Ontological Agnosticism and Solipsism

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Hans: I see. Since I care not to comment on the plight of the solipsist, you conclude I must be one! There’s a world of difference, you know, between remaining silent or agnostic about a position and accepting it as true. Again, I defer to von Glasersfeld:

I submit that the rejection of all claims to know experiencer- independent objects or relations has nothing to do with solipsism, because solipsism designates a belief about being whereas the agnostic’s rejection concerns knowing.65

Russell: I rather like this quote from von Glasersfeld. It clarifies for me a central problem with your invocation of agnosticism against realism.

Hans: Please, enlighten us.

Russell: You can help me with this one. Wouldn’t you consider solipsism, as a “designator of beliefs,” an epistemological-ontological thesis that limits both what there is – and, therefore, what can be known – to the lone subject?

Hans: I prefer von Glasersfeld’s characterization of solipsism as a purely ontological position; one that says nothing at all about knowing, and is thus of no interest to the ontological agnostic.

Alison: A belief that says nothing at all about knowing? Is that even possible? I think we agreed earlier that all knowledge begins with belief; and, moreover, Russell argued fairly convincingly that to believe something – anything – is to harbor a provisional knowledge claim about some part of the world. Beliefs about anything seem to be at least partially about knowing.

Russell: Again, you get it just right, Alison, there can be no purely ontological form of solipsism – or any other view – since it is, after all, a view.

Hans: Well, even if ontology overlaps with epistemology in some sense, that fails to undermine von Glasersfeld’s insistence that his agnosticism – as an epistemological matter – simply tells us what we can and cannot rationally believe.

79 CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Russell: I’m afraid the relationship is perfectly reciprocal: just as all ontology has an epistemic dimension, there can be no purely epistemic interpretation of agnosticism – or any other view – since it is, after all, a view of something.66

Alison: So, the agnostic who believes that there is insufficient reason to make knowledge claims about some aspect of the world is doing both epistemology and ontology?

Russell: I think that’s undeniably true. Ontological agnostics – like everyone else who does epistemology – are telling us what we can and can’t know about what there is.

Hans: Be that as it may, my agnostic scruples demand that I neither affirm nor deny the existence of all things external to the subject and his or her constructions. You seriously hope to describe that as a view of “what there is”?

Russell: Yes, your suspension does entail a minimal position on being. For instance, does your view not share with Descartes the reasonable – and I think unavoidable – assumption that the subject-who-constructs exists at each moment of construction?

Hans: Though I’m wary of what you will infer from this simple admission, I suppose it does.

Russell: Then the most radical of constructivists join the most global of agnostics in assuming this minimal ontology of the knower and its constructions, just as, in the words of critical realist Ray Bhaskar: “all philosophy, explicitly or tacitly, honestly or surreptitiously... deposits, projects or presupposes a real-ity.”67

Alison: I think you suggested earlier, Russell, that there could no more be an epistemology without metaphysics than there could be thoughts without thinkers.

Russell: Exactly.

Hans: Let us pretend that my view is indeed infected with this kind of minimal ontology. Why, then, do you continue to say that I might be a solipsist?

Russell: Well, because constructivism’s ontology still leaves it vulnerable to that charge.

Hans: How is that so?