2008 Conference

Well, we just had the third and final conference of the TPN project. It all went very well, although Mark's absence was keenly felt by everyone there. Since it was the last event of the project, this is likely to be the final post on the blog.

I gave a paper, titled "Can Transcendental Philosophy be Naturalised?", in which I offered an account of Husserl's transcendental theory of intersubjectivity. Husserl's theory pruport's to offer the necessary conditions of experiencing something as 'alter ego'. I discussed two common objections to the view and one suggestion, due to Shaun Gallagher, that problems with the theory can be resolved by recourse to empirical work on neonate imitation and mirror neurons. I suggested that we should be somewhat cautious concerning the application of this empirical work but that, nevertheless, the prospects of a naturalised version of Husserl's account are in some respects promising.

Daniel warren gave a paper, titled "Substance, Inherence and the Thinking Substance in Kant". In the paper he presented an interpretation of Kant's way with the rational psychologist in the Paralogisms. He argued that we best understand Kant's arguments there only if we take into account (a) Kant's conception of logic, and (b) the basic metaphysical categories that Kant inherits from the tradition. By paying attention to (a) we see that the Strawsonian reading of the Paralogisms doesn't really get at Kant's intended arguments. For Strawson thinks the arguments turn partly on how we successfully identify individuals with singular terms. But Kant's intensional logic means that that he is more properly understood to be concerned with how we identify the properties an object (as a substance) has essentially rather than accidentally. By paying attention to (b) we see that Kant's arguments in the Paralogisms turn on denying that the rational psychologist has the resources to properly understand the kind of compositional unity a thinking subject would have as a substance. But this strategey itself depends on employing various metaphysical categories Kant inherits from Baumgarten.

David Papineau's paper, "Philosophy as an A Posteriori Discipline", did exactly what it said on the tin. Arguing against those who see the philosophical enterprise as analytic and/or a priori, he offered an account of philosophy as broadly continuous with empirical science. His view is one not about how philosophy should be done, but about how philosophy in fact is done. Thus he thinks that philosophers who claim to be engaging either in conceptual analysis, or in (synthetic a priori) transcendental reasoning are, in fact, mistaken about their own practise. What they are actually doing is offering synthetic theories about the world that have the distinctive feature that they adress problems the resolution of which calls for no further empirical evidence.

Rolf-Peter Horstmann's paper, "Fichte's Anti-Sceptical Strategies", described two phases of Fichte's work in which he took distinct approaches to the problem of philosophical scepticism. Before 1800, Fichte offered a 'justification-oriented' picture in which the sceptic is confronted on his own terms. This account, he argued, must be considered a failure, as the sceptic can always question that which is brought in to do the justificatory work. In his post-1800 work, however, Fichte attempted to respond to scepticism in a way that might be called 'grounding-oriented'. Here there is a conception of 'absolute knowing' which itself constitutes the distinction between subject and conceptually structure world.

The second day of the conference began with Hilary Kornblith's, "Reasons, Naturalism and Transcendental Philosophy". He argued that a certain non-naturalistic picture of human reason, shared by a number of philsophers all either explicitly or implicitly influenced by Kant, is based upon false empirial assumptions. The picture is one in which humans, unlike other animals, have the capacity to reflect on their own belief-forming mechanisms and thereby revise them. We are able to do this since we possess the concepts of reason, belief and truth. As a consequence, only human subjects can be truly ascribed states of knowledge, or even states of belief. Kornblith argued that the purported distinction between human and animal cognition was unfounded and, in fact, the picture makes it very hard to see how the normal course of human development to bring us from an animal-like situation into 'the space of reasons'.

Ernie Sosa's paper, "Transcendental and Circular Reasoning" addressed the problem of how it could be that our perceptual beliefs can be justified in a non-circular way. He argued that perceptual beleifs can be reason-based, but nevertheless gain their epistemic via their reliablility in providing required information. He also considered a sceptical scenario in which it is suggested that we may have taken a pill that cognitively disables us. In response to this, he offered a transcendental argument to the effect that we cannon but believe our own reasoning faculties to be reliable. To deny it, is to prevent oneself from being able to put one's trust in that very denial.

In the final paper, "Sartre and the Transcendental Tradition", Sebastian Gardner argued that, on any reasonably broad construal, Sartre's early philosophy must be counted transcendental. One difficulty with understanding his philosophy is Sartre's emphatic claim that he is not an idealist despite the fact that he sees the structure of the world as being correlated with the fundamental structures of the human subject. How are we to understand this correlation without supposing that the world is in some sense subject-dependent. Sebastian suggested that Sartre may have considered a Fictean response according to which the distinction between being for-itself and in-itself is constituted by something itself prior to the subjective.

A Priori Workshop: Finn Spicer

In his talk ("A priori knowledge - you either love it or hate it"), Finn Spicer claimed that there is no urgent reason for naturalism to resist the concept of a priori knowledge. To support this claim, he raised a number of semantic points. If meaning is reference, to begin with, we encounter difficulties discriminating between a priori and a posteriori truths. The sentence “Napoléon is Napoléon” is an uninformative tautology and a priori true. The sentence “Napoléon is Bonaparte” is informative and a posteriori true. Both sentences have the same meaning, however, because they have a common referent. So, reference doesn’t give us any clue why they differ with regard to aprioricity. If the picture is extended to include sense, Finn claimed, these difficulties do not arise. For instance, the sense of ‘Napoléon’ is the knowledge necessary for having a concept of Napoléon. Or it is the conception associated with ‘Napoléon’ (Napoléon was a man from Corsica, won the battle of Austerlitz, spent his last years in exile etc).

Finn now suggested (if I understood him correctly) that aprioricity comes back into this in a naturalism-friendly way if the conception of ‘Napoléon’ is such that it contains bits of knowledge from a reliable source, and is needed to have the concept expressed by the name ‘Napoléon’. This is to say that some Napoléon-knowledge (e.g. Napoléon was a man from Corsica) is necessary to have the Napoléon-concept, and is a priori in that sense, without being knowledge in virtue of its a priori status.

A recurrent criticism of Finn’s approach was that on his account epistemic and semantic matters easily come apart. For the conception of Napoléon to have a priori items (those necessary to have a concept expressed by ‘Napoléon’) is one thing. For these items to be knowledge from a reliable source is another. Even if a conception contains both, they may not (never) be congruent.

A Priori Workshop: Peter Railton

In his paper, "A Naturalistic Transcendental Argument? (or, Why should Kantians have all the fun?)" Peter Railton argued that a naturalistically acceptable quasi-transcendental argument can be mounted against the sceptic. If I understood it (and I'm far from sure I do), the argument relied on the conditions necessary for a system to be in a position to learn from experience. The condition is, roughly speaking, that the epistemic options must be investigated with an expectation that assigns differential probabilities to each. If each possibility is assigned equal probability, then a system will not be able to rely on the information it gains to adjust the probabilities of further options. Further, it doesn't matter so much exactly which expectations the system begins with as, if there are epistemic reasons for the system to latch onto, then there will be a tendency for systems to converge on those reasons.

What this means for the sceptic is that his demand that his demand that we put aside all prior assignments of probabilities to the sceptical versus the non-sceptical hypotheses, is inconsistent with the supposition (sure made by the sceptic) that we are creatures capable of learning. This doesn't show that the sceptical hypothesis is false (there may be no epistemic reasons), nor that it is meaningless. Rather, it suggests that, contrary to what the sceptic wants to insist, we are justified in making assumptions (embodied in our behaving in accordance with certain norms) concerning those things the sceptic doubts despite not having an apriori 'from-scratch' argument that shows that these assumptions are true or objectively likely to be true.

A priori workshop: John Skorupski

John gave a paper entitled 'Aprioricity and Normativity'. In it he talked about a certain form of a priori knowledge we have about the relations between reasons. A thinker's epistemic reasons are relative to what John called her 'epistemic field'. This is a set of facts at a specific time that are ascertainable by the thinker, but not necessarily ascertained. If there is outright sufficient reason to believe p then that belief has a priori support in the relevant epistemic field. John then talked of a narrowed epistemic field which he called an 'epistemic state'. A fact p is part of an epistemic state if the obtaining of p at a particular time gives a monotonically sufficient reason for the thinker in this state to believe that p. An example of such a fact might be that if I'm thinking and I have the thought that I'm thinking, I can know a priori that the latter thought is true (no further adduced evidence can falsify the thought).

John then went on to describe 'a priori warrant' as a phenomenological attitude towards a thinker's belief that she has sufficient reason to believe a fact p. If she bases that sufficient reason on her being in an epistemic state which gives outright sufficient reason to believe p, then she has a priori warrant. He then gave what he called the 'critical argument' where he argued that a thinker could not generate the relevant attitude to undewrite a priori warrant with regard to any a posteriori fact. Given his argument for a priori warrant, the conclusion was what John called the cognitive irrealism of the 'normative view' - that the apparently factual a priori propositions we know about reasons are in fact non-factual offshoots of synthetic a priori knowledge of reasons. What such knowledge has as its object is something like what Kant called the pure principles of the understanding - presumably principles of epistemic reasoning as such.

A priori workshop: John Callanan

John gave a paper entitled 'Kant's a priori and seeing how things must be'. In it he distinguished between two types of necessity that get talked about, and not always kept apart, in the first Critique. The first is the familiar necessity of synthetic a priori truths about the transcendental structure of experience - the necesary conditions of possibilty of experience that hold with 'strict universality' for any thinker/perceiver as such. The second is the necessity which attaches to certain experiences, so that we literally, in the course of experience, 'see' that, say, a certain temporal ordering of events is necessary rather than contingent. In uncovering this second source of necessary truths, Kant is very roughly doing a kind of phenomenology influenced still very much by the early modern philosophy that preceded him. For instance, very much influenced by Hume's reflections on how sense impressions are given to the mind and ordered by it in certain ways. What Kant changed was the Humean demarcation between the given and constituting elements of experience (for example, the representation from which the concept space is derived is constituted not given for Kant). Also, concepts derived from what is constituted are legitimate for Kant, whereas they are not for Hume. This is because for Kant they are a necessay condition of the very experience in question (for example, the constituting element of the causal principle is a necessary condition for Kant of the possibility of us experiencing certain sorts of temporal order at all).

But John also argued that for a lot of Kant's arguments in the Critique, he is concerned not with so called transcendental arguments, but rather with a phenomenological analysis of the understanding at work in experience. Kant works with quite a rich conception of experience and John's focus was his analysis of how we 'see' that something is the case, like when we see that in turning a cube a certain coloured side is bound to reappear at a certain point. We might say then, that the focus is on an a 'seeing that' which is suffuse with the conceptual activity of the understanding.

This general approach has ramifications for how we view Kant's philosophical project. John argued that we tend to see Kant through Frege's anti-psychologistic spectacles, that we see him as concerned with the conditions of possibility of thinking per se. But on John's view, Kant is far closer to Hume. He is involved in a phenomenology of experience that uncovers constituting elements that are merely human. Of course, this interpretation will effect how we think of the Kantian a priori. That is, on John's account it quantifies over a far more limited domain of individuals than it is often taken to.

I for one think John's approach is fruitful and probably right, certainly as a reading of the Aesthetic and the Analogies. But there seems to be a problem over the Transcendental Deduction, which appears to be concerned with the conditions of possibility of thinking as such. But there is a way out: perhaps Kant is concerned in those sections, as McDowell has argued, with another problem: that of intentionality. The TD could then be seen as arguing for certain a priori concepts that constitute thoughts and perceptions alike, so that perceptions have a certain minimal conceptual content. Kant's universalism about logic then becomes detatchable from the TD and it can fit with John's overrall interpretative approach of seeing Kant as concerned with analysing phenomenologically the understanding at work in experience.

Nature of Naturalism: Adrian Haddock

McDowell understands human sensibility both as a natural item and as involving higher cognitive capacities. However, there are complete constitutive explanations for natural items in terms of law-governed first nature. Naturalistic explanations of human sensibility therefore threaten to blank out explanations of it in terms of the space of reasons. This threat can be deflected in three basic ways, familiar from McDowell:

(1) Sensibility is part of first nature, but the space of reasons isn’t sui generis.
(2) Nature is first nature, the space of reasons is sui generis and sensibility is not part of nature.
(3) The space of reasons is sui generis, sensibility is not part of first but of second nature.

As is well known, McDowell rejects option (1) and settles for option (3). The apparent advantage of that option is that there is no exhaustive first-nature explanation of items in second nature so that sensibility can (partly) be accounted for in terms of the space of reasons without abandoning naturalism altogether.

Adrian Haddock argued in his engaging paper that given McDowell’s intentions, the best option for him is not the one he chooses but in fact option (2). In particular, McDowell’s choice of option (3) undermines his recent Hegelian critique of Kant’s position on the contribution of our sensibility to our knowledge. For Kant, the conjunction of sensible intuitions and categories to which the objects of sensible intuitions conform is meant to provide us with empirical as well as a priori knowledge. This account is deficient, in McDowell’s view, because it does not allow us to know a priori what the appropriate character of sensibility (spatiotemporal or other) is, that is, the character of sensibility in virtue of which the objects intuited by us conform to our categories. Without this knowledge, specifically human sensibility and the sensibility of thinkers qua thinkers may come apart. To keep them together McDowell suggests along Hegelian lines that the specific character of sensibility must issue from the higher cognitive faculty.

Obviously, this doesn’t square with McDowell’s second-nature account of human sensibility. Second nature, to which human sensibility belongs, changes when first nature changes. The effect is the same as that of the impossibility, on Kant’s picture, to have a priori knowledge of the character of sensibility. While changes in second nature don’t affect the higher cognitive faculty of thinkers, human sensibility may change and become non-human, for instance, so that specifically human sensibility is not the sensibility of thinkers qua thinkers. Adrian concluded that to ensure that the sensibility of thinkers has the appropriate character, sensibility should be an aspect of the higher cognitive faculty, not of nature, as option (2) states. McDowell should abandon his compromised empirical concept of the thinking self and adopt the concept of a (more fully Hegelian or Roycean) absolute ego instead.

In the discussion Adrian added that this conclusion – option (2) makes more sense of McDowell’s intentions than McDowell’s preferred option (3) – could also motivate an endorsement of option (1). As long as empirical knowledge is the only relevant issue, there is no harm in giving a complete constitutive explanation of human sensibility in first-nature terms. This might prove more appealing overall than operating with an absolute concept of the self. Another point raised in the discussion concerned the variability of first nature. If first nature were to include everything in space and time, for instance, it would be essentially static, and evolving second nature would not simply follow first-nature changes. Consequently, changes in human sensibility, an item of second nature, would not necessarily disturb the co-ordination between sensibility and higher cognitive faculty in the way suggested by Adrian’s conclusion.

Nature of Naturalism: Penelope Maddy

Penelope gave a talk entitled 'Naturalism, Transcendentalism and Therapy'. This paper was very rich and I can't hope to do justice to it here. The main thread was that the 'second philosopher' who is 'born native to natural science' rejects 'first philosophy', which is any philosophy that proposes a two level view: on one level there are philosophical truths marked by a specifically philosophical level of proof and evidence, on the other is the empirical domain of everyday discourse and natural science. One way of motivating first philosophy is by making radical scepticism about the external world pressing. Answering such scepticism requires giving a 'from scratch account' of what grounds (say) our perceptual beliefs (an account that doesn't make reference to theories that draw on perceptual evidence). The second philosopher doesn't reject such a 'grounding' of natural science, but she sees that it brings in its train more problems than it promised to solve, and for that reason she rejects it.

The second philosopher also hopes to give us a dose of philosophical therapy - like Kant, Carnap and the later Wittgenstein, she wants to release us from various philosophical anxieties. But Kant and Carnap require us to swallow a lot of first philosophy in order to get the therapeutic dose. The second philosopher rejects this. She is closer to Wittgenstein. But in Wittgenstein's dealings with Moore's argument against external world scepticism in On Certainty, it seems that he wants to take Moore to task for making a category mistake (expecting an answer to the 'from scratch' question in terms of methods of evidence that take for granted what that question puts in doubt). Penelope argued that perhaps this isn't right. Perhaps Moore is just a consistent second philosopher, refusing to see why he should find the 'from scratch' question pressing. Penelope ended by saying that perhaps Austin is a better therapeutic philosopher than Wittgenstein for he only adverts to ordinary language to give us our therapy, whereas Wittgenstein seems to continue to advert to specifically first philosophical problems as pressing and natural for us.

One question that came up was about circularity: is the second philosopher's appeal to perceptual methods in justifying her beliefs viciously circular? The answer was no, some accounts of the world that are viciously circular are so because they employ suspect science, not because of circularity per se. Another question was: given that first-philosophical anxiety is rife, is the second philosopher shirking her therapeutic work if she doesn't take such anxiety seriously? Penelope suggested that perhaps there is an intermediate stage where therapy a la Wittgenstein is necessary before second philosophy can properly come into view for many philosophers.