The Problem of Critical Ontology

Bhaskar Contra Kant

D. McWherter

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781137002723
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

Dustin McWherter defends the possibility of critical ontology by pitting Roy Bhaskar's attempt to rehabilitate ontology in the philosophy of science against Kant's attempt to replace traditional ontology with an account of cognitive experience.

1

Ontology and Critical Philosophy

A recent essay by Peter van Inwagen opens with the observation that ‘Ontology is a very old subject, but “ontology” is a relatively new word’ (van Inwagen 2009: 472). Indeed, as a topic warranting systematic study, the subject is usually traced back to Aristotle or Parmenides, while the word, in its Latin form ‘ontologia’, is not known to have appeared in print until German philosopher Jacob Lorhard’s Ogdoas Scholastica in 1606.¹ It is uncontroversial, because it is evident in the word itself, that ‘ontology’ signifies the study (or theory, discourse, science) of being or that which is. This general definition is reiterated at points in Bhaskar’s work,² and it is present in Kant’s as well, though in a more nuanced form. In Kant’s lecture courses on metaphysics there are clear and succinct expressions of his conception of ontology, which he inherited from the rationalist metaphysicians Christian Wolff and Alexander Baumgarten. There, ontology is defined as ‘the science ( ... ) which is concerned with the more general properties of all things’ (TP1 295) and ‘the science of the properties of all things in general’ (LM 140), and it is said that ‘Ontology thus deals with things in general, it abstracts from everything particular’ (ibid. 307) and ‘Ontology ( ... ) contains the summation of all our pure concepts that we can have a priori of things’ (ibid. 308). Similarly, Baumgarten’s Metaphysics, which Kant often used as the textbook for his metaphysics courses, defines ontology as ‘the science of the general predicates of a thing’ (Baumgarten 1739: §4), while the second chapter of Wolff 1720, in which Wolff sets out the basic principles of his ontology, is titled ‘On the First Principles of Our Cognition and of All Things in General’.³

In each of these characterizations of ontology we are given that discipline’s distinctive object of concern, for Kant: things. More specifically: that which pertains to things in the most general fashion, and thus things in general. Insofar as we understand a thing as that which has being, or that which is, then Kant’s conception of ontology is consonant with the conventional definition. Bhaskar accepts this ontological understanding of ‘thing’ as well and elaborates on the internal unity that is a requirement of ‘thinghood’: ‘An entity counts as a “thing” if it possesses sufficient internal complexity, organisation, structure or coherence to count as a unit (or system) or a class (or part) of such units or a complex of relations between or within such units or classes or parts, or if it consists in any earthed function of any of the foregoing’ (SRHE 218). Moreover, he argues that, especially in light of recent natural science, the concept of a thing exceeds and so must be distinguished from that of an ordinary material object, for there are things such as powers, fields, gases, genetic codes, and electronic structures.⁴

The ‘in general’ in Kant’s ‘things in general’ is important as well, for it underscores the generality of ontology’s subject matter relative to that of other disciplines. It also reflects the characterization of ontology as a branch of metaphysics, namely, general metaphysics – to be contrasted with the special metaphysics of theology, cosmology, and psychology – in the architectonic of Wolff’s and Baumgarten’s systems (the same architectonic that is mirrored in the structure of the Critique of Pure Reason, where the Transcendental Analytic replaces traditional ontology).⁵ Somewhat similarly, Bhaskar often clarifies the generality of ontology’s subject matter by distinguishing philosophical ontologies, which delineate the general character of being and with which Bhaskar himself is concerned, from scientific ontologies, which describe the particular things, postulated by particular scientific theories, that instantiate the general characteristics of being.⁶ (Thus Bhaskar’s conception of a scientific ontology could perhaps be construed as a contemporary version of pre-critical rationalism’s special metaphysics.)

It is not immediately clear, however, what conceptual form a study of being or things in general would take – that is, how it would be configured or elaborated. Bhaskar says more about ontology in this regard, but I want to distinguish a frequent characterization of ontology prominent in his earlier work from one in his later work that I think is superior and more in line with Kant’s conception of ontology. Bhaskar often says, especially in his earlier work, that ontology is distinctively concerned with what the world is like.⁷ This phrase is frequently used in connection with ontology by some contemporary analytic metaphysicians and ontologically-oriented philosophers of science.⁸ Furthermore, this kind of use of ‘the world’ is common in Anglo-American philosophy generally, where one speaks of ‘the world’ or ‘the world itself’ to distinguish a metaphysical datum from epistemological or linguistic relations like our knowledge of the world or our ways of talking about the world. Hence one may say ‘X is a characteristic of the world itself and not merely of our ways of conceiving of the world’.

However, I think Bhaskar’s phrase is potentially problematic insofar as it can be misleading. The problem here is that some philosophers assign a specific technical meaning to the term ‘world’ while others do not, and Bhaskar is in the latter camp. For example, in the pre-critical rationalism that Kant emerged from, the world is something quite particular – particular enough, in fact, to be the subject of cosmology, a division of special metaphysics. Specifically, Wolff and Baumgarten define a world as a spatiotemporally and/or causally connected series of things that together form a whole,⁹ which influences Kant’s critical problematization of the world as ‘the sum total of all appearances’ (A334/B391) whose magnitude cannot be given as such but only indeterminately in the empirical regress of conditions.¹⁰ To take another example, in Heidegger’s Being and Time, which has played no small role in the history of ontology either, ‘the world’ specifically refers to the meaningful contexture of things that is essential to Dasein’s being, the ‘wherein’ of its being-in-the-world.¹¹ More examples could be adduced, but the point here is clear: for many philosophers, by their understanding of what ‘the world’ means, the characterization of ontology as consisting in an account of the world unnecessarily restricts or just outright misunderstands the proper subject matter of ontology, which exceeds the world so construed.

In Bhaskar’s terminology, though, ‘the world’ has nothing of the specificity that the foregoing examples do. It never denotes some particular thing, a regional network of things, or anything that is ontologically exceeded. In fact, in Bhaskar’s characterizations of ontology there is no evident differentiation of ‘the world’ from ‘being’, so that they are effectively synonymous. Thus an account of what the world is like, for Bhaskar, is an account of the nature of being.¹² Consequently, Bhaskar’s ‘what the world is like’ does not really deviate from the conventional definition of ontology – not because being is reduced to something as ‘limited’ as the world, but because the world is not stipulated to be something so limited in the first place. Nevertheless, because of its fairly colloquial character, its potential to cause confusion (especially vis-à-vis Kant), and the fact that there are better definitions of ontology available in Bhaskar’s work, I will not be using ‘the world’ in this way (though I will occasionally quote passages from Bhaskar’s work that do).

The conception of ontology in Bhaskar’s later work that I wish to prioritize is elaborated at FEW 33–9 (though there are precursors, such as PN 145 and DPF 107). There, Bhaskar proposes to ‘develop a robust realism about categories’ (FEW 33), which he calls categorial realism.¹³ In so doing, he aligns himself with those philosophers who take the task of ontology to consist in giving an account of the categories of being. This conception of ontology has a recognized philosophical pedigree – originating in Aristotle, it has been employed by scholastics such as Francisco Suárez and rationalists such as Wolff, critically transformed by Kant, appropriated in different ways by Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, and Wilfrid Sellars, and upheld by analytic metaphysicians like E.J. Lowe and George Molnar. I believe it is best to understand Bhaskar’s conception of ontology in these terms, not only because it fleshes out the concept of ontology in a way that communicates with Kant in particular, but also because it facilitates a useful interpretation of some of Bhaskar’s claims about ontology in the philosophy of science, as I will argue in Section 2.2.

There are different ways of defining ‘ontological category’.¹⁴ Throughout the history of philosophy ontological categories, and thus ontology itself, have been entangled with logic and conceptual categories. One reason for this lies at the origin of ontology as a discipline: the correspondence between the logic and metaphysics of Aristotle, where the ontological relation between substance and attribute mirrors the logical relation between subject and predicate, so that there is a structural isomorphy between the laws of thought and the nature of being.¹⁵ This entanglement is present in the rationalism of Wolff and Baumgarten as well, where the fundamental properties of things are characterized as predicates. Hence Baumgarten’s definition of ontology quoted above (‘the science of the general predicates of a thing’), though notice that Kant distinguishes between things and the concepts we have of them in the passage from LM 308 quoted above (‘our pure concepts that we can have a priori of things’). Indeed, Kant can be credited with rigorously disentangling the conceptual from the ontological.¹⁶ However, his critical conversion of traditional ontology’s categories into a priori concepts of the understanding ultimately reinforces the association of ontological categories with conceptual schemes insofar as it reduces the former to the latter (I will have more to say about this in Chapters 2 and 3, where this conversion will be challenged). More generally, it is skepticism about knowing the nature of being that motivates the interpretation of systems of categories as merely conceptual rather than ontological frameworks.¹⁷

This skeptical denial of categories’ ontological significance is precisely that to which Bhaskar opposes his categorial realism in FEW.¹⁸ For Bhaskar and others, ontological categories cannot be conflated with conceptual categories, despite the historical entanglement of the two.¹⁹ As Lowe says, ontological categories ‘are categories of being, not categories of thought’ (Lowe 2006: 7). More specifically, instead of being, or being necessarily isomorphic with, forms of conceptualization, ontological categories delineate the most fundamental, irreducible characteristics of what there is or, in Kant’s terms, that which pertains to things in general. These categories may therefore take the form of the most basic sorts of things (for example, minds, ideas, intrinsic or extrinsic properties, relations, events, physical objects, abstract objects, space, time, universals, particulars, propositions, substances, powers, causes, effects, and so on) or the most basic ways of being (for example, possibility, actuality, reality, existence, necessity, contingency, finite, infinite, unity, quantity, quality, presence, absence, spatiality, temporality, subsistence, dependence, and so on), or both. Hence the Dictionary of Critical Realism defines an ontological category as ‘A fundamental class or constitutive mode of being’ (Hartwig 2007b: 55). Consequently, ontological categories are at most only indirectly concerned with what there is qua individual beings and instead concern the most fundamental determinations of what there is qua being. They are, in Aristotelian terms, the genera of being and thus concern anything that ever could be. As Molnar puts it, ‘The ontological question What is there? does not ask what things there are, nor does it (initially) ask what sorts of things there are. The question takes us one step higher up the ladder of abstraction: it asks what categories are non-empty’ (Molnar 2003: 47). Acc...