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.

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.

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: Akeel Bilgrami, 'Intentionality & Norms'

Bilgrami's paper is rich, and I want neither to summarise it nor comment on everything he has to say. I'm going to focus on sections I-IV, putting aside the very interesting comments on the nature of commitments (section V) and the discussion of Davidson (section VI). This is partly justified, I seems to me, by the fact that most of the anti-naturalistic argumentation happens in these early sections.

The main claim is that intentional states, being normative states, cannot be reduced to dispositions. This, Bilgrami suggests, is a serious obstacle to the naturalisation of the mind. There are two main arguments which, as Bilgrami puts it, effect a 'pincer' movement on the naturalistic reduction of intentional states to dispositions. The first is a variation on Moore's Open Question Argument (OQA). The OQA works by pointing out that, according to the naturalistic proposal, the question "I have the disposition to f, but ought I to f?" should be a closed question. That is, the answer should trivially be yes. The problem is that it looks like an open question. So the naturalistic proposal must be false. Consider the belief that it is raining outside. Suppose that a part of the proposed dispositional account is that I am disposed to believe that it is wet outside. We can fill in the above schema, "I am disposed to believe that it is wet outside, but ought I believe that it is wet outside?".

The reason that a second argument is needed is, for reasons familiar from discussions of Moore, this argument only works if the reduction was supposed to maintain sameness of sense. If the naturalistic view was that the belief and the disposition have different senses but the same referent, then the OQA is ineffective against it. So the second, Fregean, argument asks of the senses of the intentional states (the one's to be reduced), 'what are these senses expressing?' (131). The naturalist is then faced with a dilemma: if they express naturalistically acceptable properties, then the OQA comes back into play, if they express naturalistically unacceptable properties then the reduction has failed.

Although I think that this is a really powerful strategy, I have two criticisms of Bilgrami's treatment. The first is that he appears to assume that senses are descriptive. That is, he assumes that 'senses express properties', such that there is a question to be asked concerning whether the properties so expressed are natural or normative. But, as is very familiar, there is a significant position that is being ignored here (represented by Evans and McDowell), according to which senses are ways of thinking of objects that cannot be identified with independently identifiable definite descriptions. As, I seem to recall, McDowell puts it, what the sense of an expression is can be shown but not said. Admittedly, that view may have more appeal as an account of the sense of proper names than of terms referring to intentional states. But, so it seems to me, the very existence of such a position means that, without arguing against it, Bilgrami's non-naturalistic argument is inconclusive.

My second criticism is of a move that Bilgrami makes in response to one potential reply to the pincer strategy. This response, if I understood it correctly, was to allow that the senses in question expressed non-natural properties, but that these properties are also non-actual. That is, insofar as the relevant senses attribute non-natural properties to the world, they never attribute really existing properties. Now Bilgrami asks, what could justify this claim? His answer is, nothing other than a question begging scientistic prejudice, according to which only natural properties exist. What I take issue with is the suggestion that this answer would be question begging. Here is Bilgrami:

"The naturalist was supposed to give an argument for the reduction of value to natural properties and facts...Against that argument a Frege-Moore counterargument had been presented. If it turns out that in one's response to this counterargument one is assuming a criterion for property existence that takes for granted the truth of naturalism, the naturalist has begged the question" (136)

But surely this gets the dialectic entirely backwards. In the present context there is no argument for naturalism to which Bilgrami is offering a counterargument. Rather, he is giving an argument against naturalism, to which the naturalist is envisaged to be responding. Since this is the case, the naturalist is entitled to draw on elements of his own view in order to defend himself against Bilgrami's argument. The burden is no Bilgrami to show that the senses must express properties that really exist, rather than on the naturalist to show that they do not. If that's right, then this type of response is left open for the naturalist to make.

Reading Group: David Macarthur, 'Naturalism and Skepticism'

Kant called it a veritable scandal for philosophy that claims about the existence of the external world have to be taken on faith. Macarthur echoes this sentiment. He is alarmed by the fact that most philosophers today seem indifferent to this scandal although there is still no satisfactory proof for the existence of the external world. In his view, the culprit is (scientific) naturalism. Naturalism dismisses the epistemological preoccupation with refuting the skeptic as an exaggeration of the underlying problem. It takes external world skepticism (knowledge of the external world is not rationally justified) to be defective in certain respects so that its refutation is no precondition for satisfactory accounts of knowledge. Macarthur concedes that quietism with regard to the skeptical problem is an option. However, he thinks that naturalism lacks the resources for sustaining this option. If that is true, then naturalism simply begs the question against the skeptic and thus exacerbates external world skepticism.

Hume was unambiguous about the skeptical consequences of his naturalism. According to him, all mental processes are causal processes. If all mental processes are causal processes, then subjective experiences are intramental effects of some cause. Intramental effects can be produced by an infinitely large number of causes and for that reason do not allow us to tell what their actual effective causes were. So it may be the case that, contrary to our presumptions, none of these causes issues from the external world. This causal theory of experience results in a systematic mismatch between mind and world which leads to external world skepticism.

Naturalism shares Hume’s premiss but seeks to avoid the conclusion. All attempts to do this, Macarthur argues, are dogmatic in one way or other. (Before he turns to representative naturalistic responses to external world skepticism, he rejects inference to the best explanation as a suitable anti-skeptical instrument. Even if references to the external world explain best what makes our experiences coherent, these reference are pointless if our subjective experiences are not coherent, as seems to be the case on the causal theory of experience. This is simply to reinforce the point that if inference to the best explanation is one of the most powerful tools of naturalism, it cannot hope to refute the skeptic but must settle for the quietist option.)

Macarthur discusses three representative examples for naturalistic responses to external world skepticism. These are

(1) Quine’s position that skepticism cannot doubt all of knowledge at the same time. As far as skepticism merits an answer, there is common ground with science – those bits of empirical knowledge which are not currently in doubt. External world skepticism doubts all of knowledge and thus is unanswerable.

(2) The reliabilist view that replaces rational justification with a causal account of belief formation. If beliefs are produced by reliable processes, we can have true beliefs about the external world without having a subjective experience of its justification. So the skeptic’s view that there is no external world because we do not have rationally justified knowledge of it is badly motivated.

(3) Finally, Strawson’s interpretation of Hume according to which the belief in the external world is natural, not rational. Although what the skeptic says against the external world is intelligible, the lack of rational justifications for beliefs in the external world does not affect the natural commitment to this notion.

Macarthur finds all these responses unsatisfactory. Here are (what I take to be) his main reasons for this assessment:

(ad 1) It is wrong to assume that external world skepticism doubts all of knowledge. It just doubts knowledge about the external world. So external world skepticism is answerable by naturalist standards.

(ad 2) Reliabilism may have a point on possible knowledge. But actual knowledge involves some subjective experience of justification. So the skeptical point retains its force. Furthermore, reliabilism cannot properly account for the reliability of belief-forming processes. Reliability is either posited dogmatically as the property of some process, or accounting for it leads to infinite regress because reliability is accounted for in terms of other reliable processes.

(ad 3) Natural belief cannot be revised or confirmed empirically. This contradicts naturalistic principles. Then, the notion of natural belief obscures the connection between belief and reason. Contrary to assumptions or hypotheses, Macarthur claims, beliefs are always open to rational criticism. External world criticism, like any other skepticism, insists that beliefs be given up if they become untenable. Strawson’s Humean “natural belief” is untenable by these standards.

Macarthur concludes that these representative naturalistic responses fail to stop the Humean move from naturalism (his causal theory of experience) to skepticism. Naturalism has not shown that the skeptic need not be refuted and therefore begs the question against the skeptic. So quietism on naturalist terms is not a viable solution.

Just two quick observations:

(I) Part of Macarthur’s point against (2) is that accounts for reliability are infinitely regressive. But this may not be as damaging for reliabilism as he seems to think. The accuracy of inductive reasoning may be enhanced by further induction (Popper, not Hume). Similarly, subsequent reliable processes may have corrective effects on the original process. So reliability may not be the dogmatic notion as which Macarthur portrays it.

(II) Macarthur suggests that external world skepticism withstands all these responses. However, to withstand them, it has to be modified in each case. The skepticism that survives (1) is not the same as the skepticism that survives (2). As (1) and (2) can be held jointly, naturalism might try to corner external world skepticism by combining these responses. I hope I can make this a little clearer:

To manoeuvre external world skepticism past (1), the skeptic must accept that there is some rationally justified knowledge, just not that about the external world. If positioned against (2), this appears to amount to the concession that there is some actual reliabilist knowledge – as there is rationally justified knowledge about something, though not the external world, the reliability of the process by which this knowledge is reached is confirmed as well. It does not seem impossible, then, to expand this reliable process tentatively, to close the causal gap between mind and world and to include beliefs about the external world. These cannot be not true because the process is unreliable, and this seems to hold regardless of the availability of rational justifications for them.

Naturalism Reading Group: McDowell's 'Naturalism and the Philosophy of Mind'

The dialectical structure of McDowell's paper is the following (missing out a few side points against Rorty and some linking of the argument to the history of philosophy).

(1) Lay out the distinction between the logical space of reasons within which knowing and thinking operate and the logical space of law within which the natural sciences explain the phenomena that constitute 'nature'. Accept this distinction as a genuine intellectual achievement, but refuse to identify 'nature' with the realm of law.

(2) Give motivation for this 'liberal naturalism': '[T]hinking and knowing are aspects of our lives' (p94) as rational animals, and so need to be included within the domain of nature.

(3) Point out that liberal naturalism accepts the 'sui generis' nature of activities that occupy the logical space of reasons, against 'restrictive naturalism' which does not, wanting instead to characterise such activities in terms of the realm of law.

(4) Explain the aim of isolating the realm of law, according to liberal naturalism: to understand its 'mode of intelligibility' so that it can be distinguished logically from the space of reasons. But also, to see how easy it is to conflate the realm of law and the realm of nature and thus to understand the root cause of our modern anxiety over the place of mind in nature.

(5) Diagnose the roots of this anxiety in the Cartesian philosophy of mind that attempts to include the special normative features of thinking within the realm of law: that is, such philosophy misunderstands the sui generis nature of the logical space of reasons, thinking of it as a demarcated region of the realm of law with special characteristics. Conversely, liberal naturalism properly understands the sui generis character of thought, and crafts a conception of nature that goes beyond the realm of law and is thus able to accommodate it.

(6) Show that modern 'restrictive' naturalistic philosophy of mind and language, such as that of Ruth Millikan, simply repeats the basic mistakes of the Cartesianism it purports to reject. Moreover, because of this it cannot explain the phenomenon of thought as it patterns our lives, so is to be rejected (such patterning is equated with Frege's conception of intentionality). Note, this last point is not that restrictive naturalism endangers some aspect of our folk psychology to which we are particularly wedded. Rather, it apparently endangers the very idea of thought.

I will do my best here to assess McDowell's case for (6). I will then say something about why 'restrictive' naturalists might not find his case against Millikan completely convincing, and why this hangs on what one's fundamental philosophical motivations happen to be.

McDowell takes up Millikan's rejection of what she calls Frege's 'meaning rationalism'. This is the idea that 'sameness and differences in elements of thought-content are transparently available to a rational subject.' (p100) Millikan finds fault with (amongst other things) Frege's assumption that intentionality is 'semantic rationality', which is (amongst other things) the thesis that grasping a sense is being intentionally directed towards an object (towards a Bedeutung). Thus grasping a sense is semantically rational in that 'it is a matter of what, for instance, can and cannot be true together.' (p101) Millikan takes this assumption to be 'substantive and indefensible' (ibid.). That she thinks it substantive is because - according to McDowell - she conceives of rationality as inhering in an 'intact mind' that is in good mechanical order. And this means that Frege (on this conception of the mind) is committed to the internal machinery of the mind being in such mechanical order that it could track the requirements of semantic rationality. But, Millikan points out, certain forms of semantic rationality presuppose directedness at determinate objects. 'And there are modes of directedness at determinate objects - for instance, those expressible by perceptually-based demonstratives - that we cannot get into our picture without appealing to environmental circumstances - circumstances external to the intra-organismic machinery that Millikan thinks would have to be meant by the 'intact mind'.' (ibid.) So Frege's conception of intentionality fails for Millikan because it conceives of rationality in semantic terms that are too strong to be accounted for by any properly (mechanically) functioning 'intact mind'.

But surely, McDowell argues, this is bad, for if sense and reference don't hang together in propositional attitudes as Frege takes them to, we lose partial grip on the rationality of thinking - we lose the ability to explain why a thinker is not irrational if she holds two conflicting propositional attitudes (say, belief and disbelief) toward the same object. Moreover, why not contrapose and reject Millikan's concepton of the 'intact mind' as properly functioning internal machinery, precisely because it can't account for semantic rationality? McDowell states 'to have an intact mind just is to be semantically rational.' (p102) The point being, only semantic rationality can account for the kind of normativity that structures the space of reasons. Millikan's mistake is to construe Frege's notion of sense as characterising 'the internal mechanics of having one's mind on objects.' (ibid.) But this is to treat the notion as characterising a special portion of the realm of law, and this is what her repetition of the Carteisan mistake consists in. Moreover, Millikan's allergic reaction to the idea of semantic rationality is that it would commit her to the 'spooky' idea that 'meanings move the mind directly' (p103). But this is only because she conceives of the mind as falling in the logical space of law. If it is seen as falling within the logical space of reasons, then the idea of meanings moving the mind becomes unproblematic: it becomes the idea that grasping senses describes 'patterns in our lives'. (ibid.) The basic mistake is trying to conceive of such 'grasping' in terms of mechanical understanding rather than the semantic rationality operative in the space of reasons.

With regard to Millikan's 'externalist' argument against Fregean intentionality, McDowell accepts that the environment plays a role in determining thought contents, but denies that we need displace thoughts from the rational animals that have them, as Millikan does, when she conceives of rationality as 'a norm effected in an integrated head-world system under biologically ideal conditions.' (ibid.) The problem with this form of externalism is that the thing that thinks is no longer identified with the rational animal that does the thinking.

Ultimately then, McDowell complains that Millikan fails to see his liberal-naturalist alternative because of her implicit Cartesianism (her conceiving of the mind as a special part of the domain of law). This is disastrous, because we end up losing our grip on thinking as something we do, which presumably was what the restrictive naturalist originally wanted to explain.

Now, I certainly think that if Millikan presents Frege's conception of thought in the psychologistic terms of properly functioning 'internal machinery', then she is wrong to do this (I have to say, I doubt that someone as smart as she is would do this). And it certainly seems a counterintuitive result to relocate thought outside the rational animal that thinks. But I have two worries about McDowell's argument here. First, does Millikan really conceive of the mind in terms of the realm of law? For she thinks of it in terms of 'proper biological function under ideal conditions', and that seems like a teleological and thus normative notion to me. Granted, this notion does not exhibit the same normativity that's operative in the 'space of reasons', but neither does it exhibit the non-normativity of the realm of law. Second, and more important, McDowell's motivation for refusing the assimilation of nature to the realm of law is to avoid the anxieties we experience in trying to account for thought without supernaturalism. Fair enough. But what if one is motivated by the idea that naturalism is driven by the aim of a unified scientific account of the world? Accepting the sui generis phenomenon of thought into the realm of nature is going to look ad hoc to someone so motivated, representing a failure of naturalism rather than a success. To that person the anxiety McDowell can't countenance is just an acceptable by-product of working towards such an account of the world, hopefully to be overcome in some future version. Don't we just reach a stand-off of competing philosophical motivations here? Perhaps McDowell can win the stand-off by demonstrating that restrictve naturalism leaves us with the 'grotesque' (as he puts it) result that thoughts are not wholly possessed by thinkers, or that restrictive naturalism can't account for the normativity of thought? But presumably, Millikan's conception of 'proper biological function under ideal conditions' is precisely supposed to handle the normativity of thought. Given her commitment to a unified scientific account of nature, perhaps partially extricating thoughts from thinkers heads is a price worth paying to achieve this goal? How do we mediate here? Can we appeal to the common sense of McDowell's neo-Aristotelianism? One thing is sure, simply slinging mud won't help, as McDowell does at the end of the paper by calling restrictive naturalists 'scientistic'.

In Mind and World, McDowell takes the line that he is just providing an alternative account of naturalism and intentionality, one where we don't have to stay on the seesaw of Myth of the Given/Coherentism (he uses the language of showing up a blindspot, an unseen possibility). So there he admits that the 'therapy' he offers is available to those who want it, but he doesn't claim that it is mandatory for all. Here, he seems to take a tone where rather than simply providing us with an alternative possibility, he's actually closing off the possibility of restrictive naturalism. But the arguments don't seem to warrant this stronger line to me.

Reading Group: Hilary Putnam, 'The Content and Appeal of Naturalism'

Putnam has two criticisms of (scientific) naturalism:

(I) Naturalism cannot give stable accounts of semantic content so that central naturalistic claims about language imply views that are not consistent with an overall naturalistic perspective (anti-realism or even supernaturalism).

(II) Naturalism has anti-supernaturalistic appeal, but goes too far in its reductionist fervour -- Putnam attributes this to fear of the normative.

The essay starts with a survey of naturalistic attitudes towards semantic issues. As is well known, naturalism privileges the formalised languages of science, in particular physics, over language as we know and use it. Language, meaning and reference in the ordinary sense may or may not be part of the naturalistic picture of language. At any rate, there is a distinctive hierarchy between first-rate conceptual systems with contents that pertain to the absolute conception of the world sought by physics. Only statements of this (fairly rarefied) kind are bona fide statements. If less formal statements are considered at all, naturalism strives to reduce their contents to those of first-order statements. Putnam stresses, of course, that some areas of discourse resist this reduction to what pertains to an absolute conception of the world -- talk of desire, belief, meaning or reference. Naturalism may even accept this. But it is bound to take the irreducibility of certain areas of discourse as a symptom for their groundlessness. This should raise suspicions about this reductionist approach, or so Putnam argues.

This survey leads to Putnam’s summary critique of Quine’s view that reference is indeterminate and inscrutable. Quine is opposed to ordinary ideas about word-world correspondence on the grounds that there is no ostentative distinction between an object, undetached object parts or object stages. Therefore it cannot be determined whether ordinary sentences refer to the objects and relations between objects we take them to speak about literally or whether they refer to parts or stages of objects. On a different presentation of ontological relativity, it cannot be determined whether our ordinary statements refer to what we take them to speak about literally or to complement events. Maybe it should be added at this point that from a naturalistic point of view only highly formalised languages are equipped to deal with ontological relativity. This is in part because they cover a limited and very specific range of objects, in part because there are appropriate (scientific) tools for individuating what the statements of these languages refer to. In their case, reference is in fact reduced to an aspect of scientific method.

Putnam’s main point seems to be this: If word-world correspondence is abandoned along with a sui generis concept of reference, it is not clear what language does. But it would be highly counterintuitive to deny that language makes a determinate contribution to our accounts of the world. Naturalists may reply that language is still connected to objects on their view, albeit causally and not in terms of reference. But in Putnam’s view this amendment only conceals the problem that the naturalistic position on language is ant-realist. He believes that this endangers the overall realism of (scientific) naturalism. What is left of realism if utterances have no semantic relation to an appropriate part of reality, he suggests, is too thin to support naturalism. If propositions do not refer to reality in a determinate sense, preference for the (scientific) naturalistic view that they transmit or organise neural stimulation over, say, the notion that language helps creatures like us to cope with the world (Rorty) is a matter of predilection. Putnam seems to believe that this ambiguity seals the fate of scientific naturalism as an overall realist position.

Turning to (II), like Stroud and Dupré, Putnam wants to engage with the acclaim that naturalism appears to enjoy today. He does this from his own perspective: ‘”Naturalism”, I believe, is often driven by the fear that accepting conceptual pluralism will let in the “occult”, the “supernatural”.’ (66) To keep the occult at bay, naturalism adheres to two broad rules:

(1) All things are mereological sums of physical objects.
(2) The only admissible explanations are complete explanations in physical terms.

Failure to respect (1) means that outer-worldly entities can be included in one’s ontology. Failure to respect (2) means allowing events to be accounted for by miracles. However, according to Putnam, these rules create more problems than they solve.

In the case of (1), claiming that X is a mereological sum of its physical parts is unproblematic as long as I just mean that X is never disconnected from its parts. If I assume that this means the logical identity between X and the mereological sum of its physical parts, however, I could, for instance, create mereological sums of my parts which predate me by several centuries. Evidently, these sums wouldn’t be me.

Putnam argues against (2) that naturalism is in fact selective with regard to what it takes to be a pernicious and a benign incomplete explanation. The basic vocabulary of geology, for instance, does not map onto that of physics. Naturalists don’t believe this to be obscure. What they do not tolerate, however, are normative terms like true, justified, adequate, referring. According to Putnam, naturalism appears to imply that if these normative terms cannot be reduced to non-normative ones, it is unavoidable for us that we posit a supernatural realm of values. Contrary to the parsimonious understanding of language in naturalism, Putnam’s conceptual pluralism states that a wide variety of indicative sentences, including normative ones, are bona fide statements. These normative statements are not descriptions of reality. So there is no question of them relating to that occult realm. The naturalist fear is unfounded.

One of the things I don’t understand is how Putnam gets from instability of content (I) to horror of the normative (II). More specifically, I don’t see why Putnam’s conceptual pluralism is the most compelling solution to the semantic instability of naturalism. There seem to be other solutions to the semantic instability of naturalism. One of these is naturalistic in the sense attacked: to seek a different first-order conceptual system so that reference is not unstable (Millikan). Another solution is mentioned by Putnam: if we follow Rorty, language does not consist of bona fide statements to start with. So there is no particular issue with the inclusion of normative statements. But there is no special weight to them either that would suggest that those singling out specific bona fide statements commit another mistake (anti-normativism) in addition to the mistake of ascribing special status to certain statements.

Then, I wonder whether Putnam’s blanket accusation of normative horror might have profited from some reference to emotivism, expressivism or prescriptivism. Though his accusation is more concerned with normative terms like truth, justification rather than those of ethics, emotivism et al are broadly naturalistic attempts to say something about normativity without making it disappear. They talk about normative claims that are not descriptions of reality. The main difference to Putnam’s position is that emotivism et al do not treat normative claims as bona fide statements. In particular, Putnam might have explained vis-à-vis emotivism etc why his internal realism gives us a better idea than emotivism et al about claims that are not descriptions of reality. This might have prompted him to restate his blanket accusation of normative horror as a critique of non-cognitivism about norms. And this in turn might have incited him to reveal more about the systematic architecture in the background of his critique.

Reading Group: John Dupre's 'The Miracle of Monism'

Dupre's thesis is that philosophical naturalism, defined in part by being antisupernaturalism, in fact, when committed to monism, indulges in a species of the very supernaturalism it rejects. He defines monism as the physicalism that has replaced materialism. The latter is monism because it asserts roughly that anything that occupies the same physical space as us counts as being real, everything else being unreal. But, Dupre argues, theoretical physics, specifically quantum mechanics, has put pressure on materialism. This is because what quantum mechanics takes to be the fundamental physical entities apparently cannot be considered space occupiers at all. This leads us to physicalism, which is the doctrine that whatever our best physicists say are the fundamental constituents of reality provides the criterion for deciding whether or not an entity is to be included in a naturalistic ontology. The monism of physicalism is thus that only such entities are real (that there are only such entities). And Dupre thinks that this monism is in conflict with another central tenet of naturalism, empiricism, and so presumably, on this count physicalism is to be rejected. Monism is a myth that naturalism should not be committed to, and this leaves us with what Dupre calls 'pluralistic naturalism'. He diagnoses that the major appeal of monism despite its lack of empirical confirmation is another myth: that of the Unity of Science, and he devotes a large part of the paper to debunking this latter myth.

The link between unified science and monism is that science is taken to be a complete and exhaustive account of the world. There is an immediate difficulty over what such an account should include - is history, for example, to be included? If not, why not? Dupre leaves that question alone and settles instead for the strategy that if biology, chemistry and physics can't be unified there is no hope for any more complete unification. He then focuses on two ways in which science might be considered unified: unification of content, and unification of method.

The latter option is assessed in terms of Karl Popper's theory that science is unified by the method of falsifying hypotheses. Dupre marshals some arguments against this being the way science is done. This leads him to reject Popper's account. The evidence cited is quite convincing, but two points. First, Dupre argues that many other factors influence pursuance of scientific theories beyond falsification of hypotheses, such as checking for unknown variables and fitting one's findings with existing hypotheses. But it seems to me a sophisticated form of Popperism might still be able to show that all these methods are subsidiary to the method of falsifying hypotheses. Second, rejecting the idea that science is unified by a common method by examining Popper's theory alone leaves open the possibility of it being unified by other common methods.

We then move on to analysis of the hopes of unifying science around content. Dupre argues that reductions of more primitive scientific theories by their successor theories (his example is the replacement of the science of biological trait inheritance after the development of molecular genetics) do not preserve the subject matter of the more primitive theories. Thus there is no unity of content across the two theories. I'm not sure about this. Putnam has argued in several places that there is a way of understanding such different theories as referring to the same things. Any way, I don't find this convincing evidence to give up the idea of unity of content, although it does put pressure on that idea.

Another example Dupre cites is the reduction of mental content, such as beliefs, to brain states. He says that this is where the supernaturalism of monism is clearly in view, attributing to physical states magical meaning-bestowing properties for which there is no empirical evidence (he thinks the reduction is driven purely by a metaphysical commitment to monism). Again, I'm not sure about this, for just because our current reductive theories can't do justice to the phenomena being reduced isn't a reason to think no reduction at all is on the cards.

Dupre then suggests that such reduction would ultimately have to be to the fundamental entities of physics and that this leaves us with a world bereft of the familiar entities of common sense. On this ground such reduction is to be rejected. But the committed physicalist will simply shrug his shoulders and say all the worse for common sense.

Dupre then gets to what he takes to be the heart of the matter in terms of the connection between monism and the unity of science: the belief that science gives a complete account of nature. He says the belief that such a complete account must in principle exist is a supernatural belief not grounded in empirical science. He then goes on to argue that when we look at actual scientific practice, there is no reason to think that laws identified in one context will be capable of generalisation across diverse physical systems.

There then follows a discussion of the epistemic function of the myth of the unity of science: that once a practice gets the honorific title 'science' it joins an exclusive club that bestows epistemic warrant upon membership.

Dupre concludes with the idea that monism as a commitment to there being nothing beyond the physical realm is ok, because good empirical evidence to support it. But a form of monism such as physicalism goes beyond this, holding that everything must be explainable only in terms of the behaviour of the properties of the physical stuff physicists take to be the fundamental constituents of reality. This kind of monism is a myth and we should be pluralist naturalists allowing anyone in to the explanatory project who doesn't transgress the first kind of monism.

Pluralistic naturalism is obviously quite attractive but here are a couple of problems with it. Without the metaphysical commitment of physicalism, taking empirical science to be the arbiter of good epistemic practice becomes almost a matter of temperament. Physicalism underwrites the status of (some) empirical science as such an arbiter, because it tells us that this science is committed to investigation of reality in the only terms that are apt. Lose this underwriting function of physicalism and appealing to the experimental success of empirical science as evidence for adopting the weaker monism of anti-supernaturalism begins to look circular.

Even if we adopt anti-supernaturalism willingly, allowing so-called 'non-scientific' investigation into the fold might lead to rejections of our best science on various a priori grounds (one can be both an a priorist about scientific practice and an antisupernaturalist). Is this something that can seriously be called naturalism? Perhaps Dupre would here lean on his empiricism. This brings me to my final comment.

Dupre appeals repeatedly to empiricism as a central tenet of all naturalism. It is not really clear what is meant by this. It at least seems to mean prioritising empirical confirmation over other methods employed in doing science. But is this justified (is it more faithfully naturalistic)? Some might argue that given the importance of mathematics for understanding the natural world the theoretical virtues of this discipline trump the theoretical virtues of empirical confirmation. Then one might have a reason for supposing that naturalists should be committed to the idea that a complete unified explanation of reality is both possible and the asymptotic aim of inquiry. For mathematics, I presume, does not tolerate incommensurate theories.

Reading Group: Stroud, "The Charm of Naturalism"

Stroud poses what he calls 'restrictive naturalists' with a dilemma. Here it is in the case of colour (he also poses it for ethics, maths and logic):

"Exclude coloured objects in general from the world, and you are in danger of losing the capacity to recognise perceptions of and beliefs about the colours of things. Include coloured objects, and the contents of those perceptions and beliefs no longer go beyond what is in the natural world." (30).

His point seems to be that a 'restrictive naturalist' cannot account for the contents of our beliefs about those things that such a form of naturalism seeks to exclude from the world (e.g. colours). If colours are allowed to be in the natural world, then we no longer have a 'restrictive naturalism' but an 'open-minded naturalism'. And that, he thinks, wouldn't be a substantive version of naturalism at all. Everybody would count as a naturalist if that was what naturalism was.

Before I say what Stroud's case is, and what I think is wrong with it, I want to mention an astonishing claim he makes about naturalised epistemology. This is his claim that, unless some version of ontological naturalism is already in the picture, then epistemological naturalism lacks any significant content:

"Even [ontological] supernaturalists like Plantinga, Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, and others would still count as "naturalized epistemologists" in at least one current sense that has been given to that phrase. Epistemology has been said to be "naturalized or naturalistic" as long as it tries to explain only how human beings do in fact arrive at their beliefs rather than how they ought to arrive at them. If that is enough to make an epistemology naturalistic, then virtually every philosopher in history has been a naturalized epistemologist. They have all been concerned to describe and understand the human condition as it is, to see and explain how we actually get all the knowledge we've obviously got." (24)

It's pretty obvious where this goes wrong. First, Stroud slides from 'belief' to 'knowledge'. Naturalised epistemologists describe how we get beliefs, Descartes et. al. describe how we get knowledge. The difference, it needs hardly be said, is significant. But, second, the fact that Descartes et. al. seek to, "explain how we actually get all the knowledge we've obviously got" is not yet enough to qualify them as naturalized epistemologists even on the interpretation of the view that Stroud discusses. For that view maintains that epistemologists should not be concerned with questions of how we ought to form beliefs. But the suggestion that this was not part of Descartes' project is very much in need of argument.

The passage that I have been criticising occurs in a relatively peripheral part of the paper, which is in the main concerned with ontological naturalism. I mention it because I think it is a particularly clear instance of a slip that occurs later on.

So, back to the main dilemma. In particular, to the first horn. Here's what Stroud says about the case of colour:

"Since he [the 'restrictive naturalist'] holds that there is no such fact as an object's being coloured, he cannot specify the contents of those perceptions and beliefs [the ones of/about colours] in terms of any conditions that he believes actually hold in the world." (29)

Here's the general point:

"What human beings think, feel, and care about must be fully expressible somehow within the restricted resources available in the naturalist's world." (27)

Stroud seems to think that once we have eliminated the problematic entities we will not be able to give an account of the contents of our beliefs about those entities. But he seems to assume that such contents would need to be accounted for by facts which, let's suppose, are true propositions. But, surely, nobody thinks that contents should be understood as truths, rather they are truth-conditions. As such, beliefs can have contents that concern things that don't exist. If Stroud were right, then an surely an argument could be mounted to the effect that there must be phlogiston, since we have phlogiston beliefs.

What has gone wrong, it seems to me, is that Stroud has once more slid from talking about beliefs to talking about knowledge. The content of a belief is a truth-condition, the content of knowledge is a truth. Exactly the same slide occurs in the discussion of ethics where error theory is not mentioned as a possibility for the naturalist to take. (He presupposes the falsity of expressivism as an alternative account of the content of ethical beliefs. But we can grant him for the sake of argument). The same happens in the case of maths and logic, where the presupposition of knowledge is made explicit.

But perhaps error theories are ruled out because his is a 'regressive transcendental argument', one that presupposes knowledge then argues that such and such conditions must hold, i.e. there must be colours, etc. Perhaps it is reasonable to presuppose so much. Even still I want to dig my heels in, for Stroud doesn't give us any reason to suppose that other accounts of content are unavailable.What the naturalist requires, on Stroud's way of setting things up, is an account of content that allows us to have knowledge that appears to refer to things (better, kinds of things) that do not really exist. Obviously the plausibility of any such story will depend very much on the domain under discussion. But it seems to me that this should be taken as a challenge for the naturalist to take up rather than, as Stroud wants to suggest, a reason for thinking that naturalism is bound to fail.

Naturalism in Question

New term, new reading group here at tpn towers. This term we'll be reading (bits of) de Caro and Macarthur (eds.), Naturalism in Question. More details soon.

VRG: Maddy on Putnam

The chapter on Putnam concludes the first part of Maddy’s book. So far, she has traced the SP’s progress towards a philosophy that is immune against the siren song of external justification. In the preceding chapter she presented the outline of a philosophical naturalism that in contrast to Quine’s original, is unencumbered by traditional philosophical questions, in particular those that might provide a foothold for the skeptic.

I’m recalling this because it shaped my expectations about the Putnam chapter. I expected Putnam to be criticised for bringing elements of external justification to the “inside” of scientific inquiry rather than joining the SP on her route towards unadulterated naturalism. It is not clear to me if this is what Maddy is doing here. To me the Putnam chapter looks more like a stand-alone engagement with diverse aspects of Putnam’s anti-naturalistic position, in the course of which many previous points about “external” issues (especially those against Kant and Carnap) are restated. I have difficulties seeing how this chapter advances on the preceding ones or how it brings them to some sort of conclusion. This probably shows just how limited my understanding of this discussion is.

One major topic in this chapter is Putnam’s critique of scientific realism (pp, 98-102). For Maddy difficulties begin when Putnam (still in his early naturalistic phase) casts scientific realism in semantic terms, i.e. as the claim that scientific statements are either true or false. She thinks this bias towards theorising estranges Putnam from the empirical side of the naturalistic project and leads him to a peculiar two-level account of how scientific statements are justified. The semantic gloss on scientific realism suggests that it is committed to the notion that true scientific statements correspond to unconceptualised reality. Putnam rejects this notion of correspondence as metaphysical because unconceptualised reality and our concepts are incomparable in the last instance. Instead, as is well known, he suggests that theories in general provide us with a rationally acceptable picture of the world at large (internalism). In turn, ordinary scientific explanations are constrained by this picture. They do not refer to the mind-dependent world at large. Therefore they can still be said to correspond unproblematically to a mind-independent world (internal realism).

As before, when discussing the two-level theories of Kant and Carnap, Maddy agrees with the account of the constrained inquiry but denies that there is a second level in virtue of which the basic inquiry is constrained. So her SP is an internal realist who denies that Putnam’s internalism is needed to frame the basic inquiry. In rather close analogy to her previous critiques of two-level theories, Maddy claims not to understand why there is an additional issue about the relation between theories and the world at large (p. 101, also pp. 104-5). To the SP there is no reality sans phrase but the world as described by natural science. Similarly, there is no general conceptuality but language as described by science. Clearly, then, the problem that concepts and world are incomparable with each other does not arise for her, and there is no pressure towards Putnam’s internalism either. The world of science, broadly understood, provides the common denominator for words and world. Ground level inquiry is self-contained. Internal realism does not need constraints but can stand on its own.

This leads on to Maddy’s more specific points against Putnam’s anti-naturalism. Putnam argues that belief in the world as an independent structure goes hand in hand with holding that there is a single true theory (p. 106). As science evolves, however, statements about an independent world pass from one correct theory to the next and change their truth values in the process. If anything, says Putnam, this should convince us of the theory-dependence of the world. Maddy replies that there can be several correct ways of accounting for the world as an independent structure which do not reduce to each other or disprove each other. Her correct theories are not true theories in Putnam’s sense, of course, because they do not (attempt to) say anything about the world at large. They are sets of reasonable beliefs which can be compatible with each other. Therefore the properties of the world are not theory-dependent.

I will skip the epistemological interlude (pp. 107-10). Apart from giving Maddy the opportunity to repeat large chunks of an earlier debate, as I read it the discussion of cultural relativity is mainly a preface to the truth theoretic conclusion of the chapter. But I had difficulties understanding this conclusion, so I might be wrong. Putnam asserts, metaphysical issues aside, that those operating with one single method, like the SP, also must adhere to a single concept of truth. Taking my method to be the only method means dismissing the possibility of alternatives. Seeing no merit in what these alternatives could be and thus overriding them, I claim right assertibility for my statements and justify my dismissive attitude towards the possibility of alternatives in the name of the norms of “my” culture. This is self-refuting because right assertibility is not simply assertibility according to parochial norms. So monolithic truth claims are self-refuting -- unless “my” culture is not parochial but totally encompassing, which contradicts our understanding of a culture.

Maddy denies that this point affects the SP (pp. 110-11). In her view adopting a single method does not force the SP to adopt a specific definition of truth alongside it. The SP is mainly interested in the assessment of truth claims. In assessing these claims, the SP does not commit herself to any particular definition of truth. She simply checks if it is reasonable to believe X in the light of her other beliefs and her methods, or may be prompted to adjust these methods and beliefs in the light of X. So she doesn’t say “X is rightly assertible according to my standards” at all. In fact, if she did say something like this, there would be no space left for her constant self-assessment. This is the final criticism of Putnam. Due to his truth theoretic bias, he underplays the role of empirical confirmation and theory revision, both of which are crucial for the full-blooded naturalist.

Just two questions: (1) One might wonder how Maddy’s notion of the world as seen by science qualifies as independent reality. Sure, Maddy dismisses this as a traditional worry. She thinks this worry is based on too strong a notion of independence according to which reality is strictly beyond our best understanding. She takes independence to mean that there is a difference between our experience of reality and reality, not that reality is unconceptualised. If we grant this, it seems to me, we imply that our experience lags behind our concepts. Is this intuitive? Maddy obviously believes this. She thinks that we can conceptualise reality without experiencing it, e.g. have theories whose experimental confirmation is delayed (p. 107). But then, if I make the experiment that allows me to experience what the theory anticipates, do I experience independent reality.

(2) Regarding the deflated correspondence relation between word and world, Maddy claims that both our world and our words are shaped scientifically. Doesn’t this turn words into items of the world as seen by science? Linguists may not find this an unusual thought, of course. Still, in Maddy’s context, do different aspects of the world as seen by science still make for a telling correspondence relation with respect to independent reality? Or do we need an aspect change so that words return from, and stand over against, the world for this? In that case, I have difficulties seeing how this aspect change could be performed without a two-level theory. On the other hand, so much discursive work has gone into Maddy’s word-world relation to start with that understanding it in coherentist terms doesn’t look out of place at all.

VRG: Maddy on Quine

The chapter on Quine may seem like in-fighting amongst naturalists, but it has the virtue of delineating further, through the criticisms of Quine, the SP's position. If what I have to say today is unclear, that's because my thoughts on the issues are still fuzzy.

The criticisms of Quine appear to come from two directions: on the one hand he is said to incorporate non-naturlistic elements into his naturalism, on the other the exact character of his naturalism is taken to be problematic. In actual fact, however, the two strands of criticism are closely related. For, on Maddy's view, Quine's failing to be naturalistic enough - his taking on board too great a portion of the goals and concepts of the traditional philosophical (metaphysical and epistemological) project - is really one of the major sources of the problems with his position.

Of central importance here is the way in which Maddy interprets Quine as responding to (Stroudian) scepticism. Quine admits that there is a certain sort of circularity involved in the naturalist's response to scepticism (see fn. 4, p.84), in that the results of scientific investigation are relied upon in offering an account of knowledge. However, Maddy argues, Quine's own conception of what scientific investigation amounts to appears to undercut this move. For Quine thinks that the job of the naturalised epistemologist is to offer an account of "the relation between the meager input and the torrential output" (Quoted on p.89). Quine's 'input' is the 'stimulation of his sensory reseptors', and the 'output' is his theory. As is well known, Quine thinks that the former underdetermines the latter.

But, argues Maddy, thinking of things in this way is problematic. For our acceptance of one theory over another is, in a certain sense, arbitrary, and so it is unclear what justifies us in relying on this particular one in our response to the sceptic - in our account of the world and our knowledge of it. The problem, as Maddy sees it, is to conceive of naturalised epistemology as, roughly speaking, a sophisticated empiricism pursuing much the same goals as traditional epistemology (i.e. to account for the legitimacy of our 'output 'on the basis of our 'input')

SP sees the project of naturalised epistemology differently from Quine. She refuses to give the (Stroudian) sceptic the foothold he requires, because she declines the challenge of responding to the sceptic on his own terms. To the question of how we know, say, about medium sized physcal objects, she simply cites the relevant scientific findings (about neurophysiology, visual perception, etc.). SP finds no use for Quine's input/output distinction and thus doesn't think of the one as underdetermining the other. If so, then the Stroudian sceptic can't mount the same challenge as he did to Quine.

Early in the chapter, Maddy says of SP that, "she doesn't denounce as 'unscientific' the desire of Stroud's skeptic to find an independent justification for her methods; she simply sees no way to do this." (p.85). This way of putting things, however, seems to me to be rather precarious. For it sounds rather like accepting scepticism. Quine openly denies that science is "answerable to any supra-scientific tribunal" (quoted on p.85). SP, in keeping with her refusal to delimit science, doesn't do this. But, so it seems to me, she needs to have some other way of answering the objection that her methods are problematically circular. If all SP says to the Stroudian sceptic is that his objections are unanswerable, I think that she is in trouble. Maddy sometimes gives the impression that the difference, between SP and Quine, makes the difference between the legitimacy or otherwise of employing the apparently circular reasoning involved in the naturalistic response to scepticism. At no point does SP rely on any proposition such as 'beliefs formed scientifically are justified', for she has no conception of 'the scientific' per se, rather she simply uses the science itself. Does this sort of move help? We need to think about exactly the sort of circularity involved in both Quine's and SP's views.

Consider two arguments, A and B:

(A1) Beliefs formed scientifically are justified
(A2) Science (psychology perhaps) says that we see medium sized physical objects
So,
(A3) We see/there are medium sized physical objects

(B1) The human visual system works in such-and-such a way
(B2) That the human visual system works in this way allows us to see medium sized physical objects
So,
(B3) We see/there are medium sized physical objects

Roughly speaking, A is supposed to characterise a Quinian naturalist's reasoning (ignoring other aspects of Quine's view, such as ontological relativity, and concentrating on the naturalism), and B SP's reasoning. I hope I'm not mischaracterising here, although I admit that I'm pretty uncertain.

My question is whether A is problematically circular in a way in which B avoids. Obviously neither are explicitly circular (in neither case does the conclusion appear as a premise). But both look somehow problematic. The problem with A looks to be that our reasons for accepting (A1) are dependent on our accepting (A3). That is, if we didn't already accept (A3) we wouldn't accept (A1). With B, it looks as though the same can be said for both (B1) and (B2), that our reasons for accepting them rely on our already accepting (B3).

The question whether this sort of circularity is (always) a bad thing, making the arguments useless, is I think a very difficult one. For it depends on our giving a satisfying gloss on "our reasons for our accepting___ are depndent on our accepting___". But my point is that both arguments seem to be in the same boat. So, I don't see how SP's strategy is an improvement in the Quinian one (ignoring the comments about input/output, and the later discussion of holism which I leave to one side).

So, just admitting to the Stroudian sceptic that you can't answer his objection is not good enough. You need to be able to account for the reasonableness of your own procedures. If this is done by relying on the results of those procedures, the Stroudian can say that you're arguing in a circular way. But, as I see it, Quine and SP face the same challenge here.

Mind Workshop: Kitcher

Patricia Kitcher, "The Unity of Kant's Active Thinker", offered a particular interpretation of the transcendental deduction as moving regressively from the assumption of empirical cognition to the necessary condtions of thinking, including the transcendental unity of apperception. The unity of apperception shows the poverty of inner sense views, according to which inner sense simply takes a record of psychological goings on. Our awareness of rational judgement must proceed in the light of a consciousness of judging based on the evidence. Not only cannot inner sense views account for this phenomenon, neither can contemporary, naturalistic, accounts of reasoning modelled on production systems.

Maddy on Carnap

Maddy continues her rejection of two-level philosophical accounts (begun in the last chapter on Kant) that posit an empirical level of phenomena and some meta-level account of the framework constraints that structure the various domains of enquiry at the former level.

Maddy explains that Carnap is concerned with a Kantian-style project: that of eradicating metaphysical speculation from our discuorse, or as Carnap puts it, the task of eradicating 'pseudo-sentences' from our language. These sentences have no meaning because they transgress a constitutive feature of any meaningful language: that it be based on a set of governing framework rules of some sort or another that must be adopted in order for the sentences of the language to have meaning (pp67-68).

If sentences can only have meaning relative to such a linguistic framework then we meet with a new way of responding to the sceptic: the demand for external justification of our claims about the world is just wrongheaded, for any such claim only makes sense internal to a linguistic framework. Philosophers who ask ontological questions that are supposed to swing free of any such framework and are intended to then ground them are involved in a similarly wrongheaded enterprise (PP 68-69).

Carnap's linguistic framework approach still leaves us with a legitimate question, just not a philosohpical one. What languages should I adopt, that is, what framework rules should I admit into my repertoire and what ones should I change of those I already employ? This is a pragmatic question for Carnap, for there is no fact of the matter about what framework rules to adopt. Carnap codifies this pragmatism about frameworks in the 'Principle of Tolerance' - one is free to adopt whatever rules one wishes, all that is required for meaningful debate with others is that the framework be made clear so that the sentences of the language be understood in the right light (ppp70-71).

Carnap's position seems to give us a successor understanding of Kant's synthetic a priori: some truths are a priori internal to the framework (require no empirical confirmation within the framework to be accepted as true), but are pragmatic/conventional choices external to the framework. SP finds this odd: questions about what framework rules to adopt are not merely conventional choices outside of any linguistic framework, they are of a piece with the rest of her empirical enquiry.

But Maddy recognises that this (albeit very common) Kantian reading of Carnap's two-level approach is not really fair. He is not trying to supply a successor conception of a priority that would explain what makes sentences in specific scientific languages true without empirical input or verification (that they are 'internal' constitutive rules, but externally viewed mere conventions). Practising scientists do not employ linguistic frameworks in this way, rather, they are a construct of philosophers who impose them on scientific language for the purposes of 'rational reconstruction' (p78) - a philosophical procedure for rationalising scientific practices. The purpose of this procedure is to defuse various philosophical pseudo-debates about what grounds scientific knowledge (realism, idealism, nominalism, etc.). These egregious disagreements can be reduced to mere pragmatic choices via rational reconstruction. The touchstone of such reconstruction is the principle of tolerance which assumes that there is no fact of the matter at stake in various philosophical debates (e.g. realism/nominalism about mathematical objects).

Maddy rightly questions what exactly secures the methodology of rational reconstruction (what makes the principle of tolerance itself true)? Moreover, the pragmatic jusification of the principle seems to lead to the possibility of incoherence - it leaves it open for us to pragmatically adopt a different meta-principle that brings with it substantial ontological commitments. But that looks like letting conventional choices dictate the existence of substantial truths outside of rational reconstruction.

I take it that Maddy's criticisms of Carnap on this score are well taken. But these aside SP just doesn't see the point in the detour of rational reconstruction - what point does this 'peculiarly philosophical project' serve?

I am left wondering what is philosophical about second philosophy? At bottom, any attempt to stray from naturalistic methods of inquiry seems to be met with a 'what's the point?' that sounds like a 'what's the point of philosophy?' To talk very crudely, philosophy is in part an attempt to try to understand how the possibility of very general notions (such as 'thought', 'knowledge', 'meaning') simply assumed at the empirical level can be justified at some other level. Carnap tries to justify a rejection of various such justifications that he thinks cause intractable problems by showing that there's no fact of the matter upon which such debates turn. Of course, this is itself a philosophical position of the type Carnap wants to reject, so there is an incoherence here. But if we don't provide any arguments for why empirical knowledge might or might not be possible, or why this isn't a good question to ask, won't SP just look dogmatic, forced to share the domain of discourse with all sorts of other dogmatic positions that reject its cherished methods of inquiry?

VRG: Maddy, Kant's Transcendentalism

Maddy approaches Kant’s transcendentalism by distinguishing, helpfully, between what she calls a “harsh” and a “benign” reading. The harsh reading holds that empirical objects, which we can know, are strictly mental, basically Berkeleyan ideas; things in themselves are Locke’s external objects, except that neither secondary nor primary correspond to features of them (p. 51). This view steadfastly takes appearances and representations in the strictly empirical sense, as a subject’s mental contents which have no existence independently of their apprehension. There are, famously, passages in Kant that seem to support this reading, and among those who adhere to it Maddy lists Prichard, Strawson and Guyer (p. 50, note 7).

The benign view avoids the flattening understanding of appearances as simply subjective mental states, mere sensations. Kant does of course allow for mere subjective states to count as appearances – these are appearances in the empirical sense. But there are also appearances in the transcendental sense: those objects that are to be met with in space and time, which are independent of an individual’s mental states, are still mere appearances. The realm of appearances is thus expanded to include not only subjective states, but also empirically real objects whose existence is independent of individual states of consciousness. On this view, the very same objects which Kant allows are empirically real, those familiar independent objects around us that the natural scientist studies, are recognized at the level of critical reflection also to be appearances. Plants, rocks, raindrops and the like, are all empirically real (whereas for Berkeley they are empirically ideal) and at the same time transcendentally ideal. (See Maddy, 52-53)

The benign reading is thereby committed to a two-level theory. At one level we study the world around us as empirically real; at the transcendental level we switch and study that same world as transcendental appearance, i.e. as transcendentally ideal. As Maddy brings out clearly the two levels are supposed to be sufficiently insulated in Kant for the idealism of the transcendental level of inquiry not to compromise or even affect the ordinary practice of science at the empirical level. (p. 54). There is more to be said about the benign view (pp. 53-55) but the central feature is as outlined. Among those who take the benign view Maddy cites (p. 51, note 11) Allison, Bird and Matthews.

Leaving aside the question of which of the two interpretations is most accurate, Maddy concentrates her discussion on the benign view: partly because it is philosophically more interesting, but mainly because of its relevance to a central theme of her Second Philosophy – the rejection precisely of two-level theories such as the Kantian. The SP adheres steadfastly to a single level of explanation: the empirical explanations given by natural sciences. Given this orientation of SP, the Kantian two-level model usefully poses the question whether SP is missing out on anything, or somehow falling short in virtue of her confinement, and therein lies its interest for Maddy. The rest of the chapter (56-64) is devoted to this central question. In her view, it is not clear that there is anything cogent that the Kantian has to offer at the second level of theorizing.

Maddy’s worries about Kant’s level of transcendental inquiry, and SP’s refusal to follow him out of the safety of empirical explanations, are various. But there two main worries:

(1) Kant seems to have a cluster of substantive results from his transcendental inquiry (space and time being forms of intuition, characterizing apriori the world as it necessarily appears to us, thereby cutting us off from the world as it is in itself; the categories; all cognition requiring the contribution of the two primary faculties, sensibility and understanding, of both intuitions and concepts…). SP is happy to consider these results, but does so at the level of empirical inquiry, at which level there is no evidence to suggest that they hold. Kant agrees, of course, but thinks that SP needs to depart from the empirical level of inquiry, to engage in the transcendental inquiry. The trouble is that SP cannot see what the methods of transcendental inquiry are, and cannot consequently see how they yield the substantive results that comprise Kant’s transcendental psychology. (61-63)

(2) There is no explanatory task that SP can see needs to be carried out, and which cannot be carried out except at the transcendental level. Kant thinks there is – the task of explaining how synthetic apriori truths are possible; the task of identifying transcendentally necessary conditions of experience. This is something that empirical investigation cannot establish, but in Maddy’s view the SP regards the plea for an extra-empirical investigation as misguided. “Any judgement about whether or not we have a priori knowledge of the world can only be supported by serious investigation of the world and our cognitive access to it.” (p. 63)

Maddy concludes that SP can find in Kant’s project “no compelling motivation for his extra-empirical inquiry” – there is no outstanding puzzle about a priori knowledge that requires a departure from the familiar empirical methods of inquiry, and anyway there are serious problems with the nature of the methods of that extra-empirical inquiry. (p. 64).

There are several lines of discussion that could be followed up here. Some have to do with Kant scholarship, some are more general. Here are two of the latter.

(a) An austere version of Kant’s two-level inquiry might play down the substantive claims that comprise the doctrine of transcendental psychology, emphasizing rather those framework constraints that serve to keep our scientific investigations of the world resiliently confined to the empirical level. In addressing the pressure to a two-level account it might be better to concentrate on that austere version, in a way that Maddy does not. Indeed, it is arguable that any philosophical thesis to the effect that we are of necessity confined to asking internal questions, or to our empirical investigations, must resort to some such austere two-level account. This latter is not a criticism of SP, insofar as SP does not defend such a philosophical thesis; Maddy seems nicely to construe her confinement to the empirical as more a matter of a given intellectual orientation, of her philosophical proclivity. But the weakness of this orientation in the empirical – that it is difficult to render it resilient without precisely resorting to a two-level account, however minimal – is thereby obscured. (What is it, we may wonder, that stops SP from straying into metaphysics?) It may be that the later discussion of two-level views will address to this.

(b) Has Maddy made it clear enough that there is no interesting notion of transcendental necessity to contend with? There are transcendental arguments that seem to establish something like synthetic a priori necessities: say, the First and Second Analogies, perhaps the Refutation of Idealism, or the first argument of the Metaphysical Exposition of the Concept of Space. No doubt, Kant is not clear about either the method for revealing, or the nature of such necessities. But is Maddy not too quick to dismiss the idea that there may be something going on here, which sets a priori framework constraints on empirical level experience, and which cannot be established at the empirical level?

VRG: Maddy on Hume

The chapter on Hume (I.3) is entitled “Hume’s naturalism”. However, Maddy’s chief interest here is in Hume’s skepticism and in the connection between Hume’s skepticism and his naturalism. Her general line is that for skepticism to follow from naturalism, as is the case in (some interpretations of) Hume, this naturalism must be defective.

It is not difficult to see how this chapter connects to the previous ones. Against straightforward Cartesian skepticism, the SP maintains that an inquiry yielding reasonable beliefs can go ahead without the seal of certainty. Against extraordinary Cartesian skepticism, she maintains that an external justification of ordinary knowledge is not asked for. Humean skepticism is in line with the SP’s thinking so far. It raises cautionary rather than fundamental doubts, because it has roots in everyday empirical reasoning and does not adopt an “external” perspective on knowledge. However, Humean skepticism poses a different and more serious threat to the SP’s project. If skepticism is the “internal” consequence of an investigation based on ordinary perception and reasoning, she cannot simply undercut or ignore the skeptical challenge. In this case, the very stuff of her worldview, reasonable belief, generates doubts about rational warrants for such beliefs and thus undermines her investigation.

There are two basic ways of looking at the relation between naturalism and skepticism in Hume. Either his skepticism and his commonsense approach are distinct from each other, or his position is of one piece. The first set of accounts is less interesting. If seen as a separate issue, Hume’s skepticism can be treated more or less along the lines of the skepticism about external justification. Given the problem of an “internal” skepticism, Maddy concentrates on the single Hume for whom skepticism is a consequence of naturalism. She considers two versions of this interpretation. On the first of these (Broughton), Hume’s skepticism reflects clashes between norms of ordinary perception and reasoning. On the second of these (Stroud), Hume’s skepticism arises from his naturalistic rejection of the Cartesian ego. On the first view, there is a direct connection between Hume’s naturalism and skepticism. On the second view, this connection is indirect. It has the character of a critical appropriation, on the part of ordinary knowledge, of answers to extraordinary skepticism.

The direct connection between Hume’s naturalism and skepticism (after Broughton) can be pictured as follows. Ordinary perception and reasoning is subject to norms of clarity, consistency, carefulness, certain styles of causal argumentation and the existence of an external world. According to Hume, causal reasoning and the commitment to the existence of an external world can come apart in ordinary perception. I won’t rehearse Hume’s argument here, nor Maddy’s brief gloss on it. The familiar outcome is that ordinary reasoning can only rely on resemblance and contiguity, not cause and effect, when making connections between matters of fact. It can motivate us to attend to different ideas but falls short of reasonable beliefs. So if norms of ordinary perception and reasoning can come apart, we are left with certain habits of thought, not with stringent reasoning. This inspires cautionary skepticism.

Maddy’s SP concedes that ordinary cognitive norms can clash. Where Hume sees irrevocable confusion, however, the SP still sees potential for improvement. In her view, Hume is mistaken to conclude from the failure of some norms of ordinary perception and reasoning that they fail all at once. From the SP’s perspective, the norms of ordinary perception and reasoning are open to reassessment and refinement, much like the claims of second philosophy in general. So if there is a clash between these norms, some norms should be amended or changed. This process leaves enough ground for the SP to stand on, even if there is an incompatibility between, say, principles of causal reasoning and commonsense realism. In short, Hume’s direct “internal” skepticism can be defused by appealing to a more thoroughgoing fallibilism. According to the SP, Hume’s declaration that these clashes are irrevocable and irremediable falls short of this “spirit of open inquiry” characteristic of naturalism. So his skepticism does not follow from naturalism properly conceived, and the SP prevails.

The indirect connection between naturalism and skepticism (after Stroud) does not involve specific ordinary cognitive norms. For Hume, reasoning as such is part of the natural causal order. Hence its opposition to the detached thinking substance of Cartesian philosophy. Hume’s basic argument against the Cartesian ego is that standards of detached reasoning fail, because they do not reflect how human beings are like from an empirical perspective. If measured by the standards of detached reasoning, empirical human beliefs could never be reasonable. Clearly, the SP agrees with this critique.

But the indirect view doesn’t leave it at that. It describes Hume’s skepticism as something like an after-image of his critical engagement with the Cartesian ego. Stroud argues (in oddly dialectical fashion) that this engagement prompts the transfer into the commonsense view the traditional philosophical attitude that something is lacking from ordinary practices, turning this attitude against the traditional philosophical view. What Hume has learned from the traditional philosophical perspective, according to Stroud, is that ordinary practices can be accounted for comprehensively by distancing the account from ordinary terms. Against the detached standpoint, however, Stroud’s Hume envisages a distancing from the ordinary view that is continuous with this view. The perspective anticipated by Hume—as I understand Stroud, and I’m not sure if I get his point—is that of a sustained naturalistic investigation of human life which is a fully philosophical naturalism, a philosophical vindication, rather than a mere restatement, of ordinary perception and reasoning in the medium of that reasoning. Hume’s skepticism is an after-image of this Cartesian impulse, because Hume is kept from making sense of a comprehensive account of human nature in the medium of ordinary reasoning by his associationism. He fails to carry forward his naturalistic project, so the indirect view, because he cannot revert to a realist picture of human nature.

To the SP, the most important virtue of the indirect view is to have exposed another insufficiency in Hume’s naturalism. As before, this confirms to her that Hume’s “internal” skepticism does not follow from naturalism properly conceived and thus doesn’t present a threat to the SP’s own project. (She does not make much of Stroud’s transfer from Descartes in this context. To her, the naturalistic project of a Hume cured from his doubts would be a plain triumph over traditional philosophy.) In the concluding lines, the SP suggests how to remedy the limitations of Hume’s naturalism. An obvious course of action (already suggested by Stroud) is to fully naturalise the mental side of Hume’s views on perception and reasoning. The SP’s therapy (briefly hinted at here and presented in the second part of Maddy’s book) will replace associationism with evolutionary psychology.

Questions: Can the SP expand her fallibilism about reasonable belief to the norms of ordinary perception and reasoning without further ado? Are these norms just reasonable beliefs? Is this second order fallibilism? Either of these would be strange, or require more argument, it seems to me. Aren’t reasonable beliefs about the world revised against the background of cognitive norms as well? If new evidence forces us to revise our theory, doesn’t this involve readjusting e.g. offset explanatory models against norms of consistency rather than revising these norms?
It may be a bit unfair to make much of Maddy’s concluding gestures about evolutionary psychology. Still, given that Hume’s skepticism culminates in the claim that our reasoning is truly just a habit of association, we might wonder whether the SP’s evolutionary psychology doesn’t simply discover further habits and enshrine them as reasoning. How would this defeat skepticism?