coherence

Posted On April 2, 2024

[WORK IN PROGRESS]

For a contrast of the “coherence theory of truth” with the “correspondence theory of truth” see “correspondence VS. coherence”.

Possibly relevant: John Vervaeke on coherence.

So, realness is something like the pattern of intelligibility with the widest scope. Wide and rich coherence of content. It makes the most sense of the most of your experience. Puts together your beliefs and your memories. Etc.. But look what’s happening in a higher state of consciousness. It’s [the] exact reverse! You have this single experience. It doesn’t cohere with the rest of your life, because that’s why it challenges the rest of your life. It doesn’t cohere with the rest of the life, it tells you that the rest of this is illusory and you need to change it! In fact, the difference is so great that instead of rejecting it you reject your everyday experience! So the thing that you use to reject the dream… So, look at the picture: “I use all of ‘this’ and I reject the dream. And then I have the higher state of consciousness – again a single thing – and I use this to reject all of ‘this’! What’s going on?

The higher state of consciousness is a temporary experience. It does not cohere with the rest of our experience. That’s how and why it can challenge and demand such radical transformation of our everyday life, our everyday self. And here’s what’s even more, I don’t know, perplexing! It does this without providing any new intelligible content. These experiences are traditionally ineffable. You can’t put it into words. They are traditionally trans-rational. You can’t give any argument or explanation or justification. How is it that this temporary experience that you…? “Why? What was it? Describe the experience!” “I can’t, I can’t describe it!” “Well can you explain to me what…?” “I, no, I can’t! I can’t explain it”. So there’s no content, it’s temporary and yet somehow it goes the exact opposite of most altered states of consciousness. These states, these so-called ‘higher states’ should be the ones we most reject. They’re temporary. They challenge all of our intelligibility coherence. They don’t produce any viable explanation. Any viable content and yet we promote them as the really-real and use them to reject our everyday experience. And that’s the core of the axial revolution.

This problem of the Ontonormativity of higher states of consciousness goes to the heart of the axial revolution and the way it is still informing our very cognitive grammar and our existential ways of being right here, right now.

That’s the problem of the Ontonormativity of Higher States of Consciousness. Now, we know that there is a possibility that altered states of consciousness can bring about a developmental improvement.

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And that’s problematic precisely because we tend to judge realness by how well we get an overall coherence in our intelligibility, how we’re making sense of things. But in these altered states that are very different from our everyday consciousness and therefore do not cohere with it, people do the alternative. Instead of rejecting it the way we reject dreaming, for example, because it doesn’t cohere with our everyday experience, people reject the everyday experience as illusory and they say that this state of consciousness somehow gives them an improved access to reality.

And as you remember, as we’ve been going through the Axial Age Revolution and the sense of wisdom and meaning that is attended upon it, this ability to transcend through illusion and get connected to what is more real is central to what wisdom means. And having some deep sense of connectedness to reality is also central to what it is to regard one’s life as authentically meaningful in some fashion.

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Remember we did the 9 Dot problem for example. Those “aha” moments because you get, in that moment of insight, you get a flash of insight. You get sort of super-salience; things are making sense to you; you get insight; it’s almost visual, into an underlying pattern; a unity a oneness that wasn’t there before; your sense of what’s relevant and important has been altered. And this ability to radically make sense, to find coherence, an underlying, intelligible integrative pattern… This, we now know from current work, is directly predictive of the experience of meaning in life. So Samantha Heintzelman, whose work I recommend to you. I also got to meet Samantha in person and got to talk to her about this. But what she has is good experimental evidence of the following: If you give people a bunch of scenes that make sense to them, that they can sort of determine an underlying pattern to, and then ask them how meaningful their lives are, they will rate their lives as more meaningful. The act of making sense, of finding coherence, actually makes people experience their lives as more meaningful.

They’re not being shown profound pictures or deeply dramatic or narrative scenes or emotionally… They’re just showing some very basic pictures. But the act of making sense, of finding coherence, elevates the sense of how meaningful their lives are. So, lets start to put this together: if you were to have an insight, that would give you an even more sudden increase in your sense of meaning in life, and what if it’s in flow? Well that’s going to be even more enhanced sense of meaning in life. And we already know that. The more often you have flow experiences, the more meaningful you find your life. And now what if it’s beyond that? What if it’s a higher state of consciousness that brings you this radical sense of deep intelligibility, not only of the world but of yourself in both directions at the same time? Well that is going to give you a profound sense of increased meaning in life.

Now if you put this together, if you get enhanced meaning in life coupled to an enhanced sense of understanding and that actually does guide you in improving your life, that is going to build a tremendous amount of confidence in you, that you’ve found a path towards self-transcendence and wisdom. We can start to understand some of the Buddha’s confidence. Now what do we know about these flashes of insight?

the three components of meaning that people talk about, the things that contribute to meaning in life -and this is Heintzelman‘s work and others -are a sense of coherence (COHERENCE written on the board) -I’ll explain what this means in a minute, a sense of significance (SIGNIFICANCE written on the board) , and a sense of purpose (PURPOSE written on the board) . I got to talk to Samantha Heintzelman about this! The more coherent, the more intelligible, the more things fit together for you, the more real they are, the more meaningful you find your life. Well, that’s the Nomological Order: how things fit together and make sense in a Coherent fashion. What about Significance? Significance is this (draws an arrow to indicate the ladder diagram of the Normative Order): how valuable, how deep in reality, how good are the elements of your life? That’s the normative order. Purpose… (draws an arrow to the Narrative Order)? Does your life have a direction? Is it moving in a course? That’s the Narrative Order. Human beings want things to make sense. They need a Nomological Order, and Augustine says, “I have this! It’s the Aristotelian World[view] and I can give a Christian explanation of that”. They want things to be significant. They want to satisfy the Anagogic drives of inner peace and contact with reality. And Augustine says, “I can tell you that because I can tell you how to put reason and Agape together”. That’s what Christianity does. And people want things to have a purpose. They want there to be a story. Christianity is offering the ultimate story. Augustine puts it all together! And he puts it all together as the Roman Empire is literally collapsing. He’s in Hippo in North Africa when the barbarians are literally at the gate laying siege to the city.

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Why don’t we have this beautiful synthesis of meaning today?

Nomological Order
Normative Order
Narrative Order

But what I’ve tried to show you is that these are not three separate things. They’re like the three dimensions of a space, the space of meaning! They’re the three axes of the space of meaning. This is a beautiful synthesis. It’s the culmination of tremendous amount[s] of historical development. It’s profound and it’s not just an intellectual thing. It is some, as I’ve tried to show you, it is simultaneously a scientific thing, a spiritual thing, a therapeutic thing, an existential thing. This is why this is going to last a thousand years! Because it is such a powerful and enriching vision.

Imagine, if you could… what if I could offer this to you and make it deeply historically, scientifically and intellectually viable for you? What if I could offer to you a worldview that had the deepest scientific legitimacy totally integrated with their most profound spirituality -no antagonism, no irrationality in it -conjoined seamlessly with a personal project of therapy, of therapeutic change and healing and sapiential education, the cultivation of genuine wisdom and self-transcendence, in community with yourself, your world, your culture, and other people. Would you not want this? So here’s the question you now have to ask yourself: why don’t you have it? Because we know from the science (taps Coherence, Significance and Purpose on the board) , that’s what you want! We know from the history that that’s what our culture has [*coughs] …our foundational culture from the Axial revolution built for us. Why don’t we have it?

Is it irredeemably lost? When we lost the Gnostic Mythology, when we lost the Axial Mythology, the two worlds mythology, when we lost the mythology of Christian… did we, are we now bereft forever? So part of the way I can start to answer that question, the short answer for a long series of arguments that are forthcoming is no! I think there is a response. That’s why this series is entitled “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis”, not “despairing because of the meaning crisis”! But we’re only halfway through! We’re only halfway through posing the problem! We have to, we need to understand we’re getting an understanding of this meaning and this wisdom. We’re getting how it was articulated and developed and woven into our cultural framework, our cognitive machinery, the very grammar of our existential modes! But we still don’t know why does it all fall apart? How does it all come apart? And where does that leave us? We need a better understanding of the genealogy now of the crisis, now that we have a better understanding of the nature of the meaning that was lost. We need to understand the process of loss.

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But when somebody is singing a song, singing a poem -and most songs are poems if you think about it -it is appealing to you! Not just propositionally -it’s not just that kind of knowing; its not just try-ing to create beliefs in you! First of all, by reciting the poem, you… and trying to communicate it to others, you have to bring in all your know-how of communication, being able to share with other people. You have to… all your ways of paying attention [are] much more embodied. There’s a Perspectival stuff: What does it feel like? What is it like to be here, in this space, in this context with these people uttering these words? And with that, it has the potential to be Participatory because people are like, “these are poems that have changed [me]!”. [They] have made a difference to their identity. They know these poems, not the way you know the words on the back of your cereal box, they know these poems because of the way in which they have been changed by them; their very sense of identity has been altered by [them].

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A new model for thought: the extensive self to the intensive self

So people now start to read silently to themselves and what they’re trying [to do], what they give priority to is coherence within a language rather than transformation within themselves in the world. So what matters is how the various symbols – and I don’t mean that in a spiritual sense – the various propositional terms and logical connectives fit together coherently. So, a new model for thought emerges. See the old model was “thought is a conforming to the world”, and then we get this articulated and developed and expanded into this whole process of Gnosis and Anagoge and self-transformation, that model of knowing that’s also a way of Being, that’s also a way of Becoming. That’s being taken away and it’s being replaced by a different model.

Thought, knowing, is to have coherent propositional language. Thinking is to have a coherent set of propositions in your head. So Kranz talks about, “we shift from the extensive self, the self that is trans-projectively connected to the world, that understands itself in terms of its conformity to the world, to an intensive self”. This is a self that’s inside my head. It’s inside my beliefs. My ‘self’ is primarily the way I talk to myself by affirming my beliefs through propositional language. So people start to think that the primary way in which we know things is to get as much coherence within our inner language [as possible], instead of [getting as much] conformity [as possible] in our outer existential modes.

Now, why would people make this shift? People make this shift because the world is starting to open up again. People are starting to get interested in knowing the world scientifically. … By the way, I believe in this value! I’m a scientist, right?! [But we are moving progressively towards placing greater and greater value on …] logically coherent, well organized propositional theories. The power of this is being discovered. So when I can read in this other way, I can empower my argumentative skills tremendously. What I’m losing is I’m losing reading as a psycho-technology of psycho-spiritual, existential transformation. Reading is now becoming the consumption of propositions and their structuring in logical coherency.

Love moves the will

Why? Well, as I said, there’s the beginning of this reorientation towards the external world. And it’s being driven by the fact that Aristotle is coming into prominence because he’s being rediscovered. So because of the crusades there is a rediscovery of the works of Aristotle that had largely been lost to Western Europe. And in Aristotle there is a problem for Christianity, there’s a problem for Christianity. The problem is we have a figure that can’t be ignored! Aristotle is part of that whole ancient world that Augustine gave us. He’s the author of the Nomological Order that Augustine has baptized with Christianity’s approval. So Aristotle can’t be ignored, but Aristotle describes a world that does not have a lot of the Christian mythology attached to it and offers explanations for things that Christianity makes no effort to explain.

So there is this tremendous attraction to the power, the new explanatory power provided by Aristotle and the model he gives up -getting clear definitions and clear syllogistic inferences and building up a very clear picture is enmeshed with this new way of reading and this new way of experiencing: knowing and experiencing oneself primarily inside one’s head, inside one’s language.

So Aristotle can’t be ignored or rejected because of his eminent authority. But neither can he simply be assimilated into the Christian worldview because he talks about and explains things and does things in a manner that you don’t find in the Bible. So more and more people are reading in this new way. They’re starting to emulate the new Aristotelian science. But this is starting to cause a crisis within Christianity. And so there’s an individual who arises, who sees the looming threat that this poses. Who sees two things happening. There’s a change in the psycho-technology of reading, and there is a change in how people are starting to look at the world. Both of these changes are associated with the difficulty of assimilating the rediscovered Aristotle into a Christian worldview, but Thomas Aquinas takes up the task of solving this problem. He’s going to be a pivotal figure precisely for that reason. Now, again, Thomas Aquinas: [voluminous] writing!! And there’s a whole group of people, both theologians and philosophers to mystic[s] [Thomistic?], and there’s all kinds of controversy around how Aristotelian Aquinas is, how Platonic he is. I’m going to, again, try to present the way I think he was historically taken up and basically understood.

So for Aquinas, how do we salvage both the Christian worldview and the new science of the rediscovered Aristotle? Well, he does something really brilliant! He goes to the fundamental grammar of all of us. What’s the fundamental grammar of this? It’s the mythology of the two worlds: the Axial revolution is, there’s two worlds! There’s the real world and the illusionary world. And that has been a constant throughout all of this. And he comes up with a way of trying to assimilate it. So we have the two worlds: here’s the -in Plato, in the platonic and even in the Augustinian -here’s the everyday world (draws a box), and then here is the real world (draws another box above the first). But what Aquinas does is he changes that. He says this world is real too (draws an arrow to point at The Every Day box)! There is real knowledge of this world possible (labels the above arrow with this). This is knowledge that we can get through reason and science (writes Reason and Science below Real Knowledge from above). So reason and science study this world, This world (knocks the table and the wall), and they can discover real truths about that through reason, through science.

But, this world up here (the Real World) is still somehow more real. How do we do that? Well, he invents a distinction that we tend to anachronistically push back on people before -and there and definitely precursors in Pseudo-Dionysus and Augustine -but the idea is this (the Every Day world) is the natural world that can be studied by reason and by science. This (Real) is the world above the natural world. What’s the word for above? Super. So this is the super-natural world, and this is not a world that can be studied by science or reason. This is a world that is only accessible by faith. So there’s now…the two worlds have been made. Fundamentally two separate kinds of worlds, and there isn’t a continuum between them now. There isn’t a way of moving through them by love and reason united together. What now happens is the following, and what’s going to happen is the notion of faith is going to be changed too. Reason it’s down here and love is up here (writes both of these on the board, Reason below Love). And the idea for Aquinas, is that Love moves the Will. See in Plotinus and even in Augustine, love moves reason. But for Aquinas, love moves the will. Love moves the will to assert things that it can’t know through reason. So love now becomes, sorry faith now becomes the act of willful assertion (writes Willful Assertion off of Faith & Love). Now to be fair to Aquinas, this is not Willful in the sense of my will. This is a will that is being driven by the Love of God.

But nevertheless, what’s now happening is Love and Reason are being pulled apart. Faith is going from this participation in the flow of the course of history to the assertion of propositions, the assertion of statements, giving a creed. And more fundamentally, Science and Spirituality are now being divorced from each other in a profound way, such that if it’s scientific, it’s not spiritual.

And if it’s spiritual, It’s not scientific. And if you’re talking… -and you can see the beginnings of romanticism: if it has to do with love then it has nothing to do with reason. And if it has anything to do with reason then it has nothing to do with love! …and all of these things are now being pulled apart.

Now he is, Aquinas is a wonderful man, a wonderful writer. He is trying to save the Axial Worldview by reformulating its fundamental grammar of two worlds into a formulation that is now becoming familiar to you. But here’s the danger –and this is not a danger that Aquinas foresees: as this (Reason and Science of the Every Day World) becomes more and more successful and we less and less find our assertions, our will being driven by love, but just by willpower alone, this world (the Real World) becomes less and less real to us, the supernatural world. And if there is no supernatural world, if it’s no longer -and listen to my language –if it’s no longer viable [i.e. livable] to us, we can think about it and imagine it, but if it’s no longer livable to us, then the whole Axial World mythology, the whole Axial World grammar, that grammar that gave us the grammar of meaning and wisdom and self-transcendence, that huge heritage is now threatened to fall apart. We’ll start looking at that next time together. Thank you for your time and attention.

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Where Relevance Fits Into Meaning

Relevance Realization also related to sense of connectedness & therefore meaning.
There are deep connections between:
- meaning and relevance
  - boiling down all the “arguments” to questions of relevance
  - What “arguments”?
  - Vervaeke referred to boiling all maxims of conversational implicature down to relevance. Is that related?
- relevance and agency
  - [Vervaeke says something here about the robot example & communication. Maybe robot example was supposed to be another example of conversational implicature? You give the robot a command but take much for granted, like assuming that a robot delivering a battery will have enough sense not to deliver a bomb?]
- meaning and agency
  - Agency requires an arena.
  - The Agent:Arena relationship constitutes a kind of meta-meaning.
  - It grounds of all other meaning-making projects.
- Convergence argument.
  - Many things converge in Relevance Realization
    - Intelligence, agency and consciousness

And I also suggested to you last time that this notion of Relevance Realization — and this is what we’re going to develop today — may be a way of explaining that sort of fundamental aspect of meaning — the kind of meaning that was lost in the Meaning Crisis that’s expressed in the three orders, in which we were pursuing coherence and significance and purpose that sense of connectedness, connectedness. And I’m going to try to argue that as we understand what relevance is, that relevance is exactly that sense of connectedness.

So there will be deep connections between meaning and relevance (from boiling down all the arguments to being about relevance). There’s deep connections between relevance and agency. That’s the whole point about the robot (robotics) and communicating (communication). And there’s going to be deep connections, we’ve already seen, between meaning and agency (completes an important triangle on the board between Meaning Relevance — Agency), that one of the whole things about agency is its relationship to the arena, the Agent:Arena relationship, and how that grounds, that’s the meta-meaning grounding of all our other more specific meaning making projects.

So I hope I’ve made at least a good convergence argument for you. That many things converge upon, many things that we’re interested in — many central, defining features of intelligence and agency and aspects of the functionality of our consciousness — everything is sort of converging on this Relevance Realization. What I want to try and show you now is how you might move towards — and this has been sort of the core of my, I guess you’d call it my scientific work — how you move towards trying to offer a scientific explanation of relevance and what that would look like and the difficulties you face doing so. I also want to try and argue that there’s good reason to believe that we’re talking about a unified phenomenon, a unified thing here: relevance. That this isn’t just a family resemblance term for a lot of disconnected things, that there’s reason to believe this is a central thing.

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Theories Of Relevance -A Guiding Principle

Mistakes we make when trying to explain Relevance.
- Principal mistake: Homuncular Fallacy
  - Explaining intelligence in terms of intelligence
  - Fodor: it’s very difficult to explain relevance without presupposing relevance
- Some candidate explanations of Relevance:
  - Representations
  - Computation
  - Modularity

Let’s start with trying to offer theories of relevance, and there are good ones out there. There’s the work of Sperber and Wilson and others, and I will refer to some of that work as we move along, but let’s try and work towards it at the metal-level. What do we need for a good theory of relevance to do?

What kind of mistakes do we need to avoid when we’re trying to explain relevance? The main mistake that I want to point to is a mistake in which we are arguing in a circle. If you remember, this is part of what goes into things like the Homuncular Fallacy -remember when I tried to explain vision with the little man in my head having vision?! I don’t want to use whatever I’m using…/ Let’s put it this way: whatever process or entity that I’m trying to use to explain relevance should not itself require relevance. What do I mean by that? If I have something “X” and I’m using [“X”] to explain relevance, [then] [X] cannot itself presuppose relevance for its function, because if it does that, I’m ultimately arguing in a circle. I have to find processes that are themselves, not processes that realize relevance if I’m going to explain in terms of those processes, Relevance Realization itself.

Another way of putting this is [that] I ultimately want to explain intelligence in terms of processes that are not themselves intelligent. Because if I don’t, if I’m always explaining intelligence in terms of processes that are themselves intelligent, that is no different than homuncular fallacy of explaining vision in terms of internal processes that are themselves visual processes. So that’s going to be a guiding methodological principle. Now that turns out to be very powerful and as many people have pointed out — Fodor famously has pointed out in repeated places — it’s actually very difficult to explain relevance without presupposing relevance in the machinery that you’re using to explain it.

Let’s take a look at some candidates. We might think that we could explain relevance in terms of how we use Representations. This is a very powerful way we think about the mind, that there are things in the mind, ideas, pictures, that stand for, represent the world in some way. We might think that perhaps relevance is a function of computation. Or we might think that we explain relevance in terms of what’s called modularity, that there’s a specific area of the brain dedicated to processing relevance. (writes Representation, Computation and Modularity on the board.) I want to take a look at each one of those, and I want to try and argue as to why I think they’re inadequate and what that helps us to see. And what I want you to see is, and I’ll try to show this along the way, that if, and I’m trying to make it more than an if, but if Relevance Realization is so central to our meaning making, our cognition and our consciousness and our self-transcendence et cetera, as we learn about how we have to best try to explain or understand it we should garner lessons about how to best think about and reflect upon human spirituality. At least in the terms that I have defined it for us.

Breaking Down Representation

Thumbnail Summary
- Def. Representation
  - Still not sure.
  - Sounds like he identifies representation with conceptual or pictorial groups.
    - “inner pictures, inner speech”
  - In any case, the key point is that representation depends on something pre-conceptual.
  - Vervaeke identifies representations with semantics:
    - The representational level is called the semantic level.
    - Because this is the level at which words have meaning.
  - Grouping Things Mentally
    - In Ep. 29 Vervaeke explains how we use enactment to establish relevance needed to group things mentally. We don’t always group things conceptually. There are other ways to establish their relevance, like pointing. The notion of “category” straddles the boundary between conceptually defined groups and groups that are formed enactively, i.e. by nothing more than what he calls “enactive demonstrative reference”.
  - Def. Category
    - Still not sure.
    - What’s still unclear to me is whether he wants to rigidly associate the word “category” with things that are grouped conceptually (by their essences or properties) or if he intends for the notion of “category” to straddle the boundary between conceptual groups and groups that are formed enactively, i.e. by nothing more than what he calls “enactive demonstrative reference”.
    - In this statement, he refers to enactment as something “pre-categorical” as well as “pre-conceptual”.
      - That whole conceptual, representational, categorical, pictorial… all of that depends on categorization, but categorization depends on something that is pre-categorical, pre-conceptual.
      - We have to go sub-semantic, sub-categorical, sub-conceptual.
    - Representations are aspectual
      - John Searle has famously made this point.
      - In other words, representations never exhaustive
        
        When you form a representation, you do not grasp all of the true properties
        
        Mathematically impossible for representations to be exhaustive
        
        Number of all of the true properties is combinatorially explosive
        
        Representation contains = subset of properties relevant to you.
      - Two kinds of relevance to you:
        
        Set of relevant features
        
        Set of co-relevance features that share structural functional organization
      - That’s what an aspect is (underlines aspect in aspectual).
      - Same object can undergo a change of aspect
        
        Marker or Weapon?

How you hold the marker decides its aspect.
You hold a marker but then change the way you grip it and it becomes a weapon.

Representations are inherently aspectual
Test of creativity: guess possible aspects.

Why representation cannot explain relevance
- Aspectuality deeply presupposes your ability to zero in on relevance.
  - Therefore, it can’t explain relevance
  - That would land us in the Homuncular Fallacy
- Thus representations can’t ultimately be the generators, creators of relevance
- Representations can be part of a feedback loop in which they influence our determinations of relevance, but they can’t explain it. They can’t function as the ontological basis of relevance.

So, Representation. Now this is just a terrifically hot issue both in terms of interest and controversy within cognitive science in general and I’m not going to try and completely decide this issue right now although I think I’ll say things that are pertinent to that debate, but let’s take it that what we mean by a representation is something, as I said, some mental entity that stands for, refers, directs us towards an object in the world. That’s all I need! Whatever else representations are in all that controversy, that’s all I need for the point I want to make! Because I want to show you something very important about a representation and I mentioned it a few minutes ago and this is a point that John Searle has famously made. Representations are aspectual. OK so I hold this thing up (pen) and you form a representation of it. Remember all the things we talked about when we talked about categorization, we talked about similarity etc. So when you form a representation, you do not grasp all of the true properties of this object because the number of all of the true properties is combinatorially explosive. We’ve already seen that. So out of all the properties (draws a circle) you just select some subset (draws a small wedge of the circle), and what subsets do you pick? Well, you pick a subset that is, here it comes, relevant to you!

Are they just a feature list? No, we’ve already seen that along time ago; they have a structural functional organization, they are made relevant to each other.

So here’s what we’ve got: a set of features that are relevant to each other and then a set of features that have been structurally functionally organized so that they have co-relevance, is then relevant to me. That’s what an aspect is (underlines aspect in aspectual). So whenever I’m representing anything, this is a marker (holds up marker), however I could change it’s aspectuality (changes his grip on the marker): it’s now a weapon! And we do that all the time! In fact one of the ways we check peoples creativity is to do exactly that; we will give some object and say how many different ways can you use it? How many different ways can you categorize it? Namely, how many different ways, how flexible are you at getting different aspects from the same object? So representations are inherently aspectual, but notice the language I’m using: You’re zeroing in on relevant properties out of all the possible properties, you’re structuring them as how so-relevant to each other and then how that structural functional organization is relevant to you.

Aspectuality deeply presupposes your ability to zero in on relevance, to do Relevance Realization. That means that representations can’t ultimately be the generators, creators of relevance, they can’t be the causal origin of relevance. Now, can representations feedback and alter what we find relevant? Of course, nobody’s denying that. That’s of course why we use representations! But [what we can’t serve], they can’t serve as the ontological basis the stuff in reality that we’re trying to use to generate a noncircular account of Relevance Realization.

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