Part 2: Ontological Problems in Augmented Reality
4. From believing in possibilities to knowledge of reality
Real reality is theoretically augmented reality, applied to empirical experience.
This means that real reality is not just a real possibility defined by merely
qual-itative terms and distinctions as they are reconstructed in a ‘Tractarian’ picture of logically complex empirical propositions. They rather contain already theoreti-cally ‘thick’ concepts and ‘entities’ which cannot be directly ‘perceived’ as such like ‘forces’ (energies) and ‘dispositions’ (as the content of conditional in-ferences or rational expectations).
Again, Lewis Carroll would have said that we would need very strong eyes to
‘see’ forces, powers, energies, causes and the like, by which we augment the mere actuality of present qualities by their real explanations. How turn causes, forces, powers and dispositions into ‘objects of dialectical reason’? Before we an-swer this crucial question, we should point out that no empiricist ever can pro-vide us with a sufficient account of what forces and causes are. Even though I can only state the point here, everybody who nevertheless is convinced of some empiricist account has a poor taste for what is a sufficiently good explan-ation. This holds, for example, for Hume’s transposition of ‘causes’ from a ‘deep-er’ level of theoretical thick explanations to the ‘surface level’ of merely regular sequences of present events. This seemingly ‘critical’ move, directed against al-legedly metaphysical entities ‘behind’ the phenomena, destroys in the end any scientific explanations. Russell realizes this, even though he himself falls prey to the empiricist illusion of an immediate access to the real world by perception and cannot give an account for the logical difference of talking about forces and causes and talking about empirical events and sequences of events. The same holds for the early Wittgenstein, who defended, in the Tractatus, a variant of Russell’s world view of logical atomism and, therefore, joins Hume in the claim that the ‘belief in a causal nexus is the superstition’. This is driving the Devil out with Beelzebub, or rather, an overkill-argument against any causal ex-planations, produced on the ground of the wrong idea, all sentence of the ‘nat-ural sciences’ were ‘empirical sentences’ about some ‘many or all ‘empirical events’ and ‘states of affairs’ here or there, now or then. However, not one scien-tific sentence has the indexical and temporal form of empirical statements. All of them are generic sentences or rules that apply to prototypical cases, to a genus of things and processes, to stereotypes or ideal types. All these sentences are, in their very logical form, time-general, as Sebastian Rödl calls it.
What are the truth conditions of such generic statements? What kind of
‘knowledge’ is it that we produce in the sciences? This is, indeed, a deep ques-tion in Hegel’s Science of Logic. The answer is that the truth condiques-tions of the sentences of the sciences, including the sciences about human institutions called “Geisteswissenschaften”, are the result of a worldwide work on the concept.
The concept is, in turn, a generic label for the overall system of canonized default dispositions and inferences grounded on generic distinctions that govern reason-able expectations and reasonreason-able judgments not only about real possibilities, Scientific Truth as Augmented Reality 93
but also about real realities, by which we explain actual qualities generically. In other words, we set our actual, qualitative, distinctions into a larger framework of theoretical generalities. And we say that what appears to us in actual percep-tion (empirical ‘experience’) as an A is a real A only if A shows a whole system of features that are generically attributed to a thing of the generic kind of a partic-ular kind exemplified by the individual (empirical) case (at present). What must be true about A such goes far beyond the mere judgment that this or that appears to me or you to be an A.
In our case of the milk in the fridge, I can err, even when I have checked if there is milk in the fridge, for example if the white liquid is say milk, or if it has already gone off or if it poisoned stuff. As we can see, the very truth of the claim
“There is milk in the fridge” depends on normal conditions just like the truth of
“this shirt is green”. The fallibility of my knowledge in the store if the shirt is really green corresponds in a sense to the fallibility of my knowledge if there is really real milk in the fridge – which depends, in turn, on the relevant
‘level’ of ‘sufficient proof’. Unfortunately the very notion of sufficient proof and, hence, the very notions of real (not merely ideal, utopian, divine) knowl-edge and truth behave like a moving target, as Plato already knew. The problem is that generic truths explicating conceptual conditions are ideal and indefinite.
As a result, we can always add further conditions in such a way that no individ-ual and no limited group of individindivid-uals can ever finally determine the fulfilment of all such conditions. The case is clear for geometrical ideas or ideal forms like circles or straight lines. It is a conceptual truism that in the real world there are no real, i.e. ideal circles – as empiricists like Protagoras and Hume have stressed. This should not lead us to sceptical relativism but to a relational read-ing of ideal concepts as Plato already has developed it. Assume, for example, that we two have agreed that there is milk in the fridge, for we went there, took it and drank it and were pleased with it as (normal) milk. In such a case it still ‘can’ happen, that we two are dead in the evening and the coroner deter-mines form the content of our stomach that it was no (normal, healthy) milk.
Since all systems of conceptual fulfilment are indefinite, ideal, and no real case fulfils all ideal condition of a concept, just as no real figure is a perfect cir-cle. We therefore always need realistic ‘measures’ or ‘thresholds’ Acof the follow-ing pragmatic form: If somethfollow-ing is ‘better’ than Ac, it is already a good enough C in the real world. Plato’s refutation of scepticism and his relativization of fal-libilism uses in fact this insight: Just as Kebes is tall only with respect to Socra-tes, but small with respect to Simmias, any one-place predicate stems from rela-tions and needs the fixation of appropriate relevant ‘measures’ or ‘parameters’.
Moreover, any evaluation of truth and knowledge, i.e. of sufficient proof, refers to a relevant generic we-group. Therefore, it is not true that only God knows
any-thing, as Heraclitus still seems to say and as many readers believe that Socrates had followed him. Rather, there is always a formally indefinite, ideally infinite progress of evaluation of evaluations … of truth and knowledge of individuals and groups. This is a general form defining truth and knowledge. There is noth-ing to complain about the indefinite regress, just as there is nothnoth-ing to complain about the fact that in ‘empirical reality’, i.e. mere actuality, there are no ideal circles, angles, straight lines and the like. This general feature appears to the naïve thinker, not introduced into the mysteries of logical semantics, to be a suf-ficient reason for scepticism, at least fallibilism. The position says that there is no clear distinction between the pragmatic notion of real possibility and real re-ality. However, we all work with the contrast. It is not only a possibility that you will find the Eiffel-Tower in Paris if you go there.
The problem is, of course, that we do not take in every situation all the rel-evant parameters into account – and deal correspondingly with counterfactual conditions. In normal cases, the question if there is milk in the fridge and if I know it is settled, for example if you confirm my knowledge by your score-keep-ing and undertakscore-keep-ing my ‘proof’ – and this “you” can be narrow or wide, even generic. It just has to be wide enough. It should not remain limited to a too small we-group.
In any case, only because of the indefinite possibility to turn real reality into a mere possibility it seems as if we do not know anything. Nevertheless, we know many things, as well and perfect, as any knowing of truths can be, namely when we evaluate the relevant proof conditions as sufficiently fulfilled. In mathemat-ics, this is the case when the difference between true and false sufficient a dem-onstration and a wrong demdem-onstration is as clear and distinct as between A and B – or between the mere assumption that there are infinite prime twins x and x+1 and a proof that inductive procedures show some truths for all numbers.
In the processual world of ‘becoming’ this level of a merely ‘static’ (geomet-rical) knowledge of mathematics cannot be attained, just because here all con-tentful conditions inferences always already contain dispositional inferences with respect to future behaviour of the thing or, also, some possible future knowledge about its past. This is the very reason why world-related concept or material concepts and their truth-conditions are heavily indeterminate, indefi-nite, especially if we abstract form the task of adjusting in concrete applications the relevant ‘parameters’. If we do this, then there is no clear distinction between true world-related though inferentially thick propositions and wrong ones and sufficiently proven claims versus merely reasonable beliefs. However, even though we can often distinguish between well-proven truths and mere beliefs, there is by no means a clear-cut demarcation. There is no general ‘either-or’, much less a total time-independence.
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The latter fact leads us to the insight into the very concept of the concept, the theory-dependence of the very notion of empirical truths that goes beyond mere appearances. In the domain of appearances, we only have apparent qualitative distinctions that tell us how something looks, i.e. how we qualify a Gestalt from our (joint!) perspective without any augmentation by conceptual default in-ference and any evaluation of ‘normal expectation’. In real reality, appearances are augmented by objective causes.
It is clear that even animals can err. This is so because their perceptions are also already enactively connected to normal expectations that, by some chances, can fail to become fulfilled. In this aspect, our connections of qualita-tive distinctions at presence and dispositional expectations of normal behaviour of things (objects) is, in fact, similar to animals – and the empirical cognitive sci-ences are correct to investigate similarities and differsci-ences in some form of dif-ferential anthropology. However, the relevant differences concern the notion of non-present possibilities and real reality.
As a result, Hume’s autodafé of the allegedly ‘metaphysical’ analysis of real reality ‘behind’ empirical appearances unfortunately throws the child of human knowledge and science out with the bathwater. It is crucial to see how colour-blind this attitude is. The criticism does not apply only to the metaphysical ideol-ogy of empiricism. It applies also to the self-misunderstanding of present days cognitive science, if they neglect the fact that language as it is taught is the core medium for storing, spreading and developing generic knowledge, codified in so called theories, that are nothing else than material-conceptual systems, the result of our scientific ‘work in the concept’ (Arbeit am Begriff).
As a result, philosophy and logic are not the disciplines to develop the con-cepts, but the sciences and their theories are here in charge. Philosophy and logic are ‘only’ metareflections on the development of theoretical, generic knowledge, but this is quite important for the very understanding of what science, generic knowledge, and conceptually informed empirical (perceptual) cognition is. Phi-losophy is the methodological self-consciousness of knowledge, noēsis noēseōs, without which there inner science (Wissenschaft) at all, but only traditional teachings of self-declared school-teachers, which were already ridiculed by Plato as ‘sophists’, i.e. as self-declared scientists that do not know what real sci-ence and knowledge is and this means what it ideally should be.