Four intellectual pitfalls of understanding the real

In his critique of string theory, Graham Harman names its four mistakes, or intellectual pitfalls. They are: physicalism, smallism, anti-fictionalism, and literalism.

I find myself returning to these pitfalls over and over again. They are the cause of continual confusion and miscommunication. A recent example is in the discourse around IFS, which Scott Alexander covers in his recent post:

What Is Going On In IFS?

The problem with trying to explain IFS to a rationalist is that subjective experience cannot be explained. And so if someone’s whole field of experience passes through their conceptual mind, which does not admit mysteries, symbols, energies, etc., then it’s going to be very difficult to explain IFS to them.

What I like about Harman’s work and the project of Object Oriented Ontology in general is that it tries to engage rationalism on its own terms. (This also is what I dislike about OOO; it lacks power and energy precisely for this reason.)

Here are the four pitfalls:

1. Physicalism.
   “That which exists must be physical.”
   Physicalism excludes ghosts, Jungian archetypes, souls, and other nonphysical objects. Physicalism also excludes things like corporations, say for example Nike. But Nike, like other massively distributed objects, cannot be reduced to the sum of its material parts. Nike is more than a collection of sneakers, ads, employees, and balance sheets.

2. Smallism.
   “That which exists must be basic and simple.”
   This false belief is an appeal to modularity, a preference for the component pieces over the whole enchilada. Harman refutes smallism with the idea of emergence, in which new phenomena appear when smaller objects are joined together. When a couple gets married, the emergent reality of their marriage – their choices, their dynamic, their ways of being – cannot be reduced to simple math between the individuals.

3. Anti-fictionalism.
   “That which exists must be non-fictional.”
   Fiction is an essential aspect of the human experience. Harman mentions 221B Baker Street, the fictional address of the fictional Sherlock Holmes. A good theory of everything needs to be able to say something about Sherlock Holmes. Or going deeper, pretty much all human perception is fictional in some important way. For example when I’m looking at an orange, I’m seeing it a greatly simplified way that has little to do with the complexity of an actual orange. Any theory that dismisses the way I experience the orange as a fiction, a sort of confusion of the “real orange,” excludes all of human experience from its scope, which seems like a bad mistake.

4. Literalism.
   “That which exists must be able to be stated in logical, propositional language.”
   This is maybe the pitfall most firmly embedded in our culture. It’s the one that Heidegger and Wittgenstein fought against with limited success in the 20th century. Harman targets Daniel Dennett as a literalist. Dennett argues that wine-tasting is a farce, and imagines wine-tasters being replaced by a machine that simply reads out the chemical description of the wine’s makeup. For Dennett, a literal description of the wine’s chemistry is a superior, more accurate description than the infamously flowery language of a wine-taster’s notes. For Harman and others, it’s actually the exact opposite that is the case. Art, poetry, and metaphor have a fundamental role to play in describing reality, because the real is always withdrawing or veiling itself. (That claim requires a ton of exploration, not to be covered here!) In this way, Harman is not just not a literalist, but an anti-literalist.