The Subjectifying Impulse in Philosophy

Kant famously argued that knowledge of the general properties of reality could not be gained as a result of the mind conforming itself to the structure of the world but, rather, the other way around.  This was his ‘Copernican Turn’.  This is perhaps the most famous example of what I will call a subjectifying impulse in philosophy, the impulse to imbue the seemingly non-human aspects of the world with human qualities.  For example, Kant argued that space and time themselves borrow their formal structure from the formal features of possible human experience.

If one begins to look for it, one can find this sort of thing throughout philosophy, but there is a related maneuver that I want to mention here, which is the following: whatever the qualities of the human-independent world, they are unknowable as a result of the fact that our access to the world is necessarily mediated by representations, which are subjective so render it impossible to gain knowledge of how the world is independent of any representations or representational acts.

Knowledge of how the world is in itself, independent of human representations of it, would be what Bernard Williams called an ‘absolute conception’.  For many, the absolute conception is out of reach for our knowledge is perspectival in some way.  In Past, Space, and Self, John Campbell puts the difficulty with the absolute conception as follows:

What it demands is that one should build up a synoptic picture of the world, one that wholly abstracts from one’s own place in the throng, and then somehow identify one of the people so pictured as oneself. What is dizzying is the kind of complete objectivity, the degree of abstraction from one’s own busy concerns, that is required. A first interpretation is that what is wanted is a kind of top-down view, so that we think in terms of a kind of aerial photograph, and then one has to identify oneself as one of the people shown in the photo. But that would not be enough, for it would only give the viewpoint of the photographer, and we need a picture of the world that is objective, in that it is not from any viewpoint at all. (Campbell, p. 6)

I was reminded of the issue after reading this interesting interview with Oxford philosopher Amia Srinivasan.  Here is an excerpt:

I think philosophy presupposes the ability to do something that’s actually not possible for us to do’. This, she says, is to stand outside the relationship between ourselves and the world, to be able to see both ourselves and the world. We want to be able to understand the world from something like an objective point of view, to think about it with maximal detachment. ‘But unfortunately’, she continues, ‘we are a mind in the world, and not just in the world generally, but a very specific world, a particular world for each person. And so we have this regulative aspiration, but that’s at best a regulative ideal, not one that we can actually achieve

The question I want to consider here is, why is this impossible to do, rather than simply very difficult that demands careful, rigorous thought?  Here is some more from the interview:

The philosophical ambition is to tell us the way the world is independent of our representations, but that calls for us to represent the world, so we have this ambition to represent the world as it is without representation…  In trying, Srinivasan says, one runs ‘into a kind of paradox, because one is representing the world as the sort of world which cannot be represented’. The perspectivalist position – that ‘the world in itself is such that there is no world beyond our representations of it’ – exhibits a kind of ineffability

I think this does get at the heart of at least one way of expressing scepticism about the absolute conception, but I think the question remains: what exactly is it that is paradoxical or ineffable?  Sure, to represent the world we must engage in representation, that seems unobjectionable.  But to suppose that this entails that we cannot represent the world as it is independently of representation seems to me to assume that we can only represent representations, i.e. that all representations have content that includes representations.  True, all representations have content, but not all such content is itself representational.

Consider a sentence, such as “I am standing”, said by P and some time, T.  This sentence represents P as standing at T, but it is not necessary to assume that the utterance of “I am standing” is in part about itself.  The utterance may be about a person's relation to a time but it needn’t be about the representational item itself.  A person’s position at a time need have nothing to do with a sentence that expresses that content.

One of the interesting features of indexicals, such as “I”, “here”, “now”, is that they allow us to move from our local perspective to an absolute one.  “It is now noon”, said at T, is in one sense inextricably linked to its context of utterance, in that the content it expresses depends on that context.  On the other hand, there need be nothing perspectival or representational about that context.  For example, in this case the context is merely a time, T, which may well exist independent of any human perspective.  So I don’t see that representing the world via a sentence such as “It is now noon” is to represent the world as the kind of world that cannot be represented.  Rather, such sentences represent the world as it is in itself, even if in so doing we relate ourselves to a particular worldly context. 

As Heather Dyke persuasively argues (Metaphysics and the Representational Fallacy) it is a mistake to suppose that features of our representations must be features of what we represent.  John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View) and William Alston (A Realist Conception of Truth) make similar points.  So I don’t see why we can’t use language, or other representational systems, to express content that does not implicate elements of those systems. 

So I, further, see no reason to assume that we each inhabit a unique, specific world.  Rather, we could very well share a common world even if we each have a unique set of representations of it.  The content of such representations can be shared in common. 

Suppose A says “B is all the way over there”, when A and B are separated by one kilometre.  Why not suppose that the content of the sentence/representation is, say: A and B are separated by 1 km?  Nothing impossible about that. 

Well, perhaps the idea is we must also add the following: And A thinks that 1 km is very far indeed.  That is, one might insist that part of what A is expressing is her evaluation of the distance.  Well, it is not hard to work that into the content.  For example, given the context, this extra content is equivalent to: A is at position P and believes that any position 1 km from P is very far away.  Then the sentence expresses the following content: A is at P, B is at Q, P and Q are separated by 1 km, and A believes any position 1 km from P to be very greatly separated.  In such a case, we are not representing the world as it is independently of representation, since we are representing A's beliefs.  But there is no reason to suppose this generalizes to all cases, so that all representations are reflexive.  Indeed, the objective distance between A and B is just such a content.