Intelligence from Outside

I very much like Aristotle’s cryptic remark in De Anima about intellect coming to us “from outside”. Intellect is very far from purely belonging to the individual psyche. On other grounds, I think our very notions of self only emerge through social interaction, and not any sort of originary intuition.

In a certain sense, then, specifically human as distinct from animal intelligence is already artificial in the sense that its basis is not purely organic. It cannot be separated from our acquisition of language and culture.

Where there is still a difference between human intelligence and anything in a computational domain is in the normative, practical dimension of human reason, which does not seem to be susceptible to formalization. Practical judgment (phronesis) cannot be programmed. (See also What Is “I”?)

Machine Learning?

So-called machine learning is producing all kinds of results these days. People find it very useful. Given what it actually is, though — purely statistical analysis of uninterpreted data — I think it is very misleading to call it learning by the machine. The simple execution of numerical computations and yielding of results — no matter how advanced the computations, or how useful the results — is not normally considered learning, and does not establish intelligence.

There could be a more interesting argument over whether software implementations of formal reasoning represent some form of artificial intelligence. The problem is, you cannot get real-world conclusions from purely formal reasoning, so the appearance of intelligence is rather limited.

AI researchers recognized this early on, and came up with the idea of complementing computational reasoning with some sort of “knowledge representation”. Then, in a fascinating spontaneous development within this specialized research domain, the pendulum swung back again, and there came to be a broad consensus that “knowledge representation” was best approached as intimately interdependent with reasoning.

Passive Synthesis, Active Sense

Husserl suggested an intriguing notion of passive synthesis, which I believe in his view would be the source of what Hegel calls mediated immediacy. Something like this could help round out the Kantian account of synthesis, which is strongly tilted toward active synthesis associated with deliberate conscious acts. Language is straining here; passive synthesis is just short of paradox. I think the idea here is that “passive” synthesis is synthesis that comes to us more or less ready-made, based on previous syntheses we have formed or socially assimilated.

Something related to this is also involved in the Aristotelian notion of a “common” sense, which in effect synthesizes our experience of sensible things into a unified whole. Aristotle’s remarks are in a very minimalist style, but were developed in a little more detail by the commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias. Kant and Aristotle both generally treat sense perception in passive terms, but Aristotle’s common sense clearly cannot be entirely passive. Many medieval authors working in the broadly Aristotelian tradition developed more detailed accounts of sense perception in general as also involving an active component.

These various efforts to describe such processes in terms that are neither purely active nor purely passive seem very important to me as laying the ground for a reasonable account of human agency, free of both voluntarism and simplistic determinism.

Preface to Historiography

Generically, historiography is writing about the writing of history. As applied to the section “Historiography for History of Philosophy”, I’m using the term in a slightly idiosyncratic way. Those articles mostly concern particular historical interpretations that I think significantly impact — or should significantly impact — other, broader historical interpretation, as well as interpretation of things in the present. Needless to say, this is difficult to divide cleanly from my other section devoted to History of Philosophy, but here the accent is more on the history, and there it is more on the philosophy.

I take historiography to be a kind of supplement to Hermeneutics (see dedicated menu section). Perhaps even especially as presented here, it stands in contrast with what Brandom calls Hegelian genealogy, which I highly value in a different context. The “historiography” here is largely concerned with things and perspectives that the retrospective teleology of a Hegelian genealogy largely filters out. It still involves all kinds of ultimately normative judgments in the process of making judgments of historical fact, but focuses mainly on discerning the irregularities, quirkiness, local retrograde movements, and specific materiality of the actual forward-moving succession of events.

Nature is full of purposes or quasi-purposes, but any appearance of pre-existing purpose or predetermination in history is an artifact of our story-telling.

Telling such a story is a delicate enterprise. There is no invisible hand guiding temporal succession, nor is there inherent unity unfolding in successive events. The raw material of history is strictly an accumulation of accidents. As much as possible, we should let the details speak for themselves. Yet we almost cannot help giving it a plot. This helps us orient ourselves. Inevitably, we select certain details as important and ignore others. We tend to give it direction and shape.

Independent of purpose, though, there is a kind of quasi-material accumulation of forms associated with temporal succession. (I mean that the accumulation associated with succession is independent of purpose, while the forms accumulated may themselves be purposeful.)

Succession has materially inherent directionality to it. Time only flows forward. Successive forms get superimposed on one another so to speak and become indistinct, resulting in something new and unintended, but cumulative. This is not progress, and there is nothing normative about it. It is a quasi-material analogue of arithmetic addition, indifferent to considerations of what is better or worse. But we may experience it as better or worse. And because it does have a materially inherent direction (the pile gets thicker, so to speak, and forms within it materially condition other forms), it is possible for us to take that direction in some purposeful way. We look at a raw accumulation of forms, and imagine a story that has some basis in the actual development.

It’s a bit mythical to speak as if there were two distinct phases to this. We don’t ever have the pure or original thing in a philosophical sense. But various kinds of accumulation are one of the significant features of temporal succession in a world, and we do have actual material cultural artifacts to which we can refer.

My use of “historiography” is also roughly synonymous with nonstandard uses of “archaeology” derived from the work of Michel Foucault, particularly as applied to the history of philosophy by writers like Alain de Libera and Gwenaëlle Aubry.

Univocity

Aristotle is the source of our modern notion of univocity. He was also the first to point out many things of interest that overflow our attempts at univocal representation.

Something is said univocally (i.e., without equivocation) if the meaning is the same whenever the representation is the same. This is an important, desirable property in logic, modern science, and engineering. A lack of univocity is one of the major sources of logical inconsistency or incoherence in representation.

A kind of univocity also applies to a Kantian unity of apperception. The unity of a unity of apperception is more or less equivalent to the univocity of an account of something. So since there is a kind of moral imperative to achieve unity of apperception or improve upon it, there is in that way also an ethical use for univocity. But just as unity of apperception requires constant renewal, so too do our attempts at comprehensive univocal accounts of things.

Aristotle frequently points out things that are “said in many ways” (i.e., not univocally). This refers not just to practices of ordinary language, but to meant realities as well (see Equivocal Determination). Being and cause are among the things said in many ways. He also points out cases where a more fluid, pluralistic approach is appropriate — the classification of animals, for instance — or just applies such an approach. Aristotle wants to be faithful to the variety, subtlety, and complexity of the world and everything in it. This is the famous Aristotelian manysidedness, often praised by Hegel.

Univocity is never simply found; it is a possible property of our constructions and passive syntheses. In the design of representations and schemas, there may be tradeoffs between coherence and correspondence, or consistency and comprehensiveness.

If there is an ethical imperative to univocity, there is also one to manysidedness. These are really two sides of one coin (a sort of responsibility our representations have to reality, as Brandom would say). To paraphrase Whitehead, we should seek univocity and distrust it. (See also Aristotelian Semantics; Mutation of Meaning.)

Althusser’s Hegel

French Marxist Louis Althusser (1918-90) was the academic director of France’s most prestigious university during the 1960s. He open-mindedly helped promote the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan, and maintained personal friendships with other important figures such as Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. Althusser left provocative, underdeveloped sketches of a historiography opposed to all forms of historical teleology or predetermination (see also Structural Causality, Choice). In 1960s Paris, this new historiography was considered inseparable from a strong polemic against any and all forms of Hegelianism or Hegelian influence in contemporary social thought. (See also Archaeology of Knowledge).

There indeed have been a lot of bad Hegelianisms to which this criticism legitimately applies. But much careful work in recent decades has by now, I think, established that it need not apply to Hegel himself. In fact, Hegel even appears as a major precursor of the putatively anti-Hegelian historiography.

Before his famous anti-Hegelian period, Althusser interpreted Hegelian Spirit as “process without a subject”. Process without a subject already anticipated the characteristics he later called “aleatory”. In the late period, he emphasized that history is about understanding results, not origins.

In an extremely different context and style, Brandom has developed a reading of Hegel as practicing backward-looking recollective reconstruction of the present rather than asserting forward-moving teleology or predetermination in history.

Aleatory Matter

The resurgence of interest in French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser has largely centered around his late concept of “aleatory materialism”, based on a reading of Lucretius on the alleged spontaneous swerving of atoms in the void.

Like most other recent French writers, Althusser had little use for Aristotle. He repeated many old bad stereotypes and counterposed a good Lucretius to a bad Plato and Aristotle, to whom he mistakenly ascribed — among other things — a modern-style univocal notion of causality. Althusser’s Lucretius, by contrast, stands for recognition of the contingency of events.

It is therefore all the more intriguing to note that Althusser was unwittingly recovering a key feature I have associated with Aristotelian matter. I like the Aristotelian version better, because it does not rely on a quasi-myth of a miraculous originary swerve, but just appropriately asserts the contingency of things.

Aristotelian Matter

Aristotelian “matter” and “material cause” mainly capture notions of circumstance, contingent fact, mediation, and what some 20th century writers called sedimentation.

Early Greek mathematics was not sufficiently advanced to be of much help in understanding natural processes, so Aristotle instead pioneered a logical/semantic approach to our experience of sensible nature. In accordance with this, “matter” for Aristotle is what Brandom would call an expressive metaconcept, rather than being a theory-laden empirical concept like the modern notion. We need to be careful moving between the two.

For Aristotle, matter is not a subsisting thing but a relative concept that has an expressive role. “Matter” and “form” are correlatives, only analytically distinguishable, though the relation is not quite symmetrical (form seems to be more primary). All physical things are conventionally referred to as “composites” of the two, but this should not be taken to mean that either has independent existence. (See also Hylomorphism.)

The relation between matter and form is loosely but definitely not strictly analogous to that between potentiality and actuality. Matter gives concrete embodiment to particulars, whereas potentiality is what provides the space for construction of universals.

Unlike Descartes, Aristotle does not associate matter in any direct way with mathematically analyzable extension. One of his usages for “matter” is as the inferred substrate for sensible properties. But alongside this, a different account is actually more prominent. Some “form” or way of being and doing makes the composite the particular kind of thing it is. In this context, “matter” ends up comprising the concrete circumstances of the actual functioning of a way of being and doing.

Modern people are used to thinking of form as a predicate of some matter. Some in the ancient world thought this way, too, but Aristotle prefers to speak in the opposite way, and to predicate the matter of the form.

Aristotelian matter refers to circumstance, to a body of what is the case about some particular actualized form, more primarily than to a body of stuff. What is of interest with matter is particular matters, or “a” matter, or “the” matter of some particular form — the circumstances of its actualization.

The Greek commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias postulated an ultimate “prime matter” that was distinguished by having no properties at all, which by implication would put all properties whatsoever on the side of form. At the other end of the spectrum, some later commentators spoke of a “proximate matter” (i.e., the matter closest to the form) as highly structured, and as including things like the body of an animal.

Aristotle’s various usages, if reified, would result in a layering of form/matter distinctions. (In the middle ages, there was heated debate over the so-called “unity or plurality of substantial forms”. Theologians were much concerned over the relation of soul to body. Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas and others took seriously Aristotle’s description of soul as the “form of the body”. Augustinians wanted a dualistic separation of soul and body, more like the pilot in the ship that Aristotle rejected. They therefore argued that the body already had a form of its own, and that the form of the soul is superimposed on it (a “plurality of substantial forms”). The notion of “substantial form” was a late refinement intended to be strictly univocal, where Aristotle’s general usage of “form” had instead been self-consciously overdetermined, overflowing any such conditions in the course of its dialectical development.)

Aristotelian matter is implicitly not just immediate circumstance, but always a result of a sort of layering or accumulation of circumstances over time, including some feedback loops. This is important for the kind of generalization we should expect from Aristotelian science.

Cartesian extensionality is perfectly homogeneous. Aristotelian matter is anything but that. It is a site of differences (as form is also, in a complementary way). The virtual layering or accumulation I have spoken of is a very weak kind of unity. Aristotle’s notions of necessity and universality are also both deliberately weak notions. Something is said to be “necessary” just if there is no known counter-instance. “Universal” means “said of many things”, not “said unconditionally”.

Aristotelian “science” does not aim to codify laws in the modern, univocal sense. It is an open hermeneutic that seeks to understand processes in terms of patterns, while recognizing inherent contingency in matters of fact. Particularly in the biological works, there is a genealogical intertwining of form and accident that makes it impossible to strictly separate the two. Aristotelian natural teleology is not only purely immanent, but also never univocal, as this intertwining makes clear. It gives us tendencies only, never strict predetermination.

Mutation of Meaning

It is fascinating how the meaning of terms can be inverted over time. Take form, for example. Plato and Aristotle’s notions of “form” include something like what Kant and Brandom would call conceptual content. What Kant and Brandom call “form”, on the other hand, while not properly equivalent to Aristotelian logical/semantic matter, seems to belong to that side of things.

Similarly, when medieval authors wrote about something being “merely objective”, they meant superficial or based on mere appearance, i.e., something close to what modern authors would call “merely subjective”. “Subject” had no mental connotations. It meant something more like a grammatical subject.

Such reversals or near-reversals are only the most dramatic examples. Nearly every philosophical term of interest has undergone historic shifts in its general meaning. When these are not taken into account, the result is endless confusion.

It is pointless to argue about what such a term “really means” in the abstract. Meaning is use, so we need to look at concrete contexts of usage, and ask what it means in this context.

I make opinionated remarks about usage, but always relative to a context. (See also Univocity.)

Intellectual Virtue, Love

In his discussions of ethics, alongside friendship or love and the things that go with those, Aristotle places the highest value on what he calls intellectual virtues. This is often misconstrued as a bias in favor of theory over practice. Such a misconstrual does not take a long enough view of things. Aristotle did value intellectual over manual labor, but took great interest in the kinds of things Kant called “practical”, as the ethical treatises demonstrate.

Aristotle had the idea that the keener our discernment of things in general, the keener our practical judgment will be. I may study the stars or the habits of animals or political constitutions or the nature of intellect or of virtue — and these are all worthy in their own right — but I also improve my discernment of things in general in order to be a better being, which means applying it in a broad way in my whole life, as well as in my particular deliberations and choices.

This all assumes that I already want to be good, and am relatively able to actually be so. That will not be true, according to Aristotle, unless I am fortunate enough to have had the kind of upbringing and life experiences that are conducive to the development of the kind of character in which emotion is already inclined to give reason a fair hearing. For those whose emotions will not listen to reason, the best path forward is to follow others who are more reasonable, but that may not occur without some institution of authority. Insofar as we are or aim to be magnanimous ethical beings who have nothing to prove, rather than needing to celebrate this conditional legitimation of authority over others (and implicitly of the use of force in society to gain compliance with elementary justice and civility), we should be guided by a spirit of friendship and love.

We should use our intellectual virtues in a spirit of friendship to best apply something like Leibnizian wise charity in our lives, especially with those we love, and more especially in generously understanding the particular predicament of the loved one in front of us whose emotions will not listen to reason in such and such a case, so we can more effectively help them. (See also Honesty, Kindness; Interpretive Charity; Affirmation; Genealogy.)