Text:Facts and the Self from a Constructivist Point of View
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Poetics 18 (4–5), 435–448, 1989.
Facts and the Self from a Constructivist Point of View
Of what should absolute reality be independent? If you want it independent of humans, you should consider that it would then be useless for humans. Ludwik Fleck (1929; p.429)
The title of a conference that begins with the phrase “The invention of facts…” is bound to create a variety of reactions. For a constructivist who has for a long time been engaged in the investigation and reconstruction of the concept of knowledge the phrase expresses an epistemological attitude that is diametrically opposed to the philosophical heritage that has come down to us in the Western world. It also raises the awkward questions: What is a fact? What do we intend when we use the word “knowledge”? What follows is this constructivist’s current answer to these questions.
For some 2500 years the Western world has manifested an overwhelming tendency to think of knowledge as a cognitive organism’s representation of an outside world, its structure, and how it works. The representation might not yet be quite perfect, but, in principle, it was thought to be perfectible. In any case, its goodness was supposed to depend on the degree of correspondence between it and the outside world called “reality”. Today, this way of thinking is no longer viable.
The Problem of Representation
There are two points I want to make about this notion of representational knowledge, one logical, the other semantic. First, at the time of the pre-Socratics, when our epistemological tradition began, there already were some thinkers who held that any conception of knowledge that required correspondence to a “real” world was illusory and useless. It was illusory, they argued, because there was no way of checking any such correspondence. These thinkers saw with admirable clarity that, in order to judge the goodness of a representation that is supposed to depict something else, one would have to compare it to what it is supposed to represent. In the case of “knowledge” this would be impossible, because we have no access to that “real world” except through further experience from which we abstract what we call “knowledge”; and this knowledge, by definition, would simply be another representation. In other words, we have no difficulty in comparing one representation with another to decide whether they are different, similar, or equivalent; but we cannot compare a representation with something it is supposed to depict, if that something is supposed to “exist” in a real world that lies beyond our experiential interface.
The second, semantic point pertains to the word “representation” and in particular how it has come to be used in English. Like many other words, it has different meanings. Speakers of the language usually handle ambiguity quite well; but in the case of the word “representation” there is a peculiar difficulty: one of its ambiguities seems to have sprung, not from the word’s original use in English but from an unfortunate use that was made of it by translators of German philosophy. Perhaps already earlier, but certainly since Kant’s Critique of pure reason was translated, the two German words “Vorstellung” and “Darstellung” have been rendered in English by one and the same word “representation”. In epistemological contexts, this conflation is disastrous: although both the German words are used to refer to conceptual structures, they specify incompatible characteristics. The first, Vorstellung, indicates an autonomous internal construction, whereas the second, Darstellung, indicates a structure that is considered the picture or illustration of something else. An author who remains unaware of this difference is bound to get into a muddle about what the human mind can and what it cannot “represent” to itself.
That I can mentally re-present certain things to myself is, I believe, indisputable. Though I have not the vaguest idea how I do it, I can at this moment re-present to myself the way up a mountain I climbed on a winter’s day, 40 years ago in the Swiss Alps; I can hear that peculiar swishing, crunching sound at each step, as one pushes the ski forward into the untouched snow and then puts one’s weight on it; I can see the track I am making, in front of me as a project, behind me as a product, as it follows the contour of slopes and gullies, and I can feel that constant effort to keep the track at a steady gradient; and I can smell, with every breath, that incomparable combination of dry, cold air and brilliant sunlight. – Clearly, in this context, “to hear”, “to see”, “to feel”, and “to smell” do not refer to quite the same activities as in a context of immediate perception. When I perceive, I would say I am registering signals that seem to come from my eyes, ears, and nose. When I re-present something to myself, it seems to come from another source, a source that feels as though it were wholly “inside”. Perhaps this difference springs largely from the experiential fact that when I perceive, my percepts can be modified by my physical motion; the past I re-present to myself, in contrast, is not influenced by the way I move at present.
As I said, I do not know how re-presentation works. In fact, no one, today, knows how it works. We have not even the beginnings of a plausible functional model of human memory, let alone a model of human consciousness. Yet, something we want to call memory as well as something we want to call consciousness are involved in the kind of re-play of past experiences that I was describing. The point I want to make is this: If I re-present to myself something that was a familiar experience 40 years ago, it is, indeed, very much like re-playing or reconstructing something that was made at another time. It is, under all circumstances, a re-play of my own experiences, not a piece of some independent, objective world.
That is the reason why I insist on the hyphen. I want to stress the “re” because it brings out the repetition – repetition of something that was present in my experiential world at some other time. (Note that, like the German word Vorstellung, representation may refer to a new construction that has not yet been actually experienced but is projected into the future as a possibility.) I shall leave it at that. I am not a neurophysiologist and I can live without a model of memory and of consciousness. I take these items as what they are to me, that is, I take them as phenomena, as part of my experience. I am not arguing with the traditional view that knowledge consists to a large extent, if not entirely, of representations. I am, however, refuting the notion that representations are or could be pictures, replicas, copies of an experiencer-independent ontic world; instead, I am suggesting, that they are (and cannot be anything but) re-presentations of experiential material that was present at some other time.
The moment this is said, a question arises: If one denies that “knowledge” and “representations” stand in an iconic relation to the “real” world and thus correspond to it, in what relation do they stand to it? This, again, is a serious question, because if we were to say that there is no such relation, we should find ourselves in the trap of solipsism, the doctrine according to which the mind, and the mind alone, creates the world – a doctrine that seems easily refuted by the simple consideration that our world is hardly ever quite what we would like it to be and, what is more, the “real” world has some rather nasty ways of treading on our toes.
