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September11, 2008

Lecture Notes on Sense Certainty and Perception

1) Now we start the actual book.a) Hegel is the philosopher above all who has written about and made us sensitive (I

would claim, too sensitive) to what has come to be known as the “problem of the beginning” in philosophy. Once one has resolved to be critical (at a minimum, methodologically self-conscious), and not dogmatic, where can one start, and what possible justification could one give for starting there?

b) This is the third beginning of the book, after the Preface and the Introduction. The Preface, I have suggested, serves quite another purpose: offering a bridge from the Phenomenology to the Science of Logic and the system of the Encyclopedia. But the Introduction really does serve to introduce the topic and the method in a way that motivates a starting-place. i) The topic is consciousness and its experience. ii) Though he hasn’t told us this (it would have been nice to finish the

Introduction by doing so), the plan is to talk first about its three basic aspects: discursive entries in perception, and the content and process of theoretical cognition, selves and self-consciousness, the normative force of concept-application, and discursive exits in purposive action, and the content and process of practical activity. Then talk about the whole of Spirit, of which those three aspects are aspects, in its tri-partite development.

Cf. this passage, from the Religion chapter of the Phenomenology:The moments are consciousness, self-consciousness, Reason, and Spirit --Spirit that is, as immediate Spirit, which is not yet consciousness of Spirit. Their totality, taken together, constitutes Spirit in its mundane existence generally; Spirit as such contains the previous structured shapes in universal determinations, in the moments just named...Only the totality of Spirit is in Time, and the 'shapes', which are 'shapes' of the totality of Spirit, display themselves in a temporal succession; for only the whole has true actuality and therefore the form of pure freedom in the face of an 'other', a form which expresses itself in Time. But the moments of the whole, consciousness, self-consciousness, Reason, and Spirit, just because they are moments, have no existence in separation from one another. [M 679]AndThus while the previous single series in its advance marked the retrogressive steps in it by nodes, but continued itself again from them in a single line, it is now, as it were, broken at these nodes, at these universal moments, and falls apart into many lines, which, gathered up into a single bundle, at the same time combine symmetrically so that the similar differences in which each particular moment took shape within itself meet together. [M 681]

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(I take it that the inclusion of immediate Spirit along with consciousness, self-consciousness, and reason in the first passage is explicitly to mark the role of the community, which is the other side of individual self-consciousness.)

iii) The aim is to present a science of the experience of consciousness. iv) And the method is to start with what we find in actual empirical

consciousness. c) The criterion of adequacy motivated in the Introduction is what I’ve called the

Genuine Knowledge condition: that we must make it at least intelligible that it is possible to know things as they really are, in themselves, and not just as they are for consciousness. The natural place to start, then, is with cognition that is most immediate, where our cognitive faculties have done the least work. In particular, since the issue raised by consideration of the model or metaphor of cognition as an instrument or a medium is whether conceptualizing must be understood as always in some important way falsifying, we want to begin by looking at the purest form of receptivity we can find, with as little conceptualizing (spontaneity) on our part as possible. The attitude of natural consciousness with which we begin is that “that mind knows best which does least.” [cf. “He governs best who governs least.”] We want to think about states of consciousness that just take in how things are, without doing anything, or interfering in any way with what is given, what is presented. These are direct, immediate, sensory experiences.

d) Starting here is also motivated by the Genuine Knowledge condition on semantics, in particular as motivated by the image of the mind as having to conceptualize the unconceptualized (the mind as instrument, or refracting medium). The trouble there is that anything the mind does to reality to get it into graspable, intelligible shape (into shape where it can be used as evidence to draw conclusions, that is, as premises for inferences) must count as falsifying it: as leaving something out, adding or something.

e) The idea for a positive response will be that a broadly hylomorphic account will see two different forms of one content. Thus both the difference and the identity are respected. (This means we need a special account of this kind of identity-in-difference, and that we will get, in spades.) But the common content must be understood as already in conceptual shape: we do not have a single content first in nonconceptual, and then in conceptual shape. That, the thought is, would make it impossible to satisfy the Genuine Knowledge condition. This is a big structural divide, even within the hylomorphic strategy. Q: What motivates and justifies going the one way rather than the other? A: The lessons of the Consciousness section. That is, one upshot of the argument that takes us from Sense Certainty to Perception is that we must think of the underlying content as through-and-through conceptually articulated, on pain of being condemned to treat it as completely indeterminate.

f) So the picture is something like this:

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g) Note that Hegel’s particular version of the hylomorphic strategy for combining identity and difference (by having two different dimensions, one of which is that along which identity is secured, the other along which difference is secured—note that we must also be able to have two different contents in the same form) will be distinctive in insisting that form and content are nonetheless not conceptually independent of one another.

Sense Certainty :

2) As I read Sense Certainty, Hegel makes two large-scale philosophical points, and along the way starts a third line of thought that is taken to the next stage in Perception. The first is the distinction between immediacy of content and immediacy of origin. The second is between particularity of representing and representing of particularity.

a) The first at its most general is a (indeed, the) rationalist point: no experience is intelligible as cognitively significant—as making a contribution to our knowing or understanding anything—unless it involves the application of concepts.i. More specifically, Hegel makes the distinction (familiar to us from Sellars) between the sense in which sense experience can, and the sense in which it cannot, be understood to be ‘immediate’, that is, non-inferential. This critical

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point will be with us throughout the discussion of Consciousness. Sense experience that can be cognitively significant, that can count as knowledge, cannot be immediate, which is to say noninferential, in the sense of not standing in inferential (and incompatibility) relations. For then it would be cognitively idle: unable to serve as evidence to justify further claims. It must be inferentially articulated at least in that it can serve as a premise in inferences. More deeply, unless it stands in relations of material incompatibility (indeed, as we shall see, relations of strong difference = exclusion, and not just weak or mere difference), the deliverances of sense (the content for the hylomorphic strategy) will not be intelligible as determinate. So: if determinate, then standing in relations of material incompatibility. Further, if standing in relations of material incompatibility, then standing in relations of counterfactually robust material inference (=mediation). And standing in relation of determinate negation and (so) mediation is what it is to be conceptually contentful (conceptually articulated, in “conceptual shape”), according to Hegel’s non-psychological definition of the conceptual.ii. The sense in which the deliverances of sense can be immediate or noninferential concerns not their content, but the process whereby we come to endorse them. That process need not be an inferential process. [In a recent paper on my approach to observation (for Weiss and Wanderer’s Reading Brandom), John McDowell takes issue with this notion of noninferentiality. He suggests as a replacement that judgments should count as noninferential if their justification does not depend on exhibiting them as conclusions of inferences from something else.]

b) Second, in general Hegel appreciates the significance of deixis and indexicality for empirical knowledge. He sees them as the conceptual form of immediacy.i. More specifically, he investigates (in the critical spirit of Kant) the conditions of the intelligibility of demonstrative and indexical deliverances of sense. Here his great discovery is that—as I put the point in Making It Explicit—deixis presupposes anaphora.ii. The question here how unrepeatable events (one sense of ‘particulars’) can contribute to repeatable conceptual content (conceptual content repeatables). Sorting out the distinction between particular representing and representing of particulars should be laid alongside the sense in which perceptual judgments can, and the sense in which they cannot be immediate in the sense of noninferential.

3) It is not a small thing that Hegel is the first modern philosopher (the medieval scholastic philosophers of language had, as usual, already done significant work in the area) to address the topics of deixis and indexicality. [Is this the place to talk about how these are different?] This is a central topic in contemporary philosophy of language—indeed, bone-dry, hard-assed technical philosophy of language—but most people working in the area (I mean to be slandering Kaplan and Stalnaker, among the giants, but also people such as Salmon, Almog, and Soames) are sufficiently ignorant of its history that they would be astonished to be told that Hegel had opened up the field. (I’m reminded of what someone said about one of my teachers, Gil Harman: that it was a

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calumny to accuse him of being unhistorical. In fact he is steeped in the history of philosophy, and everything he does is deeply rooted in a reading of it. It’s just that he thinks the history of philosophy started with Quine.) They would accord that honor to Frege (in “The Thought”). (Those who insist that Frege be thought of not just in the first instance, but exclusively as a philosopher of mathematics and of logic should be given pause by the realization that he explicitly discussed a whole range of topics that have become canonical, defining topics in the philosophy of language, even where they do not occur in logical or mathematical discourse: prominent among them, propositional attitude ascribing locutions, demonstratives and indexicals, pragmatic force, and the relations between artificial and natural languages.) The more knowledgeable might mention also Peirce, before moving on to Russell and Reichenbach. They are unlikely to mention Scotus and Ockham (though David Kaplan has made some use of Scotus on haeccieties—Calvin Normore has not lived in vain!). We need a good history of the philosophical and linguistic discussion of demonstratives and indexicals.

4) Hegel considers demonstratives and indexicals (this-here-now) because they express particularity and unrepeatability.

a) It is for good reason that he looks to the use of linguistic expressions. It is not that he thinks all thought must be linguistic. It is that his general principle is that we can understand the implicit only in terms of its explicit expression. (Remember: “Language is the Dasein of Spirit.”) [I claim that this expressivism is compatible with his pragmatism (see Ch. 2 of ASoT: “Some Pragmatist Themes…”), which in a certain way privileges the practical (implicit) use of expressions over their (explicit) content. But the relations and interactions between them are complex and subtle.]

b)i) Kant was very good on the distinction between representations of relations

and relations of representations. That is the point of the 2nd Analogy of Experience. In the example there, we the temporal sequential relations of representations in two cases: walking around a house, say, clockwise, on the one hand, and watching a boat drift downstream, on the other. These give rise to two different representations of relations. The ordering is represented as subjective in the first case, and as objective in the second, in the sense that responsibility for the relations of the representations are assigned to the subject in the first case, and to the object in the second. The difference in assignment of responsibility is a reflection of implicit modal differences in the representations of relations. It is possible for me to have walked around the house counter-clockwise, in which case there would have been different temporal sequential relations among my representations. But it is necessary that the drifting boat present the temporal sequential relations of representations that it did. Being able to move from relations of representations of the same temporal sequential sort to representations of relations of these two quite different kinds is an essential structural element of what it is implicitly or in practice to take what I have as representations, by a subject, of an object, which is to say, as representings at all. Their representational purport is unintelligible apart from the modal articulation of the representations of relations. Thus that representations of relations exhibit

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modal features explicitly expressed by the use of concepts of possibility and necessity is an essential structure of intentionality.

ii) Note that just this is left out of the Tractatus. One of the dimensions along with its logical picture is pure and crystalline is that there is nothing about time, and nothing about modality (other than logical possibility and necessity) in it. Kant is much more sophisticated here. And Hegel will insist, as Kant would have, too, that apart from considerations of time and modality, one cannot make sense of semantic representational relations. On their conception of experience and representation, the Tractatus account (which in this semantic respect belongs in the empiricist tradition, in spite of its lack of attention to epistemological matters) must fail.

iii) But Kant did not make a corresponding distinction between representations of particulars and particular representations. He ran the two notions together under the heading of ‘intuition’.

iv) What Hegel is doing in Sense Certainty and Perception, is, inter alia, enforcing just this distinction. He wants to know what stage-setting is required for particular (unrepeatable) representings to be representations of particulars (unrepeatables). And his answer is that a lot is required. Both repeatable representings (anaphora) and representations of repeatables (universals) are required. In Sense Certainty (cf. (2c-d) above), Hegel looks at what is required for an occurrence (performance, event) that is particular in the sense of being an unrepeatable tokening (e.g. an utterance of ‘now’) to make a cognitive contribution in virtue of which it is intelligible as a representation. The lesson is that one needs some way of preserving, repeating, or recollecting the content expressed by the particular tokening: the ‘now’ is cognitively significant because there can be a later “pointing out of the ‘now’”. In Perception, then, he gives us an account of what it is to be a representation of a particular, as opposed to a universal. This is the account of the concept object in terms of relations of material incompatibility.

5) Hegel’s conclusions from Sense Certainty are:a) We need at least sense universals to make sense of sensory knowledge or

experience. For we need something to stand in incompatibility and inference relations in order to have content.

b) We need some way of holding on to, recollecting, or repeating unrepeatable events in order for their occurrence to contribute to cognition.

c) The situations taken in in sensory experience must have internal structure: predicating something general of something particular. In Perception we’ll see how this carving up of judgment-level incompatibilities works. (And in Force and Understanding, we’ll move up from the now articulated judgments to the infinite Concept.)

6) We are examining knowledge as a phenomenon. That is, the general topic of Consciousness is the role of immediacy in cognition. The specific topic of Sense Certainty is a specific conception of the role of immediacy.

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7) Immediacy a) in the applying of concepts vs. b) immediacy in the concepts applied. The conception of sense certainty arises from the mismating of two ideas, one sustainable, and the other not. The good idea is that judgments that are immediate in the sense of being noninferentially elicited play a special justificatory role in empirical knowledge. The bad idea is that to play that role, judgments must be immediate in the sense of involving no inferential commitments, hence no applications of concepts. Immediacy in the first sense has to do with perceptual judgments as judgings: as datable, unrepeatable acts or events. Immediacy in the second sense concerns rather what is judged: the contents of perceptual judgments.

8)a) The bad conception of immediacy (7b) turns on thinking of the authority of

immediacy as involving no co-ordinate responsibility. In fact, the relations of, mediation and determinate negation among concepts make each a center of authority (for many, of the kind of immediacy) that potentially compete with each other.

b) “Sense certainty” [sinnliche Gewißheit] is Hegel’s term for a conception of the source and nature of the authority of empirical knowledge—its credibility, its claim to correctness, its right to be relied on—that takes it to be independent in this sense.

c) At the center of this conception lies the idea of an autonomous stratum of cognitive episodes whose authority derives from their immediacy. [cf. Sellars in EPM on episodes whose cognitive/epistemic authority attaches to tokenings rather than to types.] They are authoritative in the sense of being basic in the order of justification: our entitlement to any empirical claim or commitment derives ultimately from the way it is anchored in these immediate experiential episodes. They are autonomous in the sense that the capacity to have such episodes is taken not to depend on any other capacities. This means in particular that it does not depend on any capacities to deploy concepts. For if the capacity to have such episodes did depend on the capacity to deploy concepts, those episodes would be answerable for their correctness to the norms governing the application of those concepts. Their authority would accordingly involve a coordinate, reciprocal responsibility—it would involve the acknowledgment of another locus of authority, potentially conflicting, and so limiting. Understanding the authority of immediacy as being in this way independent is the deformation that defines this conception of empirical knowledge.

9) Theme: Semantic atomism (the autonomy claim) as a conception in the category of independence (authority). We will later (in Self-Consciousness), come to identify this conception of authority as autonomous (and so unbounded), as involving no corresponding, correlative, responsibility, with the strategy of Mastery. The overall lesson is that this conception of authority as autonomous independence (at the center of the metametaconceptual constellation of ideas Hegel calls ‘Verstand’) must be succeeded by one of authority as merely one element in a larger whole that always includes a corresponding correlative responsibility (dependence), a conception of freedom that stands at the center of the metametaconceptual conception of ‘Vernunft’. Slogan: From independence to freedom. It is this Vernunft conception of the intimate interrelations of

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authority and responsibility required for determinate contentfulness of both that is to be modeled on reciprocal recognition.

10) Discuss contemporary views about a 'nonconceptual element' in propositional content: direct reference and primitive demonstration, de re belief as explanatorily prior to de dicto. The importance of McDowell’s invocation of demonstrative concepts and senses. Me: anaphora as what is needed to see the demonstrative element in experience as fully conceptual (in the Hegelian sense of articulated by relations of material inference-and-incompatiblity).

11) Outline of Sense Certainty: I. In the first, the authority-conferring immediacy is associated with the object of

knowledge, with what is sensed. That is, substance or the in-itself is conceived as immediate, and knowledge is understood as acquiring its authority from its status as knowledge of the immediate. This conception is introduced in [94], and the argument whereby that conception can be seen to be incoherent when what is implicit in it is made explicit is presented in paragraphs [95] and [96].

II. In the second, the authority-conferring immediacy is associated with the subject of knowledge, with what senses. That is, consciousness as what things are something for is conceived as immediate, and knowledge is understood as acquiring its authority from its status as immediate knowledge. This conception is introduced in [100], and the argument whereby that conception can be seen to be incoherent when what is implicit in it is made explicit is presented in [101] and [102].

III. In the third, the authority-conferring immediacy is associated with the act of knowing, with what sensing is. That is, the relation between the in-itself and the consciousness it is something for is conceived as immediate, and knowledge is understood as acquiring its authority from its status as immediate knowing of the immediate. This conception is introduced in [103], and the argument whereby that conception can be seen to be incoherent when what is implicit in it is made explicit is presented in paragraphs [104] to [107].

12) A Bad Argument: Here is the basic hermeneutic challenge of reading Sense Certainty: There is a danger of seeing Hegel’s argument in the first two movements of Sense Certainty1 as moving far too quickly to the conclusion that cognition must involve universals. For it looks as though he is just saying that since anything can be responded to appropriately by a directly referential ‘this’, the ‘this’ must be understood as a universal, indeed, as an absolutely general concept. Thus he says (summing up his initial discussion):

It is as a universal too that we utter what the sensuous [content] is. What we say is: ‘This’, i.e. the universal This; or, ‘it is’, i.e. Being in general… [M97]Similarly, when I say ‘I’, this singular ‘I’, I say in general all ‘I’s; everyone is what I say, everyone is ‘I’, this singular ‘I’. [M102]

The argument would then take the form of an analogy. The repeatable expression ‘Red’ applies to a lot of particulars. So ‘red’ is a predicate, which expresses a concept and 1 Originally beginning in [M95-96] directed toward knowledge of the immediate, repeated in [M100-102] with respect to immediate knowledge.

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stands for a universal or property: the universal or property shared by all things that are properly called ‘red’. In the same way, the repeatable expression ‘this’ (‘I’) applies to lots of particulars. Indeed, for any particular (in the case of ‘I’, particular self) it is possible to refer to it by using a tokening of the repeatable type ‘this’. So ‘this’ (‘I’) is a predicate, which expresses a concept and stands for a universal or property: the universal or property shared by all things that are properly called ‘this’ (‘I’), that is, all particulars (or particular selves).

Spelled out this way, the fallacy should be obvious. Although ‘this’ is a repeatable expression type that can be applied to any particular thing or situation, it is not predicated of them, it is not describing them, it is not a universal in the sense of expressing a property that they share or a concept that they fall under. To refer to something as ‘this’ is not to characterize it in any way, certainly not to attribute a property to it, even a very general one. ‘This’, ‘I’, and ‘red’ are all repeatable expressions, and can be applied on different occasions to different particulars. But the sense of ‘apply’ is quite different: referential in the first case, predicative in the second. ‘This’ and ‘I’ are not true of anything. Put another way, there is a perfectly good sense in which ‘this’ and ‘I’ mean something different on different occasions of their tokening. In order to know what is meant by ‘this’, or who is meant by ‘I’, it is not enough to understand the use of the expression type in general. One must also know the circumstances of its particular tokening. In this sense the demonstrative and indexical expression types are ambiguous. But that is not the same as saying they express universals. ‘Bank’ is not a universal that applies both to the shores of rivers and to financial institutions. Of course in another sense, these words are not ambiguous. For what each tokening means is determined in a uniform way from the circumstances in which it is produced. As Kaplan has taught us to say, different tokenings of expressions like this have the same character (type), but express different contents. No distinction of this sort applies to expressions such as ‘red’. The predicate/term (universal/particular) distinction and the character/content distinction are actually orthogonal to one another, since in addition to singular term types where a single character determines different contents for different tokenings (such as ‘this’ and ‘I’) and predicate types whose characters assign the same content to all tokenings (such as ‘red’), there are singular term types whose characters assign the same content to all tokenings (such as ‘Hegel’, or a suitable lengthening of that name) and predicate types where a single character determines different contents for different tokenings (such as “…is the same color as this sample,”).

One might, I suppose, construct or define a sense of ‘universal’ gerrymandered so as to see these as species of a genus. But the result will not be anything like the ordinary use of ‘universal’, and in particular, will not yield the use of ‘universal’ that Hegel employs in the immediately subsequent discussion of Perception, which is supposed to take as its raw materials the conclusions yielded by Sense Certainty. Any argument that started from considerations such as those indicated above concerning demonstrative and indexical expressions like ‘this’ and ‘I’ and drew conclusions about the necessity of acknowledging the role in perception of sense universals such as red (the topic of Perception) would be fallacious, through dependence on an illegitimate assimilation.

13) We should distinguish a) classificatory and b) recollective repeatability.

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14) A Good Argument: The first sort of repeatability of content emerges from the realization that the authority of immediacy is itself a repeatable kind of authority.

An actual sense-certainty is not merely this pure immediacy, but an instance of it. [M92]

We see this because the same authority can be accorded to different contents. One tokening of ‘this’ picks out a tree, another a house.2 For convenience in our discussion, we might adopt the convention of referring to tokenings by placing expressions within slanted lines, and subscripting to distinguish tokenings of the same expression type. Then /this/i, which picks out a tree, has a different content from /this/j, which picks out a house, and a different content yet from some /this/k, which picks out a stone. Each has the authority of immediacy, that is, of experiences, putative or candidate knowings, with which one simply finds oneself. But the content—what is given or presented to the subject, what makes sense knowledge “appear as the richest kind of knowledge”[M91]—is in each case different. That the contents of different acts of sensory knowing can at least barely differ from one another is the very weakest sense in which those contents could be thought of as determinate. (As we look to ever stronger necessary conditions of determinateness of content, we will find the implicit faults in different conceptions of immediacy.)

Merely to distinguish instances of immediacy from one another, to see them as different instances of one kind of authority, is already in a weak sense implicitly to classify, compare, and characterize them.

But the mere fact that the same sort of authority, the authority of the immediacy of the origin, of the process by which the experience is elicited, is invested on different occasions, in contents that must—for them to count as having the significance even of bare referrings or pointings-out at all—be recognizable as different already implicitly brings into play a certain kind of universal applying to them. For /this/j and /this/k have in common their difference from /this/i. Using ‘’ to indicate mere difference or distinguishability of content, this is the fact that /this/j/this/i and /this/k/this/i . If we adopt the convention of using angle brackets to indicate repeatable kinds, then they are both of the kind </this/i>. Merely to distinguish instances of immediacy from one another, to see them as different instances of one kind of authority, is already in a weak sense implicitly to classify, compare, and characterize them. 15) Hegel claims that the stronger, exclusive sense of ‘different’ is also implicitly in play in determinately contentful experience, even according to the severely restricted conception of sense certainty. Day and night exclude one another, the experience of one cancels or opposes the experience of the other. This is to say that experiences can appear as incompatible, in the sense that their contents cannot both simultaneously have the authority of immediacy—they ought not be endorsed in a single act. Since the authority 2 Hegel splits up the pure indication that would be made explicit by a tokening of ‘this’ into temporal and spatial dimensions, which would be made explicit by tokenings of ‘now’ and ‘here’, and makes the point indicated in terms of a “now that is night” and a “now that is day”, on the one hand (in [M96]), and a “here that is a house” and a “here that is a tree” on the other (in [M101]). But the importation of this distinction is irrelevant to the point I am discussing.

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of immediacy can be invested in incompatible contents, it can contradict itself: authorize materially incompatible commitments, commitments that undercut or cancel each other out. Hegel says of one such example:

Both truths have the same authentication [Beglaubigung = warrant, credentials], viz. the immediacy of seeing, and the certainty and assurance that both have about their knowing; but the one truth vanishes [verschwindet] in the other. [M101]

Now if the authority of immediacy simply contradicts itself, then it is no authority at all. In treating immediacy as conferring some sort of credibility or right to endorse, we are implicitly distinguishing between the kind of authority, and the contents of its instances. We are, in effect treating the incompatibility as a feature of the contents in which the authority of immediacy is invested. The content that I merely indicate at one time we might express (using the least committal feature-placing language) by saying “It is night,” is not only different from but incompatible with the content I might similarly indicate at another time, which we could express as “It is day.” (It would beg the question against sense certainty to insist that the consciousness involved must apply these concepts. The idea is that we use those concepts just to keep track of the rich nonconceptual content that the consciousness in question, according to the conception of sense-certainty, merely points out, entertains, or contemplates.) To recognize any sort of content here at all is to acknowledge that two such contents can contradict (strongly contrast with) one another.

This relation of incompatibility, which Hegel often talks about using the term ‘entgegensetzen’ [e.g. in M98], (he also uses “ausschließen”) is stronger than mere difference, and it induces a correspondingly richer sort of universal. We might use ‘#’ to indicate the notion of incompatibility, and so express the fact that a ‘this’ (or ‘now’) that is night (that is, a content that could be picked out by a tokening of ‘this’ produced at night) “vanishes” into one that is day: this/l#/this/m. Incompatibility of contents in this sense is by no means as promiscuous a relation as mere difference among contents. For instance, it need not be the case that this/l#/this/i—for trees can appear at night or in the day. The universal <#/this/m>, which Hegel calls “not day…a negative in general,” [M98] is a genuine universal, under which /this/l, but not /this/i or /this/j falls. In fact, for many purposes we can represent the repeatable content of an experience or claim by the set of experiences or claims that are incompatible with it. The contents of commitments are determinate insofar as the class of other commitments they exclude or are incompatible with differ from one another.

15) The experience (in a much more centrally Hegelian sense) of one certainty (commitment, endorsement) vanishing in another consists in its having its authority undercut by the advent of a contrary, incompatible certainty with credentials of exactly the same kind. Cf. Hegel's Introduction

16) The first claim I am taking Hegel to be making in Sense Certainty is that the possibility of such an experience shows that sense certainty already implicitly acknowledges the presence of a universal element in its conception of the authority of immediacy. What is picked out by a barely referring /this/n that is a raining can be seen to be like what is picked out by a barely referring /this/o that is a snowing in that both of them are incompatible with (rule out, exclude, would vanish in, cannot be

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combined in a single act with) a /this/p that is fine, but not with a /this/m that is day or a /this/l that is night (though these exclude each other). Patterns of incompatibility and compatibility that can be shared by different acts of sensory awareness group them into kinds exhibiting repeatable contents that are determinate in a sense stronger than that induced by their mere distinguishability. Insisting that the cognitive “richness” of acts of sensory awareness requires acknowledging them as determinately contentful in at least this contrastive sense rules out a particular way of thinking about their contents as immediate. It rules out their being immediate in the sense of being merely particular, as involving no generality, no awareness of universals, and so no even implicit classification, comparison, or characterizing.

17) The “Bad Argument” is bad only in that it does not get us all the way to the conclusion that determinate sense universals must be in play even in the minimal deliverances of sensuous immediacy. It is just the first step in the argument. What it does give us is that we must understand the authority that is invested in a content by what is expressed by the use of a demonstrative or indexical as an instance of a kind of authority. That kind is associated with the type. And it is essential (and not just accidental) to that kind of authority that it can be invested in different contents: those that would be expressed by different tokenings of that same type. That is the second step of the argument. Then we must show that in order to grasp that general kind of authority (which we must do in order to grasp any instance of it—for the instance has its authority only as an instance of that kind) we must distinguish two different relations that the different contents that can be invested with authority of that same kind can stand in to one another: being merely, but compatibly different, and being incompatible. That will take us forward to Perception. Another necessary condition of deploying that demonstrative-indexical kind of authority is that we can “preserve” or “hold onto” the contents of previous tokenings, even though those tokenings themselves are unrepeatable. For unless we can do that (anaphorically), succeeding one presentation with that kind of authority by an incompatible one will just cancel the former. We’ll have to conclude we were wrong when we said “Now is night,” because now is in fact day. The result would not be knowledge, but a candle flickering in the wind.

18) So the argument would seem to have the following steps:a) [What really is shown by the “Bad Argument” for universals being involved

in demonstrative or indexical thoughts:] In order to understand the authority of particular representings whose contents would be expressed by the use of demonstratives and indexicals, one must understand it as an instance of the general type of authority claimed by all unrepeatable tokenings of that repeatable type. “An actual sense-certainty is not merely this pure immediacy, but an instance of it.”[M 92],

b) That requires understanding that authority of the very same type, associated with (what is expressed by) different tokenings of the type ‘now’, for instance, can be invested in different contents from the original one. For one does not understand this kind of authority (Sellars’s “token-credibility”, contrasted with “type-credibility”) unless one does distinguish it from the sort of authority that is invested equally in all tokenings of the same type, independently of the context or circumstances of tokening. As a slogan for

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this point, we can say: one must distinguish the kind of authority in (a) as token-credibility rather than type-credibility. [96]-[98] seem to have as their point that in taking the now, this, or here to be something that can be conjoined with different contents (night/day, house/tree) we are in some sense taking it to be universal: at least repeatable. I am claiming that this does not yet get us to the full conclusion. But the “vanishing” of the night into the day, the “conversion into its opposite” of the house into the tree take us to the next step:

c) Grasping what is distinctive about token-credibility requires realizing that among the different contents that can be invested with the same kind of token-credible authority, some are such that they can be combined in a single tokening (as well as invested in different ones), and others are such that though they can be invested in different tokenings, they cannot be invested in one and the same tokening. This is the difference between “day” and “fine”, on the one hand, and “day” and “night” on the other. Why must one make this distinction? If when one finds oneself non-inferentially (“Immediacy of origin”) with a content that would be expressed by some feature-placing expression such as “Now is day,” that is not practically construed as excluding some other possible contents (“Now is night,”) then it is completely indeterminate: finding out that now is day rules out nothing else, is compatible with now being anything else at all. Further (and this is the gravamen of [95]-[96]), we cannot distinguish the different tokenings of ‘now’ and ‘here’ unless we know that the fact that one of them is night and the other day, or one a house and the other a tree means that we are dealing with two different tokenings (of the same type). The fact that one here is house and the other is green does not mean that they are different tokenings of ‘here’.

19) There is a second line of thought entangled with this one throughout Sense Certainty, which comes to be the central focus in the third movement of the section. [M103-8] The issue it addresses is what is required for a dateable, intrinsically unrepeatable act or event—a unique occurrence—to be associated with a content that can be “held onto” or “preserved” after the expiration of the act itself, so as to be available for comparison with the contents of other such acts.

20) Putting the point another way, if we are to succeed in treating the unrepeatable (not merely particular, but unique as an occurrence) act of sensing as the source of epistemic authority (Conception III from the Outline in (5) above), it must be possible to treat that authority as invested in a content in a way that is not undercut by the fact that the same sort of authority may in a different, subsequent act be invested in an incompatible content. To do that, we have to be able to focus on that content, the one that the first act entitles us to endorse, independently of what contents may be introduced or validated by other acts. The act as such is intrinsically unrepeatable. But unless its content is in some sense repeatable, we cannot see the act as introducing or endorsing a content at all. The challenge is to see what is presupposed in making an act/content distinction of this sort. The conclusion will be that there is no way to make sense of this distinction if we just look at the single act, independently of its relations to other acts. (An anti-atomist conclusion.) The other acts we must consider, however, are not acts

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with the same kind of authority but different (even incompatible) contents, as was the case with the argument against immediacy as pure particularity. They are other acts with the same content, and with an authority that is inherited from the authority of the immediacy of the original act. The later act will not be immediate in the same sense as the original one, but will look to its immediacy as the source of its second-hand authority. Altogether these considerations will rule out thinking of the content as immediate in the sense of being unrepeatable in the way the uniquely occurring act is.

21) Any such tokening can, accordingly, only be understood as investing a content with the authority of immediacy if it is seen as an element (Hegel says “moment”) in a larger, temporally extended, whole comprising also acts of different types. Compare: any experience must also be a characterization, an element in a larger, extended whole comprising also other universals.The resulting understanding is of the Now, and hence immediacy in general as thoroughly mediated. For being preservable or recollectable in the anaphoric way, we now realize, is the being of the Now, an essential presupposition of the possibility of immediacy conferring epistemic authority on a determinate content. The possibility of "holding fast" to the Now (in fact anaphorically), making it into something repeatable while preserving its selfsame content, by contrast to the type <now>, which though repeatable does not preserve the content of a single tokening or /now/, is essential to the notion of immediacy investing a particular content with its authority:

The 'Now' and the pointing out of the 'Now' are thus so constituted that neither the one nor the other is something immediate and simple, but a movement which contains various moments. [M107]

22) This account presents a crucial fact about the use of demonstratives and similar indexical expressions in contributing to empirical knowledge. Deixis presupposes anaphora. (Cf. Making It Explicit, Chapter 7.)

23) The conception of empirical knowledge that Hegel calls “sense certainty” mistakenly tries to understand the role of immediacy of origin—the immediacy of the act of endorsing a content—in terms of various conceptions of immediacy of content—the immediacy of what is endorsed. Immediacy is a category of independence, in the normative sense of authority without correlative responsibility. Sense Certainty dismisses two senses in which one might take sensory content to be immediate.

a) Content immediacy as particularity is the denial of contrastive repeatability, or the involvement of universals or generality in any form. This means that possession (or grasp) of some sensory content is independent of any relation to other acts with contents that are similar in some respect, or that have incompatible contents—which induce respects of similarity among contents, as it were, horizontally. The idea is that classifying or characterizing a particular content by bringing it under a universal involves comparing it with others, which accordingly have a certain sort of reciprocal authority over the content of the original particular. That the content of one act should in this way be responsible to the contents of other acts—so that what it is depends on what they are—is what this sort of content immediacy rules out. It turns out that content cannot be immediate in this sense and still be determinate in a minimal sense.

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b) Content immediacy as temporal uniqueness is the denial of recollective repeatability. This means that possession (or grasp) of some sensory content is independent of any relation to other acts with the very same content (not just in some respects, but in all respects). But apart from their as it were vertical relation to other acts that inherit their content and authority from acts of immediate sensory awareness, the contents of those acts are as evanescent as the acts themselves. So no determinate content can be immediate in this sense either.

23) The structural presuppositions for sensory awareness I am claiming Hegel is insisting upon here are not just innovations of his. For they can be seen as developments of the structure of transcendental syntheses culminating in experience that Kant offers in the A edition deduction of the categories in the first Critique.3 To yield anything recognizable as experience, apprehension in intuition must be capable of reproduction in imagination, and these reproductions must then be suitable for recognition in a concept. To be cognitively significant, the sort of pointing-out that we would express explicitly by the use of demonstratives must be capable of being picked up and reproduced (preserved) by an act of the sort we would express explicitly by the use of anaphorically dependent pronouns. To amount to anything recognizable as even minimally determinate contents, the repeatables so constituted must then be capable of being classified under various distinguishable and contrasting kinds or universals. The two senses in which we are to conclude that the contents of our sensory experiences can not be construed as immediate then correspond to denying that in order to have them we must be able to reproduce or to recognize them.

24) An overall map of this conceptual territory in Sense Certainty might then look like this:

3 A98-106.

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Perception :

1) Outline of Perception:I. [112]-[116]: Account of how things look to us (the phenomenological,

retrospective consciousness).II. [117]: First experience of phenomenal perceiving consciousness. Both the

unity and diversity of properties and objects are seen as objectively in the independent objects and properties.

III. [118]-[120]: Second experience of perceiving consciousness. Divide the source of unity and the source of diversity between subjective and objective poles (act of perceiving and what is perceived).

a) Objective unity, subjective diversity.b) Subjective unity, objective diversity.

IV. [121]-127]: Third experience of perceiving consciousness. Unity and diversity both objective: unity in independent objects, diversity derives from their relations to one another (what they are for one another).

V. [128]-131]: Summary of how things look to us, transition to next section.

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Large hermeneutic challenges:

2) In the opening introductory sections of Perception, Hegel talks indifferently and interchangeably about:

a) Universalityb) Determinate Negation (on my reading: material incompatibility)c) Mediation (on my reading: material inference)

For instance, for (b): “The wealth of sense-knowledge belongs to perception, not to immediate certainty, for which it was only the source of instances; for only perception contains negation, that is, difference or manifoldness, within its own essence,” [112]. He talks about “…sensuous universality, or the immediate unity of being and the negative…” [115]. And for (c): “[T]he universal is in its simplicity a mediated universal…” [112].

I've argued that (b) is the key, fundamental notion. Given that, one can show that (a) and (c) are already implicitly in play, by the arguments I offered in discussing Sense Certainty. (Quickly: being incompatible with p is a universal that q and r can share, and one can introduce an inferential relation p entails q iff everything incompatible with q is incompatible with p.)

3) Explain the restriction in Perception, to sense universals. In Force and Understanding, this restriction will be lifted, and purely theoretical universals will be considered as well. The difference is that while both must stand in inferential relations (on pain of violating the denial of immediacy of content), sense universals also have some non-inferential circumstances of application (in accordance with the embrace of the possibility of immediacy of origin.

[T]he sense-element is still present, but not in the way it was supposed to be by immediate certainty, not as the singular item that is ‘meant’, but as a universal, or as that which will be determined as a property. [M 113]

4) Explaining the view about the relation between unity (identity) and diversity (difference), in relation to determinateness: The discussion of the way in which identity can depend on difference, unity on multiplicity, must take account of:

a) the way the identity of one property consists in its determinate relation to other properties (its intra-categorial others), which it excludes and (so) entails, andb) the way the identity of one object consists in its determinate relation to properties (its inter-categorial others), namely the ones that characterize it4, andc) the way the identity of one object consists in its determinate relation to other objects (its intracategorial others).

So we have in (a) the intracategorial determinate otherness relating properties to properties, in (b) the intercategorial determinate otherness relating properties and objects, and in (c) the intracategorial determinate otherness relating objects to objects. The selective rehearsal of the experience of perceiving consciousness that is presented in the exposition of the three dialectics of perception is to show that each strategy for

4 But their identity presupposes that of others that are related to it in way (a), it is this relation, Hegel claims, that is made explicit in explanation. As such, it is the 'inverted world' implicit in appearance, i.e. it is what appears to us. Immediacy is an essential aspect of it, but it is not and could not be merely immediate.

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construing determinately contentful objects and properties according to a model of independence fails to do justice to one or more of these ways in which determinateness involves relations to a multiplicity of others. The dialectic unfolds as a series of strategies attempting the reconciliation, known to us but not to perceptual consciousness to be impossible, of determinateness with independence. Along the way different elements of consciousness or knowledge are identified as the source or authority responsible for unifying and distinguishing the determinate objects and properties. But the main point is that one will never build genuine determinateness out of mutually independent, antecedently intelligible principles of diversity and unity. One must go the other way around, and derive or abstract our understanding of diversity and unity from our understanding of determinateness.

5) Holism : One point made early is with the denial of a kind of atomism, one way in which one might try to understand conceptual content as immediate. If the identity of a determinate content consists in (or has as an essential feature) its determinate differences from and exclusions of other contents, then a certain kind of holism about such contents results. Here are some passages:

Being, however, is a universal in virtue of its having mediation or the negative within it; when it expresses this in its immediacy it is a differentiated, determinate property. As a result many such properties are established simultaneously, one being the negative of another. [these determinacies] are expressed in the simplicity of the universal.. [113]On account of the universality of the property, I must rather take the objective essence to be on the whole a communityI now perceive the property to be determinate, opposed to another and excluding it. [117]They are determinate properties in it only because they are a plurality of reciprocally self-differentiating elements. [120]This determinateness, which constitutes the essential character of the Thing and distinguishes it from all others, is now defined in such a way that the Thing is thereby in opposition to other Things, but is supposed to preserve its independence in this opposition. [125]From a sensuous being it turned into a universal; but this universal, since it originates in the sensuous, is essentially conditioned by it, and hence is not truly a self-identical universality at all, but one afflicted with an opposition; for this reason the universality splits into the extremes of singular individuality and universality, into the One of the properties and the Also of the 'free matters'. [129][Notice that this opposition (Entgegensetzung) is here said to afflict things because of the involvement of sensuous immediacy. This is what drives the process of experience, and so is what gives particular shape to the motive force of negativity in driving the process of experience.]

6) Saying how to get from Sense Certainty to Perception, that is, from feature-placing to object-property. This requires explaining the relation between objects and properties, and the significance for that relation of negation.

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7) The discussion of Sense Certainty (in my notes) raises the issue of just where in his text Hegel explicitly claims that material incompatibilities, or strong differences, are required for determinateness, and not just mere differences, or weak ones. I pointed to a few uses of 'Entgegensetzung', but couldn't say a lot. The texts needed are in the Perception section, and there are lots of them. It is very explicit in [114]. Both the idea of determinate negation, as a condition of determinateness, and the idea of experience, a process— two sides of one coin (since determinate negation matters only in the context of experience, which is driven only by that structure)—are to be elaborated out of the phenomenon of making knowledge claims, of taking things to be some way. (That is where the Introduction left us.) We are unpacking what is implicit in the notion of determinately contentful (sense) experience. We are pursuing, after all, the Science of the Experience of Consciousness.

8) In [114] we read: "...if the many determinate properties were strictly indifferent [gleichgültig] to one another, if they were simply and solely self-related, they would not be determinate; for they are only determinate in so far as they differentiate themselves from one another [sie sich unterscheiden], and relate themselves to others as to their opposites [als entgegengesetzte].Yet; as thus opposed [Entgegengesetzung] to one another they cannot be together in the simple unity of their medium, which is just as essential to them as negation; the differentiation [Unterscheidung] of the properties, insofar as it is...exclusive [ausschließende], each property negating the others, thus falls outside of this simple medium."Here we have very clearly the claim that determinateness depends on a kind of difference stronger than mere ("indifferent") difference—one that is exclusive, that involves opposition. Further, it is just the 'negativity' of the content of determinate properties in this sense that requires (presupposes) that they are associated with objects as bearers, that is, with a unity or one, not just an indifferent 'also' (e.g., a feature-placing one). [114] continues:"The One is the moment of negation; it is itself quite simply a relation of self to self and it excludes another; and it is that by which 'thinghood' is determined as a Thing.Negation is inherent in a property as a determinateness which is immediately one with the immediacy of being, an immediacy which, through this unity with negation, is universality. As a One, however, the determinateness is set free from this unity with its opposite, and exists in and for itself."

9) But the way the account of objects/properties is supposed to work is made clear here:...these diverse aspects...are specifically determined. White is white only in opposition to black, and so on, and the Thing is a One precisely by being opposed to others. But it is not as a One that it excludes others from itself...it is through its determinateness that the thing excludes others. Things are therefore in and for themselves determinate; they have properties by which they distinguish themselves from others...[120]Since properties are defined by their determinate negations, Hegel says that objects are defined as the negation of these negations. For objects, as the principles of grouping incompatibility-defined properties, cannot themselves stand in incompatibility relations. This last is a lesson Hegel learned from Aristotle, who first argued that properties are

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what have opposites, substances what do not. For the opposite or abstract negation of a property is a property that characterizes just those objects that the first does not. Not-red is true of just those things that red is not true of. In terms of determinate negation, two properties are incompatible in case no object can have both of them. The opposite or abstract negation of an object, symmetrically, would be an object that exhibits just the properties that are not exhibited by the first. In terms of determinate negation, two objects would be incompatible just in case there is no property that they both exhibit. But these latter descriptions don't pick out any relations between actual objects. Given any two objects there will be some third object that neither is identical to, and hence a property that they share. Almost any two object share the property of not being identical to the number 3. And clearly if they don't share that property, then it will be easy to construct another property that they do share. If properties do come in incompatibility classes (or have opposites or abstract negations), then objects cannot. Perceiving consciousness, and Hegel, will turn this around and define properties as the components of facts that come in incompatibility classes, and objects as the complementary components that do not, but serve merely to group the former kind into the classes relevant to assessments of incompatibility. Thus the model of determinate negation as incompatibility lets us understand what Hegel means by saying that the object is the negation of the negation, and why he would think that important.

10) Hegel’s fundamental claim in this section, as I understand him, is then that recognizing this distinction between two kinds of distinction—between mere difference and exclusive difference—is equivalent to grasping the concept of an object which exhibits a property, or a particular that falls under a universal. Thus, properly understood, the concept of determinate negation implicitly brings with it the concept of the relations between universals and the particulars that fall under them.

11) Universals are principles of unity among particulars, in the sense that they bring together all the objects that exhibit one property. Particulars are principles of unity among universals, in the sense that they bring together all the properties exhibited by one object. Grasping the larger unity made up by these two different sorts of unity is equivalent to grasping the concepts of object and property, particular and universal.

12)

13) The key to arguing that the structure of objects-and-properties is already implicit in that of feature-placing talk with features exhibiting both weak and strong differences is:

a) The order of explanation: i) identity of properties as their weak and strong differences from one another, ii) distinguishing them requires objects as units of account, hence the relation between objects and properties is also essential to the identity of properties, iii) identity of objects depends on their associated properties.

b) The initial symmetry between objects and properties is that each property is associated with many objects (those that exhibit it), and each object is associated with many properties (those it exhibits).

c) But the symmetry is broken because properties have complements, and objects do not.

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d) In this regard, objects and properties are themselves opposites (have strongly different properties of not having and having complements). This is the sense in which the object is the negation of the negation of the property.

e) The asymmetry is the result of the fact that objects do not stand to other objects in two kinds of relation, corresponding to weak and strong difference. There is nothing corresponding to weak difference between them. Any two objects have properties that are strongly different (incompatible), even if just identity properties. And they will have some that are merely different. This is a consequence of objects serving as units of account, sorting relations among properties into merely and strongly different.

14) So the overall claim is that the requirement of the determinateness of even feature-placing forms of the deliverances of immediacy implicitly requires us to distinguish two sorts of distinction (epitomized by the relations between “It is fine,” and “It is day,” on the side of weak difference, and “It is fine,” and “It is raining,” on the side of strong difference). And making that distinction turns out to be equivalent to the full categorial structure of objects and properties, that is, particulars and universals. The picture is then:

15) Explaining how error enters the story. (So, why the subtitle of the chapter is "The Thing and Deception [Tauschung].)

16) Of these, the last is the hardest one. This is where the importance of the distinction between change of mind and change of object enters—and the first place we see the interaction and mutual presupposition of incompatibility of subjective commitments (in

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the same subject) and incompatibility of objective properties (in the same object), that is the different and complementary ways subjects and objects 'repel' or exclude material incompatibilities (determinate negations).

17) The crucial move, I claim, is distinguishing between change of mind, and change of object, which is what I need to do to have a notion of error —cf. i) Introduction, ii) title of Perception section. For that notion needs me to be able to hold onto a situation, and have another view of it (de re), as opposed to just experiencing a different situation, which doesn't mean I was wrong about the first. This notion of being wrong requires both a) determinate negation and b) holding onto things—i.e. it requires both the elements elaborated in Sense Certainty, on my telling. One needs strong difference, not just weak difference. For error requires the change from it's being (taken to be) red and it's being (taken to be) green, not just the difference between its being white and its being cubical, since it can be both without there being an error.

18) Moving from Sense Certainty to Perception involves taking on board the possibility of error. This arises from the acknowledgement of the applicability of determinate universals, since these represent different, and potentially competing sources of authority for claims, allowing the possibility that some claim one finds oneself with immediately will have to be given up (i.e. endorsement of it withdrawn) or treated as an error. So a big question is what this transition has to do with (1) and (2). A corresponding issue arises for the transition from Perception to Force and Understanding. There we move from sensuous or immediate universality to unconditioned or purely mediated universality: from observational concepts (which, of course, must also have inferential uses, but all of which also have noninferential circumstances of appropriate application) to theoretical concepts (which have only inferential circumstances of appropriate application). But we should ask: what does this move have to do with the holism modeled on the field of forces, which is the innovation in FU concerning the relation between unity and diversity (which itself arises out of the final movement in the experience of Perception, in which diversity is understood in terms of relations of objects to objects (each of whose identity is to be understood in terms of the diverse properties that are so understood)?

19) Overarching these hermeneutic challenges is the challenge of explaining the relation between these strands that run through the chapter.

The Three dialectics.

20) The dialectics are driven by locating responsibility for diversity or unity in different places. Hegel invokes this by using the phrase "nimmt (sie) auf sich" (takes it upon itself, takes it up), in [118], [120], [122], and [131].

21) Paragraph [117] offers an exposition of the first set of experiences as progressing like this:

a) The starting point: The object which I apprehend presents itself purely as a One....

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[Notice here the use of 'I' to indicate the point of view of the natural consciousness that is a phenomenon, by contrast to the 'we' that indicates the point of view of the phenomenological consciousness for which (or whom) it is a phenomenon (to which it appears).] This 'One' is a particular that can be picked out by a This. b) The first move:

...but I also perceive in it a property which is universal, and which thereby transcends the singularity [of the object].

Recognizing this universal element is the founding and defining insight of perceiving consciousness, and it is the experience of the untruth of mere particularity as a conception of the object or content of empirical knowledge.

On account of the universality of the property, I must rather take the objective essence to be on the whole a community.

That is, as a repeatable it is what is in principle common to a variety of instances. [Perhaps a note here—or elsewhere—on why it is not harmless to codify this distinction in terms of ‘type’/‘token.’] It is what unifies that multiplicity of instances. Hegel is here foreshadowing the view that will emerge eventually in the exposition, according to which the key to understanding what we are doing when we apply a universal to a particular instance (like applying a rule to a particular case) is to be found in the way in which Spirit, as a community of individual self-consciousnesses, is synthesized from merely particular consciousnesses by mutual recognition. [Cf. ASoT Chapter Two “Some Pragmatist Themes…”]c) The second move:

I now further perceive the property to be determinate, opposed to another and excluding it.

This shows that it was incorrect to think of the property merely as unifying its instances. It also essentially excludes other properties. The content associated with a sense universal determines not only what instances it is correctly applied to (the proper circumstances of application) but also what the correct significance of such application is (the proper consequences of application), in particular the other universals it precludes or forbids me from applying. Accordingly at this stage the determinateness of what is perceived is understood to consist in the way a sense universal or observable property differentiates itself from a multiplicity of others, which it excludes or contrasts with. This conception is not stable either, however.5 d) The third move:

In the broken up One I find many such properties which do not affect one another but are mutually indifferent. Therefore I did not perceive the object correctly when I apprehended it as exclusive....

It was realized at the previous stage that each property instantiated by a particular object excludes its instantiation of others. Now it is noticed that each particular object also includes many such excluding properties.

5 This and similar transitions should not be taken to be invested with any natural, alethic modal necessity. Any particular consciousness can fail to progress from one stage to the next, if it fails to notice or realize the shortcomings of its present conception. But at each stage an insight is available, what is implicit in the conception in-itself can become explicit for consciousness (either the 'I' or the 'we'), and such a realization is expressively progressive. So the necessity is normative: what one ought to conclude, the lesson one ought to learn (in order to be moving forward).

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...so now it [the object] is a universal common medium, in which many properties are present as sensuous universalities, each existing on its own account and, as determinate, excluding the others.

But here the demands that the properties in question both be independent of their instantiation by particular objects and of other properties and be determinate collide. Since

...only when it belongs to a One is it a property, and only in relation to others is it determinate,

if those relations are ignored, as demanded by the requirement of independence integral to perceiving consciousness' conception of the authority of immediacy,

it remains merely sensuous being in general, since it no longer possesses the character of negativity.

As indeterminate, perception has been robbed of content. Realizing this embarks us on a new phase of the development possible for perceiving consciousness.

22) The second strategy tried out by perception, in the face of the failure of the first, is to assign a role to consciousness in the reconciliation of determinateness and autonomy. (This strategy invokes a grain of Hegel's eventual truth, since it will emerge that only understanding the constitution of self-consciousness can resolve the problem of the reconciliation of independence and the dependence which is determinateness.)Responsibility for distinguishing a multiplicity of properties and unifying them in an object is to be split between the known object and the knowing subject, between the truth and the certainty of knowledge. The insight that is developed at this stage is that the authority perception derives from immediacy must be understood as compatible with the existence of perceptual error. Where sense certainty, in the middle dialectic of its three part exposition took the truth of empirical knowledge to lie in itself and its immediate Meinung, here

...consciousness recognizes that it is the untruth occurring in perception that falls within it...[118]

Perceptual takings can be mistakings. And consciousness at once recognizes this aspect as its own and takes responsibility for it. [118]

It "distinguishes its apprehension of the truth from the untruth of perception", by distinguishing its immediate, prejudgemental noninferential response (which so far just is something that happens--making no claims it can make no errors), the "apprehension", from the subsequent judgement or endorsement of a certain content as an expression of that immediate responsive disposition.6

Consciousness no longer merely perceives, but is also conscious of its reflection into itself, and separates this from simple apprehension proper. [118]

Observing that something is the case, for instance that this salt is tart, is not just a matter of exercising a reliable capacity differentially to respond to the environment, for instance as salt or tart. It also involves commitment to a certain determinately contentful characterization of what is being responded to. The contentfulness of that commitment depends in part on the way it prohibits and demands other contentful commitments. But

6 This point is a major theme of Sellars' "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind".

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just in this articulation by incompatibility and inference ("mediation") lies the possibility of error. For one may find oneself perceptually, that is noninferentially, committed to just some of those contents commitment to which was precluded by the other observation. The stick in the water looks bent but feels straight. At this stage in the development of perception, perceiving consciousness acknowledges its own responsibility for such predicaments. From here on out the activity of judging or endorsing is recognized as essential to perception.

23) On the first try, the thing is conceived of as in itself a unity, and as only appearing as a multiplicity for perceiving consciousness. Two remarks may be made about this sub-strategy.

a. First, all qualities are treated as secondary qualities, as arising only out of the interaction of the thing with consciousness.

b. Second, since these properties owe their identity and individuation to their relation to consciousness, there is no room for a gap between what properties the objects have in truth and what properties they have for consciousness. Truth is defined in terms of certainty, reality as multiplicity in terms of appearance. The properties are not even to be thought of as instanced by "white", but rather by "looks white to me now".

c. Notice that in treating consciousness as the medium of multiplicity, the medium of the "also" of the properties, Kant's view of the intellect as exclusively synthetic is turned on its head. Since the thing provides real unity to the mere "also" of consciousness, consciousness can conceive the distinction between the "object INSOFAR as it is white" and the "object INSOFAR as it is sweet" as due to itself. For determinateness, "looks red to me now" and "looks white to me now" must exclude one another (be incompatible). But the ground of their distinctness is not here conceived as being in the object, but in the subject. So the incompatibilities requisite for determinateness would be merely subjective, and the determinateness accordingly also merely subjective.

24) If the source of the incompatibilities distinguishing properties and hence making objects determinate is in consciousness, then the knowledge which consciousness has of one perceptual fact is not independent of the knowledge it has of others.

Regarded as existing each for itself in the universal medium, these diverse aspects for which consciousness accepts responsibility are specifically determined. White is white only in opposition to black...and the Thing is a One precisely by being opposed to others. [120]

The conceptions of independence and determinateness will once again be experienced as incompatible, so this strategy will not work, and the contrary sub-strategy is pursued. It arises out of the first by progressive realizations (recounted at the end of [120]), beginning from the thing conceived of as independent and what it is in-itself:

The Thing is what is true...and what is in it is there as the Thing's essence and not on account of other things.

This is an expression of the conception of what is perceived as independent. The first realization is that

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...the property is the Thing's own property or determinateness in the Thing itself, the thing has a number of properties,

so it is determinate. But since it genuinely and on its own account has these distinct properties in it, so

the Thing is the Also, or the universal medium in which the many properties subsist apart from one another, without touching or cancelling one another.

The diversity of properties is accordingly taken to exist in the thing as it is in itself, that is the thing is treated as consisting of the "also" of the properties, and the unity of those properties which makes them all properties of one thing is the work and responsibility of consciousness. The previous sub-strategy was nominalistic, in that individual things are taken as existing, and the grouping of them into various similarity classes understood as the distinguishing of repeatable properties in the particular things is entirely the contribution of consciousness. This sub-strategy is now inverted, and consciousness instead of sorting things into co-propertied classes, sorts properties into co-instantiation equivalence classes. Again the determinateness of things seems reduced to mere appearance, and consciousness must still apprehend the incompatibilities which render the properties objectively determinate in order to apprehend those properties and to respect their incompatibilities in sorting them into co-objectual classes. So again autonomy of knowledge of perceptual facts is precluded.

25) These two versions of the second strategy fell down in two ways. First, of course, determinateness and autonomy of contents and objects are still incompatible. Second, assigning responsibility for either of the necessary elements of determinateness (unity and multiplicity) to consciousness robs the thing of real determinateness. Since perception cannot appreciate the first difficulty without turning into understanding, the third and last form of perceptual consciousness attempts to avoid the second difficulty by once again putting both sides of determinateness into the thing rather than consciousness. This strategy would simply repeat the very first form of perception, except that something has been learned from the second stage. For the second stage looked for the ground of one of unity and diversity in the object, and the other elsewhere. It has now emerged that it is a mistake to look for the source of the other in consciousness, but the general idea of looking elsewhere than in the object itself need not be discarded because that special case didn't work out. So in the third stage both the elements which alternated between being assigned to the thing and to consciousness are to be assigned to things, but only one of them to the thing which is the thing characterized by perceptual properties. In particular, the thing must in itself be taken to be a unity. The diversity which makes it determinate must then be a matter of the relations which that single thing stands in to other single things. Considered by itself, the thing is just what it is, but in relation to other things it is white, sweet, etc., completely apart from how consciousness may take it to be. We have progressed through medieval nominalism and realism about universals to the doctrine of conceptualism. For or in relation to itself the thing is one. Its diverse properties, the thing INSOFAR as it is white as distinguished from the thing INSOFAR as it is sweet, are a diversity corresponding to the diversity of other objects it is related to. It is sweet or white for or in relation to them.

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26) The difficulty with this approach is that although the essence of the thing is unity and its diverse relations to other things are unessential to it (not part of what it is in itself), nonetheless it requires those unessential relations for its determinateness, and hence is neither independent nor independently knowable as determinate. The thing is demolished by the very determinateness that constitutes its essence and its being-for-self...The Thing is posited as being for itself or the absolute negation of all otherness [i.e. as independent]...But the Thing has its essential being [i.e. determinateness] in another Thing. [126] And again: But along with this simple nature the object is also to contain diversity which, although necessary to it is not to constitute its essential determinateness. [127] This is the failure of the third strategy, which puts both identity and determinate difference into the in-itself, but divides them between different things. The lesson we are to learn from all this is that the requirement of autonomy of knowledge or of object is mistaken and must be discarded in favor of a subtler notion of freedom, which corresponds to individuals socially synthesized out of particulars and universals. The requirement of determinateness will be retained. The proper model of particular to universal, of unity in the diversity of properties will follow the combined lessons of the second and third forms of perceptual consciousness. Unity or particularity will be a matter of relation of object to self, and diversity or universality will be a matter of relation to other objects as in the third stage. But, following the second stage, both the object that is for itself one and for others diverse, and the ones that it is for are conceived of as consciousnesses.

27) Perceiving consciousness admits only the existence of sense universals, and for this reason cannot understand what we understand. For its restriction to sense universals is expressed by its demand that the contents of perceivings be autonomous or independent (a conception that is pathognomic of alienation, as we shall learn), that is that they be graspable apart from any grasp or consideration of any other contents or relations to anything that is not a content. This demand collides with the inescapable consequences required by the determinateness of the contents of perceivings. When this independence requirement is relinquished, the transition is made to the level of understanding [Verstand]. Here the apparent contradictions that arose by conceiving of contents as independent, contradictions unresolvable within the vocabulary and idiom characteristic of consciousness whose self-concept is that of perceiving consciousness, are resolved by postulating an independent reality behind sensuous appearance, on which the whole of appearance is conceived as dependent. This move represents progress in several respects. It is now allowed that the determinateness of universals requires their relation to and mediation by other universals that they exclude. So the conception of universals as independent has been relinquished. Further, and as a result, the requirement of immediacy of the universals, their having to be sense universals, that is, non-inferentially reportable, has been given up as well. Now consciousness can conceive of itself as classifying particulars under universals to which its only access is inferential. So the picture of the relation between consciousness and what appears to it is no longer that of immediate contact ("rubbing the nose of the mind in the mess of the world"). This will eventually flower into the possibility of conceiving thought as a means of access to how

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things are in themselves, rather than as inevitably altering (as medium or instrument) and so perhaps radically falsifying what it presents. Again, the way is opened to conceiving of consciousness as consisting in other forms of judgement besides the classificatory, for instance the inference-codifying conditionals and modally qualified lawlike universal generalizations that express incompatibility and entailment relations explicitly in propositional form.

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