by Daniel A. Kaufman
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The aim of these prolegomena has been to advocate on behalf of a pluralist metaphysics, but what is a metaphysics? Prior to the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, a metaphysics was a First Philosophy: a set of propositions the purpose of which is to describe the most fundamental aspects of being, per se. Aristotle’s numerous scientific treatises may have been based in empirical investigation, but his metaphysical investigations are rationalistic and a priori. For example, when Aristotle concludes, in Metaphysics Zeta, that the most fundamental element of reality is Form – in apparent contradiction to his earlier claim in the Categories that it is the discrete, individual object that is metaphysically fundamental – it is not on the basis of empirical investigation, but a series of deductions.
The notion that one can obtain substantive knowledge this way may have been credible, when the world was just one part of a larger “reality” infused with divinity and divine purpose; a manifestation of ultimately supernatural, supersensible agents and forces, but today it no longer is. That analytic philosophers have revived this discredited conception of metaphysics – inspired by a hypostatic treatment of modal logic of all things – is depressing, though unsurprising. A good part of the history of philosophy is an exercise in philosophers repeating things that were once understood but have been forgotten or which have been willfully ignored.
So, when I say that I am sketching the outlines of a metaphysics, I am not suggesting a First Philosophy or an account of the most fundamental aspects of being. Indeed, I am not engaging in the project of pre-modern metaphysics or its ill-conceived offspring in any way. A metaphysics is simply one part of a philosophy, and a philosophy, as I maintained in my last installment, is something that:
(a) describes and analyzes the logics, grammars, ontologies, and epistemologies of the different types of discourses/investigations/forms of life in which we engage, and;
(b) endeavors to develop a framework within which these all can be understood as pictures of/activities within/lives belonging to a single world.
Once we understand that there is just the world and no further “reality” beyond, below, above, adjacent to, or slightly askew from it – no intelligence-infused substrate or space beyond the proverbial veil – it is easy to see that all substantive knowledge must begin with experience: from our ordinary, common encounters with people and events and things to the highly disciplined and controlled observations and experiments conducted within the context of the sciences. The result of our myriad investigations and analyses of these experiences is a series of “pictures” of different parts (aspects, dimensions, etc.) of the world that can be placed alternatively within the Manifest and Scientific Images, as we have been discussing them throughout. Our metaphysics is the philosophical account we give of the ontological commitments we make as a result of these encounters and investigations and the principles of individuation that governs the “things” to which we commit.
Humanism is the view that we – people – are special, an idea born of our alleged likeness to God. It survived the intellectual secularization of the 17th and 18th centuries, because this likeness was always understood as being metaphorical; as lying in our capacity for theoretical and practical reason, agency, and artistic creation, in the broad sense of the term (i.e. including everything from bridge-building to poetry writing). The fraying of the humanistic idea today (a disaster, in my view) is due to a series of self-inflicted blows to our collective morale in the form of wars, genocides, and horrific sociopolitical experiments and more recently, an increasingly confused understanding of our relationship to nature and in particular, to wild and domesticated animals. [1]
But, there is yet another sense in which we are special. The appearance in the world of mammals capable of certain kinds of thinking, language, and action meant the emergence of a discursive, axiological, and active space within which what I have been calling “social reality” arises and persists. We add a dimension to the world by way of our activity that would not be there otherwise and which requires us to countenance the existence of all sorts of “things” – institutions, political entities, laws, moral principles, political systems, etc. – that also would not be a part of the world otherwise. This even includes us, qua people, the identity conditions and principles of individuation for whom are to a good extent dependent on this social reality.
The specialness I am thinking of, then, is not that expressed by Kant in the sections of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals devoted to our place in the so-called “Kingdom of Ends” (though I do think Kant’s is a useful and appropriate way to account for human specialness, as part of the effort to defend liberal principles) but rather specialness in the sense of introducing a number of distinct and important complexities that function as constraints on any account of the world that purports to be adequate and complete.
The world just is the world. It is only when there are people who desire and endeavor to understand that world that there come pictures of it. Some of these pictures belong to the Scientific Image and are concerned with the world in its depersonalized state. Others belong to the Manifest Image and are focused on the world in its personalized state. Yet it is important to remember that even the Scientific Image, being an image, depends upon people to whom it is such, and consequently, it is infused with personalized elements: most significantly, as discussed in an earlier installment (and raised numerous times in my dialogues with Massimo), a narrational structure and form. This is why, as we’ve already seen, Sellars insists that “each theoretical image is a construction on a foundation provided by the manifest image, and in this methodological sense presupposes the manifest image.” [2]
For the sorts of reasons discussed over the course of these prolegomena – a hypostatic conception of ontological commitment; a desire for explanatory unity; a failure to properly distinguish the logic of reasons from the logic of causality – philosophers have expended enormous effort in reductive and eliminativist projects, pointing in both directions. These philosophers, whether Idealists (who want to reduce the Scientific to the Manifest) or Reductive/Eliminative Materialists (who want to reduce/eliminate the Manifest to/in favor of the Scientific) share a common monistic impulse; a conviction that the world is fundamentally, metaphysically homogeneous. And the failure of their reductive and eliminative projects has led philosophers either to reembrace earlier, discredited philosophies or to develop the kinds of new “crazy” ones that served as the initial “spark” for these prolegomena.
The metaphysical heterogeneity and pluralism that I have proposed is aimed at cutting off these ill-conceived and misguided philosophical developments at their roots. Sellars’ conception of two “Images,” Scientific and Manifest, which describe the world in its two most fundamental aspects, personalized and depersonalized, which can be combined – but only in a stereoscopic fashion – to yield a single, though irreducibly heterogeneous and complex picture of the world, seems the ideal framework within which to do so.
Returning to the matter of humanism for a moment and as a final note, there is a certain irony in the fact that the whole idea of divine intelligences occupying a supra-sensible, transcendent space was in part motivated by an inability to see how the world could be intelligible otherwise, but as it turns out, this intelligibility is entirely (and merely) a matter of the world including within it intelligent animals like us. It is an intelligibility that lies in the world’s representation, not in the world itself, an insight that we owe to Kant and his first Critique. And it is an intelligibility that can survive neither the aspirant-quasi supernaturalism of the idealists and panpsychists, nor the representation-abolishing efforts of the reductive and eliminative materialists.
Notes
[1] As readers know, I am a great admirer of Bernard Williams’ essay, “The Human Prejudice” in which these questions are addressed with great sophistication and wisdom.
https://theelectricagora.com/2017/12/02/course-notes-bernard-williams-the-human-prejudice/
[2] Wilfrid Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man” (1962)
http://www.ditext.com/sellars/psim.html , Part IV, ¶5.
Comments
20 responses to “Prolegomena for a Pluralist Metaphysics: Concluding Thoughts”
Its always I learn a lot from everything you right. I appreciate the clarity – perhaps the very intelligibility of which you speak is of a piece with the very content of this essay. I did want to ask you to specify or clarify a clause in this essay. When you speak of a disaster are you saying that the loss of the humanistic idea or ideal is itself a disaster (something that we are worse off for having lost) or are you saying that old fashioned view is the disaster and deserved to be defanged or demoted? I know from your admiration for Bernard Williams the answer to my question is already present but I am struck by the many philosophic positions out there and I think that anti0humanism is found in both analytic and Continental traditions if I am not mistaken. Maybe I am asking you for an elucidation of the different uses and meaning of “humanism” which takes you off topic.
I meant to suggest that I think the fraying of humanism is a disaster. And yes, anti-humanism is non-sectarian, philosophically speaking.
Well I’m still dissatisfied 😉 Why are there only two (current) images? Why are they just the “Two Cultures” slightly re-imagined or the Subject-Object? And are they permanently incommensurable ways of seeing? Why not go the “humanist” route and say that “impersonal” views of the world are not restricted to the sciences, and can be fully contained within the single Manifest.
Latour has a similar flavour to your solution: “the Subject/Object opposition is troublesome only if we take these two terms as distinct ontological regions, whereas it is really only a matter of a slight difference between two groups…For want of an appropriate metaphysics, perhaps the Moderns merely exaggerated, to the point of making an incontrovertible foundation out of something that should always have remained just a convenience of organization: some modes are more centripetal with respect to objects, others revolve more around subjects. Nothing to make a scene about; nothing that would make Nature begin to bifurcate!”
And, “…it would do no good to settle for saying that it is simply a matter of different ‘language games’. Were we to do so, our generosity would actually be a cover for extreme stinginess, since it is to language, but still not to being, that we would be entrusting the task of accounting for diversity.”
He ends up not with two, but a dozen Modes of Existence, eg the mode of Fictional objects. These appear in the sciences all the time, as well in the everyday world.
I was a little surprised that Kant was referenced twice in this brief summary. You speak respectfully of Kant’s approach to ethics (an approach to which Bernard Williams was strongly opposed, I think). And you conclude by referencing the first Critique. I shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose, as Sellars is very much in the Kantian tradition and your Prolegomena are based firmly on his ideas.
Not sure why you would be surprised.
Virtually every moral philosophy has an element of truth to it. Surely, you understand that. In the case of Kant, one of the strongest elements is the way in which he makes sense of the idea of the special value of persons, which is especially important if one is politically liberal, as I am.
As for the First Critique, I invoked it along a very narrow line. The point simply is to illustrate the somewhat obvious fact that the world is not intrinsically intelligible, but is only so under a representation. Kant provides a framework and a language for describing that obvious fact, but I need have no investment in the details of the framework in order to point to it as a useful metaphor.
As is always the case, a philosophy is a patchwork of smaller pieces, typically acquired from here, there, and everywhere. Sort of like a car you’ve had for a long time. At some point, you are going to use refurbished parts from other cars in keeping it maintained.
So, I’m not getting your puzzlement. Maybe you could clarify further?
davidlduffy,
I suppose I shouldn’t interject in a conversation you want to have with Dan; but I find your comment confusing. You seem to misread the terms of Dan’s discussion, and dump in a number of terms (including those from Latour) that seem to me to have little to do with Dan’s discussion, except in the most tangential way. Perhaps there is an essay you’re thinking of writing that would better elaborate the difficulties you’re having here?
At any rate, I don’t see either Subject-Other problematics or “modes of existence” issues in Dan’s discussion, so I find the comment as is unclear.
“In the case of Kant, one of the strongest elements is the way in which he makes sense of the idea of the special value of persons, which is especially important if one is politically liberal, as I am.”
I understand that. But you can make the case that humans (or persons) are special without Kant’s help (based on our capacity for language, certain kinds of social interaction, etc.). And it will be a stronger case because it will not be entangled with or seen to be dependent on the many problematic assumptions which Kant himself embraced.
“[A] philosophy is a patchwork of smaller pieces, typically acquired from here, there, and everywhere.”
I find it hard to relate to this kind of eclecticism. As you know, I see any thinker’s work (or any religion or ideology, for that matter) as an integrated whole. It must hang together (i.e. be coherent), at least to some extent.
Moreover, ideas are what they are and mean what they mean only in relation to ideas with which they are related within a given framework.
So, as I see it, the history of thought gives us these “packages”. And we look for a package which approximates to our own outlook. If we find one or more, we can adopt it and adapt it.
More generally, one categorizes thinkers into those for whom one feels an affinity on central questions (and so deem to be interesting and perhaps useful in building one’s own views), and those for whom one feels little affinity.
Your “package” view is entirely unmotivated, other than perhaps by your own temperament. There is no reason whatsoever to accept such a limitation on the putting together of philosophical ideas. It also is completely at odds with how analytic philosophy has been done since its inception. Quine’s philosophy has both coherentist and foundationalist elements — two different “packages” on your view. Contractualism, which began as a political philosophy in the 17th century, has been repurposed and is now a powerful and dominant moral philosophy. Rawls represents an effort to bring together elements of Kant and Utilitarianism — opposite “packages” if there were ever any. And the idea that one cannot embrace Kant’s general idea that personhood is essentially intertwined with autonomy, without also taking on his “noumenal self” is just nonsense.
So you may have whatever scruples you like, but they have no impact on the viability or validity of others’ philosophical work. Whether or not you can “relate” is obviously irrelevant to anyone but yourself.
As for the first point, it’s sort of covered by the answer I’ve given already. There is no reason why I have to swallow all or most of Kant in order to take on the idea that we are specially valuable, because we are the *creators* of value. (Which is what the whole Kingdom of Ends metaphor is about.) And I would deny that the things you’ve described are sufficient to make sense of human specialness.
Now, you may not *want* to make sense of human specialness or not even think that we are special, but to that extent you are not a humanist, so a good part of what I had to say in this installment just isn’t directed towards you.
Hi EJ.
Your contributions are always most welcome! I am frequently criticized by colleagues for being too telegraphic. In reverse order, I point to Latour as having a similar dissatisfaction with “the Moderns”, and similarly attempting a dissolution. Yes, his exuberantly pluralistic metaphysics is completely different from what Dan is outlining, but comes back to my first question – why only “Manifest” and “Scientific”? Why end up with only “Personal” (“Intentional”?) and “Impersonal”? Why just a dualism?. It’s all very well claiming these are “merely” ways of viewing the one world, and putting scare quotes around “social reality” so you avoid bifurcating Nature (in Latour’s pretty phrasing), but what is the ontology of having a view and being a viewer and having goals? Why can’t goals be comprehensively understood as impersonal, as in teleosemantics.
And I am dissatisfied with the Manifest Image as a concept, and reading later Sellars see it as not particularly coherent. Like, is mathematics in the MI or the SI? It seems to me that it was part of the “Original Image”, but it is pretty central to our understanding of both the nonhuman and human worlds. Consider, Game Theoretic models of human activity, that can also be applied to other animal societies – we personally/viscerally experience the phenomena these models describe, which is why they appeal to us as more or less true representations of our rationality works, or should work – coming back to Dan’s highlighting of teleological considerations.
“Your “package” view is entirely unmotivated, other than perhaps by your own temperament.”
I picked up the word “package” from a teacher of mine (Julius Kovesi, a philosopher). But the word itself is just a metaphor to help convey a view which I have been developing throughout my entire life. It cannot be summed up — or dismissed — in a few words. But clearly you are taking the term to mean something other than what I mean by it (a whole, or (loosely) a system).
“Quine’s philosophy has both coherentist and foundationalist elements — two different “packages” on your view.”
I would not use “package” in this context. You are using the word in a different sense from me.
“Contractualism, which began as a political philosophy in the 17th century, has been repurposed and is now a powerful and dominant moral philosophy.”
It is a strand of thinking within moral and political philosophy, not a “package” in my sense.
“Rawls represents an effort to bring together elements of Kant and Utilitarianism — opposite “packages” if there were ever any.”
Rawls work represents a whole (a “package” in my sense). Whether it is convincing or coherent is another question.
“And the idea that one cannot embrace Kant’s general idea that personhood is essentially intertwined with autonomy, without also taking on his “noumenal self” is just nonsense.”
Of course you can develop ideas like human autonomy in non-Kantian ways. But, to the extent that you reject his various assumptions, your idea of autonomy is (at least subtly) different from his.
“There is no reason why I have to swallow all or most of Kant in order to take on the idea that we are specially valuable, because we are the *creators* of value.”
Of course not. But the realization behind my original comment was that you are more committed to a Kantian view than I previously thought you were.
“And I would deny that the things you’ve described are sufficient to make sense of human specialness.”
You mean, not sufficient to make us special in the sense that you believe we are special.
“Now, you may not *want* to make sense of human specialness or not even think that we are special, but to that extent you are not a humanist…”
I think we are special, but not in a Kantian way. Whether I am a humanist or not depends on how you define the term.
“… so a good part of what I had to say in this installment just isn’t directed towards you.”
Alright.
I take the manifest image as one way of looking at the world. And I take the scientific image as another. I see that as the point of a stereographic view.
No, I don’t think the MI and SI are exclusive. There could be others. I would consider both YEC (young earth creationism) and omphalism as other ways of looking at the world, though very poor ways (in my opinion). I assume Dan’s use of “pluralism” indicates that we need not be limited to two.
As for mathematics — I see that as a wholly human creation, so not really a part of these ways of looking at the world. From my perspective, mathematics is more of a toolset than an image.
Apparently, I have not understood what you meant by a “package.”
Dear Dan,
I found myself in close agreement, however, it’s unclear to me how we delineate entities that are fundamental vs disposable in the manifest image as we.
If I say the sun is setting (Chomsky) and I understand myself to be making a claim about the entity the sun and it’s directionality. Anyone could rightly point out to me if they infer my intention correctly that the earth is turning or whatever insane symbolic system that describes sol and geodiasic curves in spacetime.
Let’s say, someone says ” he ate the pizza because he was hungry” Assuming I have the completed picture of cognitive science + enteric brain + gut anatomy and physiology. I don’t see why the intentional, teleogogical folk psychology isn’t just as correctable as my claim in folk physics.
To paraphrase Chomsky in Reply to Lycan (2003) where Lycan recommends eliminative materialism to Noam. ” If that’s the official thesis it seems to uninteresting to talk about…. Nothing’s been in a folk mental state for the same uninteresting reason nothings been in a folk physical state.
If it’s not “first philosophy” are you claiming that by engaging in folk talk I must be engaging in ontological commitment? I don’t think when I talk about James Bond, I think of him as an entity that enters into mind-independent reality. In that case from an attempted (though irreducibly human) 3rd person perspective. He is in some sense, on par with shared mental entities such as persons.
The explanatory disunity of science may or may not lay in our cognitive faculties as such or. Its not implausible to think that the unification problem throughout will be underwritten by new ontic commitments that seem crazy today. As well as methodological sophistication and experimental techniques. So I disagree with banking on it and analogically extending it to social reality.
Van Frassen also criticises Sellers for hypostatizing the images. Which I agree with, in part.
“And the failure of their reductive and eliminative projects has led philosophers either to reembrace earlier, discredited philosophies or to develop the kinds of new “crazy” ones that served as the initial “spark” for these prolegomena.”
I disagree, people seemed to o suppose an emerging discipline like psychology was even ripe for unification seems sort of strange. There failure may be indicative of our own cognitive limitations and/or the status of the sciences.
Sellers calls physical “the ultimate natural-kind term” I don’t think much of its use. Hempel’s dilemma + Chomsky’s criticism of Stoljar, Galen Strawson. So I’m not sure I buy the conception as useful. So I’m not eliminative materialist.
Best,
Marc G
Dear Dan,
I found myself in close agreement, however, it’s unclear to me how we delineate entities that are fundamental vs disposable in the manifest image as we.
If I say the sun is setting (Chomsky) and I understand myself to be making a claim about the entity the sun and it’s directionality. Anyone could rightly point out to me if they infer my intention correctly that the earth is turning or whatever insane symbolic system that describes sol and geodiasic curves in spacetime.
Let’s say, someone says ” he ate the pizza because he was hungry” Assuming I have the completed picture of cognitive science + enteric brain + gut anatomy and physiology. I don’t see why the intentional, teleogogical folk psychology isn’t just as correctable as my claim in folk physics.
To paraphrase Chomsky in Reply to Lycan (2003) where Lycan recommends eliminative materialism to Noam. ” If that’s the official thesis it seems to uninteresting to talk about…. Nothing’s been in a folk mental state for the same uninteresting reason nothings been in a folk physical state.
If it’s not “first philosophy” are you claiming that by engaging in folk talk I must be engaging in ontological commitment? I don’t think when I talk about James Bond, I think of him as an entity that enters into mind-independent reality. In that case from an attempted (though irreducibly human) 3rd person perspective. He is in some sense, on par with shared mental entities such as persons.
The explanatory disunity of science may or may not lay in our cognitive faculties as such or. Its not implausible to think that the unification problem throughout will be underwritten by new ontic commitments that seem crazy today. As well as methodological sophistication and experimental techniques. So I disagree with banking on it and analogically extending it to social reality.
Van Frassen also criticises Sellers for hypostatizing the images. Which I agree with, in part.
“And the failure of their reductive and eliminative projects has led philosophers either to reembrace earlier, discredited philosophies or to develop the kinds of new “crazy” ones that served as the initial “spark” for these prolegomena.”
I disagree, people seemed to o suppose an emerging discipline like psychology was even ripe for unification seems sort of strange. There failure may be indicative of our own cognitive limitations and/or the status of the sciences.
Sellers calls physical “the ultimate natural-kind term” I don’t think much of its use. Hempel’s dilemma + Chomsky’s criticism of Stoljar, Galen Strawson. So I’m not sure I buy the conception as useful. So I’m not eliminative materialist.
Best,
Marc G
https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/physicalism/
Hi Neil. But what is a view? “Looking” is purely metaphorical in this context. If we are of a reductionist computationalist persuasion, we can think of a view as a model of the world that has causal relationships with the environment around us (it may well be distributed over a group of “processors”).
As to mathematics, if one is reductionist about (the foundations of) human reason, and follow ideas like Brouwer’s about
the origins of mathematical intuition from “an essential languageless activity of the mind having its origin in the perception of a move of time”, then one comes to the idea that mathematics comes from the world – toolsets are for effective doing. The mathematics I use everyday is always applied and ordinary – R.A. Fisher makes a comment somewhere in his letters about how the foundations were constantly changing (at that time), but the bits of mathematics he used remained constant. If you are interested, I have recently been trying to make sense of papers that cite Charlie Geyer’s (a mathematical statistician) introduction to nonstandard analysis as applied to probability and statistics (which is roughly at my level of comprehension, given he is developing it so undergraduates don’t have to do measure theory ;))
http://www.stat.umn.edu/geyer/nsa/
These citing papers include a few by Sam Sanders on constructivism and “reverse formalism” including
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1322-2
Hi, David. I think you are in Queensland. I grew up in Australia (near Perth), but moved to the USA for graduate school.
No, I am not of that persuasion.
We carve up the world into parts. For want of a better term, I’ll call that “categorization.”
It is said that we carve up the world at the seams. But there are no seams, other than those that we create with our carving.
Cats and dogs exist because the way that we carve up the world leaves us with cats and dogs among the parts (the categories) into which we carve.
The manifest image comes from a fairly natural way of carving the world, but a way that is much influenced by our biology and perhaps partly influenced by culture.
The scientific image comes from carving up the world in a very different way. That scientific way of carving up the world tends to be very mathematical, and that’s how mathematics gets into physics.
That the manifest image and the scientific image are so different, makes a strong case that the world does not come with seams. The carving comes from us.
No, I am not a mathematical intuitionist.
As I see it, thinking is a simulated rehearsal of behavior and the perception (or proprioception) of that internal rehearsal. We can think about a golf swing or about a football kick. We think about behavior. And language gets in there because language is an important part of human behavior.
Counting could be considered a fairly natural behavior. But the we idealized counting, and that gave us arithmetic. Likewise, categorization (carving up the world) might be a fairly natural behavior. But we idealized that, to give us geometry. So mathematics, at least in my opinion, arises from human idealization of our behaviors.
Hi Neil. Yes, in Queensland, behind the locked borders again. WA is also sealed off, which is why Clive Palmer (Make Australia Great Again) is currently attempting to sue them for $30B.
Given I am monistic-unificationist in sentiment, I don’t see the SI as that different from the MI. Ian Hacking discusses the continuity from everyday world down to the microscopic as a series of steps (a la the “Powers of Ten” movie), and I think that extends to much of the sciences, despite one ending up eventually in completely unfamiliar terrain. After all, one can actually see stuff like superfluidity or macroscopic matter wave quantum tunnelling (yeah well the latter might be a little too quick). In an earlier post, I sketched how someone working in any of the biology-facing sciences might move from human behaviour down to the biochemistry of neuroreceptors to population genetics of the receptor gene to the history of human cultures that causes the distribution of different variants of that gene and back up again. As to carving up the world in general, I don’t think the multivariate statistical approaches (“Machine Learning is just iteratively reweighted least squares, you know”) we use are somehow inextricably culture bound, but the cuts they end up making make sense to the human mind more often than not. That is, I think unsupervised machine vision eventually does pick out cats and dogs, rather than “undetached parts”. These are empirical questions, and this includes empiricism about idealization – that is, that often arises naturally from averaging over multiple noisy events.
That’s why machine learning isn’t anything like human learning.
Dan,
I liked your series, and the complexity of relations you’re dealing with.
I like the deep overlap, interplay, and I think apparently indissociable nature of persons and bodies, reasons and causes, intentions and articulations, and manifest and scientific understandings.
—–
“it is an intelligibility that can survive neither the aspirant-quasi supernaturalism of the idealists and panpsychists, nor the representation-abolishing efforts of the reductive and eliminative materialists.”
I look forward to anything more you might write on the subject.