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A Spirit of Trust: A Semantic Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology

Part Two:

Mediating the Immediate:

Consciousness and the Inferential Articulation of

Determinate Empirical Conceptual Content

Chapter Four:

Immediacy, Generality, and Recollection:First Lessons on the Structure of Epistemic Authority

Hegel opens his Introduction to the Phenomenology by articulating a basic epistemological

criterion of adequacy: any understanding of the processes and practices that institute cognitive

relations between minds and the world they know about must make it intelligible that if

everything goes well, the result is genuine knowledge of how things really are. He then argues

that this requirement, what I called the “Genuine Knowledge Condition,” cannot be met by

theories exhibiting a familiar, otherwise tempting structure, whose paradigm he takes to be

Kant’s account in the first Critique. Such approaches envisage knowledge as a cognitive relation

between a mind whose understanding consists in the application of concepts and an objective

reality that, considered apart from that cognitive relation, is not in conceptual shape. Skepticism

will result, he claims, from any picture that requires minds to process or transform a

nonconceptual reality so as to get it into the conceptual form intelligibility requires.

Hylomorphic models of this kind must appeal to a notion of the content common to knowings

and what is known, which appears in a conceptual form on the subjective side of the intentional

nexus and in nonconceptual form on the objective side. Since intelligibility is identified with

what is in conceptual form, he argues, the concept of such amphibious common content must be

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acknowledged to be unintelligible as such. Such an account must lead to skepticism, since the

way the world really is (“in itself”, he says) cannot be understood. Only its appearances (what it

is “for consciousness”) are in the right shape to be intelligible.

Underlying the epistemological point is a semantic one: for the common content to count as

determinate it must be conceptually articulated, in the sense (defined by standing in relations of

determinate negation) that Hegel gives to ‘conceptual’. The Consciousness chapters are devoted

to exploring this notion of determinateness. So Hegel does not challenge the identification of

what is intelligible with what has a conceptual form, shape, or structure. He takes it that a good

thing to mean by “conceptual content” is just what must be exhibited by the intelligible as such.

His own constructive response to this critical semantic and epistemological argument is to

develop a conceptual realism, by articulating a sense of ‘conceptual content’ in which the

objective, no less than the subjective pole of the intentional nexus, can be seen to be conceptually

structured, to possess or exhibit conceptual content. The difference between the objective and

subjective forms such conceptual contents can take is understood in other terms. More

specifically, as I read Hegel, to be conceptually contentful is identified with standing in relations

of material incompatibility or exclusive difference (“determinate negation”) from other such

conceptually contentful items. The difference between the conceptual contents of facts on the

objective side and thoughts on the subjective side is to be understood in terms of the difference

between alethic modal incompatibility and deontic normative incompatibility. It is impossible

for one object at the same time to exhibit incompatible properties, whereas a subject merely

ought not think of it as exhibiting such properties.

In the first chapter of the Phenomenology, Hegel opens the extended argument that will lead

us to this conception by considering its polar opposite. The conceptual realism he endorses seeks

to satisfy the Genuine Knowledge Condition by construing both poles of the intentional nexus as

conceptually structured. Approaches that fall under the rubric he calls “sense certainty” (SC), by

contrast, agree in accepting the conclusion that to understand knowledge as requiring

conceptualization of the nonconceptual commits one to taking conceptualization to be

falsification, but seek to avoid the specter of skepticism and satisfy the Genuine Knowledge

Condition by seeing empirical knowledge as based on a purely nonceptual taking-in of

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nonconceptual reality. The complementary epistemological criterion of adequacy that a theory

must make room for the possibility of error (what I called the “Intelligibility of Error Condition”)

is addressed by seeing that possibility creep in precisely when what is cognitively given

nonconceptually is subsequently conceptualized. A foundation of genuine empirical knowledge

is nonetheless thought to be secured by construing the immediate deliverances of sense

experience as passive, in a way that contrasts with conceptual activity and allows no room for

error apart from and in advance of such activity.1

A reasonably widely held view among contemporary philosophers of language is that the

sort of causal contact with the perceptible world that is expressed in explicit form by the use of

demonstratives should be understood as non- or pre-conceptual. This de re element in empirical

knowledge is contrasted with the conceptually articulated de dicto element. Some thinkers

appeal to a primitive stratum of “pure de re” beliefs, which would be expressed by using only

demonstratives (though they could be possessed by creatures without language, and so without

demonstratives).2 Stripped of its overtly cartesian trappings, there seems to be much that is still

attractive about the idea of a minimal kind of cognition that consists in an exercise of mere

receptivity, simply registering, noticing, or pointing out what sense delivers. This would be a

kind of cognition that, while it need not be taken to be infallible (since the causal mechanisms

might go wrong sometimes), nonetheless would be particularly secure. For it would at least be

immune to errors of mis-assimilation, misclassification, and mistaken inference, on the grounds

that the subject has not done anything with or to what is merely passively registered, noticed, or

pointed out, and so not anything that could have been done incorrectly.

So the authority of immediacy is conceived by sense-certainty as deriving precisely from the

passivity of the knower, from the fact that the sensing consciousness is careful to incur no 1 Besides these three options—nonconceptual objective world and conceptual subjective grasp of it, conceptually articulated world and conceptual grasp of it, and nonconceptual world taken in nonconceptually—there would seem to be the abstract possibility of a conceptually articulated world taken in nonconceptually. I do not know of any actual view of this shape, though there are analogues if the conceptual/nonconceptual distinction is replaced by such others as the infinite/finite or divine/human distinctions. 2 [On the general issue, see the articles by Sosa and Burge that McDowell talks about in “De Re Senses” [ref.]. Mention that essay as usefully setting out the issues, in a way congenial to the approach taken and attributed to Hegel here. On “pure de re beliefs”, see Dretske, late in KFI [ref.]. The view that there is a distinctive role for demonstrative, object-involving thoughts (“strong de re commitments” in the idiom of Chapter Eight of Making It Explicit), but that they are through and through conceptual is introduced by Evans, endorsed by McDowell (for instance, in the essay referred to above), and developed in a somewhat different direction in Making It Explicit.]

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obligations. The cognitive authority of immediacy is to come with no corresponding

responsibility on the part of those to whom it is addressed. What drives the arguments I am

discussing is the incompatibility of two features of sense-certainty’s conception of the cognitive

authority of immediacy: immediacy of content (in the sense that endorsing it imposes no

responsibilities on the part of the endorser that could fail to be fulfilled, no obligation to make

distinctions or grasp relations among immediacies—things that could be done correctly or

incorrectly), and even minimal determinateness of content. Recovering some sustainable sort of

cognitive authority associated with immediacy then obliges the candidate knower

(consciousness) to do something, to make distinctions and invoke relations among the various

instances of authority of this kind.

The Sense Certainty chapter is an investigation into the epistemic authority of what Hegel

calls “immediacy” [Unmittelbarkeit]. The distinction between immediacy and mediation is a

central one in Hegel’s philosophical vocabulary. Though it has many species and ramifications,

the idea he generalizes from is to be found in specifically epistemic immediacy. We can think of

his terminology as anchored in Kant’s usage:

All certainty is either mediated or not mediated, that is, it either requires proof or

is neither susceptible nor in need of any proof. There may be ever so much in our

cognition that is mediately certain only, that is only through proof, yet there must

also be something indemonstrable or immediately certain, and all our cognition

must start from immediately certain propositions.3

Kant is distinguishing between knowledge or belief that is the result of inference and

what we come to know or believe noninferentially. The paradigm (though not the only

species) of noninferentially acquired belief is observational judgments, in which subjects

respond directly to perceptible states of affairs—for instance, the visible redness of an

apple—by coming to belief that the apple is red. It is the kind of epistemic authority

distinctive of such episodes that Hegel analyzes under the rubric of “immediate sense

certainty.” Kant finds it natural to talk about inference (whose most robust, knowledge-

securing variety he calls “proof”) in terms of “mediation” because he is thinking of the 3 Logic [ref.], p. 79. This sort of use of ‘certainty’ [Gewissheit] is also important for Hegel’s use of another important dyad ‘certainty’/‘truth’, which he uses to try terminologically to loosen the grip of the picture of subjects and objects as independent things, in favor of one in which we can appreciate thoughts and facts as having in favored cases the very same conceptually articulated contents. [ref. to my discussion of this].

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role of the middle terms in classical syllogisms (for him, the very form of inference),

which secure the inferential connections between premises and conclusions.

“Certainties”, that is, commitments, arrived at by reasoning are accordingly denominated

“mediated.” Those with a noninferential provenance, by contrast, are called

“immediate.”

The epistemological conception Hegel addresses as “sense certainty” is shaped not

just by Kant’s conception of epistemic immediacy, but more proximally by his

conception of sensuous intuition. While the first model emphasizes that immediate

sensory knowledge is being understood as noninferential, the second model emphasizes

that it is being understood as nonconceptual. This is not to say that Hegel takes the

epistemological strategy he dismantles in Sense Certainty to be Kant’s. Kant himself did

not treat the mere presence of intuitions as constituting any sort of knowledge.

(“Intuitions without concepts are blind,” as he famously says at A51/B75.) Rather Hegel

takes the Kantian conception to be the one he addresses at the outset of the Introduction,

which construes knowing as a process (“instrument”, “medium”) whereby a

nonconceptual reality (what things are in themselves) is transformed into conceptually

articulated appearances (what they are for consciousness). Sense certainty is a different

strategy, which seeks to avoid skepticism (satisfy the GKC) by finding a foundation for

empirical knowledge in a kind of nonconceptual, noninferential immediate sensuous

taking-in of how things nonconceptually are. The idea is that the mind, by being wholly

passive and receptive, making no inferences and applying no concepts, does nothing that

could alter or falsify the content it passively receives. The conception of what it is for a

proto-cognitive but in some sense contentful episode to be noninferential and

nonconceptual, however, is taken over from Kant’s way of making out the

concept/intuition distinction.

In Sense Certainty, Hegel distinguishes a number of dimensions of Kant’s distinction

between intuitions and concepts. Two of them are of particular importance to begin with.

First, for Kant the intuition/concept distinction lines up with the receptivity/spontaneity

distinction. Intuition is a passive capacity, the capacity to be sensuously affected, to be

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given representations that the subject simply finds itself with. Applying concepts, by

contrast, is something the subject actively does (though not in general intentionally).

This dimension is of the first importance for the epistemological strategy of sense

certainty, since the thought is that where the subject does not act, it cannot err.4 The

second dimension of the intuition/concept distinction is that it coincides with that

between particular representations and general ones. What one does in applying

concepts is understood as classifying particular, bringing them under universals (that is,

concepts, which Kant understands as rules). This idea fits nicely with the first one, since

classifying involves comparing what is classified with other things. Doing that

introduces the possibility of making a mistake, getting things wrong. Classification

involves the possibility of misclassification, placing particulars under the wrong

universals, ones that do not in fact characterize them. According to this line of thought,

the possibility of epistemic error arises only when the deliverances of sense are brought

under concepts.

Hegel distinguishes these two dimensions of Kant’s distinction between intuitions and

concepts in the first paragraph of Sense Certainty as “immediate knowledge” and “knowledge of

the immediate. The first is a matter of “our approach being immediate or receptive.” This is

immediacy of the act of “apprehending without comprehending.”5 It is to be distinguished from

“knowledge of the immediate,” which is immediacy of the content apprehended.

We can think of these two senses of “immediate” as corresponding to immediacy as the

noninferentiality of the provenance of an episode and immediacy as the nonconceptuality of its

content. Here it is worth comparing one of the central moves Wilfrid Sellars makes in

“Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.” He is concerned to argue there that when we talk of

observational reports or perceptual judgments as being “noninferential,” we must be careful to

distinguish between taking that predicate to apply to the act and taking it to apply to the content.

We must not be confused by what he calls “the notorious ‘ing’/‘ed’ ambiguity.”6 Observation

4 Cf. Kant: “It is therefore correct to say that the senses do not err—not because they always judge rightly, but because they do not judge at all.” [A293/B350]5 All lightly paraphrased quotations from §90.6 [ref.] to EPM.

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reports and perceptual judgments, in the sense of reportings and judgings, are noninferential in

the sense that those acts are not the products of processes of inference. They are the results of

exercising reliable dispositions to respond differentially to environing stimuli, and should not be

assimilated to the extraction of consequences from premises. But that is not at all to say that

grasp of the concepts that are applied observationally can be made sense of apart from mastery of

the use of those concepts in inferences, that is, non-observationally, or that the contents of those

reports and judgments is intelligible apart from their standing in inferential relations or being

governed by norms of inference. For Sellars, a parrot trained to respond to the visible presence

of red things by uttering tokens of “Rawk! That’s red!” might share reliable differential

dispositions with a genuine observer of red things. But it is functioning at most as a measuring

instrument, labeling, not describing the things it responds to as red.

It is only because the expressions in terms of which we describe objects…locate

these objects in a space of implications, that they describe at all, rather than

merely label.7

The genuine observer of red things must, as the mere differential responder to red things need

not, place it in a “space of implications” by knowing something about what follows from

something’s being classified as red, and what would be evidence for or against such a

classification being correct. If by “noninferential knowledge” one means knowledge one could

have even though one had no practical mastery of proprieties of inference, Sellars claims, then

there is no such thing as “noninferential knowledge.” The concept is unobjectionable only as it

applies to acts of making observation reports or perceptual judgments, that is, to reportings and

judgings, and indicates that those particular acts did not result from the exercise of specifically

inferential capacities. The existence of cognitions that are noninferential in this sense is entirely

compatible with claiming that the capacity to have any determinately contentful cognitions

requires the subject also to have inferential capacities, even if they need not be exercised in

every cognitive act of the subject.

Exactly one hundred and fifty years before Sellars, in his opening chapter Hegel is making a

point of just the same shape.8 The fact that cognitions acquired receptively through sensation are

7 “Counterfactuals, Dispositions, and the Causal Modalities” [ref.] §108.8 “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” was delivered as lectures in London in 1956, and Hegel wrote all of the Phenomenology apart from the Preface in 1806.

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noninferential in the sense that they are not the result of exercising inferential capacities does not

mean that they are nonconceptual in the sense that they are intelligible as determinately

contentful apart from the situation of those contents in a “space of implications” of the sort

exploited by inferential capacities. Being immediate in the sense of intuitive as an act of

receptivity does not, Hegel will argue, entail being immediate in the sense of intuitive as having

a content that does not involve universals. Those two Kantian senses of “intuitive” come apart.

Running them together results in what Sellars called the “Myth of the Given.” Sense Certainty

is, inter alia, an argument against the Myth of the Given. (Sellars was perfectly aware of this,

describing “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” as his “incipient Meditations Hegeliènnes”

and aligning himself with Hegel under the rubric “that great foe of immediacy.”9)

When we look at Hegel’s argument for that conclusion, however, we see that he conjoins the

Sellarsian line of thought with another, which is not present in Sellars. If the two sets of

considerations are not properly separated, it will look as though Hegel is offering a fallacious

argument for the conclusion that a coherent conception of the epistemic authority of sensuous

immediacy requires acknowledging the role of sense universals in articulating the contents of its

deliverances. Hegel structures his discussion in three movements of thought, unpacking what is

implicit in the notion of knowledge of the immediate, what is implicit in the notion of immediate

knowledge, and what is implicit in the notion of immediate knowledge of the immediate.10

While there is good and sufficient methodological reason for structuring the discussion this way,

it obscures the relations between the two crucial distinctions that articulate his argument as I

would understand it. The first of these, the distinction between immediacy of (the origin of) the

act of sensing and immediacy of the content sensed, which I have been emphasizing, is indeed

reflected in the distinction between immediacy of the act of knowing and immediacy of the

content known, which Hegel uses to organize his discussion.11 The other crucial orienting 9 In §20 and §1 of “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.” 10 The first is introduced in §94 and its consequences extracted in §95 and §96, the second is introduced in §100 and unpacked in §101 and §102, and third is introduced in §103 and what is implicit in it elaborated in §104-§107.11 Hegel follows up on his introduction of the distinction between immediate knowledge and knowledge of the immediate in the opening sentence of Sense Certainty with this passage in §92, setting up the way he will exploit the distinction in the three movements of thought: “Among the countless differences cropping up here we find in every case that the crucial one is that, in sense-certainty, pure being at once splits up into what we have called the two 'Thises', one 'This' as 'I', and the other 'This' as object. When we reflect on this difference, we find that neither one nor the other is only immediately present in sense-certainty, but each is at the same time mediated: I have this certainty through something else, viz. the thing; and it, similarly, is in sense-certainty through something else, viz. through the 'I'.”

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distinction is between two senses of immediacy of content, one corresponding to particularity as

opposed to generality, the other to authority residing in unrepeatable episode tokenings as

opposed to repeatable episode-types. The first is modeled on the distinction between singular

terms (representations of particulars) and predicates (representations of universals or properties).

The second is modeled on the distinction between demonstratives and indexicals (‘this’, ‘now’),

which are token-reflexives (in Reichenbach’s terminology) each tokening of which might refer to

something different, on the one hand, and expressions all cotypical tokenings of which types are

construed as coreferring (such as ‘tree’ and ‘night’). These very different distinctions correspond

to two further dimensions of Kant’s intuition/concept distinction, beyond that of act/content

(ing/ed).

I take the main intellectual work of Sense Certainty to be Hegel’s analysis of the fine

structure of Kant’s intuition/concept distinction as involving lining up these three distinctions,

which Hegel acknowledges as articulating genuine dimensions of representation, but which he

insightfully recognizes as actually orthogonal to one another. The way he organizes his

discussion around the first distinction makes the relation between the other two distinctions

harder to appreciate than it needs to be. It thereby invites that attribution to Hegel of a terrible

argument for the claim that if sensuous immediacy is to be understood as investing a special kind

of epistemic authority in its deliverances, the content that authority is invested in cannot be

understood as nonconceptual. For that content to be determinate, it must be conceptual content,

in that it must at least involve the application of sense universals: observable properties.

Finding this conclusion to be implicit in the conception of the distinctive epistemic authority of

immediacy as invested in determinate contents is what motivates the transition from the Sense

Certainty chapter to the Perception chapter. The beginning of hermeneutic wisdom in reading

this bit of the Phenomenology consists in disentangling the various distinctions that Hegel

deploys in his compelling argument for this important conclusion, and avoiding the snare and

delusion of what I will call the “Bad Argument” that his exposition invites us to find in its place.

The Bad Argument results from failing to distinguish three kinds of repeatability that Hegel

points out, and treating them as though they all amounted to generality or universality in the

sense in which the universals or properties expressed by predicates contrast with the particulars

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referred to by singular terms. All three are important for arguments Hegel makes, but they, and

the arguments they actually support, must be carefully distinguished. The first sort of

repeatability concerns the kind of epistemic authority distinctive of the deliverances of sensuous

immediacy. It is, Hegel observes, a kind of authority, which can be exhibited by different

episodes with different contents.

An actual sense-certainty is not merely this pure immediacy, but an instance of it.12

This observation is an important move in Hegel’s argument. But it clearly does not follow from

the fact that there is a kind of generality in the Fregean force of immediacy, that it can be

invested in different representings, that the contents in which it can be invested, what is

represented, must be general rather than particular. Only entitlement to the latter claim can

motivate the transition to the discussion of sense universals such as white and cubical in the

Perception chapter. Hegel is not trying to make this move in one step.

It can easily look as though he is doing something structurally analogous, running together

two other senses of ‘repeatable’, however. He considers how we might express in language what

is merely “meant” or “pointed out” by a consciousness taking in what is sensuously given

without characterizing or classifying, hence conceptualizing it. When we try to express

explicitly sense certainty’s understanding of its immediate experience as a passive registration,

without comparison or classification, or committing ourselves to any determinate inferential

consequences) of what is merely there (a way of talking about immediacy in the sense of

independence on the side of the thing), we can do so by using a bare demonstrative: ‘this’. The

use of the demonstrative is as a device of direct reference. It is a kind of reference, because it is

merely pointing out what is there—not saying anything about it. It is direct (immediate) in the

sense of not relying on or otherwise employing (being mediated by) concepts; it does not involve

the application of concepts at all. (This is one kind of immediacy of content. The tokening is

also immediate as a process, that is, as pertains to its origin, since it does not result from a

process of inference. But that is not the current point.) But ‘this’, he points out, while a pure

demonstrative, is an expression type that admits of many different tokenings. ‘This’ is

repeatable, it applies generally, indeed universally. Anything can be picked out by some

tokening of the type ‘this’.

12 §92.

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It is as a universal too that we utter what the sensuous [content] is. What we say is:

‘This’, i.e. the universal This; or, ‘it is’, i.e. Being in general…

Similarly, when I say ‘I’, this singular ‘I’, I say in general all ‘I’s; everyone is what I say,

everyone is ‘I’, this singular ‘I’.

“If we describe it more exactly as 'this bit of paper', then each and every bit of paper is

'this bit of paper', and I have only uttered the universal all the time.”13

These three passages are each drawn from a different one of the three explicating movements

that make up the body of Sense Certainty: the first from the discussion of immediate knowing,

the second from the discussion of knowing of the immediate, and the third from the discussion of

immediate knowing of the immediate. So observations of this sort mark important steps in all

three of the arguments. And it certainly looks as though the point is that since any object can be

responded to appropriately by some tokening of the type ‘this’ (that any subject can be indicated

by some tokening of the type ‘I’), that these demonstrative and indexical expressions must be

understood as having universal contents and expressing absolutely general concepts. The

argument would then take the form of an analogy. The repeatable expression ‘Red’ applies to a

lot of particulars. So ‘red’ is a predicate, which expresses a concept and stands for a universal or

property: the universal or property shared by all things that are properly called ‘red’. In the same

way, the repeatable expression ‘this’ (‘I’) applies to lots of particulars. Indeed, for any particular

(in the case of ‘I’, any particular self) it is possible to refer to it by using a tokening of the

repeatable type ‘this’. So ‘this’ (‘I’) is a predicate, which expresses a concept and stands for a

universal or property: the universal or property shared by all things that are properly called ‘this’

(‘I’), that is, all particulars (or particular selves).

That would be a Bad Argument. Spelled out as I just have, the fallacy should be obvious.

Although ‘this’ is a repeatable expression type that can be applied to any particular thing or

situation, it is not predicated of them, it is not describing them, it is not a universal in the sense

of expressing a property that they share or a concept that they fall under. To refer to something

as ‘this’ is not to characterize it in any way, certainly not to attribute a property to it, even a very

general one. ‘This’, ‘I’, and ‘red’ are all repeatable expressions, and can be applied on different

occasions to different particulars. But the sense of ‘apply’ is quite different: referential in the first

13 §97, §102, and §110.

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case, predicative in the second. ‘This’ and ‘I’ are not true of anything. Put another way, there is a

perfectly good sense in which ‘this’ and ‘I’ mean something different on different occasions of

their tokening. In order to know what is meant by ‘this’, or who is meant by ‘I’, it is not enough

to understand the use of the expression type in general. One must also know the circumstances of

its particular tokening. In this sense the demonstrative and indexical expression types are

ambiguous. But that is not the same as saying they express universals. ‘Bank’ is not a universal

that applies both to the shores of rivers and to financial institutions. Of course in another sense,

these words are not ambiguous. For what each tokening means is determined in a uniform way

from the circumstances in which it is produced. As Kaplan has taught us to say, different

tokenings of expressions like this have the same character (type), but express different contents.

No distinction of this sort applies to expressions such as ‘red’. The predicate/term

(universal/particular) distinction and the character/content distinction are actually orthogonal to

one another, since in addition to singular term types where a single character determines

different contents for different tokenings (such as ‘this’ and ‘I’) and predicate types whose

characters assign the same content to all tokenings (such as ‘red’), there are singular term types

whose characters assign the same content to all tokenings (such as ‘Hegel’, or a suitable

lengthening of that name) and predicate types where a single character determines different

contents for different tokenings (such as “…is the same color as this sample”).

These passages cannot be ignored, and the argument they invite us to attribute should neither

lightly be attributed to Hegel, nor—far worse—endorsed as a good one. (Few commentators on

this chapter measure up to this tripartite standard.) As I would reconstruct the argument that

emerges from Sense Certainty, Hegel is fully aware of the distinction that vitiates the Bad

Argument, and is in fact concerned to insist on it. On the side of the immediacy of content (as

opposed to the immediacy of the origin of the act of sensing—it’s being noninferential in the

only sense Sellars and Hegel allow that cognition can be noninferential), Kant’s understanding of

intuitions construes them as particular, by contrast to the generality of concepts. Hegel sees that

this doctrine is ambiguous. Kant in the Second Analogy of Experience carefully distinguishes

relations of representations from representations of relations, the former a matter of relations

among the subject’s representings, and the latter a matter of relations represented as objective.

His (meta)concept of intuition, however, elides the analogous and equally important distinction

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between particularity of representations and representations of particularity. Singular terms are

representations of particulars, while predicates and sortals are representations of general

properties or universals: things that can be true of, apply to, or be exhibited by many particulars.

Here what is particular is what is represented. Token-reflexive expressions such as

demonstratives and indexicals are particular representings, in the sense that what must be

semantically evaluated is particular, unrepeatable tokenings of the repeatable type.14 Put

otherwise, these representings exhibit a structure of authority that Sellars (in EPM) calls “token-

credibility.” Epistemic authority accrues to uses of expressions of this kind in virtue of features

of the provenance of particular tokenings of them, and vary from one to another. By contrast to

judgments like “This pig is grunting,” and “The frog is on the log,” which are token-credible if

credible at all, judgments like “Snow is white,” and “Baryons are hadrons,” have a kind of

credibility (epistemic authority) that accrues equally to all of the tokenings of those types.

Kant thinks of intuitions as both singular-term-like, in representing particulars, and

demonstrative-like, in being unrepeatable token(ing)-reflexive representations. These features

can, of course, coincide. But they need not. There are demonstrative and indexical predicates,

such as “that shape,” and “my mother’s favorite color.” And there are singular terms all the

cotypical tokenings of which are coreferential, like Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and “the

inventor of bifocals.” When these features diverge, Kant’s intuition/concept distinction breaks

down. We already saw that a similar breakdown occurs when immediacy of origin diverges

from immediacy of content, in either of these senses of “immediacy of content.”15

14 Fussy terminological note: a) It is tokenings (acts or episodes of tokening), not tokens that are unrepeatable in the relevant sense. A

religious enthusiast who makes a sign inscribed with an arrow and the legend “You are a sinner!” and goes around pointing at various passersby utilizes a single token (the sign), but performs many unrepeatable speech acts (tokenings), whose semantics varies from tokening to tokening.

b) Demonstratives and indexicals are different species of token(ing)-reflexive expression types. It is wrong to think of demonstratives as a kind of indexical, expressions relative to an index that consists not of a time, place, speaker, or world, but of a demonstration. That is wrong because in the case of genuine indexicals, the index in question can be specified independently of features of the particular speech act whose semantics depends on that index. But what is being demonstrated is highly context-dependent along a further dimension. In Lewis’s example, what makes something “the most salient pig” can be any feature of the situation at all. Which one matters is not settled in advance, as it is for proper indexicals.

15 One might be tempted to argue that the two distinctions do not really generate three senses of ‘intuition’, since uses of demonstratives are always exercises of receptivity in the sense that they are noninferentially elicited. This would not be at all plausible for indexicals, which include not only ‘here’, but ‘there’, not only ‘now’, but ‘then’. But they also include “a week from last Tuesday,” which can surely be used as the conclusion of an inference—as indeed, it then becomes clear on reflection, can even the simplest here-now-me indexicals. The same considerations show that even demonstratives, whose most basic use is in making noninferential reports and perceptual judgments,

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Hegel does want to argue that both these sorts of content-immediacy (representings of

particular representeds and particular representings) are intelligible only in the context of their

relation to things that count as mediated. But the kinds of mediation involved are different,

corresponding to the different senses of ‘immediate’. He will argue that representations of

particulars, modeled on singular terms, are intelligible as such only in a context that includes

representations of universals, in the sense of general properties, modeled on predicates and

sortals. And he will argue that representings that are themselves particular, in the sense of being

unrepeatable, modeled on the use of tokening-reflexive expressions, are intelligible as such only

in a context that includes larger structures of repeatability: ways of recollecting those

unrepeatable events and taking them up as available in inferences made later. Put otherwise,

Hegel claims in Sense Certainty that the authority of immediacy that invests acts of sensory

awareness implicitly involves two sorts of repeatability of the content of those acts. We might

distinguish them as classificatory and recollective repeatability. The first is the classificatory or

characterizing repeatability of predicates and concepts, which Hegel calls “universals”. The

second, which in the context of endorsements whose cognitive authority depends on their

immediacy turns out to be presupposed by the first, is epitomized by the way pronouns pick up,

repeat, and so preserve the content of demonstratives serving as their antecedents. Only by

keeping the considerations proper to each of these two sorts of repeatability rigorously separate

can we learn the lessons Hegel is trying to teach us in this section. The Bad Argument results

from running together these two lines of argument. To avoid it, they must be disentangled, since

both are in play in all three of the movements of thought (“dialectics”) that make up the body of

Sense Certainty. The result of that disentangling is two Good Arguments.

The Good Arguments begin with the observation that the authority of immediacy is itself a

kind of authority. This is true, in turn, along two different dimensions. First, the authority of

having been immediately (in the sense of noninferentially) responsively elicited can be invested

in different contents. Second, for an unrepeatable episode to be intelligible as possessing any

kind of epistemic authority, it must be related to other episodes that can inherit or appeal to that

also always have inferential uses: “If she left an hour ago, she should be here by now,” surely reports the product of an inferential process.

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authority. Otherwise it is a mere occurrence, like an eddy in a stream. Since our aim is to

disentangle these two strands of argument, we’ll consider them sequentially.

Hegel does not leave any possibility that we will fail to see that one of the central lessons of

the discussion of Sense Certainty is that immediacy is ultimately unintelligible apart from its

relation to universals. He repeatedly says things like “sense certainty has demonstrated in its

own self that the truth of its object is the universal.”16

As to the first, it begins with this sort of observation: one tokening of ‘this’ picks out a tree,

another a house.17 These presentations have the same kind of authority: the authority of sensuous

immediacy. It will help in our discussion to introduce notational conventions permitting us to

distinguish between episode- or expression-types and episode- or expression-tokenings. We can

refer to the types by placing a token of the expression in question between angle brackets, and to

the tokenings by placing such a token between slanted lines. Different tokenings of the same

type can then be distinguished by subscripts. Then /this/i, which picks out a tree, has a different

content from /this/j, which picks out a house, and a different content yet from some /this/k, which

picks out a stone. Each has the authority of immediacy, that is, of experiences, putative or

candidate knowings, with which one simply finds oneself. What is given or presented to the

subject, and can differ from occasion to occasion, can be called its “content,” even within the

scope of a commitment to understanding such content as being nonconceptual. The potential

diversity of such contents must be acknowledged, as what makes immediate sense knowledge

“appear as the richest kind of knowledge.”18 That the contents of different acts of sensory

knowing can at least barely differ from one another is the very weakest sense in which those

contents could be thought of as determinate.

16 §99. Other examples include:So it is in fact the universal that is the true [content] of sense-certainty §96.What consciousness will learn from experience in all sense-certainty is, in truth, only what we have seen, viz. the This as a universal… §109.

17 Hegel splits up the pure indication that would be made explicit by a tokening of ‘this’ into temporal and spatial dimensions, which would be made explicit by tokenings of ‘now’ and ‘here’, and makes the point indicated in terms of a “now that is night” and a “now that is day”, on the one hand (in §96), and a “here that is a house” and a “here that is a tree” on the other (in §101). But the importation of this distinction is irrelevant to the point I am discussing. 18 §91.

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We’ll see further along that a stronger necessary condition must obtain as well. But even the

minimal observation that the same sort of epistemic authority of immediacy can be exhibited by

episodes with different contents (which must be acknowledged if they are to be intelligible as

having the significance even of bare referrings or “pointings-out”) already implicitly brings into

play a certain kind of universal or principle of classification applying to them. For /this/j and

/this/k have in common their difference from /this/i. A ‘this’ that is a house and a ‘this’ that is a

tree have in common that they are both different in content, not merely different as unrepeatable

tokenings, from any ‘this’ that is a stone. That much they have in common, that is a

classification of their contents. (Using ‘’ to indicate mere difference or distinguishability of

content, this is the fact that /this/j /this/i and /this/k /this/i . Both are of the kind of the kind

“/this/i”.) Merely to distinguish instances of immediacy from one another, to see them as

different instances of one kind of authority, is already in a weak sense implicitly to classify,

compare, and characterize them.

Still, this is a pretty minimal sort of classification: each episode is what it is, and not

another. (As Hegel says it gets classified only as a “not-this”—for some other tokening of

‘this’.19) The degenerate character of the universals we can see as implicitly brought into play in

this way is a consequence of the weakness of the relation of mere difference. But realizing this

is just the first step.

For besides “mere or indifferent” difference, Hegel claims that a stronger, exclusive sense of

‘different’ must also implicitly be in play in any conception of sense-experiences as

determinately contentful, even according to the severely restricted conception of sense certainty.

For the contents day and night are not just different. The exclude one another: the applicability

of one rules out the applicabilitly of the other. Hegel says that the experience of one cancels or

opposes the experience of the other. This is to say that experiences can appear as incompatible,

in the sense that their contents cannot both simultaneously have the authority of immediacy—

they ought not be endorsed in a single act. Since the authority of immediacy can be invested in

incompatible contents, it can contradict itself: authorize materially incompatible commitments,

commitments that undercut or cancel each other out. Hegel says of one such example:

19 §96.

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Both truths have the same authentication [Beglaubigung = warrant, credentials], viz. the

immediacy of seeing, and the certainty and assurance that both have about their knowing;

but the one truth vanishes [verschwindet] in the other. [M101]

Now if the authority of immediacy simply contradicts itself, then it is no authority at all. In

treating immediacy as conferring some sort of credibility or right to endorse, we are implicitly

distinguishing between the kind of authority, and the contents of its instances. We are, in effect

treating the incompatibility as a feature of the contents in which the authority of immediacy is

invested. The content that I merely indicate at one time we might express (using the least

committal feature-placing language) by saying “It is night,” is not only different from but

incompatible with the content I might similarly indicate at another time, which we could express

as “It is day.” (It would beg the question against sense certainty to insist that the consciousness

involved must apply these concepts. The idea is that we use those concepts just to keep track of

the rich nonconceptual content that the consciousness in question, according to the conception of

sense-certainty, merely points out, entertains, or contemplates.) To recognize any sort of content

here at all is to acknowledge that two such contents can contradict (strongly contrast with) one

another.

This relation of incompatibility, which Hegel often talks about using the term

‘entgegensetzen’,20 (he also uses “ausschließen”) is stronger than mere difference, and it induces

a correspondingly richer sort of universal. We might use ‘#’ to indicate the notion of

incompatibility, and so express the fact that a ‘this’ (or ‘now’) that is night (that is, a content that

could be picked out by a tokening of ‘this’ produced at night) “vanishes” into one that is day:

this/l # /this/m. Incompatibility of contents in this sense is by no means as promiscuous a relation

as mere difference among contents. For instance, it need not be the case that /this/l # /this/i—for

trees can appear at night or in the day. The universal “#/this/m”, which Hegel calls “not day…a

negative in general,”21 is a genuine universal, under which /this/l, but not /this/i or /this/j falls. In

fact, for many purposes we can represent the repeatable content of an experience or claim by the

set of experiences or claims that are incompatible with it. The contents of commitments are

determinate insofar as the class of other commitments they exclude or are incompatible with

differ (merely differ) from one another.20 For instance in §98.21 §98.

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The process whereby one certainty (commitment) “vanishes in another,” that is, has the

authority it possesses in virtue of the immediacy of its origin (its having been noninferentially

elicited by receptive sensory processes) undercut by the advent of another certainty with

credentials of exactly the same kind but whose content is not mere different (distinguishable) but

contrary, is a process of experience [Erfahrung] in the sense that Hegel gives to that expression

in his Introduction. This is a much richer sense of ‘experience’ than the notion of sense

experience that lies at the heart of the conception of sense certainty. As Hegel will argue in the

Perception chapter, it opens the way for the acknowledgement of error.

The first of the two good arguments I am taking Hegel to be making in Sense Certainty is

that the possibility of such an experience of the vanishing of one immediate certainty in another

contrary one shows that sense certainty already implicitly acknowledges what it explicitly

denies: the presence of a universal element in its conception of the authority of immediacy.

What is picked out by a barely referring /this/n that is a raining can be seen to be like what is

picked out by a barely referring /this/o that is a snowing in that both of them are incompatible

with (rule out, exclude, would vanish in, cannot be combined in a single act with) a /this/p that is

fine, but not with a /this/m that is day or a /this/l that is night (though these exclude one another).

Patterns of incompatibility and compatibility that can be shared by different acts of sensory

awareness group them into kinds exhibiting repeatable contents that are determinate in a sense

stronger than that induced by their mere distinguishability. Insisting that the cognitive “richness”

of acts of sensory awareness requires acknowledging them as determinately contentful in at least

this contrastive sense rules out a particular way of thinking about their contents as immediate. It

rules out their being immediate in the sense of being merely particular, as involving no

generality, no awareness of universals, and so no even implicit classification, comparison, or

characterizing.

A second line of thought entangled with this one throughout Sense Certainty, which comes to

be the central focus in the third movement of the section [§§103-8]. The issue it addresses is

what is required for a dateable, intrinsically unrepeatable act or event—a unique occurrence—to

be associated with a content that can be “held onto” or “preserved” after the expiration of the act

itself, so as to be available for comparison with the contents of other such acts. The lesson of the

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second good argument is that deictic or demonstrative expressions do not form an autonomous

stratum of the language—a language game one could play though one played no other—and

would not even if what was demonstrated had the shape of facts or judgeable contents. Deictic

tokenings as such are unrepeatable in the sense of being unique, datable occurrences. But to be

cognitively significant, what they point out, notice, or register must be repeatably available, for

instance to appear in the premise of inferences, embedded as the antecedent of a conditional used

to draw hypothetical consequences, and embedded inside a negation so that its denial can at least

be contemplated. Demonstratives have the potential to make a cognitive difference, to do some

cognitive work, only insofar as they can be picked up by other expressions, typically pronouns,

which do not function demonstratively. Deixis presupposes anaphora. When I say that this

lesson is not a philosophical commonplace in the way the first is, I mean that the philosophers

who have seen in what is expressed by demonstratives a crucial nonconceptual basis for our

capacity to make conceptually articulated claims about the empirical world have not typically

emphasized or looked closely at the anaphoric mechanisms by which what uses of

demonstratives make available to knowing subjects is taken up into the conceptual realm. This is

a lesson we by and large still need to learn from Hegel.

Putting the point another way, if we are to succeed in treating the unrepeatable (not merely

particular, but unique as an occurrence) act of sensing as the source of epistemic authority, it

must be possible to treat that authority as invested in a content in a way that is not undercut by

the fact that the same sort of authority may in a different, subsequent act be invested in an

incompatible content. To do that, we have to be able to focus on that content, the one that the

first act entitles us to endorse, independently of what contents may be introduced or validated by

other acts. The act as such is intrinsically unrepeatable. But unless its content is in some sense

repeatable, we cannot see the act as introducing or endorsing a content at all. The challenge is to

see what is presupposed in making an act/content distinction of this sort. The conclusion will be

that there is no way to make sense of this distinction if we just look at the single act,

independently of its relations to other acts. (An anti-atomist conclusion.) The other acts we must

consider, however, are not acts with the same kind of authority but different (even incompatible)

contents, as was the case with the argument against immediacy as pure particularity. They are

other acts with the same content, and with an authority that is inherited from the authority of the

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immediacy of the original act. The later act will not be immediate in the same sense as the

original one, but will look to its immediacy as the source of its second-hand authority.

Altogether these considerations will rule out thinking of the content as immediate in the sense of

being unrepeatable in the way the uniquely occurring act (the bearer of the content) is.

Hegel introduces the idea that the evanescence of the ‘now’ (equally the ‘this’) raises

problems for the conception of immediacy of content already in the first movement of experience

expounded under the heading of ‘sense certainty’ (and is then repeated in the second). The

content indicated by phenomenal consciousness—which from our phenomenological perspective

we can pick out by attributing a tokening of 'Now'—spontaneously changes to an incompatible

content, and then to yet another incompatible with it. The strategy explored in third movement is

to rescue an understanding of the authority of immediacy by showing how the content introduced

in an evanescent act can be “fixed” or “held fast” by another sort of act, a “pointing-out” of the

first that preserves it by making it’s content repeatable.22 So we need to think about the

distinction and relation between two sorts of acts, one essentially evanescent, which might be

made explicit by a tokening of ‘now’ (or ‘this’), and the other which points to the first, inheriting

its content and authority from it.

Here it is worth looking a bit more closely at how Hegel tells this story. At the outset

I point out the Now, and it is asserted as the truth. I point it out, however, as something

that has been, or as something that has been superseded [etwas aufgehobene]; I set aside

the first truth.23

For that act has vanished, perhaps to be replaced by another with an incompatible content and an

equal claim to endorsement. But we ignore its replacement and think just about the original

claim.

I now assert as the second truth that it has been, that it is superseded.24

This, Hegel says, is a kind of negation of the first claim. (But notice that it is a very different

sort of negation of a /now/q that is day from that constituted by a subsequent /now/r that is night.)

Next22 thus for instance “festhalte”, “Bleibende”, “aufgezeigte” in §108.23 § 107.24 § 107.

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But what has been is not; I set aside the second truth, its having been, its supersession,

and thereby negate the negation of the 'Now', and thus return to the first assertion, that the

'Now' is.25

So at the second stage, it is apparent that what is true is that the immediate is not. It only has

been. The past, which is the truth of the future, the only reality it has, is a negation of the

present. But this negation is in turn negated. The original unrepeatable event was authoritative

precisely as the sort of thing that has been and has being as vanished. It is now taken to be and

indicated as something whose authority resides in being an unrepeatable event. Its authority,

properly understood, thus involves mediation, relation, contrast, and comparison, as the negation

of the negation of immediate unrepeatable being. It has significance for now precisely by not

being now. To treat the authority as consisting and residing in the unrepeatable event, one must

recollect it. Recollection [Errinnerung] refers to something that is no longer, as something that

is no longer. The authority it has now depends on this reference to what no longer exists,

because of what it was when it simply existed. It is by the sacrifice of its immediacy, by its

relation to a future that negates its negation as past, that the immediate acquires a significance.

This is quite dark. I interpret it as follows. The question is how a 'now', which is

unrepeatable and unenduring in the sense that any other tokening of that type will have a different

content, can nonetheless be understood as investing its authority in a determinate content. The

passing away of the moment during which alone one can immediately indicate the content meant

does seem to negate the possibility of investing such authority in a determinate content. But it

does so only if the only tools we have available to invoke that authority are repeatable token-

reflexive types, such as 'now' itself (or 'this' or 'I'), on the one hand, and unrepeatable tokenings of

those types, on the other hand. What is needed is another sort of meaning entirely, one whose

content is recollected from a tokening of such a type. What is required is some expression such as

'then', which will inherit the content and authority of the original demonstrative. Demonstratives

can only sensibly be used when there are anaphoric pronouns available to pick them up and use

them, and so give their epistemic authority some significance for the rest of thought.

25 § 107.

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Notice for instance the emphasized 'it's in the passages cited above in which Hegel is

"holding fast to the Now pointed out". 'Then' can function just like 'it', as a pronoun picking up its

reference from its anaphoric antecedent. Such 'then's are repeatable and reusable. Each tokening

of "now" I utter indicates something different, but I can use many different ‘then’s to indicate

whatever it is that that one "now" indicated. It is the possibility of recollection later by such an

expression that makes an utterance of 'now' or 'this' a move in a language game, and not just a

noise (flatus vocii) or an ejaculation like 'ouch'. The immediate in the sense of the unrepeatable

requires this mediation in the sense of relation to other tokenings as (content-) repetitions of it for

it to have any cognitive significance or content—even one incompatible with what would be

expressed by later tokenings of the same type. Any such tokening can, accordingly, only be

understood as investing a content with the authority of immediacy if it is seen as an element

(Hegel says “moment”) in a larger, temporally extended, whole comprising also acts of different

types.26

The resulting understanding is of the Now, and hence immediacy in general as thoroughly

mediated, in the sense that the authority of any immediate sensory episode depnds on its being

situated in a larger relational structure containing elements that are not immediate in the same

sense. For being preservable or recollectable in the anaphoric way, we now realize, is the being of

the Now, an essential presupposition of the possibility of immediacy conferring epistemic

authority on a determinate content. The possibility of "holding fast" to the Now (in fact

anaphorically), making it into something repeatable while preserving its selfsame content, by

contrast to the type <now>, which though repeatable does not preserve the content of a single

tokening or /now/, is essential to the notion of immediacy investing a particular content with its

authority:

The 'Now' and the pointing out of the 'Now' are thus so constituted that neither the one

nor the other is something immediate and simple, but a movement which contains various

moments.27

26 For future reference, it should be registered that this structure could be invoked by talk of the future, viewing the present as past, and thereby making the present into something. We’ll see further along, in the discussion of Reason, that for Hegel future interpretations quite generally determine what our acts are in themselves. It is this open-ended potential for interpretation they show to be something for future consciousness that is what we mean by the in-itself. This is just the doctrine of the historical significance of the distinction between noumena, reality, or what is in itself, on the one hand, and its phenomenal appearance, what it is for consciousness on the other, that was announced in the Introduction.27 [M107]

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This account presents a crucial fact about the use of demonstratives and similar indexical

expressions in contributing to empirical knowledge. Deixis presupposes anaphora. It is a fact

that is too often overlooked by contemporary theorists of demonstratives, who are prone to

suppose that an autonomous language or fragment thereof might consist entirely of demonstrative

expressions.

If one focuses just on the immediacy of contact that is genuinely involved in a particular

use of a demonstrative expression such as 'this', it is easy to forget that what makes such

immediate contact have a potential significance for knowledge, for instance what makes the

content it raises to salience available for use as a premise in inference, to draw a conclusion or

learn something from it that one could remember and use again, is the possibility of picking up

that content and making it repeatable, by treating it as initiating an anaphoric chain: "This chalk is

white, it is also cylindrical, and if it were to be rubbed on the board, it would make a mark. (This

is anticipating our story a bit, since inferential articulation as an essential element of cognitive

significance will not be put into play by Hegel until his discussion in Perception). The chain 'This

chalk'...‘it’...‘it’...‘it’ is a repeatability structure that makes the content of the original

demonstration repeatably available, just as though we had christened the chalk originally with a

proper name, say 'Charlie', and used other tokenings of that repeatable type to make the reference.

The use of demonstrative expressions presupposes the use of nondemonstrative expressions, in

particular anaphoric ones. In this sense, then, anaphora (the relation between a pronoun and its

antecedent) is more fundamental than, prior in the order of explanation to, deixis (the use of

demonstratives): there can be an autonomous set of linguistic practices (ones one could engage in

though one engaged in no others) that exhibit anaphoric reference but not deictic reference (though

it would not be an empirical language), while there could not be an autonomous set of linguistic

practices that exhibit deictic reference but not anaphoric reference.28

The second good argument I am taking Hegel to be making in Sense Certainty, then, is that

the possibility of determinately contentful sensory awareness implicitly requires the presence of

something that makes the content of such acts recollectibly repeatable, in order to make sense of

the authority of immediacy. What is required is another sort of act, one that is not an act of

28 I elaborate this point (without reference to Hegel) in Chapter Seven of Making It Explicit.

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immediate sensory awareness, but is rather one that has its content and credibility or authority

indirectly, by inheritance from such an act of immediate sensory awareness. Immediacy of

content in the sense of the unrepeatability of that content as a unique occurrence is accordingly

ruled out, as incompatible with the authority of immediacy being invested in determinate

contents. We already saw that immediacy of content in the sense of particularity of that content

is also ruled out by the demand that content be determinate in a relatively weak sense.

The conception of empirical knowledge that Hegel calls “sense certainty” mistakenly tries to

understand the role of immediacy of origin—the immediacy of the act of endorsing a content—in

terms of various conceptions of immediacy of content—the immediacy of what is endorsed.

Immediacy is a category of independence, in the normative sense of authority without correlative

responsibility. Sense Certainty dismisses two senses in which one might take sensory content to

be immediate. Content immediacy as particularity is the denial of contrastive repeatability, or

the involvement of universals or generality in any form. This means that possession (or grasp) of

some sensory content is independent of any relation to other acts with contents that are similar in

some respect, or that have incompatible contents—which induce respects of similarity among

contents, as it were, horizontally. The idea is that classifying or characterizing a particular

content by bringing it under a universal involves comparing it with others, which accordingly

have a certain sort of reciprocal authority over the content of the original particular. That the

content of one act should in this way be responsible to the contents of other acts—so that what it

is depends on what they are—is what this sort of content immediacy rules out. It turns out that

content cannot be immediate in this sense and still be determinate in a minimal sense. Content

immediacy as temporal unrepeatability is the denial of recollective repeatability. This means that

possession (or grasp) of some sensory content is independent of any relation to other acts with

the very same content (not just in some respects, but in all respects). But apart from their as it

were vertical relation to other acts that inherit their content and authority from acts of immediate

sensory awareness, the contents of those acts are as evanescent as the acts themselves. So no

determinate content can be immediate in this sense either.

I began my discussion of Sense Certainty by urging that Hegel fills in Kant’s notion of

immediacy by analyzing his intuition/concept distinction as conflating three distinctions that are

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actually orthogonal to one another: receptivity vs. spontaneity of episodes, particularity vs.

generality of what is represented, and unrepeatability (token-credibility) vs. repeatability (type-

credibility) of representings. I then argued that we can acquit Hegel of commitment to the Bad

Argument if we disentangle two good lines of thought that are not sufficiently clearly separated

in his discussion of them. Both start with the observation that the epistemic authority of sensory

episodes that are immediate (noninferential) in their provenance is a kind of authority. It is a

kind of authority that, first, can be invested in different, even incompatible contents. And it is a

kind of authority that, second, can be inherited anaphorically from one unrepeatable

demonstrative or indexical (tokening-reflexive) episode by others that have the same content, but

are not themselves immediate in their origin as the originating episode was. The epistemic

authority conferred by sensuous immediacy of origin is genuine and important. But it is in

principle intelligible only in a larger context that involves both generality and anaphoric

repeatability structures relating immediately authoritative episodes to ones that inherit that

authority in a way that is not immediate. This latter recollective structure picks up on a theme

from Hegel’s Introduction, and foreshadows the structure that will be attributed to agency in the

Reason chapter. The former point is already fully present in Kant, who treats judgments

involving both intuitions and concepts as the minimal units of awareness or experience, and

intuitions without concepts as blind.

It is perhaps worth pointing out that the overall structure Hegel discerns in this chapter is

also already foreshadowed in Kant. For it can be seen as a development of the structure of

transcendental syntheses culminating in experience that Kant offers in the A edition deduction of

the categories in the first Critique.29 To yield anything recognizable as experience, he says,

apprehension in intuition must be capable of reproduction in imagination, and these

reproductions must then be suitable for recognition in a concept. To be cognitively significant,

the sort of pointing-out that we would express explicitly by the use of demonstratives must be

capable of being picked up and reproduced (preserved) by an act of the sort we would express

explicitly by the use of anaphorically dependent pronouns. To amount to anything recognizable

as even minimally determinate contents, the repeatables so constituted must then be capable of

being classified under various distinguishable and contrasting kinds or universals. The two

29 A98-106.

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senses in which we are to conclude that the contents of our sensory experiences can not be

construed as immediate then correspond to denying that in order to apprehend them we must be

able to reproduce or to recognize them. The denial of that is just what I have been interpreting

Hegel as arguing in Sense Certainty.

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A Spirit of Trust: A Semantic Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology

Part Two:

Mediating the Immediate:

Consciousness and the Inferential Articulation of

Determinate Empirical Conceptual Content

Chapter Five:

Understanding the Object/Property Structure in Terms of Negation:

An Introduction to Hegelian Metaphysics in the Perception Chapter

I

The task Hegel sets himself in the Consciousness chapters of the Phenomenology is to make

explicit what is implicit in the concept of empirical knowledge. In the terms I introduced in

discussing his Introduction, this requires saying what is required to satisfy the Genuine

Knowledge condition: offering a broadly semantic account of the nature of empirically

contentful thought that leaves open at least the possibility that when things go well, how things

are for consciousness is how they are in themselves, things appear as they really are. The Sense

Certainty chapter begins with a simple model. Its starting-point is the recognition that at the core

of the idea of empirical knowledge lies a distinctive structure of epistemic authority exercised by

episodes of sensory awareness that a knowing consciousness finds itself with, as something that

happen to it rather than something done, episodes that in particular are not products of acts of

inference. The contents of these empirically authoritative immediate episodes are of the sort that

would be expressed linguistically by the use of demonstratives or indexicals (‘this’, ‘that’, ‘here’,

‘now’). They have what Sellars calls “token-credibility”, contrasting this species with the sort of

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credibility that accrues to repeatable types (such as Quine’s “There have been black dogs,”)

rather than unrepeatable tokenings elicited observationally.

The way of understanding empirical consciousness that Hegel calls “sense certainty” (a form of

self-consciousness—a way a consciousness can understand itself) seeks to secure the

intelligibility of genuine knowledge by identifying these episodes of sensory awareness as

themselves already amounting to knowledge, in a way taken to be independent of their relations

to anything else. On this conception, error becomes possible when, but only when, the knowing

consciousness actively does something with or to the passively acquired episodes of sensory

awareness: compares or classifies them, or draws conclusions from them. The strategy of sense

certainty is to discern an autonomous foundational layer of sensory knowledge that is

incorrigible because it restricts itself to what is given in sensation. The thought is that where

consciousness does not act, it cannot err. Hegel seeks to show that this notion of sensory

givenness cannot survive the unpacking of its implicit presuppositions. (Exactly 150 years later,

Sellars would take up this same task in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.”)

The main result of the arguments Hegel rehearses in Sense Certainty is that the token-credibility

of unrepeatable episodes of immediate sensory awareness is not intelligible as free-standing and

autonomous. This distinctive sort of epistemic authoritativeness is real and important, but it is

intelligible as yielding a kind of knowledge only when it is understood as situated in a

framework that includes two kinds of repeatability of the contents in which it is invested.

Diachronically, it must be possible to for the subject “hold onto” what has been experienced

when not still experiencing it. One must be able to recollect and thereby secure what is known in

acts of consciousness that are responsible to the original, authoritative sensory knowing. These

dependent episodes are what the token-credible experiencing is authoritative over. What would

be expressed linguistically by demonstratives can amount to knowledge only as part of a larger

structure that includes what would be expressed linguistically by tokenings anaphorically

dependent on the token-credible demonstrative episodes. Though as immediate in origin they are

not themselves the conclusions of inferences, episodes of sensory awareness would be

epistemically idle if they were not in principle available to serve as premises for inferences. An

unrepeatable deictic tokening ‘that’ (for instance in “That is rain,”) can count as expressing

knowledge only if it can be picked up anaphorically and used to draw a conclusion (for instance

“It is wet,”). Deixis presupposes anaphora.

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The other sort of repeatability found to be implicit in the concept of the empirical epistemic

authority of episodes of immediate sensory awareness, as part of the context within which alone

it is intelligible, by contrast, is taken up as the central topic explored in the very next chapter,

Perception. This is repeatability as universality.30 To be understood as determinately contentful,

even synchronically, experiences must be conceived as unrepeatable instances of repeatable

kinds. More specifically, the Perception chapter investigates what is implicit in the idea of sense

universals, as articulating the contents of what would be expressed linguistically by observation

reports codifying perceptual judgments. The progression within the Consciousness chapters of

the Phenomenology is from consideration of the presuppositions of the epistemic authority

distinctive of sensory immediacy, to the presuppositions of the epistemic authority distinctive of

universality (in the sense of sense universals, those that are noninferentially applicable), and

finally to the presuppositions of the epistemic authority distinctive of pure mediation

characteristic of theoretical concepts (those one can be authorized to apply only as the

conclusions of inferences).

The point of departure of the Perception chapter is this lesson we are to have learned by the

end of Sense Certainty: sensuous immediacy, to be understood as determinately contentful, must

be understood as involving an element of repeatability as universality. This conclusion emerges

from the observation that playing a cognitive role as even potentially constituting a kind of

knowledge entails that the deliverances of sense can be understood as immediate or

noninferential in only one of the two senses that are run together by empirical consciousness

understanding itself according to the structure of sense certainty. They can exhibit immediacy of

origin, but not immediacy of content. That is, the cognitive deliverances of sense can be

understood as exhibiting a distinctive kind of epistemic authority invested in unrepeatable mental

events or acts in virtue of their etiology. This authority derives from their being exercises of

responsive sensory consciousness, rather than of inferential capacities. The process from which

they result (by which they are elicited) is not an inferential process. In that sense they are

‘immediate’: the process that issues in episodes of sensory awareness is not mediated by middle

terms of the sort characteristic of a Schluss, an inferential move, construed syllogistically.

However, the claim is, to be intelligible as cognitively contentful, the deliverances of

noninferential sensings that are immediate in this procedural sense must in another sense be

30 “It is merely the character of positive universality which is at first observed and developed.” [114].

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mediated immediacies. Specifically, they must consist in the application of sense universals:

concepts that have observational uses in which their application is noninferentially elicited by the

exercise of perceptual capacities.

II

Understanding the basis for this claim depends on exploring a complex constellation of

intricately interrelated philosophical (Hegel is happy to say “logical”) metaconcepts: mediation,

universality, determinateness, and negation. The principal result of the investigation of the

presuppositions under which purely sensory awareness could count as a kind of knowledge in the

Sense Certainty chapter is that this constellation of concepts, articulating a notion of conceptual

contentfulness, must be applicable to any sort of sentience that is intelligible as a kind of

sapience. The Perception chapter argues that this requirement has surprising structural

consequences. Where construing acts sensory awareness according to the categories of sense

certainty was compatible with understanding the contents of that awareness as what would be

expressed in what Strawson calls a “feature-placing” vocabulary—“It is day,” “It is raining,”—

fuller consideration of those contents shows that sensings must present the richer structure of

“objects with many properties,” which would be expressed linguistically in a vocabulary

distinguishing and relating singular terms and predicates. That argument proceeds by teasing out

the implications of Hegel’s nonpsychological conception of conceptual contentfulness, which is

articulated by the aforementioned metaconcepts: determinateness, negation (or difference),

mediation, and universality.

As I see the argumentative relations among these concepts that are in play early in the

Perception chapter, our entry is provided by the concept of determinateness. When we

investigate what determinateness requires, we find that it implicitly involves a complex notion of

negation. In terms of that notion of negation, it then turns out to be possible to explain and show

the applicability of both the concept of mediation and the concept of universality. So the picture

is something like this:

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The linchpin of this structure is clearly the concept of negation. What is it, and how does it

emerge from the consideration of determinateness?

The master idea here is the Spinozist scholastic principle “Omnis determinatio est negatio”;

all determination is negation. The idea is that being determinate requires some limitation,

contrast, or exclusion. The image is of something that has a limit or boundary, so that there is a

contrast between it and what is not it. That is how negation comes into view. The picture here is

then:

A Determinate Thing:

What is “Not It” is everything else, things that are outside of or different from It. Understanding

the metaphor of limits or boundaries is a matter of understanding the sense of “not”, “else”,

“outside”, or “different” that the metaphor appeals to. The observable contents expressible in a

feature-placing vocabulary that were introduced in Sense Certainty offer a couple of alternatives.

The day of “It is day,” and the raining of “It is raining,” are different. So are the day of “It is

day,” and the night of “It is night.” But they are different in different senses of “different.” In

the language Hegel uses in Perception, day and raining are merely or compatibly [gleichgültig]

different, while day and night are exclusively [ausschlieend] different. For, though different,

day and raining are compatible features (it can be both day and raining), while day and night are

incompatible (it cannot be both day and night).

As I understand him, one of Hegel’s most basic thoughts is that determinateness must be

understood in terms of exclusive difference. Mere difference is not enough. The contrast

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between It and Not It required for something to be determinate (for a feature to have definite

boundaries) requires that nothing can be both It and not It. This modally robust exclusion is built

into the geometric representational apparatus of Venn diagrams with literal boundaries, as in the

picture above. For a point cannot be both inside and outside a closed plane figure. In this same

modal sense, sets—for instance, those representing the extensions of properties—have exclusive

‘boundaries’. For it is impossible for something to be both an element of a set and not an

element of that set. The ‘not’ of Not It is an exclusive not. That is the point of the law of

noncontradiction. It is not just that some regions or sets contingently do not both contain and not

contain any points. That is a necessary feature of regions and sets. The negation that is defined

model-theoretically as part of an extensional semantics for properties itself expresses a modally

robust kind of exclusive difference, not mere difference. The modal force is just hidden in the

metavocabulary that is the medium of expression of the semantics (whether set-theoretic or

geometric).

The connection between determinateness and modally robust exclusion—the ruling out of

some alternatives—is codified in the technical concept of information. A signal is informative,

contains or expresses information, just insofar as it rules out some alternatives. The measure of

information, by which amounts of information are determined, compares the alternative

situations or responses that are possible before receipt of the signal to those that remain after the

signal has ruled out some of them as no longer possible (according to the signal). While

information can distinguish merely different alternatives, it does so by ruling out some of them,

excluding them as no longer possible. This same idea is expressed in possible worlds semantics

when a determinate proposition is identified with a set of possible worlds, a partition of all the

possible worlds into those compatible with the proposition, and those incompatible with it or

ruled out by it.

The thought with which Perception begins, I am claiming, is that the determinateness of the

content even of an immediately given sensory knowing, an act of sensory awareness, as

conceived according to the metaconception Hegel calls “sense certainty”, must be understood in

terms of what it excludes or rules out, what is exclusively different from it, not just what is

merely or indifferently different from it. The metadifference between two kinds of difference

shows up already in the contents of acts of sensory awareness that would be expressed in a

feature-placing vocabulary. The determinateness of those contents cannot be made intelligible

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solely in terms of their mere difference. Exclusive difference must also be appealed to. If the

contents of minimal sensory knowings stood to one another only in relations of compatible

difference, none excluding or ruling out any other, then their occurrence would have no

significance, would convey no information. They would be mere events, ‘that’s without

‘such’es, gears unconnected to any mechanism, their occurrence as devoid of cognitive

significance as any other unrepeatable events. Their differences are less (determinate) than

“merely numerical” differences. For numbers are exclusively different from one another. Their

differences are less (determinate) than those of featureless Euclidean points, even apart from

consideration of all the lines, circles, triangles, and so on whose relations to those points might

relate them to one another. For again, being one point precludes being another, whereas merely

compatibly different contents can be instantiated together.

In fact contents that are merely or compatibly different are elements of different families of

exclusively or incompatibly different contents. Shapes such as circular, triangular, and

rectangular are exclusively different from one another. Exhibiting one rules out exhibiting any

other (so long as we restrict ourselves to shapes exhibiting the same number of dimensions as the

space they inhabit, since a three-dimensional pyramid with a rectangular base might be thought

to exhibit both triangular and rectangular shapes). Colors also form a family of exclusively

different contents (so long as we restrict ourselves to monochromatic regions). What can be

compatibly different is pairs of contents drawn from different families of incompatibles: red and

square, green and triangular, and so on. These merely or compatibly different contents are

determinate only insofar as they also stand in relations of incompatibility or exclusion from

contents drawn from the same family. It is as such that their occurrence conveys information, by

excluding the occurrence of other members of the same family or incompatibles. Mere

difference is intelligible in the context of such a structure exhibiting also exclusive differences.

But by itself it is too weak to underwrite any notion of determinate content.

There are, then, fundamental conceptual reasons to understand the notion of determinate

difference as implicitly involving the metadistinction between two kinds of difference: exclusive

difference and compatible difference. I think Hegel also thinks that this metadifference is

observable, that it is part of the phenomenology (in a more contemporary, vaguely Husserlian

sense) of sense experience. That is, I think he thinks the compatibility of day with raining, and

its incompatibility with night is part of what we are given when we have a sensory experience of

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the sort that might be expressed in a feature-placing language by “It is day.” In grasping that

content, part of what we grasp is its place in a space of compatibilities and incompatibilities with

other experienceable contents.

On this account, Hegel thinks that more is given in sense experience than empiricists such as

Locke and Hume do. The experiences we label ‘red’ and ‘green’, and those we label

‘rectangular’ and ‘triangular’ are experienced as incompatible, as ruling each other out (as

simultaneously located), while those labeled ‘red’ and ‘triangular’ and ‘green’ and ‘rectangular’

are experienced as different, but compatible. The different possibilities of combination, and so

the arraying of features into compatible families of incompatibles is a ground-level structure of

sensory awareness for Hegel, but not for traditional empiricists. They are obliged to treat the fact

that one has never experienced a wholly red and wholly green triangle as on a par with the

contingent fact that one has never experienced, say, a wholly blue pentagon. Hegel sees the

modal difference between the difference between red and triangular and the difference between

red and green as something one knows simply by experiencing them.

Is this difference of opinion about what is given in sensory experience an empirical

disagreement? Can it in principle be settled by introspection? Has traditional empiricism

suffered from restricting itself to too narrow a conception of the basic knowledge delivered by

sense experience? Hegel’s analysis of what is implicit in the idea that basic sensory knowledge

has a content that is determinate provides an argument for the claim that knowledge of which

experiential features are exclusively different from which, and which merely different, must be

part of what one knows in having experiences with those features. (This is not to say that a

subject need be incorrigible on such matters.)

One important way in which the enriched empiricism Hegel is considering differs from

traditional empiricism (including its twentieth-century variants) lies in its rejection of the latter’s

atomism about the contents of immediate sensory experience. If their exclusive differences from

one another are an essential part of what is given in experience, then each has the content it does

only as a member of and in virtue of the role it plays in a constellation of interrelated contents.

An experienced red triangle must locate the experiencing of it in the mere (compatible)

difference of members of two different families of incompatibles: colors and shapes. (It is

interesting to note in this connection that the intrinsic incompatibilities of color properties were a

principal consideration leading Wittgenstein away from the logical atomism of the Tractarian

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idea of elementary states of affairs as independent of one another.) The result is a kind of holism

about what is immediately given in sensory experience. The atomism characteristic of the

conception of sensory consciousness understood according to the categories of sense certainty is

seen to be incompatible with understanding such consciousness as determinately contentful.

Equally important, and equally radical, is the fact that Hegel’s principal metaphysical

primitive, determinate negation, is intrinsically and essentially a modal notion. The material

incompatibility of red with green and circular with triangular is a matter of what can and cannot

be combined, what is and is not possible. Modality is built into the metaphysical bedrock of his

system. Possibility is conceptually more basic than actuality, in the sense that an immediately

given actual experience is intelligible as having the determinate content it does only insofar as it

is situated in a space of possibilities structured by relations of compatible and incompatible

difference. The empiricism Hegel is considering is a specifically modally enriched empiricism.

And we shall see that, by contrast to Kant, for Hegel the essentially modal articulation of what is

determinate is not restricted to subjective thoughts or experiencings. It also characterizes

objective determinate states of affairs, whether possible objects of sensory experience or not.

III

If the contents that can be given in sensory experience, some of which actually are, (contents

that might be expressed linguistically in a feature-placing vocabulary) are determinate in the

sense of standing to one another in relations of determinate negation in the sense of modally

exclusive difference or material incompatibility, then they also stand to one another in relations

of material inferential consequence. In Hegel’s idiom, this is to say that although they may be

given immediately, the contents of sensory experience are themselves “thoroughly mediated.”

For some feature A (such as “It is raining,”) has another feature B (such as “It is precipitating,”)

as a material inferential consequence just in case everything materially incompatible with B

(such as “It is fine,”) is also materially incompatible with A. In this sense scarlet entails red and

square entails rectangular.

In much the same way, even if the features in virtue of which sensory experiences are

determinately contentful were construed as unrepeatable, their relations of exclusive difference

from one another would ensure that they also fall under repeatables, i.e. that they exhibit a kind

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of universality. For many colors are alike in that they are exclusively different from red, and all

shapes are alike in that they are not exclusively different, but merely compatibly different from

red. These repeatable commonalities ramify into arbitrary Boolean complexity. For instance,

two otherwise dissimilar features might share not being exclusively different from A or B, but

being exclusively different from both C and D. More natural sense universals are construct able

using entailments defined by exclusions. Thus all the features that entail red—for instance,

shades of red such as scarlet and crimson—can be grouped together, or features entailed by

rectangular. As Wilfrid Sellars observes, the primitives appealed to by classical empiricists are

determinate sense repeatables. They were concerned with how merely determinable sense

repeatables might be understood in terms of these, not with how unrepeatables might give rise to

determinate repeatables.

It is in virtue of these facts that I take determinate negation to be a more metaphysically

fundamental concept than mediation and universality, as pictured in the first figure in Section II

above. The concept of negation that plays the axial role in the metaphysics Hegel introduces in

Perception is a rich and complex one. As I have indicated, it is introduced as one element of a

dyad. This is the metadifference between two kinds of difference: mere or compatible difference

and exclusive or incompatible difference. We have seen that these two kinds of difference

articulate determinate repeatable features into compatible families of incompatible features, as in

the paradigm of colors and shapes. The next step in understanding exclusive difference is to

consider it in relation to another kind of negation. Determinate negation also contrasts with

formal or abstract negation. The latter is logical negation, in a non-Hegelian sense of “logical.”

Two features stand in the relation of determinate negation if they are materially incompatible. I

am helping myself here to Sellars’s terminology, itself not wholly uninfluenced by Hegel. The

idea is that items determinately negate one another in virtue of their nonlogical content. Such

items stand in the relation of formal or abstract negation if they are logically incompatible:

incompatible in virtue of their abstract logical form.

This distinction is as old as logic. It is the distinction between Aristotelian contraries and

Aristotelian contradictories. Red and green, circular and triangular, are contraries, while red and

not-red, and circular and not-circular are contradictories. Both of these are kinds of exclusive

difference. So this is a further metadifference, between two species of exclusive difference. The

first metadifference, between compatible and incompatible differences, is a structure of co-

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ordination. Neither sort of difference is definable in terms of the other; both are required for

determinateness. Together they yield compatible families of incompatible feature-kinds. By

contrast, contrariety and contradictoriness are interdefinable There are accordingly two orders of

explanation one might pursue in relating them, depending on which one takes as primitive. One

can define contraries in terms of contradictories, so determinate negation in terms of formal

negation: for Q to be a contrary of P is for Q to imply P’s contradictory, not-P. Green is a

contrary of red and triangular of circular just insofar as green implies not-red and triangular

implies not-circular. Or, one can define contradictories in terms of contraries, so formal negation

in terms of determinate negation: for something to be the contradictory of P, not-P, is just for it

to be the minimal contrary of P, in the sense of being implied by every contrary Q of P. Not-red

is implied by all of red’s contraries: green, blue, yellow, and so on, and not-circular is implied by

all of circular’s contraries: triangular, square, pentagonal, and so on.

Negation:

Hegel takes determinate negation to be prior in the order of explanation to formal or abstract

negation. He accordingly has the second picture in mind, understanding contradictories in terms

of contraries. The traditional of extensional logic and semantics, extending from Boole through

Russell to Tarski and Quine, adopts the other order of explanation, understanding material

incompatibility as contrariety in terms of formal incompatibility as contradictoriness or

inconsistency. Each approach has its characteristic advantages. It is worth noting at this point

that the interdefinability of contraries and contradictories (hence of determinate and abstract

formal negation) depends on the availability of a notion of implication or consequence. The

Hegelian order of explanation has a native candidate. For, as already pointed out, material

incompatibility underwrites a notion of entailment: Q is a consequence of P just in case

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everything materially incompatible with Q is materially incompatible with P. What I’ll call the

Tarskian extensionalist tradition also has available a notion of implication. But it is not directly

definable in terms of formal logical negation. It only becomes available if one widens the focus

of the Tarskian explanatory strategy. Doing so will illuminate the metaphysical project Hegel

pursues in Perception. In particular, it makes manifest the difference between building modality

in at the metaphysical ground-floor, as Hegel does, and adding it as a late-coming, perhaps

optional (Quine) afterthought, as the extensionalist tradition does.

The widening of focus I have in mind is to the structure of singular terms and predicates

presenting objects and properties that Hegel argues is implicit already in the idea of determinate

features presented by a feature-placing vocabulary. I am going to call a conception of the

objective world as consisting of particular objects that exhibit repeatable properties (universals)

as having an “aristotelian” structure. I do so because I take it that it is such a commonsense

conception, suggested by the way our languages work, that Aristotle aims to explain using his

proprietary metaphysical apparatus of individual substances and their essences. I am after the

Aristotelian explanandum rather than the explanans. I take it that it is also the common

explanatory target of the Perception chapter and of the extensionalist semantic tradition that

culminates in Tarskian model theory. (Russell pitched the shift from traditional logics of

properties to modern logics of relations as transformative, and along one important dimension, it

was. But that difference is not of the first significance for the contrast I am concerned to draw

here.) Unlike Aristotle himself, neither Hegel in this chapter, nor the extensionalist tradition in

general, makes anything of the distinction between sortal predicates expressing kinds such as

‘fox’ (which come with criteria of identity and individuation), and mere characterizing predicates

expressing properties such as ‘red’ (which do not individuate),—which is part of what Aristotle’s

essentialism is a theory of.

There are two broad explanatory strategies available to explicate the aristotelian structure of

objects-and-properties. Hegel wants to explain it in terms of determinate negation, relating

property-like features. I want to illuminate that metaphysical approach by contrasting it with the

extensionalist Tarskian tradition, which starts with objects understood as merely different. The

two orders of explanation exploiting the relations between contraries and contradictories, hence

determinate and formal, abstract negation) are embedded in more encompassing converse

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explanatory strategies for articulating the aristotelian object/property categorial structure, rooted

in the metadifference between incompatible and compatible differences.

The notion of compatible difference that applies to the objects with which metaphysical

extensionalism begins does not appeal to modal notions of possibility or necessity. The mere

difference that characterizes elements of the domain of objects of the Tarskian scheme is a

primitive material relation, in that it—like the contrariety with which Hegel’s converse

explanatory strategy begins—is not defined in terms of formal logical concepts. Properties are

represented in Tarskian structures as sets of objects: the extensions of the properties. The

indiscernibility of identicals—that is, that if objects a and b are identical, they have the same

properties—will follow set-theoretically from this definition. The other direction of Leibniz’s

Law, the identity of indiscernibles, will not, unless one insists that every different set of objects

constitutes a property.

On this basis, contradictoriness, and so formal negation, can be introduced. Contradictory

properties are definable as properties with complementary extensions within the domain of

objects. Not-P, the contradictory of P, is the property whose extension consists of all and only

the objects in the domain that are not in the extension of P. The relation of contrariety is not

really represented in such extensional structures. What are intuitively contraries, such as square

and circular, will have disjoint extensions. But not every pair of disjoint extensions corresponds

to proper contraries. If the domain does not happen to include a mountain made of gold, being

made of gold and being a mountain will be disjoint properties, without being contraries. The

failure of Tarskian structures to represent contrariety is the result of the modal character of that

notion. Contradictoriness of properties is represented, because negation is given the same

reading in all models: contradictory properties are those pairs whose extensions exhaustively and

exclusively partition the domain of objects. In order to represent contrariety of properties, we

could in this object-based framework impose a non-logical, material constraint on the Tarskian

interpretation function, to ensure that the extensions of contrary properties P and Q are disjoint in

every model.

That, in effect, is what the possible worlds development of Tarskian model theory does. The

modal element is added by treating contrariety of properties the way logical negation is treated:

as a constraint on all interpretations. The account moves up to intensions of properties by

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looking at functions from indices to extensions. The indices can be models, that is, relational

structures. Or they can be possible worlds. We have come to see that the differences between

these are great. One important one is that models have domains of objects. Possible worlds do

not. Another is that some logically possible worlds (i.e. combinatorially possible constellations

of objects and properties) don’t count as really (metaphysically, or physically) possible.

Whereas any relational structure with the right adicities can be a model. This is the point where

modality gets incorporated—that is, at the end, and it then trickles down, via the intensions of

properties, to the properties. But it should be emphasized that this constraint is, from the point of

view of the underlying raw materials, arbitrary and extraneous. One simply stipulates that the

disjointness of domains of certain predicates square and circular, is de jure, while that of others,

gold, and mountain, is not. Such stipulations come in at the very end of the process of semantic

construction, not at the beginning. So possible worlds semantics in the end also takes the

distinction between incompatible and compatible difference (exclusive and mere difference) for

granted. It just builds it in at a different level, as something latecoming.

A particularly extreme version of the extensionalist order of explanation is that of the

Tractatus. Not only does it not build modality into its modal primitives, it offers only the most

attenuated version of it, constructed at the very end as something to be understood in terms of

logical contradictoriness and (so) formal negation. The Tractarian scheme starts with mere

difference of objects, and mere difference of relations among them. Properties are understood as

just relations to different objects. All elementary objects can stand in all relations to all other

objects. At the ground level, there are no combinatory restrictions at all, except those that follow

from the adicity of the relations. What is syntactically-combinatorially categorically possible

(“logically possible”) is possible tout court. Elementary objects put no constraints on the

Sachverhalte they can enter into, so no restrictions on the properties they can simultaneously

exhibit. At this level, properties do not stand to one another in relations of exclusive difference

—e.g. where being A’s mother meaning one cannot be B’s father. More complex facts can be

incompatible, but this is intelligible only where one truth-functionally includes the logical

negation of an elementary fact included in the other. As I mentioned above, dissatisfaction with

this treatment of contrariety of colors seems to have played an important role in moving

Wittgenstein away from the Tractarian way of thinking about things.

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IV

Grafting on at the end substantive constraints on admissible models in the way of possible

worlds semantics does not alter the basic Tarskian extensionalist order of explanation. The order

of explanation Hegel pursues in Perception is the converse of it. It is of the essence of

extensional approaches to appeal only to mere or compatible difference of objects. Besides

compatible differences of features, Hegel also acknowledges incompatible or exclusive

differences. We have seen that these come in two Aristotelian species: formal contradictories

and material contraries. Hegel focuses on the material (nonlogical) incompatibility of such

contraries. On the basis of this nonlogical modal primitive, he then elaborates the full

aristotelian structure of objects-with-properties (particulars characterized by universals).

The process by which the metaphysical structure of objects-with-properties is found to be

implicit already in what would be expressed by a purely feature-placing vocabulary, once the

features deployed in that vocabulary are understood to stand to one another in relations both of

compatible and of incompatible difference involves three distinct moves. Each one involves

adding to the picture a further kind of difference, so a further articulation of the complex notion

of determinate negation. The first move puts in place the intercategorial difference between

properties and objects, or universals and particulars. The second move puts in place an

intracategorial difference between two roles that particular objects must play with respect to

properties, reflecting the intracategorial difference between merely different and exclusively

different properties. The third move registers a fundamental intercategorial metaphysical

difference between objects and properties with respect to mere and exclusive differences.

The first move in this argument finds the aristotelian structure of objects-and-properties, or

particulars-and-universals to be implicit already in the observation that the features articulating

the contents of sense experience stand to one another in relations of material incompatibility or

exclusive difference. This argument can be thought of as beginning with the role that what in

Sense Certainty Hegel calls “the Now” plays in the distinction between the two basic kinds of

difference, compatible and incompatible. What would be expressed by “Now1 is night,” is not

incompatible with what would be expressed by “Now2 is day.” It is incompatible with “Now1 is

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day.” The incompatibility applies only to the same ‘Now’. We could say that the ‘Now’ is

playing the role of a unit of account for incompatibilities.

What this role is becomes clearer when we think of it in connection with the second

dimension of repeatability that emerged from the consideration of the form of self-consciousness

that is sensory consciousness understanding itself as sense certainty, namely recollective

repeatability. For what would be expressed by “Now1 is night,” is also incompatible with what

would be expressed by “Then1 was day,” if ‘then1’ expresses a recollection, a holding on to, of

what is expressed by ‘now1’. The unit of account for incompatibilities is the “holding onto” that

is expressed by the whole anaphoric chain of recollections of the initial demonstrative ‘now’.

Further, ‘here’ expresses a similar unit of account for incompatibilities. What would be

expressed by “Here1 is a tree,” is not incompatible with what would be expressed by “Here2 is a

house.” But it is incompatible with what is expressed by “Here1 is a house.” And it is

incompatible with what would be expressed by “There1 is a house,” if what would be expressed

by ‘there1’ stands to what would be expressed by ‘here1’ as a recollection that would be

expressed by ‘then1’ stands to what would be expressed by ‘now1’, that is, as an anaphoric

repeatable “holding onto” the spatial demonstrative ‘here1’. Indeed, the temporal and spatial

indexicals can be combined into the spatiotemporal indexical “here-and-now.” What such

indexicals express are still units of account for incompatibilities. So are the anaphoric

repeatables formed from them, what would be expressed by ‘therei-and-thenj’s that are holdings-

onto what would be expressed by any ‘herei-and-nowj’. And what holds for these indexical

experiencings holds also for demonstrative ones. That what would be expressed by “This1 is

triangular,” does not exclude what would be expressed by “This2 is circular.” But it does

exclude what would be expressed by “That1 is circular,” if the ‘that1’ functions as an anaphoric

dependent recollecting the original tokening ‘this1’.

In all these case we can see that the same anaphorically extended structure relating

unrepeatable indexical or demonstrative experiencings plays the role of a unit of account

excluding possession of materially incompatible sensible features. At this point we can see that

the notion of incompatible difference, determinate negation, or material incompatibility (which I

have been claiming are three ways of talking about the same thing) among features implicitly

involves a contrast with a different kind of thing, something that is not in the same sense a

feature, that is an essential part of the same structure. For incompatibilities among features

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require units of account. What is impossible is not that two incompatible features should be

exhibited at all. After all, sometimes it is raining, and sometimes it is fine. What is impossible is

that they should be exhibited by the same unit of account—what we get our first grip on as what

would be expressed by a tokening of ‘now’, or ‘here-and-now’, or ‘this’, and the repeatability

structures they initiate.

So from the fact that what would be expressed by different ‘now’s can exhibit incompatible

features that the structure of sense contents that includes features that can differ either

incompatibly or compatibly also essentially includes items that are not features, but that play a

different role. These units of account are of a different ontological category from the features for

which they are units of account. Besides the intracategorial difference (concerning relations of

features) between two kinds of difference (incompatible and compatible) of features in sensory

experience that would be expressed by sentences in a feature-placing language, sensory

experience also implicitly involves the intercategorial difference between features and units of

account for incompatibilities of features.

That is to say that that what I have called the ‘aristotelian’ structure of objects-and-

properties, or particulars-and-universals, is now seen to have been all along implicit in sense

experience, even as originally conceived according to the categories of sense certainty. Making

this implicit structure explicit yields the form of sensory self-consciousness Hegel calls

“perception.”

One of Kant’s innovations is his introduction of Newtonian spatio-temporal identification

and individuation of empirical objects, as a replacement of the traditional Aristotelian

identification and individuation of individual substances through their essences and accidents. In

the transition from the discussion of sensory consciousness understanding itself as sense

certainty (immediate demonstrative awareness of sensible features) to sensory consciousness

understanding itself as perception (sensory awareness of empirical objects with observable

properties), Hegel is forging a conceptual link between Kantian-Newtonian spatiotemporal

identification and individuation and the aristotelian structure of objects-and-properties

(particulars-and-universals).

A decisive line has been crossed. The content-repeatables exhibited by unrepeatable sense

experiencings are no longer to be construed as features, but as properties. What enforces the

transition is the association of those sense repeatables not with what is expressed by the

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indiscriminate “it” of “It is raining,” or the undifferentiated merely existential “there is” of

“There is red,” but with different, competing units of account. Looking over the shoulder of the

phenomenal self-consciousness that is developing from the categories of sense certainty to those

of perception, we see that this differentiation of what exhibits the sense repeatables was implicit

already in the different ‘now’s acknowledged by sense certainty from the beginning. No longer

are the contents of basic sensory knowings construed as what would be expressed in feature-

placing vocabularies. Now they are articulated as what requires expression in vocabularies

exhibiting the further structure of subjects and predicates. What is experienced is now

understood not just as features, but as objects with properties, particulars exhibiting universals.

V

Understanding functional units of accounts for incompatible sense repeatables more

specifically as objects or particulars involves further unfolding of what is implicit in

distinguishing compatible or merely different sense repeatables from incompatible or exclusively

different ones. Hegel says of the features that “these determinatenesses…are really only

properties by virtue of the addition of a determination yet to come,” namely thinghood.31 He

elaborates that notion of thinghood along two dimensions: the thing as exclusive and the thing as

inclusive. In talking about these two different roles essential to being a “thing of many

properties”, he describes it as on the one hand “a ‘one’, an excluding unity,” and on the other

hand as an “ ‘also’, an indifferent unity.” The unity of the units of account essentially involves

this distinction and the relation between being a ‘one’ and being an ‘also’.32 These correspond to

the roles played by objects with respect to incompatible properties, which they exclude, and their

role with respect to compatible properties, which they include. So the intracategorial

metadifference between two kinds of difference between what now show up as properties is

reflected by the intracategorial difference between two complementary roles objects play with 31 [113].32 [114].

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respect to those properties, as repelling incompatible properties and as a medium unifying a set

of compatible properties.

As to the first, he says:

[I]f the many determinate properties were strictly indifferent [gleichgültig] to one another, if they

were simply and solely self-related, they would not be determinate; for they are only determinate

in so far as they differentiate themselves from one another [sie sich unterscheiden], and relate

themselves to others as to their opposites [als entgegengesetzte].

This is the by now familiar point that determinateness requires exclusive, incompatible

difference, not just mere or indifferent, compatible difference.

Yet; as thus opposed [Entgegengesetzung] to one another they cannot be together in the simple

unity of their medium, which is just as essential to them as negation; the differentiation

[Unterscheidung] of the properties, insofar as it is...exclusive [ausschließende], each property

negating the others, thus falls outside of this simple medium.

The ‘medium’ here is thinghood, the objects that exhibit the properties:

The One is the moment of negation… it excludes another; and it is that by which 'thinghood' is

determined as a Thing.33

If A and B are different things, then one can be circular and the other triangular, one red and one

green. But one and the same thing cannot have those incompatible properties. A’s being

circular and red excludes its being triangular or green. Objects are individuated by such

exclusions.

On the other hand,

This abstract universal medium, which can be called simply thinghood…is nothing else than

what Here and Now have proved themselves to be, viz. a simple togetherness of a plurality; but

the many are, in their determinateness, simple universals themselves. This salt is a simple Here,

and at the same time manifold: it is white and also tart, also cubical…. All these many

properties are in a single simple ‘Here’, in which, therefore, they interpenetrate…And at the

same time, without being separated by different Heres, they do not affect each other in this

interpenetration. The whiteness does not affect the cubical shape…each…leaves the others

33 All of this long passage is from [114].

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alone, and is connected with them only by the indifferent Also. This Also is thus the pure

universal itself, or the medium, the ‘thinghood’, which holds them together in this way.34

The thing as the medium in which compatible properties can coexist is the thing as ‘also’. It is

the thing of many (compatible) properties, rather than the thing as excluding incompatible ones.

The tokenings of ‘here’ that sensory consciousness understanding itself as sense certainty already

saw as expressing a feature of its experiencings already plays this role, as well as the

exclusionary one. Already in that primitive case we can see

the medium in which these determinations permeate each other in that universality as a simple

unity but without making contact with each other, for it is precisely through participation in this

universality that each is on its own, indifferent to the others—As it has turned out, this abstract

universal medium, which can be called thinghood itself…is none other than the here and now,

namely, as a simple ensemble of the many.35

Along this dimension, too, thinghood, the idea of objects as an essential structural element of the

structure that contains properties, shows up first in indexical form of here-and-now’s, and is

generalized first by the idea of anaphoric chains “recollecting” what is expressed by such

unrepeatable indexical and demonstrative tokenings, on its way to the full-blown logical

conception of particulars exhibiting universals.

The idea of sense experiencings that are determinately contentful in the sense of being not

only distinguishable but standing in relations of material incompatibility turned out implicitly to

involve a structural-categorial contrast between repeatable sense universals and something else.

The something else is “thinghood” or particularity. The notion of particularity then turns out

itself to involve a contrast:

This simple medium is not merely an “also,” an indifferent unity; it is also a “one,” an excluding

unity.36

These different but complementary roles reflect, within this ontological category, the distinction

between compatible and incompatible differences, within the ontological category of properties.

34 [113].35 [113].36 [114]. Also: “I now further perceive the property as determinate, as contrasted with an other, and as excluding it…I must in fact break up the continuity into pieces and posit the objective essence as an excluding “one.” In the broken-up ‘one,’ I find many such properties, which do not affect each other but which are instead indifferent to each other.” [117]

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We have seen that determinateness demands that the identity and individuation of properties

acknowledge not only compatible differences between them, but also incompatible differences.

Does the identity and individuation of objects also depend on both the role of things as unifying

compatible properties and their role as excluding incompatible ones? Hegel says:

...these diverse aspects...are specifically determined. White is white only in opposition to black,

and so on, and the Thing is a One precisely by being opposed to others. But it is not as a One that

it excludes others from itself...it is through its determinateness that the thing excludes others.

Things are therefore in and for themselves determinate; they have properties by which they

distinguish themselves from others.37

The first claim here is that the thing as a one is in some sense opposed to other things, or

“excludes them from itself.” Talk of the thing as an excluding one invokes the role of objects as

units of account for incompatibilities of properties.

But the sense in which objects exclude or are opposed to other objects cannot be the same as

the sense in which properties exclude or oppose one another. What would the units of account

for those exclusions be? More deeply, we have seen that the material contrariety of properties

admits of the definition of opposites in the sense of contradictories. Property Q is the opposite of

property P in this sense just in case it is exhibited by all and only the objects that do not exhibit

37 [120].

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P. This is how not-red is related to red. An argument due to Aristotle shows that objects do not

have opposites in this sense of contradictories.38 The corresponding notion of an opposite in the

ontological category of objects would have object b being the contradictory of object a just in

case b exhibits all and only the properties not exhibited by a. But the properties not exhibited by

any object always include properties that are incompatible with one another, and hence not all

exhibitable by any one object. The red circular object does not exhibit the properties of being

green, yellow, triangular, or rectangular. So its opposite would have to exhibit all of these

properties (as well as all the other colors and shapes besides red and circular). That is

impossible. The chart above has the properties of not being identical to my left little finger, and

of not being identical to Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto. Its opposite would have to have

the property of being identical to both. Since they are not identical to each other, this cannot be.

So although objects both differ from and in some sense exclude one another, there is a huge

structural difference between how they do and how properties differ from and exclude one

another—the distinction between two kinds of difference that kicks off the whole process of

explicitation and elaboration we have been rehearsing. The Aristotelian argument unfolds what

turns out to have been implicit all along in the distinction between the two ontological categories

of properties and objects. The key to the difference, the distinction between them, lies in their

relation to exclusive difference: the difference between their relations to this kind of difference.

How are we to think of objects as being identified and individuated, by contrast to the ways

properties are? The answer Hegel offers in the passage above is surely right as far as it goes:

they are identified and individuated by their properties. This response reinforces the order of

explanation being identified here as Hegels: from (ur)properties to objects—reversing the

extensionalist Tarskian order of explanation. In virtue of their role as hosting co-compatible

properties, objects as ‘also’s merely differ from one another insofar as they host different sets of

co-compatible properties. In virtue of their role as excluding properties incompatible with those

they host, objects as “excluding one”s exclude one another insofar as some of the co-compatible

properties exhibited by one are incompatible with some of the co-compatible properties exhibited

by another.

38 Book V of the Categories. [ref.]

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Here we see another aspect of the contrast in orders of explanation between the Tarskian

extensionalist tradition and Hegel’s metaphysics of universals and particulars. The extensionalist

tradition offers an answer to the question about how the identity and individuation of objects

relates to that of properties: Leibniz’s Law. It comprises two parts, a weaker and a stronger

claim:

LL1: The Indiscernibility of Identicals.

LL2: The Identity of Indiscernibles.

(LL1) says that identical objects must have all the same properties. (LL2) says that objects with

all the same properties are identical. The identity of indiscernibles is stronger than the

indiscernibility of identicals in that it seems to depend on there being “enough” properties:

enough to distinguish all the objects that are really distinct. As it arises in the extensionalist

framework, Leibniz’s Law appeals only to the mere difference of properties and the mere

difference of objects. It becomes controversial how to apply it when modally robust properties

are in the picture.39 How do these principle look in an environment where exclusive difference

of properties is also in play, as well as mere difference?

The Indiscernibility of Identicals says that mere difference of properties is sufficient for

mere difference of objects. The Identity of Indiscernibles says that merely different objects have

at least merely different properties. I think Hegel endorses these principles. But his talk of

objects as excluding one another suggests that he also endorses a further, stronger principle:

different objects not only have different properties, they have incompatible properties. We might

call this principle the “Exclusivity of Objects.” Such a view would satisfy three criteria of

adequacy, the first two of which are set by the passage most recently quoted above.

It would underwrite talk of objects as excluding one another.

It would do so by appealing to the more primitive notion of properties excluding one

another.

And it would respect the differences between property-exclusion and object-exclusion

that are enforced by the Aristotelian argument showing that objects cannot have

39 I discuss this issue in Chapter Six and the second half of Chapter One of From Empiricism to Expressivism: Brandom Reads Sellars [Harvard University Press, 2014].

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contradictories definable from their exclusions (in the case of properties, their

contrarieties) in the way that properties do.

In effect, the Exclusivity of Objects says that it never happens that two objects are distinguished

by their role as things-as-alsos combining different compatible properties, according to the

discernibility of non-identicals version of (LL2) unless they are also distinguished by their role

as things-as-excluding-ones. There is no mere difference of properties distinguishing objects

without exclusive difference of properties (having incompatible properties) distinguishing them.

This is a topic on which Leibniz’s Law is silent.

The principle of the Exclusivity of Objects holds even within the extensionalist context. For

even there it is denied that two objects could differ (merely differ) just by having different

merely or compatibly different properties. Taking our cue from the appeal to identity-properties

used to illustrate the Aristotelian argument that objects cannot have contradictories, we can

notice that if a and b are indeed not identical, then a will have the property of being identical to a

and b will have the property of being identical to b . If a and b are not identical, then nothing can

have both properties; they are not merely different properties, they are exclusively different. It is

impossible for any object that has the one property to have the other.

So thinking about things from the extensionalist direction, beginning with mere differences

of objects and identifying merely different properties in effect with sets of them, does yield a

version of the principle of Exclusivity of Objects. If object a is red and object b differs from it

by not having that property, then appeal to the notion of formal or abstract negation yields the

result that b has the property that is the contradictory of red. It has the property not-red. That

property is exclusively different from red, in that it is a property of formal negation that it is

logically impossible for any object to have both properties simultaneously. The fact that the

principle of the Exclusivity of Objects, that merely different objects will have not only

compatibly different properties but also incompatibly different ones, arises early in the Hegelian

order of explanation and late in the extensionalist one is a consequence and reflection of the two

orders of explanation regarding the relations between material contrariety and formal

contradictoriness that they adopt.

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For distinguishing at the outset compatibly from incompatibly different properties, as Hegel

does, commits one to a picture of properties as coming in compatible families of incompatible

properties, as in the paradigmatic case of shapes and colors of monochromatic Euclidean plane

figures. If objects a and b differ merely in compatible properties, they differ in properties drawn

from different families of incompatibles. For example, a is red and b is square. But for them to

be distinguished from each other thereby, a must not also be square and b must not also be red.

But if a is not square, it will exhibit some other shape, incompatible with being square, and if b is

not red it will exhibit some other color, incompatible with being red. But then a and b will have

properties that are not merely different from one another, but incompatible with one another.

That is just what the Exclusivity of Objects claims. According to this picture, kinds of things are

characterized by which compatible families of incompatible properties they must exhibit.

Sounds can be shapeless and colorless—though they must have some pitch and volume. But any

monochromatic Euclidean plane figure must have both shape and color on pain of not qualifying

as a determinate particular of that kind.

In a sense, then, for the identity and individuation of objects, the exclusiveness of objects,

which appeals to exclusive difference of properties, is more basic in the Hegelian order of

explanation than Leibniz’s Law, which appeals to mere difference of properties.

VI

This observation completes the rehearsal of the argument that elaborates what is implicit in

the idea of the contents of sensory consciousness as what would be expressed in a feature-

placing vocabulary, through the consideration of what is implicit in the requirement that the

features articulating those contents must be determinate, through the consideration of the relation

of negation and universality, to the much more finely structured idea of those contents as

presenting a world consisting of empirical objects with many observable properties. We are now

in a position to understand what Hegel is after when, in the opening introductory paragraphs of

the Perception chapter, he says such things as:

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Perception…takes what is present to it as universal.40

As it has turned out…it is merely the character of positive universality which is at first observed

and developed.41

Only perception contains negation.42

Being…is a universal in virtue of its having mediation or the negative within it; when it

expresses this in its immediacy, it is a differentiated, determinate property.43

Since the principle of the object, the universal, is in its simplicity a mediated universal, the object

must express this its nature in its own self. This it does by showing itself to be the thing with

many properties.44

In these passages Hegel describes a path from universality, through unpacking the requirement of

the determinateness of universals, to negation (and mediation), fetching up with the

universal/particular structure of the thing with many properties. I have told the story somewhat

differently, but not, I think, irreconcilably so. The official result inherited from the Sense

Certainty chapter is the realization by sensory self-consciousness that it must understand its

immediate sense knowledge as having contents that are repeatable in the sense of being

universal. (Not only in this sense, as we have seen.) So that is where Hegel picks up the story in

Perception. I understand the subsequent invocation of determinateness and negation to be a

reminder that what drove empirical consciousness understanding itself according to the

categories of sense certainty to the realization that repeatability as universality must be involved

was precisely considerations of the determinateness of sense knowledge as involving negation.

So I have told the story of sensory consciousness understanding itself as perceiving starting with

the distinction between two ways in which sense contents came to be seen to differ already in the

experience of sense certainty.

The passage I want to focus on at this point is one in which Hegel summarizes what we will

learn, by talking about

…sensuous universality, that is, the immediate unity of being and the negative…45

40 [111].41 [114].42 [111].43 [113].44 [111].45 [115].

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For here he is announcing that in this chapter we get our introduction to one of his master-ideas,

that determinateness should be understood as a kind of identity constituted by difference, unity

articulated by disparity. (That it is determinate sensuous universality is why the sort of unity of

being and the negative is characterized as “immediate.” I have glossed this as what I called

“immediacy of origin,” the fact that the episodes of sensory awareness being considered are

passively elicited by the exercise of noninferential differential responsive capacities.) Though he

has other big ideas, this is the central structural innovation of his thought about what he calls

“logic”, which only later in the story is differentiated into a semantics addressing the structure of

the subjective realm of thought and an ontology or metaphysics addressing the structure of the

objective realm of being. One of my main interpretive claims is that determinate negation or

material incompatibility on the side of the thinking subjects is deontic incompatibility (a matter

of commitment and entitlement) and on the side of the objects thought about is alethic

incompatibility (a matter of necessity and possibility), and that Hegel’s idealism is a story about

the unity constituted by these different kinds of differences. But that is a story for another

occasion.

What we have been exploring is the metaphysical fine structure of what Hegel invokes in

this passage as “the negative.” One of Hegel’s own summaries is this:

…the thing as the truth of perception reaches its culmination to the extent that it is necessary to

develop that here. It is

) the indifferent passive universality, the also of the many properties, or, rather, matters.

ß) the negation generally as simple, that is, the one, the excluding of contrasted properties, and

) the many properties themselves, the relation of the two first moments: The negation, as it

relates itself to the indifferent element and extends itself within it as a range of differences; the

point of individuality in the medium of enduring existence radiating out into multiplicity.46

In fact, I have argued that Hegel’s metaphysical analysis of the fine structure of the aristotelian

object-with-many-properties, and his derivation of it from the concept of determinate

universality, is substantially more intricate than this summary indicates. As on offer in the

Perception chapter, it is a constellation of no less than ten interrelated kinds of difference. We

began by distinguishing

46 [115].

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1. mere or “indifferent” [gleichgültig] difference of compatible universals

from

2. exclusive difference of incompatible universals.

This brought into view the

3. metadifference between mere and exclusive difference.

This is the first intracategorial metadifference, between differences relating universals to

universals. It is a kind of exclusive difference, since the universals must be either compatible or

incompatible. (One could use the terminology differently, so that exclusively different

universals were also merely different. But this does not seem to be how Hegel uses the terms.)

Within exclusive difference, two species that can be related by two opposing orders of

explanation:

4. material contrariety, corresponding to determinate negation,

and

5. formal contradictoriness, corresponding to abstract logical negation.

There is then also the

6. metadifference between determinate and abstract negation logical negation.

This is the second intracategorial metadifference, between differences relating universals to

universals. These are not exclusively, but only compatibly different. Contradictories are a kind

of contrary: minimal contraries.

Implicit in the concept of repeatables as universals is the

7. difference between universals and particulars.

This is the the first intercategorial difference. It, too, is a kind of exclusive difference.

Implicit in the concept of particulars in relation to universals is the

8. difference between two roles they play:

particulars as ‘also’s, that is as medium hosting a community of compatible

universals, and

particulars as “exclusive ones,” that is as units of account repelling incompatible

properties.

This is the first intracategorial difference between roles played by particulars. These are what we

might call strongly compatibly different roles, since every particular not only can but must play

both.

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Corresponding to this difference on the side of particulars is the

9. difference between two roles universals play with respect to particulars:

universals as related to an inclusive ‘One’ in community with other compatible

universals, and

universals as excluding incompatible universals associated with different exclusive

‘One’s.

Finally, there is the

10. Difference between universals and particulars that consists in the fact that universals do

and particulars do not have contradictories or opposites.

Unless the distinctions and intricate interrelations between these different ways in which

things can be said to differ from or negate others are kept firmly in mind, nothing but confusion

can result in thinking about Hegel’s metaphysics of negation. As an illustration, both

determinate properties and objects can be understood as, to use a favorite Hegelian phrase,

“negations of the negation.” But in very different ways, accordingly as both what is negated and

the negating of it must have senses drawn from different elements of the list above. For instance

the first negating of a negation is intracategorial, among universals, and the second is

intercategorial, distinguishing particulars from universals. In the first case, the identity of a

determinate property consists in how it negates or differs from all of its material contraries. Each

is in sense (2) the negation of the property in question. And it is by being the contrary of,

negating, all of its exclusive contraries that it is the determinate property that it is. This is one

sense in which universals as such “contain negation within themselves,” which is why

perception, which “takes what is present to it as universal,” thereby itself “contains negation.” In

the second case, according to the order of explanation I have attributed to Hegel, particulars are

understood in terms of their exclusive difference, of types (7) and (9), from universals. Since the

universals are the determinate universals they are because of their negations of one another,

particulars can be understood as negations of the negations that articulate those universals. They

are of the category that does not negate others of its category in the way universals do negate

others of their category. These two examples of kinds of identity that are intelligible as

constituted by negating a negation are obviously quite different, due to the difference in the kinds

of negation.

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VII

This is the structure I take it that Hegel elaborates from the requirement of determinateness

of the repeatable features characteristic of empirical consciousness understanding itself a sense

certainty. It is introduced in the first five paragraphs of Perception. In the body of the chapter,

he recounts three large movements of the experience of empirical consciousness understanding

itself as perceiving. Here we, Hegel’s phenomenological consciousness, look on at how this

underlying structure manifests itself to the phenomenal consciousness by showing the

inadequacy of the abstractions that articulate its self-understanding. The overall difficulty is that

this sort of self-consciousness still understands the sense in which the properties it perceives are

given to it immediately: not only in terms of immediacy of their origin, but still also in terms of

the immediacy of their content. As Hegel puts it, according to its self-conception:

It has only to take it, to confine itself to pure apprehension of it…If consciousness itself did

anything in taking what is given, it would by such adding or subtraction alter the truth.47

This means that

His criterion of truth is therefore self-identity, and his behavior consists in apprehending the

object as self-identical.48

The trouble is that diversity (dissimilarity, diversity of moments) is also explicitly a feature of

the content of sense perception as determinate.49 The three movements of the experience of

perceiving consciousness are conceptual strategies—each ultimately unsuccessful—for explicitly

reconciling the elements of unity and diversity, self-identity and difference, implicit in ground-

level determinate sense experience. In accordance with its self-conception, Hegel says, any

failure to reconcile these diverse moments must be attributed not to a feature of what is

perceived, but to the perceiving of it.

In general, what we see is that so long as empirical consciousness understanding itself

according to the categories of perception seeks to its experience as exhibiting independent

principles of unity and disparity (“these empty abstractons of a ‘singleness’ and a ‘universality’

47 [116].48 [116].49 Paraphrase of the final sentences of [116].

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opposed to it”50) that are somehow bolted together to yield a conception of the multifarious kinds

of identity-through-difference (“ ‘being-for-self’ burdened with opposition”51) we have seen to

be implicit in the notion of determinateness, it is doomed to confusion and failure. In its first

experience, it notices that what it takes to be the immediately simple, self-identical unity it

experiences essentially involves multiplicity, diversity, and difference. (Hegel walks us through

several of the dimensions of identity-through-difference retailed in the previous section.)

Empirical consciousness understanding itself as perceiving cannot understand how on this basis e

pluribus unum, one arising out of many, is possible. Identity and diversity are exclusively

different features. So it must be impossible for one single, self-identical content to exhibit both.

In particular, one cannot conceive of objects as determinate apart from their relation to their

properties, and one cannot conceive of the properties, in terms of which objects are determinately

what they are, as determinately what they are apart from their relations (of exclusion) to other

properties. So, one cannot understand either objects or properties as both determinate and

independent of their relations to other things (properties to other properties, objects to properties,

and objects to other objects).

Since those sorts of unities are not intelligible according its guiding metaconception,

perceiving consciousness takes it that it must be making some sort of a mistake in its taking-in of

what is given to it. Either the object of perception is unified and self-identical, and multiplicity

is being spuriously added by the perceiving subject, or what is perceived is really diverse and a

spurious unity is being conferred by the perceiving subject. What drives the second experience

of perceiving consciousness is the question of where to locate responsibility for diversity or

unity.52 This is really the issue throughout the body of the chapter. The first metaexperience

sought for both in the objective realm of what is perceived. In the second, the loci of

responsibility considered are the perceived object and the perceiving subject. The second

strategy of perceiving consciousness—still laboring under an understanding of identity as

requiring autonomy, excluding essential relation to something other—is to respond to the failure

of its first strategy by assigning a role to consciousness in making sense of the complex

constellation of unity and diversity required by determinateness.

50 [130].51 [130].52 Hegel invokes this issue explicitly by using the phrase "nimmt (sie) auf sich" (takes it upon itself, takes it up), in [118], [120], [122], and again in summary in [131].

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One way to do that is to take the thing experienced to be indeed one and autonomous, but to

be experienced as exhibiting diverse properties only because of its relation to our various senses.

We get the entire diversity of these aspects, not from the Thing, but form ourselves, and they fall

asunder this way for us because the eye is quite distinct from the tongue…53

The idea here is the one Shelley expresses in a passage in Adonais where he imagines the “white

radiance of eternity” refracted through the multicolored stained glass of the mind to yield the

multiplicity we see:

The One remains, the many change and pass;

Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,

Stains the white radiance of Eternity.

The Shelleyan strategem cannot rescue perceiving consciousness’ commitment to understanding

identity as involving no substructure of difference from or relation to others, though. For the

“various properties which seem to be properties of the Thing,”54 the “diverse aspects for which

consciousness accepts responsibility,” are still “specifically determined. White is white only in

opposition to black….”55 So the difficulty of understanding identity as constituted through

(exclusive) difference is not solved on the subjective side of perceiving consciousness. And on

the side of the objective perceived thing, whose unity or identity construed in terms of autonomy

is supposed to be preserved by relegating manyness to consciousness,

…it is in its determinateness that the thing excludes others. Things are…in and for themselves

determinate; they have properties by which they distinguish themselves from others.56

The way in which exclusive intracategorial difference is essential to the identity both of

properties and of things remains a problem even after responsibility for the diversity of

properties has been assigned to one pole of the intentional nexus and responsibility for the unity

of the thing has been assigned to the other.

And the converse Kantian version of this second strategy fares no better. The idea here is

that “the Thing itself is the subsistence of the many diverse and independent properties,” and that

“positing these properties as a oneness is the work of consciousness alone.”57 For Kant, what is

53 [119].54 [119].55 [120].56 [120].57 [121].

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given is a sensory manifold of intuition. Imposing unity on that manifold is solely the

responsibility and the result of the work of the understanding. But once again, the identity of

each of the diverse properties consists in its exclusive difference from others, and the specific

unity imposed on some compatible set of them when they are gathered together into an object as

a one as ‘also’ is distinguished from other such specific unities only by the exclusive difference

of some of their various properties.

So dividing responsibility for unity and responsibility for diversity between subjective and

objective poles of the intentional nexus, between the act of perceiving and what is perceived, will

not solve the underlying problem. Both perceptual experiencings and what is perceptually

experienced must be understood as determinate. That means both must exhibit the aristotelian

structure of particularity and universality, which implicitly, but essentially, exhibits a fine

structure articulated by different sorts of difference or negation, a complex constellation of kinds

of categorial identity constituted by relations of different sorts of difference.

Hegel sees one last desperate strategy as available to empirical consciousness understanding

itself according to the metaconceptual commitments of perceiving, in attempting to salvage its

hopelessly simple-minded atomistic understanding of identity as consisting solely in self-

relation, so excluding any essential relation to what is different from it. Interestingly enough—

given the account I have offered above of the metaphysical analysis of the aristotelian structure

of objects-with-properties I take Hegel to be offering, and its alternatives—the third strategy he

considers is what I there called the Tractarian version of the Tarskian extensionalist order of

explanation. This begins with mere difference of simple (“elementary”) objects, and construes

the variety of their properties in terms of their inessential (optional, contingent) relations to one

another.58

This third strategy, too, is bound to fail. Each thing is supposed to be the determinate thing

it is, and so distinguished from other things. But what makes it determinately different is just its

properties, now conceived as its relation to other things. So those relations, the way it

exclusively differs from others, are essential to its being the thing it is.

The thing is posited as being for itself, or as the absolute negation of all otherness, therefore as

purely self-related negation; but…the Thing has its essential being in another Thing.59

The atomistic conception of identity as involving no essential differences must be abandoned.58 In [123] and [124].59 [126].

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Rehearsing the lessons of the three experiences of perceiving consciousness, Hegel says that

it begins when

From sensuous being it turned into a universal…but a universal afflicted with an opposition; for

this reason the universality splits into the extremes of singular individuality and universality…

These pure determinatenesses…are only a ‘being-for-self’ that is burdened with a ‘being-for-

another.’60

What is required is a shift in understanding the relations between “the universality which is

opposed to and conditioned by singular being”:

But these two contradictory extremes are not merely alongside each other but in a single unity,

or, in other words, the defining characteristic common to both, viz. ‘being-for-self’ is burdened

with opposition generally…61

When fully articulated, the result is the complex structure of particulars and universals involving

ten different sorts of negation or difference expounded in sections V and VI above. The holistic

way in which the intricately interrelated items in it must be understood in terms of their relations

to one another is what Hegel calls “understanding,” and the objects understood he calls “forces.”

They are the topic of the final chapter of the Conciousness section of the Phenomenology, called

“Force and Understanding.”

60 [129].61 [130].

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A Spirit of Trust: A Semantic Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology

Chapter Six:

Theoretical Objects and the Supersensible World

I

The overall lesson of Perception is that the determinate content of perceptual experience is

unintelligible if we treat it as immediate in the sense that the structural elements articulating it

are independent of one another. We can make sense of the category of properties only in a

context that includes objects, and vice versa. And besides these intercategorial dependences,

there are intracategorial ones. Understanding a property as determinate requires contrasting it

with other properties, with which it is materially incompatible (in that no one object can

simultaneously exhibit both). And understanding an object as determinate requires contrasting it,

as the bearer of a set of merely “indifferently different” properties62 with other possible objects,

exhibiting incompatible properties. Properties and objects can each be thought of as structural

principles of assimilation, or of differentiation. On the one hand, properties are universals,

which unify their diverse particular instances—the objects that they characterize. On the other

hand, objects can be thought of as unifying the various properties that characterize them, and

which in turn differentiate one object from another. So in learning about the intercategorial

dependence of properties on objects and objects on properties, and the way the identity of

properties depends on their relations to strongly contrasting properties, and the derivative way

the identity of objects depends on their relations to other possible objects, perceiving

consciousness learns that determinateness of empirical content is intelligible only if its unifying

and its distinguishing elements are conceived as reciprocally dependent aspects of a single

structure. As Hegel puts the point in the hyperbolic language characteristic of his ‘speculative’

concept of identity: “the absolute antithesis [Gegensatz] is posited as a self-identical essence.”63

Determinate contentfulness begins to appear as a kind of differentiated identity, as identity in

difference.62 [M123].63 [M134].

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A metaconception of determinate empirical content that incorporates this lesson (even implicitly)

is not called ‘perception’, but ‘thought’.64 It understands its object, for the first time in our

exposition, as specifically conceptual content. The conception of determinate conceptual content

that Hegel discusses in the third and final section of Consciousness is inadequate, however. It is

still deformed by a residual commitment to conceiving different aspects of the articulation of that

content as independent of one another. This conception, which Hegel denominates

‘understanding’ [Verstand], has only an implicit grasp of its topic, the Concept. By the end of

this section, Hegel will have rehearsed a developmental trajectory along which enough of its

features become explicit for the true nature of the Concept to appear—its character as sinfinites,

as Hegel will say.65

Verstand’s conception of the content of empirical cognition is, like those of sense certainty and

perception, marred by commitment to conceiving various essential aspects of such content as

intelligible independently of others. It nonetheless qualifies as a conception at the level of

thought—that is, as directed at content understood as conceptual—because it understands that

determinate negation and (so) mediation play essential roles in articulating that content (even

though the conceptual tools it permits itself are in principle not adequate to make those roles

explicit). We have seen that even the immediately (that is, responsively, noninferentially)

applicable universals of sense must be understood as essentially mediated in order to be

intelligible as determinately contentful. That is, material relations of incompatibility and

inference are essential elements of the articulation of the contents even of the universals of sense

applied immediately in perception. It follows that there are two ways in which one can become

aware of something as falling under a sense universal: immediately, as a direct perceptual

response to an environing situation, and mediately, as an indirect, inferential conclusion drawn

from some other judgment (perhaps itself the result of perception). Construals of the content of

empirical cognition that fall into the class Hegel calls “perception” restricted themselves to

sensuous universals because they understood the content of universals as immediate in a sense

64 [M132].65 I mark Hegel’s distinctive and idiosyncratic ‘speculative’, qualitative, use of ‘infinite’, by putting it in special quotation marks, to distinguish it from the ordinary and mathematical, quantitative notion of the infinite, just as I mark off his special use of ‘identity’. The superscripts in sinfinites and sidentitys can be thought of as mnemonic for ‘speculative’. (But see also Making It Explicit, pp545-547 and pp.588-590.

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that limits their applicability to the direct, responsive, perceptual case. They admit only

universals we can noninferentially be aware of things as characterizing things, because the only

authority they acknowledge as capable of entitling us to apply universals is the authority of

immediacy. But this turned out to be a mistake. The authority of immediacy is intelligible as

determinately contentful only as part of a larger scheme, that involves also the authority of

mediated (inferential) applications of concepts. The authority of immediacy is not independent

of the authority of mediation.

This realization removes the rationale for the restriction to universals of sense. It opens up the

possibility that the content of empirical knowledge is articulated also by universals that are, as it

were, only mediately immediate—in the sense that the only way their application can be

authorized is by an inferential move from the applicability (perhaps immediate) of some other

concept. The metaconception Hegel calls ‘understanding’ can, as that he calls ‘perception’ could

not, countenance theoretical, as well as observational concepts. As Hegel puts it, we can move

from considering only sensuously conditioned universals, to considering (sensuously)

unconditioned ones.66 I say that this possibility is “opened up”, and that we “can” make the

move in question, rather than that we are obliged at this point to consider purely theoretical

objects. For realizing the necessity of broadly inferential articulation of concepts—and so the

possibility of objects being inferentially, and not just noninferentially, accessible—is entirely

compatible with all concepts having noninferential uses, and so being in principle observable. It

is just that not all applications of those concepts can be noninferential. So sometimes one might

observe that something was red, and sometimes one might infer that fact from the observation

that it was crimson.

Although I believe (following Sellars) that the notion of an autonomous system of discursive

practices restricted to observational concepts is intelligible, Hegel may not. The important point

is that one cannot intelligibly describe a set of discursive practices in which all the moves are

66 cf. [M129], rehearsing this movement:From a sensuous being it turned into a universal; but this universal, since it originates in the sensuous, is essentially conditioned by it, and hence is not a truly self-identical universality; for this reason the universality splits into the extremes of singular individuality and universality, into the One of the properties and the Also of the ‘free matters’…Since, however, both are essentially in a single unity, what we now have is unconditioned absolute universality, and consciousness here for the first time truly enters the realm of the Understanding.

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noninferential observations, with no inferential moves. It may seem crucial to settle this issue, in

order to understand the nature of the move from the metaconception of perception to that of

understanding. But I think it is less important than it appears to be. In the next chapter I’ll

discuss the sort of retrospective expressive HnecessityH that Hegel takes these transitions to have:

roughly, that only by making these moves can one see explicitly what turns out all along to have

been implicit in more primitive conceptions. They are necessary only in the sense that it can be

seen retrospectively, from the vantage point of one who has an explicit grasp on what is at issue,

that any other move would have failed to be expressively progressive. For now we need only be

concerned with the ideas Hegel is putting on the table in this section of the Phenomenology.

The paradigm of a theoretical object for Hegel is Newtonian force (a point underlined for him by

the role that notion plays in the rationally reconstructed dynamics of Kant’s Metaphysical

Foundations of Natural Science). Forces are only indirectly accessible to us, via inferences from

observed accelerations. But in this sense, mass is as much a theoretical concept as force.

Although he couches his discussion exclusively in terms of forces, in Force and Understanding

Hegel is addressing the whole genus of theoretically postulated objects, not just this particular

paradigmatic species. His overall topic is how we should think about the process of inferentially

finding out about how things are, which has turned out to be implicitly involved in and

presupposed by the possibility of noninferentially (perceptually, immediately) finding out about

how things are. It is important in reading this bit of the book to keep this topic firmly in mind,

and not to be distracted or misled by the literary trope in which Hegel couches his discussion—

what might be called “specific (conceptual) synechdoche”, in which a species is allowed to stand

for its genus.67

II

Sometimes facts (e.g. that an object has an observable property) that are immediately available to

a knower through perception can serve as premises from which to draw conclusions about facts

that are not immediately available. One might infer from the apple’s being red that it is ripe, and

67 As in later chapters it is important to understand the nature of the conceptual allegories that Hegel employs. (Though no doubt some readers will suspect me of being one of those “that with allegorie’s curious frame/Of other’s children changelings use to make,” as Philip Sidney says in Arcadia.)

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so would taste sweet. Though the apple’s sweetness is something one also could find out about

perceptually, one need not, if there is an inferential route leading to it from another perceived

fact. One of the most fruitful cognitive strategies—practiced formally already by the Greeks, and

culminating in modern science—has been exploiting this sort of inferential access by postulating

the existence of unobservables. These are objects and properties that are theoretical in the sense

of being cognitively accessible only by means of inferences drawn, ultimately, from what is

observable. What can we learn about reality, and about our knowledge of it, from the fact that

postulating theoretical entities that we cannot perceive is such a spectacularly successful strategy

for understanding what we can perceive? In Force and Understanding Hegel addresses himself

to this question, which has so greatly exercised twentieth century philosophers of science.

What has emerged from the discussion of Perception is a new way of thinking about immediacy.

Where we started out considering what is immediately given to us in perception as an object of

knowledge, we are now obliged to consider its role as a means by which we can come to know

about something that is not itself immediate. Instead of focusing on the noninferential process

from which it perceptual knowledge results, we focus on the inferences it supports: looking

downstream rather than upstream. Doing this is thinking of immediacy as mediating our access

to theoretical objects, by providing premises from which facts about them can be inferred. Since

they point beyond themselves inferentially, besides being whatever they are immediately,

noninferentially observable states of affairs serve also to manifest or reveal other states of affairs,

including theoretical ones, which are only accessible by means of such inferential mediation.

This is the relation Hegel talks about under the heading of “force and its expression” [Äußerung]

—the relation, namely, between a theoretical object and its observable manifestations.

Expression, making the implicit explicit, is one of Hegel’s master concepts. It is (among other

things) his preferred way of thinking about the relation between what we are thinking about and

what we think about it. Knowledge is what happens when what things are in themselves (“an

sich”, that is, implicitly) is expressed, made explicit for someone. Hegel develops this trope—a

staple of German romanticism, under the influence of Herder—to elaborate the relationship

between truth and certainty (his terms for the objective and subjective poles of consciousness).

His detailed inferentialist understanding of expression is his candidate replacement for the

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dominant enlightenment idiom of representation. (In the next chapter [INTROREP] we’ll see

how he reconstructs the latter notion by means of the former.) The rationalist emphasis on the

broadly inferential articulation (by determinate negation and mediation) of what counts as an

explicit expression marks his decisive divergence from and transformation of that romantic

heritage.

The discussion of the expression of force is the first official appearance of this idea in the

Phenomenology. The conception of expression involved is inevitably crude and primitive—a

seed we will watch grow and flower in what is to come. One important way in which this first

notion of expression is crude (Hegel would say “one-sided”) is that it assimilates the explicit to

the immediate, to what is merely overt. On the other hand, this initial rendering of expression is

oriented by the idea of inferential access to how things are, and so qualifies as a conception of

empirical knowledge at the level of thought. So it contains the germ of a more adequate

understanding.

The first development of the crudest conception consists in the move to considering

“independent opposing forces” and then “reciprocal action or the play of forces”.68 It is the

dawning appreciation of the holistic nature of the inferences that connect us to theoretical

objects. Since our only access to these objects is by means of their inferential connections, our

grasp of the content of one theoretical claim cannot be independent of our grasp of other contents

that stand to it in material inferential and incompatibility relations. Hegel is here rehearsing

difficulties and insights that arise in the course of developing more adequate conceptual tools for

thinking about the identity of each thought (thinkable content) as essentially, and not just

accidentally, involving relations to thoughts other than or different from it. This is the

expressive task of the logical concepts that articulate his Identitätsphilosophie, his account of

identity-in-difference.

We see in this discussion more pathological manifestations of the attempt to construe various

elements of a conception of the thought contents that present theoretical objects as simply 68 Force and its expression are discussed at [M136-7]. Before going on to the crucial discussion of the significance of the play of forces (at [M141-2]), he discusses supposedly independent opposing forces (at [M138-40]) as ‘soliciting’ of and ‘solicited’ by each other. By the end of the Phenomenology, we are supposed to be able to see such ‘solicitation’ as a crude natural reflection of recognition relations among self-conscious individuals.

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independent of one another. The first lesson is that force ought to be on the one hand

distinguished from or contrasted with its expressions or manifestations, and on the other hand

that it can be understood or identified only in terms of such expressions or manifestations. So

the fact that forces are only mediately (inferentially) accessible to us, while their expressions can

be immediately (noninferentially) accessible to us must not be taken to imply that these two sorts

of thing are intelligible independently of one another. If they are not, then we need a way of

thinking of the unity or identity of a single Force69 (theoretical object) as essentially involving a

diversity of possible (observable) manifestations. Perception ended with a discussion of the

suggestion that the unity of an object might be reconciled with the diversity of its properties by

seeing the properties as consisting in its relations to other objects. This is the idea that (in a

phrase it is useful to keep in mind in understanding Hegel’s idiom in general): “Difference is

nothing else than being for another.”70

So we consider what happens when the restriction to observable objects is removed—that is,

when the idea is generalized from applying to objects of perception to objects of thought in

general. The result is the thought that it is the relation of one Force to others that is responsible

for the diversity of its manifestations. Of course, if the thought of one theoretical state of affairs

is unintelligible apart from its relations to observables (which underwrite our inferential access to

it), and those relations to observables (its manifestations) are unintelligible apart from

consideration of its relations to other unobservables71, then the thought of one theoretical state of

affairs will in general essentially involve its relations to other theoretical states of affairs. That

is, we cannot think of the manifestations as the result of interactions among “wholly independent

forces.”72 The essential interdependence of the various theoretical postulates that a theory

endorses has emerged: the inferences that lead to one theoretical claim typically require other

theoretical claims as premises. For example, the inference from the movement of the needle on

voltmeter to the presence of a current with a certain voltage in the test wire depends upon all

69 Following Miller, I will capitalize ‘Force’ as a reminder of Hegel’s special, broader use of this term.70 [M136]. This thought establishes a crucial terminological link between talk of difference (in the sense of the strong material contrast that is determinate negation), which articulates Hegel’s notion of content, and talk of being for another. The latter is the genus whose most developed species is consciousness: the relation of identity-in-difference between certainty and truth, our knowing and what is known, the contents of our thoughts and the facts they (in favored cases) are knowings of.71 Or, of course, observables. But the general case must include objects of thought, and not just of perception, as capable of ‘eliciting’ observable manifestations from theoretical objects.72 [M138].

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sorts of assumptions about the functioning of the measuring device in the actual circumstances,

not all of which are restricted to claims about observable states of affairs.73

The conception of what is immediately observable as the joint manifestation of a “play of forces”

accordingly incorporates a certain sort of holism about the theoretically postulated entities:

“their essence consists simply and solely in this, that each is solely through the other.”74 Hegel

uses an explicitly inferential idiom, whose home language game is discussion of syllogisms, to

express the holistic nature of the essentially interacting theoretical entities. The forces “do not

exist as extremes which retain for themselves something fixed and substantial, transmitting to

one another in their middle term and in their contact a merely external property; on the contrary,

what they are, they are only in this middle term and this contact.”75 The nature of their

determinateness precludes understanding the ‘forces’ as independent of one another. The

conceptual challenge is to understand what sort of unity each of them can have, given that it is

the determinate entity that it is only in virtue of the diversity of its relation to other determinately

different unities of the same sort. Put telegraphically, we need a coherent way of talking about

determinate identity as essentially constituted by determinate difference.

Structurally, the difference is the same as at the end of Perception. There is no problem

understanding the determinate identity of one individual as consisting in the determinate

diversity of its relation to other individuals, if we are permitted to take their determinate

identities for granted in advance. But if we can not take it for granted, because their determinate

identities (what distinguishes them one from another) are taken likewise to consist in their

relations to others similarly conceived, then the whole scheme is threatened by incoherence. The

strategy amounts to seeing each individual as ‘borrowing’ its moment of diversity from

73 The ubiquity of this sort of dependence the second great difficulty with the sort of phenomenalism that understands statements about how things are as theoretical claims, which must be inferred from claims about how things merely seem. The first difficulty is that claims about how things seem do not form an autonomous discursive stratum—they do not involve a set of concepts one could master though one had mastered as yet no claims about how things actually are (cf. Sellars’ "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" [op. cit.]). But, in addition, inferences from how things seem to how things actually are—with their myriad implications for how things would seem if…—in general depend on further claims about how things are. This difficulty proved insurmountable for projects such as that of C. I. Lewis in Mind and the World Order. If I seem to go out the door of my office, it will seem to me as if….—what? What follows depends on whether I actually go out the door of my office, or am merely imagining or dreaming (cf. Sellars “Phenomenalism” [ref.]). 74 [M141].75 [M141].

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(depending for the intelligibility of its determinate difference from others upon) that of other,

different, individuals, which stand in diverse determinate relations to the first. But this only

works if we can already make sense of this feature of those others. If no identity or difference,

no individual or its relation to others, is intelligible prior to any other, how is any identity or

difference constituted? “They have, thus, in fact, no substances of their own that might support

and maintain them.”76 It seems that something determinate needs to be fixed first, to get the

whole scheme off the ground. This is what one might have hoped that immediacy would supply.

(Thus Quine conceived his holistic web of belief as ‘anchored’ at its edges by perceptual

experience, construed as deriving its content noninferentially, from the pattern of stimulations of

sensory surfaces that elicit them.) But this is just what the discovery of the essential, and not just

accidental, inferential articulation of the determinate content of the immediate deliverances of

sense debars. (It is why acknowledging the “theory-ladenness of observation”77 seems to

threaten to rob the whole web of determinate constraint by how things anyway are.)

This situation might be illuminated by comparing it to a later conceptual pickle that is in some

ways structurally analogous (and not historically unrelated) to the one Hegel sees looming here.

It is a difficulty that plagued various late nineteenth century British idealists (a paradigm would

be H.H. Joachim, a prominent admirer of and commentator on Spinoza, but F.H. Bradley had

similar problems). They were tempted by the view that what there really is, the Absolute, is an

indissoluble unity. But certainly that is not how things appear to us. The explanation that

seemed appropriate was that while in some sense the Absolute can understand itself as a unity,

this is not easily, certainly not immediately, achievable by us. We are only finite beings, after

all, and so can only be expected to comprehend fragments of the Absolute, or the Absolute as

fragmented. The whole is simply too rich for our poor capabilities. It is only by splitting it up,

abstracting bits from it, treating it as a collection of related, distinct, finite elements, that we are

capable of comprehending it at all. This is just a consequence of our incapacity. It is in relation

76 [M141].77 As remarked above, the point can be made even for languages so primitive as to lack purely theoretical terms, since all that it depends on is the point that any episode counts as potentially conceptually significant only in terms of its inferential articulation (the capacity to serve as premises and conclusions of inferences). But there are no actual languages like this, so philosophers of science, like Hegel in the transition from Perception to Force and Understanding, have a justification for concerning themselves with the relation between observation and theory, and not just that between noninferential and inferential applications of concepts—so long as it is kept in mind that the former distinction rests on the latter one.

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to an 'other', namely our finite minds, that the One appears as Many. But what is the status of the

finite chunks of the Absolute that are responsible for this appearance? If they are real then the

Absolute is not One and all-encompassing, but contains within it the diversity of finite minds,

really distinct from one another and distinguishable from the rest of It. And if they are not real,

how can they explain the appearance of division and diversity? It does not seem useful to argue

that they too are merely the products of finite minds trying vainly to comprehend the One—that

just sets off a regress.78

I do not think that in our own day we have very good idioms for thinking about the theoretical

problems raised by conceptual holism. They arise whenever we are tempted to think of concepts

or beliefs as inferentially articulated networks in which each node is identified and individuated,

determinately contentful and distinguished from the others solely by its relation to them. I take it

that Hegel’s speculative logic of determinate identity is a theory of concepts and the conceptual

that is designed to address this difficulty. So insofar as that metatheory can itself be made

intelligible, we potentially have something to learn from him on this score. More particularly, I

think he has a sophisticated account of how immediacy makes the determinate contentfulness of

such a thoroughly mediated (inferentially articulated) structure intelligible. On the one hand, the

nodes of the network—conceptually articulated commitments of one sort or another (applications

of concepts in judgment and action)—are tagged by performances (both speech acts and

nonverbal intentional actions) that can be held fast socially, in a public space. (In effect, they are

tagged by sentences, since “Language is the existence of Spirit.”79) On the other hand, more is

immediately perceptible than what knowers and agents publicly do. Perceptual observations of

things in general are not merely immediate, but they are noninferentially elicited, and so provide

a crucial friction for the inferentially articulated Concept: a kind of constraint without which the

determinate contentfulness of ordinary empirical concepts would be unintelligible. The concepts

that are the medium of thought can be understood as determinately contentful, in spite of their

holistic interrelations, only in virtue of the contribution of particularity to the content of these

universals. As urged in the previous chapter [[SPTHI]], the relation between them is to be

78 It is important to be clear that I am not claiming that this is Hegel’s problem—in spite of the debt that these figures owe to him. I invoke it only as an illustration of the general structure of the difficulty about a thoroughgoing holism.79 [M652]

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modeled on that of reciprocal recognition. But this is to anticipate; we are still assembling the

raw materials needed for the telling of that story [in the next two chapters].80

III

Hegel is considering, then, attempts to understand the determinateness of a theoretical object in

terms of its two crucial structural aspects: the moment of unity, in virtue of which it one

substance, to which can be assigned responsibility for its various actual manifestations, and the

moment of diversity, by which that unity is as it were dissolved into the diversity of its relations

to other theoretical objects, which result in its immediate manifestations. He identifies the

second, holistic, element as making Force visible as an object of thought: theoretical objects as

distinctively inferentially accessible, and so as essentially conceptualized in a stronger sense than

merely perceivable objects.

This actual Force, when thought of as free from its expression and as being for itself, is Force

driven back into itself; but in fact this determinateness, as we have found, is itself only a moment

of Force’s expression. Thus the truth of Force remains only the thought of it; the moments of its

actuality, their substances and their movement, collapse unresistingly back into an

undifferentiated unity, a unity which is not Force driven back into itself (for this is itself only

such a moment), but its Concept qua Concept.81

…this second is determined as the negative of Force that is objective to sense; it is force in the

form of its true essence in which it exists only as an object for the Understanding. The first

universal would be Force driven back into itself, or Force as Substance; the second, however,

is…the Concept of Force qua Concept.82

80 Notice that according to the account presented thus far, Hegel’s treatment of Consciousness in the Phenomenology begins by arguing against the Myth of the Given that articulation by concepts or universals is an essential feature of cognition, and ends by considering the threat posed by a pure coherentism: the possibility that holistically related thoughts would end up without determinate content, spinning frictionless in a void, in a way that can be avoided only by assigning also an essential role to particularity and immediacy. Contemporary readers will recognize these as the two possibilities in terms of which McDowell diagnoses the ills of modern philosophy, in Mind and World [Harvard University Press, 1994]. 81 [M141]. I have used ‘Concept’ for Miller’s ‘Notion’ as a translation of Hegel’s ‘Begriff’, but continue his practice of capitalizing it, to distinguish it from empirical or determinate concepts such as red and mass.82 [M142].

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Thinking of Force as Concept is thinking of theoretical objects as objects of the understanding—

as raising the conceptual difficulties presented by the need for holistic principles of identification

and individuation presented by their being only inferentially accessible.83

The conceptual resources Hegel inherited were not much use in making sense of the holistic

character concepts must be taken to have once their broadly inferential articulation (the material

inferential and incompatibility relations Hegel discusses under the headings of “mediation” and

“determinate negation”) is taken to be essential to their identity and individuation. This

expressive impoverishment then carries over to the objective correlates (facts about theoretical

objects) expressed by such holistically related thoughts. The best logic Hegel had available to

him was that of Kant. At the center of Kant’s enterprise is his displacing of epistemological

questions, paradigmatically those in the vicinity of skepticism about the truth or justification of

knowledge claims, in favor of broadly semantic ones. He set himself the task of making explicit

the background against which alone it makes sense to take something to be a representation or a

putative act of awareness of something—to understand it as so much as purporting to be about

some object, in the normative sense of answering to it for its correctness, in a distinctive sense it

is the business of a truly critical theory of our cognitive faculties to explicate. He assigned this

enterprise of understanding the content of knowledge claims to logic, in a sense he extended for

that purpose: what he called ‘transcendental’ logic, as opposed to traditional formal or ‘general’ 83 This is not (as it might appear) a shift in concern from the objective side of truth (in the presystematic representational terms native to Verstand, of what is sout there, to be representeds) to the subjective side of certainty (of our srepresentings, in heres). The topic is still what is known empirically, the objects of understanding and thought. Rather, we are to follow out some of the consequences of them being understandable, thinkable—that is, inferentially (and only inferentially) accessible—objects. Hegel does not here make a move that it is natural for us to consider at this point: distinguishing between sense and reference. Theoretical thoughts and claims (in the sense of the content that is thought or claimed) may well be essentially inferentially articulated, so identifiable and distinguishable only holistically, as part of a whole system of such things. But, we want to say, it by no means follows that the objects of our thoughts and claims, what we are thinking and talking about, are correspondingly essentially, and not merely contingently, related to one another. Senses might be holistic (“internally related” to each other, as the nineteenth century British idealists said) without this precluding an atomistic understanding of their referents. Understanding Hegel’s conception of the relation between Vernunft and Verstand requires keeping this deep and important issue in mind. Hegel has not at this point put on the table the conceptual resources needed for his reconstruction of the relation between what is represented and the contents of representings of it—what one needs to be entitled to appeal to a sense/reference distinction in this way. When he does, his notions will work somewhat differently. It would be premature at this point to convict Hegel of a confusion, before we see where he is going.Notice that it is not obviously an obligatory consequence of distinguishing between, on the one hand, the concepts hammer and nail, and hammers and nails on the other, that one conclude that while the concept mutually presuppose and involve one another, the actual hammers and nails do not stand in any corresponding relationships. Of course, these chunks of wood and metal do not, but the hammers and nails that occupy the same spatio-temporal regions may require thinking about somewhat differently. [Promissory Note: Must return to this point in INTROREP.]

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logic. But from Hegel’s point of view, Kant did not extend the notion of logic far enough. For

Kant’s fundamental insight into the normative character of conceptually articulated cognitive

content is expressed in his privileging of judgments, which are taken to be the fundamental units

of cognition because they are the minimal units for which the knower can count as responsible.

This much Hegel properly sees as pure advance over the logical tradition, which had started with

sub-judgmental singular and general terms, whose representational semantic properties were

simply and uncritically assumed to be unproblematic. But from the holistic line of thought he

has been led to by thinking about the conditions of the intelligibility of the determinateness of

conceptual content, he concludes that the inferential commitments implicit in the concepts

applied in judgment (and action) should be treated on a par with the doxastic commitments made

explicit in judgment. Both sorts of commitment are essential to the articulation of the contents of

determinate empirical concepts (a category that for both Kant and Hegel extends beyond

concepts that have noninferential—i.e. ‘intuitive’, ‘immediate’—circumstances of appropriate

application, to embrace also theoretical concepts).

By contrast, for Kant, proprieties of inference cannot be underwritten by the contents of the

concepts involved; all good inferences are good in virtue of their form alone. He allows (by

contrast to Leibniz) synthetic judgments, but (following Leibniz) not synthetic (i.e. material)

inferences. In his Logic, Kant defines analytic propositions as those “whose certainty rests on

identity of concepts (of the predicate with the notion of the subject).”84 Elsewhere the point is

put in terms of ‘containment’ of one concept in another—a notion Kant thinks of as a sort of

generalization of identity. Synthetic propositions, “whose truth is not grounded on identity of

concepts,” turn rather on what falls under a concept, its extension rather than its intension.85 In

Kant’s traditional usage, metal is contained in gold, while my wedding ring falls or is contained

under it. Synthetic judgments relate different concepts. One way of putting Hegel’s thought

here is that the determinate contentfulness of concepts that is expressed in their material

inferential and incompatibility relations (relations of determinate negation and mediation) to

other such concepts cannot be compounded (as Kant attempts to do) by combining independent

judgments that express on the one hand the identity, and on the other hand, the difference of the

84 Logic [ref.][go to Cambridge version], p. 117, §36.85 Quoted phrase is also from §36. The distinction between the intension and the extension (Inhalt and Umfang) of a concept is at §8 (p. 102) ff..

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concepts involved in those broadly inferential relations. Indeed, for Kant, all good inferences are

underwritten solely by the identities of concepts (which determine what is contained in, but not

what is contained under them).

Kant’s treatment of multipremise inferences shows most clearly how he presents the inferences

that for Hegel articulate the determinate content of nonlogical concepts as compounds of

independent principles of identity and difference, in the form of analytic judgments expressing

the content of identical concepts, on the one hand, and synthetic judgments expressing the

relation between different concepts, on the other.

All conclusions are either immediate or mediate. An immediate conclusion (consequentia

immediata) is the deduction of one judgment from another without an intermediate judgment

(judicium intermedium). A conclusion is mediate if beside the concept contained in a judgment

one needs others to deduce a cognition from it.86

Mediate—that is, multipremise—inferences are syllogisms [Vernunftschluße].87 The principle of

all syllogisms, he says, is that what falls under one concept falls under whatever concepts are

contained in that concept.88 So although the minor premise in a syllogism such as

All gold is metal.

My wedding ring is gold.

My wedding ring is metal.

is a synthetic claim, relating different concepts by saying that the one falls under rather than is

contained in the other, the goodness (soundness) of the inference turns only on the implicit

identity of concepts made explicit in the statement concerning what is contained in what in the

major premise.89

86 §43 p. 120.87 Or the chains of syllogisms (definable entirely in terms of the identity of the concepts they involve, that constitute what Kant calls “rationcinatio polysyllogistica.” cf. §86,7. 88 “What stands under the condition of a rule stands also under the rule itself. [Note: The syllogism premises a general rule and a subsumption under its condition. One thereby cognizes the conclusion a priori not by itself but as conained in the general and as necessary under a certain condition.]” §57 of the Doctrine of Elements (p. 125).89 “The identity of concepts in analytic judgments can be either explicit [ausdrückliche] (explicita) or non-explicit [nicht-ausdrückliche] (implicita). In the former case analytic propositions are tautological. Note 1. Tautological propositions are virtualiter empty or void of consequences, for they are of no avail or use. Such is, for example, the tautological proposition Man is man. For if I know nothing else of man than that he is man, I know nothing else of him at all. Implicitly [implicite] identical propositions, on the contrary, are not void of consequences or fruitless, for they clarify the predicate which lay undeveloped [unentwickelt] (implicite) in the concept of the subject through development [Entwickelung] (explicatio).” [§37; p. 118] [I think this doctrine of Kant’s (and this way of expressing it) is of the utmost importance, not only for Hegel, but also for Frege. But that is a story for

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Hegel is after a new way of thinking about concepts as nodes in a holistic inferential network—

and so as having their identity consist (at least in part) in their relations to different concepts. He

needs a category of inference that is unintelligible in Kantian terms: synthetic, but underwritten

solely by relations among concepts. Material proprieties of inference, underwritten by the

contents of the concepts involved, are still conceptual, but not analytic. The apparatus Kant

supplies for discussing conceptual content and inference does not put one in a position to think

about concepts and inferences in this holistic way. It is inadequate from Hegel’s point of view in

three ways. First, Kant never allows that the correctness of multipremise inferences some of

whose premises are synthetic could reach back through the judgments involved as premises to

infect the contents of the concepts presented in the analytic judgments that also function as

premises in those inferences. The concepts deployed in such inferences are “ready made”, as far

as inferences are concerned. They serve as independent raw materials for inference: building

blocks that are unaffected by the conclusions they can be combined in judgments collectively to

yield inferentially. Second, Kant consequently does not conceive of the sort of content concepts

antecedently have as essentially involving the potential for development through such feedback

from the material inferences—that is, for Kant, multipremise inferences involving synthetic

judgments—they turn out to be involved in. Thus he does not see such inferences as themselves

licensed by the contents of the concepts that articulate their premises and conclusions. That is,

he does not see material inferences—those whose goodness depends on the contents of the

particular concepts involved, rather than just on the form of the inference (and so on the form

rather than the content of the judgments that are its premises)—as underwritten by the concepts

involved.

Finally, as a result Kant cannot understand the process of determining the contents of concepts,

making them (more) determinate. Addressing this issue is one of the primary tasks of Hegel’s

replacement of talk of containment by talk of expression: making explicit what is (in the context

of all of the other concepts and judgments) implicit in a particular concept. For Hegel the

contingency expressed by synthetic judgments is incorporated into the (therefore) determinate

necessity of concepts (in Kantian terms, into the rules for making judgments) by the joint

another occasion entirely.]

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evolution of doxastic commitments (judgments) and inferential commitments (concepts) that

results from extracting hitherto implicit inferential consequences of the judgments and concepts

one finds oneself with, and adjusting both sorts of commitments in the light of the materially

incompatible commitments that emerge as their consequences. In the same way the deliverances

of immediacy (all of which will be synthetic judgments in Kant’s sense) are incorporated into the

mediated structure of concepts. Talk about the goodness of inferences and talk about the

contents of concepts are two sides of one coin. But what follows from what depends on what

else is true. So the contents of concepts must not be thought of as settled independently and in

advance of consideration of actual judgments and inferences they figure in.

Hegel thinks that adequate conceptions of form and content, of identity and difference, cannot be

adumbrated in advance of consideration of their role in explicating features of this evolutionary

developmental process. Concepts are not to be thought of (as for Kant) just in terms of their role

in judgment. First, we must think of their inferential potential. Second, we must think of that

potential as actualized by combining those inferential commitments with doxastic commitments

(judgments, including synthetic ones) in multipremise inferences that may yield discordant

(materially incompatible) conclusions. Then we must think of the broadly inferential

commitments implicit in concepts as revisable in the light of those conclusions they actually lead

us to, in concert with the doxastic commitments we actually undertake. Finally, we must identify

concepts with the second order potential to develop (in the context of other concepts and

judgments) their contents by this process. At this point we will be thinking of concepts as having

Hegelian negativity as their form: as having their determinate identity consisting in the way they

develop by giving rise to differences. The developing whole of holistically related inferential

and doxastic commitments, concepts and judgments, Hegel calls “the Concept”. In calling it

“infinite” at the end of his discussion of Force and Understanding, he is marking the conceptual

shift he is urging from the atomistic Kantian picture of antecedently determinate concepts, each

one what it is independently of its relation to any different concepts, only externally related to

those others in synthetic judgments whose truth is irrelevant to the content of any concepts. It is

the shift from conceiving concepts according to the categories of Verstand to using those of

Vernunft.

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IV

Until that shift is made, the holistic character of the theoretical concepts that provide inferential

cognitive access to theoretical objects is more or less unintelligible. Nonetheless, since the

Concept is always already implicit in any use of concepts whatsoever, partial progress is possible

along the expressive road that leads to an explicit grasp of it. Consideration of the “play of

forces” has shown the instability of an approach that treats the concept of each ‘force’

(theoretical object) as independent of that of any other, when combined first with an

acknowledgment that the concept of a force is essentially, and not just accidentally, related to the

concept of its expression (on the basis of which alone we have inferential access to the force

itself), and second with the realization that what is expressed is always a holistic system of

interacting forces. The practical effect of this holism is that the only way to understand the

forces that had been treated as having identities independent of their relations to each other is to

focus instead precisely on those relations—for the nodes in the network are what they are only in

virtue of their relations to each other. Those relations are the laws that determine how forces

interact to produce their expressions: the laws that determine how theoretical objects interact to

produce observable manifestations.

Hegel summarizes this development:

In this way there vanishes completely all distinction of separate, mutually contrasted Forces,

which were supposed to be present in this movement…Thus there is neither Force, nor the act of

soliciting or being solicited, nor the determinateness of being a stable medium and unity

reflected into itself, there is neither something existing singly by itself, nor are there diverse

antitheses; on the contrary, what there is in this absolute flux is only difference as a universal

difference, or as a difference into which the many antitheses have been resolved. This difference

as a universal difference, is consequently the simple element in the play of Forces itself and what

is true in it. It is the law of Force.90

By ‘law’ Hegel means what Kant meant: a rule that has objective validity. A rule unifies a

diverse set of instances, by applying to all of them. So we are now to look at the rules that relate

theoretical objects to each other and to their observable expressions. And for present purposes,

90 [M148].

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to say that the rule is objectively valid is just to say that the objects really conform to the law

(behave as it says they must), as opposed to expressing just our subjective view of them. As the

element of unity within the diversity that is the expression of the play of forces, law is “the stable

image of unstable appearance.”91 Laws are what is “true in” the play of forces because they

express the regularities that support the inferences from the observable to the theoretical, in

virtue of which we can know anything at all about the latter.

The essence of the play of forces now appears in the form of the objective rules that govern it.

Three features of these laws merit mention. First, as rules, they are general: they apply to many

actual and possible instances. Second, they are conditional or consequential: they say that if a

specified condition is satisfied, then a consequence of a definite sort will occur. This is to say

that the laws codify inferences. Third, the laws specify the ways in which the occurrence of one

theoretical state of affairs can (in context) necessitate the occurrence of another: they have a

modal force. This is to say that they do not just specify what is in fact the case, but rather what

would happen, or must happen if a state of affairs of certain kind were to occur. This last is a

feature of laws that reflects the character of the counterfactual inferences they must support. For

the inferential commitments that articulate the contents of both observable and theoretical

concepts are not restricted to those whose premises are judgments that express my doxastic

commitments. They underwrite my concluding that if the meter needle had moved to the right,

there would have been a higher voltage in the test wire, and vice versa.

The lawlikeness, or lawfulness, of the consequential relations among kinds of theoretical states

of affairs, which Hegel is discussing in the middle of Force and Understanding, is the correlate

on the side of truth of the way one judgment entails another inferentially, on the side of certainty.

Hegel here puts on the table, without much in the way of argument, Kant’s fundamental claim

that necessity is an essential structure of empirical consciousness. This is the idea that there is an

internal connection between the way the modal rulishness of concepts involves commitments

that go beyond the this-here-now and what it is for them to have content in the sense of

intentional purport: to be about objects, in the sense of answering to them for the correctness of

their applications to particulars in judgment. Norms of thought and laws of nature are two

91 [M149].

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expressions of the fact that one commitment may be inferentially implicit in another. We are not

yet in a position to lay out the relations between these two aspects of consciousness: truth and

certainty, the objective and the subjective. That topic is first addressed in the next chapter.92

We can think about the various conceptual points that have been made in the discussion of

Consciousness in terms of the kinds of logical vocabulary that have been discovered to be

necessary to make explicit what is implicit in ordinary empirical knowledge claims. Besides the

demonstratives, with which we began as the basic way of trying to say what is meant in

immediate experience, we discovered that we need also anaphoric pronouns, to make it possible

to hold onto and recollect what is indicated by the demonstratives: to make what is presented

available for inference. Singular terms, predicates, and negation then turned out to be needed to

articulate the propositional content of simple observations. It now emerges that quantifiers (for

generality), conditionals (for the consequential element), and modal operators (for necessity)

would be needed as well, to make explicit the inferential connections that relate observational

and theoretical concepts—that is, to state laws.

The focus is now on the features of things that underwrite inferences: on the connections among

the facts (and possible states of affairs) presented in judgments, rather than on those facts

themselves. Although this realization represents real metatheoretical progress, from Hegel’s

point of view the notion of law is fatally infected by its expressibility in the form of judgments.

A law, as statable, is a kind of superfact. As a result, the concept of law still incorporates a

conception of the determinateness of conceptual contents that is structured by categories of

independence. No judgment, including one that states a law, can be thought of as simply true or

false, so long as the concepts it employs are defective. But they will be inadequate so long as

they contain the potential, when properly applied in concert with others to which they are

inferentially related, to lead in empirical circumstances to incompatible judgments. But that

holistic potential is not a merely regrettable, because dispensable, feature of the employment of

empirical concepts. For Hegel, as we are aiming to put ourselves in a position to see, that

residual ‘negativity’ of such concepts not only provides the normative motor for conceptual and

doxastic change, and thereby the mechanism whereby immediacy and contingency are

92 [[INTROREP]]

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incorporated into concepts—mediated and given (made to have) the form of necessity—but is

what determines the content of such concepts, and so constitutes their determinateness.

So statable rules, even lawlike claims that codify proprieties of inference, are the wrong sort of

unit to look to for a solution to the unity-in-difference problem raised by acknowledgment of the

essential contribution made by inferential relations to other concepts in the constitution of the

content of one concept. For such rules or laws still presuppose, rather than articulate the nature

and conditions of the intelligibility of, the determinately contentful concepts in terms of which

they are formulated. As Hegel sees it, Kant has not told us how thinking of a concept as a rule

helps us understand how it unifies the diversity of particulars that falls under that universal. And

it is no help with that general problem to go on, as Kant does, to point out that rules can be

expressed as hypothetical judgments (so explicitly incorporating inferential commitments),

relating a consequence to the satisfaction of some antecedent conditions. (Recall the remarks

about he principle underlying syllogistic reasoning above.) For such explicit rules (e.g. “All gold

is metal,”) still presuppose the determinate contentfulness—the unity in difference—of the

concepts in terms of which they are couched.

This is the line of thought underlying Hegel’s rehearsal of the conceptual troubles with the

concept of law. The initial conception is that of the "calm realm of laws", a unified, eternal,

changeless order, contrasting in its repose with the motion of the diverse, ever-changing busy-

ness that is its actual manifestation (including what is observable). Structurally, this position

ought to be compared to the first conception of force, as confronting some sort of other that is

responsible for its expression. But this conception can be maintained no more than its

antecedent, in spite of the progress made by moving up a level to consider connections among

theoretical things, rather than just the things. Reflection on the role of the realm of laws reveals

that the concept of law is doing two different things, that two different conceptions of law are

really in play. (Compare the 'doubling' of forces into unifying force whose expression is

solicited and diversifying force that solicits that expression.) On the one hand law is the

principle of unity, of the unification of diverse appearances by exhibiting them as necessary, that

is as instances of a rule that necessitates them. This is law as the principle of lawlikeness, law as

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the abstract form of law.93 It is the principle that ultimately demands the unity of science, what

appears in Kant's philosophy of science as the ideal that science form a system, that all laws

eventually be capable of being exhibited as consequences of one law. Otherwise the realm of

law, which unifies diverse appearances, itself contains an irreducible contingency and diversity

of laws. On the other hand, laws must have determinate content, if they are to unify the restless

particularity of phenomena by exhibiting their connection as instances of rules. Explanation

cannot proceed according to empty or contentless laws, but requires determinateness and content.

For us, but not for the consciousness undergoing this experience, this splitting of the realm of

laws into a unifying principle or form and a set of diverse, determinately contentful particular

laws manifests the requirement that anything with determinate content acquire that content in

virtue of its role in a Notion, a system of relative identities constituted by their relative

differences. This principle arose for us already in the exposition of perceiving consciousness.

Law as unity must have diversity within itself if it is to have content. It cannot be purely diverse

if it is to be able to perform its unifying function. So law is seen to 'double' itself, just as force

did, when the idea of its confrontation with an 'other' is reflected upon, and its implicit

presuppositions made explicit.

The final movement of understanding consciousness operating according to the conception of

supersensuous, necessitating law unfolds the consequences of the demand for determinate

content in the laws appealed to by explanation. Explanation, which "condenses the law into

Force as the essence of the law," finding in things a "ground constituted exactly the same as the

law".94 With the concept of explanation necessity becomes not an abstract form or principle

divorced from the determinate contents of the laws that govern actual appearance, but rather a

feature inherent in those laws themselves. The question is how understanding consciousness is

to conceive the relation between the diversity in virtue of which a law can have a determinate

content and the unity that is its necessity, without which it would not be a law in the sense that

explanation requires. In making explicit this relation, understanding consciousness focuses on

the necessity, asserted by a determinate law, of the relation between the different terms that

express the content of the law. A law of motion relates the distinct concepts of space and time, a

fundamental law of chemistry relates temperature, pressure, and volume. And the lawlikeness of 93 [M150].94 [M154].

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the law, not now thought of as a separable component but as a feature of determinate laws,

consists in the necessity of the connection asserted between these terms. The question is how to

understand the necessary connection of genuinely distinct terms.

Consider Newton's fundamental law F=ma. Is this a definition, say of force? If it is, then we can

understand how it has the special status marked by calling it 'necessary'. But in that case the

distinctness of force from mass and acceleration is merely apparent. Explanation by appeal to

such an analytic 'law' then seems to be a cheat, a trick. For it just consists in exhibiting or

asserting the necessary interrelation of things that only appear to be distinct. On the other hand,

if this claim is not analytic, that is, if force is not being defined as the product of mass and

acceleration, then the explanatory invocation of this law would not be misleading, and we would

really learn something from it. But how in that case are we to understand the alleged necessity

of the law? What does it mean to say that things that are really distinct are also necessarily

related to one another? Here, of course, Hegel is asking Hume's question. How is it possible to

make sense of a natural necessity that does not collapse into uninformative analyticity or

empirical contingency? If consciousness does not respond as Hume does, but treats the necessity

as real, then two strategies become available, each of which turns out to be unsatisfactory as a

resolution of the problem of the relation of the Many and the One. On the first horn of the

dilemma, explanation appears as consciousness recognizing as necessary connections between

elements that are distinct only as consciousness has divided them up in appearance. Here once

again the supersensible in itself is conceived as a unity, with diversity being merely an

appearance for consciousness. On the second horn of the dilemma, it seems that the necessity

must be an importation of consciousness, a feature of its formulation of laws or what things are

for it, not something that could be considered as grounded in what things are in themselves.

Necessity resides in the Understanding, since the unification into a rule or law of what are in

themselves distinct things is its work. This latter is of course Kant's strategy.

These two approaches are unsatisfactory, however. In the end, they place too much of the

responsibility for the nature and existence of natural laws on the subject who uses them to

explain the happenings of appearance. As the conception of force errs on the side of objectifying

the movement of unity into diversity and its return to itself, so the conception of law errs on the

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side of subjectifying that movement. It is a primary explanatory criterion of adequacy that Hegel

places on his conception of the Notion that it be able to avoid these abstract extremes and explain

what they could not: necessary connections between the distinct determinate contents actually

present in appearance (both sensuously immediate appearance and purely mediated appearance,

and both the appearing and what appears). The incompatibilities between determinate contents

within the Notion include a modal component. Two claim-contents that are incompatible cannot

be true together, they don't just happen not to be. It is these incompatibilities (determinate

negations), and the inferential relations they determine (mediation) in virtue of which contents

are the contents that they are. But these incompatibilities are not simply stipulated, or

analytically true. They are features of the contents comprised by a system, the Notion, that has

produced them as the products of a course of concrete experience. That experience is the

movement of the system in response to the immediate (noninferential in the sense of being

commitments that are not the results of a process of inferring, not in the sense of being

articulated without reference to their inferential roles) deliverances of perception, what is

implicit in the world becoming explicit for consciousness through observation. And that

experience is the movement of the system in response to the purely mediate deliverances of

inference to the best explanation in response to the explicit confrontation of incompatibilities

among its commitments, what is implicit in the system of concrete contents becoming explicit

for consciousness through reflection. These meanings have not evolved and cannot be grasped

independently of what is taken to be true. The necessity of their holistic interconnections cannot

be reduced either to a reflection of an antecedent and independent objective reality, nor to a

reflection of an antecedent and independent subjective reality. Determinate diversity of content

and universal unity of necessity as its form are aspects of the Notion that cannot be understood

independently of one another.

V

Focusing on explanation brings explicitly into view a topic that has been in the background

throughout the discussion of theoretical entities: the distinction between appearance and reality.

Our object is thus from now on the syllogism [Schluß] which has for its extremes the inner being

of Things, and the Understanding, and for its middle term appearance; but the movement

[Bewegung] of this syllogism yields the further determination of what the Understanding

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descries in this inner world though the middle term, and the experience from which the

Understanding learns about the close-linked unity of these terms.95

The end of Force and Understanding discusses the relationships among inference, explanation,

and the distinction between appearance and reality. The issues surrounding them are discussed

in the context of three conceptions of a reality beyond or behind appearance, which is

inferentially revealed by appearance: the first supersensible world, the first inverted world, and

the second inverted world. Four crucial, interlinked distinctions are put in play in this

discussion. To understand the position Hegel is unfolding, we must distinguish them, so as to be

in a position to appreciate their relations to one another. First is the distinction between two

distinctions: on the one hand, the distinction between observable and theoretical entities, and on

the other the distinction between appearance and reality. Second is the distinction between two

ways of conceiving appearances: as a kind of thing distinct from realities, and as aspects of those

realities, ways in which the real shows up or is expressed. Third is the distinction between

broadly inferential relations and inference as a process (‘movement’). Finally, there is the

distinction between two ways of understanding the inferential relations (or mediations) that

conceptually articulate our knowledge: as a special kind of reality behind appearances, and as

something that is implicit in and expressed by them.

The first conception of a supersensible world is what one gets by running together the distinction

between observable and theoretical things or states of affairs with the distinction between

appearance and reality. Hegel wants to disabuse us of the natural temptation to identity these

two distinctions. To appreciate the temptation and the lesson, we must be clear about the

difference between the two distinctions. It is one thing to realize that the capacity to make

inferences from what is immediate—which turns out to be implicit in the capacity to be

immediately aware of anything—can give us cognitive access to things of which we cannot be

immediately aware. It is quite another to take it that the things to which our only cognitive

access is inferential (mediated), conceptual rather than perceptual, are more real than the things

to which we (also) have perceptual (immediate) access. Making this latter move is taking it that

what theory reveals is what is real, while what observation reveals is merely the appearance of

that reality: the way it shows up to creatures with our sort of perceptual capacities. But what is

95 [M145].

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this latter distinction? What is it to take some things of which we can be aware (by whatever

means) as real, and others as merely their appearances to us?

Hegel starts to use the language of appearance before he answers this question:

Within this inner truth…[which] has become the object of the Understanding, there now opens

up above the sensuous world, which is the world of appearance, a supersensible world, which

henceforth is the true world…96

Theoretical objects, as purely conceptual, as “existing only as objects for the Understanding,”

present “the inner being of things, qua inner, which is the same as the concept of Force qua

Concept.” 97

This true essence of Things has now the character of not being immediately for consciousness;

on the contrary, consciousness has a mediated relation to the inner being and, as the

Understanding, looks through this mediating play of Forces into the true background of Things.

The middle term which unites the two extremes, the Understanding and the inner world, is the

developed being of Force, which, for the Understanding itself is henceforth only a vanishing.

This ‘being’ is therefore called appearance.98

The actual, observable manifestations of theoretical objects—the products of the play of forces—

serve for the Understanding only as premises, from which to make inferences about the objects

whose interactions they express. These are objects individuated solely by the inference-

supporting laws they are subject to. The true essence of this first conception of the supersensible

world is taken consist in those laws: the “calm realm of laws”. Immediacy ‘vanishes’ for the

Understanding in playing only this mediating role. But in what sense, is the supersensible world

—the world accessible to thought through inference—taken to be the true world? What sort of

invidious distinction is being made between the (mediated) immediate and the purely mediated-

and-mediating, when one is taken as mere appearance, and the other as reality?

It is because of its priority in the order of explanation. Appearance is to be understood, in the

sense of explained by, an (in that explanatory sense) underlying reality. The notion of

explanation explains what it is to take the theoretical to be real, yielding the appearances that we

96 [M144].97 Both phrases from [M142].98 [M143].

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can observe. One takes theoretical objects to be real and what is observable to be their

appearance by seeking to explain the latter in terms of the former, and not vice versa. The real is

that in terms of which one offers accounts, and what one accounts for is how things appear.99

This sort of explanation reverses the direction of the inferences by means of which theoretical

objects are revealed (appear) to us. To find out about theoretical objects, we draw conclusions

from observational premises. To explain what we observe we draw conclusions from theoretical

premises. Thus we know there is current in the test wire because of the movement of the meter

needle, and take it that the meter needle moves because there is current in the test wire. In the

context of the experimental apparatus, the current shows itself in (appears as) the movement of

the meter needle. The propriety of both inferences is expressed in a law: the statement of a

necessary connection among distinct determinate concepts (current in the test wire and

movement of the meter needle). But what the law expresses is a force, an actually efficacious

ground of explanation, the current as making the meter needle move. In “the process called

explanation”:

A law is enunciated; from this, its implicitly universal element or ground is distinguished as

Force; but it is said that this difference is no difference, rather that the ground is constituted

exactly the same as the law. The single occurrence of lightning, e.g. is apprehended as a

universal, and this universal is enunciated as the law of electricity; the ‘explanation’ then

condenses [zusammenfat] the law into Force as the essence of the law…Force is constituted

exactly the same as law…the difference qua difference of content…is withdrawn.100

The metaconception of understanding that Hegel is considering in this part of his story does not

have a sufficiently good grip on the structure of the Concept to follow out this insight coherently.

But in explanation for the first time the identity of content of thought in its subjective aspect

(thinking) and objective aspect (what is thought about) appears, albeit darkly. When things go

well, there is an identity of content between a statement, claim or judgment and a fact, between a

propriety of inference and a law. It is a criterion of adequacy for Hegel’s metaconception of the

infinite Concept that it make sense both of this identity of content and of the difference of form

99 One wants to object to such a usage that both ends of even an asymmetric explanatory relationship can be realities: the presence of water vapor in the carburetor may explain the failure of my car to start. One is no less real than the other, even though one may be more observable. We will see below (in the discussion of the ontological status of the supersensible world) that Hegel is very much aware of this sort of case, and is concerned to make room for it in his scheme, even though the way he uses ‘real’ differently.100 [M154].

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between the subjective certainty that can attach to that content and the objective truth that can

attach to it: the difference between what something is for consciousness, and what it is in itself.

Explicating this fundamental sort of identity-in-difference, which is constitutive of consciousness

as such, is the topic of our next chapter.

It is a mistake, however, to identify the appearance/reality distinction with the

observable/theoretical distinction. The distinction between observable and theoretical objects is

not a distinction between two different kinds of objects at all. It is, as Sellars will later put it, not

an ontological distinction at all, but only a methodological one.101 It has to do with how we

come to know about the objects, not with what kind of thing they are. To say that something is a

theoretical object or state of affairs is to say that the only way we have of knowing about it is by

means of inference. Theoretical concepts are those that have only inferential circumstances of

appropriate application, whereas observational ones also have noninferential (immediate)

circumstances of application. But this is a time-relative designation. The line between things to

which we have only inferential cognitive access and the things to which we also have

noninferential cognitive access can shift with time. Thus when first postulated to explain

perturbations in the orbit of Neptune, Pluto was a purely theoretical object; the only claims we

could make about it were the conclusions of inferences. But the development of more powerful

telescopes eventually made it accessible also to observation, and so a subject of noninferential

reports. Pluto did not undergo an ontological change; all that changed was its cognitive relation

to us.

There seems to have been a permanent philosophical temptation to endorse the platonic

principle, that a difference in our means of knowledge is the criterion of differences in the sorts

of being that is known thereby. Descartes is a cardinal modern example. But this move is at

least optional. And examples of theoretically postulated items—genes are another example—

that become observable suggests that applied to the methodological distinction between

theoretical and observational, it is a mistake. Sellars is concerned to argue against

instrumentalists, who would treat theoretical objects as ontologically second class citizens

because they are only inferentially accessible, reserving the designation ‘real’ for what is 101 cf. "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" §§39-44. See also the commentary at pp. 163-166 of the Study Guide [Harvard University Press, 1997].

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observable. Hegel is here concerned to reject the converse mistake, made by someone who,

having appreciated the role of mediation in even immediate awareness, and so the genuineness

the cognitive access afforded by thought. Such a one has accepted the reality of what is only

inferentially accessible (purely mediated and mediating), but is then tempted to reject the reality

of what provides only premises for pure thought.

For the world of appearance is, on the contrary, not the world of sense-knowledge and perception

as a world that positively is, but this world posited as superseded, or as in truth an inner world.102

A humdrum way into this mistake is through Eddington's story of two tables. The table in front

of me appears to be still, solid, and colored. Physics, he says, tells us that it is really a nearly

empty cloud of tiny, colorless particles vibrating at incredibly high speeds. Nothing is really still,

solid, or colored. Yet we irresistibly believe in the table of appearance, the one we are assured

does not really exist. Now we, who are following the phenomenological exposition, are not

supposed to be taken in by this.

But such antitheses of inner and outer, of appearance and the supersensible, as of two different

kinds of actuality, we no longer find here. The repelled differences are not shared afresh between

two substances such as would support them and lend them a separate subsistence.103

That is, the difference between how things are in themselves and how they appear is not also not

an ontological difference—at least not one that is happily thought of in terms of two sorts of

thing (two worlds). In the Phenomenology, an alternative to this way of thinking about the

relation between appearance and reality, phenomena and noumena, how things are for

consciousness and how they are in themselves, has already been sketched in the Introduction.

We will discuss this view in the next chapter [[INTROREP]]. It turns on the notion of

explaining error. On this account, though appearances can take the form of observable states of

affairs, they can equally take the form of purely theoretical ones. Its purely theoretical status in

no way disqualifies a concept (say, phlogiston, or natural slave) from turning out to be a feature

only of how things appear. Putting ourselves in a position to understand this broader conception

of appearance (and so, the fourth distinction mentioned above, between two ways of thinking

about the relation between appearance and reality) requires looking more closely at the relation

between the notion of explanation, which is the basis for the distinction between appearance and 102 [M147].103 [M159]. In Hegel’s telling of the story, this lesson is entwined with the lesson concerning the distinction between inferential relations and inferential processes, in which the first inverted world (which is the second supersensible world) is a way station.

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reality, and that of inference, which is the basis for the distinction between observable and

theoretical entities.

VI

We can begin with the distinction between what might be called the external and the internal

movements of thought, as these bear on the attempt to make sense of the sort of identity-in-

difference characteristic of determinate thinkables (the contents of thoughts).104 What I’m calling

the ‘external’ movement of thought appeared already in the discussion of Perception: the attempt

to grasp any particular self-identical content (at that point, paradigmatically a determinate

property) requires considering a number of different contents (e.g. properties), which stand to the

original in relations of material incompatibility or inference. In trying to think any one content,

we are driven to consider others. Thus a movement of thought is required of us—a movement

that takes us from the unity of one content to its relations to a diversity of others. And thinking

of this diversity of contents, in their multifarious relations one to another, similarly drives us to

think of the systematic unity that they constitute. (As we saw in the previous chapter [[SPTHI]],

the model we need for this sort of holistic system is one in which the unity of the particular

elements and the unity of the universal systematically comprising them are two sides of one coin

is that of the simultaneous synthesis of self-conscious selves and their communities by mutual

recognition.) This is deserves to be called an ‘external’ movement of thought because it occurs

outside the system of concepts or contents, in a mind that is trying to understand it.

But there is also another sort of movement of thought. It is what takes place when a system of

concepts-and-judgments is transformed by the discovery within it of commitments that are

discordant in the sense of being incompatible. This is the “process or movement [Bewegung]

called explanation” in the passage quoted above.105 It is the process of accounting for or

explaining the incompatibility, which will in general involve altering both the doxastic

commitments that show up in one’s judgments, and the inferential and incompatibility

commitments that articulate one’s concepts. Thus, to use a simple example (which appears

already in the previous chapter [[SPTHI]]), suppose we have a theoretical concept of an acid 104 See for instance [M155-6].105 [M154].

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which has as inferentially sufficient circumstances of application that a liquid taste sour, and as

inferentially necessary consequences of application that the liquid will turn Litmus paper red.

We might then run across a liquid that both tastes sour and turns Litmus paper blue. The

commitments we find ourselves with immediately then are materially incompatible with those we

acquire inferentially, as the product of a process of mediation. For we can infer that the liquid

will turn Litmus paper red, and by our own lights, its being red is materially incompatible with

its being blue. We are then obliged, by our own commitments, to revise our concepts, so as to

avoid commitment to such incompatibilities. Supposing the sample in question is a cloudy

liquid, for instance, we might, for instance, we might revise the concept acid so that only clear

liquids that taste sour qualify, or alternatively so that only acids that are clear turn Litmus paper

red. Inferring—for instance, concluding that a liquid will turn Litmus paper red from the

observation that it tastes sour—is an activity that can oblige us to alter our commitments, both

doxastic and conceptual (inferential). This sort of doing should be contrasted with simply

tracing the inferential and incompatibility relations from the outside, in a way that cannot affect

actual commitments.

The distinction being appealed to here is usefully thought of in terms due to Harman.106 He

points out that deductive or logical relations are one thing, the activity of inferring is another,

and argues that logic as classically conceived runs these two together according to an

implausibly simplistic model of their relation. Inferring is an activity that ought to govern the

modification of one's beliefs. It is based on inferential relations between the contents of those

beliefs, but is not reducible to, nor can it be read off from or treated as determined by those

relations. For suppose that you believe that p, and suppose further that p entails q. What ought

your beliefs to be? On the classical, inadequate, picture one presumably ought also to believe

that q. But this is not in general the case. Perhaps one ought to stop believing p upon becoming

aware of the entailment. For one may have relatively strong evidence for something

incompatible with q, and only relatively weak evidence for p. The inferential relations settle

only that one ought not to believe both p and something incompatible with q. Thus they

constrain what one ought to believe in various circumstances. But they do not settle what one

ought to conclude, that is, how one ought to modify one's beliefs. A wider sort of inferring is

106 [ref.]

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required to pick which of the many ways of satisfying the demands of compatibility is most

appropriate. It is this that Harman calls "inference to the best explanation."

Consciousness must eventually come to identify itself with this movement of something like

inference to the best explanation in developing the Notion, as the implicit incompatibilities that

generate and constitute its component contents are gradually made explicit. As those

incompatibilities are confronted, some beliefs must be discarded and others acquired. In a

holistic system, as Quine urges in "Two Dogmas", what inferential moves are appropriate

depends on what contents one has endorsed, and so made available as auxiliary hypotheses (the

Duhem point). A parallel point obviously applies to incompatibilities. And since the identity

and individuation of contents depends on these 'mediations', any doxastic change, that is change

of belief as a result of an activity of inference to the best explanation (triggered by the explicit

expression of hitherto implicit incompatibilities), will involve also conceptual change. This is

the movement of experience, as described in the Introduction to the Phenomenology. It is also

what is beginning to be brought into view under the heading of ‘explanation’, in Force and

Understanding.

In talking about the movement of an inference, Hegel is explicitly acknowledging the distinction

between broadly inferential relations such as incompatibility, which exhibit the normative

character picked out by Kant and Hegel under the rubric of necessity, on the one hand, and the

activity of altering our doxastic and so inferential commitments by actively inferring, which was

mentioned above in connection with Harman, on the other. "The connection of the

Understanding with the inner world through the mediation is, however, its own movement

through which the inner world will fill itself out for Understanding."107 The activity of drawing

consequences from the commitments we find ourselves with—some of them as products of

immediate, noninferential perceptual processes—confronting any materially incompatible

commitments that result with each other, and then adjusting the whole constellation of our

commitments, doxastic and inferential, so as to resolve those incompatibilities, is conducted

within a framework of broadly inferential relations, which it both presupposes and transforms.

107 [M148].

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One might ask about the relative conceptual or explanatory priority of the inferential relations

and the inferential processes that are related in this intimate way in what Hegel calls

‘experience’. A fundamental empiricist idea is that the immediate deliverances of sense are all

one needs to look at, ultimately, in order to make intelligible the process and the imperatives that

drive it. Hegel has already considered this line, and while he acknowledges the crucial role

played by immediacy in experience, he emphasizes the role of processes of thought—that is, of

inference and explanation—and so rejects this sort of empiricism. A fundamental rationalist idea

is that inferential relations are prior in the order of explanation to inferential processes. What

makes an alteration of judgments and concepts rational is just that it is governed by rational

relations. A fundamental pragmatist idea is the converse one, that inferential relations (and so

conceptual contents) should be understood as abstractions from broadly inferential processes:

from what knowers and agents actually do, how they in fact acquire and alter their commitments.

From Hegel’s point of view, each of these approaches as seized on a genuine aspect of

experience, but has illegitimately accorded it a privileged explanatory role that assumes its

intelligibility independently of its relations to the others. But in taking as fundamental the

process of experience—which involves all three elements: immediacy, inferential relations, and

inferential processes—he develops a kind of higher pragmatism. It is this sort of pragmatism

that we see invoked against an ill-conceived rationalism, in the discussion of the first “inverted

world” (which is the second conception of the supersensible world considered).

VII

The first conception of a supersensible world as inverted is the result of misconstruing a genuine

insight. The insight is Understanding’s discovery that the reality that is the truth of appearance is

the Concept, and that "it is a law of appearance itself."108 That law is a law regulating

differences, changes in which "the content of the moments of change remains the same." "The

differences are only such as are in reality no differences and which cancel themselves." We have

seen how in the Concept the contents consist in their differences, which differences both thereby

cancel themselves in the sense of defining self-same unities, and do not cancel themselves

entirely, in that the movement of experience results. The idea of a calm realm of laws expressed

108 [M156].

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in a changing realm of appearance is thus replaced by a conception of law as not only a unifying

rule, but as equally the differentiating relations in virtue of which that unifying rule has a

determinate content.

And thus we have a second law whose content is the opposite of what was previously called law,

viz.. difference which remains constantly selfsame; for this new law expresses rather that like

becomes unlike and unlike becomes the like.

That is, the new form of law expresses the fact that the determinate conceptual contents that

articulate any law must necessarily presuppose their relations to the incompatible contents they

contrast with. Talk of ‘law’ here marks the normative character (the ‘necessity’) of the material

inferential and incompatibility relations that articulate determinate conceptual contents.

The mistake is to reify these essential, broadly inferential relations to construe them as

constituting a separate world: to think of the relation between these laws and the appearance of

which they are the law as a relation between two different kinds of thing. The result of making

that mistake is a very odd conception of reality:

According...to the law of this inverted [verkehrte] world, what is like in the first world is unlike

to itself and what is unlike in the first world is equally unlike to itself, or it becomes like itself.109

Looked at superficially, this inverted world is the opposite of the first in the sense that it has the

latter outside of it and repels that world from itself as an inverted actual world: that the one is

appearance, but the other the in-itself; that the one is the world as it is for an other, whereas the

other is the world as it is for itself.110

The mistake is to make the distinction between the world as it appears and the world as it is in

itself, on this conception, into an ontological distinction. The misunderstanding that results if

one "shares the differences" between "appearance and the supersensible" among "separate

substances"111 and treats the supersensible as another actual world somehow related to that of

appearance results in a collapse in important respects back into the first way of understanding the

supersensible world. On this line,

The one side, or substance would be the world of perception again...and confronting it would be

an inner world, just such a sense-world as the first, but in the imagination [Vorstellung]; it could

109 [M158].110 [M159].111 This is the language of the passage from [M159] quoted in the previous section.

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not be exhibited [aufgezeigt, literally 'pointed out'; the word used for demonstratives in Sense

Certainty] as a sense world, could not be seen, heard, or tasted, and yet it would be thought of as

such a sense-world.112

The actual sweetness in the thing is the determinate property that it is in part because of its

incompatibility with sourness in the same thing. Its identity consists in such determinate

differences. The misunderstanding associated with the first version of the inverted world is what

arises if one asks: "Where are these incompatible, excluded properties?". They are not here, in

the actual world appearing to us. They can't be pointed out. But they are, many of them,

ordinary observable properties just like the ones they contrast with (sweet, sour). That is why the

imagined other sort of actual world they are projected into can be described as "just such a

sense-world as the first," and "thought of as a sense-world". In this way an odd empiricist twist

is given to the rationalism that looks first to broadly inferential relations (which are rehearsed in

what I called above ‘external’ movements of thought), without regard to their role in inferential

processes (internal movements of thought).113

That such an inverted world ‘behind’ the one that appears to us cannot be pointed out is not just

because it is not here. If that world contains all the property instantiations incompatible with

each actual perceived instantiation—everything that determinately negates every property that

appears to us—it will contain instantiations incompatible with each other. (Recall that this is

why properties have abstract negations, and objects don't). Since properties do not just have one

‘opposite’ [Gegenteil]—is green the opposite of red, or is blue? And what is ‘the’ opposite of

seventeen marbles?—this conception is actually incoherent.

What is needed is to de-ontologize (and desensualize) the conception of the relation between

what is immediately available to us through perception and the conceptual element in virtue of

which it (or anything) is cognitively available to us at all.

From the idea, then, of inversion, which constitutes the essential nature of one aspect of the

supersensible world, we must eliminate the sensuous idea of fixing the differences in a different

112 [M159].113 I take it that there are historical reasons involving Schelling for considering this particular constellation. But such considerations are irrelevant to the sort of enterprise of rational reconstruction I am engaged in here.

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sustaining element; and this absolute notion of the difference must be represented and

understood purely as inner difference.114 [160]

The final picture of the inverted world returns this supersensible beyond to its proper place

within, as implicit in, the realm of appearance. Inversion is the way in which the second

supersensible world is in the world of appearance. It is in it as the necessary connection of

opposites in constituting the contents of possible experience. We have already seen (in the

discussion of Perception) how these material incompatibilities underwrite inferential

connections, and again how those inferential relations take the form of laws. These conceptually

fundamental incompatible contents are not realized somewhere else, nor are they nothing at all.

They are possible contents of appearance that are implicit in actual appearance insofar as it has a

determinate content. Here we have one in part sensible world whose contents are defined by

their determinate negations of other contents that would be actualized, if they were actualized, in

that same world. The second supersensible world, properly understood, consists in the mediation

of the contents according to which consciousness is aware of the sensible world. It does not

require or support a contrast with appearance. It is in appearance as what constitutes content by

relating each fact to a cloud of surrounding incompatible contents of possible facts, by contrast to

which it is the fact that it is (has the content it does).

For in the difference which is an inner difference, the opposite is not merely one of two—if it

were it would simply be, without being an opposite—but it is the opposite of an opposite, or the

other is itself immediately present in it.115

The supersensible world is the concrete mediated structure in virtue of which appearance has a

content.

Thus the supersensible world, which is the inverted world, has at the same time overarched the

other world and has it within it; it is for itself the inverted world, i.e. the inversion of itself; it is

itself and its opposite in one unity. Only thus is it difference as inner difference, or difference in

its own self, or the difference as infinity.116

The ordinary world that appears to us, in perception and inferentially, "...has, in fact, the 'other'

immediately present in it,"117, and so 114 [M160].115 [M160].116 [M160].117 [M160].

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We have to think pure change, or think antithesis [Entgegensetzung, opposition] within the

antithesis itself, or contradiction [Widerspruch].118

Here the material incompatibility or determinate negation of 'thick' concepts is understood as the

principle of "pure change"—what is responsible for the explanatory movement of concepts and

commitments, the broadly inferential process that is experience. Our practices in fact commit us

to applying incompatible sets of predicates in various actual situations, and that is how our

doxastic and inferential commitments alter and evolve. The concept of infinity, which is the

same as that of the Concept, is where the development ends. It is the outcome not only of the

movement of Understanding, but of the whole movement of Consciousness. It is where

...all the moments of appearance are taken up into the inner world.119

We see that in the inner world of appearance, the Understanding in truth comes to know nothing

else but appearance.120

The inner world is what makes it possible for what is in itself to express itself by appearing,

including immediate appearance.

The first conception of a supersensible world was a conception of a “calm realm of laws.” Those

laws are expressed by quantified, modally qualified conditionals. They underwrite inferences

from observable to theoretical states of affairs. And they were construed as for that reason also

underwriting the explanations of perceptible appearance in terms of an underlying merely

thinkable reality, consisting of objects individuated solely by the roles they play with respect to

those laws. Now we are to see that this thought about appearance and reality should not be

understood merely as the converse of the thought about observable and theoretical states of

affairs. Being a theoretical object—only accessible inferentially—does not preclude being an

aspect of appearance rather than reality. And being an observable object—noninferentially

accessible through perception—does not preclude being an aspect of reality rather than

appearance. The essential inferential and so conceptual articulation of all awareness means that

what is observable is as thinkable as what is only inferrable. The fact that observable objects are

not only inferrable but perceivable does not mark an ontological difference between them. And

the laws according to which we make inferences, which articulate the conceptual contents of

118 [M160].119 [M161].120 [M165].

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both, also do not constitute a distinct ontological realm. The quantified, modally qualified

conditionals that express those laws do not describe a distinct kind of state of affairs. Indeed,

they do not describe anything. Rather they serve to make explicit the inferential articulation in

virtue of which anything is thinkable (and so, in some cases, perceivable) at all.

The basis of those inferential relations (mediations) is the material incompatibilities (relations of

determinate negation) among the concepts. I’ve suggested that the connection is that p as entails

q just in case everything materially incompatible with q is materially incompatible with p. In

this sense, being a dog entails being a mammal, because everything incompatible with being a

mammal is incompatible with being a dog. So it is equally a mistake to think of those

incompatibilities in ontological terms of a distinct kind of thing. The material incompatibilities

that articulate the conceptual content of a state of affairs (whether perceptible or not) should be

understood as implicit in it.

VIII

Now it is, to be sure, at this point by no means obvious just what it means to say this.

This is a way of thinking about the conceptual element in experience. [on to made/found, is the

movement in us, looking on at the things across a gulf, or is it in the things. The claim that

explanation is self-consciousness is supposed to respond by overcoming this]

___________________________________________________________________

[Two ways of thinking about appearance: as thing, and as way in which the real appears, i.e. as

aspects or forms the real can take.

This is an issue of identity in difference: what things are in themselves (implicitly) and what they

are for consciousness (explicitly) are identical (in content) but different (in form). Ending stuff

on infinity wants us to use model of identity in difference in Concept, [infinite, in having nothing

outside it] the way identity of one concept involves and consists in its contrasts with others, to

understand consciousness, the way appearance (what things are for consciousness) and reality

(what things are in themselves) are related. In previous chapter [SPTHI] I have sketched how

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this story goes in general. [cf. self-consciousness] We have now assembled enough raw

materials to put us in a position to consider it in more detail.

So far, it should be admitted, talk of

[Two closely related things left to explain

a) model of expression, rather than that of representation,

b) to understand the relation between appearance and reality.

What I hope to have done in this chapter is to set up some of the criteria of adequacy for doing

that, and to have assembled some of the conceptual raw materials that are needed for doing it.]

The essential inferential and so conceptual articulation of all awareness means that what appears

is as thinkable as what explains it.

There are no differences of an ontological difference between appearance and reality than

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The concept is expounded in [161] to [165]. The infinite Notion is that system within which

content is constituted by the making of distinctions, e.g. between space and time, that are then

seen in fact to be moments of a unity because of their necessary relations as expressible in laws.

It is such a Notion that appears in appearance. It first appears as itself in the process of

explanation, which depends precisely on the necessary connection of distinct items, that is, on

identity in difference.

Appearance, or the play of Forces, already displays it, but it is an explanation that it first freely

stands forth. [163].

We are told what will be required to make explicit for ourselves the Notion that is there implicit:

The Understanding's 'explanation' is primarily only the description of what self-consciousness is.

[163]

[BB: cf.: the need to understand modality in terms of social normativity, i.e. of authority and

responsibility, which are unintelligible apart from (though not consisting entirely in) the context

of social attribution and undertaking of commitments.]

The point is put slightly more colorfully at the very end of the exposition of Understanding:

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Raised above perception [understanding] consciousness exhibits itself closed in a unity with the

supersensible world through the mediating term of appearance, through which it gazes into this

background.121

But the position that is aimed for at that point is one where:

The two extremes [of this syllogism], the one, of the pure inner world, the other, that of the inner

being gazing into this pure inner world, have now coincided, and just as they, qua extremes, have

vanished, so to the middle term as something other than these extremes has also vanished.122

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[Next: it is internal to the concepts-and-claims, in the sense that we can think of it as something

that the contents of our commitments (both doxastic and conceptual-inferential) do. For it is they

who normatively oblige us to make alterations.

Then: quote about syllogism in [M145], as transition to discussion of (i) and (ii) below, and First

Supersensible World (FSSW), and IW1 and IW2.]

The attempt to get the principle of movement into one world, instead of splitting it between two:

a calm unified realm of laws, and its diverse sensuous expression, is what yields the first IW.

When we desensualize it, we get the second IW, in which difference is implicit in the movement,

is the relations that both articulate its content and drive its development. So we have got three

things going on in these IW passages, which must be disentangled: i) ontological-

methodological shift in conception of supersensual world (=desensualizing), ii) as a result,

thinking of how supersensual is implicit in observable in a new way, and iii) internal/external

movement (contributing to (ii)), which gives both inversion, and relation between identity and

difference—or at least ends with the hint about that (identity consists in development, in accord

with and in context of relations to diverse other such unities) which will take us to infinite

Concept. ] ) Inferential relations and the activity of inferring. The latter as “inference to best

explanation”. The self-movement of the Concept as finding explanations. The normativity of

the latter expressing and expressed as the modality of the laws by which theoretical objects

produce observations.]

[a thinkable, mediated reality]121 [M165].122 [M165].

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[4 points:

still on side of truth, not certainty, in spite of talk of ‘concepts’.

no distinction of holistic sense from atomistic reference

Kant-Leibniz containment talk makes holism unintelligible

law is explanation (hence inference) congealed into a substance

appearance and reality (once what is inferentially downstream from immediacy is conceived

as explaining it, we are taking it to be the real).

necessity and inference (quantified, modally qualified conditionals: laws as universal,

necessary, explanatory).

]

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[[For end of MIP4, on Concept as infinite: qualitative, not quantitative infinity of the Concept.

Its infinity means that it is unlimited, that there is nothing outside of it—neither the immediacy

of experience, nor the immediacy of being. This claim—that the Concept is sinfinites—is another

idealist thesis of Hegel’s.]]

Perceiving consciousness admits only the existence of sense universals, and for this reason

cannot understand what we understand. For its restriction to sense universals is expressed by its

demand that the contents of perceivings be autonomous or independent (a conception that is

pathognomic of alienation, as we shall learn), that is that they be graspable apart from any grasp

or consideration of any other contents or relations to anything that is not a content. This demand

collides with the inescapable consequences required by the determinateness of the contents of

perceivings. When this independence requirement is relinquished, the transition is made to the

level of understanding. Here the apparent contradictions that arose by conceiving of contents as

independent, contradictions unresolvable within the vocabulary and idiom characteristic of

consciousness whose self-concept is that of perceiving consciousness, are resolved by

postulating an independent reality behind sensuous appearance, on which the whole of

appearance is conceived as dependent. This move represents progress in several respects. It is

now allowed that the determinateness of universals requires their relation to and mediation by

other universals that they exclude. So the conception of universals as independent has been

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relinquished. Further, and as a result, the immediacy of the universals, their having to be sense

universals, that is, non-inferentially reportable, has been given up as well. Now consciousness

can conceive of itself as classifying particulars under universals to which its only access is

inferential. So the picture of the relation between consciousness and what appears to it is no

longer that of immediate contact ("rubbing the nose of the mind in the mess of the world"). This

will eventually flower into the possibility of conceiving thought as a means of access to how

things are in themselves, rather than as inevitably altering (as medium or instrument) and so

perhaps radically falsifying what it presents. Again, the way is opened to conceiving of

consciousness as consisting in other forms of judgment besides the classificatory, for instance the

inference-codifying conditionals and modally qualified lawlike universal generalizations that

express incompatibility and entailment relations explicitly in propositional form.

[Where Hegel labors unceasingly to show us how Verstand looks from the standpoint of

Vernunft, I’m trying in effect also to reconstruct the image of Vernunft from the standpoint of

Verstand. I think one can get further in this enterprise than Hegel thought possible.]

[Here the text breaks off. Draft of chapter ends, but chapter is not finished.

Material from “Holism and Idealism in Hegel’s Phenomenology to go here.]

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