edenism

Much of the (academic and popular) contention with postmodern theory centers around what Quention Meillassoux calls correlationism: “the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other.” That is, the idea that we can describe what happens in the interaction between a person's experience and the external world, but there is no way to describe what happens when, say, two stars collide, outside of our ability to observe it, at least, since, in the end, everything we can describe is limited to our experience. Imagine that you are attending a play with your correlationist friend Carl, and after the first act the curtain comes down and the stagehands begin to change out the props. Carl tells you “there is no way you can know what happens behind the curtain. All you can talk about is what happens on stage, because that is something you can observe.” Of course, Carl is wrong, because you can make pretty good predictions about what happens behind the stage. For instance, you can throw a stick of dynamite behind the curtain and be certain that there will be no second act. What we have, then, is a realization that your ability to make beliefs about what goes on behind the curtain may rely on a deferral until you can observe the consequences (e.g. there is no second act), but so long as your predictions are true, you have no reason to doubt your beliefs. The question is why we are able to describe what happens behind the curtain without being able to directly observe it? The answer to this question is that we describe what happens behind the curtain as something like a monadic type from languages such as Haskell. What happens inside of an IO monad is not determined by the way you write the code: as long as the computation is the same, the result may differ, since you can only access the result of the computation, not its intermediate steps. Similarly, it could be that the play was cancelled for reasons unrelated to the dynamite, since you can only view the result. Experimentation, then, provides a way to describe the interactions of objects outside of your ability to perceive them, with the stipulation that “check” can only be “cashed” by perceiving the consequences of the interaction. (It is worth noting that this idea resembles scientific instrumentalism.) Magic tricks rely on this mechanism: a magic trick does not function by deceiving the eye, but by leading the spectator to construct false mental narratives about the thing they cannot see. The real art of a magic trick, then, is in giving a spectator room to misinterpret and deferring the revelation of the spectator's misconception until the appropriate moment. In other words, the magician is in control of when the correlationist check is cashed. The result of this perspective, then, is that one can accept the correlationist perspective but still have a useful ontology, such as an Object Oriented Ontology, wrapped inside.