More Ranting on Relativism: Chemero on Clark's “Being There”

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(by Jonny)

A couple of weeks ago I posted about a problem that occasionally surfaces in philosophy of cognition, particularly embodied cognition. It's the problem of relativism. It's a problem, in my eyes, because it's an unnecessary obstacle for certain very intuitive ideas to become acceptable to many people, it's a distraction. Though the notion an organism's experience of the world is necessarily dependent on contingent sensorimotor capacities is highly plausible, though the notion that the way the world is largely relative to our particular bodily form, and that form's contingent interaction with the world makes some immediate sense, relativism is off-puttingly problematic.

Well I recently came across an example of this sort of view in the form of Chemero's (1998) review of Andy Clark's “Being There” (1997). Chemero, who otherwise positively recommends Clark's embodied conclusions, complains of the author's unwillingness to accept that his thesis implies a rejection of “world-it-itself”, of “scientific realism”.

Andy Clark's "Being There"

The precise reason remains a mystery to me. Chemero seems sensible when he says,

“Since there is no central executive in mobots with connectionist brains, there will be no detailed, action-neutral representation of the world. In most cases, agents will use the world as its own model. ” (pg.3)

And it sensibly follows from the central ideas of embodied cognition that,

“we should expect creatures (including humans) to be sensitive only to those aspects of their environments that matter to the actions they regularly undertake... The world represented by animals with much different needs than humans will be much different than the world humans represent.” (pp.5-6)

But it does not seem to follow that there is no world “in and of itself” independent of our perceptions. One of the issues seems to be Chemero's notion of what realism exactly says. He writes that falsehood of we must reject “so-called "common-sense realism," in which the world-in-itself is thought to correspond to everyday human categories. ” But it is ambiguous what he means by everyday human categories. Perhaps, as I mentioned in my last post, we will have reject the idea that the world is conveniently structured as our thoughts are structured. The world as constituted by giraffes and cactus and melons is a contingent, human perception of the world based on human needs, but it does not imply that the existence of giraffes is entirely relative. There is still something about the giraffe that exists independent of an organism's contingent situation. So perhaps we will reject a certain everyday realism, a realism that takes the world to always conform to everyday human categories, but this is a weak realism.

Though Chemero is right to say that “physics and other sciences depend upon our language-using abilities” (pg.7), he is wrong to conclude that science does not tell us something, in some form, about the real independent properties of the universe. 

Embodied cognition does not entail, and should not imply, this sort of radical relativism.

How I feel when I start thinking about cognitive science and relativism.

Chemero, A (1998) A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Humans: Review of Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again by Andy Clark. Psyche, 4(14)

Clark, A (1997) Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again. MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts