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V·M·I University Microfilms International a Bell & Howell Information Company 300 North Zeeb Road INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copysubmitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adverselyaffect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand corner and continuing from left to right in equal sectionswith small overlaps. Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back of the book. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6" x 9" black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. V·M·I University Microfilms International A Bell & Howell Information Company 300 North Zeeb Road. Ann Arbor. M148106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 Order Number 9205852 Cognitive values, theory choice, and pluralism: On the grounds and implications of philosophical diversity Axtell, Guy Stanwood, Ph.D. University of Hawaii, 1991 Copyright @1991 by Axtell, Guy Stanwood. All rights reserved. V·M·I 300N. ZeebRd. Ann Arbor, MI 48106 COGNITIVE VALUES, THEORY CHOICE, AND PLURALISM: ON THE GROUNDS AND IMPLICATIONS OF PHILOSOPHICAL DIVERSITY A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN PHILOSOPHY AUGUST 1991 By Guy S. Axtell Dissertation Committee: Lenn E. Goodman, Chairperson Eliot Deutsch Larry Laudan Jim Tiles Peter Manicas Copyright by Guy S. Axtell 1991 All Rights Reserved III ABSTRACT This dissertation focuses on the development of a pragmatic account of normative discourse. The approach taken to the subject of study is metaphilosophical. Prevalent contemporary treatments of norm governance and cognitive evaluation, are examined in light of background metaphilosophical views adopted by such schools as logical empiricism, pragmatism, and schools associated with contemporary sociology of scientific knowledge. I examine metaphilosophical assumptions that pre-structure treatment of conceptual issues such as belief-modification, theory choice, and explanation, pursuing these issues across a wide range of disciplines including ethics, jurisprudence, and philosophy of science. The pragmatist account of 'inquiry as essentially normative' is developed, and utilized as grounds for a double-edged criticism of both contemporary objectivist and relativist treatment of these conceptual issues. This pragmatist account differs substantially in its conception of the relationship between facts and values --or the natural and the normative dimensions of meaning- from both logical empiricist and radical historicist accounts. Explicating these significant differences, I argue, leads towards confronting objectivism and relativism on the 'higher level' of values and meanings on which their polarity is motivated. The pragmatic conception of normative discourse that I develop as grounds for reconciliation, accounts for philosophical diversity by way of the possible variability in valuative orientations taken towards explanation of human decisions and discourse. Yet the methodological pluralism of the pragmatist school, I conclude, instantiates a philosophy of explanation in the human sciences that differs substantially from those that noted recent proponents of objectivism and radical historicism have embraced. iv CONTENTS ABSTRACT iv PREFACE vi CHAPTER ONE BELIEFAND AITITUDE ........................ .. 1 1.1 Values and the analytic/synthetic distinction 4 1.2 From Hume to Stevenson on reason and logical connections 16 1.3 Intrinsic values as unconditioned interests 30 CHAPTER TWO THE DEVALUATION OF VALUES .41 2.1 The norms of thought and action .41 2.2 'Normative' science and 'positive' ethics 62 2.3 Instrumentalism and relativism 71 2.4 Pragmatism and instrumentalism 81 CHAPTER THREE LOGICIST METASCIENCE 92 3.1 The Carnapian metaphilosophy 92 3.2 After syntax: the logicist legacy 98 3.3 A dogma of contexts: using and choosing a standard 103 3.4 Pragmatic decisions and rationality 108 CHAPTER FOUR THE BRANCHES OF THE HISTORICIST SCHOOL 120 4.1 Diverse reactions to the received view 126 4.2 Science as social practice: the historicist's challenge 132 4.3 The myth of the framework: Popper's challenge 138 4.4 Lakatos' objectivism and Popper's 'third world' 153 4.5 Lakatos' historiography and the demarcation problem 159 4.6 Intuitionism and the 'scientific elite' 163 CHAPTER FIVE RECENT OBJECTWE HISTORICISM 171 5.1 The rational, the social, and the normative 174 5.2 Laudan's normative naturalism 179 5.3 The causal dualist thesis 192 5.4 The explanatory asymmetry and primacy theses 200 CHAPTER SIX EXPLANATION IN THE HUMAN SCIENCES 216 6.1 Towards a pancritical non-foundationalist metaphilosophy 216 6.2 Pragmatism, logic, and learning 220 6.3 The explanation of normative decisions reconsidered 233 6.4 The human reasoner and the sciences of man 246 6.5 Competence and performance in norm governance 252 BIBLIOGRAPHY 263 v PREFACE The normative dimensions of knowledge and social practice have received attention in the past few years from philosophers and social scientists alike. Whenever one mentions a "norm" or "standard," one cannot help but note the multiple senses which common language associates with such terms. One may attempt to describe processes of change or alteration of norms in human practices, or one may attempt to say what constitutes improvement in norms; these projects undoubtedly are not the same, as common language attests. One may speak of norms and standards as actually existing regularities and dispositional attitudes taken by human individual or groups, or one can speak of "value itself," what the "good" is, what one "ought" to do, etc. Philosophers have typically divided inquiry into two, a division reflected in the problem commonly referred to as the Is/Ought problem, or the problem of the relationship between the "natural" and the "normative" dimensions of thought and meaning. But there are philosophical reasons as well why one must resist letting the theoretical differentiation of these senses of meaning become hardened into either an epistemological or a metaphilosophical dualism. This dissertation is an examination into the relationship of the natural and the normative dimensions of thought and meaning. Its subject is what Frederick Will has recently called "norm governance," where governance is a concept that encompasses aspects both of the empirical study of change or alteration of normative systems, as well as philosophical grounds for criteria of criticism and improvement of normative systems. Perhaps what is most distinctive about vi my approach is my treatment of the intellectual influences on dominant twentieth­ century schools of thought on this issue. The polarities of objectivism and relativism, philosophy and sociology, reason and cause, etc. which are so troubling today are in my view deeply conditioned by persistent, unacknowledged assumptions about the relationship of the normative and the natural. My focus in addressing normative discourse is metaphilosophical. The conceptual issues that come to light stretch widely across ethics, juridical theory, and philosophy of science. Treatments of issues like conceptual change, methodology, and theory appraisal are typically pre-structured by valuative judgments; getting beyond the polarities mentioned therefore requires confronting such oppositions directly on this 'higher order' of valuative meanings and discourse on which they are motivated. One example of the pre-structuring that will be examined here is the dominant metaphilosophical orientation which I call selective foundationalism, and which pre­ structures much of the epistemological and ethical theory twentieth-century logical empiricists have developed. Focusing on this metaphilosophical orientation is the first step towards reconstructing the complex relationship between the logical empiricist's epistemological objectivism and their ethical "non-cognitivism"; it is here that one finds the intellectual motivations for the quite disparate and dualistic attitudes they took towards norm governance inside and outside of science. The path of intellectual influence I trace is from early Modern sources to the highly influential Carnapian/Reichenbachian metaphilosophy, and from there into both the "objectivist" (Lakatos/Laudan) and "contingentist" (Kuhn, Barnes, Bloor, Rorty) branches of historicist thought. One assumption I trace, for instance, is the Carnapian division of questions into the "internal" and the "external," each requiring separate and disparately vii conceived criteria. This is echoed in the sharp divisions of internal and external history, rational reason and social cause, etc., which is a tenet of Lakatos/Laudan objectivist historiography (and Mertonian
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