Falsifiability and the Originary Hypothesis
The question of whether the originary hypothesis is falsifiable cuts to the heart of what kind of claim it makes. Katz's position is that the hypothesis operates by a "logic of contingency rather than necessity," and this shapes how one should assess it. As he writes in The Contingency of the Hypothesis, "there is a particular logic built into the originary hypothesis, a logic of contingency rather than necessity, making it impossible for adherents to the far more popular logic of necessity to “see” the hypothesis."1. This means the hypothesis does not present itself as a universal law derivable from prior conditions, but as a singular event that needed only to happen once — an event whose very contingency is constitutive of its explanatory power.
This has direct implications for falsifiability in the conventional scientific sense. In Infra-Humaning, Katz argues that engaging the hypothesis requires a particular intellectual posture: "You really must clear out all foundational categories to take on the originary hypothesis—you have to make a kind of (negatively capable) leap of faith that sets aside “irritable questioning” (does it match this or that archaeological evidence; is it materialist or idealist, etc.) to see that there’s simply no other way to account for the simple fact that humans can point to something and affirm that it is the same thing"2. The standard Popperian demand — that a theory be refuted by a specific empirical outcome — is precisely the kind of "irritable questioning" Katz says the hypothesis transcends, not because it is immune to evidence, but because its domain is the condition of possibility for any evidence at all.
At the same time, Katz does not treat the hypothesis as mere assertion. In Attentionality and Originary Ethics, he sketches what a proof might look like: "If one were inclined to devise a “proof” for the originary hypothesis, it seems to me we might find one in the fact that it works equally well if we assume that those on the originary scene reflected, with the skill of the great realist novelists, the nature of all those congregated; or, on the other hand, that the originary sign was a contingent, arbitrary construct, arrived at in desperation, thoroughly pragmatic, devoid of ontological claims"3. The hypothesis's robustness across radically different assumptions about the scene is offered as evidence of its validity — a kind of structural proof rather than an empirical one.
The hypothesis also generates what might be called a performative test. In Ergodism, Katz argues that "for any utterance to 'make sense' something like the originary scene must be a tacit condition"4. This means the hypothesis is embedded in the very activity of questioning it: any attempt to falsify it by articulating an objection already presupposes the shared linguistic scene the hypothesis posits. A parallel claim appears in Tagging and Tracking the Human, where Katz suggests that "an at least partial 'proof' of the hypothesis would be its commensurability with any theoretical vocabulary"5. The capacity to translate any discourse into originary terms, rather than falsifying it, actually confirms it.
Finally, Katz acknowledges that the hypothesis carries no infallibility for its adherents and does not license dogmatism. As he notes in The Prospects of the Hypothesis, "the originary hypothesis confers no infallibility on its adherents—it just offers a better way of thinking things through"6. This is perhaps the most crystallizing formulation: the hypothesis is not the kind of claim one proves or refutes in a single stroke, but a framework whose warrant is its ongoing productivity — its capacity to account for what no other framework can, beginning with the fact of the sign itself.
Excerpts
"We have perhaps not sufficiently considered that there is a particular logic built into the originary hypothesis, a logic of contingency rather than necessity, making it impossible for adherents to the far more popular logic of necessity to “see” the hypothesis. I am not well schooled in logic but maybe there’s a name for something that is unlikely but only needs to happen once to “take” (and maybe a lot of life is like that)."
[The Contingency of the Hypothesis] · Substack Read →
"You really must clear out all foundational categories to take on the originary hypothesis—you have to make a kind of (negatively capable) leap of faith that sets aside “irritable questioning” (does it match this or that archaeological evidence; is it materialist or idealist, etc.) to see that there’s simply no other way to account for the simple fact that humans can point to something and affirm that it is the same thing."
[Infra-Humaning] · Substack Read →
"For the originary hypothesis to participate in history, it must be open to being treated to endless redescriptions, taking on vocabularies drawn from new social and technological settings—indeed, a “genealogical” analysis of the originary hypothesis, formulated at a particular moment by a particular thinker and propagated by specific people situated in specific institutions, organized in deliberate ways, would show that it has already been thoroughly marked or tagged by actors in particular surroundings; meanwhile, an at least partial “proof” of the hypothesis would be its commensurability with any theoretical vocabulary."
[Tagging and Tracking the Human] · Substack Read →
"Without an originary hypothesis, other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, to differing extents of course, smuggle in a lot of naturalized assumptions in order to keep the arbitrariness of their constructions at bay—they presuppose a good deal of humanness in the constructions of the human."
[Attentionality and Originary Ethics: Upclining] · PDF Read →
"We can posit a somewhat different provenance for the originary hypothesis itself if we situate it within an ergodic space—the originary hypothesis, first of all, would be nothing more than the making explicit of the just barely unsaid of any statement whatsoever, or the virtual form including all those unsaids—for any utterance to “make sense” something like the originary scene must be a tacit condition. This does not detract from the indispensable assertion that the originary hypothesis refers to an actual event, something that must have happened, but it brings that originary event within the ergodic world itself, as a virtuality that we collectively compose, modularly, through its successive iterations."
[Ergodism] · Substack Read →
"If the originary hypothesis entails that all human possibilities must be implicit in, and therefore traceable back to, the originary scene, then it follows that Generative Anthropology must be the human science. And if Generative Anthropology is the human science, it must be both incommensurable with and inclusive of all existing human sciences."
[Generative Anthropology as the One Big Discipline] · PDF Read →