Towards Dialogical Realism

Fred Cummins
This is a snapshot of work in progress.Please do not cite. Comments most welcome!

November 2, 2018
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Prelude

This is a relatively short text entitled “Towards Dialogical Realism.” It is incomplete by design, as
it is intended to provide a reference point for future extended debate within established traditions,
rather than seeking to establish anything on its own. Because of this, it does not try to integrate
itself tightly within any specific established discourse or specialist literature. Its topic, broadly
speaking, is the manner in which we come, or fail to come, to inhabit a shared world. It is not
a scientific text, but it aspires to being relevant to scientific argumentation, as this is one of the
principal ways in which we arrive at consensus about what is and is not the case, and what we
should or should not do about it.
Not all of our conversations are haunted by the obligation to work towards some sacred notion
of truth though. Often, we just need to get things done, to plot the next course of action, or to
tell stories. And the discussions we have do not cleanly separate one kind of activity from another.
Even the most rigorous, quantitative, carefully curated debates in empirical science become part
of a larger dialogical circulation in which facts, once established, are brought to bear on matters
of value and significance, and with that, the political import of the debate is unavoidable. When
we recognise this, there does not seem to be any way to protect the carefully constructed scientific
account from the vagaries of self-interest, opinion, and groupthink.
It is in recognition of this complex intertwining of the debates by means of which collective
knowledge is constructed and then employed that the present work sets out to offer a tentative
framework of limited ambition. It does so by means of one fundamental shift, by resituating
matters of meaning from their supposed habitat inside individual minds, to the public domain of
mutual dialogue. The private mind we rely on in understanding ourselves has a well known root
in Descartes’ cogito, which arose from the certainty he felt by withdrawing from his senses and
the confusing evidence of the world, introspecting, and deducing that, however wrong he might be
about any matters of fact, he could not be mistaken about his own existence as that thinker, right
or wrong. Here, we follow a parallel route, but we do so together. Instead of retreating from the
whole world, we situate ourselves in dialogue, embodied, face to face, and in a necessary ethical
relation to one another. From this starting point, we ask, what can we, here, now, reach sufficent
consensus on to proceed?
The text cannot provide an answer of course, for it is not itself dialogical. But by depriving the
construction of knowledge of its conventional reliance on the notions of private minds and individual
psychology, the manner in which knowledge is grounded shifts. It becomes a matter of reaching
towards shared understanding and common conviction, suited to arriving at consensus for action.
Such consensus does not necessarily generalise beyond the bounds of the group of discussants. It is
co-created, and with that, it is bound to the indubitable truths, the background assumptions and
the common ground of those who take part in the act of creation.
So the stance developed here is only a seed that looks to be further developed within specific

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domains, by specific discussants, for more concrete goals. To that end, the core text will be followed
by an open-ended series of more concrete discussions within individual domains. In such discussions,
the conventions and assumptions of the community that has constructed the domain will be relevant,
and the argument can be more closely tied to the published literature or the intellectual history
of that community. For as it stands, the dialogical realism proposed here is somewhat homeless.
It is not neatly situated within science, or within Western philosophy. Indeed, it draws liberally
and somewhat recklessly on both Greek and Indian philosophy, and it suggests that knowledge
curation in so-called Western secular modernity has much to learn from other traditions, including
the venerable debates among Indian schools of religious philosophy.
In the follow-up essays and debates that draw on this central text as a common resource, topics
will range over the natural and social sciences, psychology and cognitive science, ethics, religion,
and the existential lifeworlds of others. By keeping the core proposal separate from its further
exegesis within one or other domain, it is hoped that the shortcomings of any one elaboration on
the theme may leave the core proposal intact, for elaboration in other ways, to other purposes, by
other discussants.

Disclaimer This is very much a work in progress. The text you are reading is still under develop-
ment, and the project is radically open-ended. Comments, criticisms, suggestions, and feedback of
all sorts is most welcome, and is entirely in the spirit of the project. Please send any such feedback
to Fred Cummins (fred.cummins@ucd.ie).

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Chapter 1

From simple objectivity to dialogical

realism

Objectivism is a stance adopted by default in most day-to-day scientific work. It is the simple
assumption that our disciplined inquiry will allow us to construct an account of some phenomenon
that is in correspondence with how things are. Our account will be couched in words, equations,
models, diagrams, and more. Once we have done this work, and done it well, then that which is
asserted in our account will be unpolluted by our personal biases, taste, cultural heritage, mood,
and opinion. In an ideal case, the product of the work will be so independent of its creators that
it could in principle be created anew, by others, using the same methodology. The independence
of the product—a scientific account of a phenomenon—from its creators lends a specific kind of
authority to an account of this sort in social affairs. Scientific accounts play a privileged role in
good faith argumentation in which matters of fact are relevant to ethical, political, and ecological
debate. The objective character of a scientific account is the protection it bears against charges of
partisanship. When matters of importance are at stake, this character must be recognised.
But this character must also be understood if it is not to lead to misuse. The assertion of a
matter of fact can be used to shut down a debate, and can thus be a tool of authoritarianism as
well as of reason. Facts do not wield themselves, and any given statement of fact exists within a
context within which it is interpreted. Just as the devil may quote scripture, facts may be employed
in ways that lead to miserable outcomes as well as the contrary. The objective stance effectively
sunders any assertion of fact from the realm of meaning and value, and thereby makes facts into
tools that may be wielded for many purposes. The Humean adage that you can’t get an ought
from an is is taken by many to suggest that the products of scientific inquiry are value-neutral.
To the extent that science might be of relevance to human concerns, this stance runs the risk of
making the entire scientific enterprise useless, and provides no safeguard against the immoral use
of its products.
Since Dilthey’s 19th Century distinction between Naturwissenschaften and Gesiteswissenschaften,
the split between the Humanities (broadly considered) and the Sciences has become cemented into
the institutional structure of many universities, thereby perpetuating the mistaken notion that
there are two distinct domains of scholarly activity. In what is to come, I will proceed on the as-
sumption that this distinction is not one that can be maintained in principle, and, to join Stephen
Jay Gould, I will insist that science properly done is one of the humanities. We might note in
passing that both Psychology and Mathematics may be found on either side of this misleading

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divide, being interpreted one way within one university and the other elsewhere. This instability
with respect to these two domains is not accidental. In some of what is to come, our focus will
be directed by the need to understand how these two disciplines ought to be considered, and their
mutual dependencies.
It is not a simple matter to take the vast and varied array of activities that science touches
upon and to assert anything at all about them as a whole, for, despite the best intentions of the
objective stance, matters of meaning and value necessarily intrude in most fields. Let us begin by
considering first those sciences where the human body is the principle object of study, and we all,
scientists included, have skin in the game. The somatic sciences (anatomy, physiology, medicine)
must work on the framing assumption that the living body is importantly different from a corpse,
and the activities of the organs subserve the function of keeping the body alive. In this way, we
may speak of the function of an organ such as the heart. To introduce the nakedly teleological
notion of a function is to leave any simple objective stance behind, for a function is goal-directed
and normative. Anything with a function may succeed or it may fail. When we attribute to the
heart the function of pumping blood, we are doing so within a framework in which the integrity of
the living body and the systematic importance of circulating blood are taken for granted, and this
is why we can speak of “function” at all. To speak of “function” is to use language steeped in value,
values specific to the domain of discourse. An immunologist who distinguishes between a pathogen
and an antibody is also using value-laden terms that belong within a specific domain of discourse.
The framing assumptions here are probably somewhat different from those of the cardiologist,
however. The immunologist is taking sides in a potential conflict between an immunological self
and its environment. That self will include many symbiotic organisms, e.g. the gut flora, on one
side of a self-other divide, while those organisms considered pathogenic will lie on the other. This
divide will not be drawn in precisely the same way as that drawn by the cardiologist, for whom the
macroscopic body with its tissues provides the “self” that licences functional attribution.
By way of illustration, consider the situation of a European employee of a non-governmental
developmental organisation working in Mali. Upon arrival, the worker will be confronted with a
situation in which she can be scrupulous in avoiding unpurified water for drinking or for use in food
preparation. This will prevent certain otherwise inevitable and distinctly uncomfortable intestinal
problems. There is a price to be paid for this though, and it lies in the social sphere, rather than
the digestive. For relying on such hygenic measures will necessarily complicate taking part in the
everyday life of the local people. An alternative path, and one well known to those who actually
work in the field, is to suffer the inevitable tummy upset, to go through a period of gastrointestinal
distress, after which she will have acquired a resiliance that is similar to that of the locals, and
she can now take part in everyday social activities without further ado. To the immunologist, her
immunological self has undergone an important realignment, in which the self-other boundary is
now drawn differently, in a manner more suited to the ambient range of microorganisms of Mali.
To the cardiologist, no appreciable change has taken place with respect to what we might call the
cardiovascular self. To the worker, the opportunity to participate in everyday social interactions has
increased as the alienation arising from an enforced hygienic separation has disappeared. There are
at least three selves here: the immunological one, which has undergone a shift from one equilibrium
state to another, the cardiovascular one, which is entirely unchanged, and the (poorly defined)
personal one, to whom new oppportunities for social interaction have arisen. There are not three
people here, but we can cast the person differently within these three different domains of discourse.
In each, different values are in play, and in each, we will construct accounts relying on the notion

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of “function” differently.
(Let us note in passing that the use of function in attributing a purpose, goal, or felicitous
mode of operation is importantly different from the notion of a mathematical function, which is the
simple association of values or entities in one domain with values or entities in another, as when we
describe as a function the mapping y = x2 , which associates real numbers in its source domain (x)
with positive real numbers in its target domain (y). Mathematical functions have no intrinsically
normative character.)
Medical science has its own contested history. Arguments about that which should be attributed
to the body have been bitter, often violent, and they persist to this day in the entrenched debates
about abortion, mental health, clothing standards, vaccinations, and more. The longevity of such
disputes should remind us that the delineation of a somatic domain of discourse is not a simple affair.
We encounter widely differing views about the role of the body in debates about sexuality, desire,
appetite and intoxication. Unguarded appeal to criteria of “naturalness” or “natural function” is
common in such discussion, and the heated arguments predictably ignore such niceties as the notion
of a finite or bounded domain of discourse. Even when arguing in good faith—and it is easy to see
that not all such arguments proceed in this optimal fashion—there is an abundance of opportunity
for objective claims, that is, claims resulting from science conducted in the objectivist stance, to
transcend their respective domains of discourse and thus to fail to lead to agreement.
The objective stance works best when the facts in question must appear in the same light to all
who consider them. Bodies make poor objects for disinterested study, as each of us has one body,
we have meaningful and potentially contentious relationships with other bodies, and there are no
disinterested parties. We all participate in the business of incarnation.
Science has many roots, but an important one undoubtedly lies in the observation of the lights
in the night sky. The sun and moon appear in similar ways to all of us. The stars have been
reliably there, more or less invariant, for the whole of human history. Planets meander around the
sky against the fixed backdrop of the stars, and trying to understand and even predict planetary
movement has been a concern that spurred measurement, mathematics, and modelling alike. The
night sky makes a very different kind of object of study from the body, one in which we might
better pursue the goal of description from a distance.
The objective stance is easy to maintain when we seek to describe planetary motion, as did
the first astronomers. To work towards agreement on anything, it is necessary to establish some
common ground. In this instance two investigators might literally stand on the same ground, and
thus stand in identical relation to the object of observation. Certainly, it is easy to agree on that
which might count as a measurement. This requires no more than an agreed spatial coordinate
system, so that the position of a body can be described unambiguously. The fixed background
of the stars ensures that this is possible, for the purposes of documenting apparent motion. An
agreed means of measuring time is also required. This is less straightforward, and astronomy has
only been possible among people who had some agreed means of recording time. With those two
elements in place, a representation of the position in time and space of a planet is sufficiently
well defined as to allow complete agreement on the recording of a measurement. A meaningful
interpretation of the measurements so obtained requires further ingenuity. The epicycles of Ptolomy
and the ellipses of Kepler are alternative ways to integrate such measurements within a larger
descriptive framework, and selecting among such descriptively equivalent alternatives must depend
on further considerations that may need further negotiation. This is where religious authorities have
historically chosen to interfere; not in the business of measurement itself. We might note that a

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strict application of the objective stance would preclude any appeal to function in the interpretation
of such measurements.
The venerable business of describing and predicting planetary motion may be regarded as a
poster-child for the objective stance in science. Furthermore, contemporary scientific practice would
distinguish sharply between astronomy, a scientific activity, and astrology, which is an anathema
to science to be as vigorously opposed as any heresy would have been opposed by the Spanish
Inquisition. Although astronomy and astrology are considered to be utterly distinct from the
vantage point of contemporary Western secular science, it is worth considering that most of the
early astronomers to whom we owe our convictions about the geometry of the solar system were as
much astrologers as astronomers, as the two subjects were thoroughly intertwined.
Astrology is undoubtedly unloved in the contemporary scientific world. But let us dwell just a
little on the motivation for such activity. We just noted that accurate astronomical measurement
of the kind done in the earliest days of empirical study of the heavens requires, besides a spatial
coordinate system, also an agreed means of registering time. We modern secular folk are so used to a
specific approach to chronometry that it is perhaps useful to remind ourselves that the measurement
of time is neither a simple nor a single thing, and that there are other ways to approach time than
the use of a time stamp on a scale that extends from the distant past to the distant future, and
that is divided into units of seconds, minutes, days, weeks, months and years. In our conventional
reckoning, a moment has a unique time stamp, and the scale of time is no more than a means of
labelling points along an otherwise undifferentiated continuum. Yet in our daily life, we understand
time in many other ways, all of which are less objective, more suffused with significance. We are well
aware of the difference between the working week and the weekend. We are, or are not, “morning”
people. We celebrate birthdays. During mass, we find ourselves at a determinate point in the
liturgy, e.g. before or after the consecration of the host. At a concert, we are aware that we are in
the first half, or the second half of the performance. The goal scored in the match is not understood
as being scored at 3:37 on Tuesday 23rd of March, but as being scored in the final minute of the
second half.
The use of a single abstract scale for time hides the rather obvious fact that time itself is
meaningful for everyone. Our lives unfold in the rhythms of day and night, of the seasons, the
rituals and festivals that mark recurrences, in the difference between breakfast and supper as well
as in the succession of the generations within our own community. Astrology is motivated by
the attempt to understand the indices of passing time, such as the phases of the moon and the
procession of the planets against the stars, as meaningful, that is, as related to the lives that are
necessarily entangled within the unfolding cycles of temporality. Despite the abhorrance of most
scientifically educated people for the practice, this is by no means irrational or misguided. It simply
tries to understand the world1 in a manner that recognises that observable events are meaningful.
Meaning was undeniable when we came to consider the manner in which we might understand
the body, for we participate in our own incarnation. Astrology seeks to understand time from the
point of view of a participant, one who sees themselves as caught up in the processes that bring
alternation and recurrence. The use of scientific chronometry places the observer outside of the
scale. The objective character of the single time scale that indexes—and nothing more—individual
moments makes it suited to scientific practice, but it cannot exhaust our relationship to time.
We might even contrast standard “scientific” chronometry with our conventional labels for time.
1
I use the term “world” in a maximally generous sense. As Wittgenstein suggested, “The world is all that is the
case.”

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If I say that something happened at 2:30 a.m. on December 6th, 1979, that looks like a mere time
stamp. But 2:30 a.m. will be recognised as the middle of the night, which already serves to
bring some associations to the fore, and to hide others. December has seasonal connotations, and
awakens associations with upcoming festivities. 1979 brings to mind certain trends in music and
fashion, and perhaps in international affairs. This time stamp is loaded with meaning. An objective
chronometry ought, perhaps, to take a tip from the manner in which time is indexed in the UNIX
operating system, where the same moment would be indexed by the specific number of seconds
that elapsed between 00:00:00 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), Thursday, 1 January 1970 and
the event in question. Any further use of richly overloaded words like “December” or “a.m.” must
serve to reintroduce matters of cultural significance, of values related to lives lived by the kind of
being we are in our specific habitats.
The goal of this deliberation is not to somehow argue that astrology needs to be taken seriously
by scientists, but to recognise that the objective stance cannot extend to cover all, or even most,
of the processes we live among and seek to understand. The distinction between astrology and
astronomy is a useful reminder that the kind of objectivity we avail ourselves of when engaging
in astronomy is rather special; it is predicated upon a vast amount of common ground among
observers, and does not license the assumption that we can treat of more earth-bound observations
with the same kind of joint disinterest. It is our distance from the stars that allows us to adopt a
strongly objective stance in which we describe as if we did not participate. This attitude cannot be
wielded unthinkingly as we come to consider processes closer to home, in which common ground
is harder to find, meaning and values are inextricable, and our status is as participants as well as
observers.

1.1 Participating and describing

A moshpit is a more-or-less spontaneous outbreak of vigorous, almost violent, dancing that fre-
quently arises in front of the stage at certain kinds of hard rock concerts (punk, heavy metal, etc.).
The music is loud, fast, and incendiary. Those involved engage in highly agitated movement that is
almost, but not quite, combative. Individual dancers deliberately slam into each other, elbows are
wielded robustly, and it is quite possible to get hurt. There is, however, essentially no antagonism,
and if one dancer goes to ground, the others will immediately ensure that he or she is lifted back to
their feet, or removed from the circle if that is warranted. To the onlooker it can appear perilous,
even frightening. To the participant, it is an activity that is all-consuming.
It is possible to observe the moshpit from a distance. One thing that one might observe is that
the undirected flailing of the dancers sometimes spontaneously changes to a more-or-less ordered
pattern of collective circular motion. A phenomenon of this sort is an attractive target for scientific
modelling. The phenomenon occurs in the wild, can be documented, and may be described in several
ways. One way to describe what is happening is using words. A verbal characterisation is, for most
phenomena, as good as we might hope to get, as the world is complex and various, and most singular
events do not admit of satisfying generalisation, nor do they need them. The moshpit occurs under
specific conditions though, and, because they arise again and again in different situations, those
conditions may admit of a more formal description. In Silverman et al., (2013) a formal exercise in
modelling is undertaken. Individual dancers are modelled using a form of representation derived
from models of the behaviour of particles in a gas. To each particle a state (position, velocity) is
apportioned, and a simulation using a discrete series of time steps is conducted, in which the state

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 Figure 1: Objective characterisation of motion in a moshpit

The left panel (Figure 1 from Silberberg et al, 2013) shows various representations suited to
describing collective motion in a moshpit, including the contrast between unordered mosh-
ing (Panel B), and more ordered circular motion (Panel E). The top right panel shows the
equations that collectively determine the position and velocity of each individual element
(mosher, person) in the simulation. Below: screen capture of a working dynamic model
of a moshpit based on the above equations. Red elements are moshers, black are specta-
tors. Various parameters can be set to influence the motion of individual elements and the
interactions between them.

of each dancer is updated based on interactions among the dancers (and added noise). Figure 1
illustrates some of the various representations involved, including photography of the crowd, plots of
the kind of emergent behaviour arising for various parameter settings, equations used to update the
state of each dancer, and a full-blown computational simulation in which the user can manipulate
parameters such as the degree to which individuals will tend to flock together. The result is a
satisfying descriptive account that might allow one to make predictions about some aspects of the
moshpit, e.g. in predicting when a transition from unordered moshing to ordered circular dancing
might occur.
If one is actually in a moshpit, there is no opportunity to engage in this kind of descriptive
activity. Participation in a moshpit is fully immersive. Even if one had studied moshpits for years,

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constructed elaborate models, and produced the most illuminating of descriptions, taking part in
a moshpit is simply a qualitatively different kind of activity, in which values related to one’s own
bodily integrity and that of one’s neighbours are necessarily in play. The abstract time scale used
in computational simulation is also of no relevance once one takes part in the activity. Time and
motion are not abstract and metered now; they are embodied, lived, and brought forth by one’s
own movements and those of others. As one participates in the activity, one is necessarily in a
meaningful, even ethical, relation with other participants.
The contrast between observing, describing, modelling a moshpit, and actually taking part in
one, is useful to bear in mind as we consider how objectivity works in scientific activity, and in
the collective negotiation of authority deriving from knowledge claims. Much of what is to come
will be spent in developing the idea that it is impossible to extricate oneself from the world one
seeks to describe, and that this has strong consequences for how knowledge may be wielded in
argument. Much scientific work is done within relatively well circumscribed domains, and within
such domains, objectivity may be achieved using the familiar tools of the scientific canon. Within
a domain of discourse, there will be agreement on what is required for something to be understood
as a measurement, and there will be further agreement as to how a given measurement is to be
treated, or interpreted. Within the domain of discourse, statements of fact can be debated without
reference to ethical claims. But this severing of value and meaning from descriptive statements is
bounded, and applies only within the domain of discourse. This is the idea to be pursued herein, as
we seek to contribute towards the development of scientific practice that can, indeed, be relevant
to concerns of value and significance.

1.2 The view from nowhere

No matter what kind of account of the world we may craft, there is, and can be, no such thing
as a description from an omniscient God’s eye view, or from the all-seeing Archimedean Point.
Everything said is said by an observer, as Humberto Maturana has pointed out, and this applies
to scientific accounts as well as spoken utterances. The point has been made in a relatively simple
manner by Thomas Nagle (1986), who emphasizes that each of us is necessarily always situated in
a specific context, so that a description couched, as it were, in a view from nowhere, is something
of an elaborate artifice. Objectivity as Nagle conceives it is always an unfinished project:

To acquire a more objective understanding of some aspect of life or the world, we step
back from our initial view of it and form a new conception which has that view and its
relation to the world as its object. In other words, we place ourselves in the world that
is to be understood. The old view then comes to be regarded as an appearance, more
subjective than the new view, and correctable or confirmable by reference to it. The
process can be repeated, yielding a still more objective conception. (Nagle, 1986, p. 4).

Nagle wants to acknowledge that the perspectival reality encountered by an individual is worthy
of being called “real,” no less than the impersonal account of things that has no obvious subjective
center. His variety of realism is bounded by the recognition that we are of necessity finite beings.
The objectivity towards which he strives is not an entirely decentered account, for that view from
nowhere at all, he argues, is indeed a fiction. Rather, the objectivity he strives for is an account
that transcends by being enlarged with the perspectives and concerns of others. His ideally ob-

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jective account is not only a descriptive account of how things are, but by virtue of including the
perspectives and concerns of others, becomes the basis for an ethical account as well.
Nagle shares many of the concerns to be expressed here about the explanatory overreach of
decentered objective accounts of reality, in his insistance on the reality of qualitative aspects of
experience and their need to be included in any account of the real, and in asserting the need
to reconnect the construction of objective accounts with an ethical sensibility. Nevertheless, the
manner in which he seeks resolution of such issues differs from that to be explored here. Nagle
still treats of matters of fact as if they were all describable within a single domain of discourse,
as if our scientific account were on the way to becoming a single very large story, of which only
parts are currently constructed. In the present context, we shall be more attentive to the bounds
of any specific domain of discourse and to the problem of overreach when value-laden assertions
are made without appropriate precautions and preliminaries. His analysis contrasts an expanding
objective view, presumed to arise from collective scientific activity, with the limited view of a single
person. We shall have to abandon the notion of any single grand account of being, not because of
the difficulties such a project might encounter, but because we shall understand the very notion
of an “account” differently, placing it in a dialogical rather than monological framework. Finally,
Nagel leans on a problematic distinction between the physical and the mental that we will not be
countenancing here, for reasons that will require rather more elaboration.
A more radical rejection of the idea that one might produce a free-standing objective description
of the way things are that is independent of any personal attributes or perspective is provided by
Richard Rorty (Rorty, 1979). In his influential critique of the very project of constructing a theory
of knowledge, understood as a mental representation of the way things are, he is led to move from
an abstract notion of knowledge, as it has been developed in post-Cartesian accounts of mind, and
towards a more dialogical account grounded in interpersonal debate. Conversation, he points out,
is the theatre within which the the actual business of justification of knowledge claims takes place
(ibid., p. 389). Rorty exercises an extensive critique of the manner in which “mind” has been reified
and exploited within analytical philosophy, and within the closely related development of a scientific
psychology. Such a critique aligns well with the approach to be developed here, in that knowledge
claims will be understood as being essentially tied to specific contexts, among specific dialogical
partners. This is not to replace one theory of knowledge with another, but to distance oneself from
the very idea that such a theory might make sense, and to look instead for ways to debate and deal
with knowledge claims where they intrude, as they must, in matters political, ethical, and tribal.
His pragmatic approach also refuses to lean on the notion of an individual interior cogito, that is,
an unobservable mind of the sort we implicitly rely on in every day conversation.
Rorty’s arguments against minds as hidden repositories of representations of the world are
extensive and well grounded in the history of the philosophy of mind. My purpose here is somewhat
different. Minds have long plagued both scientists and philosophers. Nobody quite knows how to
characterise them, find them, or how to demonstrate their existence (or non-existence). But all
too often, this has been seen as a thorny problem belonging to those who attempt such futile
exercises in the first place. The cognitive psychologists, and several species of cognitive scientists
more generally, have been landed with this particular messy business, while in the meantime, most
of the sciences simply put such vexed issues aside, and carry on doing the best chemistry, geology,
metereology, biology that they can do. When science is put on a pedestal as an authoritative source
of knowledge (as opposed to being a means of adjudicating specific knowledge claims, in specific
contexts, among specific discussants), it is usually to physics that debate turns, as far as possible

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from the spooks of belief, desire, intentions, plans, emotions, intuitions, and hallucinations that
resist objectification. In this manner, it is tacitly hoped, the vexatious problems of the mental
might be finessed.
This is to take out a loan on mind and its associated problems of representation, intentionality,
and phenomenality. This is a loan that enables the everyday work of the “hard” sciences, but it
is a loan taken out in a currency other than physics, or chemistry, or biology. Heinz von Foerster
quipped that the reason the hard sciences had made so much progress was because they had left the
hard questions behind. I wish to unpack that a little here, to point out that those hard questions
have not gone away in physics, chemistry, biology, in any of sciences, and the loan taken out must
be repaid. There does not exist a characterisation of mind, or an account of any of the associated
problems of intentionality, representation, reference, or phenomenality, that can be relied upon to
shore up the products of the physical, chemical and biological sciences.
Everyday talk helps itself frequently to the term “physical reality” as if it provided a bedrock
of assurance, of indubitability, that is prior to any unsettling questions of meaning, interpretation,
prior even to perception, and certainly more trustworthy than any claims of divine intervention,
supernatural jiggery-pokery or the like. The adjective “physical” has an everyday meaning, and
it has a more formal meaning as it applies to the insights, theories, and constructions of physical
theory. The everyday sense of the term is nicely illustrated by Dr Johnson’s famous response when
asked how he would disprove the metaphysical idealism proposed by Bishop Berkeley. “I disprove
it thus!” he pronounced, as he kicked a nearby stone. The kicking was intended to illustrate the
no-nonsense, unarguable, brute reality of the stone in a way that needed no further words. The
contemporary physicist Alan Sokal appealed to a similar kind of common sense when he suggested
that humanities scholars who regarded “the laws of physics as mere social conventions” might try
transgressing those conventions from the windows of his apartment on the 21st floor. As heavy-
handed and misplaced as such a taunt is, it appeals, not to any reasoned argument about the nature
of the objects of physical theory, but to the everyday sense that the physical picks out a domain
of non-negotiable, indubitable brute existence. The same character of indubitability is found when
the term “physical” escapes its connection to the work of physicists entirely, as when one insists “I
feel physically ill”, or “it made me physically disgusted.” Feeling ill, or being disgusted could not be
more experiential, more removed from the meters, equations, and models of the physicists, but the
term “physical” serves to convey this character of being real beyond all discussion or negotiation.
This is the kind of “physical” proof sought by Doubting Thomas, which lay, not in argument and
word, but in probing, feeling, seeing the wounds of the risen Christ.
It is necessary to cleanly separate discussion of indubitable reality from discussion of the scien-
tific speciality of physics. Physics, whether contemporary or Newtonian, produces theory, models,
descriptions, accounts and these accounts are understood to be about something. We might choose
to call that which the accounts are about “physical reality.” This is no more than common usage.
But there is a gap to be bridged, from the texts of journal articles, from the equations, the models,
and the data sets, to the object they refer to, that physical theory itself is not in a position to
supply. The relation of “aboutness” arises in all fields. We construct theories and we understand
the theories to be about something, and we sweep under the carpet the uncomfortable fact that
theories are not self-interpreting. To be meaningful, they must manage to refer, to index, and to
describe, and this unavoidable requirement is the content of the loan taken out on the sciences of
experience, of mind, of perception and cognition.
Disputes about how the products of physicists are to be interpreted as being about the real are,

13
of course, as old as the discipline itself. Galileo’s run in with the Catholic church is well known, but
often wrongly understood as simply illustrating the overreach of religious authorities by interfering
in the rational and objective construction of an account of the motions within the solar system.
This is to misrepresent the affair, which had as much to do with political confrontation and power
negotiation as science. In fact, Galileo’s description of a heliocentric model of the solar system was
preceded by Copernicus’ original account, published as De revolutionibus orbium coelestium shortly
before his death in 1543. This book did not incur immediate censure for a variety of reasons, but
among them is the pragmatic interjection by the theologian Osiander in the preface to the first
edition. Osiander noted that “these hypotheses need not be true nor even probable. [I]f they
provide a calculus consistent with the observations, that is enough.” By witholding a determinate
leap from models, measurement and equations to the assumed reality the theory was about, the gap
was left open for what we might these days call “constructive ambiguity.” Observational adequacy
is regarded by some as a low bar for scientific accounts. The more lofty goal of “explanation” is
frequently assumed to be the real prize sought. But explanation demands the satisfaction of doubt
of some person or persons. This circulation, from representations to acceptance by disputants,
is the dialogical work of scientific communication. It is in the business of interpretation, of the
meaning of the models and mathematics, that the religious authorities put their spoke in, here as
in so many other situations.
In what follows, we shall be paying attention to just this leap: from representation to the
generation of agreement among disputants. We will thus be in the venerable business of considering
the manner in which knowledge claims are wielded, but we shall be doing so in a manner rather
different from the classical opposition of experience and reason, the traditional pillars of scientific
epistemology. In recognising first that scientists, as all of us, participate in the business of life,
which is importantly different from mere observation from afar, we will need to be sensitive to the
manner in which values, and hence questions of ethical responsibility, necessarily play a role in the
construction of scientific accounts. Furthermore, in eschewing the impossible goal of a view from
nowhere, we will have to ask how agreement is reached among finite groups of discussants, and ask
where the limits of such agreement may lie.
The approach to be taken in this text is somewhat paradoxical, as it posits a stance with respect
to the generation of agreement that no text can, by itself, adopt. This text is thus fundamentally
and irredeemably incomplete. The distal goal is to contribute to a Dialogical Realism. We will
assume throughout that discussants are arguing in good faith. This is tantamount to allowing
that all discussants are realists, by which I do not mean any kind of physicalism, or indeed, any
metaphysical position that might be asserted to the exclusion of all others. Metaphysics is not
the kind of business that leads to agreement, and certainly not the kind that might command
assent. We will assume that there is, at all times, for everyone involved in a debate, something
that needs no justification. In this, we are rejecting any absolute skepticism in much the same
way as Wittgenstein did in “On Certainty.” There, Wittgenstein calls a halt to the generation
of endless questions that can always be raised to cast doubt upon any proposition. If the desire
for explanation is ever to be gratified, we must acknowledge that agreement will demand that
we simply allow some claims to be. Richard Feynman likewise insisted that to answer a “why”
question, that is, to produce a satisfying explanation, one must simply let some things be, without
question. Otherwise, the business of doubt knows no end. Here, we will take a cue from Rorty and
shift the negotiation of matters of fact from the dead text of the scientific journals, and the page
you are reading right now, to the cut and thrust of face to face conversation.

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1.3 Situated debate
In the framework to be presented, the hiatus to be bridged from representation to reality will be
our principal topic of discussion. For scientific work, this will mean squaring up to the loan on
intentionality taken out by the hard sciences, and making explicit their reliance on interpretation
by embodied beings who participate in a meaningful reality. The debate is sufficiently general that
we will also take time to consider the relation of other forms of representation to reality, venturing
thus into territory in which theologians, iconoclasts, media scientists, historians, and artists are
more at home. This makes the discussion very broad indeed.
In where we are going, we will be distancing ourselves from any simple objective stance, and
instead asking the question that inspires a great deal of work in Science and Technological Studies,
which is, “How can we develop accounts, descriptions and explanations that satisfy our need for
certainty, to the best of our capacity?” or put more simply, “How can we arrive at the best objective
accounts possible?” Because our concern is not only within science, but within all the discursive
contexts in which scientific argument is called as one source of authority, our overall question can
also be framed as “How can we come to inhabit a maximally shared reality.” We will be working
in full awareness that we participate as well as describe, and for this reason, discussion of value
cannot be left to others, but must be recognised as an inalienable part of any debate that leads to
knowledge claims. And we will be self-consciously resisting the temptation to avoid such issues by
apportioning interpretation and knowledge to hidden minds, separate from the world they inhabit.
We will thus not be able to rely in any strong sense on the standard pillars of a scientific psychology:
perception, attention and memory may feature in an everyday informal sense, but they cannot serve
as a carpet to sweep the larger questions of meaning and value under.
The distal goal is to push gently towards a Dialogical Realism, which never delivers a final
account, and which is constructed by a specific community. Knowledge curated in this way seems
to me to be the optimal basis for Joint Actionable Consensus, which makes an admirable remote
target. By seeking to understand how maximally certain assertions may be worked towards by
discussants in dialogue with each other, we try to avoid the historical sundering of ethics from
empirical inquiry. Participants in any discussion will be accountable for distinctions they draw,
and they will stand in a necessary ethical relation to one another. The text cannot achieve any
of this. It can contribute to the debate. It can encourage, and it can hopefully form a basis for
dialogue. Perhaps the journey might also be enjoyable.

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16
Chapter 2

Introducing the P-H framework

2.1 Preamble
How much thinking has been done by solitary men! The library shelves groan under the ponderous
weight of individual thoughts, conceived in isolation, protected against the attrition of dialogue,
and gifted to the world as a hen presents an egg: fully formed and ready for use. The quiet spaces
in which such texts are crafted receed; the text sits there shorn of its necessary link to its creator,
to be consumed by unknown readers, each of whom will make of it what they will. Throw this text
onto the pile. It does not weigh much.
But it has intent. The text has dreams. It dreams of dialogue, of the cut and thrust of debate,
of the polishing that comes from interaction. The text distrusts each and every one of the solitary
man-thinkers. Argument and debate are done by people, not texts, and understanding, if it arrives,
is proper to us, not to our texts.

2.2 Failing to draw a distinction!

A text cannot do what I wish to do. So we must imagine two people, say you and I, sitting in a
room. “This!” I say. You look bemused. My hands are not pointing to anything in particular. My
gaze does not provide any indication of what I might mean. You did not hear any salient sound,
or notice any odour that I might be referring to.
“This!” I repeat, not very helpfully. “What?” you reasonably ask. “All this. No exceptions.”
is my response. Clearly, I am misusing a word. We seem to have a case of “This”-abuse.
Ordinarily, if I use the word “This!”, I would also provide some means for picking out some
theme, some entity, element, something at all, from the undifferentiated totality of our present
situation. I would provide an indication to allow the word “this” to function in our discourse. But
I am refusing to do that. I am attempting to do something words cannot do, which is to refer to
the totality of the present situated moment, without cleaving it into foreground and background.
If I were to point, to nod my head, to turn towards something, I would be indicating, and
therewith, I would be drawing a distinction. You might interpret the bounds of that which is
thereby distinguished in a manner I did not intend, but that is how conversational alignment
works. We draw distinctions together, and as our dialogue progresses, we sharpen the boundaries
and clarify the ambiguities, in the domain that thereby arises.
If I point, and exclaim “This!,” now we have something to talk about. In interpreting my

17
indication, you decide I mean the table that lies before us. The table has been promoted to an object
of discourse. Everything else receeds. I might have reduced the space of possible misinterpretations
by using a word “table” instead of merely pointing. This would serve to make my indication
somewhat more precise, but it does not remove all potential for ambiguity. I may be indicating
the table as an instance of a more general class, and the class may be antique furniture, or hotel
property, or useful places to put down a glass. Words indicate, as pointing gestures do, and the
manner in which the indication is taken up is not thereby determined precisely.
Let us start again.
You and I sit in a room together. “This is real” I opine. You nod your head sagely, assuming
that I will elaborate, refine, or otherwise clarify my remark which, while not couched in the language
of logic, seems to approach the informative status of a tautology. I have not said anything you
might disagree with. One might suggest I have said nothing at all, but I respectfully disagree.
Having nodded along with my suggestion that “This is real,” it seems to me we have established a
bare minimum of common ground, ruling out, by choice, such radical sceptical proposals as “this
is all a simulation” or “nothing is real.” Furthermore, I have brought the focus of your attention
and mine to that which is going on in the present. I am not talking about ancient Sparta, or the
planet Neptune, or telling an anecdote about yesterday or predicting tomorrow’s weather.
Conversing with another person is an effective antidote to the weak solicitations of solipsism.
Alone, hiding in my cell,1 I might be more inclined to countenance the notion that all I have at my
immediate disposal is the creation of my singular mind. Sitting together with you, this thought
does not occur, because it does not make sense. Alone in my cell, I might, perhaps, convince myself
of a distinction between an inner world and an external world. Sitting with you, this does not
seem as plausible, despite the persistance of the loqution “external world” in the vocabularies of
the most refined philosophies. As we sit together, there is the world, and we are in it, not against
it, or outside it looking in.
What did I assert is real? We arrive back at my initial obtuse use of a deictic term without a
concomitant indicator, or more simply, a “this” without anything to go with it. I can try again to
indicate the totality of . . . of what, exactly? That which I mean by “This!” is, strictly speaking,
ineffable. Necessarily ineffable. And when I attempt to catch it with words, they fail. But their
failures are interesting in their own right.
Perhaps I meant “this present moment.” That fails, but what might that have meant? If we
were to treat time as simply the chronometric scale employed when adopting the objective stance,
it might have meant the contents of a slice of space-time, an infinitessimal, the razor edge where
the future rushes through to the past. That won’t do for many reasons. Our present reality is not
an infinitessimal. Our shared reality has volume, duration, and qualitative aspects no infinitessimal
can admit. The qualitative, on the approach taken here, is to be considered perfectly real. So the
sounds I hear, the lingering taste of coffee, the smell of wisteria, the warmth of the fire, these are
not consigned to private interiorities. These are part of “This!.”
Yet I meant something not far from “this present moment.” Perhaps I meant “that which is
present to both of us now.” This seems to swerve from an external world to an internal world. Not
my fault! Having committed to include the qualitative aspects of our present reality in any futile
attempt to demarcate “This!” conventional language would have it that I might be attempting to
describe a set of perceptions, sensations, imaginations, or, in short, the contents of your experience
and my experience. This is to attempt to make two where there is manifestly only one. As we
1
We will assume for now that the author is some kind of monk in a community of unknown allegiance.

18
sit together in the room, our experiences are not two things. Your experience is reciprocally and
inextricably entangled with mine. As you speak, my eyebrows, my gaze, my trunk all are moved
and as they move so your speaking is altered. This is not a sequence of cause and effect. This
is inseparability. This is reciprocal entanglement. True, there are some facets to what I might
describe as my experience that you are not privvy to. My foot hurts. Pain is usually taken as the
ultimate in epistemolgical privilege. Yet when the pain swells I wince, and you move in concern at
my wincing, though you do not know its cause. In this way, my pain is not independent of you. As
long as the pain stays below a threshold I might keep it secret, but this is not a basis for positing
a private inner world. As I look at the wine bottle on the table between us, I see some aspects of
the label and I know that you cannot see the same aspects. This is not mysterious, and it does
not speak of disjoint domains of experience. It speaks of a reality in which two perspectives both
participate.

Figure 2: The fusing of experience

This mnemonic glyph is inspired by the famous Feynman diagrams. It should be viewed when
sitting together with another. Let P be what we might call “my” experience/consciousness
and let Q be yours. As we observe the picture together at some time t, these two are not
separable. We are constitutively entangled in each others’ being, as we sit and agree “This is
real.” You are a great deal of what we might think of as “context” for me, and I for you. Of
course, we will arise and go our separate ways, just as we were separate before sitting together.
That is illustrated by the circles that precede and follow our current situation. The circles
are fictions. There does not exist such a bounded domain as either P or Q. We are never
out of some context. We move from entanglement with one context to entanglement with
another and we are always inseparable from our world. The diagram reminds us of this for
the rather obvious case of two people sitting in a room. If we are not to be rendered entirely
mute, however, we will need to refer to P and Q in constructing stories about ourselves. In
such stories, we might note that P becomes P’ and Q becomes Q’, as we are each changed
by our interaction, no matter how small.

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2.3 Two landmarks: H and P
Now it is time to do some violence to the history of philosophy. To those who appreciate the work
of the Pre-Socratic philosophers, I apologize in advance. I am going to use the figures of Heraclitus
(H) and Parmenides (P) in ways that are unsupported by any careful reading of their work. I shall
try to make amends later, after we have done some work. For I need to invoke these two figures
as remote landmarks in order to scaffold a discussion of reality and of the existence of things, and
in that, the simplistic contrast that one gets from a shallow reading of their works will be of great
value.
Heraclitus lived from about 535 B.C. to 475 B.C.E. He lived in Ephesus, now in Turkey, but then
part of the Persian empire. He wrote in verse and little of his work remains. From the fragments
we have, he has come to be associated with two metaphysical positions we will make liberal use of.
The first is the observation that reality grounded in the present is a continual process of change, of
coming into being. The expression panta rhei, or “all is flux” and the observation that you cannot
step in the same river twice serve to pick out a metaphysics of change, of becoming, grounded in
the reality of the present. When I tried in vain to use the term “This!” to point to the entirety
of the reality of the present, I was attempting the impossible, and so henceforth, I will use the
bold letter H to return to the situated present. In the dialogical spirit of the suggestions to be
made, the situated present will be understood by convention to mean a present in which you and
I (at least) are co-present to each other, entangled, and indubitably real. H is to be understood
as undifferentiated, but not homogeneous. By this I mean that it is the totality of our shared
reality, prior to the drawing of any distinctions, and thus prior to any attempt at description or
characterisation. The straightforward givenness of our present situation in H is acknowledged to
be ineffable in principle, but that should not render it mystical, transcendent, or other-worldly.
What could be more pedestrian, more common-sensical, than to begin from where we are, in
the present, without a shadow of a doubt? As soon as we begin talking about our situation,
describing it, measuring things, developing narratives, we immediately open the door to error, to
mischaracterisation, and to the possibility of sundering our shared reality through disagreement.
H is prior to such activity.
The second metaphysical contribution of Heraclitus may appear paradoxical at first. “The way
up is the way down,” he states. “Sea is the purest and most polluted water.” “From all things,
one, and from one, all things.” In each of these aphorisms, Heraclitus is allowing us to acknowledge
the same reality from different vantage points. The superficial opposition that appears on first
reading vanishes when a larger perspective is adopted. One is reminded of Nagle’s approach to the
construction of objective accounts, by pulling back and adopting a more inclusive view in which
things once seen as opposites can now be seen as complementary. The reconcilliation in the case
of water is made explicit: “For fish drinkable and healthy, for men undrinkable and harmful.” As
we come to consider the nature of various ways of characterising the real, the juxtaposition of
complementary elements will become an important theme. Of that, more later.
Parmenides lived slightly later, though the two figures overlapped. Born about 514 B.C. at Elea
in Southern Italy, Parmenides likewise wrote in verse. In fact, we know only of a single work, a long
poem of which mere fragments survive. The poem “On Nature” was sufficiently influential to be
cited and copied by numerous subsequent thinkiers, and Parmenides has the distinction of featuring
in the one Platonic dialogue in which Socrates is bested. In the longest fragment, Fragment 8, we
get a paradoxical metaphysical picture of an eternal and unchanging reality. This eternalist view
could not contrast more starkely with the presentist account of Heraclitus. “And there is not, and

20
never shall be, anything besides what is, since fate has chained it so as to be whole and immovable.”
Parmenides’ obsession is with being. Things neither come into being, nor wink out of existence in
this paradoxical vision. That which is, is eternally.
Each philosopher offers a mystical account, and they differ fundamentally. Heraclitus charac-
erises reality as change; for Parmenides, reality is unchanging. Both have complex relations to
any way in which we might think about time. Neither account aligns easily with our everyday
understanding of the past as gone, the future as yet to come, and the present as that which just
happens to be going on right now. However the intense focus on matters of being in Parmenides
will allow us to speak of P, which is the domain of representation, in which things are asserted
to exist or to not exist. When I say “the domain of representation,” I mean that any dialogue
we will have must, of necessity, use intentional means—language, equations, models, images—to
assert propositions about entitites that exist or that do not exist. In what is to come, I will be
interested in how domains of discourse, which are necessarily representational, arise, and subside,
from a shared reality.
We will return to the wildly divergent mystical views of Heraclitus and Parmenides later. For
now, their concerns with becoming and being, with presentism and eternalism, will be useful scaf-
folding for several different discussions. In each, we will ask how the representations constructed
and employed within a specific discourse relate to the shared ground of being. In a rather more
concise form, we will be asking about how P relates to H, for specific instances of P.
A logical barrier intrudes at this point. Several logical barriers, if truth be told. Firstly, you
and I are not conversing in a room. I am writing a text, the text will someday be unloosed on
the world. I may be dead at that point, or have taken a vow of silence. I will, in all probability
be unknown to you, the reader. We cannot thus engage in dialogue. We cannot jointly construct,
and then deconstruct, any domain of discourse. I can talk about a hypothetical situation of joint
dialogue, but this is not it. This is, as all texts must be, mere words.
The second barrier lies in the manner in which I have posited H. H is, by construction, ineffable.
This it shares with such competing notions as Truth, God, Experience, The Way, The Good, and
The One. Indeed, I anticipate that the scaffolding of H and P may be of use in discussing any
and all of those, each within its own domain of discourse, of course. Yet I have tried to suggest
that H be thought of as entirely familiar, as the situated reality of the present, for some specific
interlocutors who share their being, face to face. I need to find a way to talk about H, despite
the limitations of the construction. To do so, let us first characterize the relation of P to H as
that of map to territory. Now P is intended to stand for all referential means, including words,
models, equations, images, etc., but for now, we might restrict that to maps alone that are about
the corresponding territory. The map is not the territory. That platitude needs to be augmented in
the present context, as the only means I have at my disposal are words, which are representational.
The map of the map is not the map of the territory—a formulation attributable to Heinz von
Foerster—may serve us to get things going. In that spirit, let us construct (in a whole new domain
of discourse) a metaphor for the relation of representational means to the underlying reality.

2.4 The relation of the reals and the rationals

As children, we learn in school of different number types. One of the first distinctions we meet is
that between the rational numbers and the reals. Although this seems to most schoolchildren to
be nothing more than unmotivated mathematical fodder to be consumed and digested until it is

21
needed to be regurgitated in exams, the relation between these two types of numbers is a whole
lot more interesting than that, and the very familiarity of the territory will be of assistance, as it
provides a precisely specified and robust case in which the P-H framework may be applied, and so
this becomes a reference point for all subsequent application to other questions and domains. Most
generally, P refers to the domain of representations, or the domain of discourse, while H points
back to our situated indubitable embodied reality. Here, in this mathematical analogy, P refers to
the domain of the rationals and H to the domain of the reals. It is an analogy that might guide us
as we apply the framework more generally.
We will associate the rational numbers with P. That is, any number that can be described as a
ratio of two integers, we situate in P. These numbers are all discrete entities. It is easy to identify
any one of them unambiguously, just by naming it as x/y, where x and y are integers. Here is one
17
such number: 23 . There are infinitely many rational numbers of course, but they are all separate.
The real numbers we will associate with H. The conventional names, real and rational, align
well with our purposes, as, in elaborating the P-H framework, that which is proper to H will be
regarded as real in a straightforward sense, while rational argumentation must range over defined
and namable entities in P. The real numbers are continuous. It is not straightforward to single out
any specific one.
Each rational number in P can be located in H. Imagine a line from P to H, bridging the
hiatus, and singling out the corresponding real number. This way of linking H and P can never
exhaust H, as the real numbers are not only infinite, but their kind of infinity is greater than the
countable infinity of the rationals. The reals are uncountable, while the rationals are countable.
Thus any system or process that maps from elements in P to H cannot exhaust, or even take a
nick out of, H. No map exhausts the corresponding territory, not even a 1:1 scale map.
If you and I are sitting together (in H), and we wish to recreate for ourselves the foundations of
mathematics (why not?), we might start with integers. I can readily point to sets of 3, 4, 5 apples,
cups, seeds, etc, and in this way we can reach a very solid kind of common understanding of what
an integer is. Given integers, and some further preliminary work in establishing what we mean by
a ratio or proportion, we can construct the rationals from any pair of integers.
Real numbers are very different. There is nothing in our embodied situated present that I can
point to that unambiguously singles out a real number. Even the most rigorously made object has a
length that is somewhat indeterminate, and measurement will preclude ever unambiguously picking
out any specific real number. We can identify some (few) reals by referring to either transcendental
idealised things (such as π, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to the diameter), or by specifying
abstract operations to generate them (e.g. taking the square root of two). In the absence of such
anchors, it is impossible to even name real numbers. This will be entirely characteristic of H in
subsequent discussions, and reminds us that ineffability need not mean “unutterably strange,” but
merely unutterable.
In general, entities in P will be discrete and namable. P is the domain of representations,
so it is here that we will find symbols, words, images, graphs, models. We will be careful in our
language, but in general we might say that the things in P either exist or do not exist. Within
the P-H framework, we will distinguish between matters of existence (in a domain of discourse, P,
an entity may be said ot exist or to not exist) and being real, which we attribute to H, without
thereby carving H up into discrete things. H will be often referred to as unrepresentable. This
sounds more cryptic than it is. No set of links from elements in a discrete countable domain to a
continuous domain can exhaust the continuous domain.

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 When we name something (“this table,” “one half”, “The people, united!”) we throw a bridge
between H, the situated ground of our dialogue, and P, the domain of discourse that thereby
comes into being, or is thereby enlarged. This is analogous to identifying among the reals a number
corresponding to a specific rational number. In discourse, but not in our mathematical analogy,
the manner in which we bridge the gap from H to P will change, shift, and be negotiated. When
I pointed to the table, and perhaps said the word “table,” there remained work to be done in
ensuring that we both come to understand my intention in the same way. The necessity to bridge
the gap in a manner acceptable, or intelligible, to discussants in the dialogue makes our discourse
political from the start, and places an onus on us to ensure that sufficient common ground exists.
In our analogy, the mapping from P to H is stable and secure. Although this distinction between
P and H may be conceptually challenging to grasp as we later approach a wide variety of topics
such as iconicity, authenticity, and language, the manner in which H and P are related is quite
precisely illustrated by consideration of the rationals and the reals.

2.5 Map - Territory confusions

Ernst Gombrich retells an anecdote about the time a woman visited Matisse in his studio. Pointing
at a canvas, she opined: “But surely, the arm of this woman is much too long.” Matisse replied
politely, “Madame, you are mistaken. This is not a woman, this is a picture” (Gombrich, 1960, p.
98)
This may appear to be a simple misunderstanding. The woman is interpreting the picture as
being about a woman. Matisse is correcting her. She has mistaken a representation (a picture)
for the thing represented (a woman). I think this would not do justice to the situation though. A
picture, as singled out by Matisse, is part of the furniture of the world, as is a woman. There is
no woman present in the studio except for the visitor herself, but she is doing what we frequently
do with pictorial representations: she is seeing through the means of mediation to the presumed
intentional object. The relation of a painted canvas to an intentional object is perhaps not as
determinate as that of a photograph, but they share this quality of interpretability in discourse.
The woman, in H quite unsurprisingly speaks of a woman. Matisse, in the same situation, speaks
of a crafted object. Anyone who has seen Matisse’s paintings knows they are about bodies and
movement, so the correction he gently applies seems to me not to be one of refusing to interpret
the thing before which they both stand, but to apportion the interpretation to a different domain
of discourse. As a result, different conditions of verification and veracity obtain. What is recounted
as an apparently simple confusion of map (representation) and territory (that which is represented)
turns out to be a little more complex, as we find ourselves amid representations all the time, and
we have no choice but to interpret them. Matisse might say “I’m talking about pictures instead of
talking about women’s bodies, but I must talk about something!” We reply to words with more
words. We might illustrate an idea with a sketch, and when it fails to communicate, we do another
sketch. We do not have any means of magically puncturing the veil of representation to arrive at
reality. But we converse together in H. Matisse and his visitor stand before the canvas, which is
picked out using “this.” The need for disambiguation arises once an indication has been offered, to
be interpreted by another party, and in the process of disambiguation, the domain of discourse is
adumbrated.
Gombrich’s extended treatment of the often confusing territory between representation and
reality is sensitive to the unavoidable complexities we arrive at if we insist that such-and-such is,

23
or is not, a sign, an index, an icon, or a representation. A couch fashioned by a carpenter simply is
a couch. It does not stand for anything, and is thus unlike a photograph of a couch in a catalogue,
which stands at a representational remove from any particular. But place the real couch in a shop
window and now it becomes a sign, a symbol of couches in stock, a role that could also be played
by a faux-couch made of cardboard. A snowman, when made, is not a representation of any man,
but once made, we may reinterpret it as it appears to resemble Jimmy, and we may play with this,
giving the snowman suitable clothes and a name. As Gombrich observes, the activity of making
comes before the interpretation of the product as referring. When, on the rare occasion of snowfall
in Saudi Arabia in 2015, Saudi clerics issued a fatwa against the building of snowmen, they were
leaping over the act of making on the assumption that the assignment of reference would necessarily
follow. Could we get around this if we interpret the snow sculpture we just made to be a snow
sculpture of a snowman? The interrogation of the link between representation and represented
has been a battleground where wars have been fought. The iconclastic revolts of 8th Century
Byzantium or during the Protestant reformation are part of a larger pattern of contest about how
we understand the leap between this thing here, this image or statue, and that to which it is claimed
to refer.
Representation comes with a necessary hiatus. The hiatus can be laboriously bridged, or it
can be leaped over in one confident bound, depending on the consensual interpretation of those in
dialogue. Constructing a bridge can be the work of a detective, of one who interprets evidence,
arguing that this sign here speaks of that transcendent situation in another location and time.
When argument is constructed like this, everyone will need to be brought along. A premature
inference, and the delicate fabric of mutual consent may tear. We will argue using reason, but
we will also use every other rhetorical trick in the book. Situated dialogue is not algorithmic in
nature. In Chapters 5 and 6 we will pay a great deal of attention to the various ways in which such
bridge building is done collectively, drawing on an Indian tradition of contested debate to expand
the suite of argument kinds that may be brought to bear. In iconoclast/iconophile disagreements,
there is a familiar theological defence that icons and statues are venerated, and not worshipped;
this argument leans on a specific manner in which representation is understood to reach beyond
the here and now to a transcendent. And yet, while such iconophilic defence denies the presence of
the saint or God in the icon, it also insists that the chain from icon to original is not undisciplined
or invented, but is kept intact because the icon is produced within a curated tradition.
It is entirely conventional to finesse many questions of reference and representation by relying
on hidden minds, whose presumed contents are produced by reason operating over hypothetical
representations generated by perceptual systems working with data from the senses. This is the
epistemological tradition which is presupposed by most scientific accounts, if they address such
niceties at all. It was pointed out earlier that this stance takes out a loan on the presumed
processes of mind that must be repaid, but not through more physics, more chemistry, more biology.
The ediface is built on a metaphysics of mediation, and if one chooses to withold consent to the
representational assumptions underlying it, a different approach will be necessary. But even when
we resituate the debate to the embodied context of our two-person discourse, we are not freed from
the mysteries and paradoxes of representation. We may no longer rely unthinkingly on the mental
representations or neural representations of the materialist cognitive psychologist, but we still need
to recognise that we must constantly build bridges from H to some negotiated domain of discourse
P, and that such links are contestable in principle, even if, in any given discourse, many of the
representational assumptions will be unproblematic and shared.

24
 An alternative to a metaphysics of mediation, which aspires to underwriting a view of a universe
that unfolds in time along a single temporal axis, is to consider a theory of contact, in which we
examine and interrogate the links from a situated indubitable and shared reality (shared, that is,
among a specific group of co-present discussants) to more remote beings and events. This is not so
much a metaphysical alternative, as a pragmatic situated inquiry that tries to avoid metaphysical
sinking sand. The idea of a theory of contact, and what it would mean for making manifest the
patterns that connect us and our entanglements will be explored in Chapter 4. First, though, it
might be good to unseat our background assumptions about the nature of time and space as they
tend to figure in most of our discussions, as we try to characterise reality and discuss matters of
fact and existence.

25
26
Chapter 3

Space, Time, Existence and Reality

within the P-H Framework

3.1 Isometry of Space and Time

Both space and time are hard to think about abstractly, as they lack any characteristics of their
own, but are ways of understanding that which exists and that which happens. We arrive at
the notion of space because things have extension, and at time, because events have duration, or
more simply, because we observe change. Space and time are often regarded as the background
assumptions required to make sense of the manifest world we encounter. Yet, for all their venerable
history of causing problems in philosophy, these are not esoteric notions, available only to experts
and initiates. They seem familiar. We move through space; we observe ourselves and things around
us changing, sometimes quickly, sometimes more gradually. Furthermore, we have the best of clocks
and rulers that give us a sense that these are tamable concepts, that time and space are something
we can measure and bring order to. But neither time nor space is the kind of thing that can be
measured in its own right. As we conventionally treat them, things happen in time and space, so
that the numbers we read off our clocks and rulers allow us to say where and when one thing is
with respect to another. The King of France (to open up a novel domain of discourse) is not to be
found here or anywhere at this moment of time when we converse, but it is possible to figure out
that there are timestamps at which the King of France could have been be identified at a specific
place. (Let us now close that particular domain.)
We noted above that there is a contrast to be drawn between abstract chronometry, in which
some event is associated with a timestamp whose content is nothing but a number, the sum total of
seconds from an agreed reference, and the everyday sense of time as the form of measure of our lives,
expressed in seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years, generations, and ages. Every attribute
beyond the minimal index serves to complicate our relation to time, and to embed its construction
in the social processes that frame and structure our meaningful lives. If we say something happened
on Friday, that awakens obligatory associations for most of us with the end of the working week.
Friday contrasts greatly with Monday for many reasons. If those associations are not invoked,
then one or both of us may be thereby flagged as excused from the grind of 9-to-5 occupational
obligations. If the Friday were to be identified as Good Friday, the notion of time is further enriched
with religious ritual and convention, and those for whom the term “Good Friday” is meaningful
now suddenly appear as necessarily immersed in a specific cultural and religious landscape. The

27
resonance of such temporal words thus serves not only to situate the conversation we are having
within an organised social framework, but also to individuate each of us who take part of the
conversation. It matters to our conversation, and to the way words work between us, whether we
are both employed, Christian, etc.
Embodied creatures live among the rhythms and cycles of the body and its environmental
supports too (Fuchs, 2018). As the seasons come and go in regular succession, and within that
the alternation of night and day places its stamp upon all activities of life, so too the endogenous
cycles of the body, in respiration, heartbeat, menstruation, cycles of hunger followed by satiation, of
fatigue followed by sleep, of lust followed by release, all serve to embed us in processes of meaningful
change. These recurrences find social elaboration in the rituals, festivals, holidays, but also in the
rigors of the working week, of tax returns and mortgage payments.
Time, it is well known, has two very distinct faces. On the one hand, there is the structure we
can point to with an index, serving to arrange any list of events in sequence. Fuchs (2018) calls
this “linear time.” This provides the scale for the construction of historical stories, and indeed
speculative fiction about the future, for the linear scale that we peg our timestamps on knows no
present. Or rather, if we were to identify, you and I, the present as a point, infinitely small, moving
along that line at—well, at what rate does it move? If we say it moves at one second per second,
we demonstrate the meaninglessness of trying to identify our present reality on such a scale, or
to treat it as if it were an infinitessimal without duration. Anything else may be measured with
respect to the indices or time stamps we use, and the measurement will be in units of seconds, but
seconds themselves cannot be so expressed.
But we also use the overburdened term “time” to speak of the present, the now, where, for
now, I am assuming you and I are conversing. As we converse, we both acknowledge an irrevocable
past (though we may be unsure of the details of what happened) and an as yet indeterminate
future (though we may have strong hunches about some upcoming events). This understanding
of past and future as they relate to the present is part of our common ground, yet, as with any
facet of common ground, if we draw attention to it, any part of it may be interrogated and we may
find that that which we had unreflectively relied on together now appears as a potential bone of
contention. This is obviously the case if we recount part of our shared history, but find that the way
we retell the common story differs. We might choose to attribute such divergence to our varying
perspectives, memories, historical knowledge, or variety in the interpretation of the significance of
some events. Our links to the past are not entirely reliable or steady as we sit together in a room.
Aligning these two ways in which we understand time has been a burning concern for philoso-
phers, psychologists, and physicists alike. On the one hand, we have our lived experience of the
unfolding of things in the present. On the other, we have our convictions about the irrevocability of
past existants, even if our ability to express knowledge of them in the present is necessarily limited.
The present, where we converse, needs no mediation. Predictions about the future, or claims about
the past, are going to require diverse forms of mediation, no less than assertions about remote
places. Within a P-H framework, we will need to unseat our conventional conviction that reality
consists of the simultaneous unfolding of events the world over. We are closer, in some sense to
be explored, to certain events in the past and future to which we bear relatively straightforward
connections, than to remote events that happen to take place with an index in linear time that
corresponds to the index we apportion to the time of our conversation. As we approach a theory
of contact to set against a metaphysics of mind and mediation, we will be unpacking this notion of
being “closer.”

28
 With space, too, we might recognise that the model we conventionally employ in thinking about
space is not congruent with space as encountered by an embodied being to whom things matter.
One abstract intellectualised way of thinking of space is as a giant container within which things
happen. This way of thinking about, of representing, space underlies the use of rulers and the
measurement of extension. But as with linear time, it is an abstract notion that has become so
embedded in the manner in which we talk that it is difficult to unseat. In fact, when we treat space-
time as a container that houses unfolding events, we are often said to be spatialising time, but this
neglects the violence we also do to our embodied experience of space (space as it features in H),
which is no more linear and homogeneous than is lived time (the temporality of the present, also
of course, in H). Both space and time have been laboriously constructed as isometric frameworks,
that is, as scaffolding in which one second or one metre here is perfectly equivalent to one second
or one metre anywhere else. This is a framework without a centre, and so it is a representational
construction at one remove (a hiatus) from the experience of any living being.
Once more we might consider our embodied being in the room where we converse. Here space
is charged with meaning. We each have bodies whose morphology orients us one way rather than
another. Our eyes scan horizontally easily, vertical scanning is more difficult. We distribute our
bodies carefully in space, mindful of each other and the way in which space is slightly differently
charged for you than for me. The space into which I can reach means something other than the
space that is inaccessible, even within the room. If you are arachnophobic, the presence of a spider
casts a strong kind of field distortion over the locality. As with time, the space we live in is saturated
with meaning. Isometric space and time provide us with a useful framework for coordinating our
business, and for describing relations among objects and events, but both space and time have an
entirely different sense to embodied being who converse in H.
Part of the conjuring trick of constructing a powerful representation of space and time as
isometric relies on the insistance that all matters of meaning are purely internal, in the head or
the heart or the mind, but not in the world. This is another instance of the great loan taken out
on intentionality by the construction of an objective framework, and it is naturally rooted in the
stars. It takes a great deal of labour and training to be able to think in this fashion (Galison,
2004). It required the development of clocks and rigorous work practices to instill the notion of a
common time ticking along in a world considered to be “external.” As time was tamed, so too was
space. Indeed, the business of refining the measurement of time is inextricably intertwined with the
business of mapping the globe, using the fixed backdrop of the stars as a reliable objective scaffold.
As means for accurate mapping have been developed, so too have the options for vehicular travel,
creating the possibility of moving from anywhere to anywhere in a manageable period of time.
Trade practices connected not just spatial locations, but systems of value that had previously been
mutually isolated.1 The development of the printing press created the phenomenon of news, which
is the idea that events far away were simultaneous with events here, and experienced only at a finite
fixed lag. Later innovations of telegraphy and radio made the notion of simultaneity even more
compelling, and to those we must add the representational arts of photography and film, which reach
something of an apotheosis in the current opportunities for live streaming from (almost) anywhere
on the planet. All of these developments suggest that the drive towards establishing a simultaneous
1
The development of currency casts another form of isometric grid over our shared world, one which sustains
the fiction that value is fungible. Just as isometry of space eradicates the important difference between a bounded
volume immediately in front of my face and a similarly sized volume in the wilds of Khazakhstan, so the problematic
isometry of value introduced by fungible currency casts an isochronous grid over the value-saturated practices of
wildly disparate peoples.

29
reality for all people all over the globe continues unabated. One might see the proffering of the P-H
framework as a caution to avoid jumping to the unwarranted assumption of necessary connection
among all those who might share a time stamp within a specific representational framework. Sharing
a world becomes something rather different when we adopt a different stance with respect to the
qualitative nature of reality, aware that a quality-free simultaneity is not a full account of reality.

3.2 The Spook of Relativism

Another foundational belief we are unlikely to give up without a fight is the notion that we all
live within a single domain of the real. The spectre of relativism that can appear so threatening
can also be understood as a refusal to countenance plurality in our account of the ultimately
real, or, equivalently, it is an unshakable belief in the existence of a single regime of truth. The
P-H framework makes room for overlapping, but non-identical foundations among discussants,
and thus encourages sensitivity to mismatched assumptions, to problematic reliance on different
forms of connection and mediation. It is not a relativist position, but it also rejects the premature
declaration of a fully shared reality by any one participant.
P: If we understand the depiction of events within an isometric time-space container to be
the way things simply are, to be the bottom line, the ground truth, then we will urgently resist
any attempt to complicate this picture. This is to subscribe to the crystalline eternalist vision of
Parmenides, with all of the paradoxes that arise thereby.
H: If we take the indubitable reality of our shared present to be the way things are, to be the
bottom line, the ground truth, then we will have to acknowledge that our grasp of reality is partial,
finite, and capable of improvement by cautiously following the links of contact, of obligation, and
of communality that lead from here to all else that is real.
Heraclitus and Parmenides may seem to sing to us in irreconcilable tones. Or we might grant
each of them their own mystical insight, but recognise that to unify the two completely would be
to know as God must know, not as a finite being with singular perspectives and local values might.
The P-H framework provides a speculative and limited way to come at such issues. The distal
goal of such a framework is to work towards a Dialogical Realism. This formulation acknowledges
the need for reliance on an indubitable foundation, but simultaneously recognises that no final
account of that will be available, that explanation in all domains relies on unstated assumptions,
and that discussants who work towards Joint Actionable Consensus need to do so through a never-
finalized process of dialogue. This, it seems to me, is in no way inimicable to the purpose of
scientific inquiry. But beyond this rather bland set of aspirations, the framework is developed
with the explicit constraint of not being built upon metaphysical assumptions about reference,
representation and intentionality, as, it is suggested, leaning on a determinate account of any of
these related mysteries amounts to a kind of foundationalism we here seek to avoid, relying instead
on a different foundation, that of common sense among discussants. So we can assume no cogito,
no reliance on individual minds, no assumptions that the relation of a representation to an original
is a determinate state of affairs; all these constraints produce challenges that will be met differently
in different conversations. Once more, the limitations of any text such as this become apparant.

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3.3 Separating reality and existence
We can start by asking, how in a P-H context, we should treat of the separable notions of reality
and existence. In everyday language, these are frequently conflated. If something is real, it exists,
or it used to exist, or it will exist—we already see that time and tense are mixed up in the relation
of reality to existence. We have a pragmatic way forward available to us that is not available
to a solitary thinker. Let us acknowledge that in H where we speak, we both rely on something
being indubitable. We may not be able to agree on an account of what that is. We find ourselves
meekly asserting “This is real,” without any commitment, yet, as to what is being indicated by
the word “this.” Reality, then, pertains to our joint lived reality, to the reality we share simply by
being together. Existence is another matter, and it pertains to a Domain of Discourse, which is
necessarily representational, and thus in P. We may posit an entity, such as an atom, Batman, the
Taj Mahal, or Beauty. Once named, the entity is situated now within the domain of discourse. We
are free to assert that the atom, Batman, etc. exists or does not exist. We can attach a tense to
that assertion: it used to exist, but stopped at such-and-such a time. We can discuss the putative
existence (and associated temporal issues) once an entity has been named. To name, is thus to
introduce to a domain of discourse. To discuss the name is to flesh out or further populate and
characterise the domain of discourse.
Separating the notions of reality, grounded in where we sit and converse, and existence, meaning
representation within a domain of discourse, provides a way to avoid the scandal of ontological
plurality that arises as we come to recognise an array of modes of existence, as presented, e.g. in
Bruno Latour’s Inquiry into the Modes of Existence (Latour, 2013), or, indeed, many other recent
attempts to acknowledge the reality of various kinds of entities beyond mere material objects,
conceived of as inert and meaningless. It also provides a way of acknowledging the sense intended
when someone thumps the table and insists “This, this is real. It is physically real.” The physicality
invoked is the indubitable embodied present, not the physics of Einstein.
Introducing the notion of a Domain of Discourse, within which things exist or do not exist,
needs a great deal of further elaboration. It is clear, to the point of obviousness, that not all
of our conversations rely upon or insist upon a single set of existant entities having determinate
properties with associated manners of veridication. If I have a children’s birthday party, and there
are 8 children present, one of whom has dissociative identity disorder, I will count them as 8 persons
for the purposes of ordering pizza, even though I might display a greater sensitivity and ontological
instability when speaking to that one child in person. If you sneeze, and I say “bless you!” I am not
thereby defending an entire cosmology that includes transcendent Gods, blessings, grace, angels
and Uncle Nick himself. When we attribute causes in our historical stories, we are well aware that
a different framing of the narrative would have to appeal to different agencies. Stories, accounts,
serve purposes and are addressed to specific audiences. Each such story may be viewed as a domain
of discourse.
We might usefully contrast how a single monological text works with how a consensual narra-
tive unfolds in dialogue. As an example of a monological text, we might take a short story, for
example, and to keep things concrete, let’s pick Franz Kafka’s enigmatic short story “Die Sorge des
Hausvaters” (The Cares of a Family Man), which introduces a character the reader is certain never
to have heard of, called Odradek. Although a description of Odradek’s appearance is given (At
first glance it looks like a flat star-shaped spool for thread, and indeed it does seem to have thread
wound upon it; to be sure, they are only old, broken-off bits of thread, knotted and tangled together,
of the most varied sorts and colours. But it is not only a spool, for a small wooden crossbar sticks

31
out of the middle of the star, and another small rod is joined to that at a right angle.) it does not
make clear either the origin, purpose, or moral nature of the creature. Odradek’s apparent pur-
poselessness, along with its persistence, is simply presented as an unsettling fact, neither explained
nor fully fleshed out. The reader is left disquieted, and challenged to attempt to make sense of a
vision that refuses any singluar interpretation.
This text was written once, and read many times by many people. Readers have offered diver-
gent allegorical interpretations. The nature of the story supports such a proliferation of meanings,
so that one would have to say that the meaning of the story, and the manner in which Odradek’s
existence is understood, will vary from one reader or reading community to the next. A similar
point about multiple interpretations might be made about any text, including such pivotal works as
scriptural texts like the Bible. In the act of writing, the author is briefly sovereign over the domain
of discourse. The first time Odradek is named, he (it?) is thereby summoned into existence. The
descriptive text that follows fleshes this story out somewhat, but the reader does not have the right
or power to negate Odradek’s existence, except perhaps by abandoning the domain established by
the author, and transferring elements of the narrative to an entirely different domain of discourse.
Thus one might note that Odradek does not “really” exist, but that is to refuse the creative act of
the narrator. Within the story, Odradek most certainly exists, while within the same story, neither
the reader, nor Batman has any claim to existence.
A monological text gets to set up and control its domain of discourse. The reader may take
it or leave it. They may interpret things one way or another. But they cannot change what the
author has done. In dialogue, things work differently. If, as we sit in our room, I talk of a creature
called “Odradek,” a domain of discourse is once more established, but one over which I do not have
control. You are free to ask questions of Odradek, to debate whether it can be said to exist in a
historical sense, to demand further elaboration, and as I respond to your questions and suggestions,
so Odradek changes, becoming more defined, perhaps changing in nature completely. The domain
of discourse is negotiated. Assumptions about what can and cannot occur lurk in the background
and may be foregrounded as soon as one or other of us interjects.
Within each domain of discourse, we can speak of existence, but existence claims in one do
not spill over into another. We might agree, for example that Batman does not exist in the same
way that Angela Merkel exists. We cannot go to meet Batman and argue politics with him. Yet
we can conduct a different conversation, e.g. comparing superheroes from the two main comic
franchises, or we could discuss the economics of movie knock-off marketing. In either case, our
conversation would necessarily presuppose a specific kind of existence of Batman, without which
nothing would make sense. But in neither conversation would either Angela Merkel or Odradek
make an appearance.
Existence, when treated in this fashion, is something that we can bring about simply by calling
a name. Name calling is a common way of summoning entities in ritual and magic too. In such
cases, participants typically do not dispute the reality, or question the existence, of the entity so
summoned. Summoning by calling the name of a saint, e.g. during a ritual dedicated to him or
her and conducted among worshippers, establishes a time-limited, bounded domain of discourse
within which participants will take the saint as simply existent, and, importantly, within which
anyone else who partakes in the conversation might coherently assert non-existence. It would make
no sense, in such a conversation, to assert or deny the existence of an unmotivated entity, like, say,
Odradek.

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Chapter 4

Contact and Sharing Reality

We are local creatures. An interview with a Lybian fighter in the anarchic period after the fall of the
dictator, Ghadaffi, made this abundantly clear. “Whose side are you on?” the interviewer asked,
hoping to bring some clarity to the confusing fog of shifting and overlapping allegiances. “Well, its
basically me against my brother,” the interviewee said. “Then it is me and my brother against my
cousin. Then me, my brother and my cousin against those who are from the next village. Then
it is those from all the villages in this part of the country against those from the South and East.
But then it is all of us against those from outside Lybia.” The list went on and on. The gradients
of attachment that pervade the concentric spheres of social relations are not specific to Lybians. I
care more about my children and parents than about people I know of only inferentially. This is
non-negotiable.
I am in my kitchen and I hear of an earthquake, a disaster of biblical proportions, happening
on the other side of the globe. I am horrified. But when I burn my hand in the oven, the pain
in my thumb temporarily blots out any concern I have for the victims of the earthquake. This is
inevitable.
I read in the news of the carnage of battle. Hundreds killed. It has just happened in a distant
part of the world. Once more, I am horrified. I read in a book of the carnage of battle. Thousands
killed. It happened in the same part of the world, but two hundred years ago. I note it in passing
as an interesting historical datum. Why am I affected by the one, but not the other? What is the
nature of my relation to the victims of the two battles?
As we sit together in H, we are entangled in each others’ being; we are joint witnesses; we
stand in a necessary ethical relationship to one another. We are also, in some sense to be explored,
in contact with others, with all others who presently exist, and with those who used to exist.
Perhaps we can extend this to future beings as well as we examine the kind of contact we have.
As we sit together, neither past nor future is unambiguously available to us. H is the present,
by construction. Sitting together, we can only see as far as the walls, and perhaps the end of the
garden, glimpsed through a window. We can only hear sounds within a limited volume around us.
The aeroplane passing over the house is distant, but perceptible.
The representation of time and space that was introduced with scientific modernity does not
provide the right tools for understanding locality in any of these senses. The construction of a
so-called “external world” that is inert and shorn of any qualitative attributes makes it impossible
to understand how distant something is from me, and hence to provide any coherent way of under-
standing my attachments, or yours, or ours. Within the P-H framework, we are not condemned to

33
understand ourselves as isolated intellects churning and processing representations of an external
inert world. We start locally, and we ask what are we continuous with. This requires us to rethink
some of the conventional ways in which our sensorimotor embedding in the world is regarded.

4.1 Being in touch

The development of many kinds of representational media, from the first painted images, through
printed texts, up to the latest in live-streaming on the internet, has fostered a widespread sense of
being in touch with things. Our immoderate appetite for news springs from a conviction that we
really ought to stay in touch with the important events of the day. The same language is used in
the maintenance of family relationships—those letters you never got around to writing, or the little
feedback provided by clicking the “like” button on your friends’ social media posts, all serve to
stay in touch. The use of the verb touch is interesting in this regard, as it serves to characterise as
viscerally or indubitably real a connection that is mediated through sometimes very flimsy means.
Touch is the primordial sense. It is a way of encountering a world, and others, that is maximally
personal or intimate, and at the same time, indubitable. Doubting Thomas did not just want to
see the wounds, he wanted to touch them.
When we sit together in H, touch is a possible mode of interaction. It is non-symbolic, and
deeply meaningful. We will each be careful how we touch. All touch is local.
Touch is a two-way thing. If we explore the world with our hands, we have to be active, to
prod, rub, squeeze, in order for touch to work. In touching the world, the world must touch us
back. The same applies to touch between us. It is necessarily reciprocal. Use one hand to touch
the other. Does it feel paradoxical? Which side is inside and which outside? Which hand is feeling
which? Touch requires contact, and it is a way of staying in contact with things.
If we want to allow us to talk of what we see, feel, hear, and we want to avoid the convenient
fiction of an interior private mind in which perceptions of the world arise, distinct from the world,
touch is a much better anchor for developing our intuitions than vision. Vision has hogged the
limelight in all discussions of the sensorimotor embedding we enjoy in the world. Important as
vision is, it is a bad place to ground one’s intuitions about how we come to know the world. Touch,
on the other hand, is primal. To have a body is to be in touch with the world. Contact with the
world is a logical necessity for an embodied being. Vision certainly is not.
In squeezing, rubbing, stroking the world, touch is clearly an activity, extended in time, not
reducible to an instant. I can use my limbs to make sense of the world, and to interact with it. I
can augment the form of my body by probing with a stick, as when a blind person uses a cane to
detect obstacles. Although the physiology of touch ensures that receptors in the skin play a role in
such exploratory activity, the activity is not to be understood with primary reference to the skin,
but to the outer surface of the agent, and when a blind person wields a cane, that surface includes
the tip of the cane itself. When I drive down an uneven street in a car, and I become aware of
the ripples on the surface of the road, my effective surface is the car which makes contact with the
road through tyres. I do not notice irregularities in my contact with my clothes, or even the seat.
I notice the road. In both cases, the effective bounds of the agentive unit are where the reciprocal
interaction with the world takes place. The cane encounters a step, and the step resists the cane.
In this manner, I orient with respect to the step. The tyres encounter the road, the road pushes
back, and in this manner I come to know my relation to the road. I wield the cane with more
facility than I wield the tyres. With my hand and a cane I can make plain many distinctions in the

34
surfaces around me; I can poke too, and even use it as a lever. The steering mechanism reduces
the complexity of the manner in which I wield the tyres. By driving and steering I can reveal the
texture of the surface beneath the car, and spot gross discontinuities at kerbs and potholes. But I
am greatly restricted in my curious probing of my surround. The carapace of the car is limiting.
Within a conventional Cartesian metaphysics, perception happens within a subject, because all
qualitative reality is so confined. It is, by and large, an internal and hidden matter. The sense
organs, such as the eyes or the skin, are the means by which information is picked up by the subject,
but the perceptual relation is a private affair manifested within some notional bound (the brain?
the skull? the body?). The metaphysical underpinning of this view is culturally local. It relies on
the separability of the experiencing subject (mind) on the one hand and an inanimate inert world
that simply exists on the other. Like all metaphysical positions, this view does not travel well.
Within some Buddhist accounts, the kind of exploratory activity described above also features,
but the reciprocal nature of the subject∼world relation is made more explicit in recognising that
awareness happens when there is contact (Sanskrit: sparsha; Pali: phassa) between the sensory
organ and the world within the field of consciousness. In the case of touch, the need for contact
may be obvious, but the structure of the account remains the same for the other sensory modalities
too. Vision, hearing, smell, taste, are all conceived of as forms of contact between the body and the
world of an embodied subject. (The “field of consciousness” should not be thought of as a synonym
for the mind. As we are treating of experience, yours and mine are not separable in H, though
we can discuss their differing perspectives—a visual metaphor that once more threatens to mislead
us. We might here interpret the “field of consciousness” as the shared reality in H including all
qualitative aspects.)

4.2 Seeing as touch

If we anchor our understanding of the sense making activities of a subject in the modality of touch,
how does this look if we turn then to vision and visual exploration? We do not have available,
and cannot make use of, an internalist doctrine of secret representations. The only thing inside
the head, on the account being followed here, is flesh and bone, meat and bodily fluids. Vision
is by far the best studied of the senses, and yet, perhaps surprisingly, there does not exist any
satisfactory account of seeing within the scientific canon. Perhaps that rather negative summary
is unnecessarily inflammatory. Let me try again. There are several theories that purport to be
of vision, but they aspire to provide accounts of rather different kinds of things, experiences, and
behaviours. There does not exist an account of vision that can extricate itself from very specific
and highly contestable metaphysical assumptions about subjects and their worlds. That seems a
little better. It also helps to explain why we have available to us several disjoint, yet persisting,
accounts of seeing that do not seem to refer to the same kind of thing.
The most common way to think of seeing is as if images were involved and as if visual experience
(which is introduced as a thing to be explained) was akin to the visual inspection of an image. This
entirely familiar way of talking about seeing distinguishes between a subject (confined to a hidden
interiority) looking out at the world which is displayed in an array called the “visual field.” Making
sense of the world visually then becomes the business of interpreting this visual field, and when it
is exhausted or no longer sufficiently informative, moving the eyes to create another visual field. In
talking about this, emphasis is put on the attempt to characterize “experience.” This aspiration
requires that the language used cleanly distinguish between the seer and the seen, and the richest

35
set of metaphors and constructions that we have available to us for such purposes comes from the
joint viewing of images. We can ask what do we see, where do we see it, how does it appear to us,
and what does something look like. All of these are questions that separate seer and seen. They
are all questions that are relatively easy to discuss as we stand as detached observers in front of a
single array, as we might when viewing a painting. They are questions that make sense if we have
adopted the framing of the spectator set off against the scene surveyed.
This way of thinking about vision draws profusely from image talk. Images are a very important
kind of thing in the world, and we will have much to say about images and their relation to reality
in what comes. In discussing such notions as vision, seeing, visual experience, when we frame
such talk using the notion of images, we are adopting an explanatory stance that is of necessity
anthropocentric, indeed that makes sense only for modern culturally shaped humans. Such talk
cannot extend to vision understood as a capacity we share with many animals.
Images, for most of the history of the species, did not exist. The widespread distribution of
images has happened only in the last few hundred years, fuelled by the proliferation of printed
matter. Until the printing press, images were primarily associated with specific highly charged
spaces such as churches, or were an integral part of hand written and drawn texts perused by an
elite literate minority. Most people, at most times, have not been immersed in a world of images.
We, however, are awash in images, and we have great difficulty in turning an awareness of that into
the recognition that our immersion among images radically alters the manner in which we think
about seeing. The art of image interpretation is something that must be learned, that is constantly
being developed within our image-saturated culture.
When you encounter an image, the first thing you do is adopt an optimal distance with respect
to it. As someone who wears glasses of three different strengths, this is regrettably familiar.
Most images you will encounter will be at a specific distance from you by design because they are
embedded in screens or pages. Those images have been scaled to suit the viewing conditions, so that
the information or encounter that the author/designer would like you to have is best supported.
You can’t watch an image in the manner that the creator intends if your nose is too close or too
far from the surface. If you observe people in an art gallery, they first square up to an image,
looking for a viewing position and distance that is optimal given the content, style, and size of the
painting. This pre-positioning has been called the establishment of a relation of “maximal grip”
by Merleau-Ponty.
Seeing in the wild is not of this nature. You are constantly moving, the world is constantly
changing, and there is no single optimal distance between you and what you are looking at. We
can even see this if we go back to the art gallery, but leave behind the well framed domestic
landscapes and still lives that present a tamed and well-ordered image, and approach instead a
canvas painted by Jackson Pollack. Now the image does not depict anything, and so there is no
single best distance to stand away from it. Viewers instead will move in and out, peering at the
colours, swirls and contours at different spatial scales. The painting demands movement on the
viewer’s part. Movement is an essential element in vision under most circumstances. Interestingly,
most visual illusions create their effect by the trick of making the viewer keep their head still, staring
at a fixed point. This seemingly innocuous instruction alters the entire business of seeing. Staring
at a single point is a strange thing to do and if done under any circumstances, will eventually lead
to a radical change in vision to the point of absolute breakdown. Most of the psychological study of
vision—from which we must distance ourselves in the present work—employs methods that likewise
fix the head of the viewer and then present images. Whatever is being constructed in such work, it

36
is not suited to explain how our eyes serve our activities in the world, or what vision, understood
as something that we share with animals, is.
Imagistic approaches to understanding vision belong squarely within scientific cognitive psychol-
ogy, and in the present work we are considering things without reliance on any of the metaphysical
presuppositions of such work. Others have balked at the highly constrained manner in which vision
is understood within such traditions and have attempted to construct alternative scientific accounts
more suited to understanding the role of the visual system in organising and facilitating our be-
haviour. The best known such school of thought is the Gibsonian school of ecological psychology,
derived from the groundbreaking work of J. J. Gibson, an applied psychologist whose alternative
take on vision was greatly shaped by the highly applied problem of trying to understand how pi-
lots land planes under suboptimal conditions, such as fog or nighttime. Gibson did not lean on the
problematic assumption that vision was an internal process, or an experience of any particular kind.
Instead, he shifted the question from “what is inside your head?” to “what is your head inside
of?” He studied, in other words, the changing relations between a seer and the layout of surfaces
around her, and tried to understand how the changes in the patterning of light and shadow on the
retina was lawfully related to the movement of the seer within a specific physical environment. As
we approach a wall so that it appears to loom, for example, the pattern of light and dark on the
retina expands, and the rate of expansion is lawfully related to the distance between the eye and
the wall, and the rate at which the wall is approached. This lawfulness inheres in the spatial layout
of surfaces and the relative position of seer and seen. Vision thus becomes relocated to a relational
space, in which an active subject moves, and thereby generates changes on the retina that bear a
reliable relation to the purposes of the seer—purposes such as avoiding collision, grasping, catching,
navigating, and so on. This reconceptualisation of the business of seeing seems more appropriate
in trying to understand vision as the kind of capacity we share with animals and that has evolved
to support our confident navigation of a challenging and somewhat unpredicatable environment.
There are many questions about seeing one might have that will not be answered within such a
framework, but some of the obvious questions that are relevant to seeing find purchase here.
A third approach to understanding seeing has been developed rather more recently that shares
a great deal with the Gibsonian approach. The theory of sensori-motor correspondences developed
by Kevin O’Regan and Alva Noë (O’Regan and Noë, 2001) also eschews the metaphor of the image,
and emphasises instead the active nature of visual exploration. Here, vision is conceived of as akin to
touch, in that seeing is an activity by which the world is probed. In dodging, advancing, receeding,
we are generating information about the world because as we move, so the visual appearance of
the world changes, and through such change the things and events in the world are made manifest
and intelligible. Seeing, on this account, is the exercise of a skill in the interpretation and confident
wielding of the information generated by process of change, actively generated by a subject, or
arising in the world. Where the Gibsonian account reframes the entire topic of vision, placing it in
the active reciprocal relation between subject and world, the sensori-motor correspondence account
pushes this a little further and casts vision as skilled activity in which subject and world both play
their part.
These three basic approaches to understanding what happens when, and as, we see co-exist
in the vast space of contemporary cognitive science. Each has been used to frame explanation
of a distinct kind, but they set out to account for very different things. We might group the
Gibsonian and sensori-motor accounts together in their common relocation of questions of vision
to the public space of observable relations between a subject and their world. They differ in detail,

37
but not in spirit. These accounts contrast strongly with image based experiential accounts, not in
any list of factual claims they make, but in their fundamental stance with respect to vision, and
even in the metaphysical assumptions underlying such a stance. Accounts generated within one
framework simply will not reduce to accounts generated within the other. On the one hand we have
accounts of active relations between subjects and environments, on the other we have accounts of
the construction of representation and the generation of experience.

A great deal of ink has been shed in debating such matters. In the present context, the persist-
ing disagreement among schools that are built upon divergent metaphysical assumptions is more
interesting than the details of any particular account, theory or experiment. Image based theories
have gone hand in hand with the development of neuroscientific and psychological accounts that
insist on individual minds that are generated by brains. This has been the dominant school of
thought in most of the 20th Century. Gibson’s accounts were developed after the Second World
War, while the sensori-motor account is a new kid on the block, introduced in the 21st Century.
From the pragmatic vantage point entertained here, there is no serious problem with having very
different theories, developed within different metaphysical frameworks, each seeking to provide a
different kind of explanation for a different kind of explanandum.

4.2.1 Extramission theories of vision

The existence of different theories of vision built upon different metaphysical assumptions is hardly
a scandal. When science turns to directly address what might in a conventional conversation be
called “subjective experience,” it seems to be clear that different background assumptions, different
metaphysical stances, perhaps even different religious and cultural embeddings among those arguing
their case, will give rise to accounts that are strictly incomparable. Similar considerations apply to
the twinned problem of accounting for behaviour, as the characterisation of behaviour is itself not
an innocent act, but is possible only through the interpretation and framing of a specific observer.
It might be worth developing a sensitivity to such variety to avoid the unfortunate situation where
one set of background assumptions is taken to trump another, without either being made explicit.
Metaphysical assumptions are always lurking in the background.

The situation is well illustrated by considering another disgraced theory. Having brushed against
astrology already, we might now consider another approach that is absolutely discredited today, but
that we might nevertheless profit from reconsidering. I refer to the extramission theory of vision,
or rather to a host of accounts, all now discarded, that built upon the assumption that vision is a
capacity founded upon the emanation of rays of some sort from the eyes (See Fig 2.). Such theories
underlie the notion that the gaze of the Gorgon or of Medusa might turn to stone the one gazed
upon. Extramission theories were unexceptional in ancient Greece, but they died out by the high
Middle Ages when intromission, or the entrance of light from the world to the viewing subject
became the standard way to think of vision.

38
 Figure 3: Extramission Theories of Vision

Extramission theories of vision.

Although extramission theories of vision, which worked on the assumption that rays em-
anated from the eyes towards the objects seen, have receded into the dustbin of discarded
theories, it is worthwhile noting that any depiction of such theories produces diagrams with
geometrical patternings that are identical to those of intromissive theories. The lines in the
above figure do not display, nor do they need, directional arrows. Source: Johann Zahn
“Oculus Artificialis Teledioptricus Sive Telescopium,” 1685.

Although scientific accounts of vision moved on, the idea of extramission retains a kind of
naı̈ve appeal. A study by Winer et al. (2002) tried to assess the understanding of adults in an
experiment in which they showed participants a picture of a face in profile that might be staring at
a green rectangle. On each trial, several descriptions of what was going on were presented, including
movement from the eye to the rectangle, from the rectangle to the eye, or various combinations
of such movements (both, first one, then the other, and vice versa). These various options were
illustrated by a line of dots moving in one direction or the other (or both). Subjects were asked
to select one of these visual presentations as best describing what was going on in vision, and a
rather high number of subjects selected variants that seemed to include extramission as well as, or
to the exclusion of, intromission. This scandalous result was replicated in several different contexts,
and the persistence of the extramissive responses seemed to be even impervious to the pedagogical
efforts of psychologists.
Let’s look at the language used to describe the results, before we ask what was actually going

39
on. The article title speaks of “Fundamentally misunderstanding visual perception.” The authors
bemoan “the abject failure of traditional education techniques to overcome this belief.” In the arti-
cle reference is repeatedly made to “flawed understanding” that “persists despite formal education
in sensation and perception.” There is talk of a “failure of traditional psychology instruction to
convey a correct understanding of vision” and the article ends with a list of possible strategies for
remediating this scandal where people seem impervious to the nuggets of truth offered by scientific
psychology.
Now let us return to a somewhat broader perspective where we acknowledge that there are
different theories of vision, with differing metaphysical assumptions, that provide different kinds of
explanations for different explananda, or as we might say in the present work, within different do-
mains of discourse. We identified two large schools: one based on a notion of hidden private interior
experience of a subject separate from their world. This approach rests on a dualist metaphysics in
which the subject’s experience is characterised as “interior” and distinct from the “exterior” world,
and it employs image metaphors as a matter of course. The other is based on examination of the
geometry of the relation obtaining between a moving subject and the array of ambient surfaces as
the subject copes with endogeneous and exogenous changes in the optic array (the changing pattern
of reflected light on the retina). It has no commitment to an interiority, because the kind of ex-
planation it gives lies in an entirely different domain that seeks to account for observable relations
between an embodied subject and world. This latter is not lacking in metaphysical commitments
either. For example, any worked account of how vision works will still rely on notions of goals,
purposes, and behaviours, all of which are only possible in a metaphysical framework that allows
such things. But the Gibsonian/sensori-motor accounts (let us group them together under heading
of “embodied accounts”) do not speak of an interiority, or of experience.
Two observations need to be made. Firstly: the geometry of the situation does all the heavy
lifting in the embodied situation. The geometry of the situation is not affected by such notions as
intromission or extramission. The optical geometry of a situation in which a subject is confronted
by a world is described using straight line projections, and lines are non-directional. They link
the nodal point of the eye to an external object, but say nothing about movement along that
line in either direction. Geometrical characterisation of the situation in which something is seen
may be used by all schools of vision, and understanding the geometry that describes the spatial
arrangement of things seems to be of great importance to all schools of vision. But a geometrical
characterisation is neutral with respect to intromission or extramission. (See Figure 3.)
The second point is perhaps less obvious. Intromission theories privilege movement into some-
thing. When we ask what that is, we find it is the eye, and that the geometrical line we might
draw terminates at the retina. Light does not go any further than that, and vision, as far as we
know, depends upon the changing pattern of illumination on the retina, but not on the direction
of motion of light. Although light is said to move in physical theory, as wave propagation or as
particle movement, the sense of movement implied by intromissive theories is one of entering into
an interior subject from an exterior world. This is a complete mischaracterisation of the way light
facilitates vision, irrespective of one’s metaphysical commitments. If we compare the speed of light
with the spatial and time scales relevant to understanding the behaviour of an organism, the di-
rection of motion is irrelevant, and it is the changes in patterning on the retina that provide (or
transmit, if one is beholden to the Cartesian view) information. When I view a chair, the source
of light is definitely not my eyes. Extramission theories are wrong. But the source of light is also
not the chair. The source lies elsewhere. It does not much matter if the source is above, below, or

40
to one side of the chair. Vision of the chair is a matter of patterning, and changes in patterning,
of reflected light on the retina, not of light entering me. For those who believe that experience is
generated by brains on the basis of the activity of nerves, the retina is properly regarded as an
exterior surface of the body, not as a theatre of perception. No theory I am familiar with, ancient
or modern, suggests that seeing happens within the eyeball itself.
As we revisit the article that laments the poor understanding and resistance to correction shown
by a large proportion of adults, we find that it is the metaphysical commitments of the authors
that are different from the public, not any matters of fact. Being squarely resident within the
world view of scientific cognitive psychology, with its commitment to interior unseen minds, the
authors have confused their inner/outer commitments with a physical picture. Those untrained in
such mysteries are, perhaps unsurprisingly, not condemned to mistake the direction of light motion
(physically determinable, but irrelevant for vision) with the passage from an external world to an
internal one (metaphysical assumption by psychologists). The direction of travel of light is simply
not relevant to the process of vision. Light does not come from the eyes. It comes from a light bulb,
from the sun, or from a similar source. But the directionality that the psychologists insist their
experimental subjects get wrong plays no role in vision. The article’s talk of “flawed understanding”
and “failure” belongs on the same fundamentalist pile as the demands of theologians of a thousand
years ago that one understand the trinity or the nature of Christ in one preferred way rather than
another.

4.3 Sensorimotor embedding and locality

As we sit in a room (in H), what are we in touch with? We conduct this exercise from an embodied
and indubitable centre, but without recourse to the devices of memory, mind and intentionality, all
of which pose mysteries we choose to avoid, for present purposes.
Let us say, for the sake of argument, that it is 3 p.m. on Thursday, September 14, 2018. That
time stamp provides enough information to pick out a point on the abstract chronometric scale
we discussed previously, as it is a determinate number of seconds from the reference point of Zero
Point, UTC. One could opine that we are, at that moment, continuous with all other occurrent
events that bear a similar time stamp. This would position our understanding of the present within
a representational framework that does not make reference to days, months, or time zones, each of
which complicates our notion of time. It fixes us within what we might think of as the unfolding
of historical time, if we bleed the notion of history of all content beyond increments in a time-
counter. We might understand ourselves as yoked in time (where time has this specific meaning) to
everything else that shares the time stamp. This approach to our present would serve to highlight
simultaneity, and it might provide some grounds for our previous observation that we care about
tragedy that we understand to be happening in or about the same moment as we hear of it, while
we are seemingly unmoved by equally significant events understood to be happening in the remote
(to us) past.
But this is a very abstract way to speak of connection. I can no more contact, feel, poke,
someone on the far side of the world at this exact moment than I can poke someone who lived
hundreds of years ago. Both are equally unreachable. This also fails to take account of our
locality, our meaning-infused reality in which some things are more present than others. Your
voice is proximate; it demands my attention. The sound of a distant passing train is heard as
remote. Beyond that there is nothing either of us have access to. The stance taken within the P-H

41
framework consciously refuses the background assumption that all people on the Globe share time,
and asks instead what is it to be in touch or contact with one another.

Clearly, one way to understand what we are in contact with and what we are continous with,
is to consider our sensorimotor embedding in the context of the room. Vision, touch, and (though
we did not explore this) other sensory modalities are one way of understanding the extent of our
shared reality, and as we have considered them, this is shared because we are continuous with our
surround, we are in touch with it, there is continuous contact from me to you to the ceiling and
floor. There is material continuity, but there is also immersion in the same optical structure arising
from the differential reflection of ambient light off surfaces. Our senses are, of course, particularly
local, and an account of our joint reality couched in terms of sensation will not suffice. You and I
will not act as if we are stranded in a sensory bubble of indeterminate but small temporal depth,
and bounded spatially by the walls of the room. We know we participate in a larger world, a world
that includes a great deal we do not have to make explicit. But identifying a timestamp does not
illuminate our connections to the larger world. We need to interrogate this situation a bit further.

Let us provide the room in which we sit with no more than minimal characteristics. Four
white walls, a closed door, no external sounds, beyond the occasional distant train whistle. This
white room is, of course, another analogy. The relation of the reals (H) to the rationals (P) is
mathematically minimal and thus capable of precise articulation. Here, when we consider how the
stories we tell and representations we use (P) relate to our shared grounded being, our white room
(H), we are also drastically simplifying in order to draw out salient characteristics of the situation
in which we converse. No real discourse starts from nothing, for we are engaged all the time in
negotiating our being. We could never free ourselves from our history and prior entanglements and
commitments. We also engage in many kinds of dialgoue, and not all of them are, or aspire to be,
purely rational. With those protective qualifications in place, now let us draw out the picture of
the room somewhat.

We previously mentioned a wine bottle on the table between us, presenting different visual
aspects to the two of us, thus ensuring that we can still meaningfully talk of individual perspectives
while still refusing the leap to hidden minds. It might seem that our indubitable present extends no
further than the enclosure, at least as long as we voluntarily refrain from making use of psychological
notions such as memory, imagination and thought. Let us add to the shared situation one thing at
a time, and ask how the reach of our present is thereby extended. In this way, we might hope to
discover those attachments that are mediated by elements other than mere sensation.

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 Figure 4: Two access points

Left: Reliquary; Right: Photograph

The reliquary contains fragments of hair asserted to be from Saint Therese of Lisieux (top)
and Saint Gemma Galgani (bottom). The photograph is reputed to be of Gemma Galgani
herself.

The first item to be added, our first access point to anything beyond the room, is a small
Catholic reliquary. To keep the discussion concrete, let us use a reliquary I have in my own
possession, which is a locket, housing three tiny hairs of each of two saints, carefully mounted and
preserved. The upper saint is Saint Therese of Lisieux, the lower is Saint Gemma Galgani. Both
women had short lives, dying in 1897 and 1903, respectively. Both were inspirational figures who
were greatly venerated in their own communities, and they were both canonised rather quickly for
a process that often takes centuries. Given the appetite among pious catholics for physical relics,
it is not unthinkable that these hairs are taken from the actual heads of these two saints. Let us
jointly consider this reliquary which now sits on the table in our room.
Hairs, and any other body part, count as first class relics in Catholic interpretations. They
have a more profound, or stronger, link to the saint than second class relics (artefacts they might
have used) or third class relics, which can be manufactured ad hoc by touching (!) an object
to a first class relic. (The taxonomy gets a little more complex, but let us not dive too deep
here.) What is the link between these hairs we can observe together in our room, and the saint,
long dead and gone? The link from our present to that remote past seems to me to be based on
material continuity. Given our previous discussion of the hidden complexities of any assertion of
“physical” reality, in which we need to distinguish between a sense of indubitablity and the rather
more abstract and austere domain of physical theory, a little care is needed in interpreting this

43
material continuity, which we must not obscure by calling it, unreflectively, “physical” continuity.
Furthermore, we must address this in a manner befitting two discussants in a room together. Once
more, the textual nature of the present work becomes a limitation. What access do we, who sit
together in H, have to the person associated with the hair fragments?
To enrich this question we might also now provide ourselves with a photograph of one of the
saints whose hairs have been so carefully preserved. The photo on the right of Figure 4 is, I believe,
of Gemma Galgani, who would go on to die, aged 23, and subsequently be beatified (1933) and
canonized (1940). The portrait is taken from a position directly in front of her face; the image is
grainy, and it is one of several widely distributed images of her. Most of the other images available
emphasise her spirituality, but this image, it seems to me, makes her appear as a very real person,
who is aware of the photographer as he or she is aware of her. As with the relic, I want to ask,
What access do we have, by means of this photograph, to the person?
The relic and the photograph are, each in their own distinctive ways, about the person Gemma
Galgani. I want to consider the different ways in which they are about Gemma, and what their
relation is to time, considered in a conventional chronometric sense. In the case of the relics, I
think we can converge on an understanding of material continuity through time. Thinking cin-
ematographically, we could fancifully imagine standing (together) beside the hairs as we rewind
time. By construction we keep the hairs still as all around us everything blurs until we arrive back,
presumably at the corpse of Gemma, and further back to the living person, shortly before she died.
This continuity makes the connection of the hairs to Gemma intelligible. (The logical, and of course
technical, problems that this encounters if we take it too literally are not overly problematic, as
what we seek is not the establishment of some odd material-personal history, but rather to satisfy
you and I that we understand how these hairs, here, extend back in time to the embodied reality
of the saint herself.)
What about the photograph? We can assume, I think, that there was an occasion in which
Gemma stood opposite a camera wielded by an unknown photographer. The ambient light array
ensured that there was a trace on film that was lawfully related to her face, just as light links us
to the walls and door of the room we are in. What happened then? The film bears a direct trace.
In a sequence of chemical processing stages, the pattern transferred from Gemma to film is copied
through processes of contact and light-enabled transfer, probably producing many prints. Each
such print can now be traced back to Gemma. But I did not have access to any such print. Rather,
I found this image on the internet, and I will assume for now that I printed it out and brought
it into our otherwise rather impoverished room. So at some point, the image was converted to a
pattern of ones and zeros stored in a computer. Where is the image at that point? If we try the
cinematographic trick of rewinding time from the image in our hands, it disappears, not once, but
several times. I can trace it back to its appearence on the printer that is connected to the computer,
but as we rewind further it seems to vanish.
To say that it is still present in the computer is to leave out something very important. It is
only present in the computer if there is also the set of skills and practices, facilities and knowhow,
that make it possible to retrieve the ones and zeros, to use them to generate a pattern either
on a screen, or sent, in another hiatus, to a printer. If human life were wiped out suddenly, I
find it problematic to claim that the image is inside the computer, or indeed that there are any
patterns of ones and zeroes there either. Such a claim, it seems, would be like claiming that a
sandy beach contains images of every Donald Duck cartoon ever drawn, simply because someone
well equipped with sand painting techniques could produce any given image. The raw material

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is not, itself, the image. When we proceed in this speculative fashion, by rewinding chronometric
time, there seem to be hiatuses that the image leaps over, or we are forced, if we wish to assert
continuity of being, to include the distributed knowledge, practices, and expertise that enables
the whole of information technology. A simple path through time does not seem possible. The
connection between photograph present to us now and Gemma as she was is not one of continuity
in space-time, where space time are thought of as dimensions that index material existence.
And so I think these two links to Gemma Galgani connect us to her in rather different ways. The
first is more direct than the second, and the nature of the link of the photograph we have in our room
to the original situation in which Gemma stood in front of a camera is rather more mysterious. The
well known philosophical question of the nature of the relation between an image and its original
has been debated at great length, and the questions that arise are curiously profound, given the
facility with which we seem to make use of images in our daily lives. As we begin to tease out the
manner in which we can reach agreement within the P-H framework, such questions must arise,
together with all the related puzzles of representation, reference and intentionality.
Interestingly, and in keeping with the side theme here of examining “irrational,” “supersti-
tious,” or outmoded beliefs, the rather peculiar categorisation employed by the Catholic church in
distinguishing among different classes of relic makes a kind of sense we could not see before. A
third class relic might be prepared by taking a little snippet of cloth, touching it to a first class
relic such as our hairs, and carefully affixing it to a devotional card or perhaps some prayer beads,
where it serves as a focus for prayer or veneration. The undoubtedly peculiar metaphysical picture
employed now makes a certain kind of sense. The third class relic is in a continous line of con-
tact with the saintly original in a way that the more familiar photograph is not. If we emphasise
continuity and contact through time, it becomes more difficult to understand the relation of the
photograph to Gemma than the relation of a third class relic to her. Those who think of Catholic
belief as characterised by irrationality and mysticism might take note that the contact afforded by
a relic is based on materiality and physical contact. It is materialist through and through. The
everyday interpretation of a photograph turns out to be the exemplar that introduces metaphysical
complexity.
I am quite sure that this discussion will not cause any athiests to convert to Catholicism, and
that is not my purpose. But if we lean on a metaphysical understanding of time as a continuum,
in which the present is but an infinitessimal in a sequence extending from the remote past (the big
bang?) to the future (the big crunch?), then the relation of my relic, even a derived third class
relic, to Gemma becomes easier to understand, less in need of explication, than the relation of the
photograph to the same person. In this example, the hairs and the photograph both serve to link
us to Gemma Galgani, but in different ways. They both lie within what Gregory Bateson called the
“patterns that connect,” but they are suspended within different patterns, that lean on different
forms of connection, dependent on different forms of mediated contact.
This minimal example brings to the fore several related topics that will need to be expanded
upon. Our ethical concern for a contemporary tragedy, but not a historical one, demonstrates how
our sense of belonging, of continuity, is conventionally grounded in a notion of time and existence
that leans unreflectively on a chronometric representation that itself is in need of clarification.
Both a photograph and a relic may speak of a past person, but the former, which is undoubtedly
the more familiar mode of being about a distant reality, appears to involve hiatuses that must be
bridged by appeal to such complex and distributed notions as skill, knowhow, and practice. These,
in turn, are not readily expressed as situated at determinate points in space and time, so that any

45
thing other than a trivial explication of the links from here to there will have to transcend any
mere materialist description.
We are here very deliberately complexifying that which is normally unproblematic. This is done
with the intent of teasing out how much of the facility with which we understand the world we
live in relies, implicitly and without due acknowledgement, on an appeal to thoroughly mysterious
processes of representation, reference and intentionality (aboutness). By resituating the debate
from a singular metaphysical picture in which such problems are assumed to be resolved by hidden
minds, so that the material world can be shorn of all qualitative aspects, to a pragmatic dialogical
situation where we jointly consider our continuity with things from an embodied, real, and quali-
tatively charged shared ground, we encounter a need to relativise our understanding of time and
space, and to pose the question of how we bridge the many hiatuses from where we stand to the
things we want to acknowledge as equally real. How, then, shall we proceed? Our resituation of
epistemological issues to a shared embodied context seems to complicate our conventional means
of employing images, texts, equations, and other representational means. How, under these con-
strained circumstances, might we work towards garnering the kind of certainty required to exploit
our insights gained in scientific inquiry? It is to the treatment of certainty and explanation that
we must now turn. But first a small pictorial interlude.

46
Chapter 5

Maya and Representation

Figure X: Four images

A skull is imaged, and the resulting image undergoes many transformations

I have a skull, a fine deer skull with two wonderful horns. It provides a tangible connection to
the once lively deer, and was picked up by me and my son on a hike, and carried back to hang on a
garden shed. It hangs there now, but a while ago, I took it down and photographed it. The image
in the camera was transported by digital means through computers and electronic backbones until
I obtained a print out on a laser printer. That image is the left most of the four images above. This
image is clearly of or about the skull we found, despite the digital hiatuses that were overcome
between the click of the shutter and the print that now hangs on my wall.
Digital encoding allows reproduction, of course, so I made another print, and this time, I
transferred the image, using an acrylic medium, onto a fresh sheet of paper. The transfer process
is analogue. It necessarily involves contact. Images made by contact have a special status among
those who choose to make the representational relationship problematic. An acheiropoieton is an
image made by direct transfer. The prototype of such an image is the alleged Veil of Veronica, said
to preserve a contact print of Christ’s face obtained as he marched to Calvary. Such images make

47
powerful sources for icon traditions, as the transmission by contact ensures that the result is not a
fanciful invention. The direct contact makes the relationship urgent and indubitable in one sense,
but transfer by contact is a perilous business. The second print shows degredation. It is also about
the skull, but it has suffered attrition in its journey.
Of course digital images suffer attrition too, despite the intellectual idea that digital copying is
perfect copying. Digital images we actually encounter frequently degrade and are altered in many
ways. The practical demands of transmission often require compression, which degrades the the
image. Watermarks are added. Copies are enhanced, altered, and introduced back into the digital
realm, so that it is not safe to assume, for any given image that we see, that the digital transmission
is a simple matter of faithful copying.
The third image arose when I photographed the second, degraded image, printed it out, and
transferred it once more by contact. You can see the mirror reversal and you can see that further
degredation has occurred. What is this third image an image of? Is it an image of the skull? Of
the second printout? Of the contact print of the second printout? It is, of course, possible to argue
for any of these interpretations, but it should be clear that the question of what a specific image,
present as a material reality in front of us, is about, is not a question that can have a determinate
answer. Each hiatus, each process of copying or transmission results in a hybrid that speaks of the
skull, but also of the context that various embodiments of the image have passed through, each
leaving its stamp on the image.
The fourth image is a picture made by subjecting the third image to the same sequence: pho-
tograph, transmit, print, transfer. Now the skull is hard to see. As the hiatuses mount up, so the
links to the situation of the original photograph become weaker. The links to the original deer are
weaker still.
In the Vedantic tradition of Indian religious philosophy, the phenomenal world is described as
maya, a veil that hides the true nature of the underlying ground of reality, or Brahman. The notion
is traditionally described with reference to one who comes across something that looks like a snake,
leading of course, to a fearful reaction. When a light is turned on, the snake turns out to be a rope,
and the fear subsides. This little pedagogical tale can be given a shallow interpretation in which it
points out that perception is fallible, but that is not the underlying intent. We can get more from
this story than such a trite result.
We have characterised H as indubitably real, for this is our starting point for consensual di-
alogue. We start with some common grounding. The shallow reading of the term “phenomenal
world” given in the story might lead one to think of perception as a private thing, and the error
as lying within the head of the character who is so misled. In our present context, we might take
“phenomenal world” to mean the unrepresented, unrepresentable ground of being from where we
converse, or H. Philosophers of a phenomenological bent might speak opaquely of the intersubjec-
tive lifeworld we inhabit, but that makes the simple profane reality of our situation seem overly
complex. The “perception” is a carving up and representation of that reality, when something is
foregrounded, interpreted, represented, and with that, the problem of interpretation arises. Any
interpretation, any determinate account of what is perceived or of what is there, is necessarily re-
moved from the unrepresentable ground of being, and the link between any such interpretation and
reality is not a fixed thing. As the light is turned on, so the original interpretation gets replaced
by a different, and more useful, one. Like Matisse and his visitor, we find ourselves moving from
one domain of discourse (snakes, women) to another (ropes, pictures), but our words never escape
the endlessly receding progression of representations. Like trying to find meaning in a dictionary,

48
we start with a word, and it leads to other words, but we never get out of the dictionary.
There is a beautiful mathematical analogue of this endless cycle of description, of interpretation
and revision of interpretation, of representation and rerepresentation. It comes from a number
sequence introduced by John Conway, who called it the audioactive sequence, as, although it
belongs in the abstract Platonic world of number theory, it is grounded in the activity of the
mathematician, who must listen to each sequence, spelling it out, and noting down the description.
Start with a single number. Start with “1”. Describe that sequence. The description is “1 1”.
Describe that. The description is “2 1”, as there are two ones in succession. Now iterate. Here are
the first few terms:

1
11
21
1211
111221
312211
13112221

The process goes on infinitely. Each string that is generated describes the previous string, and
the strings get longer and longer—infinitely long, of course. As the process unfolds, something
truly miraculous happens. If String B is derived from, and so describes, String A, and String C is
derived from, and so describes, String B, after a while, String A, which is not derived from String C,
begins to describe String C nonetheless. Of course, String A is a good deal shorter than String C,
so it only describes the first portion of C and not the whole thing, but as the strings get arbitrarily
long, the portion of C that is described by A becomes a fixed amount. About the first 10% of C
is described by A. Here, after many more iterations, are the first digits of the resulting sequences.
The generative process keeps adding to the ends of the strings, but this cycle of mutual description
has appeared out of the void, and it, too grows.

3113112221131112311332111213122112311311123112111331121113122112132113121113222...
132113213221133112132123123112111311222112132113311213211231232112311311222112...
1113122113121113222123211211131211121311121321123113213221121113122123211211131...

You can step through these to verify that B describes A (one 3, two 1s, one 3, . . . ), C describes
B (one 1, one 3, one 2, . . . ) and A, magically, describes C (three 1s, one 3, one 1, . . . ).
The sequence has many interesting properties, but in the present context it provides a peculiar
mathematical analogy for how a generative process (“describe the previous sequence”) can give rise
to this cycle of representation without ever reaching a fixed point. We can push the analogy further.
If the generative self-asserting striving of the living is interpreted as a form of self-description, we
find ourselves trapped in a world of maya, of representation, without any exit to the ground where
we stand and describe. Here, in our mathematical analogy, there is no degradation of representation
as we move from one to the other. As with our previous encounter of the rationals and the reals as
an analogy of the relation between representation, P, and ground H, we have here a mathematically
distilled and purified picture of our situation that defies reduction and finality. We describe from
H, but our descriptions are never final. Dialogical realism is not a terminus.

49
50
Chapter 6

Indubitability

6.1 Mind, matter and meaning

The P-H framework is here developed as a way of approaching Dialogical Realism, an epistemo-
logical stance suited to the construction of Joint Actionable Consensus. It is motivated by the
recognition that the sciences, as they have developed since the early 17th Century, have taken
out a loan on a vague and inchoate notion of mind and meaning, and that the exploitation of the
fruits of scientific inquiry by specific groups for their specific purposes and in alignment with their
collective values depends upon the manner in which that loan is paid back.
In order to illustrate the shift proposed within this framework, it might help to sketch a cari-
cature of how matter, mind, and meaning parted company in the innovations of the 17th Century,
with special reference to the central figures of René Descartes and Isaac Newton. As with the way
in which we approached Greek philosophy, the motivation here is not accurate historical recon-
struction of the views of these individuals, but to use them as salient landmarks in intellectual
history, so that we might better articulate how the present framework seeks to distinguish itself
from established discursive practices.
To Descartes, we apportion responsibility for conjuring up the indubitable domain of individual
mind, unobservable, private, and separable from the world in which the person acts. This domain
has become known as the cogito, from the hackneyed phrase cogito, ergo sum, or “I think, therefore
I am.” Respectable scientists do not, today, study something called the cogito of course, because
the manner in which it was constructed and elaborated upon by Descartes had been to nobody’s
liking. In order to shore up the idea that the domain of the individual mind was distinct from
the domain of the world in which a person operated, it was necessary to posit two different kinds
of substance, res extensa for the physical stuff that takes up space—we might say the material
world—and res cogitans for the entirely distinct domain of thoughts, perceptions, ideas, and the
like.
Descartes has become something of a whipping boy for the contemporary psychological and
cognitive sciences. The term “dualism” or, in a more detailed discursive context, “substance du-
alism,” is used as a pejorative term to lambast a defunct metaphysical picture in which the two
domains of mind and matter interact through the mediation of the pineal gland. Truth be told,
Descartes undoubted genius and expertise did not stretch to anatomy. He was mistaken about
both the location and nature of the pineal gland, which he described as the part of the brain “in
which the common sense is said to be” (6th Meditation). No matter where one lies with respect

51
to the controversies of the present day, it is a safe move to point to a vast chasm between one’s
own position and Cartesian dualism, and it is a common rhetorical device to attribute lingering
Cartesian tendencies to one’s opponent.
All of this is very regrettable. Descartes was perhaps the clearest of the philosphers in the
Western canon, and although he too suffers from the shortcomings of the isolated thinking man,
he does so with his own commitments out in the open, and he develops a picture which, while
unpalatable to scientists and experts, nonetheless informs our common sense understanding of our
own being in the world. By attacking his metaphysics, we do not thereby free ourselves from the
conundrums raised and spelled out in the clearest terms by him. If we speak of the reality of
something called “the external world,” we are leaning upon his discredited division of stuff into two
domains. Our everyday language of mind, in which I assume a psychological continuity associated
with my person, complete with memories, and current perceptions of the world to which I pay ever
shifting attention, all of this language is grounded in the assumed split between experience and
matter, or the mental and physical realms. The puzzles raised by Descartes are genuine puzzles,
and a rejection of the technical notion of substance dualism does not magically make them go away.
Another common sin that is inappropriately attributed to Descartes is his intertwining of phi-
losophy (primarily as it concerns matters of existence and knowledge, and the relation of lived
existence to the body) and theology. His famous meditations not only introduce the mind as a
distinguished domain, they also provide some rather poor arguments designed to demonstrate the
indubitable existence of God. This does not sit well in a contemporary scientific context, and stu-
dents who meet it for the first time are apt to consider the philosopher as something of a Catholic
magic man, willing to suspend his critical faculties in deference to a presumed intolerant religious
orthodoxy associated with superstition and irrational belief. This is such a poor characterisation
of Descartes and his achivements that it barely merits dismissal, but in order to quickly reject it,
it is necessary to understand something of the intellectual and political landscape of the time, and
the business that Descartes, the scientist and mathematician, was engaged in.
It is undoubtedly true that the church authorities of 17th Century France were liable to be
intolerant of any views that threatened their power and privilege. To argue for a heretical position
was to take one’s life in one’s hands, and it is very much the case that prominent dissent might
be punished severely, up to and including being burnt alive. The stakes were high, and athiesm
was, in a sense we might today find hard to grasp, unthinkable. But this social background serves
to motivate Descartes’ agenda, which was to carve out a space for the application of reason and
its use in scientific inquiry, despite the strictures of the religious authorities. Far from being
anti-scientific, Descartes was constructing bullet-proof arguments that would allow the conduct of
empirical science, grounded in observation and directed by reason, and applied to a wide range of
potential domains of application. Rational scientific inquiry could only be safely pursued after such
a ground clearing exercise and the construction of protective arguments that demonstrated clearly
how such inquiry was independent of the domain over which the church asserted authority. As with
anatomy, theology is probably not Descartes’ strong suit, but his genius lay precisely in extending
the range over which science and mathematics might hold sway, undisturbed by religious dogma
and intervention.
The need to provide this unassailable foundation for empirical and rational inquiry lies behind
the apparent radical scepticism adopted by Descartes as he works towards his infamous conclusion
that he exists. Radical scepticism, which raises the question of how one might know anything at
all for certain, was not an innovation. It is a venerable philosophical stance that long predates

52
Descartes, e.g. in the writing of the second Century philosopher Sextus Empiricus. But where
others had adopted scepticism as a defensible stance in its own right, for Descartes it is just a
ruse that provides a path to his goal, the assertion that he cannot doubt his own existence as a
thinking thing, or as he exclaims in the second meditation, “Je suis! J’exist!” This is the one
thing he will not give up, and his insistence still echoes powerfully, that though he might be ever
so mistaken and confused, he cannot find a way to doubt that even a confused thinking being
is still a thinking being, and that as he so reflects, so he must exist. For him, there are only a
few sources of knowledge. There is the evidence of the senses, which he knows to be fallible, and
there is the activity of reasoning, which operates over the realm of ideas within the mind. Indeed,
the now common notion that one has ideas in the mind as elementary constituents to be used in
reasoning is, itself, a Cartesian innovation. This bifurcated epistemology of sense and reason has
become baked into scientific inquiry, where the fallibility of the senses stands along with the notion
of essentially imprecise measurement, interpreted by reason in constructing the ediface of rationally
grounded scientific knowledge.

One does not get away from Descartes easily. Another manner in which his framing of the central
questions of metaphysics and epistemology are still with us is evident in the everyday association
of the experiencing personal subject with the brain and its doings. I do not wish here to engage in
a sophisticated manner with contemporary cognitive neuroscience. We may return to that topic in
later writing. I wish rather to point to the everyday common sense understanding that one might
refer to the brain when one wants to point to the source of the personal, the experiential, and the
intentional. This is the sense in which we contrast brain with heart, or say that one needs to give
one’s brain a rest, or when we atttribute intelligence of any sort to the brain. This everyday use
of the term brain is barely different, if at all, from the role of the pineal gland in Descartes’ vision
of dual realms of substance. To his eternal shame, it is the sense also in which Francis Crick, an
otherwise fine scientist, muddied the water by proclaiming in his astounding hypothesis “You are
your brain,” a misleading assertion entirely unworthy of a Nobel prize winning scientist. It is worth
remembering sometimes that in referring to the brain, we are discussing a bodily organ, made of
meat and fatty tissue, and not a rational soul or spark of the divine.

It was only shortly after Descartes’ that Isaac Newton developed his grand mechanical cosmol-
ogy. The previous centuries had seen developments in the measurement of time and space that
were necessary to conceive of a mechanical universe in which motion arose through collision among
massive bodies. The concept necessary to make this work was “force,” introduced here, not as a
novel kind of element, but as a name for the relation obtaining between massive bodies interacting
through collisions under idealised circumstances. The mechanical view had been coming for a long
time. Descartes too understood the goings on of the natural world to be essentially mechanical,
though his view of the domain of mechanism was much broader and fuzzier than that provided by
Newton.

This is the point in intellectual history at which meaning is banished from the world and
consigned to the hidden unobservable domain of the interpreting mind. It is only against this
rigorously constructed separation of all qualitative, experiential, phenomenal and intentional reality
from measurable existents that “matter” could be developed as an essentially meaningless brute
stuff. Physics could now progress apace, broadening the scope of its inquiry as measurement became
more refined and ingeneous. Newtonian physics is no longer the state of the art, but the separation
of meaning from matter has never been undone, and the loan taken out on mind is outstanding.

53
6.2 Hinge propositions and dialogue
Descartes pushed doubt to its limit (or at least that is the structure of his argument), arriving at
the indubitable proposition “I am! I exist!” Despite repudiating his metaphysics, and objecting
to many of the puzzles and paradoxes that result from assenting to his form of argumentation,
many contemporary scientists and non-scientists alike might find it implausible to reject this one
assertion. This, it often seems, is not really up for doubts, though the elaboration of this basic
insight may proceed in diverse and contested ways. This is a form of proposition (a statement that
we interpret as either true or false) that Wittgenstein described in On Certainty as a hinge, upon
which the discourse moves, but itself not movable.
In the present context we are not drawn to agree or disagree with Descartes’ proposition,
but instead to relocate it to the situated discourse among two embodied persons. Now a hinge
proposition must become something that we collectively cannot doubt. Such hinge propositions are
resistent to doubt because to doubt them would be to flaunt common sense, now no longer confined
to the pineal gland or the brain, but to the situation of common discourse. Having moved to the
collective situation, of course, we must alter the form of Descartes’ hinge. Together, we can no
longer assert an individuated existence (“I”), but the indubitable reality of our collective situation.
It is the “this” that preceeds all differentiation, description, and discrimination that is indubitable.
To fail to partake of a common grounding would be to refuse rational discourse altogether, to be
mad and thus beyond the bounds of reason.
But we must make one more alteration to Descartes’ phrase. We admit no indubitable “I” for
we stand together. But the verb “to exist” is also a problem now, as we have chosen to distinguish
between matters of reality, grounded in H, and matters of existence, which pertains to elements
in the domain of discourse. Returning to our Figure 2 (“The fusing of experience”), we see that
indeed “I” can feature just fine as an element in a domain of discourse, that is, as a posit that
features in a story or account. This is what the elements P and Q are there for. They may be
asserted to exist and to have properties, just as we can talk of any other individuated entity.
And so our hinge proposition is rather mute. We have gone from “I exist!” to the unarticulated
“this” as the indubitable basis that preceeds all differentiation and discussion. The unarticulated
“this” is not a proper proposition, but a stance, or background, or horizon. Different philosophical
traditions have chosen to indicate the ineffable in various ways, albeit without the present reframing
move of considering a situation of joint face-to-face dialogue. Nevertheless, our reliance on this
minimal common ground is of a kind with Descartes’ willful insistence on his own existence. And
as with him, so we too want to use this to ground reason, though our theatre of logic and reason is
not the mind, but the mutually conducted dialogue. The unarticulated “this” will not get the ball
rolling. For that, one or other of us will have to begin the discourse. But we do share our situation,
we are in contact with one another and with a common world. As Dreyfus and Taylor (2015) put
it: “it is in virtue of this contact with a common world that we always have something to say to
each other, something to point to in disputes about reality.” The engine of our discussion then is
our awareness of the need to calibrate and extend our respective understanding through dialogue.
This task we necessarily share. Our dialogue is not the construction of a pristine representation
of a truth, but the messier business of satisfying our need to co-exist in a shared world. Reason
and logic will play their role in this process, but the dialogue proceeds, can only proceed, with
the ongoing consent of the participants. It is their expectations that must be satisfied, not some
abstract arbiter of truth.
Catarina Duthil-Novaes (2015) has recently pointed out that our understanding of what logic

54
is underwent a profound shift around the 16th and 17th Century. In classical Greece, logic was
developed in the familiar Aristotelian form, in which premises are posited that lead of necessity
to a conclusion. However the forum in which that was done was public debate, and the criterion
by which the debate was ajudicated was its capacity to satisfy those present. It is only with the
shift to a mechanistic scientific cosmology that the characterisation arose of logic as proper to the
domain of thought within individual minds. From ancient Greece to the 16th or 17th Century, logic
was a branch of rhetoric, and although logical conclusions were viewed as normative, they were
normative for the public debate and its conclusions, not for an internal calculus that tried to arrive
at truth. The certitude arrived at in logical discourse was a collective certitude, not a private and
individual one.
Propositions belong, of course, within a domain of discourse. They use language to represent
states of affairs in the world, and such representations must be interpreted by specific discussants.
The re-location of logic to the public space of dialogue allows us to recognise that debate within
a given domain may reach a final state, if it becomes apparent to all who partake in the debate
that no further contestation is required. Such finality has a familiar feel to it. If we are collectively
searching for something, and we find it, then our joint activity stops. If we debate whether so-and-
so is alive or dead, and she then walks into the room, the debate is over. As we develop the notion
of a domain of discourse, we will recognise that dialogue need not be prolonged forever. A domain
of discourse exists as long as there is something to debate, contest, or just discuss. With certainty,
debate stops.
If dialogical realism is not a terminus, there may, nevertheless, be points along the way, resting
stations, at which doubt is erased or contestation abandoned within a given the context of a given
discussion, or within a specific domain of discourse. As we stand together, our shared immersion in
the world is unspoken; but of course as soon as any aspect of it is foregrounded, that characterisation
may turn out to be misleading or plain wrong to any given discussant. The indubitability at stake
is thus not a set of facts or propositions, nor is it well characterised as a belief. It is more like
a resting place, a place where dialogue has come to an end because all concerned are satisfied.
It obtains between us, and doubt has receded. If not a terminus, then the absence of doubt is,
perhaps, more like a bus stop along the way.

6.3 The satisfying certitude of mathematical demonstration

Perhaps the clearest example of the cessation of dialogue because of the satisfaction of all discussants
arises in the activity of providing mathematical proof. Until a proof is offered, we have a proposition
put forward that stands in need of justification, and so the business of working towards that
justification is inherently dialogical. The arguments of the proof must satisfy a community of
experts, and a proof will have been offered precisely then when those experts are satisfied. There are
many kinds of mathematical proof, not all of them equally compelling or satisfying. Sometimes, the
domain in question is characterised by a small set of axioms, expressed in some symbolic language,
along with rules for transforming such expressions to generate new ones. A proof then often begins
with a target expression, to be derived from the axioms by a sequence of transformations. If
the symbolic language is well defined, the rules are unambiguous, and the proof finite, then a
proof constructed in this fashion will garner assent from those who are familiar with the domain.
Although the manner in which mathematics is taught usually lacks this high degree of rigour, many
of the proofs learned laboriously in school are of this nature. It is not usually mentioned in the

55
classroom that this process can be carried out without any reference to the notions of “true” and
“false,” and without any necessary interpretation of the symbols used as referring to the stuff of
the world at all.
Proof by induction is a familiar technique in which a result is firstly obtained for one case, and it
is then shown that if it can be obtained for one case, then it must apply likewise to a successive case,
leading to the conclusion that it must apply to all cases in an ordered sequence (e.g. a sequence
such as the natural numbers). This is a common way of arriving at a satisfactory conclusion in
certain sub-domains of mathematics. The steps are formal, and require little more than that the
cases to whom the proof applies be ordered.
Proof by contradiction is a slightly more opaque form of proof that does not always satisfy. To
obtain proof by contradiction, we begin with a proposition to be proved. We assume its opposite,
and show then that that assumption leads to a logical impasse. The proof relies on the law of the
excluded middle, that is, it works only if it is generally agreed that either the original proposition
or its opposite must garner assent. It thus leans upon a logic of propositions and their relation to
states of affairs that is rather different from the simplest case of formal derivation from axioms.
There are other forms of proof too. Indeed, there does not exist a finite catalogue of types of
proof. Proof is what you can get away with. One form of proof that seems to occupy a strange
position is proof by exhaustive enumeration. This is the manner in which the four colour theorem
is generally thought to have been proved. The four colour theorem states that no more than four
colours are required to colour areas in a planar map of arbitrary complexity, such that the same
colour does not occur on both sides of any border. One route to proving this is to enumerate a
very long list of possible cases, and to show that the general result is true for each case. This has
been achieved using computers to do the heavy work, and although this has resulted in widespread
acceptance of the result, the method of proof lacks that sense of solidity, of indubitability, that most
mathematical proofs provide. Perhaps the programmer made an error. Perhaps the machine was
misbehaving. The proof is in a messy entanglement with the affairs of the world, which convention
would have it is a most unmathematical state to be in.
Empirical science is often contrasted with the domain of mathematics. In the former, nothing
can be known for absolute certainty, as future observation may always lead to a revision or correction
of beliefs previously held to be unassailable. In the latter, certainty is reached, but at the significant
cost of divorcing the domain of mathematics from the domain of empirical facts. Mathematics
generates certainty, but that certainty is not clearly about anything at all in the world. If we
insist that mathematics has provided us with insight about reality, we have once more taken the
interpretive leap from a representation (the symbols and equations of mathematics, in P) to reality
in H. We will take such leaps. We cannot do otherwise. But we can recognise what we are about
as we do so, at least sometimes.
We met two ways of considering what we mean when we speak of “physical reality.” One is the
reassuring everyday familiarity of solid objects indubitably present to us, while the other referred
to the products of physical science, whether that be Newtonian mechanics, Einsteinian relativity,
string theory, or the like. We have here another way of coming at the notion of physics, which, of all
the sciences, bears the strongest relation to the domain of mathematics. Mathematics, it has been
said, is the natural language of physics. Yet physics, if it is not to be mere mathematics, retains its
hold on reality through the use of measurement. Physics thus appears as the domain in which the
craft of measurement has been honed to perfection, through the development of instruments and
techniques that are maximally consistent, unambiguous, reproducible, and uncontested. The strong

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link between physics and mathematics depends critically on all of these factors, and minimises the
reliance on extra-empirical theory, postulation, or linguistic elaboration to which all other sciences
are condemned. Thus in the construction of the notion of a physical domain, there has been a
reliance throughout on the generation of consensus among discussants who need to be satisfied
through dialogue. In particular, in order for physics, or any empirical science, to proceed, those
who take part must agree on what a measurement is. A measurement must provide some index
and that index must be interpreted. In interpreting any index, whether it is the position of a
needle on a meter, or a count of things observed, or a mark placed by an experimental subject
on a questionnaire, there is already a hiatus to be bridged from the index that we can point to
in H, to its interpretation as a record of something elaborated within a domain of discourse, P.
Physics is distinguished by the widespread agreement among practitioners about what counts as
a measurement and how that is to be interpreted within theory. Such agreement is not possible,
e.g. in the social or psychological sciences. Although this way of viewing physics may make it seem
more craft than science, it is one reason why we accord physical theory such a distinguished place
in the characterisation of reality as existent and non-negotiable. It also helps to account for the
ability of physics projects to attract funding that is several orders of magnitude larger than any
experimental work in the “softer” domains.

6.4 Dialoging and formalisation

There has been no attempt so far to formalise, or rigidly define, the notion of a domain of discourse,
though this phrase has been doing a lot of work in developing the P-H framework. With good
reason. The activity of seeking sufficient certainty among discussants to allow joint action is by
no means restricted to the kind of scientific debate typically associated with the establishment of
matters of fact. A very similar kind of activity goes on in the rather different domain of law, where
the nature of debate, the kind of arguments that can be made, and the curated archive of existing
judgements ensure that legal dialogue has its own very distinct character. Facts in law are not the
same thing as facts established within any specific scientific domain, though they may range over the
same events and particulars in the world. And beyond science and law, most debates are informal,
ad hoc, and need not aspire to establishing certainty, but rather reach for resolution of some sort,
enough to proceed. Even scientists and philosophers sometimes find themselves discussing menu
choices, office politics, and the probability of rain in the afternoon.
We also find that any given dialogue we might describe is nested within other discussions
and negotiations, among continually varying participants, with different levels of formality. Some
debates are very short lived and goal oriented. The goal, once reached, eliminates the need for
further exchange. But most are more radically open ended and enduring. Some persist over
millenia.
We participate in debate, but we frequently act as if that process, by which we come to adopt
a common view of things, were distinct from the unfolding of the phenomena we talk about. We
act, conventionally, as if description were separable from participation. But if we try instead to
understand how debate is part and parcel of the manner in which our incompletely shared reality
is carefully calibrated and extended, we might be encouraged to pay attention to the opening up
of new domains of discourse, populated temporarily by the things and processes we talk about,
and to recognise that in this activity, the things and processes we talk about become more defined,
and become part of the furniture of our shared world. Not unlike the establishment of precedent

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in law, dialogue leaves traces, and the certainty attained here today will potentially influence new
debates we partake in tomorrow. That which was once contested may feature henceforth as part
of the assumed invisible background we share as our concerns turn elsewhere.
We have noted at several points that naming, as an act, is a means of opening up a domain of
discourse, or of increasing the stock of entities referenced in an ongoing debate. The initial calling
of a name can be seen as building a bridge or casting an anchor from H to a domain of discourse.
Once named, debate can clarify, refine, alter, extend, contract the sense of the named entity. Its
existence can be affirmed or disputed. Prior to naming, it neither does, nor does not exist, in
the sense used here. The initial act of naming summons an entity into the scope of a domain of
discourse, but subsequent calling of the name is not consequential in the same manner.
One of the first elaborations of this approach to discourse is found in the work from the 1930’s
of Ludwig Fleck. In his seminal book “The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact,” Fleck
draws out the notion of a community of thinking (Denkkollektiv ) within which concepts come to
have determinate meaning through dialogue. His treatment of the manner in which a group of
discussants collectively bring a concept into being through dialogue, including misunderstandings,
disagreements, and revisions, has become known as the earliest worked account of the social con-
struction of knowledge, a term that has both offended and encouraged practitioners of science ever
since.
We can directly see how naming can summon entities into being, and can lead to the creation of
very real entities in our shared reality. A “refugee crisis” exists only when the term has been coined
and found widespread use, irrespective of what individual people are doing on the ground. For
example, the 2015 European Refugee Crisis has its own Wikipedia page, and the postulate of such
a crisis has found widespread acceptance. Now discussions of European and Peri-European social
affairs will refer in a relatively unproblematic sense to this entity. Prior to being named, no such
reference was possible. After naming, matters of existence arise, and are contested, within domains
of discourse. Discussion of the 30 years war was possible only after it had been terminated in the
1648 Peace of Westphalia, and thereby simultaneously summoned into existence and consigned to
the past tense. Had Kafka not written his story, it would make no sense to discuss the existence or
non-existence of Odradek. In this sense, to name is to summon into potential existence.
But just because something acquires a name, we do not want to grant it any necessary real-
ity. Leaving aside all consideration of fictional domains, entities are named all the time that do
not garner acceptance. One might legitimately critique the very notion of a refugee crisis, as to
accept the entitiy as either existing or not existing would be to buy into a host of framing as-
sumptions about who is and is not a refugee, what is and is not a crisis, and how we ought to
talk about contemporary population movements. One might, in other words, withold consent from
one’s participation in any such debate, and thereby refuse this specific means of constructing a
representation. This tends not to happen in physics, not because physics has some kind of magical
connection to Truth, but because physics chooses to ground its debate in the kind of measurement
that has little difficulty in garnering assent. The link from the joint observation of the movement
of a needle on a dial, to the role played by the corresponding measurement as a quantity in a
mathematical equation, is relatively simple when the measurement is based on those quantities we
are used to calling “physical.” As the physical sciences change, of course, the set of measurement
practices and their modes of interpretation will themselves evolve, so that which was accepted or
spurned yesterday may have a different status today.
Let us imagine a community of discussants for whom there is no question but that angels exist.

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Most of us do not belong to such a community of course, and angels do not feature prominently
in scientific discourse for this reason. However if such a community were to arise for whom angels
were part of the indubitable furniture of the cosmos, then they might well come up with techniques
for measuring the attributes of those angels. This would be possible precisely when and if the link
between an act of measurement and its interpretation as being about angels were uncontested within
that group. Under those circumstances, all you need to measure angels is angel-measuring devices.
Those of us who do not subscribe to that group might withhold our assent to the entire process,
of course, but that would not mean that the activity of the angel-measuring folk was unscientific.
For this very reason, caution is warranted when scientific facts are asserted to people who are not
part of the community that gave rise to those facts.
A real life example of this important limitation on the reach of scientific pronouncements arose
recently in political debate within the US, where a prominent politician, Elizabeth Warren, was
pressured into defending her claim, made in a university administrative context, that she had Native
American ancestry. Politics is a vicious game, and this historical entanglement that arose in self-
description within that context became a topic of debate and ridicule by the aggressive discourse
of the ruling party (to whom, it is safe to say, the basic tenets of rational debate were entirely
foreign). Called upon to back up or retract a claim of ancestry, Warren had a DNA text conducted
that demonstrated a small percentage of genetic material most likely arising from a remote ancestor
of Cherokee stock. The response of the Cherokee tribe was important. It refused to acknowledge
the relevance of genetic testing in determining tribal membership. The framework within which
tribal membership was constructed was, of course, the proper province of the tribe, and not of
geneticists. The vagaries of intermarriage and the porousness of any social grouping indeed made
DNA a particularly bad choice for proffering as data in this debate, and starkly illustrates the finite
nature of a domain of discourse.
The manner in which this incident was discussed sought unsuccessfully to apportion the issue
of identity to one or other of the realms of Nature or Culture. These can be seen as two attempts
to identify domains of discourse in the hope that issues that arise within one can be protected from
the messy entanglements of the other, and when things are laid out like that, the fate of science
is usually to pronounce with authority within one domain (Nature), and to stay out of the other
(Culture), as if facts were like bats that roosted in one cave but not the other, and, frustratingly, as
if the question of tribal membership were a mere matter of opinion. To extend the above argument,
in this instance, it is the scientists and the DNA test that act as angel measuring squads, for
whom matters of identity simply must be about genetic makeup. The Cherokee insistance that
the question of tribal identity is being mismanaged here seems entirely justified. All truth is being
subsumed under the felicity conditions and modes of verification proper to genetic testing, and in
this manner, the truth of how tribal identity is established is negated.
But how might we work towards a more nuanced and domain appropriate form of dialogue? As
we have laid it out here, we have allowed only one move in debate: that of indubitable demonstration
to the satisfaction of those taking part. If we wish to encourage the use of scientific reasoning
within domains of discourse, but we also wish to recognise the finitude of all such domains and
their associated inherent systems of value, a considerable change is needed to the way we conceive of
debate, evidence, and authority. In the next chapter, I want to suggest that there is much to learn
from the manner in which disagreement has been managed among the various schools of Indian
philosophy, allowing constructive interaction and principled disagreement, over milennia. Here, I
think, we might see our way towards integrating scientific reasoning in many discourses with rather

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different connections to daily life, to authority, and to formality.

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Chapter 7

Pramanas and Schools of Indian

Philosophy

I previously found it useful to be able to refer to the remote figures of Heraclitus and Parmenides
in drawing out the basic P-H framework. In so doing, I was relying on some rather superficial
characteristics of their respective work, and I was certainly not trying to engage directly with Pre-
Socratic thought or the meaning of their respective work in context. Rather, I was taking some
very well known polar positions that the two philosophers are vaguely associated with, and using
the philosophers as landmarks, to help in pointing now at the flux of experience in the moment
(H), and now at the crystalline certainty of things and events laid out as unchangable existants
(P). The distinction between the embodied indubitable ground of being and the representational
domains we use to talk about and understand them is of immediate and urgent relevance to us.
That broad-brush approach will now be pursued with a vengeance in a rather different domain,
that of classical Indian philosophy. Here, the territory is even less familiar to me, and I am not
a reliable guide, but I do not aspire to being one. Instead, I will draw out certain well-known
characteristics of the manner in which the several schools of Indian philosophy have learned to
disagree, and to each pursue matters appropriate to their own specific concerns, without thereby
denigrating the insights and utility of the other schools. It is thus not so much the content of
any given debate that is of interest here, as the manner in which that debate is curated, and the
kind of argumentation that is acceptable. As we saw in the regrettable case of DNA and Native
American identity, we have much to learn about how to handle different domains of discourse, each
with their own values, commitments, and each constructed for specific groups. Indian philosophy
has much to offer here, and even the relatively shallow treatment to be provided here will probably
be unfamiliar territory for many European or Anglo-American readers.
A first point to make is that Indian philosophy has a very different history from that derived
from the Greeks. In Europe, Greek philsophical practices mingled with theological debates until
quite recently, and since the middle of the 19th Century, science and religion have parted ways.
In India, this distinction does not make much sense, as neither philosophy nor religion mean quite
the same thing in an Indian context. We will try to steer clear of anything that might smack of
theology as we proceed, but it is important to remember that we are looking now into practices,
theory and debate that have a history as long or longer as that of the West, but in which many
familiar distinctions appear in different guises. We will look at the manner in which individual
schools have curated knowledge claims and dealt with the resolution of contentious issues through

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debate, but the individual schools are not always trying to accomplish the same things. The Western
development that gave rise to scientific modernity can be seen as trying to distinguish between true
and false statements about the world, and separating that business cleanly from the use of those
statements in guiding action. This distinction, familiar from the fact/value distinction, has emerged
as a problem in Western discourse, and there is something to be learned in the debates in India
in which different perspectives associated with individual schools of thought have each pursued
somewhat different agendas, often mixing metaphysics, epistemology, soteriology, and tradition in
ways quite different from the Western approach. It is this plurality that we will approach, to ask
whether it might be relevant to the questions raised so far.

7.1 Orthodox and unorthodox schools

By conventional reckoning, Indian religious philosophy has been organised into six orthodox schools,
and several non-orthodox ones. Each school has its own particular perspective, or darśana, which
may be brought to bear on appropriate questions. Some, such as the Vedantic schools, are concerned
with questions we would immediately recognise as philosophical or metaphysical, others concern
themselves rather with soteriology, or providing guidance in the conduct of life. The Nyaya school
is concerned with logical debate in a manner not unfamiliar to the tradition of analytic philosophy,
while the Yoga school emphasises the importance of specific practices that are considered important
in the spiritual development of the individual. We will not try to trace the development of these
schools from diverse traditions across India, with differing reliance on scriptural foundation in the
Vedas, but we will recognise that the six orthodox schools have perservered over more than a
thousand years as recognisably distinct, each characterised by its own concerns, and, critically,
each relying on a more or less explicit set of argument types that may be adduced in support of
knowledge claims. This feature of the protracted debate is what may be usefully considered as we
rethink scientific epistemology, as it turns out, many of the argument types recognised, discussed,
and disciplined within Indian debate are very familiar to scientific argumentation as well. Their
respective merits have been carefully considered as they have been turned to the diverse purposes
of the individual schools.
In the present context, we have deliberately abandoned some of the principal scaffolds employed
in scientific debate. In particular, we have refused to consign matters of meaning to unseen indi-
vidual minds, in the manner familiar since the onset of scientific modernity. This deliberate choice
raises challenges. In particular, we can rely on no account that posits a psychological entity as a
real thing. As we debate in H, such a posit might be fine to try to account for the behaviour or
reports of someone not present, but as we converse, we are not distinct, and we will have to find
out how to construct meaning together. If we had minds at our disposal, we know how knowledge
is contructed thereafter: sense data are interpreted through processes of perception after which
they can function as ideas all mixed up with the engine of reason to deliver truths. None of this is
available to us.
The Indian schools never underwent the separation of meaning from the world that the West
invented and then installed in all their epistemic practices. Knowledge has thus had to be constantly
justified in debate, renewed in commentaries upon commentaries, and continuously brought forth in
the earnest application of devoted, scholarly and curious individuals who learn within well defined
and carefully curated traditions. The long tradition of gurus in ashrams attracting and instructing
acolytes is not entirely unlike the university system, with its graduate schools, PhD supervisors,

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and reputation burnishing. But unlike that system, knowledge is not assumed to be captured by
writing it down in journal articles. Knowledge is honed in debate, demonstrated in the thrust of
arguing, and agreement is reached in public, in a manner well aligned with our purposes in pursuing
the ramifications of a P-H framing of debate.
There are several kinds of knowledge source that may be adduced in such argument. They
are collectively known as pramanas. The six orthodox, and several non-orthodox schools, differ in
which pramanas they accept in argument, but the pramanas are typically drawn from the same set
of about seven different types. Schools differ in which pramanas they admit, not only because of
the evidentiary weight associated with arguments of one kind or another (this tends to be the sole
criterion in judging the merits of evidence based argument in the West), but because the purposes
of the schools are rather different. Insight, knowledge, and guides to conduct are all intermingled
here, so that what for one school is a burning concern, may appear irrelevant for another. It is
worth recalling that the roots of philosophy in the West also lay in the desire to provide useful
insight that might guide conduct, lead towards the good life, and allow a person to deal with the
complexities and misfortunes of life. Such concerns are perennial.
As we step through seven pramanas, we will not analyse how they have featured in the rich
history of Indian thought, but rather, we will consider each as it might figure in our hypothetical
debate in a white room as you and I seek to arrive at sufficient common ground to allow joint
actionable consensus. This is thus an exercise in misappropriation, but structural misappropriation,
rather than misappropriation of content, as the distinctions drawn in distinguishing among the
pramanas are relevant distinctions in a scientific context too. Because these distinctions are finding
elaboration now within the P-H framework, there will be a degree of repurposing, and many debates
about the perils of translation will thus be moot. We are not looking to uncover any underlying
essence here; we are trying to construct tools that may serve us, as they have served others in other
contexts.

7.1.1 P1: Pratyakasha, or indubitability

We have already devoted a chapter to the notion of indubitability. The first pramana, and the only
one on which all the schools are agreed, is known as pratyaksha, and this is usually translated as
direct observation or perception. In our context, this might usefully be interpreted as indubitability
of the kind previously discussed, where scepticism is foiled, epistemic divergence is minimised, and
participants are satisfied. The debate has come to an end because the answer is obvious. Certainty,
to those who are present, is grounded in the absence of intelligible doubt. When this pramana
is discussed, the term “perception” is unfortunate, as when we use this in a Western context, we
typically mean something hidden, private and individual. The sense in which it is meant, and the
reason it garners so much assent across all the schools, is that of something that cannot be denied,
and this transfers to the situation of joint debate in the white room rather well.
Historically, the Carvaka school admitted only this pramana. The Carvaka school no longer
exists as a going concern. It supported a kind of strongly athetistic materialism that denied much
of the spirituality that infuses many of the more persistent schools. For that reason, it is viewed
as nastika or non-orthodox.

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7.1.2 P2: Anumana, or inference
Reasoning is at the heart of the production of knowledge. Whether we adopt a Cartesian perspective
and view reasoning as a form of derivation of ideas from ideas in the hidden recesses of mind, or
whether we debate vocally in public, arguing from premises to conclusions, we cannot really imagine
constructive debate that convinces or binds participants without the free use of reason. Reason
involves drawing inferences from prior propositions, of course, and they must come from somewhere,
so perhaps the relative ordering of pratyaksha and anumana might make sense from our point of
view too. Sometimes, we don’t even reason. If a tiger bursts into the room, we flee first, confident
in our mode of action. Later, we can introduce debate and use reason to work out whether we did
the right thing or not.
Buddhism is another non-orthodox school, this time largely due to its historical antipathy to
the entrenched caste divisions of vedic society. From a philosophical point of view, most forms
of Buddhism are quite close to some of the Vedantic schools of Hindu philosophy. Buddhism has
historically only recognised P1 and P2 (I will use numbers from here, as the Sanskrit and Pali
names are undoubtedly somewhat unfamiliar) as valid forms of reasoning, although some have
sought ways to allow the testimony of scripture to be used in argument. Among the six orthodox
schools, Vaisheshika, which is primarily concerned with an atomistic theory of materiality, likewise
admits only these two pramanas.

7.1.3 P3: Śabda, or testimony

On a conventional account of scientific epistemology, we are already finished. Knowledge gained
through the senses (P1) and the judicious application of reason (P2) are the traditional poles
supporting the canvas of scientific knowledge. There is always an unacknowledged third though,
which becomes obvious when we resituate the debate from the silent cavern of the mind to the space
of public argument. That is the reliance on the written records, the journal articles, textbooks,
conference proceedings, standards documents, and all other forms of written record. These are all
forms of testimony, which have to be adjudicated based on how reliable they are.
In an Indian context, śabda, or testimony, has been a most contentious pramana indeed. Un-
surprisingly, some schools draw on scriptural sources, many going back to the Vedas, whose origin
is lost in the fog of time, having survived in chanted form for hundreds of years before ever being
written down. It is hardly surprising to find arguments about scriptural authority, and that such
arguments serve to distinguish among schools and sub-schools is entirely familiar when we view,
e.g. the proliferation of variants of Protestantism and their differing reliance on the Bible. But once
we relocate our epistemological debate to a shared face to face context, now we might recognise
that arguments about which sources to trust, which textbooks are out of date, which journals have
poor peer review or clique like editorial structure, these debates are remarkably similar to debates
about the Bible in Protestantism or the Vedas (and many other scriptures) in Hinduism.
We might note that the very idea of literal truth, that is, that words alone, without anyone to
utter them or to be responsible for them, might have a single unambiguous form of correspondence
to the affairs of the world, this notion of literal truth is relatively recent, and has been possible
only after the parallel development of a literate public and means for printing many copies of any
arbitrary document. Literal truth, or statements of fact that speak for themselves, is a product of
Westen discourse, relying, in part, on the substantial loan taken out on the supposed capacities of
individual minds to make sense and interpret words. The notions of literal truth, the Bible, and

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scientific literature are curiously interwoven from a historical perspective. Scientific writing might
indeed be viewed as one genre among many, one in which the convention is adopted that words
refer to existant things in a straightforward relation of correspondance.
Scripture in India has a different history, most of which we can ignore right now. Reliance on
very old sources has not always gone hand in hand with comprehension of those sources. The oldest
scriptures, in the Rig Veda, do not outline any consistent cosmology or philosophy. The words
sound remote to modern Indian ears, and it has always been understood that such words must
be sensitively interpreted. Hermeneutics has always played a role in evaluating and weighing both
verbal and written testimony. It should be clear that the evaluation of testimony is an acute concern
in our situation of embodied debate. The Devil, we recall, is pretty adept at quoting scripture, and
when Tobacco companies produce funded scientific research to protect their commercial interests,
we might note that the Devil probably also cites the scientific record liberally.
In our face to face debate in a white room, if you cite testimony, I will evaluate that critically.
Work that has survived the rigours of peer review is not thereby elevated to scripture that must
be simply accepted, and if you bring a journal with you, the quality of the journal, of the review
process, of the argument therein will all be something worth considering.
In India, Jainism (another non-orthodox school), Sankhya (a dualist school looking at matter
and mind), Yoga (a much more practically minded school whose intense focus is individual liber-
ation or moksha) and some Vedantic schools all allow P1, P2 and P3 as rhetorical tools to use in
substantive arguments.

7.1.4 P4: Upamana, or analogy

The fourth pramana is upamana or analogy. In an analogy we establish a correspondence between
two structured domains, drawing equivalences among elements, and taking care not to draw false
equivalences or to confuse the two domains. In every day language, and in formal debate, we
frequently appeal to analogy in constructing our arguments. The important work of George Lakoff
and colleagues in cognitive linguistics has revealed how much of the fundamental structure of
thought and of making the world intelligible can be understood as analogical or metaphorical in
nature. We interpret the novel in terms of the known, and we bring old schemas as templates to
interpret new.
But analogy plays a larger role than often acknowledged in science too. The entire business of
constructing models is a formal version of upamana. When we model the climate, the atom, or the
stock market, we are mapping between our picture of the domain to be understood (the source)
and a constructed representation (the target, or model). Of course, we are mapping, as usual, from
one representational domain to another. That is our fate. But the guiding assumption is that we
agree on the constitution of one of the two domains. So in climate modeling, we simply hope we
have agreed on what climate is, so that we can then evaluate competing models that are analogous
to the climate. To understand traffic jams, we first describe them, creating a source domain, and
then construct mathematical or software models in which specific abstract elements play the role
of cars, traffic lights, etc.
Modeling is such a central part of scientific activity that it seems odd, to me, at least, that it
should have played such a minor role in epistemology. Scientists in all domains create models, and
much of the subsequent lively debate consists of competing claims about what should and should
not be included in a model, and what elements of the source domain have counterparts in the target
domain. The reality being modelled is, of course, not exhausted by any representation, so even the

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most detailed climate model will not aspire to capturing the sound of the rain as it falls, or the
effect of global warming on the sport of snooker.
Among the Indian schools, Nyaya, the school of logical argumentation, allows P1 through P4 as
valid forms of argument. (The existence of sophisticated formal systems of logical argumentation
in India that are not derived from Greek, and specifically Aristotelian sources, may be surprising
to those for whom Indian philosophy is new. Linguistics is another domain that found formal
elaboration in India long before comparable work in a European context.)

7.1.5 P5: Arthapatti, or inference to the best hypothesis

“Hypotheses non fingo” (I frame no hypothesis) claimed Sir Isaac Newton, who clearly believed
that his representation of the motion of material bodies was sufficiently connected to the bodies
themselves that it needed no interpretation, postulation, or linguistic support. His claim is not
widely believed, as the mechanical model he established requires quite sophisticated interpretation if
it is to be related to actual motions of actual bodies. The postulation of hypotheses is such an every
day part of scientific work that it is hard to imagine scientific practice without constant creation,
testing, and modification of hypotheses. Indeed, the critical role of the controlled experiment within
scientific investigation is a formalised means of wielding hypotheses in debate.
One area in which the postulation and subsequent testing of hypothetical constructs is particu-
larly notable is psychology, where the underlying constructs of memory, perception, and attention
are never observable in their own right, but only approached through elaborate highly constrained
experimental tasks. Such tasks do not greatly constrain the space of possible accounts, and so
hypotheses tend to multiply and proliferate. It is here that the intricate business of statistical
inference is most commonly found, and such practices have acquired something of an unfortunate
reputation for generating apparently robust empirical findings that do not withstand much scrutiny.
Framing hypotheses is a perfectly pedestrian and creative part of debate. A hypothesis, once
framed, changes a debate, offering paths towards verification or rejection. The counterfactual draws
debate onwards, and encourages the back and forth of a dynamic collective understanding. As a
pramana, arthapatti, which can be glossed as the evaluation of circumstantial evidence, or the
testing of hypotheses, has been accepted by some schools. The school of Mimamsa has grown to
accept P1 to P5 in its debates, in which scriptural authority and the proper conduct of ritual are
a particular focus.

7.1.6 P6: Anupalabdhi, or absence

The last of the major pramanas, anupaladbhi or absence, may seem a little odd at first, and it
is accepted by relatively few schools, though among those we find Advaita Vedanta, the non-dual
philosophy of Adi Sankara, which is the only school of Indian philosophy that has been substantively
noted in most of Western philosophy. With its highly intellectual tradition, eschewing most idols
and elaborate rituals, and its strong tradition of metaphysical debate, this school was recognised
early on by Jesuit missionaries as possibly relevant to their own philosophical world, unlike the many
more ritual or worship oriented practices that are perhaps more common. In the 20th Century, it
influenced and resonated with the work of both the philosopher Martin Heidegger and the physicist
Erwin Schroedinger.
To argue that the absence of some posited element is relevant to a debate requires that those
involved all recognise a place for the absent element, so that its non-presence can be informative.

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Modern science excels at uncovering systems and regularities, so arguing that something is mising
or absent is perhaps more common in scientific argument than even in Indian philosophy. The
planet Neptune was predicted to exist before it was observed. The structure of the periodic table
has made it possible for elements to be considered, along with their likely properties, long before
they are manufactured or encountered. The 20th Century structuralist tradition takes this form
of pattern interpretation further, positing systematic organisation of sounds in language, or social
orders in diverse societies, where elements within the system are defined primarily by their colelctive
contrasts with other elements. In such a system, absent elements play an important role even if only
as possibilities, as they allow larger patterns obtaining over multiple elements to be understood.
Advaita Vedanta allows the full range of pramanas, from P1 to P6, in debate.
It should be clear that all of the forms of evidential warrant that arise by application of all
six pramanas may feature in scientific debate. Itemising them in this fashion is not intended to
introduce any novelty into scientific argumentation, but to show that such argumentation has been
relying on more than just sense data and reason the whole time. When debate is relocated to the
public sphere of embodied dialogue, it becomes clear that situated arguments always draw on a
richer set of evidential types, each of which contributes in somewhat different fashion to any specific
debate.
We also noted that not all debates should be treated in the same manner. Most debates arise
because there is a present need, and the purpose of the debate is to work towards that need, for
example to motivate a choice among several possible actions, or we may be regulating and policing
our collective activities, or perhaps we are merely shooting the breeze. Even in less formal debates,
any and all of the above pramanas may be employed in service of an argument. There is a further
pramana which is relevant here, and that is aitihyam, or established custom, that is frequently
brought to bear. In formal scientific debate it is usually not invoked explicitly, but in the everyday
conduct of science, as in all interpersonal debate, tradition and custom are very much part of the
suite of arguments that may be brought to bear.

7.1.7 Reflections
The several schools of Indian philosophy differ with respect to their core concerns, and those range
over far more than the concerns we might expect of a philosophical tradition in the Greek mode.
They intrude on matters consigned to the religious sphere, though religion, in this context must
be seen as a European category brought to bear in trying to interpret the cultural practices and
character of remote peoples. They do not cleanly separate ethical and moral responsibilities from the
manner in which factual assertions are constructed. This is different from the conventional account
of how science realtes to matters of meaning and value, but that difference is more superficial than
it may seem. While lip service is frequently paid to the fact/value distinction in discussing scientific
epistemology, in practice it is thoroughly ignored, as values intrude on all the sciences, and no facts
are constructed without being supported by unseen and unutterable convictions of those taking
part.
Despite their different concerns, debate between the Indian schools, both orthodox and non-
orthodox, has been conducted in a manner that allowed the essential character of each of the schools
to persist over time (with some exceptions, such as the Carvakas). It is non-accidental that the
different schools are quite explicit in their reliance on different kinds of evidential claims made in
public debate. This allows for discussants to draw differing lessons from any given debate, and
for the conclusion of a debate to leave essential differences between the schools untouched. In

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practice, the idea of conclusions being based on a finite number of cleanly separable evidence types
is clearly an idealisation. Actual debate is messy and thoroughly shot through with the devices
of rhetoric, the push and pull of the contestation of authority or dominance, and the structural
limitations of the institutional and societal context within which it happens. But this seems to be
true of scientific debate as well. We noted that the pillars of epistemology—sensory knowledge and
reason operating over ideas in the ideal theatre of mind—does not accurately describe how scientific
knowledge comes into being and persists or dies away. The explicit enumeration of different forms
of evidence is useful in allowing debates to be fruitfully carried on on the basis of partial common
ground among discussants.
Dialogical realism then should not be thought of as any kind of theory of epistemology. Its
stated goal is to work towards joint actionable consensus, not to establish invariant truths. This is
not a relativist position. It is not a position at all, but a means of conducting our business.

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Chapter 8

Conclusions

Conclusions will be drawn later. This is still a work in progress. A line will be drawn under the
main argument here though, so that this central text might be refined, and improved. It will then
act in its turn as a landmark for more focussed discussions. These discussions are open ended, and
they will cover very many domains that normally might keep well away from each other. Here are
some thoughts about the themes to be explored, in each case with a greater attention to situating
the discourse within a specific tradition, appropriately referenced. (I also anticipate that there
will be non-textual elaborations of the key ideas here, exploring representation and reference, and
the various manners in which hiatuses are bridged. That opens the way to forging links to image
making processes already being explored, as well as inviting to collaborations with many kinds of
partner.)

Mathematics
There is an unspoken influence behind many of the thoughts herein. That is George Spencer-Brown,
author of Laws of Form (1969), a book that sets out to redefine mathematics. That ridiculous goal
is attempted in a short enigmatic text that has managed to appear of burning interest to at least
Francisco Varela, Heinz von Foerster, Alan Watts, Stafford Beer, Niklas Luhmann, and Louis
Kaufman. Varela made it the basis for his formalisation of the topic of autonomy in his 1979
book The Principles of Biological Autonomy. Spencer Brown (GSB) was an odd character, but
his work has seemed to some of these luminaries to get past an impasse encountered by Russell
and Whitehead (R&W) in their failed project of grounding mathematics in logic. Where the logic
employed by R&W was binary, built from the values of true and false, or 1 and 0, GSB reduces
things down to a single distinction, a “this!”, without a “that.” Beginning with the drawing of a
single distinction, he develops a formal arithmetic and algebra that re-founds much (at least) of
mathematics.
Where a conventional understanding of mathematics and mathematical logic would have it that
statements describe the world that simply exists, GSB shifts this so that distinctions drawn bring
into being, or create, a domain of discourse. This is the basis for the distinction drawn in Chapter
3 between reality (H) and existence (P). Importantly, one is never absolved of the responsibility
one has for drawing the original distinction. That is, this is a mathematics in which one necessarily
participates in the construction of the domain of discourse.
I am not on sure ground in elaborating GSB’s work, but I hope that the core text can help to
stimulate further application of his work to formal reasoning in well-founded and well-motivated

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domains.

Cognitive Science
The core text argues that all the sciences have taken taken out a huge loan on the sciences of mind.
A great deal of the motivation for the current text was a rejection of scientific accounts of mind
within the discipline of cognitive psychology. Furthermore, alternative approaches grouped loosely
under the heading of embodied and enactive accounts have gone some way to push back against
this. However, there is a great deal more work to do in allowing such accounts to inform human
practices as they either pay allegiance to the dominant scientific epistemology, in which case they
run the risk of becoming incoherent, or they set themselves apart from the scientific mainstream,
rather as psychotherapeutic practices, anthropology and some of the social sciences do.
The P-H framework is intended to feed into such discussions. The contact metaphysics in-
troduced in Chapter 4 represents an under-explored metaphysical alternative to mediational or
representational accounts of mind. Something similar was recently introduced by Dreyfus and
Taylor (2015) in “Retrieving Realism,” where they sought very hard to leave behind mediational
epistemologies and found that they then had to consider relations of contact. The present text
goes considerably further in reintroducing questions of representation and mediation, albeit in the
public sphere. Exploration of a contact theory seems to me to be rife with possibilities for coming
anew at old questions of our embedding in the world.
I fully intend to develop my own ideas here, but I did not want the core text to be saturated
with them. They will include further work on joint speech and ritual, but I also hope to ask how
the brain might be viewed from the kind of perspective I adopt. (Unsurprising hint: you are not
your brain....)

Logic
Recent work by Cathrina Duthil Novaes has pointed out that logic was conducted through rhetorical
means in embodied debate, from the Greeks to the onset of scientific modernity. Recognition of
this, and its further elaboration, seems to me to be a wonderful way to avoid some of the insecurities
and fears that arise when one chooses to abandon the notion of hidden minds as the theatre of
reason.

Existential anthropology
Dialogical realism provides a reassuring way to approach the notion that reality is differently
constituted for different people. This might provide a way to address some of the more painful
collisions of the Western secular view with the concerns of indigenous people. The example of
plurality among Indian schools, while not providing a template for the resolution of such issues,
does at least offer an example of how dialogue can be fruitfully conducted in cases where the parties
to a debate do not understand themselves as sharing a single indubitable reality.

8.0.1 Ecological thinking

Climate change is real. Globalisation, in the sense of expanded contact and necessary sharing of
worlds among diverse people, is also real. My personal view is that the political forms developed
so far are all unsustainable, and in a state of inevitable churn, potentially leading to collapse. I

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do not see a medium term future without massive loss of human life, conflict, and renogtiation of
different kinds of social living.
One option that this text tries to open the door to is to allow us a plural conception of what
“we” are. Part of the Modern Constitution (to pilfer Latour’s phrase) is the conviction that we
are, when it comes to it, human. Humanity is seen as the essential concept needed to describe
us. Enactive thinking encourages an alternative approach that emphasises our continuity with the
whole of life, and it allows us to see “human” as just one more division in the whole rich mixture
of the biosphere. This kind of thinking recognises the dependence of all life forms on all other life
forms, and it suggests a long game in which our goal (which “our”? Those conducting the debate)
is to find an equilibrium, to settle down, rather than to dominate, control and rule the earth.
I hope the P-H framework and its overt goals of Dialogical Realism/Joint Actionable Consensus
are more suited to this long term trajectory than the vain pursuit of the one single truth to which
all must bow.

Final note
In some sense I don’t know where this is going, and I don’t want to. You tell me . . .

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