Abstract
In the past generation, various philosophers have been concerned with the so-called “placement problem” for naturalism. The problem has taken on the shorthand alliteration of the 4Ms, since Mind/Mentality, Meaning, Morality, and Modality/Mathematics are four important phenomena that are difficult to place within orthodox construals of naturalism, typified by physicalism and a methodological preference for ways of knowing associated with the natural sciences. In this paper I highlight the importance of temporality to this ostensibly forced choice between naturalism and the 4Ms, and then reframe the problem by advocating a temporal naturalism rather than the atemporal versions that remain the orthodoxy. In short, I argue in Section 1 that scientific naturalism is standardly atemporal in outlook and in philosophical presuppositions, in Section 2 that temporality is a fundamental condition for each of the 4Ms (drawing on insights from classical phenomenology), and hence the intransigence of the dilemma. Instead of accepting this construal, in Section 3 I outline a temporal naturalism that owes more to biology than to physics (and hence more to Peter Godfrey-Smith than Huw Price), where we also see temporally dependent “points of view” in incipient biological forms, and where the norms surrounding explanation are less nomological and reductive in orientation.
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Notes
We have been taught the efficacy (and reality) of the 4Ms since time immemorial, often with a religious heritage. I hope I am not committed to any substantive views about the necessity of how we ordinarily regard each of the 4Ms (which changes with time and culture), even while I aim to challenge eliminativism and reductionism about them.
These claims are usually taken together as a package deal to address worries concerning the “pessimistic meta-induction” about the history of science. The meta-induction rightly holds that the theories and entities posited by our best sciences have changed significantly over history and are very likely to continue to do so, so the addition of something about the reliability and truth-tracking credentials of the scientific method is needed to render plausible efforts at deriving an ontology from our best sciences.
As a reviewer has pointed out, some scientific naturalists are not reductionist ‘within’ the natural sciences, instead claiming that it is the natural sciences as a whole, rather than physics specifically, that defines our ontology and methodology. Although positions like these are not always especially liberal on the surface, I think that once this move is made away from an atemporal naturalism indebted to physicalism, the position is liable to be less dismissive regarding the 4Ms and more able to countenance a biologically-inspired position like the one I outline in Section 3.
Despite his criticisms of metaphysical realism and the God’s Eye view, Putnam’s earlier work presents as a paradigmatic case of scientific naturalism: “the problem of the reality and determinateness of future events is now solved. Moreover, it is solved by physics and not philosophy... Indeed, I do not believe that there are any longer any philosophical problems about Time; there is only the physical problem of determining the exact physical geometry of the four-dimensional continuum that we inhabit” (Putnam 1967, quoted in Smolin 2013, 63). Putnam did, however, become a liberal naturalist later in his career (see, e.g. 2016).
Our phenomenological experiences of time are rather more complex than our engagement with a table. After all, no object is directly presented or given to consciousness in the case of time: although we can attend to features of temporal experience, it is more often an enabling condition for other experiences (e.g. boredom when reading a philosophy paper, retaining prior melodic sounds and structures when listening to music). It is hence “transcendental” in a sense to be explored.
Despite other work that notes the importance of the indexical (e.g. her book, Transformative Experiences), for Paul these temporal features of our experience are real “for us”, but not ontologically real (e.g. her argument draws on physics and considerations from theoretical virtues like parsimony). For her, they are more like our perception of movement when dots on a computer screen oscillate but nothing actually moves (Paul 2010).
Some versions of classical phenomenology did have temporality as instituting differences in kind between mind and world, between human and animal, etc., even if Francisco Varela, Shaun Gallagher and Evan Thompson have complicated this picture, while keeping the centrality of temporality for humans, organisms and beyond.
In early 1920s lectures Heidegger declared that “Dasein is time; time is Dasein”. There are related formulations in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception concerning time and subjectivity.
Husserl says they would presuppose the very same temporal structures rather than explaining them in non-temporal terms.
A more detailed account would show that specific kinds of experience have differing temporal structures, whether we have in mind emotions, beliefs, desires, hopes, regrets, nostalgia, etc., and it is the interplay between them that is important to reasoning, cognition, etc. Minimally put, we might just note the apparent indispensability of beliefs and desires to our lives (and to folk psychology), and note that they are temporally differentiated, with different directions of fit, and with desires in particular involving an “intrinsic temporal vector” (Altshuler 2009).
“Meaning” as one of the 4Ms is also a placeholder referring to a narrower linguistic dimension of meaning regarding the intelligibility of noises and scribbles on the page: to invoke Quine, what establishes that the verbal utterance “gavagai” refers to rabbits, or undetached rabbit parts/stages, without the answer invoking any non-naturalist commitments? I cannot address this question here.
For Heidegger, Dasein’s existence presupposes this temporal structure, but in the background, and we generally dwell in an inauthentic way. It is the experience of being-towards-death, defined as the awareness of our finitude in Angst that is important to shedding light on this structure which is usually only implicit. We can also push this analysis in the direction of psycho-pathology. For many of those suffering schizophrenia, severe depression, post-traumatic stress, the structure of temporal experience is itself subtly altered and comprehended by the sufferers as such (see Ratcliffe 2013; Parnas et al. 2005).
Indeed, this connection between embodiment and temporality also sheds new light upon Hubert Dreyfus’ famous critique of the ambitions of classical artificial intelligence (1972), which in essence is about the frame problem and the prospect of a machine encountering a non-meaningful (i.e. context free) environment and being able to flexibly navigate it in real-time. This problem has not been solved by computationalist approaches and advances in robotics. The body and its intrinsic time appear to present the central stumbling block here, preventing an infinite regress, grounding a ‘now’ and establishing a practical orientation within an environment that is able to sort relevant from non-relevant considerations.
Perhaps this might be done through an enactivist construal: after all we also cannot precisely locate affordances but on some construals such relational entities are explanatorily vital. In this vein, there is a 4e cognitive science and process biological rejoinder to the metaphysics of the 4Ms, involving as they tacitly do, a timeless naturalism (cf. Smolin and Unger 2016, 361).
Of course, in invoking the “given” here I acknowledge that an engagement with Sellars and his critique of this “myth” is also required. Carl Sachs’ work provides a useful starting place for thinking this through (2014).
David Macarthur (2010) makes this point in regard to Price’s treatment of the social sciences.
There is even, perhaps, sufficient diversity and variability to agree with Jakob von Uexküll, who maintained that: “Every animal is surrounded by different things, the dog is surrounded by dog things and the dragonfly is surrounded by dragonfly things. Every Umwelt has its own spatio- and temporal dimensions” (Von Uexkull 2010, 117). An environment like this has meaning and value for the organism in question: animals too are “thrown” to invoke Heidegger, and they do not occupy brute physicality. Rather, “living beings shape the world into meaningful domains of interaction and thereby bring forth their own environments of significance and valence” (Thompson 2007, 154).
Like the birds that do not, in fact, migrate “as the crow flies”, in direct geometrical fashion. Rather, they too are oriented by key landmarks, whether roads, mountains or trees (Mann et al. 2014).
Some phenomenologists endorse versions of this view too, of course, and there is a complex Cartesianism in some phenomenology, with versions of res extensa and res cogitans which I think is a mistake. I think Romano (2016) shows why those sorts of phenomenology should not be endorsed. Also see Reynolds 2018.
If this is so, the putative contrast between the liberal and the non or supernatural appears lost. After all, the super-natural is indeed part of many life-worlds. This is Sean Bowden’s question for liberal naturalists, one that I believe this essay helps to provide an answer to.
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Thanks to Pat Stokes and Cathy Legg for helping me to think about these issues, and to Talia Morag for organising a conference on Liberal Naturalism at Deakin University in 2017 where I got some terrific feedback on this paper, especially from Pat, Talia, Cathy, David Macarthur, Mario De Caro, and Dan Hutto. This essay has also benefitted from discussions with Ricky Sebold and Shaun Gallagher on related themes.
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Reynolds, J. Temporal naturalism: reconciling the “4Ms” and points of view within a robust liberal naturalism. Phenom Cogn Sci 19, 1–21 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-019-09613-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-019-09613-w