The first thing I wanted to say, which I probably should have said before, is a portion of this
course, of our time together, should be under the heading of stump the chumps. That is, when
you’re doing the reading for the week and you find a passage that seems like it might be really
important that you look at it and you just say, you know I have no idea whatever what he is
saying in this, save that and bring it up in the class. I’ll particularly open the floor for that
immediately after the break, but as we go along and I’m sort of moving through the text if we get
in the vicinity of one of your puzzling, significant passages, you know raise your hand and let’s
talk about it. I’m prepared to be chump-in-chief here and, you know, will do what I can with it,
but I think it’s worth it if everybody has a go at it—or anybody who can make anything of such a
passage. So although I can’t claim that everything in the book up until this point has been
pellucid, I think it really is in the “Force and Understanding” section that you start to get these
passages where, you know, you really can lose track of how he’s saying anything in them, so the
floor is always available for that. If I think we should talk about that passage a little bit later, I
won’t be bashful about saying that, so don’t you be bashful about mentioning it.
Ok, there’s another challenge that I would like some help with. For anybody who’s willing to
think about this, it seems to me to be useful to have a nice visual, sort of graphics representation
of Hegel’s picture of the thing with many properties, of particular objects as the field of the many
properties, which he says are porous to one another or inter-penetrate one another because
they’re merely or indifferently different, but he pictures each one of those as surrounded by a
kind of cloud of incompatible properties, none of which are co-instantiated with it and it’s those
clouds of properties that are incompatible with each of the properties of the thing that repel and
distinguish that thing from other things, from things that have incompatible properties. I see
these beautiful pictures of protein receptors on cell surfaces that interlock with some things and
reject others and it seems to me there ought to be a good graphic representation of this picture,
but none of my attempts to draw one have been successful. So I commend that to you as a
worthwhile thing to doodle about in off moments.
I’ll just mention, just sort of introduce our topic. The picture in “Perception” is of a property
surrounded by this cloud of incompatible properties, in virtue of which it is the determinate
property that it is. It’s by contrasting with those. And it’s in terms of that cloud of contrasting
exclusively different properties that we’re to understand the consequential relations between
properties, the way in which mammal implies vertebrate. In “Perception” exclusive difference is
thought of only as a binary operation. We’ve got the relation of Aristotelian contrariety there.
Now in fact that’s not the way exclusive difference of properties works, because it’s possible to
have three properties which are jointly incompatible, but not pairwise incompatible. So for
instance if you think of the property of winesap apple, being green, and being ripe—there are
green winesap apples, there are green apples that are ripe, there are apples that are ripe and
winesap apples, but you can’t have a green, ripe winesap apple. If it were a Granny Smith, yes,
but not if it’s a winesap. Any pair of those is compatible, but the trio isn’t. For some time I
thought that, like Aristotle, Hegel was simply innocent of the thought that there could be these
multiadic contrarieties, if you like, or material incompatibilities, but I realized that it isn’t Hegel
who is innocent of that thought. It’s consciousness understanding itself under the categories of
perception that’s innocent of that thought. And the idea that the repulsions might come only with
groups of things—that’s actually one of the key ideas of the play of forces in this section and one
of the advances from consciousness understanding itself as perceiving to consciousness
understanding itself as understanding, as we get in “Force and Understanding”, is precisely
opening up to this more holistic picture, where it’s not just pairwise exclusion that you’ve got,
but multiadic exclusion. That’s much harder to draw than the dyadic kind, not going to ask you
to draw the play of forces at this point.
I can’t resist mentioning in the vicinity my hero Wilfred Sellars, about whom we will hear a lot
more even just today, makes a lot of play of inconsistent triads of philosophical theses. They
loom large in his work. In his table talk, though nowhere in print, he speculated on whether there
were practical equivalents of this; in particular, perceptual equivalents of it. And if you look on
Wikipedia, you find something called “Sellers’s Paradox”—or I would like to think of it as
Sellers’s Challenge—which is, within the range of the perceptible, specifically having to do with
taste, to come up with three foods such that any pair of them are ok together, but the triad is
disgusting, by any standard of ok and disgusting. Set the bar wherever you like. But the pairs
have to be ok and the triad has to be not ok. At a recent Sellars conference in Dublin, we had
people actually produce foods like this and candidates for Sellarsian triads of foods—never seen
this on reality tv or cooking shows whatever. The most successful I’ll just report empirically that
we found was whiskey, lemonade, and beer. Whiskey and lemonade making whiskey sours,
lemonade and beer making shandy, and beer and whiskey making boilermakers, but, everybody
agreed, you mix the three of them together it’s not good. So I take that empirically to be the
current champion in this search for perceptual inconsistent triads. That’s in taste. You can think
about it in other dimensions. For some reason, and I’m sure Hegel would tell us, “Ah it’s the
concept,” these merely multiadic incompatibilities, which are ubiquitous in the conceptual realm,
are much harder to find in the practical, particularly the perceptual, realm. Ok that’s only a semiserious comment, but there it is.
So I see this “Force and Understanding” section as coming in six parts. There’s an overview for
the first three paragraphs, 132 to 135. There’s the discussion of force from 136 to 142, which has
three parts, “Force and Its Expression”, “Independent Opposing Forces”, and “Reciprocal Action
or the Play of Forces”. And then third—I see I’ve mis-numbered these here—“The Law and
Explanation”, which includes the first super-sensible world and then the inverted world, which is
the second super-sensible world, and finally the infinite, which is the third super-sensible world
or the second inverted world. So just to be clear, there’s three super-sensible worlds and the last
two of them are the two inverted worlds. The first inverted world, that discussion is one of the
most famous passages in— most famously obscure passages, I should say, in the
phenomenology. Everybody who is anybody has to take it on sooner or later. There’s a great
essay by Gadamer, for instance, on the inverted world. So it’s a real measure of one’s reading of
Hegel how much sense one can make of the pretty crazy things he says there. But I have a
candidate. We’ll get to that later. So roughly, once he gets into it, there’s a discussion of force,
there’s a discussion of law and explanation, and then there’s all these super-sensible worlds,
some of which he calls inverted (verkehrte Welt).
Now as is my usual practice, instead of starting with the text, I want to say what the big ideas are
that I think he’s putting in place in this chapter of the Phenomenology. And I think there’s four
of them, four great big ideas, which have sub-parts and they interact with one another, but I think
it’s useful keeping track of them under these four headings. So the first is this is where we’re
going to talk about theoretical entities. Everything we’ve looked at so far has been observable.
It’s been immediate in the sense that you can just see whether the properties are there or not but
now we’re going to move to thinking about theoretical entities, which are postulate. They’re only
inferentially accessible, as opposed to being immediately accessible.
As I indicated just at the end last time as a hint, the way he talks about these is under the heading
of force. Force is the paradigmatic Newtonian theoretical entity. Clearly in the back of his mind,
Hegel has got Newton’s law of force, F=ma, force is a product of mass and acceleration, and
everything he says is meant to be true of Newtonian forces. But it’s not just meant to be true of
Newtonian forces; it’s meant to be true of any theoretical objects. Force is playing an allegorical
role here. Allegorical in the way in which John Bunyan’s book Pilgrim’s Progress is a
paradigmatic allegory, in which our hero Pilgrim falls into the Slough of Despond and meets
characters named after virtues and vices, in which some abstract thing has been personified in a
particular. Instead of allegory, you could think of it as a kind of synecdoche, where the part is
taken for the whole. One theoretical entity, force, is standing for all the theoretical entities. But
from here on out, really through the rest of the book, you have to be able to read the allegories
that Hegel is giving us and that means keeping two sets of books. You’ve got to understand the
story he’s telling within the allegory and you’ve got to understand the lesson that he wants us to
learn from the allegory; that is, understand what the characters in the allegory are allegorical for.
The expression of force, for instance, which is essential to the notion of force in the allegory,
we’re saying, well, force has to do something. It has to accelerate some mass. That’s the essence
of being force in the allegory. But that’s allegorical for the fact that theoretical entities have to
have some observable manifestation or we’d have no way of knowing about them. But that’s true
of theoretical entities of things like genes, as well as it is of Newtonian forces or subatomic
particles like gluons—again they’re not forces, in many ways they’re not very much like forces,
but they have to have some effect, however far downstream, on something we can observe or we
would have no way of finding out about them. So from here on out, I’m going to be trying to
keep those two sets of books separate and explicit—what’s going on in the allegory and what’s
that allegorical for. Next time we’ll be reading about the struggle unto death between the master
and the slave and it’s absolutely critical to get straight on what’s happening in the allegory,
where one of them doesn’t get killed and gets enslaved, and what that’s supposed to be
allegorical for, what the master and slave are standing in for, what lessons we’re supposed to
learn from that.
So we’re still on the first big idea, theoretical entities, and here there’s two big lessons, I think,
that he wants us to learn. There’s some subsidiary ones, but there’s two big ones. And the first is,
as Sellars, who’s going to come up several times during this time, puts it, “The distinction
between observable and theoretical objects is not an ontological distinction”—it’s not a
distinction between two different kinds of things—“it’s a methodological distinction”—it’s a
distinction between two ways we can find out about things. Theoretical objects— Well, I’ll say,
observational objects are ones we can find out about non-inferentially by observation or
inferentially from other observable things. So when I see that this is a ripe green winesap apple, I
can infer that it will taste sweet. Now I can also observe that it’s sweet if I bite into it, but I can
infer that from other observable properties as well, and one of the lessons of perception is that
there is no autonomous stratum of thought of language that consists entirely of making
observations, of non-inferentially applying concepts, that in order to be intelligible as
determinately contentful the concepts you’re applying also have to be able to stand in relations of
inferential consequence and incompatibility, and therefore inferential consequence, with respect
to other ones. Now it is intelligible that there be a stratum of language or thought that consists
entirely of observational properties, that’s ones that can be applied non-inferentially, that have
what I call immediacy of origin, it’s just that not every use of them can be observational. They
also have to stand in these relations of incompatibility and inference to one another. But part of
the transition from “Perception” to “Force and Understanding” is the space opening up once we
realize that it’s essential to the applicability of these concepts of observables that they stand to
one another in relations of material consequence and incompatibility, that there be objects that
are only accessible inferentially, that don’t have an observational use. These are ones that are in
principle only— Sorry, that are accessible only inferentially. They’ve been postulated to make
sense of things at the level of observation, but the pictures is sometimes you can tell a more
systematic, unified, and simpler story about what’s going on observationally if you include some
objects that can’t be observed in the story. Now the story I usually tell to illustrate this Sellarsian
claim that the distinction between observable and theoretical entities—
Well, so let me say, so instrumentalism in the philosophy of science says there is an ontological
difference between what’s observable and what’s theoretical. Theoretical things are merely
postulated. They’re fictions of a kind. We make believe that there are these subatomic particles,
because doing that helps us organize what’s happening at the observational level, but
instrumentalism says the only claims that are really true or false are claims about observables.
The claims about theoretical entities are merely more or less useful posits or fictions, things
we’ve postulated in order to explain what’s going on observational. Now believe it or not, there
still are some instrumentalists in this sense. Bas van Fraassen’s empiricism is a contemporary
example of that kind of view. It’s opposed by a scientific realism that says theoretical entities
are, in the best cases anyway, just as real and real in the same sense as observable ones, they’re
just ones that we don’t happen to be able to observe. We can only find out about them
observationally. Sellars fought the good fight against the instrumentalists in the fifties and the
sort of example that makes his point is when the now-demoted— when Pluto, now demoted from
the status of a planet to a mere planetoid, when it was first consider, it was a purely theoretical
object. It was postulated to explain perturbations in the orbit of Neptune. People realized that the
wobble that there was in the orbit of Neptune could be explained if there were a planet—if there
were a mass—with a certain mass and in a certain orbit, that would explain things perfectly.
Telescopes weren’t good enough to see whether there really was something. It wasn’t that big a
mass. But in the 1930s the telescopes got better. They pointed them where this theory said this
postulated, merely theoretical entity should be and, lo and behold, it swam into the can of the
observer through the telescope and at that point, for the first time, Pluto changed status, became
an observable object. It was no longer a purely theoretical object. And the Sellarsian point,
Hegel’s point as well, would be Pluto didn’t change. It was just as real beforehand as it was later.
There was no ontological change, but there was this methodological change. Before, the only
way we could find out about Pluto—What is its mass? What is its orbit?—was inferentially from
things we could observe, but as observation got better, we came to be able to observe that. And
you might think of the status of genes, postulated by Mendel, worked on through the 20s, 30s,
and 40s, but eventually when we theoretically came to identify them with regions of DNA
molecules we finally found, well we can actually see those things in electron microscopes.
Again, they were just what they always were, but our access to them changed.
Parenthetically, people sometimes talk about a Platonic principle that wants to read ontology off
of methodological differences like this, to divide things into different kinds depending on the
different ways we know them. Do we know them by the senses? That’s one kind of thing. It’s in
the realm of becoming. Do we know through the intellect? That’s a different kind of thing.
That’s a way Plato thought about things. But this claim is, at least when we’re talking about
observable and theoretical entities, you shouldn’t endorse the Platonic principle. You shouldn’t
think that this methodological difference and two ways of finding out about something
corresponds to an ontological difference. That’s not to say that the Platonic principle never has
any applicability, you know, you’re going to have to justify it in each particular case.
Second big point, sorry, second point under this first big point about theoretical entities, as the
topic here, is it’s a mistake to run together the observation theory, observable object/theoretical
object distinction, with the distinction between appearance and reality. That latter being the
distinction between what things are for consciousness and what they are in themselves. And
we’ll see Hegel arguing that this is a mistake. Actually, those distinctions are orthogonal. Things
that you can observe can turn out to be mere appearances. They can be like the bent stick, which
you could observe, but it was an appearance. Or they can be real. The straight stick that you see
can just be there. Theoretical entities can be merely apparent. When we postulated phlogiston
nobody could observe it, but it was postulated to explain various phenomena. We could make
inferences to the presence or absence of different quantities of phlogiston. But it turned out to be
a bad theory. It was a mere appearance. There wasn’t really anything there in the way in which
the atomic theory of matter, postulating microstructure, turned out to be an account of what was
really there. So we’ll see the various flawed super-sensible worlds involve running together the
observation/theory and appearance/reality distinction. So those are the two main headings under
the first big idea of this section, advancing from the observable to the theoretical. I haven’t tied
this to any particular texts yet, but I’ve said something about observables and theoreticals. Any
comments or questions about this claim? That is, I’m claiming that there’s just this insight. It’s
just wrong to think about observables and theoreticals as ontologically different. Instrumentalism
has a bad idea. And I’ll say, if that’s right, it’s important to remember it in the philosophy of
mind. Behaviorists in the philosophy of mind are instrumentalists. They say there’s this
observable behavior. There’s what we can see people doing. And then you postulate these mental
or psychological states as responsible for the behavior that you can, let’s say using folk
psychology, better explain what people do—including the noises they make—if you postulate
thoughts, perceptions, beliefs, desires, and so on, but someone like Ryle is going to say unless
you can translate those postulates into regularities of behavior, into dispositions to behave,
you’re not entitled to postulate such things. That sort of analytic or logical behaviorism Sellars
contrasts with what he calls philosophical behaviorism, which says roughly the mind is to
behavior as theory is to observation and it’s entirely legitimate to postulate theoretical entities
that are not definable in terms of behavior any more than electrons are definable in terms of
voltmeter behavior and of course there’s better theories and worse theories, there’s true ones and
false ones there as well. Another example is in semantics. Michael Dummett is a semantic
instrumentalist. He says meanings are postulated to make sense of proprieties of linguistic
behavior. To explain how it’s proper to use linguistic expressions and he insists that any notion
of meaning must meet a manifestibility requirement. That is, you must be able to say what
difference to proprieties of behavior it makes that you mean one thing rather than another. His
argument for intuitionistic logic over classical logic depends just on this. There’s no way to
manifest the difference between the case in which there is no run of 21 consecutive 7s in the
decimal expansion of pi and the case where there is if it’s far enough out—how would you
manifest your grasp of the sense of the claim ‘There is no such run of 21 consecutive 7s in the
decimal expansion of pi’? Suppose it’s true that there isn’t. But that’s in principle something you
could never find out. You could never manifest your appreciation of that in your behavior, so he
says so that isn’t something you can mean. And that’s why intuitionism is the right logic for
semantics for him. So you know, when I claim that the thesis I put in the Sellarisian terms, but
the thesis that we will see Hegel is making here that the distinction between theoretical and
observable entities is not an ontological distinction, so instrumentalism is conceptually
confused—that is not just a trivial view. There are people who are on the wrong side of that,
even today, though mostly not in philosophy of the natural science. You won’t find many
instrumentalists, Bas is a lone hero there...heroic figure there, but in the philosophy of mind and
semantics it’s alive and well.
Ok, second big theme in this section has to do with the status of modal claims, alethic modal
claims, above all statements of law. The middle section of this chapter is about law and
explanation. Roughly, the way this comes out is the discussion of force first looks at force and its
expression, then looks at opposing forces, and ends up with the play of forces. And, as he puts it,
the truth of the play of forces turns out to be the laws that govern their interactions. And that’s
what moves us to thinking about law and explanation.
And here the main claim is laws are not super-facts. When you state a law of nature, you’re not
describing the way the world is, is the claim. Laws are not super-facts. So this is an anti-
descriptivist claim. Here I would cite my hero Sellars again. Once—this is a quasi-quote from
him, the exact one will be in the notes—once you’ve absorbed the tautology ‘The world is
described by descriptive concepts’, the way is open for an ungrudging acknowledgement that
many of the non-descriptive concepts that empiricists have relegated to second class status are in
fact not inferior. They’re just different. That’s Sellars’ anti-descriptivism. You also find this line
of thought in the later Wittgenstein. Don’t take it for granted that the job of every declarative
sentence is to state a fact. Don’t take it for granted that every predicate is seeking to describe
how things are. Paradigms for both of them, downstream from Moore, are normative predicates,
saying that something is good, for instance. Are you describing it in saying that? And here the
point of the third super-sensible world of the transition to thinking of concepts as infinite, not a
very helpful term for it (meine nach?? [00:38:05]), but the view we end up with, the third supersensible world, the way that Hegel wants to recommend that we think of things is a version, his
version, of the fundamental Kantian idea, realization I would say, that besides the concepts
whose job it is, whose principle expressive job it is, to describe and explain the empirical world,
there are concepts whose principle expressive job it is rather to make explicit features of
framework within which alone it’s possible to describe and explain the empirical world. These
are the Kantian categories or pure concepts of the understanding. His principle intellectual
innovation is that idea. I think, Kant’s two big ideas are the normativity of intentionality and this
idea that there are concepts that don’t describe or explain but rather make explicit features of the
framework within which you can describe and explain. And those concepts which are not over
there in some other world but are within the empirical world, that’s the conception of the third
super-sensible world, the one we end up with, where what’s super-sensible is implicit in the
world we can experience and that can appear to us.
Now principle among those framework-explicating concepts for Kant are alethic modal concepts.
This is the origin of his response to Hume, who forces the question ‘How could there be features
of the world that you describe, that are described by the lawfulness of a claim you make? How
could the way you’re describing the world go beyond mere regularities to include that and it
must be that way? It could not be otherwise. What feature of the world can we intelligibly see
claim like that? It could not be otherwise. It must be this way as describing’, Hume asks. And
he’s got an empiricist semantics that purports to tell us everything that we could intelligibly
describe, every way we could intelligibly describe the world as being, and he doesn’t find that in
it. That’s still the strategy we’ll find moving from traditional empiricism to logical empiricism in
the 20th century and to sophisticated empiricisms like van Fraassen’s today. But, the claim is,
you’re not describing the world when you state something as a law. You’re making explicit part
of the framework. Just to avoid confusion, I should mention that where alethic modality in this
sense shows up in Kant’s table of categories is not under the heading of modality. It’s
hypothetical judgments that make explicit these law-like relations in virtue of which concepts
can have the contents that they do. So the idea is going to be that the determinate contentfulness
of empirical states of affairs, whether empirical in the narrow sense of observable or empirical in
the broader sense of something we can find out about by inference from things that are empirical
in the narrow sense, the determinate contentfulness of empirical states of affairs depends on
modally robust inferential relations supported by laws to other ones and modal exclusions of
other properties that underwrite laws of nature. So being a sample of pure copper is incompatible
with being an electrical insulator. It’s necessary that if it’s copper it will conduct electricity.
That’s something we express using alethic modal vocabulary. That’s essential to the determinate
contentfulness of concepts like ‘copper’ and ‘conducts electricity’. But that law articulates the
content of the concepts. It’s not a fact about the way the world is in the sense that it’s a fact about
the way the world is that the coin my pocket is copper. That copper necessarily conducts
electricity is not a super-fact. But if not, what is it? Ok, it’s framework explicating, but Hegel’s
picture of that, of course, is going to be quite different from Kant’s. He’s developing that idea in
a different way from the way Kant did. But that’s what’s happening in the course of this chapter.
Ok, again, I gestured at a part of the text there, but I said a lot about the idea. Comments or
questions about this great big Kantian idea of there being framework explicating concepts? Ok,
well this won’t be the last we hear about it, of course.
Ok. Third great big idea in this chapter is holism about conceptual content. The term holism is
not a Hegelian term, was not introduced until the end of the 19th century, though it was
introduced to talk about Hegel’s ideas at that point. The play of forces is allegorical for semantic
holism. The things we’re talking about and the way we talk about it are alike in their holistic
structure. So last time I talked about the isomorphism that Quine is implicitly invoking when he
says, “Meaning is what essence becomes when it’s divorced from the thing and attached to the
word.” And he’s invoking there the late 19th century ontological debate between atomists and
holists, between the bucket of shot and the bowl of jelly people, and saying look, there’s a
semantic version of that too, and that’s the ground on which we should fight out this battle. It’s
semantic atomism, Jerry Fodor, on one side or semantic holism, Quine and Daivdson, on the
other side on semantics. And under the heading of law and explanation, Hegel’s going to say,
well these really are two sides of one coin and furthermore essentially so, ontological holism and
semantic holism, it’s not like you can pick to have one of them and not the other. They really are
two sides of one coin.
This is the topic that he elaborates under the heading of unities or identities that are constituted
through their differences or diversities. And that’s obviously a structural theme throughout. It’s
something we’ll hear about in much more abstract terms in the science of logic, but my view is
that to understand what he says there you have to think about the particular applications of that
idea that we get here. But if you think about a realm of properties or, well, so first think about a
realm of properties where the content of each one consists in the relations of exclusive
difference, contrariety, determinate negation, that it stands in to each of the others. That’s a
holistic picture. It’s not evidently a coherent notion. You’re dissolving the identity of the objects
that are the relata into the relations between them and saying, really it’s all the relations and these
things are just nodes in a network of relations. But of course it’s not as though you can
understand relations independently of their relata. The difficulty of finding a coherent way to talk
about things like that—and here I think it’s good to keep meanings in mind as something like
that; if we say, look, really the meaning of something is the relations of material inference and
incompatibility that it stands in to other things, well, just how does that, how is that coherent? I
address that particular issue in [Holism and Idealism in Hegel’s Phenomenology] and I’ll talk
about that some, but if you’re particularly interested in that topic, look at that. That’s in Tales of
the Mighty Dead, but we put it on the website too.
No one before Hegel had been a semantic holist. Even Kant was an atomist semantically. There
was the manifold of intuition and that provided the atoms that got synthesized under rules by
concepts and we built everything up from there. For Kant, judgments are distinct from one
another. The standard pre-Kantian order of explanation, the invariable pre-Kantian order of
explanation—I’ll say semantic order of explanation, though that’s a little bit anachronistic—
started with a doctrine of terms or concepts and built on that a doctrine of judgments, with the
judgments classified in terms of the kinds of classifications of particular terms under particular
terms and general terms under more general terms that you had, and then built on top of that a
doctrine of consequences or syllogisms relating inferentially relating judgments classifying the
kind of inferences depending on the kinds of classifications that the judgments made. Now Kant
jumps into the middle of that and says the fundamental unity is not the concept. It’s the
judgment. Why? Because the judgment is the minimal unity you can be responsible for. His
normative view of intentionality. Concepts are just functions of judgment, that is, they’re to be
understood exclusively in terms of the role they play in judgment. But judgments are atoms and
the inferential relations they stand in are to be read off of the relations between the concepts that
they contain.
Hegel’s going to take that up a level and say not only are concepts functions of judgment, that is,
to be understood in terms of their role in judgment, but judgments are functions of inference, to
be understood in terms of their inferential roles. That model that we had of the properties as
determinately contentful in virtue just of the relations of exclusion that they stand in to one
another, the modally robust exclusions they stand in to one another, now we have to think about
judgments as having he contents they do in terms of their relations of determinate negation and
mediation one to another. The judgments too get dissolved. And in fact, because of the kind of
inferences that Hegel is talking about, the kind of inferences you would make in ordinary natural
scientific or everyday reasoning, what follows from what is not independent of what judgments
you make, of what you take to be true. If I take it to be true that this is a winesap apple, I’m
going to make different inferences from its being ripe to its color than if I take it to be a granny
smith apple. And that means that not only is the content of judgment dependent on what
inferences it stands in, but also what inferences are good depend on what you take to be true.
Now Quine is a holist in this way, says meaning must at least determine inferential role, but
inferential role, the Duhem point, depends on what auxiliary hypotheses you can use in
extracting the inferential consequences of something. So meaning must determine inferential
role, but collateral beliefs affect what the inferences are, so the meaning of any one of your
claims depends on what you believe to be true, what other things you believe. That’s the Quinian
web of belief. For Hegel, he doesn’t call this a web of belief. He calls it the Concept, the Begriff.
I capitalized it when I wrote it. He does too, but in German you capitalize all the nouns, so it
doesn’t make a difference, but the Concept for him is the whole constellation of doxastic
commitments or judgments, beliefs, and inferential commitments, including the modally robust
exclusions among them that articulate the contents of the judgments and of the concepts in the
judgments, and this whole constellation of beliefs and inferential and incompatibility relations
among them evolves because every time you acquire a new belief, say by observing something,
it alters, if only ever so slightly, what inferences and exclusions you take there to be and so shift
the contents of everything in it.
A couple of times ago I mentioned this toy-linguistic practice of an acid such that anything tastes
sour is an acid and anything that’s an acid turns litmus paper red. And now I have the experience
of something that tastes sour but litmus paper blue. And the world was telling me I can’t have
that concept with that modally robust inference curled up in it. I’ve got to change that concept,
maybe to say that it’s only clear liquids that taste sour that are acids, and so will turn litmus
paper red, but now I’ve shifted the meaning of acid. I’ve shifted the inferential role of the claim.
Orange juice is an acid. It now means something different than it meant before. That’s
experience. That’s the process of Erfahrung [00:58:08], by which the concept evolves. And
Hegel’s view is, we’ve got to understand content as role with respect to that process of evolution.
And this is as far removed a picture as well could be from atomism not only of the empiricists,
but also of the rationalists, who thought of ideas atomistically in terms of the way they’re built
up of marks from other idea starting with primitive ones. The primitive ones for them were not
sensory ideas. But what was common to empiricists and rationalists was this semantic atomism.
And Kant in his synthesis of them, retained most of the atomism. He took the one step to
judgment, but he didn’t take the next one to inference and compatibility.
So there are these counterfactually robust relations of material inference and material
consequence that articulate the Concept, the great constellation of doxastic and inferential
commitments, and which themselves are subject to evolution in the way that the toy-concept of
an acid that supported counterfactual reasoning, it’s showed itself to be affected by, altered by,
the deliverances of sensuous immediacy. The first allegorical introduction to this we get under
the heading of understanding is the play of forces. The final form of thinking about theoretical
entities. And here reading the allegory on the side of theoretical entities, it’s because the content
of any particular theoretical item is articulated not only by its inferential relations to observables,
but also its inferential relations to all the other theoretical entities. Now still under this heading of
holism, one of Hegel’s big ideas and one of the reasons for the sort of tortured language that he’s
using, because he’s trying to take traditional philosophical language, which had been without
exception atomistic, and turn it to his purposes. I mean, the very idea looms large in ancient
philosophy; it looms large in Kant; the very idea of definition, of the definability of concepts,
assumes more primitive concepts that will sit still with an invariant relation between them and
the defined thing. And Hegel rejects that notion for ordinary concepts. You can have a definition
of acid all right. It’s what tastes sour and turns litmus paper red. There’s a definition of a
concept. But that definition is only good for a time-slice of the practice. Have another experience
and that definition won’t hold anymore. Quine of course says, you know you can look at your
definitions. That’s a way of introducing a term. But as soon as you’ve introduced the term by a
definition, the definition just becomes one more claim about the thing, which is no less
impervious to the effect of other experience or changes in the web of belief than something that
didn’t start off life as a definition. And here Hegel runs into— So I should say, it’s still
ferociously controversial whether any kind of semantic holism like this makes any sense at all.
Fodor and Lepore’s Holism: A Shopper’s Guide is devoted to going through the various kinds of
holism they’re familiar with one by one to show that each one of them doesn’t in the end make
any sense. Atomism must be true because nothing else is coherent. There’s no way to make
holism about meaning intelligible, is they’re view. I don’t know...it’s inconvenient if it’s true,
then, Jerry, but... Ok, now one particular issue that arises here is one that is still extremely
unsettled, specifically within the philosophy of natural science, and that is one that Hegel’s
discussing in the mid-150s. I’ll get to some passages there where he’s talking about space and
time and motion in it. I’ll use a slightly different example. When we say F=ma, this law-like
statement—so now we’re seeing a connection with the second big idea, the modal big idea, and
anyway it’s been implicit in what I’m saying that this holistic mass, the great constellation of
doxastic and inferential commitments, the Concept (I’m only talking on the subjective side;
there’s an objective analogue too)—it’s articulated by these modally robust relations of exclusion
and material consequence, by, on the objective side, laws and, on the subjective side, inference
and explanation—that’s sort of the next story. When we have a statement of a paradigmatic law,
Newton’s second law, F=ma... I guess that’s Newton’s third law, sorry. [Note: it’s Newton’s
second law.] Is it a definition of force? Or mass? He’s introduced these notions. Notions of
acceleration had been around for a long time. You just need the notion of distance and time.
You’ll get velocity. Through time in again, you get acceleration. That was ok. The medievals
were in very good shape actually on the concept of acceleration. Now he introduces these two
new notions, force and mass, related by this law. Is that an empirical law? It’s our only grip on
our notion of force and mass, comes from it. Is it definitional? Force and mass come in, play of
forces, theoretical entities, introduced together. If you had a system that had mass in it, but no
force, it wouldn’t be mass that you had in it. Or vice versa. This relation is absolutely essential to
it, even though acceleration is what we can observe. It’s essential to the concepts of force and
mass that they stand in this relation. And yet, it’s surely a synthetic claim. We had to go out and
look at the empirical world. We can imagine different ways it could be, different ways they could
relate to one another, just as we can imagine an inverse cube law instead of an inverse square law
for light or gravitation.
Hegel needs a category that Kant doesn’t have room for, of claims that are synthetic, are subject
to empirical disconfirmation—you may have to change your mind about the true of these claims
in the light of further experimentation or experience and yet the relations they state are
constitutive of the concepts, analytic of the concepts involved. They state necessary relations—
F=ma is a law. It’s a necessary relation. And yet in some sense it’s contingent. It could have been
otherwise. In the Kantian picture, we don’t have room for that. And it’s not clear how—if we
forget all the dead guys and just say how do we want to talk about this now in propria persona—
it’s not clear how to talk about the status of these laws. Marc Lange’s recent book on scientific
laws is one very sophisticated attempt to wrestle with this question. Sellars—I said he was going
to come up a number of times—said— the very first published article he wrote (There were a
couple others published sooner, but this was the earliest one. This is the one he wrote first and
eventually got published.) is called ‘Concepts as Involving Laws and Inconceivable without
Them’. This could be a sub-heading in ‘Force and Understanding’. Sellars’ idea was that the
relations that are constitutive of concepts are the nomologicals involving them. When Quine says
what’s the differences between inferences that are underwritten by the contents of concepts and
inferences that are underwritten simply by very general facts about the way the world is?,
Sellars’ answer is, what’s constitutive of the contents of concepts is all and only the
counterfactually robust relations that they stand in to other concepts, the laws that govern them. I
mentioned before that there’s a view about the metaphysics of properties that says it’s the
nomological relations among properties that identify and individuate them. David Armstrong has
a view like that. And Sellars cheerful accepts the consequence that we discover a new law of
nature or realize that a law that we had stated before had to be modified, isn’t a valid law the way
it is, that that changes the contents of our concepts and that you don’t know what the content of
your concept is just by introspecting. The content of the concept you’re applying when you say
the coin is copper depends on what the laws of nature involving copper are. And you can really
mean copper by ‘copper’, even though you don’t know that it’s a law of nature that the melting
point of pure copper is 1041.3 degrees Celsius. We get to do this, by the way, and this will be
very important to Hegel later in the book, because we speak a language. When you claim the
coin is made of copper, you play a counter in the public language. It’s up to you whether you
play that counter or not, but it’s not up to you what move you’ve made by doing it. You’ve
committed yourself when you say ‘The coin is copper’ to its being an electrical conductor and to
its melting at 1042 degrees, but not at 1041 degrees, whether you know that or not. So Sellars
has a view of the kind Hegel is trying to put in place. The claim that that’s the melting point of
copper, it’s synthetic. It’s contingent, at least in a logical or metaphysical sense. It’s not
necessary. We can consider alternatives to it. But it supports counterfactually robust reasoning
and, he wants to say, it articulates the content in the concept copper. It has all those features.
Kant thought that, since concepts were our doing, there were rules of synthesis that the mind
applied, that they were transparent to us, that by introspection we could tell the characteristic
marks of them, what the sub-concepts in them were. Hegel isn’t going to think that. Just as you
need to do empirical investigative work to find out what the facts are, you need to do that to find
out what the determinate concepts are.
Now let me mention in passing, though this is not a theme in ‘Force and Understanding’, in the
piece called ‘Sketch of a Program for a Critical Reading of Hegel’ that I pretended you were
supposed to read for the first meeting of the course in the sense that I put it on the reading list,
but I didn’t really put up the reading list in time for anybody to look at it, just to make you feel
bad really. I argued that Hegel has a really interesting successor notion to Kant’s notion, which
he’d taken over from the empiricists, of the conceptual inexhaustibility of the deliverances of
sensuous immediacy. So the thought is, when I contemplate what I can see when I look at my
hand, what I can see cannot be exhausted by any finite set of judgments or concepts that might
apply to it. Any list of conceptually articulated judgments that I could make could be added to.
Now I’ve already mentioned that in the debate about conceptual content versus non-conceptual
content McDowell’s fundamental move, in arguing that all content is conceptual content, is to
insist that demonstrative concepts are concepts too. So there’s no feature of the visual
presentation of my hand that I can’t express explicitly in conceptual terms, using concepts like
‘that shade of color’ or ‘that particular shape’. There’s no feature of it that I can’t get into the
conceptual form of judgments by using demonstrative concepts. But nonetheless no finite list of
them is going to be exhaustive. There’s always going to be something more one could see and
say. And indeed, probably no infinite list either, because any infinite list you had is probably
going to leave something out. I don’t know how to do a diagonal argument in this case to show
that but probably the empiricists and Kant believed that. Hegel’s picture of the conceptual
inexhaustibility of sensuous immediacy is quite different. He says Kant and the empiricists have
an additive conception. Just one more after another and you never get to the end of it, what he
calls a bad infinity, as opposed to the good infinity of the final picture that he’s got here. I don’t
actually thing it’s helpful to think of there being a genus infinity of which these are two species.
When we finally understand what he means, then we could sort of bolt it together with the other
one and try and come up with some over-arching concept, but we’re not going to get the genus
and come down to it to this new species. But Hegel’s idea is that no set of determinate, empirical
concepts—in principle, no set is such that it will never happen that by applying them correctly,
according to the norms that articulate their content, you end up contradicting yourself by your
own lights. That is, you end up with incompatible commitments, in the way you do with that toySprachspiel of acid and litmus paper. So Hegel’s claim, as I’m reading him, is in principle it’s
impossible to have a set of determinate, empirical concepts such that—that are correct in the
sense that by correctly applying them you will never end up with incompatible commitments. No
matter how good your concepts are, there’s always, in principle, out there some experience that’s
like that sour tasting thing that turned the litmus paper blue, the one that tells you that inference
you’ve got curled up in that concept isn’t quite right, needs to be adjusted. The evolution of the
Concept, that’s never ending. When we get to absolute knowing, when we get to the end of
history, in Hegel’s sense, experience in that sense is going to keep rolling on. Absolute knowing
in his sense is a kind of self-consciousness about that process, but it’s not the end of that process.
The conceptual inexhaustibility of sensibility, of immediacy is the permanent instability of our
concepts. There is no adequate set of determinate concepts. Negativity, well, incompatibility
drives this, and it’s always going to be normatively obliging us to change the views that we’ve
got. Negativity in that sense is built into the notion of the conceptual. The very same relations of
material incompatibility that articulate the content of those empirical concepts—not just in the
narrow sense, but in the broad sense that includes empirical-theoretical concepts—that very same
notion of exclusive difference, modally robust incompatibility, that articulates the content of
those concepts guarantees that the movement of the concept, the development of it, of the
Concept, the whole constellation, will be restless, will be never-ending. That’s the sense in which
sensuous immediacy is conceptually inexhaustible. And I hope you see how different that is from
the traditional empiricist and Kantian one that just says, well you could have a set of perfectly
adequate concepts, it’s just that by applying them you might have to keep going forever and not
have run out of sensuous material to synthesize further. This is a very different picture that ties
this kind of determinate negation to restless movement as an aspect of that very notion of
negation of content, of determinateness, and all of it.
So the idea of conceptual content that Hegel paints, the Vernunft level successor to the Verstand
doesn’t fit into any of the traditional ways of thinking about conceptual content. It’s a brand new
one. His holism involves this notion of movement, everything being up for grabs and everything
affecting everything else at all levels in it. This gets reflected in the architectonic of the
consciousness chapters when they’re structured according to logical grammar. So what do we get
in “Sense-Certainty”? We get these very general feature-placing expressions: ‘It is night’, ‘It is
snowing’. We get demonstrative indications of them. And we get them standing in anaphoric
relations to one another. That’s what we got at the level of logical grammar, semantic categories
in “Sense-Certainty”. In “Perception”, we add singular terms and predicates to that. And we add
the two kinds of negation relating these feature-placing items. And we have the very pretty
argument that all you need to have made explicit about these feature-placing as it were universals
in order to get singular terms and predicates, particulars and universals, is those two kinds of
negation. Now we get not just sentences that state facts—this object has this property—now we
get statements of laws that articulate the relations among the elements in the Concept. And those,
if we put them in contemporary logical grammar, are modally qualified—come with modal
operators, ‘It’s necessary that...’—modally qualified, quantified conditionals. That’s the
statement of all law. It’s necessary that all A’s are B’s. He’s saying, if you want to understand
any of the earlier stuff structurally categorially, you’ve got to start with what’s made explicit by
those statements of law, which you’ve got to have things they’re relating, but the things they’re
relating have to be understood in terms of these law like relations among them. But these laws
themselves are both analytic of the content of the concepts involved in them and synthetic and
empirical, revisable, defeasible things. Now all he needs is a way of adapting the traditional
atomistic language of philosophy so as to be able to say that. Well, suddenly we have being-for-
self and being-for-others and all of this. He’s immensely imaginative, but it’s difficult. If you
start off again, forget all the dead guys, I hope you have a sense of what the picture is that he’s
giving us here, forget all of them and the previous terminology. Just come up with a way of
talking that will satisfy Jerry Fodor about this now. And you’re going to find yourself saying
hard to understand things or things where there’s a bit where you say and a bit where you take it
back, the model and the commentary.
Ok, so all of this is articulating the third big idea. The first one was theoretical entities—how do
you think about the observation/theory distinction? I haven’t said much about this, but how does
it relate to the appearance/reality distinction? Second one was modality as not expression superfacts, but rather doing this other job, articulating features of the framework. Third thing, holism,
this picture of how content has to be understood in terms of role in not only the modally robust
relations of exclusion and inclusion it stands in to other concepts, but also dynamically in the
process that alters those relations, the process he calls experience. The fourth big idea that’s in
play in this section is what I’ve talked about before as hylomorphism about the intentional nexus
(?). And that’s the idea of a certain kind of content—he calls it conceptual content—which can
be the same when it’s the content of a fact, objectively in the world, it’s a way the world could
be, and in a thought. So that, when all goes well, the genuine knowledge constraint from the
introduction can be met. And the Wittgensteinian truism, McDowell would say, from paragraph
95 of the Philosophical Investigations, “When [I] say and mean that things are thus and so, [my]
thought and [my] meaning don’t stop anywhere short of the fact that things are thus and so.” The
content of the fact, let’s just think about it as that a particular is characterized by certain
universals, even though we know that picture from “Perception” is a ladder we’re going to have
to throw away after we’ve climbed up on it to the whole holistic picture of the evolving Concept,
but think about it that way. It has the content it does, it is a determinate way the world can be, in
virtue of the relations of modally robust exclusion that the properties of that particular stand in to
other universals. And my thought is the determinately contentful thought that it is because the
predicates that I’m applying stand in relations of modally robust exclusion to other predicates—
in a way that tracks the objective ones, if the claim I’m making is true. So he’s got one notion of
content that’s articulated by relations of determinate negation that are modally robust, made
explicit in the form of law-like statements relating to one another. But hylomorphic is one matter
and different forms. That one kind of conceptual content can have two forms—objective and
subjective. The objective form is made explicit by alethic modal statements of what’s necessary
and what’s possible, by statements of laws governing forces, he says, laws relating theoretically
postulated entities, like the law that being copper is incompatible with being an electrical
insulator. If it’s copper, it necessarily conducts electricity. My thoughts, on the other hand, on the
side now not of law of explanation have the determinate content they do because of the role in
my inferential processes that they play, that in committing myself to something being copper,
I’ve precluded myself from being entitled to a commitment to its being an electrical insulated,
and I’ve necessitated normatively, I’ve committed myself whether I know it or not to its melting
at 1042 degrees C.
It’s at this point that Hegel says the truth of law is explanation. And what he means is what
moves us from considering a law as what’s articulating on the objective side the relations of the
forces—that is, the theoretical entities—we’ve got law objectively articulating that, that we
would make explicit with alethic modality, and now the question is what do I need to do in order
to be taking it that there’s such an alethic, modal, lawful relation between things. What I have to
do is offer certain kinds of explanations. I have to infer in a certain sort of way. Laws are for
explaining. What it is for me to take something to be a law is to offer certain kinds of
explanation, certain kinds of inference.
Here’s Sellars again, yet another point, he says, “Although describing and explaining are
distinguishable, they’re also in an important sense inseparable. It’s only because the expressions
in terms of which we describe objects locate these objects in a space of implications”—and I’ll
just say counterfactually robust implications—“that they describe at all, rather than merely label.
The descriptive and explanatory resources of language advance hand in hand.” That’s Sellars. So
he’s saying, look, the content of these concepts, the being capable of being used to describe and
not just to differentially respond and so label, is a matter of their situation in this space of
modally robust implications and those are precisely the ones we exploit in explanation. Law and
explanation are two sides of one coin. They’re two forms that one content can take. That’s the
hylomorphism about the intentional nexus. To understand what you’re saying about the world,
when you say ‘All A’s are necessarily B’s’, you have to do so in a context that includes people
reasoning, “This is an A, so it’s a B”; if you’re committed to its being an A, you’re committed to
its being a B. That’s a relation, I claim, that Hegel is saying is a relation of reciprocal sensedependence between the sense of incompatible that’s made explicit by alethic modalities on the
objective side and the sense of incompatible that applies to commitments by subjects that’s made
explicit by deontic normative vocabulary on the subjective side. Commitments are incompatible
with one another in a different sense than properties are incompatible with one another. After all,
I can commit myself to its being copper and to its being an electrical insulator. That’s possible. I
just ought not to do it. If I’m committed I can’t be entitled to the other. That’s a deontic
normative matter, where it’s really impossible for something both to be copper and to be an
electrical insulator. That’s an alethic modal matter. But the claim is these are two side of one
coin, two forms that one content can take, and it’s this hylomorphic semantic picture that’s at the
core of everything Hegel is doing in his logic and in his metaphysics. And the first real glimpse
of it—I mean, I’ve foreshadowed it before, but the first real glimpse of it that we get is here in
the transition from the play of forces, thinking of what it is for these theoretical entities to have
the contents that they do, realizing that it’s the law-like connections among them that govern the
forces that articulate this holistic structure. And now he’s saying, ah, but if we think about all
that happening there on the objective surface of the table, we’ve also got explanation as the other
side, as the subjective correlate, of that objective law.
Now Hegel actually foreshadows this hylomorphic picture even within the discussion of force. In
140 he says, “The distinctions themselves turn out to [be] within a twofold distinction, [once] as
distinctions of content, since the…extreme term is the force reflected into itself, and the other
extreme term is the medium of the matters; the other time as distinctions of form, since one
solicits, the other is solicited, and the former [being] active, [the other being passive].” So he’s
got a hylomorphic explanatory structure within the objective story. He already said in 135, when
he’s talking about the transition, responding to my first big point, from sense universals—that is,
observable concepts—to theoretical ones, “However, because this unconditioned-universal”—
this one that is not a sense universal, but is a purely theoretic universal—because it’s “an object
for consciousness, the distinction of form and consciousness emerges within it.” The secret of the
structure, the fundamental structure of consciousness is this hylomorphic relation, the way in
which one notion of content, one content, can take the two different forms, can be articulated by
law or by explanation.
Yeah?
Student 1: So I had a question about this curious statement at the end of paragraph 163. [pages
turning; words indecipherable] ...he says, “It is precisely for that reason that there is so much
self-satisfaction in explanation, because the consciousness involved in it is, to put it this way, in
a immediate conversation with itself, enjoying only itself.”…although it seems to be busy...
[Note: it’s unclear that the student is actually reading this, as opposed to paraphrasing, but this is
the sentence he was referencing.]
Bob: Yeah, it is, and a lot turns on how that works, because the question is how are we to
understand the transition from the consciousness part of the book to the self-consciousness part
of the book. And the claim is, at this point in the experience of phenomenal consciousness, the
realization emerges that really what matters is self-consciousness. And the question is exactly
how that happens. Now let me say something generally about these big transitions between— not
between the individual chapters or within the individual chapters, but between consciousness,
self-consciousness and reason. In general they’re different aspects of self-conscious, individual
self-hood. What consciousness is about us as knowing, as knowers, what Sellars calls language
entry transitions, where in perception one moves from something that isn’t a position in the game
of giving and asking for reasons, the visible brownness of the chalkboard, to something that is
taking up a position in the space of reasons, namely claiming that or seeing that the chalkboard is
brown. Self-consciousness about the self-conscious selves that on the one hand perceive and
reason about intentional agency—he says in paragraph 24 [Note: this is actually in paragraph
22.] in the preface “Reason is purposive [agency]” and that’s the topic of the agency thing. Now
there’s no abstract reason why our progression should go from thinking about perception to
thinking about the perceiving and acting self to thinking about agency. It could just be part of the
order of exposition. It could be that you just move from consciousness to self-consciousness by
turning the page, that it’s in the order of exposition, but not even in the order of development of
phenomenal consciousness. That would not be an out of the way thing. In which case, he would
need to give us the sort of transition or segway that you need in a narrative for an expository
transition: “well, now, let us talk about this” or “that reminds me of the following thing.”
Now I don’t think it’s quite that unmotivated. What we’ve known all along, we the
phenomenological consciousness that Hegel is conducting here, what we’ve known all along is
that self-certainty is not a form of consciousness. It’s a way consciousness can understand
itself—a defective way. But it could be a form of consciousness. That’s what thinking about
what’s implicit in it shows. Perception isn’t a form of consciousness. It’s a way consciousness
can understand, indeed misunderstand, itself. It’s a defective form of self-consciousness.
Understanding finally gets to the point where he’s describing, having made explicit everything
you need to make explicit that was implicit in knowing consciousness, an adequate conception.
And at that point he’s saying part of achieving that adequate conception is realizing that what
we’ve been dealing with all along is not forms of consciousness, but forms of self-consciousness,
ways in which consciousness understands itself. That’s an experience, in the technical sense that
we get at the end of the introduction; it’s the emergence of the second new, true object, which
remember was not the straight stick, but was the bent stick now understood not as what things
were in themselves but understood as a mere appearance, as what things were merely for
consciousness. What emerges from the discussion of consciousness is that every form we’ve
looked at before was not a form of consciousness, but form of self-consciousness, a way
consciousness understood itself. So that’s sort of overall how the achievement of something that
is an adequate conception of consciousness by consciousness, the final one, the third supersensible world, is the first self-consciousness that knew that what we were talking about was a
form of self-consciousness, not just a form of consciousness. So it both gets an adequate
conception of consciousness and by the same token realizes that what it was dealing with all
along was conceptions of consciousness rather than forms of consciousness, that is forms of selfconsciousness, ways consciousness conceived itself. So that’s more than just an expository
excuse, more than just moving to self-consciousness by turning the page.
Ok, so I’ve said there’s four big thoughts or moves, four big themes being developed in these 32
paragraphs in “Force and Understanding” and you can see that they all interact with one another.
I talked about the Concept under the heading of holism, saying look it’s whole evolving
constellation of doxastic commitments and inferential commitments, using that term in a broad
enough sense to include what’s incompatible with what—those are the counterfactual-reasoning
supporting relationships that one is committed to—and the dynamic evolution of that, but when
we make this hylomorphic move, we see that the actual facts, the way things really are in
themselves, what really follows from something being copper—that’s every bit as much a part of
this process as the commitments that we undertake are. It is, after all, the interaction via the
deliverances of immediacy with the way things objectively are that drives, in the toy acid
practice, that drives the evolution of the concept. You can’t understand that evolution except in a
story comprehensive enough to include the objective correlate, the objective form of these
contents, as well as the subjective form. So the Concept, what in the Logic he’ll call the Idea,
involves not only thought but being, as he puts it. In the Logic it’s an aspect of this evolving
thing.
So still on the hylomorphism, let me just remind you that early on when I was talking about what
I called objective idealism, the reciprocal sense dependence claim between the categories that
articulate the structure of the objective pole of the intentional nexus and the categorial concepts
that articulate the structure of the subjective pole of the intentional nexus—the two forms that the
one content essentially can take. I said in more contemporary terms, if we think about the
concepts that articulate the way we take the world to be and our thought, we can say, look you
can’t understand what you’re saying when you say that the world is a world of facts, that ways
the world can be are facts, except as part of a story that includes the notion of asserting
declarative sentences, stating facts. You can’t understand what you’re saying when you say that
the those facts that the world consists in—the world is everything that is the case, the world of
facts, not of things, but it’s facts about things and what properties they have—you can’t
understand what you mean by saying those facts come as the form of facts that particulars exhibit
universals or objects have properties, except in a context in which you can talk about using
singular terms and predicates to say something, to make an assertion about how things are. And,
most relevantly to the discussion of law and explanation here, you can’t understand what you’re
saying when you say the world is articulated by laws of nature that say how things necessarily
must be, what’s possible and what’s impossible, except in a context that includes make
counterfactually robust inferences in order to explain one feature of the world in terms of others.
What you have to do to be taking something to be a law is make inferences in the form of
counterfactually robust explanations of things. So the claim is these are two sides of one coin in
the sense of reciprocal sense dependence. It’s not that there couldn’t be an objective world even
if there were no one to think it, but you can’t understand what you’re saying when you say, yeah,
the structure of that is objects exhibiting properties and those facts standing in law-like relations
to one another. All of that’s intelligible only by thinking about the other form that those contents
can take. And what you need to do, referring and classifying, asserting and inferring, all those
activities, the things you do with words or thoughts if you like, those are what make intelligible
those ontological structures of the world, that it’s facts about objects and their possession of
properties and the law-like relations among those facts. So this is the view that I think Hegel is
teaching us here. And we’re going to look at the various mistakes that get made along the way,
the different mistaken conceptions of it.
So why don’t we take our break now and let’s say come back at ten after the hour. And then I’ll
start reading some passages and maybe we can catch him saying some of these things.
Ok, well, I have some favorite passages that I want to go through now and sort of hit the high
points. We’ve got to talk about at least all three super-sensible worlds and see how these points
are being made. Any passages that people think we should talk about first? Yeah?
Student 2 (Tom Breed?): I don’t have a passage but I did have a question about the thing you
were talking about just before the break, about the hylomorphism and the sense-dependence
relation. So this is something of sort of what hit me when you first said it and now I think it may
be relevant. If it’s something that you think is answered when we get to the next sections, fair
enough.
Bob: That’s my answer to everything. [laughter.] And Hegel’s.
Tom: Yeah, I understand that when you have absolute knowledge. The whole kernel from which
this started was that there was determinateness in sense [word not clear], which sort of flourishes
into this whole other stuff. My worry is that you lose the point of having determinacy in the first
place once we get to this interdependence. The reason is, I think, say we have the copper thing,
right? So we have these modal facts about what it’s possible for copper to do and not do, namely,
what degrees it melts at, and therefore we have these deontological norms about what we should
and shouldn’t accept, but my worry is that on the property side we have this kind of Goodman
worry and on the deontological side we have this kind of rule-following worry and those two just
sway (square?) together, right? So it seems like we’re packing a lot into what we’re already
assuming about the structure of these things, namely, for you to have the deontological thing turn
up, there has to not just be a bunch of pluralities of properties which can have modal relations in
a bunch of different ways, because copper has those modal relations, but schmopper has different
ones, and if schmopper was what I was talking about all along, then I have no obligation to
change my beliefs. So my worry is that when you talk about the way— when you make sense of
negation in terms of there are these things that can crop up that can make us change our minds.
I’m not sure why, if there’s not already some assumption about there being, for example,
determinate modal properties of things out in the world, and it just sounds like the kind of thing
which Hegel isn’t going to endorse.
Bob: That’s right.
Tom: Like being some really strong modal realist about properties seems like a lot to assume.
Bob: Well, I mean I think he is a strong modal realist about properties. That is, that’s on his
understanding the conceptual modal realism is conceptual realism and conceptual idealism is
going to be what we need to make sense of that conceptual realism. Well, what’s right from
where I sit about your inclination there is the picture of the world as having determinate
properties is the picture of the world in which there can be a set of determinate concepts that
articulate the way the world really is that you would not have to give up because, since that’s the
way the world really is, applying them correctly could never lead to your having incompatible
commitments which would require you to change those concepts. So we are going to have to
construe the way the world really is differently.
Tom: Yeah.
Bob: And I think you’re absolutely right that the Goodman problem and the rule-following
Krikpenstein problem which—are intelligibles two sides of one coin here? What’s projectable?
What have we committed ourselves to? That’s, as I read it, absolutely fundamental to what Hegel
is doing. He sees Kant as having been culpably and uncharacteristically uncritical in his taking
for granted the intelligibility and the existence of—but the intelligibility is the more important
thing—concepts that are fully determinate in Kant’s sense. That is, Kant requires that a concept,
what Hegel will call a determinate concept so as not to confuse it with the Concept or with
speculative concepts like being-for-self and so on, but a concept like copper, for Kant that has to
be a rule that determines for every possible set of representations, including manifold of
intuition, whether it can be successfully synthesized according to that rule or not. Now you may
be successfully synthesizing according to the dog concept for a while and then you get these
discordant intuitions and you have to take that dog concept rule of synthesis and put it back on
the shelf and take the fox concept and say ok, well, let me synthesize all this and this new one,
but you never know—it’s an infinite task—whether some new bit is going to be unsynthesizable
according to it, but at least as Hegel reads Kant the rule has got to lay out the reals to infinity. It’s
got to settle for every possible manifold of intuition another set of representations whether they
accord with that rule or not. And Hegel doesn’t think that’s intelligible for essentially
Kripkensteinian reasons. So that’s the Verstand notion of determinateness that we see in Frege
too. It’s the sharp boundaries. It’s subtle what’s in the extension, what’s not, what possible things
would be in the extension, and Hegel’s insisting that that’s not intelligible. It’s not just that there
aren’t any concepts like that, any set of concepts like that that are fully adequate, that won’t
show themselves to need to be changed. The idea of them determining for everything, now for
every set of collateral commitments whether they’re compatible with it or not for instance—
that’s fantasy, according to him, for Kripkensteinian reasons. And that’s the point where a point
of the story that we won’t see until the end of reason comes in, namely, the historical dimension
that says—well, I suppose I talked about it a little that the end of the introduction there—that you
have to rationally reconstruct the tradition by which you developed the concept that you have a
time-slice of right now and think about everything that went before it in the light of where
you’ve gotten now. And it’s going to be the sort of gap between those—now you can see
retrospectively mistaken and the one you now take to be right even after you’ve achieved
absolute knowledge and know that this is just a temporary position, still this is the way you take
things to be—and re-construe determinateness in terms of this process of evolution in the
rationally reconstructed history of the development of the concept. So the picture of the world as
determinate—it’s not going to be determinate in the Kant/Frege/Verstand sense; only in the new
Hegelian sense. But this incorporates a solution to the Kripkenstein problem which I think is one
of the glories of the book. In 1806, he’d already seen this far down the line. So that’s mostly a
promissory note telling you that there’s a story coming.
Tom: Ok.
Bob: But, you know, I think you’re right to say that the picture of determinateness that maybe we
had in play when we were thinking about what it would take to get the general knowledge
condition satisfied—it’s not going to be determinateness in that sense, but it’s going to turn out
that we don’t need that either. It’s just he couldn’t tell us all about it in the open paragraphs.
Tom: Ok.
Bob: Yeah, Jack?
Jack: This is just a small clarificatory point about terminology, which maybe you were about to
address anyway, but looking back at the text I’m just wondering if then we should be thinking of
force as allegorical for the deontic modals and law as allegorical for the alethic, because there’s a
lot of talk in here about the difference between them and it seems like that’s what he’s saying,
like in 154. Early in the 50’s [note: 150’s, I take it] there’s a lot of that—the relationship between
force and law.
Bob: Let’s see I think I have...talk about that in a minute, but no, I see force and law are both on
the objective side of the alethic modal. I mean, they stand in a certain relation because what
makes each force the determinate force it is turns out to be the laws, the relations, that govern its
relations to other forces. And that’s still all on the objective side and it’s going to be explanation
that’s on the side of the subject that corresponds to both of those. Yeah, let me start talking about
that in 148 already. So here’s a passage from 148 summarizing sort of what we, looking over the
should of phenomenal consciousness having these possible experiences, are supposed to have
learned. “[In this way there vanishes completely] all distinction of separate mutually contrasted
forces, which were supposed to be present in this movement”—so we’re going holistic at this
point—Thus there’s “neither force, nor [the act of] soliciting or being solicited, nor the
determinateness of [being a stable medium in] unity reflected into itself; there is neither
something [existing singly by itself, nor are there diverse antitheses].”—All those are
conceptions we passed through, though I will acknowledge that these don’t exactly line up with
what went on in the earlier paragraphs, but I think that’s sort of his problem rather than ours. He
means to be summarizing what was going on there. He just was a little bit selective. “On the
contrary, what there is in this absolute…flux is only [difference] as [a] universal [difference] or
as difference into which the many antitheses have been resolved. This difference as a universal
difference is consequently the simple element in the play of forces itself and what is true in it.
It’s the law of force.” Now here within the Newtonian allegory, where force means Newtonian
force, the laws are all expressed in the form of differential equations, differential equations that
tell you if you make a small, ultimately an infinitesimal, difference in the force, what kind of
difference is that going to make in the acceleration? A differential equation is a law describing
the relation between the differences in one quantity and the differences in another quantity. So
it’s the law of the moving difference between the differences, Hegel’s going to say. You can
imagine him grinning at the thought that this is a way of describing within the allegory how laws
work, differential calculus in Newtonian physics. Now that’s within the allegory. But I say that’s
allegorical for thinking the relation between theoretical objects generally, where the
counterfactually robust consequential relations among them are what identify and individuate
and, indeed, are all there is to identify and individuate the different theoretical entities. They’re
tethered at one end as it is by bridge laws that connect them to observables, but when you’re
deep in the web, deep inside the theory, it’s their relations to one another, their law-like relations,
that govern them. It’s the law of force that articulates this holistic mass, and now we say ok they
are just nodes in this. Now I said one of the lessons is going to be that—and this is the lesson of
the dissolution of the first super-sensible world which is the calm realm of laws—that we
shouldn’t think of laws as super-facts, that we’re describing the way things are when we state a
law. Yeah.
Let me go through a few more passages before I get to the first super-sensible world. So in 145,
he says, “Our object is thus from now on the syllogism”—and the word he uses is Schluβ, which
is also just the word for inference—“which has for its extremes the inner being of Things and the
Understanding”—so there’s the way things really are according to the theoretical objects, and
then there’s the way we understand things—”and for its middle term, appearance;”—that is, in
this case sensuous immediacy—“but the movement of this syllogism”—German
word [02:09:28]—“yields the further determination of what the Understanding descries”—
finds—“in this inner world through the middle term, and the experience from which [the]
Understanding learns about the close-linked unity of these terms.” Ok that’s dark. Appearance
in—sensuous appearance, sensuous immediacy according to consciousness understanding itself
as perceiving consciousness, using those categories, what’s really there is appearance. It’s
immediately revelatory to us of what really is. But we found out the inferential articulation of the
contents was essential to it. And thinking about that inferential individuation of even the
concepts of observables, that is sense universals, led us to the idea of universals that are
unconditioned, he says, that are purely theoretical properties. Now think about the way
immediacy has changed. Immediacy is now the way you find out about those theoretical entities.
It’s by an inference from seeing the meter needle swing over that you conclude the presence of
electrons. Appearance, which was immediately revelatory of reality, now becomes significant
only as a premise from which to infer how things are theoretically. This is immediacy taking on a
mediating role. That is, the inferential role of the observables comes to the fore, when we see
appearance as a window into a theoretically described reality.
So yeah. To get to the first super-sensible world, the calm realm of laws, he says. I talked about
instrumentalism, which sees only statements couched using observables as literally true or false.
Only observational vocabulary is literally referring. All the rest of it is posits which are to be
evaluated by their usefulness in making observation level statements. There’s a converse— Ok,
and so that’s one way of taking the observation/theory distinction to be an ontological
distinction. And what’s real is what’s observable according to the instrumentalist. There’s a
converse position to that that you could call Eddington strong scientific realism. Remember,
Eddington in a famous lecture says there are really two tables here. There’s the table we see in
what Sellars would call the manifest image, which is solid, which is colored, which is stationary.
And then there’s the scientist’s table; there’s the table the way science tells us it is. The table is
largely empty space. There are tiny, invisible, colorless particles whose vibrations bring about
the effect of filling space, causing in us the impression of colors. We see something that’s not
moving, but in fact everything that’s really there is moving at very high speeds. None of it is
colored. None of it is visible. It’s the effect of all of that on us that gives us this table. But
Eddington says the real table is the one science tells us is there. It’s found out what is really
there. There are those micro-particles, that micro-structure. That’s what’s really there.
Eddingtonian realism, scientific realism of the kind my hero Sellars endorse, but I don’t—this is
where he went wrong—violates his own principle about theoretical and observable, about that
distinction being methodological not ontological, and in a famous statement that’s come to be
called the scientian mensura in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind Sellars offers this credo:
“In the dimension of describing and explaining, science is the measure of all things, of [those
that are] that [they are] and of [those that are] not that [they are] not.” That’s the scientian
mensura, “science is the measure of all things.” The apodosis of that claim is important. “In the
dimension of describing and explaining”—he’s an anti-descriptivist; there’s a lot of other stuff
we do, that science is not the measure, but “in the dimension of describing and explaining,
science is the measure of all things”, what’s really there is what science says is there. That is,
theoretical objects, that’s what science truck (?) with, those molecular orbitals, those nuclei,
those electrons, and so on. That’s what’s really there. The rest of it is mere appearance. That’s,
again, to give the observable/theoretical distinction an ontological cast, but with the opposite
valance to what the instrumentalists do. It’s saying what’s really there is the theoretical stuff.
Now that kind of scientific, theoretical realism—Eddingtonianism, if you like—that doesn’t get
us all the way to the first super-sensible world. We need to add to it the claim that the content of
those theoretical entities, of those theoretical facts, the ones that constitute reality, is articulated
by their nomological relations to one another. And add to that—so take Eddingtonian, Sellarsian
theoretical scientific realism, add to that the view that the facts that science talks about, the
forces outside the allegory that the allegory is allegorical for, are constituted by their
nomological relations to one another—that’s the second claim—and the third claim is that the
statements of law that make explicit those nomological, those constitutive nomological relations
among the theoretical entities describe super-facts. They describe a world. Those super-facts
constitute the first super-sensible world. If you’re an Eddingtonian, Sellarsian theoretical
scientific realist and you believe that those theoretical entities are constituted by their modal
relations, their nomological relations to one another and that those nomological relations are
described by statements of law, then what those statements of law describe is a super-sensible
world. It’s not a world of appearance, because it exclusively involves theoretical, merely
inferentially accessible entities, and it’s a calm realm of laws. It’s those nomological relations.
It’s the laws of nature.
And what Hegel wants us to say about that is that you should get off the bus at the first and third
stations. So get off the bus is not right. He wants to reject the first and third of those claims, not
the second. Theoretical entities, like everything else, are articulated by their modally robust
relations, determinate negation, one to another, but you shouldn’t think of the
observable/theoretical distinction as an ontological distinction. Some theoretical things are the
way things merely appear to us—phlogiston. Some observable things are the way things really
are; immediacy can be an access to reality. And a third one, it’s a mistake to think of statements
of law which articulate the semantigenic (?) relations—that is, the ones that are responsible for
contentfulness of the theoretical entities—it’s a mistake to think that the role of those statements
of natural laws are describing a realm, a super-sensible world. They’re not describing at all.
What they’re doing, we’ll find out in the third super-sensible world, is implicit in the world that
appears to us—what they’re doing is rather making explicit features of the framework within
which it’s possible to describe and explain in the one world that there really is. So that’s the first
super-sensible world and what’s wrong with it.
Now in that dark passage that I read, our object is the syllogism that has the inner being of
things—that’s the theoretical realm, if you’re an Eddingtonian realist—and on the other side our
thinking about it, and now appearance is the middle term between that. It’s how you get the
evidence to make the inferences that tell you about how things really are.
Ok, now here, jumping ahead a little bit, end of the early 150s is another set of crucial passages.
So in 153, he’s introducing this thought that I introduced by asking whether F=ma is a definition
and, if so, how it could be empirically significant and, you know, apparently contingent, even
though it states a necessary relation and so on. He says, “In the law of motion, e.g., it is
necessary that motion be [partitioned] into time and space, or [also], into distance and velocity.
…since motion is only the relation of [those moments], [motion]—the universal—is [here
partitioned] in its…self. [However], now these parts”—time and space, distance and velocity—
“do not express in themselves this [origination out of one universal].” Nothing about them says
that they were abstracted from things moving. Well, are they different or are they not? They’re
essentially related in the concept of motion, and yet the idea is these are distinct things. Skipping
down, “The necessity…[partition] is thus [certainly on hand], but not…of these parts as such for
[each other].” Ok, so in 154, summing up, “The distinction is therefore in both cases no
distinction in itself.” The distinction between force and mass, if they’re essentially—if they can’t
be the concepts they are, force and mass, the quantities they are, except by standing in this
relation, are they distinct or not? If they’re not, it’s just a definition. If they are distinct, then
there’s a substantive claim being made. It seems like they are related by definition and they’re
making a substantive claim. How can those both be right? Going on in 154, “it is thus [only] its
own necessity that understanding [articulates], [a distinction that it thus makes] in such a way
that it expresses at the same time that the distinction is to be no distinction in the [real thing].” So
this is setting up the problem. “This necessity, which [only] lies in…words…, is thus the recital
of the moments that constitute the circle of necessity.” So we’ve got this holistic mass that is
articulated by the relations among its parts, which are the parts they are only because of the role
they play in this whole thing. “…they are, to be sure, distinguished, but at the same time their
distinction is expressed as being no distinction of the [real thing itself] and [consequently] it is
itself straight away [canceled and superseded again]. This movement is called explanation.” We
invoke these things in explaining the acceleration in terms of the application of force to the mass
and so on. Remember I said you know if we’re tempted to look down our noses a little at the way
he’s putting this that this question of the status of the laws of nature and the concepts like force
and mass, there is by no means a settled way of making sense of this in contemporary talk about
laws of nature. It’s hugely controversial. People are still trying out various ways of
accommodating the different things one wants to say about it in the context of a bad theory of
conceptual content that we have. And he’s trying to give us a better one. It’s hugely
controversial. People are still trying out various ways of accommodating the different things one
wants to say about it in the context of a bad theory of conceptual content that we have. And he’s
trying to give us a better one. So this movement is called explanation, where one is on the one
hand invoking these things as different but on the other hand exploiting the necessary connection
between them—the necessary connection between them. “A law is thus declared, and from this
law, its universal in itself, that is, the ground is distinguished as force.” So he’s saying, well,
there actually are these things, in the allegory force and mass, but whatever the theoretical
entities are, and the law is saying well, the ground of the law is the actual nature of these
theoretical quantities, theoretical in having been postulated. So the law distinguishes itself from
its ground. There are these quantities that it’s talking about, but it’s the law governing them. So
“...the ground is distinguished as force. However, it is said of this distinction”—the distinction
between the magnitudes and the law—“that it is no distinction at all, but rather, [on the contrary]
that the [ground is constituted] in the same way as…the law.” The law is just making explicit the
relation between the theoretical entities in virtue of which they are the entities they are, the
quantities that they are in the theory. “The explanation then condenses the law into the force as
the essence of the law. The force is [so constituted] that when it expresses itself, …the force is
[constituted] exactly as is the law; [and] it is said that both are not [at all] distinct. The
distinctions are the pure universal expression, that is, the law and the pure force…both have
however the same content, the same [constitution].” The law is just making explicit what is
making the forces they are. “…the distinction as a distinction of content, which is to say, [of the
real thing], is therefore [again also] retracted.”
Ok. Yeah, so I mean we’ve got to get to the second super-sensible world, the inverted world, so
I’m just going to bowl (?) on. This keeps the idea that statements of law describe super-facts. So
it keeps the descriptivism. When we give that up we’ll move to the final, approved, third
conception of the super-sensible world. This is the inverted world. This is the famous inverted
world, where he says, “According…to the law of this inverted world”— (verkehrte Welt)—and
this notion of Verkehrung will come up later in the practical realm as well—“what is like in the
first world is unlike to itself, and what is unlike in the first world is equally unlike to itself,
[where] it becomes like itself…Looked at superficially, this inverted world is the opposite of the
first in the sense that it has the latter outside of it and repels that world from itself as an inverted
actual world: that the one is appearance, but the other is the in-itself; that the one is the
world…for an other, whereas as the other is the world as it is for itself.” And he says, you know
an example is what’s white in this world is black in the inverted world, what has positive
electrical charge in this world has negative electrical charge in the other world, you know, what
is going on? This is an incoherent conception. Well, so are all of them eventually. This one
maybe more obviously. Here the picture is of a property, which we already know from
“Perception”, is the property it is only because of the relations that it stands in of contrariety to
other properties. So what makes it what it is is it’s relation to these other properties. Where are
the other properties? Jenseits. They’re over there. They’re in the other world. The inverted world
is where all the properties that contrast with this property, in virtue of which it is what it is, are.
It’s— This content here is the appearance of all of these contraries. A way of thinking about it is
thinking in the language of the Tractatus is there’s a Tatsache, a fact, but it’s surrounded by a
nimbus of states of affairs, possible but not actual facts, of Sachverhalte in the Tractatus. Each
Tatsache is the one that became actualized out of a set of possible Sachverhalten. The inverted
world is the world in which all of the Sachverhalte are actualized. They’re, after all, what makes
the appearance of this actual thing what it is. In that sense, they’re what’s really there and it’s
just the appearance of all of that.
Now I said this was an incoherent conception. Well, the triumph at the end of “Perception” was
the invocation of the Aristotelian argument that properties have opposites but objects don’t have
opposites, because the opposite of an object would be the object that had all and only the
properties that the other object didn’t have and those are incompatible with one another. So this
inverted world would be where all of these properties that are incompatible with the properties
realized here are realized, but they’re incompatible with each other too. So this is the incoherent
conception. But it’s not merely a stupid conception. In fact, if you think, as Hegel wants us to
and I would argue we should, that there are no non-modal properties—if by that you mean a
properties such that whether it obtains or not doesn’t depend upon what happens in any other
possible world. Any property has as a necessary condition of the ruling out some possibilities
and the ruling in of some others. It’s not just that to say that the table is hard entails that it would
resist being pushed on, that’s true of hard, but it’s true of triangular as well. To say it’s triangular
is to say what would happen if you bisected it and so on. There are no non-dispositional, or nonmodal properties, if you mean the properties that could obtain independently of whether any
other properties about what would happen obtain. So suppose you believe that. We’ve seen that
that’s Hegel’s view, though it is a minority view among contemporary analytic metaphysicians,
who make a distinction between non-dispositional and dispositional properties. If you believe
that, then a perfectly reasonable version of the inverted world, this crazy, wacky thing that he’s
got, is contemporary possible world semantics. It agrees with both of the first two super-sensible
worlds in understanding laws and describing super-facts. What facts? Well, not facts in this
world, in this actual world, but facts in the universe of possible worlds. That universe of possible
worlds is where everything that’s true here is not true and everything that’s not true is in that
universe of possible worlds. The secret of the second super-sensible world, the first inverted
world is it’s just possible worlds semantics. The universe of possible worlds is what you get if
you take modal facts to be description, but since they’re not just descriptions of things in this
world, you imagine another world, a super-sensible world, we can’t see the other possible
worlds, but David Lewis tells us they’re there. And that super-sensible world, that universe of
other possible worlds is what we’re describing when we make modal claims. And that’s a
universe in which everything that’s not true in this world is true. It’s the inverted world. It’s the
nimbus of Sachverhalte that surrounds every Tatsache in this world. The genius of the first and
second waves of the modal revolution, as I described them last time, is it precisely found a way
to assimilate modal statements to descriptive statements. How? By expanding what there was to
be described from the actual world to this universe of possible worlds, to the second supersensible world. Well, as I said, the Eddingtonian realists need only, in order to get to the first
super-sensible world, the calm realm of laws, need only the claim that what makes things the
things they are are the modal exclusions and inclusion relations they stand in to other things.
Those are the ones are going to be made explicit by laws. That same claim is all you need to
recognize the inverted world, the second super-sensible world here, as just the universe of
possible worlds. So if Hegel’s got an argument against that conception of the super-sensible
world as the inverted world, it applies to contemporary possible world semantics. So the stakes
could hardly be higher. This is not just some wacky view that he considered here.
Ok. Now what is the third super-sensible world, the one that when we take on board Kant’s point
that the function of some concepts is not to describe anything, but rather to make explicit
features of the framework that makes description and explanation possible. So we reject the
strategy that gets us to a possible worlds understanding of modality. What is the super-sensible
world then? Well, it’s still the world of laws, but now we’re precisely understanding statements
of law as making explicit what’s implicit in the contentfulness of things here and now, not over
there in some other world. This is what he means by saying the third super-sensible world is
implicit in our world. We’re looking at the semantogenic—that is the things responsible for
articulating or conferring the contents on the way the world is, what makes it describable and
explainable in the terms it is, that there are law-like connections articulating different
determinate universals, we’re just looking at the statements of laws making those explicit,
making explicit what’s implicit in the world as it really is, and as it appears to us. But both of
those are made explicit by these law-like statements. So we don’t see it as— we don’t see the
laws as expressing— or the modal statements as expressing a special kind of reality behind ours
that ours represents, but rather as something that’s implicit and expressed here.
So here’s the passage we were talking about in 163. Let me read it and then let me talk about it.
“[Infinitude], or this absolute unrest of pure…movement, in which whatever is determined in one
way or another, e.g. as being, is rather the opposite of this determinateness”—Now ‘is’ here, this
is the ‘is’ of speculative identity. This was his idea, that there was a sense of identity that did
this. ‘Is’ doesn’t really mean is here. Ask Clinton. But you know what he says, that “whatever is
determined in one way or another” for instance as cubical, like the salt, “has being, is rather the
opposite of this determinateness”, that is that it’s determinate only in so far as it has these
contraries—it’s in contrast to being spherical that cubical is. “…this no doubt has been from the
start the soul of all that has gone before..” Now Hegel often says things like this, “this has
been...the soul of all that [went] before”. What’s the scope of that quantifier? Is that just in the
last part of “Force and Understanding”? Is it just in “Force and Understanding”? Is it in
“Consciousness”? Does it include the introduction? It doesn’t include the preface, because he
hadn’t written the preface yet, so probably not that. I mean, I think it’s in “Consciousness”. This
is the lesson that we’re supposed to have learned. “…but it is in the inner world”—inner, now, as
implicit—“it has first freely and clearly shown itself. Appearance, or the play of Forces, already
displays it, but it”—this structure of infinity that is the ongoing constellation of all these
commitments and hylomorphically the objective side too—“but it is as ‘explanation’ that it first
freely stands forth; and in being finally an object for consciousness, as that which it is,
consciousness is thus self-consciousness.” So the topic of the consciousness chapter is the notion
of content, of determinateness, determinate conceptual content, which is going to turn out to
have these two forms that the content can take that are essential to it. Categorical form’s the
model here, is the way in which it turned out to be essential to understanding the determinateness
of properties that there was a categorial distinction between objects and properties and here it
turns out to be essential to the notion of conceptual content that it can take these two forms, on
the one hand law, on the other hand explanation. Why does appearance or the play of forces
already display it? Because here we see, for the first time, this holistic identity through
differences, where the identity of each of the forces is a matter of the role it plays in terms of its
relation to all of the other forces, the expression of the force being the vector product of all of the
forces acting on one thing in the allegory, and what’s that’s allegorical for is the content of any
theoretical entity being a matter of its nomological relations to all of the others. We saw that
already in the play of forces, but it’s really going to be in explanation that we— Well, it’s in
explanation that it first freely stands forth. Why? Because that’s where we see the two forms of
this one content. “…in being finally an object for consciousness as that which it is,
consciousness is thus self-consciousness.” And this is the point that now that it understands what
a form of consciousness is a form of, it’s got that correct, it sees that what it had been taking to
be forms of consciousness that it was passing through before were really just ways it was
misunderstanding itself, not forms of consciousness but ways of understanding consciousness,
that is, forms of self-consciousness.
So, in 164, “Since this Notion of infinity is an object for consciousness, the latter is
consciousness of a difference that is no less immediately cancelled.” Now there’s no difference
between what it is in itself and what it for itself. It’s got a proper notion of consciousness.
Consciousness is for its own self. It is a distinguishing of that which contains no difference or
self-consciousness. “The necessary advance from the [various] shapes of consciousness for
which their truth was a Thing, an ‘other’ than themselves, expresses just this, that not only is
consciousness of the thing possible only for a self-consciousness, but that self-consciousness
[itself] the truth of those shapes.” Because those shapes, again, were not shapes of consciousness,
but turned out to be shapes of self-consciousness. Once we realized that they were mis-takings of
consciousness. We were wrong about what consciousness was. “But”—164—“it is only for us
that this truth exists, not yet for consciousness.”
So, in 165, “We see that in the inner world of appearance”—appearance that now includes not
just what’s immediately delivered to us, but also the play of forces, also what’s empirical in the
broader sense of being something we find out through experience, so theoretical claims as well
as observable claims. “...in the inner world of appearance”—we said, appearance as the play of
forces, that’s the broad sense. “...the Understanding in truth comes to know nothing else but
appearance”—it only knows the empirical world—“but not in the shape of a play of Forces, but
rather that play of Forces in its absolutely universal moments and in their movement; in fact, the
Understanding experiences only itself.” So this is its understanding—Well, anyway, its
exhibiting and we understand the hylomorphic point, the relation between the two sides that have
turned out to be the truth of consciousness here in the way in which the categorial distinction
between objects and properties turned out to be the truth of the determinate property in
“Perception”.
Ok, well, this is all a lot to take on board. There’s actually more than that in the notes that I’ll put
up, but essentially what I’ve said today is in those notes so you can go back over that. A thing to
do would be to re-read a bunch of passages now and see whether you’ve been given the tools to
make sense of some of the baroque tropes that he uses to say these things. But the four
fundamental points that I was seeing him as making— How should we think about theoretical
objects and our knowledge of them. How should we think about what’s expressed by modal
claims? Holism, as necessary for really thinking through determinateness. And the hylomorphic
understanding between the subjective and the objective poles of the intentional nexus. Those are
all big, important ideas that he’s trying to work out here. He’s not telling the story exactly the
way I would tell it now, but I think recognizably he’s weaving these important, plausible, or
anyway fruitful philosophical ideas together. And the picture that he ends up with of conceptual
content and empirical knowledge, I think it’s one we should be trying to think through today in
the context of empiricism, philosophy of science, possible world semantics, and particularly
semantics. That’s the one I care about.
Starting next time we talk about Selves. And the thing I’m asking you to read from my chapter is
a very ambitious constructive effort to use the raw materials that Hegel assembles in the first half
of the ‘Self-Consciousness” chapter to describe the transition from us as desiring organisms to us
as Kantian normative selves. So that’s a change of topic to say the least, but one that in the order
of exposition he wanted us to have all this stuff under our belts before we undertook.
All right. So think about drawing the thing of many properties, assemble some passages, and
given the way the book is cumulative, they can be passages from anywhere earlier in the book.
Well, not from the preface, but from any of the things we’ve read if going back you say, well,
but now I just don’t see how this goes.