Unintuitive metaphysics

At Aeon, philosopher Elijah Millgram comments on metaphysics and the contemporary analytic philosopher’s penchant for appealing to intuitions.  Give it a read -- it‘s very short.  Millgram uses an anecdote to illustrate the point that what intuitively seems to be an objective fact can sometimes reflect merely contingent “policies we’ve adopted,” where “the sense of indelible rightness and wrongness comes from having gotten so very used to those policies.”  And of course, such policies can be bad ones.  Hence the dubiousness of grounding metaphysical arguments in intuition.

As longtime readers know, I agree completely.  But contrary to what some critics of metaphysics seem to think, the dubiousness of this method of doing metaphysics doesn’t entail that metaphysics itself is dubious.  All it entails, of course, is that that particular method is dubious.  Millgram himself is aware that this is all that follows -- he says that he doesn’t think metaphysics has to make dubious appeals to intuition, only that “a lot of it does” in fact do so.  And that is certainly true of contemporary metaphysics.

Which is odd, since it most definitely is not true of Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) metaphysics, or of a lot of other traditional approaches in metaphysics.  So why on earth do many contemporary philosophers -- whether they are sympathetic to metaphysics as a discipline or suspicious of it -- think that the resort to intuitions is essential to it?

The reason, I think, is that it is commonly supposed these days that the only thing for philosophy to be, if it is not some kind of natural science, is “conceptual analysis” -- identifying the constituent parts of a concept, explicating its relations to other concepts, and so forth.  And “conceptual analysis” is understood as the investigation of the way we happen to “carve up” the world conceptually and linguistically. 

To be sure, for the early modern rationalist, how we so “carve up” the world necessarily corresponds to the world as it is in itself, at least where our most fundamental concepts (substance, causality, etc.) are concerned.  For the Kantian, while these concepts do not correspond to the world as it is in itself, the mind nevertheless has to “carve it up” in just the ways it does.  For early analytic philosophy in its various forms (Russell’s logical atomism, Wittgenstein’s early and later philosophies, logical positivism, and so forth) the analysis of language could determine the boundaries of intelligible discourse, and decisively show certain ideas, arguments, and problems to be meaningless, confused, or in some other way conceptually unsalvageable. 

But contemporary philosophy has abandoned anything as ambitious as all that.  For many contemporary philosophers, “conceptual analysis” can at best reveal the way our minds have been contingently molded to “carve up” the world -- by evolutionary forces, say, or by the surrounding culture, or what have you.  On this view, “conceptual analysis” can reveal the deepest assumptions that underlie the way thought and language “carve up” reality, the ones abandonment of which we would have the most difficult time making sense of or adjusting to, because such abandonment would have such wide-ranging repercussions.  These are the “intuitive” elements of our conceptual scheme. 

Precisely because they are so fundamental and widely shared, the contemporary metaphysician thinks these “intuitions” well worth investigating, and something which can yield powerful premises for philosophical argument.  But because they are also widely taken to be contingent -- perhaps reflecting only the molding forces of evolution, history, culture, etc. rather than objective reality -- and thus in principle revisable, critics of contemporary metaphysics understandably question the significance of conceptual analysis.  They judge that any metaphysics worthy of our attention can only be that which is implicit in natural science. 

Now this bifurcation between conceptual analysis and natural science is essentially a riff on Hume’s Fork, which divides respectable propositions into “relations of ideas” and “matters of fact.”  And the two bifurcations face similar problems.  Hume’s Fork itself is neither true by virtue of the relations of the ideas expressed in it, nor by virtue of the empirically ascertainable facts.  Hence it presupposes precisely the sort of third perspective it purportedly rules out.  And the same thing is true of the distinction between conceptual analysis and natural science.  This bifurcation is not itself something arrived at via conceptual analysis, nor (unless we frontload some question-begging premises) is it something confirmed by any findings of natural science.  Hence the very attempt to maintain that philosophy can only be either a kind of natural science or an exercise in conceptual analysis itself presupposes that there is a third kind of thing for it to be.

This third kind of enterprise is what A-T philosophers and other traditional metaphysicians take metaphysics to be.  The failure to see this leads to persistent misunderstanding.  For example, Ladyman and Ross, in their influential book Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized, dismiss contemporary “conceptual analysis”-oriented metaphysics as “neo-scholastic.”  But the epithet is inept and ill-informed, since mere “conceptual analysis” is precisely what A-T and other Scholastic writers claim not to be doing.  Consider also the difficulty (usefully discussed by Gaven Kerr in chapter 3 of his fine book Aquinas’s Way to God: The Proof in De Ente et Essentia) of comparing Thomist and analytic conceptions of existence, since for the Thomist the issue is irreducibly metaphysical whereas the analytic tradition has, by contrast, tended to approach it from the point of view of semantics and formal logic -- thereby in effect confining discussion, question-beggingly, to the “conceptual analysis” or “relations of ideas” side of the post-Humean divide.  The analytic critic of Thomism thus tends to talk past, rather than directly address, the Thomist’s arguments.

That the very attempt to wedge metaphysics into the Procrustean “either natural science or conceptual analysis” bed presupposes that there is something outside that bed suffices to show that metaphysics need not rest on intuition-cum-conceptual-analysis.  But there are other considerations that show the same thing.  We can see this both from a consideration of the things to which we apply the concepts the conceptual analyst analyzes, and from a consideration of the minds which do the analyzing.  In both cases, the “policies” and “habits” referred to by Millgram presuppose that which is not a product of mere policy or habit.

Consider first, then, Millgram’s examples of something’s being a road, of something’s being the right lane or left lane of the road, and of something’s being the correct lane to drive on.  These are, of course, matters of convention, and if we had deep “intuitions” to the effect that any of these is an objective matter of fact, such intuitions would (as Millgram rightly emphasizes) merely be a product of our being habituated to certain contingent polices we’ve adopted while forgetting that they are just contingent polices.  But these conventions presuppose that which is not mere convention.  That there is ground for us to build roads on is not a matter of convention, the raw materials out of which we build them are not the products of convention, the fact that cars would tend to crash into one another if there were no policy of driving on one side of the road rather than the other is not a matter of convention, and so forth.  And even if we tried to show that one or more of these factors were somehow a matter of convention, we would still inevitably be left with something that was not.  Again, the policies, habits, etc. that ground some of our intuitions always presuppose something which is not a product of mere policy or habit.  (This is one of the implications of Aristotle’s discussion of nature versus art in the Physics -- a distinction which, as I have argued many times, points to the deeper distinction between substantial form versus mere accidental form.)

Now, metaphysics, as A-T and other traditional metaphysicians understand it, is concerned precisely with the investigation of what the world must be like apart from our conventions, habits, and the like.  Of course, natural science is concerned with that too.  But natural science focuses on material reality, on the material reality that happens to exist, and on those aspects of material reality susceptible of prediction and control.  Are there, or could there be, real things that are not material things?  Could there have been a material world radically different from the sort we in fact have?  If there could have been, are there nevertheless features it would have to share in common with any other possible material world?  And are there features of material reality which are not susceptible of mathematical modeling, or of the prediction and control that natural science focuses on?  However one ends up answering such questions, they are not, or at least are not entirely, questions that natural science itself can answer.  That’s what makes them metaphysical.  And say what you will about the prospects for answering them, they are precisely not the study of how we happen intuitively but contingently to “carve up” the world conceptually, because their whole point is to find out what things must be like apart from how we happen contingently and intuitively to carve them up.

Then there are the minds which set the “policies” Millgram speaks of, which form the “habits” in question, which have the “intuitions,” etc.  Since conventions, policies, etc. presuppose the existence and operation of minds having a certain nature, the existence, operation, and natures of minds cannot themselves coherently be said to be the products of convention, policy, etc.  (Crawford Elder develops this point in chapter 1 of Real Natures and Familiar Objects.)  And when we consider not just the contingent details about what our minds happen to be like, but what any possible mind would have to be like in order to be the sort of thing which can form conventions, formulate policies, etc., we are asking a metaphysical rather than merely empirical scientific question.  And once again, whatever one thinks of the prospects for answering it, it is precisely not a question about how we merely “intuitively” happen to carve up reality.

So, those are three reasons why metaphysics need not be, and (properly understood) cannot be, mere “conceptual analysis” and “intuition”-mongering.  First, the very attempt to wedge all inquiry into either natural science or conceptual analysis presupposes that there is a third alternative.  Second, the things we produce by convention, policy, habit, etc. inevitably presuppose some rock bottom level of mind-independent phenomena which are not the product of convention, policy, habit, etc.  Third, the mind itself cannot be the product of convention, policy, habit, etc.  The first point suffices to tell us that there can be such an enterprise as metaphysics in its traditional form.  The second two points tell us what its subject matter is -- viz. the rock bottom features of mental and extra-mental reality, whatever they turn out to be, which both our contingent conceptual practices and even natural science must presuppose. 

For the A-T metaphysician, these features are described by the theory of act and potency, hylemorphism, the doctrine of the four causes, the essence/existence distinction, etc.  Of course, establishing all of that requires detailed argumentation, and of course other traditional schools of metaphysics (Neo-Platonism, idealism, Leibnizian rationalism, etc.) will disagree with it.  But none of this argumentation boils down to a mere appeal to intuition or conceptual analysis, and the evaluation of it cannot be settled by appeal to natural science.  Furthermore, the attempt to wave it all away by stomping one’s foot and insisting that natural science and conceptual analysis are the only two things metaphysics could be, simply, and massively, begs the question.  There just is no rational alternative to engaging the arguments head on. 

A lot more can be said, and is said in Scholastic Metaphysics.