What exactly was
behind all that stuff about ‘observation languages’, ‘elementary propositions’,
‘basic statements’, and ‘protocol sentences’ once found in Wittgenstein and
Carnap et al? The idea seemed to be that if you only simplified things enough
and got back to the nitty gritty of bald description (or somehow got back to
the ding an sich through bald
description) then language wouldn’t lead you astray. But as any cameraman might
have explained, if you’re really interested in descriptive accuracy, then for
very large reaches of the known universe, both micro and macrocosmic, a photon
map beats verbalising any day.
As for information
about the unknown universe—photography is much better than words. It’s a
pity that Karl Popper, who clarified a number of things, carried his hostility
to the “bucket theory of the mind” and to naïve empiricism so far he would
probably not have understood that bottomless information buckets can be very
useful. He believed that selective perception sabotaged human observation at
every point. In a typical statement he says that “most dissectors of the heart
before Harvey observed the wrong things—those which they expected to see. There
can never be anything like a completely safe observation free from the dangers
of misinterpretation.” [Conjectures and
Refutations, page 41, footnote 8.]
No doubt this is
so. But real-time photon maps can show you the circulation of the blood by
staining techniques (whatever you may believe and however determined you are
not to see it), just as they can record the activities of particles in cloud-chambers
(which no-one can either see or predict) and show the vortices of sunspots or
the explosions of distant super-novae. Theory of course must design and cast
the net; but what is caught is something else again. In informational terms, man
proposes: photography disposes. For countless areas of countless branches of
the natural sciences (not the social
sciences, where consciousness and feedback supervene) mechanical description replaced
linguistic description long ago.
Such, anyway,
were the ideas behind this free-wheeling rumination on aspects of Wittgenstein’s
Tractatus along with Popper’s theory
of ‘World 3’ as set out in Objective
Knowledge. The essay first appeared in Art
International in January 1978. Since that time both the reach and grasp of
what I call ‘objective graphics’ (which supersede human sensoria for
observational and record-keeping purposes) have continually expanded until now
there is hardly any aspect of life free of electronic eyes and ears. Furthermore,
they are valued precisely because they work like buckets, catching and holding far
more evidence than is sought twenty-four hours a day.
RS
Epistemology
Without a Knowing Cameraman
by
Roger Sandall
[Originally
published in Art International, January 1978]
"It
frequently happens, moreover . . . and this is one of the charms of photography
. . . that the operator himself discovers on examination, perhaps long
afterwards, that he had depicted many things he had no notion of at the
time." Fox Talbot, pioneer photographer, 1844.1
Among
the defining criteria of the objective knowledge of World 3 is the
"possibility or potentiality of being understood, (the) dispositional
character of being understood or interpreted . . . And this potentiality or
disposition may exist without ever being actualized or realized". Karl
Popper, 1973.2
"2.131:
In a picture the elements of the picture are the representatives of
objects." Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1922.3
1
Fox Talbot's
modest view of the photographer's role belongs plainly to another time and
place. How things have changed. The nineteenth-century's humble
"operator" working quietly away in the decent obscurity of his
darkroom has long since given way to the strident practices of "creative
artistry", and it is not to be expected that an ambitious creative artist
would acknowledge, much less admire, those accidental impingements of an objective
world which the genius of the photographer "had no notion of at the
time". In the most famous examples of photographic creativity nature
herself plays a secondary role. And as for the dumbly mechanical nature of
photography, the less said about that the better.The main reason for this state
of affairs is embarrassingly obvious: it is the historic deference of
"rude mechanicals" for "art". Few artisans more than
photographers have felt so keenly and so long the pressure of an older and more
prestigious tradition. There is scarcely a primer on lensmanship which doesn't
pointedly emphasize, sometimes on the very first page, that taking a picture
"is not just a mechanical act". There is scarcely an introduction to
an album of photographs which doesn't go out of its way to celebrate the role
of the interpretive human eye behind the uninterpretive, glassy lens.
In recent years
this endemic subjectivism has been given a huge boost by the cult of
self-expression. No opportunity has been lost to equate the taking of pictures with the making of pictures (the second, of
course, being the more admirable), as if the artist's ego felt directly
imperilled by any recognition of the essentially objective, physico-mechanical
nature of photography itself. Underlying this, needless to say, is the
assumption that mental states are self-evidently good, whereas machines are
self-evidently bad. Ergo, if I use a machine like a camera I must justify this
use in terms of its thorough subordination to mind; I must show that what science
imagines to be an instrument of improved perception is more wisely seen as a
self-expressive device.
All of which
this particular cameraman finds somewhat perverse. The struggle to distinguish
what is inside our heads from what is not has been embarrassingly long and
difficult; and in this struggle, photographs (along with tapes as well;
together they make up the family of "objective graphics") have played
a very useful role. Just think, for example, what progress might have been made
if cameras had been around in the 18th century. Would Sam Johnson, refuting
Berkeley's subjectivism, have kicked a stone or taken a photograph? Given his
natural boisterousness he might easily have done both. At all events there's
not much doubt that he would very soon have noticed what Fox Talbot noticed
over a century ago—that the world of objective graphics is full of surprises. Not only does the operator never get quite
what he expected, in most cases he gets more.[i]
That of course is precisely why film and tape are now used for both
scientific enquiries and social investigation, from radio-telescopic
explorations of space and the mapping of x-ray nebulae, all the way down to the
police tape recordings of witnesses’ statements or last night's
television news.
And this has
profound implications. Today the more vulgar forms of irrationalist epistemology
shelter behind two protective doctrines—the Doctrine of Selective Perception
and the Doctrine of Ideology. The first declares us to be incurably one-eyed;
the second accuses us of only using that eye which serves our own interests,
narrowly defined. But the interesting thing about objective records on film and
tape is the way they relentlessly undermine these doctrines by their very
nature. An incorrigible ideologue soon finds what he's up against. The camera's
sheer inclusiveness works against him, and the only way he can make its images
say what he wants them to say is by the most determined, and visibly eccentric,
editing. Negative evidence for this can be found in the total absence of modern
documentary film-making in those vast political regions where they take
ideology really seriously—between the River Elbe and the shores of the China
Sea. For it is not always understood, and perhaps needs stressing, that the
technology of social enquiry does not exist in a vacuum: It presupposes a
social philosophy which allows and encourages enquiry to take place.
Is it possible
to pursue this question further? Can we look beyond the social arrangements
which allow the technology of empirical enquiry to exist, and examine some of
those ideas which, if they have not actually furthered, have at least
accompanied its rise? After Marshall McLuhan's extravagances it has become
harder than it should be to argue the less apocalyptic connections between
technology and other areas of life and thought. But this doesn't mean that
they don't exist; and to the objectivist more interested in the kind of
thinking which relates thought to things rather
than to sensations (let alone the
stoned sensoria of mass society), there may still be a few lessons to be
learnt.
2
In order to draw
as clear a distinction as possible between objective and subjective graphics
Fox Talbot's observation is a good place to begin, especially that scene of a
photographer dusting off an old print and being delighted to find all sorts of
things in it he didn't know were there. This experience, while common enough in
photography, is even more common in documentary films, where individual frames
may be examined arid found to contain far more than the cameraman was conscious
of at the time. By way of contrast, you can't imagine Bruegel the Elder dusting
off an old canvas and finding a dog or a steeple he was unaware of painting
years before. In subjective graphics the painter inspecting his past work finds
only what he expects to find—or if he doesn't, he attributes the unwanted trouvaille to a failing memory of
events. This predictability is what makes subjective graphics "closed
systems" in a solipsistic sense, and while on the one hand it helps to
make them more reassuring (which is one legitimate function of art), it also
guarantees a certain epistemological sterility on the other. An exhaustive list
of everything stored in the memory of the painter's mental cupboard will tell
you all that the work of art has to say: the state of affairs it represents is
a state of mind.
Now just the
opposite is true of objective graphics. You could have the fullest possible
inventory of everything in a photographer's mental cupboard and it wouldn't
help you a bit. This is obvious enough in the case of the sort of electronic
scanning equipment used in radio-telescopy which is, by definition, searching
the sky for things which may or may not exist. But although less obvious, it is
also true of the cameraman shooting film for the evening news. Cameramen are
only human, and it must be confessed that not all of them are single-mindedly
absorbed in their work. It often happens that their attention swings to and fro
between whatever can be seen in the viewfinder and such normal human
preoccupations as food, and sex, and vengeance. It might even be argued that a
highly skilled cameraman should be able to give his mind almost entirely to the
latter; for it is one of the marks of his skill that after long experience he
knows so exactly what the producer back at the studio regards as "news"
that he is able to frame it and film it almost subconsciously.
Of course news
film is comparatively demanding: certainly the work keeps you awake. But when
you turn to something like a cricket match on a drowsy summer's day then the
cameraman's mind is bound to wander; while sound recordists, especially during\
interviews, are always falling asleep on the job. Yet despite the mental
vagaries of their operators, cameras and sound recorders (no less than radio-telescopes)
continue faithfully imprinting their maps of states of affairs. And like Fox Talbot's
photograph, the resulting mechanical maps possess "the dispositional
character of being understood or interpreted" as Popper puts it, whether
or not this ever actually happens, and whether or not there is any available
consciousness to do it for any number of years.5
To speak of
objective graphics as maps, and maps,
moreover, containing coordinate points,
is plainly to use the word map in an extended sense. The extension however is
not mine alone: it has already been made by those astronomers who in recent
years have provided us with pictures of radio-galaxies and supernova
remnants—pictures which they call maps.6 And the interesting thing
about this usage (and about the images themselves) is that it brings out the
generally hidden nature of photographs and tape recordings as patterns of
coordinate points too. In an x-ray map of a nova the sky has been scanned to
detect varying intensities of x-ray emission; and the finest discriminable
units of emission are then displayed as a chequered pattern of variously
coloured squares. It is true that the colours are arbitrary and reveal more
about the responsible technician's aesthetic taste than anything else. But as
in all objective graphics the position of the squares is emphatically not
arbitrary. In these astronomical maps each little square (or "element of
the picture" in Wittgenstein's phrase) is a coordinate point defined as so
many seconds of arc in a given sector of sky; and furthermore, there is a close
resemblance between these squares and what Witt-genstein, talking about
linguistic maps, referred to as "the representatives of objects".
Now although it
is a long way from the grand cosmic imagery of a super-nova to the family
snapshot taken last summer, it is their shared character as maps, maps made up
of definite coordinate points formed by electro-magnetic waves, which certifies
their objectivity. In the case of ordinary photographs of daily life we usually
attend so exclusively to form and content that the underlying principle of
coordinate pointillism is overlooked.
Yet that is how they are made. A light ray emanating from a spot in the world
follows a mathematically fixed path through a lens and ionizes an atom of
silver in the photographic emulsion. Simultaneously a neighboring ray ionizes a
neighboring atom, making two. And so on ad
infinitum until all the particles in the emulsion have been either struck
or not struck by rays of light. In the final event what we get, multiplied a
million-fold, is a map consisting of a myriad minute particulars, each ionized
atom (or developed crystal) a point in a coordinate graphic system
corresponding to the world beyond. In recordings on magnetic tape, whether
sound or video, we find the magnetization of iron particles instead of ionized
atoms of silver: but in each case what the
patterns of particles amount to is a system of coordinate points. Both
ionized atoms and magnetized particles are "representatives of
objects" which map the physical world.
3
In
discussions of this kind the word "representation" seems impossible
to avoid. This is unfortunate because it is all too easy to confuse the
pictorial and the political meanings of the term; indeed this confusion is
almost inevitable since their meanings are very nearly the same. Political
representation proposes that a man be said to represent a district, a class, or
a nation, when he synecdochically "stands for" numerous other human
elements in the political map. It embodies, in brief, an organizational economy
of time and motion. According to the pictoral meaning, on the other hand, a few
strokes of paint may "stand for" trees or towns or people. This
embodies an economy of meaning and display.
And for a
perfect example of the way these meanings blurr together into one we need look
no further than the quotation from Wittgenstein already cited: "The
elements of the picture are the representatives of objects." Reading this,
one all too easily conjures up an image of a kind of pictorial House of
Representatives full of splashes of paint and spots of colour in various shades
of red and blue. With this in mind it becomes as much an ethical as an artistic
necessity to know upon what principle a splash of paint represents a collection
of men, and by what right the painter decides that it shall. There is a decided
risk here both of burying the argument under a metaphor, and of politicising
the whole discussion; nevertheless it may as well be stated that in objective
graphics the process of "representation" has much more of a
particularistic, grass-roots character built into it than it does in either
painting or politics, for its history has been guided by the ideal of one man/one
vote/one representative. Under the normative goal of fidelity, and of higher
and still higher fidelity, objective graphics continually strive toward an
ideal in which each discriminable unit of space/time in the universe should be
represented by a discriminable unit in the photograph or the recording tape as
well.
Fidelity and
faithfulness are qualities which are less admired today than previously, but in
the case of objective graphics a forthright and unembarrassed use of both terms
should be encouraged at all times. This is partly desirable for historical
reasons, since as far back as 1828 we find Nicephore Niepce, the man who first
obtained and fixed a camera image, proclaiming his intention to "copy
nature with the greatest fidelity".7 But it is also appropriate
because, despite an uncompromisingly technical foundation, and a vocabulary of
things like "linearity" and "time-base stability" and
"frequency response", the precise modern concept of high fidelity
really incorporates the older, vaguer, nineteenth century one. The effect of
measures like frequency response is to make exact and explicit the implicitly
quantitative nature of old-fashioned "exclamatory" fidelity—what
might be called the fidelity of the "aha!" response. The "aha!"
response is determined by the frequency response, and it can be heard today
every time two photographs or films or radio-telescopic pictures or sound or
videotapes are compared and one of them is found to contain incomparably more
and clearer detail than the other. In objective graphics the Law of More is the
law of their evolution.
The Law of More
insists that if an astronomer is given a choice between two radio telescopes he
is bound to prefer the one giving most detail, just as it requires that any
ordinary photographer should choose the sharper of two lenses. Whether the
available detail is used is another matter. It is of course true that the
astronomer may elect to display his data in deliberately coarsened aggregates,
just as the local photographer may not always want to use the finest resolution
of his lens in the final prints. To take a famous example, when Julia Margaret Cameron
softened the focus on such portaits as her head of Sir John Herschel, turning
the astronomer's hair into a corona of solar flares, she pioneered a technique
used by numerous cameramen to spiritualise the flesh of Hollywood stars.8
But this only goes to show the mutual antipathy of objective and subjective
graphics. And in the resulting fog of soft-focussed spirituality it is
important not to lose sight of the main issue. This is that the capacity of one
instrument to get more detail than
another, and the "disposition" or "potentiality" of these
details to represent objects (whether or not this capacity is realised), is
what guarantees that it will be the most sought-after instrument in its field.
For a man who wants to find out what there is in the world, rather than what he
has in his mind, the most highly prized instrument is the one which represents
with the highest fidelity physical states of affairs.
A
physical state of affairs always exhibits varying degrees of order, more or
less; and physicists sometimes say that degrees of order and quantities of
information add up to much the same thing.9 This is directly related
to the Law of More which governs the evolution of objective graphics, for what
the constantly multiplying coordinate points in higher and higher fidelity
images are actually coordinated with
(or what they correspond to), are the
degrees of order perceptible in the world. When information is synonymous with
order it is measured in "bits", those anonymous minimal units which
enable us to distinguish, to discriminate, to tell features from featurelessness,
and something from nothing (or some thing from no thing). As narrowly
interpreted by a biologist the Law of More might mean more detailed information
about organelles; as interpreted by an astronomer it might only mean more
detailed information about galactic boundaries; but in its broad and general
form applied to all objective graphics indiscriminately the Law of More always
means more "bits". From which it follows that what the "ahas"
of the exclamatory criterion of fidelity really celebrate is the ability of
objective graphics to distinguish finer and finer degrees of organization in
the physical world; to map it, as it were, with closer and closer coordinate
perfection.
These
considerations should further sharpen our distinction between objective and
subjective graphics, for in the realm of art the degree of order reflects the
order in the artist's mind. There, as Gombrich was at pains to show, norm
governs form;10 and the vocabulary which elaborates on this
relationship is one which richly exploits the possibilities of Symbols and
Meaning and Sense. No one who has enjoyed using such terms could be insensitive
to their loss, or unaware how poor a substitute for such heady notions a diet
of anonymous "bits" of "information" must seem. To insist
that a professional appreciator of subjective graphics should forgo this
prestigious and delightful terminology in favour of mere "bits" would
be to dash from his lips a beaker full of the warm south and replace it with a
mug of gruel. Meaning, after all, is sought by poets; whereas information is
more often sought by the police. But there it is; and as a true prophet of the
Reformation of Objective Graphics ich
kann nicht anders. Besides, a renunciation of Symbols and Meaning and Sense
will make it a lot easier to relocate Wittgenstein's picture theory of meaning
where it naturally belongs—in the world of objective graphics.
4
It would not be
too hard to find people who would agree that of the two Wittgensteins, Wl and
W2, it is the objectivistic thought of the Tractatus
which is more scientifically significant. But even among these there would be
few defenders of the "picture theory of meaning". Wittgenstein's
early belief that language pictorially maps reality, and his attempt to define
the conditions of exact linguistic cartography, are generally regarded as
woefully misconceived. No doubt they were: but then it is precisely because
language can never map reality with anything approaching coordinate precision
that objective graphics are important—they do it so much better. And when one
ponders on those parts of the Tractatus
one can understand it is hard to avoid being struck by the ways in which Wittgenstein's
criteria for linguistic representation, and his atomistic criteria for
fidelity, fit much more naturally the representation of objective graphics.
"A picture is attached to reality" we read at 2.1511.11
"It reaches right out to it" with what seem to be feelers connecting
words and things. Like most people who have never actually seen a Wittgensteinian
picture I rather doubt if this is so. But how much more sense the same idea
makes in the case of objective graphics, for exact ontological maps inhere in
the very process by which they are made, projected and drawn by electromagnetic
waves which do indeed "reach right out" from the reality they
project.
Wittgensteinian
fidelity even has a numerical criterion which relates to the Law of More. At
4.04 we read that "in a proposition there must by exactly as many
distinguishable parts as in the situation that it represents".12
Now the Law of More requires that for any given field of view or state of
affairs, cosmic or microcosmic, the more faithful report is the one which
provided more discriminable bits. And by making only a few substitutions to
4.04 we can see how easily it can be adapted to our purposes: "In an objective graphic there must be exactly as many bits as in the situation that it represents." If there are not
exactly as many bits then the fidelity will be lower, and the information
inherent in the state of affairs will not be faithfully represented. Lest some
of these speculative interpretations be thought too whimsical to be taken
seriously I should perhaps add that there is more to 4.04 than the short
excerpt given above. In a second paragraph Wittgenstein reinforces his notion
of numerical equivalence by adding that a proposition and a state of affairs "must
possess the same logical (mathematical)
multiplicity. (Compare Hertz's Mechanics on dynamical models)".
The reference to the famous physicist is significant: he was a man who had
thought much on the nature of faithful representation. And it is appropriate
that the quantification of fidelity has become inseparable from his name;
wherever you find audio systems in handsome cabinets of teak veneer men talk
about hertz or kilohertz to establish the fidelity with which their systems
represent.
Yet it is
perhaps an earlier thought in the Tractatus
which most clearly relates to that essential feature of objective graphic
representation—its coordinate nature. At 2.15 we find that "the fact that
the elements of a proposition are related to one another in a determinate way
represents that things are related to one another in the same way".13
Points which relate to each other in a "determinate way",
corresponding point for point with reality, are really coordinates. And once
this is grasped it becomes apparent that Wittgenstein's "picture theory of
meaning" is equally, and perhaps more usefully, a "coordinate theory
of representation", a rechristening which preserves his general aim of
establishing certain principles of analysis while avoiding all reference to
symbols and meaning and sense. "In an objective
graphic the elements of the picture are the representatives of
objects." And in the sense that they represent them, they are indeed.
Which brings me
to that outstanding example of musical low-fidelity, Wittgenstein's gramophone
record; or rather, the serial stages of music he describes from idea, to score,
to performance, to the objective graphic of the mechanical recording. After all
the plain good sense about mapping and coordinate correspondence, what he has
to say at 4.014 is painfully disappointing. Despite the importance attached to
numerical equivalence and to the correlations of parts which exact
correspondence requires, he seems casually to imply that there's really not
much difference in the representational fidelity of machines and men:
"A
gramophone record, the musical idea, the written notes, and the sound-waves,
all stand to one another in the same internal relation of depicting that holds
between language and the world."14
Now
it's one thing to say that they share some general internal relation, and
another thing entirely to imply an external equation. Yet this is what soon
follows:
"4.0141:
There is a general rule by means of which the musician can obtain the symphony
from the score, and which makes it possible to derive the symphony from the
groove on the gramophone record, and, using the first rule, to derive the score
again."
I
suppose much depends on how precisely we interpret the word "score".
But the gist of what he says is not only at odds with my general argument here;
it also contradicts his own numerical and structural criteria for facsimiles.
The distinction between what happens when a musician reads a score and when a
needle reads a groove is absolute. We have high-fidelity amplifiers and we
value them. We don't have high-fidelity violinists and no-one would pay to hear
them if we did. What we look for in violinists are those felicitous
infidelities of style which would be the despair of anyone who wanted all performances
of a score to sound the same. These infidelities ensure that one performance is
never a coordinate representation of another.
Introducing
a human performance governed by general rules of interpretation into any chain
of mechanical replications is the surest possible guarantee of low fidelity.
And this particular example of Wittgenstein's early thought is not only
significant for the way it dramatises the contrast between objective and
subjective graphics; it also forms an intellectual bridge between the
hard-edged objectivism of the Tractatus
and the notably soft-edged subjectivism of his later years. It's a long way no
doubt from the subjective degradation of musical performances in the Tractatus to the preoccupation with
rules and games in the Investigations;
and from there to the modish wisdom of the academicians of ideology. And
perhaps the only excuse for mentioning them all in one breath is to suggest
that once you lose your grip on the idea of description as fidelity to states
of affairs, a fidelity expressed in quanta of information, then very little
stands in the way of the arrant subjectivism of the present day. The
ruminations of the Investigations relativise
truth into linguistic localism; in the doctrine of ideology the point is power.
5
A recent study of
Wittgenstein15 gives some credit to the Austrian psychologist Karl Buhler
for redirecting the ideas of the Tractatus
away from the picture theory of meaning. It appears that Buhler's view of the
mind was aggressively antipictorial: whatever thought and thinking might
consist of, images and imagery were mere mental decoration. Instead he proposed
something called "imageless
thought" and regarded vagueness in human communication as inherent,
irremediable, and at times desirable. While it is highly unlikely that the
author of Objective Knowledge would
agree with all of this, Buhler's view of the mind as engaged in a continuous
process of eliminative enquiry does appear to have influenced Popper's thought,
and Buhler's evolutionary views on language are often mentioned. From the view
of the mind as always searching for answers to questions it follows that there
is no such thing as the blank reception of data radiating from objects "out
there" which is then imprinted on human senses as light waves imprint
themselves on photographic film. The mind, Popper reminds us, is a
problem-solving device, not a bucket.16
With this
proposition no advocate of objective graphics would disagree. Yet the metaphor
of the bucket, so inapt as a psychological model, is entirely appropriate as a
photographic model. Buckets and cameras are similar sorts of things. Both have
large orifices with a habit of indiscriminately sweeping things up, water in
one case and light-waves in the other. Of course when Popper rejects the bucket
theory of the mind he is also rejecting, and rightly, the photographic theory
of the mind as well. But why allow bad metaphors to prejudice one against good
machinery? Especially since there is such a strong resemblance between the
impersonality of that knowledge he finds stored for an indifferent posterity in
“World 3” and the impersonality of the representations of objective graphics,
the information they give us about physical states of affairs which always
remains as a disposition or potentiality only awaiting the arrival of some Fox Talbotian
trouveur who "discovers, on
examination, perhaps long afterwards" things which no-one previously had
any notion existed. Popper writes about unconsulted books in libraries which
contain knowledge in the form of as yet uncontroverted statements about the
nature of things; and stresses that these statements are quite independent of
any experiencing consciousness.17 Surely much of the information
contained in objective graphics is similar?
It's true that
one of the things Popper values most as an epistemologist is verisimilitude,
and truthful assertions approximating more and more closely to that state.
Whereas objective graphics belong to a nonlinguistic and alogical universe of
physical representations which show, which display, which mirror—but which do
not assert. Sometimes they show with marvellous detail, but for all their
precision and exactitude they lack the unique linguistic possibility of
negation. Wittgenstein's dogged attempt to assimilate words to pictures in the Tractatus was really aimed at having the
best of both worlds; the exactitude of neutral representation and the
possibility of propositional affirmation and denial which only belongs in the
normative universe of logic. This can't be done. But what pictures can do (and
what objective graphics do every day) is provide the necessary observational
evidence for propositional assertion. And surely this evidence is part of the
objective knowledge of “World 3”? Surely when Rutherford said to Chadwick that
all sorts of subatomic activities had been "going on" and expressed
surprise that his colleague hadn't known about them he was implying that this
was something which Chadwick did know now; or at any rate knew more reliably as
a result of the cloud chamber evidence?
It would hardly
seem so from a reading of Objective
Knowledge, where remarks on the role of special instruments in building up
the picture we have of the physical world are few and grudging. In fact one of
the only places where the impersonal mechanical fact-gathering is seen in a
favorable light is on the occasion when Popper draws on the arguments of that
little-known epistemologist, Winston Churchill:
"Some
of my cousins who had the great advantage of University education", wrote
Churchill, "used to tease me with arguments to prove that nothing has any
existence except what we think of it... I always rested upon the following
argument which I devised for myself many years ago . . . here is this great sun
standing apparently on no better foundation than our physical senses. But
happily there is a method apart altogether from our physical senses, of testing
the reality of the sun . . . astronomers . . . predict by (mathematics and)
pure reason that a black spot will pass across the sun on a certain day. You . .
. look, and your sense of sight immediately tells you that their calculations
are vindicated . . . We have taken what is called in military map-making a (cross
bearing'. We have got independent testimony to the reality of the sun. When my
metaphysical friends tell me that the data on which the astronomers made their
calculations were necessarily obtained originally through the evidence of their
senses, I say 'No'. They might, in theory at any rate, be obtained by automatic
calculating-machines set in motion by the light falling upon them without
admixture of the human senses at any stage . . ."18
Popper
comments: "The argument is highly original;first published in 1930 it is
one of the earliest philosophical arguments making use of the possibility of
automatic observatories and calculating machines (programmed by Newtonian
theory)."19
I
know of no other place in Popper’s writings where the true significance of
objective graphics is recognised. And the basic reason appears to be the one
already alluded to—a suspicion that the secret motive of anyone using
mechanical analogies is to promote that epistemological enemy, "the bucket
theory of the mind". Yet the details of Churchill's statement are
certainly illuminating. We have automatic calculating machines, set in motion
by light falling on them, and "without admixture of the human senses at
any stage". This description exactly fits a considerable amount of
hardware now orbiting the earth or voyaging to distant places, hardware which
is receiving and storing information on the degree of order in the immediate
environment at a rate no mind could cope with, is processing it in the form of
coordinates subject to instant recall, coordinates which as in all mechanical
graphics are "the representatives of objects".
Of
course automatic machinery can be set in motion in more ways than one—sometimes
it is triggered when you enter a room. That is how many of the White House
tapes were obtained. And it would be hard to find a better example of the
discrepancy between intention and use than these unusual examples of modern
recording techniques. Presumably President Nixon had the tape-recorders
installed in the basement in the hope that he would be laying the foundation of
a memorial Nixon archive to be at least as large, if not as pretentious, as the
Johnson mausoleum down in Texas. And for months the recorders turned dutifully
on and off, building up an impressive store of information about states of
affairs which were also affairs of state.
At the end of it
all someone went through the tapes and made a number of unexpected discoveries
which had been doggedly concealed up to that time. Subjectively they shouldn't
have been there at all. Subjectively, they weren't. As the President said to Haldemann,
advocating an implausible degree of low-fidelity playback: "You can say I
don't remember; you can say I don't recall."20 And it is also
true that some of the coordinates were missing. There were long gaps in the
tapes where a beleaguered subjectivity had tried stubbornly to mis-represent. But despite all this
there was still enough unerased objectivity to ruin the Administration. For—if
I may paraphrase Fox Talbot—it is one of the charms of objective graphics that
an operator may discover, days, months, or even perhaps years later, that he
has done and said many things which all his faculties tell him could never have
taken place at the time.
1. W.H.F. Talbot, The
Pencil of Nature, 1844-46 (serial). The quotation appears on page 151 of
the revised and enlarged edition of Beaumont Newhall’s The History of Photography, published by Secker and Warburg in
1972.
2. Karl R. Popper, Objective
Knowledge, Oxford, 1973, page 116.
3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961 (translated by D.F. Pears and B.F.McGuinness),
page 15.
4. President Nixon, for example,
got much more than he expected. The history of the White House tapes
exemplifies the dramatic consequences of the data acquisitivencss of objective
graphics.
5. A story from the early days of
nuclear research at the Cavendish Laboratory nicely illustrates the contrast
between the mental state of the operator and the result of his work. We are
told that when Chadwick showed Rutherford the first cloud-chamber photographs
of recoiling protons, Rutherford exclaimed: "Do you mean to say that all
this has been going on and you didn't know it!” (Understanding Physics Today, by W. H. Watson. Cambridge University
Press, 1963, p. 16.)
6. See "X-Rays from
Super-Nova Remnants", by Philip A. Charles and J. Leonard Culhane, Scientific American, December 1975.
[In
the original printing of the essay in Art
International the footnotes were unfortunately cut off at this point. The
passage from Churchill occurs in his autobiographical My Early Life.]