E-076 SEP PROC - Process Philosophy (Thesis 3 Excerpt)

Exact excerpt

Other proponents of speculative process metaphysics between 1850 and 1950, such as Charles S. Peirce, Samuel Alexander, C. Lloyd Morgan, and Andrew Paul Ushenko, contributed two new motives for process thought, namely, the philosophical explanation of evolutionary processes and the philosophical explanation of emergence and self-organization. However, they also created an image of process metaphysics that in the eyes of their contemporaries appeared methodologically problematic. The first step of these process-philosophical enterprises seemed legitimate business—surely it was important to identify the limitations of mechanistic explanations in science. But it was the second step, the endeavor of drafting purely speculative explanations for the direction and the origin of emergent evolution, that went against the positivist temper of the time. Such explanations did not sit well with the philosophers who defined and shaped the “analytic” method in postwar Anglo-American philosophy. As they rejected any empirical claims that would go beyond what was scientifically proven, and assigned to philosophy the more mundane task of analyzing conceptual contents (as well as linguistic and social practices, and phenomenal experiences), they increased the intersubjective verifiability of philosophical claims. But in the course of this important methodological revision the ontological categories of process metaphysics were mostly thrown out wholesale with the bathwater of the speculative explanations these categories were embedded in.
Nevertheless, twentieth century _speculative_ process metaphysics is paralleled by an _analytic-interpretive_ strand in contemporary process thought. This variety of process thought also proceeds from the theoretical intuition that processuality, in its various modes, is the primary starting point for a philosophical description of the world or of reality, but does not speculate about how reality develops. Here processuality either is a defining trait of the basic categories postulated for the analysis of common sense and scientific reasoning, in the style of analytic philosophy; or processuality is conveyed in the network of metaphors selected for the interpretation of human experience and the conditions of human existence, in the style of so-called ‘continental’ philosophy. Often contributions to analytic-interpretive processism are also placed somewhere in the middle between the poles of analytic versus continental methods in contemporary philosophy. The following examples will illustrate this methodological openness of non-speculative contemporary process philosophy.
Based on their analyses of phenomenal experience, the investigations of the “reflex arc” that were coming out of the psychology laboratory, and an analysis of human social praxis, William James and John Dewey each developed contributions to a process-based pragmatist metaphysics. James’ process-based account of the self loomed less large for the history of process philosophy, until recently at least, than Dewey’s more comprehensive view. Dewey holds that all existents are events whose characters we determine by giving them meaning in our interaction. For Dewey meanings are not abstract or psychic objects but aspects of human cooperative behavior—in our interactions with the world we create significances and thus determine what kind of situation occurs. Working from studies of social interaction, George Herbert Mead added to process-based pragmatism the thesis that mind emerges from social communicative actions. On the side of ‘continental’ philosophy, Henri Bergson arrived at a process metaphysics again based on an investigation of phenomenal experience, like James and Dewey. But while Dewey and other pragmatists put the process-character of being partly into the hand of human agents and their practical and theoretical interpretations of an ongoing situation, Bergson argued that the process-character of being is precisely out of our cognitive reach, at least in so far as we try to conceptualize what we experience. As long as we understand conscious experience as a subject-object relation, Bergson pointed out, we merely follow the theoretical habits in which we have been conditioned by the substance-metaphysical tradition. However, when we carefully attend to what we take in during conscious experience, especially our self-experience, without forcing a conceptualization of that experiential content or the act of experience, we find not a relation and ready-made relata but an interactivity—an ongoing interfacing out of which world and self arise in our conceptualizations. In immediate, non-conceptualized experience we grasp the dynamicity of this interfacing as becoming or the flow of duration (“durée”), but this felt dynamic content of our experience transcends what we can conceptually articulate. As soon as we try to conceptualize what we have grasped in “intuition” we turn the continuous complex flow of experience into a sequence of discrete units, into pluralities of states of objects at locations that engender Zeno’s paradoxes of motion, and we transform our entangled being with the world into the ever puzzling opposition of a subject and an object.
Martin Heidegger’s early and late philosophy also presents an analytic-interpretive contribution to process philosophy, without speculative formulations of metaphysical ‘laws of development,’ but with a view to the metaphilosophical and practical implications of process metaphysics. In _Sein und Zeit_ (1927) Heidegger presents what could be called an ‘adverbial model’ of process metaphysics; based on an analysis of human existence (“Dasein”) Heidegger shows that what the metaphysical tradition understood as entities or factors standing in relational constellations—e.g., space, world, self, others, possibility, matter, function, meaning, time—can be viewed as ‘adverbial modifications’ of Dasein, as modes and ways in which Dasein occurs, while Dasein itself is the interactivity of “disclosure” or ‘taking as.’ Since Heidegger’s ‘taking as’ is an understanding that is ineradicably practical, his early philosophy bears certain affinities to the pragmatist tendency in twentieth century American process thought. In Heidegger’s later work, however, human understanding is no longer the dynamic ‘locus’ but more a dimension of the process of being (“clearing”).
While many twentieth century American process thinkers were influenced by Whitehead, some turned elsewhere or went their own ways. For example, W. H. Sheldon championed a largely dialectical view of the dynamic nature of reality with process as a principle of conflict resolution. Wilfrid Sellars, one of the great figures in post-war analytical philosophy, worked out what appears to be the first consistently nominalist and naturalist system ever developed in the history of Western philosophy; this is often overlooked, however, since the system relies on a process ontology that Sellars only briefly sketched but never elaborated. Naturalism implies a nominalist account of properties, Sellars argued, which in turn can only succeed if we take qualia to be aspects of processes—by categorizing _blue_ as _sensing-blue-ly_ , we can make better sense of how physical processes engender sensory contents (Sellars 1981). With the envisaged process-based solution to the body-sensory problem, which in many ways anticipates current ideas of “embodied cognition,” Sellars could further suggest a new process-based re-interpretation of intentionality. Any kind of content, Sellars argued, from the lowliest sensory content in bacteria to the norm-governed contents of conceptual experience to the contents of scientific theories, is nothing else but a way of _functioning_. Taking over from Sellars the idea that content is function, present-day functionalist theories of mind and cognition typically fail to acknowledge Sellars and thereby miss the decisive element for a successful functionalist ‘reduction’ of intentionality and the mental, namely, that the reductive basis, functions, are not static input-output tables but ongoing processes in natural systems that realize, in this ongoingness, normative socio-cultural practices (Seibt 2016). Recently American process metaphysics gained another important voice in Nicholas Rescher who, like Sellars, consistently pursued a systematic approach in philosophy. Rescher made important contributions to _all_ philosophical disciplines; originally these were framed as components of a system of “methodological pragmatism” and “pragmatic idealism”. In the mid-1990s, however, Rescher sketched a process metaphysical embedding for his system, using familiar philosophical terminology, and thus presented the first systematic overview of the explanatory potential of a non-Whiteheadian process metaphysics that forfeits technical expenditure and operates with a notion of process that is close to our common-sense understanding of developments. In parallel, since the past four decades and with increasing intensity, researchers working in the intersection of ontology and linguistics, in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, in philosophy of biology or of quantum physics, have addressed specific questions in these areas with greater attention to types of processes and processual structures. These more targeted investigations will be taken up below.
Generally speaking, current Western process philosophy has abandoned all speculative aspirations and develops the descriptive, analytic-interpretive strand of process thought (the exception might be the use of process metaphysics in areas of philosophy of physics where physics itself is speculative, see [footnote 19](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-philosophy/notes.html#note-19)). While interest in processism most recently has increased in analytic philosophy of science, of mind, and of action, process thought is currently also used to highlight productive affinities between the continental and analytical trajectories of twentieth century metaphilosophical _criticism_ of traditional metaphysics. Such analytic-continental cross-overs enabled by attention to process can also be observed in philosophy of cognition and in the philosophy of technology, often combined with alignments with the “4E paradigm of cognition” or “post-phenomenology”, respectively. Another more encompassing exploration across borders, a detailed historical and systematic comparison between Western and Eastern process philosophy (e.g., [Daoism](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/daoism/)) is an important task yet to be undertaken.
## 2. Three tasks of process philosophy
As may have become clear from the brief review of historical contributions to (Western) process philosophy in section 1, process philosophy is a complex and highly diversified field that is not tied to any school, method, position, or even paradigmatic notion of process. Some process philosophers (e.g. Whitehead) took organismic processes as their central model for a concept of occurrences that generate the internal and external coherence of an entity. Others (e.g. James) chose as their canonical illustrations individual psychological processes, or (e.g. Alexander) took evolutionary development as paradigmatic. Some process philosophers (e.g. Whitehead and Morgan) articulated their approach in the form of an axiomatic theory and in close relation to science, while others (e.g. Bergson) worked from an almost mystical sort of sympathetic apprehension of reality and insisted that process metaphysics could, if at all, only be expressed by means of a highly metaphorical use of language. Some processists (e.g., Roger Boscovich) championed a materialist position, while others endorsed idealism (e.g., Leibniz and Hegel). The historical overview in the preceding section also displays that the tools of process philosophy are not tied to any specific method of philosophical inquiry, giving present-day process philosophers a broad spectrum of approaches with which to build their theories: by conceptual analysis (via informal and formal reconstructions of conceptual contents); by the integrative interpretation of scientific results; or by phenomenological investigations. Similarly, while compatibility with recent results of science is for many process philosophers a privileged methodological constraint, others take science to be merely an aspect of the more comprehensive philosophical datum of cultural praxis.
In short, process philosophy is best understood as the effort to replace a longstanding philosophical _research paradigm_ , in a sense close to T. Kuhn’s use of the term, i.e., to replace a set of longstanding fundamental assumptions that delimit the scope of legitimate topics and direct theory construction. For example, process philosophers assume that the only primary or basic ontological categories should be terms for _occurring_ entities, and that certain formal theories—for example, set theory—are ill-suited of themselves, without modifications, to express the dynamic relationships among occurrences. Or again, process thinkers hold that philosophical research may legitimately address ‘creative’ phenomena that cannot be described as the modification of a pre-existing and persistent unit, such as phenomena of complexity or self-organization. What unifies contemporary process-philosophical research more than any other aspect, however, is its metaphilosophical aim to revise long-standing theoretical habits. Given its current role as a rival to the dominant substance-geared paradigm of Western metaphysics, process philosophy has the overarching task of establishing the following three claims:
  * _Claim 1:_ The basic assumptions of the ‘substance paradigm’ (i.e., a metaphysics based on static entities such as substances, objects, states of affairs, or instantaneous stages) are dispensable theoretical presuppositions rather than laws of thought.
  * _Claim 2:_ Process-based theories perform just as well or better than substance-based theories in application to the familiar philosophical topics identified within the substance paradigm.