Forms, Names, Descriptions: A Holy Trinity

By Chris Chrappa

Sometimes there's no good way to adequately describe something. It is indeed rather gratifying to think that we've "captured" the center of an object, passion, process, context, or person, but when we get down to the grime and grit there seems to be nothing but infinite particularity "ice grillin' us", as rappers like to say. So I should revise my first sentence: never is there a good way to adequately describe something.

For what it's worth, contemporary science no less than philosophy and other academic fields have all warmed up to this point. It is actually nothing new-any cursory reading of Lao-Tze would attest to that-but just kind of sits there, shimmering so brightly that it blinds us almost ruefully to its incisive presence, no doubt "for all practical purposes." Descriptions are the best thing since toilet paper, and we use them accordingly.

I should first give a relatively corny and simple example of what I mean by "never an adequate way to describe something." Take a table (one might recognize this from the well-known biologist Stuart Kauffman's Investigations). It has, let's say, three wooden planks, four short legs, runners between each pair of legs. There is a crack, let's say, in the middle board, about eight inches long, half an inch wide near the edge of the board, dwindling to a curved arc along its trajectory. There is a second crack six inches to the left of the first… "A cracker is on the table. A personal computer is on the table. The first crack is seven feet from the door. The second crack is seven feet six inches from the door. Both cracks are 256,000 miles from the moon and 4.3 light years from the nearest star…A mote of dust hovers of the table, two inches from a leaf that drifts down from a ficus in the living room," and so on and so on. The situation so easily slides into absurdity that we almost sympathize with positivist attempts at reducing descriptions to statements about sense data. Almost.

Positivism, you see, is a philosophy born of frustration and a rather perverse desire for certainty. Its analogue in science would be classical Newtonian mechanics, which is precisely the connection positivists like Rudolf Carnap sought to establish: laws are axioms generalized from prior sense experience, theorems are deduced from them in order to fit particular cases of sense experience, present experiments test the validity of the theorems. This is known as deductive-nomology, and its main purpose is to subsume everything under the rubric of logic, or highly elaborate and structured procedures dealing with linguistic statements pertaining to sense experience. In short, science as we were taught it in high school.

Some positivists have a tendency to be ferocious nominalists; nominalism being a view which, however attractive it might be to us radicals, is really predicated upon the same dualisms it's used to overcome. In contemporary parlance it's "hylomorphic," viewing the universe mostly as inert and for the most part chaotic matter, which our "nomos" (laws and names) imposes form and order on. You might have noticed this: Adam (yes, Garden of Eden Adam) is a most exquisite nominalist-right at the heart of some decidedly non-nominalist religious sects!

Positivism takes Adam's game and runs with it: "Only statements that are empirically verifiable are meaningful"-a nice way to cut out all of that murky and irksome particularity that always seems to make "facts" and "concepts" hang off of reality "like baggy clothes," as Bergson says.

Of course, the obvious objection here is that the positivist motto is not itself empirically verifiable; not to mention its assuming anything meaningful is immediately reducible to sense experience; not to mention the dubious conception of sense experience as, of course, a common sense (adequate description anyone?); not to mention the commonsensical presumption that only the "meaningful" is worth talking about.