Naturalism
The world we live in
Supplementary Reading
• A Field Guide to Recent Species of Naturalism
Alex Rosenberg
The British Journal for the Philosophy of
Science > Vol. 47, No. 1 (Mar., 1996), pp. 1-29
(Available on JSTOR.)
Where should philosophy start?
• Answers tend to assume that there are some things that we
know or that there is some source of evidence about how
things stand– and they go on from those things, or that
source, to various kinds of philosophical explanation.
• Examples of extremely secure claims:
– Principles of logic.
– Simple sensory reports (external/public).
– Simple sense experience reports (internal/private).
• Logical empiricism tried to give an account of science
grounded in logic and observations—since the observations
are largely taken for granted, the empiricists focused on the
logical side, examining logical relations between
observations and scientific theories.
After logical empiricism
• The logical ambitions of the LEs failed– no
formal account of induction is possible.
• This is strongly suggested by Goodman’s
Grue/Bleen puzzle, as well as the failure of
every attempt to formalize the relation
between observations and the theories those
observations are evidence for.
• So what’s a philosopher of science to do?
Godfrey-Smith’s Proposal
• Go naturalistic.
• What is it for philosophy to be ‘naturalistic’?
– Continuity with the sciences (=?) (Quine on naturalized
epistemology, philosophy of space-time as a reflective
examination of physical theories of space-time and their
epistemology…)
– Opposed to ‘abstract objects’ (in naturalism about
mathematics).
– Descriptive rather than prescriptive. Sometimes we think
of nature as a matter of what is, in a purely descriptive
sense of ‘is’; in this sense, norms would not be part of
naturalistic philosophy– this seems to fit with Quine’s
epistemological project.
Naturalism in science
• In what sense is science said to be naturalistic?
– Methodological naturalism: The notion that a
scientific account of anything must rely on natural
hypotheses, as opposed to super-natural ones.
– Metaphysical naturalism: The metaphysical doctrine
that there is nothing but nature/ natural things (i.e.,
given methodological naturalism, there is nothing that
cannot be studied by scientific means). (Query:
supposing this is true, how would we know?)
Another division
• As we noted above, some forms of naturalism are
purely descriptive in their contents.
• The main example GS considers is Quine and his
naturalized epistemology.
• But this leads to some difficult questions: there
doesn’t seem to be room in Quine’s turn to science
for philosophical questions about (for example)
evidence, justification, standards of argument.
• Psychology does study the senses and our reasoning
faculties– but it studies how they work under various
circumstances, not how they should work or how we
should apply or employ them.
Normative Naturalism
• GS prefers normative naturalism (a phrase due to
Laudan): For a normative naturalist, questions about
justification are acceptable topics, but our starting
point for thinking about such issues includes what
the sciences tell us about human senses and how
they work.
• In general, the idea is not to replace philosophy with
science (and philosophical questions with scientific
questions), but to draw on science to inform our
approach to philosophical questions.
What sort of norms?
• Instrumental norms are straightforward; GS
proposes that they be the starting point here.
• An instrumental norm takes the form of an ‘ifthen’: If your goal is X, then you should…
• Merely naturalistic claims can support such
conditionals, so long as the description of the
goal is itself naturalistic.
Again about getting started
• One tendency of naturalism is to focus our attention on
simpler, more modest starting points for philosophy.
• If we begin with the kinds of claims humans actually
manage to agree about– the most familiar, easily
checked and settled claims– one important group of
such claims are simple descriptive claims about the
sensible and measureable features of public objects.
• Science has grown out of such claims, through
systematic refinement of measurements and
observations and mathematical systematization of
some of the results.
Who isn’t a naturalist?
• A much more ambitious view of the aim of
philosophy of science holds that philosophers
lay the foundations for science.
• In a sense, such a view could be naturalistic–
that is, a philosophical view of nature could, in
principle provide such foundations.
• But it’s contrary to the spirit of naturalism,
since it puts philosophy on a kind of pedestal:
science only gets its ‘credentials’ from the
higher-ranking philosophers.
Locke’s vision
• John Locke had a much more modest
understanding of what philosophy could do.
• Rather than lay foundations for science, Locke
thought that philosophers should try to ‘clear
the underbrush’ by identifying confusions and
mistakes of various kinds that needed to be
avoided in order for a good scientific account
to be produced.
Again on the role of observation
• Theory and observation: different forms of ‘theoryladenness’.
• Guided: our theories tell us what and how to
observe.
• Evaluated: theories tell us what observations to ‘take
seriously’.
• Language: theories affect (provide?) the language of
observations.
• Impact: theories shape/affect what we actually
observe. (does this produce a circularity in testing?)
In