Contemporary Philosophical Naturalism and Its Implications

Bana Bashour, Hans D. Muller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135082475
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

One of the most pervasive and persistent questions in philosophy is the relationship between the natural sciences and traditional philosophical categories such as metaphysics, epistemology and the mind. Contemporary Philosophical Naturalism and Its Implications is a unique and valuable contribution to the literature on this issue. It brings together a remarkable collection of highly regarded experts in the field along with some young theorists providing a fresh perspective. This book is noteworthy for bringing together committed philosophical naturalists (with one notable and provocative exception), thus diverging from the growing trend towards anti-naturalism.

The book consists of four sections: the first deals with the metaphysical implications of naturalism, in which two contributors present radically different perspectives. The second attempts to reconcile reasons and forward-looking goals with blind Darwinian natural selection. The third tackles various problems in epistemology, ranging from meaning to natural kinds to concept learning. The final section includes three papers each addressing a specific feature of the human mind: its uniqueness, its representational capacity, and its morality. In this way the book explores the important implications of the post-Darwinian scientific world-view.

1 Exploring the Post-Darwinian Naturalist Landscape

Bana Bashour and Hans D. Muller

Once upon a time, Aristotelean teleologists studied the natural world, both organic and inorganic, with the goal of revealing the divinely imposed ultimate purpose of things. Things have changed. Galileo’s mathematization of physics removed Aristotelean final causes from the inorganic part of the natural world: that is a settled matter. Darwin then completed this revolution in the sciences by extending it to the organic part of the natural world. But there is considerable room for disagreement, even among naturalists, about just what the terms of the cease-fire were at the cessation of that revolutionary conflict. What is the relationship between Darwin’s contributions to natural science and the prospects for purposes or reasons in the organic sphere? Some twenty-first-century naturalists believe that Darwin removed final causes from the organic part of the natural world. For these thinkers, quite literally, there really is no purpose to life. But some post-Darwinian naturalists think Darwin actually made biology a kind of safe haven for teleological theorizing. These thinkers tend to cast such claims in epistemological as opposed to metaphysical terms, so there are by no means neo-Aristoteleans; but by the same token, they certainly do think that the study of living things is different in kind, and not just degree from the study of nonliving things. This collection of essays explores the possibilities for novel approaches to the study of metaphysics, epistemology, rationality, and the human mind in a post-Darwinian intellectual landscape.

Before attempting to get clear on the status of those controversies, it is important to note that it is difficult to give an uncontroversial definition of naturalism. Several contributors to this volume subscribe to different formulations, ranging from a fairly weak to a much stronger one. For instance, Paul Horwich accepts what he calls “anti-supernaturalism,” which he defines as the thesis that, “within the domain of phenomena that bear spatial, temporal, causal, and explanatory relations to one another, science rules” (p. 38). The basic idea is that we shouldn’t posit gods or ghosts to explain events occurring in that domain. That general sort of view is taken for granted by all the contributors to this volume. So it can be useful to think of Horwich’s definition as occupying one end of a continuum. The most likely candidate for holding down the other end of that continuum is the view expressed by Alexander Rosenberg. Rosenberg explicitly rejects skepticism about the reach of sciences: “Naturalism is the label for the thesis that the tools we should use in answering philosophical problems are the methods and findings of the mature sciences—from physics across to biology and increasingly neuroscience” (p. 17). The other contributors of this volume fall in various spaces along that continuum between Horwich and Rosenberg. So it is with these two thinkers that we begin.

1. Metaphysics Naturalized?

The volume begins with Alexander Rosenberg’s chapter, “Disenchanted Naturalism,” in which he describes what he considers to be the inescapable consequences of a true naturalistic worldview. Given that science has revealed to us how we had erred in many of our explanations, especially ones involving attributing purpose and intentionality onto the world, Rosenberg adopts the term “scientism” in what he considers to be a positive sense, or at least a nonderogatory one. If we take progress in science seriously, then we will have to give up many of the notions that were once considered necessary or even self-evident, such as traditional notions of morality, free will, consciousness, the meaning of life, and many others. He argues that because we have evolved into the kinds of creatures that are able to somehow have understanding, we tend to see purposes and causes everywhere, making us shortsighted about the way the world really functions.

Rosenberg says that the world is really “fermions and bosons, and everything that can be made out of them.” (p. 19) Thus physics can, in principle, explain each and every fact. But physics leaves no room for even a hint of design or purpose. So how do adaptations and biological functions arise? Darwin’s insight was that blind variation and passive environmental filtration are the sole sources of the means-end economy of the biological realm. The origin of adaptation in a world starting with zero adaptation is both improbable on Earth and rare in the universe. The purposeless amplification of such unlikely events is a crucial part of the story of how physics “fakes” design.

From these claims, which are not controversial for many of the contributors of this volume, Rosenberg gets to the most disenchanted conclusions of all. First, acceptance of social and moral norms does not reflect the rightness of such norms. One can think of cases of racism and xenophobia that had been widely accepted. From this, Rosenberg concludes that limiting ourselves to what science can give us generates moral nihilism. He continues to argue that despite this nihilism, it seems that we as a species tend to have cooperative child rearing along with a theory of mind and a large brain and this enables a whole slew of consequences involving technology and morality. So because of that, “niceness” is selected for.

He then goes on in a similar fashion to reject traditional views of how consciousness reveals our mental lives. The way things seem to us when it comes to thought and mental processing is not the way things really are: there is no original intentionality. Any attempt at explaining meaning or intentionality in the way we had conceived of before the current neuroscientific research is bound to fail. This is why instead of using our consciousness as the source of knowledge for our mental lives, we ought to ask the question of where this illusion of purpose comes from. Since there is no original intentionality, then there is no intentionality, and the whole way we think of our mental lives is an illusion, so is the whole way we think about ourselves. This means that most of what we consider to be experience and knowledge amounts to nothing at all.

If that is the case, then the same applies to the social sciences and history. The whole way we describe events as purpose-driven is mistaken. Natural history can be explained in terms of a series of events and processes, and human history is not too different. The result is that social sciences suffer a similar fate as the natural sciences.

This marks a huge disagreement between Rosenberg and some other naturalists, particularly other contributors in this volume. Most other writers in this book (e.g., Dennett, Millikan, Brassier, Muller, Bashour) believe that this naturalistic worldview can still retain most of our rich cultural and moral world, and being committed to Darwinism does not rule it out.

In “Naturalism and the Linguistic Turn,” Paul Horwich presents a view that is diametrically opposed to that of Rosenberg’s scientism. He thinks that the scientific method is often taken to apply beyond its proper realm. In that sense, he argues against “naturalism”—or, to be more precise, what he calls “metaphysical naturalism.” He does not deny that science can treat everything within the domain of spatiotemporal, causal phenomena; what he denies is that everything that exists is locatable within that domain.

The argument he offers in support of this opinion goes as follows. A primary source for the tendency to dismiss nonnatural facts is the conviction that reality must be fundamentally uniform. From which it follows, given the increasingly broad scope of the demonstrably natural, that everything is natural. But in tension with this reasoning we have the superficially non-natural facts of mathematics, logic, ethics, modality, and so on. The naturalist attempts to defuse this tension in his favor by showing, of each such apparent counterexample, either that the facts at issue don’t really exist (skepticism) or that they are ingeniously analyzable in naturalistic terms (reductionism). But Horwich maintains not only that these maneuvers are ad hoc but also that the pretheoretical anti-naturalist commitments they seek to dislodge have the status of data, which cannot be rationally abandoned simply for the sake of the global simplicity promised by naturalism. So that doctrine must be rejected as an “irrational overgeneralization.”

The second part of Horwich’s chapter begins with the claim that his anti-naturalist argument is not based on facts about language, and considers the question whether there is nonetheless some sense in which it respects philosophy’s “linguistic turn.” His answer is yes. We should indeed renounce the extreme linguistic turn, whereby any metaphysical conclusion is to be derived from, or regarded as mere projections of, features of language. But we can and should embrace the later Wittgenstein’s less extreme version of the idea, whereby reasoning in philosophy is recognized as peculiarly prone to confusion and therefore as especially in need of self-conscious attention to the terms and concepts being deployed.

2. Reasons Naturalized

In “The Evolution of Reasons,” Daniel Dennett offers a spirited defense of the thesis that purposes, reasons, and functions all have perfectly respectable roles to play in naturalistic explanations of biological phenomena. This view puts him at odds with a number of prominent philosophers of biology such as Peter Godfrey-Smith and Alexander Rosenberg and the biologist Richard Dawkins. After surveying the rhetorical positions taken by the most doctrinaire of these anti-teleologists, he makes the perceptive and important observation that “one of the subtle forces in operation here is the desire not to give aid and comfort to the creationists and the Intelligent Design crowd” (p. 48). The polemical dynamic for the committed naturalist is pre sented as a stark choice: (a) Shall we try to convince the general public that the apparent design, purpose, and function they see is just apparent and not actually there, (b) or should we press the interpretation that the truly remarkable breakthrough that Darwinian theory delivered “is that there can be design—real design, as real as it gets—without an Intelligent Designer” (p. 49)?

So this is not some arcane, abstract, and esoteric debate that will engage only professional philosophers and biologists. On the contrary, this has the potential to be an important development in the ongoing so-called Culture Wars. The best thing the Intelligent Design movement has going for it is the seemingly irresistible intuitive appeal of the inference from the empirically based premise that there is design in nature to the conclusion that there must be an intelligent author of that design. This argument is, of course, an instance of the form inference to the best explanation, or abduction. Dennett thinks Darwin has given naturalistically oriented philosophers the tools to break the spell of the appeal of that abductive argument by showing that there is a better explanation: one that is massively supported by the evidence and that knits together everything we know about biology.

A key starting point of the case Dennett makes is his way of characterizing the designs or reasons that get built into natural systems by evolutionary processes: “Evolution by natural selection is a set of processes that ‘find’ and ‘track’ reasons for things to be arranged one way rather than another” (p. 49). The difference between these sorts of reasons (i.e., the ones “found” by nature) and the reasons found by human designers is that the latter are represented in the minds of the humans who think them up while the former are not represented in any minds at all. At least not until a curious human investigator comes across them and either accurately theorizes about them or successfully reproduces them via a feat of reverse engineering.

An important distinction Dennett deploys in the exposition of his view is the difference between “why” in the sense of what for? and “why” in the sense of how come? “Why are you going to the store?” asks what are you doing this for, and the asker is interested in learning the reason or purpose of your trip to the grocer. “Why do balloons filled with helium rise while balloons filled with xenon sink?” asks how come, and the right answer will focus on the relative atomic weights of helium, xenon, and the mix of nitrogen, oxygen, and carbon dioxide that makes up air. On Dennett’s account, the story of how reasons get built into nature is the story of how evolution by natural selection starts with how come and ends up with what for. As he puts it, “Natural selection is . . . an automatic reason-finder, which ‘discovers’ and ‘endorses’ and ‘focuses’ reasons over many generations” (p. 54).

Those scare quotes are important and, in a sense, lie at the fault line between Dennett and theorists such as Rosenberg and Godfrey-Smith. That is, those scare quotes are necessary in order to acknowledge that natural selection is not minded and does not have its own reasons. But the central, provocative move in Dennett’s chapter is to apply the intentional stance, which he deployed to great effect in the philosophy of mind, to the process of natural selection. At the end of his chapter, Dennett tells the reader, “If you understand intentional-stance talk in the evolutionist’s way, you can see the woods for the trees, which is a good thing, because you can’t do biology without assuming function, and you can’t assume function without seeing reasons everywhere” (p. 62). So a great deal hangs on how those scare quotes get cashed out. Rosenberg’s chapter can be read as a guide to what happens when one thinks about these issues in a nihilistic way. Dennett has once again ingeniously deployed the intentional stance to give theorists the epistemic tools they arguably need while remaining strategically circumspect about the metaphysics. It is a provocative and forward-looking proposal that provides substantial resources for countering the all-too-common perception that taking evolution seriously means denying that there is design, function, and indeed purpose in the biological realm.

Ruth Millikan’s “The Tangle of Natural Purposes That Is Us” can be read as a continuation of the line of thought that Dennett starts, namely by explaining how humans become capable of having reasons for future goals, or aiming. Millikan attempts to answer two fundamental questions that lie at the intersection between natural selection and our rich cultural lives. The first question involves a very crucial issue for humans, namely, the forward-looking ability of aiming. If natural selection operates on randomly created forms and can be understood only when looking backward, then how can it explain aims, which involve future goals? The second question is one that is also involved in human culture, especially concerning the arts. If what natural selection selects for is only biological fitness, then how can certain behaviors or traits, often involving aims yet failing to help us with biological fitness, continue to have natural purposes? She begins by answering the second question and then moves on to the first.

Millikan explains biologically irrelevant aims by positing a two-level mechanism. The first-level mechanism is one that selects for behaviors and abilities that directly involve biological fitness. However, second-level mechanisms, such as operant conditioning, that were originally selected for because of biological fitness can accidentally generate behavior that is itself irrelevant to biological fitness. In other words, although such mechanisms, the second-level ones, were selected for because of their help in terms of biological fitness, it is not the case that every purpose generated from them results in activity that helps biological fitness. In fact, their activities may end up conflicting with the purposes of the first-level mechanisms that created them. This provides the Darwinian a rich way of explaining goals and aims.

Millikan then moves on to discuss a variety of kinds of conflicts within aims and between aims and purposes derived from various selection processes, for example, from feedforward perceptual mechanism and similar reasoning mechanism in which a creature represents different alternatives and aims for the best option after imagined trial and error. Finally she turns back to her first question: How can natural selection account for aims? The answer is, explicit aims are directive representational vehicles. Natural selection (the first-level mechanism) selects for our ability to have and represent aims, which is part of our sophisticated cognitive systems. The capacity to represent and evaluate aims aids our biological fitness.

A parallel explanation can be given for our linguistic capacities. These capacities are selected for by the first-level mechanism to enable cooperation among humans, those cooperative functions being their natural purposes. Once this second-level mechanism develops, it enables us to use language in different ways from simply holding and transmitting true beliefs. This enables us to have metaphor, poetry, and all other forms of communication that bear no value in terms of biological fitness. Millikan ends her chapter by posing a question concerning the origins of particular aims, of our specific conscious goals. Some may result from second-level mechanisms that involve representations, while others result from of being socialized in a particular way. Both options fit with her picture.

3. Knowledge Naturalized

It is, of course, very natural to describe concepts in terms of propositional content and similarly linguistic tools. But if we really want an account of the human mind that does justice to our natures as products of Darwinian evolution, we must look for bottom-up approaches that seek to explain how full-blown cognitive and language-dependent capacities might have been built up from simpler, less abstract aspects of our developmental repertoire. Ellen Fridland’s and Ray Brassier’s chapters give very useful overviews of the possibilities for just such an approach. Muhammad Ali Khalidi comes at the issue of our knowledge from a different perspective, namely that of classifying kinds.

Fridland’s chapter, “Skill Learning and Conceptual Thought: Making a Way through the Wilderness,” offers an exploration of the possibilities for a theory focused on the role of skill learning in developing fully rational, cognitive abilities. In a notable departure from the currently prevailing fashion of emphasizing the continuity between human and animal abilities, Fridland identifies and highlights three key aspects in which human skills are different in kind, and not just degree, from animal abilities. Her taxonomy has it that skills are a subclass of abilities: namely, skills are those abilities that are refined and developed through a process that is characterized by effortful attention and control (directed at the ability itself). As such, skills are abilities that humans do, but that animals, as far as we know, do not acquire.

But according to Fridland, for all their difference with animal abilities human skills are neither concepts themselves nor are they composed of concepts. Whereas having a concept requires meeting both the recombinatorial constraint and the generality constraint, skills meet only the recombinatorial constraint. Skills are specific to a particular context, and as such, they do not meet the generality constraint. Another way of putting this point is to say that, unlike concepts, skills cannot meet what Fridland calls the context-independent criterion. The salient contrast is between a concept, with which the agent can abstract away from a given environment, and a skill, where one becomes more skillful precisely by becoming increasingly focused on the specifics of a particular context. Fridland gives this helpful example: “If one rides a bike without being responsive to the very material, the very incline, and the very uniformity of the surface on which one is riding (e.g., a flat paved road, a grassy uphill, or a rocky mountain descent), one will not be able to perform the micromillimeter, microsecond bodily adjustments required for staying on one’s bike” (p. 83).

Fridland goes on to use this tripartite distinction between abilities, skills, and concepts to map out the possibility of a very nuanced story about human development. Instead of puzzling over how we make the leap from those abilities we share with nonhuman animals to full-blown cognitive capacities, Fridland suggests that we consider the possibility that “it is through skill learning that actions, properties, and mental st...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Original Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Exploring the Post-Darwinian Naturalist Landscape
• SECTION I Metaphysics Naturalized?
• SECTION II Reasons Naturalized
• SECTION III Knowledge Naturalized
• SECTION IV The Human Mind Naturalized
• Contributors
• Index