Preferred Citation: Margolis, Joseph. Historied Thought, Constructed World: A Conceptual Primer for the Turn of the Millennium. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1995 1995. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft2779n7t4/
 | Historied Thought, Constructed WorldA Conceptual Primer for the Turn of the MillenniumJoseph MargolisUNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESSBerkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford© 1995 The Regents of the University of California |
against the delusions of the academy
Preferred Citation: Margolis, Joseph. Historied Thought, Constructed World: A Conceptual Primer for the Turn of the Millennium. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1995 1995. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft2779n7t4/
against the delusions of the academy
PREFACE
The single most persistent impression I take away on completing the final editing of this primer is one of conceptual inertia—on my own part, of course, and (frankly) on the part of the entire philosophical community. One cannot fail to be aware of it "abstractly," but it comes as something of a shock to feel (and to infer, because one failed first to feel) the full deterrent power of inveterate practices. Try to resist the most ingrained habits of thought. You must make the effort with the tacit compliance of the executive ideas you now mean to displace. It's a little like outwitting yourself at chess. And yet it happens. I should like to think it has happened here on a reasonably generous scale. I confess it was my intention.
And yet, of course, a primer is a handbook of an inertia that has succeeded socially. This one is a little on the odd side, for it pretends to be a primer of some future-present, sometime in the next century. It is hardly completed, therefore. I shall have to track the discrepancies between my present anticipation of that future and what of it I may be fortunate enough to glimpse. But if this work is successful, others will proceed with their own inquiries in a way—perhaps increasingly—that will be distinctly in accord with the conceptual order this primer recommends.
I was talking just the other day with a young friend of mine, a sociologist, who told me a bit uneasily that some years ago he found himself criticized by referees of his journal articles as being a "crypto-idealist" and, now, after a sudden change in professional fashion, he finds himself
criticized as a "crypto-materialist," although (as he says) he hasn't changed his views at all. I believe him. My own reflection is a bit more arch. I want younger philosophers to believe spontaneously—and to be right in believing—that in introducing my primer as a prophecy I have somehow misrepresented it, that, rather, it convinces now! That would be the supreme compliment. I dare not speculate further along these lines. But you will see, in time, whether the principal schools of thought, "analytic" and "continental," will have moved beyond their present impasses, will have borrowed from one another, or simply perseverated. It hardly matters. For, in the long run, local hegemonies cannot last. Philosophy thrives in an invented present in which every innovation, whether suppressed in its own time or honored, contends with every other. There is always, in that sense, time enough to change our ways: that is to say, if one sets aside local ambitions and the immediate fortunes of the planet. In any case, there's little point to a smaller vision.
I have benefited considerably, in editing the final version of this manuscript, from detailed comments and suggestions by Marx Wartofsky and an anomymous reader for the Press. I should like to thank both for their labor: I have considered them all and acted favorably on many, and I daresay the book is better for it. I have heeded other careful suggestions from Jacques Catudal, Dale Jacquette, Michael Krausz, and Tom Rockmore, good friends all. I have watched my argument season in their company. I must also thank Rae Sykes, who, as so often before, has put a sprawling manuscript into final order with patience and precision. And I thank Ed Dimendberg of the Press for the good reception and handling of the entire project. I'm very pleased to count myself a California author.
PROLOGUE
Philosophy, like every practice and every discipline that claims a distinguished history, senses that the close of our millennium will signify a change of vision of the most profound sort. The intuition is ubiquitous. This is not to say we are clear about the theories that will dominate the next thousand years: if we knew what they will be, prophecy would be no more than chronicle. There's a mystery in thought. We know our present vision will be eclipsed, not merely displaced, but there is no form of serious inquiry that can survey our present theorizing options and guess satisfactorily at what our options will be at the close of the next millennium. No one believes that this restriction is due merely to there being too many possibilities to consider. Clearly, the genuine options of every age are a function of the tacit small choices of each successive change in the history of thought.
There's novelty in art and science and philosophy, of course. There are large notions that are born that, even when they come to full flower, we cannot quite see how they could have been generated by any permutation of the ingredients of the preceding or an earlier age. We cannot see the linear sequence of thinking that could have, for instance, rearranged the elements of twelfth-century painting as they were perceived in the twelfth century, to yield, in principle, cubism in the twentieth. But once we concede cubism's arrival, we play at reconstructing the continuous history of painting so that the elements of twelfth-century art, as assigned from the vantage of that later present, are seen to be implicit in cubism. We grasp the one because we have the conceptual resources
of the other. The lesson suggests—without risking excessive paradox—that every changing future-present constructs its own historical past.
Isaac Newton was born the same year Galileo died, but you cannot find the possibility of his great discoveries structured in Galileo's thought, except by a retrospective fiction. You cannot find Marx implicit in Kant—prospectively; you certainly cannot find in the resources of St. Anselm's proof for the existence of God Bertrand Russell's or Leibniz's vision of a universal calculus of reasoning. Intellectual prophecy is an art form. It is also implicit in the ongoing work of every serious profession, for every would-be advance in thought is premissed on the expectation that the profession's long-run history will extend its trajectory from that particular moment of promise. Inventive thought is implicit prophecy.
We are all obviously poised for the century's turn. Since the technology of our time has so remarkably altered our sense of the fluidity of our own form of life, we cannot resist the temptation to picture what new direction thought and life will take. That the close of the century should coincide with the close of the millennium makes the game impossible to avoid. No one believes we will not be vastly different in our conceptual speculations. The turn into the new millennium is already burdened with a sense of accelerating change. We already casually and familiarly entertain lines of thought that would never have been seriously allowed a short fifty years ago. Perhaps the artifacts of the immediate present mislead us, but it seems as if a new tolerance for subverting all the certainties of the past is now in vogue—possibly not merely in vogue but already an incipient habit gathering in advance of our various futures.
I believe that that is so. The changes I see looming cannot fail to generate possibilities which we cannot guess from the elements of an older sense of foundations. We are in the middle of a very large transition. One sees the evidence everywhere, in the mutually baffling confrontations between thinkers wedded to some supposed canon of the past and thinkers (armed with comparable credentials) more than eager to tear down the philosophical respectability of the other.
Possibly this is no more than a passing fashion, but I doubt it. I hesitate to offer today's best specimens in evidence. But if you consider the utter divergence and implicit opposition between two such thinkers as Gottlob Frege and Friedrich Nietzsche, born within a few years of each other, and if you reflect on how it came to be that, within the more-or-less one hundred years that separate their best work and the present
moment, each became the intellectual totem of opposed conceptual visions central to our own age, you may begin to see the plausibility of risking a more radical prophecy for a good part of the next thousand years.
I have no intention of staking out a thousand years. A few hundred perhaps. Let the future look to its own future. Artists have always known they would be superseded. The best they ever hoped for was that they had captured in their oblique way certain recurrent themes, if not the permanent visions, of the human race. Philosophy and science have always prided themselves on discerning the fixed doctrines of an ideally adequate account of the world and our place in it. Now they have begun to realize that their claims may be no more permanent than the fashions of contemporary painting. In this you may see the dwindling of Frege's canon and the rush beyond Nietzsche's optimistic subversion of every canonical longing.
I say we find ourselves puzzled in our philosophies. Fixity is suspect, and flux is unconsoling. The temper of the times is more fundamental to our thinking than it ever has been before. Nietzsche challenged the confidence of all the legible invariances of his day—but, in that day, those invariances remained profoundly attractive nonetheless. Now they are being dismantled—not in piecemeal fashion, as Frege's ideally perspicuous language has been; rather, the very naiveté of trusting such a possibility has been successfully attacked, and Nietzsche has become a somewhat bumbling, picturesque, strident, often coopted, tame, token cartoon of a subversive. It's not merely a longing to be radical that dominates our time: there's that of course, but there's a deeper inchoate sense that the insistence on fixity is simply invalid and profoundly inappropriate given the human condition. The human world, it seems, is born in history and is its creature, and the decisive constancies we seem to find—having to do with the nature of the real world, the conditions for coming to know it, and how we should conduct ourselves in such a world—cannot be more than delusive. Of course, it may be a delusion to suppose our science and philosophy are delusions. But there's a deep distrust in us that's no longer the voice of skepticism or anarchy. It asks us to consider what may be conceptually recovered from a condition of global impermanence.
This is a new theme—viewed historically. The idea has of course been gathering force for at least two hundred years. It appeared occasionally in the ancient world but was always overcome, suppressed, discounted, ridiculed—hardly perceived as a serious option. That would now be
impossible. A radical prophecy is now in order. So let me say straight out what I take to be the philosophical lessons of the future.
I have tried to arrange a legible set of the essential and circumstantial claims that interest me now, those which I think are philosophically promising. In the strictest sense, it is not a Euclidean order of any sort; it is only a plausible sequence of what appears to be an effective way of entering the philosophical debates of our time and of turning a corner in the direction glimpsed. I am personally convinced that this small set of doctrines approximates the central core of the strongest argumentative currents that the future of philosophy is likely to favor. I don't mean that they will not be contested. Of course they will: they would be pointless otherwise.
The "canons" that have been in place through the long history of Western philosophy are more or less familiar. I allude to them in a light way through the body of the argument. Here and there, I try to establish a thesis that seems intuitively important and manageable on the slim grounds I provide. But, by and large, I only sketch what needs a fuller argument, I hint at how it may be pursued, I indicate the conceptual linkages that must be borne in mind, and I leave the matter incompletely worked out. I do this, frankly, because I am advancing a prophecy and because the proofs required would fill more than a medium-sized book. I have made attempts elsewhere to confirm some of the claims I've collected here, but that's not essential to my present purpose. My point is to assemble a useful primer for the turn of the millennium: it's an effort in the service of an immediate vision. But there it is.
My thought is this. One needs to have a sense of the essential philosophical contest of our time and why it is important for more than ephemeral reasons. One needs a sense of the specific issues, of how they are linked and how they play their part in the essential agon, and of what determinate consequences they are likely to have.
I have made my claims explicit. I've numbered them. I've indicated which are central; which, tangential; which, confirmed; which, merely supported; which, inconclusive; and so on. I mean to offer a primer of what I think is philosophically important now: of what can be drawn from the insistent debates of our time. This, as I see matters, should orient professional cadres and interested general readers alike about what is likely to be the nerve of future philosophy. The difficulty of such a primer is the difficulty of its underlying prophecy.
I offer at the end a set of (program) notes for following the primer's intended lesson by collecting, for each chapter, some brief remarks about
the pertinent views and authors I had in mind in shaping the running argument. But I shouldn't want them to be more than a piece of advice and reading recommended only to assure the reader that the argument does indeed review the familiar range of philosophy and centers on what is featured in our own time. So it is a program for the future, but it's anchored in the responsible histories of the philosophies of our time. I've flagged a number of my numbered claims by putting them in boldface type. These form, in my opinion, a manageably short selection of claims closest to the running argument and closest to the currents of the age. I make the list explicit in the appendix, and I linger a little more heavily, in the notes, on the bold-face theorems. This way I venture a little further in the direction of a running argument without pretending to supply a full defense. Frankly, it would be impossible to ensure the sweep and unity of this primer and satisfy at every turn the scruple of a knockdown demonstration. I favor sweep and unity—but with some care; and I invite you to scan from time to time as you read my selection of theorems in bold-face (in the appendix).
None of this takes the form of a conventional summary, however. I predict a great shift in the center of gravity of the profession's work. I may as well say that my primer offers a way of doing philosophy. It cannot stand on its present resources: it is meant to be an ancilla or a prolegomenon; except that, in its own terms, it would be impossible to intend Kant's quantifier ("jeder" : "any") in the title of his own Prolegomena (to Any Future Metaphysics ). That would betray (as it does in Kant) the dream that an invariant canon may still be had. I believe that that is now impossible.
My own theme is the radical theme of our time: viz., thinking is a history, thinking is history. It appears for the first time among the post-Kantian philosophers, most memorably in Hegel and Marx—and Nietzsche—but it appeared at first in such controversial forms that its general acceptance has been postponed for at least a hundred and fifty years. It's the fruit of reflecting on the import of the French Revolution, one may suppose, but it is no longer marginal to our systematic thought. It has now invaded the theory of the natural and formal sciences: for instance, in T. S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and in reflections on the meaning of the paradoxes of classical mechanics that have brought us to the impasses of quantum physics. In any event, if we insist on philosophy's responsibility to the "evidence" of other inquiries, then the vision of a timelessly adequate, exceptionless, universally comprehensive, formally congenial conceptual scheme of Frege's sort (still
treating that as a specimen) has become "impossible." That's why Nietzsche has had his second inning.
This helps to explain the primer's novelty. I have cast it in terms of the standard topics of the instructional manuals of twentieth-century philosophy—before our own late age. The idiom favors the "analytic" themes, those that have dominated Anglo-American philosophy more than the philosophies of continental Europe. Frankly, what I try to do is isolate the thread of thinking by which the strongest stream of English-language philosophy begins to appear uncompelling, defective, unresponsive to challenge, even isolationalist. I bring unanswered questions out of the very resources of that tradition, that threaten (reflexively) to challenge analytic philosophy's credentials and its best promise. Slowly, but surely, I show how certain nagging but genuine doubts remain intractible within the terms of its most impressive successes, how that same tradition may be made more responsive to the evolving "evidence" of the experienced world around us, how (above all) the neglected themes have already been received within the contemporaneous traditions of continental European thought that the other has for so long shunned—and of course how these themes may be grafted onto the analytic.
I take sides and I don't take sides. I admire the sense of rigor in the "analytic" tradition, and I admire the large spirit of the "continental." I deplore the intellectual stinginess of the analytic, and I deplore the philosophical carelessness of the continental. I believe they are literally the half-assed progeny of the halved stock of Aristophanes's joke in Symposium . Those divided parts must surely be rejoined—and there is the point of the primer. I try to lead the reader to see how the standard topics yield in an ineluctable way to conceptual options beyond their standard treatments; how the lesson brings us to the baffling philosophical activity of our late age; how it helps in reading the radical possibilities that are now gathering; and how we may begin to compose again philosophical visions willing to integrate the different resources of those two halves of Western thought. The primer identifies that opportunity within the resources of a self-impoverishing practice.
The shift in theme and conceptual attitude is straightforward enough. I can state it in a handful of words. I say that the entire history of Western philosophy takes the form of a contest between the doctrine of invariance and the doctrine of the flux, and that, now, at the end of the millennium, after the strongest versions of invariance have had to concede—progressively—the world's inconstancy, the partisans of change have been able to gain for themselves (and to press into effective service)
the grand theme that thought is historied, incapable of fixing the norms of reason beyond the horizon of its own contingent vision.
A subterranean theme binds the halves of Western philosophy, and I take it as the principal postulate of my primer. Here it is a postulate, but in the chronicle of Western culture, it is a ubiquitous feature of all our thought. It is one of the grand themes of conceptual sensibility—possibly the grandest and most inclusive—and, of its kind, it is the only one that is not explored in the pre-modern world. Flux and invariance are more ancient themes, of course. But, apart from Protagoras (on an interpretation Socrates ignores in Theaetetus ), the ancient world always claimed that it could discern invariance in flux if it admitted flux at all. Hence, I favor two degrees of heterodoxy: for one, resistance to the recovery of necessary invariance (although not contingent regularities of any discernible sort); the other, the historicizing of thought (and, as a result, whatever thought enters into constitutively—the intelligible world). The first denies that flux is chaos; the second leads to the thesis that realism and idealism cannot be convincingly disjoined. It's the combination of the two themes that I take to be novel. There is no systematic account of its philosophical import.
The curious thing is that history—or, better, historicity (the notion that thought and the forms of human existence are themselves the changing artifacts of changing history)—is all but absent in analytic philosophy and all but triumphant in continental. There you have the symptom of the rift and the need for reunion. If you grant my theme—the singular contest between the champions of invariance and the champions of the flux, and the growing insistence on historicity—the future of philosophy becomes quite clear. In that sense, this primer is a report on the advanced themes of the future.
The point is: historicity is not a new idea. It belongs to the period at the turn into the nineteenth century. But now, at the end of the twentieth, we find ourselves reclaiming it in a new way because, in the intervening centuries, we have exhausted the conceptual resources by which it has been denied and ignored. We find ourselves at a new beginning: we cannot support the tempting teleologism of the first conceptual experiments with history—those of Hegel and Marx in particular; we cannot sustain the mirage of a final, absolute, invariant order triumphantly disclosed in the process of a genuinely evolving history. What is radical about the end of our century rests with the radical implications of recovering historicity. The indifference of analytic philosophy is dissolving. The pretensions of a conceptual debate that has no need to admit
the historicity of its own reasoning have been stalemated. And continental European philosophy, which was of course the true home of history, is now uncertain about its original loyalties. There is no way to avoid a hybrid labor.
My own argument is a specimen of the arguments I anticipate, an invitation to test the power of a change of argumentative exemplars: too early for some, overly familiar for others. How do I know they will prevail? I don't, of course. No one can foresee how the blandest cases might accumulate to subvert the rules on which they rest.
I flank my primer with a prologue and an epilogue. They form a primer to advance the primer. But that primer's argument is a primer for arguments that are still to come, and the lessons of the prologue and epilogue are drawn from them. You cannot have the one without the other. You cannot take a step beyond the canon without altering the power of the prevailing paradigms of argument itself.
I must risk an explanatory aside.
All the key concepts explained or defined, informally, are set off in bold-face type. They often occur before I "define" them, so I often indicate their first occurrence by italicizing them. I collect them in a glossary index, just as I collect the bold-face propositions (of the text) in the appendix. The relation between the defined concepts and the numbered propositions is not logically uniform. Sometimes the propositions are definitions. The bold-face propositions are closely linked to the six themes I collect in the epilogue. These, I think, have a fair chance of defining the terms of the philosophical currents of the next century.
The chapter divisions are deliberately conventional, in order to capture standard questions and standard connections, even if in a heterodox way. I have inserted as frequently as seemed advisable the coded numbers of propositions—often from preceding chapters (never from later ones)—in order to suggest how an argument might be constructed, yielding or involving some newly numbered proposition. But those numbers are chiefly intended to offset impressions of arbitrariness and to indicate instructive connections. Nothing hangs on a particular linkage, and I am anxious to avoid too much in the way of such detail. Any number of alternative arguments could easily be constructed by developing alternative lines of inference to other propositions already in place.
I set no store by the precise formulation of most of these propositions, particularly those that are plainly ephemeral or merely of connective
value. I have tried to keep these to a manageable number but, frankly, that reflects my own sense of the power and economy of the ones I've favored.
The notes for each chapter are somewhat meandering. They are intended to give an impression of my stream of thought or to fix a reference: to indicate what texts, what philosophers, what claims and arguments I had in mind as I proceeded. They are deliberately not supportive or confirmatory. Sometimes they offer no more than heterodox associations. They are definitely not arguments. In any case, I have tried to avoid the merely marginal and minor and have featured the theorems that are in bold-face.
Also, although I make conjectures here and there that are a little premature, I always flag them as such and restrict my use of them. They play no more than an anticipatory role, yielding a sense of how the argument is to continue or where the force of a would-be finding is as yet conditional. In no case do I argue from numbered propositions that arise in later chapters.
The entire account is an analogue of what has recently been called hyperfiction: the provision of a template (or software) for alternative narratives that feature one modular ordering of elements rather than another—one that is committed, however, to making use of all the elements, given the template's span. (I trust the invidious comparison will be generously resisted.) My primer provides a plausible template for future philosophy, not its individual narratives. It opens intuitively, somewhat blindly, and its seeming scatter subsides only at the end.
PART I
Chapter I
Terms of Reference
I have a simple proposal to make about a difficult matter. I should like to set down a reckoning of the most promising controversial philosophical options that have gained most in plausibility as we approach the end of the millennium, to explain their significance, and to speculate in their favor. The topic is an irresistible one, but it also deserves a straightforward airing. The options I have in mind are beseiged on every side. The complexity of the disputes they involve threatens to swamp the understanding of any audience of wide reading that lacks a specialist knowledge of philosophy itself. The matter is important, but it is scandalously difficult to collect and make explicit. The truth is, we are (I think) on the threshold of certain revolutionary possibilities. Imagine that it were possible—it is possible—to organize a set of program notes for the theorizing melodies of the entire symphony of thought that ranges from the time of the ancient Greeks to the present, isolating the themes that have become insistent as the century draws to a close and that favor the most novel and most radical possibilities of that entire opus.
There is no compendium of these ideas, and yet they have made their inexorable way to the very edge of collective awareness in our own time, against the dominant doctrines of more than two thousand years of continuous dispute in the West. They are ready to be collected, and they are already so clear that they are no longer arcane. In my opinion, they are the threshold resources of conceptual visions that will surely compare favorably in scope and power and intellectual generosity with the
greatest turns in thought that our common history has dared to claim.
I admit the proposal is immodest. But what if its theme were true? Even a small failure would then be worth the inning. Now, a radical conceptual innovation in the sense I have in mind cannot be such if its meaning can be easily detached from the social history in which it is causally embedded. It is easy enough to dream up "radical" notions. They cannot but be idle, even if coherent, if they fail to have entrenched themselves in the productive energies of a genuinely effective part of the human community. The greatest proof of this may be found in the career of Aristotle, self-exiled from Athens when the xenophobic citizens of that city accused him of impiety after the death of that other great Macedonian, Alexander; also, in the career of Immanuel Kant, correcting the clocks of thought in a new way in the streets of backwater Königsberg. Surely Aristotle and Kant revolutionized Western thought, but they could not have done so without the connivance of the currents of ordinary thinking that were capable of taking fire from their inventions without rising to the same magisterial heights.
Also, it cannot easily be shown that these two succeeded because they discovered a part of the timeless truths the race needed to know and has preserved ever since. No, they effected a turn in thinking when history was favorably disposed to receive it.[1] Doubtless, they shaped that receptive history, but they could not have done so singlehandedly, and time would never have sustained their innovations if they had not liberated possibilities of thought inchoate but ready for the potter's hand.
The extraordinary power of their invention rests with an amplitude of vision fitted to a good-sized history that was attracted to what seemed (and still seems) rewarding, perhaps even necessary; necessity, however, lies more in our need to remember the changing history of our best thinking than with the discovery of the actual invariant order of things: first, because the notion of the necessity of invariant order is itself now under the greatest conceptual challenge; and, second, because the particular visions of Aristotle and Kant cannot be said to have been the foundation stones of any still-secure science.
Philosophy, it is said, progresses by remembering its greatest "failures." These are the handful of encompassing visions that have organized all our systematic inquiries. But they have superseded one another sequentially and dialectially, enlarging and adjusting with each step the perceived field of coherent thought in the light of an unpredictable, irrepressibly changing history.
To see a new vision, you must live intently among the old ones—but
as a pilgrim. St. Augustine saw this clearly in the ruins of Rome, but the lesson did not require anything so grand as the assurance of eternal life. Furthermore, you must grasp the new vision at that moment of good fortune when time is kind enough to make the discovery of its emerging form an irresistible marker of the conceptual shape of the future. No one can make such a prophecy prove true. The themes that evolve beyond its first appearance will be as inventive as it itself is. Only a vision that conveys a compelling sense of its own absorptive power over time could possibly collect all such diverging and emerging novelty. None can guarantee its adequacy: if any could, it would not be the invention it pretended to be; if it were not, then its limitations would in time be exposed.
Time, of course, overtakes all conceptual creations. There are no systems of philosophical thought so clearly adequate for the needs of the race that they will have been universally and changelessly acknowledged to be such. In time, all require replacement. Still, we honor in the process those visions that have contributed to the best parts of our best thinking. The reason is simply that thinking has a history—indeed, it is a history or it is history. We cannot abandon these "best" theories, because what we take to be best about our present understanding has gained its status by contending with whatever, retrospectively, we once took to be have been the best parts of the philosophies of the past. There is an innocent conspiracy there, but it has about it a touch of self-fulfilling prophecy. In this sense, the masterful work of Aristotle and Kant—and, perhaps even more revealingly, the innovations of Descartes and Locke and Hegel in the self-conscious history of the modern world—confirms the fortuitous sense in which great turns in thought need not require the greatest perfection in thinking and in which each particular turn is bound to be succeeded by another that it cannot rightly anticipate.
Two ironies make themselves felt here. First, in promoting the idea of an incipient revolution, one cannot fail to identify the greatest strengths of the prevailing visions that are meant to topple; doing that, one may inadvertently guess at powers in the former that one supposes can be bested. Second, in advancing one's own vision, the history of thought will already have been reinterpreted in ways that are most favorable to the favorable reception of a new vision; in doing that, one risks a very deep circularity. Taken collectively, these are "civic" virtues. Here, individual fortunes count for nothing, although the defenders of particular prophecies may be subject to unpleasant reversals.
In any event, on any reasonable overview, philosophical questions
will be admitted to address three concerns at least: (i) what we take to be the nature of the real world, and why; (ii) what we take to be the extent of our ability to have knowledge of the real world, and why; and (iii), having answered those questions in a robust way, how we should conduct our lives, and why. Doubtless there are other questions that philosophers have raised, but these three concerns are the central ones of the tradition. No theory that does not address them can be seriously regarded as philosophically engaged.
We may add at once that these concerns are implicated in the posing of any determinate question about, say, the melting point of gold, or about whether the butler murdered the master, or about whether El Greco painted in the baroque manner, or about whether Tom believes that Cicero denounced Catiline, and so on. We say that philosophical questions are "implicated" in questions of these sorts because answering them effectively justifies us in supposing that we may, and must be able to, answer ulterior questions about the way the real world is, or about what knowledge is; or, if we insist that the inference is not justified, we must concede that we are then obliged to explain satisfactorily why it is not. Either way, we offer a philosophical answer. The maneuver (that is, the choice between answering directly and treating justifiably any such answer as conceptually improper) was long ago recognized by the youthful Aristotle in an all but lost work, Protepticus, as the principal way of actually doing philosophy. In effect, Aristotle says, we are bound to pursue philosophy even if we deny that we can! "Reality" and "knowledge," it seems, are not ordinary properties or states of any sort that may be added to what we know of gold's having a melting point or Tom's believing that Cicero denounced Catiline. They point instead to certain distinctive interpretations ("philosophical" theories) that we draw from whatever we may take to be true in the way statements about melting points and beliefs are true. Hence, the denial that there are genuine questions of these sorts is itself a form of the question being dismissed. The denial, we say, is self-defeating.
Here, a terminological convenience recommends itself. If we call questions of the first sort first-order questions (questions for first-order discourse )—broadly speaking, questions of fact, questions about the way the world is or appears to us to be, in terms of ordinary inspection, activity, scientific inquiry, and the like—then questions about what, in the most critical sense, we take it we should mean, as in speaking of reality and knowledge (implicated thus in our first-order inquiries), will be second-order questions (questions for second-order discourse ). Sim-
plistically put, first-order questions are questions about the way the world is, and second-order questions are questions about the right use of the concepts of reality and knowledge (or, what we should take to be the "nature" of reality and knowledge therein entailed) in the most responsible way we can manage. The concern of second-order philosophical questions (notice that not all second-order questions are philosophical: think for instance of abstracting the grammar said to be implicated in the ordinary use of our native language) is, as we now say, the legitimation (the reasoned or critical justification or defense) of an account of what reality and knowledge "are," or "should" be taken to be, under the condition of admitting a suitable run of first-order instances of actual knowledge.
I say: proceeding only thus is purely terminological, since it is open to us to reject the supposed convenience (and significance) of the idiom; although, in doing that, we should not have escaped (if Aristotle is right) the perceived philosophical entanglement. One additional qualification makes this quite clear—and problematic. Some would insist that the distinction between first-order and second-order questions is strongly disjunctive. I suggest that, whether this is so or not, it remains true that the distinction between first- and second-order questions is itself a second-order distinction. And so, the matter remains so far unsettled.
The reason the point deserves mention is that some contemporary thinkers believe it to be quite possible to save the inquiries of science (first-order questions) while, at the same time, repudiating the legitimative questions mentioned (the second-order questions). This is in fact the self-proclaimed theme of what is now fashionably called philosophical postmodernism:[2] the ability to eliminate legitimative questions without generating paradox. I contend only that any reasoned speculation as to why we should prefer one mode of inquiry over another, for the sake of an anticipated improvement in our discovery of the facts about any part of the world, is, by its very nature, a form of legitimative inquiry. Put another way, first-order inquiries without second-order inquiries cannot but be blind; second-order inquiries without first-order inquiries cannot but be empty; and the distinction between the two cannot but be a second-order distinction. This is already a considerable gain made with very little labor. It prepares the way for the principal work of philosophy. It is a philosophical gain. But it hardly settles what we should say about reality, knowledge, or conduct.
If an argument like the one just sketched did not hold, there would be an end to philosophy. If we may go on blithely collecting what we
take to constitute our sciences and our moral codes without ever stopping to reflect on our apparent good fortune, without ever having to consider the reasoned advantages of preferring this or that line of inquiry (Lavoisier's conjecture about the role of oxygen in combustion as opposed to Priestley's conjecture about the role of phlogiston), or of preferring this way of generalizing over experiments to that (applying Mill's method of difference or constructing a pertinently falsifiable claim in Popper's manner), then philosophy would indeed have no function. But if we cannot make sense of the supposed economy—and we cannot—if the intervening questions (about what to construe as knowledge and reality) do substantively and reasonably affect the direction and perceived outcome of our first-order inquiries, then philosophy is inescapable, but not for that reason cognitively "privileged" in any way at all. It is true that the very use of the paired terms "first-order" and "second-order" betrays a certain philosophical prejudice, namely, that science and moral judgment (for instance) are indeed first-order concerns and therefore implicate "second-order" questions of the sort sampled. But the denial of that conviction seems, as I say, distinctly paradoxical—self-referentially—in the sense Aristotle captured.
To ensure the merely terminological nature of the distinction being introduced, we must concede that the terms "first-order" and "second-order" have no bearing at all on the supposed logical or cognitive or legitimative priority of one over the other. The range of their respective applications is effectively inseparable. Every question of fact, we may suppose, implicitly signifies the relevance of a corresponding legitimative question, and no legitimative question has any point at all except relative to some admitted set of truths about the world. The division of professional labor may create the illusion that there is a strong disjunction between first-order and second-order queries: that one may be pursued without the other. I urge that this is false or cannot be demonstrated to be true. (It is part of the point of this primer to supply the sense in which that may be shown.) For the moment, I suggest only that you bear the matter in mind wherever the discussion turns to "legitimation" or "naturalism": for naturalism will be seen to be the dominant current of late analytic philosophy committed to the dismissal of legitimative questions or to their displacement by ordinary first-order causal questions. It is hard to gauge how radical such a program is, but it will occupy this primer in a surprising variety of ways. In fact, as in the work of Rorty and Davidson, naturalism and postmodernism sometimes converge. (My argument is opposed to both.)
It was, in fact, the presumption of an older tradition of philosophy—that held that questions of empirical science and of perennial philosophy could be separately pursued—that has led to the extravagance of what is nowadays called postmodernism. It is equally doubtful that the correction of that blunder could ever restore philosophy's presumed privilege or the disjunction tendered. (That is postmodernism's gain.) In any case, nothing is lost by the terminological caution I now offer; for, if philosophy does indeed have some cognitive advantage over the admitted resources of first-order inquiry, the champions of that view will surely make themselves heard and all of us may then decide the matter together. If such an advantage is shown, then what I have characterized as a terminological convenience will be much more than that. But there's the risk my claim admits. If one thinks of Einstein's reflections on the meaning of simultaneity in connection with relativity theory or of Bohr's reflections on the role of observation in the context of quantum physics, then it is clear at once that the burden of proof must rest with all those who mean to disjoin science and philosophy or to privilege either with respect to the other. That maneuver has become well-nigh unthinkable in our time.
May I, therefore, collect the gains we have made? I don't say I have proved the distinctions offered. But they look very promising, and they are as neutral as we may ever be able to afford—except in the sense that they are already opposed by thinkers of importance in the history of philosophy. We must, however, make a start somewhere. Perhaps any start is "hegemonic," as many now say (borrowing a term from Gramsci), in the plain sense that to catalog the world in this way is certainly to preclude its being cataloged in that way, in the same universe of discourse. (Such thinkers are often equivocally termed "postmodernists" or "poststructuralists";[3] but their worry, although not altogether pointless, is insuperable.) We cannot deny that any conceptual scheme excludes others in the very space in which it is actually applied, but that is not the same as claiming that a particular conceptual scheme is demonstrably not well suited to managing the legitimative question itself. To confuse the two issues is to opt for the irrelevance of thinking of any kind. It is a genuine form of conceptual anarchy well beyond a serious skepticism about what we could possibly know or say.
It is nonsense to suppose that categories could function otherwise, and it is useless (in the profoundest sense) to claim sans phrase that any catalog ruins every effort to legitimate our account of reality or knowledge or the right conduct of our lives. Particular challenges need to be
"reasoned," defended one by one, in the sense that some reasons may be seen to show compellingly that this way of cataloging the world but not that is indeed unsatisfactory. It is not helpful to add at once that, of course, that judgment is equally "hegemonic"—and that, really, no opinion of this (or any) sort can ever fail to be such. For, in each instance, serially as well as conjointly, each such challenge invites a pertinent dispute without ever implicating the old sense of privilege.
I was on the point of collecting all that has so far been shown—before I interrupted myself. I offer three findings:
(1.1) philosophy is concerned with the second-order legitimation of our notions of "reality," "knowledge," "right conduct," and the like, that are implicated in first-order discourse;
(1.2) the distinction between "first-order" and "second-order" discourse is terminological—neutral to every philosophical option;
(1.3) theorems (1.1) and (1.2) entail no cognitively privileged views of logic, knowledge, truth, meaning, reality, methods of inquiry, norms of conduct, or the like.
Theorems (1.1)–(1.3), I say, identify in the most generous and least quarrelsome way what philosophy is all about. They do so in the least informative way possible without being utterly vacuous. Any more explicit statement would risk skewing the issues I mean to pursue before they are even before us. (For instance, "legitimation" is meant to signify a form of second-order critique that is not, or at least need not be, "transcendental" in the Kantian sense. I shall come to this in time.) Nevertheless, these theorems already come to blows with the themes associated with postmodernism. Postmodernism, therefore, I now discount altogether (for example, in the work of Lyotard and Rorty), except in the sense of conceding that questions of would-be privilege regarding first- and second-order matters will indeed have to be aired. I do not dismiss poststructuralism for the same reasons, (i) because (preeminently in Foucault's work) it does not reject philosophical issues along postmodernist lines, and (ii) because, although the thesis regarding "hegemony" is preposterously grand, poststructuralism has other fish to fry, even with respect to the exclusionary function of given conceptual systems that, in effect, bear on the fortunes of theories subtended by theorem (1.3). (I shall return to the issue.) But, for the sake of a tidy
account, I say only that (1.1)–(1.3) serve a purely terminological function. If allowed, that amounts to a very nice gain.
I venture to add an interpretation of (1.1)–(1.3) that is substantive, that I cannot yet confirm, that I shall eventually confirm, and that is important for the entire argument that follows:
(1.4) the relationship between first-order and second-order (legitimative ) discourse is a function of the historicized nature of thinking.
Rightly understood, the validation of (1.4)[4] shows at a stroke the pointless fear of postmodernists regarding legitimative questions, namely, that their resolution must always devolve into Kantian or transcendental or apodictic arguments of some sort. I have misgivings about introducing (1.4) without suitable defense, but its eventual importance overrides that scruple; in any case, it will be satisfactorily secured in time (in part II). For the time being, you will have to guess at the meaning of "historicized" (and "privileged"). I shall draw no consequences from (1.4) until I have justified its use, but it belongs among the findings so far given, and it suggests an important version of what I should mean by "poststructuralism." (Actually, it adumbrates the entire lesson of this primer.)
Let me be clear about all this. The schema I introduce is meant to enable us to range over the entire history of Western philosophy without strain or undue distortion. I say "Western" philosophy because I am quite unable to judge to what extent what I have offered may affect the discussion of Hindu or Buddhist or Taoist or other Far Eastern philosophies, or Native American or African doctrines for that matter, or anything of the kind. I frankly cannot see how items (1.1)–(1.3) could adversely affect the analysis of these latter materials, but perhaps they can and perhaps I am blind to the danger. The qualification counts only as a scruple. I shall touch on it again at some point in the running account wherever the mention seems useful. I must however add here, before we go too far, another theorem (that is not quarrelsome in the manner of (1.4)), that I have already mentioned informally in passing, in explaining the sense of "legitimation," namely:
(1.5) the distinction between first- and second-order (legitimative) discourse is itself a second-order distinction.
Theorem (1.5), I should say, is in effect a corollary of (1.2)–(1.3) and defines the sense in which, in (1.1), philosophy is said to be implicated in first-order discourse.
On the argument so far sketched, I have said nothing as yet of a substantive nature regarding the radical themes I promised at the start. On the contrary, the various would-be canons of traditional philosophy may also claim to address the issues subtended (now) by (1.1)–(1.3) and (1.5), which, in accord with (1.4), I mean to pursue in a way opposed to the "canons." In short, I begin irenically. To examine matters thus is to have made provision for any number of confrontations between what the tradition has variously favored, from the Greeks to our own time, and the new options that (as I say) are taking form at the end of our century.
Chapter II
In Lieu of First Principles
There is no first principle of reality or knowledge or reason that must be settled before all other philosophical questions may be effectively answered. Certainly, there is no widespread agreement about what determinate form such a principle should take. There is also little prospect of agreeing on any first principle unless the real world has a discernibly changeless order. But if it had such a structure, then, in an obvious sense, that would provide the decisive first principle on which diverging philosophical policies could jointly claim to rely. Hence, short of establishing the facts of invariance—which innumerable philosophies have pursued in bewilderingly different ways—it would be a best counterstrategy to demonstrate why such a principle would be unlikely or impossible to confirm.
In actual fact, very nearly the entire literature of classical Greek philosophy—from the Presocratics through Aristotle and beyond—is committed to one version or another of this appealing (first) principle: necessarily, reality is invariantly structured and, when known, discernibly known to be such. The sole exceptions appear among the Sophists, notably Protagoras and Gorgias, although what they are reported to have said has been very harshly judged through the entire tradition as being incoherent or self-contradictory or paradoxical or self-defeating. In particular, Plato (in Theaetetus ) and Aristotle (in Metaphysics Book Gamma) argue that there is no coherent recovery possible of Protagoras's rejection of the principle just mentioned.
I have no intention of pursuing the issue in narrowly textual terms. I
have done so elsewhere. To pursue the matter would not conform with the modest purpose of my undertaking here; however, it would be a mistake to ignore altogether the advantage of airing the issue, since it bears directly on the fortunes of the radical possibilities I promised.
My thought is this. Aristotle's argument happens to supply the most explicit and the most powerful reason possible for claiming that any repudiation of the supposed principle just formulated would produce instant incoherence or self-contradiction. If Aristotle were right, it would pay to know it and stray no more. Nevertheless, Aristotle's argument fails (I claim)—fails utterly—and by that failure affords an opportunity for signaling an entirely new direction in which philosophy might proceed. (I do not say the defeat of Aristotle's argument entails the defeat of all would-be first principles, but it certainly shifts the burden of proof.)
The matter is complicated on the historical side but is altogether straightforward in terms of how the line of reasoning opposed to Aristotle's should go. Bear in mind that what I wish to draw attention to is not offered for textual or historical reasons primarily, but its effect on Aristotle's fate and on the record of the historical tradition cannot be ignored. For, Aristotle without the principle mentioned is no Aristotle, and the defeat or stalemate of the principle is—it is hard to soften the blow—a very strong (though not conclusive) indictment of the most salient, most authoritative thread of the entire tradition of Western philosophy. (That may not be believed.) So the economies of the contest intended are certainly worth noting, and the patience the argument requires may then be deemed justified.
The point of Aristotle's argument (I shall examine it more closely later in this chapter) is that the mere denial of the principle—I call its advocacy archism,[1] that is, any attempt to avoid conforming with it in making ordinary claims and judgments—instantly produces contradiction at some point in discourse because it must ultimately contradict (so it is claimed) an ineliminable part of what is true of whatever may be found in the real world. In short, Aristotle's argument is that the principle is conceptually necessary for all coherent, all cognitively qualified discourse. If true, his reasoning marks archism as the obvious first principle of all philosophy. But if he is mistaken, it follows not that the world lacks an invariant nature but rather that
(2.1) It is not in any way conceptually necessary that reality possess invariant structures or an invariant nature.
The essential thesis of Greek philosophy—that "what is real is changeless" (the doctrine shared by Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle)—is, according to theorem (2.1), not itself a necessary truth. There's the pivot of the whole trajectory of Western thought. (I shall come to the pertinent details on Aristotle shortly.) The objection to archism is not an objection to the bare claim of invariance (qualified in whatever epistemic way we please: for instance, as apparent, approximate, perceived, inferred, or reasonable as a conjecture); it is an objection to its supposed conceptual unavoidability. Aristotle's argument holds quite simply that any departure from the archic doctrine is necessarily contradictory and that the principle of noncontradiction is the most certain of rational principles .
Archism, the denial of (2.1), is a modal principle, in that (i) invariance (of whatever kind is alleged) is said to be a necessary property of whatever is real (de re ) or (ii) adherence to such invariance is a necessary constraint on rational discourse or thought addressed to the analysis of reality (de dicto ). Mere empirical regularity—apparent invariance in perceptual terms, indicative "invariance" or "universality" (as I should say)—yields no modal claim stronger than the claim that, being actual, indicative invariance is, trivially (conceptually as well as "materially"), possible as far as nature is concerned.
Theorem (2.1) is, however, emphatically not that sort of modal claim itself; it is rather the upshot of a conceptual bet:that all such modal principles—archism, in the present context—fail of demonstration, fail of any proof that they are indeed necessary in the sense intended. Any alternate reading would produce an obvious paradox: the denial that there were necessary principles would instantly confute itself. Furthermore, if there were first principles, they would be principles of modal invariance. For any would-be "first" principle (regarding reality or knowledge of reality) would be a principle presupposed in all pertinent discourse but would not itself be subject similarly to any prior presupposition; that condition is itself a form of modal invariance.
This simply means that if (2.1) affords a coherent possibility, as indeed it does, then archism cannot but be false. Alternatively put, if (2.1) is admitted, then
(2.2) philosophy—a fortiori, science—may proceed, coherently, without first principles and without assuming the necessity of resting on first principles.
There is no direct argument here as yet—for instance, against Aristotle—only a hint of what remains to be shown. A principle I take to be
(i) a truth, (ii) general and exceptionless for a given domain, (iii) judged (on some theory) to be systematically implicated in a strong sense in confirming and disconfirming the pertinent truth-claims of that domain, for instance in an explanatory or legitimative way, hence (iv) usually ranked or normatively favored over other would-be principles. Principles need not claim modal invariance or necessity, but first principles cannot fail to. For instance, the golden rule may be a reasonable ("regulative") principle without being or without being viewed as necessarily true (that is, such that any violation of it would be intrinsically "irrational" or "incoherent"), and something like (but weaker than) archism may be a fair ("constitutive") conjecture about the way the world is without being taken in Aristotle's strong (modal) sense.
Of course, for perfectly trivial reasons, if (2.1) were true, it could not then also be true that reality could ever be known to have a necessarily invariant nature. In fact,
(2.3) if (2.1) is true, then archism is false: there are no first principles,
for archism holds that the denial of the principle that reality is changeless is itself necessarily self-contradictory. (I confess I find affinities here with St. Anselm's proof of God's existence, but the archic thesis is hardly as controversial as that.) For the moment, we need not dispute whether there is any pertinent sense in which the world exhibits an invariant structure: the important point is that discourse would not be obliged to assume it in order to save its logical virtue. To confirm (2.1) would give an initial impetus to the heterodox venture I am endorsing. The issue at stake is the modal operator, "necessarily " ( = "not possibly not," sans phrase: that is, conceptually—a fortiori, materially).
Before I turn to the supporting argument, let me say a word about the historical situation. No matter how subtle the issue may have become in recent philosophy, it would be fair to say that nearly the whole of Western thought has vigorously committed itself to the denial of (2.1) in some form or other. It's true that many of the obvious versions of that denial have been overthrown by this time. Certainly, the master theme of Aristotle's philosophy—its so-called essentialism[2] —is no longer thought to be necessarily true. But to admit only that is hardly to reject essentialism itself or to sustain (2.1). Arguing in the reverse direction, it may be claimed that to vindicate essentialism —if by that term we mean that natural phenomena have and may be discernibly known to have changeless natures—implicates archism. For the modal
claim—essentialism—itself presupposes a first principle of suitable modal strength. It is also worth mentioning that, although the history of philosophy has overwhelmingly favored the rejection of (2.1), now, for the first time in a strong and persistent way, the defense of (2.1) bids fair to dominate the rest of our millennium. The point of that reversal is an important part of the story I have promised.
Let me, then, for the sake of the intended final picture, label all those views that support (2.1) as an-archic philosophies. Alternatively put, archism holds that reality and reason are necessarily invariant; anarchism holds that reality may be a flux, that is, lacking invariant structure or lacking necessarily invariant structure, and that rational thought need not invoke such invariances. (Invariance, therefore, takes an "indicative" as well as a "modal" form: changelessness or necessary changelessness.) Furthermore, archism holds that knowledge—even the avoidance of contradiction—is impossible if (2.1) is true, and anarchism holds that the coherence and consistency of (any would-be) knowledge are not rendered impossible by accepting (2.1). The meaning of "knowledge" cannot be shared by archists and an-archists, then, if both admit that human inquirers are capable of knowledge.
It is remarkable not only that twenty-five hundred years of continuous philosophy have been largely archic but that philosophy is no longer reliably such. We cannot substitute chronicle for argument, of course, but it is hard to suppose that the growing contemporary support of (2.1) is merely wilful. Its advocacy suggests how to begin to mount a reasonable campaign in favor of the radical options I have been hinting at. The point of Aristotle's claim, for instance, is hardly local to his philosophy. It embodies a universal theme. It features an essential ingredient that our counterstrategy must address if it is to have any inning at all. The same theme, let it be noted, appears in the very different policies that link the work of Frege, the "early" Wittgenstein (of the Tractatus ), and the Postivists of the Vienna Circle, who, not unfairly, may be said to form the vanguard of the principal company of contemporary analytic philosophers who still repudiate (2.1). I take the modern and contemporary ways of opposing (2.1) to be, often, cryptic pronouncements of archism, sometimes misperceived by their advocates, even disguised at times. If the linkage between the ancients and the moderns may be endorsed without serious distortion, then, by a neat economy, in exposing the fatal weakness of Aristotle's version of the argument we may claim to have gained a more general march on the entire archic company.
That would make a very trim maneuver. It would set the stage for a
larger campaign. It would confirm the near-unity of the entire tradition of Western philosophy. It would raise an otherwise local skirmish to a planetary level. It would lay the ground for explaining the importance of the dispute intended for the entire range of science and inquiry committed—in terms of their own worries—to choosing between the archic and an-archic options. For example, it would not be difficult to guess that the analysis of what we should mean by a law of nature or a causal law, in physics or economics, could hardly fail to be affected by the fate of (2.1). Thus, for different reasons, Aristotle and Hempel would regard true science as impossible if (2.1) were true. Hence, I say, Hempel is a crypto-archist. Hempel regards the laws of nature as modally necessary. There can be no question that the quarrel focused by affirming (2.1) is inseparable from the legitimation of science itself. I shall return to the issue in a more pointed way when more of what is needed has been effectively assembled. I set it aside for the moment.
The immediate corollary of admitting the point of our quarrel is this:
(2.4) the structure of natural language and rational argument and the structure of the cognizable world "implicate" each other.
The intriguing thing is that (2.4) is a claim shared by Aristotle and the company (just mentioned) that includes Frege, (early) Wittgenstein, and the Postivists. It is (also) one I myself am fully prepared to endorse. In one form at least (to be clarified in a moment), it is absolutely central to all late twentieth-century disputes. That is, (2.4) may be shared by archists and an-archists alike. I don't mean that all an-archists explicitly accept (2.4) any more than archists. I say only that (2.4) need not separate them. Theorem (2.4) is a full-fledged principle (arche ) for the archists, because it is meant to be an abstraction from some more robust claim of modal invariance—for instance, Aristotle's essentialism or Wittgenstein's explicit correspondentism (in Tractatus ).
In the hands of the an-archists, on the other hand, (2.4) is not a first principle at all, but the upshot of an argument—a bet —that holds that, regardless of what analysis may determinately yield, there is no ineluctable policy for legitimating the analysis of reality, knowledge, language, argument, truth, or related notions in any way that (i) disjoins, in a "principled" way, the analysis of discourse, thought, reason, or knowledge from the analysis of reality, or (ii) requires that truths about the first accord with the logically prior independent truths about the second (or vice versa, for that matter). To hold (say) that what the analysis of
language and thought yields may be segregated in a principled way (even prioritized one way or another) is, I say, to favor a privileged thesis. But to say that what the analysis of either language or thought yields cannot be disjoined from what may be affirmed of the other is, as such, neither (or not yet either) archic nor (or) an-archic; on the second reading, the two "yields" implicate one another. Furthermore, where the archist makes a principled claim, the an-archist is content to show only that that claim fails to be confirmed as necessarily true. In that (negative) sense, the an-archist's position is a philosophical bet, a reasoned challenge to a would-be principle, not a modal principle at all: hence, not paradoxical. (But it is also not a mere Pascalian wager, an exercise of hope or will.)
In fact, the "privileged" reading is the nerve of Greek archism. (the meaning, for instance, of Aristotle's doctrine of nous [rational intuition]). It also appears (disguised) in reverse in Dummett's recent account of the relationship between semantics and metaphysics.[3] Hence, on the argument intended, we may move at once to a consequence of (2.4), namely,
(2.5) assigning legitimative priority to the right analysis of reality over knowledge or of knowledge over reality, or of logic over empirical science or science over logic, or the logical syntax of empirical language over the semantics of empirical inquiry or the reverse, or anything of the kind, is tantamount to legitimating some form of apriorism or cognitive privilege.
I say archists and an-archists may share the sense in which "privilege" is intended in (2.5). The archists embrace privilege and the an-archists reject it. It needs to be said that archists need not explicitly invoke privilege as they proceed. There is no such explicit claim in either the Aristotle of Metaphysics Gamma or the Wittgenstein of Tractatus, but the fact is that both claim that what they have discerned, in opposing relevant versions of (2.1), does indeed entail what, touching on the topics of (2.2)–(2.5), is necessary and invariant with regard to the real world. By privilege, then, I understand (i) that feature of certain of our cognitive powers or resources, which (ii) inquiry and experience do not adversely affect or distort (despite the contingencies of human existence and discourse), such that (iii) we possess (through their exercise) an assured ability to discern (a ) the real properties of the world as it is independent of our inquiries (objectivism ) or (b ) its necessary or invariant or universal
or merely "objective" structure prior to inquiry or (c ) what is necessarily or timelessly true of it even if the world is not "independent" (apriorism ), and/or such that (iv) that ability may yield indubitable knowledge of certain epistemically strategic parts of the world or at least the strong reliability of what, by such means, we take to be true of it (foundationalism ), or that (v) that ability may yield certain reflexively discerned, necessary, "constituting" structures that human understanding provides for the "constructed" order of the (phenomenal ) world we claim to know (transcendentalism ). It is not impossible, therefore, that transcendentalism and apriorism be jointly affirmed, without affirming any explicit foundationalism. This is, in fact, part of one standard reading of Kant. But, if so, then it is not paradoxical that, as an "empirical realist," Kant should be viewed as holding a thesis akin to objectivism (as Husserl charges).
Some terminological distinctions will be helpful here. By independent, I mean only that real condition of the world in virtue of which it possesses a determinate structure entirely apart from, entirely unaffected by, the intrinsic conditions of human knowledge, understanding, and inquiry. (By privilege, as I have said, I mean only that cognitive competence by which human inquirers may know (a ) the "independent" real world as such; or, if the world is, in some essential regard, constituted, structured, by the structure of our cognizing powers, (b ) what those constituting structures are.) I should add, since the matter will surface in various forms later in this primer, that the conjunction of these two notions (independence, privilege) constitutes what, by a term of art, I shall call the externalist theory of knowledge.[4] (Notice that "externalism" may be made to take either of two quite different forms—marked as (a ) and (b ) in the definition of "privilege." I should say the (a )-reading was the usual—indeed, the proper—one and the (b )-reading the illicit and distinctly paradoxical one. The (b )-reading, of course, is sometimes applied to Kant: that is, by permitting the (b )-reading of "privilege" to override strict independence. Thus construed, the plausibility of ascribing the (b )-reading to Kant rests with the fact that Kant reinterprets standard forms of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century externalism within the novel, non-externalist terms of his own apriorism [what I shall later call constructivism ].)
Externalism proper corresponds to what Dewey called the "spectator" theory of knowledge and world. The classic externalist target has been Descartes (or a Cartesian Locke), but, apart from the textual record, the preponderant part of the history of Western philosophy has
been externalist. (Even Kant's "empirical realism" has been construed along externalist lines (for instance, incipiently, by Moore), but disjoined as far as possible from Kant's "transcendental idealism." That, of course, is a misreading, but it is a misreading suggested by Kant's apriorism. Analytic philosophy tends to follow Moore in this.[5] The reading may be thought to be encouraged by such remarks as that in the preface to the second edition of the first Critique, in which Kant, reflecting on Galileo's and Torricelli's experiments, invokes "principles of judgment based on fixed laws" and speaks of "constraining nature to give answers ['not fictitiously' ascribed] to questions of reason's own determining.") Foundationalism I take to be a strong modal thesis. Hence, merely to posit cognitive foundations —perceptual sources, say—is not (yet) to support foundationalism. The relation between the two options is analogous to that between principles and first principles. (I return to these issues with ampler resources in chapter 9.)
I must risk a further consequence of (2.4), read in terms of (2.1) and viewed as an obvious corollary of (2.5):
(2.6) there are no de re necessities tout court, and there can be no separable de dicto necessities.
I mean that there are no formulable necessary connections or structures or regularities in the world that an alternative conceptual orientation could never coherently displace; any would-be formal, logical, syntactic, conceptual, or rational necessity is either vacuous (unless interpreted in accord with a determinate reading of matters regarding (2.5)) or (when so read) always open to being coherently displaced. One might reasonably suppose that Quine's opposition to any principled reading of the anayltic/synthetic distinction would incline him to favor (2.5)–(2.6).[6] That is by and large so, but there are also strains in Quine (for instance, his view of "holophrastic" sentences) that count against it—in particular, his strong preference for an externalist doctrine. (I return to Quine later.)
Another way of putting the same lesson is this:
(2.7) inquiry is symbiotized,[7]
that is, admitting theorems (2.5) and (2.1), (i) there can be no principled disjunction between cognizing subjects and cognized objects, every would-be inquiry into the "one" implicates an inquiry into the "other,"
and (ii) there can be no privileged knowledge of "either." Once we grant (2.1), there can be no archic account of separable knowledge (of the world) or separable world (as known). (I take this to expose the ultimate arbitrariness of Kant's apriorism. Kant supports a "constructed" world—but it is transcendentally constructed. That is, the cognizing subject is not itself constructed. Kant is, therefore, opposed to symbiosis.)[8] Hence,
(2.8) distinctions between the cognitional and the real are artifacts "implicated," by conjoint pairing, in our (an-archic) theories about knowledge and reality.
There are no unconditionally fixed truths about truth, reason, meaning, knowledge, selves, or world disjoined from one another. Of course, discourse speaks of all these matters determinately, and there seems no way of escaping that condition. I am not suggesting an alternative. But I do say that if (2.8) be admitted, then some extraordinarily powerful consequences follow. In particular:
(2.9) every disjunction between the mental and the physical, the subjective and the objective, the natural and the cultural, the private and the public, the perceptual and the explanatory, the theoretical and the practical, the syntactic and the semantic, the linguistic and the real, and similar "oppositional" pairs can be no more than a provisional distinction relativized to one symbiotized stance or another;
and
(2.10) what may be said of what belongs to the one pole in the oppositions (collected in (2.9)) is conceptually inseparable from what may be said of what belongs to the other pole.[9]
In a word, what are symbiotized are not more than relata in some ontic or epistemic space. The important thing is this: symbiosis precludes "privilege" of any sort. Relata, as such, lack any criterial or cognizing function. Hence, what are said to be symbiotized are also, in ontic and epistemic contexts, taken ("interpreted," as I shall later say) as individuatable denotata of some sort. (More needs to be said about this. I return to these distinctions in chapter 4.) Furthermore, oppositions like those given in (2.9) are, I should say, prejudiced,[10] in the sense that (i)
no particular oppositional pair is privileged in any archic way, (ii) the world and one's relation to the world will appear differently within different conceptual schemes, and (iii) the conceptual schemes we actually use are those we acquire (in some contingent way) as we become the competent agents of discourse (or of thought and action) that we do become as we grow up in our home societies. Any and all distinctions between "cognizers" and "cognized" in accord with (2.9) I shall call external, so that "externalism" supports counterpart ("externalist") distinctions, but on the condition of denying theorem (2.7).
There are perhaps two principal ways of opposing (2.6) for which the historical tradition offers evidence: in one, it is claimed that logical (or near-logical) principles like noncontradiction, excluded middle, and numerical identity are genuinely invariant, and that opposing them automatically risks contradiction or incoherence or both; in the other, it is claimed that certain concepts that we employ in understanding the meaning of what we predicate of the world already include, discernibly, or tend asymptotically toward, invariant constraints, and that (therefore) opposing them risks contradiction or incoherence. The first strategy belongs to the programs I've already mentioned—Aristotle's, Frege's, Wittgenstein's, the Positivists'; the second is more diffusely represented, but I think its greatest champion in modern times is Husserl working as a phenomenologist. (The second also appears in various versions of "progressivism," as in Peirce, Popper, and Habermas.) I intrude the substance of (2.6) merely to assure you that the argument intended has strong consequences that I shall not ignore.
A more manageable economy suggests itself. There are two senses in which the de re/de dicto distinction is employed in the philosophical tradition. In one, it is no more than a "stylistic" distinction (although with attendent potential felicities and infelicities): on that view, what, in general, may be formulated de re may also be formulated de dicto, and vice versa. This is akin to the sense in which Carnap speaks of the "material" and "formal" modes of discourse, which Quine is prepared to accept—although with a distinct preference for the de dicto ("semantic ascent").[11] In the other, the distinction is treated disjunctively: discourse about language is then not discourse about the world as such. On the first usage, it is clear that, except for convenience and stylistic felicity, there is no difference between what may be said in the one idiom and what may be said in the other. Hence, there is no essential difference between would-be de re and de dicto necessities (whether there are any such necessities). On the second usage, de re and de dicto necessities are
meant to be initially distinct (whether would-be necessities of the one sort may be suitably matched by necessities of the other). Hence, on the second usage, language, being "about" the world, is not "in" it. But if we think of language as an abstraction from actual linguistic practices, the disjunction is benign enough.
According to the archism Aristotle favors, the principle of noncontradiction (and that of excluded middle) may be taken to be necessary de dicto (that is, imposes a constraint on nous ) conformable with the (independent) de re necessity of the changelessness of reality. This is the sense in which Aristotle subscribes to (2.4) but not to (2.7): the structure of our theorizing reason (nous ), he says, matches the structure of reality, but they are separable (archism). By (2.7), the an-archist (i) admits no (strict) necessities de re or de dicto and (ii) denies any principled disjunction between de re and de dicto discourse. Nevertheless, the anarchist (iii) need not deny "apparent [indicative] necessities"—for instance, against Descartes's oddly weak conjecture that, given God's omnipotence, a "valley" need not necessitate a "mountain"—which provoked Leibniz's scorn for his illustrious contemporary.
By the same token, the an-archist need not oppose the sense in which Aristotle affirms the necessity of the principle of noncontradiction. He needs to reinterpret it in accord with his own account. In a spirit closer to that of this primer, Foucault admits the "historical a priori, " by which he means to admit conceptual necessities—"a priori, " but only relative to the historicized episteme (or discursive "regime") in which our particular conceptual resources are formed or "preformed." As Foucault realizes, these "necessities" ultimately depend on the contingencies of shifting epistemes . (This begins to give a sense of the promissory note collected at (1.4).)
We are now ready for Aristotle's archism. What Aristotle claims (in Metaphysics Gamma) is that you cannot help but contradict yourself if you restrict discourse about real things ("primary substances," as he calls them: ousiai ) to how such things appear or seem to us to be. (The argument is directed against Protagoras, but that is not essential.) Aristotle claims that to restrict discourse in this way yields a contradiction somewhere .
The modern reader is bound to be nonplussed, because he or she will not be able to see, in the option mentioned, any formal contradiction at all. It's only when one realizes that Aristotle means that, since "primary substances" have essential natures, the principle of noncontradiction must be applied in accord with that, that one will understand the charge
that the restriction of predicative discourse to the appearances of things produces contradiction "somewhere"; under Aristotle's constraint, one would then be talking of appearances only, one would be obliged to treat what is essential as accidental. The modern reader will be puzzled by Aristotle's claim that the contradiction arises here for reasons that, technically, are logical . He will not accept Aristotle's use of the term "logical." He will find metaphysical notions extraneously characterized as logical. (By logical, I mean, quite simply, any feature of language or thought said to be confined to formal, syntactic, semantically uninterpreted structures that yield valid arguments, or analogues of explicit arguments—as of interpreted sentences or terms treated as ordered premisses and conclusions. The validity of arguments is said to depend on uninterpreted argument forms; but arguments are always semantically interpreted sets of premisses and conclusions. Hence, argument forms are, effectively, always context-bound [bound to the range of interpreted sentences over which they range], in spite of appearances to the contrary.)
Aristotle is right, of course, to draw the conclusion he does: namely, that contradiction is bound to arise somewhere. But it is not obvious that his premiss regarding modal invariance is true. In fact, it is false ((2.1), (2.3)). Hence, it is not obvious that Aristotle has isolated the logical issue correctly. The important thing is that a rejection of Aristotle's full claim eliminates the threat of contradiction at that point but preserves the principle itself. The modern reader is likely to treat the logic of the matter as completely neutral to the interpreted (metaphysical) argument: he will certainly not side with Aristotle. But Aristotle is committed to supporting (2.4) and to denying (2.7).
What I urge instead, against both Aristotle and the modern habit of disconnecting logic and metaphysics, is that both (2.4) and (2.7) are worth defending and are genuinely defensible. By linking Aristotle and Frege in the way I have, the vindication of (2.5) serves to defeat as well the subtler versions of necessity and privilege that modern violations of (2.5) tend to obscure. It is not unreasonable to suppose that such important contemporaries as Quine, Goodman, and Davidson tend to camouflage their own violations of (2.5).
It is easy to show—by (2.1)—that we can detach the principles of contradiction and excluded middle from the fate of Aristotle's particular metaphysics, and, by a similar argument, that it is not necessary to suppose that real things have "essential" or fixed natures. No one has ever shown that the denial of essentialism is self-contradictory. (I shall characterize "essentialism" more fully in a moment.)
For my present purpose, the matter may be treated conditionally. If the essentialist premise may be denied without self-contradiction, then it would be wrong to insist, as Aristotle does, (i) that to restrict discourse to appearances alone (as Protagoras is said to have done) necessarily leads to self-contradiction, or (ii) that to concede that not all predicates need apply "bivalently" (in accord with excluded middle) yields the same disorder. Essentialism holds that (i) there are attributes particular things possess, without which, pertinently, they cannot be the particular things they are or, possessing which, they must be real particulars of the kinds they are, and that (ii) those attributes define the changeless "natures" of such things in accord with which they alone change and may change. Hence, essentialism is a strong modal notion: particulars cannot be real, have natures, or change except in accord with the necessary truth (de re ) that they are real in virtue of the changeless natures they possess. (I shall, in chapter 7, show how this line of argument confuses or conflates the quite different processes of "individuating" particulars and "identifying" or "reindentifying" them. To explicate the required distinction is to demonstrate how the fixity of "numbering" individual things does not as such entail the fixity of the "nature" of things thus numbered. The matter is not without its subtlety.) In any case, on the essentialist view, the status of noncontradiction and excluded middle is strengthened, since, on the argument, every predication must be reconciled with the essential nature of the referent in question.
The countermove against this thesis (of Aristotle's) is absurdly simple, for Aristotle nowhere shows that repudiating essentialism is incoherent or self-contradictory. He shows only—and correctly—that if essentialism is assumed, then conditions (i) and (ii) do indeed hold and may be made to hold as logical principles . He has not shown that the denial of this assumption also violates the principle of noncontradiction. Without having shown that, however, his entire argument collapses. For the issue is not whether we should suppose that things have essential natures, but whether it is logically necessary that they do—whether that is the only consistent policy possible . (Of course, it is not.) It is easy to see that (but not so easy to explain how), given the way "things" appear to us, the "natures" we assign "them" may be coherently assigned (without any fixity at all) solely on the strength of (their) changing appearances. (This agrees with what I have said about "foundations" and "principles." That is, the argument against essences and the modal necessity of noncontradiction is, as I've suggested, an argument against first principles.) I grant the conclusion may be delayed, but I claim it cannot be con-
vincingly overturned. The most important objection to it asks whether we can identify what we mean to make predications of if we do not individuate and identify our referents as particulars exhibiting essential natures. Indeed, that is Aristotle's intent, although Aristotle never investigates the modern question of how to identify and reidentify this or that particular as numerically distinct. He offers only a general solution to the puzzle of individuation. He never links the question of individuating things and identifying and reidentifying them numerically as one and the same or as different.
Particular things, after all, cannot be individuated or reidentified by reference to their "natures." Natures are, in principle, designated by general predicates, open to multiple instantiations. Hence, although the delaying question may be raised, it cannot serve Aristotle's purpose. Still, it must be met somewhere. For the moment, I postpone the contest and the reckoning. But by that same reckoning, I must add, as a promissory note, the following corollary of (2.1) and (2.6):
(2.11) among natural languages, reference is viable without essentialist assumptions.
(I shall return to the issue in the next chapter.)
I come finally to the principles of noncontradiction and excluded middle. They are obviously of very different sorts. For one thing, one supposes the principle of noncontradiction cannot be coherently denied. But if that is so, then, it seems, (2.6) must be false. On the other hand, the denial of excluded middle does seem to be straightforwardly possible: many-valued logics are not thought to be impossible.
The difficulty regarding noncontradiction is not a strenuous one: we need only introduce a distinction between uninterpreted sentential formulas and interpreted or meaningful sentences. The "necessity" ascribed to the principle of noncontradiction applies only to such "uninterpreted formulas" as "p and -p ." (This accords with Wittgenstein's formal treatment of contradiction and tautology in Tractatus .) Contradictions,we may say, are (interpreted) "sentences" (or token sentences used in arguments in speech-act contexts or such arguments), not (uninterpreted) "sentential formulas." The upshot is, the "necessity" of the (uninterpreted) principle of noncontradiction:that, necessarily, we cannot consistently jointly affirm and deny the same sentence, is now entirely benign. Alternatively put, there are no operative "contradictions" that do not depend on interpreting the terms of given sentences. But then, any
seeming contradiction can be offset by reinterpreting the substantive terms in question: for instance, as by reconciling the corpuscular and wave theories of light. In that sense, no (substantive) contradiction is, unconditionally, such. We may not care to pay the price of escaping contradiction, but that is an entirely different matter. Here, it seems more reasonable to side with Quine then with Aristotle (that is, with Quine's treatment of the analytic/synthetic distinction). In any case, the argument shows the sense in which Metaphysics Gamma may be resisted. (By interpreting, I mean here no more than construing sentences and the like as meaningful, having meaning, being assignable semantic import or content, being thus used in spontaneous discourse.)
Furthermore, if essentialism is no more a necessary truth than is the changelessness of reality ((2.1)), then we may say that the principle of excluded middle (not construed as a mere theorem): viz., that, "necessarily, for any predicate 'F ' and for any real denotatum 'a ', either 'F(a) ' or '-F(a) ' is true," is not an unconditionally necessary principle at all. Other philosophers, Dummett for instance,[12] while apparently denying the necessity of excluded middle for technical reasons, hold instead that tertium non datur is necessarily true. By tertium non datur, Dummett means: given that our sentences are suitably interpreted and brought to bear (in a testable manner) on the way the world is, "necessarily, it cannot obtain that neither 'Fa ' nor '-Fa ' is true." But Dummett, for one thing, restores the force of excluded middle (or bivalence), and, for a second, does so arbitrarily and without legitimating the modal operator. (That is, he fails to treat tertium non datur as a principle, not a theorem, as he had treated excluded middle. On my analysis, this is because Dummett is a "externalist": the finding bears on the important difference between Dummett and Putnam.)
Of course, all this is a preamble to the deeper question whether and at what price the heterodox doctrine of (2.1) can be globally defended. Only its bare eligibility has been ensured.
It needs to be said that that is a considerable achievement, however. It's not merely that the archic thesis has been defeated. It's also worth noting that we have made a productive beginning, philosophically, without philosophical presupposition —if, by "presupposition" in this strongest possible sense, we understand an initial affirmative commitment regarding first principles.
I suggest marking the novelty of this beginning by a sort of triangulation. Aristotle presupposed a suitable match ((2.4)) between the changelessness of reality and the power of cognizing reason (nous ) to
discern such fixity. Hume accepted that constraint on philosophy, in rejecting its defensibility in the version Descartes proposed, and his skepticism about the prospects of philosophy followed directly. Hegel accepted Hume's objection and so began the Phenomenology in a "presuppositionless" way (as Hegel himself suggests), that is, without any explicit first principle. Nevertheless, Hegel supposes that our very capacity to reflect on whatever appears to be genuine knowledge—wherever and however initiated—does harbor an intrinsic power to correct itself progressively, in the direction of ultimately discerning what, necessarily, knowing is ("absolute" knowing). Hence, although Hegel begins as we have (if I may speak thus) with the way things merely appear, he "presupposes" that the very structure of what is disclosed through the "necessary" sequence of reflecting on the way the world appears will, in the limit, capture the "necessary" match (or identity) between thought and that which is thought. (But he does not explain how he knows that this is so, or how he could confirm it, or even precisely what he means. I don't deny that Hegel affirms that the dialectical process of rational reflection is marked by "necessity." But the meaning of that necessity is a mystery; it is not even clear how it contrasts with contingency.)
In a most ingenious way, therefore, Hegel begins—not with an explicit first principle of Aristotle's sort but—with a first principle that affirms that, hidden in the process of reflection itself, there must be a (first) principle (operative, somehow, evolving through the successive stages of its own activity) adequate for discerning the necessary structure internal to the entire unfolding process. To view our puzzle in this light is to appreciate the utterly unguarded beginning of beginning with the flux. We begin with the flux—so we do begin. (We may even admit "principles.") We begin therefore, without presuppositions, without first principles: we elude the snares of Aristotle, Hume, and Hegel (if, indeed, that is Hegel's claim). Hence,
(2.12) an-archic philosophies are presuppositionless.
That is, they do not begin with unconditionally necessary truths: but they also do not claim to arrive at necessary truths (in the very different ways Kant, Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger insist). There you have the unique distinction of Protagoras's early adherence to appearance and the flux: the target, jointly, of Plato's and Aristotle's insistence on adhering to the philosophical canon.
If, now, in the light of (2.12), we recall the distinction between "indicative" and "modal" invariances introduced earlier in this chapter, we can always pair an indicative mate with every archic distinction claimed: thus, admit (where wanted), "principles" but not "first principles," cognitive "sources" but not privileged "foundations," "uniformities" but not necessarily exceptionless "universals," "natures" but not "essences," and so on. This should obviate the need for repeated warnings about the "indicative" import of the distinctions that may be needed as we proceed. None are intended in the modal sense that archism favors.
There are other uses to which the analysis of noncontradiction, excluded middle, and numerical identity may be put. But they may be postponed for the time being. I have now shown the (provisional) viability of the an-archic policy. I have by no means confirmed it, but I have drawn attention to an unguarded and unconfirmed assumption in Aristotle's attack on the doctrine of the flux and on any idiom restricted to appearances, namely, that the seemingly formal principle of noncontradiction is actually dependent on the archic thesis itself—that the application of the principle to numbered ousiai entails the admission that particular things necessarily have a changeless nature. Here, I say only that the argument has not been supplied and that its denial is not obviously self-contradictory.
It is also to the point to remark that, for Peirce,[13] both the principle of noncontradiction and the principle of excluded middle fail to apply when the pertinent linguistic distinctions are not yet in play (for instance: when the predicate "human" obtains but not yet "male" and "female"). Later (in chapter 7), I shall conclude this part of the counterargument by demonstrating that the individuation of particular things can be coherently characterized in such a way that the conditions for reidentifying those particulars does not entail changeless natures. (The question is generally neglected.) In doing all that, I shall have brought the entire account into reasonable accord with construing the flux in a historicized way. So we have made a start. (Flux, I should say, is not a chaos, as Parmenides supposes, and it need not be historicized, as the example of Protagoras makes clear. But the full meaning of these possibilities must wait for part II.) We may draw the web a little more tightly, however, if we press (2.12) to yield:
(2.13) an-archic philosophies are neither externalist nor transcendental nor privileged.
Chapter III
Reference and Predication
The complexities of the line of reasoning I pursued in the preceding chapter obliged me to retreat to conditional arguments. The important claims I wished to establish were (2.1) and (2.4)—and (2.7)—but I had to settle for stopgap alternatives to (2.4). I drew out narrower corollaries that might have been conceded in their own terms. But those attenuated corollaries ((2.2), (2.3), (2.5), (2.6)) were restricted truths that did not really strengthen the larger claims, or else they ultimately depended on them. It hardly matters, since they have their own contribution to make. Still, it's natural to proceed in both directions: building conditionally toward the confirmation of (2.1) and (2.4) and drawing out entailments, partial or entire, that are advantageous to collect. It would do little good to try to establish the larger claims—particularly (2.4)—if the lesser linkages were not easily seen to hold, since it is hard to imagine a counterthesis to (2.1) more forceful than Aristotle's. For example, if de dicto and de re considerations were strongly disjoined—as in supposing, against (2.5), that the advocacy of a bivalent logic was a matter altogether independent of essentialism or other de re considerations (speaking in accord with Frege and Dummett, for instance)—then the argument being fashioned could be effectively challenged at square one. But it is very difficult to suppose that the assignment of truth-values to statements alleged to be about the way the world is is altogether independent of our views of the way the world is . This is especially clear if one admits that there is no formal reason for supposing that the bare conception of a many-valued logic (many-valued truth-values) is incoherent. What
other constraints on the choice of truth-values could there possibly be besides constraints assumed to be drawn from the nature of knowledge or the nature of the world or the nature of our knowledge or understanding of the world? (Bear in mind that considerations of consistency, coherence, relevance, and the like arise in many-valued logics as they do in bivalent logics.)
It is reasonable, therefore, to seek out independent claims that may outflank the threat of an ever-lengthening chain of conditional linkages that draw us further and further into side-issues. It would be very helpful if there were a maneuver or two that could confirm at least a part of what was needed to establish (2.4) firmly—the mutual implication of the structures of language and the structures of the world—without invoking the intervening conceptual dependencies I allowed to surface in the last chapter. As it happens, there are resources equal to the task. The situation is not desperate in the least.
The thing is this. All philosophical strategies, whether archic or anarchic (or however otherwise oriented), must come to terms with the salient conditions on which truth-bearing discourse depends. (Let me add, for convenience, that I shall use the somewhat unfamiliar term constative[1] —reminiscent of Austin's philosophical usage but not committed to his account—to signify the function of all speech acts by which we make statements or assertions or truth-claims or truth-like claims, or affirm or deny that something or other is the case. Its sense includes but is not restricted to that of the French verb "constater " used in giving testimony in court or declaring with assurance.) On any pertinent theory, the conditions in question will include conditions for the success of the "speech acts" of reference and predication: that is, the success of those linguistic acts by which (reference ) we identify something as the referent of our discourse (that about which we are speaking) and by which (predication ) we predicate what we mean to affirm of it. Reference and predication are peculiarly difficult to analyze but they cannot be dismissed. They are as essential to speech as anything that could be named. (Nevertheless, some suppose that it is barely possible to conceive of a formal alternative to referential and predicative languages: for instance, mereologically organized languages, languages that capture what we capture in the usual way but [now] by devices for part/whole relations that permit us to retire both reference and predication. My own intuition is that such a language would, for humans, be completely parasitic on the resources they would replace.)
In particular, it is uncompelling, I claim, to characterize reference and
predication in purely linguistic or logical or syntactic terms—opposing (2.4). Nevertheless, that is the way they have been standardly addressed in the strong analytic tradition that includes Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Quine, Davidson, and Kripke. They cannot be adequately treated in de dicto terms without attending to their de re complications (that is, without attending to the import of their actually being uttered; used in performing [token] speech acts in the real world.)
Alternatively put:
(3.1) the analysis of natural languages is not an autonomous discipline; as actual utterance, actual activity, language is an inseparable part of the world it represents or an abstraction from it.
I believe (3.1) may be directly confirmed if reference and predication can be shown to be impossible to analyze without addressing the indissoluble linkage between their de dicto and de re features, and, I claim, that can be shown in the strongest possible way. It is, of course, already implicated in the doctrine of symbiosis ((2.7)–(2.9)). Hence, if (3.1) can be independently confirmed, then (2.4) and (2.7) will be considerably strengthened as well. So a good deal rides on probing (3.1) by way of reference and predication.
Consider reference. Speaking unguardedly, reference conveys a speaker's intention to affirm or deny that this or that is true of what he or she effectively singles out (in the world) as the referent about which one affirms or denies what one affirms or denies. Reference, then, cannot be altogether independent of predication. Furthermore, reference is intended in a cognitively robust way: that is, it is "uttered" in order to single out effectively—as numerically distinct and reidentifiable—that (the "referent") about which the speaker is speaking. This is at least the core notion: referents, let us say, are the grammatical or "logical" accusatives of acts of reference, identified as such without regard to "ontic" issues. Once we see matters this way, it is extraordinarily important (and easy) to grasp that
(3.2) reference is inherently context-bound, not definable syntactically, impossible to retire (without loss) in favor of any merely predicative resource.
This is a powerful claim. If sustained, it would completely undermine any purely "extensional" theory of the truth-bearing capacity of sen-
tences used constatively (for instance, the fashionable disquotational theory of truth). That would be a grand prize, though the linkage is hardly obvious at the moment. (The full connection needs still to be laid out. I come to disquotation toward the end of the next chapter.) Let me say again: I take the "constative" function to be satisfied by certain speech acts, by the use of sentences or propositions—by "uttering" which (the speech acts), sentences or propositions are made "truth-bearing," are (themselves) dependently "uttered," are made hospitable for ascriptions of truth and falsity in the world we inhabit.
You must appreciate that, in the current analytic practice that treats mere sentences or propositions as truth-bearing—or, treats affirmation and denial ("utterance") as no more than the enactment or instantiation of the occasion on which truth-values may be rightly assigned particular sentences —utterances (the token speech acts performed by individual agents) become little more than external "operators." They may also be replaced, it is said, by a fuller specification of the (token) sentences they operate "on," or the relations the sentences enter into. (That is, the separable uttered sentences rather than the more complex token speech-act utterances.) For instance, in Davidson's account, it may merely specify the conditions of time, speaker, referential context, and the like, in which the sense of the operative sentence is made more determinate.
Effectively, such qualifications are construed as semantic ingredients of the token sentences in question (or features of the relations into which they enter), whereas I favor distinguishing between the speech-act context in which token sentences are constatively "uttered" and those sentences. Furthermore, I say, the "context" of utterance, or the uttered "speech act," is linguistically pertinent in ways that cannot be recovered from any would-be extensional analysis of uttered sentences (as in Quine or Davidson or Tarski). (I take this to have been conclusively demonstrated by Strawson's analysis of Russell's account of denoting. The matter bears directly on the supposed adequacy of any formal model of the extensional syntax of natural language promised in Principia Mathematica and meant to be improved in later logics.)
Featuring speech acts rather than sentences has the advantage of making explicit (i) the conceptual connection between the assignment of truth-values and the context of utterance, and (ii) the indissoluble link between constative acts and the still-unanalyzed nonlinguistic conditions of life within an actual community of apt speakers. My point, very simply, is that, by moving from sentence to speech act, by insisting on context rather than ignoring it, by denying the autonomy of language rather
than affirming it, by noting the way the nonlinguistic conditions of discourse bear on linguistic meaning itself, we prepare the ground for a complete acceptance of the thesis of symbiosis ((2.7)). Davidson's strategy[2] gives the impression that context is a negligible complication, one easily retired in principle. The syntactic structure of truth-bearing sentences, Davidson feels, may be crisply and adequately supplied: that is part of the motivation of his appeal to Tarski's formal treatment of truth. (It accounts for his being attracted, at least initially, to the disquotational theory of truth and, more pointedly, to the prospect of retiring reference.) I, on the other hand, cannot see how context can be neutralized for natural languages as used—in cognitively effective ways ((3.2)). Davidson does not show how it is possible. (Tarski does not share Davidson's conviction.) Reference, I say, affords a decisive test case against externalism.
The essential difficulty confronting treating reference in terms of sentences rather than of speech acts conveying speaker's intentions is this: a speaker may intend to single out a unique referent (for whatever he means to predicate of it), but he need not know which (if any) predicates are uniquely instantiated by his referent; those who account for reference predicatively (Russell and Quine, of course) must be able to give an account of reference in predicative terms, but all such accounts are either epistemically vacuous or not demonstrably adequate. In effect, this means that strategies of the second sort always fall back to whatever enables the first to succeed. The logical structure of our sentences is a function of the speech acts in which they actually function.
In the standard notational practice that links, say, Frege and Russell (and Searle, more surprisingly), the act of assertion or utterance is said to be adequately represented by the (external ) assertion sign (or operator ) "
erators—declarative, interrogative, imperative—could be "externally" applied to the same "propositions" [the "phrastic" element] affecting thereby only the relevance of [external] compliance with orders [given], answering questions [asked], assenting to or dissenting from claims [made]! The serious point of quarreling with this usage is that it fails to address the matter of the bearing of utterance and speech-act context ["neustic" aspects, in Hare's idiom] on the sense of what is uttered [the sentences]. This is just what an adequate theory of reference should make clear, though, as we shall see, it can do so only at a considerable price.)
In different ways, Frege and Russell hit on the idea that we could "improve" on the logical treatment of denotation by introducing logically proper names, names that, taken singly, would unequivocally single out one and only one "thing" in the world (one denotatum ). Frege's and Russell's strategies[3] for accomplishing this were at once hopelessly inoperative in cognitive terms and syntactically inexplicit for the purpose intended. The formal adequacy of their idealized notations depended on substantive (epistemic) considerations they could not represent in a purely formal way and they could not satisfactorily defend philosophically. (Frege's account is epistemically inexplicit, a mere promissory note; Russell's is "solipsistic," in the sense that Russell acknowledges that no one other than the speaker could possibly know, "by acquaintance," the denotatum of another's "logically proper names.") In natural-language contexts, it is pointless to ignore the cognitional role of reference; and, in a formal logic, it would be a disaster to make the syntax of sentences depend on the solipsistic intentions of speakers. (The problem goes back at least to Meister Eckhart's rejecting the naming of God and Duns Scotus's attempt to capture the individuum ineffabile .)
When Strawson offered his well-known criticism of Russell's "On Denoting," he ineluctably confirmed as well that the referents of our speech acts (in effect, what has to be specified by the referring act itself) could not be successfully captured by the supposed denotata of any sentences or propositions we might affirm. There is, in fact, only one possible strategy (if it is indeed possible) by which that simplification could have been achieved: namely, a strategy, by the use of general predicates ("indefinite descriptions"), by which we could effectively and uniquely individuate everything in the universe.
As it happens, that grand strategy has been laid out in a pretty way by Quine: Quine recommends replacing all proper names, definite descriptions, indexical terms, and the like by uniquely denoting or uniquely
designating general predicates. Of course, Quine is right in supposing that that would effectively retire reference as a necessary part of the grammar of speech acts invoked by natural-language users. But there is a difficulty. Quine's maneuver was no more than formal: it never addressed the cognitive side of reference (in effect, the issues raised by (2.4) and (2.7)). There are, however, no referring acts that are not cognitively intended. Quine pretends to analyze the formal structure of sentences used in referential contexts, but he has no way of demonstrating that that is possible.
Suppose, Quine argued, the name "Socrates" denotes Socrates, and suppose Socrates may be singled out in principle by some unique general property (captured by an "indefinite description": call it "socratizing"). Well then: install uniquely denoting expressions everywhere (or retire the labor the referential use of various expressions is meant to achieve). At one stroke, proper names and reference could then be retired in principle.
But of course, reference is a speech act (embedded in other acts) intended in a robust cognitive sense —intended, that is, to single out this or that in the actual world . Quine's "solution" assures us neither that there are at hand any such uniquely individating predicates as "socratizing" nor that humans (as opposed to God) could ever recognize them to be such. You cannot know that "socratizing" singles out the one we call "Socrates," unless you also know that "platonizing" singles out the one we call "Plato" and so on for every particular thing there is. (One grave difficulty in this regard, affecting Quine's account, is that, on Quine's own theory, there cannot be a single operative sense in which, speaking of the denumerably many things there "are," we may claim to speak of "everything there is.")
Leibniz had already considered the matter. In effect, he concluded (at least in his fifth letter to Samuel Clarke) that there was no purely logical barrier[4] against supposing that, for anygeneral predicables, if any were instantiated at all, they might always be multiply instantiated in principle. Leibniz felt, however, that a benevolent God would never allow it. Hence, he invoked the principle of sufficient reason to rescue the claim, but denied the adequacy of appealing only to the principle of noncontradiction. What Quine needs, precisely, is a demonstration to the effect that any serious opposing of his recommendation is instantly self-contradictory. He never offers such an argument. He never would have. No such argument is known to be successful. (Clearly, it would be profoundly archic.)
Just so. Unless human speakers can justifiably claim to possess God's knowledge of the world, it is impossible to retire reference altogether. Reference, we say, is invariably context-bound, incapable of being managed in any context-free way (extensionally ), whether by some formal syntax fitted to denotata and compliant sentences or by some cognitive rule applied to the range of application of all possible general predicates. The project is doomed, therefore, and (3.2) is true. (For the time being, I shall treat discourse as behaving extensionally if it is context-free, that is, not "context-bound" ((3.2))—if at least reference can be made entirely determinate by the mere use of a finite string of sentences.)
But if this is so, then an important theorem falls out as a consequence:
(3.3) the context in which "utterances" are made the bearers of truth-values is not a merely "external" locale in which sentences are rightly assigned such values.
This goes equally against the views of Quine and Chomsky. The critical proof rests with reference itself. To speak referringly (as the Leibnizian concession shows) cannot be captured by syntactic, semantic, or any other features of sentences: the meaning of what is uttered (both referentially and predicatively), "implicates" the collective practices of the enabling society in which assertion itself functions ((3.1), (3.3)). The meaning of what is (thus) uttered, the abstracted sentence itself, can only be assigned from the vantage of the speech-act context in which it is (thus) uttered. This yields an important corollary of (3.3):
(3.4) natural-language sentences are abstractions from speech-act contexts.
Theorems (3.3) and (3.4) explicate the sense of (3.1): language cannot support an autonomous inquiry; the meaning and meaningful structure of linguistic utterances cannot be disjoined at any point from the embedding consensual practices of the societies in which they natively function. The complexity of reference confirms this. The predicative intent of referring expressions cannot be made completely explicit linguistically—in principle . Whatever, in practice, is assigned as the uniquely individuating sense of referring expressions is assigned with the understanding that it is meant to mark off a referent that cannot be identified solely in virtue of whatever predicates may be supplied . The intention of a referring act is indeed to single out a unique referent. But if Quine's
formal program fails in epistemic terms (as it must), then the apt speakers of natural languages understand that the very success of their referring intentions depends on the supporting consensus of their society's more fundamental practices—in terms of which the contextual import of sentences thus "uttered" is effectively settled. This, of course, also supplies the wedge for replacing Aristotle's archism, for, now, it becomes possible to consider how particulars may be individuated as the unique particulars they are—without invoking fixed natures: successful reference is neutral to predicative uniqueness and provides the logical basis for the relevance of any predication at all. (In the idiom I shall introduce later, "individuation" takes priority over "reidentifiability" and makes it possible: reidentification presupposes individuation. Kripkean "rigid designators"[5] cannot retire speakers' intentions and cannot function successfully in causal terms alone.)
Referential success cannot possibly be ensured by the sole use of denumerably many predicates. For, if Quine's program fails, there cannot be any adequate predicative replacement. In practice, every predicative clue must be interpreted in accord with its corresponding referential intent, and referential intent must itself be interpreted in accord with the consensual practices of the enabling society in which it obtains. You may take this to be the import of Wittgenstein's marvelous notion of "forms of life" (Lebensformen ),[6] to which Strawson's and Austin's studies of the complexities of speech-act contexts effectively incline (although that was hardly their intent).
Wittgenstein's account is itself little more than an abstraction from a much richer and more adequate account of the processes of societal life (that he does not explore); but what he does offer is enough to offset the opposing picture of language I have sketched. Ultimately, Wittgenstein (in Investigations ) is an opponent of Frege and Russell, whom, at the time of the Tractatus, he so much admired. I shall, therefore, adopt Wittgenstein's notion of Lebensformen as signifying at least (i) the collective nature of the practices, both linguistic and nonlinguistic (lingual, let us say, linguistically informed but not specifically linguistic), that inform any and all effective constative acts, and (ii) the deeper "lingual" context of the consensual practices of apt speakers in which linguistic acts are indissolubly embedded—and because of which such acts succeed. In a word, admitting Lebensformen spells doom for all purely extensional treatments of natural language.
Let me acknowledge, therefore, that I coopt Wittgenstein's term of art as a term of art of my own. It serves to show, among other things, that
if, as is true, individual referents are linguistically "ineffable" when treated predicatively, then the whole of language is linguistically ineffable as well; for, as the argument of this chapter shows, language is lingual.[7] Once you see that in terms of my reading of Lebensformen, you see, for instance, that Kripke's initially skeptical reading of Wittgenstein's treatment of conforming with a "practice" (as "following a rule") as implicating that there is a rule that is followed (in thus conforming) is irrelevant, ruled out, committed to precisely what Wittgenstein obviates by admitting Lebensformen: namely, that language is a determinate system for which the constitutive and regulative rules can always, in principle, be formulated.
It is certainly reasonable to admit that reference and predication are normally successful. If they were not, linguistic communication would utterly founder. It cannot be supposed, therefore, that the failure of ordinary reference to yield to Quine's or Russell's or Frege's analysis—as by introducing logically proper names or replacing referents (and denotata ) by unique predicates, strategies that are themselves notably susceptible of extensional treatment—signifies a serious defect of natural languages. But if that is so, then, it is certainly reasonable to maintain:
(3.5) reference presupposes (but not criterially ) the consensual lingual practices of viable societies.
(By criterial, I mean that feature of discourse in which specific conditions, or marks, may be stipulated, that govern, adequately, the correct application of terms to the things of the world. Such "criteria" may be necessary, sufficient, necessary and sufficient, typical, or employed in looser ways. My only point is that speaking merely of Lebensformen is never "criterial.")
This is a deliberately bland formulation of a radical thesis. What it implies is that every merely formal treatment of natural language is inherently tethered to the encompassing collective life of particular societies of apt speakers whose (own) successful practices cannot be vouchsafed by formal means alone and cannot be confined to linguistic practices alone. I venture to add that (3.5) indirectly signifies that reference has a historical (or historied) dimension, since the consensual practices that inform effective speech acts (Lebensformen ) change, historically, as a result of actual ongoing life. But I have not laid the ground for a firm acknowledgement of this. (I am working toward it, of course.)
One begins to see the more radical possibilities of the line of argument
being pursued. Two important conclusions may be drawn from it alone:
(3.6) the meaning and syntax of sentences depend on the context of their token utterances;
and
(3.7) the context of utterance cannot be analyzed solely from the vantage of analyzing sentences or a language abstractly construed.
We are touching on the historical nature of human existence, but only tentatively. We are not yet prepared to pursue the matter. But it is clear that reference is bound to be a practice peculiarly sensitive to the historically changing nature of a society's Lebensformen . (It may be usefully remarked that Wittgenstein acknowledges the open-ended nature of ongoing societal practices, but he has almost nothing to say about the structure of such practices in terms of an understanding of history. So the puzzle deepens.)
I should warn, however, that some will find my use of Wittgenstein's notion of Lebensform(en) highhanded.[8] Certainly, the term "Lebensform " occurs only infrequently in the Investigations and (I believe) only once in the plural. Wittgenstein does not really explain his use of the term satisfactorily. Garver, for one, believes that Wittgenstein held that there was only one "form of life" for humans, not many (although we might speak of different "forms of life" for different creatures). According to this view, Wittgenstein (i) did not mean to treat the human Lebensform in essentialist terms, (ii) did mean to accommodate the variety of cultural modes of life, (iii) acknowledged that one could not state the defining marks of the human Lebensform, and (iv) treated it at once as "animal" and "transcendental"—meaning by the latter term perhaps that, whatever the variety of cultural modes, they are all constrained (but not in any Kantian sense) by a natural animal endowment that cannot be fully captured, descriptively, by whatever may be the contingent manifestations of this or that society. I mention all this to mark the scruple of my appearing to usurp Wittgenstein's term by (i') using it in the plural, (ii') displacing its "transcendental" function (without denying the intended insight), (iii') applying it to enculturation, and (iv') construing it in historicized terms. If Wittgenstein would have opposed my irreverent use, I confess I cannot see what he would have offered as the defeating argument—apart from textual fidelity. The important thing is
that Wittgenstein does not use his notion dynamically, does not explicate the relation between the cultural and the biological, does not account for the emergence of persons as culturally apt agents, does not reconcile the collective and the individual. In adopting "Lebensformen " as a term of art, I deliberately extend its use to all that, and I believe it captures what is most promising in Wittgenstein's own notion. But I do not claim textual fidelity.
Let me take advantage of having intruded the matter of history. I believe we shall eventually come to see the reasonableness of affirming that
(3.8) referring acts are inherently entrenched in the historically changing life of societies of apt speakers; the recovery of their meaning (or intent or successful function) cannot be disjoined from an understanding of their society's practices.
I cannot strengthen (3.8) at this point in the argument without going very far afield. I introduce it somewhat arbitrarily, but I do so in order to keep certain ulterior objectives before us. We are, you remember, bent on understanding certain radical claims (and the logic of those claims) now gathering strength at the end of our millennium. Theorem (3.8) is as good a clue as any about their common theme. But we cannot yet confirm it. (Its lesson will resurface in chapters 8 and 9.) For the moment, I may at least say that by entrenched I mean that feature of a natural language (I shall call it "historicized," later) in accord with which the effectiveness of speech acts depends on their being uttered in a lebensformlich context, by agents whose own linguistic competence presupposes and entails the mastery of a language. (Here, "entrenched" lacks criterial force altogether, but it allows lebensformlich and historied qualification. I may perhaps take the occasion to say also that I treat "lebenformlich " as an English adjective: I drop the inflectional endings.) An aggregate's sharing of such lebensformlich practices, viewed with an eye to the success of reference and predication, I call consensual. (Consensus need not be "criterial" but the criterial must be consensually apt.)
What I have shown in effect is that language cannot rightly be treated as an autonomous discipline ((3.1))—since reference is already lingual ((3.5)); that is, that the successful functioning of natural languages can be accounted for only in terms of the inseparability of speech acts from the lingual lebensformlich acts of an apt society of speaking agents. Once that much is admitted, we cannot fail to see that it is but a step to
historicize the lebensformlich practices in question. There would then be two decisive limitations to any "extensional" treatment of language: (i) its being embedded in lingual ways, which affects the meaning of sentences actually used; (ii) its meaning being historicized, in virtue of being lebensformlich . (The "extensional" treatment of language is tantamount to its being treated as autonomous.) In short, the discovery that reference is lingual is a discovery of decisive importance: it challenges in the most profound way every facet of analytic philosophy that relies on an extensional treatment of language—as, notably, in Quine, in the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus (properly confined), in Carnap, and in Frege. The beauty of the argument is that it does not rely on historicity but prepares the ground for its admission. Hence, by featuring the analysis of reference as I have, we see at a stroke that the most influential and admired features of Anglo-American analytic philosophy are placed in serious question. I should perhaps add that the analysis of reference may fairly be taken to be the single most strategic site for challenging the strongest claims of analytic philosophy. For instance, all the supposed virtues of "naturalism" (or what I shall later call "naturalizing," following Quine's usage) fail if language cannot be shown to be autonomous in the manner sketched.
Turn, now, to predication. There is an obvious connection between reference and predication: we cannot successfully predicate what is true of anything if we cannot fix the identity of what we are talking about. But if what has been said of reference is valid, then, admitting that it cannot be effectively regimented in the "extensional" way, neither can predicative acts. Bear in mind that by an extensional analysis I mean (thus far at least) either or both of two general strategies: (i) an analysis (conformable with the syntactic constraints of first-order logics like Principia ) of the structure of sentences (used in suitable speech acts) by which the denotata of our discourse may be specified in a cognitively effective way as the unique denotata they are; or (ii) a semantic analysis of our predicative terms (whether as replacements or not for referential expressions, but restricted to predicative position), such that we may effectively fix the extension (or range of application) of our most important general predicates. (The resources of reference and predication implicate one another.)
I should add: (iii) that (as with Dummett and perhaps the early Tarski) the supposed disjunction between sentence and context of utterance or between the underlying logical syntax of language and the interpreted sentences we normally utter encourages a certain confidence in programs
(i) and (ii) even where programs in accord with (i) and (ii) are not actively pursued. Strategy (i) may be illustrated by Frege's notion of uniquely denoting names or Russell's notion of "logically proper names" keyed to the "sense-content" of a direct "acquaintance" with the world, and strategy (ii) may be illustrated by Davidson's notion of the conditions for ascribing truth to sentences in accord with his reading of Tarski's semantic conception of truth), or by Fodor's account in which complex predicates may be composed (without remainder) from simple predicates and in which the extensions of the most important predicates are "known" in a "nativist" or hardwired way.[9]
A fully adequate extensional account of reference would require some suitable union of strategies (i) and (ii), possibly along Quine's lines. But that is not our concern, since, on the foregoing argument, the project is doomed from the start. The point I wish to salvage is simply that, if the linkage mentioned holds, then our inability to treat reference extensionally cannot fail to infect predication as well.
I hasten to add (iv): that "extensionality," or an "extensional" analysis, may be confined syntactically to uninterpreted "sentential formulas"—hence, to the rules of first-order logic. But, by itself, that would contribute little or nothing to our understanding of philosophical logic —that is, the analysis of those questions, in particular, that bear on reference, predication, individuation, numerical identity, truth, meaning, de re and de dicto modalities ((2.4)). For, we would have to be able to show that the analysis of sentential formulas was, pertinently, prior to the analysis of interpreted sentences, but that is precisely what I was objecting to in opposing the modern logician's tendency to disjoin logic and natural language—in discussing Aristotle's use of the principles of noncontradiction and excluded middle (in chapter 2). I agree with Aristotle about the indissoluble connection between logic and language, but to admit that is not yet to admit Aristotle's archism.
There are deeper puzzles confronting the extensional treatment of predicates. They have to do with resolving the famous problem of universals . (By universals, I intend abstract denumerable entities that (i) are the denotata of general predicates and (ii) exist. I oppose the venerable thesis that there are universals or that they are needed in an adequate philosophy; but the argument must wait.) The problem is as old as (even older than) the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. The issue takes the form of a triple question (notably routinized in the Middle Ages). Given the use of general terms, are there, one asks, "real generals"[10] in the world? (The phrasing is favored by Peirce—and answered by Peirce in
the affirmative.) Secondly, what relationship holds between the general predicates of our language and the actual attributes of independently existing things? And finally, on what grounds may we claim to know the truth about either or both of these matters?
The history of the question is a disaster. The medievals offered three lines of argument: realism regarding universals, nominalism, and conceptualism. By the first (realism ) is intended all those theories that maintain that general terms (for instance, "blue," "round," "hirsute," "baroque," "just," "beautiful," "human," "canine," "female"—or, better, some reasoned selection therefrom) do account for, by way of universals, or possibly even designate, the real general attributes of things. Peirce, who followed to some extent (and "corrected") Duns Scotus's subtle account, tried to recover a strong "realist" claim for the sciences, by wedding the analysis of general predicables to the realism of the laws of nature. (He took "generals" to be real, but he denied that universals exist .) A modern attack on all such realisms—directed particularly against Aristotle and inductivists—was mounted, for associated reasons, by Popper, who believed that, inasmuch as nature was unfathomably deep, human inquirers could not reasonably suppose their own nomological conjectures ever satisfactorily captured the underlying structure of the real world. Popper might have answered, affirmatively, the first of the three questions posed and, more cautiously (along "realist" lines of Peirce's sort), the second and third.
The trouble with the realist reading of "universals" rests with the plain fact that the cognition of "real generals" cannot be made to function in any criterially serious way when fitted to what are usually called "universals." It's all very well saying that our general terms correspond to real universals, but how could any such claim be confirmed? Plato's dialogues (particularly Republic and Parmenides ) have collected all the difficulties known to infect the thesis, without ever explicitly providing for their assured resolution; Aristotle's solution rests, quite scandalously, on the notion that, by exercising its native power prior to the work of "science" or episteme (which ultimately depends upon it), pure mind (nous )[11] simply internalizes (by brute intuition) a "noetic" grasp of the independent changeless ("universal") structures of things. Of course, contemporary views of the constructed or idealized standing of lawlike universals tend to ignore any pointedly perceptual or intuited analysis of universals. (Russell was committed to a kind of Platonism.) In a word, theories about scientific laws tend to universalize their scope, but they do not characteristically address the specifically epistemic condition un-
der which "universals " (or "real generals") can rightly be said to be actually discerned. Straightforwardly, then: the problem about general predicates and real universals is the analogue of that other vexed problem, the one about "propositions" and their corresponding "facts."
Nominalism fails outright, if by "nominalism" is meant the thesis that we do indeed use general terms cognitively, in spite of the fact that there are no general traits in the real world and no general concepts in the mind either.[12] The trouble with nominalism is simply that, on its own assumption, it cannot account for the smooth, spontaneous (massively successful) extension of general predicates in natural-language use—beyond any postulated paradigms of use or original convention. For, if any "nominalist" convention functioned smoothly within a society's practices (without new conventions being made at every moment of application), then, of course, some sort of "realism" (regarding general predicables) would be vindicated; if it failed, because (on the hypothesis) there was nothing truly "general" in the world or in thought to invoke, then nominalism could not possibly account for the plain successes (cognitive, remember) of science and ordinary linguistic communication. One sees the difficulty, for instance, in Goodman's well-known nominalism, which, although uncompromising, has nothing to say about the cognizing process itself—unless to deny that there are any "general traits" that could be discerned in any two compared things that could then be discerned as well in an independent third.
Conceptualism (a subtle medieval compromise that Peirce assigns to Duns Scotus) is also troublesome because it leans in the direction of nominalism, supposing that universal terms answer to universal concepts in the mind but not (perhaps) to any general structures in nature itself. And yet, it also leans in the direction of an attenuated realism, since the smooth functioning of such terms among chance aggregates of apt native speakers demands an explanation. Thus construed, conceptualism requires that there be a structure common (enough) to the concepts of each of us to support a valid and viable use of general terms, but it is hard to see that that could be convincingly separated from the thesis that there are "real generals" in nature. (Scotus inclines in the latter direction. The original thesis arose in a different way, earlier in the Middle Ages, in Roscelin and Abelard. But it suggests the sense in which Goodman cannot escape an implicit conceptualism.)
The upshot is that the classic answers to the problem of universals fail. One canny way of putting the difficulty is this: the standard answers suppose that there must be an externalist relation of some sort (in effect,
the realist view), a correspondence (or other relation) between our terms and the structure of independent nature (or, "what there is" or "what is real"), but it is impossible to prise our terms apart from that connection in order to test whether it holds or not ((2.4)). There is no operative way to answer the question. The difficulty is analogous (as I say) to that between true propositions and real facts: the "facts" to which true propositions "correspond" are identified only by means of those propositions, and vice versa. On the argument, we cannot "exit" from language.[13] We can never "examine" the would-be correspondence—or any putatively weaker relation, for that matter—between what our propositions "mean" and the "intelligible" facts to which they are said to conform. The argument is compelling. (I return to the matter of a realist reading of "external" relations in chapter 4. Notice, please, the change of term.)
Nevertheless, it is not the last word. For one thing, the strong "correspondence" theory—the one so masterfully developed in Wittgenstein's Tractatus —appears to be completely unworkable in epistemic terms, because of the very paradoxes Wittgenstein himself uncovered. But if the notion of a correspondence between two independent orders were rejected, then it would be open to us to consider entirely different solutions to the "problem of universals" (in effect, the puzzle of predication). The fact is that, in terms of the history of modern philosophy, nearly all forms of that sort of realism that requires a correspondence theory of truth are pretty well rejected. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein himself supplies no correspondentist theory of cognition. None, it seems, could escape the paradox of "picturing" the world.
In this very mild sense, nearly all of modern philosophy is post-Kantian —that is, holds that, eschewing all cognitive privilege (hence, Kant's own apriorism), there is no principled epistemic disjunction between an independent actual world and the world we experience and claim to know . Call this thesis symbiosis ((2.7)), since it is, as such, neutral regarding archic and an-archic denials of the correspondence claim. Symbiosis signifies (i) a holism within which the "external" relation between cognizing subject and cognized object is first posited, and (ii) a holism, therefore, the antecedent structure of which (whatever that may be conjectured to be) cannot be discerned by way of the external relationship thus posteriorly posited. Later, I shall characterize that relationship as "constituted," "constructed," even subject to "historicized" reconstitution—for the moment, however, those refinements are not needed. Nevertheless, it is to the point to emphasize that, although Kant thinks
of the real world as "constituted" as an intelligible world—in some way by the native powers of cognizing subjects—he does not think of the external relation between subject and world as itself originally posited within some prior holist "space." In that sense, Kant is not committed to—opposes, in fact—the doctrine of symbiosis. (It is precisely in that sense that analytic philosophy has found a convergence between Kant's "empirical realism" and its own externalism, although Kant of course is no externalist. Hegel, by contrast, accepts a form of symbiosis, although it is [notoriously] difficult to say what he understands by the structure of any external relationship between subject and object.)
Nothing much depends on the epithet "post-Kantian," except to link a conceptual strategy to the actual history of philosophy. I use it in a deliberately thin way; for, of course, Kant was quite sanguine about the inescapability of a strong archic substitute for correspondence. In particular, he believed that an invariant structure could be apodictically imputed to the contingencies of the phenomenal world (the work of the "synthetic a priori "). But it is entirely open to us—since (2.1) is not demonstrably incoherent or self-contradictory (hence, is valid)—to theorize that human cognitive capacities (within the symbiosis just tendered) cannot be shown to possess invariant structures, may in fact be subject to radical historical variability in the way of conceptual understanding. (This goes against Kant.)
"Symbiosis" (in the "post-Kantian" sense) signifies, therefore, no more than the denial of any principled disjunction between "the way the world is" and "the way the world appears to us to be" (in effect: Hegel's thesis in the Phenomenology )—between what (illicitly) would have been called "noumena" and "phenomena" in Kant's idiom, or between "metaphysical realism" and "internal realism" in Putnam's, or indeed between the "subjective" and "objective" elements of the phenomenal world.[14] (I shall return to the analysis of "subjects" and "objects.") I have, in effect, been arguing that a careful analysis of reference and predication—a fortiori, of individuation and numerical identity—confirms that
(3.9) the success of reference and predication signifies that, in natural-language contexts, they are indissolubly symbiotized.
This, of course, is tantamount to saying:
(3.10) no principled disjunction between "alethic," "epistemic," and "ontic" discourse can be legitimated.
Theorems (3.9) and (3.10) may be read as corollaries of (3.1). (I examine the "alethic"-"epistemic"-"ontic" distinction more closely in chapter 4. Here, it is enough to note that it is symbiotized.)
It may be convenient to add that what I have called the "externalist" view also appears classically as pre-Kantian (treating figures like Descartes and Locke as exemplars). What is instructive is that, as with Kant himself, strict "Kantians" are hardly different from pre-Kantians wherever they insist on the archic or the privileged or an asymptotic approach to the final fixities of reality.[15] (Apel and Habermas, for instance, are excellent specimens of the kind of convergence I have in mind. But so are Peirce and Popper.) Epistemically construed, the correspondence theory of truth is, by definition, an externalist theory matching constative claims and the real nature of the independent world: hence, it cannot help but presume some form of cognitive privilege (as indeed both Descartes and Locke betray). It might be argued, in this regard, that Moore's notorious "Refutation of Idealism" (that is, the refutation of a condition on which symbiosis depends) is designed to show how a correct reading of Kant's first Critique confirms that it too is ultimately committed to an analogue of a form of externalism.[16] My point is not that this is a preposterous claim (though it is indeed preposterous), it is rather that there is some justice in what Moore alleges, since, within a symbiotized conception (which neither Moore nor Kant would espouse), Kant is committed to reclaiming what holds invariantly (transcendentally) of what is empirically external to individual cognizing agents. This is precisely what contemporary Kantians fail to acknowledge—or defend. (What, we may ask, is the Kantian subject?)
The charm of this line of argument lies in the fact that the theorems just mentioned are as nearly presuppositionless as is humanly possible. That is, they are very difficult to resist, on any reasonable review of the operative complexities of natural-language reference and natural-language predication. One has only to reflect that theorizing (instead) about the nature of truth—the point of the correspondence theory—cannot be "presuppositionless" in the same sense. This is why disputes about the "disquotational" theory of truth—in Quine, in Davidson, in Putnam, in Kuhn (in effect)—cannot be disconnected from substantive views about the way the world is or about the way we come to have knowledge of it.
When, for instance, Davidson and Putnam claim that Tarski's semantic conception (of truth) is "philosophically neutral," they can only mean what they say if Tarski's account is read disquotationally (in effect:
if the predicate "true" is judged to be logically otiose).[17] But, for one thing, Tarski's extensionalism can hardly be merely disquotational; and, for another, the disquotational theory presupposes, although it does not affirm—not philosophical neutrality, but—a very confident belief that a massive part of the core of our ordinary truth-claims cannot possibly be mistaken (which, of course, is Davidson's view), or cannot possibly be meaningfully subjected to epistemic doubts (which is Quine's view in speaking of "holophrastic" sentences). This, then, neatly confirms the sense in which I earlier suggested that the solution to the puzzles of chapter 2 could be secured by turning to examine the puzzles of reference and predication. (I return to disquotation in chapter 4.)
You see, therefore, the strategy that begins to collect along the lines of (3.8). For the sake of explicit clarity, I draw the obvious conclusion:
(3.11) the an-archic reading of symbiosis is coherent and congruent with the general features of reference and predication.
I cannot justify pursuing the strategy just yet. Still, it does allow me to draw out the analogy with what has turned up regarding reference; that is:
(3.12) predicative acts are "entrenched" in the historically changing life of societies of apt speakers.
For our present purpose, the analogy is the important thing. I cannot yet explain what an adequate account of (3.8) and (3.12) require, or, indeed, the full meaning of "entrenched." But you may already see that a proper answer would involve an an-archic interpretation of symbiosis along historicized lines. Nothing is lost, however, by getting clear about the argumentative linkages being recommended. On the contrary, it helps to allay reasonable worries about the possible arbitrariness or drift of the strategy I am pursuing. I am, in effect, pursuing and illustrating at one and the same time the argumentative strategies open to an-archic philosophies.
Short of insisting on the specifically historicist cast of (3.8) and (3.12)—which, I concede, has radical implications—we can now confirm, for predication (viewed as a speech act), the counterpart of (3.5):
(3.13) predication presupposes (but not criterially) the consensual practices of viable societies;
and, of course, trivially:
(3.14) predication is inherently context-bound.
The sole point I wish to press just now is that the resolution of the problem of universals, as far as the an-archic program is concerned, requires that it be located within the space of symbiosis and in accord with (3.8) and (3.12). But thus far at least, there seem to be no strenuous objections against attempting to do that. On the contrary, what I have shown (or better: what I have sketched with an eye to showing) is that an archic resolution of the problem must be defective, that the classic answers to the problem of universals presuppose some strong form of correspondence or surrogate relation, and that, if it is to be resolved at all, the problem of universals will require some option along an-archic lines. That is,
(3.15) "real generals" are necessary for the successful practice of reference and predication.
That I take to be the direct upshot of our analysis of reference and predication. (By "real generals " [Peirce's term], I mean predicables (i) that admit of multiple instantiation but (ii), although real, do not exist . So real generals are not universals . The full force of these distinctions must wait for chapter 6. To say that "generals" are real is not yet to supply the sense in which they are real. That is certainly a reasonable caveat.)
On the argument thus far given, we may conclude that
(3.16) the structure of context-bound discourse cannot be specified in linguistic terms alone.
By context-bound I mean (adding to the sense of (3.2)) that (i) the meaning of sentences is a function of their speech-act contexts ((3.3)–(3.4)), and (ii) their contexts of utterances are not merely linguistic and are inseparable from the world—they form a part of the world ((2.4), (3.1)). Alternatively put,
(3.17) speech acts are lingual, not merely linguistic.
Theorem (3.17) leads directly to a very strong finding, namely, that
(3.18) the communicative success of both reference and predication is lingual; that is to say, incapable of being managed syntactically, algorithmically, criterially, or in any related way.
Reference and predication are intrinsically informal. A great deal of the labor of twentieth-century analytic philosophy has assumed that this was simply false. Theorems (3.16)–(3.18) explicitly return us to (3.1). (I return to the matter of context in chapter 8.) But what is becoming clearer is the sense in which the an-archic strategy means to give up every possible form of privilege and invariance, means to fall back to characterizing the world in ways adequate for whatever we discern in first-order discourse, in ways that approach the limit of presuppositionless discourse. In effect, we have now stalemated the archist and the externalist (and, earlier, the postmodernist).
Chapter IV
Truth-Values
The principal claims I have so far confirmed are: (2.1), to the effect that real invariance is not a necessary presupposition of every coherent account of the world or (a fortiori ) of our knowledge of the world; and (3.1)—or, alternatively, (3.9) or (3.12)—to the effect that the analysis of language cannot be separated from, thus is symbiotized with, the analysis of the world (which it is said to represent). The rest of what has so far been confirmed is, however important, of lesser interest.
If we reflect on these two claims only, certain additional, quite powerful theorems fall into place. For one,
(4.1) there is no necessity of any kind for restricting constative discourse to bivalent truth-values.[1]
If (2.1) had been false, then, as Aristotle correctly observed, a strong bivalence would have been unavoidable: every well-formed assertion would have had to be, disjunctively, either true or false. One could perhaps have postponed the inevitable—as Dummett attempts to do along so-called intuitionistic lines—by holding that the principle of excluded middle need not (yet) apply to syntactically well-formed statements that cannot (yet) be shown to be decidable, that is, such that determinate procedures for confirming their truth or falsity by finite operations may be explicitly formulated or are at hand. But, although Dummett thus retired excluded middle as a necessary and universally operative principle (that is, the principle that, for any "a " and for any "F, " "Fa " is
necessarily either true or false), he automatically restored bivalent values wherever decidability obtained—that is, he installed tertium non datur unconditionally (the principle that, on the condition of satisfying decidability conditions, it is then not possible that "Fa " be neither true nor false).
The important point is that Dummett resolved the question of bivalent values by some deep assumption about the way the world is (or must be), without explaining just how he arrived at that reckoning or how it justified (legitimated) precluding (or necessarily precluding) making a free choice (in this or that domain) of some array of many-valued truth-values or truth-like values that depart from tertium non datur . For example, one might have denied that "true" and "false" are exhaustive and exclusive alternatives; one might have dismissed "true" and kept "false" and then introduced a continuum of intermediary (many-valued) truth- or truth-like-values ("reasonable," "plausible," "apt," and the like) that could still be treated as ranging over "decidable" claims (open to being validated or invalidated) in ways strongly analogous with the procedure replaced. Constative practices in accord with such a policy might be very much favored in interpreting artworks (interpreting Hamlet, say), and whether they could be extended to other sectors of inquiry convincingly would surely remain an open (and entirely reasonable) question. Alternatively, one might reasonably claim that, in opposing excluded middle, Dummett already invoked an externalist assumption on the basis of which he was obliged to confirm tertium non datur . That is, he had already construed decidability in terms of a bivalent logic. Hence, in a real sense, Dummett never opposed excluded middle on the strength of a principled choice regarding truth-values.
If we ask ourselves why we should take (4.1) to be true or false, we see that there is nothing in the bare meaning of the predicates "true" and "false" that entails that affirming (4.1) could not fail to be contradictory or paradoxical or the like. The only way to resist (4.1) effectively is to require that the norms of truth should conform to what we suppose the actual structure of reality could (or must) support, and then insist that that entails the necessity of bivalent values.
That, you will remember, was the central issue of chapter 2. We were concerned there to answer the question of whether reality was necessarily invariant or necessarily possessed invariant structures (Aristotle's question). Here we are concerned rather with options regarding the assignment of truth-values to different ranges of constative discourse. There, we were occupied primarily with ontic (as well as epistemic) mat-
ters; here, we are more concerned with alethic (and epistemic) matters. I had in fact offered (2.4)–(2.10), which concede in various ways the (symbiotized) inseparability of what I am now identifying as "ontic" and "alethic"; and I had already explicitly arrived at (3.10), regarding the conceptual linkage between alethic, epistemic, and ontic distinctions. That is tantamount to affirming (4.1), for it is now impossible to claim that bivalence (either excluded middle or tertium non datur ) is necessary solely on the strength of the meaning of, or formal relations between, the terms "true" and "false." The acceptance of (2.1) leads directly to accepting (4.1). Hence, in chapter 2, we had already anticipated (4.1): after all, the denial of (4.1) is essential to Aristotle's argument. It is also essential to any "Fregean" program, and, in the present setting, it constitutes an archic (and "privileged") maneuver. Put another way: Dummett's "principled" objection to excluded middle has, contrary to appearances, absolutely nothing to do with any specifically alethic commitment: it affords no more than a negative scruple (decidability) imposed on whatever we offer in the way of an epistemically responsible account of any part of inquiry. (In this sense, Putnam and Dummett were arguing at cross-purposes in opposing "metaphysical realism.") This is also why Dummett's endorsement of tertium non datur is similarly "unprincipled."
The argument is a modest one, but it is also of considerable power. For, if (2.4) and (4.1) are conceded, then it is also true that
(4.2) the choice of truth-values (or truth-like values) assigned, as a matter of policy or principle, to any sector of inquiry is a function, under symbiosis, of what we take to be the nature of the domain in question.
For example, if, as Peirce affirms, reality is in some measure objectively "vague" and "indeterminate," then (as Peirce argued) noncontradiction may not apply at every point of constative discourse (as when, say, we use notoriously vague predicates—"bald"), and excluded middle will not apply everywhere (as when we use relatively indeterminate predicates—"human," say, where this has not yet been made sufficiently determinate to permit us to decide, from the sense of "human," whether "male" and "female" apply disjunctively). Alternately, in interpretive contexts (as remarked), we are sometimes prepared to concede (as in reading Hamlet ) that there may be valid interpretations of a given artwork that are incompatible with one another (on a bivalent logic) yet
separately compatible with the work in question: we are not prepared to dismiss one or the other merely because they cannot be reconciled in a single interpretation. Art, we suppose, may be of such a nature that such tolerance counts as a reasonable policy. The essential point is not the mere coherence of the policy but the reasoning by which it may be recommended or opposed.
For my present purpose, it is important to see that the judgment that we should or should not subscribe to bivalent values depends entirely on our characterization of the field surveyed. We may hold that interpretive judgments (of the sort in question) are not "incompatible" but only incongruent (let us say), in the sense that (i) they would be incompatible or yield contradictories on a bivalent logic but not now (although they could not of course be integrated in a single perspicuous interpretation—except trivially by a conjunction of disjuncts), if we replaced or supplemented bivalence with a suitably formed "many-valued" logic, and (ii), in fact, a many-valued logic suits the field of inquiry better than a straightforward bivalence.
On the argument, the retreat from bivalent values is not merely an "epistemic" consideration but an "ontic" one as well—that bears on the "alethic" issue in accord with (3.10). By alethic, I mean matters that concern only the choice, assigned meaning, and formal constraints on the use of truth- and truth-like values; by epistemic, I mean matters that concern pertinent evidence or grounds for ascribing truth-values to some sector of inquiry; and, by ontic, I mean matters that concern the putative structure and attributes of some part of the world. These distinctions systematically implicate one another and cannot be disjoined in principle without invoking privilege ((3.10)).
It comes as a surprise that the necessity of abiding by bivalent truth-values may be so easily set aside. The dominant view in the history of philosophy—from Aristotle, say, to Frege and Dummett—is that either departing from excluded middle produces self-contradiction somewhere in our discourse (Aristotle) or that, where a departure seems possible and imminent, one should find an alternative way of characterizing the alethic features suited to the field. For example, although Quine's notorious doctrine of the "indeterminacy of translation" appears to repudiate excluded middle, Quine himself demurs—quite arbitrarily it seems (perhaps also inconsistently), for he insists that, there, is "no fact of the matter"[2] —in a sense that does not produce truth-value gaps. Stalnaker begins his instructive discussion of conditionals by affirming (in accord with Frege) that there are just two truth-values, True and
False. But to the question, "What are they? What are these truth-values?" Stalnaker replies (avoiding Frege's odd answer), "It doesn't matter; all that matters is that there are just two of them." Be that as it may, once we accept (2.1), (4.1) follows; once we admit that, it follows as a consequence that
(4.3) many-valued logics need not be incoherent.
Of course, many philosophers would have been willing to concede (4.3) straight off, without any of the plodding caution I have preferred. But it is not true that they would normally have been willing to admit the coherence of relativism —or the coherence of relativism as a consequence of applying (4.3) in accord with (ontic) interpretations of "the way the world is." But relativism requires a many-valued logic. Since it is my intention to support the viability of relativism in a robust way, I regard it as an advantage to have approached the matter in the conservative way I have. Furthermore, admitting (4.2) and applying it to particular domains of inquiry, for instance literary criticism and interpretation, we move quite straightforwardly from (4.3) to the important finding:
(4.4) relativistic logics need not be incoherent.
I mean by a relativistic logic a many-valued logic that, relative to some interpreted domain of discourse, admits, as compatible, those constative claims that would (but not now) be incompatibles on a bivalent logic (whether in accord with excluded middle or tertium non datur ) or would yield contradictory propositions. The resultant propositions may (now) be termed incongruent —signifying, by that, what has just been remarked, plus a willingness to treat such propositions as "objectively" pertinent to (an understanding of) the domain in question. I have no doubt that the concession would serve very nicely in many other sectors of inquiry: in history for example, in the human sciences, among explanatory theories in high-level physics, in linguistic analysis, in philosophy itself. But I shall forego pursuing these extensions here. (I return to the question of objectivity in part II.)
I must add, however, that
(4.5) bivalent and many-valued logics are not inherently incompatible with one another.
For example, probabilistic truth-values (probabilizing truth-value assignments to evidence at hand) are standardly admitted to be compatible with bivalence: the first are said (as by Hempel) to be epistemically weak in some pertinent respect—so that, in the epistemic limit, where the probability of particular claims is either "1" or "0," bivalence obtains.[3] (I deny, however, that relativism takes probabilistic values in anything like this sense.) Relativistic logics do not behave conformably, for, where a relativistic logic is invoked, the bivalent values (or at least the value "true") are (is) retired and no longer apply (applies). "True" and "false" are, then, no longer (need no longer be) treated symmetrically (in effect, bivalently, as exhaustively and exclusively assignable to constative claims). As a consequence, (4.5) is not violated—if the range of application of the pertinent bivalent and many-valued values are suitably segregated. (Call these considerations, grounds of relevance. ) Hence,
(4.6) affirming (4.5) does not, as such, produce a self-referential paradox.[4]
Everyone has heard that to regard relativism as true is self-contradictory, but that is now seen to be a hasty finding: if (4.2) is conceded, then
(4.7) truth-value policies may be treated piecemeal, fitted to one domain or sub-domain or another as needed.
Let me spell this out a little more neatly. A relativistic logic I define as a logic that, for a given domain or range of inquiry: (i) replaces (alethically) a bivalent logic with a "many-valued logic," not a merely "three-valued" logic, one in which a third value ("indeterminate") is added to an otherwise bivalent pair ("true," "false"); (ii) can validate "incongruent" claims; (iii) treats truth and falsity asymmetrically, so that claims may be disconfirmed, as false, although (within the range defined) truth no longer obtains; (iv) replaces the value "true" with "many-valued" values ("plausible," "apt," "reasonable," and the like) that may, if wanted, be graded; (v) need not, if relevantly segregated, be incompatible with a bivalent logic; and (vi) can accommodate considerations of consistency, coherence, contradiction, and the like. (I return to "grading" in the final chapter.)
Relativism is a controversial matter, of course. The history of philosophy has long supposed that relativism is intrinsically incoherent. Hence, (4.4) is decidedly provocative. I take that theorem to be a par-
ticularly strategic finding, essential to the radical options of the philosophical currents of the end of our century. I have for that reason taken care to derive (4.4) from the most conservative sources. That has its tactical advantages, but I need to assure you that (4.4) is not a trick—and that it accommodates (in a fair way) the persistent philosophical conviction that relativism is incoherent and, at the same time, salvages a pertinent form of relativism that is demonstrably not incoherent.
The answer lies in a benign equivocation. There are really two distinct forms of relativism, viewed in "alethic" terms or viewed in terms of the connection between "alethic" and "epistemic" considerations. The two are distinguished by the simplest of devices: the objectionable form holds that "true" means "true-in-L, " where "L " signifies some well-demarcated language among disjunctively many languages, or, some "world" ("W ")—some "sector of inquiry," some "historical horizon," or some such context; the viable form, in contrast, unconditionally rejects definitions of that sort. The viable form treats "true" as having the same (alethic) sense it has in nonrelativistic logics, or, simply, as being not relationally defined. The objectionable form (call it relationalism, since it defines truth relationally) cannot overcome the self-disabling paradox: viz., that, on the use of its own truth-predicate, it is impossible to identify the many different "relationalized" uses of "true" that should then obtain. That, in effect, is the heart of the argument Plato has Socrates advance against Protagoras in Theaetetus, and that is the same argument upon which contemporary opponents of relativism insist (for example, Putnam).
It's of no concern here to redeem Protagoras against the ancient argument, though it can be done. The important thing is that the viable form of relativism (call it robust relativism, for tendentious reasons) defines truth in a conventional way but insists (i) on retiring, in particular sectors of inquiry, bivalent values that accord with excluded middle and tertium non datur, (ii) on replacing such values with a many-valued logic that countenances "incongruent" judgments, and (iii) on reconciling such a logic with a bivalent logic, by not allowing the ranges of their respective application to overlap (by restricting their relevance ).
In short, in accord with the viable form of relativism, "true" simply means "true"! Truth-claims remain subject to "epistemic" and "ontic" constraints. "True" means "true", but, whether relativistically construed or not, the assignment of truth-values remains subject to the vagaries of "L " and "W " and so on. That is, "relationalists" hold (by self-referential paradox ) that "true" means "true-in-Lk "; "robust relativists"
hold that "true" simply means "true" as it standardly does in bivalent logics. Relationalists define "true" (alethically) in terms of the epistemic peculiarities said to obtain in "Lk "; robust relativists oppose any such maneuver. Robust relativists insist that bivalence must be replaced, in given domains, for epistemic and ontic reasons bearing on the peculiarities of "Lk " and "Wk " and so on. They do not dispute the (alethic) sense of "true," only the choice of truth-values and the conceptual rationale for it.
There's all the difference in the world between the two options. The conditions for ascribing truth-values to interpreted claims about the world cannot ever be decided on "purely" logical grounds. There are no possible such grounds except self-contradiction, self-referential paradox, and the like. And these, as we have seen (distinguishing between interpreted "sentences" and uninterpreted "sentential formulas") yield no pertinent objections.
We may now bring the matter to bear on the epistemic complications. Fortunately, the issue returns us to the themes of chapter 3, without yet venturing any of the more radical doctrines I mean still to support. In chapter 3 I showed that reference and predication were (i) ubiquitous in constative discourse, (ii) undeniably viable and effective in natural-language use, (iii) inseparable, in being effective, from the consensual practices of particular societies, and (iv) incapable of being explained in terms of invariant rules or principles or algorithms or the like, or in exclusively linguistic terms, or in any way in which the supporting consensual practices function criterially. I construed the lesson of (i)–(iv) as explicating part of the meaning of "Lebensformen " (taken as a term of art—in effect, (3.17)).
If, now, we reflect on our findings regarding reference and predication in the context of (2.1), the denial that reality must possess invariant structures, and (3.1), the denial that the structure of language may be examined independently of the structure of the world (and vice versa), then it should be clear at once that
(4.8) language and world form an indissoluble symbiosis: the "world" is "languaged," and "language," is "worlded"; effectively, the analysis of the world and the analysis of language are one and the same.
We cannot, of course, fail to distinguish "world" and "language" in actual discourse: reference and predication presuppose the viability of doing so. For similar reasons, it must be that
(4.9) cognizing "subjects" and cognized world (or cognized "objects") are indissolubly symbiotized.
By parity of reasoning, we cannot fail to distinguish between speaking "subjects" and discursible "objects" within the space of our referential and predicative acts; the success of such acts presupposes and entails some operative ("external") relationship between what is being referred to and who, speaking, is speaking referringly. But if we admit that, then we come to a surprisingly powerful finding:
(4.10) the relationship between (speaking) subjects and (discursible) objects, and between (worlded) language and (languaged) world, although "implicated" in viable natural-language practices, is an artifact of, and discernible only within, the indissoluble symbiosis of the "two."
A perspicuous consequence of (4.10), then, is this:
(4.11) the "external" relationship of subject and object and of language and world are artifacts of their "internal" relationship.[ 5]
Theorem (4.11) may now be fairly read as "Hegelian" or at least "post-Kantian," or simply as defining symbiosis. But if you concede (4.11), you see at once the arbitrariness of Dummett's treatment of tertium non datur: it cannot possibly be regarded (by Dummett) as an alethic principle of any sort, it must be some sort of dependent theorem defended (at best) by a principled ontic policy that is as yet nowhere vindicated. For example, if you accept (4.11), which defines symbiosis, it becomes impossible to insist that a bivalent logic is alethically inescapable.
By an external relationship, I now mean one in which, as in the dyadic relationship "aRb, " "a " and "b " may be individuated, identified, and characterized independently of the relationship "R "; by an internal relationship, I mean one in which, say, "a " and "b " are no more than relata incapable of being individuated independently of "R " or of being characterized in any way independently of how they are characterized in "R ." It is, for instance, one of the notorious defects of Francophone structuralism (originated by Saussure) that the "elements" of a structuralist binarism are no more than relata . (This is in fact an important clue to Derrida's merciless "deconstruction" of Rousseau, Saussure, and Lévi-Strauss.) Symbiosis, as in (4.8)–(4.9), is an "internal relationship";
but since it plays (as such) no criterial role, it enjoys an entirely benign standing. It serves holistically: that is, only to call into question any privileged or archic reading of the "external" relationship between the polar "elements" (or surrogates) of (4.10). The conceptual weakness of structuralism lies, precisely, (i) in its treating what is real and intelligible only as relata (signifiant/signifié ), and (ii) in direct epistemic terms. (That move is self-defeating—whether in structuralist or Hegelian terms.) In accord with this reading, symbiosis—that is, theorems (4.8)–(4.11)—precludes the separability of realism and idealism. Realism concerns constative discourse addressed in criterially effective ways to (what are taken to be) the "external" things of the world; idealism addresses the subjective conditions relative to which alone the other obtains. Realism without idealism, we may say, is privileged; idealism without realism is epistemically irresponsible.[6] (I take this to be the import of (3.10).)
Idealism, therefore, may be symbiotized (as among the post-Kantian Idealists), but it also need not be (as it is not, in Kant). In Kant, the cognizing powers of human subjects are not thought to be constituted in the same sense in which the intelligible structure of the cognizable world is. That is what I take to be undefended in Kant, to be, indeed, indefensible: it avoids the initial holism of symbiosis.
Theorem (4.11) is quite radical. One sees this, for instance, if one considers how the denial of "privilege" and the admission of "historicity" bear on its meaning. (Of course, the full import of denying "privilege" and of affirming "historicity" has yet to be supplied, but, in pursuing the an-archic vision, I have already dismissed cognitive privilege as archic, and, in defeating Aristotle's archic paradigm, I have shifted the burden of proof to the champions of the archic vision.) If, therefore, (4.11) is read an-archically, one cannot resist admitting that
(4.12) the analysis of symbiosis cannot yield any privileged account of language and world or of cognizing subject and cognized object.
In short,
(4.13) symbiosis never functions criterially or epistimically.
Any inquiry that admits (4.12) but violates (4.13) is self-defeating. Theorems (4.12)–(4.13) are quite enough to defeat Kant for instance—that is, read as an archic theorist. For Kant holds that we are epistemically confined to the contingencies of the phenomenal world (noumena, after
all, are unknowable for Kant). Nevertheless, postulating that the phenomenal world lacks all cognitive privilege, Kant gymnastically manages to elicit an extraordinary number of synthetic a priori truths regulating the phenomenal world ("experience") from the side of cognizing subjects. He cannot possibly succeed in this, on his own assumptions (for instance, those of the preface to the second edition of the first Critique ). If, alternatively, he opposes (4.12)–(4.13) insofar as he elicits (reflexively) various necessary conditions of perception, understanding, and reason, he must also (in some sense) deny that the noumenal world is unknowable and, what comes to the same thing, that we confront the phenomenal world holistically (without a priori resources). Q.E.D.
It was in just this sense that I suggested, in the previous chapter, that late twentieth-century (continental) philosophy is essentially "post-Kantian" rather than fully "Kantian": it subscribes to symbiosis, but, in doing that, it abandons privilege. In the terms just introduced, Kant restricts ("mere") empirical realism (the range of cognizable "objects") so that it cannot arrive at ideal(ist) invariances, but he does not correspondingly restrict pretensions regarding the subjective or idealist sources of apodictic, transcendental invariances to the same holist contingencies. Kant cheats in this regard. (As a result, Rorty hurries, mistakenly, to the postmodernist conclusion.) Kant should have confessed that he could not possibly know what constraining conditions tacitly affected his conjectures about apparent a priori truths drawn transcendentally from experience.
In reaching (4.11), we have come to an elegant resolution of one of the deepest puzzles of philosophy. For, I am prepared to argue, if we deny cognitive privilege tout court, we thereby subscribe to some form of the principle of internal relations (specified above (4.11)); even though, if we also admit reference and predication, we cannot deny that the relation between "subject" and "object" must be an "external" one that is not (as such) subject to the peculiar logic of "internal relations." The trick is turned by denying any epistemic or criterial function to "internal relations."
The strong analytic criticism of Hegel and Bradley in this regard is largely due to Russell's perceptiveness. Nevertheless, the champions of internal relations (implicitly opposing Russell, who is an externalist and a frank advocate of cognitive privilege) have indeed grasped the important fact that their own insistence precluded cognitive privilege of every kind. It is a curious fact that, through a good part of the analytic tradition, which (rightly) opposes the doctrine of internal relations (con-
strued epistemically, as in Bradley), some form or other of cognitive privilege is often found to lurk. That privilege may, for instance, take the form of prioritizing "semantics" over "metaphysics" (as Dummett does), or it may take the form of openly advocating privileged sense-data (as the English empiricists have done) or "protocol sentences" (as Carnap had done before Neurath's correction),[7] or it may take the form of an a priori presumption that intentionality à la Brentano may be eliminated in any realist account of the world (as Quine has insisted). You begin to see, therefore, the (negative) epistemic import of holism and symbiosis. (I shall look more pointedly at this in a moment. I have already made clear, however, that, in treating Lebensformen as a term of art, I employ it holistically and symbiotically—and will, as I have also signaled, use it in a historicized way.)
These last maneuvers gain credibility only on the assumption that no version of the doctrine of "internal relations" is tenable. What I have tried to do, therefore, is provide a sense in which that doctrine (i) does not lead to the disastrous consequences Russell rightly warned of and (ii) itself exposes the equally disastrous uses to which construing the relationship of subject and object as "externalist" has been put.
Arguments in these two directions are clearly asymmetrical: against exclusively internal relations, the argument identifies a self-defeating (epistemic) paradox; against exclusively external ("externalist") relations, it warns about a drift toward cognitive privilege and modal invariance. The first simply shows that reference and predication are effectively impossible if the "external" (epistemic) relationship between subject and object is not preserved. The second shows equally compellingly that merely preserving that relationship cannot by itself ensure that the relata thereby related remain (or must remain) invariantly structured in any epistemically pertinent or productive sense. It is surely in the work of Kant and Hegel that this two-sided puzzle is effectively laid out and then threatened with incoherence. I may say that I find in Foucault the late heritage of both, formulated in a way that deliberately risks the puzzle's insolubility but, in doing that, also defines its most radical possibilities in historicist terms.[8] I take this to be characteristic of poststructuralism. Furthermore, I take theorem (4.11) to suggest a basis for reconciling the whole of analytic and continental philosophy: on the analytic side, it subverts all externalism; on the continental side, it supports the subversive work of all poststructuralism.
Beyond that, I say only that, by treating symbiosis holistically, not criterially, not in any way that plays an epistemic role, I believe I have
supplied the essential clue for solving the puzzle of internal relations without privileging external relations. In that sense, every viable philosophy of the new century will have to come to terms with the "poststructuralist" challenge, which signifies the symbiosis of realism and idealism—most radically in explicitly historicist terms. Reference to "external" relations concerns epistemic matters on their (epistemically) effective side; reference to "internal" relations concerns the holist and symbiotized conditions (not themselves criterial or epistemic) under which the other functions. There is no paradox there.
Certain late tendencies in our century, particularly in continental Europe, have, I should say, strongly favored a reading of (4.11) that is not open to the charge of privilege. In this sense, (4.11) yields:
(4.14) the world (or, a world) is a text (is "texted");[9]
and
(4.15) constative discourse "interprets" the world by "parsing" its holist space; in doing that it constitutes "the world" a text, posits distinct cognizing subjects and cognizable objects.
The conjoint import of (4.13) and (4.14) signifies that: (i) all distinctions regarding particular things obtain only within the holist space of "the world" (or, the "universe of discourse"), regarding which there cannot (yet) be any privileged posit of "what there is" (distributively); (ii) holism itself does not preclude discursive practices regarding things (thus) distributed in the "world"; (iii) every discursive practice presupposes and entails an interpretive or categorical scheme (or schemes) in terms of which the "whole" world is thought to be distributively "ordered" (is parsed, is made a "text") in the ways that discourse affirms or could affirm; and (iv) no interpretive scheme is privileged as such.
Taken together, (4.14) and (4.15) formally resolve the paradox of internal and external relations—but they do so only formally. They lead, however, to:
(4.16) referents, predicables, and truth-values are artifacts internal to the "interpreted text" that is the intelligible world.
By a text, I mean a symbiotized but individuated referent apt for interpretations. (I realize how easily the term may be abused. I shall take due
care.) Here, it may be useful to invoke something akin to Spinoza's distinction between natura naturans and natura naturata . I say (heuristically) that, within the symbiotized world, conceptual schemes "interpret" (naturans ) that undifferentiated "holist" ensemble; in doing that they constitute that ensemble, a "text" apt for further "interpretation" (naturata ). Interpretation naturans "parses" the first; interpretation naturata discursively addresses what is thereby parsed within the symbiosis of the first. In this sense, we may take a leaf from Barthes and affirm that:
(4.17) texts are the contexts of other texts.
That is, contexts are simply "texted" worlds (or parts of worlds) in which individuated texts are themselves identified. Hence, "worlds" are, alternatively, texts or the contexts of texts. (You must bear in mind the way in which (4.17) implicates (4.9).) I risk saying therefore—although I fear I shall be misunderstood—that Heidegger's Being and Time and Quine's Word and Object converge, from altogether different directions, on theorems (4.14)–(4.17).
The grandest "internalist" version of (4.16) is probably Hegel's invention (the self-discovery of evolving Geist ), and the leanest "internalist" version may be very close to what Quine allows to fall under the constraints of his "analytical hypotheses." Both doctrines are dubious but for different reasons. Similarly, the grandest "externalist" version of (4.16) appears in Wittgenstein's Tractatus, which is notable because it invokes the correspondence theory of truth in an unqualified way but without reference to the epistemic conditions of first-order truths; the leanest "externalist" version (if that is what it is) may, eccentrically, be claimed by Rorty, in the sense that, for Rorty, constative discourse simply gets on with its affirmations and denials, without ever troubling about the nature of truth or the legitimation of truth-claims.[10] (This is the import of Rorty's rejecting interpretive "tertia ".) Both doctrines are paradoxical but for different reasons.
It may be helpful to distinguish carefully between truth and truth-values . Truth-values, I should say, are (i) various sets of special predicates (bivalent, many-valued, possibly differing in other ways as well) that (ii), on a theory of truth, are assigned their proper denotata (sentences, propositions, statements, truth-claims, sentences used in constative acts, or the like), such that (iii) those bearers are ranked or graded in accord with the regulative function affirmed by the theory of truth invoked. Truth, on the other hand, is (i) a would-be relation between
the bearers of truth-values and appropriately segregated parts of the world (facts, states of affairs, or the like) which (ii) those bearers (sentences, say) claim to represent in some normative way (as by representation or correspondence or mapping or by favored forms of coherence or verisimilitude or the like), and which (iii) may or may not be independently confirmable. "Truth-values," therefore, are specified alethically but have their use only in epistemic and ontic contexts, whereas "truth," construed as genuinely regulative, designates an appraisive condition at once epistemically and ontically pertinent that normatively governs the ascription of truth-values. This accords pretty well with Aquinas's classic formula, and even with William James's, although it is easy to see that the formulation I have just given may actually be completely vacuous.[11]
The important thing is this: assuming symbiosis and rejecting cognitive privilege,
(4.18) truth can have no independent ("externalist") regulative function vis-à-vis the assignment of truth-values.
We can, of course, still "regulate" truth-claims ("internally"). Once we characterize truth-values and truth, theorem (4.18) is the clear corollary of (4.10)–(4.11). I should say truth was intransparent or transparent (derivatively: those parts of the world truth-claims are "about" are "intransparent" or "transparent"), depending on our complicitously acceding (or not) to (4.17). Hence, recalling the issues of chapter 1, if we act in accord with (4.18), then
(4.19) truth and legitimation are intransparent.
This is precisely what those drawn to the disquotational theory of truth had feared.[12] Not being able to ensure an extensional treatment of natural language by way of an analysis of truth directly, they construed truth as otiose (disquotationally, as in Quine) or replaced its epistemic function by causal means (by "naturalizing" truth, as I shall say, as Davidson does).
These distinctions help to confirm a number of additional findings. For one, reading theorems (4.18)–(4.19) in accord with (4.10)–(4.12),
(4.20) truth and legitimation are second-order artifacts of our symbiotized world;
that is, they are part of the "text" that is "the world." The postmodernists (Rorty, Lyotard) assumed that either truth and legitimation were completely "transparent" or else philosophy should be abandoned, but their judgment is an extravagance, and also a non sequitur . Under "intransparency," the reasoned legitimation of what to take as truth, knowledge, reality, confirmation, and the like increases in importance as the hazards of life and inquiry increase. In this sense, our theories of truth continue to function "regulatively," although they can no longer do so in an archic way. Furthermore, to speak constatively is to have constituted "the world" a text: truth and legitimation are as internal to that constituted world as any other objective "part." (Foucauldian "genealogy" would make this clear.)
This explains the sense in which, for instance, Putnam's insistence on the regulative function of truth (on the side of "internal realism") as against "idealism" (championed by Kuhn and Feyerabend) or against "metaphysical realism" (as in Putnam's quarrel with Dummett) is a complete nonstarter. Once privilege is abandoned and symbiosis accepted, there can be no principled difference among these doctrines as far as the "regulative" function of truth is concerned (naturata ). Furthermore, once symbiosis is admitted and/or privilege denied, then, in the spirit of (4.14)–(4.15),
(4.21) truth and legitimation are interpretive.
In the same sense (although it will have to be spelled out a little more carefully):
(4.22) the disquotational theory of truth is false, being incompatible with (4.21).
Theorem (4.22) is a powerful finding, which leads to the issues of the next chapter. (I shall come to its full meaning before closing the present chapter.) For one thing, Quine may be seen to have trapped himself in something close to a contradiction: he subscribes to the "disquotational theory" of truth, but he also holds that truth-claims (for the most part) fall under our "analytical hypotheses" (our local interpretive schemata, in accord with which we parse our holist world and, relative to which, "indeterminacy of translation" cannot be overcome). This is to argue at cross-purposes—not inconsistently, it's true, but Quine would have us believe that he eschews all forms of cognitive privilege. For another
thing, Davidson opposes the disquotational reading of Tarski's theory (which he claims to adopt and "supplement"), although he also opposes (as does Rorty, for entirely different reasons) interpretive tertia . Quine salvages "transparency" (against his own holism) by disjoining sentence and term and reserving some regulative function of truth along transparent lines ("stimulus-meaning"). Davidson favors transparency for the massive core of our ordinary beliefs (in a somewhat Wittgensteinian manner), but he does not specify a source of epistemic privilege for distributed beliefs. (Illicitly, Davidson thus exceeds Wittgenstein's holism: he commits the fallacy of division.)
I judge that Davidson rejects disquotation because he fears (rightly) that a theory of truth cannot fail to be interpretive—as, for instance, in supporting correspondence. Rorty rejects the regulative function of truth altogether and, hence, theories of truth, legitimation, and interpretive tertia regarding the structure of the world and philosophy itself. But he cannot mean what he says, in the plain sense that he respects too much the success of the sciences.[13] The work of the sciences obviously involves reasoned changes on legitimative questions.
I must clear up some terminological matters here lest the argument not be understood. By interpretive tertia (the term is introduced by Rorty and is shared, at least implicitly, by Davidson), I mean (i) alternative categorical schemes by which the holism (the intransparency) of our symbiotized world is parsed in such a way as to permit constative acts or truth-claims, or (ii) schemes that, one way or another, mediate, as such, what are linked within the truth-relation itself ((4.15)). Paradoxically, in a period dominated by admissions of intransparency, merely to offer a theory of truth that rejects tertia will appear to invoke some other tertium —as with disquotation and correspondence. (This may explain Davidson's most recent pronouncements on truth and language.)
By holist, I mean the philosophical effect of adverting to the inclusive "universe of discourse," but without reference (or grounds for making reference) to any particular truth-claims regarding what may be found in "the world" (thus, one speaks in a "holist" way about "the world"). To parse (the term is Quine's) is simply to provide a determinate conceptual scheme (one of Quine's "analytical hypotheses") among various options, facilitating particular truth-claims;[14] such claims are distributed. The intelligible world thus constituted (naturans ) I call (by a term of art) a "text" (or "texted world"). My quarrel with Quine lies in this: against what he explicitly says, admitting sentences is as much an exercise of "parsing" as admitting terms —the one cannot obtain without
the other. There are no sentences without terms, or terms without sentences. (Quine denies this.) This explains why Quine's holism is not entirely consistent, why he is committed to some form of privilege (as in his account of "holophrastic" sentences). Furthermore, once the "distributed"/"holist" contrast is adopted, any parsing (privileged or not) will be seen to be "interpretive"—hence Davidson's worry. All this follows directly from a strict adherence to the rigors of symbiosis.
Finally, by disquotational theory of truth, I mean that theory that accepts as its paradigm (disputatiously attributed to Tarski) the formula: 'Snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white. To ascribe truth, it is said (notably by Quine, who accepts the formulation), one merely "cancels the quotation marks." My own view is that the disquotational theory is either utterly vacuous (in the form just given), privileged (if taken as correct as far as it goes, as on Davidson's reading of Tarski), or else flatly false (since, admitting intransparency, some interpretive tertium will be needed). The objective of these strenuous (but ineffectual) moves against the legitimation of truth (a fortiori, the legitimation of truth-value assignments)—on which Quine and Davidson agree—is simply to endorse what has come to be called "naturalizing." I believe that program fails utterly, and I turn to it in the following chapter.
I draw one final consequence from all this:
(4.23) attributions of truth and falsity cannot be epistemically regulated in any way that escapes the constraints of symbiosis and holism.
Ascriptions of truth and knowledge, therefore, cannot fail to be (artifactual) posits made and sustained within our lebensformlich practices. (That alone defeats the disquotational thesis—and, more significantly, "naturalism.") There is no other way to avoid privilege. But to say so is hardly to disallow whatever realism our sciences are said to support.
If, now, you take a moment to reflect on the running argument, you will see that the inherent informality of reference and predication quite naturally invites a certain conceptual tolerance regarding alethic choices and that the admission of symbiosis confirms the reasonableness of considering the selective use of a many-valued logic. Conjectures along these lines permit us to question the strong sense of systematic closure often favored in analytic philosophies (for instance, in applying Tarski's conception of truth to natural languages or precluding Brentano's notion of intentionality in parsing reality). The power of these maneuvers is greatly strengthened by the fact that they are originally favored for rea-
sons internal to canonical treatments of reference and predication and subject and object. That is, that power does not depend in any way on first invoking historicity or intentionality. On the contrary, the argument leads us to see the reasonableness of admitting them in the first place.
In a word, the disquotational theory of truth (or any of a family of related maneuvers) is rightly confined to alethic constraints regarding the use of truth-values but illicitly draws epistemic and/or ontic consequences regarding truth. That, I suggest, is one of the generic strategies favored by so-called "naturalisms."
Chapter V
Epistemic Competence
If what has been claimed in the preceding chapter is conceded, particularly (4.10) and (4.11), which affirm that subject and object and language and world are symbiotized artifacts and that the "external" relationship between these artifacts is specified only within a more inclusive "internal" space, then, as remarked,
(5.1) ascriptions of knowledge are assigned within the same "texted world" in which subject and object (and language and world) are externally related.
At one stroke, therefore, all claims of privilege are subverted, without disallowing the cognitive assessment of particular beliefs and judgments. As we approach the end of the century, one sees fewer and fewer explicit claims of cognitive privilege. It's no accident, for instance, that Aristotle's insistence on reality as structured in an invariant way is matched (in the same theory) by the epistemic ("externalist") claim that the rational soul in man, the highest competence of mind (nous ), natively possesses the power (noesis ) to discern without distortion (to intuit) the changeless universal forms of independent things. You will hardly find a comparable claim in any late twentieth-century philosophy not already explicitly committed to Aristotle (or, with significantly reduced conceptual resources, committed to Kant or Husserl or some such figure). You must look for subtler marks of privilege.
Sense-data (or related) theories of the sort that once dominated Brit-
ish empiricist philosophies in the early part of the twentieth century have almost completely died out—those that in a variety of forms attracted Russell and Moore and Price and Ayer and, in the United States, Lewis and Chisholm.[1] These are the paradigms (although hardly the only specimens) of what has come to be called foundationalism: the theory of knowledge that segregates beliefs (perceptions, sensory experiences, and the like) into an ordered two-story (externalist) world of indubitable or relatively certain cognitive episodes of one distinct (privileged) sort and all those other beliefs the reliability of which ultimately depends on their appropriate linkage to the putatively "foundational" ones. Wittgenstein showed compellingly (particularly against Moore) that expressions like "I know . . . " are not (i) reports of cognitively privileged (psychological) states, nor (ii), in conveying a sense of "subjective" certainty (as Wittgenstein puts it), expressions that link certainty with the sure confirmation of truth or actual knowledge.[2] Wittgenstein, therefore, exposes (in On Certainty ) Moore's penchant for joining, in a systematic way, a naive realism, a commonsense form of the correspondence theory, and a strong version of the view that subject and object form only an externalist relationship. (Moore, therefore, is a "pre-Kantian" well after the fact.)
That Moore and Russell (and Carnap and Schlick and Ayer) were attracted to foundationalism (as well as to something like the doctrine just sketched) helps to locate the radical turn in Wittgenstein's own thought that pits him against himself as the author of the Tractatus (although he does not offer, in the earlier manuscript, any explicitly epistemic version of the foundationalist theory).
It is a fact, nevertheless, that the Positivists, who believed that their own adherence to the epistemic privilege they assigned so-called "protocol sentences" (mistakenly, as Neurath, among their own number showed), also believed that that doctrine conformed—as closely as possible—with the severe constraints on atomic sentences the Tractatus imposed. That required a gymnastic leap. They studied the Tractatus as a working text regarding the foundations of science: with an eye to the mutual fit between the formal syntax of its linguistic model and correspondence theory and their own quite different conception of empirical science and the foundational sources of scientific knowledge.[3] Wittgenstein's oblique assumption of cognitive privilege in Tractatus depends, however, entirely on the so-called picture theory relating true propositions and facts formulated in an unyielding extensional form. (There is very little of empirical science in Tractatus; there was meant to be none.
Ramsey ultimately convinced Wittgenstein that the empirical science that remained was disastrous to his project.)
The curious thing is that, in Tractatus, Wittgenstein does not directly address epistemic questions, even though his (archic) theory certainly entails some inexplicit form of cognitive privilege. Once we grasp the protean possibilities of privilege, we begin to see how epistemic claims may masquerade as merely alethic or ontic or in an even more unlikely disguise. This explains, for example, why earlier I construed Dummett's prioritizing of semantics over metaphysics as an archic thesis incorporating a camouflaged form of privilege ((2.5)). A similar charge may be laid against Frege's sanguine views regarding bivalence and an extensionally ideal language, but Frege's program was more straightforward than Dummett's.
Certainly, (5.1) goes some distance toward exposing important versions of privilege that have exercised late twentieth-century critics—views that are "foundationalist" in spirit although not cast in explicitly epistemic terms. Two such obscure doctrines address what, in the jargon of our time (in Europe at least), have come to be called the "originary" and the "totalizing."[4] (These, you may guess, are hardly perceived by "analytic" philosophers to be kin to the views of figures like Moore and Carnap. But they are, and the failure to discern that fact signifies a misperception.)
Thus, consider that—in a sense remotely related to what was featured in the Tractatus but not committed to any explicitly extensional program and not committed to an exclusively linguistic form of "picturing"—it is supposed (among certain continental European philosophies) that there must be some "original" epistemic (entirely "externalist") relationship between the language and thought of cognizing subjects and the independent structure of cognized objects, suited to ensuring a secure ("foundational," or, better, "foundationalist") basis for every form of knowledge. On the argument, the originary is that mythical point at which language and thought (possibly even prelinguistic thought) is supposed to have "first" confronted the world in the correspondence sense. The notion certainly appears in Lévi-Strauss's journal entries. The tireless (possibly tiresome) exposé of that search for the "originary" constitutes a good part of the motivation for Derrida's early, distinctly "analytic" attack on Saussure's structuralism and Husserl's phenomenology (and what Derrida takes to be the effective convergence between the two.) It's the straightforward key, in fact, to Derrida's deliberately florid program of déconstruction and interminable pursuit of "différance, "
"radical alterity," "supplémentation, " and similar exotica. (The same target, however, may be found in Descartes, Kant, and Husserl.)
Very simply put, Derrida's thesis holds that Saussure's binarism (of "signifiant " and "signifié ") and Husserl's phenomenological analysis of the constituting function of "subjectivity" in the formation of our concepts ineluctably presuppose some form of the "originary." (Derrida is probably not entirely accurate in his account of Saussure.) Furthermore, Derrida argues, if that be admitted, then, under the condition that there cannot be an "originary" (origin) at which thinking first comes to picture the independent world, it must be similarly impossible that the categories the mind supplies for the systematic analysis of reality could ever include "all possible" categories or could discern any fixity in any network of the categories with which we understand our world. Our categories cannot count on being adequate at any time for all the contingencies of evolving experience. One cannot presume to arrive at any (genuinely) totalized schema—one that in principle would never require supplémentation, wherein new distinctions (and the inevitable reinterpretation of the old ones) would dawn (unpredictably) from time to time. One cannot then escape the radical contingency of the contexts of conceptual understanding. One cannot discern the "totalized" context of all conceptual schemes. (Deconstruction is the insinuated and linguistically parasitic—but not explicitly or independently argued or analytic—exposé of "totalizing" and the assumption of the "originary.")
The matter is complicated, Derrida supposes, by the fact that conceptual schemes are said (by the structuralists) to be inherently "relational" (in the sense sketched in the previous chapter: except that, for the structuralists, that relationship is, now, fatally, epistemically prior to other forms of cognition). The complication affects Saussure's (and Lévi-Strauss's) structuralism, Derrida affirms, since signifiant and signifié are explicitly defined as the (epistemically pertinent) relata of all signes within a "closed system" of signs; something similar is said to be true as well of phenomenology, since the would-be discovery of the ("eidetic") invariances of our formative ("subjective") concepts are inseparable from the deep contingencies (historical and preformative) that mark the unfathomed originating milieu within which we presume to fix the conceptual invariances we claim to discern. This is the same theme, drawn from Derrida's objections to Husserl's philosophical program, that appears (in other forms) in the critiques of Husserl offered by Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre. But you must appreciate that what I have said about the holist nature of the phenomenal world (in
the preceding chapter) affects—by way of "internal relations"—the fortunes of "totalizing" as well. In analytic philosophy, this appears preeminently in Kuhn's acknowledging the historicity of science.
If privilege may take the attenuated forms mentioned, then it becomes instructive to insist that
(5.2) all conceptual schemes are interpretive tertia, artifacts of prior interpretation,
in the strong sense (i) that conceptual schemes cannot be originary or totalized, and (ii) that explicit conceptual schemes reflect some deeper tacit precondition that we cannot completely fathom. (By artifacts, I mean what, by a term of art, I have in the preceding chapter called texts, the products or posits of productive or interpretive human powers applied within a holist space. I extend the term, of course, to whatever is symbiotized in realist/idealist terms.)
This makes for a very pretty irony.[5] Husserl, we may now say, despite having exposed what he took to be Kant's philosophical naiveté, neglected (in his turn) to consider the (symbiotized) preconditions of his own epistemic certitude; he thereby failed to grasp the deep contingency of his phenomenological labors and the impossibility of treating them as more "foundational" (again, "subjective" or "idealist") than Kant's (or any other similarly) "naturalistic" reflection. Derrida actually has all this in mind when he adds to the presumptions mentioned a third form of privilege, the "apodictic," which, in a sense, is inseparable from the other two. The apodictic signifies (particularly in Husserl) the cognitive certainty of grasping (or the asymptotic certainty of approaching closer to grasping "eidetically") the originary and/or the totalized, in terms of which some favored conceptual scheme may (in the appropriate limit) be legitimated as necessarily invariant. It would not be entirely amiss to see in all this an alien analogue of the very thin foundationalism the British sense-data theorists and the Positivists espoused. There is, therefore, a surprising convergence (which critics have not altogether missed) between the Wittgenstein of On Certainty and the Derrida of Of Grammatology .
If we collect these sprawling patterns effectively, we cannot fail to see that (5.1) and (5.2) lead to the strong finding:
(5.3) all discourse is, epistemically, context-bound, contingently preformed, unfathomed to some extent, endogenously impenetrable, in-
transparent, requiring interpretation, unable to support claims regarding the originary or the totalized or the apodictic.
Theorem (5.3) is a firm part of the "therapeutic" philosophies practiced by (the "later") Wittgenstein and Derrida. The Anglo-American and continental European traditions converge here, however bizarrely: both Wittgenstein and Derrida mount a sustained attack on those philosophies that presume to eliminate the complex epistemic relevance of context . There's the thread that runs from the correspondence theory of Wittenstein's Tractatus (which Wittgenstein himself repudiates) and the unrelenting extensionalism of Quine's Word and Object (which Quine cannot quite make coherent) to Saussure and Husserl, the targets of Derridean deconstruction.
I believe an entire family of theorems may be drawn from this comparison, which, I remind you, has already been adumbrated in (2.5)—which, against Dummett's policy of prioritizing semantics over metaphysics, opposes any hierarchized privilege. If so, then the following makes a reasonable beginning:
(5.4) in neither epistemic nor ontic terms can realism and idealism be disjoined in a principled way.
I might have derived (5.4) directly from (4.10) and (4.11), which I recalled at the beginning of this chapter, but we have it now in the more articulated space in which epistemic distinctions are indissolubly linked to alethic and ontic ones. Theorem (5.4) signifies that most of the going philosophies of our own age are probably (or may be said to be) "naturalistic" (to use a term intended in a derogatory way by Husserl, as signifying [for him] a presumption of one-sided [and unguarded] privilege, and in a rather complimentary spirit by Quine [who speaks more usually of "naturalizing" than of "naturalistic"], as signifying [for him] the demystification of the merely arbitrary forms of second-order legitimation). But such philosophies may also be said to be "phenomenological" (to use a term intended in a privileged way by Husserl, as signifying [for him] the correct approach to an apodictic assurance regarding our conceptual resources, and [alternatively] intended in an opposed way by Hegel, as signifying [for him] the impossibility of privilege itself, the endless unfolding of novel historical experience within the movement of which we try to grasp the coherence of our changing conceptual resources).
By naturalism (also, by "naturalizing " philosophies), I (now) mean (as a term of art) no more than what, epistemically, corresponds to the ontic reading of the "external" or "externalist" relationship between cognizing subject and cognized object, in terms of which some form of "realism" and objectivity may be defended. By phenomenology, I (now) mean (as a term of art) no more than what, epistemically, corresponds to the ontic reading of the "internal" (holist) relationship between cognizing subject and cognized object, in terms of which some account of the contribution of "subjectivity" to the realism of our intelligible world may be defended. Furthermore, by realism, I mean the ontic complement of "naturalism," whether or not privileged (whether merely "external" or fully "externalist"), and by idealism, I mean the ontic theory of the "constructive" relation between subject and object, whether or not strengthened by positing privileged reflexive powers (as, differently, by Kant and Husserl) addressed to the "subjective" conditions of that same relation. On my argument, this accounts for what is illicit in Kant's and Husserl's idealisms. (It needs also to be said that the history of such terms as "realism" and "idealism" precludes any useful point in insisting on assigning them a univocal sense, even as terms of art.)
These complex notions are now definable in a strikingly symmetrical and simple way. We may go further; we may say:
(5.5) the analysis of "external" and "internal" relations in any domain presupposes the prior use of determinate distinctions of the same kind;
and
(5.6) naturalistic and phenomenological analyses are indissolubly symbiotized parts of a single inquiry.
If we take these terms in a sufficiently generous way—in accord with (5.5), that is, not in a privileged way—then "naturalism" and "phenomenology" will be seen to signify the symbiotized halves of a single coherent epistemic theory (not admitted to be such by Kant or Husserl) that the an-archist requires.[6] They are (in this respect) the epistemic counterparts of the (similarly unprivileged) ontic theories that, as "realism" and "idealism," contribute to a viable an-archic account of the intelligible world. (I shall say that an-archic, but not archic, theories favor both a "constructivist" and a symbiotized account of world and
knowledge. Neither Kant nor Husserl—nor sense-datum theorists, to include a latent comparison at which I have been hinting—admit symbiosis. But it will take some time to set the stage for admitting "constructionism.")
These definitions of "realism" and "idealism" and of "naturalism" and "phenomenology" are too tight, too spare, to be of much use without considerable elaboration. They cannot, for instance, be of much use in working out the difference between "Husserlian" and "Hegelian" phenomenology. But they are not intended as a mere classificatory convenience: they help to isolate the inseparable dialectical connection between "internal" and "external" relations and between "epistemic" and "ontic" inquiries. They serve to clarify the insuperable conceptual contingencies that result from adhering—scrupulously—to the "holist" limitations of symbiosis and intransparency, and they show how the resultant theories remain coherent.
There is at least one further dimension implicit in this conceptual knot that needs to be acknowledged—if ever we are to bring the entire sweep of Western philosophy into one vision: that of the historicity of thinking . I take the thesis to be the principal postulate of this primer, as I say. Nevertheless, in an extraordinary way, it now appears that the running argument will lead us to it as to an implicated theorem. In fact, it is hardly farfetched to insist that, in a post-Hegelian world, it is quite unlikely (in fact it is strange) that any serious critic of Kantianism—Husserl, particularly—should have questioned the sources of Kant's apriorism without invoking the formative contingencies of cultural history. But it is a plain fact that Husserl never really concedes the point, rather, he sometimes thinks he has but overrides its "transient" complications.
More pertinently, the argument signifies that I have now confirmed—by way of (5.5)–(5.6)—the unmistakable mutual dependence (and halting convergence) between the entire Anglo-American and continental European philosophical traditions. I have done this by drawing directly on the distinctive resources of each. This yields a fair sense of the self-impoverishing tendencies of late twentieth-century philosophy. It is hardly a caricature to say that Anglo-American philosophy is largely wedded to the analysis of the "external" or "externalist" relationship between subject and object, and continental European philosophy to its "internal" relationship or the privileged internalist analogue of externalism. This helps to grasp how disconcerting Kuhn's immensely important (but weakly limned and ultimately abortive) intuition must have
been when it first dawned on the local quarrels of the Positivists and Popperians, and how peculiarly unresponsive and unguarded Habermas's recovery of Kantianism must now appear when viewed in the light of its own Marxist, phenomenological, hermeneutic, and Frankfurt-Critical origins.[7] I take both episodes to confirm the sense of a loss of balanced conceptual resources resulting from a disjunctive division of conceptual labor. Kuhn exposes (in effect) the illicit "externalist" presumptions in the realism of the Positivists and Popperians; Habermas attempts to legitimate the "external" empirical inquiries of the Kantians (which risk invoking privilege, as we have seen) by his own illicit "internalist" claims regarding the would-be invariant norms of reason.
In the process, I have collected a number of specimen strategies of cognitive privilege: (i) all forms of foundationalism (sense-data theories; commonsense minima, in Moore's sense; Aristotle's noetic intuition of the essential forms of things); (ii) a priori alethic commitments on truth-values (bivalence, in Aristotle's and Frege's sense; tertium non datur, in Dummett's); (iii) correspondence as an a priori constraint on epistemic and ontic theories (as in the Tractatus ); the a priori presumption in favor of extensionalism (as in Quine's and Davidson's philosophies); (iv) any principled priority assigned to alethic, epistemic, or ontic claims separated from conditions affecting the others (as in Dummett's prioritizing of semantics over metaphysics or Chisholm's insistence on self-evident experience); (v) all versions of originary, totalizing, and apodictic claims (in the sense exposed by Derrida); (vi) all denials of the symbiosis of realism and idealism or of naturalism and phenomenology (as, respectively, in Davidson and Husserl) or of language and world or of thought and language; (vii) all principled disjunctions between analytic and synthetic truths or their sources (as in Kant and Carnap); the alleged discovery of unconditional de re and de dicto necessities or invariances (as in Aristotle); and (viii) all forms of second-order legitimation that deny or fail to concede that they are themselves constrained by the first-order claims in which they are embedded (as in Kant and Husserl). These make for a tidy windfall.
There is perhaps one additional entry to this last set of theorems that it will prove useful not to ignore, namely:
(5.7) there are no unconditionally necessary, universal, transhistorical, exceptionless interpreted structures or uniformities discernible in nature or thought.
All this may be taken to be the import of the symbiosis mentioned in (4.10) and (4.11)—with which I began this chapter—of the holism they subtend, and of course (2.1). (But that is not to disallow "indicative" or transhistorical "universals," as I acknowledge in chapter 2. Theorem (5.7) is a "bet," not a necessary truth itself.) The argument comes to this, finally:
(5.8) symbiosis, denied any and all forms of cognitive privilege, subtends some inchoate holism relative to which (only and tacitly) our (distributed) first- and second-order claims (criterially) obtain.
By holism, I now mean no more than the posit of an undifferentiated conceptual space in which (and within which alone) all distributed (realist) truth-claims may, in principle and under conditions not thereby specified, be processed.[8]
I hope you will not regard it as an extravagance if I suggest that, as I now see matters, theorem (5.8) affords a key to a useful rapprochement between Western and certain Far-Eastern philosophies. I take (5.8) to draw the common thread of Anaxagoras's Apeiron (or, better, an improvement on what Anaxagoras appears to have intended), the Tao of classical Chinese thought, and the notion of sunyatta in Buddhist philosophy.
I can put this in a better way: I stand by (5.8) in the context of the whole of Western philosophy, even its most bizarre expressions (as in Nietzsche and Derrida); I also believe that (5.8) is not altogether irreconcilable with the central themes of Taoism and Buddhism, but I am not competent to pursue the matter with any feeling of textual accuracy. I also think there is nothing determinate to say about what "holism" collects: it is no more than the "unity" of "the universe of discourse" effected, as many have remarked, as a sheer artifact of what is the philosophical analogue of negative theology. That "unity" is perhaps what Wittgenstein marked as "mysticism" at the end of the Tractatus . (I confess I see that lesson as akin to what would result from applying (4.18)—that is, the relativity of speaking of "text" and "context"—to the "universe.")
Once matters are put this way, it becomes quite clear that a productive philosophy will be concerned with the conditions under which determinate truth-claims are drawn out of an initial holism. Certainly, if we concede holism and symbiosis, and if we admit that science and related inquiries are concerned with determinate truth-claims, we cannot
reasonably deny that we must decide just what to take (i) as the mark of truth and falsity and (ii) as the mark of reasonable policies for maximizing the discovery of significant truths. But that—(i) and (ii) together—is what is meant by legitimation. Hence, at the very least,
(5.9) second-order legitimation precludes transcendentalism,
as it does the disquotational theory of truth; and
(5.10) truth and the legitimation of truth are symbiotized.
By transcendentalism, I mean (adding to what I have offered earlier) no more than (second-order) legitimative discourse that depends on and entails some form of cognitive privilege, some violation of (5.8)—Kant's own synthetic a priori truths for instance (on the interpretation I have offered)—and some violation of (5.1). Taken together, (5.7)–(5.10) defeat philosophical postmodernism . Thus, Lyotard, acknowledging (in effect) the force of (5.7) but not wishing to support transcendentalism, rejects the seemingly obvious fact that science is occupied with truth-claims ((5.8))—in effect, Lyotard rejects the reasonableness of (5.9). Rorty rejects transcendentalism, but then, admitting the work of science and the force of (5.7), he unaccountably rejects legitimation as well—he rejects (5.10). Postmodernism, then, signifes (i) the rejection of either (5.9) or (5.10), (ii) the rejection of all forms of cognitive privilege, and (iii) as a consequence, the rejection of the viability and philosophical fruitfulness of legitimation itself. It is for these reasons I regard postmodernism as incoherent. A variation on the theme of Kant's famous dictum (mentioned in chapter 1) seems very much in order: first-order truths without second-order legitimation are blind; second-order legitimation without first-order truths is empty. (Something similar holds for naturalism and phenomenology—and for the same reasons.)
Two further theorems recommend themselves. For one:
(5.11) preference for one legitimative policy over another is a function of the first-order truths we are prepared to accept;
and
(5.12) legitimation is itself an "empirical" or "indicative" undertaking concerned only with rational "adequation."
There you have the straightforward reversal of the Kantian ideal of transcendental reasoning as well as the defeat of postmodernism. The reason is the same: reason is itself a normative artifact of legitimative inquiry and, as such, affects our sense of the competence of human "subjects." We cannot reasonably abandon the (second-order) question, "How is science possible [conceptually]?"; but we also cannot pursue it in any archic way. The argument rests on two entirely straightforward considerations: (i) that first- and second-order (constative) acts are parts of a single indivisible discourse; and (ii) that the external and internal relations between subject and object are artifactual distinctions within one inseparably unified epistemic and ontic theory. (Notice: you may say that Kant is not an apriorist, in the sense that he offers his conjectures about the a priori conditions of knowledge by way of "phenomenal" reflection. But if that is so, then, of course, his determinate findings are tacitly, and impenetrably, constrained—and logically weakened—by the preconditions of such conjectures. For example, his conjectures about Euclidean geometry and causal determinism prove to be false. Wherever Kant's claims are determinate enough to lead to such would-be necessities, his conjectures fail to vindicate themselves; otherwise, they behave in ways similar to that in which, as we have seen, Aristotle's claim about the principle of noncontradiction behaves. This bears, for instance, on the conceptual status of the pure intuitions of time and space and the categories of the understanding.)
I regard (i)–(ii) as minimal conditions of rational discourse, dialectically supported by the entire foregoing argument. In claiming that legitimation is empirical, I mean only that it is ineluctably constrained by, and relativized to, first-order ("indicative") discourse. In claiming that it is adequational, I mean only that it is concerned to theorize about the conceptual relationship (or fit) between constative discourse and the cognized world (within the terms of symbiosis): it is second-order, there, in the plain sense that it considers the ("rational") regulation of first-order ascriptions of truth-values by way of policies about what best to construe as truth and how best to maximize the corpus of truth. By rational, then, in the way of constative inquiry, I mean that normative feature of inquiry in virtue of which it adheres to the empirical and adequational aspects of legitimation. (I shall return to the "adequational" in chapter 10.)
On the argument, truth itself (but not legitimation) has no explanatory function. There you have the defeat of so-called "naturalizing" theories of knowledge—Quine's, preeminently—that seek to construe epis-
temology as a subdiscipline within (empirical) psychology. For, although truth is not explanatory, its ascription must be explained and defended. That is the upshot of (5.2). To admit that much is to defeat disquotation and naturalism at a stroke. We should perhaps put this in the form of an explicit theorem:
(5.13) naturalized epistemologies are untenable, because truth is not disquotational and because legitimation, although explanatory, is not explanatory in the causal sense.
I regard (5.13) as one of the most strategic findings of this primer, simply because nearly all current analytic philosophies are drawn to "naturalizing" epistemologies—or, similarly, to naturalizing morality, intentionality, methodology, rationality, or philosophy itself. (I shall come to the moral analogue in chapter 11.)
The seminal expression of all these programs is surely the one offered by Quine in "Epistemology Naturalized." But, as already remarked, Quine favors the disquotational theory of truth; he either means to retire legitimative questions altogether or to naturalize them. In effect, Quine construes (or reduces) second-order inquiries as (or to) first-order inquiries. For his part, Davidson assumes (without argument) the reliability of some modally necessary connection between first- and second-order inquiry: what he calls "supervenience." (I return to "supervenience" in chapter 9. I mention Davidson, only in passing, only to flag the variety of "naturalisms." Nothing hangs on supervenience as yet: it simply marks another way of denying relevance to legitimative questions.) But disquotation won't do, as I have already remarked, once "intransparency" is admitted; naturalizing legitimation is unworkable if its explanatory function concerns what is "rational" (in the sense specified) rather than what is merely "causally ordered." For, what is "rational" answers to what "rationalization" yields—some favorable warrant or appraisal. Quine does not pursue the matter, but his influence (in this regard) has been extraordinary. Nowhere, I may add, do theorists like Quine, Davidson, or Rorty demonstrate that legitimation is explanatory in the causal sense, or may be replaced by causal explanation, or may be abandoned because it is not causal in nature. That is a remarkable oversight.
If, then, (5.13) holds—as I believe it does—then a very large part of contemporary analytic philosophy is simply misdirected. At the very least, there is a contest here that cannot be ignored and that depends on
the upshot of the two considerations—(i)–(ii)—listed just a moment ago. I think the meanings of "rational" and "rationalization" (that is, explanations of why this or that policy or action is "rational") are clear enough, but I shall postpone a closer study of the matter.
One other (last) topic that suggests itself concerns the famous "definition" of knowledge, namely: that knowledge is "justified true belief" (JTB ).[9] The formula is surely the single most general epistemological finding in all of Anglo-American philosophy. It is not quite the same as Plato's formula in Theaetetus: first, because, on a literal reading of the dialogue, belief and knowledge are associated (by Socrates) with entirely disjoint domains; second, because, again literally, the confirmation of knowledge in Theaetetus depends on archic and privileged grounds. But, Plato aside, there is a lot that is unpromising about the formula. For one thing, it is intended in a criterial way; for another, it is usually read in the externalist way. But, if we abandon transparency, then (as already argued) truth can serve no criterial function. (This was the trouble, you remember, with Putnam's insisting on truth's "regulative" role—truth as a Grenzbegriff —within the terms of his "internal realism.")
Clearly, the attraction of the disquotational theory of truth (as in Quine's account) is just that its adoption seems to facilitate the naturalizing of epistemology: "rationalization" (as a form of explanation) seems suddenly to be replaceable by first-order "causal explanation."[10] (The point of the maneuver, of course, lies with the fact that, in the JTB theory, "T" is not indexed to any would-be cognizing agent: as such, it defies the benign purpose of causal replacement. Hence, it must be retired!) Still, I know of no sustained account that makes the case convincingly. It is not irrelevant to mention in this regard that, in a deservedly famous early paper, Davidson did indeed attempt to demonstrate that "explanation by reasons" (rationalization) was a "species" of causal explanation. Unfortunately, the argument was a non sequitur: from the fact that reasons (the "having " of reasons) may be a cause (of an action), nothing follows regarding whether explanations by reasons are or are not a species of causal explanation.
Two attractive options hang in the balance: one, that rationalization may be replaced by causal explanation; the other, that rationalization just is a form of causal explanation. If, as I surmise, both fail, then we are bound to conclude that naturalized epistemologies fail ((5.13)), and
(5.14) legitimation is a form of rationalization,
where, by rationalization is meant (i) explanation by reasons, (ii) in accord not with causes (though reasons may be causes) but (iii) with some model of "rationality" (of what it is to be "rational" in the way of belief and understanding). Since, however, rationality in the way of belief cannot fail to have "adequational" pretentions, we must add that rationalization in epistemic matters is (iv) a second-order, not a first-order, concept. There is a promissory note here, of course, but we have turned an important corner in favoring the finding:
(5.15) where rationalization is epistemically pertinent, the domain explained is not and cannot be "naturalized."
I understand by naturalized, then, any explanatory account that (i) is causal in structure or governed by considerations of causal explanation alone, or is otherwise confined to first-order (usually physical) resources (whether by obviating or by "reducing" legitimative matters), and (ii) specifically precludes rationalizations or explanations that are not causal in structure or are not governed by the requirements of causal explanation. I do not say that rationalization is, or ought to be, or may be permitted to be incompatible with relevant causal explanations. I say only that the logical structure of a rationalization is essentially different from that of causal explanation. (More will need to be said, particularly regarding legitimation as a species of rationalization.) I should add, for compendiousness, that (iii) naturalisms are, characteristically or strictly, externalist doctrines. (In this sense, Kant's philosophy cannot be a form of naturalism, although, since Kant opposes symbiosis and is an apriorist, his doctrine, thus interpreted, is as close as a "transcendental idealism" can come to externalism.)
But it needs to be said here (Davidson makes the point compellingly) that to "explain by reasons " (to "rationalize") is to invoke the internal relata of some "holist" schema in terms of which human thought and behavior may be normatively appraised (as "rational"). Thus, one cannot speak of what an agent intends to do, except when properly coupled (relationally) with what that same agent may be said to believe: belief, intention, and action are predicable, therefore, only on the assumption of a ("holist") model of "rationality" (in a new sense of holism). The obvious difficulty in this (for "naturalizing" strategies but not for ordinary inquiries) is that the explanatory model conforms (so far forth) with the principle of internal relations—and in explicitly epistemic contexts—whereas causality is thought to behave extensionally (Davidson).
It is not enough that rationalization be normative in structure. It is normative, but, more than that, its normative structure is second-order . (I return to the issue in chapter 11.) I must add that "holist," in the epistemic context of rationalization, signifies that (i) the explanantia are treated as relata, but (ii) are employed as such by cognizing subjects already suitably individuated and functioning in our (textualized) world. There is no paradox there, but we may mark the difference by subscripting "holism" thus: holistr (where "r" stands for rationalization). Naturalizing fails, therefore, both because it will not admit explanations other than causal, and because it treats all discourse as suited to extensionalist regimentation.
We have reached a benign stalemate. I shall regard it as the promise of a victory over naturalizing philosophies. You cannot fail to see that if the argument holds for epistemology, it is bound to hold for every inquiry that depends on legitimative matters (notably, as we shall see, in moral matters). I conclude directly, therefore, that
(5.16) science cannot be naturalized;
and, of course,
(5.17) philosophy cannot be naturalized.
I have perhaps led us out on a limb, but the argument is not in the least unpromising.
I end this chapter with two brief remarks. First of all, there may well be causes of (our) beliefs, and there may (therefore) be a causal explanation for our having the beliefs we have. Nevertheless, there can be no defensible sense in which the causal explanation of our beliefs counts as an explanation of our knowledge (if what we believe, we also know), unless the very analysis of knowledge can be shown to be of an entirely causal sort. If, for instance, there is a conceptual connection between knowledge and belief —one in which knowledge is no more than a normative ranking or grading of belief—then (I should concede) knowledge might be causally explained. But if that normative connection is such only if legitimated in terms of what it would be rational to believe (so that the explanation of why that counts as knowledge is itself a form of [second-order] rationalization: holistr ),f then (I should say) the causal model was not the right one. It is a fact that many analytic philosophers (Quine of course, Pears, Goldman) have offered strenuous defenses of
the causal theory of knowledge. I say they are off the mark if they cannot show (I don't see how they can show) that the explanation of what knowledge is is not merely normative but legitimative as well. That is,
(5.18) the norms of knowledge apply only to what is antecedently rational(ized).
By normative, let me say at once, I mean whatever (whether first-order or second-order) concerns "ranking" or "grading" with respect to some norm or excellence. From what has already been said, it should be clear that legitimation is a form of explanation that is (i) second-order, (ii) normative, as regarding what it is rational to believe, (iii) with respect to philosophical questions (about knowledge, about the world, about conduct, or the like).
But if that is so, then
(5.19) no "proper parts" of knowledge can, as such, be causally explained,
which, of course, is hardly to deny the relevance of causal considerations. By a proper part of knowledge, I mean anything that either (i) is wholly specified as what is known or knowable (facts, preeminently, as distinct from states of affairs ), or (ii) is what may be specified only in ways that presuppose or entail knowledge or cognitive success (reference, for instance, or any supposed successor to reference, as with Russell and Quine), or (iii) is ingredient to knowledge in the way of functioning criterially as to whether knowledge obtains or does not obtain (the ingredients of JTB, for instance). Bear in mind that, admitting intransparency,
(5.20) knowledge of what exists or is real cannot be causally explained.
For, of course,
(5.21) knowledge is a form of rational belief adequated to truth.
Also, of course, some believe—I do—that one can refer to fictional entities (that is, entities that do not exist). If so, then, in accord with what is usually intended,
(5.22) the causal theory of reference fails,
that is, the theory that successful reference (perhaps as an instance of JTB) can be explained solely in causal terms. (Theorists like Kripke and Putnam, then, are either mistaken or, perhaps more accurately, never subscribed to the causal theory of reference as such.)[11] The more important finding is that the philosophical (and legitimative) question about what to count as successful reference cannot itself be ensured in merely causal terms.
Sometimes, the issues are more indirect. For example, on the JTB (justified-true-belief theory of knowledge), paradoxes are known to arise—famously, the "Gettier problem."[12] What is important about the Gettier problem (there are puzzles of other kinds as well), is that a question properly arises as to whether, in counting this or that as knowledge, certain inferential rules are admissible: e.g., that if it were reasonable to believe that "p, " then it would be reasonable to believe that "p v q "; and then, if it turned out that "p " was false but "q " was true, that instances of that formula could ever count as knowledge. One counter-argument holds that, in epistemic contexts, the inference from "p " to "p v q " is invalid, unless "q " is suitably introduced, antecedently, as an independent belief of the rational agent in question. Similarly, the inference, in epistemic contexts, from "Peter is at home" to "Someone is at home" is invalid; perhaps the correct inference is: "Someone [who is Peter] is at home." That is, from a singular proposition one can only infer (in context) the conjunction of that singular and the existential generalization that (in standard logic) would be admitted. (Gettier-like paradoxes are thereby obviated.) Examples of this sort confirm that the applicability of the would-be rules of logic is a function of the domain to which they are said to apply. So the objection to Gettiera counterexamples (which trade on the rules just mentioned or similar rules) raises the legitimative issue. Hence, what appears to be a purely formal question is no such thing, and therefore may be brought to bear against the supposed adequacy of the causal model. (Of course, the argument counts against any exceptionless adherence to bivalence as well.) All matters affecting the truth of beliefs, constative acts, and reference and predication inevitably implicate the holist model of rationality. You cannot naturalize cognition if you cannot naturalize the epistemic powers of cognizing agents. On the argument, you cannot do that, unless you can naturalize legitimation; for truth is not merely normative, it is also legitimative. Simply put:
(5.23) naturalizing knowledge is an ellipsis for naturalizing the cognitional and rational powers of human agents.
In short:
(5.24) naturalism (also, its rejection) implicates an ontology of persons or selves.[13]
By these devices, and following strategies invoked earlier, analytic models of knowledge are shown to be deficient, once cognitive privilege is denied, without yet invoking the puzzles of history and cultural preformation. In this way, the critique of standard epistemological questions is managed on grounds internal to analytic practice. The need for ampler conceptual resources is therefore drawn from its deficiency, and we begin to sense the advantage of going beyond the usual accounts of Anglo-American philosophy. The puzzles of part I of this primer lead ineluctably to the ampler vision of part II.
Chapter VI
Existence and Reality
There is a potential conflict between the spare taste of modern conceptions of logic and the ancient philosophical concern to exclude nothing from our ken that has the least claim to be said "to be."[1] Between Parmenides and Quine the tradition raises a remarkably constant question about "what there is." Quine and Parmenides answer in the slimmest of ways. Parmenides says: what is, is; and what is not, is not; and that is necessarily so. Of what is not, nothing (more) can be said. Quine says: what is is "the value of a bound variable"; we discern, in what one says, what one says "is."
Parmenides's view has been nearly universally construed as a disaster, since it appears to exclude from "what is" (or "what there is") whatever may be said to change (for, on the argument, what changes "is not"). If so, then all the sciences of nature would be swept out as meaningless or incoherent. There is the sticking point. The entire Greek world, including the Presocratics who were familiar with Parmenides's thesis, and Plato and Aristotle, were obsessed with reconciling the world of change with what appeared to be the ineluctable truth of Parmenides's dictum. The supposed elegance of that dictum obliges us, it was held, to admit that to affirm that "what is not, is" (which the atomists tried to defend) is contradictory; hence, that what "is not" is also impossible to treat as a suitable object for the constative discourse by which we make truth-claims about what genuinely "is."
But there are grave difficulties with Parmenides's teaching. It forces a philosophical concession from us that appears to collide, although in
a very different way, with the intended economy of Quine's formula. Quine's resolution is similarly open to challenge. One is inclined to ask of both Parmenides and Quine: When you speak of "what is," would you please explain what you have in mind? "What is what? " You don't understand, we may suppose each to reply: I am speaking only of "what is "!
The truth is that Quine is quite clear that when he speaks of "what is" he is speaking only of the individuatable things (things capable of individuation) about which we utter and confirm certain (favored kinds of) truth-claims in certain suitably formal paraphrases of what we ordinarily say. In the current jargon linking philosophy and logic, it is said that Quine uses "is" in its "existential" sense: the sense governed by the canonical use of the "existential quantifier." The implication is—and it seems quite correct—that Parmenides failed to grasp the difference between that existential sense of "is" (or something like it) and its predicative sense—that is, the sense in which the question I put a moment ago is pertinent, namely, "What is what? "—the sense of "is" in predicative position ("being red," "being round," and the like).
Parmenides seems to have misled himself into thinking (i) that "what is" ("existentially") cannot support any form of ("predicative") discourse about "it" that affirms change ("what is not"), and (ii) that "what is not" ("existentially") cannot be spoken of at all (either "existentially" or "predicatively"). I say Parmenides is wrong on both counts. Not everyone agrees. The philosophical tradition has struggled since that day to distinguish between at least the existential and the predicative senses of "is." Some would say—I certainly would—that Sherlock Holmes was ("is") a fictional character, "something" that does not and never did exist, but that, nevertheless, I can (counterfactually imagining Sherlock Holmes to exist) talk about him, mention him, and even say what is true of him (that he never married, for instance). If so, then, (i) it is entirely possible to speak (in the existential sense) of what does not exist, and (ii) it is also entirely possible to affirm (in the predicative sense) what is true of "it": without confusing what is actual and what is not actual and what changes and what does not change—and without producing paradox as a result. If so, then Parmenides's stern dictum is either false (in supposing that one cannot speak of what "is not" [existentially] or say anything of "it" [predicatively]), or false (in supposing that one cannot say of what "is" [existentially] that "it" changes [predicatively]), or preposterous (in supposing that one cannot ever say what is false—either existentially or predicatively).
Part of what is needed may be supplied by distinguishing between what "exists de re " and what "exists de dicto ." (These are meant as terms of art with respect to the existential sense of "exists.") Let us say that
(6.1) the existential sense of "exists" is a purely formal sense, indifferent to the distinction between "de re existence" and "de dicto existence."
(The "existential sense" of "exists" is a misnomer.) I suggest we treat (6.1) as no more than a terminological recommendation. The point of offering it, however, is this:
(6.2) formal or syntactic analyses of sentences entail no de re consequences; de re import is a function only of "interpreted" sentences,
where, by interpreted, I mean only: that feature of sentences (apart from their syntax) in virtue of which they are construed, when uttered, as conveying information about the actual, or some imagined, world.
On that reading, "exists de dicto " signifies, trivially, that what "exists" is no more than the grammatical referent of a given discourse ((6.1)), suited for predication—in the abstract space of that discourse —whereas "exists de re " (usually) signifies that what "exists" (de dicto ) may also, in some further (ontic and epistemic) sense, be discernible in the actual world . Clearly, there is no logical compulsion to concede that what "exists" de dicto also "exists" (because of that) de re —as if to say (as Searle seems to say)[2] that fictitious "entities" are a part (de re: if only a peculiar part) of the actual world. Nor is there any logical compulsion to say that whatever "exists" de re also "exists" de dicto . That might suggest the preposterous view that there is nothing that is actual about which we do not already know enough to have made determinate referential provision for, or that what is actual is made such by being spoken of "existentially."
But if these corrections are conceded, then they fall afoul of Quine's thesis. For, if I can speak of Sherlock Holmes without supposing that Holmes exists de re (is real: "is," in the sense Quine seem to favor), then, either (i) Quine is wrong to suppose that the "existential" sense of "is" (that he favors) must (for reasons beyond his own logical tastes) concern what actually exists (or is thereby taken to exist) de re, or (ii) in speaking of "any thing" in the de dicto sense intended, we are necessarily com-
mitted to the entailed claim that "it is" (also) de re (that it actually exists). That is a plain non sequitur . The existential sense of "exists " (or "is") is a purely grammatical sense, signifying "that about which" one is speaking—alternatively, the intentional sense of our discourse —is sometimes captured (grammatically) by the denotata of the sentences in use or the referents of our speech acts.
Quine never explains what the sense is, relative to (ii), to which in making predications of what we are speaking "about" (de dicto ) we necessarily, for purely syntactic reasons, commit ourselves, de re, as well. Is it a recommendation about how to view the canonical (syntactic) analysis of so-called "existential generalizations"? For instance: if I say "Some cats are fierce"—and if I agree with Quine about the standard formal representation of what is thus said, so that I am, in effect, committed to the truth of "($x ) (Cat x & Fierce x )"—is it also true that I am (must be) thereby committed (de re ) to there "being" at least one actual cat? Am I committed "existentially" in the de dicto sense alone (grammatically)? Or am I also committed to the "de re existence" of cats (their actual existence in the world)? And if I am committed in either way, on what grounds am I thus obligated? Is it contradictory or incoherent to say (in ordinary English), "Some unicorns are fierce" and believe (in so saying), or (even) actually say, that there are no unicorns (that no unicorns actually exist)? It certainly seems possible. Or, am I committed to unicorns in the de dicto sense (alone) when I predicate fierceness of "some" of "them "? The latter seems a ponderously worded but utterly vacuous consequence; the former seems arbitrarily strong—and false. (Clearly, Quine is bent on obviating any idiom in which we may be said to "intend" to be speaking "about" this or that—which might then claim to be able to serve as the value of a bound variable, although not because of the natural-language grammar by which the logical clarification may be standardly endorsed.)
It clearly won't help to say, "Some unicorns (although imaginary as far as our world is concerned) are fierce," because "they" exist in some "possible world" (other than our own), in virtue of which (somehow) we refer to them in our world. This looks very much like a Rube Goldberg device for referring to what we should otherwise say, tout court, was imaginary. (And what of "possible worlds"? Do they exist or are they real, or are they merely imagined to be real? Which, thus uttered, duplicates the original puzzle.)
My own recommendation is this. When introduced referringly, possible worlds[3] only "existde dicto, " that is, trivially: they "exist" in the
"existential sense" of "exists" ((6.1)) that I just assigned Quine's account (against his own interpretation). Thus I recommend that
(6.3) there are no "possible worlds," other than the actual world, that exist de re .
Some philosophers (Goodman, notably) insist that there are many actual worlds (though Goodman neglects to tell us how to individuate and identify them). Others (Kuhn, for instance) worry that, within the (one) actual world, there are many "different worlds" that may be demarcated (according to Kuhn: Priestley's "world" and Lavoisier's "world" at least, which Kuhn has no intention of construing in Gadamer's way). Still others (Lewis, for instance) hold that "possible worlds" are in some sense "real" (or at least not imaginary). As far as I can see, what is possible signifies what, (i) for predicative purposes, (ii) is (on independent grounds) actual, exists, or is real, or (iii), relative to what is (thus) actual, might exist or be real, or (iv) is (in accord with some idiom projected from the conceptual resources of constative discourse) conceptually compossible, that is, coherent and free of internal contradiction, paradox, or the like (in effect: relative to whatever is admitted to "exist de dicto ").
I cannot see how to prove, in any nontrivial or nonarbitrary way, that (6.3) is true or false: it seems to me to be no more than a prudent philosophical recommendation, an economy. I cannot see how, otherwise, to avoid the endless paradoxes that "possible-worlds" discourse generates. I regard such discourse as a conceptually dependent idiom, therefore. That is, I cannot see how "possible-worlds" talk can be detached, in any interpretively robust sense, from talk of what is "possible" relative to the actual world. I take this to be implied in imagining "possible worlds" counterfactually close to the actual world or closer than others—for instance, in adhering to the causal laws of our world but not to certain admitted facts about it (thinking of how, say, the moon might have been produced).
There seems to be no discernible syntactic difference between "Some cats are fierce" and "Some unicorns are fierce." It cannot (then) be said straightforwardly that (for "purely logical reasons") the first is true and the second false. Because, it may well be that "Some unicorns are fierce" is true, either (i) because (surprisingly) James Thurber knew something about the actual world the rest of us do not, or (ii) because, in spite of there not being any actual unicorns, "they" (the ones being referred to)
are fierce (de dicto ). It seems reasonable to say that we should not want the logical form of "Some unicorns are fierce" to change, magically, as a result of contingently discovering unicorns in the garden. It also seems reasonable to say that we can talk about imaginary unicorns, if we are careful.
This is obviously an overly busy way of speaking. Two findings are clear. For one:
(6.4) there is no incoherence or paradox in predications made of referents we suppose do not actually exist,
as in a deliberate fiction or in imagining something to exist that we believe does not.
We may recommend against notationally "entrenching" (in some supposedly "canonical" way), in the logical structure of sentences like "Some unicorns are fierce" but not like "Some cats are fierce," the familiar natural-language assumption (or intention) that, in speaking of fictitious things, we do not ever mean to commit ourselves to their actually existing. But our policy about formal notation need not affect or alter our ordinary linguistic habits—or the actual world, for that matter. If we suppose (with Quine) that the logical notation I've loosely employed for "Some unicorns are fierce" (involving "quantification," as Quine would say) should (or must ) be construed as entailing an "ontic commitment" (as he also says) to unicorns—one that expressly signifies that at least one unicorn actually exists (de re ) because (and, here, the weight of that "because" is quite uncertain) we have agreed to use a particular term (designating a member of a would-be set of things called unicorns) to designate a "value" (or a variable to which a set of "values" correspond) "bound" (as we say, with Quine) by the existential quantifier ("$ "), now taken to range over our representation of the sense of the ordinary English sentence "Some unicorns are fierce"—then (and here's the second finding):
(6.5) the syntactic representation of "ontic commitment" cannot be more than conventional.
This fits very nicely with what I have already shown, in chapter 2, regarding (2.4) and (2.5), and in chapter 3, regarding (3.10), which, taken together, argue that, although alethic and ontic considerations are inseparable, prioritizing the one over the other (epistemically) amounts
to advocating a form of cognitive privilege. (Quine might then be accused of an excessive zeal—of just the sort I claim to have found in Dummett.) We see, therefore, the potential danger of reading Quine's analysis of ontic commitment in too sanguine a way. I say it is a purely verbal and formal device, utterly lacking in ontic import by itself, or simply obscure regarding the import it acquires as a result of the larger philosophy in which it is embedded. It may be true that we cannot resist admitting (in general) that "something (or other) exists" (actually exists in the real world), but that is hardly because of a choice of logical notation; also, that hardly commits us to some unicorn existing (as opposed to something existing ). Quine has moved too quickly. The utterance "Something exists" strikes me as belonging to that set of informationally degenerate utterances , of which "Cogito ergo sum " is the most famous: those, that is, whose content never exceeds the information entailed by their being uttered.
I don't deny that we presuppose that something or other exists, but I cannot see that we are necessarily committed to the entailment (that some unicorns exist) as a consequence of employing (as in my illustration) the "existential" sense of "exists" ((6.5)). Furthermore, there is every reason to believe that the supposed assertion "Something (or other actually) exists" cannot but be logically derivative from the more robust (epistemically and ontically freighted) assertions and commitments of actual life. Singular assertions dominate market life, you see. (That was just the point of worrying Gettier-like counterexamples in the last chapter.)
This helps to confirm that
(6.6) we cannot determine what is actual, or what we take to be actual, solely from the syntax of what we utter;
and, as a consequence,
(6.7) ontic commitment, effected by the use of any canonical notation—for example, by uttering the existential quantifier ("$ ")—is equivocal: as between (i) conforming with the mere de dicto use of that notation and (ii) intending, by its use, to represent accurately, de re, some real-world belief.
On the fairest reading of Quine's notion, ontic commitment is (still contrary to Quine's own proposal) properly given by (ii); in (6.7) it does
not encumber the actual world or our actual commitment, but even that signifies only an intention to convey what one supposes to be actual. I can put this more provocatively:
(6.8) "ontic commitment," in sense (ii) of (6.7), is "intentional" and cannot be captured by the resources of sense (i), which is "informationally degenerate,"
in the sense of "intentional" in which one deliberately acts to satisfy sense (ii). (Effectively, this is the import of (3.10).) I take it that Quine's usage is itself "intentionally" motivated in this sense (although, of course, Quine's avowed intention—in his program for formulating a canonical notation—was to retire all the intentional constructions [in a different sense of "intentional"] of natural-language discourse of the sort Brentano thought he had captured).[4]
Logic, abstracted from the context of the normal use of natural language, in which language first acquires its "ontic commitment," has no ontic import of its own. This accords completely with the sense of (2.4), linking language and world indissolubly, but it also confirms (6.2). Hence,
(6.9) there is no uninterpreted syntactic relationship between natural languages and logic that determines ontic commitment.
The negation of (6.9) contradicts (6.8) and is incompatible with (3.1), which affirms that language is not an autonomous domain, as well as with (4.21), which makes ontic commitment—in fact, all truth-claims—interpretive.
Hence,
(6.10) no logical canon said to represent the "ontic commitments" of a natural language is more than an abstraction from natural-language use, just as the analysis of a natural language is no more than an abstraction from larger lingual practices.
This—theorem (6.10) or something close to it—is what I took Dummett to have arbitrarily opposed. Theorem (6.10) is, I believe, the master theme of Wittgenstein's conception of "forms of life" (Lebensformen ) of the post-Tractarian manuscripts. (It has taken a bit of labor to isolate that fact.) It is a specimen of the most profound modern analogue of
Aristotle's refusal to separate the forms of argument from the practices of natural-language rhetoric, except that Aristotle, as we have seen, opposes (2.1), the denial that reality necessarily has an invariant structure. Wittgenstein's thesis is: (i) the minimal doctrine consistent with (2.1) and (6.6); and (ii) a doctrine specifically in accord with the claims of symbiosis and holism and intransparency that are central to my own argument. Wittgenstein's notion is also the natural replacement for Kant's "constructed" picture of phenomena, under the condition just mentioned (the "post-Kantian" orientation), so long as we still lack an account of historicity. (Wittgenstein has almost nothing to say about history and, truth to tell, little to say about Lebensformen .)
These considerations bear, of course, on the resolution of the Gettier problem that surfaced in the previous chapter: there is no transparent, purely syntactic rendering of any of our(or commitments) about existence or reality or truth or knowledge. The Gettier problem is a genuinely profound problem if it is taken to embody and legitimate a philosophical policy, for
(6.11) logic, construed as an autonomous and uninterpreted discipline, sets no prior constraints on—indeed, has no particular relevance for—the analysis of lebensformlich discourse.
We see, therefore, that we have been proceeding by quite small steps toward the following straightforward finding:
(6.12) attributions of existence and reality are not merely alethic, logical, syntactic, or formal in any sense at all; they are inseparable from our constative powers intransparently "entrenched" in our Lebensformen .
By entrenched, I mean (adding to an earlier recommendation): (i) tacit, incompletely fathomable, within the practices of our Lebensformen ; (ii) made manifest by exercising our linguistic and lingual powers; (iii) judged in a "holist" sense to contribute to our society's continuing survival; (iv) hospitable, therefore, to determinate realist claims within that same holist space; and (v) rendered determinate only by reflexive interpretation (naturans: by "parsing"). (I seize the occasion to insist on the following usage as well: I say [entirely without argument] that any philosophy that is (i) an-archic, (ii) committed to symbiosis and intransparency, and (iii) disposed to construe our epistemic powers as "en-
trenched" in the sense just given, is [in my usage] an expression of [philosophical] pragmatism. Dewey is the exemplar.)[5]
I should perhaps take an additional moment to make a few further distinctions clear that bear on what has already been said. The distinction between de re and de dicto discourse (that is, discourse about reality and language) makes instant sense for anyone who thinks along Aristotle's lines or for anyone who accepts an externalism or a strong form of the correspondence theory of truth. For a theorist like Quine, there is really no way of distinguishing in principle between the two: any attempt to do so would violate Quine's treatment of the analytic/synthetic dogma (although there are always contingent uses that may be needed). Furthermore, the de re/de dicto issue is not the same as that regarding the distinction between the "material mode " and the "formal mode " of discourse, which both Quine and Carnap entertain.[6] The second is merely a difference in a "style" of discourse, a difference in two different ways of making the same assertions (regarding which both suppose the "formal mode" to be the more perspicuous). On the second view, to speak as if we were speaking of the parts of language or the parts of the real world ("semantics" and "metaphysics," say) is a façon de parler that does not affect the substance of what we say. When, therefore, Dummett prioritizes semantics over metaphysics, it looks as if he favors the first distinction (de re/de dicto ) rather than the second. Furthermore, the de re/de dicto distinction is usually invoked in speaking of necessity, or natures or essences, or existence, or in some related way. Quine clearly subordinates the first distinction to his preference for the "formal mode" regarding the second: hence, he speaks only of "ontic commitment." Theorists like (the later) Goodman and Lewis cannot concur, since the first admits many actual worlds and the second, many (robust) "possible worlds" of which the actual world is but one. I see no way of denying that "is" or "exists" is used, constatively, equivocally, in a way natural-language does not capture syntactically—which, as I've tried to show, Quine obscures unnecessarily. I think this signifies that there is a point to holding to the de re/de dicto distinction—in intentional terms. When, however, we speak of "natures" or "essences" in accord with that distinction, we usually mean to speak, respectively, of real essences and nominal essences in a sense akin to what, in their very different ways, Locke and Leibniz intended. There, too, the distinction has a use.
Let me now return to the original issue raised about the existential sense of "to be": Parmenides's confusion is now easier to resolve. For,
if Parmenides did not merely confuse external and internal negation (negation accommodating, respectively, the existential sense of "exists" and negation in the predicative sense: as, respectively, in the sentences, "it is not true that there are fierce cats" and "it is true that some cats are not fierce"), then Parmenides's doctrine must be entirely arbitrary, since it denies the very possibility of coherent discourse about change; or, if he had indeed confused the two, concluding (somehow) that "what is not" (does not exist) is tantamount to "what is not this or that or thus and so" (for instance, is not round, red, just, beloved—for any range of changeable predicables), then he has unnecessarily impoverished discourse in the deepest possible way. We owe it to Aristotle to have cleared up Parmenides's mistake: being-not-fierce (the "complement" of being-fierce ), for instance, is not the same as not existing at all (the denial that there is [there exists] a certain "a "); the difference is not a mere difference of predicates. It is entirely possible "to be" and "to be non-fierce"—without risking contradiction or incoherence. Parmenides was confused.
As Aristotle puts it, there's a world of difference between "being not this or that" (round, red, just, beloved) and "not being anything at all," that is, "not existing." There must be a third way between Parmenides's "two ways" (Truth and Opinion). That is what Aristotle means by hyle (matter), that in virtue of which what exists undergoes change, without ceasing to exist and without ceasing to be real while undergoing change. (Hyle, however, is a confused notion: it tries to treat an epistemic or grammatical matter as if it were entirely an ontic one.)
Aristotle has his own complex metaphysics, of course (which I have already sought to undermine by advancing (2.1), the denial of invariance). But if, with Aristotle, we concede that "primary substances" (ousiai, particular things) manifest "being" insofar as they have an invariant structure (are, say, instances of fixed natural kinds or species), and if such things manifest "nonbeing" (as well ), since they may be subject to change (kinesis or energeia )—for instance, in the way of generation and birth—then existing things may be real with regard both to "being" and "nonbeing"; for, as Aristotle says, "nonbeing" is not tantamount to "not being at all." Parmenides, he supposes, had thought they were the same.
We may treat Aristotle's recovery of this strategic distinction as an ancestral version of the distinction we require. But I warn you as well that we are not obliged to follow Aristotle (and could not now justify doing so) if we tried to construe our sense of "exists" and "is real" in
tandem with his notion of potentiality and actuality. The latter notion is clearly tied to the doctrine of the necessarily invariant structure of what is real (the denial of (2.1) and the affirmation of the "teleologism" of the natural).
Here, I must intrude a strenuous aside. By teleologism, I mean that theory of change according to which either (i) a "final cause, " the telos or end-state of a finite process, brings about that end-state because it is "actual" and real and effective as such through the entire potentiated process, or (ii) there is a continuum of novel and evolving "necessitations" serially effectuated through each and every (fully) actual phase of that (real) process, proceeding from any stage (of it) to the temporally next neighboring stage, without there being any final cause assignable (prospectively) to the entire continuum or to its aggregated stages.
The formula offered in (i), as by Aristotle (in Metaphysics and Physics ), presupposes a changeless "actual" nature by which the potencies of individual things (sharing that nature) are normally actualized. The formula offered in (ii) applies sui generis to the process of history, to (all the "parts" of) reality insofar as it (they) forms (form) an inclusive (actual) history. This is as close as I can come to fathoming what Hegel may have intended in the Phenomenology . The necessity it posits is historicized, ontically emergent, not lawlike (in the usual inductive sense), not analytic (in the logical sense), but such that, retrospectively and only retrospectively, viewed holistically from the vantage of each evolving stage (hence, "actual" or "actualized") and only thus, the continuous process is, in reality, one of self-realization—as of rationality or freedom—but not by way of prior potencies (in Aristotle's sense). Hegel's account is not "constative," I think, but "mythic" in a sense I introduce later.
I take the trouble to isolate the formula of (ii) because it is the master theme of nearly all twentieth-century teleologized forms of rational optimism and progress. (I find it for instance in Peirce, Popper, Habermas, and Putnam. I suggest that, without confirming the necessity posited, such optimisms are no more than arbitrary. That's to say, they are arbitrary ((2.1)).) Their rejection lays the ground for a robust form of relativism. Heidegger believes that Hegel's notion is an enormous sham, an ahistorical pretense to the effect that he (Hegel) subscribes to genuine historicity.[7] I think Heidegger is mistaken in this. But I admit I cannot find a plausible sense in which Hegel's thesis could be shown to be true or could be tested. Nevertheless, I am inclined to think Hegel may have offered what he took to be a conceptual model irresistible to human
reason reflecting on the phenomenal world under the form of an inclusive and real history. (I take Hegel's model to be heuristically intended. The would-be potentialities are the actualities of a new stage of history read back, teleologically, into the past.) History, for Hegel, is a certain contingent temporal change narratized under the guise of necessity and mythically assigned as the evolving reflection of an all-encompassing "subject" (Geist ). If Hegel means to speak literally of "historical necessity," I confess I cannot see his argument.
In any case, a better account of existence and reality (than Aristotle's) is offered by Peirce, although, for my present purpose, I must (in the same spirit) detach it from the details of Peirce's complex philosophy (which is also teleologized). (I am attracted to part of it, and I am strongly opposed to part of it; but that is neither here nor there.) What Peirce isolates in an extraordinarily clear way is the sense the notion of existence conveys of the brute "resistance" or "opposition" of the things of (and in) the actual world: their causal, affective, effective, reactive, resistant powers vis-à-vis us or other things. "Resistance" is not a criterion of what exists, but it fixes the primitive idea underlying every fruitful theory or criterion of what does exist ("what there is"—the de re "existential" sense I was worrying in Quine's company a moment ago). Quine's view seems tepid alongside Peirce's, although Peirce's does not quite settle the deeper question of precisely what, distributively, does exist. That is, on Peirce's view, existence is "attributed" to the "brute" world, but what is "brute" is not discerned in any privileged way, it is interpretively encumbered.
On Peirce's view, it's clear that numbers and universals don't exist. (Nor do "possible worlds.") They don't "resist" us in the unyielding way a wall does, say. That hardly settles the question of whether numbers or universals are real . They may be real (according to one theory or another), but it would take a version of what Peirce calls "Platonic nominalism" to support the strenuous claim that numbers and universals are not only real but existent as well. The expression "as well" signifies a possible equivocation on the meaning of "is" ("what is," "what there is").
Quine does not equivocate in this regard. He answers the question "what there is" solely in the "existential" sense, the sense of the existential quantifier, although he is not clear (he is downright equivocal, even vague) about whether the "existential" should be construed de re or de dicto —or what that means. His analytic strategy is always de dicto, but his philosophical intent is clearly de re . (That is the point of
his speaking of ontic "commitment" rather than of "what there is" simpliciter .)
Peirce's idea, if I understand it rightly, is that, granted we exist, whatever else exists in the world resists us (or other things), or would resist us (or other things), in the "brute" sense sketched. The intuition is that we would not be able to ignore what exists, as we moved through the world, but that sense may be easily extended. (Think of the micro-theoretical world.) Peirce calls this Secondness: a brute feature of things, taken dyadically, that cannot be reduced to anything else. Existence, for Peirce, is, therefore, the manifesting of "Secondness," ascribed, epistemically, on our awareness of "resisting" (or being "resisted" by) other things (bumping into them, moving them). Cannily, Peirce isolates the distinction of Secondness from "Thirdness, " which signifies primarily the interpreted, "constituted" nature of the intelligible world, but he never fails to acknowledge that Secondness is itself discerned only within the space of Thirdness. I regard this as a much-enriched analogue of Berkeley's robust sense that there is a "brute" aspect of the world we perceive when we open our eyes, in spite of the fact that what is "externally" real is, in some sense, an idea in God's mind.[8]
I like the idea. I find it compelling, sensible, uncluttered, hospitable to indefinitely many alternative ontologies of "what there is." Peirce clarifies what we should mean by saying that something exists, without thereby settling the question of what actually exists. Hence, I recommend we combine the main force of Aristotle's and Peirce's separate views (while avoiding commitment to their special philosophies: invariance, in Aristotle's case; cosmic mind, in Peirce's).
Causality and agency surely count among our best intuitions here. There is no need for greater precision, simply because we are not looking for an invariant or indubitable criterion of existence, merely a clue regarding the plausibility of competing views. Let me put some reasonable theorems before you, therefore. For one,
(6.13) ascriptions of existence are validated and legitimated on the strength of interpretations of what "resists" us and other things in the world.
Peirce speaks here of Thirdness; Davidson and Rorty, derogatorily, of tertia . Putnam, as a Peircean of sorts, defends tertia .
Paradigmatically, existence is a dyadic notion, as Peirce remarks. Nothing is said to "exist" tout court, except, derivatively, in the context
of some interpreted "resistant" space. To say that God exists, for instance, is (apparently) to say that he created the world in which "resistant" things obtain, or that Lucifer "resisted" him, or some such thing; to deny God's existence is to deny all such putative facts. Hence, it is reasonable to hold:
(6.14) causality and effective agency obtain only among existent things;
and:
(6.15) being legitimative, terms like "exists," "is real," "is actual," "is imaginary," "is fictional," "is," and the like cannot be first-order predicates, but they can and do function as predicates in first-order discourse .[9]
Theorem (6.15) will require further scrutiny. Keep it in mind. I hasten to add that I have not, of course, defined "causality" or "agency." Here, what is important to emphasize is that causality and agency "implicate" existent (real) things, are dyadic notions in the sense in which they involve brute resistance (Secondness, in Peirce's idiom). Nevertheless, dyadic relations, Secondness, causal relations, and effective agency are all, like the executive notion of the "external" (of which they are instances), ontically located in some more complex ("internal") symbiotized space (4.11). (I shall return to Peirce's notion of Thirdness in a moment.)
In the sense being developed, we are easily led to concede that
(6.16) individual things exist: ourselves preeminently, that is, individuatable, resistant "things."
The sense of (6.16) plainly favors what Aristotle calls "primary substances" (ousiai ), without having to adopt Aristotle's theories about ousiai: that they possess invariant structures or essences, for instance, that the processes of change they exhibit accord with the logic of "potentiality" and "actuality," that they are inherently directed teleologically to actualizing their essential natures. It also favors Peirce's notion of Secondness, without obliging us to adopt Peirce's full-scale ontology of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, or the brooding notion of cosmic "thinking" apart from human agency. One is certainly tempted to say that it follows from (6.16) that
(6.17) existent things = material things.
Theorem (6.17) is tautological, if we understand material to signify (as I suggest we should) no more than "capable of resistance." Even Aristotle's Unmoved Mover is "material" in this sense. So is the biblical God. (I shall contrast the "material" and the "physical" in a moment.)
Resistance, then, is the putative brute power of existent things contingently encountered as such in the world: derivatively, it is simply our sense of what is undeniably in the same world we inhabit (along the lines, as I say, of Berkeley's sense of opening our eyes and being unable to construe as imaginary what strikes us as palpable and present and cannot be ignored).[10] It is a primitive notion, certainly not criterial, basically pretheoretical, yet theoretically posited; it explains the sense in which the world, although "artifactual" (symbiotized), is also the gathering of those things that we find ("indicatively") the existence of impossible to deny—the things that cannot be swept out by mere inventive interpretation. Resistance is brute, (i) in the epistemic ("phenomenal" or even "phenomenological") sense of being palpably encountered, resistant to the possibility of being denied existence, being explained away (although that, of course, is not a suitable criterion of what does exist), and (ii) in the ontic sense that existence itself (as dyadic) cannot be entirely subsumed as a mere posit within some interpretive scheme of the world ("triadic," as Peirce would say: a mere form of Thirdness). (But I see this as exposing the extraordinarily limp sense in which Quine speaks of existence.) In fact, these distinctions catch up the dialectical connections between naturalism and phenomenology and realism and idealism explored in the previous chapter. (It is for this reason that causality need not be "nomological," lawful or lawlike; causality implicates what exists, whereas nomologicality implicates the interpretation of what is real.) The "brute," I must emphasize, has no evidentiary force, no power to confirm or disconfirm. (It certainly has no "originary" role.)
I am prepared to consider strengthening or extending (6.16), but no ground has been given for doing so. For instance, I see no reason for supposing that an ontology of events, replacing an ontology of material things, something like ousiai, must be ruled out a priori .[11] Such an ontology has its inconveniences, but some philosophers have explored the possibility. Theorem (6.17) certainly does not mean that what exists possesses only physical properties. Physicalism —at least the strongest version of what, in the current philosophical literature, is meant by "physicalism" (that which exists are only physical things possessing only
physical properties)—does not follow from (6.17). Characterized thus, physicalism remains an open question. Correspondingly, "material" (or, "material thing") signifies only that existent things are formed, insofar as they are complex or composed of parts, in a way that involves "matter" (in a sense akin to that of Aristotle's hyle and Peirce's Secondness, except for the caveats noted).
This, as we now understand matters, usually means that existent things do have physical properties, although not necessarily only physical properties. There's the straightforward reason for opposing any idiom that declares that numbers and universals exist (except in accord with our term of art—"exists de dicto, " which is to say, do not, as such, exist de re at all). Lacking "matter," they cannot be located spatiotemporally, they cannot enter into causal relations, they cannot "behave" in the resistant way (in the same world in which we exist). The same may (perhaps) be said of God, in the biblical sense. This points to the clever reason the biblical God is "supernatural." (He makes himself felt through his creation.) So, too, are Frege's numbers! In any case, it is not conceptually impossible to extend the claim of existence to numbers, classes, kinds, universals, or God, but it is (I think) uneconomical and philosophically unnecessary. I see no reason to press the point further.
Conceding this much, we may go on to consider reality . First of all, surely,
(6.18) what exists is real.
"Reality" must be a more inclusive category than "existence." It would be anomalous to deny that what exists is real. But it is also clear that the real cannot be confined to what exists—if, for instance, we oppose saying that the properties of existent things also exist. Propertied things, not properties (whatever that may now mean), manifest resistance and are individuatable. Part of Parmenides's difficulty seems to have depended on failing to keep these distinctions clear. For reasons akin to (6.18), we should then not deny that
(6.19) the "properties" of existent things are real.
Of course, just as the definition of "exists" says nothing about what exists, so, too, the definition of "real" says nothing about the "nature" of real properties. Nevertheless, theorems (6.18) and (6.19) specify what is "real."
That question returns us to the "problem of universals." In Peirce's hands, it obliges us to consider (i) whether there are "real generals," whether the fact that general predicates may in principle apply to plural things (existent things, even fictional things, depending on how we treat "ontic commitment") signifies that the real predicables they designate are, in reality, general, or whether they may or must be construed in an altogether different way, and (ii) whether, if "generality" is real, it is also true that "real generals" exist (that is, whether universals exist de re ).
Peirce says that real generals exhibit Thirdness, which relates predicates to his attractive theory of signs (the exemplars of "Thirdness"); but we may, more neutrally, see in Peirce's Thirdness an acceptance of something very much like the doctrine of symbiosis (or the inherent interpretability of what is symbiotized) introduced earlier, for instance at (4.8)–(4.9): that is, the thesis that language and world, and cognizing subjects and cognized objects, are indissolubly united to form the space within which constative discourse alone obtains and has point ((4.11)). That is, the ubiquity of Thirdness (in Peirce's sense) corresponds (at least in part) to what I have been calling "symbiosis." (I adopt it as a term of art, in that sense.) But I hasten to add that Peirce construes Thirdness as operative in nature apart from human interpretation (or interpretive "constitution")—hence, as somehow the work of a very shadowy cosmic mind. In this sense, Peirce is not entirely a "Kantian" and not entirely wedded to what I am calling symbiosis.
Peirce's extraordinarily clever point (which he offers against Hegel) is that the distinction of Secondness cannot be merely absorbed within the terms of Thirdness (as Peirce thinks—I believe wrongly—Hegel believed),[12] but that Secondness, which accommodates the requisite "external" relationship between subject and object (hence, the individuation of existent things) also constrains Thirdness. "Real" Thirds manifest Secondness, Peirce thinks, and "existent" Seconds, Thirdness. Extraordinary economy! But what does all that mean for us? I think it means at least that symbiosis must yield, somewhere, a working distinction between Secondness and Thirdness. To fail in that is to lose our grip on "objectivity." But so saying is merely to admit the ineliminability of the "brute" world: it says nothing about "it" in any determinate ontic or epistemic sense.
The history of philosophy amply confirms that the principal objection to admitting "real generals" has been the following worry: if they are admitted to be real, must they also (or something on which they depend)
be conceded to exist? Peirce shows quite elegantly that that consequence need not follow. The trick is this. We must be prepared to affirm:
(6.20) what is real, but does not exist, cannot be real apart from what does exist.
That leaves but one option:
(6.21) except for what exists, what is real are the properties, relations, states, and the like of existent things: only what is predicable of existent things can be real.
One imagines it is merely a prejudice of contemporary nominalists that they resist admitting (as existents) "abstract particulars"—numbers, for instance. But there are excellent reasons for insisting on such a policy, without addressing predication, namely: (i) what exists must be "material" ((6.17)), must "resist" other things in the world; (ii) what is real cannot be real apart from what exists ((6.20)); (iii) numbers (and other would-be abstract particulars) would have to be admitted to exist if we acknowledged that they were real (in their separate world, as Frege and Popper concede); and (iv) no systematic advantage thought to be gained by admitting numbers to be real (as well as other abstract "entities") is lost by insisting that their "reality" is conceptually bound to the existence of something else —the material world (or the achievements of science). This, I believe, is the undeveloped motivation of Mill's and Quine's "empiricist" treatment of mathematics and logic. It leads to the powerful finding:
(6.22) logic and mathematics ultimately address a radically abstracted subset of the real predicables ascribed to what exist.
Theorem (6.22), like (6.21), conveys no epistemic import at all: it serves only to distinguish (in the ontic sense) the difference between the use of "exists" and the use of "real." (Notice, by the way, that the mention of "a subset" of [mathematical] predicables no longer conveys, as it would for Quine, more than a façon de parler; for "ontic commitment" now means "commitment" in the benign de dicto sense.) Furthermore, there is an oddity among the dominant natural languages that easily misleads us: we nominalize what we predicate of existent things—as properties, attributes, qualities, predicables. But if we see matters thus, we need not
suppose that properties are more than the (grammatically) nominalized denotata of whatever we predicate of what exists (or of other suitably specified referents). Thus, we say that red is a property (perhaps redness, then, is a "universal"), when we merely (mean to) affirm that Peter's balloon is red. Here you have another reason for retaining the de re/de dicto distinction.
It should be clear that the denial of the existence of numbers in no way settles the question of whether there are "real generals" (whether generality itself is real )—a fortiori, whether numerical properties are real. The nominalist has missed the import of his own intervention.[13] He confuses the matter of the existence of numbers with that of the reality of general attributes —including (of course) attributes of the numerical kind. Strange to say: the nominalist's thesis is a muddle that cannot fail to remind us of Parmenides's muddle.
The contemporary nominalist (Goodman, preeminently), holding that numbers "are not" (do not exist), somehow supposes that that settles the question of whether numerical properties also "are not" (are not real)! Obviously, there is a gap in the argument. Contemporary nominalists (like Goodman and the early Quine) worry, it is true, primarily about whether abstract entities (numbers, classes, kinds) exist . (Quine worries much less than Goodman.) But there are also the ancient nominalists (Ockham, preeminently), who worry rather about whether "generals" (general predicables) are either real or exist . The first kind of nominalist does not address the questions of the second, but the reverse is not true.
If you now recall what was offered in chapter 3 regarding predication—in particular (3.12)–(3.14), which affirm that predication depends upon, is embedded or entrenched in, and manifests, the consensual practices of linguistically apt societies—then one sees that it is not necessary and not reasonable to deny that, in some sense, there are "real generals." There must be : given the spontaneous flow of successful linguistic exchange that extends general predicates beyond any conceivable initial paradigms, nominalism cannot but be bankrupt. (That was a part of chapter 3's argument.) Put very simply: you cannot explain linguistic behavior without explaining predication; you cannot explain predication without explaining the apt use of general predicates; you cannot explain general predicates without admitting real generality; you cannot account for real generals without admitting what we (now) mean by "exists" and "real"; and you cannot account for such linguistic behavior without attention to the enabling Lebensformen, by conforming to which referential and predicative success is vouchsafed.
"Real generals" (the phrase is Peirce's) means, I suggest, that generality is real. By that, I mean no more than that predicates, used in valid predications, regarding what exists, designate what is real. But (real) generality is itself nothing but the joint or multiple predicability of what a predicate rightly predicates (in constative discourse) of plural (existent) things. It is not, as such, explanatory in any epistemically relevant sense. Various and many things, we say, are red, but there is nothing (existing apart, denumerable) that particular things somehow "share," "participate in" (as the usual account of Plato's Forms has it), when it is true that this and that are red.
The linguistic clue—namely, that "is red" is no more than a "part" of a sentence, something that is not even such except in its functional role within a well-formed sentence—confirms that what predicates "designate" (properties ) are no more than the nominalizations of what, in the real world, answers to true predications. The best we seem to be able to say is this: it is existing things' being F that true predications signify: as in, "Those balloons are red, but these are not." There is no F -ness, but things (really) are and can be F . For the same reason, things cannot have "being" or "reality," though they can of course be real—in the predicative sense. Being is not a first-order predicable, as I have said; even in being a predicable, there is nothing that exists or is real, apart from a predicable's predicable function, which we invoke in predicative discourse and thought. (This answers, I believe, both Strawson's subtle questions about subjects and predicates and the medieval puzzles about universals.)[14]
The modern nominalist is wrong on two counts: first, in supposing that the admission of real generals commits us to their existence; second, in supposing that there is a viable way of denying that predicative generality is real. If, then, we introduce the (old) term universals as a term of art, as signifying "abstract particulars" or "nonindividual existents"—those would-be entities nominalized from what otherwise may be predicated of what exists, but are now themselves candidates for existence—we may concede (as a direct consequence of the gathering argument) that
(6.23) universals do not, and cannot, exist.
Between the admission of (3.12)–(3.14) and the grounds for advancing (6.23), all the classical parties to the dispute about universals can be defeated: nominalists and conceptualists, because they suppose either
that there are no real generals since universals don't exist (the thesis of the "nominalists") or that, although there are universals, they exist only in the mind (the thesis of the "conceptualists"), and so-called realists as well, who simply hold that universals do exist ante rem (the "Platonists"), in re (the "Aristotelians"), or post rem (the "conceptualists" again). (Conceptualism is a somewhat labile category, as a comparison of Abelard and Duns Scotus confirms.) Peirce, I should say, failed to grasp satisfactorily that the defeat of nominalism and conceptualism (on his reading) had nothing to do with denying that a proper answer to the question of real generals could (and would) concede an essential role to the way the human mind functions—not some cosmic mind functioning as a deus ex machina invoked to ensure the independent reality of "generals." (Peirce clearly confuses the epistemic and ontic aspects of "generals.") Also, of course, conceptualism is incompatible with symbiosis.
Finally, along related lines, we may take note of the fact that, in the philosophical jargon from Parmenides to the present, one hears it said that what "exists," or is "real," "has being ." It was in fact Parmenides's haste in theorizing about "being" that misled him about the distinction between "exists" and "is real"—which, of course, Aristotle corrected by distinguishing (in effect) between nonbeing (the state of being subject, as such, to change, or the continuing condition of whatever continues to exist as it changes) and not being (the mere absence of existent things). It now turns out (if we insist on the term, inasmuch as its use is widespread) that:
(6.24) what exists is a being —one among a plurality of denumerable beings.
This means that "being" (or "beings") is, as a term of art, used only distributively.
It is worth remarking that "nonbeing" also bears on the ancient distinction between complementary properties (whatever, inclusively, is, as a property, merely other than whatever a determinate predicate designates: "nonred" as opposed to "red," say) and contrary properties (whatever, within some theoretically specified set of alternative properties—in respect of color, say—is other than a given determinate property but is itself similarly determinate: "blue," say, within the range of the "nonred," as opposed to "red"). Greek philosophy seems to have favored contraries where, as with Plato and the Presocratics, it introduces schemes of "opposites" in order to understand change ("Hot"
and "Cold," for instance, or "Moist" and "Dry") as articulations of nonbeing. The Buddhists, by contrast, if I understand them rightly, introduce (not altogether unlike the Taoists) some predicatively undifferentiated source (sunyatta:not a void in the sense of "not being" and not expressible either in complementary or contrary terms) within the holist (undifferentiated) space of which complementaries and contraries play their transient role.[15]
It is also just barely possible, of course, to conjecture about what might be meant by "being," taking the term without any qualification whatsoever—"Being" (as the typographical convention has it), as Heidegger's enormous effort in Being and Time claims to explore. The answer (against Heidegger) is this: whatever we say about "Being" will be derivative from whatever we say about plural "beings." At best, Being (Sein )—lacking number, lacking attributes, lacking a determinate "nature"—cannot, except metaphorically or by abstraction, be said (as Heidegger does say) to be "the ground" of "beings" (Seiende ). Remember: on the argument given just above, what is real is real only relative to (what may be rightly predicated of) what exists. Otherwise, the assignment is patently a form of privilege. Actually, Heidegger's program does involve prioritizing (what he calls) "ontological" inquiry over "ontic" inquiry, that is, discerning the "internal relation" between "Being" and "beings" as distinct from making "objective" truth-claims among ("externally related") beings. There is a curious sense (which the Kyoto Buddhists have pursued) in which Heidegger's Sein has been assimilated to sunyatta, or vice versa. (I cannot pursue the matter further. But I turn, in chapter 8, to a larger issue that bears on Heidegger's extravagance.) In any case, it is conceptually incoherent to treat the "relation" between "Being" and "beings" as epistemically prior to distinctions regarding plural "beings"—"ontic" and "ontological" distinctions, for instance, as Heidegger has it. The result is that, contrary to what Heidegger clearly intends, there can be no principled distinction between the usual discursive properties attributed to individual things ("ontic") and those properties attributed to the same things "in virtue of" their first manifesting (in some sense) the more primordial "relation" of Sein and Dasein ("ontological").
One final question may be ventured. (I have touched on it briefly.) It is nearly canonical to say, with Kant (as in his discussion of the proofs for the existence of God), that "existence" is not a predicate.[16] Kant's charge is certainly justified in a way, but in a way it is not. For instance, it is entirely natural to say (usually in a way meant to be emphatic):
"There are coelacanth. They were thought to be extinct, but live specimens were discovered in 1938. They exist ." Now, there is no way to treat the sentence "There are coelacanth" as ill-formed, but then it does seem reasonable to construe the "are" in that sentence as at least a predicative use of "exists": viz. "($x ) (Coelacanth x & Existent x )." This shows again how unsatisfactory Quine's formal treatment of "ontic commitment" is. Notice, please, that if we elect to construe Quine's "existential" use of quantifiers as having only de dicto import, then we are pretty well obliged to concede that "exists"—in the de re sense, in natural-language contexts—is fairly construed as predicative. (Refusing that possibility, I suggest, leads to worse extravagances.)
A moment's reflection should convince the reader that the quantificational paraphrase of "exists" (Quine's option) obscures rather than informs the criterial question. Certainly, Quine nowhere explains in a sustained way just how alternative schemes of "ontic commitment" are to be appraised. Quine actually obscures the fact that prioritizing "holophrastic" sentences over "parsed" terms violates the doctrine of the "indeterminacy of translation." The truth is, Quine is "ontically committed" by that disjunction, though he denies it.
Construing "exists" predicatively confirms that the pertinent judgment is essentially "interpretive" and that the would-be raw data are "intransparent." But it is also true that the question of "real generals" (as with first-order perceptual discrimination) does not directly arise with the use of any of the "ontic" predicates. That is, mere "ontic" predicates are not descriptive. Oddly, then, these terms appear to fit both the quantificational and the predicative reading. Something is being missed.
Our formal paraphrase clearly raises the paradox Kant had in mind in asking us to distinguish between an imaginary hundred Thaler and a real hundred Thaler . It can't be the case that there "are" two numerically distinct things—both, hundred dollar bills—indistinguishable in all general respects except that one happens "to be" real and the other happens "to be" imaginary! That would oblige us to think of real and imaginary hundred dollar bills as distinct species within a common genus. That won't do at all. (It would mean that an "imaginary" hundred dollar bill did exist—but only as imaginary!)
"Real," in the sense of "exists" ((6.18)), cannot serve as a (first-order) predicate truly ascribed to things in addition to the usual first-order (descriptive) predicates ("round," "red," "just," "beloved"). Although "Coelacanth exist" is syntactically well-formed, it is not predicatively
informative about existent things (descriptive of them) by way of the mere use of "exists." It implies, in a fully predicative sense, only that there are as yet unspecified (real) properties that (existent) coelacanth possess. Hence,
(6.25) predicatively construed, "exists" and "real" and similar "ontic" expressions (or ontic predicates ) are descriptively vacuous (not predicatively informative in any first-order sense);
and
(6.26) the descriptive meaning of no first-order predicate is affected or altered in any way by the attribution (to the same referent) of any ontic predicate ("imaginary" or "real," for instance).
Alternatively put,
(6.27) predicatively construed, "exists" and "real" and similar "ontic" expressions cannot but be second-order predicates, even if they are uttered in first-order discourse.
(By descriptive, I mean no more than that feature of predicates in virtue of which they are confined to first-order discourse: are perceivable or suitably linked to what are perceivable, are subject to change for instance, are of a physical nature, and the like. The distinction will have another hearing in chapter 11, where I consider values as predicates.) For present purposes, it is enough to say that descriptive predicates = first-order predicates. Notice, by the way, that second-order predicates, which by definition are not descriptive—ontic predicates, for instance—may be coherently used in first-order discourse. The distinction is critical for the discussions of the final chapter. I suggest, for instance, that, as a second-order predicate, "exists" is evidentially supported by reference to first-order grounds regarding Secondness. The account is rather trim as a result.
Theorem (6.27) is an interesting finding, because it shows why questions of existence and reality and truth cannot be detached from the second-order legitimative concerns of philosophy . Hence, the arguments of the postmodernists are instantly rendered incoherent. Finally:
(6.28) inherently, natural-language discourse is philosophically encumbered.
We cannot, therefore, escape the philosophical import of our discourse ((1.5)). We cannot treat philosophy as "therapy," in Wittgenstein's sense. We cannot be coherent postmodernists. To speak of what exists and is real is already to implicate the lesson of (6.28). Observe as well that the foregoing argument is intended to show only that a heterodox reading of "exists" is both coherent and philosophically instructive and definitely not ruled out by the force of any would-be canon. On the contrary, it confirms the reasonableness of entertaining alternative philosophical strategies. For instance,
(6.29) the rigor of ontology is not weakened in any way by construing its truth-claims in accord with a relativistic logic.
A further question suggests itself, but I shall only mention it here. (I shall make a brief allusion to it later.) To say that particular things exist, in the sense I have favored, is to say that they are determinate (or determinable) with respect to number (read predicatively). But that, it should be said, does not ensure or entail or require (for the sake of coherence) that what (in first-order discourse) is predicable of them is also, in all cases, determinate . By number, read as a predicate, I understand (i) that predicate (or predicable) (ii) admissible in first-order discourse, (iii) that corresponds to the individuation of particular things—which, you remember, was not a matter that could be decided predicatively at all. That is to say:
(6.30) number, read as a predicate, signifies the determinate individuation of particular things; it sets no constraints on the determinateness or indeterminacy of (other) first-order predicables (for instance, "natures").
Theorem (6.30) will, as we shall see, have an important inning in speaking of cultural entities . It has a corresponding importance in Peirce's system, since, for Peirce, real predicables involve Thirdness—in effect: interpretability. It comes as a surprise, then, that
(6.31) the determinateness of individuation does not entail the determinateness of the "natures" of individuated things—nor, a fortiori, the determinateness of any of their properties.
I shall want to make considerable use of (6.31). For the moment, let me simply say that by determinateness I mean (i) the effective resolution of questions of individuation or of predication with respect to what is individuated, (ii) in accord with the principle of excluded middle. Indeterminacy, then, is similarly defined, except that, by (ii'), excluded middle is abandoned or restricted for cause. Hence, it is quite possible that the individuation of a thing be determinate, although the descriptive attributes predicated of what is determinately individuated may remain (relatively) indeterminate. Peirce effectively acknowledges a similar possibility by treating "real generals" as "triadic": hence, as made (increasingly) determinate only (as Peirce says) by interpretation; or (as I prefer to say) as open to being interpreted and continually reinterpreted because, in addition to being indeterminate, they signify what is culturally significant (Hamlet, for instance).
Peirce's idea is that what is interpreted becomes determinate, without thereby precluding residual or further indeterminacy. I agree, but I depart from Peirce here. For what is interpreted may (I say) be interpreted in an open-ended way, in alternative and emergent ways, and in "in-congruent" ways, and particular interpretations may themselves be reinterpreted in the same sense. Peirce also usefully admits that determinate things may not be determinate everywhere with respect to the application of the principle of noncontradiction; that is, determinate things may be objectively vague (e.g., as in being "bald"). It is easy to see that such a view is most plausible on the assumption of a symbiotized world in which interpretation (Thirdness, in Peirce's idiom) effectively forms ("constitutes") the real things of the world in ways that are of increased determinateness. The fruitfulness of these possibilities will be seen to best advantage among cultural entities. But Peirce also construes these processes (with respect to indeterminacy and vagueness) as irreversible and quite robust; that is, he was firmly committed to a kind of cosmic evolutionism (or teleologism) and did not distinguish in principle between physical and cultural worlds. We need not follow him in these regards. (But the matter bears decisively on Aristotle's archism.) In any case, a powerful consequence follows, namely,
(6.32) the reality of "generals" lies in the (symbiotized) fluency of natural-language predication, not separately, in the mind or in the world; that is, its reality is lebensformlich .
Hence,
(6.33) predicative generality is inherently informal, consensual, not criterial; alternatively put, predicative criteria themselves presuppose the fluency of our lebensformlich practice.
The ancient quarrel about universals is a great confusion; we need no more than "real generals" to secure objectivity. But then, "real generals" have no criterial function either; they are no more than a (nominalized) shadow thrown by objective discourse. That is, if we admit objective truth-claims, then predication must have a realist function. In that sense (alone), there are "real generals." But there are none that can be antecedently discerned, in virtue of which objectivity may be conferred. Given the ubiquity of predication, there is no way to deny "real generals." They have, however, no separable epistemic role. They are implicated in the lebensformlich viability of natural-language discourse.[17] Put another way:
(6.34) real generality is entailed by the symbiotized condition of objective truth-claims; that is, it can be affirmed holistically or, if distributively, then only trivially and parasitically.
I hasten to assure you, in closing this particular chapter, that the analysis of "what is" has produced the greatest philosophical extravagances. Some confusing specimens have surfaced in my account—for instance, regarding Parmenides, Aristotle, the medievals, Hegel, Peirce, Frege, Heidegger, Quine, Goodman, and Lewis. I could easily have mentioned others. I recommend the sparest possible policy regarding the theorems concerned with the meaning of "exists" and "real."
Chapter VII
Identity and Individuation
There is a radical strain in what I have collected up to this point, although what we have is still on the mild side. Certainly, the discussion of the preceding chapter, which moves toward its close by conceding that "existence" may, without paradox, be treated predicatively and that ordinary language is already philosophically freighted and cannot be relieved of that burden, goes contrary to familiar lines of theorizing. But I intend to press the argument along lines that are still more strenuous, as I hinted at the very end of the last chapter. Were the new turn allowed, a fundamental revision in certain well-entrenched ways of viewing philosophy would follow, and that, I suggest, would prepare the ground for even more radical possibilities.
You will have noticed that, in speaking against Heidegger's way of legitimating inquiry regarding Sein —not against the potential fruitfulness of reflecting on "the question of Being"—I said that since Being lacked "number," it lacked "(a) nature." There you have the key to what we must now explore, and what may serve to introduce a bolder line of speculation.
It's an intriguing fact that much of medieval theorizing about God was occupied with this baffling question: How could God's "being" be confined by number and nature without diminishing God's grandeur, or without God's being limited by anything in the order of nature itself? The use of any predicate, it was thought, generated a query regarding the congruity between that attribution and the "nature" of what any predicate could be applied to. Deny a would-be "being" number and
nature, and (it appears) you deny that it exists ((6.16)); admit that it exists, and (it appears) you admit that it is limited by the nature it has, as opposed to the natures other things possess (which it specifically lacks, and generally will lack). Furthermore, particular (material) things are limited by other things having the properties they have—even if they share the same properties ((6.17)). For instance, the volume one person's body fills in an elevator precludes another person's body from occupying that same space. The trick, in Christian philosophy, is to understand the sense in which "attributes" may be ascribed to God without God's having a nature or being one of a number of "beings" that share the same generic attribute (in precisely the same sense in which, in Quine's pretty phrasing, predicates exhibit "divided reference"). For, of course,
(7.1) natures are predicables .
That is,
(7.2) plural beings are intelligible only if, among other beings, they can be assigned "number" and "nature"—privatively; only if they can be individuated and identified; only if they can be referred to and can support predications.[1]
The question of how God may be treated predicatively (without limiting His "being" or powers) is certainly an engaging one; we owe the medievals a word about their athletic feat in reconciling discourse about the ordinary world and what they suppose distinguishes the Creator. But even the medievals recognized that the question has a certain directionality: we must make sense of the "natures" and predicables of individuatable (existing) things and then consider how that idiom may be adjusted to make sense of discourse about God. We cannot proceed in the opposite direction. We must begin, as St. Thomas observes, from what is most familiar. In any case, predicates are human artifacts even if we suppose there are predicables that apply exclusively to God.
In a way, this is the same puzzle that bedevils Parmenides and Plato. Applied "opportunistically," the theologically inspired speculation begins to presume, philosophically, that it can reach to certain discoveries about divinity. That is, from the confinement of the phenomenal world, philosophers like Aquinas supposed that they could discern the de re necessities on which the entire created order itself was originally made intelligible. But it is hard to see how such conjectures could possibly
escape the charge of cognitive privilege. If archism fails (2.3), claims of necessary existence cannot be compelling.
In an eccentric way—which I believe implicitly makes the same point about God and the created order but deliberately chooses not to dwell on it—Heidegger says: "Being is not a being."[2] Similarly, Parmenides treats Being as "one," which is not to attribute number to Being, since the "One" signifies the inadmissibility of plural number within the space of Being. The medievals deny that God has a "nature" in the sense in which plural beings have natures and are individuated with respect to those natures. God is "one," they hold, in the sense that there is no pertinent respect in which any distinction may be introduced, bearing on God's "attributes," that first applies to the created order. God is not, it is said, ontically limited by his own creation. (There may be a need, some supposed, for distinctions regarding God's being triune, but that, it was said, does not bear on attributing a "nature" to God.)
God, as Aquinas says, is self-subsistent (ipsum esse subsistans ),[3] which apparently entails that no predication made of God (or God's being—his "aseity") is conceptually delimited (in the way ordinary predicates are): affirming that something is blue, for instance, precludes the possibility of coherently affirming that it is red ("not blue") under the same circumstances—where the conceptual relation between the predicates mirrors the ontic relation between their designated predicables. God is not rightly thought to be thus affected. (Of course, phenomenal or physical predicates in the ordinary sense do not apply as such to God—"red" and "round," for instance—but what of "potent" and "benign" and "knowing"?) Hence, the predicables ascribed to God must be ontically different in a fundamental way from those that apply to ("created") things, things said to have "natures" or to be particular "beings" (among a multiplicity of "beings").
One medieval solution purports that to ascribe to God whatever "attributes" are admissible as determinations of being—the so-called transcendentals, which also constrain the "natures" of plural "beings" by way of a derived predication (unity, goodness, truth, as Thomas usually puts it)—is to make ascriptions of God, as the exclusive uncreated source of all "there is," without thereby assigning God a determinate nature among plural beings. Inevitably there will be a puzzle regarding attributing properties to God, since any properties (or predicables) in some sense subtended by the transcendentals (but not the transcendentals themselves) will be subject to gradation and a certain involvement with "matter" (hyle, in the sense extracted from Aristotle's account ((6.17)), in accord with our having rejected its intended archism).
Properties rightly ascribed to created things are, in principle, present, it was claimed, only in some admixture of that property and its "opposite ." Natural properties are present oppositionally , both as contraries and as complementaries, present in different degrees, present in such a way that, normally, the capacity of any (natural) thing to possess a property is ipso facto the capacity to lose that property and acquire another—but there can be no such admixture in the transcendentals . For that reason, the transcendentals are (as such) not predicated of any numbered (or natural) beings. Beings that exist and have determinate natures are subject to change, are created and may be destroyed: the continuous career of any created thing must make allowance (it is supposed) for the acquisition and loss, over time, of any property linked to its specific nature. Hence, I understand transcendentals to be defined as predicables such that their "opposites" (in the created order) are not (as a matter of necessity) predicable of that of which they are predicable (God, as in St. Augustine's account). On the contrary, they are necessarily inapplicable, or such that they have no "opposites," although the natural properties they subtend do. I designate predicables that are rightly attributed to things that change as privative, meaning by that only that, where they are rightly ascribed, their "opposites" are also necessarily predicable. (I draw no conclusions about whether there is a God or whether, if there is, God is such that only the transcendentals are rightly ascribed to him. I note only that, since we have invented the idea, we are entitled to judge whether it is coherent and self-consistent.)
This is very close to Plato's view of self-predication with respect to the Forms: the Form of Justice is said, by Plato, in Republic, to be "just," but not in any way that would admit an admixture of the "just" and the "unjust" (which applies only and essentially to the changing, or created, world). On this reasoning, although changing or created things may be said to "resemble" the Forms, the Forms do not "resemble" the things of the changing world. The Form of Justice is (itself) "just" sans phrase, but no human polis can similarly be said to be "just" without its being true as well that, in being just (in its way), it is also rightly characterizable (in some measure and for that reason) as "unjust"—necessarily, not unmixedly just. (Much of this is not my ultimate concern, of course, but it pays to have a sense of the history and complexities of the question being addressed.)
Furthermore, predication or attribution (or, some reasonably strong analogue of predication) does apply to God, insofar as rational discourse about God is possible. (The medievals, you will remember, were divided
in their mind about whether to say that God was discursively ineffable or whether some form of rational discourse could, or even must, be admitted. Shestov, perhaps, has made the most of this, among modern writers.)[4]
Hence, on the argument that attributions may be made of God—although God has no "nature" in the determinate sense in which natural things do—it must be possible to make attributions of what cannot be assigned a determinate and "privative" nature, and there must be predicables (the "transcendentals") that are not, and necessarily are not, "oppositional." The high medieval theory is meant to defeat, or supersede, the ancient Presocratic theory of the oppositional nature of the predicables; of course, it also trades on it. (There's a curious gain here that we shall draw on shortly.)
Leaving God aside, what may we say about the "natures" of things? Certainly,
(7.3) "natures" form a subset of what is predicable of what exists.
That is, if things have "natures," then they may be ascribed attributes congruent with those natures, that are not, as such, ascribed because they are part of the natures of the things in question. Alternatively,
(7.4) things that have "natures" have attributes compatible or congruent with their "natures."[5]
On Aristotle's view, since the "natures" of ("material") things are invariant, although those things are subject to change, ousiai will have accidental attributes as well, attributes that change relative to their changeless natures but that can be lost without loss of "essential" nature. For example, one may at one time remember and then forget this or that, relative to possessing a suitable psyche (or "nature"), but the loss of that "nature" (Aristotle would hold) signifies the loss (the failing to continue to exist) of that ousia itself. Leibniz, on the other hand, treats every attribute of particular things as essential to their being the particular things they are (Socrates's being snubnosed, for instance, is as necessary to Socrates's identity as is his being rational). Theorem (7.4) may be read in a variety of ways, therefore: in Aristotle's way, in Leibniz's, and in a way (in accord with the doctrine of the flux) that (says that) there are no de re necessities at all ((2.1), (2.6)).
What needs to be borne in mind is that Aristotle's and Leibniz's mo-
tivations were entirely different, but, in the present context, equally pointless. Leibniz's concerns individuation and numerical identity; Aristotle's, invariance and change relative to the reality of existing things. Aristotle cannot suppose that the "divided reference" of general predicables ("natures" included) could account for individuation or numerical identity, and Leibniz makes reference and reidentification humanly unmanageable by insisting that the seemingly accidental features of particular things are (actually) essential to their numerical identity. Both strategies may be coherently displaced by conceptually slimmer options. (Still, Leibniz's strategy does bear, as I have suggested against Quine, on the inherent informality of reference.)
Our present topic, remember, is that of individuation and identity. On that matter, I must say that Aristotle strengthens the notion of the "nature" of a thing, making it invariant, even though its identity and reidentifiability are not facilitated in the least by any theory or criterion regarding its general nature only. And Leibniz makes all the attributes a thing instantiates (including the relations it enters into) necessary and essential to its identity as the particular thing it is, in spite of the fact that that incapacitates any independent mortal effort to fix the numerical identity of particular things. (Reference, as I have said, has point only if we can succeed.) I have already shown (i) that Aristotle's modal claim about invariance is false ((2.1), (2.3)), and (ii) that (relative to Quine's claim, which bears on Leibniz's), it is impossible for human inquirers to fix the referents of—a fortiori, the numerical identity of the particular things referred to in—natural-language discourse by means of general predicables alone ((3.2), (3.5), (3.8), (3.9)).
These developments tell us a little more about individuation and identity, but not much. If "natures" were invariant, as Aristotle supposed—if beings (ousiai ) belonged to "natural kinds" (in having invariant natures), in virtue of which they were individuated as the beings they are—the distinction between the "natures" (or "essences" or "definitions") of things and any other predicables would have an entirely legible purpose. Aristotle's science (episteme) presupposes such a doctrine. But Aristotle actually claims, in supporting his view of science, that what is real is necessarily invariant qua real, and that —his modal claim—is simply false. It is true, by (7.2) and (7.3), that anything that supports predication "has a nature" (in some sense—minimally, being subject to predication), but, by (2.1), it does not follow that such a "nature" must be invariant. What, then, could that qualification mean? Aristotle thought, you remember, that to deny things a fixed nature (as Protagoras
is supposed to have done) is to court self-contradiction and incoherence at some point in our discourse. I have shown that that is not a bona fide difficulty.
We may consider the matter in another way. Let us say, reformulating the sense of (7.3) and (7.4), that
(7.5) whatever is truly predicable of what exists must be compatible or congruent with its rightly assigned "nature."
But now, on the strength of (7.3) itself, this means only that, in making predicative claims of anything, true predications must be logically compatible with one another . That is hardly news. Of course, what (7.3)–(7.5) suggest, in the context of (2.1)—the denial of invariance—is that:
(7.6) it is not incoherent, or paradoxical, to assign particular beings inconstant natures.[6]
Now, that is a radical option. (By inconstant, I simply mean "not invariant as to essence.") I freely admit that (7.6) cannot hold if its implementation violates the requirements of reference or predication. But why should it? Still, some forms of predication compatible with (7.6) may not be compatible with bivalent truth-values—for instance, in interpretive contexts. I shall come to that later.
My principal line of argument in chapter 3 had been to construe reference and predication as inherently informal, logically, and as effectively "entrenched" in our Lebensformen, consistently with (2.1). If all that were admitted, then (7.6) would follow at once. We may of course still question referential and predicative practice, but (7.6) belongs to the same theory as the theorems of chapter 3.
The argument is now very trim. We cannot resist theorem (7.6), but we need to understand what it entails. Consider this:
(7.7) existent things ("beings") are effectively individuated insofar as they are identified and reidentified, over time and under changing circumstances, as one and the same individual things;
and
(7.8) no existent things are effectively individuated or assigned number by predicative means alone.
Theorems (7.7)–(7.8) are simply the counterparts of (3.2), which affirms that reference cannot be replaced by any predicative resource. In the ontic sense, therefore, the haecceity of any thing (its "thisness"—its being this rather than that particular thing)[7] cannot be the same as, and cannot be determined by, its quiddity (its "whatness"—its having this "nature" rather than that). In a nutshell, to specify the "nature" of any existent thing is to ignore what specifically individuates it . For, insofar as natures are sets of predicables ((7.1)), "natures" logically admit of "divided reference." You cannot say which horse you see, as between two actual horses, merely in virtue of grasping that what you see is (predicatively) a horse, nor can you say which horse you see by narrowing the scope of its "nature" (or by adding further general qualifications, as "accidents"), unless you know, by other means, that, in the context given, those accidents uniquely mark this horse or that ("a chestnut mare," for instance). Haecceity cannot be merely a narrowing of quiddity.
Many have supposed (quite wrongly) that, in Aristotle's thought, hyle (matter) accounts for the individuation of things with respect to the common natures particular things share with their fellows. But, first of all, since hyle relates to the process of the characteristic development or change of (or in or with respect to) things (that have particular natures), hyle has more to do with predications made of particulars than with actually individuating particulars, or first fixing their identity in any ontic way . Second, even if it were true that every particular thing possessed this bit of "matter" but not that, if we were to bring hyle to bear on the issue of individuation or numerical identity, that itself would require that we individuate hyle . In regard to this, Aristotle has no suggestion at all, beyond the counterproductive admission that hyle has no formal structure. Hyle, it seems, has no "nature"! Hyle is nothing but the abstract capacity of particular things to possess changeable attributes (and to acquire and lose whatever, in Aristotle's sense, is their nature). It was in fact an error on Duns Scotus's part to suppose that haecceitas mediated in some way between the individuality of individual things and their generic natures by virtue of their instantiating some putatively narrower set of predicables (sorted in the mind), said to belong to this rather than to that particular (within the larger scope of their common nature). But—either haecceity is not determined predicatively at all, or, if it is, it requires something akin to Quine's solution of Leibniz's question.
Thus, (i) if reference is inherently informal, if (ii) individuation and
numerical identity correspond, ontically, to what effective reference captures, if (iii) nothing is individuated by adverting to its nature, and if (iv) natures need not be invariant, then
(7.9) to individuate existing things is to specify their persisting careers, not their natures .
I distinguish career from nature (as terms of art) in that "nature" (but not "career") is purely predicative, whereas "career" functions not only predicatively but individuatively as well (that is, in terms of numerical identity). Hence,
(7.10) the careers of things are and must be compatible or congruent with their natures;
and
(7.11) careers are not the temporal orderings of the instantiations of general predicables (whether "natures" or not), but, rather, the temporal orderings of such instantiations in, or as constituting, particulars.
Furthermore, if the argument holds thus far, then, admitting (2.1)—which denies that nature (or reality) is, necessarily, invariantly structured—it follows, trivially, that
(7.12) existing things may constitute or manifest singular careers in spite of possessing (through the length of those careers) "inconstant" natures.
Of course, (7.12) entails (7.6).
I fully and freely concede that a horse (say) cannot remain a horse—a fortiori, the particular horse it is—if it loses its "nature" or if it ceases to be a horse. Hence, again trivially,
(7.13) individuated ("individuating") careers preserve through their "phases" the natures (constant or changing) of the particular things they are.
I say only that affirming (7.13) is not incompatible with affirming (2.1), for
(7.14) the "natures" of existent things need not be invariant, either de re or de dicto .
I am obviously bound to affirm (7.14) as a matter of sheer consistency, but I back it with conviction. It is plainly central to the an-archic undertaking. Beyond that, I wish to affirm a more radical and more strategic claim for which, quite frankly, I have not yet laid a proper ground, namely,
(7.15) certain "kinds" of things are nothing but kinds of careers: particular things of such "kinds" have only careers; or, if they have or (are said to have) "natures," their natures are nothing but careers.
More perspicuously (and more provocatively),
(7.16) particulars of certain "kinds" are nothing but careers; such things may be said to lack "natures."
You see, therefore, the reason for distinguishing with care between the logic of "careers" and the logic of "natures": natures are no more than predicables; whereas, although they may be treated predicatively wherever anything is assigned a nature,
(7.17) careers are referents, or surrogates of referents when viewed in terms of the unicity of their instantiated "phases" over time and change.
From this, it is readily concluded that
(7.18) phases are the temporal parts of individual careers (individual things, individual existents).
To say that "phases" are the temporal parts of individual things (or "beings") may be admitted, but it fails (as Hume appreciated in recognizing the need to go beyond his official pronouncement) to say something about what counts, criterially, in deciding whether we have before us—through time and change—one thing or not, and why .[8]
Famously, Strawson introduced the idiom of sortals (the "kinds" [or better, the terms designating the "kinds"] to which individual things belong), in virtue of employing which, things may be differentiated or counted as the individually distinct things (they are) of the "kinds" they
are. Strawson also introduced phase sortals (the temporally segmented subaltern "kinds" of the sortal kinds to which particulars belong), in virtue of employing which, the particular things first individuated in accord with sortals continue to be implicated as such (that is, more narrowly, by reference to their phase sortals). Thus, an acorn is a phase of an oak tree (taken as a particular thing), but (predicatively) an acorn is, also, an oak tree (perhaps one should [with suitable caveats—against Aristotle] say "potentially," in the sense of being "of the kind," oak tree ).
It is true that Strawson admits "events" into his ontology. But he does not bring the matter to bear on such theorems as (7.15) or (7.16), and he has grave doubts as to whether "events" could be (what he calls) "basic particulars" or whether they are ever more than marginal to a metaphysics (lightning flashes, for instance)—or whether they are any more than the result of some convenient nominalization of what is predicated of rightly denominated individual things ("the stabbing of Ceasar," for instance, or the "stabbing of Caesar at 2 P.M. ," and so on, offered by Davidson for the sake of supporting some would-be canonical notation). Kinds, I should add, are predicables either (i) of the sortal or phase-sortal sort—hence, including "natures" or "phasic" predicables subaltern to given "natures," or (ii) those that do not normally facilitate individuation, or (iii) those applicable to anything that can be individuated. "This yearling" (functioning as a term) denotes a sorted phase of a particular referent's career, whereas "yearling" designates a phasic predicable subaltern to the predicable "horse" (that, as a term, functions as a well-entrenched sortal). However, the term "part of my property" may be read as designating a kind of "thing" pertinent to the law, that is, with respect to something antecedently individuated, without itself functioning as a sortal. "Things" may be individuated without reference to sortal natures, just as they may be individuated, even in accord with sortals, although their "natures" be "inconstant." Certainly, if events may be individuated, then it is reasonable to suppose that individuation need not always involve sortals, although (trivially) it involves kinds. Sortals, we may say, are entrenched kinds: essential or lebensformlich .
To admit the foregoing is to admit that events may be counted as individuatable "things," in the sense that they are merely individual temporal continua . Whether it is always useful to count events, or whether events may, in some sense, be made "basic" to a systematic metaphysics is not a particularly important question. For, on the gathering evidence of this primer (for instance, favoring symbiosis, intransparency, flux,
historicity, the absense of first principles, the defeat of archism), there can be no basic particulars (in Strawson's familiar sense, in his book, Individuals ): particulars on which the existence of all other particulars depends but that do not themselves depend on the existence of other particulars.
I see no reason to suppose that particular "things" that (apart from essentialism, teleologism, and the like) more or less correspond to Aristotle's ousiai need be more reliable, referentially and predicatively, than events (or careers or histories). Certainly, if (7.6) be admitted, the objection cannot be convincing. I find it entirely reasonable, therefore, to concede that
(7.19) careers (or "things") that conform with (7.15) and (7.16) may be construed as individuatable events.
But I do not say that all discourse about careers is discourse only or primarily about events. For there are also "things" (as we shall see) that have natures and have careers, or have natures that are no more than careers, in virtue of which it is entirely possible to view the referents in question as, alternatively, individuated "things" or individuated "careers," depending on which aspect of their individuation is being featured: possessing bodies (things), for instance, or being integrated histories (careers). I see no reason to deny that
(7.20) for certain particulars at least, one and the same individual may, without contradiction, be construed either as a "thing" or as a career (or event).
In the sense that ranges indifferently over referents like horses and lightning strikes, "thing " may be said to signify whatever is merely individuatable. But in that equally familiar sense that means to distinguish horses as "things" from lightning strikes as events, "things" signifies (i) whatever has a sortal nature, whether constant or inconstant, such that (ii) it is sortally individuated as a kind of body or physical object or is sortally individuated in some more complex way that specifically entails sortally individuatable bodies or physical objects. (The full import of this last distinction will be clear shortly. I am running ahead of my story.) If, furthermore, we remind ourselves that "existent things" are "material things" ((6.17)), then, for convenience, we may now construe
the second sense (of "thing") as meaning to distinguish between material things and material events.
On that basis, it is still true that events exist as do things, although it is more usual to say that events occur, where what we mean is that they exist as events . This is clearly the case with those particulars that may, alternatively, be individuated as careers and as material things ((7.20)). For we could hardly suppose that such particulars cannot rightly be said to exist, when viewed under the second usage, if they may be said to exist when viewed under the first. We see, therefore, that
(7.21) the distinction between material things and material events may, at times, be no more than a façon de parler .
It may be doubted, if (7.21) is true, that the same option holds for every "thing" and every "event." In any case, we have secured an additional measure of flexibility. (I shall shortly bring these distinctions to bear on the analysis of cultural entities.)
Clearly, anything that can be "sorted" (or counted) can be (extensionally) collected as the members of a set (or class ) of things. Hence, sets may be heterogeneous with regard to the "natures" of what they collect. If they are sorted with respect to sortals (or kinds), then the resultant sets have assignable "natures," and the "members" of such "sets" are then also instances of (the) kinds marked by their common "natures." (In chapter 10, I introduce a third classificatory distinction, the token/type distinction, the use of which I restrict to "cultural entities.")
Strawson nowhere makes sortals and phase sortals do the work of individuating things. They cannot do such work, on the argument supplied by (7.8). The individuality of a thing is the "being-brought-together-in -the-one-thing-that-is-the-one-referent-of-all-the-instantiations-of-all-the-predicables-that-truly-belong-to-that-one-thing." Leibniz seems to have confused a thing's "individuality"—its being "one" (thing) with what determines its "numerical identity," what "individuates" it, or what is merely true of it; Strawson grasps the complexity of a thing's being individual over time and through change, but he goes on to set constraints on the coherence of ascriptions of numerical identity, not on what makes an individual thing individual. (This accounts for the weakness of Strawson's theory of persons.)
I have in mind, however, making provision for an entire world of entities that Strawson does not discuss, that accommodates what he says
about phases, but I construe his distinction in a way that depends on taking theorems (7.15)–(7.17) more seriously than he does. I can barely introduce them here. Their proper admission depends on much more than I have yet supplied. But they are so important to any comprehensive metaphysics that to mention them here and now is to give some evidence of the deeper plan of argument that governs this primer. Also, of course, the promissory features of what I mean to introduce will not (should not) be permitted to affect the developing argument itself: for the time being, it signifies only a further objective.
In particular, I shall want to establish that
(7.22) cultural entities have, or are, only careers; they lack natures or have natures that are nothing but careers.
I understand cultural entities to be persons, artworks, texts, (certain familiar) actions (for instance, the writing of a check or the signaling of a turn in an automobile or the performance of a dance), words and sentences, histories, and the like. The things of the world of human culture, I hold, are individuated only or primarily as careers. I also argue that
(7.23) cultural entities are (referentially), or have (predicatively), histories.[9]
I must leave (7.23) unexplored for the time being. I think it is fair to say, however, that, on the argument I have in mind, histories are a kind of career: just what kind cannot yet be profitably said. Nevertheless, I assure you that what is still to be offered in analyzing "cultural entities" and "histories" is meant to be the capstone of this primer. Its mention may suggest at least the point of the caution, in chapter 3, of distinguishing between the syntactic informality of Lebensformen and their inherent historicity. That is, I shall need to make room for conceding that there is an important sense in which things that have "careers" may not yet have "histories" (acorns and horses, say), whereas there are "things" that clearly have "histories," if anything can be said to have a history (the American Revolution, the Cubist movement, Henry VIII's reign, a person or a person's life) and that (in some as yet unspecified regard) have properties vastly different from those of the others. (Wittgenstein, you must remember, hardly touches on history.)
Let me now intrude a strange specimen for heuristic purposes. It is
possible, say, that even where we insist that existing things have "natures," they may be said to lose one "nature" and be ascribed another, without jeopardizing numerical identity! What is arresting in this specimen case is (i) that it may, without difficulty, be coherently described, and (ii) that it involves the peculiar (and widely ignored) distinction between "natural kinds" and "kinds" that bears in a distinctive way on those things that (as I say) have or are "histories," things that are not readily construed as (belonging to) "natural kinds" themselves. The essential point, of course, is this: on the best of the analytic accounts—on Strawson's, for instance—numerical identity is made to depend on the fixity of the sortals (essentially or by lebensformlich entrenchment) in terms of which things are individuated. But the case I have in mind preserves individuality (hence, numerical identity), while abandoning the fixed sortals (or "natures") on which individuality is supposed to depend .[10]
This comes as a surprise: it makes a very important conceptual option clear. Consider the story of Lucy Westenra in Bram Stoker's Dracula . Lucy Westenra was a woman (that is, a member of Homo sapiens sapiens ). She was bitten by the vampire and became a vampire (presumably another "natural" kind, albeit a most "unnatural" one). In the story, she loses one "nature" and acquires "another," but she remains one and the same person . Qua person, she either has no nature (only a career or history), or she has no nature other than her career, or the nature she has (first) and (then) loses need not deprive "her" in any logical or conceptual regard of the unicity of "her" career—hence, the unity of "her" (inconstant) nature. (I risk using the terms "unicity" and "unity" here: they are intuitively clear. But I return to provide them with a more formal sense in chapter 9.) For the time being, I ask you only to concede that these conceptions are coherent and self-consistent—and (I urge) promising as well. For, consider that you must in any case explain what the conceptual relationship is between "natural-kind" terms (like "man" or "human being") and "kind" terms like "person," both of which function as sortals (in Strawson's sense), although not necessarily in tandem. I suggest that we should have no trouble at all, in a real-world setting, in individuating and reidentifying someone like Lucy Westenra.
It is certainly possible to hold, as many do (notably Williams), that "persons = bodies" (that is, that persons are identical with individuated specimens of Homo sapiens ).[11] But that cannot be right if, as we are clearly prepared to admit, there may be persons in the universe that are not human (Martians or artificial persons, possibly chimpanzees incip-
iently, not to mention vampires or angels or gods). Certainly, when formulated abstractly (rather as with the principle of noncontradiction—on which it ultimately depends), "everything," as Bishop Butler says, "is itself and not another thing."
I am entirely prepared to concede that
(7.24) necessarily, whatever exists is identical with itself (is self-identical ).
You must realize, however, that what I have already said about "careers" ((7.9)–(7.14)) confirms the vacuity of (7.24) in a sense analogous to what I said about contradiction when uninterpreted . There is no known criterial reading of (7.24) that, on an altered interpretation of the nature and career of any particular thing, might not confirm that an apparent criterial violation could be reasonably obviated. The claim, for instance, that "Lucy Westenra" cannot possibly be the name of one and the same person, because it cannot, on the hypothesis of the story, be the name of one and the same woman (or one and the same human being ), instantly founders if one concedes (coherently enough and consistently with what has gone before) that
(7.25) attributions of numerical identity are assigned on one (ontic) interpretation of a career or another.
I do not need the vampire case to make my point: I introduce it only to draw attention to the plain difference between our treatment of natural-kind terms (a subset of sortals) and terms like "persons" (sortals, but not natural-kind terms). Nevertheless, the example does help to fix some additional terminological distinctions. Let me say that by identity (or numerical identity ) I mean (i) that (universal ) predicate (or attribute) (ii) that is "descriptively" vacuous but (iii) may be constatively uttered in first-order discourse as a second-order predicate ((6.27)); (iv) that presupposes "number" ((6.30)); (v) that, in virtue of (iv), veridically extends to everything that exists; and (vi) that, in virtue of (v), trivially entails, with respect to that same extension, the descriptively vacuous second-order predicate (or reflexive relation) of self-identity . Here, by a universal predicate (or attribute), I understand (i) a predicate ascribed to individuated things, (ii) solely in virtue of their being individuated, (iii) vacuous in the "descriptive" (or first-order) sense, and (iv) ascribed
trivially, without exception ("necessarily"), and without being "interpreted." Number, of course, is similarly a universal predicate of existent things.
By individuation I mean, paradigmatically, (i) a discursive (or constative) act, (ii) that, in "parsing" the world, (iii) first ascribes "number" to existing things (that is, in the idiom of natura naturans, parses things at once as existing and as having number), (iv) thereby (trivially) preparing them for subsequent ascriptions (natura naturata ) of "numerical identity" and "self-identity," (v) by way of instantiative rather than mere predicative criteria. By instantiative, I mean, paradigmatically, (i) criteria in virtue of which predications are instantiated de re or de dicto, (ii) in persisting careers or things that have careers. The essential point is this: predication presupposes individuated things; instantiation entails individuation itself. In this sense, Frege's famous puzzle regarding the Morning Star and the Evening Star is as much about individuation as about numerical identity.[12] The point is nearly lost. Theoretical identities, whether "same level" (Morning Star/Evening Star) or not (bolt of lightning/suitably ionized patch of atmosphere), are first confirmed in accord with (7.25) and then applied in accord with (7.24). Of course, the paradoxes of Bell's theorems (for classical mechanics) lead us to speculate about what quanta might be and how they might be related to the things of the classical-mechanical world.[13] But that is a question, first, of individuation—not, as is usually supposed, of numerical identity. The paradoxes call for a replacement, at least at certain points, of our ontology, not a resolution of local infelicities relative to an ontology in place.
I should perhaps add that by entails I mean only "deducible from," strictly or logically, as in saying that "this figure is rectangular" is deducible from "this figure is square." By presupposes (a much more complicated notion), I mean minimally that logically relational feature of a proposition that (i) is not actually uttered and not entailed by what is uttered, but (ii) the truth of which logically bears on, or affects, the truth of what is, in context, uttered or entailed and (iii) would, on a pertinent theory or interpretation, be affirmed, conformably with (ii), by whomever competently uttered the speech act in question, or would be recognized (by such a competent agent) as falling within the scope of (ii); or, alternatively, that feature of a supposed state of affairs such that (iv) some proposition or other falling within the scope of (ii)–(iii) would be elicited from a competent speaker conformably with (ii)–(iii).
The exemplary case, of course, is due to Strawson's analysis of Russell's specimen sentence, "The present king of France is bald." On Straw-
son's analysis, that there exists a present king of France is neither asserted nor entailed by what is asserted in uttering Russell's sentence, but is only presupposed in considering straightway whether what is uttered is true or false. On one reading of Strawson's case, the truth or falsity of what is uttered presupposes the existence of the present King of France; on another, that "The present King of France is bald" is rightly taken to be true or false presupposes the king's existence, for, otherwise, what is uttered cannot rightly be assigned either value. Failure of reference here, it is said, produces truth-value gaps or requires the admission of a third truth-value, viz. "indeterminate." Clearly, the matter of presupposition cannot be restricted to the puzzles of referentiality. (It is also, as I shall later say, "Intentional.")
I need to pause here to provide as well some further distinctions—in effect, interpretations of what may be meant by the expression "one." This should gather together some remarks scattered through the early part of this chapter (as well as allusions to earlier chapters) that may strengthen the sense of the order of this entire inquiry. For, of course, to speak of numerical identity is to speak of what is "one and the same"; to speak of individuation is to speak of "this one" and "that one" among a set of distinct "ones." A career, I should say, is "one and the same this one " tracked through time and change, whereas a (mere) individual thing is "one and the same of this kind, " regardless of the "instantiative" episodes that compose its career (and regardless of whether it is a "thing" or an "event," in the disjunctive sense supplied a short while ago). Determining numerical identity, I say, presupposes individuation, whereas deciding individuation entails determining numerical identity.
I have alluded to other senses of "one," some of which are predicative and some, at least not merely, referential. The matter is quite strenuous: I offer the following only as a compendium of convenience; I hardly dare claim that it includes all interesting senses.
For what it's worth, then, by one, we sometimes mean: (i) numbered, hence denumerable as one or another of a set of countable things, in accord (therefore) with individuation; (ii) self-identical, hence one and the same (with itself), in accord with the notion of numerical identity; (iii) lacking number butinclusive in a discursive sense, hence said of "the (one) world" or "the (one) universe of discourse" (in Husserl's sense), which includes (or cannot be made to exclude) whatever, when mentioned, is mentioned; (iv) unconditionally self-subsistent (as in Aquinas's account of God), hence without assignable or "privitive" nature, though still "subject" to rational discourse; (v) not subject to any predication
at all, hence ineffable, undifferentiated, said of the ontic source of whatever otherwise exists or is differentially real (Heidegger's Sein perhaps, the Buddhist sunyatta, the Chinese Tao ), normally marked by negating what may be truly predicated ("oppositionally") of what exists or is real; (vi) necessarily and unconditionally real, hence unable (in the same sense) to support any further attribution, thus, the One,not subject to partition or differentiation of any sort (as in Parmenides's "One"); and (vii) common, "qualitatively the same," "similar," said of predicables (without prejudice to their ontic analysis, as in Quine's notion of "divided reference").
Bringing these distinctions together facilitates further findings. For example, item (v) shows at a stroke Heidegger's conceptually very strange invention (after the Kehre and evidenced somewhat before the Kehre ),[14] that construes Sein as determining the fateful projects of imminent history, despite the fact that Sein has no intelligible structure by which to do so. I have already remarked on the cognitive privilege buried in Aquinas's conception of the Creator ((iv)); for surely, as with Aristotle's metaphysics, Aquinas's schema cannot claim to be a necessary one and will not permit itself to be viewed as a mere conjecture. But there are more instructive payoffs still.
The intuition that things have "natures"—must have "natures"—is probably linked to the idea that their changes must be explained in terms of those same "natures." That is Aristotle's thesis (and, I think, Strawson's as well—although Strawson's is thinner). Aristotle believes, of course, that any departure from the necessary invariance of the "natures" of real things leads, somewhere, to incoherence or self-contradiction. The "natures" he assigns particular things (ousiai ) are precisely what he needs to ensure the explanatory powers of his science: everything that changes (well, nearly everything), Aristotle thinks, changes in ways that can be explained by reference to a thing's "nature." Modern theorists similarly insist on the necessary invariance of the universal laws of nature.[15]
Instructively, Popper argues that we are wrong to treat our nomological conjectures as more than "verisimilitudinous": wrong to suppose that our nomological guesses are ever fully correct in an invariant and realist sense; on his own option, however, Popper insists on the ultimate invariance of the laws of nature. He needs the doctrine to sustain "verisimilitude." Hence, although he excoriates Aristotle for his "essentialism," he is lenient enough to admit that his own doctrine is a form of "modified essentialism." What this means is that exceptionless laws
(however captured—whether inductively or by other means) are thought to range over natural kinds (in fact, to define them as favorably related to the explanatory powers of the laws).
My present purpose is to suggest the conceptual link between archism and modern theories of science—among the Positivists, among those committed to the unity of science program, and among the Popperians. It is true that, more recently, the explanatory laws of nature have been denied a purely realist standing, causality and nomologicality have been disjoined, and both phenomenological and explanatory laws have been treated as constructivist (as no more than artifacts of symbiosis or idealizing interpretation). Yield in that direction, and you cannot discount the an-archic reading of "natures."
I press the point to locate conceptual connections that are unexpected and often ignored and to draw attention to the tolerance of variable "natures"—in opposition to both Aristotle's model and the model of the natural sciences that has dominated Western thought through more than the first half of the twentieth century. But my argument regarding the conditions of individuation and identity does not depend on those vagaries. I mean of course to cast doubt on an archic reading of the natural sciences. On the archic reading (as in the unity of science conception), granting that reference may be replaced predicatively, the descriptive and explanatory language of a bona fide science is, in principle, homonomic, that is, the same —under real covering laws, when the world is successfully "reduced," because, ultimately, what is real is (it is claimed) what falls under exceptionless, invariant, nomological universals, laws of nature —necessary de re, hence such as to range over (fundamental) natural kinds . (Archism, of course, is, ineluctably, externalist.)
I take it to be symptomatic, for example, that theorists as diverse as Hempel, Popper, Quine, Davidson, Strawson, Putnam, and Kuhn never address the logical possibilities raised by theorems like (7.6), even though they generally oppose the usual forms of essentialism. I suggest, in fact, that the fundamental logical difference between deciding individuation and determining identity has not been rightly perceived because (among other things) the archic thesis (in some form or other—witness Strawson's account of sortals) has been thought to serve individuation. But that is clearly false, both because of (2.1) and because, for instance, although "person" is a sortal term, it is not a natural-kind term .
I put it to you that
(7.26) there is no evidence that the conceptual resources of anarchism are not adequate for any first-order inquiry, or are less adequate than those of any archic alternative.
That is, not only is (2.1) true, but scientific and philosophical strategies in accord with it compare favorably with any archic alternative. I say that a stalemate here is tantamount to victory. As a consequence,
(7.27) the "natures" assigned individuated things—even "natural kinds"—are no more than salient regularities, sufficiently well demarcated for local classificatory and recognitional purposes and/or the purposes of scientific explanation and prediction.
It's clear that (7.27) is simply an elaboration of (7.6); also,
(7.28) attributions of lawlike behavior are essentially a predicative matter—
subject, therefore, to the vagaries collected under (3.13)–(3.15), which affirm the inherent informality of predication itself. It may be remarked again that, currently, among philosophers of science, there is a strong inclination to cast doubt on claims that there have been discovered, or that there must be, nomological invariances in nature or that they must be realist in some unsymbiotized sense.
The truth is, once (2.1) is conceded and the vagaries of reference and predication made clear, insistence on the "natures" of things, on things having "natures"—a fortiori, on things having fixed natures (whether in essentialist terms or in terms of real nomological invariance)—is a matter of the most profound indifference . Notice that the question of the logic of reference and predication does not depend in the least on a choice of archic or an-archic options. On the contrary, the independent treatment of the question distinctly tips the scales (empirically) in favor of the an-archic alternative. That has been the leit-motif of my entire strategy.
This leads us to some version of the following (which makes explicit that which may be plain enough):
(7.29) "natures" are no more than provisional, salient, revisable, capable of being represented by jointly nonconverging sets of predicates relative to which, within our Lebensformen, we individuate, identify,
and reidentify the existing things we share, in sharing a contingent culture.
Theorem (7.29) confirms (i) that "natures" are relativized to the different Lebensformen (or the temporal phases of the Lebensformen ) of different societies, (ii) that they are adequate as far as "reality" is concerned if they service, coherently and adequately, according to our lights, our referential and predicative needs, our needs regarding identity and individuation, (iii) that there is nothing anomalous about our using plural, even opposed, ways of designating the "natures" of things, and (iv) that, since reality itself need not be invariant, we may be obliged to regard each conceptual strategy as vindicated only "for the most part" (as Aristotle himself sometimes affirms). (Leibniz, for instance, does not require "nominal essences" to be mutually compatible.) But if you grant that much, you see at once that
(7.30) where we individuate referents only or primarily as careers, we may also (if we wish) construe "natures" as no more than a façon de parler, without risk of incoherence;
that is, as no more than instrumental for referential and related purposes, or as heuristic in terms of lebensformlich compliance. That is simply to conform with the finding—within the terms of the flux—that individuation is not primarily concerned with "natures" but with "careers" (7.9).
Bear in mind that, as in debates regarding the systematic advantages of competing theories of the unobserved genetic (inherited) transmission of traits, we may, by a principle of charity (but not otherwise), claim to have kept the theoretical referents of such debate constant, even though the theories in which they are completely embedded change in the very process of debate;[16] also, that the evolving theories of the physical "elements" (gold, for instance) regularly change the assignment of the "natures" of those same elements, without supposing that their identity (the numerical identity of particular pieces of gold) is put at irremediable risk; also, that, as Kuhn remarks (troubled though he is by having to do so), Priestley and Lavoisier "lived in different worlds." But to say all this is to confirm (7.6) and (7.14). (These considerations raise the "incommensurability" issue, but this is not the place to make sense of it. It remains unresolved in Kuhn.)
Once we have this much in place, the triviality of (7.13), in regard to
the alleged need of the "careers" of things to accommodate the "natures" of those same things, dawns on us:
(7.31) to specify the "careers" of existing things is no more than to join together the serial instantiations of distinct predicables so as to form (through time and change) unitary (individuated) careers that signify the numerical identity of the particulars they are .
To persist, therefore, is to exist or be real over time, to possess a career. Hence, from (7.31), it follows that
(7.32) the numerical identity of "persisting" things is entailed in their individuated careers, but the structure of a thing's career is only presupposed by affirming its numerical identity.
Furthermore, if symbiosis is conceded ((4.11)), then it is reasonable to claim, in the light of (7.31) and related theorems, that
(7.33) everything that exists and is real is socially constructed.
It remains to say a last word about discerning the careers of things. Certainly, for one thing,
(7.34) natures and careers are specified only within the context of our Lebensformen .
This signifies that individuation and identity function under the same constraints as reference and predication: everything thus far presented in chapter 7—for instance, (7.27) and (7.29)—bears this out. The argument also shows why Leibniz's law does not help matters. The difficult question is how to determine when you have a single "career" before you. It is identifying "this one," rather than reidentifying "the same one," that is the decisive matter. The reason is obvious: as Hume already realized, it is the singular thread of the instantiation of plural predicables that constitutes a single career, not the indiscernibility (in different contexts) of the different instantiative sites of given predicables . Leibniz's law never addresses what to count as individuals, in any epistemically operative way, it merely presupposes that that has already been decided. (Leibniz, of course, permanently baffles its solution.) The resolution of the puzzle (with respect to reference and individuation) is the analogue of the resolution (with respect to predication) of the puzzle of "real
generals." (Discrepancies, remember, can always be deflected and assigned, in principle, to the different "phases" of any one—or any many—s.) I take it to be important to affirm, therefore, that
(7.35) in general, among things that change, the conditions or criteria of individuation cannot be derived from their conditions or criteria of identity.
I favor Hume here, against Leibniz and Frege (and, implicitly, Quine). If I am not mistaken, the philosophical force of (7.35) is nearly neglected among the principal analytic philosophers.
Hence, by way of summary, I now say:
(7.36) the realism of "natures" and "careers" is affirmed only in accord with the consensual practices of our Lebensformen .
Theorems (7.34)–(7.36) I take to be tantamount to:
(7.37) "natures" and "careers" are "social constructions."
This, of course, is already entailed in (7.33). But to put matters this way is to begin to explain the meaning of the doctrine of social constructivism (or, constructionism ), namely: (i) that what, under symbiosis, is constructed implicates "brute" existence, although without evidentiary standing; (ii) that what is real is constructed under symbiosis; and (iii) that what obtains under (i) and (ii) is lebensformlich . Conditions (i)–(iii) signify that what is real qua construction may nevertheless exhibit Secondness (in Peirce's sense). This means that, although it is true that, conventionally, "idealism" signifies that what is real is in some sense humanly "constructed," idealism (in the sense here featured) is always, also, symbiotized. The analytic opponent of idealism is ordinarily an externalist, whereas, on my account, constructivists (like Kant) are not far from being externalists as well.[17] The analysts do not admit the more strenuous possibility; they do not see that realism and idealism cannot, on pain of cognitive privilege, be disjoined in principle.
Alternatively put:
(7.38) the real world = the intelligible world.
where, by intelligible, I mean no more than discursible, accessible, under symbiosis, to constative discourse, in referential and predicative terms.
Of course, I do not mean by this that there is no part of the real world that is unknown, or that what is known to exist in the real world does not exist "apart" from its being intelligible. Nevertheless,
(7.39) the independence of the world is an intelligible feature of the world.
(By independence, as already remarked in chapter 2, I mean, "determinately structured, apart from human inquiry and understanding," said of what exists or is real.) Hence,
(7.40) that the real world is independent is compatible with its being intelligible and with its being socially constructed ((7.33)–(7.37)).
For, of course, the independence of the world signifies that Secondness rightly applies to what may be found in the world, but what may be found in the world is objectively found there under the condition of symbiosis ((4.11)–(4.13))—hence, in the constructivist sense. There is no insuperable paradox there: symbiosis never functions criterially, only holistically, and both skepticism and cognitive privilege about the independent structure of the world are obviated by admitting the constructivist constraint. Hence,
(7.41) that the world is independent = that the world is legitimatively posited as independent.
Chapter VIII
Legitimation
The convergent benefit of the arguments of the last few chapters lies in bringing the resources of constative discourse—reference, predication, individuation, identity, reidentification, ascription of truth and falsity and of existence and reality—into line with the general thesis: (i) that none of these discursive competences functions (or need function) algorithmically or in any way that is governed by universal syntactic rules, or in any other archic way; (ii) that the rigor with which any of these is exercised depends on its being conjointly "entrenched" in our Lebensformen; and (iii) that all are legitimated, without privilege, under the conditions of symbiosis.
This is a remarkably spare finding. If we suppose that everything that exists or is real obtains in "one" universe (or, "one" universe of discourse )[1] —in the sense in which Husserl correctly observes that it makes no sense to apply "singular" and "plural" to the inclusive context of whatever we affirm or deny or to whatever we suppose language refers—then, on the foregoing arguments:
(8.1) the conceptual boundaries of the universe, "the universe of discourse"—the context of all contexts —cannot be determinately specified.
Those "boundaries" need not be specified, of course. What is important is that it makes no sense to suppose that we can "violate" the limits of our "universe." There are no limits or boundaries to be reckoned with.
To speak of the inclusive "universe" is merely to register the fact that we can bring anything we wish to say to bear on anything else we wish to say. The universe is "one" in that sense only. "It" sets no constraints on relevance or coherence or consistency or commensurability or even success with respect to whatever, distributively, is individuated, identified, or otherwise specified.
I conclude:
(8.2) the universe is trivially implicated in any and every discourse;
and
(8.3) constative discourse is contexted,
that is, "implicates" some more inclusive (however inchoate) context of discourse—ultimately, the universe—within which all its truth-claims obtain.[2] From this it follows:
(8.4) the universe of discourse cannot be "totalized";
and, emphasizing (8.3):
(8.5) the universe of discourse cannot be a proper referent in constative discourse; alternatively put, "universe of discourse" is no more than a nominalization ranging over all contexted reference.
To say, therefore, that the universe of discourse is implicated in all discourse is to express, by a figurative use of the constative idiom, that which, more in accord with the strategies of negative theology, is expressed by (8.1). That is,
(8.6) constative discourse implicates some further nonconstative function of discourse.
I acknowledge that I have extended here the use of "implicates" beyond what I explored in chapter 4, for instance at (4.10). There I used the term to signify certain conceptual relations among the symbiotized parts of constative discourse alone; here "implicates" is made to link the constative and (what I shall soon characterize as) the "mythic" use of language. But the extension is straightforward and no paradox need result. In both cases, the implication links first- and second-order considera-
tions and confirms the advantage of allowing de re /de dicto distinctions.
I mean, by totalized: (i) that supposed feature of any conceptual scheme in virtue of which the inclusive set of all possible predicates apt for constative discourse may in principle be specified or otherwise systematically delimited; or (ii) that feature in virtue of which we can be assured that the concepts, categories, rules of discourse, or the like apt for some sector of the universe are not subject to change or replacement as a result of the apt analysis of any other sector of the universe; or (iii) that feature in virtue of which the boundaries of the universe are known to yield criteria for the admissibility of all substantive concepts apt for constative discourse in any sector of the universe. (By apt I mean adequate for formulating all the principal truths about any sector of the universe required for a valid explanation of its phenomena.) The extravagance is clear, and the philosophical corrective works best by exposing the limitations of would-be candidate theories. Hence, the would-be modal necessities that Aristotle speaks of (in Metaphysics Gamma) and that Wittgenstein speaks of (in Tractatus ) are, implicitly, paradigms of "totalizing." So too is Carnap's early systematic physicalism and extensionalism.[3]
This is, also, the same charge that I have brought against Dummett's prioritizing semantics over metaphysics. The Francophone structuralists (Lévi-Strauss, preeminently) suppose—more grandly—that, in effect, (8.4) is false. It is, of course, Derrida's principal objective—in his notorious deconstructions —to insinuate, or show, just how, for any would-be totalized scheme (or "system"), some unanticipatable conceptual supplément is always possible, can always be counted on to subvert the claim. This single theme—"radical alterity" (in Derrida's phrase), the excluded but not yet specified différend (Lyotard's neologism), the inchoate l'autre or l'autrui[4] (of Levinas and French feminism), and the like—is, I judge, the essential theme of contemporary poststructuralism, which opposes "totalizing" in every form and assimilates all instances of cognitive privilege to that philosophical "offense." L'autre (or l'autrui ) is what, admitting (8.4), is always omitted, neglected, marginalized, disadvantaged, or the like. Poststructuralism monitors the fact and its implications. Implicitly, every archic thesis is a form of totalizing, since, on the argument, no conceptual discovery can dislodge what it discloses.
There is, actually, an entire family of philosophical strategies by which, implicitly or explicitly, totalizing claims are serviced. They are not all of the same gauge or presumptive power. The archic thesis itself, claims of modal necessity and invariance imposed de re or de dicto, are,
ultimately, forms of totalizing. So are all the forms of apriorism, prioritizing our cognitive resources, drawing noumenal truths from phenomenal data, specific claims in favor of the "originary" and the "apodictic," the rejection of symbiosis, presumptions of transparency, the denial of interpretive tertia, the appeal to first principles, insistence on the neutrality of particular philosophical options, reference to the exceptionless laws of thought or the laws of reality, indifference to the relevance of context and history. I gather them all now as obvious forms of totalizing. That is,
(8.7) totalizing signifies that the universe is, ontically, a conceptually closed system, the parts of which are, in some respect or other, not contexted.[5]
It need not be closed in any temporal or epistemic or causal sense (Peirce). It may be said to involve relata only (Lévi-Strauss) or discrete elements (the unity of science program). It may be "rationalist" (Fodor's conceptual nativism) or "empiricist" (inductivism in the sciences). It may be explicit (Aristotle's archism) or relatively inexplicit (Davidson's various doctrines: the universalizing of Tarski's semantic conception of truth, the "supervenience" thesis). It makes no difference. All versions hold that, at some decisive point at least, a totalizing constraint is known to obtain. In that sense, the "universe of discourse" is said or thought to be such a "system."
I claim therefore:
(8.8) within the ("one") universe, constative discourse cannot overcome the conceptual inaccessibility of the totalized.
It was in this sense that I affirmed theorems (4.14)–(4.17), that is, that the world is a "text"—hence, always and everywhere "interpreted" in accord with our tacit conceptual schemes. We see at once, therefore, the global importance of bringing the informality of our Lebensformen (which affects the logic of reference and predication) into accord with symbiosis. It affects in the most profound way the logic of legitimation. Hence, to acknowledge that discourse is contexted ((8.3)) is, effectively, to admit that
(8.9) no natural-language domain, no world, can form a closed system.
It may, of course, always be arbitrarily closed.
I find it helpful to speak of a world when I mean to speak of some relatively delimited but inclusive conceptual "space" comprised of a set of denumerable "things" said to exist or to be real (or, by analogy, some "compossible" world). (By space, or a space, I mean a "world" apt for constative discourse, a world "parsed" for reference and predication, for individuation and identity, and the like.) By contrast, I speak of the universe when I mean to speak of the inclusive "space" of all (individuatable) "worlds," regardless of compatibility or commensurability. Of course, the "universe" is never interpretively totalized and never individuated. If the distinction be allowed, then I say:
(8.10) "worlds" are contexted within the universe;
and
(8.11) the universe, construed as "the context of all contexts," cannot, on pain of contradiction, be constatively addressed.
For this reason, reclaiming (8.6), I say:
(8.12) discourse about the universe is mythic rather than constative.[6]
I don't deny that we "talk about" the universe in some sense. We even say things that we judge to "fit the universe," felicitously—for instance, I am bound to say, and willingly do say:
(8.13) truth-claims are contexted within "the" universe.
But the fit itself (if we allow the expression) is "mythic" only. We cannot affirm such a fit constatively. (In "constituting" a determinate universe, we constitute no more than a world ((8.10)).)
A myth, in the sense I have in mind, is a (numbered) conceptual "picture" intended as a representation of the universe of discourse, constructed to accord with this (denumerable) "world" or that. Mythic, as a term of art, designates: (i) a kind of dependent speech act, (ii) not itself constative but one that makes a logically degenerate use of the constative, (iii) obtaining in referential acts and all speech acts insofar as they entail or imply reference, (iv) by which we are said to "speak about" the universe. But discourse about the universe is logically inert, in the sense that the universe is implicated, without relevant differentiation, in
every constative act. We may assess (in the "mythic" sense) the relative fit of competing representations (of the numberless universe) only in terms of the would-be truths about the worlds they "subtend." This may also explain my attraction to Eastern notions like the Tao and sunyatta . If I understand them rightly, they postulate de dicto an inherent limitation of constative discourse relative to what, de re, is implicated in constative discourse itself—under the condition of symbiosis. On that reading, all the annoying paradoxes of such idioms are meant as reminders of the possible confusion of the mythic and the constative. But so long as the modal presumption about referential and predicative discourse is avoided, nothing is lost with respect to the precision or validity of discourse itself. On that reading, it is false to suppose that the world is delusive (which is self-defeating in any case). If either Buddhism or Taoism means to treat the world as no more than delusive, then I must admit I can make no sense of them.
It is possible, therefore, to judge which myths, relative to which given "worlds," are apt or relatively more apt for generating important truths; conversely, it is possible to judge which "interpreted" worlds best fit this or that (mythic) picture of the universe. Clearly, myths are denumerable representations of the universe, but they are thus intended (stipulated). By denumerable, I simply mean "countable" by isomorphic matching with the natural numbers. Myths, then, are denumerable, but what is "mythically predicated" is "predicated" of what is not denumerable.
As far as truth is concerned, it goes without saying that such discourse conforms with (8.12). In assessing "fit" (not "correspondence"), the body of truths that any world subtends is already assumed to be in place: granting (8.11), it could hardly be otherwise. (I offer this, also, in the spirit of interpreting Wittgenstein's final puzzle, in the Tractatus, regarding the "mystical." Nevertheless, I oppose Wittgenstein's presumption that it makes sense to introduce a demarcation between what is "within" the world and what is not.)
Beyond this, we are led to admit:
(8.14) philosophy concerns the second-order legitimation of conceptual schemes "linking" worlds "and" universe—
in both directions: facilitating the discovery of important truths about acknowledged "worlds," maximizing the coherence and scope of any "one" such world relative to others. Theorem (8.14) leads to the very interesting conclusion that
(8.15) philosophy cannot be confined to the constative;
on the strength of (8.14), then,
(8.16) philosophy functions "mythically"—in functioning constatively.
Hence, also, recalling (1.5):
(8.17) first-order constative inquiries "implicate" the mythic function of philosophy.
I take (8.17) to be tantamount to (8.4).
It was in this sense, I believe, that Kuhn remarked that Priestley and Lavoisier lived in "different worlds." (Trivially, Kuhn meant that their "worlds" obtained in the [same] "universe.") Recall, however, theorem (8.1) and what follows from it. It will then be seen that
(8.18) no "world" can meaningfully be said to approximate the "universe."
Still, on a given theory or criterion,
(8.19) "worlds" may be said to be more or less inclusive than other worlds .
Theorem (8.19) is the normal presupposition of the goals of scientific "reason." It also introduces a bona fide legitimative question. But (8.19) must also be duly reconciled with (8.4), (8.8), (8.18), and the like. In that sense, legitimation "implicates" mythic considerations. It is in fact (8.18) that, in their different ways, Peirce and Popper and Habermas (and Hegel, on a doubtful reading) violate. Progressivism, as we may term the denial of (8.18) or any analogue of it, is, therefore, another form of totalizing. (But that is not true of first-order appraisals of progress, which might be said to implicate competing "Kuhnian" worlds.)
I suggest, therefore:
(8.20) legitimation is the exemplar of philosophical reason, in spite of the fact that reason and its norms are artifacts constructed within "constructed" worlds.
Theorem (8.20) poses (and resolves) the essential puzzle shared by Wittgenstein (in Investigations ) and Foucault (in The Order of Things ), except that Foucault (but not Wittgenstein) historicizes that puzzle radically. On my own reading, Foucault has isolated the single most important enigma of the next century's philosophy and science. The pity is, he did not stay to analyze it with sufficient care. Reason, then, in any philosophically pertinent sense, is: (i) a second-order competence, (ii) not merely normative (although it is normative), but (iii) normative in virtue of legitimated interpretations of our symbiotized world, hence (iv) compatible with an-archism and (v) itself an artifact of a constructed world; also, (vi) subject, reflexively, to historical reinterpretation. If this gives a fair reading of "reason," then (in the context of (8.16)–(8.17)):
(8.21) philosophy, science, legitimation, reason itself, cannot be construed in the naturalizing way.[7]
That is, they cannot be construed in any way reducible to, or replaceable by, or functionally equivalent to, any (first-order) psychological competence itself construed as free of philosophical (second-order or legitimative) "contamination." In short,
(8.22) naturalizing is, at least implicitly, a form of totalizing.
It is quite true, as Quine insists, that epistemic reflections cannot fail to involve our (first-order) psychological powers; it is also true, as Millikan (among others) has shown, that operative norms may be construed in the "naturalizing" way—for instance, in theorizing about the "functions" of species-specific organic life. But no one has shown that legitimative, second-order norms are or can be convincingly construed in naturalizing terms . I take theorems (8.21)–(8.22) to be extraordinarily important, therefore, in exposing a decisive lacuna among the "naturalizing" philosophies of our day (those particularly that have followed the lead of Quine's well-known paper, "Epistemology Naturalized"). I see no way in which they could resolve the difficulty posed by (8.21) without falling back to one form or another of archism or cognitive privilege or totalizing. For,
(8.23) cognitive privilege entails, by its effective exercise, the principled irrelevance of the context or contextedness of constative discourse, which is tantamount to totalizing.
In this sense, admitting (8.21)–(8.23) avoids the anti-psychologizing tendencies of the Fregeans and yields to the contingent psychologizing tendencies of the Quineans, but, in doing that, the admission does not presuppose the necessity of psychologizing epistemology or the validity (if psychologizing is avoided) of a privileged account of epistemology. As far as I am aware, there are no analytic strategies of (naturalized) epistemology that cannot be shown to be inadequately defended—on the clue collected at (8.21)–(8.23).
I had introduced in chapter 5, I may say, the "naturalizing" option Quine has brought to such high prominence. But I linked it there, for dialectical reasons, with Husserl's opposed and derogatory use of the epithet "naturalistic." I trust, therefore, that it will be useful to say now that, by naturalizing, I mean any philosophical policy or strategy that: (i) denies the ineliminability of legitimative (or normative) reason, along the lines just sketched; or (ii) claims to be able to analyze (reduce ) such reason and its operative norms to first-order psychological or causal or extensional terms; or (iii) precludes the need for legitimative reason (for instance, by defeating the doctrine of symbiosis—a fortiori, the need to admit second-order interpretations); or (iv) repudiates the epistemic relevance of countextedness, except in local terms keyed to ignorance—said to be surmountable in principle; or (v) pretends that a given natural-language inquiry ranges over a "closed system" or supersedes the "mythic" limits of constative discourse. (A closed system, therefore, is a world masquerading as the universe. The idea is not far from Wittgenstein's notion of the "mystical.")
I claim only that there is no compelling argument of the naturalizing kind, nor any that is promising about how to establish its case, nor any that satisfies the objections I have posed. I don't claim that the naturalizing option is incoherent or contradictory; I do say that stalemate here is as good as victory, for stalemate yields a sense of the barriers that must be and are not yet surmounted. In this sense, frankly, this primer is committed to the conviction that the "naturalizing" strategy cannot succeed.
I summarize all this as follows:
(8.24) the contextedness of truth-claims = the exclusion of cognitive privilege = the inseparability of first- and second-order discourse = the regulative function of legitimation = the symbiosis of world and language = the impossibility of totalizing = the implicated link between the constative and the mythic.
Count theorem (8.24) a rational "bet," not a self-defeating claim that insists that it is itself necessarily true. That, I say, is the principal benefit of the doctrine of the flux.
We have now reached something of a plateau. For, taken alone, (8.18) does not —cannot —disallow the presumption of de dicto or de re necessities; or the prioritizing of alethic, epistemic, or ontic considerations vis-à-vis one other; or foundationalist conjectures; or a priori confidence about the ultimate universal adequacy of favored philosophical strategies. No, it admits, initially, all coherent and promising strategies. Still, theorem (8.17) sets a condition on them all: it "relativizes" their supposed privilege by "entrenching" them in the Lebensformen of particular societies. It does not reject them outright: it diminishes their would-be privilege by acknowledging others that advance incompatible but comparable claims. That's all! It makes a historical artifact of modal necessity .[8]
I take this policy to be the gist of Foucault's extraordinarily perceptive (even good-humored) account of the "historical a priori " (the lesson of his "archaeology"), which, in a sense, is also a deepened version of the lesson of Wittgenstein's Lebensformen . For what Foucault suggests (and clearly believes) is that once we recognize that our science, our politics, our philosophy are entrenched in our society's epistemes (or, according to Wittgenstein, our Lebensformen, although now historicized), we cannot avoid admitting some version of the following:
(8.25) thinking is "prejudiced," tacitly constituted, impenetrably preformed, endogenously limited, "interested," perspectived, artifactually "rational," plastic, variable, culturally "constructed," alterable merely by being exercised, at once cognitively restrictive and enabling;
and, as a consequence of thinking's being thus formed,
(8.26) conceptual schemes appear from time to time to yield, as artifacts of our enabling epistemes, de re and de dicto necessities, apodictic and related totalizing powers.
Theorems (8.25) and (8.26) are meant to be blunderbuss sketches of what I make of Foucault's notion of the "historical a priori ": conceptual necessities (i) relatively successful in organizing inquiry, (ii) reasonably convincing as a consequence of the formative power of our epistemes,
(iii) alterable and replaceable under the force of changing history; but (iv) endogenously persistent. The theorems mentioned, therefore, are meant as stepping stones to what I (now) take to be Foucault's and Wittgenstein's principal discovery, namely:
(8.27) the "salience" of apparent cognitive privilege, modal necessity, and other totalizing powers is itself an artifact of our epistemes or Lebensformen .
Foucault perceptively observes that our sense of privilege and necessity is not so much mistaken as misinterpreted, for it is the touchstone of our own age regarding what to feature as the exemplars of "rational" argument. Hence, I take (8.25) and (8.26) to define the sense of Foucault's archaeological method (notably, in The Order of Things ).
The very idea of differentially weighting philosophical and scientific arguments—as open to rational ordering —betrays an (ineluctable) sense of epistemic salience, which, if it is not genuinely privileged, will seem completely arbitrary. By epistemic salience, then, I understand: (i) a first-order conviction about what is "rational" in the way of second-order legitimation, (ii) engendered by our Lebensformen, (iii) open to "rational" revision under the same constraint, and (iv) applied to what was salient in the way of legitimation in earlier phases of our continuing inquiries. (These distinctions lead, ultimately, to the topics of chapter 11.) Progressivism, we may now say, is the systematic (second-order) presumption that some sustained first-order inquiry, work, or commitment can, over time, be shown to approximate some valid invariant (archic or privileged) second-order norm.[9] Peirce, Popper, Hempel, Kuhn, and Habermas are all progressivists. So is Putnam, clinging to the "regulative" function of truth. Progress, by contrast, is a relatively modest first-order assessment (or the corresponding feature of actual inquiry thus assessed) of an approximation to any contingently posited norm. We may fairly claim to make progress in designing automobiles for fuel efficiency, but what does it mean to claim that we are making progress in designing a rational society? Assessments of progress are inevitably contexted; progressivist assessments are ultimately context-free, totalized.
Foucault resolves the puzzle posed by (8.27) by insisting on the symbiotized link between (i) the formation, in us ("upon our bodies"), of certain "epistemic saliencies" and (ii) our judging (representing to ourselves), by virtue of that enabling power, what is best in the epistemic
way. That is what I take Foucault to mean by the "historical a priori " produced (as he says) by that curious "empirico-transcendental doublet," the human self (ourselves—the selves of the modern world) thus constituted by its own formative history. But, we may well ask: From where does its legitimation come? The stunning point is surely this:
(8.28) the regulative function of legitimative reason entails its functioning reflexively as well.
Hence,
(8.29) the denial of (8.28) is tantamount to a claim of privilege.
I read Foucault's argument as a breakthrough regarding the puzzle of (8.28). If I understand it rightly, it says in effect (and if so, I agree) that
(8.30) the exemplary standing of legitimation is itself artifactually projected from its native epistemes, which set a tacit limit on what it thus projects.
There is no way to understand (8.30) except to say that
(8.31) whether first- or second-order, thinking is historically formed, historicized, and historically limited and empowered.
As I say, I accept something close to (8.31) as the postulate of this primer. Now, however, it begins to surface as a theorem. What is essential to my argument is this:
(8.32) no legitimative rationale can be disjoined from a companion theory of the causal and cultural formation of the self and its enabling epistemic powers.
Hence,
(8.33) there is no way to escape the dilemma of favoring privilege or favoring sheer arbitrariness (on legitimative matters) except by construing the regulative function of reason as itself projected, at some present time t, from whatever, at some past time t-k, will have served a similar regulative function.
In short,
(8.34) the legitimation of our legitimative practices cannot fail to be privileged or arbitrary if it does not acknowledge that it is itself endogenously dependent on saliencies that cannot be privileged.
Postmodernism, therefore, was quite right to voice its suspicions of legitimation, but entirely wrong to suppose that there could be no third way between privilege and arbitrariness (or between privilege and a non-legitimatable loyalty to local practices). (I take (8.30)–(8.34) to fix the essential theme of Foucault's genealogical interpretation of the "archaeological.")
I draw the following inescapable conclusion:
(8.35) all thinking, including legitimation, is "horizonal."
I mean, by horizonal, that aspect of thinking, both collective and individual, in virtue of which its reflexive regulative function—what is meant by "reason" or "rationality," whether first-order or second-order—is: (i) symbiotized; (ii) intransparent; (iii) socially constructed; (iv) intrinsically lebensformlich; (v) historically preformed and continually transformed in merely being exercised; (vi) tacitly confined to one "world" rather than another; and (vii) contingently so perceived within the terms of its own evolving history.[10] ("Horizonal," in the sense intended, accords with that offered by Husserl and Gadamer, but now as a term of art.) Thinking is horizonal, but there are (I say) no (denumerable) horizons to which thinking belongs. Furthermore, by tacit, I mean no more than that "horizonal" aspect of our cognizing powers, which we cannot fully fathom, and which—itself made transient through our own activity—transiently affects our sense of what is rational, relevant, valid, legitimated, normatively responsible, and the like.[11]
If this be granted, then,
(8.36) legitimation cannot escape the dilemma of privilege or arbitrariness, except by historicizing its own regulative function.
In effect, in abandoning all archic, apodictic, modal, originary, and totalizing presumptions, reason cannot fail to regard itself as horizonal. I have therefore reclaimed in part the promissory note of chapter 1, theorem (1.4), to the effect that first- and second-order (legitimative)
discourse are linked in a historicized way. For, by historicized, I mean (with respect to cognition) horizonal.If thinking were not historicized, then, reflexively, either legitimation would be privileged, would come to an end in some self-evident first principle (Aristotle), or it would be forever unable to rationalize its own legitimacy (Rorty).
I take (8.36) to confirm as well the sense in which Kant illicitly recovers the "noumenal" (with regard to cognizing subjects) from the contingencies of the "phenomenal" world (despite the demurrers of the preface to the second edition of the first Critique ). Foucault may have had this maneuver of Kant's in mind; although, in "What Is Enlightenment?" he very cleverly makes Kant the "genealogist" of the "historical a priori ."
In accord with these developments, I recommend that we concede that:
(8.37) thinking is Intentional .
I draw your attention to the use of the capital "I," by which I mean (later) to distinguish between its use and that of the more familiar terms, "intentional" and "intensional." I add—definitionally:
(8.38) the Intentional = the cultural;
or, now, more completely:
(8.39) the Intentional = the cultural = the horizonal = the contexted = the constructed.
Theorem (8.39) is the orienting theme of the rest of this primer—the nerve of the an-archic strategy. It brings together all the standard questions of philosophy under this executive postulate: thinking is a history . My argument is simply this: legitimation produces insoluble paradox (the dilemma of privilege and arbitrariness) if it is not construed in historicized terms. Why so? Because legitimation is reflexive and therefore subject to a regress. Only a solution like that implied in Wittgenstein (in On Certainty ) and that of Foucault (in The Order of Things ) could possibly resolve the dilemma without abandoning legitimation itself, because such a solution entrenches reason's regulative function in its own enabling Lebensformen but not on privileged grounds . It makes a philosophical virtue out of the insuperable threat of its own regress. It en-
trenches the regress in the historicized way. Doing that, it escapes both privilege and arbitrariness. The pretty point is this:
(8.40) legitimation = the legitimation of legitimation; that is, legitimation is reflexive.
I take theorem (8.40) to follow from (8.36) and to provide an "improved" analysis of Foucault's notion of the genealogical; that is to say, legitimation under historicized conditions.
I have already shown, in chapter 3, how reference and predication are similarly lebensformlich . Since first- and second-order discourse are conceptually linked ((1.2), (1.4)–(1.5)), to have shown why reference and predication function satisfactorily without cognitive privilege is to have addressed, however obliquely, the same question that now confronts us. The solution cannot fail to be the same. The only novelty I insist on is that, now, we see, more as a theorem than as a postulate, why thinking is inherently historied.
The solution to the riddle (call it an antinomy —there will be others) rests with this: (i) the puzzle and the solution are both inherently lebensformlich and (ii) whatever is lebensformlich is horizonal. Wittgenstein addresses (i) but neglects the historical dimension of societal life; Foucault addresses both (i) and (ii) but prefers to put the lesson in the form of an antinomy (the antinomy of history, let us say). Only by "genealogizing" something like Foucault's "archaeology" (which is what Foucault himself favors in historicizing the "a priori, " the "historical a priori, " the work of the "empirico-transcendental doublet") can we bring the riddle to resolution.
Theorem (8.39) is already entailed by what has gone before. I have made it explicit in order to cast a certain light on the developing argument. What I have been trying to do (against certain fears) is demonstrate that historicizing what is best in the analytic tradition need not produce insuperable paradox. That comes as a surprise.
There is said to be a deeper (a further) issue—incommensurability . But to grasp its curious history, you must first concede that the gathering argument comes to this:
(8.41) contextedness and horizonality are the synchronic and historicized analogues of one another.
Theorems like (8.41) are suspected (for instance, by Davidson) of harboring pernicious forms of "conceptual incommensurability."[12] The
odd thing is that they serve rather to defuse such fears. For, if incommensurability appears in benign ways in referential and predicative contexts, if the pernicious forms are marginal at best, then incommensurability cannot be very troublesome.
I grant the line of argument I favor appears to make the threat of incommensurability seem particularly dire. But if (2.1) holds, then it cannot be altogether avoided. More than that, there is no single form of incommensurability: most of the familiar forms prove benign, and those that are not are dispensable.
Consider only this: if reference and predication are, as I have argued, successful in a lebensformlich way, then, if there are plural, horizonally limited "forms of life," there cannot fail to be some (minimal) forms of conceptual incommensurability; also, those cannot fail to be benign. The phenomenon appears everywhere. Foucault actually considers epistemes that begin quite locally by environing a small change in practice (say, in the prison or the court or the asylum) and then spread out (like a virus or a colonizing strike) against other local practices that make a similar effort. And Wittgenstein remarks that even if we suppose we understand an alien language in some abstract way (perhaps by deciphering a written script, while never living among the native speakers, such as the Chinese, say), we may not understand what those native speakers mean by what they say, simply because we have no understanding of their actual practice. (These themes in Foucault and Wittgenstein are not very distant from Kuhn's—or from Marx's, for that matter.) The decisive consideration is this: the denial of incommensurability, after admitting the diversity of cultures, rests with the confusion of "worlds" and "universe." For, if we admit a plurality of cultures, how can we deny that conceptual incommensurabilities will arise? Remember: incommensurabilities need not be indiscernible or unimaginable or unintelligible or even untranslatable. Admitting incommensurables is really a local affair: they fall within a common universe, often within a common world. (That is of course the burden of Kuhn's "paradigms.")
What I have said about reference and predication must be understood in this spirit. The minimal form of incommensurability probably takes this form: skilled native speakers will notice that, moving between entrenched (but distinct) idiolects, dialects, slangs and codes, professionally discrete patterns of speech, diverse theoretical paradigms local to different groups of practicing scientists, different theorizing habits in situ, different languages (accessible to apt bilinguals), there will be stretches of fluent linguistic practice regarding each of any such pairs—
both (in some fair sense) intelligible to the same speakers—which cannot be easily detached (or detached at all) from their original entrenching practices, or inserted piecemeal, smoothly, anywhere in the counterpart practices . That's all that incommensurability entails. In short,
(8.42) the detection of conceptual incommensurability is a mark of cognitive and communicative competence, not evidence of its local failure or self-defeat.
Davidson has misjudged the threat. For consider that the linear measurement of the sides of a right triangle by integers is "incommensurable" with the measurement of its hypotenuse—even though the same agent understands the fact and can reconcile both measurements, conceptually. (This is the original case.) Complicate this sort of specimen—say, along Kuhn's or Feyerabend's or Hacking's or Foucault's or Wittgenstein's lines—and you will surely hit on any number of cases of plausible and genuine incommensurability. Nothing of importance hangs on that, "except" (i) the fact that conceptual incommensurabilityis a bona fide phenomenon that (ii) takes relatively shallow and profound forms, (iii) signifying that it is unlikely that any natural-language practice forms a single legible "system" (that excludes incommensurability). Incommensurability will also obtain of course wherever (iv) symbiosis and cognitive intransparency are acknowledged, or (v) totalizing is rejected.
Finally, at the opposite end of the continuum being sketched, grant (for the sake of the argument) that incommensurability = unintelligibility (or, = untranslatability ). As far as I know, Davidson is the only major American philosopher to have construed incommensurability along these strong lines. Accordingly, he treats it as an incoherent or self-defeating "idea": there cannot then be plural "conceptual schemes," he says; there cannot be a viable form of incommensurability.
He's right, of course—on his own grounds. But the argument fails nevertheless. First of all, there are no theorists (certainly no important theorists) who champion the thesis Davidson attacks: certainly not Whorf, not Kuhn, not Feyerabend. Second, if the distinctions I've introduced between "world" and "universe" and between "constative" and "mythic" hold, then Davidson cannot sustain his claim unless there is (or could be formulated) at least one reliable "system" encompassing the "world" and capable of accommodating (without incommensurability—neutral, as Davidson clearly affirms) any new disclosures in the "universe." But we cannot possibly know anything of the sort ((8.5)).
Third and finally, if the account I have given of reference, predication, individuation, numerical identity, ascription of truth-values, interpretation, and legitimation holds, if our discursive acts are entrenched in the way I have sketched, then Davidson cannot deny that some minimal or intermediary forms of incommensurability occur—benignly.
Davidson does not actually address these matters, though his reading of Tarski's theory of truth and his opposition to interpretive tertia do help to explain his own motivation. Beyond that, it needs to be said that "translatability " (or untranslatability)—Davidson's criterion—is nowhere defined in the philosophical literature.[13] (It bears of course on the disaster that befell Positivism.) If, then, one insists on translatability (beyond moderately successful piecemeal translation ), much more than incommensurability will suddenly be at risk. I conclude, therefore, that
(8.43) incommensurability
unintelligibilityuntranslatability.
Winch's reflections on the Azande, for instance, show how natural it is to suppose that conceptual incommensurabilities will arise ubiquitiously in field anthropology. Winch was simply misread: he never opposed theorems like (8.42), but he never ignored incommensurability either. By contrast, Quine seems to disallow incommensurability because, as he says, paraphrase and translation and understanding are all and only internal to our own language . But Quine does not acknowledge bilingualism in any pertinent way; more than that, having admitted there is no principled difference between intra- and interlinguistic communication, he offers no grounds for demarcating that linguistic community relative to which translation and paraphrase are entirely "internal ." (Quine precludes the question of intra linguistic incommensurabilities.) Furthermore, Quine's doctrine of the "indeterminacy of translation" is, effectively, the admission of a benign form of intra linguistic incommensurability. (Instructively, the same oversight appears in Rorty's insistence on "solidarity.") In short, the resolution of incommensurabilities (of any sort) does not presuppose the accessibility of a neutral language: one in which (i) all incommensurabilities can be translated; one in which (ii) no incommensurabilities arise; and one regarding which (iii) we have compelling legitimative reasons for believing that what independently obtains in the real world is formulable in its terms. I rest my case.
What, despite their differences, is missed by Quine and Davidson and Rorty and those Wittgensteinians who deny that it makes sense to think of plural "forms of life" is simply that notions like "our society" and
"our Lebensform " are holistic notions—notions that never function criterially . Hence, if one speaks of managing paraphrases of the alien utterances of the speakers of "another" society from the vantage of "ours" alone, one intrudes a sense of the boundaries of our collective practices that we cannot, in principle, confirm. For, these same "interlinguistic" puzzles arise "intralinguistically" as well. There is, in principle, no difference between the two. If you treat "our" society as a universe, then the resolution will be arbitrary; if you treat it as a "world," then you will have acknowledged plural "forms of life" in spite of your intention.
The point of these remarks is to demonstrate that a seemingly decisive puzzle (incommensurability)—in effect, a decisive objection against claims like those adumbrated in (8.41)—arises and is easily resolved in synchronic terms; if you grant that, however, there will be no reason to suppose that incommensurabilities generated by historical processes need be any more difficult in principle.
I therefore content myself with listing a series of provocative theorems that follow from all this:
(8.44) legitimative claims need not preclude, ignore, or override incommensurabilities;
(8.45) epistemic incommensurabilities may take a coherent form;
(8.46) epistemic incommensurabilities entail some form of "robust relativism"—although relativism need not entail incommensurabilities of any kind;
(8.47) truth-claims and legitimative claims are inherently horizonal;
hence,
(8.48) epistemic incommensurabilities entail the ineliminability of relativism and historicism within the strong sciences.
I take these findings to be the effect of Kuhn's work (at least in recent American philosophy), although Kuhn has to some extent retreated from them.
I remind you (in the spirit of chapter 4) that I am not relativizing truth or "relationalizing" the (alethic) reading of truth-values. Hardly anyone, however, denies the "relativity" of epistemic questions. Most suppose (even Putnam, who energetically opposes relativism) that our conceptual and epistemic resources do betray a certain "cultural relativ-
ity." My own argument is that, once "epistemic incommensurabilities" are admitted, some form of robust relativism cannot be precluded. By epistemic incommensurabilities, I mean no more than incommensurabilities affecting the use of epistemically pertinent distinctions—even regarding legitimative reason. I see no way of admitting incommensurabilities and denying that they pertinently affect our assessment of what we know. I should perhaps add, to clinch matters, that
(8.49) horizonality is, intrinsically, a source of incommensurabilities—preeminently, epistemic ones.
This is the common lesson to be drawn from Kuhn and Foucault and Gadamer, and, read in accord with (8.41), it confirms the ease with which Wittgenstein's remarks on Lebensformen may be made to yield findings of a similar sort.
History, however, can claim no privilege in effecting conceptual change. On the contrary, history remains forever blind: it is the mere medium of thinking. That is the key to the resolution of the antinomy of history (mentioned earlier), viz.: that, on the one hand, we judge what to regard as true in our historicized world; that, on the other, the grounds on which we so judge are themselves historicized.[14] If we accede to this and simply continue in our inquiries, we are merely arbitrary in our claims, and if we advance legitimative criteria by which to escape the historicizing process, we merely return to the presumption of privilege (transcendentalism, for instance, in Husserl). The dilemma is a real one. The resolution then is this:
(8.50) there is no principled epistemic resolution of the antinomy of history, but there is no need for one: epistemic practices that are neither arbitrary nor privileged are lebensformlich—although not criterially .
I am convinced that (8.50) is the best (and only) possible solution, but I admit its meaning may not be sufficiently clear. I have a reason for not coming to that too quickly: I want to emphasize first that the solution of the epistemological question will be the same solution that will serve a comparable question in moral philosophy. We shall go through the horns of the dilemma in both inquiries and, in doing that, confirm at one stroke the futility of all "naturalizing" strategies. For, "naturalizing" invokes the same dilemma everywhere .
The key, then, is this:
(8.51) epistemic competence is lebensformlich, but lebensformlich practices are merely viable.
What I mean is: what is lebensformlich are no more than the collective practices of our society within which our cognitive powers take form—and change through actual use . They are not criterial in any invariant sense.[15]
You may find the answer disappointing; I say rather that it is incomplete. The trick is this: one solves the antinomy by retiring it. That is what I mean by historicizing thinking . I do not historicize truth or knowledge, only assumptions. Nevertheless,
(8.52) although it affects its own history, legitimation cannot, epistemically, anticipate its own historical revision.
Hence,
(8.53) history is epistemically blind.
I shall risk one further remark. Admit theorem (8.51) and what it collects from (8.44)–(8.50) and (8.52)–(8.53), and you cannot fail to see that
(8.54) ascriptions of knowledge cannot be made distributively, unless derivatively on lebensformlich grounds.
Being holistic, the lebensformlich cannot be privileged—because it cannot be criterial. Knowledge is primarily an artifactual competence, not a determinate psychological state (for instance, by (5.1), (5.3), (5.10), (5.18), (8.35), (8.37)): to know that snow is white, for instance—or that " 'Snow is white' is true"—is to be able to satisfy whatever pertinent criteria may be drawn from the collectively defined instantiated competence our Lebensformen may support. Just as the meaning of isolated sentences cannot be disjoined from their deeper lingual context ((3.17)), so too seemingly isolated instances of knowledge cannot be disjoined from their instantiating a certain lebensformlich competence.
The objection may be put more tellingly.[16] It cannot fail to be question-begging to insist (with Goldman) that the conditions of knowledge may be determined "scientifically" or (with Kitcher) that the his-
tory of scientific success simply supplies the evolving methodological conditions of knowledge. Goldman tends to treat epistemologies as either naturalistic or aprioristic. But if one considers theories like Duhem's holism (which, I warn, is altogether different from Quine's, although Quine's is often conflated with Duhem's) or van Fraassen's positivism (which replaces considerations of truth by considerations of adequacy, in regard to the relation between explanatory theory and observational data), then we are forced to acknowledge a "third" sort of epistemology (neither naturalistic nor aprioristic) that resists reduction of the epistemic to the non-epistemic: to the psychological or the causal or the like; that remains reflexively critical without invoking privilege; and that is noticeably congruent with an an-archic stance. (I am not endorsing Duhem or van Fraassen, but I cannot see how their theories can be initially disallowed—or subsumed under the usual disjunctive options.) The irony remains that appeal to the cognitive achievements of science may be adversely judged to have favorably (but arbitrarily) interpreted the deeper indeterminacies of scientific practice itself. Naturalizing epistemologists typically ignore the question. Once admitted, it shows that naturalism cannot be defended on naturalistic grounds.
This is the strong reason for disallowing all causal, naturalizing, or merely first-order normative readings of cognitive ascriptions of the form, "S knows that p, " where "p " ranges over discrete propositions. Epistemology cannot be satisfactorily grounded solipsistically or in terms of individual psychology or in accord with the usual readings of JTB. For instance, it counts against the usual versions of the now-fashionable doctrine of reliabilism:[17] that is, the doctrine that holds that knowledge may be rightly ascribed an agent who, believing that p, does so in a way that either "optimizes" or "satisfices" (sufficiently) the reliability-producing conditions under which he or she so believes and that resists admitting that the "reliabilizing" conditions are themselves inseparable from the profoundly horizonal constraints under which such ascriptions alone make sense.
One may say, for instance, in accord with (8.54), that it is more important to know who putatively knows that p (given his or her deeper epistemic competence: a mathematician or a child, say, with respect to an arithmetic proposition) than to know what isolated proposition is putatively known. No naturalist has ever been able to give a convincing and ramified sketch of what is to count as the sufficient causal conditions for confirming that anyone actually knows that p . The prospects for defeating any pertinent claims of the causal sort (however ramified) are plainly beyond control.
What I claim is that the ascription can never be more than an informal abstraction from a horizonally shifting lebensformlich competence. This is why, for instance, it is such a conceptual embarrassment to try to state whether and why, by our lights, "primitive" peoples simply lack knowledge altogether! But even to succeed in sustaining such ascriptions is to admit conditions that the causal or naturalizing formula usually ignores. In part II of this primer, I consolidate the distinctions I am alluding to, in terms of what I shall characterize as the "Intentional." For the moment, however, let me simply say that
(8.55) ascriptions of knowledge are validated more in accord with the pertinent phases of an agent's career than with the causes of that agent's particular beliefs.
For, of course, if the naturalizing of epistemology fails (5.13), then
(8.56) either the valid ascription of knowledge is not a causal matter at all or the causes of knowledge cannot be specified in naturalized terms alone.
That is, the causal account of knowledge, of the naturalizing sort, is simply question-begging.
Ascriptions of truth, knowledge, rationality, and the like are, as I have argued, artifacts of our horizonal reflections. They are in this sense incapable of being totalized, precluded from progressivist optimism, and subject to lebensformlich incommensurabilities. But it is also part of my argument that, despite these important constraints, intra- and intersocietal communication is plainly effective. My only caveat about communicative success is an analogue of what I have already said about progress and progressivism. Discourse, viewed in terms of first-order communication, is decidedly successful—whether we pursue first- or second-order questions. But that alone cannot confirm that success implicates our being guided or governed by any universal norms of rationality, any invariant second-order rules of thought or understanding. That, I say, is a complete non sequitur . I cannot see that it is significantly different in the universalizing presumptions of Kant, Husserl, Peirce, Popper, Gadamer, Apel, or Habermas. All these theorists, it seems to me, are guilty (in the same sense) of construing first-order success in understanding or communication as incoherent or inexplicable unless some invariant second-order forms of reason are acknowledged to gov-
ern our pertinent first-order successes ((8.14)). Once you realize that the imputation of first-order success is itself no more than consensual and horizonal—in precisely the same sense in which (as I have argued) reference is—that particular game is utterly lost.
Briefly, then,
(8.57) progressivism is untenable.
Where the rational guidance of inquiry, thought, work, commitment, and the like are said to be, necessarily, changelessly embedded in empirical thinking (as in Kant's view or, in a way, already in Descartes's "natural light of reason"), progressivism may be displaced by the possibility of punctuated instantiations of the requisite norms; where the reclamation of ideally adequate norms of rationality is itself the gradual work of societal learning (as in Peirce and Habermas), progressivism is directly favored. In the first, reason is said to be constitutive in first-order thinking; in the second, it is regulative only. On the argument of the first, what is normatively constitutive is also normatively regulative. Both options fail to satisfy (8.57).
PART II
Chapter IX
Change and History
The essential feature of Aristotle's metaphysics lies in the skill with which Aristotle admits all forms of change or motion (kinesis or, better, energeia ) within the encompassing terms of invariant reality. Aristotle's was the first and most resilient reconciliation of change and changelessness the ancient world had ever achieved. The work of the Presocratics, notably that of Heraclitus and Democritus, proved too fragmentary for later use in any systematic way, and Plato's great effort (regarding the eternal Forms) has remained altogether baffling, from Aristotle's time to our own, so that it cannot really count as a fully explicit alternative. (Of course, it has inspired all sorts of alternatives.) More important is the intriguing and remarkable fact that history, although plainly a form of change, cannot be reduced to (that is, explicated, without significant remainder, in terms of) any other forms of change (those, say, that Aristotle admits). Not only that, but what we now mean by "history" had hardly dawned on the Western world until a philosophical review of the import of the French Revolution was seriously attempted. The significance of this single fact can hardly be exaggerated.
The conceptual link between theorizing about history and contingent history itself is probably unique in the chronicles of philosophy. That very fact bears in a most instructive way on the puzzles aired in the preceding chapter. For, you will remember, I claimed there that the rationale for legitimation could not be satisfactorily supplied except in historicized terms and that that signified a certain profound contingency regarding what we should understand by "reason." It now begins to
appear that the theme of history is an unusually large one, not in any sense a mere adjustment (adding a species of change) to an otherwise more or less adequate account of reality. In its modern form, the theory of history was hardly pursued in the ancient world. (You have only to read the few lines Aristotle spares history in his Poetics .) This is not to say that Thucydides's history was not a genuine history. But Thucydides's history was also conceived in full accord with the common theme of classical philosophy: that is, the archic theme that change is ultimately constrained by the changeless order of nature.
What I am claiming is admittedly open to dispute. You may insist that the theme of history was discovered by the Greeks: that the difference between modern and ancient notions of history is not due to the appearance of a radically different notion of history (a sui generis form of change) but only to changes in our conception of the world in which histories and change obtain; hence, that, since the Greeks had in fact considered (and rejected) the conceptual viability of denying invariance, they may (or must) be said to have considered as well the radical sort of history I am alluding to (the form of change that, in chapter 8, proved to be unavoidable).
I regard this last sort of resistance as a grand mistake, one that utterly obscures the distinctive features of human history. The Greeks did not theorize about history, because they did not consider the possibility that history was a sui generis form of change entirely unlike whatever forms of change might be found in physical nature.[1] They theorized instead about generic change (in nature), they subsumed history under that, and they admitted no essential distinction between mere (temporal) change and history. They supposed the chronicles of human life present us with information about change, about events that take time—in a sense of "change" suitably uniform for physical events and human affairs alike. Simply put, their view was that the temporal process (whatever its variety) was uniformly constrained, both epistemically and ontically, by the changeless order of things.
That is what I mean to deny: both (i) the necessary link between history and changelessness, and (ii) the indifference of history's real structure to the analysis of change itself, hence to the analysis of the "nature" of the things that change in the way of history. History, I say, is a sui generis form of change that qualifies only things of a certain "nature" apt for such change. The Greeks believed that temporal change (in effect, what they conveniently called history in certain accounts) applied in a uniform way to anything in (sublunar) nature —a fortiori, to
humans. Much of the modern discussion of history agrees with this part of the Greek view: that is, with item (ii) of the tally just offered. (I mean to replace it.) Plato's formula, in Timaeus, declares that "time is the moving image of eternity"; Aristotle's, in Poetics, that "poetry is more philosophical than history." Neither touches the essential issue.
The Greeks do not theorize about history, then, because they do not see the global significance of history as a conceptually distinctive kind of change affecting only distinctive kinds of entities (or, the entire world because of that). They do not see that the analysis of history bears on the distinctive metaphysics of human existence and the corresponding features of human knowledge. They theorize about human existence and knowledge all right—in terms of a generic relationship between (natural) change and changelessness—and then they admit history as a record of sequentially ordered changes from which, as in Thucydides, we may even glean political and ethical wisdom. Kinesis and energeia, in Aristotle's sense, are certainly ample notions. But the heart of Aristotle's account—which is no different in this respect from that of any other ancient theorist—concedes that the exemplars of change may be freely or indifferently drawn from the inanimate and subhuman worlds; that, I say, betrays the Greek blindness to the distinction of history.
In any event, returning to theorem (2.1)—the denial of the necessity of invariance—I now safely affirm that
(9.1) history does not presuppose a changeless order of reality.
Theorem (9.1) trivially recovers the large theme of (2.1) within the terms of reference that began to surface in chapter 8. More provocatively, I claim (but cannot yet show) that, within the scope of (2.1),
(9.2) history is a sui generis form of temporal change.
In this sense, the idea of history is perhaps the single greatest philosophical discovery of the nineteenth century. I shall come to my argument in a moment, but let me make clear its full intent. I mean to argue that
(9.3) history is the sui generis (Intentional) structure of human existence and of whatever belongs intrinsically to the world of human culture;
hence, that, at the very least,
(9.4) histories are real predicables.
Theorems (9.1)–(9.4) make a tidy set. It captures the modern notion of history—what accounts for all the fundamental differences between the modern and the ancient treatments. History, as I use the term, signifies (predicatively): (i) a unified sequence of temporal change; (ii) one that is paradigmatically manifested in human "careers" but is also found (only) in the "careers" of the artifacts of the human "world"; (iii) one that is intrinsically "meaningful" (Intentional) in a sui generis way; and (iv) one that is attributable to existing things without entailing any telos in the sequence of changes that it unites (qua history)—that is, without entailing a final cause somehow immanent and effective in the phases of an actual history. Since, as we have already seen in chapter 7, the term "career" functions equivocally as a predicate and as a referring (or individuative) expression, we should not find it unreasonable, now, to acknowledge, by the same equivocation, that
(9.5) a history is a kind of career.
Histories, we may say, are either or both predicables and individuated entities of some kind ((7.22)–(7.23).) Theorems (9.1)–(9.5) are noticeably modest, therefore, although they do indeed intrude a new theme—particularly (9.3). As they stand, except for (9.3), the set of theorems (9.2)–(9.5) hardly poses difficulties for Aristotle. It is of course (9.1) that radicalizes the rest of the set.
I have been inching forward here in a distinctly hesitant way. The obvious reason is that I take the philosophical significance of history to be of the grandest scope, to have been neglected or fundamentally misperceived by the entire Western world up to the period just preceding the French Revolution, and to have been inserted into the running account of my primer without adequate grounding. I have shown the indispensable role of historicity in resolving the puzzles of legitimation ((8.30), (8.31), (8.34)), and I regard that gain as vindicating the theorems so far introduced in this chapter. I have also shown that the doctrine of symbiosis leads, ineluctably, to the impossibility of disjoining the cultural and natural worlds—succinctly expressed in (8.35). That leads on (as I have shown) to historicizing thinking ((8.26), (8.32)).
But I have certainly not prepared the ground (in any pertinent met-
aphysical sense) for the full use of such terms as "Intentional," "cultural," "human," or "historicized": theorem (9.3) might be (wrongly) suspected of having assumed that more was safely in place than has actually been worked out. Have patience. I should not want to give the impression, having opposed Aristotle on the archic issue, that I had (also) somehow justified (or thought I had justified) the newer issues I (now) take (9.3) to implicate (but not to have established). These are clearly meant to explicate theorems (8.34)–(8.35), which, in effect, identify the cultural world as inherently historicized. That is the radical theme I have in mind. I do invoke and use the pertinent terms, but I cannot claim to have defined the world they designate. (That is the liberty I must still redeem.)
In short, I have not yet directly addressed the question of the very nature of history's structure. But if it were confined to the temporal processes of the human or cultural world (or if it were at least paradigmatically first located there), and if—as I did say in chapter 8 but did not stop to explain—thinking and cultural phenomena are in general "Intentional" ((8.37)–(8.39)), then the argument would also surely require that
(9.6) history has an Intentional structure.
This, too, cannot be more than a purely verbal formula as yet.
"Intentionality," then, is the linchpin of the entire account. You cannot fail to see, however, that Intentionality is already implicated in the earlier discussions of reference and predication, of identity and individuation, of world and universe, of text and context, of symbiosis and social construction. All that has gone before leads inexorably (but conditionally) to the promissory note that is theorem (9.6).
We are poised, therefore, for a fresh beginning. I mean to explain the distinction of history in terms of Intentionality, and I radicalize its lesson by construing history in terms of historicity —that is, the thesis that thought is itself historied, subject to horizonal constraint ((8.35)). Now, then, from an entirely different quarter—from my account of symbiosis, theorem (4.11), which, clearly, need not in principle be historicized—we cannot fail to see that combining symbiosis and historicity will yield a distinctive philosophy, one that could not have been available before the period of the French Revolution. I call it historicism, and define it simply as that doctrine that (or whatever doctrine) results from interpreting symbiosis in historicized terms.[2] Any attempt to recover invariance or
cognitive privilege within its terms is bound to be self-contradictory ((8.31)–(8.41)). Ranke's historicism is self-contradictory—or else it is saved by God's benevolence in epistemic matters (for God is hardly confined in the horizonal way). Foucault's historicism (what Foucault means by "genealogy") is not self-contradictory at all (although it is relatively inexplicit philosophically).
As I see matters, the thread of thinking in Western philosophy that best captures what I am calling historicism runs from Fichte's Jena Wissenschaftslehre to Hegel's Phenomenology, from a more post-Kantian symbiosis to Hegel's remarkable, fully historicized achievement. Foucault, in various stages of his own work, recovers what may be consistently redeemed of Kant's apriorism (the "historical a priori ") within the larger terms of the "genealogy" of truth. In short, I am leading my primer's argument in the direction of a thoroughgoing and consistent historicism.
The schema is now very trim—and rather powerful. The trick is: I apply historicity to both constructivism and symbiosis. That yields (what I call) historicism . At the risk of an oversimplification, I should say that transcendentalism (i) precludes symbiosis, (ii) accommodates constructivism (or constructionism), but (iii) opposes historicity; as a result, (iv) transcendentalism is a form of archism that treats the "subject" of (phenomenal) constructions as not itself constructed or historicized. My sense is that Kant is a transcendentalist in the first Critique, and that readers of the third Critique attempt to escape condition (iv)—Cassirer perhaps, Dilthey perhaps, certainly Habermas, possibly Putnam (at a considerable remove). They cannot succeed, I believe, if they are progressivists or teleologists (as Peirce and Habermas clearly are), if they hold that there is a uniquely correct account of the "possibility" of a would-be science or otherwise pertinent inquiry (as Kant and, seemingly, Cassirer and, in a sense, Husserl hold), if the categories of the understanding (and related structures) are not abstracted from "empirical" inquiry but (somehow) presupposed by or innate in such inquiry (as Kant's letter to Herz affirms), or if our reflexive findings regarding the "possibility" of a would-be science are, when true, necessarily true although synthetic (in Kant's sense). Externalism, as I say, precludes constructivism. Kant is hardly an externalist, therefore. But Kant interprets the epistemic pretensions of externalism within the terms of his own transcendentalism, and that is precisely what encourages externalists like Moore in their analytic "reduction" of Kant's own transcendentalism.
In what he calls genealogy, Foucault is (in my terms) committed to historicism. I should say that Hegel was as well—as a critic of Kant's transcendentalism. But if readers of Hegel insist that he is an absolute Idealist (meaning by that that even his historicism is internal to a larger teleologism addressed to the universe ), then I must part company with Hegel and charge him with a peculiar form of incoherence, since under no circumstances can a historicized or horizoned understanding confront the universe or confront it in a cognitively competent way. (That would be to reinstate something akin to transcendentalism.) But, then, I confess I find such a reading, as a serious reading of Hegel, preposterous.
I shall proceed by very small steps: it is much too easy to go astray. The fact is that the history of the concept of "intentionality" is itself seriously flawed. It was introduced in modern times by Brentano, from a reading of its original use in medieval philosophy, and it was greatly improved by Husserl. That is the form in which it largely now survives: psychologized (by Brentano) and phenomenologized (by Husserl), with almost no attention to the collective dimension of cultural life or to history or historicity—themes which I have hinted at drawing together by a historied reading of Wittgenstein's Lebensformen . In that form, it has nevertheless proved well-nigh ineliminable, despite Quine's notorious recommendation that it be eliminated from science and philosophy on the grounds that it is philosophically negligible as far as the descriptive and explanatory functions of the principal sciences are concerned. Quine was wrong, as the record shows, although I cannot stop to explain the sense of the "intentional" in Brentano's and Husserl's inquiries. (I will return to it, you may be sure. Quine himself never collected the telling evidence for his own claim.)
What, as I say, we need to notice about Brentano and Husserl is that their usage makes no explicit provision for forms of intentionality that cannot be analyzed in (or "reduced" to) whatever versions apply first to psychologically or phenomenologically apt agents (taken singly or as externally related aggregates). Brentano and Husserl treated the "intentional" (or the psychological or phenomenological) solipsistically,[3] although that was not their intention, in the sense that: (i) Brentano defined the psychological, and Husserl the phenomenological, in terms of the cognitional aptitudes of individual agents (that is, subjects ), without essential reference to any societally embedded, irreducibly collective structures, or (ii) characterized the societal dimension of thought and language as, in some inexplicit way, presupposing the prior cognizing
powers of the merely psychological or phenomenological. The argument that follows is intended to support the quite different—largely neglected—finding:
(9.7) the Intentional cannot be reduced to, or derived from, the intentional, construed solipsistically.
More provocatively put:
(9.8) the intentional, whether treated psychologically or phenomenologically, cannot be adequately analyzed without construing its own paradigmatic structure as Intentional.
The upshot of theorem (9.8) is to disallow transcendental subjects —a fortiori, transcendental constructionism ((2.13)). This explains the sense in which the transcendentalism of Kant and Husserl, although they are hardly "externalists," has been viewed congenially by analytic philosophers drawn to their particular forms of constructionism. (That is, always assuming that the transcendental can be empirically reduced.)
An important corollary for studies in animal psychology and artificial intelligence is tendered by the following theorem:
(9.9) the intentional, in nonhuman animals, machines, and the phenomena of physical nature is "anthropomorphized": metaphoric, heuristic, or otherwise encumbered by the prior analysis of the human world.
By anthropomorphized, I mean no more than that feature of our discourse about anything characterized as a "subject" (anything that is not paradigmatically human in the way of cognition and Intentionality) that is described, defined, or explained in terms that ineliminably implicate the Intentional. Theorem (9.9) follows fairly obviously from (9.7)–(9.8). So we have made an easy and interesting gain. But that gain features the controversial possibilities of (9.3) which I acknowledged a moment ago.
Let me, therefore, now define the Intentional (not the "intentional"), as a frank term of art:
(9.10) the Intentional is a collective predicable ascribed to individual human persons, selves, or subjects (in virtue of their culturally acquired competences) or to whatever artifacts or acts are conformably endowed (that is, Intentionally) by virtue of their activity; hence, the
Intentional implicates a model, or models, of rationality (in agents, deeds, or artifacts) drawn from the collective life of their enabling society.
Language, for instance, is a collective practice, whereas speech is ascribable only (aggregatively) to individual speakers. The structure of meaningful speech implicates the rationality of speakers, and the rationality of speakers is a holist projection of legitimating norms drawn from the collective life of a historical society. (I return to the question of norms in chapter 11.) Against both the Francophone structuralists (Saussure, Greimas) and the Chomskyans,[4] we may say that, paradigmatically, in natural-language contexts, there can be no disjunction between the collective (or "systematic") aspects of language and the individuated (improvisational and context-bound) aspects of speech (or the token instantiation of speech acts) or the prioritizing of one over the other. But models of rationality are themselves historicized.[5]
Linguistic "utterance" is at once the activity of individual agents and of agents endowed with collectively qualified (linguistic) powers. By the collective I mean (i) a predicable, (ii) qualifying any of a range of phenomena that includes the mental, the psychological, the subjective, the linguistic, the lingual, the active, and the cultural, (iii) that is not reducible to the solipsistic or to aggregative relations among solipsistic referents, and (iv) signifies the symbiosis between individual agents competent in terms of (ii) and whatever social conditions account (by way of natural acquisition) for their actual competence. (In effect, as we shall shortly see, the "collective" = the lebensformlich . I use it, therefore, Intentionally. I may perhaps add that I shall retire somewhat the use of the term "lebensformlich " in favor of the "Intentional." I relied on the first chiefly because it was already familiar in the context of Wittgenstein's Investigations . But its use in a historicized spirit is clearly contrary to Wittgenstein's profoundly ahistoricist intuitions. Some, therefore, may have found my freewheeling usage annoying. In any case, the "Intentional" is a term of art that has gained an advantage from association with the lebensformlich .)
Saussure's distinction between langue and parole is a disaster; Chomsky's hypothesis about hardwired "species-specific" grammars biologically prior to all forms of linguistic utterance is a completely arbitrary posit that has never been coherently explained. In particular, if "nomological necessity" proves a dubious concept, then the entire Chomskyan strategy is placed at risk for reasons more fundamental than any
empirical (or a priori ) local claims Chomsky might care to advance. Hence, if, as I recommend,
(9.11) persons or selves are, inherently, linguistically competent humans,
then
(9.12) persons or selves possess Intentional attributes that cannot be reduced to the biology, neurophysiology, or biologically emergent psychological capacities of the individual members of Homo sapiens sapiens .
From this, it follows that
(9.13) persons or selves are not numerically identical with the members of Homo sapiens, since the first possess, whereas the second do not (unless derivatively), Intentional attributes.
Furthermore, recalling the promissory intention of (7.22)–(7.23), we may now begin to reclaim the earlier debt by affirming that
(9.14) persons or selves are histories, consequently have Intentional "natures," or, lacking "natures," are only Intentional "careers";
and
(9.15) persons or selves are not natural-kind entities,
in that their "natures" do not accord (as such) with, or directly instantiate, any strict, universal, exceptionless law of nature (in particular, any law imputed to the "mere" things of the physical [or biological] world). None of this precludes, of course, our matching, as a matter of normal practice, individual persons and the individual members of Homo sapiens . They are related, but not by identity. (I address the question in the next chapter.)
The import of all of (9.7)–(9.15) may now be conveniently summarized thus:
(9.16) all and only persons or selves are subjects,
that is to say: (i) collectively enabled; (ii) individually competent; (iii) rational; and (iv) apt for language, cognition, reflexive awareness, and choice and deliberate action. Recalling the argument of chapter 4, we may now say that
(9.17) subjects are self-interpreting texts;
and that the individuated artifacts of their cultural world (artworks, words and sentences, machines, preeminently) are also texts, since they possess Intentional properties but are not (normally) subjects .[6] Thus, to attribute expressive properties to Michelangelo's Pietà is hardly to construe that sculptural "text" as a person or as possessing a psychologically or cognitionally competent "nature", but the ascription does oblige us to answer the adequational question (chapter 5)—which is normally ignored. Theorems (9.16)–(9.17) help to focus once again the peculiar failing of naturalism.
I conclude from this that Davidson (for one) is quite right to affirm something very close to this:
(9.18) there can be no strict or exceptionless (a fortiori, no deterministic) psychological or psychophysical laws,
although I also believe Davidson is wrong to suppose that, nevertheless, the mental or psychological can be subsumed under universal physical laws, simply because either the mental or psychological can be reduced in principle in physicalist terms (which Davidson actually denies) or can be treated in terms restricted to nonreductive physicalism or the supervenience theory (which he affirms).[7]
By those last terms, which are thought to yield equivalent truth-value assignments (speaking disjunctively in terms of the mental and the physical), Davidson advances the thesis that (i) the concerns of reductive and eliminative physicalisms (or similar doctrines) are to be treated agnostically; (ii) nevertheless, it is modally (necessarily) true that there can be no change in the mental or psychological without a corresponding change in the physical, and, as a result, (iii) wherever a truth-value may be empirically assigned to reports about the mental or psychological (taken "token-wise"), equivalent truth-values can always be assigned their physical counterparts. Davidson's point is that we cannot rightly speak of correlations between the "mental" and the "physical" taken type-wise, that is, in such a way as to invite a search for genuine psy-
chological laws. The reason, apparently, is that the mental is "intentional" whereas the physical is not. What Davidson means is: the mental implicates a model of rationality that is "holist"—in the sense introduced in chapter 5 (holistr ).
But, of course, if truths about the mental can be discerned token-wise, in individual cases, then there can be no a priori or principled grounds for ruling out psychophysical laws, or "type-wise" generalizations. The "supervenience" theory is, therefore, completely arbitrary (in Davidson's presentation), for, absent identity, there is no reason (and none is ever offered) for believing the modal claim being advanced. No one, in fact, has ever shown its truth or plausibility; hence, one may even suspect that it is no more than a cryptic version (perhaps computationally motivated) of the very identity theory it is said to avoid (or replace). Furthermore, on substantive grounds, supervenience is a dubious doctrine, because it both (i) advances a modally necessary connection between the mental and the physical (or analogous relations in epistemic or moral or other contexts), and (ii) is hardly as plausible, empirically, as the "many-many" principle Feigl formulated (but feared might be true).[8] The modal claim cannot be confirmed ((2.1)). The "many-many" principle holds, with respect to the mind/body problem: that, say, for any physical movement (a hand's waving), it is in principle possible that, in context, that movement may designate any of a variety of actions (signaling a turn in a automobile, pretending to signal thus, or acting the part of so signaling, among more elaborate possibilities); that, say, for any action (making a chess move), the action may, in context, obtain through or as a result of any of a variety of physical movements (a hand's pushing a pawn across a chessboard, a hand's writing a line of script [interpreted as a move], or a hand's motion flipping a switch on an electronic chessboard, among other more exotic possibilities); and that there is no algorithmic rule for determining or delimiting such linkages. (They are only Intentionally related.)
For the moment, consider the following four features of the Intentional (or cultural) drawn from what has already been said in (9.10): viz., it is (i) inherently collective rather than solipsistic, (ii) "holist" (holistr ) rather than extensional, (iii) emergent rather than supervenient, and (iv) historicized rather than naturalized. At the very least, no effort to naturalize history and culture can claim to be conceptually responsible if it fails to come to terms with all four features. Davidson addresses only one: the sense in which the mental is "holistr "—but that feature cannot stand on its own: it leads at once to the unsupported supposition
that all "holistr " idioms are a mere façon de parler . Perhaps they are. But where is the argument?
This is a very large matter. I can afford only a few remarks. For one thing, when Davidson speaks of "types" and "tokens," he means nothing more than particular causal occasions not subsumed under a causal law: mere "members" of a "set." (In chapter 10, I shall introduce an entirely different "type/token" idiom suited to cultural entities.) Second, when he speaks of "supervenience," he means a "dependency" (the term hearkens back to Moore's account of "natural" and "nonnatural" properties in the moral context, although Moore does not mention supervenience). Hence, when he says the connection between the "mental" and the "physical" is a necessary one (in the direction of favoring the "dependency" of the mental on the physical), Davidson reads supervenience in terms that are non-Intentional, non-causal, and non-analytic (logically).
At this point, I need warn only that wherever the psychological cannot be satisfactorily characterized in non-Intentional terms (frankly, already at the level of human language and thought), supervenience cannot be a convincing doctrine for, surely, the Intentional cannot be shown to be "supervenient" on the physical (in Davidson's sense). No view of the "mental" shorn of Intentional qualification can bear the weight of providing an analysis of the cultural world ((8.39)), and the Intentional is holistr (modeled in terms of rationality) rather than extensional ((9.10)). In general, the relation between the "mental" (linguistically qualified) and the "physical" is and must be mediated by suitable interpretive schemes—what Rorty has dismissed as "tertia ." The only other possibilities are the reductive and eliminative options that Davidson rejects.
In the same spirit, we may say that, if, indeed, the psychological is Intentional ((8.37)), then (on the argument being favored, which is still largely inexplicit),
(9.19) the psychological cannot be "naturalized,"
which is a theorem that catches up the gist of (8.25) and at least part of the gist of Davidson's own claim about the mental (being not nomological as such)—if (also) "supervenience" fails. (Of course, Davidson does not believe supervenience fails.) So the complexities of our topic cannot be hidden, although I must concede again that what I have so far constructed still looks a little like a house of cards.
For related reasons, I take Popper to be right in holding that
(9.20) there are no laws of history,
if he means, by law, exceptionless or modally necessary ("nomological") universals ranging over causal and cognate relations, regardless of whether we ever discern or can confirm them. But, against Popper, this is not to say that "laws" or "lawlike regularities" need be, or ever are, necessary de re ((2.6)) or exceptionlessly universal.[9] At the present time, there is a decided retreat from the once-favored dictum that the true laws of nature are nomologically [or ontically] necessary—contextless and exceptionless. Insistence along such lines now tends to be viewed as idealized (not strictly confirmable), possibly distorted for imagined explanatory gains, or relativized to assumptions that are hardly necessary themselves. Theorems (9.13)–(9.20), therefore, invite an entirely new set of questions. As long as analytic philosophies of science (notably, in Hempel and Reichenbach, more recently in Salmon) successfully persuaded general philosophy to acknowledge the high constraint of "nomological necessity," the bare admission of Intentional complexities was judged to threaten a fatal departure from the canon of rational science. The general failing of Positivism and the unity of science has changed our perception of all that.
Davidson's "anomalous monism," for instance, is a theory that could only have surfaced in the historical space between the decline of the nomological (the nomologically necessary), the extensional, the physicalistic, and the increased accommodation of all forms of intentionality. I am not saying a realist reading of the "laws" of nature is impossible, but its usual modal presumption is now surely problematic. The decline in nomological modality varies inversely with the star of Intentionality—and, with that, the rising need for an altered vision of what a science is . (For the reverse reason, the rise of interest in the supervenience doctrine is directly proportional to the decline in the fortunes of nomological necessity .)
The single most important and most strategic theorem in this process of conceptual change, bringing the attack on modal necessity ((2.1)) to bear on the archic reading of nomologicality, affirms that
(9.21) every science, being a human construction, is itself a human science and, as a consequence, is Intentional in structure.[10]
Theorem (9.21) is the result of applying (9.10) to the terms of symbiosis, once the modal reading of nomologicality proves difficult or impossible to defend. The consequence is a deep suspicion regarding the theory of scientific law and explanation, even where (as with van Fraassen and Cartwright) new hopes spring up about the prospects for refurbishing Positivism. The consequence for scientific realism, when historicity is permitted to affect law and explanation, is the clear loss of a methodological core and a clear drift toward relativism (as in Kuhn and Feyerabend). We simply do not know what "restoration" is possible now, but, in the interim, Intentionality cannot be put back in the genie's bottle. I say, therefore, that
(9.22) science and philosophy are inherently "folk-theoretic" undertakings that function only "top-down."[11]
It is reasonably clear that a theorem like (9.22) falls within the competence of any philosophical strategy that: (i) features the lebensformlich; or (ii) favors the "post-Kantian" reading of symbiosis; or (iii) construes either of these in historicized terms. What I have been pursuing, therefore, is the enormous advantage (for such strategies) of the developing philosophical uneasiness about the "modal" reading of nomologicality, perhaps the last of the great archic themes of Western thought. That is what it means to have brought all my arguments within the ambit of Intentionality. (The structure of intentionality needs still to be made explicit.)
I do not say that (9.22) is itself a (true) modal claim. I say that it is the best philosophical bet any of us can now foresee. It is of course very widely opposed in current analytic philosophy. (It is part of the motivation for invoking supervenience.) There is, however, no (known) compelling refutation of (9.22) or even a strong alternative at the present time. That in itself I take to be a distinctly telling sign of certain errant tendencies in analytic philosophy—for instance, in eliminationism (or eliminative physicalism ), which simply insists (without any argument that I have been able to find) that Quine's (and Sellars's related) rejection of the bare (ontic or realist) eligibility of any and all forms of intentionality in bona fide scientific or philosophical inquiries is unqualifiedly compelling.[12]
Eliminationism (which, of course, is itself a "folk-theoretic" posit intended to subvert the supposed relevance and adequacy of any folk-theoretic thesis within the sciences) depends for whatever appeal it has
on the canonical standing of strong nomologicality. This is as true in Churchland (who has indeed retreated from the nomological) as it is in Quine and Sellars—and signifies a deficiency of argument for the same reasons. I should add, here, that, by the nomological —taken in the strongest sense—I mean (i) that exceptionless attribute of the structure of the real world, (ii) in virtue of which changes in the world are, rightly, causally explained, which (iii) signifies that the changes that thus occur in nature occur necessarily (as in the views of Reichenbach and Salmon). The "nomological" may, consistently, be interpreted in various weakened ways. The definition given treats the "nomological" as deterministic.
By the canonical picture of science, I understand any theory, for instance the unity of science program, that holds that first-order description and explanation of what exists, also prediction and technological control, are pursued and formulated in nomological terms at least, as just explained.[13] (Science itself is inevitably more informal regarding the nomological and the complexity of what exists or functions causally, as we shall see. Effectively, any inquiry reasonably committed to the predictive, explanatory, and technological objectives of the canon, with or without the canon's modal presumptions, may claim to be a piece of science. There cannot be a strict canon, once we yield on modal necessity. Also, one cannot then fail to ponder the parallel fates of nomologicality and supervenience in the larger context of naturalism.)
In any case, if we treat the expressions folk-theoretic and top-down as epithets signifying that "worlds" are "texts" ((4.14)), because the symbiosis and holism within which we function are themselves Intentional, then it follows that:
(9.23) the entire universe is interpreted, textual, historicized, constructed—in a word, Intentional.
The closest anticipation of (9.23) may be found in Peirce's doctrine: namely, that the triadic structure of (what Peirce calls) signs "perfuse" the (symbiotized) universe. What Peirce calls triadic I call Intentional: whatever, predicatively, is (i) collective, (ii) culturally emergent, and (iii) interpretively significant ((8.32)–(8.35)). (I depart from Peirce in rejecting a "cosmic mind" and its implications for a weakened reading of symbiosis.)
I have permitted certain intriguing clues to surface as a consequence of having introduced the notions of historicity and Intentionality, but I
have not yet analyzed them directly or essentially in metaphysical terms, or justified any inference from them except conditionally. I have, therefore, put the entire argument at risk. (I may as well concede that this is the consequence of the strategy of this primer. I could perhaps have reversed the order of parts I and II, but I should then not have been able to trace the need for the distinctions of part II in the standard problems of part I.)
I have, however, given a partial analysis of history in a tally a short while ago—(i)–(iv)—explicating the sense of (9.4), of "history" used predicatively. (I ask you to have another look at that.) We have only to add to that tally a further item—(v) the qualification of (9.6) (Intentionality)—to round out the general lines of a fair account. That is certainly tidy, although it obviously adds to the baggage of an already heavily burdened conditional argument. I don't believe it adds any untoward difficulty, however; it brings together difficulties already broached, and it actually facilitates their (joint) resolution.
I can make this quite clear through the following combination of brief summary and slight advance: (i) history = Intentionally ordered change ((9.6)); (ii) the Intentional = the cultural ((8.38)); (iii) symbiotized, worlds are texted, socially constructed, intrinsically interpretable ((4.9)–(4.16), (9.23)); and (iv) constative discourse interprets our (interpretable) worlds ((4.15)). Treat this as a refinement of the earlier tally (at (9.4))—hence, now to include item (v). Given that, it is no more than a terminological adjustment to add to the former tally, the one begun at (9.4), as item (vi):
(9.24) interpretability = intens ionality.
I now draw—from, say, (8.34), (8.45)–(8.47), which concern the historicizing of truth-claims and legitimation—as item (vii) of the same tally:
(9.25) Intentionality = interpretability.
Theorem (9.25) is, in a way, the middle term for everything that is locally at stake: all the pertinent linkages involving Intentionality, intentionality, intensionality, history, historicity, interpretation, horizonality, contextedness, symbiosis, intransparency at least.
Theorems (9.24)–(9.25) are extraordinarily useful. They serve to isolate the essential puzzle confronting every serious attempt to construe
science in a thoroughly extensional way, along two lines: first, by admitting the realism of Intentionality itself (the world of human culture); second, by admitting the ontic and epistemic dependence of scientific objectivity on the conditions of reflexive human understanding (symbiosis). These are just the themes standardly neglected in analytic philosophy.
A bit of explication may be helpful. The term intensional is standardly used in philosophical contexts in two ways: (i) "intensional" = nonextensional, in that sense in which (in as generous or restricted a reading of "logical" as one wishes) logical (syntactic, formal, truth-functional) relations between terms, between sentences, between arguments, are said not to behave "extensionally" (with regard to the assignment of truth-values)—as in accord with a ("first-order") logic like that offered in Principia Mathematica (for instance, "love," not designating a transitive relationship, is said to behave "nonextensionally" or "intensionally"); and (ii) "intensions"
There are of course famous questions about the relation of "intensions" and "extensions" in sense (ii).[14] Plainly, an archic reading (Aristotle's) would claim a regular, even rulelike, connection between intensions and extensions, but any drift in the direction of the an-archic (for instance, the post-Kantian) will (as Putnam saw) call into question the supposed regularity championed by the archist. I have no need to pursue these matters here. The main thing is this:
(9.26) the Intentional is inherently intensional.
Theorem (9.26) shows at a stroke, therefore, why the ("solipsistic") accounts of intent ionality offered by Brentano and Husserl cannot but fail. The reason is this:
(9.27) the intent ional, although conceptually distinct from the intens ional, is inherently intens ional.
Brentano and Husserl both understand the intentional to designate—irreducibly—"aboutness"-phenomena. I use this locution (" 'aboutness'-phenomena") to avoid any restriction as to whether "intentionality" belongs to the mental or the subjective or the sentential, or is admissible de re or only de dicto, or is analyzed in naturalized or realist or phenomenological terms. For the moment, I merely wish to emphasize that sentences used to describe intent ional "phenomena" exhibit a characteristically complex (indissoluble) structure, which is or appears to be: (i) irreducible to nonintent ional structures; and (ii) such that those sentences behave "logically" in intens ional ways (in accord with the first sense of "intens ional" given above; for instance, "Tom has an irrational fear of horses" and "Tom believes that horses are dangerous and unpredictable" are sentences that, on a not unreasonable theory, are both intent ionally structured and behave "intens ionally"—and behave intensionally because they are intentional). (Thus, "Tom believes that horses are dangerous" may be true, whether "Horses are dangerous" is true or false and whether there are horses or not. There you have a paradigm of the "nonextensional.") The charm of this way of analyzing the phenomena before us is simply that it does not require taking sides as between Brentano and Husserl.
By aboutness, then, I mean no more than intentionality: that aspect of thought or speech in virtue of which a "mental state" is (as we say) "directed to," "intends" (in the original medieval sense), is "about" (in the sense Brentano sketches) some ("intentional") "referent" or other said to be internal to, inseparable from, significantly informing, that particular state. Whenever, in linguistic and cultural contexts, we attribute "aboutness" to phenomena that are neither "mental" nor "linguistic" in any obvious sense (for instance, the "lingual" tristesse of the Swan Queen in Tchaikovsky's ballet Swan Lake ), we automatically construe the "intentional" as "Intentional" (in the sense introduced). (I take the slippage to be philosophically unavoidable but usually not acknowledged.)
On this reading, the intent ional is intens ional for several reasons: (i) because the "aboutness" structure (in the mind or in the sentences appropriately affirming that structure in the mind, or, by a reasonable enlargement, affirming such structures in artworks or in the cultural world at large) is not reducible or detachable in any way that would
permit an "extensional" treatment of that structure (in the first sense of "extensional" given above); (ii) because the "aboutness" structure is inherently what it is, in virtue of the significant or interpretable "content" it encompasses—in effect, the meaning of the grammatical accusative—of that structure (hence, what is specified "intensionally," whether it is, or can be, specified "extensionally," in the second sense of "extensional" given above); and (iii) because "aboutness" may be assigned a realist function. Quine concurs in this: it is the reason he outlaws intentionality.
There are of course other important considerations: for instance, what sort of reality should be accorded the intentional structures of mental states (or artworks) thus characterized; or would, say, the sentential representation of the intentional be best managed by an "objectual" idiom or by a "propositional" idiom. (For instance, should we say that Tom fears "horses" [possibly, nonexistent horses] or that Tom is in a mental state such that the [internal] intentional content of that indivisible [monadic ] state is accurately represented by a proposition like "Horses are dangerous and unpredictable?")
Granting the relevance of this much, I claim, confirms (9.27) and (9.9) (if propositional modeling is the better policy—as I recommend)—and, now, confirms the methodologically more pointed theorems (9.21) and (9.22). For, surely,
(9.28) symbiosis entails the Intentional structure of our worlds and (mythically, our) universe,
which is itself entailed by (9.21). Hence, also,
(9.29) the admission of the real world cannot preclude the (semiotized) agents (selves) by which it is constituted as intelligible and interpretable;
(9.30) the real world (or worlds) cannot fail to include real Intent ional—intens ionally qualified intent ional—structures;
and
(9.31) the intentional and the intensional obtain only as abstracted within the space of the Intentional.
I take (9.31) to confirm (9.21) and (9.22) in a straightforward way. I also thereby obviate the need to raise (as with Meinong) the question of the reality or existence or "subsistence" of the "objects" (or internal accusatives ) of intentional discourse, although I certainly do not preclude the possibility that intentional discourse may be addressed to what is actual.
If, now, you recall the discussion (in chapter 3) of reference and predication, you will not fail to see that the present review of the varieties of intentionality was adumbrated there. For, on the analysis of the inherent informality of reference and "real generals," I was led to the conclusion that the structure of effective discourse is (on its constative side) "entrenched" in the structure of the consensual practices of its enabling Lebensformen . But that is what I take Intentionality to signify (on its discursive side):
(9.32) Intentionality = the consensual (collective) structure of our Lebensformen .
Theorem (9.32) bears in a profound way on the analysis of selves, but I must postpone the reckoning. I take the liberty, however, of focusing a little more sharply the meaning of the collective; that is, that feature designated by predicables that (i) are Intentional, (ii) describe societal structures as such, (iii) apply to the aptitudes (behavior and thought) acquired by persons and their artifacts in virtue of enculturation, (iv) are not reducible to the pre-cultural aptitudes of Homo sapiens, and (v) are expressible in "rulelike" ways, as in traditions, institutions, or practices.
I come, finally, to the bearing of this gathering argument on the matter of history. If history is indeed Intentional ((9.6)), and if history is a sui generis form of temporal change ((9.2)) then
(9.33) the time of history
mere physical time.
Theorem (9.33) has a special importance. It distinguishes between "physical" and "historical" time, it's true, but, more than that, it poses the entire question of the conceptual relationship between the (real) "worlds" of (physical) nature and (human) culture. That bears directly on the metaphysics of history and Intentionality, and that is precisely what was missing in the conditional liberties I had taken (earlier) in airing a number of issues involving the analysis of change. It's what I had in mind, in fact, in challenging Aristotle's short account of history.
You will remember that I argued that it was not enough to add a further species of change to the schema Aristotle offered. What was needed was a reinterpretation of how, metaphysically, the structure of history affects the analysis of change in both the natural and cultural worlds. Of course, Aristotle's archism precluded any adjustment of the sort I had in mind. But once one subscribes to (2.1) and symbiosis, it becomes quite implausible (perhaps even impossible) to treat history in ways that do not ramify through the entire universe of discourse. I regard this intuition as the fruit of the "cunning" of philosophy itself: for the puzzle of history in the modern sense was first perceived to have been posed only at the time of (or a little before) the advent of the French Revolution—just in time, so to say, to permit history to be interpreted in Kantian terms and (consequently) to permit Kantian constructivism to be historicized (in the symbiotized "post-Kantian" manner that links Hegel and Nietzsche and Gadamer and Foucault).[15]
In short, the significance of (9.33) is barely adumbrated in the distinction regarding time; theorem (9.33) is, after all, little more than a special case of the following theorem:
(9.34) cultural, but not physical, entities intrinsically possess Intentionality, but both the physical and cultural worlds are, as the cultural artifacts they are, jointly affected Intentionally.
Obviously, if (9.33) and (9.34) and similar theorems are admitted, then
(9.35) Intentionality affects the conceptual space of physical and cultural worlds in distinct ways, in ways that need not be alethically, epistemically, or ontically uniform, but in ways (nevertheless) that confirm their belonging to the same universe of discourse.
I need to make explicit the general theorem that links (9.4), which admits histories as real predicables, to the interlocking relations holding between history, Intentionality, interpretability, and the like (collected in the tally given a moment ago on the varieties of intentionality—following (9.26)–(9.27). That theorem affirms:
(9.36) Intentionality and interpretability are real attributes of existing things;
In a more than merely terminological sense—but in that sense at least—I should add:
(9.37) all and only cultural entities and phenomena intrinsically possess Intentionality.[16]
Theorem (9.37) brings before us all the puzzles that have been collecting in this chapter. For one, if cultural entities are real—in that they exist—then the theory of such entities will have to accord with the analysis of "exists" offered in chapter 6 (where Peirce's treatment of Secondness served as the decisive clue). For another, that same analysis will have to come to terms with an argument (also in chapter 6) involving theorems (6.16)–(6.21), to the effect that what exists has a "material nature": hence, in a way that precludes what (rather baldly) is usually termed Cartesian dualism . (The standard interpretation of "Cartesian dualism" holds that Descartes subscribed to it, but some interpreters claim that he did not.)[17]
By Cartesian dualism, I understand a metaphysical doctrine that claims that there are two (or at least two) disjunctive materiae in terms of which (i) particular existing things are "composed" and (ii) they may be individuated (res cogitans and res extensa, in Descartes). I take that thesis to be unsatisfactory, because (i) it permits no compositional account of the "nature" of human persons to be more than merely conjunctive (as involving the different materiae ), and (ii) it makes a conceptual mystery of causal interaction between the parts of any such composition. Psychophysical interaction (just the issue that exercised Davidson so strenuously) proves utterly unmanageable on the "dualist" reading. I may perhaps add another weakness to this tally, namely, (iii) whatever, in the disjunctive sense intended, is an individual thing "composed" (in part) of res cogitans (or, a similar "immaterial" materia: "a mind," say) appears not to accord with the strong sense of "exists" that I have already given. (Possibly, then, the dualist sense produces difficulties for individuation.)
In any event, in agreement with the arguments of chapter 7—those involving (7.33) and (7.34) particularly—a metaphysics must be supplied that eludes the Scylla and Charybdis of Cartesian dualism and reductive physicalism. The decisive strategy is as elegant as it is simple. I remind you that, in speaking of Aristotle's metaphysics, I was led to remark that Aristotle introduces hyle as an explanatory principle ("matter" or "stuff," that from which particular things are "composed"
or "formed" in the way of individuation), in spite of the fact that: (i) individuation does not and cannot depend on hyle criterially; and (ii) hyle itself is unformed and lacks determinate properties. If it were otherwise, hyle would itself be individuated, and then the need to account for the individuation of particular things would apply to hyle as well. We should be caught in a vicious regress. (Clearly, materia
What this shows is that, although the question of the ultimate composition of particular things generates the classic metaphysical concern regarding the choice between dualism and physicalism and the like, that question is really a "dummy" question. In short,
(9.38) questions of metaphysical "composition" are nothing but questions about the stock of predicables validly attributed to particular things but cast in individuative terms.
That is, nothing of a predicable nature can be reserved for "that" of which particular things are "composed" (hyle )—over and above what we do in fact predicate of them (or better, what, qua real, they instantiate). Alternatively,
(9.39) the "composition" of particulars or individuated things cannot be detailed except in terms of ulterior particulars.
There need not be, in principle, any "infimate" particulars, but there also cannot be any viable sense in which what makes a particular thing intelligible[18] —(i) its being identifiable and reidentifiable as the particular it is, and (ii) its possessing the attributes it possesses—is itself a distinct kind of "composition."
By (metaphysical) composition, I mean, therefore, that feature of particular (material) things in virtue of which they may be construed entirely as the parts of larger integral particulars ("wholes") or may themselves be analyzable exhaustively into constituent particular "parts." Hence,
(9.40) "composition" is predicatively redundant.
Aristotle's strategy, therefore, is either completely vacuous or completely misguided. Or, the "compositional" reading of Cartesian dualism is either a thesis about the conceptual relationship (in particular the reducibility relationship) between "extended" attributes and "cognitional"
attributes, or else it is similarly misguided. (One of the strangest doctrines in all of philosophy, I may add, is the theory of "bare particulars," which rightly perceived that "composition" cannot violate (9.40), but insisted nevertheless that "number" was a matter independent of descriptive predication.[19] My point, here, is to remind you of the findings of chapter 3, to the effect that reference and predication are indissoluble parts of the same constative activity. Furthermore, I do not assume that, in the real world, the part/whole relation necessarily takes a single or univocal form.)
It follows from all this that such philosophical choices as that between dualism and physicalism are really judgments about the reducibility or irreducibility of certain sets of predicables to others. The eliminationist, for instance, believes that there are no "mental" properties: whatever is real is "physical" only. The reductionist insists that the "mental" just is (a "part" of) the "physical." The dualist claims that the "mental" is as real as the "physical" but altogether different from it.
A number of extremely important matters hang on these distinctions. For one thing, to advocate materialism (not physicalism), as I have pointed out in (6.17), is not to theorize about the nature of (the "compositional") hyle that existent things (somehow) distributively share, but to make provision for their actually being existent . On the argument of chapter 6, only "material" things effectively exist, in that (as we now understand matters) only things that possess physical properties at least (the minimal run of material properties) can exert the required Secondness to count as existent. (I find this implicitly acknowledged in the use of what are called "mass nouns" ["water," "coal"] and "count nouns" ["horse," "a piece of coal"].)
But this does not mean that existent things possess physical properties only. That is the argument of eliminationism and reductive physicalism, but it is plainly a non sequitur . More than that, it is a non sequitur probably born of the dualist's own primitive notion, viz. that whatever is not (merely) physical must be altogether other than the physical. The dualist had invented a purely conjunctive form of composition, and a great many physicalists (for instance, Churchland and Parfit) have, in opposing dualism, somehow supposed that, if dualism fails, then the conjunctive composition of the "mental" and the "physical" fails, and (as a consequence) the mental must be either illusory or nothing but the physical.[20] The motivation for construing the choice between physicalism and dualism as disjunctive and pretty nearly exhaustive (with whatever accommodations may be thought necessary regarding "function-
alism" and the like) is straightforward enough: deny intentionality and Intentionality in all their forms and there will then appear to be no other choices. It's the admission of the Intentional as real and emergent in a sui generis way that makes it possible to entertain other accounts of the mental (for instance, the theory favored in this primer).
The fact is, the particular way in which particular things are made numerically one is not touched on at all by attending to what is merely predicable of them . Here, I recommend a terminological convenience: I speak of the unicity of a thing, in speaking of what makes it (conceptually) individuatable, hence denumerable, fit for numerical identity, reidentifiable, apt for reference—in terms, say, of its "nature," its "career," its "history," its "composition," or other mode of integral organization. I speak also of the unity of a thing, in speaking of that aspect of it which, in virtue of being individuated, it is thereupon effectively assigned number and nature . (Individuation and identity are quite different issues .)
Things need not be completely "unified" in order to exhibit sufficient "unity" to allow for "unicity." (This returns us to my first use of the terms "unicity" and "unity," in chapter 7, where they were introduced intuitively. I am discharging a small debt here.) Artworks, for example, may be individuated and reidentified, but it hardly follows from that that the "unity" artworks exhibit is of the same sort that physical objects exhibit. If, in fact, cultural entities exhibit Intentionality but physical objects do not ((9.34)), then (I am prepared to claim)
(9.41) cultural and physical entities cannot but satisfy different criteria of unicity and unity.
Aristotle's hyle disappoints us with regard to both unicity and unity; so does the dualist's reading of Descartes's res cogitans and res extensa . (Methodologically, the latter have nothing to do with individuation; they concern only predicables.)
We must go further. We must acknowledge the following theorem as well:
(9.42) real predicables that are not physical (or not merely physical), and also not dualistic, may still be "material" if they are complex with respect to the physical or if the physical may be abstracted from them.
By complex (in the way of predicables), I mean, drawing from (9.42), that feature of an Intentional predicable in virtue of which: (i) a physical
predicable may be abstracted from it; (ii) it itself is (in some as yet undefined sense) indissolubly "embedded" in, or inseparable from, such an abstractable predicable; and (iii) it itself is not reducible to such abstractable and embedding predicables.
I say that a predicable is abstracted from another if: (i) the latter is complex; or (ii) it is such that the predicate that designates it analytically entails the predicate that designates the abstracted predicable. For instance, "square" analytically entails "rectangular" and "being red" analytically entails "being colored," but neither of the first members of the pairs mentioned is "complex." By contrast, I say that
(9.43) the Intentional—a fortiori, the mental, the cultural, the historical, the textual—is a complex predicable.
Because the Intentional is complex, the physical may be abstracted from it—but not "analytically." I shall say, provisionally, that the physical may be metaphysically abstracted from the Intentional (i) because the Intentional is complex, (ii) because it falls among the real properties of existent things, and (iii) because it is in some sense "indissolubly embedded," as such, in the physical.[21] (I shall, in this chapter, later introduce "incarnate" as a term of art to characterize this "embeddedness" of the Intentional and to account for "metaphysical abstraction.")
What is most curious about "complex" predicables is the bare fact that there are real predicables that are complex . In this sense, physical properties are not merely "abstracted" from complex properties; they are also in their own right predicable as real properties of existing things. That is part of what it means to say that they may be "metaphysically abstracted." (Call that item (iv) of the tally just given.) Since, however, Intentional properties are (by that tally) not reducible to the physical, since the physical is real, and since there are real entities that are qualified in terms only of physical properties, I say that both physical and Intentional properties are basic (in a sense remotely akin to Strawson's—except that Strawson employs the term for individuatable entities, whereas I restrict it to predicables). Properties are basic, then, in that (i) they are possessed by existent entities, (ii) they are themselves metaphysically abstractable from complex properties, or (iii) they are properties from which other properties are metaphysically abstractable, and (iv) the entities that satisfy (i) form kinds of things that play, as such, a relatively important role in science or the explanation of nature (physical
objects, organisms, human persons). (Normally, then, "basic" properties will be specified in accord with some theory or other of the natures or sortal natures of classifiable entities. Remember, "natures" need not be constant ((7.6), (7.14), (7.29)).) I take the term "basic" to signify nothing in the way of a single compositional account of "all there is" or an endorsement of the unity program or a fixed hierarchy of some sort of the compositional "levels" of what is real.
Now, the pretty thing is that, although, speaking thus, geometric properties are (certainly) also able to be "abstracted" from both physical and Intentional properties, no distinct entities (geometric "objects") exist in virtue of which such properties (the geometric) are "basic." For the moment, I content myself with merely mentioning that the "complexity" of Intentional properties accounts for the sui generis form in which they and the entities they qualify may be said to have "emerged."[22] Clearly, the biological is also said to have "emerged" in the course of natural events from what was once lifelessly physical—without being "complex" in the precise sense assigned the Intentional. Hence, there cannot be a uniform sense of "emergence" in which whatever is real has emerged from whatever we suppose to have been the "original" state of the world. (I shall shortly pursue this matter more pointedly. In any case, I restrict the "geometric" to the predicative, as I have already done with numbers.) The arithmetic and geometric are, then, predicative distinctions only: there are no existent entities answering to them; hence, also, they are not basic or emergent in any sense. The biological is emergent, because there are existent organisms, but biological properties are not complex (although, in speaking of the informational, this may be disputed). The cultural is emergent, since there are cultural entities (persons and artworks), but cultural emergence takes a sui generis form distinct from the biological, since Intentional (cultural, culturally formed mental) predicables are complex.
By this general strategy, I avoid (for one thing) the fatal weakness of Strawson's metaphysics, namely, that, contrary to his own plan, different "basic particulars" (as he terms persons and bodies) may occupy the same place at the same time, without being "parts" of one another. I think there is nothing troublesome about admitting that what Strawson calls basic particulars may occupy the same place—and may be "parts" of one another. (Strawson's account would regard that as contradictory. But Strawson himself cannot escape that consequence.) The point of interest is that
(9.44) existent entities that possess complex properties are emergent with respect to entities that possess metaphysically abstractable properties (basic properties) as the existent entities they are.
The biological and the (merely) physical are metaphysically abstractable from the cultural or Intentional, and the Intentional is distinctly complex. All are "basic" and therefore enter into the explanation of different kinds of "emergent" phenomena. (For the moment, the term "embedded," mentioned in clarifying (9.43), is no more than a place marker.)
Theorem (9.44) helps to focus the essential problem of the reductionism that the unity of science program has favored, for it is entirely possible that: (i) biological entities (may) be construed as emergent relative to the inanimate physical world, without being Intentional (a fortiori, without being complex); and that (ii) the conditions (a fortiori, the explanation) of the emergence of the biological and of the cultural are utterly different from each other. Intuitively, the reason is this: persons (and other cultural entities) are numerically distinct from the entities in which they are indissolubly "embedded," but that seems not to be the case with biological entities. They emerge from the inanimate world, as more complexly organized, but they are not numerically distinct from other (equally numerically distinct) physical entities in the same way in which cultural entities are. (They are not thought to be "embedded" in other distinct entities.) In particular, cultural entities are inherently Intentional, whereas physical and biological entities are not; furthermore, cultural entities are complex in virtue of possessing Intentional properties. By contrast, biological entities are not thought to be complex in the same way. Biological properties are often thought to be such that physical properties are analytically entailed in them; alternatively, the biological is often thought to be an emergent mode of functioning of the physical itself. (In the most optimistic physicalist accounts, the biological will be reduced to the physical. There is no reason to think that that could ever happen to the Intentional.) By any of these strategies, the biological would not be said to be complex .[23] (There are other possibilities of course—the matter is still open. For instance, questions may be raised about "informational" properties. I shall touch on these in a moment.)
I leave the matter of what is "analytic" (as in speaking of entailment) undefined criterially: any working distinction, however informal, will suit my purpose. Quine may have been right to reject a principled dis-
tinction between the "analytic" and the "synthetic," but, in natural-language contexts, usage will always support some effective, if informal, distinction between the two. In any case, my argument requires only that, say, the mental does not, in any ordinary sense, "analytically entail" the "physical," although the "physical" may (as I say) be "metaphysically abstracted" from it. I shall, therefore, treat the mental (where it is Intentionally qualified) as complex, in accord with (9.43). That alone completely obviates dualism and also, perhaps, supplies the ground for rejecting all the forms of physicalism.
Certainly, to characterize the mental (that is, the linguistically or lingually informed mental) as complex (in the sense given) is to go utterly contrary to the canonical view. That explains why it is usually supposed that the mental must be treated either reductively, eliminatively, dualistically, functionally, or heuristically. But there is absolutely no reason to oppose thinking that the mental is (i) emergent, and may (ii) either be complex in the manner of the Intentional (the culturally emergent) or (perhaps) not complex in that sense but still inseparable from the physical in the manner of the biological—even if, there, it is anthropomorphicably modeled: emergent within the natural, non-Intentional world. I am persuaded that the "mental" is equivocal in this way: in fact, mental phenomena that are complex in the way of the Intentional are, in our world, (iii) emergent with respect to the mental taken in the biological sense. (Nor do I rule out the possibility that the mental in the first sense may also be emergent with respect to the electronic or something of the sort, as in AI theory, or it may simply not require such a dependence. It may, for instance, be, as a façon de parler, entirely "anthropomorphized" (9.9).)
At the present time, both in the biological and cognitive sciences, reference is made to informational properties—in a way that clearly signifies that they are thought to be real . Obviously, they could always be employed heuristically—as no more than "anthropomorphized" (as defined in this chapter). But it is not clear, for instance, whether, in speaking of DNA "codes," one means that the "informational" properties of the code, ascribed to living cells, is meant only as a stopgap measure against the time when those would-be properties will be successfully "reduced" to biochemical properties analyzable in purely physical terms (whatever that may be supposed to entail) or whether informational properties are "complex" properties in a sense similar to that just explained. (I strongly doubt that the latter is the right alternative.)
I do not find the matter examined in any straightforward or careful
way among the philosophers (and scientists) who regularly invoke the "informational." But this I can say: either the near-ubiquitous use of the "informational" jargon is a new-fangled version of dualism or it plainly lacks any metaphysical backing at the present time. (The same is true of the functional, which I introduced in speaking of the biological and mental when confined to biological resources;[24] that is, by way of a [heuristic] redescription in purposive or otherwise anthropomorphized terms.) Noticeably, in speaking of computers and systems of artificial intelligence, the issue is regularly finessed.
If "informational" properties were real properties, then, of course, the biological might be said to anticipate the Intentional.[25] (I doubt that they are independent properties. They are more likely to be anthropomorphized ascriptions made of the biological.) It would be an extraordinary discovery and would raise an important question about the possible reducibility of the Intentional to the biological (the genetic, for instance), even though the biological itself may not be reducible to the purely physical. I believe that this is the gist of Chomsky's thesis. The essential barrier to this entire line of reasoning is simply that it looks as if the "informational" is in all cases "anthropomorphized"—possibly an Intentional redescription of the causal—although the biological may indeed (also) be irreducible to the terms of the physically inanimate. (It is difficult to see what else it could be.)
I therefore venture the following theorem:
(9.45) informational predicates may form a subset of Intentional predicates, whether they designate (and, in designating, describe) real properties.
By informational, read as a term of art, I shall understand those predicates that include: teleological, functional, feed-back, purposive, even certain cognitional predicates applied to phenomena that do not as such invoke aptitudes at the conscious level (for instance, those of speech); or, more generously, predicates applied to phenomena that, apart from linguistic aptitudes, are characterized in representational, semiotic, signific, symbolic, or propositional terms (as among artworks). Think, for instance, of plants "seeking" nutrients. Broadly speaking, I shall regard informational properties equivocally, either (i) as heuristic designations of real properties that they do not, in so designating, literally describe, thus modeled (anthropomorphically) on the Intentional, or (ii) as a subset of Intentional properties, whether ascribed in a realist or heuristic
way (computational properties, for instance). One obvious benefit of admitting such an accommodation is that it helps to explain how it is that (certain) norms and values may be treated naturalistically—for instance, homeostatic norms. Here, naturalizing the normative is simply exposing the anthromorphized or "redescriptive" use of an Intentional idiom.[26]But that alone hardly shows that the normative can always be naturalized .
Nothing substantive follows from this terminological decision, except perhaps to draw attention to the arbitrariness of supposing that there is a clear sense in which the lawlike features of the "informational" can already be assigned (as in Dretske) or in which the functional and teleological can (with assurance) be completely "naturalized" (as in Millikan). I take these to be premature, rather unguarded pronouncements. If informational properties are causally efficacious, then, of course, the metaphysical analysis of such properties cannot be forever postponed. (I do see that the usual use of the "informational" in the cognitive sciences is meant to outflank any usage like that of my own "Intentional." But I do not find the supporting argument.) The obvious critical question asks (i) whether the informational is itself reducible to, or subsumable under, the Intentional, and (ii) whether the "Intentional" features of the informational can be assigned without implicating the lebensformlich as that from which it is itself "abstracted." I frankly cannot see how (ii) may be resolved in favor of independent informational properties. (The relation seems reversed: informational properties appear to be anthropomorphized. But the "biological" need not be.)
I venture a further thought. If the "intentional" cannot be disjoined from the "rational"[27] —meaning, say, that the concept of intentionality bears, paradigmatically, on beliefs and desires and their role in motivating action—then, if the "informational" designates the abstracted "content" of (Intentional) mental states, the informational may be construed as either anthropomorphized in terms of the intentional (as in supposing that a rabbit reacts to the perceptually internalized representation of the silhouette of a predatory bird) or as a mere façon de parler (where "information processing" is no more than an idiom for modeling the functional aptness of the rabbit's "response" to perceptual "pickup" not first characterized in intentional terms). J. J. Gibson has observed that, characteristically, rabbits respond too quickly to the "perceived" danger to have acted on the basis of first processing the supposed internal representation. If, however, we introduce the "intentional" as designating no more than the (informational) "content" of the appropriate
neurophysiological process where that process bypasses, or is disjoined from, the supposed processing of the first sort, then (and only then) will the "intentional" be able to be "naturalized." But it is not clear that the second model is not already necessarily parasitic on the first. I confess I cannot see how the intentional (or the informational "content" of the intentional) can be thus detached from the model of rationally ordered mental states, unless it is already known that reductionism or eliminativism obtains. For what is intentional or informational in the second instance? In this sense, I regard the prospects for "naturalizing" intentionality as profoundly empirical, but also as ineluctably question-begging.
The "Intentional" remains, as far as I can see, the pivotal notion. I introduced it in chapter 8, equating it with the "cultural," but, for purposes of clarity, I should offer a more explicit sense of what the principal manifestations (the "extension") of the Intentional include. Try this:
(9.46) Intentionality signifies—paradigmatically—the constative ascribability of any of a family of predicables of an intrinsically interpretive sort: viz. those regarding linguistic or "lingual" meaning, significance, signification, intensions, signs, symbols, reference, representations, expressions, rhetorical functions, semiotic import, rule-like regularities, purposes, propositional attitudes, intentions, and the like.[28]
The principal exemplars are all linguistic or "lingual." By lingual, I mean (once again) those predicables ascribed in the cultural world that, although not themselves explicitly linguistic, presuppose linguistic aptitude and, because of such aptitude, acquire, by lebensformlich extension, functions analogous to those assigned the explicitly linguistic. For example, the performance of the Marseillaise in France after the defeat of the Nazis may have "signified" the liberation of France and may have "referred" to that liberation. Michelangelo's Pietà "represents" events in the death of Jesus and "expresses" feelings bearing on the original mourning of that death. Signing a check normally "intends" the act of disbursing one's funds and, again normally, performatively "utters" that disbursing. There is no need for greater precision at this point, except to emphasize that speaking in this way is not in the least figurative. (It has a realist import—at the "level" of what is culturally emergent.) Thus, perception, cognitively construed, is also lingual, inasmuch as it
includes a propositional ingredient. (It is that ingredient that is anthropomorphically predicated of nonlinguistic animals.)
What still remains unanswered, what haunts this entire account, is the ontic question of the relationship between (physical) nature and (human) culture, between what is non-Intentional and what is Intentional. That was the question I had in mind in beginning, in this chapter, with theorems (9.2)–(9.4) regarding the metaphysics of history. The ensuing argument appeared to lead away from that original question. But now, curiously, we are actually closer to resolving both matters—and at a single stroke.
I had broached the issue of historical change and historical time as a way of exposing the peculiar limitation and distortion of Aristotle's theory of change—and, by association, the entire later history of Western philosophy and science that, down to our own day, has (largely in accord with some form of the archic vision) construed historical change and historical time as (no more than) narrative devices used in redescribing physical change and physical time in terms of our contingent interests. I should say that such conceptions mean to "naturalize" history, along the same lines I drew attention to in those well-known efforts (from Quine on) to "naturalize" epistemology (for instance, with regard to history, in Popper and Danto).[29] (By redescribing —introduced here as a term of art—I mean heuristically recasting predicates, that function naturalistically, in Intentional terms, so that they appear to be complex although they are not.)
I have given the problem of history a strenuous form by characterizing histories as real ((9.4)) and as intrinsically Intentional ((9.6)). Admitting that much, I was obliged (complicitously, of course) to insist on the distinction between the physical and the cultural and, at the same time, to begin to provide an account of the sense in which both are real ((9.41)–(9.42)). That is where we are at the moment—and that is where we were at the start of the present chapter. I think it would not be amiss, therefore, to return to the topic of historical time and change in order to claim (or reclaim) the clue by which to resolve the several questions that have remained unanswered.
Certainly, although physical time (the time of physical change) cannot be the same as historical time (the time of human history), it would be preposterous to suppose that the two were utterly disjoint. Surely we may insist that
(9.47) historical time is inseparable from physical time.[30]
The "two" cannot be identical, because one manifests Intentional features whereas, ex hypothesi, the other does not.
You can already see that the resolution of the puzzle mirrors the mind/body problem that has bedeviled dualism and physicalism, but it offers a much larger canvas: it now turns out that the mind/body problem (admitting the equivocation on the "mental" mentioned earlier) is little more than a special case of the culture/nature problem and that, as a consequence, the usual options tendered by dualists and reductive physicalists alike are too narrowly construed. That was the point, you remember, of introducing the puzzle regarding "informational" properties. (Informational properties are, or are the analogues of, solipsistic properties.)
Still, I need to cast the argument in even more inclusive terms. For the resolution of both problems (mind/body and culture/nature) concerns itself not merely with the issues of "unity" and "unicity" already broached (and with what must be the nonconjunctive [nondualistic] "composition" of the "mental" and the "cultural") but also with reconciling any would-be answer to either issue (or both) with the independent resolution of a further, very deep paradox that infects absolutely every speculation about the nature of the real world and our place in it. (We are close to the end of our labor: it will take a little more patience.)
The paradox in question is generated by the following two intuitions, neither of which are we prepared to reject: (i) there must have been a time (in the physical world) when the world of human culture did not yet exist; and yet, (ii) what we posit as that physical world must be an "artifact" of our symbiotized culture. To insist on both truths is what it means, roughly, to acknowledge the indissoluble union of realist and idealist conceptions of the world ((5.4)). The physical world, we say, is independent of the posits of our science, but its independenceis itself a scientific posit ((7.41)). (This is very close to Kuhn's conjecture, except that Kuhn does not subscribe to symbiosis.) The first collects what, in first-order discourse, we hold true (holistically) of the things of the natural world; the second legitimates, in second-order discourse, what we affirm (distributively) in the first. And, of course, first- and second-order discourse are inseparable ((1.1)–(1.4)). Consequently, there need be no self-defeating paradox there. There is indeed a puzzle, but it resolves itself rather nicely on our admitting the symbiosis of world and language ((4.8)–(4.9)), the distinction and interconnection between "external" and "internal" relations ((4.11)), and the further distinction between the constative and mythic uses of language ((8.17)).
I claim that, within the terms of an an-archic vision, there is no plausible way of resolving the (last) paradox without subscribing to the doctrines just mentioned; I also regard the problem as the mate of the paradox of legitimation I discussed in chapter 8 (as the "antinomy of history"). In fact, taken together, the two puzzles offer the strongest possible rationalization for abandoning the philosophical programs this primer opposes. I shall call them antinomies for obvious reasons: the antinomy of legitimation (chapter 8) and the antinomy of ontic priority (chapter 9). I insist, then, that
(9.48) no philosophy is valid that fails to resolve the antinomies of legitimation (or history) and ontic priority.[31]
My thought is that the two make very fair criteria for assessing minimal philosophical success at the end of this century and at the start of the next.
Now, if we allow ourselves to come this far, we begin to glimpse in a fresh way the gathering force of the entire argument applied retrospectively and prospectively. Retrospectively, it falls out at once that
(9.49) physicalisms of every sort are untenable;
and
(9.50) all "naturalizing" philosophies fail.
The reason is simply that
(9.51) the antinomies of legitimation and ontic priority are, for "naturalizing" strategies, inadmissible, or, if admitted, intractible.
This is the reason constative discourse is "folk-theoretic," as stated in (9.22). But it is also the reason theorem (9.22) imposes no restriction at all on science or inquiry of any kind—except, of course, to debar archic presumptions. If true, this would be a windfall, for it would confirm that
(9.52) the conceptual resources of an-archic philosophy are greater than, and permit the inclusion of, any of the viable resources of archic philosophies, except for presumptions of transparency, privilege, modal necessity, universality, contextlessness, totalizing, or the like.
To put the same point prospectively, that is, in a way meant to resolve middle-range problems that require a favorable answer to our antinomies, I now recommend (for the local question of historical time and change that has been before us through this entire chapter) that we adopt the following characterization:
(9.53) time is an attribute or predicate: in particular, an adverbial qualification of any of a range of predicates implicating change or persistence among things that exist.
Theorem (9.53) accords rather well with Aristotle's view of time (time as the "measure" of motion or change) as well as with contemporary views that acknowledge the difficulty of rendering its adverbial feature in accord with the resources of first-order logic. For instance, to say that Brutus stabbed Caesar is not to say what, at least in Davidson's rendering, comes out as "($x ) (Stabbing x & At-time-t x )": no, the temporal structure is clearly an indissoluble "part" of (an "adverbial" qualification of) what it is to be the continuous event or "career" that is "a stabbing." Nothing about the extensional behavior of predicates regimented in accord with a prior syntactic policy tells us anything about the internal structure of the predicables they are said to designate.
In general, I should say that
(9.54) predicates
predicables,
for one cannot say for certain how we should construe time as a predicable, from a study of the entrenched conveniences of a certain logical treatment of temporal predicates. The matter is no longer pressing, of course, if we abandon extensionality as a realistic ideal for the analysis of all natural-language discourse. (It should, however, remind us of the de re /de dicto issue.)
A much more important matter lies elsewhere. I suggest that we shall find it both economical and philosophically promising to concede that
(9.55) historical time is incarnate in physical time.
What I mean by "incarnate" is this. A predicable is incarnate in another predicable if: (i) it is real; (ii) qua real, it is complex—that is, Intentional and indissolubly bound to some real physical predicable ("metaphysically abstractable" from it); (iii) it is "emergent" with re-
spect to that ("incarnating") predicable—that is, not reducible to, or explicable solely in terms of, the causal role of its incarnating predicables; and (iv) it is "basic." Hence,
(9.56) cultural (or Intentional) attributes are incarnate attributes.[ 32]
This is a very strong proposal. It affords, I think, the only reasonable general way of construing historical time and change as real, as Intentional, as coherent, and as in accord with an an-archic view of the world . It steers a middle course between reductive physicalisms and irresponsible dualisms—with respect both to the mind/body problem and the culture/nature problem. It is in this sense a fair specimen of a very large family of cognate solutions, including those bearing on the ontic relationship between persons and organisms belonging to Homo sapiens sapiens, actions and physical movements, machines and (assembled) materials, speech and (uttered) sounds, paintings and (applied) pigments, cathedrals and ordered stones, mental states and neurophysiological states, history and physical change, and the like. I claim that, granting whatever logical differences may arise among these and similar pairings, they all require the admission of the incarnating relationship: that particulars of the relevant kinds (all and only "culturally emergent") exhibit their characteristic "unity" and "unicity" through and only through their possessing incarnated (Intentional) "natures."[33] The solution, therefore, dares to invite comparison with Aristotle's account of ousiai and, as I say, is more directly responsive to questions of individuation and numerical identity than is Aristotle's solution.
I cannot pursue these developing lines of inquiry here. What I want to make clear, however, is that incarnation is only one among an array of possible modes of organizing the intrinsic, integral, and entire structure of entities of different kinds, with regard to their being individuatable and reidentifiable as the particular entities they are. (I shall, in the next chapter, introduce the term "embodied" as a term of art answering, in individuative terms, to what "incarnate" signifies predicatively.)
It is, I think, worth noting that, in current analytic philosophy, although the problems of numerical identity and reidentifiability have received considerable attention, much less attention has been given to what it is to be a particular thing and how particular things may be individuated if their natures are not (sortally) constant (either de re or de dicto ). The solution I have barely sketched is intended to meet both of those questions. The general lines of the argument have been laid out
chiefly in chapter 7, but now we have a way of construing the integrity of particular things of certain kinds (cultural entities) in a way that is congruent with what has already been said about reference and predication and individuation and identity.
For convenience and clarity, let me add a few terminological distinctions. By integrity I mean that feature of particular things in virtue of which their "unity" and "unicity" are (i) accounted for ontically and (ii) preserved epistemically. I have also said, in clarifying the notion of "incarnation," that incarnate (Intentional) predicables are emergent with respect to their incarnating predicables. I cannot at the moment do full justice to what I mean by "emergent," because, on the usage I intend, emergence (like causality) cannot be applied to predicables alone, that is, without attention to the (existent) entities that exhibit them, and I have not yet introduced (I shall in the next chapter) an account of "cultural entities" that, as "emergent," possess (suitable) emergent properties. But what I can say is this. In speaking of cultural emergence, I mean to speak only of things of certain kinds (and their properties), that appear in the same "world" in which physical and biological entities appear: that is, entities uniformly subject to all the resources of constative discourse.
Of these, I say that cultural or Intentional entities (possessing incarnate properties) are emergent, in that: (i) their existence and "generation" cannot be accounted for, causally or in any other way, in terms of the existence and the causal (or other generative) powers of the (non-Intentional) entities with respect to which they are emergent; and (ii) their existence and generation can be accounted for, causally (or in other ways), in terms of other entities and their causal (or other generative) powers, if and only if they belong to the same emergent "level of reality." Intentional entities are culturally emergent, then, in that the mode of their emergence and generation is specific to that level of reality at which their "integrity" is and only is preserved, viz. the cultural. (I take the claim, of course, to be a "bet," in the sense already explained.) Furthermore, its admission captures what is essentially meant in speaking of the hermeneutic circle . "Level of reality," of course, borrows, parasitically, the standard usage of the unity of science movement, but rejects its presumption. All Intentional predicates belong to the same level of reality in being Intentional, for descriptive and explanatory purposes, and they belong to a higher level of reality than physical predicables, in the sense that physical predicables may be "metaphysically abstracted" from them. (These are meant as "indicative" distinctions fitted to a promising science.)
These categories are not terribly instructive as they stand. The reason, of course, is that we need to know just what the nature of cultural entities is in order to know specifically what mode of emergence is pertinent to their integrity and what peculiarities such entities actually exhibit, with respect to reference, predication, individuation, identity, and historical change. For example, I hold that a Dürer print (Melancholia I, say) exists in multiple token prints, each with its own local history (or career) and that it may acquire new Intentional properties as a result of its interpretive history, which may (over historical time) actually "generate" properties ("in it") that could not have emerged at some earlier time.
There is extraordinarily little discussion of such complications in analytic philosophy, and what there is in continental European philosophy (in Gadamer, for instance) is, however, intuitively instructive, almost indifferent to the resolution of the kind of question I am raising. I am persuaded that the enormous complexities of the cultural world have been pretty well ignored in analytic philosophy, simply because the archic temperament (as well as a strong externalism) has held sway for centuries and because, within its terms, the analysis of physical objects has long been deemed exemplary for everything that exists and is real. (All that is doubtful now.)
Even without a full account of cultural emergence, certain very strong findings may be drawn from what has already been said. The key notion regarding emergence is that of the limited explanatory power (of whatever kind of explanation we admit) of theories whose explanantia are restricted to whatever level proves sufficient for the description and explanation of (the non-Intentional) phenomena that form the (incarnating) ground relative to which emergent phenomena are acknowledged to be emergent. If so, then the sanguine hopes of the Positivists and those who have supported the various forms of the unity of science program are doomed, for
(9.57) the sciences of the cultural world cannot, in principle, be modeled epistemically or methodologically on any science whose own epistemic model admits truth-claims addressed only to a non-Intentional world; hence, they cannot be modeled on the physical sciences—as, in the unity of science program, they are.
There cannot be a unified science (in terms that permit every "higher-level" phenomenon to be explained in terms of the phenomena of
the "next-lower" level and the bridge laws linking the two levels) if "culturally emergent" phenomena are genuine. (Bridge laws are rules of translation linking the phenomena of two distinct "levels" of reality by way of the nomological regularities at each level [or at least at the "lower" level]. The very admission of such laws requires adherence to something close to the unity program.) There are (I admit) more "optimistic" conceptions of emergence than mine (Bunge's view, for instance) that attempt to restore methodological unity in the unity theorist's way, but I know of none that admit anything like the strong sense in which I have characterized cultural phenomena as Intentional.[34] I am prepared, therefore, to construe (9.57) conditionally. (I return to the question in chapters 10 and 11.)
Still, if, on the account so far given, the world is indeed "texted" ((4.14)), if all conceptual schemes are indeed interpretive ((5.2)), if everything that may be said to exist or be real is indeed a social construction ((7.33), (9.21)), then it cannot fail to follow that
(9.58) all the sciences are sciences of the human world,
in two senses: (i) in that what they examine include phenomena that inherently possess Intentional attributes or natures; and (ii) in that whatever attributes or natures are ascribed the things the sciences examine (even things that lack Intentional natures) are ascribed only on the strength of what is ascribed in accord with (i). If one accepts (9.58) in this way, then (I say) one is committed to a folk-theoretic conception of science and knowledge in general—and in particular, committed to the view that all that is real is "socially constructed" ((7.33)).[35] (I return to the "folk-theoretic" in chapter 10.)
The irony remains that, if the opponents of the an-archic vision are right in thinking that the model of methodological rigor they favor cannot be effectively fitted to cultural phenomena construed in Intentional terms, but wrong in thinking that the Intentional can be reduced to the non-Intentional (or eliminated altogether), then, on the argument, there is no viable model of science to be had or else the opponents of the anarchic vision have seriously misrepresented the successes of the sciences and the rigor they actually require. It may even be true, for instance, that those successes have been gained by means of a careful simplification and idealization of the complexities of the Intentional; if so, that very fact would confirm (rather than disconfirm) the need for a new picture of methodological rigor. In short,
(9.59) the physical or natural sciences are inquiries abstracted from, and within, the scope of the human sciences;
and
(9.60) whatever fundamental explanatory role the physical sciences may rightly claim is rightly claimed within and only within the competence of the human sciences.
The sense of "abstraction" in theorem (9.59) is clearly nothing but the conceptual counterpart of "metaphysical abstraction" ((9.44)). The nerve of the entire argument initiated in chapter 8 and running through the present chapter, focused for instance at theorem (9.6), is plainly this, that
(9.61) real Intentionality cannot be naturalized.
I have made something of a campaign out of exposing the inadequacy of naturalism. But I urge you not to lose sight of the fact that I have also been trying to steer a middle course between naturalism, on the one hand, and transcendentalism, on the other. My thought is that human subjects, apt in the construction of the phenomenal world, are themselves part of that construction, as a consequence of symbiosis and historicity. (That was the point of the antinomies mentioned in chapters 8 and 9.) If, now, you consider the import of such strong theorems as (9.23), (9.32), and (9.37), which link these themes to the Intentionality of the cultural world and to the existence of selves or subjects, you cannot fail to see that we are entitled to draw the analogue of (9.61) for transcendentalism as well: viz.,
(9.62) real Intentionality precludes transcendentalism.
Chapter X
Mind and Culture
It is one of the failings of contemporary analytic philosophy to have misperceived, or neglected to explore with care, the conceptual relationship between the "mental" and the "cultural." This may in part explain the perennial prominence of Descartes, Hume, and Kant, for there is hardly a suggestion among these three, extraordinary philosophers though they are, of the irreducibly social, cultural, historical, collective, artifactually constituted and variable "nature" of the mental—among humans. They are, of course, the three most influential early modern theorists studied again and again by contemporary analytic philosophers. They are the progenitors of twentieth-century "externalism."
Beyond admitting the dialectical play of the profession, it would not be unfair to claim that Anglo-American philosophy has remained remarkably loyal to the thesis that the best account of the distinctly "human" and "mental" is bound to be cast in terms of whatever proves, individually and aggregatively, to be the shared, "endogenous," species-specific endowment of Homo sapiens (in effect, the solipsistic resources of our biological nature). By the solipsistic, I mean that feature of any theory of cognizing competence that accounts for all relevant aptitudes in terms of an initial biological, genetic, precultural, neurophysiological, or subjective endowment and whatever improved skills its exercise among other similarly autonomous and similarly endowed creatures may yield. (This extends the sense of the term assigned in chapter 9.)
I take this to be a fundamental mistake . It obscures, if it does not deny altogether, the apparent truth that
(10.1) the attributes of cultural life, particularly those that bear on our discursive and cognitive powers, cannot be analyzed or adequately explained in terms only of any merely biological, or biologically restricted, mental or psychological endowment; or, indeed, in terms of the cognitional powers of apt subjects distinct (as in Kantian or Husserlian ways) from the physical or biological, but known to have certain intrinsic rational or epistemic powers (solipsistically).
Theorem (10.1) is a philosophical bet directed against both naturalists and transcendentalists. No doubt the gifted members of Homo sapiens do "become" persons, but it would be an obvious non sequitur to infer from that truism that it must also be true that the Intentional or cultural must be analyzable or explicable in terms of the biological. There's a deep mystery there, and, also, an equivocation. The bet cuts both ways, challenging reductionists and anti-reductionists alike. "Persons" emerge initially, originally, by internalizing the linguistic and lingual aptitudes of their encompassing society (Lebensformen ). Homo sapiens has the capacity for that, but I shall argue that the change is an (ontically) emergent change—one, however, that entails no biological loss and no subjective gain that is not grounded in the biological.[1] (There's the mystery.) If you grant the point, then, of course, physicalism becomes impossible to defend and we have no way of guessing at the historical possibilities of our own conceptual powers.
The telltale clue to the puzzle lies in the plain fact that the restriction of the initial resources of the human psyche is—in Descartes, Hume, and Kant—never obliged to ignore the actual features of the cultural world.[2] No, the latter is taken to be as rich and complex as you please; it is only the former that are made as spare as possible. This accounts, for instance, for Locke's marvelously candid puzzlement at finding it impossible to discern in the sensory impressions that strike his tabula rasa a sufficient clue as to the source of the idea of substance (a certain je ne sais quoi ) that he realized he could not do without.
The (solipsistic) impoverishment is never perceived, it seems: for nothing that should be acknowledged in the cultural milieu is actually denied admittance to our speculations; it is only the cognitive presumption governing the explanation of all this that remains intransigently spare, viz. that whatever we discern in ourselves and the world may be accounted for, epistemically, in terms restricted to the "mind's" original biological endowment feeding (as cleverly as you please) on the incoming data of the surrounding world. In effect, a solipsistic analysis of
linguistic and lingual intelligence treats the culturally complex or Intentional features of human life as supervenient (tacitly, although in the sense supplied in chapter 9) on whatever of the "mental" is first defined biologically—or in some analogous ("nativist") way. (In terms already supplied in (9.14), it wrongly supposes that the "subjective" can be analyzed entirely in terms of a biological (or nativist) model of the "mental.") By endogenous, I mean any putatively original source of the mental, the cognitive, the subjective, the rational that is either species-specific (restricted to the membership of Homo sapiens but characteristic of its aggregated members) or otherwise native (or nativist ) to human subjects (taken singly or in some sense prior to social or cultural learning or exchange). The endogenous, accordingly, ranges over naturalistic and non-naturalistic claims: for instance, Chomsky's, as well as Kant's and Husserl's.
In Locke and in Hume, for instance, language is essentially a convenience for recording the prior work of pristine thought; in Kant, the intelligible structures of the world are imputed to it as the gift of a nativism ample enough for what we claim to discern; in Descartes, God, very much offstage as a deus ex machina, endows native human reason with whatever one requires for understanding the various parts of the Creation. In analytic philosophy, there is almost no concern to secure a sense of the "adequation" between the native powers of Homo sapiens and what their exercise is said to reveal about the environing world or the cognizing self itself. You will find the exemplary evidence in Fodor's "nativist" analysis of concepts, which is a kind of Cartesian—even Platonist—recovery of Locke's failed project.[3]
My point is this: on pain of paradox or incoherence,
(10.2) the cognizing powers of the "mind" and the cognized features of the "world" must be adequated to one another.
Analytic philosophy largely ignores this issue—which, in their separate ways, Descartes, Hume, and Kant ingeniously address. By adequation (both ontic and epistemic ), I mean the specific "matching" (equilibration ) between the conceptual powers we impute to ourselves (apt for discerning whatever may be discerned in the world) and whatever (we claim) we actually discern.
The formula is not as vacuous as it may appear, although it is quite true that different criteria of "adequation" are bound to be internal to the theories this or that particular philosophy favors. (It is precisely this
menagerie of ideas that needs to be collected and displayed.) Thus, already in Plato, the theory of Forms (and the coordinate doctrine of the soul's "recollection") "adequates" our actual discourse about justice and the good life and the conceptual resources said to make that possible. Predictably, the more powerful the role of the Forms, the more impoverished the reckoning. Similarly, in Kant, once the phenomenal world is seen to be spatially and temporally organized, the cognizing mind (Kant thinks) must be natively endowed with the capacity to impose spatial and temporal structures onto inchoate experience and then to discern those same structures in the experienced world thus constituted. Neither in Plato nor in Kant, however, do the resources of collective cultural life play an executive role in our cognitive competence.
The telltale reason seems to be this: the cognitive powers of the human self or "subject" are assigned, in effect, to account for (or match) whatever we take to be the content of our beliefs and knowledge. Even where some genesis or biography is offered that apparently acknowledges the priority of epistemic considerations, as in Descartes's Discourse and Locke's Essay, the labor seems no more than an artful way of abstractly matching once again an account of what native mental powers would be enough to account for science and intelligence. There is hardly a serious attempt, until we reach the post-Kantian Idealists, to think of our conceptual and cognitive resources in terms of the particular culture in which our developing aptitudes first take form. The essential point may be put this way: there's no question that, moving from Descartes to Kant, cognizing selves or subjects are admitted to exist, but their existence as the cognizing agents they are is never really treated existentially, that is, in terms of the cultural forces they respond to in becoming (emerging as ) the apt agents they become. One finds the latter theme in Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Dilthey, Heidegger, Adorno, Dewey, Gadamer, and Foucault. You cannot find it in Russell, Moore, Quine, or Davidson, or in Brentano, Husserl, Frege, Carnap, Apel, or Habermas. They might as well be pre-Kantian thinkers. In a way, they can be considered as such—if you disregard their late nineteenth- and twentieth-century projects. (By existential, incidentally, I mean no more than that aspect of the historical formation of our careers as cognitive and active selves in virtue of which our interests, convictions, and categories of understanding are what they are.)
Viewed abstractly, adequation must be trivial. It is only in the details of the match required that we mark the master philosophies of the tradition. We build our picture of the "mind's" or cognizing "self's" con-
ceptual powers by "adequating" our theories of mind or self to what we say we know. Nothing could be simpler or more difficult. Thus, cleverly but disappointingly, Aristotle treats the highest powers of reason (nous ) in a completely ad hoc and undeveloped way: whatever the changeless structure of reality is said to be, the intuitions posteriorly assigned as the exercise of competent nous cannot fail to be (trivially) adequate to its task. Nous has no interesting (existential) structure of its own. It "mirrors" (or, better, "receives") the fixed "forms" of things: its "actualized" power is no more than its "passive" capacity to be undistortedly "informed" by those same forms. Nous is nothing but a deus ex machina .
Aristotle's theory is certainly "adequated" in the formal sense, but completely vacuous as far as its scientific function is concerned. Once we call the archic thesis into doubt, we cannot suppress the fact that Aristotle has even less to say about the themes of (10.1) than the philosophers I mentioned earlier. (I should add that, by equilibration —the term is borrowed locally from Goodman and Rawls and is now comparatively standard—I mean no more than a reciprocal adequation, a conceptual reckoning regarding what theorem (10.2) requires at both poles of the cognitive process, taken together.[4] (Equilibration makes very good sense if we accept the terms of a lebensformlich symbiosis; it makes no sense at all if the cognition of the world is construed in terms of an "externalist" competence alone. That is precisely what is so suspicious about Aristotle's and Plato's accounts.)
As I see matters, the most strategic (certainly not the only) puzzle adequation must address concerns whether the Intentional (especially its collective and interpretable features) can be "adequated" (as, in effect, Descartes, Hume, and Kant suppose) to the initial biological, or solipsistic, or species-specific, or endogenous, or transcendental powers each assigns to cogniscent selves. I should say straight out that I believe that cannot be convincingly done. But the point is, it is the litmus for every viable theory of the mental and cultural. It marks the difference between the mind/body problem and the culture/nature problem.
One strategic question that cannot be addressed in terms of Aristotle's theory, but is nonetheless important in contemporary inquiries, asks whether human conceptual and cognitive powers can, with the acquisition of a culture, be greater than (that is, not "reducible" to) any of its supposed powers at birth, or whether any supposed improvement or enlargement of those powers is anything but a skilled use of our first fixed biological (or "subjective") powers combined one way or another,
so that the mind may be taken to be a "closed system." Innatism or nativism (sometimes also called rationalism ), professed (in different forms) by Chomsky and Fodor and Descartes, holds that there is no increase in human conceptual powers beyond some original (modularly isolated) endowment (genetic or Providentially assigned), and that, therefore, any apparent such increase can and must be accounted for by (what in effect are) the innate rules of operation of the mind or reason or sensorium or computational powers of Homo sapiens . That is certainly what Descartes had in mind, speaking of the "natural light of reason."
Piaget, of course, opposed Chomsky's innatism, arguing that the conceptual powers of developing children actually changed, actually developed, increased, became "greater" (emerged at a "higher level"), in virtue of an organism's continual "interaction" with its environment (including its cultural environment). In effect, Piaget's argument (also Waddington's) held that our conceptual powers could not be accounted for reductively. Nevertheless, in his own "structuralist" theory, Piaget supposed that there was a necessary and invariant sequence manifest in the more and more powerful stages of the development of the conceptual capacities he mapped—which (as Chomsky rightly observed) do not really escape (as Piaget believed they did) the larger constraints of innatism. (For Piaget, unaccountably, the environment merely triggers an innate developmental capacity. This was just the point about language acquisition that Vygotsky pressed against Piaget. It anticipates my own theme.)
My own view is that some concession to innatism (but not transcendentalism) is entirely consistent with admitting the social construction of persons or selves. All that is needed is a division of labor, so to say: the admission (for instance, with Bruner) of some initial "hard-wired" endowment open thereafter to alteration or enlargement or supersession in ways that cannot be convincingly assigned or accounted for innately. The advantage of this option (which is not incoherent, as Piaget's may well be) is that it accommodates two essential intuitions: (i) that the mental does indeed belong to the biological endowment of humans; and (ii) that man's conceptual and cognizing competence is culturally generated and does vary in power and structure, at the level of cultural emergence, from society to society and from one phase of human history to another. We may concede that humans have innate cognitive powers, but we cannot rightly say what they are, what limits they impose, what "rules" they function by. The truth is, whatever we claim about our
innate (Intentional) endowment is itself an "anthropomorphized" conjecture viewed from the reflexive level at which we discover our actual aptitudes ((9.9)–(9.12)). Hence,
(10.3) innatism and social constructionism are not in principle incompatible, but they cannot apply coextensively;
and, of course,
(10.4) the "mental" is, in any pertinent generative sense, jointly biological and cultural.
There is, I think, a very simple way to accommodate (10.3) and (10.4), namely, by admitting that
(10.5) our culturally acquired (culturally emergent ) conceptual and cognizing powers are incarnate in the biological structures to which our innate mental capacities are directly ascribed.
In that sense,
(10.6) our culturally acquired aptitudes are incarnate in our innate endowment.
What we need to remember is that
(10.7) our innate mental endowment is and can only be inferred from the vantage of our reflexive (linguistic) competence (anthropomorphically).
Since all forms of physicalism fail ((9.49)), and since we are committed to symbiosis ((4.9), (4.11), (4.12)), there is no independent way to fix our innate endowment (whatever that may be), except by inference from what we ascribe to ourselves as our linguistic, lingual, and prelinguistic competence. That is,
(10.8) there is no direct perceptual access to our innate mental endowment.
We cannot query infants, and we cannot say "what it is like to be a bat" except from the human vantage: bats have no idea.[5]
I may as well add that we cannot ask the historical past—those who lived in the past—what they "thought" or "meant" or "intended" in the past, except, once again, from our present vantage. That is the insuperable lesson of Gadamer's hermeneutics and (if I may press the point, for provocation) the unacknowledged lesson of the better part of Quine's notion of "analytical hypotheses."[6] For what Quine concedes, however thinly, is the ineluctability of contingent tertia . What all this means is this:
(10.9) our innate mental endowment cannot fail to be "anthropomorphized."[7]
We must remind ourselves that our intuitions about the "mental"—items (i)–(ii), presented just before introducing theorem (10.3)—are no more than special cases of the deeper "antinomies" of legitimation and ontic priority explored in chapter 9. It is for this reason that cognitive psychology cannot be naturalized ((9.19)) or explained in transcendental terms ((9.62)).
We are moving rather quickly here. But, before I venture too much further, I should like to recover a connective theme (from what has already been said) that may easily be overlooked. The notion of "adequation" mentioned a moment ago has two foci, the significance of which requires that they be viewed together: one features the theme of the ontic resemblance between the conceptual powers of cognizing subjects and the cognizable features of the objective world; the other, the emergent lebensformlich (constructed, collective) nature of human cogniscence. The first is the theme common to Berkeley and the post-Kantian German Idealists; the second, the effect of a late Hegelianized reading of themes in accord with Wittgenstein's notion of "forms of life" (as via Gadamer and Foucault). What needs to be emphasized is both that these two themes are nearly completely absent from the "externalism" of current analytic philosophy and that they are both serviced by the doctrine of symbiosis. I do not believe any philosophy can be convincingly fitted to the puzzles of our age that does not embrace symbiosis.
There are several distinctions involving the analysis of mind that contemporary philosophy is plainly wrong about or scants. Theorem (10.1) marks the most important and the most neglected of these. It confirms that, if one treats the mental or psychological in terms restricted to some initial biological, genetic, or "nativist" sources confined to Homo sapiens sapiens, we cannot but fail to provide for the full range of the
"mental" in humans . For what is essential to being competent in the human way unavoidably involves linguistic and lingual competences. But these are specifically lebensformlich, collectively defined and, hence, impossible to analyze in terms of merely solipsistic or biological resources. There's the reductio of innatism. For,
(10.10) the lebensformlich is ontically distinct from the physical and biological.
(Wittgenstein would never have allowed this way of speaking, of course, or my other liberties. But it doesn't matter. In the same spirit, I can see how easy it would be to convert Plato's Forms into a metaphor for what I call the lebensformlich: I don't find the suggestion in Plato either.)[8] I should add that this explains the ingenuity of Chomsky's general strategy: Chomsky converts the Intentional—the culturally emergent—into the biological or nativist. He claims that there is "no other possibility" to consider, but he nowhere explains how the conversion is possible.
I have already claimed—through the running argument of chapters 3 and 8 and, explicitly, in chapter 9 where I construe the Intentional as inherently collective, in (9.10), and relate it to the consensual life of aggregated humans, in (9.32)—that the cultural, the historical, the interpretable, the linguistic, the discursive, the intelligible cannot but be (or incorporate) the formative powers by which we first "emerge" as persons or selves ((9.11)–(9.15)). I inferred (in the same context) that "solipsism" was inadequate, in (9.7); that the intentional (in humans) was Intentional, in (9.8); that the intentional among nonhumans was "anthropomorphized," in (9.9); and that, as a consequence, persons were not numerically identical with the members of Homo sapiens, in (9.13). These considerations justify my having introduced the "incarnate." For, otherwise, the admission of a numerically distinct organism not (numerically) identical with the person or self "housed" (somehow) in the same (living) body that is that organism would breed intolerable paradox.
I meant to introduce in this connection a range of distinct options regarding "unity" and "unicity" by which to ensure the "integrity" of the entities in question, including (i) bare numerical identity (as in Williams's identification of persons with human bodies), (ii) composition by mere conjunction (as in Descartes's dualistic union), and (iii) whatever, regarding entities, would be the substantive analogue of "incarnation" regarding predicables. For the moment, I merely mention that
the counterpart of incarnation, involving entities, I call embodiment. I do not say the tally just offered collects all possible modes of "integrity," but it does indicate the truth of (10.1) and the reasonableness of (10.2). And, that signifies that analytic philosophy has done poorly in its account of minds and selves.
Let me make clear the benign paradox of (10.1):
(10.11) persons or selves are numerically distinct entities possessing "natures" that exhibit collective structures.
By a term of art, then,
(10.12) persons or selves are embodied in the members of Homo sapiens, just as their cultural "natures" (their encultured properties) are biologically incarnate .
I do not hold that the individual members of Homo sapiens utterly lack mental capacities (although, as between Chomsky and Piaget, and between Chomsky and Bruner, there are various ways of reading the pre-linguistic competence of infants). My point is rather that
(10.13) the Intentional "nature" of humans marks what is not innate about them—and what, by definition, is essential to their being persons or selves.
As a consequence, in having failed to provide for the adequation between our culturally "collective" powers and our biologically (or otherwise endogenously) solipsistic gifts, a considerable part of contemporary philosophy has utterly failed its calling. I implied (just above) that that failing obtains in several distinct ways: (i) in supposing that our collective powers may be analyzed and explained solipsistically; (ii) in supposing that our lebensformlich powers may be analyzed and explained in terms of the innate competences of Homo sapiens (or pre-cultural subjects); and (iii) in supposing that the historically horizoned powers of human selves may be analyzed and explained in terms of the ahistorical powers of some pre-cultural (or transcendental) state. Failure along these lines signifies a failure to have adequated our conceptual and cognizing powers to our "nature" and to what we all affirm as the intelligible features of the world. Analytic philosophy, I say, has favored
these impoverishing commitments within its various externalist programs.
If, now, you look back to the account of reference and predication offered in chapter 3—look back to theorems (3.8)–(3.12), which affirm that both acts are entrenched in the Lebensformen in which they function—you will see at once the argument for supposing that, if, indeed, world and language and subject and object are symbiotized ((4.8)–(4.11)), then,
(10.14) cultural entities intrinsically possess collective attributes.[ 9]
For instance, a painting by El Greco, said to be baroque in style, is an individual thing whose salient "style" belongs to it only in virtue of its being a variant of the collective period style (instantiated in other aggregated artifacts) of the same epoch. The style is "horizonally" real in accord with our interpretive "prejudices" ((8.35), (8.36)). ("Prejudice," you remember, really means what is "prejudged" or "preformed" in terms of "judgment" before conscious judgment. The point is Gadamer's: a clever reading of Vorurteil .)
But, of course, if (10.12) be admitted, together with the impoverishing discrepancies assigned a moment ago to the "externalist" programs of analytic philosophy, then it follows at once that persons or selves cannot be straightforwardly identical with the members of Homo sapiens sapiens . (I have already affirmed this thesis with (9.13).) I have no wish to deny that we are both persons and members of Homo sapiens . I only say that saying that is profoundly equivocal. Since, for logical reasons, true identities are necessarily true, we need to make room for such possibilities as: (i) individual members of Homo sapiens that are not or not yet persons (fetuses, perhaps); (ii) nonhuman creatures that are persons (Martians, perhaps); and (iii) the conceptual possibility, supposing the pertinent reductionisms fail (as I believe they do), that persons cannot be "merely" numerically identical with any of the individuated members of Homo sapiens . That at least is what was anticipated in introducing the strenuous idiom of cultural emergence, incarnation, embodiment—and, more subtly, unicity and unity, and symbiosis.
I press examples from the artworld, I must say, because, like persons or selves, they too are "culturally emergent" and "embodied," without yet admitting that they are "minded" or have mental or psychological attributes. In a word, artworks
good or bad, or Nietzsche's Übermensch, or the God of the Christians according to Iris Murdoch).[10] This confirms, of course, that
(10.15) the mind/body problem
the culture/nature problem,
although, in the human context, the first cannot fail to implicate the second—or (asymmetrically), the second, the first. In fact, on the argument offered, it is not possible to solve the first without also solving the second. It should be clear, then, that
(10.16) the Intentional is not restricted to the mental, though it presupposes it;
and
(10.17) the mental is either inherently Intentional or Intentionally modeled ("anthropomorphized").
In the same spirit, I now add:
(10.18) the cultural or Intentional (or collective) competences that define persons or selves are acquired naturally .
By naturally, I mean only that new-born human offspring (Homo sapiens ) aptly and spontaneously internalize linguistic and lingual Lebensformen merely by living and maturing among the mature members of a society.[11] But to admit the ("existential") achievement marked by (10.18) is hardly to admit that the Intentional can be adequately analyzed in terms of the precultural aptitudes assigned Homo sapiens: the process of affecting the change required
Furthermore,
(10.19) the enabling Lebensformen of particular societies change continually with, and as a result of, their continual exercise.
Theorem (10.18) is an obvious empirical fact; by contrast, (10.19) is profoundly puzzling—perhaps the "template" for that family of doctrines developed by Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Gadamer, Foucault, and Bourdieu, and largely absent from analytic philosophy. What (10.19) signifies is the dynamic nature of a living "tradition": in which, that is, the aggregated use of a society's collective habits and practices changes those practices in a historically continuous way. (This is precisely what Gadamer means by a tradition and Bourdieu by a habitus.[12] I coopt these terms, therefore, although without subscribing to their authors' theories of them.)
It is important to bear in mind that, although our Intentional aptitudes are formed by internalizing the enabling practices of a tradition (to speak metonymically of a Lebensform, a tradition, a habitus, an episteme, a practice, an institution), there exists no tradition that we internalize. Discourse about traditions is entirely predicative. A tradition is (i) an Intentional structure, and (ii) a collective structure, (iii) nominalized over the culturally enabling powers of a parental generation with respect to its offspring, (iv) deployed historically, (v) entrenching prima facie norms of propriety or reflexive conformity, under historical change, and (vi) characterizable, heuristically, by the apt agents (persons) it enables to emerge, by way of rules or rulelike regularities. A perspicuous clue is offered by Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations (§ 202): " 'obeying a rule' is a practice." There is, however, no rule that is (or need be) obeyed. A rule, I should add, is (i) an Intentional uniformity, (ii) ascribed to a tradition or practice, (iii) imputed in either a realist or heuristic sense to (iv) the behavior, action, work, or thought of apt cultural agents, (v) possessing normative import (as of cultural propriety or aptness), and (vi) capable of extension under the conditions of evolving, open-ended societal life. In chess, the rules of play are genuinely constitutive and regulative of admissible chess moves—and are such as to form a closed system. In natural language usage, there are no actual, binding rules; nevertheless, apt discourse is rightly characterized in rulelike ways. (Wittgenstein notes that as well.) I should add: (vii) rules are adequated to a model of rationality (holistr ).
Every parental generation, let us say, is altered and affected by its role in rearing its own successors, and every successor generation differs from its parent in virtue of the changed Lebensformen it must internal-
ize. This is the generic lesson of what Gadamer calls Horizontverschmelzung ("fusion of horizons"). It signifies that thinking is historical, that the cultural world is a flux, that the metaphysics of Intentional entities is sui generis .
The key is this:
(10.20) paradigmatically, Intentional attributes are instantiated in the "intentional" life of persons and, hence, derivatively, in the artifacts they generate.
If we admit (10.20), we may infer:
(10.21) cultural entities do not exist, as such, except in a cultural "world,"
from which it follows directly that
(10.22) solipsism is incoherent.[13]
The point of introducing (10.22) so abruptly (although the matter has come up before) is to gain a march on the resolution of the puzzle of the relationship between the "mental" and the "cultural." There are, and can be, no solitary persons, except accidentally, as with Robinson Crusoe. (That was surely Marx's point, in the Grundrisse, where he ridicules the "Robinsonades" of contemporary theorists. It is also part of Peirce's inspiration for denying that pure "Firstness" ever obtains.) In short, selves and cultural worlds entail one another ((10.21)). I can put the point quite briefly: praxis (I should say) marks the conditional aspect of human powers that obtain as a consequence of (10.19); hence, it signifies that aspect in which theoretical as well as practical life (or reason) gains its competence and bearings in terms of the collective practices of its enabling (historical) culture. If I now add that reference and predication (as discussed in chapter 3) are praxical, you can begin to see how radical (10.19) may be judged to be. The use of the term "praxis " hearkens back to Marx's use and critique of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics in the Theses on Feuerbach . (I return later in this chapter to other aspects of the notion.)
The extraordinary importance of (10.22) lies with developing a reasonable policy for individuating numerically independent persons—in accord with the line of thought (offered in chapter 4) that links "exter-
nal" and "internal" relations between subjects and objects within a symbiotized space. Since Intentionality does not obtain in any merely physical world—it cannot be "adequated" to merely physical predicables if it cannot be analyzed or explained "reductively"—there is a danger of not being able to account for the reality of cultural worlds in a sufficiently robust way. I am trading, of course, on two themes that have already been secured: (i) the symbiosis of world and language; and (ii) the symbiosis of "external" and "internal" relations. We now find that, in the cultural world, a third form of symbiosis must be acknowledged, viz.:
(10.23) human selves are individuals only insofar as they effectively share the collective practices of a common Lebensform .
I recommend therefore that we hold that
(10.24) persons or selves are, by definition, culturally apt agents,
that is, agents capable of constative and other linguistic and lingual acts. (I shall return, in chapter 11, to the question of what an agent is.) I do not say the "natures" of human "agents" are nothing but their aggregated acts nominalized or assigned on the basis of such acts. (That would be close to the spirit of reductive behaviorism, except for the fact that Intentional predicables are anathema to thinkers like Skinner, although not, let it be said, to thinkers like Pavlov.)[14] My point here is that
(10.25) persons or selves are individual entities only insofar as they are aggregatively symbiotized relative to the collective Lebensformen they share.
Put more provocatively:
(10.26) the very existence of persons cannot be construed, either ontically or epistemically, in terms of a model of "external" relations that intrinsically lack Intentional attributes.
To admit theorems (10.24)–(10.26) is to admit at a stroke:
(10.27) the criteria for objective truth-claims in the human sciences cannot be modeled on whatever "naturalized" criteria may prove effective in the physical sciences;
for,
(10.28) persons cannot be mere spectators of themselves, or of one another, or of the cultural artifacts of their worlds, in anything like the way in which they function as external spectators of physical or natural or non-Intentional phenomena.
Alternatively put:
(10.29) persons are spectators of their cultural world only insofar as (as observers) they interpret the Intentional structures of whatever belongs to their world, that is, only insofar as they are competent "agents" in and of that same world;[15]
and
(10.30) there is no viable way of disjoining the (objective) perception and interpretation of cultural phenomena.
A whole raft of troublesome puzzles confronts us here. I content myself with two claims only and their joint import: one, that
(10.31) perception is linguistically modeled;
the other, that
(10.32) interpretation is perceptually entrenched.
You will remember that, in chapter 9, I argued that Intentional predicables are incarnate in non-Intentional predicables, and that (earlier in this chapter) I suggested that (as existent particulars) cultural entities are embodied in non-Intentional entities. (Embodiment and incarnation, I should say, entail a sui generis form of emergence, viz. cultural emergence, that is, a form of emergence that cannot be expressed in terms of the non-Intentional features and causal processes of the natural world.) I also indicated the need to confirm various forms of "adequation": in particular, (i) the "ontic" adequation of cultural entities and (their) Intentional attributes, as well as between physical or biological entities and their non-Intentional attributes, and (ii) the "epistemic" adequation of the conceptual and cognizing powers of selves and what they admit as the intelligible features of their world. Grant that much, and it will
be apparent, once you recall the third sort of symbiosis mentioned a moment ago (the aggregated sharing of collective Lebensformen ), that
(10.33) relative to perception and interpretation, Intentionality affects the "external" relations between cognizing subjects and cognized objects in different ways.
Certainly, however, before going further, we should explicitly affirm:
(10.34) persons or selves cannot be naturalized .
Theorem (10.34) is already entailed by (10.1), (10.2), (10.11), and (trivially) (9.13)—as well as (I remind you) by (9.15) and (9.19)—but it is also the compendious sense of the entire foregoing argument.
I draw your attention to the stunning fact that the distinctive aptitudes (cognitive and active) of persons are accounted for and legitimated in precisely the same sense in which the viability of reference and predication is legitimated, namely, in the real processes of collective life . What this shows is that if the inherent informality of reference and predication (reviewed in chapter 3) presupposes, for their characteristic epistemic success, the consensual processes of our Lebensformen, then the same is bound to be true regarding the cognitive and active competences of persons. This is the reason the culture/nature problem cannot be subsumed under the mind/body problem—the same reason the Chomskyan option is no more than a placeholder for a theory never supplied.
There is an enormous puzzle looming here. On the one hand, persons, as has been argued, are not identical with the members of Homo sapiens; on the other, they are the emergent artifacts of a collective culture, functionally identified as competent agents, in virtue of their sharing the collective practices of their enabling societies. There are other distinctive features of selves that I shall come to shortly, which bear on the relative indeterminacy and inconstancy of their "natures." These directly affect the precision with which we speak of persons as individual entities and specify the acts they commit. I don't deny that persons are individuals and that we treat them as such. But we are guided by different conventions in different milieux (law, medicine, biography), and even a certain informality, regarding the "unity" of persons. Nothing untoward follows from this, unless one insists on a greater precision than the domain will support—in fixing individuation, numerical identity, knowledge, effective action. In any case, examples drawn from the natural world
cannot rightly serve us here. (One sees this very clearly in epistemic contexts.)
Consider perception. I use the term perception in various wide and narrow senses to signify (i) the exercise of a cognitive capacity that is biologically grounded and culturally empowered (as in sensory perception, sensation, memory, feeling, introspection, general awareness, and the like), in virtue of which particular truth-claims may correctly express, report, or represent particular "perceptions," and (ii) the occasional exercise of a particular modality of (i) (as of vision, feeling by touch, fearing, being aware of believing, intending, and the like). I take senses (i) and (ii) to do general duty for nearly anything that may be said to be a distinct mode of cognizing. To this may be added further technical restrictions (iii) to what is admissible regarding (i) and (ii) (for instance, causal constraints on veridical vision or memory).
Furthermore, regarding the normal use of many of these modalities, we distinguish (iv) between a "nonpropositional" and a "propositional" ingredient, both of which may (perhaps, must, at times) be jointly instantiated in the paradigms of veridical perception.[16] Thus, in the matter of visual sight, exemplary cases admit the following paired sorts: "John sees a horse on the hill" and "John sees that there is a horse on the hill." These are essentially matched in veridical perception . John (veridically) sees a horse on the hill only if John sees that there is a horse on the hill and only if certain other conditions obtain "nonpropositionally" and noncognitively.
But there are also well-known asymmetries that hold in first- and third-person reports: for, if I merely say, "I see a horse on the hill," it may be correctly inferred that I believe I see that there is a horse on the hill, although I may not, relevantly, see that or "anything"; whereas if I say "John [veridically] sees a horse on the hill," one cannot then infer that John sees (or believes he sees) that there is a horse on the hill. The point of interest in this muddy problem is this:
(10.35) knowledge or cognition, which is at least lingual, if not explicitly constative, can be "adequated" only to persons or selves; otherwise, pertinent ascriptions are no more than "anthropomorphized."[17]
That is, theorem (10.35) follows from admitting that perception is propositionally structured . Hence,
(10.36) knowledge is an Intentional state,
which catches up the argument of chapter 5 against "naturalizing" strategies.
Sense (iv) of our tally about perception conforms, therefore, with what is affirmed in theorem (10.31), but that is hardly enough to ensure veridical perception . For, first of all, in "veridical perception" (in the case before us), there must be a horse on the hill to be perceived; for another, John must (we say) be in the right state to perceive the horse on the hill (veridically); and, for a third, it must be true that John then (nonpropositionally) perceives the horse on the hill and also perceives that there is a horse on the hill. Furthermore, for the second of these conditions to obtain, there must normally have been caused to occur a specifically non cognizing form of (nonpropositional) perception (v) in which veridical perception (iv) could rightly be incarnate (neurophysiologically, say). The clearest cases are afforded by sensory perception. Thus: to see a horse on the hill (in sense (iv)), John's eyes must have been suitably affected ("irradiated," says Quine) so that he appropriately sees (in sense (v)). It is certainly reasonable to suppose that a causal account may be given of the nonpropositional structure of perception (which, in addition, we suppose to be ingredient in perceiving in the cognitional way), but what should we mean by a causal account of events connected with the propositional structure of veridical perception or with the matching of the two?[18] (Certainly nothing nomologically manageable. I take the naturalistic maneuver to be a transparent dodge to avoid admitting legitimative questions.) Also, of course, these subtleties suggest a way of linking the biological and cultural aspects of perception and knowledge, but one that defeats our dreams of naturalized causal precision.
These busy qualifications explain why no adjustments relative to sense (v) can ensure "veridical perception" in sense (iv), and why naturalizing strategies are bound to fail. For, first, perceiving in sense (iv) can on no account be reduced to perceiving in sense (v); second, by veridical perception must be meant perception (in sense (iv)) that accords with JTB ("justified true belief") or a suitable alternative. I conclude that
(10.37) ascriptions of knowledge are honorific, relativized to legitimate convictions.
By honorific, I mean only that the ascriptions in question are never cognitively privileged or adequately characterized in psychological terms.
(To deny this is, in effect, to "naturalize" epistemology.) This is not to deny the importance of such ascriptions, but it does remind us that models of epistemic rationality ("rationalization") are themselves contingent artifacts of our lebensformlich practices ((5.14)–(5.15)).
Broadly speaking, an-archic strategies strenuously lower the philosophical importance of the role of truth and knowledge in the analysis of epistemic matters, resisting at one and the same time postmodernism and naturalism. An-archism refuses to dismiss second-order questions, but it is unwilling to treat them ("reductively") in first-order terms (causally or solipsistically, say) or in privileged (second-order) terms (as in externalist accounts). This is the point of theorem (10.37).
In short—to risk a leap that I cannot stop to support with the care it deserves—it now appears plausible to suppose that
(10.38) ascriptions of knowledge depend as much on presumptions of rationality as on evidence of the occurrence of the right causal sequences.
There are no ready ways of tracing causal sequences involving "propositional" perceivings: they already implicate the holism of our models of rationality. There is no way of overcoming the various sorts of indeterminacy affecting Intentional states and episodes, in terms of whatever precision we assign the description of non-Intentional states and episodes. And, for a third, individuated perceptions (beliefs, memories, sightings, even acts) are, more often than not, imputed rather than reliably discerned. In fact, there is here more than an inkling favoring a strong analogy between our policies in ascribing veridical perception and in ascribing moral validity to our actions and commitments. (I return to that theme in chapter 11. I am persuaded by the analogy.)
There are at least two further senses of perception worth mentioning briefly: for one, (vi) there is no developed sense in which some noncognitive form of the perceptual modality in sensation, in feeling pain or tickles or aches for instance, actually matches the fully cognitive form; for another, (vii) the pertinent modalities are distinctly intentional and either, as in (vi), no developed noncognitive sense obtains or, where it does, it does not "match" the cognitive sense in the required way. Thus, in Wittgenstein's reading of first-person "reports" of pain, there is no ready sense in which cognizing subjects can be said to know their pain, or that they are in pain, by perceptual means; they are said rather to avow (not to affirm constatively) what they feel. That which they
"avow" (that is, their sensations) cannot be independently perceived by others. Nevertheless, as in the dentist's chair or on the chiropractor's table, there are other causal and physical factors (rule-of-thumb correlations) that strengthen the sense in which avowals are cognitively constative after all.[19]
It is very much to the point, then, that although (felt) sensations are the "internal accusatives" of sensation-events, they are neither "independent" nor "intentional" (as Brentano realized).[20] Furthermore, as in Freud's account of the neuroses—in the "unconscious" fear of horses (said to be intentional, hence, mental or psychological)—the use of "intentional" does not play a role paralleling the noncognitive role of perception (v) that matches perception proper (iv).[21] Still, Freud's use of the intentional modalities (fearing, suspecting, and the like) is not altogether distant from ordinary ascriptions of belief, although it is restricted to explanatory inferences and assigned a twilight area a cut below conscious knowledge. (Even normal belief is often only inferentially ascribed and not directly affirmed or affirmable.)
The practice is also not very distant from the sense in which Chomsky claims we tacitly "know" the deep grammar of our natural language—not, however, in that way in which we normally make truth-claims about our language. (But Chomsky nowhere pursues the import of the "standard" sense of "know.") These considerations show once again the reasonableness of affirming (5.13) and (10.37). I mark our uneasiness about the "honorific" ascription of knowledge thus:
(10.39) knowledge is no more than a legitimated "status" publicly assigned "perceptually" incarnate states.
Hence, "knowledge" is a dummy state: neither a physical state nor an incarnate state—not a real state at all. Theorem (10.39) precludes all forms of cognitive privilege. By status, I merely mean, here, some normatively graded attribution (linked to certain standard interests—successful technology, for instance) that may or may not be construed in realist terms. Here, I remain agnostic about the matter. (In the following chapter, I raise the realist question directly.)
Wittgenstein's point, I should say, was valid against the externalist, but it is not in accord with his own notion of Lebensformen . The difficulty shows that Wittgenstein had not sufficiently thought out the import of his own doctrine. Probably, he was himself attracted to a form of externalism, although not to any as crude as Russell's or Moore's.
There is a matter of immense importance looming here, of which we have only a glimmer. It is this: since knowledge is Intentional ((10.36)) and since the Intentional is collective ((9.10)):
(10.40) knowledge "states" (perception, memory, sensation, nondeductive inference, and the like) signify as much the favorable consensual conditions in an enabling society as they signify either or both neurophysiological (or other physical or biological) conditions or psychological belief or conviction (or other subjective or private conditions).[22]
That is, no one knows anything except as a competent agent:
(10.41) cognition is a forensic competence.
Here, I take a leaf from Locke's theory of what it is to be a person. (Forensic means predicatively ascribable, said of states of competence and responsibility, in accord with consensually legitimated norms.) There's no question Wittgenstein had more than an inkling of (10.41). It is close to the master theme of the Investigations and On Certainty . But if he had seen it roundly, he should have seen that it would extend to reporting one's "private" pains as well. And if he realized that persons were themselves "constructed" in a lebensformlich way ((8.39), (10.23)–(10.29)), then he might have been led to a full acceptance of symbiosis. He was not so moved. At the very least, knowledge is a "state" paradigmatically assigned selves or subjects, open to realist ascription only if persons or selves may be construed in realist terms; and persons or selves may be said to exist only if their lebensformlich cultures may be said to be real. We see, therefore, the import of admitting the sui generis nature of cultural emergence: admit cultural emergence, and naturalizing and transcendental strategies fail at a stroke.
To accept all that leads now to a momentous finding. Although the assignment of various forms of competence and responsibility to persons (as cognitive and active agents) may be distributed to them as individuals, their competence cannot be assigned solely on grounds drawn from whatever is internal to their sub-cultural "nature"—physically, biologically, solipsistically, causally. For,
(10.42) agents are competent (and judged responsible) insofar as they instantiate the pertinent forensic (lebensformlich ) practices of their enabling society.
By responsible, I mean (as a term of art), judged (said of persons or selves) to be, or to have been, competent in the way of knowledge or action, or of being the apt agents of an enabling or surrogate society.
This shows very neatly the strong analogy between judgments of cognitive and moral agency. (I shall come to that in chapter 11.) What is more important for the moment is that we grasp how assigning a "nature" to persons or selves opposes any strong (individuative) disjunction between denumerable persons, contrary to what our individuative practices may recommend—particularly if we take physical bodies for our paradigms. That is,
(10.43) Intentional entities, having collective "natures," are individuals only as instantiative sites of collective attributes: in particular, persons are so individuated only as agents; they are individuated Intentionally and only as Intentional agents.
Hence,
(10.44) the objective description and explanation of the attributes of cultural entities (persons, artworks, words and sentences, and the like) cannot be disjoined from the description and explanation of the lebensformlich practices of an entire viable society.
This, for instance, explains at a stroke the validity of Putnam's notorious remark: " 'meanings' just ain't in the head! "[23] We individuate persons in a strong sense when we are attracted (with Williams, say) to the dictum "one person, one body", but we resist the strong analogy between individuating Intentional and non-Intentional entities when we feature the interpretable and collective—even horizontal—"nature" of cultural entities.
I can now also explain what I mean by speaking of perceptually independent things (physical objects, paradigmatically); I mean anything that (i) exists, (ii) lacks Intentional properties intrinsically, (iii) is in principle publicly perceivable in accord with exercising one or another of the modalities of sensory perception, and (iv) may be confirmed as "veridically" thus perceived. Anything meeting at least conditions (i)–(iv) is, I should say, perceived objectively . (This is the canonical sense favored by externalists: I have no objection to it.) I am also entirely prepared to extend these distinctions wherever needed, for instance, to account for the objective standing of theoretical entities: namely, those
that, in addition to meeting conditions (i) and (ii) but not (iii) and (iv), are (v) imperceptible (on some pertinent theory) and (vi) posited for the purpose of causally explaining what is perceivable in accord with (iii) and (iv).[24] It was in this sense that I had earlier introduced theorems (10.27)–(10.30). Other adjustments may well be needed, particularly regarding the perception of Intentionally qualified attributes and entities (as of paintings and persons). All this may be reconciled with Secondness.
It is easy to lose one's way here. The relevant distinctions form a thicket that the advocates of the causal theory of knowledge (Goldman, for instance) and the naturalizing of epistemology (Goldman again, since the causal theory is the principal strategy of the "naturalizing" school) tend to discount too quickly. My own strategy has been to show that knowing ("perceiving") is a salient power of persons or selves and, since it is inextricably bound to legitimative concerns, cannot be disjoined from the complexities of the Intentional world. Very simply put, this means that
(10.45) the "folk-theoretic" account of knowledge is conceptually insuperable.[25]
Theorem (10.45) affirms (9.25) more challengingly. The relevant argument has been greatly strengthened, for, now, to deny (10.45) is to claim to be able to show that the symbiosis of language and world and of "internal" and "external" relations within the terms of the first can be effectively retired. I cannot see now how that can be done. If the intended denial fails, then the "folk-theoretic" entails a third sort of symbiosis (mentioned before but not strenuously pursued): (iii) the symbiosis that holds between the individuated "integrity" of persons and their aggregated sharing of some collective Lebensform ((10.23)).
I know of no self-described physicalist who opposes the "folk-theoretic" (Churchland, for instance) who has directly addressed this puzzle. (I should perhaps add—recalling (9.25)—that, by a top-down methodology, I mean no more than this: that constative discourse cannot be "reduced" in any way not "adequated" to the resources of the folk-theoretic. I remind you once again that I have in mind the puzzles of reference and predication, which, as I say, seem to elude every conceptual strategy that is not "folk-theoretic."
There are two striking objections to the "reduction" of the folk-theoretic (ultimately, the first is a version of the second): (i) the "collec-
tive" cannot be reduced to the "solipsistic"; (ii) the "Intentional" cannot be reduced to the "non-Intentional." I put it to you that if these barriers cannot be breached, then the essential thread of the entire foregoing argument cannot be effectively opposed. That is a very considerable advance. But if you accept it, then, I claim, you cannot fail to go on to acknowledge that the objectivity proper to the human sciences cannot be "reduced" to the "objectivity" said to be "canonical" for the physical sciences. We are being pressed, therefore, to admit that the canonical ("externalist") picture of "objective" science cannot be right—or, better, cannot be enough even for its own work . The reason is plain: if all the sciences are human sciences ((9.21), (9.58)), and if the human sciences cannot be modeled solipsistically ((9.7), (9.59), (10.1)), then neither can the physical sciences! Q.E.D. The physical sciences are, I claim, abstracted from and abstracted within the terms of objectivity appropriate to the human sciences ((9.60)).
Grant that, and a decisive corner will have been turned. The key is this:
(10.46) the elimination or reduction of the Intentional entails the advocacy of the solipsistic.
Theorem (10.46) is the essential pivot on which the dominant programs of analytic philosophy (the canon ) founder. I can collect all of this now in a most strategic way:
(10.47) the normative function of epistemic appraisals cannot be reduced to, or replaced by, causal explanations of the psychological states judged to count as cognitions.
The first, of course, addresses what is incarnate, and the second what is incarnating; also, the first incorporates second-order concerns and the second does not.
We need to be clearer, however, about the nature of the "objectivity" appropriate to the cultural world. Again, the key is surprisingly straightforward:
(10.48) objectivity cannot but be consensual.[26]
Theorem (10.48) is a little startling, but entirely straightforward. By objectivity, I mean no more than that condition of our constative powers
in virtue of which our truth-claims can be legitimated as veridical: justifiably judged true (or otherwise suitably judged). Remember, we are not bound to bivalence. Of course, by the consensual, I mean (i) "entrenched" in the lebensformlich way, but (ii) not as such criterial. You have only to remember the discussion, in chapter 3, regarding reference and predication, to see that the matter was already implicitly decided by what we were there obliged to admit regarding our discursive resources. Under the various forms of symbiosis, consensual criteria governing the assignment of truth-values cannot but accord with our conjectures of what is "rational" in the way of validity and legitimation. Hence,
(10.49) objectivity, like truth, validity, legitimation, rationality, is a consensual artifact.
But what does the "consensual" entail? Try this:
(10.50) in an Intentional world, consensus is reflexive:
that is, (i) entails discerning what is collectively shared by aggregates of selves, (ii) in virtue of which each is empowered in pertinent cognitive ways. Compendiously:
(10.51) in an Intentional world, objectivity is consensual, reflexive, and interpretive.
Theorem (10.51) is no more than a summary. But from it follows:
(10.52) in an Intentional world, cognizer and cognized are the same;
that is, such that the "observation" of their "objective" attributes entails the interpreted perception of the lebensformlich structures they share . Hence, the observers of a cultural world are apt agents in and of that same world ((10.10), (10.29).) Alternatively put:
(10.53) persons or selves are, at once, cognizing agents and cognized cognizers.
Theorem (10.53) signifies, in effect, that insofar as persons are the apt individuals they are, their aptitude instantiates the incarnate collective practices that are their Lebensformen .
In short,
(10.54) in an Intentional world, there is no exit from the interpretive consensus in virtue of which such a world is constituted and perceived.
Alternatively:
(10.55) in an Intentional world, perception is inherently subject to the hermeneutic circle .[27]
Viewed more paradoxically:
(10.56) Intentional structures are real only insofar as they are cognizable by percipients whose own cognizing aptitudes are suitably qualified and conformably constituted.
Theorem (10.56) supplies the deepest version of that benign paradox known as the hermeneutic circle. I take it to define the "circle." Its puzzle cannot be resolved except within a lebensformlich world in which cognizer and cognized are constituted as such and "adequated" to each other, as in (10.52). I may now say that I mean, by the hermeneutic circle, that constraint on our cognitive powers such that: (i) our constative claims and perceptions are inherently informed by a more inclusive lebensformlich consensus; (ii) the "objective" determination of that consensus presupposes an interpretive consensus; (iii) every claim of interpretive consensus is an artifact of (i); and (iv) there is no escape from conditions (i)–(iii).
I trust it is clear that to admit the hermeneutic circle is to admit that "cultural emergence" must be sui generis, inexplicable in terms of whatever forms of emergence obtain in any world adequately characterized in non-Intentional terms. In effect, that means that, unlike biological or psychological emergence,
(10.57) cultural emergence is at once "natural" and legitimative.
Theorem (10.57) is an extraordinarily important finding. I can suggest its subtlety by reminding you that, in the psychiatric nosology, schizophrenia is often characterized as involving a deformation in the veridical perception of the objective world. But of course, on the account I have been developing, the "natural" phenomenon of schizophrenia cannot,
in principle, fail to be inseparable from its legitimative "status" vis-á-vis objective knowledge. The taxonomic manuals do not accommodate that fact—or, for that matter, its methodological import on the scientific pretensions of psychiatry. Another subtle consequence is this:
(10.58) since they are Intentional entities and since the Intentional is collective and horizonal, the integrity (the unity and unicity) of persons or selves is itself a function of our horizonal interpretation of their (and our own) careers.
Theorem (10.58) begins to open up dizzying possibilities, which, though still manageable, are clearly completely alien to canonical views of individuation and numerical identity. (Certainly, it is completely incompatible with externalist models of cognition.) Any surprise here is a consequence of the failure of analytic philosophy to address the culture/nature puzzle adequately. I suggest that it has been anticipated in recent views regarding the objectivity of literary criticism. Furthermore, both physical and cultural emergence are posited only at that level of "emergence" at which linguistically apt agents are first able to broach the question. It is in that sense that science is invariably "top-down."
I should perhaps add explicitly that, once you accept the general line of argument that leads to my reading of the hermeneutic circle, you cannot fail to grasp as well that it provides a similar treatment of praxis (in the general Marxist sense, shorn perhaps of the particular model of social causation the Marxists have favored historically.)[28] I take Foucault's notion of power/knowledge (pouvoir/savoir ), for instance, to be sufficiently "materialist" in this regard to be "Marxist." The idea is that the constructed standing of "knowledge" is a function of the historically contingent but practically effective scheme of institutionalized distinctions ("power") that some viable society has entrenched. The thesis is meant holistically, not criterially. Hence, it cannot be equated with the specific effects of deliberate political power, although it accommodates them. (A Lebensform, we may say, is a site of power, and knowledge is the artifactual status of legitimated exemplars within its space.)
The "hermeneutic circle," it's true, is normally not employed in the context of social causation, but it could be (and probably ought to be). In any case, by praxis, I mean (adding to what has been said): (i) the defeat of the conceptual basis for Aristotle's disjunction between "theoretical" and "practical" reason; (ii) the characterization of theory or theorizing (or language, for that matter) as a form of "practical" activ-
ity; and (iii) the interpretation of Lebensformen in terms of praxis and of praxis in terms of the enabling powers of Lebensformen. In short, the lebensformlich is the middle term between praxis and the hermeneutic circle.
Of course, objectivity, according to the "canon" (among the Positivists, the advocates of the unity of science program, those who would naturalize epistemology, those who would reduce the Intentional to the non-Intentional): (i) presupposes solipsism; (ii) admits a cognizable world that lacks Intentionality; (iii) denies theorems (10.51)–(10.55); and (iv) regards cognizer and cognized as epistemically independent of each other. Call this view of "objectivity," objectivitye (meaning that objectivity is confined to externalist relations), and the earlier view (in accord with (10.48)), objectivityi (meaning that objectivity accommodates internal as well as external relations). The two versions are clearly irreconcilable. That is the point of (10.45). (It signifies that "objectivitye " is a deformation of "objectivityi ")
Let me bring this discussion to a close with a final set of curious puzzles. Intentional properties are real only in the milieu of a viable culture ((10.56)), or only as the interpreted vestiges of a once-viable culture sustained by another that is still viable. Here and there, extraordinary conceptual bridges have been built between cultural worlds that no longer function "reflexively" and others that still do. (The Rosetta Stone is one of the most remarkable of these bridges.) Collective practices evolve through the effect of their actual exercise ((10.19)). I construe this to mean:
(10.59) cultural worlds are histories relative to which whatever exist within them are also histories.
On the strength of (10.59), we may now add:
(10.60) existent histories are Intentional entities embodied in non-Intentional entities,
just as Intentional properties (now, their Intentional properties) are incarnate in non-Intentional properties. This is the condition on which the "integrity" of "embodied" entities can be ensured—that is, the adequation of their "unity" and "unicity." I have already argued, in chapter 7, that individuated things need not have constant natures ((7.6)). It turns out, as a consequence, that, since the lebensformlich sources from which
the "natures" of embodied entities are drawn are themselves historicized ((10.19)), embodied entities cannot have constant natures ((10.58)).
Let us say, then, that
(10.61) all cultural entities are permeable.
By permeable, I mean that the "nature" of cultural entities is affected and altered as a direct consequence of changes in the Lebensformen in which they are formed and within which they "persist." Hence,
(10.62) selves are permeable because they have Intentional (consensually formed) "natures."
This explains the bearing of the "internal"/"external" symbiosis ((4.11)) and the open-ended nature of the hermeneutic circle on the methodology and "objectivity" of the sciences.
Furthermore,
(10.63) all cultural entities are porous because they are permeable.
By porous, I mean that cultural entities are capable of acquiring and losing Intentional properties as a function of the consensual practices on which their existence depends: that is, that their natures are intrinsically (Intentionally) collective. For example, Hamlet has acquired psychoanalytic import as a consequence of changes in the ethos of Western society—attributes that were not salient (or not even possible) in Shakespeare's time.[29] Similarly, the recent development of the feminist critique of "male-dominated" modes of life has entered into contemporary social criticism in such a way that, for instance, the "macho" life-style has been perceptually (interpretively, really ) altered. (Theorems like (10.62)–(10.63) oblige us to construe the "hermeneutic circle" in a historicized and relativistic way.)
This is not to say (as Dennett charges) that those who favor the "intentional" idiom hold that real things are altered as a result of mere redescription.[30] No, Dennett has misconstrued the problem. For one thing, non -Intentional entities are, on every view, completely unaffected by changes in mere description. (No respectable "intentionalist" has claimed otherwise.) It remains true, however, that, in intentional contexts ("opaque" contexts, as Quine calls them), it is not always clear whether one and the same entity is being referred to when descriptions
change. Here, I claim only that theorem (10.63) is not incompatible with what I have just said about non-Intentional entities.
Finally, given the historicized symbiosis of world and language (for example, along the lines Kuhn stresses, in admitting that Priestley and Lavoisier lived "in different worlds"), the "objective" concepts ("objectivee ") with which the non -Intentional world is described and explained are themselves the artifacts of our Lebensformen (of what is "objectivei "). In this sense,
(10.64) scientific objectivity is historicized.
Foucault was right. But I am also prepared to concede that
(10.65) whatever lacks Intentionality is "impermeable" and "nonporous."
The Hamlet example is profoundly instructive in other ways. (I count Hamlet as a metonym for the cultural world.) Over time, Hamlet has "acquired" a psychoanalytic import—as has, also, Oedipus Rex . But the Mona Lisa smile still possesses, vestigially, a trace of Verocchio's work.[31] Freud, by contrast, completely failed to see "in" Leonardo's Madonna and St. Anne the cultist meaning of rendering the two women equal in age: Freud imputed a sense to the painting that tradition has not sustained. Again, we have surely lost much of the semiotic import of the masks of West Africa, which have acquired traits born of being brought, in the museum world, into constant conjunction with mainstream European painting. And Dante's Commedia has obviously lost a great deal of the import of its Muslim exemplar (which may yet be restored). To the question, where are the Intentional properties of these works to be found and located, the best answer seems to be: in the works themselves (Intentionally complex artworks, mind you) as discerned in or imputed to them by Intentionally apt (even matched) agents. By imputed (to them), I mean only that the consensual traits (the "meanings," the "representational" properties and the like) they "have" are interpretively discerned in them. They "have" the changing natures they have in virtue of the rigor (naturans ) of such imputations; the imputed properties are objectively discernible in them, as a consequence (naturata ). In this sense, artworks (as well as selves) are "socially constructed" and continually reconstituted interpretively ((7.33), (9.23), (9.37), (9.38)).
This helps to explain the objectivityi of the cultural world—recalling,
always, that the seemingly rigorous sense of objectivitye in the physical world is itself dependent, epistemically and ontically, on just this objectivity.
I want to concede, however, that
(10.66) the individuation and predicated nature of cultural entities are labile.
By labile attributes, I mean those attributes in virtue of which embodied entities cannot be located physically, except by an interpretive convention, inasmuch as (i) embodiment
Where, for instance, does an action begin and end? or a war?[32] If, say, a particular act of flipping the light switch is "embodied" in a particular physical movement confined in some way to a certain (non-Intentional) causal event, then if (say, with Davidson) the action (or act ) of flipping the switch = the action of alerting a burglar (who happens to be in the house), then how may we confine that action to its proper "boundaries" in terms of its "unity" and "unicity": its "integrity," in short? Certainly not by appeal to whatever may be true of incarnating or embodying (non-Intentional) considerations. Furthermore, it is entirely possible that the practice of interpreting (a fortiori, individuating) actions according to the law may be very different from the practice of interpreting paintings. It is also possible that several different actions be embodied in the same physical movement. My schema is meant to accommodate all such puzzles. There is nothing comparable in our discourse about (mere) physical things.
I must press these gains a little further. I have already remarked that persons or selves are culturally apt "agents" ((10.24)). Let me add now that
(10.67) persons or selves are the only Intentionally apt agents there are,
in the sense that
(10.68) only persons or selves work or produce work.
(Remember, machines, prelinguistic infants, and animals may be "anthropomorphized" as "agents.") By work, I mean no more than: (i) acting in a way informed by our enabling Lebensformen (as in speaking or weaving a carpet); or (ii) the artifacts (or artifactual deeds ) produced (or effected) by work in accord with (i). Furthermore,
(10.69) an "act" or "action" or "piece of work" is done or performed only by individual agents,
even though what is done or produced will possess properties that, as Intentional, are intrinsically collective. This explains why that which is, predicatively, culturally significant is interpretively such.
The curious thing is that
(10.70) persons or selves are not only interpretable entities, they are also, uniquely, self-interpreting entities ("texts").
(The notion of a "text" I have already explored in chapter 4.) The important point here is that
(10.71) selves are the sole agents of history, though not the only causes of effective historical change.
Certainly,
(10.72) collective agents are fictions or "anthropomorphized" causes.
Braudel slights the role of particular human agents and favors instead the "agency" of large complexes of the Mediterranean world.[33] Certainly, for purposes of assigning "collective" responsibility, corporations are acknowledged in the law. By a corporation, I mean a collective agent (or person ): a fictitious or anthropomorphized agent (said to be capable of work and artifactual deeds and of assuming responsibility). But it strikes me that the convention of introducing "corporations" is an acknowledgement of the truth of (10.69). I add, therefore, following Locke:
(10.73) persons or selves are cognitively competent agents capable of work and of assuming responsibility.
The account is quite tidy now. Nevertheless, before closing this chapter, I must draw your attention to the import of (10.70). Selves, I say, act in ways in which, interpretively (whether consciously or not), they are the very agents by which, through their "permeability" and "porosity," they effectively alter their own "natures" (as well, a fortiori, as the "artifacts" of their own culture). Hence,
(10.74) selves are self-interpreting "texts," the continually reconstituted artifacts of their own reflexive agency.
I regard theorem (10.74) as capturing a good part of the strenuous but different doctrines espoused by Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Gadamer, and Foucault. It is a theme largely missing from analytic philosophy.
We are nearly at the end; a few more observations will round things out. Returning to a matter I treated too briefly before (but cannot do full justice to in this primer), I remind you that I introduced the notion of "embodied" in order to have it play an ontic role isomorphic with that intended for "incarnate" ((10.60)). The ramifications of (10.60) are extraordinarily rich, but for the sake of the most minimal clarity I add only these summary remarks:
(10.75) by definition, embodied entities necessarily possess incarnate properties;
and, as a consequence, drawing on the entire foregoing account,
(10.76) Intentional, intentional, mental, cultural, linguistic, lingual, interpretable, historical, artifactual, permeable, porous, labile, and similar properties are incarnate properties.
I should say here that by embodied I now understand (i) a complex "relationship" between numerically distinct individuals, (ii) one entirely different from that of instance/kind and member/class, in that only individuals may be thus related, (iii) an indissoluble relation as far as the existence of pertinent entities is concerned, (iv) such that their "incarnate" properties are "emergent" with respect to their "embodying" entities, and (v) open to being affirmed in a realist, heuristic, anthropomorphized, or fictitious sense. (By individuals, I mean persons or selves.
By individual things, I mean particulars, taken singly, usually in the sense of being apt for reference.)
There are a great many puzzles about the individuation and numerical identity of embodied entities. This is particularly clear when one thinks about plural (and differing) performances of the same Mozart sonata or plural utterings of the same word or sentence. I can just report that I have found all of these to yield perspicuously to the following distinction of art:
(10.77) all and only embodied entities are tokens-of-types.[34]
I hyphenate "tokens-of-types" deliberately. Particulars that are embodied particulars are taken instances of a type that is "itself" countable. Brahms wrote one "Fourth Symphony," we say, but "that" symphony has been performed innumerable times and in many different ways. We are not, however, obliged to think of types as abstract (existent) particulars of some sort that are (oddly) instantiated by (token) particulars. No, the "token" performances instantiate pertinent musical predicables, and we count those performances heuristically (nominalize them as events) as tokens-of-the-type for reasons of interest within our society (credits, permissions, royalties, and the like). The interesting thing is that the cloning and reincarnation of persons (regardless of the empirical facts) trade on the coherence of the same notion.
A further caveat is in order here:
(10.78) emergent phenomena need not be embodied or incarnate.
By an emergent order of reality, I may now say, more precisely than before, that I mean any array of empirical phenomena that (i) cannot be described or explained in terms of the descriptive and explanatory concepts deemed adequate for whatever more basic level or order of nature or reality the order or level in question is said to have emerged from, and (ii) is causally implicated and cognitively accessible in the same "world" in which the putatively more basic order or level is identified. For instance, the order of biological phenomena is said to have emerged from a more basic order (or "level") of inanimate physical things—without being incarnate in the sense here intended.
It is among questions of emergence that questions of adequation and reduction arise and are resolved. For example, Searle is prepared to make mental ascriptions of the brain, but the coherence and viability of
doing so depend on the demands of adequation and the prospects of reduction.[35] Two puzzles arise, which Searle does not satisfactorily examine: first, whether, if the "mental" can be ascribed to biological organisms (including Homo sapiens ), it follows that the mental can be ascribed to the brain; second, whether, if the first puzzle is favorably resolved, it follows that Intentional forms of the mental can also be ascribed to "parts" of the brain (neurophysiological processes, say).
You can see that there cannot be an end to these puzzles. The decisive point is that they all arise and are resolved within the terms of (10.48): the consensual nature of every sort of objectivity. It is curious, therefore, that conjecture about such puzzles as those just mentioned is so often insouciantly detached from the milieu of their very resolution. It is the irreducibility and sui generis features of the Intentional that, in the last analysis, are decisive.
Chapter XI
Values, Norms, and Agents
Some philosophers hold that the world has a determinate structure independent of our conception of it and that, although we ourselves belong to the world, the structure of our own lives is (similarly) independent of our normative reflections on that structure. As a consequence, values and norms are ontologically "queer" if they are thought to be discernible as "part of the fabric" of the real world. Hume was convinced that the use of the copula, "ought," signaled a violation of this important truth, but Hume did not extend his complaint to the entire range of moral values. In our time, Mackie has taken the drastic line, although also not unqualifiedly.[1]
It is difficult to formulate this radical thesis perspicuously, but it is the one that is currently opposed by so-called moral realists and their allies. The doctrine opposed is often called moral skepticism. In a fair sense, moral skepticism is a form of what I have earlier characterized as externalism. In my opinion, the "moral realists" and their opponents have, together, raised the crucial question regarding the grounds for the objectivity of normative practical discourse in law, in art, even in science, in addition to morality.[2] Not, of course, in the terms the skeptics would favor (and then attack), for the assumption on which they proceed runs completely contrary to the argument of this primer, but rather in the sense that, assuming the pertinence of the skeptics' challenge and the realists' rejoinder, the contest obliges us to explain how it is possible to reclaim objective moral values in a thoroughly symbiotized world that already implicates our interests. It is one thing, it seems, to recover a
sense of objective truth for science, under symbiosis; it is quite another to recover objective norms for conduct.
Now, this much is safe to say but completely unhelpful. The reason is not entirely clear. I believe the skeptic is right in some part of what he says, but wrong to draw the skeptical conclusion, and the moral realist is right in countering the skeptic, but wrong to think a mere minimal realism of values will ensure the moral objectivity wanted. Alternatively put, the argument between the skeptic and the realist is largely misplaced. The skeptic is mistaken about the force of his skepticism, and the realist is similarly mistaken about his realism, but both are right in countering the other's claim. They are arguing past one another. Properly perceived, the issue reveals a lacuna that the champions of objectivity and realism resist admitting—or actually deny—which they cannot fill to their entire satisfaction. There is, in fact, no single doctrine that can be rightly called "moral realism": at a certain point, it pays to abandon the contest as it is usually joined. There is a much deeper puzzle to reclaim. But the second is best reclaimed through a sense of the stalemate of the first.
My own thought is that the history of moral philosophy has misled itself with grander claims than it could ever support, but its detractors have usually failed to grasp the fact that their own line of attack subverts more than they would care to give up. It is true that the sciences require objective norms (of truth), but that, I suggest, is never sufficient (even if conceded) to legitimate (or to indicate how to legitimate) moral judgments in the sense usually championed. I daresay this, too, is a confusing thing to say.
The realism the "moral realists" oppose (in addition to opposing skepticism and cognitive privilege) is surely at least a certain extreme species of what Putnam has dubbed metaphysical realism, that is, the doctrine that (i) the real world is what it determinately is apart from our conception of it, and (ii) well-formed truth-claims are, as a consequence, true or false apart from whether we could ever confirm or know that they were.[3] On that intriguing (but preposterous) view, truth, however normative it may be, need not belong to the human world at all, although it is standardly supposed that values and norms cannot be coherently assigned anywhere but in a human world. This cannot be right if truth, whatever our theory may affirm, implicates some relation or other between language and world. In that sense, truth (or factuality) cannot be less "queer" than goodness, if goodness is queer when assigned a place among real things. Hence, both "metaphysical realism"
and "moral skepticism" must be defective theories—and for similar reasons.
In fact, if, by skepticism, we may understand doubts (open to legitimation) about the veridical correspondence between (internal) "representations" ("ideas" or representational beliefs) about the independent (external) world and that world, then, of course, if they are at all reasonable, such doubts will arise in the same ("externalist") way for truth-claims in general and for moral claims in particular. But the analogy fails to admit pertinent differences between "factual" judgments and "value" judgments. It fails to consider the differences between the (normative) legitimation of factual claims and the legitimation of value claims. It fails to do justice to the confused distinction between facts and values. And it fails to address the full propriety of skeptical doubts. My own view is that skepticism in general is (i) an essentially externalist program, and hence, (ii) completely obviated by admitting the various forms of symbiosis. The point is that there can be no principled skepticism if our cognizing aptitudes and the world's cognizable properties are similar for symbiotic reasons—or as they also are on constructivist grounds. But if that is conceded, then:
(11.1) there cannot be a principled distinction between the epistemic and legitimative prospects of science and morality.[4]
Nevertheless, (11.1) does not answer the question of the actual objectivity of science and morality or of the objective difference between them. Mackie, I suggest, fails to admit (11.1) but he sees something of the import of the dependent issues. The strategic point is this: once (11.1) is read in symbiotized terms, questions regarding the objective standing of moral judgments cannot be applied first to the prior space of the physical or natural world . There is no such prior world ((4.11)).
Putnam claims that truth has an inherent "regulative" or normative function, that "metaphysical realism" precludes such a function even with respect to the sciences it would champion; hence, that metaphysical realism is ultimately incoherent. He presses the argument in a way that (implicitly) precludes any of the forms of cognitive privilege either Aristotle or certain moral realists might be tempted to favor; he himself finds it necessary (and sufficient), in preserving the objectivity of both science and moral judgment, to fall back to a Kantian-like doctrine. The trouble is, the Kantian view, as we have already seen, is itself vulnerable to the charge of privilege (apriorism). Putnam has belatedly acknowl-
edged the bearing of this fact on his own program, but, in retreating to a less vulnerable post-Kantian symbiosis—in denying any principled distinction between the "subjective" and the "objective"—he has been too slow in admitting the obvious consequence for the "regulative" function of truth.
The usual moral realist is inclined to avoid the post-Kantian option (Platts, for example), and appears to advocate instead some sort of "externalist" view.[5] As a result, the (moral) realist lays himself open to the skeptic's charge. This cannot be said to hold of all moral realists, simply because some (Lovibond and Wiggins, for instance) would never accept the terms of debate the moral skeptic imposes on the contest—often (as with Mackie) a form of empiricism. And yet, even this more careful realist may still prove too sanguine. Casting the dispute in the moral realist's best terms will not vindicate a full-blown realism of moral norms. Nevertheless, the objectivity of moral judgment need not be utterly lost. There's a pretty paradox.
Dummett, with whom Putnam debated the regulative function of truth for several years, agrees that there are constraints on meaningful truth-claims—in particular, that a bona fide truth-claim must be "decidable" (that is, that, in making a proper claim, we have in mind a determinate, finitely completable plan here and now for determining whether it is true or false). Dummett, therefore, presses in the direction of opposing the principle of excluded middle, but he does not (once "decidability" is satisfied) oppose the principle of tertium non datur . In this sense, Dummett is not entirely candid. For, although he brings truth into the human world (in the intuitionist's way), he regards that about the world which makes truth relevantly determinate, to be not actually subject, thereupon, to any symbiosis. For Dummett, intuitionism is only an epistemic or methodological scruple. He reinstates tertium non datur at once, having settled the decidability issue, which is to say he favors enough of the metaphysical realist's view (and privilege) to settle for some version of externalism. But that should invite the "skeptic's" charge (now, regarding truth and decidability, if taken to be normative). Mackie is not drawn to this extreme, but he fails to provide for the normative role of truth.
I have allowed certain puzzles to collect here, but I need to introduce an economy. Moral realists, we now begin to see, are of at least two quite different sorts: (i) there are those who allow their theories to be defined as bare responses to moral skepticism and metaphysical realism; and (ii) there are those who insist on a realism of moral norms but not
merely by way of (i). Both are keen on avoiding the stigma of relying on some obvious form of privilege. For the moment, it will pay to remark that "moral realists" may be either externalists or advocates of symbiosis. By an accident of history, the term moral realism has come to be associated with theories of the first sort. For convenience, then, I shall, where needed, characterize the symbiotized option as cultural realism. I oppose the first and support the second.
Putnam calls himself an "internal realist " because he holds that any Kantian-like "realism" compatible with the "regulative" function of truth (Putnam's Grenzbegriff ) must (against Kuhn and Feyerabend, for instance) resist any slippage in the direction of post-Kantian symbiosis. (And yet, of course, Putnam has also persuaded himself to slip in just this way, for he now denies that there is a principled or fixed demarcation between the "subjective" and the "objective."[6] But if he holds to this, he must abandon his Grenzbegriff .)
The "moral realists" (among whom Wiggins is perhaps the best-known) do not feel bound—as least as far as the standing of moral claims is concerned—to offer an opinion on either Putnam's or Dummett's options; they hold instead that human life would be "meaningless" if moral values and norms were not "real" in some very strong sense. (They outflank Putnam's worry and Dummett's confidence.) But they neglect to explain how this can be—in ontic and epistemic terms. Putnam's claim is that the sciences would be impossible if truth did not have a realist function. But since to have such a function entails that truth is "normative," it would be incoherent (Putnam believes) to hold that the objective world (the world science discerns) precludes values and norms. In that sense, Putnam is, effectively, an ally of the moral realists, but of a sort they are not likely to welcome.
I shall, therefore, take moral realism (provisionally) to hold (i) that whatever the metaphysics of the real world may be, moral values and moral norms are, in some sense, "objectively" recovered but not directly discernible in its space, (ii) that, however truth-claims are rightly processed, moral claims are similarly open to objective confirmation, and (iii) that satisfying (i) and (ii) entails life's being "meaningful, " the sine qua non (according to the moral realists) of there being objective values in the first place. (Moral realism tends to be externalist, but that marks a serious defect in its argument.)
My sense is that "moral realists" would not be satisfied with (i)–(iii) alone, although Putnam might, since Putnam is (now) a willing post-Kantian. No interesting moral realist would fail to insist on a further
condition, viz.: (iv) that norms and values conformable with (i)–(iii) must be robust enough to support objective judgments regarding what is "categorically binding" or "prescriptive" or "overriding" or the like vis-à-vis human agents whose lives and actions are under review (Nagel's sensible but unsupported thesis).[7] Here, moral realism fails or falters badly, for the realist insists that condition (iv) must be granted (on pain of undercutting whatever makes life "meaningful" in the first place). Hence the moral realist (Wiggins, for instance) relies too much on defeating empiricism or relies too much on analogies between moral norms and norms of truth and meaning (Lovibond, for instance).
What the moral realist holds at all costs is this: first, that norms and values are on a metaphysical par with whatever realism is accorded natural phenomena; and, second, that that status is ontically independent of our individual interests and conceptions. The contemporary analytic moral realist ventures very little more, although, of course, more standard "realists" (Aristotle) offer instantly stronger (privileged) claims that the moral skeptic would rightly challenge. The moral realist insists (i) that the skeptic must be mistaken in attacking moral realism in such a way as to render other normative parts of our human world unacceptably baffling (for instance, regarding truth and linguistic intelligibility), (ii) that to make provision for epistemic success regarding the latter question already entails the moral realist's thesis, and (iii), that, more implicitly than not, resolving the issues raised by (i) and (ii) is hardly improved by yielding in the internal realist's way.[8]
I concede the validity of (i), although it is not narrowly relevant to the defense of the moral realist's position; hence, I doubt that any argument conformable with (ii) can be successfully mounted. Furthermore, the moral realist must still answer the skeptic's charge, although he is right to insist (iii) that the internal realist's thesis will not secure his claim. Finally, to support both (i) and (iii) is, I suggest, to argue at cross-purposes. The options before us make for much more than a local skirmish.
The trouble with internal realism cannot be confined to the issue before us: both Kant and his successor (the "internal realist") utterly fail to assess the decisive realist role of collective cultural life (our Lebensformen ). Without positing a "cultural realism"—which is effectively secured by embracing symbiosis—the moral skeptic cannot be answered, except by retreating to some form of privilege (externalist or constructivist). Accept symbiosis and the skeptic's objection instantly falls away. Accept internal realism and you cannot then legitimate (as Putnam has
always supposed he could) a "regulative" role for norms (truth or goodness) robust enough to secure a constructivist sense of objectivity as strong as what the externalist canon has always claimed—illicitly among unity of science buffs, Aristotelians, utilitarians, and the like. Putnam is not clear on the matter. Ironically, Kuhn, whom Putnam has regularly opposed, is much more explicit about the collective nature of the norms of truth regarding science. In any case, I hold (against Putnam) that moral realism cannot be adequately succored by the internal realist's treatment of truth in the sciences . And I hold (for instance, against Lovibond, who is a moral realist) that the realism of linguistic "norms" (communicative norms for natural languages) cannot succor moral realism. Both maneuvers are inapt for the purpose at hand, although reasonable enough in their own mangers. Still, truth and intelligibility are normative concerns: they do regulate in some way what we mean by "objectivity." It's just that moral norms have a different place in the scheme of things.
I recommend, therefore, that we begin (again) as tentatively as possible. Begin, then, with the following terminological distinctions:
(11.2) values are predicables for some order of things judged in accord with a given norm or norms;
and
(11.3) norms are exemplary values in a hierarchy of values, or principles or rules or regulative procedures for "grading" and "ranking" things—preeminently, choices, judgments, commitments, actions—pertinent to realizing such values.
By grading, I mean that form of evaluation in which certain value predicates ("good," "right," "true," for instance) are pertinently ascribed to whatever, singly, satisfies a given norm. By ranking, I mean a form of evaluation in which value predicates are ascribed in the ordinal and comparative sense, in accord with the degree to which different things satisfy a given norm ("better," "ought," "forbidden," for instance). Grading is a "threshold" matter; ranking, one of "ordering."[9]
Here, I suggest we take a note from Hegel's criticism of Kant; it will prove an economy:[10]
(11.4) values and norms are real (in the "cultural realist's" sense) in that they are sittlich: consensually entrenched in the historical prac-
tices of a lebensformlich world, and hence, straightforwardly confirmable in "objective" terms in first-order inquiry.
I cannot see how any account of moral values or any other values—cognitive norms for the natural sciences, for instance—can be "realist," unless something like theorem (11.4) obtains. Surely values have realist standing only in a human world, even if they are not predicatively restricted to the quality of human life. The sittlich vouchsafes that condition at the same time it collects the effective values of different societies. (I should say at once that I take "sittlich, " like "lebensformlich, " to function as an English adjective.)
I insist, however, that "externalist" legitimation entails illicit privilege ((2.5)–(2.7)) and that legitimations based on symbiosis alone cannot match what the externalist canon has always wanted. There's the difficulty. The result is, we must scale back our philosophical expectations. Norms and values have a realist standing in the sittlich world—in being consensually operative in lebensformlich ways—but they are not valid, for that reason alone, in any strong legitimative sense. We cannot guarantee that those same norms and values rightly serve as the "objective" (or "real") values to which we ought to subscribe (categorically or prescriptively). The skeptic insists on the caveat and the moral realist would be well advised to admit the weakness of his claim. For the moment, I urge only a sense of the puzzle.
Norms arise in a sittlich world, and they are forever tethered to that world. We suppose some moral values are "objectively" better than others, although they are all equally sittlich . The normative standing of truth offers a tempting parallel, but it is not an adequate examplar for legitimative strategies in moral matters. Also, insisting on the merely sittlich sources of moral objectivity trivializes the entire question. For there is then no argumentative ground for distinguishing between what is and what ought to be .[11] The sittlich does, however, obviate the question of whether life is "meaningful," for there is then no sense in which, collectively, life could possibly be "meaningless." (The moral realist's [Wiggins's] worry is ultimately negligible.)
Putnam is undoubtedly right to insist that truth is normative (since it is legitimative). But Putnam does not explain the link between the "regulative" function of truth and its sittlich standing in anything like the sense of (11.4). On the other hand, the moral skeptic cannot be entirely right, if (as is true) his objection against the moral realist also (inadver-
tently) counts against a realism regarding truth (under conditions that preclude privilege).
The fact is, the moral skeptic (most familiarly, Mackie) opposes the objectivity of moral norms on externalist grounds, that is, contrary to the doctrine of symbiosis ((4.11), (2.7)). Mackie is right to hold that, within those terms, a realist defense of moral norms must fail: externalism refuses to countenance the only grounds on which the question promisingly arises (symbiosis). But Mackie himself fails to grasp that the objectivity he favors also requires some sittlich consensus ((11.4)). The natural sciences cannot be altogether wertfrei (as Putnam rightly sees) if truth is to have a regulative function in ensuring objectivity.[12] Moral realists, however, would be wrong to suppose that correcting for that would be sufficient to provide a basis for the objectivity of moral norms going beyond the merely sittlich . That would be a complete non sequitur . I know of no moral realist (of the current analytic stripe) who has entirely mastered the force of this worry.
This also bears on Putnam's dilemma. As an "internal realist," Putnam is right to hold that the "regulative" function of truth can only be drawn out of a Kantian-like holism, but he nowhere explains how that is to be done robustly enough to save the objectivity of the natural sciences. (It cannot be done except on apriorist grounds.) Putnam seems to have persuaded himself earlier, however, that, having shown the incoherence of the "metaphysical realist's" account of truth, he was instantly entitled to claim an externalist's assurance regarding truth's regulative function—within his own internalist vision. But that proved impossible—incoherent, in fact—and he has now admitted it. The trick is to find an external, but not an externalist, formula suitably fitted to the sciences. Failing that, we cannot hope to resolve the moral realist's question convincingly. The puzzles of the philosophy of science and of moral philosophy are on a par metaphysically, even if objectivity cannot be secured in both domains in the same way ((11.1)). So Mackie's challenge cuts more deeply than Mackie may have realized.
The best Putnam could have offered would have been that truth can be (trivially) recovered as a mere sittlich value. The moral realist similarly fails to grasp that, in spite of the difference between the non-Intentional world of nature and the Intentional world of human practice, theorem (11.4) can recover truth and moral norms only in that sittlich way.
More is surely needed to secure the full ("objective") standing of moral norms (as well as truth). Moral norms are at least sittlich, but
apparently they must be more. Objective norms, we say, sit in judgment on our sittlich values. I should add, here, that I deliberately speak of "full moral objectivity" (or "full" epistemic objectivity) when I mean to distinguish sharply between the objectivity of moral (or epistemic) norms as sittlich and their supposed (full) objectivity functioning as "categorical," "overriding," "prescriptive," or in some similar (legitimative) way. The idea is that, in the familiar literature, moral norms are thought to be capable of confirming what, "all things considered," we ought to do in pertinent contexts, or what is "timelessly true." We are not generally tempted to conflate the sittlich forms of truth's regulative function with the legitimative grounds for its yielding full objectivity—unless that is indeed what Rorty is after—but we are tempted by the option in the moral sphere.[13]
In chapter 10, I explored what we should mean by objectivity . We now see that the distinctions offered there cannot resolve the puzzle before us. The reason is this: if the naturalizing strategy fails ((5.13)), then the objectivity of truth, moral norms, legitimative distinctions, and similar concerns cannot be secured in any causal (first-order) way. I suggest the following, therefore: by objectivity, let us now understand the normative (or, better, the legitimated ) "status" of our truth-claims about the world ((10.39)), regardless of the sector of inquiry to which they apply. In that way, we confirm that "objectivity" is a legitimative (a fortiori, a normative) notion (hence, that Putnam is right about that much, whereas Mackie is mistaken), but that the criteria of objectivity need not be (and may not be able to be) uniform for the whole of the real world. I have already distinguished between Intentional and non-Intentional reality. We must, therefore, adjust our criteria of objectivity to what is suited to the cultural world (in the consensual sense, that is, in which human agents are both observers and observeds) and to what is suited to the physical world (in the external, not the externalist, sense posited within the terms of the first). It's one thing to provide for the legitimation of truth in general, it's quite another to prepare this or that domain (physics or morality) for legitimated truth-claims. There's the point of the disanalogy between truth and goodness—and of realism in science and in morality.
The argument of chapters 9 and 10 confirms that the "external" conception is itself abstracted from the "consensual" ((9.57)–(9.60), (10.48)). Hence, the objectivity of the physical world is itself inextricably bound to the objectivity (and realism) of the cultural world .[14] I say only that that has not been sufficiently well grasped by metaphysical realists, internal realists, moral realists, or moral skeptics.
There is more that needs to be said, of course. But, without explaining what we should mean by a "realism" regarding values, we cannot fail to see that, since the professed objectives are either incompatible with theorem (11.4) or exaggerate its recuperative powers,
(11.5) "metaphysical realism," "moral realism," "moral skepticism," and "internal realism" are—all of them—either incoherent or defective.
Objectivity, then, is (i) the normative "status" of truth-claims about any part of the real world, (ii) epistemically construed in accord with selected criteria suited for grading particular claims, which criteria are (iii) themselves suitably legitimated. I hold that condition (iii) is either consensual or externalist and that the externalist option must fail ((2.7)–(2.9)). It would still be appropriate (admissible in a dependent first-order sense) to say (iv) that objectivity concerns the conceptual (external ) "fit" between what is constatively affirmed and what may be found in the world. It does not matter that, in addressing (iii) in terms of (iv), we operate under the constraint of the forms of symbiosis developed in chapter 10. For, on the argument, all forms of objectivity are thus constrained, and the question of specific criteria does not yet arise.
The important point lies elsewhere, in the fact that
(11.6) "objectivity " is a second-order predicate, in two senses: first, because it applies to cognitive "states" (or truth-claims) and not to any other referents in first-order discourse (unless dependently); second, because, in epistemic contexts, it applies only in accord with legitimative criteria.
Theorem (11.6) is important. It bears, of course, on the fortunes of naturalizing strategies. But, more to the point, it confirms that
(11.7) questions of legitimation, like questions of truth, validity, rationality, and the like, are, ineluctably, questions about normative values.
There you have the link between moral theory and epistemology: "true" and "good" (or "right") are normative predicates applied within a sittlich world.
Hence, recalling condition (iv),
(11.8) science itself is not viable if values and norms are not "realist" or "objective" in the "consensual" sense.
There you have the reductio of all "naturalizing" strategies, for there is no known way to naturalize legitimation ((1.4), (1.5)). For,
(11.9) even if, construed in realist terms, first-order values and norms may be naturalized, legitimative norms, also construed in realist terms (and in a way that bears on the status of the other), cannot be.
Putnam opposes the naturalizing strategy, because he admits the normative nature of truth. This is perhaps what persuades him that truth can perform a regulative function that ensures, in the long run, some "Peircean" approximation to the objective world (independent of "the opinions of you and me"). But if Putnam were to admit that legitimative norms (the legitimation of truth and moral values, for instance) were, within his own "internal realism," second-order norms, he would be obliged to concede that truth cannot have a regulative function that is not inextricably entrenched in our tacit and contingent lebensformlich practices ("external" but not "externalist"). Putnam is committed to a paradoxical doctrine: he needs an externalist criterion but he gives us only an internalist argument.[15]
Now, by the consensual conception (of objectivity), I understand no more than the feature of any theory that accords with theorem (11.6)—a fortiori, with the three sorts of symbiosis sketched in chapter 10: that is, regarding world and language, "internal" and "external" relations, and the collective and individual in Intentional worlds. By the externalist conception, I obviously now mean: any theory that accords with the externalist analogues of conditions (i)–(iv) of the tally given a moment ago—a fortiori, any theory that does not conform with the first and second forms of symbiosis just mentioned (should anyone suppose the third to be too quarrelsome). I take the "externalist" position to be flatly untenable. (The essential key is given in theorem (4.11).)
There remains an important distinction buried in theorem (11.6). To work out what is needed, I must return to the issues of chapter 4. My concern had been to encumber truth and legitimation symbiotically, so as to oppose archism and to deny all forms of cognitive privilege. But I had already noted, in chapter 4, that truth may play a normative and "regulative" (but not privileged) role with regard to truth-claims, and that "truth" and "truth-values" play quite different roles in constative
discourse. The key theorem (there) was (4.20), which remarked that truth and legitimation are second-order notions. (I had, in fact, introduced the distinction between the "internalist" [consensual] and the "externalist" [non-symbiotized] notions of truth, but I did not bring them to bear on the analysis of values and norms. I return to these issues now, to remedy the matter and to draw out the connection between epistemology and moral and other forms of value theory.)
Everything hangs on a small, but neglected, distinction. Let me make it explicit:
(11.10) truth is a second-order normative concept that has no first-order use at all (unless derivatively or if cognitive privilege obtains), whereas truth-values are second-order predicates used in both first- and second-order discourse, "regulated" by whatever theory of truth we adopt.
Theorem (11.10) conforms very nicely with the lesson of (1.5), regarding the mingling of first- and second-order discourse. Read predicatively, truth-values are normally restricted to sentences or utterances. Even so,
(11.11) in an Intentional world, sentences and other linguistic (and lingual) utterances are admitted to instantiate consensual objectivity.
I should say they were "objective" in (at least) a sittlich sense—but no more than that, on the argument before us. Furthermore, if (11.4) cannot be denied, then we have as yet no other large "realist" option ranging over truth-values but (11.11). (I do not deny that, in the natural sciences, there are all sorts of facilitating considerations bearing on the saliences of Secondness; see chapter 6.)
It will pay to recall that, earlier, I said that "exists" and "real" were "second-order" predicates. What I meant and what I explained in chapter 6—for instance in offering theorems (6.26)-(6.27)—was that
(11.12) if, in first-order discourse, "exists" and "real" are treated predicatively, then they can only function, there, as second-order predicates.
The point I had in mind was that certain anomalies obtain if, in first-order discourse, we do not segregate "first-" and "second-order" predicates. I mean, by that, no more than that second-order predicates (i)
explicitly possess "realist" import, (ii) must, therefore, be segregated from "first-order predicates," which do not, but (iii) must, when pertinently uttered, in uttering epistemic and ontic claims, still be legitimated. Otherwise, paradoxes like that regarding Kant's hundred Thaler will surely arise to embarrass us. The moral realist, I believe, is worried about the import of (11.12)—and rightly so. This leads to the important finding:
(11.13) qua sittlich,normative values may be no more than first-order predicates;qua legitimative,they are second-order predicates that may be uttered in either first- or second-order discourse, but must be segregated in first-order discourse.[16]
By segregated, I mean the effect of partitioning first- and second-order predicates so that second-order predicates are not thought to be "descriptive" of the world in any way ((6.25)-(6.26)). By first-order predicates, I mean no more than (i) predicates whose utterance (in constative contexts) invites questions of truth and falsity because they are descriptive of the actual world, but (ii) have, as such, no explicit "realist" import. This distinction among predicates does not affect in the least the pertinence of legitimative questions raised with regard to first-order discourse. (It explains why the disquotational theory of truth, even if it were true, could not be counted on to retire legitimative questions bearing on truth-claims.)
An important corollary of (11.13) holds that
(11.14) value predicates cannot be merely sittlich and, at the same time, function in a full legitimative (second-order) way.
(Theorem (11.14) puts the quarrel about moral skepticism and moral realism in a clear light.) The matter is tricky: something is still missing. What I mean to say, of course, is that a second-order predicate possesses (or conveys) "legitimative import" explicitly, that is, when merely uttered, although it cannot (as such) actually legitimate anything without satisfying the appropriate criteria of legitimation (of truth, rationality, knowledge, normative value, coherence, meaning, or the like). That is why it must be segregated. Put more doggedly:
(11.15) only the satisfaction of the appropriate second-order (epistemic) conditions governing the use of second-order predicates can ensure their actual, "full" legitimative function.
Trivially, my saying that "P " is true does not make "P " true, but it does raise the (explicit) legitimative question (inseparable from the confirmatory question) whether "P " is true ((1.5)). Still, in saying " 'P ' is true," I raise the legitimative question merely by uttering a second-order predicate ("true"); whereas in saying "This balloon is red," I do not explicitly do that . (I raise the legitimative question by speaking referentially perhaps.) The quibble is of little consequence in itself, but it is generated by the need to segregate first- and second-order predicates in first-order discourse, and it bears on a deeper matter affecting moral realism. ("True" is a second-order predicate. It obviously has sittlich sources, but it has no developed first-order standing despite a use in first-order discourse: e.g., "The jury found that what he said was true."[17] What we should take as the "full" legitimative functioning of "true," analogous to that of moral norms, depends on many things: the relation between theoretical and practical matters, the relation between Intentional and non-Intentional worlds, the accessibility of relatively undisputed criteria in different sectors of inquiry, and the like. Certainly, truth is thought to impose constraints on "rational" judgment and behavior and, hence, to have some function similar to the prescriptive function of moral norms. We say, for instance, that, on the evidence, a rational agent ought to take "P " to be true or ought to act conformably. These are not moral considerations.)
The legitimative question cannot be eluded. It is ineluctably posed by truth-claims, regardless of their grammar. But their grammar has proved so inconvenient at times that some have sought relief in such maneuvers as insisting on the disquotational theory of truth (Quine), the impossibility of treating "exists" as a predicate (Kant), and the "queerness" of value predicates in a realist world (Mackie). None of these maneuvers affects the issue at stake, simply because
(11.16) realism implicates objective norms;
and
(11.17) legitimative norms preclude "naturalizing" strategies.
Mackie fails to take into account anything like theorem (11.16)—effectively ruling out the pertinence of (11.17). Putnam accepts both (11.16) and (11.17)—but fails to attend to the constraints on objectivity that his own Kantian-like realism imposes. Both claims (Mackie's and Put-
nam's) are, on the argument being mounted, ultimately incoherent ((11.5)).
Given this much, I suggest that
(11.18) second-order predicables apt for first-order discourse include at least: epistemic attributes, attributes of rationality, ontic attributes, truth-values, other normative attributes conveying legitimative import, attributes of interpreted coherence, and the like.
Hence, given the evolving argument,
(11.19) the ineliminability of second-order predicables in first-order discourse entails the admission of an Intentional world.
But, then, of course,
(11.20) the admissibility of objective first-order claims entails the admissibility of objective second-order claims ((1.5)).
That, among other things, is what the futile effort to confirm the disquotational theory of truth was meant to derail. Admit (11.20) and you cannot, for purely formal reasons, then disallow the possibility of objective moral claims.
I spoke too quickly earlier of the sittlich nature of norms and values ((11.4)). I have of course registered a caveat in (11.14)–(11.15), and I still take (11.4) to be convincing. But what I said was too shallow and confusing. The right way to understand (11.4) (and the other theorems) is this:
(11.21) the sittlich is equivocal: the predicates it collects function either as first- or second-order predicates in first-order discourse; either way, the sittlich implicates legitimative questions—but, if so, then predicates may be legitimative in equivocal ways as well.
The point is this—in accord with theorem (11.15),
(11.22) sittlich predicates uttered as first-order predicates lack the legitimative import they have when uttered as second-order predicates; uttered as second-order predicates, their "legitimative" import still differs in important ways in the context of first- and second-order discourse.
Broadly speaking, what I suggest is this:
(11.23) sittlich legitimative predicates uttered in first-order discourse can be used (there) to "legitimate" only in a prima facie sense—perhaps then only trivially—whereas legitimative predicates uttered in second-order discourse are meant to legitimate in a critical sense and cannot (there) be merely sittlich.
This is what I had provisionally flagged earlier in speaking of the "full" legitimative function of moral norms (and, by analogy, of truth as an epistemic norm): prima facie legitimation
These are no more than verbal distinctions, to be sure, but they have a robust use. You must bear in mind that the moral realist needs to secure the epistemic use of critical "objectivity" (even if he supposes that that is no different from prima-facie "objectivity"). To say that Kwame has committed a serious breach of etiquette is, in a first-order sittlich sense, something a field anthropologist might affirm descriptively. To utter the same remark, speaking legitimatively in first-order discourse, is something a member of Kwame's tribe might confirm as a finding, in accord with custom (prima facie ). And to judge, "all things considered," that, whatever the custom, what Kwame did was or was not a serious moral affront is to judge (to presume to judge) in "full" second-order legitimative terms (critically). (It is this last possibility that moral realists must secure, which they cannot collect in the way they wish. )
This shows the reasonableness of theorem (11.21). It hardly justifies or legitimates the charge against Kwame. Doubtless, Hume had something of this sort in mind when he claimed that one could not derive an "ought" from an "is." We see now that Hume was mistaken (or, better, both right and wrong). He obviously did not consider the essential equivocation: of course we can derive an "ought" from an "is"—in the prima facie (legitimative) sense, and if in that sense, then possibly also in the critical sense .[19] There is no conceptual difficulty there, but there is a lacuna. If Jones is guilty of murder, then, surely, Jones did what, all things considered, he ought not to have done! Nothing could be plainer.
Nevertheless, a quite marvelous and surprising economy follows from applying (11.20) to the equivocation noted in (11.23), viz.:
(11.24) the (second-order ) legitimation of first-order sittlich values and norms cannot be entirely independent of the same sittlich sources.
That is,
(11.25) legitimation is at least sittlich.
The admission of theorem (11.25) is the only way, admitting legitimation, to avoid any ultimately hidden form of cognitive privilege. It is (11.25), precisely, that conveys the perspicuous power of a "genealogical" account of truth. There is a circularity that threatens here, of course, but it cannot be eluded, although it is easily resolved. It relates to what we have already encountered in Foucault's analysis of truth as both an artifact of history and an alethic predicate used "objectively" in claims about the history of truth itself ((8.36)). If you reflect on the import of (11.25)—in particular, if you construe (11.25) in the light of (1.1) and (1.4)–(1.5—you cannot fail to see the sense in which the realism accorded persons or selves and the world of human culture is the middle term mediating between the treatment of truth and the treatment of critical moral norms. In short:
(11.26) to admit legitimation is to admit cultural realism, and to admit cultural realism is to admit the pertinence of legitimative questions.
As a consequence, philosophy cannot but be "top-down" or "folk-theoretic." Even the plausibility of the eliminativist's argument cannot fail to be folk-theoretic!
I seize the opportunity, therefore, to make a small detour back to earlier questions. "Valid " (or validated ) and "legitimated " are, then (i) normative, (ii) sittlich, and (iii) profoundly equivocal second-order predicates, (iv) capable of servicing "objective" and "realist" claims (in the "consensual" sense). For, since
(11.27) we cannot exit from our Lebensformen,
we cannot deny that
(11.28) validity and legitimation are sittlich norms, in the double sense that: (i) they are grounded in sittlich sources, whether they func-
tion in first- or second-order discourse; and (ii) in first-order discourse, they function only as prima facie norms.
(Think of the disputed status of bans on abortion.) If, now, we bear in mind that
(11.29) the norms of truth are as sittlich as are our moral norms,
the missing theorem glides into easy view, namely:
(11.30) legitimation in the second-order sense must be more than sittlich, whereas legitimation in the first-order sense is sittlich only.
I have already christened the missing function, "critical."
We cannot, as Putnam correctly realized, give up the "regulative" function of truth. Yet, in accord with (11.14)–(11.15), we also cannot free that regulative function from its sittlich entrenchment. That is what Putnam neglects, what all externalists neglect (Davidson and Mackie, for instance). It remains true, nevertheless, that truth-values may be legitimated both prima facie and critically. Effectively, the sittlich is the lebensformlich viewed as normative[20] (i) in terms of the determinate historical practices of actual societies, (ii) confined to first-order norms and values, or (iii) carelessly or tendentiously, in confusing—with respect to second-order legitimative practices—"prima facie " and "critical" concerns.
Here, I must add a few clarificatory remarks. When, as in (11.28), I speak of validity and legitimation as grounded in the sittlich, I mean no more than that they are "entrenched" in our lebensformlich practices, or some habitus or tradition or episteme, although they presume to govern them in normative ways. I say that, with respect to truth, we usually introduce some (further) idiom to convey the specific sense of the prima facie: for instance, regarding what it is reasonable to "believe true" (as opposed to what is "true" tout court ).[21] That is, we are not apt to confuse the meanings of "believe true" and "true," although we may of course take what we believe true to be true. In moral matters, it is quite different: there, we are tempted to think that "objective in the critical sense" = "objective in the prima facie sense." That is the moral realist's pons. (Being "grounded," then, signifies no more than what is conveyed by (11.24). It has no criterial or privileged function.)
I take all this to confirm that
(11.31) qua critical,legitimation cannot be analytically derived from any first-order sittlich "legitimation."
Perhaps Hume had something like (11.31) in mind, but his own practice poses the question (despite his remarks about the opposed copulas). It is certainly not clear that Hegel would have sanctioned (or how he would have sanctioned) theorems like (11.30)–(11.31). My own argument insists that a satisfactory resolution must accord with theorem (11.8). The reason is simply this:
(11.32) truth-claims are interpretively adequated to our "constructed" worlds.
When, therefore, I say that the critical = the legitimative in the second-order (not the sittlich ) sense and yet is also sittlich ((11.30)), I am not contradicting myself. I signaled that fact by theorem (11.31). What I mean is this: in accord with (1.5) and (9.48),
(11.33) what, synchronically, is critical at time t is not, in that sense, merely sittlich then, but every critical claim or proposal, viewed diachronically, is interpretable, at t' later than t, as merely sittlich (or prima facie )—thus constituting further (sittlich ) data for some further critical claim at t' .
In short,
(11.34) viewed diachronically, the critical reverts to little more than the sittlich (or prima facie ), but, at every time t' at which that happens, a fresh critical conjecture at t' is not precluded.
In this double sense,
(11.35) the critical and the legitimative, as much with regard to truth as to moral norms, cannot entirely escape their sittlich sources and their sittlich fate.
It may be of help to say that
(11.36) critical discourse is inherently synchronic,[22]
that is, pertinently concerned with the reasoned coherence of the entire universe of discourse (at any time t ). (Accordingly, by diachronic, I mean no more than what, relative to questions of coherence, are the temporally ordered phases of synchronic discourse. Hence, "diachronic"
Roughly, what theorems (11.34)–(11.36) signify is that, in consulting the sittlich, efforts at critical legitimation (whether with regard to science or morality) consult not merely the history of our norms and values but also the history of our efforts at critical legitimation. Skeptics wonder how we should ever justify our efforts to validate critically the objectivity of our choice of norms and values. Part of the easy answer is surely this: whatever innovations we offer, we bring our proposals to bear on the ongoing practice of critical legitimation itself—on the fact that sittlich practice has already played a role in "yielding" prima facie legitimations as a result of accumulating presumptive efforts at critical legitimation. This is the instant benefit, of course, of shifting from externalism to cultural realism. Suddenly, our resources are enormously enlarged.
Clearly, on this reading, although I borrow the term from Kant, critical philosophies cannot yield anything like "synthetic a priori " (transcendental) truths. That is,
(11.37) critical discourse is as "horizonal" as first-order discourse, and for the same reasons ((8.31)–(8.32)).
The singular difficulty in arriving at objective critical norms—which I am inclined to think Mackie must have had in mind—is simply that
(11.38) there is no "regulative" intuition in practical matters and conduct as robust as that of Secondness with regard to natural events and causes.
Something like the truth of (11.38) has surely impressed all those who advocate "naturalizing" epistemology, moral matters, the world of human culture in general. (They misread "externalist" objectivity, how-
ever.) Fortunately, theorem (11.38) may be tempered: the picture is not unconditionally bleak.
Let me prepare the ground a little. Bear in mind that
(11.39) the sittlich is consensually real and incarnate.
I now introduce (abruptly) the troublesome notion of a fact . There is no easy sense in which it pays to insist that there are facts, that facts are real (or exist), or, for that matter, that there are no facts, that facts are fictions. The idea of a "fact" is generated by the deeper idea that what we utter constatively is true if and only if what, in the world (or better, what about the world), "corresponds" to what is thus uttered. That, of course, is the same intuition in virtue of which the disquotational theory of truth treats the predicate "true" as otiose. (I have aired the matter in chapter 4.)
If, now, we recover Aquinas's excellent formula—freely paraphrased as "truth is the adequation of propositions (which are constatively uttered) and facts (which are that about the world that propositions, correctly understood, "intend")—then, construing the formula in a sense left deliberatively uninterpreted epistemically and ontically (which is hardly Aquinas's intention), propositions and facts may be readily regarded as the matched referents of any discourse that would validate our truth-claims (whether in first- or second-order contexts, whether about normative or non-normative matters).[23] As we say, they are simply propositions, from the side of language, and facts, from the side of the world. Interpreted in accord with the entire argument of this primer, facts are facts, relative to the brute world parsed, or, viewed within the symbiosis of interpretations natura naturans and natura naturata, or, viewed within the hermeneutic circle. In a word,
(11.40) facts are artifacts.
They need not be fictions. In this sense, of course,
(11.41) the correspondence of facts and propositions is itself an ("external") epistemically legitimated artifact.
That is, "correspondence" need not invoke privilege. Also, construed in correspondentist or adequational terms, the concept of a "fact" is en-
tirely neutral as between an externalist conception of reality and any form of cultural realism ((11.40)–(11.41)).
As many have observed (notably, Austin and Strawson, in their well-known debate), propositions and facts cannot really be prised apart for epistemic purposes: facts are nothing but what true propositions intend; and propositions are true only if they intend what the relevant facts "are." For similar reasons, the correspondence theory of truth utterly fails wherever it is supposed to be criterial (as Wittgenstein realized in Tractatus ). Still, my reading of Aquinas's formula is completely unaffected by these considerations, simply because, being uninterpreted here, it is not (as undoubtedly it was meant to be) criterial of truth.
In the spirit of this benign reading, I offer two particularly strategic propositions about any world of values:
(11.42) facts and values form a mixed classification;[24]
and,
(11.43) the distinction, among sentences, between the supposed copulas "is" and "ought" forms a mixed classification.
I have already said, at the start of this chapter, that "values" are predicates or predicables ((11.2)). From what I have just added, "facts" are that (about the world) in virtue of which "propositions" take truth-values. Hence, without further ado, we may say that value judgmentsare such, in virtue only of uttering value predicates, that is, predicates apt for grading or ranking with respect to some norm or other ((11.2)); factual judgments, by contrast, are such, in virtue only of taking truth-values or truth-like values.
Of course, there is no reason why both conditions should not be jointly satisfied by the same token judgments. The entire habit of thinking that they cannot be has spawned the notorious "fact"/"value" distinction. That distinction, I say, rests on a palpable mistake: a confusion of grammatical categories. Hence, in accord with (11.42) and the realism of the sittlich, there can be no principled disjunction between factual and value judgments even on epistemic and ontic grounds. (By a judgment, I may say, I mean nothing more than a specific constative utterance intended to be treated as such, possibly following some pointed or strenuous deliberation.)
Regarding (11.43), it was Hume, as I say, who made such a great to-
do about doubtful inferences from "is" to "ought." But Hume mistakenly supposed he was addressing a formal distinction between two copulas, whereas he was actually promoting a certain doubtful form of empiricism (matched, in a sense, in Mackie). The inference from "is" to "ought" is not a mistake at all. It functions perfectly well in the sittlich sense (as we have seen), for example in the enthymematic argument sketched in the following: "Tom is a lifeguard at this beach. Tom is on duty now. Therefore, Tom ought to try to save that man calling for help from the water." Or, more familiarly: "John borrowed five dollars from me and promised to pay it back in a week. John owes me five dollars. Therefore, John ought to pay me back in a week's time." ("Borrowed" catches up the sense of (11.42)–(11.43).)
The idea that there is something logically wrong with these inferences is completely unconvincing ((11.22)–(11.26)). The point is that, in instances of the sort cited, ought is not a copula at all (or not merely) but a surrogate for a predicate of a ranking sort ("oughtful" perhaps). It would therefore not be amiss to paraphrase, "You ought to pay your debts on time" by "Your paying your debts on time is [deemed] 'oughtful' "—with whatever further accommodation may be needed to convey the imperative or prescriptive function usually intended. As a term of art—a predicate for rankings—whatever is "oughtful " (we may say) is to be preferred over pertinent options. The important thing to notice is that once we favor cultural realism over externalism, the entire attraction of "noncognitivist" options of the naturalizing sort—emotivism (Stevenson), prescriptivism (Hare), expressivism (Gibbard)—become both unnecessary and pointlessly pessimistic about moral objectivity.
What is important here is that the fact/value distinction may be resolved without invoking any ontic or epistemic considerations that adversely bear on the objectivity of value judgments—a fortiori, that adversely bear on the objectivity of token instances of prima facie or critical legitimation. The argument certainly does not strengthen the substantive needs of critical objectivity, but it removes a troublesome barrier. For, once you construe the Intentional world in realist terms ((9.30)–(9.31)), you cannot disallow the consensual objectivity of moral discourse . That's a very instructive leap. What remains is to fix the limits of rigor within which pertinent claims of truth and legitimation may be made.
One final nest of questions needs to be aired before bringing this primer to a reasonable close. Plainly, to say to Tom: "You ought to pay the loan back in a week's time, since you promised to do so" signifies that Tom is (in the normal course of things) capable (believed to be
capable) of doing so: capable of grasping his responsibility, capable of choosing to act responsibly on a reasoned choice.[25]
This raises, of course, the ancient question of human freedom . What I have to say on that score is short and sweet. I have already argued that persons or selves are "culturally apt agents," the exemplars of what it is to be a causally effective agent—entities capable of linguistic and lingual acts (or actions) effective in virtue of being embodied (and their attributes, incarnate) in physical movements (or physical attributes) ((10.12), (10.23)–(10.24)).
Now, it turns out that
(11.44) speech acts are the paradigms of human freedom and responsibility.
I cannot see how the admission of speech, particularly of constative and "illocutionary" acts (as Austin called them) can be acknowledged—with any sense of their complexity—without admitting, at the same time, that
(11.45) agents capable of speech in the usual contexts of natural-language discourse = free agents.
By free, I mean (i) capable of acting by choosing among real options and (ii) in accord with rational and evidentiary considerations; and, by responsible, I mean (i) free, and (ii) disposed to act conformably with rational and evidentiary considerations. These are very modest findings. But they do confirm that moral values and norms could not be other than grounded in our sittlich practices: human freedom is, congruently, a competence to choose among sittlich concerns. (It is not merely that, of course, but it cannot be far removed.)
In fact, when you think of matters this way, it stares you in the face that the paradigm of human freedom is nothing less than the ability to judge that a particular constative claim is true or false! That is an extraordinary economy and a confirmation of the intuitive force of the gathering argument of this primer. For how should we ever understand language in terms of linguistic (and lingual) acts if we did not admit our ability to choose or decide between the truth and falsity of a given claim? There could not possibly be a more compelling instance of human "freedom." Which shows, of course, that freedom is itself a legitimative, second-order consideration. Hence, for instance, if it makes sense to characterize persons or selves in terms of freedom or the power of
choice—which is what is entailed in construing persons as agents ((9.11), (11.45))—then whether human fetuses are persons is not a first-order question at all.
As far as I can see, the only serious ontic issue that might block the acknowledgment of human freedom is settled by admitting the following:
(11.46) it is not a necessary truth that, in the real world, the extension of the possible and the actual be the same.[26]
I take theorem (11.46) to be vindicated by (2.1). Beyond that, it is, as far as I can see, an entirely empirical question just what any particular agent is "free" to do. Theorem (11.46) entails the denial of strict determinism (that is, that the possible = the actual)—this denial is what freedom requires. Determinism is empirically unconvincing, in any case, among the physical sciences. But, in the absence of defeating the "folk-theoretic" vision (chapter 9), I content myself with merely remarking that
(11.47) the admission of a lebensformlich world entails the existance of free agents.
I take this to confirm that what I have already noted about the sittlich sources of the critical ((11.29)–(11.30)) is neither surprising nor a confession of the doubtful objectivity of moral norms. After all, on the argument I have been pressing, a strong analogy is bound to hold with respect to truth itself. By an agent, I may add, I mean no more than a person or self, an entity capable of being free and responsible with regard to thought and action.
Of course, saying no more than this tidies up what is needed for the small occasion before us. It says very little more about the human condition relative to our cognitive and active powers as persons. Take another moment to lay out the largest relevant options, however, both with respect to moral (and political) agency and with respect to our cognitive competence. With very few exceptions, the philosophical tradition from the ancients to Kant treats human selves or subjects merely adequationally . By an adequational theory of the self, I mean a theory that (i) admits objective knowledge about the world, (ii) with or without admitting objective prescriptions for our conduct in the world, (iii) as directly accessible to human beings; a theory that (iv) meets constraints (i)–(iii) by
imputing to human nature only what, antecedently, is abstractly required for that, (v) without interpretive tertia . Among moral philosophers,[27] Rawls is (by his own admission) an "adequational" theorist—both in A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism . He remarks, in the latter, that his theory requires no more than a "sparse" sense of human selves or agents, whereas the usual criticism of Rawls—or of Hume or Mill or Kant (on Hegel's argument), or Habermas—is precisely that none of them attends to the complexity or historicity of the human condition within the terms of which objectivity is first gained.
To acknowledge that the human self is a culturally emergent artifact ((10.21)), an entity that has a history rather than a nature ((10.74)), and that cognizing subject and cognized object are symbiotized, is to favor instead an existential account of the self. By an existential theory of the self, I mean (once again) no more than a theory: (i) that includes at least the counterpart of an adequational theory, but (ii) construes the competences admitted in such a theory to be formed historically in accord with some enabling Lebensform, (iii) which then affects all questions of objectivity. This, of course, is an enormously important matter that I cannot do full justice to here. For my present purpose, it is enough to note that moral realists and moral skeptics are typically adequational, not existential, theorists, and, as a consequence, they generate insuperable paradoxes (Mackie, notoriously) regarding a realist reading of moral legitimation and knowledge in general. Only an existential account fully committed to symbiosis can resolve the legitimative question favorably, once privilege is denied. This marks the strategic importance of Hegel's distinction between Moralität and Sittlichkeit (and its analogue in factual matters). (But the resolution is far from automatic.)
I come, finally, to the matter of moral norms viewed in the second-order ("critical") sense. In the philosophical literature, Kant's conception of the Categorical Imperative is the obvious exemplar. But Kant's view is altogether too extravagant, since it involves (as it does) invoking (necessarily) the use of the concept of a noumenal world, the presumption of an invariant form of reason, and the absence of any explicit methodological presumption in favor of genuinely sittlich constraints. What I offer instead along related lines is the following: although theorem (11.31) is plainly true,
(11.48) it is prima facie "good" or "oughtful" (in the legitimative sense) to ensure our first-order sittlich values.
Furthermore,
(11.49) it is prima facie "good" or "oughtful" (in the legitimative sense) to meet our first-order prudential needs .
By prima facie, I now mean (i) an adverbial qualification of any attempt to legitimate a judgment, (ii) thought to be "provisional," (iii) restricted to sittlich considerations alone, (iv) which may be overridden for higher "critical" reasons. By prudential needs, I understand whatever values are (i) reasonably construed (empirically) as minimally necessary for a sittlich morality, (ii) grounded in our biological condition as members of Homo sapiens, or (iii) construed as instrumental to, or a functional part of, our sittlich values, or (iv) construed in terms of survival—individual, aggregated, societal, species-wide. (Note: prudential needs are normative but need not be moral.) There are undoubtedly other arguments of this kind regarding prima facie legitimations. I regard that as all to the good. For what they show is that second-order moral questions are not entirely without resource (open to being favorably compared with our intuitions about Secondness). For:
(11.50) any would-be prima facie legitimation of our sittlich values and norms by which aggregates of individual agents are willing to live, and do live, is, trivially, legitimate—prima facie .
I an entirely prepared to admit that theorems (11.48)–(11.49) are logically trivial although not at all trivial in practical terms. They are trivial in the plain sense that sittlich values are normative (relevantly, action-guiding ); they are not trivial in practical terms, because they require a form of practical consistency, the pertinent congruity between judgment rendered and responsible action. Both considerations implicate forms of rationality, but not the same form. Those who believe (like Anscombe and Hare) that "practical consistency" always requires (when valid) an agent's acting "straightway" (as Aristotle says) have failed to notice that (even on their own terms) they must first secure at least the critical legitimation of the norms they invoke in relevant contexts.[28] (They nowhere do that.) The confusion or conflating of the two (forms of legitimation) I call ideological. Still, there is a great gain here. For, on the argument, there can never be a dearth of (sittlich ) moral practices in terms of which to order one's life responsibly and in a "meaningful" way. That relieves "critical" speculation of the need to ensure a com-
pletely inclusive system of moral rules: it is, after all, entirely possible that not every sittlich need can be convincingly construed in the most exacting "critical" terms.
I must add (what Aeschylus and Sophocles make so much of):
(11.51) in moral matters, the mutual compatibility or incompatibility of different sittlich values and norms—a fortiori, regarding prima facie legitimation—is, as such, a matter of prima facie indifference.[29]
Theorems (11.50)–(11.51) are a little startling but hardly negligible. They do not signify that "anything goes," but they are hospitable to the widest range of divergent convictions and are clearly prepared for sittlich conflicts.
The question is: What do we expect from our moral theories? My own answer is a slim one: a modicum of humanity, an openness to conflicting convictions, an admission that there are no privileged norms, and a willingness to bear witness within the routines of ordinary life to whatever one regards as the sorry plight, the injustice, the inhumanity suffered by others. Very much more than that I believe is futile, philosophically, although it is also hardly enough politically and morally. To put more in place, one must presume to have greater moral resources than we can possibly justify.[30]
Beyond that, I have only three things more to say. First of all,
(11.52) critical norms for moral legitimation are socially constructed from, but cannot be discovered in, or analytically derived from, sittlich materials ((11.30)).
Mackie is surely right in this, although not for his reasons. Secondly, granting theorem (11.52),
(11.53) if there are any salient, relatively convincing moral norms in the critical sense, then the perception of summum malum may be made to yield a moral norm (or norms) as reasonable, in that sense, as any.
I mean, by summum malum, whatever (i) is spontaneously and widely perceived, (ii) notably across divergent cultures, (iii) to be a condition of suffering moving toward the limits of human tolerance, (iv) among whole peoples, large populations, well-defined societies, over extended
periods of time, (v) often among smaller groups and individuals perceived within similar terms, or (vi) to be forms of pain, deprivation, and the like that bear decisively on the survival of whole societies or the satisfaction of what are judged to be their prudential needs, as in starvation, torture, disease, natural disaster, war, genocide, willful murder, prolonged and extreme discrimination, and the like, (vii) usually in accord with sittlich convictions, but (viii) not, as such, a moral matter .[31]
I insist here that: first, the perception of summum malum is not and need not be of an invariant or unconditionally valid or even relatively constant sort; second, it is not as such offered as a moral principle or ineluctable moral value; third, judgments in its name are interpretively variable, informal, possibly conflicting, not always reliable; fourth, judgments of summum malum are factual judgments and, if normative (for instance, medically informed), not moral judgments as such; and fifth, in the moral commitment of individual careers, the admission of summum malum may not and need not play a central moral role and may, even if admitted, be overridden by other considerations that cannot, merely as such, be shown to be critically illegitimate. For example, the recent famine in Somalia has attracted a remarkably widespread perception of suffering—summum malum —both among aggregates of people and corporate societies, such that many have urged the need for immediate relief—in terms of various moral visions. But many have also felt no sense of moral obligation to relieve such famine, even when legitimating their own commitments.
The perception of summum malum is, I think, the exercise of a salient (perhaps a profoundly animal) disposition, not a moral intuition as such but a perception capable of spawning and inspiring (yielding, as I say) reasoned moral judgments and moral norms grounded in the biological sensibilities of the species, incarnating various sittlich values but detached from them (in any legitimative sense), and capable of overriding (when incorporated in a critical moral vision) mere sittlich moralities. It is a fortunate form of sensibility addressing what many regard (possibly under its influence) as among the most salient of moral concerns.
The pretty thing about this use of summum malum is that it eschews the greatest exertions of moral realism altogether. That is, it builds on the sittlich realism of morality—not enough for a critical morality (which the moral realist dearly wants)—and it proceeds parasitically (or dialectically) on the strength of whatever others in the society pretend is or can be legitimated in critical terms (for instance, "ideologically"). By parasitically, I mean that it seeks only a conditional legitimation:
that, given the critical or realist presumptions of any complex society regarding its own moral norms (ideologically), it is entirely possible to confirm that a counterpart morality (a "second-best " morality) based on summum malum and addressed to the sittlich values that prevail will, projected from these non-moral grounds, prove as reasonable as, or more reasonable than, the morality ideologically invoked.
If you grant this much, then a parallel argument can be mounted as well in terms of what may be termed minimum bonum: that is, normative, empirical, but nonmoral conjectures about what any human infant requires for a tolerable life, relatively free of pain and want and insecurity and the stunting of various forms of development, and the like. Again, I say, there is a considerable convergence here (of a nonmoral sort) among the peoples of the earth, relativized, to be sure, to the perception of technology and history and ideology. But if there is no noticeable convergence with respect to minimum bonum and summum malum (or similar dispositions), then, I fear, there can be no plausible sense in which a critical morality could ever be said to be objective (objectively "yielded"). Furthermore, of course, the doctrine of human rights is a perfectly plausible critical moral (political, economic, etc.) conjecture about proposed "rational" norms of societal life, (i) capable of being effected, (ii) dialectically convincing in terms of bringing minimum bonum and summum malum to bear on sittlich practices and actual ideological convictions, and (iii) not merely utopian but, within practical terms, able to support (in real-time terms) progress toward "indicative" universality. (Historically, the doctrine of human rights has been defended in archic terms—as natural rights . But that is an extravagance. I hold no brief for such a thesis.)[32]
The advantage of a "conditional" legitimation lies with its conceptual economy, the acknowledgement of the difficulty of strong realist claims, its generosity and openness to divergent views, its tolerance of conflict, its refusal to construe morality as akin to a scientific system, and, most important, its concession that morality need not be, critically, either categorically binding or comprehensive with regard to the entire range of human practice. By categorically binding, I mean that logical or quasi-logical feature of moral judgment by which it is alleged (as among the prescriptivists) that if a critical moral judgment is valid, then, for any possible alternative options within the pertinent space of action, to acknowledge that it is critically valid and to intend not to conform (although one is able to conform) to what it enjoins is to conduct oneself in an immoral, morally deficient, irresponsible, or irrational way. By
comprehensive, I mean only that, on the basis of some proposed morality, nothing in the way of commitment or action would not find its systematic place at the bar of objective validation and legitimation. I take both claims to be altogether uncompelling on the evidence I have been collecting. (Here, "comprehensive" = "all things considered," sufficient to determine what is "full" in the fullest possible critical sense.)
Roughly, my thought is this: corporate societies tend to insist on loyalty to first-order sittlich values more or less already in place, as well as to norms of legitimation that, although partly "critical," are defended partly on prima facie grounds (with whatever ideological skills may be invoked). In this sense, societies "act" corporately to bring the conduct of their aggregated members into some relatively "comprehensive" sittlich order. (So there is no danger of a dearth of "comprehensive" and "categorical" moralities.) Individual agents, however, often have no such overriding needs, and they oppose these tendencies on their own putatively critical grounds. They may have quite idiosyncratic visions—for instance, as did Nietzsche.[33] But, insofar as we may expect a measure of "critical" congruity between the collective morality of a entire society and the separate moral visions of individual selves, theorems like (11.48)–(11.49) are probably close to the core of the prevailing moralities and are reasonably realistic if offered as constraints on flights of moral fancy. In short, the account being offered presupposes the entrenchment of an effective sittlich order. I do not legitimate that order in the critical sense, but I acknowledge that, "corporately," it will act to compel all those within its space to believe, or to act in accord with, some variant of this dictum: prima facie legitimation = critical legitimation. In short, it will function ideologically . Moralities based on summum malum or minimum bonum may, then, in context, compete dialectically (I claim) with any such ideologically grounded moralities (as "second-best"). That is where the economies of critical reason play their best part. They need not pretend to any cognitive privilege, because they are parasitic, and they need not subscribe to the rigors of a bivalent logic, since they are not advocated in any sense stronger than the cultural realist's terms.
What is important, here, is that legitimative disputes about moral values and norms tend—however strongly committed to second-order questions—to be profoundly grounded in sittlich ways. Indeed, once the
argument against realisms that veer off in the direction of metaphysical realism, moral realism, and the argument that tempers moral skepticism are in place, it is difficult to see how a critical morality can fail to be substantially grounded in sittlich terms, or fail to be open to "parasitic" strategies. That finding will be strengthened if one also accepts additional limitations (second-order but not moral) on plausible candidate visions, such as the following:
(11.54) there are no convincing critical grounds for legitimating any uniquely valid or preeminent moral vision;
(11.55) there are no convincing grounds for construing the incompatibility or conflict of sittlich or prima facie values and norms, or of critical systems grounded in such values and norms, as signifying a failure of moral vision;
(11.56) there are no convincing grounds for legitimating any principle or principles (if not merely vacuous or tautological) as morally indispensable, essential, or necessary to any valid critical vision.
I take theorems (11.54)–(11.56) to signify that
(11.57) constative claims in the moral world favor (but not morally) a relativistic logic.
To insist on bivalence in moral matters presumes an access to objective moral sources that our sittlich world cannot convincingly sustain. In short,
(11.58) to confine critical legitimation within the terms of a bivalent logic (moral realism ) is to confine morality (and other normative practical concerns) ideologically.
Simply put, to admit the ineliminably sittlich character of morality at every level of rational review, to admit the loss of cognitive privilege, to admit the conflict among sittlich norms and values through the whole of human history, to admit the conflict of critical moralities, is to admit as well that
(11.59) there are no convincing grounds for insisting on a determinate, necessary, unique, practical or pragmatic or rational or moral connection between responsible moral judgment and responsible moral action :
first, because one may not believe, legitimatively, that (contrary to theorists like Hare and Anscombe) moral judgment, being practical (that is, action-guiding on the basis of the best reasons one can muster), must also therefore be prescriptive, or "categorically binding" (that is, such that, admitting the validity of a moral judgment that ranks one's own options, when the appropriate circumstances obtain and when one perceives them to obtain pertinently, one "straightway acts"—for rational or moral reasons or both); and, second, because one may not believe that, in that sense, morality "comprehensively" overrides (that is, takes precedence over) all other practical commitments.
I confess I am one of those who subscribes to (11.59) for the reasons given. At any rate, I see no way of demonstrating its incoherence or ineligibility. Hence, to end this account by offering the third comment I promised, let me say,
(11.60) there are no convincing grounds for disallowing, as contrary to reason, the view that, beyond morality, we function as civilized witnesses of the human condition; that, grasping the inherent limitations of moral inquiry and judgment and commitment, and however we may act morally, we may also act, overridingly—as rationally as any—merely by preserving the public memory of our lebensformlich history.
Part of any such effort lies with preserving the continuous public memory of perceived crimes against mankind, the record of mankind's suffering (summum malum, construed morally), the failure to satisfy minimum bonum, and the violation of conjectured human rights. But, more than that, it is a way of sharing, without let, the history of our global home.
The point is this. To be a civilized witness is to believe (i) that we may be able to change "human nature" in accord with our critical convictions, and (ii) that, by a division of labor, we may alter and enlarge our understanding of the entire world, so that, as a result, (iii) our sittlich resources may begin to incorporate what is critically favored in other societies and other worlds. There is no special wisdom in this. (And there
is obviously a great risk.) But it is a vision by adhering to which summum malum may conceivably be diminished and minimum bonum enhanced.
It is certainly not mere quietism, and it is not a merely moral matter. It is more a matter of coming to realize that
(11.61) a critical morality is a "rationalization" of a practical or existential vision that: (i) is, on legitimative grounds, rationally unable to invalidate all divergent, incompatible, even actively conflicting visions on the part of others; and (ii) is rationally unable to override effectively the prima facie norms of all others.
I should say that, by practical, I mean that aspect of a human agent's life in virtue of which judgment and action may be coherently "uttered" in accord with some critical or prima facie norm of rational behavior. By uttered, I now mean, by explicit extension from what has been said of speech acts, the instantiation, in the sittlich world, of effective lingual acts as well. By existential, I mean no more than the "practical"—construed horizontally by actual agents. (By "meaningful, " I add again [in agreement with Wiggins's usage, although not with his doctrine], that I mean the "existential" when actually sufficient to motivate the "practical" commitments of an entire human career.)
Finally, reflecting on certain alleged philosophical desiderata, I should say that the entire foregoing argument precludes any critical universalism —in any practical, existential, or meaningful sense: meaning by that, that (against philosophers like Rawls or Hare or Habermas)[34]
(11.62) practical judgment proceeds primarily analogically and by exemplar rather than by formal rule or algorithm.
If you grant (11.61) and (11.62), you cannot (I think) deny that
(11.63) if summum malum "yields" a critical morality as good as any (11.49), or minimum bonum, then, under its terms, no society palpably suffering summum malum or failing to achieve minimum bonum can be morally condemned by another for whatever effective measures (possibly involving summum malum elsewhere) it pursues to relieve that condition.
Life can be short and brutish and often is. I read (11.63) as the analogue of Hobbes's principal law of nature adjusted to the terms of this
primer. But of course that makes (11.63) a minimal constraint on morality, hardly a maximal one, and (against Hobbes) a conditional constraint, a "second-best" constraint, one that cannot be made out to be "critically universalized." That is, theorems (11.62) and (11.63) defeat the necessity of relying on first principles, or moral principles, or invariant reason ((2.2)). The argument from summum malum (or minimum bonum or similar sensibilities) is an argument that acknowledges that we cannot simply know, at the level of critical legitimation, what we ought morally to do. We act as reasonably as we can if, given the presumption of any critical morality, we construct ("parasitically") a morality committed to relieving summum malum or enhancing minimum bonum (or both) within the span of our sittlich sensibilities. My sense is that moral realists would never agree to that.
The upshot of (11.61) and (11.63), read in the context of the failure of moral realisms of the externalist sort, is simply this:
(11.64) if moral norms can be critically legitimated, then moral revolutions can be as well.
For, of course, the perception of summum malum or minimum bonum or some analogue of these, not suitably relieved or enabled by the prevailing Sitten of a society, may be made to yield new norms and values that would require the subversion and reconstitution of the offending structures of that society. For example, it might require the redistribution of land, the equality of races or sexes or different peoples, the repudiation of entrenched taboos, the empowerment of the dispossessed. By moral revolution, I mean: a critical vision, grounded in a sittlich way, that significantly exceeds the critical visions that obtain (in this or that viable society), prepared in the short run to favor the enabling praxical conditions by which, eventually, that vision may prevail in the prima facie legitimative sense. Hence,
(11.65) there is no principled disjunction between the moral and any other form of practical life.
Since, under symbiosis, there is no principled disjunction between theoretical and practical reason, the whole of human life has a moral cast, meaning, by that, that responsible human agents cannot ignore the ubiquitous relevance of questions about the scope or legitimative adequacy of their sittlich practices, their ideologies, their would-be critical
norms—in terms of possible moralities yielded by attending to summum malum or minimum bonum or the like. Correspondingly, the world has an economic, a political, a religious, a medical, and an educational "cast" as well, and moral agents are alert to the possibility of transforming their own lives conformably ((10.68)). Which is to say: to be a "civilized witness" need hardly be to serve a quietist vocation.
In my opinion, the single most important conceptual resource of a society (or cluster of societies) faced with the perceived intractability of its (their) sittlich world, with regard to critical norms (for instance, summum malum or minimum bonum ), lies with redefining (for cause) its prudential and prima facie goods and reforming its sittlich perceptions accordingly. Of course, to be effective, such a change must already be incipiently sittlich . Thus, in our own time, many believe (I think correctly) that the widespread use of heroin and marijuana is effectively uncontrollable, in the United States, by the usual societal sanctions and that the social costs of futile measures to control their use are unacceptable; that the same is true of putatively deviant sexual practices; that our evolving technology subverts and threatens to make obsolete "traditional" views of abortion, assisted suicide, "heroic" medical measures, a normal span of life, population growth, ecological control, and the like. We cannot foresee what, in time, will be judged morally legitimatable (in the critical sense)—whatever our present convictions—apart from the changing sittlich condition of actual societies.
Accordingly,
(11.66) societies may, reasonably, collectively promulgate a policy of nullum malum .
By nullum malum, I mean a society's affirmation that a part of its sittlich world, hitherto critically condemned—judged morally unacceptable or indefensible or the like—is now relieved of that onus. The usual rationale would involve emphasizing the ineffectiveness of relevant sanctions in real-world terms, social costs and other adverse consequences for summum malum and minimum bonum, the incipiently sittlich standing of such affirmations, the prospects of the coherence of relevantly altered perceptions and practices. For instance, homosexual intimacy, same-sex unions, medically managed drug use, and assisted suicide may possibly be "affirmed" as being (now) in accord with nullum malum . By affirm or promulgate, I mean, to act deliberately to alter our lebensformlich practices so as to reduce, possibly to eliminate, the prima facie condem-
nation of relevant behavior and life-styles of the sorts mentioned. The rationale for doing so is the conviction that
(11.67) there is no invariant rule or criterion of nature or reason ((2.1)) by which to confirm that anything human beings do, or can do, is, intrinsically, contrary, in the moral sense, to nature or reason—
which, of course, is not to deny that within the space of what is thought to be "natural" or "rational" (artifacts of our symbiotized world), given practices and behavior may be critically condemned, if any practices or behavior can be.
It does mean, however, that the usual treatment of legitimative strategies in moral matters—that between cognitivist (or "realist," that is, Aristotelian) and noncognitivist (or "constructivist," that is, Kantian) options as exclusive and exhaustive of each other (as Rawls argues)—is utterly inadequate. Within the terms of cultural realism (but only there), moral legitimation is realist; within the terms of symbiosis (but only there), moral legitimation is constructivist. If they are, then only a "second-best" morality is possible: a policy of nullum malum is then unavoidable. But that is to say that morality, like human life in general, is "existential"—never adequately guided by the presumptions of a formal or invariant system—and, of course, it says that a relativistic logic cannot be avoided.
Let me add a further, final thought. There is ample evidence in Kant's first Critique (pointedly in the preface to the second edition) that, although a constructivist, Kant is drawn to (what, following Peirce, I call) Secondness. The theme persists among the post-Kantian Idealists, who, in addition to being constructivists, are also committed to some form of symbiosis—which Kant is not. It is in this sense that, in accord with theorem (4.11)—to the effect that "external" relations between subjects and objects are artifacts posited within a symbiotized space—that the physical world is "metaphysically abstracted" from within the space of an Intentional world. For, as I have argued, the entire universe is an Intentional space ((9.23)). But if that is granted, then, on the argument, there cannot be a principled difference (as far as cognitive competence is concerned) between the legitimation of an objective natural science and the legitimation of an objective morality. There can be no basis for legitimating science without providing for legitimating morality at the same time. That, I suggest, is an extraordinary gain, one that we clearly
owe to Hegel. I have had the benefit of that in mind from the start of this primer.
Nevertheless, the difference between the legitimation of a coherent science and a coherent morality remains in place. I have shown how considerations of Secondness assist us (even in an-archic terms) is legitimating scientific objectivity, relative to the usual interests of prediction, explanation, technological control, and the like. I have been arguing in a parallel way with regard to moral objectivity: featuring, in the moral world, Sittlichkeit rather than Secondness and prima facie and prudential interests rather than prediction and technological control. I found it necessary to fall back to "second-best" considerations (and the consequences of doing so, regarding practical conflict, the logic of moral judgment, and ideological factors bearing on "the meaning of life"). And I have shown how policies of summum malum,minimum bonum, and nullum malum may be invoked to yield a "second-best" plausibility (objectivity) to competing, even conflicting, moral visions—which thereby escape the conceptual traps of moral realism and moral skepticism.
Now, the very need to fall back to a "second-best" morality helps to strengthen the ("parasitic") objectivity of certain candidate doctrines. For, given the inherent limitations of "critical" legitimation and its inseparability from "prima facie " (logically trivial) legitimation, it is impossible to disallow, on objective grounds, the following regulative policy:
(11.68) moralities should aim at increasing the scope of nullum malum within the space of their own Sitten, particularly when guided by summum malum, minimum bonum, and presumptions of what is required by, or is contrary to, "nature ."
Theorem (11.68) is, I suggest, the least encumbered advice (both morally and rationally) that follows from applying the notion of being a "civilized witness" to the entire foregoing argument—particularly if we concede (11.67). I don't deny that (11.68) may be opposed. But I cannot see how its validity can be dialectically disallowed, on objective grounds—that is, as a "second-best" morality competing with others. Any morality in accord with theorem (11.68) is what I should call a generous morality which, on non -moral grounds—given the sittlich encumbrances on a critical morality and the inescapability of invoking a "second-best" morality—cannot be bettered in terms of restricting the
ideologically arbitrary. (I should say that a "generous" morality was superior to what, following Rawls, has usually been understood to be a "liberal" morality. But that is another matter.) Its best application lies in disarming sittlich notions of what is said to be "unnatural" (morally) or "against" nature in the way of personal life-styles and what is said to be "ineluctably" required in the way of "natural" rights.
If, now, you review the argument of this last chapter, you will see that, in providing an account of objectivity and critical legitimation for morality under the conditions of symbiosis and historicity, I have in effect provided a paradigm for objectivity and legitimation regarding every and any sustained inquiry that we might undertake—those, for instance, of the sciences. For, every inquiry is, or is abstracted from, a human science ((9.58)), and every inquiry, like that of morality itself, is (as has just been argued) symbiotized and historicized. But to grant that is to grant:
(11.69) there is no principled distinction between theoretical reason and practical reason that accords with the canonical view (Aristotle's, for instance)
for: (i) reason is an artifact of history (ch. 8); (ii) there are no de re necessities ((2.6)); (iii) reference and predication, which are common to theoretical and practical discourse and inquiry, are historically entrenched ((3.8), (3.12)); and (iv) objectivity and legitimation with regard to truth and practical norms are, in a symbiotized world, of equal standing epistemically and metaphysically (ch. 11). Seen thus, the critical legitimation of scientific objectivity accords very well with the lebensformlich practices of science, relative to acknowledged salient interests (predictive power—for instance, technological success). The very same is now true of morality, except that eligible interests (summum malum, minimum bonum ) are more profoundly contested than those of science. This leads us in the direction of relativism. The objectivity of every other inquiry is, accordingly, open to legitimation along related lines—but not otherwise. To admit all that, however, is to confirm the amplitude and adequacy of the conceptual resources of the an-archic vision. That is:
(11.70) critical legitimation, applied alike to practical and theoretical norms, cannot exceed a "second-best" objectivity.
Under flux, under symbiosis, under historicity, it could not be otherwise. But I must break off here.
EPILOGUE
This completes my primer. Its conceit lies with having mapped a possible—a plausible—view of how the philosophical work of the close of the twentieth century will flourish in the twenty-first.
Perhaps Euclid's Elements forms a primer for the world of geometry that Euclid introduces . (There's evidence against the idea.) One is inclined to say of Euclid's world: if you change the fifth axiom, it will be a very different world. It will not be Euclid's world, not the world Euclid mapped. ("Chess, but not without the queen!" you see.) What I am saying, rather, is that our world will have been changed (has already changed in that future ) in such a way that my primer shows how to get from here to there. Euclid's world was very trim—and closed. Ours is particularly untidy, and we live in it—conceptually—in a most untidy way.
I have tried to guess at the master claims of that future, which will have found, in our own present, philosophical clues enough by which to overturn the salient canons of our time for the sake of a larger vision. The answer must be embedded in theorems like the ones I've assembled—perhaps not mine, but those of others. For, on the argument, their selection must be motivated by a larger intuition than we ourselves have favored. I do not say the master themes are no more than the accidental beneficiaries of the drift of philosophical history. I see them, rather, as contending now and once again—at the end of the 2500-year-old agon that is Western philosophy. They have been thrown down again and again. But they are the Antaeuses of the philosophical earth, and they are stronger for it. Only Hercules is a fiction.
Here, then, are the master themes:
(1) There is no principled difference between the world (the world as it is, independent of our inquiry) and the intelligible world (the world as it appears to us to be). Call that doctrine symbiosis .
(2) There is no significant claim about the way the world is that is incontestably true, known to be true for a certainty, or self-evidently true in any way. Call that doctrine intransparency .
(3) There are no de re necessities, no necessary invariances in the world, and there are no prior de dicto necessities ranging over the terms and sentences by which we interpret the world. Call that doctrine flux .
(4) Thinking has a history, in the sense that any and all of its manifestations (in logic, science, conversation, critique, action) are artifacts of the historically changing conditions of actual human life. Call that historicity .
(5) Human persons, linguistically and cognitively apt selves, are themselves formed, empowered, and emergent only in virtue of having internalized and shared the collective practices of a viable society. Call that social construction .
(6) The human world—human persons and what they do and produce—is a real world, the distinctive phenomena of which are marked by possessing structures of significance complexly embedded in their physical properties. Call that Intentionality .
I must enter several caveats to avoid misunderstanding. I do not mean to say that these are the only themes that prophetically mark our late age. But they are, I think, the most commanding of all those that might have been tallied, and they gain strategic power in being linked—as in this primer. They could easily be implicated in arguments very different from the ones my primer favors. But I intend them as a prophecy, and I know them to be quarrelsome. We cannot know prophecy's course, but, if we are persuaded, we read its chronicle under the mode of necessity. In any case, on the theory I offer, there cannot be any uniquely correct way of doing philosophy or any uniquely correct set of philosophical theorems. After all, any one vision blinds us somewhat to the choice of others.
APPENDIX
The following are the theorems that appear in bold-face in the body of the primer. I now add at the head of that list the governing postulate of my argument, which is mentioned in the prologue. I may say that the conjunction of the postulate and theorem (2.1) define in the slimmest way what I regard as the anarchic option. I trust that that will now seem an attractive prospect—and fairly defended.
Postulate
Thinking is a history.
Theorems
(1.4) The relationship between first-order and second-order (legitimative) discourse is a function of the historicized nature of thinking.
(2.1) It is not in any way conceptually necessary that reality possess invariant structures or an invariant nature.
(2.12) An-archic philosophies are presuppositionless.
(3.2) Reference is inherently context-bound, not definable syntactically, impossible to retire (without loss) in favor of any merely predicative resource.
(3.15) "Real generals" are necessary for the successful practice of reference and predication.
(3.17) Speech acts are lingual, not merely linguistic.
(4.1) There is no necessity of any kind for restricting constative discourse to bivalent truth-values.
(4.11) The "external" relationship of subject and object and of language and world are artifacts of their "internal" relationship.
(4.17) Texts are the contexts of other texts.
(5.2) All conceptual schemes are interpretive tertia, artifacts of prior interpretation,
(5.10) Truth and the legitimation of truth are symbiotized.
(5.21) Knowledge is a form of rational belief adequated to truth.
(6.17) Existent things = material things.
(6.28) Inherently, natural-language discourse is philosophically encumbered.
(7.1) Natures are predicables.
(7.23) Cultural entities are (referentially), or have (predicatively), histories.
(7.33) Everything that exists and is real is socially constructed.
(8.3) Constative discourse is contexted,
(8.16) Philosophy functions "mythically"—in functioning constatively.
(8.39) The Intentional = the cultural = the horizonal = the contexted = the constructed.
(8.53) History is epistemically blind.
(9.15) Persons or selves are not natural-kind entities.
(9.23) The entire universe is interpreted, textual, historicized, constructed: in a word, Intentional.
(9.25) Intentionality = interpretability.
(9.37) All and only cultural entities and phenomena intrinsically possess Intentionality.
(9.48) No philosophy is valid that fails to resolve the antinomies of legitimation (or history) and ontic priority.
(9.56) Cultural (or Intentional) attributes are incarnate attributes.
(9.58) All the sciences are sciences of the human world.
(9.62) Real Intentionality precludes transcendentalism.
(10.14) Cultural entities intrinsically possess collective attributes.
(10.22) Solipsism is incoherent.
(10.34) Persons or selves cannot be naturalized.
(10.36) Knowledge is an Intentional state,
(10.48) Objectivity cannot but be consensual.
(10.57) Cultural emergence is at once "natural" and legitimative.
(10.63) All cultural entities are porous because they are permeable.
(10.74) Selves are self-interpreting "texts," the continually reconstituted artifacts of their own reflexive agency.
(11.1) There cannot be a principled distinction between the epistemic and legitimative prospects of science and morality.
(11.13) Qua sittlich, normative values may be no more than first-order predicates; qua legitimative, they are second-order predicates that may be uttered in either first- or second-order discourse, but must be segregated in first-order discourse.
(11.16) Realism implicates objective norms.
(11.17) Legitimative norms preclude "naturalizing" strategies.
(11.25) Legitimation is at least sittlich .
(11.29) The norms of truth are as sittlich as are our moral norms,
(11.31) Qua critical, legitimation cannot be analytically derived from any first-order sittlich "legitimation."
(11.39) The sittlich is consensually real and incarnate.
(11.40) Facts are artifacts.
(11.47) The admission of a lebensformlich world entails the existence of free agents.
(11.70) Critical legitimation, applied alike to practical and theoretical norms, cannot exceed a "second-best" objectivity.
Notes
Chapter I Terms of Reference
1. The theme is Hegel's, of course. But one of the boldest and most sympathetic applications appears in Michel Foucault's "What Is Enlightenment?" in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984). Foucault treats Kant's apriorism as the deliberate posit of a genealogical reflection—quite an ingenious maneuver.
2. In the Anglo-American analytic literature, the single clearest specimen of postmodernism appears in Richard Rorty, "Pragmatism, Davidson and Truth," in Ernest LePore (ed.), Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). Rorty's dismissal of legitimative questions rests on two themes: first, that any legitimation implicates some indefensible form of cognitive privilege (notably, something like Kant's transcendental reasoning); second, that the pretense of legitimation is itself little more than the effect of some socially entrenched form of hegemonic power. Rorty traces these themes in his influential Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), but you will look in vain for a supporting argument. (Remember Protepticus! ) What is important, here, is to grasp the strong convergence (less than agreement) between Rorty and Donald Davidson. See Donald Davidson, "A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge," also in the LePore volume. This confirms the sense in which postmodernism (Rorty) and naturalism (Davidson) converge. Late twentieth-century American (analytic) philosophy, I should say, hovers somewhere between Rorty's and Davidson's views. The best-known pop version of postmodernism, from continental Europe, takes an outrageous form in Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). The interesting thing about the second theme mentioned is that it converges somewhat
with the poststructuralist ( not postmodernist) thesis of pouvoir/savoir offered by Michel Foucault, for instance in "Truth and Power," in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon et al. (New York: Pantheon, 1980). Foucault's thesis affirms that every historical "regime" for determining what is to count as admissible truths arises from a society's contingent form of life. But, against postmodernism's complaint, pouvoir/savoir plays no criterial (second-order) or (naturalized) causal role (although it provides for causal questions), and it neither dismisses legitimative questions nor insists on cognitive privilege. Saying so marks a distinct lacuna in both postmodernism and naturalism and indicates a third option (which this primer favors).
3. The important point here is that postmodernism and poststructuralism are radically different but easily confused. The reason for insisting on the difference is that it signifies the convergent themes of recent Anglo-American and continental European thought, despite their relative isolation from each other. Curiously, the difference between the two is most conveniently marked in two slim volumes of Jean-françois Lyotard's: The Postmodern Condition and The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges van den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). The difference may be put this way: postmodernism opposes all forms of legitimation; poststructuralism pursues all discursive contexts in which l'autre (the "other") is implicated. By the "other" is meant conceptual categories, possible or actual, that are marginalized, precluded, exploited in terms of social power, or the like, within any discursive (or political or legal or similar) "space." The idea behind postmodernism is that legitimation is illicit; the idea behind poststructuralism is that no single conceptual scheme can be expected to accommodate all possible or all viable conceptual schemes. That is in fact the meaning of pouvoir/savoir .
4. I give notice here that I shall bring the theorem into play later. But, together with (1.5), it draws attention to the lacuna in arguments like Rorty's, which fail to recognize that legitimative arguments cannot be privileged (in Kant's or Descartes's or Husserl's way) and cannot be discounted as merely hegemonic. I mean to clear a space, therefore, for the argument that follows. It is surprising how many analytic thinkers believe that Rorty has mounted an argument that must be met. The matter is important enough to flag. It bears on the philosophical prospects of naturalism, which will occupy us later. Rorty's failure to produce an argument may be gleaned from his paper, "Solidarity or Objectivity?" in Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). As we shall see much later, the matter affects the fortunes of "naturalizing" philosophies.
Chapter II In Lieu of First Principles
1. What I am calling Aristotle's archism is the most strenuous, most unyielding, candidate theory in Western philosophy in favor of first principles: Aristotle holds that one cannot speak of what is real or have any knowledge of reality if one does not subscribe to the doctrine he advances. The claim is straightforwardly stated in Metaphysics, particularly in Book Gamma. What
Socrates says in Phaedrus regarding the "self-moving" mover may be taken to mark Plato's counterpart conjecture about first principles, just as the dictum "what is, is; and what is not, is not" marks Parmenides's judgment. In this sense, classical philosophy converges very strongly in the direction I have indicated. The history of philosophy, I suggest, is largely occupied with replacing Aristotle's first principle with others. You would be quite surprised to see how frequently such maneuvers still obtain in contemporary philosophy. For example, in an account very well received among analytic philosophers of science, Wesley Salmon explicitly follows Aristotle's archic thesis (in Posterior Analytics ) in his own strong theory of the laws of nature. See his Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). Compare Carl G. Hempel, "The Function of General Laws in History," in Aspects of Scientific Explanation and Other Essays in the Philosophy of Science (New York: Free Press, 1965), which, although somewhat inexplicitly, is committed to the same thesis. One can also find contemporary formulations that are not "analytic" that are analogues of Aristotle's claim: for instance, in Stanley Rosen, ''Theory and Interpretation," in Hermeneutics as Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). I offer these merely as specimen views. The important thing is that such modal claims are nowhere defended: they are simply affirmed where useful. If they are offered as conceptual truths, then, for one thing, they cannot be more strenuous than Aristotle's claim; for another, they are as easily defeated by virtue of the plain fact that their denial is not demonstrably self-contradictory. If they are offered as truths about some sector of reality, then, on their face, they cannot be as strong as claims of conceptual necessity and they cannot be pertinently tested if it is not explained how that may be done. I know of no plausible instruction of this sort. Also, if I'm not mistaken, nothing substantive is lost by giving up such claims, except the bare notion of modal necessity itself. Much later in this primer, the contemporary doctrine of "supervenience" will surface. It is another analogue of Aristotle's claim.
2. For a recent specimen view sympathetic to Aristotle's archism in this regard, see Roderick M. Chisholm, On Metaphysics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
3. See Michael Dummett, The Logical Basis of Metaphysics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). I regard Dummett's effort to disjoin metaphysics and semantics and to assign epistemic priority to the second over the first as providing a very clear specimen of what, very shortly, I shall term "externalism." In effect, this is to deny theorem (2.4). Dummett advances his proposal in a noticeably quiet way, but he gives no compelling argument. On the thesis I am developing, Dummett's general strategy is characteristic of a great deal of recent analytic philosophy. Dummett himself is ineluctably drawn to some inexplicit "first principle," some modal claim he nowhere explains. The evidence lies, I think, with his insisting on tertium non datur, after (apparently) challenging the principle of bivalence. I shall return to the issue very soon in this chapter and in a number of other places. See Michael Dummett, Truth and Other Enigmas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978). The issue will arise also in the context of considering Dummett and Hilary Putnam together.
4. Contemporary analytic epistemologies are almost always externalist, and naturalism is the dominant form of externalism at the present time. We are touching here on the essential themes of current analytic philosophy. For the moment, you will find a general impression of the new "naturalism" in Philip Kitcher, "The Naturalists Return," Philosophical Review, 101 (1992). The topic is of the greatest strategic importance: I return to it again and again in this primer. The best-known (analytic) opponent of externalism and naturalism is Hilary Putnam. See, for instance, The Many Faces of Realism (La Salle: Open Court, 1987).
5. See G. E. Moore, "Refutation of Idealism," Philosophical Studies (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922).
6. I find it impossible to reconcile in this regard W. V. Quine, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," in From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), and Word and Object (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960). The "Two Dogmas" paper seems to admit of no exceptions, and Word and Object insists on exceptions, namely, on whatever is logically prior to the play of "analytic hypotheses.''
7. Most briefly put, externalism and naturalism violate the theorem. Doing that, they lead back to all the forms of privilege and archic claims, whether they take a naturalist or a postmodernist form—to remind ourselves of references (in chapter 1) to Rorty and Davidson. On my reading, Immanuel Kant—who is not an externalist—nevertheless confirms the sense in which externalists need not be naturalists. I am running ahead of my story, but only in the interest of drawing attention to the gathering line of argument. The doctrine of symbiosis, I suggest, first appears in its distinctive form among the post-Kantian German Idealists, notably Fichte and Hegel. It is true that Kant construes the phenomenal world (to which we are cognitively confined) as a "construction," which, on Kant's theory, depends on the joint work of our understanding and whatever we passively receive from the independent world. That theory, I claim, is ultimately inconsistent, since, although we are thus confined, Kant is (somehow) able to determine what the a priori contribution of our subjective understanding is. I take that to be inadmissible on Kant's own conditions. Otherwise, Kant knows more about the noumenal world than he admits, and certainly more than he is entitled to admit. The German Idealists solved the problem by advocating a form of symbiosis: that is, first, by insisting that cognitive success presupposes an indissoluble internal relation between perceiving and what is perceived; and, second, by repudiating any principled disjunction between the real and the phenomenal. Kant fails in this regard, as may be seen from the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason . See Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, corr. (London: Macmillan, 1953). As will become clear, I regard this failure on Kant's part, and its correction by the Idealists, as leading directly to the theme of historicity—the postulate of this primer. Thus seen, naturalism and externalism prove to be regressive theories—"pre-Kantian," I should say. (I return to the issue later in these notes.)
8. I take this to be the mark of both Kant's and Husserl's philosophies. In fact, it marks the respect in which Husserl's philosophy is more Kantian than it would care to admit. See, for instance, Edmund Husserl's early essay, The Idea
of Phenomenology, trans. William P. Alston and George Nakhnikian (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964). The correction of his earlier view favoring "psychologism" (the effect of Frege's critique of his Philosophy of Arithmetic ) signifies the sense in which Husserl distances himself from Kant ("naturalism") but yet remains drawn to Kant ("apriorism''). Husserl never managed to resolve the conceptual puzzle of the relationship between the "psychological" and the "subjective": were these notions meant to be disjoint or overlapping or (indeed) the same cognitive power (however differently applied); and, were they solipsistic, generic, socially shared, or sui generis? Husserl's failure to define the distinction satisfactorily (that is, to his own satisfaction) confirms the difficulty of overcoming a Kantian-like reading of his phenomenological project—against his own intentions. Husserl's Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorian Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), marks his most promising resolution of the problem. Hegel is the principal philosopher committed to both a constructivist view of phenomenal reality and symbiosis. See G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). In our own late age, the Hegelian theme reappears in a pared-down form in John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, enlarged ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1948), particularly where Dewey opposes the "spectator theory," and in Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. (New York: Vintage Press, 1970), particularly where Foucault introduces the "historical a priori ." Dewey, I may say, distances himself from Hegel—possibly in reaction to Russell's provocation—by opposing what he calls "block universe monisms" (that is, an insuperable and all-inclusive holism: following the line of Peirce's criticism of Hegel). He insists (justifiably) on his "pluralism" (against Russell). A sympathetic reading of Hegel would confirm that Dewey remains a (remote) Hegelian and that Hegel was not a "Hegelian" of Russell's (or, of F. H. Bradley's) sort. See John Dewey, "Experience, Knowledge and Value: A Rejoinder," in Paul Arthur Schilpp (ed.), The Philosophy of John Dewey, 2d ed. (New York: Tudor Publishing Co., 1951).
9. In my opinion, the most extreme experiment along these lines appears in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968). Merleau-Ponty loses control of his interesting effort to undermine the Cartesian idiom. I should say that he fails to distinguish satisfactorily between the "external" and "externalist" features of discourse.
10. I use the term in Gadamer's ingenious sense, that is, in accord with his interpretation of " Vorurteil ." On Gadamer's view, "prejudiced" = "prejudged" in the sense of what is "preformed" for judgment (tacit, often unconscious). See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. from 2d ed. Garrett Barden and John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1975). In this sense, the argument is being prepared for the introduction of the historicist thesis, but the qualification does not yet entail it. I do not intend, however, to commit myself to Gadamer's particular theories.
11. Without prejudice to his preference for physicalist and extensionalist doctrines, I signal here my general acceptance of Quine's rejection of any principled disjunction between de re and de dicto distinctions (which I treat sym-
biotically), as well as Quine's rejection of any principled account of the analytic/synthetic distinction (for much the same reason). Quine's conception of "analytical hypotheses" is rather close to something like symbiosis, except that Quine nowhere explains how he arrives at his extensionalism or how he justifiably restricts the applicability of "analytical hypotheses." See Quine, Word and Object and ''Two Dogmas of Empiricism." Symbiosis would have entailed that "analytical hypotheses" obtain everywhere in discourse. Quine demurs.
12. Understandably, many suppose that Dummett is, in rejecting excluded middle, raising doubts about bivalence. I should say that that is very far from the truth. Dummett never challenges bivalence in any alethic sense, he merely challenges excluded middle methodologically (see note 3, above). There is no sustained challenge to bivalence in the analytic tradition; here and there, there are considerations regarding supplementary alethic resources.
13. Peirce offers a most ingenious and plausible account of conditions under which neither noncontradiction nor excluded middle have application in certain discursive contexts. Peirce ultimately overrides the potential danger of this concession (as he sees matters) by way of his strong evolutionism. But the thesis stands, even if we reject Peirce's teleological reading of evolution. Peirce's argument concerns the possibility of real indeterminacy and real vagueness, which would have been useful in the context of speaking of human culture. The issue bears on Peirce's conception of Thirdness. See Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934), vol. 5.
Chapter III Reference and Predication
1. I take the term pretty well in Austin's original sense, although Austin's distinction between the "constative" and the "performative" led him into an impasse. See J. L. Austin's "Performative-Constative," trans. G. J. Warnock, in Charles E. Caton (ed.), Philosophy and Ordinary Language (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1963). Together with P. F. Strawson's "On Referring," Mind 19 (1950), and Austin's How To Do Things With Words (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962), it marks the principal line of opposition to the treatment of sentences as relatively freestanding, contextless bearers of truth and meaning—the dominant model of analytic philosophy favored by Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, W. V. Quine, Alfred Tarski, R. M. Hare, Michael Dummett, and Donald Davidson. John R. Searle is an interesting hybrid among these philosophers. In his Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), Searle favors the speech-act model but actually neutralizes the point of its opposition to the sentential model by treating the "constative" (or "assertive") function more or less as the work of an external "assertion operator" (or "sign"). Effectively, this is Frege's preference: Searle treats speech acts as the production of token sentences. Hence, despite appearances, Searle is not actually committed to Austin's or Strawson's model. The decisive evidence concerns the "act" of reference, for, on a full-blown speech-act model, there are no isolabsle sentences in which the referring function can be discerned . That is also the point of sStrawson's devastating critique of Bertrand Russell's immensely
influential paper, "On Denoting," Mind 14 (1905). It marks the fundamental difference between the denoting function of expressions in sentences and the referring function of sentences in speech-act contexts. In this same sense, the quarrel leads directly to the contextedness of speech acts themselves in the even larger nonlinguistic practices of a viable society— which practices also bear on the meaning of what is uttered as sentences; hence, the quarrel leads directly to the confirmation of the symbiosis thesis (see (3.2).) A similar argument may be mounted for predication. The argument undermines the entire presumption of the autonomy of language.
2. Davidson's is one of the best-known attempts, in the analytic literature, to bring the troublesome complications of context and normally assigned speech acts within the terms of a sentential model, thereby combining in a new way elements of Tarski's account of truth and Frege's original motivation. See Donald Davidson, "Eternal and Ephemeral Events," in Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980). See also his contribution to the symposium, "On Events and Event-Descriptions," in Joseph Margolis (ed.), Fact and Existence (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969), and "Moods and Performances," Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984). A careful reading will confirm how difficult and contorted the effort is obliged to be. I offer it as a specimen only. Even greater difficulties appear in Jaegwon Kim, "Events as Property Exemplification,'' in Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
3. See Gottlob Frege, "On Sense and Reference," trans. Max Black, in Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, ed. Peter Geach and Max Black (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1960); compare with Frege's considerably earlier Begriffsschrift, trans. P. T. Geach, in the same volume. See, also, Bertrand Russell, "Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description," in Problems of Philosophy (London: Oxford University Press, 1912). Frege seems to have speculated along ontological lines, but almost not at all along epistemological lines. Russell's account is rather heroic but betrays the impossibility of anything like an empiricist account of denotata . (Russell's account is, in fact, solipsistic.) But if, as I say, reference is intended in an epistemically effective way, then the various sentential (or sententially grounded) models Frege and Russell spawned cannot possibly satisfy us on reference. The most important payoff of this line of reasoning is, in my opinion, the complete subversion of Quine's famous resolution of the referring use of proper names, in Word and Object . I shall come to it in a moment. See, also, R. M. Hare, The Language of Morals (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952).
4. There is a very pretty demonstration of the validity of this Leibnizian theme in Max Black, "The Identity of Indiscernibles," in Problems of Analysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1954). I cannot see how Black's argument (which is restricted to metaphysical possibilities) can be resisted. But if you allow it, and if you concede that natural-language reference is essentially occupied with epistemic success, then the hopelessness of Quine's proposal stares you in the face. Of course, Quine cannot have been unaware of Leibniz's original finding along the same lines.
5. See Saul A. Kripke, "Naming and Necessity" (with Addenda), in Donald
Davidson and Gilbert Harman (eds.), Semantics of Natural Language, 2d ed. (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1972). See, also, Hilary Putnam, Renewing Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), ch. 3. Here, Putnam either clarifies, or retreats from, his (and Kripke's) apparent earlier commitment to the causal theory of reference.
6. The expression ( Lebensformen ) appears rather sparely in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: MacMillan, 1953). I find its full epistemic import much clearer in Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969). The idea seems to have been original with Wittgenstein, one of his numerous stunning inventions as an outsider in the Cambridge philosophical world. Certainly there is nothing in Russell or Moore to suggest the theme. On my own reading, it affords a very plausible bridge between the thin themes of the analytic speech-act model of language (although that is hardly its primary intention) and the "thicker" cultural themes of continental philosophy: Hegelian, Marxist, phenomenological, hermeneutic (although there is no basis for treating Wittgenstein's view as borrowed in any sense). The main fault with the idea lies with its complete lack of interest in the historical dimension of human life. Viewing it thus, I simply make (a practical) use of Wittgenstein's notion as a distant but congenial approximation to the post-Kantian Idealist themes mentioned earlier. That, of course, was never in Wittgenstein's mind. So I use Wittgenstein's idea in a way it was never intended for. See, also, Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Free Press, 1990). In good part, my reason is due to the fact that analytic philosophy has learned to tolerate the idea of collective practices in Wittgenstein but not in Hegel. For an appreciation of Russell's and Moore's impact on analytic philosophy, see A. J. Ayer, Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (New York: Vintage, 1954), ch. 2.
7. I cannot emphasize enough how extraordinarily important Wittgenstein's insight is here. The key passage, in Investigations, is probably I, § 202. See Saul A. Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Languages: An Elementary Exposition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). My thought is this: "obeying a rule" is an indissoluble idiom—to be treated monadically, not relationally, so that, in the lebensformlich sense, it does not follow that, in obeying a rule, there is a rule that one follows (construed relationally). Skepticism (here) is the solipsistic thesis that the seemingly collective practice ( Lebensform ) can be analyzed in terms of a convergent aggregative pattern of individual speakers' obeying a rule (bringing their speech into conformity with a rule—by consulting the rule they intend to conform with). Wittgenstein demonstrates the inherent "informality" of natural language, its not being algorithmically ordered. To offer a rule that, in ordinary linguistic practice, we may be said to "follow'' is to interpret the practice we are "following": you may find such a formulation an apt "description" of our practice. But we are not bound in any conceptual regard by any such rules in following our practice; there may be alternative such rules proposed and judged perspicuous; and the continuation of our practice will invite replacing such interpretations by others. What is re-
quired is the analysis of a (collective) practice, not (solipsistic) rules that, aggregatively, somehow form a practice.
8. For a well-known and careful account of " Lebensform, " see Newton Garver, "Naturalism and Transcendentality: The Case of 'Form of Life'," in Souren Teghrarian (ed.), Wittgenstein and Contemporary Philosophy (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1994). I regard Garver's reading as quite reliable, even if open to dispute. But I depart from his reading on philosophical, not textual, grounds.
9. Both Davidson and Fodor offer, without any supporting argument that I have been able to find, very strong extensional programs: of truth and meaning (Davidson) and of predicative concepts (Fodor). See, for instance, Donald Davidson, "In Defense of Convention T" and "Semantics for Natural Languages," both in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation; and Jerry A. Fodor, Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), and Representations: Philosophical Essays on the Foundations of Cognitive Science (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981). I don't deny that each has a rationale for his particular account, but I don't find an actual demonstration of the validity of their respective undertakings. (And, of course, as I argue, both fail.)
10. Peirce identifies the notion as the "doctrine of scholastic realism," in Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 5. But he pursues it in an extremely interesting way: in terms of his distinction between "exists" and "is real"—which also bears on his fundamental contrast between Secondness and Thirdness. As a consequence, although he admits real generality, he denies the existence of universals. I follow Peirce here, but I also find Peirce unsatisfactory in accounting for the operation of Thirdness in nature, apart from human minds . In this sense, Peirce is more Kantian than Hegelian: ultimately, he favors a curiously teleologized form of Kantian externalism. It may just be that it is this last theme that informs Putnam's internal realism and attracts him to Jürgen Habermas's philosophy. Both Putnam and Habermas are Peirceans who are in some sense close to Peirce's teleologism. (This is not the place to pursue the question, but it will come within our ken shortly.)
11. To appreciate Aristotle's concept, one must compare Metaphysics, Posterior Analytics, and De Anima . My own sense is that Aristotle "fits" the theory of nous to whatever he requires for his archism. He offers no genuinely independent epistemic analysis. In whatever sense his account might compare favorably with medieval accounts of "real generals," Aristotle has almost nothing to say about the actual epistemic process. Aristotle speaks only of the fait accompli . That may serve as a clue as to why the solution to the problem of "generality" cannot be successfully managed except in terms of lebensformlich practices. I return to the issue later.
12. The best-known contemporary nominalist is surely Nelson Goodman. You will find two sides to Goodman: for one thing, Goodman nowhere discusses nominalism in specifically epistemic terms—which of course is what is wanted; for another, when he suggests that nominalism is sufficient in cognitive contexts, he himself always betrays a "conceptualist" orientation (that is, an incipient "realism"), which he never explains. See, for instance, Nelson Goodman, "Seven
Strictures on Similarity," in Lawrence Foster and J. W. Swanson (eds.), Experience & Theory (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970).
13. The phrasing is Pears's. I borrow it gladly. Pears's account helps to mark (though that is not its intention) the limitation of the analytic account of universals: Pears rightly sees the reductio of attempting to ensure a realism of universals along epistemic lines; but he does not consider the terms under which the problem can be solved. I suggest we treat Pears's account as a paradigm of the relative fruitfulness of an "externalist" and an "internalist" (or symbiotized) treatment of epistemic matters. See D. F. Pears, "Universals," Philosophical Quarterly 1 (1951).
14. The terms are Putnam's and are clearly demarcated in Hilary Putnam, Meaning and the Moral Sciences (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978). The book represents a phase in Putnam's passage from his early days as a scientific realist (committed to the unity of science program), to his implicit acknowledgement of the defeat of his "Kantian" thesis in The Many Faces of Realism, where the principled distinction between the "subjective" and the "objective" is finally admitted to be untenable. This should have committed Putnam to a strong form of symbiosis, but he resists the final phase of his own theoretical slide. The issue catches up his debate with Michael Dummett, who has (as already remarked) never relented on his own externalism. I am bound to add that Popper, Putnam, Karl-Otto Apel, and Jürgen Habermas are all Peirceans and are either explicitly Kantian (as is Peirce) or are eccentrically linked to the Kantian conception. Popper may be the most difficult to place in this regard. But see Karl R. Popper, "Epistemology without a Knowing Subject,'' in Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972). On the "regulative" function of truth, Putnam and Popper are surprisingly close. See Karl R. Popper, Realism and the Aim of Science, ed. W. W. Bartley III (Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1983), ch. 1.
15. The seriousness of Kant's difficulties in precluding the intrusion of the noumenal are not widely acknowledged in analytic philosophy. They bear decisively on the prospects for reinterpreting Kant in a way that is both pertinent to the perceived constraints on contemporary philosophy and on remaining true to Kant's first Critique . See, for instance, Kant's well-known letter (February 21, 1772) to Markus Herz. It appears in Immanuel Kants Werke, herausg. Ernst Cassirer: Band IX ( Briefe von und an Kant, Erster Teil, 1744-1789) (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1918). Together with the preface to the second edition of the first Critique, it pinpoints an essential feature of Kant's "Copernican revolution": viz., that the pure forms of the understanding are not abstracted from empirical phenomena. Of course, they could not be, one may imagine someone saying, if they are to be a priori, necessary. But the importance of this admission is regularly ignored. The usual maneuver among contemporary "Kantians" is to construe the first Critique in terms of the accommodating themes of the third Critique . See Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason . Perhaps the most serious and sustained effort along these lines is that of Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 3 vols., trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953, 1955, 1957). Habermas's resolution is, I should say, more characteristic of contemporary tastes, but it is an obviously failed program.
I shall return to it much later in these notes. What becomes clear is the attenuation of Kantian apriorism: we cannot say what "necessity" means under the condition of evolving sciences (biology, in Cassirer's case) or rational inquiry in general (in Habermas and Putnam); and, we cannot tell whether the sense of necessity is itself an artifact of our evolving history (as it appears to be in Habermas). The two likeliest efforts to save the Kantian theme (the theme of the first Critique ), under concessions to the history of an evolving science (and more), cannot but fail: the first is a teleologized evolution in which rational conjecture moves self-correctively toward what is necessary at the limit (Peirce's "long run"); the other is a reliably self-corrective regulative notion of truth that persists discernibly through all change (Putnam's Grenzbegriff ). See, for instance, Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); and Richard Rorty, "Putnam and the Menace of Relativism," Journal of Philosophy 90 (1993). Only some form of symbiosis can escape the Kantian dilemma—by rejecting it. This is the point of theorem (3.15): ''real generals" must be lebensformlich ((3.17)). This is why Cassirer yields in the direction of Hegel, all the while he tries to put his thesis in loyal Kantian terms. I believe the effort cannot succeed: apriorism must be abandoned.
16. See G. E. Moore, "Refutation of Idealism," in Philosophical Studies (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922). Moore's essay has been extraordinarily influential. It counts as one of the exemplars of the new analytic spirit Moore and Russell "imposed" on British philosophy (and, in effect, on early American analytic philosophy). It also shows how to emasculate Kant so that what may be salvaged makes Kantian philosophy appear to be not terribly different from "pre-Kantian" thought.
17. Tarski is well known for a celebrated treatment of truth along strong extensionalist lines. But Tarski was quite aware that his theory was not philosophically "neutral," contrary to what both Davidson and Putnam have claimed. He was rather doubtful that it would ever rightly apply to more than a very small fraction of natural language. In fact, Tarski doubted that it could apply to formalized languages without being severely restricted. Also, whatever initial optimism Tarski felt about the prospects for applying his account to natural languages, he soon confessed that they must be slimmer than he had originally supposed. For his part, Davidson has applied Tarski to natural language without restriction, but he has never demonstrated (with anything like Tarski's analytic care) how the model would work; he also insists, of course, that Tarski's account is philosophically neutral. But that would mean that natural languages were, in principle, extensionally structured —which is hardly obvious. Tarski seems to have been troubled by Davidson's use of the "semantic conception." See Alfred Tarski, "The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages," in Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics, 2d ed., trans. J. W. Woodger, ed. John Corcoran (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1983). (Note the Postscript.) (I have been led to appreciate Tarski's unease by a private communication.)
Chapter IV Truth-Values
1. This of course is the general theorem under which, in effect, Aristotle's archism was opposed. In its modern form, that archism is rightly viewed as
Fregean. See, for instance, Robert C. Stalnaker, Inquiry (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984). It also explains my reasons for opposing Michael Dummett's recovery of tertium non datur, in Truth and Other Enigmas . The important point is to see how plausible the resistance to bivalence may be made within the terms of symbiosis, and how arbitrary the insistence on bivalence will appear from the same vantage. It explains why bivalence is so often linked to externalism (as, indeed, it is in Dummett).
2. The remark is Quine's. It is a baffling admission, chiefly because it appears to concede "truth-value gaps" relative to Quine's holism—which it then denies; but, presumably, it cannot treat such an admission (or denial) as principled, since that would violate Quine's attack on the so-called analytic/synthetic "dogma." It also appears to require a principled disjunction between the epistemic treatment of "holophrastic" sentences and sentences "parsed" in terms of some form of ''ontic commitment," about which, apparently, there is "no fact of the matter." It is extremely difficult, to say the least, to reconcile these notions plausibly, and yet Quine nowhere provides a rationale. See Quine, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," Word and Object, and Pursuit of Truth, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). The failure of Quine's program, here, signifies the absence of any compelling objections, in analytic philosophy, against restricting or abandoning bivalence. That is an extraordinarily important finding. I do not say there are no other lines of objection, but the arbitrariness of Dummett's alternative suggests very strongly that the Fregean line lacks a sufficient rationale for its restrictions. Quine, Davidson, Putnam, Rorty, and Dummett are all Fregeans in this regard.
3. Hempel's account is standard. Probabilized values are qualified (non-detachably) in an evidentiary way, but, in principle, they are said to presuppose the usual bivalence. So relativistic values are utterly different from probabilistic values. See Carl G. Hempel, "Inductive Inconsistencies," in Aspects of Scientific Explanation and Other Essays in the Philosophy of Science (New York: Free Press, 1965).
4. This is in effect the charge Plato has Socrates bring against Protagoras in Theaetetus . The passage has never been satisfactorily interpreted, unless along the lines of self-referential paradox, which makes Protagoras an idiot in logical matters. The extraordinary thing is that Plato's summary is very close to the argument contemporary opponents of relativism invoke—notably Putnam, in The Many Faces of Realism . I see no reason to read Protagoras as Plato does, and I see no reason to believe, with Putnam, that no relativism can escape the paradox. The issue bears on my own (tendentious) distinction between "relationalism" (the offending doctrine) and what I call "robust relativism." See, further, Joseph Margolis, The Truth about Relativism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991).
5. There is no logical difficulty with the doctrine of internal relations, so long as it does not play a criterial or epistemically operative role of its own. It is in fact ineluctable wherever we speak of the meanings of linguistic utterances or of cultural phenomena (or, I may add, of rationality and the like). Surely, whatever linguistic, semiotic, significative, or related function may be assigned language, determinate meanings are discerned only within some holistic "con-
ceptual space" (as we say). (I am speaking loosely here. But the idea is that meaning, significance, and the like cannot be disjoined from rationality. I return to the idea later.) The idea marks the difference between the physical and the human sciences. In any case, the point counts against F. H. Bradley, Principles of Logic, 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1922), and fixes Bertrand Russell's correct motivation (opposing the epistemic function of holism) in dismissing the abuses of British Hegelianism. See Bertrand Russell, "The Monistic Theory of Truth," in Philosophical Essays (London: Longmans, Green, 1910). But it has no bearing, as such, on the fortunes of historicizing thought (as among the Hegelians or the American pragmatists). That is an irony. (Of course, Hegel was never a British Hegelian.) I take all this to go to the same point, however unlikely it may seem, that is at stake in Jacques Derrida's "deconstruction" of French structuralism (in particular, of Saussure and Lévi-Strauss). See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). It suggests a basis for admitting Derrida's philosophical skills, so often arbitrarily discounted in the Anglo-American practice. Derrida is fatiguing, but I do not regard that as a philosophical objection.
6. There is a very curious appeal to Wittgensteinian Lebensformen, bearing on rules and rule-following, that relates (eccentrically) to the realist/idealist issue, in Saul A. Kripke, Wittgenstein On Rules and Private Languages: An Elementary Exposition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). Kripke manages to turn Wittgenstein on his head, thus finding support for a form of skepticism about rules. Many have found Kripke's account wrongheaded, in that it does not really attend to what is entailed by admitting Lebensformen . But the matter has been brought to bear on the relation between realism, idealism, and anti-realism (in Dummett's sense). See, further, John McDowell, "Wittgenstein on Following a Rule," Synthese 58 (1984), and "Anti-Realism and the Epistemology of Understanding," in H. Parret and J. Bouveresse (eds.), Meaning and Understanding (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1981). See, also, Crispin Wright, "Kripke's Account of the Argument against Private Language," Journal of Philosophy 81 (1984), and Realism, Meaning and Truth (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986).
7. Neurath seems to have scotched positivism almost at its inception, by demonstrating that there is no principled distinction between such sentences and any other first-person reports of experience (or Erlebnisse )—either logically or epistemically. Positivism failed in its "Cartesian" presumption quite apart from its hapless treatment of the puzzles of meaning and truth. See Otto Neurath, "Protocol Sentences," trans. George Schick, in A. J. Ayer (ed.), Logical Positivism (Glencoe: Free Press, 1959).
8. I read Foucault as offering a very natural unceremonious way of Hegelianizing Kant's ( a fortiori, Husserl's) philosophy: not to dismiss the Kantian theme but to neutralize its modal presumption. This is the force of Foucault's extraordinary essay, "What Is Enlightenment?" It affords an implicit interpretation of Foucault's notion, the "historical a priori, " which appears in The Order of Things . I believe it undermines Habermas's critique of Foucault—indeed, Habermas's entire review of Hegel and post-Hegelian philosophy. See Jürgen
Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987).
9. I associate the phrasing with Derrida's dictum: "il n'y a pas de horstexte," which appears in Of Grammatology . It is, I think, Derrida's principal philosophical doctrine— not a form of deconstruction at all—and it is meant in a "post-Kantian" sense. But Derrida's handling of the doctrine is too florid for analytic tastes. I am trying to recover its import here in an "acceptable" way ((4.17)). It appears (implicitly) in the work of Roland Barthes as well (who was influenced in this regard by the younger Derrida). See Roland Barthes, "From Work to Text,'' in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977).
10. I return here to the convergence of Davidson's naturalism and Rorty's postmodernism. That convergence is dubbed, by Rorty himself, as the new pragmatism . The pertinent texts are these: Davidson, "A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge"; and Rorty, "Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth." To grant (4.19) is, effectively, to dismiss, for cause, both Rorty's postmodernism (and postmodernism itself) and Davidson's naturalism (but not naturalism as such).
11. See St. Thomas's definition of truth, which, although suggestive and justly famous, requires a strenuous metaphysics and is not reconcilable with symbiosis: "The true is in the intellect insofar as it is conformed to the object understood" (adequation of thing and thought), in St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, vol. 1 (Westminister: Christian Classics, 1980), I a Q. 16. For James's notorious pragmatist definition and a sensible recovery, see William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (London: Longmans, Green, 1907), and The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to "Pragmatism" (London: Longmans, Green, 1909). James and Aquinas obviously hold very different theories, but what they confirm is the suspicion that, apart from "some apt" relationship between the cognizing mind and the cognized world, there is nothing one can say about truth except what conforms with particular theories of our understanding of the world. We cannot rely on the meaning of truth, for that is the very prize at stake in our competing theories. There is no assured or neutral account that could function criterially .
12. Quine subscribes to the doctrine in Pursuit of Truth . Rorty follows Quine here, in "Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth," but wrongly believes Davidson does as well. Davidson is tempted to read Tarski's "semantic conception of truth" as merely disquotational but resists the idea, in "A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge." The whole point of its advocacy—or of any similar conception—is, ultimately, to preclude the need for any legitimative account of truth. This is in fact the purpose of Davidson's essay, which seeks to gain the same end "by other means." Accordingly, it is an important plank in naturalism's boat.
13. Quine is very clear (against Davidson) about the impossibility of avoiding regular reinterpretations of the accomplishments of science. Given only science's history, neither Davidson's nor Rorty's rejection of "interpretive tertia " makes good sense. See. W. V. Quine, "Postscript on Metaphor," in Theories and Things (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981). See, also, for a con-
gruent specimen of recent views about the history of science, Paul Thagard, Conceptual Revolutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); also, more adventurously, Karin D. Knorr, The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1981).
14. I deliberately use Quine's term here (from Word and Object ) in order to replace Quine's sense of it in the context of his "indeterminacy of translation" thesis with another that fits the symbiosis doctrine I prefer. In this way, all of Quine's doubtful commitments can be discharged and can be seen to be reasonably dismissed. I take the essential defect of Quine's account (in this regard) to lie with his disjunctive treatment of interpretation, "analytical hypothesis," "ontic commitment," and the like—in a word, parsing —in terms of terms treated as artifactually assigned to antecedently specified ''holophrastic" sentences . But there are no sentences without words and no words without sentences. See Quine, Word and Object and Pursuit of Truth .
Chapter V Epistemic Competence
1. In their heyday, sense-data theories were the principal exemplars of theories of perception and of first-order knowledge possessing "foundationalist" standing. They dominated the analytic epistemologies of the first half of the twentieth century and have now nearly all disappeared. One reason is that it was discovered that sense data could not be individuated and reidentified except, dependently, by being indexed to the very "material objects" they were meant to replace. See, for instance, Wilfrid Sellars, "Phenomenalism," in Science, Perception and Reality (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963); also, J. L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia, reconstructed by G. J. Warnock (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962). Very nearly the only version of the sense-datum (-like) theory still championed among analytic philosophers is that offered by Roderick Chisholm. Chisholm's thesis is an "adverbial" variant, which is to say, it begins with the "self-presenting" states of cognizing subjects, thereby escaping the aporia of the other versions. Nevertheless, it also requires an explanation of the relationship between such states and the real world in order to build (as Chisholm intends) a theory of knowledge of the independent world. Chisholm's may be the last of these theories: much admired for its skill but ultimately too implausible, too remote, too risky a methodological basis for, say, the palpable achievements of the empirical sciences. See Roderick M. Chisholm, Perceiving: A Philosophical Study (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1957), and Theory of Knowledge, 2d ed. (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1977). Sense-data theories of the first sort were very much favored by the Positivists, who had grave difficulties with attempts to ensure their meaningfulness (apart from Neurath's challenge to Protollsätze ). The attempt to find the right formula may be traced through A. J. Ayer's numerous accounts (all failed): for instance, The Problem of Knowledge (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1956), ch. 3. The more methodological difficulties are adumbrated in Carl G. Hempel, "Empiricist Criteria of Cognitive Significance: Problems and Changes" and "Postscript (1964)," in Aspects of Scientific Explanation and Other Essays in the Philosophy of Science (New
York: Free Press, 1965). The general foundationalist theory of knowledge is analyzed in Keith Lehrer, Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974). The most famous sense-datum theory is probably that offered by H. H. Price, Perception, 2d ed. rev. (London: Methuen, 1950).
2. Wittgenstein's analysis shows conclusively that Moore's attempt to recover a "Cartesian" source of epistemic certainty was uncompelling. In his remarkably effective way, Wittgenstein subverts the foundationalist presumption of all externalist accounts of knowledge and, at the same time, shows how abandoning foundationalism does not entail skepticism, if only the reliability (not secured criterially—hence, not secured in the Cartesian sense) is grounded in a lebensformlich way. See Wittgenstein, On Certainty . On my reading, the diverse lines of criticism offered by Neurath, Sellars, Austin, and Wittgenstein converge in preparing a ground for a symbiotized account of cognition, but they do not entail any such theory in advance.
3. It is an extraordinary fact that the Positivists believed (at least initially) that the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus was concerned with the empirical foundations of science; whereas the fact is: (a) the Tractatus does not explicitly address empirical sources of knowledge at all; and (b) Wittgenstein meant to exclude all contingent factual claims from his text. His treatment of the problem of the compatibility of colors led him (partly through Frank Ramsey's prompting) to see that he could not satisfactorily draw a demarcation line between contingent and necessary truths regarding colors. He realized, therefore, that the entire project of the Tractatus was placed at risk—perhaps irremediably. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, rev. ed., trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness, corr. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972). For their part, the Positivists had hoped Protokollsätze would have functioned as the middle term between Wittgenstein's logical atomism and their own methodology of science. They were mistaken.
4. These notions are bound to sound alien to analytic ears. They do, however, mark the eccentric convergence between Derrida's critique of phenomenology (Husserl) and structuralism (Lévi-Strauss) and the critique I have been mounting against the local forms of privilege in analytic philosophy. Derrida's efforts touch on one or another of the strategies I've called "symbiotized," "post-Kantian," or "poststructuralist.'' Derrida's tactic tends to be reactive and parasitic—and verbally unusual. But the attack on the "originary" is an attack on externalism, and the attack on the "totalized" entails a recognition of the role of internal relations in comparing and assessing conceptual schemes. I don't find the convergence contrived, therefore, or useless. It signifies the possibility of a stronger and more explicit convergence between analytic and continental philosophy. I should say both Derrida's and Wittgenstein's correctives (the latter's, in the Investigations and On Certainty ) draw attention to the insuperability of context: to the pretense of closed conceptual systems and supposed criterial assurances of indubitable truth. What both lack is a clear sense of the historicity of context itself. Wittgenstein's use of the notion of Lebensformen is ultimately more promising (in my opinion) than Derrida's abstract and reactive analyses. Their analyses point beyond themselves to the remarkable (but somewhat muffled) intuition of historicity in Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), and the even more remarkable (but unemphatic) prescience of John Dewey's domesticated Hegelianism, for instance in Reconstruction in Philosophy . Both have been largely eclipsed by this time: Kuhn, partly through his own retreat—see, for instance, the Postscript to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and also The Essential Tension (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). Dewey, largely through the selective coopting of pragmatist themes (compatible with externalism) in the American continuation of Russell's and Moore's dismissal of British Hegelianism and the close scanning of the uncongenial themes of American pragmatism, in the work of Quine and Davidson particularly. The result is the almost total eclipse of an interest in historicity in current American analytic philosophy. Continental European philosophy has, for the most part, featured the puzzles of history and social context in Hegelian, Marxist, Nietzschean, phenomenological, existential, hermeneutic, Frankfurt-Critical, and Heideggerean currents. In this sense, Foucault is more promising than either Derrida or Wittgenstein. For purposes of comparison, see Jacques Derrida, "Différance," in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); and Michel Foucault, "Two Lectures," in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon et al. (New York: Pantheon, 1980). A theorem like (5.2), I should add, is the beneficiary of a great many of these converging currents, short of endorsing historicity. But it needs to be said as well that recent European philosophy is (noticeably) also veering away from historicity. I think this is due in no small degree to the growing disenchantment with Marxism and communism evidenced well before the collapse of the Soviet empire and to the perceived confirmation of the triumph of the ahistorical mentality that the Gulf War has come to signify. The result is a palpable conceptual vacuum that, in retrospect, we may conjecture, had been filled by Marxist themes qualifying the principal work of Western thought. In my view, the confirmation appears most saliently among philosophers in Jürgen Habermas's about-face: in his displacing his Marxist and Franfurt-Critical perspective with a (pragmatized) Kantian one. Compare, for instance, Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975), with his "Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification,'' in Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990). In the United States, the "parallel" but more tepid retreat appears in the self-styled pragmatisms of Putnam and Rorty, who, in rather different ways, have had something to say about their earlier Marxist interests. See, for instance, Richard Rorty, "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids," Common Knowledge 1 (1992). Habermas is conceptually more interesting in this regard, for Habermas is reenacting—post-Hegel and post-Marx—Kant's own inability to surmount his apriorism (along the lines I earlier associated with the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason and the letter to Markus Herz that bears on Kant's Copernican revolution). I take that to provide the essential clue to Habermas's own failed Kantianism (as in "Discourse Ethics"). The theme was always present in Habermas, however, as one can we see from the important early essay, "What Is Universal Pragmatics?" in
Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979). I find Habermas's work to be dominated by the Peirceanized Kantianism of Apel—except, of course, that Habermas disastrously pretends to generate the benefits of apriorism through ("empirical" or "communicative") rational reflection. Compare Karl-Otto Apel, "From Kant to Peirce: The Semiotical Transformation of Transcendental Logic," in Towards a Transformation of Philosophy, trans. Glen Adey and David Frisby (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980).
5. It is quite extraordinary that Husserl, having grasped the implicit privilege in Kant's "naturalistic" program, "corrects" it by endorsing an even more profound form of "subjective" (or "Cartesian") privilege: partly by disjoining (or at any rate by obscuring the relationship between) the (phenomenologically) ''subjective" and the ("naturalistically") psychological; partly by disjoining (or at any rate by obscuring the relationship between) the "transcendental" powers of the reflective Ego and the culturally enabling resources of whatever reflexive powers human understanding may claim. As far as I can see, Husserl never resolved these puzzles satisfactorily, never fully acknowledged the lebensformlich sources of all our cognizing powers, and never came to terms with the general problem of historicity. In a very real sense, Husserl's philosophy must count as one of the most thoroughgoing violations of theorem (5.2) that modern philosophy affords. See Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970). It should be borne in mind that Derrida's earliest and most "analytic" work was directly addressed to unmasking the illicit privilege embedded in Husserl's account of geometry. The essay, "The Origin of Geometry," appears in the appendix to the Crisis volume. For Derrida's quite compelling treatment, see Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, trans. John P. Leavey Jr. (New York: Nicolas Hays, 1978). Husserlians have always argued that Derrida was not up to reading Husserl accurately. But the study of the "Geometry" paper dispels the charge. In fact, it exposes Husserl's own uncertainties, even fudging, in a decisive way. (Husserl, one must remember, isolated the process of rational thought from the contingencies of linguistic expression: Derrida locks on to the pretensions of that maneuver with admirable precision.) Resistance to Husserl's failings in this regard has led, in rather different ways, to the divergent programs of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Heidegger. In this respect, late phenomenology has been more critical of Husserl than late analytic philosophy has been of the orienting function of Russell, Moore, and Quine at least. Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations might have harbored the turning point in analytic philosophy, but the possibility has petered out. Neither have Dewey's or Kuhn's contributions succeeded in this regard. On the phenomenological side, the most promising criticism has gone astray. I refer to Maurice Merleau-Ponty's unfinished The Visible and the Invisible . But, at least roughly, analytic philosophy (including a strong externalist reading of Kant) and Husserlian phenomenology (but not late phenomenology) have played rather similar roles in their respective worlds.
6. The verbal distinctions may be a little too densely packed. The terms are used expressly by Husserl to identify the failing of the epistemological tradition
from Galileo to Kant ("naturalism") and his own corrective ("phenomenology"). The clearest account of Husserl's use is given in a pair of papers published in recent years as a small book. See Edmund Husserl, Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, trans. Quentin Lauer (New York: Harper and Row, 1965). By theorem (5.6), I signal the fact that Husserl's disjunction can't possibly work, although it would be fair to say that "naturalism" must be phenomenologized and "phenomenology" naturalized. Hegel's usage is quite different, for Hegel is attempting to overcome the aporia of Kant's distinction between phenomena and noumena. See Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit . See, also, Jean Hippolyte, Genesis and Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), especially part 7.
7. Without comparing their respective philosophical abilities, I should say that Jürgen Habermas plays a role with respect to Frankfurt Critical philosophy that is not very different from the role Quine plays with respect to pragmatism (particularly, Dewey's brand). For both outflank any trace of historicity. Habermas's effort is the odder of the two, since his work is regarded, somehow, as the fulfillment of the Frankfurt School's endeavor, whereas there is no sense of anything like that in Quine's work. (In a very thin way, something of the sort may be said of Putnam, who, as I have indicated, is also wrestling with a Kantian demon.) A great deal of the work of Horkheimer and Adorno was directed precisely at dismantling the conviction of Enlightenment philosophy—along historicist lines. I cannot say that Habermas is the apotheosis of Enlightenment mentality, but he aspires to something like it, replacing his original inspiration (Marx) with Kant. In this, he has fallen completely under the philosophical spell of Karl-Otto Apel, who is a frank apriorist of the Kantian sort, although an ingenious one. The theme of legitimation has troubled Habermas through his entire career: he has oscillated between a "transcendental" (Kantian) sense of legitimation and what he now calls a "pragmatic" form. But his difficulty here is the perfect analogue of Putnam's (analyzed earlier: that is, the difficulty associated with Putnam's use of the Kantian theme of the Grenzbegriff ). On the Frankfurt School philosophers, see Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1973); Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Seabury Press, 1972); and, explicitly against Husserl and implicitly (in anticipation) against Habermas, Against Epistemology: A Metacritique, trans. Willis Domingo (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982). On Apel, see Towards a Transformation of Philosophy .
8. W. V. Quine plays a double game with "holism." By one strategy—generalizing well beyond Pierre Duhem's well-known thesis about a certain indeterminacy in disconfirming theoretical claims in science (among distributed propositions)—Quine arrives at his "indeterminacy of translation" thesis; by another—illicitly disjoining word and sentence—he leads us to the cognitive privilege associated with his use of "holophrastic" sentences. The first theme belongs chiefly to Word and Object (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960) but is also thought to have the blessing of his treatment of the analytic/synthetic dogma. The second has a more obscure inning in Word and Object, particularly in
connection with the delayed relevance of "analytical hypotheses" (which, in effect, reserves a space in which sentences may escape the stalemate intended by the first sort of holism). It reappears, more robustly and more explicitly, in Pursuit of Truth, in the form of "holophrastic" sentences. There, effectively, Quine reverses the line of argument directly against Carnap and the search for Protokollsätze . For a sense of Duhem's rather different thesis, see Pierre Duhem, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, trans. Philip P. Wiener (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954).
9. This is the generic form of nearly all analytic theories of knowledge. One may well claim that the late naturalism of the analytic sort is primarily concerned to construe JTB in suitably naturalized terms. This accounts in part for the interest in the disquotational theory of truth. For a sense of how recent efforts of the naturalizing kind have gone, see Alvin I. Goldman, Liaisons: Philosophy Meets the Cognitive and Social Sciences (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992). For its application to the sciences, see Philip Kitcher, The Advancement of Science: Science without Legends, Objectivity without Illusions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). For an overview of the original doctrine, see Chisholm, Theory of Knowledge .
10. Quite early in his career, Davidson sought to construe rationalization ("explanation by reasons") as a species of causal explanation ("explanation by causes") on the grounds (independently reasonable) that "having a reason" could be a cause for one's action. The non sequitur is plain enough. But what is important about it concerns the fortunes of naturalism (in the late analytic sense). For, for one thing, it might (if it worked) undercut second-order legitimation; for another, it might smooth the way for a benign form of nonreductive physicalism (in effect, what is now called supervenience) by neutralizing the holism of our models of rationality. Davidson's insight here is more ingenious. The trouble is that there's no argument to back it up. See Donald Davidson, "Actions, Reasons, and Causes" and ''Mental Events," in Essays on Events and Actions (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980). I shall come to the second issue later.
11. See Putnam, Renewing Philosophy, ch. 3.
12. Edmund Gettier's famous little paper, "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" Analysis 23 (1963), produced a cottage industry designed to recover JTB from obvious mortal threats. Its effect was misperceived by analytically minded philosophers. For what it actually demonstrates is, first, that there are always antecedent questions that must be answered before any "standard" logic can be supposed to be applicable to the fine-grained questions of the domain to which it is applied; and, second, that what is to count as "knowledge" cannot be altogether freed from legitimative concerns. It is an irony that Gettier's implicit challenge should have gone largely unexamined.
13. I regard it as a telltale clue that naturalistic epistemologists very often have no developed theory of persons or selves to offer. This is noticeably true of Quine, in "Epistemology Natualized" and in Goldman, Liaisons . The strategies that would be required if naturalism were to go through are easily specified, of course. But they are characteristically scanted. See, for instance, Davidson, "Mental Events"; and D. C. Dennett, Content and Consciousness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969). I shall introduce a little later the fashionable
notion "supervenience," which is perhaps the most potent feint the naturalists have perfected in order to obviate the difficulties now looming.
Chapter VI Existence and Reality
1. Parmenides seems to have dominated the entire Greek discussion of what exists and is real. Aristotle, in Metaphysics, exposes Parmenides's great confusion between the predicative and substantive issues. But Aristotle himself seems to have marked this in a most unfortunate way: hyle (matter) has no determinate function at all in that discussion; it plays no role either in individuation or in predicable change with respect to whatever is individuated. For his part, Quine introduces the notion of "ontic commitment" (by way of the use of the existential quantifier). But that too is unfortunate, for it means that Quine never actually addresses the question of what exists or of what it is to exist ! See W. V. Quine, "On What There Is," From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953), and Word and Object . The well-known formula, "to be is to be the value of a bound variable," bears on the first notion ("commitment"), but not on the second ("existence''). The point has been effectively noted by William P. Alston in his "Ontic Commitment," Philosophical Studies 9 (1958). As far as I can see, there is no more compelling account of "exists" and "is real" than that offered by Peirce (in terms of Secondness and Thirdness). See Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 5. In effect, in what follows, I treat Quine's recommendation as purely "grammatical," although that is hardly Quine's intent.
2. See Searle, Speech Acts . Searle introduces the "Axiom of Existence" but instantly subverts it. The Axiom would make contradictory any would-be reference to what does not exist (fictional referents, therefore—Sherlock Holmes, for one). But Searle offers no sustained argument; his view clearly goes against ordinary usage. Restricting Quine's sense of ontic commitment to the "grammatical" helps to explain why nothing paradoxical results from reference to fiction, for it is entirely possible, on Quine's usage, that what we refer to (assuming it to exist) may not exist at all! In that regard, Quine's maneuver would lead to skepticism, construed in Searle's way. The only way to avoid this awkwardness is to treat reference grammatically. I find no provision for concluding that errors about what exists somehow also entail a failure of reference. The matter goes back, of course, to Russell's concern about "the present King of France" and Meinong's "golden mountain" and the like. But they are part of the folklore of the theory of reference. See Bertrand Russell, "On Denoting," Mind 14 (1905). Meinong's theory has been revived by Terence Parsons, Non-existent Objects (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980). For a contrast with Searle's view of fiction, see Gregory Currie, The Nature of Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Currie opposes Searle's puzzling solution, but, for his own part, he contrasts fiction with truth, which seems odd as well. It seems more reasonable to contrast fiction with reality and allow truth to range over the appropriate utterances, whether about reality or fiction.
3. I approach the matter only in the spirit of reducing the possibility of unwanted paradox. I see no benefit, for instance, in theorizing that the actual
world is merely "one" of many "real" possible worlds. I oppose without qualification the idea (Goodman's) of many actual worlds. See Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1978). There's no point to such a provision if no criterion is supplied for individuating actual worlds. Goodman introduces his maneuver in order to avoid contradictory predications: wherever they threaten, Goodman sanctions an additional, separable world to keep true predications "apart." But he never explains how to tell the difference between incompatible predications (in one world) and predications that would be incompatible (in the same world) but now are not (being segregated to one or another actual world). As far as I can see, talk of "possible worlds" is a façon de parler for what is suitably nominalized regarding what may be predicated of the actual world (including what may be predicated counterfactually) or what may be grammatically posited (in the nominalized sense) as merely compossible. I take all this to be no more than a stylistic matter. For a more robust conception of possible worlds, see David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). Lewis regards the actual world as one among alternative (real) "possible worlds'' ("modal realism"). I confess I am not persuaded that this accommodation is needed. See, also, Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974).
4. In Word and Object Quine dismisses out of hand Brentano's famous distinction of "intentionality." It signifies Quine's most candid commitment to physicalism and extensionalism. But his remarks are in the form of an ontological manifesto. There is no supporting argument offered. There is no argument that Quine ever offered to shore up his summary dismissal. There can be no doubt that a great number of analytic philosophers have been emboldened by Quine's example to dismiss intentionality as well. But the plain truth is that analytic philosophy has only infrequently—perhaps now in a more forthcoming way than was true earlier—actually addressed the conceptual role and possible advantages of the various forms of the intentional idiom. For Brentano's own account, see Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, ed. Oskar Kraus, English edition ed. Linda L. McAlister, trans. Antos C. Rancurello et al. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973). For a sense of Husserl's treatment of Brentano's distinction, see Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, 2 vols., trans. J. W. Findley (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), particularly Investigation V.
5. I confess I find Dewey tiresome reading. But he is, nevertheless, the single American philosopher best "placed" for the line of argument I am developing. I take Dewey to be a "Hegelian" in the sense that: (a) he favors symbiosis; (b) he accepts historicity; and (c) he relies on the holist role of consensual life. See, for instance, Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy . I prefer Peirce as a philosopher—and, of course, Dewey is immensely indebted to Peirce. But Peirce veers off along teleologized lines (regarding some vaguely Emersonian cosmic mind: a source of Thirdness in nature apart from human interpretation, somehow required for "objectivity"). This disjunction makes Peirce a "Kantian" rather than a "Hegelian," although there are Hegelian aspects to his philosophy. Dewey is clearly "post-Kantian": very nearly "poststructuralist" avant la lettre . But I hasten to add that, as far as I can see, Rorty is not a Deweyan even though
he professes to be one. This is partly because he adheres to Davidson's strong naturalism and because he insists on a critical disjunction between the private and the public. See Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays 1972-1980 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). I believe there is no other important English-language philosopher who has constructed an alternative to the pared-down Hegelianism Dewey managed to work out. Its most distinctive features include an optimism that is not teleologized, an opposition to absolution, and an attack on all metaphysical dualisms. That is a theme of increasing importance as we approach the end of the century. For an impression of Dewey's early gauge of Hegel, which is still reasonably revealing, see John Dewey, "The Present Position of Logical Theory," in The Early Works of John Dewey, 1882-1898, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), vol. 3.
6. For Carnap's treatment, see Rudolf Carnap, The Logical Syntax of Language, trans. Amethe Smeaton (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1937). On essentialism, see Richard Boyd, "On the Current Status of Scientific Realism," amended, in Richard Boyd, Philip Gosper, and J. D. Trout (eds.), The Philosophy of Science (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991).
7. Heidegger claims that his own thesis—that the defining existentiale of Dasein is Zeitlichkeit —does justice to the meaning of history in a way that is superior to Hegel's. Compare Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), and Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit . I find Heidegger's account instructive, particularly on the theme of avoiding teleologism. I am not convinced that Heidegger has Hegel right, and I don't find Heidegger clear about the conceptual relationship between the "ontic" and "ontological" dimensions of his account of Dasein and Seiende, which, in effect, answers to the Kantian and phenomenological aspects of his analysis. This is due partly to the original inadequacy (already broached) of Husserl's attempt to distinguish between the "naturalistic" and the "phenomenological" and partly to the fact that the relationship between Dasein and Sein (in Heidegger) cannot be straightforwardly discursive. (I should characterize it rather as ''mythic," in a sense I introduce later.) Kojève's well-known reading of Hegel is influenced by both Marx and Heidegger. For a sense of it, see Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel ( Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, assembled by Raymond Queneau), ed. Allen Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols Jr. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), particularly ch. 5. See, also, Herbert Marcuse, Hegel's Ontology and the Theory of Historicity, trans. Seyla Benhabib (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987).
8. I find Peirce very often preoccupied with the implications of George Berkeley's intuition about the necessity of a real similarity between our cognizing ideas and the objective "ideas" that constitute the material world. In Berkeley's Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous (in The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, 9 vols., ed. A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop [Edinburgh: Nelson, 1948-1957]), for instance, the notion effectively disallows John Locke's inescapable skepticism in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 2 vols., ed. A. C. Fraser (New York: Dover, 1959). But Berkeley also anticipates, in an
eccentric way, the fundamental theme of the German Idealists attempting to root out an analogous skepticism at the heart of Kant's philosophy. I believe it is in this sense that Peirce found it impossible to yield altogether on his notion of an objective "mind" at work in nature apart from human intervention. The theme is at once Berkeleyan and Hegelian and teleologized in Peirce's treatment of the issue. (Peirce, I note, speaks of a "Schellingian" theme.) See Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols. 5-6. (In vol. 6, Peirce actually addresses the difference between his conception and Hegel's.)
9. The theorem confirms the sense in which legitimative issues are ubiquitous and unbidden. I view it, therefore, as making explicit the complete unten-ability of Davidson's naturalism and Rorty's postmodernism. See Davidson, "A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge," and Richard Rorty, "Pragmatism, Davidson and Truth."
10. It is undoubtedly something of a leap, but I associate the function of Peirce's Secondness (relative to the Hegelian vision) as similar to the function of Merleau-Ponty's "brute world" (relative to Husserl's phenomenology). The parallel comes out most clearly in the Working Notes appended to Merleau-Ponty's late unfinished work, where Merleau-Ponty obviously finds himself obliged to abandon Husserl's misdirection. See Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible .
11. Strawson considers the possibility but dismisses it as inherently unsatisfactory. See P. F. Strawson, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (London: Methuen, 1959). Davidson shows, though not intentionally, the inflexibility of the standard Fregean resources for accommodating events as substantives. See Donald Davidson's contribution to the symposium, "On Events and Event-Descriptions," in Joseph Margolis (ed.), Fact and Existence (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969). The principal analytically minded English-language philosopher who has featured an ontology of events is, of course, A. N. Whitehead—now, rather neglected. See Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1929).
12. I take this to be Peirce's ingenious formula ensuring the interpreted status of truth-claims. It is, in this sense, the basis on which (as a Peircean) Putnam opposes Davidson and Rorty. But, on my reading, Peirce himself spoils the formula by construing Thirdness as objectively present in nature without human intervention . (This is what I mean by Peirce's "Kantianism": the avoidance of symbiosis.) But that, too, reappears—vestigially, hardly convincingly—in Putnam. See, particularly, the closing remarks of Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
13. With Goodman, nominalism has pretty well ceased to be, as it was with William of Ockham, primarily a theory of certain conditions of cognitive competence. It has become a form of ontology only. Nevertheless, Goodman himself slips between the ontological and epistemological—since he implicitly invokes the first in drawing conclusions about the second. This may be seen by reading Nelson Goodman, "Seven Strictures on Similarity," in Lawrence Foster and J. W. Swanson (eds.), Truth & Experience (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970), in the context of Goodman's The Structure of Appearance, 2d ed. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966). Goodman means, by nominalism,
the denial that there are nonparticulars that are existent (without regard to whether particulars are abstract entities or not). A more recent line of argument, meant to test Quine's thesis that the admission of mathematical entities is needed in the explanations of physical science, is offered in Hartry A. Field, Science without Numbers: A Defense of Nominalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). Field construes nominalism as denying the existence of abstract entities. Peirce's distinction between existence and reality applies quite readily to the issues both raise. But Peirce of course has the medieval controversy in mind as well, that is, the analysis of cognition. For a sense of Ockham's thesis, see Ockham's Theory of Terms, Part I of the Summa Logicae, trans. Michael J. Loux (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974).
14. See Strawson, Individuals, Part II. Here, Strawson picks up an important question Aristotle bruits in Categories, but without the "benefit" of Aristotle's metaphysics.
15. I can only offer my impressions here. My first effort to pursue the matter was, on what I took to be good advice, to consult the Kyoto school. But, of course, I soon discovered that reading the Kyoto philosophers was startlingly like reading Heidegger. Still, I think there is a reasonable connection there—philosophically, I mean—given Nietzsche's probable influence on Heidegger's notion of Sein . See, for instance, Kitaro Nishida, "The Intelligible World," in Intelligibility and the Philosophy of Nothingness, trans. Robert Schinzinger (Honolulu: East-West Centre Press, 1958); and Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, trans. Ian Van Bragt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).
16. The point at issue is uncomplicated. Kant is quite right about the illicit use of "exists" as a predicate in St. Anselm's and St. Thomas's proofs. But the essential insight is not that "existence" cannot be a predicate; it is only that it cannot be a "first-order'' predicate like the "descriptive" predicates employed in describing a hundred Thaler . Many assume (following Quine, for instance) that "exists" cannot be a predicate at all, but I don't find the argument for it. I should say, against both Anselm and Aquinas, that there is no necessity for admitting "necessary existence" ((2.1)), but that depends, precisely, on being willing to construe "existence" as a predicate. See Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason .
17. One of the best-known efforts to bring Wittgenstein's view (in Investigations ) to bear on the problem of universals appears in Renford Bambrough, "Universals and Family Resemblances," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 61 (1960-1961).
Chapter VII Identity and Individuation
1. I emphasize the neutrality of the theorem—that is, it entails nothing regarding alternative theories of predicates, natures, or beings. It does not entail or preclude Aristotle's claim, in Metaphysics Gamma, on the necessity of invariant natures or essences, and it does not preclude or concede that God (in the Judaeo-Christian sense) has a nature or has a nature characterizable only in terms of predicables uniquely attributable to God. This, of course, has occa-
sioned the theory that God may be "characterized" by (divine) analogy only, that is, where the available predicates are first employed in discourse about the natural (or created) order. See, for instance, James F. Ross, Portraying Analogy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
2. Formulated negatively, thus, Heidegger is safe enough in collecting the entire Western tradition. The question remains, of course, of what else to say. My own view is that it is best to regard "being" sans phrase as a nominalization of "is" (or ''real") in its predicative use. Heidegger speaks, rather, of "Being" ( Sein ), so that the capital "S" takes on a second, potentially delusive meaning. Heidegger's account in Being and Time seems at first straightforward. "Sein" is used always in conjunction with " Dasein "—which is to say, in a constructive sense akin to that of Kant's transcendentalism (in effect, as "implicated" in admitting plural Seiende )—except that Dasein is not the site of the invariant categories of the understanding. I judge Heidegger's formula to be tantamount to being (at best) a radically historicized form of post-Kantian Idealism. But Heidegger himself calls all this into question in the Kehre of the notorious "Letter on Humanism." There, we are led to suppose that (the human) Dasein has a completely passive role in receiving some destinal message about Being from Being itself—or Being "thought" by some manifest Dasein different from human Dasein . This signifies a turn (in Heidegger's own mind) from the "subjective" emphasis of Being and Time to the "objective" (in a most mysterious sense). The entire maneuver is a philosophical disaster. See Heidegger, Being and Time and "Letter on Humanism," trans. Frank A. Capuzzi, with J. Glenn Gray and David Farrell Krell, in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977). See, also, Otto Pöggeler, Martin Heidegger's Path of Thinking, trans. Daniel Magurshak and Sigmund Barber (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1987).
3. I see no reason to think the doctrine of transcendental attributes is incoherent. But that is not to say that God exists, that there is anything that necessarily exists, that the relationship of Creator to created world is intelligible, or that the transcendentals applied uniquely to God are linked in some legible way to the ("privative") natural properties attributed to the "created" world. The relevant account is given in St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 5 vols., trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, rev. (Westminster: Christian Classics, 1981); see particularly QQ. 3-4. Duns Scotus characterizes transcendentals as predicates (predicates of God) such that they "do not have genus [or predicate] above [them] except 'being'." For textual reference, see note 7, below.
4. See Lev Shestov, Athens and Jerusalem, trans. Bernard Martin (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966).
5. Again, as with (7.1), the theorem is neutral as between alternative theories about the nature of reality. The minimal constraint is that of the compatibility of ascriptions, but that of course can be ensured in many ways, even where attributions seem at first incompatible. Similarly, the theorem sets no antecedent limits on the extension of "natures" or what may be truly (or admissibly) predicated of anything. Aristotle's Metaphysics affords one canonical view, of course, but Leibniz's philosophy offers an entirely different (quite radical) view.
Leibniz held that "the concept of the predicate is comprised in some way in that of the subject," that that is an ineliminable condition of truth, and that, as a consequence, "individual substances" (Alexander the Great, say) contain within themselves everything that has happened to them or will ever happen to them. ("Nominal definitions," it must be remembered, need not, for Leibniz, be compatible; "real definitions" are, for Leibniz, infinite.) This bears adversely, as I have remarked, on Quine's proposal to retire reference ( a fortiori, the denotational function of proper names) by predicative means. See Bertrand Russell, A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz, 2d ed. (London: Routledge, 1992). Leibniz himself affirms the point about the relation between subjects and predicates in many places, since it is an essential part of his mature theory. See for instance his letter to Arnauld (July 14, 1686) and Discourse on Metaphysics, in Leibniz: Discourse on Metaphysics and Correspondence with Arnauld, trans. G. R. Montgomery (La Salle: Open Court, 1902). In the correspondence with Samuel Clarke (Leibniz's fifth letter), the principle of the identity of indiscernibles is linked to the principle of sufficient reason. See Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence, ed. H. G. Alexander (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1956).
6. I regard this theorem as central to Protagoras's theme of the flux and the point of his "relativism." Socrates "defeats" Protagoras, in Thaeatetus, by getting him to deny something like (7.6). But the defeat of Aristotle's modal claim shows that that was a trick. At any rate, Socrates's argument is inconclusive.
7. The concept is attributed to Duns Scotus. Philosophically, apart from the metaphysical status of universals, it must be clear that haecceity cannot contribute in any criterial sense to the individuation or reidentification of particulars: first of all, natures are no more than predicables ((7.1)); second, the maneuver requires that humans be capable of grasping "real definitions" in something like Leibniz's sense. Duns Scotus seems to have regarded haecceity as among the "ultimate differences" among different things, that is, as irreducibly simple (an irreducibly simple individuating difference). But this is impossible, since it is predicative. See, for a general impression of Scotus's views, John Duns Scotus, Philosophical Writings: A Selection, 2d ed., trans. Allan Wolter (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1987), particularly Section I ("Concerning Metaphysics"). For a sense of Peirce's use of Scotus, see Murray G. Murphey, The Development of Peirce's Philosophy (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1993), ch. 4.
8. Hume obviously realized that adherence to his own ("official") notion of numerical identity (which meant that the least change in quality entails a violation of identity) would make discourse utterly impossible. In this and in other important respects, Hume regularly falls back to some informal, more interesting account that cannot be reconciled with empiricism in any straightforward way (primarily because it involves some associative practice that is not itself explicable in empiricist terms). Here, Hume is clearly intrigued by the problem of individuation as distinct from that of numerical identity and reidentification. I find the distinction largely ignored in recent analytic philosophy, doubtless for reasons of a Fregean sort. See David Hume, A Treatise of Human
Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon, 1888), especially bk. I, pt. iv. Compare P. F. Strawson, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (London: Metheun, 1959); also, David Wiggins, Sameness and Substance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980). Wiggins, incidentally, correctly regards haecceitas as an "absurd idea."
9. The theorem and its elaboration in part II of this Primer are largely my own construction. I know of no sustained analysis of cultural phenomena along similar lines. For further details, see Joseph Margolis, The Flux of History and the Flux of Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), Interpretation Radical But Not Unruly (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), and Culture and Cultural Entities (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1984). Nicholas Wolterstorff, Works and Worlds of Art (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), favors platonism. Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Objects, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), fails to distinguish effectively between nature and culture. Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), construes the cultural, at least implicitly, as nothing more than a rhetorical projection. These three are the closest alternative proposals for a metaphysics of culture. It is worth noting that the most sustained interest in the question appears in the philosophy of art.
10. I cannot resist reporting a conversation, probably in the very early 1970s, with Peter Geach. I offered him the Lucy Westenra story, which he took to be incoherent—essentially, I judged, because of his adherence to a Thomist metaphysics. My frank impression was that he was unable to identify the reason for the incoherence he alleged. I was surprised and delighted to discover, however, that Norris Clarke, then-editor of the International Philosophical Quarterly, found my account of Dracula instructive about the triune nature of God! Clarke was kind enough to publish an early paper of mine on the topic, "Dracula the Man," vol. 4 (1964), a distant intuition of the theorems being developed—to which he then appended his own paper on the trinity! I regard his gesture as a mark of a rather startling philosophical generosity.
11. Bernard Williams presses the equivalence largely against Strawson's inadequate distinction between persons and bodies. See Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971). But Williams fails to consider any alternative possibilities for individuating persons (as distinct from bodies): he does not, for instance, consider the import of different histories, and he treats what appears to be a minor or ill-formed objection (having to do with supposed reincarnation) as sufficient (without a full argument) for disallowing any metaphysical distinction between persons and bodies (that manage to avoid invoking dualism). Much more is clearly needed. Williams does not pursue the matter further.
12. Frege makes no provision for managing the problem of individuating the Morning Star and the Evening Star. Yet his discussion of the numerical identity of the "two" presupposes some resolution. See Frege, "On Sense and Reference." Regarding Leibniz's principle of the identity of indiscernibles, Bertrand Russell offers an extended discussion of notable clarity. See Russell, A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz . Russell explicitly remarks that, in Leibniz's fifth letter to Clarke, that principle is deduced with the aid of the
principle of sufficient reason; also, that Leibniz treats the (first) principle sometimes as contingent, sometimes as necessary, sometimes in epistemological terms, sometimes in metaphysical terms. Even more interestingly, Leibniz is clearly aware of complications that are due to intentional contexts. Among theoretical identities, however, Leibnizian strategies are outflanked since ("same-level") indiscernibilities are not at issue. The usual discussions are hardly satisfactory. See, for instance, J. J. C. Smart, "Sensations and Brains Processes," rev., in V. C. Chappell (ed.), The Philosophy of Mind (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1962); and Jerry A. Fodor, Psychological Explanation: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Psychology (New York: Random House, 1968).
13. Bell's theorems are expressed in the language of classical mechanics. They confirm irresolvable paradoxes in the standard "ontology" of classical physics. At the present time, quantum physics has no legible "ontology" though its formal structure apparently accommodates, without risking paradox, the observations and predictions of standard physics. The technical issues are beyond my competence. For a sample of the discussion of the philosophical issues, see Bas C. van Fraassen, Quantum Mechanics: An Empiricist View (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991); Henry Krips, The Metaphysics of Quantum Theory (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987); Arthur Fine, The Shaky Game; Einstein, Realism, and the Quantum Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); and David Z. Albert, Quantum Mechanics and Experience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
14. I refer (once again) to Heidegger's excessively glib, philosophically disastrous "turning" in his relatively late essay, "Letter on Humanism." There, Heidegger undoes in a completely arbitrary way the strongest feature of Being and Time: by making Sein "speak" to Dasein by a kind of revelation not qualified in any way by the conceptual constraints originating from (human) Dasein . The result repudiates Kantian, post-Kantian, and Husserlian conceptions, which were very much in evidence in Being and Time . Literally, only a seer (Hölderlin or Hitler) could thereupon continue to do philosophy (or whatever rightly succeeds it).
15. A very telling example (touched on earlier) appears in Salmon, Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World . Salmon appeals to Aristotle's Posterior Analytics in order to secure what he regards as the requisite sense of nomic universality—otherwise at intolerable risk, conceptually. I take this to betray the weakness of the unity of science program. Salmon was much influenced by Hans Reichenbach, but he feared that Reichenbach's own attempt to ensure nomic necessity (by way of the logic of probability) would ultimately prove insufficient for rescuing scientific realism! More recent theorists are quite prepared to repudiate ontic readings of nomic necessity and even the need for them. See, for instance, Nancy Cartwright, How the Laws of Physics Lie (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983); and Bas C. Van Fraassen, Laws and Symmetry (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989). Related doubts may be found in Ian Hacking and Arthur Fine. (See note 13, above.) For a sense of Reichenbach's theory, see Hans Reichenbach, Laws, Modalities, and Counterfactuals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976).
16. There is no way to ensure the reidentification of theoretical entities
(which we take to be real) except intentionally, by appeal to a principle of charity or by way of theorizing economies. The only ground on which more would be possible presupposes the validity of something like the unity of science program itself. I have already argued that the reidentification of perceivable entities cannot fail to be informal and that nomic necessity is indemonstrable. I take this to be the basis for Putnam's rejection of any principled confidence in the reidentifiability of theoretical entities. In Meaning and the Moral Sciences, Putnam strongly favored reidentifiability—in the company of Richard Boyd. His change of mind has been dramatic. It was, in any case, required by (his) "internal realism": that is, by his rejection of externalism. See, for instance, Putnam, The Many Faces of Realism . The change of view is noted in Lecture II. (I don't know whether Boyd ever published the paper to which Putnam refers.)
17. On my reading, Kant is (in the first Critique ) a constructivist but not a "social constructivist." That is, he does not treat the constructed nature of the phenomenal world in a lebensformlich way. He draws (illicitly, I should say) what would have been the social dimension from the supposed species-specific (solipsistic) powers of each individual's understanding. Precisely the same difficulty appears in Husserl, despite Husserl's critique of Kant. The difficulty is transparent in Husserl; it is much more innocently muffled in Kant. See, for instance, Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, Fifth Meditation.
Chapter VIII Legitimation
1. There is a straightforward explication of the notion in Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy . It is, I may say, entirely neutral to the fortunes of Husserl's own philosophical program—which, however, exploits the point (dubiously) in the service of neutralizing the import of historical and cultural divergence.
2. The theorem catches up the essential theme of poststructuralist criticism (e.g., of totalizing, certainty, privilege, the originary) that has now entrenched itself in more positive philosophies. (The explanation follows.) On the poststructuralist side, I find two principal currents: one, synchronic, largely against the "totalized" and "originary"; the other, historicist, largely concerned to confirm the profound contingency of thinking. The first is best illustrated in the work of Jacques Derrida, in, for instance, "Différance," and Speech and Phenomena and other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). The second is best illustrated in the work of Michel Foucault, in, for instance, his "archaeological" mode, in The Order of Things, and his "genealogical'' mode, in "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. David F. Bouchard, trans. David E. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), and Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977). The bare theme of poststructuralism—of l'autre, as I explain shortly—appears in various bizarre forms: in Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute; Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, n.d.), in which Levinas invokes l'autrui ; and Luce Irigaray, This Sex
Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter, with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). Let me offer, as a plausible target, at least one that is standard: French structuralism, as in the seminal account of Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Forms of Kinship, rev. ed., trans. James Harle Bell et al., ed. Rodney Needham (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969). Another, more meaningful to the analytically oriented but less accessible to the strategies of French poststructuralism is Rudolf Carnap's early The Logical Structure of the World, 2d ed., trans. Rolf A. George (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967); also, Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus . Lévi-Strauss speaks with assurance of an underlying, essentially unconscious, inclusive system of thinking, in which the laws of thought are identical with the laws of physical nature, relative to which all mental phenomena are generated. Carnap envisages an analysis of reality in terms of the ultimate constituents of all there is. Wittgenstein's notion, I should say, is more complicated—and, in a way, less convincing, since it sets a finite limit to what it analyzes, but it does not rightly explain how this fixed order fits into the "one" universe of discourse. I return to it below.
3. See Rudolf Carnap, "Psychology in Physical Language," trans. George Schick, in A. J. Ayer (ed.), Logical Positivism (Glencoe: Free Press, 1959).
4. The notion ( l'autrui ) is Levinas's, and is contrasted with l'autre, in Totality and Infinity . Although widely influential, the idea, I'm afraid, is incoherent. Levinas attempts to isolate l'autrui as "absolutely other" (Section One), that is, as altogether outside all ordinary referential and predicative discourse: beyond "ontology." But the fact is that l'autrui (the other—the other person ) cannot fail to be individuated and identified (in some face-to-face encounter), hence to implicate ordinary linguistic categories. L'autre, by contrast, is "ontological," " 'other' like the bread I eat." Derrida, whom Levinas profoundly influenced, is well aware of this difficulty in Levinas— and he avoids it in his own writing . See Jacques Derrida, "Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,'' Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
5. Perhaps the most explicit and most confident statement among the structuralists favoring a closed system with regard to both nature and linguistic phenomena appears in the glossematics of the Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, trans. Francis J. Whitfield, rev. ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961). I cannot help feeling that Chomsky's grammatical universals are no more than conceptually idle modal idealizations of empirically contingent regularities projected in accord with something like Hjelmslev's conviction. In our own time, possibly the best-known opponent of closed systems, with respect to physical nature ( a fortiori, cultural phenomena), is Prigogine. See Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature (New York: Bantam Books, 1984); also, Karl R. Popper, who subscribes to Prigogine's general outlook, in The Open Universe: An Argument for Indeterminism, ed. W. W. Bartley III (Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1982).
6. The theorem raises serious questions about the coherence of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, quite apart from the essential puzzle of the correspondence doctrine, which Wittgenstein abandoned. For the Tractatus is "totalized" in a
curious way: it divides the "universe" between what can be said in the Tractarian way and what cannot. That is, it affirms that everything that falls within the boundaries of the "world" of facts can be reported in Tractarian terms and that what cannot be thus cast ( which it identifies ) cannot belong among the facts. (See Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus .) On the affirmative side, the most ambitious modern philosophical vision accommodating (something like) the distinction between the constative and the mythic appears in Martin Heidegger, Being and Time . On my reading, this is what Heidegger should have meant in introducing the model of Sein and Dasein . He does not, however—or at least he does not do so consistently. He distinguishes between the "ontic" and the "ontological" and treats both discursively, in spite of the fact that it was his intention to call all essentialized metaphysics into question. In effect, he ends by entrenching a new metaphysics, which, despite his scruple (about the ''ontological"), instantiates what he himself intended to undermine. The same, I might say, holds for Husserl—his mentor—in calling Cartesian and Kantian thought into question: except that the irony dawned on Heidegger (but not, apparently, on Husserl). You have only to read Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, particularly the Fifth Meditation, where Husserl combats the charge of solipsism.
7. See Ruth G. Millikan, Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984), for a specimen of current naturalistic treatments of norms. The issue is not altogether clearly understood by either its defenders or its opponents. When, for instance, truth is regarded as normative or "regulative" (as Putnam insists, for instance in Reason, Truth and History ), analytic philosophers, writing in the spirit of Quine's "Epistemology Naturalized," in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), either believe that norms may be psychologized or biologized (or dismissed in favor of causal accounts) or believe that legitimative questions are of no concern at all. But it may be argued that just as questions of truth, which are normative in first-order discourse, implicate second-order legitimative questions (which are also normative), so, too, any norms that are naturalized in first-order discourse implicate (further) legitimative questions that have not (yet) been shown to be naturalizable as well. (I believe they cannot be.) Putnam sometimes speaks as if the issue at stake was that of merely naturalizing norms, but that's not true.
8. I take this to be the essential theme of Michel Foucault's "genealogical" perception of his own "archaeological" writings, incipient for instance in The Order of Things . It explains, therefore, the sense in which (8.16)-(8.17) capture the poststructuralist thesis, without disallowing the historicized appearance of modal necessity. To grasp the point is to appreciate the importance of Foucault's fundamental intuition, which, against his own practice, may be straightforwardly recovered. The genealogical account is sketched—never fully explicated—in Foucault's Power/Knowledge . I may perhaps add, for clarification, that poststructuralism (in the sense in which Foucault is an exemplar) is diagonally most opposed to the notion of "modernity" as it appears, for instance, in Habermas. The point of conflict concerns "totalizing" and its bearing on presumptions of exceptionless universality—hence, on the powers of theoretical
and practical reason. See, for the contrast, Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987).
9. Progressivism is simply totalizing cast as a historical achievement. This is the common failing in Peirce's "long run," Popper's "verisimilitude," Lakatos's "research programs," and Habermas's "dialogic" rationality. Compare Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 5; Karl R. Popper, Realism and the Aim of Science; Imre Lakatos, "Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programs,'' in Philosophical Papers, ed. John Worrall and Gregory Currie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), vol. 1; and Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols., trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984, 1987). It is worth remarking that "progressivism" in science and moral and political contexts is indistinguishable, logically, for pragmatists (in effect, Peirceans and Deweyans). The key is this: both inductivism and falsificationism (Kuhn, Lakatos, Popper) and "dialogic" self-correction (Habermas) are thought to be "fallibilist." But fallibilism (in the strict sense) requires: (a) a teleologism along progressivist lines; (b) an invariant cognitive competence—reason—suited to theoretical and practical matters or, at least, a uniquely teleologized evolution of reason; and (c) grounds for believing that objectivity = epistemic neutrality. Liberalism in morality and politics is the upshot in practical terms (Habermas, Putnam, Rawls, Dworkin, and likeminded thinkers) of assuming the validity of fallibilism. By now, that is a very dubious assumption. I touch on the issue again in chapter 11. But it should be clear that symbiosis and historicity are incompatible with fallibilism.
10. I use the term more or less in Gadamer's sense, without commitment to his own themes of authenticity, the universal poet's voice, the "classical," the scaled-down adherence to Heidegger's conceptual orientation, or anything of the kind. I believe Gadamer affords a plausible sense in which the human world is historicized, without any temptation toward the teleologized, the apodictic, the necessarily invariant, or any of the other baggage of the archic orientation. The term appears also in Husserl, but Husserl is ultimately unable to come to terms with the open-ended nature of history. See Gadamer, Truth and Method, and Gadamer's effective critique of Habermas's opposed (ultimately, ahistorical) view, in "On the Scope and Function of Hermeneutical Reflection," trans. G. B. Hess and R. E. Palmer, in Philosophical Hermeneutics, ed. and trans. David G. Linge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). For a sense of Husserl's failed attempt to come to terms with the historical nature of human existence (partly, it seems, provoked by Max Weber's work), see Husserl, The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology . There is a very telling discussion, by Merleau-Ponty, of a letter Husserl wrote to the anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, which suggests that Husserl may have sensed the futility of a phenomenology that ignored its historical sources. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "The Philosopher and Sociology," in Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964). My sense is that if he had come to terms with what he took Lévy-Bruhl to have discovered about the "savage mind"—in effect, the historical variability of conceptual orientations—Husserl would have had to abandon all of his principal writings and yield in a
direction that would have brought him closer not only to Merleau-Ponty (and even Heidegger) but, strange as it may seem, to Foucault. I regard Husserl as a heroically failed figure, who returns again and again to recover the apodictic possibilities of phenomenology without ever making the decisive move that would have called his entire project into question. For an illuminating overview of Husserl's labor in pertinent respects, see Gail Soffer, Husserl and the Question of Relativism (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991).
11. I use the term in a sense very close to that favored by Michael Polanyi, in Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), without subscribing to Polanyi's theory of science. I may say that Polanyi's usage very much influenced Kuhn's theory. See Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; also, Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Garden City: Doubleday, 1966).
12. I take the denial of incommensurabilities to be tantamount to claiming that we have at our disposal a conceptually neutral language by which to mediate among all interpretively prejudiced or perspectived theories. The strongest and best-known opponent of conceptual incommensurabilities, among analytic philosophers, is surely Donald Davidson. His objections belong to the conjoint claims of "The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme," in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), and "A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge." Theorem (8.43) is specifically directed against Davidson's thesis in "The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.'' I must say, I know of no supporter of incommensurability (among those Davidson either mentions or is likely to have had in mind) who holds the view he ascribes to its advocates: that is, that incommensurability = unintelligibility = untranslatability. It cannot be found, for instance, in B. F. Whorf, "The Punctual and Segmentative Analysis of Verbs in Hopi," in Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, ed. J. B. Carroll (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1956); or T. S. Kuhn, "Reflections on My Critics," in Criticism and Growth of Knowledge, ed. Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); or Paul Feyerabend, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge (London: Verso, 1978). (Davidson mentions these sources.) A very plausible defense of incommensurability (much maligned and scandalously misread) is offered by Peter Winch, in "Understanding a Primitive Society," American Philosophical Quarterly 1 (1964), and in The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958). See, also, Ian Hacking, "Language, Truth and Reason," in Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes (eds.), Rationality and Relativism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982). For what has become the usual reaction to Winch, see Alasdair MacIntyre, Against the Self-Images of the Age: Essays on Ideology and Philosophy (London: Duckworth, 1971), ch. 19. I would be negligent if I did not say straight out that Davidson's "The Very Idea" utterly misrepresents the incommensurability issue; also, that the presumption of a neutral language there indicated (which looks very much like an insistence on its modal necessity) is fleshed out in the "Coherence Theory" paper but is nowhere supported by way of a sustained argument. I find this extraordinary, given the unusual influence this pair of papers has exerted on recent American philosophy. As far as I am aware, there is no
successful demonstration (a) that there must be a neutral language, (b) that we must assume that there is, (c) that we possess a neutral language, (d) that we have compelling grounds for claiming to possess a neutral language, or (e) that the admission that we don't have, or don't know that we have, or can't demonstrate that we have, or must have, a neutral language entails the incoherence or paradoxicality of our epistemic claims.
13. Davidson invokes translatability in attacking the incommensurability thesis. He intends his charge mainly in the sense of invoking the necessity of a neutral language. This is the thesis of "The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme." But, of course, it also reminds one of the Positivists' fatal endorsement of the so-called verifiability theory of meaning. For the most balanced overview of the Positivists' attempt, see Carl G. Hempel, "Empiricist Criteria of Cognitive Significance" (together with the 1964 postscript). Beyond that, as far as I know, no one pretends to have successfully formulated a theory or criterion of translat ability . Certainly, no one denies that meaningful expressions can be translated, but then, there are no compelling arguments to show that incommensurable distinctions are not also open to translation! Not only that, they are open to having their local incommensurabilities resolved! But that is hardly to say that conceptual incommensurability can be retired in principle, or that we possess a viable sense of the conditions of translatability, or that we can legitimately claim to possess a neutral language.
14. Foucault clearly has the antimony in mind, but he is not disposed to formulate it in just those terms. See, however, his "Two Lectures," in Power/Knowledge .
15. This is the key to (8.53). The point holds for both Wittgensteinian Lebensformen and for historicized analogues: for instance, Gadamerian horizons and Foucauldian epistemes . Any retreat leads directly back to archic privilege. In the Marxist literature, for instance, it leads directly to the Stalinist extreme of Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: NCB, 1977), particularly "Marxism and Humanism."
16. The ultimate objection to naturalistic epistemologies is that they are question-begging. The appeal to the fruits of a scientific study of knowledge (Goldman) or to science's being the paradigm of rational success with regard to knowledge (Kitcher) are simply circular. See Goldman, Liaisons, particularly "Epistemic Folkways and Scientific Epistemology"; and Philip Kitcher, The Advancement of Science: Science without Legend, Objectivity without Illusions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); and note 26 (regarding Duhem), p. 355.
17. This is one of the more fashionable doctrines of the newly naturalized epistemologies that (admirably) do not avoid admitting that ascriptions of knowledge are normative. In fact, such accounts often introduce epistemic "virtues." But you will look in vain for a detailed demonstration of how the argument works in real-life contexts. See, for instance, Goldman, Liaisons . There is an obvious circularity in the program, for the legitimation of what is to count as knowledge or "reliabilized" belief of the right sort cannot be rendered in causal terms, unless derivatively. The matter had already been attempted (without evident success) by the new sociologists of knowledge. See, for instance,
David C. Bloor, Knowledge and Social Inquiry (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976).
Chapter IX Change and History
1. For a recent overview of the problem of history, see Margolis, The Flux of History and the Flux of Science .
2. Pared down to essentials, the key figures here are Fichte and Hegel (defining the trajectory of post-Kantian idealism) and Foucault and Dewey (as fair specimens of contemporary post-Hegelian historicism). For a sense of Fichte's "subject-centered" theory, however unsatisfactorily articulated, see Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Science of Knowledge, ed. and trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Hegel's view is centered in the Phenomenology, of course; See his Phenomenology of Spirit . But see, also, the discussion of Fichte in G. W. F. Hegel, The Difference between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy, trans. H. S. Harris and Walter Cerf (Albany: SUNY Press, 1977). For a sense of Foucault's thesis, see Michel Foucault, "Two Lectures." It is difficult to find a short account of Dewey's Hegelian heritage. In fact, the issue is hardly developed in the "appreciative" literature. For a sense of this, see R. W. Sleeper, The Necessity of Pragmatism: John Dewey's Conception of Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); and Paul Arthur Schlipp (ed.), The Philosophy of John Dewey, 2d ed. (New York: Tudor Publishing Co., 1951).
3. For contemporary resumés of Brentano's and Husserl's views of intentionality, see (on Brentano) Roderick M. Chisholm, Perceiving A Philosophical Study (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1957), ch. 11; and Linda L. McAlister (ed.) The Philosophy of Brentano (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1976); and (on Husserl) Jitendra Nath Mohanty, The Concept of Intentionality (St. Louis: Warren H. Green, 1972); and Hubert L. Dreyfus (ed.), with Harrison Hall, Husserl, Intentionality, and Cognitive Science (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984). The most sustained recent attempt in the analytic literature to recover intentionality appears in John R. Searle, Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), which is, in principle, also solipsistic. The odd thing is that what I call the "Intentional" (marking the term by a typographical distinction) is, of course, commonplace in modern hermeneutics, both pre-Heideggerean (as in Dilthey) and post-Heideggeran (as in Gadamer), except that it is almost never brought into close accord with the debate about intentionality itself. See Rudolf A. Makkreel, Dilthey: Philosopher of the Human Studies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), ch. 7. See, also, Gadamer, Truth and Method, second part, § 2; and Joel C. Weinsheimer, Gadamer's Hermeneutics: A Reading of Truth and Method (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). The same, I should say, is true of Wittgenstein. See his Philosophical Investigations . I find it quite curious that Wittgenstein's emphasis on the collective aspects of Lebensformen should have been as widely ignored by his admirers as by his detractors. The theme (of intentionality) is much less explicit in Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, but it is surely there. It is also present in Dewey but, again, in a muted
form. See Sleeper, The Necessity of Pragmatism, ch. 5. For a sense of Ranke's version of historicism, see Leopold von Ranke, The Theory of Practice of History, ed. Georg Iggers and Konrad von Moltke, trans. Wilma A. Iggers and Konrad von Moltke (New York: Irvington Publishers, 1983).
4. I take Chomsky to hold one of the most extreme forms of solipsism, namely, nativism or innatism, the doctrine that our cognitive (in particular, our linguistic) capacities are, initially and in a profound sense, genetically determined, fixed in a species-specific way. Chomsky advances his claim on the grounds that there is no other option that is viable. But he nowhere explains how natural language is empirically acquired or how our innate competence is actually triggered among infants—or even how we function epistemically as apt linguistic agents . He offers no sustained account of the actual process of "acquiring" a first language in terms of the utterances of learning children. Characteristically, he offers idealized specimen sentences, taken atomically, as instantiating his grammatical theory and as (somehow) capturing the process of initial human speech. See, for instance, Noam Chomsky, Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin and Use (New York: Praeger, 1986). In a way, all this has been anticipated by Kant, as the letter to Herz (mentioned earlier) makes clear.
5. A very large part of Lévi-Strauss's polemical work has been taken up with opposing any and all forms of historicism, notably in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre. But Lévi-Strauss never explains the grounds on which he projects a timeless or transhistorically valid model of rationality. This is a point of considerable importance in assessing the plausibility of structuralism. As far as I can see, the thesis is entirely arbitrary. It leads directly to a descriptive deformation of the empirical facts about different societies. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), ch. 9, and The Elementary Forms of Kinship . Although (and with justice) Chomsky cannot be called a structuralist, his nativism is subject to the same large criticisms that can be brought against Lévi-Strauss. For an "exasperated" (original term), often naive, certainly unguarded, more or less "Wittgensteinian," nevertheless useful, and thoroughly charming critique of Chomsky's sense of linguistic system, see Ian Robinson, The New Grammarians' Funeral: A Critique of Noam Chomsky's Linguistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). For a critique (of an altogether different sort) of Chomsky's conception of a "generative grammar"—that is, an algorithm-driven system of sentences, even if denumerably infinite—see D. Terence Langedoen and Paul M. Postal, The Vastness of Natural Languages (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984). See, also, Terry Winograd, Understanding Natural Language (New York: Academic Press, 1977).
6. If selves or subjects and the artifacts of their cultural world are construed in realist terms—and there is no viable argument by which a realism of selves (ourselves) can be denied—then, arguably, it is impossible to deny a realist reading of the Intentional features of artworks, languages, artifacts, and actions. That is an extremely powerful finding. Its denial leads directly to a profound incoherence. Danto professes to treat art, history, and action "rhetorically" (that is, not in realist terms), even though, quite obviously, he treats selves, human
persons, as real enough. I am persuaded that this leads to unresolvable paradox. See, for instance, Arthur C. Danto, "The Artworld," Journal of Philosophy 61 (1964), The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, and Narration and Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
7. Davidson's thesis (the two notions are not quite the same) appears in Donald Davidson, "Mental Events," Essays on Events and Actions (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980). This single paper has enjoyed the most remarkable reputation and has exerted an equally remarkable influence. It is, without doubt, one of a very small number of key papers that give a sense of direction to naturalistic philosophies of mind. It offers a fairly ample account of "anomalous monism" (in effect, nonreductive physicism) but no more than a sketch of "supervenience" (which has now eclipsed the other, among naturalists). But anomalous monism is inconsistent, and supervenience is arbitrary and undefended. It is also true that the "supervenientists" regularly assume that Moore's account of ''good" as a non-natural quality somehow introduced the supervenience thesis. That is a flat mistake, for, although Moore surely did believe that good depended on natural properties, he nowhere says (and I think he would never have said) that there was a determinate entailment relation between particular natural and nonnatural properties. But if not, then Moore's argument cannot help the naturalist and is (in fact) opposed to naturalism. See G. E. Moore, "Reply to My Critics," The Philosophy of G. E. Moore, 2d ed., ed. Paul Arthur Schlipp (New York: Tudor Publishing Co., 1952). See, for a clear sense of the supervenientists' tendency to depart from Moore's thesis—which Davidson plainly shares—Jaegwon Kim, Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
8. I have heard Feigl speak of the principle, but have not found it laid out in any text. It is plainly implicated, however, in Herbert Feigl, The "Mental" and the "Physical": The Essay and a Postscript (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1967).
9. Popper believes that there are laws of nature, but, he thinks, nature is fathomless for humans. They cannot directly discern any asymptotic approximation to progressively improved formulations of the laws of nature (inductivism). Nevertheless, we do have rational strategies by which we can judge the "verisimilitude" of the would-be laws we formulate. I believe (and have some evidence) that Popper was influenced by Peirce in a general way. But Peirce's optimism about the "long run" is frankly teleologized, whereas Popper pretends that verisimilitude can be defended on rational or methodological grounds that need not rely on any teleologism. I find the argument unconvincing. See Karl R. Popper, "Two Faces of Common Sense: An Argument for Commonsense Realism and Against the Commonsense Theory of Knowledge," in Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), and, also, Realism and the Aim of Science, particularly ch. 1. The Realism book is one of three that, together, comprise Postscript to the Logic of Scientific Discovery (1983, 1982, 1982). I take them to be largely committed (by somewhat different routes) to the defense of "absolute truth" as a "regulative idea" ( verisimilitude ). I have, I should add, already mentioned selected current views that call the realism of nomic invariance into question. On Popper's view of history, see Karl
R. Popper, The Poverty of Historicism, 3d ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1960).
10. I should say that, among contemporary philosophers of the physical sciences, Feyerabend subscribed most completely to this theorem, in spite of the fact that he also strongly favored a form of eliminative physicalism. The truth is, he viewed eliminativism as a project for the dim future. See Paul K. Feyerabend, Against Method, and Philosophical Papers, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
11. This goes against eliminativist (physicalist) tendencies in current philosophies of mind. As far as I can see, they are entirely undefended and utopian. Feyerabend, I have just noted, was frank enough to push the need to muster arguments in favor of its denial into a very remote future. The same is true of Stephen P. Stich, From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science: The Case Against Belief (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983). The same is true, for all its bluster, in Paul M. Churchland, A Neurocomputational Perspective: The Nature of Mind and the Structure of Science (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989). I cannot find a single specifiable argument in support of any of these accounts, except the bare claim that the "folk-theoretic" view must be mistaken. The same (physicalist) point had been made years ago by J. J. C. Smart, Philosophy and Scientific Realism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963). But Smart had the "advantage" that the unity of science seemed (then) to be in the ascendent. That is no longer true.
12. The most extreme statement of eliminationism in the context of the unity of science program is the one offered in Wilfrid Sellars, "The Language of Theories," in Science, Perception and Reality (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963).
13. There is of course no single canonical "picture." For a sample of the spirit of the unity program, see the first three volumes of the Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956, 1958, 1962), edited by Herbert Feigl and his associates. For an inordinately optimistic version of that picture (or something akin to it), see Mario Bunge, "Emergence and the Mind," Neuroscience 11 (1972), and "Levels and Reduction," American Journal of Physiology 103 (1977). The unity theorists and their allies have been much occupied with the problem of emergence in nature—reaching of course to the mental and the cultural—in terms of its reconcilability with a strict methodological canon. My own emphasis is, precisely, on the methodological discontinuity entailed by the admission of Intentionality. In effect, Peirce precludes any such admission—not for the unity theorist's reasons but—by adhering to his doctrine of ''objective" Thirdness (which obtains independently of the constituting work of human inquiry). Peirce's "cosmic mind" falls away from the post-Kantian constraint, but its evolutionism is obviously dated.
14. An extremely clear sense of the puzzles involving extensions and intensions—in sense (ii)—once we depart from something like Aristotle's archism is offered in Putnam's papers on semantics. See Hilary Putnam, Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Cambridge: University Press, 1975).
15. For a sense of Kant's treatment of history, see Yirmiahu Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).
16. The whole thrust of Positivism, the unity of science program, and naturalism is to insist that it is unreasonable to construe the phenomena of the cultural world as not analyzable, ontically or epistemically—hence, also, conceptually or methodologically—in the non-Intentional terms thought to be apt for the physical sciences. For a somewhat overly optimistic (but revealing) specimen, see Smart, Philosophy and Scientific Realism . To press the point, I cannot see any fundamental difference in outlook, although I admit local refinements and variations, in the more recent specimen offered in D. C. Dennett, Content and Consciousness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969).
17. For doubts about the standard interpretation, see Lilli Alanen, Studies in Cartesian Epistemology and Philosophy of Mind, Acta Philosophica Fennica 28 (1982), and "On Descartes's Argument for Dualism, and the Distinction between Different Kinds of Beings," in S. Knuutila and J. Hintikka (eds.), The Logic of Being (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1986).
18. Although modern atomic (and subatomic) theory is utterly unlike the original "atomic" theory of Democritus, there is much that links them still. Democritus, of course, meant his atoms (indivisible entities) to be construed literally as such. Hence, on Democritus's view, all perceptible change in nature is to be explained in terms of the combination of unalterable and impenetrable (ultimate) atoms and the distinction between the perceptual appearance of any combination of atoms and what combinations actually obtain at the atomic "level." Modern cosmologies have been forced to concede that subatomic structures (as presently conceived) cannot be ultimate, but it is clear that the search for microtheoretical entities is still largely motivated by the dream of capturing the ultimate compositional elements of physical nature. The present state of quantum physics has proved particularly baffling. I mention some specimen discussions in the notes in chapter 9. The plot gets much thicker. Quite a number of theorists, who oppose the optimistic physicalism of the unity of science model, nevertheless do believe that a unity can be recovered. Some of these have been led to believe that there must be a deeper connection between quantum physics and the structure of the mind. I have never found these accounts convincing, although I see the motivation for them. But then, I have never found the unity of science model convincing either. For specimens, see Roger Penrose, The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); and Michael Lockwood, Mind, Brain and the Quantum: The Compound 'I' (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). The general strategy of these very different books is to urge us to appreciate the puzzling complexity of matter —which is, after all, a refreshing change. For a rather revealing set of reflections on the part of David Bohm, who has surely had as much as anyone to do with the attempt to link the mind/body problem to our interpretation of quantum physics, see David Bohm and F. David Peat, Science, Order, and Creativity (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1987). My sense is that these accounts tend to confuse the requirements of symbiosis with the dream of a unified science.
19. The doctrine is the unfortunate consequence of attempting to treat, within the terms of a Fregean or Russellian logic, the analysis of particulars essentially in predicative terms. Hence, it is attracted to a kind of Platonism (as
in Russell), in that a "particular" is construed in terms of the site of a "bare particular" at which universals somehow are present. See, for instance, Edwin Allaire, "Bare Particulars," Philosophical Studies 16 (1963). The thesis is the result of trying to conform with certain of Russell's constraints without adhering to Russell's views about their import for knowledge "by acquaintance." See Gustav Bergmann, "Russell on Particulars,'' Philosophical Review 56 (1947).
20. It is a curious but undeniable fact that physicalists often agree, despite rejecting dualism, that dualism offers the only (or very nearly the only) serious alternative to physicalism itself. There's no doubt, for instance, that that supposition motivates the accounts of Churchland and Parfit. See, for instance, Churchland, A Neurocomputational Perspective; and Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984). The confusion is palpable in Parfit, for, in one of the earliest of his papers leading to Reasons and Persons, Parfit actually conjectures that the issues of the numerical identity of persons may be retired in favor of certain predicative continuities. See Derek Parfit, "Personal Identity," Philosophical Review 80 (1971). But of course that deprives the predicative issue of any determinate application and leads (if psychological attributes are still to be invoked) to what Strawson calls (and criticizes as) the "no-ownership theory." See P. F. Strawson, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (London: Methuen, 1959). In any case, there's no point to debating dualism and reductionism without a firm commitment to the logic of reference and predication. Something similar (to Parfit's difficulty) appears in Dennett's Content and Consciousness, for Dennett, too, believes that the concept of persons can be retired. In principle, this would require that intentional predicates be "reduced" in some suitable way so that their replacements could be predicated of (non-Intentionally qualified) physical or biological entities. Dennett nowhere provides the required account. In fact, he has tried, more recently, to enrich the language of intentionality. See Daniel C. Dennett, The Intentional Stance (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), and Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991). But the original intent is plainly still in play. Parfit's is more problematic, because Parfit does not broach any explicit, comparable reduction.
21. Strawson's very promising intuition about the difference between persons and physical bodies was spoiled, I believe, by his implicit adherence to a "dualism" of mental and physical properties. See Strawson, Individuals . This explains the ease with which Bernard Williams was able to show that Strawson had not satisfactorily distinguished his account from the dualism he wished to avoid. See Williams, Problems of the Self . If I am right in this, then the only conceptual option that respects the realism of the mental, the avoidance of dualism and reductionism, is the one I propose: that is, the view that the mental is "complex." To enrich the notion for what else is needed, I say that one must also construe the mental as Intentional, historicized, constructed. But the key maneuver rests with admitting the (cultural) emergence of the "complex."
22. I offer a short overview of the various relevant strategies of emergence in "Emergence and the Unity of Science," in my Science without Unity: Reconciling the Human and Natural Sciences (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987).
23. For a clear sense of the problem of reductionism and of distinguishing between the physical and the biological, see Marjorie Grene and Everett Men-
delsohn (eds.), Topics in the Philosophy of Biology (Dordrecht: D. Reide, 1976), especially parts II-III. For a very fair-minded recent overview, favoring (nevertheless) what he calls "the general redirection-replacement model," see Kenneth F. Schaffner, Discovery and Explanation in Biology and Medicine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), particularly ch. 9.
24. For a sample of the sense in which the "functional" is invoked in biological and related contexts, see Larry Wright, Teleological Explanation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976). The most sustained (relatively early) discussion of functional explanations occurs, I believe, in Charles Taylor, The Explanation of Behaviour (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964). (Taylor's work influenced Wright. Schaffner reviews the critical literature.) See, also, Marjorie Grene, The Understanding of Nature: Essays in the Philosophy of Biology (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1974).
25. For a sense of the role of the "informational" in the development of contemporary genetic theory, see James D. Watson, Molecular Biology of the Gene, 2d ed. (Menlo Park: W. A. Benjamin, 1970). You cannot fail to see that the philosophical issue is nowhere present. The most recent sustained philosophical application (that I know) of the "informational" in ontic and epistemic terms congenial to analytic philosophy may be found in Fred I. Dretske, Knowledge and the Flow of Information (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981). It is, I think, wedded too obviously to notions of nomological necessity, which are not independently defended.
26. Broadly speaking, this is the gist of Millikan's strategy. See Millikan, Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories . The strategy works wherever the function is merely heuristic or emergent in the way of biological phenomena. For a sense, for instance, of the "homeostatic," see Ernest Nagel, The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1979), ch. 12. It's only when the normative specifically implicates the Intentional that the naturalizing strategy fails. See, also, Allan Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).
27. See James J. Gibson, The Senses Considered As Perceptual Systems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), and The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979). Among philosophers, Fodor is one of the most determined of those who would oppose "meaning holism" ( a fortiori, the holism of models of rationality) and, as a result, the conceptual (necessary) linkage between attributions of intentionality (and information) and such holist models. See Jerry A. Fodor, A Theory of Content and Other Essays (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990).
28. The methodological complications of the theorem, or of the general admission of the reality of the cultural world, is amusingly and interestingly explored in Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). Dawkins seems to have become increasingly impressed with the promise of his model, although, of course, the constraints he favors (that is, cultural analogies with the "gene") are uncertain (that is, imposed without any independent analysis of the relevant cultural complexities: those of Intentionality). See
also Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).
29. One can, without difficulty, see that Popper and Danto converge, however remotely and with whatever difference in results, on the guidance of the unity of science program, at least as far as history is concerned. See Popper, The Poverty of Historicism; and Danto, Narrative and Knowledge .
30. It is not surprising that both Danto and Popper treat time univocally in the context of history and science. It is more surprising that Ricoeur does so as well, which actually generates insoluble paradoxes for his well-known account of history. Ricoeur cannot decide whether the narrative structure of history is real or merely rhetorical. Curiously, he seems to say that it is both! See Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), and The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies in the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny, with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello, S.J. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981).
31. I take it as symptomatic that neither Davidson's naturalism nor Rorty's postmodernism comes to terms with the antinomies. I cannot see how the antinomies can be responsibly dismissed. See, for instance, Donald Davidson, "A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge," and Richard Rorty, "Pragmatism, Davidson and Truth," both in Ernest LePore (ed.), Truth and Interpretation .
32. I am unaware of any sustained theory along these lines within analytic philosophy except my own. I have explored it in a number of places, usually linking the discussion of "incarnate" attributes with that of "embodied" entities (the latter topic to appear in the next chapter). For earlier discussions, see, for instance, Margolis, Culture and Cultural Entities, and Texts without Referents: Reconciling Science and Narrative (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989).
33. What is conceptually unique about the "culturally emergent" is, of course, that it is only at that "level" that epistemically competent reflection is at all possible; a fortiori, it is only at that level, conceding symbiosis, that the structure of physical nature itself can be discerned and specified as obtaining at a "lower" (or "prior") "level''—from which the cultural is itself emergent. That was the point of the "antinomy of ontic priority." But to admit cultural emergence as sui generis (since it is not reducible or explicable, causally, in terms of the generative powers of any known "lower-level" phenomena) is to admit a tacit, endogenous limitation in our explanatory powers. The admission of the culturally emergent is, therefore, tantamount to the defeat of the unity of science program. Interestingly, the matter never really surfaced in this form for the strong advocates of the program. They were fearful that the "mental" might be "emergent" in the sense that it could not be explained in terms of the nonmental. I take that to have been weakly prescient about the larger issue: the sense in which the mind/body problem turns out to be a special case of the culture/nature problem. It is certainly clear that the problem of emergence was central to the work of the unity program. See, for instance, Herbert Feigl, The "Mental" and the "Physical": The Essay and a Postscript (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1967); and Paul E. Meehl and Wilfrid Sellars, "The Concept of Emergence," in Herbert Feigl and Michael Seriven (eds.), Minnesota Studies in
the Philosophy of Science, vol. 1. (The volume is mentioned above for another reason.)
34. I have already cited Mario Bunge's views, above.
35. Paul Churchland is among the most energetic recent champions of the thesis ("eliminationism") that the folk-theoretic claim may be straightforwardly shown to be empirically false. I have not been able to find his argument (to that effect) anywhere, but I also have not found that he addresses the issues I have been collecting here. Frankly, I take that to be a sign of a certain failure to engage the relevant objections (which Churchland shares with a large company of like-minded theorists). See Churchland, A Neurocomputational Perspective, and Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). See, also, Patricia S. Churchland, Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Understanding of the Mind-Brain (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986).
Chapter X Mind and Culture
1. This is a remarkably strenuous issue, largely neglected by analytic philosophers (and others as well). I have already suggested that Chomsky gives the matter very scant attention, intruding in effect a sense of "knowledge" of the deep structure of language (that we are unaware of) as an extension or analogue of the "ordinary" sense of "know"—which he does not bother to analyze. This, the most interesting part of his theory philosophically, is nowhere explicitly defended, except to say that there is really no other alternative. Piaget, however, offers the sketch of an alternative that is not unreasonable in its general outlines, except that it is an eccentrically ''structuralist" alternative. There is a very revealing exchange between Chomsky and Piaget in a volume devoted to a debate between them, that exposes the arbitrariness of each. See Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (ed.), Language and Learning: The Debate Between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), particularly the opening papers by Piaget and Chomsky. On Piaget's view, see, also, Jean Piaget, Structuralism, trans. and edit. Chaninah Maschler (New York: Basic Books, 1970), which confirms that Piaget mysteriously supposed that the sequence of the developmental phases of our cognitional powers is somehow triggered by the external environment; Piaget, however, does not explain (Chomsky catches him out in this) why the developmental sequence is invariant. See, also, C. H. Waddington, The Strategy of the Genes: A Discussion of Some Aspects of Theoretical Biology (New York: Macmillan, 1920), and Evolution of an Evolutionist (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975). On his side, Piaget effectively challenges Chomsky's assumption that there is a determinate disjunction between what is "innate" and what is "acquired." Vygotsky criticizes the early Piaget in a telling way for the implicit solipsism of his account. See L. S. Vygotsky, Thought and Language, edit and trans. Eugenia Hanfman and Gertrude Vakar (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1962), ch. 2. In a rather subtle way, Jerome Bruner draws attention to the likelihood of prelinguistic socialized invariants on which first-language learning depends—which, if granted, could easily admit forms of grammatical regularity short of the invariances of a "universal gram-
mar" (a hard-wired, species-specific grammar, the full meaning of which is hardly clear)—given that there is no obvious way to account for "informational" invariances of the sort in question. For a glimpse of Chomsky's view, see Noam Chomsky, Rules and Representations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). On Bruner, see Jerome Bruner, Acts of Meaning (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), ch. 3.
2. An excellent recent specimen is provided in John R. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992). It obviously admits social phenomena in its account, but effectively construes social significance in terms of some prior psychological endowment, which is itself identified with the brain's mode of functioning. This is precisely what I call "solipsistic." There is no convincing way to generate the "social" or ''collective" (for instance, in terms of language) from solipsistic mental resources. Searle promises a new book on the "social character of the mind" but he does not acknowledge the "anthropomorphized" nature of his present speculations about consciousness. So he holds that the mental is a feature of the brain. At best, the present argument is premature. I should add that Husserl is, in my opinion, guilty of a similar mistake, although it is frankly never quite clear just how Husserl distinguishes between the "psychological" and the "subjective." He clearly means to absorb the social in the (subjective) work of transcendental phenomenology. But it is doubtful that he succeeds; if he had succeeded, he would not be able to disjoin the psychological and the subjective, and then the search for the apodictic would have been compromised. See Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, especially the Fifth Meditation. As I have already remarked, the generic version of this trick appears already in Kant's first Critique .
3. Fodor's indebtedness to Chomsky's conception is apparent in Jerry A. Fodor, The Language of Thought (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1975). See, also, Fodor's contribution, "On the Impossibility of Acquiring 'More Powerful' Structures," in Massimo Piartelli-Palmarini (ed.), Language and Learning, which confirms that the thread runs through all of Fodor's work. In effect, both Chomsky and Fodor are Platonists, who have interpreted "recollection" as genetic invariance with respect to "knowing."
4. I mean, by "equilibration," a theorizing strategy, not an epistemic source. For its more or less standard use, see Nelson Goodman, "The New Riddle of Induction," in Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, 2d ed. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965); and John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971).
5. The reference is to Thomas Nagel's well-known paper, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Nagel has made a complete about-face on the analysis of mind, but his query does not improve our sense of the question. The reason, plainly, is that only humans can know what it is like to be a bat! Humans may make empirical mistakes about the matter, as perhaps they do in wondering whether lobsters feel pain on being boiled alive. But only humans can correct their conjectures, by interpolating within a range of cases that are reasonably clear-cut. But if this holds for Nagel's conjecture, it holds as well for Chomsky's and Fodor's. The truth is, their conjectures presuppose (but nowhere establish) something like
Hjelmslev's doctrine: that is, that for the process of natural-language discourse there must be a closed generative system adequate to it. They do not show the modal necessity for such a supposition. Nor do they notice the "anthropomorphic" nature of their own speculation. See Hjelsmlev, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language . Searle is at his most effective, in The Rediscovery of the Mind, in combatting Chomsky.
6. The essential pivot of Gadamer's hermeneutics is directed against the so-called Romantic hermeneuts, who claimed that the objective rule for determining the meaning of a linguistic (or literary) utterance was the speaker's (or author's) intention (in the intuitive psychological sense). Gadamer's thesis is simply that speakers' intentions can be reclaimed only in a constructivist sense—from the vantage of our present reflexive practice—and hence, that that recovery is subject to two conditions: one, that "authorial intent" is a function of what, from our present vantage, we determine to be the intentional ethos or tradition within which relevant utterances are uttered; the other, that the meaning or significance of what is uttered is tacitly affected by our horizonal interests and sense of significance. The first condition implicates the historicity of discerning authorial intent; the second implicates the historicity of discerning the significance of whatever is designated in accord with the first. Together, they mark the joint play of what Gadamer calls Horizontverschmelzung (the fusion of horizons) and wirkungsgeschlichtliches Bewusstsein (effective-historical consciousness). Together, they deny the possibility of closure and uniquely correct interpretations under the terms of the hermeneutic circle. See Gadamer, Truth and Method . Gadamer's entire theory may be fairly construed as "post-Heideggerean," meaning both that Gadamer was specifically influenced by the theory of time and history offered in Heidegger's Being and Time, and that, as a consequence, Gadamer avoids metaphysical fixities (notably in the human sphere). The upshot is that Gadamer's theory, like Heidegger's, emphasizes questions of "authentic" existence rather than of methodological objectivity. This, however, leaves the question of objectivity unresolved but still relevant. Moreover, Gadamer's own themes require an answer that he nowhere supplies. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, "Interview: Historicism and Romanticism,'' in Hans-Georg Gadamer on Education, Poetry, and History, Applied Hermeneutics, ed. Dieter Misgeld and Graeme Nicholson, trans. Lawrence Schmidt and Monica Reuss (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992).
7. Rightly seen, the theorem is the essential pivot for the defeat of the entire classical tradition of epistemology: from Descartes and Locke, through Hume, through Kant, up to Husserl— a fortiori, to all the naturalisms of the twentieth century. For (10.9) signifies that any and all accounts of the solipsistic or species-wide resources of cognizing agents are projected from within the terms of our lebensformlich competence. Applied to Quine, for instance, it raises a question (which Quine never addresses) of why "analytical hypotheses" are not called into play in every cognitive claim, why there is an interval reserved for certain "stimulus-meaning" or "holophrastic" utterances that are not subject to the influence of "analytical hypotheses." See Quine, Word and Object and Pursuit of Truth . This may be all the reassurance Donald Davidson needed for his claims
in "A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge." There is a loose analogy here between Davidson's use of Quine and his use, elsewhere, of Tarski.
8. I cannot find any clear version of the theory of Forms in Plato's dialogues, and I cannot find clear evidence that Plato is committed to the theory of Forms. There's no question that he broaches the matter and appeals to myths involving the Forms. But I also cannot find any evidence that he repudiates the doctrine, or that Aristotle is mistaken in claiming that his own doctrine is closer to that of Socrates than is Plato's. See, for instance, Aristotle, Metaphysics . Aristotle says that Socrates "did not make the universals exist apart." By a similarly motivated reflection, I cannot see that Wittgenstein actually formulates his notion of Lebensformen sufficiently explicitly to answer relevant epistemic questions, although the clues he offers are more robust than Plato's with regard to the Forms. It would not take much to interpret Plato along lines not altogether distant from Wittgenstein's—if one cared. The conservative bent of Wittgenstein's thought is captured in J. C. Nyíri, Tradition and Individuality: Essays (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992).
9. The theorem draws attention, among other things, to two features of collective entities: one, that the (Intentional) predicables attributed to persons, artworks, and the like are, intrinsically, subject to changes due to historicity; another, that their "natures" are, accordingly, no more determinate than Intentional attributes can be. Notions like period style, for instance, are inherently informal. This bears on the fortunes of the various forms of hermeneutics. For an instant sense of the difference between the "semiotic" and "Romantic" views of style or genre, see Nelson Goodman, "The Status of Style," in Ways of World-making (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1978); and E. D. Hirsch Jr., Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967). Hirsch, in Appendix II, explicitly condemns Gadamer's "Heideggerean'' innovation. For Gadamer's use of "prejudice," see Gadamer, Truth and Method . To grasp the sense of (10.14) is to realize: (a) that the "nature" of any particular possessing collective, Intentional properties may be affected by pertinent changes in other particulars sharing similar properties (the "tragic" cast of Sophocles's Antigone may be affected by the later history of Shakespeare's Hamlet ); and (b) the cognitive competence of the individual members of the same society to understand one another is a function of their sharing a common Lebensform, in a sense that parallels the mutual interpretability of artworks possessing any of a range of associated genres or styles within a common cultural tradition. I have explored these connections further in my Interpretation Radical But Not Unruly . I should add, of course, that I certainly do not regard Goodman as a "Romantic" hermeneut; only that, like the Romantics, Goodman lacks a sense of historicity. (Goodman's theory is a kind of ahistorical semiotics.)
10. See Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Chatto and Windus, 1992), ch. 4. See, also Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche, Life as Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985).
11. I take the acquisition of a first language to be an empirical mystery. I cannot see how it can be analogized, as Chomsky does, to the acquisition of a second language. That is simply Platonism. The idea plays a large part in Chomsky's debate with Nelson Goodman and Hilary Putnam, for instance, who are
noticeably flat-footed in response to Chomsky. But the image is the wrong one, for, on Chomsky's own view, "universal grammar" (which is said to be innate) cannot function apart from the acquisition of a first language in the usual intuitive sense. Chomsky nowhere discusses that, and the supposed possession of a universal grammar is nowhere convincingly shown to function criterially with respect to the acquisition of a "natural" language. Wittgensteinian Lebensformen, on the other hand, bear only on the fait accompli, not on the process of the acquisition. See the symposium on Chomsky's "innateness hypothesis" in Synthese 17 (1967), to which Noam Chomsky, Nelson Goodman, and Hilary Putnam contributed.
12. For Bourdieu's use of the term, see Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980), and In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).
13. I find Marx unwaveringly clear—implicitly—about this theorem. It is the key both to the joke about "Robinsonades" and to the criticism of Pierre Joseph Proudhon. See Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolas (New York: Random House, 1973), Introduction. Marx's emphasis is invariably on the historicized nature of collectively enabled cognitive powers—what Marx clearly means by " praxis ." The term is Aristotle's, originally; also, Marx does not discuss the notion in a sustained and systematic way. For what seems to me to be the most convincing elaboration of what Marx may have had in mind, see Karel Kosík, Dialectics of the Concrete: A Study on Problems of Man and World, trans. Karel Kovanda and James Schmidt (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1976). Here you have the clue regarding my deformation of Wittgenstein's Lebensformen and Gadamer's horizonal sense of "tradition." For, of course, neither Wittgenstein nor Gadamer has anything to say about the dynamics of social history.
14. On the very different behaviorisms of Skinner and Pavlov, see B. F. Skinner, Science and Human Behavior (New York: Macmillan, 1953), and About Behaviorism (New York: Knopf, 1974); and I. P. Pavlov, Conditioned Reflexes, trans. G. V. Anrep (London: Humphrey Milford, 1927), and Lectures on Conditioned Reflexes, trans. W. H. Grant (New York: International Publishers, 1928). Of course, Pavlov is neither a reductionist nor an eliminativist regarding human minds or selves.
15. I draw attention, here, to two important themes: first, epistemology is inseparable from the metaphysics of persons; second, epistemology is inseparable from moral philosophy. Both are ignored in analytic philosophy. Within the terms of symbiosis, theorem (10.29) strengthens the artifactual standing of both truth-claims in general and claims of moral objectivity in particular. This is the consequence of conceding that knowing is inseparable from what we are able to do as agents . I take this to be the most abstract consequence of endorsing something like Marx's notion of praxis . The issue will occupy us in chapter 11. I may perhaps say that Rorty's pretense to restore historicity to philosophy is nowhere more transparent than in his advocacy of Davidson's ahistorical epistemology and in his disjunction between the private and public spheres of in-
terest among human agents. These moves are simply incoherent on the acceptance of anything like (10.29). See Richard Rorty, "Pragmatism, Davidson and Truth," and Contingency, Irony and Solidarity .
16. For a sense of various standard ways of distinguishing between the two, see Chisholm, Theory of Knowledge ; and Fred I. Dretske, Seeing and Knowing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969). I offer these as specimen views only. Chisholm's favors a foundationalism I cannot endorse, and Dretske's an externalism I cannot endorse.
17. Hume, who is a very likeable and ingenious philosopher, is almost never taken to task by his analytic admirers for the hopeless muddle that lies at the very heart of his theory. He offers his "official" account in terms of sensory "impressions" and "ideas," but, in doing so, he appeals to our sensibilities in discerning these . Now, Hume nowhere develops the issue of how to understand the continuous perceptual and cognitive competence of selves in virtue of which (alone) his entire argument makes sense. One might suppose Hume had missed the question in some way or other. But I know of no empiricist who has seriously considered the bearing of Hume's doctrine on the existence and nature of selves! (If anything, they typically—and wrongly—take Hume to deny that there are selves.) By parity of reasoning, I find most analytic accounts of perception and cognition (however they depart from empiricism) to neglect in general (unless they are out and out Kantian) a theory of selves as cogniscient agents apt for the perceptions attributed to them. In this sense, Hume's influence among analytic philosophers is "clinically" instructive. See Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature .
18. Causal accounts of perception and knowledge are very popular among analytic philosophers. Nevertheless, I know of no explicit, sustained, and convincing account that comes to terms with the ineliminable propositional element of cognitive states. Two points need to be stressed: one, to the effect that the admission of the propositional ingredient inevitably leads to the ineliminability of legitimative matters; the second, to the effect that naturalizing epistemology leads to a causal theory of perceptual (and similar sorts of) belief. The second seems to free matters for a causal theory, but it does not really do so for we have no satisfactory account of the causal conditions of intentional states —certainly none that could be said to behave in nomologically regular ways. Clearly, a causal theory of belief is bound to implicate a model of rationality (along lines already sketched, to which I shall return in a moment). Also, the judgment that suitably caused beliefs constitute knowledge remains a nagging question that the causal theory cannot itself resolve. See, for specimens, H. P. Grice, "The Causal Theory of Perception," in Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989); and Alan White, with H. P. Grice, in "Symposium: The Causal Theory of Perception," in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 4 (1961). On the most recent version of the naturalist's causal account of knowledge, see Alvin I. Goldman, "A Causal Theory of Knowing," in Liaisons, and Epistemology and Cognition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), ch. 3.
19. I take Wittgenstein's account of pain avowal to betray the fact that he, too, is an externalist. This suggests that he does not construe his Lebensformen
in the way I have deliberately exploited. For, if he had, he would have construed persons and their perceptions as artifacts of our Lebensformen, and then he would have had to be hospitable to the idea that avowals of pain could function reportorially (in their distinctive way) every bit as much as constative utterances about sensory perception. See Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations . For an appreciation of Wittgenstein's account, see George Pitcher, The Philosophy of Wittgenstein (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), ch. 12.
20. On Brentano's view, see Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, bk. 2.
21. Freud treats the unconscious as a theoretical posit invoked in explanatory contexts. It plays no reportorial role in first-person contexts. See Sigmund Freud, "The Unconscious," in Collected Papers, vol. 4, trans. under supervision of Joan Riviere (New York: Basic Books, 1959). It helps, therefore, in clarifying the fact that "belief" often plays an explanatory role in ordinary contexts, where it is "unconscious" in a familiar sense. Chomsky's version of the "unconscious" (''innate," "species-specific") does no explanatory work that I can see. It has no variable or variably structured function in different linguistic contexts. It amounts to no more than an en bloc pronouncement that whatever we rightly claim are the invariant and exceptionless grammatical structures of natural language are innately present in the biological resources of humans. It does not explain how these structures work and it does not confirm that there are any such structures. See Chomsky, Rules and Representations, and Knowledge of Language .
22. Here I generalize in a way linked to Locke's theory, except that Locke (who is of course profoundly "pre-Kantian") does not realize that construing persons forensically alerts us to the possibility that both persons and their perceptions may be artifacts of a deeper process. Locke treats persons as independent existents— but forensically; whereas I treat them as artifactual existents— hence forensically. This suggests why Locke has no difficulty reconciling his "Cartesian" view of natural rights with his empiricism. It also explains why, although Hume is cleverer, Locke is more solid and more plausible. That Hume is on his way to some sort of constructivism is clear, but Kant's example shows that it needn't have led to the doctrine of symbiosis or to that of historicity. So the novelty of (10.40) becomes clearer. See Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and, also, Two Treatises of Government, edit. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960).
23. I take Putnam to have had a strong disposition favoring the collective, lebensformlich, constructivist theory of persons the post-Kantian tradition has championed, without quite grasping the full import of that line of reasoning. See Hilary Putnam, "The Meaning of 'meaning'," in Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). It helps to explain the collapse of Putnam's epistemology and metaphysics in The Many Faces of Realism, while not yet abandoning the vestiges of a Kantian externalism.
24. A very reasonable account of the need to posit theoretical entities is offered in Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). For an account along different lines, see Cartwright, How the Laws of Physics Lie .
Van Fraassen, who is more of a purist in the way of positivism than Cartwright, tries to interpret the laws of nature in empiricist terms: except that, in his appealing but self-defeating candor, van Fraassen admits that there is no principled demarcation between theoretical and perceptual distinctions. See Bas C. van Fraassen, The Scientific Image (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980).
25. I am not certain how, precisely, the notion of the "folk-theoretic" became a term in the eliminationist idiom. I feel sure that it has its immediate sources in Wilfrid Sellars, "The Language of Theories" and "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man," in Science, Truth and Reality ; and in papers like that by Feyerabend, "Materialism and the Mind-Body Problem," Review of Metaphysics 17 (1963). But it appeared in what seemed an instantly established usage in Stephen P. Stich, From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science: The Case Against Belief (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983); and is associated in my mind with the views of such figures as Churchland, A Neurocomputational Perspective ; and Daniel C. Dennett, Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology (Montgomery: Bradford Books, 1978). But to be able to affirm (10.45) on the strength of the foregoing argument is to expose the rather surprising laxness of the entire company of eliminativists, who fail to a man to explain precisely how they mean to dispose of the ''subject" or "self" or cognizing "agent." Feyerabend suggests that we wait as long as the "folk" tradition has held sway; Churchland says that anything like (10.45) is simply "empirically" false; Stich says what he would replace the folk idiom with but admits he cannot see how to do so quite yet.
26. The double lesson of the theorem is that "objectivity" is an artifact of lebensformlich practices and, as such, belongs to the realism of the cultural, but only (or initially) in a holist way. I construe holism here in a sense akin to that of Wittgenstein's appeal to Lebensformen (or, a "language game" within the terms of a Lebensform ), that is, acts and utterances in which we are entitled to claim a sense of congruity with our enabling practices but not yet with rules or criteria in virtue of which our claims may be judged to be right or valid. We simply "know how to go on" within our "form of life," and whatever we assign as the criteria of correctness will, similarly, conform with those encompassing practices. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1956), and On Certainty . The important point to bear in mind is that Quine's "holism," in Word and Object and Pursuit of Truth, is altogether different—a heterdox and doubtful interpretation of Duhem's more interesting holism. Quine's, I'm afraid, is incoherent: it tries to combine the "indeterminacy of translation" doctrine (which looks at first glance like a generalization of Duhem's theory) with some sort of minimal empiricism (which is supposed to be metaphysically neutral, as in the way of "holophrastic sentences"). But Duhem's emphasis is applied only to the empirical testing of theories, without our being able to say precisely which propositions within those theories are being tested (and why that is so), whereas Quine's maneuver is meant to subvert the pretensions of something like a "folk" science and metaphysics. See Duhem, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory .
27. The hermeneutic circle is the central theme of so-called hermeneutic philosophies. Originally, it was applied to the interpretation of texts for which
canons might be claimed: sacred, legal, and, more recently, literary. In that form, in the tradition from Schleiermacher to, say, E. D. Hirsch, it simply signifies the part/whole relation of interpretable texts: the meaning of any part depends on the meaning of the whole, and the meaning of the whole depends on the meaning of its parts. In post-Heideggerean hermeneutics—Gadamer's, preeminently—societal life itself conforms with the terms of the hermeneutic circle. In that sense, the "circle" signifies the consensual nature of interpretation, the absence of ahistorical canons, the historicized and openended nature of interpretation itself. I am simply usurping the term in that sense, in a way that, contrary to Gadamer's usage, permits us to reconsider what objectivity may mean within the human sciences and human studies. My own argument emphasizes, of course, that the objectivity accorded the natural sciences is also affected. (I shall come to this in a moment.) For a sense of the "Romantic" view, see Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation ; for the post-Heideggerean, see Gadamer, Truth and Method .
28. I have isolated the "hermeneutic circle" for particular mention. But there are a great many different influential views of the relationship of interpreting agents and interpretable materials that trade on the same part/whole relationship. I see the same theme in Marx's notion of praxis and in Roland Barthes's semiotized (poststructuralist) literary criticism; also, of course, in Foucault's archaeologies. See Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974); also, Foucault, The Order of Things .
29. Ernest Jones's Hamlet and Oepidus (New York: Norton, 1949) is a well-known example, literal-minded though it is. A more interesting case is offered by George Thompson, Aeschylus and Athens (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1941), who shows us how to construe the Oresteia in Marxist terms. I view these examples both metaphysically and epistemologically. The idea that these plays are simply being cleverly interpreted misses the essential challenge. My thesis is that the cultural world is "permeable," "porous," and (as I shall say in a moment) "labile''—metaphysically—because of its Intentional properties, and that objectivity in the human sciences is affected—consensually—because, in the human world, perceiver and perceived are one (10.51)-(10.56). I hold that persons and artworks are very similar, ontologically, with regard to the fixity of their "natures."
30. I find it difficult to account for Dennett's blunder. See Dennett, Content and Consciousness . Dennett does not correct his mistake in The Intentional Stance . At bottom, Dennett is an eliminationist, but he is also put off by the crudity and haste of the usual eliminationists. Hence, he keeps lengthening the postponement of the "inevitable" eliminativist coup. But he never supplies the decisive argument.
31. For a remarkable disconfirmation of Freud's speculations about Leonardo da Vinci, see Meyer Schapiro, "Leonardo and Freud: An Art-Historical Study," Journal of the History of Ideas 17 (1956). See Sigmund Freud, "Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. under the general editorship of James Strachey, vol. 11 (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1957). Shapiro's superb command of the art-historical materials as well as what pertains to Freudian psychoanalysis shows, by example,
something of the recoverability of a sense of objective claims within the human sciences. Here, I should say, somewhat against Schapiro's view of his own procedure, that where he disconfirms Freud's conjectures (about the import of treating Mary and St. Anne as being of the same age), the evidence leads to a more decisive finding than when he attempts to support his own affirmative conjectures about the psychoanalytic import of further details (for instance, about the alleged homosexual import of treating Jesus and John the Baptist as children of about the same age). I don't mean this in a merely art-historical sense—that is, in a merely evidentiary sense. What I have in mind is that truth and falsity play asymmetrical roles in a relativistic logic (chapter 4) and that art-historical arguments favor, in my opinion, a relativistic rather than a bivalent logic.
32. Actions and historical events are extraordinarily difficult to individuate—hence, difficult to reidentify through redescriptions. For one thing, they have Intentional identities, and, for another, there are no clear criteria for deciding the aptness of alternative descriptions for particular actions and particular historical events. Donald Davidson has offered a remarkably confident thesis, congruent with a moderate physicalism and sympathetic with supervenience, for identifying actions in terms of minimal physical movements ("primitive actions"). But this supposes that there is a legible relationship between actions and movements favoring the rule, "one movement, one action" (rather like William's policy of "one body, one person''). If, however, cultural emergence is, as I have argued, a sui generis form of emergence, the thesis is at the very least question-begging. See Donald Davidson, "Actions, Reasons and Causes" and "Agency," in Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980). Alvin I. Goldman has, in A Theory of Action (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1970), constructed an alternative theory, rather on the extravagant side, one that threatens paradox here and there, that nevertheless allows for indefinitely many different actions to be conceptually linked to a single bodily movement. My own view is that neither of these accounts can be said to have isolated anything that is modally necessary. Neither is particularly plausible. And neither conforms very closely to the actual practice of natural-language discourse. The important point is that any policy falling between Davidson's and Goldman's options will upset the effectiveness of an extensional treatment of actions— a fortiori, an extensional treatment of historical events.
33. The cultural world, I am arguing, depends essentially on the role of individual persons as competent agents. I have shown how entities other than culturally apt human persons may, anthropomorphically, be construed as agents. The most interesting extension involves collective agents: societies, classes, families, clans, peoples, and the like. The Annaliste school has, in its effort to make history a science, been attracted to the possibility that individual human agents may be marginalized or eliminated. But this is to misunderstand (in a way not altogether distant from the structuralist temptation) the conceptual relationship between individual agents and the collective features of the culture human aggregates share. See Fernand Braudel, On History, trans. Sarah Matthews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). War, for instance, can only (on the usual theories) be fought by collective agents, but, on the argument, there are no collective agents, they are fictions (10.72). Hence, wars implicate
ideologies by which aggregates of individuals believe they are serving the interests of a collective agent.
34. I believe I have invented a unique "relational" notion, suited exclusively for cultural phenomena, but comparable in an interesting way with the member/class and instance/kind "relationship." I take it that classes, kinds, and types do not exist but may mark real attributes. The notion of "tokens'' and "types" originates with Peirce, I believe. Peirce's account treats types as universals of some sort. I construe the "relation" as one "between" individuals—one that is heuristically introduced. See Joseph Margolis, Art and Philosophy (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1980). The principal alternative interpretations appear in Wollheim, Art and Its Objects; and Wolterstorff, Works and Worlds of Art . Both of these views admit real universals.
35. See John Searle, Minds, Brains and Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
Chapter XI Values, Norms, and Agents
1. "Queer" is Mackie's skeptical and derogatory term for any favorable realist reading of the ontic status of moral norms and values. See John Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977). I draw attention to two considerations. For one, Mackie assumes that what is real regarding the natural world is not (in any comparable sense) "invented"—it is, rather, securely "there," independent of our conceptual interventions. So his epithet conveys an externalist's complaint. He does not provide the supporting argument. The second consideration is simply that Hume, before him, had made a related move regarding the distinction between the ("realist") import of the copulas, "is" and "ought." See Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, III, I, i. Hume is more transparent, since Hume does not altogether disallow a favorable empiricist reading of value-laden and normative predicates. Hume singles out the copula "ought" for adverse criticism. I argue that you cannot disallow the pertinent (realist) use of "ought" if you do not disallow normative predicates in general and that you cannot make the would-be economy convincing if you cannot interpret the regulative function of "true" conformably. Mackie does not address the matter; Hume picks and chooses in a peculiarly arbitrary way just what (in Mackie's terms) we should regard as "queer." There are additional infelicities that depend on Hume's empiricism, of course. Hume cannot account satisfactorily for any full-blooded posit of cognizing selves. This is the deep point of Kant's great compliment to Hume and of Reid's contempt for Hume's puzzlement (and perhaps more) regarding the existence of selves. See Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (Cambridge: MIT, 1969), essay 6, ch. 5. A little later, in this chapter, I suggest that "ought" may be read as "oughtful," that is, predicatively. If so, then Hume's concessions on normative predications subvert his own resistance to the strong categorical use of "ought," and Mackie's failure to acknowledge that a similar concession may be needed for "true" ( on externalist grounds) confirms the inherent limitations of the strongest forms of empiricism. My own suggestion is that both Hume and Mackie have conflated first- and second-order considerations in the naturalist's
way, and that that (rather than externalism) accounts for the seeming plausibility of the conceptual impoverishment each is inclined to favor. (Empiricism is largely extraneous at this point.)
2. The thinnest form of "moral realism" (in the philosophical sense) is the version offered by Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), Introduction and ch. 8. It is actually not an argument, but a plea for such an argument. (Nagel believes "the methods needed to understand ourselves do not yet exist.") Compare Nagel's The Possibility of Altruism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), chs. 1, 9. Furthermore, Nagel construes the issue as involving in an essential way some form of (moral) neutrality. I suppose this really means that his statement is also the most attenuated version possible of Rawls's ''original position." See Rawls, A Theory of Justice . Still, the trouble with "the view from nowhere" is that it issues "from nowhere" and yields no conceptual fruit. That cannot be said of Rawls's thesis. It pretends to have been issued "from nowhere" (that is, from a neutral vantage). But it is surely the principal American examplar of a moral ideology (liberalism). A similar weakness appears in Ronald Dworkin, A Matter of Principle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), except that Dworkin's undertaking is meant to be constrained by the legal and political institutions of the United States. That qualification is less compelling in his Law's Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986).
3. The term "metaphysical realism," I believe, is Putnam's. I find it first in his Meaning and the Moral Sciences . It is meant to mark the conceptual oddity of combining the advocacy of an uncompromising externalism and its detachment from any conceptual dependence on the epistemic function of truth. Here, Putnam succeeds (at an unfortunate price) in exposing the ultimate incoherence of the "correspondence theory of truth." This explains why I bring Putnam's account of the quarrel between the metaphysical realist and the "internal realist" (Putnam) to bear on the puzzle Mackie raises. The disagreement with Dummett (about excluded middle and Dummett's intuitionistic scruple) is beside the point, for Dummett, as I have shown, is himself an externalist! Putnam fails to grasp the full picture because he also hankers after the externalist's assurance. It is only when he comes to The Many Faces of Realism that he begins to yield on the externalist issue, but it is much too late for the rest of his theory. See also on Dummett, Truth and Other Enigmas . On a constructivist view, let me say—that is, on an "idealist" view, in Crispin Wright's idiom—and assuming that the constituting subject is not a transcendental subject, bivalence cannot be defended in a principled way (as Dummett pretends to do and as, I believe, Putnam also thinks possible). Once you yield on bivalence, both Dummett's and Putnam's views become untenable. Since, as I shall very shortly argue, we cannot, in moral matters, avoid subscribing to "cultural realism" (which is constructivist or "idealist" in the sense supplied), we are well on our way to relativism. See Crispin Wright, Realism, Meaning and Truth, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). But, if so, moral theory shows epistemology the way.
4. I take the theorem to capture at least "half" of the best work of the post-Kantian Idealists. I don't deny that Hegel's philosophy is an indigestible extravagance. But it correctly grasped, once Kant came to dominate modern philos-
ophy, the need to reject the disjunction between noumena and phenomena. I endorse that decision in endorsing symbiosis . The other "half" of Hegel's grand achievement is marked by what I call historicity . My reading of this is that the world is "constructed" within the terms of symbiosis and in a historically evolving way. In this sense, the argument of the present chapter is, frankly, "Hegelian." But I eliminate Hegel's teleologism, the purple fiction of the Geist, and every trace of an evolving (internal) ontic necessity. I take that labor to be in accord with what is most likely to be the most promising philosophical work of the next century. See, in this regard, Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit, and Hegel's Philosophy of Right, trans. corr. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon, 1945).
5. I offer Platts only as a specimen. See Mark Platts, "Moral Reality and the End of Desire," in Mark Platts (ed.), Reference, Truth and Reality. Essays on the Philosophy of Language (London: Routledge, and Kegan Paul, 1950). Platts, I feel sure, was jointly influenced by Davidson's naturalism and Wiggins's sensitivity to the problematic of moral philosophy (which is explicit in his own paper). Davidson himself signals the difficulty of treating moral judgment in terms of "supervenience." See Donald Davidson, "Mental Events." Wiggins I take to be the originator (to the extent that that can be determined) of the new "moral realism''—whatever his own intentions may have been. His role in this belongs chiefly to his Inaugural Lecture, "Truth, Invention and the Meaning of Life," in Needs, Values, Truth, 2d ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991). The new "moral realists" are not Aristotelians, however they may recover (or wish to recover) Aristotle, for, both implicitly and explicitly, they attempt to meet Mackie's charge of "queerness." That is, they expressly avoid Aristotle's realism. This is why Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2d ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984) is not a "moral realist," although (of course) MacIntyre is a realist about moral matters in an (adjusted) Aristotelian sense. "Moral realism" begins to diversify almost at once. The most interesting claim, I believe, is the version offered by Sabina Lovibond, Realism and Imagination in Ethics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). I note for the moment that Lovibond is sympathetic both to Wittgenstein's appeal to Lebensformen and Hegel's use of the sittlich . These themes are more or less ignored or discounted in the analytic literature. The reason, already adumbrated in Wiggins, is that if the realist argument is to go through, one must overcome the externalism of the empiricists. The English-language philosophers, however, are noticeably disinclined to abandon externalism. Lovibond's position threatens (weakly) to challenge externalism itself. Further, for a recent analytic appreciation of Aristotle, see John McDowell, "Virtue and Reason," The Monist 62 (1979). The "moral realist," but not every "realist" about morality, avoids "discovering" objective moral norms in human nature.
6. I merely remind you that Putnam's The Many Faces of Realism completely undermines the thesis of Meaning and the Moral Sciences . Putnam's continued insistence on truth or reason functioning as a " Grenzbegriff " is quite incompatible with the thrust of his most recent argument.
7. I take Kant to have set the sense of "categorical" obligation that is now very nearly ineliminable in moral philosophy. See Immanuel Kant, Foundations
of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Lewis White Beck (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1959). See, also, Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, trans. Louis Infield (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1963). This is not to endorse Kant's theory, of course. Many have tried to "naturalize" Kant's imperativism: for instance, Hare, The Language of Morals . See, also, on naturalizing Kant's universalizability principle, R. M. Hare, Freedom and Reason (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963). I offer Hare only as a specimen. For a careful analysis of Kant's view, see H. J. Paton, The Categorical Imperative: A Study in Kant's Moral Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948). In a sense, Kant seems to have "invented" moral duty, in writing the Foundations .
8. For a closely reasoned critique of Mackie, along somewhat slimmer cognitivist lines, see John McDowell, "Values and Secondary Qualities," in Geoffrey Sayre-McCord (ed.), Essays on Moral Realism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). McDowell, like Mackie, holds (here at least) what I shall call an "adequational" theory of the self.
9. These distinctions are offered as large simplications, for the purpose at hand, of a kind of linguistic care that is nicely pursued in such well-known accounts as those of J. O. Urmson, "On Grading," Mind 59 (1956); and P. H. Nowell-Smith, Ethics (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1954).
10. The Philosophy of Right is Hegel's most sustained alternative to Kant, of course, in terms of the distinction between Moralität and Sittlichkeit . But the entire point of the replacement rests on a closer look at the internal difficulties of Kant's abstract account. See, also, G. W. F. Hegel, Natural Law, trans. T. M. Knox (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975). For a brief but careful overview and "balance sheet" on Kant and Hegel, see Timothy O'Hagan, "On Hegel's Critique of Kant's Moral and Political Philosophy," in Stephen Priest (ed.), Hegel's Critique of Kant (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987).
11. A strong teleologism would oblige us to read Hegel as identifying the two (under some suitable criterion). Interestingly, something very similar is true of Peirce's account of truth and belief as viewed in the "long run." But, although it is true that, at least sometimes, Hegel does appear to be committed to the inherent telos of history (the so-called "right-wing" view), it is certainly not clear that he believes human inquirers can be said to discern what, thus construed, would accord with that imputed telos, and "that" telos is not construed by Hegel as a potency present and gradually actualized through the entire course of history (the themes of the "left-wing" view). Something similar is also true of Peirce, although Peirce is more obviously a fallibilist —that's to say, a progressivist. In any case, recent appeals to Hegel (as also to Marx and Peirce) are less and less disposed to accept the fiction of Geist's self-discovery or of a cosmic mind somehow drawing the course of history to its appointed end. Read thus, the merely sittlich reading of ''what is" and "what ought to be" is insufficient for legitimating anything like the "categorical" or "prescriptive" sense of moral norms derived from the Kantian theme, if not from Kant's own vision. See Hegel, Philosophy of Right; and Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 5.
12. The term wertfrei is Max Weber's of course. Weber sought a wertfrei methodology for the human and social sciences but was ultimately convinced
that that was impossible. Weber is remarkably difficult to characterize. My sense is that he accepted, within what I shall call the empirical space of practicing social scientists, the sittlich world Hegel (and Marx) defined, without subscribing to Hegel's idealism or Marx's materialism, without accepting any teleologism, and without adopting any a priori or doctrinaire or en bloc theory of the processes of social change. I suggest that Weber's search for a wertfrei science signifies the marginal relevance of the Hegelian themes; his acknowledgement that he could find no compelling arguments in support of such a ( wertfrei ) picture signifies his (reluctant) return to the Hegelian parameters. See, for instance, Max Weber, " 'Objectivity' in Social Sciences and Social Policy," The Methodology of the Social Sciences, trans. and edit. Edward A. Shils and Harry A. Finch (Glencoe: Free Press, 1949). See, also, Otto Stummer (ed.), Max Weber and Sociology Today (New York: Harper and Row, 1971).
13. There is, in epistemology, a well-established literature committed to one or another form of foundationalism—which, of course, goes hand in hand with externalism. For a relatively recent overview, see Keith Lehrer, Knowledge (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974). But externalism is very difficult to defend (nowadays) in moral philosophy. This is precisely why current "moral realists" tend to avoid Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (although they may long to get back to it). Also, as with Mackie, epistemology tends not to perceive that its own concern with truth is at least at sittlich as our interest in moral norms. The question remains: can objectivity in either science or morality survive (and if so, how) if the question must be answered under the terms of symbiosis? My answer, I may as well say, is: yes and no. The strategy I favor is akin to what (I surmise) Plato has in mind in Statesman and Laws, in speaking of the "second-best" state. What I mean is this. Since the Forms are not epistemically accessible, we theorize about normative matters (and about science) by dialectically comparing the seeming strengths and weaknesses of competing conjectures. My view is that a morality can claim a plausible objective standing if it is at least as convincing as others that enjoy a strong endorsement in sittlich life and among the prevailing theories about such norms. If one insists on more, I confess there's nothing stronger to be had. But then, there's nothing stronger in science either—which hardly disables science or the theory of science.
14. This is the pons of Kuhn's very interesting theory of science. I may say I see a small but instructive parallel between Kuhn's and Weber's views of objectivity and scientific neutrality. Neither theorist resolves the competing tensions in his account. For a sense of Kuhn's indecisiveness—that is, his inclination to treat the work of science as progressively uncovering the structure of the independent world—see Thomas S. Kuhn, "Postscript—1969," in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
15. I am quite prepared to admit that Rorty has effectively defeated Putnam on his own grounds. See Rorty, "Putnam and the Menace of Relativism." I take Rorty to have shown the internal weakness of "internal realism," but not that of a symbiotized recovery of legitimative questions. Here, the inadequacy of Putnam's, Rorty's, and Davidson's philosophies converge. The payoff is particularly noticeable in the context of moral philosophy.
16. I should like you to think of the theorem as a way of recovering a "He-
gelian" treatment of normative values without subscribing to Hegel's teleologism (if indeed Hegel does subscribe to it—as, for instance, in The Philosophy of Right ). The irony is, I suggest, that the "moral realists" have found a clever way to commit themselves to what, in effect, is the dubious "Hegelian" denial of (11.13). See, for instance, Lovibond, Realism and Imagination in Ethics . I pursue this line of thinking at (11.16) and (11.22)-(11.23).
17. This is the point at stake in the celebrated symposium between J. L. Austin and P. F. Strawson, "Truth," in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 24 (1950). See, also, J. L. Austin, "Unfair to Facts," in Philosophical Papers, edit. J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961).
18. This is the pons of naturalistic moral theories. For a sense of the ingenious lengths to which naturalists are prepared to go, see Allan Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).
19. This is what Searle does, quite reasonably, in his well-known analysis of promising. See Searle, Speech Acts, ch. 3. But, of course, Searle was challenged (correctly) on the grounds that that secured only (what I am calling) prima-facie legitimation. Searle does not go further. This is the point at stake in (11.25), which, in my view, leads to the "second-best" forms of legitimation mentioned just above. It is in this sense that I treat Foucault's genealogies as "Hegelian."
20. This, in effect, is the formula for my deformation of Wittgenstein's Lebensformen in the direction of Hegel's sense of historicity and for disallowing a teleologized reading of Hegel's use of the sittlich .
21. This points once again to the question-begging sense in which recent naturalized epistemologies that do not preclude normative assessments pretend to eliminate legitimative questions in favor of first-order causal questions. See Goldman, Liaisons; and Kitcher, The Advancement of Science . The parallel between epistemology and moral philosophy is difficult to ignore. Hence, given the obvious puzzle confronting moral philosophy, there can be no convincing reason for not admitting its analogue in epistemology. This is precisely what is conveyed by (11.30).
22. I take theorems (11.32)-(11.36) to contribute to making Foucault's genealogizing of truth suitably operational. See Foucault, "Two Lectures."
23. See Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, Q.16. I reject, of course, Aquinas's epistemic and ontic presumptions. I treat "facts" and "propositions" as heuristically introduced, or idealized, for the sake of the correspondence idiom. As far as I can see, they function honorifically only—which is not surprising, since knowledge is itself honorific ((10.37), (10.39)). It's the issue in the debate between John Austin and Peter Strawson, and it's the point jointly captured by (11.38) and (11.39).
24. This theorem and (11.43) are discussed in greater detail in Joseph Margolis, Values and Conduct (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971). I also introduce, there, the use of "oughtful" detailed just below.
25. I agree that, in central cases, "ought implies can," but I deny that, in any particular instance, where the precept does not hold (as in being obliged to pay one's taxes when one has gambled the money away), anything untoward follows from the qualification. Failure to appreciate the point has led to unnec-
essary extravagances regarding freedom, choice, agency, akrasia, and the like. See, for instance, Hare, Freedom and Reason . The deeper reason for such embarrassment concerns, of course, the reconcilability of freedom and cauality (another unfortunate Kantian legacy). Once you grant (11.43), however, you begin to see the unavoidability of a "top-down" or "folk-theoretic" orientation. This obviates the need for such accounts as those of C. A. Campbell, "Is 'Free Will' a Pseudo-problem?" Mind 60 (1951); and of Nowell-Smith, Ethics, chs. 19-20; and endorses the corrective of J. L. Austin, "Ifs and Cans," in Philosophical Papers, edit. J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961).
26. See Roderick M. Chisholm, "Human Freedom and the Self," in John Bricke (ed.), Freedom and Morality (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 1976). Theorem (11.47), which follows, catches up the entire argument in a spare way. Thus, for instance, it shows, by the slightest of strategies, the tendentiousness of the unity of science conception of determinism. See Sellars, "The Language of Theories," which explicitly notes the bearing of the underlying theory on the elimination of persons; but, also, Carl G. Hempel, "The Function of General Laws in History," in Aspects of Scientific Explanation and other Essays in the Philosophy of Science (New York: Free Press, 1965), which leads to much the same conclusion but obscures the fact. See also, Carl G. Hempel, Philosophy of Natural Science (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1966), ch. 8.
27. Nearly all analytic moral philosophy is "adequational" in the sense given: in effect, continuous with eighteenth-century philosophies interrupted by the "existential" and historicist philosophies of the post-Hegelian world. The exemplar is John Rawls, most recently in Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), notably Lecture III. I am particularly interested here in the parallel between moral philosophy and epistemology in general. What I suggest is that modern epistemologies linking cognizing subjects and cognized objects have moved through four phases: correspondentist, constructivist, symbiotized, and historicized. Most analytic views, both epistemological and moral (that is, with regard to theories of moral agents and their competence as agents), are either correspondentist (for instance, moral intuitionism) or constructivist (Kant). Kant is, of course, difficult to place in any simple way. But certainly in the first Critique (or in much of it) and in the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant lends himself to being annexed by analytic philosophers. There are grounds for treating Kant somewhat more in accord with symbiosis and historicity, as for instance in the work of Dilthey and Cassirer. But I know of no convincing account along these lines specifically focused on Kant's moral philosophy. This sets the background, for instance, for the recent confrontation between critical legal studies and liberalism, although Rawls does not mention Roberto Unger or the studies, in Political Liberalism, and although Unger does not mention Rawls in his multivolume manifesto. See, for a sample of Unger's radical liberalism, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Social Theory: Its Situation and Its Task (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), and The Critical Legal Studies Movement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983). For a sample of the confrontation from the liberal side favoring Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, see Andrew Altman, Critical Legal Studies: A Liberal Critique
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). I should point out that Unger uses the term "existentialist" in speaking of views critical of "objectivism" and "modernism" that he finds inadequate. My own intention would accommodate Unger's historicism, but the matter is merely terminological. The important point is that Rawls presumes to have canvased nearly all relevant alternatives, but he never actually considers any theories of the artifactual nature of reason and moral agents.
28. "Aristotelians" about practical reasoning, like Anscombe and (more marginally) Hare, presuming, somehow, that "externalist" moral judgments are straightforwardly confirmable, tend to draw a robust conclusion—they say—from "practical" rationality; whereas, in truth, that depends not only on rationality but on the epistemic standing of moral judgments. See Hare, Freedom and Reason; and G. E. M. Anscombe, Intention (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958).
29. It is commonplace in contemporary moral philosophy to suppose that an unresolved conflict between moral judgments is a sign of conceptual or evidentiary error. But that is because moral philosophers are so often "externalists" or "moral realists." The Greek tragedies are more "realistic." In the Oresteia, Oedipus Rex, and Antigone, it is quite clear (as Hegel had already remarked) that the moral world may come into conflict on internal grounds. Once you give up externalism, the matter seems obvious. See the discussion of tragedy in G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art, 4 vols., trans. F. P. B. Osmaston (London: Bell, 1920). I find myself in sympathy, therefore, with John D. Caputo, Against Ethics: Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), particularly chs. 1 and 10. As my argument makes clear, however, I am more sanguine about characterizing the structure of the moral world.
30. There are actually very few kinds of moral systems that pretend to do more, apart from the Kantian (apriorist and constructivist) and Aristotelian (realist) options. In the analytic literature, the principal options are those of utilitarianism and rational self-interest. The latter are best represented in peculiarly American forms: liberalism, as in Rawls, A Theory of Justice, and libertarianism, as in Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974). Both are completely ahistorical, utterly without regard for sittlich complications. Rawls makes a virtue of this (disinterested reason, in "the original position"); Nozick pretends that there is some original Lockeian "mixing of labor" with the land (or material things). Neither considers the Hegelian objection or that justice makes no sense apart from an interpreted history of injustice! In short, both are forms of political ideology masquerading as neutral moral philosophies. Both are weaker in this respect than Roberto Unger's more radical liberalism. It is as ideological as theirs, but it makes no pretense at discerning invariant norms. It favors historicity and a sense of the changing collective practices of a people, and, above all, it considers the plausibility of projected norms in terms of the enlarged possibilities the actual history of perceived injustice is able to support. See Roberto Magnabeira Unger, Social Theory: Its Structure and Its Task (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). For a sense of the current drift of utilitarian thinking, which is now also cast in terms of rational self-interest, see J. J. C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism: For and
Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). I cannot see that the original conceptual puzzle noted by Sidgwick has yet been met, particularly since the presumption of an ideal convergence between utilitarianism and egoism is clearly unconvincing. See Henry Sidgwick, Methods of Ethics, 6th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1901).
31. I should like to acknowledge the as yet unpublished work of my dear friend, Henry Hiz, who experienced the effect of the Nazi invasion of Poland and who thought of summum malum rather in the manner (if I understand him correctly) of a moral first principle. I heard Hiz present a brief sketch of his conception and was struck by the convergence in our ideas. But I must also emphasize that I view the "perception" of summum malum (also, minimum bonum, as I shall indicate in a moment) as not a moral intuition or moral discernment of any sort, but rather a remarkably widespread human sensibility (a sympathy for creatures like ourselves, I should say) that, dialectically, could be made to "yield" a moral norm—as reasonable as any that are known to have been invoked. It would count, as I have already suggested, as a "second-best" conception.
32. The archic defense of human rights, widespread though it is, is sheer ideology. And yet, the doctrine could be reinterpreted as a theme projected from a perception like that of summum malum and minimum bonum . So seen, it would have to be viewed as a plausible alternative, dialectically, among others ("second-best"). But that would be good enough. I am reminded of Marx's opposition to any such doctrine as the archic reading of human rights: in particular, his criticism of Lassalle. See Karl Marx, "Critique of The Gotha Program," in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Works, 2 vols. (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1950). See, also, Karl Marx, "On the Jewish Question," in Karl Marx: Early Writings, trans. and edit. Tom Bottomore (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964).
33. Friedrich Nietzsche is a paradoxical figure in moral theory. There is the genealogical side of his work, a forerunner (largely in a critical sense) of Foucault's genealogies (notably, in On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Horace B. Samuel, in The Philosophy of Nietzsche [New York: Modern Library, n.d.]). There is the elite "morality" of the Übermensch opposed to the moralities of the herd (in, say, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche [New York: Viking, 1954]). And there is the vision of the flux within which all projected moralities, theories, philosophies obtain (tantalizingly, in The Will To Power, edit. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale [New York: Vintage, 1968]). I find it difficult to suppose that Nietzsche was committed to any explicit moral theory, but I cannot imagine any thoughtful recent theory not informed by Nietzsche's penetrating grasp of the entire puzzle. See, also, Nehamas, Nietzsche, Life as Literature .
34. In Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), John Rawls pretty well concedes the indefensibility of the assumed moral (or critical) universalism of A Theory of Justice, although he does not abandon it: he simply diminishes our reliance on it in political circumstances. He also accepts (in Political Liberalism ) Isaiah Berlin's devastating criticism against any universalized or exceptionlessly principled liberalism: that is, any that does not ac-
knowledge that there must be some sacrifice of the master goods of a society, under the historical and structural conditions it favors. See Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity (New York: Knopf, 1991). Hare partly confuses mere consistency of usage with universalized (or generalized) values; when he considers the second ("generalization"), he does little more than fall back to his own intuitions. See Hare, The Language of Morals . Habermas tries to afford a sense of what is "necessary" (universally) in practice, from a moral point of view, but his examples, partly drawn from Karl-Otto Apel, are plainly uncompelling. Habermas makes no effort at all to demonstrate how one moves from stage to stage in the direction of "dialogic" universality. See Habermas, "Discourse Ethics." See, also, Karl-Otto Apel, "The A Priori of the Communicative Community and the Foundations of Ethics,'' in Towards a Transformation of Philosophy, trans. Glyn Adey and David Frisby (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980).
GLOSSARY INDEX
A
Aboutness, 199
Absolute idealism, 187
Abstracted, 207
Accidental, 133
Action-guiding, 286
Adequation (ontic, epistemic), 225
Adequational theory, 93 , 284
Affirm (promulgate), 295
Agency, 115
Agent(s), 284
Alethic, 66
Analytically entails, 207
An-archic, 27 , 301
Anthropomorphized, 188
Antinomy, 168
Antimony of critical norms, 279
Antinomy of history, 173 , 216
Antinomy of legitimation, 216
Antinomy of ontic priority, 216
Apodictic, 86
Apriorism, 30
Apt, 156
Archaeological, 164
Archism, 24
Argument forms, 35
Argument(s), 35
Artifact(s), 86 , 255
Artifactual deeds, 255
Assertion, 45
Assertion sign (operator), 45
Autonomous, 52
Autre, 1 ', 156
Autrui, 1 ', 156
Avow, 242
B
Basic, 207
Basic level, 257
Basic particular(s), 139
Being, 123
Being, a, 122
Bet, 25
Bivalence, 63
Bridge laws, 220
Brute, 116
C
Canon, 247
Canonical picture of science, 196
Career(s), 137 , 138 , 146 , 151
Cartesian dualism, 203
Categorically binding, 289
Causality, 115
Causal theory of reference, 99
Civilized witness, 292
Class, 141
Closed system, 157 , 162
Close ("possible worlds"), 105
Closer ("possible worlds"), 105
Cognition, 240
Cognitivist, 236
Cognizing, 240
Collective agent(s), 255
Collective (attributes), 189 , 201 , 232
Collective person, 255
Common (predicables), 147
Complementary (properties), 122
Complex (predicables), 206
Composition (metaphysical), 204
Compossible, 105
Comprehensive, 290
Conceptual incommensurability, 170
Conceptualism, 56
Conceptual schemes, 86
Conditional (legitimation), 288
Consensual, 52 , 247 , 270
Consensually real, 280
Constative (discourse), 42 , 197
Constitutive, 177
Constructed, 167
Constructionism, 151
Constructivist, 148
Content, 200
Context-bound, 61
Contexted, 155 , 167
Context-free, 48
Context of all contexts, the, 154
Context(s), 76
Contradiction(s), 37
Contrary (properties), 22
Corporation, 255
Correspondence theory of truth, 59
Cosmic evolutionism, 127
Criterial, 49
Critical (legitimation), 275
Critical morality, 293
Critical universalism, 293
Cultural (attribute[s]), 167 , 218
Cultural emergence, 249
Cultural entity(-ies), 142 , 232 , 252
Culturally emergent, 219
Cultural realism, 263
Culture/nature problem, 215 , 227
D
Decidable, 63
Deconstruction(s), 85 , 156
Degenerate (logically), 158
Denumerable, 159
De re / de dicto distinction, 33
Descriptive, 125
Descriptively vacuous, 125
Determinateness, 127
Deterministic, 196
Diachronic, 278
Disquotational theory of truth, 80
Distributed, 75 , 79
Dualist, 205
Dummy (state), 243
Dyadic, 115
E
Eliminationism(-t), 195 , 205
Eliminative physicalism, 195
Embodied, 232 , 251 , 256
Embodiment, 232
Emergent, 219 , 257
Empirical, 93
Endogenous, 225
Entail(s), 145
Entrenched, 52 , 109
Epistemic, 66
Epistemic incommensurabilities, 173
Epistemic salience, 164
Equilibration, 227
Essentialism, 26 , 36
Evaluation, 265
Event(s), 139 , 140
Evidential(-ary), 116
Excluded middle, principle of, 38 , 63
Exist(ence), 113 , 114 , 119
Existential generalization, 99
Existential (predicates, theory), 288 , 293
Existential quantifier, 106
Existential sense of "exists," 103 , 104
Existent things, 116
"Exists de dicto, " 103
"Exists de re, " 103
"Explain by reasons," 96
Extension(al)(ly), 48 , 53 , 198 , 226
Externalist (theory of knowledge), 30 , 270
External negation, 111
External (relationship), 33 , 45 , 71
F
Fact(s), 250
Factual judgment(s), 281
"Fact"/"value" distinction, 281
Fallibilism, 337 , 361
Fictional, 102
Final cause, 112 , 184
First-order discourse, 16
First-order logic(s), 53
First-order predicate(s), 125 , 272
First principle(s), 25
Fit (of myths), 158
Flux, 27
Folk-theoretic, 196 , 221
Forensic, 244
"Formal mode," 110
Foundationalism, 30 , 83
Foundation(s), 31
Free, 283
Free agent(s), 283 , 284
Full (legitimation), 268
Functional, 212
G
Genealogical, 166 , 168
Generality, 121
General predicables, 47
Generous (morality), 297
Gettier counterexamples, 99
Grading, 265
Grounded (in the sittlich ), 277
H
Habitus, 235
Haecceity, 136
Hermeneutic circle, 249
Heuristic, 150
Higher level of reality, 219
"Historical a priori, " 163
Historicism, 185
Historicity, 7 , 185
Historicized, 167
History(-ies), 142 , 174 , 182 , 184 , 197
Holism(-t), 75 , 79 , 91
Holist, 97
Homonomic, 148
Honorific, 241
Horizonal, 166 , 167
Human rights, 289
Hyle, 111 , 136
I
Idealism, 72 , 88
Identity, 144
Ideological, 286
"I know," 83
Implicates(-d), 21 , 155
Imputed, 253
Incarnate (attributes), 217 , 280
Inclusive (in a discursive sense), 146
Incommensurability, 169
Incongruent, 66 , 67
Inconstant, 135
Independent(-ce), 30 , 153 , 215
Indeterminacy, 127
Indicative (invariances), 25
Individuality, 141
Individual(s), 256
Individual thing(s), 146 , 256
Individuation, 145 , 146
Ineffable, 147
Inert (logically), 158
Informational, 212
Informationally degenerate utterances, 107
Innatism, 228
Instance(s) of kinds, 141
Instantiative, 144
Instrumental, 150
Integrity, 219
Intelligible, 152
Intended, 159
Intension(al), 198
Intentional attribute(s), 218
Intentional(ity), 139 , 167 , 188 , 192 , 196 , 197 , 199 , 201 , 203 , 213 , 222 , 232
Internal accusative, 201
Internalist, 89
Internal negation, 111
"Internal realism"(-t), 263
Internal relations, principle of, 72
Internal (relationship), 71
Interpretability, 197
Interpreted, 103
Interpreting, 38
Interpretive tertia,79 , 86
Intransparent, 77
Invariance, 270
J
JTB, 95
Judgment, 281
K
Kind(s), 139
Know(ledge), 95 , 98 , 174 , 240 , 241 , 243
L
Labile (attributes), 254
Language, 189
Law, 194
Law(s) of nature, 148
Lebensform(en),49 , 51 , 250
Lebensformlich (world), 168 , 174 , 277 , 284
Legitimated, 268 , 276
Legitimation, 16 , 98 , 275 , 276 , 277
Legitimative norms, 273
Lingual, 49 , 213
Logical, 35 , 198
Logically proper names, 36
M
"Many-many" principle, 192
Materiae, 203
Material (events, things), 116 , 141
"Material mode," 110
"Meaningful," 293
Members of a set, 141
Mental, 210
Metaphysically abstracted, 207
Metaphysical realism, 260
Mind/body problem, 215 , 227
Minimum bonum,289
Modal (principle), 25
Monadic, 200
Moral cast, 294
Moral norms, 277
Moral realism(-ts), 262 , 263 , 291
Moral revolution, 294
Moral skepticism, 259
Mythic(ally), 158 , 160
Myth(s), 158
N
Native, 225
Nativism(-t), 225 , 228
Naturalism, 18 , 88
Naturalize(d), 94 , 96
"Naturalizing," 88 , 161 , 162 , 273
Natural kind(s), 148
Natural-kind term(s), 149
Naturally (acquired), 234
Natural properties, 132
Natural rights, 289
Naturans, 76
Naturata, 76
Nature(s) (-al), 37 , 130 , 136 , 137 , 138 , 249
"Necessarily," 26
Neutral (language), 171
Nominal essence(s), 110
Nominalism, 56
Nominalize, 119
Nomological(ity), 196
Nomological universals, 148
Nonbeing, 122
Noncognitivist, 296
Noncontradiction, principle of, 37
Nonextensional, 198
Nonpropositional structure of perception, 241
Nonreductive physicalism, 191
Normative, 98 , 268
Normative value(s), 272
Norm(s), 265
Not being (at all), 122
Nullum malum,295
Number, 126
Numbered, 146
Numerical identity, 144 , 146
O
Objective norms, 273
Objectivism, 29
Objectivity, 268 , 269
"Objectivity" (as predicate), 269
Objectivitye , 251
Objectivityi , 247 , 251
"Objectual" idiom, 200
Occur(s), 140
One, 146
One, the, 147
Ontic, 66
Ontic commitment, 107
Ontic predicate(s), 125
Oppositional (properties), 132
Originary, 84
Ought, 282
"Oughtful," 282
Override(s), 292
P
Parasitically (legitimated), 288
Parse, 79
Particular (thing), a, 204
Part/whole relation, 205
Perceived objectively, 245
Perception, 240
Perceptually independent, 245
Permeable (nature), 252
Persist(s), 151
Person(s), 190 , 237
Phase(s), 138
Phase sortal(s), 138
Phenomenology, 88
Philosophical logic, 54
Philosophically emcumbered, 185
Philosophical (questions), 15
Physicalism, 116
Picture theory, 83
Porous (nature), 252
Possible, 105
Possible world(s), 104
Post-Kantian, 57
Postmodernism, 17 , 92
Poststructuralism, 74 , 156
Power/knowledge, 250
Practical, 292 , 293
Practical consistency, 286
Practical reason, 298
Pragmatism, 110
Praxical, 236
Praxis, 236 , 250
Predicable(s), general, 47 , 130
Predicate(s), 42
Predication, 42 , 145
Predicative, 102
Predicatively informative, 124
Prejudiced, 32
Pre-Kantian, 59
Prescriptive, 292
Presuppose(s), 145
Presupposition, 38
Presuppositionless, 39
Prima facie legitimation, 275 , 286
Principle(s), 26
Privative, 132
Privilege, 29 , 30
Probabilistic truth-values, 68
Progress, 164
Progressivism, 160 , 164
Promulgate, 295
Proper part of knowledge, 98
Properties, 120
"Propositional" idiom, 200
Propositionally sructured, 240
Proposition(s), 280
Prudential need(s), 286
Q
Quiddity, 136
R
Ranking, 265
Rational, 93
Rationalism, 228
Rationality, 189
Rationalization, 69
Real, 117 , 119
Real essence(s), 110
"Real generals," 61
Realism, 54 , 72 , 88 , 273
Reason, 93 , 161
Redescribing, 214
Reduce(d), 160 , 181
Reductionist, 205
Reductive behaviorism, 236
Reference, 42 , 43
Referent(s), 42 , 43
Reflexive, 248
Reflexive agency, 256
Regulative, 177
Relata, 32 , 71
Relationalism, 69
Relativism, 69
Relativistic logic, 67 , 68
Relevance, 68 , 69
Reliabilism, 175
Representation, 158
Resistance, 116
Responsible, 245 , 283
Robust relativism, 69
Rule, 235
S
Same level of reality, 219
Science(s), 196 , 221
"Second-best" (morality), 289
Secondness, 114
Second-order discourse, 16
Second-order predicate(s), 125 , 217 , 272
Segregated, 272
Self-identical, 144 , 146
Self-interpreting texts, 256
Self-predication, 132
Self-referential paradox, 69
Self-subsistent (God), 131
Self(-ves), 190 , 237 , 256
Semantic, 198
Sentence(s), 37
Sentential formula(s), 37
Singular proposition(s), 99
Sittlich, 265 , 274 , 277 , 280
Skepticism, 261
Social constructivism (constructionism), 151
Socially constructed, 151
Solipsism, 236
Solipsistic(ally), 187 , 223
Sortal (natures), 139
Sortal(s), 138 , 139
Space, 158
Space, a, 158
Species-specific, 225
Speech, 149
Speech act(s), 44 , 61
Status (normative), 243
Strict determinism, 283
Structuralism, 72 , 85
Subject(s), 187 , 190
Summum malum,287
Sunyatta, 122
Supervenience, 191 , 192
Symbiosis, 57 , 69
Symbiotized, 31 , 32
Synchronic, 278
T
Tacit, 166
Teleologism, 112
Telos, 184
Tertium non datur, principle of, 58 , 64
Text, 75 , 256
Theoretical entities, 245
Theoretical identities, 145
Theoretical reason, 297
"Things(s)," 140
Thinking, 163
Thirdness, 114 , 118
Three-valued logic, 68
Time, 217
Token instance(s), 256
Token(s)-of-types, 256
Token (speech acts), 44
Token-wise, 192
Top-down, 196 , 246
Totalized, 85 , 156
Tradition, 235
Transcendentalism, 30 , 92 , 186 , 222
Transcendental(ly), 32
Transcendentals, 132
Transparent, 77
Triadic, 196
Truth, 76 , 277
Truth-value gap(s), 146
Truth-value(s), 76
Type, 256
Type-wise, 191
U
Unconditionally self-subsistent, 146
Unicity, 206
Unified science, 220
Unity, 206
Universal predicate(s), 144
Universal(s), 54 , 121
Universe, 158 , 196
Universe of discourse, 154
Utterance(s), 44
Uttered, 44 , 293
V
Vague, 127
"Valid(ated)," 276
Validity, 276
Value judgment(s), 281
Value predicate(s), 281
Value(s), 265
Veridical, 247
Veridical perception, 241
W
Work, 255
World(s), 158 , 197
Y
Yield(ing), 288
INDEX OF NAMES
The principal references are keyed to the glossary index. There are really no philosophical texts or figures that are discussed in a sustained way. The items listed here are more in the way of key allusions, mainly drawn from the endnotes but occasionally from the running text as well.
A
Alston, William, 325
Anaxagoras, 91
Anscombe, G. E. M., 286 , 292 , 365
Aquinas, Thomas, 130 -131, 280 , 318 , 330 , 363
Aristotle, 16 , 24 , 34 -37, 38 -39, 111 -112, 114 , 115 , 116 , 131 , 133 -134, 136 , 139 , 147 , 156 , 181 -182, 183 , 202 , 203 -204, 227 , 250 , 306 -307, 313 , 325 , 330 , 351
Austin, J. L., 281 , 310
B
Berkeley, George, 73 -74, 327 -328
Berlin, Isaiah, 366 -367
Black, Max, 311
Bohm, David, 344
Bourdieu, Pierre, 235
Bradley, F. H., 317
Braudel, Fernand, 357
Brentano, Franz, 187 , 198 -199, 293 , 326 , 340
Brunet, Jerome, 348
Buddhism, 91 , 159
Bunge, Mario, 231 , 343
C
Chisholm, Roderick, 319
Chomsky, Noam, 189 -190, 211 , 243 , 335 , 341 , 348 , 349 -350, 351 -352, 354
Churchland, Paul, 196 , 246 , 343 , 345 , 348 , 355
D
Danto, Arthur, 341 -342, 347
Davidson, Donald, 44 -45, 79 -80, 95 , 96 , 170 -171, 191 -193, 194 , 217 , 254 , 305 , 310 , 315 , 319 , 324 , 342 , 357 , 360
Dawkins, Richard, 346 -347
Democritus, 344
Dennett, Daniel, 257 , 345 , 356
Derrida, Jacques, 84 -85, 156 , 317 , 320 , 323
Descartes, René, 203 , 226 , 228
Dewey, John, 309 , 326 -327, 334
Dretske, Fred, 212 , 346
Duhem, Pierre, 175 , 355
Dummett, Michael, 38 , 63 -64, 65 , 156 , 262 , 307 , 310 , 314 , 338 -339, 359
Duns Scotus, 55 , 56 , 330 , 331
Dworkin, Ronald, 359
F
Feigl, Herbert, 192 , 253 , 347
Feyerabend, Paul, 343
Field, Hartry, 329
Fodor, Jerry, 346 , 349
Foucault, Michel, 34 , 161 , 163 -166, 167 -168, 169 , 250 , 276 , 306 , 317 , 334 , 336
Frege, Gottlob, 46 , 145 , 311 , 332
Freud, Sigmund, 243 , 354 , 356 -357
G
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 230 , 233 , 235 , 236 , 309 , 337 , 350 , 356
Garver, Newton, 51
Gettier, Edmund, 324
Gibson, J. J., 212
Goldman, Alvin, 174 -175, 246 , 339 , 357
Goodman, Nelson, 56 , 120 , 313 -314, 326 , 328 -329, 351
H
Habermas, Jürgen, 321 -322, 367
Hare, R. M., 286 , 292 , 361 , 365 , 367
Hegel, G. W. F., 39 , 58 , 112 -113, 186 -187, 265 -266, 285 , 296 , 319 , 359 -360, 361 -362, 363
Heidegger, Martin, 123 , 131 , 147 , 327 , 330 , 333 , 336 , 350
Hempel, C. G., 316 , 339
Hirsch, Jr., E. D., 356
Hjelmslev, Louis, 335 , 350
Hume, David, 275 , 277 , 282 , 331 -332, 353 , 358
Husserl, Edmund, 84 -85, 86 , 89 , 157 , 188 , 198 -199, 308 -309, 322 -323, 334 , 336 , 337 -338, 340 , 349
J
Jones, Ernest, 356
K
Kant, Immanuel, 31 , 32 , 58 -59, 72 -73, 89 , 92 , 123 -124, 186 -187, 188 , 226 , 285 , 296 , 308 , 309 , 314 -315, 329 , 334 , 359 -360, 361 , 364
Kripke, Saul, 317
Kuhn, Thomas, 89 -90, 105 , 150 , 160 , 320 -321, 362
Kyoto school, 329
L
Leibniz, Gottfried, 47 , 133 -134, 142 , 151 -152, 331 , 332 -333
Levinas, Emmanuel, 335
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 84 , 85 , 156 , 325 , 341
Lewis, David, 326
Locke, John, 226 , 244 , 354
Lovibond, Sabina, 360
Lyotard, Jean-François, 92 , 305
M
Mackie, J. L., 259 , 261 , 267 , 282 , 358
Marx, Karl, 236 , 352 , 366
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 309
Millikan, Ruth, 212 , 336 , 346
Moore, G. E., 83 , 193 , 315 , 342
N
Nagel, Thomas, 349 , 359
Neurath, Otto, 317
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 366
Nozick, Robert, 365
O
Ockham, William, 120
P
Parfit, Derek, 345
Parmenides, 101 -102, 110 -111, 117 , 120 , 122 , 130 -131, 325
Pavlov, I. P., 237
Pears, D. F., 314
Peirce, Charles S., 54 -55, 65 , 113 -117, 118 -119, 121 , 122 , 126 -127, 196 , 254 , 310 , 313 , 325 , 326 , 327 -328, 329 , 342 , 343 , 358 , 361
Piaget, Jean, 228 , 348
Plato, 55 , 121 , 132 , 183 , 226 , 316 , 351 , 362
Platts, Mark, 360
Popper, Karl R., 147 -148, 194 , 342 -343, 347
Protagoras, 69 , 316 , 331
Putnam, Hilary, 245 , 260 , 261 -262, 263 , 267 , 270 , 277 , 314 , 316 , 334 , 354 , 359 , 360
Q
Quine, W. V., 31 , 46 -47, 66 , 78 -80, 87 , 94 -95, 101 -102, 103 -104, 106 -108, 110 , 113 , 124 , 161 -162, 171 , 175 , 187 , 196 , 209 -210, 230 , 308 , 310 , 311 , 316 , 318 -319, 323 -324, 325 , 326 , 336 , 350 , 355
R
Ramsey, Frank, 320
Ranke, Leopold von, 186
Rawls, John, 288 , 296 , 298 , 359 , 364 -365, 366
Reichenbach, Hans, 333
Reid, Thomas, 359
Ricoeur, Paul, 347
Rorty, Richard, 76 , 193 , 305 , 321 , 326 -327
Russell, Bertrand, 46 , 73 -74, 83 , 145 -146, 311 , 325 , 343 -344
S
Salmon, Wesley, 307 , 333
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 189
Schapiro, Meyer, 356 -357
Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 356
Searle, John, 257 -258, 310 , 325 , 349 , 363
Sellars, Wilfrid, 196 , 355
Skinner, B. F., 236
Smart, J. J. C., 343
Spinoza, Baruch, 76
Stich, Stephen, 343 , 344
Strawson, P. F., 138 -140, 141 -142, 145 -146, 147 , 281 , 310 -311, 345
T
Taoism, 91 , 159
Tarski, Alfred, 59 -60, 315
Thompson, George, 356
Thucydides, 183
U
Unger, Roberto, 364 -365
V
van Fraassen, Bas, 355
Vygotsky, L. S., 228 , 348
W
Watson, James, 346
Weber, Max, 362
Wiggins, David, 293 , 360
Williams, Bernard, 143 , 332
Winch, Peter, 171
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 37 , 49 -53, 57 , 83 -84, 91 , 108 -109, 156 , 159 , 161 , 163 -164, 167 , 169 , 189 , 235 , 243 , 244
Wright, Crispin, 359
Designer: UC Press Staff
Compositor: Impressions
Text: 10/13 Sabon
Display: Sabon
Printer: Edwards Brothers, Inc.
Binder: Edwards Brothers, Inc.
Preferred Citation: Margolis, Joseph. Historied Thought, Constructed World: A Conceptual Primer for the Turn of the Millennium. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1995 1995. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft2779n7t4/