June 10, 2006: No Ontology without Phenomenology!

Since no one picked up the gauntlet I threw down yesterday on "Between the Lines," I would like to use this space to clarify why some might view me as an ontology-basher. This is actually material that I had prepared for my talk in Ireland that I mentioned in my June 5 entry; but it probably deserves more attention as the world (or some fraction thereof) lines up to ride the Semantic Web hobby-horse. This is also a good place for me to give credit to the late Gian-Carlo Rota for tweaking my curiosity about phenomenology. Like Hubert Dreyfus, Rota seemed to want to use Husserl as a stick for bashing artificial intelligence; but I always felt that Rota's discipline as a mathematician gave him a far sharper mind than Dreyfus had. (Rota reminds me of a remark that Bertrand Russell once made about his own intellectual pursuits: He devoted his youth to mathematics, turned to philosophy in middle age, and devoted his twilight years to writing fiction! Rota never made it to fiction, but he read Husserl with the same intensity he applied to reading mathematics.)

As I tried to do with Habermas, let me just try to being a few key points into the foreground. Most important is the nature of the subject matter: Phenomenology is the study of appearances. Once you fix on that basic premise, everything else is icing on the cake (although it would probably be a good idea to sort out who made the icing, be it Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger (philosophy's answer to music's three B's?), or any of the more recent sources). A key element of Husserl's icing is the study of noesis, which is his term for the "knowing act" that mediates between appearances and what the mind takes to be reality.

Note the "scare stress" in that last sentence: At the end of the day, I probably have to confess to being an unabashed idealist. I may not necessarily embrace Berkeley's extreme solopsism; but I still tend to live by Ringo Starr's immortal line in Help!: "It's all in yer mind!" This is why I have a general problem with the very concept of an Ontology of Everything: It presumes some representation of reality that can provide a foundation for all person-person (and person-machine) interactions (what Habermas (June 8 entry) called the "foundation of shared concepts"). However, the mind reshapes what it takes to be reality with every experience it has; and it seems naive and/or vain to assume that there is going to be some digital resource out there that can be compatible with every mind that tries to engage it.

This is why I have tried to live by the motto in today's title: No ontology without phenomenology! Unless the Semantic Web figures out how to get a grip on this concept of noesis, it is likely to open itself up for any number of bloopers once we try to use it for "real world" applications, whether they involve business or leisure. As Habermas tried to emphasize, at the end of the day, it is all about understanding; and understanding does not reside in "objective facts" but in the negotiation between individual "knowing acts" that is part of our everyday discourse.