The ‘traditional’ objections to a wholly naturalistic metaphysics, within the modern Western philosophical tradition, involve the vexed notions of freedom and consciousness. But there is, I think, a much deeper and more interesting line of criticism to naturalism, and that involves the notion of intentionality and its closely correlated notion of normativity.
What is involved in my belief that I’m drinking a beer as I type this? Well, my belief is about something — namely, the beer that I’m drinking. But what does this “aboutness” consist of? It requires, among other things, a commitment that I have undertaken — that I am prepared to respond to the appropriate sorts of challenges and criticisms of my belief. I’m willing to play the game of giving and asking for reasons, and my willingness to be so treated is central to how others regard me as their epistemic peer. But there doesn’t seem to be any way that the reason-giving game can be explained entirely in terms of the neurophysiological story of what’s going on inside my cranium. That neurophysiological story is a story of is the case, and the reason-giving story is essentially a normative story — of what ought to be the case.
And if Hume is right — as he certainly seems to be! — in saying that one cannot derive an ought-statement from an is-statement,and if naturalism is an entirely descriptive/explanatory story that has no room for norms, then in light of the central role that norms play in human life (including their role in belief, desire, perception, and action), it is reasonable to conclude that naturalism cannot be right.
(Of course, it does not follow from this that any version of theism or ‘supernaturalism’ must be right, either.)
That statement was made by a person who openly calls himself a ‘naturalist.’ Thus, why should anyone believe a word he says?
Will ‘Kantian Naturalist’ now in this thread finally disown his own chosen pseudonym?
Interesting. Thanks for posting.
My reason for being skeptical of a naturalistic metaphysics, is that I am skeptical of all metaphysics. But I think my reasons for that are, in a way, related to your objections.
In another thread, keiths expressed his view of naturalism in terms of the laws of nature. I don’t believe that there are any laws of nature. Or, more precisely, I see laws of physics as human constructs. I see it as unavoidable that they must be human constructs. Why I take them to be human constructs is probably connected to why you see there to be a normative story involved in intentionality.
Will Gregory finally disown the name “Gregory”?
KN,
I don’t see this. Your belief is still about the beer even if you choose not to respond to challenges and criticisms. The commitment to defend a belief is not essential to its “aboutness”.
Are you arguing that you objectively ought to defend your belief about your beer, and that naturalism cannot explain this objective ought?
If so, I would respond by asking how you know, objectively, that you ought to defend your belief.
If you mean something else, please clarify.
It looks like my abject disregard for being taken seriously has damaged a circuit in KN’s processor.
Your defense isn’t about the beer and/or the drinking, that I can see, it’s about yourself. You’re right, and as a social being it matters that you are seen/known to be right. You should be able to figure out what is going on in your surroundings, so you point out how and why you are right about it.
But why should you? There is no “ought” there, it’s more an “is.” We are how we evolved to be. I don’t think that Hume’s dictum can be taken as precluding the evolution of “oughtness” in organisms.
Not that I have anything for “naturalism.” I just don’t see how our evolved responses to objects in our social situation is an argument against naturalism.
Glen Davidson
I took KN’s talk of defense to be a way of getting to the normativity. And I took the normativity to be with regard to how he is using the words of the language, which does relate to intentionality.
I’ll grant that I might be misreading that.
In another sense, sure, one might say that it’s more about the object. Like, my arrows are very good, so I can defend myself reasonably well from the other tribe, bears, etc.
But the “oughtness” is still about you, your control in, or of, a situation. Sure, objects and our sense of “aboutness” with respect to them interact with our own norms and desires. That’s because we have to know our capabilities with them.
Glen Davidson
Philosophy is the art of asking the wrong questions and pretending that they are profound.
That’s seems correct, but I guess I never figured out what intentionality has to do with anything except as a kind of relationship to ourselves, a purpose that we find for things. A gun isn’t a thing, it’s a use, a social connection, etc. Or maybe it’s nothing (or a bit of context at best), if I don’t really know or care about such things.
I’ve always tilted more toward Nietzsche on these matters–it’s psychology, not some mysterious philosophic phenomenon.
Glen Davidson
Neil, to Glen:
I did too, but since the defense is optional, so is the normativity.
And even if normativity invariably accompanied our thoughts, I don’t see why it would present a problem for naturalism. A feeling of obligation can be explained in terms of brain states as readily as any other feeling or thought.
The only way any of this could be a problem for naturalism would be if the ought was somehow objective and free-floating. But that idea is untenable for all the same reasons that WJM’s supposedly objective morality is untenable.
There are no free-floating oughts. They are all condtional, as in “I ought to defend my beliefs if I want others to accept them“, or “I should use standard English if I want readers to understand me“, or “I shouldn’t cheat on my taxes because my conscience tells me it’s wrong.”
Note to William: Please don’t hijack this thread for a discussion of your moral “system”. This is about KN’s thesis, not your endlessly flogged morality. I have an OP in the works on your moral “system”. Please wait for it.
KN in the OP
Checking the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy I find:
If this is the naturalism that KN is referring to, then I wonder what he means by “naturalism cannot be right”? Such a statement suggests something else is right, or at least more right than what we can find out about the universe we inhabit.
What would that be and where else do we look?
Alan’s final question is appropriate and specific. What alternative ideology to ‘naturalism’ is Kantian Naturalist suggesting or proposing (other than ‘supernaturalism’)? Or is this yet another negation exercise and waffling rhetoric on his behalf?
If he actually believes what he writes – “naturalism cannot be right” – then logically he should change his name to ‘Kantian Something Else‘ (or just drop the backwards-looking ‘Kantian’ label too, while he’s at it!), that is, if he wants to be consistent.
Proverbs 9: 7-9 (zoom to the entire chapter KN)
The notions of ‘normativity’ and ‘intentionality’ are surely important, I agree, as does the entire Abrahamic tradition broadly speaking. It just doesn’t seem that KN with his (analytic-continental divided) team of preferred philosophers (e.g. Dewey ahead of Niebuhr) has figured a way out of his own constructed conundrum. There are many who have (or who never fell into it in the first place) and who speak much more clearly and professionally than KN, by rejecting naturalism outright or rather qualifying it to mean something quite narrow, with few ‘worldview’ implications. But that last item itself is a problem with ‘naturalism’ too.
When KN was a ‘practising’ Reformed Jew (though I’m not sure if he said he ever vertically believed), of course he didn’t need to wrap his personal worldview around ‘naturalism’ as a limited (anti-supernatural) ideology. Nor are social scientists or humanities scholars generally required to limit/constrain their/our perceptions to naturalism (though quite a few of them do). But KN somewhere, somehow, for some (still unexplained or not understood) reason succumbed as a ‘scholar’ to ideological naturalism.
Yet now it appears he is taking a step here at TSZ to openly contradict his mentors’ naturalistic ideology, all the while remaining worldview agnostic-eclectic-mixed up with no anchor that he once (apparently) had (ethnically &) religiously. But he won’t even talk about religion or theology because he strangely thinks his apparent ideological ‘naturalism’ has *nothing* to do with it. (And he compares this with asking about one’s sex life.) So potentiality for healing sadly doesn’t appear to be even an option in his negative, horizontal, denialist approach.
What alternative to naturalism will KN name that might help him escape his self-admitted disenchantment that often displays ‘philosophistry’? What more than ‘neurophysiology’ does KN want to associate with ‘being human’? Is he turning ‘spiritual’ (beyond the merely natural, material & physical) as many, many, many have done before him and still do now? Is “Let there be light” יְהִי אוֹר (yehi ‘or, Fiat Lux) itself a ‘normative story’ that KN could ever embrace as inspirational?
Keiths,
The only person here apparently attempting to hijack the thread into a debate about morality is you.
OlegT, many of your former countrymen and women would passionately (not only as post-Marxists) disagree with your superficial dismissal of philosophy. Were you dropped by a philosopher or graded poorly when you were young? 😉 I have met good, encouraging and inspiring Russian philosophers even nowadays! Where does such rank distaste for the ‘love of wisdom’ come from; is it common among ex-Soviets living in the USA?
This I found recently at one of the top English-language libraries in the world (delicious!), which you might appreciate (and he’s not ‘just a philosopher,’ LOL):
The naturalist version of oughts is that every ought is an is – a feeling produced by a brain state in a situation. Norms are just what you have when enough people that share the same brain-state sensation in a given situation. You might as well call “skin color” a norm if naturalism is true. Like oughts or intentions, it’s just a natural feature certain individuals happen to share.
As far as intention is concerned, under naturalism intention is just a candy coating the computation throws on our pill of instructions. If we are computed to do something we would prefer not to, we don’t get the candy coating and we call the act a “compulsion”. There’s no real difference between intention and compulsion under naturalism other than whether or not we get that candy coating.
Under naturalism, “aboutness” is whatever the computation of physics generates into an “aboutness” state of experience, intention is a corresponding sensation, not a causal source, all oughts are is-es and the only difference between a free-will choice and an internal, biological or mental-disease compulsion is whether or not we get the candy-coated or hard-to-swallow version of computed outcomes.
FWIW, I agree with keiths’ criticism of KN’s claim that intentionality requires normativity. But I also disagree with keiths’ claim that every ought statement is shorthand for some “ought if I want to____”–that is, unless we include “ought if I want to do the right thing.”
As Moore once said, everything is what it is and not another thing. You’d think a principle like “it is what it is” would be easy to abide by, but alas……
No, that does not follow. It could be that whole way of looking at things is misguided.
Hi Neil.
Not quite sure what you mean but I’m guessing you are referring to”naturalism” as a philosophical outlook. If you are saying that, though KN rejects “naturalism” as “not right” he doesn’t need to provide an alternative philosophy, then, sure, that’s so but it’s an odd stance for a philosopher.
If intentionality refers to representation, then the usual position is that there must be a possibility for misrepresentation in any proposed explanation of how mental representation works.
So deciding whether a representation is correct would seem to involve some kind of normativity, although not the moral kind I think Hume was referring to.
Instead, seeing how well the representation helps the organism to function in the physical or social environment seems to offer one approach to evaluating the correctness or at least effectiveness of mental representation.
KN in original post:
I take this as an argument for wide mental content — namely one cannot fully explain intentionality without reference to the external environment. You’ve phrased this in terms of having to explain beliefs to a community, so I am assuming you are referring to something unique about human intentionality — perhaps the ability to use language to describe beliefs?
I think animals also have mental representations, ie intentionality, so I don’t agree one always needs language to have intentionality, if that was your intention.
In either case, normativity would seem to be related to how well the mental representation helps the organism function in the social/physical environment.
——————–
Wide mental content usually involves looking at the history of how a mental representation was formed as part of understanding its meaning. Similarly, I wonder about the history of this post — in particular, how many beers had you been drinking before hand? 🙂
(Note to moderators: if impugning the sobriety of posters is against site rules, even in jest, feel free to move this post)
If one defines “truth” as “what works”, then “truth” is a useless concept under naturalism (or, more accurately, it is a stolen concept); the only thing that exists is what works (truth), and what works better than what worked before (closer to the truth), regardless of whether or not it represents a 1 to 1 correspondence to any factual, real condition in reality.
Interesting that it is only the theist in this bunch that actually lives and thinks along these lines – eschewing the concept of “truth” as irrelevant in any practical sense and working only with, and only making claims about, what apparently works in one’s experience.
And I’m not even a naturalist. Imagine that.
Not how I would define truth.
BruceS,
You’re off the hook as you framed it as a question!
I’m not sure what you mean by “how mental representation works.” I take it that might involve neurophysiology or just be some sort of philosophical stance–like representationism v. qualiaphilia. But again, intentionality is what it is–however we might explain it.
I agree with you that any representation may be a misrepresentation. And maybe whether or not some representation is correct requires “normativity.” But I don’t see that that that would provide any succor for KN’s claim about normativity. My sense about what he’s saying–though I may be wrong about this–is that he’s giving some sort of behavioristic criteria by which we can tell what somebody else is representing. Again, I think that’s irrelevant.
I think it’s extremely important to separate questions of “being” from those of “being known” (what x is from how we know what x is or whether x is really y or whatever). In my experience, most philosophical errors take place right there. Nearly every post on the last couple of ethics topics here seem to me to be all confused on that. So, e.g., there might or might not be any non-subjective values in the world–but however one comes down on that doesn’t alter what “ought” means.
W
Actually, I’m assuming something stronger — that language doesn’t merely play a role in describing (and expressing) beliefs, but that language allows for having beliefs of a different kind than the sorts of beliefs that we unproblematically ascribe to animals and infants.
I certainly agree that some animals have mental representations, i.e. intentionality, but not of the same kind that discursive animals have. I call this “somatic intentionality”: the intentionality of purposive behavior.
In the case of the sort of mental representations that we share with other animals, yes — the normativity of those kinds of representations would be (probably) cashed out in terms of the effects of past natural selection. But I’m deeply skeptical of the thought that the kind of mental representations unique to discursive animals can be cashed out in just the same way. That’s the skepticism I was trying to convey in my original post.
I accept wide content at both levels — the somatic and the discursive — but the externalism operates in two different ways: physical externalism about somatic mental content and social externalism about discursive mental content.
Clearly non-discursive animals have the former kind, and perhaps some of the large-brained social animals have an attenuated or rudimentary version of the second kind. (They would have if we’re going to preserve our commitment to Darwin’s continuity thesis, however punctuated at the level of speciation!) And the vast majority of our mental lives involve the two acting in concert. Perhaps certain kinds of mental activity — e.g. mathematics and logic — are sufficiently decoupled from somatic mental content that they count as purely discursive.
I find it somewhat intriguing that no one here has pressed me as to why I chose the pseudonym “Kantian Naturalist” here. Two relevant texts:
(1) “it is Spinoza who most clearly points toward a new philosophical era. Although earlier thinkers paved the way with a new picture of nature, they held fast to the assumption that this picture must be reconcilable with the truth of scripture and with the idea that human beings are in some significant way above, or independent of, nature. Not until Spinoza is a comprehensive attempt made to challenge this assumption. Applying the same critical reason that fostered the new science to basic questions of human existence, Spinoza reaches the conclusion that the assumption must be abandoned. That Spinoza’s revolution leaves many problems unresolved (consciousness, freedom, normativity) goes without saying, but these are now the problems distinctive of modern philosophy” (Don Rutherford, “Innovation and Orthodoxy” in The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Philosophy, pp. 35-36.
(2) “How to Be a Kantian and a Naturalist about Human Knowledge: Sellars’s Middle Way” , James O’Shea, Journal of Philosophical Research 36, 2011, pp. 327-359. (Also available here.)
“The contention in this paper is that central to Sellars’s famous attempt to fuse the “manifest image” and the “scientific image” of the human being in the world was an attempt to marry a particularly strong form of scientific naturalism with various modified Kantian a priori principles about the unity of the self and the structure of human knowledge. The modified Kantian aspects of Sellars’s view have been emphasized by current “left wing” Sellarsians, while the scientific naturalist aspects have been championed by “right wing” Sellarsians, the latter including William Rottschaefer’s constructive criticisms of my own reconciling interpretation of Sellars. In this paper I focus first on how (1) Sellars’s Kantian conception of the necessary a priori unity of the thinking self does not conflict with his ideal scientific naturalist conception of persons as “bundles” or pluralities of scientifically postulated processes. This then prepares the way for a more comprehensive discussion of how (2) Sellars’s modified Kantian account of the substantive a priori principles that make possible any conceptualized knowledge of a world does not conflict with his simultaneous demand for an ideal scientific explanation and evolutionary account of those same conceptual capacities. Sellars’s own attempted via media synthesis—what I call his “Kantian scientific naturalism”—merits another look from both the left and the right.”
My point is that my willingness to defend a belief is essential to the “aboutness” of the belief, if the belief is understood in the high-grade sense of “endorsing an assertion” and not just in the low-grade sense of “taking the environment to be a certain way”. And the reason for this is that assertions just are moves that one makes in the game of giving and asking for reasons.
I don’t know what “objective” means here; I think that both “objective” and “subjective” tend to produce more heat than light, because (1) the objective/subjective distinction, if taken as a dichotomy, excludes the all-important domain of the intersubjective; (2) there is a tendency to conflate this distinction with other distinctions, such as real/imaginary, absolute/relative, and (in some cases) physical/mental. I’m opposed to treating all of these as dichotomies and to conflating these distinctions with each other.
However, I am saying that my willingness to defend my belief, and willingness to revise it in light of further reasons (including, of course, evidence), is what constitutes this belief as belonging to the state of a rational being. And I don’t see any hope of being able to understand rationality in terms of what’s happening in my individual wetware.
Because, to repeat what I said above, my willingness to defend or revise my belief — if the appropriate sort of challenge is made — is what constitutes this belief as playing a role in the overall economy of my rational mental states — including being able to serve as a premise for reasoning, esp. practical reasoning.
walto,
If we define “the right thing” as “what I ought to do”, then “I ought to do the right thing” is equivalent to “I ought to do what I ought to do” — a tautology.
The question is whether we ought to do X where X is something specific, not merely “what I ought to do”.
Given that we have no access to objective morality, the moral question “Should I do X?” can only be answered by consulting one’s conscience, in which case we can say “I ought to do X if my conscience tells me I should do X.”
keiths:
KN:
“Taking the environment to be a certain way” is the same as having a belief about the environment. I am eating popcorn right now, and I believe that I am eating it. My belief is about the popcorn, and about me, even if I choose not to endorse it or defend it to anyone. Likewise, your belief is about the beer, and about you, even if you choose not to endorse or defend it.
If you want to persuade someone else that you are drinking a beer, then you ought to give reasons. But this is a conditional ought: If I want others to believe that I am drinking a beer, then I ought to offer reasons for them to accept that belief. I don’t see how that is a problem for naturalism.
keiths:
KN:
Your belief can play a role in your “overall mental economy” even if you choose not to defend it or revise it. Because I believe that I am already eating popcorn, I choose not to get another bag out of the cupboard and pop it. It makes no difference whether I am willing to defend my belief to you or to anyone else who challenges it.
Sure, in the same sense of “belief” that my cat believes his food bowl is empty and that it’s time to eat. That’s a different kind of belief than the sort of belief the justification of which matters to us (“I believe that the US should not assist Nigeria in helping to find the missing school girls, since US presence in Nigeria will only antagonize Boko Haram even further”).
So perhaps I should have emphasized justification, not just having a belief. But I do think that in the vast majority of cases of normal adult human beings, we care about whether our beliefs are justified or not — and that caring about justification is central to what it is to be a rational being.
KN,
Even in that case, our desire to justify our beliefs is optional. You can believe “that the US should not assist Nigeria in helping to find the missing school girls, since US presence in Nigeria will only antagonize Boko Haram even further”, and you can act on that belief, all without making any attempt to justify your belief to anyone, including yourself. Your belief is still about the missing school girls, the US, Nigeria, and Boko Haram. Its “aboutness” does not depend on your willingness to justify it.
Yes, with the exception of William. But how is “caring about whether our beliefs are justified or not” a problem for naturalism? Caring is a brain state. So is the thought “this belief is justified”, and also the thought “this belief is not justified”.
I don’t see how any of this is problematic for a naturalist.
Yes, that one ought to do the right thing is a tautology. The point is that none of the other things you mention, like “I ought to do X if I want Y” are tautologies. And the moral of that is that none of them mean what “I ought to do X” means.
And that’s true for the my conscience biz too. “My conscience bids me to do X, but X is nevertheless something I ought not to do” is not contradictory. Therefore, I ought to do X does not mean “my conscience bids me to do X.” All this stuff was explained by G.E. Moore over 100 years ago.
Now it may well be (though I don’t think so myself) that all there all in the way of values are the urgings of our conscience–that such urgings provide no evidence of anything outside themselves. If so, that means that there simply are no objective values, not that the meaning of “ought” has changed.
Of course KN *IS* actually going to provide here in this thread an alternative to the ‘naturalism’ that he fatuitously CLAIMS “cannot be right.” Right? Otherwise his ‘do the hokey pokey’ is just cute emptiness. Philosophism, too obvious to ignore.
That’s precisely what I’m denying — in particular, I’m denying that thoughts are brain-states.
If thoughts were brain-states, then we’d be able to construct a correspondence relation between how we individuate thoughts and how we individuate brain-states. But I simply don’t see how any criteria for individuating brain-states, no matter how much information we pack into it about environment and history, can even be fine-grained enough to confer unique propositional content on the brain-state.
What I’m suggesting, in effect, is that the disjunction problem is insoluble: there is no wholly adequate causal theory of propositional content.*
Either there is no propositional content — we don’t really have thoughts, beliefs, and desires at all — or however we account for propositional content, it cannot be in purely causal terms. I opt for the latter — propositional content is individuated by its role in reasoning, reasoning is normative, and norms cannot be reduced to causes. And that’s why naturalism cannot be right.
* As noted above, I do insist that there are non-propositional intentional content — in fact, I published a paper on this in 2010 and it’s beginning to receive some appreciative critical attention from other people who work in philosophy of mind. I simply haven’t made up my mind yet whether I think there is a wholly adequate causal account of non-propositional intentional content. I’m inclined to think that there isn’t, but that’s a separate issue.
As you well-know, my view is that the problem with “naturalism” is its too-hasty identification of “nature” with “what is disclosed or made intelligible by natural science”.
We will, I suspect, have to rediscover all the insights of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie all over again and follow Adorno in re-interpreting the disenchantment of nature through the lens of the domination of nature as fueled by the capitalist mode of production.
The upshot, I suspect further, is that we will have to overthrow capitalism in order to discover what nature really is. No “naturalism” that merely restricts nature to what is exploitable by capitalism can account for consciousness, freedom, or normativity.
walto,
It is contradictory if you define “what I ought to do” as “what my conscience tells me to do”. If you don’t define “what I ought to do” in that way, then you have to define it some other way, such as “what I ought to do” is “what Leviticus tells me to do.” But then we can ask “why should you do what Leviticus tells you to do?”.
The only thing that can terminate the regress is for you to a) establish an objective morality, which seems impossible to me, or b) to say “because I think I should do so”, which to me is tantamount to saying “because my conscience tells me to.”
Well, he tried. Whether he succeeded is hardly a settled question.
In any case, I don’t see how normativity is a problem for naturalism.
KN,
Huh? Who here is advocating a naturalism “that merely restricts nature to what is exploitable by capitalism”?
A naturalism that excluded neutron stars, say, because they aren’t exploitable by capitalism, would be a strange naturalism indeed. Who would subscribe to it?
To illustrate the range of views about the meaning of naturalism, here are two different formulations from a collection of essays I’m reading:
Alex Rosenberg: “Naturalism is the label for the thesis that the tools we use in answering philosophical problems are the methods and findings of the mature sciences — from physics across to biology and increasingly neuroscience. It enables us to rule out answers to philosophical questions that are incompatible with scientific findings It enables us to rule out epistemological pluralism — that the house of knowledge has many mansions, as well as skepticism about the reach of science. It gives us confidence to assert that by now in the development of science, absence of evidence is prima facie good grounds for evidence of absence: this goes for God and a great deal else.”
Paul Horwich: “Anti-supernaturalism: Within the domain of phenomena that bear spatial, temporal, causal, and explanatory relations to one another, science rules. (For example, the prospects for astrological influence, extrasensory perception, and acupuncture are to be settled by scientific investigation” is acceptable, but “naturalism is an irrational over-generalization” because we have no reason to believe that “everything that exists is located within the spatiotemporal causal domain”. More specifically, we have very good reasons for doubting that everything that exists can be located in that domain, because we have extremely good reasons for believing that there are “non-natural facts”: “that there are numbers, that it’s good to care about the welfare of others, that if dogs bark then dogs bark, and that the world could have been different from the way it is”. These facts — mathematical, moral, conceptual, and modal — are basic data that no adequate view, naturalistic or otherwise, can ignore.
That’s fine, but who does (or would) subscribe to a naturalism “that merely restricts nature to what is exploitable by capitalism”?
ETA: That seems as arbitrary as a naturalism that excludes “pink things” or “things that seemed appetizing on Tuesday afternoon”.
KN,
Your’re implicitly assuming that unique brain states would need to represent unique propositional content. I don’t think that’s true, because I subscribe to a theory of intentionality much like Dennett’s.
That seems like a different argument entirely. Your OP claims that beliefs are normative and that the normativity can’t be naturalized. Now you are saying that naturalism is defeated by the disjunction problem.
There is a third option, which is that propositional content is not uniquely determined by brain states, just as “quarterhood” is not uniquely determined by an activation of Dennett’s “two-bitser”.
keiths,
Well, sure, if you want to throw metaphysical realism under the bus! Then you can have whatever stance you please, as long as it pays its way in generating useful predictions! Seems like paying a very high price, though!
I mean, Dennett has recently come out in favor of reasons and purposes in nature — but merely an epistemological device, with no ontological significance!
The thing that frustrates me about Dennett is that he acknowledges that there have to be “real patterns” to which the stances somehow relate, but he never wants to cash that check.
KN,
How am I throwing metaphysical realism under the bus? All I’ve said is that brain states don’t uniquely determine propositional content. That’s perfectly compatible with metaphysical realism, as far as I can see.
If anyone were to define “S ought to do X” as “S’s conscience bids S to do X” they would not be able to understand this: “S’s conscience bids him to do X but he really shouldn’t” (which we all can understand). So, say you define “S ought to do X” as “My conscience tells me that S shouldn’t do X” then the problem is that you can never disagree about any moral matter with anyone. But, obviously, we often disagree about what people should do. We’re not disagreeing about what YOU think is right, however. I certainly take no position on that, anyhow.
There’s no problem of terminating a regress, because there IS no regress. “I ought to do X” does not mean “According to my conscience, I ought to do X” (which, of course, does result in a regress). Fortunately, however the claim that that’s what “I ought to do X” means is false.
Finally, one does not have to “establish” an objective morality to use ought-statements. One can simply be wrong. (I mean mortals like Moore and Kripke–you know, those other than you.)
W
If I interpret the problem trying to understand how brain states relate to mental content, then I see this as a problem for science, not philosophy. For example, neural networks can help with fuzzy categories, and (subconscious) processing implementing Bayesian reasoning can help with understanding what we consciously assert. Such science is at a very early stage, but saying it can never succeed is just a “mental content of the gaps” type argument similar to those used by creationists.
But your argument seems more about epistemology: how can we justify our beliefs? It seems to be to be a a continuation of your points of earlier posts rejecting the reducibility of epistemology to psychology.
In other words, it is not enough to understand how we learn things and assert them as beliefs. We also need standards for distinguishing reliable beliefs. And developing and understanding such standards requires more than science.
I think these standards must be pragmatic. But I don’t see how that makes them non-naturalistic. For “somatic” beliefs, evolution implemented the standards. For “discursive” beliefs, our culture (including science and philosophy) has developed and applies standards implemented through action in our physical and cultural environment — those are the standards enforced by the methods of science and philosophy. (I use the scare quotes just because I may not be using the words the way you intend, even though that is why I am trying to do).
But how does using pragmatic justification for developing and applying such standards make them non-naturalistic? Is it because you restrict naturalism to science?
I’m vaguely gestured to a somewhat Marxian thesis that the conception of nature that I find problematic is the conception of nature as what would be exploitable by capitalism. The problem isn’t neutron stars; the problem is the non-fungibility of biologically unique individuals.
I can say a lot more that explicates this point of view, or we can leave it be. It’s not central to what I’m saying here in this particular thread.
It might help to point out here that you’re making a point about definition, which in turn trades on a lot of work in strict identity and intelligibility. But even when strict identity fails to vindicate “an obligation is a call to conscience,” it could still make sense to say, “what we used to call ‘absolute obligation’ is really an emotional response to transgressions against local cultural taboos”..
They turn out to be “non-naturalistic” because natural science trades only in declaratives or assertions, and not in what ought to be (or ought-not-to-be) the case.
In other words, “Hume’s guillotine” is a very real problem — not just for ethics, but for epistemology and philosophy of mind and of language — and not just for naturalists, but for any attempt to ground normativity in metaphysics, whether naturalistic or non-naturalistic.
That’s quite right, but I think it’s not just about justification — it’s also about being able to correctly identify a belief as having the specific propositional content that it does. My thought here is that, in order to be able to correct specify a belief’s propositional content (if it has one), we have to be able to recognize or understand the inferential role that such content has a norm-governed inferential nexus, and that those norms aren’t reducible to regularities or dispositions — the stock-in-trade of what is described by natural science.
Developing and understanding such standards requires more that how the world (including) ourselves is represented by science. I still think that the method of science is essential for the world to get a vote in what we say about it.
Yes (and no). As I’ve already indicated, I think it’s extremely important to distinguish things from how we know them. Thus, the bidding of my conscience, or a look at a statute, or parental training (or whatever) could create feelings of obligation in me. In addition, my belief that I have some obligation may result from “an emotional response to transgressions against local cultural taboos.” The point is that no obligation IS a parental training, a bidding of conscience or an emotional response. They’re not even the same sorts of things.
Again, maybe there are no “objective obligations” at all (though I don’t believe that myself). But be that as it may, failure to distinguish ratio essendi from ratio cognoscendi creates sooo many errors in philosophy.
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KN,
I don’t know of anyone who defines nature that way.
No need for a revolution. Scientists routinely study phenomena that are not “exploitable by capitalism”. I don’t know of anyone, scientist or non-scientist, who subscribes to a naturalism that “restricts nature to what is exploitable by capitalism”.
The workers on an assembly line may not be valued for their individuality by their employer, but that doesn’t require the denial of their individuality. Capitalism is compatible with a naturalism that encompasses neutron stars and “biologically unique individuals”.