Intangible Materialism: The Body, Scientific Knowledge, and the Power of Language

Notes

171 Introduction 1. In Modernism and Time, I argue that in his accounts of quantum physics, Heisenberg replaces notions of simultaneity with the idea—based on the Copenhagen interpretation—of alternation. The “conception of complementarity,” according to Heisenberg, encourages physicists “to apply alternatively different classical concepts which would lead to contradictions if used simultaneously” (1958, 179). Alternation, like Russell’s periodicity (discussed in chapter 1), makes temporality a constituent element in any sense of materialism (see Schleifer 2000b, ch. 5, esp. 186–87). 2. I examine such a procedure at length in Analogical Thinking (2000a, esp. ch. 1). 3. In The Disorder of Things, John Dupré argues that the category of an “essence” or a “natural kind” both for physical objects and biological creatures can be delineated “only in relation to some specification of the goal underlying the intent to classify the object” (1993, 5), what I describe throughout Intangible Materialism as notation and attention, the very “noticings” of literature: “The idea that things belong to unambiguously discoverable natural kinds,” Dupré writes, “is intimately connected with the commitment to essentialism . . . [which posits] that what makes a thing a member of a particular natural kind is that it possesses a certain essential property, a property both necessary and sufficient for a thing to belong to that kind” (1993, 6). Dupré rejects this idea in favor of the “pluralism” of something like Wittgenstein’s “family resemblance concept” (1993, 10) based on “the underlying ontological complexity of the world, the disorder of things” (7). In a similar fashion, following Wittgenstein and Kuhn more explicitly, Andersen , Barker, and Chen (2006) describe “family resemblance” classifications in astronomy and biology. Together, these studies “reformulate” (to use Poovey’s term) understandings of wholeness in terms of ontology and Notes 172 Notes to Chapter 1 epistemology (cognitive science). Intangible Materialism attempts to do this in terms of semiotics as well. 4. In The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, Gould offers an extended example of this difference. “The appearance of a ‘face’ on a large mesa of the surface of Mars—an actual case by the way, often invoked by fringe enthusiasts of extraterrestrial intelligence—bears no . . . conceptual homology to faces of animals on earth. We label the similarity in pattern as accidentally analogous—even though the perceived likeness can teach us something about the innate preferences in our neural wiring for reading all simple patterns in this configuration . . . as faces. (An actual face and the accidental set of holes on the mesa top may stimulate the same pathway in our brain, but the two patterns cannot be deemed causally similar in their own generation—that is, as faces)” (2002, 928). In chapter 2, I examine this phenomenon of apprehending faces, which Gould suggests provides an analogy of function. In chapter 3, I argue that there is a material homological relationship between automatic calling phenomena in mammals, and especially in primates, which are revealed in Tourette syndrome, and poetry (see ch. 3, note 6). 1. Intangible Materialism 1. In this catalog, Chalmers presents physical, biological, and cognitive examples of reductionism, the three categories I examine in chapter 2 and throughout this book. (John Dupré [1993] also follows these categories in his philosophical critique of reductionism.) In another delineation of reductionism , George Levine notes that “in the end, not only would human behavior be explicable by biology, but biology would be explicable by chemistry , and chemistry explicable by particle physics. . . . Reductionism,” he concludes, “gives causal priority to one level of explanation over all others” (2006, 54). Edward O. Wilson offers a strong version of such reductionism throughout his career and especially in his book Consilience, which I examine closely in chapter 2. In fact, Levine describes Wilson’s “strong reductionism ” (125) and calls him—along with Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Steven Pinker—a “biological determinist” (107), offering a sweeping survey, focused on Wilson, of the contemporary debate over reductionism. Dawkins and Dennett pursue sociobiology—a scientific program Wilson helped initiate early in his career (1975)—while Pinker pursues evolutionary psychology; in Consilience, Wilson subscribes to a basically physicalist reductionism. These three categories—physicalism, sociobiology, and evolutionary psychology—also describe the categories treated in Intangible Materialism. “Much current resistance to reductionism,” Levine argues, “is based on the argument . . . that reductionism, in assuming that all complex structures are built up out of smaller and less complicated ones, tends to ignore Notes to Chapter 1 173 the problem of the relations...