This link has been bookmarked by 1 people . It was first bookmarked on 22 Jul 2009, by Todd Suomela.
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22 Jul 09
Todd SuomelaPart of a series of posts on modernism, philosophy, speculative realism.
Crucial reading of "Circulating Reference" by Latourphilosophy critical-theory objects speculative-realism realism about(BrunoLatour) science epistemology representation
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Philosophical epistemology begins from a stark opposition between words (or, alternatively mental representations) on the one hand, and world, on the other hand. Like the King’s soldiers, it then wonders how it is possible to put these two sundered halves together again. It is not difficult to see how it might be possible to cook up a theory of reference for propositions such as “the cat is on the mat”, but what could adequation between word and “thing” possibly mean for propositions like “the savanna is advancing on the jungle” or “the jungle is advancing on the Savannah”? What would a mental representation or mimesis between idea and world be in such a case? What are the inscrutable markers we find in our mental representation that establish such a correspondence? What resemblance is there between this proposition or statement and the world that it depicts? Posed in this way the question seems irresolvable as we either remain a “mind-in-a-vat” with no access to anything save our own mental representations (and therefore without the means of distinguishing the marks of the true from the false in our representations), or, equivalently, a “speaker-in-a-vat” with no means of distinguishing the marks that distinguish the true and the false in our propositions.
The whole problem, Latour contends, lies in the fact that philosophers always begin too late.
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The entire problem emerges because philosophy begins with its “knowledge-datum” as it appears at dusk, but does so without being aware that it is doing so. In other words, beginning with the product of knowledge labor as inscribed in a text such as the Principia or the Elements, philosophy then proceeds to inquire into how the propositions that compose this product resemble or mimic true reality such that they are adequate to that reality. As a result it finds itself plunged into irresolvable difficulties because, of course, reality shares no resemblance to either these mental representations or these propositions. In other words, when conceiving knowledge as a mimetic adequation between mind and world, word and world, we very quickly encounter an unsurpassable gap between the two. What possible resemblance is there between a chemical equation and the transformation that takes place in a beaker in the laboratory? The two could not be more unlike.
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What establishes the possibility of reference, then, is not a resemblance between the proposition and the forest-savanna, not an isomorphism between word and thing, but a series of transformations or translations between the final propositions and the forest-savanna upon which one can circulate back and forth from final propositions to initial research and back again. There is no resemblance between each ordered transformation and that which it transforms, but we can pass from one stage of the transformation to the next… Especially since the data is carefully preserved at each stage.
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