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.

Nature of Naturalism: David Papineau

David gave a talk entitled 'Methodological versus Ontological Naturalism'. The talk had two parts corresponding to the two forms of naturalism. In these David defined the kind of naturalism in question and then went on to defend it against possible objections.

In the first part of the talk David argued that Ontological Naturalism is driven by natural science itself. The drive is to have an ontology that only counts things that have physical effects which are thus measurable by natural science. This motivates the naturalist to include in her ontology only the kinds of things that can have such effects. However, this ontological move alone is not enough to yield physicalism. For there could be things that have physical effects that aren't themselves physical. Physicalism is driven by the idea that there be explanatory closure in the domain of the physical (the domain described by physics).

Methodological Naturalism, David argued, is not driven by philosophy adopting some set of scientific methods, but by a rejection of 'conceptual analysis'. What philosophers do is analyse - test for coherence and consistency - the theories operative in science. The commonality between scientific method and philosophy is thus a rejection of conceptual analysis and an embracing of theory testing. Philosophy differs from natural science in that its theory testing is not evidence based.

One question that came up was whether philosophy really wasn't concerned with conceptual analysis seeing that it seems to be so widespread in philosophical practice. David replied that perhaps that is so much the worse for much philosophy. Another question was whether the distinction between science and philosophy being that the former is evidence based and the latter not is tenable. After all, much of the science that is concerned with the closure of the physical is not evidence based at all (theoretical physics for example).

Reading Group: Davidson's 'Can there be a Science of Rationality?'

Davidson’s paper starts with some remarks about Quine’s position with regard to the prospects of a natural scientific account of the propositional attitudes, and more generally of thought and meaning. This detour introduces two possible ways to view the project of giving a scientific account of these phenomena: (1) that there is a natural scientific account to be had because the phenomena in question are behavioural dispositions and as such are physiological entities for which it is natural to expect there to be such an account; (2), that the problematic intentional concepts in question are not reducible to a natural scientific account but should be maintained for their usefulness (p155).

Davidson then goes on to ask whether his own account of thought, meaning and the propositional attitudes (the ‘Unified Theory’), can be called scientific. In this regard he makes some interesting, albeit inconclusive, suggestions. I am not going to discuss these suggestions. Rather, I want to focus on a more general issue regarding the ‘Unified Theory’, one that connects to (1) and (2) above.

Davidson says that the ‘normative, holistic, and externalist elements in psychological concepts cannot be eliminated without radically changing the subject (p157).’ So presumably he thinks (2) above is the way to go. He thinks ontological reduction is possible (hence anomalous monism), but that ‘nomological and definitional’ reduction are off the cards (p168). He does not explain in this paper exactly why such reduction is not possible or in what sense. The story he has given elsewhere usually appeals to the so-called principle of charity. But whatever the detail, what is the content of the claim? Is it that the entities being studied (propositional attitudes, thoughts) *are* not nomologically and definitonally reducible? Or is it that they may well be but that we are incapable of *understanding them* without the prop of a folk-psychology (that the concepts in question are *only* useful)? Moreover, what is not so reducible? Is it that the state of being in a propositional attitude might be reducible to natural scientific terms, but that the practice of interpreting such attitudes is not? If this is the case (as Davidson seems to suggest at p167), then it seems to me deciding whether this matters depends on what view one has on the subject of whether thought and language are constitutively intersubjective. Those (like Fodor and Chomsky) who think they are not, are already committed to some sort of reduction being on the cards, so treat interpretation as a folk-psychological prop. What does Davidson think? If he thinks radical interpretation is just part of a folk-psychology, then his ‘Unified Theory’ is certainly not scientific, as such theories do not describe how we take things to be, but how things actually are with the world (unless of course, it is a theory that formalises how we mistakenly think about how we think, which it is not). So presumably he does not think this. But his invocation of the constitutive role of intersubjectivity in thought and language is based on the fact we can’t *make sense* of these phenomena without concepts like radical interpretation. But this is compatible with it being the case that the constitutive role in question is illusory – radical interpretation may actually be something we only posit as a folk-psychological heuristic. So when he says Fodor et al are changing the subject when they posit that the ‘nature of thought and meaning…' can 'be answered by discovering neural mechanisms’, it doesn’t seem to me he is able to say this. Not unless he can show that intersubjectivity really is constitutive of thought and language. But that is a question his ‘Unified Theory’ is neutral on.