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"Exploded view diagrams open up– a little –these black boxes so as to discern the multiple-composition that objects or units are as complexes of relations. What we discover is that every object is both a unit and a crowd of other objects or units."
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This is why there is not only a democracy of objects where every object is on equal ontological footing despite there being hierarchy and inequality among units, but also a democracy in objects. In Irreductions Latour notoriously says that “we will never do better than a politician” (1.2.1). Here Latour is referring not to state leaders (though them too), but objects or actants in general. Every entity that enters into relations with other entities is a politician insofar as it must navigate the tendencies or singularities of the other entities to which it relates.
"Tim seems to conceive world as a container that entities are in. For me, by contrast, the world is anything but a container. Ultimately there are no containers, there are just relations between entities. And as a consequence, in the framework of my ontology, a world is nothing but a network of relations between structurally coupled entities. "
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One of the reasons why I think OOO is so compelling for a lot of people is because we intuitively sense the importance of thinking ‘the many’ (as substances or “objects”) at the same time as acknowledging ‘the one’ (as immanence or flat ontology). I’m not sure overemphasizing the objectal features (e.g. temporal consistency) of reality at the expense of process, as some versions of OOO seem to do, is the best way forward, but I certainly respect the notion of irreducibility and individuation at play in the work of certain authors.
"Kant’s Copernican revolution has enjoyed, in diverse ways, a reconceptualization in much current philosophy. I’m interested in doing a quick taxonomy of some of the ways Kant is being thought anew in three different contexts: A.N. Whitehead’s process philosophy, Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology, and Brett Buchanan’s onto-ethology. "
"One of the things that I’ve found most stunning, that in certain ways I somewhat regret, is my claim that fictions are real. Now there’s something about me that seems to create a ruckus wherever I go– and that’s been above all true of my pronouncements on this blog –but there have been few things I’ve said that have generated more heat than this thesis."
"This article argues for the following: 1. Information is a thing to be handled and controlled; knowledge is not. 2. Knowledge can be managed only indirectly, through the management of information. 3. Personal knowledge management (PKM) is, therefore, best regarded as a subset of personal information management (PIM) — but a very useful subset addressing important issues that otherwise might be overlooked."
In Ordinary Objects, Amie Thomasson mounts a spirited and vigorous defense of the reality of ordinary objects.
in list: Books Noted
In her short book, Types and Tokens, Linda Wetzel defends the thesis that types exist. Wetzel's main argument for the existence of types may be summarized as follows. We refer to and quantify over types in many different areas (in everyday life, in linguistics, in physics, etc.). Furthermore, at least some of the claims we make when referring to or quantifying over types are true. This is sufficient for the existence of types. Therefore, types exist. She then counters some nominalist responses to this argument (that, for example, such apparent reference to types is merely a façon de parler) and ends with the beginnings of a positive theory of types and their relation to tokens.
in list: Books Noted
"To start: I've generally found the strictures of "microfoundations" and "agent-based explanations" as representing ontological constraints on sociological explanations rather than guides for empirical research. The constraints require, essentially, that all our explanations of social processes and causal connections need to be compatible with providing plausible micro-level accounts of how they work."
"The concept of microfoundations is relevant to each of these domains. A microfoundation is:
a specification of the ways in which the properties and structure of a higher-level entity are produced by the activities and properties of lower-level entities.
In the case of the social sciences, this amounts to:
a specification of the ways that properties, structural features, and causal powers of a social entity are produced and reproduced by the actions and dispositions of socially situated individuals."
"Sean Esbjörn-Hargens is a leading representative of the school of thought known as “integral theory,” based on the philosophical writings of spiritual philosopher and polymath Ken Wilber. Esbjörn-Hargens (subsequently “E-H”) has developed his own variant of integral theory, “integral pluralism,” which he applies in the article at hand to the issue of climate change, and which he outlines in his book Integral Ecology, co-written with environmental philosopher Michael Zimmerman (see here for a summary and here for further reading).
“The Ontology of Climate Change” is one of the more impressive article-length syntheses I have read on recent post-constructivist reappraisals of the ontology of environmental problems like climate change. "
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Post-constructivisms, in their various guises, are ontological projects that emerge out of a dissatisfaction with the status quo in how complex worldly events and phenomena, from AIDS to climate change to biotechnology, have been conceived within the dominant paradigms of social and scientific theory. They aim for understanding how the world is “co-constructed” by social, discursive, material, biological, and other processes — which makes them constructivist in a broader and deeper sense than the term is customarily used.
The main forms of post-constructivism discussed by Esbjorn-Hargens are critical realism (whose leading representative is Roy Bhaskar), actor-network theory (ANT) and related post-ANT approaches such as the “ontological politics” of John Law and Annemarie Mol, the post-constructivist work of political ecologist Tim Forsyth and (Whitehead-inspired) environmental sociologist Michael Carolan, and to a lesser extent the enactive cognitivism of Francesco Varela, Evan Thompson, and others. (E-H does not discuss Varelian enactivism in any depth in the article, but he mobilizes its central concept of enaction to great effect.)
"The real, then, is that which holds open the potential for the new. We can never fully know what’s real. The more we look, the more we see. Endlessly. It’s turtles all the way down, but not quite the same turtles. They keep morphing. And become doves.
All the way down.
And, that, I believe, is what object oriented ontologists are driving at when they make these strange assertions about how objects are withdrawn, how they withhold themselves – not merely from us (for it’s not about us at all, this is not us-oriented ontology, after all) – but from one another. There’s always more object there. Our nervous system can never fully assimilate an object, a real object, to its familiar patterns – which is, incidentally, what nervous systems are ‘designed’ to do, more or less, but not always, not in emergencies.
Objects are withdrawn. They withhold themselves. There’s always something more."
"Searle thinks that rules, institutions, and collective intentions are the fundamental "atoms" of social phenomena; and -- this is the dogmatic part -- he thinks that these all depend on one mental action, which he refers to as a Status Function Declaration. He holds that we cannot understand the working of a rule, a socially embodied obligation, or a socially embodied right, without postulating a commonly recognized Status Function Declaration that establishes that practice. And, sure enough -- a status function declaration is a form of a speech act."
"I offer a social ontology that I refer to as methodological localism (ML). This theory of social entities affirms that there are large social structures and facts that influence social outcomes. But it insists that these structures are only possible insofar as they are embodied in the actions and states of socially constructed individuals. The “molecule” of all social life is the socially constructed and socially situated individual, who lives, acts, and develops within a set of local social relationships, institutions, norms, and rules."
"The challenge of explanation for any social outcome, we might say, is that of constructing an interpretation of the states of minds of a set of actors; the constraints and opportunities within which they choose a course of action; and the interactions that are created as they act within a common environment, leading to the outcome in question. This is what we can refer to as an aggregative explanation, and it lies at the heart of Thomas Schelling's methodology in Micromotives and Macrobehavior. As Schelling points out, sometimes the explanation turns on specific features of agency (the actors' preferences or their modes of decision-making), and sometimes it turns on the specifics of the environment of choice (the fact that the outcome of action is a public good). But in general, explanation proceeds by showing how agents with specific features, acting within a social and natural environment with specific characteristics, bring about specific kinds of outcomes.
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These are imbroglios, where humans and nonhumans are bound up with one another in complex networks without any particular actor or object standing above the rest. And this, in the end, is what immanence or flat ontology means: a single world characterized by imbroglios, where no actor or object stands outside the others. Perhaps there are gods and spirits, but if there are then they do not stand apart from being or outside of the world, but are caught in imbroglios like all other objects.
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Just as all other objects find themselves caught up in imbroglios with other objects, this requires first that signs, for example, are caught up in imbroglios with non-semiotic objects rather than circulating throughout the world in a smooth space without resistance or encounters with density. If I have been attracted to the concept of memes, then this is because the concept of memes approaches this dimension of imbroglios with respect to signs.
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Throughout his post John draws a distinction between reality or the “really real” and illusion. But it is precisely this distinction that is undermined by the ontic principle. As I argue in my post on Flat Ontology, there are not two worlds– one consisting of the really real or “mind-independent objects” and another consisting of mind and the social –but rather only one world, the real, of which mind is counted as a member. Consequently, the first point to make is that the phenomena that take place in the mind regarding the game are themselves real.
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What is taking place in the mind regarding the game is an instance of what I call translation. The principle of translation states that there is no transportation of a difference without a transformation or translation of that difference. In other words, in the interaction between the game and mind a difference is conveyed from one domain (the game) to another (the mind). In being received by the mind– or, for me, more preferably, the brain –that difference is reorganized or transformed in a variety of system-specific ways precisely as John describes. However, the important caveat made by the object-oriented ontologist is that this process of translation is true not simply of mind-object interactions, but of all object-object interactions regardless of whether or not minds are involved. In other words, translation is every bit as much a phenomenon characterizing the interaction of rocks with sunlight as it is of frogs tracking “flies” and humans regarding the Game of Life. There is no object that receives differences from other objects like a glassy reflection in a mirror… Including mirrors themselves! Rather, for every interaction between objects there is a translation and a transformation. As such, translation is not an epistemological limitation that prevents us from ever getting at the “true things in themselves”, but is rather a general ontological feature of all inter-ontic relations among objects. Translation is an ontological process.
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