Process and Conversation

by J. L. Speranza
for the Grice Club.

The issue or point may arise as to the categorial system of a language. Whitehead, since this is a safe way to start or indulge in some philosophical dialogue -- with Grice -- would speak of a 'process'. Indeed, the whole thing is schemtaised in the wiki entry --

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_philosophy

-- on which I will provide some running commentary.

"Process philosophy (or ontology of becoming) identifies metaphysical reality with change and dynamism. Since the time of Plato and Aristotle, philosophers have posited true reality as "timeless", based on permanent substances, whilst processes are denied or subordinated to timeless substances."

Kant did not help! And Grice often refers to Kantotle or Ariskant. So what is Whitehead up to?

"If Socrates changes, becoming sick, Socrates is still the same (the substance of Socrates being the same), and change (his sickness) only glides over his substance: change is accidental, whereas the substance is essential. Therefore, classic ontology denies any full reality to change, which is conceived as only accidental and not essential."

Of course none of this can be ascribed to Grice who coined with Myro what he called the Grice-Myro theory of time-relative identity!

Wiki continues:

"This classical ontology is what made knowledge and a theory of knowledge possible, as it was thought that a science of something in becoming was an impossible feat to achieve [1]. On the contrary, Process philosophy, or an ontology of the becoming, does not characterize change as illusory or as purely accidental to the substance, as in Aristotle's thought, but as the cornerstone of reality, or Being (thought as Becoming)."

Anti-Aristotelian? It should be noted that for Aristotle, metaphysics includes both ontology (cosmology being a branch of 'special ontology', the other being anthropology) and a more general 'theory-theory' as it were -- where the lay out of the categorial structure is displayed and analysed. The approach allows for both a descriptive and a revisionary variety -- if not a mixed one.

"Modern process philosophers include Henri Bergson, Charles Peirce, John Dewey, Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, Nicholas Rescher, and Gilles Deleuze. In physics Ilya Prigogine[2] distinguishes between the `physics of being' and the `physics of becoming'."

Grice thought of Heidegger, or at least said, "the greatest philospher", but perhaps he WAS just using an illustration! And he found some of the Peirce slightly cryptic.

"The formal development of this theory begins with Heraclitus's fragments in which he posits the nous, the ground of Becoming, as agon, or "strife of opposites" as the underlying basis of all reality defined by change. That balance and conflict were the foundations of change and stability in the flux of existence."

--- Oddly Whitehead famously said that philosophy is footnotes to Plato, not to Heraclitus!

"In early twentieth-century philosophy of mathematics, it was undertaken to develop mathematics as an airtight axiomatic system, in which every truth could be derived logically from a set of axioms. In the foundations of mathematics, this project is variously understood as logicism or as part of the formalist program of David Hilbert. Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell attempted to complete, or at least greatly facilitate, this program with their seminal book Principia Mathematica, which purported to build a logically consistent set theory on which to found mathematics."

Grice would often refer to "PM and its heirs" -- notably in WoW: where the heirs are defined as 'modernists'.

The wiki goes on to expand the consequences on WHITEHEAD (the first quote in Whitehead and Russell, "Principia Mathematica"):

"This project may have been ultimately defeasible, and afterwards Whitehead intuited that the entire venture was an organ of an overarching ontological mistake."

Perhaps he should have survived to read Grice's "Logic and Conversation" on what the modernists and neo-traditionalists make as a "common mistake".

(Whitehead died in 1947).

The wiki goes on:

"[Whitehead] saw that science and mathematics were struggling to overcome an ontology of substances, and thus could not engage phenomena whose nature are more properly understood as 'process'."

He would have corresponded on this with Russell who would speak of a 'stone age metaphysic' -- a phrase which Grice found 'rhetorical' rather than 'argumentative' -- "why not stone-age PHYSICS, after all?"

Wiki goes on:

"This resulted in the most famous work of process philosophy, Alfred North Whitehead's Process and Reality, a work which continues that begun by Hegel but describing a more complex and fluid dynamic ontology."

Too fluid to some tastes!

"While process thought does describe truth as "movement" in
and through

determinates

(Hegelian truth), and not these

determinates

as fixed concepts or "things" (Aristotelian truth), process thought since Whitehead is distinguished from Hegel in describing complexes of occasions of experience that arise or coalesce in becoming, rather than being simply dialectically determined from prior posited

determinates."

--- Try to formalise that in first-order logic. And report. (I'm not saying it's impossible!)

The wiki:

"It is also distinguished in being not necessarily conflictual or oppositional in operation. Process may be integrative, destructive or both together, allowing for aspects of interdependence, influence, and confluence, and addressing coherence in universal as well as particular developments, which aspects are not condign to Hegel's system."

--- Grice was fairly familiar with Hegel, as, well, an Oxonian. Recall that Whitehead's Hegelianism is sort of second-hand. One usually stays within the walls of Oxford to experience Hegelianism from the pens of Bradley or Bosanquet.

(Grice refers to Bradley in "Prolegomena" to Logic and Conversation):

The wiki:

"Additionally, instances of determinate occasions of experience, while always ephemeral, are nonetheless seen as important to define the type and continuity of those occasions of experience that flow from or relate to them."

Which is supposed to be a good thing.

The wiki continues:

"Whitehead's background was an unusual one for a speculative metaphysician. Educated as a mathematician, he became, through his coauthorship and 1913 publication of Principia Mathematica' with Bertrand Russell, a major logician. Later he wrote extensively on physics and its philosophy, proposing a theory of relativity rivaling Einstein's."

Proposed as rivalling or rivalling simpliciter? Mind your dangling gerunds!

The wiki:

"He was conversant with the quantum mechanics that emerged in the 1920s. Whitehead did not begin teaching and writing on process and metaphysics until he joined Harvard at 63 years of age."

Oddly, Grice, a representative of the 'new' school of thinking, was invited as the 'revolutionary' from Oxford -- already when "canonical linguistic analysis" was past its prime. Grice was William James lecturer at Harvard in 1967. And he was, let me check:

1967
- 1913
--------
54

Grice: 54; Whitehead: 63. But Grice was considering this stuff from a few decades earlier.

The wiki:

"The process metaphysics elaborated in Process and Reality proposes that the fundamental elements of the universe are occasions of experience."

A word that would have filled pages if approached by a philosopher of perception as Grice thought himself as being.

Wiki:

"According to this notion [of 'experince'], what people commonly think of as concrete objects are actually successions of occasions of experience."

Vide Grice on sense-datum versus material-object reductions.

The wiki:

"Occasions of experience can be collected into groupings; something complex such as a human being is thus a grouping of many smaller occasions of experience."

delivering utterances like:

"That occasion of experience is tall"

(?).

The wiki:

"According to Whitehead, everything in the universe is characterized by experience (which is not to be confused with consciousness); there is no mind-body duality under this system, because "mind" is simply seen as a very developed kind of experiencing."

Grice was rather interested, on the whole, in "that"-ascriptions. He would avoid grand terms like "mind" (and would describe his project as one of 'philosophical psychology' rather than philosophy of mind) and stick to, say, the belief that the door is closed (and the desire that the desirer would rather have it open).

The wiki:

"However, Whitehead is not an idealist in the strict sense. Whitehead's ideas were a significant development of the idea of panpsychism (also known as panexperientialism, because of Whitehead’s emphasis on experience)."

Good for him!

The wiki:

"Whitehead's philosophy resembles in some respects the monads of Leibniz. However, unlike Leibniz's monads, Whitehead's occasions of experience are interrelated with every other occasion of experience that precedes it in time."

-- This HAS some analogy with Grice's idea that 'personal identity' -- or more vulgarly, "I" in "I was hit in the head by a cricket ball" -- can be replaced by a succession of what he calls temporary temporal states.

The wiki:

"Inherent to Whitehead's conception is the notion of time; all experiences are influenced by prior experiences, and will influence all future experiences."

Grice's obsession with time later transpired in his co-authored theory with Myro on time-relative identity. In fact, he was well aware of the counterexamples to a simple mnemonic theory of personal identity that the Scots philosopher Reid had provided against Locke. He discusses it at some length in his 1941 essay on "Personal Identity".

The wiki:

"This process of influencing is never deterministic; an occasion of experience consists of a process of prehending other experiences, and then a reaction to it. This is the process in process philosophy. Because no process is ever deterministic, free will is essential and inherent to the universe."

Grice would often have polemics on this with Strawson -- who had come to the fore with his point about 'resentment' as raising the question of libertarians versus determinists! (The type of lower-case discussion Grice favoured).

The wiki:

"Process philosophy, for some, gives God a special place in the universe of occasions of experience. God encompasses all the other occasions of experience but also transcends them; thus Whitehead embraces panentheism. Since, it is argued, free will is inherent to the nature of the universe, God is not omnipotent in Whitehead's metaphysics. God's role is to offer enhanced occasions of experience. God participates in the evolution of the universe by offering possibilities, which may be accepted or rejected. Whitehead's thinking here has given rise to process theology, whose prominent advocates include Charles Hartshorne, John B. Cobb, Jr., and Hans Jonas, who was also influenced by the non-theological philosopher Martin Heidegger."

Alas, Grice's experiences with theology were slightly more negative ('negative theology'). The one to blame is perhaps his tutee at St. John's, A. G. Flew, whose claim to fame was to be a 'philosophical atheist' if you can believe that!

(Flew applied Popperian arguments against the existence of God -- and he failed, in that he converted to some sort of religion later in (his) life).

The wiki:

"However, other process philosophers have questioned Whitehead's theology, seeing it as a regressive Platonism. Whitehead enumerated three essential natures of God. The primordial nature of God consists of all potentialities of existence for actual occasions, which Whitehead dubbed eternal objects. God can offer possibilities by ordering the relevance of eternal objects. The consequent nature of God prehends everything that happens in reality. As such, God experiences all of reality in a sentient manner. The last nature is the superjective."

superjection, being the noun.

Wiki:

"This is the way in which God’s synthesis becomes a sense-datum for other actual entities. In some sense, God is prehended by existing actual entities."

-----

Wiki:

"Whitehead's influences were not restricted to philosophers or physicists or mathematicians. He was influenced by the French philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson (1859-1941), who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1927. Process philosophy is also believed to have influenced some 20th century modernists, such as D. H. Lawrence, William Faulkner and Charles Olson."

And ... I mean, if you are going to list influences! When Flew died last year I was doing some research and found that an online source listed his 'personal influences' as having been Grice and Mabbott. I said to my friend, R. Paul. "You see: he listed Grice first -- that surely implicates the influence by Grice was stronger." "Or that the editor chose an alphabetic order", Paul commented.

Wiki:

Homeopathy and homeostasis:

"Several fields of science and especially medicine seem to make liberal use of ideas in process philosophy, notably the theory of pain and healing of the late 20th century. The philosophy of medicine began to deviate somewhat from scientific method and an emphasis on repeatable results very late 20th century by embracing population thinking, and a more pragmatic approach to issues in public health, environmental health and especially mental health. In this latter field, R. D. Laing, Thomas Szasz and Michel Foucault were instrumental in moving medicine away from emphasis on "cures" and towards concepts of individuals in balance with their society, both of which are changing, and against which no benchmarks or finished "cures" were very likely to be measurable."

More of a Gricean relevance:

"In psychology, the subject of imagination was again explored more extensively since Whitehead, and the question of feasibility or "eternal objects" of thought became central to the impaired theory of mind explorations that framed postmodern cognitive science. A biological understanding of the most eternal object, that being the emerging of similar but independent cognitive apparatus, led to an obsession with the process "embodiment", that being, the emergence of these cognitions. Like Whitehead's God, especially as elaborated in J. J. Gibson's perceptual psychology emphasizing affordances, by ordering the relevance of eternal objects (especially the cognitions of other such actors), the world becomes. Or, it becomes simple enough for human beings to begin to make choices, and to prehend what happens as a result. These experiences may be summed in some sense but can only approximately be shared, even among very similar cognitions with identical DNA. An early explorer of this view was Alan Turing who sought to prove the limits of expressive complexity of human genes in the late 1940s, to put bounds on the complexity of human intelligence and so assess the feasibility of artificial intelligence emerging. Since 2000, Process Psychology has progressed as an independent academic and therapeutic discipline.[3]"

Pretty complex passage. I may comment at a later stage. To have Gibson and Turing and God and Whitehead in one passage is a feat!

The wiki:

"In the philosophy of mathematics, some of Whitehead's ideas re-emerged in combination with cognitivism as the cognitive science of mathematics and embodied mind theses. Somewhat earlier, exploration of mathematical practice and quasi-empiricism in mathematics from the 1950s to 1980s had sought alternatives to metamathematics in social behaviours around mathematics itself: for instance, Paul Erdős's simultaneous belief in Platonism and a single "big book" in which all proofs existed, combined with his personal obsessive need or decision to collaborate with the widest possible number of other mathematicians. The process, rather than the outcomes, seemed to drive his explicit behaviour and odd use of language, e.g., he called God the "Supreme Fascist", echoing the role Whitehead assigned, as if the synthesis of Erdős and collaborators in seeking proofs, creating sense-datum for other mathematicians, was itself the expression of a divine will. Certainly, Erdős behaved as if nothing else in the world mattered, including money or love, as emphasized in his biography The Man Who Loved Only Numbers."

That above is interesting and concerns broader issues of the ontology behind mathematical claims, and notable interpretations of mathematical statements. The influence of C. McLarty has been good on my thinking on this matters. He is a Platonist without tears!

The wiki:

"In plant morphology, Rolf Sattler developed a process morphology (dynamic morphology) that overcomes the structure/process (or structure/function) dualism that is commonly taken for granted in biology. According to process morphology, structures such as leaves of plants do not have processes, they are processes[4][5]."

This may relate to Grice's point about izzing and hazzing -- or not. (He notes that 'is' as in "... is a process" sometimes hides a 'has' (as in "... has a process").

"See also Gaston Bachelard, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, Wilmon Henry Sheldon
Gilbert Simondon, Process theology, Elisionism"

References
1.^ Anne Fagot-Largeau, 7 December 2006 course at the College of France, first part of a series of courses on the "Ontology of Becoming" (French)

2.^ Ilya Prigogine, From being to becoming, W.H. Freeman and Company, San Francisco, 1980.

3.^ Cobb, John B., Jr. "Process Psychotherapy: Introduction." Process Studies 29, no.1 (Spring-Summer 2000): 97-102.

4.^ Sattler, R. 1990. Towards a more dynamic plant morphology. Acta Biotheoretica 38: 303-315

5.^ Sattler, R. 1992. Process morphology: structural dynamics in development and evolution. Canadian Journal of Botany 70: 708-714.

"External links. Whitehead Research Project
"Process philosophy" article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Chromatika website
Process and Reality. Part V. Final Interpretation"