Sellars, Derrida and the Task of Analytic Philosophy 1 Thomas J. Brommage, Jr. University of South Florida Department of Philosophy 4202 E. Fowler Ave FAO 226 Tampa, FL 33620 brommage@mail.usf.edu Comments requested I I begin with a non-sequitor to focus the discussion to come. Richard Rorty, in a short introduction to a recent edition of Wilfrid Sellars' classic essay Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, describes the importance of Robert Brandom's recent book Making it Explicit, 2 as an attempt to usher analytic philosophy from its Kantian to its Hegelian stage. 3 Indeed, even the most cursory look at Brandom's mighty programmatic statement will confirm the influence of Sellars. But Rorty makes a much more interesting statement when, in his characteristically hyperbolic style, he explains that the Sellars-Brandom 'social practice' approach to the traditional problems of analytic philosophy might help reconnect that philosophical tradition with the so-called 'Continental' tradition. 4 That is, one of the tasks for philosophy in a post-positivist age is to overcome what Rorty calls the unfortunate, temporary breakdown of communication between the schools of Anglo-American Analytic and European Continental philosophy. 5 My project as a whole is guided by the motivation for this recent turn in twentieth century analytic 1 I would like to thank Elizabeth Hirsh, Joanne Waugh, Charles Guignon and Steven Turner for comments on earlier versions of this paper. This paper has also benefited from comments at the Florida Philosophical Association Conference, November 2005. 2 Making it Explicit (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). Hereafter abbreviated MIE. 3 Richard Rorty's Introduction in Wilfred Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1997) p. 8-9. 4 Ibid., 11 5 Ibid., p. 11-12 1
philosophy, and specifically the development of epistemology and semantic theory, away from the influence of Kant and toward the influence of Hegel. A re-thinking of the fundamental task and elements of analytic philosophy in the post-positivist age including the growing concern for the inherently normative and social dimensions of linguistic and epistemic content are characteristic of this turn. My hope is that careful inquiry into the similarities between these characteristically divergent philosophical traditions rather than focusing on the dissimilarities will give us a more examined view of the benefits that each can learn from the other. This paper is making the first few modest steps in that direction. II The tradition of empiricism from its naïve form in Locke, Berkely and Hume, to its more sophisticated Kantian and post-kantian varieties has left a shadow, under which the task of analytic philosophy has been obscured. Empiricism, in its broadest sense, is the claim that what we know is in some way caused by what is external to us, usually mediated by 'sense-data' which impress themselves upon the mind. Although it is an epistemological doctrine, adopting an empiricist stance typically commits one to certain specific views of metaphysics and language. In order to make this empiricist epistemology viable, it requires the metaphysical notion of the world as somehow given to the mind. In short, it requires a 'metaphysics of presence.' But it is very easy for an uncritical form of this doctrine to devolve into subjective idealism and to skepticism, as Hegel demonstrates in the move from Locke to Berkeley to Hume. 6 If that which is 6 Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 3 tr. E. S. Hadane and Frances H. Simson (New York: Humanities Press, 1955) p. 360-74 2
knowable, is so if and only if it is present to the senses, then it follows that what is present to sense is all that is knowable. This is an unsatisfactory result. The recent rejection of empiricism in Anglo-American 7 analytic philosophical tradition beginning with the work of Wittgenstein, Sellars and Quine, and continuous through such contemporary thinkers as Davidson, Rorty and Brandom are in many ways allowing for the possibility of analytic philosophy to find a common ground with the theses offered by such traditionally Continental theorists, such as Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and most recently Derrida. From the perspective of semantic theory, I believe that the lessons of such Continental thinkers strengthen the arguments of the recently emerging view of language as fundamentally expressive and semantically rich, a doctrine which is gaining prominence in contemporary Analytic philosophy, especially in the work of Davidson, Rorty and Brandom. This position runs contrary to the view that language should be understood in terms of a primarily referential function, a view prominent in the philosophies of logical atomism and logical positivism. It is by jettisoning these purely extensionalist and logicist theories of semantic and epistemic content that is, the logical atomist and positivist philosophies of Russell, Carnap, Ayer, et. al., that the channels of communication between the schools of Anglo-American Analytic and European Continental philosophy will be opened. 8 7 I am uncomfortable with the term Anglo-American,and prefer the term Anglo-Austrian, following Michael Dummett, to denote the roots of Analytic thought are primarily German. This destabilizes one of the more naïve characterizations of the divide, which centers the traditions in terms of their geographical location. Indeed, the roots of the Fregean philosophy are themselves of the European continent (e.g., Lotze). 8 In so doing, perhaps it could be said that my argument is preformative, in that I will borrow with near reckless abandon themes from both Continental and Analytic theorists through my reading. This may lead to the objection that by using such words as epistemology and empiricism, I am taking great liberty with the details of Derrida's thought. This objection is not incorrect, but it is also 3
One can read the tradition of analytic philosophy in terms of a single dominant theory of linguistic meaning. The insufficiencies of this view, criticized by both Sellars and Derrida, can be summarized as the assertion that language and the mind do nothing more than to represent the world; the task of dethroning this doctrine is, in large part, one of the motifs of the expressivist model. 9 This stale dogma of representationalism a persistent consequence of modern philosophy from Descartes to Kant still is resident in contemporary philosophers who retain the elements of logical empiricism, especially those who embrace some variety of foundationalism and a correspondence theory of truth (or, to wax Sellarsian, the dual role of the given to serve both a justificatory and constitutive role in our knowledge). A consistent critique of epistemological empiricism that can be accepted by philosophers from both the analytic and continental traditions is needed. But in this paper, my goals are much more modest. In what follows, I offer an interpretation of Derrida's critique of presence through his notion of différance, and I attempt to draw some implications for, and from, a contemporary neo-pragmatist philosophy of language and thought. III Few philosophers have been met with such a mix of praise and hostility as has Jacques Derrida. He remains a philosopher who has been interpreted and re-interpreted to serve the needs of contemporary discourse. Derrida's main contribution was to philosophy is the process of deconstruction, a methodology for collapsing and overcoming binary oppositions. In any set of opposing terms, usually one is privileged symptomatic of the problem I am attempting to work through. 9 The foundations of such a reading of the history of philosophy have been laid by Robert Brandom in his Tales of the Mighty Dead (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2002). 4
over the other. The strategy is to shift the emphasis from the primary to the subordinate side, and to show that both are explanatory insufficient on their own terms. The focus, throughout Derrida's work, was the onto-theological presuppositions of the tradition of Western philosophy, including what he calls the metaphysics of presence. Derrida's critique of presence hinges upon his notion of différance. This neologism, implying at once both a differencing and a deferring, indicates the absence which exists always already in the dialectic of presence. Early in the essay entitled Différance, he tells us that Différance is literally neither a word nor a concept. 10 But elsewhere he admits that [t]his does not prevent it from producing conceptual effects. 11 Thus, it may be safe to say that différance is not a concept, but it is conceptual; or better yet, it establishes the possibility of conceptuality, of a conceptual process and system in general. 12 Derrida's 'epistemology' is marked by différance and its conceptual effects, which resists one of the founding oppositions in philosophy, between the sensible and the conceptual; 13 or put differently, one of the basic assumptions that characterizes the empiricist philosophy of knowledge. 14 As a sign, the word différance itself resists the opposition of the written and spoken word, the opposition upon which Derrida's science of grammatology is built. The silent a can be known only through the written form, as the spoken pronunciation does not capture différance's difference. This is because there is no phonic difference between the words difference and différance in French, the silent a that Derrida includes is 10 Derrida, Margins of Philosophy tr. Alan Bass (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982) p. 3 11 Derrida, Positions tr. Alan Bass (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981) p. 40 12 Margins p. 11 13 Ibid., p. 5 14 This opposition (what Davidson call the third dogma of empricism has also been criticized by other analytic thinkers, such as McDowell and Brandom. 5
only captured in the written form of the word, not as it is spoken. Derrida intends this, so that the determinate meaning of the word cannot be known in the sense of direct reference, as empiricism would dictate: What am I to do in order to speak of the a of différance? It goes without saying that it cannot be exposed. One can expose only that which at a certain moment can become present, manifest, that which can be shown, presented as something present, a beingpresent in its truth, in the truth of a present or the absence of the present... It is never offered to the present. Or to anyone. 15 Différance cannot be a concept in the empiricist sense, since its double meaning ( temporalization and spacing 16 ) denies a single determinant meaning; in this way it is similar to the Hegelian Aufheben, which implies both destroying and preserving, but is not completely contained in either term. Finally, différance is not marked by activity and passivity, as the ending -ance remains undecided between the active and the passive. 17 Derrida specifies that différance is not elaborated simply as a philosophical discourse, operating according to principles, postulates axioms or definitions, and proceeding along the discursive lines of a linear order of reasons. Rather, Derrida characterizes his epistemological thought as both strategic and adventurous: Strategic because no transcendent truth present outside the field of writing can govern the totality of the field. Adventurous because this strategy is not a simple strategy in the sense that strategy orients tactics according to a final goal, a telos or theme of domination, a mastery and ultimate reappropriation of the development of the field. Strategy implies that there is no clear decision process to be made in thought, as strategies are required when a process is uncertain. In opposition to the sense-certainty of the empirical philosophy, 15 Ibid., p. 6 16 Ibid., p. 8 17 Ibid., p. 9 6
wherein knowledge is reducible as presence-to-sense, différance is always already inside the system of signs and meaning. Meaning is deferred in the sense that it is always constituted against a background of understanding and it is this background characterized by its absence (or, not being present) to the perceiving subject which is required for any understanding of what is present. Derrida argues that any understanding of presence necessarily requires features that remain absent. IV I want to tie together my remarks through an analysis of the epistemological attack of the given (or, if you prefer, of presence) by an analysis of one key contemporary figure in Anglo-American analytic philosophy, namely Wilfrid Sellars. In his difficult and influential essay Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, Sellars sets out to show that the myth of the given, the hallmark assumption of empiricism, is a misleading picture of human understanding. Sellars begins this through an attack of non-inferential sense data as basic, pre-conceptual, and self-justifying. As classical empiricism would have us believe, sense-data serve a privileged role in the formation of any knowledge whatsoever. From this basic pre-conceptual foundation, one conflates knowledge with the presence of sensations to the mind of a given subject. Or, to put it differently, presence-to-sense is what makes us know. Early in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, Sellars discusses the epistemic relation of the expressions 'looks to have a property' and 'has a property' in terms of a triadic relation of a subject, an object, and a property. 18 This relation is 18 Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind op. cit., 11. Hereafter abbreviated EPM 7
considered by empiricism to basic, and therefore further unanalyzable. Sellars rejects this picture. In so doing, he spins a story about a young man named John who works in a store that sells neckties. Each evening, John takes count of the inventory, reading off the color of each tie. At a certain point while John is working there, electric lighting is invented. After the new lighting is installed, at the end of each day he systematically misjudges the color, as the lighting effects the visual properties of the ties. John begins to count blue ties as green. Of course, no such lighting exists outside, and when John brings a given green tie outside, it appears to change color in the sunlight. Sellars point is that John would not come to the conclusion that the tie has somehow magically changed color in the different locations. Rather, he should be aware that his judgment is being tempered by lighting and its effect on sense perception, regardless of the indication by the senses that the same tie appears to be changing color from green inside to blue outside. Sellars concludes that the concept of 'being green' is prior to, and mediates, the concept of 'looking green'. John, when asserting that the tie is blue, is not making a reporting use of this sentence. He uses it as the conclusion of an inference. 19 To say that the role of this sentence is inferential is to say that it is derived not from the immediate presence to sense of the object, but that concepts about the standard conditions of observation (in this case: the effects of lighting on visual abilities, the inability of ties to magically change color, etc.) mediate his judgment, and thus mediate his report, about the color of a given tie. We find in Sellars' account of non-inferential reporting observations that typically it is none of these: neither non-inferential, nor merely reporting, nor simply observational. 19 Ibid., 14 8
In fact, to assert even basic sensory statements requires (in general terms) a conceptual context: Not only must the conditions be of a sort that is appropriate for determining the color of an object by looking, the subject must know that conditions of this sort are appropriate. And while this does not imply that one must have concepts before one has them, it does imply that one can have the concept of green only by having a whole battery of concepts of which it is one element. It implies that while the process of acquiring the concept of green may indeed does involve a long history of acquiring piecemeal habits of response to various objects in various circumstances, there is an important sense in which one has no concept pertaining to the observable properties of physical objects in space and time unless one has them all and indeed, as we shall see, a great deal more besides. 20 In this sense, knowledge in the conceptual order requires a series of concepts, one relying upon its relation to others, and thus is never final. Sellars proposed critique of givenness and presence resonates in a way strikingly similar to Derrida's notion of différance. V Crucial to understanding Sellars' position is an examination of how it relates to his larger philosophical enterprise. Such a view is presented in his 1962 Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man, which is re-published a year later as the first chapter of his Science, Perception and Reality, the collection of essays which contains also Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. In this article, he attempts to expose and evaluate two conflicting images of humanity in relation to the world, which he calls the manifest and the scientific images. These images are not to be understood as conceptual schemes, but rather as explanatory models of philosophical inquiry. The 20 Ibid., 19 9
manifest image, he argues, arises as a sophistication and refinement of the image in terms of which man first came to be aware of himself as man-in-the-world; in short, came to be man. 21 Philosophy, when built in the manifest image, attempts to explain the world in terms of what it is to be human, and examines all other issues even those of theoretical physics and cognitive psychology in terms of furthering this goal. This perennial philosophical tradition includes not only the Platonic tradition in the broadest sense, but [the] philosophies of 'common sense' and 'ordinary usage.' 22 The primary methodology for the manifest image is one of correlation of the world with our distinctive human capacities and abilities. Sellars juxtaposes this with the scientific image, a sophisticated version of the Democratean view of the world as atoms in the void. The scientific image relies not on introspection to make its case, but rather by identifying complex human process through the postulation of unobservable entities to describe them. It is an unapologetically reductionistic view. Twentieth century philosophical behaviorism is an example that Sellars uses to explain the scientific image, wherein mental processes are explained through the unobservable neuro-physiological processes that underly the phenomenon at hand; behaviorism reduces thought to brain states, and then denies that concept use can have any special status other than that which is reducible to, or explainable in terms of, these states. Sellars scientific realist solution, a synoptic vision of philosophy, is not the overtly simplistic position that we should use both in coming to a proper understanding of how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together. 23 21 Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man in Science, Perception and Reality (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1991) p. 18 22 Ibid., p. 19 23 Ibid., p. 16 10
Rather, he finds not only that both have advantages; but both, taken on their own terms, are false:... just as the claim that 'physical objects are complexes of imperceptible particles' left us with the problem of accounting for the status of the perceptible qualities of manifest objects, so the claim that 'thoughts, etc., are complex neurophysiological processes' leaves us with the problems of accounting for the status of the introspectable qualities of thoughts. 24 The task, rather, is to define each in terms of their role in the explanation, as each can learn great lessons about their own shortcomings of one another. Sellars, in what might be called a deconstructive move, prescribes that we embrace the cases wherein one benefits from one explanation over another, instead of taking both as complete and exhaustive descriptions of the same thing. He offers no promissory note here; rather, Sellars re-writes the distinction, shifting the ontological burden of proof and focusing philosophical discourse on scientific objects. But, then, he expands the field of what counts as scientific objects, to re-cast the task of the scientific image in terms of what it is to be a person (that is, a scientific image of man ). Such additions blur the linguistic distinction between semantics and syntax, thought and world, form and content, and expands the goal of the scientific image without detracting the integral elements of the manifest image. VI The critique of epistemological empiricism that both Derrida and Sellars offer is that meaning, in its basic empiricist sense, is neither foundational, nor final, nor simple, nor self-justifying. An understanding of presence in terms of absence requires that 24 Ibid., p. 31 11
meaning is a product of the conceptual order, which is not strictly speaking present in the way that sensations seem to be. Rather, it is a product of what is absent to consciousness, of an understanding of a conceptual (and thereby, normative) process which tempers judgment. In short, presence-to-sense is insufficent for the development of epistemic content. Although I do not propose here that Sellars and Derrida's respective arguments are perfectly compatible, they do have a shared goal in exposing the problem of naïve empiricism, criticizing the idea that reports of sensation are the most 'basic,' and most 'obvious' instances of presence to the mind. As a consequence, empiricism cannot take this basic reporting as the model of both the foundation and justification for all other knowledge. Derrida takes great pains to show, in no uncertain terms, that the philosophy of presence is infected with absence, and that this absence (whether in terms of the concepts presupposed, or of a pre-ontological understanding of Being) re-frames the epistemology of presence in these terms. Différance in this sense, although not exclusively epistemological, has specific epistemological effects, which allow us to think more carefully about thinking as such. I would suggest, therefore, that Derrida presents a powerful critique of empiricism. In recent scholarship, Derrida's work has been compared to the powerful analytic critiques of the later Wittgenstein, Quine and Davidson. 25 For analytic philosophers in the tradition of post-empirical thought, these Derridean themes should not be discounted as an overly esoteric model, which applies only to literature and to writing 25 On Wittgenstein, for instance, Henry Staten's Wittgenstein and Derrida, Marjorie Grene "Life, Death, and Language: Some Thoughts on Wittgenstein and Derrida" in Philosophy in and out of Europe as well as much of the work of Richard Rorty. On Davidson, see Samuel Wheeler, Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy. 12
as such; If I am right, it is grounded in the same basic premises which cement the best insights of post-positivist epistemology and semantic theory. 13