Hilary Lawson - Closure: A Story of Everything

While perusing the philosophy section at the bookstore the other day, I picked up a curious book entitled Closure: A Story of Everything by Hilary Lawson (Routledge, 2001). After reading this, I find the ideas presented therein to be very enlightening and persuasive. I also find that they are consonant with Rosennean complexity in a very deep way, such that I feel it has opened up and broadened my understanding of complexity and its pervasiveness greatly. It is difficult to summarize, but I will try.

The Prologue discusses in some detail how relativism (which I personally consider a cancer upon the mind) and realism both suffer from self-referential, self-defeating paradoxes, and the need for another alternative - one which can abide the self-referential nature of a broad philosophy without being at all paradoxical.

Both realism and relativism take as a basis that there is some 'thing' - namely, the world - to which these accounts are deemed to apply. By contrast, the beginning in Closure is to not take the world as a 'thing' to be grasped or understood. Instead, the world is to be thought of as the "openness", which is the site or space of possibilities that occur in the absence of our attempts at comprehension. Lawson uses the phrase "undifferentiated flux" as another way of attempting to illustrate the notion of "openness". (But this is illustrative and not meant to indicate some physical "flux".) In this sense, "openness" is not a 'thing', but a lack of our imposing of closures.

'Things' occur with closure. "Closure can be understod as the imposition of fixity on openness....It is the conversion of flux into identity, the conversion of possibility into the particular." [p. 4] Lawson uses a simple example of a piece of paper with many random dots on it. >From that, we can perceive various patterns, lets say we can identify a face. That face - that 'thing' - is the result of a closure. The world of things, the world of chairs, music, quarks, algebra, society, and so on, are the results of closures. And, typically, closures are stacked upon other closures. For example, 'paper' and 'dots' are also the results of closures upon which the result of closure of 'face' rests. It is immediately clear, also, that closures incorporate a context of other closures; at the least, it is a ceteris paribus condition.

Note that this "other of experience" is very much like, if the not the same as, the "ambience" of Rosen [LI 41]. The results of closure is very much like a more general notion of systemhood [LI p. 41], that Rosen uses: that some collection of percepts (which are also closures to Lawson) seems to us to belong together as a system, a thing, which is of course another closure. Rosen could be taken as presenting a realist stance, whereas Lawson is explicitly not.

A closure also carries with it (or in it), all the possibilities of the openness which are missed by that particular closure. The selection of the face from the page of dots chooses some-thing, but inevitably also are still present all the other possible patterns. This aspect of closure agrees with the idea of complexity as the extent to which there are multiple non-equivalent ways of viewing a system [AS 322]. And, more importantly, it agrees in the broader sense of complexity that a system is complex to the extent that a system is not exhausted by a given system "does not let itself be exhausted within a given set of (subjective) limitations" [The Limits of the Limits of Science, p. 45]. As Lawson notes, closure's themselves are just such subjective limitations, they also thereby constrain further closures, and any given closure or set of closures does not exhaust the openness.

But closures are necessary - just as Rosen called the choosing of a particular collection of percepts a "basic yet fateful step for science", so too Lawson sees closures as constraining yet necessary. Without closures there are no things, there are no particulars, there is no fixity. They are what allow us to intervene in the world. Organisms are, among other things, "closure machines". (Lawson states firmly that 'machine' is not to be taken as indicating organisms are merely machines, but that they include the activity of closure machines.) Unlike mechanical contrivances, biological organisms often partake in closures which are self-referential:

Since in this account there is no objective world that is a 'thing', the nature of language must be considered differently, because language can no longer be considered as reliably having referents in the world, since the world is only the openness - the space of possibility - subject to our closures. Linguistic closure and thereby, meaning, are (roughly speaking) closure that associate linguistic marks (which are of course closures themselves) with other closures.

Science, by Lawson's account, is not engaged then in an uncovering of the Truth of a fixed world. Instead, science's accomplishments are those sets of closures which relate material closures (successfully) to mathematical closures. (Note that science is not a matter of seeking agreement of closures with openness, only with other closures.) Mathematical closures are themselves defined so as to have no residue of openness: the symbols have specific meanings, and a formal model has only specific degrees-of-freedom. They have a certainty that is uncharacteristic of material closures. Science is therefore always subject to material closures outstripping mathematical ones, or creating new material closures which require new closures with other mathematical closures. Science, in this view, is as open-ended as, say, art.

This does not mean that truth completely goes out the window. Lawson puts it: "While subjective existential truth applies to all closures at the point of realisation, there are no closures which live up to the notion of ideal truth. All closures are thus both existentially true and ideally false." [p. 100]

Linguistic closures, of course, have influence and are influenced by social closures, so Lawson also delves into them, as well as art, religion, consciousness, and politics in later chapters. But, he does so without any discernable political bias or agenda. Finally, in the Epilogue Lawson notes that the theory of closures - if it is to be consistent - must apply to itself. Thus, his theory of closures must self-referentially be seen as itself being a closure. However, this recognition does not create a self-defeating paradox for the theory: to be a closure itself neither denegrates nor elevates the theory, but leaves it intact as a theory.

It is about 300 pages of text, moderately referenced. His writing style is clear and direct, or at least, as clear and direct as I imagine one can be in discussing this kind of topic. It felt a little like I was reading the thoughtfulness of Heidegger, but without the same kind of impenetrability. I give it 5 out of 5 stars.