The Relational Mode of Being of Concepts - Towards a Generative Relational Epistemology
ENGLISH
The Relational Mode of Being of Concepts
Towards a Generative Relational Epistemology
Wanhong Huang · huangwanhong@serendip.ngo
Abstract
Prior work in the generative relational framework (hereafter GRB) developed an ontology of relational presence, an account of how a shared world arises from the bond between subjects. This paper carries the same framework from the register of being into the register of knowing, and advances the claim that knowing is itself relational. It begins from a limitation that traditional epistemology leaves unexamined, the supposition that a concept can be adequately carried by a single symbolic system, so that knowing becomes the search for a correct definition and its work is finished once representation is secured. Against this supposition the paper develops the relational mode of being of concepts. A concept exceeds any one symbolic system, and it becomes observable through the relations among several symbolic expressions of it, among which a natural language, a mathematics, a psychoanalytic vocabulary, a political economy, and a neuroscience each render a partial and situated aspect. From this the paper draws its central epistemological term. Knowing takes the form of generative observation, an epistemic achievement that stands short of ontological identity, historically situated and symbolically mediated and for that reason incomplete. Three consequences follow. Interdisciplinarity is shown to be an ontological consequence of the relational mode of being of concepts, since the crossing of symbolic systems furnishes the condition of observation. Dialogue is shown to be an epistemic necessity, the relational process through which concepts become progressively observable, a result that reinterprets the Socratic form of philosophical education. And truth is shown to be historically generated, a becoming that moves with the dialectical development of material and relational conditions. The paper closes by turning this account upon itself. A theory that claims completion arrests the generation it describes, and so GRB is held to stand within the history it theorizes, co-generated in dialogue and open to further development. The paper advances no final synthesis, and leaves its central questions open in the manner its own account of theory requires.
Keywords: generative relational epistemology; relational mode of being of concepts; observation; representation; interdisciplinarity; dialogue; Socratic education; dialectical materialism; generativity; truth as historical generation.
AI usage statement: The ideas, claims, and theoretical framework of this paper originate with the author. AI tools were used as an aid in drafting and revision. The origin of each idea has been verified by the author, who takes full responsibility for the content.
§1 Introduction
The generative relational framework was first developed as an ontology. It gave an account of how a shared world arises between subjects, how value comes to rest in the bond that the reproduction of signs cannot dissolve, and how presence comes to be generated in the bond. That account concerned being. The present paper carries the same framework into a second register. It turns from the generation of a world between subjects to the manner in which anything is known, and it advances the claim that knowing is relational in the same manner that being was shown to be relational. The extension carries the framework to a level at which the framework turns upon the activity of knowing by which frameworks are themselves held, and for that reason it belongs to the foundations of the project.
A question is often posed at present in the idiom of method. Why has inquiry come to require the crossing of disciplines. The usual answer names the complexity of the objects. Problems have grown intricate, it is said, and no single field commands the instruments an intricate problem demands, so the disciplines are joined for the sake of a more complete explanation. This paper holds that the usual answer mistakes a symptom for a cause. The crossing of disciplines is required by the relational mode of being of concepts, and it holds because no symbolic system, taken alone, exhausts the concept it renders. The complexity of objects is real, and it operates as a further occasion of crossing while the ground of the necessity lies elsewhere. The ground lies in what a concept is and in the way a concept becomes available to be known.
Traditional epistemology proceeds, for the most part, on a supposition it does not examine. It supposes that a concept can be adequately carried by a symbolic system, that there exists, at least in principle, a correct expression in which the concept is fully set down. Knowing, on this supposition, is the search for that expression, and the labor of inquiry is the refinement of definition toward adequacy. The supposition governs traditions otherwise opposed. It is present in the analytic search for the definition that states necessary and sufficient conditions, in the structuralist reduction of meaning to position within a system of differences, and in the project of knowledge representation that would set a concept down in a formal notation a machine can manipulate. Across these differences the shared assumption holds that a concept awaits its adequate symbol, and that the work of knowing is finished when the adequate symbol is found.
The account developed here begins by refusing that supposition. It holds that no symbolic system completes a concept, that every symbolization selects and compresses and situates and so renders a partial aspect, and that a concept becomes observable only through the relations among several such partial renderings. From this refusal the paper draws a term to replace representation. Knowing is generative observation. What is known is observed through the relations among symbolic expressions, the observation stands as an achievement that falls short of identity between the known and the real, and because the relations among expressions increase and change through history the observation is never final and the knowing continues.
This refusal carries a shift in the question philosophy asks of a concept, and the shift locates the paper’s contribution. Analytic philosophy has asked, in the main, what a concept is, seeking the conditions an instance must satisfy to fall under it. The cognitive sciences have asked how a concept is represented, seeking the format in which a mind or a machine holds it. The present paper asks a third question. It asks how a concept becomes observable, by what epistemic access a concept that no symbol completes is reached at all. The move is a shift of the central problem from the representation of concepts to their epistemic accessibility, and the answer the paper gives, that a concept becomes accessible through the relations among its several symbolic expressions, opens a philosophy of concepts organized around access where the older questions were organized around constitution and format.
The shift carries with it a claim about relations that the paper states plainly, since it is the deepest of the paper’s commitments and the one a hasty reading passes over. On the received understanding, a relation connects items of knowledge already secured, joining what is separately known and adding nothing to the knowing of either. The account developed here assigns relations a stronger office. Relations among symbolic expressions are epistemically generative. They are productive of observation, and they bring a concept into view that no one of the related expressions holds on its own. The relation does the work of disclosure, and the concept becomes observable in the relation and through it. This is a stronger philosophical statement than the claim that knowing a concept requires several symbolic systems, for it locates the epistemic yield in the relations themselves and makes the generativity of relation, and not merely the plurality of expressions, the ground of observation. The consequences the paper draws follow from this generativity of relation, and the paper returns to it wherever a relation is shown to generate an observation that its terms did not separately contain.
A word on how these claims are argued belongs here, since it governs how they are to be received. The paper proposes the relational mode of being of concepts because it provides the most coherent explanation of a set of phenomena that the representational picture leaves disconnected, among them the limits of representation, the necessity of crossing disciplines, the indispensability of dialogue, and the historical development of truth. The thesis is advanced as the hypothesis that best explains these phenomena together, and the reader is asked to accept it on the strength of that explanatory yield and not as a self-evident metaphysical fact. The section that sets out this inference to the best explanation states the phenomena and the argument in full, and the language throughout in which a concept is said to have a relational mode of being is to be read in that key, as the assertion of a well-supported explanatory hypothesis open to a better one.
The remainder of the paper develops these terms and draws their consequences, of which three are principal, that interdisciplinarity is an ontological consequence, that dialogue is an epistemic necessity, and that truth is historically generated. The paper advances no final synthesis, and closes on questions that its own account of theory requires it to leave open.
§2 The Symbolic Limitation of Concept
The tradition to be displaced can be stated as a schema. Reality stands first, a concept arises as the mind’s grasp of some region of reality, and a symbol is then found in which the concept is set down, so that the symbol represents the concept and the concept represents its region of reality. Knowledge, on this schema, is the possession of adequate symbols, and the criterion of adequacy is the fidelity of the symbol to the concept it carries. The schema is rarely stated so plainly, and it operates the more firmly for remaining tacit. Its force is felt wherever inquiry is understood as the pursuit of the expression that will state the matter correctly and close the question.
The schema governs the analytic search for definition. To define a concept, on this understanding, is to state the conditions an instance must satisfy to fall under it, and the definition succeeds when its conditions are severally necessary and jointly sufficient. The labor of the tradition, from the examination of knowledge as justified true belief through the counterexamples that unsettled it, proceeds by proposing a symbolic expression and testing it against cases, in the expectation that a sufficiently refined expression will at last state the concept without remainder. The expectation is the schema. It supposes that the concept is the kind of thing a definition can exhaust, and that the failures met along the way count as failures of a particular definition and leave the form of definition itself unquestioned.
The schema governs structuralism as well, by a different route. Here meaning is lodged in the position a term holds within a system of differences, and the correspondence between symbol and thing gives way to that position, so that a concept is what its oppositions and contrasts within a closed system make it. The move away from reference is real, and it does not leave the schema behind. It relocates adequacy from the single symbol to the system of symbols, and it supposes that the system, taken as a whole, sets down the concept without remainder. The concept remains that which a symbolic order, now enlarged from the term to the structure, is held to complete. The relational insight is present in structuralism and is confined within a single system, and it is precisely this confinement that the present account will open.
The schema governs, most explicitly of all, the project of knowledge representation in the sciences of the artificial. There a concept is to be set down in a formal notation, a logic, a graph, a vector, so that a machine can store and manipulate and reason upon it, and the adequacy of the representation is the measure of the system’s grasp. The project makes the tacit schema into an engineering program. It supposes that for a given concept there is a representation that captures it well enough for the purpose, and it treats the residue that no representation captures as noise to be reduced, and it passes over the possibility that this residue marks a structural feature of the relation between concept and symbol. The recent turn to distributed representations complicates the notation without disturbing the supposition, for a vector that locates a concept in a space of learned relations is still offered as the representation that captures it.
Across these traditions one supposition holds. The concept awaits its adequate symbol, whether the symbol is a definition, a position in a structure, or a formal notation, and knowing is the finding of that symbol. The present account denies the supposition at its root. It holds that no symbol and no system of symbols completes a concept, because symbolization is by its nature an operation that selects and compresses, and that the residue no symbolization captures carries the mark of a mode of being that the following section sets out, where a representational reading would treat that residue as mere noise.
The denial of the representational supposition is not itself new, and the account gains by saying so plainly where a claim of novelty here would lose it credit. Several traditions have already unsettled the picture of a concept awaiting its adequate symbol. Kuhn showed that the terms of a science shift their sense across the transitions between paradigms, so that no fixed representation carries a concept through the history of inquiry. The later work of Wittgenstein displaced the search for defining conditions with an attention to the uses a word bears within a form of life, so that meaning comes to rest in a practice a single definition cannot close. Gadamer developed an understanding that proceeds through the historical situation of the interpreter and the fusion of horizons, so that a concept is reached through a dialogue with tradition a final formulation would foreclose. Polanyi drew out the tacit dimension of knowing, the personal and unspecifiable ground on which explicit representation rests. These traditions establish that representation is limited, and the present account stands on their achievement.
What the present account adds lies at a different level. Those traditions show that representation is limited, and they locate the limitation variously in the history of science, in the practices of a language, in the historicity of understanding, and in the tacit ground of skill. The account developed here supplies a reason for the limitation that lies in the concept itself. Representation is limited because a concept has a relational mode of being, because it is exhausted by no single symbolic system and becomes observable through the relations among several of them. The limitation of representation is a symptom, and the relational mode of being of concepts is the cause. This is the contribution the paper claims, and it is stated as such so that the reader may weigh it against the achievements it builds upon.
§3 The Relational Mode of Being of Concepts
The account offered here can be stated first and defended after, and its defense, given in the section that follows this one, takes the form of an inference to the best explanation. A concept has a mode of being that no single symbolic system renders. It exceeds any one of its symbolizations, and each symbolization, a rendering of it in a natural language, in a mathematics, in a psychoanalytic vocabulary, in a political economy, in a neuroscience, sets down a partial and situated aspect of it. The concept does not appear directly in any of these renderings. It becomes observable through the relations among them, as a form is inferred from several projections none of which is the form. The claim requires care in its statement, for a careless version collapses into a position this account rejects.
One point of care must be marked at the outset and held throughout. To say that a concept exceeds its symbolizations is not yet to settle whether it stands prior to them as an independent structure, whether it emerges from the relations among them, or whether the question of its independent standing is one the account should leave suspended. These three construals yield three different epistemologies, and the choice among them fixes the final form of the account. The present paper does not make that choice, and it develops the relational mode of being of concepts in terms neutral among the three, reserving the question of the concept’s ontological status for the late section that takes it up directly. The reader is asked to hold the stronger metaphysical questions open until then, and to read the language of a concept that exceeds and is observed as committing the account to the fact of the excess and the mode of access, and not yet to a verdict on what the concept ultimately is.
Consider first two concepts that press the point. The infinite has been rendered in many symbolic systems, in the potential infinity of a process without last term, in the completed infinities of set theory with their orders of magnitude, in the theological infinite of a being without limit, in the vanishing and the unbounded of the calculus. These renderings do not agree, and they are not reducible to one another, and yet they do not seem to be renderings of different things arbitrarily sharing a word. They behave as partial observations of a single matter that exceeds each of them. Justice presses the point from the other side. It is rendered in a jurisprudence, in an ethics, in a theology, in a political economy, and these renderings conflict at their foundations. One may draw from the conflict the conclusion that justice does not exist, that the word names no single matter and only marks a site of contest. One may draw instead the conclusion that justice exceeds every one of its symbolizations, and becomes observable only through the relations among them. This paper draws the second conclusion, and the difference between the two conclusions is the whole matter of this section.
The care the claim requires is a distinction between two statements that a hasty reading conflates. The first statement holds that a concept is a relation, that there is nothing to the concept beyond the play of its symbolic expressions and their differences. The second holds that a concept becomes observable through relations, that its mode of being is such that it is reached only by way of the relations among its expressions, while the concept is not exhausted by those relations and is not dissolved into them. The first statement is a version of social construction, and it dissolves the concept into the symbolic activity that renders it, so that the infinite and justice become artifacts of vocabulary with no purchase beyond it. The second statement holds a mode of being for the concept that the symbolic activity brings to observation without exhausting, and it leaves open, for a later section, whether that mode of being stands prior to the relations or emerges within them. The present account holds the second statement and refuses the first. What the relations among expressions afford is observation of the concept, and observation, as a later section develops, is an epistemic relation to something that exceeds it, a relation that stops short of identity with it.
The situation is shown in Figure 1, in which the concept forgoes the center as a visible node. What is visible is the expressions and the relations among them. The concept is the matter these relations allow to be observed, and it is marked by its position among the expressions, holding no node of its own.
Figure 1. The relational mode of being of a concept. Around an empty center sit five symbolic expressions, joined to one another by relations: a natural language, a mathematics, a psychoanalysis, a political economy, a neuroscience. The visible structure is the several expressions and the relations among them. The concept occupies no node of its own and becomes observable through those relations, marked here by the empty center, labeled “(observed, not shown).”
Figure 1 is to be read against the schema of the preceding section. There the concept stood as a node to be captured by an adequate symbol. In the figure the concept occupies no node at all. The nodes are the expressions, each partial, and the concept is what the relations among the expressions allow to be observed. To seek the one adequate expression is to seek a single node that would make the others unnecessary, and the account holds that no such node exists, since each expression renders an aspect the others do not, and the observation lives in their relation and in no single one of them. From this the governing principle of the account can be stated.
The five nodes of the figure can be given content by a single example. Take desire as the matter to be observed, and consider how each of the five symbolic systems the figure names renders it. A natural language renders desire in the vocabulary of wanting and longing and lack, a field of everyday speech that marks the experience of being drawn toward what one does not have. A mathematics renders desire as a preference ordering over outcomes and a utility that a rational agent maximizes, the form it takes in the theory of decision, where wanting becomes a ranking that a function represents. A psychoanalysis renders desire as the movement set in motion by a constitutive lack, directed upon an object that stands in for what no object supplies, the desire that circles its cause without reaching it. A political economy renders desire as a demand that is produced and organized, a want manufactured and directed toward the commodities whose sale depends upon it. A neuroscience renders desire as the activity of a dopaminergic system that codes the anticipation of reward, a signal of prediction and its error in the circuits that drive approach. These five renderings do not reduce to one another. The utility function omits the unconscious cause the psychoanalysis makes central, the neural signal omits the social production the political economy makes central, the everyday vocabulary omits the formal structure the mathematics supplies, and no one of the five holds what the others hold. Desire itself appears in none of the five nodes. It is observed in the relations among them, in the passage from the ranking to the circling cause, from the reward signal to the produced demand, and this is the empty center the figure marks. The example fills the figure without disturbing its lesson, since the concept observed remains the matter between the nodes and takes no node of its own. The five nodes, moreover, did not arrive together. The rendering of desire as a utility, the rendering as a lack that constitutes the subject, the rendering as a dopaminergic signal, each entered the history of the observation of desire at its own moment, and each arrival opened relations to the others that were unavailable before it, so that the field of relations the figure displays is the present state of a history still under way. A later section returns to this historical generation of the field.
The Observation Principle. A concept is never exhausted by any symbolic system. It becomes observable only through the relations among several symbolic expressions of it. Every such observation is historically situated, symbolically mediated, and for that reason necessarily incomplete.
The principle has three clauses, and each does work in what follows. The first clause, that no symbolic system exhausts the concept, denies the supposition of the representational schema and grounds the necessity of crossing symbolic systems. The second clause, that the concept becomes observable through relations, states the positive mode of access and distinguishes observation from the direct grasp the schema assumed. The third clause, that every observation is situated and mediated and incomplete, carries the epistemic humility that the next section draws out, and prepares the account of truth as historical generation, since an observation that is always incomplete is an observation that history can always enrich.
§4 The Argument as Inference to the Best Explanation
The relational mode of being of concepts has been stated, and the manner in which the paper argues for it should be made explicit before its consequences are drawn, since the form of the argument governs the strength of the claim. The paper does not offer a direct demonstration that a concept has a relational mode of being, as though the thesis could be read off from an inspection of concepts taken in isolation. It offers the thesis as the hypothesis that best explains a range of phenomena that the representational picture leaves obscure. The argument is an inference to the best explanation, and marking it as such places the claim at the level of a well-supported explanatory hypothesis, open to the improvement or the displacement that a better explanation would bring.
The phenomena to be explained are four, and each stands as a fact about knowing that inquiry meets independently of the present account. The first is the necessity of crossing disciplines, the circumstance that inquiry into a concept of any depth draws on several fields and loses something of the concept when confined to one. The second is the indispensability of dialogue in the formation of understanding, the circumstance that philosophical education has proceeded through exchange across its history and that new understanding arises in the meeting of expressions, where the delivery of one expression alone would leave it unformed. The third is the historical development of truth, the circumstance that the observation of a concept is enriched as inquiry furnishes new expressions and new relations, so that knowing has a history that is more than the correction of error. The fourth is the incompleteness of symbolization, the circumstance that every rendering of a concept in a symbol leaves a residue no refinement of the symbol removes. These four are set out at length in the sections that follow, and they are named here as the explananda the hypothesis is offered to explain.
The representational picture accounts for these phenomena poorly. On that picture a concept awaits its adequate symbol, and the crossing of disciplines, the labor of dialogue, the history of inquiry, and the residue of symbolization appear as difficulties to be overcome on the way to the adequate symbol, features of an as yet imperfect state of knowledge that a completed representation would remove. The picture treats as defects to be repaired what present themselves as standing features of knowing, and its explanations of them borrow, at each turn, the premise that a single adequate symbol is in principle available, which is the premise the phenomena strain against.
The relational mode of being of concepts accounts for the same phenomena as expressions of a single structure. If a concept is exhausted by no one symbolic system and becomes observable through the relations among several, then the crossing of disciplines is the assembling of those several expressions, the labor of dialogue is the generation of relations among them, the history of inquiry is the accumulation of expressions and relations through which the concept is progressively observed, and the residue of symbolization is the mark of the excess of the concept over any one rendering. The four phenomena, disparate on the representational picture, become four faces of the relational mode of being of concepts, and the hypothesis earns its standing by this unification.
Stated in this form the argument has a structure worth making plain. The representational picture fails to explain the four phenomena without strain. The relational mode of being of concepts explains them together and without strain. On the principle that the hypothesis which best explains the phenomena is to be preferred, the relational mode of being of concepts is to be preferred. The conclusion is held with the confidence that an inference to the best explanation affords, which is the confidence of a hypothesis well supported by its explanatory yield and answerable to any further hypothesis that would explain the same phenomena as well or better. This is the sense in which the paper advances the relational mode of being of concepts, and it is consistent with the suspension, in a later section, of the further question of the ontological status of the concept, since a hypothesis offered as the best available explanation does not thereby pronounce on the ultimate constitution of what it concerns.
[Thesis] The paper proposes the relational mode of being of concepts because it provides the most coherent explanation of a set of otherwise disconnected phenomena, the limits of representation, the necessity of crossing disciplines, the indispensability of dialogue, and the historical development of truth. The thesis is advanced as the hypothesis that best explains these phenomena together, to be accepted on the strength of that explanatory yield and held answerable to any hypothesis that would explain the same phenomena as well or better.
An inference of this form gains further support when the hypothesis is shown at work, and the section that follows sets out three cases in which a matter that resists a single symbolization becomes observable through the relations among the several frameworks that render it. The cases carry the argument from the statement of a structure to its exhibition on matters drawn from regions that lie far apart, and they show the generativity of relation in operation where a single symbol fails.
§5 Three Cases of Observation across Symbolic Systems
The argument of the preceding section is an inference from phenomena to the hypothesis that best explains them, and an inference of that form is strengthened when the hypothesis is shown at work on cases. This section sets out three. Each takes a matter that resists capture by any single symbolic system, exhibits the renderings that several frameworks give of it, marks what each rendering leaves out, and shows how the movement between the renderings brings into view what no one of them holds alone. The cases are drawn from regions that lie far apart, the political economy of the subject and the topology of desire, the metaphysics and soteriology of several traditions, and the mathematics of systems and the theory of the optimal, and their distance is part of the demonstration, since a principle that holds across such distance holds by more than the affinity of neighboring fields. In each case the matter observed is named by no term of its own, and the account speaks of it only as that which the several frameworks render, holding their renderings apart as expressions that observe from different sides and refusing the claim that they say the same thing.
One Movement in the Marxian and Lacanian Frameworks
Consider first a movement that a prior study in this framework read across two vocabularies at once, the movement by which a generative activity that circles a core no possession can occupy is turned, in the course of its mediation, into a demand upon a substitute the core cannot be. The Marxian vocabulary renders this movement as alienation. A subject engaged in a generative activity within a relation produces, in that activity, something that is then appropriated and set over against the subject as an alien power, so that the product of the subject’s own relational activity comes to govern and to draw upon the subject from without. The rendering is precise about the appropriation and about the reversal by which a product of activity becomes a power over the one whose activity produced it, and it is silent about the structure of the desire on which this power takes hold. It does not say why the core of the activity resists occupation, or how the substitute comes to stand in for a satisfaction it cannot deliver, and these silences mark the aspect the Marxian rendering leaves out.
The Lacanian vocabulary renders what appears to be the same movement in other terms. A drive circles a core in the Real that no object occupies, and the movement of the drive around that core is turned, under a demand, into a desire directed upon an object that stands in for the core and fails it. The demotion of the drive to a desire fixed upon a substitute is the rendering the Lacanian vocabulary gives, and it is precise about the topology of the core and about the constitution of the subject in the circling and the failure, and it is silent about the political economy of the appropriation. It does not say who takes the product of the activity, or under what historical and material conditions the substitute is manufactured and sold, and these silences mark the aspect the Lacanian rendering leaves out.
The observation the case affords lives in the movement between the two renderings. Set beside the Lacanian rendering, the Marxian account of appropriation supplies the political economy the topology of desire omits, and the historical and material conditions under which the substitute is produced come into view. Set beside the Marxian rendering, the Lacanian account of the core and its circling supplies the structure of desire the account of appropriation omits, and the reason the appropriated product can govern the subject from within comes into view. Neither rendering completes the other, and neither is the other translated without loss. In the passage between them a movement is observed that is at once the appropriation of a relational product and the demotion of a drive to a desire, and this movement appears in neither vocabulary taken alone. The observation is generated in the translation, and it is the plainest kind of instance of the principle that a concept becomes observable through the relations among its expressions.
One Void in the Daoist, Buddhist, and Lacanian Frameworks
The second case reaches a matter still more resistant to symbolization, for the matter is itself a place that symbolization cannot fill. Several traditions, in the course of seeking a final ground for the order of the world, arrive at a core that no positive determination occupies, and each renders that core in a vocabulary of its own. The Daoist vocabulary renders it as an emptiness from which the ordered world proceeds, a nameless and unpossessable source around which the movement of things is organized and which no act of grasping holds. The rendering is generative in its cast, since the emptiness is that from which the ten thousand things come, and it is silent about the extinction of the grasping subject and about the constitution of desire in relation to the core.
The Buddhist vocabulary renders a core that is empty in a different key, an emptiness of own-being in which no thing possesses a self-standing essence, a rendering that turns toward release from the grasping that takes the empty for the substantial. The rendering is soteriological in its cast, precise about the dissolution of the substantial and about the liberation that follows the seeing of emptiness, and it is silent about the generative procession the Daoist rendering makes central and about the topology of a desire that circles the void. The Lacanian vocabulary renders a void of its own, a lack in the Other and a place in the Real that no signifier fills, around which the desire of the subject is constituted and from which the subject’s want takes its rise. The rendering is constitutive in its cast, precise about the subject that is formed in relation to the void and about the desire that the void sets in motion, and it is silent about procession and about release.
These three renderings are not one rendering, and the account does not say that the emptiness of the Daoist source, the emptiness of own-being, and the lack in the Other are the same. It says that three traditions, seeking a final ground, have each arrived at a core that resists positive determination, and that each has rendered that core in the vocabulary its concerns supplied, generative, soteriological, constitutive. The observation the case affords is generated in the movement among the three. The Daoist rendering discloses a generativity the Lacanian void does not carry, the Buddhist rendering discloses a release from grasping the Daoist source does not thematize, the Lacanian rendering discloses a constitution of the desiring subject the other two do not frame. Held in relation, the three bring into view a core that resists symbolization, that generates, that constrains grasping, and that constitutes desire, and no single tradition observes all of these at once. The case exhibits the principle twice over, since the matter observed is a place that symbolization cannot fill, and it is observed only through the relations among the several symbolizations that circle it.
One Terminal State in the Economic and Dynamical Frameworks
The third case carries the principle into the formal sciences, where the resistance to a single symbolization takes a form that the humanistic cases do not display, and where the movement between renderings discloses a matter that one of the renderings conceals. Consider the terminal state toward which a system is organized, the condition at which its movement settles. The vocabulary of dynamical systems renders this as an attractor, a state or a set of states toward which the trajectories of a system tend over time, whether a point at which motion comes to rest, a cycle it settles into, or a more intricate set upon which it wanders without escaping. The rendering is exact and it is free of any suggestion that the state so reached is a state that ought to be reached. An attractor is where the system goes, and the rendering attaches no worth to the going and no approval to the destination.
The economic vocabulary renders a terminal state of its own, the optimum at which no rearrangement can improve the position of one party without worsening another, a condition in which the possibilities of costless improvement are exhausted. This rendering, unlike the dynamical one, carries a charge of worth. The optimum presents itself as a state that is reached and that is desirable in the reaching, a condition the system ought to attain and at which it is right for it to rest, and the language of optimality attaches an approval to the destination that the language of the attractor withholds. The rendering is precise about the exhaustion of costless improvements, and it is silent about the source of the worth it attaches to that exhaustion, treating as a property of the state what is supplied by the framework that describes it.
The observation the case affords is generated in the movement between the two renderings, and it is an observation with a critical edge. Set beside the dynamical rendering, the economic optimum is seen to be, in its formal skeleton, a terminal state of a system, a place where a certain movement settles, and the dynamical rendering carries no worth attaching to such a place. The worth that the economic rendering attaches to its terminal state is thereby exposed as an addition the framework makes, a normative charge laid upon a structure that, observed from the dynamical side, bears none. The translation reveals that the optimum is a stable terminal state to which a framework has attached the value of the desirable, and the question of the ground of that value, obscured while the optimum is viewed only from within the economic vocabulary, comes into view once the optimum is set beside the attractor that shares its structure and lacks its charge. Here the relation between renderings does more than assemble a fuller view. It discloses that one rendering has smuggled a worth into a structure the other shows to be worth-neutral, and the observation of that smuggling is available only in the passage between the two.
This observation has a historical condition that the case itself brings into view. The setting of the optimum beside the attractor requires that a mathematics of dynamical systems, with its notion of a terminal state toward which trajectories tend, be available to be set beside the economic optimum. Before the vocabulary of attractors matured, the optimum could be observed from within the economic framework and from the frameworks that preceded that mathematics, and the particular relation that exposes its smuggled worth was not yet available, since one of its terms had not yet come into being. The observation waited upon the historical arrival of a symbolic system, and the relation through which it is won is itself a historical acquisition. This point is taken up in the account of what the three cases show in common.
The Common Result of the Three Cases
The three cases run from the political economy of the subject, through the metaphysics of several traditions, to the mathematics of systems, and they show one thing in three places. Wherever a matter resists capture by a single symbolic system, whether because it circles a core no possession occupies, because it is a place symbolization cannot fill, or because its structure and its worth come apart under description, the matter becomes observable through the relations among the several frameworks that render it, and the observation is generated in the translation among them and found in none of them alone. The cases exhibit the four phenomena named in the argument from the best explanation. They show the incompleteness of each single symbolization, the necessity of crossing frameworks to observe the matter, the way a dialogue between vocabularies generates an observation neither holds, and the manner in which the observation of such a matter develops as further frameworks are brought into relation. A fourth or a fifth framework would extend each case, a neuroscience of the circling drive, a further tradition of the void, a thermodynamics of the terminal state, and the extension would enrich the observation in the manner the account predicts, by adding relations through which the matter is further observed. The cases are offered in this spirit, as demonstrations that the principle does work on matters that resist the single symbol, and as instances of the generativity of relation that the paper places at the center of knowing.
The cases as set out are snapshots, and a snapshot conceals the movement the account holds to be central. Two forms of historical generation run through them, and drawing them out completes the demonstration. The first concerns the meaning observed within a settled field of frameworks. Even where the frameworks in relation stay the same, the observation of the matter develops, since the omission of one rendering often becomes visible only once another rendering arrives to throw it into relief. The silence of the Marxian account about the topology of desire was not marked as a silence in advance. It became observable as an omission once the Lacanian rendering was set beside it, and the meaning of the movement the two frameworks render has developed accordingly, enriched through a relation that the history of these vocabularies made available. The observation is a historical acquisition even when the frameworks that afford it are given.
The second form of generation is the deeper, and it concerns the field of relations itself. The relations through which a matter is observed are not a standing inventory awaiting discovery. They come into being in history, and a relation between two frameworks becomes available only once both frameworks have arisen and their juxtaposition has become possible. The third case shows this directly. The relation that sets the economic optimum beside the dynamical attractor, and through which the smuggled worth of the optimum is observed, waited upon the maturation of the mathematics of dynamical systems, and before that mathematics the relation was unavailable and the observation it affords could not be won. What was missing was not an insight that a sharper mind of an earlier time might have reached. What was missing was a term of the relation, and with it the relation itself. The relational field through which concepts are observed is therefore itself generated in history, and its growth opens observations that no earlier state of the field could reach.
These two forms of generation are the temporal face of the relational mode of being of concepts, and they are what the term generative in the paper’s title finally names. Relations generate observation, and both the meanings observed within a field of relations and the field of relations itself develop in the dialectical movement of the material and symbolic conditions under which frameworks arise. The observation of a concept returns, across this history, to the same matter, the infinite, desire, the terminal state, and it returns to it in a field of relations grown richer, so that the return reaches the same concept observed anew and does not return to the observation once held. This is the movement of a spiral and not of a circle, a return to the root that reaches a place the origin did not occupy.
Footnote. The formal structure of this return, developed through the geometry of holonomy and the sublimation proper to a generative cycle, is treated in the author’s The Sustainability of Intimacy (GRB Series, Paper IX).
The static cases, read in the light of this movement, are moments in a history through which the observation of each matter is generated and will continue to be generated, and the generativity the paper claims for relation is a generativity in time as much as in structure.
§6 Observation as Achievement
The term chosen to replace representation must now be held apart from what it replaces and from what it might be mistaken for. Observation, as this account uses the word, names an epistemic relation to a concept that exceeds it. It is achieved through the relations among symbolic expressions, and it does not coincide with the concept it observes. This non-coincidence is the whole point of the choice of word, and a set of alternatives were refused precisely because they efface it. To represent, to capture, to reflect, to mirror, each carries the suggestion that the knowing renders the known without loss, that what is set down is the thing itself in another medium. Observation carries the opposite suggestion. To observe is to view from a position, under conditions, through a medium, and so to view partially and to leave a remainder unobserved.
The word carries one further liability that the account meets directly. In its ordinary use observation names a relation of an observer to an object, the astronomer to the star, the biologist to the cell, and this ordinary use suggests a passive reception of what stands ready to be seen. The process the account names is active and composite. To observe a concept through the relations among its expressions is to translate one expression into the terms of another, to compare their renderings, to hold them in a dialogue that generates a further rendering, to interpret each in the light of the rest, and to align their structures where they meet. Observation, in this account, is the name for this whole generative and relational labor, and the word is to be read as compressing that labor into a single term. The account accordingly favors the compound generative observation where the active sense must be kept in view, so that the passivity the bare word suggests is held off by the qualifier.
This liability of the word is itself an instance of the account’s central claim, and the account owns it as such. The term observation is a symbolic expression of a concept, and by the Observation Principle it renders a partial aspect of that concept and leaves a remainder. It renders the aspect of viewing under conditions and with a remainder, which is the aspect the account most needs, and it forgoes the aspects of translation, dialogue, and generation that the alternatives the reviewer of such an account might propose, disclosure, understanding, recognition, would render in their turn while forgoing what observation retains. No one of these words completes the concept the account is reaching for. The concept becomes observable only through the relations among them, and the reader is asked to observe it there, in the relation of observation to translation and dialogue and generation and disclosure, and not to rest in any single term. That the account’s own central term stands in need of this treatment is not an embarrassment to it. It is the account exemplifying, in the choice of its own vocabulary, the limitation of symbolization it describes, and it is the plainest available demonstration that the account holds of itself what it holds of all knowing.
From this the cardinal distinction of the section follows. The observed is not the real. What the relations among expressions afford is an observation of the concept, and the concept, and beyond it whatever region of reality the concept concerns, exceeds the observation. To take the observed for the real is to repeat, at the level of the enlarged relational access, the error the schema committed at the level of the single symbol, the error of mistaking an adequate-seeming rendering for the matter rendered. The account guards against this by insisting that observation is an epistemic achievement that stands short of ontological identity. It is something won, under conditions, by the labor of relating expressions, and what is won is a view and not a possession of the thing.
[Thesis] Observation is an epistemic achievement, and it stands short of ontological identity. It is won through the relations among symbolic expressions, under historical and symbolic conditions, and it affords a partial view of a concept that exceeds it, and it stops short of a possession of the concept itself.
A consequence of this that the account accepts without softening is that an observation may be alienated or insufficient. It may render an aspect in a way that distorts the concept, it may privilege one expression and let its selections govern the whole, it may carry into the observation the compressions and the exclusions and the relations of power that inhere in its symbolic means. That an observation is achieved does not certify that it is adequate, and the account of alienation in a later section will show how the symbolic means through which observation proceeds can bend the observation to interests the observer does not avow. To hold that observation is an achievement is therefore not to celebrate it. It is to locate it as a fallible act performed under conditions, and to keep open, as a permanent possibility, that a given observation misconceives what it observes.
The humility this enforces is not a rhetorical modesty added to the account from without. It follows from the structure the account describes. If a concept becomes observable only through the relations among its expressions, and if those expressions are always finite in number and partial in reach, then no state of inquiry commands all the relations that would be required to observe the concept without remainder. There is always a further expression, a further relation, a further aspect not yet brought into view. The incompleteness is not a defect of the present state of knowledge that a future state will repair. It is a feature of the relation between concept and symbolization as such, and it is what the third clause of the Observation Principle records. The account that follows builds on this humility and makes it load-bearing, for it is precisely the permanent incompleteness of observation that makes interdisciplinarity necessary, dialogue generative, and truth a matter of historical enrichment that stays open to further enrichment.
§7 Interdisciplinarity as an Ontological Consequence
The first consequence of the account overturns the standing understanding of what it is to cross disciplines. On the standing understanding, interdisciplinarity is a methodology, a technique adopted for the sake of a better explanation when a problem outruns the reach of one field. The disciplines are treated as reservoirs of instrument and result, and they are combined as tools are combined, because the job at hand needs more than one. On this understanding the combination is contingent. A problem simple enough to fall within one field would need no crossing, and the crossing draws its justification from the difficulty of the case, and it appeals to nothing in the nature of what is known. The account developed here reaches the opposite conclusion. The crossing of disciplines is required by the mode of being of concepts, and it stands therefore as an ontological consequence, with the office of a methodological convenience falling away.
The argument is short once the Observation Principle is in place, and it proceeds in four steps that are worth setting out in order, since the conclusion has force only when the intermediate steps are seen to carry it. The first step fixes what a discipline is. Each discipline is a symbolic system, rendering its objects in a vocabulary, a formalism, a set of admissible operations, and in doing so it observes an aspect of them and leaves other aspects unobserved. The second step follows from the mode of being of concepts. A concept that several disciplines concern is exhausted by no one of their renderings, and each discipline furnishes one partial and situated expression of it. The third step applies the Observation Principle to this plurality of expressions. Since a concept becomes observable only through the relations among several symbolic expressions of it, and since the several disciplines furnish exactly such a plurality of expressions, the observation of the concept becomes available through the relations among their renderings and through nothing that lies within any one of them. The fourth step draws the conclusion. The crossing of disciplines is the setting into relation of these several disciplinary expressions, and it is therefore the very operation through which the concept is observed. The chain runs from the concept, through its several disciplinary expressions, through the relational observation these afford, to the crossing of disciplines that carries out that observation, and each link is required for the next.
The conclusion holds with a strength the intermediate steps make plain. No enrichment of a single discipline reaches the observation, because the single discipline, however refined, remains one symbolic system and renders one aspect. The crossing of disciplines furnishes the condition under which the concept becomes observable at all, and it does the work of observation itself, where a reading that stopped at the difficulty of problems would cast the crossing as a mere remedy for complexity.
From this the standing understanding undergoes a correction in its terms. To cross disciplines is not to integrate them, if integration names the merging of their renderings into a single enlarged rendering that would supersede them. Such a merger would be one more symbolic system, one more partial expression, and it would stand in need of relation to others exactly as its components did. The crossing affords observation precisely by holding the renderings in relation without collapsing them, so that the aspect each renders remains available and the concept is observed in the play among them. What crossing produces is observation, and not a super-discipline that would end the need for crossing.
Interdisciplinarity as ontological consequence. Interdisciplinarity is an ontological consequence of the relational mode of being of concepts. Since each discipline is a symbolic system that renders one aspect of a concept, and since a concept becomes observable only through the relations among several such renderings, the crossing of disciplines is the condition under which a concept is observed, and not a technique adopted for the difficulty of a case. Its work is observation and not integration, for it holds the renderings in relation without merging them into a further single system.
The correction can be shown on a pair of cases. When a political economy and a psychoanalysis are brought to bear on a single concept, the concern that structures a cultural form, say, the older understanding reads the psychoanalysis as a supplement that fills what the political economy omits, and the political economy as a supplement that grounds what the psychoanalysis leaves suspended. Each is made to complete the other, and the ideal at the horizon is a single account in which neither omits nor suspends. The present account reads the same encounter differently. The psychoanalysis does not complete the political economy and the political economy does not complete the psychoanalysis. The two render different aspects of a concept that exceeds both, and their relation affords an observation of that concept which neither affords alone. The physics and the economics of a shared object, the psychology and the anthropology of a shared practice, stand in the same case. They stand as partial observations whose relation is the site at which the concept they jointly concern becomes observable, holding the place that a contest of rivals or a sum of fragments would occupy on other readings, and the relation generates that observation and does not merely connect two findings already complete. The generativity is the whole of the point. Were the relation only a link between two settled results, the crossing would add nothing to the knowing of either, and the observation it affords would already be contained in the disciplines it joins. The relation instead brings into view a concept that neither discipline held on its own, and the crossing is productive of observation for exactly this reason.
This is, in the terms of the framework, the deepest reason that inquiry has come to cross its disciplinary bounds, and it is a reason that the idiom of complexity conceals. The objects of present inquiry are indeed complex, and the complexity is not the ground. The ground is that the concepts through which any object is known have a relational mode of being, so that the crossing of the symbolic systems in which they are rendered furnishes a condition of observation. Interdisciplinarity, understood in this way, ceases to be a policy that inquiry might adopt or decline and becomes a consequence that the nature of concepts imposes.
§8 The Alienation Proper to Symbolization
The account has held that every symbolization renders a partial aspect and leaves a remainder. It is worth stating why this is so, for the reason lies in a structure that belongs to symbolization as such, and a better symbolization would leave that structure in place. A prior study in this framework developed the alienation of the structure of desire, the rerouting by capital of the mediation through which drive is structured. The present section develops a formally kindred point at the level of the concept. Where the prior study followed an alienation worked upon desire from without, this one follows an alienation that inheres in the act of naming itself, and the kinship between the two is that in each a generative movement is bent by the form through which it is made to pass.
To symbolize a concept is to perform several operations at once, and each of them incurs a loss. Symbolization selects, for it renders some aspects of the concept and passes over others, and the selection is governed by the purposes and the capacities of the symbolic system, so that what falls outside its purposes falls outside its rendering. Symbolization compresses, for it sets the concept down in a finite means, a word, a formula, a notation, and the finitude of the means cannot hold the concept without reduction. Symbolization situates, for it renders the concept from within a context, a language with its history, a discipline with its commitments, and the rendering carries the marks of that context into itself. Symbolization inherits a history, for the means it employs arrived with sediments of prior use that bend the rendering toward what the means has been used to say. And symbolization carries relations of power, for the means through which a concept is rendered are not neutral, and the interests served by a vocabulary enter the rendering as a selection that is not avowed as such.
From these operations it follows that naming loses something of necessity. The loss is not the mark of a poor name that a better name would avoid. Every name selects and compresses and situates, and so every name renders an aspect and forgoes the rest. This is the sense in which symbolization alienates. It sets the concept over against itself in a partial form, a form that presents itself as the concept while rendering only an aspect of it, and it is in the gap between the aspect rendered and the concept exceeded that the alienation lies. The alienation is not to be lamented and not to be escaped. It is the condition of there being any symbolization at all, since a symbolization that selected nothing and compressed nothing and situated itself nowhere would amount to a second copy of the concept and would forfeit the character of a symbolization, and no such copy is available to finite means.
The consequence for the account is exact. If every symbolization alienates in this structural sense, then no single symbolization can be trusted to deliver the concept, and the observation of the concept must proceed by holding several alienated renderings in relation, so that the selection of one is checked against the selection of another, the compression of one supplied by what another retains, the situation of one relativized by the situation of another. The relations among expressions do not undo the alienation proper to each. They set the alienations of several expressions against one another, and it is in this setting-against that observation is won. The alienation that inheres in every naming thus furnishes the very reason the account requires a plurality of expressions and the relations among them, and it becomes the ground of the account’s method.
§9 Dialogue as an Epistemic Necessity
The second consequence concerns dialogue, and it reaches a domain that at first appears remote from an epistemology, the domain of philosophical education. The account holds that dialogue is an epistemic necessity, the relational process through which concepts become progressively observable, and that this holds the reason philosophical education has taken a dialogical form across its history. The claim is developed first in general and then through the case of Socratic teaching, which it reinterprets.
Dialogue is ordinarily understood as an exchange between subjects. On one account it exchanges opinions, each party stating a view and receiving another in return. On a second account it trains a faculty, the give and take sharpening the critical powers of those who engage in it. Both accounts are true as far as they reach, and both stop short of what the present framework discloses. For a dialogue is a meeting of symbolic systems. Each party brings a rendering of the matter under discussion, a rendering shaped by a history, a vocabulary, a set of commitments, and the dialogue sets these renderings into relation. When one party offers a definition and another a counterexample, when the counterexample forces a revised definition and the revision draws a new question, the movement accomplishes the construction, in real time, of relations among symbolic expressions of a concept, and by the Observation Principle it is precisely through such relations that the concept becomes observable. The exchange of views proceeds within this construction as its surface, while the construction of relations is its work. Dialogue generates observation because it generates the relations in which observation consists.
[Thesis] Dialogue is the relational process through which concepts become progressively observable, the setting into relation of the several symbolic expressions that several subjects bring. It carries the communication between subjects as its outward form and performs, beneath that form, the construction of the relations in which a concept, exhausted by none of the expressions, comes into view.
This reinterprets the Socratic form of teaching. The received reading holds that Socrates poses questions so that the pupil may discover the answer already latent within, and that the dialogue is a scaffold for a recollection or a self-discovery that the pupil performs. The present account offers a different reading. What Socrates does, through the sequence of definition, counter-instance, and revised definition, is to alter the relations among the symbolic expressions of a concept. A definition of courage is offered, an instance is produced that the definition cannot hold, a revised definition is framed to meet the instance, and a further instance unsettles the revision. At no point is the concept set down in an adequate expression, and this incompleteness is the form of the proceeding itself. The proceeding does not converge on a definition. It builds the relations among successive partial expressions through which the concept, courage or justice or piety, becomes observable to those who follow the movement. The Socratic dialogue leaves no doctrine because its work was never the delivery of a doctrine. Its work was the generation of the relations in which a concept is observed, and that work is recorded in the dialogue itself.
The contrast with the lecture makes the point sharp. A lecture transmits a symbolic expression from one who holds it to those who receive it, and within its own terms it can transmit knowledge already won. What a lecture cannot do is generate the relations among expressions in which new observation consists, for it moves in one direction and sets one rendering before its hearers, and it leaves the several renderings unset into relation. A dialogue sets the expression of one party against the expression of another and generates from their relation an observation that neither party held at the outset. The lecture can deliver an observation already made. The dialogue can generate an observation not yet made. This is the difference between transmitting knowledge and generating it, and it is the reason philosophical education, whose matter is concepts of a relational mode of being, has found the dialogue indispensable where the transmission of settled results would have sufficed for a matter of another kind.
The reading extends the account of interdisciplinarity into the space between persons. A discipline is a symbolic system, and the crossing of disciplines affords the observation of a concept several disciplines concern. A person, too, is the bearer of a symbolic system, a rendering of the world shaped by an experience, a history, a language, a culture that no other person exactly shares. The dialogue between persons is therefore a crossing of symbolic systems in the same sense that interdisciplinary inquiry is, differing in that the systems crossed are borne by minds where the systems of interdisciplinary inquiry are codified in fields. What the crossing affords is the same in both cases. It is observation, won through the relations among partial renderings of a concept that exceeds them all. The framework thereby joins interdisciplinary inquiry and dialogical education under a single principle, and gives to the ancient practice of teaching through dialogue a ground in the mode of being of what is taught. If the object of philosophical inquiry is relational, then the form suited to it is the dialogue that generates the relations in which a concept comes to be observed, and the monologue that delivers a finished result reaches only what has already been observed.
§10 Truth as Historical Generation
The third consequence concerns truth, and it is developed in the register of dialectical materialism, for the movement the account ascribes to truth is the movement of material and relational conditions in their dialectical development. If a concept becomes observable only through the relations among its symbolic expressions, and if those expressions and their relations are furnished, revised, and displaced by the historical development of the conditions under which inquiry proceeds, then the observation of a concept is carried by that development, and truth, understood as the state of observation reached, moves with it. Truth so understood is not a static object awaiting discovery. It is a becoming, generated in the dialectical movement of the conditions that furnish the expressions and the relations through which concepts are observed.
The point must be stated with care to avoid a misreading. To say that truth is historically generated is not to say that truth changes in the sense that what was true becomes false at the turn of an age. It is to say that the observation of a concept is enriched as history furnishes new expressions and new relations, so that the concept comes into view more fully, from more sides, under more of its aspects. The infinite observed through the potential infinity of a process, and later through the completed infinities of set theory, and later again through the relations these bear to the vanishing quantities of the calculus, is not a different infinite at each stage. It is the same matter observed through an accumulating structure of expressions and relations, and the truth concerning it is generated as that structure grows. History does not overturn observation. It enriches it, and the enrichment is the generation of truth.
This development is dialectical and material in a precise sense. The symbolic expressions through which concepts are observed do not arise from a free play of ideas. They arise from the conditions of a form of life, its practices, its instruments, its relations of production and reproduction, and they develop as those conditions develop, through the contradictions the conditions generate and the resolutions those contradictions find. A new mathematics, a new science, a new vocabulary of the self arrives when the conditions of a form of life make it available and press it into being, and it brings new expressions and new relations through which concepts are observed anew. The generation of truth is thus carried by a movement that is material in its ground and dialectical in its form, and this is why the account renders the historicity of truth in the terms of dialectical materialism, where a history of ideas moving under its own power would miss the material ground.
From this a governing thesis follows, and it concerns the office of theory in relation to a history that has no predetermined end. The account has refused, throughout, the supposition that a matter can be set down in an adequate and final expression. Applied to history, the refusal becomes a refusal of teleology, of the supposition that history moves toward an end already written, which a theory might read off and announce. If the observation of every concept is incomplete and open to historical enrichment, then the concept of a good arrangement of common life is incomplete and open in the same way, and no theory commands the final expression of it. Material conditions constrain the forms that common life can take without determining which form it takes, so that history has direction and lacks a script, has constraint and lacks a predetermined close. The office of a theory that grasps this lies in the discernment of what history is generating and the keeping open of that generation, and it holds the declaration of where history ends in abeyance. The following box states this office and the truth and the education and the politics that follow from it.
[The office of theory] Truth moves with the dialectical development of material and relational conditions. It is a becoming, enriched as history furnishes new expressions and new relations through which a concept is observed, and it holds none of the fixity of an object awaiting discovery. From this a single office of theory follows, displayed here in the three registers it governs.
Of truth. What matters most is the keeping open of history’s power to go on generating answers, beyond the delivery of any settled answer.
Of education. What a generative education generates is the capacity to go on generating knowledge, beyond any body of knowledge it imparts.
Of politics. A genuinely democratic arrangement functions and, beyond functioning, retains the power to reconstitute itself.
History has direction and no predetermined end. The highest office of theory is therefore the discernment of what history is generating and the keeping open of that generation, and it leaves the declaration of where history ends aside. A theory that closes history with an answer arrests the generation it claims to grasp. A good theory does not close history with an answer; it opens history with a better question.
To change the world is not to write its ending in advance, but to enable it to go on creating its own future.
The closing proposition of the box stands in deliberate relation to the eleventh of the theses on Feuerbach, which set against the interpretation of the world the task of changing it. The account developed here carries that task one step further. To change the world, on the present understanding, is not to substitute one finished interpretation for another and inscribe a new ending in place of the old. It is to enable the world to go on generating its own future, to preserve and enlarge the power of common life to reconstitute the conditions of common life. The revolution so understood takes the form of a generative capacity, and the theory that serves it serves through the keeping alive of that capacity, where a theory aimed at a terminus would write the close it should leave open. This is the sense in which the account rejects teleology while retaining direction, and it is the sense in which the office of theory is generative in its form.
§11 The Generativity of Theory
The account must now be turned upon itself, for it makes a claim about theories, and it is a theory. If truth is generated in history and no expression is final, then a theory that declares itself complete stands in contradiction with the very account of truth it may otherwise share. The contradiction is performative in kind, and it arises in the performance of the assertion while the form of the assertion stays intact. Such a theory may assert in its content that the world is in movement and that knowledge is unfinished, and it belies the assertion in its posture, presenting itself as the finished expression that the movement of knowledge was said to preclude. Many theories carry this contradiction unremarked. They hold that the world develops and that their own account of it is settled, that inquiry is unending and that their statement of its results is the end. The present account cannot carry the contradiction, because the contradiction is precisely what its account of truth forbids, and so it is required, on pain of self-refutation, to hold itself open in the manner it ascribes to all knowing.
The framework accordingly holds itself to stand within the history it theorizes, and it claims no station above that history. It did not arise as the finished insight of a single mind surveying history from without. It arose, and continues to arise, in a movement of relation, from the author’s inquiry, from the dialogue with a body of prior thought that includes the analyses of political economy and the vocabularies of psychoanalysis, from the continuing correspondence with contemporary scholars of generative justice, from the responses of readers and interlocutors, and from exchanges as ordinary as the ones in which particular formulations of it were first sharpened. To ask who is the author of a theory so arising is to receive, on this account, an answer that the ordinary attribution obscures. The theory is co-generated. It arises as the generation of a long relational network, and its propositions clarify through relation, each drawn from the movement of many exchanges and none issuing from a single origin.
This places theory within a category the framework has developed elsewhere. A theory that is co-generated in a relational network is a form of relational wealth, generated in common and belonging to the movement of relation that generates it, and a proprietor who would hold it as an owner holds a thing has no title to it. The point is consistent with the framework’s account of production and reproduction. To produce an answer is an act that occurs once and is finished. To generate the capacity to go on producing answers is an act of reproduction, a keeping-alive of a generative power, and a theory that understands itself rightly aims at the second of these, the keeping-alive, and lets the finished answer fall where it may. It aims to participate in the reproduction of the conditions under which common inquiry continues, and not to freeze the history of inquiry at the moment of its own statement.
From this an ethics of theory can be stated, and it is the ethical counterpart of the epistemology the paper has developed. A theory that proclaims its own completion arrests the generation it describes, and in arresting it commits the performative contradiction set out above. A generative theory must therefore consent to be altered by the history, the practice, and the others it meets, on pain of ceasing to be generative. The consent is not a modesty appended to the theory. It is a condition of the theory’s consistency with its own content, and it is the discipline that keeps the theory from installing itself as a new guarantee in the place of the guarantees the framework was developed to unsettle. A theory is not a new divinity and must not become one. It is one condition, among others, under which a community goes on thinking, practicing, and revising the terms of its own life. The framework holds itself to this discipline, and it is in holding itself to it that the framework remains, in its own conduct and not only in its assertions, a generative theory.
§12 The Three Registers and an Open Problem
The account has used, throughout, a term it has not fully secured. It has spoken of a concept that stands prior to its symbolizations and becomes observable through the relations among them, and it has distinguished this concept both from the symbols that render it and from the reality it concerns. Three registers have thus been in play, reality, concept, and symbol, and the relations among them have been left partly undetermined. The determination is deliberately withheld, for the relation among the three registers is a problem the account does not consider settled, and the manner of its eventual settlement would fix the final form of the epistemology. This section states the problem and the paths open through it, and it declines, in keeping with the account of theory just given, to close what the present state of inquiry does not close.
The problem can be posed as a question about the middle register. Symbol is clear enough in its office, the concrete means, linguistic, mathematical, pictorial, institutional, through which a concept is rendered. Reality is the region of what is, whatever its independence from the concepts through which it is known. The concept stands between them, and its status is what the account has left open. Three construals present themselves, and each yields a different epistemology.
On the first construal, the realist one, the concept is a structure independent of the human activity that observes it, a structure that inquiry approaches through the relations among its expressions without constituting. On this construal the Observation Principle carries a metaphysical weight. The observation is an observation of something that stands on its own, and the incompleteness of observation is the incompleteness of a finite approach to a mind-independent structure. The construal secures the objectivity of what is observed, and it inherits the standing difficulty of saying how a concept that stands wholly prior to symbolization is reached through symbolization at all, and how the pre-symbolic is characterized except through the symbols it is said to precede.
On the second construal, the generative one, the concept emerges from the relations among symbolic expressions and emerges from them, so that the concept is generated in the symbolic activity and stabilized as that activity settles into recurring relations. This construal sits closest to the framework’s general commitments, for it treats the concept as it treats other relational realities, as generated in relation and drawn forth in the activity of expression. Its difficulty is the one the third section labored to avert, the slide toward a position on which the concept is dissolved into symbolic activity and loses the purchase that let the infinite and justice behave as matters exceeding any one of their expressions. The construal must show how a concept generated in relation can nonetheless exceed each of its expressions, and the account has gestured at this without securing it.
On the third construal, the suspensive one, the question of the concept’s status is set aside, and the account confines itself to what can be said of observation without pronouncing on what is observed. On this construal the epistemology makes no claim about whether the concept stands prior to its expressions or emerges from them, and it holds only that observation proceeds through the relations among expressions and is always incomplete. The construal is the most cautious and the most defensible on present resources, and it purchases its safety by forgoing the ontological reach that the framework’s extension from being to knowing seemed to promise, leaving the relation of knowing to being unstated where the framework aimed to state it.
The account does not choose among the three. It holds that the choice would fix the final form of the generative relational epistemology, that the resources to make it well are not yet in hand, and that to make it prematurely would install one construal as a guarantee in the manner the account has been at pains to refuse. The relation among reality, concept, and symbol is left, therefore, as the open problem on which the further development of the epistemology turns. This is an application of the account and not an evasion of it. A theory that has argued that observation is incomplete and that truth is generated in history is required to leave open the question its present state cannot close, and to mark it as the site at which the dialogue, the practice, and the history that generate the framework will continue to work.
§13 Conclusion
The paper has carried the generative relational framework from the register of being into the register of knowing. Where the framework had shown a shared world to be generated in the bond between subjects, the paper has shown knowing to be relational in a kindred sense. It began from a supposition that traditional epistemology leaves unexamined, that a concept can be adequately carried by a single symbolic system, and it traced that supposition through the analytic search for definition, the structuralist reduction to position within a system, and the project of knowledge representation. Against the supposition it developed the relational mode of being of concepts. A concept is exhausted by no symbolic system and becomes observable only through the relations among several partial and situated expressions of it.
From this the paper drew a term to stand in the place of representation. Knowing is generative observation, an epistemic achievement that stands short of ontological identity, historically situated and symbolically mediated and for that reason incomplete, and open, for the same reason, to the possibility that any given observation is alienated or insufficient. Three consequences were drawn. Interdisciplinarity was shown to be an ontological consequence of the relational mode of being of concepts, since that mode makes the crossing of symbolic systems the condition under which a concept is observed. Dialogue was shown to be an epistemic necessity, the relational process through which concepts become observable, a result that reinterpreted the Socratic form of philosophical education as the generation of relations among expressions, where the received reading had cast it as the delivery of a latent answer. And truth was shown to be historically generated, a becoming carried by the dialectical development of material and relational conditions, whose enrichment across history is the generation of truth.
The paper then turned the account upon itself. A theory that claims completion arrests the generation it describes and falls into performative contradiction with its own account of truth. The framework accordingly holds itself to stand within the history it theorizes, co-generated in a relational network of inquiry, prior thought, contemporary dialogue, and reception, and belonging to the movement that generates it, with no title vested in a proprietor. From this an ethics of theory followed, that a generative theory must consent to be altered by the history, the practice, and the others it meets, and must decline to install itself as a new guarantee in the place of the guarantees the framework was developed to unsettle.
The analysis advances no final synthesis, and it closes, in the manner its own account of theory requires, on the questions it has made it possible to ask. Whether the concept stands prior to its symbolizations or is generated in the relations among them, and how, on either construal, it comes to exceed each of its expressions. What relation binds the three registers of reality, concept, and symbol, on whose settlement the final form of the epistemology turns. How an inquiry, a pedagogy, or a common life might be arranged so that the crossing of symbolic systems and the generation of observation are sustained and kept from foreclosure. These are posed in the manner of a generative pedagogy, which sets the problem before those who hold it in view and does not dictate its solution. Consistent with the account it has developed, the paper offers the conditions under which the inquiry may continue, and it withholds the ending of the inquiry, and it holds, of its own propositions as of all others, that what matters most is the keeping open of the power to go on generating an answer, beyond the delivery of any settled one.
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中文
概念的关系性存在方式
迈向一种生成性关系性认识论
黄万宏 · huangwanhong@serendip.ngo
摘要
生成性关系框架（下称 GRB）的先前著作展开了一种关系性在场的本体论，即一份关于”一个共享的世界如何从主体之间的结中生起”的说明。本文把同一个框架从存在的register带入认知的register，并推进这一主张：认知本身是关系性的。它从一个传统认识论留而未察的限度开始，即那一假定：一个概念能被一个单一的符号系统充分地承载，于是认知成为对一个正确定义的寻求，而它的工作一旦表征被保全便告完成。针对这一假定，本文展开概念的关系性存在方式。一个概念逾越任何一个符号系统，而它经由它的若干符号表达之间的关系而变得可被观察，其中一门自然语言、一门数学、一套精神分析的词汇、一门政治经济学、一门神经科学，各自呈现一个局部而处境化的方面。由此本文引出它的中心认识论术语。认知取生成性观察的形式，一种”止于本体论同一之前”的认识论成就，历史地处境化、符号地被中介，并因此故不完整。三个后果随出。跨学科性被表明为概念之关系性存在方式的一个本体论后果，因为诸符号系统的穿越供给观察的条件。对话被表明为一种认识论上的必然，即概念经由之逐步变得可被观察的关系性过程，这一结果重新解释了哲学教育的苏格拉底式形式。而真理被表明为历史地被生成的，一个随物质与关系条件之辩证发展而运动的生成。本文以把这一说明转向它自身而作结。一个宣称完成的理论遏止它所描述的生成，于是 GRB 被持守为立于它所理论化的历史之内，在对话中被共同生成，并向进一步的发展开放。本文不推进任何最终的综合，而以它自己关于理论的说明所要求的方式，把它的诸中心问题留而敞开。
关键词： 生成性关系性认识论；概念的关系性存在方式；观察；表征；跨学科性；对话；苏格拉底式教育；辩证唯物主义；生成性；真理作为历史生成。
AI 使用声明： 本文的思想、主张与理论框架源于作者本人。AI 工具被用作起草与修订之辅助。每一想法之来源都已由作者核实，作者对内容负全责。
§1 导论
生成性关系框架最初作为一种本体论被展开。它给出一份关于”一个共享的世界如何在主体之间生起、价值如何来安歇于那’符号之复制所不能消解’的结之中、以及在场如何来在结中被生成”的说明。那一说明关乎存在。本文把同一个框架带入一个第二的register。它从”一个世界在主体之间的生成”转向”任何东西被认知的方式”，并推进这一主张：认知是关系性的，以存在曾被表明为关系性的同一种方式。这一延伸把框架带到一个层面，在那里，框架转向那”框架自身由之被持有”的认知活动，也正因此故它属于这一计划的诸基础。
一个问题当下常以方法的措辞被提出。为何探究开始要求诸学科的穿越。通常的答案命名对象的复杂。问题已变得繁复，人们说，而没有一个单一的领域掌握一个繁复问题所要求的诸工具，于是诸学科为一个更完整的解释之故而被接合。本文持守，通常的答案把一个症状误认作一个原因。诸学科的穿越是被概念的关系性存在方式所要求的，而它之所以成立，是因为没有一个符号系统，单独取来，穷尽它所呈现的概念。对象的复杂是真实的，而它作为一个进一步的穿越之机缘而运作，那必然的地基则在别处。地基在于一个概念是什么、以及一个概念如何变得可被认知。
传统认识论大体上在一个它不加审查的假定上进行。它假定一个概念能被一个符号系统充分地承载，假定存在，至少在原则上，一个”概念被完全写下于其中”的正确表达。认知，在这一假定上，是对那一表达的寻求，而探究的劳作是定义朝向充分性的精炼。这一假定统辖着别处相互对立的诸传统。它在场于分析式的”对陈述必要与充分条件之定义”的寻求，在场于结构主义式的”把意义化约为一个差异系统内之位置”，也在场于知识表征的计划，那计划意欲把一个概念写下于一个机器能操纵的形式记法之中。跨越这些差异，那共享的假设成立，即一个概念等待它的充分符号，而认知的工作在那充分符号被找到时告完成。
此处所展开的说明以拒绝那一假定而开始。它持守：没有符号系统完成一个概念；每一次符号化都选择、压缩、并处境化，从而呈现一个局部的方面；而一个概念只经由若干这样的局部呈现之间的关系而变得可被观察。从这一拒绝，本文引出一个术语以替换”表征”。认知是生成性观察。被认知者经由诸符号表达之间的关系而被观察，那观察作为一个”止于’被知者与实在之间的同一’之前”的成就而立，而因为诸表达之间的关系历经历史而增多并改变，那观察永不是最终的，而认知继续。
这一拒绝携带着一个”哲学对一个概念所问之问题”的转变，而那转变定位了本文的贡献。分析哲学主要问的是一个概念是什么，寻求一个实例为落在它之下所必须满足的诸条件。认知科学问的是一个概念如何被表征，寻求一个心灵或一个机器持有它的格式。本文问一个第三的问题。它问一个概念如何变得可被观察，问那”没有符号完成的概念”究竟经由何种认识论的通达而根本被够及。这一着是把中心问题从概念的表征转向它们的认识论可及性，而本文所给的答案，即一个概念经由它的若干符号表达之间的关系而变得可及，开启一种”围绕通达而组织”的概念哲学，而那些较古老的问题是围绕构成与格式而组织的。
这一转变随身携带一个关于关系的主张，本文平白地陈述它，因为它是本文诸承诺中最深的一个，也是一个仓促的阅读会略过的一个。在既受的理解上，一个关系连接已被保全的诸知识项，接合那被分别地知者，而对二者的认知一无所加。此处所展开的说明赋予关系一个更强的职分。诸符号表达之间的关系在认识论上是生成性的。它们生产观察，并把一个”诸被关联表达中无一者独自持有”的概念带入视野。关系做那揭示之工，而概念在关系之中、并经由它而变得可被观察。这是一个比”认知一个概念需要若干符号系统”之主张更强的哲学陈述，因为它把认识论的产出定位在关系本身，并使关系的生成性、而非仅仅诸表达的复数性，成为观察的地基。本文所引出的诸后果随于关系的这一生成性，而本文凡在一个关系被表明去生成一个”它的诸项未曾分别包含”的观察之处，便回到它。
关于这些主张如何被论证的一个词属于此处，因为它统辖它们被如何接受。本文提议概念的关系性存在方式，是因为它为一组”表征的图景使之互不相连”的现象提供了最融贯的解释，其中有表征的限度、诸学科穿越的必然、对话的不可或缺、以及真理的历史发展。这一论题作为”最好地一同解释这些现象的假设”而被推进，而读者被请求凭那解释之产出的力量、而非作为一个自明的形而上学事实来接受它。那铺陈这一”最佳解释之推断”的一节完整地陈述诸现象与论证，而通篇那”一个概念被说成有一个关系性存在方式”的语言，都要在那一调上被读，作为一个”向一个更好者开放的、被良好支持的解释性假设”之断言。
本文的其余部分展开这些术语并引出它们的诸后果，其中三个是主要的，即跨学科性是一个本体论后果、对话是一种认识论上的必然、真理是历史地被生成的。本文不推进任何最终的综合，而在那些”它自己关于理论的说明要求它留而敞开”的问题上作结。
§2 概念的符号限度
有待被取代的传统能被陈述为一个图式。实在首先而立，一个概念作为心灵对实在某一区域之把握而生起，而随后一个符号被找到、概念被写下于其中，于是符号表征概念，而概念表征它的那一实在区域。知识，在这一图式上，是对充分符号的占有，而充分性的判准是符号对它所承载之概念的忠实。这一图式很少被如此平白地陈述，而它因保持隐默而运作得更牢固。凡探究被理解为”对那’将正确地陈述此事并闭合那问题’之表达的追求”之处，它的力量便被感到。
这一图式统辖分析式的对定义的寻求。定义一个概念，在这一理解上，是陈述一个实例为落在它之下所必须满足的诸条件，而定义在它的诸条件各自必要、共同充分时成功。这一传统的劳作，从对”知识作为被证成的真信念”之审查、经那些搅动了它的反例，靠提议一个符号表达并把它对照诸情形加以检验而进行，怀着这一期待：一个足够精炼的表达将终于无余地陈述那概念。那期待就是那图式。它假定概念是那种”一个定义能穷尽”的东西，并假定沿途所遇的诸失败算作一个特定定义的失败，而把定义之形式本身留而不问。
这一图式也统辖结构主义，经由一条不同的路径。此处意义被安置于一个项在一个差异系统内所持有之位置，而符号与物之间的对应让位于那位置，于是一个概念是它在一个封闭系统内的诸对立与诸对比所使它成为者。那”离开指称”之移动是真实的，而它不把那图式留在身后。它把充分性从单一符号重新安置到符号的系统，并假定那系统，作为一个整体取来，无余地写下那概念。概念仍是那”一个如今从项被扩大到结构的符号秩序被持守去完成”者。那关系性的洞见在场于结构主义、并被囚限于一个单一的系统之内，而恰恰是这一囚限，当前的说明将开启它。
这一图式最明白地统辖人工诸科学中知识表征的计划。在那里，一个概念要被写下于一个形式记法之中，一个逻辑、一个图、一个向量，于是一个机器能储存它、操纵它、并对它推理，而表征的充分性是那系统之把握的量度。这一计划把那隐默的图式化为一个工程纲领。它假定，对一个给定的概念，有一个”为那目的而足够好地捕获它”的表征，并把那”没有表征捕获”的残余当作有待被减少的噪声，而它略过这一可能：这一残余标记着概念与符号之间关系的一个结构性特征。晚近向分布式表征的转向使记法复杂化而不扰动那假定，因为一个”把一个概念定位于一个被习得的关系之空间中”的向量，仍作为那”捕获它”的表征而被提供。
跨越这些传统，一个假定成立。概念等待它的充分符号，无论那符号是一个定义、一个结构中的位置、还是一个形式记法，而认知是对那符号的寻找。当前的说明从根上否认那假定。它持守没有符号、也没有符号的系统完成一个概念，因为符号化凭其本性是一个”选择并压缩”的运算，并持守那”没有符号化捕获”的残余承载着一个存在方式的标记，那存在方式由随后一节铺陈，而一个表征式的读法会把那残余当作纯然的噪声。
对表征式假定的否认本身并不新，而说明靠在此平白地这样说而得益，一个”此处之新颖”的主张会在此使它失信。若干传统已然搅动了”一个概念等待它的充分符号”这幅图景。库恩表明一门科学的诸术语在诸范式之间的过渡里移动它们的意义，于是没有固定的表征把一个概念带过探究的历史。维特根斯坦的晚期工作以”对一个词在一种生活形式内所承之诸用法的注意”取代了对定义条件的寻求，于是意义来安歇于一个单一定义所不能闭合的实践。伽达默尔展开了一种”经由解释者的历史处境与视域的融合而进行”的理解，于是一个概念经由一场与传统的对话被够及，而一个最终的表述会预先关闭那对话。波兰尼抽绎出认知的默会维度，即那”显明表征所搁于其上”的个人而不可规定的地基。这些传统确立表征是有限的，而当前的说明立于它们的成就之上。
当前的说明所添加者在一个不同的层面。那些传统表明表征是有限的，并把那限度各样地定位于科学的历史、一门语言的诸实践、理解的历史性、以及技能的默会地基。此处所展开的说明供给一个”在概念自身之中”的限度之缘由。表征之所以有限，是因为一个概念有一个关系性的存在方式，因为它被没有单一的符号系统穷尽、并经由它们中若干者之间的关系而变得可被观察。表征的限度是一个症状，而概念的关系性存在方式是那原因。这是本文所主张的贡献，而它被如此陈述，好让读者可以把它对照它所建于其上的诸成就来称量。
§3 概念的关系性存在方式
此处所提供的说明能被先陈述、后辩护，而它的辩护，给于紧随此节之后的一节，取一个”最佳解释之推断”的形式。一个概念有一个”没有单一的符号系统呈现”的存在方式。它逾越它的诸符号化中任何一个，而每一次符号化，即在一门自然语言中、在一门数学中、在一套精神分析的词汇中、在一门政治经济学中、在一门神经科学中对它的一次呈现，写下它的一个局部而处境化的方面。概念不直接出现在这些呈现中任何一个里。它经由它们之间的关系而变得可被观察，如一个形式从若干投影中被推断，而无一投影是那形式。这一主张在它的陈述上要求小心，因为一个粗心的版本会塌入一个此说明所拒绝的立场。
一个小心之点必须在一开始便被标出、并被通篇持守。说一个概念逾越它的诸符号化，尚未裁定它是否作为一个独立的结构而先于它们、是否从它们之间的关系中涌现、抑或它的独立地位之问题是一个说明应留而悬置者。这三种解读产出三种不同的认识论，而它们之间的选择固定说明的最终形式。本文不作那一选择，而它以在三者之间中立的术语展开概念的关系性存在方式，把概念之本体论地位的问题保留给那”直接取用它”的靠后一节。读者被请求把更强的形而上学问题持守敞开、直到那时，并把”一个逾越且被观察的概念”之语言读作把说明托付于那逾越之事实与那通达之方式，而尚未托付于一个”概念究竟是什么”的裁决。
先考虑两个把这一点施压的概念。无限已被呈现于许多符号系统中，在一个无末项之过程的潜无限中，在集合论的完成无限连同它们的诸量级中，在一个”无限度之存在”的神学无限中，在微积分的消逝者与无界者中。这些呈现并不一致，也不可彼此化约，然而它们看起来不像是”任意地共享一个词”的不同之物的诸呈现。它们表现为一个”逾越它们每一个”的单一之事的诸局部观察。正义从另一侧把这一点施压。它被呈现于一门法理学、一门伦理学、一门神学、一门政治经济学中，而这些呈现在它们的诸基础处冲突。人可从这一冲突引出这一结论：正义不存在，那词命名不了任何单一之事、而只标记一个争议的场址。人可反而引出这一结论：正义逾越它的每一次符号化，而只经由它们之间的关系而变得可被观察。本文引出第二个结论，而两个结论之间的差异是本节的全部事情。
这一主张所要求的小心是一个”仓促的阅读会揉在一起”的两个陈述之间的区分。第一个陈述持守一个概念是一个关系，即在概念之处除了它的诸符号表达及其诸差异的游戏之外别无一物。第二个持守一个概念经由关系而变得可被观察，即它的存在方式是这样的：它只经由它的诸表达之间的关系而被够及，而概念不被那些关系穷尽、也不被消解入它们。第一个陈述是社会建构的一个版本，而它把概念消解入那呈现它的符号活动，于是无限与正义成为词汇的产物，在词汇之外无着力。第二个陈述为概念持守一个”符号活动把它带入观察而不穷尽”的存在方式，而它留下一个问题给靠后的一节，即那存在方式是先于诸关系而立、还是在它们之内涌现。当前的说明持守第二个陈述而拒绝第一个。诸表达之间的关系所提供者是对概念的观察，而观察，如靠后一节所展开，是一个”对某个逾越它者”的认识论关系，一个”止于与它同一之前”的关系。
那情形被显示于图一之中，其中概念放弃中心而不作为一个可见的节点。可见者是诸表达与它们之间的关系。概念是这些关系所允许被观察之事，而它由它在诸表达之间的位置所标记，不持有它自己的节点。
图一。一个概念的关系性存在方式。 围绕一个空的中心坐着五个符号表达，彼此由诸关系相接：一门自然语言、一门数学、一门精神分析、一门政治经济学、一门神经科学。那可见的结构是这若干表达与它们之间的关系。概念不占据它自己的节点，而经由那些关系变得可被观察，在此由那空的中心所标记，标注为”（被观察，未被显示）”。
图一要对照前一节的图式来读。在那里，概念作为一个”有待被一个充分符号所捕获”的节点而立。在图中，概念根本不占据任何节点。诸节点是诸表达，各自局部，而概念是诸表达之间的关系所允许被观察者。寻求那一个充分表达，是寻求一个”会使其余者成为不必要”的单一节点，而说明持守没有这样的节点存在，因为每一个表达呈现一个其余者所不呈现的方面，而观察活在它们的关系之中、并不在它们中任何单一者里。由此，说明的统辖原则能被陈述。
图的五个节点能被一个单一的例子给予内容。取欲望为有待被观察之事，并考虑图所命名的五个符号系统各自如何呈现它。一门自然语言以想要、渴望、欠缺的词汇呈现欲望，一个”标记’被引向自己所不拥有者之经验’”的日常言说之场。一门数学把欲望呈现为一个跨诸结果的偏好排序、以及一个理性行动者所最大化的效用，即它在决策理论中所取的形式，在那里想要成为一个函数所表征的排名。一门精神分析把欲望呈现为一个”被一个构成性的欠缺所发动、指向一个’替代那没有对象能供给者’之对象”的运动，即那”环绕它的成因而不够及它”的欲望。一门政治经济学把欲望呈现为一个”被生产并被组织”的需求，一个”被制造、并被指向那’其出售依赖于它’之商品”的想要。一门神经科学把欲望呈现为一个”编码对奖赏之预期”的多巴胺系统之活动，即那”在驱动趋近的诸回路中”的预测及其误差之信号。这五个呈现不彼此化约。效用函数略去精神分析所使为中心的无意识成因，神经信号略去政治经济学所使为中心的社会生产，日常词汇略去数学所供给的形式结构，而五者中无一者持有其余者所持有者。欲望本身出现在五个节点中无一者里。它被观察于它们之间的关系里，在从那排名到那环绕之成因、从那奖赏信号到那被生产之需求的过渡里，而这是图所标记的空的中心。这个例子填充那图而不扰动它的教训，因为被观察的概念仍是诸节点之间的事、并不取它自己的节点。此外，五个节点并非一同到来。把欲望呈现为一个效用、呈现为一个”构成主体的欠缺”、呈现为一个多巴胺信号，各自在它自己的时刻进入欲望之观察的历史，而每一次到来开启了那些”在它之前不可得”的对其余者的关系，于是图所展示的关系之场是一个仍在进行之历史的当前状态。靠后的一节回到这一场的历史生成。
观察原则。 一个概念从不被任何符号系统穷尽。它只经由它的若干符号表达之间的关系而变得可被观察。每一个这样的观察都历史地处境化、符号地被中介，并因此故必然不完整。
这一原则有三个子句，而每一个在随后者中做工。第一个子句，即没有符号系统穷尽概念，否认表征式图式的假定、并奠基诸符号系统穿越的必然。第二个子句，即概念经由关系而变得可被观察，陈述那正向的通达之方式、并把观察从图式所假定的直接把握区分开。第三个子句，即每一个观察都处境化、被中介、并不完整，承载着下一节所抽绎的认识论谦逊，并为”真理作为历史生成”的说明作准备，因为一个总是不完整的观察是一个历史总能丰富的观察。
§4 论证作为最佳解释之推断
概念的关系性存在方式已被陈述，而本文为它论证的方式应在它的诸后果被引出之前被弄明白，因为论证的形式统辖那主张的强度。本文不提供一个”一个概念有一个关系性存在方式”的直接证明，仿佛那论题能从对孤立地取来之诸概念的一次审视中被读出。它把那论题作为”最好地解释一系列’表征的图景使之晦暗’之现象”的假设而提供。论证是一个最佳解释之推断，而把它如此标记，把那主张置于一个”被良好支持的解释性假设”之层面，向那”一个更好的解释所会带来”的改进或取代开放。
有待被解释的现象是四个，而每一个作为一个”探究独立于当前说明而遇到”的关于认知之事实而立。第一个是诸学科穿越的必然，即”对任何深度之概念的探究都汲取若干领域、并在被囚限于一个领域时丧失那概念的某物”之情形。第二个是对话在理解之形成中的不可或缺，即”哲学教育跨越它的历史经由交换而进行、而新的理解在诸表达的相遇中生起”之情形，在那里，单一表达的递送会使它保持未成形。第三个是真理的历史发展，即”一个概念的观察随探究供给新的表达与新的关系而被丰富、于是认知有一个’多于错误之纠正’的历史”之情形。第四个是符号化的不完整，即”一个概念在一个符号中的每一次呈现都留下一个’没有符号之精炼所能移除’的残余”之情形。这四个在随后诸节中被详尽铺陈，而它们在此被命名为那假设被提供以解释的诸explananda（被解释项）。
表征式的图景对这些现象解释得很差。在那图景上，一个概念等待它的充分符号，而诸学科的穿越、对话的劳作、探究的历史、以及符号化的残余，显现为”在通往充分符号之途上有待被克服”的诸困难，一个”一个完成的表征会移除”的、尚不完善的知识状态之诸特征。那图景把”以’认知的诸长存特征’之姿呈现自身者”当作有待被修复的诸缺陷，而它对它们的诸解释，在每一转处，都借用那”一个单一的充分符号在原则上可得”之前提，而那正是诸现象所抵抗的前提。
概念的关系性存在方式把同样的诸现象解释为一个单一结构的诸表达。倘若一个概念被没有一个符号系统穷尽、并经由若干者之间的关系而变得可被观察，那么诸学科的穿越便是那若干表达的聚集，对话的劳作便是它们之间关系的生成，探究的历史便是”概念经由之被逐步观察”的诸表达与诸关系的积累，而符号化的残余便是”概念对任何一个呈现之逾越”的标记。四个现象，在表征式图景上互不相干者，成为概念之关系性存在方式的四副面孔，而那假设靠这一统一挣得它的地位。
以这一形式陈述，论证有一个值得弄明白的结构。表征式的图景未能不费力地解释四个现象。概念的关系性存在方式一同、并不费力地解释它们。凭”那最好地解释诸现象之假设当被偏好”这一原则，概念的关系性存在方式当被偏好。这一结论以一个”最佳解释之推断所提供”的信心被持守，而那是一个”被它的解释性产出所良好支持、并对任何’会同样好或更好地解释同样诸现象’之进一步假设可答责”的假设之信心。这是本文推进概念之关系性存在方式的意义，而它与一个靠后的一节中”概念之本体论地位的进一步问题”之悬置相一致，因为一个”作为现有最佳解释而被提供”的假设，并不由此便对它所关切者的终极构成下断言。
[论题] 本文提议概念的关系性存在方式，是因为它为一组否则互不相连的现象提供了最融贯的解释，即表征的限度、诸学科穿越的必然、对话的不可或缺、以及真理的历史发展。这一论题作为”最好地一同解释这些现象的假设”而被推进，凭那解释之产出的力量而被接受，并对任何”会同样好或更好地解释同样诸现象”的假设保持可答责。
一个这种形式的推断，在假设被表明处于运作之中时，得到进一步的支持，而随后一节铺陈三个案例，在其中一个”抵抗一次单一符号化”之事，经由那”呈现它”的若干框架之间的关系而变得可被观察。这些案例把论证从一个结构的陈述带到它在”取自相距甚远之诸区域”的诸事情上的展示，而它们表明关系的生成性在一个单一符号失败之处的运作。
§5 跨符号系统之观察的三个案例
前一节的论证是一个从诸现象到”最好地解释它们之假设”的推断，而一个那种形式的推断，在假设被表明处于对诸案例的运作之中时，被加强。本节铺陈三个。每一个取一个”抵抗被任何单一符号系统捕获”之事，展示若干框架给予它的诸呈现，标出每一个呈现所留下者，并表明诸呈现之间的运动如何把”它们中无一者独自持有者”带入视野。这些案例取自相距甚远的诸区域，即主体的政治经济学与欲望的拓扑学、若干传统的形而上学与救度学、以及系统的数学与最优的理论，而它们的距离是那展示的一部分，因为一个”跨越如此距离而成立”的原则，凭”多于相邻领域之亲缘”者而成立。在每一个案例中，被观察之事由无它自己的术语所命名，而说明只把它说成”那若干框架所呈现者”，把它们的诸呈现持分开、作为”从不同侧面观察”的诸表达，并拒绝”它们说同一件事”之主张。
马克思式与拉康式框架中的一个运动
先考虑一个”此框架中一个先前的研究曾同时横读于两套词汇之上”的运动，即那”一个’环绕一个没有占有能占据之内核’的生成性活动，在它的中介之过程里，被转成一个’对一个内核不能是之替代物’之要求”的运动。马克思式的词汇把这一运动呈现为异化。一个”在一段关系之内从事一个生成性活动”的主体，在那活动中生产某物，而那某物随后被占据、并被树立于主体对面作为一个异己之力，于是主体自己的关系性活动之产物开始从外部统辖并汲取主体。这一呈现对那占据、以及对那”一个活动之产物成为一个凌驾于’其活动生产了它者’之上的权力”的反转，是精确的，而它对”这一权力所把持于其上之欲望的结构”是沉默的。它不说为何那活动的内核抵抗占据，或那替代物如何来替代一个它不能递送的满足，而这些沉默标记着马克思式呈现所留下的方面。
拉康式的词汇以别的术语呈现看起来是同一个的运动。一个驱力环绕一个”没有对象占据”的实在界中的内核，而那驱力环绕那内核的运动，在一个要求之下，被转成一个”指向一个’替代那内核并辜负它’之对象”的欲望。驱力之降格为一个”固着于一个替代物”的欲望，是拉康式词汇所给的呈现，而它对那内核的拓扑学、以及对主体在那环绕与那辜负之中的构成，是精确的，而它对那占据的政治经济学是沉默的。它不说谁取走那活动的产物，或在何种历史与物质条件之下那替代物被制造并被出售，而这些沉默标记着拉康式呈现所留下的方面。
这一案例所提供的观察活在两个呈现之间的运动里。置于拉康式呈现之旁，马克思式的关于占据之说明供给了欲望的拓扑学所略去的政治经济学，而那”替代物被生产于其下”的历史与物质条件进入视野。置于马克思式呈现之旁，拉康式的关于内核及其环绕之说明供给了关于占据之说明所略去的欲望之结构，而那”被占据的产物能从内部统辖主体”之缘由进入视野。无一呈现完成另一个，而无一是另一个被无损地翻译。在它们之间的过渡里，一个运动被观察，它同时是一个关系性产物的占据、与一个驱力向一个欲望的降格，而这一运动出现在任一词汇单独取来中无一者里。观察在那翻译里被生成，而它是”一个概念经由它的诸表达之间的关系而变得可被观察”这一原则的最平白一类的实例。
道家、佛家、拉康式框架中的一个虚
第二个案例够及一个对符号化更为抵抗之事，因为那事本身是一个”符号化所不能填满”之处。若干传统，在为世界之秩序寻求一个最终地基的过程里，抵达一个”没有正向的规定占据”的内核，而各自以一套自己的词汇呈现那内核。道家的词汇把它呈现为一个”有秩序的世界由之而出”的虚，一个”无名而不可占有、诸物之运动围绕之而组织、而没有抓取之举持有”的源头。这一呈现在它的调子上是生成性的，因为那虚是那”万物由之而来”者，而它对”抓取之主体的寂灭”以及对”欲望在与内核之关系中的构成”是沉默的。
佛家的词汇以一个不同的调呈现一个空的内核，一个”无一物拥有一个自立本质”的自性之空，一个”转向’从那把空取为实的抓取中之解脱’”的呈现。这一呈现在它的调子上是救度学的，对那实之消解、以及对那”随见空而来的解脱”是精确的，而它对道家呈现所使为中心的生成性之procession（生出）、以及对一个”环绕那虚”之欲望的拓扑学是沉默的。拉康式的词汇呈现一个它自己的虚，一个大他者中的欠缺、一个”没有能指填满”的实在界中之处，主体的欲望围绕之而被构成、而主体的想要从之而起。这一呈现在它的调子上是构成性的，对那”在与虚之关系中被形成”的主体、以及对那”虚所发动”的欲望是精确的，而它对procession与对解脱是沉默的。
这三个呈现不是一个呈现，而说明不说道家源头之虚、自性之空、大他者中之欠缺是同一个。它说三个传统，寻求一个最终地基，各自抵达了一个”抵抗正向规定”的内核，而各自以”它的诸关切所供给”的词汇呈现了那内核，即生成性的、救度学的、构成性的。这一案例所提供的观察在三者之间的运动里被生成。道家的呈现揭示一个”拉康式的虚所不承载”的生成性，佛家的呈现揭示一个”道家源头所不主题化”的从抓取中之解脱，拉康式的呈现揭示一个”其余两者所不框定”的欲望着主体之构成。持于关系之中，三者把一个”抵抗符号化、生成、约束抓取、并构成欲望”的内核带入视野，而没有单一的传统一次观察所有这些。这一案例把原则展示两遍，因为被观察之事是一个”符号化所不能填满”之处，而它只经由那”环绕它”的若干符号化之间的关系而被观察。
经济学与动力学框架中的一个终末状态
第三个案例把原则带入形式诸科学，在那里，对一次单一符号化的抵抗取一个”人文诸案例所不展示”的形式，而在那里，诸呈现之间的运动揭示一个”诸呈现之一所隐藏”之事。考虑一个系统被组织朝向的终末状态，即它的运动所安顿之状况。动力系统的词汇把这呈现为一个吸引子，一个”一个系统的诸轨道随时间趋向之”的状态或状态之集合，无论是一个”运动来歇息”之点、一个”它安顿入”之环、还是一个”它在其上游荡而不逃脱”之更繁复的集合。这一呈现是精确的，而它免于任何”如此被够及的状态是一个应当被够及的状态”之暗示。一个吸引子是系统所去之处，而那呈现对那”去”不附加价值、对那目的地不附加认可。
经济学的词汇呈现一个它自己的终末状态，即那最优，在其处没有重新安排能改善一方的地位而不使另一方变差，一个”无代价改善的诸可能被穷尽”之状况。这一呈现，不像动力学那个，携带一个价值之电荷。那最优以一个”被够及、并在够及中是可欲的”状态之姿呈现自身，一个”系统应当达到、并在其处让它歇息是对的”之状况，而最优性的语言对那目的地附加一个”吸引子的语言所扣留”的认可。这一呈现对无代价改善的穷尽是精确的，而它对”它附加于那穷尽之价值的源头”是沉默的，把那”由描述它的框架所供给者”当作那状态的一个属性。
这一案例所提供的观察在两个呈现之间的运动里被生成，而它是一个带一个批判之锋刃的观察。置于动力学呈现之旁，经济学的最优被看作，在它的形式骨架里，一个系统的一个终末状态，一个”某一运动所安顿”之处，而动力学的呈现不携带任何附于这样一个处的价值。经济学呈现附于它的终末状态之价值，由此被暴露为一个框架所作的添加，一个”被铺在一个’从动力学一侧观察便不承载它’之结构上”的规范性电荷。那翻译揭示那最优是一个”一个框架已附以’可欲者之价值’”的稳定终末状态，而那价值之地基的问题，在那最优只从经济学词汇之内被观看时被晦暗，一旦那最优被置于那”共享它的结构而缺它的电荷”之吸引子之旁便进入视野。此处，诸呈现之间的关系做的多于聚集一个更充分的视野。它揭示一个呈现把一个价值偷运进一个”另一个表明为价值中立”的结构，而对那偷运的观察，只在两者之间的过渡里可得。
这一观察有一个案例本身所带入视野的历史条件。把最优置于吸引子之旁，要求一门动力系统的数学，连同它的”诸轨道趋向之的终末状态”之观念，可得以被置于经济学最优之旁。在吸引子的词汇成熟之前，最优能从经济学框架之内、并从那些先于那门数学的框架被观察，而那”暴露它偷运之价值”的特定关系尚不可得，因为它的诸项之一尚未来到存在。观察等待一个符号系统的历史到来，而那”它经由之被赢得”的关系本身是一个历史的获取。这一点在关于三个案例共同表明者的说明中被取用。
三个案例的共同结果
三个案例从主体的政治经济学、经若干传统的形而上学、到系统的数学，而它们在三个地方表明一件事。凡一个事抵抗被一个单一符号系统捕获之处，无论是因为它环绕一个没有占有占据的内核、因为它是一个符号化所不能填满之处、还是因为它的结构与它的价值在描述之下分开，那事都经由那”呈现它”的若干框架之间的关系而变得可被观察，而观察在它们之间的翻译里被生成、并在它们中无一者独自里被找到。这些案例展示那”最佳解释之论证”中所命名的四个现象。它们表明每一次单一符号化的不完整、穿越诸框架以观察那事的必然、一场”诸词汇之间的对话”如何生成一个”无一者持有”的观察、以及这样一个事的观察如何随进一步的框架被带入关系而发展。一个第四或一个第五框架会延伸每一个案例，一门”环绕之驱力”的神经科学、一个”虚”的进一步传统、一门”终末状态”的热力学，而那延伸会以说明所预测的方式丰富那观察，即靠增添”那事经由之被进一步观察”的诸关系。这些案例以这一精神被提供，作为”原则确实在’抵抗单一符号’之事上做工”的诸证明，作为本文置于认知之中心的”关系之生成性”的诸实例。
如所铺陈的诸案例是快照，而一张快照隐藏那”说明持守为中心”的运动。两种历史生成的形式贯穿它们，而抽绎出它们完成那证明。第一种关乎”在一个已定的框架之场内被观察的意义”。即便当处于关系中的诸框架保持不变，那事的观察也发展，因为一个呈现的略去常常只在另一个呈现到来以把它衬托出来时才变得可见。马克思式说明对欲望之拓扑学的沉默，未曾预先被标记为一个沉默。它一旦拉康式呈现被置于它之旁，便作为一个略去而变得可被观察，而两个框架所呈现之运动的意义相应地发展，被一个”这些词汇的历史使之可得”的关系所丰富。观察是一个历史的获取，即便当那”提供它”的诸框架是已给的。
第二种生成是更深的，而它关乎关系之场本身。那”一个事经由之被观察”的诸关系不是一个”等待被发现”的现成清册。它们在历史中来到存在，而两个框架之间的一个关系只在两个框架都已生起、它们的并置已成为可能时才变得可得。第三个案例直接表明这。那”把经济学最优置于动力学吸引子之旁、并经由之’最优被偷运之价值’被观察”的关系，等待了动力系统之数学的成熟，而在那门数学之前那关系不可得、而它所提供的观察不能被赢得。所缺者不是一个”一个较早时代的更敏锐之心灵或会够及”的洞见。所缺者是那关系的一个项，而随之是那关系本身。那”概念经由之被观察”的关系之场因此本身在历史中被生成，而它的生长开启了”没有一个较早的场之状态所能够及”的诸观察。
这两种生成的形式是概念之关系性存在方式的时间之面，而它们是本文标题中”生成性”一词最终所命名者。关系生成观察，而”在一个关系之场内被观察的诸意义”与”关系之场本身”二者，都在那”诸框架由之生起的物质与符号条件”之辩证运动中发展。一个概念的观察，跨越这一历史，回到同一个事，即无限、欲望、终末状态，而它回到它、在一个已生长得更丰富的关系之场中，于是那回返够及被重新观察的同一个概念、而不回到曾持有的那观察。这是一个螺旋、而非一个圆之运动，一个”够及一个原点未曾占据之处”的向根之回返。
脚注。 这一回返的形式结构，经由和乐诺米（holonomy）的几何与一个生成性循环所固有的升华而被展开，在作者的《亲密的可持续性》（GRB 系列，第九篇）中被处理。
如所铺陈的静态诸案例，在这一运动之光下读，是一个历史中的诸时刻，每一个事的观察经由那历史而被生成、并将继续被生成，而本文为关系所主张的生成性，是一个时间中的生成性、正如它是一个结构中的生成性。
§6 观察作为成就
那”被选来替换’表征’”的术语，如今必须被从它所替换者、以及从它可能被误认者持分开。观察，如这一说明所用之义，命名一个”对一个逾越它之概念”的认识论关系。它经由诸符号表达之间的关系被达成，而它不与它所观察的概念相重合。这一不重合是选这个词的全部要点，而一组替代词被拒绝，恰恰因为它们抹去它。表征、捕获、反映、映照，各自携带这一暗示：认知无损地呈现被知者，被写下者是”在另一个媒介中”的物本身。观察携带相反的暗示。观察是从一个位置、在诸条件之下、经由一个媒介来观看，从而局部地观看、并留下一个残余未被观察。
这个词携带一个说明直接迎击的进一步的负担。在它寻常的用法里，观察命名一个观察者对一个对象的关系，天文学家对星、生物学家对细胞，而这一寻常的用法暗示一个”对那’现成待见者’的被动接收”。说明所命名的过程是主动而复合的。经由一个概念的诸表达之间的关系来观察它，是把一个表达翻译入另一个的术语、比较它们的诸呈现、把它们持于一场”生成一个进一步呈现”的对话之中、就每一个在其余者之光下加以解释、并在它们相遇之处对齐它们的诸结构。观察，在这一说明里，是这整个生成性而关系性的劳作之名，而这个词要被读作把那劳作压缩入一个单一的术语。说明相应地偏好那复合词”生成性观察”，在主动之义必须被保持在视野中之处，好让”赤裸的词所暗示”的被动被那限定语所挡开。
这个词的这一负担本身是说明之中心主张的一个实例，而说明如此地认领它。术语”观察”是一个概念的一个符号表达，而凭观察原则，它呈现那概念的一个局部方面、并留下一个残余。它呈现”在诸条件之下、带一个残余地观看”这一方面，即说明最需要的方面，而它放弃了翻译、对话、生成这些方面，而那些”一个如此说明的评审者或会提议”的替代词，即揭示、理解、认出，会转而呈现它们、同时放弃观察所保留者。这些词中无一者完成说明所伸手够向的概念。概念只经由它们之间的关系而变得可被观察，而读者被请求在那里观察它，在观察对翻译、对话、生成、揭示之关系里，而不歇息于任何单一的术语。说明自己的中心术语需要这一对待，对它不是一个难堪。它是说明在它自己词汇的选择里，例示它所描述的符号化之限度，而它是”说明对它自身持守它对一切认知所持守者”的最平白可得之证明。
由此，本节的枢要区分随出。被观察者不是实在。诸表达之间的关系所提供者是对概念的一个观察，而概念、并在它之外那概念所关切的无论何种实在区域，逾越那观察。把被观察者取为实在，是在那”被扩大的关系性通达”之层面上，重复图式在单一符号之层面上所犯的错误，即把一个显得充分的呈现误认作被呈现之事的错误。说明靠坚持”观察是一个’止于本体论同一之前’的认识论成就”来防这。它是某个”在诸条件之下、靠关联诸表达的劳作而被赢得”者，而被赢得者是一个视野、而非对物的一个占有。
[论题] 观察是一个认识论成就，而它止于本体论同一之前。它经由诸符号表达之间的关系、在历史与符号条件之下被赢得，而它提供一个”对一个逾越它之概念”的局部视野，并止于对概念本身的一个占有之前。
一个”说明不加软化地接受”的后果是：一个观察可能是被异化的或不足的。它可能以一种”扭曲概念”的方式呈现一个方面，它可能偏私一个表达、并让它的诸选择统辖整体，它可能把那”寄于它符号手段中”的诸压缩、诸排除、诸权力关系带入那观察。一个观察被达成，并不证明它是充分的，而靠后一节关于异化的说明将表明”观察经由之进行”的符号手段如何能把观察弯向观察者不承认的诸利益。持守观察是一个成就，因此不是庆祝它。它是把它定位为一个”在诸条件之下被施行”的可错之举，并把这一点作为一个长存的可能而持守敞开：一个给定的观察误解它所观察者。
这所强制的谦逊不是一个从外部添于说明的修辞性谦虚。它随于说明所描述的结构。倘若一个概念只经由它的诸表达之间的关系而变得可被观察，而倘若那些表达在数目上总是有限、在够及上总是局部，那么没有一个探究之状态掌握”无余地观察那概念所会要求”的一切关系。总有一个进一步的表达、一个进一步的关系、一个尚未被带入视野的进一步方面。那不完整不是一个”一个未来状态会修复”的当前知识状态之缺陷。它是概念与符号化之间关系本身的一个特征，而它是观察原则第三个子句所记录者。随后的说明建于这一谦逊之上、并使它承重，因为恰恰是观察的长存不完整使跨学科性成为必然、使对话具生成性、并使真理成为一件”保持向进一步丰富开放的历史丰富”之事。
§7 跨学科性作为一个本体论后果
说明的第一个后果推翻了”穿越诸学科是什么”的既立理解。在那既立理解上，跨学科性是一种方法论，一种”当一个问题跑出一个领域的够及时、为一个更好的解释之故而采纳”的技术。诸学科被当作工具与结果的储库，而它们如工具被组合那样被组合，因为手头的活儿需要不止一个。在这一理解上那组合是偶然的。一个”简单到落在一个领域之内”的问题会不需要任何穿越，而那穿越从案例的困难引出它的证成，并不诉诸被知者之本性中的任何东西。此处所展开的说明抵达相反的结论。诸学科的穿越被概念的存在方式所要求，而它因此作为一个本体论后果而立，一个方法论便利的职分则脱落。
论证一旦观察原则到位便短，而它以四步进行，那四步值得按次序被铺陈，因为结论只在诸中间步骤被看作承载它时才有力。第一步固定一个学科是什么。每一个学科是一个符号系统，以一套词汇、一套形式体系、一组可容许的运算呈现它的诸对象，而在这样做时它观察它们的一个方面、并留下别的方面未被观察。第二步随于概念的存在方式。一个”若干学科所关切”的概念被它们的呈现中无一者穷尽，而每一个学科供给它的一个局部而处境化的表达。第三步把观察原则施用于这一表达之复数性。既然一个概念只经由它的若干符号表达之间的关系而变得可被观察，而既然那若干学科供给恰恰这样一个表达之复数性，那么概念的观察便经由它们的诸呈现之间的关系、并经由”不在它们中任何一个之内”者而变得可得。第四步引出结论。诸学科的穿越是把这若干学科表达设入关系，而它因此正是”概念经由之被观察”的那一运算。链从概念、经它的若干学科表达、经这些所提供的关系性观察、到那”施行那观察”的诸学科之穿越，而每一环为下一环所要求。
结论以一个”诸中间步骤使之明白”的强度成立。没有对一个单一学科的丰富够及那观察，因为那单一学科，无论多么精炼，仍是一个符号系统、并呈现一个方面。诸学科的穿越供给”概念根本变得可被观察”的条件，而它做观察本身之工，而一个”停在问题之困难处”的读法会把那穿越铸为一个对复杂之纯然补救。
由此，那既立理解在它的术语里经历一个纠正。穿越诸学科不是整合它们，倘若整合命名”把它们的诸呈现合并入一个’会取代它们’的单一被扩大之呈现”。这样一个合并会是又一个符号系统、又一个局部表达，而它会需要与其余者的关系，恰如它的诸组分曾需要那样。那穿越提供观察，恰恰靠把诸呈现持于关系之中而不使它们塌陷，于是每一个所呈现的方面保持可得，而概念被观察于它们之间的游戏里。穿越所生产者是观察，而非一个”会终结穿越之需要”的超级学科。
跨学科性作为本体论后果。 跨学科性是概念之关系性存在方式的一个本体论后果。既然每一个学科是一个”呈现一个概念的一个方面”的符号系统，而既然一个概念只经由若干这样的呈现之间的关系而变得可被观察，那么诸学科的穿越便是”一个概念被观察于其下”的条件，而非一个”为一个案例之困难而采纳”的技术。它的工作是观察而非整合，因为它把诸呈现持于关系之中而不把它们合并入一个进一步的单一系统。
这一纠正能在一对案例上被表明。当一门政治经济学与一门精神分析被带来施于一个单一概念（比方说那”结构一个文化形式”的关切）之上，那较古老的理解把精神分析读作一个”填补政治经济学所略去者”的补充，而把政治经济学读作一个”奠基精神分析所留悬置者”的补充。每一个被使去完成另一个，而地平线处的理想是一个”无一者略去或悬置”的单一说明。当前的说明别样地读同一个相遇。精神分析不完成政治经济学，而政治经济学不完成精神分析。两者呈现一个”逾越二者”之概念的不同方面，而它们的关系提供一个”无一者独自提供”的对那概念之观察。一个共享对象的物理学与经济学、一个共享实践的心理学与人类学，处于同一个案例。它们作为”其关系是’它们共同关切之概念变得可被观察’之场址”的局部观察而立，持有那”一场对手之争或一堆碎片之和会在别的读法上占据”的位置，而那关系生成那观察、并不仅仅连接两个已然完整的发现。那生成性是全部的要点。倘若那关系只是两个已定结果之间的一个连接，那穿越会对二者的认知一无所加，而它所提供的观察会已然被包含在它所接合的诸学科里。那关系反而把一个”无一学科独自持有”的概念带入视野，而那穿越恰恰因此故对观察是有生产力的。
这，以框架的术语，是”探究开始穿越它的诸学科界限”的最深缘由，而它是一个”复杂之措辞所隐藏”的缘由。当前探究的诸对象确实复杂，而那复杂不是地基。地基是那”任何对象经由之被认知”的诸概念有一个关系性存在方式，于是那”它们被呈现于其中的诸符号系统”的穿越供给一个观察的条件。跨学科性，如此理解，不再是一个”探究或采纳或谢绝”的政策，而成为一个”概念之本性所强加”的后果。
§8 符号化所固有的异化
说明已持守每一次符号化都呈现一个局部方面、并留下一个残余。值得陈述为何如此，因为那缘由在于一个”属于符号化本身”的结构，而一个更好的符号化会把那结构留在原处。此框架中一个先前的研究展开了欲望之结构的异化，即资本对”驱力经由之被结构化”的中介之改道。本节在概念的层面展开一个形式上同类的点。在那先前的研究追随一个”从外部施于欲望之上”的异化之处，这一个追随一个”寄于命名之举本身”的异化，而两者之间的亲缘是：在每一个之中，一个生成性的运动被那”它被使去穿过”的形式所弯。
符号化一个概念，是同时施行若干运算，而它们每一个都招致一个丧失。符号化选择，因为它呈现概念的某些方面、并略过别的，而那选择被符号系统的诸目的与诸能力所统辖，于是那”落在它诸目的之外”者落在它的呈现之外。符号化压缩，因为它把概念写下于一个有限的手段、一个词、一个公式、一个记法之中，而那手段的有限不能不带化约地持有概念。符号化处境化，因为它从一个语境之内呈现概念，一门带它历史的语言、一门带它承诺的学科，而那呈现把那语境的诸标记带入它自身。符号化承继一个历史，因为它所使用的手段带着”先前用法之诸沉积”而到来，那些沉积把呈现弯向”那手段一直被用来说者”。而符号化携带诸权力关系，因为”一个概念经由之被呈现”的手段不是中立的，而”一套词汇所服务的诸利益”作为一个”不作为如此被承认”的选择而进入那呈现。
从这些运算随出：命名出于必然丧失某物。那丧失不是一个”一个更好的名字会避免”的糟糕名字之标记。每一个名字都选择、压缩、处境化，从而每一个名字呈现一个方面、并放弃其余。这是符号化异化的意义。它把概念以一个局部的形式树立于它自身对面，一个”以概念之姿呈现自身、而只呈现它一个方面”的形式，而正是在”所呈现的方面”与”被逾越的概念”之间的间隙里，那异化在焉。那异化不应被哀叹、也不应被逃脱。它是”根本有任何符号化”的条件，因为一个”什么都不选择、什么都不压缩、把自己处境化于无处”的符号化会等于概念的一个第二副本、并会丧失一个符号化的品性，而没有这样一个副本对有限的手段可得。
对说明的后果是确切的。倘若每一次符号化都在这一结构性之义上异化，那么没有单一的符号化能被信任去递送概念，而概念的观察必须靠”把若干被异化的呈现持于关系之中”而进行，于是一个的选择被对照另一个的选择加以核查、一个的压缩被另一个所保留者所供给、一个的处境被另一个的处境相对化。诸表达之间的关系不解消每一个所固有的异化。它们把若干表达的诸异化相互设置，而正是在这一相互设置里观察被赢得。那”寄于每一次命名”的异化因此供给了”说明要求一个表达之复数性及它们之间的关系”的那个缘由本身，而它成为说明之方法的地基。
§9 对话作为一种认识论上的必然
第二个后果关乎对话，而它够及一个初看远离一门认识论的领域，即哲学教育的领域。说明持守对话是一种认识论上的必然，即概念经由之逐步变得可被观察的关系性过程，而这持有”哲学教育跨越它的历史取一个对话形式”的缘由。这一主张先在一般层面、后经苏格拉底式教学的案例被展开，而它重新解释后者。
对话通常被理解为主体之间的一场交换。在一个说明上它交换意见，每一方陈述一个观点、并收到另一个作为回报。在第二个说明上它训练一个官能，那”来与往”磨利从事它者的批判之力。两个说明就其够及而言都为真，而两个都止于当前框架所揭示者之前。因为一场对话是诸符号系统的一次相遇。每一方带来对讨论中之事的一个呈现，一个被一个历史、一套词汇、一组承诺所塑造的呈现，而对话把这些呈现设入关系。当一方提供一个定义、另一方一个反例，当那反例逼出一个修订的定义、而那修订引出一个新的问题，那运动实时地成就”一个概念的诸符号表达之间关系”的建造，而凭观察原则，恰恰经由这样的关系概念才变得可被观察。意见的交换在这一建造之内作为它的表面而进行，而关系的建造是它的工作。对话生成观察，因为它生成”观察于其中构成”的诸关系。
[论题] 对话是概念经由之逐步变得可被观察的关系性过程，即把”若干主体所带来的若干符号表达”设入关系。它以主体之间的沟通作为它的外在形式，而在那形式之下施行”一个概念（被诸表达中无一者穷尽）于其中进入视野”的诸关系之建造。
这重新解释了苏格拉底式的教学形式。那既受的读法持守苏格拉底提出诸问题、好让门徒可以发现那已然潜伏于内的答案，而那对话是一个”门徒所施行的回忆或自我发现”的脚手架。当前的说明提供一个不同的读法。苏格拉底所做者，经由定义、反例、修订之定义的序列，是改变一个概念的诸符号表达之间的关系。一个勇敢的定义被提供，一个”那定义所不能持有”的实例被产出，一个修订的定义被框定以迎接那实例，而一个进一步的实例搅动那修订。在无一点处概念被写下于一个充分的表达，而这一不完整是那进行本身的形式。那进行不收敛于一个定义。它建造那”概念（勇敢或正义或虔敬）经由之对’跟随那运动者’变得可被观察”的、诸接续之局部表达之间的关系。苏格拉底式的对话不留下任何教义，因为它的工作从来不是一个教义的递送。它的工作是”一个概念被观察于其中”的诸关系之生成，而那工作被记录于对话本身之中。
与讲座的对照使这一点尖锐。一个讲座把一个符号表达从”持有它者”传递给”接收它者”，而在它自己的术语之内它能传递已然被赢得的知识。一个讲座所不能做者，是生成”新观察于其中构成”的诸表达之间的关系，因为它朝一个方向移动、并把一个呈现置于它的听者之前，而它把那若干呈现留而未设入关系。一场对话把一方的表达对照另一方的表达设置，并从它们的关系生成一个”两方在开端都未持有”的观察。讲座能递送一个已然被作出的观察。对话能生成一个尚未被作出的观察。这是传递知识与生成知识之间的差异，而它是”哲学教育（它的事是关系性存在方式的诸概念）已发现对话不可或缺”的缘由，而对一件另一类之事，已定结果的传递本会足够。
这一读法把跨学科性的说明延伸入人与人之间的空间。一个学科是一个符号系统，而诸学科的穿越提供对一个”若干学科所关切”之概念的观察。一个人，也是一个符号系统的承载者，一个”被一个经验、一个历史、一门语言、一种文化（没有别的人恰好共享）所塑造”的对世界之呈现。人与人之间的对话因此是诸符号系统的一次穿越，以跨学科探究所是的同一种意义，其别在于所穿越的诸系统由心灵所承载，而跨学科探究的诸系统被编纂于诸领域中。那穿越所提供者在两种情形中相同。它是观察，经由”对一个逾越它们全体之概念的诸局部呈现”之间的关系而被赢得。框架由此把跨学科探究与对话式教育置于一个单一原则之下，并给那”经由对话而教”的古老实践一个”在所教之物之存在方式中”的地基。倘若哲学探究的对象是关系性的，那么适于它的形式便是那”生成’一个概念来被观察于其中’之诸关系”的对话，而那”递送一个完成结果”的独白只够及那已然被观察者。
§10 真理作为历史生成
第三个后果关乎真理，而它在辩证唯物主义的register里被展开，因为说明归于真理的运动是物质与关系条件在它们的辩证发展中的运动。倘若一个概念只经由它的诸符号表达之间的关系而变得可被观察，而倘若那些表达及它们的关系被”探究进行于其下之条件”的历史发展所供给、修订、并取代，那么一个概念的观察便被那发展所载，而真理，被理解为”所够及的观察之状态”，随它而运动。如此理解的真理不是一个”等待被发现”的静态对象。它是一个生成，被生成于那”供给’概念经由之被观察’之诸表达与诸关系”的条件之辩证运动中。
这一点必须被小心地陈述，以避免一个误读。说真理是历史地被生成的，不是说真理在这一意义上改变：曾为真者在一个时代之转处成为假。它是说一个概念的观察随历史供给新的表达与新的关系而被丰富，于是那概念更充分地、从更多侧面、在它更多的方面之下进入视野。那”经由一个过程的潜无限、后经集合论的完成无限、再后经这些对微积分之消逝量所承之关系而被观察”的无限，不是在每一阶段一个不同的无限。它是同一个事、经由一个正在积累的表达与关系之结构而被观察，而关于它的真理随那结构生长而被生成。历史不推翻观察。它丰富它，而那丰富是真理的生成。
这一发展在一个精确之义上是辩证的与物质的。那”概念经由之被观察”的诸符号表达不从一个理念的自由游戏中生起。它们从一个生活形式的诸条件（它的诸实践、它的诸工具、它的生产与再生产之诸关系）中生起，而它们随那些条件发展而发展，经由那些条件所生成的诸矛盾、以及那些矛盾所找到的诸化解。一门新的数学、一门新的科学、一套关于自我的新词汇，在一个生活形式的诸条件使它可得并把它压入存在时到来，而它带来”概念经由之被重新观察”的新表达与新关系。真理的生成因此被一个”在它的地基上是物质的、在它的形式上是辩证的”运动所载，而这是说明以辩证唯物主义的术语呈现真理之历史性的缘由，而一个”在它自己之力下运动的理念之历史”会错失那物质地基。
由此一个统辖的论题随出，而它关乎理论在与一个”没有预定终点之历史”之关系中的职分。说明通篇拒绝了”一个事能被写下于一个充分而最终的表达”之假定。施用于历史，那拒绝成为对目的论的一个拒绝，对”历史朝向一个已然被写下之终点运动、而一个理论或能读出并宣告它”之假定的拒绝。倘若每一个概念的观察都不完整、并向历史丰富开放，那么”共同生活的一个好安排”之概念也以同样的方式不完整并开放，而没有理论掌握它的最终表达。物质条件约束”共同生活能取之诸形式”而不决定它取哪一个形式，于是历史有方向而缺一个脚本、有约束而缺一个预定的关闭。一个把握这的理论之职分，在于”辨识历史正在生成什么”以及”持守那生成敞开”，而它把”宣告历史在何处终结”搁置。以下的框陈述这一职分、以及随它而来的真理、教育、政治。
[理论的职分] 真理随物质与关系条件的辩证发展而运动。它是一个生成，随历史供给”一个概念经由之被观察”的新表达与新关系而被丰富，而它持有”一个等待被发现之对象”的固定性中无一分。由此一个单一的理论之职分随出，在此显示于它所统辖的三个register之中。
就真理而言。 最要紧者是持守敞开历史”继续生成答案”之力，越出任何已定答案的递送。
就教育而言。 一种生成性教育所生成者是”继续生成知识”的能力，越出它所传授的任何一套知识。
就政治而言。 一个真正民主的安排运作，并且，越出运作之外，保留”重新构成它自身”之力。
历史有方向而无预定的终点。理论的最高职分因此是”辨识历史正在生成什么”以及”持守那生成敞开”，而它把”宣告历史在何处终结”搁于一旁。一个”以一个答案闭合历史”的理论遏止它所声称把握的生成。一个好的理论不以一个答案闭合历史；它以一个更好的问题开启历史。
改变世界不是预先写下它的结局，而是使它能够继续创造它自己的未来。
框的收束命题与关于费尔巴哈的第十一条论纲处于一个有意的关系之中，那论纲把”改变世界”之任务对置于”解释世界”。此处所展开的说明把那任务再推进一步。改变世界，在当前的理解上，不是以一个完成的解释替换另一个、并以一个新的结局取代旧的而铭刻它。它是使世界能够继续生成它自己的未来，去保存并扩大共同生活”重新构成共同生活之诸条件”之力。如此理解的革命取一个生成性能力的形式，而服务它的理论经由”那能力之持续存活”来服务，而一个”瞄准一个终点”的理论会写下它本应留而敞开的那关闭。这是说明拒绝目的论而保留方向的意义，而它是理论之职分在它的形式上是生成性的意义。
§11 理论的生成性
说明如今必须被转向它自身，因为它作出一个关于诸理论的主张，而它是一个理论。倘若真理在历史中被生成、而没有表达是最终的，那么一个宣称自己完成的理论与它或许别样地共享之关于真理的说明本身处于矛盾之中。那矛盾在种类上是施行性的，而它在断言的施行中生起，同时断言的形式保持完好。这样一个理论可以在它的内容里断言世界处于运动之中、知识未完成，而它在它的姿态里违背那断言，把自己呈现为那”知识之运动被说成预先排除”的完成表达。许多理论不加察觉地携带这一矛盾。它们持守世界发展、而它们自己对它的说明已定，持守探究不息、而它们对它诸结果的陈述是那终点。当前的说明不能携带那矛盾，因为那矛盾恰恰是它关于真理的说明所禁止者，于是它被要求，冒着自我反驳之险，以它归于一切认知的方式持守自己敞开。
框架相应地把自己持守为立于它所理论化的历史之内，而它不主张任何凌驾于那历史之上的位分。它不作为一个单一心灵从外部勘察历史的完成洞见而生起。它生起，并继续生起，在一个关系的运动中，从作者的探究、从与一个”包含政治经济学的诸分析与精神分析的诸词汇”之先前思想之body的对话、从与生成性正义的当代学者的持续通信、从读者与对话者的诸回应、以及从”它的诸特定表述最先在其中被磨利”的那些寻常的交换。问一个如此生起之理论的作者是谁，是收到，在这一说明上，一个”寻常的归属所晦暗”的答案。理论是被共同生成的。它作为一个长的关系网络之生成而生起，而它的诸命题经由关系而澄清，各自从许多交换的运动中被引出、而无一从一个单一的起源发出。
这把理论置于一个框架在别处已展开的范畴之内。一个”在一个关系网络中被共同生成”的理论是关系财富的一种形式，在共同中被生成、并归属于”生成它”的关系之运动，而一个”会如所有者持有一物那样持有它”的业主对它没有产权。这一点与框架关于生产与再生产的说明相一致。生产一个答案是一个”发生一次并告完成”之举。生成”继续生产答案”之能力是一个再生产之举，一个生成性之力的持续存活，而一个正确地理解自己的理论瞄准这二者中的第二个，即那持续存活，并让那完成的答案落于它所落之处。它瞄准参与那”共同探究于其下继续”之诸条件的再生产，而非在它自己陈述的时刻冻结探究的历史。
由此一个理论之伦理能被陈述，而它是本文所展开之认识论的伦理对应者。一个宣告它自己完成的理论遏止它所描述的生成，而在遏止中它犯下上面所铺陈的施行性矛盾。一个生成性的理论因此必须同意被”它所遇的历史、实践、诸他者”所改变，冒着停止是生成性的之险。那同意不是一个附于理论的谦虚。它是理论与它自己内容之一致的一个条件，而它是那”使理论不把自己安装为一个新的担保、以取代’框架为搅动它们而被展开’的诸担保”的训导。一个理论不是一个新的神性、并且必不成为一个。它是一个条件，诸条件之一，一个共同体在其下继续思考、实践、并修订它自己生活之诸术语。框架把自己持守于这一训导，而正是在把自己持守于它之中，框架在它自己的操持中、而不仅在它的诸断言中，保持为一个生成性的理论。
§12 三个 register 与一个开放的问题
说明通篇使用了一个它未曾充分保全的术语。它说到一个”先于它的诸符号化而立、并经由它们之间的关系而变得可被观察”的概念，而它把这一概念从”呈现它的诸符号”、以及从”它所关切的实在”二者区分开。三个 register 由此一直处于运作之中，即实在、概念、符号，而它们之间的关系被留而部分地未定。那规定被有意地扣下，因为三个 register 之间的关系是一个”说明不认为已定”的问题，而它最终被裁定的方式会固定认识论的最终形式。本节陈述那问题与穿过它所开放的诸路径，而它谢绝，与刚给出的关于理论的说明一致，去闭合”当前探究之状态所不闭合”者。
那问题能被摆为一个关于中间 register 的问题。符号在它的职分上足够清楚，即那”一个概念经由之被呈现”的具体手段，语言的、数学的、图像的、制度的。实在是”所是者”的区域，无论它对”它经由之被认知的诸概念”之独立性为何。概念立于它们之间，而它的地位是说明所留而敞开者。三种解读呈现自身，而每一个产出一种不同的认识论。
在第一种解读，即实在论的那个上，概念是一个”独立于’观察它’之人类活动”的结构，一个”探究经由它的诸表达之间的关系而接近、却不构成”的结构。在这一解读上观察原则承载一个形而上学的分量。那观察是对某个”自立”者的观察，而观察的不完整是”一个有限的接近对一个心灵独立之结构”的不完整。这一解读保全被观察者的客观性，而它承继那长存的困难，即说出一个”全然先于符号化而立”的概念如何根本经由符号化被够及，以及那”被说成先于诸符号”的前符号者，除了经由那些符号之外如何被刻画。
在第二种解读，即生成的那个上，概念从诸符号表达之间的关系中涌现、并从它们中涌现，于是概念在符号活动中被生成、并在那活动安顿入诸再现的关系时被稳定。这一解读坐得最靠近框架的一般承诺，因为它对待概念如它对待别的关系性实在，即作为”在关系中被生成、并在表达的活动中被引出”者。它的困难是那”第三节曾致力去避开”的一个，即向一个”概念被消解入符号活动、并丧失那’让无限与正义表现为逾越它们任何一个表达之事’的着力”的立场之滑移。这一解读必须表明一个”在关系中被生成”的概念如何仍能逾越它的每一个表达，而说明已朝这作了手势、却未保全它。
在第三种解读，即悬置的那个上，概念之地位的问题被搁置一旁，而说明把自己限于”关于观察所能被说者”，而不对”被观察者”下断言。在这一解读上认识论对”概念是先于它的诸表达而立、还是从它们中涌现”不作任何主张，而它只持守观察经由诸表达之间的关系而进行、并总是不完整。这一解读是在当前资源上最谨慎、并最可辩护的，而它以放弃那”框架从存在到认知的延伸似乎许诺”的本体论够及来购买它的安全，把”认知对存在的关系”留而未陈述，而框架曾瞄准去陈述它。
说明不在三者之间选择。它持守那选择会固定生成性关系性认识论的最终形式，持守”良好地作出它”的诸资源尚不在手，并持守”过早地作出它”会以”说明一直煞费苦心去拒绝”的方式把一种解读安装为一个担保。实在、概念、符号之间的关系因此被留下，作为那”认识论的进一步发展所转于其上”的开放问题。这是说明的一个施用、而非对它的一个回避。一个”已论证观察是不完整的、真理是在历史中被生成的”理论，被要求把”它当前的状态所不能闭合”的问题留而敞开，并把它标为那”生成框架的对话、实践、历史将继续做工”的场址。
§13 结论
本文已把生成性关系框架从存在的 register 带入认知的 register。在框架曾表明一个共享的世界”在主体之间的结中被生成”之处，本文已表明认知在一个同类的意义上是关系性的。它从一个传统认识论留而未察的假定（一个概念能被一个单一的符号系统充分地承载）开始，并把那假定追踪穿过分析式的对定义之寻求、结构主义式的向一个系统内之位置的化约、以及知识表征的计划。针对那假定它展开概念的关系性存在方式。一个概念被没有符号系统穷尽、并只经由它的若干局部而处境化之表达之间的关系而变得可被观察。
由此本文引出一个术语以立于”表征”之处。认知是生成性观察，一个”止于本体论同一之前”的认识论成就，历史地处境化、符号地被中介、并因此故不完整，并且，出于同一缘由，向”任何给定的观察是被异化的或不足的”之可能开放。三个后果被引出。跨学科性被表明为概念之关系性存在方式的一个本体论后果，因为那方式使诸符号系统的穿越成为”一个概念被观察于其下”的条件。对话被表明为一种认识论上的必然，即概念经由之变得可被观察的关系性过程，一个把哲学教育的苏格拉底式形式重新解释为”诸表达之间关系的生成”的结果，而那既受的读法曾把它铸为”一个潜伏答案的递送”。而真理被表明为历史地被生成的，一个被”物质与关系条件的辩证发展”所载的生成，它跨越历史的丰富就是真理的生成。
本文随后把那说明转向它自身。一个宣称完成的理论遏止它所描述的生成，并陷入与它自己关于真理之说明的施行性矛盾。框架相应地把自己持守为立于它所理论化的历史之内，在一个”探究、先前思想、当代对话、接受”的关系网络中被共同生成，并归属于”生成它”的运动，而没有产权归于一个业主。由此一个理论之伦理随出，即一个生成性的理论必须同意被”它所遇的历史、实践、诸他者”所改变，并必须谢绝把自己安装为一个新的担保、以取代”框架为搅动它们而被展开”的诸担保。
这一分析不推进任何最终的综合，而它以它自己关于理论的说明所要求的方式，在它已使之成为可问的诸问题上作结。概念是先于它的诸符号化而立、还是在它们之间的关系中被生成，以及，在任一解读上，它如何来逾越它的每一个表达。何种关系绑定实在、概念、符号这三个 register，而认识论的最终形式转于它的裁定。一场探究、一种教学法、或一种共同生活如何或能被安排，好让诸符号系统的穿越与观察的生成被维系、并被使免于关闭。这些以一种生成性教学法的方式被提出，那教学法把问题置于”把它持于视野中者”之前，而不口授它的解答。与它所展开的说明相一致，本文提供那”探究或于其下继续”的诸条件，而它扣下那探究的结局，并持守，就它自己的诸命题、如就一切别的命题，最要紧者是持守敞开”继续生成一个答案”之力，越出任何已定答案的递送。
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