Ep. 384: Graham Harman's Object-Oriented Ontology (Part Two)

Hey, this is the partial exam in life episode three eighty four part two discussing Graham Harmon's 2018 book, object oriented ontology. We had given a sprawling overview of the parts that we read and discussed most of chapter one. We didn't really explain those key terms that he introduces about Really, it's about reductionism. So we've had a lot of reductionism in our podcast coverage over the years. I was looking back at Carnap, for instance, Wittgenstein. The idea that in an ontology, there's some things that are not real, maybe psychological states, maybe mental states, we need to somehow reduce them. So like reduce the mental to the physical, Carnap and Wittgenstein in his Tractatus wanted to reduce philosophical project as reducing the incoherent mass of creation including the tables and chairs and things that we the macroscopic objects, reduce them to something more basic, whether it be atoms or strings or molecules. So instead of just calling that all reduction, he wants to call it what's undermining if it's moving you toward a smaller thing, but it could also be a a more basic internal thing. But he also then introduces this term over mining where when you're reducing it to something phenomenal or something merely social or something merely functional and you're saying, oh, what is this chair? A chair is just something that we as pragmatists, we carve out of the mass, the blooming, buzzing confusion, and we just make it an object because it's useful for us. But really all the chair is is the function. It doesn't really matter what it's made of. It is just, you know, what it is to us. Yeah. I I think the difference, right, undermining is a reduction to something that's not readily apparent to us, and overmining is a reduction to what is readily apparent to what's epistemologically more basic. So undermining goes to what's ontologically more basic, but not necessarily accessible to us directly. Overmining goes towards what's epistemologically more basic and more directly accessible. So in the case of undermining, which we're familiar with, and we've already talked about this in this episode in association with smallism. Right? Mid sized objects are he says they're too shallow to be real. That's the way he puts it. What they really are are atoms, for instance, and these things are reducible to to their component parts. In overmining, he gives I think this is a little bit more of a difficult idea, but he gives the example of Descartes reducing everything to raise extensa. That's what Descartes thinks of as as matter, but it's really more like just geometrical extension. And that might be seeming like an odd contrast because Descartes, in a way, is a materialist himself scientifically, even though he's ultimately a dualist. Descartes over minds according to Harman in two ways. One is to matter as res extensa, and one is into consciousness as something that we have incorrigible direct access to. Right? …