All awareness of absolute entities, and all awareness even in particular, is a linguistic affair. This is the definition, the canonical definition of psychological novelism given by Sellers in his 1956 lecture, In Prison and the Falsy of Mind. And for philosophers of a realist stance, psychological novelism understood as a claim that all awareness is a linguistic affair, is of a peace with philosophical behavior, which allegedly denies the reality of consciousness. If psychological normalism is complicit with this denial, which strikes many philosophers of absurd, some would say it deserves to be relegated to the dustbin of philosophical
history along with its behavior as a sibling. Sellers coined expression, psychological normalism, psychological normalism and defended the doctrine throughout his long philosophical career. But he also distinguished between two aspects of the mind, thinking and sensing, and laid claim to realism about both. This distinction between thinking and sensing, which can be traced back to Kant, essentially prefigures David Chalmers' more recent distinction between functional, psychological and the phenomenal slash experiential aspects of the mind. The crucial difference however is that while the charmers in those phenomenal experiential states with a cognitive authority equal to if not greater than
that of functional psychological states, sellers reserves cognition for functionally characterized thinking alone. I'll try to explain what that means in the course of the talk. So he resorts cognition for functionally characterized thinking alone and characterizes sensation as a non-cognitive state that plays a causal but not a justificatory role in empirical knowledge. One of the things I'd like to argue for tonight is that Salos cannot be accused of downplaying the significance of the phenomenal or experiential aspects of the mind. Indeed, his account of sensory consciousness leads him to make the controversial claim
that sensation has a metaphysical purchase insofar as it indirectly reveals a fundamental aspect of physical reality. Its intrinsic qualitative aspects which, as Sellers sees it, cannot be reduced to the extrinsic or dispositional property of things. Again, this is another distinction which I hope will become clear in the course of the lecture. Sellers' Rortian ears, in the forensic tradition, have made much of his psychological normalism, but they tend to dismiss his suggestion that sensation is a metaphysical purchase as an aberrant relapse into dogmatic rationality.
So what I want to do is argue that self-account of the metaphysics of sensation is not a dogmatic regression because it offers a way of resolving the deadlock between realists whose equation of consciousness with knowledge leads them to embrace dualism. people like Chalmers, who thinks that because experiential consciousness has a directly cognitive valence, and because it cannot be mechanistically or materialistically explained, conscious properties, the properties of conscious states are fundamentally different in time from the properties of material states,
That's one branch of the dynamic. The other is the attempt to reduce consciousness to conceptual awareness. This is the claim, the alternative move that's made by a sorcerer like Rorty or Robert Brandon in a certain regard, who want to say that all there is to consciousness is conceptual awareness. They take that to be an exhaustive characterization of the nature of consciousness. But in doing so, the threat is that they will sever the causal link between mind and nature. So it's because the mind is embedded in nature that we need to explain,
first of all how in a way thinking conceptual consciousness is the irreducible sensation but we also need to explain how conceptual consciousness is constrained by sensation. In other words how the mind is anchored in nature and this anchoring is causal. It can only be a causal anchoring. Okay. Now, I'm going to use PowerPoint. Because I'm an incompetent PowerPoint user, I tend to put up either too much or too little on the slides. So I'm going to try, and I fear, I'll try to, most of the content,
the essential content of my argument is only slides. So hopefully even if there's too much information it will be useful. So, first thing to explain is how Sellers wants to, what Sellers is a transcendental philosopher in the Kantian tradition, who wants to avoid the twin excesses of dogmatic rationalism and skeptical in person. According to dogmatic rationalism, the mind enjoys a priori cognitive access to a mind-independent reality, such that reason can deduce the fundamental features of our reality. Skeptical imprecisism on another hand claims that all knowledge is rooted in but limited by sensory experience,
so that reason cannot deliver a priori knowledge of a mind-independent reality. And what Celtus claims that both dogmatic rationalism and skeptical and criticism are part of the framework of givenness. They're enthralled in what he calls the framework of givenness, which is the belief that mental states are self-insonating. In other words, that to be conscious is to know what it is you're conscious of. Dogmatism, dogmatic rationalism, takes a correlation between thinking and being as given, as in Descartes. He thinks that I can reduce my own existence from my own self-consciousness,
while skepticism takes the intelligibility of sensory experiences given. For Hume, for instance, what's interesting is that for all his skepticism about the objective correlates of sensory experience, his attempted decomposition of experience into these units, these elementary units of sensation, he never doubts that sensations can be intelligible in and of themselves, that there are intelligible units of sensation. And this is the other version of what Sellers called the Metamageddon. Sellers then wants to postulate a transcendental difference. A way to reject the framework of forgiveness is to postulate a transcendental difference
between thinking and knowing what is thought, between the act of thinking and the object of thought. And also a difference between sensing and knowing what is sensed. And this can be encapsulated in this Svarjan dictum, the awareness of something is not the awareness of something as something. To be aware of something is not to be aware of it as the something that it is. This is the myth of the category of the game. So all that the word transcendental means for sellers is simply postulating this difference between sensing and sensing us, between experience and experiencing us.
This is all that sellers need in a way to gain critical purchase on the relationship between thinking and sensing. So, cognitive awareness for sellers then will be a linguistic affair because it involves being aware of something as something. Such awareness requires conceptualization and concepts or linguistically instantiated rules. We would not be aware, controversially, the claim is we would not even be aware of ourselves as thinking were it not for language. This is Seller's myth of Jones. Again, this is simply an immediate consequence of the rejection of the framework of givenness. It follows that if we need concepts to be aware of anything,
it's not just that we need concepts to be aware of the objects of thinking or the objects of sensing, it's that we need a concept of thinking to be aware of ourselves as thinking or as feeling. So the thing is that there's a distinction between consciousness and self-consciousness. Self-consciousness involves conceptual mediation and the claim is that we, the kind of conceptual self-consciousness enjoyed by human beings or characters such as ourselves depends upon language, depends upon linguistic resources. because language is the medium of conceptualization, at least in some sense.
So, if one rejects the premise that thoughts are essentially self-intimating or self-disposing, or the assumption that to think is to know that one is thinking, it becomes possible to understand the concept of thinking as modeled on the concept of speaking. thoughts then according to the Szilagyi account are understood as inner episodes modelled upon overt public utterances these inner episodes are theoretical entities postulated as structurally analogous to linguistic utterances yet devoid of the physical characteristics of these they are silent, invisible intangible etc in this regard then thoughts are akin to theoretical observables. This is the famous analogy between the postulation, you know,
learning to explain the behavior of a sentient organisms in terms of beliefs and desires or thoughts and sensations is akin to postulating the behavior of gases in terms of imperceptible molecules. And in this regard, thoughts then, this is a quote from Charles, thoughts are in language using animals as molecular impacts are in gases and not a dulcery machine. Empirical observables are identified with the theoretical observables without the former being the birth manifestation of the lateral scover of existence. if you say that water is H2O you're not saying that water is the manifestation of H2O it's an
identification you're saying that water is H2O it shows that the micro physical structure of this micro physical phenomenon that is not like saying that the mind is this substance that inhabits the body. So it's very important not to conflate the dualism of observational vocabulary and theoretical vocabulary with the dualism of inner and outer. And it's this dualism, the dualism of observable and unobservable or postulate or postulated is not the dualism of outer and inner. you don't say that H2O is in water. That claim makes no logical sense. The claim is that water is H2O and that it's, you know, the distinction between the macro physical and micro physical is not one of spatial containers.
And this is the key to understanding psychological norms. So, linguistic utterance is not the exteriorization of thought, and thought is not the interiorization of utterance. Utterance itself becomes a thinking out loud, just as thinking becomes a silent saying. Theoretical terms acquire an observational role through which they can be used in perceptual reports. report. So we learn to perceive each other and ourselves as thinking or believing or hoping or feeling etc etc. Now, Selvig's claim is not that thinking depends upon language. This is a metaphysical
misinterpretation of psychological knowledge. The Reilians in Selvig's account, that the creatures who initially who think but don't yet have the concept of thinking, who are conscious but not yet self-conscious, they're still thinking but they just don't understand or conceive of themselves as thinking beings. What they need is a theory, but they need a vocabulary to be able to, in a way, perceive themselves as thinking. So they don't think of themselves as thinking until Jones, Genius Jones himself, provides them with a concept of what it is to think. Because it's not at all obvious what it is to think. The concept of thinking is the least self-evident concept
there is. You don't just tell whether or not something is thinking. It can't simply be it's an abstract theoretical concept. This is Selva's whole point. By embracing George's theory of thought as inner episodes of sin, the Rylians acquire the concept of thinking as what underlies meaningful actions. They become aware of themselves as thinking. Once this move has been made, you can give the intentionality of thought is understood to be modeled on the intentionality of language. The concept of meaning to say, of intending, meaning something when one speaks, attention in
the psychological and semantic sense is ushered in with the shift from conscious to self-conscious thought. This is precisely what Jones's theory of thoughts in our episodes is supposed to explain. But it entails that the intentionality of public language is the condition for the intentionality of thought. This is a very controversial reversal. People usually assume it's the other way around. That the intentionality of thought is a condition for the intentionality of language. And the seller says no, it's actually the inverse. We have to be able to learn to use words properly before we can understand what it means to say something. Here's a quote from Sellers, from Language of Thought and
Communication. Instead of analyzing the intentionality or aboutness of verbal behavior in terms of its expressing or being used to express classically conceived thoughts or beliefs. By classically conceived thoughts or beliefs he means, you know, with the Augustinian or even Cartesian conception of thoughts as being, you know, ontologically independent, you know, attributes of some kind of substance which cause behavior or cause linguistic activity. Instead of analyzing intentionality or aboutness of verbal behavior in terms of its expressing or being used to express classically perceived thoughts of beliefs, we should recognize that this verbal behavior is already thinking in its own right and its intentionality or
about this is simply the appropriateness of classifying it in terms which relates to the linguistic behaviour of the group to which one belong. And this is the second clause that needs to be explained. What does Sellers mean here? It means that the intentionality of public discourse is a matter of appropriately classifying linguistic behaviour according to standards encapsulated by collectively accepted norms. These norms involve the rules of criticism or ought to be's to which speakers are encouraged to conform as well as the rules of action or ought to do's which speakers are expected to realize. Since rules of criticism
and rules of action are codependent, ought to be is implied ought to do. So conforming to the former is indissociable from accepting the latter. Linguistic action and linguistic behavior are both non-governed. They cannot be opposed to one another since the capacity to conform is the precondition for the ability to act. Again, what Xelos is trying to do to overcome the binary between action and behavior. Where action is, involves again an intention, some kind of interior intention, whereas behavior is merely at the kind of outward manifestation of that intention. He's saying once you
dissolve the inside-outside dichotomy, you can understand, you know, behavior as intrinsically intentional so that the ability to behave correctly is evidence of the ability to understand something to intend properly and vice versa. So if psychological normalism identifies thinking with verbal behavior this is not in the same sense in which psychological behaviors, public eye, you know, people like BF Skinner, etc., identifies thinking with behavioral dispositions. Verbal behavior expresses thought only insofar as thinking is understood as a kind of doing
cognitively modeled on linguistic doctrines. So, thinking is a kind of doing because it involves inferring, which in turn involves representing. I'm not going to say much about representing, but it's very important to emphasize the link between these verbs, these adverbs. Thinking, doing, inferring. Concepts are inferential roles and these roles are defined by networks of implication across webs of linguistic assertion. To say that intentionality is the appropriateness of classifying a linguistic expression relative to the behavior of the linguistic community is to say that intentionality is a functional characteristic.
So, because thinking is a kind of doing, the intention, in a way which is realized in thinking, has a function. This is why you can give a functional characterization of intention. and Selv's dot quoting device is the exhibition of the linguistic function. It's simply, this is a kind of formal device used by Selv's whereby the dot quotes, whenever you dot quote a linguistic expression, you show its function. You show what it does in a language. This, of course, presupposes familiarity with the dot quoted expression's proper function. and this familiarity is the background of tacit understanding against which the exhibition of the meaning of particular expressions
can stand out as an instance of explicit understanding. Exhibiting the meaning of a specific expression is only possible against the backdrop of a language and a form of life within which the use of words is necessarily embedded. In other words, there is no transcendent context in terms of which you could judge the propriety of function, of semantic function. You measure the propriety of function according to a social context, social, historical, and cultural context, which is ultimately the manifestation of what Birkenstein calls a form of life. So at one level you can't, this is why meaning can't be defined, you cannot define what meaning is, you can only show it.
Because meaning is about function and to understand a function you can't give a kind of a propositional encapsulation of the function, you can only show it. And this exhibition of showing, rather than stating a complex rule-governed functioning, which presupposes familiarity with the language in which the dot-coding device is deployed, re-imbeds language within a world of practical involvement. Because when you show the meaning of a term, you can only, you know, that exhibition is only comprehensible to someone who understands, to someone who knows how the dot-coded term is already being used. So consequently, self psychological normalism and his claim that cognitive functioning is
linguistically instantiated envelops awareness within language only in so far as language itself is enveloped in a world comprising a variety of human practices and purposes. Drawing out those conditions exposes the chain of nested mediation from awareness to awareness as, from awareness as to conceptual role, from conceptual role to linguistic practice, and from linguistic practice to a world of practical involvement. What is exposed through this chain of mediations is the way in which the content of any single state of awareness is bound up with a context of significance that includes a whole practical
life world. So, psychological normalism is usually a report for denying the reality of mental states. But if anti-realism in this context means denying that mental states belong in the world, then this reproach is misguided. Or on Sellers' account, mental states are as real as anything else in the world, of which they are a part. The fact that cognitive awareness of mental states is conceptual through and through in no way compromises their reality, since on Sellers' account this is as true of tables, zebras and galaxies as it is of thoughts and sensations. Everything is conceptually mediated. All the ontological furniture of reality is apprehended conceptually. So thoughts and sensations would be no different in this result.
But if the issue is one of realism, the more fitting reproach to psychological normalism, and so the transcendental stance from which it ensues, is that realism, whether about mental states or non-mental phenomena, comes at the price of an exorbitant holism, which is obliged to take as given a total context of significance, i.e., a form of life in which which the transcendental perspective is necessarily embedded. Why should this be so? On terms of the count, the opt-to-bees and opt-to-dos which condition all of our thinking and acting constitutes the linguistic framework within which we live. This framework furnishes the
resources for all justification and evaluation. Will claims made within the framework be assessed, criticized or rejected. There is no higher authority or court of appeal with regard to which the framework as a whole could be judged and found wanted. Then the danger is one of quietism. This is a famous quote from the book of Strangels on Certainty. You must bear in mind that the language game is not based on grounds. It is not reasonable or unreasonable. It is there, like our life. If our linguistic framework is simply there, like our life, it is not susceptible of rational revision. It is just something to be accepted as it is.
And Sauer's emphasis on holism, both semantic and epistemic, would seem to point towards a quietest acceptance of the form of life within which we find ourselves as the ineluctable horizon of all thinking and doing. If the rejection of the empiricist and rationalist versions of givenness ultimately entails accepting the givenness of a form of life as the ultimate horizon circumscribing reflection, this may prove too high a price, because transcendental reflection would then find itself constitutively incapable of critically interrogating the legitimacy of the practices and specifically of the cognitive practices within which psychological states and conceptual rules are necessarily embedded.
Now Celsus rejects this whole, so this is kind of quietism, so and this is really tied to his whole account or his preoccupation with the statements of civilization. Celsus' conceptual philosophy as a theoretical endeavor requiring conceptual construction as well as conceptual revision is opposed to this quantity. The roots of this opposition lies in Celsus' bifurcated worldview. Our understanding of the world is split into two competing conceptual structures, the manifest and scientific images of man the world. Both are autonomous categorical schemes, neither of which can be wholly subsumed within the other. But the bifurcation is in our conceptual grasp of the world,
not in the world as such. So Seles's transcendental dualism of images should not be taken to be incompatible with monism. In fact it's a kind of double aspect theory, of a spinetist kind. He's not saying that there's the world, there's two different kind of dimensions of reality. There's only one world but it appears or it's kind of, it's apprehended from two distinct vantage points and that's from the manifest image vantage point or from the scientific image. And both those images are connected. Sellers, according to the scientific image, is a peculiar privilege of describing and explaining why the world appears to us as it does. This is what the manifest
image cannot do. Transcendental reflection within the bounds of the manifest image reveals normative practice as the fundamental horizon of understanding, but it cannot explain why the world manifests itself to us as it does, or why we engage in these particular practices but not others. Indeed, such questions make no sense so long as transcendental investigation is confined to the manifest image. However, these questions are perfectly legitimate if one understands the task of transcendental reflection to be that of articulated the two images. So, for Seller said, ultimately the common sense picture or the manifest image of the world, in spite of its delicate
opinions, poses problems which it lacks the resources to resolve. And the topic of sensation is crucial because it lies at the interface between the two images. It It is the juncture between the causal nexus investigated by science and the normative space of reasons within which we conduct our daily lives. This is why Purceller's sensations are essential to the explanation of how we come to construct the appearance which is the manifest world. So in response to the charge that holism entails quietism, it's worth pointing out that sounds bifurcated holism makes room for conceptual revision because it allows for the possibility
of diagnosing categorical dysfunction, not only within each image but also across it. The category of dysfunction, because concepts are functions, the functioning of any single concept is bound up with a whole economy of concepts. So if a concept is malfunctioning, that malfunction will ramify across the whole structure. And in fact there are there in a way that the symptoms of categorical dysfunction are simply philosophical perplexity. That's why philosophy in a way tracks categorical dysfunction.
So, Sellers' controversial proposal for a metaphysics of pure processes exemplifies its critical or constructive conception of thought of it because it's motivated by concern over the malfunctioning of the category of sensation, not by the dramatic deference towards the epistemic authority of thought, as the argument has been misunderstood of the latter. Since thoughts can be characterized in terms of their functional roles, Sellers insist that, quote, there is no barrier in principle to the identification of conceptual thinking with neurophysiological process. So the conceptual role of, let's say, red rectangular, the conceptual predicate, is
identified through dot-quoting of the metalinguistic sort of dot-quote red rectangular, fungal core. And this linguistic function is at least in principle identifiable with a set of physical states in which its particular tokenings are realized. But although sensation can be functionally characterized as a sensing red triangle, it's, you know, Seller's adopt what he calls an imverbial theory of sensation, so the sensation of a red triangle is actually a sensing red triangular way and that way you remove the idea that there has to be some kind of object of sensation. Sensation is not object involved but it has an intention of it's about something. What it's about is not some kind of thing
some peculiar item in the works which is a sense data. The thing about sensing very triangular is that it cannot be identified with its functional role. So to understand why sensation cannot be identified with its functional role we must distinguish between the formal and the content properties of objects. Formal properties include all of an object's causal, dispositional and structural properties. They are conceptual. I mean causal, you know, what would the objects, you know, its causal powers, what it makes happen, dispositional, its propensities, I mean a pane of glass is a disposition to shatter, and structural properties. Structural properties can be micro-physical properties. All these properties are charted by mathematical science, they're conceptual.
The content properties comprise the object's sensible properties in the structure. Whatever can only be directly seen, touched, heard, tasted or smelled of an object. So, while the former, the formal properties are categorical features of objects, the latter, the content properties are purely of current qualities. This is, tells us an account of an occurrence, or the contrast between occurrence and category of property. We do not perceive of the object its causal properties. What we see of it are its occurrence, sensible features. This can now be generalized as false.
We do not perceive of the object its character as a substance having attributes, its character its character belonging to other substances in a system of interacting substances, its character as conforming to laws of nature. In short, we do not perceive of the object what might be called categorical features. The reason is that if we could simply perceive the categorical features of objects, we would need science. Theoretical science would be completely superfluous. It's precisely because we can't see, directly perceive what objects can do, how they behave under certain circumstances, that we need to do science. What we perceive are the occurrence, the sensory properties of objects, through what they look like, what they smell like, what they sound like, what they feel like, or what they taste like.
So what we see of an object are its sensible content properties, while what we see an object as are its conceptual or category features. And the latter are intuitive, not sense. So, this is a lengthy quote from Sellers, but it's important because in a way it's kind of amplifies this distinction. And it's why Sellers thinks an account of the word merely in terms of causal, distritional or structural properties is going to be unsatisfactory. And this is where Sellers' account rejoins the concerns of metaphysicians such as buffer
nor voighting. So, this is Sellers. It should be noted that if physical objects are genuine individuals, they can scarcely have only if-if-y properties, i.e. if and only if properties, causal or dispositional properties, the kinds of properties that are formulated in physical laws. If we have properties, power to propensity and dispositional properties are not. They must have some non-dispositional or recurrent attributes. But nor, as Whitehead reminds us, will it do to limit their recurrent attributes to such primary qualities as shape and size. Or, to use an Aristotelian term of phrase, geometrical qualities are formal qualities and presuppose a content or a matter, thus color.
color. Things which had primary qualities without content qualities would have vacuous actuality. This is Whitehead's expression. That Whitehead construed the current content of physical objects in terms of feeling rather than color as a symptom of the revisionary character of its metaphysics. You know, you need to try on what's going on in this book. Whitehead construes a current content in terms of feeling because he is a pan experientialist for whom or pan typist, for whom actuality divorced from subjectivity is necessarily factors. In other words, actuality, the actuality of any property or feature must be registered in a
subject. There has to be a subject of sensation, of a current sensation. And a vacuous actuality in Whitehead sense is a non-subjective actuality, an unperceived actuality wholly independent of subjective experience. So at the root of Whitehead's pan-experientialism lies a conflation of sensing with perceiving, or of awareness with awareness as. Sellers is too Kantian to accept point heads for a visionary recategorization of a current physical content as an instance of feeling. He endorses the traditional characterization of the metaphysical task as the identification of ultimate categories understood as summa genera.
Categories in general, says Sellers, are classifications of conceptual roles. What does this mean? It means that the metaphysical task is to properly classify, to identify what categories do, what role they play in our understanding and describing of reality. So like Kant, Sellers views categories as ways of classifying conceptual representings, rather than as the attributes of unrepresented things. He removes, you know, Aristotle thought that categories were in things, and Kant replaces categories in us, not in things.
The categories, the pure concepts of the understanding according to Kant, are in us and they are the condition of possibility for our experiencing things as being thus or so. Thus sellers insist that metaphysics must accurately describe our extant categorical framework, i.e. our extant ways of representing things, before engaging in the revisionary task of postulating new categories or recategorizing entities. So from the viewpoint of descriptive metaphysics, which Sellers endorses, the category of actuality is not subordinate to the category of subjectivity as species to genus. They are distinct genera.
Something can be actual without being experienced. Why would you claim that something's actuality depends upon its being experienced? That's the premise of the unexperienced, which is a peculiar premise which is unnecessary for a set of space. A current actuality manifests itself to us through sensation, and sensations are a current state of perceiving subject, but they need to be conceptually perceived, i.e. represented to be known by the subject who states they are. So now we come to the so-called brain argument. So although current sensations are revealed, although current contents are revealed
through sensation, sensation reveals to us the occurrence, contents, the content properties of things. Sensation itself is not the cognitive awareness of occurring content. And this is what prevents sellers from embracing whiteheads pan-experientialism as well as the kind of property dualism championed by Chalmers and others. It's also why sellers' so-called grain argument for the irreducibility of content quality is not phenomenological or at least not as that term is used by analytical forces. Sellers' great argument works from, proceeds from what he calls the principle of reducibility, which Sellers formulates as follows.
If an object is in a strict sense a system of objects, then every property of the object must consist in the fact that its constituents have such and such qualities and stand in such and such relations, every property of a system of objects consists of properties of and relations between its constituents. So, the properties of a whole can be reduced to its parts if and only if, all the properties of the whole can be explained in terms of properties and relations of its constituents. It seems relatively uncontroversial. But it presents a problem for giving, for understanding,
for giving a reductive account of sensation. Because sensations according to Sellers are characterized by ultimate homogenization. This is another quote. This is Sellers' famous pink ice cube. The reason it's a pink ice cube is because he was a devotee of martinis and spent a lot of his life looking through martinis. So that's why the pink ice cube is the big master. The ice cube presents itself to us as ultimately homogeneous and an ice cube variegated in color is though not homogeneous in its specific color, ultimately homogeneous in the sense to which I am calling attention with respect
to the generic trait of being colored. That's my answer, the generic trait of being colored. Homogeneity then pertains to the generic, which is to say the categorical trait of being colored and not to a current pinkness as such. The pink is seen as homogenous in so far as it is a color, but homogeneity is not something one sees on the ice cube, or more precisely It is the coloredness of the ice cube that is seen as homogenous rather than its current pinkness. This is to say that homogeneity is not on a current content property, but a formal generic property of pink as a species of color.
Now it's because of this account of homogeneity that sellers think that we need to forge a new category to be able to understand what sensations are. Because sensations can be functioned and characterized without remaining. We need to come up with a category that will allow us to account for the homogeneity of sensation. homogeneity of content property. And this is why, this is where the concept of pure processes comes in. This is a quote from Selva's foundations or methods of pure
processes. What is primary in the various senses of the verb to buzz is the concept of the intrinsic character of a certain kind of process which can be identified in terms of its typical causes. The verb to buzz then would have a sense in which processes of that intrinsic kind would be buzzings, even when they were not being brought about by one of these typical causes. Thus, in this sense of the verb to buzz, we could say that a buzzing is going on without implying that some object, e.g. a.b, is buzzing. So buzzing then, as an occurring content quality,
is irreducible to the formal properties of its constituents, i.e. the activity of the human. And this then means that the concept of an absolute process, or a pure process, an absolute process is contrasted to an object-bound process. Once you start understanding buzzing as something that occurs independently of bees, the bees in a way that kind of these activities, you know, we can generate the buzzing, you understand that there's something about the buzzing which is an occurring quality, which is not object-bound in the cellarist term. it's there's something going on that it can is that is not the effect of an
underlying cause so the concept of an absolute process is the concept of an intrinsic quality occurring independently of the properties of objects or relations that are on the buzzing is irreducible to the properties of the bees or the relations between the bees just as the pinkness of the ice cube is irreducible to the properties of the molecules, you know, the ice molecule, the relation between those molecules. This occurrence aspect is decided not only because it allows us to conceptualize content qualities independently of any object that might bear them, but also because it provides us with a paradigm of an absolute occurring, an occurring that is not attributable to something that begins and ceases to occur.
So this is why for sellers in the case of absolute processes we can speak of absolute coming to be and ceasing to be because when a sounding for instance a C sharpening begins there is nothing which begins in the relevant sense to sound. So by the same token it's not that although we talk about bees buzzing the The buzzing itself, strictly speaking, can be understood to be going on independently of anything that the bees have been. There are three basic characteristics of absolute process. Intrinsicality. Each, an absolute process is characterized by an intrinsic quality, a somehow-ness.
The somehow-ness is like a current, is the pinkness of the pink, the very pinkness of the pink ice cube in the case of color. it's the very buzzing, the very buzzing-ness of the buzzing in the case of example the bees. That's the intrinsicity, it's an intrinsic quality, a current-ness, the fact that this is a pure actuality and finally homogeneity. So, what Sellers then does is postulates what he calls sensor as theoretical entities which occur as the components of absolute processes traversing the nervous systems of sentient organisms without all absolute processes involving senses.
So the claim is this, is that sensations can play the causal role that they play in causing certain states of awareness, because they involve current content qualities, which have an autonomous and independent ontological status. These current content qualities can be attributed or explained in terms of the micro-physical components of sentient organisms. In other words, no matter how far you look, you will never find anything corresponding to the intrinsic quality of the sensation in the nervous system of the organism that is experiencing that sensation.
The sensor then, the sensor, the singular sensor plural, is the theoretical thing, the thing that is being registered by the organism. Now, sensor are components of absolute processes, but not all absolute processes are sensing, they're both sensing. The characteristics of processes are defined without any reference to organisms. And, you know, because these are the characteristics of absolute processes. Intrinsicality, kernel homogeneity. There's nothing here that involves a reference to sentence as such.
This is why sellers are not white men. So, sensor then and processes are physical, but now we need to distinguish between two different senses of physical, generic and a specific sense of physical to understand if it's possible to claim that sensory processes are physical. A generic sense of physical, an entity is said to be physical, one if it exists in the framework of space and time. The specific sense in which something can be said to be physical is if it's definable in terms of theoretical primitives, adequate to describe completely the actual states, though not necessarily the potentialities of the universe before the appearance of life.
So, what needs to be understood is the relationship then between sensing and processes. And here's another kind of, quite likely quote, which I'll try to unpack. This is sellers again. Whereas the objects of contemporary neurophysiological theory are taken to consist of neurons, which consist of molecules, which consist of quarks, all of which are physical two objects, specifically physical objects. An ideal successor theory formulated in terms of absolute processes, both flying and rowings. What flying and rowings are basically variables, theoretical
variables associated with the pure processes in the generic sense and pure processes in the specific sense. The phi-2ing is something that sounds called a quarking or an electron. This is a process which is physical too, which applies to independently of organic life. Whereas a rowing is a sensory process, it's a current sensing. So these, they still constitute certain of its objects, I use neurons in the visual cortex, that they had rowings as ingredients differing in this respect from purely physical structures. So what does this mean? It means rowings are
things like reddings, buzzings and C sharpings. These are sensory qualities. These will be considered as constituents of nervous systems alongside neurons and the particular entities of which neurons are composed, i.e. molecules and quarks. They would be understood as objects abstracted from underlying physical two processes, such as quarkings and electronics. In the final analysis, however, both quarkings and reddings, i.e. both flyings and rowings, these two generic and specific finger process, would be physical. The ultimate claim would be a kind of physics, a fully developed physics that is capable of integrating the sensory states of organisms.
You no longer have this discontinuity between the inorganic and the organic, which plagues a lot of contemporary philosophy. And in a way, there's lots of forces who try to kind of dissolve discontinuity. But at the point, you can't just do it by fears. You can't just wish it away. You have to work. You have to generate the conceptual resources to actually to break the gap, to achieve properly and explanatory, theoretical solution to the discontinuity between the inorganic and the organic. So, if homogeneity is a structural categorical feature of a current sensation, it need not
be attributable to the organism's component parts to be explicable in terms of their properties and relations. And this means that while the reducibility of a current pinkness for a content property requires its attribution to the constituent parts of the object variant of property, the reducibility of the homogeneity of a current thing does not. The homogeneity of form does not equal the homogeneity of content. This is why ultimately homogeneity is not a current. Homogeneity is a property of a current property such as sensations, but it is not itself an current property, an intrinsic feature of sensation. To qualify a property as a
current is also to qualify as homogenous. Since the property of homogeneity is entailed by the property of occurrence. But to qualify a property as homogenous is not to say that it's occurrence. Now the point here is that I I think that there's a problem with Sellers' analysis, his categorical analysis here. In other words, I think that although if we return to the three basic characteristics of processes, intrinsicity, occurredness and homogeneity, Sellers' made a possible case for the intrinsicity and occurredness
as fundamental characteristics of pro-textism, but not of homogeneity. So I think this is the limitation of his analysis. And this is important because the argument works on the basis of diagnosing a category of dysfunction. So again, Salazar has been misinterpreted, I think, as someone whose motivation for this metaphysics of pure processes is an unwillingness, is simply a kind of table pounding about the undeniable reality of sensory consciousness. but that's not the structure of his argument at all I think his argument
he wants to be able to account for the phenomenon of sensation for explanatory reasons because sensation is what ties us to the world it's also because he thinks that the world must have content as well as form you cannot have this dualism of form and content where mathematical science tracks the form of reality without being able to account for its content. The content remains as something I do not want. So he wants to be able to integrate form and content and to be able to, he wants science to have traction upon the content of reality. And I think his account is immensely attractive and plausible,