Articulating the World

Conceptual Understanding and the Scientific Image

Joseph Rouse

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780226293844, 9780226293677
• eBook ISBN: 9780226293707
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

Naturalism as a guiding philosophy for modern science both disavows any appeal to the supernatural or anything else transcendent to nature, and repudiates any philosophical or religious authority over the workings and conclusions of the sciences. A longstanding paradox within naturalism, however, has been the status of scientific knowledge itself, which seems, at first glance, to be something that transcends and is therefore impossible to conceptualize within scientific naturalism itself.
           
In Articulating the World, Joseph Rouse argues that the most pressing challenge for advocates of naturalism today is precisely this: to understand how to make sense of a scientific conception of nature as itself part of nature, scientifically understood. Drawing upon recent developments in evolutionary biology and the philosophy of science, Rouse defends naturalism in response to this challenge by revising both how we understand our scientific conception of the world and how we situate ourselves within it.

ONE

Naturalism and the Scientific Image

I—Naturalism as a Historical Project

This book aims to advance a naturalistic self-understanding. Naturalism conjoins several core commitments. First, its advocates refuse any appeal to or acceptance of what is supernatural or otherwise transcendent to the natural world. The relevant boundary between nature and what would be supernatural or otherwise transcendent is admittedly contested, and conceptions of that boundary have shifted historically. The significance of conflicts over what is or is not “natural” nevertheless arises in substantial part from the aspiration to a naturalistic understanding. Conceptions of nature and aspirations to a naturalistic self-understanding may be mutually intertwined. Contemporary naturalists also undertake a second more specific commitment to a scientific understanding of nature. At a minimum, naturalists regard scientific understanding as relevant to all significant aspects of human life and only countenance ways of thinking and forms of life that are consistent with that understanding. More stringent versions of naturalism take scientific understanding to be sufficient for our intellectual and theoretical projects and perhaps even for practical guidance in other aspects of life. A third commitment is a corollary to recognition of the relevance and authority of scientific understanding: naturalists repudiate any conception of “first philosophy” as prior to or authoritative over scientific understanding (Quine 1981, 67).

The book develops these core commitments in ways that many fellow naturalists will find unfamiliar and perhaps even alien. I therefore need to be clear from the outset about why I still identify these proposals as a naturalistic program. Naturalism has a long and distinguished history that predates its contemporary versions. That history encompasses the earliest human efforts to understand the world and our place within it without invoking gods, mysteries, or other incomprehensible or otherworldly beings, powers, or authority. The emergence and expansion of the modern natural sciences encouraged the identification of naturalism with a commitment to the autonomy and authority of scientific understanding. Yet the constructive development of a naturalistic self-understanding extends beyond the efforts of those thinkers and inquirers who explicitly embraced a naturalistic project. Adamant critics of naturalism have developed or advanced many important aspects of what we can now recognize as a naturalistic self-understanding. Scientific achievements guided by theologically framed natural philosophies were prominent among those contributions, but philosophical objections to a naturalistic standpoint have also led to improvements in its prospects.

In retrospect, there should be no irony in the recognition that ardent critics of naturalism have constructively advanced the cause. Articulating a thoroughly naturalistic self-understanding is difficult. Throughout the history of naturalistic thought, and in some respects even today, committing to a naturalistic self-understanding required some philosophical myopia. Apart from having to cope with significant gaps in understanding the natural world, naturalists have often embraced what look in retrospect to be oversimplified conceptions of what a defensible naturalism would require. Some proponents were overly optimistic about the capacities of austere scientific and philosophical resources. Others overlooked residual theological or supernatural commitments in their own efforts. Many have not fully recognized or understood the complexity of the phenomena a naturalist must account for or the sources of incoherence within their projects. How else could they endorse and defend commitments that would otherwise outrun the limits of recognizable feasibility? It should be no surprise that the challenges confronting a more adequate philosophical naturalism have often been most carefully and insightfully understood by those who therefore eschewed any commitment to naturalism. As Charles Taylor noted, “In philosophy at least, a gain in clarity is worth a thinning of the ranks” (1985, 21).

Recognizing the dialectical complexity of philosophical naturalism throughout its history has important consequences. Naturalism as a philosophical and scientific project cannot simply be identified with any of its various formulations, including currently prominent versions. Some of the most important achievements within the naturalistic tradition have reformulated which commitments a genuinely naturalistic project must undertake. Many of these reformulations had philosophical roots. Hume’s criticisms of causal necessity and of derivations of “ought” from “is,” Kant’s “Copernican Revolution,” Frege’s and Husserl’s arguments against psychologism, Quine’s criticism of the analytic/synthetic distinction, and Wittgenstein’s reflections on rule following, among others, have left their mark upon subsequent formulations of naturalism.1

Other revisions in then-predominant conceptions of naturalism call attention to implicit tensions between naturalistic philosophy and the empirical sciences. The establishment and pursuit of new scientific inquiries have been crucial to the advance of naturalism. Indeed, naturalism is nowadays often simply identified with a scientific or even scientistic conception of the world. Yet the potential tensions between philosophical naturalism and the empirical sciences are apparent from the many occasions when scientific developments have stranded scientifically based philosophical programs. Philosophical naturalisms have often confronted disciplinary, theoretical, methodological, or empirical innovations and discoveries in the sciences that challenged their version of naturalistic understanding. Examples of broadly naturalistic scruples undermined by scientific developments include seventeenth-century mechanistic hostility to “occult” gravitational action-at-a-distance, causal determinisms grounded in classical physics, Quine’s commitment to behaviorism, or the rejection of biological teleology. Moreover, the proliferation of relatively autonomous scientific disciplines and research programs leaves open the question of which approaches to which sciences would most constructively advance a naturalistic point of view. Fundamental physics, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and the sociology of knowledge are prominent among contemporary contenders, but the relations among these scientific orientations and their respective philosophical significance for naturalists remain contested.

I regard naturalism as a historically situated philosophical project.2 We find ourselves in the midst of ongoing conflicts over what naturalism’s commitments are and why they matter, along with challenges to those commitments. I do not here defend a naturalistic self-understanding against those who regard it as unattractive. I endorse a broadly naturalistic stance, but my reasons for doing so are familiar, and I have nothing especially original to say on that topic. I am instead concerned to respond to the possibility that a consistent and thoroughgoing naturalistic self-understanding is unattainable. This book proposes revised conceptions of ourselves and of the sciences that are directly responsive to conflicts over the viability of a naturalistic stance. It reformulates the dominant contemporary philosophical conceptions of naturalism, both by reworking received philosophical approaches to science, intentionality, and conceptual understanding and by drawing upon recent scientific work that has mostly not yet been assimilated philosophically. I endorse the resulting conception, but I do not propose that it would or should settle these issues once and for all. The questions of what philosophical naturalism is, what must be done to sustain a viable naturalistic orientation, and whether and why to be a naturalist will undoubtedly remain at issue within the tradition. My aim is instead to refine and clarify these issues to avoid recognized or recognizable problems and to propose and defend new directions for further philosophical and scientific work in response. These limited aspirations do not merely result from modesty about what I did or could accomplish, though modesty is undoubtedly appropriate. These aspirations are instead shaped by the conceptions of science and philosophy developed in the course of the book, which emphasize that conceptual understanding is always contested and future directed in ways oriented by what is at issue and at stake in those conflicts.

The book is motivated by a specific conception of the current situation in the philosophical understanding of naturalism. The most pressing challenge for naturalism today is to show how to account for our own capacities for scientific understanding as a natural phenomenon that could be understood scientifically. Naturalist views that cannot meet this challenge would be self-defeating. The principal claim of the book is that meeting this challenge requires substantial, complementary revisions to familiar philosophical accounts of both of its components: how to situate our conceptual capacities within a scientific understanding of the world and what a scientific conception of the world amounts to. The two parts of the book develop a broad overview of these revisions and their rationales. These are relatively new approaches to the issues, and much work remains to be done on both sides. In the first part of the book, I reconsider how to think philosophically and scientifically about conceptual understanding. In place of more familiar appeals to a functional teleology of cognitive or linguistic representations, I emphasize the normativity of discursive practice within an evolving developmental niche and take both language and scientific practices to exemplify the evolutionary process of niche construction. In the second part of the book, I reconsider the sense of scientific understanding embodied in naturalists’ core commitment to situating philosophical work within a scientific conception of the world. The ongoing practice of scientific research encompasses the relevant form of scientific understanding; efforts to extract an established body of scientific knowledge from that practice are among the philosophical impositions upon science that naturalists should reject. The two parts of the argument are presented sequentially, but they should be understood as mutually reinforcing. The first part situates conceptual understanding within a scientific conception of nature. The second part explicates what it is to have a scientific conception of nature in terms of that account of conceptual understanding. This preliminary chapter prepares the ground by working out the conception of our current philosophical situation as aspiring naturalists, which motivates the remainder of the book.

II—Sellars and the Prospects for Philosophical Naturalism

Wilfrid Sellars (2007, ch. 14) provocatively framed contemporary philosophical discussions of naturalism by recognizing tensions between two alternative conceptions of human beings and our place in the world. The philosophical tradition has inherited what Sellars calls the “manifest image” of ourselves as persons whose involvement in the world incorporates sentient experience, conceptual understanding, and rationally reflective agency. A different self-conception emerged from the natural sciences, even though the sciences arose as exercises of our “manifest” capacities. This emergent “scientific image” takes our life activities and achievements to be comprehensible without residue in theoretical terms drawn from physics, chemistry, biology, and perhaps psychology and the social sciences. The manifest and the scientific images each purport to completeness and autonomy. The manifest image takes the world as the setting for our experience, understanding, and action, incorporating the scientific image in “manifest” terms as a rationally explicable achievement of human understanding. From within the manifest image, scientific understanding is accountable to sense experience and is only meaningful to and authoritative for us through a shared commitment to think and act in empirically accountable terms. From the other direction, the scientific image proposes that experience, thought, and action are explicable in theoretical terms drawn from the relevant scientific disciplines. For Sellars, both conceptions express insights we ought to endorse. Each is nevertheless comprehensive in ways that may leave no space for the other’s insights within its own account of our place in the world. Sellars thus identified a preeminent contemporary philosophical task as doing justice to the comprehensiveness and apparent autonomy of both images in a stereoscopically unified vision of ourselves in the world. Sellars also insisted that this stereoscopic conception should be naturalistic in a strong sense. An adequate fusion of the images should give priority to the scientific image, situating our self-conception as sentient, sapient, rational agents within the horizons of a scientific conception of ourselves as natural beings.

Despite the prominence of W. V. O. Quine as an advocate of naturalism, Sellars’s philosophical vision predominantly sets the terms in which naturalism is nowadays conceived and discussed. First, Sellars recognized that naturalism cannot simply culminate in the replacement of philosophy by some empirical scientific discipline, as Quine proposed that scientific psychology might replace epistemology. Philosophical questions go beyond the interests and the locus of the various scientific disciplines. Sellars’s expression of the distinctively philosophical task in relation to the sciences is well known: “to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term” (2007, 369). That task receives a more determinate form, however, in Sellars’s aspiration to account for the legitimate insights of both the manifest and the scientific images. The manifest image locates us within the “space of reasons” in which normative authority is constituted, including the normative authority of science itself. In understanding and expressing normative authority, however, philosophy does not further describe or explain things but instead articulates and contributes to a shared project. A naturalist will of course conceive that philosophical project in ways that rely upon scientific understanding, and that do not claim independent authority over scientific inquiry, but will not be able to dispense with philosophical work.

Sellars’s conception of a naturalistic philosophy was also influential in two further respects. For Quine, the primary task of scientific theory is descriptive. The psychological theories that would replace epistemology aim to describe how we actually construct systematic and far-reaching scientific theories from a meager base of evidence. Sellars offered a more expansive conception of scientific aspirations. Science aims to explain what happens in the world. The priority that Sellars accords to the scientific image derives from its greater explanatory power: science enables us to understand and explain as well as describe the phenomena within its purview. This difference in turn accounts for the more expansive intellectual resources that Sellars accords to the scientific image. Whereas Quine would restrict science and philosophy to the most austere theoretical vocabulary sufficient to characterize actual events and dispositions, Sellars insists that the modal locutions of scientific laws are indispensable. The philosophical rehabilitation of modal language and inference from empiricist critics is a much longer story than I need to tell here.3 One clear outcome of that rehabilitation, however, has been to lead most naturalists toward Sellars’s conception of the scientific image as a framework of explanatory laws rather than Quine’s vision of efficiently systematized resources for theoretical description.4

Sellars not only set the terms in which most naturalists understand the scientific image and its philosophical authority, however. His work also guided several prominent challenges to naturalism. In his provocatively titled book The Scientific Image, for example, Bas van Fraassen (1980) proposed an epistemological challenge to Sellars’s naturalism on two fronts. He first argued that the explanatory power of the scientific image does not confer upon it a philosophical priority over the manifest image of ourselves as rational knowers and agents. Explanation is only a pragmatic virtue responsive to contextually specific questions and concerns and cannot sustain the ontological priority naturalists ascribe to the scientific image. Second, van Fraassen argued that a scientific conception of the world should remain tethered to its rational accountability to human observation, even though the conceptual content of scientific theories legitimately outruns the limits of human observation. As rational agents with limited sensory access to the world, we should only believe what our best scientific theories tell us about what we can observe. Accepting van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism would thereby restore philosophical priority to the manifest image as the source of rational epistemic norms to which the scientific image must answer. Empiricist epistemology would set limits to scientific understanding.

Several of Sellars’s former colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh defend the philosophical autonomy of the manifest image by a different route. Unlike van Fraassen, John McDowell, Robert Brandom, and John Haugeland would not legislate rational constraints upon the scope of scientific beliefs. Indeed, their work shifts the primary philosophical concerns with science away from epistemology. These “left-Sellarsians”5 instead seek to comprehend the normativity of conceptually articulated understanding. Each situates conceptual normativity within the manifest image of ourselves as reflective rational agents. Each places scientific understanding among our most important achievements as concept users but regards its explanatory resources as insufficient to understand the normative authority that constitutes an intelligible “space of reasons.” To be sure, our self-conception as rational agents who answer to norms must be consistent with our self-conception as scientifically explicable natural beings. They see nothing mysterious, ineffable, or metaphysically transcendent about conceptual normativity and to that extent espouse a minimalist naturalism. Yet that consistency is a rational demand we should impose upon ourselves from within the space of reasons. The opening of a conceptually articulated space of reasons, although identifiable in retrospect as an event within a natural history of the human species, cannot be properly understood in terms of its natural history or of the laws, causes, or symmetries that govern it. Moreover, from within the space of reasons we can then recognize scientific understanding as only one among many domains of conceptually articul...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Naturalism and the Scientific Image
• PART ONE Conceptual Understanding as Discursive Niche Construction
• PART TWO Conceptual Articulation in Scientific Practice
• Conclusion
• References
• Acknowledgments
• Index