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THEJOURNAL of PHILOSOPHY VOLUME XCI, No.9, SEPTEMBER 1994 ~~~~~~~~~~~~+-.-f------------- THEJOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY VOLUME XCI, No.9, SEPTEMBER 1994 SENSE, NONSENSE, AND THE SENSES: AN INQUIRY INTO THE POWERS OF THE HUMAN MIND* "No theory is kind to us that cheats us of seeing."l LECTURE I: THE ANTINOMY OF REALISM he besetting sin of philosophers seems to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. From the beginning, each "new T wave" of philosophers has simply ignored the insights of the previous wave in the course of advancing its own. Today, we stand near the end of a century in which there have been many new insights in philosophy; but at the same time there has been an unprecedented forgetting of the insights of previous centuries and millennia. It would be absurd, however, to make the reactionary move of try­ ing to believe what philosophers who lived two hundred or two thou­ sand years ago believed. AsJohn Dewey would have told us, they lived under wholly different conditions and faced wholly different prob­ lems, and such a return is impossible in any case. And even ifit were possible to go back, to do so would be to ignore the correct criticisms of the abandoned positions that were made by later generations of philosophers. But I want to urge that we attempt to understand and, to the extent that it may be humanly possible, to overcome the pat- * The Dewey Lectures at Columbia University, given March 22, 24, 29, 1994. Warm thanks to James Conant for his painstaking criticism of the successive drafts and helpful suggestions. Among others who assisted with criticisms, suggestions, and information at one point or another are Burton Dreben, Sam Fleischaker, Richard Heck, Ernie Lepore, David Macarthur, Sidney Morgenbesser, Alva Noe, Robert Nozick, Dan O'Connor, and, as always, Ruth Anna Putnam. My apologies to anyone whose help I may have forgotten to acknowledge. 1 HenryJames to Robert Louis Stevenson, January 12, 1891, in Henry James: Selected Letters, Leon Edel, ed. (Cambridge: Harvard, 1987), p. 242. 0022-362X/94/9109/445-517 © 1994 TheJournal ofPhilosophy, Inc. 445 446 THEJOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY tern of "recoil" that causes philosophy to leap from frying pan to fire, from fire to a different frying pan, from different frying pan to a dif­ ferent fire, and so on, apparently without end.2 In these lectures, I shall try to show what such understanding and overcoming might involve by examining the central metaphysical issue ofrealism. That issue is especially suited to this purpose, because current exam­ ples of the "recoil" phenomenon are so plentiful in connection with the topic. Philosophers who recoil from the excesses of various ver­ sions ofmetaphysical realism have recoiled to a variety ofvery peculiar positions - deconstruction being currently the most famous, but one could also mention Nelson Goodman's "irrealism," or Michael Dummett's "antirealism," as examp!~s ofa similar recoil on the part of some analytic philosophers. And philosophers who recoil from what they see as the loss of the world in these antirealisms have embraced such mysterious notions as "identity across metaphysically possible worlds" and "the absolute conception of the world."3 Today, the humanities are polarized as never before, with the majority of the "new wave" thinkers in literature departments celebrating deconstruc­ tion cum marxism cum feminism ... and the majority of the analytic philosophers celebrating materialism cum cognitive science cum the metaphysical mysteries just mentioned. And no issue polarizes the humanities - and, increasingly, the arts as well - as much as realism, described as "logocentricism" by one side and as the "defense of the idea of objective knowledge" by the other. If, as I believe, there is a way to dojustice to our sense that knowledge claims are responsible to reality without recoiling into metaphysical fantasy, then it is important that we find that way. For there is, God knows, irresponsibility enough in the world, including irresponsibility masquerading as responsibility, and it belongs to the vocation of the thinker, now as always, to try to teach the difference between the two. I began by saying that we have lost insights as well as gained them in the course of the philosophical debate (indeed, that is an essential part of the phenomenon I am calling "recoil" - when one is domi­ nated by the feeling that one must put as much distance as possible between oneselfand a particular philosophical stance, one is not like- 2 The term 'recoil' has been used in this connection by John McDowell in his Mind and World (Cambridge: Harvard, 1994). Although I do not wish to hold McDowell responsible for my formulations in the present lectures, I want to acknowledge the pervasive influence of his work, which has reinforced my own interest in natural realism in the theory of perception - an interest which was first reawakened by thinking about the views ofWilliamJames. g Saul Kripke, David Lewis, and Bernard Williams being, perhaps, the most influ­ ential producers of these mysterious notions at this time. DEWEY LECTURES 447 ly to acknowledge that the defenders of that stance possess any insights); and, as my reference to previous millennia was meant to suggest, some of those insights are very old. Indeed, I might have titled these lectures "Aristotelian Realism without Aristotelian Metaphysics." But I could equally have titled them "Deweyan Realism." For Dewey, as I read him, was concerned to show that we can retain something of the spirit of Aristotle's defense of the com­ mon-sense world, against the excesses ofboth the metaphysicians and the sophists, without thereby committing ourselves to any variant of the metaphysical essentialism that Aristotle propounded.4 I am there­ fore delighted to give these lectures under the rubric "Dewey Lectures." For I am convinced that my concern in these lectures ­ the search for a middle way between reactionary metaphysics and irresponsible relativism - was also one ofDewey's concerns through­ out his exemplary philosophical career. THE ASSUMPTIONS OF TRADITIONAL REALISM Dewey's realism was influenced, in turn, by that other great American pragmatist, William James. James aspired to a kind of realism in phi­ losophy that was free of the excesses of traditional forms ofmetaphys­ ical realism.5 This has made it difficult for philosophers to read him as a kind of realist at all. Toward the end of his life, James wrote a let­ ter to a friend in which he bitterly complained of being misread.6 James wrote that he never denied that our thoughts have to fit reality to count as true, as he was over and over again accused of doing. In the letter, he employs the example of someone choosing how to describe some beans that have been cast on a table. The beans can be described in an almost endless variety of ways, depending on the interests of the describer, and each of the right descriptions will fit the beans-minus-the-describer and yet also reflect the interests of the describer. And James asks: Why should not any such description be called true? He insists that there is no such thing as a description that reflects no particular interest at all. And he further insists that the descriptions we give when our interests are not theoretical or 4 In this remark, I do not mean to be endorsing Dewey's view ofAristotle. For a persuasive argument that Aristotle's essentialism was not the strong metaphysical essentialism that the scholastics read into him, see Martha Nussbaum's The Fragility ofGoodness (New York: Cambridge, 1986). I agree with Nussbaum that a good deal ofAristotle can be read in a less metaphysical way than the tradition has, although I have difficulty in seeing how all ofAristotle's writing can be so read. The kinship between Dewey's project and Aristotle's is especially marked in Dewey's Experience and Nature (Chicago: Open Court, 1925). 5 This did not, unfortunately, keep James from his own idealist and panpsychist lapses. 6 James's letter to Dickinson S. Miller, dated August 5,1907, in Letters of William James, Volume 2 (Boston: Atlantic Monthly, 1920), p. 295. 448 THEJOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY explanatory can bejust as true as those we give when our interests are "intellectual." "And for this,"James wrote, "we are accused ofdenying the beans, or denying being in any way constrained by them! It's too silly!" (ibid., p. 296). A traditional realist philosopher might reply to James as follows: "If that is allyou are saying, then I do not see that any ofyour fulminations against philosophers who believe in a 'ready-made world' are in order. And ifyou have been misunderstood, it is your own rhetoric that is at fault. The scholastic realists had the matterjust right in their rejoinders to their nominalist opponents," my imaginary traditional realist might continue. "Suppose you decide to classify the beans by color, or by whether they are next to a bean of the same size, or in any other way. The reason that such a classification is possible, and can be extended to other similar collections of beans in the future, is that there are such properties as colors, sizes, adjacency, etc. Your beloved "interests" may detennine which combinations of properties you regard as worth talk­ ing about, or even lead you to invent a name for things with a particu­ lar combination of properties if there is no such name already in the language, but it does not change the world in the slightest. The world is as it is independently ofthe interests ofany describer." As will become clear, I do not, myself, side completely with James nor do I side completely with his traditional realist critic. I agree with the critic that the world is as it is independently of the interests of describers.7 Although I deplore james's suggestion that the world we know is to an indeterminate extent the product of our own minds,s the traditional realist's way of putting what is wrong with James's position involves a metaphysical fantasy.
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