The Epistemic and The Ontic
The Magical Flower of Winter is an essay series exploring reality and our relationship to it. It deals with philosophy, science and our views of the world, with an eye on the metacrisis and our future. Sign up to receive new essays here:
...But later, among the stars, what good is it - they are better as they are: unsayable. For when the traveller returns from the mountainslopes into the valley, he brings, not a handful of earth, unsayable to others, but instead some word he has gained, some pure word, the yellow and blue gentian.
Rainer Maria Rilke - Duino Elegies
In the first article I attempted to give a flavor of the topic and scope of my project. In this piece I want to start to introduce some of the concepts that stand central to several of the questions we will be facing down the line. I might to a larger degree be asking questions than providing answers, and the reason for this is threefold. First, the questions posed are meant to stimulate thinking about these topics, and second, in the limited context provided the questions may not yet have meaningful answers. Lastly, I believe the core of the understanding we are aiming for simply does not lie in propositions that can be supplied as answers to questions, that the knowledge we seek in trying to understand reality is itself more akin to a process than a set of facts.
To be a realist about a subject is to believe that certain things within this subject have an existence independent of us. The question of the existence of an external world independent of us constitutes the central issue in realism/anti-realism debates in metaphysics and philosophy of science1. To be a physicalist is to believe that the mental, that mind, reduces to the physical. The question of how mind arises from body or brain, the mind-body problem, is the central issue in philosophy of mind and its debate between physicalism and anti-physicalism2. Before discussing these in detail I want to introduce two terms that provide a common understanding to these seemingly unrelated questions. Epistemology is the philosophical subfield concerned with the nature of knowledge, while ontology is concerned with the nature of being. From the terminological roots of these two branches of philosophy we extract the concepts of the epistemic and the ontic. By the epistemic I will mean all discourse, language, mathematics and science, anything and all that we order and structure, all our frameworks, all our knowledge. By the ontic3 I will, tentatively, mean what the epistemic is telling us about or corresponds to in reality, what grounds the epistemic, what ultimately exists. The distinction between these two concepts comes in many guises throughout the history of philosophy and science, for instance as phenomena versus noumena and the ontic as Kant’s “thing-in-itself”, as the distinction between appearance and reality, and of the ontic as an ultimate reality, as something hidden beneath or beyond the world we experience. We can, for present purposes and very roughly, think of the distinction between the epistemic and the ontic as the distinction between physics and metaphysics. For the debate of realism, the ontic will then be the external, independent world, the ultimate «hidden» reality, while the epistemic will be our theory about it. In a similar vein, for the mind-body problem the epistemic will be our theory of mind, while the ontic will be mind itself, our subjective experience. So the common issue of these two problems can now be seen as: how can the leap be made across the gap that these two different kinds, the epistemic and the ontic, make up?
One may ask why these two kinds are in need of uniting at all, and the answer is explanation. Without explaining how mind arises from brain or body, without us grasping how the reality we experience comes about from the substrate of physics, how can we say that we have an understanding of reality or ourselves? Explanation is one of the aims of science, but professional opinion differs as to what lengths we require explanations to reach. If we hold that the goal of science is explanation, and if we believe science will be able to provide a “theory of everything”, then the gap between the epistemic and the ontic will have to be bridged somehow. On the other hand we could believe the role of science to be less total in its scope and its reach, we could for instance believe that metaphysics, the ontic, is dead4, and that science is about empirical adequacy, that all we can expect of scientific theory is for it to adequately account for our observations. I will be discussing explanation more in a separate piece, but as food for thought let me ask the following: what evidence do we have for the dualist presupposition of distinguishing between the epistemic and the ontic? Why separate the world in these two kinds in the first place, and why keep up this assumption? Science and philosophy has evolved through many cycles in which these dualist presuppositions are laid aside, metaphysics is declared dead, and philosophical stances that restrict their metaphysical claims or are of a more monist kind see the light of day. Yet the dominant philosophy underpinning modern culture and society, characterized by the separation of man from nature, is seemingly still dualist. This phenomenon itself will need to be accounted for.
In relation to the epistemic and the ontic, two additional terms will be useful. When we envision that the epistemic connects to the ontic, we are envisioning the epistemic transcending itself, going beyond what it itself is. Immanence on the other hand is a keeping within itself, and necessarily so in the case where there is no “beyond” or “outside” whatever the subject is. This boundary, this notion of transcendence, comes into play when we consider the hard problems, for the reason these are problems at all is because of the issue of the discreta of the epistemic transcending itself to provide the continuum of reality and experience. For this is exactly what we expect our theories to provide, a bridge from the limited to the unlimited. But, does not this seem the wrong way around? Would it not be more natural to expect the unlimited to give rise to the limited, for the epistemic to be immanent to the ontic? But if this is the case, if what is to provide explanation is more naturally intelligible in terms of what is to be explained, what aspirations can we then have for explanation as a criterion of science?
I ask these questions in order to highlight the difficulties that may arise in expecting the relationship between the epistemic and the ontic to be reductive, of assuming that one can be made intelligible completely in terms of the other. Reductionism holds that all wholes are nothing more than the sum of its parts, a position and an assumption it should be clear stands central to the hard problems. Anti-reductionism, what we are being pulled towards in questioning the reach of reductive explanation, holds that a whole is more than its parts, and is a position obviously at odds with a conception of explanation as purely bottom-up. But what can be made of a conception of explanation that isn’t bottom-up? Wouldn’t such a conception go against causality, and border on teleology5? I will return to the seeming conflict with both common sense and the scientific method posed by these anti-reductionist notions we arrive at in thinking about the hard problems.
She knew that in the end you really can’t know. You can't get hold of the world. You can only draw a picture.
You will never know what the world is made of. The only thing that's certain is that it's not made of the world. As you close upon some mathematical description of reality you can’t help but lose what is being described. Every inquiry displaces what is addressed.
Cormac McCarthy - The Passenger
So much of discourse deals in pictures and metaphor, we illustrate our meanings by painting pictures with words. We interchange synonyms and utilize stand-in models in talking about almost anything6. This is an integral part of language, but it can be taken too far: when we use a picture to describe a phenomenon, and then erroneously ascribe some property to the phenomenon, based on the properties of the picture. This fallacy is named confusing the map for the territory7, which should amply illustrate what is meant. How we represent the subject of our discussion may shape the discussion. In describing reality in terms of the epistemic and the ontic, in thinking about the hard problems in terms of transcendence and immanence, are we not ourselves engaged in this confusion to some inevitable degree? Have we not already engaged in using pictures from our experience in space and time (things and their appearance, inside/outside) and applied properties of the pictures onto abstract concepts that should lie beyond the constraints of space and time, to concepts we expect space and time to arise out of? In asking this, how do we have confidence in where the boundary between the name and the thing named lies? Are we seeing reality clearly, without the influence of evolutionary, psychological, cultural or linguistic baggage? These questions should highlight to what great extent we are walking on slippery ice (a picture) in this investigation, that the ground we walk on is shaky (another picture). How can we find purchase for our thoughts, language and models, when “every inquiry displaces what is addressed”? In the next piece I will start the attempt to shed some light on these issues.
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References
Braver, L. (2007). A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism. Northwestern University Press.
Button, T. (2013). The Limits of Realism. OUP Oxford.
Chalmers, D. J. (1997). The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. OUP USA.
Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time. Harper.
Korzybski, A. (1933). Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. International Non-Aristotelian Library Publishing Company.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (2003). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press.
McCarthy, C. (2022). The Passenger. Knopf Publishing Group.
Rilke, R. M. (2001). Duino Elegies, trans. Edward Snow. North Point Press.
van Fraassen, B. (2002). The Empirical Stance. Yale University Press.
See Button (2013) and Braver (2007).
See Chalmers (1997).
My meaning of the ontic might differ slightly from how it is usually understood within ontology. In particular, my meaning of the ontic is closer to what Heidegger (1962) means by ontological, than what he means by ontical.
van Fraassen (2002).
Explanation in terms of ends, purposes or goals, and not in terms of causes.
See Lakoff (2003).
Korzybski (1933).