Naturalism and the ontological status of properties J.P. MORELAND
Knowing that my representation is true is quite a different condition from knowing the respective objective circumstance to be the case. When I know that the book in my briefcase is a copy of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, for example, what I know is not that my representation of the book in my briefcase as being a copy of Kant’s Critique is true
– though of course I might know that too. What I know is something about that book, namely, that it is in my briefcase. And likewise, when I know that, I may not know that I have an “appropriate basis” for representing it as I do – though I might know that too.
It is enough that it is true, and that I do I have an appropriate basis for representing it as I do.
Clearly, if I cannot know without knowing that I know, then I cannot know that I know without knowing that I know that I know. And so forth. This is a genuinely vicious
regress. But we often do in fact know things without knowing that we know, and without even considering whether we know or not. Many familiar cases could be cited.
Essential to knowledge and knowing are, then, at least truth and logical grounding. We know only if our representations in the given case are true and logically non-arbitrary. Essential to logical grounding are logical relations: especially the simple formal relations of implication, consistency and inconsistency. Noetic unity comes in because knowing and knowledge require a larger context of consciousness involving many interrelated states and acts and kinds of states and acts. Our question now becomes: Can truth, logical relations and noetic unity be understood in physicalistic – and in that sense “naturalistic” – terms? Can knowing and knowledge be accommodated within the categories of physicalism, the narrower or “puritanical”
naturalism?
Truth as “matching up”
Truth lies at the heart of knowledge. Knowledge is a condition of the human being that involves truth, for it involves representing its subject matter as it is; and, as we shall also see, much of our knowledge is in the first instance knowledge of truths.
Truth is also a vital human need, and a major part of what makes knowledge valuable. It and its opposite, falsity, are solidly at home in the midst of ordinary life. To know what truth is and to be able to recognize it and its opposite are basic components of ordinary human competence. To find one’s way about, to communicate, and to give and receive directions and commands often requires us to identify the truth values of thoughts, beliefs and statements. In functioning in normal human relationships, say in a family or on a job, one must be able to recognize truth in thought, belief and statement. All of us bear a primary ethical responsibility to make sure that how we are thinking and speaking of things is as they are, that is, that our thoughts and words are true. Our view of the nature of truth must be compatible with its actual role in real life.
But what is truth?
We first come to know truth – and what truth is – in concrete cases of verification within our physical environment. An infant in its second year of life or earlier develops the ability to look for something and to recognize it – what they are looking for – when it is found. The child at that point is capable of sustaining a specific thought or representation of something and of sorting objects that come before it with respect to whether they are or are not what they are seeking. Close to the same time the “uh oh!”
phenomena emerges. The child observes things as not being how they ‘should’ be or are expected to be and verbally expresses the felt incongruity or lack of “fit.” Closely linked with these developments is the ability to think of something as being such and such, and the associated capacity to find something to be (or to not be) as it is thought
to be. This is verification as a human reality. It is a primary form of knowing in the occurrent sense.
Soon the child learns the utility of lying, or representing things as it knows they are not. At that point it is in position to become truthful or honest, to routinely represent things as it knows them to be. Interestingly, children never have to be taught to lie. At an early age they figure it out quite on their own from their understanding of how thoughts and words do and do not match up with what they are about. This “matching up” – primarily of thought, and well before language is at the child’s disposal – stands clearly before the child and is an essential condition of then learning the use of the words “true” and “false.”
There is, accordingly, nothing esoteric, mysterious or enigmatic about truth (or falsity) itself, though many particular truths have such properties and some may even be completely unknowable. It is enigmatic or mysterious only for those who have decided that what it is it cannot be, or who have adopted a theory of mind (or language) and world that makes it either impossible or inaccessible. When what our belief or statement is about is as we believe or state it to be, when our representation or idea “matches up” to its object in the familiar way already indicated by cases, our representation (belief, statement) is true. Truth itself is just this characteristic of
“matching up.” When it is absent our representation etc. is false.
Truth and falsity are objective properties of representations. They are objective ways in which propositions differ and resemble among themselves, just as colors (red, yellow, green) and sizes are objective ways in which apples and other things differ and resemble among themselves. To say that they are objective is to say that they do not depend upon what we may think or feel about them. No proposition etc. can be made true merely by believing or favoring it – by one person or a million.
Now since this is so, what we find truth (or falsity) to be in the abundant cases where we can compare beliefs or statements (or, more properly, the propositions they involve) to what they are about is exactly what truth is in the cases where we do not or cannot directly compare thought with its subject matter. This characteristic constancy is something that truth values share with any object that, like truth, is not produced of modified by cognitive or other attitudes toward it. For example, thoughts to the effect that a certain candidate won an election, that the earth goes around the sun, and that Milton in Paradise Lost really intended to glorify rebellion are cases where we cannot directly verify or experience the truth of the thoughts by comparing them with what they are about. This inability, however, is due to the nature of the particular subject matter in relation to our cognitive faculties, not to the nature of representations, truth and reality as such. The truth of a belief or statement is not created by verification, but discovered by it. Otherwise we could prevent a belief from being true by refusing to verify it. Even in the cases most difficult to verify, truth remains a “correspondence” or
“matching up” of the general type we become acquainted with in the verified cases.
For a thought or statement to be true, then, is simply for its subject matter to be as it is represented or held to be. When we confirm that a hitherto unconfirmed belief or statement is true, we do not create the relation (correspondence) it actually has to what it is about, any more that we create the fit of a wrench to a bolt head by placing the wrench on the bolt head, or the fit of a door to a frame by setting the door in the frame.
The wrench fits the bolt head (or does not) even if it is never placed upon the bolt head, and the door fits the frame (or does not) even if it is never placed within it. And, similarly, a representation that is true is true even if it is never verified – by direct comparison with its object or otherwise. Truth is not the same thing as verification or proof, nor is it dependent for its existence and nature upon verification, any more than the fit or “correspondence” of the wrench to the bolt head is or is dependent upon the juxtaposition of the wrench upon the bolt head.
Also, what truth is does not change with time or historical process. It is a certain property or relation-like structure, and as such it is not the kind of thing that can change, any more than grey and yellow or sister or brother can – which is a totally different matter from how we choose to use the words “grey,” “yellow,” “sister,” and
“brother.” When philosophers of the last two centuries have suggested that truth – this relation-like structure of correspondence that we all become acquainted with in our early years – is “really” the logical coherence or practical utility of beliefs or statements, etc., their suggestion is no more worthy of serious consideration than would be a suggestion that yellow is really an odor or that being a sister is the same thing as being a seamstress. Those suggestions were in fact based on the assumption that we cannot compare beliefs and statements with what they are about – an assumption that is refuted by the fact that everyone constantly does it.
The naivety of “correspondence”
But is not this view, as commonsensible as it may seem, simply naive, simple minded?
Has not what we have learned about mind, phenomena, language and culture in the last two centuries shown that we do not and cannot experience such “truth,” can never directly find the fit (or lack of fit) between representations and what they are of or about?
To answer this question in any remotely adequate manner would require a critical interpretation of theories of knowledge since Locke. It is, above all, with Locke that we seriously and continuously began to develop theories of representation (first mental and then linguistic or “symbolic”) according to which our representations actually make it impossible to see whether our thoughts “fit” what they are about because any attempt to do so would only yield another representation, and so on. This theory has been the foundation for many of the major “triumphs” over naturalism,
from Kant and Hegel to Putnam and Derrida, as well as the root of the failure of many attempts at a genuine realist (often confused with naturalistic) theory of knowledge.
It is also what has turned truth itself into an enigma or impossibility for many thinkers, and has led in the last two centuries to the emergence of many well-known candidates for its office.16
Still, a few points might be usefully mentioned in response to the charge of naivety.
First of all, the anti-correspondence, representationalist theories which now fill up the recent philosophical past are far from coming together in an adequate account of the mind–world relation or lack thereof. It is not as if there were now available some solid insight grounding an alternative to the type of accessible correspondence described above. In fact there is no generally acceptable alternative to correspondence. There is a series of successively discredited theories from Locke to Hume, to Kant to Hegel (or Fichte) to positivism and phenomenalism in their various forms; and then “language” (the “new way of words”) is substituted for way of “ideas”
or “experience,” and the old battles fought over again. This time about how words tie to the world, and the outcome being a lingo-centric predicament instead of a ego-centric predicament. One cannot easily suppose that there is a philosophically credible alternative to the correspondence theory of truth. We do not have
“something better” on hand.
Second, it is a noteworthy historical fact that every significant philosopher up to Kant accepted correspondence or “matching up” as the correct account of truth, even in cases, such as Hume’s, where it was inconsistent with their overall system. Of course that does not by itself prove that that account is correct. But it is a historical fact that calls for some explanation.
This fact is, I think, associated with another significant fact: that those philosophers never suspected that thought was somehow linguistic, and that the real problem of truth had to do with sentences and what we do with them. Sentences and utterances do not, in fact, correspond to what they are about, and whatever truth may be as a predicate of them or other linguistic items is certainly open for speculation.
What counts as a sentence (etc.) is also obviously relative to a language, and which sentences are true or false will be likewise. No doubt there are many interesting questions to be pursued with reference to sentences, languages, and “truth” as a linguistic predicate. But to suppose that a pragmatic or disquotational or rational acceptability theory of truth, for example, has anything to do with truth as a child comes easily to recognize it and as it is present in the constant experience of adults is simply to mistake or try to substitute one thing for another – of course from deep and powerful philosophical motivations.
These would surely include motivations of an empiricist or naturalistic character.
Sentences and utterances, at least, present themselves as public, sense perceptible objects – though the “rules” governing them do not. But a certain version of
contemporary formalism in logical theory actually attempts to pass off the visible shape and arrangement of written symbols as logical form.17
Third, there remains the fact that we do constantly experience the “matching up”
of thought with a subject matter we do not make or maintain in existence. At least we are strongly impressed that we do when we are not in the philosophical armchair: so strongly impressed that only some very strong philosophical impetus to the contrary could shake us. I think it is this that explains the long dominance of the correspondence theory among philosophers.
There are two main philosophical interpretations of consciousness that undermine this commonsense impression and the long philosophical tradition. One
– the “Midas touch” picture of consciousness, as I call it18 – is the view that to take something as our ‘object’ automatically transforms it in some essential way (possibly even making it ‘mental’). How, exactly, consciousness – or for that matter language, or culture – being what it is, could make a tree or block of ice what it is, or turn something that was not already a tree or block of ice into one, is truly hard to say. We actually know how trees etc. come about, and they are not made by consciousness. One also can safely say that the story about how consciousness supposedly does its transforming and productive work has never been satisfactorily told. The second interpretation plays off of the saying that one cannot escape consciousness – cannot, as it is often said, “step outside of one’s mind.” Certainly, to be conscious of anything one must be conscious. But it does not follow from this that one cannot compare a thought to what it is about and see whether it “matches up” or not. Only confusion could make one think it does – a confusion probably based upon the “Midas touch” picture of consciousness.
Fourth, those who reject the correspondence model of truth do still, its seems to me, accept it, or at least its essential point, in a certain important respect. In advancing their own theories of the relationship between mind (or language/culture) and world they do not seem to me to suggest in any way that the truth of those theories about that relationship is in any sense relative. They seem to me to be telling us how things are with that relationship regardless of how they or any other person or culture may or may not speak or think of it. They give us the essential truth and the necessary essence of that relationship. I believe this to be true of the extreme relativists such as Rorty and Derrida, but also of the more modest ones such as Putnam.
Thus, Putnam states his own view that “truth and rational acceptability – a claim’s being right and someone’s being in a position to make it – are relative to the sort of language we are using and the sort of context we are in.”19 But can we imagine him to be thinking that his view of truth and rational acceptability here expressed is relative to language and context? I believe he intends to tell us what is the case with regard to truth and rational acceptability itself, and what indeed cannot be otherwise. That we are always “within” a language, he is telling us, is an essential truth that makes
“metaphysical realism” a strict and eternal impossibility. And yet he surely is, precisely, a metaphysical realist about our being within a language. The idea that in his discussions of language (mind) and world he is merely reporting on how things go from within a particular language and context which happen to be his does not seriously bother him – as surely it should if his views of truth etc. are, shall we say, true.
But that would turn his view into something that would be of no general philosophical interest. And he does take philosophical interest to be of great importance. That is why he wants to be a “realist” of some sort, if only an “internal” one. He cannot just join up with Rorty et al. and treat truth as whatever can be sustained in your context. Thus his claim that Quine allows himself a “transcendental standpoint” in a certain respect20
actually applies to himself, if I am right, with regard to his claims about rationality, truth, reference and allied subjects. Here, he indeed does take the “God’s eye view.”
Now this is by no means peculiar to Putnam, who is certainly one of the very finest of contemporary thinkers. I think it is built into the essential function of thought and assertion to present things as they are without regard to their being thought of or spoken of. Thus we have to use special forms of thought and language to express how things appear to us or are conceptualized by us or our group. If I am right, the simple correspondence indicated above has had the influence it has had over philosophical tradition and plays the role it does throughout human life because that is what really lies at the juncture between mind and world where we actually live. I believe no sound reason has ever been given for thinking it does not.
Why truth cannot be “naturalized”
Suppose, then, that truth in the sense of the matching up of representation with subject matter lies at the heart of knowledge. Can it be captured within the categories of the narrower Naturalism? I believe it clearly cannot. The argument against it is an old and simple one that has been reworked in many forms in recent decades.21
Suppose that we have an acceptable list of physical properties and relations. We might take them from physical theory, as the properties and relations corresponding to the concepts of current physics: location, mass, momentum and so forth. (Who knows what the future or ultimate physics will look like?) Or, moved by the above doubts about what philosophy can soundly derive from the sciences, we could turn to the primary qualities of modern philosophy, and, for that matter, add on the secondary ones as well: color, odor, etc. I don’t think we need, for present purposes, to be very scrupulous about the list. Let us agree that whatever goes on such a list will count as physical properties, and that narrow naturalism is the proposal to confine our inquiries and conclusions to whatever shows up on the list and combinations thereof.
The argument, then, is simply that no such property or combination of properties
constitutes a representation of anything, or qualifies their bearer as being of or about anything. The properties of those properties and combinations thereof are not the same as the properties of representations (ideas, thoughts, propositions, beliefs, statements). If this is correct, and if the narrower naturalism admits only these properties, then there are no representations in the world of the narrower naturalism.
Truth then disappears from that world, because in it no subject matter is represented; and hence it can never happen that something “is as it is represented or thought to be.” With truth, knowledge also disappears. The ontological structure of knowledge cannot be present in the world of narrower naturalism.
Note that my claim is that such physical properties never constitute a representation. I say nothing here about representation (mental qualities) not emerging from the physical properties of, say, the human brain. This is not because I think they may so emerge, although some form of interaction between them and the brain surely does happen. Rather, it is because I can only regard talk of the emergence of irreducibly mental properties from the brain or the central nervous system as mere property dualism cum apologies.22
Significantly, Hilary Putnam and Daniel Dennett, in defending their own views of representation, belief and the intentional, emphatically support the view that the physical is devoid of the representational. Putnam asks us to imagine an ant crawling around in a patch of sand in such a way as to trace out “a recognizable caricature of Winston Churchill.”23 “Do the lines thus produced depict or represent Churchill?”
Putnam asks. He thinks most people would say it does not. The ant has simply traced some lines “that we can ‘see as’ a picture of Churchill.” Putnam’s view is that nothing (in the brain/mind or out) in itself is a representation of anything, but is of or about (depicts or denotes), something other than itself, if it does so, only because we “take it” as depicting or denoting that other thing.
Dennett holds a similar view, and specifically with reference to the states of human beings, such as beliefs, desires, etc. In the typically “naturalistic” mode he declares his
“starting point to be the objective, materialistic, third person world of the physical sciences,” and holds “that philosophy is allied with, and indeed continuous with, the physical sciences.”24 Like Putnam (who of course is not a naturalist), depicting, denoting, etc. is for Dennett only a matter of how we treat something. “The intentional stance” or “intentional strategy,” as he calls it, “consists of treating the object whose behavior you want to predict as a rational agent with beliefs and desires and other mental stages exhibiting what Brentano and others call intentionally. ”25 The existence of belief, etc. with its intentionality is to be confirmed only by the success of the intentional stance as a strategy for predicting behavior. And when a better predictive strategy comes along, all the mental clutter of “folk psychology” will go the way of phlogiston and witches. Of course if that happens they are not “really there” now.
For Dennett, as for Putnam, there is nothing in the brain or out that by its nature
represents something else. There are no “natural signs.” There are only human events of “taking as.” And these events of “taking as” also, it would seem, must themselves lack any natural capacity for representation (of what is taken as). Rather they, in their turn, can only be taken as representing what is taken as intentional states or systems of the human organism, or what is taken as pictures or symbols. They do not inherently represent them.
Surely there is something wrong here. If we are in a world where nothing is naturally representative of something else, and we see the lines traced by the ant as a picture of Winston Churchill, then our seeing also is not naturally of the lines, and of the lines as depicting Churchill. Either there is going to be at some point a “taking as”
which does not itself represent anything (even what is “taken”) – which certainly sounds like a self-contradiction and is at best unlike the instances of “taking” featured in Dennet’s explanations – or there is going to be an infinite regress of “takings.” This inclines one to say that unless there are some natural signs – things that refer or represent simply because of what they are – there will be no signs at all.26 But natural signs are, precisely, impossible in the world of strict physicalism – and, for his own reasons, in Putnam’s more generous world as well.
Logical relations
If narrow naturalism cannot provide for truth, it also cannot provide for logical relations. Yet these too are essential constituents of knowledge. It cannot provide for such relations because they are, precisely, relations with respect to the truth values of propositions. Here we need only consider simple cases such as the relation of contrariety. Two propositions are logical contraries if they can both be false but cannot both be true. For example, Sue’s dress is red and Sue’s dress is blue. If one of these propositions is true, the other must be false. They cannot both be true. But both can be false – if Sue’s dress is white, for example. The relation of contradiction, by contrast, is one that requires two propositions related by it to have opposite truth values, whichever they may be.
These and other logical relations are, like truth itself, objective relations. They obtain or do not obtain between propositions regardless of what any individuals or groups may feel or think about them. Moreover, laws expressing the logical relationships and logical character of propositions have a different sense and character from any laws of physical or psychological fact. They are neither hypothetical nor inductive, and have no existential import for such facts. They remain valid whether or not any such facts obtain. This becomes clearer if one tries to deduce or prove them from physical, psychological or linguistic facts or laws. It is not so much that it is not, in fact, done, or that it cannot be done, as that one cannot even imagine
what it would be like to do it.27 These are points which Frege and Husserl elaborated so effectively in the late nineteenth and early twentieth Centuries that they could hardly be raised for discussion until the philosophical turn from thought to language and culture was more or less completed in recent decades. But I think they are points which can be made to stand up independently of the correspondence account of truth; and, if so, they provide a refutation of naturalism independent of that account and resting simply on the nature of the laws of logic.
But the centrality of logical relations for knowledge does not just concern the essential involvement of logical relations with truth values. Comparatively speaking, there is very little that we know we know because we are able to directly examine the respective subject matter and verify the truth of our ideas about it. This little is, of course, profoundly important, both in allowing us to understand what truth is, as explained above, and in providing true premisses from which we may proceed to other known truths by following out logical relations. Finding truths by following out logical relations occurs to an almost fantastic extent by the application of mathematics to various domains – and especially now, when such application is hugely extended by means of computers. In these cases, it is knowledge of the truth of the derived propositions that allows us to know that the corresponding state of affairs obtains and that its constituents exist. Here logical relations plus truth of premisses allows us to know unexperienced (and even unexperiencable) existence, rather than the comparison of existence to thoughts about it allowing us to know truths.
Noetic unity
As logical relations presuppose truth, so noetic unity presupposes logical relations –
and more, presupposes a pattern of simultaneous and successive awarenesses that intercommunicates across a wide range of mental states and acts and their objects. The noetic aspect of knowing and knowledge encompasses all of the types of mental states and acts and their ways of coming together that are involved in the individual coming to know or to be in a state of knowledge. Knowledge is something that must be possessed. It is not the same thing as theory. And the possession of knowledge is an incredibly complicated and messy business, even with such a relatively simple part of knowing as a mere inference.
Thus Kornblith is quite right and makes a crucial point in rejecting purely apsychological accounts of belief (and knowledge) formation.28 These types of accounts simply overlook the noetic requirements of knowledge and lead to what she calls “The Arguments-on-Paper Thesis,” which treats justification as merely a matter of the logical relationships between propositions. The various forms of anti-foundationalism draw most of their ammunition from legitimate noetic
considerations, and that is their strength: Quine’s famous “web of belief,” Popper’s picture of inquiry as driving piles into mud and sand just deep enough to support the bridge, Norwood Hansen’s theory-ladenness of perception, Horkheimer’s distinction between “traditional” and “critical” theory, the currently famous “intertextuality,” etc.
Because the noetic issues are routinely mishandled through ontological mistakes or confusions carried into discussions of them – usually from empiricist or naturalistic assumptions – those who emphasize the noetic (and in a sense the psychological or even the social) conditions of knowing and knowledge most often turn out to be antirealists. And one may be taken for an anti-realist just for attempting to do justice to the noetic requirements. About a century ago Wilhelm Wundt accused Husserl of refuting logical psychologism in the first volume of his Logical Investigations and reverting to it in the second volume – merely because the second volume is devoted to issues that are essentially noetic. The opposite of naturalism, however, is not some form of subjectivism or idealism. Anti-naturalism does not need to downgrade the ontological status of the empirical world and the empirical self. We don’t surrender realism to defeat naturalism.
Still, for all the risks, any careful practice of knowing or theoretical examination of knowledge (and none have surpassed Husserl’s) must take its noetic dimensions into account. That is why philosophers do not write their arguments on three by five cards and pass them around to each other, and why even footnotes ( pace Searle) are not a sign of low philosophical quality.29 Philosophers produce expository texts, as well as arguments, to express, convey and evoke a noetic context within which actual understanding and knowing can occur and arguments be appreciated.
Thus, in his Discourse on Method, Part II, Descartes lays out his favored four from among “the great number of precepts of which Logic is composed.” All four are clearly noetic principles, from refusing to “accept” whatever is unclear, to the meticulous review of the steps in the progression from the clear and simple to the complex but logically derivable. Of course they also presuppose truth and logical relations and an ordered awareness thereof.
In a more recent philosophical presentation of modern logic, L. S. Stebbing distinguishes and interrelates inference (the essential noetic structure) and implication (the logical relation), the “therefore” and the “if . . . then,” as she also puts it.30 (She uses the term “epistemic” but clearly means the noetic as here understood.) The
“epistemic” conditions of coming to know q on the basis of p, as she describes them, include: p must be known to be true, and p must be known to imply q without its being known that q is true. She also holds that “although p may imply q when q is false, yet q cannot be validly inferred from p unless it is the case both that p is true and is known to be true.” She goes on to discuss the difference between inferring something (“validly”?) and tracing out the logical consequences of a proposition not assumed to be true or even assumed to be false, as in reductio ad absurdum. Such use of assumptions
and logical relations are obviously a crucial part of coming to possess knowledge, though they clearly are not inferences or arguments.
Alvin Plantinga rightly notes that “foundationalism is a normative thesis about noetic structures.”31 And, of course, the same is true about the many versions of Coherentism, verificationism, Aufbau projects, social constructionism, externalism, internalism, and “linguistic rule” theories that have turned up during the last century or so.
So, can the noetic be naturalized? It clearly cannot be, because of its pervasive involvement with logical relations. But there is more. The Kantian theme of the “unity of apperception” turns up here. His primary focus was upon the unity of a simple judgment and what was thereby presupposed about the mind. That is an important topic in itself, but knowledge and knowing does not come in the form of a simple judgment, or two or three of them. It comes in the form of a vast “web,” to borrow Quine’s word, of judgments, conceptualizations, perceptions, memories, even feelings and sensations, and experiences of many kinds. Indeed, it is not too much to say, a web of life. To know, we have said, is to represent something as it is, on an appropriate basis of thought and experience. The “appropriate basis” is never just awareness of a few logical relations, and a considerable “background” must be in place before the simplest cases of verification – finding the broom to be in the closet as I thought it to be – can occur.
Now, without logical relations and awareness of logical relations none of this could exist. But everything from how rationality functions across the great noetic web of the individual self, to the basic nature of creative genius (what was it about Einstein, after all?), to issues of self-identity are involved in noetic unity. This, I believe, is why it is impossible to lay down general sufficient conditions of an “appropriate basis.” And before naturalism can triumph it would have to provide an elucidation of noetic unity within the framework of physicalism specified above. This will take more than an argument that pain is a chemical process in the brain plus a salute to the future of brain science. We will need an “identity thesis” that reduces Einstein’s understanding of physical theory to brain states before it becomes really interesting.
Summary
We have tried to show why naturalism must be taken in the form of a “puritanical”
physicalism if it is to be a philosophically significant position, and have presented knowledge as involving at least truth as correspondence, logical relations and noetic unity. We have argued that there is no place for truth or logical relations in a world where the only properties are physical, and therefore that noetic unity is also impossible in such a world. Since it is possible – many things are known and there are
people of great knowledge – naturalism must be false. It cannot accommodate the ontological structure of knowing and knowledge.32
Notes
1 What might be called “generic naturalism” has a long history that includes: classical naturalism, with figures such as Democritus, Epicurus, Aristotle and Lucretius; Renaissance naturalism, with Bruno, Campanella and Telesio, and – born too late – Spinoza; empiricist/
nominalist naturalism, with Hobbes, Hume, D’Holbach and most of the French Encyclopedists and Comte; nineteenth-century materialistic naturalism, with Jakob Moleschott, Karl Vogt, Ernst Haeckel, Ludwig Büchner, Herbert Spencer and, it is often presumed, Charles Darwin; mid-twentieth-century (largely anti-materialistic) naturalism, with Santayana, Dewey and others; and late-twentieth-century (“identity thesis”) naturalism, which wavers between scientism and physicalism, with Quine, David Armstrong, Paul and Patricia Churchland, John Searle, etc.
To appreciate contemporary naturalism for what it is, and the logical nuances that surround it, one has to see it in this long historical context. The single unifying theme of all Naturalisms is anti-transcendentalism. Their steady point of reference is the visible world and whatever it contains, which is “nature” in extension. Nothing “outside” it is to be allowed.
This visible world is held to be self-existent, self-explanatory, self-operating and self directing.
Usually though not always it is thought to consist entirely of processes involving only blind force. But what “nature” is in intension has never been agreed upon among naturalists. Some look very much like pantheists, and yet others (Santyana, Dewey) reach very far to incorporate “the divine” and all that is humanly unique into “nature.” (See, currently, the divergence between Searle and, e.g., Paul Churchland or Daniel Dennett on the nature of the the mental.) Thus “self” in “self-existent” etc. only has the negative meaning of “non-other,” i.e., not in virtue of something separate from this thing called “nature.”
Effective entry into the long story for use by a contemporary thinker can be gained by starting with the article in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 10th ed., s.v. “Naturalism,” by James Ward, 88, and then going on to his Naturalism and Agnosticism, (London: A & C Black, 1915). W. R.
Sorley’s The Ethics of Naturalism (London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1904), especially 17–
21, is also helpful in understanding how naturalism has tried to distance itself from materialistic naturalism of Vogt, Haeckel, Büchner, etc. A series of articles on naturalism in The Journal of Philosophy from 1945 through 1949, easily identifiable by their titles, was evoked by the appearance of Naturalism and the Human Spirit [ed. Yervant H. Krikorian (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944)] and by A. E. Murphey’s excellent critical review of it in The Journal of Philosophy 42 (1945): 400–17. The outcome of the mid-twentieth-century discussion is nicely summarized by Arthur Danto’s article, “Naturalism,” in Paul Edwards, ed., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 5 (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1967), 448–50. One of the intriguing aspects of the current situation is how Materialism, which was thought to be dead or something to be avoided for the first half of the twentieth century, came to life again in association with the “identity thesis” of mind and body and a new scientism, and led to a reformulation and resurgence of naturalism at the end of the twentieth century. Reading
Danto’s fine article you would never have thought it possible.
For broader, cultural bearings of naturalism, see Paul F. Boller, Jr., American Thought in Transition: The Impact of Evolutionary Naturalism, 1865–1900 (Chicago: Rand McNally & Company, 1969), and John Ryder, ed., American Philosophic Naturalism in the Twentieth Century (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1994).
2 See for details my paper, “The Integrity of the Mental Act: Husserlian Reflections on a Fregian Problem,” in Mind, Meaning and Mathematics, ed. Leila Haaparanta (Dordrecht/Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994), 198–224.
3 W. V. Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 101.
4 Hilary Kornblith, “Beyond Foundationalism and the Coherence Theory,” in Hilary Kornblith (ed.) Naturalizing Epistemology, 2nd ed., (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1994), 142.
5 See Jaegwon Kim, “What is ‘Naturalized Epistemology’?” in, Naturalizing Epistemology, 33–55; and Hilary Putnam’s two Howison lectures, published in his Realism and Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), Chapters 12 and 13, under the titles “Why There Isn’t a Ready-Made World” and “Why Reason Can’t Be Naturalized.”
6 Putnam, Realism and Reason, 246.
7 See the chapter “The Construction of Good,” in Dewey’s The Quest for Certainty (New York: G.
P. Putnam’s Sons, 1960) or most any of Dewey’s mature works, such as Human Nature and Conduct (New York: The Modern Library, 1922) or, perhaps best of all, Experience and Nature (New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1958). On norms in nature see also Alvin Plantinga, Warrant: The Current Debate (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 72, and the thorough discussion in his Warrant and Proper Function (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), Chapter 11.
8 John Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1992), 85.
9 Searle, Rediscovery, xii.
10 Patricia Kitcher, “Review of Stephen P. Stich’s Deconstructing the Mind,” The Journal of Philosophy 95 (December, 1998): 641–4, 641–2. This entire review is actually quite instructive on the problems of specifying naturalism currently.
11 Ibid., 642.
12 A. E. Murphey, “Book Review of Naturalism and the Human Spirit,” The Journal of Philosophy 42
(1945): 400–17, 17. This may be the deeper reason why there is now a widespread sense that, in the words of Michael Friedman, naturalism “has reached the end of its useful life.” See his thorough examination of the current situation regarding naturalism in his Presidential Address to the American Philosophical Association: “Philosophical Naturalism,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 71 (1997): 7–37, as well as Barry Stroud’s Presidential Address of the previous year, “The Charm of Naturalism,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 70 (1996): 43–55, which emphasizes the lack of anything approaching a consensus concerning the meaning of the term. The volume Naturalism: A Critical Appraisal, Steven Wagner and Richard Warner, eds., (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993) also demonstrates what hard days have now befallen the movement.
13 One can also retreat to agnosticism, as seems to have happened with Thomas Huxley and
others in the late 1900s. See the article, “Naturalism,” in Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, ed., James Hastings (New York: C harles Schribner’s Sons, n.d.), 195–8. Also James Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism. Agnosticism about matter has begun to re-emerge in the philosophy of mind in recent years.
14 For a quick introduction see the article by Steven Luper-Foy, “Knowledge and Belief,” in Johathan Dancy and Ernest Sosa (eds.) A Companion to Epistemology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993), 234–7. Unfortunately, John Cook Wilson is not discussed there.
15 Roy Wood Sellars says that “knowledge is the possession of ideas which do disclose the characteristics of the object denoted. In knowing we hold ourselves to grasp the nature of the object, its properties, characteristics.… Knowledge is the disclosure of the characteristics of existence.” Roy Wood Sellars, The Philosophy of Physical Realism (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1932), 106. The entire Chapter IX, “Knowing a Common World,” should be read.
16 First Hegel and Kierkegaard, then pragmatism and “coherence”, then several twentieth-century options parasitical upon language (verifiability, rational acceptability, disquotational theories, and so forth). Loosening the grip on truth as an objective structure quickly led to loss of an objective and imperious logic. See the ways Hume, Kant, Hegel and Mill abuse the idea of logic, and for later developments up to the present see my “The Degradation of Logical Form,” Axiomathes (1997): 31–52.
17 See my “Space, Color, Sense Perception and the Epistemology of Logic,” The Monist, 72
(1989): 117–33, for a critical discussion of this idea. With respect to the linguistic nature of thought, Dennett remarks: “So the argument for a language of thought comes down to this: What else could it be?” aDaniel C. Dennett, The Intentional Stance [Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1987], 35 and see the footnote on this page). Well, there are some interesting possibilities as to what thought apart from language might be, well known in the history of thought, if one can but for a moment escape the grasp of empiricistic naturalism.
18 See my “Predication as Originary Violence: A Phenomenological Critique of Derrida’s View of Intentionality,” in Working through Derrida, ed., Gary B. Madison (Evanston Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 120–36.
19 Putnam, Realism and Reason, 234.
20 Ibid., 242.
21 In the last chapter of his The Intentional Stance, Dennett gives a very helpful presentation of the issues in recent discussions, from the discussions between Roderick Chisholm and Wilfrid Sellars to the time of the writing of his book in 1987.
22 Searle’s position is the clearest case of this. See The Rediscovery of Mind, and the more recent collection of papers, The Mystery of Consciousness (New York: The New York Review of Books, 1997). I do believe that emergence can be employed as a valid and useful concept in numerous domains, e.g., chemistry, sociology and the arts. But its valid employment requires some degree of insight into why this emerges from that. Such insight is lacking in the case of the brain and thoughts. This is a basic point made by such authors as Thomas Nagel and Colin McGinn. Searle’s “simple solution” to “the famous mind–body problem,” which “in a sense, we all know . . . to be true” simply refuses to face up to this fact ( Rediscovery, 1). Rightly insisting on the irreducibility of mental properties, Searle tries to force them to be natural by assigning them a role in evolutionary theory and claiming that they in some literal sense are present in or on the brain. As to the former point, even Descartes’ could have recognized the
function of his mental qualities in survival. Of course he did not think they ‘emerged’ from the brain. But neither Searle or anyone else has given any sense to the claim that they come from or are in or upon the brain. The actual relationship remains totally obscure.
23 Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 1.
24 Dennett, The Intentional Stance, 5.
25 Ibid., 15.
26 This is the thesis developed in Laird Addis, Natural Signs (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), especially “Part Two.”
27 For development of this point with special reference to Quine, see my “The Case against Quine’s Case for Psychologism,” in Perspectives on Psychologism, ed. M. A. Notturno (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1989), 286–95. And see the lengthy discussion of psychologism and the laws of logic in my Logic and the Objectivity of Knowledge (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1984), 143–
66.
28 Hilary Kornblith, “Beyond Foundationalism and the Coherence Theory,” 133. She seems unaware that she is dealing with issues that were thoroughly worked out a couple of times during in the last one hundred years. See my Logic and the Objectivity of Knowledge, 143–66.
29 See Searle’s remark to the effect that “philosophical quality varies inversely with the number of bibliographical references, and that no great work of philosophy ever contained a lot of footnotes,” In The Rediscovery of Mind, xiv.
30 L. Susan Stebbing, A Modern Introduction to Logic (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961), 214–
15. Stebbing draws heavily on the three volume Logic of W. E. Johnson, especially Part II, Chapter I, §3.
31 Plantinga, Warrant: the Current Debate, 73.
32 For an account that covers much the same ground as this paper, but from within the framework and terminology of Husserl’s strongly realist account of knowledge, see my paper,
“Knowledge,” in Barry Smith and David Woodruff Smith (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Husserl (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 138–67.
3 The incompatibility of naturalism and scientific realism
Robert C. Koons
1. Introduction
Whenever philosophers bother to offer a defense for philosophical naturalism, they typically appeal to the authority of natural science. Science is supposed to provide us with a picture of the world so much more reliable and well-supported than that provided by any non-scientific source of information that we are entitled, perhaps even obliged, to withhold belief in anything that is not an intrinsic part of our our best scientific picture of the world. This scientism is taken to support philosophical naturalism, since, at present, our best scientific picture of the world is an essentially materialistic one, with no reference to causal agencies other than those that can be located within space and time.
This defense of naturalism presupposes a version of scientific realism: unless science provides us with objective truth about reality, it has no authority to dictate to us the form which our philosophical ontology and metaphysics must take. Science construed as a mere instrument for manipulating experience, or merely as an autonomous construction of our society, without reference to our reality, tells us nothing about what kinds of things really exist and act.
In this chapter, I will argue, somewhat paradoxically, that scientific realism can provide no support to philosophical naturalism. In fact, the situation is precisely the reverse: naturalism and scientific realism are incompatible.
Specifically, I will argue that (in the presence of certain well-established facts about scientific practice) the following three theses are mutually inconsistent: 1.
Scientific realism
2.
Ontological naturalism (the world of space and time is causally closed) 3.
There exists a correct naturalistic account of knowledge and intentionality (representational naturalism)
By scientific realism, I intend a thesis that includes both a semantic and an epistemological component. Roughly speaking, scientific realism is the conjunction
of the following two claims:
1.
Our scientific theories and models are theories and models of the real world, including its laws, as it is objectively, independent of our preferences and practices.
2.
Scientific methods tend, in the long run, to increase our stock of real knowledge.
Ontological naturalism is the thesis that nothing can have any influence on events and conditions in space and time except other events and conditions in space and time.
According to the ontological naturalist, there are no causal influences from things
“outside” space: either there are no such things, or they have nothing to do with us and our world.
Representational naturalism is the proposition that human knowledge and intentionality are parts of nature, to be explained entirely in terms of scientifically understandable causal connections between brain states and the world. Intentionality is that feature of our thoughts and words that makes them about things, that gives them the capability of being true or false of the world.
I take philosophical naturalism to be the conjunction of the ontological and representational naturalism. The two theses are logically independent: it is possible to be an ontological naturalist without being a representational naturalist, and vice versa. For example, eliminativists like the Churchlands, Stich and (possible) Dennett are ontological naturalists who avoid being representational naturalists by failing to accept the reality of knowledge and intentionality. Conversely, a Platonist might accept that knowledge and intentionality are to be understood entirely in terms of causal relations, including, perhaps, causal connections to the forms, without being an ontological naturalist. I will argue that it is only the conjunction of the two naturalistic theses that is incompatible with scientific realism.
Many philosophers believe that scientific realism gives us good reason to believe both ontological naturalism and representational naturalism. I will argue, paradoxically, that scientific realism entails that either ontological naturalism or representational (or both) are false. I will argue that nature is comprehensible scientifically only if nature is not a causally closed system – only if nature is shaped by supernatural forces (forces beyond the scope of physical space and time).
My argument requires two critical assumptions:
PS:
A preference for simplicity (elegance, symmetries, invariances) is a pervasive feature of scientific practice.
ER:
Reliability is an essential component of knowledge and intentionality, on any naturalistic account of these.
2. The pervasiveness of simplicity
Philosophers and historians of science have long recognized that quasi-aesthetic
Naturalism and scientific realism 51
considerations, such as simplicity, symmetry, and elegance, have played a pervasive and indispensable role in theory choice. For instance, Copernicus’s heliocentric model replaced the Ptolemaic system long before it had achieved a better fit with the data because of its far greater simplicity. Similarly, Newton’s and Einstein’s theories of gravitation won early acceptance due to their extraordinary degree of symmetry and elegance.
In his recent book, Dreams of a Final Theory, physicist Steven Weinberg included a chapter entitled “Beautiful Theories,” in which he detailed the indispensable role of simplicity in the recent history of physics. According to Weinberg, physicists use aesthetic qualities both as a way of suggesting theories and, even more importantly, as a sine qua non of viable theories. Weinberg argues that this developing sense of the aesthetics of nature has proved to be a reliable indicator of theoretical truth.
The physicist’s sense of beauty is . . . supposed to serve a purpose – it is supposed to help the physicist select ideas that help us explain nature.1. . . we demand a simplicity and rigidity in our principles before we are willing to to take them seriously.2
For example, Weinberg points out that general relativity is attractive, not just for its symmetry, but for the fact that the symmetry between different frames of reference requires the existence of gravitation. The symmetry built into Einstein’s theory is so powerful and exacting that concrete physical consequences, such as the inverse square law of gravity, follow inexorably. Similarly, Weinberg explains that the electroweak theory is grounded in an internal symmetry between the roles of electrons and neutrinos.
The simplicity that physicists discover in nature plays a critical heuristic role in the discovery of new laws. As Weinberg explains,
Weirdly, although the beauty of physical theories is embodied in rigid, mathematical structures based on simple underlying principles, the structures that have this sort of beauty tend to survive even when the underlying principles are found to be wrong. . . . We are led to beautiful structures by physical principles, but the beauty sometimes survives when the principles themselves do not.3
For instance, Dirac’s 1928 theory of the electron involved an elegant formalism.
Dirac’s theory led to the discovery of the positron, and the mathematics of Dirac’s theory has survived as an essential part of quantum field theory, despite the fact that Dirac’s approach to reconciling quantum mechanics and relativity was wrong.4
Similarly, mathematicians’ pursuit of elegant mathematical theories has regularly anticipated the needs of theoretical physicists. The theory of curved space was developed by Gauss and Riemann before it was needed by Einstein, and group theory
antedated its use in the theory of internal symmetry principles in particle physics.5
Weinberg notes that the simplicity that plays this central role in theoretical physics is “not the mechanical sort that can be measured by counting equations or symbols.”6
The recognition of this form of beauty requires an act of quasi-aesthetic judgment. As Weinberg observes,
There is no logical formula that establishes a sharp dividing line between a beautiful explanatory theory and a mere list of data, but we know the difference when we see it.7
In claiming that an aesthetic form of simplicity plays a pervasive and indispensable role in scientific theory choice, I am not claiming that the aesthetic sense involved is innate or apriori. I am inclined to agree with Weinberg in thinking that “the universe acts as a random, inefficient and in the long-run effective teaching machine. . . .”8 We have become attuned to the aesthetic deep structure of the universe by a long process of trial and error, a kind of natural selection of aesthetic judgments. As Weinberg puts it,
Through countless false starts, we have gotten it beaten into us that nature is a certain way, and we have grown to look at that way that nature is as beautiful. . . .
Evidently we have been changed by the universe acting as a teaching machine and imposing on us a sense of beauty with which our species was not born. Even mathematicians live in the real universe, and respond to its lessons.9
Nonetheless, even though we have no reason to think that the origin of our aesthetic attunement to the structure of the universe is mysteriously prior to experience, there remains the fact that experience has attuned us to something, and this something runs throughout the most fundamental laws of nature. Behind the blurrin’ and buzzin’
confusion of data, we have discovered a consistent aesthetic behind the various fundamental laws. As Weinberg concludes,
It is when we study truly fundamental problems that we expect to find beautiful answers. We believe that, if we ask why the world is the way it is and then ask why that answer is the way it is, at the end of this chain of explanations we shall find a few simple principles of compelling beauty. We think this in part because our historical experience teaches us that as we look beneath the surface of things, we find more and more beauty.
Plato and the neo-Platonists taught that the beauty we see in nature is a reflection of the beauty of the ultimate, the nous. For us, too, the beauty of present theories is an anticipation, a premonition, of the beauty of the final theory. And, in any case, we would not accept any theory as final unless it were
Naturalism and scientific realism 53
beautiful.10 This capacity for “premonition” of the final theory is possible only because the fundamental principles of physics share a common bias toward a specific, learnable form of simplicity.
3. The centrality of reliability to representational naturalism The representational naturalist holds that knowledge and intentionality are entirely natural phenomena, explicable in terms of causal relations between brain states and the represented conditions. In the case of knowledge, representational naturalism must make use of some form of reliability. The distinction between true belief and knowledge turns on epistemic norms of some kind. Unlike Platonists, representational naturalists cannot locate the basis of such norms in any transcendent realm. Consequently, the sort of rightness that qualifies a belief as knowledge must consist in some relation between the actual processes by which the belief is formed and the state of the represented conditions. Since knowledge is a form of success, this relation must involve a form of reliability, an objective tendency for beliefs formed in similar ways to represent the world accurately.
A representational naturalist might make use, as do Dretske, Papineau and Millikan, of teleological properties, so long as these are taken to consist in a set of causal and historical relations. Knowledge could then be identified with true beliefs formed by processes whose proper functions are fulfilled in normal circumstances.
However, this teleological account also connects knowledge with reliability, since the proper function of belief-forming processes is to form true beliefs, so the sort of process which fulfills this proper function must be a reliable one.
Thus, if representational naturalism is combined with epistemic realism about scientific theories, the conjunction of the two theses entails that our processes of scientific research and theory choice must reliably converge upon the truth.
A naturalistic account of intentionality must also employ some notion of reliability.
The association between belief-states and their truth-conditions must, for the representational naturalist, be a matter of some sort of natural, causal relation between the two. This association must consist in some sort of regular correlation between the belief-state and its truth-condition under certain conditions (the
“normal” circumstances for the belief-state).
For example, according to Papineau, beliefs have teleological purposes, and these purposes fix their truth conditions, since “beliefs are true when they fulfill their purpose of co-varying with the relevant circumstances.”11 This co-variation of representation and represented condition is what gives the capacity for belief is biological value. “According to the natural-selection story it is the fact that a belief-type
‘typically’ obtains in certain circumstances that will explain our having it in our repertoire. . .”.12 This regular association of belief-type and truth-conditions, and the biological purposes which the association serves, provide exactly the kind of naturalistic explication of intentionality that the representational naturalist requires.
This regular association is a form of reliability. As Fodor observed:
. . . we shall still have this connection between the etiology of representations and their truth values: representations generated in teleologically normal circumstances must be true. 13
This reliability is only a conditional reliability: reliability under teleologically normal circumstances. This condition provides the basis for a distinction between knowledge and true belief: an act of knowledge that p is formed by processes that reliably track the fact that p in the actual circumstances, whereas a belief that p is formed by processes that would reliably track p in normal circumstances.
It is possible for our reliability to be lost. Conditions can change in such a way that teleologically normal circumstances are no longer possible. In such cases, our beliefs about certain subjects may become totally unreliable.
It is the past predominance of true belief over false that is required.… [This]
leaves it open that the statistical norm from now on might be falsity rather than truth. One obvious way in which this might come about is through a change in the environment.14
In addition, there may be specifiable conditions that occur with some regularity in which our belief-forming processes are unreliable.
. . . this link is easily disrupted. Most obviously, there is the point that our natural inclinations to form beliefs will have been fostered by a limited range of environments, with the result that, if we move to new environments, those inclinations may tend systematically to give us false beliefs. To take a simple example, humans are notoriously inefficient of judging sizes underwater.15
Finally, the reliability involved may not involve a high degree of probability. The correlation of belief-type and represented condition does not have to be close to 1. As Millikan has observed, “it is conceivable that the devices that fix human beliefs fix true ones not on average, but just often enough.”16 For example, skittish animals may form the belief that a predator is near on the basis of very slight evidence. This belief will be true only rarely, but it must have a better-than-chance probability of truth under normal circumstances, if it is to have a representational function at all.
Thus, despite these qualifications, it remains the case that a circumscribed form of reliable association is essential to the naturalistic account of intentionality. The reliability is conditional, holding only under normal circumstances, and it may be minimal, involving a barely greater-than-chance correlation. Nonetheless, the
Naturalism and scientific realism 55
representational naturalist is committed to the existence of a real, objective association of the belief-state with its corresponding condition.
4. Proof of the incompatibility
I claim that the triad of scientific realism (SR), representational naturalism (RN), and ontological naturalism (ON) is inconsistent, given the theses of the pervasiveness of the simplicity criterion in our scientific practices (PS) and the essentiality of reliability as a component of naturalistic accounts of knowledge and intentionality. The argument for the inconsistency proceeds as follows.
1.
SR, RN and ER entail that scientific methods are reliable sources of truth about the world.
As I have argued, a representational naturalist must attribute some form of reliability to our knowledge- and belief-forming practices. A scientific realist holds that scientific theories have objective truth-conditions, and that our scientific practices generate knowledge. Hence, the combination of scientific realism and representational naturalism entails the reliability of our scientific practices.
2.
From PS, it follows that simplicity is a reliable indicator of the truth about natural laws.
Since the criterion of simplicity as a sine qua non of viable theories is a pervasive feature of our scientific practices, thesis 1 entails that simplicity is a reliable indicator of the truth (at the very least, a better-than-chance indicator of the truth in normal circumstances).
3.
Mere correlation between simplicity and the laws of nature is not good enough: reliability requires that there be some causal mechanism connecting simplicity and the actual laws of nature.
Reliability means that the association between simplicity and truth cannot be coincidental. A regular, objection association must be grounded in some form of causal connection. Something must be causally responsible for the bias toward simplicity exhibited by the theoretically illuminated structure of nature.
4.
Since the laws of nature pervade space and time, any such causal mechanism must exist outside space time.
By definition, the laws and fundamental structure of nature pervade nature. Anything that causes these laws to be simple, anything that imposes a consistent aesthetic upon them, must be supernatural.
5
Consequently, ON is false.
The existence of a supernatural cause of the simplicity of the laws of nature is obviously inconsistent with ontological naturalism. Hence, one cannot consistently embrace naturalism and scientific realism.
Frank Ramsey17 and David Lewis18 have proposed an account of the nature of natural law that would dispose of any need to explain the reliability of simplicity as an indicator of genuine lawhood. Their account simply identifies the laws of nature with the axioms of the best theory of the world, where best is cashed out in terms of such virtues as simplicity, strength and fit with the empirical data. Hence, it becomes an analytic truth that simplicity is a criterion of the lawfulness of a confirmed generalization.
In Realism Regained 19 I argue that the Ramsey/Lewis account of laws is incompatible with scientific realism (as I defined it) and fails adequately to explain the changing, dynamic nature of our standards of simplicity as we learn by experience what sort of aesthetic properties the laws of nature really have. On the Ramsey/Lewis account, facts about the laws of nature are not independent of our practices and preferences, and so lack the kind of objectivity required by scientific realism. In addition, Ramsey and Lewis cannot give a causal theory of scientific knowledge or intentionality, since, on their view, laws of nature are not the kinds of things that can enter into cause-and-effect relations with our cognitive faculties.
5. Papineau and Millikan on scientific realism
David Papineau and Ruth Garrett Millikan are two thoroughgoing naturalists who have explicitly embraced scientific realism. If the preceding argument is correct, this inconsistency should show itself somehow in their analyses of science. This expectation is indeed fulfilled. For example, Papineau recognizes the importance of simplicity in guiding the choice of fundamental scientific theories. He also recognizes that his account of intentionality entails that a scientific realist must affirm the reliability of simplicity as a sign of the truth. Nonetheless, he fails to see the incompatibility of this conclusion with his ontological naturalism. Here is the relevant passage:
. . . it is plausible that at this level the inductive strategy used by physicists is to ignore any theories that lack a certain kind of physical simplicity. If this is right, then this inductive strategy, when applied to the question of the general constitution
Naturalism and scientific realism 57
of the universe, will inevitably lead to the conclusion that the universe is composed of constituents which display the relevant kind of physical simplicity.
And then, once we have reached this conclusion, we can use it to explain why this inductive strategy is reliable. For if the constituents of the world are indeed characterized by the relevant kind of physical simplicity, then a methodology which uses observations to decide between alternatives with this kind of simplicity will for that reason be a reliable route to the truth.20
In other words, so long as we are convinced that the laws of nature just happen to be simple in the appropriate way, we are entitled to conclude that our simplicity-preferring methods were reliable guides to the truth. However, it seems clear that such a retrospective analysis would instead reveal that we succeeded by sheer, dumb luck.
By way of analogy, suppose that I falsely believed that a certain coin was two-headed. I therefore guess that all of the first six flips of the coin will turn out to be heads. In fact, the coin is a fair one, and, by coincidence, the five of the first six flips did land heads. Would we say in this case that my assumption was a reliable guide to the truth about these coin flips? Should we say that its reliability was 5/6? To the contrary, we should say that my assumption led to very unreliable predictions, and the degree of success that I achieved was due to good luck, and nothing more.
Analogously, if it is a mere coincidence that the laws of nature share a certain form of aesthetic beauty, then our reliance upon aesthetic criteria in theory choice is not in any sense reliable, not even minimally reliable, not even reliable in ideal circumstances. When we use the fact that we have discovered a form of “physical simplicity” in law A as a reason for preferring theories of law B which have the same kind of simplicity, then our method is reliable only if there is some causal explanation of the repetition of this form of simplicity in nature. And this repetition necessitates a supernatural cause.
Papineau recognizes that we do rely on such an assumption of the repetition of simplicity:
The account depends on the existence of certain general features which characterize the true answers to questions of fundamental physical theory. Far from being knowable a priori, these features may well be counterintuitive to the scientifically untrained.21
Through scientific experience, we are “trained” to recognize the simplicity shared by the fundamental laws, and we use this knowledge to anticipate the form of unknown laws. This projection of experience from one law to the next is reliable only if there is some common cause of the observed simplicity.
Similarly, Millikan believes that nature has trained into us (by trial and error learning) certain “principles of generalization and discrimination”22 that provide us with a solution to the problem of theoretical knowledge that was “elegant, supremely
general, and powerful, indeed, I believe it was a solution that cut to the very bone of the ontological structure of the world.”23 However, Millikan seems unaware of just how deep this incision must go. A powerful and supremely general solution to the problem of theory choice must reach a ground of the common form of the laws of nature, and this ground must lie outside the bounds of nature.
Papineau and Millikan might try to salvage the reliability of a simplicity bias on the grounds that the laws of nature are, although uncaused, brute facts, necessarily what they are. If they share, coincidentally, a form of simplicity and do so non-contingently, then a scientific method biased toward the appropriate form of simplicity will be, under the circumstances, a reliable guide to the truth.
There are two compelling responses to this line of defense. First, there is no reason to suppose that the laws of nature are necessary. Cosmologists often explore the consequences of models of the universe in which the counterfactual laws hold.
Second, an unexplained coincidence, even if that coincidence is a brute-fact necessity, cannot ground the reliability of a method of inquiry. A method is reliable only when there is a causal mechanism that explains its reliability. By way of illustration, suppose that we grant the necessity of the past: given the present moment, all the actual events of the past are necessary. Next, suppose that a particular astrological method generates by chance the exact birthdate of the first President of the United States. Since that date is now necessary, there is no possibility of the astrological method’s failing to give the correct answer. However, if there is no causal mechanism explaining the connection between the method’s working and the particular facts involved in Washington’s birth, then it would be Pickwickian to count the astrological method as reliable in investigating this particular event.
Analogously, if the various laws of nature just happen, as a matter of brute, inexplicable fact, to share a form of simplicity, then, even if this sharing is a matter of necessity, using simplicity as a guide in theory choice should not count as reliable.
6. The Forster–Sober account of simplicity
In a recent paper,24 Malcolm Forster and Elliott Sober offer a justification of the scientific preference for simplicity that seems to be compatible with scientific realism and yet which does not acknowledge any sense in which simplicity is a reliable indicator of the truth. If the Forster-Sober account provides an adequate explanation of the role of simplicity without any such reliable connection between simplicity and truth, then it would provide a serious challenge to the argument of the previous section. As Forster and Sober put it,
In the past, the curve fitting problem has posed a dilemma: Either accept a realist interpretation of science at the price of viewing simplicity as an irreducible and a prioristic sign of truth and thereby eschew empiricism, or embrace some form of anti-realism. Akaike’s solution to the curve fitting problem dismantles the
Naturalism and scientific realism 59
dilemma. It is now possible to be a realist and an empiricist at the same time.25
The issue for Forster and Sober is realism vs. empiricism, whereas for us it is realism vs.
naturalism, but it would seem that analogous claims could be made on behalf of Akaike’s solution. This solution is supposed to give the realist some reason for preferring simpler hypotheses that is independent of any supposed correlation between simplicity and truth.
The Akaike solution goes something like this. First, we must assume that all of our observations involve a certain amount of noise – that random observational error regularly occurs, and the the error values are normally distributed. We divide the possible hypotheses into a finite sequence of families, based on the degree of simplicity (measured by the number of parameters that are allowed to vary within the family). Instead of selecting the hypothesis that best fits the actual data, we instead look for a family of hypotheses with the best combination of goodness-of-fit and simplicity, and choose the best fitting hypothesis within that set.
The rationale for the Akaike criterion is the avoidance of overfitting. Since the actual data includes some unknown observational error, the curve that best fits the data is unlikely to be the true one. It will tend to fit the actual data better than the true curve, which is called the “overfitting” of the hypothesis to the data. Balancing goodness-of-fit with simplicity is supposed to mitigate this overfitting error.
Consequently, the realist is given some reason to employ simplicity as a desideratum of theory choice without assuming any correlation between simplicity and truth.
Simpler, low-dimensional families are much smaller than the more complex, high-dimensional families. There are therefore two reasons why the more complex families are more likely to contain the hypothesis that best fits the data: (a) Larger families generally contain curves closer to the truth than smaller families.
(b) Overfitting: the higher the number of adjustable parameters, the more prone the family is to fit to noise in the data.26
According to Forster and Sober, we want to favor a family of hypotheses if it contains a good fit to the data because of reason (a), but not if it contains one because of reason (b). What is needed is an estimate of the expected degree of overfitting associated with each family, given the actual data. Akaike demonstrated that, under certain special conditions, we can find an unbiased estimator of this special form of error. By subtracting the number of parameters that are allowed to vary within a family from a measure of the degree-of-fit of the best-fitting curve within that family (this measure is one of log-likelihood or, in special cases, the sum of squares), we can arrive at a corrected estimate of the degree of fit of the family to the truth, which Forster and Sober call the
“expected predictive accuracy” of the family.27 The Akaike criterion tells us to choose the best-fitting hypothesis within the family with the greatest expected predictive accuracy. In this way, we have both a definite rule for trading-off goodness-of-fit for
simplicity, and a plausible rationale for making the tradeoff.
There are several points to be made in response to this solution. First, it is not at all clear that the role of simplicity in the kind of curve-fitting practices Forster and Sober discuss is at all analogous to the role simplicity plays in our choice of fundamental physical theories. As Weinberg observed, the kind of simplicity that guides our choice of fundamental theories is not easily defined. It does not correspond directly to what Forster and Sober mean by the simplicity of a family of hypotheses, namely, the number of variable parameters in the corresponding equations.
Second, the technical results upon which Forster and Sober rely are quite limited in their scope of application, as I. A. Kieseppä has demonstrated.28 The Aikake estimator of predictive accuracy is valid only when the space of hypotheses is carefully circumscribed. For example, it is valid when the space of hypotheses includes only polynomial equations, but invalid when it includes periodic functions, like the sine wave function.29
Third, the rationale for the Akaike criterion is incompatible with the reliabilist implications of combining scientific realism with representational naturalism. The sort of “scientific realism” that Forster and Sober have in mind is much less specific, implying only a concern with the truth of our scientific theories. Forster and Sober make no effort to demonstrate that reliance on the Akaike criterion leads reliably to the truth. Instead, they provide only a rationale that might reasonably motivate a realist to prefer simpler theories.
Finally, it is far from clear that even this rationale provides a basis for preferring simplicity that is genuinely independent of the reliability of simplicity as a sign of the truth. As has been pointed out by Kieseppä,30 Scott De Vito,31 and Andre Kukla,32 the Akaike solution presupposes that a determinate conception of simplicity is a given.
There is no objective, language- and representation-independent way of “counting the parameters” associated with a given curve. A linear curve is naturally thought of as having a single parameter, but this can easily be altered by redescribing the curve or altering the coordinate system. Sorting hypotheses into families by simplicity as we perceive it reflects a prior and unjustified preference for some hypotheses over others.
Forster and Sober might insist that the sorting of hypotheses into a hierarchy of families is entirely arbitrary or random. As they present the argument for the Akaike criterion, all that matters is that the hypotheses be sorted into a sequence of families in which the size of the families increases exponentially, and that this sorting not be done in an ad hoc fashion, in response to the actual data observed. Then, when we observe a relatively small family F with a hypothesis h showing a surprisingly good degree of fit to the data (surprising, that is, in light of the smallness of F), we are supposed to have good reason to believe that F has a high degree of predictive accuracy, and, therefore, that we have reason to prefer h over other hypotheses with better fit that happen to belong to much larger families. However, if it was entirely a matter of chance or caprice that h ended up in a small family, and its better-fitting competitors ended up in larger families, it is hard to see how h’s good fortune provides us with any rational ground for preferring it.
Naturalism and scientific realism 61
To the contrary, the plausibility of the Akaike solution depends on our prior conviction that simpler hypotheses (as measured by mathematical conventions that have proved reliable at this very task) are disproportionately probable. What Forster and Sober give us is a principled way of weighing the two competing desiderata of simplicity and goodness of fit, but they do not provide us with a rationale for treating simplicity as a desideratum in the first place.
Consequently, Forster and Sober do not provide us with a way of escaping the conclusion that a reliabilist conception of scientific realism entails the reliability of simplicity as an indicator of the truth.
7. Pragmatic accounts of the simplicity criterion
A popular strategy for explaining the role of simplicity in scientific theorizing has been to appeal to a variety of pragmatic considerations. For example, Reichenbach argued that we favor simpler hypotheses because they are easier to represent, to make deductions from, and to use in calculations.33 More recently, Peter Turney has argued that simpler hypotheses are more likely (given the presence of random observational error) to be repeatedly confirmed.34
However, these pragmatic justifications again sidestep the central issue, that of reliability. If our reliance on simplicity is unreliable, resulting in a bias toward simplicity that is not reflected in the constitution of nature, then we cannot combine scientific realism with representational naturalism.
A pragmatic justification of our scientific practice, when combined with representational naturalism, yields the conclusion that scientific theories must be interpreted non-representationally, either as mere instruments for generating empirical predictions, or as conventional constructs valid only for a local culture.
Pragmatism, by eschewing any commitment to the objective reliability of scientific methods, cannot be combined with a naturalistic version of scientific realism.
8. Conclusion
Philosophical naturalism, then, can draw no legitimate support from the deliverances of natural science, realistically construed, since scientific realism entails the falsity of naturalism. If scientific theories are construed non-realistically, it seems that the status of ontology cannot be affected by the successes of natural science, nor by the form that successful theories in the natural sciences happen to take. If scientific anti-realism is correct, then the “manifest image” of the scientific world-view must not be taken as authoritative. Instead, that image is merely a useful fiction, and metaphysics is left exactly as it was before the advent of science.
Of course, naturalism as a metaphysical program existed before the development of modern science (Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius) and presumably it would
survive the downfall of scientific realism. However, modern naturalists owe the rest of us a rational basis for their preferences that is independent of science.
In fact, the situation for the naturalist is even worse than I have described it. To the extent that the success of natural science provides support for scientific realism (in both its semantic and epistemic versions), to that extent it provides grounds for rejecting philosophical naturalism. Thus, conventional wisdom has the relationship between natural science and naturalism exactly backwards. In fact, the more successes natural science accumulates, the less plausible philosophical naturalism becomes.
There is a third thesis that is often included (especially since Quine) in the definition of naturalism: the continuity between the methods of philosophy and those of natural science, which we might call “metaphilosophical naturalism.” Scientific antirealism, when combined with meta-philosophical naturalism, leads to the conclusion of philosophical antirealism, since philosophical theories are, according to metaphilosophical naturalism, merely a species of scientific theories.
This means that full-orbed naturalism (ontological + representational +
metaphilosophical) is a self-defeating position. Full-orbed naturalism is a philosophical theory, and yet it entails philosophical anti-realism, which means that such theories cannot be known, and do not even purport to represent the world. Full-orbed naturalism cannot be true, since if it were true, it would entail that no philosophical theory (itself included) could be true.
Notes
1 Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory: The Scientist’s Search for the Ultimate Laws of Nature (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 133.
2 Ibid., 148–9.
3 Ibid., 151–2.
4 Ibid., 151.
5 Ibid., 152.
6 Ibid., 134.
7 Ibid., 148–9.
8 Ibid., 158.
9 Ibid., 158–9.
10 Ibid., 165.
11 David Papineau, Philosophical Naturalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 177.
12 David Papineau, “Representation and Explanation,” Philosophy of Science 51 (1984): 558.
13 Jerry Fodor, “Semantics, Wisconsin Style,” Synthese 59 (1984): 247.
14 Papineau, “Representation and Explanation,” 558.
15 Papineau, Philosophical Naturalism, 100.
16 Ruth Garrett Millikan, “Biosemantics,” Journal of Philosophy 86 (1989): 289.
17 F.P. Ramsey, Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
18 David Lewis, “Humean Supervenience Debugged,” Mind 103 (1994): 473–90.
19 Robert C. Koons, Realism Regained: An Exact Theory of Causation, Teleology and the Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
20 Papineau, Philosophical Naturalism, 166.
Naturalism and scientific realism 63
21 Ibid., 166.
22 Millikan, “Biosemantics,” 292.
23 Ibid., 294.
24 Malcolm Forster and Elliot Sober, “How to Tell When Simpler, More Unified, or Less Ad Hoc Theories Will Provide More Accurate Predictions,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 46 (1995): 248–52.
25 Ibid., 28.
26 Ibid., 8.
27 Ibid., 2.
28 I.A. Kieseppä, “Akaike Information Criterion, Curve-fitting and the Philosophical Problem of Simplicity”, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 48 (1997).
29 Ibid., 34–7.
30 Kieseppä, “Akaike Information Criterion.”
31 Scott De Vito, “A Gruesome Problem for the Curve-Fitting Solution,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 48 (1997): 391–6.
32 Andre Kukla, “Forster and Sober and the C urve-Fitting Problem,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 46 (1995): 248–52.
33 Hans Reichenbach, “The Pragmatic Justification of Induction,” in H. Feigl and W. Sellars (eds.), Readings in Philosophical Analysis (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts), 305–27.
34 Peter Turney, “The Curve-Fitting Problem, a Solution,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 41 (1990): 509–30.
Ontology
4 Naturalism and the ontological
status of properties
J. P. Moreland
Throughout the history of philosophy, many have advanced the idea that there is a connection between naturalism and nominalism. Specifically, many philosophers have argued that naturalism requires a nominalist rejection of the existence of properties construed along traditional realist lines as abstract, multiply-exemplifiable entities that non-spatially inhere in their instances.1 Thus, in Sophist 246A-C, we read these words from Plato:
Stranger:
What we shall see is something like a battle of gods and giants going on between them over their quarrel about reality.
Theaetetus: How so?
Stranger:
One party is trying to drag everything down to earth out of heaven and the unseen, literally grasping rocks and trees in their hands, for they lay hold upon every stock and stone and strenuously affirm that real existence belongs only to that which can be handled and offers resistance to the touch. They define reality as the same thing as body, and as soon as one of the opposite party asserts that anything without a body is real, they are utterly contemptuous and will not listen to another word.
Theaetetus: The people you describe are certainly a formidable crew. I have met quite a number of them before now.
Stranger:
Yes, and accordingly their adversaries are very wary in defending their position somewhere in the heights of the unseen, maintaining with all their force that true reality consists in certain intelligible and bodiless forms. In the clash of argument they shatter and pulverize those bodies which their opponents wield, and what those others allege to be true reality they call, not real being, but a sort of moving process of becoming. On this issue an interminable battle is always going on between the two camps.
In the contemporary setting, Howard Robinson remarks that “materialist theories are incompatible with realist theories of universals. The tie between nominalism and materialism is an ancient one.”2 Since most philosophers currently see physicalism (which for our purposes can be used synonymously with materialism) as the best form of naturalism, Robinson’s remark applies with equal force to a widely accepted
contemporary version of naturalism to be described below. Along similar lines, Reinhardt Grossmann has argued that naturalists are at war with what he calls ontologists.3 According to Grossmann, the universe is the spatio-temporal totality of physical entities and the world includes every existent whatever, including non-spatiotemporal abstract entities such as properties. Naturalists deny the world and only believe in the universe; ontologists like Grossmann accept the world. Wilfrid Sellars claimed that “a naturalist ontology must be a nominalist ontology.”4 Elsewhere, Sellars argued that a nominalist analysis of predication is the “. . . very foundation of a naturalist ontology.”5
However, not all philosophers have agreed with this view of the relationship between naturalism and nominalism. For example, Colin McGinn claims that as long as the naturalist gives an account of the instantiation of all properties in terms of the instantiation of physical properties taken as straightforward physical facts, (s)he is free to take properties themselves as non-physical, abstract entities.6
Currently, debates about naturalism and abstract objects usually focus on mathematical entities, e.g. Quine is called a Platonist for embracing sets, Hartry Field adopts a fictional instrumentalist account of mathematical truth as a requirement for expressing a consistent physicalist naturalism, and Penelope Maddy tries to work out a version of realism in mathematics that is consistent with naturalism as she conceives it.7 As interesting as the debate about mathematical entities is, for three reasons, I think it is a mistake to focus the dialog about naturalism and abstract objects on mathematical entities instead of on properties. For one thing, without begging any questions against nominalists, the existence and nature of properties is just more pre-analytically evident than the existence and nature of numbers. Thus, pre-analytic intuitions allow for more flexibility for analyses of numbers than for properties. For example, if a philosopher identifies the number two with a set because the identity conditions of the latter are unproblematic, there is more prima facie plausibility in that move than for a similar strategy for treating the property of being red.
Second, properties are every bit as central to scientific theory as mathematical entities, so no advantage is gained for those who wish to give pride of place to scientific discourse in ontology by focusing on mathematics.
Third, and most importantly, properties are far more critical for fleshing out an adequate ontological framework than mathematical entities. Virtually any ontological issue will require properties or at least property-talk for its expression, but the same cannot be said for mathematics. Indeed, some solutions to the ontological status of mathematical entities employ properties (or at least property-talk). For example, Maddy attempts to work out a version of realism consistent with her conception of the constraints that follow from naturalism (e.g. rejection of first philosophy, justification of entities because they are required by our best scientific theories, acceptance of
The ontological status of properties 69
entities only if knowledge of them can be harmonized with a naturalist view of humans as physical cognizing entities).8 For Maddy, numbers are properties of sets and sets are located at the place where the physical objects which are members of the sets are. Now Maddy’s solution requires at least property-talk and she explicitly leaves open the realist/nominalist debate about properties. For our purposes, I note simply that the debate about properties is more fundamental to Maddy’s ontology than is her position on numbers.
It would seem, then, that debates about the ontological status of properties are central to the task of analyzing the adequacy of different forms of naturalism. There are four strategies that naturalists can employ in dealing with properties: (1) Accept a traditional realist construal of properties and claim that this is fully consistent with a widely accepted version of contemporary naturalism. (2) Accept a traditional realist construal of properties and take this to require an abandonment of a widely accepted version of contemporary naturalism. (3) Reject a traditional realist and accept a modified construal of properties which is acceptable within the constraints of contemporary naturalism. (4) Reject the existence of properties in favor of extreme nominalism.
The thesis I wish to defend is (2). If properties exist and are what traditional realists take them to be, then a widely accepted contemporary version of naturalism is false.
(4) is the path taken by naturalists such as Wilfrid Sellars. I shall not look at this strategy due to space considerations and because I think the arguments against extreme nominalism are persuasive and widely known.9 I will list but for two reasons not develop a set of considerations against (1). First, in my opinion those naturalists who take this option often do so apparently without being aware of the fundamental issues involved in embracing this alternative. I believe this often happens because these issues are matters of so-called first philosophy and many naturalists seem uninterested in or simply reject topics in first philosophy. (3) brings these issues to center stage and by focusing on them, I hope to show how crucial they are to debates about the adequacy of naturalism. Second, my interests simply lie in the current debate about (3), so if I can show it to be problematic, I can at least raise problems for those naturalists who agree with me that (3) is the key area of debate.
In what follows, I shall first, compare three schools of thought regarding the ontological status of properties and clarify the traditional realist approach; second, characterize three crucial elements that constitute a widely accepted contemporary version of naturalism and show why traditional realist depictions of properties are not a plausible option for naturalism so conceived; third, analyze and criticize the two most powerful naturalist attempts to reconcile naturalism with an acceptance of properties – the views of Armstrong and Campbell.
Three schools of thought regarding the ontological status of properties
There are three major schools of thought regarding the nature of properties. They can be clarified by focusing on attribute-agreement. Suppose we have before us two red and round spots. Suppose further that each spot has the “same” shade of red and the same roundness. Let us call the two spots Socrates and Plato. Let us also use red1
and red2 to stand for the redness of Socrates and the redness of Plato, respectively.
Attribute-agreement can be interpreted in three general ways. First, there is extreme nominalism. There are several versions of extreme nominalism, but all exclude properties as they are construed by the realists or nominalists, The extreme nominalist is committed to a reductive analysis of attributes: a has the attribute F, if and only if, Q.
Different versions of extreme nominalism will spell out Q in different ways. A predicate extreme nominalist may spell out Q as “the predicate ‘F’ is true of a.” A class extreme nominalist may state Q as “a is a member of the class of F-things.” A concept extreme nominalist would substitute for Q something like “a falls under the concept F.” My purpose is not to delineate all the varieties of extreme nominalism. I merely note that the fundamental feature of this account of attribute-agreement and exemplification is its denial that attributes form an additional category of being distinct from the things that have them (unless, of course, a new category other than that of quality is introduced and to which qualities are reduced, e.g. predicates, classes, concepts, etc.).
The second major interpretation of attribute-agreement is called nominalism. A nominalist acknowledges the existence of properties but denies that attribute-agreement is to be explained along realist lines where properties are taken to be universals. The nominalist denies that the redness of Socrates is numerically identical to the redness of Plato. Socrates and Plato may both have a determinate shade of color that is “exactly alike.” But the two do not share the same numerically identical quality.
Each has a particular entity that is not multiply exemplifiable, a little red. Quality-instances construed along nominalist lines have various labels: Among them are
“tropes,”10 “abstract particulars,”11 “perfect particulars,”12 “cases,”13 “aspects,”14 “unit properties,”15 “property-instances,”16 and “moments.”17
Finally, the third type of interpretation of attribute-agreement is called the realist view. There are different varieties of realism. For example, Aristotelian realists disagree with Platonic realists over the question of the existence of uninstantiated universals. However, traditional realists like Reinhardt Grossmann hold universals to be non-spatio-temporal abstract entities which are constituents “in” their instances.18
The ontological status of properties 71
To elaborate on a traditional realist understanding of qualities and quality-instances, recall our round, red spot, Socrates. According to traditional realism, a universal is a multiply exemplifiable entity which is a numerically identical entity in each of its instances. Thus, instances are not simples for a traditional realist; they are complex entities. Now consider the following three sentences and the states of affairs they describe.
(1) Socrates (a red, round spot) is red.
(2) Red1 is red.
(3) This (individuator, e.g. a bare particular) is red.
The state of affairs described by (1) is best understood as follows. Socrates has a property-instance in it, red1, and red1 is red. The relation between red1 and Socrates is a sort of part/whole relation. Let us call this the “moment/whole” relation, to borrow Husserl’s terminology.19 Observe that (1) is grounded, at least in part, in (2).
The “is” in (1) is grounded in two different “ways of being in” – the way a moment is in a whole (Socrates) and the “way of being in” expressed in (2).
The state of affairs described in (2) contains a second kind of part/whole relation.
(2) states that the universal, redness, is a part of the whole, red1 in the sense that redness is one of the constituents that is in red1. This is not a spatial sense of in. Let us call this “way of being in” the relation of “being an essential property-constituent of”.
Two things should be said about this relation as it is found in (2). First, this is a part/
whole relation that differs from the “moment/ whole” relation of (1) in at least one important way. If b stands to a in such a way that b “is an essential property-constituent of” a, then the following two principles hold between a and b that fail to obtain in the moment/whole relation: (1) b transcends a in the sense that b is necessary for a’s existence but not vice versa. Moreover, b enters into the being of a but not vice versa.
Here b is redness and a is red1. Redness can exist without red1, and not vice versa. Red1
could be destroyed but redness would still exist unchanged. Thus, there is a modal distinction between a universal and its instances. When a universal is exemplified, the universal is modified and constitutes the essence of its instances which, in turn, are complex, dependent particulars. The same could not be said for the “moment/
whole” relation in (1) between Socrates and red1. (2) B is the essence of a; that is, b answers the question “What is a an instance of?” Redness is the essence of red1. Red1
is an instance of redness in that redness is immanent within red1 as its informing essence.
Second, this last point suggests an implication of (2). (2) entails an “is” of classification. It implies that red1 is to be placed in the class of red instances, where
“class” refers to a group of entities that literally share some entity in common. An “is”
of classification is more clearly expressed in
(2′) Red1 is a red.
This sentence expresses the fact that red1 is identical to some red instance in the class of red instances. Moreover, (2) and (2′) are grounded in a more basic relation which founds the inclusion of red1 in the class of red instances. This more basic relation is expressed in (3).
The state of affairs described by (3) contains an “is” of exemplification or predication. I use these two as synonyms here. The “is” in (1) and (2) are expressions of predication in a loose and popular sense and not in a strict, philosophical sense.
This is because the “is”’s in (1) and (2) are grounded in a more basic relation. (1) is grounded (in part) in (2), and (2) is grounded in (3). The “is” in (3) refers to a basic, undefined, irreducible nexus of predication. It expresses the fact that the universal, redness, is connected to a bare particular (or, perhaps, some other individuator) in red1 by the nexus of exemplification. This nexus of predication is inhomogeneous in the sense that it relates two entities that differ categorically, a universal and an individuator. So redness is in an individuator (which is in red1) in that redness is predicated of or “tied to” that individuator.
This, then, is a sketch of a traditional realist assay of property-instances which (1) maintains true universals, (2) grounds the individuation of property-instances by making them complex entities with an individuating constituent in them, and (3) clarifies three important states of affairs and their associated “ways of being in.” For traditional realists, neither the universal nor the exemplification nexus are spatiotemporal entities. Moreover, in the case of Socrates and Plato, the exemplification nexus connects an abstract entity with a spatio-temporal one.
Johanna Seibt notes approvingly that Sellars argued several decades ago that
“since the basic relation of a Platonist theory of predication, i.e. exemplification, cannot be defined in naturalist terms, a nominalist theory of predication proves to be
‘. . . the very foundation of a naturalist ontology’.”20 It may now be evident to the reader why Sellars thought this was so. If not, it should become evident once we get clear on the nature of a widely accepted version of contemporary naturalism to which Sellars subscribed.
Naturalism and the rejection of a traditional realist view of properties
Contemporary philosophical naturalism
Just exactly what are the central features of contemporary scientific naturalism?21 As
The ontological status of properties 73
with any widely accepted ideology, there will be different nuances given to naturalism by different thinkers. Nevertheless, it is both possible and desirable to give an accurate characterization of a specific form of philosophical naturalism (hereafter, simply naturalism or scientific naturalism) that is currently enjoying widespread acceptance.
Roughly, naturalism is the view that the spatio-temporal universe of entities postulated by our best (or ideal) theories in the physical sciences is all there is. Scientific naturalism includes (1) different aspects of a naturalist epistemic attitude (e.g. a rejection of so-called first philosophy along with an acceptance of either weak or strong scientism); (2) an etiological account of how all entities whatsoever have come to be, constituted by an event causal story (especially the atomic theory of matter and evolutionary biology) described in natural scientific terms; and (3) a general ontology in which the only entities allowed are ones that bear a relevant similarity to those thought to characterize a completed form of physics.
The ordering of these three ingredients is important. Frequently, the naturalist epistemic attitude serves as justification for the naturalist etiology which, in turn, helps to justify the naturalist’s ontological commitment. Moreover, naturalism seems to require a coherence among what is postulated in these three different areas of the naturalistic turn. For example, there should be a coherence among third-person scientific ways of knowing, a physical, evolutionary account of how our sensory and cognitive processes came to be, and an ontological analysis of those processes themselves. Any entities that are taken to exist should bear a relevant similarity to entities that characterize our best (or ideal) physical theories, their coming-to-be should be intelligible in light of the naturalist causal story, and they should be knowable by scientific means.
1. The naturalist epistemic attitude
As with much of modern philosophy, naturalism first and foremost is an expression of an epistemic posture, specifically, a posture called scientism. In the early 1960s, Wilfrid Sellars expressed this posture when he said that “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.”22 Steven Wagner and Richard Warner claim that naturalism is “the view that only natural science deserves full and unqualified credence.”23 Contemporary naturalists embrace either weak or strong scientism.
According to the former, non-scientific fields are not worthless nor do they offer no intellectual results, but they are vastly inferior to science in their epistemic standing and do not merit full credence. According to the latter, unqualified cognitive value resides in science and in nothing else. Either way, naturalists are extremely skeptical of any claims about reality that are not justified by scientific methodology.
Naturalists believe that they are justified in this posture because of the success of science vis a vis other fields of inquiry. Also, some naturalists justify this standpoint by
appealing to the unity of science, though this argument is employed less frequently today than it was a few decades ago. For example, Roy Bhaskar asserts that “naturalism may be defined as the thesis that there is (or can be) an essential unity of method between the natural and the social sciences.”24 And as John Searle notes, since for these naturalists science exhausts what we can know, then belief in the unity of science turns out to be a belief in the unity of all knowledge because it is scientific knowledge: Every fact in the universe is in principle knowable and understandable by human investigators. Because reality is physical, and because science concerns the investigation of physical reality, and because there are no limits on what we can know of physical reality, it follows that all facts are knowable and understandable by us.25
For the naturalist, the exhaustive nature of scientific knowledge entails that the only explanations that count are scientific explanations.
We have seen that scientism is the core epistemic posture of the contemporary naturalist. From this core commitment, at least two philosophical theses follow that in one way or another elaborate the epistemic and methodological constraints for philosophy that are part of taking the naturalistic turn. First, there is no such thing as first philosophy. According to David Papineau, there is a continuity between philosophy and natural science:
. . . the task of the philosophers is to bring coherence and order to the total set of assumptions we use to explain the natural world. The question at issue is whether all philosophical theorizing is of this kind. Naturalists will say that it is. Those with a more traditional attitude to philosophy will disagree. These traditionalists will allow, of course, that some philosophical problems, problems in applied philosophy, as it were, will fit the above account. But they will insist that when we turn to ‘first philosophy’, to the investigation of such fundamental categories as thought and knowledge, then philosophy must proceed independently of science. Naturalists will respond that there is no reason to place first philosophy outside of science.26
A second, and closely related thesis follows from the fact that “the philosopher who wants to regard human beings and mental phenomena as part of the natural order
[must] explain intentional relations in naturalistic terms.”27 The naturalist will hold to an externalist theory of knowledge or justification (or warrant). This is true for two main reasons, one positive and one negative. The positive reason is that “A scientific or naturalistic account of [human beings and their mental states] must be a causal
The ontological status of properties 75
account.”28 Externalist theories in epistemology either implicitly (e.g. reliabilist theories) or explicitly (e.g. causal accounts) center on the notion of causality.
The negative reason is this: The central notion of “internal” for the internalist is an irreducibly mental one that makes reference to such things as being a self-presenting property, being a mode of conscious, being directly present to the cognizer’s awareness, cognitive accessibility, being internal to one’s point of view, first person introspection, etc. Arguably, all these notions are mental. Moreover, they are irreducible and cannot be analyzed merely as functional states if the perspective is to remain an internalist one because if these are reduced to (or replaced by) physicalist (causal/functional) notions, then what is distinctive to internalism will fall out and the view will collapse into externalism.29 Why? Because neither the properties just mentioned nor the way that they are internal to epistemic subjects (e.g. by being self-presenting, being available to private, first person access) is identifiable with (1) a particular, property, or relation that belongs to the ontology of physics or (2) a functional state or a physical realizer of a functional state.