Philip Kitcher. Pragmatic Naturalism

Marie I. Kaiser | Ansgar Seide (Eds.) Philip Kitcher

Pragmatic Naturalism

15. Münstersche Vorlesungen zur Philosophie 2011 15th Münster Lectures on Philosophy 2011

mit / with

Philip Kitcher

Marie I. Kaiser | Ansgar Seide (Eds.)

Philip Kitcher

Pragmatic Naturalism

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CONTENTS

Preface 9

List of Abbreviations 11

1 LECTURE

Pragmatic Naturalism 15 Philip Kitcher

2 COLLOQUIUM

Living with Kitcher? Some Thoughts concerning the Relation 45 between Darwinism and Theism Wolfgang D. Gerr, Tim Grafe, Reinhardt Liesert, Johannes Müller, Peter Nickl

Can Kitcher Avoid the Naturalistic Fallacy? 61 Simon Derpmann, Dominik Düber, Tim Rojek, Konstantin Schnieder

Well-Ordered Science in a Not Well-Ordered Society 77 Dennis Bätge, Anna Blundell, Wolfgang D. Gerr, Andreas Gotthelf, Bianca Hüsing, Reinhardt Liesert

Refining Kitcher’s Semantics for Kind Terms, or: 91 Cleaning up the Mess Amrei Bahr, Jan G. Michel, Mareike Voltz

8 Contents

Promiscuous Objects, Hybrid Truth and Scientific Realism 111 Julia F. Göhner, Markus Seidel

The Apriorists Return 129 Dirk Franken

Examining the Quality of Life: 147 Notes on Philip Kitcher’s Writings on Bioethics Johannes Drerup, Thomas Müller, Alexa Nossek

Well-Ordered Philosophy? 161 Reflections on Kitcher’s Proposal for a Renewal of Philosophy Eva-Maria Jung, Marie I. Kaiser, Ansgar Seide

Some Answers, Admissions, and Explanations 175 Philip Kitcher

PREFACE Philip Kitcher is one of the most distinguished philosophers of our days. Since the rise of philosophy of biology in the 1960s Kitcher has deeply influenced and inspired many of the debates in this field. Among his most important books are The Advancement of Science (1993), In Mendel’s Mirror: Philosophical Reflections on Biology (2003), and Science in a Democratic Society (2011). However, Kitcher’s philosophical interest is not restricted to the philosophy of science. Rather, he has also made groundbreaking contributions to ethics, to the philosophy of religion, to the philosophy of literature, to the philoso-phy of mathematics, and, most recently, to pragmatism.

From a general perspective, two features of Kitcher’s work are particu-larly noteworthy. First, in most of his writings it becomes apparent that he takes a naturalistic stance. Kitcher characterizes himself as having an “impulse to naturalism”, which means that he resists the expansionist tendency to invoke entities or processes that are quite different from those studied in the various branches of inquiry (like Platonic forms or other abstract entities, Cartesian egos, and faculties of pure reason). Kitcher has explicated his naturalistic stance in The Naturalists Return (1992) and refined it in various recent works.

Second, the philosophical questions that always have urged Kitcher most are questions that matter to human lives. Just to mention a few examples, these are questions like “How do we reconcile our scientific picture of the world with religion?”, “In which way does social practice impact scientist’s search for knowledge?”, or “How do we understand and improve our moral practices?”. In recent years Kitcher has argued that his focus is not merely due to his personal interests. Rather, he thinks that the only philosophical problems that are significant are those whose solution makes a difference to contemporary human life. Philosophers would be wise to focus on these pragmatically relevant kinds of questions, rather than addressing questions that are isolated from real life. In defending this claim, Kitcher expresses his

10 Preface

affinity to the pragmatist tradition of Dewey and others. Thus, the second major characteristic of Kitcher’s work is that he takes up a pragmatist stance.

Although Kitcher’s naturalistic and pragmatist impulses are discernible in most of his writings, he has only lately started to explicitly defend what he now calls pragmatic naturalism. His work on pragmatic naturalism contains innovative insights into questions about naturalism and pragmatism, while at the same time providing a meta-philosophical, unificatory framework for his longstanding work in various philosophical fields. Kitcher’s paper that is printed in this volume is one of the first publications in which he sets out his idea of pragmatic naturalism.

This volume is the result of the 15th Münster Lectures in Philosophy which were hosted by the Department of Philosophy of the University of Münster from the 27th to the 29th of October 2011. The basic idea of the Lectures is to give advanced students of the Department the opportunity to get into discussion with important philosophers of our days. In line with what has become by now a venerable tradition, Kitcher gave a lecture to a public audience on the first evening of the Lectures, and he participated in a colloqui-um on the following two days. At this colloquium, eight groups of advanced students and faculty members presented papers on a wide range of topics from Kitcher’s work. Both the lecture and the papers are published in this volume. In addition, it contains Kitcher’s detailed replies to the colloquium papers.

We would like to express our gratitude to Philip Kitcher for accepting our invitation to Münster, for all the controversial and very stimulating discussions about his work, and also for the pleasant atmosphere during and around the Lectures. We would also like to thank the students and colleagues from Münster for the preparation of the colloquium papers and their various contributions to the discussions. Furthermore, our thanks go to the many helping hands in the background which ensured that the colloquium ran smoothly. Last, but not least, we are grateful to Raphael Hüntelmann and the ontos verlag for funding the Lectures and for making this publication possible.

Münster, January 2013 Marie I. Kaiser, Ansgar Seide

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS OF PHILIP KITCHER’S PUBLICATIONS

AK “A Priori Knowledge”, in: Philosophical Review 79, 1980, 3-23. AKR “A Priori Knowledge Revisited”, in: Boghossian, Paul/ Peacocke, Christopher

(eds.): New Essays on the A Priori, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, 65-91. AMM “Against the Monism of the Moment: A Reply to Elliot Sober”, in: Philosophy of

Science 51(4), 1984, 616-630. AR “Author’s Response”, in: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 55(3), 1995, 653-

673. AS The Advancement of Science. Science without Legend, Objectivity without Illusions, Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1993. BAC “Born-Again Creationism”, in: Pennock, Robert T. (ed.): Intelligent Design Creation-

ism and Its Critics. Philosophical, Theological, and Scientific Perspectives, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002, 257-287.

CPP “Creating Perfect People”, in: Burley, Justine/ Harris, John (eds.): Blackwell Companion to Genethics, Oxford: Blackwell, 2002, 229-242.

CS “Challenges for Secularism”, in: Levine, George (ed.): The Joy of Secularism. 11 Essays for How We Live Now, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011, 24-56.

DV Deaths in Venice: The Cases of Gustav von Aschenbach. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.

ECD “Education, Capitalism, and Democracy”, in: Siegel, Harvey (ed.): The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Education, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009, 300-318.

EP The Ethical Project, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2011. ER “On the Explanatory Role of Correspondence Truth”, in: Philosophy and Phenomeno-

logical Research 64(2), 2002, 346-364. EU “Explanatory Unification and the Causal Structure of the World”, in: Kitcher,

Philip/ Salmon, Wesley (eds.): Scientific Explanation, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, 410-505.

EWH “Epistemology Without History is Blind”, in: Erkenntnis 75(3), 2011, 505-524. FBE “Four Ways of ‘Biologicizing’ Ethics”, in: Sober, Eliott (ed.): Conceptual Issues in

Evolutionary Biology, 3rd ed., Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2006, 575-586.

12 Abbreviations

GDD “Giving Darwin his Due”, in: Hodge, Jonathan/ Radick, Gregory (eds.): The Cambridge Companion to Darwin. 2nd edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, 455-476.

IDP “The Importance of Dewey for Philosophy (and for Much Else Besides)”, in: Shook, John/ Kurtz, Paul (eds.): Dewey’s Enduring Impact: Essays on America’s Philoso-pher, Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2011, 19-41.

KSH “Knowledge, Society, and History”, in: Canadian Journal of Philosophy 23(2), 1993, 155-177.

KTD “How Kant Almost Wrote ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’”, in: Philosophical Topics 12(2), 1981, 217-249.

LC The Lives to Come. The Genetic Revolution and Human Possibilities, New York: Touchstone, 1997.

LD Living with Darwin, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. MMA “Militant Modern Atheism”, in: Journal of Applied Philosophy 28(1), 2011, 1-13. MMN “Mill, Mathematics, and the Naturalist Tradition”, in: Skorupski, John (ed.): The

Cambridge Companion to Mill, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 57-111. MT “Mathematical Truth?”, in: Kitcher, Philip: Preludes to Pragmatism, New York:

Oxford University Press, 2012, 166-191. NR “The Naturalists Return”, in: The Philosophical Review 101(1), 1992, 53-114. PIO “Philosophy Inside Out”, in: Metaphilosophy 42(3), 2011, 248-260. PKD “Public Knowledge and its Discontents”, in: Theory and Research in Education 9,

2011, 103-124. PN “Pragmatic Naturalism”, unpublished manuscript, 5 pp. PON “Projecting the Order of Nature”, in: Kitcher, Patricia (ed.): Kant’s Critique of Pure

Reason. Critical Essays, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998, 219-238. PR “Pragmatism and Realism: A Modest Proposal”, in: Kitcher, Philip: Preludes to

Pragmatism, New York: Oxford University Press, 2012, 128-144. RCT “Refining the Causal Theory of Reference for Natural Kind Terms” (with P. Kyle

Stanford), in: Philosophical Studies 97, 2000, 99-129. RHL “Reply to Helen Longino”, in: Philosophy of Science 69(4), 2002, 569-572. RR “Real Realism: The Galilean Strategy”, in: The Philosophical Review 110(2), 2001, 151-

197. S “Species”, in: Philosophy of Science 51(2), 1984, 308-333. SDS Science in a Democratic Society, Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 2011. SRD “Science, Religion, and Democracy”, in: Episteme 5(1), 2008, 5-18. STD Science, Truth, and Democracy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. TTT “Theories, Theorists and Theoretical Change”, in: The Philosophical Review, 87(4),

1978, 519- 547. TW “The Third Way: Reflections on Helen Longino’s The Fate of Knowledge”, in:

Philosophy of Science 69(4), 2002, 549-559.

Abbreviations 13

URI “Unification as a Regulative Ideal”, in: Perspectives on Science 7(3), 1999, 337-348. US “The Unity of Science and the Unity of Nature”, in: Parrini, Paolo (ed.): Kant and

Contemporary Epistemology, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994, 253-272. VA “Varieties of Altruism”, in: Economics and Philosophy 26, 2010, 126-148.

PRAGMATIC NATURALISM

Philip Kitcher

I

‘Naturalism’ is a word that means many very different things to different philosophers – and the same holds for ‘pragmatism’ as well. Hence, when two such slippery terms are combined, the possible interpretations are legion. Al-though my principal aim is to motivate a perspective, my first task must be to identify it.

Twenty years ago, I defended a timid form of naturalism (cf. NR). Aim-ing to overcome the horror of psychology that had invaded philosophy in the wake of Frege, I argued that epistemology should be naturalized by studying the processes that go on in cognition and that a priori claims about method should give way to reflection on the practices of the successful sciences. Yet, unlike the most prominent naturalistic epistemologist of the times (Quine 1969), I saw the philosophical task as normative. In a cloudy phrase, I sug-gested that epistemology aimed to contribute to the improvement of inquiry – to the “meliorative project”.

What exactly did I have in mind? It would have been hard to say – al-though I might have started by declaring that epistemology ought to address issues whose resolution would contribute to achieving the goals of inquiry. Trouble would have come if I had made the declaration, for it would have invited questions about just what those goals are, questions to which I would not have had good answers. Equally, it might have been pointed out how close the declaration comes to recapitulating central themes in classical pragmatism, and that would have given me pause. Like virtually all of my contemporaries, I had learned early on in my philosophical education that there had once been some woolly characters who anticipated in their vague

16 Philip Kitcher

ways ideas that the logical empiricist tradition had elaborated more precisely and fully, and I would not have been happy to associate my own enterprise with that of William James or of John Dewey (perhaps C.S. Peirce would have been acceptable as a fellow-traveler). Moreover, I had very specific reasons for distancing myself from pragmatism, beyond the general ignorance that pervaded the consciousnesses of those who shared my kind of training. In the late decades of the twentieth century, a central task of philosophy of science lay in responding to a live form of skepticism: inspired by studies in the history and sociology of science, serious scholars had queried the ability of the sciences to provide “truth” or to serve as shining exemplars of “ra-tionality”, and, in making their arguments, they had sometimes appealed to ideas from classical pragmatism (see, e.g., Pickering 1995). The (tempered) realism and rationalism I aimed to defend seemed impossible to combine with any alliance with pragmatism. So James and Dewey were held at a distance, and my cloudy talk of the “meliorative project” went unanalyzed.

A popular interpretation of pragmatism, one that influenced those who questioned the images of science taken for granted by many of its professed champions, views the classical pragmatists as breaking with the correspon-dence theory of truth. There are good grounds for that reading: Peirce famously identified truth as that “which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate” (1992 [1878], 139), James declared that truth is what is “expedient in the way of our thinking” (1987 [1907], 583) and that “truth happens to an idea” (1987 [1909], 823), and Dewey’s discussions of inquiry are notable for their studied avoidance of the term and the topic. Yet it is evident in the cases of Peirce and James that they regard the phrases I have cited as preliminary characterizations, standing in need of considerable further explication, and Dewey’s position should be understood in the light of his uncharacteristically sharp response to the suggestion that he is commit-ted to some form of idealism (1981 [1924], 24, fn. 3). Perhaps the first step towards a more adequate account of pragmatism and truth should consist in recognizing that the correspondence theories that plainly troubled these three authors did not include those approaches that rely on the framework devel-oped by Tarski in his seminal work on truth: pragmatists reacted against correspondence accounts that took a holistic view of the “reality” to which true sentences correspond, accounts that often invoked a mysterious neo-

Pragmatic Naturalism 17

Hegelian absolute. Second, in his discussion of truth, James is quite explicit that he does not intend to deviate from the common understanding of truth as correspondence to (or, in his terms, “agreement with”) reality. Well before the famous slogan about expedience, he writes:

Truth, as any dictionary will tell you, is a property of certain of our ideas. It means their ‘agreement’, as falsity means their disagreement, with ‘reality’. Pragmatists and intellectualists both accept this definition as a matter of course. They begin to quarrel only after the question is raised as to what may precisely be meant by the term ‘agreement’, and what by the term ‘reality’, when reality is taken as something for our ideas to agree with. (James 1987 [1907], 572)

With respect to statements about physical reality (common-sense and scien-tific claims), pragmatism does not attempt to replace the correspondence theory of truth, but to provide it with a clear content.

Once this point is appreciated, the way is open for a rapprochement be-tween realism and pragmatism. Real realism eschews any strong metaphysics about the natural world – it rejects assumptions that nature comes divided into objects and kinds, that nature has its own language or its own agenda. It supposes simply that truth about physical reality is to be understood in terms of the Tarskian machinery and natural relations of reference between singular terms and objects, between predicates and sets (see RR and ER).1 Those relations are set up by human behavior, as we navigate our way around the world – in just the way James suggests in his discussions of how to under-stand ‘agreement’ (‘correspondence’) (e.g., 1987 [1909], 882).

The resulting position enables would-be pragmatists to avoid the imputa-tions of subjectivism that vexed Dewey. It also makes it possible to give substance to the idea of a meliorative project. You might suppose, for exam-ple, that epistemology contributes by enabling inquiry to proceed more systematically and successfully in the acquisition of truth. As we shall see, that

1 I should note that my version of pragmatic naturalism would gloss the claim about sets

by using the notion of mathematical truth developed in Mathematical Truth (MT). The reconciliation between pragmatism and realism, outlined in this paragraph and its predecessor, is articulated more thoroughly in Pragmatism and Realism (PR).

18 Philip Kitcher

is not the position I aim to defend. My pragmatist commitments, once begun, extend much further.

II

The term ‘pragmatism’ was chosen by William James as the title of a book in which he intended to characterize a philosophical movement, one he hoped would reform philosophy as he found it. At the center of James’ characteriza-tion is a principle – or perhaps a slogan – frequently taken as constitutive of the pragmatist attitude. It is given in a much-quoted sentence:

There can be no difference anywhere that doesn’t make a difference elsewhere – no difference in abstract truth that doesn’t express itself in concrete fact and in conduct consequent upon that fact, imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere, and somewhen. (James 1987 [1907], 508)

Many interpreters, often reading that sentence in isolation, suppose that James is offering a theory of “content”, that he wants to address the problem of what our words and thoughts mean, what their significance consists in. Even if the sentence isn’t ripped from its context (as I have done), there’s an apparent excuse for taking it in this way, given that it is preceded by a sen-tence that talks of a “collapse into insignificance” when there are no concrete consequences. Yet, if you read that sentence entire, with a modicum of care, it’s clear that issues of linguistic meaning aren’t on James’ mind. What con-cerns him is the other sort of significance; he’s worried that “philosophical disputes” collapse into insignificance through being unimportant, making no difference to people and their lives.

The deepest impulse of pragmatism, both in James and in Dewey, is to recall philosophy to an active role in human culture. James follows up his statement of the “pragmatist principle” by suggesting that “the whole func-tion of philosophy” ought to be to relate “world-formulas” to human deci-sion-making. Dewey makes similar points in numerous places. Here are two instances:


Unless a philosophy is to remain symbolic – or verbal – or a sentimental indulgence for a few, or else mere arbitrary dogma, it’s auditing of past experience and its program of values must take effect in conduct. (Dewey 1980 [1916], 328)

The problem of restoring integration and cooperation between man’s beliefs about the world in which he lives and the values and purposes that should direct his conduct is the deepest problem of modern life. It is the problem of any philosophy that is not isolated from that life. (Dewey 1984 [1929], 204)

Pragmatic naturalism incorporates the pragmatic attitude expressed in these and kindred passages.

But what exactly is meant by connecting philosophy “with life”? For that matter, how should one make sense of James’ criterion for the significance of philosophical problems? Significant questions are alleged to make a differ-ence. What kind of difference? And to whom? The most obvious ways of reading James’ sentence or Dewey’s cloudy phrases seem not to pose any kind of challenge to the continuation of “normal philosophy”.

For consider an enthusiastic champion of the types of discussions James and Dewey apparently want to criticize – a partisan of a Neo-Hegelian absolute, for example. The metaphysician speaks: “You ask what difference answering my central question would make. But that is evident. A world containing an absolute is entirely different from one without.” Faced with this response, pragmatists should be explicit that their criterion is psychological rather than ontological – what psychological difference does it make to someone if she comes to believe in the absolute? Yet the reformulation will leave the metaphysician unperturbed. “When I accept the existence of the absolute, it makes all the difference in the world to my intellectual life, to my posing of new problems and to the conversations I have with my peers.” Identifying the shortcomings of these supposed “differences” requires extending the psycho-logical demand.

James and Dewey do not think that “making a difference” can be estab-lished by pointing to the activities of a small group of enthusiasts. Instead of being some idiosyncratic perturbation, a genuine difference must resonate in the broader society. That does not mean that only non-technical – “popular” – problems can count as significant. The social criterion should recognize the

20 Philip Kitcher

actual limitations of broader appreciation of what is significant. It points towards what would be socially acknowledged under ideal circumstances.

Here is a way to reformulate the criterion. Questions count as significant just in case they would be endorsed in an ideal discussion. Ideal discussions are those in which the full diversity of human perspectives is initially repre-sented, where those perspectives are corrected to eliminate identifiable errors, and in which the participants are mutually engaged – that is, they wish to promote, insofar as it is possible, the interests of each of their fellows.2 Ideal discussions set an agenda for inquiry. They mark out some questions as having broad interest, from an enlightened pan-human point of view – and, correlatively, they view others as failing to contribute much beyond the myopic satisfaction of a rarefied curiosity, as “a sentimental indulgence for a few”. Philosophy has a tendency to veer towards this myopic perspective, to become engrossed in issues that no longer bear on anything of wide concern – even when the outsiders are fully instructed in the best knowledge of the age. Philosophical disputes collapse into insignificance because they fail to make a difference in this important sense.

Although my reconstruction may seem quite far from James’ original discussion, it has the virtue of avoiding the trivialization into which his criterion threatens to slide, and it does so in ways that exclude the scholastic metaphysical exercises he plainly took as inimical to healthy philosophy. Even more evidently, the explication captures themes that are prominent in Dewey’s work. It incorporates the idea of a democratic project in which researchers participate:

[Investigators] represent a social division of labor; and their specializations can be trusted only when such persons are in unobstructed cooperation with other social occupations, sensitive to others’ problems and transmitting results to them for wider application in action. (Dewey 1982 [1920], 164)

Adopting this perspective on inquiry, and on what makes for significance within it, we can return to the problem with which I began, the problem of

2 This way of explicating the criterion recapitulates the notion of well-ordered science,

originally presented in Science, Truth, and Democracy (STD) and developed further in Science in a Democratic Society (SDS).


understanding what is meant by viewing epistemology as promoting a melio-rative project.

Inquiry is a human project, a collective human project, in which some people aim to acquire information that will answer questions that matter to us all – the questions that figure on the agenda resulting from the ideal conversa-tion. Those people play their part by focusing on the significant questions, and the epistemologists among them should reflect on what all inquirers do and on ways in which the collective project can be advanced. That requires epistemologists themselves to identify issues that make a difference to the functioning of inquiry. Like investigators in other fields (in geology or eco-nomics, say) they may be side-tracked into posing and pursuing unimportant questions. The sub-text of “The Naturalists Return” was that much “analytic epistemology” had fallen into this trap. Not only do I now want to make that point explicit – even make it in italics – but pragmatic naturalism generalizes it by renewing the revolution that James and Dewey hoped to see.

What is the point of philosophy, today? A first attempt to characterize the philosophical task might use James’ high-sounding notion of a “world-formula”. The individual fields of inquiry supply a large mass of disparate information, and it falls to philosophy to find a way of welding all the diver-gent pieces together, to offer as clear a picture as can be provided of the universe we inhabit and our particular situation in it. So viewed, pragmatic naturalism starts with an enterprise of stock-taking and systematization. But it does not stop there. Beyond is the further work of finding orderly and helpful syntheses that allow the results human inquiry has achieved to bear on people’s lives and on the decisions they face.

As I shall suggest below, this constructive work can be usefully divided into three main projects. Before I characterize them, however, it is worth reflecting on the kind of ground-clearing systematization that is first needed. This is where the naturalism comes in.

22 Philip Kitcher

III

I began by acknowledging that ‘naturalism’ is found on the banners of people who fight for many different causes. So it is important to be careful in defin-ing the approach I hope to defend.

One genus of naturalistic enterprises starts from a sense of the im-portance of recent developments in some area of non-philosophical inquiry. Within the genus, there are different species: some philosophers are much taken with advances in neuroscience, others with contemporary evolutionary biology, yet others with economics. Ambitious naturalists declare that, now that we have the insights of the favorite field, the traditional problems of philosophy can be convincingly resolved.3 Typically, they inspire the wrath of those who contend that the alleged answers succeed, at most, in scratching the surface of complex problems. I want to record a different sort of worry. Whether or not self-styled radical proposals for replacing the obscurities of philosophy-as-usual with the sharp clarity of the candidate science are correct with respect to some, or even all, of the questions philosophers currently discuss, they are oddly conservative in at least two respects. In the first place, they take the contemporary agenda of philosophy for granted, supposing that the problems now posed are those that ought to be occupying attention.4 Second, to the extent that they think of the scientific developments that fascinate them as parts of an evolving practice, they suppose that the ele-ments on which they rely will remain stable in the subsequent articulation of the field, and that philosophical reflection itself will not be needed as further scientific progress is made.5

Naturalists of this sort issue one important reminder to their philosoph-ical colleagues. Subject to the proviso that a question labeled as “philosophi-

3 I suspect that so extreme a view is rare. More common and more plausible is the

proposal that the favorite science enables the resolution of some cluster of philosoph-ical problems.

4 Here I echo an insight of Dewey’s, on which Rorty (1989) expands: sometimes progress is made not by solving a problem but by getting over it – finding a new way of talking.

5 A thought advanced by Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). In his discussions of Kuhn’s work, Michael Friedman (2001) has developed this theme.


cal” is worth posing and pursuing, formulations and discussions of it should pay attention to the best available information from any pertinent field of non-philosophical inquiry. It is salutary, for example, for epistemologists and ethicists to recall that contemporary psychology has made advances beyond the concepts and positions of those who initiated the lineage of discussions in which contemporary disputants would place themselves. Perhaps there are important questions for which reformulations guided by the results of recent fields of inquiry could lead quickly to solutions, but, even without supposing in advance that this is so, the reformulations are surely worth exploring.

The form of naturalism I favor does not assume that any area of current or recent inquiry has the power to put an end to philosophical perplexity. Nor does it endorse a related idea, the popular conception that the natural sci-ences, as currently understood, are the measure of what there is. Again, I resist on two grounds. Discussions of the possibilities of reducing particular scientific fields to other fields – classical genetics to molecular biology, or psychology to neuroscience, say – have shown the difficulties of dispensing with the conceptions of the supposedly “less fundamental” sciences. Natural-ists, I suggest, should be happy to acknowledge a wide spectrum of rigorous disciplines, ranging from anthropology and art history to zoology, and should not conclude that some of these are capable of reduction, in practice or even in principle, to others, supposedly more basic.6 More importantly, we should not suppose ourselves to be at the end of inquiry, or to imagine that no further surprises are in store for us. During the past millennia, conceptions of the structure of matter have changed quite radically: apparently continuous physical bodies have been decomposed into atoms, electrons and protons, a host of fundamental particles, quarks, and even strings and branes: it would be folly to think that the story has come to an end. Without knowing the shape of future investigations, it thus seems that our conception of the natural world, and hence of what is natural, must remain indefinite.

Philosophers of an expansionist inclination will surely seize on this point, contending that their naturalistic critics face a dilemma. Either natural-ism is cast as a definite position, one dedicated to using the current sciences

6 This is not to suggest either that there are no disputes among these areas of inquiry, or

that they are all on a par with respect to the development of rigorous methods.

24 Philip Kitcher

as a standard, in which case it foolishly ignores the evolution of the forms of inquiry it celebrates, or it is compelled to recast its critiques in the form of an unknown future science, about whose contours it can only vaguely speculate. Expansionists may even view themselves as more faithfully representative of the scientific temperament, in that the arguments they offer and the consider-ations to which they draw attention are of a piece with those that figure in the episodes through which the sciences have made their most celebrated ad-vances. What difference is there, after all, between the Platonist’s invocation of a world of abstract objects to explain mathematical truth or the moralist’s appeal to the principles of practical reason as the source of all values, and the explanatory suggestions made by Newton and Dalton, Darwin and Mendel, and their more recent successors?

This last question provides the clue to escaping the Naturalist’s Dilem-ma, and it returns us to the contrast with which I began. For, the committed Naturalist will reply, there are deep and important differences between the high flights of imagination that distinguish the history of philosophy and the more disciplined efforts of inquirers in the sciences (broadly construed). To specify the version of naturalism I favor we can begin with the naïve proposal that makes contemporary inquiry the standard of what there is. Naïve natural-ism contends that a philosophically postulated entity or process should not be admitted unless it already belongs to the inventory provided by the current sciences, taken inclusively (the spectrum that runs from anthropology and art history through zoology). Less naïve naturalism modifies that criterion for admissibility by recognizing that scientists legitimately include or exclude entities based on arguments and evidence they take to be rigorous: so a philosophically postulated entity might be admitted, provided that it could be viewed as a legitimate expansion of the inventory of the universe now available, where the standards of legitimacy are set by the sciences (as usual, broadly construed). Reflections on scientific practice are sometimes dominat-ed by a tempting idea, the thought of a set of goals, standards and techniques shared by all the sciences, and only partially present in other areas of human inquiry. This, however, is a myth. “Scientific method” can be characterized in a relatively thin way, so that it applies across the paradigmatic sciences – but the goals and criteria of evidence so selected are equally found in many other forms of inquiry, in criminal investigations, searches for lost objects, and a


host of everyday projects. Any attempt to provide something more substan-tial must pay attention to the diversity of the sciences, to the very definite ways in which different disciplines articulate standards of good reasoning: it is no accident that aspiring professionals in art history or psychology or devel-opmental biology receive instruction in the “methodology” of the field.7 Hence, less naïve naturalism cannot proceed from the idea of a single Scien-tific Method, but must rely on the diverse corpus of standards applied in those realms of inquiry that are able to reliably achieve enduring results.

Those standards evolve over time. For, as we learn more about the world and about ourselves, we learn more about how to learn about both. Methodo-logical strictures that are now routine – the use of double-blind trials in medicine, for example – were not always recognized. Hence, even though less naïve naturalism is an advance on the position with which I started, it faces a slightly more subtle version of the original challenge. To cope with that challenge, an obvious amendment is required. Methodological change is inspired by the recognition that a different set of standards for weighing the evidence would be more likely to lead to the sorts of conclusions at which we aim – sometimes true conclusions, but often conclusions that are close enough to the truth for our purposes. Even less naïve naturalism accommodates the possibility of progress in standards of evidence by admitting those entities that could not be supported by applying the methods we currently have but that would be endorsed by applying standards obtained through a progressive shift from our current position, one based on a prior apprehen-sion of more reliable ways of proceeding.

Is this the end of my characterization of naturalism? No. For analogs of the familiar challenge can arrive at this third level, to be met by an amend-ment that introduces a fourth level of potential revisions, that in turn gener-ates a novel version of the demand to recognize the possibility of change, and so on and on. Practically speaking, proceeding beyond Even less naïve naturalism may only be required in the rarest of instances, so that this position

7 Invocations of probability theory and the thesis that Bayesianism tells us everything

about scientific evidence offer a relatively thin set of common guidelines. With respect to the complex decisions and judgments scientists make daily, these guidelines are virtually useless.

26 Philip Kitcher

can be treated as a useful approximation to naturalism (tout court). Naturalism, strictly speaking, provides a criterion of admissibility for entities and pro-cesses that requires us to seek that point in an infinite sequence of candidate requirements after which the test remains stable – that is, no further modifica-tions would be demanded – and to apply the criterion introduced at that point. Since we typically cannot acquire positive evidence for supposing a particular point in the sequence to be stable, naturalists proceed in practice by responding to cases of concrete doubt: if the entities or processes under scrutiny are claimed to explain certain phenomena in ways vindicated by the standards of some current scientific practice, then it is appropriate to apply the criterion of Less naïve naturalism; if they are accompanied by a proposed modification of extant standards, defended in the name of increasing reliabil-ity, then Even less naïve naturalism supplies the pertinent test. A first pragmatic point applies – we do not have to confront all possible doubts about the current results of inquiry, but only those doubts that actually arise in the investigative context.8

A second pragmatic theme has already figured tacitly in my account, in the casual reference to conclusions that are good enough for our purposes. Pragmatic naturalism envisages inquiry as one form of human practice among others, one directed towards goals that can sometimes be discussed without ranging more widely – as when we take it for granted that an investigation aims at the truth, or even at the whole truth – but that are always in principle subject to consideration in light of our overall aspirations.

Expansionist philosophers might agree to play by the naturalist’s rules, contending that their favorite entities and processes can be vindicated by the standards of non-philosophical forms of inquiry. Many great figures in the history of philosophy can be viewed as adopting that stance: Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, and even Hegel might well have contended that their ideas about world, mind and history rested on rigorous evidence of types familiar to other great investigators.9 Yet my admission that the articulated methods

8 For elaboration and defense, see Peirce’s Some Consequences of Four Incapacities (1992

[1868], 28f.). 9 Other philosophers might have favored a very different conception of their work, one

that did not view philosophy as striving for knowledge, but as articulating a broad


and standards of the sciences vary from domain to domain might be taken to concede something to a popular position, one that naturalists rightly resist. According to that position, philosophy has methods and standards of its own, capable of rigorous deployment to deliver philosophical conclusions. Philos-ophers sit at their desks and think, and the products of their activities should be taken with the same respect as that accorded by naturalists to the deliver-ances of music historians or field linguists or biochemists.

The many contemporary philosophers who subscribe to the idea of a special philosophical technique should be invited to explain exactly how it works, the kinds of conclusions it can deliver, and the sources of its reliability. Conceived as a form of inquiry that shares the sorts of aims that motivate other investigations – the generation and defense of propositions about some particular subject-matter – the track record of philosophy is dismal: insofar as philosophers have contributed enduring contributions to human knowledge, it appears that they have done so by proceeding as special scientists avant la lettre – that is the source of the judgment that philosophy’s principal achieve-ments lie in giving birth to independent sciences. Philosophical reflection is, I propose, good for something. When it is well-informed, as so often with the greatest figures in the history of philosophy, it can expand conceptual hori-zons, inspiring new investigations and practical interventions, even playing a positive role at those moments of large and convulsive change in the history of the most respected sciences.10 Pleas for expansionism contain a kernel of truth, one that naturalists ought to acknowledge, for there is a valuable division of epistemic labor that allows for imaginative ventures that respond to the major problems and puzzles unearthed by the various types of rigorous inquiry, while insisting that those ventures are subject to constraint by the criteria of naturalism in its less naïve guises. If philosophers are to play their part in this division of labor, the kind of philosophy they practice, while

perspective (or several broad perspectives) for consideration. I think Nietzsche is best read in this way, and, although it would distort his self-image as the rebuilder of a system partly inspired by Kant, it might help to read Schopenhauer in a similar fashion.

10 As emphasized by Kuhn and Friedman; see fn.5.

28 Philip Kitcher

gloriously exemplified in the history of the subject, is starkly at odd with the principal foci of contemporary practice.11

IV

Locke famously characterized philosophers as under-laborers, whose first duty is to cart away the rubbish left by earlier attempts at systematic visions of the world. He saw himself as humbly contributing to the emergent science of his day, and contemporary naturalists quite reasonably adopt a similar vision. So they try to offer alternatives to expansionist proposals about mathematics, or morality, or the existence and attributes of the deity (to name just three areas in which expansionism has flourished, and in which it has served as a source of seemingly interminable philosophical debate).

I begin with a general guiding insight: with respect to any contemporary human practice that puzzles us, we can benefit from understanding the history that stands behind the present. Darwin’s deepest thought, one prior to his suggestions about the relatedness of living things or his hypotheses about the mechanisms of evolutionary change, was that the present biological world could be understood in terms of its past. So too with mathematics, or science, or ethics or religion. If, for example, we are trying to fathom what mathema-ticians are talking about, it helps to look at the circumstances in which they come to novel discussions, exchanges in which they employ language they have not used before. Assuming that Platonists are right, their conversations result from episodes in which they have discovered new parts of the abstract realm – so let us look and see what has moved them to talk in the new idiom, in the hope we might find clues as to what might have counted as contact with newly recognized abstract entities. More generally: histories of transitions in human practices provide clues to what the practitioners are doing.

The original languages of mathematics were developed in the ancient world, in response to situations in which objects are grouped, regrouped and tallied with one another, or with respects to the operations of measuring land.

11 For a sharp version of this charge, and efforts to defend it, see Philosophy Inside Out

(PIO).


Out of that came the languages of arithmetic and geometry, generating in their turn further questions that inspired the rudiments of algebra (needed in ancient Babylon for the division of legacies). Within these languages it was possible to pose questions that nobody knew how to answer, but these seemed like unimportant puzzles. Up through the Renaissance mathematics was low-status activity, its useful parts apparently well-understood, with a few outlying areas in which especially clever people could try their skills at solving problems of purely intellectual interest. In the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, that social order changed, as extensions of mathematics, originally motivated by puzzle-solving considerations, turned out to be valu-able in developing nascent physical sciences. From this point on, mathemati-cians were given a license to devise and play the games that interest them, in the hope that some of their extensions of symbolic languages might fruitfully be applied in other fields of inquiry. That bet has paid off handsomely.

Reviewing this history in more detail than I can offer here12 motivates a hybrid position, according to which the elementary parts of mathematics are idealized accounts of the ways in which people can operate on objects in the natural world (and on objects of thought), while the more advanced branches are formal games, introduced to systematize previous parts of mathematics or to allow for concrete interpretation and application to natural phenomena. For “higher mathematics”, mathematical truth reduces to provability within a system that is worth adopting (or in a language game that is worth playing). The need for mysterious abstract entities disappears. The account of truth stays close to what mathematicians do at moments of significant change – to wit, introduce and manipulate novel symbols in ways that permit them to achieve the goals of systematization and application.13

In this case, genealogical investigation provides a perspective from which to make sense of a human practice, without displacing either the everyday activities of the practitioners or the judgments that their activities are valu-able. All that is abandoned is a philosophical picture, one that has often

12 For more elaboration, see Epistemology without History is Blind (EWH) and Mathematical

Truth (MT). 13 As Nenad Mischkevic wryly noted, the position is a historicized version of that

adopted by Hilbert in On the Infinite.

30 Philip Kitcher

generated perplexities (even if it has, from time to time, given mathematicians an odd sense of their own powers). Similarly, as the next section will suggest, a genealogical account of ethics supports the common judgments that our ethical practices can, in principle, make progress – even if, in practice, they do so only rarely. Matters are different, however, with respect to religion. Here genealogy debunks. That is, for many (but not all) forms of religion, a meta-physical picture that populates the world with transcendent entities – gods or spirits or sacred places – is so deeply entangled with religious practice that the latter can no longer be sustained when the myths are gone.14

The naturalist systematization of the results of inquiry aims at present-ing the best systematic picture of the world available to us, by ordering and connecting what we have come to know, and eliminating those elements in popular thought that potentially clog our actions and further investigations. Lockean underlaborers are important precisely because sound future con-struction should not be impeded by the obstructive remnants of past mis-takes. Yet, as the example of religion makes clear (and that example will briefly resurface again in section VII), systematization may generate new problems. James’ own yearnings for a “world-formula” that would allow some expression of religious impulses is testimony to that.

V

Pragmatic naturalism views inquiry as a collective human project, aimed at addressing the questions that matter, and takes epistemology to be directed towards the improvement of inquiry. Yet the James-Dewey approach to significance, as I have reformulated it, embeds inquiry within an even broader collective project, one that Dewey would describe as preserving, extending and transmitting the “meanings” that make human lives, individually and collectively, worth living.15 The systematization of knowledge that philosophy seeks is a part of that broader project, and philosophy’s constructive efforts are intended to advance the project. (That is why Dewey can write at times

14 I defend this claim in the last chapter of Living with Darwin (LD). 15 See, for example, the closing paragraphs of A Common Faith (Dewey 1986 [1934]).


that philosophy is a form of critical appraisal – and at others, that the general problem of philosophy is one of education: from the perspective of the broader project, these are two aspects of the same goal.) Hence it should come as no surprise that the theory of value is central to philosophy, that clarification of the status of values and promotion of discussions of values are as fundamental as philosophical enterprises get. Indeed, pragmatic natu-ralism restores Socrates’ old question, “How to live?”, to the center of philosophy, a place it shares with a variant – “How to live together?”.

Questions significant at one stage of human cultural evolution may lose their significance at another, and, equally, advances in knowledge or modifica-tions of our ways of life may pose new problems. Moreover, the “eternal questions” may endure, even if they change their gestalt. Philosophical stock-taking should be aware of these possibilities, and alert to their consequences for continuing “philosophy as usual”. Sometimes keen reflection will endorse the importance of a traditional field, while shifting its central questions. As this section and the next attest, that applies both to ethics and epistemology.

The naturalist strain in pragmatic naturalism requires that any satisfacto-ry account of our practices of valuing in general, and of ethical practice in particular, foreswear an appeal to mysterious novel entities – there must be no “spooks”. As in the case of mathematics, I use genealogy to liberate our perspectives about ethics.16 Once again, I begin from Darwin’s most basic insight, the thought that we should understand a complex present by investi-gating the historical processes out of which it has emerged. Surely there was a point in our past when our ancestors – hominids or humans – had not yet arrived at an ethical life. By the time of the invention of writing, however, roughly 5000 years before the present, it is obvious from the extant docu-ments that people had come to live in large and complex societies where conduct is subject to a vast array of rules. The ancient law codes that have survived are plainly additions to a prior corpus of precepts, which they develop further in response to new situations and challenges. Human social life has almost certainly been governed by norms for tens of thousands of years. Instead of seeking a priori first principles, or trying to analyze the

16 The account sketched in the following paragraphs is developed at much greater length

in The Ethical Project (EP).

32 Philip Kitcher

meaning of ethical pronouncements, pragmatic naturalism recommends beginning with a different question.

How did we get from there to here? Religious traditions often suppose that there must have been some moment of revelation, a time at which the correct principles for human conduct were handed down by a deity. Philoso-phers tend towards a different picture, one in which ethical truth is somehow discoverable, and in which it may even have been discovered by quite ordinary people. Both types of account are subject to the accusation of mystery-mongering. More-over, when you take a look at recorded history, focusing on the ethical changes that have sometimes occurred – the repudiation of chattel slavery, or the abandonment of the idea that it is a sin for two people of the same sex to express their love for one another – it is very hard to identify the moment of ethical revelation or discovery.17

I propose a different approach. For a very long time, perhaps for most of the history of our species since we achieved our full linguistic capabilities, we have been embedded in a venture, the ethical project, which has evolved and ramified, and which remains permanently unfinished.18 That project began in the small human groups of the Paleolithic, bands of some thirty to eighty people, mixed by age and sex, who lived in much the fashion of contempo-rary chimpanzees. Social life of this sort requires some capacity for fellow-feeling, but psychological dispositions to altruism are and were typically limited. Because of those limits, human relations were often strained, and the social fabric had to be rewoven through frequent and time-consuming activi-ties of peace-making – the sorts of activities readily visible among our primate relatives. Human beings escaped from this predicament through the acquisition of a capacity to respond to directives, to inhibit forms of behavior that were recognized as creating trouble and to reinforce their limited altru-ism. Those directives became embedded in their social lives, as they learned to discuss the rules that might be useful in problematic situations. Thus began a vast sequence of “experiments of living” (in Mill’s happy phrase; 1863,

17 See Chapter 5 of The Ethical Project (EP). 18 Once again, these are Deweyan themes, the first attempting to elucidate his thesis that

moral conceptions grow out of the conditions of human life, the second recalling his emphasis that no number of commandments would be enough.


Chapter 3)19 out of which emerged the codes already discernible in the first written documents, and the diverse ethical perspectives of today. The cultural evolution of ethics is interwoven with the introduction and development of the idea that deities (or other transcendent beings) are guardians of morality, with the expansion of group size, first to allow for peaceful interactions with neighbors, and later to achieve large settlements with a complex division of labor, with the development of imperatives to do one’s part in sustaining a world in which complex coordination and cooperation is required, with the subsequent introduction of ideals of virtue and, eventually, with conceptions of what it means to be human and to live a worthwhile human life. All this has occurred gradually in a cultural evolutionary process – a process that has not yet ended.

On this approach, ethics is not something we passively receive or that we actively discover. It is something that human beings invent – together. The invention is not arbitrary, but grows out of our capacities and limitations and the deepest problems to which they give rise for us.20 Ethical life begins in our dispositions to live together, and even to care for those with whom we live, and in the frictions of our cross-cutting desires and aspirations. As the group of those with whom we interact, with whom we must interact, expands, the deep problems with which the pioneer ethicists originally wrestled do not go away – they merely take on more complex forms and occupy our species on a larger scale. Philosophers have a role to play in renewing the ethical project, but it is not that of pronouncing on the changes that ought to be made. At most, it can be that of facilitating the necessary discussion, of making proposals and offering ideals about the ideal forms of conversation. There are no experts here, only heirs of Socrates, midwives all.

You might worry that this naturalistic account debunks ethics. That wor-ry can, I believe, be addressed. First, the authority of ethical life remains, for the ethical project is inescapable – the only alternative we know of to con-tinuing it is the dead-end of our evolutionary cousins. Second, it is possible to make sense of the notion of ethical truth. Transitions in ethical life are

19 Mill is often misquoted as talking of “experiments in living”. 20 As Dewey saw very clearly: see the closing paragraphs of the second section of

Dewey’s and Tufts’ Ethics (1933).

34 Philip Kitcher

progressive to the extent that they overcome previous problems – ethics is a kind of social technology. The ethical truths are those principles that remain stable in the march of progress: in William James’ formulation “truth hap-pens to an idea” (1987 [1909], 823). The best candidates for ethical truth are vague generalizations of the sorts common to extant cultural traditions, recommendations of honesty for example, generalizations we don’t know how to make strictly universal and precise. Yet, if there is room for notions of ethical truth and ethical falsehood, it should not be assumed that these concepts apply across the full range of ethical statements. It is quite possible that different lineages of ethical practice might progress indefinitely, each recognizing the value of something to which the other gives greater weight, without ever converging. To the extent that scenarios of this sort occur, ethics must acquiesce in pluralism: instead of thinking that all ethical statements are determinately true or false, or supposing that all are relative (in some sense to be specified), it may be that there is a core of determinate truths and false-hood and a penumbra of statements that lack determinate truth values.21

The philosophical task is again to contribute to a meliorative project. We have inherited an ethical practice from our predecessors, and, in recognizing the processes through which our particular code has emerged, we can see how progress has occasionally been made and that the rare instances of unambiguous progress have typically occurred blindly. In the light of a clearer understanding of what we have been about, it is possible to envisage a more methodical, more reliable, way of going on. The task of philosophy is to use the tools so far developed to facilitate future conversation.22

VI

The first constructive venture, the meliorative project for ethics (and for values more generally) offers a reorientation of a traditional field of philoso-phy, centered on posing new issues as well as reposing some traditional

21 The view of ethics that emerges here thus allows for the type of pluralism envisaged

by Isaiah Berlin. 22 This goal is clearly expressed by Dewey (see 1984 [1929], Chapters 9 and 10).

Philip Kitcher. Pragmatic Naturalism

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