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.

Maths & Logic Workshop: Michael Potter

Michael Potter presented the outline of a theory of arithmetic for which a priori knowledge is not trivial (contra empiricism) and which takes a qualified attitude towards absolutely unknowable truths (contra full-blooded transcendentalism). He started with a short appraisal of Kant’s contribution to arithmetic, holding fast to the Kantian notion of synthetic a priori truths as a genuine addition to monadic and polyadic logic while rejecting Kant’s idealist account of these truths.

Potter proceeded to recall that Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem leads to the disjunctive conclusion that either human minds are not machines or there are absolutely unknowable truths about arithmetic. Both disjuncts are not empiricist (provided the rejection of physicalism about the mind results in a non-empiricist position). However, it is not clear from Gödel’s argument whether both are transcendental. Potter turned to Wittgenstein to motivate a transcendental interpretation of Gödel’s first disjunct. Wittgenstein remarked that there is no space between our capacity for recognising the limits of our cognitive abilities – so that it makes sense to say that there are absolutely unknowable truths about the mind – and the absence of this capacity – so that all a priori truths about the mind turn out trivial. If this is true, the rejection of empiricism about minds implies transcendentalism.

Combining Wittgenstein’s views about cognitive limits with Gödel’s disjunction results in a further disjunction. Potter concluded that the introduction of synthetic a priori truths in arithmetic implies that there are either absolutely unknowable truths about the mind or absolutely unknowable truths about arithmetic. This disjunctive conclusion makes it unnecessary to commit to absolutely unknowable truths across the board (in analogy to Dummett’s non-systematic conception of antirealism). Committing to either transcendentalism about the mind or about arithmetic is unavoidable, but there are no external criteria to adjudicate on which side our commitments go. It is in this sense that Potter’s (tentative) transcendental position on arithmetic is a qualified position and not a full-blooded one. We are committed to transcendentalism about arithmetic if human minds are machines. We may be committed to it if that is not the case.

Reading Group: Lear's 'Disappearing We'

Jonathan Lear takes a line on the later Wittgenstein (LW) inspired by the Williams' paper we read last week. The paper outlines Wittgenstein's investigation of the way inner episodes of understanding meaning are intrinsically connected to the potentially publicly available outer manifestation of the practical ability to follow a rule. It compares this to Kant's investigation of how intuitive representations are 'saturated' by concepts due to their being instances of the analytic unity of apperception. The quite general point of comparison is that a certain synthetic unity amongst representations is required to make possible inner episodes of understanding/apperception. For LW the synthetic unity in question is constituted by language-games, so that understanding has to be capable of manifesting itself in rule-following which is potentially recognisable as a shared linguistic practice. Lear glosses this in terms of every 'I understand' implying a 'We are so minded'. This is supposed to license the 'we' in the second locution disappearing, so that what makes sense to 'us' shortens to 'what makes sense'. I presume the thought here is that if any case of understanding a word will also be a case of some potentially publicly available linguistic ability manifested in a language-game, then the 'we' who take making sense to consist in such manifestation just is the 'we' of sense-makers simpliciter.

The disappearing 'we' is one leg of Lear's interpretation of LW. The other is that our reflective self-consciousness of the fact that making sense simpliciter is a matter of words being potentially manifested in shared linguistic practices is consciousness of a form of transcendental idealism. The idea here is that the metaphysical articulation of the world is utterly enmeshed with the linguistic articulation of language-games - to individuate an object is always to articulate a view of the world that is part of our linguistically articulated 'form of life'. The thought is that any such individuation will consist in introducing one more possible articulation of the world that the global 'we' finds makes sense as a language-game, and that this means there is no room for articulating how the world is in itself. Or, to put it another way, on this view, the limits of possibilia coincide with the limits of what is linguistically articulable.

There are two obvious questions here. Does the 'we' disappear simply because understanding a word requires potentially publicly available manifestations of rule-following? If so, does this really imply idealism? To the first question, I think the answer is yes. If the global 'we' is defined as those subjects who understand meanings in terms of publicly available rule-following or shared linguistic practices, then any such understanding will be encompassed by some shared linguistic practice. It is then an anayltic truth that understanding will be part of the global 'we'. As for the second question, I'm not sure. I think it will depend on what one understands by 'realism'. If this is understood as our linguistic articulation of the world not falsifying the properties and relations that the world contains , then I don't think anything idealistic follows (some subset of our form of life might be articulated by language-games that precisely 'map' what there is). But if realism is taken as having an epistemic element, so that it requires that what makes our thoughts/sentences true is their correspondence with a world as it is in itself, then I think the position is transcendentally ideal. For it says that no such correspondence is intelligible, for there is now no sense to the idea of the way the world is in itself.

Reading Group: Williams on Wittgenstein

I'm going to be very brief today for the reason that my grip on some of the central aspects of this paper is pretty slender. As is familiar, Williams thinks that there is a view implicit in the later Wittgenstein that might be called 'first-person plural transcendental idealism'. All rests on his view that the later Wittgenstein accepts something along the lines of "the limits of our language mean the limits of our world" (p.150).

I want to focus in on two remarks that Williams makes that are, as I understand it, intended to give flesh to this first-person plural transcendental idealism. They are:

"what the world is for us is shown by the fact that we can make sense of some things and not others: or rather - to lose the last remnants of an empirical and third-personal view - in the fact that some things and not others make sense." (p.152)

"our language, in this sense in which its being as it is has no empirical explanation, shows us everything as it appears to our interests, our concerns, our activities, though in the only sense in which we could meaningfully say that they determined everything, that statement would be false. The fact that in this way everything can be expressed only via human interests and concerns, things which are expressions of mind, and which themselves cannot ultimately be explained in any further terms: that provides grounds, I suggest, for calling such a view a kind of idealism." (p.151)

The relevant "we" here is not an empirical group of people located within the world, but a plural version the metaphysical self of the Tractatus. This is what is supposed to legitimate the move in the first quote that would otherwise appear to express an unfounded optimism, or arrogance. The thought is perhaps expressed by saying that "we" refers to all possible subjects. One problem with this might be that we (some empirical group) cannot be said to have privileged access to what "we" can make sense of. But I won't say anything about that.

My query is why we should think of the first quote as expressing a form of idealism. It concerns, after all, what the world is for us. But shouldn't idealism tell us something about what the world is. I realise that this is overly blunt. But the point is that there is a way of reading the first quote such that it is very far from idealistic.

The second quote, I presume, is supposed to provide something of an answer to this query. It seems reasonable to suppose that Williams' use of "human" in this passage is a slip suggesting, as it does, some empirical group. But, in so far as I think I understand the claim, it once more seems to me to be susceptible to non-idealist readings. For the claims concerns "everything as it appears" and the way "everything can be expressed". But this doesn't strike me as being a claim about what is in any obvious way. Or, at least, I need to be shown why we should understand even this second passage amounts to something which should be regarded as treating the world (phenomenal, noumenal, empirical, transcendental, in-itself, whatever...) rather than our expression of it, or its appearance, as in some sense mind-dependent.

These remarks are, no doubt, naive. As I said, I felt that much of the subtlety of this paper was passing me by. But nobody said life was a bed of roses. J

Idealism Workshop: Moore

In his paper, "Vats, Sets and Tits", Adrian Moore explored some of the relations between Putnam's proof that we could not be brains in vats, a certain form of scepticism concerning set theory, and a radical form of transcendental idealism. An appealing response to Putnam's original argument is to claim that it answers one kind of scepticism only to leave us with another - the worry that we cannot tell whether our thoughts are limited to our "phenomenal bubble" (a limited aspect of how things are). But this kind of scepticism can be answered, thinks Adrian, by pointing out that for the subject to describe his phenomenal bubble as failing to encompass all the things there are, he has thereby thought about all the things there are. One way to respond to this is to move to a radical form of transcendental idealism according to which we can achieve some kind of inexpressible insight into the possibility that my thoughts are only answerable to my phenomenal bubble.

But the existence of such an inexpressible insight does not vindicate transcendental idealism, at best it indicates that for all I know transcendental idealism may be true. As Wittgenstein pointed out, as soon as we try to draw the limits of the thinkable, we will fail (by thinking the supposedly unthinkable). Thus we cannot think of any insight we may have as the insight that our thinking is only answerable to the phenomenal bubble. In this way, we should resist the move to radical transcendental idealism.

In discussion a number of different issues came up. One was how we should think of the Cartesian dreaming hypothesis in relation to the various types of scepticism discussed. Another was whether we should accept that the brain in Putnam's vat can have thoughts at all, since it seems that he would be unable to think about (genuine) propositions, and that looks as though it may be a condition of the possibility of thought. Finally, there is the question as to what conception of thought is being assumed in the Wittgensteinian denial of the possibility of drawing a limit to thought. Might not some "thick" conceptions of what thought about an object requires block such a move?

Some Thoughts on Transcendental Idealism and the Later Wittgenstein

Here are some thoughts that might be relevant to the discussion that followed Stephen Mulhall’s paper at the recent Wittgenstein workshop.

One of the charges made against transcendental idealism (TI) by the early Witgenstein is that transcendental claims are at best senseless and at worst false. For example, Wittgenstein asserts that the transcendental self as the linguistic subject is supposed to set the limits to the world. But he also asserts that this statement lacks sense because the limits in question restrict sense to factual statements about possible combinations of simple objects, yet the statement is not a factual one.

Now, the idea of a referential isomorphism between elementary propositions and simple objects falls apart with the colour exclusion problem. This leads Wittgenstein eventually to a language game based theory of meaning, where reference is still set by the possible combinations of objects, but where these combinations do not have a general form reflected in the general form of the proposition as factual assertion. We also get allowed into our theory of meaning non-referential forms of discourse such as giving orders. Obviously some of the senses employed in the latter linguistic practice are not meaningful in virtue of being true or false (by referring or not).

The kind of TI advocated by Lear and others (apparently inspired by Williams) is one where we test the limits of intelligibility (sense) through noting where our understanding runs out. The first thing to say is that this kind of ‘testing’ discourse cannot be ruled out as lacking sense simply because it is non-factual. If that was the case then giving orders wouldn’t make sense either. This leaves it open for the later Wittgenstein to countenance the activity of ‘showing’ the limits of sense via a specific family of non-factual second-order language games. If you like, talking about the limits of language ― doing philosophy ― is just another sui generis human language game, like that of giving orders, that reflects ‘our way of being minded’. So one cannot appeal to the early Wittgenstein’s charge of incoherence against transcendental claims when denying he is espousing a first-person plural TI of some form in his later work.

Stephen makes a case for reading the ‘limits of my language…’ comment, with regard to the later Wittgenstein, trivially ― as stating the truism that what someone can’t bring to language she can’t include in a linguistically constructed view of the world. Some of the motivation for this trivial reading of the comment comes from the incoherence charge which I have just said doesn’t hold for the later Wittgenstein. The rest of the motivation comes from Wittgenstein’s ‘quietism’ ― his railing against ‘constructive philosophy’ that advances ‘theses in philosophy’. I take the target of Wittgenstein’s quietism to be philosophical outlooks that lead us into making a problem out of aspects of our ‘mindedness’ that seem unproblematic before we do philosophy ― such as following rules, being aware of other’s mental states, perceiving that something is red. But Lear’s Williams-inspired view that the later Wittgenstein is a kind of transcendental idealist does not present him as engaged in advancing philosophical theses that make a problem of what common sense takes in its stride. The term ‘our mindedness’ is supposed to capture the characteristic ease with which our minds engage the world, of how ‘we go on’. Mapping out the limits of that mindedness is mapping out where that characteristic ease begins to fall away, causing the ‘we’ to disappear by showing that the idea that things could be different loses its force ― where understanding goes dark limits show up that dissolve the need for constructive philosophy to reassure us our mindedness isn’t caught up in some kind of Whorfian relativism.

So if reading the comment trivially is motivated by the thought that countenancing some form of substantive (transcendental) conception of limits to intelligibility leads to constructive theses in philosophy, then this motivation gains no succour from Lear’s understanding of the later Wittgenstein’s TI. But there might still be the worry that understanding these limits reassures us of the ‘transcendental’ fit between mind and world, when really all it does is make plain that we need seek no such transcendental guarantee, because the question over such fit is cognitively empty. McDowell makes this distinction in an afterword to Mind and World (pp. 158-9 of the 1996 paperback). Yet even if we rein in Lear’s TI to this minimal point about rendering Whorfian relativism senseless, there is still an issue about the modal status of the cognitive structures we are investigating. Even if those structures are just our way of being minded, surely some of the structures in question can be necessary for that mindedness ― contingent as it is ― to be what it is? The image of a cognitive terrain preexisting our linguistic practices upon which we gradually fill out possibilities is the image that Lear and others are invoking when they talk about first-person plural TI as mapping out such necessary cognitive structures.

Stephen questioned the need for such an image. To that end he attempted to rebut the charge of relativism laid at the later Wittgenstein’s door ― the charge of adhering to a constructivist theory of meaning. This rebuttal is necessary to neutralise the desire to appeal to the image as a bulwark against such constructivism. Stephen did this by showing that the later Wittgenstein has no room for a realism/idealism distinction, so no room for being a ‘constructivist’ about meaning. I was quite convinced by this at the time, but now I am not so sure (and I see now the force of Michael Morris’s comment).

The thing is, I can’t see how we can deny sense to the realism/idealism debate without appealing to the image of a preexisting cognitive terrain. We refuse idealism by denying sense to the claim that things could be otherwise for us. But that seems to involve the idea that there is a way things make sense to us ― precisely the preexisting cognitive terrain that is our way of being minded. We refuse realism by denying that we could hook ourselves up to the world in a way that was independent of our mindedness ― that is, by denying we could take some God’s-eye-view of reality. But this too seems to entail that there is a definite way we are minded. Thus anything less than the image seems to push us into one or the other of idealism and realism. If the instances where understanding goes dark are not taken as instances of our mindedness reaching its limits, then this is tantamount to the belief that there are no limits and we could take another viewpoint on reality (idealism). With such idealism in mind, we get the vertigo that generates the need for a constructive philosophy that reintroduces a distinction between our access to the world and how it is in-itself (realism).

This seems to me to leave us in the apparently odd position of asserting that escaping the realism/idealism debate requires adopting TI. But perhaps we should remind ourselves that all that is being asserted by such ‘TI’ is that because our way of being minded has a necessary structure, certain philosophical questions are in principle cognitively empty for us. This only seems like idealism when we compare it to classical realism. But then what this version of ‘TI’ shows us is that such realism can have no sense for us.