Jon Cogburn's Blog

Oops

Today I have finally been getting around to putting my attempted formalazations of Meillassoux's argument to contingency (HERE and HERE) in a Fitch style proof system, and I realized I made one big mistake in the second post.

The argument to dialetheism is invalid.

Yes there is a contradiction between (~<>K~<>R) and (~<>K~<>R). But all that entails is that Meillassoux rejects that it is not possible to know the possibility of his sentences. By double negation elimination, that means it is possible to know that R is possible. But this is his whole conclusion with respect to any sentence and it's negation.

This makes me very happy, because by the principle of charity it means that it's more likely that I got the arguments correct.

Some preliminary thoughts on Meillassoux's theology

I think I might be teaching the first graduate seminar on Graham Harman in the United States. At least two of my students are applying for this awesome summer institute at Bonn on the new ontology (teachers including Hagglund, Brassier, Harman, Grant, and Zizek!) and as part of a class on Derrida with my colleague Francois Raffoul they should get a chance to work through some of Hagglund's work.*

We've started the semester with a huge dollop of Meillassoux and Harman on Meillassoux (many notes thus far are HERE, this week I'm going to include more stuff on Harman on Meillassoux). Two Springs from now I'm scheduled to teach a class on Meillassoux and Graham Priest which will be awesome, awesome, awesome and which Insha'Allah might form the genesis of some collaborative work with Levi Bryant (at the very least it will form the genesis of some solo work on Bryant, which would also be awesome).

One of the things we've read this semester is Meillassoux's "Spectral Dilemma" essay and Harman's exegesis of parts of Meillassoux's second (currently unpublished) magnum opus L'Inexistence Divine. Strangely, I was able to lead a discussion of some of the material in the article in the current adult sunday school class I'm doing on the Meaning of Jesus.

So I think today, February 12, 2012 might be the first time Meillassoux has been taught in an adult sunday school class (notes on that class HERE; Meillassoux is mentioned multiple times in different contexts).

I do not think my teaching bits of Meillassoux today will be the last time that conscientious Christians will struggle with his ideas in churches though, for a couple of reasons.

Antoine Roquentin is alive and well in Paris

I've only read these books in English translation, so this probably would not work for a French reader looking over the originals.

This being said, here's a thought experiment. Let an educated somewhat philosophically literate English reader who has never heard of Sartre nor Meillassoux read Sartre's Nausea, and then have her read Being and Nothingness and Meillassoux's After Finitude. Do not tell the reader who wrote these books, but do tell her that Nausea was written either by the author of Being and Nothingness or the author of After Finitude. Then ask her which one.

I think that a huge majority of even marginally sophisticated readers of the English text would be absolutely certain that Meillassoux wrote Nausea.

Again, this probably would not hold for the French versions, because it would perhaps be too easy to pick up on facets of the style that are not preserved in English translation. But my God, Meillassoux's hymn to chaos is exactly what Sartre's Antoine  should have written once he got out of the sticks, over his failed relationship, and found himself able to use that prolonged existential freakout and genius to write speculative philosophy.

Of course Sartre could not have written After Finitude. Some tragic combination of his own fourfold horrors (occupation, vilification by French Heideggerians, massive benzedrine abuse, and as a result of all of these a confused yet culpable gullibility concerning Soviet marxism) prevented him from writing After Finitude. So in the end we got the execrable The Critique of Dialectical Reason. And with the possible exception of mid-period Heidegger, I can think of no greater self-inflicted waste of genius in the twentieth century.

But Antoine in fact did get his %$#* together! Like Jacques Brel, he is in fact alive and well in Paris. You can listen to the music! You can read the book!

more development of Meillassoux's argument in modal logic, plus a possible dialtheist problem

I've had a couple of fantastic discussions with Levi Bryant about Graham Priest's connection to a slew of continental philosophers that Priest doesn't even mention in Beyond the Limits of Thought, and a bunch of weird things are popping out with respect to my current reading of Meillassoux.

The most important connection is that Meillassoux several times makes the kind of argument Priest diagnoses and logically regiments, where it is shown that just articulating a limit (Closure) forces that very limit to be contradicted (Transcendence). Given my teaching rotation, I should be able to teach a class on Meillassoux and Priest two Spring semesters from now, and the course notes for that class might be the genesis of something collaborative with Bryant (Insha'allah).

Weirdly, in Chapter 3 of After Finitude. Meillassoux does have two discussions of the possibility of true contradictions, first in arguing that a contradictory being can't exist, since it would have all properties it would nto be contingent in the way Meillassoux has argued that objects are, and second in admitting that his argument uses ex falso quodlibet, something not valid in paraconsistent logics. It's pretty clear Meillassoux hadn't read Priest at the time he wrote After Finitude, because much of Priest's work can be read as picking up the challenge Meillassoux lays down in his discussion of paraconsistency.

Tonight I initially thought that I could prove that Meillassoux actually may need it to be the case that truths that escape the correlationist circle are all true contradictions, but as I dug deeper into the modalities, I actually came up with even more formal logic derivations of Meillassoux's key arguments. At the end of this post though, I do show how actual dialetheist worries arise, but then raise a couple of issues concernin whether the resulting form of dialetheism may not be a problem for Meillassoux.

In THIS POST I showed that Harman's interpretation of a central Meillassouxian argument was provable in modal logic.

The key lemma is that Verificationism (Strong Correlationism), the position that all truths are knowable (P --> <>KP), entails that if it is impossible to know that something is impossible, then that fact is possible (~<>K~<>R --> <>R). This latter statement forms the core of Harman's reconstruction of Meillassoux's argument to absolutize facticity.

Updated post on Chapter 1 of Meillassoux's After Finitude, with what I take to be the master argument against correlationism

After lecturing on the material today, I realized that I hadn't really clarified how the chapter presents a sustained argument (with some fascinating tangents). So I rewrote the lecture and edited the earlier post that is HERE. There's lots of cool stuff there, including some of Harman's criticisms. The biggest thing is that I take Meillassoux's master argument against correlationism to actually be the following.

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 A^us versus A^absolute. A^us is true, while A^absolute is false or meaningless.

5. The claim that A^us  is true and A^absolute is false or meaningless directly contradicts the scientist's own understanding of the meaning of A! When the correlationist says A^us  is true, the assertion gives rise to a Euthyphro dilemma. (5.1) A^us  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.

8. In any case, the claim that A^absolute is false or meaningless contradicts Finitude. Saying anything about A^absolute requires claiming knowledge about an absolute, which the correlationist claims we cannot have.

Again, full details (in addition to an overview of the other great things in the chapter as well as a discussion of some really nice related points and criticisms by Harman) are HERE.

(modal logical) Meditations on the Meillassoux versus Harman

Yesterday I provided a preliminary formulation of a key lemma in Meillassoux's argument that correlationism absolutizes. I'd wanted to do this in a full natural deduction form today, but my thinking got both ahead and behind the argument. Let me get behind the argument first.

I. Correlationism, and the contrast between Meillassoux and Harman

From the position of an analytic philosopher (and I pray that this is not too distorting), Meillassoux's correlationism is best presented in terms of the following three positions.

(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 could be "knowable by an infinite mind." Only arguments concerning finitude 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, but Graham Priest has discovered the true nature of this argument).

Before I go any further I must make absolutely clear the contrast between Harman and Meillassoux. Harman rejects (1) the Verificationism and maintains (3) the Finitude (if I could write an aria I'd write one in praise of this insight!) by radically externalizing the manner in which Finitude is expressed by Heidegger. Meillassoux rejects (3) the Finitude while keeping the (1) Verificationism. This is in some sense the titanic strugle at the heart of Speculative Realism.

II. Meilllassoux Needs (some form of) Verificationism

As I briefly (much more is needed exegetically) argued yesterday, the way Meillassoux gets to his rejection of Finitude actually uses Verificationism as a premise.

III. Meillassoux Rejects Verificationism

Here is a big problem. As far as I can make out, Meillassoux's argument that correlationism need not entail Berkeleyan Idealism is inconsistent with the very Verificationism he uses. Meillassoux's worry is that correlationism renders the thing in itself unthinkable/unconceivable, but then we might think that it is impossible, which is the position of Berkeleyan idealism.

So Meillassoux argues, persuasively to me (and this actually has powerful resonances with Lovecraft that are in common to all of the first generation Speculative Realists, and many of the second generation ones such as myself), that unthinkability does not entail impossibility.

But I'm not sure he can argue this. First, notice that Meillassoux is arguing against a strawman. To stop Berkeleyan Idealism, he must argue against the proposition that unthinkability does not entail falsity. For the Berkeleyan Idealist need only be committed to the claim that it is false that things in themselves exist, not that it is impossible that they do so. But the proposition that unthinkability does not entail falsity is much harder to argue against than the proposition that unthinkability does not entail impossibility. In fact, it is not a proposition that I think Meillassoux can argue against (though Harman and myself, following him, can).

No Verificationist of the sort we've been considering can argue against the calim that unthinkability entails falsity! For surely unthinkability entails unknowability. But this claim, plus Verificationism, is provably inconsistent with the claim that unthinkability does not entail falsity! Let me explain the formalism before giving the proof.

One of Meillassoux's key arguments is formulizable in modal logic (and valid)

[Note: (1) Meillassoux's argument to contingency is further developed in modal logic HERE, with some dialetheist worries thrown in. (2) A clearer explanation of the difference between Meillassoux and Harman is HERE, including a distinct worry.]

Reading page 26 of Graham Harman's Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making, and just put the key argument (of which Harman writes, "This apparently hair splitting point point is actually the key to Meillassoux's entire system, and is worthy of closer attention") in modal logic. If I have not fudged too much by putting things in terms of a knowledge predicate, it definitely works. And in a very weak modal logic to boot, I think classical K but in the next few days I will put it in natural deduction to check. 

Basically there is a simple proof from P --> <>KP (if P, then it is possible to know that P, to which the correlationist is arguably committed) to Meillassoux's conclusion ~<>K~<>R --> <>R (if it is not possible to know that R is impossible, then R is possible). Contraposing the correlationist claim gives you ~<>KP --> ~P. But then substitute in ~Q for P and you get ~<>K~Q --> ~~Q, which via classical logic entails ~<>K~Q --> Q (if it's not possible to know that something is false, then it is true). Now substitute in <>R for Q, and you get ~<>K~<>R --> <>R (if it is not possible to know that R is impossible, then R is possible).

That's it. I'll do a proper natural deduction proof (without the substitutions) in the next few days, in part because I want to find out if I had to use classical negation rules above (if I was a better logician I would know this without having to formalize it; but full formalization sometimes yields unexpected interesting things so I don't mind).

The reason this is so mind-blowing is that so much does follow from the incredibly simple point, once you think about it in a way informed by knowledge of German Idealism, as Harman and Meillassoux do. More on that soon. I have to get clearer on how this fits with Meillassoux's other key argument in this context that unthinkability does not entail impossibility. This is how Meillassoux rejects Berkeleyan Idealism while still being a Verificationist (correlationist). But then the Verificationism entails ~<>K~<>R --> <>R, and then some other commitments entail that there are a lot of Rs for which the scheme applies.

It's the fact that for the correlationist the antecedent is maintained for lots of philosophically Rs that entails much of the weird and fascinating aspects of Meillassoux's philosophy (let R equal "humans will survive their death" or "things in themselves exist"), which is why I'm going to get clearer on that next. As far as I'm getting it now, the reason we can't know so many things is from Kantian Dialectic type Finitude arguments (the Verificationism follows from Berkeleyan type arguments).

Interestingly, Meillassoux, like Graham Priest, ends up exploding the Finitude arguments while staying with the Verificationism, and Harman (to some extent like a certain period John McDowell) keeps the Finitude but jettisons the Verificationism. I should note that by saying this I'm not reducing any thinker to any other thinker or just understanding the continental philosophers as shadows of the analytic ones (a horrible, horrible tendency of a lot of analytic "pluralists"). I'm learning all sorts of new things from Meillassoux and Harman, and there are essential respects in which the two differ from the analytic analogues (among other things, Harman is not hobbled by McDowell's quiteism, and this makes a humongous difference).

It's really cool stuff. Any logician readers will have intuited interesting issues involving Fitch's Paradox as well. I have a couple of lines on that (one from Tennant, one from reflection on Moore's Paradox) that I want to try out on Meillassoux this semester.

Speculative Realism is neither continental nor analytic in the deeper substantive sense

Characteristically nice post about the analytic-continental divide from Graham Harman HERE.

Whenever Harman posts on this issue I find myself agreeing with everything he says. With Harman I think it is much more healthy than not that there are different traditions, and that they remain different

In place of thinking the division should disappear, I would instead make the following claims: (1) an a priori unwillingness from members of one tradition to learn from members of other traditions is problematic, (2) almost equally problematic are people from one camp who are only open to people from the other tradition to the extent that those people articulate views that seem to support those of the supposed pluralist's,* and (3) whatever you think about the different styles, the thinkers covered by continental philosophers should be taught in analytic programs (especially German Idealism and 19th Century more broadly, but also the things Leiter derides).

I should note in passing that one of the things I like about Speculative Realism is that its main practitioners do not embody any of the above vices. Analytic and Continental describe first and foremost training regimes for academic philosophers. But at a certain point you should put on your big boy pants just try to do philosophy, which requires following the muse wherever she wants to take you.

Avoidance of the above vices is not accidental, since Speculative Realists reject two substantive positions at the heart of the most significant continental and analytic philosophers, positions that started with the Positivists and Heidegger, and that rise up zombie-like over and over and over again.

This becomes crystal clear if one realizes that the divide between analytic and continental philosophers is much less philosophically important than a couple of other deeper divisions (1) between anti-metaphysical thinkers and at least anti-anti-metaphysical thinkers,** and (2) between naturalists and non-naturalists.

Weirdly, analytical philosophy's founding sin was combining naturalism and anti-metaphysics and continental philosophy's founding sin was combining non-naturalism and anti-metaphyiscs! But naturalism is false (see Michael Ruse HERE) and anti-metaphysics is incoherent (read the early critics of Kant or Graham Priest for that matter!).

In analytical philosophy anti-metaphysics is where naturalism goes to, if not die, continue some kind of a zombie-like existence. This goes all the way from Marburg School Neo-Kantianism to Robert Brandom, currently holding the office of the last positivist (after Bergmann then Quine and then Rorty before him). Brandom-type Pittsburgh Hegelianiasm, for all of its manifest virtues, almost constitutively returns to the kind of view that Heidegger derides in his very first (emergency war) lectures, of the universe as some valueless hunk with humans (in the guise of social practice) guilding and staining it. This is properly neo-Kantian, not Hegelian, as is the quietistic anti-metaphysics*** that obscures the basic move.

But, on the contrary, in continental philosophy anti-metaphysics comes from the Heideggerian view that science itself is a founded mode over something anti-metaphysics phenomenology reveals to be more originary. So while analytic naturalism leads to anti-metaphysics (because one must deride as meaningless questions that the natural sciences cannot answer), continental anti-metaphysics leads to anti-naturalism.

One is actually tempted to join the two above observations to make the following sort of argument. Analytic philosophy shows that naturalism refutes metaphysics. Continental philosophy shows that the refutation of metaphysics refutes naturalism. Therefore naturalism refutes naturalism.

In any case, I raise my flag with anti-naturalist anti-anti-metaphysicians. We're a tiny minority in both analytic and continental philosophy. With the possible exception of a non-trivial set of Christian apologists (usually working in a dialectical setting horribly tainted by either fideism or its opposition, IMHO), analytical philosophers who are not anti-metaphysicians are almost all naturalists (argument above notwithstanding)! And, with the notable exceptions of the Speculative Realists, Deleuzians, and some other heroic figures, continental philosophy by and large continues to chug along wearing the same old phenomenological straightjacket, with its attendent quietism and other forms of recycled neo-Kantianism. Note that this is perversely a straightjacket that any proper reader of the German Idealists would have thrown off long ago. Well with Quentin Meillassoux and Graham Priest's readings of this tradition,as well as Graham Harman's indefeteagable labor, at least some of us have begun to wiggle our way out of the damned thing.****

[Notes:

*It's very hard not to fall into this trap, perhaps impossible. Some strategies for an analytic philosopher who wants to be a "pluralist": (1) You must, must, must avoid the temptation to use your continental friends to give yourself a patina depth by simply adding a footnote when one of those continental friends tells you that someone you've never read has an idea kind of like yours, (2) You must go to talks about thinkers you don't like and be vigilently open to the idea that informed people of good will disagree with you about your assessment, (3) As much as possible, maintain an active reading life that has nothing to do with whatever current project on which you are working; this helps in all sorts of ways.

**The distinction between anti-metaphysics and anti-anti-metaphysics should not be confused with the distinction between anti-realists and anti-anti-realists. John McDowell is both an anti-metaphysician and an anti-anti-realist. See the next note.

***John McDowell is, like most continental philosophers, actually anti-metaphysical and non-naturalist. Brandom claims to be non-naturalist, but he really is not, at least in the important sense that the early Heidegger adumbrated. This is the entire reason, I think, that Crispin Wright famously put John McDowell down as not really being an analytic philosopher, but (as far as I know) has never said anything remotely similar about fellow Pittsburgh Hegelian Robert Brandom.

****Just because nothing above makes this sufficiently clear- I think Heidegger is one of the most important five philosophers in history and also that Brandom is easily in the top five of living philosophers.]