Jayarava's Raves

07 October 2016

Institutional Facts & Language: Social Reality (II)

Part II of a V part essay. Begin with Part I.

"The central span on the bridge from physics
to society is collective intentionality."
- John Searle

Stipulating the nature of functions, we now need only add one more ingredient to begin to see how social reality is constructed. This is collective intentionality.

As with my essay on Searle's philosophy of mind, we need to be clear about what this word intentionality means. The word comes from a Latin verb tendere 'to be tense' (probably cognate with Sanskrit √tan, whence tantra). With the prefix in- it comes to mean 'directed at'. "In medieval logic and philosophy, the Latin word intentio was used for what contemporary philosophers and logicians nowadays call a ‘concept’" (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). A conscious state is intentional if it is directed at or to objects and states of affairs in the world. Sensations like pain are not usually thought of as intentional, but thoughts about being in pain could be. The phenomena of intending is only incidental to this usage; it is only one kind of intentionality and not definitive.

Searle notes that we humans and many animals do things together. For humans to cooperate requires that we have conscious states which are intentional in the same way, i.e. states refer to the same objects, and to the same goals, at the same time. Suppose that a group of builders are going to build a house. They all have to look at the plans and understand how they map onto the site. They all have to look at the project and know what stage it is at. They must coordinate their activities so that everything that is required (drainage, utilities, foundations, walls, roof, etc) is included in the project and at the right time. They have to cooperate on some tasks to make them happen. This requires that they have common reference points, common understanding, common knowledge, and common motivations. Thus we can say that there is collective intentionality.

A lot of philosophy, particularly philosophy of mind, focusses on individuals. But humans are social and any philosophy of mind in which this commonality is not an obvious and significant feature is just not interesting.

Collective intentionality allows us to agree to refer to some object or person as performing some function. And by function here I mean specifically function as defined in the preceding part of this essay. The screwdriver is a rather trivial example, that helps to establish the idea. As I said, the function of screw driver is an observer relative feature of the object. A naive observer could not the intrinsic features of the object and not think of it as serving the function of turning screws. The function requires intentionality. Social reality requires collective intentionality.

Money is a more compelling example. Money can only function as money if we all agree that it is money and act as though this agreement holds. Nowadays the function of being money is almost unrelated to any intrinsic feature of the objects that serve as tokens of money. We require our monetary token be durable, distinctive, and difficult to copy, but it is not intrinsically valuable. Paper money is almost worthless as an object. However, money as such is an abstraction that need not have any physical representation. Money is a symbol: it performs the function of symbolising wealth.

Another apposite example is government. Being a ruler, despite what rulers themselves have said down the ages, is not an intrinsic quality of a person. It's a function that requires collective intentionality. We all have to agree to the leader being the leader. A leader may not even be very good at leading. No one ever said of a water molecule that it wasn't very good at being wet. Leaders cannot lead if followers do not consent to follow. The British political landscape is replete with examples of leaders who the people, party, or government would not follow.

Searle has created a shorthand for functions:

X counts as Y in C

C here stands for context; the conditions which much hold for us to agree to the imposition of the function. The relation is that there is agreement under certain circumstances to impose the function Y on object/person X. X carries out the function of Y, in a particular context. For example a £5 note counts as money in the United Kingdom if it is issued by the UK government (or certain Scottish banks) consistent with the relevant laws. Barrack Obama counts as "Mr President" for a limited period in the context of having won election to the office and having taken the oath of office. I count as Dharmacārin Jayarava in the context of the having been ordained into the Triratna Buddhist Order by Nāgabodhi on my ordination retreat in 2005. I also have the function of son, i.e. I count as a son of Peter and Durelle, in the context of my family; and because they had other sons, I count as brother to them.

Society can be described in terms of rules taking this form. However, keep in mind that rules and collective agreements by themselves don't make a society. Later (Part IV) we will see that Searle does not believe that we follow rules per se, but that rules shape dispositions so that we behave in ways that are consistent with rules, without necessarily referring to them consciously or unconsciously.

As an aside, compare this with Lakoff and Johnson: "The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another" (2003: 5). Metaphors allows us to think about a target domain, as if it were the source domain. In other words, in the context of a metaphor, the target domain counts as the source domain. Once I map the idea of an object onto thoughts, I can verbally apply to thoughts, any action that is relevant to objects. This looks like the same relation as being described by Searle. Can we then say that the nature of Searle's relation is essentially metaphorical? A £5 note is money. Theresa May is the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. No statement of this form is true because of some external reality, but only because we ascent to X counts as Y. This probably requires more thought, but I think there is potential for some synthesis here. I may be the first person to notice the similarity, because I don't see any other discussion of it.

Coming back to the main point, money only works because we collectively agree on it. When we stop agreeing, as sometimes happens in countries with hyper-inflation for example, then money stops working. Even officially issued tokens cannot function as money if people lose confidence in them. When a central bank starts issuing 100 trillion dollar notes, as happened in Zimbabwe, you stop taking them seriously and start using something more stable as money or you go back to bartering. Money is a fact, in the same way as the screwdriver was a fact. Money is defined socially by collective intentionality rather than by any appeal to ontology or reality. Searle calls this an institutional fact.

Modern money has no basis in physical reality whatever. It is entirely based on ideas and symbols of wealth; where wealth is itself an abstraction from concepts of value; and value is a concept combined with an emotional response. Money per se is therefore ontologically subjective. However, if I pull out a fiver, i.e. a £5 note, the note itself, the paper/plastic and ink, does physically exist. A £5 note is ontologically objective (the only people who doubt this are philosophers) even though the function and the value of the note are ontologically subjective. As above, the brute physical facts of the note are more or less unrelated to its function as money. Whether made of paper or plastic, for example, a fiver is a fiver. There is no doubt that a £5 note is money and we know it is money, and we know that the value of a £5 note is £5. These facts are epistemically objective.

This differentiation of facts is really very important. We can and do have facts that are not ontologically objective and not in any way related to brute physical facts, not based on reality, but which are still unequivocally facts. Despite not being real in the widely understood sense, such facts are never-the-less true. It is straight-forwardly true that a £5 note is money in the UK and yet this statement has no basis in reality. A £5 note is only money because of the collective agreement that it counts as money. And this relation is true of government, schools, hospitals, roads, clubs, associations, families, parties, playgrounds, traffic lights, etc.

Next time you step out of your house imagine what your world would be like if everyone simply withdrew their consent to follow these rules. Almost everything we see in the world around us functions as it does only because we agree that it does. Almost everything could go the way of the Zimbabwean Dollar. Imagine if we had to consciously decide what was what, and negotiate every detail of every interaction with every person we met. It would be chaotic. The fact that our Western Industrialised world works at all is remarkable, let alone that it works well.

This observation about the nature of social facts has far reaching implications. There is an the argument that because consciousness is subjective, that it does not exist or is an illusion; or another argument that because of the ontological subjectivity of consciousness, that we can never have objective knowledge of it. The same arguments are clearly false when applied to money or any other facet of our social worlds. So why do we treat these arguments as true when applied to consciousness? However, I'm going to leave this question hanging and continue on.

Society would not work well if anyone could declare anything to be money. Money must have some relation to wealth. If there is more money than wealth, then money is devalued. If money is worth less, it buys less, and we get price inflation. Price inflation devalues many forms of wealth (such as savings or fixed assets). Deflation is also problematic. Managing the supply of money is an important role of government, even though banks create by far the great majority of all money through issuing debt. A government can create more money simply by allowing banks to create more debt - the 2008 financial crisis was underpinned by banks issuing too much debt. For a bank, a debt they issue generates income in the form of interest payments. In economics this is a form of rent (a form of wealth accumulation that requires no effort or labour, but relies on appropriating the wealth of others). So-called "quantitative easing" is sometimes called "printing money", but in fact it involves the government buying debts from banks. This frees the banks to issue more debt, thereby increasing the supply of money. A government does this when inflation is too low and there is a risk of deflation. In deflation prices fall and consumers defer purchases in anticipation of getting a bargain. The lack of demand further depresses prices. Both inflation and deflation are susceptible to positive feedback. There are many historical examples of runaway inflation or deflation wrecking an economy. This whole set up is ontologically subjective, but none-the-less we can have epistemically objective knowledge about it.

We collectively impose the function of managing money on government, which largely exercises this function though regulating banks. We elect the government and thus impose the function of member of parliament (or whatever title our country uses) on those we elect. Government imposes the function of central bank on the Bank of England. The Bank of England has a governor who oversees and implements the functions of the bank, one of which is regulating and over-seeing the behaviour of banks. And so on. Such functions are iterative. We can diagram this iterability like this:

Y₁ in context C₁ becomes X₂ in context C_1,2. I've tried to show that the context aspect of this model is cumulative. In line two, the context in line 1, C₁, is still important. Hence the notation C_1,2. In this case we can see that the relation X₁ counts as Y₁ is part of the context C₂. So not only is the structure of these relations iterative, it is also interconnected. Society is based on a network of interconnected, iterated relations of this kind.

Something else happens when we impose a function on an object or person. With the function comes a status. In order for X to act as Y, we have to treat X as if it is Y. X has to have a change of status consistent with the imposed function. Status and function coexist. As Searle puts it:

"Collective intentionality assigns a new status to some phenomena, where that status has an accompanying function that cannot be performed solely in virtue of the intrinsic physical features of the phenomenon in question." (46)

"Collective agreement about the possession of the status is constitutive of having the status, and having the status is essential to the performance of the function assigned to that status." (51)

In assigning a status to X than enables X to count as Y, we can say that X is empowered to count as Y. The imposition of the function is thus both an act of power and an empowerment to act. So the rules governing institutional facts involve: functions, statuses, and powers. Neither function, status, nor power are related to the intrinsic physical properties of the object or person they apply to; they rely only on the collective intention that X counts as Y. Indeed it is quite possible to appoint X as Y, only to discover that X is not a very good Y. But not being a very good Y, does not stop X from counting as Y, until the collective intentionality is withdrawn.

We now need to look more closely at the issue of empowerment and power.

~ Status and Power ~

When we impose social functions, at the same time we impose a social status on the object or person who carries out the function. The example of money can illustrate this process. A £5 note counts as money. This imposes the function of money on the paper/plastic and ink of the note. By general agreement (i.e. collective intentionality) the note is money. The £5 note has the status that comes with being money. It can be used for all transactions where money represents wealth or value. In the American phrase it is "legal tender for all debts public and private". Status in he human world often comes with a label or title: mother, father, mayor, Prime Minister, priest, cab driver, etc. In some cases, having the status requires some kind of indicator. Examples include a wedding ring, a soldier's uniform, a bishop's mitre, and so on. Other status functions merely require general acknowledgement.

"Where the institution demands more of its participants that it can extract by force, where consent is essential, a great deal of pomp, ceremony, and razzamatazz is used in such a way as to suggest that something more is going on than simply acceptance of [the institutional fact]." (Searle 1995: 118)

The social status associated with the function is important in understanding social reality because status exists in a hierarchy. Human societies, like most primate groups, are constituted as loose, nested, hierarchies. Our position in the hierarchy is to some extent defined by the functions we carry out. And the functions we carry out are largely those imposed on us by collective intentionality. In other words our overall status in any social group is also determined by collective intentionality, more than by features which are intrinsic to us.

At least as important as the bestowal of status along with a function is that "in general the creation of status functions is a matter of conferring some new power" (95). Several different kinds of power may be involved in conferring status-functions: symbolic, deontic, honorific, or procedural. I'll deal with symbolic power here and deontic power in the next essay. For the others see Searle (1995).

The symbolic function refers mainly to powers that we impose on verbal phenomena. Some noises we make with our mouths are count as words; some collections of words count as sentences. In other words language is a power that we humans collectively impose upon our own utterances. Language is not intrinsic to any utterance and many utterances are not language. Without collective intentionality language could not work. The rest of this essay is about language in this sense and how it contributes to social reality.

~ Language ~

Some people invested with a status-function are empowered to authorise new institutional facts, which they may do by making a declaration. A declaration is a particular kind of speech act, i.e. something that we do with speech, rather than something we mean by it. This is the essential distinction between pragmatic and semantic approaches to language; a distinction that Searle was instrumental in establishing. When the Governor of the Bank of England declares, this £5 note is legal tender (by having "I promise to pay the bearer the amount of five pounds" and the signature of the Chief Cashier "for the governor" printed on the note), it becomes, in fact, legal tender. As above this fact is epistemically objective, but ontologically subjective. One of the paradigmatic examples of this kind of declaration occurs in a marriage ceremony.

A modern marriage ceremony has two parts: verbal and written. Typically the couple each declare their willingness to marry, recite vows outlining the duties and responsibilities that each undertakes. If the marriage celebrant is satisfied they then say - "I now pronounce you to be spouses". In days gone the marriage would be a fact at this point. However, nowadays governments wish to regulate marriage so they have imposed a layer of bureaucracy. So once the traditional ceremony is completely, the celebrant, couple, and witnesses have to sign the marriage licence, which is a legally binding contract whose terms are dictated by state law. The signature is another type of declaration - it symbolises ascent to taking on the legal obligations of marriage as defined by the state. Signing the licence is a declaration that one accepts the legal contract. It is only once the paperwork is filed that the state recognises the change in legal status of the individuals and starts treating them as a couple. The declaration of willingness and vows are often felt by the couple to be significant moments in their life. But if they should decide to separate the legal contract dominates the proceedings. Rich folk try to get around state laws by having pre-nuptial agreements that allow one or both spouses to contract out of their rights under state law.

Declarations can be explicit verbal statements like "I do" or printing "this note is legal tender" on money. Or they can be implicit statements. Sometimes a lack of any specific gesture or statement. The English habit of lining up at bus stops on a first come, first served basis is only ever commented on if someone tries to jump the queue. Silently agreeing to line up, without in any way acknowledging any of the other passengers, is a declaration that one accepts that such a queue counts as fair. It is one of the few areas of English society where there is no deference to status indicators such as pin-striped suits. Many of us simply acquiesce to the rules of the society we are born into; a few want to question every rule.

Language itself only works because of collective intentionality, i.e. we all agree that certain verbal sounds count as words; that certain words count as representing concepts; that certain combinations of words count as sentences, and so on. So language is itself an institutional fact. But language is also special because, according to Searle, all institutional facts must be declared in some form, whether verbally or symbolically (e.g. a signature on a marriage licence); explicitly or tacitly. Language is thus constitutive of society, because it is constitutive of institutional facts. Without language we could not have society. For Searle, language underpins all other institutional facts because they require that some authority declares that X counts as Y, one way or another.

I want to take a brief digression to raise a quibble about this definition. For example, the institution of alpha-male in chimpanzee groups has the same structure. Drawing on an example from Jane Goodall's In The Shadow of Man: [The Chimp called] Mike counts as the alpha-male of the Gombe Stream troop in the context of having won the charging display through judicious use of empty kerosene cans which make a loud noise when knocked about (this was captured on film and featured in a National Geography documentary t=14:00). Mike becomes the alpha-male and is acknowledged as such by the others in the troop. Therefore the chimps display collective intentionality with respect to Mike. Furthermore this relationship takes the form of a Searlean institutional fact: X counts as Y in context C, but in a non-linguistic setting.

Chimp and bonobo researcher Frans de Waal recently mentioned in an interview on BBC-Radio4 that although chimps can be aggressive, they also actively reconcile after conflicts (peace making) and also console others who came off worse in conflicts (empathy). He notes that even a small male may become the alpha-male if he can form the necessary coalition. And if he does he is expected to reciprocate with offers of food, and allowing confederates a chance to mate with females, etc. In other words the alpha-male gets privileges, but must also share them. Female chimps also play active roles in supporting candidates for alpha and helping to build coalitions. All of this is rather different from the popular emphasis on testosterone laden males fighting it out for dominance. In fact the group has to reach a consensus on the candidate and the role has a good deal of reciprocity built into it (there is a deontological element to the role of alpha-male, a subject I will return to in Part III). This is even stronger evidence of collective intentionality in chimps. I'll be returning to the work of de Waal on the evolution of morality very soon. He has shot to the top of my non-fiction reading list.

So at the very least for chimpanzees, language per se is not essential to institutional facts. There still has to be a "declaration". The alpha male has to put on a charging display; other chimps, especially large males, have to acknowledge the alpha as alpha, and he in return must carry out the obligations of alpha. However, beyond being member of the troop, some family relationships, and alpha-male, chimp society can sustain no other social institutions. Language is what makes complex human societies possible by allowing us to make a large number of status-functions into facts through declarative speech acts representing our collective intentionality.

I noted that these status-functions confer authority for making declarations on those upon whom they are imposed. This suggests that there is a deontological element to status-functions. This turns out to be a characteristic of status-functions. Status-functions impose rights, duties, and obligations on those who carry out the functions. And deontology is the subject of the next essay in the series.

~~oOo~~

~ Bibliography ~

Covers all parts of this essay

Dunbar, Robin. (2014). Human Evolution: A Pelican Introduction. Pelican.

Foucault, Michel. (1983) The Subject and Power, in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (2nd ed.) edited by H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 208-226. Original Publication: Le sujet et le pouvoir (Gallimard, D&E Vol.4 1982). Online: http://foucault.info/doc/documents/foucault-power-en-html

Goodall, Jane. (1971). In the Shadow of Man. London: Collins.

Jones, Richard H. (2013). Analysis & the Fullness of Reality: An Introduction to Reductionism & Emergence. Jackson Square Books.

Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (2003). Metaphors We Live By. New Ed. [Originally published 1981]. University of Chicago Press.

Lyotard, Jean-François. (1984). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester University Press. Originally published as La Condition Postmoderne: Rapport sur le Savoir, 1979

MedicalXpress. (2016) Children overeagerly seek social rules. September 27, 2016 http://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-09-children-overeagerly-social.html/ [Commenting on Schmidt M. F. H (2016)]

Medical Xpress. (2012) Toddlers object when people break the rules. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-07-toddlers-people.html July 26, 2012 [commenting on Schmidt 2012)

Schmidt, M. F. H. & Tomasello, M. (2012) Young Children Enforce Social Norms. Psychological Science. 21(4), 232-236. doi: 10.1177/0963721412448659

Schmidt, M. F. H. et al. (2016) Young Children See a Single Action and Infer a Social Norm: Promiscuous Normativity in 3-Year-Olds, Psychological Science (2016). DOI: 10.1177/0956797616661182

Searle, John R. (1992). The Rediscovery of the Mind. MIT Press.

Searle, John R. (1995). The Construction of Social reality. Penguin.

Searle, John R. (2012). The Normative Structure of Human Civilization [lecture]. Max-Weber-Vortragsraum des Käte Hamburger Kollegs „Recht als Kultur". https://youtu.be/edn8R7ojXFg

Waal, Frans de. (2013). The bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Amongst the Primates. W.W. Norton & Co.

30 September 2016

Components of Social Reality: Social Reality (I)

This is part one of a five part essay on the philosophy of society, mainly based on John Searle's book The Construction of Social Reality, but drawing on sources that will be familiar to my readers:, including works by George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Robin Dunbar, and Michel Foucault.

~ Introduction ~

One of the major problems for modern philosophers is how to get from the world of quantum fields, particles, waves, energy to the world of governments, money, pubs, etc. These domains, so far apart in scale and properties, seem irreconcilable. So much so that some sociologists openly deny that physicists know anything about the world and vice versa. Proponents often take up extreme versions of idealism ("the world" is only our minds) or realism (minds are only matter). The kinds of knowledge that are produced, the methods used to obtain it, and the language used to describe it all seem to be worlds apart. Attitudes become trenchant. What can be done to bridge these two domains? This is task that John Searle set himself in The Construction of Social Reality. He starts at quite a high level. Having already written about mind and it's relation to reality in The Rediscovery of the Mind, he mostly takes he conclusions there as read.

This essay is the first of a series that both outline and modify Searle's theory of social reality. After a recapitulation of the main points of my series of essays on layered reality, I'll begin with the cornerstone of Searle theory, i.e. functions.

~ Core Philosophy ~

Many prominent physicists are committed to a worldview in which reductionism is the only principle on which we can understand anything, i.e. metaphysical reductionism. I've explored how this approach to ontology fails to account for the observed world. The fact is that sociology does not reduce down to physics. At least some elements of sociology are irreducible because the object of study is groups of human beings interacting. One cannot make sociological observations of individuals, though in fact lacking company many of us find imaginary friends of animals to talk to. Rather than take up such an extreme position, we have to hedge our bets. To the best of our knowledge, the world is made of matter and energy. But this substantial stuff is made into complex objects. This combination of made of (analysis) and made into (synthesis) are central to my approach to ontology (and I owe the insight to Richard H Jones 2013). In many cases complex objects are not simply aggregates of their constituents, but have properties that only emerge when constituents are bound into structures.

Chemists distinguish between mixtures and compounds. A mixture is an amorphous aggregate in which the constituents retain their identity and physical character. The physical character of a mixture is a simple aggregate of the properties of the constituent. In a compound the individual character and existence of the constituents are lost and made into a new entity that must be seen as an entirely new phenomenon. In a compound, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It has unique properties that are not properties of the constituents without structure. Structure makes a positive contribution to the world.

Thus we have to treat structure as a real component of the world. The world is not simply matter and energy. The world is matter, energy, and structure.

In previous essays I've tried to outline the dynamic that pertains to hierarchies of structures. Structure adds something real to the universe; complex structures (i.e. structures made from structured constituents) require us to adopt a hierarchical, structured approach to describing and understanding the world (which we can infer maps onto a world with levels of complexity). As we observe more complex objects on greater scales, we are less likely to be able to explain the properties of higher levels of structure in terms of physics; less likely to be able use mathematics in our descriptions and more likely to resort to narratives. The behaviour of higher level phenomena are constrained, but not determined by lower level properties. In general the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, because as we add structure to matter, new properties emerge and interact with each other at that level and above. By the time we get to biology, fundamental physics only makes the broadest of generalisations and explains very little about what is actually happening. Psychologists and sociologists have very little recourse to physics as an explanatory paradigm, because it doesn't explain things at these levels.

These facts require that we adopt an ontology that is substance reductionist ("made of") and structure antireductionist ("made into"). No other approach to ontology can cope with a hierarchically structured world.

Prominent humanities scholars have argued that all knowledge is social and that there is no underlying reality on which facts can be based (cf Lyotard 1984). I haven't written much on the background of post-modernism, because it has never really seemed credible or interesting to me. I attempted to read Derrida, Baudrillard, and Lacan in my adventurous youth and found nothing to help make sense of my world. Post-modernists were/are more interested in undermining attempts to make sense of the world, i.e. in non-sense. Barthes' Mythologies did seem to me to be entertaining, though not very useful. Of the French philosophers, only Foucault seemed to be saying anything of value, though even he seems to deliberately obscure his contribution in execrable writing. I get onto my understanding of Foucault's contribution to this issue later in the series. Notably, Searle and Foucault were friends.

My understanding of epistemology is that as individuals our perception of the world is limited by the fact that what is presented to consciousness as the world is in fact processed and filtered by our minds. It's as though every sight we see has been craftily photoshopped to highlight some features of reality, and to distort or even hide others. These representations are accurate enough to help us navigate the world, but always contain irreducibly subjective elements. Kant called this idea, transcendental idealism.

I have complained that the approach to knowledge that ends with transcendental idealism, that devolves into thinking of philosophy as mere language games, is fundamentally solipsistic. I've called this the solipsistic fallacy (See The Problem of relativism. 20 May 2016). It's a fallacy because when we join forces and compare notes, we can identify and eliminate the purely subjective elements from our window on the world. Comparing notes on experience allows us to infer that there is a world that we sense and interact with and that is independent of our observing it. We can accurately infer knowledge about this world and we find that on our own scale (the mass, length, and energy scales we can sense unaided by technology) that the world is much as we expect it to be from experience. On the other hand technology has, since the early 1600s, shown us aspects of the world at different scales that are quite unexpected and counter-intuitive, not to say virtually impossible to fully understand.

If our ontology is both reductive and antireductive, then in order to seek knowledge we have to apply methods of both analysis and synthesis. Analytical methods reveal the constituents of phenomena. It can be very valuable to know this as it enables us to understand how changing the constituents changes the phenomena. Analysis can lead to systematic accounts of domains of phenomena - like the periodic table of elements. Synthesis involves looking at systems as wholes. A physicist may seek to break phenomena down into matter and energy, for example. And create general laws of how matter behaves. This allows us do do things like send a probe to a passing comet using minimal energy and send back information on what the comet is composed of. And this enables us to infer something about how our solar system was created. By contrast a biologist studying an organism may well be interested in what the organism is composed of. These days a lot of effort is going into analysing DNA and corresponding proteins, or into identifying neural correlates of behaviour for example. But a biologist must also study the behaviour of the whole, living organism. And in order to make sensible deductions, they must ideally see their organism in its natural environment, interacting with it's own kind (kin, mates, offspring, peers, etc) and with other organisms (parasites, symbionts, competitors, predators, prey, etc).

Our world is both made of stuff and made into stuff. In order to know our world we have to attack the problem at both ends. To be one sides is to be half-blind to the world.

The world I am talking about is immanent, real, and entirely natural. If there were a supernatural or transcendental world, then we have no way of gaining knowledge of it. The existence of a supernatural world would have, could have, no impact on human beings. Furthermore, this process of collective empirical realism has only come into focus since the so-called Copernican revolution that began in the early to mid 1500s*. Though in principle it was always available to us, the necessary insights and the motivations to use it seem to have been lacking or were overwhelmed by myth and religion.

* Like many historians I date the start of science from the publication of Copernicus' theory of a heliocentric universe in Dē Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (1543), though he was known to be thinking in heliocentric terms by at least 1514 and may have been influenced Arabic theologians.

In summary, my nascent philosophy employs an ontology which is both substance reductive and structure antireductive; and an epistemology which acknowledges the limit of transcendental idealism for individuals, but argues that the limit can be breached through collective empirical realism. The world so described is monistic, real, immanent, and natural. Methodologically this requires both analytical and synthetic approaches to seeking knowledge. At present I'm not aware of any other person who takes precisely this stance, though there is significant cross-over with the various people who have inspired it. There are certainly other approaches to ontology and epistemology. Some of them endorsed by genius-level experts. But this is the only way I can see to encompass both physics and sociology; and to bridge the apparent gap between them without claiming that one or other does not exist. This is the only philosophy, so far as I can seem, that does not end in that intellectual or practical cul de sac of dividing the world into real and unreal.

However there is important discontinuity to deal with and that is the fact of conscious states in animals, and self-conscious states in particular. Here I take my lead from John Searle's book, The Rediscovery of the Mind (1994). My essay Searle on Consciousness & Implications for Buddhism (2 Sep 2016) attempts to provide a brief introduction to his philosophy of mind. In this view consciousness is a neurobiological process. Conscious states are qualitative, subjective, and unified. There is no valid ontic distinction between mental and physical phenomena, we live in one world, at most. But there can be valid epistemic differences. The details of how this works in practice are slowly emerging from the collective empirical realists practices of science (observation, comparing notes; conjecture and refutation). The legacies of metaphysical reductionism and scientific materialism, and the current obsession with computation are hampering our efforts to study consciousness qua consciousness. Instead a lot of effort goes into studying mind as an illusion, mind as the activity of atoms, or mind as a computer. Bottom up, analytical approaches which look at neurons or brain sub-structures are making progress, but little synthetic work is being done on the brain as system that does not already assume that we know what kind of system the brain is. For example a lot of effort goes into trying to prove that the brain is a kind of computer; or that rule-based Game Theory accurately predicts human behaviour. But quite obviously the brain isn't a computer, and Game Theory makes outrageous assumptions about people and doesn't predict their behaviour (so at this point those pursuing these avenues are not doing science, because their null hypothesis is already refuted). No rule-based theory of behaviour is ever going to be accurate, the reasons for which I will attempt to set out in the fourth essays in this series.

Hunting Hephalumps

I'm increasingly seeing conscious-ness as a problematic concept. As David Chalmers defined the problem of conscious-ness, conscious states—memories, perceptions, cognitions, etc.—are part of the easy problem. It is the abstraction—conscious-ness—that constitutes the Hard Problem. It occurs to me that it's a hard problem precisely because it is an abstraction. Abstractions do not exist outside of our minds. More precisely, abstractions are produced by and in human minds. And when thinking in terms of abstractions we do so almost exclusively in metaphorical terms. Treating conscious-ness as a distinct phenomenon rather than an abstraction is like treating what I see when I look in a mirror as a being rather than a reflection. So the search for objective knowledge of this abstraction is doomed to fail. The Hard Problem guys are hunting a hephalump. What we have is a series of conscious states, not the nebulous abstraction conscious-ness. The aspects of subjectivity, qualitativity, and unity amongst conscious states is a feature of conscious states, not proof that an abstraction is warranted.

In any case these are the parameters of my current thinking about life, the universe, & everything: substance reductionism and structure antireductionism; describing a mind-independent, immanent natural world; which we understand through transcendental idealism as individuals, and collective empirical realism when we join forces and compare notes. Knowledge seeking requires both analytical and synthetic methods. Conscious states are a higher level property brain states. Consciousness is a dubious concept.

My sense is that philosophers have a problem with solutions that work, and continually and artificially generate problems because problems are more interesting and better for an academic career than solutions. Searle seems to be a exception to this general trend. I'm interested in making sense of the world, so far as that is possible; and with solutions where they are available. I also embrace the more literal version of Occam's Razor and am disinclined to invent entities to explain what is as yet unexplained: a mystery is always better than mysticism. I'm not interested in undermining sense, or endless invented problems without solutions. The more I turn my mind to actually thinking about things, the less interest I find I have in what low-mid level academics have to say about anything, or in Buddhist studies in general.

Having cleared and prepared the ground, the question now is, "How do we get from the basic facts about the world and conscious minds, to a philosophy of society?" Not only is this a fascinating study in its own right, but as I will try to show, it demonstrates why a constructive approach to ethics is best. We begin with functions.

~ Functions ~

The first point that Searle makes is that we can distinguish intrinsic features of phenomena from observer relative features. Phenomena may have both. Intrinsic features are those features which an phenomena has regardless of the observer, or whether there is an observer at all. Searle uses the example of an object: a screwdriver.

It is an object made from wood and metal. The materials an object is made of don't vary from observer to observer. We don't find one person saying it's made of porcelain and asphalt and another saying it's made of beetroot and beetle wings. That the object is made from wood and metal is a stable fact about the object. But the fact that it is a screwdriver is dependent on the observer understanding what a screw is and what a screwdriver does to a screw in the hands of a competent user. There are people alive on the planet who've never seen a screw and would not see the screwdriver as tool for turning screws.

When I think about this, I also see that worked metal might be unfamiliar to a naive observer. It is lower level features like mass, shape, texture, resistance, etc that are observer independent. Colour, which might be expected to be in the same category turns out not to be observer independent (cf. Seeing Blue. 6 Mar 2015). For the sake of argument, however, let us stipulate that the materials that make up the screwdriver are intrinsic features of it.

For anyone who knows what a screwdriver is, the object in question is a screwdriver. No one familiar with such tools will mistake it for, e.g. a hammer or a egg whisk. One might, in pinch, use a screwdriver as a hammer, but screwdrivers, don't make very good hammers. Even if we misuse the tool deliberately we still know that it is a screwdriver. So "it is a screwdriver" is a fact. Observer relative features of an object are created by the mental states of the observer. So "screwdriver" is an observer relative feature of the object, so it is not an ontological fact. If the observation "the object is a screwdriver" is not ontologically objective, but it is a still a fact, then what kind of fact is this? Such facts are epistemically objective. The observer knows that it is a screwdriver, but the observer has to exist in a certain context in order for them to know this. What is the ontological status of such epistemically objective facts? They are ontologically subjective. A screwdriver is only a screwdriver because someone thinks it is a screwdriver. It certainly has intrinsic features that make it amenable to the function of turning screws, but that function depends on the observer conceiving of it as such.

So in thinking about the intrinsic versus observer relative features of objects we have identified three kinds of facts.

Ontologically objective facts: e.g. it is made of metal and wood;
Epistemically objective facts: e.g. it is a screwdriver;
Ontologically subjective facts: e.g. the function of a screwdriver is to turn screws.

We have said that a screwdriver can be used to turn screws and that this fact is an ontologically subjective. It turns out that all functions that are not identical to intrinsic features are ontologically subjective. That is to say, that as human beings we can impose functions on objects that are not implied by their intrinsic features and when we do this, it is how we conceive of the object that creates a new fact about it. A screwdriver is not intrinsically a screwdriver, but becomes a screwdriver when we conceive of it as a tool for turning screws.

A feature of how human beings conceive of the world is that when we see objects we think of how we could use them. We even have a special neurons, called canonical neurons, for modelling how we can or might interact with three-dimensional objects. This feature of perception is a central feature of the philosophy of embodied consciousness associated with George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (amongst others). Our understanding of objects is shaped by how we interact with them, either practically or potentially. And this in turn shapes how we construct abstractions and use metaphors to manipulate ideas. The phrase "to manipulate ideas" is an example of the metaphor IDEAS ARE OBJECTS. Once we make the connection between ideas and objects, once we map the source domain onto the target domain, then any manoeuvre that applies to objects, can be applied to ideas: we can grasp them, turn them over, throw them around, kick them into the long grass, juggle them and so on. Metaphors such as this are constitutive of conceptual thought. This parallel between Searle and Lakoff is important because it gets to the same conclusion through very different means, though, so far as I can tell, the parallel is not explicit in the work of either man. In fact they both teach at the University of California, Berkeley, and I suspect some back-story to the fact that there is unacknowledged overlap between their approaches to philosophy.

So functions, as perceived by humans, are always observer relative and imposed on objects by human beings rather than being intrinsic or related to intrinsic features. Functions always involve ontologically subjective facts, i.e. facts that are only true relative to observers, but which are nonetheless true. The existence of ontologically subjective facts is important for Searle more generally because in his view consciousness is ontologically subjective. And as the screwdriver example shows, we can have epistemically objective facts about an ontologically subjective domain. Searle has many more examples of this relationship: money, government, cocktail parties, etc. He shows that just because consciousness is ontologically subjective, it does not mean that we cannot have epistemically objective knowledge of consciousness. This observation by Searle may be his single greatest, and at the same time his most under-rated, contribution to philosophy.

This observation about functions being imposed by human beings is of central importance to understanding social reality because so much of what constitutes social reality consists of objects and people performing specific functions. Once we see that functions are observer relative, subjective, and imposed, then we are well on our way to understanding social reality. What we need next is to show the role of collective intentionality in creating social and institutional facts and this is the subject matter of the next essay in this series.

~~oOo~~

Part II: Institutional Facts & Language