Tom Swann Price Naturalism And The Fate Of The M Worlds
what Journal from?<<<
Reply from Jackson Tom Swann Jackson M Worlds
##Intro Naturalism makes the Ms problematic. Meaning Modality Morality the Mental
Options: - eliminate. But this is unsatisfying. - Deny they have anything to do with scientifically explicable reality. But this is mysterious Rescue strategies: - Reductionism - Noncognitivism - FUNCTIONAL PLURALISM
Section I
Noncognitivism as neat way out of placement problems without going nonnaturalist Nothing unnaturalistic about ‘linguistic function’ Fn3 unless there is. Esp: problem with intentionality
But is unattractive, esp for modality, fn4 (Boghossian 1990) not even clear it is coherent for meaning. >>>sure Blackburn would have something to say ~> to do sematics is to express one’s commitments…?<<<
Another line of critique. (Price 1988?) How can the noncognitivist split non/cognitive? Semantics, psychology But not obvious this will work. Esp due to minimalism about truth How avoid thought that any indicative is truth-apt? Fn5 maybe minimalist only about truth, not aptness. But we can be min about all of it
‘analogous but less familiar point’ from Carnap 1950 >>>analogous how?<<< internal questions. Can legitimately ask what entities ‘are quantified over in the most satisfactory representation of the framework concerned’and as to what particular entities there are of the recognised kinds.’ P250 external questions. Can legitimately ask pragmatic questions about frameworks. No external ontological questions
‘satisfactory representation’ = ?, without being circular. ‘need to be quantified over’ = ?. How can there be a question, internally? Unless we privilege some category or epistemic end over others. So assume it is external. Now ask: needed for what end? What framework to adopt for the purpose of asking this question?
what sense of ‘abstract entity’ in the abstracta framework? Wouldn’t ‘abstract’ have to be a trans framework claim? What sense of ‘thing’ in the thing framework?
Fn7 says can be atheist in the theistic framework. This is to say ‘this is what God would be but there isn’t one’?
Price says the nominalist eliminates internally. what sense of elimination that isn’t just adopting a new framework? <<<
Makes things hard for the noncognitivist. Fn7 ‘ontology is so close at hand’.
P251 ‘reflection on the function of existence claims leads to trouble for the very view that stakes its living on the thesis that linguistic functions may not be what they seem’. >>>how exactly is the Carnap thesis about linguistic function?<<<
argues noncognitivism has gone awry by adopting traditional ways of talking about linguistic functions. Need a new way. Thinks his new way gets strength from minimalism about semantics and ontology
##Section II functional pluralism.
(fn9 : once said it was a form of noncognitivism. >>>How?<<< Vertical pluralism ’ different discourses, not theories within.)
P252 ‘accepts that moral, model and meaning utterances are descriptive, fact-stating, truth-apt, cognitive, belief-expressing or whatever’and full-bloodedly so, not merely in some ersatz or ’quasi’ sense’ They are descriptive, but their job is not to describe what science describes.’
Makes it sound Moorean nonnaturalist. But actually rejects the idea of a single world. ‘I don’t mean that it replaces the single workld with a bare multiplicity of worlds, which would be equally unappealing. The point is that the judgment of unity or plurality could onlt be made from the framework-independent stance, which the Carnap thesis disallows. Without the stance, functional pluralism is neither monist nor pluralist, in a primarily ontological sense’for there is no sense’
pluralist about linguistic function. Plurality of worlds is just a result of the fact that more than one function may be performed at the same time >>>why is this necessary? Wouldn’t it be enough that different functions performed at any time?<<<
Fn 11 frameworks must be able to mix. But is not as bad as it is for the noncog. >>>but ‘mixing’ here is just that one use two frameworks at once? Not obviously the frameworks themselves that mix. Or is it the possibility of conflicts and negotiations between how they are employed simultaneously that gives one the mixing?<<<
functional pluralism obscured by commitment to World-Word dichotomy, with Nature qua Science standing in for World, and starting with the Words for philosophy >>>representationalism. But issue is really monistic representationalism ’ commitment to the scientific object frame?<<<
thinks two mistakes here. - imagining there is an extra-linguistic stance for metaphysics - fails to notice the plurality of ‘functions, or frameworks, within descriptive discourse as a whole’. P253 >>>so functions are frameworks? The use of frameworks?
Need the naturalist accept the first accusation? They could say that we do metaphysics from within science and that’s that.<<<
Extending Carnap’s treatment of Mathematics to the other Ms.
##Section III Description as a multi-purpose tool
Trivial plurality, as associated with plurality of content But no threat to ‘functional taxonomy’ with description as basic category But not all tools ‘wear their essential properties on the surface’ functional taxonomy of human artefacts would have core properties, and explicate particular artefacts as having these and having them used in different ways.
P255 Similarly "description and ‘assertion’ may be nothing more than relatively superficial labels for a linguistic category whose core properties remain to be discovered’a category which may turn out to have a multi-functional role in language, in the sense that its core properties serve a range of very different functions’.
The functional pluralist needs to say - what are the core properties of description? - What are the various uses?
P256 Function of assertion = ‘to give voice to speakers’ mental states and behavioural dispositions in a way which invites criticism by speakers who hold conflicting mental states. ’ thus embodies a normative idea of answerability to an external standard’ Expressions of truth are purest expressions of these norms Price 1988, also Brandom 1994
seems more questions here than answers! ‘give voice to’? ‘mental states’? ‘invites’? ‘conflicting’?
the external standard is what? The way the world is? Intersubjective acceptability? But then worries about under what conditions etc. <<<
‘avoids the kind of circularity that would be involved if we tried to characterise the core functions of assertoric discourse in terms of the very group of concepts whose functional significance is at issue.’ Fn 16 Price 1988 Ch7 ’ only if mental states are explicable without
What range of functions? Expressing various mental states, and ‘dependencies on human capacities and responses’, perceptual states. Noncog appeals to non-belief states, functional pluralist denies this. But both can agree about the distinctions.
why would a cognitivist not also be able to agree?<<<
Section IV
Belief and Ontology
noncogists compelled to deny belief because they have truth-conditions / ontological commitments. >>>are these just the same thing?<<<
Carnap tells us this is an illegitimate notion of belief. Against the idea that beliefs are the mind trying to get in contact with a pre-existing world. ‘pre-existing’ in the ‘sense that it is thought of from an external stance which supposedly we occupy as semanticists and ontologists, asking to what our beliefs refer, and what makes them true’ P257
= idealism? No way the world could be other than a way we could think of it? He’s surely not saying that we create what we know about by knowing it? <<<
No such stance.
We may discover that when moral beliefs are expressed in canonical form, they refer to moral properties.
on the Carnap thesis, how could this be a discovery?<<<
Fn 17 Quine’s semantic ascent not externality. Posing internal questions by talking about the framework. The sentences of which we can ask whether they are true must be interpreted. Carnap’s external questions are like asking whether to interpret.
Noncog and pluralists: the remaining puzzle is sociolinguistic, not metaphysical. P258 ‘It is the issue as to why creatures like us should find ourselves engaged in this particular linguistic practice, not the issue as to what these moral properties are.’
Pluralist thinks the noncog’s concession is irrelevant.
‘Doesn’t the metaphysical issue emerge again, from within the sociolinguistic perspective?’ is naturalistic in initial orientation. But what is the function of moral discourse? - need to appeal to moral properties that moral judgments respond to - or, if we don’t, then we must concede error
the second outcome is in error. ‘The fact that there are no moral properties in the natural world does not entail that moral talk is in error, if its function is not to describe such properties.’ >>>but I thought this was predicated on the assumption that it was? What is the point of the Carnap stuff then? And what if it is its function?<<<
maybe description fulfills the moral functions best. This would give a naturalistic understanding of what speakers are doing without conceding the descriptive function of the discourse.
Section V
Primacy of science
naturalism must say that science is special discourse easy to take this to say that science gives genuine descriptions, unlike other discourses
primacy is that ‘as functional pluralists, we speak from within the scientific framework, but about other frameworks’
not about the things they are committed to, >>>but to their being committed to it.<<<
doesn’t this undermine the commitments of the other frameworks? This is to forget the Carnap thesis, to take science as the framework-neutral stance.
‘what is the distinguishing factor of scientific discourse?’ ‘scientific discourse may appear distinctive in that when we address this sort of question with respect to science, our answer will refer to the entities countenanced by the discourse’science itself’in a way which isn’t true of other discourses’ >>>ambiguous. It will refer to us qua framework wielding linguistic animals and perhaps some stuff in the world, but not necessarily in the way in which the stuff in the world is understood internal to the framework? Or would an alternative explanation here supercede the original commitment<<<
seems we need to appeal to middle-sized physical objects to explain folk talk about them, but that we don’t need to appeal to moral properties to explain talk about them. (Harman) whatever discourse needs to be explained as a response to a pre-existing world.
Closely related to way of settling realist/anti-realist in metaphysics. If the putative entities do causal-explanatory work. But would science then come out as descriptive? Irreducibly modal at various points, plus the notion of causation itself Possibility of explaining causal and modal talk without appeal to such facts. E.g. Lewis. Even categories and kind terms would be suspect.
Might be that there is no useful residue from the attempt to distil pure representation from functional reflection on thought and language.
P261 ‘we cannot take it for granted that all the conceptual tools used by science are themselves to be explained as bare responses to proper objects of scientific study’ ‘The appropriate scientific course might be to study talk of causation’to ask why we have it, what it does for us.’
Need in no way devalue its original uses.
Reason to be wary of functionalist account of causation if you want to run an argument for physicalism from physical causation.
Section VI
Jackson’s program
Ramsey-Carnap-Lewis approach to theoretical terms
Uses ‘cool’ as a toy example Synonyms don’t get us very far. Ramsey sentence. There is a property F such that CT(F)
Functional pluralist can agree with this Difference in the next step. Pluralist wants to know what role ‘cool’ plays in the lives of its speakers ‘there need be no further significant issue about what property cool is, and no mystery at the lack of such an issue.’ Issue arises inside the framework, but the CT answers it. Outside the framework, the issue doesn’t arise. What does arise is the question: ‘why use ’cool’?’
In Jackson’s view, there is a further issue. What physical property F satisfies the theory?
Two ways to it. FIRST: they describe, but there is nothing else for them to describe. (naturalism and representationalism).
Functional pluralist denies that description is univocal in the ‘right sort of way’. Core function but various applications.
SECOND: supervenience. Some vastly disjunctive physical property that coolness covaries with.
Pluralist parts at the same juncture as the noncognitivist. Agree that there is a naturalistic specification of the extension of some terms T P264 ‘It doesn’t show that to be cool is to have the natural property that marks this class.’ [in this proposition] one uses the term ‘cool’, whereas in the former one [i.e. in saying that things people call cool have certain other properties] only mentions it’.
what then is it to be cool? To have speakers say ‘cool’ of it?
Is this the only way to make the Jackson point? <<<
or the speakers themselves recognize and assent to the supervenience thesis. But this doesn’t entail that ascription of ‘cool’ is ascription of physical properties.
Raises example of applauding at tennis. Say speakers assent to the idea that physically identical plays both deserve applause or not. The applause supervenes on the physical, but doesn’t mean that to applaud is to ascribe physicals
but the candidate for supervenience is the appropriateness of applause. So this must hinge on the point above.<<<
‘the attempt to extract reduction from supervenience is blocked by functional difference.’
Doesn’t show the identity claim is false, only unmotivated. Does the pluralist require falsity? Will accept such reduction within a framework, not between.
Makes a lot hang on the notion of frameworks. What are? How to individuate? Doesn’t answer, just offering another way of rescuing.
’Without the Carnap thesis, naturalism seems to require ontological monism.
Controversial. But comes from two simple theses. Carnap thesis and the possibility of descriptive functional pluralism.
still not clear to me what the links between these two actually are. Carnap thesis is about frameworks not functions; couldn’t frameworks and functions come apart?<<<