Dialectics of Aconceptuality

These essays present a dialectic-idealist overview of natural language and natural (non-artificial) thinking. The view is thoroughly non-classical and takes ambiguity and contradictoriness as vital and inalienable properties of all speaking and thinking. The main function of a sentence is to change the meanings of the words which occur in the sentence. Communication of pre-existing facts or reference to external pre-existing objects is a secondary, rare and special case derivable from the primary function. In processing the intended meaning change, sentences resort to experiential word meanings which are preconceptual and ambiguous, only circularly definable, and therefore prone to generate contradictions. This kind of view of natural language can be taken as an updated and considerably modified version of Hegel’s logic and phenomenology. In particular, it has been inspired by Jung-Pauli co-operation, and is designed to serve as an underlying framework for ‘quantum-friendly’ linguistics and cognitive science, and other human and social sciences that use quantum mathematics (notions like ‘superposition’ and ‘entanglement’) and philosophical notions (like ‘complementarity’) that have arisen from the interpretative discussion concerning quantum theory. The task of the framework is to help explain how unforeseen meanings can arise from a genuinely holistic, partly unconscious, and perpetually changing experiential source.

What ultimately is, is experience that is originally aconceptual, but partly organized by semiotic systems. It is these systems—be they artistic, scientific, social, verbal, or perceptual—that make the world, or versions of the world, appear for us. We experience the appearance as the unity of our self-consciousness as it finds itself living in the middle of this world made by human semiotic activities. Some of these semiotic systems are verbal, but sentence-like patterns underlie the meaning generation in non-verbal systems as well. From a verbal point of view, idealism can be characterized as a philosophical position according to which sentential intensions go prior to extensions, and, for a dialectic idealist, the intensions are essentially ambiguous, only circularly characterizable, and potentially contradictory. With sentences—as with any other actions which, nevertheless, always satisfy an underlying sentence-like pattern—we intend to change the world such that it accords with our desires; and, like the result of any action, the result of sentence generation is not fully controllable, and, therefore, the emerging sentence may carry, not only unforeseen and unpredictable intensions, but unintended and undesirable ones as well. This is so because the roots of word meanings and concept meanings are partly conceptually inaccessible and unconscious.

Within a Hegelian framework the world is considered as a perpetually changing conceptual-semiotic totality, such that an object and the concepts that constitute the object comprise an inseparable and interdependent but still polarized whole. For a present-day Hegelian the world is a perpetually changing conceptual-semiotic totality which is partly unconscious, irrational and aconceptual (preconceptual, partly conceptually inaccessible). The best of our physics, quantum theory, is itself paradoxical, and its relation to other physical theories, like classical physics and relativity, cannot be handled without contradictions, and, thus, without contradiction-tolerant logic. Therefore, it is reasonable to say, though in a very peculiar dialectic sense of the term, that some truths are contradictory, and that the world itself is partly irrational. This implies that we should not accept any variant of classical logic, and such classical rules as the law of noncontradiction (ex contraditione sequitur quadlibet) and the law of self-identity, without discussion and without proper reservations and constraints.

With the help of the updated Hegelian notion of sententiality we may manage to approach verbal discourses in such a manner that their inalienable contradictoriness, ambiguity, and circularity will not be suppressed, and the underlying aconceptual meaning can be utilized to some extent. This suggests a dialectical strategy of investigation which does not constrain the sphere of contradictoriness to unsuccessful cognition or confused discourses but allows the sphere to permeate the whole semiosis. The term ‘semiosis’ is used here to denote the totality of human meaning-generating systems and activities within a given culture. The semiosis includes always verbal-conceptual-semiotic systems but is not limited to them.

By admitting that no discourse is able to free itself completely of contradictions, we are prepared to study them from a close range and thus hope to understand them better, and perhaps even control their impact to some extent. The best way to avoid full-scale irrationality is not to keep maximal distance to irrationality and contradictoriness but to make acquaintance with it and study its ways intimately. The price of this strategy of contradiction-tolerance is that the central dialectical terms which will be developed below are not, and are not intended to be, normal scientific terms. This holds already to the notion of ‘irrational’ itself. Obviously, no normal scientific theory contains a term which refers to the failure of the theory, or to the failure of reason in general. The term ‘irrational’ hints at phenomena of which we believe that they cannot, for serious reasons of principle, be explained fully rationally. As an epistemic attitude, to believe that there are phenomena which we cannot now explain fully rationally is not in itself always particularly irrational; the rationality of this dialectical attitude is not weakened even if we also concede that there are phenomena which, most probably, will never be adequately explained in fully rational terms. Yet no normal scientific theory is expected to be able to approach, let alone credibly characterize, what appears preconceptual within its own jurisdiction, namely, what defies its own power of conceptualization. Such central notions of Jung’s as ‘archetype,’ ‘instinct’ and ‘psychoid’ with which he tries to denote unconscious experience that he calls ‘irrepresentable’ require a special-purpose language of advanced dialectics to be handled adequately. Similarly, Wolfgang Pauli’s notion of ‘psycho-physical neutrality’ and Bohr’s ‘complementarity’ do not belong to quantum theory proper but to its dialectic interpretation.

The dialectic conception of sententiality that will be developed below opens also a perspective to the interpretative debate of quantum theory that has continued almost one hundred years. Quantum measurements which work on the borderline between the classical and the quantum world can be interpreted to exemplify sentential processes in the updated Hegelian sense of the term. This lends support to a dialectic-idealist approach to the problem of what kind of entities quantum states are.

Chapter 1, Hegel’s dialectics and Frege’s star paradox defends a Hegelian approach to Frege’s famous dilemma and serves as an introduction to the main themes of the overall work, and the themes will be developed in detail and in a more systematic way in Chapter 4 and Chapter 5. 1892 Frege published his essay “Über Sinn und Bedeutung” [On sense and reference] where he presented the so-called Star paradox. The paradox and Frege’s own solution to it became later very famous and influential. This paradox of how to relate logical and contingent identities is perhaps the emblematic problem of Analytic philosophy, and Frege’s solution has been celebrated as a brilliant opening of a whole new era of philosophy. Because Analytic philosophy, its British branch in particular, has been regarded as an anti-Hegelian movement par excellence it is not only interesting, but fair, to ask how a Hegelian would have reacted to this problem.

Any Hegelian approach to the problem must be ready to question the assumption that sameness statements of natural language are identity statements of classical logic. Inspired by their logicist program (reducing mathematics to logic), Frege and Russell just decided to formalize identity statements as a = a and a = b, and this gave the misleading impression that also natural expressions and natural thoughts concerning sameness satisfy the properties of classical logical identity (reflexivity, symmetry, transitivity, substitutivity). According to Hegel, what looks like a logical or contingent identity statement is, in fact, an asymmetric subject-predicate sentence whose predicate (= b, for example) is not logically further decomposable. Instead of logical or contingent identity statements, we have sameness statements the credibility of which rests on the beliefs entertained in the discourse where the statement occurs. Therefore, sameness statements of natural discourses never reach strictly up to logical or contingent identities. This prevents the Star paradox from arising.

Chapter 2, Dialectics as dialetheism: Graham Priest’s paraconsistent Hegel is a critique of Priest’s Hegel-interpretation and shows that Priest’s dialetheism which is formalized in his paraconsistent logic relies on presuppositions which are alien to Hegel’s metaphysics and Hegelian dialectic logic. This essay shows how much of Hegel’s metaphysics can be expressed within Analytic philosophy, and therefore also where a genuinely Hegelian logic and conception of language has to depart even from the most sophisticated variant of Analytic philosophy. This question is important also because simple paraconsistent logic will be used in Appendix to enlighten a quantum-theoretical paradox. In his logic Priest defines languages as recursively enumerable sets and then resorts to the Tarski schema which requires that truth is a property of the structural description (or name) of a sentence. This ties Priest’s view of Hegel to the principle of compositionality which violates some of the central tenets of Hegel’s logic where a true sentence always changes the meaning of the concepts which occur in it. For example, identity statements are with Hegel asymmetric subject-predicate sentences, and thus sameness itself is more like a qualitative principle of unity or wholeness than the identity of modern logic. Therefore, Priest’s main thesis that the general form of the Hegelian contradiction is (a = b) & (a ≠ b) misses the point. The Hegelian switch from the closure of formal or classical logic (Verstand) to the transcendence of genuine dialectical reasoning (Vernuft) cannot be reduced to the switch of a dialetheic logician who changes her logic from classical reasoning to paraconsistent reasoning.