1.1 Naturalist Themes: Science, Ontology , Anti-Transcendentalism
One of the great difficulties in deciding how to reconcile our fairly robust views on normativity with naturalism is that there are about as many forms of naturalism as there are naturalists. The label has been adopted by or ascribed to philosophers as disparate in their views as John Dewey , Frank Ramsey, Roy Wood Sellars, Wilfrid Sellars , Ernest Nagel, David Armstrong, W.V.O. Quine, Thomas Kuhn , Philip Kitcher , Paul and Patricia Churchland, J.L. Mackie, Philippa Foot, Aristotle, David Hume, Ludwig Wittgenstein , Richard Rorty , and even Jacques Derrida (Staten 2008); to ordinary language philosophers, to experimental philosophers, and to the entire pragmatist tradition. We do not confront a single doctrine in naturalism, but rather numerous methodologies, motivations, and projects; which of these to adopt and which to dismiss will be substantial philosophical questions.
Perhaps one unifying feature in all the various approaches that lay some claim to the title of “naturalism” would be a purport to treat humankind in all its various dimensions as part of the natural world without privilege, priority, or enchantment. This would generally entail a rejection of any “first philosophy” in the spirit of Plato that might precede our observations, experiences, and practices. For some (but by no means all) putative naturalists, this implies an especially close relationship between the sciences and philosophy. This may grant scientific discourse a kind of authority on certain questions, and by some estimates, good philosophy will simply be those modes that clear obstacles for subsequent scientific inquiry. The business of philosophy will be putting philosophy out of business, either by assimilating philosophical projects to projects in the sciences or by undercutting older philosophical modes, problems, and assumptions altogether. As Quine said:
Is this sort of thing still philosophy? Naturalism brings a salutary blurring of such boundaries… It undertakes to clarify, organize, and simplify the broadest and most basic concepts, and to analyze scientific method and evidence within the framework of science itself. The boundary between naturalistic philosophy and the rest of science is just a vague matter of degree. (1995, 256–257)
This will reek of treason to many philosophers, but this image of the sciences eclipsing philosophy over time will have its critics even among those named above. To some naturalists, the sciences are simply further sets of historically conditioned social practices for coping with experience, and they will have no ultimate authority over others. Rorty (1979, 1989) made such claims explicitly and associated many of the more important philosophical voices of the twentieth century with his project. That in turn will sound like treason to more scientifically inclined naturalists, but it suggests another way of interpreting the naturalist tenet that there is no privileged position from which inquiry can begin. At most, we can only articulate the significance of our practices from within the perspective they afford us, rather than holding them to some higher ideal such as objectivity or progress. There is a reading of Thomas Kuhn ’s work that lends itself to this sort of naturalism. 1 Where philosophers since the seventeenth century had generally sought to demarcate science from other forms of discourse and grant it a greater measure of epistemic legitimacy in uncovering truths, Kuhn emphasized the importance of reading each historical phase of scientific inquiry in its own light.
Rather than seeking the permanent contributions of an older science to our present vantage, [historians of science] attempt to display the historical integrity of that science in its own time. They ask, for example, not about the relation of Galileo’s views to those of modern science, but rather about the relationship between his views and those of his group, i.e. his teachers, contemporaries, and immediate successors in the sciences… By implication, at least, these historical studies suggest the possibility of a new image of science. (1970, 3)
That “new image” would thus abandon the view of science as a progressive, cumulative, world-representing enterprise rising above its time and place, and instead treat it as a further set of problem-solving practices best understood in light of their social and historical context. Science itself would thereby become one more item to situate in the history of natural world, rather than a means to step outside it and look back in.
Why should all of this concern us? Very little is at stake for the future of any given philosophical project or method in the name that we assign it. Yet we do think that there are issues of genuine philosophical concern that we must address here, even in the absence of a single, unified doctrine of naturalism. While the many strains of naturalism at hand differ greatly from one another, there is still a sense in which they are responses to a common set of concerns that have some traction for us. Rather than offering a unified doctrine of naturalism, we can approach the matter thematically, by making explicit a number of these animating concerns and illustrating how different forms of naturalism incorporate them. Not all who call themselves naturalists will endorse all of these themes, but there will be considerable overlap, and in our affinity to these themes, we are closer to the naturalists than to most non-naturalists in contemporary philosophy. We see three major themes that cut across most of those lumped together under the banner of naturalism: (a) a priority assigned to scientific practices; (b) ontological and explanatory conservatism; and (c) anti-transcendentalism. Once these themes are on the table, it will be possible to elaborate why we see each one concerns us as we offer our account.
1.1.1 Naturalism and the Priority of Scientific Methods
Naturalists often grant some form of priority to the methods of the natural sciences and their results. With a nod to Protagoras, Sellars said “in the dimension of describing and explaining the world, science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not” (1956/1997, §42). In some cases, this priority is granted in light of the predictive and instrumental successes of scientific practices. Scientific methods and practices have proven themselves reliable sources of knowledge, we might say, and there are no grounds but tradition and dogmatism to assign them second-class status. This scientific orientation overturns the Platonistic assumption that only the methods of philosophy lay bare for us the real structure of the world, the nature of knowledge, and the purpose of our lives in it. According to the most robust forms of naturalism, there would be no special role left over for philosophy but to clear the clutter and confusion that might inhibit scientific progress . “[It] is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described,” as Quine put the point, and this implies the “abandonment of the goal of a first philosophy prior to natural science” (1981, 21, 67). Scientific practices would thus be at least the peers, perhaps even the more able and enlightening successors, to the canonical methods of philosophy.
How radically would this priority of scientific methods and results reshape the landscape of our knowledge? Much of the debate on this point has been shaped by Sellars ’s “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man” (1962), in which he claimed that modern philosophy generates the “manifest image ” of the world, “a [philosophical] refinement or sophistication of what might be called the ‘original’ image… which makes it relevant to the contemporary intellectual scene” (§17). But scientific practices will generate the “scientific image ,” which at least appears to supersede the “manifest image” from which it emerged. Sellars suggested that we may hope to see our world through both images in the future, but many naturalists have been less concerned with preserving our philosophical past. On such strongly science-friendly forms of naturalism, all of our theoretical understanding (including the crude theories we call “common sense”) will give way to scientific successors in the future (e.g., Churchland 1981, 1996; Stich 1983; Rosenberg 2014). Some would say that philosophy serves only to clarify and organize the work then undertaken in scientific practices (Quine 1969, 1995), while others have focused on naturalizing particular regions of traditional philosophy such as language, mind, and knowledge (e.g., Millikan 1984; A. I. Goldman 1992; Rosenberg 1999; Kornblith 2002). More recently, some philosophers have applied methods from social psychology to the critical examination of central philosophical intuitions under the banner of “experimental philosophy” (e.g., Knobe and Nichols 2007).
Outside the confines of academic philosophy, there is widespread suspicion that even the most science-friendly proposals here are too little, too late for philosophy as a discipline. Stephen Hawking, perhaps the preeminent public figure in the natural sciences in recent decades, declares philosophy “dead” and that “scientists have become the bearers of torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge” (Warman 2011). This has brought charges of “scientism ,” or a hegemony of scientific methods born of dogmatism rather than innovation or insight. McDowell (1994) and Margolis (2003) both resist philosophical trends they see as scientism, for instance. To those more committed to “perennial philosophy,” this overtaking of philosophy by scientific methods will seem unmotivated. Science succeeds on its own terms, but scientific practices do not generate the grounds for their own legitimacy. That we should value the knowledge or instrumental possibilities they produce and privilege them over other methods and practices is not a matter that scientific practices even purport to settle. Know-nothing declarations of disinterest in philosophy do not eliminate these problems, so it will be premature to say that naturalism can set aside all philosophical reflection. Dan Dennett, a staunch proponent of approaches to the mind deeply informed by the sciences, struck a gently defiant note on the subject recently: “There is no such thing as philosophy-free science, just science that has been conducted without any consideration of its underlying philosophical assumptions” (2013, 20).
We share with most naturalists the sense that scientific practices should be granted some priority in “describing and identifying” the contents of the world, as Quine put it, although we do not share the more radical ambitions of some forms of scientism to supplant all philosophical (and other) discourse with some scientific successor. We see reason to be catholic in our methods and practices, embracing whatever contributes positively to our interests and goals in inquiry, and our scientific practices have more than earned a place at the table at this point. Many philosophers are apprehensive about the crude myopia of dogmatic scientism, and we share such apprehensions, but our response to this should not be to circle the wagons around some idealized conception of philosophy that insulates it from other forms of discourse.
Here, it may be helpful to bear in mind a distinction offered by Huw Price between what he calls object naturalism and subject naturalism . An object naturalist takes it that ontologically “all there is is the world studied by science,” and epistemically “all genuine knowledge is scientific knowledge.” Subject naturalists take it that “humans are natural creatures, and if the claims and ambitions of philosophy conflict with this view, then philosophy will have to give way” (2004/2011, 185–186). Subject naturalists would incorporate scientific discourse into our philosophical self-reflection as a partner, even if this discourse does not replace those reflective modes wholesale. Adopting such an approach will require novelty and ingenuity to avoid either collapsing into scientism or diluting the role of scientific practices to window-dressing. We see this as a tremendously difficult challenge, but just the one this naturalist theme rightly prompts. Our goal should be a better fusion of those parts of science, philosophy, and many other practices that best inform our understanding and guide the pursuit of our interests. How all of those parts should hang together, whether we should adopt new ones and abandon old ones, and how we should conceive of our goals in this self-correcting enterprise are all matters that we will find ourselves compelled to revisit; and any conclusions we reach are provisional and remain open to future challenges. But note that any such reflexive examination of our practices will be a form of philosophical inquiry. We have every reason to assume that philosophy will always be with us, even if it looks very different from its past and present forms. Count us among those in whom such a prospect inspires awe and excitement, rather than dread.
Our primary concern in this book remains normativity, however, and many naturalists have been particularly suspicious about it. Reconciling normative discourse with our various forms of scientific discourse is no trivial matter, and many would prefer to see some reduction of the normative to non-normative, or perhaps a successor that was somewhat more an...