A professor walks into the first day of his graduate-level Learning and Cognition course. He tells the students the following story:
“A boy is riding his bike and sees a bracelet on the street. He stops his bike, picks up the bracelet, and realizes the bracelet is a snake.”
After reading the story, the professor asks the students to describe it using the concept “real.” The students share perplexed glances, as if to say, “I signed up for a science course, not a philosophy course.” The professor continues to press the issue, and eventually a student speaks.
“He thought the object was a bracelet, but it was really a snake.”
This prompts another student to say, “He misperceived the snake as a bracelet.”
The professor asks the class if they understand these statements and if they agree with the students’ use of the concept “real.” The vast majority of the class nods yes.
The professor then asks the following, “Is there anything real about the bracelet?”
Eyes roll and students laugh as the question comes across as being silly more than important. The professor waits patiently and asks the question again.
After some time, a student states, “He really believed he saw a bracelet.”
When the professor asks the class if they understand and agree with the statement, only half or less nods yes.
To cut to the chase, the professor asks, “How many of you had a dream in the last week?”
Surprised by the question, few students raise their hand.
Needing to get the class on-board, the professor pushes harder and asks, “Ok. How many of you have had a dream in the past year?”
Now everybody raises their hand.
“Good,” says the professor. “And was there anything real about the dream?”
Connecting the questions regarding the reality of the bracelet and the reality of dreams, a student says, “The dream was real in the sense that I had the experience.”
“Excellent,” states the professor. “Now you understand the type of thinking that lies at the root of our thinking about reality and truth.”
Students look back at him, slightly puzzled.
“According to what you just told me,” the professor begins, “both the snake and the bracelet are real.”
The class continues to stare.
“How many of you think the two are equally real?”
More staring.
“OK. How many of you think the snake is more real than the bracelet?”
Roughly two-thirds of the class raises their hand.
“Why?”
One student raises her hand and states, “The boy really experienced a bracelet, but since the bracelet was an incorrect perception, the snake is more real.”
“And when the boy finally had a snake perception,” states the professor, “his perception was correct?”
“Yes,” responds the student confidently.
“Excellent!” exclaims the professor. “How many agree?”
The students look back and forth to each other, seeking an answer. Eventually, most everyone in the class raises their hand.
“Now we are truly making progress,” states the professor, “and for my final question, how do we know the snake is more real than the bracelet?”
The same student answers without hesitation, “Because the snake perception accurately corresponds to the object.”
“There it is,” exclaims the professor. “We know the object is really a snake because our experiences correspond to it. In short, perceptions are true, or accurate, because they correspond to reality correctly.”
He centers himself in front of the class and states, “This way of describing reality is known as the correspondence approach to truth and reality. It has dominated the way we think about truth and reality for at least four hundred years, if not longer. And over the next two weeks I hope to show you that if you believe this approach to truth and reality, you, one, logically deny yourself access to reality, and, two, make it very difficult to defend the reality of phenomena such as love, hate, the sound of music, and the taste of ice cream.”
He looks out over the class and sees that he has their attention.
“How many of your really like ice cream?” he asks.
Everyone raises their hand instantly. Some students raise both hands.
“Good then,” the professor states. “Let us begin.”
While the story described above may seem rudimentary, the purpose is to give the reader, as well as the hypothetical student, a common entry point into the conversation regarding correspondence and coherence approaches to reality and truth. This is important because coherence approaches have not been proposed all that often over the past one hundred years. Thus, very few contemporary cognitive scientists know of them, let alone make use of them. This century-long waxing and waning of correspondence and coherence approaches, respectively, may have had something to do with the fact that alternatives to correspondence have come to be seen as increasingly irrelevant after a century of naturalism, physicalism, and realism. That is, the increasingly sophisticated view of the physical world that has developed over centuries of scientific practice has led the vast majority of practicing cognitive scientists to assume that the issue of reality and truth has been solved, and by using science, we decrease the degree of discrepancy between objective and subjective reality. From this perspective, science is metaphysical in the sense that science reveals how reality really is, independent of our personal perspective.
While this correspondence-driven, metaphysical take on science is practically implicit in contemporary cognitive science, we propose that the issues addressed in the snake/bracelet story are, in fact, unresolved. Furthermore, we believe that the current zeitgeist of correspondence thinking is due to historical choices regarding our conceptualization of the reality of human experience. In what follows, we briefly review some of these choice points in the hope of clarifying why a commitment to correspondence has seemed to be such an obvious step for cognitive scientists.
a. Spiritual versus mental subjectivity. Questions about whether or not the bracelet is real, or the manner in which it is real in relation to the reality of the snake, are the same kind of questions René Descartes asked himself when he addressed the reality of God and the material world hundreds of years ago. To be sure, very few if any contemporary cognitive scientists would account for the reality of the snake and the bracelet via Descartes’s notion of interacting yet qualitatively distinct physical and spiritual realities (i.e., dualism). However, despite their assumed distinctiveness from dualism, most contemporary cognitive scientists implicitly, if not explicitly, endorse the basic assumption of dualism that the interesting point about reality is the extent to which it is independent of observers. This commitment to correspondence thinking was evident in the writing of one of Descartes’ major critics, John Locke (1700). Even after Locke took some of the first formal steps toward developing cognitive science (i.e., a “science of man”) and re-described the spiritual side of Descartes’ dualism as being “mental,” the question for Locke’s “science of man” was how it is that our sense impressions are able to accurately correspond to physical reality.
b. Radical skepticism. In response to Locke’s non-spiritual correspondence approach to reality and truth, David Hume (2012) asked whether or not such an approach is even logically possible. Specifically, Hume’s basic argument was that if one accounts for reality in terms of the “impressions and ideas” it causes within us, then all we can ever really know are the impressions and ideas we have about reality. This is because every test we could ever run to assess the extent to which our impressions and ideas about external reality are accurate would have to be mediated by impressions and thoughts. That is, once we claim that we know external reality through observer-dependent structures such as thoughts and impressions, we have logically doomed all of our knowledge to be trapped within us.
Though Hume’s radical skepticism is hundreds of years old, and seems outdated to many contemporary scientists in general—and cognitive scientists, specifically—we believe Hume’s radical skepticism constitutes both a historical choice point and an individual choice point for the issue of how we conceptualize the reality of the subjective. On the one hand, there were and are those scholars who took radical skepticism to be diagnostic of a logically flawed approach to reality and truth. On the other, there were and are those who believed and continue to believe that the test for whether or not the correspondence approach to reality and truth is “correct” is empirical. That is, the “correctness” of science will ultimately be decided on correspondence grounds; that is, by whether or not science can eventually represent the entirety of observer-independent reality accurately. In what follows, we examine various historical attempts to sustain the correspondence approach in spite of radical skepticism.
c. Overcoming radical skepticism. What is somewhat ironic about the attempt to overcome skepticism is that although those who did and do so tend to present themselves as being quite different from each other, they nonetheless avoid skepticism in roughly the same way; specifically, by nesting the correspondence relation within an assumed, larger-scale reality that guarantees the veridicality of the correspondence relation. Descartes, for example, after having doubted all but his ability to doubt, then went on to infer that his ability to do so could have only been created by a superior, omnipotent being (i.e., God). Then, to secure the correspondence relationship completely, he assumed that his subjectivity must correspond accurately to reality because God created both and would not have done so incorrectly. Bishop Berkeley made much the same maneuver when he proposed to overcome Hume’s radical skepticism by asserting that the correspondence relation holds because we exist within God’s mind.
Cognitive scientists, while certainly not dualists, nonetheless rely on evolutionary theory as a means of placing the correspondence relationship within a larger-scale reality as a means of validating the correspondence relationship. There are two dominant varieties of such thinking: indirect-realism and direct-realism. Realism is the assertion that objects exist as they are, with all of their intrinsic properties, independently of observers. Indirect realism asserts that our knowledge of reality is mediated by our sensory systems and knowledge structures. Direct realism asserts that our knowledge structures are directly in contact with external properties, exactly as they are.
Indirect realism is basically an evolutionarily inspired re-description of Locke’s mediated theory of perception in which external events cause the internal formation of impressions and ideas. Though there are many varieties of indirect realism (Fodor 1983; Pinker 1999), common to most is the computationalist, representationalist view of cognition, which assumes that we know what is outside of us because of the representations that external events cause within our brains. Given that our brains co-evolved with the world and were naturally selected, it seems self-evident that our brains give us accurate access to external reality.
While in the early days of cognitive science indirect realists believed that internal, sensory-driven (i.e., bottom-up) representation of external events could be augmented by top-down, cognitive processes such as attention (Broadbent 1958; Cherry 1953), they still nonetheless believed that the bottom-up processes entailed accurate representations of their external causes. Such assumptions derived support from findings such as Hubel & Wiesel’s (1962) discovery of neurons in the primary visual cortex (V1) that expressed spatially correspondent receptive fields (i.e., the activity of a neuron in V1 could be maximally stimulated by a visual stimulus emanating from a particular location in the visual field). Later research revealed a massive degree of spatial correspondence between locations in external space and neural space within a host of different modalities (e.g., visual, auditory, and kinesthetic space). Milner & Goodale’s (1995) discovery of visual systems used for object identification versus visual systems used for guiding action (i.e., vision for perception versus vision for action) further solidified indirect realism because it seemed to clarify how internal representations of external events were used to accurately guide behaviors back onto external reality.
In light of this accumulating neural evidence as well as a host of perceptual-cognitive research that revealed our apparent ability to represent invariant properties of biologically relevant external events, Roger Shepard (2001) stated the following in the opening line of the abstract to his seminal paper, Perceptual-cognitive Universals as Reflections of the World: “The universality, invariance, and elegance of principles governing the universe may be reflected in principles of the minds that evolved in that universe” (p. 581). Clearly, from this indirect-realist perspective, our connection to the world around us is mediated by internal representations that are phylogenetically derived stand-ins for what the world around us is like.
Critiques of indirect realism within cognitive science basically recapitulated Hume’s critique of Locke’s mediated theory of perception. That is, cognitive scientists dating back as far as the Six Realists (Holt et al. 1910) criticized the representational approach to cognition because they believed it logically denied one access to external reality. Interestingly enough, instead of challenging the correspondence view of reality and truth that lay at the heart of indirect realism, and which constituted Hume’s biggest concern with Locke’s approach, cognitive scientists who labeled themselves direct-realists argued that the connections between the internal and the external were not constituted of mediating representations of the external but, rather, of natural relations between the organism and the environment. Though this idea dates back at least as far as William James as well as the Gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka (Ash 1998), perhaps its most influential expression was provided by J. J. Gibson (1979), who argued that we perceive the world in terms of behavioral possibilities, what he referred to as affordances.
Since Gibson (1979), many cognitive scientists have effectively investigated affordances. Given that most ecological psychologists who investigate affordances are simultaneously direct realists, it is important to their realism that affordances be real, and that we have direct access to affordances via our sensory systems. Instead of constructing representations, however, our sensory systems are described as having the task of picking up or detecting information (i.e., affordances).
The direct-realist appeal to the reality of directly perceivable affordances defends the validity of the correspondence relation by arguing that organisms veridically perceive affordances because they evolved to do so. That is, just as was the case with Descartes, Berkeley, and indirect realism, the assertion of the correspondence relation is validated by placing it within an assumed, larger-scale reality. In the case of direct realism, that assumed, larger-scale reality is the evolved physical world.
By calling the evolved, physical world an assumed, larger-scale reality, we are not proposing that the theory of evolution is untrue, or that the phenomena referred to via the concept of the physical world do not exist. In fact, we believe the phenomena referred to via the concept of the physical world do exist, and we further believe that the theory of evolution is “true.” We just believe they exist and are true respectively, in a manner that is not couched in the correspondence framework espoused by realists. (We will describe how we believe they exist and are true at a later point in this paper.) Rather, what we are trying to accomplish by referring to the evolved physical world as an assumed, larger-scale reality is to point out the common strategy shared by correspondence theorists across the centuries. Specifically, if one espouses a correspondence account of reality, in which knowledge and/or perceptual structures are meant to correspond to reality, either via perceptually generated representations or via evolutionarily tailored relations, then, by definition, all we have contact with are knowledge and perceptual structures, and any statement about external reality is an assumption. This, in fact, was the gist of Hume’s critique of Locke’s mediated theory of perception. Radical skepticism does not argue that objects do not exist. Rather, it is simply a critique of a particular account of reality (i.e., the correspondence account), and the critique refers to the logical coherence of the account. If one espouses a correspondence framework for reality and truth, one has logically denied oneself access to external reality, and neither empirical data nor an assumed larger-scale reality is capable of overcoming this logical flaw. On logical grounds alone, one cannot use realism and its attendant correspondence arguments to overcome radical skepticism.
To be sure, direct realists might respond that their brand of realism overcomes radical skepticism because direct realism does not rely on internal representations to connect the internal to the external. Rather, the connections, as stated above, are conceptualized in terms of relations between organisms and environments that co-evolved in such a way that organisms are able to directly perceive these relations (i.e., affordances).
While at first glance the anti-representational slant of these arguments does seem to skirt the issue of radical skepticism, it’s appeal to relations or relational properties between relata (e.g., organisms and environments) still commits to the correspondence notion that truth is determined by the degree of correspondence between the system (i.e., the organism) and something external to the system (i.e., affordances). Again, this commitment to the correspondence relation stems from the centuries-old belief that the important thing about reality is its independence of observers. Armed with such an approach to reality and truth, science is believed to be metaphysical in that it reveals observer-independent properties of external reality. To be sure, the direct realist will argue that evolution has solved all of this. However, as was stated above, it is their commitment to realism that logically denies the correspondence scholar access to external reality. In short, it is the logically incoherent notion of correspondence that denies the realist access to external reality, not reality itself.
In order to overcome the representationalism inherent in indirect realism, direct realists re-framed the connection between organisms and environments in terms of evolutionarily derived relations as opposed to internal representations. Doing so, however, begs the issue of the nature of the things that stand in relation to each other (i.e., the relata). Are the relata themselves constituted of relational properties? If so, just how far down is reality constituted of relations?
While questions regarding the relational nature of reality might seem silly to contemporary cognitive scientists, it was actually of paramount importance to the maintenance and perpetuation of the correspondence approach roughly a century ago. Bertrand Russell (1911), for example, went to great lengths to counter the notion of internal relations that was prominent in idealist philosophy in the 1800s and early 1900s. As described by Russell, the notion of internal relations is the idea that the relations between entity A and B are actually constituents of A and B. In other words, part of what constitutes A is its relationship with B. This idea was problematic for Russell because idealist philosophers often used it as a means of overcoming radical skepticism. Specifically, these philosophers proposed that the objectivity of supposed external reality was actually observer dependent, in that a subject (i.e., an observer) was internally related to its objects. That is, the objects do not have an existence independent of the subject, and vice versa (Hegel 1971; Oakeshott 1933; Priest 1991). Different idealist philosophers held different motivations for espousing this view. Many did so in order to maintain the reality of God. Others did so in order to maintain the reality of phenomena that Descartes had relegated to the subjective (e.g., values, meaning, and aesthetics).
Regardless of their motivations, the idealist notion of internal relations was problematic for Russell because he wanted to describe reality in terms of the objects of science and logic. In short, Russell wanted metaphysics to be empirical. In order to do so, he felt he needed to establish the logical independence of external reality. That is, he had to show that objects are not internally related to subjects. As a result, he argued that not all relations are internal, and that some are external. By external relations, Russell meant that a relationship between entity A and entity B is not constitutive of entities A and B. An example of an external relation would be the relative height of two people, say Mary and Sam. While it is logically coherent to state that Mary is taller than Sam, the “taller” relation is not constitutive of either Mary or Sam. That is, the “taller” relation depends, of course, upon Mary and Sam, but it exists externally from Mary and Sam in the sense that it plays no role in the properties that constitute Mary or Sam. Russell uses this notion of external relations to propose a correspondence approach to reality and truth in which entities share relations and via those relations constitute components of complexes. Having assumed that he had logically negated the notion of internal relations, Russell then proposed that we get on with the empirical, metaphysical business of scientifically describing reality “as it is,” independent of observers.
The use of the notion of externally related entities as a means of sustaining the correspondence approach to reality and truth is also evident in the work of direct realists such as Holt et al. (1910) and Gibson (1979). By utilizing this relation-driven form of realism, all three were implicitly asserting the belief that the issue of reality was to be solved via epistemology. That is, they were continuing the centuries-old argument that the important thing about reality is its independence from observers.
a. The relational nature of reality. As stated above, the direct-realist assumption that we have contact with external reality via relations begs the issue of the nature of the things that stand in relation to each other (i.e., the relata). In other words, if we claim that two relata share a relation, we imply that there is a difference between relata and relations. This leads to another choice point that historically influenced the manner in which we describe the reality of the subjective: Are the relata themselves constituted of relational properties, or are they constituted of non-relational properties, what one might refer to as intrinsic properties? The answer to this question is important, for if one argues for a difference between intrinsic and relational properties, then realism seems the obvious choice; the purpose of science is to uncover the intrinsic properties of reality. If, however, one assumes that relata are themselves constituted of relational properties, we have a much different problem. For if all relata are constituted of relations, then there can be no intrinsic properties. This is because the constitution of all properties, by definition, would be relational. In short, reality would constitute a unity in which all things were constituted of all things.
The notion that all things are about all things sounds much like the idealist notion of internal relations. And while the idea might seem outdated in contemporary cognitive science, it has recently gained traction in the philosophy of science as a possible explanation of properties. For example, mass is often considered an intrinsic property in that the mass of an object is considered to be independent of its context, while weight is considered to be an extrinsic property because the object’s weight is determined by how its mass interacts with its context. Jammer (2000), however, proposes that all particles receive their inertial mass via their interactions with the Higgs field, “a scalar field that ‘permeates all of space’ and ‘endows particles with mass’” (p. 162). Bauer (2011) argues that the dependence of mass on the Higgs field renders mass externally grounded. This means that the mass of the particle is not independent of its context. As a result, the object’s mass is a relational, non-intrinsic property.
Bauer’s notion of external grounding should not be confused with Russell’s (1911) notion of external relations. Bauer uses the notion of external grounding to make the case that a property (i.e., mass) that was assumed to be intrinsic (in order to distinguish it from the property of weight, which was assumed to be contextually relative) was actually contextually relative. “External” in this sense was used to flesh out the relative nature of a previously assumed to be non-relative (i.e., intrinsic) property (i.e., mass). Russell, on the other hand, used the concept “external” in the opposite way. That is, he wanted to demonstrate that certain properties were independent (i.e., were not entailed in the constitution) of other properties. In short, Russell used the notion “external” to create independent properties in a reality the idealists had described as an internally related unity, while Bauer, roughly a century later, uses the concept “external” to re-contextualize properties that post-Russellian realists had conceptually isolated from reality by describing them as intrinsic.
While one could see Russell’s (1911) and Bauer’s (2011) uses of the concept “external” as contradictory and leave it at that, one might also argue that their different uses of the same concept are diagnostic of the success of Russell’s efforts. Specifically, Russell used the concept external to de-contextualize certain parts of reality (i.e., make them intrinsic), while Bauer, one hundred years later, uses the same concept to re-contextualize what Russell had worked so hard to de-contextualize. In short, one might argue that while Russell represented a first conceptual step away from holism, contemporary works such as Bauer’s represent initial conceptual steps back toward holism. Further evidence of a tendency to conceptually move the philosophy of science away from the notion of intrinsic properties can be found in the work of Harré (1986), who proposes the notion of ultra-grounding, the idea that a property may be grounded by a property, or properties, of reality as a whole.
Such an anti-intrinsic take on the nature of properties is also proposed by both Schaffer (2003) and Dehmelt (1989). These authors assert that there may be no fundamental level to reality at all (i.e., no final, non-relational, intrinsic property that forms “relations” into “complexes”). Rather, they propose that reality may be constituted of infinite levels of microstructure. Consistent with the notion of external grounding, Prior et al. (1982) propose the Global Groundedness Thesis. This thesis asserts that all dispositions (i.e., properties) are grounded (i.e., externally grounded) rather than ungrounded (i.e., intrinsically grounded). Ladyman et al. (2007) implicitly, if not explicitly, express a similar critique of the notion of intrinsic properties when they assert that contemporary analytic metaphysics needs to abandon the idea that reality is constituted of self-subsistent individual objects.
b. Truth in a relational reality. The idea that reality is infinitely relational is inconsistent with the correspondence approach to reality and truth because a relational reality can never be subdivided into final, intrinsic, “in-and-of-themselves”-type properties. In an infinitely relational reality, all objects and subjects are composed of relations (i.e., they are contextually grounded), and all intrinsic properties are inherently relational. This implies that dialectic counterparts such as objective versus subjective, or relational versus intrinsic, come to be introduced into one’s description of reality, not because they reflect accurate, final, ontological subdivisions of reality, but for the same reason one describes the snake in the snake-bracelet story as being more real than the bracelet—specifically, because one accepts the subjective-objective divide inherent in the correspondence view and tries to defend the assumed greater reality of the snake by asserting its independence of oneself. It is this assumption that the important thing about reality is its assumed observer-independent nature that drives the correspondence approach and leads one to further believe that the goal of science is to overcome subjectivity and reveal the objective truth about reality. Once such independence is no longer assumed, then truth can no longer be measured by assessing the degree of difference between reality and an impression, idea, or representation we have of it, or by investigating an assumed relation we share with it. There exists nothing “as it is” to which anything else can accurately correspond. The final, ontological description of what something is must include reality as a whole. In short, truth must be assessed in a non-correspondence fashion.
One way to measure truth without asserting a correspondence relationship is to do so on the basis of coherence. By coherence we mean lack of contradiction. In contemporary philosophy, lack of contradiction (i.e., coherence) is most often used to refer to the means by which a belief is justified (Kvanvig 1995; Lycan 2012). Specifically, a subset of contemporary epistemologists, who might be loosely referred to as “coherentists” (Lycan 2012; Quine & Ullian 1978; Thagard 1978), propose a view akin to the following:
[…]what justifies […] the formation of any new belief—is that the doxastic move in question improves the subject’s explanatory position overall and/or increases the explanatory coherence of the subject’s global set of beliefs. (Lycan 2012, p. 6)
While the coherentist approach to propositions clearly relies on the notion of “lack of contradiction” to measure the justifiability of beliefs, it does not make use of “lack of contradiction” as a measure of the truth inherent in experience. As a result, it is logically possible for one to be a coherentist about beliefs while simultaneously holding an implicit or explicit correspondence view that conceptualizes beliefs as subjective propositions that refer to external, objective reality. It is not clear where Lycan (2012) stands on this issue.
At any given moment, we find ourselves involuntarily holding any number of beliefs, at least those produced by perception and by memory; however, […] I do not make any primary appeal to those faculties as justifying. Call such unconsidered beliefs “spontaneous beliefs”; they are primarily about our immediate environment, past events, sometimes our own mental states, and more. (p. 6)
Although Lycan (2012) makes no claims regarding the metaphysical status of perception, or where he stands on the issue of reality and experience, his use of the word perception allows him to interject other phrases such as “primarily about our immediate environment,” that then implicitly connect beliefs to external reality via a correspondence relation. Regardless of whether or not this was Lycan’s intent, it is clear that coherentism is about the justifiability of beliefs and not about reality, per se. As a result, it may not have much to offer in our attempt to develop a coherence approach to reality and experience.
One possible way to apply the coherence approach to the issue of reality and experience is the very same test entailed in the snake-bracelet problem. If one assumes that reality constitutes an internally related unity that defies that logic of correspondence tests of truth, then statements regarding the truth of the snake and the bracelet should be stated in terms of contradiction. That is, the statement “the boy saw a bracelet while riding his bike” is true in the sense that the boy had a persistent flow of “bracelet” experience. The notion of persistent flow is important here because it calls attention to the fact that from moment to moment during the bracelet phenomenon, the phenomenon did not contradict itself; that is, the “bracelet” phenomenon at one moment was not followed by a different “non-bracelet” phenomenon the next. Jordan & Vandervert (1999) propose that it is this coherent flow of phenomena, what they refer to as “within-instance” coherence, that underlies our propositions regarding the reality of phenomena. To be sure, later on in the story, when the boy picked up the “bracelet,” he suddenly did have a contradiction in the flow of the bracelet phenomenon; specifically, the bracelet phenomenon was contradicted by a “snake” phenomenon. Given that the snake phenomenon persisted in a more coherent fashion than the bracelet phenomenon (i.e., no matter what he did, the boy could not convert the snake phenomenon into another type of phenomenon), one then asserts that the snake phenomenon is more real than the bracelet phenomenon. From the coherence perspective, what this means is that the snake phenomenon was more coherent (i.e., more persistent, or less contradictory) than the bracelet phenomenon.
Such a coherence approach to the reality and truth of phenomena is rather similar to the approach advocated by Michael Oakeshott. In perhaps his most famous book, Experience and its Modes, Oakeshott (1933) described reality in a manner that is consistent with the idea that reality constitutes an internally related unity. He did not say it this way, however. Rather, as was consistent with both his idealist background and the philosophical context of his time, he described reality in terms of experience and stated, “[…]experience is a single whole, within which modification may be distinguished, but which admits of no final or absolute division” (Oakeshott 1933, p. 27). Also,
[s]ubject and object are not independent elements or portions of experience; they are aspects of experience which, when separated from one another, degenerate into abstractions. Every experience [...] is the unity of these, a unity which may be analysed into these two sides but which can never be reduced to a mere relation between them. (Oakeshott 1933, p. 60)
To be sure, the manner in which Oakeshott uses the concept of experience makes it difficult for those who have already made correspondence-driven commitments to the meaning of “experience” to follow his arguments. For correspondence theorists, “experience” refers to the subjective side of Descartes dualism. But given that Oakeshott did not define experience in terms of the mental, spiritual, transcendental, or absolute, it seems reasonable to assume that when he described reality as a world of experience, he was using the concept differently than it had been used by Locke, Kant, or Hegel. This is important, for when most contemporary cognitive scientists refer to idealism, they tend to mention Locke and Berkeley (Charles 2011). Locke and Berkeley both accepted the correspondence relation. Locke accepted it without reservation. Berkeley accepted it and then placed it within the assumed larger-scale reality of God’s mind in order to avoid skepticism. Oakeshott, on the other hand, denied the correspondence relation (as did most all the German idealist philosophers). Thus, for Oakeshott, the terms “reality” and “experience” were synonymous, not because he believed reality was ultimately subjective, but because he believed reality constituted an internally related unity that defied any ontological, final division into dialectic categories such as subjective and objective, or reality versus experience.
c. Coherence, truth, and modes. Oakeshott proposed his coherence approach to reality and truth because he believed that the correspondence approach was, first, logically incoherent, and second, improperly applied in contexts in which it was not relevant. Specifically, Oakeshott argued that within the confines of the correspondence approach, it was easy to believe that the task of science was to uncover the intrinsic, observer-independent properties of reality. In addition, given its supposed ability to accumulate a stockpile of context-independent, universal knowledge, it became easy to believe that its criterion for truth (i.e., correspondence) should have dominion over all arenas in which truth was at stake.
Agreeing with his idealist predecessors about the logical incoherence of correspondence thinking, Oakeshott argued that endeavors such as “science” constituted modes of experience. What he meant by “mode” is that science constitutes a distinct means of generating abstractions about the internally related unity in which we are embedded. It is an abstraction in the sense that it is constitutive of reality (i.e., it is “within” the reality it is attempting to describe) and can therefore never be “outside” of reality, looking “at” reality. As a result, it should be conceptualized as a recursion on reality—an abstraction about that from which it emerged and within which it is entailed.
Oakeshott described at least four different modes: science, daily practice (i.e., politics), history, and poetry. What distinguishes these modes, in addition to the content they are about, is the means by which truth is determined within each. In the mode of science, truth is determined by the degree of quantitative coherence that can be achieved in the description of a phenomenon, both individually and collectively. Given that quantitative coherence within and between individuals is paramount, factors such as personal opinion are irrelevant to the truth criteria of the mode of science. In the mode of daily practice (i.e., politics), however, opinion and desire (i.e., how people want to live their lives) constitute the issue at hand. Truth, therefore, could not be measured in terms of the degree of quantitative coherence within and between individuals. Rather, it was reflected in the degree to which members of a group treated each other in accordance with a normatively determined system of expectations. As a result, the truth criteria of the modes of science and politics (i.e., daily practice) were similar in that they were both measured in terms of coherence but were fundamentally different in terms of the phenomena whose coherence was being assessed (i.e., quantification of a phenomenon versus normatively determined expectations).
Because of this qualitative difference in the relata of science and politics, Oakeshott argued that the truth criteria of one could not coherently be used to measure the truth of the other. That is, just as personal opinion and desire were to play no role in the truth status of scientific statements, quantitative coherence in both individual and collective descriptions should not play a role in determining the truth status of political statements (i.e., statements of how people should live their lives).
Oakeshott went to such great lengths to distinguish science as a mode of experience because he felt he needed to provide an alternative to the correspondence approach. By appealing to the notions of coherence and internally related unity that were common to idealist philosophers, without making appeals to the mental, spiritual, transcendental, or absolute, Oakeshott presented a coherence approach that was capable of addressing the physicalist, naturalist forms of correspondence thinking that were emerging during his time. The difference between Oakeshott’s coherence approach and the correspondence-driven naturalism of his time was not that the former did not believe in the reality of objects or that the former was created to maintain a place for God in metaphysics, as had been the case for Berkeley and Kant. Rather, the difference was that the former recognized the logical incoherence of the latter and worked to develop an approach to reality that avoided the logical pitfalls historically encountered by the latter. Given that direct realists such as Holt et al. (1910) and Gibson (1979), who were, to some extent, contemporaries of Oakeshott, had probably developed fairly robust associations between coherence, idealism, and the religious agendas of Berkeley and Kant, they probably had no reason to assume that an idealist-inspired philosophy had anything to offer.
Regardless of who did or did not read Oakeshott’s work while he was alive, his lack of appeal to mental, spiritual, transcendental, or absolutist themes, coupled with his persistent attacks on the correspondence approach, collectively support the idea that when he referred to reality as a world of experience, he was using it more as a placeholder in his arguments with the correspondence approach as a way to slowly transform the reader’s meaning of the word experience from the subjective-mental denotation it had acquired in the midst of the correspondence approach to the holist-driven, internally related unity of all phenomena it was meant to imply in the coherence framework.
d. Coherence and science. To correspondence ears, the description of the coherence approach given above might be interpreted as antiscientific. That is, since we take seriously the logical incoherence of the correspondence approach and assert that it does not inform us about context-independent, intrinsic properties of reality, one might assume we are proposing that science does not reveal truth. This is a common reaction of those who implicitly hold a correspondence view. They assume that those who acknowledge the strength of Hume’s insight are actually denying the existence of “things.” This is simply not the case. As stated above, radical skepticism is a critique of the internal logic of the correspondence approach to reality and truth, not a critique of the existence of “things.” Oakeshott’s coherence approach constitutes a means of addressing reality and truth in a way that does not beg incoherent correspondence assumptions. In order to further demonstrate the compatibility of science and the coherence approach, we present WST as a case in point. As we present WST we will also point out how various choice points in the theory’s construction were guided by the notion of coherence.