Tag: correlationism

Meillassoux expresses the problem that the correlationist has with the arche-fossil via the concept of ‘the given’.  For the correlationist the arche-fossil is quite straight-forwardly a self-contradictory concept because it suggests that there is a ‘givenness of being anterior to givenness’.  The correlationist points out that what we should do is conceptualise the scientific quantitative facts that the arche-fossil is aimed at as modes of ‘given-ness’.  For the correlationist, “being is not anterior to givenness, it gives itself as anterior to givenness” (AF:14).  The presentation of this argument is close to the bizarre notion that somehow God placed dinosaur fossils in the rocks in order to ‘test our faith’, a curious convoluted manoeuvre that is blatantly designed to maintain some sort of ‘biblical consistency’ in the face of science.

In once sense the argument is curiously distorted by the idea of givenness, because if we begin by accepting that ‘the given’ is the starting point from which we know the world then we are already inside the determinative framework which leads to correlationism.  Think of this in terms of the analogy with the argument about God and the dinosaur bones.  If the existence of god as outlined in the Bible is already axiomatic then any empirical fact must be determined within the determinative framework of the biblical frame.  If I find geological evidence of timespans that appear inconsistent with such a framework, if I find fossils that appear to be located in geological layers older than is seemingly possible within the biblical axiomatic, then the appearance must be deceptive.  The axiomatic determines the range of possible solutions.  This is the crux of Meillassoux’s argument – the axiomatic of the given determines the range of possible solutions available to us in terms of knowledge of the world.

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In the first of these notes on After Finitude the focus was on the initial move in the book, the retrieval of the concept of primary properties.  Even though this is the first move it is still vital to realise that it is the starting point for a more prolonged attack on the dominant contemporary philosophical mode of thinking. This contemporary mode of thinking is what Meillassoux calls correlationism. Correlationism begins with the ‘transcendental revolution’, which finds its origin in Kant. If we have no access to the in-itself then what we are left with are different types of subjective representation. It is no longer the case, the correlationist thinks, that we distinguish between representations which are correct because they adequately represent the object and representations which are distorted by subjective influence (primary properties fulfilling the formal role and secondary properties the latter). We should now distinguish between representations that we must all agree upon and representations that do not demand universal consent. “From this point on, intersubjectivity, the consensus of the community, supplants the adequation between the representations of a solitary subject and the thing itself as the veritable criterion of objectivity, and of scientific objectivity more particularly.” (AF:4). (more…)

This is part of a series of notes, intended primarily to work through the arguments in Quentin Meillassoux’s book After Finitude.

The first move made in Meillassoux’s book is to attempt to retrieve the viability of ‘primary properties’ as a philosophical concept that can do serious lifting.  The origin of the explicit ‘primary’ versus ‘secondary’ properties distinction is in Locke – although he uses the term ‘qualities’ rather than properties –  and it’s core problem is perhaps found in Berkeley.  Locke posits primary properties of an object as those which, we might say, are in the object itself and secondary properties as those which are in the perception of the object ¹.  The former might be extension, solidity and motion whilst the latter might be colour, taste and smell.  Berkeley’s objection to the distinction is to the primary property as being ‘in the object itself’ – for Berkeley all we have are ideas and even if there is a distinction among our ideas of an object that matches the ‘primary/secondary distinction, this is still a distinction only amongst ideas and has no necessary bearing or connection on anything outside the mind.

There has been debate over what exactly might be listed under the category of ‘primary property’ but in the initial outlining of the distinction the primary properties are those that are divisible.  “Take a grain of Wheat, divide it into two parts, each part still has Solidity, Extension, Figure and Mobility; divide it again, and it retains still the same qualities; and so divide it on, till the parts become insensible, they must retain still each of them all those qualities.”  The crucial move here – ‘and so divide it on, till the parts become insensible, they must retain still …’ – indicates the presence of a non-empirical principle.  The necessity that these particular qualities must exist in any object whatsoever, no matter how large or small, is not something that we extract from experience but something with which we organise or understand experience.  Primary properties, then, are what belong to the objects themselves as objects not as perceived objects.  The existence of these properties does not depend on any subject, any observer, discovering them – they are properties in the object itself.

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