Is There a Designer?

Abstract

This is a commentary on Michael Lissack’s two-part article “Understanding is a Design Problem: Cognizing from a Designerly Thinking Perspective.” Michael Lissack and I co-authored Coherence in the Midst of Complexity. In this article, readers will see how our thought has since diverged. While Lissack has increasingly focused on a cognitive interpretation of basic concepts or categories of the mind, I have pursued object-oriented-ontology (O-O-O) and rejected the mind-based thesis. Lissack has chosen for human cognition and the brain as his baseline, while I claim that objects inherently withdraw from perception, and that knowing is ontologically partial and incomplete. The “realness” of objects, whether the objects are mental, cultural, physical, imaginary or whatever, is limitedly accessible. I criticize “corrolationism,” or the assertion that all there is, is mind (or cognition and awareness). I insist that objects, in their enormous variety and complexity, require to be acknowledged and not reduced to epiphenomena dominated by thought; i.e. it is not mind all the way down. Keywords: Object-oriented-ontology, critique of corrolationism, Graham Harman