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In an episode of ‘The Philosopher’s Zone‘ called ‘Is it art?’ Alan Saunders talks to Arthur C. Danto about his theory of indiscernables. If you have two identical objects, but one of them is a work of art, and the other is an ordinary something-or-other, how can you tell which is which? He talks of an Andy Warhol show he’d seen, and begins by talking about a photo of Warhol in front of some duplicated shipping cartons:

You couldn’t have told from the photograph that these were anything except shipping cartons. Because until 1964 nobody saw them as anything else. And what Warhol had done had been to duplicate them. Now, my interest in this show – you’ve got two objects which are to all outward appearances indiscernable, but one is a piece of avant garde art and the other is just a utilitarian container. And I thought, well that raises the question of what is art in a very different form than had ever been raised before…What Warhol did was to put it in a different way: how, if you have two objects which look exactly alike (are, as I’ve put it, indiscernable), one being a work of art and the other one not. What’s the difference?

This idea of indiscernables struck me as similar some other ideas…

This is a quote from the end of ‘The Courtier and the Heretic’ by Matthew Stewart (speaking of the continental rationalistic reactions to the scientific revolution):

All begin with the conviction that there is some vital aspect of experience which escapes modern thought. All maintain that the purpose of life begins where modernity ends. All claim to discover the special and elusive meaning of existence through an analysis of the putative failures of modern thought. And all remain indissolubly attached to precisely that which they oppose. (311, Stewart)

And this is a quote from Simon Critchley’s ‘A Very Short Introduction to Continental Philosophy’ where he is describing the feeling one might have at a hypothetical end of science where everything has been explained, “…not an explanatory gap that might be closed by producing a better, more comprehensive theory, but more of a felt gap.” (6, Critchley)

A few other ideas along these lines that I don’t have quotes for offhand are: Aristotle and Kant’s ideas that there is a difference between someone just going through the motions, and someone performing an identical act out of earnest, appearance and reality, and another example being how to tell if someone is conscious or a zombie.

These examples seem to point to what could be a decent definition of philosophy. Danto says:

…I thought that it had the character of any classical philosophical question where you’ve got two things that can’t be told apart but are momentously different. Like in the beginning of Descartes’ Meditations Descartes says: well, what better evidence can I have than what the senses provide me with. And then he says: well, that would be true if only I knew I were sensing, because as a matter of fact, I’ve dreamt that I was having certain experiences and the dreams were very vivid and I would’ve had no idea that there was nothing in front of me, nothing being perceived until I woke up and realized that I’d been dreaming…

This brings up another idea: how do we account for the ability to have such a felt gap epistemologically? My theory is that philosophy is this: the intuition of a “felt gap”, and the elucidation of this. If it were more than just a “felt gap” then it would be empirically testable. So, some exception must be found between what was previously indistinguishable. This could be called a philosophical instinct of sorts.

But what would it mean for these exceptions to come from within (your mind, as opposed to the external world)? The capacity for allowing exceptions in the external world would seem to be one that would equally allow for exceptions coming from within. As in the empiricist/Lockean sense of the external world as mental representation, thus the two realms aren’t so remote. This capacity doesn’t necessarily mean that such exceptions-from-within must exist, as/or in a Spinozean way, that there are necessary corresponding phenomena of mind (though that is an interesting idea: our mind’s capacity for producing exceptional intuitions as beging learned from a willy-nilly/capricious nature). But this point need not be argued that these internal intuitions exist.

I’m going to make a leap here: once we start to receive exceptions from within, we are intelligent. The extent to which we receive (or produce) intuitions to which we find/take exception in/to, is the extent to which we are intelligent/brilliant. It is the zombie that finds nothing of note coming from within, in the analytic truth sense of the predicate being entailed in the subject; the intuitions of consciousness being ‘entailed in the subject’. It is the robot that behaves according to what is entailed in him. Our capacity for being struck by an intuition, of admitting exceptions, goes beyond the capacity of such a robot/zombie, thus such exceptions are a mark of intelligence. I’ve compared this ‘unintelligent’ robot to an anaytic truth, thus intelligence could be defined in comparison to synthetic judgement, in which something additional is introduced (although not a necessary truth). (And in the Kierkegaardean/existentialist sense of not really existing.)

Here is a little recap, since looking back i’m not sure of the coherency of what was written above. The first paragraph starts with an example of the ‘what must be necessary…’ method, and ends with a thesis about the role of this method being central to philosophy. In the second paragraph I start with the example of the philosophical instinct (kinda self-referrential). Then, instead of trying to support my thesis that this method is central to philosophy, I move on to applying this method (’what must be necessary…’) to this philosophical instinct. I didn’t have to use an example from philosophy (the problem of universals) in the second paragraph, but that was the train of thought I followed, and looking back on it, using this ‘what must be necessary…’ method on the philosophical instinct would have to give us what must be necessary for the philosophical instinct, and this is a much more interesting topic than the initial thesis. Then I make the leap to what it is to be intelligent/brilliant.

This is from an article on autism and deception: “True deception assumes the deceiver knows that (1) other beings have minds, (2) different beings’ minds can believe different things are true (when only one of these is actually true), and (3) you can make another mind believe that something false is actually true.” This is a good example of a priori reasoning: without concession to experience, trying to unpack what must be entailed from the comfort of your armchair. I want to argue that such ‘what must be necessary…’ arguments are one of the central methods of philosophy. (through a series of digressions) (thus lacking a necessary connection, but more of a story of some likelyhood to account for it)

Take, for example, some previously taken-for-granted aspect of experience that now resonates with a slightly different ring, strikes you as strange (as I had defined philosophy elsewhere). The example I was thinking of was universals: at some point it dawned on someone that the fact that I can identify x as one of a type, that I must have some criteria by which I judge it as such. Obviously, in order for this to occur… or, rather, what must be necessary for this to occur? (Since it wouldn’t exactly be obvious, since that was kinda the point, that it was previously seamless.) At the very least, for this above described intuition to strike you as such, it would seem that you would need to have bundled into this intuition the idea that this previously-seamless phenomenon might not be seamless – that things might not be as they seem.

In order for one to realize that the scene might not be seamless – that things might not be as they seem – it seems like there must be at least 2: as-it-seems, and as-it-is (or as-it-might-otherwise-be). Thus we are able to account for skepticism as an organizing principle in the philosophical endeavor. There would be no philosophy if we weren’t able to see things any different than they appear. Possibly another way of saying this is that our mind must allow for exceptions, exceptions to the rule, which is of course the case with respect to the external world since we are able to learn from special-case experiences. When it comes to dealing with the external world, we have to be plastic – allowing for exceptions.