Towards a Philosophical Anthropology of Culture

Naturalism, Relativism, and Skepticism

Kevin M. Cahill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000348767
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Social Philosophy

This book explores the question of what it means to be a human being through sustained and original analyses of three important philosophical topics: relativism, skepticism, and naturalism in the social sciences.

Kevin M. Cahill's approach involves an original employment of historical and ethnographic material that is both conceptual and empirical in order to address relevant philosophical issues. Specifically, while Cahill avoids interpretative debates, he develops an approach to philosophical critique based on Cora Diamond's and James Conant's work on the early Wittgenstein. This makes possible the use of a concept of culture that avoids the dogmatism that not only typifies traditional metaphysics but also frequently mars arguments from ordinary language or phenomenology. This is especially crucial for the third part of the book, which involves a cultural-historical critique of the ontology of the self in Stanley Cavell's work on skepticism. In pursuing this strategy, the book also mounts a novel and timely defense of the interpretivist tradition in the philosophy of the social sciences.

Towards a Philosophical Anthropology of Culture will be of interest to researchers working on the philosophy of the social sciences, Wittgenstein, and philosophical anthropology.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9780367638238, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

1 Lost in the Ancient City

Pluralist Naturalism and the Philosophy of the Social Sciences

Kevin M. Cahill

I

This essay deals with questions concerning naturalism and its relation to the idea of philosophical anthropology. My way into these questions will be to take up the threads of an old debate in the philosophy of the social sciences, a debate many today would likely describe as quaint, and probably mostly settled: this is the debate about the possible “demarcation” between the Geisteswissenschaften and the Naturwissenschaften. My half-ironic use of the antiquated terminology here signals my awareness of how passé this discussion may appear to be, especially in light of the confident ascendancy of various naturalisms that, to me at least, now hardly seem to recognize that there was ever a time when their credentials were respectably questioned. My route will be a bit circuitous and, not surprisingly for an unreconstructed interpretivist and hermeneuticist such as myself, begins with the question of language. Although many of the pieces of my story have been shaped by the thinkers whose work I rely on here, I have tried to rework and assemble them in a way that I hope casts some new light on an old question.

My starting point is some recent claims by John Dupré that concern the relationship between ordinary language and the language(s) of the social sciences.¹ For many years, Dupré has offered powerful arguments for an anti-reductionist, pluralist naturalism in the Philosophy of Science.² He has supported his position by arguing that reductionist dogmas, most notably physicalism, are simply unsupported by scientific practice and findings. Dupré’s anti-reductionism runs deep indeed: he is not merely a methodological pluralist, a now widespread view in the philosophy of science, he is also an ontological pluralist. He thinks, rightly I believe, that the sciences not only exhibit the legitimacy of different ways of studying nature, but that they also show that nature itself contains genuinely different kinds of things to be studied.³

Dupré has recently taken his pluralist naturalism to cast doubt on an apparent suggestion by Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations to the effect that there is a philosophically relevant difference between the languages of the sciences and ordinary language. Dupré argues against this idea that not only is there no discernible sharp difference between the natural and the social sciences, but relatedly, there is no in-principle difference between the languages of the natural and social sciences on the one hand, and ordinary language on the other. Dupré has stated previously that, “[O]ne point I share with all contemporary philosophers who describe themselves as naturalists is that I assume that the best ways of interrogating nature can be found by looking at the empirical sciences”.⁴ I understand him here merely to be making the point that the work of coming to know whatever it is we can know about nature should involve our best tools, and those tools happen to be the empirical sciences. There is nothing, or at least not much, to object to there.⁵ Yet a key element of what I will say in response to Dupré’s position rests on the point that intractable philosophical problems intrude if we fail to recognize that human language users occupy one end of a relation to the world not well described as “knowing”, but one that in some sense can be said to undergird the knowing relation.⁶ By drawing on important aspects of ordinary language that Dupré overlooks or mischaracterizes, I will argue here that he misses a philosophically crucial, even if not metaphysical, distinction between the natural and social sciences, a distinction that goes directly to the issues of naturalism and philosophical anthropology.⁷

After sketching Dupré’s discussion of the relationship between ordinary language and the languages of the sciences in Part II, I criticize his account in Part III by calling on a distinction between “theoretical holism” and “practical holism” that was introduced by and argued for many years ago by Hubert Dreyfus. Working with this distinction, which Dreyfus articulates by relying mainly on ideas taken from the early Heidegger but also from the later Wittgenstein and others, I try to show that despite his frequent avowals of pluralist anti-reductionism, Dupré’s treatment of the relevant passage by Wittgenstein, as well as some of his remarks on Peter Winch’s work, betrays a subtle but deeply troublesome form of reductionism. In short, while Dupré certainly recognizes differences between ordinary language, the languages of the social sciences, and those of the natural sciences, I will argue that those acknowledged differences don’t go deep enough. As I’ll make evident, in his discussion of Wittgenstein and Winch, Dupré implicitly depicts, or at least allows the image to stand of, ordinary language as a kind theory. As a result, essential normative facets of the kinds of agents that human language users are, become obscured and the twin results are a distorted view of the social sciences and meaning skepticism. In Part IV, I go on to show that despite their importance of bringing out a troubling aspect in the kind of naturalism Dupré stands for, Drefyus’ own arguments are marred by a dubious apriorism. In order to bring this point out, I refer briefly to a tradition of reading Wittgenstein which can be traced back to Stanley Cavell, but has been brought into sharper focus by other writers over roughly the last 30 years by writers like Cora Diamond and John McDowell.⁸ While Dupré’s tacit treatment of ordinary language as a theory blocks our view of the normativity of human conceptual life in one way, in Part V, I look at the issue from a different vantage point, namely, how or whether the kind of agents that human language users are can be accommodated within a scientific naturalist worldview. I show that the usual attempts to “naturalize” the normativity that characterizes us as language users, what John McDowell has called our second nature, faces a new version of the same problem that arose when from collapsing the distinction between theoretical and practical holism. In Part VI, I try to bring these considerations together in a way that folds the sort of naturalism McDowell has defended into the overall theme of Philosophical Anthropology.

II

Dupré states that “[t]he central thesis of this paper … [is] that social science is not that different from much in the natural sciences.”⁹ In the event that the point of arguing for such a thesis has become so obscure in today’s philosophical climate that it might need pointing out, Dupré is referring to an old question in the philosophy of the social sciences, namely whether there is a philosophically interesting demarcation between the natural and the social sciences. In former times this was frequently cast as a debate between the supporters of Erklären (explanation) and Verstehen (understanding) with those in the first camp maintaining that the methods (or perhaps, “the method”) of the natural sciences were entirely appropriate for gaining knowledge about human social life, while those in the latter camp countering that the social sciences required a distinctly humanistic, more literary approach appropriate to their objects of study.¹⁰

Let’s start with a well-known remark from The Blue and the Brown Books, cited by Dupré, where Wittgenstein suggests something like the idea that assimilating philosophical to scientific contexts is centrally implicated in generating metaphysical confusions:

Our craving for generality has another main source: our preoccupation with the method of science. I mean the method of reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural laws; and, in mathematics, of unifying the treatment of different topics by using a generalization. Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness.¹¹

Dupré sympathizes with the main thrust of this remark, which points to the lamentable consequences of philosophers’ tendency to treat different kinds of problem in a one-size-fits-all manner, but at the same time he strongly disagrees with what he takes to be Wittgenstein’s own simplistic depiction of science here, something like a covering law view, perhaps supplemented by the idea that chemistry and physics provide paradigmatic examples of the sciences. As an avowed pluralist naturalist, Dupré resists the idea that there is such a thing as “the method” of natural science, and so only distortion can arise by contrasting philosophy, or anything else, with a false monolith. Rather, Dupré rightly maintains that there are different sciences with distinct but overlapping methodologies, and so, not surprisingly, one finds distinct but overlapping languages of science.

With Dupré’s view of the languages of the sciences in mind, we can turn to his treatment of the following passage by Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations:

[A]sk yourself whether our language is complete;—whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus were incorporated in it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.¹²

Given Wittgenstein’s anti-scientism, his hostility to philosophical theorizing, and the evident significance that ordinary language plays in his later thought, it is entirely reasonable to read this remark as expressing suspicion of conflating two importantly different kinds of things: ordinary language and the theoretical languages of science (or the sciences, if you will).¹³ But this idea runs afoul of an important feature of Dupré’s pluralist naturalism, since it seems to postulate a clear break between ordinary language and what is only a mere caricature of science. Indeed, Wittgenstein’s examples of chemistry and calculus, each one a discipline with a fair amount of formal structure, might seem to both screen out the general linguistic messiness of various scientific enterprises and ignore the ways in which the languages of the natural sciences, social sciences, and ordinary language penetrate one another. Resisting Wittgenstein’s contrast of an ancient city (presumably ordinary language) and new boroughs with straight regular streets (presumably “science”), Dupré remarks,

This charming metaphor suggests some kind of radical disjunction between so-called “ordinary language” and the language of science, and while such a disjunction may seem plausible enough when science is represented by these particular examples, in general, it is, I think, a serious mistake.¹⁴

And a bit further on we read,

I now want to argue, the complexity and diversity of both language and phenomena provide no more objection in principle to a successful social science than they do to biological science. We need only avoid unrealistic and unattainable aspirations as to what any science can be expected to achieve.¹⁵

Thus far we have seen three critical terms, “ordinary language”, “natural science”, and “social science”. Yet the remark by Wittgenstein that Dupré wants to criticize only seems to invoke the first two. But Dupré’s main thesis is that the natural sciences and social sciences are not substantially different from one another and so it may not be clear what is going on and where the questions lie. In a nutshell, one might say that Dupré wants to criticize the following idea: since the social sciences aim to study entities who happen to be ordinary language users, and since ordinary language has some special characteristics, the languages and methods of the social sciences will (of necessity?) be different from those of the natural sciences. That is, at least, the idea that Dupré takes Wittgenstein’s remark to support. And a bit later still, Dupré frames the main...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Lost in the Ancient City: Pluralist Naturalism and the Philosophy of the Social Sciences
• 2 The Grammar of Conflict
• 3 Skepticism and the Human Condition
• Appendix: Wittgenstein’s Paganism
• Bibliography
• Index