Anglo-american Postmodernity

Philosophical Perspectives On Science, Religion, And Ethics

Nancey Murphy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429981890
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The term 'postmodern' is generally used to refer to current work in philosophy, literary criticism, and feminist thought inspired by Continental thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacques Derrida. In this book, Nancey Murphy appropriates the term to describe emerging patterns in Anglo-American thought and to indicate their radical break from the thought patterns of Enlightened modernity. The book examines the shift from modern to postmodern in three areas: epistemology, philosophy of language, and metaphysics. Murphy contends that whole clusters of terms in each of these disciplines have taken on new uses in the past fifty years and that these changes have radical consequences for all areas of academia, especially philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, and ethics.

1 . . .
Anglo-American Postmodernity

1. Introduction

The term 'postmodern' is being used more and more frequently in a variety of intellectual circles. It is most often associated with deconstructionism, a literary theory-cum-philosophy whose best-known proponent is French critic Jacques Derrida. Deconstructionism's line of descent is Continental: from Friedrich Nietzsche and also from Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, whose work gave birth to structuralism.

But is postmodernity merely a Continental phenomenon, or does it make sense to speak as well—or instead—of Anglo-American postmodernity?¹ I argue that it does; it is becoming fairly common on this side of the Atlantic as well to note the passing of modernity. For instance, in Stephen Toulmin's intriguing book Cosmopolis, he glances at changes in art, architecture, and politics but concentrates his gaze on epistemology.² Modern thought, he says, was characterized by a drive for certitude and universality.

We are now at the point in history where we can see the emphasis on certitude and universality as a particular, historically conditioned episode in Western thought. But what comes next? Toulmin urges a return to the values of the Renaissance: interest in the particular, the timely, and the local. He urges especially the replacement of the seventeenth-century ideal of scientific-logical rationalism with the reasonableness of the Renaissance, which was modest about its own powers and required tolerance of social, cultural, and intellectual diversity. But is this the way ahead?

I claim that the groundwork has already been laid for a postmodern world-view very different from both modern and Continental 'postmodern' thought. The first task of this chapter is to provide a brief characterization of philosophical modernity. Against this background we are able to recognize assorted philosophical moves of the past forty or so years as genuinely postmodern. Here we find a way ahead that is in fact modest, that recognizes genuine diversity in intellectual matters but without succumbing to the relativistic conclusions of the Continental postmodernists.

I suggest that modern thought in general, especially modern philosophy, has been characterized by three interrelated positions.

1. Foundationalism in epistemology
2. Referentialism in philosophy of language
3. Atomism and reductionism in metaphysics

This general characterization of modern thought was first worked out in an article I wrote with James Wm. McClendon Jr. titled "Distinguishing Modern and Postmodern Theologies."³ We claimed that modern thought could be 'mapped' along three interdependent axes: the epistemological axis, representing degrees of optimism regarding the foundationalist project; the linguistic axis, with poles representing referential versus expressivist or emo-tivist views of language; and what we called the metaphysical axis, where we located thinkers according to their individualist or collectivist accounts of human action and identity. We then argued that thinkers who had managed to transcend all three of these polarities or debates, but without simply returning to premodern modes of thought, should be counted as postmodern.

In this chapter I intend to revisit all of these issues. My chief focus, however, is to make good on the claim that the individualism of the modern period is indeed but an instance of a general metaphysical stance and, in addition, to suggest that the epistemology and philosophy of language that we designated as 'modern' are deeply influenced by the same metaphysical assumptions. I argue that metaphysical atomism and reductionism first became embodied in natural science, but very quickly spread, via metaphorical or catachretical extension, to the rest of modern thought.⁴ Thus, I am able to claim that (Anglo-American) postmodernity is at its root a rejection of reductionism in all its forms, including rejection of reductionism in science, but also the substitution of holism for foundationalism in epistemology and the substitution of a focus on use in social context for a referential account of meaning that was in its own way atomistic.

2. Modern Thought

2.1. Foundationalism

Foundationalism is a theory about knowledge. More specifically, it is a theory about how claims to know can be justified. When we seek to justify a belief, we do so by relating it to (basing it on, deriving it from) other beliefs. If these other beliefs are called into question, then they, too, must be justified. Foundationalists insist that this chain of justifications must stop somewhere; it must not be circular, nor must it constitute an infinite regress. Thus, the regress must end in a 'foundation' of beliefs that cannot themselves be called into question.⁵

The plausibility of the foundationalist theory of knowledge comes from a metaphor: knowledge as a building. Upper stories are built upon lower stories, but the whole structure collapses if it has no solid foundation. This metaphor has so thoroughly imbued our thinking that we can scarcely talk about knowledge without hints of it: good arguments are well grounded and solidly constructed; suspicions are unfounded or baseless; disciplines that explore presuppositions are called foundational.

Some historians (Richard Rorty, for example) trace foundationalism all the way back to Plato, but more commonly it is identified with modern philosophy, beginning with Rene Descartes. It was a fateful day when Descartes, forced by cold weather to stay in a warm room in Germany, examined his "ideas," while meditating on the architecture visible through his window. "It is true," he said,

that we never tear down all the houses in a city just to rebuild them in a different way and to make the streets more beautiful; but we do see that individual owners often have theirs torn down and rebuilt, and even that they may be forced to do so when the building is crumbling with age, or when the foundation is not firm and it is in danger of collapsing. By this example I was convinced that ... as far as the opinions which I had been receiving since my birth were concerned, I could not do better than to reject them completely for once in my lifetime, and to resume them afterwards, or perhaps accept better ones in their place, when I had determined how they fitted into a rational scheme. And I firmly believed that by this means I would succeed in conducting my life much better than if I built only upon the old foundations and gave credence to the principles which I had acquired in my childhood without ever having examined them to see whether they were true or not.⁶

Modern philosophy from then on has been captivated by the architectural picture. This notion of tearing down the house (rejecting tradition) is what distinguishes Descartes's foundationalism from earlier quests for certain knowledge.

Why the anxiety? Why the perceived need to justify all received knowledge? We are so much the children of the modern worldview that this question may not even arise. Yet there is a historical explanation. Toulmin offers plausible speculations regarding the cultural climate that gave foundational-ism its appeal. Descartes lived through the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648). The bloodshed and chaos that followed upon differences of belief lent urgency to the quest for universal agreement; the epistemologist could render a service to humanity by finding a way to produce such agreement. Science and religion stood for two paths to knowledge: pure reason versus tradition. If human reason was a faculty shared universally, then a new structure built on the deliverances of human reason must garner universal assent. So since Descartes's time, the ideal of human knowledge has focused on the general, the universal, the timeless, the theoretical—in contrast to the local, the particular, the timely, the practical.⁷

One can do a tidy job of summing up the main currents in epistemology since Descartes by noting successive answers to two questions: What is the nature or source of foundational beliefs—clear and distinct ideas, impressions, sense data? What kind of reasoning is to be used for the construction— deductive, inductive, constructive, hypothetico-deductive?

2.2. Referentialism

If we look at theories of language developed by philosophers in the modern period, the predominant view of language can be described as atomistic and referential (or representative). That is, complex utterances were to be understood by analyzing them into their simplest parts, and the meaning of the parts was to be accounted for in terms of reference.

For John Locke, words referred to or represented ideas—"words in their primary or immediate signification, stand for nothing but the ideas in the mind of him that uses them.^"8 Ideas, in turn, stood for things; simple ideas were "perfectly taken from the existence of things" (3.4.17). Simple ideas were compounded to form complex ideas; sentences represented the connections the mind makes between ideas. Locke's approach stands behind much modern philosophy of language.

Gottlob Frege has been one of the most significant influences on modern philosophy of language. Frege was largely responsible for banishing "psy-chologism" from theories of language—that is, for the rejection of views such as Locke's that understood language first in relation to mental contents. Michael H. McCarthy points out that when the sense of a sentence is made dependent on individual feelings or beliefs, it loses its ability to provide a basis for collaboration. "If shared inquiry is to be possible, there must be a common ground of objective meaning independent of the psychological reactions of the participants. The sense of language must be separated from the private impressions caused by its use."⁹ Here we find another instance of the drive for universal agreement that lies behind foundationalism.

Frege's famous distinction between Sinn (sense) and Bedeutung (reference) might have distracted modern philosophers from their preoccupation with reference since Frege claimed that sense was the primary meaning of 'meaning.' However, he understood the sense of a word in terms of the contribution it makes to the truth of sentences, and the truth of sentences, for Frege, depended only on its reference—so reference returned through the back door.

The logical atomists—Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein in his early work, and others—followed Frege in supposing that philosophy of language was to be done by devising formal artificial languages rather than by analyzing natural languages. They also followed Frege in recognizing the sentence or proposition as the smallest unit of meaningful discourse. Thus, in place of a referential theory of the meaning of words, we have a representative or 'picture' theory of the meaning of sentences or propositions.

With this very clear expression of a referential-representative approach to language came the recognition that whole realms of discourse, such as religion, ethics, and aesthetics, could not be treated in the same manner as factual discourse. This prompted the elaboration of a second theory of lan guage—or, more precisely, the elaboration of a theory of second-class language. For example, A. J. Ayer, in his influential popularization of logical positivism, claimed that ethical judgments, having no factual meaning, serve merely to express the attitudes or moral sentiments of the speaker.¹⁰ Hence, we may call this the expressivist theory of language. In general, it stated that language that is not factually meaningful, if significant at all, merely expresses the attitudes, intentions, or emotions of the speaker.

2.3. Reductionism

2.3.1. From Metaphysics to Natural Science When we think of the transition from medieval to modern science, the Copernican revolution is most likely to come to mind. However, the transition from Aristotelian hylomorphism to atomism has had equally significant cultural repercussions. Yet probably because the transition happened more gradually—finally completed in biology only in the nineteenth century—this change has received less attention.

Galileo can be given as much credit for this change as for the revolution in astronomy. He was one of the first modern scientists to reject the Aristotelian theory that all things are composed of matter and form in favor of an atomic or corpuscular theory. His version of atomism hypothesized that all physical processes could be accounted for in terms of the properties of the atoms, which he took to be size, shape, and rate of motion.

The success of the subsequent system of physics developed by Isaac Newton depended on the specification of inertial mass as the essential property of atoms and on the development of the concept of a force. Atomism was extended to the domain of chemistry by Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and John Dalton, who made great headway in explaining the phenomena of chemistry on the assumption that all material substances possessed mass and were composed of corpuscles or atoms. This was a striking triumph for the atomic theory of matter and for reductionism, that is, the strategy not only of analyzing a thing into its parts, but also of explaining the properties or behavior of the thing in terms of the properties and behavior of the parts.

The atomist-reductionist program continues to bear fruit in contemporary physics, as particle accelerators have made it possible to continue the quest for true 'atoms' in the philosophical sense: the most basic, indivisible constituents of matter. Silvan Schweber states: "Unification and reduction are the two tenets that have dominated fundamental theoretical physics during the present century." He goes on: "With Einstein the vision became all-encompassing. Einstein advocated unification coupled with a radical form of theory reductionism. In 1918 he said, 'The supreme test of the physicist is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction.' . . . The imp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Anglo-American Postmodernity
• Part I Philosophy of Science
• Part II Philosophy of Religion
• Part III Science, Religion, and Ethics
• Postscript
• About the Book and Author
• Index