This meeting is being recorded. Okay. Right. Okay. Okay. Thank you. And welcome to this conference on an introduction to philosophy of science. It's hosted by Therese Gallery at the Elmihalvi Foundation in New York. This conference is in conjunction with Eric Schmidt's Prodegomenon to a Treatise, which is published by Bower of Alive this year. um thanks to christian at emmy hub foundation richard leslie at bauvelaar macvore and ergan france for their kind sponsorship connor tomica and eric schmidt for organizing both the event last night and the conference today and to all of our speakers for kindly offering to contribute to these talks our speaker is going to talk about 30 minutes each we can start uh with giuseppe longo
followed by rocco gangel at two eastern time then we'll have a short time for questions in a short break and return promptly at three o'clock eastern time for Ian James, followed by Reznor Grastani at 3.30, and at four o'clock we've got Colin McCarthy as a respondent to Ian James and any other talks from today. So to introduce the first speaker, we have Giuseppe Longo. He's a mathematician specialised in logic and computability and is also an epistemologist. For the past 15 years, his work has concentrated on the relationship between mathematics and natural sciences, in particular on evolutionary and organismal biology. His current project develops an epistemology of new interfaces focusing on historical correlations and alternatives to
the new alliance between computational formulisms and the governments of man and nature by algorithms. The title of Giuseppe's talk is Alphabet's Equations, Axioms, DNA on Human Knowledge and the Discreet Charm of Alphanumeric Codings. Thank you for the invitation. Thank you very much. Thank you. Perhaps I started too early. I am pleased to talk to you and the friends I see there. Well, I modified the title, but this meaning is the same as the one you read. I must say that we started two new journals recently that actually set the bridge in the way I will try to do between discussions in foundations of mathematics and natural sciences.
I will start with the critique of mechanics in mathematics and biology, the role of the linguistic term, both in mathematics and biology. And I will try to hint to the approach I'm working with several biologists and theoreticians in approaching evolution and also ontogenesis. that should be unified in our perspective as a foundation of a sound discussion about the organism. We must go back very briefly to the roots of this discussion, which actually begins with the scientific revolution, which was focusing on celestial mechanics. Fantastic turn, of course, because, I mean, there was a relation to the actual production of machines
and most of all the invention of a new mix between observation theory and practice and practice that's the real novelty that came out at first in in Italian Renaissance and then it moved into the European scientific revolution. The approach, though, was deeply embedded into the mechanics, in particular concerning life. Galileo produced the allometry, which is a fantastic idea. It's a mechanical correlations between the size of bones and body. It's a mechanical properties, which is perfectly fair and interesting. Did not formalize this in a broader view, as it was the case for Descartes. I mean, for Descartes, life in general, the universe is a machine, which is made a composition of all its parts that allow to understand the entire structure.
Probably Francis Bacon was even more radical on this because the view of nature as a machine is what made he say that we should modify work on nature as a machine. Indeed, Francis Bacon is still now quoted by the promoters of biotechnologies and GMOs, as I will try to hint at the end. Let's go back to mathematics, where this mechanicistic approach has had a major revitalization. Probably in part, it was already in Leibniz, in other predecessors, but Hilbert made this approach rigorous scientific invented metamathematics in a way that has had many interpretations. Of course, Hilbert was a major mathematician. When he was working, he was working in Cantor's Paradise, as we all know.
However, I will follow the interpretation of Hilbert's work given by Poincaré, Hermann Weil, who many consider his best student, Goethe, Church and Turing by their work. Again, this is not a presentation of Hilbert's view. I will look at the consequences. Philosophy matters also for its consequences. So the views, this philosophical view is beautifully summarized by Poincaré in a long review of the fundamental book of Hilbert, Foundations of Geometry. Poincaré appreciates the technicality and the mathematical depth of the work. However, he totally disagrees with the philosophy. And he Here he says that according to Hilbert, mathematics is like the Chicago sausage machine.
It produces theorems and sausages from peaks and axioms. He also refers to Jevons piano, a tool at the time to mechanically produce music. Herman Weil is not less severe. In his book of 1918, the continuum, insists at least twice that the program of potential mechanism of mathematics is a trivialization trivializes mathematics and it conjectures incompleteness this is something that not many stress but there is a doubtful hesitating conjecture of incompleteness of arithmetic um then he goes even more heavily in a critique of Hilbert in in a posthumous paper published in mathematical intelligence in 53 where he really
addresses the major misunderstanding of the foundational mathematics within the Hilbertian approach and of course Church Goodell and Turing worked with an interpretation of the Hilbert's meta theory as a mechanics okay so they invented machine the fantastic machines that made out from computability and gave us our computers at least the theory of those computers let's go to a reflection on foundation first we all agree that mathematics is abstract is symbolic is reverse let's try to give a hint of what these words very deep difficult words may mean mathematics is absurd i think a way by which we can understand the strength of abstraction
in mathematics is the focus on invariance and their transformations um so symmetries typically But when you start with counting, thinking of counting, we do capture the concept of number as an invariant with several action of countings. Brouwer's intuition of the turnus of time is, of course, something I like, but I think is large and sufficient. You have to think also of the action of counting in space. And so you get an invariant. You need several practices in order to construct the conception invariant. But then there are other fundamental invariant is the notion of trajectory, which is a blend, a sum, a gluing up of retention and pretension, the falling of a continuous trajectory.
I mean, you understand what continuity is when you see the master making a line and then stressing the continuities, the trajectory made. Of course, these deep components of our cognition, I mean, relation to the world, are not sufficient. They are just a condition of possibility for the conceptual construction that we make by abstraction, singling out invariants, and by our symbolic culture. Symbolic, mathematics, symbolic, no doubt. Symbols in Greek means bring together. So it's something complex that is synthetic. Symbols are not signs.
They evoke gestures. They evoke meaning. And so numbers typically are symbols for actions. They are not just signs. They are common invariant, as I said before, of ordering in space and passing of time. And symbols are extremely relevant. Think what happened when Cantor wrote a symbol for infinity, omega, and then started working on it with algebra on it, making addition and multiplication. You have a new world that opens, but this is not just a sign. It is a symbol referring to deep meaning, the ones that had this first symbolic presentation in Daniel Rehman's science, infinity, as the projective point, as a symbolic form of infinity.
And mathematics is rigorous, no doubt. While Kreisel wrote several beautiful papers on that, in particular, the notion of informal rigor that I love, typically Euclid has this form of rigor where, by definition, better. It was introduced later, but it's really very consistent with Euclid's approach. He defines a line with the length, has a length with no thickness. But then symmetry, of course, is the other fundamental tool for rigor in Euclid because they are everywhere in proofs. Symmetry has rotations and translations of the plane where Euclid geometry is done and theorems are proved. Rigor also is beautifully represented in two books that were very important to me in computability theory, namely Davis' Computability and Solvability and Rogers' Wood.
They are both very rigorous, but in a very different way. Devis writes almost fully the Turing machine that computes the function he's interested in. Proving computability for him is really giving almost entirely the formal definition of a function in a formalism, Turing's formalism. For Rogers, a very rigorous book, the reference to the construction is very informal. It never gets into the detail of a regional algorithm, but by an informal discussion, it brings the reader to fully understand that if he or she wants, he or she can write in full
the program computing, computing the function. But it is a much higher level and still very rigorous. I had an exchange with Chrysler many years ago that is downloaded from my web page. Now, at the core of formalism, in my view, in Inverton's perspective, as a foundation, not as a practice of mathematics, of course, as a foundation, is the idea that these three very difficult different notions are identified with being formal. And that's a reduction. That's the trivialization, as Herman Weill says, of mathematics. And then, of course, one can focus on formal proof with the major advantage of inventing a frame for making computability and writing programs, because a computer program is a proof in a suitable environment, is a formal proof in a suitable environment, which is, of course, very interesting.
of course I follow a different perspective which is an epistemological one it's the analysis of the Constitution of a mathematical concept and structures this is for me the foundational analysis the critique of this Constitution and analysis of it I may say that I've been working with some major formulas because their practice was a formal one like Roger Hindley and Hank and by the complementarity of our views, I enjoyed our work very much. So what I've been working at in part, but since many years now, I'm mostly focusing on biology,
but as you will see, starting with the critique, we chose a lot to this perspective, is that for me, uh one has to move from a foundation of mathematics as an annex of a philosophy of language to towards an essential component of philosophy of nature mathematics as part of it then of course it's a matter of an historical analysis and epistemology is also an historical analysis of the invention of objects categories invariants transformation toposes because mathematics is a fundamental tool for setting contours in science and qualifying the real then on working with rigor in sciences in all sciences with reality and the perspective
which is mine is to see where one can make links between the foundations of physics first I've been working at the book with the physicist on this and then now biology by using the conceptual natural richness of mathematics and sometimes the tools of course and that's why I dared many years ago to borrow almost borrow the title from this book of Herman Weil which has been extremely important to me and I wrote with the physicist Francis Bailly a book on mathematics and the natural sciences um the physical singularity of life as we started collaborating with biologists And he, Francis, already did for many years. And that's where my interest in biology began.
Which is the challenge we have in biology? Immediately, a major one is that we have to move from this fantastic role of symmetries, from Euclid geometry to physics. Because as Hermann Weill says, any fundamental principle in physics is a symmetry principle. We know this from Nutter's theorem, Weill's work. We have to move to something very different. The first principle by Darwin, reproduction with the variation, which takes four chapters out of the first six, is absolutely important. selection makes sense after this revolutionary principle because it is total in contrast to bouffant and lamarck to whom he makes a praise i mean he refers to a lot to both of them but he
radically departs in particular from this first principle this is in contrast to physics a non-conservation principle for phenotypes so it's a symmetry breaking darwin is saying anytime there is a reproduction, there is a symmetry breaking. So really it departs from the notion of invariance. Heredity is reproduction with variation. Even breeders insist who try to maintain stability of a species or variety they like, they cannot. There will be a variation every time there is a reproduction. But I've been working, starting from this, and I quote here three books, and the most recent is in italian and let me give some some ideas of this approach and how this relates
first of all i i want to stress that the linguistic turning mathematics can be found again maybe that the role it did have a role also in the dominating foundations theoretization in in biology organismal biology not so much evolutionary biology um because there the consequence of of heaps approach the invention of machine to prove the limits to prove negative results but yet the compatibility theory has been largely borrowed in particular in laboration of information and in somehow also in transmission of information borrowed from shannon um you see the idea of
completeness hilbert's idea of completeness of the axioms as sequences of of letters axioms are sequence of letters is still there the central dogma uh invented the 60s you find it in old books of biology particular doctors in medicine even though the authors will say well we know it's no longer fully true, but it is there because they have no alternative that's around. It is an assumption of completeness. The DNA as a finite sequence of science is complete with respect to ontogenesis. It completely determines ontogenesis. Letters of science. Yes, yes, absolutely. The founding fathers of the dominating genocentric approach to biology, Manon and Jacob,
found the fathers as their beautiful theoretical book that you rarely find as well with this approach. I totally disagree, but they are rigorous, consistent theoretical reflections on how organismal biologists should be theoretized. And indeed, it's an alphabet, you know, like the letters you use and the symbols you use for writing axioms um and um and the the cell is a cartesian mechanism we go back to the mechanicistic approach i mentioned before is autonomous exactly independent from external influences macromolecular interaction are stereo specific this is absolutely fundamental this means they are like gears they they get one into the other exactly
and they are like a boolean algebra like in computers i'm quoting of course the consequence of these are very severe as i will try to in gmos for example and many abuses in gene editing gene driving i participate to an organization which is called european network scientists social mental responsibility our on our commitments is the issue of gmos that are making disasters in the american continent fortunately we don't have them here and not many know this in the american continent is the censorship is very severe in mexico basically they kill people who dare to say what's happening to the soil in in the areas of of core i will say something more
about this um you see i'm not denying in criticizing the genocentric approach the axiomatic the axiomatic completeness of the axiomatic of life i'm not denying the relevance of dna my god is the the chemical phase physical trace of evolution which is present in every cell immensely important constraint to molecular dynamics but of course you have to to move away from this idea that it is a complete description of the organism um you see You see, the core idea, as I said, is the completeness guided by the mechanicity of the macromolecular interactions.
And as I said before, the central dogma still now, quoted everywhere, quoted in the book by the recent Nobel Award in biology, Jennifer Dudna in Berkeley. Her book of 2017 is based on the central document. Which are the consequences? The direct children, as I said before, GMOs are there, but much more. Look at quotations from major biologists who got immense financial support for their work in genocentric approach, particularly interested in cancer. once coded the DNA we will able to transfer decoded DNA the transfer
um you know CD-ROM and say here's human being this is me and the DNA is a set of instruction it's a program complete of course and for example personalized medicine is a concept of this but these you mean that you get to an hospital you encode your DNA on a DVD and you give it to different departments. In time, this will be examined by machines thanks to the big data, and you get to the dream of having medicine without patients and without doctors. You just have to compare your DVD on the grounds of big data. In this frame, after the so-called decoding, which is, of course, a sequencing only of DNA, not the decoding, the sequencing, which is different in spite of the myth.
For example, the then president of the National Cancer Institute in the States, three billion years of financial support, said that, and that's the title of this paper, which is just an amazing paper, um that we will eliminate suffering and death due to cancer in 2015. Cancer has been doubling in incidence in the last 40 years for ecosystemic reasons largely ecosystem reasons that are totally disregarded not studied only focusing on the search for the oncogene the Not the oncogene, the oncosuppressor gene. No attention to endocrine disruptors and the other causes of cancer.
But then it was promised in those years, 2003, 2004, that in two or three years, we would do the agonosis, prognosis, the understanding where the cancer is metastatic, is primary, by looking at DNA. Till now, 20 years later, as you know, probably many of you know, because, you know, any of us has a relative or has a direct experience of cancer. Only the histologists looking at the light microscope can understand whether it is a metastatic or primary cancer, whether it's benign or malign and can try to make some prognosis. looking at the tissue at the light microscope the dna is in a total mess with very rare regularities that may allow to understand one of these instances and yes it is so rare that nobody
can use it and of course as i said before the dna where the real disaster is that because of lack of specificity of molecules it is totally false that when you put it it will kill only the parasite you're aiming at of course it does kill the parasite the glyphosate or in the case of the bt gmos that produce a protein that kills the intended parasites it works in this sense but it destroys the microbiome the fungi the microbial flora and fauna that is fundamental to humus to to make to make agriculture viable in the medium term but only the long term of course you can find the temporary remedy to the fact that the soil becomes like sand by buying enough fertilizers
from Bayer. And as you know, Bayer and Monsanto are now one of the major conglomerates, conglomerates, industrial conglomerates in the world. But then what is a gene, these axioms, defining from which one could deduce, one could deduce the organism. Well, the notion changed five times in the 20th century, and the Misa's understanding of what it is is beautifully explained by a paper of 99, by Collins, who was head of the public program concerning the sequences of DNA. he thought that they they were going to find uh 80 000 genes on the grounds of a wrong wrong
assumption the one gene one protein assumption 50 years old they still he still believed it next year they will say oh no they are 25 000 oh well no they are actually 20 000. Fortunately, the other guy, the private group that actually arrived first in sequencing the DNA, Wenter, a few years later, acknowledged that we learned nothing from the genome. And in the paper, he calls Fani's colleagues who believed on the completeness of the DNA.
Well, what is a gene is very hard to say because, you know, if you call genes, say, the green, the yellow parts here, then proteins are produced like the brown, the red or the blue part. Namely, this is called the overlapping gene. Here's what you would consider gene. And then proteins are produced like this, this or this. That's something discovered long ago in the 70s, ignored for years, and now it seems to be a very common process in the production of protein. But these fantastic constraints to molecular dynamics, which is the fundamental constraints,
the major mistake is there in this exactness, which is totally false, that you still find it in major texts concerning biology. Those gears invented by Monod against evidence, against evidence, are still there, the Cartesian gears of the mechanical approach. This is totally false. We know since the 60s, and it's confirmed everywhere, the proteins never fold in a particular shape, but rather in structure and disorder. In mammals, about 75% of signaling protein proteins and half of all proteins are taught to contain long disordered regions while about 25 percent of all proteins are predicted to be fully disordered many of these intrinsic
and structured proteins are involved in regulatory processes and are often at the center of large protein interaction networks of course under strong canalization these largely stochastic processes are canalized and dominate statistically. With low numbers, that's a major challenge. We cannot trace this process like in statistical physics with huge numbers. Sometimes there are a few hundred, few thousand molecules. And yet one has to invent that that's the core issue, right? Mesoscopic level for these stochastic dynamics.
I would like to mention something which we have been very much concerned recently, the pandemics. In 2015, a paper, a book appeared telling very, very close analysis, the history of the last 60 years, 70 years about the epidemics. epidemics they mean an explosion you see almost an exponential growth of epidemics the the black ones are those who are coming back every year their current ones the most important ones are the white ones you see the growth they are largely zoonosis 70 percent of zoonosis this means they are due to the breaking of niches uh in in the degrading of the biodiversity at the
interface with wild areas where breeders introduce concentrated animals in breeding and as the explosion was clear to everybody since the early 90s and this book of 2015 represented which is then the probable origin of covid we have no idea because it could be a and the investigation, they're still not fully sure about that. Many claim that it's been a elaborate escape. You know, this was an attempt of editing, of manipulating DNA with the idea that it's a program. You can do a combinatorial activity with it.
And the debate is open. I was sure that in 2015, the Obama administration stopped the gain of function, these particular forms of gene editing for very, very large project, apparently more than $20 million, because there had been many laboratory escapes. This pose was stopped by Trump in 2017. The point is that there are fantastic technologies that allow to manipulate DNA in lots of ways. I mean, technically, the tools are extraordinary.
It is the lack of science. I mean, this is a techno science. an amazing amount of technologies coming from outside, crystallography, electronics, even computer science, providing tools to manipulate the DNA, very cheap tools today. But those guys don't know what they are doing. You know, it's like those who have a genocentric approach and do this kind of work. In a paper, I compared it with the geocentric approach, a paper with with former student of mine, Matteo Mossio, we carry on a very close approach of the genocentric approach, the comparison between the genocentric approach and the geocentric approach, the Ptolemy approach.
It would be like giving a rocket capable to reach Mars to people believing in a geocentric approach. It would be a disaster because, of course, not only would never reach Mars with epicycles, looking at planets and moving like epicycles, but also because they wouldn't be able to consider that the Earth is turning, the rocket would fall on the next city. It may have happened also with elaborate escapes. So in all those cases, my precaution principle is not only the ones we always discuss, which are certainly sound, is more deep. But you see such a blatantly false theoretical frame,
one should not work technically in such, in seeing this way. Then again, I insist, I do not consider DNA as irrelevant, is a fundamental constraint, which is an historical trace of the entire evolution and is inside. very original situation. I would strongly advise a beautiful book by Wes Eber, an evolutionist in 2003, where she gives lots of examples and the sound theoretical frame for evolution, where I will understand that genes are followers most of the time. In the same cases, they may be drivers, of course, of evolution, but most of the time they are followers. There is a beautiful case of the
cave fishes, you know, they are blind. They live in caves. There are about 100 species. They are close enough so one can make easily hybrids. The hybrids have their eyes and functionalize many times. The DNA is there for producing eyes. It's there. But the proteins needed are there. But they're not used. Probably the methylized, I don't know. But it is there. Okay, I will stop shortly. We need to invent new principles because the fact that there are some applications is not a proof of the validity of a theory. You know, with the geocentric approach,
the Toremaic approach, they constructed the Alphonson table that were used by the Christian kings and their navigators in Spain and Portugal to drive and discover America, for example. This was based on amazing work by the Arabic tradition. In the Arabic tradition of localizing all planets, they made tables with all visible celestial bodies with measures of an incredible precision, fantastic technique, theoretical frame, or rock. Okay. So the consequence of this linguistic turn has been very severe.
I don't know if the consequence, probably there was certain autonomy, of course, but there is a mechanicistic common view, which is at the ground of the scientific revolution, with major merits in physics, in celestial mechanics, but of course a disaster in understanding life. um so my personal work and understanding what is biological sense perhaps I should go somewhat fast here and our proposal concerns first the molecular level they are largely stochastic but of course they are contextual and canalized constrained by all levels of organizations the fact is that almost all most common phenotypes use almost all DNA find it everywhere
so we are moving from the central dogma to what's Nobles calls biological relativity then is novel um namely there is no privileged causal level in biology all level of organization from the DNA, of course, to the cell, the tissue, the organs, the ecosystem contribute to the stability and the dynamics, both of ontogenesis and evolution. So my perspective tries to unify the epistemology at least, or the critique. For me, an analysis foundation is not a search for absolute certainties but the critique of the principles and to see the bridges and connections
between different approaches and unified as much as possible in our case evolution and organism and of course here a major role is given by the symmetries and their breaking which is absolutely central in biology it goes with the peculiarity of historicity in biology and viability Here are some readings, some classical texts, and then a paper of two former students of mine that nowadays is a major researcher in theoretical biology, which I think is truly a seminal paper. And here are three books that I co-authored in the last 10, 20 years.
Okay, well, thank you very much. Thank you, Giuseppe. So, our second speaker is Rocco Gangl. He's a philosopher whose current research focuses on metaphysics, semiotics, diagrammatic logic, and category theory. Rocco is also one of the foremost translators and expositors of the work of contemporary French thinker Francois Laruel. Rocco has published several books, including Diagrammatic Imminence, Category Theory and Philosophy in 2015, and with Jane Luca Caterina, Iconicity and Abduction in 2016.
He's the co-director of the Centre for Diagrammatic and Computational Philosophy at Endicott College. Booker Gangl talk on diagrammatic gestures of friendship in Plato's Mino Are we good? I hope so Is my audio coming through? Yeah, that's great Thanks so much Ben I wanted to thank first of all the organisers Richard and Leslie and the rest of the people here at the emily harvey foundation organizing this the other participants today eric pulling together this conference it's great to be to be with you all actually and virtually
and yeah really enjoying being able to be here um so i have a slightly different uh title for the talk. Just a simplifying a bit, just scientific friendship in the form of a question. And the basic idea of the talk is to pose not so much a dilemma, because I don't mean
it to be some sort of forced binary choice and decisive problem that science would have to confront but rather a kind of almost a kind of double bind that i think science finds itself in with respect to its um contemporary program of naturalization of various traditional philosophical domains that naturalizing metaphysics naturalizing ethics naturalizing phenomenology is a kind of ongoing research program at least since quine it's very live in
many different domains of philosophy and in a nutshell it's a matter of turning over traditional philosophical domains to the sciences and i think there's a lot to be said for naturalizing various domains and there's a kind of evangelical impulse behind it that's quite positive the sense that we can uh if you think of someone like wilfrid sellers that we can um use the scientific image of human beings to have a more a richer and richer understanding of ourselves that can supplement what sellers calls the manifest image or just our ordinary interpretation of humanity. But I think that there's a kind of essential problem in that program and related
programs. And I want to try to shed light on this double bind or conundrum by contrasting the position of contemporary science with a very particular image of friendship that I think is canonical for the Western tradition, the notion of friendship coming out of Plato. And what I want to do is sort of push an interpretation where the notion of friendship or philia is really at the heart of Plato's entire philosophical project, that Platonism is best thought of not as the positing of some sort of world of ideas beyond ours, but the essence of Platonism is actually the construction of a certain kind of social fabric through a particular mode of friendship
motive philia um and i'm going to try to draw out this interpretation through the dialogue of the men and in order to try to um get the the meno and science sort of on the same page it's worth thinking that the common term the common denominator of this platonic dialogue and contemporary scientific practice would be reasoning through diagrams or reasoning through models this is going to be a kind of common term to the two projects so the menno before um getting to that but um just as a framework um there's a really wonderful introduction to
philosophy of science i'd recommend if anyone is sort of interested in this field it's by the philosopher of science peter godfrey smith it's called theory of reality and the uh subtitle is an introduction to philosophy of science and he opens that book which is a nice survey of the field um with i think a pretty straightforward uncontroversial way of thinking of philosophy of science that modern science um as uh giuseppe longo was pointed out in the previous talk going back to galileo um kind of 17th century scientific revolution it really has sort of it's a it's a stool that has three legs uh the first leg is empiricism right we have observation of the world in various modalities there's the use of mathematics and there's some kind of social
structure that determines the community of researchers right i think you know an index of that would be the emergence of the scientific world view in conjunction with say the royal society in london right which developed the notion of peer review the idea of the scientific journal which are still kind of the bread and butter of scientific practice today at a planetary level. So I think it's clear that using diagrams or using models connects with the first two components, right? It's a way of constructing something that can be directly observed, but also can serve for some kind of distraction. It can be mathematicized. What I want to try to push is the idea that diagrammatic thinking and model based reasoning
also might have a certain kind of social formation connected with it. In particular, through Plato, it might have a certain image of friendship connected to it that might be in some ways incompatible with the kind of diagrammatic or model based reasoning endemic to science. So the Menno, in a nutshell, is a platonic dialogue between Socrates and a sort of aristocrat from Thessaly named Menno. Menno is a student of some of the more prominent sophists of the day, and he's kind of proud of his learning and his skills now in argumentation. And he poses this question to Socrates, who's his guest.
he says well where does virtue come from can virtue be taught is it acquired through practice is it built into us by nature or some other means in short how do we get virtue um and socrates following the traditional uh sort of socratic protocols um tries to undermine the question says well we can't even ask how do we acquire virtue until we know what it is and this gets Socrates and Menno started on a long conversation about the relationship between knowledge, metaphysics, and virtue. And the one point that I want to begin with is sort of in the middle of the dialogue. At one point, Socrates, I think in reaction to Menno's desire to argue like
a sophist, right? And to throw up sort of easy arguments that are meant to force the opponent maybe into some kind of false dilemma and these kinds of things. Socrates says, well, let's really argue as friends. And he says, if people want to engage in discussion with one another as friends, the way you and I are doing right now, right? Notice the indexical dimension where he points as we are talking here, you and I, Socrates and Menno, if we're going to do this kind of talk, this form of discourse, in other words, if we're going to speak as friends, we must answer more gently, right, according to gentleness, prowls, and in a more dialectical manner. And it's perhaps
more dialectical not to answer the truth alone, but to do so in terms which the answerer agrees he knows. So the image here is not a matter of finding truth as against what is false, but of working with an interlocutor according to the particular aptitudes and capabilities of that interlocutor, so as to guide that individual into a relationship to the truth, right? It's dependent upon the features of the members of the conversation. And at a crucial juncture in the dialogue, um socrates introduces the thesis that the soul is immortal because they're trying to to deal with the problem of how can we uh inquire towards truth if we don't possess it already and if we possess
it already why would we need to inquire this is sort of menno's objection in a kind of way to the very project of inquiry right inquiry is impossible um and socrates says well maybe not Maybe we have knowledge within us. We just need to bring it to awareness. We need to remember this knowledge that has been somehow part of us but forgotten. And the surprising hypothesis that he proposes is that the soul is immortal, that we have lived, as Nietzsche will later say in the Eternal Recurrence, infinitely many times. We have lived before and infinitely many times more. And in this, although rather than living the same life over and over as in Nietzsche, in this hypothesis, we have lived many, many lives over and over and over experiencing all these different things.
Therefore, if we just look into those past forms of experience, we can recover the knowledge that we've always had. And this is the notion of anamnesis, unforgetting, as the model of knowledge. So strategically to sort of justify this hypothesis, Socrates says, let me show you what I mean. This idea of the immortality of the soul, bring one of your household slaves, Menno. And Menno grabs one of his household slaves, who remains nameless. And Socrates says
to the slave, do you know anything about geometry? And the slave being uneducated said, no, I don't know anything. And Socrates says, well, let's show through a process involving a kind of diagram, how the knowledge that you think you don't have is really already within you. So he poses to the slave boy this problem in geometry given a square of a certain size how can you construct a square of exactly twice the size twice the air it's a kind of puzzle and the um the slave boy thinks about it for a little bit um and says well let's just make a square you know with the side twice as big which seems quite reasonable right and socrates says something well let's draw it out let's
construct a diagram and test this out. And so if you see the darker square in the lower left, think of that as the first square that's drawn. And then Socrates kind of guiding the slave says something to the effect, well, can you divide that square into equal parts into halves up and down and then the slave does something like that. This is, well, now can you do the same thing, but rather than making smaller squares, make them larger? won't that be a square of twice the length of each side and you get something like this so you can imagine the slave kind of drawing this somewhere in the dirt and then you can see right empirically just by inspection that it doesn't work because you can see that the number
of the original square that fit into the larger square is four not two so we've doubled the length for the side we have four times the area so now working on the same diagram right constructed this way um the slave proposes the hypothesis well maybe you know one is obviously too small two seems to be too big maybe the right ratio is something like three to two maybe we need a side that's about one and a half times as long somewhere in between so you kind of test it out on the diagram you get something like this and again just by visual inspection you can see that the ratio of the areas is nine to four not eight to four so it's a little bit too big well at this
point the slave is quite puzzled socrates suggests to the slave trying out the construction along a diagonal he says well what have you heard about this this term that the geometers use the diagonal draw one of those the slave draws it and then on the basis of that construction he's able to get the answer right and again what's the truth in this case that the larger square is twice the area of the smaller you can just count the smaller square is composed of two triangles the larger square is exactly four of the same size triangles so now the slave has has solved the problem and the dialogue then continues and develops in a lot of different
directions. But just to focus on this episode with the diagram, which is meant to provide a kind of direct evidence of this hypothesis of the immortality of the soul, what I'd like to focus on is the kind of semiotics that's involved in this exchange between Socrates and the slave. The diagrams have a very unique mode as signs, right, ways of signifying, because they represent their object, right? The reasoning is not about this particular square, but about squares in general. But by drawing a diagram, the particular square that's projected on the screen serves the role of representing any square whatsoever and with the kind of reasoning that's involved in
diagrammatic discourse we can perform constructions on a diagram inspect details of a diagram and infer statements truths about the object of the sign on the basis of what is directly observable in the diagram now it's not guaranteed of course we can always make mistakes but it's a particular way of using signs so um you might be familiar with the um the notion of semiotics coming out of charles perps which i think i find i think is very useful for thinking about this kind of thing and this is one of many places where purse defines a sign or represent a man in essentially the same way right different formulations but they all amount to the same thing as complicated as it
seems it boils down to a relatively simple idea which is any sign is a relation between the sign itself which he calls the representative and the thing that that sign is meant to represent which is the object so we have a relation of representiment to object but that relation isn't a signifying relation until that relation itself is such that it is capable of bringing some third thing the interpret it by way of a relation to the representative into that particular relationship to the object. So Peirce insists that genuine signification is always a triadic relation.
It's never just a relationship between signified and signifier, for example. It's always a, if you want to use the terms of so sure it is a relation of signifier to signified such that some mind which might be something like a computer algorithm doesn't have to be a conscious being but something some third thing by being brought into relation in the appropriate manner with the signifier will by that relation be carried mediated to the object or the signified um and so we have if you look at the top part of this schema, right, a way of kind of turning this into a diagram, the representiment is in relation to its object in such a way that the interpretant brought into
relation to the representiment will, through almost a kind of composition of arrows, be brought into a determinant relation to the object. And the one thing that I want to emphasize in thinking of this in the context of the menno right uh regardless of the interesting characteristics of the diagrammatic form of signification which there's there would be a lot to be said when a representiment is a diagram it it has an iconic relation to the object that allows for certain forms of reason the only thing i want to emphasize uh here is that socrates plays a role that is outside the semiotic triad that he's something like a facilitator right it's it's the the slave who
is the interpretant manipulating the diagram in order to come to some kind of understanding but it wouldn't work in the die in the dialogue itself were socrates not to guide the slave in certain constructions right so socrates is i here i'm just putting plate uh proposing this role of facilitator by definition a facilitator is something that facilitates the relationship of interpretant to representament in the appropriate way so that the semiotic triad can obtain and then when we to get to platonic friendship what i find fascinating about the dialogue is that this facilitating relationship actually gives us something like a concrete
instantiation, a kind of diagram of a certain mode of philosophical friendship. So at level one, the interior most boundary, we have the slave looking at the diagram, reasoning about something. And I want to hold off now on this something, it's just a black dot, because it's not at all clear what exactly the object of this representament is. Is the slave learning something about the area of a square? Is that the end of the day? Or is the slave learning something about his own soul? Or is he learning something about the equality of his soul with the soul of his master, Memma? Right. The status of what is learned in that semiotic triad is the object of the sign is open.
Right. There's a lot going on. Whatever is being learned. Right. The slave is learning it through the manipulation of the diagram. But those manipulations are being facilitated by Socrates. Right. But why is Socrates doing this at all? he introduces this episode with the slave, not because he wants to teach the slave geometry, but because he wants to make a point in his dialogue with Menno. He's engaged in this relationship with Menno, and he says, look, let me show you that the soul is immortal. Bring me one of your slaves, and I'll demonstrate something. So the entire operation, the entire process whereby the slave comes to this realization about the diagonal of a square is serving the semiotic purpose
of teaching Menno something. But again, Socrates is playing a role facilitator. So Menno is meant to learn by watching the exchange between Socrates and the slave. Again, something, right? A black dot. What is he supposed to learn? Certainly something about the immortality of the soul, but probably a lot else as well. Right. A lot of things are caught up in the thing that Socrates is trying to show men. But then we go one level further. Right. And I think Plato is very self-consciously doing this. Plato, as soon as we've gone up one level, implicitly we can keep going up. Right. And this is something that we see again and again in Plato is this idea that once we have a relation between terms,
we can always leverage that relation through a kind of transcendence. Probably the clearest example of this is the notion of the divided line in the Republic. Take a line, divide it in two unequal portions. You then get some kind of ratio, say A to B, and then divide each of those portions, A and B, by the same ratio. And the idea that a relation is the kind of thing that can appear at successive hierarchical levels and yet be the same relation is, I think, exactly what Plato intends by philosophical friendship. That that formal relationship of relations is something that can actually be brought into the world in constituting a certain form of community.
right so plato is writing this text right we the readers are watching this event with menno and we then through plato's facilitation are brought into some kind of understanding of something again a black dot we don't know exactly what it is but there's some meaning of the dialogue is all that Plato is just telling to us, but trying to encourage us to see by watching the relationships that take place between Socrates and Menno, and among those is the relationship of Socrates slave, right? So what I'd like to suggest is that the Platonic image of friendship is something like
the identity of those three black dots, to take processes of coming to understand and to see them as ultimately coinciding with a single object. That object is the kind of relations and the form of community that is capable of bringing that kind of understanding to light and extending it to a further level so that the movement of transcendence and leveraging that goes from level one to level two to level three is not occasional or accidental, but essential to the kind of activity that these philosophers are engaged in, right? That's what makes it philosophical friendship rather than just philia in the ordinary sense, like, oh, we have something in common.
Philosophical friendship is the kind of friendship that is capable of self-leveraging and self-scaling without limit right which is why it is in principle a kind of universal structure um i've tried to work out this um this argument uh in a uh a chapter in a book that's coming out next year by uh edited by um charles uh alany francesco lamantia and fernando zalmaia diagrams and gestures. But the conclusion in that in that chapter is to say, even this way of thinking about the Menno, we can kind of abstract a thesis, which would be that philosophical
friendship works along three axes. It facilitates discovery, right? It encourages new knowledge. But then the it's in parentheses there, the kind of syntax that I'm borrowing from French philosopher François Larorel is to say that what makes it philosophical friendship is that as it facilitates discovery of whatever domain chemistry mathematics astronomy it's always facilitating discovery of itself as the kind of community that is capable of generating that kind of knowledge so it's facilitating knowledge but always also self-knowledge it's demonstrating relation
right? It's always indexical. Philosophical friendship shows we here right now are doing this, right? And it might be relations that are chemical, right? Or material, physical, but it's always also social relationships, the relationships of the friendship itself. So it's demonstrating relations and always also demonstrating its own relations. And finally, it dissolves closure. It always refuses some kind of final statement of truth, right? Assumes the truth is always infinite, right? And also at the same time, dissolves its own closure, right? The form of universality in philosophical friendship would say is as soon as we've restricted the community of philosophers to
the Greeks alone, right? Or to whatever community, right? We have failed to realize philosophical friendship because it is not only dissolving closure with respect to truth in general, but its closure, right? Its own limits are constantly being transgressed. So this is a kind of picture, let's say a schema of an idea of philosophical friendship. And incidentally, if this is right about Plato, right, which is really just a kind of speculative hypothesis, right, is really based on just this one dialogue. But the one thing that I love about this hypothesis is if it's a fair representation of what Plato was doing, it would go a long way for accounting for why Platonism in particular was so successful
in grafting itself into the two world traditions of Christianity and Islam. It's often thought that those, you know, these religious traditions sort of borrow Platonism. But I like to think of it actually the other way around. It's as if Platonic knowledge and friendship is a certain abstract form that's just waiting for certain kinds of revelatory historical events that are going to constitute communities that will look for the logic that they need to do the kind of thing they want. And Platonism is waiting there, packaged perfectly to serve that role. If this picture of philosophical friendship is right, it would explain why Christianity and Islam in particular, in their claims both to specificity, specific relations linked to particular texts, particular moments of incarnation and so forth,
can also by that very notion constitute at least an in principle universal community right um but that's sort of just an aside but i that's that's one way to think of why this notion of friendship might be um might be interesting but then to to kind of close up my main point here is that that picture of philosophical friendship seems to me in certain respects incompatible with a typical understanding of science and the scientific community. So this is obviously just a kind of brutal schema, but I think it captures something important, which is that the semiotic relation of science takes as its object something like realitas,
things as they are independent of any mind that thinks of them. So whatever reality is, we take it almost as an axiom that reality is the kind of thing that would be what it is, regardless of what it is we think about it. And how does science work? Well, it has a very complicated, elaborate, multilevel relationship among theories, practices and models. Right. But if we bundle all of those things, right, and just presume, OK, whatever the complexity is there at the end of the day, the scientific community is engaging semiotically models that represent theories in order to capture something of reality. Again, kind of brutal,
but I think fair, at least for realist conceptions of science. But then the only point I want to make is that that very relationship, which prioritizes reality as independent, necessarily rejects some sort of inherent leveraging of the relation of the scientific community to society at large as a basic element of that semiotic triad. In other words, the scientific community seems to no longer be scientific if they say what makes us scientists is that we are engaged with the larger community in particular relations that are ultimately being leveraged to transform society in the light of some kind of universality
and transcendence, right? For a scientist to speak that way immediately makes them something like a philosopher, maybe even a Platonist, and no longer a scientist. So to conclude, you know, I want to put a question mark. I don't think it's necessarily a hard dilemma. I think there are ways probably to overcome it, but it seems at least at first sight that we have a problem for science. On the one hand, science depends upon a kind of radical equality of the members of the community. Whoever counts as a scientist counts as such in the same way that every other scientist does, which is another way of saying that the work of science is meant to depend upon experiment and observation that is independent of the particularities of the
researcher. If a researcher makes reference to some special character, like Socrates did, of hearing a special voice of the diamond, then they're not really a scientist anymore. Each scientist, they might have skills, they might have special insights, but as a scientist, their work puts them at a level of radical equality, a little bit like in Ranciere. Ranciere, I think, according to this model, would have a picture of philosophy and knowledge more on the image of science, that no one gets to be Socrates, right? And there's good reason, of course, to reject this platonic vision. It requires a kind of authoritative figure who has some kind of secret, right? Bestows the right facilitation. But that epistemic universality by equality seems incompatible with a project of social universality, at least the kind of social universality that takes place
through this self-referential leveraging, where we would say, look at who we are, look at how who we are and what we are doing can be used to transform and extend who we are and what we're doing ultimately to a universal community. That particular semiotic move that I've tried to identify in Plato seems to me incompatible with science. And I'll then leave it there. I'm interested in hearing from anyone if that's, if you can solve the dilemma, if the dilemma is real, and what status it might have. Yeah, thanks. OK.
Do we have any questions at the minute? Maybe some of our other speakers, do you want to start? I could do a quick question perhaps. Yep. Hi, I had a question for you Giuseppe. I admired the way you sort of sketched out genocentrism. I couldn't hear you. I'm sorry. There's something wrong on the line somewhere. Can you repeat your question? Can you hear me now? Yes, there was.
I'll try and be a bit clearer. So I just wanted to ask you about epigenetics. You spoke about the marginalization of epigenetics. And certainly for the way a lot of biochemistry and microbiology is done in my neck of the woods, in my institution, everything you say, I think, holds largely true. But it does seem to me that epigenetics has been expanding in the last 10 to 15 years. Could you say a bit more about how you feel it's been marginalized? Well, you know, Valdenton and Barbara McClintock, who were pioneers in the 30s and 40s, were not quoted for 20, 30 years.
Pietelli Palmerini, who was a postdoc in Paris in the 70s, in his book says that it was forbidden to go and visit Valdenton in Britain, and it was forbidden to quote Barbara McClintock. And Monod said, oh, well, she saw something important, but she didn't get it. Because, of course, she was discovering the epigenetic control of gene expression in mice. And then in core. And then Vaditon, of course, who is the inventor of epigenetics. Yes, there is a revitalization with major difficulties, though. And, you know, simply people working, for example, on RNA, the role of RNA in the proteome.
Catherine Carrico was a pioneer in the 90s. She couldn't get tenure. Then with her work, now they did Pfizer and Moderna vaccine. I mean, you know, and Morin in France, in Canary, in France, Bruno Canary in France, could not be financed for 20 years. He was trying to understand the autonomous role of RNA in a proton. So that's, you know, producing, contributing phenotypes independently. They are simply not financed. Of course, there is an increasing trend. But, you know, there is the myth of the magic bullet, which is entirely genocentric. You get there, you modify something, and you obtain exactly the phenotype.
This kind of myth is still there. And as I told you, Jennifer Doudna, who got the Nobel Award in her 20s, in her book of 2017, is still there entirely. The technical contribution she did is fantastic. She and Charpentier, a French researcher, they transferred something that happens in bacteria as a way in which bacteria modify the DNA of viruses. They transfer it in laboratory. Fantastic technique. The science around it, nothing. I mean, it's just aura. I wrote a survey of her book, eight pages survey.
You can find it on my webpage. Okay, any more questions? Anyone in this in the gallery corner? Well, if anyone online has a question, just type it into the chat or just unmute yourself. Okay.
Well, should we take a short break, do you think now? And then start the rest at like, let's say, 3 o'clock? It's 10 minutes? Do you want a bit more? 10 minutes, okay? Yeah. Okay. And then we'll take some more questions so that everyone spoke to the end. Okay, so we'll take a short break, okay? So see you back at 3 o'clock. Thank you.
Right, okay. So, right, in our second part we will have Ian James and Rezan Negarastani, and then following straight from those we'll have Colin McCarty as a respondent. So Ian James is Professor of Modern French Philosophy and Literature at Cambridge University. Ian's research focuses on 20th century and contemporary French literature and philosophy. He's written written extensively on contemporary French philosophy and also on the reception in France of German thought. Ian's most recent book, The Technique of Thought, 2019, explores the relationship between post-deconstructive French philosophy and the sciences in order to elaborate its own
distinctive form of philosophical naturalism. One aspect of his current research engages with bio deconstruction, semiotics and biological theory in order to further develop the post continental naturalism elaborated in his book The Technique of Thought. Ian James will talk on scientism, biosemiotics and semiotic imminence. Over to you. Thank you. I've just shared my screen. Can you see it? Yeah, that's fine. Yeah. Thank you. I'm just starting the slideshow. So just struggling here slightly. Okay, you should be able to see it now.
Yeah, right. Okay, thank you. I want to echo Rocco's thanks to the organizers. I'm exceptionally pleased to be on this panel and part of this event. So the first part of my paper is scientism. Contemporary scientism might be understood in the context of recent work in the philosophy of science, such as that undertaken by James Lederman and Don Ross. from their perspective that of untick structural realism what is required is and i quote a metaphysics that is motivated exclusively by attempts to unify hypotheses and theories that are taken seriously
by contemporary science scientism understood in this metaphysical manner would take scientific knowledge as its exclusive authority regarding matters of the ultimate truth and being of the universe. In this way, the scientific metaphysics that is proposed here would, for Lederman and Ross at least, restrict its scope to the activity of unifying science as a whole in order to produce a coherent scientific picture which brings together in consilience fundamental physics and all the other special sciences. On the face of it then, they concede that other dimensions of non-physical, qualitative and non-scientifically objectifiable being have their own domain.
They write, I quote, people who wish to explore the ways in which the habitual or intuitive anthropological conceptual space is constructed are invited to explore social phenomenology, and they avow in most conciliatory fashion, we say, go in peace to Heideggerians. Sadly, however, no such conciliation really seems viable from the perspective of ontic structural realist scientism. For elsewhere, Leidemann and Ross argue unequivocally that speculative ontology has no place in an objective scientific understanding of the world. and that naturalized metaphysics must be inspired and constrained by our best science,
and that therefore philosophy is continuous with science to the point one might argue of being almost entirely absorbed by it and subordinated to it. Such a radical, scientific metaphysics ultimately emerges as rapaciously eliminative of all those dimensions of experience that might concern what they referred to as social phenomenology. Ladyman and Ross are quite explicit in their belief that qualia, and therefore by extension qualitative experience per se, are the unknowable non-structural components of reality. And they affirm that on their view, qualia are idle wheels in metaphysics, and that ontic structural realism imposes a moratorium on such purely speculative philosophical toys.
In this, they rejoin and reaffirm, whether they like it or not, I would say, the traditional core belief of scientism, namely that the physical and biological sciences will provide an adequate, indeed the essential and fundamental framework for any ultimate truths that might be said to underpin all other non-scientific disciplines, those of the humanities and of the social sciences. On matters of scientific reductionism, Ladyman and Ross offer complex and nuanced arguments that I can't revisit here. But given that they dismiss Qualia as idle wheels in metaphysics and eliminate them from its domain of ultimate existence and truth, might one wonder whether they cannot, along with theories such as that of eliminative materialism, be anything but crudely reductive of qualitative experience per se in all its multiple forms.
In this way, contemporary scientism, together with its metaphysics, are confronted with a key debate that is to be located in biology relating to the qualitative and quantitative dimensions of life and the activity of living organisms and how the former, the qualitative, might become an object of biological science. The arguments relating to scientism, its metaphysics, and the relation of both to the tradition of continental philosophy are to be played out, I would venture, within biology, and more specifically within the anti-reductionist orientation of contemporary biosemiotic theory. Part two, biosemiotics.
biosemiotics can be defined briefly and schematically in the words of one of its leading figures jesper hoffmeyer as a science whose core tenet is i quote that the semiotic dynamic constitutes a vital key to a more complete biochemical understanding without which the fundamental biochemical organization of life processes cannot satisfactorily be explained It has also been defined variably as the study of qualitative diversity in biological organisms, and perhaps most ambitiously as the thesis that semiosis is coextensive with life as such.
The immediate origins of biosemiotics lie in key developments of the last decades of the 20th century, in the work of mid 20th century precursors who, in unconnected ways, made links between biology and both cybernetics and semiotics, and in early 20th century contexts, most notably the thought of Jacob von Uxku. Its most decisive inspiration and original moment is the thought of the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce and his triadic theory of signs. So the philosophical underpinnings and hinterland of biosemiotics are American pragmatist, but also distinctly continental, insofar as Peirce's thought is marked by the influence of Kant and Hegel and von Uxsker's scientific outlook by the prevalent neocantionism of his day.
The aims of biosemiotics as a sub-discipline of biology, but also as a would-be overarching theoretical framework for biology as a whole, are conceptual and broadly philosophical, and place themselves in opposition to what it sees as the reductionism and latent Cartesianism that has historically been widespread in the scientific study of living organisms of all kinds. The argument, or polemic, can be outlined as follows. Any biology that holds life to be nothing other than chemistry and molecules reduces it to mechanistic explanations and notions of cause and effect that connect purely physical interactions. The dominant concepts understanding are underpinning our understanding of biological structure and of living organisms would be those of machine and mechanism.
We've heard already a lot about that today. Biology in this form thus ultimately reduces to chemistry and physics. This necessarily proposes, presupposes, that something like mind, consciousness or qualitative and subjective experience are somehow ontologically separate from biological and physical. Such a presupposition being, of course, the central commitment of Cartesian dualism. From here, it's an easy step from the modern scientific perspective that purports not to believe in dualism, either to unthinkingly carry over the Cartesian divide in a vestigial manner by treating physiology and mind as distinct and entirely separate domains, or to simply deny the real existence of mind and consciousness per se.
The former outcome has, for example, been discerned by those who argue that an unthought or unacknowledged Cartesian legacy of the mind-body split still pervades much contemporary cognitive neuroscience. The latter outcome can be discerned in limited materialist positions, where it is not only denied that non-human life possesses anything like a mind or qualitative experience, but also that our own, specifically human experience of subjectivity, consciousness or qualia are anything other than the epiphenomenal and illusory products of pervasively held folk psychologies. colleges. Yet if we proceed down an uncompromising reductionist and eliminative path, the outcome
is not one of a happy or untroubled scientistic and monistic physicalism. For what eliminative reductionist positions in effect achieve is a preservation and privileging of one half of the Cartesian dualism, that of physiological mechanism obeying laws reducible to physical cause and effect. At the very same time, these positions disavow and leave entirely unexplained the other half of the dualism, that of consciousness, mind, and qualitative experience, whilst arguably, of course, being still dependent on that other half as that which allows them to be developed and held as scientific positions. Either way, such positions knowingly or unknowingly maintain
Cartesian dualism intact. Leading practitioners and theoreticians of biosemiotics, such as Klaus Emesch and Kalevide Kulv, have argued that this retention of a vestigial and unthought Cartesianism in biology constitutes a form of scientism that is arguably mired in self-contradiction. Such an image of science closely resembles the perspective of scientism that I've just described. Now, a biologically reductionist position might well accuse biosemiotics in its attempt to introduce qualitative meaning into the study of life of a range of unconscionable errors and unscientific epistemological or ontological regressions, those of anthropomorphism, vitalism, mystical panpsychism, or simply the adoption of an empirically unverifiable metaphysics.
The biosemiotic perspective, however, would return the accusation in kind by arguing that reductionism results in an unsustainable eliminativism, which strips all life of its qualitative dimension, whilst leaving itself entirely unable to explain how qualitative experience, including that which underpins scientific doctrine as such, might evolve or emerge within life processes in the first place. biosemiotics thus seeks to move beyond cartesian dualism once and for all but not by embracing one half of that dualism at the expense of the other either physicalism or idealism in a way that always ultimately preserves the separation and opposition of its two constitutive poles rather
it understands life itself in terms of the qualitative needs demands and purposive functionality of biological organisms as they negotiate their activities and ongoing survival in surrounding environments. In so doing, it rejects the elimination of qualia found in reductionist, eliminativist, and physicalist positions, and seeks a theoretical and conceptual grounding for biology that might allow for a still strictly scientific understanding of the ontological continuity between the two cartesian poles of res extensa and res cogitans in short biosemiotics seeks a more theoretically mature understanding of the way the qualitative dimension of life
progressively emerges and complexifies alongside and with biological form as jesper hoffmeyer has put it in one of his seminal works the one that you see displayed here biosemiotics does not turn experimental biology into metaphysics, but instead replaces an outdated metaphysics, the thought that life is only chemistry and molecules, with a far better, more contemporary and more coherent philosophy. Hoffmeier's position here echoes that of Robert Rosen, who, in elaborating his own anti-reductionist theory of relational biology, insists that in order to make progress, science and most pressingly 20th century biological scientists
need to examine their fundamental philosophical commitments or their, I quote, basement of epistemology and ontology and what they call metaphysics. It's worth noting that Rosen's relational biology has been called upon as an ally of biosemiotics in its attempt to establish itself as a science, not least because Rosen explicitly shares the critical understanding of the Cartesian legacy within modern biology that has just been described, and with this a questioning of the dominant notions of machine and mechanism. In this context, the establishment of biosemiotics as a science has far wider implications than that of a simple reform or renewal of biology. It very much wants to position itself as a legitimate scientific theory that will
have a transformative impact on biological standing, practice, and progress. Yet it also seeks to situate itself within a wider shift in the fundamental assumptions that guide our knowledge in general. As Aaron Garr has put it, biosemiotics is at the centre of the struggle to overcome Cartesian dualism and to overcome the rift between science and the humanities. This is so, I would argue, precisely because of biosemiotic theory's philosophical underpinning by and hinterland within the European continental philosophical tradition, which of course, after Kant, places questions of the possibility of experience, consciousness, and their qualitative
dimension of meaning at centre stage. I indicated earlier the Hegelian and Kantian influence on Peirce, the neo-Kantian context of von Oerkskoll's Umweltstheorie. One might note that von Oerkskoll influenced Heidegger and Deleuze. It might also be noted that the theoretical literature of biosemiotics is deeply informed by references to post-Kantian continental thinkers, to Schelling's natura philosophie, to the phenomenologies of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, and to figures such as Gilbert Simondon, who bear the marks of phenomenology of the French neo-Cantian spiritualist tradition that culminates in Bergson, and of the historical epistemology of Bachelard and Canguillen. In this, biosemiotics distinguish itself from related areas within
biological theory, those of biosemantics and of teleosemantics, which arguably have their underpinning in hinterland in more analytic contexts. Although there's not the space to rehearse this here, I've argued elsewhere that modern biosemiotics effectively naturalizes the Kantian and post-Kantian transcendental and gradually emerges as a non-reductive and materialist relational realism. It is in precisely this context that it can be shown to offer a space within contemporary biology in which the continental tradition and its relation to science can be rethought. This is also the space within which the problem of scientism can be revisited
in order to remap the relations pertaining between the sciences, social sciences and humanities more generally. Everything hangs, however, on resolving or at least engaging with some of the fundamental issues pertaining to biosemiotics itself and its status as a science. Writing in 2011, the authors of what were dubbed then the Theses of Biosemiotics conceded the following, I quote, although there are many descriptions of semiotic processes, it is still an unresolved challenge to provide an account that explains what exactly constitutes semiosis. They also note that we are currently not in a position to provide a more precise and an ambiguous description of the
interpretative architecture that is implicit in an organism. So 20 years after Hofmeyer and Emesh's seminal paper on co-duality, and 10 years on from the initial gatherings of biosemioticians, that led to the formation of the nascent discipline. These admissions indicate that at that time, fundamental questions regarding the scientific content of the biosemiotic project seemed still to remain unanswered. For arguably, the core difficulty faced by biosemiotics as an aspiring science is that it takes as its object of interrogation and inquiry what will always and irreducibly remain a dimension of qualitative meaning. The question therefore arises as to how
biological sign activity can be determined as such in specific contexts, and how such determinations can either be related to or transposed into the quantitative terms more familiar to the methodologies and experimental procedures proper to objective science. It may simply and indeed irreducibly be that biosemiotics has taken as its object of study something that in and of itself defies any ready incorporation into the realm of objective and empirically verifiable observation. Tur von Uxküll, the son of Jacob, and pioneer of the biosemiotic approach within psychosomatic medicine has highlighted the key issue relating to the study of living
organisms in terms of sign activity. We have to infer the meaning which vehicles assume as signs for living systems, from the way in which these systems behave towards their environment after the vehicles have acted upon their receptors. Thus, we have to interpret their behaviour as semiosis of symptomization, that is, as symptoms of their biological state. The insight here is that if biosemiosis is to be taken as a process of interpretation at work within the processes of living systems, then as such it needs itself to be interpreted. The meaning of a biosemiotic judgment or sign action is inferred by reasoning or judgment, because as an immaterial relation,
it cannot directly be observed in and of itself. In short, the activity of sign vehicles and their interpretants in biosemiosis have themselves to be determined by a further act of semiosis, according to which the biologist seeking to investigate the living system being studied may stand themselves as an interpretant of a preceding semiotic chain. As von Oexkel himself puts it, we cannot directly observe the interpretant according to which a living system codes effects of the environment on its receptors into signs. Therefore, whatever may be at stake here by way of the outcome of scientific observation and experiment, it has to be interpreted, I quote,
from the system's behaviour and has to be inferred against the grain, as it were, by reconstructing their history. One might conclude from this that biosemiotics, even if practiced according to qualitative methodologies which might complement quantitative approaches, always unnecessarily follows a methodological path that much more resembles the procedures of the humanities than it does of those of the hard sciences. This is a path of interpretation, of inference, based on the reconstruction of contingent relational contexts, and therefore of judgment, in relation to something that cannot be observed, rather the empirically verifiable determination of something that presents itself objectively.
In this way, the decisive question of the quantitative and the qualitative in biosemiotics, and with this its relation in one direction towards the hard sciences and in the other direction towards the soft sciences and the humanities, ultimately resolves itself into a single and very specific further question or problem, that of imminence. I'll finish with a short section, part three, semiotic imminence. Jesper Hoffmeier has approached this question in a very helpful way in his discussion of consciousness and of the tendency within biology and with eliminative approaches in particular to conflate or collapse the distinction between first-person experience and third-person experience.
Citing the example of a newspaper story in which it was claimed that scientists would be able to see consciousness using MRI scanning and data processing of cerebral activity, Hofmeyer highlights that there is an irreducible difference between the third-person view of a brain from the outside, that is the MRI image generated from scanning data, and the subjective qualia of first-person consciousness and experience that define it as experience. Thus, if the subject Hoffmeyer has his brain scanned while feeling a longing for summer, the resulting data or image is simply an external object that will not say, show, nor in any way determine anything at all
of that longing as a qualitatively lived internal instance. In this irreducible difference between the third person perspective of objective science and the first person experience of qualia, the objectivist hard approach arguably reaches a limit point beyond which it cannot pass. As I have argued elsewhere, this limit point is precisely the impossibility of determining or objectifying imminently lived consciousness as such. As was alluded to in the discussion of the Cartesian legacy, there is always the possibility of simply denying the existence of qualia, and of holding that all supposedly conscious experience is an illusion of folk psychology
that will progressively be displaced by ever better objective knowledge of the physical neural substrate of the brain. Arguably, such positions have as their basis an unwillingness to properly discern the epistemological limit point that is encountered in the difference between third and first-person perspectives. In denying the fundamental existence of first-person experience, the limit point of determination in relation to lived imminence is disavowed, and in the imminence itself is repressed or foreclosed. This limit point of imminence is at play in the semiotic and biosemiotic field more generally, marking the limits of what can be objectively
determined in biological sign activity on the one hand, and what must be inferred or interpreted therein on the other. Plaus-Hermes comes very close to acknowledging this in his own terms when he notes signs have intrinsic, publicly observable, as well as intrinsic, phenomenal aspects. That should be extrinsic, the first word there. We can only access the meaning of a sign from its observable effects, but observation of the phenomenal experiences of another organism may either be impossible or highly mediated. Reality exceeds what exists as actually observable. The scientific status of biosemiotics may well be rendered inherently or irreducibly
problematic by the incorporation of the notion of life as sign action into the fundamentals of biology and understanding of biological systems. But if Emesh is right, that reality exceeds what exists as actually observable, then the question becomes not whether science should maintain its scientificity as such by ever preserving and guarding its objectivist stance, for with regard to biological life at least, to do so would it inevitably to be to obscure, eliminate, and thereby repress an essential dimension of reality by reducing everything to chemistry and molecules. From the biosemiotic perspective, the question becomes of how science itself can come to account for those unobservable aspects of reality and thereby come to a broader, more inclusive picture.
As an epistemological endeavour relating to the inclusion of qualitative meaning within the domain of biology, biosemiotics explicitly encounters and foregrounds the limit point of imminence that I have discerned here. By the same token, objectivist, reductionist and eliminativist biology disavows or represses qualitatively lived experience as the price of its epistemic success. As a scientific endemma, involving the reconstructions of theory, modelling and experimental observation, biosemiotics needs, however, to discern the epistemological limit point of imminence. It must of necessity work with the irreducibility of this limit point in order to somehow bring together the qualitative and quantitative perspectives on biological life processes into a complementary relation each with the other.
The orientation towards imminence and the encounter with the limit point of imminence is arguably an irreducible fundamental aspect of biosemiotics itself. No theoretical or philosophical attempt at conciliance with more scientifically respectable theories will overcome it or make it disappear. It's part and parcel of the Peercean framework and of the very notion of qualitatively meaningful, purposive and interpretive sign activity. This is my final conclusion, and it's an homage to Rocco's fantastic work. Because Rocco has brilliantly developed this point relating to Peerce in his book Diagrammatic Imminence.
In his critical elaboration of what he calls Peirce's semiotic imminence, Gangle points out that the triadic structure of the sign and the other formulations of Peircean triadicity, notably firstness, secondness and thirdness, cannot simply stand as a theoretical model to be applied in an abstract way that would leave the scientist or semiotician in a position of separation from or transcendence over that which is being interrogated or observed. Thus, for Gangle, Pierce's triadic logic of the sign, I quote, cannot be applied merely theoretically, but can only be concretely and experientially performed in a way that changes the performer itself. Gangle's insight has far-reaching implications for the whole of the biosemiotic enterprise that seeks to take its primary orientation from the Piercean semiotic theoretical framework.
It develops in a more philosophical and radical manner to have on Uxgurl's point relating to the necessity of inference and interpretation in the biosemiotic investigation and analysis of living systems. Gangle notes that since any interaction with semiotic processes must necessarily be a continuation of and participation in the furtherance of those processes in ongoing sign activity, such an undertaking can only occur in determinable and self-implicating contexts of meaning. It is therefore necessary to step into a triadic relation in order to manifest that relation as such. As a theoretical tool for the explanation, modelling and possible experimentation, experimental investigation of biological systems,
biosemiotics, insofar as it builds on Pearson's sign theory, would in practice necessarily implicate biosemioticians themselves in the semiotic processes of the living systems that they study. Semiotic imminence dictates that the triadic sign may be experienced or participated in as triadic, but can only be theoretically modelled at the expense of losing its triadic quality. That's citing Rocco again. It might be suggested that biosemiotics arguably inaugurates within biological science an observation problem that is in a certain way analogous to that which occurs in the measurement of quantum systems in physics, namely that observational measurement entails an interaction with the system that is
measured. Yet in this case, it may not necessarily be a question of observation affecting or causing a state change within the system observed, but rather of observation constituting a further development and supplementation in an ongoing chain of semiosis. Gangl's account of semiotic imminence in Peirce complements the argument relating to the limit point of imminence that I have been giving here. For if semiotic realities cannot be seen and therefore have to be constructed, it is clear that such constructions will themselves be further semiotic acts. Although the theorists of biosemiotics discussed here have clearly acknowledged the irreducibly qualitative interpretive dimension of their discipline, the full implications of semiotic imminence as
characterized by Gangl and of the limit point of imminence as described here are arguably yet to be fully accounted for or adequately responded to. Nearly 100 years after the birth of quantum mechanics in 1925, earlier maybe, the implications and difficulties thrown up by quantum measurement and the quantum measurement problem are still being worked out and still generate new theories in attempts to resolve such difficulties. By comparison, it's still early days for biosemiotics. However, Gangl's formulations do point towards ways forward for some of the possible futures. For if what biosemiotics seeks is a mean to specify itself as a rigorous science that can furnish itself, in the words of Howard Patti, with empirically decidable models that
obey the requirement to clearly define symbols and codes in an empirical scientific way that is more familiar to physicists and biologists, then Gangl's formulations around the diagrammatization of eminence through the mathematical formulations of category theory might prove to be an invaluable resource. It's worth noting that Rosen's relational biology also relies on the diagrammatic formalization of category theory, and worth recalling once again the role that it has played in the literature of biosemiotics. One can thus imagine a future for biosemiotics in which the quantitative and empirically observable can be modeled alongside the qualitative and unobservable sign relations of living systems on the basis of mathematical and diagrammatic formalization
of semiotic imminence in such a way that what has been called here the limit point of imminence is placed centre stage and given a decisive role. This is a future in which the tradition of continental philosophy and an emergent scientific discipline would find themselves set into a novel configuration. Within this novel configuration, scientism would have no place, and the relations subsisting between the sciences, social sciences, and the humanities might also find themselves similarly reconfigured. This would be a future, though, that may be imaginable by philosophy, but would, of course, of necessity be accomplished by mathematically literate practitioners themselves. Thanks.
Thank you very much, Ian. Right, then we'll go on to our fourth speaker, Reza Negolistani. Reza Negosan is a philosopher. He's lectured and taught at numerous international universities and institutes. His current philosophical project is focused on rationalist and universalism, beginning with the evolution of the modern system of knowledge and advancing towards contemporary philosophies of rationalism, their procedures, as well as their demands for special forms of human conduct. His latest book, Intelligence and Spirit, 2018, is focused on philosophy of intelligence at the intersection between cognitive sciences, German idealism and theoretical computer science. He is currently directing the Critical Philosophy Program at the New Centre for Research and Practice. Reza's talk is entitled,
A New Curse of the Mind, Explanatory Models with Descriptive Deficiency. Thank you so much. I'm honored to be among you. I mean, I see so many familiar faces, Giuseppe and so many others great old friends so may I know I know that I have 30 minutes but I have almost like 20 minutes notes and I mean is it possible to open up at the end of my talk for like two or three questions, I think that would be excellent. Excellent. Excellent.
So as the title says, I'm particularly interested in a very specific phase in the kind of like what you might call to be the tumultuous phase of the relations, but also cultivating phase between philosophy and science. Of course, phenomenology, which somehow once exploded, gave rise to what you might call to be canonical, even though I don't believe in such trends, canonical analytic philosophy, content of philosophy, so on and so forth. What I'm referring to is, of course, I'm merely zooming in on a very specific phase.
The conversations between people like Ernst Mach, Brentano, Husserl, and Ludwig Boltzmann. with regard to a very specific sort of problem, the nature of description. Perhaps I should actually, before I start reading my own short paper, I should open it with a rather long citation by a friend of mine, Adam Berg, in his book, Mack, Husserl, Boltzmann, and the question of time.
So the quotation is this. description, Ernst Mach argues, is only possible for events that constantly recur or of events that are made up of component parts that constantly recur that only can be described and conceptually represented, which is uniform and comfortable to law. For description presupposes the employment of names by which to designate its elements. Names can acquire meanings only when
applied to elements that constantly reappear, right? So Mark wants to talk about two, according to at least his own view, two indispensable sides of description, constancy and continuity. So that was constancy. Constancy, which Mark recognizes as historically stemming from a teleological principle, together with continuity, are the two prerequisites for an effective and coherent method of relating or describing sensations and elements. When these two teleological principles are maintained as Mark contends they detect any scientific claim
like atomism or mechanical explanation in general as not abiding to a direct relation between observation understood as descriptions of the immediately givens in Mark's accounts unexplained description of accounts of the immediately given. Now, why I actually start with this citation? Precisely because those of you who have read Ernst Smock, Economy of Thoughts, he has quite a very interesting view, which I think has been somehow, you know, carried over within, you know, the philosophy of modeling, particularly the philosophy of modeling of the mind.
and it's going to actually, I would say, it's going to be even more exacerbated, knowing that Mach is a phenomenalistic sort of thinker, right? Not phenomenological, phenomenalistic in the sense of bundles of sensations, right? The sensations are immediately given and Mach's concept of description of any sort of phenomenon, which he calls, you know, description is really for Mark, and perhaps even for Husserl, and Boltzmann is really the ultimate idea of science. This is actually not explanation to these people that is the ultimate idea of science. It's
description. So Mark's concept of description is highlighted, you know, by the concept of the immediately given, which is usually couch in terms of phenomenalistic bundles of sensations, so on and so forth, not to be mistaken or confused with the Hume's bundles. Where basically these immediately givens constitute the ground and the background of any sort of description that we can actually give with regard to any sort of phenomena of either physical or mentalistic nature. But there is a very interesting point
that I think that needs to be accounted for in tandem with Marx's economy of thought. This is a point that he makes in, if I remember correctly, in theory of heat in his work. he contends that to place ourselves in any relation to our surroundings meaning world we need a picture of the world and to obtain this in an economical way we cultivate science there are a lot of
sort of, you know, kind of obscure sort of moves and concepts here. You know, what is world, you know, what is economical way, and what does it mean to cultivate science? Well, the idea of economical way, and that's what I actually want to highlight, pertains to this idea that when you're describing something, according to this sort of conversations among Oldsmann, Brentano, Husserl, Mark, and other people during that time, is that our descriptions are usually direct or indirect, right?
but more importantly according to mark his phenomenalistic account of description descriptions of all phenomena whether that would be you know a system an isolated system of gas or imagination or consciousness ought to be economical in the sense that it has to reorganize itself from the immediately given, the concept of sensations
or basically sensations being understood quantitatively. right? And then we can actually create in an economic sort of assembling these or reconfiguring these sorts of, you know, sensations. We can account for any sort of description of any sort of phenomena. Description in double sense of either description of what is the phenomena that we are talking about or the description of what accounts for the phenomena that we are trying to describe meaning explanation and description in the in the in the canonical uh philosophy of
science but it is really important that the economy of thoughts plays a role and that has something to do with a certain sort of recourse to the immediately given, right, understood quantitatively. And then we can actually account for any sort of phenomenon in the universe. as we see today with regard to AI you know modeling transcendental egos or transcendental subjects different sorts of faculties such as
imagination perception I don't know things as vague as consciousness that there is this sort of machian tendency going on, right? Where we are trying to say that, look, and this is what I'm trying to highlight, that look, that there is nothing special about description of this sort of phenomena, such as, for example, consciousness. because the description of the phenomena is a subset of an economy of thought in the machian sense in the sense of quantitative
reassembly and assembly of the immediately given and of course according to various sorts of methods and paradigms of today's ai and uh neuroscience and so on and so forth You can introduce the immediately given, even if you don't call it immediately given, in various sort of way, you know, empirical data, information processing systems, so on and so forth. what i want to say that um i think that philosophy of mind at least uh not all of it i don't want to be uh quite uh blatant uh so as to blur the boundaries
but i think that philosophy of mind philosophy of consciousness particularly the ones that are under you know the influence of today's you know certain sort of computational and neuroscientistic tendencies are primarily entertain this sort of mocking picture of description of phenomena or basically description is being encapsulated by the very method that's supposed to actually do the job of description and explanation. And hence, if the economy of thought, allow Marx's thesis, is real, then all we need to do
is to, I wouldn't call it reduce, but disassemble and decompose any sort of normative function, or transcendental function for that matter to its economic undergirding in the phenomenalistic sense right this obviously this sort of view this machin view is vehemently being criticized during that time by Berentano, by Husserl, and by Boltzmann.
He was an astonishing philosopher rather than being a magnificent scientist. Of course, we see that among these three archetypes, the Husserlian, the Berentanian, and the Boltzmannian, each of them represent a certain sort of what you might call to be a reaction, either critical or not, with regard to this, you know, prevalent paradigm of description of phenomenon. Not all of them, actually, I would say, are critical. I would say that Husserl's and Boltzmann's accounts are fundamentally critical,
but not so much as Brentano. But of course, Brentano needs to be understood as a precursor to certain sort of the honest lot of the phenomenalistic economy of thought, that modeling every phenomenon according to an economy of thought in a very particular phenomenalistic quantitative sort of way. So let me start reading my notes, and then I kind of develop it by way of some other citations,
and then we can actually go to a discussion. So within philosophy of scientific modeling, particularly when it pertains to modeling ordinary and or manifest phenomena, events or activities, there exists an indelible imbalance between the explanatory and the descriptive, at least for now. The import of the describing activity or the descriptive is often relegated, as in the case of descriptive models, how the word descriptive models are being used in today's parlance.
the import of the describing activity or descriptive is often relegated as in the case of descriptive models to information ontologies meteorological and other relationships between the components of the phenomena to be described that is to say it is relegated to a systematization in favor of the sufficiency of the formal structure in conducting the systematization, but at the expense of systematic determination of the criteria necessary to determine what it takes to describe something or what the describing activity consists of.
Put differently, what counts as descriptive modeling in today's vocabulary often bottoms out at seeing the structure of the target phenomenon, imagination, consciousness, whatever you might call it, in terms of the formal relations obtained among the components of a formal structure. For example, a geometrical descriptive model of visual field, the visual field, or at the highest level, you know, something like imagination, right? As you see it's in today's resurgence of, you know, text to image models, AIs,
kind of models of imagination. Sorry. So, put differently, what counts as descriptive modeling often bottoms out at seeing the structure of the target phenomenon in terms of the formal relations obtained among the components of a formal structure, whose agreement with the structure of the target phenomenon is, if not arbitrary, at least suffers a sense of epistemic deficit. That is, how and why do the relations
between the formal structure map onto the target phenomena. Yet more pressingly, in fact, the question is how the description of a target phenomenon X, in terms of the relationships obtained from the formal structure adjoined to it, is adequate to describe that which is meant to be described. There's a kind of like a paradox of description, right? In other words, descriptive model does not determine what exactly it is that is supposed to be described. Because that's not his job really.
it does simply systematize what has been non-systematically decided to be described and hence systematicity lacking a system it is a systematization that lacks proper criteria and justification of the systematicity insofar as there is very little or no systematicity in framing or marking out the boundaries of that which is to be described like for example think about imagination and
you know, in philosophy of mind, they say, well, you know, we have, you know, model imagination on information processing, right? Or some sort of geometric, you know, formal, by way of formal procedures on some sort of geometric relations. But really, the question here is that, would you be able to tell me what is exactly the boundaries of imagination here? that you are trying to systematize, right? By way of such thus and so formal relations. It is a systematization that lacks proper criteria
and justification of the systematicity in so far as there is very little or no systematicity in framing or marking out the boundaries of that which is to be described. This is the descriptive level demarcation problem. so to speak, the description of the target phenomenon, namely boundaries and the exact designation of what is to be described is left to happy coincidence or a miraculous act of description by way of the economy of thought a la maq. Miraculous insofar as it is not given in any sense or formulated by the descriptive model,
but rather is implicitly assumed by it to an extraneous act of describing, which is often lacks any systematicity. So within essentially the so-called descriptive models of today, we see that there is a certain sort of of bloatedness of implicit assumptions, not only about the method of description, but also about how such methods of descriptions arrive at thus and so target phenomenon to be described. The gravitation towards the models of explanatory weight or gravity combined with descriptive
impoverishment is now further exacerbated by the naturalizing tendencies of modern sciences. The notable lopsidedness between the explanatory and the descriptive which is instituted at the level of models structure and the so-called model construals which is to say models assignment scope and fidelity criteria so essentially when we are talking about model in a precise sort of way uh at the very least we have a model description a model structure and uh what you might call to be model construals interpretive
constraints uh that account for its assignment is a scope and its fidelity to the target phenomenon right so uh the so-called model construals cannot be disregarded as a matter of mere biases or conveniences, instrumentalist or otherwise, motivated by the practice of science, because it rather stems from various prejudices about the status of models, their ontological status, as well as their genetic constitution. What is interesting to address is how this imbalance between the descriptive and the explanatory within this ambit of Markian
economy of thought, where basically description does two jobs at the same time, playing the role of explanation also playing the role of describing the target phenomenon, right? What is interesting to address is how this imbalance has been put in the service of deflationary or so-called disenchanting stances within philosophy of neuroscience and philosophy of mind. Conscious and intentional states in the specific Husserlian sense or activities now by virtue of this sort of paradigm can be deflated and replaced by explanatory models
of information processing systems, mostly model and digital computation, right? And processes. It is in this context that the typical Danetian, reference to Dan Danet, right? It is in this context that the typical Danetian hysteria against something like phenomenology arises in full force. Every phenomenological description and or explanation is ejected, according Dennett, in favor of subpersonal, non-intentional explanatory models
of information processing systems only to, at the end of the day, levy that explanatory force against a wrong level of description. In other words, phenomenological reflection on the description of a part of a mental life, such as imagination, consciousness, and so on and so forth, as what it is we are attempting to explain, is somehow booted out as an excuse to bring back cluttered for psychological concepts
against which the explanatory force of naturalizing sciences has effectively been mobilized. So it's a certain sort of a straw manning of consciousness in the netions. The netion hysteria is a form of a straw manning, right? First, the strategy goes like this. First, make an utterly impoverished description of imagination or consciousness. Then by virtue of this impoverishment of description, which also has gone into the
very method of explanation explain consciousness or imagination and then say that look i x i explain away consciousness and anything else that remains of consciousness or imagination is a full psychological concept this is kind of like a magic trick that's why i call it the Danetian magic trick. And you see it in genetics. I mean, Stephen Hawking. I mean, sorry, Dawkins. You see it in, you know, kind of neuroscience.
Stephen Cosselin, so on and so forth. I mean, there are so many numerous examples to be mentioned other than Dawkins and, you know, Danet. In a sense, this sort of deflationary hysteria is a double expression of what I call the disproportional imbalance between description one and description two, description and explanation, so to speak. One, the explanatory model operates under a condition characterized by a lack of meteorologically controlled description
of what is attempted to be explained. Two, the thrust of the explanatory force is directed not just at a wrong descriptive level, but at the description of a target phenomenon of mental life which is introduced much later, ad hoc, ad lib. from the ordinary descriptive vocabularies of folk psychology. This move, of course, goes hand in hand in the broader justification of voiding philosophical relevance as an excuse to practice the most impoverished form of philosophy unquestioned,
where the disenchanting powers, the so-called disenchanting powers of natural sciences can be brandished against the enfeebled, straw-mand folk psychological concepts of consciousness and intentionality. Waussel's emphasis on the descriptive level of conscious or mental phenomena by way of the phenomenological method should indeed be recognized as a counterweight to this sort of imbalance against a double bind of deflationary models and inflationary folk psychological concepts.
transcendental and phenomenological reflections on various components of mental life, not only mitigate or suspend the entrenched psychologistic attitudes towards such components, but provide a dynamic view of the labor of description, where the description of a particular phenomenon, its demarcation changes depending on how a specific acts of reflection and their objects shift co-constitutionally. And in the process, descriptive levels pertaining to occluded unities can be reawakened or if
if needed, sunk back as the very result of the descriptive reflection itself. It is in this sense that Husserl's distinctions between noesis and noema, transcendent object and noemata, with transcendent object, not being objects of consciousness, but nevertheless, can be brought under or represented in the Husserlian sense, under consciousness. In this sense, Husserl's distinction between noesis and noema, transcendent objects, and noemata,
and the progressive explication of presenting, which is of the sensations and perception, presentifying, which is reproducing, productively reproducing in a different sort of mode, that act of presentation, and intending acts with the corresponding objects provide a much needed systematicity or even conceptual engineering engineering in the Carnapian sense of explication to the labor of description itself
such that we can we don't see description as either immediately given or part of an economy of thought in the economical sense but rather a labor, right? The description is ultimately a labor in the phenomenological sort of way. Within this scenario, the phenomenological method does not need to be contrasted with the naturalizing tendencies, such as modeling conscious phenomena and activities on information processing systems, such as we are forced to endorse a thesis according to which phenomenology
strongly contrasts cognitive science. Instead, a much more fruitful yet more modest thesis can be accommodated. If we are to seek explanations of various aspects of mental life and sub-personal levels modeled on computational phenomena and information processing systems, it is imperative to begin with a precise and correctly framed description, a description that is not monolithic, but rather is protean, protean in two different sense, that all descriptions are descriptions by
virtue, just like explanations, on different levels or scales of a phenomenon. And hence, they need to be methodologically organized according to their scale sensitivity, according to their own levels, but also in the sense that, you know, descriptions fundamentally understood are acts of reflection. Hence, they are not neutral. When we reflect about imagination, when we reflect about consciousness, we are not actually merely being just conscious or merely
being imagining stuff, but rather we supplement the act of consciousness with an act of reflection. And within every moment of description, there is an implicit moment of reflection, phenomenologically understood, with the understanding that reflection as an act is not neutral with regard to its own object. So if we are to seek explanations of various aspects of mental life on subpersonal levels modeled on computational phenomena and information processing systems, it is imperative to begin with a precise and correctly framed description of what it is
that we are trying to explain, such that we can identify a right explanation for the correctly framed, namely described phenomenon, and also correctly described method of description. Ultimately, the relation between phenomenology and physicalism comes to the foreground that descriptions in that sense are not actually highlighting as many people think about phenomenological descriptions and other sorts of descriptions
they don't highlight the bipolarity of physicalistic content and mentalistic content no because to submit to that sort of bipolarism is essentially what is wrong as I have been trying to say with regard that falls in the purview in the framework of the economy of thoughts in the sort of way but rather that if we are trying to actually model a phenomenon particularly parts and morsels of mental life we should say that uh a lot Boltzmann that the difference
between the physicalistic vocabulary and the mentalistic vocabulary is not ontological but rather of the epistemic content. And what is happening today in the realm of modeling, particularly within the philosophy of mind or science, so on and so forth, is that it appears that there is some sort of misguided impulsion to ontologically level conscious or mental phenomena to those of physicalistic phenomena.
And by virtue of the ontological flattening, also embark upon an epistemic flattening. Thank you very much. Okay, thank you Reza. I think we'll go straight to Colin, if that's okay? Sure. And then come back for some questions once Colin's, maybe Colin will sort of start some going. So Colin McClarty is a Truman P. Handy Professor of Intellectual Philosophy and Professor of of mathematics at KS Western Reserve University. He's the author of Elementary Caterists, Elementary Toad Poses, 1992.
And he's an American logician whose publications have ranged widely in philosophy and the foundation of mathematics, as well as in the history of science and of mathematics. Over to you, Colin. Okay, yeah. Feedback. There's feedback? Yeah, feel thoughts on these presentations. Okay, I've turned off my sound. Is that better? Yeah, that's fine. Yeah, just feel thoughts. Is that better? Yeah, that's fine. Yeah. Or am I now not audible at all? You're audible to me.
I can hear you. Okay, well, I'll talk and if people can hear me, they'll hear you. hear you um yeah that's fine Ian's critique of reductive scientism it was really interesting to me got me thinking about uh philosophy of mathematics which is you know what what got me here um and in in a I want to come up with a kind of mathetism um I have to apologize for the word because mathematism mathetism and even mathism have already been used in multiple senses but I mean it precisely in the sense of in that Ian took for scientism from Ladyman and others that it's a philosophy of mathematics taking mathematics as author as authoritative so so now am I being
heard or is anyone hearing I can I can hear you very well Colin okay okay great okay um can a naturalistic philosophy of mathematics take mathematics as authoritative, this is going to be very opposite to the scientism that Ian critiques a lot, because it's not going to be crudely reductive. It's going to be the opposite of reductive, because when I say mathematics here, I mean what's being done over in the math department and what has been done in the past as mathematics and also philosophic discussions based on that.
This is going to be much less reductive than the kinds of descendants of logicism that we have in philosophy of math now. um the the qualia of mathematics that a topologist or a number theorist or differential geometer if if there is something like qualia there it's it's being lost by set theoretic reductionism it's being used in the mathematics but it's not making it across the the reductionism um so this is so so I'm actually going to say that if we if we take the practice of mathematics as authoritative we'll have a much wider range of topics of discussion than is currently being used in
philosophy of mathematics um we we have when we have structuralism they have this particular particular notion of structure that's based maybe on model theory maybe on board by key certainly not based on current topology current algebraic geometry and this is the connection with with Grotendieck um that that in some ways uh brought us here I mean Grotendieck is not figured largely in the talks that we were got but in the planning for this meeting um In particular, so when I talk about math, I've written a lot about math, and I don't want to talk about the math right now because it's hard to convey quickly in conversation.
But I will say, in particular, I would like to see a Platonism in philosophy of mathematics that deals with Plato's texts, that deals with what Plato said, as well as the best historic recreations of mathematics being done at that time. I wonder, I think it might be interesting to ask, how is it that taking science as authoritative in philosophy has such an opposite effect to what I see for taking mathematics as authoritative in philosophy of math? and and i think well part of it is there's a mismatch because when we say philosophy of science when we take when we talk about scientism we're not we're not talking about eliminating quality
from particle physics qualia don't figure very largely in in particle physics we're talking about eliminating the qualia that physics can't account for from everything whereas here i'm saying let's let's just take mathematical practices authoritative for philosophy of mathematics. Ian, in his conclusion, actually noticed that taking more current mathematics, in particular, in connection with category theory, he noted in his conclusion that his anti-scientism wants to bring more of current mathematics into the discussion so so this this methodism is is somehow it's this is the question where does
philosophy of math sit compared to philosophy of science why is philosophy of math in so many ways not matched up in philosophy of science we go to the philosophy of science association have philosophy of math sessions but the the issues are different and uh I'll just leave it at that. I mean, we're running on a schedule here. So I'll just say, what would be the value of this mathetism making mathematics more central to philosophy of mathematics and then to philosophy of science? Will this help make philosophy of mathematics bring it towards other philosophy of science, the kind of philosophy of science that Ian was talking about, not the kind that he's calling scientism.
So I'll just leave it at that. Oh, unfortunately, I can't hear if anybody's saying anything. Okay, can you hear now, Colin? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Do we have any other questions? So it could be people in the chat or other speakers from today. I mean, could we throw that to Rocco perhaps, like what Colin suggested, like what is it about the productive potential of Mathetism as opposed to... Okay, Giuseppe's got his hand up. Well, yes. Thank you, Colin. I think that the teaching we have implicitly from the debate in the Foundation of Mathematics has a major role.
I tried to hint the relevance for biology of the consequences of the idea of complete sequence of signs, you know, the axioms of being complete. And this was very quickly no longer an issue in the philosophy of mathematics, at least not since 1931. We all know very well, but it's they remain in biology till today i mean there is a vast majority of molecular biologists who believe that the final sequence of science is complete with respect to development ontogenesis so this is a major trace and the nonset of these may can make a parallel to uh philosophy of
mathematics with a broader perspective thing for me the relevance of structures and meaning or anything like a relativizing perspective, a grotendic perspective, may be connected to what I called biological relativity. No privileged level of causality and the meaning then is given by contextual and historical dependence. So the role of structures and meaning in alternative philosophy mathematics in biology is the appreciation of historicity specificity and contextuality of an organism and how this matters both in ontogenesis and in philogenesis so i think yes we have to learn a lot from each other's philosophy and this is my current
attempt yes reza get your hand up put your mic off no no no your mic's off can you hear me now that's it uh hello giuseppe It's so good to have you here. One thing that is a genuine question, by no means a sense of critical. When you say historicity in that context,
what is exactly the nature of historicity? Is it the historical contingencies of one sort or, you know, kind of history, grand sense of historicity? I mean, would you be able to kind of like explicate the nature of the historicity that you are mentioning here such that that it wouldn't actually become merely a byproduct, an epiphenomenon of mere historical contingencies, like the emergence of capitalism, right?
No, I mean, it's related to knowledge construction. So if you want to understand what is a mouse, no way to give you know a formal definition or any sort of definition of an object like in physics by equations an electron is a solution of dirac's equation but if you want to know about the mouse you have to understand the phylogeny so historicity in the sense you are happy with it only with the definition that branches back into evolution yes when you have an ancestor that singles out phylogenesis that allows the gold this is a mouse we are happy the best is to have an an example of this ancestor in the museum then you really can robustly say that here then i understand
when the ramification that gives to my current mouse first second sense of of of uh uh historicity the concrete one in laboratories. In good biology laboratories, mice and cells are labeled by their phylogenists. So you say, oh, this is a mouse which is a descendant of a couple in Poland, 1972. Really? They do that. That's the concrete. History is the only invariant. We only know fragments of it, but it's the only thing which is stable. Otherwise, if you try to describe a mouse, we are lost, because any good evolutionist would give lots of examples satisfying your definition,
which is not a mouse. So it's, uh, it is a historicity within a very context-sensitive sensitive sort of framework which would require us to somehow espouse first and foremost a notion of life without the ideality of life in the platonistic not of the plato but platonistic sense absolutely right but okay call it contingency of i mean satisfied no i'm not i'm not quarreling about that but i just wanted i was just really curious about how you
might elaborate that notion of historicity if you make a measurement in biology is a measurement requires first stabilizing stabilizing what you're observing so you have to make symmetries you make basic metabolists basal metabolism you have to say the mouse has to be addressed at least one hour after feeding and it must not be asleep and so you stabilize symmetry and then you must know the past because if you don't know how the lungs were formed you you will never get the correct measurement in comparing situation the individual history medical history of the mouse and evolutionary history so measurement the challenge of measurement in biology is that it requires knowledge of the present and as much as you can knowledge of the
Right, right. Is there any role of protensive, like in the Husserlian potential sense, or anticipatory systems that Ian was talking about, is there any sort of role for that sort of, that plays in measurements, the role of anticipation or pretensions, so to speak, even though they're not the same really i have been doing a lot of work about retention but in slightly different constants i mean both in the different understanding about continuity for me the mathematical notion of continuity is constructed by the gluing of
pretension and retention so is is seeing the gesture uh seeing a trajectory and then being able to glue retention both from cognitive retinal and brain retention and pretension and then you say this is continuous that's the understanding of continuity for me in what i said before uh i i don't know i didn't i didn't so i've not been thinking in those terms i mean well when when you make measurement you're choosing an observable so you're you are expecting something in a sense yes of course because you say i decide to to measure this observable in view of
why not you're right yeah there may be something like that i see i see thank you so much joseph Do we have any questions from the gallery? Oh, Ian James, you got your hand up, up to you. Well, if there are questions from the gallery, I'd be happy to seed my hand. Oh no, do we have any questions? Go for it. Was that a green light to me? Yeah, green light. Okay, thank you. I really just wanted to respond to the proceeding interventions really and say how useful I found them.
I was fascinated by Colin's sort of problematizations of the question of sort of scientism within mathematics. And of course, I was very absolutely, very clearly evoking Rosen and Rocco's work in the context of biosemiotics with the sense, not being a mathematician myself, that But some kind of biological, some kind of mathematical formalism within biology is needed. And this is clearly what Giuseppe and his colleagues have been doing. And outside of the context of biosemiotics, what the discussion has made me think about is the other sort of biological philosophies that I'm sort of familiar with.
And that's going back to sort of mid 20th century France and George Canguilhem and his student Simondon. And the way in which within Canguilhem's axiology of life, a notion of sense and qualitative meaning emerges within the activity of a biological organism. And he's working outside of the tradition of or the hinterland of biosemiotics that I was talking about. But but how there and I think also in Simondon's account of individuation, there's a sense that the meaning and qualitative sense relations emerge within within structural topologies of biological forms and the sort of topological spatialization of biological forms and the different kinds of causality within the activity of life
that emerged there that of course well beyond you know efficient causality or or or such like and so the sense i have and this is responding i suppose both to colin and to a sense of appreciation of what giuseppe may be doing that the mathematics is and and and any any relational mathematics uh perhaps all mathematics is relational you you'll forgive me if i'm um slightly um uh working blind there but but but something like category theory and the relationality of it can capture perhaps physical topological um organizations with the multiple relations and causalities such that um it can perhaps capture formalize this this this this
qualitative relationality that emerges from topological spacing of structures in precisely a non-reductive way. So that's my sense, responding to you, Colin, very positively, but also with my sense of excitement about what Giuseppe is doing and the direction that Rocco's brilliant work can take us in. I'm afraid I have to leave now for family reasons. So I just want to say in person, thank you to everyone. And I wish you well for the rest of the discussion. and thank you to the organizers again. Thanks. Thank you, Ian. Do you have any more questions? Well, unfortunately, Yannis is gone, but yes, I agree. There is a lot of a delay in applying,
let's say more modern mathematics but i don't know i don't think only in in in in biology i don't know maybe some of you know more but i i'm afraid that most physics i and i think there's one or two exceptions but i lost track of that don't use relativizing tools like grotendix approach to topos which provides a priority point of views and then a coordination of them by the notion of by the way of transforming from a topos to another and that they treat relativity theory with the same tools and equations as einstein one century ago i i'm not enough an expert i really
cannot say but i was somewhat surprised by seeing many physicists theoretical physicists i mean this complaint is also made by others like alan con i may say but that's it is somewhat surprising that the novelties in in mathematics are not so much accepted or used by mathematical physics and that's in biology is a major challenge and well we can discuss more about that i don't think we think i think we need further invention but that's another issue i might say about biology uh it's worth knowing i guess not everybody knows this the term category
theory did not exist until rosen introduced it in 1957 and 1958 there was no theory that was category theory until rosen is called at one and this is after grotendi after daniel khan i mean shortly after but it is rosen that crew that produced the word right i wrote the paper about that unfortunately not not it's not very rigorous way let's say but indeed beautiful ideas very stimulating ideas quite quite inconsistent uh you may look at my But fantastic. I love Rosen's work, even though I think it's insufficient, it's inconsistent, bad notations, etc.
but they did. And there are physics faculty, say, at my own university, who will agree with you in the sense that they say we should be using more of modern representation theory. We should be using more of modern topology, but we don't actually know how. There's many, many papers making serious progress with the previously standard tools, and we just don't see how to do that. But they're saying, yeah, great, go ahead, and get, you know, get Grotendee's ideas more widespread, but for now they don't, they can't use them. Rocco, do you wanna sort of come back to anything
or give any thoughts in the gallery? Just seeing a window, so maybe. Sure. I'm not sure if our video is good. I really appreciated Colin's point about the difference between mathematics and science with respect to their specific philosophizations. That the philosophy of science raises certain problems that philosophy of mathematics doesn't. And And in fact, philosophy of mathematics seems in a funny way to get what's very important about mathematics to many mathematicians wrong in a way that even if philosophers tend to
get science wrong, they usually get it wrong in a way that scientists feel like they have something interesting to contribute. And so I completely agree. I think it's a wonderful point that for sure, the philosophy of mathematics needs more input for mathematicians. And the fact that there's a kind of structural obstruction pedagogically and academically, that there just aren't that many philosophers with enough training in contemporary mathematics to really hear those messages, right? But I think all those things are in place, But I think one thing that might be a helpful contribution is an insight that Charles Peirce
made about mathematics, which I think strongly demarcates it from science, which is that when one has a mathematical proof, it's not infrequent that there turns out to be a small error somewhere in the proof. And maybe sometimes it takes centuries to discover this error. But the interesting fact is, once the error is discovered and made public, there is almost never any controversy about whether it's an error or not. That there's something about mathematical proof that doesn't give rise to the kinds of controversies that arise with respect to scientific theories. And I think the core of that is that science, even under an umbrella conception of instrumentalism, is still aiming at some independent reality that presumably has its own structure.
And a lot of mathematicians might think that way, right? They might be sort of spontaneous Platonists. But if you actually look at what they do, they never disagree about the actual, to cast things in the language of Reza, the descriptions that their proofs make of the structures that they are are unraveling right or or carefully um detailing so that if if if mathematics is something like a science of pure description in proof that that lack of the independent object would would maybe account for why philosophers don't have as much business sort of stepping in or stepping onto
mathematicians terrain in a way they might with respect to the sciences. No, we just have to do it better. We have to do it right instead of wrong. That's the only thing. that's that's what i think i mean i talk with mathematicians all the time but i also read them so i'm i'm very good what what do you think that that better practice might look like concretely especially in terms of the like institutionally well i mean we've got this this literature on unstructural and says mathematicians use this idea of structure there's virtually never a citation
of an example there's virtually never a quotation of anybody doing it um it would actually be a better discussion if they would say for example now they might say for example hilbert okay but tell me what about hilbert um engage with something you claim in hilbert is structural um i've got kind of this campaign i've been urging against anonymous mathematics try to never say mathematicians do such and so without naming at least one now one example is not decisive but it's way better than no examples it's it is decisively better than none because it focuses what you're doing um i think philosophers of math they spend you know they spend a lot of time reading previous
philosophy of math, which is great. You need to do that. But simply to, I mean, the number of philosophers I've heard tell me that probably mathematicians just aren't as conceptually careful as philosophers. They don't need to read mathematicians because mathematicians will just do whatever works. And I come back and I try to say, yeah, but not everything works. They have to find whatever works and you should be paying attention to that. and i just think as a partly we're recovering from a great idea logicism the invention of set theory the the guillot theorems are really fantastic achievements and whenever people get a fantastic achievement you you've got a period of recovering from that as you you absorb
it and you over value it overvalue it maybe and and you let it keep you from moving on with other things um so i think it is fair to say sort of philosophy of math was stunned by the guillot theorems and then the cohen theorems the independence results cohen gave but the answer is not to keep recycling the causes of those discoveries it's you gotta also see what's going on now uh perhaps not to go back to what reza mentioned about pretension uh i should have said intentionality in the examples i gave in biology that's the core also in mathematical work uh i what i learned from my main master and you know the georgie major mathematician in pisa with
I had nine years of a seminar. He insisted to say, well, yes, proving theorems is the job of a mathematician. You have to do that. But the main point is to understand which theorems are worth proving. That's really the intentional attitude of knowledge, which is fundamental. Twice, you know, you do like automatic theorem proving. There is no relevant theorem. entirely done by computer simply because the finite branching from axioms is so huge and most of them are nonsense the consequence the automatic consequence the formal consequence from from axioms are mostly nonsense the getting on the right branch is the major intentional duty
of making the mathematical conjecture this should require some more reflection yes no i i completely agree with you i mean uh i forgot um i wanted to actually say something you know with this whole idea of so-called explosion of ai uh so baldzman is actually one of the first people who are talking about ai and there is a quote by him uh where he says that look uh um you know uh you can actually talk or think about a hypothetical machine that does absolutely everything hypothetically that we
do. It's just that you can't actually say really that whether this machine is conscious or not, precisely because the marker of consciousness is a co-constitution of the world through which that consciousness is being recognized. And then Boltzmann adds this sort of thing about, you know, how is it possible actually for us to talk about a cognizing agency that for that matter any sort of way that you can talk it talk about it hypothetically has
a certain sort of objectivity but in so far as the objectivity and objectivity is a tissue between the subject and what you might call to be the world whatever you might understand or interpret the world, so long as you don't have that tissue, you can actually say that this intelligence has consciousness or not. In a sense, Boltzmann deflates this whole, you know, kind of misguided idea of AI in a sense today, that look, there are processes that might be objective, but so long as they are not objective within the co-constitution of your own world,
you might as well not talk about them. Because that would fall under the axe of Kant, of extreme speculative sort of philosophy, that our consciousness is always co-constitutive co-consciousness. and it would be a fundamentalist stretch to actually not to hypothesize about an art consciousness but another world that is co-constitutive with that consciousness
we can always talk about an ant's consciousness but can we actually talk about the world of and from us school was mentioned several times and yes yes of course these are these are fundamentally vogue ideas in in that source of time frame yes uh and uh uh colin uh you mentioned about platonism something that i wanted to actually mention are you familiar with Jacques Bouverie's classical essay called what is exactly platonistic in platonist mathematics no no it's a magnificent essay yeah I've talked with um with
Marco Ponsa I think about about some of what's in it but I have not have not gone so So one of the things that Jean Bouveries talks about is that when we are talking usually about Platonism, we really most probably don't actually mean Plato's. I mean, the dialogues or Plato's models of the so-called mathematicals, but rather we have a certain sort of idea. And Jacques Bouverieze talks about, the essay is actually quite illuminating, that there are different grades of Platonist mathematicians, right?
that in some grade, for example, there would be no way that you can actually wed mathematical Platonism with constructivism. But there are also grades of mathematical Platonism where constructivism and Platonism are happy couples. And this is quite actually a phenomenal essay. I highly recommend it. yeah well i don't care what people call platonism it's it's not that important to me but when i refer to platonism i do mean going to the text i mean going to the text looking at the original noticing that for example in the republic socrates very clear mathematicians do not
deal with realities mathematicians are dreaming they mistake dreams for realities he's perfectly clear about it only dialectic allows us to reach yes okay so in that sense i would say that you don't uh and i'm completely fine if you don't like it because i don't like it uh you probably don't have that much compassion for bad use vision of mathematics and play to them i think it's fun i've even published on that but i it's Yeah, I mean. Precisely because Badiou has a certain sort of vision of mathematical truth, which is empty of all sorts of epistemological concerns. Because that wouldn't be really Badiou's form of mathematics.
And yes, I think that you are actually referring to the analogy of the divided lines, where basically the mathematicals have a certain sort of a status. between the dialecticals and dianoia. But also discussion several pages later where he specifically says the mathematicians are dreaming, they are not dealing with reality. Yes, yes. But the thing is that, for example, in works like Cretilus and Philebus, Plato ascribes a certain sort of pragmatism. And this is something that has only been recently brought up. I know that it has been brought up by way of Tobinjan's school, but it has been brought up by Paul Livingston that Plato's vision of mathematics actually has more in common with Peirce.
That could be. I wouldn't be surprised just in the sense that they're both very, very smart, but I have not really read Peirce very extensively. I see. I see. What magnificent talks, Giuseppe, Colin, everyone. Excellent. Thank you so much. Thank you. Yep. Any more questions? Are we sort of done now? I think it's gone on quite light. No? Okay. Thank you so much, everyone, for taking part. Thank you, Giuseppe, Colin, Reza, Ian, Rocco, people in the gallery, people who have persevered online. It's been great. Thank you