Naturalism and Scientific Practices: a Concluding Scientific Postscript

Wesleyan University From the SelectedWorks of Joseph Rouse January 2007 Naturalism and Scientific Practices: A Concluding Scientific Postscript Contact Start Your Own Notify Me Author SelectedWorks of New Work Available at: http://works.bepress.com/jrouse/5 Joseph Rouse Naturalism and Scientific Practices: A Concluding Scientific Postscript Wesleyan University Naturalism is the dominant philosophical stance in North American philosophy today. Many philosophers explicitly identify themselves as naturalists, whose philosophical work is closely aligned with the natural sciences. Yet the best evidence for the dominance of naturalism comes from those philosophers who profess to be its opponents. These critics often make very significant concessions to naturalism. They hasten to accept a broadly scientific understanding of the world. They also often disavow any philosophical constraints upon scientific inquiry. Many even express these sentiments by accepting ‘naturalism’ as a label for their own views: they oppose “radical” versions of naturalism, but do so by defending a more tolerant, inclusive version of naturalism. My response to this apparent triumph of philosophical naturalism echoes the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the triumph of Christianity in 19th Century Europe. Nowadays we all of us indeed are Christians. But with this, what have we all become, I wonder; and what has Christianity become by the fact that we all of us as a matter of course are Christians of a sort? This work has made it difficult to become a Christian, so difficult that among people of culture in Christendom the number of Christians will not be very great. (1941, 519–20) My “concluding scientific postscript” advances a similar claim about philosophical naturalism. It has become too easy nowadays to profess to be a naturalist; we need to recognize how difficult it is to fulfill the philosophical demands of naturalism. I say this not to criticize naturalism, but to invite you to accept a more demanding conception of what naturalism commits us to. I then argue that a conception of naturalism which gives central place to scientific practices rather than scientific knowledge best satisfies these demands. The paper has two main parts. The first part of the paper identifies some tensions and conflicting demands that arise within naturalist philosophy today. The second argues that shifting primary philosophical attention from scientific knowledge to scientific practices provides a constructive response to these tensions. 62 Joseph Rouse Part I: Making It Harder to be a Naturalist The tensions and conflicts within naturalism stand out especially clearly in the context of the historical development of naturalism, so I begin the first part of the paper with some brief historical remarks. After a more extensive discussion of the resulting internal tensions, the first part of the paper concludes with a more detailed discussion of one prominent locus for these tensions, namely whether to think of a scientific understanding of nature in terms of natural laws, or whether to do so in terms of causal interactions and theoretical models. This issue will then play a prominent role in the second part of the paper. Ia: Some Historical Remarks About Naturalism Western philosophical naturalism arose in the long struggle to free science or natural philosophy from its origin within a religious understanding of the world. Most early modern natural philosophers (such as Isaac Newton in the 17th Century) placed the scientific interpretation of nature within the larger project of understanding God’s creation. Reading the Christian Bible and “reading” God’s creation were two sides of a single activity. During the 18th and 19th Centuries, scientific research gradually freed itself from subordination to theological con- cerns. Nature became a distinct domain of understanding, accountable solely to its own standards and norms. Natural science was thereby freed from the authority of church or scripture. The French mathematician Laplace famously expressed the spirit of this initial stage of naturalism. In response to the Emperor Napoleon’s question about the place of God in Laplace’s celestial mechanics, Laplace said, “I have no need for that hypothesis.” His view expressed the “enlightened” aspiration to free our understanding of nature and ourselves from appeals to divine intervention or other supernatural elements. When natural science had been partly freed from subordination to religion, however, naturalism took on a new dimension. New scientific disciplines in psychology and the life sciences emerging in the late 19th Century offered a more expansive naturalist vision: natural science might also replace philosophical accounts of thought and rationality. In Germany, this project had a practical import, since there were then no university chairs in psychology. If experimental study of the mind was to find a place in the university, it would have to replace logic and epistemology in university chairs previously devoted to philosophy. For much of the 20th Century, most philosophers rejected the effort to give empirical scientific answers to traditional philosophical questions. The great anti-naturalist philosophers of the early 20th Century such as Frege, Husserl, or Carnap argued that science could not do without philosophical guidance as easily as it had forsaken religion. They agreed that only empirical science can describe the contingencies of nature, society, and human psychology. Naturalism and Scientific Practices 63 Philosophy nevertheless had a different and supposedly vital task. Only philosophy could clarify and justify the meaning and validity of scientific understanding. Science therefore needed philosophy to fulfill its own mission of understanding nature and human society. The competing philosophical programs of logical analysis, phenomenology, and neo-Kantian philosophy agreed that some form of philosophically comprehensible necessity must provide the norms for genuine scientific understanding. The primary topic of debates over naturalism had then changed, however, from a metaphysics of nature that rejects any- thing “supernatural,” to the semantics and epistemology of science. How did naturalism become more acceptable to philosophers later in the 20th Century? What changes in science or philosophy allowed naturalism to achieve its current philosophical prominence? Internal criticism of the anti- naturalist philosophical programs was important, but that is less relevant to my argument. I will instead highlight three developments that made naturalism a more attractive philosophical position. I will then discuss some different conceptions of philosophical naturalism that emerged from these developments, and the difficulties of integrating these conceptions. Sophisticated new scientific research programs in cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience were the first development that made naturalism more attractive to philosophers. Early 20th Century psychological theories and research programs were vulnerable to philosophical criticism. Frege, Husserl, or much later, Noam Chomsky, could readily show why these research programs were unable to explain the content of thought and language or the norms of epis- temic justification. In contrast, the new research programs in psychology and biology did propose a defensible basis for understanding content and justification, in terms of the cognitive or evolutionary functions of mental states. These scientific fields were also much better empirically grounded than their predeces- sors. Above all, however, they introduced a new relationship between natural science and philosophy. Early 20th Century naturalists sought to replace philosophy with empirical research in psychology. Contemporary naturalists instead typically propose philosophical theories for which cognitive psychology, evolutionary biology or neuroscience provide important resources. Naturalists now want to use science to do important philosophical work that empirical science alone could not replace. Science provides philosophers with new empirical and conceptual tools to help understand thought, language and knowledge philosophically. Moreover, these scientific resources enhance the legitimacy of naturalist philosophy. Naturalists can now plausibly claim to replace mere philosophical specu- lation with empirically grounded philosophical research. A second major development occurred within the philosophy of science. Earlier opponents of naturalism argued that only philosophy could account for norms of scientific justification and understanding. Historical and contemporary studies of scientific research showed, however, that the sciences often did not 64 Joseph Rouse fit philosophical claims about how science ought to be done. The failure of logical empiricist philosophy of science was the most widely discussed example, but phenomenological accounts of science encountered similar problems. The even- tual response of most philosophers to conflicts between philosophical norms and scientific practice was to accept the self-sufficiency of the sciences. If scientific work conflicts with philosophical accounts of science, we should revise our philosophy. Philosophy of science has no standing to legislate norms governing science. Some philosophers still do offer general philosophical accounts of science, but their accounts now typically defer to how science is done. For example, recent

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