Meillassoux’s argument against correlationism is not too complicated, but covers a lot of deep philosophical material. Here I will present the structure of the argument first, and then do some textual exegesis to support that as well as discuss some of Harman’s criticisms of this chapter.
Remember that we earlier defined “correlationism” in this manner:
(1) Verificationism- We cannot coherently think of reality as unthought (from the British empiricists originally, though Berkeley actually argued for it). Note that this arguably entails that if P is true, then it is possible for someone to know that P is true, but that in itself it places no restriction upon who is doing the knowing, it maybe could be "knowable by an infinite mind." Arguments concerning Finitude are typically what force the verificationism to be knowable by something human-like.
(2) Embodiment/Embeddedness-We cannot coherently think of humans without thinking of them as embedded in a reality ( Schopenhauer and then later Heidegger developing Kant's claim that concepts without intuitions are empty, Schopenhauer with respect to the body and Heidegger with respect to a reality experienced as in some sense pre-existing, modal (involving possibilities), and valuative).
(3) Finitude- We cannot coherently think of self-subsistent totalities/absolutes (from Kant’s dialectic, which is often taken to entail that we can therefore only think of finite totalities in relation to us; Graham Priest has a different analysis of these kinds of arguments, one that makes him in the speculative realist who rejects both Finitude and Verificationism, but who like Meillassoux argues from this by radicalizing correlationism).
Here is the first part of Meillassoux’s argument, from (2.2 (pp. 13-15)).
1. Let A be the sentence, ‘Event Y occurred x number of years before the emergence of humans.’ A seems to undermine the correlationist claim that being and thought cannot be separated, as scientists are thinking of truth making events existing in the absence of any thinkers.
2. The correlationist can say that the sentence is always false, in the manner of contemporary creationists, but they understandably don’t want to do this.
3. Instead, they typically give an account of such scientific statements being part of a “founded mode” defined over something more originary involving human practices and perceptions. In this manner, they actually double the meaning of the sentence. The error is thinking the sentence is true and originary, but understood as founded it can be true.
4. So according to this strategy, A is true for the scientists, or more broadly for us, but not true from an external, absolute “God’s eye” perspective that does not involve human thinkability. So we must distinguish Aus versus Aabsolute. Aus is true, while Aabsolute is false or meaningless.
In 2.3 (pp. 16-18) Meillassoux continues the argument. His first criticism is the following.
5. The claim that Aus is true and Aabsolute is false or meaningless directly contradicts the scientist's own understanding of the meaning of A! When the correlationist says Aus is true, the assertion gives rise to a Euthyphro dilemma. (5.1) Aus asserts the following: “Event Y occurred x number of years before the emergence of humans” correlates with a set of verification procedures followed by scientists that lead them to assert A. (5.2) Scientists hold that this is the case for the following reason: The set of verification procedures followed by scientists leads them to assert A because event Y occurred x number of years before the emergence of humans.
6. The correlationist could outright deny 5.2, but this would be to lapse into Idealism, holding that scientists’ verification procedures caused reality to be the way it is.
7. Or the correlationist could just refuse to assert 5.2, perhaps because it is meaningless, or perhaps out of some kind of Wittgensteinian quietism, but this again leads to a contradiction of what the scientist means.
To be fair, at this point the correlationist could just bite the bullet and hold that when scientists philosophize about their own results, they almost uniformly get it wrong. To many of us, this is as unsatisfying as the creationist from Premise 2, but it is a common move in philosophy. However, in the end it does not help the correlationist, because Meillassoux lets the hammer fall. Not only does the correlationist’s understanding of why Aus is true involve a form of bad faith, the correlationist herself cannot affirm either that Aabsolute is false or meaningless! Meillassoux gives this argument in In3.3 (pp. 22-26).
8. In any case, the claim that Aabsolute is false or meaningless contradicts Finitude. Saying anything about Aabsolute requires claiming knowledge about an absolute, which the correlationist claims we cannot have.
I wish I could teach Graham Priest’s Beyond the Limits of Thought in this class, because he makes the exact same claim and shows that the argument for this claim is actually a version of Russell’s Paradox.
Anyhow, as far as I can tell the above is Meillassoux's actual argument against correlationism in this chapter. Remember that Meillassoux himself will respond to this by keeping the Verificationism and rejecting Finitude.
1 (pp. 1-9)
1.1 (pp. 1-3)
The book begins and ends with a discussion of primary and secondary qualities. In a strange sense, the entire dialectic works to resuscitate the distinction. The first two paragraphs are a beautiful and evocative description of how the distinction spontaneously occurs to us with respect to pain and taste (in us, not in the things themselves) and then why we extend it to qualities such as color (sights instead of tastes).
But correlationism undermines the distinction. Since it undermines our ability to sensibly talk about things in themselves, it undermines our ability to say that “the sensible is a relation, rather than a property inherent in the thing.” (AF 2)
The version of the distinction that Meillassoux wants to defend in the end of the book claims that: “all those aspects of the object that can be formulated in mathematical terms can be meaningfully conceived as properties of the object itself.”[1]
[I should note that it is possible to be moved by Meillassoux’s critique of correlationism but still not think there is a meaningful distinction between primary and secondary qualities, other than some primary qualities true of us (such as the fact that I have hair, or am in pain) and some primary qualities true of the non-sapient (such as the fact that it can be modeled by math, or that it is painful).]
1.2 (pp. 3-5)
In this section Meillassoux shows how correlationism disallows the characterization of primary properties as those that exist independently of humans. Instead, primary qualities are at best ones that are universalizable or shareable in some sense. So the best you get is inter-subjectivity. This is also what happens to truth under correlationism, since there is no independent reality by which to determine whether or not a sentence is true. Thus, the best one can do is arrive at sentences that achieve universal agreement.
Elsewhere Meillassoux (AF 42-43) argues that this may be unsustainable and lead to what Harman calls Very Strong Correlationism, since the Correlationist must absolutize the correlate (sacrificing Finitude) in order to defend universality!
1.3 (pp. 5-6)
Meillassoux defines correlationism here. At this point, he essentially works the Finitude into the way he states the “two step,” which are what we call Verificationism and Embodied/Embeddedness.
Quite brilliant ending paragraph on how correlationism determines meta-philosophy: Cartesians worried about the subject-object relation, phenomenologists the noetico-moematic, and analytic philosophers the language-referent relation. So philosophy primarily tries to describe the correlates.
1.4 (pp. 6-7)
We get the basic Berkeleyan insight through Francis Wolff and Meillassoux’s assertion that this is in the DNA of analytic and continental philosophers if we just look at many of the dominant research programs (in analytical philosophy it’s certainly true of Richard Rorty, Brandom, and Brandom’s students, but not so much many metaphysics, though I would argue it is true of metaphysicians too wedded to Quine’s “to be is to be the value of a bound variable” ideal language methodology).
1.5 (pp. 7-9)
Nice quote- “And in fact, the critiques of representation have not signaled a break with correlation.” Could be the epigraph for my next book.
Very nice discussion of Heidegger and Ereignis, how the late Heidegger didn’t really get out of the Daseinocentrism that led to aporias in Being and Time.
So we are breaking with all of this when we return primary qualities. In the next part Meillassoux is going to show what is wrong with correlationism.
2.1 (pp. 9-18)
I will call ‘ancestral’ any reality anterior to the emergence of the human species- or even anterior to every recognized form of life on earth . . . I will call ‘arche-fossil’ . . . materials indicating the existence of an ancestral reality or event; one that is anterior to terrestrial life (AF 10)
Meillassoux thinks that correlationsism cannot correctly interpret these statements.
Note that Absolute Idealism can, they describe a fact correlated with in the mind of God (even if that God is a pantheistic one), but Meillassoux will later argue that this view involves giving up Finitude. So the correlationist cannot succumb to the Idealist (we will discuss this at length in the next chapters). Meillassoux wants to keep Verificationism, and embodied/embeddedness while not succumb to absolute idealism. He does this by rejecting Finitude, not via Graham Priest type Russell-Paradox arguments, but rather by his argument concerning contingency.
And of course the Cartesian has no problem with ancestral statements, “from a Cartesian perspective, ancestral statements are statements whose referents can be posited as real (albeit in the past) once they are taken to have been validated by empirical science at a given stage of its development.” (AF 12)
2.2 (pp. 13-15) Meillassoux’s Euthyphronic Dilemma Part 1
In this section we get most of the first four steps of the argument:
1. Let A be the sentence, ‘Event Y occurred x number of years before the emergence of humans.’ A seems to undermine the correlationist claim that being and thought cannot be separated, as scientists are thinking of truth making events existing in the absence of any thinkers.
2. The correlationist can say that the sentence is always false, in the manner of contemporary creationists, but they understandably don’t want to do this.
3. Instead, they typically give an account of such scientific statements being part of a “founded mode” defined over something more originary involving human practices and perceptions. In this manner, they actually double the meaning of the sentence. The error is thinking the sentence is true and originary, but understood as founded it can be true.
4. So according to this strategy, A is true for the scientists, or more broadly for us, but not true from an external, absolute “God’s eye” perspective that does not involve human thinkability. So we must distinguish Aus versus Aabsolute. Aus is true, while Aabsolute is false or meaningless.
Here’s the key quote.
Semantic Doubling (cf. Lee Braver on Heiddegger’s problem passages)
Consider the following ancestral statement: ‘Event Y occurred x number of years before the emergence of humans.’ The correlationist philosopher will in no way intervene in the content of this statement: he will not contest the claim that it is in fact event Y that occurred, nor will he contest the dating of this event. No - he will simply add - perhaps only to himself, but add it he will - something like a simple codicil, always the same one, which he will discretely append to the end of the phrase: event Y occurred x number of years before the emergence of humans - for humans (or even, for the human scientist). . . .Accordingly, when confronted with an ancestral statement, correlationism postulates that there are at least two levels of meaning in such a statement: the immediate, or realist meaning; and the more originary correlationist meaning, activated by the codicil (AF 14).
This whole discussion is really rich. It relates to Carnaps internal/external distinction as well as philosophers like Brandom, Robert Kraut, andMark Lance who are committed to analogous things.
He also notes that since the (weak and strong) correlationist(s) takes objectivity to just be intersubjectivity, then the correlationist ratifies the ancestral statement by its intersubjectivity, but still must interpret this statement in a way radically at odds with the scientist’s own (Cartesian) understanding of it. We really see how logical positivism counts as just as correlationist as classical phenomenology in this discussion.
2.3 (pp. 16-18) Meillassoux’s Eythyphronic Dilemma Part 2
In this section we get most of the following.
5. The claim that Aus is true and Aabsolute is false or meaningless directly contradicts the scientist's own understanding of the meaning of A! When the correlationist says Aus is true, the assertion gives rise to a Euthyphro dilemma. (5.1) Aus asserts the following: “Event Y occurred x number of years before the emergence of humans” correlates with a set of verification procedures followed by scientists that lead them to assert A. (5.2) Scientists hold that this is the case for the following reason: The set of verification procedures followed by scientists leads them to assert A because event Y occurred x number of years before the emergence of humans.
6. The correlationist could outright deny 5.2, but this would be to lapse into Idealism, holding that scientists’ verification procedures caused reality to be the way it is (in later Chapters Meillassoux shows that such Idealism violates Finitude).
7. Or the correlationist could just refuse to assert 5.2, perhaps because it is meaningless, or perhaps out of some kind of Wittgensteinian quietism, but this again leads to a contradiction of what the scientist means.
I should strongly note here that if this were the end of the story, the correlationist could just bite the bullett and hold that scientists are not deluded about the truth values of their first order claims, they just are massively deluded about important second order claims concerning the ontological meaning of those claims. This seems perfectly ridiculous to me, in part because the first order/ second order distinction just will not bear this explanatory weight. But in any case Meillassoux doesn’t need to argue against too strongly against the bullet biting, as his final maneuver in section 3.3 puts to rest correlationism. Anyhow, here’s the main quote that justifies much of the above.
Meillassoux’s Euthyphronic Challenge.[2]
. . . .if ancestral statements derived their value solely from the current universality of their verification they would be completely devoid of interest for the scientists who take the trouble to validate them. One does not validate a measure just to demonstrate that this measure is valid for all scientists; one validates it in order to determine what is measured. It is because certain radioactive isotopes are capable of informing us about a past event that we try to extract from them a measure of their age: turn this age into something unthinkable and the objectivity of the measure becomes devoid of sense and interest, indicating nothing beyond itself. Science does not experiment with a view to validating the universality of its experiments. . . (AF 17)
We want to say with common sense that the scientists’ measurements come out the way they do because they measure the way things are. Meillassoux thinks that the correlationist is forced to either deny this truism or to be committed to the other Euthyphronic horn, which would not be correlationism, but idealism, making reality causally dependent upon the scientists’ measurement.[3]
Harman notes that here Meillassoux’s considers whether semantic doubling makes correlationism collapses into Berkeleyan Idealism, quoting this passage.
it is as if the distinction between transcendental idealism - the idealism that is (so to speak) urbane, civilized, and reasonable - and speculative or even subjective idealism - the idealism that is wild, uncouth, and rather extravagant -it is as if this distinction . . . which separates Kant from Berkeley . . . became blurred and dissolved in light of the fossil matter . (AF 17-18)
But the Meillassoux does not try to block this move until Chapter 2 (Harman gives a quote from page 38). I will have much to say about it. Here I should note that Fitch’s Paradox is actually a logically valid deduction from strong correlationism to Absolute Idealism, and we must consider Meillassoux’s discussion in light of it.
Meillassoux thinks that rejecting the first horn of the dilemma (that measurements have intersubjective validity because they measure an independent reality) with or without accepting the second horn (idealism), forces the correlationist to construe the meaning of ancestral statements as contradicting the actual meaning of those statements. (AF 16-17)
The correlationist is not likely to be bothered by this. It is a very old strategy in philosophy to try to say that a statement is true if understood in a way completely at variance with the way people who utter those statements would understand them (were the understanding presented to them). Wittgensteinian philosophers of religion do this. Averroes did it with respect to the Koran. Berkeley did it. Meta-ethicists of all stripes do it more often than not. And correlationists do it.
Note that on the way I construct Meillassoux’s argument, this Euthyphronic dimension is only the first part of his argument against correlationism. The second key part comes from 3.2, pages 22-26, below!
3 (pp. 18-26)
3.1 (pp. 18-20)
Harman is devastating in his criticism of this section. Here are the two passages he singles out.
The lacunary nature of the given has never been a problem for correlationism. One only has to think of Husserl’s famous ‘givenness-by-adumbrations’” a cube is never perceived according to all of its faces at once, it always retains something non-given at the heart of its givenness. (AF 19)
But then the problem is solved by the idealist in this fashion.
[introducing] a counter-factual such as the following; had there been a witness, then this occurrence would have been perceived in such and such a fashion. This counterfactual works just as well for the falling of a vase in a country house as for a cosmic or ancestral event, however far removed. (AF 19-20)
3.2 (pp. 20-22)
Meillassoux tries to argue that the counterfactuals cannot solve the problem of the arche-fossil, because the arche-fossil is a time necessarily before the existence of givenness. So the counterfactual, “had someone been there to perceive it” never gets purchase (in most logics of counterfactuals this would make all such counterfactuals true! and since the statement of what happened in the past’s truth is equal to the relevant counterfactual. This would make all ancestral statements, and their negations, true.
This is a very clever argument, but Harman’s discussion (QM 41-42) provides enough ammunition to effectively undermines some of the scope distinctions that the Meillassouxian would be using to establish that the arche-fossil is necessarily before the existence of any giveneness. I mean we could have lived in the universe where God created Adam and Eve coterminously with himself.
Harman also has fascinating arguments concerning whether Meillassoux is justified in prioritizing temporality over spatiality in these discussions. This leads to a striking conclusion that saves Meillassoux here.
. . .quite apart from ancestral Big Bangs and lonely falling vases, we need to ask what happens in the case of a vase that is currently present to some consciousness. Let us imagine that we are in the countryhouse ourselves, staring directly at the vase before, during and after its fall to the floor. The vase holds water and flowers, even as we perceive it. But it is not our perception of the vase that holds these other items; only the vase itself does this. This is not simply because our current perception of the vase is not yet good enough. Even if we were to study it for half a century, putting a lifetime’s energy into understanding the vase - perhaps with the use of advanced supercomputers or direct epiphany through the assistance of angels - the situation would still not change. For no amount of knowledge about the vase can ever step into the world and replace that vase’s labor in the cosmos. Only the vase itself can perform this labor. In short, Meillassoux should never have conceded the point about lacunary perception, because even in the case of direct physical presence an entity outstrips the thought-world correlate in a manner that is never merely lacunary. Just as all the steel in the world cannot build a song, all the perceptions in the world cannot build the very realities that they perceive. (QM 43)
The correlationist will respond that Harman is misconstruing the issue, for the correlationist never meant to claim the true counterfactuals make the object, just that all ancestral truths can be captured by the counterfactual strategy, and that this is consistent with correlationism.
But there are two issues here that Harman is raising: (1) Reality outstrips what we can say about it in a set of counterfactuals. Reality is not linguistic! I have a paper on vagueness with Frankie Worrell that develops this point. And analytic philosophers worried about “non-conceptual content” are worried precisely about this issue. The more I read Harman the more important and plausible it is. (2) Harman’s causal talk work to reinstate Meillassoux’s Euthyphro argument from 2.2 and 2.3 above, as well as the affection argument coming in section 3.1 We will need to keep the counterfactual strategy in mind as we return to the affection challenge.
Finally, I should note that there is a huge literature coming out of Michael Dummett’s paper on the reality of the past that should be read along with Meillassoux’s discussion.
3.3 (pp. 22-26) VI. MEILLLASSOUX’S AFFECTION ARGUMENT
As noted above to the Euthyphronic move, the correlationist need only double down on the semantic doubling, holding is that there is one (internal, empirical, Dasein dependant) sense in which the measurements depend upon the measured reality and another (external, transcendental, Dasein independent) sense in which such an assertion is either false or not truth evaluable.
Many of us don’t like this kind of move in the history of philosophy, because it is usually accompanied by a kind of bad faith discussed above. But Meillassoux’s second punch delivers the knockout blow to this reaction to the Eythphronic dimension. He notes that:
8. In any case, the claim that Aabsolute is false or meaningless contradicts Finitude. Saying anything about Aabsolute requires claiming knowledge about an absolute, which the correlationist claims we cannot have.
So the correlationist’s strategy cannot work, since it contradicts correlationism. The key quote is.
Meillassoux’s Affection Type Argument
But how do notions such as finitude, receptivity, horizon, regulative Idea of knowledge arise? They arise because, as we said above, the transcendental subject is posited as a point of view on the world, and hence as taking place at the heart of the world. The subject is transcendental only insofar as it is positioned in the world, of which it can only ever discover a finite aspect, and which it can never recollect in its totality (24-5).
But once the subject is positioned as essentially in the world (Embodiment/Embeddedness- the second thesis of correlationism that neither Harman nor Meillassoux dispute), it no longer makes sense to say that the world is dependent upon the subject, because our sense of dependence is inextricably dependent upon the world (cf. Hilary Putnam on twin earth). Thus Meillassoux thinks that correlationism is pragmatically self defeating in an even stronger sense than Wright. The very reasons one has to subscribe to it end up being inconsistent with the position itself.
If we look at Graham Priest’s (2003) work, Meillassoux’s insight can be strengthened considerably. One looks at a philosophy’s account of truth and justification and examines whether that very account can explain the justified truth of the claims being made by the philosopher in question. Applied to Kant, the Priestian self-refuting argument would then go like this. If possibility is just a category imposed by the mind to organize experience, then what sense can we make of the claim that transcendental philosophy provides the conditions of possibility of experience itself? Possibility is something both limited to experience (Priest calls this Closure) but also something that must transcend the totality of experience (Priest calls this Transcendence).
Priest would argue that the same kind of self-refutation happens here. If phenomenology shows that claims about absolute dependence or independence from Dasein are meaningless, then we are in no position to make sense of the claim that Dasein independence of phenomena is itself absolutely Dasein dependent. Q.E.D.
I should note that it is possible that a Wittgensteinian quietist like Brandom might try to argue that the entire Euthyphro dilemma covered in premises 5 and 6 of Meillassoux’s master argument is something of which we cannot speak. Interestingly, this very kind of quietism is shown by Priest to be incoherent for reasons similar to Meillassoux’s own defense of premise 8.
4 (pp. 26-27)
Rousing cry here to get outside of ourselves!
I should note that people who just read this chapter are likely to think that Meillassoux rejects Verificationism, since his argument seems to be that Verificationism and Embodiment together deconstruct in just the way early critics of Kant blew up transcendental idealism.
But as Maimon and Hegel, following him, realized, giving up Finitude also gets you out of the problem. If an infinite intellect is the one who can verify everything, then there is no problem for the Verificationist, especially if aspects of this intellect are parts of the things themselves in the pantheist fashion. For this form of pantheism is the only thing that will answer Harman’s criticism from section 3.2.
As I will present him, Harman will give just a little bit to skepticism, defending Verficiationism as performatively valid in a certain sense but not true, and give just a little bit to pantheism, but not in a way that rejects Finitude.
[1] cf. Silcox and Cogburn’s paper on ontological versus epistemic emergence!
[2] Compare to Wright (1994)!
[3] Even the most idealistic interpretations of Quantum physics don’t in any way confirm this. On the Copehagen interpretation, the uncollapsed probability distribution exists independent of viewers. Non-local interpretations don’t even have to go this far though.
