The Phenomenological Critique of Representationalism:
Husserl's and Heidegger's Arguments for a Qualified Realism
by John Davenport
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Philosophy
University of Notre Dame
February, 1997
821 West Angela
South Bend, IN 46617
John.J.Davenport.5@nd.edu
ABSTRACT
This paper begins by tracing the Hobbesian roots of `representationalism:' the thesis that reality is accessible to mind only through representations, images, signs or appearances that indicate a reality lying `behind' them (e.g. as unperceived causes of perceptions). This is linked to two kinds of absolute realism: the `naive' scientific realism of British empiricism, which provoked Berkeley's idealist reaction, and the noumenal realism of Kant. I argue that Husserl defined his position against both Berkeleyian idealism and these forms of absolute realism by way of two arguments: a pragmatic argument against skepticism about the external world (as described by Karl Ameriks) and a distinctively phenomenological argument against the representationalism implied by absolute realism.
In the Second Introduction to Being and Time, Heidegger reformulates these arguments, giving them a more rigorous form and tracing their implications for the nature of Being. In section 7, he provides a transcendental argument that the nature of appearance or representation itself shows that the mind must have a more direct form of contact with Being `as it is in itself,' which he calls `phenomena' in the original sense. I explain the relevance of Heidegger's position for evaluating contemporary theories of representation such as Fred Dretske's, and for establishing an `intermediate' conception of the mind's relation to the world which falls between absolute scientific realism and the common antirealism in analytic philosophy today.
My goal in this paper is to analyze Heidegger's transcendental argument against `representationalist' theories of phenomena, and to show its relevance to contemporary theories of representation and mind, such as Fred Dretske's. This case study will show not only that Heidegger undoubtably has serious arguments (which is sometimes denied by those for whom it is easiest just to dismiss `continental philosophy' in toto as unrigorous play), but also that --whether or not his arguments ultimately persuade us-- they raise important issues which are overlooked by contemporary analytic approaches to the same questions today.
As we will see, Heidegger's argument is a direct development of the central idea of intentionality in Edmund Husserl's Logical Investigations. The idea that mental states intend not mere appearances or representations but real objects themselves --the idea that in its contents, consciousness reaches beyond itself towards the world `outside' consciousness-- follows from Husserl's own response to the commonplace scientific realism which regards the Real as the noumenal being that causes the appearances and judgments through which alone the mind can gain knowledge. As Kent Bach recently wrote of this view, "If actually seeing things were like seeing things in pictures and films, the connection between things in the world and our experience would be merely causal."(1) In rejecting this view, writers like John Searle(2) are following a line of thought that begins with Husserl and culminates in Heidegger's transcendental deduction of phenomena.
In section I, I explain the historical context for the development of this phenomenological theme, which provides the background for Heidegger's position. Section II then explicates Heidegger's transcendental argument and explains its role in Being and Time. Finally, in section III, I show that Heidegger's theory raises difficulties for contemporary theories of representation such as Fred Dretske's model, and I try to anticipate possible objections against Heidegger's position.
I. Husserl's Phenomenological Argument Against Hobbesian Representationalism
Descartes is generally credited with first popularizing the notion that even the basic `components' of our thoughts --primary qualities of "corporeal nature" such as "its extension," "shape," "quantity," "number," "time," and "place"(3)-- might themselves be illusions, inaccurate reflections of things `as they really are.'(4) But it was Hobbes who first clearly developed a `psychologistic' theory of phenomena as `appearances' which represent the object outside our mind, yet differ from what they represent because they are caused by a physical process which is not itself perceived.
Hobbes introduces this theory of the `unreality of consciousness' at the very beginning of Leviathan, since it is foundational for the rest of his empiricism. The thoughts of man are "every one a Representation or Apparence, of some quality, or other Accident of a body without us."(5) Consciousness arises as a reaction to stimuli from external bodies,(6) and thus our sensation is what he calls "fancy," meaning that what it presents is not the same as the qualities actually present in the objects outside our minds. As Hobbes puts it, "All which qualities called Sensible, are in the object that causeth them, but so many several motions of the matter, by which it presseth our organs diversly" and thus "their apparence to us is Fancy, the same waking, that dreaming."(7) Since colors and sounds cannot be in the bodies themselves, as physics has shown us, phenomena are all images, appearances restricted to a psychological realm:
And though at some certain distance, the reall, and very object seems invested with the fancy it begets in us; Yet the still the object is one thing, the image or fancy is another.(8)
Similarly, understanding is not the apprehension of any form actually in the object which makes it what it is and intelligible as such; rather, understanding is a kind of imagination --a recombination of appearances derived initially from sensory representations-- that is evoked "by words, or other voluntary signs."(9) Thus understanding also operates strictly through representations.
This doctrine is clearly intended by Hobbes to replace Aristotle's theory, given in his De Anima and elsewhere, that in sensation, the sensible form of the object we perceive, or its "species" as Hobbes calls this copy of the form,(10) directly enters our mind, just as in understanding, "the thing Understood sendeth forth intelligible species" into the mind.(11) As an early positivist, Hobbes declares this Aristotelian doctrine meaningless, and openly hints that teaching it will be outlawed when the universities are ruled by his Leviathan.(12)
As I indicated, part of Hobbes's motive for this radical departure from the classical conception of phenomena is the same scientific one that later leads Locke to agree that secondary qualities exist only in the mind. As Hobbes says in another work on Human Nature, "the introduction of species visible and intelligible" moving between real objects and minds is "worse than any paradox," because observable phenomena such as reflection, doubling, refraction, the effects of concussions, and so on show "that image and color is but an apparition unto us of that motion, agitation, or alteration which the object worketh in the brain or spirits, or some internal substance in the head."(13) Reality in this account becomes what Bertrand Russell later called the "unperceived cause of percepts."(14) Yet Hobbes clearly does not anticipate the further steps by which the implications of his critique will lead Berkeley to idealism, or the conclusion that the very being of phenomena consists simply in their being phenomena, present to some mind. The reason he cannot anticipate this development is that, as vehemently opposed to Aristotle's phenomenology as it is, Hobbes's account (like Locke's after him) still rests on a naive realism which it would never occur to him to question: namely, that we know after all that there is a realm of material entities that our phenomena `represent' because our phenomena are caused by these real objects outside the mind. The experiments with a glass of water(15) which he describes presuppose this, as does his certainty that when the new physics reveals primary qualities of the corpuscles, we are thereby getting access to the material entities themselves beyond the mind. It never occurs to Hobbes that the experimental phenomena he cites are themselves appearances, and thus ideal or unreal in his account, or that their regularity can be explained just as logically by regularities of the perceiving mind as by the causal assumptions of his naive realism. Hobbes's confidence betrays no awareness that if our consciousness were as completely `unreal' as his theory says, then we would have no certain access to anything `behind' consciousness which might cause it. In Hobbes's satisfaction with unperceived causes of phenomena, there is no trace of the doubts which Hume would later raise with his argument that since phenomena are representations, we can have no proof in the phenomena (individually or collectively) that there is any causation at all as scientific realism understood the concept.
Twentieth-century analytic philosophy has revisited in great scholarly detail every turn of this long road from Hobbes through Locke, Berkeley, and Hume to Kant and beyond. Similarly, almost every aspect of the debate between realism and idealism (or antirealism, as it is sometimes called) which this history set in its well-known terms has been reconsidered in light of different contemporary philosophies of language. But throughout, the interlocutors have generally accepted without question the basic Hobbesian premise that phenomena --and more generally, `units' of meaning in language and thought-- are representational, i.e. that they are appearances that indicate something about something else (such as linguistic senses, referents, or states of affairs) to which they are related in various ways. It remains largely unremarked that, as we observed in Hobbes's writings, a representational account of phenomena that would still tie phenomena to an `independent' reality in defiance of idealism unwittingly implies the possibility of a different, unmediated and hence nonrepresentational access to this reality --which is precisely what an account of phenomena as mere appearances simultaneously denies.
From its inception, phenomenology is distinguished as a method precisely by its rejection of this Hobbesian conception of phenomena or mental experiences. This is clear in Husserl's arguments against "psychologism" in the Logical Investigations, which turn on the idea that the intentionality of consciousness consists in a transcendence of mind towards the object itself, i.e. that consciousness is by nature `about' reality beyond consciousness. As Lyotard explains, "perceiving this pipe on the table is not, as the associationists thought, having a reproduction of this pipe in miniature in the mind, but to intend the object pipe itself."(16) For consciousness, therefore, the "world is posited as really existing," but the paradox is that it is posited as "transcendent" in this sense by the ego, whose unity is not derived from the Being which is external to it.(17) Thus, as Burt Hopkins points out in a recent study, since the conscious experience is an intention of reality beyond experience, reflection on conscious acts is not "some kind of observation of inner sensuous data."(18) This rejection of Hobbes's view of phenomena as appearances remains clear in Husserl's Ideas I, despite the apparently idealistic implications of his "transcendental reduction" or bracketing of "any judgment that concerns spatio-temporal existence."(19) Revising his earlier analysis, Husserl argues that in reflective or "immanently related" intentional experiences, "perception and perceived essentially constitute an unmediated unity," whereas conscious intentions of things in the natural world, other minds, and essences all remain transcendent;(20) in these cases, the "intuition and the intuited" are "in principle and of necessity not really and essentially one and united."(21)
This separation of conscious act from its objective content allows Husserl, for example, to avoid Berkelean idealism by holding that we perceive the physical thing only through "the `perspective' manifestations of all its determinate qualities"(22) which never give it to us adequately or completely. Yet he can still deny (through the epoché) the opposite position of extreme realism, which would imply that the "perceived thing" is "mere appearance" while the real thing is the object of natural science whose spatial extension is characterized purely mathematically.(23) The problem with the extreme realist position is its implication that "The `true Being' would therefore be entirely and fundamentally something that is defined otherwise than as that which is given in perception as corporeal reality..."(24) In Sellar's terms, by conceiving the `scientific image' as utterly heterogeneous with the `manifest image' or phenomenal contents of lived experience, this realist approach self-defeatingly implies that no empirical process could take us towards the scientific in-itself either.(25) As one Kantian scholar recently put it, extreme realism thus defines noumenal Being in a way that actually entails skepticism; it makes the impossibility of knowledge tautological, since it defines `reality' as essentially inimical to any cognitive access to reality.(26)
In this light, we can see that Husserl's hope is precisely to negotiate a way between, one the one hand, `psychologistic idealism' that simply equates Being itself with conscious experience of Being and ignores the way in which realities in presenting themselves transcend the conscious states that access them,(27) and on the other hand, naive realism which makes all phenomena mere appearances, signs, or representations of noumena. As Lyotard puts it, despite the realist separation of transcendence, the relation is described in terms of noesis and noema precisely to indicate that
the relationship of consciousness to its object is not that of two exterior and independent realities. For on the one hand, the object is a Gegenstand, a phenomenon, leading back to the consciousness to which it appears; while on the other hand, consciousness is consciousness of this phenomenon. It is because the inclusion is intentional that it is possible to ground the transcendent in the immanent without detracting from it.(28) Husserl clarifies his opposition to any extreme realism which makes conscious phenomena and things-in-themselves independent realities in a famous section of the Ideas, which tells us that it is a "fundamental error to suppose that perception (and every other type of intuition of things, each after its own manner), fails to come in contact with the thing itself."(29) Husserl gives a brief, two-part argument against this view that phenomena are only representations of reality, rather than the mind's direct contact with such reality itself. First, he says that the idea that there is another (e.g. divine) intuition of things-in-themselves which occurs "without any mediation through appearances," whereas finite beings grasp only representative appearances, would imply that "there is no essential difference between transcendent and immanent," as if as spatial thing itself could be wholly immanent in God's consciousness, or could be pure experience and yet still be physical.(30) Second, Husserl maintains that this `fundamental error' derives from the assumption that "the transcendence of the thing is that of an image or sign," which suggests the misdiagnosis that finite minds can only grasp such representations.(31) Rather, transcendence is not a symptom of the finitude of consciousness, nor are the phenomena intended by finite minds mere representations: despite its transcendence to consciousness, it is the spatial thing itself of which we are consciously aware in its embodied form: "We are not given an image or a sign in its place."(32) Representations, such as images, signs, or propositional meanings, are instead a special class of phenomena:
With these types of presentation we intuit something, in the consciousness that it copies something else or indicates its [sentential] meaning; and though we already have the one in the field of intuition, we are not directly towards it, but through the medium of a secondary apprehension are directed towards the other, that which is copied or indicated.(33)
This is the argument against the representational theory of phenomena which Heidegger subsequently develops and extends in Being and Time. To Heidegger, however, Husserl's formulation of the argument remains inadequate in several important respects. First, it does not make sufficiently clear why we cannot suppose that all phenomena are representations even when they do not appear as such to us, and then reinterpret the distinction between transcendence and immanence in an anti-realist fashion as the difference between two interconnected systems of signs. Despite his precautions, Husserl remains too close to empiricist or `positivist' views of science which take its only aim to be the description and prediction of the structure of experience, ignoring unobservable entities that might underlie this structure. These views have anti-realist consequences because, as Peter Godfrey-Smith recently put it, they forget that "conceptions of how theory relates to experience are associated with theories of the world itself."(34) This is an instance of Heidegger's more general recognition that how we conceive knowledge and the relation of its content to `reality' depends on how we conceive the meaning of Being itself: in accordance with the `hermeneutic standpoint' described above, there is no pure epistemology prior to all ontological presuppositions, since knowledge itself is part of Being.
Second, although for Husserl the original phenomena through which consciousness first `encounters' realities are not representational, as noema they both present the character they have indubitably, and are structured according to the different thetic modes of judgment. Being in this sense remains for Husserl the correlate of the cognitive structure of our consciousness. Consciousness exists only as intending transcendent reality, and this reality offers itself to mind as phenomenon both undeceptively and with cognitive sense: it is meaningful only within a horizon of phenomenal possibilities that determines what `validity' or necessity truth means for judgments involving the phenomenon. Since Heidegger believes that the meaning or `phenomena' in which we originally encounter the Real are prior to propositional meaning, these primitive meanings cannot be limited by the ideal validity conditions of discursive understanding nor divided by the different illocutionary types of judgments with their different modal significances. For Heidegger, in this respect Husserl remains too close to contemporary theories which equate meaning with truth-conditions.
Yet in theories of meaning, we find a reflection of the same dilemma between customary forms of realism and anti-realism that we meet in interpreting `phenomena.' Truth-condition approaches aim to express the insight that meaning must be shareable and therefore refer to something real (or suitably objective(35)), which they interpret as something about which one can be wrong or right, independently of opinion (assuming that reality necessarily supports bivalence).(36) So these approaches focus too narrowly on meaning-that as the paradigm of all meaning.(37) Alternatively, approaches equating meaning with use (e.g. the later Wittgenstein) aim to express the `structuralist' insight that no element of meaning has significance outside a system of contrasts, similarities, and relations --a web of interconnections with other meanings. But since this insight is most easily grasped with respect to language --gestures, symbols, and spoken words-- use-condition approaches tend to take the signifieds of signs, whose use is determined pragmatically by mutually controlling practices or `language-games,' as the paradigm cases of meanings. Thus they reduce the meaning-relation to representation again, with the inevitable anti-realist implication that meaning is at least culture-relative, or more radically, relativized to a system of differences between signs which always exceed cognitive grasp or complete expression. Then meaning can never be the expression of anything `real' in the sense of transcending the network of signs.(38) Like Hobbesian representations, meanings become inherently idealist.
As we will see, Heidegger's conception of originary phenomena, which follows Husserl in rejecting the representationalist view but does not start with cognitive or discursive truth-conditions, also leads to a conception of originary meaning that is supposed to avoid the dilemma I have just outlined. The meaning found in originary phenomena will precede and join the (more realist) sense of propositional import and the (more anti-realist) structural background conditions of practices and mutual comportment. Originary meaning both makes propositional meaning and the very idea of truth-conditions possible through its non-representational encounter with the Real, and yet this level of meaning forms its own interlocking structure or `web' of significance (or "world," in Heidegger's terminology) which underlies and makes possible the use-meanings implicit in practices. Both these aspects of originary meaning arise, on Heidegger's analysis, from the basic structure of Dasein as a being that `discloses' or encounters the Real, but encounters it as a world, an actuality extended by all sorts of possibilities, unified through fundamental forms of `expectation' grounded in the being of persons.
[This part is still not complete]
Husserl's 45, 52, and 55 of Ideas.
Contrast Schlick, pp.88-89
As John Drummond explains, Husserl's concept of intentionality is thus supposed to resist the `subjectivizing' tendency of modern philosophy:
Husserl claims that all conscious experience is directed to objectivities, and these objectivities are not real contents of an empirical consciousness as are Descartes' esse objectivum, Humean impressions, and Kantian representations. Rather, Husserl claims that the objectivity to which consciousness is directed is an intentional moment of transcendental consciousness, inseperable from the experience and its real components but not reducible to them. By virtue of this doctrine, Husserl recovers features of the premodern conception of intelligibility as belonging to the things themselves and as being truthfully present to us in our evident apprehension of them...(39)
++++
II. Heidegger's Transcendental Deduction of the Possibility of Phenomena as Primordial Manifestations of Being as it is in itself.
Heidegger presents his own argument in the long and justly famous ¶7 on "The Phenomenological Method of Investigation" in the Second Introduction to Being and Time. Heidegger begins this section by saying that overall theme of his investigation, the meaning of Being or "the Being of entities" (p.49) can only be investigated phenomenologically, i.e. in the method that is itself ontologically "rooted in the way we come to terms with the things themselves" (p.50). To understand the "kind of `self-evidence'" phenomenology aims at, we must consider the meaning of two concepts, `phenomenon' and `logos.'
Heidegger begins by distinguishing three senses of the phenomenon. The first is indicated by the derivation of the Greek word from the verb phainesthai, which is a "middle-voiced form" for showing itself or "to bring into the light of day" (p.51). Thus, first and foremost, "the expression `phenomenon' signifies that which shows itself in itself, the manifest" (p.51). The key idea behind this first definition is that it is part of the very reality of entities to make themselves accessible, and thus their meaningfulness or possible epistemological significance is itself originally ontological, rather than conferred by mind. As Thomas Sheehan explains in a very valuable essay on Heidegger, this radical phenomenological claim was a renewal of the Greek idea of truth as alethia, a self-`uncovering' in which entities "disclose" themselves:
Heidegger's intense rereading of Greek philosophy in general and of Metaphysics IX 10 in particular led him to the major if implicit tenet of Greek thinking, namely, that entities, to the degree that they are `natural' (physei on), are intrinsically self-presentative, that is accessible and intelligible -- on hos alethes(40) -- even if that accessibility and intelligibility is always shot through with finitude.(41)
This is similar to the point Jonathan Lear makes, in commenting on Metaphysics VII, that Aristotle's ontology requires that "the world is ultimately intelligible."(42) Yet for Aristotle, this intelligibility requires that reality be founded on substances, which are both ontologically basic because they are logically independent, and at the same time fully cognizable, because they are determined by an essential form that makes a particular "what-it-is," or "a being thoroughly definable."(43) By contrast, Heidegger's primordial concept of the phenomenon only carries the implication that Being is intelligible from itself, or self-opening. So Heidegger understood himself to not only as retrieving the Aristotelian conception of the phenomenon, but as foregrounding the full and radical alethiac core of that conception, which had so degenerated by Hobbes's time that its point could no longer be understood. This core, which Heidegger believes is common to all the major Greek philosophers from Heraclitus to Aristotle, does not commit us to the additional distinctively Aristotelian claims that the intelligibility which is (as it were) `built-into the Real,' is primarily cognitive or consists of abstractable forms that fit into discursive understanding, let alone that it is the cognitive intelligibility of substances or primary ousia. The `phenomenon' in Heidegger's primary sense is simply that which shows itself in some way, without extra cognitive specifications (or `validity conditions') on the manner in which it shows itself.
Thus as Heidegger says, "It is even possible for an entity to show itself as something which in itself it is not." This gives us the second sense of phenomenon, which Heidegger calls "seeming" [Schein] or "semblance" (p.51). Since a phenomenon in this second sense seems to refer to an illusion, we might at first assume that Heidegger means a false representation, one that signifies something which does not correspond to actuality. But he is careful to clarify that this is not what he means by a "`phenomenon' as semblance." Rather, the semblance is a non-representational manifesting, an instance of primordial phenomenality, but a "privative" instance because the phenomenon is deficient in its way of showing itself. Thus the semblance is "structurally interconnected" with the primary sense of `phenomenon:' as Heidegger says,
Only when the meaning of something is such that it makes a pretension of showing itself--that is, of being a phenomenon [in the primordial sense]--can it show itself as something which it is not; only then can it `merely look like so-and-so.' (p.51).
The second sense of phenomenon includes and is founded on the first. Hence, if it is possible for any actual phenomenon of our experience to be a `semblance' in Heidegger's sense, this entails that it is possible for us to experience phenomena in the primordial sense as revelations of entities-in-themselves,(44) in however limited or partial a way this may be. In this sense, the semblance is just a limiting case of the primordial phenomenon, namely a case in which the self-showing is maximally limited or distortive. The opposite limiting case would be a primordial phenomenon whose self-showing is absolute, totally unreserved, unlimited in clarity and distinctness, or as Heidegger would put it, completely unhidden (p.56), holding nothing back from us.(45) But since human beings or Dasein exist as finitude, for us there are no phenomena like this: the "unconcealing" of primordial phenomena is always to some extent also a "concealing;" this is what Heidegger later called "the lethe at the heart of alethia."(46)
The transcendental argument for the possibility of `phenomena' in Heidegger's primordial sense (and thus for the possibility of scheinen or semblances as well) only gets going when Heidegger distinguishes both these from a third sense of `phenomenon' which (following Hobbes), he calls appearance [Erscheinung].(47) `Appearance' is a "reference-relationship which is in an entity itself" (p.54), a representational structure (exhibited most familiarly by linguistic signification) that announces rather than showing that of which it is the appearance. For example, a symptom is the appearance of a disease, because certain bodily occurrences, "in showing themselves as thus showing themselves,(48) `indicate' something which does not show itself," namely, the disease (p.52). Thus representation in its true sense is quite different than primordial phenomenality, in which an entity's making-itself-intelligible through showing its being is itself part of that very being. By contrast,
...appearance, as the appearance `of something,' does not mean showing-itself; it means rather the announcing-itself by something [else] which does not show itself, but which announces itself through something which does show itself (p.52).
Thus as Heidegger's translators Macquarrie and Robinson help explain in an analytic footnote to this difficult section of the text, the general structure of `appearance' for Heidegger is like this:
Y, in showing itself, indicates X, which does not show itself, but rather announces
itself through Y's manifestation.(49)
It is interesting to note that although this formula gives us only the most basic notion of representation, without any subdivision of types of representation or analysis of how indication is achieved, it is not incompatible with contemporary analytic models of representation. Consider, for example, Fred Dretske's model:
By a representational system (RS) I shall mean any system whose function it is to indicate how things stand with respect to some other object, condition, or magnitude.(50)
The only immediately apparent difference between these models is that Dretske's does not emphasize that the `representational system' Y must itself be apprehended phenomenally.
For his purposes here, Heidegger does not need a taxonomy of types of appearance or any more detailed account of how representation works. The important thing is that "All indications, presentations, symptoms, and symbols have this basic formal structure of appearing" (p.52), or being `announcers of Xs that do not show themselves.' It is clear that Hobbes's phenomenon as mental fancy is meant to be a particular paradigmatic kind of `appearance' in this sense: namely, one in which the sign or image announces the object(s) or physical processes which caused it. But if Heidegger's analysis of the structure of appearance or representation is right, it now becomes clear that all phenomena cannot be appearances, because the `appearance of something' itself involves an indicator or announcer that is not merely represented by the mind in another appearance. That which serves as the appearance or representation of something else must itself be a real phenomenon. Of course, representations or appearances themselves can be represented in other appearances: for example, we can have a sign that stands for or refers to other signs. But since there can be no infinite regression, at the bottom of the representational lattice we must have signs that are not merely signified by other signs but which actually show themselves.(51) In Heidegger's words, "what does the referring (or the announcing) can fulfil its function only if it shows itself in itself and is thus a `phenomenon'" in the original, quasi-Aristotelian sense (p.54). The very character of the referring signifier, or the structure of representation in general, betrays its essentially derivative status as dependent on phenomenal meaningfulness: as Heidegger declares, "appearing is possible only by reason of a showing-itself" that does not itself merely `appear' (p.53). Representationalism, as the thesis that all phenomena are appearances, is thus refuted: "If one defines `phenomenon' with the aid of a conception of `appearance' which is still unclear, then everything is stood on its head" (p.53).
To make this argument rigorous, however, we must also take into account the relation between appearances and semblances. Heidegger's interpretation of representation helps make clear the difference between Y as an appearance of X and Y as a semblance, because it allows us to see that Y can represent X either with or without also being a semblance. Being a semblance is thus independent of being the appearance or indication of something else. An arrow marked on the tree points to the right trail to follow, but similarly, the bear leaves a scratch on the tree and we mistake it for an arrow that indicates the way. A photograph pictures our friend, or similarly, we see what we think is a picture of our friend and take it for a representation of her, when in fact it is not. Something can thus `show itself' deceptively (or `seemingly') as a sign or appearance of something else. The illusion of the indicator light in the cockpit would be a semblance-phenomenon that in deceptively showing itself seems to be the sign of some state of affairs in the plane's machinery --which certainly does not show itself. The light which the pilot thought she saw would tell her that the landing gear is down: although the gear may or may not in fact be down, the indicator was a semblance, a pseudosymptom. The falsehood of the representation does not depend on the representive element's being a semblance, nor does the truth of the signification we apprehend through the sign require that we saw the sign correctly. For instance, we may take our dream-image for a Polaroid picture, but it still does represent our friend. Thus Heidegger's definition of the appearance does not say that what shows itself or serves as the `sign' of the announced `signified' must show itself primordially, as it really is in itself; it must simply show what it is in some way, which can even be deceptive . As he says,
...appearance too can become mere semblance. In a certain kind of lighting, someone can look as if his cheeks were flushed with red; and this redness which shows itself [i.e. deceptively] can be taken as the announcement of the Being-present-at-hand of a fever, which in turn indicates some disturbance in the organism (p.54)
However, since any semblance also depends for its sense on the possibility of primordial self-manifesting, an appearance that involves a semblance is still connected with showing-itself in itself. Thus "Both appearance and semblance are founded upon the phenomenon, although in different ways" (p.54).
With this relation clarified, we are in a position to summarize Heidegger's argument. Formally, this argument may be seen as a transcendental deduction of phenomena in the primordial sense as the ground of possibility for the fact that some appearances, referring signs, or representations are accessible to us or apprehendable by our minds.
(1) There are appearances, such as images, signs, or occurences that indicate or refer to something else = (def.) a referential relationship occuring between something Y that refers, or signals, and or `announces,' and something else X which is represented by Y but does not show itself at all (either deficiently as a semblance or as it is in itself) [premise].
(2) For an appearance or indication-relation to be accessible to us, we must have access to the Y which represents X, and we must be able to apprehend Y as an appearance that announces something else (X) [premise].
(3) In every case of appearance, the Y which represents X is accessible only because it is either (A) the referent of something else Z which the mind can apprehend as an appearance of Y, or (B) capable of manifesting itself directly to the mind. [premise: the mind can intuit new data only through `acquaintance' or representational `report'].
(4) (A) If the Y which represents X is apprehendable by mind through its own self-showing, it is a phenomenon = (def.) either a Semblance that shows itself deceptively or a phenomenon in he primordial sense of showing itself as it is in itself.
(5) (B) If the Y which represents X can be apprehended as the referent of another appearance through Z, then Z can be apprehended by the mind only as referent or phenomenon [premise 3 applied to Z]. In the latter case, there will be some Z* apprehended by the mind as phenomenon which is the appearance of Z' which is the appearance of (...) Z [by 3, recursion, and the assumption that only finite orders of representation can be apprehended by the mind].
(6) If there is some accessible appearance of X through Y, then either (A) Y is a phenomenon apprehendable directly by the mind or (B) there is some Z* which is a phenomenon apprehendable directly by the mind [conjunction of 4 and 5].
(7) If there is some accessible appearance of X through Y, then there is some which is a phenomenon apprehendable directly by the mind. [from 6 by generalization].
(8) If there is some which is a phenomenon apprehendable by the mind, then is either a semblance or a primordial phenomenon showing itself as it is in itself [by def. of phenomenon from 4]
(9) (A) If is primordial phenomenon, then primordial phenomena are possible. [actuality entails possibility]
(B) If is a semblance, then primordial phenomena are possible [from the analysis of semblance]
(10) If there is some accessible appearance of X through Y, then primordial phenomena are possible [by chain of conditional implication from 7, 8, and 9]
(11) Primordial phenomena are possible [by 1, 10, detachment].
In other words, appearances or representation-relations are ultimately accessible only through our direct access to phenomena which are not representations or appearances. Even if they are accessible only as semblances, they imply at least the possibility of primordial phenomena, in which we would apprehend something as it shows itself from what it is in itself. There is thus a kind of `apprehension' or access which is not representational, for representional access itself presupposes it. At the price of extra length needed for meticulousness, this summary restates Heidegger's deduction in a more rigorous (albeit more tedious) form than he provided, but does not add anything essentially new to his own more informal version of the argument.
This transcendental result provides the basis for Heidegger's further thesis that the essence of human existence is precisely to disclose primordial phenomenality, or to be the intelligence which apprehends the intelligibility built-into different kinds of Being (including its own): "Understanding of Being is itself a definite characteristic of Dasein's Being" (p.32). The person is an entity whose essence is to be `there' (Da-sein) in the ontological meaningfulness of Being, existing as openness to an indefinite modal range of primordial phenomena (both actual and merely possible). Heidegger says at the end of his First Introduction that this result is a development of what Aristotle saw more obscurely in the De Anima when he argued that "Man's soul" is like a mirror of all things: "it discovers all entities, both in the fact that they are, and in their Being as they are, that is, always in their Being" (p.34). Thus, as Thomas Sheehan explains,
Heidegger conjugated this `altheiological' insight of the Greeks with the phenomenological insights he had learned from Husserl and Aristotle: entities are self-disclosive (alethes) only insofar as they are in correlation with the various modes of human co-performance of disclosure (aletheuein), primarily the practical ones... This `event' of intelligibility in its facticity became, for Heidegger, the `thing itself' that philosophy had to interrogate. It was, he thought, the ultimate a priori, the `first' of everything about the human world, and thus (for those with the sensitivity for it) the most obvious fact of all... the `happening' of this correlation -- the always-already operative empowering of the essential togetherness of disclosive human comportment and of the entities qua accesible -- is what Heidegger, both tentatively in his earlier courses and boldly in his final writings, called Ereignis.(52)
III. Analytic and Aristotelean Objections Answered
However, before considering further how this concept of primordial phenomenality orients Heidegger's project as a whole, we should briefly consider some likely objections. The first objection would say that by adding Dasein to his analysis, Heidegger risks returning to idealism. For more detailed analyses of representation, such as Dretske's, show that indication requires a real counterfactual dependency between the Y and the X it announces, which is usually a causal or "a lawful dependency between the indicator and the indicated."(53) And although (in what Dretske calls "Type I" systems) this dependency can be conferred on an arbitrary system of signs by the care of their human manipulators,(54) it can also arise from natural relations which can exist completely independent of their apprehension by minds:
Some people think that all indication is indication for or to someone. ...This view, I submit, is merely a special version of the more general and even more implausible idea [i.e. Idealism] that nothing is true unless it is true for someone, unless someone knows (or at least believes) it. I do not intend to quarrel about this matter. I shall simply assume that if one mistakes a perfectly reliable and properly functioning boiler-pressure gauge for something else, thinks that it is broken, completely ignores it, or never even sees it ...it nonetheless still indicates what the boiler pressure is.(55)
It is important to realize that Heidegger need not deny that natural processes and causal connections can contain "information" in this sense of "an objective, mind-independent, indicator relation."(56) As his discussion of "symptoms" shows, he can accept this without also accepting that "objective" reality is completely independent of mind in the naive realist sense, because reality's inherent accessibility does not lie in its `appearance' to any mind. His concern is rather with how apprehension of reality first becomes possible: when it occurs through accurate discernment of `natural information,' it has an objective referent for the reasons Dretske brings out, but our apprehension of any such information through representations depends on a phenomenal manifestation of what Dretske calls the "expressive elements of an RS."(57) And this `showing' of the expressive elements when they are apprehended cannot be a mere indication of them.
Heidegger could also accept Dretske's useful insight that what a system "represents" to human beings is usually only one of the things that its expressive elements "indicate or mean" in the sense of its natural correlations. In what he calls "Type II" systems, this apprehended significance is determined subjectively: e.g., the fuel gauge is causally correlated with the value of many physical variables in the car's machinery, but we "take a special interest in and give it the function of indicating" a particular one of these natural indicating relations, and callibrate it accordingly.(58) In what Dretske calls Type III or "Natural Systems of Representation," this selection of functional role is also naturally determined: in biological organisms, of the many things that the state of sensory organs may naturally indicate, one or a few are intrinsically important to the organism because its reactions are keyed to them.(59)
Dretske argues that it is this difference between indication relations (which either hold or fail to hold independently of our beliefs) and representational functions assigned either by choice or intrinsically, which first makes misrepresentation possible: misrepresentation occurs when the signs that serve a system "as its representational elements fail to indicate something they are supposed to indicate" according to their function.(60) But in light of Heidegger's analysis, we cannot accept Dretske's next step to the conclusion that the "intentionality" distinctive of mind in general is a result of the capacity to "misrepresent" (in this propositional sense) built into Type III systems.(61) In order for representation of any of the three kinds Dretske distinguishes to be apprehended intentionally, there must be a prior kind awareness, which Schlick would call `acquaintance-intentionality,' that apprehends primordial phenomena as what they show themselves to be. This is not an indication relation, nor is it `natural' in Dretske's sense, since it can misapprehend in the case of semblances, but in either case, the `truth' or `deception' realized in primordial acquaintance with phenomena is not propositional. To be primordially acquainted with a phenomenon P that `shows itself' or is apprehended as manifest is not to `say' or `judge' that P, but to connect directly with something's being in the P way.
This crucial point forestalls another type of argument that would resist Heidegger's claims. The view that there are `primordial phenomena' says that in one sense at least, we are at home in the world: elements of reality, as well as its horizons, are accessible to us in a non-accidental manner. In a recent paper titled "Cognitive Homelessness," Timothy Williamson argues instead that aside from trivial cases, such as contradictions and tautologies, nothing is "luminous" in the sense of being "inherently accessible" to our knowledge.(62) But Williamson bases his argument on the assumption that such "luminous" phenomena would be defined in terms of our being "in a position to know that P" in relevant contexts where P obtained.(63) For example, "Pain is often conceived as a luminous condition, in the sense that, if one is in pain, then one is in a position to know that one is in pain."(64) But the knowledge available from primordial phenomena is not propositional knowledge at all: my feeling is an immediate acquaintance, and my knowing how this feels is fully immanent to me in Husserl's sense, whereas the judgmental application of a concept like "painful" (or more precise adjectives) to this feeling is reflective and uncertain.(65) Moreover, Williamson's paradigm-argument to show that we do not have luminous knowledge in any non-trivial case exploits these very problems of concept-application. By reductio, he argues against the supposition "that the condition that one feels hot is luminous."(66) In a fashion resembling a sorites argument, he imagines a person sitting outside from dawn until noon, who definitely feels cold in the morning, and is unequivocally certain that he feels hot by the end, but must inevitably pass through intermediate stages where he will give "neutral answers" to the question of whether he feels hot.(67) Since knowing that one feels hot at any time t must involve reliably based confidence in the judgment, which must be almost equal at the previous moment t-1, and hence one must actually feel hot at t-1. Given this principle, if feeling hot were luminous, we would be able to work back to the false conclusion that one felt hot at dawn, so feeling hot must not be luminous. There are times when one feels hot but "is not in a position to know that one feels hot."(68) The problem is that the concept "hot," arguably like all concepts employed in judgments, is not fine-grained enough to capture the immediacy of the experience. Even when their application is certain, we do not have luminous propositional knowledge that concept C applies in this circumstance. What Williamson misses is that `feeling something,' sometimes hesistantly described as hot, sometimes more confidently, is itself a state of `knowledge' in another sense from knowing that we feel so-and-so. The `luminosity' of primordial phenomenality can occur at this level precisely because it is pre-conceptual.
For this reason, however, an Aristotelean might be tempted to object that Heidegger is treating `sensible phantasms' as phenomena rather than appearances, and treating as unmanifested signifieds represented in appearances what are actually the intelligible forms grasped directly by nous rather than through perception and imagination. But this would be misleading. As the rest of his book makes abundantly clear, Heidegger thinks that the paradigm cases of primordial phenomena are essential structures of different sorts of beings that are grasped only by the mind, after much interpretative clarification allows them to `show themselves.' Pre-conceptual primordial phenomenality is certainly not limited to `raw feels' as in Williamson's examples, but includes cases where the phenomenon is intentionally `over-against' us as it is not in feelings, and cases where the phenomenon is a horizon of such intentionality. Thus Heidegger specifically warns against resting simply with his "formal conception of `phenomenon'," which includes Kantian empirical intuition, and urges that the substantively "phenomenological conception" of the phenomenon focuses on those primordial `phenomena' which are basic manifestations of Being that must `show themselves' primordially because they open the way of access for whole classes of ordinary appearances. Thus in Kant's system, for example, the "forms of intuition" are paradigm "phenomena" in the specifically phenomenological sense (p.54-5). Thus for Heidegger at least, it is the eid or regional `essences' which in Husserl's system are disclosed in the eidetic reduction that are the real `phenomena' of phenomenology as such. Similarly, in Heidegger's own work, it is intelligible forms that can be "thematized" in an interpretative logos --like the existential structures of Dasein-- that constitute the basic phenomena to be uncovered. As Heidegger says in §C of ¶7,
Only as phenomenology, is ontology possible. In the phenomenological conception of the "phenomenon," what one has in mind as that which shows itself is the Being of entities, its meaning, its modifications and derivatives...`Behind' the phenomena of phenomenology there is essentially nothing else; on the other hand, what is to become a phenomenon can be hidden. And just because the phenomena are proximally and for the most part not given, there is need for phenomenology (p.60).
Thus the specifically phenomeno-logical concept of the `phenomenon' is the kind of ontologically basic primordial phenomenon that can be apprehended only through thinking. Not only the formal concept of the phenomenon as such, but also Heidegger's hermeneutic conception of logos, go together to determine the sense of `phenomenon' appropriate for a logos of phenomena. Thus although his understanding of nous is hermeneutic, unlike Aristotle's, Heideggerian phenomenology focuses on what Aristoteleans would call the `intelligible species.'
The significance of this hermeneutic aspect of Heideggerian phenomenology becomes apparent if we ask how we know when we have found a phenomenon that is `primordial,' or complete in showing itself in itself. This issue is central to all of the main phenomenological analyses in the rest of Being and Time, but Heidegger denies that there can be any criterion for primordiality known in advance. Since phenomena can be covered up in various ways, history gives us phenomena that seem primordial but on investigation turn out to be semblances. In some cases, investigation is also easily fooled, because it is not historical accident but the very nature of the phenomenon at stake which makes it conceal itself in semblances, resisting becoming a primordial phenomenon (p.60). Thus hermeneutic phenomenology must be critical, and "The idea of grasping and explicating phenomena in a way which is `original' and `intuitive' is directly opposed to the naiveté of a haphazard, `immediate,' and unreflective `beholding'" (p.61). In short, those phenomena are most likely to be primordial which figure centrally in the best interpretive account we can give within an explanation of the history of concepts themselves, extending to the horizons. In the hands of many contemporary thinkers, however, such a hermeneutic theory of knowledge implies a `historicism' in which interpretation is a closed system, and reality, truth and meaning cannot transcend our most coherent interpretation. With Heidegger, hermeneutics is essential for the interpretation which discerns and uncovers primordial phenomena, but these phenomena themselves are the revelation of a reality with its own meaningfulness over against human systems.
In conclusion, although neither would like the comparison, it seems to me that Heidegger's hermeneutic phenomenology stands on the realism-antirealism continuum about where Hilary Putnam's own "realism with a human face" means to stand.(69) Heidegger rejects what Putnam calls "metaphysical realism," or
[the] picture in which there is some fixed set of "language-independent" objects (some of which are abstract and other are concrete) and fixed "relation" between terms and their extensions.(70)
This view, or "Realism" with a big "R" as Putnam says,(71) equates reality with something that can be defined independently of all mental and linguistic access to reality. But this view has absurd consequences: Putnam concentrates on those evident in quantum mechanics and contemporary theories of truth, while Heidegger focuses on those which arise from trying to take representation as the most basic form of such access. They approach the issue from opposite angles, but arrive at much the same conclusion. Though reality involves `access to reality,'(72) and therefore there isn't even in principle such a thing as a sum of the real --or a `total view' of it from a completely `external' perspective (in Nagel's sense)(73)-- this does not mean that reality is simply conventional or something our minds produce.(74) `Access' remains access to something which does not itself have the "disclosive" character of Dasein, as Heidegger says, but this something is entirely independent of disclosive access: Being has the character of giving itself to mind, or offering access to itself, while simultaneously concealing itself and withdrawing from being a Totality, so that there is `room' for mind to exist, time for disclosure to open to reality at all.(75)
1. Kent Bach, "Searle Against the World: how can experiences find their objects?," presented at a colloquium on Searle's work (University of Notre Dame, April 1997), mss. p.1.
2. See Searle, Intentionality: An essay in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge University Press, 1983).
3. See Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, tr. Donald A. Cress (Hackett, 1979), First Meditation, p.15. Descartes's selection of primary qualities clearly points back to Aristotle's Categories and forward to Kant's table of categories and pure intuitions.
4. Admittedly, for Descartes, this was a case of hyperbolic doubt, nevertheless its possibility was among those encompassed by the evil demon hypothesis.
5. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Penguin Classics, 1985), Part I, ch.1, p.85.
6. ibid: from the sense-organs, the stimuli travels through the nerves and membranes to the "Brain and Heart," and "causeth there a resistance, or counter-pressure, or endeavour of the heart, to deliver it self: which endeavour, because Outward, seemeth to be some matter without" (p.85-85). As crude as this account is, contemporary physicalist explanations of consciousness such as Dennett's seem only to have elaborated rather than fundamentally altered this reaction-model.
7. ibid, p.86.
8. ibid, p.86.
9. Ibid, p.93.
10. Hobbes, Leviathan, p.86.
11. ibid, p.87. Hobbes gives a very compressed summary of Aristotle's theory a few pages later: "Some say the Senses receive the Species of things, and deliver them to the Common-sense; and the Common Sense delivers them over to the Fancy, and the Fancy to the Memory, and the Memory to the Judgement, like handing of things from one to another, with many words making nothing understood" (p.93).
12. ibid: "I say not this, as disapproving the use of Universities: but because I am to speak hereafter of their office in a Commonwealth, I must let you see on all occasions by the way, what things would be amended in them; amongst which the frequency of insignificant Speech is one" (p.87).
13. See Thomas Hobbes, Metaphysical Writings, ed. Mary Whiton Calkins (Open Court, 1989), "Human Nature," ch.II, p.158.
14. See Bertrand Russell, The History of Western Philosophy (Simon and Schuster, 1945), ch.XX, "Kant," p.717.
15. Ibid, p.158-159.
16. Jean-François Lyotard, Phenomenology, tr. Brian Beakley, int. Gayle Ormiston (SUNY Press, 1991), p.54.
17. ibid, p.53-54.
18. From Ronald Bruzina's review in Husserl Studies, 12.3 (1995), p.228: see Burt Hopkins, Intentionality in Husserl and Heidegger: The Problem of the Original Method and Phenomenon of Phenomenology, Contributions to Phenomenology, Vol. 11 (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993).
19. Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, tr. W. R. Boyce Gibson (Collier Books, 1962), §32, p.100.
20. ibid, §38, p.112.
21. ibid, §41, p.117.
22. ibid, §42, p.121.
23. ibid, §40, p.116.
24. ibid, §40, p.116.
25. As Husserl remarks, if all phenomena are mere appearances or symbols standing in for the thing itself, we have an aporia, since "that which is given in perception serves in the rigorous method of natural science for the valid determination, open to anyone to carry out and to verify through his own insight, of that transcendent being whose `symbol' it is" (p.116).
26. Reference needed.
27. While these conscious states themselves, as Husserl always urges, remain completely unperspectival and lacking in transcendence, and thus do not "present" themselves to reflective consciousness of experience but are completely given in the immanence of reflection, and hence distinguished in their essential character from things-in-themselves (see, for example, §44, p.126). Thus we may regard Husserl's basic distinction between transcendence and immanence as an attempt to distinguish Being and Access-to-Being from one another phenomenologically (i.e. through access to each in turn). Seen this way, however, the remaining inadequacy of this approach from Heidegger's standpoint becomes clearer: Access or experience itself is part of Being, and so Husserl's phenomenological account leaves us with two unmediable kinds of Being, with no way to clarify the univocal character of Being that holds them both together and explains why Being divides itself this way, and gives itself (though only partially) to consciousness.
28. Lyotard, p.55.
29. Husserl, §43, p.122.
30. ibid, §43, p.123, omitting Husserl's italics. The problem is that the very extension essential to a physical thing is constituted in part by its transcendence to consciousness, which is lost if it becomes as perfectly given as any part of the stream of consciousness is to the reflective act which is part of the same stream.
31. ibid, §43, p.123. In other words, by misinterpreting the transcendence of the Real to consciousness as the independence of the signified from its signifier or representation, this view misdiagnosis the transcendence of things themselves as a result of the finitude of our minds, implying that an infinite mind without this disability would grasp them without any intervening representations, and thus without any transcendence.
32. ibid.
33. Ibid.
34. Peter Godfrey-Smith, "Quine and a Dogma of Empiricism," talk delivered at the University of Notre Dame, October 11, 1996. At the end of his paper, Godfrey-Smith recognizes Thomas Kuhn as his main source for this point that "Theories of the world carry with them their own standards for the proper relation between theory and experience" (mss. p.6). But he does not acknowledge the earlier pedigree of this insight in Heidegger and the phenomenological tradition, to whom Kuhn was indebted.
35. Habermas, for example, relies on communicative conditions implicit in the illocutionary mode of moral assertions to get from his theory of meaning to the basic standard for norms. But while he thinks that moral claims have an objective content whose meaning is dependent on such validity conditions, he does not want to equate `validity' with factual truth, as if there were literally a realm of moral facts as `moral realism' holds.
However unclear this intermediate status remains, Habermas's theory is an attempt to mediate
the dilemma I am noting between truth-condition and use theories through the idea of
"transcendental-pragmatic" conditions for meaning, which are supposed to have an
objectivity analogous to realist truth and yet to be invested in (and read off from) our
communicative practices, albeit not as group-relative but as universal to all humanity.
36. Michael Dummett, for example, uses a positivist version of this (naive) realist approach
meaning --equating meaning with empirically identifiable truth-conditions-- to argue for the
anti-realist status of discourse in domains where such conditions cannot be found for a
completely bivalent separation of truth from falsehood.
37. We will see this again in the discussion of Dretske's theory of representation in section V
below.
38. This, of course, is the Sausurrean basis for Derrida's theory of meaning, which falls within
the anti-realist spectrum, broadly understood.
39. John Drummond, "Edmund Husserl's Reformation of Philosophy: Premodern, Modern, or
Postmodern?" in Edmund Husserl, ed. John Drummond, American Catholic Philosophical
Quarterly, Vol. 66.2 (Spring 1992), 135-154, p.146.
40. For the same idea governs the notion of truth as alethia, or self-directed uncovering of the
entity itself by itself, which is a frequent theme in Heidegger's later writings.
41. Thomas Sheehan, "Reading a Life: Heidegger and Hard Times," in The Cambridge
Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles Guignon (Cambridge University Press, 1993), 70-96,
p.81.
42. See Lear, Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p.273.
Note also that Heidegger refers to Aristotle's Metaphysics VII, chapter 4, right at the end of
¶7 (p.63).
43. Ibid.
44. I avoid the word "thing" in this context, because Heidegger uses "dinge" for entities that
primordially show themselves in the particular character of presentness-at-hand in the
environment. He uses "entities" (ta onta) for the universal class of beings that show
themselves in any way (p.51), or anything towards which we can be comported.
45. Note that this would be a status of ultimate adequatio even more pure than that which
Husserl claims for the transparency of his immanent phenomena.
46. Thomas Seehan, p.83. However, note that Heidegger believes that we are capable of what
he calls noein (p.57), in which the phenomenon is disclosed through discourse in exactly the
way that it shows itself. To properly `interpret' the phenomenon in this noetic fashion is the
ideal and meaning of "phenomenology" (p.58).
47. There is a further category which he calls "mere appearance" or blosse Erscheinung, which
can be conveniently ignored here for the sake of avoiding further complexity.
48. I believe Heidegger means: in showing themselves in the particular way that they are
showing.
49. This formulation is not quite the same as any of the ones the translators offer (p.52), but
represents my own version of their formula 1a.
50. Fred Dretske, Explaining Behavior: Reasons in a World of Causes (MIT Press, 1991,
Bradford Books series), ch.3, p.52.
51. Nor, we should note against Derrida, can the signs or appearances support themselves
through their own interdependent relations of difference. Even granting that logically, the
ultimate differences between signs in a finite system of signs must logically be themselves
`unrepresentable' or unsignifiable in that system of signs, for us to have access to these signs
qua signs at all requires that they show themselves in a way distinct from signification and thus
not bound by the system of differences that allows signs their representational significance.
Thus the meaningfulness of signs cannot arise, as Sausurre and other structuralists thought,
solely from their difference from one another. Heidegger's transcendental argument is as
decisive against Derridean neostructuralism as it is against Hobbesian representationalism.
This should not be surprising, since both Hobbes's and Derrida's analyses imply forms of anti-realism that miss the third way between realism and idealism which phenomenology opens.
[Perhaps Derrida could respond by just deconstructing the terms `phenomenon' and
`appearance.' But this carries the danger of suggesting that the `iron cage' of difference
automatically extends to enclose whatever tries to escape it (as part of its definition)! If so,
deconstruction would become trivially unfalsifiable, and then as inconsequential as any
irrefutable absolute skepticism].
52. Sheehan, p.82. Ereignis, for example as discussed in Heidegger's lecture on "Time and
Being," is usually translated as `Appropriation,' because it refers to the disclosive taking-up in
time of Being that is given as intelligible in its very being, or let-be as meaningful.
53. Dretske, p.56.
54. Dretske's example is someone using coins on a table to represent players in a basketball
play. In this case, the correlation of the coins-moves with the actual players-moves is
maintained only by the human agent who is using the coins to represent the game (p.52-53).
In this case, both what Dretske calls the indicating relation (i.e. the correlation) and its use to
perform some representational function are conventionally conferred. In Type II systems, the
indicating relation is `natural' because the correlation is causally fixed, but the selection of this
correlation (out of the many in which the indicator) as its representational function is
conventional or conferred. In Type III systems, both the indication and its relevance are
naturally determined, as I explain below.
55. Dretske, p.55. As Dretske points out, this kind of indicative relation, which arises from
causally assured correlations between positions or magnitudes in one object and others, gives
rise to what Paul Grice called the natural sense of meaning, in which for Y to mean X entails
that X is actually the case (p.55).
56. Dretske, p.58.
57. Dretske, p.52.
58. Dretske, p.59.
59. Dretske, p.62.
60. Dretske, p.66-7.
61. Dretske, p.67.
62. Timothy Williamson, "Cognitive Homelessness," Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 93.11 (Nov.
1996), 554-573, p.554.
63. ibid, p.555, my italics.
64. ibid, p.556.
65. Williamson acknowledges (p.556) that "more primitive creatures are sometimes in pain
without possessing any concepts at all," and therefore says that we might have to make the
possession of concepts or language use part of the relevant contexts. But this is just to miss
the lesson taught by the "primitive creature:" namely that the relevant sense of knowledge is
not knowledge-that. One might of course deny that this constitutes knowledge at all, as is
sometimes done, for example, in response to Frank Jackson's `Blind Mary' argument against
physicalism. But whether we call it knowledge or not, such non-propositional familiarity or
direct acquaintance with phenomena is presupposed by representational knowledge, as
Heidegger's argument shows.
66. ibid, p.557.
67. ibid, p.558.
68. ibid, p.559.
69. See his lecture "Realism with a Human Face," in Putnam, Realism with a Human Face, ed.
James Conant (Harvard University Press, 1990).
70. Ibid, p.27. Putnam takes the term "metaphysical realism" from Hartry Field (see p.30).
71. Ibid, p.28.
72. As Putnam says: "elements of what we call `language' or `mind' penetrate so deeply into
what we call `reality' that the very project of representing ourselves as being `mappers' of
something `language-independent' is fatally compromised from the start" (Realism with a
Human Face, p.28, italics omitted).
73. See Putnam, p.11: "a great dream is given up--the dream of a description of physical
reality as it is apart from observers, a description which is objective in the sense of being `from
no particular point of view.'"
74. Ibid, p.28.
75. See Martin Heidegger, On Time and Being, tr. Joan Stambaugh (Harper Torchbooks,
1972): "To think Being explicitly requires us to relinquish Being as the ground of beings in
favor of the giving which prevails concealed in unconcealment" (p.6); the "Appropriation"
(Ereignis) which gives Being and time is "a giving in which the sending source keeps itself
back and, thus, withdraws from unconcealment" (p.22); "The fundamental experience of Being
and Time is thus that of the oblivion of Being. But oblivion means here in the Greek sense:
concealment and self-concealing" (p.29). The inspiration for this conception of Being comes
ultimately from Schelling's conception of God as self-limiting so as to make room for man's
freedom.