Naturalism and Normativity (review)
- Naturalism and Normativity
Recent trends in philosophical naturalism have their chief source in Quine's influential call to 'naturalize' epistemology, which recommended that philosophical concerns be seen as simply one part of a scientifically informed attempt to understand the natural world. The result is the view described as 'scientific naturalism' where philosophy now must defer to science when addressing questions of knowledge, meaning and existence. This naturalist turn is sometimes portrayed as a novel and radical transformation of philosophy, one that holds the promise of genuine philosophical progress. However, there have been many other twentieth century American philosophers trained in different contexts and issues who have been ready to extol the virtues of naturalism. Writing some four decades before Quine, Roy Wood Sellars confidently explained: "We are all naturalists now. But, even so, this common naturalism is of a very vague and general sort, capable of covering an immense diversity of opinion. It is an admission of a direction more than a clearly formulated belief " (1922). This comment seems an accurate characterization of the ongoing enthusiasm over naturalism in its various manifestations.
A further intervention is now on offer with this new volume of essays on naturalism and normativity. The editors attempt to build on their previous volume (2004) by seeking to break the hegemony of recent scientific conceptions of naturalism. The influence of scientific naturalism should not blind us, they argue, to its apparent inability to address normative phenomena involving claims about what we should to do and evaluative judgments concerning people, events and things. The first theme of the volume then addresses this question of whether [End Page 531] a strict scientific conception of naturalism is fully adequate for understanding human creatures and their characteristic normative activities including thought, language, morality as well as science. When scientific naturalism appeals only to descriptive scientific facts for explanatory purposes it becomes difficult to locate these normative dimensions of human life within the natural world. This then prompts a second theme involving the articulation and defense of an alternative more liberal conception of naturalism. This position is conceptually wedged in between scientific naturalism and supernaturalism, maintaining respect for all forms of scientific understanding while denying that such understanding is exhaustive of human attempts at inquiry. However, it seeks to avoid supernaturalism by not positing forms of understanding or entities that conflict with science. The contributions are a rich set of discussions that examine these two general themes in the areas of ethics, epistemology, metaphilosophy and the relationship between philosophy and science. Space limitations prevent a serious discussion of all these essays. I will then touch on those essays that are most directly relevant to the challenge of locating and defending a liberal conception of naturalism.
Mario De Caro and Alberto Voltonlini's paper responds to Ram Neta's challenge that liberal naturalism is a logically unstable position, since it collapses into either scientific naturalism or supernaturalism (69-86). They suggest a middle-ground position that posits entities not motivated by science but not in conflict with the causal order of a scientific worldview. Abstract modal properties are offered as a central example, which can be further known through an unproblematic sense of imagination. These properties are part of a legitimate type of understanding, one that we might deem 'philosophical.' Yet such entities lack causal powers and do not then violate the causal order of things demanded by scientific explanation.
Arguing along similar lines, David Macarthur claims that strict forms of scientific naturalism, such as reductive physicalism, are implausible from the standpoint of science itself (123-41). Thinking through this point leads to a 'Broad Scientific Naturalism' that includes the social and human sciences along-side the other natural sciences. The naturalist attitude of taking science seriously must then be open to such social-human sciences and their respective modes of understanding and ontological commitments. If they require things like values, norms, and meanings, then as good naturalists we must allow them as legitimate parts of our ontology and explanations. Macarthur further argues that even this broadened form...
