Inquiry

ISSN: 0020-174X (Print) 1502-3923 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/sinq20

On surfaces: A rejoinder

Avrum Stroll

To cite this article: Avrum Stroll (1989) On surfaces: A rejoinder, Inquiry, 32:2, 223-231

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00201748908602189

Published online: 29 Aug 2008.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 16

View related articles

Citing articles: 1 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=sinq20

Download by: [University of Arizona] Date: 13 June 2016, At: 09:29

 Inquiry, 32, 223-31

Discussion

On Surfaces: A Rejoinder
Avrum Stroll
University of California, San Diego

It is argued that there is a non-technical common-sense view of surfaces that

Downloaded by [University of Arizona] at 09:29 13 June 2016

virtually all of us share. This view stands in complicated relationships to the sorts of
accounts of surfaces found in mathematics and in various sciences, being in certain
ways the bases for these technical analyses, but also containing information about
the world that is different from anything to be found in mathematics and the
sciences.

I am grateful to the editor of Inquiry for his generous invitation to comment

on Ernest W. Adams's review of my book, Surfaces, that appeared in the
December 1988 issue of this periodical and to Professor Adams for an
advance copy of his review. In response I propose (1) to give a straight-
forward description of the main contents of the book, (2) to give an example
of how my views have been misrepresented by Adams, and then (3) briefly
to discuss an issue which I take to be of deep philosophical significance but
which Adams does not apparently see to be an issue at all. He simply
presupposes that mathematical/scientific analyses (which he does not dis-
tinguish from one another) are essential for understanding what surfaces
are, and his approach to my book is predicated upon that assumption.
Without in any way denigrating mathematics or such sciences as physics,
chemistry, or oceanography, which in their differing ways tell us a lot about
surfaces, my central concern in this work has had a different focus: to
explore a non-technical view of surfaces that virtually all of us share. For
this reason much of what he has to say about the book overlooks our
common-sense understanding. This difference in approach between us is
not merely methodological, though it is partly so, but is substantive. It turns
on the question of whether there can be a non-reductive, philosophically
autonomous account of the world and/or of certain of its features, such as
surfaces, edges, and boundaries. My position is that there can be, and the
book, using the concept of a surface as an exemplar, is in effect an extended
demonstration of this point. That Adams does not even mention this central
purpose of the work is another and indeed the major reason for my agreeing
to write this commentary. The issue I will be addressing in (III) below
thus goes beyond the specifics of his review and should be of general
philosophical interest.
 224 Avrum Stroll

I
Let's begin with a little background that will help explain why I felt a book
on this topic should be written. The concept of a surface has been discussed
in Western philosophy from the time of the Greeks to the present. Aristotle,
for instance, in the Physics (IV, 208a-13a) uses the notion of a surface to
define the concept of a place and similar references to this concept, involving
variations on Aristotle's problem, are found in the medieval period, notably
in Ockham. Leonardo da Vinci has a particularly interesting discussion of
surfaces and boundaries in his Notebooks (ed. by E. MacCurdy, pp. 75-
76), which I analyze at length in chapter 3 of Surfaces. In the twentieth
Downloaded by [University of Arizona] at 09:29 13 June 2016

century, the literature which invokes this notion becomes quite extensive,
most of it being connected with perception, for example in such writers as
G. E. Moore, H. H. Price, J. J. Gibson, Thompson Clarke, Frank Jackson,
and Robert French inter alios. Moore and Gibson, for instance, claim that
it is a necessary condition for seeing an opaque physical object that one
see part of its surface. I was struck by this claim and indeed found it to be
wrong in several ways. For one thing it implied that every opaque physical
object has a surface and in my book I show this thesis to be mistaken.
There are also convincing counter-examples to the assertion that one cannot
see an opaque physical object without seeing its surface. Many of us have
seen Jupiter, which is an opaque object, but nobody has ever seen its
surface: indeed it is not even clear that it has one.
My point in referring to this literature is that though references to surfaces
are not uncommon, there has been no in-depth analysis of this concept
in the Western tradition and possibly for this reason philosophers and
psychologists have made wild and untenable claims of both ontological and
epistemological sorts. I thus set out to examine this concept and in particular
to begin with the sort of ordinary, non-technical notion these philosophers
seemed to have in mind when they discussed perception. They used this
concept without analyzing it or realizing how complicated it is and hence
how easy it is to be mistaken in its application. As far as I know, my essay
is the first book-length study of this notion in philosophy; and one reason
I had for writing it was that the topic, though clearly important, had been
neglected by philosophers.
But in the course of my research I found other reasons as well, for
instance that at least two major philosophical conundrums, the problem of
abstract ideas and the problem of our knowledge of the external world,
can be approached in new and fruitful ways via a discussion of surfaces
(see chapter 1 for example). Furthermore, I found the subject to be of
interest in its own right, raising all sorts of puzzles. How much of an opaque
object can one see from here and now? Under normal conditions of
observation can one see at most only part of its surface and if the answer
 On Surfaces: A Rejoinder 225

is yes, does that imply that one is not seeing the whole object under those
conditions? Or is one seeing the object but not directly? But if so, then
what is the relationship between the perceived surface and the whole object?
A cube has twelve edges and six surfaces. The surfaces are contiguous and
thus exhaust the total outer area of the cube. But then where are the edges?
When water lies flat, as in a lake, we can on occasion speak of its surface,
saying, when the wind is up, that its surface is rough. But in such a case
we never speak about the surface of the air that is in contact with the
surface of the water even though the air moves up and down in an exact
symmetry with the water. Why don't we? Is it because we can't see air? So
I set out to answer these and other questions and from these inquiries the
Downloaded by [University of Arizona] at 09:29 13 June 2016

book grew. And here is what it is all about.

As I explain in the Introduction, the book has several interconnected
themes. Some have to do with content, some with methodology. Because
of space restrictions, I will confine myself to matters of content. The book's
primary project is the investigation of what might be called the 'common-
sense notion' of a surface. By this term, I mean a concept that belongs to
folk physics or to folk semantics in a non-pejorative sense of these terms.
It is a concept, as I have indicated above, that virtually all of us share and
that is pre-technical or non-technical. A second project, closely connected
with the first, though not identical with it, is an inquiry into what I call 'the
geometry of ordinary speech'. The concept of a surface is one of an
indefinitely large number of notions that belong to a kind of protogeometry
that we all use in daily life. Some other terms that belong to this system of
words are 'top', 'corner', 'edge', 'margin', 'border', 'boundary', and 'limit'.
Here I ask such questions as: How are these terms related to one another?
How does this so-called geometry relate to the formal discipline of that
name? Does it generate any necessary truths? What is its purpose or
function? Does it raise any philosophical issues - and, if so, which? Most
of these questions are indeed answered - here, for instance, is a simple
necessary truth about surfaces: it is impossible to scratch the surface of an
intact, ivory billiard ball without scratching the ball, and conversely. More
interesting is the fact that we cannot replace 'scratching' by 'seeing' in the
above theorem.
The investigation into this pre-technical geometry is thus an inquiry into
the properties of a system of concepts of which the concept of a surface is
an especially important member. Like Adams, I thus begin with certain
assumptions - but I make them explicit. I assume, for example, that this
system of informal geometry is an aspect or a feature of a deep-lying world
outlook we have inherited. Moore called it the 'common-sense view of the
world', Wittgenstein in On Certainty describes it as 'that which stands fast
for us', and John Searle in Intentionality speaks of it as 'the background'.
(I do not wish to imply that their views are identical, of course.) Now I do
 226 Avrum Stroll

not argue in this book that there is some such picture of the world that we
inherit - 1 have done so elsewhere1 - but I rather presuppose that there is.
What I do argue is that this system of informal geometry plays a special
role in the common-sense view. It is that aspect of it that human beings
employ for organizing and structuring the world in quasi-geometric terms.
Although I do not argue that this informal geometry is deeper, more
primitive, conceptually prior to, and indeed the basis for the refined and
regimented mathematical and scientific treatments of geometric concepts,
I in fact belief that these things are so. To have argued the case in extenso
would have required another book. In my view, Adams has the situation
backwards. He holds that mathematics has a special purchase on the truth
Downloaded by [University of Arizona] at 09:29 13 June 2016

about these matters. I hold that mathematicians, like the rest of us, begin
with the commonsensical notions of such things as surfaces and edges, and
then refine these notions for their particular purposes. But in so doing they
leave out some of the things that common sense has to say about these
entities; so not all of the truth is to be found in such technical developments.
What I therefore try to show in my book is what that non-technical residue
is. I sometimes do so by showing how such ordinary notions differ from
their mathematical counterparts in certain cases where they impinge upon
one another.
The preceding comments lay out the philosophy that motivated the
writing of the book. But now for a little detail about its actual contents.
The book begins in chapter 2 with a careful phenomenological account of
how ordinary persons speak about surfaces, aiming through such an
endeavor to elicit the common-sense conception that is embedded in
ordinary speech. Adams seems to fix on this chapter as suggesting that the
whole work is an exercise in ordinary-language philosophy, even though I
explicitly say that I take ordinary language to be only the first and not the
last word. And this disavowal is reinforced by my finding that the common-
sense conception contains at least two different and incompatible accounts
of what surfaces are. Yet both are expressed in ordinary language, so that
we cannot identify ordinary language with the supposed common-sense
view. In everyday discourse we employ both of these notions, often moving
between them from case to case and without noticing the transition. Each
account is internally coherent, and a rich and fertile source for its theoretical
counterparts, in mathematics on the one hand, and the physical sciences
on the other. The investigation reveals, that is, that the putative common-
sense notion of a surface is bifurcated between the conception of a surface
as an abstract entity, which is a source for subsequent mathematical treat-
ments of surfaces, and the conception of a surface as a physical entity,
something which one can scratch or polish, and which is the basis for
scientific treatments of this notion. Thus, unlike Adams, I find that math-
ematics and science, in their purest forms, give us radically different
 On Surfaces: A Rejoinder 227

conceptions of surfaces, conceptions that can be traced back to a divergence

within common sense itself. Chapter 3 is devoted to a description of this
tension which is not fully articulated in ordinary discourse and which
therefore must be buttressed if one is to capture the distinctions involved.
These issues lead us still farther away from questions that ordinary
language poses. In chapter 4 I move from ontology into the domain of
perception, asking such questions as: 'Is it possible to see the surface of x
without seeing x and vice-versa?' Here some of the findings of science,
connected with such notions as magnification and resolution, become
apposite. In chapters 5 and 6 the investigation of perception is expanded,
and I ask whether and how surfaces might impede or block one's perception
Downloaded by [University of Arizona] at 09:29 13 June 2016

of opaque objects. The discussion that ensues leads to a critical exposition of

three philosophical defenses of direct realism, those of Moore, Chisholm,
and Clarke, respectively. Chapter 7 continues the discussion with a fourth
type of realist theory, J. J. Gibson's, and chapter 8 enlarges and generalizes
upon that discussion by asking whether we see external objects directly when
we see their surfaces. Gibson holds we do and Moore holds we do not.
This chapter is one of the most important in the book since it challenges
the entire tradition that comes down to us from Descartes by arguing that
our perception of external objects, in normal cases, is neither direct nor
indirect. In the long history of epistemology it has been assumed that the
perception of the external world must be either direct or indirect - that
these are the only alternatives. My argument undercuts both positions and
thus rejects the assumption that perception must be one or the other.
Because vision involves surfaces that are not abstractions, that is, things
that can be seen, touched, scratched, polished, etc., neither a mathematical
statement of nor a mathematical solution to this problem is possible. This
is a good example of the limitations to which any mathematically-oriented
treatment of surfaces is subject.
Chapters 9 and 10 are the final chapters of the book. In both I return to
ontological issues. In the former, I discuss the relationship between surfaces
and faces. I there argue that despite the clues that ordinary language gives
us, suggesting that a sur-/ace seems to be a type of face, the logics of the
two concepts are wholly different. Surface-talk is about the inanimate
world, about ice, roads, putting greens, and so forth, whereas face-talk is
about the world of animation, about human beings and animals primarily.
The two concepts thus belong to different logical systems. I think this is a
genuinely surprising result. In chapter 10, there is a general discussion of
surfaces and boundaries. Here it is argued that surfaces are types of
boundaries, but that because of ambiguities found earlier in the concept of
a boundary, there can be no single, true, holistic account of surfaces. The
answer to the question, 'What are surfaces?' instead requires a detailed,
context-sensitive description, something that I in fact give in chapter 2.
 228 Avrum Stroll

II
Because it cannot be of general philosophical interest to point out the
various features of my book that Adams ignores, or the numerous ways in
which he merely passes over or misrepresents its contents, I shall give only
one example of the latter simply to establish that his comments should be
read with caution. He indicates that the analysis of 'surface', 'boundary',
and 'limit' are closely bound up with the problem of the Continuum and
that one cannot properly understand even the lay person's concepts without
taking the contributions of Eudoxus, Aristotle, Russell, Weyl et al. into
account. He writes:
Downloaded by [University of Arizona] at 09:29 13 June 2016

This can't be gone into in detail, but two places can be noted where topology would
have been helpful to Stroll's enterprise. One is on page 39, where he speaks of a
boundary as 'that which is farthest from the center of a thing', which clearly can't
be right for things like tables that don't have centers. This could easily have been
avoided, for, as any topologist would have pointed out, the surface points of an
object are not so much those that are farthest from its center as those that are
closest to its outside (more exactly, they are arbitrarily close to points not belonging
to the object).2
But the quotation he attributes to me is both a truncated and distorted
version of what I actually wrote on page 39 and thus wholly misrepresents
the point I am making. Here is in fact what I do say:
Depending on the object we are speaking about, for example, whether it is a
baseball or a table or a lake, its surface can be thought of as a kind of boundary or
limit, that which is farthest from the center of the baseball or farthest in a vertical
dimension from the bottom of the lake.3
In quoting me as saying that a boundary is 'that which is farthest from
the center of a thing', he is attributing to me words which I do not use. I
do not in the passage he is mentioning ever use the words 'center of a
thing', as he states. In fact, he changes my text which speaks about a surface
as a kind of boundary that is farthest from the center of a baseball in order
to make it appear that I hold that a surface is a boundary that is farthest
away from the center of any object. But it is clear from the lake example
I give in that passage that I am explicitly asserting that what counts as the
surface of an object will depend on the kind of object it is. In the case of
a lake, its surface is not that which is farthest from its center because, not
being a sphere, as a baseball is, 'the center of a lake' bears a different sense
than 'the center of a baseball'. Chapter 3 in fact points out how context-
dependent the notion of a surface is. Here, for instance, is how the rest of
the passage from page 39 reads:
In the case of a baseball, its surface cannot be its top or its uppermost aspect since,
being spherical, a baseball has no top, or at least no top in the way that a table
does. But we can think of the surface as its outermost border, the last feature, as
 On Surfaces: A Rejoinder 229
it were, that one touches before releasing the ball. In the case of a table, and with
respect to certain operations one might wish to perform on the table, such as
painting its surface, one might think of the surface as its top boundary, but not as
its outermost boundary; for the notion of being an 'outermost boundary' does not
straightforwardly apply in this case. In that respect, a table is similar to a lake
whose surface might be regarded as its uppermost layer of water, that part of the
lake where the water ends and just before the air begins. We do not speak of such4
a border as the outermost aspect but rather as the uppermost aspect of the lake.
Adams's passage not only misrepresents the contextually-sensitive posi-
tion I hold but also suggests that a mathematical approach is the only way
to go in this matter. But clearly it isn't. If we look at his own charac-
terization, which I have quoted above, he makes the comment that 'the
Downloaded by [University of Arizona] at 09:29 13 June 2016

surface points of an object are not so much those that are farthest from its
center as those that are closest to its outside (more exactly, they are
arbitrarily close to points not belonging to the object)'. Unfortunately, this
characterization is inadequate in two ways. First, his analysis does not apply
to such things as tables and lakes, as I point out above, where the contrast
between an innermost and an outermost boundary has no application; and
second, that with respect to objects like a baseball, which do have outsides,
the notions of the outside and the surface coincide; so that one could not
without circularity define, for that object, the concept of a surface in terms
of the concept of an outside. As I have indicated, I think Adams has
distorted what I say, and indeed misrepresented the argument of my book,
because of his overweening emphasis upon a mathematical approach to
this subject.

Ill
Finally, a few remarks about the substantive issue that divides us. Adams
clearly presupposes that the truth in these matters is to be found in
mathematics and not in common sense. Now in defending common sense
against this point of view, I note that Adams does not carefully distinguish
mathematical from scientific analyses of surfaces, but homogenizes these.
There are, to be sure, overlaps between mathematics and science in
practice, but we can ignore these cases for our purposes here. In their purest
forms, mathematicians are dealing with abstractions, with disembodied
objects, entities that one cannot scratch, touch, see, and which occupy no
locus in the actual space-time order. In contrast, science treats of things
that do occupy some such locus, can be polished, dusted, and bruised, and
which can be pitted, rough or smooth, wet, sticky, and so forth.
It is important to distinguish between scientific and mathematical
approaches because each is directed to, and in fact does tell us something
different about surfaces. What we learn from a mathematical analysis will
 230 Avrum Stroll

typically be different from that which one of the sciences teaches us. When
the chemist G. A. Somorjai writes (see page 54 of my book):
Defining the surface to be15studied as the topmost layer of atoms, one must obtain
detectable signals from 10 atoms or molecules in the background of 1022 molecules
to obtain surface information,
he is making an empirical claim that does not belong to any branch of pure
mathematics. There is thus a division of labor between mathematics and
science in the nature of the information that these disciplines give us about
surfaces. But now recognizing this fact, we must also be sensitive to the
fact that even within the sciences themselves there is a comparable division
of labor. What solid state physicists tell us about surfaces may differ from
Downloaded by [University of Arizona] at 09:29 13 June 2016

what oceanographers tell us, and conversely. On page 58 of my book, I

quote the distinguished oceanographer, Walter Munk who writes:
You spoke about the visibility of the surface. I have thought of this in terms of the
fraction of light that comes from reflections by particles within the water column
at various depths. For high absorbing (dirty) water the light is so quickly attenuated
that you only see your reflection from the surface. For clear water this can be
different. It also depends upon from what angle of incidence one views the surface.
Take the case of a very transparent lake on a day with no winds when viewed from
above. Under those circumstances one may see essentially the lake bottom and not
even be aware of the existence of the surface.
Munk's comments differ from those of Somorjai and of course from
anything that the pure mathematician will tell us about surfaces. Munk's
remarks are at least in part the comments of a keen observer of the
environment, and no mathematician, while employing his trade, can be
said to be an observer of the environment, keen or otherwise. What Munk
is saying comes close to what a perceptive non-scientist, a fisherman for
instance, might say about the relationship between light and the surface of
a body of water.
We thus find a spectrum of differing human concerns about surfaces.
Each of these concerns has its own validity and none of them has a monopoly
on the truth. There is much to learn about surfaces from mathematics and
from the sciences, but there are things they fail to talk about and things
which common sense does. I've investigated what common sense can tell
us about surfaces. I hope that I've shown that common sense has much to
say on this matter and interestingly: much of it is different from what either
science or mathematics has to proffer. To minimize or perhaps to ignore,
as Adams does, this rich fund of information because of an emphasis upon
mathematics and science is to miss the point of my book and an opportunity
to learn something new.

NOTES

1 Avrum Stroll, 'Primordial Knowledge and Rationality', Dialectica 36 (1982), pp. 180-201;
 On Surfaces: A Rejoinder 231
'Some Different Ways that Things Stand Fast for Us', Grazer Philosophische Studien 22
(1984), pp. 69-89; 'Foundationalisra and Common Sense', in F. van Holthoon and D. R.
Olson (eds.), Common Sense (New York: University Press of America, 1987), pp. 35-54;
'Wittgenstein and Folk Psychology', Proceedings of the 12th International Wittgenstein
Symposium (Vienna: Hlder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1988), pp. 264-70.
2 Ernest W. Adams, 'Stroll on Surfaces', Inquiry 31 (1988), pp. 551-2.
3 Avrum Stroll, Surfaces (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 39.
4 Ibid., p. 39.

Received 15 November 1988

Avrum Stroll, Department of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla,

Downloaded by [University of Arizona] at 09:29 13 June 2016

California 92093, USA