Eversion

Suppose one said we should turn the world inside out. Not "upside down" -- that's a phrase that's been applied to revolutionary movements that seek to reverse the rulers and the ruled -- but rather "inside out". The first question would likely be, what does that mean?

Well, for example, in a conventional philosophical view, the world is split into an internal world and an external. In that view, our internal world consists of perceptions, like colors, sounds, touches, etc. while the external world (otherwise known as the real world) consists of electromagnetic radiation, compression waves in air, nerve fiber reactions, etc. The problem with this is that it starts too late in the process, after we've already constructed conceptual artifacts like self and objects. But suppose we keep, at least provisionally, the idea of two distinct worlds or realms, but evert them, switch inside and outside, and put the colors, sounds, and so on out there as the real world, and bring the electromagnetic waves, sound waves, and so on inside, in a sense, as ideas, useful in dealing with the perceived world. In this sense, perception isn't an intermediary, at worst a veil, through which we get access to reality -- perception is instead the bedrock of reality, on top of which we build concepts that help us deal with reality. Even something as simple as the notion of an object, in this eversion, is a concept, that helps me be aware that the desk before me, for example, has a back I can't see at the moment.

This implies a pragmatic definition of truth, but of a stringent kind. Often, pragmatic notions of truth take on a kind of either opportunistic or "rule of thumb" quality, as though for someone too busy for "ultimate" truth. The eversion, however, says that practicality or usefulness just is truth, since there is no other path or kind. This in turn implies that truth has degrees, but not that it merely serves private ends (opportunism), nor that all versions are equivalent (relativism). Usefulness is the criterion of truth here, but it's a more general and extensive notion than the everyday usage might imply -- all concepts are constructions, but the most true are the most "workable", perhaps a better term than usefulness. And workability involves both relative simplicity and breadth of application.

At this point, then, I should probably say that the eversion itself was just a kind of conceptual prop, and it's time to let it go. This is because the division into two worlds is itself such a prop, and one that serves more to mislead than to help -- there's really only the world, with its foundation in our phenomenal experience, and a knowledge superstructure built on top of that. The idea of a real real world, outside of experience, a thing-in-itself, might be a common or handy shorthand, but is basically a fiction, or an unnecessary hypothesis, as Liebniz said of God.

What, one might ask, is the practical effect of this revision, what difference does it make? We should allow that any such difference would be on a very general level, removed from the everyday. But on that level, I think there are two important effects. First, it gives us back lived, phenomenal experience as a bedrock for all our knowledge, rather then as merely a surface to be excavated endlessly in search of  a foundation. And second, it lets us see knowledge as something to be built or constructed, which is fundamentally an endless creation of truth rather than just exposure of error.

Jun 3/20