Living Skepticism: Essays in Epistemology and Beyond (Brill Studies in Skepticism, 5) 9004525408, 9789004525405

Table of contents :
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: Skepticism as a Way of Thinking
References
Chapter 1 Skepticism and Metaphysics
References
Chapter 2 No Moral Ground: Political Content and the Emptiness of Ethics
1 Introduction
2 Judgmental Morality: God’s Inescapable Presence
3 Aesthetic Ethics
4 Meta-Political Ethics
5 Only Harmful without It
References
Chapter 3 A Material Defense of Inductive Inference
1 Introduction
2 Skepticism about Universal Logics of Inductive Inference
2.1 Inductive Generalization
2.2 Hypothetical Induction
2.3 Probabilistic Induction
3 Material Theory of Induction
4 A General Argument for the Material Theory of Induction
5 Illustration: Galileo’s Law of Fall
6 The Superfluity of Formal Theory
7 Conclusion
References
Chapter 4 The Recovery of the Human: Cavell, Skepticism, Romanticism
1
2
3
4
References
Chapter 5 Skepticism and Naturalism of Other Minds: Remarks on the (In)visibility of Other Minds
1 Introduction
2 Naturalism and the Mind
3 Are Other Minds (In)visible?
4 Reading Others
References
Chapter 6 A Defense of Transcendental Arguments
1 Introduction
2 The Transcendental Argument and the Refutation of Humean Skepticism
3 Philosophical vs Real Skepticism
4 Skepticism as Underdetermination
5 Skepticism as Underdetermination and A Posteriori Inferences
6 Transcendental Arguments and Objectivity
7 Conclusion
References
Chapter 7 Content-Determinacy Skepticism and Phenomenal Intentionality
1 Introduction
2 Searle on Quine and Davidson
3 Updated Worries about Content-Determinacy
4 Searle on the Sources of Content-Determinacy
5 Phenomenal Intentionality and Externalistic Intentionality
6 Phenomenal Intentionality as the Ground of Content-Determinacy
7 Determinate Phenomenal Intentionality and the Whole Hard Problem
Appendix
References
Chapter 8 Skeptical Politics
References
Chapter 9 Fallible Knowing, Fallible Acting
1 Introduction
2 Infallibilism? Fallibilism?
3 McDowell’s Categorial Strategy
4 A Fuller Fallibilism?
5 Knowledge as Capacity: The Basic Idea
6 Knowledge as Capacity: An Example
7 Belief
8 Explaining Some Current Epistemological Ideas
9 Knowledge as Gradable
10 Knowledge as Both Factive and Fallible
11 Some Skeptical Reasoning
12 Picturing Ourselves as Knowers
References
Index

Citation preview

Living Skepticism

Brill Studies in Skepticism Editors Diego Machuca (conicet, Argentina) Duncan Pritchard (University of California, Irvine) Advisory Board John Greco (Saint Louis University) John Christian Laursen (University of California, Riverside) Casey Perin (University of California, Irvine) Dominik Perler (Humboldt-​Universitat zu Berlin) Claudine Tiercelin (Collège de France)

volume 5

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/bss

Living Skepticism Essays in Epistemology and Beyond Edited by

Stephen Hetherington and David Macarthur

LEIDEN | BOSTON

The Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data is available online at https://cata​log.loc.gov lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022033676​

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-​typeface. issn 2215-​1 77x isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​5 2540-​5 (hardback) isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​5 2547-​4 (e-​book) Copyright 2022 by Stephen Hetherington and David Macarthur. Published by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau and V&R unipress. Koninklijke Brill nv reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-use and/​or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill nv via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-​free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents  Notes on Contributors vii Introduction: Skepticism as a Way of Thinking 1 Stephen Hetherington and David Macarthur 1  Skepticism and Metaphysics 10 Barry Allen 2  No Moral Ground: Political Content and the Emptiness of Ethics 31 Anat Matar 3  A Material Defense of Inductive Inference 54 John D. Norton 4  The Recovery of the Human: Cavell, Skepticism, Romanticism 73 Nikolas Kompridis 5  Skepticism and Naturalism of Other Minds: Remarks on the (In)visibility of Other Minds 107 David Macarthur 6  A Defense of Transcendental Arguments 121 Stephen L. White 7  Content-​Determinacy Skepticism and Phenomenal Intentionality 139 Terry Horgan and George Graham 8  Skeptical Politics 161 Andrew Norris 9  Fallible Knowing, Fallible Acting 179 Stephen Hetherington  Index 201

Notes on Contributors Barry Allen is Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy, McMaster University, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. His work in philosophy concentrates on the concept of knowledge, which he studies from interdisciplinary and multi-​cultural perspectives, addressing a wide audience in contemporary and comparative philosophy and the human sciences. His books explore the relationship of art to knowledge and knowledge to civilization, and compare Chinese and Western ideas about knowledge. He is the author of Truth in Philosophy (1993), Knowledge and Civilization (2004), Art and Technology in Human Experience (2008), Knowledge in Chinese Tradition (2015), and A Philosophical Look at the Asian Martial Arts (2015). George Graham is Professor of Philosophy at Georgia State University. His areas of specialization include philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychopathology (philosophy, psychiatry, mental illness), consciousness and intentionality. He has co-​edited Person to Person (Temple University, 1989); Philosophical Psychopathology (mit, 1994); Philosophy Then and Now (Blackwell, 1998); Companion to Cognitive Science (Blackwell, 1998); When Self-​Consciousness Breaks: Alien Voices and Inserted Thoughts (mit, 2000); The Oxford Textbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry (Oxford, 2006); Identifying the Mind: Selected Essays of U. T. Place (Oxford, 2004); Reconceiving Schizophrenia (Oxford, 2007); The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry (2013); Addiction and Responsibility (mit, 2011). He is also author of Philosophy of Mind: An Introduction (Blackwell, 1998); The Disordered Mind (Routledge, 2013), The Abraham Dilemma: A Divine Delusion (Oxford, 2015). Stephen Hetherington is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. He is Editor-​in-​Chief of the Australasian Journal of Philosophy and of the series Elements in Epistemology, for Cambridge University Press. Author of more than one hundred papers, he is also the author of research monographs –​more recently, Knowledge and the Gettier Problem (Cambridge University Press, 2016) –​and introductory books –​most recently, What Is Epistemology? (Polity Press, 2019). He has also edited, co-​edited, and general-​ edited many books –​most recently, with N.D. Smith, What the Ancients Offer to Contemporary Epistemology (Routledge, 2020).

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Terry Horgan is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona. His areas of specialization include metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind and metaethics. He is the author of Connectionism and the Philosophy of Psychology [with J. Tienson] (Bradford/​m .i.t., 1996); Austere Realism: Contextual Semantics Meets Minimal Ontology [with M. Potrč] (mit, 2008); The Epistemological Spectrum: At the Interface of Cognitive Science and Conceptual Analysis [with D. Henderson] (Oxford, 2011); and Essays on Paradoxes (Oxford, 2017). Nikolas Kompridis was formerly Research Professor in Philosophy and Political Thought and Foundation Director of the Institute for Social Justice at the Australian Catholic University. His areas of specialisation are 19th and 20th century European Philosophy; Critical Theory, aesthetics and political philosophy. He is the author of The Aesthetic Turn (Bloomsbury, 2014), Critique and Disclosure (mit Press, 2006), and Philosophical Romanticism (Routledge, 2006). He is currently completing two books on Aesthetics and Political Theory, and Critique and Receptivity. David Macarthur is Associate Professor in Philosophy at The University of Sydney. He has published widely on liberal naturalism, metaphysical quietism, skepticism, common sense, perception, ordinary language, and philosophy of art (especially architecture, photography and film). He edited Hilary & Ruth-​Anna Putnam, Pragmatism as a Way of Life (Harvard University Press, 2017) and, with Mario De Caro, co-​edited: Naturalism in Question (Harvard University Press, 2004); Naturalism and Normativity (Columbia University Press, 2010); Hilary Putnam, Philosophy in an Age of Science (Harvard University Press, 2012); and Hilary Putnam: Philosophy as Dialogue (Harvard University Press, 2022). Anat Matar is senior lecturer of philosophy in Tel Aviv University. Her areas of specialization include philosophy of language, political philosophy, philosophy and literature, modernism and postmodernism, meta-​ philosophy; the philosophies of Wittgenstein, Dummett, Derrida, and Lyotard. She is also a political activist advocating for: Palestinian political prisoners; resistance to serve in the Israeli army; democratization of academia; criticism of Zionism; and the 1967 Occupation of the Palestinian Territories. She is the author of From Dummett’s Philosophical Perspective (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1997); Modernism and

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the Language of Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2006); and The Poverty of Ethics (London: Verso, 2022). Andrew Norris is Professor of Political Science and Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His areas of specialization include political philosophy, skepticism, and the thought of Stanley Cavell. He is the editor of three books: Truth and Democracy (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), The Claim to Community: Essays on Stanley Cavell and Political Philosophy (Stanford University Press, 2006), and Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer (Duke University Press, 2005); as well as the author of Becoming Who We Are: Politics and Practical Philosophy in the Work of Stanley Cavell (Oxford University Press, 2017). John D. Norton is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. His areas of specialization include the history and philosophy of physics and the general philosophy of science. He is the author of a web-​book Einstein for Everyone, and will soon publish two related books, The Material Theory of Induction and The Large-​Scale Structure of Inductive Inference. Stephen L. White is Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University. He did his undergraduate work in philosophy and mathematics at Berkeley and a second ba in philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford. He studied filmmaking briefly at ucla before returning to Berkeley for his Ph.D. in philosophy. His areas of specialization include philosophy of mind, the self, transcendental argument, and skepticism. His current interests outside philosophy include film and photography. He is the author of Unity of the Self (2001).

Introduction: Skepticism as a Way of Thinking Stephen Hetherington and David Macarthur Skepticism has always been a fundamental way of thinking philosophically, being both a way of leading a philosophical life and helping to create the conditions for constructive philosophy in ancient Greece. And skepticism inaugurated modern philosophy in Descartes’s Meditations—​a skepticism whose world-​consuming power Descartes’s was unable to contain. But the contemporary philosophical reception of skepticism, whether ancient or modern, seems to have largely forgotten, and left underexplored, its preeminent place in the history and current incarnation of philosophy. This is no doubt partly due to our living in an age of science, for the typical scientific attitude to skepticism is that it is an “overreaction” (Quine 1981: 475), as if it could be relatively easily tamed by a due respect for the sober discoveries and technological advances of the sciences; particularly the natural sciences. Within modern philosophy, skepticism is widely understood as a distinctively epistemological problem that allegedly threatens the epistemic status (whether meriting the title of knowledge or belief) of some significant domain of claims (regarding the external world, other minds, the past, morality, religion, logic, etc.) on the basis of skeptical arguments purporting to show that we lack appropriate rational entitlement to them. But the problem raised by skepticism is more often than not treated as a dispensable intellectual puzzle that, when one steps out of the study, one does not really need to take all that seriously. The figure of “the sceptic” typically plays the role of a merely notional figure in philosophical debate, standing for a theoretical position that no one actually believes, and addressed only in the manner of a paradox to be overcome, a puzzle to be solved. External world skepticism provides a telling example of this. No one takes seriously the thought that there is no world external to their mind; or, in other words, that solipsism is true. Such skepticism is said to be “unliveable” even if it poses a prima facie challenge to the rationality of our “common sense” knowledge.1 John Greco astutely notes (2000: xiii) that “nearly all philosophers have a story about why skepticism is wrong”; and those stories are almost always purely intellectual, not really reflecting on skepticism and how it might reflect, 1 For example, in Hume’s view, our natural form of life cures us of the malady of skepticism: “I find myself absolutely and necessarily determin’d to live and talk and act like other people in the common affairs of life” (1896: Bk.1.iv.vii).

© Stephen Hetherington and David Macarthur, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004525474_002

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in turn, on our actual human existence and life in and away from our studies. Typically, an epistemologist argues with a skeptical conclusion not because any of her colleagues holds it or thinks it correct, but simply in order to understand better the non-​skeptical position that she and others always took every sane person to hold anyway. Skeptical arguments are thought to be misguided, simply on the ground that they lead to a skeptical conclusion—​even if, as in the famous case of G.E. Moore, one cannot say definitively what is wrong with such a conclusion on independent grounds.2 Consequently, it is never really in doubt that we have the knowledge or beliefs that “the sceptic” is attacking, nor it is supposed that somehow we should not have them. Skepticism’s being wrong in some way—​at least false, perhaps (subtly) incoherent—​is the default assumption. We could say that, for the vast majority of contemporary philosophers, skepticism is dead on arrival, with subsequent epistemological attention to it amounting only to an autopsy, of forensic interest at most. With this brief sketch of skepticism’s place in contemporary epistemology in place, we can state the aim of this book, which is to encourage philosophers both within and beyond epistemology to see skepticism not as dead (as it were), but as quite alive, with much potential for vigor, and as needing only a new orientation and some words of encouragement to once again take a central place in our thinking. Those words appear here. This book is an invitation to view skepticism from a fresh philosophical perspective, welcoming new ways of being a skeptic and of learning from skepticism that have significant implications for contemporary philosophy. Or, as we wish to put it, this book invites you to consider examples of skepticism that are alive! If we look into the philosophical past, several philosophers and at least one school of skeptical philosophy stand out as trailblazers for our project: –​ Ancient Pyrrhonism, as practiced, most notably, by the physician Sextus Empiricus (1994), was promoted as a dialectical skill of showing, for any target thesis as to what is really true, that any reasons favoring the thesis can be counterbalanced with equally plausible reasons against it, disfavoring it. The resulting suspension of judgment (epoché) on the topic—​a suspension sketched time and again in case after case by Sextus—​had the practical benefit that one could live in a more tranquil way, freed from endless argumentative disputes 2 Moore freely admits that external world skepticism is irrefutable (1922: 159): “Any valid argument which can be brought against it must be of the nature of a petitio principii: it must beg the question at issue.” And, when it comes to his “proof of an external world,” Moore uses the premise “Here is a hand” but admits that he is unable to prove this premise; and, although he takes himself to have “conclusive evidence” for it, he also admits that “I could not tell you what all my evidence is” (Baldwin 1993: 169–​170).

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about the reasons both for and against this (or indeed any) thesis as to how the world really is. –​ Michel de Montaigne’s engagement with Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Pyrrhonism had the effect of making him a mitigated skeptic who adopts a moderate or undogmatic attitude in all matters. Human ignorance and fallibility must be acknowledged and become part of one’s ways of believing or knowing: “I love terms which soften and tone down the rashness of what we put forward: terms such as ‘perhaps’, ‘somewhat’, ‘some’, ‘they say’, ‘I think’ and so on.” (Montaigne, 1987: 1766). The essay form that he pioneered is well-​suited to questioning, curiosity, unassertiveness, and critical inquiry without presumption—​an ideal form of skeptical philosophical writing. –​ In the Treatise, David Hume (2007) takes himself to have shown that skepticism about the external world, the self and induction is rationally irrefutable. And he notoriously admits to philosophizing with “a small tincture of Pyrrhonism” to remind himself, in all of his reflections, “of the universal perplexity and confusion which is inherent in human nature” (1999: 208). Skepticism reveals “the whimsical nature of mankind,” tempering dogmatism in personal and moral matters and fanaticism in the social and political realm (1999: Sect 12. Part 2.23, 205). –​ The classical pragmatist C.S. Peirce diagnoses Descartes’s search for complete certainty—​or indubitability—​as nothing but a dream: “what has been indubitable on one day has often proved on the morrow to be false” (1955: 297). More generally, he dismisses certainty as a criterion in epistemology: “If I were really convinced I should have done with reasoning and require no test of certainty (1955: 229).”3 We might say, then, that pragmatist epistemology is built on a skepticism of Cartesian certainty. But such examples of methodologically significant skepticism—​based on an awareness of human frailty or fallibility or the self-​destructive powers of reason—​are relatively few, and certainly far between. Moreover, these examples do not exhaust the possible ways of giving voice to the idea that skepticism is alive.

3 On the classical pragmatist approach to epistemology, the skeptical claim is that we cannot know anything with Cartesian (absolute) certainty. The protection of common sense and scientific forms of knowing, hopefully achieved by an idea of knowing fallibly, is bought at the cost of skepticism about absolute certainty (that is, indubitability). Scientific and technological advances thus depend on a form of skepticism. For a defense of conceiving knowledge in pragmatist terms, and espying within pragmatist thinking, for all of its antiskeptical power, shades of skeptical thinking, see Hetherington (2011: 65–​70).

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We have therefore brought together leading thinkers, from a range of philosophical fields, both within and beyond the bounds of epistemology, who look upon skeptical ideas and arguments anew; not as historical curiosities or dialectical strawmen. They are united in the belief that the interest of skepticism is not exhausted by being dissolved or refuted en route to establishing a non-​ skeptical picture of the world and our knowledge of it. The volume contains two main ways of regarding skepticism as alive: (1) Some of our contributors argue that skepticism, in one form or another, might be true, so that one could declare an allegiance to skepticism as part of an enlightened form of life. For example, if one is a skeptic about metaphysics—​a topic explored here by Barry Allen—​then one will see the whole subject of philosophy very differently in so far as one will not then see philosophy’s primary aim as the construction of a ‘true’ metaphysics;4 (2) Other contributors argue that even if one cannot accept skepticism there remains a ‘truth’ in skepticism; properly interpreted, it contains insights that are true enough to profoundly change one’s philosophical outlook or practice. For instance, in his chapter Stephen Hetherington’s encounter with some versions of skepticism leads to an improved conception of knowledge, while also thereby opening the door to improved conceptions of skepticism itself. It should be apparent from this description that we are not simply attempting to bring back the ancient skeptical vision of skepticism as a way of life. There is no attempt here to live life as a Pyrrhonian without invoking any knowledge or reason-​based belief. A skeptic about, say, metaphysics or philosophical ethics need not be a skeptic in other domains. Moreover, in the outlook of Stanley Cavell, as Macarthur and Kompridis show, skepticism may go largely unnoticed, being a mode of interpreting our compromised relations to one another without being a self-​consciously adopted attitude. Without attempting to give a full summary of the papers collected here, we would like to briefly sketch the different ways in which our authors undertake the invigorating and rewarding challenge of bringing skepticism to life in one way or another. Andrew Norris’s historical survey of the politics of skepticism as well as forms of political skepticism broaches the idea that skepticism haunts our democratic polis in so far as the vast majority of citizens actually know very little about the policies of their elected representatives; and they and their leaders lack the effective knowledge to solve the hypercomplex social and political problems that we collectively face in a globalized world.5 This is skepticism of 4 For a defense of metaphysical skepticism see Macarthur (2016). 5 For an elaboration and defense of this form of political skepticism and the hypercomplex global economic factors that our lives now depend upon, see Kitching (2020). For an

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the political. But there is also a politics of skepticism. For example, as recent Trump presidency in the USA demonstrated, it is possible to lead a democratic country while openly attacking knowledge, and scientific expertise and the very notion of truth itself (e.g. as “fake news”). Sometimes, a form of skepticism goes unnoticed, because it is a ubiquitous condition of everyday life. David Macarthur argues that many of us are skeptics about the reality of other minds, in so far as we follow Descartes in denying that other minds are open to being seen and heard and touched.6 On this account, one’s mind is, from the point of view of others, an “invisible object” that can be known only, if at all, indirectly, through causing appropriate bodily behaviors. This widely accepted view is related to what Stanley Cavell calls “soul-​blindness,” which he characterizes as “lack[ing] the capacity to see other human beings as human beings” (1979: 378). Cavell goes on to suggest that there is a general (largely unnoticed?) failure to fully or adequately acknowledge others, which he speaks of as “living our skepticism of each other” (1979: 440). So, what first presents itself to us as an epistemological difficulty (traditional “other minds skepticism”) is ultimately revealed as the practical difficulty of (our responsibility for) knowing others, and the serious ethical implications of our small and large failures to adequately meet this difficulty. As Cavell puts it, “skepticism about other minds is not skepticism but tragedy” (1979: xxiii). Cavell’s analysis of the lived consequences of skepticism’s various denials of others led him, unexpectedly, into a deep and unpredictable engagement with romanticism that appeared out of nowhere in the final part of The Claim of Reason. Nikolas Kompridis carefully and critically tracks Cavell’s concerted attempts to make sense of his romantic turn, demonstrating how his account of skepticism became increasingly dependent on and altered by his unfolding account of romanticism. Cavell’s engagement with romanticism and romantic literature pushed him “to discover the problem of the other,” and to rethink philosophy’s relationship to its other—​literature. But romanticism pushed Cavell yet further, to recognize that answering the question of how to respond to skepticism first requires that we free our understanding of skepticism from traditional philosophy’s monopoly over it. Cavell called romanticism’s response to skepticism the “recovery of the human,” a recovery that his “romantic” arguments made continuous with the recovery of the human and non-​human world. Inspired by Anscombe’s well-​known skepticism about moral obligation in a non-​theistic context, Anat Matar defends an even more far-​reaching skepticism articulation of the problems of hypercomplexity (and hyperspecialization) for social life see Millgram (2015). 6 As evidence for its wide acceptance, see Avramides (2020).

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about the content of morality in general, with profound implications for moral and political practice. She goes on to argue that “the emptiness of moral discourse serves the mighty as a convenient tool for whitewashing political crimes.” In this case, the truth of moral skepticism is tied to the important work of making available an effective radical politics. Matar thus uses skepticism to demonstrate the relative priority of the political over the moral; a surprising and provocative conclusion to say the least. Metaphysical skepticism is another form of skepticism that can reconfigure one’s entire philosophical outlook in so far as it is possible to see philosophy—​ following Wittgenstein (2009) amongst others—​as an activity of conceptual clarification rather than the activity of constructing a “true” metaphysics. Allen’s survey paper discusses this often-​neglected counter-​metaphysical tradition in philosophy, along with its philosophical significance. As in the case of moral skepticism, metaphysical skepticism can be seen as a way of achieving the Socratic goal of living the reflective life. Metaphysics affects our experience of others as is evident in our tendency to think in terms of stereotypes. And morality has often been supposed to rest upon a metaphysical foundation. So, both moral and metaphysical skepticism (or both together) make available a qualified recovery of the ancient skeptical idea that skepticism can be a way of life and thought with important practical consequences. Of course, talking of metaphysics naturally puts us in mind of language, thought, and knowledge—​all traditional targets of skeptical attack. Naturally, therefore, the book includes some engagements with such topics. John Norton brings his eminence as a philosopher of physics to this challenge, and the result is enlightening. One of epistemology’s more venerable exercises in skeptical thinking is Humean inductive skepticism. Did Hume reveal an inherent irrationality within, and eating away at the epistemic prospects for, inductive reasoning? Many have thought so, and have reacted in disparate ways. Norton sees a prospect in all of this for refining, not despairing about, our continued trust in the apparent rationality of inductive reasoning. He points to the variety of ways that we can make epistemic progress through inductive reasoning; and he counsels against conceiving of such reasoning, and its capacity for rational insight, in formal terms, looking always to the model of deductive reasoning. What also matters? Facts do. We have only felt threatened by inductive skepticism because we have allowed ourselves to work with a factually impoverished sense of what we do when we think inductively.7

7 For more on the idea of evaluating inductive not in purely formal terms, see Stove (1986).

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Of course, many such facts are embedded in the physical world around us, the world beyond our inner thoughts, feelings, and apparent sensings of that very world. Perhaps even more notorious within philosophy has been Cartesian external world skepticism. How can we know that there is a world at all, let alone one with the features that we seem to perceive it as having? Hetherington engages here with that classic form of skeptical challenge, with results that aim to deepen, not undermine, our sense of ourselves as knowers. What do we learn from confronting skeptical thinking? We are pushed to see ourselves as successful epistemic agents, gaining knowledge that is itself practical in its underlying form—​with all knowledge being knowledge-​how. We also see how we may aim, more relaxedly, for knowledge that is fallible, a realistic way to live an epistemic life. Does this banish skepticism from our continuing epistemic lives? No. Skeptical doubts can persist, by mutating. If all knowledge becomes knowledge-​how, skeptical doubts become doubts that themselves reflect an epistemic skill within some forms of knowing. In knowing, one can retain the skill to doubt that one knows. Just as questioning can be more or less skillful, so can doubting.8 That is a possibility implicit in Hetherington’s chapter, showing us a further way in which skepticism can stay alive. But what of our inner thoughts, the data that we seem to receive as perceivers of the wider world? Are these, at least, immune to skeptical doubts? Even here, skeptical arguments have aimed to undermine us. The notorious brain-​ in-​a-​vat story is a cousin of Quine’s tale of the indeterminacy of translation, and Davidson’s consequent worry about radical translation: do these worries begin at home, within our own minds, leaving us as not really perceiving and thinking in ways worthy of these names—​ways that encode meaningful and informative content? George Graham and Terry Horgan reassure us on this front, but in a way that respects what we also learn about how we manage to have determinate content in our thinking and perceiving. This is all good news, and reflects well on the skeptical thinking that prompts it. Stephen White draws a useful distinction between philosophical and real skepticism, and claims that all forms of modern skepticism have both philosophical and real versions. Philosophical external world skepticism, for example, is notorious for imagining scenarios such as the brain in a vat in which nothing could count as evidence for knowledge of the external world, since all that one is confronted with are one’s own subjective experiences; and whether or not the cause of these is the external world is simply not discernible from the first-​person perspective of reflection. In order to understand philosophical 8 This point is also argued by Macarthur (2011).

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skepticism as it is intended, then, one must see that there is no possibility of answering it by appeal to the usual forms of perceptual and testimonial evidence. Real external world skepticism, alternatively, is skepticism about our knowledge of the external world, but with the crucial proviso that at least some perceptual evidence is available that can justify some external world knowledge—​regardless of whether or not one knows which of one’s experiences have this status.9 White further argues that anti-​skeptical transcendental arguments (such as Kant’s Refutation of Idealism) are only effective, if they are, against philosophical skepticism. Real skepticism is left unscathed because it is an empirical question whether or not we are systematically in error. In summary, some of our authors find forms of skepticism to live by, whereas others see skepticism as unknowingly characterizing our everyday lives; and yet others argue against skepticism whilst acknowledging its insights and its continuing usefulness in our thinking and practices across various domains. The ancient skeptical tradition was associated with a politically conservative life of reflective tranquility accepting the moral and political status quo into which one was inculcated. Skepticism is alive in the present volume in a potentially more revisionary and active sense: e.g., Matar’s politically charged moral skeptic is anything but tranquil. Nor need the metaphysical skeptic be tranquil if the distorting influence of metaphysical thinking is as natural to us, and as ubiquitous, as both Kant and Wittgenstein suppose it to be. Whether or not skepticism is something that one wants to endorse, or seeks to overcome, depends on the kind of skepticism at issue and on the obstacles that stand in the way of accommodation or resolution. Many books on skepticism aim at its refutation or dissolution; but that is not our concern here. In contemporary professional philosophy, this book is unique in attempting to restore skepticism to something like its former glory, by showing that there are true skepticisms and even skepticisms that we live, knowingly or not; as well as transformative skepticisms that alter us even as we combat them; and truths of skepticism that provide insights that the skeptic himself is unaware of. In the essays presented here, there is a great deal to learn from engaging with, and perhaps finally endorsing, contemporary forms of living skepticism. We would like to acknowledge the fine editorial assistance of Winston Leung in the compilation of the index for this volume. 9 In the film The Matrix (Wachowski 1999), the skeptical problem that the Matrix poses for those “within” the Matrix, such as Neo, is real external world skepticism since one really can become aware (through glitches, and the taking of a red pill) that one is the victim of a systematic illusion.

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References

Anscombe, G.E.M. “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy 33/124, 1958: 1–19. Avramides, A. 2020. “Other Minds.” In E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2020 Edition). url =​ https://​plato.stanf​ord.edu/​archi​ves/​win2​ 020/​entr​ies/​other-​minds/​. Baldwin, T. (ed.). 1993. G. E. Moore: Selected Writings. London: Routledge. Cavell, S. 1979. The Claim of Reason. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Greco, J. 2000. Putting Skeptics in Their Place: The Nature of Skeptical Arguments and Their Role in Philosophical Inquiry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hetherington, S. 2011. How to Know: A Practicalist Conception of Knowledge. Malden, MA: Wiley-​Blackwell. Hume, D. 2007 [1739–​1740]. A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by D. F. Norton & M. J. Norton. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hume, D. 1999 [1748]. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by T. Beauchamp. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kitching, G. 2020. Capitalism and Democracy in the Twenty-​ First Century. London: Routledge. Macarthur, D. 2016. “Metaphysical Quietism and Everyday Life.” In G. D’Oro & S. Overgaard (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Philosophical Methodology, 270–​ 296. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Macarthur, D. 2011. “Pragmatist Doubt, Dogmatism and Bullshit,” M/​C Journal: Doubt, Johannes Klabber &, Anna Poletti eds., vol. 14, no. 1. On-​line: http://​journ​alme​dia .cult​ure.org.au/​index.php/​mcjour​nal/​arti​cle/​view​Arti​cle/​349. Millgram, E. 2015. The Great Endarkenment: Philosophy for an Age of Hyperspecialization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Montaigne, Michel de. 1991 [1580]. The Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Edited by M.A. Screech. London: Allen Lane: Penguin Press. Moore, G.E. 1922. “Hume’s Philosophy.” In his Philosophical Studies, 147–​167. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Peirce, C.S. 1955. Philosophical Writings of Peirce. Edited by J. Buchler. New York: Dover. Quine, W.V.O. 1981. “Reply to Stroud,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, volume 6. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 473–475. Sextus Empiricus. 1994. Outlines of Scepticism. Translated and edited by J. Annas & J. Barnes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stove, D.C. 1986. The Rationality of Induction, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wachowski, Lana and Lilli (directors). 1999. The Matrix (film). Warner Bros. Pictures. Wittgenstein, L. 2009 [1953]. Philosophical Investigations, 4th edition. Translated and edited by G.E.M. Anscombe, P. Hacker, & J. Schulte. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Skepticism and Metaphysics Barry Allen Some skepticism is passé, like skepticism about miracles or witches. They were once live questions and skepticism seemed either urgent or a terrible mistake. Now, however, the questions are quiescent, at least in my part of the world. Other skepticism is contrived and has never been serious, like skepticism about other minds or the external world. These are at best heuristic skepticisms, dialectical toy soldiers. Classical philosophical skepticism—​the skepticism of Sextus Empiricus and the Pyrrhonists—​is outright, unmitigated, skepticism about knowledge. This stance was always paradoxical, but it is especially difficult today because it is hard to be seriously skeptical about well-​established scientific results. How does one express interesting doubt that water consists of hydrogen and oxygen? The more one persists in doubting, the more skeptical one’s interlocutor must become as to whether you understand the scientific proposition at all, or perhaps even whether you speak the same language. Serious philosophical skepticism is today always mitigated, partial, discerning in its target. Skepticism on the classical model, which baffles and makes doubtful any and every claim of knowledge, is rare. One strain in modern, mitigated skepticism singles out metaphysics, creating doubt and misgiving as to its intellectual credibility. How did metaphysics become a target of skepticism? What kind of skepticism targets metaphysics, with what arguments, and to what end? These questions are the remit of this chapter, and I will come to them, but first I want to discuss skepticism in a more free-​wheeling way. Descartes innovated heuristic skepticism as a mode of philosophical argument. The skepticism of his First Meditation is not sincere. The author knows, and knows that he knows, what he makes his skeptic pretend to doubt. Readers are supposed to learn something from the passage through this imaginary doubt. Heuristic skepticism is not skepticism for the same reason that cops-​n’-​robbers is not criminality. The argument is tactical, conditional, ironic, never seriously skeptical skepticism. Real skepticism is never this didactic ruse. Serious skepticism is living, active, committed, insisting on questions audiences think are inappropriate, and resisting every effort to make the doubt go away. The ancient skeptics doubted anything and everything. Singling out metaphysics as a special object of mitigated skepticism probably began with

© Barry Allen, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004525474_003

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Enlightenment thinkers in their polemic against school philosophy. For La Mettrie, Voltaire, and Diderot, “metaphysics” was a synonym for the abstruse, logic-​chopping science of the schools, where Aristotle remained an authority. Of course, these schools and schoolmen were extensions of the Roman Church, which made the line between metaphysics and theology agreeably fuzzy. Attacks on metaphysics, which was not a sacred science, agreeably blurred into attacks on theism, a risky high-​value target. Positivism is the first philosophical movement to make skepticism about metaphysics part of its program. I will look at this skepticism in due course, but I should explain why I am jumping past Kant. His conclusion about metaphysics is not advanced skeptically. On the contrary, it is advanced as knowledge—​ critical, reflective, knowledge about knowledge, including its limits, which metaphysics demonstrably overruns, and is therefore not a possible science. Hume is more truly skeptical, discrediting metaphysics without making systematic claims about his own supposed knowledge. The arguments are consistently skeptical, pouring cold water on supposed knowledge of the real nature of things, while reassuring us that we will not miss metaphysics when it is gone. What is “metaphysics” and why distrust it? Some critics distrust systems and the Cartesian esprit de système. “Metaphysics” is sometimes a skeptic’s name for such systems. This is the skepticism of La Mettrie, D’Alembert, and Diderot, and later Nietzsche and William James. D’Alembert, in his Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot (1751) reported that “those frivolous conjectures honored by the name of ‘systems’” is now “almost entirely banished from works of merit.” Restating the argument of Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Traité des Systêmes (1749) he said that “thousands of experiments prove how dangerous the use of systems is” (1963: 94–​95, 25).1 Diderot, the Encyclopedist, favored l’esprit systématique, systematically searching out whatever is productive and useful to know. Diderot’s Encyclopedia was not a closed ontology or doctrine of categories. It is the glory of the Encyclopedia to have been out-​of-​date practically on publication.2 To be so belated, and still an exuberant contribution to experimental knowledge, is a rare combination, a new ethical model (with antecedents in Francis Bacon and Robert Boyle). The Encyclopedia helped

1 Sometimes Diderot used the word “metaphysics” for any set of abstract principles, which have their place in scientific knowledge. In the Encyclopedia he defines métaphysique as “the science of the reasons of things. Everything has its metaphysic and its practice; the practice without the reasons for it, and reasons without the practice make only an imperfect science” (Diderot in Mason [1982: 118]). 2 Circumstances “will give a superannuated appearance to the work” precisely because “philosophy is advancing with gigantic strides” (Diderot 1964: 282).

12 Allen teach Europe how to think experimentally, and to embrace the virtues of an experimental attitude toward knowledge, the inductive ethics of the hypothetical life, without system, certainty, or simple truth.3 The Encyclopedia makes no effort to close debate on what there is. The work’s knowledge, such as it is, is designed for revision, teaching the counter-​ intuitive value of a work constantly to be restarted. The Encyclopedia taught an early lesson in how to be systematically provisional in settling the composition of the world. It cannot be done once and for all (in a system), but can be done better or worse (more or less systematically), and should never stop. Since the work of experimental knowledge is never finished, finality loses its former value. The most important thing about the Encyclopedia is the ethos of inquiry it teaches by example. Systematic questions are more productive than systematic answers. Of course, systematic questions still require a principle, and for Diderot that principle is humanity. “It is the presence of man that makes the existence of things interesting … Why not make him a common center?” (1964: 292). Since we cannot know things as they are in themselves, let us begin with the one being we know from the inside, namely ourselves, and systematically search for knowledge of what is productive and useful for life. Metaphysics is not, however, just a matter of arcane systems. That is one meaning, obviously polemical, but there are others. A proponent of the return to metaphysics in analytic philosophy writes that “a philosophical thesis is metaphysical if (i) it cannot be assigned with confidence to any other part of philosophy, and (ii) it involves a very high level of abstraction” (van Inwagen 2014: 17). I suppose that one can use words as one pleases, but I think this usage is grossly indifferent to what the philosophers who innovated metaphysics thought they were doing. Everyone knows the story about the word “metaphysics.” It was not specially coined to describe a science that transcends (“meta”) physics, a super-​natural science. However, Plato and especially Aristotle did advance the idea of such a science, and Aristotle discusses it in the treatise traditionally known as the Metaphysics, even though that is not the reason the treatise bears this title. Scholastic textbooks after Aristotle’s model present metaphysics as the science of being—​“being qua being.” Ironically, Aristotle himself has the distinction of being the first skeptic about this metaphysics. His criticism of Plato’s theory of Ideas (being qua being is Idea) convinced him that it was impossible for a science to have mere unqualified being as its object (Posterior Analytics 3 This Enlightenment figure of experimental knowledge builds on the heritage of Robert Boyle in the seventeenth century, who gave some of Europe’s first lessons in experimental humility and fecundity. See Shapin (1994).

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77a, 92b; Topics 121a). Eventually, however, Aristotle found a way past the problems of Plato’s theory. In the treatise posthumously known as Metaphysics he reversed his former skepticism and established scientific results concerning being qua being. The details—​Aristotle’s theories of substance, essence, and the categories—​set the terms for textbook treatments of metaphysics in the schools of Europe. Plato and Aristotle identified contemplative insight into the truth of being with wisdom, and the result was one historical meaning of “metaphysics.” A science of metaphysics is the philosopher’s idea of wisdom. The wise know the truth of being, being qua being, as it is for itself, in itself, by itself (auto kath auto is what Plato says), in advance of all accidents, relations, or differences of perspective.4 That is not the wisdom of the poets or Sophists. It is, however, the wisdom that Parmenides defines when he makes the philosophical seeker of wisdom confront the awesome choice between Opinion and Truth. Later, Plato identifies the truth of being with the wisdom that Socrates died for, and taught philosophers to honor this truth above all else. The ancient Skeptics were skeptics of Plato’s ontological truth. They doubt knowledge because they assume that knowledge, to be the real thing, has to be true, and they understand truth in the terms that Parmenides and Plato innovated and that Aristotle and the Stoics refined, as adequation, mimesis, isomorphism, correspondence, a vicegerent representation (Stoics called it a kataleptic phantasy) taking its measure from the thing itself. Driving all the arguments of the ancient skeptics is the impossibility of knowing such a truth. Because these skeptics are still philosophers, they cared about wisdom, but they thought that Plato, Aristotle, and the other philosophers made a terrible mistake in supposing that the way to wisdom passes through knowledge of truth. Wisdom required forgetting about truth, which is the skeptic’s ethos and formula for happiness. These skeptics made two discoveries. The first was that truth apparently cannot be known, the second that ethically it does not matter because happiness and wisdom do not depend on knowledge of truth, contrary to the teaching of Socrates. The skeptic wisely forgets about truth and finds tranquility. Yet I wonder whether skeptic and dogmatist do not agree that if truth could be known, it would be wise to do so. Knowledge of truth would be good if we reliably had it. The new skepticism of Montaigne in the sixteenth century

4 On auto kath auto, see Plato’s Phaedo 78d, 100b; Parmenides 128e–​129a; Timaeus 51d; and the analysis by Vlastos (1991: 72–​76).

14 Allen expands doubt to the value of this “knowledge of truth” even supposing that we could have it: Of what advantage can we conceive the knowledge of so many things was to Varro and Aristotle? Did it exempt them from human inconveniences? Were they freed from the accidents that lie heavy upon the shoulders of a porter? Did they extract from their logic any consolation for the gout? Or, from knowing that this humour is lodged in the joints, did they feel it the less? montaigne 1913: ii 175

They have the knowledge, or knowledge so-​called, but it has no value. Montaigne departed from the Greeks in the direction of St. Paul: “Would you have a man sound, would you have him regular, and in a steady and secure posture? Muffle him up in the shades of stupidity and sloth. We must be made beasts to be made wise” (1913: ii 183). Hume will not make that concession. There is no knowledge in metaphysics. Metaphysics for him means what it meant for Aristotelians—​something about being, about the in-​itself, what is per se, or causa sui. For Hume, such knowledge is impossible. We never get past our impressions and their ideas, and relations among all our impressions are external. What power or essence may be shut up in things as they are in themselves is for us a closed book. The wise are not detained by such questions, and they limit their inquiries to the historical, comparative, relative, and fallible. Montaigne’s perspective somewhat resembles what we can imagine as the Confucian attitude toward metaphysics. Of course, the ancient Confucians (fifth to third century bce) had no experience of our metaphysics and did not take any attitude toward it. But, from what we can reconstruct of their perspective, it seems likely that the pursuit of metaphysics would seem to them pointless, even deviant, regardless of its potential knowledge or truth (in the Western sense of those words). Such “knowledge” would not enhance your benevolence or ceremonial propriety, and those are the criteria for what a perfected person values and pursues. To concern yourself with something so indifferent to humanity as being qua being is disordered. Analects show us a Confucius who does not expound on human nature or heaven. “Zigong said, ‘The Master’s personal displays of his principles and ordinary descriptions of them may be heard. His discourses about man’s nature, and the way of Heaven, cannot be heard’” (2003: 5.15). These things are beyond control. You cannot control your inborn qualities or your fate. Confucius sticks to what is within control, which is a commitment to learning and the discipline of the Confucian way.

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Xunzi, last of the great Confucian teachers of the classical period, says that sages observe nature but do not try to understand it. He means that they do not investigate it with detached curiosity. He is averse to inquiry into ultimate origins and abstract truth. “Discriminations and theories, illustrations and examples, though clever and sufficient, convenient and profitable, that do not follow the requirements of ritual and moral principles are termed ‘dissolute theories.’” The superior sort of person is “indifferent to the real nature of truth and falsity and the true nature of what is the case and what is not.” A gentleman’s superiority lies elsewhere, in mastering the art of “causing each affair and changed circumstance to obtain its proper response.” “In response to the myriad things of Heaven and Earth, [a perfected person] does not devote his attention to theorizing about how they came to be as they are, but rather tries to make the most perfect use of their potentialities.” “How can brooding over the origins of things be better than assisting what perfects them?” (1999: 17.3, 6.11, 8.5, 12.3, 17.13). The value of wise knowledge is this assistance and perfection, what Confucians call “completing things.” To complete things is to conduct them to a ceremonially appropriate place in the collective economy of human and nonhuman things. That is what perfected people do, the sagacious accomplishment of their knowledge. The pursuit of theory indifferent to the art of completing things is, as Xunzi put it, “dissolute.” The problem is not that it is not knowledge or not knowable (in the Western sense); the problem is that the pursuit of such knowledge is disordered and unworthy of a serious person.5 Before there could be skepticism about metaphysics it had to acquire a kind of salience, coming to stand out from knowledge in general, truth in general, and especially from natural science. The emergence of modern science is the principal difference of context between ancient and modern skepticism. For ancient skepticism, any claimed knowledge is subject to their epoché, and to a squadron of dialectical arguments designed to induce doubt and puzzlement. Modern skepticism—​made modern by its situation in relation to the Scientific Revolution—​is invariably a mitigated skepticism. Skeptical philosophy had to adjust to the awkward fact that one field of knowledge (modern science) brooks no serious skepticism. Once natural science became off limits, the idea of a super-​science, or a science of the super-​natural (meta-​physics), became a focus for polemic in modern philosophy. For the first time, it seemed important to draw a line between the good knowledge of natural science and the faulty pretense to knowledge of 5 On ideas about knowledge in Chinese tradition, see Allen (2015).

16 Allen something that has a confusing tendency to look like the scientific knowledge it is not. Law looks like law. Poetry looks like poetry. But metaphysics has a specious tendency to look like science. Montaigne is in this respect still with the ancients. Aristotelian natural philosophy is for him a still-​living context. There is no successful new science on his horizon, which includes Copernicus, who is no hero to him, and not much else. Montaigne’s skepticism is no less unmitigated than that of the Pyrrhonists. All the study and inquiry in the world confirms no more than our fateful natural ignorance. “Men, having tried and sounded all things, and having found in that accumulation of knowledge and provision of so many various things, nothing massive and firm, nothing but vanity, have quitted their presumption and acknowledged their natural condition” (1913: 2:193). Hume cannot say that, because he cannot disqualify the statements of Newton, Boyle, and others. Hume would play havoc with the libraries but would not burn them to the ground. He is more discerning with his flames. “If we take in our hand any volume—​of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance—​let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion” (1955: 173). Mathematics, Hume’s abstract reasoning concerning number, and experimental natural philosophy have become knowledge about which skepticism is not serious. The only way that you can be skeptical about, say, quantum mechanics is to be a better quantum theorist than everyone else and to persuade them of some scientific mistake. Of course, you could just refuse to believe the theory, expressing agnosticism as to the truth of quantum mechanical hypotheses, but that is not philosophical skepticism. It is confessing that you do not know, not arguing that nobody knows such things, that such knowledge is impossible, and that the scientists are deluded and dogmatic. Hume has no doubt about the rationality of F =​ma. If you need to calculate, that is the formula to use. It is knowledge, abstract reasoning about number and quantity. But ask him what “force” is, what “mass” is, whether these are objective realities or subjective appearances, and his position would be implacably skeptical. In this, Hume anticipates positivism. Claims to know the truth of things, how they are in themselves, have no place in the fabric of scientific inquiry. On this point, the positivism of Auguste Comte is at one with the later logical positivism of the Vienna Circle. Comte takes from Kant the idea that natural science is a formally demarcated domain. From his French Enlightenment heritage, he knew that the emergence of this demarcation in European consciousness was a great moment in history, a hard-​won prize of rationality and the philosophical

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spirit. Comte’s celebrated work Cours de Philosophie Positive (1830–​1843), enunciates this Law of History: “Each of our leading conceptions—​each branch of our knowledge—​passes successively though three different theoretical conditions: the theological, or fictitious; the metaphysical, or abstract; and the scientific, or positive.” He says this law “has a solid foundation of proof, both in the facts of [human] organization and in our historical experience” (1975: 71). The law, empirically confirmed in its own terms, was also explained as an effect of a second, deeper “law of human organization,” which is “the instinctive tendency of the human race to perfect itself” (1975: 39). That is our nature, and from this nature flows the laws that contour and preview history, or at least the history of knowledge. Progress in knowledge is inevitable, and metaphysics must give way to the perfection of positive scientific knowledge. The quality common to Comte’s theological and metaphysical stages is the preponderance of imagination over observation. For untold millennia of prehistory, before the emergence of scientific astronomy with the Babylonians five thousand years ago, the sky, the sun, moon, stars, and other celestial bodies were a playground for the imagination. Astronomy is a paradigm of positive science. It was not just a new theory entering the field, as Newton’s was in physics. There was no preexisting scientific field for Babylonian astronomy to struggle with. It is the birth, not of a new science, but of the idea of science, which, together with the much older idea of art, must count among humanity’s most decisive innovations. With astronomy, the scientific spirit first enters the history of knowledge, and to great effect. On Comte’s account, understanding the heavens in terms of mechanism and natural law liberated humanity from metaphysical and theological ideas that kept people in thralldom. The progress of astronomy from Babylon to Alexandria, and then in Europe from Copernicus and Galileo to Newton and Laplace, liberated the intellect from “theological and metaphysical thralldom,” by showing that “the most general phenomena are subjected to invariable relations and that the order of the heavens is necessary and spontaneous” (1975: 137). We were enthralled by metaphysics when we accepted the possibility of such knowledge as it promises—​knowing the truth of things, their real inner nature, not as they appear in relation to us but as they are in themselves. We were enthralled by that idea. It was what friends of wisdom and lovers of truth aspired to, and honorable philosophers were satisfied with nothing less. If we cannot have such knowledge, then we do not have knowledge at all. Modern experimental science discredited that attitude. It gave what no serious skeptic can disallow as knowledge, but it gives no metaphysical insight into the inner nature of things. Instead, science gives laws. These laws concern the relations of things. Scientific laws correlate changes, linking them and making their

18 Allen knowledge relative to the relationship. Physics does not know anything about the essence of matter or energy. It knows the relation of changes in matter and energy to changes in time, space, acceleration, and so on. But, as for energy or matter themselves, apart from all those relations, well, are we sure that the question makes sense? “Everything is relative,” said Comte, “this is the only absolute principle” (1975: 4). He adds: “The relative character of scientific conceptions is inseparable from the true idea of natural laws” (1975: 221). The Law of History made inevitable a shift from theological interest in spirits to metaphysical interest in natures and powers, and finally to the properly positive interest in laws of relation. To acknowledge natural science as the sole serious form of knowledge is at the same time to dismiss the idea of knowledge as knowing the “truth” of things, their inner nature or essence, and becoming resigned to the irreducible relativity of knowledge and the requirement of continuous improvement “without the precise reality being ever fully disclosed” (1975: 221). Metaphysics is fixated on knowledge that is absolute, unconditional, true to beings as they are in themselves. Science graduates to laws of relation, dismissing essences, powers, and inner natures as wholly imaginary. A century later, Carnap takes this same view of science and metaphysics (without Comte’s Law of History). For Carnap, the quintessential “metaphysical” claim is to know the thing in itself, apart from all its relations, an sich, or auto kath auto. “If someone … wishes to know what the object in question is in itself … [the] question presupposes that the object does not only exist as a certain constructional form, but also as an ‘object-​in-​itself’ and this characterizes the question as belonging to metaphysics” (1967: 256). Comte and the logical positivists differ in what might be called the modality of their discontent with metaphysics. Comte does not so much “criticize” metaphysics as announce its demise and write its obituary, as Nietzsche later would do for God. There may yet be metaphysical minds, but they are dwindling to extinction, bound to be swept from the stage of history by inexorable historical law. There is no need for dialectics, refutations, or the abstruse polemic that gave metaphysics its bad name. The direction of history is clear, and metaphysics belongs to the past. It is just a question of time. The progress is inevitable. It is instinct with us. That assurance was not good enough for the twentieth century. It was not robust enough to demarcate the properly scientific from pseudo-​scientific pretenders like Marxist economics, Freudian psychology, or Aryan anthropology. Whereas Comte grandly consigns metaphysics to the dustbin of history, the logical positivists see it as an entrenched ideological disposition against which vigilance is urgent. Language itself is dangerous, riddled with unnoticed pitfalls where we lose our way in meaningless confusion. “Traditional philosophy” is rife with it. Writing in the wake of innovations in logic that Comte missed

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out on, the new positivists advanced the novel idea that what distinguishes science from everything that it superficially resembles, especially metaphysics, is logical form, logical syntax, the logical grammar of scientific language. “Metaphysics” is a faulty logical form. Its discourse seems to have the form of scientific propositions but on analysis it does not, and no place can be found for it among the sentences of science. Carnap was inspired by Wittgenstein’s idea in the Tractatus Logico-​ Philosophicus, which equates “what can be said” with “propositions of natural science.” Whenever someone wants “to say something metaphysical,” a logical philosopher would “demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions” (Wittgenstein 1961: 6.53). Carnap spun variations on that idea throughout his career. The details change, but the theme remains that a discourse is non-​metaphysical, and thus rational and intelligible only if it can be incorporated in a unified language of science. Metaphysical language cannot be used to make a scientific statement. Metaphysical statements are pseudo-​statements. They merely appear to have the form of a serious statement. On analysis, they reveal an alien form that cannot be assimilated to the scientific canon. Metaphysical pseudo-​statements depend on metaphors that are not acknowledged as metaphors but fallaciously taken for serious concepts in which to discuss rare truths unattainable by natural science. Metaphysical language creates “the fiction of theoretical content” (Carnap 1996: 2), generating the erroneous belief that “truth and falsehood are at stake” (1996: 29). People who try to think with such language are seduced and guilty of “gross logical errors” (1996: 21). An unverifiable discourse is not to be tolerated. It must be eliminated from serious discussions, reduced to quivering silence. Why does Carnap want to “eliminate” metaphysics anyway? Its language is unverifiable, but so what? Lyric poetry is unverifiable and Carnap does not want to eliminate that. But metaphysics is not like poetry. Metaphysics is like bad poetry. “Metaphysicians are musicians without musical ability”; metaphysics “is a substitute, albeit an inadequate one, for art” (1996: 30). It does no more than poetry, and even as poetry it is diminished by the delusion of these inadequate poets that they are pursuing a cognitive goal, and not merely venting their personal Lebensgefühl. “The metaphysician believes he travels in territory in which truth and falsehood are at stake. In reality, however, he has not asserted anything, but only expressed something, like an artist” (1996: 28–​29). “Metaphysics” is not merely unverifiable. It is badly misled about itself and misleads those who take it seriously. The problem with metaphysics is not that it is a subjective emotional expression rather than objective knowledge. The problem is that the metaphysicians do not know themselves. They fail the

20 Allen test of the Socratic philosopher. Yet if Carnap is something of a Socratic, he reverses Plato’s judgment against poetry. Poets are more truthful than metaphysicians. Poets are wiser, they understand themselves better. Metaphysics deceives in a way that poetry does not. Since everyone knows that poets lie, no one is deceived, whereas all too many (including Plato himself) suppose that metaphysics is the serious pursuit of a cognitive goal. One problem with Carnap and indeed with positivism in all forms is its reified conception of science. For these positivists, science is not a history; it is an essence, a logical form. The problem is that, with time, as we see the sciences grow, we also see them change. This was one of the first things that alert people saw in the Enlightenment, and why they came to despise “systems,” which connote closure. The positivists require us to forget about history. Comte’s Law of Three Stages is not a serious historical thought. It is an obstacle that prevents serious historical thought, preempting the contingency that makes history historical and not subject to any law. Positivist science is a logical form, a logical syntax, as timeless as modus ponens. Carnap says there is “a unity of language in science,” meaning “a common reduction base for the terms of all branches of science, this basis consisting of a very narrow and homogeneous class of terms of the physical thing-​language.” He says that “we can endeavor to develop science more and more in the direction of a unified system of laws only because we have already at present a unified language” (1938: i 61). This fond assumption has been utterly refuted. All the movement in the sciences has been in the other direction, toward proliferation and apparently irreducible multiplicity. It is by now almost a solecism to speak of science, as if it were singular. All that we see are sciences. Their relationships are historical, genealogical, not logical, formal, or deductive. Scientific knowledge is relational, relative, not absolute, as Comte insisted, but so are the scientific methods of inquiry and experimentation, which are historical and changeable, contrary to positivist rationalism. Positivism assumes that the logical form of scientific knowledge is known—​indeed, known with a certainty these positivists do not extend to the results of natural science. Positivism makes no allowance for experiments in knowledge. There can be no experiments in what knowledge can be. For if knowledge can acquire new forms and methods, then the formal strictures that demarcate science from pseudo-​science lose all their rigor. In this respect, logical positivism is a step backward from the position of the French Enlightenment. Science, as it came into focus at that time, refused the formal closure that positivism tried to enforce. Diderot said that the most important service that great experimentalists can provide “for those whom they are training in

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experimental philosophy” is “not so much to instruct them in methods and results as to inculcate in them that spirit of divination by which one can so to speak smell out (subodore) new methods, novel experiments, and unknown results” (1983: 113). To revalue this emptiness, this lack of closure, to make it exhilarating rather than an embarrassing lacuna, was an enduring accomplishment of the Enlightenment, even for a philosopher as skeptical as Nietzsche is supposed to be of Enlightenment values. Describing the feeling of his “philosophers and ‘free spirits’” when they hear the news that God is dead, Nietzsche says it is “as if a new dawn shone on us.” “Our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonitions, expectations. At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright; at long last our ships may venture out again … all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again” (1974: §343). Nietzsche was skeptical of “systems” in something like the way that Voltaire and Diderot were, though perhaps with more penetrating pessimism. He was skeptical of knowledge concerning a thing in itself, a noumenon, or essence. He was also skeptical of the “truth” that metaphysics tends to presuppose and idealize. In one passage he addresses the “realists”: “You call yourselves realists and hint that the world really is the way that it appears to you … That mountain there! That cloud there! What is ‘real’ in that? Subtract the phantasm and every human contribution from it, my sober friends! If you can! If you can forget your descent, your past, your training—​all of your humanity and animality” (1974: §57). Nietzsche initiated a now-​prevalent skepticism about the “correspondence” theory of truth. He alluded to “my problem,” “our problem, my unknown friends”: “What meaning would our whole being possess if it were not this, that in us the will to truth becomes conscious of itself as a problem?” (1967: III §27). The American pragmatists, especially William James, independently raised similar doubts. The “correspondence” theory of truth belongs to the philosophical-​cum-​religious attitude that James termed “rationalism” (meaning “metaphysics” in the scope of this essay). For a “typical rationalist,” a heuristic figure who could be James’s anti-​pragmatic alter ego, “reality stands complete and ready-​made from all eternity” (1978: 108). Truth means “the absolute correspondence of our thoughts with an equally absolute reality” (1978: 38). Such truth is “non-​utilitarian, haughty, refined, remote, August, exalted,” and “what we ought to think, unconditionally” (1978: 20). For James, this ostentatiously rigorous stance is a mistake, or perhaps a psychological symptom. “The actual universe is a thing wide open, but rationalism makes systems and systems must be closed” (1978: 124). He dramatized the difference between pragmatism and rationalism in a histrionic trope:

22 Allen The alternative between pragmatism and rationalism … concerns the structure of the universe itself. On the pragmatist side we have only one edition of the universe, unfinished, growing in all sorts of places, especially in the places where thinking beings are at work. On the rationalist side we have a universe in many editions, one real one, the infinite folio or édition de luxe, eternally complete; and then the various finite editions, full of false readings, distorted and mutilated each in its own way. This is a choice we face, an option we can exercise in philosophy (for James, every one of us has our own philosophy). James made his choice. He said that a “genuine pragmatist” is “willing to live on a scheme of uncertified possibilities which he trusts,” willing, he says, “to pay with his own person, if need be, for the realization of the ideals which he frames” (1978: 142–​143). This pragmatism is therefore not mere skepticism, but also not metaphysics; rather, it is faith and a will to believe. James’s position on metaphysics resembles that of Kant and Comte. He has reasonable grounds to doubt that any metaphysical statement could be true. For James, those grounds were the Pragmatic Rule, C. S. Peirce’s thesis for the determination of meaning. To determine the meaning of a concept, ask what you would have to experience for it to be confirmed or disconfirmed. James thought that most of the concepts with which “rationalism” is articulated either failed the test outright or, when interpreted practically, reversed rationalism to the advantage of pragmatism. Pragmatists today, or neo-​pragmatists, often prefer to overlook this side of James. It seems discredited by presumed advances in the philosophy of language associated with W. V. O. Quine and Donald Davidson. There is no such thing as meaning, and any “theory of truth” has to take an entirely different form from the insipid utilitarianism of the so-​called pragmatic theory of truth associated with James and other early pragmatists. It seems unlikely that dialectics were decisive about anything for James. If rationalism (metaphysics) is wrong, it is morally wrong, aesthetically wrong, existentially wrong, or at least not right for the pragmatist. Beyond theoretical objections, James seems not to like the feel of a world in which metaphysics would be a science. He views alternately with aversion and medical curiosity the kind of mind for whom such a world is compelling—​a mind craving certainty, clarity, fixity, and deductive salvation. For James, pragmatism was a sentiment before it was a philosophy. He called it “an attitude of orientation,” the attitude of looking away from first things—​principles, categories, necessities—​and looking instead toward last things—​fruits, consequences,

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facts (1907: 32). By the end of the twentieth century, Richard Rorty will misread James as saying “hope instead of knowledge” and “philosophy as cultural politics.”6 Sometimes, Rorty was skeptical of the ontological possibility of metaphysical truth or knowledge. That seemed to be the point of his “antirepresentationalism,” which argues against representations, against mimetic truth, and against the sort of world that it would take to make metaphysics true. He rendered metaphysics speechless. There are no representations, not of the sort that could be metaphysically true. At other times, Rorty’s argument was that metaphysics has no value anymore. It had tried and came to nothing, so let us drop its evidently sterile questions. Instead of arguing dialectically for the impossibility of metaphysics, he argued pragmatically for its fatuousness. The hope of his work was to contribute to a cultural environment where metaphysics cannot flourish, where it comes to seem more and more pointless until finally nobody wants to do it anymore. The anti-​metaphysical strain in twentieth-​century philosophy had two sources—​Heidegger and logical positivism. Heidegger at least knew what he was talking about. What he sees as the leitmotif of metaphysics from Plato to Nietzsche is ever-​deepening obliviousness to ontological difference—​that is, indifference to the difference between beings and their being, or between the to be and what is. Whatever lets beings be cannot itself be a being. How, then, do we think it? Parmenides warned the philosophers to “say and think only this: being is.” Ever since then, philosophy tended to assume that the being of beings derives from the timeless presence of a highest being, which most truly is. Plato called this highest being the Idea of the Good. Aristotle defined it as the complete actuality of the unmoved mover. Then came Plotinus and Augustine, Thomas and Descartes, Leibniz and Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche—​ over and over, indifference to ontological difference, reinforced with a thesis on the permanently present, even one as tenuous as the Will to Power in Heidegger’s notorious reading of Nietzsche. This decline into an unconscious epoché of ontological difference defines the epoch of Western metaphysics, within whose parentheses we remain. Heidegger’s position is not exactly skepticism about metaphysics. It is postmodern despair of ever not being metaphysical. Whereas logical positivism with its animus against metaphysics inspired a good part of analytic philosophy, Heidegger inspired a continental school of

6 See Rorty (2007), and three lectures collectively entitled “Hope in Place of Knowledge: A Version of Pragmatism” in Rorty (1999).

24 Allen philosophical hermeneutics that held out hope for philosophy in the shadow of the end of metaphysics. This hermeneutic philosophy is skeptical of metaphysics, but, more than that, it is an alternative to metaphysics, conditioned by the “metaphysical needs” of those who understand that metaphysics is impossible. Metaphysical forgetfulness of being amounts to what Nietzsche called “bad philology.” All human understanding is a kind of reading, or a kind of interpretation for which reading is the model. For one experienced in the range of what is given to us to interpret and understand, the incorrigible presence of clear and distinct ideas will never be more than a sideshow. There are many other texts, no less true than mathematics, and mathematics is no help in understanding them. This hermeneutical philosophy was developed in several directions by Hans-​Georg Gadamer, Gianni Vattimo, and others. Perhaps the most unexpected development of philosophical hermeneutics was the avowedly skeptical work of German philosopher Odo Marquard. His was a mitigated skepticism, of course, as we still have not overcome the formidable opposition that modern science makes to unconditional Pyrrhonism. Yet Marquard’s skepticism is less mitigated than others. He directed his skepticism at principles, Prinzipien. “Skeptics are not those who as a matter of principle know nothing; it is just that they do not know anything that is a matter of principle. Skepticism is not the apotheosis of perplexity; it is simply bidding farewell to matters of principle” (Marquard 1989: 15).7 Scholarly self-​conscious hermeneutics emerged in Europe as a response to religious civil war. The first phase of Christian hermeneutics in antiquity established the absolute text of the Bible, identifying apocrypha, settling orthodoxy, silencing schismatics, and creating a Bible that no longer sustained multiple readings. European post-​Reformation hermeneutics is by contrast pluralizing, having discovered the multiplicity lurking in what was supposed to be an absolute text. Religious war in Europe was war over two absolute texts. The reply of the first theories of hermeneutics (from Friedrich Schleiermacher to Wilhelm Dilthey) was to transform a dogmatic relation to the text into an interpretive one, neutralizing the compulsion to agreement. Hence Marquard’s ironical motto for hermeneutic philosophy, “Here I stand, I can always do otherwise” (1989: 105). Not simply the experience of disciplined reading recommends this skepticism of principles. Consciousness of mortality, the death of God, and the contingency of history confirm the wisdom of this perspective. Appreciation of mortality should impress on us the skeptical insight that, as Marquard puts 7 I discuss Marquard’s skepticism in more detail elsewhere (2013: 91–​111).

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it, “[w]‌e cannot spend our lives waiting for principled permission finally to begin living, because our death comes more quickly than the principles do—​ which is why we are forced to bid them farewell” (1989: 16). The expectation of principles assumes that at some level something exists, is true and real, as a matter of principle. It is inconceivable that it not be. That is, in effect, the metaphysical idea of the highest being, the one whose being lets everything else be. Spinoza called it causa sui. For hermeneutics, belief in this being (“metaphysics”) betrays a limited acquaintance with the library. Read more books, read more different books, learn from reading that interpretation is indispensable to understanding not just books but anything, and that every interpretation is a counter-​interpretation. That is the hermeneutical version of the Pyrrhonist argument that every assertion succumbs to an equipollent counter-​assertion. The disciplined, historical experience of reading teaches that one never starts from the beginning. There is no first text. Everyone takes up a position in history that is impossible to justify unconditionally or even to understand completely. Everything has a history, everything is derived, nothing unconditionally has to be as a matter of principle. Having insisted on it, philosophical hermeneutics then teaches readers how to bear their derivativeness. Mastering its approach to texts enables one to hold on to what is slipping away, improvisationally adapting old things to new contexts, and rendering unintelligible things intelligible again. Framing skepticism in these terms is a clever response to the problem that forced mitigation on modern skepticism. Marquard is not skeptical of science—​of particular theories or concepts. But he is skeptical of the thesis that these theories or concepts are not merely a useful technology but are true—​true not just because useful, but true as a matter of principle, inherently true in themselves, corresponding to the real disposition of beings. It is probably impossible to be metaphysical without invoking principles somewhere in the argument. Metaphysics without principles is simply pragmatism, not metaphysics at all. The original reason for skepticism about metaphysics was in defense of an experimental approach to what was still called natural philosophy, precursor to our natural science. Voltaire, Diderot, Comte, and Carnap were skeptical about metaphysics achieving results comparable to those of natural science. They were skeptical of closed system because experimental science is not a closed system. They were skeptical of claims to know the thing in itself, because experimental science does not deliver such knowledge, knowing only empirical regularities in changes among things. With the sciences now safely institutionalized and indifferent to philosophy’s ministrations, we might wonder whether a point remains to skepticism

26 Allen about metaphysics. Is that not like being skeptical about witches? Once they were no longer burned, the skepticism lost its point. With the collapse of logical positivism and its puritanical ban on unverifiable discourse, the successor, analytic philosophy, has been indulgent to the point of a veritable renaissance in metaphysics. This new metaphysics is subservient to the sciences, does not claim to be one, or to enjoy any superiority, or in any way to compete with the sciences. Yet still it aspires to be a philosophical knowledge of rational truth, just like the metaphysics of old. Here is not the place and I am not the author to survey this new metaphysics or even to suggest its variety. Much if not most of this work seems to abide by assumptions that bind it to the traditions of Western metaphysics that I have discussed. According to Peter van Inwagen, a prominent contributor to this new metaphysics, the challenge of their work is to answer the question that W. V. O. Quine posed in the opening lines of his classic paper “On What There Is” (1961). “A curious thing about the ontological problem is its simplicity. It can be put in three Anglo-​Saxon monosyllables: ‘What is there?’ It can be answered, moreover, in a word—​‘Everything’—​and everyone will accept this answer as true. However, this merely says that there is what there is. There remains room for disagreement over cases; and so the issue has stayed alive down the centuries” (1961: 1).8 For Van Inwagen, the new metaphysics is dedicated to such disagreements, sorting the admissible answers to Quine’s question in terms that are general, abstract, and systematic (2014: 185–​186).9 But those are the terms of any science. What makes such an account metaphysical? He does not say and does not seem to know. Usually, however, it is some version of the assumption that there are things in themselves and that they naturally divide into a cosmic inventory of the world from no perspective at all. Any implementation of this assumption results in Thing-​in-​itselfism and Already-​there-​anywayism, quintessentially “metaphysical” efforts to specify the substantial, intrinsic, permanently present being in itself. Nothing has upset the reasons for doubt about knowledge from nowhere. Things-​in-​themselves are what a view from nowhere, unconditioned by egregious contingencies like human evolution, would afford. Doubt that natural

8 Quine is wrong about what has kept the issue alive. It is not disagreement over cases; rather, it is disagreement over relations. Aristotle said that “all things are ordered together” (Metaphysics 1075a). A metaphysician fails if he merely offers an inventory. He must say how things are related. For those relations, while not something additional, are the intelligible aspect of what there is. 9 Skeptics of this new metaphysics include Bas C. van Fraassen, with “Against Analytic Metaphysics,” in his (2000), and Hilary Putnam, with “Ontology: An Obituary,” in his (2004).

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science delivers such knowledge, or that such knowledge is a worthwhile aspiration, still has point and value. Montaigne’s argument, which would later be Nietzsche’s, was that we never get to the thing in itself, never understand beings apart from the differences that relate them to others and have no reason to think that there is such a “being” at all. Nietzsche called it the last smoke of an evaporating reality (1954: 481). No alternative exists to perspective. For Montaigne, “[t]‌o make the handful bigger than the hand, and the armful bigger than the arm, and to hope to stride further than our legs can reach, is impossible and monstrous; or that man should rise above himself and humanity: for he cannot but see with his eyes, nor seize but with his power” (1913: 320). Nietzsche unconsciously quotes this three centuries later. “The human intellect cannot avoid seeing itself in its own perspectives, and only in these. We cannot look around our own corner” (1974: §374). Knowledge is always ours, cut to our shape and powers. Mind, cognition, intellect, and reason are outcomes of evolution, conditioned by adaptation and contingency, and unconditioned to contemplative truth. For as long as Aristotle remained a scientific authority, metaphysics was accepted as the science of being qua being. This “being” is the theme of the textbook questions of metaphysics. Why is there something rather than nothing at all? What is substance (ousia: being)? What is essence (esse: to be)? A few assumptions schematically define the Western concept of being that these questions silently presuppose. One is the presumed priority of being over becoming. It goes without saying that being is first; becoming, relation, and difference are antecedent accidents that happen to beings. Plato has Socrates say, “[i]‌t is clear that things have some fixed being or essence (ousia) of their own. They are not in relation to us and are not made to fluctuate by how they appear to us. They are by themselves, in relation to their own being or essence, which is theirs by nature” (Cratylus 386d–​e). First come being and beings. Beings have a nature, an essence, a substance of their own. They are identical to themselves, auto kath auto, Plato says, “themselves from themselves.” Relations and differences derive from this original identity and presence of beings. These are old assumptions. They are assumptions, however, and seldom subject to reasoned proof from truly independent premises, which is probably not possible. However, it is possible to think differently, for instance, to look upon becoming as first and “being” as perhaps no more than an artifact of life and perspective. One finds variations on this alternative in the work of Henri Bergson, William James, A. N. Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze, and Bruno Latour. A philosophical discourse in which standard assumptions of metaphysics are reversed—​one that thinks in terms of original becoming, original multiplicity, original difference, and

28 Allen that views actual, unified, self-​identical beings as derivative effects of becoming and differences of time—​might seem as “metaphysical” as the tradition it reverses, yet it is obviously not “metaphysical” in the various precise senses that I have explained. It is not an ontology, not a doctrine of being, not an onto-​ logic of mimetic truth, does not posit an original self-​identical unity older than difference and relation, and is not a closed system of explicit concepts, or a foundation for the sciences. It will be said that one cannot get out of metaphysics by a mere reversal. You merely spin in the same trap, only now you are also upside down. That was Heidegger’s criticism of Nietzsche.10 By merely reversing Platonism, Nietzsche remained reactive, slavish, dominated by a Platonic forgetfulness of being that survives reversal and unconsciously constrained Nietzsche’s freedom to think. The criticism is implausibly rationalistic, which is not something that you often find in Heidegger. There is all the difference between the forgetfulness of being in Plato and Aristotle, where the to be, its difference from what is, disappears into the eternal presence of a divine substance, and Nietzsche’s forgetfulness of being. Plato and Aristotle do seem oblivious to ontological difference. They hardly notice it at all.11 Nietzsche is different. His forgetting is not thoughtless obliviousness. It is an active, polemical, even artful, poetic forgetting. Nietzsche is among the first philosophers to take the measure of Darwinism against philosophical rationalism, and Heidegger is much too pious about Western tradition (and the mystical connection of Greece and Germany) to consider that an empirical theory of life’s evolution could have anything to say to philosophy.12 “Beings” have no being save as artifacts of perception and affordances of life. The source of “presence” is the life of the organism for whom that posit of being is advantageous. It is not over the finished being of beings that thought should linger, but rather their becoming, the processes by which we collect beings, posit beings, institute artificial presences in a world whose deepest reality is the Heraclitean fire of becoming. The thought is perhaps arcane, obscure, and not obviously practical. But that seems merely to indicate that it is philosophical, and not that it reproduces a mode of thinking that rightly made philosophers skeptical of metaphysics.

10 11 12

See Heidegger’s “Nietzsche’s Word: God is Dead” in (2002). See Kahn (1973, 1976, 1986). I compress a lot in these statements about Nietzsche’s relation to Darwin, which is complicated. See Johnson (2010).

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References

Allen, B. 2013. “Postmodern Pragmatism and Skeptical Hermeneutics: Richard Rorty and Odo Marquard,” Contemporary Pragmatism 10 (1): 91–​111. Allen, B. 2015. Vanishing Into Things: Knowledge in Chinese Tradition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Carnap, R. 1961. “Logical Foundations of the Unity of Science.” In O. Neurath (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, 393–​404. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Carnap, R. 1967. The Logical Structure of the World. Translated by R. A. George. Berkeley: University of California Press. Carnap, R. 1996. “The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language.” In S. Sarkar (ed.), Logical Empiricism at Its Peak: Schlick, Carnap, and Neurath, 10–​31. New York: Garland. Comte, A. 1975. Cours de Philosophie Positive. In G. Lenzer (ed.), Auguste Comte and Positivism: The Essential Writings. New York: Harper and Row. Confucius, 2003. Analects, with Selections from Traditional Commentaries. Translated by E. Slingerland. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. D’Alembert, J. Le-​ R. 1963. Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot. Translated by R. N. Schwab. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-​Merrill. Diderot, D. 1964. “Encyclopedia.” In Rameau’s Nephew and Other Works. Translated by J. Barzun & R. H. Bowen. Indianapolis: Bobbs-​Merrill. Diderot, D. 1983. The Interpretation of Nature. In G. Bremner, Order and Chance: The Pattern of Diderot’s Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, M. 2002. Off The Beaten Track. Edited and translated by J. Young & K. Haynes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hume, D. 1955. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by C. W. Hendel. Indianapolis: Bobbs-​Merrill. James, W. 1978. Pragmatism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Johnson, D.R. 2010. Nietzsche’s Anti-​Darwinism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kahn, C.H. 1973. The Verb ‘Be’ in Ancient Greek. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. Kahn, C.H. 1976. “Why Existence Does Not Emerge as a Distinct Concept in Greek Philosophy,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 58 (4): 323–​334. Kahn, C.H. 1986. “Retrospect on the Verb ‘To Be’ and the Concept of Being.” In S. Knuuttila & J. Hintikka (eds.), The Logic of Being: Historical Studies. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. Marquard, O. 1989. Farewell to Matters of Principles: Philosophical Studies. Translated by R. M. Wallace. New York: Oxford University Press. Mason, J. H. 1982. The Irresistible Diderot. London: Quartet Books.

30 Allen Montaigne, M. de 1913. “Apology for Raimond de Sebonde.” In The Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Translated by C. Cotton. London: G. Bell and Sons. Nietzsche, F. 1954. Twilight of the Idols in The Portable Nietzsche. Edited and translated by W. Kaufmann. New York: Viking. Nietzsche, F. 1967. On the Genealogy of Morals. Translated by W. Kaufmann, New York: Vintage. Nietzsche, F. 1974. The Gay Science. Translated by W. Kaufmann, New York: Vintage. Putnam, H. 2004. “Ontology: An Obituary.” In his Ethics without Ontology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Quine, W.V.O. 1961. “On What There Is.” In his From a Logical Point of View, 2nd edition. New York: Harper and Row. Rorty, R. 1999. Philosophy and Social Hope. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Rorty, R. 2007. Philosophy as Cultural Politics, Philosophical Papers, volume 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shapin, S. 1994. A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-​Century England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. van Inwagen, P. 2014. Existence: Essays in Ontology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. van Fraassen, Bas C. 2004. “Against Analytic Metaphysics.” In his The Empirical Stance. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Vlastos, G. 1991. Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wittgenstein, L. 1961. Tractatus Logico-​Philosophicus. Translated by D.F. Pears & B.F. McGuinness. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Xunzi, 1999. Translated by J. Knoblock. Library of Chinese Classics. Changsha, China: Hunan People’s Publishing House.

chapter 2

No Moral Ground: Political Content and the Emptiness of Ethics Anat Matar Simply put, the recourse to ethics so deeply inscribed in every humanist ideology may play the part of an imaginary treatment of real problems. Once known, these problems are posed in precise terms. louis althusser, For Marx

∵ 1

Introduction

Jacques Derrida’s inspiring essay, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” opens with a close reading of Anatole France’s The Garden of Epicurus and especially of the analogy brought in this book between metaphysical terms and effaced coins. Metaphysicians are compared to knife-​ grinders who turn coins, carrying some finite value, to useless objects that have no value at all. Yet they boast, having succeeded in their effacement project: “These pieces have nothing either English, German or French about them; we have freed them from all limits of time and space; they are not worth five shillings any more; they are of an inestimable value, and their exchange value is extended indefinitely” (1982: 210; France 1923: 208). Polyphilos, the critical character in France’s book, mocks this project and comments: “A sorry lot of poets, they dim the colours of the ancient fables, and are themselves but gatherers of fables. They produce white mythology” (Derrida 1982: 213).1 Emphasizing the crucial appeal to economy underlying France’s analogy, Derrida reminds us that traditional metaphysics is involved in a double

1 Alan Bass modified the translation of the last sentence. In Allinson’s translation it is: “Their output is mythology, an anaemic mythology without body and blood” (France 1923: 228).

© Anat Matar, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004525474_004

32 Matar effacement: first, the expulsion of economy from its territory, and then a suppression of the first obliteration. The latter oblivion is no less crucial than the former on the way to buttressing the image of metaphysics as eternal, universal and necessary. Economy must have no relevance to the purity of metaphysics; and ‘economy’ should be read here in its widest sense, as anything “schmutzig” (as in Marx’s First Thesis on Feuerbach): anything mundane, contingent, laden with calculations of power, interests and desires. However, this double effacement, instead of bringing us to the safe haven of eternal truths, produces a mythology, white mythology. France’s criticism of the metaphysicians’ project brings into play the adjective ”white”’ in two senses. ‘White’ is of course a symbol of the emptiness, anaemic nature of Metaphysics, that is devoid of concrete content; yet white is also a particular colour, and more particularly: skin colour. France wittily intimates that Eurocentrism is infused into the metaphysicians’ abstraction project already in its initial notion of contingent versatility, from which the “universal” is to be deduced: gaining the perspective of eternity means, for his knife-​grinders, ridding not only of any economic value, but also of any specific cultural bias, anything “either English, German or French.” Note the narrow limits of this “versatility”: the only optional economies are of the three dominating white European cultures. The metaphysicians in The Garden of Epicurus do not even bother to abstract from Spanish or Italian coins, let alone Egyptian or Japanese, on the road to the creation of their colourless metaphysics. Derrida sums this up: “Metaphysics—​the white mythology which reassembles and reflects the culture of the West: the white man takes his own mythology, Indo-​European mythology, his own logos, that is, the mythos of his idiom, for the universal form of that he must still wish to call Reason … White mythology—​metaphysics has erased within itself the fabulous scene that has produced it, the scene that nevertheless remains active and stirring, inscribed in white ink, an invisible design covered over in the palimpsest” (1982: 213). Inspired by Epicurus’s skeptical attitude to the relations between gods and men, Rabbinic literature adopted the name epikores for the heretic, he who disrespects the Torah, denies God’s knowledge of the affairs of humans or expresses doubt about the reliability of God’s communication with humans through prophecy. In a somewhat similar vein, and having France’s Garden of Epicurus always at the background, in what follows I wish to advance two epikorsian claims about morality. I maintain, first, that our common notion of morality is devoid of any significant content and cannot serve as a ground for political thought or action. This is equally true of judgmental conceptions of morality, according to which we are to deduce particular prescriptions from universal moral principles, and of existentialist and postmodernist conceptions of ethics, which prima facie seem to overcome the naivety of the judgmental

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appeal to moral principles, yet still treat ethics as primary. I claim that ethical discourse is actually secondary to political discourse and that it derives whatever genuine content it eventually gains from political analyses, concrete empirical facts, historical cases, lived experience and personal tendencies.2 My second epikorsian contention is that in practice we pay a toll for the emptiness of moral discourse, since it often serves the mighty as a convenient tool for whitewashing political crimes, or at least for keeping the existing political order (which often enough amounts to the same thing). This vacuum thus constitutes a hindrance to radical politics. These two alternatives make up the Janus-​faced white mythology of ethics.3 2

Judgmental Morality: God’s Inescapable Presence

In 1958, Elizabeth Anscombe stirred the Anglo-​American philosophical community with the publication of a provocative article in Philosophy. The article, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” presented and defended three bold theses—​ “epikorsian” theses, I would say—​stated in the following succinct manner in its opening paragraph: The first is that it is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy; that should be laid aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology, in which we are conspicuously lacking. The second is that the concepts of obligation, and duty—​moral obligation and moral duty, that is to say—​and of what is morally right and wrong, and of the moral sense of “ought,” ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible; because they are survivals, or derivatives from survivals, from an earlier conception of ethics which no longer generally survives, and are only harmful without it. My third thesis is that the differences between the well-​known English writers on moral philosophy from Sidgwick to the present day are of little importance. (1958: 1)

2 In Matar (2022), I complement this claim by the statement that political morality, like its pallid mythological sister, must also take on a color: red. Where morality is concerned there is no room for relativity: morality is left-​wing. This ostensibly outrageous claim is left out of the present paper, apart from scattered allusions. 3 I shall use both terms, “morality” (and “moral”) and “ethics” (“ethical”) interchangeably, though naturally there are differences in nuances and shades of sense.

34 Matar Anscombe advances three poignant allegations against the moral discourse I dub here “judgmental.” Within this discourse, the differences between Kantian, Utilitarian and other calculations of duties and rights are indeed “of little importance.” She argues that judgmental moral discourse presupposes a suspicious philosophy of psychology, that it relies on a fundamental principle it in fact rejects as obsolete, and furthermore, that this discourse can be easily manipulated and abused. Postponing our discussion of the latter allegation, let us focus on the linkage between the first two. A particular “philosophy of psychology”—​i.e., a rationalist image of moral, critical, self-​conscious persons—​is necessary for judgmental ethics not merely in order to confer on the procedures of moral evaluation a touch of truth, but also in order to suppress their genuine source: irrational, unjustifiable faith, a version of an appeal to God.4 It is, of course, in Kant’s moral theory that the modern version of the connection between God, pure reason and freedom is best laid out. The interdependence between the ideas of freewill (autonomy, self-​determination, sovereignty), reason (rational criticism, devoid of particular interests), and an intelligible world, whose origin is God, is clearly expressed in the Critique of Pure Reason, the Critique of Practical Reason and the Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals.5 Yet at the same time, it is no less clear that the idea of God, unlike the other two basic notions, is simultaneously asserted and denied by Kant, and that this self-​contradictory strategy is essential. It is indeed immanent to every modern version of the judgmental conception of morality: So far, then, as practical reason has the right to conduct us, we shall not look upon actions as binding on us, because they are the commands of God, but we shall regard them as divine commands, because we are internally bound by them. We shall study freedom under the teleological unity which accords with principles of reason; we shall look upon ourselves as acting in conformity with the divine will only in so far as we hold sacred the moral law which reason teaches us from the nature of actions themselves, and we shall believe that we can obey that will only by promoting the weal of the universe in ourselves and in others. Moral theology is, therefore, only of immanent use. (1998: A819/​B 847, 684)

4 Robert Adams (1995) describes in detail the kinds of faith needed in order to sustain morality, our self-​image as moral and particular ethical choices as such. 5 See Adams (1995: 69–​72).

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God is exiled from the Kantian moral discourse as an explicit transcendental source of validation; but it remains this discourse’s condition of possibility. The quoted paragraph clearly discloses this with its recurrent appeals to theological vocabulary: divine commands, divine will, sacred moral law and moral theology. What Anscombe insinuates is that philosophers engaged in the kind of discourse initiated by Kant suppress this conceptual necessity and imagine it is enough for them to presuppose only the binary connection between rationality (Reason) and freewill, without acknowledging the third, dimmed edge of Kant’s triangle. Such postulated notions as “principles of reason,” “immanent” and “internal bind,” aided by the faculty of imagination (“regard as,” “look upon ourselves as,” “believe that we can”) do the trick. The tacit and unquestioning appeal to these conditions of possibility is dogmatic and illusory. Those who adopt Kant’s metaphysical and moral view fail to realize “how to tell the difference between ‘discovering’ and ‘inventing’,” in Nietzsche’s (2002: § 11) words. Could there be a justification for a Godless discourse that nonetheless relies on a pure, rational, truthful yet immanent authority? No, the case is rather that after “God’s putrefaction” there can no longer be any “up or down left,” no absolute orientation: the discourse of unbiased principles of reason, independent of any particular perspective, had died with God, and any appeal to it is nothing but a camouflage. Nietzsche’s “madman,” whose words I have just quoted, knows very well that it is not easy to come to terms with the consequences of the death of God—​to acknowledge them, let alone accept them: “My time hasn’t come yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still traveling—​it has not yet reached human ears. Lightning and thunder need time, deeds need time after they have been done before they can be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most distant stars—​and yet we have done it ourselves” (2002: §125). Like Nietzsche, Anscombe recognizes the huge psychological difficulty in overcoming the judgmental discourse of moral duty, obligation, right and wrong. Our language is laden with moral terms, many of which echo a legal jargon. But what law bestows meaning on this jargon? It is, Anscombe argues, Christian law, itself a derivative from the Torah. Christianity, dominant for so many centuries, left us with its “survivals, or derivatives from survivals,” even if it no longer survives as an ultimate source of meaning. Man had replaced God, but since temporality and relativity are essential to it, he cannot avail himself to such an eternal source of meaning any longer. The contents of his moral laws and derived judgments necessarily reflect particular contexts. In order to pass as universal, they must erase their own genealogy, ignore their dependency on particular contexts, and then conceal, or “forget,” this erasure itself. This is no less true of the empiricist Mill than the transcendental Kant: “Mill also, like

36 Matar Kant, fails to realize the necessity for stipulation as to relevant descriptions, if his theory is to have content. It did not occur to him that acts of murder and theft could be otherwise described” (1958: 3). Anscombe was able to identify the source of this puzzle for she was herself a devout Catholic. Even Protestant moralism was for her a first step down a slippery slope.6 She realized that once the “autonomous reason” of Man replaces God, the authority of moral law vanishes and we remain with nothing but mere camouflage. It is because this camouflage is so successful in hiding its workings that Anscombe advises that we defer any discussion of moral theory “until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology,” i.e., until we truly understand what it means to be human, all too human, and courageously face our self-​deceiving mechanisms and the dependence of consciousness on “impure” external factors. Such comprehension, I wish to add, cannot be gained without adequate anthropological, sociological, economic and political theories about the various structures that could be combined under the title of “ideology.” It is interesting to compare the views of Catholic Anscombe on Kant, religion and morality with those of Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a prominent Israeli philosopher and a devout Orthodox Jew who was famous for his bold and controversial views of Judaism. Leibowitz grudgingly admitted that the basic notions of his philosophical thought were drawn from Kant, yet he characterized Kantian atheism as “a view of man as God,” which he conceived—​contrary to Anscombe—​as a legitimate alternative to his preferred “theocentric view embodied by the Judaism of the Torah” (1992: 209, 208). It is essential, however, that the latter contain no moral theory at all: There is no Hebrew word for ‘ethics’, and the term ‘Mussar’ in the sense of ethics is a neologism. In biblical Hebrew ‘Mussar’ means teaching. Neither in Scripture nor in the language of the Sages is there a word for ethics, even as there is no biblical term for the concept ‘conscience’. Indeed, only the ethical atheist follows his conscience, which is his inclination, whereas the believer who fears God is not guided by his heart or eyes. (1992: 114) Morality is, then, an atheist alternative to religion. But, for Leibowitz, although it is ultimately based on Kant’s ethical approach, it cannot adopt his moral laws, since they are formalistic and empty of content. “Ethics is not a program of behavior,” alienated from human nature, but the principle of “following your 6 Compare with Hegel (1991: §141).

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own heart.” Like Anscombe, Leibowitz juxtaposes religion and ethics, and like her, he rejects judgmental moralism as a viable alternative to religion. His view of atheist ethics (which, being religious, he himself does not adopt) is focused on the personal and subjective experience of conscience. It is no coincidence that both Anscombe and Leibowitz were not only immersed in religious practice and reflection but also politically active. Both were known for their strong political convictions and their persistent involvement in the political agendas of their days. For both, the content of moral judgements and actions could not be detached from their political background, which endowed them with sense and justification and yielded the needed motivation for action. Anscombe’s political record is surely better known to readers of the present volume than Leibowitz’; let me therefore quote the following explicit claim made by the latter: The concept of ‘human values’ is meaningless and completely vague. The elevation of the standard of living, the accumulation of knowledge and the deepening of understanding; honor, power, and the satisfaction of the needs of the belly or sex; empathy for the suffering or revenge on an enemy; provision of a slice of bread to all who hunger and a glass of milk to every child; death for one’s country or leader; enjoyment and amusement; devotion, heart and soul, to a particular goal: all these are human values … Halakhic Judaism and Nazism, the nihilism of Japanese Zen and the humanitarian-​utilitarian Enlightenment of the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe; mysticism and materialism—​each and every one of these shapes man and society’s image. (1975: 302–​303) Unlike Kant’s “immanent” laws, which are in truth transcendent, since their source of authority is foreign to the practice in which they should be put to use, Leibowitz’s conception is truly one of immanence. Particular decisions can only gain their sense and justification from a rich worldview, one that weaves together theoretical insights, political beliefs, historical analyses, social customs and personal inclinations. For sustaining the judgmental conception of morality, a clear distinction between fact and value is essential: “rational” absolute principles must have nothing contingent in them. Both Leibowitz and Anscombe suggest that this approach betrays a strongly entrenched and indefensible dogma. Facts, values, general principles and descriptions of particular cases cannot be abstracted from the totality which endows them with meaning. In particular, ethics is always-​already embedded within a political realm that grounds it, rather than vice versa.

38 Matar 3

Aesthetic Ethics

A year before “Modern Moral Philosophy” was published, Anscombe’s book Intention came out and was immediately regarded as the cornerstone of any future discussion of intentional action. A year after the article’s publication, in 1959, Anscombe published her famous interpretation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Yet although her philosophical views on language and human action certainly influenced the main tenets of “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Anscombe hardly mentioned them in the article. She did not even refer to Wittgenstein’s own harsh critique of moral philosophy, as expressed clearly in “A Lecture on Ethics.”7 During the years that have elapsed since the publication of “Modern Moral Philosophy,” some of those who followed in Anscombe’s footsteps did form a linkage between their (by and large Wittgensteinian) philosophy of language, their views on philosophical methodology and a critical assessment of traditional (i.e. argumentative, analytical, explicit) moral discourse. Stanley Cavell and Cora Diamond, to name but the most salient examples, point in similar ways at the vacuity of the language of judgmental moral philosophy. Their arguments explicitly appeal to the Wittgensteinian conception of meaning as intimately connected to human action within Lebenswelt. Other philosophers who play a part in weaving the same thread, e.g. Alasdair Macintyre, Bernard Williams and Craig Taylor, do not base their arguments on any particular philosophical approach to language, but their analyses of the problems with ethical discourse either rule out or minimize the plausibility of a representation-​ based conception of language. It seems to me pointless to summarize these well-​known positions here. In gross generalization, all take their leads from alternative currents in the nineteenth century rather than the mainstream moral philosophers criticized by Anscombe. Instead of Kant and Mill, these post-​Wittgensteinian moral philosophers echo Schlegel, Schopenhauer or Kierkegaard, whose romanticism, aestheticism and existentialism fare much better with their approaches to meaning, and indeed, to philosophy in general. Common to all the philosophers just mentioned is the rejection of what Bernard Williams dubbed a “rationalistic theory of rationality”—​a rejection expressed, primarily, by an essential change in philosophical methodology. Rather than circularly explaining the source of our moral duties via the 7 Wittgenstein delivered the lecture in Cambridge in November 1929. Although it was published in The Philosophical Review only in 1965, i.e., after the publication of “Modern Moral Philosophy,” it is unlikely that his close disciples, Anscombe included, were not familiar with its main tenets, or indeed with Wittgenstein’s general attitude towards moral discourse expressed already in the Tractatus.

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allegedly a-​priori, transcendental justification of the general moral principle from which these duties are to be deduced, they maintain that no postulated metaphysical origin is necessary. To put it differently: whereas judgmental moralism implicitly relies on the divine, we may see aesthetic ethics as consisting “in resolving the religious world into its secular basis” (Marx 2000: 172). The rigid structure of premises-​conclusion, which conceals much more than it makes explicit, cannot convey the richness of ethical life and hence cannot serve as a viable tool for philosophical accounts of morality. What needs to be developed, instead, is an ethical sensitivity to our lives and our world. A variety of experiences help us in shaping such a subtle and delicate attitude; and therefore, for moral education and reflection, works of art (novels, films) serve us much better than arid philosophical arguments. Naturally, judgmental moralists cannot regard such an alternative as an appropriate philosophical methodology. The character of Aristos in The Garden of Epicurus, the defender of metaphysics—​of white abstraction—​ends his dialogue with the epikorsian Polyphilos with these bitter words: “I leave unconvinced. If only you had reasoned by the rules, I could have rebutted your arguments quite easily” (France 1923: 228). What we are dealing with, then, is not merely a divergence of opinions about ethics, but a sharp cleavage between two essentially different approaches to philosophical discourse, its aims and its conditions of possibility. The question of foundation is central in this debate. Contrary to judgmental moralists, supporters of aesthetic ethics reject the notion that we need a moral ground as an autonomous, separate category, for justifying political ideas and actions. However, in another sense, ethics is granted a special, privileged status in their writings. A conspicuous example is that of Cora Diamond. Diamond convincingly reads Wittgenstein as thinking of ethics “not as subject of discourse but rather as primarily tied to the sense of life” (1991: 10). Endorsing this Wittgensteinian stance and acknowledging her debt to Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy,”8 she develops a strong case against judgmental moralism and emphasizes the dramatic change of philosophical methodology her approach entails. In “Having a Rough Story about What Moral Philosophy Is,” Diamond juxtaposes two philosophical readers of literature: D. D. Raphael and Wolfgang Iser. The former reads literature as a judgmental moralist, looking for arguments he wishes to rephrase in explicit philosophical language, so they can be easily implemented elsewhere. The latter emphasizes, in his reading, the “fluidity” of human experience, which defies the rigidity of systematic 8 Cf. “Secondary Sense” (Diamond 1991: 237f.).

40 Matar thinking. “What we learn of human nature is not the truth or falsity of any particular view in the repertoire; rather, reading the novel teaches us how to think about human nature by making us think about it” (1991: 369) and “not by giving us what to think” (371). Diamond exemplifies this approach lucidly in her beautiful article “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy” (2008), where she uses the character Elizabeth Costello in J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals in order to press her case against “the common and taken-​ for-​granted mode of thought that ‘how we should treat animals’ is an ‘ethical issue’” (2008: 51). Costello manifests what it is to overcome the judgmental, simplistic attitude, and to sense, instead, what animal life is, what it is to think of our own lives as the lives of a kind of animal. She also manifests the enormous complexity essential to particular circumstances and the richness of any individual being. It is crucial that Costello cannot be generalized; understanding her does not mean adopting her views but imitating her attitude, using it as a vague guideline. “The contribution of the novel is then a greater understanding of how things can and do happen—​an understanding which could also have come from keeping one’s eyes open to similar things happening in the world” (1991: 378). Where is the implicit primacy of ethics, then? First, in the pervasiveness of the ethical: “An ethical spirit, an attitude to the world and life, can penetrate any sort of talk or thought” (1991: 9). No matter which discourse we are engaged in, our ethical attitude shows in it. “Moral reflection may be directed not just towards individual human beings but towards forms of social life” (1991: 375). When analytical philosophers interested in morality turn to socio-​ political issues, says Diamond, they usually do so with regard to concrete issues such as “income distribution or the death penalty.” They tend to ignore everything which enables deep understanding, that is, the texture of social being as expressed in customs and manners, architecture, furnishing and gardening styles, turns of phrase—​subtle aesthetic qualities which escape the eye. Ethics is foundational, then, not as a specific discipline, subject matter or set of values, from which truths and decisions are deduced, but as a basic stance that colours or shapes any other.9 9

Alice Crary (2009) explicitly adopts and implements Diamond’s suggestion. She advances a strong and persuasive argument against judgmental moralism, exposing its problems not merely as moral ground for political thought and action (as I attempt to do here) but as a general approach towards philosophy, ethics, language and indeed, our lives. In Diamond’s holistic spirit, Crary suggests that we think of ethics rather as “distinguished by a preoccupation not with judgments in one region of discourse but with a dimension of all of discourse—​and on which a responsible ethical posture involves forms of attention that, far from being restricted to moral judgments, extend to webs of sensitivities informing all

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Diamond’s resentment from judgmental moralism leads her to refrain from discussing practical judgments and concrete decisions in the political sphere. An interesting exception appears in her most recent book, Reading Wittgenstein with Anscombe, Going on to Ethics (2019). There she touches upon two political topics: the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and resistance to slavery. The important point, to my mind, is that in both cases particular political moments are treated as examples of sensitivity to correct modes of using language, as opposed to modes in which language is betrayed and thinking “derailed.” Let me briefly discuss the former topic here.10 The foundation of Diamond’s political argument is laid down in her discussion of what she calls “preparatory propositions.” Such propositions can only be true, but they are not tautologies—​their truth value is not a pure result of their logical structure. Rather, their function is to prepare language for use. Although preparatory propositions are true and reflect reality, they do so not by presenting a true picture of the world but as practical tools, as rules for directing thought: these are rules which turn our attention to possible ways of thinking or warn us off dangerous paths. An example of a preparatory proposition of the first kind might be “choosing to kill the innocent as a means to your ends is always murder”: this proposition forms part of the grammar of the concept of murder. Diamond exemplifies this thesis in particular, and the workings of preparatory propositions in language in general, in her discussion of a speech by Anscombe, “Mr. Truman’s Degree.” In this famous speech, Anscombe used the tautology “choosing to kill the innocent as a means to your end is always murder” in order to make her listeners, about to vote on whether Oxford University should grant President Harry Truman an honorary degree, see “that voting for the degree is voting to honour a murderer.” Diamond reads this speech as aiming at “making truths operative” (2019: 226) against “widespread corruptions of thought, goings astray of thought.” Anscombe turns an admittedly empty grammatical remark, “part of the grammar of murder” (2019: 225), into an operative rhetorical instrument.

10

of individuals’ modes of thought and speech” (2009: 3). Having established a firm foundation in the form of her aesthetic conception of ethics, Crary eventually reclaims moral judgment. Her point is that actual practices of moral judgment making can take place only given a conception of objectivity that is intimately interwoven with our sensitivity to how things are and with our affective responses towards various states of affairs. She clarifies this point through a discussion of sexual harassment and domestic abuse. This political twist is a rather recent development of aesthetic ethics and I discuss it briefly below. For a detailed discussion of Diamond’s analysis of such propositions as “there is nothing else to think but that slavery is unjust and unsupportable” and “property in human beings is an abomination” see Matar (2022: chap. 2).

42 Matar I cannot agree more. But how is this aim achieved? What Diamond neglects, in this story, is the rhetorical mechanism through which Anscombe builds, step by step, a formidable argument against Truman’s decision to drop atom bombs on two Japanese cities. In her speech, Anscombe contrasts Truman’s mode of conducting warfare to that of his predecessor, Roosevelt; she analyses the development of the war and delineates its phases as well as the crystallization of political dogmas regarding it; she considers the demagogic propaganda which took root in the United Kingdom, which claimed that modern warfare makes it impossible to distinguish clearly between civilians and military personnel; she reminds her listeners that, at the time of the bombings, a broad consensus held that the Japanese had already reconciled themselves to defeat and were willing to accept the broad outlines of the Potsdam Declaration, if it was amended; she reminds the audience that the Japanese had already tried, twice, to initiate peace talks; she hints that the very existence of atomic weaponry helped to mould the position that there was no choice but to use it; she analyses the concept of innocence in the context of war; she clarifies how strongly her position differs from pacifism and why she is utterly opposed to the latter; she suggests a connection between indifference to mass murder and the moral philosophy prevalent at Oxford; she places Truman’s mass murder alongside those committed by Hitler and Stalin; she even discusses the death penalty! In sum, Anscombe presents a rich argument which combines empirical detail, political and historical analysis and philosophical elucidation of concepts. Now all this is missing from Diamond’s account. I suspect that this is because, contrary to Diamond’s wish, Anscombe does aim at telling her audience “what to think,” in a kind of meta-​level; and in this respect her speech resembles judgmental moralism more than it does aesthetic ethics. However, it resembles the latter, rather than the former discourse, in its attention to delicate details, to contingencies that cannot be subsumed in a rigid structure of a formal argument. Following Diamond’s suggestion in “Anything but Argument?,” we may say that Anscombe’s argument is far from being a simple deduction from moral principles to a particular prescription. Through the primacy it condones to the historical-​political perspective, Anscombe’s argument puts to work not only truths and tautologies, “grammatical remarks,” general and formal moral principles, but also minute descriptions which require political and aesthetic sensitivity more than abstract intellect. In fact, it would be more accurate to rephrase this structure as follows: we are not faced with a preparatory proposition (in this case, “choosing to kill the innocent as a means to your ends is always murder”) alongside a separate mechanism enabling its implementation, but with a unitary proposition which is always already a part, with

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no special status of its own, in a whole mechanism. A capacity for skepticism toward the nostrums of military specialists and the decisions made by a US President; the possibility of overcoming British government propaganda and the morality and philosophical methodology prevailing at Oxford; the realization that comparisons between Truman, Hitler and Stalin are warranted—​all these depend on an understanding, an experience, a being, all rooted deeply in the political. To be sensitive and open to rhetoric of this kind, one must be politically prepared when it appears, or at least partly so. Thus, it is no accident that Anscombe’s preparatory proposition failed to move the dons of Oxford despite its impeccably referenced and detailed structure. I have noted that Anscombe alludes in her speech to the propaganda which set the stage for the acceptance of Truman’s decision as natural and reasonable. Her listeners, after all, were recipients of such propaganda (some of them, without a doubt, were also among its propagators): and it was this propaganda precisely which framed the decision to grant Truman his honorary degree, as well as the decision not to resist this decision, as natural and reasonable. The corruption of thought—​yes, this is precisely what it was—​which prevented Anscombe’s speech from persuading took place because the ground on which Anscombe had tried heroically to stake her claim could only reject it due to the solidity, depth and power of the ruling, barbaric ideology. Only as the expression of a full world-​view, as part of a vast tapestry of insights and experiences, could the speech even be comprehensible; and only in such a context could a grammatical rule dealing with the murder of innocents do any work. All these indispensable moments are complementary aspects within a single movement, whose source of sense and truth is political, not moral. I compared above the line of thought characteristic of aesthetic ethics and Marx’s reading of Feuerbach’s standpoint, seen as “resolving the religious world into its secular basis.” I find Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach” helpful also in pointing at the negligence, typical to those endorsing this “secular” position, regarding the political as indispensable in construing the moral life of individuals and of ethics in general. Having successfully overcome the divine dimension of previous moral discourses, aesthetic ethicists produce an updated version of “contemplative materialism,” whose “highest point” is “contemplation of single individuals and of civil society.” When Diamond scorns judgment of actions and evaluations about income distribution or the death penalty, she rightly exposes the crudity and shallowness of moralistic discourse as unsuitable for genuine moral reflection. Yet, at the same time, her scorn betrays a reluctance to acknowledge that “all social life is essentially practical” and that the individual whom she contemplates “belongs to a particular form of society,” “civil society” (Marx 2000: theses iv, ix, viii, vii, 172–​173). In short,

44 Matar her words—​and their tone—​disclose an impatience, even a latent hostility, towards the political. In other words, once the ethical is taken to be primary and the political secondary, reality is abstracted. What we get is either Godlike “grammatical” commandments and empty discussions about “death penalty,” “income distribution,” “vegetarianism” and “euthanasia,”11 or nuanced phenomenological descriptions, which are totally impotent when abstracted from a full-​blooded political worldview. No moral ground helps us understand our lives as they really are. I mentioned earlier that in her speech, Anscombe referred to the propaganda of the Allies. She did not dig further down, to the deepest layers of Western bourgeois ideology that made the propaganda convincing. It may not be redundant to note that the speech was met with complete silence. The vote in favour of awarding the Oxford honorary degree to Truman was massive. Only four people—​among them the philosopher Philippa Foot—​voted against it. White mythology is so hard to observe, let alone defeat. “The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-​changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.”12 4

Meta-​Political Ethics

The third category of philosophical positions I wish to briefly discuss is that of philosophers who are no less interested in political philosophy than in moral philosophy, and, moreover, are involved in radical political action as well. I see these philosophers as political and philosophical allies. Paramount examples are Chantal Mouffe (e.g., in The Democratic Paradox [2000]), Adi Ophir (The Order of Evils—​Toward an Ontology of Morals [2005]), Simon Critchley (Infinitely Demanding—​Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance [2007]) and Alice Crary (e.g., in Beyond Moral Judgement [2009]). Despite the obvious differences between them, there is a lot in common in the way they act and think. In addition to their mutual interest in the (generally Wittgensteinian) philosophy of language, they draw their inspiration mainly from Continental or post-​analytic writings on moral and political philosophy.13 These are all 11 12 13

This is, of course, but the beginning of a metonymical list. Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach,” thesis iii. Mouffe introduces her most basic ethical outlook through Cavell, Walzer, Rorty and Derrida. Ophir adopts themes from Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche, but his main sources of influence are Levinas and Lyotard; Crary’s target is a direct attack on judgmental moralism, and she acknowledges Iris Murdoch’s, Cavell’s, and Diamond’s influence on her ideas; and Critchley resorts mainly to Kant, Marx, Levinas, Lacan, Løgstrup and Badiou.

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traits I share as well. But despite this substantial agreement, I reject a fundamental principle expressed in all the above writings, the one espoused also (in different guises) by judgemental moralists and aesthetic ethicists, namely, that ethics must be laid into the foundation of political-​philosophical edifices. The version of this principle that is adopted by the philosophers I refer to in the present section is succinctly expressed by Critchley: “at the heart of a radical politics there has to be what I call a meta-​political ethical moment that provides the motivational force or propulsion into political action. If ethics without politics is empty, then politics without ethics is blind” (2007: 12f.). Mouffe, Ophir, Critchley and Crary (and many others of course) are correct in claiming that the idea of a pure, ascetic ethics is a hoax. They realize that moral thought cannot be divorced from political thought. Yet they still find a need to posit a relation between the ethical and the political paralleling that between metaphysics to physics. Thus, the symmetry echoed by Critchley’s allusion to the Kantian formulation is deceptive. For Kant, there’s no primacy where concepts and intuitions are concerned. Ethics as meta-​politics is prioritized. Again, I shall have to limit myself here to one example.14 Critchley believes that the present experience of political disappointment of liberal democracies “provokes the need for an ethics or what others might call normative principles that might enable us to face and face down the present political situation” (2007: 3). This situation of “motivational deficit” requires as remedy “an ethics that empowers subjects to political action” (2007: 8), by eliciting “the core structure of moral selfhood” (2007: 9). Like many others who regard ethics as meta-​politics, Critchley turns to Levinas in order to gain the ethical-​ cum-​metaphysical idea of the basic relation to an infinite demand originating from an “other” which metaphysically precedes, or indeed annuls, the modern “archic” subject or self. This idea serves him for advancing an “an-​archic” theory of ethical subjectivity, which forms the basis of an ethically committed political anarchism, organized “around responsibility, an infinite responsibility that arises in relation to a situation of injustice” (2007: 93). Thus, for Critchley, the raison d’être of one’s political action emanates from an otherness’ call; it is “an ethical responsiveness to the sheer precariousness of the other’s face, of their injurability and our own. An ethical politics flows from our constitutive powerlessness in the face of the other” (2007: 120). There are two principal problems with this approach. The first is our inability to identify the needy “other,” to recognize the face of “the stranger, the 14

And again, I refer the reader to Matar (2022: chap. 3). The discussion there revolves mainly around Levinas, Critchley, Ophir and Judith Butler, as representatives of the view of ethics as meta-​politics.

46 Matar widow and the orphan,” as Levinas characterizes it metonymically. Which plea is the one genuinely asking for our attention? And how should we intervene? Levinas’s concept of “third party,” which moves us from the pre-​textuality and infinitude of the demand to the concrete and violent world of justice, is supposed to solve this problem.15 Yet it eventually remains essentially vague. I’ll say a word about the price of this vagueness in the next section. Recognising this pitfall, Critchley himself tries to fill the vacuum by turning to the “strategic occupation of the universalistic terrain of international rights and international law”; it is that which “provides the leverage for a local political articulation” (2007: 107). Thus, the ethical call emanating from the other’s face is eventually translated through an established political apparatus, the thin layer stratum that has managed to coalesce into liberal ideology in the West. The other problem I find with meta-​political ethics has to do with its assumption about the causes for the acute lack of motivation on the left. We saw that Critchley believes the “motivational deficit” is the result of the absence of updated normative principles which would show the way to yield moral selfhood. He therefore proposes to solve this problem by constituting a subject through the ethical experience of a responsible answer to the call of the Other. But in fact, the lack of motivation on the left today is not at all embodied in a lack of compassion or a lack of awareness of ethics. We have enough of these. The exhaustion on the left results from the feeling that global capitalism has triumphed and supposedly cannot be beaten, that all there is left is to take small bites out of it, to harry it, to “resist” fragmentarily. Therefore, it is an up-​to-​date left-​wing world view which could give convincing answers to the burning questions of the day, a vision of potential victory, that could yield the desired motivation. Contrary to Critchley,16 I believe that a healthy and effective political attitude cannot ignore our own needs and interests as the strongest motivational power for action and that the notion of responsibility towards others should only be grasped in relation to them. Otherwise, our political vision ends up as another version of white mythology, an attitude somewhat reminiscent of Victorian charity, whose moral subjects, laden with guilt feelings, belong to a

15

16

Note that for Levinas, justice is not ethical precisely because it asks for concrete content. It is by nature violent, because it always entails determination, demarcation, stoppage of the continual process of response, and thus a betrayal of some of our obligations towards the other—​an incapacity to answer the infinite demand it makes on us. And others in this family, like Ophir, and to a lesser degree also Butler.

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privileged class and can afford being “good” through an active care for some precarious others.17 Bringing back the notion of freedom, which Critchley chooses to downgrade in his political theory (2007: 93), we may remember that one of the most profound insights underlying Marx’s political analyses was that unless everyone is free, no one is free. Nelson Mandela expressed the same insight in the following memorable words: “A man who takes away another man’s freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-​mindedness. I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else’s freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity” (1994: 751). Or, appropriately, in more concrete terms: “we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians; without the resolution of conflicts in East Timor, the Sudan and other parts of the world.”18 Critchley is certainly right in diagnosing the current despair that leads to a lack of political action. It is with his prognosis that I disagree. Rather than meta-​political ethics, what we presently need in order to empower subjects to political action is primarily a robust political vision that could serve as a convincing and viable alternative to global militaristic capitalism. This updated vision for the international Left in a postmodernist reality should furthermore point at concrete ways through which what seems to be an undefeatable inhumane political and economic hegemony can be overturned. Without such a vision, the deep pessimism and passivity characterizing political subjects is totally understandable; no ethical construction could serve as a remedy. This claim is not a political manifesto but a philosophical remark pertaining to the question of the necessity and viability of (post-​)modern moral philosophy, in all its present manifestations. Anscombe had argued that we should not bother with ethics until we have “an adequate philosophy of psychology, in which we are conspicuously lacking.” As I’ve commented above, I believe that we actually need much more: a full-​bodied and applicable political theory that would eventually fill moral discourse with concrete content.

17

18

Remember the dustman Alfred Doolittle’s reply to Professor Higgins question: “Have you no morals, man?”—​“Can’t afford them, Governor. Neither could you if you was as poor as me.” Although the two characters in Pygmalion discuss what Hegel, in Philosophy of Right, would call Morality—​rather than Ethical Life—​the upshot is the same, I believe. Address by President Nelson Mandela at the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, 4 December, 1997.

48 Matar 5

Only Harmful without It

Anscombe, we remember, argued also that the concepts of what is morally right and wrong ought to be jettisoned, as long as they are detached from the context in which they get their sense, since they are only harmful without it. Following her, I have argued that such a context has to be politically saturated. I wish to conclude this paper with my second epikorsian contention, which is that appeal to an allegedly content-​less (“grammatical”?) moral discourse serves a conservative agenda. This is emphatically true of the judgmental conception of morality: the deceitful image of a deliberating, rational agent, carefully and disinterestedly weighing the pros and cons of every judgment—​the image inherent to the Kantian conception of morality and its various judgmental successors—​guarantees that power remains at the hands of those who already have it. There is no politically neutral ethical judgment. The judgments we may deem innocuous simply reflect the most deeply entrenched ideas, and we know what these represent: The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas … The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-​evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch. marx 2000: 192

Here is a concrete and actual example of an ethicist who rules as a thinker. Asa Kasher, the Laura Schwartz-​Kipp Professor Emeritus of Professional Ethics and Philosophy of Practice at Tel Aviv University, an Israel Prize laureate, is one of the authors of the Israeli Army’s Code of Ethics. Appealing to this code and to general moral principles, he gave moral justification for extrajudicial killing of Palestinians suspected of belonging to terror organizations, for demolitions

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of the homes of terrorists’ families and to other manifestations of the army’s conduct in its dealings with the occupied Palestinian population. Kasher also served Israel’s propaganda in justifying its attack on Gaza in December 2009—​including some of its particularly horrific methods;19 and again, the attack on Gaza in July 2014, when he developed moral justifications for the killing of civilians.20 I have analysed elsewhere (Matar 2006) Kasher’s philosophical and rhetorical justification mechanisms and cannot go into detail here, but a brief indication is due, since these mechanisms exemplify a way to exploit the emptiness of moral discourse and the triviality of abstract moral principles, by imbuing it with the content desired by the ruling class—​in this case, the Israeli government’s ideas of “morally right.” The Code of Ethics is a set of a noncontroversial “values,” such as “purity of arms,” “comradeship” and “sanctity of life.” Wishing to apply these abstract values in practice and reach a concrete decision, one instantly notices the inner tensions among them. This enables Kasher to “apply” the Code and strike the “right” balance by echoing the establishment’s desired conclusion. This “deduction” is backed by a set of empirical claims that are either taken for granted as true and non-​problematic or excluded from the balancing discussions, to be reflected upon some other time. In fact, these claims are even hardly ever mentioned. They include such assumptions as that Israel is a democratic state (it is not!), that the situation of a never-​ending harsh occupation is not relevant to the particular issue discussed (of course it is!), that people should behave rationally and usually do so (well …), and that political and military leaders do not think of their own interest and are not motivated by foreign considerations when they contemplate the state of army’s actions (sure …). Kasher is widely acknowledged in Israel 19 20

See, e.g., Kasher (2009). For that, he was harshly criticized in the UN Human Rights Council’s Report which investigated violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory in the context of the military operations conducted since 13 June 2014. Paragraph 395 in the Report “notes with concern the appearance of new terminology in the debate relating to respect of international law during the latest hostilities. The term ‘enemy civilian’ has been used by Asa Kasher, the drafter of the idf Code of Ethics. The commission believes that it is important to clarify that the concept of “enemy civilians” does not exist in international law. One of the most elementary principles of international humanitarian law is the obligation to distinguish between combatants and civilians; however, it never establishes different categories of civilians. The commission reiterates that a civilian is a civilian regardless of nationality, race or the place where he or she lives” (UN doc a/​h rc/​2 9/​c rp.4). For Kasher’s version, see his (2014). I remind the reader that in “Mr. Truman’s Degree,” Anscombe referred to the perverse idea, already prevalent, that modern warfare makes it impossible to distinguish clearly between civilians and military personnel.

50 Matar as a moral expert, a professional ethicist, but the philosophical conservatism and militaristic worldview which permeate his ethical project are hardly ever acknowledged. Kasher’s method demonstrates a way of making grammatical remarks operative. In this, it may be compared to Anscombe’s argumentation in her “Mr. Truman’s Degree.” Such a comparison clearly reveals the substantial differences between the two philosophers. Anscombe’s rhetoric—​as I have argued above—​ consists not merely of conceptual analyses but also of nuanced phenomenological descriptions. Unlike Kasher, she explicitly addresses the wider political context and does not pretend to be dealing with an abstract and general moral problem, which can be inspected from an allegedly neutral perspective. And, crucially, her stand is not that of the hegemony; she does not think as a ruler. She is critical of the ruling ideology and challenges its political dictates, as the strikingly small vote against awarding the honorary degree to Truman attests. We may now be in a slightly better position to observe an aspect of the harmfulness of the post-​theological appeal to the Categorical Imperative. The Imperative requires that in our moral judgment we overlook our perspective and reflect without bias. I have argued that this requirement is impossible to fulfil; our judgements are never neutral. What the Imperative intimates is primarily the illusion that non-​perspectival judgments are possible at all: that we can judge others’ behaviour from an objective point of view. This belief is harmful enough on the personal level, but it is disastrous when we think on a larger scale. What it amounts to is the double erasure of the “white mythology”—​a denial of the ideological matrix that comfortably arranges judgments to suit the interests of those who have the power, and then a suppression of this denial. Critchley’s meta-​political ethics does not fall into this trap. Aligning from the start with radical leftist criticisms of the current political deadlock in Western liberal democracies, his aim is to find a basis for political dissent and resistance. For him, true democracy is “a dissensual practice” (2007: 119), and he finds it is nowadays best carried out by contemporary anarchist practice. “Contemporary anarchists have created a new language of civil disobedience that combines street-​theatre, festival, performance art and what might be described as forms of non-​violent warfare” (2007: 123). The reason Critchley finds these anarchist practices particularly suitable is that the ethical stance underlying them defies “the privileging of a specific particularity because it is believed to incarnate the universal … democracy as democratization is the movement of disincarnation that challenges the borders and questions the legitimacy of the state” (2007: 119).

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Now, in practice, I not only support anarchist anti-​hegemonic activities but also gladly and consistently participate in them. However, I claim that the fear of saturated political content and the adoption of empty meta-​political ethics yields the opposite result than the one sought by Critchley. His book was published in 2007, during the heyday of global anarchist resistance to the militaristic neo-​liberal hegemony. Fifteen year later, we are back to an even deeper despair. Just think of the harrowing result of the cop26 summit in Glasgow, of our feeble stance—​despite its clear moral message—​vis-​à-​vis the class which has the means of material production at its disposal. Levinas’s “face” doesn’t help us either, and indeed, as Judith Butler convincingly shows, the emptiness of this concept is easily manipulated by the powers that be: How do we come to know the difference between the inhuman but humanizing face, for Levinas, and the dehumanization that can also take place through the face? […] media portraits […] are often marshaled in the service of war, as if bin Laden’s face were the face of terror itself, as if Arafat were the face of deception, as if Hussein’s face were the face of contemporary tyranny. butler 2004: 141

The case of aesthetic ethics is ostensibly more evasive. On the face of it, sensitive and nuanced descriptions do not have to yield to conservatism. In fact, one would expect them to penetrate the thick layers of the ruling ideology and expose neglected aspects of reality that are repressed in our everyday exchanges. Diamond’s treatment of our attitudes towards animal life is a fine example. However, as I have argued above, sensitivity is not enough in order to shatter our most fundamental political dogmas, those that are buttressed by the ruling classes, e.g. those pertaining to questions of citizenship, world order, private property or mass incarceration—​to name but a few salient examples. For these, mere sensitivity isn’t enough: a full-​blooded political analysis and conviction are needed. Diamond distances herself from moralistic judgment. Yet her aesthetic ethics leaves room for it to quietly sneak in from the back door. Denial is the best fertilizer for hegemonic judgments: it enables white mythology to rule unnoticed. In the introduction of The Realistic Spirit, Diamond exemplifies her approach in the way she reads Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark”: The central character of that story is shown as, in Wittgenstein’s sense, unhappy. The world does not meet conditions he lays down. That ethical

52 Matar spirit is shown in the story in relation to the doing of evil. The story is a kind of ethics by geometrical construction: extend the line (of this character) far enough and it destroys life, goodness, beauty. (1991: 10) This indeed is not a judgment of action, of right or wrong. Nonetheless, it is a judgment, a pervasive one; and also, I believe, a dangerously conservative one. We begin, it is true, with a refusal to lay down rigid principles, with sensitivity to subtle features and openness to complexity, but when we find ourselves in a political vacuum, it becomes almost impossible to think ethically except “by geometrical construction” of good and evil, and this is the very essence of moralistic thought. In reality, it may often happen that “good” people of the complacent, happy-​go-​lucky variety are blinded by their joie de vivre to the need to identify their privileges, to take a critical position, to challenge the status quo; in other words, from time to time “goodness” might turn out to be an avatar of insensitivity, conservative inertia, even “evil.” Conversely, often those whose conditions “the world does not meet” may, precisely due to their alienation from their surroundings, be those who see reality for what it is, the ones who scratch at that which others would rather paper over. And this insight is political, not ethical.21

References

Adams, R.M. 1995. “Moral Faith,” The Journal of Philosophy 92 (2): 75–​95. Anscombe, G.E.M. 1958. “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy 33 (124): 1–​19. Butler, J. 2004. Precarious life: the powers of mourning and violence. Verso, London. Crary, A. 2009. Beyond Moral Judgment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Critchley, S. 2007. Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. New York: Verso. Derrida, J. 1982. Margins of Philosophy. Translated by A. Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Diamond, C. 1991. The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind. Cambridge, MA: The mit Press. Diamond, C. 2008. Philosophy and Animal Life. New York: Columbia University Press.

21

This research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation, grant no. 176/​13. The present article was its first fruit; its most developed version is my book The Poverty of Ethics (Verso, 2022). I refer the reader to that book for more elaborate discussions of the points fleetingly dealt with here.

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Diamond, C. 2019. Reading Wittgenstein with Anscombe, Going on to Ethics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. France, A. 1923. The Garden of Epicurus. Translated by A. Allinson. New York: John Lane Company. Hegel, G.W.F. 1991. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Edited by A. Wood; translated by H.B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, I. 1998 [1781]. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated and edited by P. Guyer & A. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kasher, A. 2009. “Operation Cast Lead and the Ethics of Just War,” Azure online 37 (Summer). Kasher, A. 2014. “The Ethics of Protective Edge,” Jewish Review of Books (Fall), http://​ jewi​shre​view​ofbo​oks.com/​artic​les/​1104/​the-​eth​ics-​of-​pro​tect​ive-​edge/​. Leibowitz, Y. 1975. Judaism, the Jewish People and the State of Israel. Tel Aviv: Schocken. (Hebrew, excerpt translated by Matan Kaminer.) Leibowitz, Y. 1992. Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State. Edited by E. Goldman; translated by E. Goldman, Yoram Navon et al. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mandela, N. 1994. Long Walk to Freedom. London: Abacus. Mandela, N. 1997. “Address by President Nelson Mandela at the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People,” 4 December, 1997, South Africa History Online, https://​www.sahist​ory.org.za/​arch​ive/​addr​ess-​presid​ent-​nel​son-​mand​ela -​intern​atio​nal-​day-​sol​idar​ity-​-​pale​stin​ian-​peo​ple-​preto​ria-​4. Marx, K. 2000. “Theses of Feuerbach.” In his Selected Writings, 171–​174. Edited by D. McLellan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Matar, A. 2006. “Asa Kasher, How Is He Possible?,” Mitaam 6 (Hebrew). Matar, A. 2022. The Poverty of Ethics. London: Verso. Mouffe, C. 2000. The Democratic Paradox. New York: Verso. Nietzsche, F. 2002. Beyond Good and Evil. Edited by R.-​P. Horstmann & J. Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ophir, A. 2005. The Order of Evils: Toward an Ontology of Morals. Translated by Rela Mazali and Havi Carel. Cambridge, MA: The mit Press. Wittgenstein, L. 1965 [1929]. “A Lecture on Ethics,” The Philosophical Review 74: 3–​12.

chapter 3

A Material Defense of Inductive Inference John D. Norton 1

Introduction

Skepticism about inductive inference is so deeply woven into our philosophical tradition that we name its many forms after our philosophical heroes or villains: Hume’s problem of induction, Hempel’s problem of the raven, Goodman’s problem of grue, and Quine’s problem of underdetermination. This proliferation of skepticisms surrounds inductive inference with a miasma of philosophical decay. Yet, at the same time, inductive inference in science brings us the most extraordinary achievements. We live with a disturbing tension. Doubting inductive inference in the generality is philosophically respectable. There can be no inductive justification of inductive inference, Hume assured us. Yet doubting inductive inferences in the specific seems pointlessly quarrelsome. Are we to doubt the inductive inferences that tell us that the planets orbit the sun, that matter is made of atoms, that life evolved, that microbes carry contagion, and so on? To echo C. D. Broad’s lament, inductive reasoning is the glory of science but the scandal of philosophy.1 The standard response by philosophers is to quarantine our skeptical doubts in an isolation ward where the fever may rage. We do not allow the contagion to pass beyond these confines, lest we risk derision when our non-​ philosophical friends discover that we think nothing justifies the belief that the sun will rise tomorrow. Sometimes skepticism is merely troublesome sophistry and quarantine is the best response. However, sometimes skepticism is a clue that there is a real problem. If the skepticism is persistent, spanning not just centuries but millennia, it might well be a strong signal of a deep, unsolved, foundational problem. This I believe to be the case with inductive inference. The skepticism persists because have not properly identified the foundational problem and so have had no chance to solve it. 1 Broad’s exact wording has proven less quotable: “May we venture to hope that when Bacon’s next centenary is celebrated the great work which he set going will be completed; and that Inductive Reasoning, which has long been the glory of Science, will have ceased to be the scandal of Philosophy?” (1926: 67).

© John D. Norton, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004525474_005

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The real problem is that we have simply misunderstood how inductive inference works. We think it is sufficiently like deductive inference that we can model our account of inductive inference on it. We try to distinguish the valid inductive inferences from the invalid in the same way as we do with deductive logic—​by checking which of them conforms with one of a set of universal inference schemas. That is how formal logic works. Valid inferences are distinguished from invalid ones by their form. After two millennia, we need to accept that this model has failed for inductive inference and is responsible for the lingering miasma that surrounds inductive inference. We dispel it with a better understanding of the nature of inductive inference. The correct model, I will argue below, is that inductive inferences are not warranted by conformity with a universal template. None succeed universally, so that there is no universally applicable logic of induction. Rather, inductive inferences are warranted not formally but materially. They are justified by facts, that is, by the factual matter that is itself the content of argumentation. My principal goal in this paper is to illustrate how this material theory of induction emerges as the natural response to our failure to identify a universal formal logic of inductive inference. In Section 2, I will review several of these failures, including the failure of universality of Bayesian inductive logic. In Section 3, I will argue that the mode of its failure will lead us directly to the material theory of induction, which replaces the ever-​elusive universal logic of inductive inference with many localized logics of induction, each adapted to specific domains by the facts prevailing there. Section 4 provides a general argument for the view. It is illustrated in Section 5 and 6 with the case of Galileo’s law of fall. Conclusions are in Section 7. 2

Skepticism about Universal Logics of Inductive Inference

There is no formal logic of inductive inference that succeeds universally. I stress the “universally.” Most logics work quite well somewhere. I assert that none work everywhere. This is a strong claim and one that needs considerable work to sustain. For there are very many formal logics of inductive inference. My approach has been to coalesce these many logics into one of three large families of accounts, each of which is powered by one idea. This coalescence makes the refutation tractable, for the failure of universality of representatives of each family is easier to demonstrate. This exercise has been explored a little more fully elsewhere (Norton 2003, 2005). Here I will reproduce a few examples of it.

56 Norton 2.1 Inductive Generalization The first family is inductive generalization.2 It is powered by the notion that an instance confirms a generality. Expressed in syllogistic logic, it becomes the schema of enumerative induction. Expressed in first order predicate logic, it becomes Hempel’s instance account of confirmation. This is the argument form most commonly invoked in traditional skeptical analyses. The past history of sunrises inductively supports future sunrises. The past history of bread nourishing inductively supports bread always nourishing. They are all instances of this schema of enumerative induction: Some As are B ————— All As are B The schema has survived only through our willful indulgence of ignoring what everyone surely knows—​that, most commonly, when some As are B, it is not the case that all As are B. The schema simply does not work. Its uncritical use almost always produces bad results. We avoid disaster only by carefully contrived selection of our As and Bs. The problem becomes quite apparent if we look at real cases in science. After extraordinary labors spanning years, Marie Curie finally managed to isolate a mere tenth of a gram of radium chloride. She inspected its crystalline form and, on the strength of this one sample’s properties, immediately declared a general conclusion: “The crystals, which form in very acid solution, are elongated needles, those of barium chloride having exactly the same appearance as those of radium chloride” (1904: 26). This inference, and many she made that are like it, involve highly selective choices of A and B. She could have generalized from her tenth of a gram sample to conclude that all radium chloride is in Paris; or prepared by chemists by fractional crystallization; or comes in tenth of gram weights; or is roughly at room temperature; and so on endlessly. She chose only very specific As and Bs. How can a formal theory accommodate this narrowness of selection? The only resource is to add extra formal clauses to the schema that specify just which As and Bs are allowed. It takes only a little reflection to see how hopeless is the task. We must find clauses that will authorize just Curie’s careful selection as well as all those that might come up in every other application

2 For a pedagogic introduction, see Norton (2010a).

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of the schema. Indeed, a non-​chemist will likely fail to see just how carefully contrived is Curie’s selection of the property to be generalized. We shall see below that the choice of B as “elongated needles [exactly like] those of barium chloride” was no mere idle convenience. It was carefully chosen. 2.2 Hypothetical Induction This family of accounts of inductive inference is powered by the notion that an hypothesis accrues inductive support when it deductively entails affirmed evidence. The most familiar form is the astronomical saving of the appearances. Hypotheses over the motions of heavenly bodies accrue support when they conform to, and correctly predict, the celestial motions we observe (the “appearances”). The great difficulty with this basic notion is its profligacy. If we have any hypothesis that saves the appearances, so will any logical strengthening of it. Each of Copernican astronomy simpliciter and Copernican astronomy, conjoined with some of his neoPlatonic assertions about the sun, both save the celestial phenomena equally well. Are they then equally well supported? As a result, there have been many attempts to rein in simple hypothetical induction, often called “hypothetico-​deductive confirmation.” It is done by adding conditions that must be met before an hypothesis can accrue support from its affirmed deductive consequences. I will discuss just one. According to “inference to the best explanation,” we require that the hypothesis not just entail deductively the affirmed evidence; it must also explain it. In his celebrated work, J.J. Thomson (1897) found that cathode rays deflected in electric and magnetic fields just as if they were constituted of massive charged particles with a specific mass to charge ratio. The best explanation of this fact was that cathode rays just are beams of these particles. He thereby set aside the alternative view: “the almost unanimous opinion of German physicists [that] they are due to some process in the aether” or, more briefly, some sort of wave phenomenon. The success of the inference was short lived. By the 1920s, with the rise of quantum mechanics, the wave character of the electron was soon affirmed. Davisson and Germer (1927) found that cathode rays, scattered off a crystal of nickel, formed diffraction patterns just as if the rays were waves with wavelengths given by the quantum de Broglie formula.3

3 Curiously, J.J. Thomson’s son, G.P. (George Paget) conducted similar experiments at the same time and also affirmed the wave character of electrons. J.J. did not find this to be a refutation

58 Norton The best explanation was that these rays are de Broglie waves of this wavelength.4 We have two inferences to the best explanation that give strikingly different conclusions. That fact alone does not impugn inference to the best explanation as an inductive inference form. For inductive inference is fallible, and the display of failed inductive inferences may merely be illustrating the fallibility. Rather, the two inferences illustrate the major failing of inference to the best explanation. It is that explanation, understood formally, contributes rather little to the outcome of the inference. That outcome is mostly controlled by the factual background we assume when making the inference. This manifests in the fact that both of these inferences provide strong support for their hypotheses. However, the schema of inference to the best explanation provides no formal structure for these judgments of strength. If we know in the abstract that some hypothesis is the best explanation of the evidence, we have no way to assess how strongly the hypothesis is supported. It may be strong, weak, or negligible. However, once we look at the specifics in the background facts, we can then make the judgment, at least qualitatively. Thomson’s cathode rays respond in perfect concert to electric and magnetic fields of varying intensity, as expected of charged particles. Davisson and Germer’s cathode rays deliver a diffraction pattern that is the distinctive fingerprint of waves of the requisite wavelength. Hence, both inferences are strong. This lesser formal role for explanation reflects the deeper problem with inference to the best explanation. It is not a properly developed logic at all. It lacks a unique, stable, formal account of explanation. Accounts of explanation are notoriously scattered. If to explain is to subsume under a covering law from which the explanandum is deduced, inference to the best explanation reverts to simple hypothetico-​deductive confirmation, unless we can provide a general characterization of just what a law is. If we take explanation to be the displaying of probability raisers, then we need to find a probability space in which we can assign probabilities to the various propositions concerning the nature of cathode rays. Or if to explain is to display the causes, then we need to find a clear pathway through the tangled thicket that is the present literature on causation. Or if to explain is to unify, we need some account of the of classical physics, but instead an affirmation of the success of a classical account of the electron as a composite particle and field structure. For further discussion of J.J. and G.P.’s work and their interactions, see Navaro (2010). 4 That just this hypothesis specifically is supported is clear from Davisson’s (1937) and G.P. Thomson’s (1937) cautious formulations in their Nobel Prize acceptance speeches, as well as the award speech (Pleijel 1937).

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difference between mere conjunction of propositions and their unification. Perhaps we can make progress on all of these questions. But that is mere hope for the future and is not now giving us a precise formal theory of inductive inference. It is, to use Lipton’s (2004: 2, 55, 57) wording, more a “slogan.” It is an advertisement for what might one day be a properly developed logic. 2.3 Probabilistic Induction Philosophical fashions change. Even though the idea has been with us for centuries, it is only in the last few decades that a probabilistic approach to inductive inference has risen to be the dominant approach, in the form of Bayesian confirmation theory. Its appeal is immense. There are many contexts in which it produces analyses of extraordinary power. It also has the virtue of a mechanical calculus. Once you have determined the probability space and have a modicum of probability assignments, solving an inductive problem, even of some complexity, may reduce to mere computation, often only a little more challenging than simple arithmetic. This undeniable appeal has encouraged Bayesians to discount or overlook the shortcomings of the system. Two shortcomings are of foundational importance. First, the Bayesian view is that the entirety of inductive inference is subsumed by its probabilistic approach. This is mistaken. Bayesian analysis succeeds only in constrained domains in which grounding for its probabilities can be found. Elsewhere it returns meaningless numbers that can mislead profoundly. Second, the Bayesian view mischaracterizes the nature of inductive inference. It regards this as a branch of mathematics, so that the explication of inductive inference is largely the deriving of theorems in the probability calculus. I will argue below that inductive inference is better characterized as an inseparable part of empirical science. Elsewhere, I have joined a minority tradition of Bayesian critics and written at some length on the shortcomings of Bayesian confirmation theory (Norton 2008, 2010b, 2010c, 2011). Here I will work through one problem to illustrate some of the lingering weaknesses of Bayesianism. Norton (2010b) identifies the “inductive disjunctive fallacy” to which Bayesians are prone. It arises as follows. Assume that we have a very large number N+​1 of mutually exclusive and exhaustive outcomes a0, a1, …, aN. Now assume that we simply have no evidence that supports any of the outcomes whatever. It is not that we have no grounds that favor any one outcome over another. Rather, our evidence is completely bereft of anything helpful in deciding their truth or in discriminating among them. How can a Bayesian characterize this circumstance of what I shall call “completely neutral inductive support”? Each of a0, a1, …, aN must be assigned a very

60 Norton small probability, spreading the measure widely, for otherwise we are favoring one. Write this as P(ai) =​smalli where i =​0, 1, …, N. The actual value smalli assigned to each ai can vary. They definitely need not all be the same. They merely need to be very small and non-​zero, for a zero amounts to a negative certainty. We now compute the probability assigned to the disjunction of all the outcomes, excluding a0: P(a1 or … or aN) =​P(a1) +​… +​P(aN) =​small1 +​… +​smallN Since the sum of all the probabilities must be unity (“additivity”), we know that 1 =​small0 +​small1 +​… +​smallN so that small1 +​… +​smallN =​1 -​small0 =​ nearly-​one This last sum must be nearly one, since small0 is very small. Combining these, we have P(a1 or … or aN) =​ nearly-​one That is, we are now near certain of (a1 or … or aN) or, equivalently, near certain that the outcome is not a0. Recall the initial assumption: we simply have no evidence at all concerning the truth of the outcomes. Yet a simple, rather mindless, manipulation of the probabilities has given us near certainty, in contradiction to our initial assumption. Hence, I characterize this inference from no evidence about the outcomes to near certainty as an inductive fallacy, the “inductive disjunctive fallacy.” One might imagine that no one would seriously fall into the mechanical manipulation of probabilities that leads to the fallacy. It turns out that there are many instances of it, as recounted in Norton (2010b: sect. 4). For example, Van Inwagen (1996: 95) uses it to answer the (pseudo) profound question, “Why is there anything at all?” The answer proceeds, in effect, by attaching the possible world with no beings to outcome a0, since there can be only way to have no beings. All of the very many possible worlds with beings are attached

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to outcomes a1, …, aN. It is now concluded that outcome a0 of a world with no beings is “as improbable as anything can be” (1996: 99). Once the fallacy is displayed, its source is clear. It stems directly from the key formal property of a probability measure: it is an additive measure. All of the probabilities of mutually disjoint outcomes must add to unity. Hence, we have no way to represent completely neutral support. If we assign a very small probability to some outcome, additivity forces us to assign high probability to the disjunction of the rest. That is, we assign strong support or belief to the original outcome’s negation; and that is incompatible with having completely neutral evidential support. There are, broadly speaking, two ways in which Bayesians can respond. I categorize them as an “inelastic” and an “elastic” response. With the inelastic response, the Bayesian insists that the probabilistic computations must be respected. There is no fallacy. There is merely an error in our interpretation. Perhaps we should simply discount the possibility of completely neutral evidence at the outset. Or, more credibly, a subjective Bayesian may insist that all of the probabilities involved are arbitrarily selected subjective beliefs, akin to the way in which subjective Bayesians treat prior probabilities. The difficulty with this last response is that, once we discount the probabilities as expressing mere opinion, they cease to represent degrees of inductive support, as they should in an inductive logic. The probabilities are supposed to transform from pure opinion to a measure of inductive support as conditionalization proceeds. However, there is no objective criterion in the system that tracks the conversion. Merely having a high probability is not enough to show that the conversion is near completion, as the inductive disjunctive fallacy illustrates.5 Given these failures, in my view, the only viable inelastic response is simply to accept that there are cases that elude the Bayesian system and that this is one of them. The computation is mathematically correct but merely inapplicable to the case at hand. The elastic response accepts that the additivity of a probability measure prevents it from representing directly situations of completely neutral inductive support. However, probability measures can be used indirectly to represent them. The proposal is to replace a single probability measure with a set of them. Complete neutrality of evidential support would be captured by allowing all probability measures over the outcome space into the set. The proposal is appealing initially, since the complete neutrality of inductive support 5 This version of the inductive disjunctive fallacy includes no conditionalization. However, conditionalization could be added merely by extending the ai to include very many more outcomes aN+​1, …, aM, and then conditionalizing on all of the outcomes excluding these.

62 Norton appears to be captured by allowing in everything possible in the probabilists’ repertoire. If everyone speaks equally, no one is favored. While the proposal fails for technical reasons,6 it should be resisted by probabilists for a principled reason. It is, in effect, giving up the core of the probabilists’ theory: that relations of inductive support are represented by an additive measure. The elastic response allows that the proper account of inductive support includes non-​additivity. Probability measures are demoted to artifices. That is, they become adjunct structures used to simulate another non-​additive logic whose principles are not clearly articulated. We no longer have a probabilitistic logic of induction. Rather we have an elastic language that is deformed as needed to accommodate whatever inductive behavior is deemed appropriate in the case at hand. In sum, both elastic and inelastic responses lead to the same outcome: there are inductive problems that lie outside the Bayesian reach.7 We arrive at this directly from the inelastic response and also from the elastic response since the latter reduces additive probability measures merely to tools used in the simulation of non-​additive inductive relations of support. 3

Material Theory of Induction

Examples such as these indicate that there is no formal account of inductive inference that succeeds universally. However, inductive inferences succeed. These examples also suggest how that is possible. In the case of inference to the best explanation, we saw that explanation itself played a negligible role. What supported the conclusions were background facts. That idea, taken to its extreme, is the core thesis of a material theory of induction: Inductive inferences are warranted by facts, not by formal schemas. The clearest illustration is in Curie’s induction on radium chloride. The attempt to explicate it with the schema of enumerative induction failed. We could not justify why the schema should be limited precisely to the few properties of radium chloride that Curie so confidently generalized. The justification for this restriction cannot be found in any formal analysis of predicates and properties. Rather, it lies in the researches of chemists in the nineteenth century. The core result is known as “Haüy’s Principle” and is named after one of its earliest proponents, Reny Just Haüy. It asserts that, generally, 6 Completely neutral support should be invariant under negation. Sets of probability measures, no matter how extensive, do not exhibit this invariance. See Norton (2007: sect. 6). 7 For another example, see Norton (2010c).

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each crystalline substance has a single characteristic crystallographic form. The principle is grounded in extensive researches into the chemical composition of crystalline structures and into how their atoms may be packed into lattices. That means that, once one has found the characteristic crystallographic form of some sample of a substance, generally one knows it for all samples. Curie’s inductive inference is warranted by Haüy’s Principle and not by conformity to any inductive inference schema. There is an inductive risk taken in this conclusion, as indicated by the “generally” in the principle. Some substances admit polymorphism, which means that they form more than one type of crystal. We can now see why Curie’s induction is limited specifically to the crystallographic form of radium chloride rather than to the many other properties of Curie’s one tenth gram sample: Haüy’s Principle is restricted precisely in this way. Indeed, its formulation is extremely hard-​won. We now know that all crystals fall into one of seven crystallographic families. They are defined by the axes characteristic of the crystalline lattice.8 Discerning these families constituted a major mathematical challenge, and it was only after the mathematical problem was solved that truly reliable inductive inferences on crystalline forms were possible. When Curie identified radium chloride crystals as just like those of barium chloride, she was adopting the expediency of not specifying the family formally, but of merely allowing that it was the same as that of barium chloride. This in turn lent credence to her induction since another principle of chemistry, the law of isomorphism, allowed that analogous chemicals formed similar crystals. This core idea of the material theory of induction can be applied in the other examples. Probabilistic induction is warranted, according to the material theory, just in so far as there are background material facts authorizing the use of probabilities to represent degrees of support. Such circumstances might include inferences over populations where physical probabilities are introduced through an assumption of random sampling. In the case of the inductive disjunctive fallacy above, the probabilistic analysis failed since, by careful design, the problem situation is bereft of just the facts needed to authorize the use of probabilities in inductive inference.

8 The simplest system is the cubic system. When one learns that table salt form cubic crystals, one might imagine that its crystals are all little cubes. They are not. Rather, they are many shapes with the distinctive property of being derivable from cubes by cleavage along cleavage planes.

64 Norton 4

A General Argument for the Material Theory of Induction

There are two major premises in the general argument. The first is this: (1) Deductive inference is not restrictive; inductive inference is restrictive. This premise expresses the distinction traditionally drawn between deductive and inductive logic. Deductive inference is not restrictive, in the sense that the conclusion of a deductive argument expresses no further factual restriction than that already expressed by the premises. Inductive inference is restrictive, in the sense that the conclusion of an inductive inference must prohibit some of the possibilities that are logically compatible with the premises, else it would be deductive. It follows that, for any inductive inference, we can always find scenarios, even if contrived, that are inhospitable to the inference so that its use in them is not appropriate. That the context of an inductive inference is hospitable is a contingent property of the context. Securing an hospitable factual background is all that is needed to warrant the inference. The fact—​ the truth—​that the background is hospitable is the warrant of the inductive inference: Hence, inductive inferences are warranted by facts. Often, of course, we proceed with an inductive inference on the presumption that our warrant is a truth. The proper use of the inference is dependent on a later affirmation of the truth of the warrant. This requirement for a factual warrant applies to probabilistic inductive inference. To say that a circumstance is extremely probable or improbable is to assert a factual claim, albeit probabilistic, that goes beyond the facts in evidence. The second premise is this: (2) There is no universally applicable warranting fact for inductive inferences. One might to try to warrant inductive inferences by means of a universal fact. Such was the proposal by Mill (1882: bk. iii, chap. iii, 223) when he sought to ground induction in the “universal fact, which is our warrant for all inferences from experience, … that the course of nature is uniform”. However, no such singular fact has been forthcoming. Candidates turn out to be either optimistic, contingent falsehoods or vacuous truths. Rather, as we see in the examples of this paper, the facts warranting inductive inferences are varied and show no indication of deriving from a single, common, universal fact. The warranting facts may impose some regularity on the inductive inferences that they support. Those regularities, when described systematically, will form an inductive logic. Since there is no universal warranting fact, the resulting inductive logics will be applicable only to the restricted domains in which the warranting facts obtain: Hence, all induction is local.

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65

Illustration: Galileo’s Law of Fall

An illustration will show once again the necessity of background facts for inductive inference to be supported. Here is an insoluble inductive problem. Given the first members of a sequence of numbers: 1, 3, 5, 7, …, what comes next? There are many choices. We could continue as the odd numbers: 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, …; the odd prime numbers including 1: 1, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, …; countably many more continuations for which rules can be given;9 and uncountably many more for which no finite rule can be given. With the problem as posed, we have no means to discern among the possibilities. No inductive logic can help us. What makes the problem inductively insoluble is that the factual context in which the sequence arises is not specified. Once we know the factual context, we can rule out some, many, or most of the possible continuations. We can infer inductively. What we infer will depend sensitively on the background facts. There are many possible factual contexts in which these numbers may appear. They may merely be the numbers read from the right-​hand pages of a book; or from the decimal expansion of 359/​2645.10 Or they may be the numbered balls drawn by a randomizing lottery machine. Or they may be numbers offered to us in a question in an iq test. Or they may be numbers devised by a clever psychologist who plans to deceive us. Once we know these background facts, the possibilities are reduced and an inductive inference is possible. The inferences will be fully controlled by these facts and different in each case. If the numbers are page numbers, we will expect the continuation as the familiar odd numbers. If the numbers are lottery drawings, we will spread our expectations probabilistically over the remaining numbered balls. The cases of the iq test and the deceiving psychologist are more complicated. Each of these background facts will engender a different inductive logic that applies just to the domains in which those background facts prevail. Let us pursue one case. The numbers 1, 3, 5, 7, … turn out to be classics in the history of science. Galileo’s (1638) Two New Sciences presents Galileo’s law of fall in several forms: the speed of fall increases in proportion to the time of

9 10

The function f(n) =​(2n-​1) +​ (n-​1)(n-​2)(n-​3)(n-​4) g(n) returns the original sequence 1, 3, 5, 7 for n =​1, 2, 3, 4. But for n =​5, 6, 7, … it returns different numbers according to the arbitrary selection of the function g(n). 359/​2645 =​0.13572778828 ….

66 Norton fall; or the distance fallen increases with the square of the time of fall. It could also be expressed so: Hence it is clear that if we take any equal intervals of time whatever, counting from the beginning of the motion, such as ad, de, ef, fg, in which the spaces hl, lm, mn, ni are traversed, these spaces will bear to one another the same ratio as the series of odd numbers, 1, 3, 5, 7; … Third Day, Naturally Accelerated Motion, Thm. ii, Prop. ii, Cor. i

That is, a freely falling body falls incremental distances 1, 3, 5, 7 in successive units of time. Thus the total distances fallen in the successive units of time are 1, 1+​3=​4, 4+​5=​9, 9+​7=​16, and we recover the more familiar squares of the times. These incremental distances may have a more direct place in Galileo’s discovery. Stillman Drake (1978: 89) conjectures that Galileo may have measured experimentally the distances that a body falls in equal times by using the surrogate for free fall of a ball rolling down a groove in an inclined plane. Gut frets were arranged across the groove, so that the noises made by the passing ball beat a uniform rhythm in time. Then the spacing of the frets would measure the incremental distances. Drake’s text reproduces a Galileo manuscript (87) in which, Drake believes, Galileo recorded the positions of the gut frets.11 We will never know exactly how Galileo posed the inductive problem to himself. So let us pose a Galileo-​like problem in which we are allowed only to use the resources available to Galileo. We imagine that Galileo has measured, nearly enough, that incremental distances fallen in unit time are in the ratios 1 to 3 to 5 to 7. What is the continuation? Without some further background assumption, nothing can be inferred. Galileo apparently assumed that the continuation is governed by a simple rule, expressible in the limited geometric and arithmetic language available to him. This immediately directs him to the odd numbers for incremental distances and to the squares for total distances fallen. Did Galileo make this assumption explicitly? It is indicated informally in Two New Sciences when Galileo introduces the gains of speed in free fall with the rhetorical question, “why should I not believe that such increases take 11

They were 33; 130; 298; 526; 824; 1,192; 1,620; 2,123 (corrected to 2,140). A short computation (by me) shows that the intervals between these distances, taking 33 to be the unit, are: 1; 2.94; 5.09; 6.91; 9.03; 11.15; 12.97; 14.67; which are quite close to the odd numbers 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15.

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place in a manner which is exceedingly simple and rather obvious to everyone?” (1638: 161). There is a stronger statement in the Assayer, where Galileo writes thus: Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wanders about in a dark labyrinth. (1623: 237–​238) Galileo does not present the Platonic assumption as abstract metaphysics. It is a methodological guide. It is also a factual assumption. There are many ways that things might be in the world. Galileo’s Platonism rules out all possibilities save those that can be described simply in the language of mathematics. The restriction to simple rules is powerful. But it is not powerful enough to rule out all other continuations of 1, 3, 5, 7. One further, often overlooked, assumption rules out these others. Galileo’s ratios of 1 to 3 to 5 to 7 to … for the incremental distances fallen in unit time succeeds whatever unit is taken for time. It might be a second, a half second, a pulse beat, and so on. The same is true for the total distance fallen. Their ratios are always the squares: 1 to 4 to 9 to 16 to … To see how this works arithmetically, take the incremental distances: 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, … Now choose a new unit of time, equal to two of the old units. Hence the incremental distances fallen in the new doubled units of time are these: 1+​3, 5+​7, 9+​11, 13+​15, 17+​19, … =​4, 12, 20, 28, 36, … =​4×1, 4×3, 4×5, 4×7, 4×9, … The ratios 1 to 3 to 5 to 7 to … are preserved. Galileo knew this. He wrote in Corollary 1 above that the result holds if we select “any equal intervals of time whatever”. It is a remarkable fact, strongly suggested by his experiments. Galileo had no accurately measurable standard unit of time. He had no atomic clock that could deliver one second with

68 Norton extraordinary precision. His units of time were selected arbitrarily in the context of the experiment. When an arbitrary selection of a unit of time delivers just the ratios 1 to 3 to 5 to 7 to …, either Galileo happened by sheer good fortune onto just the right unit of time; or any selection of unit will return the same result. Galileo clearly chose the second option. This insensitivity to choice of unit is a powerful factual restriction. Virtually all laws of fall will not respect it. Consider, for example, fall in a resisting medium. It initially follows Galileo’s law but then asymptotically approaches a limiting constant velocity. The motion will require a time, characteristic of the specific arrangement, to achieve this terminal velocity, nearly enough. That time parameter gives the motion a definite temporal scale and precludes preservation of the law under a change of the unit of time. Galileo could quickly affirm, as we did above, that his law of fall respects this invariance under the selection of the time unit (to use a slightly more modern phrasing). He would also have found it impossible to write any other simple law of fall that conformed to it, while preserving the initial segment of incremental distances 1, 3, 5, 7. We do not know if Galileo recognized just how complete this restriction is. Mathematical techniques not available to him show that the only laws of fall that respect this invariance have the total distance fallen growing as a simple power of time (see Norton 2014a). These yield a correspondingly restricted set of laws for the incremental distances. The incremental distance d(t) fallen in the unit of time between times (t–​1) and t satisfies the following: d(t) is proportional to tp –​(t–​1)p, where p is any real number greater than 0. The only case of linear dependence of d(t) on t arises when p=​2, for then d(t) is proportional to t2 –​(t-​1)2 =​ t2 –​(t2-​2t+​1) =​ 2t-​1 These are the odd numbers of Galileo’s law, for when t =​1, 2, 3, …, 2t-​1 =​1, 3, 5, …. We need no appeal to simplicity to reduce the possibilities to this one law. Since it has just one free parameter, p, very little data eliminates all the rest. For example, take just the first two numbers –​1, 3 –​of the initial sequence. We have d(2)/​d(1)=​3, and p must satisfy this: p p p p 2 − (2 − 1) 2 −1 p 3= p = = 2 −1 p p 1 − (1 − 1) 1

The unique solution is p=​2. In sum, the premise of the inductive inference is a measurement of incremental distances of fall in the ratio 1 to 3 to 5 to 7. The conclusion is that distances of fall in general conform with Galileo’s law. The material facts that

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warrant it are (a) (Platonic assumption) that fall conforms to a rule that may be written simply using techniques available to Galileo, and (b) (invariance assumption) that the law is invariant under a change of the unit of time. It turns out that (b) alone is sufficient to warrant the inference, which is something that Galileo may have suspected, but likely could not have shown. 6

The Superfluity of Formal Theory

We might say that Galileo’s law of fall is the best explanation for the numerical regularities found in the experiments. However, declaring it so adds nothing of any use to the material analysis already given. Once we make the Platonic and invariance assumptions just listed, we have specified the result. At best, the declaration of a best explanation gives us a sense of comfort with the inference. At worst, it creates a spurious unity with other inductive inferences that are intrinsically different from it, but are now collected under the umbrella of “best explanations”. We are misled into seeing a principle of inductive logic, where there is nothing beyond superficial similarity. We can embed Galileo’s inference into a Bayesian analysis. The Platonic assumption can be expressed as a prior probability distribution over various possible laws that accords higher probability to the simpler law, such as in Jeffreys’s (1961: sect. 1.61). We might then also incorporate the invariance assumption into the likelihoods. We would then carry out the computations required by Bayes’s theorem and discover the happy outcome that Galileo’s law of fall is accorded high probability. Once again, nothing of value has been added to the analysis given in the preceding section. We have just obscured a simple inductive inference behind a fog of probabilities. Without the Platonic and invariance assumptions, a Bayesian analysis is unable to deliver any result. But once we make those assumptions, we have no need of the Bayesian analysis. It is superfluous. At best, we have given merely a probabilistically minded philosopher a sense of comfort with the result. At worst, we have misled ourselves into thinking that inductive inference is merely a sub-​branch of the mathematics of the probability calculus. 7

Conclusion

Inductive inference has been a favorite target of skeptical assault for millennia. It has been so, not because of any special malice amongst skeptics against inductive inference. It has been so, because it is troubled and because those troubles lend themselves to skeptical formulations.

70 Norton My claim in this paper is that the root cause of the fragility of inductive inference is that, for millennia, we have sought to model our accounts of it on deductive inference. That is, we have sought formal theories of inductive inference in which good inductive inferences are warranted by conformity to universally applicable schemas. The correct account, however, is a material account in which inductive inferences are warranted by facts. Underlying this is a change in our understanding of the nature of inductive inference. It is not a branch of mathematics to be studied in the abstract. It is an inseparable part of the empirical content of science. I doubt that this reorientation will resolve all skeptical challenges to inductive inference. It would be foolish to circumscribe the ingenuity of a skeptic. However, notorious skeptical problems concerning inductive inference evaporate. For example, Goodman’s (1983: chap. 3) “grue” challenge fails. Nineteenth-​ century crystallographers faced extraordinary difficulties in determining the very few predicates that could be projected for materials like emeralds. Grue-​ ified predicates are not among them and also, probably, “green” is not.12 (One might be tempted to reanimate the problem by the strategy of “grue-​ifying everything”, including the background facts that pick out projectible predicates. The reanimation fails since changing everything turns out to be indistinguishable from changing nothing (Norton 2006). More significantly, the skeptical problem, the Humean problem of induction, is dissolved. It is argued in Norton (2014) that setting up the problem in the first place requires the separation of the matter of inductive inference from the warranting structures—​that is, from the formal schema to which a formal theory requires inductive inferences to conform. This separation of matter from schema leaves a formal theory that is impoverished in its justificatory resources; and sufficiently so that the Humean skeptical challenge is easy to mount. If one approaches inductive inference materially, however, the distinction of matter from warranting structure dissolves. It turns out that one can then no longer set up the traditional Humean challenge.13

12

13

It turns out that all emeralds are green not because of any determining property of the mineral beryl that forms emeralds, but because gemologists decree that only beryl that is colored green by impurities can be called emerald. That is, “all emeralds are green” is simply true by definition. “All emeralds are grue” turns out to be a contradiction. After the writing of this chapter in 2014, I completed two book manuscripts on the material theory of induction: The Material Theory of Induction (BSPSopen/​University of Calgary Press, 2021), and The Large-​Scale Structure of Inductive Inference. Both are available for download at https://​sites.pitt.edu/​~jdnor​ton/​jdnor​ton.html.

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References

Broad, C.D. 1926. The Philosophy of Francis Bacon: An Address Delivered at Cambridge on the Occasion of the Bacon Tercentenary, 5 October, 1926. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Curie, Marie 1904. Radioactive Substances, 2nd edition. London: Chemical News Office. Davisson, Clinton J. & Germer L.H. 1927. “Diffraction of Electrons by a Crystal of Nickel,” Physical Review 30: 705–​40. Davisson, Clinton J. 1937. “The Discovery of Electron Waves,” Nobel Prize Lecture, December 13, 1937. url =​. Drake, Stillman 1978. Galileo at Work: His Scientific Biography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Reprinted by Dover Publications, 1995.). Galilei, Galileo 1623. “The Assayer, in Stillman Drake.” Edited and translated in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, 231–​280. New York: Doubleday & Co., 1957. Galilei, Galileo 1638. Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences. Translated by H. Crew & A. de Salvo. MacMillan, 1914. (Reprinted by Dover Publications, 1954.). Goodman, Nelson 1983. Fact, Fiction and Forecast, 4th edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jeffreys, Harold 1961. Theory of Probability, 3rd edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lipton, Peter 2004. Inference to the Best Explanation, 2nd edition. London: Routledge. Mill, John Stuart 1882. A System of Logic, 8th edition. New York: Harper and Brothers. Navarro, Jaume 2010. “Electron diffraction chez Thomson: Early Responses to Quantum Physics in Britain,” The British Journal for the History of Science 43: 245–​275. Norton, John D. 2003. “A Material Theory of Induction,” Philosophy of Science 70: 647–​70. Norton, John D. 2005. “A Little Survey of Induction.” In P. Achinstein (ed.), Scientific Evidence: Philosophical Theories and Applications, 9–​34. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Norton, John D. 2006. “How the Formal Equivalence of Grue and Green Defeats what is New in the New Riddle of Induction,” Synthese 150: 185–​207. Norton, John D. 2007. “Disbelief as the Dual of Belief,” International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 21: 231–​252. Norton, John D. 2008. “Ignorance and Indifference,” Philosophy of Science 75: 45–​68. Norton, John D. 2010a. “A Survey of Inductive Generalization,” url =​. Norton, John D. 2010b. “Cosmic Confusions: Not Supporting versus Supporting Not,” Philosophy of Science 77: 501–​523. Norton, John D. 2010c. “There Are No Universal Rules for Induction,” Philosophy of Science 77: 765–​77.

72 Norton Norton, John D. 2011. “Challenges to Bayesian Confirmation Theory.” In P. S. Bandyopadhyay & M. R. Forster (eds.), Philosophy of Statistics, Vol. 7: Handbook of the Philosophy of Science, 391–​439. North Holland: Elsevier. Norton, John D. 2014. “A Material Dissolution of the Problem of Induction,” Synthese 191: 671–​690. Norton, John D. 2014a. “Invariance of Galileo’s Law of Fall under the Change of the Unit of Time,” url =​. Pleijel, H. 1937. “Nobel Prize in Physics 1937: Award Ceremony Speech,” url =​. Thomson, George P. 1937. “Electronic Waves,” Nobel Prize Lecture, June 7, 1938 url =​. Thomson, Joseph John 1897. “Cathode Rays,” The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science 44: 293–​316. van Inwagen, Peter 1996. “Why Is There Anything at All?,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 70 (supp.): 95–​120.

chapter 4

The Recovery of the Human: Cavell, Skepticism, Romanticism Nikolas Kompridis In memory of Stanley Cavell Superior cultures have no use for what Peirce called make-​ believe doubt. rorty 2010: 6

…

I say this struggle with skepticism, with its threat or temptation, is endless. I mean to say that it is human, it is the human drive to transcend itself, make itself inhuman, which should not end until … the human is over. cavell 1989: 57

∵

1

Stanley Cavell’s portrayal of skepticism is unlike any other in philosophy. It is so unlike any other that it is mostly ignored in the skepticism literature. For there to be a skepticism literature, the two chief problems that constitute that literature—​the problem of “other minds” and the problem of “the external world”—​had to be standardized to a certain extent, as is the case with any literature. With standardization, skepticism became a language game with a finite number of moves and relative ease of access for any interested “players.” The unwelcome circumstance that follows is not that there are too many participants cluttering up the discussion; but rather, (far) too much agreement about

© Nikolas Kompridis, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004525474_006

74 Kompridis what skepticism is. Given excessive background agreement, it is very hard for Cavell’s account of skepticism not to appear idiosyncratic, its novel philosophical arguments, notwithstanding. Cavell’s eccentric position in relation to the skepticism literature, arises from his insistence that what we call skepticism is inseparable from how it is lived, from how we respond to it in the lives we live with others. Neither Descartes nor Hume lived their skepticism; like all modern skeptics, they intellectualized it; they made it a philosophical problem, from which their own lives (as lived) were insulated. On Cavell’s admittedly expansive and heterodox view, skepticism is not strictly a philosophical problem nor primarily an epistemological matter—a matter of what can or cannot be known. Drawing our attention to the myriad ways skepticism comes to inhabit the complex, knotted textures of human lives, imperiling them in ways humans knowingly and unknowingly invite, Cavell asks us to consider whether skepticism is an inescapable condition of human life. He wants the question of how we live our skepticism, and, conversely, of how skepticism comes to inhabit (and haunt) our lives, to supplant or reframe the standard questions that have been the preoccupation of the skepticism literature since Descartes. To rethink the significance of skepticism as Cavell suggests, is also to take on the discomforting thought that in our lives we are actively receptive to the threat of skepticism, receptive to its inhabitation, regardless of the perils it brings, and, perhaps, perversely, because of them, as Cavell shows in his essay on Poe’s short story, “The Imp of the Perverse” (1988a: 125–​139). If Cavell is right, what we are receptive to, may not be what philosophers since Descartes have called “skepticism”—​not exactly, and maybe, not at all. Thinking about how skepticism is lived, and about how it might otherwise be lived, moves one’s thinking quite far from the epistemologically oriented concerns of the profession. When one’s thinking about skepticism moves so far from those concerns as to bring it into conversation with romantic literature, Shakespeare, and Hollywood films, one moves onto terrain that is filled with reputational risks: the risk that by departing too far from the canonical understanding of skepticism one has also departed too far from intelligible philosophy; the risk that by raising questions one’s peers for good reason sidestep or ignore demonstrates that one’s philosophical nous is of somewhat suspect quality; the risk that one’s peers will therefore find your thinking a bit too loopy to take seriously; the risk that your work will be considered merely literary, and not philosophical; and, the risk, above all, that one’s philosophical contributions will be regarded as somehow “phony” or “fraudulent.” The possibility of fraudulence is an issue that Cavell treated rather incisively in his early essay, “Music Discomposed.” I think it unlikely that when Cavell wrote that essay, he

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had any intimation that his own work might one day induce among professional philosophers doubts and suspicions of the kind that were provoked by a strain of “modern musicy.”*,1 In response to the question of whether the so-​called serious music of that period should and could be taken seriously as music, Cavell wrote, “the possibility of fraudulence … is endemic in the experience of contemporary music … [I]‌ts full impact, even its immediate relevance, depends upon a willingness to trust the object, knowing that the time spent with its difficulties may be betrayed” (1976: 188). But that just is the kind of trust that Cavell’s writing came to require, not because it is opaque and hyper-​complex in the way that was typical of modernist music in the 1950’s and 1960’s; but because of how far from the concerns and methods of professional philosophy Cavell was prepared to depart, and eventually did depart. Risking that such trust as his writing requires, might not be charitably supplied by his professional peers, Cavell nonetheless pushed his thinking about skepticism, or rather, was pushed by it, onto unfamiliar terrain, terrain on which he did not already know his way around. Somewhat ironically, an explanation for the general neglect of Cavell in the skepticism literature is anticipated in his most systematic and academic work on the topic, The Claim of Reason.2 One can usefully read the first half of The Claim of Reason (parts 1–​2) as a quasi-​genealogical account of how the preoccupations of modern skepticism seemed “to express our fundamental concerns about our relation to the world,” thereby turning the question of skepticism into “the fundamental question of philosophy.”3 If Cavell’s book had ended right there, it might have had a different reception history, and possibly earned itself a secure place in the literature. For up to that point, Cavell’s concerns about skepticism sit comfortably within the ambit of academic philosophical discourse about the topic. These concerns were addressed directly to professional philosophers and written in a properly professional vocabulary. As a novel critique of traditional epistemology’s picture of knowledge, The Claim * I want to thank David Macarthur for his patient encouragement through the course of writing this essay, and especially for the many fruitful and lively discussions about pragmatism, skepticism, Cavell, and Rorty, and much else, for which I will always be grateful. My paper owes much to the spirit of those discussions. Its shortcomings are mine alone. 1 Post-​Weberian music of the kind written by Pierre Boulez, Milton Babbitt, and Karlheinz Stockhausen in the 1950’s and 1960’s is the reference point of Cavell’s essay, dspublished in (1976: 170–​212). 2 Although it carries a hefty Kantian weight (or tonality), I have always been puzzled by Cavell’s choice of title, since reason, even in some expansive sense, is not the subject of the book. 3 Stanley Cavell, “Responses,” in Goodman (2005: 159).

76 Kompridis of Reason had no small affinity with contemporaneous critiques of epistemology, such as Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and Charles Taylor’s proposals for “overcoming epistemology.”4 However, nothing in the first half of the book nor the excursus on moral philosophy in part 3 prepared one for the direction of Cavell’s investigations in part 4, which functions, unexpectedly, as the dramatic “finale” of the book, veritably Beethovenian in scope. Whereas the previous three parts form “an academically recognizable study of … skepticism as understood in Descartes and Hume and Kant,”5 part 4, the longest part of the book (167 pages), roams about in a conceptual space much larger than is circumscribed by any previous discussions of skepticism. Cavell’s elaborate and detailed engagement with Shakespearean tragedy and romantic texts bursts the boundaries of philosophical discussions of skepticism. Turning the question of skepticism inside out, exposing it to larger questions about what it is to be human (and inhuman), Cavell tells a story about the persistence of skepticism in our philosophical and non-​philosophical lives that is not only unlike any in the skepticism literature, it made itself alien to that literature. To tell his story about skepticism as an irremovable temptation and as a standing threat in our day-​to-​day encounters with one another and the world, Cavell required conceptual and expressive resources that philosophy by itself could not provide. From part 4 of The Claim of Reason onwards, in a remarkable series of books and essays, it is a story that unfolds through some extraordinarily rich readings of literature, film, and drama, and not through philosophical argument alone. And, yet, the more that Cavell allowed his philosophical investigations to work themselves out through a deep and unpredictable engagement with works of literature and art, the less what he was doing resembled what his philosophical peers were doing, and the more he resembled a philosophical (and ignorable) oddball. After all, Cavell was not simply making use of examples from Wordsworth’s poetry, Hollywood films, and Shakespearian drama to illustrate or support his philosophical arguments. No sharp line is drawn between the interpretation of these works and the prosecution of an argument. In effect, Cavell staked the intelligibility of his philosophizing on an unusually intimate relation to works of art and literature. He placed his faith in these works, trusting that they would not only speak to his philosophical concerns, but also guide them, to a degree that is extremely rare in the history of philosophy (Nietzsche comes to mind, but few others).

4 The relevant papers on “overcoming epistemology” are collected in Taylor (1997). 5 Preface to the 1999 edition of The Claim of Reason (ix).

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The cost of such intimacy and trust is not slight. After all, a book that begins as “an academically recognizable study of … skepticism as understood in Descartes and Hume and Kant,” and ends with the question of whether “philosophy can become literature and still know itself” (1979: 496), has wandered very far from academic philosophy. This question does not (and cannot) belong to the class of questions that define academic studies of skepticism. It is therefore not surprising that Cavell’s texts after The Claim of Reason provoke the thought that he has gone as far out as one can go, and much further than one should. As Richard Rorty points out in his review of Cavell’s In Quest of the Ordinary, Cavell is “the least defended, the gutsiest, the most vulnerable. He sticks his neck out farther than any of the rest of us” (1989). Coming from Rorty, who stuck his neck out quite far and quite often, that is high praise, indeed. Very early in The Claim of Reason, as though foreshadowing how far from his starting point his inquiry would stray, Cavell’s speculations about a fateful change in Beethoven’s music bear directly on the unexpected change of direction that takes place in the final part of his book. Elaborating upon remarks made in “Music Discomposed,” Cavell claims that there is a point in Beethoven’s work where one can no longer relate to what one hears as a process of improvisation. At that point, Cavell claims, “music, such music, must be written” (1979: 5). Why? Because at this point the intelligibility of the music can longer depend on hearing it as originally flowing from or arising out of a process of improvisation, as was the case with early Beethoven, and, of course, Mozart and Haydn. With later Beethoven the part/​whole relationships create issues of second-​order intelligibility. For such music, music that must be written, “requires parts that are unpredictable from one another” (1979: 5, my emphasis). [O]‌ne may speculate further that Beethoven’s sketches were necessary both because not all ideas are ready for use upon their appearance (because not ready ever in any but the right company), and also because not all are usable in their initial appearance, but must first, as it were, grow outside the womb. What must be sketched must be written. (1979: 5) It is quite uncanny how much these speculative remarks apply to the final part of The Claim of Reason, the very part of the work which was “unpredictable” from the parts that preceded it. Moreover, Cavell’s subsequent writings on romanticism, both the volume and breadth of those writings, could not have been predictable from what he had written up to the “finale” of The Claim of Reason (I will have more to say about this “finale’s” connection to Beethoven’s

78 Kompridis music later). As Cavell came to see following the completion of The Claim of Reason, the ideas that first appeared as “sketches” in the final part of that book required further growth outside its womb: “What must be sketched must be written.” Much of In Quest of the Ordinary is an attempt to make sense of the sudden “outbreaks” of “moments and lines of romanticism” in the final part of the Claim of Reason. “As I was trying to follow the last part, part 4, of my book The Claim of Reason to a moment of conclusion, my progress kept being deflected by outbreaks of romantic texts” (1988a: ix). Cavell’s conscientious attempt to do justice to these outbreaks of romanticism was nonetheless unsettling, for they were “threatening the end of my story, if for no other reason than that I did not know enough, or how, to accept it.” It is as though Cavell were asking himself: Why did I suddenly, inexplicably, let romanticism, of all things (!), intrude into my philosophically sober discussion of skepticism? Why did I let the end of my story be dictated by romanticism? It thus became imperative for Cavell to find out, as he makes clear in the opening pages of In Quest of the Ordinary, why he postulated some decisive or fateful “interplay between skepticism and romanticism” (1988a: x), such that he could no longer avoid the task of “uncovering the connection with romanticism” (1988a: 6). By this point, without providing any account of why or how, Cavell, the philosophical modernist who appeared in the pages of Must We Mean What We Say and The World Viewed has disappeared, and in his place, Cavell, the unapologetic romantic emerged. This, needs explaining. Having stuck his neck out this far, Cavell had to ask himself, “What is philosophy for me, or what has it begun showing itself to be, that it should call for, and call for these, romantic orientations and transgressions?” (1988a: ix). He should have also asked himself: What is romanticism for me that it led me to abandon my modernist self-​understanding? What do I get from romanticism that I can’t or don’t get from modernism? Why did I stake my idea of philosophy on a philosophy of romanticism? These are question that Cavell, alas, left unanswered. As much as he wrote about romanticism after The Claim of Reason—​and he wrote a great deal, and always in relation to skepticism, the one becoming a new key to unlock the other—​he never sufficiently clarified why the two had become so closely intertwined with one another, such that his claims about skepticism became intertwined with his claims about romanticism. With the help of questions posed in Rorty’s review of The Claim of Reason and, some years later, his review of In Quest of the Ordinary, I want to offer an account of why Cavell made his post-​ Claim of Reason account of skepticism increasingly dependent on his account of romanticism, figuring the latter as some kind of “answer” to the former. Not an answer in the sense that it would bring skepticism to an end; nor an answer

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that would silence the skeptic, once and for all; rather, an answer—​well, one answer—​to the normative question of how one ought to respond to skepticism, since, on Cavell’s view, a life without skepticism, at least what Cavell calls “skepticism,” is not an option for creatures like us. To be sure, Rorty and Cavell make an odd couple. It is a pity that they didn’t make more of their mutual oddness through a more direct and sustained engagement with each other’s positions. Rorty made an effort to initiate such an engagement, but Cavell did not meaningfully reciprocate.6 In any case, their striking disagreements about both skepticism and romanticism can still be instructive and illuminating, not least because they are so very close to and yet so very far from each other’s positions. Moreover, there is also something to be learned from how they both placed themselves at odds with professional philosophy, and did so, each in their own way, by trying to enlarge and broaden what could count as philosophy, and who could count as a philosopher. As Cavell wrote in response to Rorty’s review of The Claim of Reason: “Rorty is an American philosopher of my generation—​and there is no other known to me who is intellectually or culturally more broadly informed—​who came to be as dissatisfied with his philosophical education (which is as much as to say, with the contemporary dispensations of philosophy given to him) as, halfway through a Ph.D. dissertation, I found myself to be” (Goodman 2005: 158). How does one continue to do philosophy when one has come to question the effects of one’s professional self-​formation? What does one do with one’s inherited dissatisfactions? To what or where does one turn if one wants to do philosophy but on different terms? Must one turn away from philosophy to return to it under different terms? Can one return under different terms? These questions are not external to the question of why romanticism became a crucial part of Cavell’s account of skepticism; they are at the very heart of it.

2

Forty years after it was written, Rorty’s review of The Claim of Reason looks prescient. He very precisely identified the unresolved issues in Cavell’s account of skepticism that, to this day, neither Cavell nor his closest readers adequately 6 One can only speculate why the engagement was not reciprocal. Perhaps, Cavell didn’t think he had anything meaningful to say about Rorty’s project. Perhaps, Cavell was overly protective of his own body of work. Certainly, but for few exceptions, Cavell did not much engage with the work of his contemporaries in the way that peers like Rorty, Putnam, and Taylor did.

80 Kompridis or convincingly addressed. Rorty shows that Cavell slides between two notions of skepticism and goes back and forth between two conceptions of philosophy, which have their structural correlate in the striking discontinuity between parts 1–​3 of the book and part 4, written some twenty years after. Rorty suggests that the divergence between them is such that The Claim of Reason is actually two distinct “books,” about which he has diametrically opposed views. While he praises Cavell’s notion of skepticism in “the deep and romantic sense,” “where it helps us see something about the human situation” and “human finitude” (Rorty 1982: 176), Rorty is perplexed by the amount of attention Cavell gives to skepticism in the standard academic sense. He happily accepts Cavell’s characterization of the “truth of skepticism”—​i.e., just what it is that we can learn from skepticism when we are attuned to it not as a philosophical position in need of refutation, but as a way to see “that the human creature’s basis in the world as a whole, its relation to the world as such, is not that of knowing, anyway not what we think of as knowing” (Cavell 1979: 241).7 But, he asks, somewhat impatiently, and not unreasonably, “does he have to drag us back through Berkeley and Descartes to get us to see it? … Why the external world again?” (Rorty 1982: 177). Rorty doesn’t believe Cavell offers a convincing answer to this question because Cavell assumes what he has to prove, namely, that the impulse which leads philosophy professors to “convert the human condition, the condition of humanity, into an intellectual difficulty” (1979: 496) is the very same “impulse which leads grownups to try to educate themselves, and cultures to criticize themselves … He takes for granted that the ‘philosophical problems’ with which we infect the freshman by assigning Descartes and Berkeley are something the freshman really needs—​not just so that he can understand history, but so that he can be in touch with himself, with his own humanity” (1982: 181). This, in turn, leads Cavell “to confuse temporary, historically conditioned little frenzies (the seventeenth-​century theory of ideas, ordinary language philosophy) with aspects of the human condition” (1982: 186). The target of Rorty’s criticism is not just the absence of an argument by which persuasively to connect the broad romantic sense of skepticism with the narrow technical sense; he is pushing Cavell to clarify two further questions, one which pertains to Cavell’s relation to professional philosophy, and the other to the relation between skepticism and the human condition. Rorty notices that Cavell is of two minds about the profession. On the one hand, 7 Of course, this view is not entirely unique to Cavell, since the idea that our most basic orientation to the world is not “knowing” is present in different ways in classical pragmatism, especially Dewey, in early Heidegger, and in Merleau-​Ponty.

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Cavell sometimes defines philosophy in a way that transcends any professional capture of its place in culture, characterizing it as “the criticism a culture produces of itself” (1979: 175) or as “the education of grownups (1979: 125). On the other, Cavell switches to “a narrow ‘professional’ sense” in which “the impulse to philosophize” (1982: 166) is, according to Rorty, “implicitly identified with the impulse to raise the sort of problems (of epistemological skepticism) in which ‘the ordinary language philosophers’ specialized” (1982: 179). Cavell is thus conflicted, argues Rorty, between “the narrow and professional identification of ‘philosophy’ with epistemology” and a larger sense of philosophy “in which one cannot escape philosophy by criticizing it, simply because any criticism of culture is to be called ‘philosophy’” (1982: 181). This conflicted relation to the profession reappears in Cavell’s characterization of the thought of Wittgenstein and Emerson as refusing professionalization, and at the same time as always waiting “to be received” by the profession (1979: xvi). Understandably, Rorty wants to know why one should worry so much about (one’s standing in) the profession if “one is not concerned about being professional” (1982: 178)?8

8 Rather curiously, when one looks over the course of each of their careers, Rorty and Cavell manifested mirror inversions of their relation to professional philosophy. Following the publication of The Claim of Reason, Cavell’s writings grew ever further away from mainstream analytic philosophy. With but few exceptions, most prominently, his brilliant response to Saul Kripke’s interpretation of Wittgenstein, which, given Krikpe’s views of skepticism and of Wittgenstein, required a response, Cavell’s concerns moved ever further away from the profession. He wrote as a philosopher whose interest in the broader humanities, in literature, film, music, drama, and popular culture, was performatively committed to relinquishing the epistemic authority of philosophy (and the authoritative figure of the [masculine] philosopher), placing his trust in the power of those other texts to speak to him, and to guide his investigations. And yet, paradoxically, in other ways he did not break as dramatically from the profession as Rorty did. This may be a function of how far out Cavell got, since getting out as far as he did may have intensified an unspoken need for professional approbation. After all, he held an endowed chair in the Harvard philosophy department, which he did not abdicate. And this may also be why he maintained that there was a connection between skepticism in traditional epistemology and skepticism as an inescapable feature of the human condition. Rorty by contrast, made a much more dramatic break with the profession by leaving the Princeton philosophy department to take up a chair as a professor of humanities at the University of Virginia, and later, towards the end of his life, to a position in comparative literature at Stanford. Although Rorty may have thumbed his nose at professional philosophy, he never broke continuous contact with it, and in his own inimitable way, kept up to date with whatever was going on in the central domains of inquiry in contemporary analytic philosophy (e.g., see his review of Scott Soames’s history of analytic philosophy (2005: 12–​13). Cavell’s questions led him to break contact with the concerns of professional philosophy (and its changing fashions) but he could never quite break with the professional conception of philosophy. We are such stuff as paradoxes are made on.

82 Kompridis Rorty also wonders whether too much is made of skepticism’s significance to the human condition. Under the influence of Thompson Clarke, Cavell’s view of the “legacy of skepticism” seeks to turn “a question about whether we can be sure we’re not dreaming” into “a question about what sort of being could ask itself such a question” (1982: xxxi). Supposedly, this gives us reason to believe that skepticism is of transhistorical and transcultural importance, expressing “something important about human beings, not just about the modern West” (1982: xxxi). Unconvinced by this line of inquiry, Rorty suggests a different and altogether contrary approach. Academic discussions of skepticism should be historicized and treated as questions that arose under historically specific circumstances, at a particular time and place. Moreover, they should be provincialized, and regarded as a mostly regrettable chapter in the history of Western philosophy and Western culture, not as essential to making sense of the human condition as such. Disappointingly, in his response to Rorty’s review of The Claim of Reason (Goodman 2005: 158–​162), Cavell stepped around Rorty’s suggestion, leaving unaddressed the question of whether skepticism is merely a peculiarity of Western high culture—​be it manifested in Shakespearean tragedy, traditional epistemology, romantic literature, or ordinary language philosophy. Doubtless, this is because Cavell is thoroughly convinced that skepticism writ large is an inseparable part of the human condition, a thorny reminder of human finitude. However, it is not a view that Cavell properly justifies (either with sufficient argument or with empirical evidence), which is why I believe Cavell should be read as (implicitly) proposing a weak philosophical anthropology—​weak, because it eschews strictly essentialist or foundationalist premises. And yet, because Cavell does not make any of this explicit, he leaves unclarified how his fundamental claims about skepticism’s relation to the human condition should be understood, and how they could be justified. Regardless of Cavell’s own position on the matter, Rorty’s suggestion opened up a largely (and still) unexplored field of inquiry about how historically and culturally peculiar Western philosophy’s preoccupation with skepticism might be. Rorty may have had very good reason to wonder whether the profession’s investment in preserving the significance of skepticism in either sense, the romantic or technical sense, is a telling indication of a culturally conservative streak, requiring philosophers to “devote themselves to safeguarding the tradition … making us even more deeply Western” (1982: xxxi). This thought provides another register in which to hear Rorty’s question, “why the external world, again?” Put more basically, what really prompts skepticism? Out of what does the experience of skepticism, arise? If we say it is alive, in what sense is it “alive”? If alive, for whom is it alive? What keeps it

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alive? As what? Rorty’s own answers to these questions are unequivocal, which he expresses with typical exasperation and wit (one can’t get Rorty’s wit at its best without his exasperation at its worst). Textbook academic skepticism about the external world is, Rorty bluntly claims, simply an artifact of a historically specific philosophical tradition, modern epistemology, reproduced through classroom “indoctrination”—​for example, by pressing students to admit that they can’t actually see the whole of some generic object, say, a tomato. “The only people who go all existential about the invisibility of the rest of the tomato are lecturers on epistemology who relieve the classroom tedium by hype. When such lecturers encounter an unstable freshman who actually does feel the tomato to have catastrophic implications, they hasten to join his more robust classmates in assuring him that it is all ‘just philosophy’” (1982: 181). As a pragmatist, Rorty is constitutionally disinclined to take Cartesian or Humean skepticism seriously, to think it really matters, makes any meaningful or practical difference to how we live. For Peircian pragmatists like Rorty, there is something about skepticism at its very source that we shouldn’t ever take seriously, something that is indicative of intellectual and cultural immaturity. The fascination with some of the ingenious thought experiments that have served as the typical medium of skeptical inquiry (from Descartes to Parfit) signify only philosophy’s refusal to grow up. All these skeptical scenarios abstractly played out in a soberly professional register are simply indulging in make-​believe skepticism. As Peirce pointedly put it, “Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts” (1972: 86). Inflecting Peirce’s point with heavy Kantian topspin, Rorty claims that “Superior cultures have no use for what Peirce called make-​believe doubt” (2010: 6). “Superior” is here an obvious synonym for “mature”—​mature, in the specifically Kantian sense of Mundigkeit, invoking the closely aligned idea of “autonomy.” In “superior cultures,” philosophy can play a role in “the education of grown-​ups” (as Cavell likes to say) only when it has itself grown up, and it grows up only when it realizes that it must put away such childish things as skepticism about the external world. Rorty wants us to see that such academic discussions of skepticism are “as obsolete as … controversies about the nature and elements of the Eucharist” (1998: 47). Kant’s worry that we cannot answer the skeptic’s doubts about the existence of the external world if we cannot provide proofs is, to Rorty’s mind, a sign that Kant had not intellectually outgrown the worry. Rorty’s own view is actually much closer to the view Heidegger expressed in Being and Time: “The ‘scandal of philosophy’ is not that this proof has yet to be given, but that such proofs are expected and attempted again and again” (1962: 249).

84 Kompridis By contrast, Hilary Putnam, in a rather sanguine mood, believed that skepticism and (its evil twin) relativism “are all too easily refutable when they are stated as positions;” the problem, as he concedes with some resignation, is that “they never die, because the attitude of alienation from the world and from the community is not just a theory, and cannot be overcome by purely intellectual argument” (1992: 178, my emphasis). To say of skeptical philosophical positions that “they never die” because they live off human “alienation from the world and the community” is to liken them to zombies. Skeptical controversies can’t become obsolete, as Rorty would have it, because they are continually reanimated as the living dead. With this remark Putnam has hit on something that allows us temporarily to reconcile the difference between Rorty and Cavell. We can say with Rorty and pragmatists that there is something indeed intellectually dubious about skeptical positions taken seriously as philosophical positions, not least because they turn “the human condition … into an intellectual difficulty, a riddle” (1979: 493). On the other hand, if we think that such positions can simply be killed off by intellectual argument alone, we reinforce the error by which we turned skepticism into an “intellectual difficulty, a riddle,” in the first place. In line with Cavell, we should then say that to believe one can outgrow skepticism—​that it is a mark of maturity that one does so, that one can do so—​ is altogether to miss what keeps skepticism alive, why it cannot die off, since what keeps it alive, and which intellectual attempts to refute skepticism do not touch, is human alienation “from the world and the community.” But Rorty would respond, quite rightly, that we still haven’t provided an argument with which persuasively to connect the two senses of skepticism; instead we’ve projected onto them a story about the human condition, providing in place of argumentative connection, a conjecture about the nature of human nature (the weak philosophical anthropology, to which I alluded earlier). It is an intriguing conjecture, nonetheless, and it may be that this is all that can be provided. In other words, it may be a mistake to expect an argument that could make the connection that Rorty is looking for. There just isn’t sufficient congruence between the two senses of skepticism between which Cavell oscillates. And so, contrary to what Cavell thought or wanted to believe, there really is a gap between the two “books” that comprise The Claim of Reason, a gap that cannot be closed. If not for that gap, the “moments and lines” of romanticism in part 4 would not have appeared in the form of sudden outbreaks: they would not have appeared at all. The “outbreaks” were necessary, because Cavell could not argue his way from academic skepticism to skepticism in the deep

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romantic sense.9 For it is those very outbreaks that allow Cavell to say something new and valuable about skepticism unlike anything said before, even if it meant changing the meaning of skepticism to do so. We should not be too hard on Cavell for not resisting the urge (or pressure) to professionalize his thought, making it sound as though it were more continuous with the concerns of academic skepticism than it was. That Cavell could not give us an argument for why he had to drag us through “the external world, again,” matters less than what it is that we get in the end, which is an account of skepticism that eventually emancipated itself from academic discussions of the topic. It is surely no coincidence that those outbreaks of romanticism occurred primarily in the context of Cavell’s discussion of the “problem of the other.” Not the “other” of other minds skepticism, in the accounts of which we abstractly encounter an other “mind” as though it were just another “object” in the world whose mind-​like attributes or marks give us skeptical pause; but rather, actual others with whom we share a life; others in relation to whom our (unreflective or chosen) way of living our skepticism can have destructive and tragic consequences. The very idea that I am living my skepticism, living it as my skepticism, such that I can experience it as a temptation or threat, can be “discovered” only in my relationship to an “other.” I am the other’s addressee, and as such the question of the “other” is concerned with the kind of response I owe the other, ethically, politically—​the very question that skepticism about “other minds” simply occludes. That just is the “discovery of the other,” or what it is that Cavell intends by that phrase. Overcoming the narrowly epistemological relation to other minds that is the starting point of academic skepticism, makes room for a normative stance to the other that is distinct from the third person stance towards a possible “other mind,” the existence of which is up to me to confirm or deny. It is this power that I hold over the other’s “existence,” according to Cavell, that allows and enables my (potential) mistreatment of the other. But does the mistreatment of the other actually follow from, even indirectly, the stance towards “other minds” that academic skepticism assumes in its artificial skeptical scenarios? It is a certain realization of a late intuition of mine that other minds skepticism is, in comparison with external world skepticism, the more fundamental orientation (The Claim of Reason, e.g., pp. 451, 454). Of the many asymmetries or interactions I propose between these addresses

9 See Rorty (1982: 179–​183) for his argument denying the connections Cavell wants to make between academic skepticism and skepticism in his deep romantic sense.

86 Kompridis of skepticism, the one that at the moment seems to me to speak most directly to that intuition is this relation to tragedy, namely, that in the case of other minds the skeptical denial of existence is most clearly revealed, or expressed, not as discovered but as inflicted, as indeed my denial. Here Descartes’s notation of “astonishment,” in recognizing that he has no proof of the world’s existence, is the least of the matter. Here I am instead revealed as lethal, not a murderer of the world exactly, but the dealer of those small deaths of everyday slights, stuttered hesitations of acknowledgment, studied reductions or misdirections of gratitude that kill intimacy and maim social existence. This perception of skeptical practice is what has led me sometimes to speak of skepticism as nihilism. goodman 2005: 159, my emphasis

Close readers of Cavell will have noticed that Cavell equivocates regarding his view of which orientation is more fundamental, sometimes indicating as he does here that other minds skepticism is more fundamental, and at other times indicating that he seeks a balance or symmetry between the two. But either way, Cavell confuses the issue, because, as Rorty was the first to see, Cavell wants to show more continuity between academic skepticism and his deeper romantic version than is warranted. If “with respect to the external world, an initial sanity requires recognizing that I cannot live my skepticism” (1979: 451), that recognition will not all by itself lead one to the thought that “skepticism with respect to the other is tragedy” (1979: xix). Certainly, Descartes and Hume were altogether content, sanely, to intellectualize their (methodological) skepticism about the external world, not to live it. Pace, Cavell, I am not at all convinced that there is a direct route from other minds skepticism to the thought that “skepticism with respect to the other is tragedy.” Thus, when Cavell writes the succeeding complementary clause of the sentence above, “whereas with respect to others a final sanity requires recognizing that I can, I do,” he cannot mean skepticism about other minds, although that is apparently and mistakenly what he intends to mean. The “final sanity … that I can, I do,” is not a consequence of my stance towards “other minds” as it is taken in academic skepticism. “[T]‌he dealer of those small deaths of everyday slights … that kill intimacy and maim social existence” is not struggling with academic questions about other “minds” but with the actual demands of living with other human beings with whose lives his own life is entangled. It is not an issue for the “dealer of those small deaths” whether s/​he has direct access to the mental states of another, since actions that “kill intimacy and maim social existence” presuppose not only that the other has mental states but also that one’s words and actions can affect those states directly—​that is,

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that one’s words and actions have the power to “kill intimacy and maim social existence.” It not just an accident that they do! Of course, such actions also presuppose that one is already situated in a social relationship with others, a relationship that is embedded in a context and a history, and therefore, a relationship that is inescapably structured by asymmetries of power and knowledge. In other words, this socially constituted relationship is wholly unlike the artificially constructed situation in which “one” confronts an “other mind” in the skepticism literature, and thus it is essential not to conflate “the problem of the other” with “the problem of other minds.” Just as there is no inferential pathway from external world skepticism to the idea that skepticism is tragedy, there is also no inferential pathway from “other minds” skepticism to what Cavell calls the “discovery of the problem of the other.” The premises to get from other minds skepticism to the problem of the other are simply not there. Other minds skepticism begins from a 3rd person, observer’s stance towards an “other,” which is methodologically neutral, regardless of whether the “other” is a person or a thing. Within that stance, I can make inferences about the behavior of the other’s “mind” as I would about the behavior of any other “object” in the world; however, I do not stand in a normative relationship to the other in a moral space in which questions about what one owes the other are constitutive of that relationship, but in an intellectualized and asymmetric epistemic relationship. Within that intellectualized epistemic space the other can appear as an other “mind” only to the degree I am prepared to attenuate my skepticism as to whether the other “mind” has an inner mental life. But this epistemological skepticism about other minds does not figure the other as someone that can make ethical claims to which I am enjoined to respond, since it is the other’s (un)knowability that is at issue, not its normative expectations of me. In this respect, the epistemic status of the other “mind” is no different from the status of the tomato—​just as I can’t see all of the tomato, I can’t see into the mind that is barred by the other’s body—​which is why the Cavellian idea that “skepticism is tragedy” is just as foreign to academic discussions of skepticism about other minds as it is to external world skepticism. As Rorty points out in his review, Cavell’s discussion of the problem of the other “does not even pretend to hook up with the “professional problem” of other minds (1982: 187). That is one of its virtues, thinks Rorty, who remains puzzled by Cavell’s ongoing attempts to run the two together. But there are occasions when Cavell shifts the sense of the problem entirely: what block’s “my vision of the other is not the other’s body but my incapacity or unwillingness to interpret or to judge it accurately, to draw the right connections. The suggestion is: I suffer a kind of blindness, but I avoid the issue by projecting

88 Kompridis this darkness upon the other” (1979: 368). The normative language of “unwillingness,” “blindness,” “projecting,” and “darkness” would be completely out of place here, if this were not a moral failure—​a failure to be responsive to the other’s concerns or call. My responsiveness to the other’s concerns or call does not allow me to see through the other, but it does allow me to accommodate the other, and to accommodate myself to the other. Skepticism that follows from my inability to see the whole of an object or through the other’s body can be thus be described as a situation where accommodation is called for but is refused or declined; or as Cavell suggests, “as the case in which accommodation is not possible” (2005: 138). Were I to arrive at the point where I am able to acknowledge that I am “the dealer of those small deaths of everyday slights,” to realize that I suffer from “a kind of blindness,” I would have to acknowledge not only that I am the other’s addressee, but also that I am answerable to the other. Only when I understand myself as answerable to the other, am I in a position to acknowledge the other’s claims on me, the other’s expression of suffering, and, above all, my own unresponsiveness to the other. Normatively speaking, this requires assuming a 2nd person stance in relation to the other that is altogether incompatible with the 3rd person/​observer’s stance in relation to another mind, whose possible “mindedness” is inductively or inferentially constructed in a non-​ communicative and abstractly epistemic relation. Cavell is thus not talking about other minds, at all, but playing off an ambiguity between “other minds” and the “problem of the other,” which, unlike the altogether familiar “problem of other minds” is one that Cavell claims he had to discover. If he had to “discover” the problem of the other, then he had to do so independently of the problem of other minds, which is, as he will tell us, just how he discovered it. The “other” or “others” that Cavell actually has in mind are like the “others” to whom a character in one of Satre’s plays is referring when he declares, “Hell is other people” (L’enfer, c’est les autres),” and the other to whom Levinas is referring when he invokes the “face of the other” (Sartre: 2001). Hell is other people because les autres get in our way, they limit and constrain our negative freedom by placing their normative demands and expectations on us, turning us into their addressees, enjoining us to respond either with acknowledgment or its avoidance (or with something much worse). Our problem with those others is not a consequence of our lack of access to their internal mental states; our problem is a consequence of our own divided and conflicted mental states, which can move us to deny that we must answer to the demands of others, which can impel us to deflect and evade the other’s appeal to us, which can drive us to “kill intimacy and maim social existence.” Thus, “skepticism with respect to the other is not a generalized intellectual lack, but a stance I take in

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the face of the other’s opacity and the demand the other’s expression places upon me; I call skepticism my denial or annihilation of the other” (2005: 150). Put more forcefully, and more clearly: it is not the other’s opacity that ultimately drives “my denial or annihilation of the other,” it is “the demand the other’s expression places upon me.” From an ethical perspective that is a neighbor to Cavell’s, Levinas declares, “To see a face is already to hear ‘Thou shall not kill’” (1990: 8). The failure to hear that injunction is what lies behind Cavell’s claim that “skepticism with respect to the other is not skepticism but is tragedy.” The more one reads Cavell, the more one finds that the persuasiveness of his conception of skepticism is in no way derived from academic examples of “make-​believe doubt,” but from “the everyday ways in which denial occurs in my life with the other—​in a momentary irritation, or a recurrent grudge, in an unexpected rush of resentment, in a hard glance, in a dishonest attestation, in the telling of a tale, in the believing of a tale, in a false silence, in a fear of engulfment, in a fantasy of solitude or of self-​destruction—​the problem is to recognize myself as denying another, to understand that I carry chaos in myself. Here is the scandal of skepticism with respect to the existence of others; I am the scandal” (2005: 151, my emphasis). Skepticism in Cavell’s sense becomes conspicuous first and foremost in “the everyday ways in which denial occurs in my life with the other.” If “I am the scandal,” it is not primarily because I deny the existence of other minds, as Cavell is often inclined to say, but, as I would put it, because I deny my answerability to others. That is why the other can become, is, a “problem” for me. The “problem of the other” arises not only from the denial of the other, but, perhaps, more importantly, from the denial “that I carry chaos in myself.” That discovery is certainly worthy of being called a scandal, but it is a moral not an epistemological scandal. To preserve the continuity between “the problem of other minds” and “the problem of the other,” Cavell misstates, however, elegantly, his very important insight. Noteworthy in this respect, is Cavell’s response to Cora Diamond’s essay, “The Difficulty of Reality and The Difficulty of Philosophy,” especially her treatment of the fictional character, Elizabeth Costello, the central character of Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals and the eponymous Elizabeth Costello.10 By staging an encounter between academic skepticism and Coetzee’s difficult and perplexing character, Diamond exposes the tendency of the former to deflect from “a difficulty of reality to a philosophical or moral problem apparently in

10

On the questions raised by Coetzee’s text, see also Kompridis (2013) and Macarthur (2020).

90 Kompridis the vicinity” (Diamond 2008: 58). Unsurprisingly, Cavell finds altogether congenial the use Diamond makes of his image of deflection to account for the shortcomings of academic skepticism. However, in our present context what is particularly noteworthy is not Cavell’s comments on Diamond’s essay, but rather his comments on the opening words of Coetzee’s novel, which begins with the following observations: There is first of all the problem of the opening, namely, how to get us from where we are, which is, as yet, nowhere, to the far bank. It is a simple bridging problem, a problem of knocking together a bridge. People solve such problems every day. They solve them, and having solved them push on (2003: 1). In his comments on this passage, Cavell not only amplifies the thought distinctive to his view of skepticism—​namely, the generality or universality of the human tendency to intellectualize its encounters with a difficult, recalcitrant reality that outstrips the powers of human expression and exposes the limits of human knowledge; he also restates his more considered view, one which was unthinkable prior to his engagement with romanticism (and literature in general)—​namely, the view that philosophy has no “monopoly on responses to the threat of skepticism.” I take Coetzee’s repetition, in his book’s opening … of “solve” or “solving,” three times in two adjacent sentences, ironically but tenderly to picture “people,” in attempting to construe their existence as itself a problem, an intellectual puzzle to solve and from which to push on. cavell 2008: 109

If the threat of skepticism is as ubiquitous as Cavell claims, then we should expect human responses to that threat to be just as ubiquitous, not to mention, far more diverse than those to be found in academic skepticism. If philosophy has no monopoly over responses to the threat of skepticism, and if that threat is endemic to human forms of life—​i.e., if it is what people daily do, a part of our everyday, our ordinary way, of “construing” our existence—​then, we should regard Cavell’s unintended and unexpected foray into romanticism at the end of The Claim of Reason as the beginning of a new philosophical project, namely, to free our understanding of skepticism from philosophy’s monopoly over it. But can that project have even begun without Cavell’s engagement with romantic literature? Could it have begun without the sharp break with academic skepticism that is initiated in the final part of The Claim of Reason?

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What then are the implications for philosophy, particularly for its relation to literature, which Cavell brings into such close proximity in the final sentence The Claim of Reason?

3

The human other with whose life mine is entangled is not the only “other” that is implicated in Cavell’s so-​called discovery. There is another “other.” That “other” is philosophy’s other, namely, literature (or art, in general), which helps cast further light on what impelled those outbreaks of romanticism. As Cavell notes, thinking out loud, “I am pushed to pieces of literature to discover the problem of the other” (1979: 476, my emphasis). So, it is a consequence of being “pushed to pieces of literature” that the “second book,” both in form and content, seems suddenly emancipated from the concerns of the “first book,” and just as suddenly veers off in completely new directions. Pushed by literature to “discover the problem of the other,” Cavell is “pushed” all the way to the edge. However deliberately or unknowingly or apprehensively he may have done so, Cavell breaks completely the connection with the concerns he inherited from academic skepticism. The question of whether philosophy “can … become literature and still know itself” provokes a further question—​the question of whether philosophy can find its way to its “other,” any other way. Why should this other matter to philosophy? And if we are persuaded that it should matter, why single out romanticism? Why this (route to the) other? Rorty’s review of The Claim of Reason Rorty doesn’t make nearly enough of Cavell’s romantic turn in the final part of the book. Just as Rorty’s pragmatism kept him from taking skepticism seriously, so it also kept Rorty from taking romanticism seriously. At the time, it appeared to Rorty that Cavell’s quixotic efforts to take academic skepticism so seriously were a sign that Cavell was still taking professional philosophy too seriously. What became clear later but is already foreshadowed in the final part of The Claim of Reason, is that Cavell had begun to move very far away from the professional concerns of the discipline, having found that taking the “interplay between skepticism and romanticism” as seriously as he did, as he must, meant stepping beyond the boundaries of the discipline, even blurring them. Having concluded that, “philosophy’s essential business has become the response to skepticism,” Cavell’s encounter with romanticism led him to further conclude that there is something in the “communication between philosophy and literature, or the refusal of communication … that causes romanticism” (1988a: 27, my emphasis). Therefore, he must persist with his “experiments with romantic texts,”

92 Kompridis experiments which traverse the space between philosophy and literature, the space where they communicate and where they refuse to communicate. Just how far out Cavell got in part 4 of The Claim of Reason is disguised somewhat by Cavell’s understandable investment in making the individual parts of the book look and sound like an integrated whole. (You could say that he wanted to even out its oddness, and his own). I think Rorty is correct to argue, against Cavell’s own self-​understanding, that part 4 reads and sounds like another book—​a book in which, as Rorty writes in his review, Cavell “comes into his own. He speaks with a stronger voice” (1982: 187). Given the significance Cavell himself attaches to voice, to the idea that in philosophizing we are also seeking to find and to speak in our own voice, this is no casual remark. But it is not just a stronger voice that distinguishes part 4 from the first three parts of the book. Cavell’s own voice became strong enough to make room for multiple voices, allowing him to give voice to, not only cite, “a quatrain from Blake, Wordsworth’s Boy of Winander, Coleridge’s Ode on Dejection, Frankenstein, a division in Emerson’s ‘Transcendentalism,’ a passage from Walden” (1988a: ix). Here, on just this point, it is worth dwelling on the significance Cavell assigns to the presence of multiple and diverse voices in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: “the recurrence of skeptical voices, and answering voices, struck me … as a feat of writing. It was some years before I understood it as what I came to think of as a discovery for philosophy of the problem of the other; and further years before these issues looked to me like functions of one another” (1979: xiii, my emphasis). With this remark, Cavell explicitly links philosophy’s access to the problem of the other to a mode of philosophical writing that enables the interplay of multiple, diverse, and conflicting voices. Compare, for purposes of contrast, the philosophical voice in Descartes’ Meditations, the canonical expression of modern skepticism. The voice that speaks in its pages may oscillate between sounding completely rational and self-​possessed at one point and as though it were on the verge of hysteria and madness at another, but it always sounds like one and the same voice. There is no play of voices, the kind of interplay that make up, according to Bakhtin (1984), the polyphony of the novel, of literature. I am going to surmise Cavell came to see the significance of Wittgenstein’s polyphonic mode of writing only after he himself was “pushed to pieces of literature to discover the problem of the other” (which also represents an avowal of the discontinuity between the problem of the other and the problem of other minds). This would then explain why Cavell ends The Claim of Reason with the question of whether philosophy can become literature and still know itself. It would require some strength, call it self-​trust, as Emerson means it in his essay on “Self-​Reliance,” both to pose this question, and to leave it open, to

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abide with it as open and as unresolved; in short, to end such a book with this question. Cavell should not be read as making a quasi-​deconstructionist claim that seeks to dissolve the genre distinction between philosophy and literature (by which I do not mean to deny the more trivial claim that one can read philosophy as literature, and literature as philosophy). Rather, he is asking, how polyphonic can philosophy be? At what point would it stop being philosophy? Is there a fixed line that one should not cross, one clearly marked and identifiable in advance? Drawn by whom, and by whose authority? Cavell wants to occupy and settle into that space between philosophy and literature but without entirely relinquishing his identity as a philosopher. Rorty was right to say that Cavell comes into his own as a philosopher in part 4 of The Claim of Reason, but he does not see (nor did Cavell himself quite see) how much that was a consequence of those romantic outbreaks. By way of becoming receptive to those outbreaks, allowing them to divert him from his book’s original purpose, Cavell found a way to give voice to those outbreaks, voicing them in relation to skepticism. His own voice was no longer just the voice of a professional philosopher, but a more capacious voice that could permit and juggle multiple voices—​the philosophical and the not philosophical, the professional and the not professional. As well, through these outbreaks of romanticism he was able to see Wittgenstein and Emerson as fellow romantics, sharing a common purpose, following from the realization that writing and philosophizing were essentially “functions of one another.” Coming to this realization may have also provided the older, romantic Cavell an opportunity to redeem something that was lost when the young Cavell gave up his composition studies to study philosophy. If anything is central to musical composition, it is putting multiple voices into communicative and expressive interaction with one another. Perhaps Cavell’s foray into romanticism can also be understood as the redemption of that earlier impulse and interest, allowing Cavell to engage in the play of multiple and diverse voices. This thought turns into more than biographical speculation, once we are prepared to hear the outbreaks of romanticism in part 4 of The Claim of Reason as outbreaks of new voices in an argument whose outcome is not yet decided. Indeed, they serve as the preparation for a different conception of argument that Cavell subsequently articulated in Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, consistent with his view that in our argument with skepticism neither we nor the skeptic should win, since “skepticism is neither true nor false” (1988b: 24). The point of argument, any argument, isn’t winning, but rather, “to manifest for the other another way” (1988b: 31). Imagine, for a second, what it would mean in the context of a piece of music for an argument to “win.” It’s hard to imagine anything like that because that is not how we hear music, how we play it, or

94 Kompridis how we write it. If one voice were to “win,” the music would lose. Philosophy would lose, too, were it to lose the voice of its other: “imagine a world in which the voices of the interlocutors in the Investigations continue on, but in which there is no Wittgensteinian voice as their other. It is a world in which our danger to one another grows faster than our help for one another” (1989: 75). I take Cavell’s acute attention to the question of how the other is voiced and to what it voices, as an invitation to imagine how a philosopher with a musician’s ear might hear the question with which The Claim of Reason ends. Just what is that question voicing? For whom? To hear it right, one must hear the whole of the development leading to it. I was completely serious in suggesting that the final part of The Claim of Reason exhibits the character of a Beethoven finale, and I am thinking specifically of the finale of the 9th symphony, which is full of unprepared outbreaks of romanticism of its own, outbreaks which could not have been anticipated by anything in the previous movements (or Beethoven’s previous symphonies), opening up considerable musical Lebensraum within which Beethoven’s romantic successors could operate. Rather than hearing those romantic outbreaks in Cavell’s text against the background of something unromantic, a typically restrained text of professional philosophy, one should hear the whole of part 4 as itself romantic, not just during the occurrence of those outbreaks. Given Cavell’s observation many years later that part 4 is marked by the “irregular rhythm of its preoccupations,” “the discontinuity of its instances” and the “the looping among the parts,”11 we have very good reason to regard, to hear, part 4 as romantic in form and not just in content—​to hear it, in other words, as unpredictable from the parts that came before it. What do I mean by saying it is romantic in form and not just in content? Recall Cavell’s comments about how these romantic outbreaks “deflected” his efforts to bring the book to a “moment of conclusion,” “threatening the end of [his] story.” If we transpose the “moment of conclusion” in a complex philosophical argument into the definitive tonic cadence that concludes a movement of tonal music (in classical sonata form), we can hear the unexpected concluding question of Cavell’s book as a dramatic modulation to a new key—​i.e., as a conclusion that isn’t a conclusion in the classical sense, which would normally require a very strong movement-​ending tonic cadence. The unexpected shift

11

Cavell’s own description of part 4 in the preface to 1999 edition (ix).

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to a new key represents a dissonance, both structural and local. We can then say that Cavell’s book did not resolve as formally required and expected to its tonic key—​the key of “an academically recognizable study of … skepticism as understood in Descartes and Hume and Kant.” Instead, it ended in distinctly romantic fashion, provoking a whole new set of questions, which stand in dissonant relation to those with which it began. The various deflections—​“irregular,” “discontinuous,” and “looping,” comprising part 4 would not let Cavell end the story he began—​think of them as analogues to the chromatic, dissonant harmonies that deflect resolutions to the tonic in romantic music (typical of Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, Wagner, etc.). Rather, these recurrent outbreaks took him to a “conclusion” that he did not already have in view, culminating in a question that is thoroughly romantic, not least because the means by which he arrived at it—​its very form—​departs from as it destabilizes the academic study of skepticism that came before it. It is my further thought that the striking modulation that brings The Claim of Reason to its unexpected “conclusion” needs to be understood at the level of the body of work that follows it, and not only of this particular work. Skepticism, its significance and consequences, remained the defining theme of Cavell’s body of work, but with the unexpected “conclusion” of The Claim to Reason that theme modulated to a new and surprising “key”—​the key of romanticism. Just as romanticism allowed Cavell to make sense of skepticism in a new way, skepticism allowed him to make sense of romanticism in a new way. Together, they allowed him to come closer to an answer to the question that arises when one believes that skepticism is not a problem for which there is a solution. What kind of response does skepticism require, then? Cavell thereafter took on the task of showing (to possibly incredulous readers) why it is that one should look to romanticism for the required response. Rorty’s review of The Claim of Reason failed to take the proper measure of Cavell’s romantic turn, but he partially made up for it in his review of Cavell’s In Quest of the Ordinary.12 Though Rorty remained doubtful that one could “find some deeper philosophical significance in Descartes-​like skepticism” (1989), he astutely identified the response to skepticism that Cavell believes romanticism offers. Rorty singles out Cavell’s phrase, “the recovery of the human,” as a good name for that response. It may well be the best name for it. When I “recognize myself as denying another,” when I see “that I carry chaos in myself,” I may 12

Rorty notes that since his romantic turn, Cavell’s “books have gotten better and better, more persuasive and more moving,” and he offers a description of Cavell that is aptly romantic and accurate: “Who touches this book touches a fleshly, ambitious, anxious, self-​involved, self-​doubting mortal” (1989).

96 Kompridis then discover that in living my skepticism I’m impelled by a “drive to the inhuman” (1988a: 26), the very drive that impels me to deal out “those small deaths of everyday slights … [that] kill intimacy and maim social existence.” I am then faced with the fundamental question of how to make sense of all this—​which is to say, of how to live my skepticism, how to live it, differently. Having come to the belated realization that (one’s) skepticism is not only inescapable but potentially destructive, the thought that skepticism may be something from which one must recover might not seem so strange or far-​fetched. Indeed, one may come to see it as an urgent need, since what may be at stake is the recovery of one’s humanity. This is precisely what Cavell means when he asserts that “skepticism is tragedy”—​it is or becomes tragedy when, for example, one’s own actions foreclose or blindly refuse a recovery of the human in oneself (as in the case of Othello) or in another (as in the case of Lear). What is it about romanticism that gives Cavell the idea that it can aid our recovery from skepticism? Before answering that question directly, some stage setting is required to contrast Rorty’s understanding of romanticism with Cavell’s. For Rorty, too much of what Cavell calls romanticism sounds like “pastoralism.” Rorty prefers what he calls the “Promethean side of romanticism,” the assertive side that seeks to create new selves and new worlds (1989). He has no patience for a romanticism that seeks “a return to the ordinary, or of it” (1988a: 53). That goal sounds, well, it sounds too ordinary, as though the goal were to domesticate romanticism, robbing it of its Promethean energy and powers. What’s missing, claims Rorty, is the “Promethean need to enact one’s own existence, to invent a self rather than to play out a role embedded in ordinary forms of life.” This “is what makes odd people stop speaking Ordinary. It is … why the ordinary isn’t good enough for them” (1989). A romanticism, which is framed as a “quest for the ordinary,” looks too much like a quest for ordinariness. Why would a romantic want to affirm the ordinary, wonders Rorty, why not sublimely transcend the ordinary rather than affirm it? But to Cavell, any “romantic” repudiation of the ordinary and the flight from it—​call it the “aspiration to the sublime” (1988b: 92)—​is itself “the creation of skepticism (language and the world seen as from the leaving of them).” Rorty abruptly abandons his talk of Promethean self-​enactment and the aspiration to the sublime the moment he avows in a rather Cavellian formulation “that the danger of self-​enactment is the inability to acknowledge others” (1989). When Rorty subsequently concludes, “that life is hardly worth living without oddity and egoism, yet also hardly worth living without love and communion,” there isn’t very much left to his Promethean romanticism to distinguish it from Cavell’s so-​called pastoralism.

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Part of the difficulty in adjudicating their disagreement is that Cavell and Rorty don’t mean the same thing by the “ordinary,” which partly explains their larger disagreement about what is central to romanticism. Cavell means much more by the “ordinary” and by the “everyday” than Rorty allows these terms to mean. In this respect, Cavell is much more capaciously and complexly romantic than Rorty, for his understanding of romanticism includes the originally romantic idea that the ordinary and the extraordinary are irremediably entangled with one another, that they are semantically interdependent. There’s nothing “ordinary” about the ordinary—​or about the everyday, and neither of them is “invulnerable to skepticism” (2005: 134). They each provide as secure a foothold for the “drive to the inhuman” as any. Which is why Cavell is so attentive to the everyday spaces of skepticism, tracing the sheer ordinariness of our lived skepticism, which, for all of its “ordinariness” can flip suddenly into the extraordinary, typically in destructive ways. “The skeptic tells me what I ordinarily ‘believe’ (for example, the ‘world’ ‘exists’ as ‘my’ or ‘our’ ‘senses’ ‘inform’ me or us of it); he replaces my ordinary, the very vulnerability and inarticulateness of its inhabitability” (2005: 134). By doing so, the philosophical skeptic removes the extraordinariness from the ordinary, makes it impervious to experiences of the uncanny, and so a place where nothing is really at stake when the question of how one lives one’s skepticism is off the table, and so one can feel “safe.” Poe’s short story, “The Black Cat,” can be read as a parody of this soberized picture of the ordinary and everyday, a story in which “a series of mere household events” is recounted in “the most wild and yet most homely narrative,” culminating in the realization that we are not exactly safe even when we are at “home”—​least of all, from ourselves, from how we choose to live our skepticism.13 In effect, Cavell’s idea of the ordinary fuses the Freudian view of the uncanny as the (repressed) entanglement of the ordinary and extraordinary with the Wittgensteinian and Wordsworthian thought that the ordinary and the everyday must be recovered and redeemed in some new form. It is a thought that “any Romantic would be lost without, that the world could be—​could have been—​so remade, or I in it, that I could want it, as it would be, or I in it” (1988a: 35). As Wordsworth phrased it in The Prelude, if a new world is to arise, it will necessarily be prefigured and made visible in everyday appearances,

13

See Cavell, “Being Odd, Getting Even” in (1988a).

98 Kompridis Not in some Utopia … Or some secreted Island, Heaven knows where! But in the very world, which is the world Of all of us,—​the place where, in the end, We find our happiness, or not at all! 1990: 140–​44

Consistent with this romantic thought, and quintessential romantic hope, Cavell understands the task that romanticism sets for itself as “the task of bringing the world back, as to life” (1988a: 52–​53). I suggested above that the “the recovery of the human” may well be the best name for romanticism’s response to skepticism. But only if the recovery of the human, includes, indeed, requires, the recovery of the world, both the human and non-​human world, which is just how Cavell understands the recovery of the human, and, above all, why Cavell’s romanticism is both more capacious and more complex than Rorty’s. For the latter, romanticism reduces ultimately to an especially useful platform for human self-​expression, making it a part of, and party to, what Charles Taylor (2007) has called “exclusive humanism.” In fact, Rorty was a rather reluctant romantic, whose relation to romanticism was internally limited by his commitment to Quinean naturalism (what McDowell aptly called Rorty’s “bald naturalism”). His thought happily reposed on a naturalistic ontology that strips the world, and nature, of all normative status. As Akeel Bilgrami puts the implications of this position, “since nothing intrinsic in nature is valuable, nothing in nature can constrain our desires, utilities, and moral sentiments” (2014: 155). Rorty’s naturalism therefore made him insensible to the romantic idea that the world, including nature, can make claims on us, that it possesses value properties to which we are answerable. Without that idea romanticism would not exist. Cavell, in stark contrast to Rorty, situates himself in the company of the romantic critics of Kant, and received his understanding of the task of romanticism from the lines of romantic thought that run from Coleridge and Wordsworth through Thoreau and Emerson to Heidegger. Indeed, Cavell’s engagement with romanticism is quite explicitly and emphatically a continuation of the romantic critique of Kant, and in some ways its fulfillment (by which I don’t mean its culmination). It should come as no surprise that Cavell shares with Kant’s romantic critics a deep dissatisfaction with Kant’s philosophical settlement with skepticism, regarding it, just as they did, not “as an answer to the threat of skepticism,” but rather as “a further expression of it” (1988a: 52).

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To settle with skepticism … to assure us that we do know the existence of the world, or rather, that what we understand as knowledge is of the world, the price Kant asks us to pay is to cede any claim to know the thing in itself, to grant that human knowledge is not of things as they are in themselves (things as things, Heidegger will come to say). You don’t—​do you?—​have to be a romantic to feel sometimes about that settlement: Thanks for nothing.” (1988a: 31) Well, it may be true that you don’t have to be a romantic to feel that way—​you could, for example, be prompted to reject the dualist metaphysics that underlie Kant’s settlement in the familiar ways that classical pragmatism and some varieties of naturalism do (Quine, Sellars, Davidson, Rorty). But you would pretty much have to be a romantic to feel it as a profound crisis of knowledge, to become distressed by it, and to feel called upon to respond to it with a kind of writing through which our contact with “things as things” can be regained and reclaimed. Otherwise, certain romantic criticisms of Kant’s 1st Critique might sound desperately unglued and hyperbolic, as in a passage in Coleridge’s Biographia where he declares, “that all the products of the mere reflective faculty partook of death” (1985: chap. xi). For Cavell, the philosophical peculiarities of Coleridge’s prose—​it’s autobiographical mode, and its “literariness”—​ is not an indication that romantic writers are “in ignorance of the sound of philosophy” (1988a: 29). On the contrary, Coleridge’s response to Kant, which emerges from a deep engagement with the “illustrious sage of Königsberg,” issues in a kind of writing that is decidedly “in argument with his philosophy” (1988a: 29), however much it may seem a deviation from professional modes of argument. That there is an argument of some significance is what matters to Cavell, and he thinks it is worth restating for what it has to say about the cost of Kant’s settlement with (external world) skepticism: I interpret the death, of which the reflective faculty partakes, as of the world made in our image, or rather through our categories, by Kant’s faculty of the Understanding, namely that very world which was meant to remove the skeptic’s anxieties about the existence of objects outside us. Here is extreme testimony that what both the world and the faculty of the world need redeeming from is felt to be at once skepticism and the answer to skepticism provided in the Critique of Pure Reason. And I think the feeling or intuition can be expressed by saying: since the categories of the understanding are ours, we can be understood as carrying the death of the world in us, in our very requirement of creating it, as if it does not yet exist. (1988a: 44, my emphasis)

100 Kompridis Extreme testimony to be sure, hence, the reason romanticism sets for itself the task of recovering the world, “to bring it back, as to life” (1988a: 45). And here is where things start to get a little crazy, or crazier than they already were. As I indicated earlier, Rorty misdescribed Cavell’s appeal to romanticism as a reversion to a bygone bucolic pastoralism. The air of modernist condescension hangs a little heavy around that description, because Rorty could not imagine any romanticism worthy of the name without the “aspiration to the sublime” at its very core. What would be the point of romanticism without the promise of sublimity? Cavell recognizes the draw of the sublime, but as already noted, is wary of its power to draw skepticism along with it. If you regard the task of romanticism to consist in the recovery of the world, in its reanimation, it is not going to be the sublime that draws you; it is going to be the things of the world, things as things. And if you let yourself be drawn that way, you will find yourself wondering whether, and how much, you ought to take animism seriously: “a companion to the question whether knowledge or consciousness is the more fundamental or useful emphasis in understanding romanticism—​ is whether animism or sublimity is the more fundamental emphasis” (1988a: 53, my italics). Since he is committed to the idea that skepticism requires both a recovery of the human and a recovery of the world, and that the two, in this case as well, are functions of one another, Cavell has no choice but to take animism seriously. For those with their “Enlightenment conscience” intact, the prospect of having “to accept something like animism” (1988a: 53) to regain contact with things as things, is altogether too high a price to pay. Much better to accept the Kantian bargain with skepticism, limiting knowledge to make room for “faith”—​or as Cavell varies the familiar Kantian refrain, the “effort to make room for faith by, so to speak, limiting faith” (1988a: 53). The “faith” that is being limited here is faith in the world, that it exists, that what we are in contact with, “always already,” in Heidegger’s lingo, is the world.14 That faith can be tested, it can be threatened, crushed; it can be lost, and it can be recovered and renewed. We may believe it wiser not to expose such faith as we have to a threat it cannot withstand. Think of this as another way to understand Kant’s bargain with skepticism: limit faith for its own good, as it were, so it is not so fully exposed to the potentially overwhelming threat of skepticism. But what does that show? What does it show if my faith or trust in the world was unfounded, that it was an error to be so trusting? “If the earth opens up and

14

That is the “faith” or “trust” that Putnam has in mind when he claims that “Our language game rests not on proof or on Reason but trust” (1992: 178).

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swallows me up, this need not prove that my trust in it was misplaced. What better place for my trust could there be? … Of course, there is a spirit in which you may feel like saying, ‘Trust nothing!’ But would it express that spirit to say, ‘Take no further step on this earth!’? So there is a question about whether we can live our skepticism, and if we cannot, what kind of threat skepticism poses. Which raises the question of whether philosophy is the best (or only) place to consider the matter (1988a:52). If philosophy is not the best place or the only place to consider the matter, if one is not averse to look elsewhere, say, towards philosophy’s “other,” one may be less disinclined to consider something like romantic animism. Cavell does not need to be told that he has “transformed the issue of skepticism into the issue of animism,” and thereby “exchanged one form of craziness for another” (1988a: 55). That is to be expected when one decides to give romanticism so much emphasis, so much weight, in the matter of how we are to live our skepticism. On the other hand, craziness in one form or another may be an inherent feature of skepticism, a constitutive part of living it, notwithstanding skepticism’s tendency “to soberize, or respectify or scientize itself” (1988a: 59). How many times in the Meditations does Descartes raise the possibility that he (or we) would be crazy to trust our taken for granted knowledge of the world or our ordinary perception of things, and just as crazy, if not more so, to begin to doubt them? Surely there’s nothing crazy in recognizing that the question of how we are to live our skepticism—​of whether we can live it—​is inseparable from the question of what or whom we can trust—​of whether we can trust, at all. Cavell must find a way to make the craziness of animism sound a little less crazy, or make its cost more attractive, or at least less costly, than the cost of Kant’s settlement with skepticism. Cavell’s case for transforming the issue of skepticism into the issue of animism is made in relation to four texts—​ two philosophical, two poetic. For reasons of space, I cannot go into Cavell’s account of Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner nor of Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.”15 Of the two philosophical texts, John Wisdom’s essay, “Gods,” and Martin Heidegger’s essay, “The Thing,” it is Heidegger’s that plays the more important 15

I wish nonetheless to stress here the vital importance of Cavell’s readings of Coleridge and Wordsworth’s to shaping his understanding of romanticism: “What I mean by romantic is meant to find its evidence—​beyond the writing of Emerson and Thoreau—​in the texts of Wordsworth and Coleridge that I explicitly consider. If what I say about romanticism is false to these texts, then for my purposes it is false of romanticism, period” (1988a: 6, my emphasis).

102 Kompridis role for what it tells us about regaining our contact with things, and what it is Cavell means by the recovery of the world through a recovery from skepticism. And once again the focal point of the discussion is the cost of Kant’s settlement, and what may have been lost to us, and to the world, in coming to accept it. To “deny that you can experience the world as world, things as things; face to face, as it were,” is outright to deny “the life of things” (1988a: 53). But to consider that denial fully, one has to regard Kant’s settlement with skepticism as part of his broader settlement with naturalism (about which Cavell, surprisingly, is silent). Already by Kant’s time, the fateful process that began in the West in the 17th century, call it the disenchantment of the world, call it the desacralization of nature, made “the idea of the natural as what the natural sciences study and the supernatural as what falls outside of the coverage of the natural sciences (2014: 182), the default, common sense view of things, and thus provided the ontological presuppositions to assert that our knowledge of the world could not include knowledge of things in themselves. Otherwise, Kant thought, and feared, we would remain vulnerable to fanaticism and dogmatism, and concomitantly, to skepticism. But for romantics, as Bilgrami argues, “not only the words on our pages and on our lips and not only the images on our canvases, but objects and things in the world, including in nature, are filled with properties of value and meaning” (2014: 183).16 To philosophically disclose how things convey meaning and value, independently of the meanings and values we project onto them, Heidegger offers a quasi-​transcendental argument for things as necessary conditions of human intelligibility, an argument that Cavell incorporates into his story of what a recovery from skepticism, in this case, external world skepticism, requires: What [Heidegger’s] essay is after is a return of human thinking around from Kant’s turning of it upside down in his proud Copernican Revolution for philosophy; rather than saying that in order for there to be a world of objects of knowledge for us, a thing must satisfy the conditions—​ whatever they turn out under philosophical investigation to be—​of human knowledge, Heidegger is saying that in order for us to recognize ourselves as mortals … we must satisfy the conditions of there being things of the world—​whatever accordingly these turn out within philosophical thought to be. And this apparently means: The redemption of

16

On the agency of things, see also Kompridis (2020).

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things of the world is the redemption of human nature, and chiefly from its destructiveness of it own conditions of existence. (1988a: 66)17 We have now come a very long way with Cavell on the journey that began in part 4 of The Claim of Reason. Nothing Cavell said about skepticism in that book, particularly about external world skepticism, could have given anyone the idea, perhaps, least of all Cavell, that an inquiry that began as an academic study of the preoccupations of modern skepticism would culminate in a call to redeem human nature by redeeming the things of this world. Yes, Cavell set all this into motion by following “the lead of romanticism” (1988a: 8), but as the interaction between skepticism and romanticism deepened, it became increasingly obvious that romanticism was doing most of the leading, leading skepticism into the orbit of romanticism’s preoccupations. No wonder then that Cavell took on romantic animism, took on “the questionable idea that there is a life and death to the world dependent on what we make of it” (1988a: 68). Had Cavell grasped the wider implications of his romantic turn more fully, he could have provided a more persuasive answer to Rorty’s exasperated question, “why the external world again?,” because Cavell’s romantic turn gives his account of external world skepticism an altogether different salience, and an urgency that it lacked altogether in The Claim of Reason. Reframing external world skepticism to express romanticism’s concerns about our threatened contact with things as things, changes the issue and its stakes in the process. True, Cavell does end up romanticizing skepticism, partly to counter-​act the scientized self-​image of skepticism as a well-​scrubbed and methodically scrupulous mode of philosophical inquiry. But some decades after the publication of In Quest of the Ordinary, this “questionable idea,” which has been around far longer than that, is much harder to question. At the risk of stating the bloody obvious, we are only now beginning to face up to the catastrophic implications of a climate-​changed world. It is therefore not too difficult to see that we are indeed answerable for the life and death of the world, our world, a world we share with other forms of life, whom we have long denied just consideration. Animism as a response to the world may have a lot more going for it than we troubled heirs of the Enlightenment were previously inclined to think, and if taking it seriously gives us a way to recover our contact with things as things, then we may find that romanticism is still speaking to us, a timely reminder of the life of things, of a world replete “with properties of value and meaning,” 17

For a detailed discussion of romanticism’s attempt to regain our contact with things, and Wordsworth’s reflections on the role of romantic writing in making that contact possible, see Kompridis (2009: 247–​270).

104 Kompridis whose aliveness we have systematically denied and devalued—​at our cost, and the world’s.

4

Of course, a philosopher might very well be sympathetic to the idea that we are answerable to the world for the mess we have made of it, but still feel entitled to ask, “Are we still talking about skepticism, here?” As I remarked at the outset, Cavell’s account of skepticism is so heterodox and at the same time so expansive that it easily outstrips the range of academic discussions of skepticism. It is altogether fair to ask whether he has so altered the meaning of skepticism that it is no longer resembles what it is philosophers talk about when they talk about skepticism. Although I have strongly emphasized the discontinuity between Cavell’s treatment of skepticism in the standard academic sense and his treatment of it in the deep romantic sense, it is clearly the case that Cavell himself remained committed to the unity of the two. However, nothing more underscores the discontinuity between the two senses of skepticism than his engagement with romanticism, to which he was by his own admission “pushed.” I would argue that Cavell’s engagement with romanticism actually rescued his account of skepticism, making it less provincial, less dependent for its sense and purpose on one of the more parochial corners of professional philosophy. By making “use of the skeptical problematic as [his] opening into romanticism (and contrariwise)” (1988a: 58), the central theme of his career acquired an intellectual richness and cultural breadth it would have sorely missed. Because those qualities meant a lot to Cavell—​the last thing he would have wanted for his philosophy is for it to be accused of being parochial—​far better to be accused of being crazy than of being parochial. In the end, by sticking his neck out a little further yet, Cavell was able to rescue a philosophy of romanticism from the spirit of skepticism. At this point, the question of whether Cavell’s version of “skepticism” has anything to do with academic skepticism is much less interesting than the question of what do with the project he left behind, unfinished. Can it be carried forward? If so, can it be carried forward as philosophy? Was it some intellectual idiosyncrasy of Cavell’s that moved him to end The Claim of Reason with the question of whether philosophy can become literature and still know itself, or was there some underlying “logic” through which he was able to release his philosophical imagination from the grip of academic skepticism? Let’s say that this question follows from, implicitly, a more general question about what philosophy’s relation to its other should be. After all, what sense can philosophy

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make of itself without contrasting itself with its other, whatever it takes that other to be—​art, religion, science, common sense, the ordinary, or some other candidate “other”? I expect that Cavell would agree with the suggestion that skepticism is what philosophy becomes when it is indifferent to the other, when it is (rendered) absent from philosophy. But then, in a Cavellian spirit, we should ask: Can philosophy even remain itself without its other? I believe Cavell concluded that it could not, and in his search for a way to do philosophy in the right relation to its other, he found an answer in romanticism. Philosophy presents itself as an untaken way of life. This is what [romantic] perfectionists will find ways to say … [I]‌n calling for philosophy Emerson is not comprehensible as asking for guardianship by a particular profession within what we call universities. I assume what will become ‘philosophy itself” may not be distinguishable from literature—​ that is to say, from what literature will become. Then that assumption, or presumption, is, I guess, my romanticism.” (1988b: 62)

References

Bakhtin, M. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bilgrami, A. 2014. Secularity, Identity, Enchantment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cavell, S. 1976. Must We Mean What We Say? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cavell, S. 1979. The Claim of Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cavell, S. 1988a. In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cavell, S. 1988b. Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cavell, S. 1989. This New Yet Unapproachable America: Lectures after Emerson after Wittgenstein. Albuquerque: Living Batch Press. Cavell, S. 2005. Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cavell, S. 2005. “Responses.” In Russell B. Goodman, Contending with Stanley Cavell. New York: Oxford University Press. Cavell, S. 2008. “Companionable Thinking.” In Carey Wolfe (ed.), Philosophy and Animal Life. New York: Columbia University Press. Coetzee, J. M. 2003. Elizabeth Costello. London: Secker & Warburg. Coleridge, S.T. 1985. Biographia Literaria, volume 1. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

106 Kompridis Diamond, C. 2008. “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy.” In Carey Wolfe (ed.), Philosophy and Animal Life. New York: Columbia University Press. Heidegger, M. 1962. Being and Time. Translated by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, New York: Harper & Row. Kompridis, N. 2009. “Romanticism.” In R. Eldridge (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, 247–​270. New York: Oxford University Press. Kompridis, N. 2013. “Recognition and Receptivity: Forms of Normative Response in the Lives of the Animals that We Are,” New Literary History 44 (1): 1–​24. Kompridis, N. 2020. “Human Normativity and Non-​Human Agency.” In Akeel Bilgrami (ed.), Nature and Human Value. New York: Columbia University Press. Levinas, E. 1990. Difficult Freedom. Essays on Judaism. Translated by S. Hand. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Macarthur, D. 2020. “Difficulties of Reality, Skepticism, and Moral Community: Remarks After Diamond on Cavell.” In A. Gleeson & C. Taylor (eds.), Morality in a Realistic Spirit: Essays for Cora Diamond, 176–​193. New York: Routledge. Peirce, C.S. 1972. “Questions Concerning Certain Faculties.” In Charles S. Peirce: The Essential Writings. Edited by E.C. Moore. New York: Harper and Row. Putnam, H. 1992. Renewing Philosophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rorty, R. 1982. The Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press. Rorty, R. 1989. “Philosophy of the Oddball,” The New Republic, June 19. Rorty, R. 1998. “Putnam and the Relativist Menace.” In his Philosophical Papers, volume 3, 43–​62. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rorty, R. 2005. “How Many Grains Make a Heap,” London Review of Books 27 (2) (20 January): 12–​13. Rorty, R. 2010. “Naturalism and Quietism.” In M. De Caro & D. Macarthur (eds.), Naturalism and Normativity, 55–​68. New York: Columbia University Press. Sartre, J.-​P. 2001. Huis Clos and Other Plays. London: Penguin. Taylor, C. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Wordsworth, W. 1990. The Prelude Or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind. In William Wordsworth: The Major Works, including The Prelude. Edited by S. Gill. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

chapter 5

Skepticism and Naturalism of Other Minds: Remarks on the (In)visibility of Other Minds David Macarthur 1

Introduction

The traditional problem of other minds arises on the grounds that since we cannot perceive (or otherwise witness) the minds of others the only option we have to gain knowledge of this problematic domain is to infer it on the basis of the other’s behavior. But how can we possibly infer ‘inner’ mental states which can never be directly experienced on the basis of ‘outer’ bodily movements which, if we are not to beg the question, must be conceived in wholly non-​ mental terms? Notice that in this formulation a metaphysics of mind comes first and conditions how we conceive the epistemology of other minds, rendering it deeply problematic if not impossible. Rather than accept this orthodox formulation of the problem at the outset I would like to challenge its assumption that the mind is invisible; which is to also challenge the idea that the bodies of others are to be conceived in non-​ mental terms. I shall also try to suggest a motivation for finding the mind invisible on the basis of the otherwise laudable ambition to understand the mind not as some supernatural entity but, in some sense, part of the natural world. That is to say we are concerned with the way the mind is conceived within a naturalistic outlook. Cuiously enough, as we will see, naturalism about the mind tends to reinstitute certain key features of the Cartesian conception of mind; most notably, that there is a dualism of mind/​body. I will suggest that the difficulty we find in relating to others minds is connected to what Stanley Cavell calls “soul-​blindness” and his vision of us as “living our skepticism” of each other. 2

Naturalism and the Mind

Why do we find it natural to think the mind is invisible? In its broadest terms, I want to suggest that this issue concerns the problem of giving an account of human psychology, our understanding of the mind, “consistent with […] our

© David Macarthur, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004525474_007

108 Macarthur understanding of human beings as part of nature” (Williams 1995: 67). That this in not a straightforward task is apparent when we consider that the term “mind” and its cognates like “soul” has long been associated with the supernatural, as in Descartes’s (1985) account of the mind as capable of disembodied non-​spatial existence. The religious idea of the soul or mind shared by Descartes and many others around the world and throughout human history grants the mind a temporally unbounded existence (in the Judeo-​Christian tradition, only if God so pleases). Ryle castigated the Cartesian mind as “the myth of the Ghost in the Machine” (Ryle 2009: 5). If the mind is not a physical thing like a machine nor a non-​physical thing like a ghost then it is, presumably, not a thing at all. As Wittgenstein puts it, “It is not a Something but not a Nothing either” (Wittgenstein 1958: §304). But, then, how does one provide an account of “the mind,” a nominalizing locution which misleadingly suggests a Something? According to functionalism, the most popular contemporary account, the mind is a set of functionally characterized states of a person which play certain roles in some psychological theory.1 Put in these very abstract and general terms, “functionalism” is consistent with supernaturalism since the roles played by mental states might be, e.g., telepathic or magical or capable of operating independently of the body. If a functionalist approach to mind is also a naturalist theory, as is widely taken for granted in contemporary philosophy, then the mental states are typically those posited by our best scientific explanation of human behavior. Indeed, this move is almost invisible in contemporary philosophy as is evident from the almost universal assumption that our so-​called “folk psychology” is a proto-​scientific theory, which aims to explain and predict human behavior by hypothesizing “law-​like [causal] relations holding among external circumstances, internal states and overt behaviour.”2 One reason for the invisibility of an everyday psychology distinct from scientific theorizing is that a scientific psychology seems to be already anticipated by the very use of the term “psychology” to pick out the subject matter that we might otherwise pick out by using the terms “mind” or “soul” which, if anything, carry counter-​scientific connotations.3 The oed definition of psychology is “the scientific study of the human mind and its functions.” To think 1 For example, in Hilary Putnam’s influential version of “computer functionalism” the psychological theory is given by a set of computational states. See “Why Functionalism Didn’t Work?” for a survey of this conception in Putnam (1994: 441–​462). 2 Paul Churchland, quoted in Pettit & Jackson (1990: 33). 3 John McDowell remarks: “We do not need to surrender the term “psychological” to scientific psychology” (1992: 42).

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of mental states as roles in some psychological theory, then, seems to make it almost inevitable that we understand the roles in question as posits of some scientific explanatory theory of mind. Today what most philosophers mean by a naturalistic account of the mind is a scientific account of mind, and usually one where the sciences in question are natural sciences, particularly physics or biology; although as a temporary placeholder promising a future reduction they may accept a social scientific account, e.g., scientific psychology.4 The logic of the situation is this: to understand the mind is to have a theory of it; to have a theory of it is to have a scientific theory at least in the sense of a scientific metaphysics—​a metaphysics of mind suggested by or consistent with the scientific study of the mind. It is of great importance to realize how much these all-​but-​invisible moves “cook the data” before one even begins to seriously reflect on the mind. When Anglo-​American philosophers speak of a scientific theory they are best interpreted as referring to a distinctive form of intelligibility associated with the rise of modern science in the Western world since the time of Galileo and most fully realized by the natural sciences.5 Scientific intelligibility, as I will call it, is a matter of explaining and predicting phenomena on the basis of objectively discoverable causal patterns or laws; or, in another version, causal propensities.6 The ultimate aim, apart from satisfying our curiosity, is to explain natural phenomena and gain some measure of predictive control of the natural world. In restricting our theoretical focus when considering the mind to the objects of a scientific study, it is presupposed that the data for our comprehension or study of the mind must conform to the following conditions: The Causality Condition That the items enter into causal relations by either causing various effects or being effects of various causes, or both.

4 One wonders in passing: why not chemistry? 5 McDowell (1994) discusses scientific intelligibility but does so in terms of natural laws. It is more realistic to understand scientific intelligibility as a kind of causal intelligibility which either appeals to causal propensities of particular kinds of things or to both local causal patterns (e.g., in social science) and causal laws (e.g., in physics). I take it that current physics is still understandable in causal terms, even if this may not be the most fundamental description of what is going on. See Frisch (2012: 313–​336). 6 One of the problems surrounding the use of the term “science” is the way it can refer to Wissenschaft (a system of knowledge), natural science (governed by scientific intelligibility), and social science (which in practice is a confusing blend of causal explanation and rational or “hermeneutical” explanation of social action).

110 Macarthur The Objectivity Condition That the data for hypothesizing causal items is “objective” in the sense that it is based on an application of concepts (e.g., of observation, or measurement) that can be equally applied by other suitably trained investigators. Mathematically quantifiable concepts of size, mass, speed and so forth are prime examples of objective concepts in the relevant sense. One important way in which the data about the mind is “cooked” in advance is that once we adopt the point of view of scientific intelligibility (typically within a broader metaphysics of mind) we must restrict the vocabulary we use to describe the mental data to objective concepts that conform to impersonal public standards of identifiability and verifiability. It is this demand for scientific objectivity in the use of relevant descriptive vocabulary that rules out the use of normative or evaluative terms that lack the requisite objectivity in a naturalist account of the mind. Suppose we apply this methodological requirement to the minds of others rather than one’s own mind. The first thing to note is that looking at other minds in the manner of science involves a radical departure from everyday practice. We cannot say one acted for a reason, or on the basis of an understanding of another’s remark, or that one did something courageously or with malicious intent or thoughtfully and so on. All of these ordinary evaluative locutions are too subjective to pass muster in a naturalist account of the psychological data. Quine (1969: 24) said that such concepts belong to a “second-​grade system” that does not pass scientific standards of clarity. Indeed so much is cut out from the very beginning in giving a naturalistic account of the mind that we lose a grip on our subject matter, everyday psychology, i.e., our familiar everyday understanding of others. If we want to be able to describe other minds by employing such terms as “meaning,” “understanding,” “sincerity,” “courage,” “a loving expression,” or “a scornful remark” (etc.), then we need another form of naturalism, which is consistent with the use of this non-​scientific vocabulary. In other words we need to reconceive what a naturalist account of minds looks like. If mental states are roles in some psychological theory then, in order to be a naturalist (i.e. an anti-​supernaturalist) whilst avoiding the danger of scientism, what we need is to be careful not to identify the natural with the scientifically explicable. The moral is clear: everyday psychology should not be assumed at the outset to be a proto-​scientific “folk psychology.” In previous writings, I have articulated a liberal naturalism built on the distinction between the natural and the supernatural (De Caro & Macarthur 2004, 2010). One earns the right to be a naturalist in this framework by

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rejecting all forms of supernaturalism where, at first blush, the supernatural is understood in quasi-​scientific terms as unobservable entities that are posited to explain various observable phenomena but without any empirical verification. To understand naturalism as anti-​supernaturalism in this sense leaves open the possibility that something is non-​supernatural and non-​scientific, i.e., not supernatural and not fully explicable by science. A liberal naturalism thus makes available the conceptual space to understand aspects of the mind in non-​scientific non-​supernatural terms, even if it can also admit that minds are, in certain respects, amenable to scientific studies of various sorts (e.g. psychology, sociology, anthropology). So, a key first move in making everyday psychology visible is to adopt the outlook of liberal naturalism. I shall not defend this move in the present context, but I invite the reader to consult other of my writings that do so (Macarthur 2017: chap. 4). 3

Are Other Minds (In)visible?

The difficulty we have been considering is why we tend to think of minds as invisible; and, relatedly, why we tend to discount or repudiate everyday psychology, our everyday interactions and understandings of each other? Philosophy here is, as Wittgenstein repeatedly claims, largely a matter of description not explanation (Wittgenstein 1958: §109). The terms we use to describe our everyday psychology are everyday psychological concepts that are, prima facie, neither metaphysical (e.g., not matters of some ethereal “soul”-​stuff) nor scientific (e.g., not described in the language of physics, neurophysiology, etc.). The overwhelming urge to provide a scientific or scientific-​metaphysical account of mind—​to have that sort of theoretical grasp of other minds—​covers up or avoids the difficulty we have in giving an adequate description of other minds in everyday psychological concepts. What is this difficulty? Let us consider the question: Do we see (and hear) other minds, or do we, as philosophers are wont to say, only really observe material things, bodies and their movements in space (and the sounds they make), from which we can, at best, only infer other minds which are, by implication, invisible (and inaudible)?7 The standard and widely held view in philosophy is that we do not literally see other minds. Here is David Hume:

7 For ease of exposition, I will only focus on seeing other minds.

112 Macarthur No passion of another discovers itself immediately to the mind. We are only sensible of its effects and causes. From these we infer the passion. hume 1978: 3.3.1.7

We do not see the anger in the gesture or facial expression; we only see various behavioral effects of an “inner” (invisible) mental state. In this remark, Hume restricts his comment to passions but the same applies to mental states across the board. And the same outlook holds true of contemporary philosophy quite generally. A recent commentator, summarizing philosophical orthodoxy, writes, “What is striking is that we never have direct knowledge that other human beings are in whatever mental state they are in” (Hyslop 2021). The philosophically enlightened position is that the psychology of others is invisible to us! Consequently, the most common reason for believing in the existence of other minds, at least from this philosophical point of view, is not from simply looking and listening but by way of an inference from what we do observe. This is the so-​called Argument from Analogy, which is nicely summarized by John Stuart Mill as follows: I conclude that other human beings have feelings like me, because first, they have bodies like me, which I know, in my own case, to be the antecedent condition of feelings; and because, secondly, they exhibit the acts, and other outward signs, which in my own case I know by experience to be caused by feelings. mill 1865: 208

Since I cannot directly see or hear other minds I use the relation between my own mind, which I am aware of, and my own public behavior as a model for an analogy with others, projecting my own mental states, or something I imagine is very like them, as hidden causes of the other’s behavior so long as it seems similar enough to my own. The fact that many philosophers have found the Argument from Analogy convincing shows, I think, how confused we tend to be about other minds and our relation to them. The argument takes the supposed fact of our outward similarity in, say, word and gesture (more precisely, sound and bodily movement) to be the basis of an inference that the other has a mind like one’s own. But the argument proves too little and too much; and it begs the question. It proves too little by simply accepting, without argument, the skeptical conception of mind as metaphysically interiorized, an unobservable something hidden from view. And this hiddenness is not a temporary malady that could

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be overcome under certain circumstances. The word “hidden” here is being given a metaphysical employment to indicate the impossibility of being seen. The argument proves too much in so far as the conclusion is that another’s mind is understandable on the model of one’s own mind, as if the other’s mind is simply a version or simulacrum of one’s own. But that seems to deny the otherness of the other’s mind; its particularity or distinctness—​what is sometimes called the mind’s alterity. This understanding of the uniqueness of other minds is what moved Wilhelm Windelband to speak of the human sciences as “idiographic” sciences, meaning that they issue in singular judgments which “represent a unique object in its individual formation” (Kinzel 2021). And, furthermore, the argument begs the question by assuming what is in question, namely, that the causal regularities between mind and behavior in a single case, one’s own, holds for other minds in general—​although this can never be empirically established since, by hypothesis, we can never observe other minds. The argument thus rests on a wild, and unjustified, generalization. That there is something amounting to a philosophical consensus about the thesis that we do not see, or hear, other minds is startling when one reflects on the way in which this position conflicts with ordinary phenomenology in our dealings with others. In everyday life it is a familiar fact that we can see a loving expression in a face, we can hear doubt or excitement or pity or fear (etc.) in a voice, we can understand a gesture of friendship just by looking at a friendly wave or a gesture of ignorance (e.g., the Greek gesture of opening one’s palms, a short sharp backwards tilt of the head and a tsk); and we hear everyday talk as meaningful utterance rather than mere sounds and so on. As for the existence of other minds it is as certain as anything could be!8 Consider this example from Wittgenstein. Imagine you are sitting by the side of a sick person suffering from some serious illness. The remark continues: I know that a sick man is lying here? Nonsense! I am sitting by his bedside. I am looking attentively into his face.—​So I don’t know, then, that there is a sick man is lying here? Neither the question nor the assertion make sense … “I know that there’s a sick man is lying here,” used in an unsuitable situation seems not to be nonsense but matter-​of-​course only because one can fairly easily imagine a situation to fit it, and one thinks that “I know that …” is always in place where there is no doubt, even where the expression of doubt would be unintelligible. wittgenstein 1969: 10

8 Being “certain” here means being without doubt. That is not the same as Cartesian certainty which requires that doubt is not possible.

114 Macarthur No shaky hypothesis there! Wittgenstein is saying that if we are sitting next to a man suffering from sickness (that is, close to him) and looking attentively into his face (not distractedly or absent-​mindedly) then under these circumstances to express a doubt whether the man is really suffering as opposed to, say, adopting an eccentric way of expressing joy, would make no sense at all. And to say “I know there is a sick man lying here” without further ado would be mystifying. It suggests that there is a doubt in the midst of our certainty. And it carries the suggestion that we have some further and more secure grounds for saying that the man is suffering which has nothing to do with how the man looks. But in the situation described what could those further grounds be? Sense-​making in either case is a matter of filling in a scenario in which doubting, hence knowing, gets some grip. Without that crucial “filling in” these statements make little or no sense. Why not, then, take our ordinary experience seriously and say that we do indeed see and hear other minds?9 Of course, we do not see and hear other minds as opposed to their bodies; rather, we do so by way of their bodies. If the ordinary phenomenology of understanding others is taken at face value then we are well placed to say that our psychological goings-​on are expressed in human behavior and that we observe and “read” these expressions. Indeed what we should find incredible is the philosophical dogma that we see mere physical movements of the body from which we infer the mind as something that lies (invisibly, inaudibly) behind them. Describing a face we naturally employ psychological terms, e.g., joy, grief, hope, conviction, courage, determination and so on. If we are asked to describe a face without the use of such vocabulary where what is in question is not skin or eye color nor gross features of size or shape but all the myriad subtle facial movements that poets sing about and that is the lifeblood of actors on stage and screen, then we are at a loss. We seem quite incapable of giving a point by point objective account of facial movements in physical and geometrical terms. So the idea that this is what we really see comes to seem mythological. But why are we tempted by this mythology of the human as a complicated physical mechanism? Part of the problem is that we do not simply see the mind of another, or to put it better, we do not see the mind of another in the same way that we see chairs, houses and trees. Consider this remark of Wittgenstein’s:

9 We might also talk of feeling another mind in such cases as a handshake or a caress where one is communicated to by another by way of touch.

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A misleading parallel: psychology treats of processes in the mental sphere, as does physics in the physical. Seeing, hearing, thinking, feeling, willing, are not the subject matter of psychology in the same sense as that in which the movements of bodies, the phenomena of electricity, and so forth are the subject matter of physics. You can see this from the fact that the physicist sees, hears, thinks about and informs us of these phenomena, and the psychologist observes the utterances (the behaviour) of the subject. wittgenstein 1958: §571

A physicist sees objective phenomena of electricity like sparks, lightening, a light bulb switching on, electromagnetic attraction, and so on. A psychologist arguably does not see mental states of seeing or hearing or thinking or willing, etc. in the same way. The seeing here is a case of seeing-​ in: a psychologist sees these mental states in the utterances and demeanour of persons. In other words, he observes these things in the behavior, the meaningful actions and gestures and facial expressions, of persons; just as we do in our everyday interactions with each other. Part of the point of Wittgenstein’s remark is that we not be misled by the term “behavior” when we are describing the psychology of another. In this context we are not to interpret “behavior” in merely physical terms as the movement of limbs, muscles, bones and ligaments.10 Notwithstanding, many philosophers have been misled into applying a physical object model to the subject matter of psychology. In that case there seems to be no alternative to the view that the data for psychological goings-​ on is mere behavior, that is, behavior described in the vocabulary of physics or biomechanics at the macroscopic level. And it is worth noting that this physicalist prejudice is consistent with a neo-​Cartesian materialist picture of the mind according to which the mind is an unobservable functional system that is realized by the brain or central nervous system. Why is it so hard to accept the ordinary phenomenology of our interactions with others: that our relation to other minds is direct; that other minds are openly available for all to see? I suggest that the problem is that there is a deep anxiety about our capacity to read other minds as expressed in or through their behavior.11 To read another person’s psychology as it is expressed in their physiognomy, facial expressions, gestures, tone of voice, gait etc.—​within a shared 10 11

A point also made by Socrates in Phaedo, 98–​99. Plato (1997). For a rich account of the difficulty of reading the emotions of others, see Morag (2017: 343–​ 363, esp. 350–​355).

116 Macarthur form of life—​is an interpretative task that we unreflectively perform every day. But when we reflect upon this capacity we have a tendency to lose our footing and become doubtful, even skeptical, that we can perform it. We seem to have no ready-​to-​hand theory of other minds to support our judgments about the mental life of others; at least in contrast to our knowledge of physical objects, which is theoretically richly elaborated and extended by the natural sciences. And this can seem to deprive us of any secure justification for our judgments about other minds if our judgments and the ordinary reasons for give for them are criticized or challenged. This suggests that even our talk of folk or everyday psychology is misleading in so far as it suggests we have a theory of minds. I have been operating with the assumption so far but it would be better to say that we have a folk or everyday understanding of other minds—​one that comes in degrees, and can be deepened and extended in various ways (e.g., through exposure to literature or psychoanalysis). Our understanding of art provides a good model for our understanding of other minds. But while we are all familiar with art criticism we seem unaware that there is also something we might call ‘other mind criticism’—​in the non-​perjorative sense of the term. 4

Reading Others

Of course, we know from everyday experience that some people are better than others at reading the manifold expressions of mindedness in those we meet and work with. Wittgenstein calls such people of good judgment in matters of understanding others, Menschenkenners, and says that they rely on “imponderable evidence” to determine the character of another’s mental life at certain times and places.12 For example, they might be better at saying whether a certain expression of feeling is genuine or whether one is being sincere or lying or hiding something. As Wittgenstein characterizes them, what Menschenkenners know about other minds is unteachable, more art than craft; though if one is receptive and has the right experience a Menschenkenner can act as a sort of mentor to help in the appreciation of fine or subtle differences and nuances of psychological expressivity. Like an art critic, a Menschenkenner issues judgments that we discriminate into better or worse, more or less refined, more or less sensitive, and so on. 12

Wittgenstein (1958: Part 2, sect. 11, §355–​360). Wittgenstein is a good touchstone on these matters as he is interested in describing everyday psychology (from a linguistic perspective) without any metaphysical blinkers to distract him.

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Of course insightful, refined and sensitive judgments about human psychology are something we look for and find in great psychological novels such as George Eliot’s Middlemarch; but, as we have seen, we seem to have no worked out theoretical grasp of this capacity. Not only do our judgments about other minds lack guarantees but there seems to be no explicit theoretical system of justifications to draw on—​that is, apart from our life experiences and the wisdom stored in our language and literature which allows for psychologically rich descriptions involving concepts such as being ironic, fanatical, imaginative, self-​serving, stoical, weak or strong willed and so forth. If this is on the right track then reading another mind is inevitably a subjective matter that remains subjective in the sense that it is always a matter of good judgment—​what in the eighteenth century was called taste—​rather than of objective evidence and scientific theory. Variability in this capacity opens up the possibility of Menschenkenners but also, of one person being what we might call “soul-​blind” to another (Cavell 1979: 378). This is a second sense in which our everyday psychology can be invisible. We live in a condition of what Stanley Cavell thematizes as “living our skepticism” of one another, in so far as we are too often partially, and sometimes completely, blind to each other through our failures to acknowledge the expressions, actions and reactions of another—​perhaps because we do not want to admit that the other thinks or acts or feels this way or because of the way the other thinks or acts or feels reflects unfavourably on us and our self-​image—​which may be revealed as a delusion or worse. Think how often we have heard of employees saying of their bosses, or wives saying of their husbands, or teenagers saying of their parents, that they do not listen to them. I take it that this does not mean that the bosses or husbands or parents in question are literally deaf in these moments. The words that the employees etc. are producing are heard no doubt; but the bosses, etc. do not hear the one who is speaking, they do not respond appropriately, they do not understand what is being said or communicated. And not because they do not understand the words. They do not understand what the employees etc. are using their words to say to them—​perhaps because they do not want to. These bosses, husbands and parents are to that extent soul-​blind. And the same complaint is made in modern medicine when patients complain that their doctor does not really see or hear them. Too often the doctor tends to focus on the body as a physiological system, a complex physiology with various signs and symptoms—​in short, the body looked at from the objectifying stance of scientific disinterest. The doctor, in concentrating on pathologies of the flesh, can easily overlook the person in front of him or her and their suffering. The doctor is, to that extent, soul-​blind.

118 Macarthur Cavell’s point is that we should not think of these as isolated cases; we are all, to various degrees and in various different ways, soul-​blind. That is why he says we live in a condition of skepticism about other minds in a way that has no parallel in the case of external world skepticism, which is notoriously unlivable. Skepticism in Cavell’s re-​imagining of the problem of other minds is not a matter of doubting the existence of other minds in general as in traditional skeptical problem of solipsism which trades on a metaphysical “gap” between mind and body. Rather it is a felt shortcoming in what we achieve by way of our knowledge of other minds. It is as if we live on the psychological surface of people, only occasionally penetrating beneath that. Wittgenstein remarks: What makes [an] object hard to understand—​if it’s significant, important—​is not that you have to be instructed in abstruse matters in order to understand it, but the antithesis between understanding the object & what most people want to see. Because of this precisely what is most obvious may be what is most difficult to understand. It is not a difficulty for the intellect but one for the will that has to be overcome. wittgenstein 1998: 25

The suggestion I want to draw from this remark is that our difficulty in confronting our everyday understanding of other minds is not best thought of as an intellectual problem. Other minds are there in public space for all to observe: you, me, him, her, one and all. Indeed we could take Wittgenstein”s thought further by saying that a problem of the intellect can cover up what is really a problem of the will, of our desires and cravings or fears and anxieties. Perhaps we construct the traditional problem of other minds precisely in order to cover up our condition of soul-​blindness, the everyday practical problem of engaging with and responding to others. Cavell remarks, In making the knowledge of others a metaphysical difficulty, philosophers deny how real the practical difficulty is of coming to know another person, and how little we can reveal of ourselves to another’s gaze, or bear of it. Doubtless such denials are part of the motive which sustains metaphysical difficulties. (1979: 90) I suggest that knowing another person is a life-​long achievement—​as we all more or less know when it comes to our immediate family, friends and lovers—​but we do not feel comfortable facing up to the fact our understanding of most people most of the time falls short of what is owed them; or at least

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what we can feel is owed them; and certainly it falls very far short of what is possible. Or at least so it can seem. To live as we ordinarily do we seem, on the whole, not to be able to do justice to other people, and their demands on us for acknowledgement.13 Another suggestion is that we are afraid that we do not know ourselves, that there is nothing substantial there, nothing very solid or stable, to be known. Buddhism turns that thought into a religion. Anglo-​American philosophy turns it into a matter for science. But turning our knowledge of other minds into an objective scientific matter arguably gives a false air of control and solvability, whose real motivation is to turn away from an ineliminable subjectivity (and the responsibility for it!) that we would prefer to avoid. Our partial soul-​ blindness—​our failure to fully acknowledge the character and depth and otherness of other minds—​may include ourselves in so far as we tend to deny that we are the person seen, heard and felt in public space as if we were, literally, an invisible supernatural “soul” not bound to the everyday world.14

References

Cavell, Stanley. 1979. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy. Oxford: Clarendon Press. De Caro, Mario & Macarthur, David. 2004. Naturalism in Question. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. De Caro, Mario & Macarthur, David. 2010. Naturalism and Normativity. New York: Columbia University Press. Descartes, René. 1985. Meditations on First Philosophy. In The Philosophical Writings of Descartes: Vols. i–​i ii. Edited and translated by J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frisch, Mathias 2012. “No Place for Causes? Causal Skepticism in Physics,” European Journal for Philosophy of Science 2 (3): 313–​336. Hume, David. 1978 [1738–​1740]. A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd edition. Edited by P.H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

13 14

This is a major theme in the work of Stanley Cavell, whose writings have helped shape the outlook expressed in this paper. I want to acknowledge his pervasive influence on my way of seeing the skeptical problem of other minds. I’d like to thank Katherine Morris and Stephen Hetherington for their valuable critical comments on a draft of this paper.

120 Macarthur Hyslop, Alec. 2021. “Other Minds,” In E. N. Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2021 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, url =​ https://​plato.stanf​ ord.edu/​archi​ves/​spr2​016/​entr​ies/​other-​minds/​. Jackson, Frank & Pettit, Philip. 1990. “In Defence of Folk Psychology,” Philosophical Studies 59 (1): 31–​54. Kinzel, Katherina. 2021. “Wilhelm Windelband.” In E. N. Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2021 Edition). url =​ https://​plato.stanf​ord .edu/​archi​ves/​sum2​021/​entr​ies/​wilh​elm-​win​delb​and/​. Lear, Jonathan. 2004. “Psychoanalysis and the Idea of a Moral Psychology: Memorial to Bernard Williams’s Philosophy,” Inquiry 47 (5): 517–​522. Macarthur, David. 2017. “Liberal Naturalism and the Philosophy of the Manifest Image.” In A. Gare & W. Hudson (eds.), For a New Naturalism, 50–​65. Candor, NY: Telos. Macarthur, David. 2019. “Liberal Naturalism and the Scientific Image of the World,” Inquiry 62 (5): 565–​585. McDowell, John. 1992. “Putnam on Mind and Meaning,” Philosophical Topics 20 (1): 35–​48. McDowell, John. 1994. Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mill, J.S. 1865. An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy. London: Longman, Green. Morag, Talia. 2017. “The Tracking Dogma in the Theory of Emotion,” Argumenta 2 (2): 343–​363. Morris, Katherine J., “Some Problems of Other Minds” in Morag, Talia (ed.) Sartre and Analytic Philosophy, London: Routledge, forthcoming. Plato. 1997. Complete Works. Edited by J. M. Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett. Putnam, Hilary. 1994. Words & Life. Edited by J. Conant. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Quine, W.V.O. 1969. Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York: Columbia University Press. Ryle, Gilbert. 2009 [1949]. The Concept of Mind. London: Routledge. Williams, Bernard. 1995. “Naturalism and Morality.” In J.E.J. Altham & R. Harrison (eds.), World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams, 202–​205. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. Philosophical Investigations, 2nd edition. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. London: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1969. On Certainty. Edited by G.E.M. Anscombe & G.H. von Wright; translated by D. Paul & G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1998. Culture and Value, revised 2nd edition. Translated by P. Winch. Oxford: Blackwell.

chapter 6

A Defense of Transcendental Arguments Stephen L. White 1

Introduction

In “Transcendental Arguments” (2000a [1968]), Barry Stroud targeted those forms of argumentation that purport to prove, on the basis of propositions about our experience, thought, or language, something about the world as it is independently of us. And he argued that it is implausible to suppose that any such argument could succeed. Such arguments (to focus on their most typical contemporary versions) purport to prove an instance of this:

(1) In order for there to be a meaningful language, some a posteriori proposition about how the world is independently of us must be true.

And all that could plausibly be established, according to Stroud, is some instance of this:

(2) In order for there to be a meaningful language, we must believe some a posteriori proposition about how the world is independently of us, or it must be the case that it “looks for all the world as if” some such proposition is true. (2000a: 24)

Stroud held in 1968 that the transition from claims of the latter kind to claims of the former could only be made on the basis of a form of “the verification principle” (2000a: 24). More recently, he has expressed his skepticism about the possibility of a transcendental argument taking us all the way to truths about the world as follows. Even if we allow that we can come to see how our thinking in certain ways necessarily requires that we also think in certain other ways … how can truths about the world which appear to say or imply nothing about human thought or experience be shown to be genuinely necessary conditions of such psychological facts as that we think and experience things in certain ways, from which the proofs begin? It would seem that we must find, and cross, a bridge of necessity from the one to the other. That would

© Stephen L. White, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004525474_008

122 White be a truly remarkable feat, and some convincing explanation would surely be needed of how the whole thing is possible. (2000c: 158–​159) Stroud’s distinction between (1) and (2) has given rise to a distinction between ambitious and modest transcendental arguments. Ambitious transcendental arguments are those that attempt to establish claims of the same type as (1). Modest transcendental arguments, by contrast, seek only to establish something much weaker—​connections within our thought between our thinking in certain ways and our thinking in certain other ways (2000c: 164). And Stroud’s distinction has typically been deployed in support of the rejection of ambitious arguments, thus understood. Hence, it figures as part of the idea that transcendental arguments could never give us knowledge of the world as it exists independently of our psychologies, linguistic practices, and so forth. Stroud acknowledges, to be sure, that arguments of the modest variety are not without philosophical interest. But, on his view, it seems, such modest arguments could not play the anti-​skeptical role for which transcendental arguments have traditionally been slated. Recently, however, the distinction between modest and ambitious transcendental arguments has itself become the object of critical scrutiny. And questions about the distinction have often been pressed by those who, like Robert Stern (1999), see more philosophical potential than Stroud does in modest transcendental arguments. But the task of calling the distinction into question can be pushed considerably further. The transcendental argument that I gave in White (2007) is both modest and ambitious by the criteria of Stern’s article (1999). Given that the conclusion is world-​involving in the strongest sense, it is ambitious. The argument is modest, though, in being, in the first instance, aimed at blocking a certain skeptical argument. Thus it is not, at least in the first instance, aimed at showing that and how we have knowledge of the external world, though (as we shall see) it has implications for these issues as well. The fact remains, however, that, in blocking what might well be regarded as the most powerful argument for skepticism about the external world, the argument does very much the anti-​skeptical work for which transcendental arguments were designed. In what follows, I shall give a version of that transcendental argument as a response to Hume’s argument for epistemological skepticism regarding a posteriori propositions about the external world. I distinguish between Philosophical and Real Skepticism, and I argue that the transcendental argument blocks the former, but not the latter. Indeed, I claim that typical skeptical scenarios like the brain-​in-​the-​vat hypothesis have both philosophical and real versions and that the transcendental argument does not purport to rule out

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hypotheses of the latter type. It is, however, relevant to such hypotheses in telling us that we must have some external world commitments but not what they are or how extensive they must be. 2

The Transcendental Argument and the Refutation of Humean Skepticism

Suppose that we start with Hume’s argument for epistemological skepticism about the external world (1988: 184). This is hardly an arbitrary starting point. For it was Stroud himself who made this argument central to the contemporary discussion of skepticism and made its philosophical power clear (2000b: 6). In this argument Hume asks, in effect, that one focus on the character of one’s first-​person or subjective experience. Such an experience, for example, might purport to be of a room, other people, etc. And now consider that this experience could have had many causes other than those that one normally assumes it did. It could, for example, have been caused by an evil demon, a dream, one’s being a brain in a vat, one’s being in a virtual reality, and so forth. There is, then, a logical gap between any such experience and any a posteriori proposition about the external world. Since we have already exhausted the resources of perceptual experience, this gap could only be bridged by an inference from what is given in perception to the external world. And Hume’s claim is that no such inference could be justified. No a priori inference could be justified, of course, since we cannot argue a priori from effects to causes (at least not in the normal case in which there is more than one cause possible). Nor, however, could any a posteriori inference be justified. For such an inference could only be justified on the basis of a justified a posteriori belief about the relation of our sensory experience (impressions and ideas for Hume, or sense-​data in a more modern terminology) to objects, properties, or events in the external world. Such an a posteriori belief, however, could only be justified by observation, and all we could ever observe in principle are more and more sense-​data. And the conclusion is not simply that we cannot be certain about any a posteriori proposition about the external world. Rather, it is that we can have no rational justification whatsoever for preferring one hypothesis about the external causes of our perceptual experiences over any other. The question that a proponent of a transcendental response to Hume will want to raise is whether this picture of our epistemic position is compatible with our having a meaningful language. And the answer is, at the outset, not obviously favourable for the prospects of such a response. It was a project of

124 White C.I. Lewis’s (1946), after all, to show how our ordinary external-​object language could be given a meaningful interpretation in terms of stable patterns within the sense-​datum basis to which the Humean epistemological skeptic allows us unproblematic access. For, as Lewis recognized, word-​to-​word connections can only take us so far. Indeed, they can take us no further than an uninterpreted formal language. That is, we have a genuinely meaningful language only in virtue of some connections between words and some extra-​linguistic entities. Or, to put the point another way, we can say that a meaningful language must be grounded in something nonlinguistic. Moreover, such nonlinguistic entities as would ground a language, it has seemed, could not be (or be only) ordinary external objects. For the meaning of an expression like “the Morning Star” or the name “Phosphorus” would seem not to be their referent, Venus. This is because the expression “the Evening Star” and the name “Hesperus” refer to Venus as well but seem, intuitively, to have different meanings. That these two expressions (as well as the corresponding names) mean different things is strongly suggested by the fact that one could, while being perfectly rational, believe something that one would naturally express by saying something of the form “The Morning Star (Phosphorus) is F” and at the same time also believe something that one would naturally express by saying something of the form “The Evening Star (Hesperus) is not F.” These two expressions, we could say, are associated with different “modes of presentation” of Venus. And it seems that, whatever other merits it might have, a theory of meaning that failed to accommodate these facts would be inadequate. With this requirement on a theory of meaning in mind, we can see that sense-​data seem ideally suited to provide the modes of presentation necessary in bridging the gap between an uninterpreted formal system and a meaningful language. For they seem to provide the modes of presentation when we refer to an object directly—​i.e., without the benefit of any further linguistic characterizations. (We refer directly, for example, when we explain what we mean by “the Morning Star,” by saying “that planet” while pointing to Venus in the morning and what we mean by “the Evening Star” by saying “that planet” while pointing to Venus in the evening.) For it seems to be the fact that Venus presents different sense-​data in the morning and in the evening that makes it possible to believe obviously incompatible things of Venus while remaining completely rational: one can simply fail to realize that the source of the sense data is the same in each case. Thus, Lewis’s attempt to explain the word-​to-​ world dimension of meaning in terms of an association between words and sense-​data seems, on the face of it, well motivated. Moreover, sense-​data are the only resources available to the Humean skeptic in defending the claim to be speaking a meaningful language.

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The reference to Lewis, however, in defense of Hume is plausible only to the extent that we fail to recognize how radical Humean epistemological skepticism really is. For the same principles that generate skepticism about external objects generate skepticism about one’s own past, future, possible, and counterfactual sense-​data (and, of course, about the sense-​data of others). This is because what does the work in insulating one’s own sense-​data from skepticism is not the notion of a sense-​datum per se, or even the notion of one’s own sense-​data, but rather the notion of one’s acquaintance with one’s sense-​data. This is the idea that one’s sense-​data are immediately before the mind and that there is nothing more to them than what is thus given. It is the idea, then, that, where sense-​data are concerned, “to be is to be perceived.” And this is true only of one’s own present actual sense-​data. The argument for this is straightforward. Certainly one’s being mistaken about the intrinsic nonrelational character of one’s present actual sense-​data seems (linguistic mistakes apart) genuinely difficult to conceive. But one’s only source of access to one’s past sense-​data consists in present (apparent) memories of them. And such apparent memories of one’s past sense-​data are just as open to error as are one’s (apparent) memories regarding anything else. Moreover, one’s access to one’s future, possible, and counterfactual sense-​data is even more problematic. Thus it is only one’s present actual sense-​data—​a kind of instantaneous “snapshot” in the visual case—​to which the Humean skeptical principles allow us unproblematic access. And this seems too thin a basis to provide the grounding of any of the terms of our ordinary vocabulary. Indeed, the idea of finding even the kinds of stable patterns that C.I. Lewis sought in such a momentary “snapshot” makes no obvious sense. Properly understood, then, and consistently applied, Humean epistemological skepticism leads to meaning-​skepticism. And this is skepticism about (among other things) the meanings of all of our most ordinary words for external objects. That it entails such a radical form of meaning-​skepticism makes Humean epistemological skepticism self-​refuting. Thus, we have the basis for a transcendental argument for anything that we can show to be necessary to block such skeptical conclusions. The Humean argument itself, however, makes it clear what it is that we have to deny. It is the assumption that what we are given most immediately from the subjective point of view is (what I call) external-​ world neutral. That is, we have to deny that what is given in immediate experience can be completely described or characterized in its intrinsic nonrelational character without any commitment to any a posteriori propositions about the external world. (Note that, although a sense-​datum theory of perception is sufficient to get Hume’s conclusion, it is not necessary. Therefore, merely denying the sense-​datum theory is not sufficient to block the argument.) One must,

126 White then, have some de re, or Russellian, or object-​involving intentional states. Some of one’s intentional states must, that is, take one all the way out to the world.1 More particularly, we must be given, or perceive, some external objects directly. This is to say not that our relation to them is unmediated by causal connections, but rather that we perceive such objects and that there is nothing that we perceive more directly in virtue of which we do so. (In this respect, direct perception is exactly analogous to basic action—​namely, something we do, such that there is nothing more basic that we do in virtue of which we do it. The idea that an action is basic in no way suggests that it is uncaused; it is just that, as far as action ascription is concerned, it is the end of the story. And exactly analogous considerations apply to direct perception.) Suppose that we have shown that any domain capable of grounding our ordinary language will include some objects with which we are not acquainted and which are external by Hume’s or the sense-​datum theorist’s lights. And suppose that (some) such objects must be given in perception in the sense of being directly perceived. Then the Humean argument for skepticism—​based as it is on the assumption that we could only get to the external world from what we are given (or perceive) directly via an inference—​is blocked. But is this conclusion—​that we must be given some external objects directly—​really world-​involving? It is difficult to see how it could fail to be, since the intentional states give one external-​world commitments and since these commitments are ontological. That the intentional states give us such commitments follows from the generalization of Quine’s criterion of ontological commitment that has been the default assumption of most analytical philosophers for several decades—​roughly, that one is ontologically committed to the things that one has to talk about in order to say the things that one is committed to saying. And, of course, any such commitment is defeasible. But it is only defeasible against the background of other external world commitments that remain in place. “But that’s just us!” will be the response of a certain kind of critic—​namely, the critic who grants the conclusion of the transcendental argument but who interprets it, in spite of what has been said, as merely modest. For such a critic, even our ontological commitments are merely psychological facts and not the kinds of things that could bridge the alleged gap between our psychologies and the external world. But such a position is doubly incoherent. For such a critic is saying, in effect, “Yes, I see that we can’t step back from all of our external-​world

1 That this is the conclusion supported by independent phenomenological arguments is argued in White (2007).

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commitments simultaneously on pain of incoherence. Now, step back from all of your external world commitments … ” And this is incoherent not only because it both does, and does not, allow the possibility of stepping back in the relevant way. It is incoherent as well because (as the critic acknowledges in granting the conclusion of the transcendental argument), in the absence of such external world commitments that take us all the way to the world, meaningful language is impossible. 3

Philosophical vs Real Skepticism

“But you still haven’t shown that I’m not a brain in a vat.” This is by far the most common response to the transcendental argument. But notice at the outset the failure to register a basic philosophical distinction—​the distinction between a refutation of a powerful (arguably the most powerful) argument for skepticism and a positive argument against it. (As I use the expression here, “a positive argument against skepticism” would entail that we are not brains in vats, inside the Matrix, etc.) And this initial response of mine to the objection may make the argument seem quite modest, after all. But here I think that appearances are misleading. For we do in fact get a good deal of mileage against the person who claims that we have not shown that we are not brains in vats. It simply is not mileage of the kind that defenders of skepticism have led us to think a response to the skeptic requires. For consider: a perfectly good argument that we are not brains in vats is that keeping a brain alive in separation from any body, and providing it with artificial sensory input, would be prohibitively difficult and expensive and (under most circumstances) pointless and stupid. A good argument that one is not in the situation of Truman Burbank (of The Truman Show) is that one’s life is not interesting enough to broadcast twenty-​ four hours a day, seven days a week, on network television. The proponent of this objection to the transcendental argument will protest that these responses beg the question. How do we know that keeping brains in vats is difficult or that ordinary lives would not provide successful prime-​ time entertainment? And this takes us to the crux of the issue. For we have to remind the proponent of skepticism of the rules of the game as established by the transcendental argument—​namely, that we cannot step back from all our external-​world commitments simultaneously. Granted, the would-​be skeptic need not give us the assumption that keeping a brain (alive and conscious) in a vat would be difficult and pointless or that ordinary lives are not entertaining. What the transcendental argument shows, however, is that there must be some assumptions about the external world that the objector is willing to grant.

128 White What the transcendental argument does not purport to show is that such assumptions will necessarily be enough to show the objector that he or she is not a brain in a vat, is not in the Matrix, or is not in some other virtual reality setup. Neo, after all, gets quite good evidence that he is indeed in the Matrix. And the David Aames character (of Vanilla Sky) is an even better example. For he gets extremely good evidence that he is in a virtual reality (or that he is, for some other reason, receiving non-​veridical sensory information and is the victim of a radically inaccurate conception of the world) while he is still in the virtual reality. (The uncanny stranger that he meets in a bar simply knows too much and is too powerful, given Aames’s view of the world.) And certainly Neo has virtually conclusive evidence that he was in the Matrix after he has been extracted. Had the objector had similar courses of experience, the hypothesis that he or she was or had been in a virtual reality might (from his or her perspective) be perfectly rational. The point is this: what the transcendental argument refutes is Humean Skepticism, or what I also call Philosophical Skepticism. As I have suggested, what generates Humean or Philosophical Skepticism is the notion of acquaintance or some close analogue and the assumption that only that with which we are (or can be) acquainted (the internal) is (or can be) perceived directly. Our access to everything external (everything else) can only be via an inference. This means that there could be, in principle, no evidence for one hypothesis about the causal source of (the totality of) our sense-​data (or perceptual experience) over any other. And this is because all we could ever get, in principle, is more and more sense-​data. The Humean skeptic has no interest in whether keeping brains in vats is difficult or pointless, because such hypotheses merely illustrate the general point that there are different possible causal sources of our sense experience. Any suggestion that we could eliminate (as highly improbable, say) any of them will be seen by the Humean skeptic as begging the question. And this is for the reason we have seen—​namely, that Humean Skepticism purports to call all a posteriori propositions about the external world into doubt simultaneously. With such Philosophical Skepticism off the table, however, such a posteriori and probabilistic considerations (as that keeping brains in vats is pointless and expensive) could (in the appropriate context) be completely cogent. That is, they could be cogent to the skeptic (whom I shall call the real skeptic) who “really wonders” whether he or she might be a brain in a vat. To appreciate the difference between the philosophical skeptic and the real skeptic, consider the following example. Imagine that one of one’s freshman philosophy students rushes up to one on campus and says, “Professor, you might be under the influence of an hallucinogenic drug,” then rushes off before one can ask

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for an explanation. One can, I think, easily hear this in either of two ways. On the first interpretation, the student’s statement is simply an overly enthusiastic response to a first encounter with epistemological skepticism, and any other example (“you could be dreaming,” “you could be a brain in a vat”) would do as well. On the second interpretation, the student “really means” you could be under the influence of an hallucinogenic drug. (The student has just come from a meeting with the Dean during which his roommate was accused of spiking the coffee in the faculty lounge, and he knows that that’s where you normally take your morning break.) What determines (in a given context) the cogency of the difficulty of keeping brains in vats or of the entertainment value of ordinary lives are the assumptions that the skeptic—​now the real skeptic—​is willing to grant. But remember that, although no particular consideration of this kind (i.e., a consideration like the claim that keeping brains in vats is difficult) can be known to be cogent in advance of some indication of what the real skeptic will grant, there must be some such considerations that qualify. This is because the transcendental argument establishes that there must be some assumptions about the external world to which the real skeptic is committed. Part of my diagnosis of the resistance to transcendental arguments, then, turns on the ease with which the critics have been able to vacillate between Philosophical and Real Skepticism. Stroud says that transcendental reflection starts from statements like ‘We think or experience in such-​and-​such ways’ or ‘We believe that things are so-​and-​so’, and proceeds by necessary steps to conclusions like ‘Things are so-​and-​so’. We start with what we can call psychological premisses … and somehow reach non-​psychological conclusions which say simply how things are, not that people think things are a certain way. (2000d: 210) In this characterization of what the proponent of a transcendental argument must be doing and of the prospects for success, Stroud is appealing to an almost irresistible picture. But the picture can be resisted if we distinguish between skeptical arguments like Hume’s that involve substantive philosophical presuppositions that could be undermined by an a priori argument and skeptical arguments that are not similarly vulnerable and that we must in fact approach on a case-​by-​case basis. And Stroud has given no reason why a transcendental argument should not be aimed at blocking the Humean argument that he himself would agree is central to the philosophical debate over skepticism. This is not, however, merely a defense of modesty. The point, that is, is not simply that a transcendental argument could do less than Stroud imagines it

130 White doing. For his assumption about the resources available to a proponent of the transcendental argument must, for such a proponent, obviously beg the question. Stroud characterizes the skeptic’s starting point by saying this: What is in question is our knowledge of anything at all about the world, of any of the truths that are about things around us. The difficulty in understanding how sense-​perception gives us knowledge of any such truths is that it seems at least possible to perceive what we do without thereby knowing something about the things around us. There have been many versions of that fundamental idea. But whether it is expressed in terms of ‘ideas’ or ‘experiences’ or ‘sense data’ or ‘appearances’ or ‘takings’ or ‘sensory stimulations’, or whatever it might be, the basic idea could be put by saying our knowledge of the world is ‘underdetermined’ by whatever it is that we get through that source of knowledge known as ‘the senses’ or ‘experience’. (2000b: 5–​6) But Stroud’s assumption that underdetermination is the essence of skepticism completely obliterates the philosophical/​real distinction on which the refutation of Hume’s argument crucially depends. Stroud’s framing of the problem, in other words, deprives the proponent of the transcendental argument of the resources necessary to refute Hume—​and indeed of the resources necessary to formulate Humean Skepticism in the first place. We might say, then, that when I speak of the modesty of an argument that aims in the first instance (and only in the first instance) at the refutation of a skeptical argument (Hume’s), and when Stroud speaks of the modesty of the modest transcendental arguments that he allows can succeed, we are speaking of radically different things. Indeed, Stroud not only fails to see the possibility of a refutation of Hume of the kind that I am suggesting; his almost complete indifference to how the internal/​external distinction is drawn makes it impossible even to address Hume cogently, as I shall now explain. 4

Skepticism as Underdetermination

That Stroud begs the question against both the Humean and the proponent of a transcendental response to Hume can be seen most clearly by reference to the concepts of the domain and counter-​domain that I have introduced in some of my earlier work on skepticism. By the skeptical domain, I mean simply that general realm our access to which—​indeed, the existence of which—​the relevant skeptic calls into question. The domain, then, of skepticism about the external

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world, for example, is simply the external world. The more interesting concept is that of the counter-​domain—​the domain to which the skeptic in question gives us unproblematic access. (There must always be some counter-​domain, since the attempt to call into question simultaneously everything—​including all the laws of logic—​could hardly be the basis of a coherent position.) In skepticism about the external world, one might be allowed unproblematic access to one’s impressions and ideas, or, if there is a difference, to one’s sense-​data. In skepticism about other minds, the counter-​domain would normally be nonmental facts about the external world and the mentalistic facts about one’s own mind, and so forth. Where skepticism regarding the external world is concerned, the obviously crucial questions are about the nature of the counter-​domain and the relation between the counter-​domain and the domain. Stroud says, as we have seen, that the counter-​domain is “whatever it is that we get through that source of knowledge known as ‘the senses’ or ‘experience’” and that “our knowledge of the world is ‘underdetermined’” by the counter-​domain. (2000b: 6) But what is the detailed substantive character of the counter-​domain? As we have seen, Stroud presents, indifferently, a very heterogeneous list of things that we might suppose we are given in perceptual experience, one of which is “sensory stimulations.” I take it that this might (compatibly with Stroud’s intentions) be an input state of a physically realized functional system—​hence a physical state of the brain, of the central nervous system, or of the organs of sense. Is this, then, still Humean skepticism that Stroud is discussing? The answer, of course, is “no.” Instead of speaking of the given, let us speak of the possible objects of direct perception as characterized in Section 2. Then, although we could not accuse Stroud of naturalizing Hume on these issues—​Stroud includes sense-​ data and ideas among the possible conceptions of the given—​he does, without argument, drop an assumption that is crucial to Hume’s argument for skepticism, and in this sense he begs the question against Hume. The Humean assumption is that there is a dichotomy between the things that could in principle be given—​perceived directly—​and any entity in the domain of the external world. Hume has, of course, a conception of impressions and ideas (and the sense-​datum theorist of sense-​data) and of acquaintance that justifies the assumption that in principle only such impressions and ideas could be given (perceived) directly. But, for the purposes of Hume’s skeptical argument, as we saw in Section 2, it is, at least in the first instance, that dichotomy (between what can be given in perception and what cannot) that matters. That argument, recall, assumed that what is given in perception cannot in principle be any element or feature of the external world (of the kind to which our access is a posteriori). It follows, then, that we could only

132 White gain access to such things on the basis of an a posteriori inference. Such an inference could be justified, as we have seen, only on the basis of an a posteriori belief connecting impressions and ideas (sense-​data) with external objects—​ a generalization that was itself justified. And such a justified generalization could only be made on the basis of observed correlations of impressions and ideas or sense-​data with external objects—​correlations which, in the light of the dichotomy, we could never observe. By dropping the idea of the dichotomy between the elements of the domain and the counter-​domain, Stroud begs the question, not only against Hume, but against the proponent of the transcendental argument of Section 2. For the transcendental argument purports to be a deductive argument. And if the skeptic is committed to nothing more than the underdetermination by the given of its causal sources, then it is difficult to see what it could be other than what Stroud takes it to be—​a deductive argument from what is given in perception to some a posteriori claim about its causal source in the external world. However, with the dichotomy in place (and with Hume’s conception of the given that supports and justifies the assumption of the dichotomy), the picture is completely different. The proponent of the transcendental argument can appeal to the conditions on the existence of a meaningful language to reject the dichotomy by rejecting the conception of the given on which it is based. Of course, as the proponent of the transcendental argument would be the first to admit, this leaves Real Skepticism in place. And perhaps it is Real Skepticism and not Humean Skepticism that comes closest to what Stroud has in mind. Things are more complicated than this, though, as I shall now show. 5

Skepticism as Underdetermination and A Posteriori Inferences

Suppose that we take Stroud at his word and assume that underdetermination is the basis of the skepticism with which he is concerned. The skeptic who simply points out the underdetermination of the domain by the counter-​ domain need have, it seems, no special, substantive, and controversial philosophical commitments. Thus, the skepticism, so expressed, would be immune to a transcendental refutation or response. For it would depend on no special assumptions on which such an argument could be brought to bear. In this respect, it would be disanalogous to Hume’s position or that of a modern sense-​datum theorist, whose conceptions of the counter-​domain are substantive and highly controversial. Thus, whereas those theories are vulnerable to considerations stemming from the conditions necessary for our having a meaningful language, this would not be true of a skepticism based solely on

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underdetermination. Does that mean that the transcendental argument that I have offered cannot play a significant role in countering skepticism and so is weak after all? The answer is “no.” For underdetermination (of the domain by the counter-​domain), without the dichotomy that limits what can be given in principle within the counter-​domain (and without the conception of the given that justifies the dichotomy), generates no philosophically distinctive form of skepticism whatsoever. To see this, consider the question of why there is no such thing as Outside-​ a-​Room Skepticism. We can, after all, imagine someone who, Howard-​Hughes-​ like, never leaves the confines of a single windowless room. Imagine that he has access to all the usual media, entertains friends on a regular basis, and even has the equipment and expertise necessary to carry out sophisticated scientific experiments. Nevertheless, we can imagine him wondering what justifies his belief that the world outside his room is more or less as he takes it to be. Certainly what he takes to be his New York Times could be a fake, full of fabricated stories. Equally, it seems, there would be no difficulty in supposing that his television was being fed faked footage and that his email messages were similarly unrelated to events in the actual world. Indeed, even the visits of his so-​called friends could be the exceptionally skilled performances of carefully chosen actors. Is such a form of skepticism on a par with Humean Skepticism? The answer is “no.” The example is to be understood as presenting a world that has the same character both inside and outside the room. Indeed, the world outside the room is (very roughly) as the subject takes it to be. Thus, there is no dichotomy (as regards what is or can be given or directly perceived) between the counter-​domain and the domain. The same kinds of medium-​ sized bits of dry goods, among other things, exist both inside and outside the room. And I shall assume, in line with the conclusion of the transcendental argument in the context of Humean Skepticism, that at least some of them on either side of the domain/​counter-​domain distinction are directly perceivable in principle. In this example, then, the argument of the Humean skeptic (or the sense-​datum theorist) that an a posteriori inference cannot be justified simply does not apply. That argument was based, recall, on the claim that we could in principle never be given (never observe directly) correlations between items in the counter-​domain and in the domain. That was because, of course, we could never be given external objects, in Hume’s sense, at all. But since we could never be given a set of domain/​counter-​domain correlations, we could never have the basis for a justified a posteriori generalization connecting sense-​data with elements in the external world. And if we could never have such a justified generalization, we could never have the basis for a justified a posteriori inference from the counter-​domain to the domain.

134 White In the outside-​a-​room example, there is no analogue of this skeptical argument about a posteriori inferences. Hence, there could be no such argument for skepticism about induction in this context. Similarly, there is no argument for an analogue of the Humean’s (or the sense-​datum theorist’s) rejection of inference to the best explanation. From the perspective of Humean Skepticism, by contrast, the objection is obvious. Since we could never be given correlations between elements in the counter-​domain and the domain, we could never have evidence for the thesis that explanations that are recognizably good from the perspective of the counter-​domain are likely to capture the truth of the domain. But, again, this is no problem where Outside-​a-​Room Skepticism is concerned, since we can, in principle, test our explanations against direct observations (direct perceptions) of phenomena in the domain—​i.e., in the world outside the room. Similarly, the appeal to the coherence of a belief with our other beliefs is of no avail where Humean Skepticism is concerned, since (as the classic objection has it) the coherence might be just the coherence of a coherent dream. The coherence of a belief about the world outside the room with one’s beliefs about the world inside, however, is the coherence of a testable belief with beliefs of the same kind (about the external world in Hume’s sense) which (it can be assumed) are themselves testable and to which one is committed. There is, then, no possibility of calling all the beliefs of some intrinsically problematic class into question simultaneously, and the idea of a coherent dream gets no purchase. The upshot, then, is that Stroud’s skepticism is neither Humean Skepticism nor Real Skepticism, but instead combines elements of each to produce a kind of skepticism that does indeed seem unanswerable. The problem for Stroud is that the features that he apparently wants to combine are incompatible. His skepticism, if it is based on underdetermination, is unlike Hume’s in requiring no special assumptions about the counter-​domain. Hence, there is no possibility of answering it with a transcendental argument of the kind employed against Hume in Section 2 above. But, by definition, the counter-​domain is the domain of things to which we have unproblematic access. Moreover, we need direct perception of some things to ground language. And since there is no domain/​counter-​domain dichotomy as regards direct perception, we have in principle the possibility of direct perception of some objects in the domain. Therefore, although there is no deductive or a priori inference from the counter-​domain to the domain, all the usual inductive and a posteriori inferences—​those based on induction, the principle of inference to the best explanation, and coherence—​are legitimate. And this is what we would expect. For, as we saw, Neo and David Aames get very good evidence that they are in virtual realities. Stroud, then, has not identified a philosophically distinctive

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form of skepticism about the external world to which the transcendental argument does not apply. 6

Transcendental Arguments and Objectivity

In spite of the foregoing, the suspicion is likely to persist that, if the transcendental argument underwrites an inference from facts about how we must think, perceive, or act to the objective world as it is independently of all such thought, perception, or theoretical or practical activity, then the objective cannot really be objective and independence cannot be real independence. And this suspicion would be in line with one of Stroud’s early themes, as we have seen. For that theme involves the assumption that, because a transcendental argument constitutes an inference from the subjective to the objective, it could, in principle, succeed only on the assumption of a background theory that was something less than full-​blown Realism. That is, it could succeed only on the basis of something like Verificationism, Subjective Idealism, Transcendental Idealism, or Pragmatism, according to which objective truth is characterized in terms of, or cannot completely transcend, the deliverances of our senses, our best efforts at verification, our best practices, or our best theories at the end of enquiry. Moreover, Stroud believes that any view that has the consequence that Skepticism is incoherent or meaningless (as Verificationism and the other views in this category arguably do) must rely on a false theory of meaning, since we clearly do know what “the skeptic” means (1984: 205). The short response to this line is simply to reiterate what has already been said. The transcendental argument does not purport to deliver the impossible—​namely, some form of metaphysical bridge from the subjective (as conceived by the philosophical skeptic who believes in the possibility of a counter-​domain that is “external-​world neutral”) to the objective external world. Rather, the transcendental argument shows that no such characterization of a counter-​domain is coherent and that no such bridge is necessary. And with Philosophical Skepticism off the table—​in virtue, in part, of the direct perception of external objects—​it underwrites non-​deductive or a posteriori inferences from the counter-​domain (involving, as it must, external world commitments) to the domain. And no inferences to the “external world” involve what Stroud calls a “bridge of necessity.” We make deductive inferences from the external commitments we already have, but we extend all of these commitments via ordinary, non-​deductive, a posteriori reasoning. Thus, there will be no reason to suppose that the domain delivered is less than fully independent of our thought and practice—​as there would be if we relied

136 White exclusively on deductive or a priori inferences from an external-​world-​neutral counter-​domain. This seems, though, to raise the spectre of Stroud’s other claim—​that all a priori arguments to the effect that “the skeptic” is saying something incoherent or meaningless fly in the face of the fact that we do so clearly know what the skeptic means. But this point is answered by appeal to the philosophical/​real distinction, where skepticism is concerned. What the transcendental argument shows to be incoherent is Philosophical Skepticism. We do indeed understand what “the skeptic” is saying, but this means “the real skeptic.” And, in fact, we not only know what is meant, we know, or can find out, what would count as a relevant and useful response, as I shall explain. Assume, as I have argued, that we can answer Stroud’s objection that transcendental arguments presuppose background theories that are more subjective than full-​blown Realism. Can we give an account of the sort of background theory that this transcendental argument supports that displays its realist character in positive terms? Suppose that we have indeed eliminated any form of Philosophical Skepticism. Then we can take Outside-​a-​Room Skepticism as paradigmatic of the only kind of skepticism that remains and notice how far it is from presupposing any kind of subjectivism about the external world. Imagine, for example, that we identify the existence of a force inside the room. Are we justified in inferring that it exists outside the room as well? Suppose we establish that it can travel from one end of the room to the other and that it can penetrate the materials of which we believe the walls (on the basis of their inner surfaces, blueprints, general beliefs, the testimony of experts, and/​or our best guesses) to be made. Then, other things being equal, it seems that we do have some reason to suppose that the force exists at least a few feet outside the room—​and, if it turns out to play a fundamental role in our theories of the world, perhaps in the rest of the universe. Are such inferences shaky? Certainly if we had to recreate all of our contemporary physical science, social science, and the rest of our cultural assumptions about how human beings interact (since science is a social and cooperative undertaking) within the confines of a single room, the prospects would not be good. But neither are the prospects for our settling detailed and fine-​grained questions about the physical facts on the other side of the universe. This recognition is not the denial of Realism. Such questions could be answered in principle, even if in fact they will not be. Our instruments inside the room could come to give us such detailed and transparent access outside that we literally observe external phenomena. And, of course, we could—​in principle—​ knock a hole in the wall, or, indeed, simply walk out the door. Far from being opposed to Realism, this view, incorporating as it does a healthy recognition

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of our limitations—​individually and collectively—​as knowers, is Realism (no blurring of the distinction between the truth and our best efforts to discern it) and realism (what we come to accept as adults when we bring our most hubristic impulses under control). 7

Conclusion

Stroud is wrong, then, if he thinks that a transcendental argument must, by definition, be an a priori argument that purports to bridge the gap between an external-​world neutral counter-​domain and the external world. What the transcendental argument sketched above purports to do, however, is to bridge the alleged gap between what we are in fact given directly from the first-​person point of view, on the one hand, and ordinary external objects, on the other. And it does this by showing that we must sometimes perceive such external objects directly. It is in virtue of such direct perceptual experience that we are always necessarily external-​world-​committed. And it is in virtue of the necessity of such commitments (and the source of that necessity) that we can legitimately reject as incoherent the Humean skeptic’s demand that we step back from all of our external-​world beliefs simultaneously. And although this move may seem, necessarily, to blur the distinction between the psychological and the nonpsychological, if all that this consequence amounts to is the claim that some of our psychological attitudes take us all the way to the world, then that consequence is not only one that we should accept, it is one upon which we should insist. And there is nothing in this that requires or supports a background view that blurs the distinction between truth and even our most idealized efforts to achieve it.

References

Hume, D. 1988. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. La Salle, IL: Open Court. Lewis, C.I. 1946. An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation. LaSalle, IL: Open Court. Stern, R. 1999. “On Kant’s Response to Hume: The Second Analogy as Transcendental Argument.” In R. Stern (ed.), Transcendental Arguments: Problems and Prospects, 47–​66. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Stroud, B. 1984. The Significance of Philosophical Skepticism. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Stroud, B. 2000a [1968]. “Transcendental Arguments.” In his Understanding Human Knowledge, 9-​-​25. New York: Oxford University Press.

138 White Stroud, B. 2000b [1984]. “Scepticism and the Possibility of Knowledge.” In his Understanding Human Knowledge, 1–​8. New York: Oxford University Press. Stroud, B. 2000c [1994]. “Kantian Argument, Conceptual Capacities, and Invulnerability.” In his Understanding Human Knowledge, 155–​176. New York: Oxford University Press. Stroud, B. 2000d [1999]. “The Goal of Transcendental Arguments.” In his Understanding Human Knowledge, 203–​223. New York: Oxford University Press. White, S. 2007. “The Transcendental Significance of Phenomenology,” Psyche 13 (1): 1–​31.

­c hapter 7

Content-​Determinacy Skepticism and Phenomenal Intentionality Terry Horgan and George Graham 1

Introduction

Worries about whether the content of thought and language is radically indeterminate have been prominent in philosophy. Quine famously argued for the indeterminacy of translation, and famously argued that indeterminacy really begins in one’s home language and also extends to thought-​content (e.g., Quine 1960). Davidson incorporated Quinean themes, and famously argued for the indeterminacy of what he called “radical interpretation”—​the overall hermeneutic assignment, to the members of a class of creatures, of meanings to their linguistic outputs, of intentional mental states like beliefs and desires, and of action-​descriptions to their behaviors (e.g., Davidson 1973, 1979). Related worries about content-​determinacy have been raised, for instance, by Putnam (1977, 1980, 1981), Kripke (1982), and (on Kripke’s construal) Wittgenstein (1958). Worries about content-​determinacy are a form of skeptical thinking in philosophy, broadly similar to skeptical thinking about knowledge and about justified belief; and indeterminacy theses are a form of philosophical skepticism—​ broadly analogous, for instance, to skepticism concerning knowledge of the external world. Furthermore, for those philosophers disinclined to accept content-​determinacy skepticism, ourselves included, seeking out ways to resist it can help to shape a plausible philosophical conception of intentionality in thought and in language. This, too, is broadly analogous to the ways in which epistemology has been shaped by attempts to avoid philosophical skepticism about knowledge and about justified belief. From the perspective of pre-​theoretic common sense, radical indeterminacy theses are wildly implausible. It seems just obvious—​as obvious as anything—​that the sentences uttered by oneself and others normally have determinate content, that thought itself normally has determinate content, and that sincerely uttered sentences normally are the content-​determinate overt expressions of content-​determinate thoughts. Also, radical indeterminacy theses seem to confront pragmatic paradoxes so severe that these theses seem well nigh unintelligible on their face: the very articulation of a thesis of

© Terry Horgan and George Graham, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004525474_009

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radical indeterminacy seems to presuppose the determinate content of the thesis as thus articulated—​contrary to the content (sic!) of the thesis itself. Crazy though such theses seem from a common-​sense perspective, however, it is no simple matter to explain why and how they are mistaken—​if indeed they are mistaken. And it is sobering to realize that such important and influential philosophers as Quine and Davidson actually espoused radical content-​determinacy skepticism. In this paper, we will maintain that theses of radical content-​indeterminacy are indeed mistaken. We will describe a general approach to intentionality in language and thought that we claim is both independently plausible and also secures determinacy in the content of thought (and thereby in the content of language). Our approach will draw upon, but will also extend in a specific way, an important approach to these issues that has been advocated by John Searle. 2

Searle on Quine and Davidson

As Searle (plausibly) construes Quine’s famous argument for the indeterminacy of translation, this argument employs an extreme behavioristic thesis about linguistic meaning, and the argument really constitutes a reductio ad absurdum of that thesis. The argument has this status because of what we know, from our own first-​person perspective, about the content-​determinacy of our utterances and of the thoughts they express. Here is a key passage from Searle:



Now, why exactly is Quine’s argument a reductio ad absurdum of extreme linguistic behaviorism? There are two positions which are inconsistent: (1) The thesis of [linguistic] behaviorism: The objective reality of meaning consists entirely of correlations between external stimuli and dispositions to verbal behavior. (2) In a given case of speech behavior, there can be a plain fact of the matter about whether a native speaker meant, e.g., rabbit, as opposed to rabbit stage, or undetached rabbit part, by the utterance of an expression. If alternative and inconsistent translation schemes can all be made consistent with the same patterns of stimulus and response, then there cannot be any fact of the matter about which is right, because, according to (1), there isn’t anything else to be right about. But this is inconsistent with (2); so, if we accept (2), (1) must be false.

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I think it is clear which of (1) or (2) we have to give up. Quine has simply refuted extreme linguistic behaviorism. But why am I so confident about that? The answer is the obvious one: if behaviorism were correct, it would have to be correct for us as speakers of English as well as for speakers of Gavagai-​talk. And yet we know from our own case that we do mean by ‘rabbit’ something different from ‘rabbit stage’ or ‘undetached rabbit part’ … In all discussions in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind, it is absolutely essential at some point to remind oneself of the first-​person case. (1987: 126) Searle goes on to consider Davidson, who (as Searle plausibly construes him) “accepts the doctrine of indeterminacy while explicitly denying behaviorism” (1987: 137). Davidson’s discussion of indeterminacy is often couched in terms of what Quine called “the inscrutability of reference”—​which asserts that there is no fact of the matter, for example, about whether a speaker who employs “rabbit” is referring to a rabbit or to a rabbit stage. Searle takes this to follow immediately from indeterminacy about meaning and translation, and he (plausibly) construes Davidson as effectively committed to versions of both theses. Davidson also characteristically frames indeterminacy issues in terms of what he calls “radical interpretation” (rather than in terms of radical translation)—​where radically interpreting an alien or a group of aliens is a matter of simultaneously (i) construing their behaviors as actions falling under specific act-​types, (ii) construing some of their behavioral outputs as meaningful sentences with specific content, and (iii) assigning specific intentional mental states to them, such as beliefs and desires. As Searle (plausibly) reconstructs Davidson’s argument for inscrutability, this argument requires a premise that is ultimately as dubious as Quine’s extreme linguistic behaviorism. The argument effectively amounts to a reductio ad absurdum of that premise itself. Searle begins by reconstructing and then illustrating Davidson’s argument, thus:



The puzzle about Davidson is that, if you set out the argument as a series of steps, it doesn’t follow that there is inscrutability unless you add an extra premise concerning the nature of an empirical theory of language. Here are the steps: (1) The unit of empirical analysis in radical interpretation is the sentence (as opposed to subsentential elements). (2) The only empirical evidence for radical interpretation is the fact that speakers “hold true” certain sentences in certain situations.

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(3) There are alternative ways of matching words with objects which are inconsistent, but any number of which could equally well explain why a speaker held a sentence true. But these three do not entail any inscrutability or indeterminacy about what the speaker actually meant or what he is referring to. For that you need an extra premise. What is it? I believe that it amounts to the following: (4) All semantic facts must be publicly available to both speaker and hearer. If the interpreter cannot make a distinction on the basis of public, empirical evidence, then there is no distinction to be made. Here is one of his examples: if everything has a shadow, then in a circumstance in which a speaker holds true the sentence ‘Wilt is tall’, we can take ‘Wilt’ to refer to Wilt and ‘is tall’ to refer to tall things, or we can with equal empirical justification take ‘Wilt’ to refer to the shadow of Wilt and ‘is tall’ to refer to the shadows of tall things. The first theory tells us that ‘Wilt is tall’ is true iff Wilt is tall. The second theory tells us that ‘Wilt is tall’ is true iff the shadow of Wilt is the shadow of a tall thing. (1987: 138–​139)

Searle then goes on to explain why he takes Davidson’s argument to be a reductio ad absurdum of (the set of) its premises, and why the implicit premise (4) is the specific one whose falsity is effectively established by the argument: In order to deepen our understanding of what is going on here, let us contrast the common-​sense account of the speech situation with Davidson’s account. On the common-​sense account, when I make the assertion, “Wilt is tall,” by ‘Wilt’ I refer to Wilt, and by ‘is tall’ I mean: is tall. When I say “Wilt,” I make no reference explicitly or implicitly to shadows, and when I say “is tall,” I make no reference to shadows. Now these are just plain facts about me …. But, on Davidson’s view, there is no empirical basis for attributing these different intentional states to me …. As with behaviorism, different and inconsistent interpretations at the subsentence level, at the level of words and phrases, will be consistent with all the facts about what sentences I hold true under what conditions. But now it begins to look as though Davidson’s version of inscrutability might be a reductio ad absurdum of his premises, just as Quine’s account was a reductio ad absurdum of behaviorism …. [O]n Davidson’s view the indeterminacy follows only if we assume from the start that different semantic facts must necessarily produce different “publicly observable” consequences …. But, I submit, we know quite independently that this

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conclusion is false …. We know it because we know in our own case that we mean, e.g., Wilt as opposed to Wilt’s shadow, rabbit as opposed to rabbit stage …. Now, in my own case, when I understand myself, I know a great deal more than just under what external conditions I hold what sentences true. To put it crudely: in addition, I know what I mean. (1987: 139–​141) We ourselves are deeply in sympathy with Searle’s critique of Quine and Davidson on the alleged indeterminacy of translation and radical interpretation and on the alleged inscrutability of mental and linguistic reference. But more needs saying, we think, about what it is—​as revealed from the first-​ person perspective—​that undergirds content-​determinacy in thought and language. We will return to this matter below, after first commenting on how certain recent approaches to content are themselves subject to worries about radical indeterminacy. 3

Updated Worries about Content-​Determinacy

Although the writings of both Quine and Davidson have received enormous attention in the philosophical literature, nonetheless it seems fair to say that, in recent decades, many influential treatments of content in philosophy of mind and philosophy of language have paid comparatively little attention to worries about content-​indeterminacy. This seems especially true of a number of currently influential theories of mental intentionality that are versions of what we call strong externalism: roughly and generically, the view that (1) all intentionality is grounded in certain past or present causal connections between states of the cognitive system and states of the external world, and that (2) there can be no mental intentionality without some suitable kind of actual connection between what is going on “in the head” and the wider environment. Strong externalist theories include (i) causal theories of content that find the necessary connection in the causal antecedents of the state, (ii) covariational theories that find the connection in certain kinds of systematic correlations between occurrences of an internal state and occurrences of an external state of affairs, (iii) teleosemantic theories that look to environmentally situated proper functions that certain internal states possess in virtue of evolutionary design, and (iv) learning-​based theories that invoke internal adaptational changes in the creature’s own history. (See Stich & Warfield [1994] for a representative sample of such theories.)

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In our view, strongly externalist theories are all highly objectionable for reasons quite apart from matters of indeterminacy. For instance, they all seem to go contrary, in one way or another, to the very plausible claim that an accidentally produced, non-​evolved and non-​designed, envatted brain—​e.g., a “swamp brain in a swamp vat, hooked to a swamp computer”—​would have a mental life that is very rich in intentionality, including an extensive range of external-​world beliefs that are systematically non-​veridical (see Horgan, Tienson, & Graham [2004]). But at present, the point that we want to emphasize is that, prima facie, such approaches to mental intentionality all look to be vulnerable to radical-​indeterminacy worries. For let R be whatever externalistic connection, between an inner state of a creature and an object or kind in the creature’s environment, constitutes mental reference according to a given strongly externalistic theory. In general, if there is one R-​mapping from a creature’s inner states to objects and/​or kinds in the creature’s environment, then there are apt to be numerous other such R-​mappings as well. (For example, if occurrences of a mental representation expressible linguistically with the word “Wilt” causally co-​vary with the presence of Wilt, then they also causally co-​vary with the presence of Wilt’s shadow.) One symptom of this looming indeterminacy-​threat is the persistent “disjunction problem” faced by strongly externalist theories, especially in connection with the question of how to account for mental misrepresentation. When a cognitive agent misclassifies a perceived object—​say, as a zebra when it is really a cleverly disguised horse—​what makes it the case that the agent’s inner representational state means zebra, as opposed to zebra-​or-​cleverly-​disguised-​ horse? Although advocates of strongly externalist theories are well aware of the disjunction problem and the serious challenge that it poses, they do not always recognize that the challenge is not merely to explain why the inner state means zebra rather than zebra-​or-​cleverly-​disguised-​horse, but also to explain why the inner state has any determinate content at all. If Searle’s diagnosis of Davidson’s inscrutability argument is right (as we ourselves believe), then this outcome is hardly surprising. For, recent strongly externalist theories of mental content evidently ignore the first-​person perspective too, every bit as much as does Davidson’s third-​person methodological approach to radical interpretation. Another influential recent philosophical idea about mental and linguistic content that bears on matters of content-​indeterminacy—​in this case, in a more overt and self-​conscious way—​is due to David Lewis (1983, 1984). Lewis maintains that properties (which he conceives as classes of possibilia, although that probably doesn’t matter for present purposes) fall into a gradation of comparative “naturalness”—​where perfect naturalness is a matter

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of “carving nature at its joints.” (Presumably, good candidates for the properties that come closest to perfect naturalness would be those properties posited by an ideally complete and correct physics.) As a way of trying to fend off the threat of radical content-​indeterminacy that is posed by Hilary Putnam’s well-​known model-​theoretic argument against the idea that our language has a single “intended interpretation,” Lewis proposes that, among potential language-​world mappings that meet all other constraints on radical translation, the correct one is the mapping that maximizes the degree of naturalness of the assigned objects and properties. Presumably, if this tactic works against Putnam, then it will also go a long way toward fending off Quinean radical inteterminacy of translation—​and it will be harnessable as a constraint on the correct assignment of thought-​contents too, and hence will also go a long way toward fending off Davidsonian indeterminacy of radical interpretation. However, appeal to a Lewis-​style naturalness constraint on radical interpretation runs into trouble when the following question is posed. In virtue of what is it the case that a correct radical interpretation must conform to this constraint?1 One cannot appeal to anything like human intentions or purposes in addressing this question, of course, because the present issue is whether internal states of humans have determinate content in the first place. But, prima facie, it is very hard to see what other kinds of facts, apart from facts about people’s referential intentions and the like, could possibly ground the proposed naturalness-​constraint. It begins to look as though the obtaining of the naturalness constraint—​if indeed it does obtain—​would have to be an ontologically basic fact, not explainable in more fundamental terms. But this would be an extremely queer kind of basic fact—​utterly different, for instance, from whatever facts of physics might turn out to be ontologically basic (e.g., facts about the nature of the ultimate constituents of matter, whatever they might turn to be, or facts about what the fundamental physical laws are). The naturalness constraint would be an “ontological dangler,” dangling oddly apart from the other ontologically fundamental facts about the world. It is very hard to believe that such a constraint could really obtain unless it is explainable in other, more fundamental, terms—​especially if one inclines (as Lewis did) toward a naturalistic metaphysical worldview. But it is also very difficult to see what such an explanation could possibly look like; certainly, Lewis himself did not offer one.

1 Horgan once put this question to Lewis, in conversation. “That’s a good question,” Lewis immediately replied. After a long silence, Horgan realized that this was all that Lewis had to say about it, and so Horgan changed the subject.

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Nothing about the proposed naturalness constraint, as Lewis presents it, seems to invoke anything like the theme so central in Searle’s discussion—​ viz. an essential role for the first-​person perspective. We ourselves would say that this is the underlying problem with Lewis’s approach—​just as it is the underlying problem that generates such a serious threat of radical indeterminacy for strongly externalist accounts of mental content. We maintain that the source of determinate content, in thought and language, is something that emerges distinctively from the first-​person perspective. But what exactly is that something? 4

Searle on the Sources of Content-​Determinacy

Let us consider what Searle himself has to say about this question. His remarks about it in his (1987) are brief and sketchy. Here is one key passage: In real life I understand the speech of another not only within a Network of shared assumptions, but more importantly against a Background of nonrepresentational mental capacities—​ ways of being and behaving in the world which are both culturally and biologically shaped and which are so basic to our whole mode of existence that it is hard even to become aware of them (see my Intentionality, op. cit., ch. 5). Now, given the Background, it will, in general, be quite out of the question that, when you say in English, “Wilt is tall” or “There goes a rabbit,” you could with equal justification be taken to be talking about Wilt’s shadow or rabbit stages. (1987: 141–​142) And here is another: Semantics includes the level [of description] at which we express beliefs and desires in our intentional utterances, at which we mean things by sentences and mean quite specific things by words inside of sentences …. It is part of the persistent objectivizing tendency of philosophy and of science since the seventeenth century that we regard the third-​person objective point of view as preferable to, as somehow more “empirical” than, the first-​person, “subjective,” point of view. What looks then like a simple declaration of scientific fact—​that language is a matter of stimulations of nerve endings—​turns out on examination to be the expression of a metaphysical preference and, I believe, a preference that is unwarranted by the facts. The crucial fact in question is that performing speech

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acts—​and meaning things by utterances—​goes on at a level of intrinsic first-​person intentionality. (1987: 145) We ourselves find these remarks tantalizing, but not satisfying by themselves. As regards the first passage, an immediate concern about appeal to a “Network of shared assumptions” is that content-​indeterminacy threatens to apply to this Network itself, so that the operation of such a network in human cognition, and in human behavior-​control mechanisms, doesn’t help to fend off indeterminacy worries. And an immediate concern about appeal to “a Background of nonrepresentational mental capacities” is that such capacities, however much they might contribute to the aetiology of specific internal states and specific utterances, do not in any obvious way thereby fix determinate content for those states and utterances—​a concern that is exacerbated in so far as the capacities are construed as “nonrepresentational.” As regards the second passage, the problem is that it mainly just rehearses the common-​sensical idea that one can immediately tell, in one’s own case, what the content is of one’s thoughts and utterances. It does not explain what fixes determinate content, or what it is about determinate content-​fixing features that makes the content of thought and language epistemically available in a special first-​person way. More needs to be said about these crucial questions. 5

Phenomenal Intentionality and Externalistic Intentionality

As Searle repeatedly stresses in his discussion of Quine and Davidson on content-​indeterminacy, from a common-​sense point of view it seems just obvious, in the first-​person case, that I am determinately thinking that Wilt is tall (rather than, for instance, that Wilt’s shadow is the shadow of a tall person), and that my utterance of “Wilt is tall” expresses this determinate thought and thereby inherits the thought’s determinate content. What is wanted, as a basis of content-​determinacy, is some feature that not only is accessible to the agent in a special first-​person way, and not only secures content-​determinacy, but also renders such determinacy utterly obvious. Are there features of one’s mental life whose presence is so obvious as to be beyond doubt? Indeed, there are: viz. phenomenal features, i.e., those features such that there is “something it is like” to undergo them. Phenomenal character is distinctively self-​presenting to the experiencing subject. Moreover, it is self-​presenting in a way that figures directly in the content of higher-​order beliefs about one’s current phenomenal states: phenomenal character figures in such beliefs as a self-​presenting mode of presentation—​thereby giving such

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a belief a specific content that is directly fixed by the phenomenal character of the first-​order state itself. This makes such beliefs especially obvious to the person undergoing them, especially immune to serious doubt.2 We ourselves advocate a number of claims about the phenomenal character of conscious experience, and about the role of phenomenal character in mental intentionality—​claims we have defended elsewhere, sometimes in collaboration with John Tienson (Horgan & Tienson [2002]; Horgan, Tienson, & Graham [2003, 2004, 2006]; and Graham, Horgan, & Tienson [2007, 2009]). Here, as a prelude to addressing the issue of content-​determinacy, we offer a brief summary of the general position we favor. Phenomenology, we claim, is narrow: it is not constitutively dependent upon anything “outside the head” (or outside the brain) of the experiencing subject. Indeed, it is not constitutively dependent upon anything outside of phenomenal consciousness itself: in this sense, it is intrinsic. Your phenomenology, being narrow and intrinsic, supervenes—​with at least nomic necessity, and perhaps with metaphysical necessity—​upon physical events and processes within your brain. Phenomenology is also richly and pervasively intentional: there is a kind of intentionality that is constituted entirely phenomenologically (we call it phenomenal intentionality), and it pervades people’s mental lives. Among the different aspects of phenomenal intentionality are the following. First, there is the phenomenology of perceptual experience: the enormously rich and complex what-​it’s-​like of being perceptually presented with a world of apparent objects, apparently instantiating a rich range of properties and relations—​ including one’s own apparent body, apparently interacting with other apparent objects that apparently occupy various apparent spatial relations as apparently perceived from one’s own apparent-​body centered perceptual point of view. Second, there is the phenomenology of agency: the what-​it’s-​like of apparently voluntarily controlling one’s apparent body as it apparently moves around in, and apparently interacts with, apparent objects in its apparent environment. Third, there is conative and cognitive phenomenology: the what-​it’s-​ like of consciously (as opposed to unconsciously) undergoing various occurrent propositional attitudes, including conative attitudes like occurrent wishes and cognitive attitudes like occurrent thoughts. There are phenomenologically discernible aspects of conative and cognitive phenomenology, notably (i) the phenomenology of attitude type and (ii) the phenomenology of content. The former is illustrated by the phenomenological difference between, for

2 Themes in this paragraph are pursed in greater depth in Horgan, Tienson, & Graham (2004, 2006), in Horgan & Kriegel (2007), and in Horgan (2012).

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instance, occurrently hoping that Joe Biden will be re-​elected as U.S. President and occurrently wondering whether he will be—​where the attitude-​content remains the same while the attitude-​type varies. The phenomenology of content is illustrated by the phenomenological difference between occurrently thinking that Biden will be re-​elected and occurrently thinking that he will not be re-​elected—​where the attitude-​type remains the same while the attitude-​ content varies. Perceptual experience, as we say, is richly intentional. Phenomenologically, perceptual experience is richly presentational: it presents, to the experiencing subject, a richly textured apparent world of apparent concrete objects apparently instantiating numerous properties and relations. For instance, experience presents various apparent objects apparently instantiating various shape-​ properties, size-​properties, relative-​position relations, and relative-​orientation relations. Among the experientially presented apparent objects is one’s own apparent body, with its various apparent component parts—​a body that is apparently under one’s voluntary control. Some of the relations apparently instantiated by the various apparent objects—​for instance, relative-​position relations and relative-​ orientation relations—​ are experientially presented within a self-​oriented reference frame. Thus, apparent objects are experientially presented as lying at various distances from oneself (as well as from one another, as presented from one’s own visual point of view), and as apparently oriented in various ways vis-​à-​vis oneself (as well as vis-​à-​vis one another, as presented from one’s own visual point of view). This point of view is what Husserl called the “zero-​point” in this self-​oriented reference frame. Up and down in this reference frame normally depend heavily upon kinesthetic/​tactile aspects of phenomenology, in combination with visual aspects: roughly, down is the direction in which one’s own apparent body apparently tends to move of its own accord, and the direction of a surface to which one’s apparent body apparently tends to stay attached when apparently not moving relative to that surface. When experience presents various apparent objects as apparently instantiating properties and relations such as shape-​properties and relative-​position relations, experience thereby acquaints the experiencing subject with such properties and relations, and this mental acquaintance-​ relation grounds mental reference to these properties and relations. Such mental reference is constituted wholly phenomenologically. It makes no difference, so far as this phenomenally constituted and reference-​grounding form of acquaintance is concerned, whether or not the relevant experiential presentations are veridical. In the case of your brain-​in-​vat phenomenal duplicate (your “biv phenomenal duplicate”), for instance, the perceptual-​experiential presentations

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are radically illusory: there are no real objects that are really perceived by that experiencing subject and that really instantiate the relevant properties and relations. But no matter: your biv duplicate’s perceptual experience acquaints the biv with shape-​properties and relative-​position properties just as much as your own perceptual experience does, even though this acquaintance occurs via radically nonveridical experiences of merely apparent instantiations of these properties and relations by merely apparent objects. And, for the biv, such experiential acquaintance with the properties and relations grounds mental reference to them—​just as it does for you. Experientially presented apparent instantiation of the properties and relations suffices to acquaint the experiencing subject with them, and thus suffices to ground mental reference to them, whether or not the experiencing subject is ever experientially presented with actual instantiations of them. It is an important philosophical question which kinds of properties and relations are ones to which creatures with human-​like phenomenology bear phenomenally constituted, reference-​grounding, experiential-​acquaintance relations. Although we cannot pursue this large topic at any length here, we take it that the range of such properties and relations is very extensive. It appears to include, inter alia, temporal relations, causal relations, properties like being a temporally persisting object, being an animal, being an agent, and being a person, numerous artifactual kinds like being a container and being a table, and numerous social relations and properties like being friend of, being a boss of, and being a politician. Since phenomenal intentionality is constituted entirely phenomenologically, and since phenomenology is narrow, phenomenal intentionality is narrow, too. Hence, there is an exact match of phenomenal intentionality between yourself and any actual or possible phenomenal duplicates of yourself—​e.g., a biv phenomenal duplicate or a Twin Earthly phenomenal duplicate. This exactly matching, narrow, intentional content involves exactly matching, phenomenally constituted, narrow truth conditions. On the other hand, exact match in narrow content between your own intentional mental states and the corresponding states in your phenomenal duplicates does not require or involve exact match in referents (if any) of all the various matching, putatively referring, thought-​constituents. For instance, certain of your own occurrent thoughts that you would express linguistically using certain proper names—​say, the thought that Donald Trump is not a genius—​involve singular thought-​constituents whose referents (if any) are determined partly in virtue of certain external relations that obtain between you and those referents. Thus, your occurrent thought that Donald Trump is not a genius involves a singular thought-​constituent that purports to refer to a particular specific

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person (viz. Trump); its actually referring, and its referring to the specific individual to whom it does refer, depends in part upon there being certain suitable external relations linking you to a unique eligible referent (viz. Trump). A Twin-​Earthly phenomenal duplicate of yourself, in a Twin-​Earthly duplicate local environment, would refer to a different individual (viz. Twin-​Trump) via the corresponding singular thought-​constituent of the corresponding occurrent thought. And in the case of your brain-​in-​vat phenomenal duplicate, the matching singular thought-​constituent fails to refer at all, because that envatted brain does not bear suitable externalistic relations to any suitably reference-​eligible individual in its own actual environment. (Parallel remarks apply to thought-​constituents that purport to refer to natural kinds, such as the thought-​constituent that you yourself would express linguistically with the word “water.”) For mental states involving thought-​ constituents for which reference depends partly upon externalistic factors, there are two kinds of intentionality, each involving its own truth conditions. First is the kind of intentionality already mentioned above: phenomenal intentionality, with truth conditions that are phenomenally constituted and narrow. Second is externalistic intentionality, with wide truth conditions that incorporate the actual referents (if any) of the relevant thought-​constituents. Your own thought that Trump is not a genius, and the corresponding thoughts of your biv phenomenal duplicate and your Twin Earth phenomenal duplicate, have matching phenomenal intentionality, with matching narrow truth conditions. (These truth conditions are satisfied in your case and in the case of your Twin Earth duplicate, but not in the case of your biv duplicate. In both your case and your Twin Earth duplicate’s case, there exists a unique individual who (i) satisfies (relative to the thinker—​you in one case, your Twin earth duplicate in the other) the phenomenally constituted reference-​eligibility conditions that accrue to the singular thought-​constituent expressible linguistically by ‘Donald Trump’, and (ii) is not a genius. (In the case of your biv phenomenal duplicate, there does not exist such an individual.) On the other hand, your own thought that Trump is not a genius and your Twin Earth duplicate’s corresponding thought do not have matching externalistic intentionality, because the externalistic truth conditions of these respective thoughts do not match: the truth value of your own thought depends upon the intelligence level of Trump, whereas the truth value your Twin Earth duplicate’s corresponding thought depends upon the intelligence level of an entirely different individual, viz., Twin-​Trump. (Each thought’s wide truth conditions are indeed satisfied.) As for your biv duplicate’s thought, it lacks externalistic intentionality and wide truth conditions,

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because its singular thought-​constituent purporting to refer to a person called “Trump” does not actually refer at all. Among the various attractions of the approach to mental intentionality that we have been sketching, two deserve specific mention here. First, the approach yields the intuitively right verdict about the mental life of various thought-​ experimental beings that strongly externalist treatments of mental content have trouble accommodating—​e.g., the above-​mentioned case of “swamp-​ brain-​in-​swamp-​vat-​hooked-​to-​swamp-​computer” (for short, “Swampie”). Intuitively, a Swampie-​creature whose brain processes exactly matched your own throughout its life would have a very rich mental life that exactly matched your own (apart from externalistic intentionality and indexical self-​reference); and its external-​world beliefs would be systematically false. Second, the approach underwrites and vindicates the extreme confidence people have in their beliefs about their own current mental life—​a confidence so strong, for instance, that it never occurred to Descartes to doubt such beliefs in the early portion of his Meditations, even though his avowed purpose there was to engage in systematic methodological doubt, thereby calling into question every belief that is capable of doubt. For, as we remarked at the beginning of the present section, phenomenal character is distinctively self-​presenting, in a way that makes it immune to doubt: how things seem phenomenally is how they are phenomenally. The phenomenal intentional content of one’s current experience, therefore, is itself self-​presenting in this way, and hence is also immune to doubt. 6

Phenomenal Intentionality as the Ground of Content-​Determinacy

By now, the reader can probably anticipate our next claim: Not only is the phenomenal character of experience inherently intentional, but it is also inherently determinately intentional. There is something it is like to occurrently think, “There’s a rabbit,” for example, and there is something else it is like to occurrently think, “There’s a rabbit stage.” There is something it is like to think, “Wilt is tall,” and something else it is like to think, “Wilt’s shadow is the shadow of a tall thing.” (The phenomenological difference is at the level of content itself—​not merely or mainly at the level of (say) acoustic/​phonological imagery or subvocalization.3) The determinacy of linguistic content derives from 3 It bears emphasis that there can be determinacy of thought-​content even if the specific content is itself indeterminate in the sense of being vague or imprecise. For instance, my thought can determinately have the vague, imprecise, content that Wilt is tall; and this determinacy

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the determinacy of mental content: utterances in public language express content-​determinate thoughts. The overall determinacy of thought, in turn, derives from the determinacy of phenomenal intentionality: externalistic intentionality is jointly dependent upon (i) phenomenally constituted, determinate, reference-​eligibility conditions that govern externalistically reference-​ purporting thought-​ constituents (e.g., thought-​ constituents purporting to refer to individuals, or to natural kinds), and (ii) the presence of individuals or kinds, in a thinker’s external environment, that satisfy those reference-​ eligibility conditions. Phenomenal character, of course, is something that directly manifests itself only from within a first-​person perspective on the world. What-​it’s-​likeness is something one is acquainted with only in one’s own case. So, if one tries to frame an account of mental or linguistic intentionality entirely on the basis of features of the world that are publicly accessible—​e.g., behavior and behavior-​ dispositions, systematic correlations between patterns or neural activity and external-​environmental conditions, and the like—​then one is bound to miss the very feature which we are claiming is the root source of intentionality itself, and also of the determinacy of intentional content, viz. the phenomenal character of experience. Searle was right to stress the role of the first-​person perspective, as essential for securing content-​determinacy. But the further point that needs stressing is the crucially relevant feature that one finds from within the first-​person perspective—​viz. the richly determinate intentionality of phenomenal character. You know what you are thinking and what you mean by your utterance, and there is a determinate fact of the matter about what you are thinking and what you mean by your utterance, because there is something it is like to think a determinate thought and to make an utterance that expresses that thought. 7

Determinate Phenomenal Intentionality and the Whole Hard Problem

In summary, we maintain that the intrinsic phenomenal character of experience is richly and determinately intentional, and that the determinacy of phenomenal intentionality secures the overall determinacy of radical

of vague thought-​content can be present even if the question “Exactly how tall do you think Wilt is?” has no answer.

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interpretation.4 Searle was right about the essential role of the first-​person perspective vis-​à-​vis content-​determinacy. He was right because phenomenal character directly manifests itself only from that perspective: it is self-​ presenting, to the experiencing subject. Searle was right, too, that from the first-​person perspective it is just obvious that thought and its linguistic expression are content-​determinate—​obvious, for instance, that my utterance of “Wilt is tall” expresses the determinate thought that Wilt is tall and determinately means that Wilt is tall. He was right because the self-​presenting nature of phenomenal character figures in one’s beliefs about that phenomenal character as a content-​determining mode of presentation, thereby rendering such beliefs immune from doubt or error. We recognize that many who incline toward a materialistic metaphysics, in at least some suitably broad sense of “materialistic,” will feel an itch that has not here been scratched. They might ask, “How could determinate phenomenal intentionality be materialistically naturalized—​i.e., located within the natural world as described by the physical and biological sciences? And, unless and until some proposal is put forth for materialistically naturalizing it, why believe there is such a phenomenon at all?” Concerning the first of these questions, we would say three things. First, we admit that we don’t know how to “materialistically naturalize” phenomenal character at all, let alone determinately intentional phenomenal character—​and we have no proposal to offer. Second, we agree with David Chalmers that locating phenomenal consciousness within the natural order is a very difficult problem, worthy of the label “the hard problem”; and in our view this problem only worsens once one claims, as we do, that virtually all non-​unconscious mental states have proprietary phenomenal character, and that it is richly and determinately intentional. Third, 4 What about unconscious intentional mental states, perhaps including subdoxastic intentional states that are utterly inaccessible to consciousness—​for example, pre-​conscious, intentional, subdoxastic states like those posited in Marr (1982)? We ourselves find plausible the following hypothesis: given a specific cognitive-​scientific account of the cognitive architecture of competent human cognizers, there will be a unique content-​assignment C of intentional contents to internal states of humans that meets the following two constraints: (i) C assigns to phenomenally conscious states their determinate, inherent, phenomenal-​intentional content, and (ii) C assigns contents to all other internal states in such a way that C exhibits an acceptably high degree of overall internal rational coherence (both synchronically and diachronically). The key idea here is that the phenomenally fixed contents of the phenomenally conscious mental states provide a sufficiently constraining network of “anchor points,” for an overall assignment C of intentional contents to actual and potential internal states of human creatures, that only one such assignment can simultaneously honour all these anchor points and also render rationally appropriate, both for total synchronic states and for diachronic state-​transitions, all of the assigned contents.

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we find ourselves wondering whether the question of what constitutes a suitable “materialistic naturalization” should itself be re-​thought, with the hope of providing some new form of naturalization that could somehow leave behind what Searle, in an above-​quoted passage, tantalizingly calls “the persistent objectivizing tendency of philosophy and science since the seventeenth century” (Searle 1987: 145). The second question asks why we think that one should believe in phenomenal intentionality if one lacks any proposal for how to materialistically naturalize it. Our answer is that determinate phenomenal intentionality is not merely or mainly a theoretical posit—​although it does have the important theoretical virtue, despite its prima facie resistance to materialistic naturalizability, of explaining both content-​determinacy itself and also the introspective obviousness of content-​determinacy. Rather, content-​determinate phenomenal intentionality is also is a datum—​an introspectively evident aspect of one’s own experience.5 Materialistic naturalization in philosophy is well and good when it can be achieved, but an adequate metaphysics needs to accommodate all of the relevant introspectible data—​not just the data for which one already has some fairly clear idea as to how to explain it in a broadly materialistic way.

Appendix

Suppose that we are right that virtually all conscious experience, including conscious thought, has intrinsic phenomenal character that is richly and determinately intentional, and that such phenomenal character is self-​presenting to the experiencing subject. How might this dual claim bear on epistemological skepticism? The most commonly discussed form of radical epistemological skepticism focuses on the external world. It is concerned with the question whether one’s beliefs about the external world are radically mistaken (including one’s beliefs about one’s own apparent body and its apparent physical characteristics). Curiously, there is not much discussion of what might be called internal-​world skepticism—​which is concerned instead with the question of whether one’s immediate, non-​inferential, introspective, beliefs about one’s own current mental states are radically mistaken. A striking fact about internal-​world skepticism is that it gets no grip upon people psychologically, whereas external-​world skepticism does get a psychological grip. 5 Admittedly, this claim is controversial in contemporary philosophy of mind, especially as regards non-​perceptual mental states such as occurrent beliefs and occurrent desires. For some discussions aimed at prompting recognition that cognitive phenomenology is indeed an introspectable datum see, for instance, Strawson (1994), Siewert (1998), Horgan & Tienson (2002), Horgan, Tienson, & Graham (2004), Pitt (2004), and Horgan (2022a, 2012).

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Getting a grip, in the relevant sense, need not be—​and, for most people, is not—​a matter of coming to have genuine doubts about whether one’s beliefs of the relevant kind are really true. It need not be—​and, for most people, is not—​a matter of actually becoming a skeptic about knowledge and/​or justified belief. Rather, it is a matter of judging that it is a genuine epistemic possibility—​albeit perhaps a wildly unlikely, hugely implausible, possibility—​that one’s beliefs of a certain kind are systematically and radically false. (Or, at any rate, it is a matter of being disposed to so judge if prompted in the right way—​e.g., in an introductory philosophy class.) Skepticism concerning external-​world beliefs, for example, grips the philosophical imagination in light of the apparent conceptual and epistemic possibility that one might actually be the victim in a radical-​deception scenario—​e.g., one might be undergoing systematically non-​veridical experiences caused by Descartes’s Evil Deceiver, or one might be an envatted brain. Internal-​world skepticism, by contrast, tends not to strike people as philosophically problematic in the same way. People are simply not gripped by the idea that their introspective beliefs about what is currently going on in their own minds might be radically and systematically false. Indeed, Descartes himself in his First Meditation displayed no tendency even to consider such a putative possibility, even though his avowed purpose in that text was to practice methodological doubt vis-​a-​vis everything doubtable, as a means toward the end of determining what cannot be doubted (and thereby, he hoped, to place human knowledge claims on a solid epistemological foundation). For instance, when he was entertaining the thought “Perhaps I am really dreaming right now,” he did not consider the putative possibility that he was not presently entertaining that very thought at all; nor do other people consider this putative possibility while entertaining that thought, even when methodological doubt is the task at hand. A further dimension of the non-​grippingness of internal-​world skepticism is that failure to be thus gripped does not seem, upon reflection, to be a lapse in rationality. On the contrary, it seems eminently rational. The occurrent episodes in one’s current and very recent mental life seem to be directly given in experience—​given in such a way that one’s current beliefs that such episodes are occurring (or have very recently occurred) seem epistemically unassailable. For instance, it seems directly given introspectively that one is now thinking about what to cook for dinner, or that one is now experiencing a toothache, or that one is in now wishing that one were in a swimming pool, etc. But the non-​grippingness of internal-​world skepticism—​the failure to become philosophically puzzled by the putative possibility that one’s own current non-​inferential beliefs about one’s current mental states might be radically mistaken—​generates a philosophical puzzle in its own right. The puzzle is this. Why is one not gripped psychologically by internal-​world skepticism, and why does failure to be thus gripped seem,

Content-​D eterminacy Skepticism and Phenomenal Intentionality 157 upon reflection, to be rationally appropriate? The phenomenon of non-​grippingness calls out for explanation. One possibility is that the right explanation is a debunking explanation of some sort—​an explanation that treats non-​grippingness as a ubiquitous error, perhaps resulting from some kind of subtle cognitive illusion to which humans are highly prone. An advocate of a debunking explanation would claim that internal-​world skepticism ought rationally to be gripping, even though it fails to be because of this pernicious psychological blindspot. But such a view is almost never espoused in philosophy.6 We maintain, however, that the non-​grippingness of internal-​world skepticism is correctly explainable, non-​debunkingly, on the basis of the distinctive phenomenal character of conscious experience, by virtue of the self-​presenting nature of the phenomenal character. We also maintain that this non-​grippingness cannot be plausibly explained non-​debunkingly in any other way. Together with the late John Tienson, we have so argued elsewhere (Horgan, Tienson, & Graham 2006). The non-​grippingness of internal world-​skepticism, furthermore, means that when a person’s inner thoughts are signs of mental illness or disorder, the thoughts subjectively reported can still be self-​presentationally gripping (Stephens & Graham 2000; Graham 2021). Illness does not preclude internal grippingness. Quite the contrary, consider a delusion of “thought insertion,” for example, to be an important symptom of the major psychosis of schizophrenia. Persons suffering from delusions of thought insertion experience or feel that certain thoughts are occurring to them or in their mind, although the thoughts are not experienced as produced by themselves. Another agent (they believe) is causally responsible for inserting the thoughts in their stream of consciousness. An explanation may sometimes be offered by a patient or subject for how another’s thoughts can or may get into his or her (the patient’s) mind. As one patient remarks, “he treats my mind like a screen and flashes his thoughts onto it like you flash a picture” 6 Two notable exceptions are Schwitzgebel (2006) and Stalnaker (2008). Schwitzgebel’s discussion underscores the fallibility of introspection. In Horgan, Tienson, & Graham (2006) and Horgan & Kriegel (2007), it is argued that, although introspection is indeed fallible to some extent, such limited fallibility is compatible with the impossibility of being radically deceived about one’s own current conscious experience. Stalnaker asserts the following (2008: 95): “Our epistemic relation to our experience is like our epistemic relation to anything else in the world.” Stalnakers’s case for this assertion apparently rests on the assumption that if one were in a thought-​experimental situation such as that of Frank Jackson’s hypothetical color scientist Mary, in a circumstance where she first has a visual color-​experience but does not know that it instantiates the category ‘phenomenally red’ (and hence she does not know what brain state is occurring in her visual cortex or what light-​reflectance property is currently instantiated by the object at which she is looking), all pertinent epistemic possibilities concerning one’s situation would be genuine metaphysical possibilities. Horgan (2011b) has pointed out that this assumption is eminently questionable.

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(Mellor 1970: 17). Sometimes, non-​human agents might be claimed to insert them. Another patient claims that the thoughts “belonged to the houses, and the houses put them into my head” (Saks 2007: 29). Stephens and Graham (2000: 126–​127) write: “The subject has the sense that another person [or agent] somehow carries out [the patient’s] own thinking within [their] psychological history.” The thoughts in the patient are experienced as cases of the intervenor’s agentic wondering, praying, studying, planning, and so on. All and all, then, a deluded subject who experiences thought insertion is phenomenally gripped two-​fold, by experiencing having thoughts and also by being conscious of them as if inserted by another agent. The phenomenology of an illness might help to preserve its status as an illness. A delusion of thought insertion is a case in point.7



References

Davidson, D. 1973. “Radical Interpretation,” Dialectica 27: 313–​328. Davidson, D. 1979. “The Inscrutability of Reference,” The Southwestern Journal of Philosophy 10: 7–​19. Graham, G. 2021. The Disordered Mind, 3rd edition. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Graham, G., Horgan, T., & Tienson, J. 2007. “Consciousness and Intentionality.” In M. Velmans & S. Schneider (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, 468–​484. Oxford: Blackwell. Graham, G., Horgan, T, & Tienson, J. 2009. “Phenomenology, Intentionality, and the Unity of Mind.” In B. McLaughlin, A. Beckermann, & S. Walter (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mind, 512–​537. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Horgan, T. 2011a. “From Agentive Phenomenology to Cognitive Phenomenology: A Guide for the Perplexed.” In T. Bayne & M. Montague (eds.), Cognitive Phenomenology, 57–​78. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Horgan, T. 2011b. Review of Robert Stalnaker’s Our Knowledge of the Internal World, Mind 120: 561–​565. Horgan, T. 2012. “Introspection about Phenomenal Consciousness: Running the Gamut from Infallibility to Impotence.” In D. Smithies & D. Stoljar (eds.), Introspection and Consciousness, 405–​422. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Horgan, T. & G. Graham 2012. “Phenomenal Intentionality and Content Determinacy.” In R. Schantz (ed.), Prospects for Meaning, 321–​344. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

7 The present paper is an abridged version, with minor additions, of Horgan & Graham (2012). The Appendix has been added.

Content-​D eterminacy Skepticism and Phenomenal Intentionality 159 Horgan, T. & Kriegel, U. 2007. “Phenomenal Epistemology: What Is Consciousness that We May Know It So Well?” Philosophical Issues 17: 123–​144. Horgan T. & Tienson, J. 2002. “The Phenomenology of Intentionality and the Intentionality of Phenomenology.” In D.J. Chalmers (ed.), Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings, 520–​533. New York: Oxford University Press. Horgan, T., Tienson, J., & Graham, G. 2003. “The Phenomenology of First Person Agency.” In S. Walter & H.-​D. Heckmann (eds.), Physicalism and Mental Causation: The Metaphysics of Mind and Action, 323–​340. Exeter: Imprint Academic. Horgan, T., Tienson, J., & Graham, G. 2004. “Phenomenal Intentionality and the Brain in a Vat.” In R. Schantz (ed.), The Externalist Challenge, 297–​318. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Horgan, T., Tienson, J., & Graham, G. 2006. “Internal-​World Skepticism and the Self-​ Presentational Nature of Phenomenal Consciousness.” In U. Kriegel & K. Williford (eds.), Self-​ Representational Approaches to Consciousness, 41–​ 61. Cambridge, MA: The mit Press. Kripke, S.A. 1982. Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Lewis, D. 1983. “New Work for a Theory of Universals,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 61: 343–​377. Lewis, D. 1984. “Putnam’s Paradox,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 62: 221–​236. Marr, D. 1982. Vision: A Computational Investigation into the Human Representation and Processing of Visual Information. San Francisco: w.h. Freeman. Mellor, C.S. 1970. “First Rank Symptoms of Schizophrenia,” British Journal of Psychiatry 117: 15–​23. Pitt, D. 2004. “The Phenomenology of Cognition: Or What Is It Like to Think that P?” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 69: 1–​36. Putnam, H. 1977. “Realism and Reason,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 50: 483–​498. Putnam, H. 1980. “Models and Reality,” The Journal of Symbolic Logic 45: 464–​482. Putnam, H. 1981. Reason, Truth and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Quine, W.V.O. 1960. Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: The mit Press. Saks, E. 2007. The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness. New York: Hyperion. Schwitzgebel, E. 2006. “The Unreliability of Naïve Introspection,” The Philosophical Review 117: 245–​273. Searle, J.R. 1987. “Indeterminacy, Empiricism, and the First Person,” The Journal of Philosophy 84: 123–​146. Siewert, C. 1998. The Significance of Consciousness. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Stephens, G.L. & Graham, G. 2000. When Self-​Consciousness Breaks: Alien Voices and Inserted Thoughts. Cambridge, MA: The mit Press.

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Stalnaker, R.C. 2008. Our Knowledge of the Internal World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stich, S.P. & Warfield, T.A. (eds.). 1994. Mental Representation: A Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Strawson, G. 1994. Mental Reality. Cambridge, MA: The mit Press. Wittgenstein, L. 1958. Philosophical Investigations, 2nd edition. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

chapter 8

Skeptical Politics Andrew Norris Skepticism has played a vital role in Western political philosophy since its inception in fifth century Hellas. In response to Parmenides’ radical monism, which in its subliming of logic and language denies the possibility of knowledge of a sensible, changing world, the Sophists embraced a conception of common sense and a political arête based on it characterized by phenomenalism, relativism, and subjectivism (Kirk & Raven 1957: 267; Guthrie 1971: 47–​48).1 Nature (phusis) and convention (nomos) parted ways, and with the former went the possibility of knowledge of a supra-​conventional grounding for political practice, which received the only foundation it could in the social contract theory first explored by the Sophists. The politics of such skepticism is deeply ambiguous. If knowledge of norms “natural” to humankind is not available, political deliberation and education can aim only at persuasion, not proof; politics cannot, in the end, disentangle itself from rhetoric. Plato’s political philosophy is developed in reaction to this thought, and two of his greatest political dialogues, Gorgias and Republic, turn on the claim that persuasion can only be a matter of force or seduction, itself only a subtle form of subjugation. In both dialogues, the sophistic position is set out in stages that culminate in a hostile and threatening rhetor (Callicles and Thrasymachus, respectively) who embraces as his ideal the life of the tyrant. Though the rhetorical give and take of the assembly appears to be democratic, it is only the combat of aspiring dictators, the dictator being the sole speaker (dicere) and the rhetor, as Socrates suggests in his exasperation with his interlocutors’ lengthy speeches, a frustrated monologist (Norris 2017a).2 From a more sympathetic perspective, however, a skeptical, rhetorical politics need not be one devoid of principle or reason, only that of severely chastened or pragmatic principles, which might

1 Parmenides’ central claim, “What can be thought is only the thought that it is,” as opposed to the “mere names” mortals lay down regarding changing, various things, epitomizes what Wittgenstein terms the “subliming” of logic (Kirk & Raven 1957: 277; Wittgenstein 2001: §§38, 89, 94). 2 In accord with this, Book viii of The Republic presents tyranny as the inevitable product (in Hegelian language, the truth) of democracy. For contemporary accounts indebted to the Platonic one, see Strauss (1950) and Bloom (1987).

© Andrew Norris, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004525474_010

162 Norris well include truthfulness and sincerity. In light of the fact that Plato’s counter to sophistry in The Republic is to grant absolute power—​extending to eugenics and euthanasia—​to those with true knowledge of the good, friends of democracy from Mill to Habermas have found good reason to prefer variants upon the discursive polemics of the Sophists—​particularly given that the Republic’s philosopher-​kings and the Statesman’s quasi-​divine statesmen have not been forthcoming.3 The Platonic appraisal of the sophistic politics of skepticism has, however, been dominant in the tradition of Western political philosophy, in part because of deeply seated biases against democracy, and against the poor and working classes who might benefit from it; and in part because of Platonism’s correspondence to central themes in Christianity, where the impossibility of (genuine, adequate) knowledge of a timeless reality grounding the moral evaluation of political practice—​viz. God—​is characterized in terms of the need for obedience, and not the possibility of pragmatic freedom. (As Nietzsche remarks, “Christianity is Platonism for ‘the people’ [‘das Volk’]” in its appeal to servile dispositions and needs expressed in ontology as well as morality [1966: 2, 204–​ 205; 1999: 12; 1989: 45–​46].) Though Eve eats from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil because she sees that its fruit fulfills the demands of truth (it will “make one wise”), excellence (it is “good for food”), and beauty (it is “pleasant to the eye”), doing so in disobedience to the divine prohibition is the originary moment of sin (Genesis 2:17, 3:6). Authority beyond and even opposed to human ken is likewise emphasized in the Lord’s angry insistence in the book of Job that He who can “draw out leviathan with an hook” exceeds any judgment favorable or otherwise that Job and his friends might make of Him (Job 41:1, 38:1–​2.). Skepticism concerning the capacities of reason is further underscored by Paul’s insistence that “The wisdom of the world is foolishness to God” and Augustine’s condemnation of the “temptation” of the “diseased craving” that seeks knowledge of the operations of nature for its own sake (Corinthians 1:25; Augustine 1992 211–​212; cf. Freeman 2003). While this obviously breaks sharply with the Platonic claim that knowledge of a good “beyond being” (Republic 509b) is possible for at least some, it is more of the same for the masses ruled

3 This should not be overstated: though they embrace a discursive society and a fallibilist conception of reason, Mill and Habermas retrain elements of a Platonic approach —​e.g. Mill’s commitment to expert control of governmental legislation and to plural voting and elite leadership, and Habermas’ claim that communicative as opposed to instrumental action pursues not just the interests of the speaker or community, but “the inherent telos of human speech” (Mill 2008: 271, 334–​337; Habermas 1984: 287). And, for both, truthfulness is of manifestly greater importance than it was for most of the Sophists.

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by either the ineffable Lord or a philosophical elite whose reasoning they cannot follow—​a helpful reminder that quite similar political practices can be based upon or deploy quite different epistemological claims—​and vice versa, as above.4 A “skeptical politics” is never just that. One implication of this is that it is wrong to consider skepticism as such as being conservative in its political implications. If we cannot know with certainty/​a priori/​outside of unlimited trial and error which regime or law or policy is better, this opens us up to previously untried or unconsidered options quite as much as it recommends sticking with whatever we now have. If Montaigne, the first great modern skeptic, is conservative in his politics, this has more to do with his embrace of the Christian tradition sketched above than it does with his admiration for Socrates and Sextus Empiricus, the latter of whom openly attacks the notion of the authoritative sage (Sextus 1985 141–​142). Indeed, Montaigne celebrates Pyrrhonism in part for “annihilating [human] judgment to make way for faith” (1965: 375), and for the kind of obedience that the Lord demands in Genesis.5 The first law that God ever gave to man was a law of pure obedience; it was a naked and simple commandment about which man had nothing to know or discuss; since to obey is the principal function of a reasonable soul, recognizing a heavenly superior and benefactor … And on the contrary, the first temptation that came to human nature from the devil, its first poison, insinuated itself into us through the promises he made us of knowledge and intelligence. (359–​360) Montaigne characterizes our faith in such demonic promises as “vanity,” and in his essay of that name he draws the political consequences of his fideistic marriage of Augustinian Christianity and Pyrrhonian skepticism, and condemns the attempt to radically reform the polity on the basis of human reason: “These great, lengthy altercations about the best form of society and the rules most suitable to bind us, are altercations fit only for the exercise of our minds,” and not for actual practice. “Not in theory, but in truth, the best and most excellent government for each nation is the one under which it has preserved its existence. Its form and essential fitness depend on habit” (730–​731).6 4 As Popkin (1979: 95) says of “complete skepticism,” it “is a two-​way street, from which one can exit either into the ‘reasonableness’ of the Enlightenment, or the blind faith of the fideists” (cf. Raz 1994). 5 Note the echo in Kant (1998: Bxxx): “Thus I had to deny knowledge to make room for faith.” 6 Compare Machiavelli’s dismissal of utopia-​building in favor of turning to the “effectual truth” of human practice (1950: 56).

164 Norris This celebration of habit entails the acceptance of the mediation of history. Obedience is not paid to virtue, or virtuous rule(r)s, as habits and institutions are not their product alone: “from their very vices they set up a political system amongst themselves and a workable and regular society”—​that is, vices play a direct role, and not only that of providing the occasion for virtuous legislation and judgment. Hence, “laws remain in credit not because they are just, but because they are laws. That is the mystic foundation of their authority” (1965: 730, 821). More than any particular political disposition, conservative or otherwise, the turn to history is a relatively consistent feature of skepticism’s political life in the modern West.7 Hume is exemplary here, first in offering as he does the “skeptical solution,” of custom, to skepticism concerning induction and causality, and second in formulating a political teaching (particularly in his Essays and History of England) that rivals Machiavelli’s in the centrality of its concern with the careful elucidation and analysis of historical examples and precedents (2007: 30–​31).8 Hume, however, is hardly alone, and for our purposes it will be more fruitful to concentrate on two other, more emulated, followers of Montaigne—​Bernard Mandeville and Thomas Hobbes. I shall begin with the first of these before returning somewhat later to Hobbes. The very title of Mandeville’s infamous but hugely influential early-​eighteenth-​century tract, The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Public Benefits, echoes Montaigne’s remark that by our “very vices [we] set up a workable and regular society.”9 Mandeville’s central claim—​echoed in Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” and Kant’s “unsocial sociability”—​is that our vices are what make commercial (viz. capitalist) society not just “workable and regular,” but industrious, ingenious, opulent, and happy (Smith 1981: 456; Kant 1991: 44). Virtue may bring the sage peace, and it may suit small, traditional, relatively Spartan communities, but the industrial society that emerges quite without conscious design in 7 Space allows us only to note that, in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, the greatest philosopher of history depicts the spiritual (cognitive, cultural, moral, political) development of the west as “a pathway of doubt [Zweifels], or more precisely as the way of despair [Verzweiflung].” This “thoroughgoing skepticism” “brings about a state of despair about all the so-​called natural ideas, thoughts, and opinions” (1977: 49–​50; :1969 72), allowing for a properly philosophical self-​understanding and self-​realization. 8 Far from being a metaphysical skeptic in politics, Hume demonstrates a deep distrust of the political effects of systematic, metaphysical reflection (Sabl 2015). 9 Cf. Mandeville (1997: 20): “It was said of Montaigne, that he was pretty well versed in the defects of mankind, but unacquainted with the excellencies of human nature: if I fare no worse, I shall think myself well used.” The central point of convergence is a naturalistic skepticism of traditional distinctions between human and non-​human animals.

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modernity requires the pursuit of luxury and preeminence and the discovery of ever-​new “needs” if its tradespeople, laborers, and craftsmen are to flourish or even survive (Mandeville 1997: 28). Though he was styled “man-​devil” for his cynicism, Mandeville continues to use the traditional language of vice and virtue, denying only that the moral judgments of the private agent are adequate to the demands of the modern social theorist. His skepticism emerges in his rejection of traditional limits upon consumption. In his accommodation of Christianity with the ways of the world, Aquinas had limited the Gospels’ radical attack on avarice to a desire for more worldly goods than are required by one’s station (2006: 243). Mandeville goes far beyond this, “subliming” in his own way the logic of luxury and need: “if once we depart from calling everything luxury that is not absolutely necessary to keep a man alive … there is no luxury at all. For if the wants of men are innumerable, then what ought to supply them has no bounds” (1997: 66). The principle of infinity that Aristotle feared would be introduced if we turned from considering the “use value” of goods to prizing their “exchange value” is realized: the “good life” that requires the use of a set number of things that each have their own telos or ergon is not just unknowable, but unthinkable (1984, 1995). For the modern social scientist, the good life is that of enflamed desire, and not its satisfaction or limitation.10 Mandeville’s influence (via the Scottish Enlightenment) is particularly prominent in contemporary neo-​liberalism with its defense of a market-​centered economy and an economy-​centered society.11 Exemplary here is Friedrich von Hayek, the self-​proclaimed “classical liberal,” who arguably plays the central role in the rise of neoliberalism (Harvey 2005: 27–​28; Biebricher 2012: 58–​59; Muller 2003: 378). In 1960’s The Constitution of Liberty, his fullest account of his social and political theory, Hayek defends as free (or, following his definition, as minimally coercive) a society that minimizes the role of the state and distributes social goods almost exclusively through the market. This conception of a free society is, he argues, “an artifact of civilization,” not nature, but it nonetheless “did not arise from design. The institutions of freedom, like everything that freedom has created, were not established because people foresaw the benefits they would bring. But, once the benefits were recognized, men began to perfect and extend the reign of freedom” (Hayek 2011: 49). Hayek’s primary target 10

11

Compare Stanley Cavell’s distinction in Disowning Knowledge between modern and pre-​ modern skepticism: “The issue posed is no longer, or not alone, as with earlier skepticism, how to conduct oneself best in an uncertain world; the issue suggested is how to live at all in a groundless world. Our skepticism is a function of our now illimitable desire” (2003: 3). On the distinction between the economy and the market, see Aristotle’s Politics (Barnes 1984) and neoliberalism’s first and greatest critic, Karl Polanyi (2001).

166 Norris is those who (like Hobbes, F.D.R., and the “socialists of all parties” to whom he dedicates the more famous Road to Serfdom [1994]) think otherwise and favor a more a priori “legislative” approach to politics—​one that Hayek, adopting Michael Oakeshott’s terminology, characterizes as telocratic, as opposed to nomocratic, on account of its pursuit of substantive “ends” for unified political action—​like a just and egalitarian society (Hayek 1967: 163; Oakeshott 1991: 26–​27). Skeptical claims play a crucial role in this analysis: Hayek argues that “the case for individual freedom [and against “socialist” model] rests chiefly on the recognition of the inevitable ignorance of all of us concerning a great many of the factors on which the achievement of our ends and welfare depends” (2011: 80). He understands knowledge to include “all the human adaptations to environment in which past experience has been incorporated,” including “our habits and skills, our emotional attitudes, our tools, [and] our institutions” (2011: 77). Such knowledge is amassed and enjoyed by individual agents and select groups thereof, who in amassing it distinguish themselves from others. The growth of knowledge thus entails the corresponding growth of ignorance. A free society is one that allows individuals in a competitive and decentralized market to profit from this ignorance, by allowing others to exercise knowledge that they themselves do not possess: “all institutions of freedom are adaptations of this fundamental fact of ignorance” (2011: 82). Individuals as such, of course, might not profit from this: they might be left unemployed and impoverished, while others reap the gains; but they will profit as representatives of the community, or, as actual individuals, most likely, or from a series of such interactions. A rising tide lifts most, or at least many, boats. But if this “fundamental fact of ignorance” is known, this knowledge is not itself the result of experience; at most, that would yield only a provisional report of repeated failure. Rather, it is a limit internal to something like the transcendental conditions of knowledge: our ignorance is, as Hayek puts it, “necessary” (2011: 81). Given what knowledge (of political and economic practice, as opposed to political philosophy) is, it can be directly shared only so widely. A rational social order is thus one based upon the indirect and dispersed sharing of knowledge (via, e.g., prices), the exposure to the knowledge of others as expressed in their acts. On the individual level, this will no doubt sometimes be painful. But, Hayek maintains, the full knowledge of the society can be put to greatest use (for the accumulation of innovation and profit) only if the ambition of any individual or group of individuals (e.g., the state) to possess and control it in its entirety is renounced; the rational political order is the skeptical one that renounces “political rationalism.” This is not skepticism about being, or God’s will, or the moral order or the good, but rather about ourselves and our own political and

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cognitive capacities.12 What self-​knowledge is available to us as a polity can only be acquired retrospectively and indirectly. The aspirations of democrats should accordingly be limited to doing what they can to ensure a “liberal” order of property rights in which the state plays the role of umpire and guard, protecting us from one another, and from those outsiders who crave the wealth that we amass and distribute with no concern for equality or substantive human need. Hayek is open in his hostility to Hobbes, and it is not difficult to see why this is so, given Hobbes’s commitment to a political rather than economic solution to the problems of modernity. But Hobbes, the title of whose Leviathan evokes the Lord’s awful rejection of criticism in Job,13 can also be seen as building upon the inheritance of Montaigne; and, appearances notwithstanding, he embraces history in much the same manner as does his skeptical predecessor, though he certainly rejects any foundation for political authority more “mystical” than human need and fear. The thought experiment of the political covenant—​as noted, an inheritance from the Sophists—​demonstrates the legitimacy of any effective political authority. Hobbes is under no illusion that actual states are founded by explicit covenant or “institution,” arguing as he does in a deeply skeptical vein that our values reflect nothing more than the various and changing states of our bodies (and are thus essentially secondary qualities), and that our ability to reason with one another is hopelessly limited:14 Not but that Reason it selfe is always Right Reason, as well as Arithmetique is a certain and infallible Art: But no one mans Reason, nor the Reason of any one number of men, makes the certaintie; no more than an account is therefore well cast up, because a great many men have unanimously approved it. And, therefore, as when there is a controversy in an

12

13 14

Contrary to the claims of some of his critics, Hayek is not one who “values market exchanges as ‘an ethic in itself,’” and he is adamant that traditional morality is essential to a decent life, though he remains quite blind to the extent to which such morality is undercut by the marketization of private and public life (Harvey 2005: 3; 2006: 56). That the critique of political rationalism need not lead to libertarian conclusions is demonstrated by the example of Hannah Arendt, who advances a similar critique but to far different ends. Significantly, Arendt’s critique is not epistemological in the manner of Hayek’s. This echo is underscored by the fact that the title of his Behemoth derives from the same source. In “The Skeptic,” an essay that Hume announces as addressing the “ancient sect[’s] … ideas of human life and happiness,” but in which neither the modes nor ataraxia appear, Hume emphasizes at length the comparison of values with secondary qualities like color (1987: 138, 163, 166); on the question of inherent values, compare Sextus (1985: 41).

168 Norris account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge, to whose sentence they will both stand, or their controversie must either come to blowes, or be undecided; so is it also in all debates of what kind soever. hobbes 1968: 120, 111, 216; cf. tuck 198915

Given this, and the conflict that it and our mutual vulnerability and fear induce, only a rational choice theorist could believe that a “multitude” of politically unsubjugated people on the wide-​open tundra would agree with one another to the conditions that Leviathan lays out. True “acquisition” must be enough: sovereign is as sovereign does.16 But that acquisition is one that will strictly limit public deliberation and the political use of rhetoric. One might say that Hobbes embraces the Platonic critique of skeptical sophism while rejecting the Platonic solution, the Hobbesian sovereign lacking any but an institutional or situational advantage over its subjects. Put otherwise, Hobbes, too, presents a skeptical solution to the political problem of skepticism, one that channels political will into the “personification” of an anti-​democratic authority that is able to stipulate “correct” answers to questions of political morality and practice, and thereby to establish custom (1968: 220, 227).17 Hobbes is something of a patron saint of “political realism,” in many eyes the most skeptical school of contemporary political philosophy. For some, like Raymond Geuss, Stuart Hampshire, and Bernard Williams, this is due to Hobbes’s skepticism concerning the political reach of our quite various moral intuitions and his recognition of the distinctively political and unavoidable problem of order (Geuss 2008: 22; Hampshire 1989: 68, 73–​4; Williams 2005: 3, 62); for others, like Carl Schmitt—​on whom, more below—​it is also due to Hobbes’s authoritarianism (1985: 33; 2007, 67). In keeping with this embrace of Hobbes, and of similar forerunners like Machiavelli and Weber, political realism shows itself to be deeply skeptical of the ability of political philosophy to regulate and restrict political conflict. Little surprise, then, that in Justice is 15

16 17

Hobbes is more direct in De Cive: “By right reason in men’s natural state, I mean, not, as many do, an infallible Faculty, but the act of reasoning … although in a Commonwealth the reason of the Commonwealth itself (which is the civil Law) must be regarded as right by individual citizens” (1998: 33). Sovereignty by institution differs from sovereignty by acquisition “only in this, that men who choose their Sovereign, do it for fear of one another, and not of him who they institute” (Hobbes 1968: 251–​252). No doubt, Hume’s custom runs much deeper, beginning as it does with the lessons our mothers (and, more rarely, fathers) teach us, while Hobbes imagines us “just emerged from the earth like mushrooms” (Hobbes 1998: 102; Hume 1978: 486).

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Conflict Hampshire, for instance, calls for a conversion of political thinking, away from the theory-​construction of Rawls, toward “a thoroughgoing skepticism and negativity” (2000: ix), or that Hans Sluga writes, of the “diagnostic” mode of political philosophy that he recommends, “Skepticism will be the handmaiden of this new political thinking” (2014: 2). In general, though, this skepticism is a methodological one, and not a substantive one. Hobbes argues that if “right reason” exists, it does so in a realm to which we cannot gain access, and hence that it is irrelevant for human practice, political or otherwise; we can avoid violent conflict only by subordinating reason to authority—​and not, as in Locke, vice versa. As provocative as the title of his last book might be, Hampshire does not take this tack, and instead argues that all political partisans (that is to say, almost all of us) need to accept that justice is first and foremost a procedural matter, that of “hearing the other side/​audi alteram partem,” ideally in established forums such as courts and parliaments. And he argues further, in what he describes as a kind of “transcendental argument,” that the “authority and justification [for such procedures] are to be found in the structure of practical reason itself” (2000: 11, 42; for an explicit rejection of skepticism concerning practical reason, see his 1989: 175). Though he grants that thick conceptions of the good cannot be deductively grounded on a priori principles, in part because they are the product of imagination as well as intellect, Hampshire characterizes imagination and intellect as “distinct and complementary functions and forms of thought” (2000: xi, 13–​14). He plainly thinks that he has good reasons (other than the state of his body) for his own commitment to democratic socialism; he just doesn’t think that those reasons will consistently persuade his political opponents. The solution, such that it is, is to embrace respectful political conflict—​not, as in Hayek’s neoliberalism, to pretend that it can be dismissed as unimportant, as if all “rational” agents could agree that a market economy and its insecurity and inequity were obviously preferable to any alternative that gave a larger role to the state and, with it, democratic politics.18 Sluga, too, does not deny that political philosophy has an important role to play; he only insists that role be the “diagnostic” one of addressing concrete political choices and issues in a historically self-​conscious manner that favors 18

Given that Hayek accepts that “to be free [in his sense of the term] may mean freedom to starve,” and argues that “there is no practicable measure of the degree of inequality that is desirable” in a free society, it is unsurprising that he grants that “it is very probable that there are people who do not value the liberty with which we are concerned” (2006: 17, 42). This is not, however, a point on which he thinks it necessary to linger. See, in this regard, Geuss (2016: 161).

170 Norris genealogical terms and eschews ahistorical and apolitical theorizing which aims at anything like an “invariant standard” for political life (2014: 25, 32).19 Hence, when he characterizes the skepticism that will inform this diagnostic work, Sluga writes, not of the fixed and a priori limits of knowledge as such, but rather of intellectual virtues and methodological guidelines: The new, diagnostic form of political thought seeks to advance a more modest form of political philosophy: one more observant of the political realities and more attentive to our limited grasp of them, more alert to the fluidity of the political field, more aware of the fact that we always think about politics under political conditions; a political philosophy not given to the pronouncement of grand principles, but focused, instead, on the language and concepts of politics, more cautious in its practical conclusions. (2014: 7) The diagnostic theorist will be “skeptical of speculative political theorizing” and even “skeptical about the powers of diagnosis and the outcomes of the diagnostic practice” (2014: 420). She will respect her own limits, and will recognize that she works from within an essentially complex system that as such is unsurveyable. Such a political system is an open one that consists of a large variety of component elements that are internally related in a very large number of ways, all of which is subject to unanticipated change over time. As the self-​reflective theorist is herself imbedded in this system, the system is not just essentially complex but is “hypercomplex” (2014: 238–​239). When Sluga writes, then, of “epistemic limits” (2014: 38), these are nothing like the a priori boundary or Grenze lying between objects of experience and things in themselves for Kant (1950: 99–​100), but are instead the conditions of political history. Much the same is true of Williams, who argues that the fundamental problem with liberal “political moralism” is that it lacks any historical self-​ consciousness, and with it a “theory of error” that would explain “why what it takes to be the true moral solution to the question of politics, liberalism, should for the first time (roughly) become evident in European culture from the late seventeenth century on” (2005: 9, 66). Just as morality in this sense has no priority over politics, concepts more generally are ancillary to historically situated and conditioned action: Goethe’s Faust was quite right—​Am 19

Sluga’s sense of the possibilities of historical change go far beyond those of Rawls, and he writes of his own conviction that technological change is in the process of “the remaking of man” in such a manner that the categories of autonomy and individuality will lose their purchase (2014: 85).

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Anfang war die Tat. This does not, however, imply a general philosophical skepticism, and in his late essays and his final book, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy, Williams defends the specifically political value of truth, which is a precondition of both democratic accountability and effective (collective) action (2002: 211–​212). Morality, too, has a role to play in political life; but it must be a morality that does not claim to precede and dictate to political life, but rather one immanent to that life. What Williams terms the Basic Legitimation Demand—​that political order not be a reign of terror but instead the way out of such—​is “a claim that is inherent in there being such a thing as politics: in particular, because it is inherent in there being first a political question” (2005: 4–​5). For Williams, as for Hampshire and Sluga, the primary philosophical opponent is Rawls, who thinks much more than modus vivendi justice can be agreed upon, at least by “reasonable” people; and the same is true of Raymond Geuss (Rawls 1993: 147; Hampshire 2000: 22; Sluga 2014: 16–​17; Geuss 2005: 11–​12; Williams 2005: 12–​13). (Perhaps surprisingly, this is not true of Richard Rorty, whom many would count as a skeptic, but who enthusiastically embraces the later Rawls as the last word in politics, in so far as anything needs to be added to Mill’s On Liberty [Rorty 2011: 381ff.; 1989: 63].)20 Geuss is, indeed, the most vociferous critic of Rawls among the realists: on his account, Rawls is not just a misguided, overly optimistic philosopher guilty of basic methodological errors, but is the leading figure in a “the normative (counter)revolution” against “historically and sociologically sophisticated views about ethics and politics developed in the period of Herder and Marx.” This reactionary movement has been “an unmitigated catastrophe for ethics, politics, and the humanities in general,” in large part because of “the especial suitability of normativism as an ideology for the established economic and political structures that, after the challenges of the 1960s, were able to entrench themselves even more firmly than before” (2016: ix). Rawls is ideological because he distracts our attention from the real issues, and presents as “natural” or inevitable a political culture and political rationality that are anything but that (2008: 50–​51). As Geuss’ language suggests, the primary issue here is a political one, not an epistemological one, and if he is more critical and suspicious than Rawls, this does not make him more skeptical in any substantive meaning of the term. Indeed, in the conclusion of his programmatic 2001 book, History and Illusion in Politics, Geuss explicitly distinguishes his own Weberian realism and pluralism from “a family of 20

Indeed, Rorty is much more of a pragmatist than he is a skeptic, and his major contributions to political philosophy are insistent that skeptical irony remain a private matter and that democratic solidarity be taken deeply seriously (1989, 1998).

172 Norris very powerful lines of argument, instances of which have been developed by Burke, Oakeshott, Popper, and Rorty, which is predicated on significant skepticism about the possibility or desirability of ‘abstract theorizing’ about politics” (2001: 156).21 Geuss does not share this skepticism, and he rejects both “Protagorean relativism” and the Sophistic lack of “regard for truth” in favor of a critical realism that owes more to the example of Dewey (and perhaps the teaching of Sidney Morgenbesser) than is commonly recognized (2005: 4, 229–​ 30).22 Crucial here is the pragmatist commitment to cognitive openness and to the idea that we cannot say ahead of time—​in the manner of Hayek—​what limits there are to either abstract theorizing or our ability to make truth claims. We must look and see (Geuss 2001: 8, 124, 127, 158). This is not quite the approach of Schmitt. As Gopal Balakrishnan has observed, Schmitt is an “opposite type of intellectual” to systematic thinkers like Rawls, “one whose work consists overwhelmingly of interventionist texts”—​a fact that accounts for the “alarming discontinuity in the positions he adopted as [his] targets shifted” (2000: 5). Over the course of his career, no one was more attuned than Schmitt to the changing face of the political world. That said, in the work from the 1920s for which he is most famous (or more often infamous), he deploys a quite abstract a priori account of the sovereign decision that rests upon his earlier skeptical study of the aporias of legal interpretation and application, 1912’s Gesetz und Urteil: Eine Untersuchung zum Problem der Rechtspraxis. In this text, Schmitt argues that legal indeterminacy can be avoided only if there is sufficient agreement or homogeneity within the community of interpreting judges; no purely formal limits to the judge’s 21

22

Burke is certainly skeptical of all “metaphysical abstraction” in politics (e.g., a priori doctrines of human rights), and argues in favor of the “wisdom without reflection” of a literally conservative understanding of politics for which institutions and polities are inheritances one cares for before passing them on in turn (1968: 90, 119, 152). Though equally as conservative, Oakeshott (1996) distinguishes himself from Burke in arguing that conservatism is not an ideological adherence to a set of such principles, but a disposition. He does not quite embrace what he terms “the politics of skepticism,” as that must be balanced by a “politics of faith.” Oakeshott’s own politics fall between Burke’s and Hayek’s, whose views on individualism and economics he closely approximates. Cf. Oakeshott (1991); for a critique of the inconsistency that the latter involves him in, see Norris (2017b). The connection with Hayek is even closer in the case of Popper, who with Hayek was one of the founders of the Mont Pelerin Society which gave birth to neoliberalism. All three can certainly be understood as skeptical of abstract theorizing and “political rationalism,” a phrase that Oakeshott made famous. Paul Feyerabend (1980) advances a radically democratic version of the relativism that Geuss eschews. The position, however, is so extreme that few even engage with it. For an exception, see Norris & Elkins (2012: 100ff.).

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discretion will suffice. Here the problem is with the model of subsuming a particular decision under a general rule. This analysis of “rule skepticism” is radicalized and taken out of the courtroom in 1922’s Politische Theologie: Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveränität.23 Here Schmitt addresses the political basis of the legal system as a whole, and argues that no legal system can apply or ground itself, as the very concept of a normal or orderly situation cannot be generally recognized but must be determined by the political authority in its decision upon the exception. The echoes of Hobbes are strong here, but the claim is, if anything, even stronger. In Hobbes, the sovereign decides what order shall count as good or legitimate (e.g., a Catholic or Calvinist order, a capitalist or community order); and the sovereign makes the final decision about what counts as a threat to that order. It is less clear whether the sovereign decides whether our condition is that of the disorder of the “state of war” or the order of a polity as such. Indeed, it would seem that the effective existence of the sovereign itself implies that the latter is the case; and this effective existence is something the presence (e.g., Germany) and absence of which (e.g., Afghanistan) the citizenry recognize (know) for themselves. This is consistent with the fact that Hobbes’s thought-​experiment requires that his readers be able to do this: only so can they accept that even a political order that they would not count as good fulfills their more basic need of being a political order (and hence meets Williams’s Basic Legitimation Demand). Schmitt, in contrast, argues thus: The exception appears in its absolute form when a situation in which legal prescriptions can be valid must first be brought about. Every general norm demands a normal, everyday frame of life to which it can be factually applied and which is subjected to its regulations. The norm requires a homogenous medium … There exists no norm that is applicable to chaos. For a legal order to make sense [die Rechstordnung einen Sinn hat], a normal situation must exist, and he is sovereign who definitively decides whether this normal situation actually exists. All law is situational law. (1985: 13; 1922: 19) When the analysis pushes beyond practical difficulties into “metaphysics,” the law or rule does not determine the particular decision; rather, the decision on the exception determines and makes possible the rule (Schmitt 1985: 46; cf.

23

The phrase is H.L.A. Hart’s, in his classic response to this general position, in his ordinary-​ language-​inspired book, The Concept of Law (1961).

174 Norris Norris 2007). Locke’s dream of the rule of law and not of men is only that—​a dream—​and the demand is again to obey. Schmitt cites Kierkegaard in this context, and though Kierkegaard’s own analysis in Fear and Trembling of the limits of the universal telos of ethics does not make the exception the ground of the rule, as does Schmitt, it already points to the dangers of such an account: as Kierkegaard acknowledges, because each operates beyond universal rules, there are no external criteria that allow us to distinguish a “knight of faith” like Abraham, who in his (divinely aborted) sacrifice of his son Isaac performed a “teleological suspension of the ethical,” from an “evil” lunatic ready to carve up his own children for no good reason at all (Schmitt 1985: 15; Kierkegaard 2013: 177, 204). Schmitt’s views might seem so extreme as to make themselves politically irrelevant, but such complacency would be misplaced. In the American context, Schmitt-​style positions were advanced with great energy by the Bush/​ Cheney administration, which styled itself a “unitary executive” able to rightly override constitutional strictures regarding the separation of powers and the rule of law in fashioning “states of exception” such as Guantanamo Bay. In the age of Putin, Erdoğan, Berlusconi, and Trump, similar claims are heard with increasing frequency. Trump supplemented such claims with his own contribution to the politics of skepticism, a sustained and relentless assault upon the very idea of truth. By this, I refer not just to his pernicious attacks upon “fake news” (that is, the fourth estate or independent press in so far as it reports inconvenient facts), attacks that are increasingly aped by lesser despots, but also his endless and often apparently pointless lying, which threatens to wear down the distinction between truth and falsity altogether. As Harry Frankfurt observes in his 1986 essay, “On Bullshit,” lies are not the only counter to the truth, and they are not the most destructive. Where the liar attempts to profit from the misrepresentation of facts that she herself knows, and thereby pays homage to the truth in the manner of la Rochefoucald’s hypocrite, the bullshitter is indifferent to how things really are.24 Frankfurt—​who certainly never foresaw a political figure like Trump—​attributes the increase of bullshit in our lives to our need to talk about things we don’t know about, and to “various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are” (1988: 125, 133). It is impossible to imagine Donald Trump being influenced by or even reading skeptical epistemology, but it is certainly true that he manifests a stunning, 24

“Hypocrisy is an homage vice pays to virtue” (La Rochefoucauld 2009: 43).

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almost total, disregard for knowledge on almost any level. As Craig Calhoun (2017) observes, Trump “shows no willingness to be guided by scientific knowledge” about matters like climate change, preferring to be guided by rightwing opinion programs; he has left understaffed numerous significant governmental agencies charged with collecting and analyzing data; he appoints people to offices overseeing matters about which they know nothing; he accepts briefings that merely recycle opinions (when he does take briefings); and he does everything that he can to keep the public from knowledge they would need to accurately evaluate his policies and their own situation. Part of this is perhaps due to Trump’s background in real estate, a mode of business in which bullying and image promotion can matter more than research and development, for which knowledge is more obviously necessary; and part of it is obviously a matter of Trump’s character. But in the end it is, or has become, a mode of politics: Trump’s own political activity was not based upon knowledge: he did, as it were, bet his political career as well as the health of his polity on the denial of knowledge. The American press continues to describe Trump, like Bush before him, as a “conservative,” disregarding the fact that he manifests no interest in conserving anything but white privilege and a Playboy-​Mansion-​style of patriarchy. Jan-​Werner Müller makes a strong case in What Is Populism? that Trump is better seen as an anti-​democratic and plutocratic populist (Müller 2016). But one might also see him as a particularly concrete manifestation of the politics of skepticism. The skepticism that we have discussed thus far is generally skepticism about some politically important matter: one doubts that political actors can in principle ground their claims in nature or reason or morality, that they can acquire the knowledge necessary to successfully steer society as a whole, that they can adequately justify a particular decision by appealing to an abstract rule, and so on. But there might also be a politics of skepticism, where politics is not the object of skepticism, but is rather the field in which it is played out: skepticism ceases to be the predicate of politics, and becomes its substance. We may find that this is the most fruitful way to consider Trump and his ilk.25 If it is, the questions of tyranny, deliberation, authority, realism,

25

Trump’s is not the only possible model we have of a politics of skepticism in this sense. Stanley Cavell argues that modern life and modern politics are in significant measure an expression of our skepticism concerning our criteria and our relation to one another. While his analysis, like Hegel’s, is of a complexity that resists the kind of account possible in an essay of this length, it is surely relevant to the question of how to reply to the problem that I have associated with Trump and with Schmitt. For discussion of Cavell’s contribution to political thought, see Norris (2017a).

176 Norris and pragmatism that we have addressed will not be set aside; they will only be taken to a new and unfamiliar level.

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Hobbes, T. 1998. On the Citizen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hume, D. 1978. A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd edition. Edited by P.H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hume, D. 1987. Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, revised edition. Edited by E.F. Miller. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Hume, D. 2007. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by P. Millican. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kant, I. 1950. Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics. Indianapolis: Bobbs-​Merrill. Kant, I. 1991. “Idea for a Universal History.” In Kant: Political Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, I. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kierkegaard, S. 2013. Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kirk, G.S. and Raven, J.E. 1957. The Presocratic Philosophers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. La Rochefoucauld, F. duc de. 2009. Maxims. South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press. Machiavelli, N. 1950. The Prince and the Discourses. New York: Modern Library. Mandeville, B. 1997. The Fable of the Bees and Other Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett. Mill, J.S. 2008. On Liberty and Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Montaigne, M. de. 1965. The Complete Essays. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Müller, J.-​W. 2016. What Is Populism? Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Muller, J. 2003. The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Western Thought. New York: Anchor. Nietzsche, F. 1966. Beyond Good and Evil. New York: Vintage. Nietzsche, F. 1989. On the Genealogy of Morals. New York: Vintage. Nietzsche, F. 1999. Jenseits von Gut und Böse /​Zur Genealogie der Moral. München: de Gruyter. Norris, A. 2007. “Sovereignty, Exception, and Norm,” Journal of Law and Society 34 (1): 31–​45. Norris, A. 2017a. Becoming Who We Are: Politics and Practical Philosophy in the Work of Stanley Cavell. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Norris, A. 2017b. “Michael Oakeshott and the Postulates of Individuality,” Political Theory 45 (6): 824–​852. Norris, A. & Elkins, J. 2012. Truth and Democracy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Oakeshott, M. 1991. Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Oakeshott, M. 1996. The Politics of Faith and the Politics of Scepticism. Edited by T. Fuller. London: Yale University Press. Polanyi, K. 2001. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press.

178 Norris Popkin, R.H. 1979. The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rawls, J. 1993. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Raz, J. 1994. “Liberalism, Scepticism, and Democracy.” In his Ethics in the Public Domain: Essays in the Morality of Law and Politics, 97–​124. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Rorty, R. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rorty, R. 1998. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-​Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rorty, R. 2011. “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy.” In R. Talisse & S. Aikin (eds.), The Pragmatism Reader: From Peirce through the Present, 381–​402. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sabl, A. 2015. “David Hume: Skepticism in Politics?,” In J.C. Laursen & G. Paganini (eds.), Skepticism and Political Thought in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 149–​176. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Schmitt, C. 1922. Politische Theologie: Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveränität. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot. Schmitt, C. 1985. Political Theology. Translated by G. Schwab. London: mit. Schmitt, C. 2007. The Concept of the Political, expanded edition. Translated by G. Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sextus Empiricus, 1985. Selections from the Major Writings on Scepticism, Man, and God. Edited by P.P. Hallie; translated by S.G. Etheridge. Indianapolis: Hackett. Sluga, H. 2014. Politics and the Search for the Common Good. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, A. 1981. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Edited by W.B. Todd. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Strauss, L. 1950. Natural Right and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tuck, R. 1989. Hobbes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, B. 2002. Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Williams, B. 2005. In the Beginning Was the Deed: Realism and Moralism in Political Argument. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wittgenstein, L. 2001 [1953]. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. New York: Macmillan.

chapter 9

Fallible Knowing, Fallible Acting Stephen Hetherington 1

Introduction

Canonical enumerations of epistemological challenges have long included this one: “Tell us what it is for a person—​any person—​to have some knowledge.” In recent years, there has been increasing emphasis upon a related such challenge, that of understanding why it should matter to a person—​any person—​ to have knowledge: “Tell us what is valuable in knowing as such (given what it is to have some knowledge).” This chapter engages with both of those challenges, especially the former one. It does so by engaging critically yet respectfully with another of those canonical epistemological challenges—​a traditional Cartesian form of skeptical argument within epistemology. For the way in which that argument will be seen to fail will embody a conceptual shift in how we describe what it is to have some knowledge. In a sense, skepticism will continue to live in one form, by dying in another. Even as the chapter’s critical engagement with that Cartesian reasoning will show why knowledge should not be conceived of in one familiar way—​a way that is susceptible to being damaged by that skeptical reasoning—​ maybe we will thereby be shown a better way to conceive of knowledge. If, as I suspect, we will have had to embrace my proposed reconceptualization of knowledge’s nature if we are to evade the Cartesian skeptical argument’s clutches, then at least something of the skeptical thinking can be respected and maintained in the very fact of our moving to that seemingly non-​skeptical reconceptualization of knowledge. Maybe the skeptical argument as it was traditionally motivated and formulated was not its optimal version, enabling many epistemologists to look askance at skeptical thinking. However, once we see how to move to a better formulation, not only of such thinking but also of non-​skeptical thinking about knowledge, we will have a richer epistemology in hand, one that can embrace something importantly true within it that is owed to its surviving skeptical element. How could all of this be so? How could that exquisite balance be achieved within epistemology? The answer will turn upon our appreciating the nature and inescapable presence of fallibility within our lives: wherever there is fallibility, there is at best fallible knowing—​yet perhaps no knowledge at all.

© Stephen Hetherington, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004525474_011

180 Hetherington A fallibilist should acknowledge that, even when there is knowledge, there need not have been—​which is to say that a correlative skepticism at least might have been true instead. Even in conceiving of what knowledge is, therefore, a fallibilist should somehow be incorporating within that conception the possibility of there being no such knowledge—​that is, a skeptical possibility. This is how, I suggest, a skeptical sensitivity can animate even a non-​skeptical picture of knowing. We will find an instance of that approach within this chapter. The chapter’s other central theme, underwriting and indeed being strengthened by the details of that link between knowing and skepticism, is a link between knowing and acting. This will be at the core of the envisaged reconceptualization of knowledge’s nature. It will also be at the core of my answer to the question of why, most generally, knowing matters—​the value question (as it is usually named) for knowledge. I will be gesturing at what I call a practicalist model of knowing, one that I have developed more fully elsewhere (e.g., 2011a: chap. 2; 2011b; 2017; 2018; 2020; 2021a). It will gain strength from its ability to recast epistemological discussions of knowledge’s nature—​indeed, so much so as to enable us to set aside, as being framed from the outset in optional and perhaps mistaken terms, the notorious Cartesian form of skeptical conundrum about our ever having external world knowledge, say. Again, though, this is not to set aside skeptical thinking per se. The resulting practicalist conception of knowledge will allow us to view the Cartesian challenge even as arising only against the conceptual background of what we will now see is at least an optional, but perhaps a fundamentally mistaken, general picture of knowing and of knowers. But the practicalist conception will also allow us to continue being answerable to some elements of traditional skeptical thinking. This chapter’s main moves will not be claimed to dispose of all possible skeptical challenges to our ever having external world knowledge, say. Rather, we will be in a position to shape and to direct any further such challenges more aptly. I remain welcoming of skeptical thinking. I claim that my practicalism will help us to understand skeptical thinking in terms that reflect what we will have independently found to be an improved conception of knowledge, a conception that more readily explains what is valuable in knowing as such. Correlatively, it will be a conception that renders more significant, other things being equal, any skeptical challenge directed at it, at the idea of people actually having knowledge. That is (with all else still being equal), it will render the associated skeptical thinking also more valuable, more epistemologically alive—​more genuinely challenging.

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Infallibilism? Fallibilism?

I mentioned fallibility a moment ago. In thinking about knowledge’s nature, especially when responding respectfully to skeptical challenges, one of the pivotal questions is that of whether knowing and fallibility are compatible. Let us begin therefore with this venerable form of epistemological puzzle. If knowing must involve infallibility, how could there ever be much if any knowledge? Yet if knowledge need only ever involve fallibility, how could knowledge often if ever be what we should want it to be? (‘He knows it although he could be mistaken about it, given how he knows it.’1 To many, such an admission of fallibility sounds to be misdescribing knowledge.) That puzzle is a dilemma of epistemological planning. It tells us that infallibility is a bridge too far, yet also—​and here skepticism silently slides into the room—​that fallibility is a bridge not wanted. This is equally a dilemma of epistemological gardening. We are assured that infallibility is a seed from which grows our rarely if ever attaining knowledge, yet also that fallibility is a seed from which grows only rarely if ever our attaining knowledge as it should be. Do we thus fall short of having knowledge, as it is or as it should be? It is common to say that infallibilism threatens our right to regard ourselves as knowers. But does fallibilism have a similarly dire implication? Will fallibility allow what knowing should not—​a lingering possibility of not being correct, even when one is correct? How therefore could knowledge worth having ever be fallible? 3

McDowell’s Categorial Strategy

John McDowell (2011: 36–​44) proposes a distinctive way of escaping such potentially worrisome skeptical thoughts. Do not allow there to be instances of fallible knowledge; yet do not allow, either, that all knowledge is infallible. Resist those usual applications of the category of epistemic fallibility or infallibility. Your belief that you are sitting on a chair is knowledge, let us assume; it is not fallible, though. Is it therefore infallible knowledge? To infer so would bespeak an epistemological category mistake: no individual instance of knowledge is

1 Claims like this—​concessive knowledge-​attributions—​have recently become test cases for any would-​be fallibilism about knowing. See Hetherington (2013a; 2021b).

182 Hetherington either fallible or infallible; only the means by which the knowledge has arisen was either fallible or infallible: Fallibility is a property of capacities, or perhaps of cognitive subjects as possessors of capacities. If a capacity is fallible, or if, to speak in that other way, anyone who has it is fallible in respect of it, that means that there can be exercises of the capacity in which its possessor does not do what the capacity is specified as a capacity to do. (2011: 37) A perceptual capacity, for instance, can be fallible without precluding [us] from saying that what it is a capacity to do is this: to get into states that consist in having a certain feature of the objective environment perceptually present to one’s self-​consciously rational awareness. If that is what a capacity is a capacity to do, that is what one does in a non-​defective exercise of it. (2011: 37) And one can thereby gain “indefeasible warrant for perceptual beliefs” (2011: 38). When confronted apparently by something green, your “perceptual state leaves no possibility that [the something] is not green” (2011: 38). At any rate, this is so when your perceptual state results from “a non-​defective exercise of the capacity” (2011: 39)—​the “capacity to tell whether things in one’s field of vision are green” (2011: 38).2 Next we may readily generalize that picture of McDowell’s, beyond perceptually acquired and warranted beliefs that are thereby knowledge. In effect, he is offering a strategy for conceiving of all cases of knowledge. His picture renders the fallibility present within knowing as a property of a capacity for knowing (for each of the however many such capacities there are). The fallibility would be manifested, whenever it is, in the non-​appearance of the knowing. But whenever the knowing itself does appear, it would not thereby be fallible. We are accordingly free to describe the knowing, once present, as involving conclusive warrant—​even while thinking of it as produced through one or more fallible capacities. For there would be no such deficiency in the knowing, now that it has resulted from the exercise of a capacity which had the potential not to produce the knowing. McDowell’s picture is part of his answer to a traditional skeptical challenge to our ever attaining knowledge of an external physical world. Sebastian Rödl 2 For a similar conception, see Millar (2014: 131).

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(2007: 157), quoted approvingly by McDowell (2011: 42), calls that challenge the argument from illusion. McDowell’s picture in response is disjunctivist: when an experience is veridical, it is wholly successful as an experiencing of the world; it is not somehow lessened in that respect—​thereby being susceptible to skeptical thinking—​due to being internally indistinguishable from some actual or possible non-​veridical experiences.3 McDowell is talking of a ‘rational perceptual capacity’ (2011: 41; my emphasis): a capacity not only to know certain kinds of thing about the environment, but, on an occasion on which one knows something of the relevant kind through the exercise of the capacity in question, to know that that is how one knows it. 2011: 41.; mcdowell’s emphasis

Fallibility remains (we are assured). Yet it is external, not internal, to the successful exercise of the knowledge-​producing capacity. Once there is a successful exercise of the capacity, knowledge is present; and fallibility has been left behind, wholly evaded on the specific occasion. The fallibility pertained only to whether the capacity would be exercised successfully; not to whether it has been so, at a given moment, in such a way as still to be present or embedded within the capacity’s particular exercise or manifestation—​the knowing. 4

A Fuller Fallibilism?

Yet we should view that picture of McDowell’s as not doing justice to how most fallibilists would regard the experience of knowing. The picture is not sufficiently fallibilist. McDowell portrays any perceptual knowledge-​producing capacity as a capacity that might not have been successfully exercised. Mistakenly, however, he does not then infer that, even once the capacity has been successfully exercised, the fallibility lingers: the successful result might not have been successfully produced—​and this modal fact is itself a persisting presence within the successful result, even helping to shape the way in which it is successful, the form taken by it as a successful result. Let me explain that a little more fully. The fallibility that McDowell describes as present in the knowledge-​producing capacity is a modal feature. So, it has modal consequences. One of these is that even a successful exercise of the 3 For more of his disjunctivist anti-​skeptical reasoning, see McDowell (2008).

184 Hetherington capacity is an outcome that has-​but-​might-​not-​have eventuated, even given the capacity’s presence. The latter modal feature is as much a part of the knowing that has been produced as was the correlative modal feature, in advance, of the knowledge-​producing capacity—​the capacity that was successfully exercised, resulting in that instance of knowing. Thus, there is fallibility present throughout this process—​in both the knowledge-​producing capacity and the knowledge produced by that capacity. Hence, it is epistemologically arbitrary—​ because it is not as fallibilist as is warranted—​to claim to discern fallibility fully, as McDowell does, within the capacity yet not also within the result of exercising that capacity. (All the more so, when we bear in mind that much perceptual knowledge, once produced, is itself used by knowledge-​producing capacities to gain more knowledge. We may wish to say that these capacities are fallible in McDowell’s sense partly because the knowledge they use as input is itself fallible.)4 So, we face an intriguing challenge if we wish to do justice at least to a strong form of fallibilism by accepting—​as a skeptical sensitivity to illusion and kindred dangers might prompt us to think—​that fallibility is inescapable throughout the entire process of coming to know, with the resulting knowledge inheriting that fallibility.5 Can we do justice to this fully fallibilist view while retaining McDowell’s central suggestion—​that fallibility is a feature first and foremost of capacities or their ilk? This amounts to the question of whether we can accept that fallibility is somehow embedded within any instance of knowing—​present not only as part of what would (if successful) proceed to generate the instance of knowing, but as part of the knowledge itself. Can knowing be fallible within itself? Clearly (as McDowell’s suggestion reflects), whether one will attain a particular state of knowing could embody fallibility: this is a potential for not knowing. But once that state of knowing has been attained (in this way overcoming that potential for it not to eventuate), might fallibility remain, even so—​as the potential, which in this case has actually remained unexercised, for the knowledge’s not having been generated? The knowledge exists; might it—​that is, the knowledge itself—​retain within itself a mark of its not having had to come into existence?

4 Perhaps he overlooks this, by focusing only on perceptual knowledge-​producing capacities. But it is clear that the epistemological issues, like his strategy for this specific case, take us farther afield. 5 Peirce (1931–​1958) gave philosophy the word ‘fallibilism’, introducing it in these terms: “fallibilism is the doctrine that our knowledge is never absolute but always swims … in a continuum of uncertainty and indeterminacy” (1.171).

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Knowledge as Capacity: The Basic Idea

Such a combination is indeed possible, given one conceptual shift that I will now encourage us to make. We need only conceive of knowledge itself as being the fallible capacity (or something relevantly akin). Epistemologists talk of the state of having a particular piece of knowledge. On the hypothesis that I will be proposing, this would now be a state of having a fallible capacity of an apt kind.6 That conceptual shift would require us to speak not quite as McDowell does: we would not describe the capacity that is the knowledge as being a capacity for that knowledge as such. Instead (we could say), the knowledge can be a capacity for so many other specific kinds of outcome—​ones that are not themselves cases of knowledge. The knowledge would be a capacity for various possible knowledge-​exemplifying outcomes—​pertinent ways of being or behaving. In principle, the capacity that is the knowledge might be penumbral: even knowledge of a particular aspect of the world could be a multi-​ faceted capacity, encompassing further capacities—​for instance, perceptual, memorial, inferential, or communicative ones. Successful exercises of one or more of those further embedded capacities will in turn be expressions, exemplifications, or manifestations of the knowledge. On a given occasion, one might manifest one’s persisting knowledge that p (for a particular ‘p’) by manifesting one’s capacity for seeing that p, for instance, with the latter capacity itself able to be located within the more capacious capacity that would, on this occasion, be the knowledge that p. 6

Knowledge as Capacity: An Example

I will make that general idea clearer with the following example. When taking a walk one afternoon, my attention is caught by a sprawling garden. I pause, gazing at it with pleasure. I continue my walk, now possessing for a little while some knowledge of the garden’s contents. Do I thereby also have some inter-​related capacities? Or do I thereby thereby have those other capacities? Here is what I mean by those competing questions.

6 Accordingly, my aim here is only to describe the contours of what I take to be a conceptual possibility with some allure, not to prove that it is satisfied. I am investigating whether we can improve on McDowell’s account of fallibility as a property only of a capacity rather than of something produced through that capacity.

186 Hetherington Suppose that I know there was a wattle-​tree in that garden. In describing myself as having this knowledge, I think of various capacities that I do or could have. I am or could be capable of recalling seeing the wattle tree, and/​or accurately describing the tree to others and/​or to myself, and/​or accurately feeling confident of having seen it, and/​or accurately answering questions from myself and/​or others as to what I saw, and/​or accurately drawing the tree, and/​ or accurately returning to that tree’s location if asked where to find a wattle-​ tree nearby, and/​or etc. Some or all such capacities are now present within me. And there is some epistemologically interesting link between their presence and my knowledge of the wattle-​tree’s presence. What link would that be, though? Are these capacities present along with the knowledge—​present presumably as a causal result of having the knowledge?7 Or are they collectively the knowledge—​present simply in the knowledge’s being present? Those questions lay before us the following options if we are to understand knowledge in terms of capacities. (1) Should we single out only one of those capacities, such as my capacity for actions that can produce an accurate inner confidence (which we may regard as my believing occurrently and truly that there was a wattle-​tree in that garden)—​letting it be the knowledge?8 If so, then the other capacities would be present (whenever they are present at all) as consequences of that more narrowly described knowledge-​capacity’s presence. But this falls short of their being included within the knowledge as such; they would be causally associated with it, even if predictably and welcomely, but not metaphysically constitutive of it. That honor would be accorded, instead, to the single favored capacity being allowed to be the knowledge. Or (2) should we accord no particular one of those further capacities that sort of metaphysical priority in an instance of knowing’s being constituted? If so, then the knowing would be no more—​within itself—​a matter of doing or having whatever produces an occurrent and accurate state of belief, for example, than of being similarly well-​placed for accurately asserting, questioning, answering, acting, inquiring, etc.—​the actions that typically exemplify those other capacities. Even as notable a capacity as that for responding perceptually

7 This is not to say that, in every related sense, the capacities need be merely a causal consequence. It could also be rational to have them. Still, their presence would remain causally grounded in the knowledge’s (conceptually separable) presence. 8 ‘But surely the occurrent and accurate belief would itself—​and not the capacity that produced it—​be the knowledge on a given occasion.’ That is a traditional view, on which Section 7 will comment. For now, note only that I am investigating how we could or would—​if indeed we should—​seek to understand knowledge as a capacity.

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so as to generate accurate beliefs would be like those other related capacities, in this metaphysical sense: to manifest or express it would be to do something that knowing enables one to do—​accurately asserting and/​or answering and/​ or being confident and/​or locating and/​or perceiving, etc. But this kind of enabling is not the same as revealing what is within: the perceptual capacity would not be part of the knowledge; it would be causally enabled by the knowledge. I favor the second of those pictures (the ‘egalitarian’ one), no matter that the first one is more standard within contemporary epistemology.9 I allow the knowledge to be whatever more general capacity most narrowly underlies those comparatively specific capacities (the ones of which these ways of acting would be manifestations or expressions). For example, my knowledge that there was a wattle-​tree in that garden would be a more general capacity encompassing some comparatively specific capacities—​ones that could be exemplified by actions that we typically regard as indicative of or as generating (states of) knowing. Knowing would thereby be inherently reflective of a wide range of actual or potential actions (some but not all of which are or would be purely intellectual).10 And this would be due to the knowing’s literally being a capacity for such actions. Note also the inherent flexibility in that picture, which is not imposing an unrealistic sharpness on the boundary of the concept of knowledge. For any given instance of knowledge, there could be an open-​endedness and indeterminateness in the range of those pertinent actual or possible actions exemplifying it. And this flexibility makes it natural for us to infer that the knowledge need not be a capacity with a distinctive further nature—​a substantive nature describable in itself, independently of its encompassing these other capacities. It need only be, in effect, a coalition of these more specific capacities, each of which could itself be exemplified in substantively distinctive ways, with actions that we would naturally regard as expressing or reflecting some knowledge. (And is that coalition therefore analogous to a Humean commonwealth of mental experiences coalescing into a self—​not clustered around a further

9

10

I have argued more fully elsewhere for this preference (as I mentioned in Section 1), calling it a practicalism about knowledge. It understands all knowledge-​that (theoretical knowledge, propositional knowledge) as knowledge-​how (practical knowledge, knowledge-​how-​ to-​do-​X). Within that portrayal, I refer to the gathering of those further capacities, within the capacity that is some knowledge that p, as the epistemic diaspora for p (2011a: 35). On the related question of whether there could be extended knowing by extended epistemic agents, see Hetherington (2012b).

188 Hetherington inner substance identifiable as the self? Is knowledge like that? Perhaps so; which is an idea awaiting another day’s attention.) 7

Belief

Should I be perturbed by the fact of Section 6’s picture clashing with the epistemologically usual view of knowledge as first and foremost a sort of belief (even if an epistemically augmented accurate belief)? This clash is due to that usual approach’s giving us a version of the first alternative described in Section 6—​according conceptual, explanatory, or even metaphysical priority to just one of those related kinds of exemplification (accurately being confident and/​ or asserting and/​or questioning and/​or etc.). Traditional epistemology says, of my true belief that there was a wattle-​tree in that garden, that because—​at least causally because—​of that true belief’s having apt epistemic properties (perhaps reflecting how it was gained) it is knowledge; and that therefore—​ still causally so—​I have a capacity to make those accurate wattle-​assertions and/​or accurately answer those wattle-​questions and/​or act in those wattle-​ directed ways, etc. With the knowledge being constituted and ‘in place’ as that augmented true belief, I am thereby also capable of performing some or all of these other kinds of action (accurately asserting and/​or answering, etc.). That is their epistemological role here—​merely consequential upon the knowledge, not at all constitutive of it. But why must we retain that traditional kind of interpretation? Let us consider two competing views as to the nature of that belief (which, we are being told in the usual way, is the knowledge). Belief as capacity. It is not uncommon for epistemologists to adopt a dispositional theory of the nature of belief. For example, Jonathan Cohen (1992: 4)11 says that belief that p is a disposition, when one is attending to issues raised, or items referred to, by the proposition that p, normally to feel it true that p and false that not-​p, whether or not one is willing to act, speak, or reason accordingly. Any such disposition is, in effect, a capacity. I am advocating knowledge’s being an even more complex capacity, one that can incorporate belief along with 11

See also Stanley (2011: 17–​18, 27) on a functionalist conception of belief.

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those further capacities (to make—​when called upon or tested relevantly—​ apt wattle-​assertions,12 and/​or to answer accurately those wattle-​questions, and/​or to perform wattle-​directed actions, etc.). In which event, any standard conception of the wattle-​knowledge as being the wattle-​belief (an epistemically augmented one) returns us to the core of my proposal: given a dispositional account of belief, the wattle-​knowledge—​by being a suitably robust kind of wattle-​belief—​would be a capacity, with whatever degree and range of flexibility is apt. Belief not as capacity. Alternatively, suppose that we do not interpret beliefs as capacities. For instance, we could adopt a representational view of belief.13 We need not be very specific about what this would involve—​beyond one point. We would be regarding a belief’s presence as something more momentary, maybe because it is always occurrent (even if possibly not always consciously so). Yet even so—​and this is my main point here—​such a conception still allows each instance of belief to be viewed as an exemplification or manifestation, on a particular occasion, of a pertinent capacity (such as a perceptual one). This further capacity would underlie the belief’s presence, perhaps alongside whatever other capacities underlie instances of my related exemplifications or manifestations—​instances of my asserting wattle-​accurately and/​ or answering wattle-​accurately and/​or acting wattle-​accurately, etc. (these being thought of as ways of acting that are, equally clearly, exemplifications or manifestations of my cognate capacities). That parallel between those various capacities then allows us to treat the wattle-​knowledge, too, as a capacity. It would be a more general capacity—​a capacity to exemplify any or all of these other capacities, these more specific ones. The knowledge-​capacity would be penumbral in that way. We thus gain a streamlined explanation of the knowledge-​relatedness of those various ways of being or behaving, without arbitrarily according conceptual, explanatory, or metaphysical privilege to just

12

13

“A newsreader often makes accurate assertions without believing them.” This is not clear. She could well believe that whatever she reads from the autocue is true, even if she has no independent reason for believing the claims to which she gives voice. “Yes, but she need not have any such belief. She could nonetheless be skillful at reading aloud the autocue.” Maybe the newsreader would then be merely acting the part of a knower. She can be a source of knowledge without having the knowledge. For more on this possibility, see Lackey (2008). “Yet does the newsreader satisfy the account given so far of knowledge, by having the capacity for accurate asserting when reading the news bulletin?” Well, she need not be viewed as asserting, if she has no commitment to the accuracy of her utterances. On this sort of case, see Madison (2010: 186–​188). For an overview of this, see Schwitzgebel (2011).

190 Hetherington one of these phenomena (such as the believing).14 The overall capacity, underlying all of these capacities equally, would be my wattle-​knowledge. 8

Explaining Some Current Epistemological Ideas

That picture gains support from its enabling us to explain and accept a trend that has been gathering pace within recent epistemology. Increasingly, epistemologists argue for there being constitutive and normative links between having some particular knowledge and engaging in supposedly knowledge-​related activities. I will mention a few instances of this trend. Timothy Williamson (2000: chap. 11) argues that asserting is normatively apt only when reflecting knowledge. Jonathan Schaffer (2005) thinks of knowledge-​attributions as assessments of what questions the person is in a position to answer. Jaakko Hintikka (e.g., 2007) has long urged a view of knowledge as discoverable via an inquiry understandable in terms of questioning and answering; and Christopher Hookway (1990) treats skeptical challenges to knowledge as understandable in terms of challenges to our ability to inquire in ways that will give us responsibility for our relevant actions. John Hawthorne and Jason Stanley (2008) tell us that acting is in general normatively tied to knowing. Jeremy Fantl and Matthew McGrath (2009) see knowing as constituted partly by pragmatic pressures. James Beebe (2012) and Jennifer Lackey (2012) each describe a supposedly central purpose of knowledge attributions, seemingly as a contribution to our conception of knowledge itself: Beebe focuses on attributions of blame, Lackey on sources of information. These epistemologists—​like many others—​aim to tell us about what it is to know. But not narrowly so, because the collective reach of their respective ideas is wider than was promised by conceptual analyses of ‘knows that p’. Illumination about knowing is intended to emerge from accounts of what we do, either with knowing or in knowing. And we should welcome that goal. Certainly this chapter’s proposal does so, being easily able to harmonize these otherwise disparate projects, thereby also lessening the proposal’s currently programmatic visage. We need only let any instance of knowledge be the capacity to perform any or some of these various kinds of action—​asserting accurately, and/​or questioning and/​or answering accurately, and/​or blaming accurately, and/​or imparting real information, and/​or etc. That is a significant conceptual gain. 14

For more on this, see Hetherington (2011a: chap. 2; 2017).

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Knowledge as Gradable

So, too, is the fact that, once we regard any given instance of knowledge as a capacity, we are free to regard any case of knowledge as fallible in the same way as capacities in general are fallible. This is further support for my proposal. Not everyone will instantly grant that. Here is an implication of the proposal that might feel less comfortable for some epistemologists. Given the proposal, knowledge is gradably fallible, given the gradability in general of capacities. How is that so? In knowing fallibly that there was a wattle-​tree in that garden, I would have more or fewer of those specific wattle-​related capacities described earlier. That is a first dimension of my knowledge’s fallibility. Not only that; for each one of those capacities that I have, it would be more or less fallible in itself—​in that same first way if it has other capacities within it, but at least by being itself a more or less strong and dependable capacity. But all of that is realistic. With all else being equal, I would be capable of asserting accurately (if asked what flowers I had seen during my walk) that I had seen some wattle. Even so, I could forget what I had seen, in some more or less wide range of settings. In that and/​or other gradable ways, therefore, it is realistic to regard the fallibility inherent in my knowledge’s being the kind of thing it is—​a human capacity, encompassing subsidiary specific capacities—​ as able to be manifested or expressed. Yet even this would not entail the knowledge’s absence. The main point is that, perhaps in a few ways, a capacity analysis of knowledge supports a fallibilism about knowledge. (And part of my aim in this chapter is to understand, by working initially with McDowell’s account, how we might best be knowledge-​fallibilists.)15 10

Knowledge as Both Factive and Fallible

Section 6 mentioned various capacities that could be involved in my wattle-​ knowledge by being sub-​capacities that might collectively, as it happens in a particular case, be the coalition that would constitute the overall capacity that is the specific wattle-​knowledge. Each of those sub-​capacities was characterized 15

For more on gradability within knowing, see Hetherington (2001).

192 Hetherington with the term ‘accurately’. For example, I would have not merely the capacity to make wattle-​assertions; I would have the capacity to make them accurately, hence to make them in representationally apt circumstances. But there remains this fundamental question to be answered about that picture: how does it accommodate the traditional view of knowledge as factive? Since (as Section 7 explained) knowledge is not being required to include belief, what within the knowledge would be true? Surely not the sub-​capacities: these are not categorially fitted to be true or false. Instead, we might propose that it would be the capacities’ manifestations, since these include such representational outcomes as assertions and beliefs. Yet then the account faces a complementary question: how does it accommodate the view (introduced in Section 1 and reinforced by Section 9) of knowledge as fallible? Consider the capacity (if we deem it as being so) for wattle-​asserting accurately. It is impossible for an action of describing a wattle to be manifesting that capacity without being accurate. And seemingly this is a kind of infallibility being manifested by the describing. Does my kind of account therefore preserve the factivity of knowledge only by sacrificing fallibilism? Which is it to be? Isn’t this a problem for the account, since neither of those options accords with this chapter’s aims? After all, we want an account on which knowledge can be both factive and fallible. My reply to that proposed dilemma involves re-​conceiving slightly the nature of knowledge-​fallibility, in line with the chapter’s skepticism-​responsive re-​ conception of knowledge itself. As knowledge-​fallibility has traditionally been characterized, the justificatory component within some fallible knowledge is compatible, in some more or less epistemically complex way, with the falsity of the knowledge’s belief component. But that (even when we render it in more detailed terms) was never an adequate form of conception of knowledge’s fallibility, if only because it does no justice to the idea of fallibly knowing a necessary truth: the falsity of such a truth is never compatible with some given body or background of justification. And that incompatibility implies, in turn, that all knowledge of necessary truths is infallible knowledge; which is quite implausible. When a mathematical expert assures me of the truth of some arithmetical claim that I can understand, barely, and this persuades me to believe what she says, I have good testimonial justification for what, we may assume, is indeed true. Yet something is amiss in deeming my justification to be infallibly good. Do I have infallible knowledge of that arithmetical truth? Surely not. We need a more flexible conception of knowledge-​fallibility. So, I will reach for my own earlier (1999; 2001: chap. 2; 2016: chap. 7) conception of it. On that conception, knowledge-​fallibility (as traditionally conceived) is a species within a genus that I called knowledge-​failability. Let us

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suppose that one knows that p by satisfying various conditions (such as, for simplicity, one’s having a true and justified belief). One knows failably that p when one knows that p yet one’s satisfying all-​but-​one of those conditions does not entail one’s satisfying the other condition.16 Knowing fallibly that p (as this was traditionally conceived) is thus the situation where ‘the other condition’ is the truth condition in particular—​and so where having the justified belief does not entail the belief’s being true. That is, one knows fallibly that p (on this picture) when one does indeed know that p even while it remains possible for one’s to have that justified belief that p without its being true that p. Yet now that, in this chapter, we are conceiving of knowledge as a capacity, we may modify that earlier account accordingly. When developing my conception (1999; 2001: chap. 2; 2016: chap. 7) of knowledge-​failability, I presumed that knowledge is always a kind of belief. But this chapter’s account allows that believing is just one possible way, and not a mandatory way, of manifesting some knowledge: believing is not required as part of knowing, even if we agree that it is typically present when knowledge is.17 Let us therefore allow knowledge-​fallibility to be the more general characteristic that I have introduced—​namely, knowledge-​failability. We thereby preserve in name what was always, in any event, the spirit behind talking of knowledge-​ fallibility. That spirit was this: when one knows fallibly that p, one knows that p in a way which did not have to result in this case of knowing that p. We have traditionally highlighted the fact that one might know that p in a way that did not ever have to eventuate, thanks to the truth that p not being entailed by one’s having a justified belief that p. But, again, that was just one of the possible ways for the knowledge not to have been guaranteed even once all-​but-​one of its components were in place. Components other than truth might not have been guaranteed. Accordingly, once we adapt that earlier general picture to this chapter’s story about knowledge and capacities, we may now talk as follows: Circumstances could be wholly apt for exemplifying a particular capacity that one has as part of knowing that p; yet, even so, one might not exemplify that capacity. (This is simply part of the nature of capacities.) Believing accurately that p could be one such capacity, as could appropriately using accurate evidence of p’s obtaining.

16 17

For some endorsement of my approach to understanding fallibility, see Dougherty (2011). For more on why knowing need not include believing, on my practicalist conception of knowledge, see Hetherington (2017: sect. 9).

194 Hetherington But now, too, we may revisit (in these newly expanded terms) the dilemma at the start of this section: if we save knowledge-​fallibility by emphasizing how, as a complex capacity, some knowledge (as a capacity) might be present without being manifested, even when its being so would be apt, do we also sacrifice the knowledge’s factivity? Not quite. Any manifestation that does arise is factive, because the capacities are for accurately doing this-​or-​that. Correlatively, each manifestation reflects its being the case that p. And so, in a derivative sense, the knowledge itself—​the capacity that is the knowledge—​may also be regarded as factive; for any manifestation of it would involve accuracy. In other words, when the knowledge is manifested, a kind of truth is the result.18 Nonetheless, we should now appreciate why we are not obliged to regard this as the knowledge’s being infallible. The knowledge could be present in a circumstance as a capacity, even when it is not resulting in any (factive) manifestation of itself.19 11

Some Skeptical Reasoning

Another reason for grounding fallibilism in a conception of knowledge as a capacity is that doing so redirects deftly the impact of some classic skeptical reasoning. We learn something important from engaging with that reasoning, albeit not what we have traditionally been advised to learn from it. It can take its place, slightly redescribed, within a newly orientated epistemology (as the next section will explain). Imagine someone saying, in a Cartesian vein, ‘But you knew of that wattle-​ tree’s existence, only if you knew that you were not dreaming its existence.’ This chapter’s metaphysical re-​configuring of what it is to know provides independent justification for the following counter-​Cartesian-​skeptical reasoning. (1) My knowing that there is a wattle-​tree in that garden would be fallible. Moreover, it would be fallible in ways determined by its being a capacity (enabling me accurately to speak and/​or think and/​or act more broadly in ways that bear upon the wattle’s existing). So, this knowledge—​this capacity—​could exist even in circumstances where it is not expressed or manifested at all (that is, not in any of those ways). 18 19

‘But how can there be truth at all, given that the manifestations are actions?’ For first steps towards showing how this is possible, see Campbell (2011). For further discussion, see Hetherington (2019; forthcoming), the first of these two papers being on God’s knowledge. For more on this picture—​describing it as a distinction between knowledge and knowing—​see Hetherington (2011b). For a Nyāya perspective on such matters, see also Matilal (1986: chap. 4).

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(2)

What (1) describes is also true, mutatis mutandis, of my knowing that I am not dreaming. It would be a fallible capacity (enabling me accurately to speak and/​or think and/​or act more broadly in ways that bear upon my not dreaming). So, this capacity—​this knowledge—​could likewise be present even in circumstances where it is not expressed or manifested at all (that is, not in any of those ways). (3) For example, even if (once the issue arises) I admit to not being wholly confident of my not dreaming, I am not conceptually obliged to infer from this that I do not know that I am not dreaming. That lack of occurrent confidence is a specific way of failing to manifest or exemplify the capacity that would be my knowing that I am not dreaming. But (2) has explained how such a lack of manifestation or exemplification is nonetheless compatible with the capacity’s existing—​and thus with my knowing that I am not dreaming. (4) Consequently, even if (as the skeptical reasoning proposes) my knowing that I am not dreaming is necessary to my knowing that there is a wattle-​tree in that garden, my not being confident that I am not dreaming is not therefore necessary to my having that knowledge of the wattle-​tree. For, by (3), it is not necessary even to my knowing that I am not dreaming. (It would be just one way of manifesting one possible capacity-​component of this knowledge-​capacity.) (5) And, from (4), what is true in that way of my not being confident of not dreaming is no less true of any other particular way of manifesting or exemplifying my knowing that I am not dreaming. No one of these is necessary to my having the knowledge of the wattle-​tree’s existence. That is a substantial anti-​Cartesian-​skeptical conclusion. It dulls an otherwise shining skeptical sword, one that has played such a powerful role in creating modern epistemology. 12

Picturing Ourselves as Knowers

Yet what of skeptical thinking, more generally? Might that failure of the Cartesian form of skeptical thinking not be, most deeply, a skeptical failure—​ in the sense of being a collapse of the rational credibility of skeptical thinking as such? I believe so. For we have, as readily available, the option of interpreting that outcome, which is clearly unfortunate for the Cartesian thinking, as fundamentally a problem for what has often been an allegiance to a mistaken picture of knowledge itself—​a picture that has underwritten that failed form of

196 Hetherington skeptical argument in the first place. We have the attractive option of regarding the underlying intellectual fault here as having been that of the mistaken picture of knowledge, rather than the skeptical thinking as such. That is my hypothesis. We need only notice how Section 10 defused that classic Cartesian skeptical reasoning about external world knowledge precisely by calling upon what earlier sections had independently deemed to be an improved conception of knowing. In effect, therefore, Section 10’s apparently anti-​skeptical argument may be interpreted also as arguing indirectly for that new conception of knowing. The point is that if we choose not to adopt that conception, we forego the fruits of its elegant dismissal of that Cartesian skeptical argument. In particular, we may remain without a ready account of how, in the face of that skeptical argument, we nonetheless can know; for we would not have adopted the alternative account of what it is to know. Skeptical suspicions, particularly when distilled and shaped into skeptical arguments, can function as tests, as crucial philosophical experiments to be confronted by candidate conceptions of knowledge. They can help us to improve our conception of what it is to know. They have at least this vital epistemological role. We have found that this chapter’s practicalist picture—​of knowledge as a complex ability for action—​is a conception with which we can neutralize the Cartesian skeptical challenge, at least, to there being any external world knowledge.20 But, I stress, this does not entail that we cannot find new forms for skeptical thinking, so that such thinking can continue living, even an energized one, enjoying an invigoratingly new life, once it is freshly tailored to an improved conception of its primary target—​knowledge. The latter point has been illustrated here by our treating the Cartesian skeptical argument as being, in effect, a test not merely of whether people have knowledge, but, more fundamentally, of what knowledge even is. We have seen how knowledge can be conceived of as a capacity. Does this defeat all forms of knowledge-​skepticism? Probably not. But it should push us to ask ourselves whether we have yet found the best form of knowledge-​skepticism, if knowledge is indeed a capacity, not the sort of aspect of a person that has seemed to many to be vulnerable to the Cartesian skeptical argument. So that is one aspect of skepticism’s potentially valuable future life, as it accompanies our conceiving of knowledge anew in practicalist terms. And that difference of perspective on the potential value in skeptical thinking fits well, too, with the way in which our newly emergent practicalist conception

20

For further discussion of how we can profitably reflect on that form of skeptical reasoning while improving our conception of knowing, see Hetherington (2013b).

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of knowledge reveals some of the value within knowing as such (and hence within the skeptical thinking’s supposed target). It does this by implying that we would do well to value knowledge in so far as we value our actual and potential agency. On this chapter’s practicalist conception, knowledge is inherently constituted by possible actions and expressed by actual ones. After all, it is a complex ability to act, an ability thereby constituted modally, in terms of possible actions. And it is an ability that—​whenever it is manifested—​is being expressed by actual actions (of asking, answering, representing, describing, inquiring, asserting, etc.). So, here is my associated conjecture. Whatever value there is in our living is constituted by our actual or possible actions.21 So, whatever value there is in knowing as such is part of the value that there is in living. There cannot be a more fundamental value than that for us in having some knowledge. Of course, one can live, bereft of the realistic possibility of further actions, including all mental ones. Is there any value for one in so living, though? I am prepared to doubt it. One would be in an epistemic coma. One would at best have become an epistemic subject, relinquishing epistemic agency. And knowledge, at any rate given my practicalist picture, is the preserve of the latter. These closing remarks on knowledge’s value question have been brief and conjectural. But they are also suggestive, and we have come even that far in this project only by having engaged with some skeptical thinking. Doing so has guided us towards a conception of people as fallible knowers and fallible agents, all at once. Skepticism thereby continues to live, and unworryingly so—​ at the very least because of its role in helping to undermine some traditional conceptions of knowledge, ones that can now give way to this alternative and independently welcome conception of ourselves as epistemic agents.22

References

Beebe, J. 2012. “Social Functions of Knowledge Attributions.” In J. Brown & M. Gerken (eds.), Knowledge Ascriptions, 220–​242. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 21 22

Yes, even our possible actions are valuable within life. They are part of the power or potency—​this modal dimension—​within whatever is valuable in our living. Brent Madison and James Hill gave me helpful comments on respective drafts of this chapter, as did an audience at the xxiii World Congress of Philosophy (in 2013, in Athens). For a little more on the final section’s picture, see Hetherington (2012a).

198 Hetherington Campbell, R. 2011. The Concept of Truth. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Cohen, L.J. 1992. An Essay on Belief and Acceptance. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Dougherty, T. 2011. “Fallibilism.” In S. Bernecker & D. Pritchard (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Epistemology, 131–​143. New York: Routledge. Fantl, J. and McGrath, M. 2009. Knowledge in an Uncertain World. New York: Oxford University Press. Hawthorne, J. and Stanley, J. 2008. “Knowledge and Action,” The Journal of Philosophy 105 (10): 571–​590. Hetherington, S. 1999. “Knowing Failably,” The Journal of Philosophy 96 (11): 565–​587. Hetherington, S. 2001. Good Knowledge, Bad Knowledge: On Two Dogmas of Epistemology. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hetherington, S. 2011a. How To Know: A Practicalist Conception of Knowledge. Malden, MA: Wiley-​Blackwell. Hetherington, S. 2011b. “Knowledge and Knowing: Ability and Manifestation.” In S. Tolksdorf (ed.), Conceptions of Knowledge, 73–​100. Berlin: De Gruyter. Hetherington, S. 2012a. “Knowledge.” In The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, url =​ http://​www.iep.utm.edu/​knowl​edg/​. Hetherington, S. 2012b. “The Extended Knower,” Philosophical Explorations 15 (2): 207–​218. Hetherington, S. 2013a. “Concessive Knowledge-​ Attributions: Fallibilism and Gradualism,” Synthese 190 (14): 2835–​2851. Hetherington, S. 2013b. “Skeptical Challenges and Knowing Actions,” Philosophical Issues 23 (1): 18–​39. Hetherington, S. 2016. Knowledge and the Gettier Problem. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hetherington, S. 2017. “Knowledge as Potential for Action,” European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 9: http://​journ​als.open​edit​ion.org/​ ejpap/​1070. Hetherington, S. 2018. “Knowledge and Knowledge-​Claims: Austin and Beyond.” In S.L. Tsohatzidis (ed.), Interpreting Austin: Critical Essays, 206–​222. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hetherington, S. 2019. “Creating the World: God’s Knowledge as Power,” Suri 8: 1–​18. Hetherington, S. 2020. “Knowledge as Skill.” In E. Fridland & C. Pavese (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Skill and Expertise, 168–​178. New York: Routledge. Hetherington, S. 2021a. “Knowing To.” In K.L. Lai (ed.), Knowers and Knowledge in East-​ West Philosophy: Epistemology Extended, 17–​41. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Hetherington, S. 2021b. “Some Fallibilist Knowledge: Questioning Knowledge-​ Attributions and Open Knowledge,” Synthese 198: 2083–​2099. Hetherington S. forthcoming. “Knowledge-​Practicalism.” In S. Aikin & R. Talisse (eds.), Routledge Companion to Pragmatism. New York: Routledge.

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Hintikka, J. 2007. Socratic Epistemology: Explorations of Knowledge-​ Seeking by Questioning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hookway, C. 1990. Scepticism. London: Routledge. Lackey, J. 2008. Learning from Words: Testimony as a Source of Knowledge. New York: Oxford University Press. Lackey, J. 2012. “Group Knowledge Attributions.” In J. Brown & M. Gerken (eds.), Knowledge Ascriptions, 243–​269. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Madison, B.J.C. 2010. “Is Justification Knowledge?,” Journal of Philosophical Research 35: 173–​191. Matilal, B.K. 1986. Perception: An Essay on Classical Indian Theories of Knowledge. Oxford: Clarendon Press. McDowell, J. 2008. “The Disjunctive Conception of Experience as Material for a Transcendental Argument.” In A. Haddock & F. Macpherson (eds.), Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, Knowledge, 376–​389. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McDowell, J. 2011. Perception as a Capacity for Knowledge. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press. Millar, A. 2014. “Perceptual Knowledge and Background Beliefs.” In D. Dodd & E. Zardini (eds.), Scepticism and Perceptual Justification, 128–​148. New York: Oxford University Press. Peirce, C.S. 1931–​1958. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Vols. i–​v i edited by C. Hartshorne & P. Weiss; vols. vii–​v iii edited by A.W. Burks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rödl, S. 2007. Self-​Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schaffer, J. 2005. “Contrastive Knowledge,” Oxford Studies in Epistemology 1: 237–​271. Schwitzgebel. E. 2011. “Belief.” In E.N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2011 Winter Edition), url =​ http://​plato.stanf​ord.edu/​archi​ves/​win2​ 011/​entr​ies/​bel​ief. Stanley, J. 2011. Know How. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williamson, T. 2000. Knowledge and Its Limits. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Index Ancient Pyrrhonianism 2–​3, 16, 25, 163 alterity. See otherness animism 100–​101, 103–​104 Anscombe G. E. M. 33–​36, 38, 41–​43, 47, 48, 49n20, 50 Arendt, Hannah 167n12 Aristotle 12–​13, 23, 26n, 27. See also metaphysics: Aristotle on Aquinas, Thomas 165 auxiliary hypotheses 65 background facts. See auxiliary hypotheses Bayesian confirmation theory 59–​62 belief 188–​189 functionalism about 188n representationalism about 189n13 transparency of 148, 148n warrant for 182 being 12–​13, 23, 25, 27–​28 auto kath auto 13, 13n, 18, 27 Burke, Edmund 172n21 Cavell, Stanley 4, 5–​6. See also Rorty, Richard: on Stanley Cavell on argument 93–​94, 93n on human condition 74, 82, 96 on Kant 98–​99, 100–​101 on music 74–​75, 77, 94 on modernism 78 on philosophy 75–​77, 78, 81, 89–​91, 104–​105 on philosophical voice 92–​93 on politics 175n on romanticism 78, 91–​105, 101n on skepticism 74–​76, 88–​90, 93n, 97, 98–​ 99, 101, 103, 118, 165n10, 175n on ‘the ordinary’ 97 The Claim of Reason 75–​79, 91–​95, 103 the problem of the ‘other’ 85–​89, 91 Confucianism. See also metaphysics: Confucianism on Analects 14 Xunzi 15 Critchley, Simon 45–​47, 50–​51

Davidson, Donald 22, 139, 141–​143 on inscrutability of reference 141–​143 democracy. See politics: democratic Descartes, Rene 5, 7, 10, 92, 101, 152, 156. See also mind: Cartesian account Derrida, Jacques 31–​32 Diamond, Cora 39–​41, 41n, 43, 51–​52, 89–​90 disagreement 26, 26n8, 169 economy versus market 165n11 epistemic agency 7, 197 epistemic boundedness. See knowledge: bounded epistemic limits. See knowledge: bounded epistemology. See knowledge. See also skepticism: epistemological Chinese 14–​15, 15n criticisms of traditional 75, 75n4, 188–​190 extended. See knowledge: extended pragmatist 3n ethics. See also skepticism: about ethics conceptions of 38–​39 Continental 44 foundations of 39–​40 and politics 32, 37, 41–​44, 45, 48, 51–​52, 164–​165, 168, 170–​171, 174, 175 and language 38, 41–​43, 49–​50 and religion 34–​37 secular 39, 43 Feyerabend, Paul 172n22 folk psychology 108–​110, 116 Frankfurt, Harry  “On Bullshit” 174 Freud, Sigmund 97 Galilei, Galileo 65–​69 Geuss, Raymond 171–​172 Goodman, Nelson  Goodman’s “grue” paradox 70, 70n12 Habermas, Jürgen 162, 162n Hampshire, Stuart 168–​169 Hayek, Friedrich von 165–​167, 167n12, 169n

202 index Hegel, G. W. F. 164n7 Heidegger, Martin 23–​24, 28, 83, 102–​103 hermeneutics, philosophical 23–​25 Hobbes, Thomas 167–​169, 168n15, 168n17, 173 Hume, David 1n, 3, 14, 16, 70, 112, 123, 164n8, 167n14, 168n17 hypothetico-​deductive method 57 induction  compared to deduction 64 enumerative 56 formal vs. material theories 7n, 62–​ 63, 69–​70 no general principles for 64, 69 inductive disjunctive fallacy 59–​62 inference to the best explanation 57–​58 intentionality 126 strong externalism about 143–​144 phenomenal 149–​155 James, William 21–​22 Kant, Immanuel 11, 34–​37, 45, 83, 163n5, 170. See also Cavell, Stanley: on Kant Categorical Imperative 50 Kierkegaard, Søren 174 knowledge  and action 190 and politics. See politics: and knowledge as capacity 185–​188, 191–​194, 194–​195 bounded 27, 170 conceptions of 179, 196 essence of 13, 21 extended 187n10 factive component of 192–​194 fallible 179–​184, 191–​194, 193n16 gradability of 191, 191n practicalism about 180, 187n9, 193n17, 196–​197 scientific 11–​12, 12n, 16–​18, 20 value of 180, 197 Leibowitz, Yeshayahu 36–​37 Levinas, Emmanuel 45–​46, 51, 88–​89 Lewis, C. I. 124 Lewis, David 144–​146 linguistic behaviourism 140–​141 Mandeville, Bernard 164–​165, 164n9 Marx, Karl 39, 43, 44, 47

McDowell, John 108, 109n5, 181–​183 metaphysics  analytic 12, 26 and science 11–​12, 15–​18, 25–​26 and religion 11 Aristotle on 12–​13 Confucianism on 14–​15 Continental philosophy on 23–​24, 31–​32 defining 11n1, 12, 26 Enlightenment on 11 pragmatism on 21–​23 metaphysical language 18–​19 metaphilosophy. See philosophical method Mill, J. S. 4, 112, 162, 162n mind  Cartesian account 108 functionalism about 108, 108n1 (in)visibility of another’s 111–​116 naturalism about 109–​111 scientific conception of 108–​110 reading another’s 115n11, 116–​117. See also soul-​blindness modernity.  See 167. Cavell, Stanley: on modernism Moore, G. E. 2, 2n Montaigne, Michel de 3, 13–​14, 16, 27, 163 nature, disenchantment of 102 natural kinds 144–​145 neo-​liberalism 165–​167 Nietzsche, Friedrich 21, 23–​24, 27–​28, 35, 162 Nyāya (school of Indian philosophy) 194n19 Oakeshott, Michael 172n21 objectivity 110 ontology 126, 145. See being. See also metaphysics process 27–​28 otherness 45–​46, 87–​89, 113 Parmenides 13, 23, 161, 161n1 Peirce, C. S. 3, 22, 83, 184n5 Plato 13, 115n10, 161–​162, 161n2 perception 149 disjunctivism about 183, 183n phenomenal states 126, 126n, 147–​148 introspectability of 155, 155n, 155–​ 158, 157n phenomenology 148–​149, 155n philosophical method 38–​39 political action 37, 41–​44, 45, 46–​47, 166

203

index political ends 165–​166 political persuasion. See politics: and rhetoric political realism 168–​172 political sovereignty 162, 168, 168n16, 172–​173 political theory 169–​170 politics. See also skepticism: and politics; skepticism: political and Donald Trump 174–​176 and ethics. See ethics: and politics and knowledge 162–​164, 166, 167, 174–​175 and law 172–​174 and rhetoric 161–​162, 168, 169 democratic 162 fideism in 162–​164, 163n4, 163n5 Christianity on 162–​163 Plato on 161–​163 pragmatism about 171n, 172 positivism 11, 16–​20 pragmatism 21–​23, 25. See also epistemology: pragmatist; metaphysics: pragmatism on Putnam, Hilary 84, 100n, 145 Quine, W. V. O. 1, 22, 26, 126, 139–​142 on indeterminacy of translation 139 Rawls, John 171 realism 137 Romanticism 96–​98, 102–​104, 103n. See also Cavell, Stanley: on romanticism; Rorty, Richard: on romanticism Rorty, Richard 23, 171, 171n and naturalism 98 on romanticism 96–​97 on Stanley Cavell 77, 79–​83, 84, 85n, 87–​ 88, 95–​97, 95n Ryle, Gilbert 108 Searle, John 140–​143, 146–​147, 154–​155 Sextus Empiricus 2, 167n14 Schmitt, Carl 172–​174 science, conceptions of 109, 109n5, 109n6 sense-​data 123–​125, 128 skepticism  as a distinctly Western cultural problem 82 ancient vs. modern 10, 15–​16 and ethics 87–​89

and language 124 and science  1, 11–​12, 15, 16, 25 and politics 43, 163 about memory 125 about practical reason 169 about truth 13, 21 epistemological  1, 155 domain(s) of 130–​132 external world 2n, 7–​8, 123–​127, 155, 194–​197 implications of 4, 7, 8, 80, 163–​164, 174, 179, 196, 196n inductive 6–​7, 54, 70 irrelevance of 1–​2, 10, 25–​26, 83 live/​lived 4, 8, 85, 101, 117–​119, 179, 196 metaphysical 4, 4n, 6, 13, 25, 26n9 moral 32–​33 other minds 5, 5n6, 87, 107, 111–​113, 118 “philosophical” vs. real 5, 7–​8, 73–​74, 75–​76, 118, 128–​130 political 4–​5, 5n5, 161–​164, 164n7, 164–​ 165, 165–​167 the role of history in 164, 164n7, 167 semantic 125, 139. See also skepticism: content-​determinacy responses to 25, 98, 103–​104, 127, 168, 169, 181–​183, 194–​195 traditional 2–​3 Sluga, Hans 169–​170 Sophists 161, 167, 172 soul-​blindness 117–​119 Stroud, Barry 121–​123, 129–​130, 134–​135 Taylor, Charles 75, 75n4, 98 transcendental arguments 121–​123, 129, 135–​137, 169 truth 13, 171, 191–​194. See also skepticism: about truth correspondence theory of 21 underdetermination 130–​133 van Inwagen, Peter 12, 26 verifiability 19 Williams, Bernard 170–​171 wisdom 13, 15 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 19, 38, 92–​94, 111, 113–​ 114, 115, 116, 116n, 118