Part 3: The Epistemology of Augmented Reality
1. The minimalist conception of reality and poetic invention
Karsten Schoellner
Augmented Reality and Augmented Perception
Abstract: In this paper I argue that the term ‘Augmented Reality’ as a description of technologies that informationally augment our perception is misleading and possibly harmful. The paper begins with a characterization of the concept of ‘re-ality’ and describes three different philosophical phenomena that could be accu-rately described as ‘Augmented Reality’. The first section discusses the poet Wal-lace Stevens’ notion of how the poetic imagination can enrich our reality. The second section looks at the “sensibility theory” of moral and aesthetic value as-sociated with McDowell and Wiggins, which is meant to explain how anthropo-centric but objectively real values can enter into a naturalistic world. The third section examines Wittgenstein’s notion that someone who ceases laying down conditions upon the world and learns to accept it has enriched their reality.
A fourth section then examines the claim of Augmented Reality technologies to be an ‘augmentation of reality’. I argue that the term reflects a dangerous con-fusion. When we see these technologies in contrast with the three different no-tions of what ‘augmenting reality’ discussed in the first three secno-tions, we see that while Augmented Reality technologies can be incredibly useful and to that extent valuable, they also threaten to diminish our reality. The conflation of truly Augmented Reality with a technological augmentation of our perception is a moral temptation that we should avoid.
Keywords: Augmented Reality, sensibility theory, Wallace Stevens, McDowell, Wiggins, Wittgenstein, minimalist theory of truth.
1. The minimalist conception of reality
minimalist conception of truth distinguishes itself from other conceptions in that it starts and ends with this equivalence. The truth of p is just p; what speaks in favor of believing in the truth of p is just whatever speaks in favor of believing in p; there is nothing general to be said about truth. This conception of truth has its roots in Frege; although he did not consistently uphold the minimalist position, he offers an argument against the possibility of any general characterization of truth. Suppose we want to say that truth is correspondence to reality, for exam-ple. Then to determine whether it is true that ‘it is snowing outside now’, we will have to determine whether the proposition ‘it is snowing outside now’ corre-sponds to reality; in other words – given the equivalence of p and it is true that p – we will have to determine whether it is true that the proposition ‘it is snowing outside now’ corresponds to reality. And to determine whether that is true, we will need to determine whether it is true that the proposition ‘the prop-osition “it is snowing outside now” corresponds to reality’ corresponds to reality, etc. Hence the correspondence theory of truth fails by opening and endless re-gress. And Frege writes:
And every other attempt to define truth collapses too. For in a definition certain character-istics would have to be stated. And in application to any particular case the question would always be whether it were true that the characteristics were present. So one goes round in a circle. (Frege 1999, 87)
The argument may not be convincing exactly as it stands. If ‘the proposition “it is snowing outside now” corresponds to reality’ just means ‘it is snowing outside now’, then the determination of the latter will already be a determination of the former and the regress does not begin. But then we have avoided the regress only be retreating to a deflationary understanding of the talk of ‘correspondence’;
that p corresponds to reality just means that p. If on the other hand we want to understand ‘the proposition “it is snowing outside now” corresponds to real-ity’ as telling us something more substantial than just that it is snowing outside now, then the regress will begin. Hence the minimalist theory of truth tells us that there is nothing general and non-empty to be said about truth; other theories of truth, such as correspondence, have to be given a minimalist reading of their key terms in order to function.
It was Ramsey (1990, 38–39) who first explicitly presented the minimalist theory of truth, which was also endorsed by Wittgenstein, Ayer and Strawson among others. For example, the notes on Wittgenstein’s lectures in the 1930s have him saying:
The words “true” and “false” are two words on which philosophy has turned, and it is very important to see that philosophy always turns upon nonsensical questions. Discussion of these words is made easier once it is realized that the words “true” and “false” can be done away with altogether. Instead of saying “p is true” we shall say “p”, and instead of
“p is false”, “not-p”. That is, instead of the notions of truth and falsity, we use proposition and negation. […] Let us examine the statement that a proposition is true if it agrees with reality and false if it does not. We must look at language games to see what this agreement and disagreement consist in. There are cases where what is meant by agreement and dis-agreement is clear. (Ambrose 2001, 106)
It is not quite true that we can do away with the word ‘true’ altogether, for we need it for what Blackburn (2010, 38) calls “deferred reference”. If I wish to say ‘everything that she says is true’ without using the word ‘true’, for example, I would have to say ‘If she says p then p, if she says q then q….etc.’ But once we see the function of the concept of truth more clearly, we at least lose any sense of a great metaphysical puzzle about truth. And as Wittgenstein notes in the pas-sage above, this should shift our interest from truth in general to p, to what it is to assert p and how the conviction in p is determined. The proposition snow is white is true just in case snow is white, and the proposition, to use one of Blackburn’s (2005, 17) examples, that “life, like a dome of many-colored glass, stains the white radiance of eternity” will be true just if life does in fact stain the white radiance of eternity like a dome of many-colored glass. In the second case there still is a philosophical puzzle, but it is not a metaphysical problem about truth in general. Rather we do not know exactly what we are asserting when we assert life’s staining of eternity’s white radiance, nor, relatedly, do we have any sense of what might ground that assertion, by what mode and man-ner of thought or perception one might come up with anything that supports it.
But if it does become to clear to us through some experience or reflection that life does in fact stain the white radiance of eternity like a dome of many-colored glass, then we will be willing to say that it is true. (It is important to note that it is not a consequence of the minimalist theory of truth that our thinking some-thing makes it true; rather, our thinking p is our thinking that p is true; and here there is no philosophical mystery about the truth of p that could not be cleared up by an understanding of p.)
A minimalist understanding of ‘reality’ would likewise understand the real-ity of p to consist simply in p, and hold that no more substantial general char-acterization of reality can be given. Some people, in contrast, feel that reality ul-timately only consists in the laws discovered or discoverable in the natural sciences, or more specifically in physics. If we adopt a minimalist understanding of the concept reality, it does not exactly compete with the claim that reality is ultimately the reality of the laws of physics; it displays what this claim would Augmented Reality and Augmented Perception 173
amount to. Someone who thinks that reality comprises only the laws of physics would, on a minimalist understanding of reality, be someone who only believes and is willing to assert the laws of physics and nothing else. If they also want to insist that they were wronged by their mugger, then, on the minimalist under-standing, they clearly believe in a reality that includes not just the laws of phys-ics but also this wronging. If they cannot abandon their conviction that human dignity is inviolable, then they will believe in the reality of our inviolable human dignity as well.¹ (I am assuming here for the sake of simplicity that these claims cannot be reduced to physicalist terms, and that the claims are in fact proposi-tional, and do not have the underlying form of imperatives or avowals of emo-tion; in the formulation It is part of reality that p = that p, p serves as a variable ranging over all propositions, not over anything a person might think or say.) What speaks in favor of including an inviolable human dignity in our conception of reality, is simply whatever speaks in favor of believing human dignity to be inviolable; and the only thing that could speak in favor of some bare physical conception of reality would be some set of compelling considerations that under-mined every other sort of belief, for example our belief that human dignity is in-violable.
There is a good deal more that could be said about these matters. Here we only need the roughest outlines of a minimalist understanding of reality to begin to consider what it might look like to ‘augment’ reality. I will begin in this section by briefly canvassing the idea that poetry can achieve a greater real-ity. There is a great different between a reality that only includes bare physical facts, on some understanding of ‘bare’ and ‘physical’ – perhaps the concatena-tions of particles and their forces – and a reality that includes such facts as life’s staining the white radiance of eternity. Assuming for now that a conviction that life stains the white radiance of eternity makes sense and is merited, some peo-ple have felt that this cannot be something the poet has discovered, that rather this reality is the poet Shelley’s achievement, that it was in no sense real prior to the poetic articulation. This was the view of the poet Wallace Stevens (1951, 32), for example, who felt that “[a] poet’s words are of things that do not exist with-out the words.” Stevens wrote:
My minimalist understanding of “reality” is clearly closely related to Quine’s notion of how we incur ontological commitments – we are committed to the existence of anything we find our-selves quantifying over – as well as Taylor’s “Best Account” principle, according to which what-ever we need to make “the best sense of our lives” after critical reflection is therefore real. (cf.
Quine 1964, Taylor 1989, 56–9)
There is, in fact, a world of poetry indistinguishable from the world in which we live, or, I ought to say, no doubt, from the world in which we shall come to live, since what makes the poet the potent figure that he is, or was, or ought to be, is that he creates the world to which we turn incessantly and without knowing it and that he gives to life the supreme fictions, without which we are unable to conceive of it. (Stevens 1951, 31)
This does not mean that the poet can invent any reality at will. The achievement of poetry is more than an act of will; and not every poetic achievement is possi-ble in every age and culture. Stevens is clear that differing cultural and historical circumstances offer the poet different rages of possibility. In his essay “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” Stevens (1951, 6f.) discusses how certain poetic images of nobility from earlier ages have lost their ability to move us pre-cisely because they have become unreal for us, and “the imagination loses vital-ity as it ceases to adhere to what is real […] It has the strength of realvital-ity or none at all.” And one of Stevens’ central concerns in his work is that in our time we have lost the ability to sustain conviction in anything but bare physical reality – what Critchley (2005, 27) calls “an oppressive or contracted sense of the real […]
what Hilary Putnam would call ‘realism without a human face’” – that with the loss of metaphysical and religious foundations and under the enormous “pres-sure of reality” nowadays poetry can only lament the loss of a meaningful reality.
But at other moments in his work he maintains his hope that poetry can trans-form reality. We can see this in the opening canto of “The Man with the Blue Gui-tar”:
The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, “You have a blue guitar, You do not play things as they are.”
The man replied, “Things as they are Are changed upon the blue guitar.”
And they said then, “But play, you must, A tune beyond us, yet ourselves, A tune upon the blue guitar,
Of things exactly as they are. (Stevens 1964, 165)
The phrase “things as they are” recurs as a refrain of the following thirty-two cantos, and seems to reflect quite different associations and moods in every canto. What underlies these variations is a consistent minimalism, I would argue. The poem cycles back and forth between hope and despair, sometimes giving in the suspicion that the only things we can say honestly and with con-Augmented Reality and con-Augmented Perception 175
viction concern bare physical reality, sometimes rising to the hope that things as they actually are can be meaningful and expressive. Even within this first canto we can see something of this tension. An anonymous audience essentially accus-es art of illusion and irreality, saying “you do not play things as they are”. The artist responds: “things as they are are changed upon the blue guitar” – they are not falsified but rather transformed. And at this point the audience voices that wild and unhinged desire verging on incoherence that we all bring to art – that it show us something “beyond us, yet ourselves … of things exactly as they are.” We turn to art to find something more than plain reality, beyond plain reality – but it must also be real or it will not satisfy us. (“It has the strength of reality or none at all.”) We want something more than plain reality, yet not an illusion or empty fantasy; we want a transformed reality, an Augment-ed Reality. It is helpful here to recall Coleridge’s distinction between imagination and fancy, a distinction that is of central importance to Stevens – the true poetic imagination is a meditation upon reality rather than a willed recombination of ideas unconstrained by reality². As the philosopher Simon Critchley (2005, 11) writes in his book on Stevens: “the poetic imagination imagines things as they are, but beyond us, turned about, whereas fancy fantasizes about things that are not: unicorns, gods, golden mountains.” As this formulation reminds us, we can also distinguish imagination from fantasy, from escapism and self-indul-gence. Sometimes self-indulgent escapism is exactly what we want, of course, but this is not what we want from art, which must adhere scrupulously to reality in its own way. We could take a passage from “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” as Stevens’ ambitions for poetry:
……We seek Nothing beyond reality. Within it, Everything, the spirit’s alchemicana Included, the spirit that goes roundabout And through included, not merely the visible, The solid, but the movable, the moment, The coming on of feasts and the habits of saints,
The pattern of the heavens and high, night air. (Stevens 1961, 471f.)
Coleridge’s discussion of imagination is somewhat obscure, but he describes fancy as
“a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word CHOICE.” (Coleridge 1983, 305)
This is one conception of what it might mean to ‘augment reality’ – and it is a possibility that only comes into view when we start by conceiving reality mini-malistically. If we started with some more substantial conception of reality such as the fundamental entities and laws of physics, it is hard to say what an augmenting of reality might look like. Perhaps if the universe as a whole is growing, or if the total number of particles increases? Otherwise reality could only be augmented from outside by the unreal; a conviction in the inviolable dig-nity of each human, for example, would only be an unreal projection upon the real. If we start with a minimalist conception of reality, then this allows for the possibility that only some domain of bare physical fact is the only thing we can sustain conviction in, but it also allows for the possibility that reality could grow inwards, that reality could multiply inwardly in what Stevens (1964, 486) calls
“the intricate evasions of as”³. It is important to note that Stevens’ view does not follow from the minimalist conception of reality; that conception only allows Stevens’ view as a possibility. The minimalist conception is not that thinking something real makes it real; the minimalist conception is only that to think something is to think it real, and that what speaks in favor of a belief in the re-ality of any propositional claim p is simply whatever speaks in favor of p. Hence the poet does not necessarily create reality simply by creating conviction. One could hold the minimalist notion of reality and also at the same time think that poetry only at best reveals something real rather than creating the reality, hence that the poet can only augment our sense or our perception of reality and cannot augment reality itself. This is not Stevens’ view, but it’s the default view for us nowadays. I think Stevens’ view is not as improbable as it might seem. The next section briefly discusses the “sensibility theory” of moral and aesthetic value developed McDowell and Wiggins, which explains how what they call “anthropocentric properties” can emerge from human culture, proper-ties that are fully real and objective and yet also dependent in some sense upon human sensibilities.We can derive from this theory a related notion of what ‘aug-menting reality’ would be that should help to make Stevens’ idea of poetry more credible.
The passage in “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” reads: “ … A more severe, / More har-assing master would extemporize / Subtler, more urgent proof that the theory / Of poetry is the theory of life, / As it is, in the intricate evasions of as, / In things seen and unseen, created from nothingness, / The heavens, the hells, the worlds, the longed-for lands.”
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