Craig C. Shelton has written an interesting critique of correspondence theory (The Illusion of Correspondence Theory) that converges somewhat with what I’ve also been calling participatory realism. We share a desire to overcome representationalist accounts of perception and knowledge, but my process-relational approach to participatory realism avoids the transcendental consciousness that Shelton reaches for to grant the world determinate reality. Drawing on Whitehead, I think we can preserve a version of the correspondence theory without making the correspondence relation onto-epistemically ultimate. Shelton’s post comes at an opportune time, since Ben Snyder and I have recently been discussing the same issue.

The tl;dr is that, while the correspondence relation is real, it is downstream of a deeper participatory relation.

The trouble with the classical correspondence theory, as I see it, is that it imagines that knowledge requires two already constituted terms: a fully pre-determinate fact on one side, and an independent and fully-formed subject that might represent it on the other. Truth would then consist in comparing a pre-fab subject’s picture of the fact with the fact. But how do we ever gain access to an unrepresented fact so as to compare it with its supposed representation? Further, how does either side, the subject or the fact, gain its determinacy in the first place? What specifies this fact as the relevant fact, or this characterization as the one whose correspondence is to be assessed?

Unsurprisingly, Whitehead’s answer to these questions follows from his theory of concrescence, which pushes the relational processes of determination and specification all the way down (rather than lodging them in experience-independent facts or in a transcendental subject). Facts are not grains of sand waiting around to be counted. They are achievements of concrescence. Concrescing actual occasions arise out of indeterminate circumstances and pass into determinacy by way of an act of aesthetic synthesis. Actuality itself is thus a decision amid potentiality, whereby many real potentials are inherited and grow together into a novel perspective. Once achieved, this novel perspective then becomes a new fact to be inherited by the next iteration of concrescence. The Whiteheadian mantra for this process is that “the many become one, and are increased by one.” The decision made by each actuality as it arises out of its past is evaluative, including gradations of relevance and integration of contrasts along the way to satisfaction.

Thus the question of “Who specifies the fact?” is somewhat misleading from a process-relational point of view. There is no transcendental spectator outside the process who might specify it. The fact specifies itself in the act of becoming determinate. Concrescence is self-determining, even if it decides what it becomes out of conditions it did not choose.

No actual occasion determines itself in isolation. Every concrescence begins with a world it did not create. The past presses in upon the present as a stubborn fact. But the settled past, even if objectively given, does not mechanically dictate the subjective form through which it will be inherited, nor the superjective aim that will unify it. The objective datum streaming in from the past and the subjective form enjoyed in the present grow together in each new concrescence as they aim at a future superjective satisfaction. The antecedent world is causally efficacious and constraining, but how that world functions here and now, and how it is handed off to the future, is self-determined by the perspective achieved by the concrescing occasion that it passes through.

The objective datum should not be construed as self-subsisting and awaiting inspection by a suspiciously aloof subject. The datum grounds what knowledge is of, but it does not by itself constitute the concrete act of knowing. Antecedent actual entities certainly must exist before being felt or prehended by their successors. But their functioning as objective data for their successors presumes the relational event of prehension, which is quite unlike a substantial subject’s internal representation of external objects.

It is precisely his novel conception of prehension that allows Whitehead to overcome the representationalist spectator theory of knowledge while still remaining a realist.

Whitehead’s Radical Notion of Prehension

Again, the past is not constituted by the present subject. Caesar crossed the Rubicon whether or not I consciously reflect on the fact. But Caesar’s crossing can enter innumerable subsequent occasions of experience under different modes of objectification. The past is fixed in its own achieved actuality while remaining inexhaustible in the relations into which it can subsequently enter. This should address the problem Shelton raises with regard to multiple specification. The same bridge may be prehended in many ways by many actual occasions, eg, as a molecular aggregate, a load-bearing structure, a ruin, a piece of artwork, or a route of passage. There is no metaphysical requirement that any one of these renderings be the canonical description corresponding to The Fact Itself. Each is a propositionally articulated selection from a concrete actuality (really, a vast nexus of actualities) that is far richer than any one abstraction that could be made from it.

A participatory realism grounded in a process-relational ontology does not need to choose between a wholly ready-made world and a merely apparent world constructed by consciousness. This false dichotomy evaporates once actuality is reimagined as an internally related network of occasions.

Shelton’s Grain of Sand argument is especially revealing of the divergence between my process-relational pluralism and his transcendental monism (if I may). Shelton’s argument asks us to suppose that the configuration constituting a grain of sand exists at one Planck interval. What determines that a relevantly similar configuration will exist at the next interval? If reality is normatively inert, why should the grain continue to be specified as this grain from one instantaneous state to the next? For Shelton, the persistence of the grain requires a continuously active normative principle. Whitehead’s critique of the abstraction of “nature at an instant” challenges this framing.

The classical idea that nature might be captured in freeze frames has no place in our contemporary understanding of physical processes. An instant of clock time is an abstraction from the concrete passage of nature. We have no access to a clock that is not itself aging. Nature is not built from instants as its elementary units, but events. At an instant, there is nothing.

If nature really did consist of a sequence of self-contained instantaneous states, eg, sand₁, sand₂, sand₃, sand₄, then persistence would indeed become mysterious. We’d need an explanation for how one complete instantaneous configuration is succeeded by another sufficiently similar configuration. We’d also run into an intractable regress determining when one instant ended and the next began (cf. Zeno). Something is needed to bridge the gaps between the slices. But for Whitehead, the gaps are just artifacts of misplaced concreteness. There never was a substantial grain of sand ensconced within an instantaneous temporal slice that then had to be recreated with the next tick of the cosmic clock. Instead, the grain is an enduring pattern of process, a historical route with a defining characteristic, a fantastically complex society of societies reproducing a common form through relations of prehensive inheritance.

Persistence is thus not repeated re-specification from scratch, but the historical transmission of conformal feelings from occasion to occasion. The successor does not confront its predecessor across an ontological void. The predecessor becomes immanent within the successor as an objectively immortal datum. Causal efficacy carries the achieved past into the becoming present. There is no static configuration at t₁ that must leap an inexplicable gap to another static configuration at t₂. There are, rather, prehensive internal relations among contiguous concrescences. Nature is composed of interlocking routes of creative events, not static instants.

The mystery Shelton confronts is therefore an artifact of thinking of nature as a succession of already determinate instantaneous states. If we recognize that nature is nothing apart from transition, the persistence of even a grain of sand becomes a special case of the creative advance whereby achieved actualities provide conditions for subsequent becomings. A grain of sand remains stable because its constituent processes reproduce inherited patterns. In such relatively inorganic societies, novelty is largely suppressed by overwhelming conformity. Still, continuity is an achievement of causal inheritance, rather than the mute persistence of an underlying substance that is fully present at an instant.

I agree with Shelton, then, that bare, simply located bits of matter cannot explain their own simple endurance. But the remedy for the gap need not be a Transcendental Consciousness continually specifying reality from behind the scenes. The process-relational alternative is that actuality is intrinsically durational, relational, valuative, and self-organizing.

The same move helps dissolve the regress haunting representational versions of the correspondence theory. In short, there is no representation without prehension. If our experience really began with an internal representation of an external world, the obvious question, again, would be: how can we compare that representation with the external thing it is supposed to represent? Any answer would seem to require yet another representation, and another, thus indefinitely postponing the bridge back to actuality. Whitehead’s theory of prehension offers an alternative starting point that avoids the transcendental escape hatch.

The basic relation of an actual occasion of experience to the world is prehensional, not representational. This means the past is genuinely transmitted from occasion to occasion, without the need for any kind of gap closing inference accurately pointing a private inner picture at an external cause. Prehension is our feeling of the efficacy of the past in the present. The past world has already flowed into experience before our reflective consciousness begins making judgments about it. Prehensional experience should not be collapsed into intentional consciousness: the prehensive structure of experience is unlike the intentional structure of consciousness studied by transcendental phenomenology. Prehensions are not “about” anything else. They certainly are not mental pictures of external material stuff. Prehensions are the concrete relational inheritances whereby what has already become acquires objective immortality in what is now becoming. Representational consciousness is, in contrast, a late and highly specialized achievement arising within a more primordial participation.

Our conscious experience is not looking in upon the world from behind a screen but is one of the ways the world is continuing to create itself. It follows that truth, concretely considered, must be more than correct representation or static mirror reflection. Truth is a participatory event.

All that said, there is still a sense in which correspondence relations can be defended. Whitehead explicitly preserves propositional truth and falsity. A proposition refers to determinate actual entities as logical subjects and some complex predicative pattern of eternal objects as potentially characterizing them. Insofar as that proposed characterization does or does not conform to the indicated actual entities, the proposition is true or false for the occasion entertaining it. Notice that before there can be a proposition corresponding to an actuality, there must be an actual occasion of experience achieving determinacy by prehending an objective datum under a subjective form, including the entertainment of alternative predicative patterns. A Whiteheadian proposition is not a little linguistic photograph of the world. It is a “lure for feeling,” a hybridization of actuality and possibility that proposes that those actual entities might be felt through this pattern. Such proposals are entertained for their aesthetic interest before they are affirmed for their logical truth.

Only within this wider participatory process does correspondence become possible or relevant. Whitehead deliberately refuses the opposition between correspondence, coherence, and pragmatic theories of truth, instead affirming aspects of all three as descriptions of different phases of experiential process, aka, concrescence.

The correspondence relation has to do with a proposition’s conformity or nonconformity to the actual entities constituting its logical subjects, as they are given in the actual world of the occasion prehending the proposition. The relation of coherence has to do with the way that propositional feeling, together with countless other feelings, is integrated within the concrescence. The pragmatic dimension enters insofar as propositions are lures whose significance cannot be exhausted by their already-achieved truth-value. A proposition may conform to what has been, but its importance lies partly in what it allows a presently concrescing subject to feel, imagine, judge, and do. Truth is thus never reducible to one abstract relation between static terms. Truth includes a correspondence relation, but knowing truly is never merely a matter of correspondence.

We are now entering territory addressed during my recent exchanges with Ben Snyder.

Whitehead’s Adventure in Rationality

“Behold, x!”; or, What Logic Leaves Out

Ben rightly insists that Whitehead goes to great lengths to preserve a form of the correspondence theory. There really are antecedently achieved actualities—facts—and propositions really can conform or fail to conform to them. Whitehead calls himself an “organic realist” for a reason. The past is not whatever a present subject wishes it to be. A sufficiently internally coherent hallucination is still a hallucination. No amount of conceptual ingenuity can make it the case that Caesar crossed some other river on that particular day.

But granting a process-relational form of correspondence does not mean that knowledge consists simply in the correct representation of an antecedent datum. Knowledge is neither the passive reception of ready-made objects nor the transcendental construction of an autonomous subject. It is the achievement of a new relation in which subject and object become internally implicated without losing their asymmetry.

That asymmetry is crucial to what I mean by participatory realism. The past is stubborn in a way the future, though always constrained, is not. Once an actuality has achieved satisfaction, nothing later can undo the fact that it happened. Yet what that actuality can mean, how it can function, what contrasts it can enter into, and what propositions it can help lure into relevance remain open-ended. The past is fixed in its own being while inexhaustible in its future becoming-for-others.

This is why we can say of truth both that it can be found and that it can be made, without contradiction. We find truths because our concrescences inherit a world whose determinations are not of our own making. We make truths because every successful act of knowing is itself a new actuality, establishing relations and possibilities that did not previously exist. My coming to know that Caesar crossed the Rubicon does not make that proposition true retroactively. But my knowing it becomes a new fact in the universe. It may enter new conversations, provoke new interpretations, modify institutions, or inspire new actions. Knowledge of old truths creates new truths.

In this sense, truth is always in the making, without that meaning that truth is whateverwe make of it.

Shelton’s notion of “answerability” gets at something important here. Reality resists certain interpretations because the settled world exercises causal efficacy. We can be surprised, corrected, thwarted, and forced to revise our propositions because what has become objectively immortal is not available for arbitrary redescription. But the resistance of reality does not afford us the possibility of somehow comparing our internal representations with an original hidden beyond them. The real potency of the original has already become fused with the present occasion via prehension. The world can correct us precisely because we are already causally entangled with what we are trying to know.

In Whitehead’s terms, we can say that Shelton’s notion of answerability is grounded in objective immortality. What has become becomes available for what is becoming. This allows for the preservation of epistemic friction without the need to resort to ontological dualism or the bifurcation of nature into primary quantities and secondary qualities.

Where I part company with Shelton is in his attempt to locate the source of determination and normative specification in a single Transcendental Consciousness. I agree that actuality cannot be adequately understood as valueless bits of matter colliding in a meaningless void. But I do not see why selection, valuation, or exclusion must therefore be brought into being by one overarching conscious subject.

On my reading, every actual occasion is selective via positive and negative prehensions. Every concrescence grades relevance, excludes possibilities, integrates contrasts, and decides among definite alternatives. But, again, we should not identify this primitive valuation with intentional or reflective consciousness. Consciousness, for Whitehead, is a comparatively rare and high-grade form of experience arising when conceptual novelty contrasts in a particular way with physical inheritance. Experience and valuation go all the way down, but consciousness does not.

Shelton moves rather quickly, it seems to me, from the fact of selection to normativity, and from normativity to the requirement that there be something like a conscious apprehension of a standard. Whitehead loosens that chain of reasoning such that the world can be evaluative without being everywhere conscious in the intentional sense. An actual occasion need not entertain an explicit rule that it might violate in order for its concrescence to involve comparative relevance, attraction, aversion, exclusion, and satisfaction.

For Shelton, participation ultimately seems to be vertically oriented. Finite subjects and physical things participate in one underlying Transcendental Consciousness whose activity grounds their determinacy. The many are derivative articulations of an antecedent One. Whitehead reverses the direction of explanation. The many are not derived from a prior unified cosmic subject. Each actual occasion achieves a fresh unity out of a proliferating plurality: “the many become one, and are increased by one.” Unity is real, but it is repeatedly, pluralistically achieved rather than metaphysically presupposed. The universe is not one consciousness differentiating itself into many apparently conscious alters. It is an open-ended pluralization of eccentric experients constituting themselves out of their relations with one another.

The latter account seems to me better suited to a genuinely evolutionary cosmology, because novelty does not need to be understood as the unfolding of determinations already contained within an antecedent transcendental unity. Every new actuality adds something to the universe that was not there before.

Even God does not escape this process of pluralization. Whitehead’s process theology admittedly bears an interesting resemblance to Shelton’s position. The primordial nature of God grades the relevance of eternal objects, while the consequent nature prehends and integrates every achieved actuality. There is therefore something in Whitehead that resembles an ideal cosmic judge: a divine experience in which the partial perspectives of the finite world are received and woven into ever richer harmony.

But there is still a fundamental difference, since Whitehead’s God does not make finite facts determinate by knowing them. If anything, the dependence runs in the reverse direction. Finite actual occasions first achieve their own satisfaction, and only then become objectively immortal in God’s consequent experience. God does not stand behind a merely apparent universe of finite alters as the transcendental subject whose constituting activity gives those alters their reality. The world genuinely contributes something to God. Whitehead can therefore preserve an ideal of maximal integration without allowing that ideal standpoint to swallow the many finite perspectives it integrates.

I’ve described Whitehead’s participatory realism as descendental rather than transcendental in orientation. There is no point at which participation bottoms out in a self-sufficient spectator. There is no final subject for whom the entire universe is simply an object. Subjectivity itself is always transitional: every subject becomes a superject as it perishes into objective immortality, thereby becoming objective data feeding further subjects.

The universe is participatory all the way down because actuality is relational all the way down. Actualities inherit one another, select possibilities in relation to one another, and achieve new determinations out of their relations.

Correspondence is therefore one real moment within a much deeper—indeed, a bottomless—circuit of experience. Truth happens inside this never fully closed circuit. Because each completed circuit adds another actuality to the world, there can never be a finally completed inventory of truths. As Emerson put it it “Circles”:

“Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.”

There are stubborn facts, but there is no finished Book of Facts containing the universe once and for all. Every inventory of the actual world becomes datum for another concrescence, which introduces another perspective, another constellation of contrasts, another novel proposition.

The universe continually outruns every attempt to represent it. This is the process-relational participatory realism I am suggesting for consideration. Reality is not dependent upon human consciousness, but neither are we alien spectators confronting a world that is external to experience. We are the descendants of what we know. The world enters us through causal inheritance long before we begin forming conscious representations of it.

You could say that the traditional correspondence theory of truth sought to secure realism by purifying knowledge of participation. Whitehead secures realism in the opposite way, by plunging us into participation.

I want to note in closing that Rudolf Steiner had already arrived at a closely related account of cognition in The Philosophy of Freedom. Thinking “must never be regarded as a merely subjective activity,” since it “lies beyond subject and object.” The subject does not first exist as an enclosed spectator and then produce representations of an external world. Rather, subject and object are themselves concepts that become articulated within thinking. Steiner accordingly refuses to treat concepts as subjective copies of a world already complete without them. Percept and concept are understood as partial moments of one processual reality, reunited in the act of knowing. As Steiner puts it:

“…our attention is [habitually] concentrated only on the object about which we think, but not at the same time on the thinking itself. The naive consciousness, therefore, treats thinking as something which has nothing to do with things, but stands altogether aloof from things and contemplates them. The picture which the thinker constructs concerning the phenomena of the world is regarded, not as part of the things, but as existing only in men’s heads. The world is complete in itself even without this picture. It is all ready-made and finished with all its substances and forces, and of this ready-made world man makes himself a picture. Whoever thinks thus need only be asked one question. What right have you to declare the world to be complete without thinking? Does not the world produce thinking in the heads of men with the same necessity as it produces the blossom on a plant?Plant a seed in the earth. It puts forth roots and stem, it unfolds into leaves and blossoms. Set the plant before yourselves. It connects itself, in your soul, with a definite concept. Why should this concept belong any less to the whole plant than leaf and blossom? You say the leaves and blossoms exist quite apart from a perceiving subject, but the concept appears only when a human being confronts the plant. Quite so. But leaves and blossoms also appear on the plant only if there is soil in which the seed can be planted, and light and air in which the leaves and blossoms can unfold. Just so the concept of a plant arises when a thinking consciousness approaches the plant.”

Thinking is thus one of the ways nature becomes intelligible to itself. Whitehead radicalizes this participatory insight by pushing it beneath conscious human thinking into the prehensive relations active throughout nature: the knower can participate in the known because the same sort of experiential transmission among worldly entities is already occurring prior to consciousness.