Scepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties
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Scepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties

P.F. Strawson

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Scepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties

P.F. Strawson

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By the time of his death in 2006, Sir Peter Strawson was regarded as one of the world's most distinguished philosophers. Unavailable for many years, Scepticism and Naturalism is a profound reflection on two classic philosophical problems by a philosopher at the pinnacle of his career.

Based on hisacclaimed Woodbridge lectures deliveredat Columbia University in 1983, Strawson beginswith adiscussion of scepticism, which he defines as questioning the adequacy of our grounds for holding various beliefs. He then draws deftly on Hume and Wittgensteinto argue that we must distinguish between'hard', scientificnaturalism; or 'soft', humanistic naturalism. In the remaining chapters the author takes up several issues in which sceptical doubts play an important role, in particular the nature of transcendental arguments andincluding the objectivity of moral philosophy, the mental and the physical, and the existence of abstract entities.

Scepticism and Naturalism is essential reading for those seeking an introduction to the work of one of the twentieth century's most important and original philosophers.

This reissue includes a substantial new foreword by Quassim Cassam and a fascinating intellectual autobiography by Strawson, which together form an excellent introduction to his life and work.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2011
ISBN
9781136652813
1
Scepticism, Naturalism And Transcendental Arguments
1. Introductory Remarks
The term ‘naturalism’ is elastic in its use. The fact that it has been applied to the work of philosophers having as little in common as Hume and Spinoza is enough to suggest that there is a distinction to be drawn between varieties of naturalism. In later chapters, I shall myself draw a distinction between two main varieties, within which there are subvarieties. Of the two main varieties, one might be called strict or reductive naturalism (or, perhaps, hard naturalism). The other might be called catholic or liberal naturalism (or, perhaps, soft naturalism). The words ‘catholic’ and ‘liberal’ I use here in their comprehensive, not in their specifically religious or political, senses; nothing I say will have any direct bearing on religion or the philosophy of religion or on politics or political philosophy.
Each of these two general varieties of naturalism will be seen by its critics as liable to lead its adherents into intellectual aberration. The exponent of some subvarieties of strict or reductive naturalism is liable to be accused of what is pejoratively known as scientism, and of denying evident truths and realities. The soft or catholic naturalist, on the other hand, is liable to be accused of fostering illusions or propagating myths. I do not want to suggest that a kind of intellectual cold war between the two is inevitable. There is, perhaps, a possibility of compromise or détente, even of reconciliation. The soft or catholic naturalist, as his name suggests, will be the readier with proposals for peaceful coexistence.
My title seems to speak of varieties of scepticism as well as varieties of naturalism. An exponent of some subvariety of reductive naturalism in some particular area of debate may sometimes be seen, or represented, as a kind of sceptic in that area: say, a moral sceptic or a sceptic about the mental or about abstract entities or about what are called ‘intensions’. I shall explore some of these areas later on; and it is only then that the distinction between hard and soft naturalism will come into play.
For the present, I shall not need any such distinction and I shall not make any such slightly deviant or extended applications of the notion of scepticism. To begin with, I shall refer only to some familiar and standard forms of philosophical scepticism. Strictly, scepticism is a matter of doubt rather than of denial. The sceptic is, strictly, not one who denies the validity of certain types of belief, but one who questions, if only initially and for methodological reasons, the adequacy of our grounds for holding them. He puts forward his doubts by way of a challenge – sometimes a challenge to himself – to show that the doubts are unjustified, that the beliefs put in question are justified. He may conclude, like Descartes, that the challenge can successfully be met; or, like Hume, that it cannot (though this view of Hume’s was importantly qualified). Traditional targets of philosophic doubt include the existence of the external world, i.e. of physical objects or bodies; our knowledge of other minds; the justification of induction; the reality of the past. Hume concerned himself most with the first and third of these – body and induction; and I shall refer mainly, though not only, to the first.
I shall begin by considering various different kinds of attempts to meet the challenge of traditional scepticism by argument; and also various replies to these attempts, designed to show that they are unsuccessful or that they miss the point. Then I shall consider a different kind of response to scepticism – a response which does not so much attempt to meet the challenge as to pass it by. And this is where I shall first introduce an undifferentiated notion of Naturalism. The hero of this part of the story is Hume: he appears in the double role of arch-sceptic and arch-naturalist. Other names which will figure in the story include those of Moore, Wittgenstein, Carnap and, among our own contemporaries, Professor Barry Stroud. This part of the story is the theme of the present chapter. It is an old story, so I shall begin by going over some familiar ground. In the remaining chapters I shall tackle a number of different topics – viz. morality, perception, mind and meaning – and it is only in connection with these that I shall introduce and make use of the distinction between hard and soft naturalism.
2. Traditional Scepticism
To begin, then, with G. E. Moore. It will be remembered that in his famous A Defence of Common Sense 1 Moore asserted that he, and very many other people as well, knew with certainty a number of propositions regarding which some philosophers had held that they were not, and could not be, known with certainty. These propositions included the proposition that the earth had existed for a great many years; that on it there had been, and were now, many bodies, or physical objects, of many different kinds; that these bodies included the bodies of human beings who, like Moore himself, had had, or were having, thoughts and feelings and experiences of many different kinds. If Moore was right in holding that such propositions are widely known, with certainty, to be true, then it seems to follow that certain theses of philosophical scepticism are false: e.g. the thesis that it cannot be known with certainty that material objects exist, and the thesis that no one can know with certainty of the existence of any minds other than his own or, to put it a little more bluntly, that no one can know with certainty that there are other people. Again, the first of these two sceptical theses is implicitly challenged, indeed denied, by Moore in yet another famous paper called Proof of an External World.2 He claimed, in delivering this paper, to prove that two human hands exist, hence that external things exist, by holding up first one hand, then another and saying, as he did so, ‘Here is one hand and here is another.’ The proof was rigorous and conclusive, he claimed, since he knew for certain that the premise was true and it was certain that the conclusion followed from the premise.
It was hardly to be expected that Moore’s ‘Defence’ or his ‘Proof’ would be universally accepted as settling the questions to which they were addressed. Rather, it was felt by some philosophers that the point of philosophical scepticism about, say, the existence of external things, of the physical world, was somehow being missed. A recent expression of this feeling is given by Professor Barry Stroud in an article called ‘The Significance of Scepticism’.3 At its most general, the sceptical point concerning the external world seems to be that subjective experience could, logically, be just the way it is without its being the case that physical or material things actually existed. (Thus Berkeley, for example, embraced a different hypothesis – that of a benevolent deity as the cause of sense-experiences – and we can find in Descartes the suggestion, though not, of course, the endorsement, of another – that of a malignant demon; while the consistent phenomenalist questions the need for any external source of sense-experience at all.) So if Moore, in making the claims he made, was simply relying on his own experience being just the way it was, he was missing the sceptical point altogether; and if he was not, then, since he issues his knowledge-claims without any further argument, all he has done is simply to issue a dogmatic denial of the sceptical thesis. But simple dogmatism settles nothing in philosophy. Stroud, at the end of his article, suggests that we ought to try to find some way of defusing scepticism. He does not mean some way of establishing or proving that we do know for certain what the sceptic denies we know for certain, for he does not appear to think that this is possible; but, rather, some way of neutralizing the sceptical question, rendering it philosophically impotent. These expressions are not very clear, but I doubt if Stroud intended them to be.
Stroud mentions one attempt to neutralize the sceptical question, an attempt which he finds unsatisfactory. The attempt is Carnap’s.4 Carnap distinguished two ways in which the words ‘There are or exist external or physical things’ might be taken. On one interpretation these words simply express a proposition which is an obvious truism, a trivial consequence of hosts of propositions, like Moore’s ‘Here are two hands’, which are ordinarily taken, and in a sense correctly taken, to be empirically verified, to be established by and in sense-experience. On this interpretation, Moore’s procedure is perfectly in order. Nevertheless Carnap would agree with Stroud that Moore’s procedure is powerless to answer the philosophical question of whether there really are physical things, powerless to establish the philosophical proposition that there really are such things. For Carnap accepts the point that, as the sceptic understands, or, more precisely, as he claims to understand, the words ‘There exist physical things’, Moore’s experience, or any experience, could be just the way it is without these words expressing a truth; and hence that no course of experience could establish the proposition these words are taken by the sceptic to express; that it is in principle unverifiable in experience. But the conclusion that Carnap draws is not the sceptical conclusion. The conclusion he draws is that the words, so taken, express no proposition at all; they are deprived of meaning so that the question whether the proposition they express is true or false does not arise. There is no theoretical issue here. There is indeed a practical issue: whether or not to adopt, or persist in, a certain convention, to make, or persist in, the choice of the physical-thing language or framework of concepts for the organization of experience. Given that the choice is made, the convention is adopted, or persisted in, then we have, internally to the adopted framework, a host of empirically verifiable thing-propositions and hence, internally to the framework, the trivial truth that there exist physical things. But the external, philosophical question, which the sceptic tries to raise, viz. whether the framework in general corresponds to reality, has no verifiable answer and hence makes no sense.
Moore, then, according to Stroud, either misses the point of the sceptical challenge or has recourse to an unacceptable dogmatism, a dogmatic claim to knowledge. Carnap, again according to Stroud, does not altogether miss the point, but seeks to smother or extinguish it by what Stroud finds an equally unacceptable verificationist dogmatism. It is all very well, says Stroud, to declare the philosophical question to be meaningless, but it does not seem to be meaningless; the sceptical challenge, the sceptical question, seem to be intelligible. We should at least need more argument to be convinced that they were not.
Many philosophers would agree with Stroud, as against Carnap, on this point; and would indeed go further and contend both that the sceptical challenge is perfectly intelligible, perfectly meaningful, and that it can be met and answered by rational argument. Descartes was one such; though his appeal to the veracity of God to underwrite, or guarantee the reliability of, our natural inclination to believe in the existence of the physical world no longer seems very convincing; if it ever did. More popular today is the view that the assumption of the existence of a physical world, of physical things having more or less the characteristics and powers which our current physical theory represents them as having, provides a far better explanation of the course of our sensory experience than any alternative hypothesis. Such an assumption puts us in the way of a non-arbitrary, full, detailed, coherent causal account of that experience to an extent which no alternative story comes anywhere near rivalling. It can therefore be judged rational to accept it by the same criteria of rationality as govern our assessment of explanatory theories framed in natural scientific enquiry or empirical inquiries generally. I shall return to this answer later.
Stroud does not discuss this approach in quite the form I have given it; but he does discuss a near relation of it, viz. Quine’s suggestion of what he calls a ‘naturalized epistemology’, which would address itself to the empirical question of how, from the meagre data available to us in experience, we come to form the elaborate structure of our ordinary and scientific beliefs about the world.5 Stroud acknowledges that such an enquiry is perfectly legitimate in itself; but, he contends, it leaves the sceptical challenge completely untouched. If it were seen as an attempted answer to the philosophical question, it would be, he maintains, in no better position that Moore’s commonsense assertion; merely a ‘scientific’ version or analogue of the latter. We may in the end be convinced that Quine’s legitimate naturalistic question is the only substantial one that confronts us; but if we are to be satisfied that this is so, it must first be shown that there is something radically faulty, radically misconceived, about the sceptical challenge, about regarding what Carnap called the external question as raising a genuine issue. But this, says Stroud, has not so far been shown, either by Carnap, though he asserted it, or anyone else.
It is at this point that Stroud acknowledges the appeal of a kind of argument which he calls ‘transcendental’. Such arguments typically take one of two forms. A philosopher who advances such an argument may begin with a premise which the sceptic does not challenge, viz. the occurrence of self-conscious thought and experience; and then proceed to argue that a necessary condition of the possibility of such experience is, say, knowledge of the existence of external objects or of states of mind of other beings. Or he may argue that the sceptic could not even raise his doubt unless he knew it to be unfounded; i.e. he could have no use for the concepts in terms of which he expresses his doubt unless he were able to know to be true at least some of the propositions belonging to the class all members of which fall within the scope of the sceptical doubt. Stroud remains dubious of the success of such arguments; presumably for the same reasons as he expounded in an earlier article entitled ‘Transcendental Arguments’.6 There he confronts the propounder of such arguments with a dilemma. Either these arguments, in their second form, are little more than an elaborate and superfluous screen behind which we can discern a simple reliance on a simple form of verification principle or the most that such arguments can establish is that in order for the intelligible formulation of sceptical doubts to be possible or, generally, in order for self-conscious thought and experience to be possible, we must take it, or believe, that we have knowledge of, say, external physical objects or other minds; but to establish this falls short of establishing that these beliefs are, or must be, true.
The second horn of the dilemma is perhaps the more attractive in that it at least allows that transcendental argument may demonstrate something about the use and interconnection of our concepts. But if the dilemma is sound, the sceptic’s withers are unwrung in any case. (Stroud seems to assume without question that the point of transcendental argument in general is an antisceptical point; but the assumption may be questioned, as I shall later suggest. In either case, according to Stroud, the sceptic is unshaken because he does not deny that we do, and need not deny that we must, employ and apply the concepts in question in experiential conditions which we take to warrant or justify their application. His point is, and remains, that the fulfilment of those conditions is consistent with the falsity of all the propositions we then affirm; and hence that – failing further argument to the contrary – we cannot be said really to know that any such propositions are true.
3. Hume: Reason and Nature
Is there any other way with scepticism which is not a variant on those I have referred to, i.e. is neither an attempt directly to refute it by rational argument drawing on commonsense or theological or quasi-scientific considerations nor an attempt indirectly to refute it by showing that it is in some way unintelligible or self-defeating? I think there is another way. There is nothing new about it, since it is at least as old as Hume; and the most powerful latter-day exponent of a closely related position is Wittgenstein. I shall call it the way of Naturalism; though this name is not to be understood in the sense of Quine’s ‘naturalized epistemology’.
In a famous sentence in Book II of the Treatise Hume limits the pretensions of reason to determine the ends of action.7 In a similar spirit, towards the end of Book I, he limits the pretensions of reason to determine the formation of beliefs concerning matters of fact and existence. He points out that all arguments in support of the sceptical position are totally inefficacious; and, by the same token, all arguments against it are totally idle. His point is really the very simple one that, whatever arguments may be produced on one side or the other of the question, we simply c...

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