps, 8, 13, 76; partial, 113; plans
and, 36, 56, 69, 90, 9395, 122,
126, 166167, 173
187 Index
Marburg school, 82, 83, 93
Margolis, Joseph, 83, 8691
Marriage, 3738, 9192, 130, 165
166
Marx, Karl, 910, 33, 60, 181n29
Mathematics, 138, 153, 158, 162163
Maxwell, James Clerk, 147
Meaning, 15, 4849, 7376, 95,
99, 109; empirical, 7374; Hirsch
on, 177n2; Platonic, 74; semantics
of, 73; stimulus, 93
Memory, 47, 103, 112, 140
Meta-language, 82
Metaphor, 5759, 100101, 120
121, 123, 138
Metaphysics, 90, 109111, 141,
147148, 172173
Middle, excluded, 118, 119, 163165
Mill, John Stuart, 105, 145
Mbius strip, 160161
Morality, 3638, 41, 112, 160, 165
166
Motion, 130, 139143, 148, 155,
159, 173, 183n13
Music, 8, 15, 34, 115, 119, 128
131, 136, 156, 161, 175
Myth, 54, 5759, 70, 96, 99, 125,
161, 175
Nagel, Ernest, 177n1, 178n14
Narratives, 913, 5256, 122123,
161, 175176
Neo-Platonism, 113, 137
Newton, Isaac, 14, 16, 70, 71, 147, 148
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 4, 114; on
freedom, 34; Genealogy of
Morals, 2021; on history, 3334,
46
Noncontradiction, 12, 118, 119,
148, 152, 158159, 163166
Norms, 3738, 4344
Objectives, 11, 3738, 9495, 119
Objectivity, 8485
Ontology, 49, 89, 97107, 151152;
logic and, 164; relativity and,
6364, 169; skeptical, 7475
Operationalism, 170
Orwell, George, 55
Palladio, Andrea, 115
Parallelism, 170
Parmenides, 84
Parts/whole, 121, 134135, 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, 9395, 122, 166
167, 173; testability of, 122123
Plato, 13, 33, 67, 71, 97, 159;
Descartes and, 93, 111;
Euthyphro, 5; meaning and, 74;
myths of, 57, 58, 9899; Repub-
lic, 9, 105, 107, 109110; theory
of Forms of, 58, 77, 151. See also
Neo-Platonism
Pleasure principle, 46, 48
Plotinus, 182n8
Podolsky, B., 165
Politics, 3844
Positivism, 64, 112, 156
Possibility, 159, 164, 170171
Postmodernism, 2930, 33, 50, 100
Potentiality, 156158
Practical life, 4748, 74, 110, 114,
125126, 134, 139142; locality
and, 154; morality and, 165166;
science and, 38, 3132, 36, 69
70, 152, 167173
Precedence, 126128
Preferences, 9, 48, 6465, 156
Prejudice, 3, 10, 30, 33, 5354
Presentists, 137
Pre-Socratics, 70
Presuppositionlessness, 8687, 90
Prigogine, Ilya, 179n20
Primary substances, 105, 107, 143, 156
Principles, leading, 4, 35, 119121,
125176; categorial form and,
172173; formal, 163165;
188 Index
Principles, leading (continued)
hypothese and, 173; inventory of,
131166; moral, 165166;
motivating values and, 166167;
precedents for, 126128; priority
of, 125126, 167172; use of,
128131
Priority, order of, 125126
Private life, 3536
Probability, 149, 161163, 169
Proportion, 165
Protagoras, 4, 13, 49, 80
Psychology, 30, 157, 161, 170. See
also Neuroscience
Ptolemy, 79
Putnam, Hilary, 23, 67, 183n27
Pythagorean theorem, 16, 108
Quality/quantity, 127129, 135136
Quantum theory, 30, 136, 146149,
152155, 171, 179n20; indetermi-
nacy and, 167169; nothingness
and, 151; relativity versus, 155,
172; spacetime and, 138139,
172, 173. See also Atoms
Quarks, 104105, 107108, 121,
159160
Quine, William Van Orman, 3, 10,
12, 67, 81, 131; Marburg school
and, 83; on scientific method, 62
64; theory of sentences of, 6162,
8081, 93, 100
Realism, 114, 164; Cartesian, 8687,
90; idealism versus, 2, 2526, 49
50, 87, 90; nave, 87
Reality: testing of, 2425, 98, 123,
176; values and, 28, 36, 166167
Reason, sufficient, 144, 147153,
157158, 167, 183n13
Reciprocity, 106107, 130, 159160,
166, 175
Reflex arc, 94
Relativity theory, 2, 142, 143, 153,
158; Margolis and, 90, 91;
ontological, 6364, 169; quantum
versus, 155, 172; spacetime and,
171173
Rockmore, Tom, 8391
Romanticism, 34, 69
Rorty, Richard, 182n6
Rosen, N., 165
Rubrics, 4, 73, 92, 120, 123, 131
132, 144
Rules, 38, 60, 117122, 131132,
145146, 151152, 158159
Russell, Bertrand, 7980, 182n7
Ruth, Babe, 3637
Saltation, 139141
Schematizations, 4, 910, 32, 102,
121, 127128; Kant on, 83, 121,
127128; Quine on, 6162; values
and, 97
Schrdinger equation, 135, 169
Science(s), 121, 148, 151, 162;
discipline of, 6264, 9596;
humanities versus, 78, 109113,
179n20; hypotheses in, 7, 9496,
109; mythology and, 5758;
practical life and, 38, 3132, 36,
6970, 152, 167173; values and,
36, 102103
Scientism, 112
Self-interest, 165166
Self-love, 35
Self-regulation, 40, 150, 152
Self-sufficiency, 40, 107, 139
Self-understanding, 59, 89, 101
Semantics, 7375, 7880, 82, 121,
156. See also Syntax
Sentences, 16, 31, 73, 82, 110113,
152, 158, 163164; Bridgmans
theory of, 170; formation of,
79, 110, 163; interanimating,
100; Quines theory of, 6162,
8081, 93, 100. See also
Language
Shakespeare, William, 93, 120
Significance. See Meaning
189 Index
Skepticism, 17, 25, 49, 6871, 168
171; Cartesian, 17, 68, 7174, 85,
170; Humean, 14, 17, 7172,
156; ontological, 7475
Socrates, 2021, 60, 70
Spacetime, 105, 112, 134, 137145,
158161, 168; determinism and,
153; quantum theory and, 138
139, 172, 173; relativity theory
and, 171173; sentences in, 73
Spector, Marshall, 182n6
Spinoza, Benedict de, 177n6
Sports. See Baseball
Statistics, 149, 161163, 169
Status, 4749, 92, 114
Stegmuller, Wolfgang, 180n12
Stengers, Isabelle, 179n20
String theory, 154155, 173
Structural properties, 155159
Symbiosis, 86, 8990
Syntax, 73, 7880, 87, 118119,
121, 143, 156, 163164. See also
Semantics
Systems, 103109, 158162;
evolution of, 145, 161; reciprocity
and, 159160
Taxonomy, 5152
Ten Commandments, 38
Testability, 34, 914, 2428, 70,
95, 98, 176; atomism and, 107;
dialectic of, 109114; of imagina-
tion, 122124; Quine on, 6364;
Rockmore on, 8485
Theology, 113
Time. See Spacetime
Tolerance, 43, 6465. See also
Diversity
Traffic laws, 32, 39, 131, 161162,
165
Transitivity, 165
Transparency. See Intransparency
Truth, 1213, 7680, 93, 175176;
attitudes and, 7677, 81, 176; of
beliefs, 2, 2123, 39, 113, 176;
coherence and, 82; of hypotheses,
12, 76, 80, 166167; literary
interpretations and, 2933, 5759,
100101, 120123
Universals, 109
Use, 128131
Values, 910, 24, 3536, 4041, 48,
165167; attitudes and, 2728,
91, 95, 9798, 167; cognition
and, 45; determinate, 171; facts
and, 23, 7, 5657, 167; herme-
neutic, 91; humanistic, 7; motivat-
ing, 36, 100101, 166167;
schematization and, 99; schizoid,
19. See also Belief(s)
Variation, 119, 121122
Verifiability. See Testability
Weber, Max, 1
Whole/parts, 121, 134135, 160,
175. See also Holism
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 131, 183n16
Zeno of Elea, 165
Zero-sum game, 14
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 nd our way in strange cities and streets.
Such beliefs supply meaning and security. Ascribing signicance 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
procedureinquiryfavors reality testing and truth. The otherinterpretationuses
meaning to appease vulnerability and glorify believers. Beliefs of these two kinds are some-
times 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 claries them.
Like all of Weissmans 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? Weissmans 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 condent about our sense of ourselves and our position in the world.
Joseph Grange, President, Metaphysical Society of America
Weissmans 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

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