them as tractable through the methods of the empirical sciences or at
least, without a distinctively a priori project of theorizing. For
much of the history of philosophy it has been widely held that
philosophy involved a distinctive method, and could achieve knowledge
distinct from that attained by the special sciences. Thus, metaphysics
and epistemology have often jointly occupied a position of "first
philosophy," laying the necessary grounds for the understanding of
reality and the justification of knowledge claims. Naturalism rejects
philosophy's claim to that special status. Whether in epistemology,
ethics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, or other areas,
naturalism seeks to show that philosophical problems as traditionally
conceived are ill-formulated and can be solved or displaced by
appropriately naturalistic methods. Naturalism often assigns a key
role to the methods and results of the empirical sciences, and
sometimes aspires to reductionism and physicalism. However, there are
many versions of naturalism and some are explicitly non-scientistic.
What they share is a repudiation of the view of philosophy as
exclusively a priori theorizing concerned with a distinctively
philosophical set of questions.
Naturalistic thinking has a long history, but it has been especially
prominent in recent decades, and its influence is felt all across
philosophy. This article will look at why and in what ways it is
prominent and will describe some of the most influential versions of
naturalism.
1. Introduction
"Naturalism" is a term that is applied to many doctrines and positions
in philosophy, and in fact, just how it is to be defined is itself a
matter of philosophical debate. Still, the overall landscape of
naturalism can be surveyed, and that is what we will do here. This
discussion will not present a defense or critique of one or another
specific version of naturalism. Its aim is to characterize the broad
range of views typically identified as naturalistic and to say
something about what motivates them. It will also locate the debate
about naturalism in the larger setting of philosophical inquiry and
theorizing overall.
Different periods in the history of philosophy exhibit different
emphases in what are the most prominent and pressing concerns, and
there are reasons why different issues are at the forefront at
different times. In antiquity, basic questions about the constitution
of reality motivated various conceptions about the material substance
of things, about whether that substance is material, and about the
relation between matter and whatever else might be constitutive of
reality. Views ranged from variants of (recognizably naturalistic)
materialism to those that included decidedly non-materialist and
non-naturalist elements, such as Platonism and Aristotelianism. During
the medieval period, debates over the status of universals and the
nature of the intellect, the will, and the soul were especially
central. In large part, this had to do with their significance for
issues in natural theology. Also, questions concerning the relation
between soul and body and whether and how the soul survives the death
of the body were prominent. This was because of their significance for
the individuation of persons, the possibility and nature of
immortality, and for the nature of providence. These families of
issues were prominent in all three of the great Western religious
traditions. They are though, enduring philosophical questions. Many of
them have roots in the Classical tradition.
In the early modern period debates about the respective roles of
reason and the senses in knowledge were especially prominent. They had
long been important, but there was a revived interest in skepticism
and the possibility of knowledge. Also, debates concerning determinism
and free will attained high visibility. In both cases, the explanation
had to do, in part, with the impact of dramatic developments in
scientific theorizing. Those developments led to large-scale revisions
in the conceptions of many things, including human nature and human
action. In the twentieth century a focus on questions of meaning and
semantic issues played a role in many different philosophical
movements (from logical positivism to ordinary language philosophy).
It was widely thought that linguistic approaches might untie some
age-old philosophical knots.
The main problems of philosophy have not really changed over time, but
there are differences in what motivates certain formulations of them
and ways of addressing them. In recent philosophy, the methods and the
results of the sciences are again playing an increasingly important
role in motivating new philosophical conceptions, and indeed, overall
conceptions of philosophy itself. Various versions and defenses of
naturalism are currently at the center of many philosophical debates.
Naturalism is a philosophical view, but one according to which
philosophy is not a distinct mode of inquiry with its own problems and
its own special body of (possible) knowledge. According to many
naturalists, philosophy is a certain sort of reflective attention to
the sciences and it is continuous with them. They maintain that this
is so not only in the sense that philosophy's problems are motivated
by the sciences, but also in that its methods are not fundamentally
distinct. It might be said that the sciences afford us a more
systematic, rigorous, and explanatory conception of the world than is
supplied by common sense. In turn, we might say that philosophy is
motivated by, and remains connected to the scientific conception of
the world. There may be ways in which the scientific conception
dramatically departs from common sense, but it is rooted in experience
and the questions that arise at the level of common sense. Similarly,
according to many defenders of naturalism, philosophy is not
discontinuous with science. While it attains a kind of generality of
conceptions and explanations that is perhaps not attained by the
special sciences, it is not an essentially different inquiry. There
are no separate philosophical problems that need to be addressed in a
distinctive manner. Moreover, philosophy does not yield results that
are different in content and kind from what could be attained by the
sciences. Thus, in being a view about the world, naturalism is also a
view about the nature of philosophy.
It is worthy of remark that while the sources of naturalism go back a
very long way in Western philosophy, it has been especially prominent
in philosophy in America. The pragmatist tradition, in which
philosophers such as C. S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, W. V. O.
Quine, and Richard Rorty are key figures, has been crucial to the
development of recent and contemporary naturalism. (There are other
key figures in the American pragmatist tradition less clearly
associated with its naturalist dimension. In recent years Nelson
Goodman [1978; 1979] and Hilary Putnam [1981] are examples.) There is
a naturalistic cast to a great deal of pragmatist thought in a number
of respects. It regards the general skeptical problem in epistemology
as less than genuine. (We will see the significance of this below.) It
closely ties meaning to experiential consequences, and it closely ties
truth to methods of inquiry and the practical consequences of belief.
Also, it often emphasizes the public or social and non-a priori
character of inquiry (in contrast to the ego-situated method described
by René Descartes, for example). It is anti-foundational,
anti-skeptical, and fallibilist. It tends to put a great deal of
weight on the accessibility to scientific resolution of genuine
intellectual problems. In the American pragmatist tradition there is a
wide spectrum of views, of course. But it is an outstanding example of
a significant, modern, and still evolving tradition with significant
naturalistic currents running in it. Peirce and other American
pragmatists have influenced a great deal of recent philosophy of many
types. As a result, they are beginning to be more thoroughly studied,
after having been widely neglected for several decades.
At numerous places in this discussion we will see that the affirmation
of science as the only genuine approach to acquiring knowledge is
often a feature of naturalism. However, naturalism is not always
narrowly scientistic. There are versions of naturalism that repudiate
supernaturalism and various types of a priori theorizing without
exclusively championing the natural sciences.
2. Basic Elements of Naturalism Concerning Reality and Knowledge
The debate about naturalism ranges across many areas of philosophy,
including metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of mind,
just to mention areas where it is especially prominent. There are two
basic dimensions in which the debate takes place. One of them concerns
(to put it simply) what there is, and the other concerns methods of
acquiring belief and knowledge. There are several affiliated issues
(supervenience, objectivity, various realism/antirealism debates, the
character of norms of epistemic justification, the theory of meaning,
and so forth) but they are all connected through those two main
concerns.
a. What There Is
With respect to the first, the naturalist maintains that all of what
there is belongs to the natural world. Obviously, a great deal turns
on how nature is understood. But the key point is that an accurate,
adequate conception of the world does not (according to the
naturalist) include reference to supernatural entities or agencies.
According to the naturalist, there are no Platonic forms, Cartesian
mental substances, Kantian noumena, or any other agents, powers, or
entities that do not (in some broad sense) belong to nature. As a very
loose characterization, it may suffice to say that nature is the order
of things accessible to us through observation and the methods of the
empirical sciences. If some other method, such as a priori theorizing,
is needed to have access to the alleged entity or to the truth in
question, then it is not a real entity or a genuine truth. According
to the naturalist, there is only the natural order. If something is
postulated or claimed to exist, but is not described in the vocabulary
that describes natural phenomena, and not studied by the inquiries
that study natural phenomena, it is not something we should recognize
as real.
Unsurprisingly, the success of the sciences has been one of the main
motivations for thinkers to embrace naturalism. The sciences have
proved to be powerful tools for making the world intelligible. They
seem to have such a strong claim to yield genuine knowledge that it is
widely thought that whatever there is, is a proper object of science.
That does not require that in embracing naturalism one also embrace
determinism, physicalism, and reductionism. (However, it is true that
many advocates of some or all of those are also very often
naturalists.) While those specific theses about the structure or
character of the world are not essential features of naturalism, many
who endorse naturalism believe that over time scientific progress will
make the case for physicalism, in particular. Even if, for example,
attempts to provide fully reductive accounts of mental phenomena,
certain biological phenomena, and values do not succeed, that would
not be an insurmountable impediment to physicalism; or, at least that
is the view of some defenders of naturalism. There is only the
physical natural order, even if there are various constituents and
aspects of it that are to be described in their own non-reducible
vocabularies.
Naturalism could be said to involve a denial that there is any
distinctively metaphysical area of inquiry. Thus, even if one's
preferred interpretation of naturalism is not reductionist or even
physicalist (in a non-reductionist form), naturalism is a conception
of reality as homogeneous in the sense that there is one natural order
that comprises all of reality. There are no objects or properties that
can only be identified or comprehended by metaphysical theorizing or
non-empirical understanding. What exactly is the true theory of that
single natural order may remain open to dispute. The key points are
that our conception of reality need include nothing that is
exclusively accessible to a priori theorizing, or to "first
philosophy," and there is only one natural order.
b. How We Know
For natrualistic epistemology, the main claim is roughly the
following: the acquisition of belief and knowledge is a (broadly)
causal process within the natural order, and a priori norms,
principles, and methods are not essential to the acquisition or
justification of beliefs and knowledge. Compare David Hume and
Descartes, for example. Hume explains our acceptance of beliefs on the
basis of habits of association—causal tendencies that we can
reflectively articulate into rules of epistemic practice. There are
processes of belief acquisition and acceptance, but they are not
underwritten by principles formulated a priori, nor are they
structured by such principles. Epistemology is part of the overall
science of human nature. It is not a project that is prior to or
independent of the empirical sciences. There are norms of belief
acceptance and of inquiry, but they are derived from consideration of
experience and practice. (Here too, there is also an important point
of contrast with Kant and also with the Platonic theory of knowledge
as recollection of innate ideas, as well as with Descartes.)
Descartes held that the norms and method of belief acceptance must be
independent of experience, and must have their grounds in reason
alone. Otherwise, they would be vulnerable to exactly the sorts of
skeptical objections that led to the search for epistemic principles
in the first place. Even if one does not defend rationalism or a
conception of the synthetic a priori, one might still think (as most
philosophers have) that there are certain distinctively philosophical
epistemological issues that can be dealt with only by distinctively
philosophical (that is, a priori) methods. Hume and Descartes'
positions are rather like bookends, and there are many other, less
"pure" or radical positions, in between theirs. But they are excellent
examples of a causal-empirical approach on the one hand and a
rationalist-a priori normative approach on the other.
There is a vast contemporary literature on the extent to which
epistemology can be naturalized and what a naturalized epistemology
would or should look like. At the core of the controversy is whether
we need a philosophical theory in order to understand knowledge or
epistemic justification, or is the so-called "problem of knowledge"
really just another (broadly) empirical problem. If it is, then
perhaps it can be addressed by the methods of the sciences
(psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, cognitive science, etc.). This
is not just the same as the debate between rationalists and
empiricists, though it is related to it. It is open to an empiricist
to argue that there are analytic truths that are known just by
consideration of their meanings, and that this knowledge is not
explicable in exclusively naturalistic terms. Similarly, if there are
conceptual truths or logical truths that are not explicated in
naturalistic terms, then that could be an important part of an
empiricism that is not also a variant of naturalism. Still, there are
some affinities between empiricism and naturalism that make them
plausible candidates for having close relations.
Most epistemological theories are not as purely rationalistic as
Descartes'. Also, though Kant's influence has been enormous, there are
few contemporary theorists who accept the conception of synthetic a
priori knowledge on the basis of Kant's transcendental idealism.
Nonetheless, many epistemologists argue that fundamental issues
concerning skepticism and the nature of epistemic justification cannot
be successfully handled by the resources of naturalism. Or, they argue
that they can only be handled in a question begging way by those
resources. On the other hand, naturalists insist that there is nothing
for a priori epistemology to be. Unless epistemology remains fully
grounded in and tethered to the practices of scientific inquiry and
the results they yield, it is cut off from the only sorts of evidence
and strategies of explanation that can be conclusively vindicated or
confirmed.
Recent decades have seen the development of not only different
versions of naturalized epistemology, but also different overall
approaches to it. One of the key distinctions is between what are
sometimes called "replacement" theories and theories that develop
naturalistic accounts of epistemic justification instead of
repudiating the traditional epistemological project. The former are
attempts to abandon the normative issue of epistemic justification.
They substitute for it a more fully descriptive and causal account of
our beliefs.
For example, at some points in his career, Quine openly rejected the
traditional project of justification (at least as he construed it). He
sought to fully assimilate epistemology to psychology (broadly
construed), making it a part of empirical science, rather than a
special inquiry that might underwrite scientific knowledge claims. He
held that we should abandon (as hopeless) the project of identifying
epistemically privileged foundational beliefs and inferring other
beliefs from them, via a priori rules. Moreover, there is no clean
break between supposed analytic truths on the one hand and synthetic
truths on the other, and there is no realm of meanings distinct from
linguistic behavior and the rest of behavior that it is embedded in.
The philosophical distinction between truths of meaning and truths of
fact does not reflect a genuine, explanatorily significant
distinction. Like the entire project of a priori epistemology, it is a
misrepresentation of what the actual problems of knowledge are. Also,
while Hume had shown that there is no a priori justification of
inductive inference, Quine maintained that that does not leave us with
a profound skeptical difficulty. Rather, we are to examine and adjust
our inductive practices in light of what we find to be empirically
effective and supported without first (or ever) requiring that they be
justified on non-empirical grounds. There is no "first philosophy"
that underwrites science.
Other defenders of naturalistic epistemology, such as Alvin Goldman
(1979; 1986), have developed causal accounts of justified beliefs or
of knowledge, but still regard the philosophical project of
epistemology as a genuine project, though it is to be carried out with
naturalistic resources. We still are to speak in terms of beliefs
being justified. In that respect there are versions of naturalism that
continue to regard epistemology as involving normative considerations
about belief and knowledge. Also, if we ascertain what is involved in
beliefs being caused by reliable processes, we can deflect or defeat
various general skeptical challenges. Those can be taken seriously,
but naturalism can meet them. In meeting them, we will have attained
substantive conditions of justification, but without requiring that
they be accessible to a cognitive agent in order to be fulfilled. The
causality of justified beliefs is one thing; whether an agent can
articulate grounds for his beliefs is another. Justification can be
explicated in non-epistemic terms, in terms of processes that are
reliably truth-conducive. The problems of epistemology admit of
naturalistic solutions, but need not repudiate the problems as
unwelcome and less than genuine philosophical artifice.
Both the more and the less radical approaches share the central claim
that the correct account of knowledge is in terms of reliable
processes of belief-acquisition that are themselves explicated in
empirical, and mainly causal, terms. The true beliefs of cognitive
subjects, we might say, are one type of phenomenon that occurs in the
natural world. We need not leave the latter in order to explain the
former. There is no stand-alone problem of epistemic justification,
requiring its own distinctive vocabulary and evidential
considerations. Epistemic value, we might say, can be interpreted in
terms of naturalistic facts and properties.
3. Naturalism in Various Versions and Various Contexts
On the basis of the discussion so far, it might appear that naturalism
is more or less a type of scientism, the view that only the methods of
the sciences are legitimate in seeking knowledge, and that only the
things recognized by the sciences as real are real. There are indeed
naturalists who hold that view, but it is not a necessary feature of
naturalism. As noted at the outset, there is considerable debate over
what sorts of views should be recognized as naturalistic. There are
theorists who wish to identify their views and approaches as
naturalistic without embracing reductionist physicalism. There are
also some approaches that can plausibly be described as naturalistic
that are quite self-consciously anti-scientistic. In particular, there
are philosophers who have been influenced by the later work of Ludwig
Wittgenstein (1953) who regard their general approach as naturalistic,
though it is just as critical of scientism as it is of traditional
metaphysics.
This is not to say that Wittgenstein was deliberately making a case
for naturalism. Rather, because of his emphasis on the importance of
looking at actual practice, the significance of the wider social
context of practices, and the avoidance of a priori theorizing, his
work can be seen as having features of naturalism. Like G. E. Moore
before him, Wittgenstein argued that the refutation of skeptical
hypotheses is not required in order to succeed in making knowledge
claims, and that we have knowledge of the external world without first
proving that such knowledge is possible. Moreover, Wittgenstein
rejected the view that there is some single, global method (including
the scientific method) for arriving at a true account of the world,
and his approach is explicitly oriented to honoring the differences
between contexts. This is evident in his discussion of language games,
for example. His philosophical explorations are anti-reductionist.
They disavow any attempt to capture and explain everything in the
terms of some overall theory within one or another special science. He
vigorously opposed the attempt to force phenomena to "fit" some
preferred theory or vocabulary. Indeed, in some important ways, his
work is anti-theoretical without being anti-philosophical. (The same
might be said of Thomas Reid [1785] in the eighteenth century. It is
also plausible to regard his views as naturalistic in important
respects. One can see this especially in contrast to Kant, for
example.)
If it is appropriate to describe this approach as naturalistic it is
because of the ways in which Wittgenstein insisted that philosophical
examination should look closely at the facts and should avoid
theorizing about them in ways that lead to a large scale reconceiving
of them or to postulation of entities, agencies, and processes. Very
often the truth is disclosed by looking carefully, rather than by
discovering something "behind" or distinct from what we encounter in
experience. There is not some order of the "really real" or a
transcendent order beyond what we meet with in the natural world. Yet,
this does not mean that only a narrowly scientific understanding of it
is a correct understanding. That sort of view itself would be an
example of an overly restrictive approach that misrepresents the world
and our understanding of it.
In addition, Wittgenstein was especially concerned to understand
normative issues (such as the normativity involved in the use of
concepts and in engaging in various practices) without explaining them
away or reducing them to something non-normative. There are important
normative issues even in contexts where we are not directly
investigating questions concerning values. All sorts of practices,
including various kinds of thinking and the use of language, have
normative dimensions. Their normativity cannot be reduced to the
occurrence of this or that event, or state, or causal process. For
example, there may be no specific physical or psychological state or
process that underlies or causally explains how a person is able to go
on applying a concept to new cases, and to use a term in indefinitely
many new situations, and to do so correctly in ways that are
understood by others. That might mean that there is an irreducible
normativity involved in the use of concepts and terms. There is
nothing metaphysically exotic about that. It does not indicate that
there are special normative entities or properties in addition to the
practices and activities in question. There just is the normative, but
natural activity of speaking, understanding, and making judgments.
These are altogether familiar to all of us. If we want to understand
what makes for the correct use of a term, for example, we should look
at the way that it is used rather than look for some other fact or
entity underlying its use. There is no special realm of meanings, or a
thinking substance that grasps them, or a world of universals outside
of space and time that is grasped by thought. (It is noteworthy that
Plato understood the forms to be not only real, but normative
realities.)
Many approaches to meaning, to the explication of inference and
thought in general, and to the acquisition of concepts that have been
influenced by Wittgenstein (see Wittgenstein on meaning), are
naturalistic in an anti-metaphysical regard and in their close
descriptive attention to the actual facts and natural and social
contexts of the phenomena at issue. Traditional, central,
philosophical debates, such as those between realism and nominalism in
regard to universals, are purportedly deflated by Wittgensteinian
approaches. That makes it plausible to regard them as naturalistic in
at least a broad sense, though there is a very wide spectrum of
Wittgenstein-influenced views and of Wittgenstein interpretation. Many
different "-isms" can be interpretively connected to Wittgenstein's
work. Some Wittgensteinians and interpreters of Wittgenstein seem to
support antirealism and nominalism. Others present views plausibly
described as realist, but in a distinctively Wittgensteinian way. The
range of Wittgenstein-influenced views is so wide, in large part,
because he refused to be drawn into the use of many of the prevailing
formulations of issues.
Wittgensteinian approaches have been very influential in the
philosophy of social explanation, an area in which there has long been
a debate about whether the methods of the natural sciences are
appropriate to the kinds of phenomena it is claimed are uniquely
encountered in social explanation. This is a place where we can see
the breadth of the field of interpretation of naturalism. In one
sense, Wittgensteinian approaches are naturalistic, in the ways
described. At the same time, they are decidedly not naturalistic, if
by "naturalism" we mean that the categories, concepts, and methods of
the natural sciences are the only ones that are needed to explain
whatever there is.
There are some affinities between Wittgenstein and some currents in
American pragmatism with respect to the emphasis on the importance of
the shared, public world for understanding language and the
significance of practices. In particular, recent work by Richard Rorty
(1979; 1982) has been important in drawing attention to that tradition
and reinvigorating pragmatism in a post-Wittgensteinian context. His
views and others like them have also attracted a great deal of
criticism, reinvigorating debates about the interpretation and
plausibility of naturalism. At the center of the debate is the issue
of whether there are enduring philosophical problems about the nature
of reality, and truth, and about value, for example, or just the more
concrete, contingent, but still significant problems that individuals
and societies encounter in the business of living.
As might be expected, many naturalistic thinkers feel discomfort at
being grouped with Wittgenstein under the same heading. They regard
his approach as unscientific and as much more permissive in regard to
interpretation than more empirically fastidious approaches can accept.
Still, it is plausible to regard at least some of Wittgenstein's views
as naturalistic even though they constitute a version of naturalism
that differs from others in important respects.
a. Naturalism in Ethics
Ethics is a context in which there are important non-scientistic
versions of naturalism. For example, there are respects in which
neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics can be regarded as naturalistic. It
does not involve a non-natural source or realm of moral value, as does
Kant's ethical theory, or Plato's or Moore's. For Aristotle, judgments
of what are goods for a human being are based upon considerations
about human capacities, propensities, and the conditions for
successful human activity of various kinds. Thus, while it is not a
scientistic conception of human agency or moral value, it also
contrasts clearly with many clearly non-naturalistic conceptions of
agency and moral value. Central to the view are the notions that there
are goods proper to human nature and that the virtues are excellent
states of character enabling an agent to act well and realize those
goods. This can be construed as naturalism in that many defenders of
the view, especially recent ones, have argued that familiar versions
of the so-called "fact-value distinction" are seriously mistaken.
Correlatively, they have argued that the distinction between
descriptive meaning and evaluative meaning is mistaken. Their view is
that various types of factual considerations have ethical
significance—not as a non-natural supervening property, and not merely
expressively or projectively. The agent with virtues is able to
acknowledge and appreciate the ethical significance of factual
considerations, and act upon them accordingly.
While it is apt to call this "naturalism," it is quite different from
some paradigmatic examples of moral naturalism, such as the hedonistic
utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill. Mill attempted to explain moral
value in non-moral (naturalistic) terms—in terms of what people desire
for its own sake and what they find pleasing. He sought to do this
without any non-empirical assumptions or commitments about what people
should desire, or what are proper goods for human beings. (He tried to
make distinctions between inferior and superior pleasures on an
empirical basis independent of antecedent normative commitments.) This
is an attempt to demystify moral value by showing that it can be
explained (even if not outright defined) in terms of facts and
properties that are themselves non-moral and accessible to observation
and the methods of the sciences. Other theorists, whether or not they
accept Mill's conception of what in fact has moral value, have pursued
the project of theorizing in the same general direction in so far as
they wish to show that moral values can be understood in terms of
natural (including social) facts and properties.
In some respects, this is analogous to showing how, say, biological
phenomena are explicable in physico-chemical terms. There are theories
of moral value according to which it is constituted by, supervenes
upon, or is defined in terms of non-moral, natural facts and
properties. (Each is a different account of the relation between the
moral and the non-moral. They are not simply different ways of saying
the same thing.) This does not turn moral thought into a department of
natural science, but it does mean that the explanation of what moral
thought is about may very well depend extensively upon scientific
methods. There may be regular and even law-like relations between
non-moral facts and properties on the one hand, and moral facts and
properties on the other. It may be that moral concepts are not
entailed by or reducible to non-moral ones, but moral values have no
independent ontological standing and are not essentially different in
kind from natural phenomena in the way that Moore, for example,
understood them to be. At the same time, moral values are real, and
there are moral facts. The evaluative meaning of moral judgments is
not merely expressive (see non-cognitivism in ethics). Moral judgments
report moral facts, and moral claims are literally true or false.
There are numerous versions of naturalistic moral realism.
There are other versions of ethical naturalism that owe much more to
Hume and make the case for antirealism rather than realism. It was
central to Hume's moral theory that there are no value-entities or
special faculties for perceiving or knowing them. According to Hume,
moral value and moral motivation are to be explained in terms of facts
about human sensibility. In this type of view, moral judgments are to
be interpreted projectively, but they are also to be regarded as
having all the form and force of cognitive discourse. On the one hand,
commitment to objective values (with all of their alleged metaphysical
and epistemological difficulties) is avoided. On the other hand, there
is ample scope for moral argument, for critical assessment of moral
views, and for regarding moral language as having much richer meaning
than just being emotive in a person-relative way. The learning of
moral concepts, the practice of reason-giving, and the adjustment of
moral beliefs that we take to be part of moral experience and practice
really are parts of it, though their genuineness does not depend upon
there being moral facts or objective values. All that is needed is a
common human sensibility and our propensity to make action-guiding
judgments. To defenders of this approach, naturalism is not a way of
explaining away moral values, or translating moral language into
non-moral language. Instead it is the project of explaining all that
moral values can be, in terms of sensibility, and showing how that is
sufficient for full-fledged morality. It may be instructive to
interpret this account of moral thought and discourse as analogous to
Hume's treatment of causal thought and discourse. There too, he
severely criticized realist interpretations, but he also sought to
show that his account could preserve the significance and the form of
causal claims and causal reasoning. In that regard, the Humean
approach can be said to explain moral judgments and causal judgments,
rather than explaining them away.
Some Humean-influenced views of morality put weight on the role of
evolutionary explanations. They can be important to the story of how
there came to be creatures with morally relevant sentiments and moral
concern, and also why certain kinds of cooperative and coordinated
behavior—certain types of moral behavior—well-serve us as a species,
and are regarded by us as valuable. That does not mean that we are
"naturally" moral, but that naturalistic explanations are central to
the account of the possibility and character of morality. The
Humean-influenced approach (of which there are many variants) to
meta-ethics is not reductive naturalism, but it certainly seems to
count as a type of naturalism. And, as we have noted, special
argumentation is needed to show why naturalism would have to be
reductive.
There are also versions of evolutionary ethics that are not much
influenced by Hume. Ethical theories strongly influenced by
evolutionary thinking but without ties to Hume's philosophy were
developed in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first
half of the twentieth. Some were crude variants of Social Darwinism,
but others were sophisticated attempts to show the naturalistic origin
and ground of ethical value and practice. (Thomas Henry Huxley [1893]
is a good example of a subtle, sophisticated nineteenth century
exponent of the role of evolution in ethics.) In recent decades there
have been important developments in this tradition, incorporating
knowledge of genetics and animal behavior and its physiological bases.
In general terms, evolutionary ethics attempts to show that the
attitudes, motives, and practices that are part and parcel of ethical
life are to be accounted for in terms of how they are adaptive.
Virtues, vices, moral rules and principles, and so forth do not have
an independent standing, or a basis in a priori reasoning. Moral
values are not detected by a quasi-perceptual moral sense or by a
faculty of intuition. This does not mean that morally significant
behavior is robotic or uninfluenced by judgment and reasoning. Rather,
the point is that needs are met by certain dispositions,
susceptibilities, and behaviors, and the presence of those things
themselves is explicable in terms of selective advantage in the
struggle for existence. Altruism and various patterns of coordinated
behaviors are explained in terms of the biological benefits they
confer. They enhance fitness. That there is morality and concern for
moral issues at all are facts that can be accounted for in terms of an
account of how we came to be, and came to be the sorts of animals we
are in a process of natural selection. Defenders of this view argue
that only if one thinks morality must have its source in God or reason
would one find this threatening to morality. It does not subvert
virtue, or render moral motivation something base or no more than an
animal function, like digestion or excretion. Morality is a no less
real or significant part of our lives, but it is in our lives at all,
in the ways that it is, because of our evolutionary history. We need
not look elsewhere.
b. Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mind
The philosophy of mind is another area in which naturalistic views
have been prominent and highly controversial in recent times. Many
theorists hold that the categories, concepts, and vocabulary needed to
explain consciousness, experience, thought, and language are those of
the natural sciences (and perhaps some of the social sciences,
understood naturalistically). The impetus for this view comes from a
number of directions, including developments in biological sciences,
linguistics, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science. To many
theorists it seems increasingly clear, or at least plausible, that the
mind is as fully a part of nature as anything else. They hold that
while the properties and processes of mental life may have distinctive
features, (which, admittedly, may be especially difficult to study and
to understand) they are not ultimately inexplicable by the methods of
the sciences. The study of them is especially complicated because of
the ways in which biochemical, physiological, social, developmental,
and many other processes and events interact. But according to the
naturalist, the mind is not "outside of nature." It operates in
accordance with principles fundamentally like those that govern other
natural phenomena. Here again, the naturalist need not be a
reductionist physicalist. The theorist of mind may be a
non-reductionist physicalist (taking the view that the mental
supervenes on the physical) or not take an explicit stand on
physicalism one way or the other. Rather, the naturalist with respect
to philosophy of mind may emphasize the claim that the study of the
mind does not involve any methods other than those recognized in the
various natural sciences. It requires no commitments to the existence
of entities and properties other than those recognized in the
sciences.
As before, Plato, Descartes, and Kant are excellent examples of
non-naturalism concerning the mind. Their theories differ in important
ways, but they all share the principle that the mind and its
activities are not physical and are not governed by the laws of
nature. This is not because of pre-scientific ignorance or lack of
sophistication. It is because they found it virtually or literally
incoherent that awareness, comprehension, and the activity of thought
should just be part of what goes on in the natural order. Many
theorists still find that incoherent. They argue that either the
object of cognition is something non-natural, such as a state of
affairs, or a proposition, or a universal (or a complex of instances
of universals), or that cognition itself is something non-natural—or
that both are. Thinking, the objects of thought, and the relations
between them (which are often necessary relations, but not causally
necessary relations) seem to be matters that are not susceptible to
being rendered in naturalistic terms. (It may be that the objects of
cognition are not exactly the same things as the objects of
perception, which are natural objects and also artifacts made by human
beings.) Indeed, even apart from disputes focused on naturalism these
are some of the persistent, fundamental problems of philosophy of
mind, and its relations to epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy
of language.
Modern critics of naturalism often point to (at least) two especially
significant problem areas for naturalism. One of them concerns how a
naturalistic conception of mind is to handle intentional states—states
such as belief, desire, hope, fear, and others that have objects.
These are expressed in the form, "X believes that…" or "X hopes that…"
and so forth. These are states that are about something. Many mental
states are intentional in this way, and this feature of being about
something seems to be distinctive of mental states. A state of
temperature, or a quantity, or a positive or negative charge, or a
valence, or combustion, or the suppression of an immunological
response is not about something. These and other states, events, and
processes have causes (and effects) but do not have objects. They are
not directed at anything in the way that many mental states are. There
are difficult questions concerning the nature of intentionality and
also the nature and status of the objects of intentional states. Are
the latter propositions, or states of affairs, or something else? Many
mental states (such as belief) seem to be representational. How is
representation to be understood?
A second issue is the following. Is understanding the meaning of a
sentence, or the grasp of a mathematical truth, or the grasp of other
sorts of necessary truths (as in logic) something that can be
exhaustively explained in terms confined to the language of the
natural sciences and its referents? In addition to questions about how
thought has intentional objects and about the objects of thought,
there are questions about the form and structure of thought and
whether they are susceptible to naturalistic treatment. Is the
necessity of logical validity something that can be completely
accounted for in causal-empirical terms? Are relations between
concepts supervenient upon, or explicable in terms of, relations
between events? Are they resistant to assimilation into natural causal
processes, even if they are dependent upon them? (There are analogies
here to the issue of epistemic justification and the status of moral
values, which too may be dependent upon naturalistic phenomena, though
not simply "nothing but" naturalistic phenomena.)
The insistence that the mind is not a separate substance is not
sufficient to make for naturalism about the mind. Similarly, insisting
that we can only learn language and develop cognitive abilities
because of the way we have evolved is not enough to underwrite
naturalism. It is not a view only about what is relevant to explain or
understand a certain range of phenomena. It is a view about what is
sufficient to do so. Substance dualism is very much out of favor, but
it is hardly the only alternative to naturalism with regard to the
mind. In this context, as in the other contexts, there is a broad
range of views, many of them naturalistic, many of them not. It is not
as though there is a single, prevailing naturalistic theory of mind.
The debate about what naturalism about the mind should look like
remains very much open and ongoing.
4. Overview of the Debate About Naturalism
The debate about naturalism remains so very much alive and so complex.
Much of it concerns just how narrowly or broadly to construe
naturalism and how open it should be to the form and content of what
is accepted as belonging to science. What if our best understanding of
the sciences indicates that reductionism is at best "local," confined
to certain areas, and there is no single, fundamental level of
description in which all scientific truths can be expressed? And what
if the interpretation of the "physical" is expanded to include
supervenient properties, including mental properties, and moral
values? Would that be a defeat for naturalism, or only for certain
versions of it? Or, suppose a theorist claimed that philosophy could
dispense with a priori theorizing or with attempts to arrive at highly
general theories altogether (the theory of knowledge, the theory of
morality, the theory of meaning, etc.), say, in the manner of the
later Wittgenstein? Would that rejection of "first philosophy" and the
search for foundations or essences constitute a kind of naturalism? We
can imagine a defender of that approach answering in the affirmative,
and other self-avowed naturalists finding that inappropriate and
misleading. In their view naturalism requires certain quite specific
commitments about what there is and how it can be known or explained.
This does not mean that the debate about naturalism is merely or
mainly verbal. There are significant, substantive issues involved.
Some of them concern just how naturalism is to be interpreted, and
some of them concern the truth of naturalism in one or another area.
These are not matters of stipulation, but difficult, complex issues.
In trying to resolve them there is considerable traffic back and forth
between philosophical theorizing and empirical science. One could, for
example, be a naturalist about moral value, but not a "global"
naturalist, a naturalist about all things. Moral theorizing has some
important relations with epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of
mind, but one need not tackle all of those issues and relations at
once in order to assess the claims of naturalism in one area. Or, at
least that appears to be a workable approach. At the same time, part
of the appeal of naturalism is its potentially global scope. It has
the apparent merit of providing a single, or at least integrated
overall account of what there is, and what it is like, and how it
works—including the actions, experiences, and thoughts of rational
animals.
a. Conclusion
Totalizing views have often had considerable appeal to philosophers.
Such views promise to make the world intelligible with a single array
of fundamental concepts. They purport to overcome the perplexities
attending views in which the world is ultimately heterogeneous, with
objects, properties, and processes of fundamentally different kinds,
belonging to different categories. Objective idealism such as Hegel's
is one sort of totalizing view, and so is global naturalism, though
the two are radically different from each other. Spinoza's
metaphysical theory according to which there is just one substance is
another totalizing view, and so is phenomenalism, in its own way. Each
is an attempt to produce the widest and most thorough intelligibility
by identifying a small number of basic categories and principles
through which things can be understood.
It is understandable that a great deal of philosophical theorizing
should have a tendency to be reductionist or to seek a "privileged"
vocabulary for describing the ultimate constituents of reality or the
basic activities or processes that govern it. After all, many
philosophers conceive the project of philosophy to include the task of
articulating an account of the most general features of reality,
knowledge, value, and so forth. In one respect, naturalism resists
that tendency, in so far as it rejects the project of a priori
theorizing as hopeless, irrelevant, or obsolete. Given the guiding
intellectual disposition of naturalism, it seems that it would
countenance as real whatever the progress of (empirical) enquiry
indicates is required for complete explanations. It would be open to
what is found. Rather than fashioning a completely general and
abstract conception of reality, it focuses on the substantive
explanations and theories that are developed in specific areas of
inquiry. According to naturalism, if philosophy becomes detached from
those, it is mere theory-building and does not afford us real
understanding.
In another respect though, naturalism is a decidedly philosophical
approach and an entrant in the grand debate about what is the true
global view. As noted above, naturalism is itself a philosophical
view, though it claims to be a rejection of a great deal that
historically has been distinctive of philosophy. Even if naturalism is
articulated in strictly empirical terms, and strives to be scientific,
we are still faced with the issue of whether strictly empirical terms
are adequate to capture and express all that there is and all we can
know. It is not as though naturalism can avoid questions about whether
it is itself a true view, and all the associated concerns about how to
interpret truth, and what would make it a true view. The issue of
whether naturalism is true may be the sort of issue that is not
clearly resolvable in exclusively naturalistic terms. At least it
seems that the view that it can be, is itself a distinctively
philosophical view. Once we begin to explore such questions, we are of
course doing philosophy, even if our aim is to make the case for
naturalism.
5. References and Further Reading
This list indicates titles of selected sources and is not an attempt
to be exhaustive. It includes some of the most relevant works of
thinkers referred to in the article and also some important works by
thinkers who are not named in the article.
Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics.
Blackburn, Simon (1988). "How To be an Ethical Anti-realist," Midwest
Studies in Philosophy 12, pp. 361-375.
Blackburn, Simon (1998). Ruling Passions, Oxford University Press.
Churchland, P. M. (1988). Matter and Consciousness, MIT Press.
Descartes, René (1641). Meditations on First Philosophy.
Dewey, John (1920). Reconstruction in Philosophy, N.Y.: Henry Holt and Company.
Dewey, John (1925). Experience and Nature, Chicago: Open Court.
Foot, Philippa (2003). Natural Goodness, Oxford University Press.
Gibbard, Alan (1990). Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of
Normative Judgment, Oxford University Press.
Goldman, Alvin (1979) "What is Justified Belief?" in George S. Pappas
Justification and Knowledge Dordrecht, pp. 1-23.
Goldman, Alvin (1986). Epistemology and Cognition, Harvard University Press
Goodman, Nelson (1978). Ways of Worldmaking, Hackett Publishing Company.
Goodman, Nelson (1979). Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, Harvard University Press.
Hume, David (1748). An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
Hume, David (1751). An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals.
Huxley, Thomas Henry (1893). Evolution and Ethics, Pilot Press.
Jackson, Frank (1982). "Epiphenomenal Qualia" The Philosophical
Quarterly, Vol. 32, No. 127 April, pp. 127-136.
James, William (1907/1979). Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways
of Thinking, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979 (originally
published in 1907).
Kant, Immanuel (1781/87). Critique of Pure Reason, Werner Pluhar
(trans.), Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996. (First edition originally
published in 1781, second edition in 1787.)
Kant, Immanuel (1783). Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Gary
Hatfield (trans.), New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997
(originally published in1783).
Kim, Jaegwon: "What Is 'Naturalized Epistemology'?" Philosophical
Perspectives 2, James E. Tomberlin (ed.), Asascadero, CA: Ridgeview
Publishing Co., pp. 381-406.
Kornblith, Hilary, ed. (1985). Naturalizing Epistemology, MIT Press.
McDowell, John (1995). "Two Sorts of Naturalism" in Virtues and
Reasons: Philippa Foot and Moral Theory, Rosalind Hursthouse, Gavin
Lawrence, and Warren Quinn (eds.), Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp.
149-79.
McDowell, John (1996). Mind and World, Harvard University Press.
Mill, John Stuart (1861/1998). Utilitarianism, Roger Crips (ed.),
Oxford University Press. (Originally published in 1861).
Moore, G. E. (1925). "A Defense of Common Sense," Contemporary British
Philosophy (2nd series), ed. J. H. Muirhead. Reprinted in Moore
(1959c).
Moore, G. E. (1959a). "Proof of the External World" Ch. 7 of Moore
(1959b), pp. 126-148.
Moore, G. E. (1959b). Philosophical Papers. London: George, Allen and Unwin.
Peirce, Charles Sanders (1898/1992). Reasoning and the Logic of
Things: The Cambridge Conference Lectures of 1898, Kenneth Laine
Ketner (ed., intro.) and Hilary Putnam (intro., comm.), Harvard
University Press, 1992.
Peirce, Charles Sanders (1903/1997). Pragmatism as a Principle and
Method of Right Thinking: The 1903 Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism,
Patricia Ann Turrisi (ed.), SUNY Press.
Plato. Republic.
Plato. Theaetetus.
Plato. Sophist.
Putnam, Hilary (1981). Reason, Truth and History, Cambridge University Press.
Quine, W. V. O. (1969a). "Epistemology Naturalized," Ontological
Relativity and Other Essays, New York: Columbia University Press.
Quine, W. V. O. (1969b). "Natural Kinds,"Ontological Relativity and
Other Essays, New York: Columbia University Press.
Quine, W. V. O. (1990). Pursuit of Truth, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press.
Reid, Thomas (1785). Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man.
Rorty, Richard (1979). Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton
University Press.
Rorty, Richard (1982). Consequences of Pragmatism, University of
Minnesota Press.
Ruse, Michael (1986). Taking Darwin Seriously: A Naturalistic Approach
to Philosophy, N.Y.: Blackwell.
Ruse, Michael & Wilson, E. O. (1985). "The Evolution of Ethics," New
Scientist 108, pp. 50-52.
Searle, John (1980). "Minds, Brains and Programs," Behavioral and
Brain Sciences 3, pp. 417-57.
Searle, John (1983). Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of
Mind. Cambridge University Press.
Trigg, Roger (1982). The Shaping of Man: Philosophical Aspects of
Sociobiology, Oxford: Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1953). Philosophical Investigations, New York: Macmillan.
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