Philosophy And Its Epistemic Neuroses

Michael Hymers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000302691
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

This book argues that analytical philosophy and radical theory alike stand in an ambivalent relationship with skepticism. It explains structuralism, feminist theory and critical theory to outline a therapeutic alternative to philosophical theoreticism.

1
The "External" World

The neurotic may discuss his problems—he may indeed—but he never means business; the discussion is not a means to action, to something other than itself; on the contrary, after a while we get the impression that in spite of his evident unhappiness and desire to come from hesitation to decision he also desires the discussion never to end and dreads its ending. Have you not quite often had this impression with philosophers?—philosophers other than ourselves, for we, of course, are never neurotic.

—John Wisdom, Philosophy and Psycho-Analysis

What could a diagnosis of the habits of philosophers as "neurotic' amount to, beyond unflattering rhetoric? Wisdom is reluctant to press the comparison with neurosis: "There is a big difference between the philosopher and both the psychotic and the obsessional neurotic," he says, locating that difference in "the flow of justificatory talk, of rationalization, which the philosopher produces when asked why he takes the extraordinary line he does" (1957, 174). Of course, the psychologically disordered sometimes give reasons too—even quite elaborate justifications. But the difference, says Wisdom, is that "we are impressed by the philosophers talk" (174f.). Even if we are not quite convinced by it, it retains a ring of plausibility that is absent from the reasons we get from the neurotic or the psychotic.

Now, there is a much greater difference than the one Wisdom offers: Neuroses make people miserable, and psychoses destroy people's lives. Philosophy usually does not—though it might on occasion trouble the sleep of the impressionable. Wisdom is well aware of this, describing his encounter with a man who felt compelled to "starve himself and study the Scriptures" (1957, 172). But the point is worth mentioning, so that it will be clear that I do not regard philosophers as people in suffering or as deserving of special sympathy. (Madness is worse than philosophy.) And the only therapy that I recommend—paradoxically—is more philosophy.

We can see better what Wisdom's simile might amount to, I think, if we turn our attention to a real case of "epistemic neurosis"—the attempt to be a metaphysical realist without being a skeptic about the "external" world.

Two Kinds of Realism Conflated

The term realism has acquired so many different, at times conflicting, connotations in so many different contexts that it might seem prudent to avoid it altogether. (I shall not exercise such prudence.) Realism has at one time or another been used to refer to a view regarding the existence of universals, as a synonym for materialism or physicalism (in contrast to idealism), as a view about the existence of unobservable entities postulated by the sciences (in contrast to instrumetitalism), as a view in the semantics of natural languages that takes the meaning of a sentence to be given by its truth-conditions, rather than its assertibility-conditions (as is contended by proponents of "antirealism"),¹ and as the related, but distinct, view that the truth-conditions of sentences of natural language in some sense "transcend" our abilities to recognize them.²

The sense of realism I have in mind is most closely connected with the realism-idealism contrast. I want to distinguish two kinds of realism that I shall refer to as metaphysical realism and modest realism, viewing the former with disfavor and the latter with favor. These two kinds of realism diverge precisely-over how to interpret the "mind-independence" or "discourse-independence" or "objectivity" of the world, as I explain below. But the approach I shall take here also has consequences for how we should conceive of truth. Part of my contention later (see Chapter 4) will be that truth is an epistemic notion not in the sense that it can be defined or analyzed in terms of epistemic concepts like warrant and justification, but in the sense that its use cannot be understood without an acquaintance with such concepts. There is an internal relation (in a sense to be further specified) between the concept of truth and the concept of justification.

The construal of realism as an epistemic or semantic doctrine has been criticized by Michael Devitt, who has insisted that we "Settle the realism issue before any epistemic or semantic issue" (1997, 4). Realism, in his view, is primarily a metaphysical doctrine, and it should be justified or criticized on those grounds before one turns to any considerations about knowledge or meaning and truth, Michael Dummett, he thinks, is a clear example of someone who has not heeded this advice.

We have Dummett to thank for the "colorless term 'anti-realism'" (1979,145), though we should not blame him for the reckless abandon with which that term has come to be used. On Dummett's account, antirealism opposes a view called (surprisingly enough) "realism," and realism is, in turn, a view that one can hold of a particular set of statements, for example, statements about theoretical entities, statements about the past or the future, or statements about material objects. A realist about a class of statements is someone who maintains of those statements that they "possess an objective truth-value, independently of our means of knowing it: they are true or false in virtue of a reality existing independently of us" (146). The antirealist, by contrast, holds of the "disputed" class of statements that their possessing truth-values depends on our "means of knowing" them. Dummett's antirealist "insists... that the meanings of these statements are tied directly to what we count as evidence for them, in such a way that a statement of the disputed class, if true at all, can be true only in virtue of something of which we could know and which we should count as evidence for its truth" (146). These descriptions of realism and antirealism run together just the sorts of issues that Devitt thinks ought to be kept quite distinct: epistemic or semantic issues about truth, on the one hand, and metaphysical issues about independently existing reality, on the other.

Devitt, as we have seen, holds that realism is best defined as a doctrine about the "mind-independence" of the world, and that epistemic and semantic questions must be held secondary to a proper account of this independence. But the phrase mind-independence is notoriously difficult to make clear. Putnam contends that the sort of independence at issue can be neither causal nor logical, on the ground that no careful opponent of realism is likely to deny either of these modes of independence. "The problem of the inexplicability of metaphysical realism," he proclaims, "simply re-emerges as the problem of the inexplicability of the required notion of'independence'" (1992b, 355).

However, Devitt is reasonably clear that the sort of independence that he has in mind is, in part, an epistemic independence: "Realism, though largely metaphysical, is a little bit epistemic and semantic: the world must be independent of our knowledge of it and of our capacity to refer to it" (1997, 4). Part of what he means by this, I presume, is that what we believe about the world typically neither causes the world to be that way nor entails that the world is that way. Neither does the world's being a certain way usually entail that I believe it to be, though it might often cause me to believe it. Of course, inasmuch as I am part of the world, there are some beliefs that can be causally self-fulfilling. My lack of self-confidence might lead me to believe that I will fail at some task, and this belief might then undermine my chances of success. As well, my believing that I believe something logically guarantees that I do, and the world's being such that I believe that p entails that I believe that p. But my believing that the wolf is at the door neither causes the wolf to be at the door nor entails it.

Such epistemic independence Devitt takes to characterize the notion of objectivity: "To say that an object has objective existence ... is to say that it is not constituted by our knowledge, by our epistemic values, by our capacity to refer to it, by the synthesizing power of the mind, by our imposition of concepts, theories, or languages" (1997, 15). But a commitment to the objectivity of the world, he thinks, is insufficient for realism, because certain forms of idealism share that commitment: "The unsensed sense data of some empiricists, and Kant's preconceptualized intuitions, have objective existence in the above sense" (15). Thus, independence for the realist is independence both from our epistemic capacities and from all things "mental," where the latter qualification is intended to be an affirmation of the "material" or "physical" nature of things.³

But all this still leaves a difficulty for the idea of mind-independence. In particular, Devitt's formulation does nothing to distinguish the two ways of interpreting "mind-independence" that I have said separate metaphysical realists from modest realists. They differ in their contrary attitudes toward the vulnerability of our knowledge claims about the world around us to a certain kind of skeptical doubt. Realists of both kinds think that the nature and existence of the world are independent of our epistemic capacities or, better yet, of the reliability of those capacities—that is, of the tendency of our cognitive abilities to provide us with true empirical beliefs. But there are two ways in which the world could be so independent.⁴

First, it might simply be that the world could exist much as it does, with trees and shrubs and diatomaceous earth and planetary nebulae, in the absence of human beings and a fortiori in the absence of our epistemic capacities. It is not unusual to believe that it once did so exist, and sober reflection will easily convince many that someday it might so exist once again. Call this view modest realism. Modest realism is a view that does not have a great deal of content (hence its "modesty"). The modest realist further believes that we can hold empirical beliefs that are false, but she does not draw the additional conclusion that there is a serious skeptical threat to our knowledge of the world around us. From the mere fact that any given empirical belief might be wrong it does not follow that all our empirical beliefs might be wrong, any more than from the mere fact that some money is counterfeit it follows that all money might be counterfeit.⁵

There is nothing aberrant in referring to the foregoing position as a kind of realism. It is certainly not a variety of idealism. But it is not yet metaphysical realism. The metaphysical realist insists that the nature and existence of the world are independent of the reliability of our epistemic capacities in a much stronger sense: Our empirical beliefs might fail quite systematically to represent the world correctly. In other words, the metaphysical realist, but not the modest realist, sees the mind-independence of the world as characterized by our vulnerability to the doubts of the external-world skeptic. (I say "the" external-world skeptic, but there is more than one way to be skeptical about the "external" world, as we shall see shortly.) Of course, as I indicated above, the modest realist allows that we can have false beliefs, but that fact, she insists, does not entail that we can be wrong in the encompassing way that the skeptic suggests.

The Same Conflation Again

The link I have suggested between metaphysical realism and skepticism has been made by other philosophers. But in making this link, they have often, like Devitt, run together metaphysical realism (or "strong objectivism," as I shall also sometimes call it) and modest realism. According to Colin McGinn, for example, anyone who adopts a position that "manifestly ... foreclose[s] the threat of skepticism" is automatically an "anti-realist" (1979, 115).⁶ Thomas Nagel writes that "The search for objective knowledge, because of its commitment to a realistic picture, is inescapably subject to skepticism" (1986, 71). Realism, he tells us, can take "two possible forms," namely, "skepticism and objective knowledge," and "The two are intimately bound together" (70f.). There is no distinction here between metaphysical and modest versions of realism, because any deviation from "the realist claims of objectivity" (71) is a lapse into "a form of idealism," which "conflicts with" the idea that "the world is independent of our minds" (90).

David Papineau concurs. Sounding at first like a modest realist, he remarks that "the Cartesian picture of self-intimating 'insides' contrasting with inaccessible 'outsides' shouldn't still be on the philosophical agenda thirty years after Wittgensteins private language argument and Sellars's attack on givens" (1987, x). Yet he goes on to write:

Intuitively, realists are philosophers who accept that there is an independent reality which is as it is independently of human judgment. But because they think of reality and judgment as separate in this way, realists think there is always a possibility that our judgments might fail to represent the world as it is. And so realists, unless they are to subside into skepticism ... will feel that there is a need for us somehow actively to ensure that our beliefs do get the world right. (2)

But subsiding into skepticism is a worry characteristic of metaphysical realism, not modest realism, and the "Cartesian picture of... inaccessible 'outsides'" belongs, I suggest, with the former doctrine, not the latter.

Nagel and Papineau are not alone in their treatment of realism. Bernard Williams, in a discussion of Descartes's philosophy, links realism to what he calls the "absolute conception of reality" (1978,65)—a conception of "the reality which is there 'anyway'" (65): "If knowledge is what it claims to be, then it is knowledge of a reality which exists independently of that knowledge, and indeed ... independently of any thought or experience. Knowledge is of what is there anyway" (64). Reality's "independence" from our knowledge of it—its being there "anyway" —sounds rather like the independence that a modest realist might attribute to the world of spatio-temporal objects. However, Williams glosses it as "the source of the invitation" to skeptical doubt (64), and he insists that it is not Cartesian demands for certainty that issue this invitation (62ff.). It is the very objectivity of the world, in Williams's view, as in Nagel's, that threatens our knowledge of it.

Barry Stroud's excellent book on skepticism offers us a similar picture of objectivity, portraying it as a conception that is already bound up with our everyday practices:

I think we do have a conception of things being in a certain way quite independently of their being known or believed or said to be that way by anyone. I think the source of the philosophical problem of the external world lies somewhere within just such a conception of an objective world, or in our desire, expressed in terms of that conception, to gain a certain kind of understanding of our relation to the world. But in trying to describe that conception I think I have relied on nothing but platitudes we would all accept. (1984, 82)

In Stroud's view the conception of objectivity that gives rise to skepticism embodies nothing that we are not obliged to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Philosophy and Neurosis
• 1 The "External" World
• 2 Internal Relations
• 3 Truth and Reference
• 4. Renouncing All Theory
• 5 Conceptual Schemes
• 6 The Ethical-Political Argument
• 7 Realism and Self-knowledge
• 8 Self-knowledge and Self-unity
• Conclusion: The Rhetoric of Neurosis
• Credits
• Reference List
• Index