Tom Swann Redding Directions For Analytic Kantianism Naturalism Or Idealism
#Paul Redding Two Directions for Analytic Kantianism: Naturalism and Idealism From Redding’s website: http://www-personal.arts.usyd.edu.au/paureddi/publications.shtml “to appear in Mario De Caro and David Macarthur (eds), Naturalism and Normativity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009)”
This deals with exactly the kinds of topics I am interested in, so I’ve used this summary as an excuse to sign post things I need to check up on and think about and read - especially what seem some good references to follow up. Pretty sure some of my thoughts here are a bit loopy…
p1 Analytic philosophy had two currents: the empiricism and commonsense realism coming from early Russell and Moore, and a more Kantian stream from Frege and Wittgenstein, through Carnap to Quine. The Kantian features being Kant’s synthetic a priori form of knowledge, now redefined by “axiomatizing, relativising and historicising it, so as to fit with the results of the contemporary sciences” (Friedman 1999). So the Kantian bit is the idea of content being having conditions that condition it. Deflation of attempts at metaphysics from concepts alone, concern for the frameworks that make representation possible.
P2 Quine’s attack in Carnap’s distinctions: synthetic/analytic and empirical/conceptual, “and with this…assimilated to a fully naturalized holistic”web of belief"
why does Two Dogmas lead to naturalism? In logical terms: can we not a) allow that the analytic/synthetic distinction is relativised, not just historical but in the deeper sense that analyticity is no longer possessed absolutely by any claim, even considered internal to a part of the web, but only as determined by the epistemic responses it licenses to possible observations, and yet b) reject a naturalistic understanding thereof. One way of holding b) is by retaining Carnap’s pragmatism with regards to ways of talking / thinking, the idea of a constitutive relation to a framework without which we do not properly understand it. I think we see something like this in Quine’s On What There is, and I think it is Price’s doubt about Quine that turning frameworks into neighbourhoods of one web doesn’t remove the point.
What’s Quine’s official line on why Two Dogmas => naturalised epistmology? <<<
Two Kantian ideas seem unassailable to Western thought today 1) the mediation of human experience by concepts. (Concepts as nodes in a web which are the background against which things can be learnt.) >>>annoys me that Redding puts it like this, as this is exactly how I think of it, makes me realise it wasn’t an original thought-diagram.<<< 2) the mediation implied by our being natural beings; contact with the things would be supernatural
#naturalistic transcendental philosophy Pihlstrom: acknowledging the circularity of transcendental reasoning. 2004 “In order to examine the preconditions and limits of cognitive experience, the transcendental philosopher must already operate within the cognitive sphere s/he is examining.”
Tom Swann Transcendental Circularity
Dennett says a bit on this. Very naturalistic obviously, would be interesting to contrast.
Possibilities left open here?: - that some limits are intelligible from other perspectives with different limits. - of transcendental contexts: the relativity of limits to the perspectives from the perspectives from which they are considered? Have in mind here the way that different discourse seem when considered from other discourses. For my purposes, the way the scientific seems from the manifest, and the manifest from the scientific.
These are slippery points. They seem compatible with the idea of the transcendental as the that-without-which-we-could-not-X. But not with the more distinctly Kantian idea that we have to work this out both universally and from the ‘inside’.
Here though the thought is liable to what I /think/ this is a Hegelian objection: Kant both assumes that we can and must work out the universal and necessary limits of all knowledge, and yet must in doing so presuppose that there is knowledge that stands outside it, namely knowledge of said limits. There are ways around this, for example treating Kant as a proto-Wittgensteinian therapist. But not clear that Witters isn’t vulnerable to similar charges: isn’t he creating a grammar of grammar-talk? Another response, not entirely unfair as a reading of Wittgenstein, would be that philosophy is a way to see things and not some things to see: phenomenology as a method and not a subject matter. But by this stage my grip is pretty loose on what’s being said.
Bringing it back to bruteness, what is the gap between such thoughts and Chalmers/Jackson style conceptual analysis? is the question of limits and preconditions, if allowed to go all relativistic like this, just a matter of the structure of our concepts?
a point of contention could be over whether the limits / preconditions were not merely conceptual. I have in mind something like: the structure of our USE or APPLICATION of concepts in our making sense of things, understanding. A way of being conceptual qua involving concepts without being conceptual qua being propositionally structured.
danger being of course what if we can’t say anything about it. ~Davidsonian issues about the unintelligibility of the unconceptual. although he does need something like this to be involved in radical interpretation… except for language use equivalent to the truth predicate, the interpretation of which is somehow secured…
a detour within a detour, might split some off into its own pages if I come back to the thoughts.
Guiding strategy here being that of iteration of a problem on the solutions offered to solve it. Can seem a trivial and useless sophistry, or can seem the deepest thing one can say (e.g. is what I think of the fact that verificationism cannot be verified’?). Would be nice to know of some who talk about this in general; seems it’s a common theme in lots of Continental though, e.g. Deleuze. But too much work to decode that as well! Tom Swann The Space Of Spaces <<<
back to Redding! the transcendental is said to be found in our natural practices >>>what is natural about the practices? That they are available to science to study? Wouldn’t this be to beg questions about what the transcendentally-laden practices are?<<< what kind of knowledge of? natural scientific? then just do science! but that leaves us with a situation where P3 “many would argue that nothing short of nihilistic destruction of reason threatns”
#Two problems for Naturalism Mark Sacks problem of philosophy . seems for Sacks to be not merely “what is there for philosophy to do now?” but how can this particular philosophical position account for its own status. Sacks 2006 P 99 “Although the given structures that cast the lines of individuation of our empirical reality are themselves not purported to be a priori or transcendental now, still the entire theoretical explanation itself clearly amounts to a synthetic a priori claim, and it is not clear how any such claim can be accomodated.” >>>fascinating. will have to read this essay. Tom Swann Mark Sacks Naturalism And The Transcendental Turn <<<
Redding doubts “clearly”. Less explicitly, seems to focus on the issue of ‘what then is special about philosophy?’ Does being continuous with science just mean being a part of?
Special pleading for a special philosophical job to do?
but we can make the point even granting the continuity of science with philosophy: what is distinctive of those questions that we attempt to answer in the ‘philosophy’ neighbourhood of the problem context of total theory as opposed to those of the sciences?
Still, this is something that Quineans / conceptual analysts think there is a good answer to’ <<<
The Problem of Nihilism. Sacks P 99 “once the Kantian transcendental psychology, or the Wittgensteinian a priori linguistic form, are each avoided, some of the safeguards of a transcendental idealist are undermined…. We are now faced with a relativism that goes beyond the mere instability of bare naturalism… different frameworks, or conceptual schemes, will result in different ontologies, different worlds, each of which can be the object of knowledge for those inhabiting the relevant framework, but none of them can lay claim to universality.”
the “relativism” here precedes the naturalism, historically?
on substance: it is not worlds but world-pictures that are multiplied. answers to the question: how is the world? ontologies understood as ontological commitments.
the paradox is really that each framework claims (or at least could) its own universality, yet that our understanding of the universality of these—and any other!—framework as indexed to them and to nothing else seems to say that their claims are not universal. what sense in a non-universal universality? but furthermore, it seems built into the framework-talk that nothing could be universal without being claimed such by a framework. the two results taken together mean that the concept of universality, understood as framework transcendence, is incoherent.
it seems hardly promising to start talking about the framework of ‘frameworks’, the ‘world-picture’ world-picture, or whatever other higher-order iteration one could imagine. of course the relativised Kantian has by this point already taken some such notion on as a commitment of their methodology, perhaps not on the books of any particular theories of ontological commitment, but certainly as a presupposition in terms of which they must understand and regulate what they are doing. having accepted the relativity of claims to their frameworks, from whence should we say we make this very claim? but then how can it help to try to climb the infinite tower of ordered presuppositions that would seem to ensue? <<<
Redding: “an expression of the process of denormitivization that, as is commonly said, accompanies the naturalizing of an originally normative discipline.” “collapse of some foundational discipline that is meant to assure the status of various normative claims”.
Perhaps foundational discipline does not just mean foundationalism. Kant would be a paradigm of how they come apart: the knowledge he claims to find does not found all others, rather it aims to show us how our representations must be structured if they are to count as of objects. Davidsonian coherentism is more recent example, in the sense that coherence is for him the ground of epistemic normativity; nothing of the coherence relation secures any particular belief relata. As such there are lots of ways of being “assured” of normative claims, and lots of ways their normative status may be assured. it’s not clear which Redding has in mind. but at its most general and insightful, and here I think Redding would agree, foundational philosophy concerns the normativity qua normativity.
So the denormitivization of philosophy that is set up as the ideal naturalized epistemology can be understood as its saying it will stop making normative claims and stop trying to say how normative claims should be assessed. But following from this is the truly transcendental worry that naturalised epistemology stops being able to say what it is to be normative as such. Wouldn’t that mean it would be equally unable to say what it is not to be normative? It would then be committed to the conceptual bankruptcy of all such claims. So that datum for naturalistic explanation - that we naturally think in normative terms and in so many philosophical projects think of thinking as presupposing various kinds of normativity - would face treatment as a systematically projected error. In fact it’s even worse than that:
I think this is what Redding’s thought is angling towards. But it’s <<<
P4 naturalising the Kantian a priori as a further stage in the process of the death of God. Jacobi on nihilism, taken up by Schelling. reflective thought is the subject arising out of nature so that nature can be knowable to it reflection is the condition of freedom. but also seems to undermine action. Schelling: “the less [man] reflects upon himself, the more active he is”. plus theme of “estrangement from some constituting community with nature.” Romantic inheritance. philosophy must bring man back into equilibrium with nature “through freedom”. reflection must have only “negative value”.
sounds like Wittgensteinian therapy, but with more abstract nouns and a conception of nature as the pre- or non-human.
not quite sure about what action and freedom has to do with it, unless these are species of a common genus of normative phenomena that naturalisation makes problematic? or are they common to the normative phenomena, in the sense that our knowing is our choosing some way to ask and answer questions? <<<
P5 Draws parallel with Nagel - 1984 View from Nowhere reflection aspires to the view from nowhere but we can only act from a particular place in the world. Bernard Williams makes the point with regards to ethics: “reflection can destroy [ethical] knowledge” Ethics and the Limits of philosophy. P 148 concept of perspective. the ethical is seen from the ethical point of view. first-personal P O V. shows the world as having action guiding properties. But “Looked at from the outside, this point of view belongs to someone in whome the ethical dispositions he has acquired lie deeper than other wants and preferences.” P 5 - 6.
In otherwords, it seems to the ethically engaged agent that the world is ethically valued and we are disposed to respond to it as such; it seems to the realistic or objectivising perspective that the ethical value is grounded in our dispositions to respond to non-valued features of the world.
useful to look at for my Joyce essay. essentially a kind of projectivism as based on the reality of certain categories from which we can justify the view that the ethical is unjustified because just something that we are disposed to do and moreover (dunno if this is William’s claim also but is in Joyce from Mackie) because that removes the only good reason to believe they are justified, namely removing the need to think of as real the properties such judgements would be made true by.
Tom Swann Bernard Williams The Ethical Perspective
Also, Mc Dowell has two attempts at criticising this; Tom Swann Mc Dowell On Secondary Qualities from memory he urges that there is nothing objectionably unobjective about the thought that objectivity itself being perspective relative. but I think Mc Dowell wants to resist the Lockean projectivist idea of secondary qualities that says they don’t exist ‘out there’ independantly of acts of knowing them; rather the idea is that we can’t make sense of them except as being properties that make sense that are to be made sense of only from some perspective. consonant with Putnam’s reading of Kant as saying that all properties are secondary. But would that be enough? wouldn’t it rather have to be that we cannot make sense of properties qua the properties they are except by adopting the perspective that makes them intelligible?
the notion of perspective here is doing all the heavy lifting. will need to look further at it. including in: Tom Swann Redding What Is An Epistemic Perspective <<<
P6 “far from clear that theoretical knowledge /itself/ escapes the corrosive effects of such reflection” Cites Lewis on “Elusive Knowledge”. Tom Swann David Lewis Elusive Knowledge
Worried about just what this problem of nihilism is supposed to be. I assume that ‘reflection’ is supposed to be something like the asking for justification of all claims, including justification claims. (this is not to say reflection must as for the justification of all at once, for that would mean not all at once! But what connection between reflection and naturalism? Redding doesn’t even link them! Love the topics in this paper but it’s pretty messy. <<<
Huw Price’s Subject Naturalism Tom Swann Huw Price Subject Naturalism
Object naturalism (ON): philosophy takes its objects to be the objects that natural science talks about. this generates “placement problems”. common strategy is to reduce the special phenomenon in question to natural facts.
“reduction” here standing in for any of the options. Stoljar told me there are 17 different definitions out there, will have to ask him for a reference on that. Tom Swann Taxonomy Of Reduction Concepts
But some important distinctions can be made between options, some of which don’t usually count as reduction. For example, identity. Or to claim that the phenomenon it is a systematic error. e.g. projectivism about secondary qualities and value.
Also worth pointing out that placement problems are not unique to physicalism or naturalism. They’re part of having a ‘world-picture’ in terms of which you try to understand everything. This point also from Stoljar’s manuscript. <<<
P7
Problem with reduction however: “there may be hidden assumptions implicit in this approach that are actually incompatible with a genuinely naturalistic view of /ourselves/ as the subjects capable of such knowledge.” Actually, the claim is that there ARE such assumptions. But what are they? And why incompatible with viewing subjects as natural, taht is in a naturalistically respectable way? what does that mean? Price contrasts two ways of generating placement problems. Starting with a material conception of philosophy’s objects: we find some things; our commitment to object naturalism makes us ask how these things could be the kind of thing studied by science. In the tradition of “What is X?” Or there is the linguistic conception: start with what we say about things. How do we talk about Xs or use the concept X? But ON makes us wonder how the things talked about are the kind of thing studied by science.
Maybe some / many / most naturalists do this - I don’t know. I think Something like this seems to have occured in the historical move from an analytic philosophy that understands itself (at least in its Kantian moods) to be working out the conditions of linguistic sense, to naturalist realist metaphysics concerned with placing humanly rational phenomena in the natural world. But it doesn’t seem to follow, even given ON. For we could just ask ourselves: what kinds of object facts events are these ‘talkings and thinkings of X’? <<<
Aha j’acuse! The move from talk about talk to talk of the things talked about is based on the assumption that the object-talk is representational. This is is dangerous.
So is the commitment to representation doing the work here? But what’s wrong with that concept? Surely part of the linguistic practices under consideration is the fact that we take some of them to say the world is a certain way, that is to represent… Obviously the concept of representation is difficult in many ways, especially re naturalism. But surely it is also presupposed by naturalism: science represents (truthfully or otherwise in whatever senses you want) the world as being a certain way, so naturalism must be taking itself to being saying something about the ideal form of this representation. <<<
Moving from the linguistic (Carnap’s formal?) mode to the material is not to be understood as a step down Quine’s semantic ladder. Semantic ascent is Quine’s idea that talking about ‘the truth of “F is X”’ is really just a way of talking about X.
I find this view attributed to Quine totally implausible. Talk of the truth of ‘F is X’ is saying ‘F is X’ is true is saying something about the expression ‘F is X’? Need to look into this. Tom Swann Quine On Semantics <<<
But to endorse the concept of semantic ascent in Quine’s terms is not to say that we can move from studying terms to studying the things they are / could be about. For that (Price p78:) “rests on substantial theoretical assumptions about what we humans do with language - roughly, the assumption that substantial”word-world" semantic relations are part of the best scientific account of our use of the relevant terms." It is /these/ assumptions that pose recalcitrant placement problems for the naturalist.
well, to say there are hidden assumptions isn’t enough, nor to say that these assumptions pose problems for naturalism. even granting naturalism, you then have to show that the problems are insurmountable or better that in fact the relations don’t enter into the ‘best scientific theory’. Also, there are lots of “word-world” semantic relations out there; which ones are at issue? Look at the later Wittgenstein: language-games exist only in the context of a form of life, that is, ways the language can be used in different worldly situations. Is there not then a sense in which the playing of a language-game in ways does say how the world is, even if the game is not understood as one of “representing” by the participants? and why not especially then? <<<
P8 Redding draws parallels with Kant. Subject naturalism aims to be something like what Kant did with the dogmatic metaphysicists, who, on Kant’s account, thought they could derive knowledge of the world from concepts alone by trading on unexamined and assumptions. Kant wants to know “what is the ground of the relation of that in us which we call”representation" to the object" - presumably in virtue of which it is in fact a representation. Kant has a go at Locke for thinking that merely being caused by the object suffices to make something represent it. >>>I think there are readings of Locke where he is saying more than that, but not orthodox<<< P 9N 33 “Locke’s causal explanation cannot give an account of the normative status that adheres to the ideal of knowledge or representation, the ‘right’ of some mental state, as it were, to be called a representation”.
Puts aside the details of Kant’s account in order to highlight the genius of the question. Now Price is compared with Kant in the sense that Locke could be seen as begging Price’s “substantial, non-deflationary semantic notions”. Lockean ideas look intrinsically representational.
Kant accuses Locke of begging the question; is Price’s opponent begging any question that Price is posing? what exactly is it then? whether/ that language can represent the world as it is for a being who is not linguistically conditioned in some way that we are? but the Kantian critical response to this—No!—seems compatible with talk of “word-world” semantic relations; it is just the world must be understood as itself being word-apt. This is the idealism in Kant. Maybe the denial of this is being taken for granted here? Still it seems there are lots of ways of arguing over what it takes for the world to be word-apt and why are none of these available to a physicalist? or is it that the physicalist cannot coherently take the world to be word-apt in some required way? then /what/?
also, isn’t it odd to draw a parallel between Kant who asks how is representation possible and Price who accuses people of making representationalist assumptions?
also, what’s wrong with something being intrinsically representational? also, apparently things can be intrinsically related to something. So maybe Redding means essentially?<<<
another similarity is the contrast between the natural subject and some divine intelligence that is not limited in our ways and so can see things as they really are not just as they are for us. Locke’s representations look like what Kant says Gods would be like. analogue in Putnam’s idea of ‘metaphysical glue’ that sticks words to their bits of the world.
I sense the analogue here but it’s pretty obscure to me. Tom Swann Putnam Metaphysical Glue <<<
P10 Now Redding turns to ask if subject naturalism has anything to say about Sack’s problems of philosophy and of nihilism. Takes Price’s talk of the ‘M’-worlds, the humanly rational things that we have trouble placing in the naturalistic world, become threatened by the rising tides of commitments to naturalism. >>>the naturalist would say: by the successes of science in these areas. so Price and friends have obligation to deny this<<< “The subject naturalist fights along side the nonnaturalists to protect these regions, and does so by developing a critique of the scientistic excesses of earlier”object" naturalists." >>>urgh. still have no idea what the view actually is?!<<< but at the heart of this critique is a pluralism that seems just as threatening to philosophy’s integrity. “liberal naturalism is secured in the culture generally by the strategy of strict or scientistic naturalism /within/ philosophy”. >>>?<<< “aspires to combine the metaphysical economy of naturalism without the expense of nihilism.” >>>this must be a fairly early draft; bad england.<<< the advertised appeal of subject naturalism is that is offers a reconciliation with nonnaturalists.
Big quote from Price (2004 P 88) “Object naturalism gives science not just centre stage but the whole stage, taking scientific knowledge to be the only knowledge there is (at least in some sense). Subject naturalism suggests that science might properly take a more modest view of its own importance. It imagines a scientific discovery that science is not all there is—that science is just one thing among many that we do with ‘representational’ discourse.”
will need to mull this over. but seems to me that it’s misrepresenting people like Jackson and Chalmers who would be the paradigm ONists. they don’t say that science is the only way to know. The whole point of conceptual analysis is that we have concepts the objects of which we have to ‘place’ somewhere. Theirs is an ontological in the sense of not merely or especially epistemic claim. although they do think that it follows from the ontological claim that you get the epistemic claim - a priori entailment of everything from the Physical and all that. horse and cart? need to think more about what exactly they do say and what the relation is between science qua epistemic practice and science qua idealised world-picture… Tom Swann Conceptual Analysis And Naturalism also a new book by DBM that I should check out with just this title <<<
Price M-world P 247 n1: naturalism “is just the view that the project of metaphysics can properly be conducted from the standpoint of natural science”. Redding: “the problem with object naturalism is that it is /bad science/.” Price 2004 P 88 “the story then has the following satisfying moral. If we do science better in philosophy, we’ll be less inclined to think that science is all there is to do.”
but the science in philosophy would be the way to understand what we are doing when we do all the other non-science things. what does it even mean for there to be science ‘in’ philosophy?<<<
the shift from the idea that “we humans are natural creatures” to requiring us to start from what “science tells us about ourselves” because science tells us “that we are natural creatures.”
worried this gets things the wrong way around. worried that Price’s point is that philosophy should starts from our naturalness because science tells us we are natural which means philosophy should do some kind of science. maybe the difference doesn’t matter how can science tell us we are natural (read: exhaustively describable by ideal science)? does philosophy of science, in the sense of attempts to give grounds for the practices and perhaps in terms of these practices even particular theoretical products of science, count as science? maybe we can say that philosophy of science in this sense is part of science — in some historically bastardised idealisation is its methodological questioning. or better, that questioning over scientific methodology, as it occurs in particular scientific problem contexts, is philosophy of science. but are disciplinary discussions of their own methodology in general part of the knowledge their methodology might produce? Tom Swann Science As Act And Content
this wouldn’t work under Sellar’s nice slogan that philosophy is seeing how things in the broadest sense fit together in the broadest sense. maybe we have to read ‘philosophy’ here in the broadest sense, so phil of sci is that bit of the broader task that is concerned with science, but the concerns of scientific methodology are not obviously those of how science fits with everything else. yet in modern philosophy it keeps coming about that they are taken to be constitutively linked… Tom Swann Sellars Philosophy And The Scientific Image Of Man <<<
why science in particular? it means other discourses can’t tell us anything important about ourselves. >>>I don’t think anyone thinks /that/!<<< forms of art as revealing things about us as natural finite creatures - e.g. about the sensuous phenomenology of our lives “in ways that are very difficult if not impossible to convey in a maximally conceptualised medium like that to which the sciences aspire”. >>>the naturalist can accept this and say that we can’t know in the privilidged scientific way what is going on in these acts if they don’t fit them into the physicalist picture. again, ontological not epistemological concerns. Chalmers style dualism seems as close as you can get to naturalism while at the same time denying the above condition. but on this view all there is to learn about ourselves other than what that which is knowable by science determines is just what it’s like to be in certain conscious states.<<<
‘Science’ is not a natural kind term. many sciences. each tell us about beings qua some designation. >>>is ‘physical’ a natural kind term?<<<
“Price is vague as to the identity of the science he recommends”. >>>to say the least. it wouldn’t be enough even just to say: psycho-linguistics. you have to pose the concrete psycho-linguistic questions in an empirically meaningful way.<<< Price sometimes talks of sociology and anthropology. but the identity and methodologies of these sciences are disputed as well~! Geistewissenschaffen - the view of the human sciences as interpretive not explanatory, or explanations mediated by interpretations as ascribed intentions. >>>reasons v.s. causes?<<< brute v.s. institutional facts rule following rather than causal regularities. but not supernatural. culture v.s. nature (biology?) as internal to nature. but why is this naturalism and not historicism? >>>because the rule following and intention ascribing is all grounded in the physical?<<<
a non-supernaturalist non naturalist alternative? Idealism. Bob Brandom. idealism typically the mirth of analytic philosophers. we learn that Moore and Russell killed it once and for all. Brandom suggesting history of analytic philosophy not as the Naturalization of Kant but Hegelianization.
Digresses to make clear what he means by idealism is not Berkeley, who is rather a ‘spiritual realist’. Kant had to defend his view against claims he was just snazzing up Berkelean views about the dependance of the world on minds. this misses the Aristotelian dimension of Kant“s way of expressing the difference between what he ascribes to Berkeley as”material idealism" and his own /formal/ idealism.
P13 God was the place where the forms went between Platonists and early Christians. all matter depends on God for Berkeley, but for Kant ‘God’ has no normal refering function. parallel with Price’s later-Wittgensteinian attitude: look to use no referent.
still the issue of how the form of representation can be mind dependent while the matter isn’t<<<
P14 But if Kant’s ok by our realist lights here, don’t things turn spiritual again with the German Idealists proper? denies, thinks Hegel is Kanting Kant; thinks Hegel shows that one doesn’t need to be a spiritual realist to have an account of spirit.
Geist, objective spirit. concept of the human sciences. from Hegel via Dilthey. Redding claims is just the brute fact v.s. institutional fact of people like Searle. William’s terms: “what is there anyway” v.s. P15 “facts belonging to accessible only to a person able to deplot all those relevant culturally transmitted perspectival concepts described by Williams, that is, by someone located within some collective”first-person" standpoint."
Price’s strategy is to question the naturalistic credentials of the reductionist about the first-person plural. tries to do this by being more naturalistic-than-thou. but should we hold on to this commitment? Williams: “Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline”. responding to charge of scientism from Putnam. has a similar project to Price. absolute conception as that which converges. point of demarcation.
P16 but he never regarded philosophy as aiming at the absolute conception. philosophy must account for relations such a semantic ones that are normative. semantics must be consistent with physics but shouldn’t be assumed to need to be reducible to.