Edmond Wright: an introduction

Edmond Wright had this letter published in The Times Literary Supplement on January 4^th, 2002. It was in answer to a review of a book on Foucault written by Raymond Tallis. The letter encapsulates his philosophical theory, New Critical Realism, in a reflection upon language:

Dear Sir,
One cannot expect everyone not a philosopher to be au fait with all the latest on the Cretan Liar Paradox, but it behoves me as a philosopher to acquaint Raymond Tallis with at least one relevant objection to his claim. As I have pointed out on a number of occasions in the last decade (e.g. currently in the present issue of Paragraph, Vol. 24:2, that I and my wife have edited on the subject of Slavoj Zizek's thought, pp. 13-15), the story of the Cretan Liar is a just metaphor for what actually occurs in ordinary communication. The reason is as follows: in order to try to update someone else's references upon the world, two or more persons in dialogue have to act on the strictly false hypothesis that they have both selected exactly the same referent by means of exactly the same set of criteria - once this is done, the one with the ostensibly better set of criteria is then able to adjust that of his or her hearer, perhaps to point out that it was not even one thing they were both 'referring' to. After all, as Wilhelm Dilthey put it, if we both understood everything in the same way, there would be no point in speaking at all. So, in the linguist's terms, we have to hypothesize a perfect 'synchronic' view of the language for both of us, a perfect 'truth', in order to make a 'diachronic' correction of it. Therefore, it is metaphorically appropriate to say that, in order to speak a language, you have to subvert it, change it, by strict logic tell a lie, that is, in the former version of it, for every new utterance does diachronically change the language. This is what the eminent linguist Sir Alan Gardiner used to say, objecting to Saussure's view of communication. So it is not only all Cretans who are liars: all speakers of any language are. Tallis's view is like Saussure's in privileging the existing synchrony, endeavouring to turn what is in fact only an act of trust in the other, the useful faith that we are referring to exactly the same entities - which is only the first move in a communicative act - into an undemocratic objectivist superstition. All objectivists and, by the same token, relativists, forget that common speech is based on mutual trust, and real trust allows for the risk of the other not having understood in the same way as oneself: one has to love one's enemy, not accuse her of having uttered a 'falsehood' as soon as her understanding turns out to have been different from one's own. To use Tallis's own words, this critique of 'truth' I have just made as a communication to you now can show itself to be 'false' without philosophical harm.

What is confronted here is the fact of the differences between persons as regards both their sensing and their perceiving. That this is an evolutionary advantage has never been sufficiently brought out. Philosophy up to now has been largely concerned with the agreement of persons in their use of words. Instead of thinking of philosophy as 'An Inquiry into Human Understanding', as John Locke did, we should better conceive of it as 'An Inquiry into Human Misunderstanding'. Indeed, it has been thought to be 'sceptical' and 'relativistic' to suggest that understandings might differ, as it would seem to open the way to Humpty Dumpty's view of language, that 'when I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.' But if the fact of the differences is really taken into consideration, what is implied is that no one can be sure that 'their' meaning corresponds precisely with anyone else's, so, whatever we think we may be saying, we cannot be sure how it will be taken by someone else - Humpty Dumpty was lost in a narcissistic illusion.

Edmond Wright owes a central insight to the Austrian sociologist Alfred Schutz, the English linguist Sir Alan Gardiner, the Norwegian psycholinguist Ragnar Rommetveit, and the American philosophers Roy Wood Sellars and Clarence Irving Lewis, all of whom stated it independently of the others. This very fact is one indicator of a extremely powerful prejudice about the insight itself, for it is one that is difficult to grasp because of the very obviousness and universality of its operation.

Take it, first, that each of us, inside and outside our bodies, sensing the flux of being, the Real, in a different way. There is nothing controversial about this: children hear higher frequencies than grown-ups, everybody's powers of vision differ, and so on. Take it, second, that each of us has learned to select from that flux a slightly different set of perceptions, that adds up to what we call 'reality', the world of things and persons, because we went through a different regime of learning about those things and persons (as Jean Piaget makes clear). If these two uncontentious claims are granted, then we are faced with a problem. It is the following, 'How do we bring our different sensings of the Real and different perceivings of it into co-ordination so that we can try to update each other's learning?' We are constantly finding out that it seems that someone else does not understand something as they should and we want to tell them about it; after all, we would not speak unless we wanted to do that.

The insight from Alfred Schutz and Rommetveit and the others is this: in order to bring our differing perceptions into some kind of overlap, we have to behave and refer as if we have ALREADY singled out together exactly the same portion of the Real. Instead of the actual case, that there is really a fuzzy overlap of one person's selection and another's, together we have to imagine that we have obtained a perfect match, an absolute superimposition. Schutz calls this unconscious collusion 'the Idealization of Reciprocity'. Though we are each of singling out a slightly different 'thing', we must treat the situation as if we were singling out something that existed in perfect singularity already. Once we have done this, the speaker can then show that the perfect match was not perfect at all by showing that the singularity needs adjusting in some way. In logical terms, a perfect subject is agreed upon and then a predication is added which upsets that agreement.

Here is an example: a speaker might say to you "You see the bird in the tree we just noticed?" "Yes," you reply, so now the Speaker and you as Hearer are now apparently agreed in your understandings of the bird in the tree. The Speaker and you are agreed that you both 'know' 'it'. "Well," says the Speaker, "it's really two leaves." Your understanding of the 'thing' the bird in the tree has now been updated; you now see its course of existence through space and time as significantly altered, and even that 'it' was not one singular thing. We have to project a perfect 'referent' together so that the Hearer's can be updated.

The prejudice arises out of the temptation to take the Idealization of Reciprocity for real. After all, to enter into it, however unconsciously, is to act on a naïve trust in the other and, too, in the predictability of the Real itself, as if the other person or 'it' could never do anything to give us an unpleasant surprise. It is a disturbing thought that every 'single' thing and person, including ourselves, contains elements that we have not accounted for. It seems, mistakenly, much more reassuring to believe that there are securely single things and persons around us: surely it would turn everything uncanny to think otherwise? But to resist the conclusion above is like saying that, if someone swore to be faithful to us, they could never do anything to surprise us with a new interpretation of something we had 'finally' agreed upon. Rabelais has an amusing character in his book Gargantua and Pantagruel called Panurge, who would not marry a woman until he had absolute assurance that she would not be unfaithful to him!

Underpinning this theory of communication is a philosophy of perception. In this philosophy, sensing and perceiving are two separate activities.

Sensing is something involuntary and as material as the input with which it varies. It is part of the Real itself, no more than blank evidence, fields of effects from which we have to learn a range of possible causes. It is evidence devoid of information. Your body has made the seat you are sitting on now warmer than it would have been without your being there, so there is evidence of your presence in that raised temperature, but no one would say that that was actual 'information' in the seat underneath you. Similarly, perhaps from certain distributions of light rays on your retina you have come to the conclusion that 'the corner of a table is just visible though a door', but those distributions are still no more than blank evidence which you have learned to interpret. In the same manner as other blank evidence, one can go on learning more from it, for example, that it is an oak table, or that it has been moved, or it is a new one, or broken in two, etc., etc. This state of the sensory fields is called 'non-epistemic', that is, knowledgeless.
In contrast, perceiving is something initially learned through the experiences of pleasure and pain, which have the effect of imprinting portions of the blank evidence in your memory and tabbing them with desire or fear accordingly. As a human being you have also learned from the updatings of those memories from other human beings, principally through what you have been told. 'To tell' is to update someone's perceptions, and it is significant that this is what happens in all stories when we are 'told' them, that someone gets his or her perceptions updated - with a consequent shift in their fears and desires. Sometimes this is funny, when the protagonist in the story can make the shift without too much pain (take Falstaff at the end of Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor, where at last all those who have been conspiring against him as supposedly 'vengeful fairies' invite him to drown his humiliation in a 'posset tonight' at Master Page's house): sometimes the shift is beyond bearing (as in Othello when he discovers that his 'unfaithful' wife was not unfaithful after all). What is notably implied here is that all knowledge is motivation-driven: every 'thing' and 'person', including ourselves, that we claim to 'know', is a selection from the Real that we have carried out at the behest of our fears and desires and is dependent on the Idealization of Reciprocity, that hopeful convergence of our and others' selections. In this constricted sense Artur Schopenhauer was correct in claiming that the World was a projection of the Will. All 'reality' is a hopeful selection of the Real done by ourselves and all those who have 'told' us about it. If you thinks of all those creatively human efforts out of which our knowledge has arisen as 'God', one might even say, in a new sense, that 'God made you' and 'God made the world.' However, He did not make the Real, only 'reality', those shared projections upon the Real.

There is an obvious consequence, however: we have to concede that all objectivity, all 'true knowledge', can never capture existence. So it is not a 'foundationalist' philosophy. It is clear that, if 'objectivity' is but an idealization built from fundamentally differing perspectives on the Real, it can never capture all of them. Our useful pretence that there is a 'single thing' in front of us has us both colluding in putting the differences aside as 'negligible', but whether they are really negligible or not we may not find out till tomorrow. And then, in addition, the evidence of the warmth of your seat did not become information in itself, 'true knowledge' - it was just evidence of it. Existence is what we, no solipsists, sense all the time - we are up to our necks and beyond in the Real - but all our identifications are nothing but hopeful guesses, co-operative hypotheses, on the basis of its evidence. As far as the world of things, selves and persons is concerned, what we call 'reality', it is a huge, socially and historically well-maintained single projection forged from differing projections that have to affect to be the same in order that we can get what co-ordination in action that we can. We are constantly updating each other on the best sort of 'reality' to project upon the Real. In spite of what many logicians have thought, we actually live in a 'possible world' while remaining as 'Real' as the air about us. This is why the accusations of 'scepticism' or 'relativism' pass this philosophy by, since it claims a closer relation to the Real than any other philosophy for we are seamlessly part of it.

Therefore, this philosophy is a materialist Realist one, since it upholds a realism of the Real, the continuum, the 'Flux', Aristotle's hyle, but it rejects a Direct Realism of entities and properties, seeing those as co-operative, but only viable, ventures of selection from the Real. The name New Critical Realism has been chosen in honour of the American philosopher Roy Wood Sellars, who called his own philosophy of perception 'Critical Realism', and who, with his notion of an endless feedback of adjustment from the Real, moved philosophy in the right direction, away from an over-intellectualized view of knowledge. Neither is this present theory of perception, knowledge and language Representationalist, since it does not argue for the direct representation of entities and properties in the external world; nor is it Phenomenalist, for it asserts that the sensory experiences are part of the brute Real and not mental at all. They help to produce a mind when worked upon as evidence, but they are not in themselves mental or psychical; they are merely cranial.

But, finally, there are further secure, non-sceptical conclusions arising out of the fact that we can correct each other, shift about each other's selections for the Real. Such mutual correction convinces both participants that the other has access to the external world that produces sensory fields for all, and by that simple token, provides a multiple proof of all the following:

that the external continuum exists as real, but quite distinct from the tentative objective 'reality' that is being selected from it by this co-ordination process, that is, existence and objectivity never coincide;
that an individual subject's sensory fields exist as a brute part of the real beyond its voluntary choice, because of the other being able to effect such an intimate correction of it beyond the will of the self (which is in itself a disproof of the accusation of solipsism);
that the other must have his/her own sensory evidence to be able to produce that correction;
that the other must exist as a corrector within the social language-group that has created the possibility of such correction;
that the adjustment cannot begin until the imagined perfect coincidence of reference is performed (i.e. an impossible hypothesis dramatically maintained);
that the correction is brought about by the provision of a contextual 'second clue' that brings about the change in intentional perspective, which gives the character of a Story to all our relations with each other;
that, as well as the singling out of 'objects' and 'properties' from the continuum, that of 'selves', both one's own and that of others, and that of 'social groups', is effected, maintained and refined by this very process.

So, although we may not know finally what kind of persons we and others are, we can be sure that there are 'Persons' and that there are 'Things' existing but only as the outcome of overlapping projections from the Real. These differing projections of entities do overlap and what we call 'human beings' do behave AS IF there was no overlap and there actually were singularities before them. It is like watching a play and knowing that, although the characters are not real, the play is, for it is taking place on a real stage and is acted by real people. There really is a game going on, but it will never have a final result: in fact, the whole point is the playing of it. What matters is what the poet Alice Meynell urged upon us, that the 'Way' is more important than any supposed 'Goal'.