Abstract
Reviewing the state of play in the attempt to naturalise content a quarter of a century after John Haugeland’s survey paper “The Intentionality All-Stars”, Dan Hutto and Glenda Satne propose a new naturalistic account of content that supposedly synthesizes what is best in the three failed programs of neo-Cartesianism, neo-Behaviourism and neo-Pragmatism. They propose to appeal to a Relaxed Naturalism, a non-reductive genealogical form of explanation and a primitive notion of contentless ur-intentionality. In this paper I argue that the authors’ Relaxed Naturalism is a broad form of Scientific Naturalism and, as such, it is unable to account for the problem of conceptual normativity that arises for any scientific naturalist attempt to explain content – whether reductive or not. This is based on the irreconcilability of the objective third-personal character of scientific inquiry and the intersubjective second-personal nature of the normativity of content. I suggest that the authors would do better to simply become neo-Pragmatists who, properly understood, are Liberal Naturalists who have the conceptual and methodological resources to acknowledge and do justice to conceptually normative content.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
It is also known as the “location problem”. See, e.g., (Price 2011, 53).
Another option that I shall leave aside in this paper is that of non-factualism (e.g., Ayer’s emotivism, Blackburn’s quasi-realism) which treats the language of intentional content in non-representational terms – leaving the way open to non-representationalist (“expressivist”) understandings of its function.
Unless otherwise indicated numbers in brackets in the text represent page numbers in the Hutto & Satne paper.
To accept this claim one would have to suppose that the same, or a similar, problem arises on the basis of ancient Greek, pre-scientific conceptions of nature. That seems dubious but I will not pursue this point here.
“What I teach is: to pass from unobvious nonsense to obvious nonsense” (Wittgenstein 1953, §464).
Of course, if one takes the natural sciences as one’s ontological base and also makes allowance for the plurality of the sciences, then this commitment would require suitable amendment. I will leave this complication aside for ease of exposition.
This has been convincingly argued by (Ritchie 2008). Of course I realize that there is a powerful movement of analytic metaphysicians who treat naturalism as a commitment to a scientific metaphysics (e.g., David Armstrong, David Lewis, David Papineau) but the a priori methodology of metaphysics is in considerable tension with the broadly empirical methodology of the naturalist. A naturalist can adopt an empirically defeasible a priori of course, but are Armstrong’s theory of universals, Lewis’s theory of possible worlds or Papineau’s causal fundamentalism really being treated as empirically defeasible?
Just how a problem can have the appearance of legitimacy despite being illegitimate is left unexplained but it is surely worth asking why a considerable number of philosophers have spent their time and energy on a fruitless research program.
See (Macarthur 2010)
And even the a priori status of these disciplines is open to question. Putnam, for one, has argued that mathematics, at least, is quasi-empirical. See (Putnam 1975).
Bertrand Russell’s well-known criticisms of James’ theory of truth reveal a misunderstanding of this point, one which helped inspire a century or more of further misinterpretations. See (Russell, Olin ed. 1992). Neo-Pragmatists, in the broad sense in which we are using this expression here, include Robert Brandom, Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam, the latter two being its founding fathers.
See (Haugeland 1990, fn. 22).
Hutto and Satne remark: “The important point being made here is that by integrating the contributions of different theories [DM: two for naturalizing content, one not] a possible story can start to be told about the natural origins of content” (27).
Put in Sellarsian terms: “the content of any concept is the conceptual content that it is only in virtue of playing a specific normative role or having a certain normative status within the logical space of reasons.” (O’Shea 2010, 462). One might further argue, with Frege and Wittgenstein, for the primacy of judgment and the idea that we can only discern the “logical parts” of judgment (i.e. concepts) by abstraction from the patterns of inference into which judgments enter.
The modern problems of conceptual normativity for scientific naturalism in Anglo-American philosophy are a recrudescence of themes explored in the German tradition in the late C19th and early C20th by thinkers such as Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert.
Stanley Cavell remarks, “no current idea of “convention” could seem to do the work that words do — there would have to be, we could say, too many conventions in play, one for each shade of each word in each context. We cannot have agreed beforehand to all that would be necessary” (Cavell 1979, 31).
The tie-break was instituted world-wide by the ITF in 1971 after several years of various versions being trialed at several major tournaments.
Tim Crane admits the “genuine challenge” posed by the possibility of such “internal errors” for any naturalistic account of content in (Crane 1998).
The most sustained and deepest account of this understanding of ourselves is to be found in the works of Immanuel Kant.
Of course, liberal naturalists respect the results of the natural and human sciences and, like any good naturalist, admit all of the scientific entities posited by successful scientific explanations into its ontology.
Haugeland also reads neo-Pragmatism as a third person methodology but this is disputable. It is no doubt true that Brandom – who seems to waver between an in-game second person and a sort of third person umpire who keeps score of language games – does not do full justice to what I am calling second-personal space. But neo-Pragmatism, as a form of liberal naturalism, is ideally placed to do so.
This objectivist conception of science is elaborated by, amongst others, (Kim 2003).
For example: “the structure of the space of reasons is sui generis, in comparison with the organization of the realm of law.” (McDowell 2004). McDowell goes astray in identifying the realm of the scientific with the nomological. Social sciences plausibly deal in local causal patterns rather than global causal laws. But this does not affect the deep insight in this remark.
It also becomes mysterious from within the mythology of an ultra-objectivist Platonism, but since the focus of this paper is on naturalism I shall not discuss this in the present context.
References
Anscombe, G. E. M. (1957). Intention. Oxford: Blackwell.
Brandom, R. B. (1994). Making it explicit: reasoning, representing, and discursive commitment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Brandom, R. B. (1997). Precis of Making it explicit. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 57, 153–6.
Cavell, S. (1979). The Claim of Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Crane, T. (1998). Reply to Tanney. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 6(2), 279–282.
Danto, A. (1981). Transfiguration of the commonplace: a philosophy of art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
De Caro, M & Macarthur, D. (Eds.). (2004). Naturalism in Question. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univeristy Press.
De Caro, M. & Macarthur, D. (Eds.). (2010). Naturalism and Normativity. New York: Columbia University Press.
Haugeland, J. (1990). The intentionality all-stars. Philosophical Perspectives: Action Theory and Philosophy of Mind, 4, 383–427.
James, W. (1975). In F. Bowers & I. K. Skrupskelis (Eds.), Pragmatism (1907) . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kim, J. (2003). The american origins of philosophical naturalism. Journal of Philosophical Research: APA Centenary Supplement, 83–98.
Macarthur, D. (2008a). Pragmatism, metaphysical quietism and the problem of normativity. Philosophical Topics, 36(1), 193–207.
Macarthur, D. (2008b). Quinean naturalism in question. Philo, 11(1), 1–14.
Macarthur, D. (2010). Taking the human sciences seriously. In M. De Caro & D. Macarthur (Eds.), Naturalism and normativity. New York: Columbia University Press.
Macarthur, D. (2014). “What’s the use? price & wittgenstein on naturalistic explanations of language. Al-Mukhatabat Journal, Special issue on Wittgenstein, (9): 77–95.
Macarthur, D. (2015). Liberal naturalism, ordinary things and the importance of second-personal space. Telos, in press.
McDowell, J. (2004). Mind and world (pp. 108–9). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
O’Shea, J. (2010). Normativity and scientific naturalism in Sellars’ ‘janus-faced’ space of reasons. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 18(3), 459–471.
Price, H. (2011). Naturalism without mirrors. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Putnam, H. (1975). Mathematics, matter and method: philosophical papers (Vol. 1). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Intro, chs. 1–4.
Ritchie, J. (2008). Understanding naturalism. London: Acumen.
Russell’s. (1992). William James’s conception of truth. In O. Doris (Ed.), William james: pragmatism in focus. London: Routledge, pp. 196–211.
Wittgenstein, L. (1953). In G. E. M. Anscombe (ed.), Philosophical investigations . Oxford: Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, L. (1998). Culture and value (Revised 2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Thanks to Talia Morag for comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Macarthur, D. Liberal Naturalism and Second-Personal Space: A Neo-Pragmatist Response to “The Natural Origins of Content”. Philosophia 43, 565–578 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-015-9621-7
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-015-9621-7