Price Naturalism Without Representationalism
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What is it?
An argument for subject naturalism (detailed below) over object naturalism on the basis of difficulties with a representationalist view of language.
Where is it found?
Price, H., 2004, Naturalism without representationalism in Naturalism in Question, Macarthur & de Caro (eds), Harvard University Press.
How does it fit in?
Points out more difficulties for the Quinean naturalist ontology. Namely that it most likely must rest on some sort of representationalist principle (the derivation of which is no easy task).
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The Argument - Object naturalism (the standard naturalist view) := all there is the world of science (thus this is all there is for philosophy to investigate). — (Epistemological variant as well: just substitute “all genuine knowledge is scientific”.) - Subject naturalism := philosophy must not conflict with what science tells us about ourselves as natural subjects. - Placement problems arise for the usual naturalist ontological account: how to place objects to do with morality, meaning, mathematics in a “natural” way? - One can view these problems as beginning with linguistic conception or a material conception. - Linguistic conception: — (Note that under the linguistic conception, subject naturalism is given theoretical priority as the use of language is well within the realm of the natural subject. Thus under this conception subject naturalism is the perspective from which we must assess object naturalism.) — Requires that the object naturalist provide some means of moving from dealing with a linguistic term to its subject (a semantic ladder). This is the representationalist move. — Note that this is in conflict with deflationary accounts of such moves (as proposed by Quine amongst others) in which such a shift is viewed as a shift from talk of how we talk of object terms, to talk of the object terms themselves (thus one never leaves the linguistic realm). — Hence the object naturalist needs a non-deflationist representational account. — Bhogossian’s criticism of the irrealist position may be adapted here to point out in order for object naturalist not to just legislate out the irrealist position, they must allow for the possibility that their semantic bridge terms do not have an empirical basis. — However, they cannot do this, as they then do not have a naturalist semantic ladder to talk about objects in the first place. — The subject naturalist is immune from any Bhogossian based critique as thhey just remain silent on the ontological question. — Furthermore, a critique provided by Stich seems to suggest that more than mere non-deflationism is needed. - Material conception: — The linguistic conception is already being widely used as evidence by some mainstream philosophical positions (e.g. noncognitivism) not even making sense under this conception. — Starting from the material anti-naturalistic in the sense that it removes the possibility of learning from linguistic use. — Furthermore, semantic notions are often used as tools in metaphysical investigation (and thus if taken to be used in any “substantial” way (which, as Yablo has pointed out, is difficult to determine), one must assume the linguistic conception). - [[crimson Can you explain a bit more why one must? Jason ]] - {[green I think the idea here is that if one is using semantic notions in a significant way (i.e. analysing them in order to make ontological commitments), then one is back in linguistic conception country in terms of needing a “ladder” from the semantic to the ontological. ]} — One possible strategy may be to adopt some material conception based on Lewis’ causal description idea. — This is problematic if one denies that all objects of interest are causal. - [[crimson Which is really cool if one’s writing a thesis on philosophy of maths. Jason ]] — Obviously, one cannot use the linguistic role as a replacement as then we are back to the linguistic conception. — Furthermore, if one tries to accommodate the above objection by allowing for many different roles to be used on a case by case basis, one runs into difficulties to do with justifying why each of these should be accepted in each case (similar to Lewis’ “all causation is physical causation” premise). - Finally, one can see that by removing the representationalist assumption and going with a subject naturalist approach, one reduces placement problems to puzzles regarding the origins of linguistic use.
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What do I think? - Overall, I found the aspects of the argument dealing with problems of giving an object naturalist account of the difficult areas to be quite telling. — Naturally, this doesn’t rule out a satisfactory object naturalist response but it does much to make it seem a less attractive option. - I did find that I didn’t really have a clear idea of the exact nature of the “natural subject” of subject naturalism (and indeed of the relation that such a subject has to scientific endeavour and discovery). This concept will play a major role in whether the subject naturalist position is held to be an attractive one (and has major implications for the limits of philosophy under this view). — (Of course a “fleshing out” may already have occurred elsewhere and the sketch of the position in this paper was sufficient for the purposes of the argument.) - [[crimson I don’t think Price has done much fleshing out (yet). He could respond that if the definition of subject naturalism is that “philosophy must not conflict with what science tells us about ourselves as natural subjects” then he can rely on science to do most of the fleshing out. - Not that philosophers should merely leave it to scientists to do the fleshing out (even if he takes that line at all, and I don’t know whether he does). Remember, from Quining Naturalism: - “philosophy … is not an activity `after’ science, in a logical sense. In particular, it does not rely on inferences from what best current science says about reality. On the contrary, it is itself a kind of formal finishing school for scientific theory. Its own products ARE best current science.” - One bit of fleshing out he has done is on a pragmatist theory of truth, e.g. in his paper “Three norms of assertibility, or how the MOA became extinct”. - Jason ]] — One wonders whether this concept of the natural subject may benefit from analysis using phenomenological tools more commonly associated with continental philosophy and as such enable the subject naturalist position to bridge the analytic and continental traditions (I’m not sufficiently well-versed in phenomenology to assess its utility here). - [[crimson What a great idea! I don’t know enough about continental philosophy to know whether it works. Jason ]] - The subject naturalist position certainly seems to overcome the problems raised by Yablo. His metaphorical/literal distinction no longer has the ontological implications it had for the object naturalist, it merely becomes a distinction between two different kinds of language game. - One worry that may be voiced in light of the argument above and the previous paper (Price Naturalism) is that the spectre of relativism is beginning to raise its head (as the scientific language game is no longer the only one in town). — However, these concerns may be alleviated by a more detailed account of the natural subject.
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