Philip Kitcher, bait-and-switcher

Here’s a thumbnail history of philosophy and science since the early modern period, in three stages.  First, the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition had by the beginning of this period hammered out a conception of the natural world that is at the same time unified and radically anti-reductionist.  It is unified insofar as to all natural phenomena we can apply the theory of act and potency, the hylemorphic analysis of material substances, the doctrine of the four causes, and other components of Aristotelian philosophy of nature.  It is radically anti-reductionist insofar as it affirms that certain divisions in nature -- between the inorganic and the organic; between the merely “vegetative” or non-sentient forms of life and the sensory or animal forms; and between the merely sensory or animal forms of life and the distinctively rational or human form -- are nevertheless differences in kind rather than degree.

Churchland on dualism, Part V

Paul Churchland has just published a third edition of Matter and Consciousness, his widely used introductory textbook on the philosophy of mind.  The blog Philosophy of Brains has posted a symposium on the book, with contributions from Amy Kind, William Ramsey, and Pete Mandik.  Prof. Kind, who deals with Churchland’s discussion of dualism, is kind to him indeed -- a little too kind, as it happens.  Longtime readers will recall a series of posts I did several years ago on the previous edition of Churchland’s book, in which I showed how extremely superficial, misleading, and frankly incompetent is its treatment of dualism.  Prof. Kind commends Churchland’s “clear writing style and incisive argumentation” as “a model for us all.”  While I agree with her about the clarity of Churchland’s style, I cannot concur with her judgment of the quality of the book’s argumentation, for at least with respect to dualism, this new edition is as bad as the old. 

Eliminativism without truth, Part I

Suppose you hold that a good scientific explanation should make no reference to teleology, final causality, purpose, directedness-toward-an-end, or the like as an inherent and irreducible feature of the natural order.  And suppose you hold that what is real is only what science tells us is real.  Then you are at least implicitly committed to denying that even human purposes or ends are real, and also to denying that the intentionality of thought and the semantic content of speech and writing are real.  Scientism, in short, entails a radical eliminativism.  Alex Rosenberg and I agree on that much -- he defends this thesis in The Atheist’s Guide to Reality and I defend it in The Last Superstition.  Where we differ is over the lesson to be drawn from this thesis.  Rosenberg holds that scientism is true, so that eliminativism must be true as well.  I maintain that eliminativism is incoherent, and constitutes a reductio ad absurdum of the scientism that leads to it.  I responded to Rosenberg at length in a series of posts on his book.

In his paper “Eliminativism without Tears,” Rosenberg attempts in a more systematic way than he has elsewhere to respond to the charge of incoherence.  Rosenberg kindly sent me this paper some time ago, and I note that it is now available online.

Naturalism in the news

On the subject of naturalism, Raymond Tallis opines in The Guardian, Massimo Pigliucci reports at Philosophy Now, and Daniel Dennett is interviewed at 3:AM Magazine.  James Ladyman, co-author of the influential Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized, gets a prominent mention in each piece.  Which gives me an excuse for some photoshopping fun (with apologies both to Ladyman and to Tim Meadows).

Mackie’s argument from queerness

In his book Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, J. L. Mackie famously put forward his “argument from queerness” against the objectivity of moral values.  The argument has both a metaphysical aspect and an epistemological aspect.  Mackie writes:

If there were objective values, then they would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe.  Correspondingly, if we were aware of them, it would have to be by some special faculty of moral perception or intuition, utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else. (p. 38)

Mackie’s claim is that we simply have no good reason to believe either in such odd entities as objective values or in an odd special faculty of moral knowledge.  We can explain everything that needs to be explained vis-à-vis morality by analyzing values in terms of our subjective responses to certain events in the world, and Ockham’s razor favors this approach to the alternative given the latter’s “queerness.”

Nagel and his critics, Part IX

Returning to my series on the critics of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, let’s look at the recent Commonweal magazine symposium on the book.  The contributors are philosopher Gary Gutting, biologist Kenneth Miller, and physicist Stephen Barr.  I’ll remark on each contribution in turn.

Around the web

Metaphysician E. J. Lowe discusses ontology, physics, Locke, Aristotle, logic, laws of nature, potency and act, dualism, science fiction, and other matters in an interview at 3:AM Magazine. 

Over at The Montreal Review, Alex Sztuden responds to Leiter and Weisberg’s review of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos.

Frank Beckwith replies to David Bentley Hart on natural law in The Catholic Thing.

Nagel and his critics, Part VIII

Resuming our series on the serious critics of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, let’s turn to Simon Blackburn’s review in New Statesman from a few months back.  Blackburn’s review is negative, but it is not polemical; on the contrary, he allows that the book is “beautifully lucid, civilised, modest in tone and courageous in its scope” and even that there is “charm” to it.  Despite the review’s now somewhat notorious closing paragraph (more on which below) I think Blackburn is trying to be fair to Nagel.

Nagel and his critics, Part VII

Let’s return to our look at the critics of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos.  New commentary on Nagel’s book continues to appear, and to some extent it repeats points made by earlier reviewers I’ve already responded to.  Here I want to say something about Mohan Matthen’s review in The Philosophers Magazine.  In particular, I want to address what Matthen says about the issue of whether conscious awareness could arise in a purely material cosmos.  (Matthen has also commented on Nagel’s book over at the New APPS blog, e.g. here.)

The limits of eliminativism

Eliminativist positions in philosophy are a variety of anti-realism, which is in turn typically contrasted with realist and reductionist positions.  A realist account of some phenomenon takes it to be both real and essentially what it appears to be.  A reductionist account of some phenomenon takes it to be real but not what it appears to be.  An eliminativist view of some phenomenon would take it to be in no way real, and something we ought to eliminate from our account of the world altogether.  Instrumentalism is a milder version of anti-realism, where an instrumentalist view of some phenomenon holds that it is not real but nevertheless a useful or even indispensible fiction.

Nagel and his critics, Part V

Our look at the critics of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos brings us now to philosopher of science John Dupré, whose review of the book appeared in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.  The review is pretty harsh.  At his kindest Dupré says he found the book “frustrating and unconvincing.”  Less kind is the remark that “as far as an attack that might concern evolutionists, they will feel, to borrow the fine phrase of former British minister, Dennis Healey, as if they had been savaged by a sheep.”

The remark is not only unkind but unjust.  At the beginning of his review, Dupré gives the impression that Nagel is attacking neo-Darwinian evolutionary biology per se.  Dupré writes: 

Darwinism, neo- or otherwise, is an account of the relations between living things past and present and of their ultimate origins, full of fascinating problems in detail, but beyond any serious doubt in general outline.  This lack of doubt derives not, as Nagel sometimes insinuates, from a prior commitment to a metaphysical view -- there are theistic Darwinists as well as atheistic, naturalists and supernaturalists -- but from overwhelming evidence from a variety of sources: biogeography, the fossil record, comparative physiology and genomics, and so on.  Nagel offers no arguments against any of this, and indeed states explicitly that he is not competent to do so.  His complaint is that there are some explanatory tasks that he thinks evolution should perform that he thinks it can't.

Nagel and his critics, Part IV

Continuing our look at the critics of Thomas Nagel’s recent book Mind and Cosmos, we turn to philosopher Alva Noë’s very interesting remarks over at NPR’s 13.7: Cosmos & Culture blog.  Noë’s initial comments might seem broadly sympathetic to Nagel’s position.  He writes:

Science has produced no standard account of the origins of life.

We have a superb understanding of how we get biological variety from simple, living starting points. We can thank Darwin for that. And we know that life in its simplest forms is built up out of inorganic stuff. But we don't have any account of how life springs forth from the supposed primordial soup. This is an explanatory gap we have no idea how to bridge.

Science also lacks even a back-of-the-envelop [sic] concept explaining the emergence of consciousness from the behavior of mere matter. We have an elaborate understanding of the ways in which experience depends on neurobiology. But how consciousness arises out of the action of neurons, or how low-level chemical or atomic processes might explain why we are conscious — we haven't a clue.

We aren't even really sure what questions we should be asking.

These two explanatory gaps are strikingly similar… In both cases we have large-scale phenomena in view (life, consciousness) and an exquisitely detailed understanding of the low-level processes that sustain these phenomena (biochemistry, neuroscience, etc). But we lack any way of making sense of the idea that the higher-level phenomena just come down to, or consist of, what is going on at the lower level.

Nagel and his critics, Part III

In the previous installment in this series of posts on Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, I looked at some objections to Nagel raised by Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg.  I want now to turn to Elliot Sober’s review in Boston Review.  To his credit, and unlike Leiter and Weisberg, Sober is careful to acknowledge that:

Nagel’s main goal in this book is not to argue against materialistic reductionism, but to explore the consequences of its being false.  He has argued against the -ism elsewhere, and those who know their Nagel will be able to fill in the details.

Sober then goes on to offer a brief summary of the relevant positions Nagel has defended in earlier works like his articles “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” and “The Psychophysical Nexus.”  As I emphasized in my previous post, keeping these earlier arguments in mind is crucial to giving the position Nagel develops in Mind and Cosmos a fair reading.  Unfortunately, however, having reminded his readers of these earlier arguments of Nagel’s, Sober immediately goes on to ignore them.

Nagel and his critics, Part II

Whereas my First Things review of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos accentuated the positive, the first post in this series put forward some criticisms of the book.  Let’s turn now to the objections against Nagel raised by Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg in their review in The Nation.  

First some stage setting is in order.  As I indicated in the previous post, Mind and Cosmos is mostly devoted to the positive task of spelling out what a non-materialist version of naturalism might look like.  The negative task of criticizing materialist forms of naturalism is carried out in only a relatively brief and sketchy way, and here Nagel is essentially relying on arguments he and others have developed at greater length elsewhere.  Especially relevant for present purposes is a line of argument Nagel put forward in what is perhaps his most famous piece of writing -- his widely reprinted 1974 article “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” -- and developed further in later works like The View From Nowhere.

Was Aquinas a dualist?

At the start of chapter 4 of Aquinas (the chapter on “Psychology”), I wrote:

As I have emphasized throughout this book, understanding Aquinas requires “thinking outside the box” of the basic metaphysical assumptions (concerning cause, effect, substance, essence, etc.) that contemporary philosophers tend to take for granted.  This is nowhere more true than where Aquinas’s philosophy of mind is concerned.  Indeed, to speak of Aquinas’s “philosophy of mind” is already misleading.  For Aquinas does not approach the issues dealt with in this modern philosophical sub-discipline in terms of their relevance to solving the so-called “mind-body problem.”  No such problem existed in Aquinas’s day, and for him the important distinction was in any case not between mind and body, but rather between soul and body.  Even that is potentially misleading, however, for Aquinas does not mean by “soul” what contemporary philosophers tend to mean by it, i.e. an immaterial substance of the sort affirmed by Descartes.  Furthermore, while contemporary philosophers of mind tend to obsess over the questions of whether and how science can explain consciousness and the “qualia” that define it, Aquinas instead takes what is now called “intentionality” to be the distinctive feature of the mind, and the one that it is in principle impossible to explain in materialistic terms.  At the same time, he does not think of intentionality in quite the way contemporary philosophers do.  Moreover, while he is not a materialist, he is not a Cartesian dualist either, his view being in some respects a middle position between these options.  But neither is this middle position the standard one discussed by contemporary philosophers under the label “property dualism.”  And so forth.

Animals are conscious! In other news, sky is blue, water wet

A reader calls my attention to a Discovery News story which breathlessly declares: 

A prominent group of scientists signs a document stating that animals are just as “conscious and aware” as humans are.  This is a big deal.

Actually, it is not a big deal, nor in any way news, and the really interesting thing about this story is how completely uninteresting it is.  Animals are conscious?  Anyone who has ever owned a pet, or been to the zoo, or indeed just knows what an animal is, knows that.  

OK, almost anyone.  Descartes notoriously denied it, for reasons tied to his brand of dualism.  And perhaps that is one reason someone might think animal consciousness remarkable.  It might be supposed that if you regard the human mind as something immaterial, you have to regard animals as devoid of consciousness, so that evidence of animal consciousness is evidence against the immateriality of the mind and thus a “big deal.”  This is not what the article says, mind you, but it is one way to make sense of why it presents the evidence of animal consciousness as if it were noteworthy.

The road from libertarianism

I have pretty much always been conservative.  For about a decade -- from the early 90s to the early 00s -- I was also a libertarian.  That is to say, I was a “fusionist”: someone who combines a conservative moral and social philosophy with a libertarian political philosophy.  Occasionally I am asked how I came to abandon libertarianism.  Having said something recently about how I came to reject atheism, I might as well say something about the other transition.

Concretizing the abstract

Eric Voegelin famously (if obscurely) characterized utopian political projects as attempts to “immanentize the eschaton.”   A related error -- and one that underlies not only political utopianism but scientism and its offspring -- might be called the tendency to “concretize the abstract.”  Treating abstractions as if they were concrete realities is something Alfred North Whitehead, in Science and the Modern World, labeled the “Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness,” and what has also been called the “Reification Fallacy.”  It has been an occupational hazard of philosophy and science since the time of the Pre-Socratics.  The Aristotelian strain in Western thought formed a counterpoint to this “concretizing” tendency within the context of ancient philosophy, and also more or less inoculated Scholasticism against the tendency.  But it came roaring back with a vengeance with Galileo, Descartes, and their modern successors, and has dominated Western thought ever since.  Wittgenstein tried to put an end to it, but failed; for bad metaphysics can effectively be counteracted only by good metaphysics, not by no metaphysics.  And Aristotelianism is par excellence a metaphysics which keeps abstractions in their place.

The road from atheism

As most of my readers probably know, I was an atheist for about a decade -- roughly the 1990s, give or take.  Occasionally I am asked how I came to reject atheism.  I briefly addressed this in The Last Superstition.  A longer answer, which I offer here, requires an account of the atheism I came to reject.

I was brought up Catholic, but lost whatever I had of the Faith by the time I was about 13 or 14.  Hearing, from a non-Catholic relative, some of the stock anti-Catholic arguments for the first time -- “That isn’t in the Bible!”, “This came from paganism!”, “Here’s what they did to people in the Middle Ages!”, etc. -- I was mesmerized, and convinced, seemingly for good.  Sola scriptura-based arguments are extremely impressive, until you come to realize that their basic premise -- sola scriptura itself -- has absolutely nothing to be said for it.  Unfortunately it takes some people, like my younger self, a long time to see that.  Such arguments can survive even the complete loss of religious belief, the anti-Catholic ghost that carries on beyond the death of the Protestant body, haunting the atheist who finds himself sounding like Martin Luther when debating his papist friends. 

Reading Rosenberg, Part X

And now we reach, at long last, the end of our detailed critical look at Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality.  In this final post I want to examine what Rosenberg has to say about a set of philosophical arguments he regards as “among the last serious challenges to scientism” (p. 228).  The arguments in question all entail that the realm of conscious experience -- what common sense says we know only “from inside” (p. 238), from a point of view “somewhere behind the eyes” (p. 222) -- cannot be accounted for in terms of neuroscience or physical science more generally.  In his treatment of these arguments, we get Rosenberg simultaneously at his best and at his worst.