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Tuesday, October 23, 2007
The Haunting Wordsworth: Romantic Poets and Monkeys With Typewriters
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes)
You might go on extending the list of explanations indefinitely, but you would find, we think, that all the explanations fall into two categories. You will either be ascribing these marks to some being capable of intentions (the living sea, the haunting Wordsworth, etc.), or you will count them as nonintentional effects of mechanical processes (erosion, percolation, etc.). But in the second case—where the marks now seem to be accidents—will they still seem to be words? Clearly not. They will merely seem to resemble words.
-Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, “Against Theory” (JSTOR link)
Suppose you confront a fallen pudding, or a toaster that would toast, but for that frayed power cord. It would be absurd to say, ‘I have no notion whatsoever what this...thing...is for.’ The fact that you call it a fallen pudding registers your awareness of what it was supposed to be for: eating.
-John Holbo, “Form, Function & Intention: Drafty Thoughts” (announcement and link here)
Under the fold: Thinking through the problem of intentionality with John Cage, Douglas Hofstadter, Percy Shelley, and Immanuel Kant, among others.
(UPDATED: I recommend the full text of Ray Davis’s post on the matter, available here.)
In their infamous article “Against Theory,” Knapp and Benn Michaels argued that if you happened across a reproduction of “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal,” and you decided that no purposive being was responsible, the illusion of meaning would vanish. In its place, you would merely have the curious presence of shapes resembling words.
In Holbo’s wonderfully provocative series of responses, continued with “Now God Help Thee, Poor Monkey!”, he drafted the outlines of an argument about replacing intention with function. For Holbo, the best way to understand language is by understanding what it does within a community: between people, rather than merely in the purposive mind of the author (which is nonetheless quite real). Holbo’s argument about normative function hasn’t assumed its final form, but I suspect it will have elective affinities with the account given by Ray Davis, who writes:
Most art is intentionally produced, and, depending on the skill and cultural distance of the artists, many of its effects may be intended. And yes, many people intentionally seek entertainment, instruction, or stimulation. But as with any human endeavor, that doesn’t cover the territory...Happy accident is key to the persistence of art across time, space, and community, and, recontextualized, any tool can become an object of delight or horror.
I generally agree with both Davis and Holbo: language is a functional melange of intention and accident. I would add that it is a functional result of intentions both conscious and unconscious. Bearing this in mind, let’s probe a little deeper into the specific examples that arise in these conversations.
The first example, provided by Knapp and Benn Michaels, is that of a Wordsworth poem appearing on a beach; the authors suggest a number of possible agents, including the “living sea” and “the haunting Wordsworth.” The play on “haunting” is instructive; as much as this is a fable about human speech, it is also the record of an anxiety about the meaning of natural landscapes and events. To the Romantics, Nature was meaningful and capable of expression; to Knapp and Benn Michaels, Nature is a series of meaningless “mechanical processes.” The beach is supposed to represent a blank slate upon which words either are or aren’t written. Really, however, it is a symbolic maneuver in a bizarre anti-Romantic fantasy. I imagine we have all had the experience of writing words in the wet sand of a beach, and then looking on as the surf gradually erases them. This is the world as the Romantics knew it:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
In Shelley’s poem, Nature (particularly the natural process of decay) has an effect on the meaning of the inscription. It elevates it to the level of the sublime, in the full philosophical sense of the word. However, in “Against Theory,” the surf actually inscribes words, rather than washing them away. The result, that which “seems to resemble words,” brings us back to Immanuel Kant:
But what does even the most complete teleology prove in the end? Does it prove anything like that such an intelligent being exists? No; it proves nothing more than that because of the constitution of our cognitive faculties, and thus in the combination of experience with the supreme principles of reason, we cannot form any concept at all of the possibility of such a world except by conceiving of such an intentionally acting supreme cause. (Critique of the Power of Judgement, 5: 399)
Things in Nature seem to resemble words: they seem to have purposiveness. Kant’s fundamental insight was that order is purposive, but that the aesthetic is produced when you have the appearance of purposiveness without the knowledge of an end.
Thus, Kant is actually much more thorough and skeptical than Knapp and Benn Michaels. As several commenters on Holbo’s posts have noted, the argument in “Against Theory” isn’t very good, not least because it assumes that you can have knowledge of whether other beings are acting in an intentional manner in some direct, non-interpretive way. This amounts to completely dodging the so-called “problem of other minds.” Since you have to base your claims about intentionality on the fact that certain patterns appear to be intentional, which is circular, Knapp and Benn Michaels would have to conclude that an intentionally acting, supreme intelligent being does exist if similar-looking patterns appear in Nature (they do). Kant gets out of this problem by locating the circularity of this logic within the human mind, and calling the teleological assumption an inevitable result of the “constitution of our cognitive faculties.”
Holbo confronts the problem more directly. He cites Joseph Plunkett and William Paley on, respectively, the mystical and probabilistic arguments for a supreme cause, but rejects both of them. For Holbo, the liminal space between intentionality and mechanism becomes the realm of accident:
Suppose we find a screwdriver in the sand. Merely by seeing it as such, we register its function: driving screws. Also, if asked, we are prepared to presume it had a maker...We will not, certainly need not, assume anyone left this screwdriver as a message.
In short, he uses Paley’s argument from probability (it is very improbable that a universe ordered like ours could happen by accident) against Plunkett, and then uses the conjunction of intentionality (which is human) and accident (which manifests an absence of order) in order to refute Paley.
This brings us right back to Plunkett; you can’t use Paley to refute him if your next move is to refute Paley. Certainly, when it comes to small implements, the phenomenon of accident does not inspire a feeling of sublimity. In “Ozymandias,” however, the screwdriver in the sand does become something sublime. The tension between what is knowable and unknowable is the alternating presence and absence in things of an analogy with ourselves. We see ourselves in landscapes, animals, other people; then, just as quickly, they turn an alien face towards us, terrifying us with the prospect of destitution and oblivion.
I only have time to gesture at where this goes. People have a quite sophisticated grasp of the beautiful and the sublime; they write with sticks on the beach, watching in fascination as the surf rubs out each word, while simultaneously feeling in harmony with the larger pattern of the restless tide; they quote poetry to one another, unsure whether their own intentionality comes through when they repeat something originally written by Pablo Neruda or Bright Eyes. Meanwhile, scientists do all their work right at that line where the edifice of knowledge crumbles into guesswork.
Furthermore, we feel the acid of the sublime within our own selves, gnawing and disfiguring our words, threatening nonsense and madness. The reason that the image of the monkeys writing Shakespeare is so arresting is that we have typewriters (or laptops or what-have-you), and we don’t make particularly good use of them. Anybody who has ever tried to write a research paper or a dissertation can certainly identify with both of these paragraphs:
Moving from calculation to experiment, The Monkey Shakespeare Simulator, in existence since 2003 with a hundred monkeys typing at a vastly accelerated speed, has produced just nineteen letters from The Two Gentlemen of Verona after 42,162,500,000 billion monkey years: “Valentine. Cease to 1dor:eFLPoFRjWK78aXz …”
An enterprising experiment that involved real monkeys produced even more confounding results, not least because “they get bored and they shit on the keyboard rather than type …”
In the film Alien, human beings have to save themselves from the hideous alliance of computer (Ian Holm’s corporate android) and animal (the alien), notwithstanding the fact that they themselves are this hybrid. The problem with the monkey example is that the monkeys never pay attention to what they’re writing. They never develop any sort of organic, aesthetic relationship to it; if they did, it would compromise the randomness necessary for the experiment. However, if those monkeys were human beings, then the moment Shakespeare happened it would drag the whole bunch of monkeys along with it, away from the junkheap of “1dor:eFLPoFRjWK78aXz” and towards normativity. If that sounds like Harold Bloom, don’t blame me: I didn’t make Shakespeare the gold standard for monkey type. This is less Bloom than it is Douglas Hofstadter: in Godel Escher Bach, Hofstadter argues that a set of determinate formal parameters (in this case, the fact that the typewriter has a given number of keys, and is being typed on by monkeys) can eventually produce a self-referential system with the capacity for meaning. This meaning, however, is always haunted by its own incompleteness, amounting finally to Hofstadter’s own Godelian sublime.
In other words, we should not think of monkeys-with-typewriters as a story about the presence or absence of intentionality in the non-human world; it is really a story about the aleatory genesis of meaning by and for human beings.
Of course, it is possible to argue that we should not distort the meaning of the example of monkeys with typewriters: the fact that such monkeys might remind us of human beings is not germane to the point of the thought-experiment. Similarly, the fact that a beach is where shore meets ocean is not germane to the point in “Against Theory,” and the fact that the toaster is broken is not germane to the nature of a toaster.
Two responses:
1. Easy distinctions between “accidental” and “necessary” states or causes frequently break down themselves. I might assume that the function of a broken toaster is still to make toast, and that the malfunction is an accident. If, instead of a toaster, you have an iPod, that assumption is totally unwarranted. The batteries always run out, and the mechanism itself usually dies as a result of planned obsolescence.
2. The insistence on throwing away the ladder that delivers us to a logical equation is partly a result of our modern situation. In a comment, Holbo writes:
A magic elf has five dollars but gives three to John. How much money does the elf have now?
Bob has five dollars but gives three to John. How much money does Bob have now?
Swampman, a creature generated by thermodynamic miracle, has five dollars but gives three to John. How much money does Swampman have now?
It seems to me the answer, in each case, is 2 dollars.
In each case the answer is 2 dollars, because in each case the point of the statement is purely algebraic. If function y equals x - 3, and x = 5, then y(x) = 2. It doesn’t matter if you call y “magic elf” or “Bob.” This is the logic of capital—it doesn’t matter who buys a pair of shoes, the store still makes a net profit of $2 per customer. It is also the logic of the cellphone or instant messaging conversation. If cellphone interference produces a garbled sentence, I still assume that the person on the other end of the line meant to speak clearly, and I reconstruct their sentence to the best of my ability. Hofstadter mentions that most people can be fooled into thinking that a chat session with a computer is a conversation with a living human being: in the context of Internet chat, passing the Turing test becomes an achievable benchmark. So every time we do converse via computer with a human being, we have to do a lot of imaginative work making them live in all their glorious intentionality and complexity. There is always a strain involved, and hopefully it is clear that in many cases this continual digital remastering of the world is something of a comforting lie. Certainly, modern pop and punk music has benefited enormously by bringing finally to consciousness the wealth of distorted and atonal sounds we are normally supposed to ignore.
Speaking of aleatory things, I will end by pointing out that intentionality can enter into a relation with the sublime, something already suggested by the image of someone writing in anticipation of the surf. The Aeolian harp did not die out with Coleridge; John Cage created aleatory music by having multiple radios playing simultaneously on stage (as Hofstadter notes). To a greater or lesser extent, the aleatoric artist sets the parameters for the work, and these more blatantly open constructions take the place of the more conventional standards for achieved communication. We can use the Lilliputian, almost kindly language of accident to describe this aleatoric movement, or we can use the High Romantic vocabulary of wreckage and death. Regardless, we should not fail to see that Knapp and Benn Michaels have put Wordsworth on the beach in order to erase Wordsworth, and to erase Einstein on the beach, and finally to exorcise the sand and waves themselves: the haunting poet, the living sea.
Comments
Quite enjoyed this post. Don’t have time for a real comment, but I wanted to contribute this quote to the conversation:
“If such a hypostasis, which changes the literary act into a literary object by the suppression of its intentional character, is not only possible but necessary in order to allow for a critical description, then we have not left the world in which the status of literary language is similar to that of a natural object. This assumption rests on a misunderstanding of the nature of intentionality. ‘Intent’ is seen, by analogy with a physical model, as a transfer of a psychic or mental content that exists in the mind of the poet to the mind of a reader, somewhat as one would pour wine for a jar into a glass. A certain content has to be transferred elsewhere, and the energy necessary to effect the transfer has to come from an outside source called intention. This is to ignore that the concept of intentionality is neither physical nor psychological in its nature, but structural, involving the activity of a subject regardless of its empirical concerns, except as far as they relate to the intentionality of the structure. The structural intentionality determines the relationship between the components of the resulting object in all its parts, but the relationship of the particular state of mind of the person engaged in the act of structurization to the structured object is altogether contingent. The structure of the chair is determined in all its components by the way the fact that it is destined to be sat on, but this structure in no way depends on the state of mind of the carpenter who is in the process of assembling its parts. The case of the work of literature is of course more complex, yet here also, the intentionality of the act, far from threatening the unity of the poetic entity, more definitely establishes this unity.”
-De Man, “Form and Intent in the American New Criticism,” in Blindness and Insight, p. 25
Not unproblematic, but the distinction between intentionality as a formal or structural property and intent as an empirical psychic or psychological state seems quite helpful to me in these sorts of discussions, and De Man’s treatment of the chair example seems a lot more to the point than screwdrivers in the sand: the latter leads us back from the functional object to its production in order to ground function in intention, but the former shows that when we get back to the act of production, it doesn’t guarantee intention, only intentionality. The craftsman may be a copyist (See also Heidegger on mimesis the Nietzsche book), and copying may be mechanical - monkey see monkey do…
Regardless, all this talk about monkeys on typewriters seems like a good excuse for me to pick up “Typewriter Ribbon” next in my exam prep. Maybe more later…
"In each case the answer is 2 dollars, because in each case the point of the statement is purely algebraic. [...] This is the logic of capital [...]”
“‘BEGONE, thou fond presumptuous Elf,’
Exclaimed an angry Voice,
‘Nor dare to thrust thy foolish self
Between me and my choice!’”
Elves give acorns, or sometimes leaves
That look like dollars, then fade away
If John gets three, under the tree
Who knows how much the elf displays?
Swampman’s dollars, too, are strange
Formed by lightning, swamp-bereft
With no odd tint, but from no mint
Does he have two *dollars* left?
The answer only stays the same
If capital asserts its claim
When language becomes atmospheric
Dollars themselves are not generic
Thanks, Joseph. Good poem, Rich. And now, to bed. (More later.)
I don’t know why I always feel that I must announce that I’m going to make a comment later, when I don’t have time to draft a proper one. I suppose making my intentions public forces me to follow through with them.
This post is interesting and I’ll be back to say something about it. I estimate this will occur on Thursday morning.
surlacarte:
What a terrific contribution, thank you.
You raise a point that had, at some point or other, been intended (ha!) for this post and then mislaid, which is the phenomenon of mimesis without knowledge. It is quite possible for me to photocopy, print, or reproduce by hand a text that I do not understand, and to present that to another person who will understand it. This is what happens some of the time when a book is typeset; it is also fundamental to our thinking about plagiarism (if I go ahead and claim ownership of that text, and understanding of it). Obviously, my intention is not equivalent to the “intentionality” of the text, even though I’m the one (re)producing it.
An addendum to my last comment: This “nonetheless existent structural intentionality” is very much how Hofstadter understands the relationship between the conscious mind, which thinks, and the network of neurons that constitute that mind without “understanding” what they are constituting.
Couple of quick points. First, I have to say that I find the notion of intentionality as a ‘structural’ or ‘formal’ property - as opposed to a functional property (or as psychological backing) - to be mystification. That is, we get dragged back to really hopeless notions about intention as ‘realized structure’. You get this from Ransom and Wimsatt back in the New Criticism days. These notions have a certain Well Wrought Urn-ish charm. The rhetoric of intention ‘in the structure of the work’ is quite charming. But it doesn’t point in any analytically fruitful direction.
De Man makes a show of rejecting the ‘wine into bottles’ metaphor, which might seem to get him off this hook. But really he is saying the same thing about intentionality that Cleanth Brooks says when he tries to explain ‘irony as a principle of structure’. (I rather like New Criticism and have a soft spot for Brooks, in particular. So I speak these words not in anger but in friendly diagnosis. De Man’s position is much less sophisticated than his tangled post-Heideggerese makes it seem.)
Also, re: the screwdriver. According to surlacarte, it “leads us back from the functional object to its production in order to ground function in intention, but the former shows that when we get back to the act of production, it doesn’t guarantee intention, only intentionality.” I made a specific point of saying that we could recognizing the screwdriver as a functional object without thinking about its origins at all. So I think I was trying to make surlacarte’s very point. (I said that, if prompted, we would probably be prepared to say that the screwdriver was made by someone who intended to make one. But being willing to say so - much less actually thinking so - is not a condition of the possibility of recognizing a screwdriver.)
Quick response to Kugelmass: I think you have misread me in a few basic ways. Which probably is my fault, since really this piece is supposed to go with a frame I didn’t provide. But here’s a start at that: I don’t use Paley against Plunkett. I merely point out that even if Paley is right, that is still no argument for Plunkett. Quite a different point. So there is no inconsistency in then turning to attack Paley.
Sorry, I ripped surlacarte’s quote out of context, orphaning ‘the former’, leaving it to spin its anaphoric wheels in vain. “The former shows that when ...” should read ‘the case of the chair shows that when ...’ But again, my point was that the case of the screwdriver is the same as that of the chair. And I think surlacarte is making the same point I was making (modulo disagreements about the utility of De Man’s notions of structure.)
Ha - just noticed that Bill Benzon quoted the exact same passage here two weeks ago in the comments on the John’s “Form, Function, Intention” post. I suppose I ought to go read that comment thread and come back.
Another response to Joseph: “In each case the answer is 2 dollars, because in each case the point of the statement is purely algebraic.”
Not exactly, at least not in relation to the discussion to which this potted case was a contribution. John Emerson objected to thought-experiments contains things that are very unlikely to exist. My point is that thought-experiments set the likelihood of something’s existence at 1, for thought-experimental purposes. If John has 5 dollars and he gives 2 dollars to Mary, the likelihood that John exists = 1. The likelihood that he had 5 dollars = 1. So forth. For story-problem purposes. There may, of course, be intellectual problems with setting the likelihood of certain things at 1. But one cannot simply assume that this is a problem. (Rich’s point about disappearing elf-gold is a good one, actually. I thought about it myself after I posted, except I was going to make it by means of a silly story about Bob, the round-square, giving 3 dollars to Sally, who was the sum of 1 + 2 = 4. Something that shows we are imagining a ‘world’ in which basic truths of arithmetic may not hold. Rich’s poem does the same work, in effect.)
Yes, I noticed that, too, surlacarte. (Just so Bill B doesn’t feel entirely left out of the conversation.)
Actually, I first quoted the De Man back in the days when I was a guest blogger. At that time I juxtaposed it against what cognitive linguists call the “conduit metaphor” for communication. You might want to review those few remarks on the conduit metaphor:
http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/de_man_fish_and_simulation/
I fear that Wordsworth on the beach is a last-ditch attempt to keep the conduit metaphor running in the face of obvious difficulties (e.g. the arbitrarieness of the sign).
BTW John, I think you’re right about what de Man is up to. And I’m doubtful about his chair example. If literary texts were like chairs in all important respects, only with more parts in more complex configurations, we wouldn’t have these problems.
Still haven’t read the comments to the “Form Function Intention” thread, but I did read the actual draft. I have a follow-up question for John about the comment vis-a-vis the article so that I can be sure I understand the article before I respond to the comment:
Under what definition of function (preferably one given in the draft of your article) can we “recognize the screwdriver as a functional object without thinking about its origins at all,” specifically without necessarily being “prepared to say that the screwdriver was made by someone who intended to make one”? And given such a definition, does the claim still apply to broken screwdrivers?
"Something that shows we are imagining a ‘world’ in which basic truths of arithmetic may not hold. Rich’s poem does the same work, in effect.”
Writing arguments as poems always seems like a good idea beforehand for some reason (to me, anyway), but it seems like most people just look at poems and drop them into a mental slot called [a poem], so they’re essentailly unread. So I’m glad that you read this one.
But, since I’m now elaborating on it, I can say that I think my point was slightly stronger. It’s not really that basic truths of arithmetic may not hold—I don’t think that anything in the given examples strikes at formally algebraic qualities—but that the same language that you use to describe the example necessarily means that you can’t have some kind of generic dollars in that same example.
In the case of Swampman, for instance, his mere existence means that the word “person” is somehow called into question, in terms of the assumptions that have always gone along with it, so he can’t have simple dollars either. The mere existence of the magical elf means that you can no longer assume that objects don’t appear or disappear, and that language that depends on that assumption—which “dollars” certainly does—can’t really be used without question.
But of course the use of dollars in the example also brings in a whole Marxist superstructure, because the assumption of indistinguishability is a key one for means of exchange. (Thus the Wordsworth poem with the voice shouting “don’t stand between me and my choice” seemed appropriate.) Let’s say that instead they were giving each other apples, something that neither elves nor Swampmen typically are thought to transform. (It seems more unlikely, anyway, that the original guy wandering in the swamp would have had 5 apples with him.) In that case some of the extra elements of complexity might go away.
“My point is that thought-experiments set the likelihood of something’s existence at 1, for thought-experimental purposes.”
But that’s not really true, for physics thought-experiments. In those, when you set the likelihood of something’s existence at 1, the important thing is not the mechanical bits, like Einstein’s elevator. The important thing is that you’re imagining that the universe works in a certain way—that the likelihood of a physical law existing is 1, I suppose. Then you use that assumption to predict what kinds of observations it would produce. But there’s really no unlikelihood about it; if you’re right that it exists, it exists everywhere.
surlacarte: “Under what definition of function (preferably one given in the draft of your article) can we “recognize the screwdriver as a functional object without thinking about its origins at all,” specifically without necessarily being “prepared to say that the screwdriver was made by someone who intended to make one”? And given such a definition, does the claim still apply to broken screwdrivers?”
Well, suppose, for whatever reason, I teach my children that the contents of the toolbox grow on trees. (This is not something I have actually attempted.) Presumably, after a while, they would figure out that something didn’t add up here. But kids are pretty credulous. In the meantime, I take it they could identify the the hammer, the screwdriver, so forth. And even learn to use them. I’m not really sure how it is that I identify screwdrivers. I’m sure it’s a pretty complex interaction between my eye and brain - among other things. I very much doubt I’m equipped with any definition of ‘screwdriver’ whatsoever, let alone one that makes no reference to origins. But, given that you could certainly teach someone to identify screwdrivers without teaching anything about origins, there must be some way it could be done. Works for broken screwdrivers, too. That a screwdriver was made by someone for driving screws is an inference FROM the fact that it is a screwdriver, NOT some independent bit of data that helps me leverage my way to an awareness of screwdriveriness. (I do admit that if, in some case, I had special awareness that someone intended to make a screwdriver - say, a somewhat inaccurate drawing of one by a child - that would, admittedly, help me recognize it.)
Rich writes [first quoting me]: ‘“My point is that thought-experiments set the likelihood of something’s existence at 1, for thought-experimental purposes.”
But that’s not really true, for physics thought-experiments. In those, when you set the likelihood of something’s existence at 1, the important thing is not the mechanical bits, like Einstein’s elevator. The important thing is that you’re imagining that the universe works in a certain way—that the likelihood of a physical law existing is 1, I suppose.”
I’m not sure whether this is what Rich intended, but it seems like a strong argument in favor of the propriety of swampman cases. Because, in those cases, the important thing is not how swampman got made but a different thing. The question is not what the likelihood of swampman is but, given swampman, what would happen concerning something else. Right?
Here’s another way to answer surlacarte’s question. An analogy. If I thought someone had replaced my iPod with a bomb that would explode if I pressed play, I wouldn’t press play. But when I do press play - as I tend to - it is not because I have reasoned that no one has replaced it with a bomb. I am, of course, prepared to form the believe that no one has replaced it with a bomb, if prompted by the right sort of question. (’Do you believe someone has ...?’ ‘No.’) But in the ordinary course of events, the proposition ‘someone has replaced my iPod with a bomb’ really plays no role in my psychic economy. It is, at most, some potential energy stored in some sort of generally coiled spring. I am disposed to form beliefs, if prompted. Likewise, I think ‘this screwdriver was made by someone’ probably plays a pretty small role in my psychic economy. When I see one on the beach I think ‘a screwdriver’. Not: ‘a screwdriver. Someone must have made it, because they don’t occur naturally.’) Although I am disposed to form the belief that someone made it, from a lot of other beliefs, if prompted.
In response to John:
I merely point out that even if Paley is right, that is still no argument for Plunkett.
It’s also not an argument against Plunkett. At the core, it seems that your argument against Plunkett is that he’s either paranoid, or simply out-of-date for a modern reader. While that may be true of his religious literalism, it’s not true of the simple experience of finding meaning in a landscape. That’s why my post focused on the forced evacuation of Romanticism from a conversation ostensibly about human intentions. From my perspective, Plunkett is more right about human experience than either Paley or “Against Theory.”
My point is that thought-experiments set the likelihood of something’s existence at 1, for thought-experimental purposes.
And so they do; however, what that something is is a function of connotation, normative associations, and context. In your set of three word problems, it is obvious that the changing cast of improbable monsters really stand for a purely mathematical function: subtraction.
But that doesn’t change what those same monsters might mean in other contexts, particularly if they aren’t sandwiched next to other, deliberately parallel thought experiments. Benn Michaels and Knapp could respond to me by saying, “Oh, it didn’t have to be Wordsworth, and it didn’t have to be a beach. It could have been the opening page of Moby Dick written on an Etch-A-Sketch.” To which I would respond: yes, it could have been, but it wasn’t, and in that alternate universe a whole other set of “excessive” meanings would have been generated.
That a screwdriver was made by someone for driving screws is an inference FROM the fact that it is a screwdriver, NOT some independent bit of data that helps me leverage my way to an awareness of screwdriveriness.
Human beings constantly use natural things as tools, even though those things may not have been intended for such uses. I can manufacture a knife, or I can see a piece of already broken obsidian and use that. The independent data of sharpness helps me leverage my way to an awareness of “knifeliness” or knifely potential.
The same is true for meaning.
Likewise, I think ‘this screwdriver was made by someone’ probably plays a pretty small role in my psychic economy. When I see one on the beach I think ‘a screwdriver’. Not: ‘a screwdriver. Someone must have made it, because they don’t occur naturally.’
You can form all sorts of hypotheses about an object lying on the beach, some explicit ("a screwdriver") and some implicit ("made by somebody rather than by Nature"). Regardless, it doesn’t change the fundamental situation:
a) What something is to you is a function of its structure, and not of another person’s intention. If somebody tells you they’ve produced a lovely toaster, and you can’t make it work, all their talk won’t mean a thing.
b) The fact that something is meaningful to you doesn’t necessarily mean that it was intentionally created, as with the rocks and the sea, and furthermore there’s no reason to think that unintentional things can’t or shouldn’t be meaningful, or that such meaning is spurious.
Updated: added a link to Ray’s remarkable post.
Ray, apologies.
I also enjoyed the post and surlacarte’s remarks. One nit:
“I generally agree with both Davis and Holbo: language is a functional melange of intention and accident. I would add that it is a functional result of intentions both conscious and unconscious.”
I hope it’s clear from my post that I don’t believe conscious intent is all that’s involved here. My own stance, in fact, may be a bit more extreme than yours: what we choose to call “conscious intention” and “unconscious intention” might best be understood as results of a patterning drive (in particular, narrative-making) rather than causes. In developmental psychology, “I” develops by telling stories about the “I”.
To agree with John’s defense of bizarre thought experiments, in this discussion screwdrivers aren’t being used to tightly fasten objects but as story props. That first function may have little in common with the second one, and the second one can obviously be taken by science-fictional Big Dumb Objects. My objection to the thought experiments of some analytic philosophers is that they seem to seek out Big Dumb Objects that will let them tell unrealistically trite stories.
Oh, goodness, Joseph, no problem—and thank you for the very kind words.
"The question is not what the likelihood of swampman is but, given swampman, what would happen concerning something else. Right?”
Nope. In physics, the question is, given Swampman, what would you observe? And then you notice that you don’t observe any of those things. Ergo, no Swampman.
In other words, in physics, this could be a sort of theory about thermodynamic miracles. If they were more common, maybe we’d occasionally see Swampmen wandering around. But they aren’t, so we don’t. But probably it would really be about elementary particle combinations, such that if they happened more often than plain thermo would make us expect, it would lead to some kind of long-lasting thing that we could detect. I think that Hawking’s bit about small black holes evaporating was of a similar order; if you assume that virtual particles work a certain way, you can sneak mass out of black holes, even though normal gravity says that you can’t. And that’s detectable, at least in theory (I haven’t done physics in so long, I’ve forgotten whether someone has designed some clever experiment to detect it.)
In other words, in physics, if you design an experiment that should detect whatever your thought experiment predicts, and you don’t detect it, you have to give up on the thought experiment. I took John Emerson’s objection to mean, at least in part, that even though philosophers don’t think that Swampman could ever really exist, they still don’t want to give up on the idea.
To agree with John’s defense of bizarre thought experiments, in this discussion screwdrivers aren’t being used to tightly fasten objects but as story props. That first function may have little in common with the second one, and the second one can obviously be taken by science-fictional Big Dumb Objects.
This gets at one of the most important issues here: the legitimacy of what Ray calls a “Big Dumb Object.” To begin with, few scientists interact with Big Dumb Objects. They’re out in the field, collecting quarrelsome, imperfect, complex data. Few literary critics encounter such things either, dealing as they must with character, setting, plot, implicature, and so on. Arguably, philosophy may have some use for the B.D.O., but not if it wants to discuss something as nuanced as intentionality. I want to highlight Ray’s use of the word “unrealistic”—the point is not to insult Knapp and Benn Michaels for telling a bad story, but rather to question whether denatured stories can make any claim to the truth in matters like these, other than revealing an authorial drive towards that very denaturing.
With all due respect to Ray, the problem with these sorts of thought experiments isn’t that they are Big Dumb Objects - or Big Dumb Narrative Objects, as in Kaveney’s original formula, I think it was. I think philosophers gravitate, rather, to an ungainly sort of twee. The way you can tell that they aren’t BDNO’s is that no one writes fanfic about Putnam’s twin-earth. QED.
"Nope. In physics, the question is, given Swampman, what would you observe? And then you notice that you don’t observe any of those things. Ergo, no Swampman.”
But if it’s a thought-experiment, you won’t observe anything. I think you are confusing thought-experiments with plain old experiments, Rich.
"an ungainly sort of twee”
Best description of the literary frustrations of Hofstadter’s book, ever.
"What something is to you is a function of its structure, and not of another person’s intention.”
But this isn’t the case when you are considering, say, someone else’s actions - that is, something in which someone else’s intentions are an essential part. Or, to take an even simpler case: when the something IS another person’s intention. Not to be a pain about it, but this is sort of the point at issue.
No, it’s a question of (...drumroll...) function. A physicist would never design a thought-experiment that could not be confirmed or disconfirmed by observation. That would be meaningless, within the context of physics. Thought experiments aren’t real experiments, but they are supposed to lead to them, at least in theory. Einstein’s work is remembered not because of the cool elevator thing, but because that idea led to experiments in which the effects were actually detected.
Which is not to say that philosophers are barred from thinking about purely imaginary things. But the problem with Swampman is that it doesn’t seem to be about an imaginary thing. Swampman is formed by a natural accident, not by a wizard’s spell. Therefore a context is being imported that doesn’t apply.
To move on to Joseph’s second point: “The fact that something is meaningful to you doesn’t necessarily mean that it was intentionally created, as with the rocks and the sea, and furthermore there’s no reason to think that unintentional things can’t or shouldn’t be meaningful, or that such meaning is spurious.”
I think the problem here is that we are slopping across the line between presumptively different senses of meaning. The meaning/intention theses don’t purport to dictate what you can find significant - important, spiritually meaningful, large in existential implication. That’s something else entirely.
"A physicist would never design a thought-experiment that could not be confirmed or disconfirmed by observation. That would be meaningless, within the context of physics. Thought experiments aren’t real experiments, but they are supposed to lead to them, at least in theory.”
There’s something to this, but it is going to score against such a mass of philosophical thought-experiments - all of the ones ever used in ethics, for example - that I think it would have been sporting for the critics to announce at the start that they were really leading up to a demand for empirical testability.
I suppose I shouldn’t kick against the swamp pricks so hard, because I actually agree that the experiment is problematic - encourages bad intuitions. But I have haughtily rejected the grounds on which others have been inclined to reject him. ONLY I MAY REFUTE SWAMPMAN!
And Hofstadter can’t even blame his tweeness on being a philosopher as he was trained as a physicist. But then, calling a physics book The Eightfold Way has a bit of twee about it, no?
The meaning/intention theses don’t purport to dictate what you can find significant - important, spiritually meaningful, large in existential implication. That’s something else entirely.
They do, though—if I find a particular reading of a story important and spiritually meaningful, and then the author disavows that interpretation, intentionalism says that I must be wrong—or, if I am right, that communication still hasn’t been achieved. Whereas, from my point of view, if the reading holds up, then the author is wrong, and in fact there has been true understanding.
The only way to arrive at a knowledge of another person’s intentions is through their words and deeds, all of which constitute a text (since we aren’t telepaths). It is up to me, not them, to determine what their true intentions might be. I am free, if I wish, to put my faith in a particular assertion of theirs, even one that contradicts a general pattern, but this is a decision that I make as a reader, and not one they can make for me.
In other words, for Knapp and Benn Michaels there is a difference between communication and sympathy (as Emerson or Thoreau might have defined it). You can feel in subjective sympathy with anything, but you can only communicate with another purposive being according to its intentions. For me there is no difference, and I think this is why Knapp and Benn Michaels felt compelled to make their thought-experiment about Wordsworth—that infamous Aeolian harp—writing on a beach.
How important have “readings” been in cultural history? Does anyone actually care about readings outside of a small intellectual community that hardly even existed prior to the 20th century? How is it that this small community has arrived at the odd notion that their “readings” are the most important understandings of texts that we’ve got? How did all those writers and readers, story tellers and audiences, playwrights, actors, and audiences, ever get along without professional literary scholars telling them what texts mean?
"Readings” are just a contemporary term for modes of interpretation, criticism, and evaluation that have always existed. Certainly, Romanticism goes back a long way before the 20th Century.
"There’s something to this, but it is going to score against such a mass of philosophical thought-experiments - all of the ones ever used in ethics, for example - that I think it would have been sporting for the critics to announce at the start that they were really leading up to a demand for empirical testability.”
But no one really expects empirical testability for ethics. People do expect that Swampmen emerging from a bolt of lightning and some muck do or do not exist, though. It doesn’t really matter whether the philosopher announces that this isn’t intended to be an empirically testable Swampman; the context of that particular thought experiment demands it.
Wow, a lot of conversation has happened since my last comment! Thanks for the responses, John, but they don’t actually answer my question. I’m not asking to be convinced that we can “recognize the screwdriver as a functional object without thinking about its origins at all.” I am actually quite convinced about this already. I especially agree with your claim, “That a screwdriver was made by someone for driving screws is an inference FROM the fact that it is a screwdriver, NOT some independent bit of data that helps me leverage my way to an awareness of screwdriveriness.” But your claim is that this is because of function rather than structure, and I’m willing to entertain the conclusion that it’s because of function only on the condition that I know what function means, and that it is defined in such a way that it doesn’t require us to identify the origins of an object as a condition of identifying it’s function. I don’t see a definition of function in your article that, at least as I understand it, allows us to conclude that a screwdriver on the beach is a screwdriver except on the condition that it was built with the intention of driving screws.
So what I’d really like is a definition of function rather than another thought experiment. The screwdriver is just fine on its own, at least so far.
"People do expect that Swampmen emerging from a bolt of lightning and some muck do or do not exist, though. It doesn’t really matter whether the philosopher announces that this isn’t intended to be an empirically testable Swampman; the context of that particular thought experiment demands it.”
But this is precisely the issue, Rich. I say that they don’t expect this, so the context doesn’t demand it. You say they do. What you need to give me, Rich, is some reason to believe that people OUGHT to expect that swampman will be empirically testable, even if (like me) they presently think that’s not the issue.
surlacarte, I don’t think we actually do identify screwdrivers by means of definitions. I think it works some other way, so I can’t provide the definition that ‘allows us to conclude that a screwdriver on the beach is a screwdriver’. I think the answer to that question is: none. On the other hand, when theorizing about functions, I think we are tempted by an inconsistent mix of Cummins-functions and Wright-functions, per the draft. Cummins-functions, which are defined in terms of the contributions of the parts of the system to the whole (that’s an oversimple gloss), are your best candidates for what people actually ‘see’ when they pick up a screwdriver in the sand. The feature of this sort of function that is thought to make them paradoxical, as a general account - namely, radical interest relativity - is not a problem as a hypothesis about the minds of beachcombers.
I do see your point now. You are more or less hinting at a critique of strong Millikanism. Namely, origins can’t be everything, since they can’t be how we identify things in a preliminary sort of on-the-beach way. But I don’t think she would be committed to saying otherwise. (Still, it would be an interesting question to ask her. What pre-theoretic notion do people actually work with?)
Joseph [quoting me, to start with]: “The meaning/intention theses don’t purport to dictate what you can find significant - important, spiritually meaningful, large in existential implication. That’s something else entirely.
They do, though—if I find a particular reading of a story important and spiritually meaningful, and then the author disavows that interpretation, intentionalism says that I must be wrong.”
Some intentionalists - Hirsch, for example - draw the distinction explicitly (if not completely coherently.) Knapp and Michaels don’t draw it, but they pretty clearly need to. The distinction can be drawn. Intentionalism doesn’t have a snowball’s chance without it. Part of meaning is, for example, just natural implication. Bird tracks mean birds. That’s not semantics or intentionality, and it certainly needn’t be intended by any author (Plunkett notwithstanding.)
Joseph—It may well be that the term “readings” grandfathers in all sorts of things, but the kind of thing that has been routine in literature departments for 3/4s of a century is relatively rare outside those departments and was relatively rare prior to the 20th century. Even if I grant you back to Romanticism, most of literary history took place prior to it. For the most part, literary texts have managed to circulate through society without benefit of “readings,” just informal chit-chat among friends and acquaintances. Whatever literary culture depends on, it isn’t the activity of writing out interpretive readings for the consumption of a small body of people.
John,
What do you mean by “drawing the distinction”? Of course we both agree about implicature, but how does that (or any particular distinction that might be drawn) resurrect intent in any extra-textual sense?
I want to briefly quote Knapp and Michaels, in order to clarify where I disagree with them:
From the standpoint of an argument against critical theory, then, the only important question about intention is whether there can in fact be intentionless meanings. If our argument against theory is to succeed, the answer to this question must be no.
From this point of view, then, you really cannot have meaning unless it is founded on intention, and you have to distinguish between the “interpretation of signs” in language and all other cases of inductive reasoning from indices, a move that cannot possibly be justified.
Bill,
For the most part, literary texts have managed to circulate through society without benefit of “readings,” just informal chit-chat among friends and acquaintances. Whatever literary culture depends on, it isn’t the activity of writing out interpretive readings for the consumption of a small body of people.
Well, literary criticism as part of Western literary culture has been around since the Greeks, and it has been vital since then. Even Plato’s commentaries on art qualify as “readings” of the art of his time. Then Aristotle’s Poetics, Longinus On The Sublime, and so forth. There are exegetical traditions within many different religions, of course, and not only in the West.
But even if criticism, or the meta-critical theories of perspectivism and existentialism, were relatively new (and aspects of them are), that wouldn’t diminish their potential truth-value. Many of our most fundamental ideas about the world come from the scientific revolutions of the 20th Century.
"Of course we both agree about implicature, but how does that (or any particular distinction that might be drawn) resurrect intent in any extra-textual sense?”
I don’t really understand this, Joseph. Intent in an extra-textual sense would be any plan someone has, no? Also, we may or may not agree about implicature, but it isn’t obviously relevant. Implicature is an essentially intentional notion. Implication is not. I’m now confused about what point you are making.
I’m also confused; you wrote that Michaels and Knapp failed to draw a distinction that they needed, and should have drawn, but I wasn’t quite clear on what the content of that distinction should have been.
I thought, at some point prior, that you were trying to distance yourself from surlacarte’s proferred “structural” theory of intent, a theory with which I agree. My comments were intended as a defense of that structural theory; perhaps the best thing is to see how you want to respond to surlacarte on the question of “function.” That will give me a better sense of what’s at stake for you here, and how I might contribute.
John, re: “I don’t think we actually do identify screwdrivers by means of definitions” - I don’t think my comments suggest in any way that we identify screwdrivers by means of definitions. Rather, I’m simply trying to understand the meaning of your claim that we can “recognize the screwdriver as a functional object without thinking about its origins at all,” i.e. without necessarily being “prepared to say that the screwdriver was made by someone who intended to make one.” I need to understand what you mean by functional object so that I can evaluate the validity of the second part of the claim. Obviously you have some definition of “function” in mind or you wouldn’t have used the word in a sentence, no?
It’s a rather good strategy to avoid answering that question before you know my specific objection, but I’ll take “an inconsistent mix of Cummins-functions and Wright-functions” as at least a preliminary answer. My hypothesis would be that in either case (Cummins and Wright functions) thinking that a screwdriver has a function always already requires that we be “prepared to say that the screwdriver was made by someone who intended to make one,” i.e. that in either case, going back to the origin is a “condition of the possibility of recognizing a screwdriver,” contrary to your earlier statement.
In the case of the Wright function, it’s fairly obvious that calling the screwdriver a functional object is synonymous with making a claim about its origin. If we call the screwdriver a Wright function, we are saying that it is exists “because” it is capable of driving screws which is to say, we are making a claim about the cause of its existence. If we identify it as a screwdriver but are not prepared to make a claim about its origin, then we are not calling the screwdriver a Wright function, and must concede that we’ve identified it as a screwdriver by some other means.
I’m not sure in the case of Cummins functions because I still don’t totally understand the concept or how the screwdriver would be a Cummins function. What is the “whole” and what are the “parts” here? Is driving screws the whole that is explained by the parts of the screwdriver, or is the screwdriver the part that is explained by its role in a larger system, which includes driving screws?
Anyway, in a sense, I’m doing exactly the opposite of what you suggest I’m doing. “The critique of strong Millikanism,” that “origins can’t be everything, since they can’t be how we identify things in a preliminary sort of on-the-beach way” seems to be your claim (at least in your last two comments to me), rather than mine. I’m actually suggesting that, as long as we define screwdrivers in terms of function, we do need to go back to the origin. If we can identify screwdrivers without going back to the origin, it isn’t because of function. I haven’t decided yet whether this suggestion is correct, nor whether the appropriate follow-up conclusion would be to go back to the origin and explain it without recourse to empirical, psychological intention (as, I think De Man attempts to do) or, alternatively, to abandon “function” as the basis of screwdriverness in favor of “structure.” But those follow-up conclusions are irrelevant until we decide whether it is possible to identify a screwdriver as a functional object (whatever that means...) without simultaneously implying a claim about its origins.
Apologies to Joseph, I’m not going to respond to your post because I don’t understand it. I do have something for John Holbo though, following up on
[O]rigins can’t be everything, since they can’t be how we identify things in a preliminary sort of on-the-beach way. But I don’t think [Millikan] would be committed to saying otherwise. (Still, it would be an interesting question to ask her. What pre-theoretic notion do people actually work with?)
What she calls “conceptions” (horrible terminology) are the ways we actually go about identifying things in the real world. We decide it’s a screwdriver because it looks so-and-so, because somebody called it a screwdriver (even though we can’t see it ourselves very well), because it’s obviously the object that that guy over there just used to put some screws in. These methods are all fallible, some very much so, and there’s no expectation that we all apply the same ones.
Her point is that there’s an ontological level at which it is really a screwdriver (based on origins) and an epistemic level at which we perceive it as a screwdriver. When things are working properly our perception is accurate (it’s adjusted for accuracy by our evolutionary history), but it can be fooled.
And she certainly isn’t saying that we are thinking about origins when we decide (on the beach) that the thing “is” a screwdriver. The point of the ontological level is that there should be a category of screwdrivers that is connected by origins (copying, causal links), because otherwise knowing things about one screwdriver won’t help you make predictions about another. (Or might help but only by accident; tools already start to challenge this idea, since they can be independantly invented and yet the constraints of their function will produce regularities that can support inductions.) But if that ontological-level category exists, it’s perfectly reasonable to use whatever fallible means you have available to get to grips with it.
With regard to “meaning” it comes down again to a distinction which she makes very systematically, between what’s “really” there at an ontological level (roughly, the intentional input by the author—although the conventional nature of the signs complicates matters) and what the interpreter perceives. A lot of the disagreements seem to come down to trying to say that “meaning” refers only or preferentially to one of these, or must necessarily refer to both. From my outside-the-field perspective it seems natural to respond by defining some more fine-grained terminology, and admitting that it doesn’t line up too closely with the normal use of the word “meaning”.
If you make this move, then the Knapp and Michaels quote Joseph singled out degenerates to tautology:
From the standpoint of an argument against critical theory, then, the only important question about intention is whether there can in fact be intentionless meanings-intended-by-the-author.
Of course there can’t be, and of course an interpreter can find music in the play of the waves or meaning(-as-significant-response) in a sunset. (Yes, linguistic meaning at the interpreter end is more systematic; I’m pushing the extreme argument for admitting the term is hopelessly ambivalent.)
I should have been more careful about “meaning”: Millikan carefully distinguishes at least three types, none of which is exactly speaker intention. In very short, I have the same doubts as about tools --that regardless of origins the constraints of function can support inductions-- but multipled enormously: there isn’t much to words except function.
Put differently: we “should” align our concepts to ontologically-real natural kinds (dogs, water, etc.) because that way we can get around the world better. Why “should” we (in Millikan’s evolutionary sense) align our interpretations to the causal histories of the words? Or to speaker intentions? Clearly we should to some extent, but it’s much less clear that this should be exclusive, and particularly so in the case of literary (poetic) language.
Thanks, Tikitu. I found both of your comments quite helpful. A couple points:
1) Why does do you claim that even the “ontological level” is still necessarily determined by origin? Doesn’t the distinction between ontology and perception simply reinscribe the same debate? In other words, Millikan, as you describe her, might help us displace, as no longer relevant, arguments like Holbo’s about how we actually perceive the screwdriver, but does that necessarily mean that screwdriverness is still ontologically determined by origin rather than structure or function?
2) Even if we grant that “there should be a category of screwdrivers that is connected by origins” and we agree to call that “ontological” (and this is a move I’m certainly willing to consider), it doesn’t follow that “origin” is synonymous with author’s/maker’s intention, especially in the case of the literary text. This, I think, allows me to express quite clearly why I needed the De Man quote and the discussion of the craftsman as copyist. If the craftsman can learn to blindly copy without knowing what he copies (the chair is a bad example because it’s hard to imagine a craftsman who doesn’t know exactly what a chair is, but perhaps with a more complex object - a literary text or Holbo’s “lorem ipsum") then the functionality of the object is not contingent on the craftsman’s intention. We might still account for the origin in terms of function (maybe the only reason there was a chair there to copy was because chairs are good for sitting on, and this particular chair would not exist without there being a chair there to copy), but the origin is now longer the labor of the craftsman (the origin is the original chair), and the ontology of the object is no longer controlled by his intention. This, I would suggest, is exactly what happens in language, composed as it is of borrowed words, phrases, metaphors, genre forms, etc. from multiple overlapping traditions that one cannot master, gathered without necessarily being guided by a fixed intention. In this way, Knapp & Michaels aren’t really stating a tautology - even when the word “meaning” is used to refer exclusively to origin, there can be intentionless meaning because writing is not inherently driven by intention.
Another way to explain this is to say that deconstruction formulates a “split origin,” an origin that is never one, never present, whether as a conscious intention of the author (What would this even mean? Would a conscious intention be language in the thoughts of the author? What, then would ground the meaning of these thought-words?) or even as unconscious intention insofar as the unconscious is thought of as an entity (homologous to consciousness but inaccessible to it) rather than a process by which the uncontrollable play of copies inscribe a trace. This would amount to saying that all writing is similar in certain ways to Wordsworth’s words appearing on a beach - if all there is is author’s intention, then all poetry, or at least the best, no longer counts as language, in K & M’s definition, precisely because it doesn’t not originate in an empirical, psychological intention, but rather in the intentionless literary act that can be belatedly hypostatized into the intentional structure of a literary object.
Tikitu,
If there’s any way I can clarify the post, or at least parts of it, tell me; I would hate to leave things in obscurity.
The Millikan paraphrase:
The point of the ontological level is that there should be a category of screwdrivers that is connected by origins (copying, causal links), because otherwise knowing things about one screwdriver won’t help you make predictions about another.
Also:
Put differently: we “should” align our concepts to ontologically-real natural kinds (dogs, water, etc.) because that way we can get around the world better.
Certainly, human beings can create categories that have predictive value; they can identify patterns (such as a pattern that defines a given tool) and expect that pattern to recur.
However, there is no such thing as the ontological level of the screwdriver. For one thing, if there were no screws, a screwdriver would essentially be a chisel or prybar. The very existence of an “ontological level” implies a non-contextual Being of things. Is the ontological level of a German shepherd the same as that of a chihuahua? Certainly, in some circumstances, it is useful to call both animals “dogs,” as though they came from the same Platonic form, but in other contexts they are totally dissimilar. When human beings evolved from simians, did some new form burst into existence on the level of ontology? We should accept that, with no offense meant to inductive reasoning and categorical thought, these are the products of the human mind that enable us to interact with reality, not (ever) reality itself, about which nothing definitive can be said.
The situation gets even worse when it comes to human intentions. For Freud and other psychoanalysts, the “ontological” level of the mind is the unconscious. I don’t think we need to accept that hierarchy, but the reverse doesn’t work either.
The fundamental problem here is that our def