Approaching commonsense and science

The centrality of humans as subjects to knowing

I am a subject. You are a subject. We both view the world through a local instance of consciousness. That is our starting point.

As a subject, I view the world as it relates to me. My ordinary, habitual, everyday experience requires me to solve a multitude of practical problems concerning my life and my needs. Solving these practical problems involves manipulating the things (and persons) I find within my experience in order to satisfy those needs. Again, this set of concerns regards the world as it relates to me, as a subject.

With the advent of modern scientific methods, we developed the means to treat things according to how they related amongst themselves, independent of their relation to us. We began to speak of how objects might relate to one another apart from the utility they possess to satisfy our practical needs. This was done by expressing these relations mathematically.

The previous, Aristotelian model for science was satisfied to explain the nature of things in qualitative descriptions. But the genius of a Galileo was to develop the means by which the nature of a thing or event, say that of a free fall, could be described quantitatively. This marks the distinction between regarding a thing descriptively and regarding it explanatorily, between treating it in relation to us and treating the relations apart from their direct relevance to human experience, life, or needs.

This shift also means we could treat ourselves as objects in addition to subjects. Hence, not only can we describe ourselves in terms of our experiential cognitive relation to things, to persons, and to ourselves, but we are also beginning to understand the neurological processes operative behind, or under, our conscious experience. We can speak of ourselves quantitatively as well as qualitatively, as objects as well as subjects.

Advocates of scientism desire to eliminate the discussion of the conscious and qualitative altogether, thereby leaving only quantitative explanations of human cognition and consciousness. However, this cannot be done for two reasons.

First, eliminating the qualitative descriptions of the world as it relates to us implies dispensing with an account of the practical exigencies towards which humans as subjects are indexed. While it may be messy, crude, and inexact, this practical perspective is nonetheless our original and primary perspective. One cannot give a full account of human beings without also giving account of the fact that human beings are creatures with a uniquely qualitative aspect to our inhabiting the world, and one which cannot be written of as merely “prescientific.”

Which leads to the second reason. Quantitative science begins with qualitative descriptions. Human observation is the beginning of science, both historically and experimentally. Granted, once a system has achieved thorough quantitative explanation, we no longer speak of it in descriptive terms and now possess the means to speak of it independent any relation to us. It is true that science can be regarded strictly as a product, or output. And in this sense, science offers an image of the world.

Nevertheless, we came to understand and create that representation as human subjects following a consciously operative sequence of steps that began with an observing subject’s description of phenomena, which was only subsequently formulated in quantifiable, mathematical terms.

To give a full account of science, then, not merely as a product or output, but also as a process by which a product is acquired, we must also account for, rather than dispense with, the qualitative, experiential consciousness that does science, as well as the proper conditions for its truth and objectivity. In other words, we cannot give a full account of science as a method of human knowing by only regarding it as a finished product. We must also account for it as an ongoing, epistemological process involving the conscious, human knowers that produce it.

Far from dispensing with discussion of the cognitive operations in which the human knower as subject engages, and from which science takes its origins both historically and constitutively, we must understand the proper place of the knower-as-subject in the human cognitive and epistemic endeavor.

We must account for science in terms of humans as subjects precisely because it is humans as subjects who do science. By this I mean that using the scientific method as a means of investigating the world transpires through the cumulative and repeated occurrence of specific cognitive processes of which we are conscious as subjects. Scientists learn to be scientists through instruction concerning and mastery of these cognitive processes, all of which they are conscious of as subjects.

To be explicit, they do not master the methods of scientific investigation and discovery by treating themselves as objects, or in terms that correspond with their underlying neurological structures. The wondrous scientific progress and success that the human race has enjoyed as all been mediated by conscious cognitive terms and instructions aimed at guiding the scientist as subject.

However, the vast majority of the underlying neurological function producing our consciousness is not transparent to us. We are learning that we cannot “see” the neurological functioning that occurs beneath our conscious representations and self-representations; and yet, the very neuroscientific discoveries that alert us to this fact were, in fact, discovered by scientists operating as subjects following a particular method laid out in terms of subject-indexed cognitive processes and instructions.

Cognitive processes as question asking

The cumulative and repeated set of cognitive processes can be understood as a sequence of questions that are asked and answered as we guide our conscious attending in pursuit of knowledge.

There are a variety of such questions that we ask as human knowers that determine how and what we attend to in the world. The way we attend to the world shifts as the exigencies of human life shift. At times, regarding things in their relation to us is sufficient to achieve some practical end. At other times, a better understanding of the same things (i.e. an understanding of the relations that hold between things independent of our particular considerations) is required to achieve a different practical end, or to achieve the practical end differently.

The shifts of ends and exigencies demand corresponding shifts in the way we attend to the world. Human knowers as subjects ask disparate questions about the world in order to arrive at particular understandings entailed by the need at hand.

We see that these shifts in ways of attending occur not only by description of the changes in our conscious operations and questions, but we also see this when human knowers are treated as objects with emphasis on our underlying neurological structures. Iain McGilchrist’s study of the human brain describes in detail and at length the biehemispheric neurological structure that gives rise to these shifts in our ways of attending.

I have written about this elsewhere, but the difference between the right- and left-hemispheric modes of attending come down to regarding things in the world either as concrete individuals within their unique and experientially engaged context or as reified entities abstracted from their living, or immediate, situation. But this is crucial: it is the same object that is being attended to through these different modes of attending, but for different purposes.

For simplicity’s sake, I’ll refer to the concrete, in-context individual as the intended object of commonsense attending and the reified, abstract entities as the intended object of scientific attending. But notice, I am not positing two separate or distinct ontologies. There are not commonsense objects ‘over here’ and scientific objects ‘over there’. Instead, there is one set of objects which can be attended to variously.

In either case, human knowers only attend to limited and deliberately selected aspects of their objects in order to achieve their specific, predetermined end. And the same goes from scientists, who also attend to only those aspects of their objects that are relevant to the inquiry at hand. They prescind from those aspects, or elements, of their objects not being experimentality measured.

The question, then, concerning which objects are real, or more real, those of commonsense or of science, is ill put. This question erroneously assumes that there are two different ontologies between which we must choose rather than correcting understanding that we possess two differing modes of attending to the same set of objects.

What is really being asked in this question concerning which objects are more real is how much of the world we inhabit can be subjected to scientific attending. Put another way, how much of the world can be quantified according to scientific methodology and explanation? And the answer is: all of it. The known, material universe, humanity included, is properly subject to scientific attending. We can, and should, abstract and reify as much as possible in order to better understand our world and ourselves.

But, as I previously mentioned, we must also remember that we cannot fully account for ourselves, even as objects in the world, without attending to ourselves as subjects, specifically as subjects that discovered and gave rise to the objective, scientific view of the world.

At a minimum this is simply an acknowledgement that right-hemispheric, in-context attending to the world is a legitimate and indispensable mode in which we engage in the world. As previously mentioned, just as attempts to dispense with qualitative descriptions of the world amount to denying the existence of practical exigencies, so too dispensing with commonsense attending to the world amounts to denying the existence of the right hemisphere of the brain. And just as we cannot dispense with qualitative descriptions of the world because they are the stuff from which our quantitative explanations arise, so too we cannot dispense with right-hemispheric attending to the world because it is constitutive of all left-hemispheric attending.

A promissory note

I am aware that I have asserted a number of things for which I have yet to provide demonstration, chief among them the claim that scientific investigation attends to the abstract reifications of objects rather than the concrete, in-context individuals of experience. Inasmuch as science is empirical investigation of the world, how can I claim that it does not deal with the concrete, in-context individuals by which we are surrounded? If anything, science, much more than philosophy or mathematics, addresses the “furniture of the world”, does it not?

To this, I briefly reply, Yes, of course it addresses the furniture of the world, but it does so by attending to the abstracted, reified representations of that furniture in order to facilitate better explanations of the concrete, in-context individuals that we encounter in their ordinary, everyday relation to us. That this is the case will have to be demonstrated by examining the nature of the scientific method…in a future post.