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Davidson, Emergence, and Pragmatic Realism

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Davidson, Emergence, and Pragmatic Realism Mental Causation Proceedings of the Third International Colloquium in Philosophy of Mind André Leclerc, Giovanni de Queiroz and Michael B. Wrigley (eds.) CDD: 144.3 A PRAGMATIC REALIST VIEW OF EMERGENCE CHARBEL NIÑO EL-HANI Departamento de Biologia Geral, Instituto de Biologia, Universidade Federal da Bahia, Rua Barão de Geremoabo, s/n, Ondina, 40170-290 SALVADOR, BA BRAZIL [email protected] SAMI PIHLSTRÖM Department of Philosophy, P.O. BOX 9, FIN-00014 University of Helsinki FINLAND [email protected] Abstract: This paper examines the notion of emergence from the perspective of pragmatism, drawing special attention to Donald Davidson’s recent account of the emergence of thought and to Hilary Putnam’s pragmatic realism, which, we argue, can be applied to the question of the reality of emergent properties. Our overall conclusion is that the debate over the concept of emergence actively going on in contemporary metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science should be focused more strongly on the realism issue, even though most emergentists (and their critics) tend to assume a rather straightforward metaphysical realism – a view that ought to be called into question on pragmatist grounds. Key-words: emergence; realism; pragmatism. © Manuscrito, 2002. Published by the Center for Logic, Epistemology and History of Science (CLE/UNICAMP), State University of Campinas, P.O. Box 6133, 13081-970 Campinas, SP., Brazil. 106 CHARBEL NIÑO EL-HANI AND SAMI PIHLSTRÖM 1 INTRODUCTION In this paper, we examine a number of ideas concerning emergence, taking as a starting-point a discussion about a recent paper by Donald Davidson on the emergence of thought (Davidson [1997](2001)). Richard Rorty ([1987](1991), p. 113) regards Davidson’s work as “... the culmination of a line of thought in American philosophy which aims at being naturalistic without being reductionist”. He is referring to pragmatism, even though Davidson does not accept Rorty’s interpretation of himself as a pragmatist (in: Borradori (1991), p. 44. See also Pereira (1998)). We do not intend here to enter any controversy concerning what would possibly be the best way to interpret Davidson’s philosophy, as it suffices to our purposes to notice that, no matter whether Davidson is a pragmatist or not, his work is at least partly consistent with the kind of pragmatic realism we consider to be consequential to current debates about emergence. The tradition of pragmatism has, especially since John Dewey, been characterized by a commitment to non-reductive naturalism. It is indeed proper to see it as aiming at a philosophical doctrine which is naturalistic without being reductionist. In the case of Davidson’s philosophy, Rorty ([1987](1991)) claims that his non-reductive physicalism is based on the conjunction of three theses: First, the thesis that reasons can be causes; second, the thesis that there is no relation between non-sentences and sentences (or between non-beliefs and beliefs) called ‘making true’; and, third, the thesis that metaphors do not have meanings. We do not aim here either at providing an exegesis of Davidson’s original theses (which can be found in Davidson (1980), (1984)) or at presenting in full detail how they are interlinked by Rorty to lay the foundations for Davidson’s non-reductive physicalism. Rather, our goal is to discuss the issues of emergence and realism taking as a point of departure an analysis of a paper on the emergence of thought recently published by Davidson. But why might this paper be an © Manuscrito, 2002. XXV (Special Number), pp. 105-154. A PRAGMATIC REALISTIC VIEW OF EMERGENCE 107 interesting starting-point for us? Davidson is not among the emergence theorists. But consider, first, that Davidson was responsible for the long interest in the idea that physicalism might be properly couched in some form of the supervenience relation. Philosophers were allured by the prospect of discovering through supervenience a dependency relation that would not entail reducibility after Davidson’s usage of this concept in his “Mental Events” (Davidson [1970](1980)). A great number of philosophers tried to formulate a non-reductive physicalist stance on the grounds of supervenience, with a very limited success (see, e.g., Kim (1993), (1998)). Curiously, Davidson himself did not explore this idea further in his subsequent works. All this said, it may seem even more farfetched to use Davidson’s paper to deal with the issue of emergence. But emergentists are similarly interested in dealing with the apparent paradoxes that follow from the relations between macro-micro dependence, microdetermination, and irreducibility. And, recently, Davidson wrote a paper on the emergence of thought that comes back to the issue of the mind-body relation, and the intertwined issues about reducibility and dependence. In this paper, Davidson’s approach to the issue of emergence seemed to be similar, in important respects, to some proposals we have been defending in recent works (Pihlström (1996), (1999a), (2002); El-Hani (2000), (2002); El-Hani & Pihlström (2002)). Here, we want to examine these similarities, in order to see if they are indeed relevant to our own research. Briefly, we have been arguing that emergence theorists should pay more attention to the realism issue, casting doubt over the strong metaphysical realism to which they are usually committed. Rather, we have advocated a pragmatist alternative to metaphysical realism. If one adopts some form of pragmatic realism, the purely ontological, metaphysically realist treatment of emergence typical of most contemporary approaches will have to be given up. From the perspective of pragmatic realism, the ontology of emergents, like any ontological © Manuscrito, 2002. XXV (Special Number), pp. 105-154. 108 CHARBEL NIÑO EL-HANI AND SAMI PIHLSTRÖM issue, is irreducibly epistemologized, simply because it is embedded in our ontologically relevant practices. 2 DAVIDSON ON THE EMERGENCE OF THOUGHT In the paper we want to examine, Davidson asks: “What does it mean [...] to say some aspect of the world ‘emerged’?” (Davidson [1997](2001), p. 123). He states, thus, a problem which has been receiving more and more attention in the last few years, but goes back at least to the beginning of the twentieth century. Let us see how Davidson answers the question he poses. First of all, it is important to notice that he avoids the usual way of understanding the emergence debate, firmly committed to a strong metaphysical realism, and assumes, instead, a conceptual perspective on emergence: Emergence makes sense only as seen from a point of view, from within a set of concepts. Given our set of concepts, we can appreciate the idea that different concepts were instantiated at different times. The concepts of quantum physics were instantiated very early; the concepts of the various elements were instantiated over a longer subsequent period. The concept of life was instantiated quite recently, and the concepts of thought and language were filled out only moments ago, with the coming of higher mammals. This doesn’t mean the laws of physics changed, but it does mean that in order to describe and explain thought we need concepts that can’t be defined in the vocabulary of physics (or any of the natural sciences). Thus, in a clear sense, emergence is relative to a set of concepts. Concepts themselves are abstractions and so timeless, of course, but it can happen that certain concepts are instantiated only as time goes on. The universe is, needless to say, indifferent to our concepts. (Davidson [1997](2001), p. 123. Emphasis in the original). Our interest in Davidson’s approach, even though he is not himself deeply involved in the emergence debate, stems exactly from this attitude towards emergence, which is compatible with our recent efforts to raise the realism issue as a metaphilosophical basis of the current debates about emergentism. The consequential move from a strong realism about levels and emergence to a more pragmatically-oriented © Manuscrito, 2002. XXV (Special Number), pp. 105-154. A PRAGMATIC REALISTIC VIEW OF EMERGENCE 109 realism is readily apparent, notwithstanding Davidson’s reluctance in accepting the ‘pragmatist’ label, in his treatment of the emergence of distinct levels not as a pure event in an independently perceived reality, but rather as a process involving an instantiation of concepts. Surely, this raises a number of important problems regarding the relation between knowledge and reality, some of which will be discussed later in this paper. It is quite clear, anyway, that one should not fear that a critique of strong realism necessarily ends in some sort of anti-realism. Even though Davidson assumes what we might describe as a conceptual approach to a typical ontological question such as that of emergence and the levels of reality, he still recognizes that the ‘universe’, that reality out there which must be assumed to underlie and in some way be responsible for experience, though remaining unknowable, is indifferent to our concepts. On the other hand, we must remember that Davidson is famous for his devastating critique of the very idea of distinguishing between our conceptual scheme(s) and the world (or the universe) as the content of those conceptual schemes.1 Davidson’s endorsement of a concept-independent ‘universe’ is also a move that results in some tensions between the critical attitude towards strong metaphysical realism and the usage of some terms which seem to have a strong realist flavor. Notice, for instance, Davidson’s reference to the ‘laws of physics’, which would remain unchanged 1 The paper ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’ was first published in 1974 and is included in Davidson (1984). It is not our task to determine here whether, and to what extent, Davidson’s critique of conceptual relativism is compatible with the kind of ‘pragmatic realism’ we ascribe to him regarding emergentist ontology.
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