Abstract
D’Oro asks whether Collingwood’s metaphysics of absolute presuppositions leads to the belief-system relativism that is the target of Boghossian’s sustained criticism in his Fear of Knowledge (2006). She argues that Collingwood’s metaphysics of absolute presuppositions aims to defend a form of epistemic pluralism which is not reducible to the kind of epistemic relativism Boghossian critiques. The decoupling of epistemic pluralism from epistemic relativism rests on a reading of absolute presuppositions as epistemic “hinges” which give rise to the characteristic complexes of questions and answers operative in different contexts of inquiry. The task of the metaphysician, D’Oro argues, is to show that the questions asked in different contexts of inquiry are entailed by the absolute presuppositions constitutive of those forms of knowing. Since epistemic pluralism is not a form of epistemic relativism, it is not vulnerable to the stock objections raised against relativism.
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Notes
- 1.
Hinge epistemology is often discussed in the context of Wittgenstein.
- 2.
In this example of a relative presupposition Collingwood is referring to a measuring tape, not to the unit of measurement, the foot. The question “is the foot accurate as a unit of measurement?” is the kind of question which Collingwood would have most likely treated as one which cannot be answered by stating either “yes the foot is an accurate unit of measurement”, or “no, the foot is not an accurate unit of measurement”. In other words, Collingwood would have treated the proposition “the foot is an accurate unit of measurement” not as an ordinary proposition that can be found to be true or false, but as a presupposition to which the notion of truth and falsity does not apply, and moreover as the kind of presupposition which cannot be restated as a proposition by changing its role.
- 3.
On what is unfortunately a standard reading of Collingwood, this rejection of metaphysics allegedly leads to the dissolution of philosophy into a form of cultural anthropology . Since the task of the metaphysician is no longer to assess absolute presuppositions for truth or falsity and to discuss, for example, whether there are causes, or whether there is freedom of the will, the task of metaphysics is downgraded to that of establishing what people tended to believe at certain times and places. On this view metaphysics simply gets dissolved into history . While there are passages that lend support to the standard interpretation of what philosophy is supposed to do (to discuss the truth or falsity of the most general propositions about reality), the standard interpretation is clearly at odds with Collingwood’s view that metaphysics (understood as the study of absolute presuppositions) is a logical enquiry and that the philosopher is a kind of detective who uncovers presuppositions by following the logical clues that they leave in the questions to which they give rise. Thus while the explanatory practices that metaphysics studies are historically instantiated, the logical regress from answers to questions, and from questions to presuppositions, is not a descriptive historical process. The standard interpretation of An Essay on Metaphysics as dissolving metaphysics into history brings Collingwood closer to the kind of relativistic pluralism of Rorty . But such an interpretation fails to acknowledge the full implications of Collingwood’s claim that presuppositions do not possess causal power, but logical efficacy, and therefore that they stand to the questions to which they give rise as their logical rather than causal ground.
- 4.
- 5.
My goal is not to evaluate whether Boghossian’s reconstruction of Rorty is correct.
- 6.
For a comparison of Collingwood and Carnap on this see D’Oro 2015.
- 7.
There is a third objection against epistemic relativism which Boghossian deems to be even more powerful than the self-undermining objection. This is the claim that epistemic relativism advances incomplete propositions (Boghossian 2006: 87 ff.) which potentially generate a vicious regress (2006: 89). As Boghossian says, it is crucial to the relativist that a thinker accepts a belief system (Boghossian 2006: 86). This entails that propositions such as “Copernicanism is justified by Galileo’s observations” is incomplete and stands for “In relation to epistemic system C (which the subject accepts), Copernicanism is justified by Galileo’s observations”. I have not considered this objection in much detail because, although distinct from the self-undermining objection, it relies on a premise to which the hinge epistemology that I have ascribed to Collingwood is not wedded: Collingwood, as we have seen, denies that presuppositions do their work in virtue of being believed or accepted as true by the subject.
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D’Oro, G. (2018). Why Epistemic Pluralism Does not Entail Relativism: Collingwood’s Hinge Epistemology. In: Dharamsi, K., D'Oro, G., Leach, S. (eds) Collingwood on Philosophical Methodology. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02432-1_7
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