The World of SPLectrum
Two-Pronged Anti-Representationalism
Whitehead and Rorty don’t often show up in the same sentence. Process metaphysics and pragmatism keep to their own neighbourhoods. Both reject representationalism — the view that reality is out there and our experience is a deficient copy of it. Both insist that reality is at its core relational. They are two prongs of the same attack.
Reality starts as personal experience, lived and enacted, and propagates through sharing. P2 — Language is the medium through which a subject experiences reality. Reality is lived, not witnessed.
By grouping Whitehead and Rorty together I like to draw attention to the duality this expresses. To understand what I mean we must start from the creational principle: P0 Being implies language. It could be freely translated as where there are entities, there are relations between them. It is a duality of a similar nature as, for instance, the particle-wave duality. Each chooses a different side for the formulation of their rejection. Whitehead veered towards being, Rorty towards language. Where Rorty’s treatment is purely epistemological, Whitehead’s framing ends up ontological while his content is epistemic. SPLectrum aligns with Rorty on the epistemological side, and aims for alignment with Whitehead on process and methodological rigour. A future post will go into more detail on this.
Whitehead rejects representationalism because he rejects what he calls the bifurcation of nature, the split between the world physics — of measurements — and the world we live in — of experience. Physics in his time is still overwhelmingly outside-view, and Whitehead responds to that measurement-first picture of nature. He responds with a relational metaphysics — one where nothing stands outside its relations. The actual entity is its prehensions; nothing is a self-contained thing first and secondarily related. There is no inside-the-mind that represents an outside-the-mind, because the inside/outside line gets dismantled at the metaphysical level. But the framing he puts around it is ontological.
Rorty in his rejection sets aside the mirror — the picture of mind as a reflector of nature. He keeps a minimalist view — there are only vocabularies. He switches the conversation. Knowledge isn’t accurate representation; truth isn’t correspondence. Both are what survives in our practices of justification. Truth as solidarity. He doesn’t argue against representation so much as walk out of the room where representation was the only game.
Two rejections of representationalism starting from the same relational core but expressed along two different axes. Rorty on the language axis has an epistemological view that at its heart is simple. The complexities of reality are lived and enacted by evolving vocabularies. Whitehead on the being axis ends up in a framework with real tension — relational content in an ontological framing. His strength is on the processual side — about how things come to be in relation — epistemic. But his categories of existence, types of being, make the framing ontological. The form and the content pull against each other. Ontological framing needs an outside vantage from which to lay out its categories. That outside vantage is what reintroduces the witnessed view — the very thing the relational content was trying to refuse.
Rorty keeps reality lived by staying inside vocabularies. Whitehead rejects the bifurcation of nature and develops a process theory of how things come to be in relation. Two-pronged anti-representationalism. How can this contrast be turned into a unity, take Rorty’s minimal position in language and add Whitehead’s process and rigour?
This post is part of the seed series. See also the seed.
Photo: vincentvanzalinge / Unsplash