Pragmatic Externalism as a Heideggerian Alternative to Naturalistic Epistemology[1]

 

Introduction

              It is commonly asserted by hard-nosed proponents of science that if we are going to do anything philosophically, we might as well be doing it in a naturalistic, objective fashion. This assertion, while being carefully retracted for semi-philosophical disciplines such as literary theory, has been most arduously applied to the field of epistemology. These scientistic proponents have typically asserted themselves against "subjective" or “phenomenological” accounts of human knowledge, which include our agenthood and subsequent agentive self-interpretation into the explanandum.  Naturalistically inclined epistemologists have been quick to point out that such narratives are at odds with the goal of a unified, objective science, given that talk of “being an agent” is inherently framed in terms of a subjective consciousness. Thus, the naturalized epistemologist is apt to say things like:

But why all this creative reconstruction, all this make-believe? The stimulation of his sensory receptors is all the evidence anybody has had to go on, ultimately, in arriving at his picture of the world. Why not just see how this construction really proceeds? Why not settle for psychology? (Quine, 1969, p. 263)

               Why not indeed? For the philosopher resistant to Quine's forceful and lucid call for a naturalized philosophy rid of "subjective" vocabulary, I can think of no other question as challenging as this one. Quine's demands for a naturalized epistemology in this particular sense of objectification do much to illustrate just what is at stake if epistemology were to go the way of "natural philosophy," and be directly absorbed into the scientific enterprise of hypothesis-making and empirical observation. Another way to put this question is to ask "what is left for epistemology?" Indeed, if we were to succeed in "dislodging" epistemology from all traces of subjectivity, consciousness, and ontology, what would be missing? Quine thinks nothing, but I - echoing the subdued objections from the fields of hermeneutic and phenomenological study - think a great deal would be left out of such an objective account, namely, our status as Dasein; as creatures for whom things have significance, exemplified by how we take things to be salient, of importance or non-importance, of worth or non-worth, and all manners of degree in between. It is this decidedly interpretive or hermeneutic dimension of humanity that I want to discuss in this paper, particularly in respect to the attempt by proponents of science to reduce, or outright eliminate, all epistemically “subjective” talk of human experience in favor of a unified, physical-behavioral language. 

              The general outline of this paper will be as follows. I will first establish what a crudely naturalistic epistemological enterprise would look like and what, if anything, it will be missing in its account of the human epistemic condition. Next, I hope to demonstrate that such a methodology is circular insofar as it takes for granted certain conditions of hermeneutic interpretation in accounting for our understanding of the world. Then, I will argue that language fundamentally changes the way we perceive attend to the environment, structuring our conscious experience in terms of meaningful, partially articulated self-interpretations. Sensing the need to alter our epistemic vocabulary, I will present Heideggerian philosophy in terms of its most central feature: epistemological direct realism. I will explain this feature through a Gibsonian framework of ecological psychology, defending a Heideggerian form of pragmatic externalism as an alternative to naturalistic epistemology. Lastly, I hope to illustrate the potential ramifications of externalist theories of mind for altering how we understand the evolution of human psychology in the advent of language acquisition.

 

Naturalized Epistemology

What would it look like?

                  A crudely naturalistic epistemological theory in the sense we have just discussed would look roughly like a reductionist account of the physical-behavioral conditions under which individual body-systems gain knowledge about the physical world external to their nerve endings. Such a theory would more or less eradicate any talk of intentionality, understanding, or significance,[2] for discussing those subjects would require something akin to a logical analysis of meaning and as we know, Quine went great lengths to show that such an analysis is not the proper domain of epistemology.[3] Subsequently, any such epistemological language should be rejected in practice as being unworthy of serious academic attention, given that it does not primarily lead to the prediction of future physical states. Quine’s naturalistic enterprise would then strictly split up the objects of knowledge into two separate domains: a natural realm containing facts and a human realm containing no facts at all. Since the human realm would be devoid of any "real" meaning, the only remaining task left over for epistemologists would be to discover and articulate the shared physical conditions that make it possible for individuals to gain theoretical knowledge of the world. This link between physical conditions and individual belief-structures is crucial, for such a presupposition of what it means to interact with the world eliminates the possibility of conceiving the semantic realm as containing any "facts." Thus, naturalized epistemology more or less becomes assimilated into scientific theory with neuroscientific research at the forefront of discovering the causal conditions that make knowledge possible. Indeed,

Naturalism does not repudiate epistemology, but assimilates it to empirical psychology. Science itself tells us that our information about the world is limited to irritations of our surfaces, and then the epistemological question is in turn a question within science: the question how we human animals can have managed to arrive at science from such limited information. Our scientific epistemologist pursues this inquiry and comes out with an account that has a good deal to do with the learning of language and with the neurology of perception (Quine, 1981, pp. 305-306).

 

               For Quine then, naturalized epistemology eliminates the "stubborn enigmas" concerning epistemological priority, or "first philosophy." An example Quine used to illustrate the abdication of philosophical priority was the question of whether perception should be counted as epistemically "prior" to the "unconscious two-dimensional reception" of stimulation upon our retinas. To such a question Quine replies "now that we are permitted to appeal to physical stimulation, the problem dissolves; A is epistemologically prior to B if A is causally nearer than B to the sensory receptors." In this way, causal-physico explanation becomes dominant in the exculpation of how knowledge is possible, and any talk of agentive experience is thrown out of consideration.               Accordingly, Quine becomes committed to the epistemological abandonment of what Charles Taylor calls "subject-referring properties:"

These are properties which can only exist in a world in which there are subjects of experience, because they concern in some way the life of the subject qua subject (Taylor, 1985, p. 54).

Essentially, the naturalistically inclined epistemologist becomes barred from understanding the human subject in terms of being an agent, in the broadest ontological sense of the term. As Taylor points out, such a program of objectivity automatically excludes any consideration of experience as a subject, which, in turn excludes from the vocabulary of epistemology any agentive or intentional account concerning the conditions underlying what it is to have an understanding of the world.

Does anyone still argue for it?

One question that might arise here is whether I am attacking a strawman to which no one holds any longer. We then might ask: is such a seemingly strong epistemological position alive and well today? Who holds onto such views? An almost cliche answer would be to point to the work of Patricia and Paul Churchland, who famously mounted a neuroscientific attack on what they perceived as the last vestiges of an antediluvian conception of epistemology as first philosophy, working irrespective of advancing scientific knowledge of evolution, cognition, and actual brain circuitry. Enthusiastically endorsing Quine in her 1987 paper "Epistemology in the Age of Neuroscience," Patricia Churchland wrote:

The fundamental epistemological question from Plato onward is this: How is it possible for us to represent reality? How is it that we can represent the external world of objects, of space and time, of motion and color?...Since it is, afterall, the nervous system that achieves these things, the fundamental epistemological question can be reformulated thus: How does the brain work? (Churchland, 1987, p. 546)

While I think one might be hard pressed to find many contemporary philosophers endorsing such a strong eliminativist position today[4], I do not think it would be difficult to find such an opinion within academia if you starting hanging out around the local neuroscience lab[5]. However, despite the apparent lack of philosophers working today who would explicitly endorse a Quinean "replacement" of intentional vocabulary with a crudely naturalistic one, I think this result largely stems from how the project of epistemology is conceived and not from a deeper hermeneutic critique of empirical psychology in the tradition of Taylor or Dreyfus. To see this, we can observer that, as Philip Kitcher has argued, "traditional naturalism"(as opposed to the radical naturalism of Quine and the anti-naturalism of post-Fregean analytic philosophy[6]) has endorsed the following outline for the project of epistemology: 

The central problem of epistemology is to understand the epistemic quality of human         cognitive performance, and to specify strategies who use human beings can improve their cognitive states (Kitcher, 1992, p. 74).

This meliorative position has followed naturally from the post-Quinean/Kuhnian idea that we are all necessary linked to the past through the common lore of our ancestors and are subsequently struggling on Neurath's boat[7] with the problems of cognitive optimization and behavioral prediction specification. The subsequent conception of epistemology as given above then becomes "naturalized" by accepting the idea that "the epistemic status of a belief state depends on the psychological processes that sustain it”(Kitcher, 1992, p. 115). Thus, we have a naturalization of epistemology that nevertheless maintains itself as an agentive-explaining theory so long as scientific theories retain an intentionalistic vocabulary of belief states and other theoretical psychological processes.

                  Subsequently, we have a whole mess of philosophers maintaining an essentially Quinean conception of epistemology (as committed to simply fixing Neurath's leaky boat) while simultaneously resisting the radical replacement of intentional terms with neuroscientific vocabulary. However, to claim that these philosophers are really not opposed to radical naturalization would be disingenuous, given that they are only psychologistic in so far as the most popular scientific frameworks are still classically homuncular, as opposed to connectionist or dynamical[8]. In other words, it does not follow that many philosophers are committed to the irreducibility and conceptual necessity of intentional/hermeneutic accounts for human understanding when the dominant psychological frameworks are still implicitly utilizing agentive/homuncular vocabulary.

                  The real question then is not whether intellectuals today are radical naturalists, but rather, if they would continue their appeal to intentional language if neuroscience was significantly more advanced and causal mapping of brain circuitry had in fact replaced belief-desire psychology as it stands today. Accordingly, if we look at the project of epistemology in a different light, casting aside questions of meliorative enhancement and optimal cognitive performance in favor of ontological/hermeneutic ones concerning our interpretation of the external world, we can see how the psychologistic trend of traditional naturalism, in being committed to exploring how scientific psychology can help account for the normative dimension of epistemology, is but a mere facade, and in fact not emphatically committed to the logical necessity of a intentional/phenomenological perspective in accounting for human understanding of the world. Furthermore, this tension between traditional naturalism, which holds onto psychological vocabulary in so far as that is the common scientific nomenclature, and radical naturalism, intent on removing all references to intentional constructs, has been debated largely in isolation from the criticisms of the hermeneutic/phenomenological tradition stemming from Heidegger and his followers. This school of thought has long stressed that the traditional epistemological account of human knowledge in terms of a subject/object distinction[9] is fundamentally flawed and that subsequently, both camps become crippled by a hermeneutic presupposition. As Dreyfus puts it,

Since Descartes, philosophers have been stuck with the epistemological problem of explaining how the ideas in our mind can be true of the external world. Heidegger shows that this subject/object epistemology presupposes a background of everyday practices into which we are socialized but that we do not represent in our minds (Dreyfus, 1991, p. 3).

We can see this implicit bias towards Cartesian epistemology in contemporary philosophy simply by observing how the project of epistemology has been commonly conceived. Accordingly, it strikes me as presumptuous that most philosophers debating these issues of naturalistic epistemology never even stop to question the underlying presuppositions built into their concept of what it means to "do" epistemology, naturally or not. Thus, when Kim attacks Quinean epistemology on the grounds that epistemology is essentially a normative discipline, and ipso facto, could be not "replaced" by a causal-nomological theory, his conception of "normative" is still unabashedly wrapped up in the classically Cartesian framework of belief-justification and the "truth" correspondence between mind and world. Indeed, by defining epistemology as a "normative inquiry whose principal aim is a systematic study of the conditions of justified belief"(Kim, 1988, p. 383), (in line with traditional naturalism) the deeper ontological questions of understanding never even surface, and we are left with a radically incomplete framework for thinking about how humans achieve knowledge.
                  So, while Quinean projects can be said to run counter to the epistemological tradition, and should be applauded for their attempt to overcome the limitations of Cartesian mentalism, they do so by completely overshooting the target, implicitly offering an opposed, but similarly dogmatic claim about the subject domain of epistemology. Instead of critiquing Cartesian metaphysics for the epistemological presuppositions Heidegger pointed out[10], Quine simply replaces it with a physicalist ontology devoid of any intelligible account of human intentionality. In the next section, we will see that the hermeneutic criticism of Heidegger and his followers neatly steps outside of the oscillating debate between traditional and naturalistic epistemology, rejecting them both for ignoring the deeper ontological questions of being. For Heidegger then, epistemological questions are at root ontological questions, and until we see this, philosophy can never move past the specious influence of Descartes.

What is missing from naturalized epistemology?

                      We are now in a better position to see why a purely occurrent[11] account of humanity could never be intelligible as an exhaustive description of human experience. As the phenomenological tradition has been keen to point out, the subjective experience of temporal existence as a concrete, social organism embebbed within an environment is difficult if not impossible to intelligibly reduce to causal-nomological description. Without an account of the ontological dimension of experience, any occurrent story about humanity is rendered incomprehsible as a description of experience, by virtue of the fact that such systems fail to account for the phenomenon of understanding, of taking an occurent entity[12] as something - something of worth - to guide future action or stir thought e.g. a philosopher taking a causal-physico theory of human knowledge as a theory of knowledge and letting this guide his/her subsequent intellectual endeavors. This systematic ignorance of understanding, in effect, neuters any purely naturalized epistemological project given that it could never even get off the ground as a theory of meaningful experience[13]. That is, by neglecting to explain the conditions for which real, existing people could even take such a project as a theory or explanation of anything, such crudely objective frameworks leave the project of "explaining" human understanding unfinished.
                      In other words, the naturalized epistemological project is essentially oxymoronic[14], for it runs in a vicious circle of ignoring the question of how there can even be understanding at all, the precondition needed for there to be the phenomenon of flesh and blood humans taking certain epistemological theories as being correct or not, illuminating or not, worthy of interest or not i.e. taking something as something. Thus, naturalized epistemology - the project of accounting for our connection with reality in terms of objective causal connections - can never be complete without explaining the phenomenon of a concrete entity (the philosopher in flesh) understanding an epistemological theory at all; in effect, leaving the philosopher's very real understanding out of the explanandum, begging the question[15]. I will attempt to show that understanding on a broad socio-ontological level is in fact necessary to account for any meaningful experience of the world at all. Accordingly, for the remainder of this section, I will try and spell out just why it is crucial to account for the hermeneutic conditions underlying the very possibility of "any...interaction with things that could amount to knowledge of them" (Rouse, 2002, p. 126), the quintessential epistemological project. Then, by reconceptualizing the epistemological enterprise in such a way as to account for Taylor's "subject-referring properties" without recourse to the problematic subject-object model, I hope to show that the Heideggerian assimilation of epistemology into phenomenological-ontology is the only foreseeable escape from the mires of Cartesian subjectivism.

The Hermeneutic Intelligibility Requirement 

              As I read it[16], Heidegger's Being and Time provides, amongst other things, a phenomenological description of the constitutive hermeneutic conditions of a linguistically informed, meaningful, perception actively oriented towards a concrete, external world. Explaining this phenomenon is, I think, at the heart of epistemology as conceived in the West. However, as Taylor Carman forcefully argues in his Heidegger's Analytic (2003), the traditional epistemological attempts to answer this "problem of perception" have failed insofar as they have assumed certain hermeneutic conditions of intelligibility in order to account for such a phenomenon. Indeed, to account for the meaningfulness of perception, the fact that we take certain entities as entities, including ourselves, requires a presupposition of understanding, for otherwise we are left wondering how we can understand the objective world as objective, as of something.
                      For example, when we going about our business -- dealing with the world, operating within certain domains of expertise or familiarity -- our visual perception is meaningful and linguistically informed. It involves recognizing what things are and understanding that they are. That is, in our everyday experience, barring submersion into an alien culture and environment, we for the most have a passing understanding of the world we experience…..

[Insert Quote]

                In other words, meaningful human perception involves an understanding of being insofar as we understand that things are and what they are; with our explicit interpretation of entities as entities presupposing an understanding of being. The epistemological question of meaning then becomes transformed into an ontological question of being, with being understood as "that which defines entities as entities, that on the basis of which entities...are in each case already understood" [reference SZ 6]. Indeed, as Carman puts it,

[F]or Heidegger, being is constituted by the meaning of being, so that an understanding of being is in effect the same as an understanding of its meaning(Carman, 2003, p. 16)

 

All this is understood through the question of what it means to be a human agent, the only animal (that we know of) capable of such explicit interpretive perception. Thus,

the point is...that being - that is, the intelligibility of entities, their making sense as entities - depends on human beings, whose own being, Heidegger maintains, consists essentially in having an understanding of being. Being, then, is always and only being of which Dasein has an understanding (Carman, 2003, p. 17).

        We can now see why the traditional epistemological attempts at answering the fundamental question of meaning are obtusely circular. Any epistemological framework isolated from the ontological question of being is rendered oxymoronic, and in threat of being unintelligible prima facie as a "theory of meaning" by ignoring how the hermeneutic conditions of understanding must be presupposed in an account of any meaningful interaction whatsoever.

Given that we are now allowed to introduce full-fledged human agency in our answer to the primary epistemological question, what does phenomenological inquiry tell us about agenthood?

The Significance of Language for Self-Interpretation

 

An immediate consequence of taking subject-referring properties seriously in accounting for meaningful human experience is the recognition of human agency as being partially constituted by the use and understanding of language. Furthermore, as we will see, language allows for self-interpretation, and acknowledging the significance of this fact underlies one of the basic points in Heideggerian philosophy. In this section, I will be looking at the hermeneutic analysis of Charles Taylor for an exculpation of how the capacity for self-interpretation is constitutive of what kind of creature we are, and subsequently can’t be seen as a mere epiphenomenon of more fundamental objective qualities being registered in the mind. Indeed, philosophers have been wrestling for centuries with the disastrous philosophical consequences of dividing reality into primary “objective” properties and “subjective” secondary properties.

[Insert Quote]

With that said, I want to examine Taylor’s account of how the capacity for language deepens our experience by allowing for self-interpretation in light of emotional feelings dependent on the partial articulation of subject-referring properties. The heart of Taylor’s argument involves a phenomenological analysis of certain emotional experiences that are constituted by subject-referring properties. He begins by noting that emotional experience involves import-ascriptions, with an import being “a property of something whereby it is a matter of non-indifference to a subject” (Taylor, 1985, p. 48). That is, experiencing an emotion always involves being aware of the situation as being of relevance or importance to desire, aspirations, etc. e.g. as humiliating or exhilarating, shameful or honorable, etc. Furthermore, some of these imports are subject-referring,[17] in the sense of referring to the experience of the subject qua subject. Some examples include our sense of guilt, dignity, contempt, self-hatred, and embarrassment, amongst others. As Taylor notes, for example,

 

Shameful[ness] is not a property which can hold of something quite independently of the experience subjects have of it. Rather, the very account of what shame means involves reference to things – like our sense of dignity, of worth, of how we are seen by others – which are essentially bound up with the life of a subject of experience (Taylor, 1985, p. 54).

 

Thus, such feelings all involve a sense of what is important to human agents as agents, and Taylor argues, this reflexivity is crucial to our understanding of what it means to be human. Furthermore, this reflexivity is constituted by the explicit articulation of such feelings, which in turn, allows for self-interpretation in light of the relevancy and significance of those articulations. By articulating our feelings through the structures of language (good/bad, desirable/non-desirable, etc), we set up the possibility of having

a sense of what the good life is for a subject; and this involves in turn our making qualitative discriminations between our desires and goals, whereby we see some as higher and others as lower, some as good and others as discreditable, still others as evil, some as truly vital and others as trivial, and so on (Taylor, 1985, p. 65).

             

              Taylor discusses this possibility of discrimination in terms of another uniquely human capacity: strong evaluation, otherwise known as second-order evaluation[18]. Strong evaluation involves the evaluation of desire itself, in terms of the imports those desires have for our everyday life and the ongoing projects we are involved in and care about. Furthermore, the articulation of second-order desire into explicit, contrastive languages allows for the “possibility of a plurality of visions which there was not before.” In Heideggerian terms, the strong evaluator thus characterizes his life in terms of a for-the-sake-of, which “always pertains to the being of Dasein, for which, in its being, that very being is essentially an issue” (Blattner, 2006, p. 94). In other words, the articulation of subject-referring feelings allows for an essentially unfinished, future-oriented self-interpretation in terms of overarching life goals. However, as Dreyfus points out, “a for-the-sake-of-which, like being a father or being a professor, is not to be thought of as a goal I have in mind and can achieve. Indeed, it is not a goal at all, but rather a self-interpretation that informs and orders all my activities” (Dreyfus, 1991). Thus, Taylor comes to a five-staged claim:

1. That some of our emotions involve import-ascriptions;
2. That some of these imports are subject-referring;
3. That our subject-referring feelings are the basis of our understanding of what it is to be human;
4. That these feelings are constituted by the articulations we come to accept of them; and
5. That these articulations, which we can think of as interpretations, require language. (Taylor, 1985, pp. 75-76)

 

Coupled together, these claims give us a picture of what it means to be human that is counter to man being an object among other objects, irrespective of his/her partially articulated understanding which feeds back into the reflexive loop of self-interpretation. From this perspective, we can see how our faculty of language fundamentally alters what it means to experience the world for without the articulated domain of strongly evaluative language, we would have no understanding of ourselves as having deeper motivations than a purely occurrent, utilitarian calculus allows. Indeed, man becomes

An animal whose emotional life incorporates a sense of what is really important to him, of the shape of his aspirations, which asks to be understood, and which is never adequately understood. His understanding is explicated at any time in the language he uses to speak about himself, his goals, what he feels, and so on; and in shaping his sense of what is important it also shapes what he feels (emphasis added) (Taylor, 1985, p. 74).

 

Hopefully, it should be clear by now that a crudely naturalized theory would be inadequate for fully describing the complexities of human self-interpretation. Given that many humans understand themselves in terms of theoretical narrative structures, often involving elaborate concepts like God, scientific evolution, loyalty, nationalism, cultural-social background, etc.,  it seems implausible that we could intelligibly capture the motivational significance of such concepts in purely neurophysiological terms. In a standard input-output computational framework, how do you capture the pragmatic significance of something like God in terms of a complicated pattern of neural excitation? More challenging still, how do you capture the reflexive dynamics involved in understanding one’s self in terms of, for example, being a follower of Christ, or being a professional academic, a parent, child, lover, and so on. Such expansive self-interpretations have significant hermeneutic force, fundamentally changing how we perceive and act in the everyday world. So, while perhaps it isn’t logically impossible, it nevertheless seems rather vain to hope that we can adequately describe and fully understand such complicated phenomena in terms of an empirical chain of objective inputs and outputs.

Thus, the full-blown “space of reasons” that shapes our experience of the world seems resistant to physicalist reduction. But what are the alternatives? Eliminativism? Idealism? How can we reconcile the materialistic monism that characterizes our Modern Age with the hermeneutic complexities articulated by the continental tradition? As I see it, there is already an available framework to worth with in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. For the rest of the paper, I will be looking at the radical Heideggerian answer to the primary epistemological problem of perception by integrating it with contemporary theoretical frameworks, including Gibsonian approaches to visual perception and Julian Jaynes radically externalist theory of mind.

Heideggerian Direct Realism

 

What would it look like?

 

Instead of attempting to exhaustively cover the complete phenomenological analytic of Martin Heidegger, which would have to include an account of how he dealt with phenomena such as death, anxiety, guilt, etc., I want to instead focus my attention on what I consider to be the most essential philosophical feature of his philosophical “system”[19]: epistemological direct realism, particularly in respect to visual perception. By examining Heideggerian philosophy[20] in terms of a realist approach to visual perception, I want to elucidate one central feature of his thought: pragmatic externalism. Furthermore, I will be assimilating his radical epistemological theory to a loose alliance of 20^th century thinkers, who may or may not ultimately endorse my appropriation of their work to Heideggerian philosophy. Nevertheless, I think such a broadly theoretical approach can be helpful in laying out a stable framework for fundamentally re-thinking the central problem of perception, that is, of determining the constituent factors of having knowledge of a body-external world at all. By the end of this section, I hope to establish Heideggerian philosophy as a plausible alternative to the established inferential approach[21] stemming from antiquity and culminating in the computationalism of contemporary cognitive science[22]. Central to my approach will be an overarching commitment to the pragmatic tradition, which has customarily dismissed representationalist approaches to perception as being fundamentally flawed in their epistemological and metaphysical implications. I will begin by examining Heidegger in light of the dynamic philosophy of James Gibson and his ecological approach to visual perception and end by discussing some implications that externalist theories of consciousness have for re-thinking the evolution of human psychology.

Direct Perception and Being as Presence

[Most] theories have assumed that the visual perception of a stable, unbounded, and permanent world can only be explained by a process of correcting or compensating for the unstable, bounded, and fleeting sensations coming to the brain from the retinal images. That is to say, all extant theories are sensation-based. But the theory here advanced assumes the existence of stable, unbounded, and permanent stimulus-information in the ambient optic array. And it supposes that the visual system can explore and detect this information. The theory is information-based, not sensation-based (Gibson, quoted in Noë & Thompson, 2002)

 

              Gibson’s “information-based” theory is a direct reaction to the 20^th century sense-data theories of visual perception, which, as Gibson sardonically observes, are committed to the inferential computation of a stable world from ambiguous “retinal images” that may or may not contain enough information for the “inference” of external, three-dimensional objects. One immediate problem with this traditional view is that it overlooks the distinction between stimulation by light and information in light. As Gibson puts it,

The relation between optical stimulation and optical information seems to be as follows. The stimulation of photoreceptors by light is a necessary condition for visual perception. The activity of the visual system depends on ambient light; there is no vision in darkness. But another necessary condition for visual perception is an array of ambient light. It must be structured or differentiated, not homogeneous. With homogeneous ambient light, perception fails although the sensation of light remains. Such is the case in dense fog, empty sky, or in the experiment of wearing plastic diffusing eye-caps, an experiment that we repeat every year at Cornell. In homogeneous darkness, perception fails because stimulation is absent. In homogeneous light, perception fails because stimulus information is absent although stimulation is present (quoted in Noë & Thompson, 2002).

 

Gibson’s conception of perceptual information is framed almost exclusively in terms of an environmental optic-array, which is a “geometrical projection to a point of observation” of invariant structural features of the physical world. The function of the perceptual system then becomes involved in picking up such information with respect to the body-relative behavioral opportunities “given” by the environment. With these opportunities dubbed as affordances, we can now see that Gibsonian vision involves the perception of “properties of the environment that have some significance to some animal’s behavior” (Chemero, forthcoming, p. chapter affordances). This aspect of ecological psychology brings us to our primary resonance with Heidegger’s thought: pragmatic externalism. Pragmatic, because stimulus information is in terms of pragmatic coping strategies relative to the unique properties of the perceiver’s body-makeup and evolutionary adaptation, and external, because perception doesn’t necessitate any sort of “internal” computational inference from ambiguous two-dimensional retinal images; meaningful information is out there, in the environment[23]. As Sellars tersely puts it, “physical objects are really and directly perceived, and…there is no more basic form of (visual) knowledge than seeing physical objects and seeing that they are, for example, red and triangular on this side” (quoted in Levine, 2007, p. 87).

              We are now ready to put pragmatic externalism into Heideggerian terms. Heidegger’s pragmatism is famously articulated in his analysis of equipment as ready-at-hand, but his externalism in the sense I am using the term here is less explicit. Because I assume most readers are somewhat familiar with his ready-at-hand equipmental pragmatics[24], I will be focusing more in this section on his less-acknowledged perceptual externalism. A useful conceptual framework for thinking about this issue of externalism was developed by Frederick Olafson in his Heidegger and the Philosophy of Mind.

              Olafson frames Heidegger’s entire philosophical project in terms of a tension between “existence as the ground of presence” and “presence as the ground of existence.” In this sense, existence is the being of human agents and presence is conceived as what is presented to human observers when perceiving world[25].  Olafson’s dilemma is then between existence as conceived in terms of being grounded primarily by the constitution of the perceiver (Dasein) and by contrast, in terms of being grounded primarily by how the world is “given” to us as perceivers. This tension balances between an idealist reading of Heidegger (existence as the ground) and one that is framed in more realist terms (presence as the ground). Olafson vividly interprets later Heidegger’s conceptual Kehre [turning] from Being and Time in terms of this dilemma. According to this reading, Being and Time is framed in terms of existence as the ground of presence, and his later works after die Kehre are more aligned with presence as the ground of existence by virtue of their more explicit externalism. Olafson see’s Heidegger’s turn from anti-realism in his abandonment of the project of Dasein as being too subjectivist, too couched in “the language of metaphysics.” According to Olafson, later Heidegger wanted to hedge his bets against idealist tendencies readings of Being and Time, which sloppily states that “only as long as Dasein is, ‘is there’ being” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 255). 

              While many Heideggerian scholars have reconciled these passages to a more plausible form of ontic realism[26], there nevertheless remains a feeling of paradox within Heidegger’s thought. He was constantly pivoting back and forth between these two positions, and much of his self-criticism can be pinpointed to this oscillation. Following Olafson, I want to cease wavering on this issue and claim that being as presence provides the necessary theoretical foundation to properly answer the fundamental questions of epistemology and metaphysics as I have framed them[27]. By stipulating that the intentional content of human beings is cashed out primarily in environmental terms, Heidegger set out to overturn the representational internalism of Cartesian metaphysics[28], upsetting the standard theoretical framework for thinking about perceptual consciousness[29]. It is in this sense of existential experience being primarily grounded by the physical, publicly available physical world that Heidegger’s externalism should be framed. Indeed,

In directing itself toward something and grasping it, Dasein does not somehow first get out of an inner sphere in which it has first been encapsulated, rather its primary kind of being is such that it is always “outside” with entities that it encounters and that belong to an already discovered world. Nor is any inner sphere abandoned when Dasein dwells with the entity to be known, and determines its character; rather even in this “being-outside” amidst the object, Dasein is still “inside” as being-in-the-world that knows. And furthermore perceiving what is known is not a matter of returning with one’s booty to the “cabinet” of consciousness after one has gone out and grasped it, even in perceiving, retaining, and preserving, the knowing Dasein, as Dasein, remains outside (Heidegger, 1962, p. 89).

 

              Returning to Gibson, we are now in a position to see the close conceptual resemblance of the ambient optic array with Heidegger’s conception of presence. Both constructs can be construed in terms of certain ontically real properties of the world being presented to a physical animal in precisely such a way so to be relevant to his practical comportment[30]. On both accounts, the content of intentional consciousness is primarily constituted by ecological stimulus information structured by the physical environment. As Carman puts it, ““[Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein] is externalist in insisting that our intentional relations to the world are constituted by our orientation in the public domain, not by our private possession of internal mental states” (Carman, 2003, p. 122). Furthermore, intentional perceptual consciousness could only come about insofar as there is a public world existing independently of us. Ontic realism is thus a necessary condition towards achieving perceptual consciousness of an external world.

This entity[the world] is intraworldly. But innerworldliness nonetheless does not belong to its being, rather in dealing with this entity, nature in the widest sense, we understand that this entity is as something occurrent, as an entity that we run up against, to which we are given over, that for its own part always already is. It is, without our uncovering it, i.e. without our encountering it in our world. Innerworldiness devolves upon this entity only when it is uncovered as an entity . [quoted Carman pg 157]

 

              It is this sense of uncovering what is already there that rings so closely with Gibsonian ecological optics. For Gibson, the act of perception involves the receptivity of a particular sort of animal (capable of locomotion) towards information contained in an ambient optic array structured by the physical properties of the environment[31]. It is only in virtue of these properties that there is any awareness of the world at all, for indeed, awareness must be awareness of a world.

Perceiving is an achievement of the individual, not an appearance in the theater of his consciousness. It is a keeping-in-touch with the world, an experiencing of things rather than having of experiences. It involves awareness-of instead of just awareness. It may be awareness of something in the environment or something in the observer or both at once, but there is no content of awareness independent of that of which one is aware (emphasis mine) (Gibson, 1979, p. 239).

 

              Gibson’s point is well heeded, but what else can we say about the relationship between human and world? Does specifying the structural layout of the environment suffice for an analysis of Dasein’s intentional comportment? Do we not also need to specify the peculiar type of entity that we are as beings for whom being is an issue? In dealing with Heidegger’s thought, the pragmatic component of his externalism necessarily requires an analysis of the type of creature we are, in virtue of pragmatics being intimately related to how it is a particular animal uniquely copes within an environmental niche. This brings us to a question of our physical constitution and psychohistorical evolution. In the next section, I want to examine Heideggerian externalism in terms of Julian Jaynes theory of consciousness and discuss some striking implications that externalist theories have for the understanding of our psychological evolution.

 

The Radical Implications of Externalism

 

Once we have taken seriously the notion that our human consciousness is crucially constituted by the presentation of salient features of an external environment, our investigation into human nature opens up dramatically as we examine just what has been salient to humans as civilization as developed over time. In this section, I will be exploring the ramifications of Julian Jaynes’s theory of linguistic consciousness in terms of Heideggerian externalism. By following Jaynes in claiming that the development of complex, metaphorical language is a necessary step towards full-blown human consciousness, I wish to argue in support of Jayne’s thesis that the internal mind-space of modern, intentional consciousness is an analog of the external environment.

An analog is a model, but a model of a special kind. It is not like a scientific model, whose source may be anything at all and whose purpose is to act as a hypothesis of explanation and understanding. Instead, an analog is at every point generated by the thing it is an analog of (my emphasis). A map is a good example (Jaynes, 1976, p. 54).

              The concept of analog can be grasped easily in terms of the Gibsonian theory of externalist realism we have been discussing. The question then becomes, if human conscious is an analog of the environmental patterns of salience as presented to our nervous systems, then what happens when the external stimulus information specified includes language and metaphor? Would not everything change? “…metaphors increase enormously our powers of perception of the world about us and our understanding of it, and literally create new objects (my emphasis)[32]. Indeed, language is an organ of perception, not simply a means of communication” (Jaynes, 1976, p. 50). Heidegger would concur. Seeing the world in terms of language allows for radically different specifications of stimulus information as related to pragmatic coping.[33] Furthermore, language opens up the possible spatialization of the world around us through the development of an analog “I” which can “look out” onto the world. Through a deeply embedded container metaphor, the internal mind-space of modern human consciousness becomes operative and allows for more complicated behavioral processes in response to novel situations and stressful environment contexts.[34]

              All of this orients us towards a theory of consciousness that allows for psychological development within a relatively short evolutionary timeframe. This has drastic implications for when we place a date on the evolution of modern consciousness, contrary to the traditional view of it lurching slowly over the course of many millions of years. If Jaynes is right that language provides for radically different salience patterns in the environment to catch our attention[35], and that such new perceptual powers would necessarily lead to the development of advanced cultural pragmatics (see note 34), then we are necessarily forced to date the development of language closer to when archeological evidence indicates signs of civilization emerged. Subsequently, if it turns out to be true that the advent of full-blown consciousness can only emerge after the metaphorical and narratization powers of humanity have sufficiently developed, we can then place the full maturation of human consciousness at a relatively later point of time than orthodox theory as supposed. A more detailed discussion of the historical record and evolutionary/neurological plausibility of this theory[36] is beyond the limited scope of this paper, but needless to say, Jaynes does much to provide a truly interdisciplinary theory of human psychohistory and The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind deserves a place as one of the most challenging works of the 20^th century, upsetting much dogma, and in the words of one reviewer, “rendering whole shelves of books obsolete.”

 

Conclusion

In this paper, I have attempted to do several things:

1. Show that naturalistic epistemology as traditionally conceived is inadequate as a complete description of human nature, and even worse, when framed in terms of how academics actually interact with such theories, becomes downright oxymoronic.
2. Frame the epistemological problems of antiquity in terms of perceptual questions; questions about how we interact and understand a meaningful, three-dimensional, linguistically salient external environment. Particularly crucial to my account of externalism, I argued that the infusion of language into how we perceive the world changes the nature of that interaction by introducing new patterns of salience. Language carves the world up into patterns of significance that are framed in terms of partially constituting, linguistically grounded, self-interpretations.
3. Provide an answer to these epistemological problems in terms of what I believe is the most important feature of Heideggerian philosophy: direct realism. Furthermore, I attempted to offer a plausible interpretation of Heideggerian direct realism through the conceptual frameworks of “presence” and Gibsonian ecological optics. I argued that Heidegger’s concept of presence can be fruitfully framed in terms of Gibson’s ambient optic array, and furthermore, that ecological psychology is a contemporary extension of Heideggerian pragmatism.
4. Lastly, explore some implications of externalism as a theory of visual consciousness in lieu of Julian Jaynes thoughts on consciousness as presented in The Origin Of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. His radically externalist theory posits that the intentionality of perceptual consciousness from an internal mind-space directed out towards an external environment is at root, a linguistic phenomenon, possible only through the powers of language and metaphor. The “I” of intentional visual consciousness is a point-by-point, metaphorically generated analog of our perceptual access to the external environment (as described by Heidegerian externalism) and allows for a spatialization and narratization of the physical world in order to create a mental space within our heads, from which we can look out towards the world.
5. 
   

All five of these points are deeply interrelated, and subsequently imply each other when considered as a whole. While the Heideggerian picture of human-world interaction has deep conceptual muddles that need to be worked out more fully[37], it should be kept in mind that this theory is still in its infancy, with many fresh lines of corroborating research coming in from all angles. Pragmatic externalism is gathering allies from many diverse disciplinary traditions and as the inadequacies of traditional dogma become more apparent, I am confident that a Kuhnian paradigm shift for re-thinking the human situation is beginning to gather itself into a potent possibility. These are exciting times. 

 

             

 

 

 

             

 

             

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