10.13125/CH/5434
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2533-1825
5434
2
en
urn:nbn:it:unica-28968
Anton Friedrich Koch
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Critical Hermeneutics
Our Common Extended Consciousness and the Readability of Things
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/ecch
6
Articles
2023-01-26
2022-12-20
2023-01-27
2023-01-27
35-59
1
Anton Friedrich Koch
2022
10.13125/CH/5434
35
2533-1825
2
59
urn:nbn:it:unica-28968
Our Common Extended Consciousness and the Readability of Things
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/ecch/article/download/5434/5364
6
Critical Hermeneutics 6(2), (2022)               Submission date: 7 November 2022
Biannual International Journal of Philosophy     Acceptance date: 5 January 2023
http://ojs.unica.it/index.php/ecch/index         Date of publication: 27 January 2023
ISSN 2533-1825 (on line); DOI 10.13125/CH/5434




      Our Common Extended Consciousness and the

               Readability of Things: Two Theses of

                            Hermeneutic Realism


                               Anton Friedrich Koch




Abstract
The article consists of a general introduction and two main parts, the
first relating to sensory, qualitative consciousness and the second to
discursive, intentional consciousness. The general thesis of the first
part can be formulated like this: Humans literally overlap in their infi-
nite spatiotemporal field of consciousness, which is one and the same
for all and is only oriented differently by each individual, namely ego-
centrically in each case. On the basis of this common extended con-
sciousness we can talk to each other about things. In the second
part, the thesis – inspired by the divergent picture theories of ele-
mentary sentences developed by the early Wittgenstein and then by
Wilfrid Sellars – is argued that when we talk about things, we read
them and translate them into verbal language. We read them as
world-sided primordial tokens (1) of their names, (2) of phenomenal
“this-such” representations of them, and (3) of various elementary
sentences about them, thus treating them as objects, as Kantian in-
tuitions and as token facts respectively. Incidentally, this result can
serve to illuminate Heidegger’s thesis in his 1950 lecture on language
that it is originally language that speaks – as the “ringing of silence”
Anton Friedrich Koch, Our Common Extended Consciousness and the Readability of Things




or “chiming of stillness” (“Geläut der Stille”) – and that humans have
the call to speak back to language in talking to each other, i.e. to re-
spond to the chiming of stillness.
Keywords: qualia, essential indexicality, space, picture theories for
elementary sentences, world-sided ur-tokens of linguistic types


1. Introduction
The philosophical position that I call hermeneutic realism and have
been advocating since 2006 and under this label since 2016 (see
Koch 2006, Koch 2016) is a moderate version of realism that others
might call, with similar legitimacy, a moderate idealism. In Thomas
Hofweber’s helpful terminology, it is a combination of an ontological
realism with a conceptual idealism. That is, it does not claim, as onto-
logical idealisms do, “that what there is, and what it is like, are mind
dependent” (Hofweber 2016: 257), but it does declare certain basic
features of reality to be in some sense dependent on our conceptual
capacities. For example, there are no ineffable facts: What can be the
case is not beyond our conceptual possibilities. More pointedly, her-
meneutic realism holds that reality and mind are logico-ontologically
entangled in mutual dependence. Minds are necessarily corporeal und
reality necessarily includes minds. Logic thus restricts the physically
possible initial conditions of the cosmic process to the effect that be-
ings with conceptual capacities that epistemically individuate them-
selves a priori and locate themselves a priori in space and time had to
emerge from those conditions at some point and somewhere. If this
so-called subjectivity thesis, which I have been defending since 1990
(cf. Koch 1990: § 3), looks somewhat idealistic, it nevertheless has
the rather realistic consequence that the facts, regardless of their ef-
fability, cannot all be brought together in a single consistent overall
view. In this respect, the subjectivity thesis leads to a fundamental
critique of the myth of transparency, which in its scholastic and ra-


36
                                             Critical Hermeneutics 6(2), (2022)




tionalist versions posited an omniscient being and was then secular-
ised into the naturalistic scientism of our time, according to which a
physical theory of everything is in principle possible. It is not; for
things themselves are of such an ontological constitution that, alt-
hough they are potentially unconcealed, they do not allow their un-
concealment to be fixed in an aperspectival God’s eye view as from
nowhere. As a consequence, the finite perspectives to which things
are open cannot be transcended into the universal by precise calcula-
tion and made transparent in an unambiguous way. Rather, universal-
ity is a difficult and endless task on which we work together, talking,
arguing and learning, under the conditions of what Quine and Da-
vidson called the indeterminacy of translation and interpretation re-
spectively. Herein lies the specifically hermeneutic trait of hermeneu-
tic realism.
     In the following, two fundamental theses of hermeneutic realism
will be developed and justified. Accordingly, the text has two main
parts, one relating to sensory, qualitative consciousness (part 2) and
the other to discursive, intentional consciousness (part 3). Some
people say that understanding qualitative consciousness is the hard
problem and understanding intentionality is the easy problem of con-
sciousness. I think that a philosophical explanation of qualitative con-
sciousness is hard indeed, but an account of intentionality is anything
but easy. Given Quine’s arguments for the indeterminacy of meaning
and reference, Davidson’s arguments for the anomaly of the mental,
Kripke’s Wittgenstein-inspired arguments for the paradox of rule fol-
lowing, to name but a few, it seems incredible to me that people con-
tinue to offer variants of functionalism such as causal role functional-
ism, inferential role functionalism or computational functionalism as
candidates for a philosophical understanding of intentionality. But as
Heidegger rightly observed, within human being (Dasein) itself, and
thus within our understanding of our own being, there prevails an


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Anton Friedrich Koch, Our Common Extended Consciousness and the Readability of Things




“ontological back radiation”, a reflecting back of the way we under-
stand the world onto the interpretation of our own being (Heidegger
1927: 15-16). Fichte was more curt when he noted that “most people
would be more easily led to believe that they are a piece of lava in
the moon than an ego”, i.e. a free and thinking subject (Fichte
1845/46: 175 footnote).
     Heidegger endeavoured to create a new way of words to neutral-
ise the ontological back radiation. In what follows, however, I will
stick to the ordinary philosophical terminology. This can lead to un-
familiar, perhaps even paradoxical formulations when the ordinary
terminology contaminated by the back radiation is used to escape this
very back radiation. Instances of this are the general theses I will put
forward in the two parts of my paper. The first can be formulated as
follows: People literally overlap in their infinite spatiotemporal field of
consciousness, which is one and the same for all and is only oriented
differently by each individual, namely egocentrically in each case. (Of
course, one would have to distinguish further between the spatial and
temporal components of the field, but for simplicity’s sake, we will
stick to space in the following.) The second thesis states that things,
not in and of themselves and not for animals, but for speakers, are
literally tokens of linguistic types and can be read (a) as their own
names, (b) as indexical singular terms designating them and (c) as
sentences about them.
     This readability thesis is inspired by quite diverse sources. For
one thing, in his evolutionary theory of logico-ontological space,
which he terms the science of logic, Hegel reports for a certain stage
of the evolution that onto-/logical space is all judgement at this
stage, i.e. that “all things are a judgement” (Hegel 1830: § 167). If a
thing is a judgement, or rather an individual token of a judgement
type, it ought to be able to be understood or read as a judgement
and translated into ordinary verbal language. A second inspiration,


38
                                              Critical Hermeneutics 6(2), (2022)




and the most important, is provided in the divergent picture theories
for elementary sentences developed by the early Wittgenstein and
then Wilfrid Sellars. Thirdly, and finally, we have Heidegger’s dictum
in his 1950 talk on language (“Die Sprache”) that “language lan-
guages” (or that “speech speaks”: “die Sprache spricht”, Heidegger
1985:10), and that language speaks as a gathering call, i.e. as a
ringing or chiming, but as a chiming of silence or stillness (“Geläut
der Stille”, Heidegger 1985:27). We mortals have the call of speaking
back to language, of answering the chiming of stillness. Gadamer, in
his more mundane way, sums up: “Being that can be understood is
language” (“Sein, das verstanden werden kann, ist Sprache”, Gada-
mer 1960: 450).
    Apart from rare internal criticisms – I shall deal with one at the
end of this article –, I usually receive two external objections to the
idea that being as understood is language and that things are tokens
of linguistic types. Firstly, it is contended that in the case of things,
there are no speakers who produce them, and without speakers there
are no linguistic tokens. But here we may appeal to David Lewis’s
“Lagadonian method” as a precedent that “exploits our freedom to
take the words as anything we please. Do we need one and only one
name for everything in some large domain? Just declare that each
thing names itself” (Lewis 1986: 145). Things are linguistic tokens
not because we produce them in speaking, but because we take them
as such in perceiving and understanding them. That is why I am talk-
ing of reading them. After all, we are used to tokens without percep-
tible speakers when we read texts whose writers are absent or un-
known or have long since died. And besides, if the wind sometimes
whispers Mary, it might as well draw readable letters in the sand.
    Secondly, it is criticised that language represents, but things do
not. This is a bit petty, though, as is again illustrated by Lewis’s
Lagadonian method. What matters is logical form, not representation,


                                                                             39
Anton Friedrich Koch, Our Common Extended Consciousness and the Readability of Things




and logical form, as Wittgenstein already noted in the Tractatus and
as will be shown, is identical here on both sides, the same for linguis-
tic representations and the items represented, for mind and world,
thinking and being. We project logico-linguistic form onto things in
the same way that we project it onto spoken expressions or written
texts. True, things qua linguistic tokens do not represent anything
else. They are ur-tokens, so to speak. They do not re-present, but
just present themselves in virtue of their logico-linguistic form, and
by our reading them, they become unconcealed, as Heidegger would
say.
       This, then, is the plan for the article: first (part 2), I will argue
for the extendedness of consciousness1, and second (part 3), for the
readability of things. I hope that in the course of my argumentation it
will become clear that – and how – both theses belong together.


2. Our common extended consciousness
In his book The Conscious Mind, David Chalmers explicates his topic,
conscious states, thus (Chalmers 1996: 4):


       […] a mental state is conscious if it has a qualitative feel –
       an associated quality of experience. These qualitative feels
       are also known as phenomenal qualities, or qualia for short.
       The problem of explaining these phenomenal qualities is just
       the problem of explaining consciousness. This is the really
       hard part of the mind-body problem.


       The problem of explaining qualia is thought to be so hard be-
cause qualia do not seem to be exhaustible functionally, i.e. by their


1
 This philosophical thesis of the always already extended consciousness must not
be confused with the scientific hypothesis of the artificially extended mind first for-
mulated by Cark and Chalmers (1998).



40
                                                Critical Hermeneutics 6(2), (2022)




causal roles in perception and behaviour, and because, on the other
hand, nowhere in the firing of our neurons do neurologists find the
shades of purple or green we see or the ringing of a bell we hear or
“the musty smell of an old wardrobe, the stench of rotting garbage,
the whiff of newly mown grass, the warm aroma of freshly baked
bread” (6), to quote Chalmers again. The usual idea here seems to be
that qualia form the rich phenomenal endowment or decoration of an
inner cognitive map of ours that represents our external spatial or
spatiotemporal environment as well as parts of our own body, as for
instance in the case of pain. Qualia qua concrete decorations of our
cognitive maps thus represent objective external states according to
this standard picture, like maps represent a territory. The problem, as
said, seems to be that brain scientists do not find any phenomenal
decoration when investigating neural “representations” of our exter-
nal environment.
     But perhaps the whole picture is misguided and in turn mislead-
ing. To find out if it is, we should look at our practice of raising truth
claims, i.e. of judging, which is a workable abstraction of our concrete
being-in-the-world as human beings. It seems self-evident that, as
Gareth Evans once put it, “to make a judgement about an object, one
must know which object is in question”. Evans has called this principle
Russell’s Principle and has specified it to the effect that someone who
is “in a position to think of an object must have a discriminating con-
ception of that object – a conception which would enable the subject
to distinguish that object from all other things” (Evans 1982: 65), i.e.
to individuate it epistemically and then to refer to it in speech by
what is called singular reference.
     Certainly, it may be that “one” (or “man” in Heidegger’s German)
can talk about a thing without being able to individuate it, relying on
the division of linguistic labour. But this kind of talk is then most likely
mere talk in Heidegger’s technical sense of “Gerede”. Because think-


                                                                               41
Anton Friedrich Koch, Our Common Extended Consciousness and the Readability of Things




ing is essentially articulated through language, it is just as essentially
subject to the possibility of falling into mere talk. Nevertheless, Rus-
sell’s Principle applies to thinking proper and to “authentic” talk.
     Now think of epistemic individuation. How do we accomplish it?
How do we individuate things in thought and speech? Concepts qua
general ideas, precisely by being general, are in principle insufficient
for individuation in thought, just as general descriptions are insuffi-
cient for singular reference in speech. We also need demonstrative or
indexical thought contents and their linguistic expressions to form
mixed representations of indexical and conceptual elements of the
general form “this-such”, e.g. “this child”. Wilfrid Sellars analyses sin-
gular ideas, i.e. Kantian intuitions, as representations of this form
(see Sellars 1968: 4–8). Given these, we can then introduce proper
names along the lines of: “Let this child be called Emma.” Names,
then, are essentially secondary means of reference whose use, more-
over, is particularly dependent on the division of linguistic labour. The
much-discussed question of the essential or inessential indexical
would have to be settled here, in the context of Russell’s principle,
not as John Perry tried to do in his seminal article, on the basis of our
behaviour in discovering the circularity of a sugar lane in a supermar-
ket; and then settled, of course, with Perry in favour of the essentiali-
ty of the indexical2.
     What is surprising in all this is that even the advocates of the es-
sential indexical do not ask further about the underlying, indeed a
priori, presuppositions that we must invest when we think and speak
indexically. Everyone seems to notice that our indexicals function like
an informal coordinate system whose origin is centred in the particu-
lar thinker, but they do not ask how it is possible to establish such an



2
  See e.g. Perry (1979), who discusses the problem within the framework of the
theory of action, and, on the other hand Cappelen and Dever (2013), who disagree



42
                                                     Critical Hermeneutics 6(2), (2022)




egocentric coordinate system in the first place. After all, coordinates
must be fixed relative to a real frame of reference, a frame of refer-
ence that must belong to that very manifold of things that can be ep-
istemically individuated and referred to by means of the coordinates.
The natural follow-up question, rarely asked, then has to be: How is
the frame of reference to be originally individuated? Not, of course,
by indexicals (which have yet to be introduced), let alone by names,
nor by general concepts or descriptions. Since this already exhausts
the possibilities of individuating the frame of reference through em-
pirical knowledge alone, some kind of knowledge a priori must be in-
volved.
     If we take pains to isolate this a priori knowledge through ab-
straction in a theory of the a priori presuppositions of reference, a
picture emerges that is reminiscent of Kant’s transcendental aesthetic
in combination with his doctrine of transcendental apperception. But
with Kant, these two doctrines remain too separate; it is important to
unite them in an account of the a priori self-individuation and self-
localisation of corporeal subjects in space and time. According to this
account, a subject must know a priori that it exists in a spatiotem-
poral manifold of things that are perspectivally – and thus partially –
perceivable, and that it exists as that thing which, like others, can be
perceived from the outside and at the same time is the only thing al-
so felt from the inside. This epistemically unique thing, whose precise
physical contours must be determined empirically, is known a priori
by the subject as the frame of reference for the egocentric indexical
coordinate system, and indeed as the subject itself. Here lies the
source of our knowledge of the basic indexical truth: “I am here”.
     What Kant calls pure apperception, i.e. the representation “I
think” that by necessity can accompany all representations of a think-


with Perry and other proponents of the essentiality of indexicals on a similar, or at



                                                                                    43
Anton Friedrich Koch, Our Common Extended Consciousness and the Readability of Things




ing subject, seems to have no intrinsic relation to space and time, let
alone to the body of the subject. By contrast, the representation “I
am here”, even when understood most abstractly, in a decontextual-
ised and a priori way, is to be spelled out in the sense of: “I, as a
bodily thinker, find myself here in the midst of infinite space, which I
partly perceive by empirical intuition and at the same time imagine a
priori in its entirety by pure intuition as an infinite whole”. This imme-
diate connection between pure self-consciousness on the one hand
and the corporeality and spatiality of the self and the world on the
other arises from the role of the subject as the frame of reference for
the epistemic individuation of things.
      But even if in this way thoughts and intuitions are more closely
connected than Kant suggested, empirical and pure intuition, or per-
ception and pure imagination, fall further apart than he believed. This
is not bad news for Kant, however, but on the contrary excellent
news, because it saves the main ideas of his transcendental aesthetic
from empirical refutation by the general theory of relativity. Relativity
has taught us that, contrary to what Kant and the physics of his time
taught, physical space is curved a little out of its Euclidean default
position by mass or energy. Nowadays we have to say that perception
and imagination reveal different, though closely related things. Per-
ception reveals real physical space, imagination, for lack of real
masses and real energies, i.e. real curvatures, reveals the Euclidean
default position of space.
      Incidentally, this explains why, more than a hundred years after
the development of general relativity, we are still unable to imagine a
curved three-dimensional space pictorially. Nor will we ever be able
to; the space of the imagination is three-dimensional and Euclidean
by logico-imaginative necessity. But it is not empirically real. It is


any rate similarly insufficient, theoretical basis.



44
                                              Critical Hermeneutics 6(2), (2022)




transcendentally ideal, as Kant says, or rather, it is ideal simpliciter.
For what is empirically real cannot be transcendentally ideal, and vice
versa. On this point, Kant’s teaching must be corrected, with certain
detrimental consequences for his two-world doctrine, which, however,
can well be tolerated or even welcomed.
    Nevertheless, the transcendentally ideal, which we cognise a pri-
ori, unfolds a binding effect on the empirically real, and this is what is
essential for Kant’s theory. Intuition and imagination converge in the
case of purity, that is, of empirical emptiness. And in pure intuition or
pure imagination, we know a priori the limiting case in which physical
space and time would per impossibile be empty. Real, physical space
and time are systematic deviations from this limiting case depending
on the distribution of mass and energy. In our life world, these devia-
tions are so slight that even expert physicists did not notice them be-
fore Einstein. But even if they had been more noticeable, it would still
be true that we know something about real space and time a priori,
namely their pure and empty Euclidean default and limiting constitu-
tion. Furthermore, it is clear that we cannot attain this a priori
knowledge by discursive conceptual analysis alone, but owe it to pure
intuition or imagination.
    Ideas, to use a Lockean turn of phrase, when discursive, are rep-
resentations, intuitive ideas are presentations, and imaginative ideas
come somewhere in between. If they are impure, i.e. have an empiri-
cal content, they are Humean ideas and represent something past or
absent or something future or fictitious, fictive or fictional. If, on the
other hand, they are pure, then they are pure intuitions and thus pre-
sentations, albeit of something transcendentally ideal, an impossible
limiting condition of something real. What is intuited a priori in this
way as something present is not confronting the intuiting subjectivity
as something extraneous, but is an essential aspect of this subjectivi-
ty itself. Kant even goes so far as to say that


                                                                             45
Anton Friedrich Koch, Our Common Extended Consciousness and the Readability of Things




       if we suspend [“aufheben”] our subject or even merely the
       subjective character of the senses in general, then [...]
       even space and time would disappear and as appearances
       could not [literally: cannot] exist in themselves, but only in
       us (Kant 1781/1787: A42/B59).


     Space and time can only exist in us: This may sound outrageous,
since on the contrary we exist in space and time, a fact that is not
only pre-theoretically obvious, but also a necessary truth of the theo-
ry of the a priori presuppositions of reference. But Kant does not use
“in” in a spatiotemporal sense here, as if space and time were en-
closed in my head, but rather in a metaphysical sense, similar to that
in which a substance is said to be in itself, in se, and an accident in
another, in alio. Yet there is a difference. While a substance has onto-
logical priority over each of its accidents, subjects are as much onto-
logically dependent on space and time as space and time are depend-
ent on them. After all, thinking subjects are by necessity corporeal,
spatiotemporal beings. The essential in-esse that ties thinking sub-
jects to space and time is thus reciprocal.
     If we now return to the widespread idea that qualia form the
phenomenal endowment of an inner cognitive map that represents
our outer environment, we must say that it is indeed misguided and
misleading. For we could not refer to the details of the inner map in
thought and speech unless we ourselves were the central part of the
map – homunculi in our own heads, so to speak – as its egocentric
frame of reference, which is of course an absurd idea. Therefore, we
must conclude with Alex Byrne and Michael Tye that qualia ain’t in the
head but out there in public and objective space (see Byrne and Tye
2006). The field of our consciousness extends into the expanse of
perceptual public space and, indeed, into the infinite expanse of im-


46
                                                Critical Hermeneutics 6(2), (2022)




aginative public space. All sentient beings overlap partially with some
other sentient beings in their surrounding fields of phenomenal quali-
tative consciousness and all sentient beings who are also sapient,
whose imagination is thus discursively guided, overlap completely in
their infinite spatiotemporal field of consciousness. Q.E.D.
     Dreams and hallucinations do not provide counter-examples. A
person momentarily oblivious of wearing sunglasses may mistakenly
locate the proximal brown she sees distally on the surface of a white
wall and judge that the wall is brown. Analogously, under the non-
standard conditions of dreaming or hallucinating, when the usual
channels of perception are blocked or clouded, individuals may sys-
tematically mislocate distally certain proximal brain processes that
remain inconspicuous under standard conditions and now become
conspicuous. But even then, our shared singular space remains the
alternativeless field of localisation or, in this case, mislocalisation.
     To conclude part 2, let us add some observations that may pave
the way to the readability thesis in part 3. If we try to transpose the
prima facie somewhat lofty doctrine of our common extended con-
sciousness into a more down-to-earth phenomenological key, we get
the statement that all things spatial and temporal are in principle or
potentially open to us. They are phenomena in Heidegger’s phenom-
enological sense, i.e. they show themselves, they are potentially un-
concealed and become actually unconcealed, insofar as we do our
part to actualise the unconcealment by engaging with them together,
for instance by talking about them together. Our being-in-the-world is
a being-with (Mitsein), as Heidegger noted, who further had the pre-
Socratics conceive of truth as unconcealment and sympathised with
this view himself. If we take into consideration that also and especial-
ly judgements are true – the vast majority of them, as Davidson
pointed out – it seems obvious to conceive of things, since they are




                                                                               47
Anton Friedrich Koch, Our Common Extended Consciousness and the Readability of Things




unconcealed, as tokens of judgements, and true ones at that3. In our
perceptions we read them and in our observation sentences we trans-
late them – correctly or incorrectly – into verbal language. Seen this
way, errors of perception turn out to be misreadings or mistransla-
tions, for the things read and translated are themselves true, that is,
potentially unconcealed.
     We can spin this thread of thought a little further. Truth is not
merely unconcealment, but has three essential aspects that belong
together in tension, a phenomenal, a realistic and a pragmatic aspect.
Each of these aspects is reflected in every other, which is why it is
easy in philosophical theorising to focus on one aspect and declare it
to be the whole truth about truth. The pre-Socratics, if Heidegger is
right, viewed truth through its phenomenal or epistemic aspect and
conceived of it as unconcealment. Truth-theoretical realists identify
truth with its realistic or objective aspect and take it to be a corre-
spondence (to be specified in more detail) of judgements with facts.
Pragmatists, finally, identify truth with its pragmatic or normative as-
pect and conceive it as warranted assertibility. In the spirit of
Heidegger, we could link these aspects of truth with the tenses or
modes of time, the phenomenal aspect with the present, the realistic
with the past and the pragmatic with the future. But this need not be
explored further here.4
     Let us focus instead briefly on classical, scholastic transcendental
philosophy, informed by the reception of Aristotle, and on its famous
formula of the convertibility of transcendentals: quodlibet ens est un-
um, verum, bonum (quoted by Kant in 1787: B113). Now, if every
thing (ens) according to this formula is also something true (verum),


3
  This accords with the metaphysical thesis cited by Hegel (1830: § 167) as fixing a
certain evolutionary stage of onto-/logical space: “All things are a judgement”. But
since the metaphysicians that Hegel imagines here do not distinguish between
types and tokens of judgements, their thesis remains comparatively indeterminate.
4
  But see Koch 2006, Part I, Chapter 3, and Part II, Chapters 3-4.



48
                                            Critical Hermeneutics 6(2), (2022)




then we have again the starting point of the readability thesis:
“Things are true, so believe them and translate them correctly into
true sentences!” Incidentally, the convertibility of ens and verum does
not, at first glance, fit well with the correspondence theory of truth
prevalent in classical scholastic philosophy. It seems, then, that a
subliminal awareness had been preserved that truth is also uncon-
cealment.


3. The readability of things
In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (henceforth: TLP), Wittgenstein
is tacitly committed to a correspondence theory of truth, at least for
simple thoughts, which, however, has some special features. First and
foremost, Wittgensteinian correspondence is a pictorial relation be-
tween facts and thoughts, where thoughts have assertoric force and
are thus judgements. Since thoughts or judgements are perceptibly
expressed in sentences (TLP 3.1), pictorial correspondence is second-
arily a semantical relation between facts and sentences, and indeed
sentence tokens (“Satzzeichen”, 3.12). Sentence tokens, interesting-
ly, are not objects or things, but are themselves facts like the extra-
linguistic facts to which they correspond if they are true: “The sen-
tence token is a fact” (3.14). With Wittgenstein, then, we have a cor-
respondence relation between facts and facts, linguistic facts and ex-
tra-linguistic facts.
     Secondly, it follows that we find the same logical form on the
part of language and on the part of the world. This identical logical
form is called the form of actuality (“Wirklichkeit”, 2.18) on the side
of the world and the logical form of imaging (“Abbildung”, 2.281) on
the side of thought and speech. The form of actuality actualises
atomic objects by connecting them into facts, and on the side of lan-
guage, the same form, now as a form of imaging, connects names
into sentences. Later, Wittgenstein characterises this form very point-


                                                                           49
Anton Friedrich Koch, Our Common Extended Consciousness and the Readability of Things




edly as “the one logical constant” and as “that, which all sentences,
by their nature, have in common with each other. But this”, he adds,
“is the general form of the sentence” and “the essence of the sen-
tence” as well as “the essence of the world” (5.47–5.4711). But if the
form of the sentence and the essence of the world are identical, there
is nothing to stop us from conceiving of the facts of the world as sen-
tence tokens, which we understand, read and translate into verbal
language.
     Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, Wittgenstein sees the
power of imagination as the source of thinking and speaking. He does
not say so explicitly (and many Wittgenstein scholars will disagree
with me), but it follows from what he says: “We make images of facts
to ourselves” (2.1). “The image is a fact” (2.141). “When the form of
imaging is [minimal, i.e. nothing but] the logical form, then the im-
age is called the logical image” (2.181). And (3): “The logical image
of facts is the thought.” I have been translating “Bild” here through-
out as “image” rather than “picture” in order to emphasise the role of
imagination for Wittgenstein’s philosophical semantics. Wittgenstein
does not thematise the power of imagination, let alone examine it,
but be relies on it as the capacity, firstly, to understand images as
images – originally natural “images” such as reflections in water and
shadows on the ground – and, secondly to produce images. Thirdly,
imagination is the capacity to imagine things pictorially in memory,
expectation, daydream, etc. – and in thought, according to TLP 3, a
fact that points back to the understanding of images as images –,
and fourthly, the capacity to supplement perceptions pictorially with
what is shadowed in them. Heidegger once pondered whether the
power of imagination might be that unknown common root of sensi-
bility and understanding that Kant ruminates on in the introduction to




50
                                                  Critical Hermeneutics 6(2), (2022)




the first Critique.5 It is noteworthy that Wittgenstein, unnoticed by
scholarship, has an affirmative answer ready, not in words, but in
substance.
       Fourthly and finally, Wittgenstein formulates a theory that he
himself says cannot be expressed in meaningful sentences. According
to it, one can talk about objects but not about facts, yet the theory
consists largely of theorems about facts. So these theorems are
meaningless, although, as Wittgenstein thinks, not worthless; for
they are gestures towards something mystical and important that
shows itself but cannot be said. Be that as it may, one cannot, at any
rate, formulate a readability thesis within the Wittgensteinian frame-
work that would make sense according to the framework. It would
only be another gesture towards the mystical.
       This changes fundamentally with Sellars’s naturalistic and behav-
iourist philosophy. Sellars can speak meaningfully about facts, which
according to his analysis are just true propositions, where a proposi-
tion ultimately boils down to certain functionally equivalent sentence
tokens of arbitrary languages that are meta-linguistically character-
ised. Sentence tokens, in turn, are objects, not facts. One can talk
about them as tokens, i.e. meta-linguistically, and call them token
facts if one wishes (but they remain objects), or one can talk about
them as natural objects like any others, using the object language.
We then speak about them as natural linguistic objects.
       A second difference to Wittgenstein is that Sellars does not allow
for semantical language-world relations. He works within Carnap’s
syntacticist or inferentialist framework of 1934. All semantical rela-
tions are intra-linguistic relations of inference; what looks like seman-
tical relations of reference must be analysed purely intra-linguistically.
That the word “Socrates” designates Socrates means that tokens of


5
    Kant 1781/1887: A15/B29, and Heidegger 1991: 137.



                                                                                 51
Anton Friedrich Koch, Our Common Extended Consciousness and the Readability of Things




that word are to be used according to certain rules of inference. In no
way, however, does the word stand in a semantical relation to the
Athenian philosopher Socrates. This Carnapian position is hard to
swallow and Sellars was reproached with it for instance by John
McDowell (see McDowell 2009). It could easily be remedied by the
readability thesis, according to which Socrates himself is the world-
sided ur-token of the word “Socrates”. Reference would then turn out
to be a semantical relation between a linguistic type and its world-
sided ur-token, i.e. a relation that is simultaneously an intra-linguistic
and a language-world relation. But Sellars does not even consider the
readability of things as a possibility.
     What nevertheless brings his position close to the readability
thesis, unbeknownst to him, is his picture theory for elementary sen-
tences. Tokens of elementary sentence, qua natural linguistic objects,
picture or map objects, according to Sellars, in a non-semantical,
purely factual sense of mapping or picturing. It is this non-semantical
and non-intentional representational function of language that sup-
posedly underlies all its other functions as a necessary condition.
Sellars’s basic idea is that a simple name-predicate sentence is a de-
termination of the name occurring in it. The name (or else an indexi-
cal singular term in its place) is determined by being flanked with a
predicate, but it could in principle also be determined directly by be-
ing produced in a certain style, as is done in maps.
     A map is a spatial model of the landscape it depicts, the items in
it are cartographic names of geographical objects, and the ways these
names are determined in terms of size, shape, colour etc. depict the
objects as cities, rivers, lakes, roads, railway lines, borders, moun-
tains etc. of certain sizes and shapes. Furthermore, the names in
their cartographic relations to each other depict the named objects
according to their geographical relations. As a result, “the items in a
map translate into both names and sentences”, but no items in a map


52
                                             Critical Hermeneutics 6(2), (2022)




translate into predicates or for that matter into “logical connectives,
quantifiers or modalities” (Sellars 1979: 133). Regarding the repre-
sentational function of language, predicates are only “syncategore-
matic expressions, contributing to the meaning of sentences without
having reference”; they are “simply auxiliary symbols” (59–60) for
determining names in the context of predication, as is made apparent
by the predicate-free language of maps.
      But Sellars is clear that a map “is a parasite” (133) and feeds on
an established verbal language, which according to Sellars’s linguistic
behaviourism is a multi-dimensional system of learned pattern gov-
erned behaviour, with (a) language entry transitions from observable
situations to observation reports, (b) intra-language transitions, i.e.
formal and material inferences, and (c) language exit transitions from
intentions to actions. Based on an already established language,
maps can then be produced as linguistic annexes and read according-
ly.
      This would also apply to the alleged inner sensory map assumed
by those who believe that qualia are in the head. Sellars is one of
them, even though he recognises that in what he calls the manifest
image of humans in the world in which we currently still conceptualise
our lifeworld, we also conceive qualia as distal qualities of things,
thus duplicating the phenomenal into an inner and an outer. If, how-
ever, the supposed inner phenomenal map can be treated as an an-
nex to language and thus read, if we can hence think in qualia, then
by the same token can the phenomenal outer lifeworld be read, albeit
not as a map of something else. We can simply cut through the sup-
posed interior here and take the external things themselves as world-
sided ur-tokens (a) of their names, (b) of “this-such” representations
(intuitions) of them, and (c) of many simple observation sentences
about them in each case.




                                                                            53
Anton Friedrich Koch, Our Common Extended Consciousness and the Readability of Things




     In this way, Sellars could and should have integrated his picture
theory of simple sentences, suitably enriched by a readability thesis,
into his philosophical semantics and theory of intentionality. Language
entry and language exit transitions, according to this upgrading, ac-
quire an intra-language or inferential second nature. Observable
things turn out to be reasons, and actions to be practical conclusions,
as Aristotle taught. Things, when read as tokens of their names, are
objects, present-at-hand (“vorhanden”) in Heidegger’s sense, when
read as “this-such” tokens, they are phenomena that show them-
selves, and when read as sentences about them, they are token
facts, though not facts in the full sense of “true propositions” (i.e.
type facts). Discursively articulated perception can now be seen as a
special case of translation and is thus subject to the hermeneutic in-
determinacy pointed out by Quine and Davidson. The logical space of
reasons as a whole extends to nature, as was already to be expected
in light of our thesis of the extended consciousness.
     But there is a fly in this promising ointment, an objection to
Sellars’s specific type of picture theory raised by Irad Kimhi, which
would also affect the readability thesis if the latter could not emanci-
pate itself from Sellars’s behaviourist overall conception. Kimhi’s point
is that picture theories à la Sellars treat a token of a simple proposi-
tion as giving “a spatial model of a situation”, but that a spatial model
“can be used to make two contradictory claims” (Kimhi 2018: 104)
because it cannot be negated and is therefore open to being used ei-
ther affirmatively or negatively. While he agrees with Sellars that “a
simple propositional sign […] depicts (reveals) a possible determina-
tion of name bearers by being a determination of their names”, he
adds that the sign must also be negatable – which cartographic signs
are not – and “that these two roles cannot be dissociated” (Ib.) and
one handed over to maps and the other to verbal predications. So




54
                                              Critical Hermeneutics 6(2), (2022)




maps as spatial models just aren’t language, and the things modelled
even less so.
    Sellars, on behalf of his non-semantic picture theory, would
probably reply that maps as parasitic annexes of a language are only
possible when the language in question is fully developed. Only when
we have been trained long enough into a language does our verbal
behaviour acquire a non-semantical cartographic side that allows us
to represent the world. Arguably, it is precisely this reply that pre-
vents Sellars from adopting the readability thesis, which is semantical
and hermeneutic from the outset and through and through.
    Kimhi, too, favours a propositional, i.e. semantical, picture theo-
ry, one in which depicting and negating are possible together, just as
Wittgenstein did in the Tractatus. But there is a crucial difference be-
tween these two philosophers. Whereas Wittgenstein tacitly relied on
the logically basic capacity of imagination to produce images, Kimhi
seems to neglect precisely this essential feature of Wittgenstein’s
theory. He seems to neglect, in other words, that the minimal, i.e.
purely logical form of imaging, the one logical constant that is guiding
our imagination, already comprises the whole logical essence of the
sentence and of the world and thus in particular negation. They who
understand images also understand negation, understand that imag-
es are not what they depict, and understand that images in their de-
fault use are to be used affirmatively. Negation has always already
been there, even in images, even in maps, even in things, before we
introduce an arbitrary verbal expression for it. Trusting, therefore,
that negation will make itself felt anyway, we uphold the readability
thesis as a natural consequence of a picture theory that differs from
Sellars’s in that it is semantical, from Wittgenstein’s in that it has ob-
jects depict objects, and from Kimhi’s in that it sees negation at work
in imagination and images as it is at work in discursive thinking and
in objective being.


                                                                             55
Anton Friedrich Koch, Our Common Extended Consciousness and the Readability of Things




     Let me conclude. We started out with the extended sensory con-
sciousness of phenomenal qualities that we share with all sentient be-
ings and in which we spatiotemporally overlap with many. We live it
all the time, but it is hard, nay impossible, to say what it is like be-
cause our human consciousness has always already been informed by
discursive, conceptual thinking, and it is strictly impossible to abstract
from thinking by thinking. So we can only speculate about the thicket
of sensa or qualia we were in phylogenetically and ontogenetically be-
fore we began to light or clear it a little, to make room for a clearance
or lighting (Heidegger’s “Lichtung”) in the thicket. In this awakening
of the imagination (Heidegger’s “Er-äugnis”, i.e. original eying), we
started negating, i.e. making distinctions, between a reflection and
what is reflected, an image and what is depicted, ourselves and our
environment, appearance and being, and so on. The sensory thicket
gradually cleared to the world and revealed itself as world-sided lan-
guage when, as “the chiming of stillness”, it called us to speak and we
answered the call. Kimhi is perfectly right that revelation and nega-
tion cannot be dissociated. But this is not an objection to the thesis
that we can read the predicative structure in which revealing and ne-
gating are combined into a spatial model of a situation and into the
modelled situation. By doing so, we only make explicit what is implic-
itly included in the situation itself. It would be impossible to reveal by
predication if what is revealed were not implicitly and imperceptibly
permeated with predicative and logical form.
     It is indexical “this-such” representations, i.e. empirical intui-
tions, in which sensibility and understanding converge, for in them
predicative form is implicitly contained, which is made explicit in per-
ceptual judgements: “This bunch of green …” (is a hawthorn, say). In
the indexicality of our intuitions, the irreducible mineness (Jemeinig-
keit) or perspectivity of our being-in-the-world comes to the fore, in
their spatiotemporal form, which we intuit a priori as our common


56
                                               Critical Hermeneutics 6(2), (2022)




field of consciousness, their intersubjectivity and objectivity. Objectiv-
ity makes general understanding possible, while mineness precludes
that this understanding can be spread from one observer to another
through calculation via transformation equations as in physics. It
must instead be negotiated under the conditions of hermeneutic inde-
terminacy and charity in an open-ended process of discussion. If even
observation sentences are already translations and thus subject to
hermeneutic indeterminacy, then all the more indeterminacy will
reign in intersubjective interpretation and translation. But our com-
mon field of consciousness ensures that our efforts towards universal
understanding are by no means in vain, but will yield gratifying par-
tial successes over and over again.




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