Abstract
I argue that Devitt should replace his maxim, “Metaphysics first!,” with “Explanation first!,” since scientific explanation provides the only basis to decide which metaphysical claims deserve any priority. This seems to me particularly important to urge against Devitt, given his odd inclusion of Moorean “commonsense” in his understanding both of “realism” and of Quine’s “holistic” epistemology, an inclusion that I suspect is responsible for his surprisingly unscientific views of many topics he discusses, specifically (what I’ll address here) secondary properties, linguistics, and the possibility of a priori knowledge.
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Notes
- 1.
As, for the record, did Russell:
There is not any superfine brand of knowledge, obtainable by the philosopher, which can give us a standpoint from which to criticize the whole of the knowledge of daily life. The most that can be done is to examine and purify our common knowledge by an internal scrutiny, assuming the canons by which it has been obtained, and applying them with more care and precision. (1914: 73–74)
Indeed, the several pages there sound so like Quine, that one wonders whether Quine simply forgot that he’d read them.
- 2.
- 3.
See for example, the majority of the discussion and readings under the “metaphysics” rubric in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, not to mention what’s proffered under it in standard bookstores.
- 4.
For some idea of the complexities one might face in trying to sort the issue out, see Woodward (2017).
- 5.
The influence of Moore on behalf of realism pervades much of Devitt’s (2010a): in addition to this passage, see also pp. 109–114, 122–123, 136, 184–185, 316–320. All of this would be innocuous enough did Moore display any interest in science over commonsense, against which I wager he’d deploy his same appeal to commonsense that Devitt endorses.
- 6.
He does discuss what some people might regard as problematically human-dependent entities, such as artifacts, tools and social phenomena (1984/97: §13.5). Here he’s entirely right to claim that mere human dependence for their identification isn’t enough to render something unreal. But the cases typically raised by scientists are ones in which the issue is the stability of the identification, which hammers enjoy, but which, as we shall see shortly, e.g., secondary properties do not.
- 7.
One might wonder if any commonsense entities, such as tables, could ever be regarded as real, given that tables qua tables don’t enter into any serious science. In my (forthcoming: §9.2) I argue that there are two conditions under which it’s reasonable to take a commonsense term realistically: (i) if there’s enough stability in its usage across people and time, and (ii) if all the central properties connected to the usage of the term can be preserved under the assumption it applies to something that can be delineated by a serious explanatory science. “Table” and “chair” seem to me to satisfy both these conditions: tables are just hunks of matter occupying a certain space time position that, modulo vague boundaries, are stably picked out by the relevant uses of “table.” By contrast, rainbows, Euclidean figures, and (as I will shortly argue) secondary properties are either unstable or have features that aren’t satisfied in the physical world.
- 8.
Devitt does go on in the passage to acknowledge that there are potential problems with respect to his account of color, citing Hardin (1988/93), but thinks the problems depend upon subjective features being regarded as essential to colors. Since he concedes this is a matter of dispute, he concludes that “[t]he right theory of colour would be largely Lockean, but partly eliminativist” (1984/97: 251). What he fails to recognize is how Hardin’s discussion – and the discussion of most vision theorists – completely undermines any explanatory significance whatsoever to “normal” conditions of human perception, and so any viability at all to the Lockean strategy.
- 9.
Russell didn’t consider there a Lockean, dispositional proposal, but his point is made even sharper in this regard by Kuehni’s data (see Mound 2019: §6.2, for recent general acceptance of the point). It’s curious that in his extended discussion of color (2010a: 122–136) Devitt nowhere considers this problem of the diversity of color responses. Perhaps he thinks it could be handled by simply relativizing it to more specific populations and conditions, just as he is willing to relativize it to species (1984/97: 250). It would be interesting to see him try to spell out what seem to be all the relevant parameters: cone sensitivities, nature of the ambient light, surrounding context, angle, prior exposure, expectations, etc., and in such a way that also supported counterfactuals. Given some of the continuities of these parameters, what hope is there that the list of conditions “C” would be finite?
I should stress that I am not for a moment endorsing the global response dependency of properties – the view that all properties are response-dependent – that Devitt is reasonably opposing in those pages.
- 10.
In their defence of color realism, Byrne and Hilbert (2003) presume there is some such basis, but don’t provide one, or (to my mind) provide any reason to believe one exists.
- 11.
Devitt (1984/97: 81) does make a passing reference to what he takes to be a role for real colors in biology. But he presents no argument that what’s relevant there are actual colors. On the face of it, one would expect the biologist’s concern would be precisely the same as the vision theorists’, with animals’ sensitivities, and what colors they represent. What role would colors themselves play apart from those sensitivities?
- 12.
In this regard it’s worth noting recent proposals of Chomsky (2000) and Pietroski (2005, 2010), according to which what the human language faculty makes available to our cognitive and other “performance” systems are various phonological, syntactic and only rudimentary semantic material, which only the conceptual system uses to create the full semantic phenomena of reference and truth. The proposals allow for essentially polysemous expressions of natural language to be interpreted one way for the purposes of science, quite another for purposes of ordinary talk, as in the cases of rainbows and the sky. See also Sperber and Wilson (1995), Carston (2016), and my (2009, 2014b, forthcoming: ch. 10) for related discussion. I commend these approaches to Devitt as a strategy for painlessly liberating metaphysics from the burdens of commonsense and ordinary talk.
- 13.
Again, as with color, the present point is not really to deny the existence of SLEs, but just to call attention to their lack of explanatory significance. Devitt (2006a: 189) does wonder how communication without real SLEs would be possible; but here the same kind of explanation is available as with so much human life: reliably shared illusions can suffice, as they happily do in, e.g., our talk about “rainbows” in “the sky,” or what turns out to be illusory, Kanizsa lettering – of “language”! – on many billboards. See my (2006) for discussion.
- 14.
Thus, Chomsky and the phonologist Morris Halle write in their influential The Sound Pattern of English:
We take for granted, then, that phonetic representations describe a perceptual reality. Our problem is to provide an explanation for this fact…. Notice, however, that there is nothing to suggest that these phonetic representations also describe a physical or acoustic reality in any detail. (Chomsky and Halle 1968: 24–25)
The relevant external acoustic phenomena don’t display the segmentations into phrases, words and syllables that we take our utterances essentially to possess. Thus, SLEs display neither the stability nor the preservation of central properties in the acoustics that I argued in note 7 were needed to maintain at least an external realism about them.
- 15.
Note that, unlike Platonists, Devitt doesn’t think language is causally independent of minds (2006a: 26). And I say he thinks language is “largely independent” of psychology, since he does think that regarding something as language requires regarding it as the result of human intentional action (see his 2006a: 230–231).
- 16.
I do so in my (2012) and in my (forthcoming).
- 17.
Devitt expresses (2) and (3) in his (2008a: 211).
- 18.
In line with my motto “Explanation first!,” I actually prefer to think of the criterion as one applied not purely formally, but in terms of what entities are posited by the theory that do genuine explanatory work. A discussion of this difference is, however, not at issue in the present discussion.
- 19.
Collins (2008) raises essentially the same point, to which Devitt (2008b: 250) replied merely by quoting an introductory linguistics textbook, adding,
simply taking grammars to mean what they say, without any revision or reinterpretation, they give empirical explanations of linguistic expressions.
And maybe they sometimes do. But these are emphatically not the explanations Chomskyans intend to provide, as innumerable of Chomsky’s explicit statements make clear (see, e.g., his 1955/75: 5–7, 105; 1965: 4–5, 1968/2006: 25, 1980: 129–130). Note that it’s one thing to argue with the ontological commitments of a theory, as Quineans often do, quite another to reject its repeated, detailed, empirically motivated explanatory aims. Could Chomskyans really be so wrong about what it is they’re trying to explain?
Devitt (2006a: 31) does cite what sound like Chomsky’s (LR) formulations of his task in his (1957, 1965: 9 and 1980: 222). However, the (1957) formulation was only for the limited purpose of mere lecture notes for a course, and both the (1965) and (1980) passages he quotes consist of (misleadingly) brief ways of expositing merely the competence/performance distinction, and are belied by ample other passages in the same volumes (see Chomsky 1965: 30ff, 1980: 189ff). Chomsky (2000: 159–160) does further complicate the issue by appearing to reject talk of “representations of.” However, he’s there concerned with the “of” relating representations to external objects. I use “representation” in what I take to be a traditional sense whereby there can be a representation of an x even though there is no x, as in the case of Zeus, phlogiston, and the highest prime; see my (2003, 2012, and forthcoming: ch. 8) for extended discussion.
- 20.
- 21.
Chomsky (2013: 41) calls them, less mnemonically, “fine thoughts” – as in perfectly “fine thought, but it has to be expressed by some circumlocution.” Linguistic texts are bursting with examples. If one remembers nothing else about Chomsky, one should remember at least a few of these examples: a great deal of Chomsky’s approach can be readily re-constructed merely by reflecting upon how they could possibly be explained. They serve not only as striking evidence for the innateness of grammatical rules (although some of them may involve learned parameter settings), but, just as importantly, as crucial evidence of the psychological focus of a Chomskyan theory.
- 22.
Devitt does have a go at trying to show how it is possible for conventions to, e.g., yield unvoiced elements, such as PRO (the subject of, e.g., infinitives, as in Bob tried PRO to swim). Devitt writes:
Consider the string “Bob tried to swim.” The idea is, roughly, that each word in the string has a syntactic property by convention (e.g., “Bob” is a noun). Put the words with those syntactic properties together in that order and the whole has certain further syntactic properties largely by convention; these further properties “emerge” by convention from the combination. The most familiar of these properties is that the string is a sentence. A more striking discovery is that it has a “PRO” after the main [finite] verb even though PRO has no acoustic realization. There is no mystery here. (2008a: 217–218)
But it’s hard to take this hand wave seriously. The more one focuses on the utterly non-obvious relevant rules, the elaborately hierarchical tree-structures, and the plenitude of multiple occurrences of unarticulated elements, the harder it is to see how the rules could possibly just “emerge” from kids just “combining” words. I’m reminded of Louise Antony’s (2002) nice rejoinder to Hubert Dreyfus’ similar rejection of representationalist theories of skills. She quotes Monty Python’s “How to Do It” advice:
How to play the flute. (Picking up a flute) Well here we are. You blow there and you move your fingers up and down here. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNfGyIW7aHM)
Devitt (2008b: 253) is later slightly more cautious, retreating to agnosticism about whether the rules on PRO are conventional or innate. But what about all the other WhyNots and the rules needed to explain them?
- 23.
Vision theorists, like Palmer, routinely proceed to talk about “colors,” despite denying their reality. As with most cognitive psychology, whether vision, linguistics, or theories of Greek mythology, it’s convenient to express the content of mental representations by simply pretending the representations are true (see my (forthcoming: §6.4) for discussion).
- 24.
“c-command” is the relation of a node in a tree structure to its sister and any of her descendants; a licensor is, e.g., an interrogative (Do you …?) or a “negative” like not or doubt – but the details aren’t important here.
- 25.
Why don’t the following sorts of formulations appear anywhere in texts? Well, obviously they’d be awkward and prolix. But I fear it’s also because of rampant use/mention confusions that Devitt (2006a: 69–71) and I (2003) have elsewhere deplored, which are partly due to indifference and partly to confusions about intentionality (see my (forthcoming)), but which unfortunately can easily mislead the reader into a realism based on a use/mention confusion, according to which the SLEs are the neural states themselves that are said to represent them (so that, e.g., [+ voice] is a feature of a brain, not a larynx!).
- 26.
None of this is to say (à la Jackendoff 1987, 2006) that a representation independent world is somehow unintelligible. Pretending that p doesn’t, after all, entail (even believing) that not p. Here I share Devitt’s (2010a) insistence on at least a scientific realism about the (possible) entities genuinely needed by true explanations.
- 27.
Briefly: I argue for the causal efficacy of structural descriptions of SLEs, which seems to me supported by empirical evidence that Devitt’s alternative hypotheses can’t explain. In my (forthcoming), I supplement my earlier pieces by citing still further experimental evidence (much of it from Fernández and Cairns 2011: 206–224) regarding, e.g., involuntary perception of native speech, its rhyme and register; garden paths; syntactic priming, “slips of the ear” and syntactic “nonsense” (as in Lewis Carroll and Derrida). Devitt (2006a: 224; 2014: 284–287) mysteriously claims that such phenomena can be explained merely by representations of semantic messages having syntactic properties, rather than representing them. But it’s unclear how this explanation would go: a representation’s merely having certain, e.g., neural properties, after all, doesn’t make those properties perceptually real. See Maynes and Gross (2013) for related discussion.
- 28.
Devitt (1996: 2; 1998/2010: 253) actually defines “naturalism” in this way, claiming “[Rey] is a bit confused about the sense in which he [accepts it], given his position on the a priori” (1998/2010: 254). As I said at the start, I reject the definition, preferring the explanatory conception that seems to me to be what Quine is defending in his (1969). It is worth noting that Devitt’s characterization is not included among the many other characterizations that either Steup (2018), Papineau (2016) or Rysiew (2017) discuss in their Stanford Encyclopedia articles on the topic(s). At best, Steup notes that a “naturalized epistemology” treats epistemology as part of natural science – but this of course doesn’t entail anything substantive about “the only way of knowing.” But, fine, one can see how Devitt might have in mind a usage that assimilates this continuity of epistemology with natural science – there’s no “first philosophy” (as even Russell allowed; see note 1 above) – with the view that logic and arithmetic are also continuous with it, and known in the same way (as Russell surely didn’t allow!). I just want to allow that these issues be distinguished, and that, in any case, it’s simply not true that “what has interested nearly all philosophers under the name ‘a priori’ has been a non-naturalistic way of justifying beliefs” (Devitt 2010b: 273). Epistemologically naturalistic defences of the a priori status of logic and arithmetic, like mine and those of Goldman (1999) and Antony (2004), not to mention the various strategies of the early Wittgenstein and the Logical Positivists, are all perfectly intelligible cases in point.
- 29.
I initially set out the views of this section in my (2014b: §2); some passages are identical, but others have (I hope) been improved, and I’m trying to improve further in my (forthcoming).
- 30.
I emphatically do not mean to be drawing a “personal”/“sub-personal” distinction here, only a distinction between the obviously different purposes of a working vs. an explanatory epistemology (hence the “as it were”).
- 31.
I don’t mean to be suggesting for a moment that the explanatory ascription of attitudes is generally “normative,” as many have insisted (see the exchange between myself and Ralph Wedgwood in McLaughlin and Cohen 2007): perfectly descriptive facts can explain satisfactions of norms.
Another distinction that is partly orthogonal to the one I’m drawing is between an “internalist” and an “externalist” epistemology, the first concerned with justifications a person may provide, the second with the relations a person or animal may bear to its environment (see Steup 2018: §2.3). But an explanatory epistemology could be purely internal, along lines I’ve noted Chomskyans pursue.
- 32.
To generalize Putnam’s (1965/75: 36) observation about analyticity, there may be an a priori, but it “cuts no philosophical ice … bakes no philosophical bread and washes no philosophical windows” – at least not in any of the usual working philosophical disputes. Thus, Devitt (2010b: 283n) is precisely right in noticing that a priori claims “could do little epistemic work” – in, I would add, a working epistemology, since (apart from mathematics) it may only be available in an explanatory epistemology, which may be one of the last things we’ll ever get right. As Hegel pointed out, the owl of Minerva may spread its wings only with the falling of the dusk (see my (1993) for discussion).
- 33.
Cf. Russell’s (1914) denial of a “first philosophy” quoted in note 1 above.
- 34.
I have to confess to now being deeply embarrassed about how little I and others have pressed this issue since being under the spell of Quine’s view since the Sixties (talk about being “in the grip of a picture”!). I’m genuinely grateful to Devitt for so insisting on the view as to cause me, counter-suggestible as I am, to finally notice its virtual vacuity and/or empirical outlandishness.
- 35.
There is the case of Putnam’s (1968/75) proposal to revise logic in the light of quantum mechanics. But arguably this can be construed as a case of the revision of the classical theory of logic, not of logic itself (see Stairs 2015 for nuanced discussion). It is often thought that Einstein’s empirical theory of General Relativity gave the lie to Euclidean geometry (Devitt (2010a: 257) suggests as much), but this is an historical and conceptual error: what refuted the parallels postulate of Euclid was the development in the eighteenth–nineteenth centuries of non-Euclidean geometries by Gauss, Riemann and Lobachevsky – all reasoning purely mathematically. Once the mathematical possibility of spaces with different metrics was understood, it was then an empirical matter to determine which specific metric (flat or curved) applied to actual space/time. The math and geometry were a priori; what was empirical was, per usual, determining which mathematical structures apply to the physical world.
- 36.
Indeed, on the physical face of it, locality would appear to be essential to any explanation of anything (I presume neither Devitt nor Quine are going to appeal to very puzzling non-locality claims in some interpretations of quantum physics).
- 37.
Note that despair over essentially this point was one consideration that drove Descartes (1637/1970: 116) to his dualism.
- 38.
Note that one might wonder how various sorts of self-knowledge are supposed to fit into Devitt’s “one way of knowing.” Don’t people seem to have various sorts of privileged access to their thoughts, sensations, attitudes, motor movements and positions of their body (maybe even features of their I-language!)? I should think it requires some pretty subtle empirical research to determine just where someone’s epistemic privileges begin and end. A priori-ish claims about “one way of knowing” shouldn’t preclude or constrain that research (see my (2014a: §3.21) for discussion of what seems to be special introspective knowledge of many of one’s attitudes).
- 39.
Actually, the details here bear experimental scrutiny: denials of claims about particular numbers (“267 + 12 = 279”) and particular inferences (“Some pets are dogs, therefore some dogs are pets”) seem on modest reflection unintelligible, but generalizations, especially non-elementary ones, say, Cantor’s results regarding infinity, or the law of excluded middle, might not be (cf. Russell 1912/59: 112–113).
- 40.
Hartry Field in his (1996) and in conversations with Devitt pressed this issue, which Devitt addresses in his (1998/2010), finding something “fishy” about this form of argument. But he confesses:
I have not located the source of the smell. And this is something that should be done, because the dominant idea is appealing. Alas, I do not know how to do it. I comfort myself with the thought that we know so little about our evidential system. (1998/2010: 270)
But if in fact we know so little about our evidential system, how can Devitt be so confident that Field’s argument is in fact “fishy,” and that the empirical way of knowing is the only way? I confess, it’s continually difficult to resist the charge that even Devitt (1998/2010: 268) notes to be “a neat and perplexing point,” that, for Quineans, it would appear to be a priori that there’s no a priori!
- 41.
Cf. Frege (1884/1980: 16–17): “Induction … must base itself on the theory of probability…. But how probability could possibly be developed without presupposing arithmetic laws is beyond comprehension.”
- 42.
Note that I’ve added “or inhabit” here to rule out the accidentally believed a posteriori necessities, such as “All men are mortal” or “Water is H2O” that also worry Devitt. Pace his (1998/2010: 260 n. 9), I’m still inclined to think that logical truths are true by virtue of their pattern of operators alone, being moved by Gillian Russell’s (2008: 33–34) nice analogy with “xy = z”, being satisfied by <5,0,0> by virtue of y alone: logical truths are worldly enough; it’s just that the world makes no more distinctive contribution to them than does 5 to the truth of 5x0 = 0. But there’s no need to press this specific issue here; knowing logical truth by virtue of knowing the meaning of the operators alone will suffice. For further replies to Devitt, see my (1998) which appeared in the same place as his critique.
- 43.
Devitt also wonders why I chose an axiom-free system:
suppose that [someone’s belief in a non-obvious logical truth] was not produced by a non-axiomatic system of natural deduction but is inferred from some general logical beliefs. Once again, the epistemic status of [a logically true belief] depends on the status of the general beliefs. So we have to say more to show that they are knowledge. It is hard to see how the change from general beliefs to sub-systems of rules could remove the need to say more. (1998/2010: 262–263)
The reply is that, on the face of it, an axiom-free system, using perspicuous, easily realized inference rules, would be potentially more explanatory than a system that merely posited comparatively arbitrary axioms. Expositorily, it’s also easier to see natural deduction as rules an agent would find obvious and ineluctable, as opposed to (dispositions to assent to?) – arbitrary axioms. But essentially the same argument could be made with axioms – see, for example, the argument of the preceding section according to which Bayesian (and likely any probabilistic) procedures of confirmation require the probabilities of logic and arithmetic to be equal to 1.
- 44.
I’ve not dealt here or elsewhere with Devitt’s (2010c) discussion of biological essentialism, since I don’t know the domain sufficiently well. Perhaps the problems I’ve discussed here do not arise there, in which case: great!
- 45.
Many, many thanks to Andrea Bianchi for saintly patience in his perceptive editing of my ms. I’m also indebted to John Collins and Steven Gross for very helpful discussions of earlier drafts of this paper, and to Michael, both for earlier comments, but, really, for stimulating and wonderfully genial arguments over the (egad!) nearly five decades of a great friendship, that’s endured for me as much because of, as despite our differences.
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Rey, G. (2020). Explanation First! The Priority of Scientific Over “Commonsense” Metaphysics. In: Bianchi, A. (eds) Language and Reality from a Naturalistic Perspective. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 142. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47641-0_15
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