Abstract
Some consequences of direct realism and William James’s philosophy of mind are considered in terms of American naturalism as seen in the debate between John Dewey and Roy Wood Sellars. Sellars’s critical realism and evolutionary naturalism is compared and contrasted with Dewey’s pragmatic realism and emphatically evolutionary naturalism. Though these naturalisms are similar, there are significant differences between methodology, their critiques of James’s reflex arc concept in his Principles of Psychology, and the mind-body problem. Sellars’s critical realism and naturalism retains a priori commitments to fixed categories and concepts, whereas Dewey’s emphatically evolutionary pragmatic naturalism is empirical and sees continuities where Sellars insists on discontinuities. One significant difference is Sellars’s maintaining a place for introspection as methodologically appropriate and Dewey’s’ rejection of it. These differences are illustrated through Sellars’s modification of the reflex arc to include an organic but interpretative step, and Dewey’s radical criticism of approaches like James’s and Sellars’s as recapitulating the Cartesian dualism that such views intended to overcome. These differences are finally contrasted in Sellars’s maintaining a privacy of mind by constraining it to the brain in a dual-aspect theory, while Dewey advocates mind as sociocultural, expanding mind into body and world.
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Notes
I refer to scientistic naturalism as curious because I can only seem to discern it from methodological naturalism in the former’s emphatic priority on physics (as opposed to biology, for instance) whereas the latter is noncommittal enough to allow for a pluralism of sciences and their particular methods. Moreover, I have further difficulty finding an actual thinker who defends scientistic naturalism (in this absolutist reductivist sense). Perhaps a difference between these two naturalisms is what counts for a belief. While both see scientific method as the best or only way of fixing true belief, methodological naturalism leaves room for having beliefs which are not fixed by science, whereas scientistic naturalism demands that beliefs fixed by the sciences always trump our beliefs that have not been fixed by science – indeed it is unclear on this view whether we can even have beliefs if they are not first fixed by scientific method. But, again, I hardly find this distinction satisfying. After all, no person in their right mind will declare that their beliefs – every single one of them – have been fixed beyond doubt by the sciences. The difference, then, seems to be a matter of degree of practicality and principle. That is, methodological naturalism, so characterized, leaves room for beliefs that will never be actually fixed by the sciences but are going to be held regardless; whereas scientistic naturalism emphasizes that in principle beliefs can be inquired into and fixed accordingly to the results of such inquiry.
Popp also includes Daniel C. Dennett as an ultranaturalist. I would add Mark Johnson, Philip Kitcher, and Peter Godfrey-Smith. For more on Dewey’s contemporary influence on naturalism, see Bernstein 2020. Much of Bernstein’s discussion compares and contrasts Dewey’s naturalism with the naturalism of Roy Wood Sellars’s son, Wilfrid Sellars.
For Dewey’s elaborations on this distinction, see Dewey 1915, 178–179.
The entirety of Chap. 1 of Dewey 1925 is devoted to this topic.
To be sure, this is not to say that Skinnerian behaviorism is still the ruling paradigm in psychology. As recent work in neurobiology has shown, this model of stimulus-response is far too simple to be the whole story. And as mentioned below, Dewey’s early criticism of James on this matter is having a renaissance in contemporary connectivism in neurobiology, neurophilosophy, and 4E cognitive science.
See Sellars 1970, 16, where Sellars concludes the essay stating that “Critical realism…explains perceiving as a separate cognitive achievement by studying its mechanism and its development in the framework of S—C—R. In this context, it can account for sense-data theories and ‘appearances.’”.
It must be noted that an organism may or may not be consciously aware of – viz. perceiving, in Sellars’s terms – the stimulus and the response, it is not consciously aware of or perceiving the neural patterns or processes (which, in Sellars’s terms, are the appearances or sense-data). For more on this aspect of his critical realism, see Sellars 1920. See also Chisholm 1954, where Chisholm carefully dissects the important use of perception and sense or appearance in Sellars’s thought.
Other inquiries, like art, are not focused on the causal relationships, indicative of natural science, but nevertheless serve the reconstruction of situations.
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Solymosi, T. Critical and Pragmatic Naturalisms: Some Consequences of Direct Realism in John Dewey and Roy Wood Sellars. Topoi 43, 161–170 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-023-09954-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-023-09954-x