The Evolution of Intelligibility IX: The Evolution of the Observer

We began this series with a strange question:

What was there before there was a way of seeing?

It seemed at first that the answer must concern the world.

Before physics, there were physical processes.

Before biology, there were living organisms.

Before mathematics, there were quantities and patterns.

Before language, there were events and relationships.

The world was there.

We were not yet there to describe it.

But after following the evolution of intelligibility this far, the question begins to look different.

For there is another thing that has evolved.

Not merely our descriptions.

Not merely our theories.

Not merely our concepts.

The observer has evolved.

This does not mean that human beings have biologically evolved in some simple linear progression from primitive observers to sophisticated ones.

The deeper evolution is cultural, linguistic, conceptual and technological.

We have acquired new capacities for noticing.

New instruments for detecting.

New distinctions for comparing.

New languages for construing.

New practices for investigating.

New communities within which these capacities can be transmitted.

The observer is therefore not simply a biological organism equipped with senses.

The observer is an organism whose capacities for seeing have been historically developed.

A child does not enter the world already seeing the world as a physicist, biologist, mathematician or linguist.

The child learns what differences matter.

They learn that some sounds belong together.

That some objects persist.

That some actions have consequences.

That some patterns repeat.

That some things can be counted.

That some events have names.

That some relationships matter.

The world is encountered through an expanding repertoire of distinctions.

And as the repertoire expands, the observer changes.

This is why learning can transform perception.

The student of biology eventually sees an organism differently from someone who has never studied biology.

The musician hears relationships in sound that another listener may not notice.

The mathematician sees structure where another person sees examples.

The linguist hears choices in language where another person hears merely sentences.

The historian sees traces of processes where another person sees isolated events.

The observer has acquired new capacities.

But these capacities do not arise independently.

They are inherited.

Every observer begins inside a world already rich with distinctions.

We inherit languages.

We inherit categories.

We inherit metaphors.

We inherit theories.

We inherit practices.

We inherit instruments.

We inherit institutions.

We inherit questions.

Even the questions we regard as our own often have long histories.

Someone before us had to make the distinction that made our question possible.

Someone had to develop the vocabulary.

Someone had to construct the instrument.

Someone had to establish the practice.

Someone had to make the phenomenon visible.

The observer is therefore historical.

We do not begin from nowhere.

We begin from somewhere.

And that "somewhere" shapes what we are capable of seeing.

This does not mean that we are trapped by our inheritance.

If we were, intelligibility could never evolve.

We can modify inherited distinctions.

We can combine concepts in new ways.

We can borrow metaphors.

We can encounter other conceptual worlds.

We can discover anomalies.

We can invent instruments.

We can create new forms of language.

We can ask questions our predecessors could not ask.

The observer is therefore both inheritor and innovator.

This duality is crucial.

An observer without inheritance would have no developed repertoire through which to see.

An observer without innovation would merely reproduce what has already been seen.

The evolution of intelligibility requires both.

Inheritance provides continuity.

Variation provides possibility.

The observer is where these meet.

This also changes how we should think about objectivity.

Objectivity is sometimes imagined as the elimination of the observer.

The ideal observer would supposedly see the world from nowhere.

No history.

No language.

No conceptual commitments.

No perspective.

Pure observation.

But such an observer may be impossible even in principle.

Observation always involves selection.

Something is attended to.

Something else is ignored.

An instrument is configured.

A measurement is defined.

A distinction is made.

A result is classified.

A pattern is recognised.

Even the decision about what counts as an observation depends upon prior forms of intelligibility.

This does not make objectivity impossible.

It makes objectivity more interesting.

Objectivity cannot simply mean the absence of perspective.

Perhaps it means the capacity to make perspective accountable.

We can compare observations.

Replicate experiments.

Expose assumptions.

Translate between conceptual frameworks.

Look for anomalies.

Invite criticism.

Develop instruments that compensate for limitations.

Construct communities in which claims can be challenged.

Objectivity becomes a practice of reflexive correction rather than a fantasy of having no standpoint.

And this is where the observer becomes genuinely reflexive.

At first, the observer looks outward.

Then the observer learns to notice the world.

Eventually, the observer learns to notice how they are noticing.

This is a profound transition.

The physicist can ask how the choice of measurement affects the phenomenon being investigated.

The biologist can ask how the categories used to classify organisms shape the patterns being recognised.

The linguist can ask how their own theoretical framework construes language.

The historian can ask how the historian's categories shape the history that becomes visible.

The philosopher can ask what assumptions make a particular philosophical problem possible.

The observer becomes an object of observation.

But something stranger happens.

The observer discovers that the observer they are studying is also historically formed.

The very capacity for reflexivity has been inherited.

The language of reflection has a history.

The concepts used to analyse observation have histories.

The institutions that support inquiry have histories.

The standards by which inquiry is judged have histories.

The observer discovers themselves inside the evolution they are attempting to understand.

This is where reflexivity becomes more than self-consciousness.

It becomes a form of participatory understanding.

The observer is not standing outside the evolution of intelligibility and describing it from a privileged position.

They are one of its current expressions.

A scientific community studying scientific observation is using inherited practices to investigate the history of those very practices.

A linguistic community analysing language does so through language.

A mathematical community investigating formal structure uses mathematical forms of reasoning.

A culture reflecting upon its own conceptual inheritance does so through resources that the inheritance itself has provided.

The observer cannot step completely outside the history that made observation possible.

But neither does this trap the observer.

It creates a possibility.

Once we can see the conditions under which we see, we can begin to transform them.

Reflexivity becomes evolutionary.

We can revise the distinctions we inherited.

We can question metaphors that have become invisible.

We can notice what our conceptual world excludes.

We can encounter other worlds.

We can borrow from them.

We can create new relationships.

We can teach new generations to see differently.

The observer becomes capable of participating consciously in the evolution of intelligibility.

This is perhaps one of the most remarkable capacities human beings have developed.

We can inherit a way of seeing and then ask:

Why do we see this way?

We can inherit a category and ask:

What does this category make visible, and what does it hide?

We can inherit a metaphor and ask:

What happens if we replace it?

We can inherit a question and ask:

Why did this become a question in the first place?

We can encounter another conceptual world and ask:

What can it see that we cannot?

These are not merely questions about knowledge.

They are questions about the evolution of the knower.

The observer becomes capable of observing the evolution of observation.

And once that happens, the history of intelligibility becomes reflexive.

The process begins to include an awareness of itself.

But there is a further complication.

The observer does not merely change the observer.

Observers change the world in which observation occurs.

A new scientific concept leads to new technologies.

A new technology changes practices.

New practices create new environments.

New environments create new problems.

New problems require new concepts.

The observer participates in a feedback loop.

Seeing changes acting.

Acting changes the conditions of seeing.

Seeing changes again.

The evolution of intelligibility therefore cannot be separated completely from the evolution of the environments in which intelligibility operates.

Human beings construct observatories.

Laboratories.

Libraries.

Computers.

Universities.

Networks.

Cities.

Archives.

These are not merely places where observation happens.

They are environments that shape what can be observed.

The observer is therefore ecological as well as historical.

We see through worlds that others have built.

And what we see becomes part of the world through which future observers will see.

A scientific paper becomes a textbook.

The textbook becomes a curriculum.

The curriculum produces a new generation of scientists.

Those scientists develop new instruments.

The instruments reveal new phenomena.

The phenomena require new concepts.

The concepts enter new textbooks.

The cycle continues.

The observer evolves through participation in a world of inherited intelligibility.

This makes the observer less like a detached camera and more like an organism in an ecosystem.

The observer has a history.

The observer has dependencies.

The observer has a niche.

The observer exchanges resources with other observers.

The observer is shaped by its environment and also modifies that environment.

And perhaps this is why the language of participation has become increasingly difficult to avoid throughout our journey.

The observer participates.

The knower participates.

The learner participates.

The community participates.

The language participates.

The conceptual world participates.

And what is known emerges within the relationships among them.

This does not mean that reality is reducible to the observer.

Quite the opposite.

The observer is continually confronted by something that exceeds their expectations.

Reality resists.

Anomalies appear.

Predictions fail.

New observations surprise.

Other people disagree.

Other conceptual worlds reveal blind spots.

The observer remains answerable to what is encountered.

Participation is therefore not arbitrary construction.

It is responsive relationship.

The observer changes through encounters with what they did not fully determine.

And the world becomes intelligible through forms of participation that are constrained by what is encountered.

Perhaps this is the deepest transformation in our understanding of the observer.

We began with an apparent opposition:

observer here, world there.

But the history we have followed has gradually destabilised the boundary.

The observer is formed by a world of language, culture, practice and history.

The observer's capacities change the possibilities of observation.

Observation changes action.

Action changes environments.

Environments change future observation.

The observer is therefore one node in an evolving network of relationships.

Not outside the world.

Not dissolved into the world.

In relation to it.

And this may be the point at which objectivity and participation cease to appear as opposites.

The more reflexively we understand our participation, the more carefully we can distinguish what comes from our inherited modes of seeing from what resists them.

The observer becomes more objective not by becoming less situated, but by becoming more aware of how their situatedness works.

The mature observer therefore does not say:

"I see the world exactly as it is."

Nor:

"I merely construct the world I see."

Instead:

"I have inherited ways of seeing. They make some relationships visible and others difficult to see. The world continually exceeds them. I can revise them through encounter."

That is a very different conception of knowledge.

It is neither possession nor projection.

It is learning.

And perhaps this is why the evolution of intelligibility eventually becomes the evolution of the observer.

As our worlds become more intelligible, we become different kinds of observers.

As we become different observers, different worlds become intelligible.

The two processes cannot finally be separated.

The evolution of intelligibility is also the evolution of the beings capable of participating in it.

And now the final question is waiting.

If the observer has evolved,

if the conceptual world has evolved,

if the relationships through which things become intelligible have evolved,

then what exactly should we mean when we say that the world is intelligible?

Perhaps the answer is not that intelligibility was simply sitting inside the world, waiting to be extracted.

Perhaps it is something that emerges in the relationship between world and observer.

Perhaps the world becomes intelligible.

Not because the observer finally possesses the right representation of it.

But because, through an ever-evolving history of participation, new possibilities of relationship continually become available.

And perhaps that is where we must finally turn.

Not to the evolution of the observer.

But to the world that becomes intelligible.