Throughout the text the term human has often occurred without a definite article in order to emphasize the meaning of the word human as a singular universal which makes sense of its mode of being by inhabiting collectivizing or universalizing processes. This is human not merely by virtue of being a species but rather by virtue of being a generic subject or a commoner before what brings about its singularity and universality. Human, accordingly, as Jean-Paul Sartre points out is universal by the singular universality of human history, and it is also singular by the universalizing singularity of the projects it undertakes.
A particularly elegant and incisive argument in defense of human significance as conditioned by the neurobiological situation of subjectivityinstead of God or religion has been presented by Michael Ferrer. To great consequence, Ferrer demonstrates that such an enlightened and nonconflated revisitation of human significance simultaneously undermines the theologically licensed veneration and the deflationary attitude championed by many strains of the disenchantment project and its speculative offshoots.
“Multi-person epistemic dynamics can only work profitably if the stability of shared knowledge and the input-connection of this knowledge (its ‘realism’) are granted. If not, a system of knowledge, although cognitively possible, cannot be socially enacted and culturally elaborated. As in complex social networks, Darwinian selection operates at the level of social entities (which survive or disappear), only species, which have solved this problem, can exploit the benefits of a higher level of cognition. The question is therefore: How does language, or do other symbolic forms, contribute to the evolution of social awareness, social consciousness, social cognition?” Wolfgang Wildgen, The Evolution of Human Language: Scenarios, Principles, and Cultural Dynamics (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2004), 40.
See Robert Brandom, Between Saying and Doing: Towards an Analytic Pragmatism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
Ibid.
Abductive inference, or abduction, was first expounded by Charles Sanders Peirce as a form of creative guessing or hypothetical inference which uses a multimodal and synthetic form of reasoning to dynamically expand its capacities. While abductive inference is divided into different types, all are non-monotonic, dynamic, and non-formal. They also involve construction and manipulation, the deployment of complex heuristic strategies, and non-explanatory forms of hypothesis generation. Abductive reasoning is an essential part of the logic of discovery, epistemic encounters with anomalies and dynamic systems, creative experimentation, and action and understanding in situations where both material resources and epistemic cues are limited or should be kept to a minimum. For a comprehensive examination of abduction and its practical and epistemic capacities, see Lorenzo Magnani, Abductive Cognition: The Epistemological and Eco-Cognitive Dimensions of Hypothetical Reasoning (Berlin: Springer, 2009).
See Anthony Simon Laden, Reasoning: A Social Picture(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
Thanks to Peter Wolfendale for the term “critical reflexes” as an expression of prepackaged theoretical biases used to preempt the demands of thought in the name of critical thought.
It is no secret that the bulk of contemporary sociopolitical prescriptions are based on a conception of humanity that has failed to synchronize itself with modern science or take into account social and organizational alterations effected by technological forces.
To be continued in “The Labor of the Inhuman, Part II: The Inhuman”