Abstract
In this article I will suggest ways in which adding the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze to the mix can complement and extend the 4EA approach to cognitive science. In the first part of the paper, I will show how the Deleuzean tripartite ontological difference (virtual/intensive/actual) can provide an explicit ontology for dynamical systems theory. The second part will take these ontological notions and apply them to three areas of concern to the 4EA approaches: (a) the Deleuzean concept of the virtual will clarify the ontological status of perceptual capacity as sensorimotor skill; (b) the Deleuzean concept of “intensive individuation” will clarify the ontological status of the genesis of perceptually guided behavior; (c) the Deleuzean critique of confusing the actual and the virtual will enable us to intervene in the realism/idealism debate. These aspects will not be addressed sequentially but will be interwoven into an unfolding argument.
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Notes
The latest 4EA work to tackle the realism/idealism debate is Chemero (2009), which contains a fine overview of the issue (183–205).
Despite the general trend described here, how precisely to define cognition within this general framework, and the exact nature of which biological details are necessary for cognition—or even if they are necessary at all—is hotly contested within the 4EA and orthodox approaches. See Wheeler (2010) for an overview of the issues involved.
Although it is an excellent book, Braver (2007) nonetheless treats only Foucault and Derrida, not Deleuze, in its “History of Continental Anti-Realism.”
Naturalism is a notoriously fecund notion. We can say that Deleuze is a naturalist qua anti-humanist, in the Spinozist sense of denying that humans form a “kingdom within the kingdom” (of nature). In refusing a special status to human beings, Deleuze uses the same basic concepts (self-organization and creative novelty in dynamic systems) to handle phenomena in the physical, biological, social (including the social animals), and human registers. However, these same basic concepts have enough differences in their expression in the different registers that we cannot say Deleuze is a reductionist, with purely physical explanations being the only legitimate form of meaningful discourse.
I will use organismic behavior guided by sensorimotor perception as my paradigm case. Among the differences that divide thinkers in the 4EA approach is the status of “representation-hungry problems” and “action-oriented representations,” which are approved of by Clark (1997) and Wheeler (2005) but contested by Chemero (2009). They do agree however that a wide range of behaviors that traditional AI or orthodox cognitive science tries to handle by positing computation performed on representation do not in fact require representations, as they can be handled by models of coordination within the organism–environment couple considered as a dynamic system.
Differential calculus for Deleuze in DR is only a “technical model” for the structure of progressive determination of the Idea (Deleuze 1994, 220–221). The important thing is the ontological differences among virtual, intensive, and actual, terms which we will discuss shortly in the main body of the text. This tri-partite difference is illustrated by the difference between differentiation as determining the existence and distribution of singularities in a vector field and integration as the full determination of singularities while generating the trajectory modeling system behavior (Deleuze 1994, 176–179; DeLanda 2002, 30–34). But as we will show, the physical model of crystallization, the meteorological model of tropical cyclones, the biological model of gene regulatory networks and protein synthesis, and the social model of disciplinary institutions are also models of individuation leading the actualization of a virtual field.
Deleuze distinguishes intensive processes—those that cannot change beyond a certain threshold without qualitative change of the behavior pattern of the process—from extensive properties, which can so change. In a simple example, a ruler cut in half becomes two rulers (length is thus an extensive property), while a pot of water heated from below produces convection currents at a certain threshold of temperature difference between top and bottom (heating water is thus an intensive process, or, in standard terminology, temperature is a control parameter of the system) (DeLanda 2002, 26–27).
In a terminological wrinkle that need not concern us here, Deleuze distinguishes virtual “differentiation” from “differenciation” as the process of actualization.
Deleuze’s discussion of the “progressive determination” of an Idea is expressed in the language of calculus (Deleuze 1994, 171), but this is only for expository reasons. Following DeLanda’s discussion (2002, 30–31), we see that considered as pure “elements,” rates of change are undetermined, but determinable (dx, dy). As these rates of change are linked, they enter into differential relations, which are reciprocally determined (dx/dy)—this is differentiation as yielding instantaneous rates of change. These differential relations define the “existence and distribution” of the singularities of a vector field, but they are only completely determined as those differential relations and singularities are actualized (values of dy/dx)—this is integration as the generation of trajectories.
Deleuze distinguishes “who?” questions, which pick out individuation processes, from “what?” questions, which classify products. However, our focus on the individuation of a hurricane, such that it deserves a proper name, cannot be so extreme that we lose sight of the shared structure of the morphogenetic process leading to hurricanes. Each hurricane is unique—they really do deserve proper names—yet they are all hurricanes. In other words, Deleuze does not deny the utility of genera, but he does insist that individuation precedes the differenciation of genera; this insistence allows for counter-effectuation and hence allows for dynamic development in the virtual register. These very delicate points are discussed in Chapter 5 of DR (Deleuze 1994, 244–254).
Deleuze rehearses in several works the debate between Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier which follow the same lines of a distinction between the structure of morphogenetic processes and the classification of properties of products (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 45–47; Deleuze 1994, 184–185). It would of course be necessary to treat the difficult questions of teratology and the limits of viability in a full treatment of Deleuze and biology, but I will defer that challenge for another time.
My thanks to Manuel Cabrera Jr. for pointing me to this passage and for clarifying remarks.
“Neurological correlates” is a loaded term in this context and should be approached in terms that Chemero lays out clearly: “Experiences do not happen in brains. Even though it is perfectly obvious that something has to be happening in neurons every time an animal has an experience, for the radical embodied cognitive scientist, as for the enactivist, this something is neither identical to, nor necessary and sufficient for, the experience” (2009, 200; emphasis in original).
A more full treatment of this issue would take us to the distributionist versus localist dispute in neuroscience. Deleuze is on the side of the distributionists. Thus, he would agree that, for example, while the hippocampus may indeed be necessarily involved in long-term memory, the retrieval of a memory involves the integration of distributed neural systems. In many ways, the dispute between distributionists and localists is a dispute between dynamicists and anatomists, and Deleuze, as a process philosopher, will side with the dynamicists.
In another context, we might develop more fully this notion of the progressive determination of the Idea of the embodied-embedded system, and its counter-effectuation, as the ontological grounding of neural and behavioral plasticity.
Deleuze follows Bergson’s critique of the possible as the retrojection of the real minus existence (Deleuze 1991, 43; 96–97).
Although in his books Prinz does not rely on dynamical systems theory or on phenomenology, he does rely on biologically plausible models of emotion that emphasize the brain–body–world context: “emotions are not merely perceptions of the body but also perceptions of our relations to the world…. This book … is an attempt to bring body, mind, and world together” (Prinz 2004, 20).
Certainly, learning to swim in the ocean is more complex than learning in a pool; but even in a pool, putting on one of the new bodysuits will require that even expert swimmers attempt a new “conjugation.”
We should note that in his discussion of Affordances 1.1, Chemero insists that abilities are not dispositions, which on Chemero’s understanding are automatically triggered under the right circumstances (145). Thus, Chemero will claim that abilities are not inherent in animals (as are dispositions), but in animal-environment systems. However, I do not believe that Prinz’s notion of disposition, discussed above, is as deterministic as Chemero’s.
Think of two trains moving on parallel tracks at the same velocity. You can look from one window to the other and see stable things, but this is only due to the coordination of rates of change.
I would like to acknowledge very helpful comments from Jeff Bell, Manuel Cabrera Jr, Manuel DeLanda, Shaun Gallagher, Joe Hughes, Mike Wheeler, James Williams, and two anonymous reviewers from PCS.
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Protevi, J. Adding Deleuze to the mix. Phenom Cogn Sci 9, 417–436 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-010-9171-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-010-9171-1