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Horizonality and Defeasibility

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Abstract

The anticipation of the typical under the assumption of the non-occurrence of the atypical is the experiential schema governing the individuation of ordinary enduring objects and their properties. Against this background, a primitive form of “if-and-only-if” consciousness is implicit in our everyday perceptual intentions. The thematization of the fact that perception operates under this proto-tentative structure occurs at the level of reflection and is expressed by defeasible judgments of the form “if p, then q, unless r,” or “if p, then q provided that not-r”. Here I will argue that what is made thematic by judgments containing such restrictive clauses is the structure of unpredictability inherent in what Husserl calls the horizon of latency and, indirectly, the world as background of normality.

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Notes

  1. A prominent representative of this view was, as is well-known, Quine.

  2. See for this Crowell (2013, Chapter Five).

  3. See in this respect, Rang (1990).

  4. All references to Husserl’s work are to the original German. I have included numbers within square brackets corresponding to the existing English translation only when those translations do not contain the Husserliana pagination in the margin. References to Peirce’s Collected Papers are abbreviated as CP, followed by volume and paragraph.

  5. Husserl employs the structurally equivalent expressions “causal style” and “causal habit” (cf. Hua IX, p. 103; VI, p. 28 [31]). The affinity between Husserl’s and Peirce’s dispositional conception of thinghood is noted in Rang (1990, p. 103, n. 131).

  6. We are not considering here other employments of the concept of normality by Husserl, such as that of the lived body or the intersubjective normality. For the former see Steinbock (1995). For the latter see Zahavi (2001, Chapter Four).

  7. In the following I will refer to them as ceteris paribus and ceteris absentibus pre-conditions, respectively. I follow Schurz (2002), who argues that “ceteris paribus” is an ambiguous notion, insofar as it can be understood in two different ways, namely: i) as establishing the requirement that certain things be kept constant, and ii) as establishing the requirement that potentially disruptive factors be kept absent.

  8. Husserl’s example is very similar to Brandom’s (2015, p. 193).

  9. In Ideas II Husserl poses the example of a steel spring, which presents the dispositional property of elasticity. According to Husserl, grasping the steel spring as having the reidentifiable property of elasticity entails the parallel recognition of other properties (like temperature) that must remain within a range of variability for the object to continue exhibiting itself as elastic (cf. Hua IV, pp. 47–49). From this it follows that only if we assume that certain pertinent circumstances will not undergo significant variations (e.g. the spring will not be exposed to extreme temperatures), can we anticipate that under this or that external force, the spring will oscillate in this or that manner.

  10. Cf. also Hua XV, pp. 156–7. In the literature on dispositional properties, such extrinsic inhibiting factors are referred as “antidotes.” See Bird (2007 pp. 27–29).

  11. Brandom formulates this point in terms of the nonmonotonicity of the inferences involved in the acquisition of empirical concepts: “The fact that the inference from p to q is a materially good one in some situation does not mean that the inference from p and r to q must also be a good one, in the same situation” (Brandom 2015, p. 192; emphasis added; also pp. 141–143). An inference is nonmonotonic when its conclusion can be retracted after the incorporation of new information in the premises. An inference is monotonic, in turn, when the addition of new information in the premises preserves the validity of the conclusion. The vast majority of the inferences we make in our everyday life are nonmonotonic. For examples, see Pollock (2008).

  12. Processes, like things, goals, and persons, have styles (cf. Hua XXXIX, p. 292, 512; IV, pp. 265–280).

  13. On our everyday understanding of negative events and human omissions as causes, see Hart and Honoré (1959, pp. 30–38). For further textual evidence concerning the margin of latent Gegenmöglichkeiten co-substantial to our practical intentions, see Hua XLII, pp. 286, 299–300, 398, 402.

  14. I thank the anonymous reviewer for urging me to address this issue.

  15. Of the philosophers associated with the phenomenological tradition, John Haugeland (1998) stands alongside Crowell as a central proponent of the view that perception is normative. For more recent elaborations, see also Doyon (2018), the contributions in Doyon and Breyer (2015), and Hugo (2017a).

  16. See Crowell (2013, Chapter Six). For Crowell, such standards of success find their source in our practical capacities, and are not established, therefore, in a propositional way. Addressing this issue is beyond the scope of this paper.

  17. The reviewer rightly detects the structural similarity between this thesis and what in the phenomenological literature on cognitive skills and artificial intelligence is known as the frame problem, i.e. the problem of how an intelligent, deliberating behavior can confront a changing world by focusing directly on what is pertinent with respect to the goal, and disregarding, at the same time, irrelevant information without “agonizing” in this “recalculative” process. Settling the dispute as to whether computers can have this skill is far beyond the scope of this paper. I must say, however, that the original inspiration of the thesis developed in this section derives from Gurwitsch rather than from this debate. See in this respect the good compilation of articles in Pylyshyn (1987).

  18. See Gurwitsch (2010, Part Five) and Marginal Consciousness, Chapter Four (in the same volume).

  19. I am aware that there is a vast gray zone between the concepts of interest and commitment, the latter understood as a self-referential possibility of the agent—or, in Heideggerian terms, as a terminal “for-the-sake-of-which”—and I agree that the former might not be sufficient to explain how the horizons are subjectively organized into domains of relevancy and irrelevancy. Within a Husserlian framework, any attempt to illuminate this point would require a deep analysis of the concepts of personal style, self-correction (Selbstkorrektur), life-interest (Lebensinteresse), care (Sorge), and vocational interest (Berufsinteresse), all of which are subordinated to the ideal of self-coherence (Selbsteinstimmigkeit). This paper is part of a larger project in which I intend to address this issue. Pioneer work in this regard can be found in Hugo (2017b).

  20. I readapt the example in Wiggins (2001, pp. 91ff).

  21. See in this respect Gurwitsch (2009), pp. 164–183.

  22. See specially Lohmar (1998), Vigo (2013, Chapter Four), and Walton (2004).

  23. I owe this subdivision, which I proceed to explain next, to Walton (2009, p. 109; also 2015, pp. 375–378). The influence of Walton’s work has been decisive for my argument. For the pertinent references in Husserl, see Ms. D 14, p. 36b; Hua XXXIX, pp. 16, 101–102, 436; HuaDok II/1, p. 211, 215.

  24. The same idea can be found, albeit with a different terminology, in Hua VIII, pp. 147–149.

  25. While Husserl’s analyses—and, following him, those of the Merleau-Ponty of the Phenomenology of Perception (see for example 1945, pp. 387–9)—focus, for the most part, on the potentially affecting objects within the sphere of latency understood as spatial framework, my account will also include events, in the everyday sense of the term.

  26. This further subdivision is my own.

  27. On the difference between absolute and relative apodicticity, see Walton (2015, pp. 352-359).

  28. See Cairns (1976, p. 98); also Walton (2015, p. 332).

  29. See Gurwitsch (2010, pp. 496–7). Also Hua XLI, p. 376.

  30. The world is, in a sense, an amphibious a priori. On the one hand, a universal world-apperception is a condition for the possibility of every possible experience. Everything unfamiliar is apperceived as harmonizing with or being integrable into the world that is already familiar to me. Once established, the structure of the world cannot be abolished: the unfamiliar must have something to do with the already familiar. Seen from this angle, the world is an “a priori prejudice” whose adoption is beyond our free choice (Hua XXXIX, pp. 125, 492, 56–57, 73; Hua VIII, p. 387). Yet, on the other hand, we would know nothing about the world if it were not for our factual experience of mundane beings (Hua XXXIX, p. 126). Lastly, from a logical point of view, the world is the a priori tribunal for the decidability of every judgment susceptible to being true or false (see for this Hua XVII, §§79–80, and 92).

  31. I am leaving aside, for example, retrospective forms of defeasible reasoning, like abduction.

  32. Cf. Husserl (1999, §§16, 42b).

  33. Reference to the English translation.

  34. As Hart and Honoré (1959) argue, the distinctive feature of our ordinary conception of causality—unlike the scientific one, which is based on the detection of correlations between types of events (e.g. smoking causes death)—lies in the fact that what is usually ranked as the cause of the effect is a singular event which alters the normal course of things.

  35. For a pioneer defense of the concept of cause as difference-maker, see Hart & Honoré (1959, pp. 30–38; see also 109, 110).

  36. Cf. Husserl (1999, §67b).

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Acknowledgements

The elaboration of this work has been possible thanks to the generous financial support of my doctoral studies by CONICYT (Comisión Nacional de Investigación Científica y Tecnológica, Chilean Ministry of Education), and the Onassis Foundation. For his guidance and constant support on this project I should like to extend my gratitude to my supervisor, James Dodd. I am also thankful to Richard Bernstein, David Carr, and Dmitri Nikulin for our numerous and productive conversations on the matters I discuss here. Shorter versions of this work were presented at the Husserl Colloquium (Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Santiago de Chile, December 2017) and the Copenhagen Summer School in Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind (University of Copenhagen, August 2018). I thank Søren Overgaard for his feedback on my paper at the Copenhagen Summer School. The anonymous referee read my manuscript with great care. His or her critical observations contributed to improving the paper in many aspects. I would like to express my special appreciation to Zachary Hugo for reading different versions of the manuscript (more than I can remember) with exceptional acuteness. In addition, the English translations of the passages from works of Husserl and Fink which are only available in German are of his authorship. Lastly, I thank the director of the Husserl Archives, Julia Jansen, for permitting me to cite from Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts.

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    Emilio Vicuña

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Vicuña, E. Horizonality and Defeasibility. Husserl Stud 35, 225–247 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-019-09244-8

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