Tom Swann Sacks Naturalism And The Transcendental Turn

Sacks - Naturalism and the Transcendenal Turn 2006

naturalism as non-metaphysical >>>!<<< naturalism is itself not clear. for present purposes: “no facts about the world the knowledge of which requires resources that extend beyond those available for use within natural science” >>>this allows concepts that are used by science but not explainable by it, that find no ‘place’ in it<<<

naturalism should be resilient: able to compell those who want to build systems. how can the argument be made? should deny relativism. but naturalism compatible with the contingency of scientific generalisations. might be a problem when P93 “our most fundamental normative constraints emerge as equally indexed to a contingent bio-chemical, or indeed socio-historical constellation.” >>>not clear what this is about<<<

##2 Naturalism and the transcendentalturn in Analytic Tradition

analytic philosophy is implicitly committed to transcendental idealism transcendenal turn: that knowledge is confined to empirical facts presented as independent, but in fact as the result of a human framework. at odds with analytic self-conceptions linguistic turn. not defining the analytic >>>contra Dummett<<< and not exclusive to it. but typical is the concern to show language as perspicuous means of representation, rather than to show that language ‘taints’ the world as we experience it.

Russell’s 1905 “On Denoting” - undermining the need for elaborate systems by showing that their motivation rested on a confusion from the surface of language. ushering in split between nonsense and sense.

Russell happy with nondeflationary metaphysics, e.g. about meaning. but the split ended up “militating” against metaphysics. need to safeguard the sciences. search for a way to understand the empirical without commitments to metaphysics.

Vienna Circle gave simple expression to this commitment. >>>simple?<<< but the verificationist criterion was insufficient to do the job >>>wasn’t this a later contribution of Ayer types?<<<

Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: propositional sense and nonsense = empirical / transcendental. Assured of accurate representation by synthetic a posteriori. but this assured by the worlds being formally dependant on the logical form by which we are bound to represent it. No room for language to outstrip the world, or the world to outstrip language. P 97 “parallel to Kantian empirical realism i.e. naturalism, secured by a transcendental framework.” >>>Wittgenstein is surely /not/ a naturalist!<<<

but the claims of transcendental necessity themselves revealed to be nonsense. the transcendental as well as the transcendent are unsayable.

Carnap and Quine, withholding from full-blooded transcendental doctrine, take an essentially transcendental turn. more appropriately naturalistic, for it abjures from “any manifestly transcendental story” questions of existence are here settled by the linguistic apparatus with which we approach them. conceptual scheme is new analog of Kant’s transcendental psychology - determines or individuates the world we approach by it. so we can only know the world in some way we can represent it. >>>of course!<<<

P98 “But the transcendental turn here is naturalized. It is two steps removed from Kant, and one from the early Wittgenstein. It is not the apriori faculties of the mind, as in Kant, that are doing the work, but the structure of language; and, it is not the a priori structure of language, as in the early Wittgenstein, but the empirical linguistic frameworks in which in principle nothing need be immune to revision.”

knowledge resiliently confined to empirical reality >>>Carnap allows for non-empirical frameworks?<<< external questions are psuedo-problems, for which there could be no possible evidence. no possibility of taking the merely empirical as metaphysical. gives the resilient naturalism.

what is this ‘metaphysical’?<<<

##Problems with the naturalized Copernican turn

Two problems.

1. P99 “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 explanationitself clearly amounts to a sytnhetic a priori claim, and it is not clear how any such can be accomodated.”

the problem of the frameworks framework<<<

2. “The resilience of the confinement to a merely empirical reality is sustained, but it no longer goes along with the resilience of the construal of that reality. 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 first problem underlies Davidson’s criticism of Quine’s scheme/ content distinction in On the very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme. “it is a dogma—an apriori thesis—that cannot be retained within a thoroughgoing empiricism that holds that all non-trivial truth is aposteriori (posterior at least to the adoption of one conceptual scheme or another).” Sacks thinks the point there is not whether scheme/content is coherent. if it is coherent, it cannot be legitimately thought as a priori. P100 “we are no longer reading off the world as a discovery an individuation of facts and states of affairs that we ourselves have in fact projected onto it” >>>Carnap and Quine never talk of projection?<<<

Davidson rejoices; this gives us unmediated touch with what makes our sentences T/F ontological relativity lost. >>>really?<<<

##3.1 The theoretical importance of maintaining the synthetic apriori status of the transcendental turn

“why should we, having reached such brute or naive realism, construe it as falling in any way short of the way the world is in itself - that is, construe it as less than the purported depiction of a metaphysical reality. In the absence of the two-level structure of transcendental idealism, insisting on an exclusively naturalist orientation seems dogmatic, and theoretically unstable.”

cannot be anything but an empirical generalisation. impetus for more robust metaphysics. but once we do this, we get enmeshed in the sort of evidence-transcending claims the analytic tradition was meant to be avoiding. without dissolving metaphysical problems, we allow them to proliferate.

obscure. assuming that metaphysics is bad? isn’t that question begging?<<<

P101 “what is needed is a way of sustaining the two-level structure typical of the transcendental idealist account, but without it being predicated on precisely the sort of… metaphysics we are concerned to expunge.” and without excessive relativism.

##3.2 The extent of the relativist threat

Davidson’s excising the scheme/content distinction fails to rid us of relativism. naturalism assured, ordinary contact with ordinary objects. avoids relativism to schemes. but only tells against one way of talking about relativism.

later Wittgenstein gives materials for a greater naturalized transcendental turn. what we make of the world is our own making. but P102 “The structuring framework may be a worldy affair. Habits, practices, traditions, create and enforce certain taxonomies, certain patterns of perceptual salience, which present a certain world to us as discovered, thereby occluding the extent to which it is a reflection of our own form of life.” Fn 14 ditto Foucault.

talking as if there is hidden work going on in making the world as such, as if what we find is an illusion?<<<

P103 “the articulation of the world as we encounter it might be the result of our own entrenched world-involving practices”

toppling the scheme/content distinction wont “curb the underlying relativist threat to the assumption of a single empirical reality”.

acute need for middle way between metaphysics and naturalism.

##4 Conclusion

For the later Wittgenstein there is no room to assert that we are in P104 “a world of our own making, such that we cannot ever get beyond the structure introduced by our own practices to know the way of the world as it is in itself.” but still room for ‘transcendental insight’. shown not sayable. therapy would help us be comfortable restricting ourselves to domestic reality.

showing without saying avoids the need for the synthetic a priori claim

but this is available to anyone!<<<

the cost of naturalism still seems to be relativism.