"Placement" Problems -- A Naturalist Responds

Metaphysics & Epistemology
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Good. If I may, this would be the equivalent of Price’s “derived in some sense from a scientific picture, or at the very least be reducible to such a picture.”

Again, the question is about instantiation: whether a network of meaning can be in some sense discovered or grounded in the physical world.

Now Price’s response is to agree with you. His “subject naturalism” is very similar to what you’re talking about, I think. But notice that where you originally saw the “false dichotomy” was when I described object naturalism – that it appears to require that naturalism be true of objects in the world in order to be meaningful, and not merely a theory about how humans think and talk. I was trying to show why that kind of naturalism is problematic, just as Price does, and just as you do, I would say. All three of us agree that if naturalism about items like meaning, truth, morality, et al., is to be coherent, it can’t be accomplished by trying to place these items qua items in the world that science studies. Something needs to be placed or instantiated there, but it isn’t a physical item like an electron.

You and Price go on to make the linguistic interpretation as discussed in my OP. With subject naturalism, we’re no longer talking about items in the world, but about the terms we use – how they become meaningful, part of a “semantic network”. That’s what gets instantiated. I think Price would probably agree with you that “these semantic relationships can be meaningful, and ultimately guide action, just by virtue of the structure of their self-contained semantic networks.”

I don’t find this completely convincing. Have we really succeeded, on this interpretation, of meaning what we want to mean by the terms in question? Or have we “naturalized” them beyond recognition? Morality/ethics, for instance, is usually taken to refer to right and wrong action. Can the “semantic web of language itself” carry the full burden of explanation? By naturalizing the term in this manner, there seems to be a danger that we have eliminated it except as a form of linguistic behavior. So my question to Price – and to you, if this analysis seems to fit for you – would be, Have we overcome the choice described here?:

IMO, this is equally exigent when the topic in question is rationality itself.

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I’m short on time today so I’m just going to respond to those things which, on a superficial perusal, seem most to relate to my presents interests.

I see the two stances―in broad terms the scientific and the phenomenological―as being just different imaginatively possible orientations or attunements. So one is prior to the other only in the local context that consist in the adoption of one orientation or the other. So, I don’t think in terms of their being a fact of the matter regarding priority.

I’m not sure what you have in mind with “threatened by internal revolution” but I’m guessing you are referring to the disruption that may occur with any radical recontextualization of knowledge and understanding.

You say the naturalist might say “I’ve got my microscope trained on the world, and I sure don’t see any logic embedded, no matter where I look”. What you have the naturalist doing here is taking the scientific objectifying comportment to a, to borrow Heideggerian terms, “present-at-hand” world. Of course on that view which sees only, as isolatable, objects that appear directly to the senses, and of course logic is not such an object.

What I was gesturing towards was instead that, on phenomenological reflection, it is possible to see that all our experience is suffused with logic from top to bottom, back to front and inside to outside. To identify anything at all is an exercise in both imagination and primal logic, as I see it. So, I’m not speaking about formal logic, which is secondary and derivative inasmuch as it is a formalization, an explication, of the more primordial logic of experience, inclduing, but not limited to, perception..

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Oh, I tend to agree – or if not logic, then conceptualization at the least. But the naturalist is not a phenomenologist or a Heidegerrian, so they won’t be satisfied. My naturalist is a bit unsubtle as I’ve depicted them (or a bit too much of a physicalist, perhaps), but I do think that to be a naturalist in Price’s sense, you have to assert that the “present-at-hand world” is fundamentally what there is. Everything else needs to be grounded in it or reduced to it.

And that’s part of why I find naturalism, of whatever variety, a questionable proposition. Neither objective nor subjective naturalism can really make sense of how the “problem topics” can retain their meaning and force if they’re pushed into the Procrustean bed of “it’s in the physical world” or “it’s just linguistic behavior.” Phenomenology sees different ways to construe experience.

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Isn’t the nature of causation at issue here? Physical causation is that a cause generates an effect or entails a consequence through an identifiable physical relationship that is in principle explicable in terms of physical or chemical laws and principles. Whereas the relationship between premise and conclusions is defined in terms of semantics. So too value-statements and meaning statements.

But then, recognising the apparent incommensurability of those two domains is the starting point of the Huw Price paper. I’ve taken the time to read it, and it’s very cleverly written. But Price’s audience are emphatically not phenomenologists or mathematical Platonists. They’re analytical philosophers who’s outlook is grounded in the presumption of ‘object-naturalism’. He then works through a number of arguments which are all intended to demonstrate that object naturalism itself contains contradictions in its own method and presumptions. And that’s a much tougher row to hoe than to criticize object naturalism from another paradigm altogether, as I’m always inclined to do.

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That makes sense to me.

Right. Our sense of what’s possible is fluid.

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A great passage from early Heidegger, which I understand in terms of an alienation of personal life in various theoretical attitudes.

When we speak of the ‘ease’ of the attitude here, we do not mean its technical carrying-out, the fulfilment of the conditions and requirements in the enactment but rather the approach to enactment itself. The situation of adapting oneself, of entering into the attitude, the attitude itself is devotion to a task, to the matter as matter. The attitude is enactment of a self-world, but precisely such a one that in it the relation is simply unconcerned about the self-world [selbstweltunbeku’mmert]. Attitude is the pushing away [Wegstellung] from the self-world. It is easy because it is absolved of the self-worldly worry, absolves itself of it, of a worry that is heavy. This ‘ease’ and ‘heaviness’ are specifically selfworldly concepts of Dasein. It is typical for contemporary life and its domination by the theoretical to pass off exactly the scientific and further matter-of-factness as the most difficult, to take the self-worldly worry lightly and to relieve oneself of it by way of being cultivated and knowledgeable, or to not take it seriously at all.

page 113

The problem of the human sciences is not a separate problem but the expression of an ultimate philosophical motive: to interpret life from out of itself, primordially. Life philosophy is for us a necessary station on the way of philosophy, in contrast to empty formal transcendental philosophy. One subsumes Dilthey under the concept of historicism and fears in him the specter of relativism; but we must lose the fear of this specter.
…
It could now be said: Certainly, philosophy can begin with a critical confrontation and thereby will be referred to the factical situation of intellectual history and in this respect will stand in factical life experience; however, it can dispense with this and immediately construct positively. In contrast, we will see that this is a fundamental illusion and that every philosophy, from its starting point onwards, in some way drags factical life experience along within its problematic - even if in an entirely hidden, un-genuine and heavily theorized way.
…
For now, it is only a thesis that factical life experience belongs to the problematic of philosophy in an entirely primordial sense, namely in a sense that hitherto was concealed and became the reason for many pseudoproblems in philosophy, further in a sense that has nothing to do with the prejudice of positivism and that is a far cry from the thesis that every philosophy has grown from its factical spiritual situation and as such is necessarily and from the outset relative.

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Good analysis. I agree, a naturalist who isn’t satisfied with object naturalism really has their work cut out for them, as Price realizes. And his move into “subject naturalism” doesn’t quite get the job done, IMO, though I don’t disagree that subject naturalism casts a wider net and can dissolve a number of object-naturalist problems.

Like you, my concerns about naturalism are coming from a different place. But I like seeing what Price and others are doing here, because we want to understand naturalism as charitably as possible, and make sure that our critiques aren’t aimed at a strawman that is no longer believed in by the naturalists themselves. And in any case, the “placement” issue is exigent whether you’re a naturalist or not, and I think his exposition of it is sympathetic and clear.

That’s part of it. But it’s not only about whether the relationship between semantic items can be considered causal in some way. It’s also about the relationship between those items and the other, obviously lawlike items that normal science studies. How can physics cause semantics? Now that’s a placement problem! I agree with your emphasis on the causal element, just noting that it goes even wider.

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Yes, conceptualization at least―but is conceptualization not basically identification and categorization, and are identification and categorization not based on logic, which is in turn based on pattern recognition?

When you say phenomenologists are not naturalists, I think it depends on what you mean by naturalism. There are certainly current projects concerned with naturalizing phenomenology.

I think ti also pays to remember that naturalism gets its sense in contrast to supernaturalism, and on that interpretation of naturalism, most phenomenologists can be counted as naturalists, including Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau Ponty.

I’m not familiar with Price―was he a phenomenologist? As I see it the present-at-hand world is the world of disinterested (in the sense of ‘impartial’, not in the sense of ‘not interested’) observation―the world of science and protoscience or everyday observation. That said, I think Heidegger is right to say that for us, the ready to hand world―the world of affordances― is primary.

But the world for us in the direct perceptual sense is the ‘visible’ world, whether that world appears implicitly in the ready to hand “transparent coping” that Heidegger suggests or appears in the context of the impartial observational comportment which includes science.

The ineliminable counterpart of that “visible” world is the “invisible” world―the world imagined as independent of us. The latter is open only to the imagination, since anything perceptible cannot be counted as belonging to anything but the world as it variously appears, that is the visible world.

I see no reason not to include the social/cultural world as a part of the natural world. Other social animals also have their societies, and we count those as natural―so why not our own?.

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Is there a presumed need to stack things ? As if we must stack on semantics on top of physics, even though physics presumably means something.

Life is a race around the hermeneutic circle.

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Let me change the verb and ask: Is there a presumed need to ground things? I think the answer to that is yes. Metaphysics is largely about what does or does not ground what, and why. One can reject the idea that semantics ought to be arranged hierarchically in relation to physics, but in doing is, one is still saying something about grounding.

Amen to that! At least, this time around the race course.

I’m really not sure, and there’s a lot of debate about it. But I think we’re both saying that some kind of conceptualization or categorization seems to suffuse experience.

Right, if we hark back to that original use of “naturalism,” it would include anyone who wants to push back against using theological concepts in philosophy.

No, he’s an analytic philosopher of science. He had a semi-bestseller back in the '90s: Time’s Arrow and Archimedes’ Point: New Directions for the Physics of Time.

This reminds me of Sellars’ distinction between the scientific image and the manifest image. Price would argue, on behalf of his version of naturalism, that the manifest image, the world of affordances, may be primary for us but must defer to the scientific image in terms of explanation.

Yes, this seems reasonable. And this is why there’s a placement problem at all: How is it possible, on any sense of “natural” that is science-based, for items like meaning or aesthetic value to co-inhabit the world of electrons? Something has to give, it would seem. Either our use of “natural” needs radical alteration and expansion, or else what is in fact natural must somehow give rise to culture in a way that can be explained scientifically.

I think of this as one of a number of “arm-waving” problems. It seems so obvious! – How can what we humans do not be natural, as we are ourselves natural creatures? So philosophers, and thoughtful people in general, are often reduced to waving their arms and gesturing as if to say, Well, just look! That’s the way it is! But I don’t think that will do. If that is the way it is, it is a great mystery how it comes to be that way. It may be obvious that there must be an explanation, maybe even a simple one, but what the explanation is isn’t obvious at all.

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The way I think about it, if there were no logic (which would amount to ‘no schematic consistency’) to conceptualization and categorization, then they would not function―they would be useless.

I don’t see Sellar’s distinction that way. As I interpret it, both the vorhanden and the zuhanden would counts as parts of the manifest image, while the scientific image would consist in the causally based explanations of how things work, and the theories regarding the fundamental constitution of things. That said, I don’t think the distinction is perfectly clear-cut.

I don’t see this as a problem, because apart from the meaning, such as it is, that the world of electrons might have fro us, I don’t think meaning or aesthetic value really does inhabit the microphysical domain.

I don’t think there must be an explanation because I tend to see the question as incoherent―that is, based on a category error. But that’s just me―I understand that others with different basic presuppositions may see it very differently.

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I agree. One saying something, deciding on something. I think your OP is great because this is a central existential/personal issue for those who accept science and need to figure out how to fit it into the larger scheme of things, into their individual existence as a whole.

I think Sellars is too self-alienated ( with the piety of his tribe) when he calls the lifeworld the manifest image. For the sense of his own philosophy is woven into this “image.” Democritus is great as a physicist but naive as an ontologist, because he didn’t account for the forum ( the space of reasons, the institution of personhood, etc. ) in which his own atomism could be meaningful and relatively warranted. I’ve been trying to point out the “piety” of scientistic reductionism to explain how a view so internally incoherent could remain persuasive. I’ve also tried to point at the strangeness of technology’s lifeworld power —its scratching our itches — being read as implying the “unreality” of that same lifeworld.

If one chooses the lifeworld as ground, one might still say that this ground is an “abyss,” along of lines of what Braver writes in Groundless Grounds. We also have Dreyfus in Being-in-the-world.

For both Heidegger and Wittgenstein, then, the source of the intelligibility of the world is the average public practices through which alone there can be any understanding at all. What is shared is not a conceptual scheme, i.e., not a belief system that can be made explicit and justified. Not that we share a belief system that is always implicit and arbitrary. … What we share is simply our average comportment. Once a practice has been explained by appealing to what one does, no more basic explanation is possible. As Wittgenstein puts it in On Certainty: “Giving grounds [must] come to an end sometime. But the end is not an ungrounded presupposition: it is an ungrounded way of acting.” This view is entirely antithetical to the philosophical ideal of total clarity and ultimate intelligibility. Heidegger in An Introduction to Metaphysics suggests that there can be no such metaphysical grounding:
..

It remains to be seen whether the ground arrived at is really a ground, that is, whether it provides a foundation; whether it is an ultimate ground [Ur- grund]; orwhether it fails to provide a foundation and is an abyss [Ab orund] ; or whether the ground is neither one nor the other but presents only a perhaps necessary appearance of foundation —in other words, it is a nonground [Un-grund].
…
Our way seems to make intrinsic sense—a sense not captured in saying, “This is what we in the West happen to do.” What gets covered up in everyday understanding is not some deep intelligibility as the tradition has always held; it is that the ultimate “ground” of intelligibility is simply shared practices. There is no right interpretation. Average intelligibility is not inferior intelligibility; it simply obscures its own groundlessness. This is the last stage of the hermeneutics of suspicion. The only deep interpretation left is that there is no deep interpretation.

As you probably know, Rorty talks about an inescapable ethnocentrism. We start, trained as children, from the way One does things around here. It’s from “within” this training that we can gradually question it, dig for something under it. In my view, physics offers some a connection with the trans-human. Here, finally, we have an absolute solidity ! In regularities of sense experience, mathematically expressed. A strange reduction of the old god to the brute fact of patterns that are still contaminated with human sensation, still tacitly constrained by the presupposition that humans can communicate with one another and trust one another’s reports. But the itch for transpersonal demands a reification of the wave function, the excision of the measurer and any embarrassing reminder that nature, as intelligible, is part of culture.

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I agree that we should seek for scientific explanations, but perhaps we should not expect science in general to be like physics. As I see it, Gadamer’s Truth and Method is a great work of science.

On the other hand, I personally believe that the “total fact” of the world is, in principle, beyond explanation. Why ? Because explanation, as typically understood, links entities to entities. But the system of entities as a whole allows for no “external” entity to explain it. If physicists find a TOE, that’s great. But then we have a brute fact expressed mathematically, a wonderful compression of experience that we trust to imply reliable predictions, when and only when we can manage the measurements and calculations necessary for this or that prediction.

In my experience, “explanations” of the “total fact of the world” tend to be myths or stories that provide heroic roles for those who adopt them. Perhaps most of us, however cynical, still live by such myths.

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I agree with you, but I’m tempted to say that the “method” precisely guarantees this. Filtration is done on the input side, on what we measure. I think this filtration is one of the greatest ideas our species ever had, just to be clear.

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That makes sense. My previous hesitancy was more about whether categorization et al. are based on logic. I think this is where a lot of the debate arises: What grounds what? Is possible we form our logic(s) based on a human capacity for categorization, rather than the reverse? This would be implying that logic is caused by our capacities, rather than providing a reason for why we have them.

Good, thanks. You may well be right. What matters, regardless of what labels we choose, is that these ways of encountering and describing the world are important to notice and discriminate.

Yes, perhaps pushing the issue down to physics is tendentious. But a naturalist has to say that meaning and value can be placed somewhere in the natural world, yes? Either as actual items in that world, or as part of how we talk about the world? So, for me, the problem remains.

This is a good observation. I think the question is, would a naturalist countenance the kind of category error you’re suggesting? For there to be such an error, there needs to be two categories. And for the naturalist, there’s only one. To say, “It’s a category error because values aren’t in the world of electrons at all” forces the response, “But then what world are they in? Didn’t we (naturalists) agree that the natural world is fundamentally what there is?”

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Yes, which might lead one to posit math as what is ultimately trans-human and solid.

Agreed. That would be what I meant by the first alternative: to radically alter the traditional picture of what science says and does.

Staying with this idea of freeing science from some of its characteristic roles: Might we say that the total fact of the world, while inexplicable scientifically, can nonetheless be described scientifically?

Say more about this? What is the “method”? In Gadamer’s sense?

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Yes. Described. For instance, a TOE would “max out” physics. Likewise philosophy can continue to intensify the “self-consciousness” of rationality.

I take Gadamer to be critiquing the idea of a dead, fixed final method. What I meant was the way natural sciences “access” the lifeworld.

Physical science is based on a measurement process that ignores most of a situation to assign a quantity. Perhaps I determine the weight of the Mona Lisa in grams. Or I count the number of words in Joyce’s Ulysses.

“Full” ordinary perception in the life world includes “value.” Joyce’s words “signify” richly in reader-relevant ways. But the observer is a generic witness who applies a technique to generate a datum from a far richer lifeworld situation. So the scientific image is designed to be “the world from the POV of a generic measurer who ignores ethical and aesthetic value.” Moreover the “quality” of the perception is put aside too, so that we are left with only numerical ashes.

So we build the scientific image by filtering out “cultural meaning” and then find ourselves alienated as we “fall into” our own pragmatically useful reduction as a substrate reality.

38

OK, I get you. It’s an important distinction. But notice:

This formulation of what physical science does says nothing about whether “most of a situation” – the stuff that measurement ignores – is also accessible to a generic observer. But surely it is, just a different genus. The value of Ulysses is not a personal matter, decidable by comparing people’s opinions about it. So our now-familiar placement problem can’t be addressed by saying, “Science’s forte is to measure things that are generic – objective in that sense,” since cultural measurements make similar claims.

So while I agree completely that “full ordinary perception in the life world includes value,” we need to notice what a remarkable thing that is. What should we say about a “life world” which seems to contain, objectively, things like aesthetic value and yet cannot be found using the inquiries of science? Once again, how do we place it? How do we avoid a stipulated dualism that gestures toward a solution by saying, “Well, there’s two worlds, and we mustn’t mix them up”?

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For me it still looks like we insist that physical science ignores most of the objective (inter-personal) world in order to be physical science. As Einstein puts it, the stream of experience contains all kinds of richness, buy physics ignores everything but sensations that are classified for now as perceptions rather than hallucinations. Basically a phenomenalist is not tempted to see a useful reduction ( obviously a map ) as the “bottom” layer of reality.

However I completely grant that many intensely feel physical science to “punch through” the human altogether. But I’m tempted to read scientistic ontologies as reveling in this. So I try to look at the itch that is scratched.

40

Have you seen this ? Eddington’s two tables ?

I have settled down to the task of writing these lectures and have drawn up my chairs to my two tables. Two tables! Yes; there are duplicates of every object about me - two tables, two chairs, two pens.

This is not a very profound beginning to a course which ought to reach transcendent levels of scientific philosophy. But we cannot touch bedrock immediately; we must scratch a bit at the surface of things first. And whenever I begin to scratch the first thing I strike is my two tables.

One of them has been familiar to me from earliest years. It is a commonplace object of that environment which I call the world. How shall I describe it? It has extension; it is comparatively permanent; it is coloured; above all it is substantial By substantial I do not merely mean that it does not collapse when I lean upon it; I mean that it is constituted of “substance” and by that word I am trying to convey to you some conception of its intrinsic nature. It is a thing; not like space, which is a mere negation; nor like time, which is - Heaven knows what! But that will not help you to my meaning because it is the distinctive characteristic of a “thing” to have this substantiality, and I do not think substantiality can be described better than by saying that it is the kind of nature exemplified by an ordinary table. And so we go round in circles. After all if you are a plain commonsense man, not too much worried with scientific scruples, you will be confident that you understand the nature of an ordinary table. I have even heard of plain men who had the idea that they could better understand the mystery of their own nature if scientists would discover a way of explaining it in terms of the easily comprehensible nature of a table.

Table No. 2 is my scientific table. It is a more recent acquaintance and I do not feel so familiar with it. It does not belong to the world previously mentioned that world which spontaneously appears around me when I open my eyes, though how much of it is objective and how much subjective I do not here consider. It is part of a world which in more devious ways has forced itself on my attention. My scientific table is mostly emptiness. Sparsely scattered in that emptiness are numerous electric charges rushing about with great speed; but their combined bulk amounts to less than a billionth of the bulk of the table itself. Notwithstanding its strange construction it turns out to be an entirely efficient table. It supports my writing paper as satisfactorily as table No. 1; for when I lay the paper on it the little electric particles with their headlong speed keep on hitting the underside, so that the paper is maintained in shuttlecock fashion at a nearly steady level. If I lean upon this table I shall not go through; or, to be strictly accurate, the chance of my scientific elbow going through my scientific table is so excessively small that it can be neglected in practical life. Reviewing their properties one by one, there seems to be nothing to choose between the two tables for ordinary purposes; but when abnormal circumstances befall, then my scientific table shows to advantage. If the house catches fire my scientific table will dissolve quite naturally into scientific smoke, whereas my familiar table undergoes a metamorphosis of its substantial nature which I can only regard as miraculous.

There is nothing substantial about my second table. It is nearly all empty space - space pervaded, it is true, by fields of force, but these are assigned to the category of “influences”, not of “things”. Even in the minute part which is not empty we must not transfer the old notion of substance. In dissecting matter into electric charges we have travelled far from that picture of it which first gave rise to the conception of substance, and the meaning of that conception - if it ever had any - has been lost by the way. The whole trend of modern scientific views is to break down the separate categories of “things”, “influences”, “forms”, etc., and to substitute a common background of all experience. Whether we are studying a material object, a magnetic field, a geometrical figure, or a duration of time, our scientific information is summed up in measures; neither the apparatus of measurement nor the mode of using it suggests that there is anything essentially different in these problems. The measures themselves afford no ground for a classification by categories. We feel it necessary to concede some background to the measures - an external world; but the attributes of this world, except in so far as they are reflected in the measures, are outside scientific scrutiny. Science has at last revolted against attaching the exact knowledge contained in these measurements to a traditional picture gallery of conceptions which convey no authentic information of the background and obtrude irrelevancies into the scheme of knowledge.

To me it’s just obvious, at this point anyway, that there’s just the one damned table. If the scientific table wasn’t also the lifeworld table, then science would have no power in the lifeworld and therefore neither prestige nor value. Excepting maybe pure math as a deductive science.