Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and the Demise of Naturalism

Reunifying Political Theory and Social Science

Jason Blakely

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780268100674
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Éthique et philosophie morale

Today the ethical and normative concerns of everyday citizens are all too often sidelined from the study of political and social issues, driven out by an effort to create a more "scientific" study. This book offers a way for social scientists and political theorists to reintegrate the empirical and the normative, proposing a way out of the scientism that clouds our age. In Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and the Demise of Naturalism, Jason Blakely argues that the resources for overcoming this divide are found in the respective intellectual developments of Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre. Blakely examines their often parallel intellectual journeys, which led them to critically engage the British New Left, analytic philosophy, phenomenology, continental hermeneutics, and modern social science. Although MacIntyre and Taylor are not sui generis, Blakely claims they each present a new, revived humanism, one that insists on the creative agency of the human person against reductive, instrumental, technocratic, and scientistic ways of thinking. The recovery of certain key themes in these philosophers' works generates a new political philosophy with which to face certain unprecedented problems of our age. Taylor's and MacIntyre's philosophies give social scientists working in all disciplines (from economics and sociology to political science and psychology) an alternative theoretical framework for conducting research.

CHAPTER 1

THE DEEPER SOURCES OF THE BREAKUP

The Rise of “Naturalism” in Philosophy, Social Science, and Politics

In the twentieth century, naturalist assumptions were pervasive, even dominant. Indeed, so powerful was naturalism’s influence that Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s contributions to social science can hardly be rendered intelligible except as critical responses to this cultural and philosophical movement. Moreover, because naturalist intuitions are still widely held, a definition and brief sketch of this cultural and philosophical movement are necessary to reflect on the current situation.

At the most basic level, naturalism is driven by a particular response to the success and prestige of the natural sciences. Naturalist philosophers and social scientists are those who, justly impressed by the accomplishments of natural science, set out to remake their own disciplines in its image. Taylor and MacIntyre suggest that naturalism was born when seventeenth-century thinkers, inspired by the revolution in the natural sciences, applied the mechanistic forms of explanation of Newton’s physics to the social sciences.¹ Instead of explaining human behavior by referring to people’s beliefs, intentions, and purposes, early naturalist thinkers increasingly favored mechanistic and impersonal forms of explanation inspired by the new physics. In this sense, naturalism originated as the attempt to replace classical and medieval teleology (founded on Aristotle’s notion of individual purposes as the sources of human action) with a social science of underlying, mechanistic causes. Such efforts to eradicate teleology through mechanistic explanation gained momentum in the nineteenth century through the writings of philosophers like Auguste Comte and his English admirer John Stuart Mill, whose works spread widely amid European intellectuals.²

Naturalism, from its birth in the seventeenth century, was always characterized by what Taylor refers to as a “metaphysical motivation.”³ This metaphysical motivation consists of the attempt to demote or even eliminate human properties from social explanation in favor of supposedly more scientific and impersonal factors. A recurrent feature of naturalism, in other words, is the assumption that subjectively human dimensions of reality (e.g., meanings, purposes, values, and even beliefs) must be explained in terms of supposedly “harder” and more objective data (e.g., brute facts about demography, surrounding environments, or neurobiology).

One of the most important examples of this naturalist effort has been the attempt, dating back to the Enlightenment, to separate facts from values in social science research. The doctrine that facts must be dichotomized from values, still very much alive today, rests on the assumption that values are purely subjective and therefore must be filtered out of truly objective scientific knowledge. For it to be considered a bona fide science, therefore, social science must be ethically and politically neutral. There are other commonly recurring assumptions that reflect naturalism’s quest to account for what is specifically human, for example, that human behavior is determined by scientific laws, that human action is reducible to impersonal causal mechanisms, that “higher” human motives are simply the function of “lower” ones, and that individual interpretations and meanings must be replaced by brute and verifiable facts.

I will return to all these features at length in the coming chapters in the context of Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s critiques of naturalism. For now the key point is that naturalism is a certain outlook or worldview consisting of recurring assumptions and doctrines that are general enough to take on a great variety of differing and even competing forms. In other words, there is not just one but many naturalisms. For example, note that naturalism as defined above does nothing to determine whether a particular research program in the social sciences should consist of sociology, economics, neo-Darwinism, psychology, or some other approach. Naturalism, in this respect, encompasses rival research programs that nevertheless hold certain basic philosophical resemblances.

Dealing with such a broad philosophical category requires some caution. This is because such a general term might easily lead to essentializing the varied research programs of the social sciences into a single, monolithic caricature or straw man.⁴ Likewise, the term naturalism might be defined so broadly that it becomes too capacious to be useful. Indeed, even within the parameters of the above definition, a full historical account of the naturalist outlook would include a very wide set of thinkers, spanning Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Denis Diderot, Nicolas de Condorcet, Henri de Saint-Simon, David Hume, Auguste Comte, Adolphe Quetelet, John Stuart Mill, Emile Durkheim, William Stanley Jevons, and Max Weber, to name only a few. In this sense, the definition of a concept like naturalism, if it is to be of any constructive use, must be appropriately general without being either unfairly simplified or too sprawling and vacuous to be of any use.

Fortunately, my own purposes are much more limited. I do not endeavor to write anything like the full history of naturalism but only to flag the particular versions of naturalism that formed the background to Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s work. This means briefly reconstructing how, during the twentieth century, something very complex, yet also clearly identifiable as naturalism, became predominant not only intellectually but also as a form of power.

Specifically, there are three representative areas that offer a sense of how naturalism captured the intellectual and political mainstream during the early and mid-twentieth century. The first area is English-speaking philosophy; the second, the study of politics; and the third, the management and governance of nation-states, big business corporations, and other major sites of organized power. Taylor and MacIntyre never responded to naturalism as simply an intellectual phenomenon. It was also, they believed, one of the modern world’s primary forms of power. Naturalism has been a massively influential cultural movement, and like many of the most influential cultural movements, it has become almost invisible because of its very success. One might even say that naturalism is hiding in plain sight. Looking at its intellectual roots will make it conspicuous again and help to clarify how often unstated intuitions in the general populace have reached high levels of sophistication, articulacy, and rigor in the work of professional philosophers and social scientists. Although naturalism is a dispersed and widespread worldview found in various forms throughout modern culture, it gained intellectual heft and cogency through the help of the following theories. Because Taylor and MacIntyre began to think and write in midcentury, this world of rising naturalism marks the starting point to their respective philosophical stories.

Naturalism in Philosophy

Some of the most influential and articulate defenders of naturalism during the twentieth century were philosophers working in the Anglo-analytic tradition—a tradition in which both Taylor and MacIntyre were highly trained. Indeed, the analytic tradition originated in the English-speaking world in part as an attempt to revalorize empiricist approaches against what early analytic philosophers saw as the metaphysical obscurities of Hegelian and idealist philosophy.⁵ A brief look at a few of the founders of analytic philosophy will clarify how the natural sciences, to the exclusion of nearly all other forms of knowledge, were crowned as almost the sole authorities for knowing what is real.

Naturalist tendencies were evident from the outset in two of the greatest pioneers of analytic philosophy: G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell. These two philosophers famously sought to revive British empiricism by rejecting the Hegelian idealism that then reigned supreme. British Hegelians like F. H. Bradley and T. H. Green were teaching that one ought to understand the world in terms of a holistic and historically cumulative system of ideas. By contrast, Moore and Russell wanted to restore the empiricism of John Locke, Hume, and Mill by creating an ahistorical and atomistic philosophy that was made in the image of the natural sciences.

Inspired in part by the atomism of modern physics, Moore suggested that philosophy be reconceived as the activity of decomposing complex ideas and concepts into their atomistic parts through analysis.⁶ Similarly, Russell’s “logical atomism” held that the goal of philosophical analysis was to break down ideas into the “ultimate simples” out of which the world was built.⁷ Russell’s philosophy was part of a wider effort to grant the natural sciences greater authority within human knowledge. He not only modeled philosophy on the natural sciences but also argued that other disciplines should conform to this paradigm.

Both Russell’s and Moore’s turn toward atomism also marked a rejection of idealist notions of philosophical understanding as intertwined with historical knowledge. Instead, Moore and Russell made appeals for an ahistorical, common sense perception as the starting point for all sound philosophical analysis. Russell thus wrote, “The process of sound philosophizing … consists mainly in passing from those obvious, vague, ambiguous things, that we feel quite sure of, to something precise, clear, [and] definite.”⁸ In the same passage he lauded Descartes’s scientific method of philosophy, which always began by appealing to immediate and obvious data.

In short, Moore’s and Russell’s atomistic philosophies were meant to rehabilitate empiricism by repudiating any dependence on holistic, historical narratives. Instead of being formed on the basis of historical narratives of idealism, sound disciplines would be built on atomistic and empirical principles. Thus, philosophy itself would conform to a particular vision of natural science—with basic concepts that could be perceived in unproblematic, empirical fashion, while more complex concepts could be broken down into easily identified atoms.

Such a naturalist bent of mind became even more strongly apparent in the next generation of analytic philosophers—the logical positivists. Radicalizing Russell’s call for the dominance of the natural sciences, the logical positivists argued that only inquiry modeled on the natural sciences could provide true knowledge about the world. But unlike Moore and Russell, the logical positivists largely rejected attempts by philosophers to articulate a basic picture of reality. Only a naturalistic science could speak authoritatively about what was real and what wasn’t. The question was entirely empirical and was not to be left to the metaphysical speculations of anybody—be they philosopher, artist, mystic, or prophet.

Probably the single most influential logical positivist, A. J. Ayer, defended naturalist positions by adopting an extreme version of the analytic-synthetic distinction. Although this distinction could already be found in the work of the young Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well as in that of various members of the Vienna Circle, Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic (1936) helped popularize it beyond philosophical circles. Specifically, Ayer argued that all meaningful propositions must be one of two types: either analytic tautologies that were true by definition (e.g., “All unmarried men are bachelors”) or synthetic propositions that were verifiable hypotheses (e.g., “John Thomas is unmarried”). According to Ayer, analytic propositions were the business of logic, mathematics, and philosophy, while synthetic propositions needed to be verified by empirical science. If a proposition was neither verifiable by science nor a truth of logic, then it was “metaphysical” and thus “neither true nor false but literally senseless.”⁹

I will return to Ayer, logical positivism, and Taylor’s and MacIntyre’s critiques of this philosophy in later chapters. For now the point is to see Ayer’s thought within a larger movement that was busy trying to turn the natural sciences into the sole authorities on truth about the world. For Ayer, math, logic, and philosophy were analytic disciplines that dealt with things that were true by definition. But the actual picture of reality was the domain of the natural sciences alone. This meant that, if social scientists wished to offer valid knowledge about the world, they would have to build theories strictly on the verification of synthetic propositions.

No less important to logical positivism’s brand of naturalism was Ayer’s famous (and famously problematic) verification principle of meaning. The verification principle connected the meaningfulness of propositions in language to the ability to verify them. Again, a term could be analytic and therefore meaningful as a tautology, but otherwise, all meaningful language depended on empirical verifiability. The natural sciences thereby not only furnished truth but also set the boundaries of meaningful language. Accordingly, Ayer polemically denounced all statements that used ethical, religious, aesthetic, and philosophic language as “meaningless.” For example, “God exists” was neither a truth of logic nor a proposition subject to straight verification. The proposition was therefore deemed meaningless. A similar line of argument discounted key ethical words like good and evil or aesthetic terms like beautiful. In short, nonscientific forms of understanding and ways of approaching the world were not simply incapable of producing verifiable knowledge but were also without meaning. Ayer and the logical positivists thus furnished a philosophical justification for the most extreme and thoroughgoing stripe of naturalism. Anything beyond the bounds of science and logic could be tossed onto the trash heap of history.

Naturalism is in part defined by the tendency to reduce distinctly human aspects of reality to purportedly objective and verifiable facts. In logical positivism we see a particularly extreme example of this. Famously, Ayer inspired other logical positivists like Charles Stevenson to argue that moral and ethical language is primarily emotive. Ayer’s emotivism, which presupposed a version of the fact-value dichotomy, maintains that good and bad are examples of purely subjective language with no cognitive content and therefore no meaning at all. To call something a “good x” is like shouting “hooray for x!” Similarly, to call something a “bad x” is like shouting “boo for x!”¹⁰ In other words, values are not a form of objective knowledge or even of meaningful language. Values are instead the equivalent of a subjective or emotional outburst. The implication is clear: social science, like the natural sciences, would need to purge itself of any ethical and political commitments. Social science must be value free.

Logical positivism loomed large in the 1950s and 1960s when Taylor and MacIntyre were completing their university studies and coming of age as philosophers. Moreover, the logical positivists and other analytic philosophers, who shared naturalist sympathies, had enormous success in granting a certain prestige to philosophical naturalism that extended beyond the boundaries of philosophy departments to various fields in the social sciences. This, combined with the already impressive and growing accomplishments of the natural sciences, put increasing pressure on the social sciences to conform to naturalist models during this period.

So, for example, naturalism took hold in psychology departments through the increasing influence of behaviorists like Edward Tolman, Clark Hull, and B. F. Skinner. Parallel naturalist trends also gained traction in disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, economics, and political science.¹¹ A brief sketch of the rise of naturalism in Anglophone political science during the twentieth century will help show how this cultural movement revamped the social sciences as well.

Naturalism in Modern Political Science

Like analytic philosophy, the modern discipline of political science was born out of a struggle against an earlier paradigm that was primarily historical and narrative in approach. Also like analytic philosophy, the new discipline that emerged reflected strong naturalist inclinations.¹²

In the late nineteenth century, the study of politics largely consisted of the construction of large-scale historical narratives. This approach typically assumed that the task of students of politics was to lay out the developmental structure of human history and its progression toward some fixed and final goal. There was, in this vein, everything from the Darwinian-inspired narrative of Henry Jones Ford to the historical accounts of Karl Marx and American Hegelians like John W. Burgess.¹³ Although these were rival accounts, they all equally assumed that the study of politics consisted of narratives that revealed the progressive stages of history.

By contrast, the new discipline of political science that emerged in the early twentieth century, when scholars broke free from these developmental and historical narratives, employed formal, ahistorical explanations modeled on the natural sciences. Scholars in the late nineteenth century had largely considered the study of politics and the study of history to be a single enterprise. But the new political scientists began to distance themselves from history, preferring to emphasize policy-relevant knowledge that was abstracted from historical contexts and articulated the purportedly timeless and essential features of political life.¹⁴

Charles Merriam, often credited as one of the founders of modern political science, provides an example of this shift in approach. Beginning in the early 1920s, Merriam called for a political science that focused on classifications, typologies, and atomized beliefs culled from surveys. Like his contemporary Graham Wallas in England, Merriam believed that political science needed to make “broader use of the instruments of social observation in statistics … the analytic technique and results of psychology” while forming closer relations with the “disciplines of geography, ethnology, biology, sociology and social psychology.”¹⁵ Notably, history was not included in Merriam’s list of allied disciplines (an omission that would have been unthinkable only a few decades earlier).

Merriam also helped form the Chicago school of political science that trained several of the leading political scientists of the next generation, including Harold Laswell, Harold Gosnell, V. O. Key, and Quincy Wright.¹⁶ For the Chicago school, history was not primarily a source of narrative but rather was made up of quantifiable, measurable units. History was a data trove for ahistorical typologies and inductive causal generalizations. Thus, in 1931 Merriam wrote approvingly of a new generation of political scientists that sought to discover the “measurable units of political phenomena.”¹⁷ In this way, the new political science revamped its subject matter ...