What if Kant’s books suddenly become successful, making Kant into the first philosopher of biology?
Kolen and Van de Vijver
Any idea that the human mind has access to truths that are independent of investigation or somehow transcend it are just hangovers of superstition.
Dudley Shapere
Abstract
I discuss various reactions to my article “Again, what the philosophy of science is not” [Callebaut (Acta Biotheor 53:92–122 (2005a))], most of which concern the naturalism issue, the place of the philosophy of biology within philosophy of science and philosophy at large, and the proper tasks of the philosophy of biology.
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Notes
Our very debate here neatly illustrates the language problem. To mention but one example, Van Speybroeck (this issue) quotes me on “do[ing] justice to the facts and theories of biological science, including the things that Darwin began to teach us about the epistemological predicament imposed on us humans as products of biological evolution.” My Webster’s renders “do justice” as “to act justly,” “to treat fairly or adequately,” “to show due appreciation for.” Van Speybroeck, who obviously mis-understands the expression, feels that “when taking philosophy in its general interpretation of critical thinking” (a rather one-sided interpretation as far as I am concerned, but that is a different issue), “a call for ‘a philosophy of justification’ is not entirely evident.” She goes on to write about “a philosophy of justice” (John Rawls?) and offers an extreme interpretation of my “doing justice” as “the suggestion that biology somehow is ‘in need’ of an external justice and that philosophy can provide this.” Well, by “doing justice” I only meant doing justice.
Some philosophers of biology of a strict analytic or empiricist persuasion, being even more ardent in their “revolt against metaphysics” (Bas Van Fraassen) than the naturalists, prefer to remain agnostic on this score.
Quite a few historians and sociologists of biology of a more historicist bend think that “a strong naturalism is incompatible with a principled historicism” (Nickles in Callebaut 1993, p 453). But even so, Kuhn is to be credited for naturalizing the philosophy of science in that he sensitized philosophers to the importance of history as a “repository” for the testing of philosophical theories.
To whom it may concern: I characterize contemporary naturalism in terms of four—negative—attitudes (or methodological maxims, if you prefer): (M1) the articulation of philosophy in a way that is continuous with scientific method and explanation (against methodological dualism); (M2) anti-transcendence (Diesseitigkeit); (M3) an anti-transcendental stance that requires abandoning the ambition of finding epistemological foundations; and (M4) a deep appreciation of the bounded rationality of all cognizing systems, whether human or animal, which makes the naturalist suspicious of ‘optimization’ talk. (See, e.g., Callebaut 2003, pp 38–44 for discussion.) This view is in line with John Dewey’s (1939) aperçu of naturalism as “opposed to supernaturalism” and to the version of the latter that ”appeals to transcendent a priori principles placed in a Realm above nature and beyond experience.” See Giere (2006a, p 53ff.) for a discussion of the pitfalls of attempts at positive characterization of naturalism.
An interesting exception is Stanovsky (2004, p 173), who discusses virtual reality as providing “a laboratory for the exploration of Kantian metaphysics”—Second Life as an instance, maybe, of Van Speybroeck’s “experimental philosophy”
Van de Vijver et al. (2005) do not refer to the Symposium once. Van Speybroeck, who is obviously the most consensus-oriented among the participants in this debate, in addition to largely supporting the naturalistic alternative also offers a number of reflections that do take seriously the Amsterdam agenda. Unfortunately, most of these are déjà vu, and although I can sympathize ‘at some level’ with her specific recommendations, several of them—such as her plea for alternative publication formats in philosophy, or her suggestion that philosophers of science are well equipped to popularize science—seem half-baked to me. (She hints at this herself in her title.) I discuss some of her ideas in Sect. 3.
Our natural languages play tricks on us here. How can we avoid the essentialism trap in plain English? “A philosophy” and “philosophies” of biology are a bit awkward. Talking about “what philosophy of biology is (not)” (Hull), without article added, is, I am told, not entirely grammatically correct. Reading into my title “Again, what the philosophy of biology is not” that this suggests that I am looking for “the” Philosophy of Biology (Van Speybroeck, this issue) seems to me overkill, though—I was only referring to the birth pangs of our little discipline on the Continent.
How else am I to understand their claim that their (post-Kantian—for that is what it is) transcendental space “is a space in which conditions of possibility are no longer set apart as untouchable and untouched products of a conscious or transcendental subject. In contrast, the exploration of the conditions of possibility is seen as instantiating the engagement of a knowing instance with the phenomena under study” (Van de Vijver et al. 2005, p 67)? Talking about engagement, I find it curious that the Ghent group never refers to Roy Bhaskar’s writings (e.g., 1979, 1989; Norris 1999 is a good introduction). Bhaskar uses transcendental and dialectical arguments to uncover the (Humean) ontology that is presupposed in science and many philosophies of science, and to come to grips with the “epistemic fallacy”—the idea that one can reduce or analyze knowledge in terms of being—and with any number of dualisms that continue to plague the social sciences and humanities. Maybe Bhaskar’s discourse is too political in a concrete sense?
Replacing space as a form of intuition in the original Kantian sense, spatial tropes are all over the place in both Van de Vijver et al.’s 2005 and K&V’s article: “ontological space” (seven times), “a space of conditionality” (six times), spaces to breathe, reflect, work, etc. Space either seems to be already there (e.g., “open[ing] a space in history within which certain questions and answers have succeeded in finding an entrance” or must be constructed first (e.g., “creat[ing] a space within which the meaning of a transcendental perspective on science ... can appear”. If all or any of this has a deeper “meaning” (40 occurrences), I am afraid it escapes me. Fortunately for me, there are no Rortyan mirrors to run up against on the transcendental scene! What about temporal and causal tropes?
The ‘naive’ realism that comes with common sense, and which critical philosophers so abhor, was a functionally adequate background assumption for biological systems like ourselves to achieve reproductive success (Metzinger 2000).
K&V rightly note that this “resonates quite clearly with the neo-positivistic demarcation between sense and non-sense.” The difference is that in light of the Science Wars, some naturalists now prefer to refer to the latter as “pretentious nonsense.”
Demarcation (Auguste Comte and the positivists in general, Bachelard, Wittgenstein...) was definitely a Continental invention (in the literal meaning of the word), whereas the naturalistic tradition has always stressed the continuity of common sense, philosophy, and science instead.
The roots of naturalism in the philosophical tradition are materialism in metaphysics, and, yes, skepticism (thus, Donald Campbell’s evolutionary epistemology was motivated by his resistance to skepticism) and empiricism in epistemology, but, pace Spinoza, definitely not rationalism. Moreover, when I used the term “rationalism” in my (2005a) article I was referring to its encompassing meaning (rationalism plus empiricism), as my references to Kitcher and Longino should have made clear.
By the way, Griesemer’s (2002) useful distinction between theories, perspectives, and images, which builds on earlier work by Giere, was presented at the 2001 Ghent Conference on Epigenetics Van Speybroeck refers to in her article (note 1). Callebaut et al. (2007) put Griesemer’s distinction to work in an analysis of “packages” in evolutionary developmental biology.
“Today, a more critical assessment and explication of the choices and perspectives, e.g. an elaborate theory of engagement, may lead to a more profound exploration of the transcendental space Kant initiated with regard to living systems. It still is a space that obeys ... a ‘logic of meaning’ ... and it does acknowledge the potential value of a metaphysics of intersubjectivity and communication...‘(K&V, this issue). We should ask what remains of the objectivity and certainty that Kant’s transcendental-idealist turn warranted in light of K&V’s relaxation (cf. also note 9); could it be that they have thrown away the baby with the bathwater?
That K&V do not use the word ‘model’ once is one indicator of the huge distance that separates their real preoccupations from contemporary biological discourse and practice (cf. Van Speybroeck, this issue; I will return to the topic of distance in Sect. 3). I invite the reader to substitute “chemistry,” or even “stamp collecting” (in reverence to Ernst Mayr; see Levin 1982) for “biology” in K&V’s pamphlet, and ask herself what difference, if any, this makes to their ‘argument’
Van Speybroeck and De Waele take issue with K&V’s view that one role of the philosophy of biology is to critically “destabilize” biology, but they don’t question the ’checks and balances-idea behind it. What, I ask bluntly, gives (transcendental) philosophy the authority to interfere in matters scientific? On the problem of governing science in a democratic society, which goes back at least to the Polanyi-Hessen debate in the interbellum, see, e.g., Fuller (2000).
Conversely, most naturalists take historiography seriously enough to reject its being guided by some alien epistemological program as advocated by K&V who in this respect show again how ‘French’ they are. Notice, moreover, that in the case of the history of biology, the heritage of Kantian critical philosophy for natural history is ambiguous. Whereas in the 1770s, Kant appears to have given preference to Naturgeschichte over Naturbeschreibung, in the late 1780s he “weakened the epistemological status of the ‘history of nature’ and gave theoretical preference to ‘description of nature’ (Sloan 2006, p 627). Phillip Sloan argues that as a result, “Kant’s successors, such as Goethe, could draw from Kant either a justification for a developmental history of nature, or ... a warrant from the critical philosophy for denying the validity of the developmental history of nature as anything more than a ‘regulative’ idea of reason (ibid.).
Contrary to what K&V (this issue) suggest, it obviously does not take a transcendental viewpoint “to find out what could possibly have happened in history” to make the philosophy of biology “into what it is today.” It is an analysis of our current situation that led me to go back to Darwin rather than to others.
Van de Vijver et al. (2005, p 57, n. 1) rightly point out the “recurrent attention” that Kant’s view of living beings receives from authors working on organization (e.g., Brian Goodwin) or complexity (e.g., Stuart Kauffman). They could have added German philosophers” work on teleology (e.g., Toepfer 2004) or ‘methodological culturalism’ as applied to biology (e.g., Gutmann 1996). Notice that nothing in my 2005 plea to define the philosophy of biology so as to exclude inquiries that show no potential for contributing to our understanding of relevant biological issues bars the aforementioned authors’ work in a Kantian vein from being included.
I note in passing that my demarcation in terms of ‘Darwin’ was never intended to be a part of my construal of naturalism itself. See Giere (2006a, p 53) on the question ‘how evolutionary’ naturalism can and should be.
As to Kant’s prediction of the impossibility of a “Newton of the blade of grass” not being a prediction but the expression of a contradiction (“an impossibility in principle”—K&V, this issue), I stick to my Logic 101 notion that if something is logically impossible (for what else could “impossibility in principle” mean?), then it is also factually impossible. Adding, tautologically, that this expression “is situated within Kant’s discourse” is of no help, for in what other discourse could Kant have expressed himself? Fortunately Kant or Husserl are no longer with us to read this. But then, K&V shouldn’t forget that today, Jean Bricmont is looking over their shoulder!
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Callebaut, W. Transcendental Niche Construction. Acta Biotheor 55, 73–90 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10441-007-9011-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10441-007-9011-z