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Naturalism, Normativity and Explanation - ebook
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Naturalism, Normativity and Explanation - ebook
This book critically examines philosophical naturalism, evaluates the prospects for naturalizing such normative properties as being a reason, and proposes a theory of action-explanation. This theory accommodates an explanatory role for both psychological properties such as intention and normative properties such as having an obligation or being intrinsically good. This overall project requires distinguishing philosophical from methodological naturalism, arguing for the possibility of a scientifically informed epistemology that is not committed to the former, and freeing the theory of action-explanation from dependence on the reducibility of the mental to the physical. The project also requires distinguishing explanatory power from causal power. Explanations—at least of the kinds central in both science and everyday life—are conceived as constitutively aimed at yielding understanding; the book sketches a view of understanding that clarifies the nature of explanation; and, partly in the light of this relation, it provides a broad account of causal power on which psychological properties can possess it without being reducible to physical properties. The book concludes with an account of how, especially in the normative domain, explanations can be a priori. They may use a priori generalizations to provide understanding of what they explain, and they may clarify a priori propositions, or both. They may achieve these aims not only in logic and pure mathematics, but also in the realm of moral and other normative phenomena. The overall result is to show how philosophical understanding of both natural and normative phenomena is possible through integration with a scientific habit of mind that does not require a narrow empiricism in epistemology or a reductive naturalism in metaphysics or the theory of explanation.
Author
Robert Audi is an internationally known contributor to epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of action. He has published books and numerous papers in epistemology, and he lectures widely in epistemology and such related areas as ethical theory and philosophy of action. His epistemological books include The Structure of Justification (1993), The Architecture of Reason (2001), Epistemology (3rd edition, 2010), and Moral Perception (2013). His recent books in ethics and political philosophy include The Good in the Right: A Theory of Intuition and Intrinsic Value (2004), Practical Reasoning and Ethical Decision (2006), Moral Value and Human Diversity (2007), and Democratic Authority and the Separation of Church and State (2011). Audi is a past president of the American Philosophical Association, a former editor of The Journal of Philosophical Research, Editor-in-Chief of The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (third edition forthcoming in 2015), and currently John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.
| Kategoria: | Filozofia |
| Język: | Angielski |
| Zabezpieczenie: |
Watermark
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| ISBN: | 978-83-7886-148-5 |
| Rozmiar pliku: | 6,3 MB |
FRAGMENT KSIĄŻKI
Naturalism as a Philosophical and Scientific Framework: A Critical Perspective
In contemporary philosophy, naturalism is probably the most pervasive and influential intellectual orientation. It is widely presupposed; deviations from it are commonly felt to need justification; and where an important phenomenon, such as value, does not seem naturalizable, we find a plethora of attempts to show that, despite appearances, it is. Naturalism was important in philosophy even in the nineteenth century, but its popularity increased with the influence of certain elements in positivism and with the development of the philosophy of science. In 1969, W. V. Quine published “Epistemology Naturalized,” which helped to popularize the verb ‘to naturalize’, and ever since then the philosophical literature has had title after title announcing a naturalization of something viewed as highly significant.^() But as common as appeals to naturalism are, its defense is rarely accompanied by a general account of the position, and it is frequently defended at best from a restricted point of view, such as that of epistemology or ethics. I am not prepared to offer a nicely detailed conception of naturalism as adequate to all of these contexts. But we can approach a plausible broad conception through reflection on how naturalization might proceed in some major philosophical territories: the metaphysical, including a focus on the mental; the epistemological; the scientific; the theological; and the ethical. I begin with some background observations and proceed to sketch an approach to conceptualizing naturalization projects and thereby naturalism as the successful completion of such a project. This will help us to see how much unity the notion of naturalism has, or can be given. A special concern of the chapter is to determine what kind of naturalism, if any, is required as a presupposition of scientific inquiry.
I. The Historical and Philosophical Context
Historically, naturalism has ancient roots, perhaps most notably in Aristotle, who saw human beings as part of nature, derived an ethic mainly from what he took to be natural facts about us, and made no sharp distinction between scientific and philosophical knowledge. Aquinas’s influential rendering of Aristotle preserved certain elements in Aristotle’s naturalism, but denaturalized much of his thought, not only by making theology central and, I believe, introducing a notion of the a priori that went beyond the resources of Aristotle’s apparent empiricism, but also by putting natural laws under God and licensing, though without mapping, a supernatural route to certain discoveries about nature. Seventeenth-Century rationalism, especially in Descartes, took philosophy still further from Aristotelian naturalism.^()
Elements of rationalism remained in some of the British empiricists, at least Locke; but empiricism, especially in Hume, who carried it into semantics as well as epistemology, emerged as fertile ground both for the beginnings of modern naturalism and for the scientific worldview. Perhaps Kant may be seen as, in part, reconciling a kind of rationalism with a scientific worldview; but it was in England, particularly with J. S. Mill, and later, in America, that naturalism most prominently flourished in the nineteenth century.^()
By the early Twentieth Century, naturalism had strong proponents on both sides of the Atlantic and especially in America, where Roy Wood Sellars wrote, in 1922, “We are all naturalists now,” though he quickly added–quite insightfully, in my view–that naturalism “is less a philosophical system than a recognition of the impressive implications of the physical and biological sciences.”^() Wilfrid Sellars, writing three decades later, went further. Parodying Protagoras, he said that “science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is and of what is not that it is not.”^() And in a famous paper defending materialism about the mental, J. J. C. Smart had no hesitation in saying “That everything should be explicable in terms of physics ... except the occurrence of sensations seems to me frankly unbelievable.”^() He apparently intended ‘everything’ to apply unrestrictedly, but even excepting such abstract entities as numbers would make him a naturalist about what is commonly called the world.
Twentieth-Century naturalism may have arisen initially as a reaction to supernaturalism, which posits beings or (concrete) entities that are neither in the physical world nor (assuming existence is possible for what is not in the physical world) necessarily physical or material at all. So conceived, naturalism stresses a non-theistic approach to understanding the world and, typically, scientific ways of explaining events. Modern empiricism is also a factor: its adherents see both meaning and knowledge as arising from our experience of the natural world in a way that makes it easy to conclude that the truths about nature are the only basic truths there are. Twentieth-Century positivism, though it refines this view, retains its naturalism: for positivism, observation and scientific method are the only grounds of substantive knowledge (knowledge of logical and analytic truths is not considered substantive on this approach).
Early in the Twentieth Century, naturalism was often clarified by contrast with two major philosophical views. First, naturalists in philosophy opposed idealism–roughly, the theory that reality depends on, or is indeed constituted by, minds and their ideas. Second, and perhaps even more important, naturalists opposed ethical views that posited intrinsic value, such as that of the dignity of persons, as an irreducibly non-natural phenomenon. The rightness of an action, on these views–Moore’s for instance–is a moral property that cannot be reduced to (e.g.) any naturalistic property, such as the total pleasure the action produces. On Moore’s view, pleasure has intrinsic value, but is not equivalent to the intrinsically good.^()
More recently, naturalism has been contrasted with Cartesian dualism and interpreted in relation to the possibility of an ultimately physicalistic understanding of human behavior. We are flesh and blood, neurons and synapses; and if the life of the mind is more than a powerless shadow, it must occur in this biological network. In the past three decades, naturalism has also become a powerful force in the theory of knowledge and justification. Knowers are seen not as meeting evaluative standards, such as criteria that entitle one to believe, but as reliable instruments responding to experience of the world: they reliably register truth rather as a good thermometer registers temperature.
In metaphysics, then, we have naturalism both as a reaction to supernaturalism and as a rejection of mind-body dualism such as we find in Descartes; in ethics, naturalism–at least in realist, as opposed to noncognitivist versions–appears as a rejection of irreducible notions of value and rightness (and an effort to naturalize the corresponding properties); and in epistemology naturalism accounts for knowledge and justification in terms of notions amenable to scientific treatment, particularly the concepts of physics and psychology. If there is a unifying conception of naturalism in all these domains, it is at least not commonly made clear. One could, for example, be a naturalist in rejecting transcendent beings, but a non-naturalist in the philosophy of mind, ethics, or epistemology. Indeed, it may be that, in any one of these domains, there are forms of naturalism that are consistent with rejecting naturalism in all the others. If, however, we recall Sellars’s claim that science is the measure of all things and Smart’s view that everything is explicable in terms of physics, we may think of philosophical naturalism as, in outline, the view that nature is all there is and the only basic truths are truths of nature. This is certainly not the only kind of naturalism that merits the term ‘philosophical’, but it represents a strong, broad thesis that serves as a good focus for analysis and comparison.^() We can gain a better understanding of naturalism so conceived–that is, as a broad metaphysical thesis–and of departures from it by considering some of the projects philosophers regard as advancing it.
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