Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-fwgfc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-10T03:22:08.287Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Naturalism and the Idea of Nature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 May 2017

Lynne Rudder Baker
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

There are many versions of naturalism. In contemporary Anglophone philosophy, the dominant versions are forms of scientific naturalism. After discussing three forms of scientific naturalism – eliminative, reductive, and nonreductive naturalism – I turn to the idea of nature that scientific naturalism presupposes, and I argue that the presupposed idea of nature is inadequate: It does not include everything in nature. I shall argue that all forms of naturalism – even so-called liberal naturalism, a nonscientific version – suffer from presupposed and unargued-for closure principles that limit the scope of reality. Finally, I'll briefly discuss my own view that I call ‘near-naturalism’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 92 , Issue 3 , July 2017 , pp. 333 - 349
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Kim, Jaegwon, ‘The American Origins of Philosophical Naturalism’, The Journal of Philosophical Research: Philosophy in America at the Turn of the Century (2003), 84 Google Scholar.

2 Caro, Mario De and Macarthur, David, ‘Introduction: The Nature of Naturalism’, Naturalism in Question (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 1Google Scholar.

3 Ladyman, James and Ross, Don, Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I discuss this book in ‘Ontology, Down-to-Earth’, The Monist 98 (2015), 145–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Rosenberg, Alex, The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011), 4Google Scholar.

5 Rosenberg, Alex, ‘Disenchanted Naturalism’, Kritikos 12 (2015), 4Google Scholar.

6 Op. cit. note 5, 4

7 Op. cit. note 5, 22.

8 Op. cit. note 5, 7.

9 Op. cit. note 5, 7.

10 The illusion that we can think about things outside the mind, says Rosenberg, ‘gets built up in each brain anew during the developmental ontogeny of every language learning child and has been built up in hominem evolution from grunts, shrieks, eventually clicks and gestures coordinated with behavior, all the way to Chinese characters and Kanji calligraphy’. These features have great adaptive value and perhaps were selected for. Op. cit. note 5, 14.

11 Speaking for myself, I doubt that any nonphilosopher ever thought that introspection tells us anything at all (true or false) about the brain, much less about a language of thought.

12 Also, the error theory does not apply to animals whose behavior seems intentional. What error are they making? And how could fleeing a predator be an error?

13 Searle, John R., Making the Social World. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Searle, John R., ‘Social Ontology: Some Basic Principles’, Anthropological Theory 6 (2006), 13 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. My emphasis.

15 Op. cit. note 13, 3.

16 Papineau, David, ‘Causation Is Macroscopic but Not Irreducible’, Mental Causation and Ontology (eds) Gibbs, S., Lowe, E.J. and Ingthorsson, R. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 126–151 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Nonreductive naturalists do not rule out the possibility of global supervenience, according to which fixing all the microproperties in the whole world thereby fixes all the macroproperties in that world.

18 Kornblith, Hilary, ‘Naturalism: Both Metaphysical and Epistemological’ ( Philosophical Naturalism: Midwest Studies in Philosophy 19, French, Peter A., Uehling, Theodore E., Wettstein, Howard, eds. (Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 1994), 40Google Scholar.

19 Kornblith, Hilary, On Reflection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 89 n27.

20 Op. cit. note 18, 40.

21 Julian Reiss and Jan Sprenger, ‘Scientific Objectivity’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (ed.) Edward N Zalta (2014) [http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2014/entries/sciencitific-objectivity/.]

22 Nagel, Thomas, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

23 Dennett, Daniel C., Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1991)Google Scholar. I think that ‘third-person’ and ‘first-person’ are correlative terms; so to be accurate, we should speak of objective reality rather than third-person reality, where objective reality is nonpersonal that does not vary with point of view or perspective.

24 Some philosophers (e.g. David Chalmers) may disagree, but I see no reason for disagreement other than a desire to continue to be naturalists while acknowledging first-person properties. No one has produced a first-person science.

25 Op. cit. note 23, 72–79.

26 Hilary Kornblith (personal correspondence, March 17, 2016) took issue with an earlier formulation of this premise. This formulation of the premise should by-pass his objection inasmuch as it is explicitly ontological, and no science has first-personal phenomena in its ontology – not even John Perry. Any third-person investigation of I*-phenomena just changes the subject.

27 Castañeda, Hector-Neri, ‘Indicators and Quasi-Indicators’, American Philosophical Quarterly 4 (1967), 85–100 Google Scholar; Castañeda, Hector-Neri, ‘He: A Study in the Logic of Self-Consciousness’, Ratio 8 (1966), 130–157 Google Scholar.

28 My use of ‘I*’ also extends ideas found in Matthews, Gareth, Thought's Ego in Augustine and Descartes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

29 John Perry argued that ‘I’ cannot be eliminated in various contexts, but my point here is that even if ‘I’ were eliminable, ‘I*’ would not be. John Perry argued that ‘I’ cannot be eliminated in various contexts, but my point here is that even if ‘I’ were eliminable, ‘I*’ would not be. ‘I*’ occurs in the content clause of a sentence. A sentence that attributes to the speaker a first-person reference would not be true unless there were a first-person reference. ‘I*’ occurs in the content clause of a sentence. A sentence that attributes to the speaker a first-person reference would not be true unless there were a first-person reference. See Perry, John, ‘The Problem of the Essential Indexical’, Noûs 13 (1979), 3–21 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Geach, Peter, Mental Acts (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), 120Google Scholar.

31 Schlick, Moritz, ‘Meaning and Verification’, Readings in Philosophical Analysis (eds) Feigl, Herbert and Sellars, Wilfrid (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1949), 166Google Scholar.

32 Russell, Bertrand, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1945), 567Google Scholar.

33 I think that one insurmountable problem is that no one has come up with a satisfactory semantics for neural mechanisms. Baker, Lynne Rudder, ‘Has Content Been Naturalized? Meaning in Mind: Fodor and His Critics (eds) Loewer, Barry and Rey, Georges, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1991), 17–32 Google Scholar.

34 Baker, Lynne Rudder, Naturalism and the First-Person Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Perry, John, ‘The Sense of Identity’, Identity, Personal Identity and the Self (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2002), 229Google Scholar.

36 Op. cit. note 29.

37 Op. cit. note 35, 239.

38 Lewis, David, ‘Reduction of Mind’, Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 318CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 Op. cit. note 38, 317.

40 Baker, Lynne Rudder, ‘Cartesianism and the First-Person Perspective’, Phenomenology and Mind 7 (2014), 20–30 Google Scholar; Baker, Lynne Rudder, ‘Beyond the Cartesian Self’, Phenomenology and Mind 1 (2011), 60–71 Google Scholar; Baker, Lynne Rudder, ‘Human Beings as Social Entities’, Journal of Social Ontology 1 (2015), 77–87 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 Caro, Mario De and Voltolini, Alberto, ‘Is Liberal Naturalism Possible?’ Naturalism and Normativity (eds) De Caro, Mario and Macarthur, David (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 69–86 Google Scholar.

42 Op. cit. note 2, 17.

43 Op. cit. note 41, 70.

44 I definitely intend to include artifacts and artworks within the scope of natural reality. See Baker, Lynne Rudder, ‘The Ontology of Artifacts’, Philosophical Explorations 7 (2004), 99–111 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45 Baker, Lynne Rudder, ‘Practical Realism as Metaphysics’, American Philosophical Quarterly 51 (2014), 13–20 Google Scholar.

46 This paper was presented at the conference on Nature and Naturalism at the Gregorian University in Rome on April 18–19, 2016. Thanks are due to its organizer Louis Caruana, SJ, and to my commentator, Josef Quitterer.