Wandering Significance: An Essay on Conceptual Behaviour

by Mark Wilson

Mark Wilson presents a highly original and broad-ranging investigation of the way we get to grips with the world conceptually, and the way that philosophical problems commonly arise from this. He combines traditional philosophical concerns about human conceptual thinking with illuminating data derived from a large variety of fields including physics and applied mathematics, cognitive psychology, and linguistics. Wandering Significance offers abundant new insights and perspectives for philosophers of language, mind, and science, and will also reward the interest of psychologists, linguists, and anyone curious about the mysterious ways in which useful language obtains its practical applicability.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

696 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Mark Wilson is distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, a fellow of the Center for Philosophy of Science and a Fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Before moving to Pittsburgh, he taught at the University of California-San Diego, the University of Illinois-Chicago, and Ohio State. His main research investigates the manner in which physical and mathematical concerns become entangled with issues characteristic of metaphysics and philosophy of language. He is also interested in the historical dimensions of this interchange; in this vein, he has written on Descartes, Frege, Duhem, and Wittgenstein. He also supervises the North American Traditions Series for Rounder Records.

Reviews

[Jeff]

Perhaps a more casual note in response to finishing the 90 pp. Chapter 6, "The Virtues of Cracked Reasoning," since I seem to have started the chapter sometime in 2012, having read Wilson's first five chapters over three summers beginning in 2010, and then bogged down in some seam of Virtue for two years, now picking it up again in this summer of 2014. Far from insisting on the book's difficulty, I'll simply remind readers who might have stumbled here wishing to have a kind of field guide to Wilson that Chapter Six is all about "hardness" as a conceptual matter, so how surprising can it be that the book's virtues make themselves again apparent in returning to this theme? I got the itch for Wilson's intellectual groundwork again -- which he insists is a pre-pragmatic pre-emption of various sorts of bad high modern habits of philosophical jiggering-in-an-effort-to-return-to a "classical picture" of how concepts behave at the crossroads of science and literary effort. Wilson offers a nice little summary near the close of Chapter 6, so allow him to broad-brush for a moment:

[G]reat philosophical disputes about the nature of concepts arose in the context of late nineteenth century mechanics, driven by the many practical concerns that troubled physical practice in that era. . . . In many of these circumstances, the problems arose from subtle forms of foundational looping we have just surveyed. Although they knew it not, the classical mechanical framework in which they toiled comprises an excellent illustration of an uneven facade that cannot be regularized without ruining its integral descriptive utility. As various illustrations scattered throughout the book will show, doctrines of quite different supportive natures can mimic for one another quite nicely within classical physics, giving rise to a collected bundle of useful assertions that can seem -- if we don't look too closely -- as if they constitute a unified theory. In truth, however, we confront what was dubbed a theory facade.

I underline above where Wilson's tropes (from carpentry, from information theory) harden his sense in difficult ways. I offer them to suggest Wilson's critique of his contemporaries' confident habit of theory. "Theory facade" suggests to me that theory is what we do when we're not certain what we should be doing. Nothing wrong with that, though humans do appear to be happier when they think they know what they're doing, and in literary efforts we call this a confident performance. Wilson on concepts is a confident performance.

In Chapter Five, "The Practical Go of It," Wilson critiques Quine. From Wilson's vantage, his own critique of Russell's "classical picture" of concepts is informed from two directions -- the pragmatist and W.V. Quine's "anti-classicism." Wilson himself subscribes to what he calls a "pre-pragmatist" critique of the classical picture, a problematical label since there were indeed pre-pragmatists (Emerson, e.g., or Chauncey Wright) whose influence on Whitehead or Russell might be addressed. That aside, later-period pragmatists, with whom Wilson is not at all aligned, e.g., Rorty, share none of Wilson's purpose in trying to understand linguistic skepticism, in whose "disagreeably pessismistic" mood Quine's own anti-classicism emerges. For the pragmatist, conceptual evaluation does not, or should not, entail comparing words and their objects; not so pre-pragmatists (Chauncey Wright is very much to the point here, though Wilson does not mention him.) Here Wilson demonstrates one of the virtues of his very literary style, which is a facility with evidence that can encapsulate his problem with dispatch:

Classical thinking promises us, through its invocation of concepts unrealistically conceived, that it is fairly easy to get our predicates attached cleanly to worldly attributes, a claim made to seem plausible largely through painting the world's true attributes in projected layers of ersatz adhesive and passing off ghostly imposters as "attributes." From this vantage point, classicists promise us that a tidy reference relationship exists that can tie a predicate "p" firmly to an attribute @ as long as the employers grasp @ firmly and steadfastly maintain the tie. As anti-classical critics, many of us declaire this picture to be simplistic. But to do so, we needdn't insist that speaking of "reference" in the course of everyday linguistic evaluation is wrong or mythological: "'Dog' refers to being a dog in English" should be accepted as an innocuous expression of genuine correlative fact. On the other hand, we should also note that, if someone off-handedly asserts that "'robin' refers to being a robin or that "'rouge-gorge' refers to being a robin in French," we will balk and ask, "Wait a minute: do you realize that a little hitch arises here with respect to Turdis migratorious and Erithacus rubecula?" (277)

What Wilson adduces here is the slight conceptual discrepancy between the way we regard dogs, and the way we regard robins. Whereas conceptually a dog is a dog in St. Louis and Perth, robins were birded in Britain, and then when the British colonized our shores they continued to call what we would come to know better as a thrush a robin; just so, we now have compromised, with "is a robin" an acceptable predicate on both shores, though we now distinguish (vide the Latin) between the one that migrates and the one that stays in Europe.

Chapter Four, "Theory Facades," presents this note-taker with some rather formidable intellectual hurdles, and it has taken me almost a month to excuse myself for them. This long central chapter is best suited for those who properly understand the interstices between pure mathematics and applied mathematics, applied mathematics and the sciences; sciences and the humanities. While it may seem a set of analogies, the structure of relationships between discourses within these fields is far from exact. One of Wilson's crucial arguments, it seems (again, I'm in no position to judge his persuasiveness on this score), is that "theory" as it emerges in the 19th century, and by mid-twentieth century becomes an almost monstrous formation, must be accounted for in the lack of precision with which "covers" or "facades" meant to "patch" incongruities in this set of analogies (again, pure math::applied math; applied math::physics, thermodynamics, etc; the physical and biological sciences::popularizing discourses in the humanities) become a natural outgrowth of continuing "practice" within each of these areas of knowledge-plying. His means of demonstrating this is taking the reader into instances of the relation of applied mathematics and physics, including "variable reduction" within continuum mechanics, quantum mechanics' asymptotic "patches" of that relation, etc. What we are privileged to see in this, however stunted our training, is the romanticism of our various "theories" and the real-world work they are hopeful indeed in trying to do.

"We strive for presentation" Ezra Pound wrote, and by "we" he meant poets. I thought of this as I was reading the very hefty Chapter Three of Wilson's book, called "Classical Glue," because in order to get through it I had to go back and read (partially re-read) Russell's The Problems of Philosophy (1912) and there I came upon, for the second time (the first had been in a Steven Meyer graduate seminar on science and poetry), Russell's very nice remarks about description, which do suggest to poets, I believe, a way to use Wilson's text. Rhetorically I become accustomed (because I teach writing) to understanding description as mode of topical development. It is a muscle, Virginia Woolf says, of exposition and everyday she would begin with descriptive exercises. What are these? The moderns seem particularly keen on bringing something out in de-scribing it; either verbally, or in writing, taking something that was not in an other than in-scripted form, and giving it presentational form, i.e., a verbal object that allows someone else to have knowledge about the thing we think we see. William James calls this knowledge about a thing; Russell -- knowledge by description. Russell contrasts knowledge by description to the idea I suspect he gets from James, "knowledge by acquaintance," a knowledge of things that requires no a priori conceptual apparatus. Frequently knowledge-about relies on the sense data acquired in acquaintance with objects, but not always, and it is in proving this that Russell feels confident in dismissing Berkeleyan idealism. However, as Wilson argues, it is the "classical picture's" confidence in the inherent capacity of concepts to live in both of these realms (knowledge-about, and knowledge by acquaintance) at once that causes Wilson to set himself up as an anti-classicist.

While Wilson does not locate himself as a pragmatist, he summarizes a position somewhere between Coleridgean empiricism, and the naive, as well as sophisticated, classical position summarized in Chapter One. To take an example of the former position, recall Aristotle's well-known claim that, in the act of perception, the perceiving subject becomes part of the perceived field. In Chapter One, Wilson distinguishes between a naive and a sophisticated Classicism with regard to the question of whether, for example, it's possible that "Archie has never fully grasped the concepts of Calculus, so he cannot be expected to work the problems." This latter statement, we will readily admit, while taking as wholly problematic, for example, the question of whether, when we go down to Appalachia to do fieldwork in ethnomusicology, we should record Clarence Ashley, or play banjo with him, or record ourselves playing banjo with him. What is it, in other words, that needs to be "preserved"? Here Wilson's amateur ethnomusicology experience is indeed a delightful spin on things. Wilson argues that the problem is the "content of concepts" -- I cannot go into the entire proof here, but Wilson has a beautifully erudite and literary approach to allowing us to see the folly of our usual willy-nilly post-modernism.

Lost Chords: If we found moss on Mars what would be our first inclination? to study the thing in all its awful mystery or to try to define what we mean when we say that what we found is moss? Herein lies a problem within contemporary writing about the sciences which Wandering Signficance takes as its subject. Within parascientific writing, i.e., writing popularizing the sciences, the mysteries of existence are bracketed on behalf of the set of problems which the parascientist is trying to de-mystify; messiness, which we see all about us, is pre-empted by the sheer ethos of the athiest-scientist. Within philosophy, on the other hand, and as Mark Wilson notes, concepts like "moss," fungus, or water, are endlessly excavated, so that mystery of Mar's moss goes unremarked upon for another day. Wilson's subject, then, is how significance tends to "wander" from the subject under hand to concepts warranting the inquiry, most often unthinkingly. He seems right to suppose that our failure to ever deal with the messiness is responsible for philosophy's marginality in current debates about culture.

[Charlie Huenemann · Rating 5 out of 5]

When we come up with terms or concepts, we do not have full knowledge of what in the world we are talking about, or the range of future uses of those terms or concepts. Each term is just good enough for our immediate purposes. Over time, as we learn more and get busy with other things, each term or concept gets stretched, bended, twisted, and shaped for new ranges of uses. Mark Wilson believes that the clearest cases of these evolutions of meaning are found in the history of applied mathematics, and so much of this long and complex book is dedicated to teasing out very technical details of mathematicians and engineers revising old conceptual tools to accomplish new practical tricks. But there is also some P. G. Wodehouse in Wilson, so these complex matters are infused with wry observations and wit. His discussions are subtle and detailed enough to give the definite impression that most philosophers just have not read enough to be as confident as they are in the sweeping claims they are making. The details matter; indeed, Wilson's thesis might be that the details are all there are, and philosophical generalizations flatten out the map into one that does not capture the world in any helpful way.

[Nat]

I started reading this in 2007. I've referred to it in stuff I've published, but only in a cherry-picking way. Only during the long/super-short COVID summer of 2020, with the help of a reading group, did I finally find my way through its 327,000 words.


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December 2007

Someone just recalled this. They're going to get the retributive instant recall.