Method in Metaphysics 9781442688605

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Revival of Metaphysics
2. From Epistemology to Metaphysics
3. The Question of Method
4. Metaphysics of the Self
5. On Knowing and Naming
6. Natural Kinds: From Description to Explanation
7. Universals, Tropes, Substance, and Events
8. Causality
9. Dispositions, Development, and Supervenience
10. Metaphysics of the Social
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Recto Running Head

Method in Metaphysics: Lonergan and the Future of Analytical Philosophy

i

This page intentionally left blank

Recto Running Head

ANDREW BEARDS

Method in Metaphysics Lonergan and the Future of Analytical Philosophy

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto London Buffalo

iii

iv

Verso Running Head

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2008 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada isbn 978-0-8020-9752-1

Printed on acid-free paper Lonergan Studies

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data Beards, Andrew, 1957– Method in metaphysics : Lonergan and the future of analytical philosophy / Andrew Beards. (Lonergan studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8020-9752-1 1. Lonergan, Bernard J.F. (Bernard Joseph Francis), 1904–1984. (Philosophy). 3. Metaphysics. I. Title. II. Series. b995.l654b42 2007

191

2. Analysis

c2007-903462-4

Publication of this volume has been made possible by grants from the Jesuits of Upper Canada; Lonergan Center, Seton Hall University, N.J., U.S.A.; Maryvale Institute, Birmingham, U.K.; and the financial help of the Academic Vice-Presidency and Cosmopolis: Lonergan Research Group, of the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá, Colombia. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

Recto Running Head

To my wife, Christina, and to the memory of my father and mother

v

This page intentionally left blank

Recto Running Head

Contents

Acknowledgments / xi Introduction / 3 1 The Revival of Metaphysics / 10 Lonergan and Analytical Philosophy / 13 The Concern with Method / 15 The Roots of Metaphysics in Epistemology / 17 2

From Epistemology to Metaphysics / 20 Understanding Method / 20 Critical Realism I: Cognitional Structure / 23 Characteristics of the Cognitional Process / 34 Critical Realist Epistemology / 38 Critical Realism II: Comparison and Contrast / 46 Critical Realism a Foundation for Metaphysics / 56

3

The Question of Method / 59 Reality as Anticipated in Knowing / 59 Appropriating the Aristotelian Tradition / 62 Establishing Ontological Commitments / 66 Whitehead and Process Metaphysics / 69 Method and Ockham’s Razor / 72 Ontology as ‘Truth Making’ / 74 Metaphysics, Language, and Logic / 77 The A Priori in Knowing / 81 Myth and Metaphysics / 86

vii

viii

Contents

Phenomenology / 89 An Outline of Metaphysics / 92 4 Metaphysics of the Self / 97 Lonergan and Descartes / 98 First-Person Language: G.E.M. Anscombe / 101 Confusions over Self-Knowledge / 108 First-Person Ontology: E.J. Lowe / 110 First-Person Ontology: Sydney Shoemaker / 117 The Divided Self: J.R. Lucas / 118 5

On Knowing and Naming / 123 Kripke and Putnam versus the Frege-Russell Thesis / 124 Searle’s Critique / 127 Empiricist Presuppositions / 129 Lonergan on Reference and Demonstratives / 131 Assessment of Kripke and Putnam / 134 Problems in Searle / 138 Conclusion / 140

6 Natural Kinds: From Description to Explanation / 141 Our Knowledge of What There Is in Nature: The Essentialist/Antiessentialist Debate / 142 Beyond Primary and Secondary Qualities / 154 Explanation: The Formal Cause as a Set of Internal Terms and Relations / 165 The Natural-Kinds Debate: A Critical Realist Assessment / 174 7 Universals, Tropes, Substance, and Events / 193 Universals / 194 Tropes / 196 Lewis on Properties / 196 Possible-Worlds Semantics / 199 A Critique of Lewis / 202 Possibility as Intelligibility / 205 Substance / 207 A Critical Realist Approach to Substance / 212 How to Understand Universals / 217 Substance: Unity-Identity-Whole versus ‘Body’ / 222 Further Elucidations: Loux’s Questions on Substance / 228 Strawson and Whitehead on Substance / 232 Events and Occurrences / 235

Contents

8

Causality / 243 Counterfactual Theory / 252 A Broader Perspective on Causality / 255 Problems from Hume / 259 Causation Present in Consciousness / 262 The Statistical Turn / 264

9

Dispositions, Development, and Supervenience / 269 Lonergan on Potency, Emergence, and Development / 271 Directedness and Supervenience: Martin on Dispositions / 283 Kim on Supervenience / 287

10 Metaphysics of the Social / 297 Issues of Method: Terms and Relations / 300 The Ontology of Social Relations / 303 Value as Final Cause / 307 Persons as Interdependent / 311 Intersubjective Communication as Causal / 312 The Ontology of Language / 317 Mutual Self-Mediation / 320 The Quasi-Operator / 323 The Ontology of History / 326 Conclusion / 332 Notes / 343 Bibliography / 367 Index / 375

ix

This page intentionally left blank

Recto Running Head

xi

Acknowledgments

I should like to thank my wife Christina Beards for her painstaking work correcting the manuscript of this book. I also thank my colleagues at the Maryvale Institute: Jean Pearson, for her helpful comments on the work in progress, and Paul James, for his work on the index. I owe a considerable debt of gratitude to two anonymous reviewers of the University of Toronto Press for their extremely helpful comments on an earlier draft of this work. I would like to express my gratitude to those individuals and groups who have generously contributed to the funding of this book: Professor Richard M. Liddy, of the Lonergan Center, Seton Hall University, NJ; Rev. Professor Jean-Marc Laporte, S.J., Provincial, and the Jesuits of the Province of Upper Canada; Professor Francisco Sierra Gutierrez and the Cosmopolis: Lonergan Research Group, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá, Colombia; Dr Jairo Humberto Cifuentes Madrid, Academic VicePresident, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá, Colombia; and Rev. Fr Paul Watson, Director, and Maryvale Institute, Birmingham, U.K. Chapter 5 of the book appeared earlier in a slightly different form, in Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies 8.2 (October 1990): 106–28. I would therefore like to thank the editors of that journal for their kind permission to use the material in the present work. Some of the material on G.E.M. Anscombe in chapter 4 appeared in my article ‘Assessing Anscombe,’ in the International Philosophical Quarterly 67.1 (2007): 39–58.

This page intentionally left blank

Recto Running Head

Method in Metaphysics: Lonergan and the Future of Analytical Philosophy

1

This page intentionally left blank

Recto Running Head

3

Introduction

‘Metaphysics’ in this book is taken to mean knowledge of reality acquired through philosophical reflection and analysis. I think that all of the philosophers whose work is discussed in this book, and who believe that metaphysics is a worthwhile pursuit, would endorse this initial definition. However, one may observe immediately that this description of what metaphysics is about includes within it reference to our cognitive processes. Metaphysics, we have said, is knowledge achieved through philosophical investigation. This at once suggests that it is in some fashion distinguished from other ways in which we might acquire knowledge of reality, of the world: through common sense, physical science, history, scholarship, religious belief, literature, and the arts. While in the ancient and medieval periods, the fact of being able to achieve knowledge of reality, of being, through philosophical analysis may have been taken largely for granted (excepting schools of scepticism), in the modern and postmodern periods whether philosophy can contribute to our knowledge of reality and how it can be said to do so in addition to, or alongside, other human cognitive approaches have been questions central to philosophical debate. This book focuses on the renewal of metaphysics, especially in AngloAmerican or analytical philosophical circles in the last thirty to forty years, and also upon the contributions to these new metaphysical discussions that the work of Bernard Lonergan can make. Both questions concerning the legitimacy of metaphysics noted above have been part of the recent history of analytical philosophy. In both the logical positivist and ordinary language (of ‘strict observance’) phases of recent Anglo-American philosophy, metaphysics was rejected because, it was argued, it could not contribute in any meaningful fashion to our knowledge of reality. The developments in

4

Method in Metaphysics

Anglo-American philosophy discussed in this book demonstrate that this negative view has been overturned in the view of many philosophers working in that tradition. In chapter 1 I will present an overview of some of these philosophical developments. While I focus primarily upon analytical philosophy and Lonergan’s thought, the contributions of a number of philosophers in the continental tradition are also brought into the discussion. But, as will be evident from the discussions in this book, those philosophers who now readily embrace the task of metaphysical analysis do so well aware of the methodological issues that still arise from questions concerning the very legitimacy of metaphysics. This book, therefore, stresses the importance of Lonergan’s contribution, which, in an openeyed fashion, addresses the question of the method of metaphysics: How are conclusions regarding individual issues in metaphysics to be arrived at on the basis of a more general philosophical strategy? Making a case for metaphysics in current philosophy has, then, to involve coming to grips with the questions of whether there can be metaphysical knowledge of reality, and how that knowledge is to be understood vis-à-vis our other knowledge claims about the world and the various areas of human life in which we explore our life and the world around us. It may be something of a historical exaggeration but I think there is truth in saying that, while the objections to the legitimacy of metaphysics in the modern period had to do with how its claims could be reconciled with those of physical science, the postmodern objections are to metaphysics as some putative, overarching account of reality providing criteria against which the insights and activities of ordinary language, art, religion, and literature must be assessed. Lonergan’s view is that metaphysics is by no means the whole of knowledge, but that it is in some sense the whole in knowledge: it can provide an integrated account of what is meaningful and what is meaningless in human discourse about reality. Of course, the more astute among postmodern philosophers recognize that one cannot, in some way, do without the language of metaphysics, and that criticisms of it therefore, in fact, employ its resources. However, I do not think that such positions are fully cognizant of the way in which this type of argument – the argument indicating the self-reversing or self-destructive nature of a position – when further developed, inevitably leads to an affirmation of our ability to arrive at objective knowledge of reality. Lonergan’s critical realism deploys this method of refuting the sceptic to establish a core position in cognitional theory and epistemology. This core position is, in turn, the basis for an approach to metaphysics that attempts to critically validate fundamental elements in metaphysics. Establishing a fundamental position in metaphysics, on the basis of arguments in episte-

Introduction

5

mology and cognitional theory, also provides criteria for assessing the contributions to our metaphysical knowledge of the world that may be made by science, common sense, scholarship, literature, and other human cognitive endeavours. Any argument or discussion in philosophy, or in any other area of human life, cannot help but distinguish between the meaningful and the meaningless, and between the true and the false. The strength of Lonergan’s philosophy lies in its success in making explicit (and in arguing convincingly that it has made explicit) some basic criteria for deciding between meaning and absence of meaning, between truth and falsity – criteria of which we are conscious in our daily thinking and reasoning. Critical realism, then, is the key factor in arguing for a coherent approach to metaphysics in general and for conclusions (some more definite, some less so) in various areas of metaphysics. The central theme of this book is the way incoherence and mistakes in metaphysics result from an overt or covert empiricist epistemology, on the one hand, and from an uncritical idealism, or rationalism, on the other. These ‘traditions’ or tendencies in metaphysics are as much in evidence today in the renewed analytical metaphysics as they were in the whole of the history of philosophy. On the critical realist position reality is to be known not by sensation alone, nor by sensation and the use of our intelligence to elaborate theories or hypothetical constructs, but by a compound of attention to sensation, intelligent understanding, and, in addition, reasoned judgment as to what is or is not (or probably is or is not) the case with regard to reality. Lonergan’s critical realism is discussed and defended in some detail in chapter 2, but succeeding chapters in the book also refer back to, and reiterate in argument, the basic position on knowing reality from which Lonergan’s method in metaphysics follows. In chapter 3 the question of method in metaphysics is raised explicitly. The renewed interest among analytical philosophers in metaphysics goes hand in hand with an awareness of the question as to which method or methods should be adopted in metaphysical analysis. Lonergan’s approach to metaphysics is, therefore, introduced in a context in which I survey and critically assess some of the approaches on offer in the new work in metaphysics. Analytical metaphysics is characterized by perspectives emerging from the Anglo-American philosophical tradition as it developed in the twentieth century, and so the role of language analysis remains important in the new work on metaphysics. Metaphysics is seen as ‘basic semantics.’ In elaborating such semantics some analytical metaphysicians attempt to identify the ontological features of reality that make our linguistic claims true or false. Lonergan’s approach is, in fact, not at all opposed to this kind of semantic analysis. But it analyses language as an

6

Method in Metaphysics

expression of conscious, intelligent, and reasonable human persons. Again, such an emphasis, upon the conscious, intentional activities of the agent expressed in language, is not at variance with a good deal of the philosophical writing in current analytical philosophy. In fact, in analytical philosophy the move away from the antimetaphysical prejudices of the earlier periods of positivism and ordinary language analysis has, at the same time, been a move away from the prejudice against investigating the conscious, mental activities of human beings. It is the philosophical investigation of what constitutes human persons as conscious unities that provides the topic for discussion in chapter 4 on the nature of the self. In this chapter I move from what may be termed background discussion or discussion of foundations to dealing with an area of metaphysical debate current in analytical philosophy. From the perspective of Lonergan’s philosophy the transition from background to foreground discussion in evaluating arguments on the ontology of the self is appropriate, since it is clear that, on the basis of Lonergan’s arguments, in coming to know my knowing (in cognitional analysis and epistemology) I also come to know something of the reality of myself as a conscious unity – a dynamic, active unity going through the various conscious activities in coming to know. Some of the most seminal debates on the nature of language to take place in twentieth-century analytical philosophy emerged from discussions of how we refer to things or persons in the world. Frege and Russell made distinctive contributions to this question at the beginning of the twentieth century, but their views were challenged towards the end of the century by philosophers like Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam. This new account of naming and reference invoked the idea of possible worlds in order to clarify what it is we mean when we refer to an individual. The discussion of possible worlds opened out in other directions as analysts attempted to use the idea to throw light on our modal language, our talk of possibility, impossibility, and necessity. It was clear in this case that analysis of the language of reference was turning into a full-blown metaphysics. Some welcomed this and other rejected it. In chapter 5 I examine this important stage of the development of analytical metaphysics and I again offer a critical evaluation of it from the perspective of the critical realism already argued for. The ‘essentialism’ that Kripke’s view gave rise to was rejected by others, some objecting to it in the name of the fluidity of language, as described by the later Wittgenstein, others for different, more strongly metaphysical reasons. This essentialism appeared to be saying that once science has got hold of the essence of an object then that is essentially what this object is, across all possible worlds. Of course, the question arises as to whether

Introduction

7

science does get hold of the essence of things in this way. So we see in analytical metaphysics the debate over ‘natural kinds.’ Does science definitely give us the essences of things in our world? If it does not, is the very idea of definite essences philosophically problematic? Even if we do grant that science can at least move towards giving us information on the true essences of things, not just as they are described but as they are independent of human concerns, how does this knowing of things relate to other types of identification of things in the world around us, such as goes on in our ordinary discourse? In chapter 6 I examine some of the important contributions to this discussion in the work of recent analytical philosophers and I outline ways in which Lonergan’s distinctive contributions in this area can illuminate some of the issues highlighted in the questions noted above. Since the appearance of Aristotle’s metaphysics the notion of ‘substance’ has been at the centre of metaphysical debate. Some philosophers, like Whitehead, have rejected the idea as hopelessly static and a result of picture-thinking. For Whitehead the rise of modern science has pointed the way beyond substance to the idea of metaphysical entities that are more dynamic. The notion of ‘picture-thinking’ is a crucial one here. In continental thought also there has been a sustained campaign against ‘presencing’ metaphysics. All these objections to the metaphysics of the tradition seem to point in the same direction. It is in the direction of the criticism of knowing as mere looking, or sensing. And according to Heidegger and Richard Rorty the whole tradition is captivated by this illusory image of objective knowledge, as looking at what is out there to be looked at; therefore its metaphysics has similarly gone awry. In this book I emphasise that Lonergan, quite independently of these thinkers, identified a fundamental problem with the epistemology of much of the tradition in terms of its empiricist notion of ‘knowing as looking.’ And the metaphysics that is the correlative of such knowing as looking is pretty much a metaphysics in some way tied down by the descriptive accounts we can give of everyday objects. Questions naturally arise as to how such metaphysics copes with the challenge of the apparently ‘counter-intuitive’ world revealed by science. However, also underlined in this book is the way Lonergan argues that a genuine critical realism, arriving at objective knowledge and therefore metaphysics, can be developed from aspects of the tradition (notably from key aspects of the thought of Aristotle and Aquinas). This realism can indeed challenge the dominant ‘picture-thinking’ metaphysics of empiricism and its offshoots (which include scepticism). The discussion of substance in chapter 7, therefore, takes place in the context of the debate over these other, far-reaching issues in philosophy. While many analytical meta-

8

Method in Metaphysics

physicians explicitly reject empiricism (we will see that some do not), the absence in their work of a coherent and cogently argued realism means that, unfortunately, empiricist myths keep returning by the back door. These continue to create problems for philosophical work on the nature of the individual entity and its differentiae (the changes it undergoes). Lonergan argues that since reality is correlative to our three-phased, threelevelled process of coming to know (examined in chapter 2) one can argue in a critically validated fashion for diverse ontological aspects of one and the same entity. In chapter 7 we also see how critical realism is able to contribute to current debates on just how we can identify and distinguish one individual from another. If reality is to be known not simply through sensation but also through the use of our intelligence and reason, then reality is what is intelligible. This position is not a matter of conceding to idealism, which, as will be argued, is as incoherent and as ‘self-refuting’ as empiricism. However, if one can make a case for this basic metaphysical viewpoint, then clearly ‘picture-thinking’ in metaphysics is not the way forward. One does not literally picture ‘intelligibility.’ Rather, one understands it and one reasons about it. Science and our most developed cognitive disciplines witness to this fact. This is so despite the philosophical myths and fables concerning their work which may be recounted by the wise in those disciplines, who may be unable to furnish an account of the way they, in fact, come to know the world as sophisticated as the theories they devise in their own spheres of expertise. There is a need to consistently and deliberately unfold the implications of this view of knowledge and reality for the work being done in metaphysics. In chapter 8 I attempt to do this with regard to work being done on causality. Here, quite naturally, Hume remains a dominant figure, and contributors either criticize or agree with various aspects of his analysis of causality and our knowledge of it. Chapter 8, then, provides the opportunity of spelling out some of the differences between critical realism and Hume’s thought, while acknowledging that Hume’s argument that we do not literally see causes needs to be heeded in our own time as, in fact, a warning against picture-thinking, empiricist trends. Often enough discussion of issues in this book will reveal that while Lonergan and analytical philosophers may employ divergent terminology, both sides are, in fact, discussing the same or similar matters. For instance, while analytical philosophers talk of ‘dispositions’ Lonergan prefers to use ‘potency’ to refer to diverse aspects of ontology. Again, while analysts discuss the nature of ‘supervenience’ Lonergan writes of different forms of ‘emergence.’ Chapter 9 is dedicated to bringing these different perspectives, of Lonergan and analytical writers, into dialogue. Arguments con-

Introduction

9

cerning possible worlds may leave one with the impression that recent analytical metaphysics has been more preoccupied with abstract worlds than with the metaphysics of the world we inhabit. That world offers abundant evidence that it is not inert or static, but is dynamic and characterized by development and decline. While work in the philosophy of biology tends to off-set the impression that analytical metaphysics is more concerned with the static and apparently abstract, it is above all the work of Jaegowan Kim that has stimulated discussion of the developmental nature of the world, a world in which states and individuals apparently supervene upon prior states of affairs. Lonergan has a good deal to say about the processes of emergence, recurrence, and decline that characterize the world we know. According to Lonergan these processes, in which we witness types of supervenience, may be understood in statistical estimations of probability. While human history and human society are also, it would seem, characterized by the same processes of emergence, recurrence, and decline as the rest of the physical world, there are also distinctive aspects of human society that indicate the need for a metaphysics of the social. Such phenomena as human language, art, literature, and the distinctive nature of human intersubjective relationships point in the direction of a distinctive ontology of human society. In chapter 10 I attempt to bring together diverse aspects of Lonergan’s philosophy that, I believe, are relevant to developing such a metaphysics of the social. This chapter, then, is more exploratory than previous chapters and focuses almost exclusively on Lonergan’s philosophy as I attempt to draw together the resources it offers for this area of metaphysics. However, the chapter does include a discussion of a debate among analytical philosophers concerning the ontology of human language. Interest in the metaphysics of the social is, therefore, not absent from analytical metaphysics.

Recto Running Head

10

1 The Revival of Metaphysics

Metaphysics has survived numerous attempted assassinations. Hume’s call for the burning of books has not yet been heeded except by his distant descendants the logical positivists, whose theatrical derision of metaphysics raised a few cheap laughs. Now the show is over and serious metaphysics flourishes once more. But it has not survived unscathed. There are urgent, unanswered questions about its methods of inquiry. Alex Oliver, 1996.1

It cannot be denied that there has been a quite remarkable revival of interest in metaphysics in Anglo-American philosophical circles during the last thirty years or so. Both those energetically pursuing research in metaphysics and those who look upon this ontological turn in analytical philosophy with grave suspicion are witnesses to the fact. It might, of course, be objected that metaphysics has never really disappeared from analytical thought, and there is certainly some truth in this contention. The work of Peter Strawson, who did much in the 1950s and 1960s to keep alive interest both in metaphysics and in the Kantian legacy among analytical thinkers, is testimony to the truth contained in this view.2 He was later joined by Jonathan Bennett, whose works on Kant in the 1960s also stimulated interest in metaphysical questions among analytical philosophers.3 Even W.V.O. Quine’s attempts to do away with an epistemological ‘first philosophy’ and his program of outlining a purer form of empiricism can be said to have stimulated ontological debate as to how deflationary and minimalist one’s ontology could be. The ‘theatrical derision’ of metaphysics on the part of the logical posi-

The Revival of Metaphysics

11

tivists of which Oliver writes also involved the adoption of a rhetoric of denunciation; if one’s philosophical opponent’s position could be labelled ‘metaphysical’ the chances were it might die the death of guilt by association. So it was that the new generation of linguistic analysts denounced the position of the logical positivists as itself metaphysical in the same way that the older communists were branded ‘reactionary’ by those in the ascendant in the era of Soviet Russia. Perhaps even more damaging to the cause of metaphysics than the canards of logical positivism were the fragmentary yet penetrating insights of the later Wittgenstein as he elaborated his own version of the ‘end of philosophy’ thesis also advocated in another style by continental philosophers like Heidegger. The re-emergence of metaphysics in analytical philosophy in the last two decades has been against the backdrop of this Wittgensteinian denial of its feasibility, and it is clear that given Wittgenstein’s continuing influence those analytical philosophers who champion metaphysical speculation do so as part of a deliberate choice to distance themselves wholly or in part from the program of the later Wittgenstein. The metaphysical ‘turn’ that has occurred in recent analytical thought is witnessed to in the criticisms of the trend levelled by those philosophers who look aghast at this abandonment of the Wittgensteinian vision, as set forth in Philosophical Investigations. One such philosopher is Max Deutscher who writes that things have reached such a sorry state that ‘now many of the pages of American, Australian, and even British philosophy journals are packed with the age-old, ready-made disputes about universals and nominalisms, possible and actual worlds, and attribute and substance.’4 One should not overlook, in a brief account of recent metaphysical trends in analytical philosophy, the part played by developments in the philosophy of science. Here again interest in metaphysical issues never entirely disappeared, and as the influence of that opponent of Wittgenstein, Karl Popper, grew among Anglo-American philosophers of science serious attention was given to the role metaphysics played in the history of science. However, Popper’s work stimulated both agreement and opposition, and the new-found interest in the history of science that his work helped to arouse led to questions as to whether all such metaphysical programs, supposed to be tacitly operative in science, were provisional. On the one hand, there was the option already outlined by R.G. Collingwood in the 1940s of saying that all frameworks of scientific beliefs were based on unverifiable metaphysical assumptions and, on the other, there appeared the option of holding that science does presuppose metaphysical principles but that these may be argued to be true of the world; they are not simply all the unverifiable assumptions of a certain historical culture or community.5

12

Method in Metaphysics

Any timidity or embarrassment on the part of analytical philosophers regarding their enthusiasm for metaphysical research now seems to be a thing of the past. Notable figures in the analytical world such as Hilary Putnam, Donald Davidson, Michael Dummett, David Lewis, David Armstrong, and Roderick Chisholm either actively pursue investigation into metaphysical topics or, at the very least, take the time to observe how their philosophical work in general has implications for ontological questions. In the case of Davidson one can note that his researches into the semantics of language about action have stimulated debate concerning the ontology of actions and causality. Michael Dummett’s whole philosophical program is oriented in the direction of an elucidation of such metaphysical realities as the nature of time, as his The Logical Basis of Metaphysics and subsequent writings make clear. Chisholm has written extensively on ontological matters, and, of course, Lewis and Armstrong are known as two of the key figures in the literature of current analytical metaphysics. Besides Dummett, another British philosopher to have produced important work in the area is David Wiggins. Wiggins’s 1980 work Sameness and Substance became a standard point of reference in metaphysical debates in the next two decades, as one may see by perusing the philosophical journals of the period. Perhaps even more influential in recent analytical metaphysics than Wiggins’s book has been Derek Parfit’s 1984 work Reasons and Persons. A significant feature of Parfit’s work is his highlighting for the new metaphysicians the link between metaphysics and ethics, the latter being the primary concern of the book. In part three of Reasons and Persons Parfit offers a number of thought experiments that challenge an ontologically strong notion of personal identity across time. I may now experience memories of the Piazza in front of St Mark’s in Venice, but what determines that it was the same ‘I’ that was there twenty-three years ago? Perhaps I am experiencing the memories of a different self. Turning to Putnam one can observe the way metaphysical questions and themes recur in his works. One contribution he has made to the revival of metaphysics has been his support for Saul Kripke’s philosophical program as set forth in the influential little book Naming and Necessity. In the early 1970s Kripke issued a challenge to the standard ways of handling questions of naming and reference in analytical philosophy and argued that a semantics was required that took seriously reference across possible worlds. Kripke also forged ahead in the formalization of his insights by expressing them in the language of modal logic. One interesting feature of the work of some of those who followed Kripke’s line was the way in which explicit reference began to appear to earlier precedents in the history of Western metaphysics. So Nathan Salmon observed that Krip-

The Revival of Metaphysics

13

keans were beginning to look for inspiration to late mediaeval metaphysical work on the notion of ‘haecceity’ or ‘thisness.’6 However, this renewed interest in the history of metaphysics among analytical philosophers is not restricted to the followers of Saul Kripke. Examples of explicit reference to the metaphysical tradition are widespread. Thus, while not claiming to be a scholar in the field of Leibniz research, Lewis nevertheless believes that he has learnt much from the seventeenthcentury metaphysician. While Lewis looks to the rationalists for inspiration, C.B. Martin, whose small but significant output has had an influence on the new metaphysics, looks to Locke. On the other hand, a number of those working in the field of Anglo-American metaphysics, including David Wiggins, espouse some form of neo-Aristotelianism. No doubt such unashamed attachment to the philosophical past on the part of these thinkers contributes further to the sense philosophers like Max Deutscher have that many have now abandoned wholesale the ‘end of philosophy’ creed, which was almost taken as de rigueur for analytical philosophers during both the positivist and antipositivist later-Wittgenstein periods of Anglo-American philosophy. Lonergan and Analytical Philosophy The purpose of this book is to examine this recent work on metaphysics in the light of the work of a twentieth-century philosopher who stands in some ways outside the mainstream of Anglo-American philosophy, Bernard Lonergan. I say in a qualified way that Lonergan’s work stands outside this tradition since in many ways it is linked to this tradition, that is, his thought is linked to the Anglo-American philosophical tradition in an explicit way, in a way that, say, Heidegger’s or Sartre’s philosophies are not. Lonergan (1904–84) was an English-speaking Canadian philosopher and theologian whose initial philosophical education took place in England in the 1920s, and this education involved not only initiation into Thomistic philosophy and the thought of J.H. Newman, but also extensive study of interwar British philosophy. Later Lonergan’s reading broadened to include continental thought, but his links with and interest in AngloAmerican thought remained strong. Insight, his magnum opus, finished by 1953 but published in 1957, has as its subtitle A Study of Human Understanding and this literary linking of the text with the classics of Locke and Hume is quite deliberate on Lonergan’s part. The work attempts to introduce the insights Lonergan had gained from extensive scholarly work on Aquinas into the context of twentiethcentury debates in epistemology, those debates having been given their modern form in the work of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philoso-

14

Method in Metaphysics

phers. Integral to that context of current philosophical debate were the perspectives opened up by the accelerated developments in science and mathematics since the seventeenth century, and Lonergan was well aware of the importance of these. Thus, not only in the work Insight but in earlier papers and lectures Lonergan attempted to outline his own philosophical program in dialogue with the advances made in science, mathematics, and symbolic logic.7 Naturally such dialogue involved Lonergan in an ongoing conversation with some of the key figures at work in Anglo-American thought in the phase before the advent of logical positivism, during its influential phase, and during the period in which linguistic analysis of an Austinian and late-Wittgensteinian stripe was dominant. It is clear that Lonergan’s interest in analytical philosophy focused upon developments in the philosophy of science, mathematics and logic, while he attacked logical positivism and the doctrinaire dismissal of access to mental acts found in some forms of linguistic analysis in the latter part of the twentieth century.8 However, he was far from denying the usefulness of all forms of linguistic analysis pursued during this period, and expressed satisfaction when he noted mainstream analytical philosophers, such as J.O. Urmson, repudiating such positions as empiricism and logical positivism, since central to his philosophical work was a critique of all forms of crude representationalism, which he rejected in favour of what he termed a ‘critical realism.’9 A key preoccupation for Lonergan was that of method. This methodological concern was manifest in his work in a number of interrelated fields, and not least among these was metaphysics. A lengthy chapter in the 1957 work Insight carries the title that I have adopted for this book, ‘Method in Metaphysics,’ and the issue of the correct method for metaphysics is one that occupied his thoughts in writings prior to and subsequent to that book. I believe that a critical dialogue between Lonergan’s approach to metaphysics and that taken by analysts working in the area today is singularly opportune. Given the open-eyed awareness of those working in metaphysics today that they stand in the long tradition of metaphysical work in the history of philosophy, and that there is much to be learned from the past, the contribution of a thinker like Lonergan, the principal influence on whose thought is Aquinas, should not be unwelcome. Furthermore, Lonergan’s work in metaphysics takes place within the context of the modern philosophy of science, logic, and mathematics and that is a context he shares with those who would pursue metaphysical research in philosophy today. Finally, as Alex Oliver insists in the quotation from his article on properties with which this chapter began, if metaphysics has undergone a renaissance in analytical philosophy it has done so in a way that has highlighted the fundamental question of method: How

The Revival of Metaphysics

15

is metaphysics to be pursued? How are its results to be justified? In light of this one may see the importance of Lonergan’s contribution for current debates, for, as I have emphasised, the crucial issue in metaphysics for Lonergan is that of methodology. The Concern with Method The methodological question that Oliver underlines is indeed evident as one examines the current literature of Anglo-American metaphysics. Naturally, the question is raised and discussed in contexts in which diverse metaphysical topics are treated and debated. Sometimes a philosopher is pursuing a discussion of a particular theme, be it natural kinds, causality, or whatever, and, at the same time, investigating how his or her results are to be tested and validated. Perhaps the best way of understanding the methodological concern of recent analytical metaphysics is to see how interest in ontology and metaphysics arises within analytical thought. The turn to metaphysics among analytical philosophers is, it must be understood, a natural outcome of the linguistic investigations pursued in Anglo-American thought in the twentieth century. Michael Dummett’s philosophical program illustrates this point well. Dummett informs us that he was a devotee of the later Wittgenstein until about 1960 when, principally under the influence of Frege, he began to move away from accepting Wittgenstein’s strictures against the examination of conscious intentional acts, mental acts.10 Whatever the subsequent developments in his later thought, however, Dummett remains convinced that what gives analytical philosophy its identity and what constitutes its strength is the conviction that philosophical analysis must begin with the linguistic expressions of intelligent language users. That being said, Dummett nonetheless is adamant that in order to understand these linguistic expressions aright we have to understand the conscious, intentional acts of human beings that they express. Further, since intrinsic to the intuitions of such language users is the intuition that their language is about a real world, the linguistic philosopher must respect and work with a realism with which some kind of inchoate metaphysics is inevitably allied. Dummett insists that metaphysics is in some way part of everyone’s mental equipment.11 Metaphysics or ontology, then, are what our linguistically expressed judgments and affirmations are about, what they aim at in claiming to know reality. As Lonergan puts it, in terms virtually identical to those employed by current analytical metaphysicians, metaphysics and ontology constitute ‘a basic semantics.’12 In other words analytical metaphysicians realize that, if one is to pursue an adequate theory of meaning and linguistic use, one must face the issue of the metaphysical realities to which language users refer:

16

Method in Metaphysics

one must analyse language and meaning with regard to what C.B. Martin terms, in a now widely adopted phrase, the ‘truth makers’ referred to in assertoric propositions. For David Lewis an adequate understanding of language can only be had when one moves into metaphysics to analyse the ‘constitutive semantics’ at the base of that language use. Such investigation into metaphysics as basic semantics, however, does not mean a passive acceptance of what one may find in ordinary language use. That usage is a start, but clearly other types of language, notably scientific language, may be in tension with the intuitions of ordinary usage. It could be argued, then, that the new analytical metaphysics is characterized by a willingness not only to be ‘descriptive’ but, when the need arises, ‘revisionary,’ to use Strawson’s famous distinction. Of course, it can be argued that the distinction between these two forms is not so easy to delineate when it comes to a discussion of detailed issues; phenomenological accounts which purport to be merely descriptive can, and, in the case of Strawson’s work, do give rise to disputes. However, I believe it is the case that the newer work in metaphysics shows none of the coyness of earlier analytical discussions about departing too far from the ontological accounts supposed to be ‘obviously there’ in ordinary language usage. We can take Dummett’s work again as illustrative of this new-found philosophical confidence. Dummett shows a good deal of respect for the intuitions of common sense, but also believes that many of our ordinary assumptions need revision when it comes to notions of ‘past’ and ‘future,’ for example. This willingness to propose revisions to ordinary intuitions when this is deemed necessary leads directly to the heart of the matter – the methodological question. If the intuitions of common sense are to be respected but not taken as immune from revision, how is one to determine a method for deciding metaphysical issues? The intuitions of current science are, again, an important factor to be taken into consideration, and analytical metaphysicians continue in the tradition of their sixteenth- and seventeenth-century forebears in grappling with questions that arise when these two supposed sources of knowledge about the world, science and common sense, appear to come into conflict. If one is not dogmatically to privilege either set of intuitions at the expense of the other, the methodological issue becomes clear once again. On what basis is one to adjudicate in cases of conflict? A number of the thinkers whose work is considered in this book take time to comment upon or provide a sketch of what kind of methodology they are adopting as the basis for their metaphysical conclusions, and I will highlight such reflections in the course of the work as their contributions are examined and evaluated. In doing so I will examine the cogency of

The Revival of Metaphysics

17

various methodological standpoints from the perspective of Lonergan’s method in metaphysics, for which I will argue in the first part of the work. Naturally, both Lonergan and the other contributors to metaphysical debate considered here argue that to some extent the proof of the pudding is in the eating: the method adopted will show its efficacy in the treatments offered of various metaphysical disputed questions. The Roots of Metaphysics in Epistemology A fundamental tenet of Lonergan’s position on metaphysics is that disputes are to be decided ultimately by reference back to one’s epistemological starting point, and he argues for a number of metaphysical theorems in this way. Of course it is uncontroversial to say that many positions in epistemology tend to lend support to their counterparts in metaphysics: this is just a fact of the history of philosophy. Historically empiricism, for example, has tended to be aligned with a materialist metaphysics. However, Lonergan believes there can emerge from positions established in epistemology a fairly rigorous decision procedure that determines in at least a general, but significant way, the correct account of metaphysics. The details of the way Lonergan unfolds conclusions in the metaphysical domain, as resulting from his stand on issues in epistemology and cognition, will be discussed in chapter 2. But it can be observed immediately that, on Lonergan’s view, this method provides what is required if we are to respond to the questions asked above concerning a way forward for metaphysics, for Lonergan would be in agreement with other philosophers who hold that the intuitions and insights of both common sense and science are important for elaborating a metaphysics. His methodical unfolding of metaphysics from positions argued for in epistemology would, he believes, provide not only a core of fundamental metaphysical principles and theorems, but also a basis upon which to evaluate critically the contributions of these two domains. The two principal protagonists of this work are, then, current analytical philosophers working in the area of metaphysics and Bernard Lonergan. However, I do not wish to ignore the dimension of continental philosophy altogether, particularly at a time when in various ways the old ‘Cold War’ stand-off between continental philosophers and analytical philosophers seems to be gradually passing. My principal reason for concentrating on analytical thought in a work on metaphysics is because it is among analytical philosophers that a renaissance in metaphysical writing is under way. This is indeed a truly ironic state of affairs when we survey the course of twentieth-century philosophy. Around 1950 who would have thought that analytical philosophers would be vigorously pursuing metaphysical

18

Method in Metaphysics

research in thirty or forty years time? At that time continental philosophy appeared to be far more open to such philosophical investigation, as in the immediate post-war period thinkers like Nicolai Hartmann continued to pursue constructivist projects in metaphysics. It appears now that the tables are turned, and while metaphysics enjoys a revival in Anglo-American thought, among deconstructionists and postmodern continental philosophers it is out of favour. If human beings are unable to come to know objective reality they are hardly capable of descrying features of that reality in ontological categories and principles. Of course, one avenue of communication between continental thinkers and analytical thinkers is seen in the antimetaphysical cause common to both continental thinkers, who hold to some version of the Heideggerian closure of philosophy thesis, and postmodern analytical thinkers like Richard Rorty, who remain loyal to the later-Wittgenstein’s vision of the end of philosophy. To some this will appear an over generalization and a false characterization of the way things stand in continental philosophy. However, I believe it is in general a true description of the way things stand at present although I am aware that the image I have presented needs to be further refined and qualified. First, one should not think that all continental philosophers follow the lead of certain proponents of deconstruction and genealogical hermeneutics. In fact in a later section of the book I shall call on the work of at least one continental philosopher in arguing against the position taken on consciousness by Derrida. Second, it may be objected that philosophers such as Heidegger, E. Levinas, and J. Derrida do not reject the metaphysical enterprise. Levinas, for instance, disputes Heidegger’s metaphysical notion of es gibt and proposes instead his idea of il y a, or ‘there being.’ An adequate response to these objections to my characterization of continental philosophy would have to include a detailed study of each major continental thinker of the last fifty years, and that I do not intend to attempt. I do not dispute there are metaphysical analyses offered by the above-mentioned thinkers, but in the case of Heidegger and Derrida, two influential continental thinkers, my general contention is borne out, for their work is based on the premise that we cannot be ‘ontologically serious.’ Since both thinkers reject what they take to be the last significant attempt to argue for objective knowledge of the world, the philosophy of Husserl, they cannot but conceive metaphysics in a ‘non-serious’ way, as a subjective human construct that is ultimately imposed upon reality, or that is the way ‘we’ have to conceive of reality. They accept, therefore, the legacy of Kant and Hegel in viewing Husserl’s project to ground objective knowledge as ill conceived. I appreciate the way Derrida goes beyond Heidegger in his analysis of

The Revival of Metaphysics

19

such phenomena as the ‘trace,’ and I can only applaud his contention that metaphysics is inescapable in the sense that it is intrinsic to our linguistic usage. Derrida’s criticisms of his former teacher Levinas and of Michel Foucault stress this inescapable metaphysical quality of our linguistic and conceptual framework. Derrida’s work also draws our attention to the rather limited and ahistorical perspective of the later Wittgenstein, who failed to see that the wells of ordinary language were already ‘poisoned’ to an irredeemable degree by millennia of metaphysical influence. However, Derrida’s contention that we continuously ‘take’ and ‘re-take’ the metaphysics embedded in our language in playful inversions of conceptual hierarchies, as we deconstruct the writings of our tradition, witnesses to the fact that we cannot view one metaphysical scheme as binding, insofar as we should not have the kind of knowledge of reality that would result in such a metaphysics. Towards the end of his philosophical career Derrida emphasized that it was his relationship with Husserl’s thought that was of fundamental importance for understanding his philosophical development.13 Taking Derrida at his word I propose to examine his earlier work on Husserl in order to see how his philosophy depends upon the idea that if Husserl could not secure the objectivity of human knowing no one could. This examination will, I hope, provide a useful exercise in comparison and contrast with Lonergan’s critical realist position on knowing, which will be outlined in the next chapter. As we shall see in the chapters to follow, this epistemological viewpoint will provide the methodological starting point from which a critically validated metaphysics can be developed.

Recto Running Head

20

2 From Epistemology to Metaphysics

Understanding Method As was noted in the previous chapter the issue of method is recognized in one way or another to be crucial by those involved in the renewal of metaphysics. The need for a viable philosophical method was felt keenly by Bernard Lonergan and the attempt to elaborate such a method, a method also applicable in the field of metaphysics, is central to his intellectual endeavours from the 1940s until his last work in the early 1980s. The very notion of ‘method,’ of course, can be off-putting, to say the least. To many philosophers it conjures up images of the kind of philosophical strait jacket involved in the idea of a deductive or axiomatic system; that ever elusive logical key to the universe, the quest for which, in the view of not a few, characterized the philosophical labours of modernity. Given the way in which Lonergan understands ‘method’ it might well be thought that the term is unhelpful and another should be sought. In his elaboration of his understanding of the notion he makes quite clear that the method he is concerned with is anything but a deductive system of logic. As we shall see in a later section about the relationship between logic and metaphysics, Lonergan learned from his scholarly work on Aquinas in the 1930s and 1940s that what is fundamental for Aquinas is not logic per se, but method, understood as the recurrence of the intelligent and reasonable operations of the human mind that yield cumulative results in terms of insights and judgments of fact. Such is the basic method to which Lonergan refers – the ‘method’ that is the human mind itself in all its flexibility and adaptability. Since it is the human mind that produces, refines,

From Epistemology to Metaphysics

21

revises, accepts, modifies, and rejects logical schemes, scientific theories, historical accounts, and the opinions we hold in ordinary life, it is the conscious operations of the mind that constitute the fundamental ‘method.’ One might argue that such lessons learned by Lonergan, from detailed study of a premodern thinker like Aquinas, were lessons brought home to Anglo-American philosophers in the 1950s and 1960s through a renewed interest in the historical nature of scientific rationality, stimulated by Popper’s researches, by (ironically) Quine’s interest in Duhem, and through the writing of philosophers interested in the history of logic like William and Martha Kneale.1 The perspectives that these debates and researches opened up helped to offset the rather static ahistorical image of logical method and, indeed, of rational activity in general that pervaded positivist philosophy and early forms of linguistic analysis. Of course just to state that ‘the mind’ provides a fundamental method appears to be stating the obvious or trivial. Clearly, it is one’s account of mind that is the crucial issue, and at issue here is Lonergan’s account of our conscious mental operations, which he proposes as a basic methodological starting point in philosophy in general, and metaphysics in particular. Lonergan’s approach is to say that the answers to three interrelated questions issue in a cognitional theory, an epistemology, and a metaphysics respectively. The first provides an answer to the question, ‘What am I doing when I am knowing?’ The second answers the question, ‘Why is doing that knowing?’ The third answers the question, ‘What do I know when I do that?’ For philosophers working in analytical metaphysics I think the third question, ‘What do I know when I do that (knowing)?’ would cause little difficulty. Clearly C.B. Martin’s talk of metaphysics as an elaboration of the ‘truth makers’ of reality, which render our correct propositions about the world true and meaningful, or David Lewis’s notion of metaphysics as outlining a ‘constitutive semantics’ are pointing in the same direction as Lonergan. What might appear a little odd for some analytical philosophers is Lonergan’s distinction between a cognitional theory and an epistemology, understood as answers to the questions, ‘What am I doing when I am knowing?’ and ‘Why is doing that knowing?’ This distinction indicates, it should be pointed out, a strategic path Lonergan follows in order to outline and defend his critical realist position on knowing. This involves, first, describing the set of interrelated conscious operations in three phases (or ‘levels’) that are involved in our attempts at coming to know reality and, second, arguing that our affirmation of this account is fundamentally correct (although open to improvement) and is, when rightly understood, a paradigmatic instance of correct objective knowledge of

22

Method in Metaphysics

reality, which illustrates what constitutes objective knowledge. Thus the phenomenology of knowing leads on to an affirmation that correct, objective knowledge does occur in some cases. And understanding that this is so answers the question, ‘Why is doing that (following through on these mental operations) true knowing of reality?’ It is generally acknowledged that the basic positions one takes up in epistemology play a vital role in determining one’s ontological commitments, or, indeed, in determining whether or not one wishes to be ‘ontologically serious’ at all. Lonergan’s insistence on a method for metaphysics arising from commitments made and argued for in epistemology/ cognitional theory will, therefore, not appear at all eccentric. It is in the detail of how he explains the methodological implications of the one philosophical domain for the other that the originality of his approach will appear. Briefly, one can say that from the positions argued for in critical realist cognitional theory and epistemology one can proceed to metaphysical analysis by teasing out the implications of the fact that in knowing one’s own knowing one has come to know an instance of objective reality. If that is so, then what in general is involved in knowing an instance of objective reality may be drawn out and made explicit and, further, one may reflect upon the ontological features of the conscious self one has come to know. This paradigm case of knowing a metaphysical entity can then be of assistance in developing a method for metaphysics that aims to integrate the more or less provisional results of commonsense knowing, scientific knowing, and scholarly knowing. Such a method is not without its critical or dialectical aspect. It would not be shy of critiquing what are the results not of common sense but common nonsense, nor would it be coy when criticism is called for of what are not the deliverances of pure science or scholarship, but scientific and scholarly ‘results’ that are bound up with certain dubious philosophical assumptions. The history of science rightly serves to put the philosopher in his place. But upon closer scrutiny it at once renders somewhat ambiguous the judgment as to who is the ‘pure scientist’ supposedly free from all philosophy. It also teaches lessons about metaphysical research programs once thought to be intrinsic to a given set of scientific results but later found not to be so. If one turns from the world of physical science to that of historical scholarship, sociology, or psychology, I think none but the most sensitive egos will feel wounded if one insists that the views and positions advanced in these disciplines are not beyond critical evaluation in a similar way. I now turn, then, to Lonergan’s phenomenology of the process of coming to know, and then proceed to a discussion of his arguments for the possibility of objective knowledge, since these establish the basis of his method for metaphysics.

From Epistemology to Metaphysics

23

Critical Realism I: Cognitional Structure The Process of Coming to Know Reality Lonergan’s response to his own question, ‘What am I doing when I am knowing?’ takes the form of a phenomenology of the conscious process of coming to know, unfolding on three interrelated ‘levels,’ or in three phases of intentional, mental acts. This account develops out of Lonergan’s critical appropriation of Aristotle, Aquinas, and Augustine, among the premoderns, and from his appraisal of various philosophers in modern philosophy including thinkers as diverse as Descartes, J.H. Newman, J.S. Mill, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophers of science and logic. In a previous book I have attempted to argue for the viability of Lonergan’s position on the conscious process of knowing, and I did so choosing as interlocutors and potential critics philosophers in the analytical tradition sceptical of reference to mental acts and our ability to know them.2 In this chapter I shall outline and defend Lonergan’s positions on knowing, on mental acts, and on objective knowledge. But since I have engaged in such debate elsewhere I would also refer the interested reader to those discussions for further reading, rather than review the arguments at great length here. I would make the observation that, whether one is happy or disturbed by the prospect, the growing interest in metaphysics among analytical philosophers appears to go hand in hand with a steady diminution of hostility on their part to the idea of mental acts and the philosophical investigation of them. Daniel Dennett still holds, for his own purposes, to aspects of the later Wittgenstein’s denial of real, conscious mental acts. Yet the whole area of debate in which his writing finds its context, that concerning the nature of human cognition and its relation to AI, testifies to the fact that new philosophies of mind are a growth industry in Anglo-American philosophy. And the list of significant analytical philosophers who have now abandoned the strict Wittgensteinian observance of avoidance of mental acts talk is impressive. It includes Dummett, Searle, Chisholm, Shoemaker, Hintikka, David Mellor, J.R. Lucas, and J.L. Mackie to name but a few.3 According to Lonergan the three phases or ‘levels’ of coming to know are as follows: the level of ‘experience,’ the level of ‘understanding,’ and the level of ‘judging.’ Let us look in more detail at what Lonergan has to say concerning these levels of conscious mental acts. The Level of Experience The level of experience: this is the level of sensate experience, of seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and experiencing such phenomena as the sense

24

Method in Metaphysics

of inner balance. It may be referred to as the level of the knowing process on which we experience the ‘given’ or data. However, Lonergan does not mean by this the kind of ‘raw data’ of some empiricist accounts, and he is clear that we do not grow up as mere ‘phenomenalists’ experiencing raw data about which, perhaps ‘at the age of reason,’ we begin to make enquiries. Philosophers such as Wilfred Sellars and Heidegger have rightly attacked such ludicrous images and notions. Lonergan insists as they do that we grow up in a world that is already structured by the meanings a community gives to it. With the animals we share feelings of attraction and repulsion towards certain objects, and as part of a human community we begin very early on to move out of an infant world of immediacy into a world mediated by the meaning of our community. Such meaning is communicated to us through the language and symbols of that community and through insights into the meanings and values with which our community endows the objects around us. Such insights are ‘insinuated,’ often ‘caught’ by us rather than taught to our developing minds. Lonergan writes: A datum of sense may be defined as the content of an act of seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling. But the difficulty with that definition is that such contents do not occur in a cognitional vacuum. They emerge within a context that is determined by interests and preoccupations … Accordingly, it would be a mistake to suppose that scientific observation is some mere passivity to sense impressions. It occurs within its own dynamic context, and the problem is to distinguish that cognitional orientation from the orientation of concrete living.4 Having said all this it still remains the case that there is a level of data, of the ‘given,’ that our enquiries are about. Indeed, one can define this level of experience heuristically as ‘that which our enquiries are into.’ It is true for the most part that the data for our enquiries is that provided by the senses. However, in the case of enquiries into the other elements of our consciousness, clearly we inquire into data other than that given in sensation or inner feeling. It should also be pointed out that by ‘experience’ in this context Lonergan is employing the term in a technical sense, not in the sense of Dewey’s ‘person of experience’; such a person, on Lonergan’s view, would be one who has an ample and expanding repertoire of insights into the level of ‘experience,’ or data. Coming to know, then, involves attention to such data of experience. Such attending to our experiences on our part is an instance of conscious, intentional activity. I shall go on to discuss below Lonergan’s important distinction between self-consciousness, on the one hand, and self-knowl-

From Epistemology to Metaphysics

25

edge on the other. However, it can be pointed out here that attending to our experiences of seeing, hearing, and the like is a conscious and intentional activity, whereas those sensate states themselves are conscious and intentional but are not mental acts in the same way. One is conscious of looking at a tree. The experience is a conscious one. One is not unaware of the tree; one is aware of it. The experience is intentional: one’s seeing is in some way oriented to the tree. But there lurks an ambiguity in using the phrase ‘looking at the tree.’ Does one mean ‘actively looking’ or just ‘gazing,’ simply ‘having the tree within one’s purview’? The latter case would not be one in which we would say that one is ‘attending’ to the object in one’s consciousness. A further refinement in this regard is to observe that there are instances where ‘something catches my attention,’ as distinct from when I am ‘actively on the look out for something.’ This also leads on to issues concerning the ‘active’ and ‘passive’ elements in human consciousness, which I shall return to below. Throughout the history of philosophy the empiricist or naive realist enterprise has been committed to trying to demonstrate how knowing is fundamentally a matter of ‘the level of experience,’ of somehow ‘letting all the information just rush in through one’s senses.’ Of course few empiricists have been so minimalist in their accounts as to suggest there is nothing else at all involved in knowing, given the witness of human language and concepts. However, the ideal, we may say, is to keep the account as simple as possible and to emphasize this primary level of knowing as the pre-eminent one. Idealists, relativists and sceptics in one way, and rationalists and Platonists in another, have remained unimpressed. The role of language and of conceptual elaboration is too crucial in human knowing to be downplayed in the empiricist fashion. With this historical preamble in mind, then, let us turn to Lonergan’s second level in the process of coming to know, the level of ‘understanding.’ The Level of Understanding This level or phase involves the intelligent operations of asking questions concerning experience, enjoying (if I am fortunate) insights in response to those questions, expressing those insights in concepts and words and excogitating ideas, theories, and hypotheses. We could also refer to this level as that on which we experience intuitions and ‘hunches’ concerning that which we seek to understand, if we wish to use such synonyms for ‘insight.’ Lonergan’s view is that such acts of understanding occur as a response to our ‘What?’ questions with regard to the data. Aristotle and Aquinas suggest that there are two distinct types of question: the ‘What?’ or ‘Quid sit?’ question, and the ‘Is it?’ ‘An sit?’ question. The move from

26

Method in Metaphysics

the first level of experience is occasioned as we consciously ask the ‘What?’ question with regard to the data. In response to our question we may enjoy insights into the data and form concepts and theories to explain it. However, the further question arises, the ‘Is it?’ question, with regard to our insights, concepts and theories. On the third level of coming to know, therefore, we attempt to reach a definite or probable judgment as to the truth or falsity of our second level concepts and theories. We attempt to answer the question ‘is this idea, concept, theory true of reality?’ On the second level of conscious mental acts involved in coming to know Lonergan distinguishes between insight, on the one hand, and concept, or conceptual and verbal elaboration, on the other. While not wishing to delay too long over this distinction it may be worth indicating what Lonergan means by it and examining ways in which his analysis parallels some recent discussion of mental acts in analytical philosophy of mind. However far away some in the analytical tradition may feel they have moved from the position of the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations, it remains the case, I believe, that the Anglo-American philosophical world remains indebted to Wittgenstein for his insights into the fluidity and complexity of human understanding manifest in ordinary language. The Wittgensteinian campaign against the image of human understanding as that which is to be encapsulated in some formalized language has been effective. If Wittgenstein’s protest went too far it was in terms of thinking that the whole philosophical enterprise, including metaphysics, was to be conceived in terms of what Wittgenstein himself had attempted in the Tractatus, and what he spent the rest of his philosophical career undermining – a mapping out of meaningful, conceptual thinking in a way that was inspired by classical logical systems. The attempt had a long history behind it, as we can see from the seventeenth-century rationalists’ ideal of a complete formalization of thought. I believe the history extends even further back to medieval Scotism and nominalist ideas of a ‘mentalese,’ a ‘basic language’ of the mind, an idea revived in our times by Chomsky and Fodor. What I take to be Wittgenstein’s resultant overstating of the case means, of course, that what I have written of his achievement above would not be in accord with his position. I have said that his phenomenology of the diversity of human linguistic expressions demonstrates the fluidity and flexibility of human understanding, and ‘understanding,’ intended as ‘mental, intentional activity’ would not be acceptable Wittgensteinian vocabulary. However, part of an adequate critique of Wittgenstein’s overstatement of his case involves, I believe, acknowledging his genuine achievement in demolishing the myth of conceptual formalization, while at the same time insisting, as does Dummett, that the linguistic fluidity and

From Epistemology to Metaphysics

27

flexibility Wittgenstein highlights in ordinary discourse is the fluidity and flexibility of intelligent and rational language users. Indeed, these language users are conscious of this fluidity and flexibility in their intelligent acts of understanding. Lonergan’s own analysis of common-sense or ordinary language understanding in his work Insight also stresses this fluidity and flexibility. His position, outlined without any knowledge of Wittgenstein’s work in this area, is equally sensitive to the non-systematic character of ordinary language use, but the phenomenology is pursued with the aim of illustrating the intelligent operation of human understanding in the insights to be identified in common-sense understanding. After a lengthy investigation of the properties of conscious insight into data, the act of understanding, as these are manifest in geometry and science, Lonergan moves on, in his lengthy study Insight, to investigate insight in common-sense understanding. He begins this phase of his investigation by remarking: There is intelligence in the home and in friendship, in conversation and in sport, in the arts and in entertainment. In every case, the man or woman of intelligence is marked by a greater readiness in catching on, in getting the point, in seeing the issue, in grasping implications, in acquiring knowhow. In their speech and action the same characteristics can be discerned as were set forth in describing that act that released Archimedes’ ‘Eureka!’ For insight is ever the same, and even its most modest achievements are rendered conspicuous by the contrasting, if reassuring, occurrence of examples of obtuseness and stupidity.5 It is because Lonergan identifies the intentional conscious acts on three related levels in ‘coming to know’ as operative in common-sense understanding that he is able to elucidate a quite conspicuous phenomenon that hardly ever appears in the analyses of ordinary language undertaken by the followers of Wittgenstein; that is, the contrast to be seen between common sense and common nonsense. Coming to know involves attention to the data of sense, the effort to exercise intelligence (such as one possesses) in thinking up explanations for, or hypotheses about, the data, and the commitment to be reasonable in judging the veracity of one’s theories. But it is up to the individual to be attentive or inattentive, intelligent or stupid, rash or reasonable. Naturally, individuals are either encouraged to exercise their capacity for truth finding or discouraged to do so by the social groups in which they find themselves. Ordinary language, then, is not some immutable product over and above the persons and communities who express themselves in it, although, of course, it is in another way

28

Method in Metaphysics

prior to the activity of any one individual, as a formative condition for the exercise of intelligence and reason on the part of a given individual. Nevertheless, an analysis of the intelligent and reasonable conscious operations of individuals is necessary if we are to make any sense of the everyday experience we have of the disjunction between intelligence and reasonableness manifest in common sense, on the one hand, and the obtuseness and unreasonableness manifest in common nonsense, on the other. Part of the fluidity and flexibility, the elusive quality, of the acts of understanding witnessed in our everyday lives has to do, in Lonergan’s view, with the distinction between insight, the often fleeting, conscious act of understanding, on the one hand, and the conceptual, verbalized formulation, on the other. Lonergan came to a realization of the importance of this distinction from his study of Aquinas’s subtle analyses of the features of human understanding, in their turn influenced by Aristotle. It is a distinction that, Lonergan argues, can be readily observed in various areas of human intellectual activity. In the domain of teaching and learning there is a familiar experience of having to communicate the same insights or ‘say’ the ‘same thing’ in different ways, employing diverse media for different groups and different individuals. While it is true that the distinction between the conscious act of understanding (Lonergan calls ‘insight’) and the conscious activity of intelligence in forming concepts can be found in various areas of human cognition, Lonergan believes some quite clear instances can be identified if one examines such domains as mathematics and geometry. Thus he begins his work Insight with an analysis of the insights that need to occur if one is to understand the conceptual account Euclid gives of the nature of circularity, that is, the definition of a circle as ‘a series of coplanar points equidistant from the centre.’ One can parrot this definition, understanding something of the concepts involved perhaps (concepts such as ‘point’ and ‘line’), without having the insights into the data that are required in order to understand how the definition arises. However, such insights can arise if one pursues the thought experiment (or thought plus paper and pencil experiment) of understanding how, say, the lines from a centre must be equidistant for there to be an instance of circularity. If the radiating lines are not equal in length then one will not have an even curve. The wheel, so to speak, will have bumps on its surface as the unequal radiating spokes create an undulating rim. The grasping of the impossibility of circularity if the lines radiating from a given centre are not equidistant is one of the insights that is expressed in the formulation of Euclid’s definition. But that insight is had via the thought experiment, or experiment with paper and pencil, as one

From Epistemology to Metaphysics

29

imagines the figure now with unequal lines and now with equal lines radiating from the centre point. It is through conscious insights into the data of the diagrams that one grasps the necessity of circularity in the shape, if the lines radiating from the centre are all equal in length. But discerning the difference between understanding concepts and insight is tricky. For one thing, as Lonergan, points out, When we express the content of the insight, we are already using concepts. When I say that in the insight we grasp the necessity of this curve being round ... I am already using words, and behind my words are judgments and concepts. So I am using this further part in knowledge to give an account of some prior part in which there are not yet concepts, judgments, or words. I described that earlier part by using the word “necessity.”6 One of Lonergan’s interests has been the way the history of mathematics and, in particular, geometry manifests this distinction between insight and conception. He argues that while the Euclidean system strove to formulate in conceptual, axiomatic form the insights necessary and sufficient for an adequate geometrical system, later geometers came to the realization that insights were involved that had not been formulated. Such insights had been ‘seen,’ understood, in diagrammatic articulations but had not been expressed in axioms or concepts. In fact, Lonergan argues, the contemporary concern with surveyability in mathematics and symbolic logic arises in part from this situation. Symbolically articulated recursive schemes in mathematics and logic are an attempt to express in clear conceptual form the insights involved. It was the ‘casual’ insights of previous generations of geometers, for instance, that led to errors such as the assumption of infinite validity in the parallel postulate. The postulate only works if the imaginable strip of space-time, into which insights are had concerning extension of parallel lines, does continue indefinitely in the same fashion. And the postulate extrapolates in an invalid way from the imagined instance because in casual, unformulated insights one assumes things will continue in that way. But, in fact, one does not show this is so. Rather, if space becomes narrower or roomier as we continue then non-Euclidean geometries are possible. In general what Lonergan is referring to with this distinction is what Wittgenstein seems to have indicated by his distinction between ‘saying’ and ‘showing,’ and John Searle, in his work on intentionality, has deployed this Wittgensteinian distinction in rather the same way as Lonergan.7 When we say what we mean we conceptualize and give verbal expression to our insights. When we do not do this our conscious act of understanding may only be shown by our actions or behaviour. In the life and work of the artisan

30

Method in Metaphysics

and artist this distinction is also well illustrated. The skilled worker has acquired mastery and familiarity over a certain domain of technical expertise. In passing this on to an apprentice he may do more by showing his understanding than by verbally explaining it, and usually the training of the apprentice will involve both ways of communication. It is in manuals or ‘how to’ textbooks and cookery books that those with the acquired skills and intellectual dispositions in a given area attempt to conceptually formulate what they may otherwise only show. The artist and composer also express their creative insights in auditory and plastic mediums and ‘show’ rather than ‘say’ what they understand. Lonergan draws attention to this when he writes: An artist has insights, but he does not express them in general formulae, in terms of R1, R2 and S. He does not express them in any abstract terms, where ‘abstract’ refers to scientific or philosophic terms. He expresses himself in poetry, in painting, in the plastic and visual arts, and in other manners. Artistic expression does not move off into this abstract field of general formulation. The artist gives concrete expression to the insight into particular situations or data. In short, I think there is an insight in art, but the artist does not attempt this type of conception. The artist’s expression of his insight is his work of art, whatever the work of art may be.8 Works of musical appreciation or analysis meet with our approval or rejection insofar as they appear to express correctly or fail to express in conceptual form something of what we have understood in the aesthetic creation. I would also maintain that any parent who has observed small children before they have acquired skills of verbal articulation, and as they struggle to take their first steps in doing so, will acknowledge that they nevertheless enjoy a quite rich life of preconceptual insights. Michael Dummett is another philosopher who, in more recent work, has become increasingly preoccupied with the variety of insight manifest in human language and behaviour.9 Dummett believes important philosophical lessons are to be learned from the fact that some types of human understanding are both practical and theoretical in nature and are of this ‘showing’ rather than ‘saying’ kind. He illustrates this with the image of someone who has learned to do a dance. When asked to explain how one does this dance they will do so via a combination of actions and words.10 It is, perhaps, important to stress that insights and conceptual formulations are equally conscious acts of understanding. When I struggle to express a reply in response to a question someone has asked, and a third party succeeds in saying what I know ‘I really wanted to say,’ my frustration is conscious not unconscious! Further insights, acts of understanding,

From Epistemology to Metaphysics

31

occur as I attempt to express my insights in concepts. It might also be helpful to observe at this point that by ‘concept’ is meant both ‘descriptive,’ everyday language concepts, and ‘explanatory’ concepts. In later chapters I will have more to say on the relation between these two types in discussion of metaphysical issues arising from the relationship between common-sense understanding and scientific and scholarly understanding. What in general, however, is meant by our conscious operations of level two is that we need to attempt to be as intelligent as we can in coming up with ideas, concepts, theories to answer the question ‘What is it?’ concerning the data. So whether I am attempting to know why a friend is acting in such and such a way, or whether I am attempting to understand a chemical reaction in the laboratory, or to account for an object unearthed in an archaeological dig I am following the same ‘method’ and asking and attempting to give an answer to the question ‘What is it?’ regarding the data. The Level of Judgment However, what I am after in such questioning is clearly not merely an idea or concept, however entertaining or aesthetically satisfying. I am, rather, after the truth. The further question arises, ‘Is my idea, concept, theory correct?’ and here we move to the third level of the process of coming to know, the level of judgment. It is Lonergan’s contention that if the naive realist and empiricist fail to appreciate the full importance of the conceptual level, the second level, of coming to know, as the idealist and relativist would insist, the latter types of philosopher fail to appreciate the full significance of this third level. This will be explained more fully when we come to examine the epistemological issues surrounding objectivity. As the history of science and scholarship demonstrates so vividly, brilliant theories are no substitute for correct answers, and it is the latter that are sought as the former are rejected as incompatible with, or unsubstantiated by, the evidence. The third level of coming to know, characterized by Lonergan as the level of judgment, involves such conscious mental activity as gathering evidence, weighing and assessing the evidence, and making judgments. Such judgments may be definite (quite rare) or probable. Or one may be involved, on this level, in saying that the issue needs further clarification or that there is a lack of evidence for judgment. Lonergan illustrates something of what is involved in the process of making a reasoned judgment in a parable about a man who comes home to find windows in his house broken and smoke in the rooms. The limited, initial judgment of this person in the situation may be simply ‘something has happened.’ In this judgment insights into both the similarity and dif-

32

Method in Metaphysics

ference in two sets of data are involved. The person understands the two sets of data as data on the one set of circumstances ‘my home,’ and also has the insight regarding differences between the sets of data. Things are not the same now as they were this morning. Such insights are involved in the minimal judgment ‘something has happened.’11 In the conscious, reasonable process of making a judgment we grasp the combination of a conditioned, a link between the conditioned and its conditions, and the fulfilment of the conditions given in the data. We return to data, then, as that in which is to be grasped the fulfilling conditions: it is the evidence for an affirmative or negative judgment concerning the truth of the proposition. Lonergan’s analysis of judgment stresses its intellectual nature. Empiricist or perceptualist accounts of judgment often focus upon two aspects: 1) the phenomenon of the appearance of an object within the framework of our space-time visual field; and 2) the linking of the subject and predicate in judgment by the copula verb ‘is.’ So in answer to the question as to whether there is any butter on the toast we may say, ‘Yes there is’ or we may say, ‘The butter is hard.’ Such accounts may even suggest that b) is because of a), but often enough the because is left unanalysed. This is also the case with positions that in no way wish to be empiricist but that do not offer very much more. For Lonergan the process of trying to establish whether or not the conditions of a proposition are fulfilled is a properly intellectual activity in which we consciously attempt to establish whether the evidence is in, and whether or not there is sufficient reason to affirm the proposition in a judgment. The ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ of judgment is an intellectual response to a conscious question asked as to the status of the hypothesis, theory, or conceptual package under scrutiny. I may be standing in a room gazing absentmindedly at a wall that is covered with sports trophies and memorabilia. When I step out of the room and someone asks me whether or not there was a cricket bat hanging on the wall I may not be able to answer either way, although there is no doubt I was surveying all the relevant data. The objects appeared in my space-time perceptual framework, but this does not mean that the requisite judgment just popped into my head. On the other hand, the police detective may look inquisitively at the same cricket bat hanging on the wall that I indeed saw, but given the line of questioning which is in his mind at the time he arrives at the judgment that the marks on the bat are consistent with the marks on a victim of a murder he is currently investigating. He grasps the sufficiency of the evidence to judge that this is potentially the murder weapon, and perhaps further investigation in the police laboratory furnishes evidence for a later judgment that it is highly probable that the bat was the weapon employed in the murder. He has interrogated

From Epistemology to Metaphysics

33

the data in a way I did not when gazing at it thinking of something else, and he has intellectually grasped that the sensate data is evidence for a judgment of a certain kind. Distinguishing between the properly intellectual activity of asking and answering a question as to the real existence or truth of x (and seeking sufficient reason for judgment), on the one hand, and the perceptual and emotive orientation we may have to a sensed object, on the other, is not an easy task. In fact Lonergan argues that the root of perceptualist, empiricist, and intuitionist epistemologies lies in their inability properly and adequately to make the necessary distinctions. His insistence upon a virtual ‘philosophical therapy’ to effect a move from such naive realism to a critical realism reminds one of Wittgenstein’s call for philosophical therapy. It is the case that our conscious flow, our stream of consciousness, shares a good deal with that of the higher animals. Thus like them in perception we do not register objects on some passive screen, but rather we are already emotively and psychically oriented to various objects as objects of desire or aversion – the human infant instinctively reaches out for mother’s breast. A fundamental philosophical task, then, is to differentiate between this kind of animal objectivity, or extroversion, and the rational and intellectual objectivity that results from asking and answering questions that seek justifying reasons for an affirmation or negation. A further point to make in this regard is that clearly as we grow and develop we do not always proceed in a ponderous manner through the three stages of experience, understanding, and judgment to knowledge. For one thing we share with animals a spontaneous reaction to objects, and for another our truly rational, intellectual knowledge can become habitual as we develop. So, as a child the learning process of acquiring the know-how to tie my shoelaces was a lengthy one, but now, as long as I am able to get down that far, the process proceeds rapidly. We acquire such familiarity and mastery in various areas of life, and our insights and judgments pertinent to these areas of expertise flow in an habitual manner. If there is any doubt that the relevant conditions are fulfilled, then a probable judgment will be the result. In such a case we may think that the terms or concepts up for judgment are unclear or need further specification and so for the time being we give a measured assent. It may be the case, on the other hand, that there is some evidence for a judgment ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ but this is not conclusive. In the case of the sciences the network of interlocking theories involved in the elaboration of a particular theory will mean that the probability of the affirmative judgment will vary in strength according to how well established the background theories and the particular theory are. Lonergan is a realist as regards scientific theories, but like most realists in current philosophy of science he maintains

34

Method in Metaphysics

that our scientific theories are at best highly probable, and in principle they are capable of revision. Characteristics of the Cognitional Process Having provided a brief outline of Lonergan’s account of cognitional structure, the process of coming to know, it may be in order to offer some further observations concerning the position, by way of clarification, before moving on to the epistemological arguments concerning objective knowledge and how it is to be validated. First I would draw attention to the fact that Lonergan’s account situates this knowing structure within the larger whole that is our flow of conscious experiences. Lonergan refers to different ‘patterns of experience’ that may characterize the dominant concern of our flow of consciousness at any one time. The ‘intellectual pattern’ of experience is one among many, which include the ‘aesthetic pattern’ and the ‘dramatic pattern,’ in which everyday concerns are dominant. In understanding aright his account of the three levels of coming to know, then, one should see them as situated in this larger whole of consciousness. Thus, I may break off from intellectual enquiry on some topic to engage with some other concern in my conscious flow. When we speak of ‘levels’ we mean simply that each phase or level necessarily presupposes the prior level or levels. If I enter a room and say, ‘Yes, it’s true,’ and to the question, ‘What is true?’ I then respond, ‘Well, it is just true,’ I enter the wonderland of Alice. Clearly judgments are about what I have understood, and my insights are about the data which they regard. The higher levels of the process depend upon the lower levels. The second observation I would make is that, if I can verify in the data that is my conscious experience that I do come to know through the exercise of mental operations of attending to sensation, having insights, and making judgments, I can verify not only that these are distinct acts, but that they are related in one conscious unity, which is myself. For an act of judging is quite different from a sensation. Yet I can verify that in my conscious experience the diverse acts are consciously related; that is, I am aware of my judgment being about an insight, or concept, and I am aware that the concept is about some data I have also experienced. I am conscious not only of the diversity of acts but also of their unity within consciousness. Nor is this unity something static, or inert. I am aware that sometimes with considerable effort I have to move myself to be attentive to the data, try to be as intelligent as I can in coming up with an explanation for it, and try to be reasonable, rather than rash or indecisive, in judging as to the veracity of my account. It is also important to emphasise in this chapter a key distinction Lonergan makes between self-consciousness, on the one hand,

From Epistemology to Metaphysics

35

and self-knowledge, on the other. It appears that philosophers often fail to make the appropriate distinctions in this area. Lonergan’s position is that self-consciousness or self-awareness may be verified in the data of one’s own conscious activity, which includes the conscious intentional acts on the three levels of coming to know. But the crucial point is that this verified account itself, the one Lonergan is presenting in outlining cognitional structure, is an instance of self-knowledge, a report concerning self-consciousness. The blunder, which gives rise to many pseudoproblems, is to take the prior experience of self-consciousness as self-knowledge. In consciousness or awareness I am conscious not only of an object, a tree, say, in my purview, but also of my attitude to the object. I may be asking a question about the tree, or simply gazing at it thinking of something else, or judging as to its age or beauty. If a friend approaches me and asks what I was doing, I can not only respond that I was looking at the tree, but also inform my friend concerning my conscious attitude towards it. If I were not conscious of my self as well as of ‘tree’ I could not do this. This can cause problems of apparent regress if consciousness is regarded as some kind of gazing at myself (looking at my looking at my looking …). However, if one simply refuses to accept that this is the way to understand consciousness and points to the simple facts of my quotidian experience, that I am concomitantly aware both of object and of my attitude towards the object, the issue is settled. Self-knowledge or self-appropriation is, then, as Lonergan remarks, not a matter of looking back into yourself, because it is not what you look at but the looking that counts. But it is not just the looking; it is not being entirely absorbed in the object; rather, it is adverting to the fact that, when you are absorbed in the object, you are also present to yourself. If you were not, it would not count. If there were no one there to see, there would be nothing present to the seer. That to whom other things are present, that which must be present to itself for other things to be present to it, is not merely there. He or she is intelligent, rational, rationally self-conscious.12 Self-knowledge, strictly speaking, however, is not this prior self-consciousness. Without that prior self-consciousness, self-knowledge or report on self-consciousness cannot arise. Such reporting can be a tricky business. The labours of poets, novelists, and psychologists may be involved in attempting to provide me with an accurate and detailed account of my flow of consciousness, and in everyday experience I can find it difficult to move from being involved in a state in which my awareness is teeming with different concerns and feelings to giving a detailed account of this to someone

36

Method in Metaphysics

who says to me, ‘a penny for your thoughts.’ I think such a distinction can make sense of a notion of Wittgenstein’s, that is, philosophical reflection can help us realize ‘something we have always known.’ Clearly this cannot be meant literally, since if we had already ‘known’ such and such, analysis would not be required to bring it to our attention. But if we mean here ‘something of which we have always been aware,’ then the idea does make sense. Rendering that of which we are aware explicit in self-knowledge may need some analytical labour. Philosophers of logic labour to express in some adequately formalized way principles such as non-contradiction, and there is debate over the scope of principles such as excluded middle. But such labours and debates concern aspects of my conscious activity since childhood: I knew, when a child, that there cannot both be and not be a glass of milk in the fridge. And debates over issues of formalization inevitably make reference to what is already ‘intuitively grasped’ in consciousness; they have to do with the adequacy of attempts to express in formal terms prior intelligent, conscious exigencies of the mind. If we take the proposition ‘I am a knower’ as an expression that sums up what Lonergan has to say of the three levels of coming to know, then we can see that in the verification of this proposition the threefold process is applied to itself. Since this is so, we can also observe that the notion of judgment (as a rational grasp that the conditions of a given proposition are fulfilled in the data) is instantiated in the process of verifying cognitional structure itself. As Lonergan observes, Hence in the self-affirmation of the knower the conditioned is the statement ‘I am a knower.’ The link between the conditioned and its conditions is cast in the proposition ‘I am a knower if I am a unity performing certain kinds of acts.’ The conditions as formulated are the unity – identity – whole to be grasped in data as individual and the kinds of acts to be grasped in data as similar. But the fulfilment of the conditions in consciousness is to be had by reverting from such formulations to the more rudimentary state of the formulated, where there is no formulation but merely experience.13 Finally, I will briefly mention the way Lonergan approaches the issue of mental acts and language. He stresses the intimate ‘bond’ between thought and language and maintains that it is in linguistic expression that human meaning is most accessible.14 In the work Insight his approach to the analysis of intentional conscious activity is through an investigation of the linguistic expressions of the domains of common sense, mathematics and science.15 On the other hand, Lonergan sees little value in the type of linguistic analysis that would banish mental acts, and one of the funda-

From Epistemology to Metaphysics

37

mental oversights he detects in this kind of philosophy regards a lack of sensitivity to the facts of linguistic change and creativity.16 Most of the meanings in language are common meanings, but this should not lead us to overlook original meanings that subsequently become common usage. Such meanings are generated in discoveries in, say, science, mathematics, literary theory, and historiography through the intelligent and reasonable labours of individuals engaged in communal effort in those domains. The development of language, then, goes forward, in part at least, because of new meanings generated in the growth of knowledge and theory about the world. A static, ahistorical analysis of synchronic segments of communal meaning may fail to pay sufficient attention to such fairly obvious facts that attest to the crucial role of insight in linguistic change.17 Seldom is it the case that the meanings in my everyday life are concepts that I have originated through some intellectual discovery or invention of neologisms. But the experiences of consciously understanding a word or phrase or, on the other hand, not understanding what some linguistic expression means are familiar ones to me. And while the concepts I use in my everyday thought are very rarely due to my own invention, as I move around my everyday surroundings there is always innovation in my conscious propositional attitudes, within which those consciously understood concepts play their role. For example, I make judgments about whether x or y are here or there or absent, and this is a conscious intellectual activity of my own doing, not that of all my partners in a linguistic community. I make judgments as to whether such and such is the case in my everyday environment, and as Lonergan points out such judgments are also to be included in understanding linguistic meaning. In Lonergan’s terms they are ‘full acts of meaning.’18 Michael Dummett holds that what distinguishes analytical philosophy from other philosophical ways, and what constitutes its strength, is its insistence on language as the point of departure for philosophical investigation.19 However, as I have observed in the previous chapter, Dummett is insistent upon the fact that to understand language aright we must understand it as the expression of intelligent language users. Thus, for Dummett, investigation of language is the starting point for an investigation of human consciousness. If this is so, then I do not see any real disagreement between Lonergan’s position and this type of linguistic analysis. Dummett contrasts his view with that of ‘philosophers of thought,’ as he characterizes them, like Gareth Evans and Christopher Peacocke. While it is not entirely clear to me exactly what Dummett objects to in these philosophers’ approach to mind, it would appear that his objections are part of a general position that one cannot begin to investigate thought by unmediated access to thought. It is also important to note Dummett’s remarks in his Gifford lectures concerning the ‘mysterious processes’ of

38

Method in Metaphysics

conceptual development, and the way development of knowledge and language go together.20 As Dummett makes clear, such change and development in linguistically expressed concepts is no mere nominalist renaming of concepts already in our possession, but is rather a phenomenon that witnesses to our ability to change and develop concepts in the course of the development of our knowledge. Dummett, therefore, shares Lonergan’s concern that we come to understand the dynamic, historical development of language and thought. It is this phenomenon that Lonergan endeavours to clarify in light of his position on a basic method, which involves our cognitional operations on the three levels of experience, understanding, and judgment. Such a ‘method’ yields cumulative results as the pattern of operations recurs – the wheel turns and turns again.21 We have seen in this section how Lonergan’s analysis of conscious mental activities is quite compatible with a viewpoint that insists upon the fundamental importance of linguistic expression. In the section of this chapter to follow we will proceed to examine how Lonergan’s position issues in a critical realist account of objective knowledge. Such an account is presented in a positive form, but it can also be defended and validated through antisceptical arguments. This critical realist viewpoint is then, in turn, the basis of the core position on metaphysics at the centre of Lonergan’s methodical approach to metaphysics. The basic features of that metaphysical method will be examined in the chapter to follow, and its implications will unfold in the successive chapters of the book. Critical Realist Epistemology Lonergan’s critical realist epistemology is developed as a response to his own question concerning the conscious cognitional acts, occurring on three levels, which were described above: ‘Why is doing that knowing?’ In other words, ‘Why does the process involving the three related levels of experience, understanding, and judgment lead to objective knowledge, knowledge of reality?’ The answer to this question comes in the form of an invitation to verify that the acts on the three levels do in fact occur as specified, and to verify that such verification is itself an instance of objective knowledge of reality. If one verifies that the latter is the case, then one may go on to analyse, in this paradigm instance, what is involved in objective knowledge and in definitive judgments concerning reality, and probable judgments concerning reality. The way to knowledge of reality, to objective knowledge, is through attention to the data of experience (be that sensation or consciousness itself), questioning that experience and gaining insight as a result of questioning, and judgment as to whether or not our insights correspond with

From Epistemology to Metaphysics

39

reality. Such a process is operative in simple everyday cases. Two friends walk down a foggy street. They share similar experiences of the morning cold and the shrouded objects before them. A sudden crash in the distance stimulates questions on their part as to what is going on further down the road. One friend comes up with a hypothesis in terms of a car hitting a building; his companion prefers the idea that a lorry has shed its load. Eventually sufficient evidence comes to light, as they move towards the part of the road where the incident has occurred, to reach a clear judgment on the matter: the second hypothesis turns out to be correct. This process, however, is also operative in scientific inquiry, in historical and interpretative inquiry, and in philosophical investigation. We take it that when Kant and Hegel wrote about the human mind and its scope and limitations they did not produce the works we read in order simply to enjoy the aesthetic aspect of the German language. Rather, we take it that they were making truth claims about human knowing and that they intended the judgments they made to provide true knowledge of some aspects of reality. Lonergan’s contention is that his positions on cognitional structure, and on our ability to know reality through the implementation of this structure, are instances of self-supporting positions, while the attempt to deny such positions would fall into the ‘self-destructive’ category.22 Although he holds that the outline of cognitional structure may be further developed, he maintains that it cannot be revised without incoherence since we will discover that we are employing the very operations themselves in our denial that we do so. On the other hand, the position may be described as ‘self-supporting,’ since we can verify that we do employ the conscious operations on the three levels in trying to check whether our knowing does occur in this way. He writes: ‘Am I a knower? The answer yes is coherent, for if I am a knower I can know that fact. But the answer no is incoherent, for if I am not a knower, how could the question be raised and answered by me? No less, the hedging answer ‘I do not know’ is incoherent. For if I know that I do not know, then I am a knower; and if I do not know that I do not know, then I should not answer.’23 Furthermore, the general position on objectivity can be argued for in the same way. We can observe that in coming to know how we know we arrive at objective judgments about a part of reality, to wit our own mental operations. On the other hand, if we deny that we can come to know what is truly the case, we end in incoherence, for if the judgment in this case is uttered as a truth claim, it claims to know as objectively the case that we do not reach objective knowledge of reality. In examining Lonergan’s account concerning our operations on the levels of experience, understanding, and judgment we will be attending to

40

Method in Metaphysics

the data, the data of the words on the page, or as communicated in some other mode, and to the data which is our own conscious experience to which his account draws our attention. We will be attempting to understand what he means, attempting to gain insight into the questions involved and to formulate such insights, and we will be attempting to make some judgment as to the veracity, truth or falsity, probability, of his claims. However, in doing so we will have in the data of our conscious experience the evidence necessary and sufficient for an affirmative judgment concerning the basic outline of cognitional processes offered. In addition, we will be aware that our question concerning the account and our answer to our question refer to ‘what is truly the case’; they refer to an aspect of reality we name the human mind and its capacities. On the other hand, the denial of the position, or of elements within it, will involve the selfdestructive incoherence of judging that one does not judge, questioning and doubting whether one questions and doubts, and, with regard to the position on objectivity, claiming it is really the case that one’s mental operations do not come to know what is really the case. Lonergan, of course, stands within a long tradition of philosophical use of such ‘self-referential’ or ‘transcendental arguments.’ Long before Descartes’ endeavours in the field, Aquinas, in such works as De Veritate, had reiterated Aristotle’s point that we can know our own knowing and understand our own acts of understanding, and he added that such knowledge is definitive, certain.24 One of a number of significant differences between Descartes and Aquinas, whom Lonergan follows, is, however, in the area of judgment concerning the truth. When Descartes has secured his knowledge of the self in the Cogito argument, he attempts to build a bridge to outside reality via an argument for the existence and nature of God, making an attempt to traverse the epistemological bridge that many think dubious. Part of the problem is that all Descartes can offer us in terms of criteria for a judgment that succeeds in giving us knowledge of objective reality is the ‘clarity and distinctness’ of the idea in question. We are, on his view, to inquire whether the idea compares favourably with the clarity and distinctness of the Cogito idea, which is indubitable. The problem is that Descartes has failed to appreciate the nature of the judgments he has made in putting forward the Cogito argument, and has presented a position on which knowledge is had by some kind of direct intuition. What he has missed is that I come to know that I know by grasping that the evidence for the judgment ‘I know’ is found in the data of my own conscious activities.25 In the case of my own conscious, intentional acts, on the three levels of coming to know, then, Lonergan holds that I can come to know reality in a definitive way. In terms of the analysis of judgment briefly mentioned above, I know that the conditions are fulfilled, the evidence is in, for such

From Epistemology to Metaphysics

41

judgments regard operations in my own consciousness. These judgments are invulnerable, since to deny that sufficient evidence is there is at once to have before me in consciousness such sufficient evidence. When, on the other hand, I do not grasp that the conditions for a judgment are definitively fulfilled in this way, I may reasonably make a probable judgment concerning reality. Such judgments, with varying degrees of probability attached, occur in the sciences. They also occur in common-sense experience, pace Moore’s claims that it is these judgments that are certain. It is common experience that quite elaborate practical jokes can be played on people and they succeed insofar as they make people believe that what is normal is still occurring, when the joke resides in the fact that it is not. In such cases it is possible to doubt that the door before me is my front door, although it is reasonable to judge that it is highly unlikely that it is not – I know elaborate hoaxes, tricks of the CIA and so forth, are possible. In the case of my own conscious acts such hoaxes are not possible. For, as Descartes saw, the trickster or, in current fantasy, the supercomputer of the brain in the vat, needs to play tricks on me and on my conscious processes.26 Knowledge of Reality Is Not Mere Looking Lonergan, as mentioned above, was a fierce critic of the intuitionist, naive realist, empiricist myth of ‘knowing as looking’ some decades before Richard Rorty began to descant on the deformities of representationalism. On this Lonergan is insistent: Knowing can be conceived as intrinsically or essentially a matter of confrontation, of taking a look, seeing what is there, intuition. Since knowing, on this account, is what comes from the look, anything that comes from the subject is not knowing at all: and if it comes from the subject, that just means it is not knowing. Knowing is what is given in the look, and what is known is what is out there to be looked at and seen when one looks. One may go further and distinguish between sensible looks (looks through one’s senses) and spiritual looks (looks with one’s intellect, interior and spiritual x-rays that penetrate the essence of things and see the essence that is there).27 Like Rorty and others28 Lonergan is adamant that idealism, relativism, and scepticism play off naive realism in a dialectical to and fro that characterizes not only philosophy in the West but, it would seem, in Eastern traditions also. However, the way beyond this impasse is not to declare objective knowledge a chimera, as some thinkers believe. It is to find other

42

Method in Metaphysics

resources in the tradition, such as those offered by Aristotle and Aquinas for instance, and to elaborate a critical realism that may be validated in the manner outlined above. The perennial objection to objectivity in knowledge is that we cannot get outside ourselves to see if what we think we know does truly correspond with what is ‘out there.’ The alternatives offered include Kantian and Hegelian idealism or social constructivist accounts. But such positions are still parasitic upon the myth of knowing as looking. For Aquinas truth is known not in sensation, but in correct judgment, which naturally makes use of sensation. When the implications of such a view are sufficiently spelled out, as Lonergan attempts to do, one will grasp that the correspondence view of truth is validated, not by some unmediated looking or intuition into reality, be that inner or outer reality, but by appreciating that reality is what is known through experience, understanding, and judgment. If that is so, then all such idealisms and subjectivist views are also seen to be incoherent, for they claim to know that the theories they have put forward are true of reality, of what is the case. How do I know that I am not God, that I know everything about everything in an infallible way? The response seems obvious. The idea of my being God is ridiculous, since there are myriad questions I can ask but cannot answer, and I do not know whether some of the questions make sense. This is a matter of intelligent grasp and reasonable affirmation concerning the truth, concerning the reality of my many limitations. If it is true that I am limited in so many ways, then this is known as purportedly correct knowledge of reality. To claim to have correct knowledge that all I know is appearance is to claim to know something true of reality. Kant, Hegel, and others make many such judgments, truth claims, concerning how my consciousness operates and how it cannot do such and such. But knowledge of what x cannot do purports to be true knowledge of how things are; otherwise it does not qualify as a contribution to a debate about what is the case concerning mind. For all its ingenuity and subtlety the Kantian position ends in the incoherence of claiming, ‘It is truly the case that I cannot know what is truly the case.’29 Regarding our ability to come to know the fact that we can know objective reality, Lonergan observes: As I might not be, as I might be other than I am, so my knowing might not be and it might be other than it is. The ultimate basis of our knowing is not necessity but contingent fact, and the fact is established, not prior to our engagement in knowing, but simultaneously with it. The sceptic, then, is not involved in a conflict with absolute necessity. He might not be; he might not be a knower. Contradiction arises when he utilizes cognitional process to deny it.30

From Epistemology to Metaphysics

43

Now if one grants that the Kantian position ends in such an impasse this may only serve to confirm an idea that ‘self-referential’ arguments, while useful, can only serve as ‘dead end’ signposts. The question may be, ‘But where do we go from here?’ Understanding Lonergan’s position aright is a matter of understanding how precisely one got to this point, of demonstrating the incoherence of a position such as Kant’s, and, therefore, how one might proceed to elaborate further positive philosophical positions. One sees the incoherence of such a position when one attends to the conscious act of judgment ‘I cannot know what is so,’ and notices that this act contradicts the explicit intention of the person putting forward the position. There are various kinds of self-referential argument and not all of them concern the precise issue Lonergan is concerned with in outlining the way cognitional structure is to be verified in conscious experience itself. However, when one does come across instances, in the literature of this kind, of transcendental argument being touched upon invariably the treatment is insufficient. Normally, the discussion centres on the fact that one has here propositions that stand in a relationship of logical incongruity.31 Rather, what needs to be highlighted is the fact that when, say, someone denies that ‘one can know objective reality’ they are involved in a self-destructive position because there truly is a conscious act that is an act of judgment at variance with what they are claiming. In other words, if one attends to the act and realizes the incoherence, one at once has a way of validating objective knowledge. It is not simply knowledge that this proposition will not work since it is incoherent. One only knows the incoherence if one knows that here is really and truly an instance of a certain kind of conscious mental act. Lonergan’s position, then, shows that a correct analysis of these types of argument leads not only to an acknowledgement of ‘what I cannot say’ but in so doing leads to an acknowledgement of what I must affirm, that I can know instances of objective reality, namely my own conscious acts. There is a common core to arguments against the type of foundational exercise attempted by Descartes. The private language argument much discussed in analytical circles in the second half of the twentieth century is only one of a number of philosophical objections to the idea that one can achieve epistemic certainty via some form of direct, intuitive contact with the self.32 The common objection running through these arguments is that we do not have unmediated access to our thought or to our conscious selves. This pretended unmediated access conceals within it our conceptual and linguistic dependency on something other than ourselves, on an external community (according to some views). From what was said above concerning Lonergan’s approach to knowledge of mental acts via a study of their manifestation in the languages of science, mathematics, scholar-

44

Method in Metaphysics

ship, and ordinary language, one can understand that Lonergan, following Aquinas, does not believe in such direct, intuitive access to thought or to the conscious self. However, this does not mean that nothing similar to Descartes Cogito argument can work. Confusion is caused in this area by mistaken notions of introspection allied to confusions arising from the conflation of self-consciousness with self-knowledge. As was stressed above, one needs to distinguish knowledge of the conscious self from self-awareness. The former is the reporting, itemizing, of what occurs in the latter, and the latter makes such reporting possible, for if I were not aware of my conscious states I could not check a report of them as true or false. Further, the notion of introspection as a ‘quasi-literal’ looking within, the kind of notion Hume ridiculed in his critique of Descartes’ attempts, is also to be rejected. The process of coming to know myself as a knower is, rather, a matter of noticing and attending to my conscious acts and to their relation one with another. This is the kind of activity Hume himself went in for, as is clear from his invitations to his readers to attend to such data as their mental anticipations concerning cause and effect, in order to verify his claim that they do not experience an intuitive link between phenomena in the way they do in mathematical intuitions. Antiprivate language arguments are on the right track when they insist on the mediate nature of knowledge about the self and its acts. They are erroneous when they go on to deny that, because of this dependency, there can be no certain knowledge in this area. To begin with, they do not really achieve what their proponents sometimes believe they do: the vindication of an objectivity claim concerning a wider linguistic world outside myself. It is well within the powers of Descartes’ evil genius, or of the Matrix computer to which is attached a deluded brain, to feign the appearance of such an external community as the (partial) source of the concepts I employ. On the critical realist position defended here I can have definite knowledge that I do experience the various acts on the three levels of coming to know. As to the ‘external sources’ that contribute to the formation of my words and concepts, I can make reasonable probable judgments as to their reality, since I have no evidence to the contrary. On the other hand, because I can make reasonable affirmations as to the mediated nature of my knowledge of my conscious acts, mediated via words and concepts, this does not mean that I cannot make a definite judgment that such acts occur. To deny that they occur is to be involved in the incoherence of denying acts that I can verify as involved in the process of denying that I am involved in such acts. Might some of the words I employ in this attempt at self-knowledge not be employed as in standard English? Perhaps, that is so. But my self-knowledge is a matter of asking whether an x is so and ver-

From Epistemology to Metaphysics

45

ifying the same in my conscious experience. The concept, x, I am trying to verify is given a meaning by me in understanding it. Therefore I may arrive at correct knowledge concerning myself, while at the same time being mistaken about normal English usage.33 Critical realism would also be at variance with a view expounded by fallibilists. Philosophers such as Popper argue for a view of rational progress relying on knowledge that is only ever at best probable.34 Of course, this has a good deal of plausibility to it. I have written above that on the view defended here scientific judgments are at best highly probable, and even the judgments of common sense do not reach certainty, for there are tricks and illusions. However, the position has also been defended that there are certain, definitive judgments, and some of the paradigm cases of these are found in self-knowledge. It is relative to such definitive cases of judgments, in which the conditions are known to be given, the evidence is known to be in, in a definitive way, that one can go on to clarify probable judgments as not enjoying such vulnerability but approximating to it. Fallibilist attempts, however, fail to satisfy the demands of the sceptics, as is witnessed by the assaults of instrumentalists and others on Popper’s position in the philosophy of science. Such sceptics question how we can know that science is on the road of progress to the goal of truth if, as Popper maintains, we never know or have never encountered this chimera. The fallibilist may mount a defence saying that the evidence for his or her position is probable, that our intuitions and experiences tend to confirm it. But the sceptic may be unconvinced. How do we know that any of the elements that feature in the fallibilist argument for probable judgments are themselves probably the case? We seem to be set on an infinite regress.35 The response of the critical realist to this is that we do know some truths definitely, notably those about our own cognitional acts and capacities. The fallibilist objection to this is no different from that of the idealist and Kantian mentioned above. To know that an item of knowledge is not certain but probable is to know this with certainty. It is not reasonable to say that one does not know if one is certain or not about something. As Socrates was well aware, knowledge that one does not know is definitive knowledge. The notion of ‘objectivity’ suggests not only objective knowledge of the reality that is the subject, the knower, but also additional knowledge that informs one about other aspects, parts of reality other than oneself, the knower. Thus, as Lonergan points out, such objectivity would distinguish between, say, A, B, and C, where A is the reality that is the knower and B and C are other realities distinct from the knower. The important point to grasp is that just as the knower was known by using intelligence and reason to come to know that part of reality that is oneself the knower, so intelli-

46

Method in Metaphysics

gence and reason are similarly employed to identify other distinct realities. So I have good evidence to say that the computer keyboard before me as I write is a reality, and that it is really distinct from me, in a way my hands are not (for one thing I am able to exercise voluntary control over the latter in a way I cannot over the former). Finally, objections to the notion of objective knowledge are sometimes raised because our judgments are about not only ‘reality’ but the truths of mathematics and logic; if we make ‘true’ judgments in all these cases what distinguishes our judgments about ‘the world’ from these other purportedly true judgments? On the basis of the position argued for in this chapter one can respond to this by pointing out that judgments about reality are those that have as evidence data that are of sense or of consciousness (my own conscious mental activity). On the other hand, judgments in mathematics and logic have as their aim the testing of insights in these realms for coherence and rigour. Finally, the very claim that all judgments are merely logical or mathematical or are not about a reality as different from these is an incoherent one, for it purports to state truths about conscious acts that occur in reality (acts we name judgments). The truth or falsity of this claim can only be checked by us if we make reference to real conscious acts such as judgments of the various types. I am aware that my prior judgment, say, was a logical judgment, not a mathematical one. The critical realist position, then, presents a positive philosophical account of some basic features of the knowing process and argues that objective knowledge of reality is within our grasp. This knowledge comes about in the way specified and not via some empiricist or representationalist shortcut. The position on objective knowing, it has been argued, cannot be gainsaid since this leads to the incoherence of knowing that one does not know. Furthermore, understanding that this is not an option at once involves positive knowledge of reality. One knows that the judgment ‘I cannot know’ is incoherent because one truly knows that a putative act of judgment about the truth occurs in one’s consciousness if one tries to make this claim. In the following section we will examine an example of epistemological debate from recent philosophy in order to highlight the way the options under consideration in that debate contrast with the critical realist stance examined so far. Critical Realism II: Comparison and Contrast Derrida’s Critique of Husserl Towards the end of his philosophical career Derrida drew attention to the fact that his encounter with Husserl’s philosophy remained a crucial ingre-

From Epistemology to Metaphysics

47

dient in his thinking. It is Husserl who taught him the ‘incompetence of empiricism.’ At the same time, his critique of Husserl’s attempt to ground objective knowledge provides the starting point for Derrida’s subsequent deconstructive reading of the philosophical tradition.36 Derrida’s attitude to Husserl, then, is akin to William James’s view of Hegel, or the later Wittgenstein’s view of his own earlier, Tractarian philosophy: if the earlier position or thinker did not succeed in formulating a viable philosophy then the whole project of philosophy is suspect. In the case of Derrida’s position on Husserl the idea is that if the latter thinker failed in his attempt to justify objective knowledge of reality then it cannot be done. Despite all that the better Derrida scholars have to say by way of rebutting popular misconceptions of Derrida’s postmodernism as a simple theatre of the absurd (and indeed in Derrida’s later philosophy indications of an interest in developing a Kantian morality of ‘universals’ show a number of criticisms to be misplaced), it remains a fact that the idea of objective knowledge is a chimera for Derrida. The deconstructive technique he employed to show the tensions and incoherencies in some of the work of major philosophers and of recent thinkers like Levinas and Foucault effectively brings out Derrida’s endorsement of Hegel’s insistence that ‘all negation is determinate’: certain positions are self-destructive, and one cannot escape philosophy (even in the way the later Wittgenstein thought, because one uses the language of philosophy to do so). It might seem then that Derrida adopts the same kind of approach to identifying self-referentially inconsistent positions as was adopted above in arguing for Lonergan’s cognitional structure. There are, of course, similarities between the two approaches in this regard, just as there are between Hegel’s and Lonergan’s critiques of positions in this vein.37 However, I hope my claim will not appear surprising, given what was said above concerning critical realism, that the ‘difference which makes a difference’ between Lonergan and Derrida is to be found in the nature and use of arguments employed to justify our capacity for objective knowledge. Taking Derrida at his word, then, I believe it useful, by way of comparison and contrast with Lonergan’s critical realism, to examine Derrida’s extended essay on Husserl, Speech and Phenomena. An initial criticism levelled at Husserl’s phenomenological project in this essay is that Husserl wishes to engage in a phenomenological quest for the facts of human conscious intuition freed from the baggage of all prior presuppositions of philosophy, metaphysics, science, culture, and language, which are bracketed or put to one side. Derrida asks whether this attempt to remove all such ‘presuppositions’ would not itself constitute a presupposition that determines the direction of the phenomenological method.38 On the contrary, Derrida suggests, the phenomenological approach of Husserl is simply one more moment in the long history of metaphysics. Indeed there appears to

48

Method in Metaphysics

be some tension in Husserl’s own thinking, since towards the end of his Cartesian Meditations he admits as much himself. Derrida’s critique of Husserl is very close to the type of antiprivate language arguments deployed by linguistic analysts against Cartesian and other forms of philosophy of thought. There is, of course, quite a ‘linguistic turn’ to Derrida’s thought insofar as he draws upon Saussure’s linguistics to elucidate the notion of the linguistic sign. That Husserl approaches the sign, or language, via rationality and thought, such that the sign should be the pure expression of inner thought, serves further to enhance Derrida’s suspicions with regard to his project. Husserl wishes to identify pure consciousness, pure intuition, as that which is clearly independent, ‘prior’ to its self-expression in its ‘object,’ which is the sign, or language. Yet it appears that this pure presence of consciousness to itself, which must be talked of and referred to by that consciousness via repeated use of objects, signs, exterior to it, cannot be independent in the way Husserl would have us believe. As Derrida writes: Since self-consciousness appears only in its relation to an object whose presence it can keep and repeat, it is never perfectly foreign or anterior to the possibility of language. Husserl no doubt did want to maintain ... an originally silent, ‘pre-expressive’ stratum of experience. But since the possibility of constituting ideal objects belongs to the essence of consciousness, and since these ideal objects are historical products, only appearing thanks to acts of creation or intending, the element of consciousness and the element of language will be more and more difficult to discuss. Will not their indiscernibility introduce nonpresence and difference (mediation, signs, reference back etc.) in the heart of self-presence?39 Husserl’s attempt to separate out the ‘worldly, accidental’ elements in language from its pure communication of truth meets with a cautious and sceptical reaction on Derrida’s part. Since thought is intrinsically bound up with language, can one achieve, and know that one has achieved, the desired ‘purity of expression,’ such that all that language suggests, communicates, insinuates comes to be directly under the control of the watchful eye of the consciousness, which is simply using it as a tool for pure communication? Derrida clearly believes that such doubts nagged Husserl as he attempted to clear the ground for an account of consciousness ‘in command’ of expression. The situation brings to mind Humpty Dumpty’s response to Alice, so dear to many a linguistic analyst, concerning linguistic meaning and how the speaker gives meaning to words: ‘Who is to be master? That’s the only question.’ One begins to see a stratagem essential

From Epistemology to Metaphysics

49

to Derrida’s deconstructive approach to philosophical texts emerge in these discussions of the shortcomings of Husserl’s position on thought and language; the writing of an author, of a philosopher, is a medium which controls as much as it is controlled. In the company of other critics of Husserl’s phenomenology Derrida proceeds to take aim at Husserl’s mystifying distinction between our empirical ego and a transcendental ego. Hugo Meynell has called the latter a ‘metaphysical extravagance,’ and it seems to have caused commentators on Husserl’s thought as much trouble as Dummett and other Fregean commentators have experienced in making sense of Frege’s similarly Platonic notion of the realm of thoughts.40 Derrida is quite right in asking what evidence there is for asserting such an alter ego. Husserl affirms that the one inhabits the other implicitly but, as Derrida points out, the one ego is distinguished from the other on the basis of no evidence at all, by ‘nothing that can be determined in the natural sense of distinction.’41 How, then, does the problem of objectivity arise in Derrida’s discussion of Husserl’s phenomenology? Not unlike Descartes, Husserl believes that through the process of phenomenological reduction and bracketing one can indeed move beyond the ‘other’ ‘alienating’ and distorting aspects of contents of consciousness, such as language, to achieve what is termed an ‘adequate intuition,’ that is, a pure and certain intuitive knowledge of the self unmediated by anything extraneous to the self. In this case objectivity would be assured. In such a case one touches the pure lived experience of consciousness. Derrida writes: ‘And lived experience ... does not have to be so indicated [by signs, words] because it is immediately certain and present to itself ... The certitude of inner existence, Husserl thinks, has no need to be signified. It is immediately present to itself. It is living consciousness.’42 Derrida points out that Husserl distinguishes between ‘fictitious language,’ which occurs in soliloquy and self-knowledge, and language proper, used to communicate my thoughts to another. The former is ‘fictitious’ because since I am self-present in my conscious acts I do not need to come to know about them through language in the way in which another needs to receive communication via words.43 Derrida sees Husserl’s phenomenology as standing within the metaphysical tradition for which the ‘metaphysics of presence’ is paradigmatic. Heidegger had already indicated the link between a ‘knowing as looking’ epistemology, dominant in philosophy, and its metaphysical correlate, a ‘presencing metaphysics.’ Derrida believes that Husserl too privileges that which is intuited in the present, in being or reality present before the spectator. The pure intuition of what is present in reality before me here and now must be re-presented in all subsequent references to that same intuited reality, and these subsequent references to the same intuited reality

50

Method in Metaphysics

come via language, words, signs. So emerges another strain or tension internal to Husserl’s program: the issue of temporalization. According to Derrida, for Husserl the self-presence of consciousness as intuited is precisely free of signification, and this primordial intuition, which is the ‘principle of principles’ for Husserl, is characterized by the absence and uselessness of signs. Derrida comments on this: ‘If the punctuality of the instant is a myth, a spatial or mechanical metaphor, an inherited metaphysical concept, or all that at once, and if the present of self-presence is not simple, if it is constituted in a primordial and irreducible synthesis, then the whole of Husserl’s argumentation is threatened in its very principle.’44 It is in the context of his critique of Husserl’s attempt to ground objective reference back to the ‘now’ of a present and indubitable intuition that Derrida introduces his notions of ‘difference/deferring’ and of the ‘trace.’ Derrida continues, ‘the possibility of re-petition in its most general form – that is the constitution of a trace in the most universal sense – is a possibility which not only must inhabit the pure actuality of the now but must constitute it through the very movement of difference it introduces.’45 Here we reach the heart of the paradox. ‘Presence’ as that intuited ‘now’ involves non-presence insofar as it is dependent upon the ‘trace,’ which is a repetition of signs, words, and meanings from previous time. In Ideas I Husserl writes, ‘But to every present and presenting consciousness there corresponds the ideal possibility of an exactly matching presentification of this consciousness.’46 As Derrida expresses it, for Husserl, ‘Expressive language itself would be something supervenient upon the absolute silence of self-relationship.’47 But this cannot be, affirms Derrida, since what is other than self-present consciousness, word, sign, language is required for intuition and for the repetition involved in references to the same. Not only is the goal for Husserl the pure self-presence in unmediated intuition of consciousness, of the self, but according to him the aim of all language is to strive for objective declaration of the subjectively intuited ‘essential distinctions’ of a true ontology. Derrida believes that Husserl’s ‘pure logical grammar’ has advantages over classical and modern grammar.48 But its limitations are also clear. While Husserl recognizes that language often fails to express the essences, or natures, grasped in subjective intuition, the aim, or goal, is that of a pure language in which the expression is perfect. Therefore, Derrida concludes (with a comment that indicates a point of origin of one of his own philosophical terms) that Husserl’s own showing the system of ‘essential distinctions’ ‘is a purely teleological structure whose realization de facto is permanently differed.’49 Rather than achieving its aim of returning to the ‘things themselves,’ phenomenology finds that they constantly elude it. The desire to achieve the

From Epistemology to Metaphysics

51

pure self-presence of consciousness exposed to itself, which is understood as the paradigmatic instance of certainty and revelation of a true ontology, is frustrated. The failure of Husserl’s enterprise is, for Derrida, the failure of Western metaphysics. He writes, ‘The history of metaphysics therefore can be expressed as the unfolding of the structure or schema of an absolute will-to-hear-oneself speak.’50 Derrida on Husserl: A Critical Realist Appraisal As will be discussed further in the following chapter, Lonergan believes that a methodologically sound approach to metaphysics will situate metaphysics within the wider context of other human concerns, and will offer an account of how metaphysical language is to be justified as a distinct element within the various linguistic and cognitive components of that wider context. Derrida’s assault on both the myth of an unmediated intuition into the self or consciousness, and on the notion of an ideal, pure language of mental intuition, which somehow must struggle to retain or regain purity once it is expressed in the ordinary languages of the world, can only be welcome from the perspective of critical realist philosophy. Derrida insists that the purity of conscious self-presence, which Husserl believes can be achieved in intuition into self, is chimerical, since the other of language and word must be involved in any such self-knowledge. If that is so then the dependence of any philosophy on language, not only of Husserl’s, entails that an extraneous, uncontrolled element is found within any given philosophy. For the language used brings with it its own history of use. Deconstruction will, then, in part be concerned with ways in which the language used by a thinker may actually throw up notions and perspectives at variance with the professed intentions of the philosopher as author. The language of the prior philosophical tradition will set the conditions for the proposed, perhaps, ‘revolutionary’ contributions of the philosopher and it will insinuate notions and ideas into the fabric of his writing. Richard Rorty, in an evaluation of what he takes to be positive in Derrida’s work, draws attention to the fact that such deconstruction has occurred throughout the history of philosophy as, in various ways, succeeding generations of philosophers have adverted to tensions and contradictions in the thought of their predecessors.51 It is, then, nothing new. In fact, as one reads Derrida’s critique of Husserl, which issues quite plainly in the judgment that Husserl does not succeed in achieving that which he would achieve, that is, the grounding of objective knowledge, one easily detects instances of claims that Husserl’s position is in some respects inconsistent, or question begging, or does not prove its case. Indeed, the upshot of Derrida’s argument can be expressed as follows:

52

Method in Metaphysics

Husserl argues that B (intuition of self) is independent of A (linguistic formulation, verbal content), but does not prove this, and indeed puts forth analyses that suggest that B is always bound up with A. Determining that a text, a philosophical argument, is inconsistent, then, occurs in a number of ways. One can show that the argument is not proven, and one way to do this is to show that there is inconsistency within the argument. Such inconsistency, again, takes various forms. One can determine, perhaps, that a logical problem occurs down the line, which the author apparently in no way anticipated. One can ‘deconstruct’ the work in terms of incoherence detected between the overt statements made and intentions that one must take to be implicit in the mind of the author, at least if one is to pose the purported argument, as an argument, to oneself. One can, perhaps, note tensions and unresolved vagueness because of the language the author uses, which may perhaps be imbued with the terminology of an earlier philosopher or an earlier position of the author himself, which he is now seeking to criticize. Derrida’s notion of the ‘trace’ brings to our attention the language of the author as already formed and moulded by the insights of others. It is interesting therefore that Lonergan shares this concern and, in fact, offers to throw light upon it in terms of the analysis of the distinction between conscious insight and conscious verbal conception, which was mentioned above. In writing of the challenges that face us in the interpretation of texts – of texts, for instance, from various stages in the development of a philosopher – Lonergan insists that we need to take into account this fact: Expression not only is an instrument of principal acts of meaning that reside in conception and judgment but also a prolongation of the psychic flow from percepts, memories, images and feelings into the shaping of countenance, the movement of the hand, and the utterance of words ... our speech and writing are basically automatisms, and our conscious control supervenes only to order, to select, to revise, or to reject. It follows that expression bears the signature not only of controlling meaning but also of the underlying psychic flow.52 Insights, conscious acts of understanding, occur in the various contexts identifiable in the human stream of consciousness – within common sense, aesthetic projects, science, scholarship, religion, and so forth. As Socrates discovered, it is not the concern of ordinary language users to formulate into a systematic whole the ad hoc insights that occur within a given cultural community concerning such matters as value and virtues. Since our insights occur as acts of understanding into sensate data, which include

From Epistemology to Metaphysics

53

percepts, words, symbols, and the expressions of another’s face, the further task of formulating the insight can be a tricky one. We know this from all kinds of experience common to human language speakers. So the lessons taught by those who have familiarity and mastery in skills from cookery to football, from sculpting to rock climbing are more often communicated by being ‘caught’ rather than ‘taught.’ The labour that may go into writing ‘How to do books’ in these areas testifies to the difficulty experienced in the conscious effort to express verbally our conscious insights, acts of understanding. However, as Lonergan’s analysis of the history of geometry and the move to symbolic logic makes clear, the challenge of shifting from occasional or casual insights to a conceptual formulation of the same is also experienced in the case of mathematics, logic, science, and scholarship. The fact of the history of logic, which was perhaps brought home to analytical philosophers by the pioneering (if by now somewhat dated work) of the Kneales,53 and the current debates in philosophy of logic both provide evidence for the view that logics labour to render explicit what is, in some fashion, implicit in our intelligent and reasonable conscious activities. Overstating the case to a sceptical degree, however, is self-defeating. It is to give a linguistic turn, albeit of Saussurean stripe, to the Kantian and idealist objections to realism, the incoherence of which has already been described above. If one cannot use one’s intelligence and reason to come to know what is the case, because the language within which one works and which one moulds in expressing one’s views is so imprecise and unclear as to render objective knowledge unattainable, then one cannot come to know the facts about the way language and thought operate. It also follows that one cannot know about the ways in which language comes to one as already imbued with the insights and percepts, the affect-laden signs and metaphors of a culture, of a linguistic community. Derrida claims that such a view of language and its effect on thought is correct, and therefore he must allow that such factors do not prevent the attainment of knowledge of objective fact. As Simon Blackburn points out, our successful use of language and, I would add, our successful attempts at knowing what is so, or probably so, rest upon ‘a raft of contingencies.’54 No position that claims that because the determining factors in knowledge or language are contingent, knowledge cannot be attained, is coherent. And since the knowledge that it is incoherent is genuine knowledge, our ability to know is vindicated in that way also. According to Derrida’s interpretation of Husserl the latter believed that a paradigm instance of certain, objective knowledge could be attained in an intuition that would be pure presence to self of the conscious subject or ‘I.’ Derrida’s objection to this stands in a long line of objections to the idea

54

Method in Metaphysics

of unmediated access to the conscious self by that self. Hume’s cavils against Descartes’ introspective discoveries, Nietzsche’s critique of Descartes, and that of the antiprivate language camp of analytical philosophers are moments in this history of objections that in one way or another point to the dependence of such self-knowledge on the ‘extraneous’ element that is language. Not so well known, but adverted to by Hintikka, among others, is Aquinas’s rejection of such a path to self-knowledge. For Aquinas one does not ‘look into the essence of the soul’; rather knowledge of self comes via attention to the various conscious activities in which the self is engaged, and the process is one in which our attention shifts from those objects intended in the activities to the activities themselves, which are also found to be interconnected in one consciousness. This is also the path Lonergan follows in outlining his account of cognitional structure. Intuitionist accounts of unmediated self-presence are, in this view, blunders that inevitably result from a failure to grasp that knowledge of self is no different from knowledge of anything else, insofar as it is mediated via attention to data, understanding the data, and judgment as to the truth, falsity, or probability of one’s understanding, one’s insights, one’s ideas. There is presence to self, as we have noted above, insofar as in conscious awareness I not only intend an object, a tree, say, but I am also aware of my attitude to the object – whether I am asking a question about it, admiring it, or gazing at it while thinking about something else. If this were not the case I could not reply in any sensible way to the question, ‘What were you doing when you were looking at that tree?’ However, such self-presence is not self-knowledge: it is simply self-awareness. Moving to self-knowledge, to a report or account of that stream of consciousness with its various activities and vectors, can be quite tricky. I can get it right and I can get it wrong, as cases testify in which I am rather nonplussed by the request of another to describe what was going on in a period of reverie or daydreaming. The blunder of conflating self-consciousness with self-knowledge appears, I believe, to be endemic in the philosophical literature. This error is tied to a larger epistemological myth, that of ‘knowing as looking,’ or representationalism. If knowledge of self is seen as ultimately looking at what is present in consciousness, this is because the notion of knowledge is ultimately one of gazing at what is there to be looked at. Because critical realism holds that ‘looking’ is only one element in the path to knowledge, that knowledge is always mediated via the activities on the three levels of coming to know, and that truth, reality, is not known except in judgment, critical realism finds it hardly surprising that naive realism, empiricism, and representationalism are always to be found together with the parasitic companions of idealism, scepticism, subjectivism, and the like. The philosophical positions of Husserl, on the one

From Epistemology to Metaphysics

55

hand, and Derrida, on the other, are no exception to this historical rule. It is significant that Derrida attributes to Husserl his own liberation from the ‘incompetence of empiricism’ and, at the same time, criticizes Husserl for inheriting perspectives and notions from empiricism. Lonergan too argues that Husserl’s phenomenology is only one more version of empiricism.55 The pattern of philosophical relationships one sees in Hume’s thought, then, is almost exactly replicated in Derrida. In both cases the only model of objective knowledge available seems to have been some kind of empiricism, some version of representationalism, and the incisive and penetrating criticisms levelled by both philosophers at the models of knowing with which they were best acquainted led to the abandonment by them of the hope of arguing for the validity of objective knowledge. One final point may be made concerning Derrida’s position on objective knowledge. It is clear that Derrida’s deconstructive method is anything but a mere celebration of an irrational free for all. As his most sympathetic interpreters point out, he is insistent on the need for rigour and intellectual robustness in interpreting works of the tradition.56 What one means by such ‘rigour’ is not really spelled out, or gone into in Derrida’s own work. But if one examines an essay such as his Speech and Phenomena it is clear, as was suggested above, that arguments of various kinds take place, the upshot of which is to show that the philosopher in question, Husserl, did not achieve his aim. In other words, Derrida makes a case for saying that what Husserl held to be so, to be the case, is not so. Deconstructing Derrida himself then is, from our perspective, a matter of showing from his own argumentation that inevitably he is involved in the activities on the three levels of experience, understanding, and judgment. Indeed, Hugo Meynell has argued that this critical realist deconstruction results in what he calls, with a humorous nod in the direction of Trollope, an ‘archdeconstruction.’57 Further, such analysis indicates that Derrida’s own argumentation refers to what is, and what is not, objectively the case. Is he examining Husserl’s work as one would Grimm’s fairy tales, to see how aesthetically satisfying the stories are, or is he arguing that Husserl’s account of knowing and intentionality are not true, or not wholly true, of some aspect of reality, to wit human thought and language? Do consciousness and language really exist, or are they in the realm of mere objects of thought, as are, presumably, unicorns and phlogiston? It is clear that Derrida refers to both as existing realities and, in fact, is arguing that the real nature of language and its actual relationship to thought are correctly understood in a way that entails that crucial positions in Husserl’s philosophy are shown not to be correct. In the course of arguing Derrida makes unavoidable reference to the evidence that we can find if we advert to the data of our consciousness and

56

Method in Metaphysics

our language use. If the response to this is to answer that one is simply presuming the same philosophical language as one’s interlocutor in order to offer an internal critique with reference to nothing outside that language itself, the answer is inadequate. In the critique I offered of Kant’s philosophy, and by implication of similar positions, the point was not simply that Kant ends in a contradiction by, in effect, claiming, ‘It is really so, that I cannot know what is really so,’ and therefore the Kantian way is not viable; the more significant point is that one only shows the flaws in that position by at the same time showing what is a viable position on objective knowing. One shows the contradiction in Kant by adverting to the fact that, really and truly, one makes a conscious act that is a judgment, a truth claim, when one affirms, ‘I cannot know what is so,’ and thereby shows up the contradiction. Without the objective knowledge that this act, this judgment, is really an act of this kind, no contradiction would be identified. Similarly, one cannot agree or disagree with Derrida, and one cannot say that Husserl does or does not achieve his goal of grounding objectively knowledge, if one does not identify real conscious acts, and if one does not make judgments concerning a reality referred to as ‘human language,’ since it is to these realities that Derrida refers when he asks us to evaluate as true, false, or in some way inadequate the philosophy of Husserl on consciousness and language. Critical Realism a Foundation for Metaphysics In this chapter I have briefly outlined and defended Lonergan’s positions on the process of coming to know and on objective knowledge. The process of coming to know was seen to be characterized by three fundamental phases or stages of attending to the data of experience, understanding that data, and judging as to whether that understanding is correct, whether it truly corresponds with reality. The conscious subject or person who goes through these processes in order to come to know reality does so as empirically conscious, intelligently conscious, and rationally conscious. He or she is aware not only of the object intended in these cognitional activities but of him or herself as the conscious subject. In providing an explicit account of this knowing process we move from this selfawareness of our cognitional, conscious operations to an explicit account or report of them. As was pointed out, this is the move from self-consciousness to self-knowledge proper, which can be extremely difficult. The claim is that the failure to effect this transition in an adequate way leads to much confusion in philosophy. In this chapter we then went on to argue for the critical realist solution to questions concerning objective knowledge. Such knowledge is attain-

From Epistemology to Metaphysics

57

able, it was insisted, since the affirmation of the process of coming to know is itself an instance of objective knowledge, an instance in which we grasp that our conception of knowledge truly corresponds with what is the case. Attempts to deny this is so only serve to demonstrate the truth of the propositions concerning critical realism, for one can grasp that in order to deny cognitional structure one must in fact operate with it. Further, it was pointed out that one can go on to make additional intelligent and reasonable judgments as to the existence of entities other than the knowing self. In recent years much discussion in the area of theory of knowledge has focused on debates between foundationalists and antifoundationalists. In the Anglo-Saxon philosophical world followers of Richard Rorty have denied that foundations for objective knowledge can be established, and among continental thinkers there are many who share the same viewpoint. Influential among these has been Derrida. In the preceding section, therefore, I devoted some space to Derrida’s critique of Husserl’s attempts to lay foundations for realism in order to bring out, by way of comparison and contrast, both the shortcomings of Husserl’s attempts and the incoherence of the position of Derrida that emerges from his critique. In doing so I hope to have illustrated further aspects of Lonergan’s critical realism, showing how it is distinct from Husserl’s intuitionism and how it can be deployed to subvert the anti-foundationalist position that Derrida espouses. Husserl’s intuitionism was seen to be yet another variation on the theme of knowing being fundamentally a matter of ‘looking,’ and Derrida’s scepticism was seen to be parasitic upon this problematic view of objectivity. Antifoundationalism has attacked attempts to base objective knowledge upon sense data, or upon some privileged intuitions, and from the perspective of the position argued for above such criticisms are justified. However, it is true to say that Lonergan offers foundations for objective knowledge. In one sense such foundations are the conscious operations we engage in spontaneously in attempting to know reality; they include our attending to the data of sensation in empirical consciousness, intelligently seeking understanding of that data in intelligent consciousness, and assessing the veracity of our insights and concepts in judgment in our rational phase of consciousness. In another way the foundations for a critical realist justification of objective knowledge are had in our explicit factual judgments concerning the conscious process; they are identified in applying the process to itself. We saw how it is the case that to affirm the process (while saying that more could be discovered concerning its details) is consistent and coherent, while the denial of the process is incoherent, since the evidence for the truth of the propositions concerning the process is given in the conscious activities of denying the truth of the account. In an

58

Method in Metaphysics

ironic passage Lonergan points out the inconsistency of philosophers who employ the foundations, in his sense, in the attempt to argue against such foundations: Despite the doubts and denials of positivists and behaviorists, no one, unless some of his organs are deficient, is going to say that never in his life did he have the experience of seeing or of hearing, of touching or smelling or tasting, of imagining or perceiving, of feeling or moving; or that if he appeared to have such experience, still it was mere appearance, since all his life long he has gone about like a somnambulist without any awareness of his own activities. Again, how rare is the man that will preface his lectures by repeating his conviction that never did he have even a fleeting experience of intellectual curiosity, of inquiry, of striving and coming to understand, of expressing what he has grasped by understanding. Rare too is the man that begins his contributions to periodical literature by reminding his potential readers that never in his life did he experience anything that might be called critical reflection, that he never paused about the truth or falsity of any statement, that if he ever seemed to exercise his rationality by passing judgment strictly in accord with the available evidence, then that must be counted mere appearance for he is totally unaware of any such event or even any such tendency.58 In the chapter to follow I will argue that this critical realist base in the theory of knowledge provides a foundation for metaphysics, and I will attempt to show how Lonergan unfolds the implications of his critical realism for a method in metaphysics.

Recto Running Head

59

3 The Question of Method

In the previous chapter I outlined and defended Lonergan’s critical realist position on knowing. That position was seen to involve an account of our coming to know proceeding on three levels of conscious activities described as experience, understanding, and judgment. The validity of the claim that objective knowledge is attainable was seen to be established by arguments to the effect that coming to know the activities so outlined was a case of objective knowledge of reality. The attempt to deny the same was seen to be self-defeating, for the evidence that one did perform cognitional acts is found in the very process of argument to the contrary. From this paradigm case of self-knowledge further implications could be drawn, it was argued. Among these was an account of probable judgments (the majority of the judgments we make) in which it was seen that although the conditions, or evidence, for the prospective judgment was not given in a definitive way, as in the case of cognitional activities, still some coherence to the proposed theory and some evidence for its truth suffice for making a reasonable judgment as to its being probably true of reality. Reality as Anticipated in Knowing It was also pointed out in chapter 1 that metaphysics, in Lonergan’s view, is to be understood as the answer to the third of a triptych of questions: ‘What am I doing when I am knowing?’ ‘Why is doing that knowing?’ ‘What do I know when I do that (knowing)?’ The argument for critical realism was set forth as an answer to the first two questions. Thus, the outline of the interrelated conscious acts in the process of coming to know constitutes an answer to the first question. The answer to the second ques-

60

Method in Metaphysics

tion takes the form of an analysis of the knowledge achieved of cognitional structure, itself an instance of correct knowledge of reality, for in the case of judgments concerning the reality of the said activities, their characteristics and relations, one can understand that objective knowledge is reached insofar as judgment grasps that a correct understanding has been achieved concerning some aspect of the data. In this case the data is that regarding one’s conscious activities. That the understanding is correct is grasped in judgments in which one knows that all the relevant evidence is given, for in questioning and doubting that one questions and doubts, one will find that the evidence is given in conscious activity. Furthermore, the judgment one makes is an answer to a question that asks after the real existence of the activities of knowing, and the judgments as to their actual, real existence is had (unlike judgments as to the truths of logical or mathematical insights) on the basis of data, data of sensation or, as in the case of cognitional activities, data that is found within consciousness. Lonergan’s metaphysics is, then, elaborated as an answer to the third question, ‘What do I know when I do that (knowing)?’ Given that Lonergan’s is a critical, as opposed to a naive or empiricist realism, and that his realism takes seriously Aquinas’s position that truth is known not in sensation but in judgment, it is no surprise that in elaborating a metaphysics the fundamental point will be that the ‘known’ is precisely what can be known through operations of intelligence and reason. There is an isomorphism between knowing and known, such that the only meaning to be given to reality is ‘that which is to be known through intelligence or reason.’ Reality, ‘what is,’ being is, therefore, the intelligible. It is what is known by intelligent grasp and reasonable affirmation. We can, therefore, in some broad fashion rule in and rule out what there might possibly be. As we shall see below, Lonergan’s position on this is not at all far removed from that of a philosopher whose work has had not a little influence on thinkers involved in the recent renaissance of metaphysics in analytical philosophy, Michael Dummett. While Dummett’s philosophy is described as a form of ‘antirealism,’ this is, to say the least, rather misleading, insofar as Dummett defends a realist attitude to knowledge of the world and to metaphysics.1 It would be a grave mistake to think Lonergan is some kind of idealist. I have every reason to think, according to Lonergan’s position, that, for example, the table and computer keyboard before me are realities distinct from me.2 Rather it is the case that the critiques both these thinkers offer of naive realism show up the erroneous picture-thinking that goes on when one imagines that reality is just ‘stuff out there’ that bears no relation to the intelligible distinctions I make in coming to know what is the case. For Dummett such erroneous picture-thinking blurs analysis of, for instance, time, and is in some way at work in the ‘classical logic’ of Frege and the early Wittgenstein.

The Question of Method

61

Lonergan’s critique of the picture-thinking arising from the myth of ‘knowing as looking’ leads him to take a critical view of the whole philosophical tradition, which is as radical as anything to be found in Rorty’s evaluation of the historical influence of representationalism, or the similar hermeneutical evaluations of Western philosophy found in the critiques of ‘presencing metaphysics’ offered by Heidegger and Derrida.3 As we have seen in the previous chapter, however, for Lonergan the idealist or subjectivist reaction to naive realism or empiricism rather than breaking away from the myth remains in its thrall. The critical realism Lonergan develops leads, on the contrary, to an approach to metaphysics that offers the prospect of developing what is of value within the tradition, while reversing that within it that arises from ultimately incoherent epistemological positions. In Lonergan’s evaluation of the tradition a number of thinkers contribute to a viable metaphysics, but it is above all Aquinas, and to some extent Aristotle, who stand out as thinkers whose epistemology can be understood as fundamentally critical realist and whose work in metaphysics has, therefore, made a lasting contribution to philosophy. A critical hermeneutic of the tradition is a crucial element in Lonergan’s approach to metaphysics. The myth of ‘knowing as seeing’ is pervasive. We share with the animals dynamic and dramatic psychological reactions to our environment and, therefore, a kind of realism that sees ‘the real’ as the ‘out there now stuff to be sensed’ appears inevitable once human beings begin to attempt some account of how we come to know. Critiques of the ‘raw data’ or ‘immediate given’ epistemologies, within both the phenomenological and analytical traditions, demonstrate, however, that simply because bats and humans dodge out of the way of oncoming buses, this fact does little to settle disputed questions in, say, the philosophy of scientific investigation, of scientific knowing. As Lonergan points out, the world of immediacy is one we move out of as we move away from early infancy and move into a world mediated by meanings and ideas.4 Critical realism, then, is at once strange and yet very familiar. It is familiar, for during childhood we develop our critical capacity for deploying notions of reaching the truth, such as questioning our experience, and coming to make judgments in terms of sufficiency of evidence. It is strange, for it requires that one follow through on those critical capacities of which one is aware since childhood (but has not until now made explicit) to work out philosophical theorems and results, while resisting the temptation of imagining that the answers to philosophical questions are easily or readily given in ‘intuitions’ that are really no more than imaginary projections constructed from the data of sense – picture-thinking. I will return to the issue of a hermeneutic of metaphysical language and thought later in this chapter, but first it might be useful to say something about how Lonergan

62

Method in Metaphysics

understands his approach to metaphysics as arising out of a critical reappraisal of Aristotle’s metaphysics. Appropriating the Aristotelian Tradition As Lonergan made clear in lectures in 1958, one way of understanding his approach to metaphysics is in terms of it providing ‘a systematic solution to [the] problem of determining where Aristotle’s physics ends and where his metaphysics begins.’5 In other words, Lonergan’s metaphysics may be characterized as a retrieval of what is valid in Aristotelian metaphysics, this retrieval occurring on the basis of a critical realist epistemology. The position on cognition provides, according to Lonergan, a way of ‘deriving basic terms and relations from the data of consciousness, of accepting traditional metaphysics in the sense that is isomorphic with these basic terms and relations, and of rejecting traditional metaphysics in any sense that is not the to-be-known of human cognitional activity.’6 Even a cursory acquaintance with Lonergan’s metaphysics is sufficient to convince one of Lonergan’s indebtedness to the Aristotelian project. However, I will note here four areas in which Lonergan moves beyond the Aristotelian position on metaphysics and is critical of it. Firstly, Lonergan notes a certain verbalism in Aristotle’s approach to some metaphysical problems. This is shown in the repeated use of ‘as such’ qualifications regarding definitions and distinctions. No doubt the linguistic differentiations which result have an appeal for those like J.L. Austin, who considered Aristotle to have anticipated his own brand of fine-grained analysis of ordinary usage, but such verbalism has also contributed to the proliferation of the competing metaphysical stances on particular topics of those in the tradition who have considered themselves to be Aristotelians. Lonergan’s method is an attempt to move forward out of the morass of disputed questions that characterize this philosophical tradition. A second area of divergence from Aristotle has to do with Lonergan’s distinction between the truly explanatory and the merely descriptive in Aristotelian metaphysics. Lonergan follows the robust realism with regard to our ordinary knowledge, which is upheld in Aristotelian and Thomist thought. In terms of the three phases or levels of coming to know, we can, in our ordinary attempts to know, be more or less attentive to the data, more or less intelligent in thinking up explanations for the data, and more or less reasonable in making a judgment as to the truth of our conjectures concerning reality. Lonergan follows Aristotle and Aquinas in holding that while descriptive knowledge, if correct, gives us knowledge of reality, still that knowledge is ‘descriptive,’ not explanatory. It is, therefore, a matter of nominal definition, not explanatory definition of things, and things in

The Question of Method

63

relation to each other. I may know truly that there is a stone in my shoe, but what a stone is in terms of its inner constitution is unknown to me. In fact Aquinas held that we know very little of the inner constitution of things, and that finding this out is a difficult and laborious enterprise. No doubt we have good reason to think we know a good deal more about the inner constitution of things than was known in Aquinas’s day, but his epistemological point is still valid. Lonergan holds a realist view of science, but a realist view which entails saying at best ‘such and such a theory is probably true of reality.’ He would agree with nearly all realists in philosophy of science today, then, that science is intrinsically revisable. What is not revisable are the intelligent and reasonable operations of our minds, which do the revising of theories; as we have argued, knowledge of those conscious operations can be arrived at which is definite insofar as the attempt to question whether there are such mental activities only serves to provide evidence that there are such. The distinction between descriptive and explanatory knowledge that Lonergan develops from Aquinas will be examined further in a later chapter on ‘natural kinds,’ but the point to be made here concerning the difference between Lonergan’s method and the metaphysics of Aristotle is that Lonergan believes that in two related areas Aristotle conflates the descriptive and the explanatory. It is Aristotle’s own view, Lonergan notes, that metaphysics is a science of knowledge through causes, and causes in Aristotle’s view are the end, the agent, the matter, and the form.7 However, Aristotle appears to include in his list of metaphysical elements the ten categories that include such items as quantity, quality, and place, and time. Further, Aristotle appears to understand in a metaphysical way what are sometimes termed ‘proper sensibles,’ that is colours and sounds. In contrast, one of Lonergan’s fundamental tenets in metaphysics is that metaphysics primarily regards reality as explained, not as described. Now clearly we are always on the way to this goal in science and scholarship but metaphysics can, on the basis of both our knowledge of our cognitional acts and the results achieved already in common-sense knowledge and science, identify certain metaphysical principles and structures in advance. Since Lonergan agrees with the view, advanced by a number of analytical metaphysicians, that metaphysics regards a basic semantics, the results of present common-sense knowledge and of scientific and scholarly knowledge may need to be transposed into metaphysical terms. However, such terms will be explanatory, not merely descriptive. Lonergan holds that it is Aristotle’s and Aquinas’s investigations into the way our insights into data grasp intelligible organization or ‘forms’ in the data that provide the starting point for an adequate metaphysics. Such insights grasp intelligible forms that, when judged to be correct or proba-

64

Method in Metaphysics

bly correct, provide knowledge of an explanatory kind. Of course, nominal or descriptive knowledge of things, and things in relation, is also the result of intelligent activity and insight. But it is insight understood as an answer to a question seeking understanding that motivates explanatory inquiries. In the latter case we are after knowledge of a ‘formal cause,’ a reason why the data appear as they do. In the former case we wish to understand what a word refers to. In later sections of the book we will examine issues to do with the explanatory/descriptive distinction and the nature of causation in general. However, it should be noted in the present context that Lonergan accepts the Aristotelian and Thomist enumeration of causes as indicating diverse kinds of intelligible dependency in reality. Unlike Whitehead, Lonergan does not believe, then, that we must drop some of the Aristotelian causes altogether. However, he would point out that rather than understanding modern science as abandoning the Aristotelian list of causes one should rather observe the way modern science has concentrated almost exclusively on one type of cause, the ‘formal’ cause. That is, when one is attempting to understand why the data are as they are one is aiming to discover a formal cause, an intelligible patterning or organization of the data; and that is the type of explanatory enquiry identifiable in science in the modern period. Aristotle’s categories of, for instance, place and time, however, are not properly explanatory but rather descriptive. Thus one would have to advance from descriptive notions to an explanatory account by examining contemporary scientific theory of space-time, including relativity and, while noting the provisional nature of such theory, attempt to understand the metaphysical implications of the scientific results.8 Since metaphysics properly regards explanatory ‘form’ or ‘formal causes’ (the intelligible organization of data explaining why that data appears as it does) colours are not to be thought of as forms in the strict sense of formal causes. Insight into colours occurs as we learn to apply colour words appropriately in a given socio-linguistic context. Explanation of colours involves various scientific theories concerning electromagnetic wavelengths and, on the part of the recipient, theories concerning pigment absorption and brain states. We cannot, therefore, take a given colour as an instance of a metaphysical form.9 Indeed, Aristotle and Aquinas demonstrate a certain sophistication in this regard, even if Aristotle’s proper sensibles remain a somewhat ambiguous category, for in their view ‘sensation in act is the sensible in act.’ If the bell of an alarm clock rings in the desert with no one around, then one characterizes the event by making a distinction between scientifically described wavelengths that constitute the potential for sound, on the one hand, and, on the other, sound as actual hearing, which does not occur in this case.

The Question of Method

65

A third issue indicating an area in which Lonergan believes Aristotle’s metaphysical views need supplementing has to do with the third level of coming to know: the reflective act of judgment in which we claim to know, with certainty or probability, that something is or is not actually the case. The way the triad knowing (experience-understanding-judgment) gives rise to a triad of metaphysical distinctions will concern us later. However, it is relevant to a discussion of Lonergan’s views on Aristotle’s metaphysics to observe that Lonergan believes that one of a number of significant advances made by Aquinas with regard to Aristotle’s philosophy is found in Aquinas’s analysis of rational judgment as the cognitional act in which we grasp the existence of some aspect of reality. Clearly, Aristotelian metaphysical notions such as the contrast between potency and act, the contrast between a disposition and its actuation, point in the direction of the metaphysical significance of ‘act.’ However, Aristotle’s emphasis is upon ‘matter’ and ‘form’ as the metaphysical constituents of a thing, whereas in Aquinas we find clearly discerned a third category in the ‘act of existence’ of a thing, or the ‘act of occurrence’ of an event – knowledge had of the actual existence of an individual, or of an occurrence, of a system or whatever means that we affirm that some x is not a mere object of thought but is a reality.10 The importance of this epistemological feature and its metaphysical corollary, the ‘act of existence,’ will be seen in some later discussions in this book. Finally, while Lonergan agrees with the Aristotelian notion of chance, he is also concerned to draw out the metaphysical implications of modern scientific theories that regard statistical probabilities of the emergence, survival, and decline of groups and individuals. While some recent discussions of Aristotelian biology highlight ways in which Aristotle is not unaware of such ideas as species adaptation,11 it remains the case that Aristotle’s world view needs, at the very least, to be complemented by an analysis of an intelligibility to be found in the way large numbers and long periods of time make effectively probable the realization of potencies or dispositions in given individuals and ecologies.12 From what has been said concerning Lonergan’s relationship with the metaphysics of Aristotle it should be clear that Lonergan stands within the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition. However, his is a position characterized by a critical retrieval of what he considers to be of permanent value in that tradition and this occurs on the basis of his positions on cognition and epistemology. Lonergan not only establishes a decision procedure for accepting and rejecting given elements in the Aristotelian viewpoint, but also finds ways of complementing a valid nucleus of insights from that tradition with perspectives gained from the development of modern science and scholarship. Rather than distancing his position from those adopted by

66

Method in Metaphysics

recent analytical metaphysicians I believe Lonergan’s explicit avowal of his indebtedness to historical traditions in metaphysics demonstrates a feature his work has in common with the new metaphysicians.13 Establishing Ontological Commitments Lonergan’s approach to establishing ontological commitments, to outlining a methodical approach to metaphysical issues, emerges, then, from the critical realist position argued for in epistemology. How is the issue of method in metaphysics tackled by other philosophical contenders in the field and, in particular, by the advocates of the renaissance of metaphysics in analytical philosophy? Alex Oliver, in ‘The Metaphysics of Properties,’ draws attention to the desire expressed on the part of a number of notable philosophers writing on metaphysics to follow or imitate in some way the criteria adopted in the explanatory efforts of science. Thus, there is a general sense that metaphysics should be explanatory insofar as it is to analyse and explain predication of various kinds so as to furnish a basic or fundamental semantics for language use. This basic semantics will identify, on the view adopted by some, the ‘truth makers’ for our assertoric propositions or judgments, and delineate a compositional semantics grounding language use. Like science, metaphysics will adhere to the criterion of parsimony; it will wield Ockham’s razor. For David Lewis this implies that metaphysical theories should not contain ‘overabundant primitive predications,’ ‘unduly mysterious ones,’ or ‘unduly complicated ones,’ and they should not have an ‘overly generous ontology,’ nor disagree with ‘less-than Moorean commonsensical opinion.’14 Oliver himself is committed to such economy in metaphysics. He informs us that we should aim at a theory with the minimum number of primitive predicates possible because of the ‘aesthetic elegance’ of such theoretic simplicity.15 There is a place for reductive moves in conceptual analysis, Oliver insists, if we find that some predicates can be analysed ‘away’ in favour of others. Our analysis in metaphysics is to be guided by a ‘wide reflective equilibrium’ as we discern how we should proceed in judging between rival metaphysical claims and between analyses that would now reduce the complexity of our ontology, now enrich it. Oliver agrees with Lewis that this approach means that we should ‘balance demands of theory against preservation of commonsense beliefs. These beliefs are not sacrosanct. We override them if the theoretical benefits of ontological or ideological economy are sufficiently great. For example some of our commonsense beliefs about modal matters may be rejected for the sake of defining the predicate “… is a possible world.”’16 The demand for ‘simplicity’ and ‘economy’ and the application

The Question of Method

67

of Ockham’s razor to theories may be a generally acknowledged methodological desideratum. However, as Oliver insists, it is not always easy to see just which way Ockham’s razor is to cut, just how it is to be wielded. Lewis’s metaphysics certainly does not privilege common-sense beliefs as fundamental, as his comments quoted above suggest, and in his view ontology has only two kinds of entity: sets and possibilia (actual and possible particulars). One’s ontological ideology can be naturalistic, and then Ockham’s razor is wielded in a particular, mainly reductive, fashion. This is the preferred option of W.V.O. Quine. Another option is to settle the issue by saying that only those entities that are causally efficacious are to be allowed in an ontology.17 But Oliver objects to this view as it needs to be established that those objects without causal efficacy are to be dismissed from an ontology. On the other hand, are Lewis’s very minimal ontological resources sufficient to do justice to apparently strongly held metaphysical intuitions? Lewis appears at times to suggest that the truth makers necessary and sufficient for a statement such as, ‘David Lewis is mortal’ concern the set of David Lewis’s properties rather than David Lewis himself. However, as Oliver observes, the methodological issue here is precisely which analytical approach is to be preferred – that which yields a set of properties, or an analysis that claims to identify ‘the person’?18 It would appear fairly easy to situate Quine within a reductionist metaphysical tradition that stretches back through logical positivism, to the positivism of nineteenth-century thinkers like Comte, and to the empiricists and materialists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While such a genealogical outline has, no doubt, some foundation, one needs to appreciate the diverse aspects of Quine’s philosophy, aspects that his critics would maintain stand in tension and render his position ambiguous. Quine followed Carnap in rejecting the idea that an analysis of conscious mental acts or ‘meanings in the head’ can provide a basis for philosophical reflection. Once one has rejected this path for philosophy then the position Quine espoused in his celebrated 1952 essay ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ follows as a consequence. Quine rejected the distinction between analytic sentences and empirically verified sentences, and went on to develop increasingly radical views over the years concerning the impossibility of translation. That we take a sentence in one language as roughly equivalent to a sentence in another language is a matter of social convention in his view. This is not surprising since once one has given up the idea that the meaning of an utterance is something consciously intended by a speaker problems of translatability inevitably arise.19 In ontology Quine is a reductionist. Science is the best way we have of determining what there is, but the results of scientific investigation are revisable and therefore we cannot cull a permanent ontology from

68

Method in Metaphysics

science. And logic, he insists, cannot decide our ontological commitments as regards what exists. Famously Quine’s reductionism manifests itself in his contention that there are no properties, that properties are ‘creatures of darkness.’20 Instead then of thinking there is a real entity, a property of ‘being a philosopher,’ say, which we refer to when we say, ‘Quine was a philosopher,’ we need, in this view, to retranslate such propositions into expressions regarding mere logical extension. Thus to say, ‘The individual Quine was a philosopher’ is, in this view, to say something like, ‘That individual is a member of a logical set all of whose members have the property P (the property of being a philosopher).’ However, according to his critics, Quine’s reductionist and naturalist ontological commitments appear, malgré lui, at the ‘margins,’ so to speak, of his analyses. Thus his use of the term ‘queerness’ in a pejorative way to highlight suspect aspects of an ontology demonstrates his prior naturalistic and reductionist commitments, according to William Alston.21 A further criticism is that Quine’s use of the existential quantifier in his attempts to give a logical map of language is ‘objectual,’ and is not therefore as ontologically neutral as he would claim it to be.22 The ambiguities and tensions in Quine’s position become evident as we witness the development of the epistemological position that underlies his ontological stance. In the mature Quine we have, on the one hand, the profession of belief in a naturalized epistemology, an empiricism of the crudest form, to put it bluntly, and, on the other, an assertion of the indeterminacy of translation, which implies for Quine that determining what is the case is relative to ‘our concerns.’ Added to this we have a fallibilist notion of science as open to constant revision, and belief that this revision can penetrate to even the central logical beliefs of our conceptual system.23 The position on cognition and epistemology argued for in the present work contends that the denial of mental acts lands one in the incoherent and self-destructive position of claiming that, for instance, ‘I judge that I make no judgments,’ or ‘I know it is the case that I cannot know what is the case.’ The approach Lonergan takes to analyticity, based on critical realism, will be discussed below. But perhaps the aporias which, I believe, are evident in Quine’s philosophy only serve as an object lesson indicative of what results when the attempt is made to abandon an analysis of linguistic meaning as the expression of the conscious intentional acts of human agents. Lonergan’s concern to defend a realist position as a way of establishing ontological commitments is one shared by some analytical metaphysicians. C.B. Martin has, in a number of articles, offered criticisms of idealist and conceptual relativist options as a prelude to outlining a realist metaphysics very different from Quine’s views on ontology.24 Martin’s metaphysics

The Question of Method

69

would aim to engage with contemporary science in order both to take advantage of scientific results, and to offer philosophical perspectives that would not be without a critical edge as regards the philosophical assumptions operative in scientific positions.25 His arguments in epistemology bear some resemblance to some of the moves made in Lonergan’s exposition and defence of cognitional structure and the objectivity of knowing. Thus Martin insists that any putative idealist, relativist, or subjectivist account of knowing is involved in incoherence insofar as these positions make objective claims about realities that are our beliefs; these theories claim to know that there are such realities and that it is true that such beliefs do or do not cohere with other beliefs. Coherence theories of belief, therefore, tacitly assume correspondence theory, since they claim that their accounts of belief really do correspond with the way things are.26 What, then, is Martin’s approach to method in metaphysics? How does he attempt to settle questions as to what our ontological commitments should be? It is perhaps disappointing that Martin does not attempt to develop a metaphysics from his epistemological base in the methodical way suggested by critical realism. He demonstrates a sensitivity to the relationships between epistemology and metaphysics, as is clear in his treatment of the way the non-mental may be found to exhibit the kind of directedness and responsiveness some thinkers mistakenly take to be the exclusive property of mental intentionality.27 However, beyond the attempt to establish ontological commitments by arguments for realism, arguments that I believe have much to commend them, Martin does not attempt to develop a metaphysics on an epistemological base in a systematic way. It is Lonergan’s view that a metaphysics, at least in its essential or core aspects, should be critically grounded in each instance upon the basis of the positions established on cognition and epistemology. The dialectical implication of this view is that erroneous positions in metaphysics may be traced back to counterpositions, positions that are shown to be self-destructive insofar as they seek to deny the facts concerning our cognitional acts or operations and the objective knowledge to which these aspire and, in some instances, are known to attain. Whitehead and Process Metaphysics The issue of the critical appraisal of metaphysical views in terms of the epistemological positions upon which these are based, positions which may be more or less explicitly acknowledged, highlights the principal weakness of one metaphysical system in which some recent analytical philosophers have shown a renewed interest – the organic philosophy of Whitehead. Whitehead attempted to develop a metaphysics that took

70

Method in Metaphysics

account of the rise of modern science, with, in his view, the attendant abandonment of Aristotelian metaphysics and the logic that encapsulated it. Furthermore, the rise of modern science had, in its initial stages, been tied to what Whitehead describes as a ‘materialism.’ However, such naive materialism had itself been eroded in the course of the development of science, so that assumptions and presuppositions concerning the way reality was to be characterized as a realm of easily sensed extended bodies were undermined. In a number of ways, then, Whitehead’s preoccupations were similar to Lonergan’s: both thinkers wished to adumbrate a metaphysics that would take account of the shift from the Aristotelian scientific world view to that of modern science; both saw the need for a critique of naive, empiricist and picture-thinking versions of metaphysics (the presencing type of metaphysics also denounced by philosophers influenced by Heidegger). However, the differences are also conspicuous. As we have seen above, Lonergan pursues a hermeneutic of both suspicion and retrieval regarding the Aristotelian metaphysical tradition, and this hermeneutic is grounded upon the critical realism position argued for in cognitional theory and epistemology. This entails that much that is central to the Aristotelian metaphysical position is retained and, indeed, vindicated in a critical fashion. I would venture to suggest that it is the area of epistemology that is the Achilles’ heel of Whitehead’s system. Whitehead’s option was simply to bypass the Kantian challenge to epistemological realism and attempt a philosophy constructed upon a robust confidence in the deliverances of early twentieth-century science. This ‘dependence’ of Whitehead’s system on science is taken to be one of its virtues by some advocates of the philosophy. According to H. Mays the system awaits verification from the scientific viewpoint, since Whitehead explicitly rejected the deductive approach to metaphysics of Descartes and opted instead for a hypothetico-deductive approach that would ground results on those of science.28 However, one of Whitehead’s earliest students and expositors, Dorothy Emmett, forcefully argues that the lack of critical epistemological grounding invites sheer scepticism, or at least agnosticism, with regard to Whitehead’s system in general. The problems Whitehead faces here are not at all dissimilar to those faced by Quine’s naturalized epistemology. That is, although Whitehead would eschew what in his view would be crude naturalism or empiricism, his attempt to offer an account of the way outside impressions and sensations become, or are transformed into, thoughts and truth assertions fails to meet the objections of the sceptic. I should say that anyone cognizant of the realist/antirealist debates that have raged in both analytical and continental philosophical circles in recent decades would remain unimpressed by the rather simplistic way in which Whitehead accounts for the objectivity of

The Question of Method

71

our knowledge as a result of its being in some way an accurate representation of the external world. Percy Hughes in his outline of Whitehead’s epistemology draws attention to the way the account of knowledge and consciousness is determined by Whitehead’s general metaphysical views on the implications of early twentieth-century physics.29 Thus, just as in a plant there is a concresence, an integration of the prehensions, or processes on lower levels, so in consciousness there is a similar constructive process in which lower level ‘feelings’ enter into the higher synthesis of apprehension.30 Mays points out that for Whitehead consciousness is cognition, and that a judgment of truth about the external world is nothing other than a ‘direct causal awareness of physical events.’31 The impasse at which such naive realist foundationalism arrives is well brought out by Emmett. She explains that for Whitehead our images or data derived from the outside world are to be considered ‘symbols’ and that a symbol must in some way represent that which is symbolized. However, Whitehead has no way of grounding the claim that we do reach truth about the world, truth that results from the conformity of our symbols with that which, it is supposed, causally brings them about from outside. Whitehead, she writes, ‘is only able to slur over the difference introduced by consciousness by speaking, as we have seen, of “transmutation” and “novelty” as affected by feelings of aversion and adversion, this being the function of the “mental pole”. But we have reason to believe that a break in kind occurs when physiological response becomes perceptual awareness, and still more when it becomes a deliberately directed judgment of meaning.’32 As we have seen in the earlier outline of Lonergan’s account of cognition and epistemology, a critical realism needs more than dogmatic assertions of the success of perceptual awareness in giving us a true picture of the world. What is required is a distinction between what is proper to human knowing alone and what we share with the animals in our spontaneous reactions to the environment. What is proper to human knowing alone are the intelligent and reasonable processes that, as was argued, can be verified in the data, that are our cognitional acts. Thus, judgments of truth, of what is the case, are a matter of reasonable operations on our part in which we gather and assess evidence and arrive at probable or definite conclusions. Arriving at such conclusions is a matter of exercising one’s capacity for reasonableness, not an immediate or subrational staring or looking at reality. The perceptualist myth evident in Whitehead’s account of consciousness and knowledge is the breeding ground for the endless variety of sceptical, idealist, and relativist philosophies that, from the dawn of philosophy down to our own day, have relied in a parasitic fashion upon the myth of knowing as direct perception for their existence. Lonergan’s

72

Method in Metaphysics

critical realist position is presented not only as an argument for the possibility of a realist metaphysics in general but, in particular, it grounds metaphysical claims concerning the reality known in knowing our own cognitional structure and metaphysical principles operative in achieving that knowledge. One cannot insist too strongly, against a misguided Cartesian or Husserlian view of self-knowledge, that knowing the self revealed in knowing cognitional structure is knowing an aspect of reality; it is the achievement of knowing part of that whole, reality, that is intended in all our questions and answers concerning what is truly the case. Not only does Whitehead’s system falter in the crucial methodological area of the critical vindication of metaphysics from its epistemological base, but further methodological conundrums arise. On Whitehead’s view the macroscopic processes that we can observe, or that science can identify, are only manifestations of Leibnizian-type entities. Unlike Leibniz’s ‘windowless’ monads, Whitehead’s monads are ‘all windows,’ as they are intrinsically open to and tend towards coalescence in larger wholes. However, we do not directly verify such microcosmic entities. Our assertion of their existence is, then, it would seem, a matter of postulation. But on what grounds does this postulation occur? Certainly the postulation of entities and states is a viable way of explanation in both science and metaphysics. But it is unclear how the postulation of such entities as Whitehead proposes is to be preferred to an alternative explanation. If we do not and apparently cannot verify the existence of Whiteheadian monads, what is to commend the postulation of their existence rather than the postulation of possible rival explanatory entities and states? For all its laudable denunciation of crude materialist atomism, Whitehead’s system does seem to betray the fact that it owes a good deal to the tradition in modern philosophy heavily indebted to the revival of Empedoclean atomism in Renaissance Europe. Such atomism, a version of which was espoused in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, appears, from the perspective of critical realism, to be a construct of projective imagination, of picture-thinking. Method and Ockham’s Razor Among the criteria for economy in metaphysical method that Alex Oliver adopts from Lewis, we saw that the core aim of the desiderata for metaphysical predication is the laudable one of adhering to Ockham’s razor. However, as in the case of Quine’s metaphysical economics one needs to be aware of the way Ockham’s razor is wielded in the service of one’s particular explicit or implicit philosophical commitments. Thus, we saw critics of Quine like Alston drawing attention to Quine’s tendentious use of such pejorative terms as ‘queerness’ in his attempt to descry the bounds of an

The Question of Method

73

acceptable ontology. Lewis’s prejudice against ‘unduly mysterious predication’ in an ontology appears equally question-begging and ambiguous. As for his specification that metaphysical explanations and theories should not contradict ‘less than Moorean common-sensical facts’ one may question whether Lewis is consistent in following his own advice. His theory of actual other worlds as an explanation of modal predicates seems to go against such common-sense views, and the invocation of Moore in such a context cannot but lead one to think that Moore would have been as suspicious of Lewis’s metaphysics as he was of the exotic idealisms of his own day. It is clear from Lewis’s debates with Armstrong, referred to above, that what the ‘basic facts’ of an ontology are may be a matter of dispute. Lonergan’s method of approaching metaphysics from a base established in epistemology and cognitional analysis is precisely an attempt to establish in a critical fashion some facts of metaphysical significance: the facts concerning how we know reality, that we do know reality, some of the realities known, and facts concerning some of the metaphysical principles operative in our knowing. Oliver’s contention that explanatory economy in metaphysics has to do with a criterion of ‘simplicity’ that, he believes, can be understood in terms of aesthetic satisfaction highlights further the ambiguities surrounding one’s use of Ockham’s razor as a principle of method. While I think the case can be made in aesthetics that not everything is a free-for-all in terms of taste, I cannot but think that postmodern philosophers would have a field day deconstructing any metaphysics supposedly grounded on a merely aesthetic decision as to its explanatory desirability. No doubt there were cultured Europeans in the seventeenth century who found the aesthetic simplicity of one of the neo-Aristotelian versions of the cosmos on offer preferable to the Newtonian vision. This is in no way to deny the importance of the principle of explanatory economy enshrined in Ockham’s razor, or the scholastic dictum entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. However, the criterion needs to be understood as expressing the exigencies of reasonableness, not aesthetic judgment. In making a reasonable judgment about what is the case, about reality, we can only affirm that for which there is sufficient evidence. Thus, in a murder case there may be sufficient evidence to affirm that the victim’s death was due to the actions of another human being. However, if one murderer will suffice there is no evidence that two or ten or twenty persons participated in the crime. Such an illustration suffices to indicate that the principle of economy is one of human reasonableness, not of taste. However, in the case of ontology the issue is a little more complicated. We need to decide what entities, causes, and states there are in terms of which the data is to be explained. In

74

Method in Metaphysics

the case of naturalistic reductionism, such as that espoused by Quine, we can see that the application of the principle of explanatory economy becomes circular. Thus, we ‘explain away’ as epiphenomena whatever is said to be redundant. But how is the position upon which such decisions regarding redundancy established in the first place? For a phenomenalist of Humean persuasion, for example, all we need, or can have, are sense data, and every other putative ontological object or construct is chimerical. The fundamental issue is, then, that of establishing a philosophical position on the basis of which one will erect criteria of explanatory economy. Again, this is faced in an open-eyed manner in Lonergan’s approach, which argues for a basic position in epistemology and cognition in such a way that, as has been explained, the denial of the basic positions set forth is seen to be incoherent or self-destructive. If one, therefore, establishes, under pain of self-referential incoherence, that our knowing of reality consists in attention to the data we experience, intelligent inquiry into that data, and reasonable judgment as to the truth, falsity, or probability of our insights or theories regarding that data, then one may conclude that the real so known, the real proportionate to that process of knowing, is empirical and intelligible in its constitution. As recent science witnesses, ‘what there is’ may not have to be ‘that which is sensed,’ but it does have to be ‘that which is intelligently grasped and reasonably affirmed’ – that which is reasoned to on the basis of the data we can sense. Quine’s naturalism, therefore, is not supported by the criteria operative in the intelligent and reasonable operations we use in discovering what is the case, and the reductionism operative in all such positions that works in favour of ‘what we can sense directly’ is unsupported. Ontology as ‘Truth Making’ The expression ‘truth makers’ is not one Lonergan employs. However, what is suggested by the phrase is congruent with what Lonergan understands metaphysics to be about, since its task is to identify the necessary and sufficient realities referred to in true judgments of fact. One objection to the idea of ‘truth makers,’ understood as the entities and states of reality, has to do with the question of how our negative judgments are supposed to be ‘made true’ by something, and how our false assertions are rendered so by states of affairs to which they do not correspond. Clearly, the phrase ‘truth makers’ needs to be understood in a broader context, in which it is also understood that our knowledge of reality consists of both positive and negative judgments. Furthermore, our judgments should not be considered as being ‘made’ true or false by states in the world, or their absence, in any simplistic or crude sense of ‘made.’ The causal factors that enter into the process of understanding data and making judgments con-

The Question of Method

75

cerning the veracity or probability of that understanding certainly involve data, but they also involve the causal factors that are the operations of our intelligence and reason. Given this qualification, a qualification guarding against the understanding of ‘truth makers’ in a crude empiricist causal way, the phrase seems unobjectionable. If there is no such state of affairs as x or entity such as y, our judgments that there is no x or y are rendered true, made true, by the world; if we claim that x and y exist our judgments are made false by the world being otherwise. Here ‘rendered,’ ‘made,’ are to be understood as ways of indicating the ‘because’ in the answer to the question, ‘Why is your judgment false concerning the existence of x?’ the answer being, ‘Because there is nothing in reality that corresponds to x.’ There is no feature of the world that makes a negative judgment true. Rather it is the absence of the feature denied in the negative judgment which makes that judgment true. Richard Cartwright has raised a further objection to the notion of ‘truth makers,’ understood as the ontological commitments of a theory.33 Cartwright argues: Consider a theory that consists of a single sentence to the effect that there is at least one tree. What must exist in order for its single sentence to be true? At least one tree, of course. But also according to some philosophers, the attribute of being a tree; and numbers, according to those philosophers who think them necessary existents; God, according to Kilmer. These answers need not be endorsed, but neither can they be dismissed as perverse distortions of the question: and if there cannot be at least one tree unless God exists, then it cannot be true that there is at least one tree unless God exists. But it would be perverse, even for a theist, to say that God is something there is according to any theory that contains a sentence to the effect that there is at least one tree.34 Cartwright goes on to suggest that similar perversity would be manifest in a philosophy that insisted upon the ontological commitment to ‘treehood’ of a theory committed to the statement, ‘There is at least one tree.’ To understand Cartwright’s objection in this case aright one needs to appreciate that what he is objecting to is some form of logical-linguistic analysis of first order language, à la Quine, which would specify what first order, or ordinary languages, are necessarily committed to in making assertions about reality. Thus, he concludes his argument by stating, ‘Specification of the universe of discourse of a language determines nothing more with respect to the ontological commitments of theories expressible in it. Within the language, there is plenty of room for disagreement as to what there is.’35

76

Method in Metaphysics

This being recognized, however, it does not seem that Cartwright does make a case against the philosophies he brands as ‘perverse.’ From the perspective of the critical realist position it is important to appreciate the differences between common-sense knowledge and language and scientific knowledge. Metaphysics primarily regards reality as explained, and such explanation is anticipated as occurring in such domains as the scientific (but not exclusively so). Ordinary language and knowledge, on the other hand, gives an account of things as related to our everyday concerns. That is not to say it does not provide genuine knowledge: on the contrary, its accounts can be true or false, more or less accurate. And there are ways in which these two areas of human intelligent and reasonable activity interact. Furthermore, as has been discussed above, metaphysics is developed from philosophical positions established in critical realist epistemology and cognitional theory. However, it also aims to integrate the results of ontological significance of common sense, of science, and of scholarship with the core metaphysical perspectives derived from the general philosophical position. Therefore, in the language of these three domains, ordinary language, scientific/scholarly, and philosophical there is room for disagreement. Metaphysics involves variable and provisional results insofar as there are, at best, only probable theories in some areas of metaphysics, and a subset of these theories will be those that aim to integrate the provisional results of science and common sense into a metaphysical perspective. On the other hand, insofar as there are core metaphysical elements established from critical realism, it is the case that any language or theory that is an expression of the human activities of attention to data, understanding and judgment will be found to be implicitly committed to an ontology, an ontology implicit in our attempts to know the world – an ontology, that is, which a critical realist metaphysics seeks to render explicit. Cartwright grants that ‘a theory in the language that contains one or more existentially quantified sentences is committed to there being at least one such-and-such.’ However, the contention here is that if ‘one such-and-such’ is, as in his example, a tree, it will be a ‘one’ that has come to be known through experience of data, understanding, and judgment concerning data. The ‘one,’ then, will have an ontologically triadic aspect to it, as an empirical, understandable (‘form’), and actual (existence) entity. And there may be more in terms of causal connections and entailments once what is implicit is teased out and made explicit. Within this schema of ontological commitment common to both common sense and science, however, there would be room for disagreement, as Cartwright suggests there might be. Scientific theory might conclude that what in some instance common sense took to be ‘one tree’ was in fact not a unity but a social conglomerate. Present science does tend to confirm common-sense judgment that

The Question of Method

77

trees are unities, but in other cases, as we know, what was once thought to be a unity has turned out to be an amalgam of smaller entities. One could imagine such a case of revision occurring when some newly discovered plant or tree turned out, on investigation, to be a ‘one’ in the sense of a social conglomerate, not to be ‘one’ in the sense of a unity. In general, then, more needs to be said on the matter of ontological commitment than Cartwright offers in his argument. While one can respect his desire for a more nuanced analysis of what ontological commitment in a language involves than is provided by the theories he scrutinizes, it remains the case that he does not demonstrate the falsity of the claim that any language that makes truth claims, judgments, about the world is involved in ontological commitments. These commitments will normally be implicit, although in no way ‘unconscious’; they may also involve entailments that, once teased out, involve the kind of ontological requirements Cartwright labels ‘perverse.’ Metaphysics, Language, and Logic Grammar is concerned with words and sentences; logic is concerned with concepts and judgments; but metaphysics is concerned with the enumeration of the necessary and sufficient realities on the supposition that judgments are true.36 If the revival of metaphysics in analytical philosophy may be characterized as a movement from language to the realities to which language makes reference, then, in this sense, Lonergan’s metaphysics may be said to have a linguistic turn to it. In lectures in the late 1950s Lonergan refers to metaphysics as providing a ‘fundamental’ or ‘basic semantics.’37 This approach is congruent with the position of influential analytical philosophers working in metaphysics in recent years, such as David Lewis, who describes metaphysical analysis as an attempt to provide a compositional semantics. While, therefore, there is much common ground between critical realism and these analytical philosophers on what metaphysics is about, the position I have argued for, which involves an analysis of our intelligent and reasonable intentional acts in order to proceed to well grounded results in metaphysics, is not one pursued in any systematic fashion by analytical metaphysicians. This does not mean that such philosophers would necessarily be hostile to such a method. On the contrary, as was argued in chapter 1, the revival of metaphysics in analytical philosophy has gone hand in hand with a move away from the prejudice against investigating mental acts. Furthermore, we have seen how some philosophers, such as C.B. Martin, employ moves similar to some of the arguments deployed by

78

Method in Metaphysics

Lonergan to establish critical realism, in order to undermine subjectivist epistemologies opposed to realist ontological commitments.38 A philosopher of importance in recent analytical writing on metaphysics is Michael Dummett. I have already commented upon some significant points of contact between his philosophical approach and that of critical realism. I would observe in the present chapter on method that there are similarities between the ways both Dummett and Lonergan envisage the relationship between language, logic, and metaphysics. For Dummett one cannot take for granted the assumptions of the ‘classical logic’ of Frege and early Wittgenstein and then attempt to read off from this some kind of ontology. The issue is far more complex. One first has to determine which logic is correct or which elements from various logics are correct or preferable. In order to approach such an investigation one needs to attend to language as the expression of intelligent and reasonable human agents. This program, it can be argued, is precisely that followed by Lonergan, although it would have to be pointed out immediately that Lonergan does not attempt to be exhaustive in his account. While he attempts to give a fairly detailed account of the activities that are involved in coming to know (and this account can be further developed, although not revised under pain of self-referential inconsistency), and is insistent that these aspects of conscious activity occur in the much wider and broader context of other patterns of activity, he by no means claims to perform the impossible task of pinning down the way insights and judgments occur in all the domains of human activity. Lonergan’s approach to both logic and metaphysics, then, is on the basis of the cognitional position, the account of the conscious activities involved in the process of coming to know. The priority of the analysis of the process of coming to know, of developing understanding moving towards judgment, vis-à-vis logic is something Lonergan insists is to be learnt from Aquinas. He writes, ‘Reasoning was not characterized by Aquinas with a reference to a text on formal logic; it was characterized as the development of understanding.’39 This priority means that logical principles can be assessed from this prior cognitional viewpoint, and one can be open both to the historical reality of the development of logic, and to the way in our own day logic has become hypothetico-deductive in a way similar to science.40 By the latter claim Lonergan means that with the various systems of logic that have emerged during the last two centuries, some of which are complementary and some not, we can view the enterprise of formulating a logic as an attempt to express in conceptual, verbal, and symbolic form what is operative in the intelligent and reasonable mental activity of human beings. For example, Lonergan would hold that intuitionist logics, emerging from Brouwer and Heyting, which clearly influence Dummett, are accu-

The Question of Method

79

rate to the extent that they do capture features of our knowing process. Thus, Lonergan writes, with regard to the principle of excluded middle: The principle of excluded middle possesses ultimate but not immediate validity; it possesses ultimate validity because, if a judgment occurs, it must be either an affirmation or a denial; it does not possess immediate validity, for with respect to each proposition, rational consciousness is presented with the three alternatives of affirmation, of negation, and of seeking a better understanding and so a more adequate formulation of the issue.41 This restricted validity of the principle, Lonergan points out, was appreciated in the ‘logic’ of scholastic method, in which one reserved the right to make distinctions in disputes rather than being forced into an illegitimate corner that demanded a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ response to the question put. Such a move is clearly open to human reasonableness in the genesis of knowledge. We can all see that it is unreasonable to expect only either a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ judgment or response to a query of the kind, ‘Have you or have you not stopped using racist language?’ Furthermore, Lonergan would also agree with Dummett, and for that matter with Aristotle and Aquinas, that since the future is contingent and not determined, there is no way here and now in which I could come to know whether some proposition regarding the future is either true or false.42 However, while Lonergan’s approach to logic and metaphysics via cognitional theory would endorse some of Dummett’s intuitionist contentions it would certainly contradict the perhaps more radical views on non-contradiction put forward by Graham Priest. Priest has argued that the law of non-contradiction may not hold in all cases, and adduces arguments to this effect from mathematical cases in which we appear to have arguments for both p and not p. He maintains that a logical system can be devised that restricts the application of non-contradiction.43 That a system of logic such as Priest suggests can be outlined is not surprising. As Lonergan points out, logical systems can be developed that provide some partial account of our intelligent and reasonable operations. However, it is on the basis of these operations that these systems are to be evaluated for cogency, consistency, and adequacy. The principle of noncontradiction is formulated due to our insights into our own conscious exigencies in the area of reasonable judgment; and naturally these ‘third level’ operations are also anticipated on the level of intelligence as we suppose or consider the cogency of some proposed judgment. Lonergan writes: ‘Logic as a science may be deduced from cognitional analysis … logic rests on the major premise of the parallel between the conditions of knowing and the

80

Method in Metaphysics

conditions of possible terms of meaning. Thus, terms of possible meaning are subject to principles of identity and non-contradiction because judgment is an intrinsically rational act that affirms or denies.’44 Therefore ‘Priestism,’ which holds that sometimes the principle of non-contradiction does not apply, cannot be defended. No object of thought, no theory or idea elaborated on the level of intelligence arrives with a ‘label’ on it to tell us that in this case the principle of non-contradiction does or does not apply. We anticipate judgments in questions as we ask the question, regarding some idea or insight, ‘Is it so?’ And we are spontaneously aware in such questions, and in the judgments that are answers to them, that ‘It is so’ is absolutely opposed to ‘It is not so.’ So we arrive at a reductio of Priest’s position, for the implication of his position is that we cannot know what is so in any instance, because in this case, or in any case, we do not know whether or not the principle of non-contradiction applies. There might be an argument to the contrary we have not yet met, which is just as good for not A as is the argument for A. Therefore we do not know anything, including the truth of the individual steps that constitute the mathematical arguments Priest adduces to show that there are cases of equally good arguments for and against certain propositions, and the general position Priest espouses. But, as we have argued earlier, the position that we do not know anything is self-destructive. Even probable judgments are relative to definitive knowledge, for we definitively know they are probable, not definitive. Paradoxes remain paradoxes, therefore, and invite resolution in a way other than by saying that the paradox of contradiction disappears in such cases. It is not surprising, therefore, that Priest’s critics have pointed to the incoherence of his holding the views he does.45 And the fact of disagreement between Priest and his critics serves further to bring out the incoherence of Priest’s position. Why is it that we know that both Priest and his critics cannot both be right? In Priest’s view if both he and they produced totally convincing arguments for their respective positions then we should know that in this case the law of contradiction did not apply; but we can see in advance that such a situation would be absurd and, therefore, not true. For on that scenario it would be true both that the law of contradiction does not hold when we have two solid arguments establishing opposed conclusions and true that this is not the case. Given the position he defends it is not surprising that Priest’s views on our knowledge of the world are crudely representationalist, and not the type able to withstand sceptical criticism. An empiricist account of knowing, such as Priest’s, is unable to come to grips with the intelligent and reasonable operations involved in the process of coming to know reality, of which the rational exigency we call the principle of non-contradiction is an integral part.

The Question of Method

81

The A Priori in Knowing Returning to the issue of analyticity mentioned above in the discussion of Quine, it should be observed that Lonergan’s approach to the analytic and to the general issue of the a priori has a number of strands to it. To begin with there is the fundamental a priori constituted by the heuristic of our intelligent and reasonable operations involved in our coming to know reality. Reality is anticipated by us as that which will be known through intelligence and reason – it is anticipated as the intelligible. The fact that reality is what is to be known through operations of intelligence and reason, that it is, therefore, the intelligible, is a fundamental metaphysical fact established through knowledge of our cognitional operations and our ability to know the real. There are, of course, not only judgments about reality, but also judgments that are merely logical or mathematical. However, judgments about reality are those that refer to the data of sense or consciousness as evidence, and that are answers to questions concerning real existence. Language about ‘reality’ and ‘being’ has caused not a little trouble in some philosophical traditions. Thus, Meinong’s influence can be seen in the analytical tradition, as philosophers such as Russell and Quine attempted to escape from the apparent impasse created by Meinongian metaphysics and conundrums such as that of ‘Plato’s beard’ – famously invoked by Quine. Moving in an opposite direction it would seem, however, is Lewis who is only too happy to accept a metaphysical view that, somewhat in the manner of Meinong but for somewhat different reasons, posits a vast metaphysical landscape of real entities to which our language makes reference. Lonergan’s approach to these questions, however, situates being, reality, in the context of our cognitional process. Mere objects of thought, objects that are our insights, ideas, theories, are thought about by us for an ulterior motive: we think about them in order to move on to the final goal of knowing about the world. Only on the level of judgment do we achieve knowledge of reality and affirm or deny, if possible, that such objects of thought are not mere objects of thought but exist in reality. What kind of existence do such objects have as mere objects of thought? Their existence is simply that of mental acts such as insights, ideas, hypotheses, and the like. In the tradition of continental philosophy Heidegger’s attempt to retrieve the Aristotelian notion of ‘being qua being,’ and his insistence upon the ontological difference between being and beings, posed further problems for philosophers. How was one to make sense of such a distinction? One approach, adopted by some German philosophers, attempts to demystify Heidegger’s thought in this area by transposing it into terms

82

Method in Metaphysics

familiar to analytical philosophers. Thus, ‘being,’ on this view, is to be understood as that to which assertoric propositions refer.46 It could be said that our critical realist analysis moves further in this direction insofar as talk about ‘being’ is located in the context of cognitional activity, which includes judgments, ‘is’ statements, about reality that are expressed in propositional language. Lonergan’s analysis then, grounded in verifiable cognitional activity, helps us avoid the kind of conundrums suggested by some attempts to extract a common ontological ‘nugget,’ named ‘being,’ from each affirmation regarding matters of fact. In judgment it can be verified that a final contribution to the knowing process occurs in which we do posit, know, the actual existence of a thing, of its parts, of states of affairs. Judgments regarding reality, therefore, posit that the natures or forms understood on the level of understanding have real or actual existence. Our knowledge of reality, or ‘being,’ therefore, gradually increases as we know more and more about what actual things and states there are. Such an analysis does ground talk of an ontological difference between the essences (‘whatness,’ natures, forms) of things, on the one hand, and the existence or being of things, on the other. The understanding of natures and affirmation of the reality of those natures do make distinct contributions to the process of coming to know, and indicate distinct aspects of the realities known. However, approaching the matter in this way does, I believe, avoid mystifying notions of ‘being’ that suggest that it is another thing, or some ‘super thing,’ alongside or beyond other things. The second order, or heuristic definition of reality, of being, as ‘that which is to be known through intelligence and reason,’ as, therefore, the ‘knowable’ or ‘intelligible,’ is one that is, in one way or another, acknowledged by some recent analytical philosophers. As Karen Green points out, Dummett holds that reality is determined by us relative to our rational decision procedures.47 This is a significant aspect, I think, of Dummett’s misleadingly named ‘antirealism.’ Dummett is very definitely a realist, but he eschews naive realism or simplistic empiricism or perceptualism. The project of metaphysics, for Dummett, is precisely an exploration of what reality is, given that it is relative to our knowing. Of course such ‘relativism’ could easily slip into idealism and rationalisms of an antirealist kind. However, as I see it, Dummett’s position is the clearest affirmation in current analytical philosophy of a metaphysical realism that at the same time insists on reality as relative to our knowing. Hilary Putnam also appears to have a sense of what Lonergan terms the ‘isomorphism’ between reality and our knowing. He writes: An intrinsic similarity metric … which gives weight to what sorts of features we count as similarities and dissimilarities between states of

The Question of Method

83

affairs, is one which again implies that the world is like a mind, or imbued with something very much like reason. And if this is true, then it must have a (suitably metaphysical) explanation. Objective idealism can hardly be a little bit true. (‘It’s all physics except that there’s this “similarity metric”’ just doesn’t make sense.)48 This statement of Putnam’s regarding the isomorphism between our knowing and the known is made in the context of a discussion in which Putnam allows that we may not be able to decide between a realist and an idealist interpretation of the facts. Such a drift to idealism may appear inevitable once one has abandoned immediate or naive realism. It is a central preoccupation for Lonergan, however, as we have seen in the previous chapter, to show that idealism and relativism are positions that are as confused as the empiricism upon which they are parasitic. Truth about reality is not known through sensation alone, nor through insights and concepts had on the basis of sensation, but through such operations completed by rational acts of judgments. To affirm that our metaphysical categories give us not the structures of reality but ways in which we subjectively divide it up (the Kantian option) is to involve oneself in the incoherence of claiming to know that one cannot truly know. When one affirms the basic principle that reality is the knowable, the intelligible, an understandable response will be that it is extremely presumptuous to claim to know in advance or dictate to the ‘great unknown.’ However, while it is true that I am massively limited in what I know and in what, personally, I could hope to understand, such limitations are themselves known to me via intelligent grasp and reasonable affirmation. How do I know that I am not God, knowing everything about everything? The response will no doubt be that such an idea is preposterous and foolish. But it is so because I have good reason to affirm that there is so much I do not know. The alternatives, then, are stark: either I know nothing at all, no item of knowledge at all, or, if I know something, something for instance about my limitations, then I can know something and reality is the knowable, intelligible. Affirmation of the first option, however, is not an option for me, since it is a claim to know that I do not know. A second issue to mention with regard to Lonergan’s treatment of the a priori is his position that it is a fundamental cognitional fact that ‘similars are similarly understood.’ This cognitional fact is the ground of generalizations and analogies. However, while it furnishes the rational ground for such rational moves it at once shows how precarious they are, for it requires intelligent and reasonable inquiry into concrete instances in order to discover whether or not they are in fact similar. Even if we have come to a probable conclusion regarding the scientific causes and expla-

84

Method in Metaphysics

nations of Hume’s loaf of bread, we do not know whether the next instance of data in which we grasp similarity of appearance is, in fact, similar in an explanatory sense. While this is so, it is none the less reasonable to take the scientific route that all sciences follow. While we cannot be certain that every blade of grass in the field has the same scientifically explained constitution as the next blade (for no science exhaustively investigates each and every instance covered by laws, every blade of grass) such a procedure is rational. Where there is no difference in similar data there is no evidence for significant explanatory difference, albeit this is not impossible. Finally, Lonergan’s approach to analyticity also involves an analysis of distinct forms of analytic principles and propositions that are all expressions of types of judgment. The basic form of rational judgment is as follows: there is understood a conditioned (the proposition), a set of conditions linked to the conditioned, and judgment results from a grasp of these conditions as fulfilled. Thus, in Lonergan’s position, what he terms an ‘analytical proposition’ would be illustrated by a logical postulate such as, ‘If A then B.’ Since it is analytic that whenever there is A there is B, it is implied that the judgment ‘There is B’ will result if the condition A is given. However, such a case is an instance of a merely logical postulation. ‘Analytic principles,’ as opposed to ‘analytic propositions,’ are, for Lonergan, cases in which judgments of fact occur that go beyond merely logical postulation. Thus mathematical judgments, for Lonergan, are ‘serially analytic.’ He writes: The mathematician knows de facto that there are instances of 1, 2, 3, but how far does he go? At least his concrete experience does not take him on to 10n, where n is as big as you please. That number, 10n, where n is as big as you please, is not the number of something he has counted and knows to exist. But 1, 2, 3, are something he has counted and knows to exist. That idea can be extended throughout the whole of mathematics. In mathematics you deal not merely with analytic propositions but with analytic principles in some serial sense.49 In the case of science there are ‘provisionally analytic principles.’ In science empirical generalizations begin to be used as definitions of terms. If there is an instance of C then there will be D, E, F, where the latter are aspects of the current scientific explanation of C. However, such definitions are only provisional, as science is revisable and the best scientific position of the day is, on a realist view of science such as Lonergan’s, at best a probable account of some aspect of reality. In the case of metaphysics there are ‘analytic principles’ in a full sense. Such principles are derived from judgments of fact concerning reality, but

The Question of Method

85

they make an a priori stipulation regarding some aspect of reality. Such principles may be derived from the facts of cognitional theory that are known to be definitely so. Thus, a case in point would be the principle of the intelligibility of reality. We have argued above that this principle is operative in our attempts to know and in our successes in the cognitive field. Furthermore, it cannot be denied without self-contradiction. If the position is that there are analytic definitions and principles in metaphysics, does this not run up against problems to do with reference and generality? Clearly an analytic principle of the type to which we refer has the characteristic ‘If there is an a then it is F’, or ‘All cases of a have the quality F.’ In the article by Cartwright to which reference has already been made, Cartwright deals very well, I believe, with questions that have arisen in twentieth-century philosophy of logic concerning the possibility of quantification across all domains.50 Cartwright argues that despite the water that may be thought to have run under the bridge since Russell’s first ruminations concerning the paradoxes of set theory, philosophers still continue to be dogged by what Cartwright terms the ‘all-in-one principle.’ That is, it should be obvious by now to all, Cartwright insists, that the paradox of the ‘class of all classes’ was arrived at through an illegitimate reification of the notion of class, so that it somehow became a ‘thing’ alongside the other things that classes supposedly classify. Now a set or class may be thought of as a set of terms and relations, in which there is a mutual conditioning in meaning of terms by relations and relations by terms. And the paradox at which Russell arrived could be identified as resulting from an illegitimate reification of ‘class’ by a simple reflection upon a notion that Aquinas claims is ‘naturally known’ to us – a whole is greater than a part. Thus, the idea of a ‘class of all classes’ is the contradictory notion of a part that is also the whole of which it is a part. Clearly there is a category mistake lurking if someone persists in asking to see ‘the set of my favourite things,’ after having been shown my stamp collection, my matchbox collection, and my books, which are the subsets making up the set of ‘all my favourite things.’ This being so, Cartwright maintains that the illegitimate ‘all-in-one principle’ can still be seen to be at work in the reservations some philosophers, including Dummett, express about generalized quantification. Cartwright identifies passages in which Dummett is critical of the idea of overall quantification and yet notes that he also holds that we can, of course, make some general statements.51 I believe, in fact, that Cartwright’s argument as to Dummett’s inconsistency in this area highlights a lack of clarity on Dummett’s part concerning just what is involved in rationally justified knowledge of the individual. It may be worth noting in this context the cognitional basis of our notions such as ‘all’ or ‘totality.’ In our questions concerning reality, and

86

Method in Metaphysics

our judgments about reality, which answer such questions, we see that we aim at completeness or at the ‘all’ that constitutes correct, satisfactory knowledge about individual entities, parts of entities and totalities, or groups of entities. The notion of ‘all,’ then, is operative in all our questioning and thinking as such a rational goal. Therefore, arguments that we could not in some way achieve a complete result in any cognitive search, or that the goal of referring to ‘all’ or ‘totality’ (understood as the correct answers to questions asking about anything) was in some way incoherent would undercut the very basis of any intellectual argument that attempted to reach a conclusion about anything. I do not think philosophers have gone quite so far as to argue that such reference to totality, completeness, or ‘all’ is illegitimate, but the kind of ambiguity or confusion in this area that Cartwright’s argument highlights may encourage us to reflect further upon the nature of such notions as being essential to our thinking and knowing. Myth and Metaphysics The upsurge in interest in metaphysics among analytical philosophers in the last twenty years or so implies, as has been pointed out, that metaphysics is approached in recent work through the medium of language. Metaphysics is seen as providing a basic or fundamental semantics. One of the key methodological issues we have encountered, however, is the question of how to assess the metaphysical assumptions and anticipations identified as being present in ordinary language, especially when these may be found to clash with other perspectives, such as those of science. It has been pointed out that a critical realist sees an adequate method in metaphysics as involving the integration of positive results from ordinary language and science, but that the fundamental core of metaphysical method would be derived from cognitional theory, and this would also provide a normative and critical way of evaluating the results of common sense, science, and scholarship. Ordinary language as expressive of the insights and judgments of human intelligence and reasonableness will, in Lonergan’s view then, point to metaphysical elements that may also be validated via the cognitional position of critical realism. Thus, as he writes: ‘There are many words: some are substantival because they refer to intelligible and concrete unities; some are verbal because they refer to conjugate acts [‘accidental’ acts of a thing]; some are adjectival or adverbial because they refer to the regularity or frequency of the occurrence of acts or to potentialities for such regularities or frequencies.’52 However, I would concur with analytical philosophers working in the area of metaphysics that a sound method

The Question of Method

87

in metaphysics cannot just leave everything as it is in ordinary language. First, as we have noted, there may be clashes between common-sense understanding and notions that arise from science or from philosophy itself. Because of the dominant cultural hegemony of the former it is probable that ordinary language users will be prepared for some kind of linguistic reform should a clash occur between science and common sense. In the case of the latter the attitude of ordinary language users will be more ambivalent. On the one hand, there is the somewhat justified, pragmatist suspicion on the part of common sense regarding the success, use, and therefore authority of philosophical analysis. However, there is also the unreasoned tendency or bias towards omnicompetence manifest in common sense which, historically, was once evident in hostility towards scientific endeavours, before these proved themselves powerful in transforming the environment, and this bias is no more intelligent when directed against the conclusions of philosophy than against those of science. Ordinary language expresses not only the intelligence and reasonableness of human persons operating in communities, but also the inattention, obtuseness, and irrationality to which we human beings are prone. The metaphysical intuitions evident in common sense are, therefore, not immune to refinement or revision. Language, then, may have a metaphysical ‘surface grammar’ that can lead us astray. For instance, Lonergan points out that the sentence ‘I see’ does not necessarily imply that ‘I’ is an ontological subject exercising efficient causality. ‘Seeing,’ in fact, may be more of an ‘undergoing’ than an active ‘doing,’ if we prescind from the active element of attending to what I see. One needs to distinguish in this case between the ‘grammatical subject of a transitive verb in the active voice and, on the other hand, the ontological subject of the exercise of efficient causality.’53 A second crucial factor that, when taken into consideration, renders the situation more complex has to do with what Lonergan terms the ‘polymorphism’ of human consciousness. Indeed, it is the identification and analysis of this characteristic of human consciousness that is fundamental in understanding the problems of philosophy. In a way similar to Wittgenstein, Lonergan maintains that the identification and resolution of philosophical conflicts requires a therapeutic effort to lay to rest wrong-headed philosophical and metaphysical positions that spontaneously emerge from the fact that as human beings we have both an ‘extroverted’ animal approach to the ‘real’ and, at the same time, a distinctively intelligent and rational anticipation of reality as ‘that to be known.’ On Lonergan’s view the all-pervasive myth of knowing as seeing, of representationalism and empiricism, arises from this ambiguity. And, of course, scepticism, relativism, idealism, and the like are

88

Method in Metaphysics

parasitic upon such notions of human knowing, which they, in turn, claim to have shown are not proven. While from childhood we have operative within consciousness the criteria of correct knowledge of reality as the use of our intelligent and reasonable capacities, our ability to give a correct account of these and, therefore, of objective knowledge is another matter. Our tendency is, rather, to take what is obvious in knowing, seeing, sense experience for what knowing obviously is.54 That picture-thinking and unverifiable imaginative projection are common in metaphysics is not, therefore, surprising. Lonergan distinguishes three phases in metaphysics: latent metaphysics – a metaphysical anticipation of reality operative within all our thinking; explicit, but problematic metaphysics – the varied and sometimes competing systems of the philosophical traditions; and critical metaphysics. This latter would be a metaphysics such as he attempts, that is, a metaphysics that, as we have seen, stands largely in the Aristotelian Thomist tradition, but is established in a critical fashion on the basis of a critical realist epistemology that is argued for in terms of self-referential arguments for consistency and coherence. It has been observed in our discussion of metaphysics so far that analytical philosophers in the field are also agreed that common-sense intuitions of ontology while important are not to be taken as beyond revision. Thus Dummett’s reflections upon the need to move beyond certain notions regarding space and time in common-sense thinking have been noted. On the critical realist view, a fundamental task for a critical metaphysics is to distinguish those metaphysical notions that can be critically validated, in the manner discussed above, from those that may be the result of the uncritical imaginative projections arising from sense experience. Thus Lonergan writes: We have found the abstract intelligibility of space and time to lie in the invariants of the geometry employed in a verified physics. But if one insists that going beyond concrete insights is a desertion of reality, a flight to metaphysical make-believe, then one cannot rise above one’s personal, spatio-temporal frame of reference and one cannot distinguish between the intelligibility immanent in that frame and mere sensitive familiarity with directions and with the lapse of time. Without such a distinction, objective space and time are credited not only with the intelligibility of the frame but also with our feelings … As we make decisions and then produce results, so causes are before effects … Causality cannot be merely an intelligible relation of dependence; it has to be explained and the explanation is reached by an appeal to the sensation of muscular effort and to the image of the transmission of effort through contact. So

The Question of Method

89

universal causality is a pervasive fate, linking all things at once, keeping the wandering stars to their strange courses and, by the same stroke, settling for astrologers the destinies of men.55 Ordinary language, as all language, therefore, expresses various aspects of the human stream of consciousness. In that stream human persons are found to move in communal, intersubjective, aesthetic, practical, religious, and ‘intellectual’ modes. Words and images have an affective, symbolic, and aesthetic dimension to them and thus the truth of Heidegger’s dictum ‘man dwells poetically.’ Myth is expanded metaphor and metaphor is pervasive in language. This affective and imaginative dimension to language and thought is, certainly, a permanent characteristic of human existence. While it would be quite wrong then to think that such a dimension to human thought is negative and requires removal, for this would be impossible, one should not go to the other extreme and claim that therefore true objectivity in language and thought is impossible. That would be an endorsement of a self-destructive counterposition that would undercut not only itself but the claim to know all these affective and aesthetic characteristics of human thought. Lonergan agrees with philosophers like Merleau-Ponty and Gilbert Durand that such ‘bodily’ and affective factors are everywhere at work.56 However, this sets the stage and characterizes the problem for metaphysics. Metaphysics as a basic semantics aims at a control of meaning from a critical base in such a way that notions which result from affect-laden images and imaginative constructs may be distinguished from ideas subject to critical verification. If deconstructionists protest at the notion of ‘control’ and ‘dominance’ of meaning, it can be readily pointed out to them that their own protests result from just such a control in terms of the intelligent and reasonable work that has gone on in developing their objections. Phenomenology Such observations lead to reflection upon a further rival metaphysical method to that of critical realism, that of phenomenology. In his introduction to the Cambridge Companion to Levinas, Simon Critchley observes that while Levinas would eschew the idea that he follows some particular method in philosophy, when one observes his work one can in fact see that, in a general way, he follows the methodology of phenomenology – the ‘way’ of doing philosophy outlined by Husserl.57 That phenomenological ‘method’ or way attempts to set forth the data, to draw attention to what is ‘evident,’ and in Levinas’s case the work is aimed at drawing attention to the data of ethical phenomena.

90

Method in Metaphysics

If one closely observes a thinker in this tradition, like Levinas, at work one will also notice that there are agreements and disagreements in his work as to how the ethical phenomena are to be characterized. So Levinas’s account of what he terms the ‘il y a’ is at variance with Heidegger’s view of the ‘es gibt.’ Levinas also has agreements and disagreements concerning ethical phenomena with philosophers such as Martin Buber and Gabriel Marcel. The enterprise of the Philosophical Investigations also manifests this phenomenological stance of (apparently) simply pointing to the relevant data which are ‘evident.’ However, it may be that Wittgenstein is more honest than Husserl (if commentators on the latter like Derrida are to be believed), since Wittgenstein is explicit about the fact that such a description of language is motivated by the traditional philosophical problems. Phenomenologists, then, disagree, and what is affirmed by one to be ‘evident’ is denied to be so by another. A good example of this would be Sartre’s quite negative construal of the data on interpersonal relationships, the same data being construed in a more positive light by Marcel. However, our interest here is simply to note that these very disagreements demonstrate the fact that phenomenologists implicitly follow the ‘method’ of cognitional structure. They attend to data, have insights and formulate accounts of that data, and judge as to the veracity or probable truth of their accounts; their disagreements with one another testify to the latter critical activity. However, while such a fundamental cognitive procedure is followed in their thought and work it is the case, as we have seen in the earlier discussion of Derrida on Husserl, that they fail to provide an adequate account of this cognitional activity. Standing as they do in the Kantian tradition they fail to provide a proper account of critical judgments and, therefore, of objective knowledge. On the view taken here phenomenologists have made significant and very important contributions to various areas of philosophy, including ethics and aesthetics. However, while they have often contributed profound insights in these areas, the purely ‘descriptive’ stance of phenomenology means that a move to a properly critical metaphysics does not seem viable. It is no accident, perhaps, that phenomenologist and existentialist philosophers have often expressed themselves in works of literature, in novels and poetry. Like the poet or novelist the phenomenologist is not concerned with the systematic or explanatory (in Lonergan’s sense at least), but with rich and significant insights into concrete situations and patterns of human behaviour. Now just as metaphysics, on our view, involves in part the integration of insights from common sense, so it will involve the integration of genuine insights from poets, artists, and the like. But the task of normative or critical integration is one performed by such a metaphysics, not by these other accounts of human existence and behav-

The Question of Method

91

iour. Why is this the case? It is so because a critical metaphysics, arising from a critically established position on cognition and epistemology, will need to distinguish between the explanatory account of what is so and the merely descriptive. Lonergan describes the work of phenomenology as an attempt to describe what Aristotle would term the ‘partes materiae’ of things. The partes materiae, or material elements of, say, a circle, any particular circle, will be the marks in chalk or in ink in which it is drawn. Now such descriptions can be more or less accurate; they are the result of attending to data, intelligent insight into the data and judgments as to whether or not the description is accurate or complete. However, describing things, however useful it is, does not advance to explaining them. Describing a circle is not the same as offering the kind of explanation Euclid offered of circularity when he identified a circle as a series of coplanar points equidistant from the centre. Metaphysics, I would argue, aims at an explanatory account. Phenomenology appears to be hampered in any attempt to arrive at such a view. It does not succeed in breaking out of the representationalism inherent in Kantian thought. Therefore it is not able to say what constitutes knowledge of reality. As a result, it has no clear way of distinguishing between the real and the nonreal and, therefore, possesses no clear criteria for identifying the inherent explanatory structure of the real. Rich and profound as its insights into the ethical and metaphysical may be, the fact that it restricts itself to non-systematic insights into the concrete data implies a problematic ambiguity in results. The world of myth and magic is also the result of insights into the presentations of images relating to data. As Lonergan writes: Now I am no opponent of insight into the concrete presentations of one’s own experience. But I would note that all the explaining is done by the insight and that, unless one distinguishes between the insight and the presentations, then one is open to the blunder of attributing an explanatory power to the presentations and even to associated feelings and emotions. One can know exactly the contribution made by the insight by having recourse to concepts, to abstract formulations, to the utterance of terms and relations with the terms fixing the relations and the relations implicitly defining the terms. But if one employs this procedure, one is involved in the explanatory viewpoint; and if one rejects the explanatory viewpoint, one is without defence against the tendency to regard as explanatory what merely is an item to be explained.58 One may note here that an example of such explanation is cognitional structure itself. The terms and relations that mutually define each other

92

Method in Metaphysics

are the intentional, conscious acts on the three levels of coming to know: experience, understanding, and judgment. And this structure is verified as existing in one’s data of consciousness, for the attempt to deny its existence provides evidence in the very conscious activity of denial that it is in fact the case. Without the explanatory dimension, insights into concrete data regarding reality, the ethical, human life and relationships run the risk of shading off into a pseudometaphysics that is in fact mythical. Thus, one wonders how in fact phenomenology per se could contribute to, say, a Christian theological understanding of how anthropomorphic images of the Deity are to be understood. One could envisage rich and profound ethical reflections concerning ‘the face of God’ as emerging from such phenomenological reflections, but could phenomenology really settle the question of the status of anthropomorphic images of the Deity: Are they to be taken literally? If they are not, how else could one understand such predicates being applied to God? I do not really see how phenomenology could be helpful in settling such issues simply from its own resources. If this is so, then one should at least be aware of the inherent weakness in phenomenology regarding its inability to distinguish fact from fiction, and myth from metaphysics. An Outline of Metaphysics So far in this chapter I have discussed work of some influential analytical philosophers that has a bearing on the question of a possible method for metaphysics. Those who desire to pursue metaphysics approach it as a basic semantics, as providing the ontological truth makers for intelligent human language about the world. I have also critically assessed some of the methodological criteria set forth by some analytical philosophers on the basis of the critical realist position argued for in the previous chapter. I then went on to critically assess some of the philosophical presuppositions of process thought and phenomenology. Lonergan’s method of deriving a core position in metaphysics on the basis of his critical realist cognitional theory and epistemology was outlined. In subsequent chapters I intend to explore a number of metaphysical issues that are discussed by both Lonergan and recent writers in analytical philosophy. In concluding this chapter it may be useful to provide a brief sketch of some salient features of Lonergan’s position on metaphysics. The self-knowledge acquired in the affirmation of oneself as one who comes to know through diverse yet interrelated conscious acts in phases of experience, understanding, and judgment at once grounds metaphysical notions of substance, or unity, and accidents or differentiae. There is a unity of consciousness verifiable in the various conscious acts I go through

The Question of Method

93

to arrive at some item of knowledge. I am aware of such acts as attention to sensations, insights, and judgments. Again argument to the contrary will only provide further evidence that there are the said conscious noetic acts, and that they are related in the one consciousness. This critical grounding of the idea of a substantial unity, of the one who advances through diverse acts (the accidents, or differentiae) of experience, understanding, judgment, and responsible decision, provides a paradigm instance of the substance/accidents categories of traditional metaphysics. The grounding of these ontological notions in this way provides a way of meeting objections to such ideas from Hume and those who seem indebted to his legacy like Derek Parfit. Hume may have thought of himself as a mere bundle of fleeting perceptions; still if I am to go through the process of arguing for him or against him I can find that I am a conscious unity, substance, differentiated by intelligent and reasonable activities or operations. What I know in knowing the self, in affirming cognitive and evaluative structure, is, therefore, a unity, a ‘thing’ (in traditional terms, a substance) differentiated by acts on diverse levels of consciousness, these acts being changes in this same conscious unity. Such acts are, in traditional terminology, ‘accidents’ or Aristotle’s ‘differentiae.’ According to Lonergan’s usage such acts are termed ‘conjugates.’ Lonergan’s use of terminology is intended to emphasize continuity with what he considers viable and important in Aristotle and Aquinas, but also implies a wish to distance himself from much in the Western philosophical tradition and metaphysics that is implicated in representationalism or naive realism – the myth of ‘knowing as looking.’ Thus he states that he wishes to avoid the use of the term ‘substance’ because of the notion of ‘what stands under,’ which in the history of philosophy the word has often been taken to imply.59 This notion of substance has led to seemingly intractable problems both past and present, and the puzzles it gives rise to are well brought out in the humorous comment of Michael Hinton: ‘Substance is that which is without properties, but which has all the properties.’60 Lonergan’s use of ‘conjugate form’ to replace ‘accidental form’ is a deliberate attempt to avoid the suggestion that the ‘accidental’ at once implies the ‘incidental,’ the ‘insignificant.’ Thus, while a human person remains the selfsame human person through a lifetime, that selfsame person undergoes growth and development through processes that are, to say the least, highly significant. And such changes (as we shall see in a later chapter) are in terms of the acquisition of new conjugate forms, understood as capacities, habits, or dispositions. A unity, or thing, then is differentiated, identified through its conjugates. A dog is differentiated as an individual through the identification of a unity judged to be present through experiences of changes in shape, colour, movement, sound. Lon-

94

Method in Metaphysics

ergan’s use of ‘conjugate form’ is therefore nearer to the expression ‘differentiate’ quite often used in modern translation or commentary on Aristotle. However, the use of ‘conjugate’ adds a further element of precision, on Lonergan’s view.61 Thus, such acts or occurrences as are identified in science are defined in ‘conjunction,’ both with other similar acts and, more important, in a way that shows terms and relations to be mutually defining. We find such mutual definition of terms in arithmetic, geometry, and modern science. And the definitions of the elements involved in cognitional structure are, indeed, ‘mutually’ complementary in meaning. So, for example, in understanding what a ‘judgment’ is one understands judgments as related to questions asked, and as related to the insights or ideas that are being evaluated. Since metaphysics is conceived, on Lonergan’s view, as integrating the results of common sense, science, and philosophy, this paradigm instance of verifying in reality a unity-substance differentiated by accidents should be seen in context. Myriad are also the instances in science and common sense in which we have evidence for a reasoned judgment that there are unities, substances, differentiated by their activities, accidents. The fact that reality comes to be known by us through the interrelated activities of attention to data, understanding and reasoned judgment as to the truth or probable truth of our concepts implies fundamental ontological distinctions within the reality we come to know. Thus the triad in knowing of experience, understanding, and judgment correspond to the distinctions in reality between potency (the empirical), form (that which is understood), and existence, or the act of existence. Talk of ‘potency’ with regard to what is sensed on the empirical level may seem a little odd, especially for those not acquainted with the Aristotelian Thomist tradition. However, I think the point can be put in the following way: if we find that this data is in fact data which is, say, that of an elephant then this data has the potential or potency, of being the data of an elephant – fact proves possibility in this concrete instance. Reality is also known as ‘informed.’ Thus our intelligence grasps ‘forms’ or intelligible patterns, or organizations in the data. But such forms, natures, and orderings between beings are, if real, actual: they have actual existence. A further observation may be made concerning the ‘potential’ or ‘merely empirical’ aspect of reality that our knowing encounters on the first level: this element of reality is not intelligible in itself but only as ‘informed’ by form, by a nature, by a ‘what it is.’ Lonergan’s analysis of knowing focuses not only upon direct insight, which grasps intelligible patterning in data, but upon what he terms ‘inverse insight.’ Such insight grasps that there is nothing to understand in a given instance; that one has, so to speak, gone down a blind alley, and that one is to gain a correct insight into something in a different, roundabout fashion. Lonergan illustrates such insights,

The Question of Method

95

which occur in contexts involving complementary direct insights, in various instances of mathematical and scientific understanding. The Gödelian proofs of limitations in attempts at systematic deductive expansion in logic would be a case in point, since these proofs, involving direct insights of various kinds, are to the effect that such and such cannot be proven, that there is nothing to understand in a positive way in such and such an instance. The understanding that the merely empirical or potential is not to be understood in a positive way, but as informed by some nature or set of natures, involves such an inverse insight. The discussion of this metaphysical level will enter into analysis of debates concerning individuation and identity in later chapters. However, in the present context it can be noted that this level is that of, what Lonergan terms, ‘merely empirical difference.’ Lonergan illustrates the point in the following fashion: Why is one point different from another? If you say that it is the distance between them, then let us take a third point in an equilateral triangle, and I will ask you why are the three distances different? Well, you may say, they are different directions. You cannot say they are unequal: they are not different because they are unequal. And you cannot go back to the points, and say, ‘The distances are different because the points are different,’ because what you want to explain is the difference of the points. If you say, ‘It is the directions,’ then we can just move on to another question: Why are the directions different? Finally, you will say, ‘Well, we have to presuppose something.’ Of course, and that is precisely what I am trying to show. There is such a thing as material individuation. There is a fact of difference without a reason for difference.62 If we attempt to pursue the option of saying potency, form, and act of existence are only what we impose on reality, à la Kant, we become involved in incoherent counterpositions. We have to engage in experience, understanding, and judgment to make these claims in order to tell the Kantian or idealist story about the reality of our knowing and its supposed limitations. Lonergan, then, distinguishes six basic metaphysical elements pertaining to the individual: central and conjugate potency, form, and act. The acts of a thing, which are occurrences, are composed of empirical, formal (the ‘what,’ or nature to be understood), and actual ontological elements, for these aspects are known in the correct knowing of these acts via experience, understanding, and judgment. And similarly, the thing as a whole or unity is composed of an ontological triad of the empirical, the formal (intelligible), and the actual. Lonergan’s method-based work in metaphysics is also preoccupied with growth, development, and emergence, and decline in processes. In this

96

Method in Metaphysics

area Lonergan brings together, on the one hand, Thomistic analyses of the dynamic development that occurs in the movement from potency to act, and, on the other, modern scientific study of the development that occurs within individual things, and within the wider context of ecologies of things and world process in general. Kantians and others will deny the objective reality of finality. But returning once more to the paradigm instance of the conscious activities of coming to know, one can verify the reality of dynamism and movement. Our intelligence works upon the level of data in order to reach understanding, and the insights we enjoy as a result are further subject to higher activities of rational scrutiny in order that we might ascertain their truth. Our own cognitional process is, then, a self-assembling, dynamic reality motivated by the finality that is our desire for, or intention of discovering, the truth. But, again, both science and common sense offer evidence that our cognitional process is not alone in this regard. The world order, it would seem, is not static or inert, but is characterized by the emergence and decline of species, of individuals, and of developments within those individuals. If, as was pointed out above, metaphysics is understood as involving a component derived from philosophical reflection alone, still that is only one component. The method Lonergan proposes also involves a critical integration into a metaphysical viewpoint of the results of common sense, science, and scholarship. Accordingly Lonergan pays particular attention to the growth of statistical analysis in scientific method in the last two centuries, and the way this brings to light an intelligibility in world process in terms of the probabilities of the emergence and decline of ecological environments supportive of the growth, development, and decline of individuals. Such a perspective broadens the scope of the notions of act and potency, or ‘disposition,’ a term preferred by analytical philosophers when referring to the same metaphysical reality. Thus, the prior states of affairs, which emerge in processes whose probability of emergence and survival may be statistically estimated, constitute a potency or disposition for the emergence of higher individuals and ecologies of individuals. It is in the context of an analysis of world process understood in this way that Lonergan offers what he terms an explanatory account of genera and species, as opposed to a merely descriptive, preliminary, or classificatory account of the classes of things differing in genus and species. In the context of his treatment of metaphysics Lonergan also discusses such matters as relations, the relations internal to individuals and external to individuals, and, in diverse places in his work, causality. In the chapters to follow such items will also be discussed as I attempt, in a critical fashion, to relate Lonergan’s work in metaphysics to that of recent analytical metaphysics.

Recto Running Head

97

4 Metaphysics of the Self

The title of this chapter is in some respects misleading from the viewpoint of Lonergan’s philosophy, since the issues I propose to discuss arise in the area of what is referred to as ‘philosophy of mind,’ and Lonergan’s metaphysical position clearly regards mind as but one aspect of the human self or person. It is indeed the central feature of the human self, but is nevertheless a part of a larger metaphysical whole. In order to provide a more complete metaphysical account of the self or person one would need, at the very least, to engage in an inquiry as to what contributions the various physical and social sciences and humanities might make to a philosophical anthropology, and then begin the task of assessing the merits of the various theories on offer from the standpoint of the core cognitional, epistemological, and metaphysical positions that have been outlined and defended in this book so far. Since even the results that could be accepted on the basis of this dialectic would be understood as, at best, provisional, one would need to engage in the further task of sketching out what the metaphysical equivalents would be for the terms involved in the propositions that might be accepted. Such a lengthy undertaking is not my concern here, although I will say more on these issues in later chapters that deal with development and the metaphysics of the social. The more limited aim of the present chapter is to initiate the discussion between Lonergan’s metaphysics and the metaphysical positions of analytical philosophers currently writing on metaphysics. That discussion will be the focus of the chapters to follow. Since in analytical circles philosophical investigation into theory of knowledge is seen as close or allied to discussions of the philosophy of mind, the progression from a treatment of Lonergan’s work on cognition and episte-

98

Method in Metaphysics

mology as laying the foundations for metaphysics to a discussion of some of the metaphysical features of mind appears natural. This chapter will also allow further elucidation of Lonergan’s position on consciousness, knowledge and our knowledge of the reality of the mind via clarification and contrast with some representative work being produced in this area by analytical philosophers. Lonergan and Descartes An issue, which it will be as well to tackle at the outset, is Lonergan’s relationship to Descartes. While Descartes is denounced almost universally today as the ‘father of foundationalism,’ and of the scepticism that goes hand in hand with it, it is clearly the case that modern philosophy of mind still grapples with the problems that emerge in one way or another from his philosophy. Lonergan is critical of Descartes’ thought in a number of ways. However, he does not write off all of Descartes’ arguments, nor does he take it as obvious, as do many postmoderns, that Descartes’ attempt to provide foundations was totally wrong-headed. Indeed, while it is important when situating Lonergan’s thought in the context of current postmodern debates on foundations to emphasize his difference from Descartes, it is also important to be clear about the way Lonergan shares some of Descartes’ preoccupations and even, in certain respects, argues in ways similar to Descartes. Thus, for someone with a general philosophical background coming to Lonergan’s thought for the first time a salient feature of that philosophy will be Lonergan’s antisceptical arguments for self-knowledge, knowledge that, it is claimed, is definitive, unrevisable, and this appears to be the same kind of philosophical position espoused by Descartes. The first point that needs to be made concerning the relationship of Lonergan’s arguments for definite self-knowledge (knowledge of cognitional structure) and Descartes’ similar Cogito arguments is that they both emerge from a historical background of antisceptical argument. Such a historical background needs to be understood, and, in fact, historical studies of medieval and Renaissance philosophy are of considerable importance in helping us to understand what lies behind Descartes’ enterprise.1 Descartes’ antisceptical moves arise from attempts to find a foundation for knowledge against the background of the scepticism widespread in Renaissance thought. And both that scepticism itself and the kind of antisceptical moves Descartes makes have a long history behind them, which includes the arguments for and against the scepticism of medieval philosophy. Seen in this context, neither Descartes’ sceptical arguments nor his rebuttal of them in the Cogito are original. Lonergan’s own devel-

Metaphysics of the Self

99

opment and deployment of such arguments, then, is indebted to aspects of the tradition that stretches back before Descartes, and have as their point of departure Aquinas’s version of such arguments, which need to be understood in the context of the overall Thomistic philosophy of mind. Having noted this common tradition, however, it is crucial that we acknowledge the different ways in which these antisceptical arguments are understood; and it is in this respect that the arguments of Lonergan and Descartes differ in very important ways. My intention here is not to provide a thorough treatment of such differences but to highlight two important issues. The first one is Descartes’ view of knowledge, which is essentially intuitionist. That I cannot deny that ‘I,’ the knower, exist, Lonergan would agree. But how do I arrive at the judgment of truth in which I claim to know my existence? Lonergan would argue that I do so by the deployment of intelligent and reasonable operations on the three levels of coming to know. I ask questions about myself as a knower. I have insights into the data of my conscious activities (aided by my reading of the philosophical tradition on the matter). I formulate an account of a conscious unity differentiated by activities on the three levels of experience, understanding, and judgment. I am then in a position to verify that concept of ‘knower’ so arrived at, in the data of consciousness. Furthermore, I cannot flee from the affirmation that I am a knower, understood in the way specified, since any denial would provide evidence of the conscious activities in question, and silence would be no escape since it would be silence adopted for a reason of which I am conscious. Descartes provides no such account of differentiated noetic activities that are applied to themselves in this way. One consequence of this is that he can never derive a satisfactory criterion of certainty from his thought experiments. His response to his critics are notoriously weak in this regard, for all he can assert is that an idea will be certain if it has that degree of clarity and distinctness that is found in the indubitable idea of the self, knower, Cogito. But the certainty in question is not a matter of intuition into ideas. The certainty arises not by necessity but de facto from the fact that the conditions for affirming that I am a knower, in the sense specified, are fulfilled in an unambiguous fashion in my consciousness; to deny that they are fulfilled will simply provide evidence that they are. A theory of knowledge that is intuitionist (representationalist) pretends that there is immediate vision in this case. But the truth is otherwise. The definite knowledge of the self and its conscious activities is mediate knowledge, as all our knowledge is mediate. And by mediate one means that knowledge comes to us via the operation of the interrelated activities on the three levels of coming to know. Descartes’ ‘intuitionist immediacy’ notion of self-knowledge is also subject to the criticisms of later philosophers such as Nietzsche and

100 Method in Metaphysics

Wittgenstein, who insist that since concepts are involved in the elucidation of the Cogito the knowledge of the Cogito cannot be prior but is subsequent to the acquisition of language and conceptual apparatus. We saw that, in essence, Derrida’s attack on Husserl’s philosophy stands in this tradition of criticism. The response of Lonergan’s philosophy to this justified criticism of intuitionism is to point out that it does not invalidate definite self-knowledge, for the claim still holds that I cannot, de facto, deny that I am a knower, whatever the contingent conditions of my doing so may be. Claims to know such conditions and presuppositions are claims to know what is the case. Furthermore, it can be pointed out that, despite the way the matter often seems to be presented, the private language argument does not constitute a knock-down refutation of Cartesian solipsistic scepticism. The way is always open to a sceptic of Cartesian inspiration to deny that the words and concepts that he uses ‘prove’ the existence of an outside world, a world of a linguistic community – perhaps they are all products of the evil genius, the illusion machinery, or whatever. This brings me to the second difference between Lonergan and Descartes, which I would highlight here. It is a difference that also obtains between Lonergan and Husserl, given the insistence of the latter on the foundation of knowledge being the self, the Cogito. For Lonergan this is not the case. Since my knowledge of myself as a knower is a matter of experience, understanding, and judgment, what is fundamental is not ‘selfknowledge’ as some ‘self-presence,’ or self intuiting, but my ability to know reality. In coming to know that I am a knower, I formulate concepts regarding myself as a knower on the basis of my insights into the data of consciousness, but then I ask whether these concepts are true, whether they are true of reality. If I come to know myself, then, I come to know an aspect, or part of reality. I assess the truth of the claim that I am a knower in accord with the intelligent grasp of concepts and the reasonable affirmation that this is so, and such operations are operations by which I know any putative aspect of reality to be, in fact, an aspect of reality. In this way problems of the ‘bridge’ are pseudoproblems in that they overlook the fact that in knowing the self I know some aspect of the real. I do not need to escape from the self to get to a reality that is ‘outside.’ There is a further question about what other realities, parts of the real, I can come to know. But there is abundant evidence that there are other real objects apart from myself, since these other objects cannot be meaningfully included in any stipulation of what I am (they do not obey my will, they do not remain in my consciousness when I move away from them, and so forth). Now it is true that knowledge of these other objects cannot be definitive in the way that knowledge of my conscious acts is, or the metaphysical theorems derived from this. It is not the case that in denying that these things are of

Metaphysics of the Self 101

such and such a nature I have direct evidence that they are so. And this I do have in the case of cognitional self-affirmation. In other cases, then, it is possible that there is trickery or delusion at work. However, rational judgment with regard to what is really the case is also a matter of probable judgment. Since, for example, we have no evidence for the hypothesis of an evil genius, we have no reason to affirm that this is the cause of things appearing before us. While the hypothesis cannot be ruled out, then, we may still claim that probably it is not true of reality; and in this case the probable estimation derives from an application of Ockham’s razor. When in science, scholarship, or ordinary language we claim that something is probably true of reality we are justified in doing so, and such probability may be of a higher or lower degree. A good number of present scientific theories have a lower probability of being true attached to them than does the claim, established through the advance of science, that the moon is an object more than a couple of thousand miles away from the earth. First-Person Language: G.E.M. Anscombe A position that would appear to challenge Lonergan’s idea that one can achieve a definitive self-affirmation of oneself as a knower is that of G.E.M. Anscombe. In her essay ‘The First Person’ Anscombe follows the lead of Wittgenstein in attacking the dualism of Augustine, Descartes, and Kripke.2 Lonergan would be equally suspicious of Cartesian dualism. However, when Anscombe goes on to attack certain attempts to think of ‘I’ as a self-referring expression with philosophical significance, one might well wonder whether Lonergan’s position is to be included among those targeted by Anscombe. Anscombe asks how is ‘I’ that word through which I refer to myself? Speaking of Smith’s use of ‘I’ to refer to himself, she writes: ‘His use of “I” surely guarantees that he does know it. But we have a right to ask what he knows; if “I” expresses a way its object is reached by him, what Frege called an “Art des Gegebenseins”, we want to know what that way is and how it comes about that the only object reached in that way by anyone is identical with himself.’ ‘I’ is not, she insists, a proper name; we call it, rather, a personal pronoun. In order to sort out the question of self-reference Anscombe admits that ‘we must get to understand self-consciousness.’3 Anscombe maintains against the dualists that a ‘self’ is not something that things have. However, she holds that self-consciousness is acceptable if taken as consciousness that such and such holds of oneself.4 On the other hand, in thinking of ‘I’ as an expression that captures a self-consciousness there are problems. Anscombe writes, ‘It would be a question what guaranteed that one got hold of the right self, that is, that a man called ‘I’ was always con-

102 Method in Metaphysics

nected with him or was always the same man himself.’5 Anscombe goes on to ask whether ‘I’ is a type of demonstrative. She quite rightly dismisses as nonsense the idea that ‘I’ could be a kind of bare ‘this,’ for we should ask, ‘This what?’6 If ‘I’ is, however, not understood as a mere unadorned demonstrative but with a content attached, yet more problems arise for the Cartesian approach to self through reference to the conscious ‘I.’ When I attempt to refer to ‘this man’ the demonstrative ‘this’ is clearly not empty. Yet the proposition could turn out to be mistaken: ‘this man’ could turn out, instead, to be ‘this lamp post.’ But the Cartesian notion of reference to a consciousness named ‘I’ implies that mistakes are not possible. The reference is successful in an indubitable fashion. The worry in this case is the Wittgensteinian one: if I cannot be incorrect about knowing an object then I cannot be correct about knowing it. As Anscombe writes, ‘Getting hold of the wrong object is excluded and that makes us think that getting hold of the right object can’t be done.’7 And, therefore, as she writes in her chapter ‘The Subjectivity of Sensation,’ ‘contrary to Cartesian assumptions, the ‘incorrigibility’ of descriptions of sense contents (narrowly understood) is simply not any kind of correctness.’8 Locke, long before Derek Parfit, conducted thought experiments about the possible metaphysical difference between ‘I that did it’ and ‘I that remember it done.’ How does the use of the referring expression ‘I’ guarantee that reference is made to a conscious ‘I’ that is the same ‘I’ thought to have accomplished things many years ago, things of which that ‘I’ is no longer conscious? Even if we do take ‘I’ as a referring expression, Anscombe asks, how could reference to the right object be guaranteed? There are sceptical questions that arise such as Russell’s ‘problem of shortterm selves.’ Anscombe concludes, ‘How, even, could one justify the assumption, if it is an assumption, that there is just one thinking which is this thinking of the thought that I am thinking, just one thinker? How do I know that ‘I’ is not ten thinkers thinking in unison?’9 Towards the end of her essay, Anscombe makes clear her agreement with William James’s distinction between consciousness, on the one hand, and self-consciousness, on the other. Further, Anscombe wonders whether the latter is to be understood as ‘private’ experience.10 Does Anscombe’s argument represent a challenge to Lonergan’s view of introspective self-affirmation of a knower, differentiated by cognitional activities on three levels of coming to know? Certainly there are points of agreement between the two philosophers. On Lonergan’s view the ‘I’ in self-affirmation is in no way a ‘free’ or ‘bare’ demonstrative; it is specified as the conscious unity among the differentiated noetic acts. In ordinary experience, no less than in Lonergan’s more technical activity of self-affirmation, the ‘I’ is, I would say, in some sense referred to as such a conscious

Metaphysics of the Self 103

locus, unity among my experiences. However, there are confusions in Anscombe’s position that can, I believe, be identified and corrected from the perspectives of Lonergan’s thought. To begin with, it was noted above that Anscombe does accept a notion of self-consciousness as awareness that ‘I hold such and such.’ However, in order to agree with Anscombe on this one needs to be able to verify in the data of consciousness that one does have such an awareness of what one holds. In doing so one is making a report about such conscious awareness and one is aware that one is referring to that of which one is conscious. ‘I’ refers to this consciousness data. By the use of the demonstrative, one indicates, or refers to the data of consciousness. All the data that are conscious data constitute ‘my’ consciousness, or the ‘I’ to which I refer. That others are also centres of consciousness is a fact that I assert on the basis of good evidence. But such other selves, consciousnesses, are what are reasoned to in an inferential fashion. They are not constitutive elements of this data of consciousness of which I am aware. Anscombe’s own affirmation that there is self-consciousness is arrived at, and can only be reasonably affirmed by me, her reader, if I can attend to the data of which I am conscious. As in any other instance of knowing, demonstratives such as ‘this’ are used to indicate data that is already patterned through insights, acts of understanding that are descriptive or explanatory. Therefore, in the process of coming to affirm it is the case that I am a knower, reference has been made throughout the inquiry, which leads up to such an affirmation, to ‘this’ data, which is described and explained as the several, interrelated, conscious activities, on three levels of coming to know. When one is asked to judge whether it is the case that one is a knower in the sense specified, one refers again to the data of consciousness, ‘this’ data, and finds in it the fulfilment of the conditions that specify the concept of ‘knower.’ I turn now to the sceptical questions Anscombe entertains concerning the possibility of ‘I’ as an expression used successfully to refer to just one self, a self who perdures through time. ‘I’ refers to the conscious experiences of understanding and judging that I am aware of. I am not aware of any other consciousnesses involved, so I have no evidence or reason to affirm that they exist, but I do have reason sufficient to affirm that one consciousness exists, and that is what the ‘I’ refers to. In fact, the presuppositions of Anscombe’s thought experiment of more than one consciousness thinking the same thought also point to the same result. In order to affirm a state of affairs as true, or even probably true of reality, that there exist ten conscious subjects somehow aware of each other directly in thought, one would need to have evidence sufficient to affirm that there is one consciousness, and that there is another consciousness, and that the first consciousness is not the second (and so on) until one reached the rea-

104 Method in Metaphysics

sonably supported affirmation of ten consciousnesses. This then would be to affirm, presumably, ten beings who could refer to themselves as ‘I,’ differentiated in some way adequate to say that A and B are distinct consciousnesses. For I have evidence to affirm that although my judgment about x is sufficiently different from my sensate experience of x, they both occur in the same consciousness as aspects of the dynamic processes of that consciousness seeking knowledge. Talk of thinking the same thought in this context, as Anscombe does, is also somewhat ambiguous. If by ‘thought’ we mean a conscious act or set of interrelated activities, then my mental acts are not the same as, say, your acts, even if we are both thinking of the Eiffel Tower. I would not want to exclude the possibility of a consciousness in some way directly experiencing another consciousness in the way we do not do in ordinary life. But even in such an hypothetical case what has been said above about rationally differentiating one consciousness from another would hold, and it would be true that if there were no more thoughts than one thought, understood as a mental act, there would be reason to affirm one being but no more than one being. Anscombe, as we have seen, follows Wittgenstein’s position that claims about states of sensation, and by extension states of consciousness, cannot be verified, since if it is the case that we cannot be wrong about something we cannot be right about it either. In response it should be pointed out that neither Wittgenstein nor Anscombe argue for this contention in any systematic way. However, with regard to the kind of knowing we human beings engage in, the point they are getting at can be developed and clarified precisely in terms of Lonergan’s position on knowledge. What they are again offering a critique of, I would suggest, is the mistaken image of self-consciousness as immediate self-knowledge. However, Lonergan’s account of the self-affirmation of the knower (the conscious ‘I’) is, to repeat, in terms of the process of applying cognitional acts on three levels to themselves. Knowledge of self is not immediate but mediate. It is the move from self-consciousness to self-knowledge. The ‘indubitable’ element, so to speak, enters in since the process of verification in this case is a matter of discovering in the data the fulfilment of the conditions for the truth of the claim that one is a conscious knower, and this judgment cannot be gainsaid since the activity of arguing against it provides conscious data that demonstrate its truth. The point that if something cannot be wrong then it cannot be right either is, I would say, a gesture in the direction of the awareness we have in our cognitional structure that any theory, any conceptual package, excogitated on the second level, the level of understanding, is only ever a contingent possibility at best. We are aware that the further question ‘Is it true?’ must be raised and

Metaphysics of the Self 105

answered if we are to come to knowledge of reality. This question moves us to the third phase or level of knowing, that of judgment. Now, the process of self-knowledge, although it arrives at incontrovertible results, does not circumvent this process, and in this way the Wittgensteinian criticism of intuitive immediacy in self-knowledge can be seen to be well founded. But it does not affect Lonergan’s position on self-knowledge. Indeed, since the conscious ‘I’ affirmed in self-affirmation is not a bare ‘it,’ or ‘this,’ but is identified precisely in terms of its noetic characteristics, it is very much the case that one can go massively wrong in self-knowledge. Lonergan’s views on the history of philosophy witness to this fact. Further, Anscombe’s question as to whether self-consciousness is not public, rather than private, can be seen to have a point, although one would need to substitute ‘self-knowledge’ for ‘self-consciousness’ in order to make her position less ambiguous. Correct knowledge of the self as knower is, on Lonergan’s view, a difficult and precarious achievement. This knowledge is arrived at only with the aid of a cultural tradition and, specifically, philosophical traditions, among which Lonergan singles out the Aristotelian-Thomist as playing a decisive role. However, even that tradition is far from unified and unambiguous when it comes to epistemology. In this way the self requires the ‘other’ of tradition and community to come to self-knowledge. (The metaphysical implications of this fact will be discussed further in a later chapter.) However, what should also be observed in the present context is that such reliance upon the ‘other’ of community and tradition in self-knowledge does not remove the ‘privacy’ of the endeavour of coming to know oneself as a knower. It is the individual who must attend to the data on the matter, and attempt to exercise intelligence and reason to the best of his or her ability in coming to make the relevant judgments. Furthermore, those judgments will concern, and will find their fulfilment in, the data that are the private conscious states, noetic states, or activities of the individual. What are we to make of the thought experiment regarding successive selves? As has been argued, self-affirmation of the conscious ‘I,’ differentiated by the various activities of coming to know on the three levels of the noetic process, can be definitive. The attempt to deny it manifests evidence for its truth. Furthermore, the unity of consciousness is also given, and is incontrovertible insofar as the related noetic acts are different yet present in the one consciousness and, indeed, are related one to another in the process of coming to know. Therefore, I cannot deny that I deny, or judge, and not only am I aware of judging but of sensation and of the several other activities of coming to know. Even if I claim that, perhaps, it was not I that understood x, the understanding now having entered into the process that culminates in some judgment, but that in some way the

106 Method in Metaphysics

understanding had by another self was ‘infused’ into my consciousness, it remains the case that I now understand x, and that activity of understanding now constitutes part of the conscious whole of activities that make up the ‘I’ referred to in the judgment of self-affirmation. However, we do not meet the same kind of evidence for judgments that would affirm that this consciousness, affirmed in self-affirmation, is the same consciousness that willed or wished to do x some years ago. Yes, I now have the conscious experience of these supposedly past experiences, so they are now part of ‘me,’ but insofar as I want to affirm that this experience is, in fact, a memory of an act performed by myself on such and such an occasion in the past, other elements enter into the judgment that entail that it cannot be definitive in the way judgments concerning the noetic acts of myself affirmed as knower can be. This can be understood if we grasp the idea that to deny that I sense when I sense, or to deny that I understand when I understand, are judgments that are to be reversed on the basis of the evidence immediately given in consciousness. However, one does not have the same state of affairs if one denies that the memory of doing x at a certain time in the past was my doing of x at that time; there is nothing self-referentially inconsistent or incoherent about such a denial. In these cases, then, affirmations about myself are, strictly speaking, judgments that are reasonable affirmations concerning reality but that are probable, highly probable in most cases, but not certain. It is possible that someone else did these things and the memories are somehow infused into my consciousness, just as it is possible, in a Russellian thought experiment, that the world only began five minutes ago. But such possible scenarios are to be judged as highly improbable accounts of the data, given all the background information we need to have in order even to put forth the hypotheses, and the myriad of other facts that constitute evidence to ground the claims that the world is a lot older than five minutes old, and that it is the self-same ‘I’ who was a student in Italy twenty-five years ago doing such and such, not another self whose conscious experiences have been placed in my memory. Similar considerations apply to the rational grounding of the ascription of ‘I’ by the present knower to him or herself during, say, the early period of life of which he or she has no memories, or to him or herself during times of dreamless sleep (if there be such). As was said at the beginning of this chapter, the self in the metaphysical position espoused by Lonergan is a good deal more than consciousness. Consciousness itself testifies to psychological, physical, and social forces beyond it, beyond its control, and the physical and social sciences and other cognitive approaches all make their contribution to knowledge of the self. There is good reason, then, of the kind we have been discussing, for saying that in, say, dream-

Metaphysics of the Self 107

less sleep ‘I’ continue to exist. For one thing, given all the evidence there is concerning the arduous processes involved in acquiring the linguistic and cognitive dispositions I have acquired over the years, it is only reasonable to hold, as very well founded, the position that the same ‘I’ who activates such dispositions in awakened consciousness perdures through lapses in that consciousness. A fundamental problem with Anscombe’s position on the self is, therefore, her inability to move beyond the terms of reference delineated by the Cartesian discussion of the topic. A basic confusion apparent in her account, one that is common in the literature, arises from her failure to distinguish clearly between self-consciousness, on the one hand, and selfknowledge, on the other. She cites with approval William James’s distinction between consciousness and self-consciousness, and by their use of this distinction both authors hint in a vague way at the distinction we have made. But their terminology is infelicitous. All our conscious states are selfconscious insofar as we are always aware both of an object and of our intentional attitude to that object, be it of aesthetic admiration, emotional response, intelligent inquiry, or whatever. On the other hand, self-knowledge is the report concerning our self-consciousness. Such reporting may be easy and familiar, as when we tell others what we have been thinking about in some everyday manner. But it may also be very difficult to achieve, as the work of psychologists and poets and writers who explore the stream of consciousness makes evident. The intellectual pattern of our stream of consciousness, the process of coming to know, is also, in Lonergan’s view, an extremely difficult item of self-consciousness to identify and make explicit in an adequate fashion as self-knowledge. The latter point is, of course, one that was emphasized in chapter 2 in our examination of Derrida’s critique of Husserl. The conflation of selfknowledge or reflection with self-consciousness, evident in both Husserl and Derrida, is seen by Manfred Frank (in an essay critical of Derrida’s philosophy) as part of the legacy of German philosophy that plays itself out in the writing of these two thinkers. Frank finds this erroneous conflation in Leibniz, Kant (the unity of apperception), Heidegger, Husserl, and Derrida. On the other hand, he maintains that the mistake was to some extent avoided in Brentano and Sartre, for whom self-consciousness is not immediate attention to the self.12 One would not be able to say, however, that Brentano or Sartre achieved very satisfactory results when explaining how knowledge of self is achieved. In the context of Anscombe’s questions as to whether the referring expression ‘I’ is to be seen as some type of demonstrative, it is perhaps worth noting that Derrida’s discussion of Husserl on the self also focuses upon tensions in the thought of the latter with regard to the linguistic utterance of ‘I’ by the speaker.

108 Method in Metaphysics

Confusions over Self-Knowledge Derrida quotes Husserl, who writes, ‘The word ‘I’ names different persons from case to case, and does so by an ever altering meaning (Bedeutung).’ And Derrida’s comment on this is, ‘Does not speech and the ideal nature of every bedeutung exclude the possibility that a bedeutung is “ever altering”?’13 On the basis of the position argued for in this book, one would clear up the confusion evident in these passages by adverting to the fact that, like the demonstratives ‘this’ or ‘that,’ ‘I’ does not change in meaning, if by meaning is understood the meaning we understand these words as having precisely as demonstratives. Part of our understanding of these words is precisely that they will vary in reference according to the different data or individuals or things that they are employed to refer to. In the following chapter we will have more to say on demonstratives and reference, but it will be as well to note here that we can also talk of ‘reference’ as a type of ‘meaning,’ since a type of intention is involved in indicating data. What we would wish to avoid are wooden-headed empiricist notions of ‘reference’ as some physical act devoid of meaning and opposed to ‘meaning’ understood in such views as reserved for reference to words or concepts only. Derrida goes on to criticize Husserl for holding that one needs to intuit the object ‘I’ to understand the word ‘I’;14 and Derrida adds that Husserl’s position in general, that we understand a word in the absence of the thing referred to, runs counter to this point. We can on the contrary, Derrida insists, understand the word ‘I’ in fiction or when the author is dead. If indeed Husserl’s position is as Derrida characterizes it on this matter then he is right to criticize it as he does. However, there is some point to what Husserl may be gesturing towards by talking of ‘intuition.’ By ‘intuition’ one might in this context, in some unclear fashion, be pointing to the fact that a) we require insight into the meaning of any word in order to employ it properly, in fiction, which is dependant upon knowledge of the real world, as in other instances; this has, of course, to do with Husserl’s and Derrida’s contention that we can use a word in the absence of the thing referred to; b) we require ‘intuition’ in the sense of a judgment, which is a reflective insight into the data as providing evidence for assent, in order to know that the thing referred to by the word does in fact exist; c) we make reference to the object or thing known, or thought to exist, by indicative phrases or gestures that involve practical insights as to ways of communicating knowledge about it. Yet another philosopher whose position is marred by confusions over self-awareness or consciousness and self-knowledge is David Mellor. Mellor’s work in this area, however, does have the merit of drawing atten-

Metaphysics of the Self 109

tion to two metaphysical issues regarding the self that are of great importance. These are knowledge as a disposition, and states within the self as mutually causative. Thus Mellor writes, ‘The man who believes h, and knows himself in this respect, is a man disposed to assent to h.’15 As to the causal nature of self-knowledge, Mellor explains: ‘The mechanism of selfknowledge is like the mechanism whereby, when something we look at is red, it causes us to believe it’s red, and when it isn’t, to believe it isn’t. In short, self-knowledge is a species of perceptual ability, which enables facts to cause us to believe them … since what it informs us of is one of our own states of mind, it is an inner sense.’16 Mellor calls the privileged access we have to our own minds our ‘insight’ into our minds: ‘When we introspect beliefs we are simply perceiving them with a special sense, just as with other senses we perceive visible and audible aspects of the outside world.’17 On our awareness of causal relations between cognitive states and on knowledge as a disposition we will have more to say in later chapters. But I will comment upon both these issues briefly in the present context. How does the notion of belief as disposition fit within the scheme of things as regards the use of ‘I’ and other self-referring expressions? As has been argued above, the use of ‘I’ in speech can be a sign of one’s moving from the self-conscious states and activities that characterize one’s flow of consciousness at any one time to a report on the same, to self-knowledge. However, there is no doubt that something of a sliding scale is operative in which the use of ‘I,’ and other expressions of self-reference, can at one end of the spectrum be part of the expression of a wish, or some type of avowal, and the other extreme, which is represented by a judgment of the kind involved in self-affirmation. ‘I’ can, of course, also be used in contexts that do not connote any content of consciousness that one could possibly now recall, such as the statement that ‘I was born in Hampshire.’ A spontaneous reply to a question as to whether one would like a cup of tea with words such as, ‘Yes, I’ll have one’ may be an example of the ‘avowal type.’ If I am in a meeting and the chairman turns to me to ask my view on the matter in hand I may respond with a phrase such as, ‘Well I was just thinking that …’ which would be of the ‘report of consciousness’ type, involving the move from self-consciousness to self-knowledge. A different case would be that of a response I give in answer to a question which is put to me out of the blue. Someone turns around to me and asks, ‘What is your opinion of x’ and I use a self-referring expression such as ‘I’ in my response of the kind, ‘On that question I think …’ In this instance I may be actualizing an already established belief or set of opinions and therefore ‘I’ betokens the actualization of a belief disposition. This enumeration of types may not be exhaustive. However, my concern

110 Method in Metaphysics

in the present context is to draw attention to the way in which many philosophers completely overlook the distinction to be drawn between self-consciousness, on the one hand, and self-knowledge, on the other. And the mistake is to take it that the latter is identical to the former. Numerous conundrums appear on the horizon when this slippage occurs. Surely one simple question should be enough to unsettle the many philosophers who appear to incline to this view of self-awareness as selfknowledge. Why are the debates over epistemology and philosophy of mind so fierce in the history of philosophy if we all have such ready, immediate, access to our mental states? Is it not the nature of such conscious states that has been at the centre of debates among philosophers from the inception of the discipline? As I have said, Mellor falls into the trap of conflating self-consciousness and self-knowledge. And his confusion is part of a more general epistemological confusion engendered by a naive perceptualism. His position shows merit in that he draws attention to causal relationships within mind and knowledge, but he does so by making the usual mistakes – mistakes that inevitably become the target of antifoundationalist critiques. So we are told that external objects ‘cause beliefs in us’ and in the same way our conscious states cause us to believe that we have these states. Certainly the data, be they the data of sense or of consciousness, play a causative role in our coming to know – in our coming to know about the world around us, and about our conscious states themselves. However, this is not the whole story, and its inadequacy is reflected in the excessively passive image it presents of human knowing. The data are a cause of my knowing, but equally causative is my attention to that data, my attempts to gain insight into it and form hypotheses and concepts regarding it, and, further, my attempts at being reasonable in assessing the likelihood of my concepts or hypotheses being right about reality. First Person Ontology: E.J. Lowe If Anscombe’s essay represents the anti-Cartesian orientation of the thought of the later Wittgenstein, a far more positive appraisal of the opportunities for metaphysical analysis offered by exploration of the conscious self is found in the work of E.J. Lowe. Lowe, a noted contributor to the recent literature of analytical metaphysics, disagrees with Anscombe and holds that a ‘self’ is a being able to identify itself as the unique referent of thoughts.18 Regarding the self-reference demonstrated in the use of such expressions as ‘I,’ Lowe writes: ‘Such reference is typically “direct” in contrast to demonstrative reference to all physical objects, apart from those that are parts of one’s own body in which one can localize sensations

Metaphysics of the Self 111

or which are directly subject to one’s will.’19 And of the metaphysical implications of self-reference he affirms, ‘My conclusion will be that the semantic distinction between “direct” and “indirect” demonstrative reference helps to delineate the metaphysical boundary between oneself and the rest of the world.’20 From reflection on consciousness we can conclude, Lowe avers, that the self is a simple, non-composite, self-creating substance – it is not to be subdivided as in reductionism.21 Lowe accepts W.E. Johnson’s formulation of Aristotle’s thought in the categories: the self is a continuant capable of persisting through qualitative change. In the light of our examination of philosophical theories of self-consciousness and self-knowledge, Lowe’s position on conscious activity as constitutive of the self is welcome. He writes, ‘Our own thoughts and experiences, when present and conscious are not presented to us as objects of our awareness, but as constituents of it.’22 However, the all too familiar identification of self-knowledge and self-consciousness is not absent from his thought, and there is an additional element in such knowledge on Lowe’s account. Lowe writes, ‘The self necessarily knows that it itself is the unique subject of certain thoughts and experiences.’23 In Lowe’s view, then, ‘that such and such are my experiences’ is a necessary truth, whereas ‘these thoughts are associated with this body’ is a contingent truth. In attempting to rebut a position akin to that taken by Anscombe, in which ‘this pain’ or ‘this itch’ might be assignable to different subjects, Lowe argues, ‘I necessarily know, of my present conscious thought or experience that it is my own, that I (and I alone) am the subject of that thought or experience. But then I don’t of course necessarily know, of any of your present conscious thoughts or experiences, that you are their subject.’24 Lowe goes on to clarify further what he means by a priori knowledge in the domain of self-reference: Knowledge which is acquired through or with the aid of experience – and thus for example through the kind of ‘privileged access’ adverted to earlier – may none the less have an a priori status. The mark of an a priori truth is this: that if a subject comprehends the proposition in question (and such comprehension may indeed call upon experience of an appropriate sort) then he or she need have no further recourse to experience as a source of evidence to justify a claim to know it to be a true proposition. And this … is precisely how matters stand with regard to the proposition expressed by the sentence ‘This pain is my pain’, used by me to speak about a present pain of mine.25 While Lowe might be considered Cartesian in persuasion by some, he in fact rejects Descartes’ dualism since, on his view, Descartes does not prove

112 Method in Metaphysics

that the body and mind are separable. On the other hand, given the strong position he takes on the metaphysical unity and identity of the conscious self, it is hardly surprising that he rejects Hume’s atomistic constructivism, adopted by some recent philosophers like Derek Parfit. On the ‘bundle of fleeting perceptions’ idea of the self, Lowe observes: ‘The deepest problem with this sort of view is that the entities out of which it attempts to construct the self – psychological states and processes – are themselves quite generally not indivisible and identifiable independently of the selves that are their subjects, so that a fatal circularity dooms the project.’26 Lowe, therefore, defends a metaphysical substantivalism regarding the self, the challenges to which, as he sees it, emerge from two areas requiring further philosophical elucidation. These regard the traditional question of the interaction of this thinking substance with the body, and questions to do with persistence conditions of the self. In response to the first question Lowe maintains that this body is ‘mine’ because it is subject to my will, and that my perceptions of the world are localized via my body.27 In this context he affirms his antireductionist stance, ‘It is impossible to associate such mental states with a body non-derivatively, that is, without relying upon their ascription to the self or person whose body it is.’28 It cannot be said, Lowe argues, that the self has parts like the body and we cannot reify faculties of the self.29 On the question of identification of the self through time, Lowe takes issue with David Lewis’s view that since selves and objects such as electrons are simple, and are without parts, there are no criteria for diachronic identity in such cases. Lowe in fact agrees with Lewis’s contention concerning simplicity and ‘atemporality’ in these instances, but nevertheless asserts that we can hold that perdurance of selves across time is discernable, and that, in the case of things like electrons we may, at least, be able to rule out some putative reidentifications.30 For Lowe selves are not inscrutable across time, ‘because perception and action are only possible within a temporal framework that includes both forward-looking and backwardlooking mental states.’31 This consciousness of ‘backward’ and ‘forward’ orientation that selves possess is also employed by Lowe to highlight the overly passive image of the conscious memories the self entertains, an image found in the philosophies of Hume and Parfit.32 While there is some disagreement between Lowe and Lewis on this point it seems to me that stronger objections can be made to the atemporality thesis than the reservations expressed by Lowe. The rather counterintuitive suggestion that a ‘partless self’ or ‘partless atom’ cannot be identified over time may be contested. To begin with, if one suggests that a physical particle has no existence across time it is to be wondered how physical science could even verify the existence of such an entity. To connect occur-

Metaphysics of the Self 113

rence a, at an earlier time, and occurrence b, at a later time, in terms of a perduring entity of which these occurrences are manifestations, requires verification of a theoretical construct whose existence is through time. Is Lewis not ‘thinking’ rather of an unverifiable construct of imagination in this case, such as an Empedoclean atom, or a monad? Even if such an entity were not to undergo change in its internal constitution, fairly basic Aristotelian considerations should be enough to remind us that it would still undergo categoreal changes regarding its relative position and relations in the space-time continuum. With regard to the conscious self, however, there is abundant evidence for persistence through time insofar as in its cognitive capacities there is clearly growth. I not only learn new facts over time but acquire new intellectual dispositions. I have every reason to believe that it was in the period 1982 to 1984, for example, that I had a number of insights into the meaning of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy that have played a role in my subsequent thinking. I am aware of asking a question on an issue at a time earlier than the time at which I arrive at an answer to the selfsame question. Furthermore, these insights and processes in my conscious growth are, often enough, associated with events in the rest of my life that carry the mark of assignable dates in my biography, and in the biographies of those close to me, and in the world at large. While Lowe is to be commended for his subtle defence of the unity of the conscious self, the absence in his work of an account of the conscious processes of cognitive and evaluative growth in knowledge encourages oversight of another essential aspect to the unity of consciousness – the conscious self is not only a locus of conscious acts but can be identified as a dynamic, self-assembling unity or subject. In my attempts to come to know what is the case and what is of value, I show myself to be moved by stimuli that come to me from sensation, and from other persons around me, and to be an active, dynamic cause or principle of knowledge seeking. I am aware that I can be either attentive or inattentive to the data on an issue, be either intelligent or silly in thinking about the data, and be either rash or timid as regards reasonable reflection on the possible truth of the ideas or hypotheses I entertain. Lowe is right, then, in holding that Parfit has too passive a notion of the memories that the self may call to mind. However, his own philosophical position does not seem to have within it the resources to delineate a fuller account of the dynamic continuity across time of the self – the self whose present cognitive and ethical dispositions have been formed over time through its own active engagement with the environment and with other persons. The metaphysical position Lonergan expounds would be in sympathy with Lowe’s antireductionism. However, I wish to treat such matters in a

114 Method in Metaphysics

later chapter on supervenience. What is worthy of further examination in Lowe’s position, I believe, is his intriguing discussion of the de re metaphysical knowledge that he attributes to the self regarding knowledge of conscious acts and states as one’s own. To express part, at least, of what Lowe is getting at in terms of Lonergan’s position, then, one can maintain that if the conscious act of judgment is consciously linked to, say, conscious acts of sensation and questioning, in the conscious unity that I can affirm exists (when I affirm myself to be a knower), it cannot be the case that these conscious acts are the acts of different individuals. Even if the question or sensation were to be in some fashion ‘infused’ into a consciousness from some other consciousness insofar as they are linked into a conscious unity of acts, of judgment, sensation, question, and so forth, that unity as it is judged to exist has its own identity, and therefore all acts are truly of the one consciousness. Truly the ‘I’ can say of them, ‘These are my acts.’ I would argue that a three- or four-year-old is, indeed, aware of this, but not that he or she knows it, in the sense that such a phrase could be understood, let alone affirmed to be true by a child of that age. Here again we touch upon the confusion engendered by conflating self-consciousness and self-knowledge. If all Lowe’s philosophical opponents as conscious selves already know de re propositions like this about themselves how could there even be a disagreement on the issue, as Lowe’s discussion of the matter clearly implies there is? It is the case, rather, that I am self-conscious in such a way that, when I reflect upon and come to know my self-consciousness, I can affirm the necessity of one or other conscious activity, of which I am aware, as being my activity. But what precisely is the nature of the necessity in such cases? To begin with, Lowe’s claim in the passage quoted above, that he can know of the necessity of one of his conscious acts being his, but not the necessity of some other self’s conscious act being the act of that self, appears somewhat paradoxical. Given the understanding of selves, their consciousness, and their conscious acts and states for which Lowe argues, it would appear nonsensical even to entertain the idea that the conscious act of a given self could be anything other than its own conscious act, whether this conscious self be myself or another self. I believe the conflation of self-consciousness and self-knowledge is again the root of confusions in this instance. Similars are similarly understood. If I understand that a knower, a self, is that which is constituted by the conscious thoughts and experiences that are related within it, then I understand an instance of an intelligible structure that may be found to exist in one or more instances. This is no different from understanding that the Euclidean definition of circularity as ‘a series of coplanar points equidis-

Metaphysics of the Self 115

tant from the centre’ applies to any instance of circularity. There cannot be a case of circularity in which, say, there are some points that are further away from the centre than others: such a supposition is unintelligible. If a knower, any knower, then, is a conscious locus of such-and-such acts, then it cannot be that a conscious act within the structure is not a conscious act within the structure – the structure being the conscious unity between the acts, the ‘I.’ Of course I do not know, cannot verify the proposition ‘I am a knower’ for you in the way I can for myself. We have seen above how Lowe holds that a priori knowledge can come about through ‘comprehension’ of a situation. Such comprehension may include insight into sensible, empirical data, but there is no further need, in epistemic cases of this kind, according to Lowe, for further empirical evidence. Lowe maintains that this is the case with some mathematical truths. In an earlier chapter we outlined Lonergan’s account of analytical principles (which are statements of logical equivalence), and analytical propositions. Analytical propositions, on his view, may be serial (mathematical), provisional (scientific), and of the kind unqualified in these ways, which are the propositions of the core of metaphysics. There would be agreement with Lowe that both mathematical propositions and the analytical propositions of metaphysics are to be reached through verified insight into data, into experience. However, Lowe’s account of necessary truth and of the a priori is not as nuanced as could be wished. If I come to know that what makes up a dog includes such-and-such characteristics, indicative of the canine creature that occurs within a given niche of the evolutionary scheme, then my definition of ‘dog’ will include some items as a minimum, and any other instance to be named ‘dog’ must be similar in these given respects. This, then, is an a priori, and indeed, given my definition I can say there is a necessary truth involved: a ‘dog’ cannot but have such-and-such characteristics, I will say. However, since the study of zoology is a science, and is in theory subject to the ongoing process of revision inherent in the scientific process, the stipulation of what constitutes ‘dog’ from the scientific viewpoint will not be some analytical principle (a matter of mere definition), but will be a provisional analytical proposition. There is something a piori about such propositions, but they are not unrevisable as are the analytical propositions simpliciter of metaphysics. Now, if I come to know myself as a unity of related conscious acts and experiences (what I stipulate as a ‘self’), then there is an a priori and necessary element involved insofar as that which I know is a self and any other entity having the same nature is a self, and must have the same structured arrangements of elements. But the a priori or necessary aspect in this case is no more than what is involved in any case of ontological similarity. The issue remains of discovering whether cases are similar. I can verify that I am

116 Method in Metaphysics

a knower; if it is the case that I am a knower, then necessarily I am so. This is the conditional necessity of any judgment of fact, of which we have spoken above. However, my existing is merely contingent, not necessary. I have good reason to believe that others are consciousnesses of a similar kind capable of self-affirmation; but this is not the apodictically confirmed reason of self-affirmation experienced in my case. There is a difference between the statement that I am a knower and the statement that x is a dog in the sense that the former cannot be denied without contradiction or self-refutation whereas the latter can. I achieve knowledge of myself as knower in a definitive, unrevisable fashion, and this knowledge is achieved by insight into the data immediately present to me. Such knowledge, then, demonstrates the two characteristics Lowe thinks may be found in instances of necessary, a priori knowledge. What we are talking of here, however, does not seem to be an a priori in the sense of some metaphysical requirement, analytical proposition, holding in all possible worlds. For something to be possible, for any set-up named a possible world to be such, the a priori analytical proposition concerning the intelligibility of reality holds. Reality is nothing other than what can be intelligently grasped and reasonably affirmed. So it has been argued. This principle of intelligibility is itself an example of an analytic proposition holding in all possible worlds. However, there is no such necessity in the case of a conscious subject, understood as a subject conscious of more than one act or experience. One cannot rule that out as a priori impossible. In another possible world there could, for example, be a single conscious experience. In the self that I verify as existing in the case of selfaffirmation this is found not to be so, for I experience my conscious acts as related, but that does not render the idea unintelligible. However, the contention above should, perhaps, be modified somewhat. It might be argued that certain types of conscious act are not able to exist apart from other types, or, at least, that they cannot exist as the type of act they are known to be in my consciousness without conscious reference to other experiences or acts of consciousness. One can think here of the act of judgment. It is unintelligible to think of a conscious act of judgment (an act of affirmation or denial) as existing without other conscious elements. Judgment is intrinsically related to what is understood. A ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ about nothing is unintelligible. If this be so, then in such cases we might be able to say that in any possible world a conscious act of judgment could not exist alone. However, it is not clear that a similar argument would apply to other conscious acts or experiences such as those that relate to sensation. It would seem then that the necessity of my knowledge that my conscious acts are mine is, in the first instance, a definitional necessity: if there

Metaphysics of the Self 117

is a conscious ‘I’ and it is said to be a structure constituted of such-andsuch terms and relations, it cannot be otherwise than stipulated. This structure is found to exist in the case of the self-affirmation of the knower. The knowledge achieved in such judgments is unrevisable. There is good evidence to affirm that there are other selves structured in this way. The existence of myself and these other selves is contingent. But if they exist then necessarily they exist. Finally, the idea that some of the conscious acts I find verified in my case could exist independently of the acts to which they are intelligently related is a metaphysical impossibility. These are some of the lessons that, I believe, should be drawn from the type of discussion Lowe pursues. However, due to inadequacies in his philosophical position, a number of these points are run together in a confusing manner and others are ignored. First-Person Ontology: Sydney Shoemaker Like Lowe, Sydney Shoemaker mounts a vigorous defence of the possibility and importance of introspective first-person analysis in the context of the renewed analytical metaphysics.33 Shoemaker believes that Hume has stimulated such inquiry in the Anglo-Saxon philosophical world and yet his views have occluded the path of progress. Hume, in Shoemaker’s view, was held captive by the act-object scheme in thinking of mental activity. But what philosophical inquiry has to investigate, Shoemaker believes, are the intrinsic qualities possessed by the internal relations constitutive of mind.34 He holds, therefore, that it is as ontologically compelling to say that experience is had by an experiencer as it is to say that bending is had by a twig.35 Shoemaker is critical of David Armstrong’s notion that we do not have direct access to the self, but rather merely postulate its existence36 and, in the company of a number of thinkers treated in this chapter, Shoemaker sees his own work as in some way a rebuttal of the attempted deconstruction of the self in Derek Parfit’s philosophy. Against Parfit, Shoemaker emphasizes both the synchronic and diachronic aspects of the unity of consciousness. With regard to the latter he observes that with a sense like hearing the construction of the ‘object’ is necessarily over time.37 While his contributions to the debate stimulated by Parfit’s work are worthy of consideration, his account of the ‘self-formation’ of the knowing subject over time is thin. Shoemaker offers good arguments for the position that the qualities of conscious states are intrinsic and therefore constitute distinct states. He writes that when I am in pain ‘there is not a feeling of the feeling that is something over and above the feeling of pain.’ The same goes, he says, for

118 Method in Metaphysics

other states.38 In this regard he is closer to the viewpoint of Brentano and Sartre on consciousness. However, the reader of this book will hardly be surprised if I express disappointment at the way self-consciousness and selfknowledge are identified as the same phenomenon by Shoemaker.39 At one point in his book, Shoemaker does remark, ‘Having a belief normally gives rise to the belief that one has it, or at any rate does so if one considers whether one has it.’40 The second part of this disjunction, we may observe, does seem to suggest a distinction between self-consciousness and self-knowledge. The casual nature of this comment, however, in fact highlights Shoemaker’s lack of awareness of the major philosophical difficulties and questions in this area. Do we normally know, in the strict sense, ‘all our beliefs’? How do we shift from holding them to knowing them when we do? 41 The Divided Self: J.R. Lucas The final philosopher to be considered in this chapter on philosophy of mind and of the self is one whose writing in this area yet again attempts to meet challenges to the metaphysical unity and identity of the self, posed by Parfit. J.R. Lucas’s essay, ‘A Mind of One’s Own,’ is perhaps more directly focused on metaphysical issues than the other philosophical treatments of mind we have considered so far. Lucas begins his examination of metaphysical issues to do with fission and fusion of selves by considering Bernard Williams’s contention that, since memory can deceive to such an extent in some pathological cases that someone in the twenty-first century ‘recalls’ being Guy Fawkes, the required criteria for determining the identity of a self through time are provided by physical locatability. One could point out against Williams that memory is involved when we make reasoned judgments as to this data here and now, and that data there and then are being data on the selfsame entity. Further, arguments that involve the claim that memory is sometimes mistaken rely on recall of memory errors in the past to substantiate such claims. However, Lucas’s retort is that, even if we grant that two things cannot occupy the same space at the same time, it still remains a contingent, not a necessary, truth that material objects do not divide up and recombine like rain drops. Some creatures like amoeba seem, in fact, to do so.42 If, then, neither material continuity nor memory provide an adequate answer to Parfit’s denial of the temporal continuity of the self, is there no other option than that of conceding to Parfit’s scepticism? Lucas believes that there is an adequate defence of self-continuity to be made if we consider the first-person stance and the use of tensed language expressing future options viewed by the self from the present perspective.

Metaphysics of the Self 119

Against Locke’s scepticism concerning memory as proof of personal continuity across time, Lucas argues: ‘But though at this present time I can only remember having done some particular deed in the past, at one time I was deliberating, and was making up my mind whether I should do it or not. I was an agent not passively experiencing but actively doing. And until I had carried out my intention, it was an open question whether or not I actually would.’43 One needs therefore to consider the forward-looking, future-intending perspective of the self to gain a proper appreciation of self-identity. The phenomenon of conscious responsibility for actions points us in a more promising direction for identifying criterion of self continuity than do passive, picture images recalled by the self from the past. Lucas then proceeds to indulge in his own metaphysical thought experiments in order to elucidate what is and what is not contingent with regard to the temporal continuity of selves. We can imagine that Tweedledee and Tweedledum have shared consciousness and memories. There could be instances of shared consciousness. Lucas writes: ‘While one of me was dutifully present at a faculty meeting, my happier half could be reading a good book or getting on with revising a typescript, only occasionally interrupted by the need to know which proposal my dutiful half was voting against … so long as there was unity or control, and my faculty half could not vote against my library half, it would be right to regard me as two bodies with but one single mind, and therefore just one person.’44 What, on Lucas’s position, differentiates one individual from another, therefore, is the ability an individual self has to make up his or her mind in one way or another. What is one to make of this position? It is possible, as a thought experiment can demonstrate, that there be two bodies in different places with one mind. According to Arthur Eddington’s celebrated (and to some extent misleadingly ‘pictorial’) image of the table understood from the scientific viewpoint, where common sense identifies a solid table there is mostly empty space in which there occur phenomena from time to time that are now described as particles and now as waves. Therefore, contiguity between physical parts is not a necessary condition for the intelligible unity constitutive of a given entity. On the other hand, in the case of two consciousnesses supposedly sharing a body, the question would arise as to how one was to determine whether in this case one had one body or two bodies. The central problem for Lucas’s notion of two in one body has to do with the possibility of identifying as distinct two different conscious patterns of thought that, he holds, are constitutive of one identity, one self. In identifying oneself as a conscious unity in the self-affirmation of the

120 Method in Metaphysics

knower, one has found sufficient evidence to posit one conscious unity of interrelated, conscious noetic acts. The question of how one could identify other selves sharing consciousness has already been discussed in examining the questions posed by Anscombe. And I would not deny the possibility of two or more consciousnesses communing in a unified and direct way. One could imagine a direct sharing of thoughts as a kind of empathetic telepathy or the like. With regard to Lucas’s self divided between the library and the Senate House meeting, however, further questions arise. For instance, are all the decisions about the typescript, under scrutiny in the library, reached by one party or by both parties? Let us attempt to recast the points Lucas appears to be making in terms of the cognitional theory we have expounded in this book. Let us suppose in coming to know that the activities on the level of judgment (level three) referred to two different sets of conscious activities on the lower levels of understanding and experience. Does this possibility support Lucas’s idea of the split self? No it does not. For in this imagined case metaphysically one would have nothing other than evidence for judging that there were three subjects or selves. There would be two conscious unities having conscious experiences of the types level one (sensation), and level two (understanding) – they would be constituted by these conscious activities. And one would have evidence for affirming a third consciousness, a third entity, having experience of all three types of noetic experience. As has been maintained above, even if ideas that someone else has already had were now infused into my mind, in order for me to make a reasoned judgment about such-and-such, these conscious experiences would now be united with the conscious experiences on the level of judgment. They would now constitute a unity, an ‘I.’ Where, then, would be the evidence that I have, or I am, two consciousnesses that somehow are ‘joined at the top,’ joined at level three? There would, I think, be none. Lucas’s confusion in this matter deepens, for he goes on to maintain: ‘It could be the case that Dum and Dee did not know, until told, what the other was doing. But this often happens in ordinary life, where I do not know what I am doing until I tell myself and consciously recognize it.’45 Here again we encounter a failure to distinguish and successfully relate consciousness, self-consciousness, and self-knowledge. I am always already self-conscious of what I am doing, but ordinarily do not need to give a report of this to myself, which would be self-knowledge. I certainly do not move from lack of consciousness to consciousness in doing so (in giving the report), for I am not in a state of dreamless sleep, my mind a total blank, as I go about my daily routine. Surely Lucas does not mean in his thought experiment about Dum and Dee that they are in such unconscious states, blank mind states? His thought experiment about himself,

Metaphysics of the Self 121

divided between the faculty meeting and the typescript work, indicates selfconsciousness as operative in both cases. A further aspect to Lucas’s response to Parfit is his invocation of transworld (possible world) designation as providing a way in which to identify individuals across time. In chapter 1 mention was made of the way many working in the field of analytical metaphysics today make explicit reference to ideas and methods proposed by important philosophers in the past. In the present context it is interesting to observe Lucas’s professed indebtedness to Leibniz.46 Lucas argues: If we move into the infinite realm of possible courses of events, we can hope to specify an individual uniquely by an infinite specification characterizing every response he might make under every set of conditions. If two putative persons would respond to every situation in the same way, then they are one and the same person, numerically identical; if there could be some discordant response they are to that extent qualitively as well as numerically distinct. Instead of needing the bodily continuity of the corpuscular to guarantee the separate individuality of each entity necessarily located in space, each monad differs from every other one by virtue of the way it actualizes the infinite potentiality open to it as an agent.47 We shall have a good deal more to say in the following chapter on the deep-seated confusions of the possible-worlds metaphysics of Kripke, and these objections will apply equally to the kind of Leibnizian metaphysics adopted by Lucas. But for present purposes it will suffice to object to Lucas’s position that possible worlds do not help us to differentiate individuals, since we cannot rule out that what is possible in terms of circumstances and characteristics for one individual may be equally possible for another individual. The ‘corpusculeans,’ as Lucas calls those following Williams’s criteria of selfcontinuity, have a point; significant difference in data is evidence for different things, entities. However, their position falters insofar as they take it that such entities are those differentiated only on the basis of the data of sense, not of consciousness. In addition, on the physical criteria advanced by Williams and others, the sensible data are taken to constitute the total reality of an entity. On the position argued for in this book, the totality of the entity is only known in judgment and judgment posits, as existing in reality, entities that are constituted (normally) by potency (the empirical), form (the ‘what’ it is), and act of existence (‘that it is’). Some discussion of these metaphysical constituents of entities has occurred in the brief summary of Lonergan’s metaphysics at the end of chapter 3. However, we will return to discussion of these ontological elements in succeeding chapters.

122 Method in Metaphysics

On a more positive note, it can be said that Lucas’s appreciation of the self-determining nature of the individual raises stronger objections to Parfit’s notion of a putative self as a locus of fleeting memories than are found in some of the criticisms of Parfit offered by other philosophers we have discussed in this chapter. As Lucas observes, memories are not simply accepted without critical evaluation on the part of the self. If I think that I have in the past acquired a disposition to know or do x, I can check this out at the present time by trying to perform certain activities.48 The view taken by Lucas is one that lends support to the position argued for above on the reasons we have for affirming that I am not only a self constituted by diverse conscious acts here and now, but I also have good reason to think that I am the same self who acquired the abilities and habits I now possess (including those that are intellectual and moral) over a period of time. In this chapter I have begun to move beyond an examination of the cognitional and epistemological aspects of critical realism to an examination of the metaphysical position that emerges from it. Through a critical appraisal of work in the philosophy of mind by Anscombe, Derrida, Mellor, Lowe, Lucas, Shoemaker and, in an oblique fashion, Parfit, I have begun to deploy Lonergan’s method in metaphysics in the domain of philosophy of mind. Such philosophy of mind is often enough found to be a cross-over point from epistemology to metaphysics in the writing of current analytical philosophers. Nor is an initial treatment of the metaphysics of the self inappropriate in an exploration of Lonergan’s metaphysics. In outlining and defending critical realism I have argued that we may come to know both that we know and what activities of the self are involved in coming to know. The move to metaphysics occurs as we reflect that in coming to know knowing we come to know about an aspect of reality we name ‘the self.’

Recto Running Head 123

5 On Knowing and Naming

A mini revolution within the Anglo-American tradition in the last few years has resulted from the challenge made to what was regarded as the orthodox account of naming and reference that emerged from the work of Frege and Russell. This Frege-Russell position has been attacked over the last three decades by Saul Kripke, Hilary Putnam, and Keith Donnellan, and has been defended, usually in some modified form, by such notables as Peter Strawson, Michael Dummett, and John Searle. From the viewpoint of Lonergan’s philosophy, this debate on the philosophy of language within the analytical tradition has some interesting features. Nathan Salmon has argued in his book, Reference and Essence, that the philosophy of language sketched out by Kripke and Putnam implies a metaphysics, which Salmon names ‘essentialist.’ Salmon also makes the observation that some contributors to the debate, of the Kripkean persuasion, attempt to explicate the notion of ‘reference’ in terms knowingly adopted from some traditions within scholastic philosophy; the idea of ‘haecceity,’ or ‘concept of thisness,’ found in the philosophy of Duns Scotus, has been employed by some of these philosophers. An analysis of these debates in terms of Lonergan’s methodology is to some extent facilitated by the fact that one of the contributors to the debate, John Searle, makes a number of points, in defending a much modified version of the Frege-Russell account, that come closer to elements in Lonergan’s position than any of the approaches taken by the other disputants. Searle, a philosopher in the mainstream of the analytical tradition, has offered an analysis of the problems identified in the naming and reference debate in terms of the intentional acts involved and, in this regard, takes a stand that is not popular among those analytical philoso-

124 Method in Metaphysics

phers who follow Quine and who wish to avoid an account of meaning as something mysteriously ‘in the head.’ Searle’s account, however, suffers from the inevitable shortcomings consequent upon a naive realism. Although analysed in terms of intentionality, the problems are still seen in the context of how an ‘in-here’ mind can successfully ‘refer’ to an ‘outthere’ world. Some of these weaknesses in Searle’s position will be treated towards the end of this chapter. In what follows I hope to substantiate the claim that Lonergan’s method offers, in the approaches it suggests, a more successful resolution of the problems regarding naming and reference that are at issue in the debate between the upholders of the Frege-Russell thesis and its detractors. To this end I shall present an outline of the Kripke-Putnam position, some of the criticisms of this position offered by Searle, and an analysis of both these approaches from the viewpoint of Lonergan’s philosophy. Kripke and Putnam versus the Frege-Russell Thesis In his book A System of Logic J.S. Mill held the position that proper names have denotation but not connotation. A place name like ‘Dartmouth,’ for example, denotes a locality in England, but it has no connotation, no meaning content. The name originally derived from the fact that the town was at the mouth of the river Dart, but that does not constitute the meaning of the name ‘Dartmouth,’ as many people use it to refer to the place without knowing its history. In reaction to this position, that a proper name is a contentless reference mark or indicator, Frege offered an opposing theory in his celebrated essay ‘On Sense and Reference.’ Mill’s view cannot be accepted, according to Frege, for it fails to make sense of a number of telling counterexamples. Notable among these is the case, which Frege describes in a letter, where we employ two different names to refer to what we consider are two different objects, only to discover subsequently that they are one and the same. A traveller in an unexplored region sees a mountain on the southern horizon and names it ‘Afla.’ Another traveller in another part of the same region sees a different-looking mountain to the northwest and calls it ‘Ateb.’ At first it is thought that two mountains have been discovered, but later it turns out that they are the same. If, as on Mill’s account, we immediately knew to what the name referred, in this case the particular mountain, then we should simply know, without further investigation, that both names referred to one and the same object. But this is not the case. In Frege’s view, then, when using a name one does not have simple knowledge that there is some ‘that which is’: rather, the meaning of the

On Knowing and Naming 125

name is a description or a set of descriptions. Of course, in insisting that one cannot know that something is without knowing what it is, Frege’s remarks form part of a venerable tradition. Dummett, in his defence of Frege’s position, alludes to a similarity with St. Thomas Aquinas’s denial of the validity of the ontological argument.1 And with regard to this point, G.E.M. Anscombe draws attention to a passage in Aristotle’s Physics, ‘There is no such kind of thing as the things that there are, that there is such a thing as it, is not what anything is.’2 I have been describing the ‘orthodox’ thesis concerning naming and reference as the Frege-Russell position. Although such a designation is standard it has to be understood that Russell’s contribution differed from Frege’s, in accord with his somewhat differing epistemological views. Russell agreed with Frege that in using a proper name in ordinary speech we are employing it as a kind of shorthand for a bundle of descriptions. Names, therefore, have sense, meaning, as standing for descriptions and are not just empty pointers. However, Russell thought that at some stage we should be able to get beyond abstract descriptions and simply refer to the object located in space and time. Such reference occurs in the use of demonstratives, such as ‘this,’ or ‘those.’ But these do not have sense, they are indeed simply references, pointers. The demonstratives for Russell were ‘logical proper names,’ most of the terms we think of as ‘names’ being a second-class version of these. For Russell, then, the demonstratives are such that, as Dummett puts it, their sense ‘shrinks down to reference.’3 Another aspect of the orthodox, or ‘descriptive,’ theory of naming, which Russell’s account spells out clearly, is the notion that the description or descriptions that are ‘concealed’ within a name must uniquely identify an individual, if the name is to refer successfully. Thus, if I say ‘Aristotle existed’ I will have some such description in mind concerning Aristotle as ‘the last great philosopher of antiquity who taught Alexander.’ If ‘Aristotle’ did not do these things, or if more than one individual fits such a description, then, according to Russell, our attempt to refer to an individual using the name ‘Aristotle,’ understood in this way, fails. The position that proper names are really concealed descriptions, which uniquely specify an individual in cases of successful reference, is criticized in different, yet convergent, ways by Putnam, Kripke, and Donnellan. Kripke’s attack on the orthodox view, outlined in his Naming and Necessity, is considered to have been the most far-reaching critique of ‘descriptivism.’ Putnam provides a succinct summary of some of the key points made in this critique of the Frege-Russell thesis. With regard to the puzzles that arise concerning names and reference, he writes:

126 Method in Metaphysics

Kripke’s solution is ... to assume a set of objects called possible worlds which are, in structure, just models for the non-modal part of the language; i.e. each possible world determines a universe of discourse. And once again there is an accessibility relation. But there is an additional relation as well: the relation of trans-world identity. That is some individuals have to be identified across possible worlds ... Consider two possible worlds which both contain the same individual, say Aristotle, but in which that individual is assigned different predicates. For example, in one of the two worlds he might be born in Stagirus and in the other Athens. The phrase ‘the great philosopher born in Stagirus’ refers to Aristotle in the actual world (which we shall identify with the former of the two worlds just postulated), but not in the second of the two worlds. Indeed, it might even refer to a different individual altogether in the second world; perhaps Plato was born in Stagirus in the second possible world. So the same descriptive phrase, ‘the great philosopher born in Stagirus’ can denote different individuals in different worlds. In Kripke’s terminology, the description is non-rigid. What about the proper name ‘Aristotle’? How do we customarily use this name in referring to hypothetical worlds? When we say ‘Aristotle might have been born in Athens’, we do not just mean that someone named Aristotle might have been born in Athens. Indeed, when we say ‘Aristotle might have been born in China’, we are also likely to add ‘If he had been born in China, he probably would not have been “named” “Aristotle”’. What we mean is that the same individual who was born in Stagirus, named Aristotle and became the star pupil in Plato’s Academy etc. in the actual world, might have been born in Athens (or in China), might have been named Diogenes (or Tu Fu), etc… Since the name ‘Aristotle’ is customarily used to refer to the same individual when we talk about non-actual worlds (even if that individual is not named ‘Aristotle’ in those non-actual worlds), the proper name ‘Aristotle’ is a rigid designator in Kripke’s terminology.4 One of Kripke’s main arguments against the Frege-Russell descriptive theory is, then, that we want to say that a name still refers to an individual even when the description or descriptions associated with the name we use for the individual do not hold. Another example Kripke gives is of Richard Nixon. ‘The man who was President of the U.S.A. in the years 1970–74,’ is what we may understand by the name ‘Richard Nixon.’ Now it is surely true that Nixon might never have entered politics in the first place. But, Kripke avers, we would still want to say that we can refer to the person we refer to with the name ‘Nixon’ if it had not been the case that Nixon went

On Knowing and Naming 127

into politics; or even if the baby we refer to as ‘little Dickie Nixon’ had not been so named. If talk of ‘possible worlds’ is somewhat daunting we can, according to Kripke, understand ‘trans-world identification’ as simply a matter of talking about what might have been the case with regard to a particular individual, as opposed to what actually is the case. As Kripke puts it, ‘We can point to the man and ask what might have happened to him, had events been different.’5 Summarizing various arguments of those opposed to the ‘descriptive’ theory of names, those who hold some version of what is called the ‘causal theory,’ Salmon points out that some have found support for their position in the work of medieval philosophers. If a name, according to the ‘causal theory,’ does not refer to an individual with regard to a set of descriptions concerning that individual, that set being merely contingently true of him, then perhaps we may say it refers to a unique property. ‘This property,’ Salmon remarks, ‘is what Robert Adams, following Duns Scotus, calls haecceity (‘thisness’) ... It is the property of being this very thing ...’6 Kripke argues that the older theory of naming failed to take account of its social and historical dimensions. The older theory was happy with the picture of a man going into the privacy of his room and fixing the reference of a name by listing to himself the descriptions he would associate with it. On the contrary, Kripke suggests, the normal course of events is that a name is passed through a community and a tradition from those who first had contact with an individual to others – it passes along a causal chain.7 It has been noted by some that Kripke does not directly tackle in any detail the Fregean argument, noted above, concerning the way in which we learn ‘Ateb=Afla’ (that they are the same mountain) through subsequent investigation, not through simple acts of reference. However, he does argue at some length that when, in modern logical notation, we symbolize the law of identity as ‘a=a’ the symbolism ‘a=b’ should be taken as also expressing something of the law of identity, and not as indicating the assignment of contingent properties to a thing, as might be suggested by Frege’s argument. He asserts that ‘identity should just be taken to be the relation between a thing and itself.’8 And to those philosophers who object to the cogency of such a notion Kripke answers that examples of such a relation, between a thing and itself, are not hard to find: someone can be his own worst enemy, or severest critic.9 Searle’s Critique In an early article Searle defended the Fregean thesis that a name was employed in referring as associated with some set of descriptions of an individual. In a later presentation of this theory Searle takes an approach that, he admits, may depart substantially from Frege’s obiter dicta, but is one

128 Method in Metaphysics

that Searle believes clears away some of the muddle created by Kripke and Putnam with their new proposals for dealing with the problem of naming. Searle’s new approach occurs in the context of a larger work on intentionality, and may have much in it that is nearer to Husserl than to Frege.10 One of the central concepts Searle expounds in his book Intentionality is what he terms the ‘self-referential’ nature of intentional acts. Intentional acts, which include seeing, believing, thirsting, fearing, to name but a few, ‘represent’ in themselves the objective to which they are oriented. As such the acts have built-in awareness of conditions of satisfaction or frustration. Hunger anticipates eating and therefore ‘represents’ within itself the conditions that, if they occur, will provide satisfaction. The ‘self-referentiality’ of intentional acts can be seen in the example of visual experience. Searle writes: ‘For visual experience the specification of the conditions of satisfaction makes reference to the visual experience itself. If I see my hand in front of my face then the conditions of satisfaction are Vis Exp (there is a hand there and the fact that there is a hand there is causing this Vis Exp).’11 On the basis of this approach Searle attempts to criticize the Kripke-Putnam thesis on proper names and reference. One of the problems that causal theorists find with Frege’s position is that reference to individual things cannot occur via general concepts but only through the referential use of the indexicals (or demonstratives), ‘I,’ ‘he,’ ‘this,’ ‘now,’ ‘then,’ etc. As has been mentioned, Russell thought that such demonstratives had no sense, only reference. How then, it is asked, can one have a complete set of descriptions that uniquely identify a particular individual? One needs to refer to the individual via demonstratives and, in Russell’s account, these have no sense or meaning and are, therefore, not themselves further descriptions or abstract concepts. Anthony O’Hear makes this point against Frege in the following passage: As Colin McGinn has put it, ‘an accurate description of the phenomenological content of an experience will employ only general terms to specify how the experience represents the world.’ We often regard our thoughts and other experiences as being thoughts about particular individuals in the world, but on McGinn’s account we are able to do this because we are in direct causal and perceptual contact with some of those particulars ... This inherent generality of experience may also be part of what Wittgenstein was referring to when he said ‘If God had looked into our minds, he would not have been able to see there whom we were speaking of.’12 To such objections to the Fregean account Searle responds:

On Knowing and Naming 129

Some authors think that the descriptionist holds that proper names are associated with a ‘dossier’ in the speaker’s mind and that the issue is between this dossier conception and the conception of the use of a proper name as analogous to pointing. But that again is a misconception of descriptionism. On the descriptionist account, pointing is precisely an example that fits his thesis, since pointing succeeds only in virtue of the intentions of the pointer.13 Searle attempts to elucidate the way in which pointing or ostensive reference has ‘sense’ using his analysis of the self-referentiality of intentional acts. When someone says, ‘I am now hungry,’ this will be a true statement if the person uttering the sentence is hungry at the time of utterance. The statement has conditions for its satisfaction ‘within’ it and these are, ‘(the person making this utterance, “I,” is hungry at the time of this utterance, “now”).’14 The indexical expressions, ‘I’ and ‘now,’ then, have conditions for satisfaction, which may be satisfied in the particular situation in which the person finds himself. These conditions are the ‘sense’ of the expressions. But, of course, when someone says, ‘I am hungry,’ he does not, as a rule, ‘unpack’ into concepts the ‘I’ as meaning, ‘the person uttering this statement,’ or the ‘now’ as, ‘the time of utterance.’ These ‘senses,’ meanings, as intended by the speaker are, maintains Searle (employing Wittgenstein’s distinction) shown but not said in the act of utterance. Expressions like ‘this,’ then, do have a sense from the particular locus of use and not simply from general concepts. On the basis of this analysis Searle argues that Kripke misses the most important part of the causal story of the way in which names get passed through the community. The missing link is precisely the point at which the first users ascribe the name to a particular individual. Searle believes that his own account remedies that deficiency in a way that explains what Frege failed to explain – the nature of the act of reference to a particular, involving general descriptions but also acts of reference that still have sense, or meaning. Empiricist Presuppositions It should have become fairly clear from the outline given of the various positions taken in the debate on naming and reference that the philosophical approaches adopted would, in varying degrees, be regarded from the critical realist viewpoint as manifesting an insufficiently articulated account of cognition. One may identify, in these debates, the dominant epistemological model at work as being an empiricist, representationalist one.

130 Method in Metaphysics

Central to the issue is the Fregean distinction between Sinn and Bedeutung. Whatever Frege’s own intentions were in employing the distinction, the analytical tradition has understood it, for the most part, in the way in which it is seen in Russell’s philosophy – as the distinction between descriptive concepts and their application to a ‘this’ or a ‘that’ which we refer to when we bump into them in the world. In fact, it is not so much ‘when’ we bump into things that we refer to them; in much of the writing on the topic our ‘bumping into’ them is in some ill-defined way our actual ‘referring’ to them. In this fashion ‘meaning’ is identified with abstract concepts that are the province of intellect and are, indeed, the sole occupants of that province. What, then, do we make of reference? That is obviously not a matter of further concepts, for it concerns the way we apply them, and in that case it has not really to do with intellect, or human understanding. With regard to the problem there seem to emerge at least three different reactions among the philosophers we have been concerned with. Some, the Kripkean admirers of Scotus, attempt to squeeze even more into concepts than other analytic philosophers think is possible.15 Thus, even on the level of concepts, the second level of human knowing according to Lonergan, concepts of ‘thisness’ or ‘haecceity’ already refer to the entity in reality. The second, and more standard, route among analytical philosophers is to deny conceptual status to the act of reference and thereby deny that acts of reference have ‘meaning’ or have to do with intelligence. This latter point is not spelled out in detail by many of those who write on the topic. As we can see from the O’Hear passage cited above, vague statements about ‘coming into causal contact with the world’ suffice rather than protracted analysis. However, the image hinted at is of reference as being some conscious or semi-conscious unintelligent knee-jerk ‘at reality out there’ – as unintelligent as Wittgenstein supposed (wrongly) his ‘grunts’ to be.16 A third approach is suggested by Searle. Although Searle’s philosophy is also under the sway of the empiricist model, one of its merits is to have challenged the idea that since the mind deals only with abstract concepts, our referring of these ‘to reality’ is something akin to a senseless knee-jerk. His use of the Wittgensteinian distinction between saying and showing is, I think, particularly helpful in this regard. Searle’s analysis of the self-referentiality of intentional acts is, again, encumbered by empiricist notions. However, in his use of this analysis he is trying to get at something very important which some analytical philosophers, trapped in empiricist conceptualism, overlook. One might suggest that what Searle describes, in terms of the distinction between saying and showing, Lonergan explains in the course of his cognitional analysis. That one understands what one means in using the demonstrative ‘this’

On Knowing and Naming 131

to refer to something does not entail that one expresses the insight involved in concepts. As Searle insists, one ‘shows’ that one understands (that Searle does not use the term ‘understands’ in this regard is indicative of the empiricism implicit in his analysis), one does not ‘say’ (conceptually unpack) all that is involved in one’s understanding. Indeed, the ‘showing/saying’ distinction is rather a useful way of highlighting other examples of what Lonergan explains in terms of a distinction between insight and conception. When someone tells me a clever joke he may realize from the way I laugh, if he knows me well, that I have ‘got’ the joke, including the many nuances involved: I ‘show’ that I understand. However, I may attempt, in turn, to explain the details of the joke to a third party who is present, who is unfamiliar with the elements necessary to appreciate it fully. But in such explaining I may be quite unsuccessful in expressing conceptually, in ‘saying,’ all that I have grasped in ‘getting’ the joke. Lonergan on Reference and Demonstratives It would perhaps be useful, at this point, to survey some of the features of Lonergan’s approach to the matters under discussion, before going on to offer some assessment of the positions of Kripke, Putnam, and Searle. The hard and fast distinction between ‘meaning’ and ‘reference,’ which was seen to be essential to much of the recent literature, disappears in Lonergan’s method. Indeed, just as Lonergan sees talk of intentionality as synonymous with talk about meaning, so the notion of ‘reference’ could be regarded, perhaps, as interchangeable with these terms.17 One might wish to be a little cautious, however, for just as the term ‘substance’ has acquired unfortunate philosophical associations, so, it might be urged, has the term ‘reference.’ In the literature we have been considering ‘reference’ is employed in the context of ‘confrontationist’ epistemologies, and while Lonergan believes ‘confrontation’ to mark certain moments in the process of coming to know (the moment of sensory contact), the essential mark of insight as knowledge is identity with the known. Be that as it may, it is clear that what some analytical philosophers would carve up into ‘meaning’ and ‘reference’ Lonergan would relate as different acts of meaning in the one process of coming to know. It has been observed that for some analytical philosophers reference is some non-intellectual act by which the concepts of intellect get applied to reality. On Lonergan’s account there are no conscious acts of intention or reference that are not either attentive, or intelligent, or reasonable (or responsible). As such there is no act of reference that is not also an act of meaning, as Searle, in his own terms, has attempted to argue.18

132 Method in Metaphysics

When some analysts talk of ‘reference,’ then, they are alluding to what may be more correctly understood as a rational judgment that posits the existence of an entity, an occurrence or state of affairs. That is the act by which we ‘refer’ to reality and determine that a concept is not merely a concept but is a meaning that corresponds to an objective meant. Such an act is anything but a mindless twitch by means of which we somehow refer to a real world ‘out-there.’ It may also be observed that, with a failure to distinguish a level of judgment in knowing, many philosophers do not distinguish, on the one hand, between an act of reference that is a reasoned judgment of fact and an ‘instrumental act,’ on the other. An ‘instrumental act’ of reference is, in Lonergan’s view, an intelligent act in which we use gestures, words, or symbols to refer to some data. Such activity would appear to fall into the category of ‘ostensive reference,’ and this may be granted as long as the major proviso is taken into account that such reference is intelligent in intentionality and not the mere pointing of the blind drunk. An insufficient attention to the intelligent and reasonable qualities of such acts is often evident in accounts of what role demonstratives play. As has been stated above, demonstratives are either seen, in the Russellian way, as verbalized expressions, manifesting the fact that we have ‘bumped into’ something ‘in reality’ that corresponds to one of our concepts, or, in the more recent Kripkean fashion, they are taken to be another kind of concept, the concept of ‘thisness,’ which we employ to refer to individuals across possible worlds. With regard to the second option, F.E. Crowe has noted the way in which Lonergan’s analysis reveals the vacuity of the Scotist notion of ‘haecceity.’19 Demonstratives, like ‘this,’ are used by the intelligent and reasonable subject to refer to the data of sense or consciousness, to the level of the empirical residue or, in metaphysical terms, potentiality. Such use occurs when we are referring to particular data in questions for intelligence: ‘What’s that?’ in acts of judgment, when we indicate that ‘this’ data provides the fulfilment of conditions necessary for something to be the case; and in acts of instrumental meaning, when we indicate to ourselves or to another a possible source of meaning in the data. The latter two uses are quite distinct, although empiricists run them together.20 Lonergan’s point is that since the empiricist lacks an adequate theory of the notion of reality, as that which is intelligently grasped and reasonably affirmed, he identifies the realm to which our reasoned judgments refer not with reality, as he should, but with the field of sensible presentations. In this way the use of demonstratives is thought of as direct reference to reality, unmediated by intelligent grasp and reasonable affirmation. The invocation of the notion of ‘thisness’ by some philosophers, past and

On Knowing and Naming 133

present, can therefore be seen as an attempt to compensate for the lack of a more differentiated account of the knowing and referring we engage in when talking of entities. On Lonergan’s account, then, the use of demonstratives is not dumb, but open-eyed and intelligent. One uses them when one returns from the level of conception to the field of presentations, and in a way that endorses Searle’s distinction here between ‘saying’ and ‘showing’ what we understand when we employ demonstratives, Lonergan writes that it is not necessary to be a cognitional theorist to understand what one is doing when one refers using a demonstrative, for ‘questions relevant to cognitional theory are not relevant to every instance of knowing. They are not universally relevant because, in fact, there is no cognitional obscurity about meanings that cognitional theory elucidates ... such elementary meanings are fixed, in a manner which surpasses determination by definition.’21 According to Lonergan, however, one needs to go further to grasp the full implications for human knowing involved in the meaning of demonstratives. ‘I am sitting here now,’ ‘That book is over there,’ are expressions involving demonstratives that may be transposed into their equivalences in various, diverse spatio-temporal reference frames. One may locate such expressions on a public map and calendar so that ‘now, here’ becomes ‘an office in my house, in Evenwood, County Durham, on the 7th July, 2003.’ These issues are discussed by philosophers such as Husserl and Searle. However, Lonergan’s critically established distinction between explanatory and descriptive knowledge requires that a further transposition take place if we are to grasp the significance of expressions like ‘this,’ ‘these,’ ‘here,’ and ‘now.’ He writes: A man who understood everything might proceed from his grasp of metaphysical analysis through its determinations in appropriate sciences to the nature and occurrence of his own sensations and acts of imagining. Still that all-inclusive act of understanding would account no less for past and future sensations and images than for the experiences of the present; and inasmuch as it accounted for present experiences, it would be independent of the experiencing for it would consist in assigning laws and probabilities to instances labeled with the ultimate conceptual determinations named ‘here’ and ‘now.’22 Lonergan’s position, therefore, demands a further transposition. From the heuristic viewpoint of explanation, as it is to be anticipated in the procedures of present or future science, demonstrative expressions, as acts of meaning referring to the empirical residue (that which is encountered on the ‘level’ of experience in knowing), would be transposed into terms that

134 Method in Metaphysics

denote particular, concrete extensions and durations, that is, ‘matters,’ the intelligible ‘forms’ of which are to be understood as part of the intelligibility immanent in emergent world process.23 Assessment of Kripke and Putnam Now that we have noted some of the elements of Lonergan’s approach relevant to the discussion of reference, we may be in a better position to offer an assessment of the positions of Kripke and Putnam based upon Lonergan’s analysis. Turning to the main argument that Kripke and Putnam urge against the descriptive theory of naming, it can be readily seen that there are errors involved that stem from a faulty cognitional analysis. The various cognitional levels – attention to data, insight into data and conceptual formulation, and judgment – are not properly distinguished. As a result, in true Scotist fashion, the activity of conceptual formulation is taken to be the totality of operations involved in human knowing. This conceptual level becomes the playground in which logical analyses are not seen in their true perspective, but usurp the roles that insights into the particular, and judgment with regard to the particular, rightfully play in coming to know. To talk, as Kripke and Putnam do, of trans-world identification of this same, actual individual across possible and actual worlds is precisely to confuse this arena of imagination and logical hypothesis with the real world of cognitional operations, through which we come to know the real world. Demonstratives such as ‘this’ and ‘that’ have their meaning from the intelligent use made of them in the cognitional process when one returns from the level of conception to the level of the given of sense or consciousness. The data of sense or consciousness are what is known to exist in judgments that issue in descriptive knowledge, and, furthermore, this data provides the fulfilling conditions for issuing judgments of fact in explanatory knowledge. Therefore, these data are known to be real, actual. They do not pertain to a world of general abstractions or concepts. Therefore, to talk of ‘this’ or ‘that’ being used to refer to an individual in a ‘possible world’ is to be involved in metaphysics gone on holiday. If one finds talk of ‘trans-world identification’ too much to swallow, there is Kripke’s apparently more modest suggestion that all we need to understand here is simply talk of alternative situations for the same individual. We say that Richard Nixon would still be this man, ‘Richard Nixon,’ even if he had not gone into politics, and Aristotle would still be the same individual if he had not gone into philosophy. Similarly, I would still be the same individual if I had not come into this office this morning. The descriptive theory insists that the name must have sense from a list of descriptions, but Kripke maintains that we can still refer to the same indi-

On Knowing and Naming 135

vidual using his name, even if the contingent facts originally associated with the name in our initial use of it do not obtain. To illustrate what is wrong with Kripke’s account, and the way in which a better account of what is really at issue may be offered, let us consider a little story. I enter a pub one evening and across the bar, on the opposite side from which I sit down, I make out the face of a man who is drinking a pint of beer. The man moves about a bit, as he talks to the publican, and through the smoke I glimpse various aspects of his features and clothes. Now I decide to name this chap ‘Jim’; a bit artificial, this kind of baptism, but we can imagine that I am a private detective, or some kind of person who is new to the area, who wants to make a mental note of the people he spots in the local pubs. In terms of an analysis that results from answering the question ‘What do I know when I am knowing?’ one could say that I have come to know a unity-identity-whole in the data understood as individual, a person whom I name, refer to as, ‘Jim.’ The various movements, noises, appearances that are the data understood to be relevant are a series of conjugate potencies, forms and acts, through which I come to differentiate the unity, the person, Jim. Now, as Lonergan writes, ‘Just as potency, form and act are the many components of a single reality, so central and conjugate forms equally are the many components of a single reality.’24 Therefore, the claim that Jim could be the same reality if the conjugates by which I differentiate him were different is a somewhat ambiguous one. If we imagine me sitting in the pub and saying, ‘Jim is the man doing x, y, and z, but he can be the man not doing these things,’ it becomes clear that such a claim is nonsensical. It is to claim that this reality can, at the same time, be what it is and not what it is. The tense is, of course, the clue here to disambiguating the claim made. ‘Jim cannot be doing other than he is doing, if he is to be the same reality, but Jim could have done something different and still have remained the same person, unity, that he is,’ seems a clearer way of expressing what is meant. However, this is precisely the point at which confusion ensues in the accounts of Putnam and Kripke. If we say ‘Jim would still be Jim even if all I know of him were not the case,’ it may appear to follow that the name by which I refer to him could be stripped of all the associations it acquired that evening in the pub. He might never have come into the pub that evening, he might not have looked as he did (he might have worn different clothes, or have undergone plastic surgery). Surely I can refer to the same him, using the same name, even if all the differentiae are different – so Kripke reasons. However, what is implicit in the process of knowing and naming Jim, and my subsequent speculations about him, shows such reasoning to be mistaken.

136 Method in Metaphysics

Having come to know, and thereby name, Jim, that knowledge being of both conjugate and central potency, form, and act, whenever, from that moment on, I refer to Jim I refer to the reality that in my knowing I know could not be other than it was. What Kripke and Putnam overlook is that there is a multiple referentiality operative in my subsequent thinking about, and referring to, Jim, for I come to know the reality Jim as a unity differentiated by conjugates in a judgment of fact. That judgment of fact, that successful (if it is correct) reference to reality, may then enter into further contexts of thinking and knowing. But in such further thinking and knowing concerning Jim I will be referring to Jim precisely as the reality I knew could not be other than it was. In human knowing and living there is an ever widening context in which the ‘references’ implicit in our acts of meaning multiply. As a human subject advances from attention to data, to understanding, judgment, evaluation, and action, the sublation, or integration, of the intentional levels involved means that the higher the level the more complex will be the ‘references’ involved. In a concrete judgment of fact I ‘refer’ to the universe of reality, to an existent or occurrence, but in such a judgment I also ‘refer’ to the prior activities of insight and conceptual formulation, and to the data that provides the fulfilling of conditions necessary for a grasp of the virtually unconditioned. What Lonergan names the ‘habitual texture of the mind’ is the ever widening context of interrelated thoughts and judgments that accumulate through a lifetime. Our judgments, then, always refer to other more proximate or remote judgments, increments of knowledge, as these condition them. When I refer to Jim, then, in thoughts or judgments subsequent to my first coming to know him, I refer to the reality that I knew – the conjugates of that reality being intrinsic to it. What do I do when I say ‘Jim might not have come into the pub this evening’? What I do not do is strip, in Lockean fashion, the differentiae away until I reach a bare ‘it,’ which I then reclothe in different accidents. Rather, now I know and name Jim, I am given certain facts about reality to work with. Given what I know I can speculate about possibilities in hypothetical judgments which also have reference to that which, in part, grounds them – the judgment about the reality, Jim, as I knew him at time t1, conjugates, warts, and all. I can speculate as to what Jim might have done; I know, at time t1, that Jim is sitting on the other side of the bar, having a pint of beer, etc. I may think, ‘He might never have come here to drink this evening; it was possible for him not to have come in here; he might have gone to see a film; he might have worn different clothes.’ What I am doing here, as is suggested by the tenses of the verbs involved, is referring to past situations when the future contained a number of possible courses that became more or less probable as the various conditions in world process became fulfilled. On

On Knowing and Naming 137

the basis of my knowledge of reality, on the basis of my knowledge of Jim, at time t1, I am extrapolating to earlier times and situations in world process in which, I have reason to believe, Jim would have been involved. All the while in such speculation I am making reference to Jim, as I know him, that knowledge being of him as he was at time t1. What I refer to, in my speculations concerning what Jim might have done, is not some other ‘possible world,’ floating free of this one, but the actual world at times earlier than t1, and I therefore refer to the potentiality (not mere abstract possibility) that world process involving Jim had at those times for realizing this or that possibility. I think that this account, based as it is upon an epistemology and metaphysics critically grounded in self-affirmation, offers a better solution to the problems at issue concerning naming and reference than does that offered by Kripke. Putnam’s claim that the same person, say Aristotle, could remain the same person while having been born in a completely different epoch of history is, perhaps, even bolder than anything Kripke is prepared to argue for.25 To imagine that this is a real possibility is, again, to have a mistaken metaphysical notion regarding the constitution of a person. The particular person that I am is constituted, in part, by physical, biological, neurological, and cultural factors (not to give an exhaustive list), which, in accord with the emergent probability of world process, are manifested in the concrete particular which I am, such that conditions at a different time and place in world process are hardly likely to produce a similar individual, let alone the metaphysical impossibility of their producing the same one! Again, one of the fundamental weaknesses in such philosophy is apparent in its failure to understand what it is to know the particular. Mention was also made, earlier in this chapter, of Kripke’s stance with regard to the law of identity. Frege held that ‘a=b’ symbolizes the discovery that what one had thought were two objects turned out to be one. But in the course of his argument concerning naming and reference, Kripke puts forward the idea that ‘a=b’ is as much a symbol for the law of identity as is ‘a=a.’ I do not wish to go into detail with regard to Kripke’s argument here, but a few remarks may not be out of place. I believe that we find in this instance another example of the way in which some contemporary logical theoreticians fail, in their attempts to resolve problems, to advert to the insights that lie behind the symbols used in logical expressions.26 In this instance there is a failure to notice that ‘a=a’ expresses the metaphysical principle of identity, whereas ‘a=b’ expresses a type of concrete judgment of fact. The former involves insight into insight into data. When I notice a car across the road I do not, as a rule, explicitly formulate the phrase, ‘there is a car over there; it is what it is and not anything else.’ However, such a notion is operative in my understanding, and it is made explicit in

138 Method in Metaphysics

a metaphysics that results from investigating what I know when I know. However, what is symbolized as ‘a=b’ does not express this kind of insight into insight. It expresses a concrete judgment of fact in which one grasps a unity-identity-whole in two sets of data understood as individual. So I come to realize that the man I see playing cricket is none other than Jim, although his appearance had led me to think otherwise initially. I could, of course, go on to enjoy insight into this insight and formulate that in terms of identity, ‘there is only one individual (in these two sets of data), and he is what he is and not another.’ Frege was right, therefore, to insist that ‘a=a’ and ‘a=b’ symbolize quite distinct matters. Problems in Searle It was suggested that Searle’s position on reference and naming is, in a number of ways, superior to those of Kripke and Putnam. Searle acknowledges that reference to the particular involves something that is more like descriptive, or conceptual knowledge than unintelligent physiological acts, in that reference is an intelligent act that must have some kind of meaning or sense. Searle tries to indicate the way such reference involves understanding, without explicit conceptual formulation, by employing the distinction between ‘saying’ and ‘showing.’ However, I have summarized Searle’s position here using terms that do not occur in his own account. The term ‘understand’ is a case in point. Searle’s analysis of intentionality is still very much in the empiricist mould. There is no distinction made between intentional acts such as fear, on the one hand, and thinking and reference, on the other, in terms of the empirical, intelligent, reasonable, and responsible phases of human consciousness. What Searle does appear to understand by ‘understanding’ is presented in terms of his analysis of the ‘self-referentiality’ of intentional acts – the property they have of representing in themselves the states they aim at, this property enabling them to recognize satisfaction of aims when this is achieved. Such an insight approaches what can be critically established in self-appropriation: the elements within cognitional process are selfauthenticating. For example, we have the ability, as Plato noted, to recognize a correct answer when we get one. However, Searle’s analysis does not recognize the differences involved in appetite as empirically conscious and appetite as intelligently, reasonably, and responsibly conscious. The consequences of such oversights are manifested throughout Searle’s book, Intentionality. For example, he gives us a case where we may observe the way in which the self-referentiality analysis supposedly illuminates what occurs in understanding.27 You tell me over the telephone that you are at a party, and that there is a drunken man standing in the opposite corner of

On Knowing and Naming 139

the room. In terms of Searle’s self-referentiality your understanding of the drunken man’s being there runs: ‘(Visual Experience) “There is a drunk over there who is causing experience.”’ On the basis of this analysis Searle argues that I do not understand the fact that there is a drunk at the party in the way you do, for only you have the visual experience. However, it seems rather odd to say that we do not understand the proposition in the same way. What is more to the point is that Searle does not analyse the way the understandings differ. What makes my understanding, when I am at the other end of the phone, understanding at all on Searle’s view? On Lonergan’s account, of course, the similarities and differences are easy to pinpoint. We both understand the same proposition, which may be expressed in different formulae: ‘there is a drunk here,’ ‘there is a drunk at the party that he is attending.’ Besides this, given the differences in our sensible experiences, the fact that there is a drunk at the party is for you, given your access to the data, a matter of immanently generated knowledge, but for me it is a matter of belief, the kind of belief in the testimony of others which is necessary for the day-to-day survival of society. As can be seen from Searle’s characterization of coming to know a fact in terms of ‘visual experience,’ he is implicated in the most basic of empiricist errors: the assumption that what is most obvious in knowing is what knowing most obviously is. ‘Facts’ just come in through the senses. This means that Searle’s naive realism is easy prey for the sceptic and the idealist. Searle, in fact, attempts to counter the Humean argument that we cannot know causality as real in the world, but his attempt is unsatisfactory. Searle argues that his self-referential analysis of intentional acts demonstrates that we have immediate awareness of causality. Again, from the critical realist perspective, this might sound promising, but given Searle’s empiricist background the only examples he can offer are those of awareness of processes on the level of empirical consciousness, and such cases are often those that may be dismissed by the sceptic. Thus Searle avers that we can notice our immediate awareness of causality in the case where I wish to imagine the front of my house, and this image comes to me: I am indubitably aware of causing the image.28 But need the sceptic grant this? The Humean or Derridian can still argue that although one wanted this image to appear before one, one simply cannot prove that one’s wanting it caused the image to appear; it might be mere continuous conjunction that leads you to think this. Searle attempts to deal with a similar objection in the case of a man who thinks that he is raising his arm, and sees it rise, only to discover that he has come round from an operation in which a complicated machine has been installed to do the arm-raising for him when he sends nerve messages

140 Method in Metaphysics

to the areas of his body that usually achieve this end.29 Searle tries to parry the sceptic here by arguing that the man can learn that this has happened and can, therefore, come to use this new system now aware that he does cause the arm-raising, but via the machine. However, Searle seems unaware of the more global sweep of the sceptical move. It may satisfy someone who asks whether we can know that the stick seen through water is really bent or not by pointing out that we can take it out and have a look, but the sceptic and idealist argue that there is no universal vantage point from which we can look to see if our ideas ‘fit reality’ or not. In Searle’s stories such a vantage point is assumed, not argued for. The attempt to counter scepticism with empiricist weapons is, then, not likely to be successful. However, it is quite another matter to point out to the sceptic that he is aware of the operation of the principle of sufficient reason in his criticism of Searle or anyone else. To deny that, is to be involved in incoherence, for the very denial is the assertion that there is not sufficient reason for this to be the case. One can grant the Humean that one is not directly aware of causing the image of the front of one’s house to appear before the mind when one wants it to (although one can ask if his doubt is reasonable here). But it can be retorted that one is aware that one wanted to imagine one’s house because one judged it to be of value to perform the experiment, to see whether Searle or the Humean had the stronger argument. Conclusion Putnam writes of the revolution that many believe Kripke has effected in the analytical tradition, ‘Kripke was led to his discoveries in the philosophy of language partly by work he had done previously in a branch of mathematical logic, modal logic, in which he is the world’s outstanding authority.’30 If some of the criticisms of this position that I have offered above appear apposite then, taking account of Putnam’s comment on the origins and importance of Kripke’s work, the present chapter may provide a piece of evidence in support of the claim Lonergan made in Insight that current logical theory requires the coherence offered by the perspective of Lonergan’s method.31 It was also noted in the course of this chapter that some analytical philosophers have found themselves drawn to logical analyses done by fourteenth-century philosophers such as Scotus. I have suggested here that a more satisfactory approach to issues surrounding reference, knowing, and naming is to be found in the work of a philosopher whose work draws on the philosophy of the thirteenth century, the philosophy of Aquinas.

Recto Running Head 141

6 Natural Kinds: From Description to Explanation

The view that the Socratic endeavour to discover definitions that would yield insight into the essences of beings is at best illusory and at worst a kind of violent attempt to impose the categories of a particular human culture upon the non-human world has been gaining ground in one way or another for the last two centuries. German idealism, inspired by Hume’s attempt to liberate humankind from its perennial illusions as to its capacity to receive genuine answers from the interrogation of mother nature, moved from theories of ‘category imposition on the data’ to more disturbing anthropological accounts, in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, of the way irrational forces, ‘will to power,’ lead to such anthropomorphic imposition of human categories upon mute and dumb nature. The heirs to the Nietzsche tradition of suspicion are to be found more in the world of continental philosophy. The debates between Heidegger, Sartre, Levinas, Foucault, Lyotard, and Derrida continue the theme of metaphysics as, perhaps, an inescapable matrix of human categories ‘imposed’ in some sense without rational warrant, and focus attention upon the underlying ‘need’ or ‘needs’ that human beings and groupings of human beings have to engage in such activity. In the Anglo-Saxon philosophical world, on the other hand, the recent resurgence of metaphysical writing has occurred in epistemological contexts in which realist and antirealist debates demonstrate somewhat different concerns and interests. Indeed, such debates and their prolongation into metaphysics appear to be more aligned with the earlier phase of the development of the German philosophical tradition. So Hume’s doubts and questions haunt AngloAmerican metaphysical debate, and the Kantian idealist option of ‘categories of thought’ is taken up and appears in many different guises in

142 Method in Metaphysics

accounts of ‘conceptual schemes’ and antirepresentational or coherentist epistemologies. For those philosophers on the Anglo-American scene who aim at a bolder ontological commitment and metaphysical analysis than such sociology of knowledge or idealism will allow there still remain numerous questions emergent from epistemology for a proposed metaphysics: to affirm one’s commitment to some form of realism still leaves detailed questions with regard to the several interrelated areas of metaphysics. It is such questions concerning the foundations of ‘metaphysical semantics’ that have been the dominant theme in the previous chapters. Decisions as to what is real and what epiphenomenal in one’s metaphysical view, or what is to survive and what is to be replaced as knowledge moves forward, are seen to be crucial in the arena of debate concerning ‘natural kinds.’ Even for the metaphysician committed to the boldest realism not all the linguistic categories operative in the everyday usage of the cultures of the contemporary world are to be taken as providing immediate and irreformable access to the nature of things. It is a most common experience that common sense can be mistaken. If that were not enough to convince us, then the great engine of scientific research, never at rest (which itself appears to have corrected numerous intuitions of previous forms of common sense) of its own nature appears to be intrinsically revisable. It appears to me that a useful distinction can be made regarding two interrelated areas of debate that come under the rubric of ‘natural kinds.’ The first area has to do with clarifying and explaining to what extent our language and our judgments can attain knowledge of the ‘kinds’ or essences that are truly constitutive of reality. The second, related area, concerns the ontological status of human artefacts: to what extent can such artefacts be categorized as ‘natural kinds’? Of course, with regard to the latter area of debate the terms ‘natural kind’ seem to prefigure and determine in advance the question. ‘Natural’ naturally enough suggests ‘of nature’ as opposed to ‘of human construction.’ But, as we shall see, upon closer examination it appears difficult to determine, in terms of an ontology or metaphysics, how artefacts and human products of self-expression are to be marked off from the essences of the ‘things’ we find ‘in nature.’ Our Knowledge of What There Is in Nature: The Essentialist/Anti-essentialist Debate The contemporary debate concerning natural kinds is aware of itself as standing in a very ancient philosophical tradition, and it is no surprise that recent analytical protagonists acknowledge their connection to this

Natural Kinds: From Description to Explanation 143

eminent tradition (which includes Aristotle, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, and Hume) and also, on many occasions, demonstrate explicitly their indebtedness to the insights and approaches of these earlier thinkers. ‘Natural Kinds’ as Ethnocentric: Cassam One contributor to the debate who, sceptical of the linguistic essentialism espoused by Putnam and Kripke, provides us with a genealogical sketch of the biases in the tradition, which lead to these (on his view) contemporary confusions, is Quassim Cassam. Cassam is representative of a number of contemporary analytical thinkers who might be said to stand within the tradition influenced by the works of the later Wittgenstein, a tradition severely critical of the ‘ethnocentric’ oversights of the Western metaphysical traditions. Cassam holds that this misguided tradition was initiated by Aristotle, who began the search for the substantial behind data, and continues in our own time in the work of neo-Aristotelians like David Wiggins.1 The discussion is mediated to modern philosophy primarily through Locke; Cassam points to the following passage in Locke as a conspicuous piece of evidence in favour of this genealogical account: ‘When I am told that something besides the figure, size and posture of the said parts of the body is its essence, something called substantial form, of that I confess I have no idea at all, but only the sound “form”’ (John Locke, Essay II, xxxi). However, Cassam notes, Locke retains the notion of substance as of the, ‘Real internal, but generally unknown constitution whereon their discoverable qualities depend’ (Locke, Essay III, iii). Kripke’s and Putnam’s work, according to Cassam, falls into this tradition of looking for the ‘real essence’ behind appearances. His principal objection to their endeavour is the claim that it is an unjustified ‘ethnocentric’ semantics: the KripkePutnam stipulations concerning de re necessity only apply in a scientific culture, like our own, while in another culture with underdeveloped science these analyses would not be relevant.2 In his article Cassam then goes on to note the development of the tradition, in the modern period of philosophy, concerning the relation of the concept ‘substance’ to that of ‘cause’ and ‘power,’ and once more identifies Locke’s pervasive influence in the modern period. Locke writes, ‘Powers make a great part of our complex ideas of substance’ (Locke Essay II, xxiii). In the twentieth century we find philosophers like P.F. Strawson claiming that ‘concepts of objects are always and necessarily compendia of causal law or law-likeness, [and] carry implications of causal power or dependence.’3 Cassam observes that the Lockean/Leibnizian/Kantian idea of powers and dispositions is explained on the basis of internal powers

144 Method in Metaphysics

and that this analytical tendency lends force to the Lockean idea of natural kinds.4 It is evident that David Wiggins stands within this tradition. In Sameness and Substance Wiggins outlines a theory of identity in terms of ‘sortal dependency of identity,’ fleshed out in a number of ‘(D) principles.’ In light of these principles Wiggins claims that ‘among the best candidates to play sortal concepts which figure in D are natural kind words understood after the manner of Putnam.’ So arises his ‘modest essentialism,’ expressed in the following three principles: i) x can be phi if it is possible to conceive of x that it is phi; ii) x must be phi if and only if it is not possible to conceive of x that x is not phi; iii) the position of the boundary between what one can conceive of x and what one cannot conceive of x depends on what x is. For one example of de re necessity Wiggins turns to set-theory, but more importantly he provides examples of the derivation of ‘necessities of constitution.’ Thus, for example, it is impossible to conceive of Caesar that he is not a man, ‘man’ being the highest individuative sortal for Caesar. Wiggins holds that every natural thing necessarily satisfies the highest sortal concept under which it falls; such sortal concepts will, Wiggins writes, ‘represent the least specific account of their bearers that will suffice to articulate these very bearers from the rest of reality.’5 He continues: ‘Suppose that “an” (x) has its sense fixed by reference to some hypothesized generic constitution ... And suppose G is some (not too specific) genetic feature that is scientifically partially distinctive of that constitution. Now consider anything that is a man. He is then necessarily if-a-man-thenG.’6 Cassam’s principal objection to Wiggins’s approach is that Wiggins thinks natural kind terms have their senses fixed by reference to some hypothesized general constitution. While acknowledging that ‘primitive people’ are more epistemologically sophisticated than is sometimes imagined in philosophical thought-experiments, Cassam remains convinced that ‘primitives’ do not have some sense of the ‘inner constitution of things.’ Therefore the semantics of natural kinds of essentialists like Kripke and Putnam, or of moderate essentialists like Wiggins, cannot claim to have succeeded in mapping out the terrain of intelligent language use in this area. Inspiration from Locke: Wilkerson No doubt Cassam would see in T.E. Wilkerson’s contribution to the natural-kinds debate a clear example of yet another attempt dogged by the Lockean distinction between ‘inner essence’ and outer ‘appearance.’7

Natural Kinds: From Description to Explanation 145

Wilkerson is quite confident that philosophical analysis can progress (in rather the way Kripke, Putnam, and Wiggins think it can) towards a clearer delineation of ‘natural’ and ‘non-natural’ kinds. He subscribes to the view that natural kinds have intrinsic properties that make them what they are, and that such intrinsic properties lend themselves to scientific investigation. Such a confidence in the reality of natural kinds, however, does not mean that all issues are settled, or that analysis of these kinds is considered plain sailing. Further analysis of examples reveals the need for differentiation. Thus Wilkerson argues that when geographers talk of cliffs, mountains, valleys, seas, and beaches, and meteorologists talk of depressions and anticyclones, they are not referring to natural kinds. Such reference does not lead to scientific generalization, since the same ‘clump’ will count as mountain in one environment and not in another. He comments, ‘Cliffs, as such do not have real essences but sandstone, limestone do.’8 A further example of the ‘merely conventional’ are ‘states’ (i.e. countries), for clearly such arbitrary human divisions are not studied by science. If Wilkerson stands within the Lockean tradition he does, however, take exception to some of Locke’s conceptual apparatus. He finds the Lockean distinction between nominal and real essence problematic and remarks, ‘It is not clear ... how we are to decide which properties are to count as part of the real essence of a thing, and which to count as part of its nominal essence.’9 Some recent philosophers have followed Locke and speak of nominal essences ‘made by the mind and not by nature’ (Locke, Essay III, vi).10 But Wilkerson challenges this. He writes of trees and shrubs, rivers and glaciers, clouds and thunderstorms; ‘their classification does not reflect the de dicto peculiarities of our language, and thereby the peculiar interests, conventions and preoccupations of human beings.’11 He notes that after having whetted our appetite for de re essences Locke says we have access to very few of them (Locke, Essay II, xxii) and that we must remain satisfied with nominal essences. As an improvement upon the Lockean distinction between ‘nominal’ and ‘real’ essences Wilkerson offers a ‘suggestion’ that comes from his reading of Aristotle. The distinction that we should use in marking off the ‘natural kind’ from the ‘conventional’ is the distinction between those things that ‘stand alone’ and ‘things that are understood in relation to something else.’ As an example of what he means he points to the case of the way a wind is named a ‘south wind,’ if moving from one direction, a ‘north wind,’ from the opposite direction. These are cases of descriptions relative to the reference frames of observers, but ‘real’ descriptions, Wilkerson insists, for all that.

146 Method in Metaphysics

Inspiration from Mill: Meyer Leroy Meyer’s contribution to the natural-kinds debate further elucidates the connection between current concerns and the philosophical tradition within which they stand.12 In Meyer’s view Wilkerson’s defence of the idea of ‘essential kinds,’ which science is out to identify, stands in the tradition of Mill’s System of Logic, and runs counter to an ontological minimalist view. However, Meyer, while also wishing to align his position with that of Mill, offers a number of criticisms of Wilkerson, and argues that a more authentic appropriation of Mill’s position would obviate the difficulties for the essentialist position highlighted by those who accuse it of cultural parochialism. Meyer observes that in the minimalist view all that is needed for a ‘natural kind’ is some naturally occurring instance of similarity. Furthermore, modern science has rendered older notions of kind redundant as it demonstrates that what is important is deep structure behind apparent similarity. For those who follow Mill, on the other hand, what is required is deep similarity and strong affinity. They would insist that a stronger version of natural similarity is required than that granted by a minimalist in order to make sense of theory continuity in scientific development. For Mill determination of natural kinds is an integral part of scientific method. Theoretical kinds are revisable. So to get at natural kinds one must reach intra-theoretic kinds, transcending particular theories. However, Meyer believes that Mill does not posit an ultimate ‘real essence.’ Rather a natural kind is based upon a set of properties that is ‘indefinite and inexhaustible.’13 For Mill classification by kinds is based upon ‘the spontaneous tendency of mind’ to group objects that are most thoroughly similar. Thus the task is to determine a few characteristics that serve as indicators of a great number of traits. But here Meyer finds Wilkerson’s use of Aristotle’s ‘substance’ as ‘that which stands independently’ vague if it is offered as such a determining set of traits. A heart cannot be seen independently of other things, so are we to say, in this view, it does or does not qualify as a ‘natural kind’? Further problems arise, Meyer argues, regarding Wilkerson’s proposal for marking off natural from non-natural kinds. Are systems, as sets of interrelationships (such as the solar system), natural kinds or not? Meyer also detects what he deems to be a tendency to reductionism in Wilkerson, and argues that there are good grounds provided by the methodologies of the various sciences for opposing such philosophical temptations.14 On this Meyer observes, ‘It is misleading to suppose that the kinds of objects of cosmological study, Galaxy, black hole, neutron star, quasar – are simply logical derivatives of microphysical theory.’15 Meyer believes it is not the notion of ‘natural kinds,’ when understood

Natural Kinds: From Description to Explanation 147

along the lines suggested by Mill, that invites the ‘ethnic parochialism’ charge levelled by some, but the linguistic essentialism of Kripke and his followers. For Mill’s view does, at least in some respects, point us towards the ongoing and revisable nature of science, which seems to be downplayed in the Kripkean school. Meyer writes, ‘The attachment to science is no more ethnocentric than is the very term “natural” in “natural kinds”: to see something as natural is to see it in a way that could lend itself to scientific inquiry.’ And he continues, summing up his Millian thesis: But without the kinds we have nothing as a point of reference to choose between or otherwise to compare ultimate perspectives or theories. For, we must have some natural kind concepts or other parts of our phenomenological apparatus, to which we have recourse in scrutinizing scientific theory.16 However, at the conclusion of his argument Meyer makes a number of remarks that leave one wondering quite how he would clearly mark off his apparently strong (yet heuristic) Millian notion of natural kinds from the kind of position which would object to the ‘objectivistic,’ ‘ethnocentric’ strand in his position. He writes, ‘Science is characterised by a search for connections which can be viewed by the community engaged in the search as rationally compelling, as having some explanatory force that accords with the concept of explanation of the community.’17 Given this admission one is left wondering how one can, or whether one can, differentiate a truly ‘scientific’ search for connections from one that could take place according to common-sense notions employed in a culture which, for example, wished to identify the cause of some person’s death in terms of voodoo powers exercised in his regard. Of course such issues open out upon all our current debates concerning rationality and commensurability, but for all that the issues cannot be ignored or taken as settled. Inspiration from Aristotle: Haldane An attempt to mark off the merely conventional from the ‘essential’ or ‘real’ (which has some elements in common with Wilkerson’s position) is found in John Haldane’s response to Putnam’s strictures against the Aristotelian-Thomist notion of ‘Substance.’ Haldane attempts to argue a ‘strong’ position on essences, which Putnam rejects since it does not appear to cope with the inevitable complexities that arise from divergent taxonomies.18 So, in the face of Haldane’s attempt to argue that the accounts of the biologist and molecular biologist assist in clarifying the ‘essences’ of animals, Putnam enquires whether or not the essence of ‘dog’

148 Method in Metaphysics

means ‘descended from Wolves’?19 In response, Haldane asserts that his own argument can be further refined, and points to ways in which accounts of morphology, structure, and genesis can contribute to the differentiation of a natural essence.20 In the course of his discussion, Haldane identifies Putnam’s position as that of the ‘pragmatic nominalist.’ On such a view science does investigate the forms of things, but these forms are not totally conception-independent. Nature itself does not have natural kinds; rather we humans ‘carve it up’ for various purposes. On the other hand, Putnam urges a return to the ‘common-sense’ realism of the ordinary person, and acknowledges that such realism involves the epistemological activity ‘abstracting’ the ‘forms’ or ‘ideas’ from their material conditions.21 It is this latter aspect of the recent turn taken in Putnam’s thought that is attractive to Haldane, who is influenced by Aristotelian-Thomism. While Putnam believes the older ‘common-sense’ view of knowledge should be revived, he also wishes to separate it from any metaphysical moorings. So while he attacks such metaphysical views as atomism, he does not wish to replace them with an alternative, and he criticises other traditional metaphysical positions. Thus the older metaphysical notion that every word corresponded to some ‘form’ in nature must be rejected.22 In addition it must be acknowledged that the transformation of the notion of ‘object,’ which has gone on in the development of modern science, demonstrates that the aspirations of the older metaphysics are illusory. In this older metaphysical view ‘reality’ was some ‘super-object’ to which metaphysical concepts referred. However, Putnam insists that this view is no longer tenable, and we should rather understand ‘reality’ as that which we negotiate and categorize in various ways for a variety of purposes.23 Haldane remains unconvinced that Putnam can be consistent in holding his common-sense epistemology while adhering to a position that would reject the notion that in such common-sense knowing one does not get at real ‘forms’ in nature. Furthermore, he responds to some of the objections Putnam makes against older Aristotelian notions such as substance. Putnam asks what counts as ‘substantial’ and what ‘accidental’ in the case of his old table lamp from which bits fall off when it is moved. Haldane counters by indicating that the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition includes resources for distinguishing between artefacts like this and natural substances. It offers types of analysis that handle the ‘relative’ and ‘nonrelative’ aspects of ‘things.’ Thus the important role Aristotle assigns to ‘relativity’ categories such as time, place and relation, which, Haldane points out, would enable one to handle such cases as ‘the last pigeon in Trafalgar Square on the night of such and such a date.’

Natural Kinds: From Description to Explanation 149

While it is evident from what I have written already in earlier chapters that I would be fundamentally sympathetic to the line Haldane adopts in his debate with Putnam, it remains clear that a number of Putnam’s objections to the kind of metaphysics Haldane champions require, I believe, a more satisfactory response than Haldane offers – one that involves Lonergan’s wide ranging hermeneutic task of retrieving the vitally important insights of Aristotle and Aquinas from the earlier scientific-cultural context in which they were originally formulated. However, before giving a critical response to the natural-kinds debate from the perspective of Lonergan’s position (a task to be pursued in the second part of this chapter) I wish to examine two further contributions to the debate. These contributions are helpful in moving the debate further towards an appreciation of the epistemological underpinnings of the various positions more or less explicitly acknowledged to be operative in the ontological analyses offered. Kinds and Recognitional Capacities: Brown Jessica Brown’s contribution to the natural-kinds debate offers both telling criticisms of the ‘new orthodoxy’ of Kripke and Putnam, and a subtle analysis of the epistemological and ontological intricacies which need to be entered into if one is to work towards a more satisfying account.24 She is careful to distinguish between the common elements in Kripke and Putnam and issues on which they remain divided. She points out that one needs to keep in view the diverse implications for the discussion of Kripke’s ‘name baptizing’ position, on the one hand, and Putnam’s ‘what language users are really referring to’ position, on the other. She sees weaknesses in both positions insofar as neither philosopher successfully resolves what she calls i) the problem of higher-level natural kinds, and ii) the composition problem. The ‘higher-level’ natural kind objection to the Kripke-Putnam position on the semantics of name reference emerges, Brown believes, when one notes that if an item instantiates one natural kind then it usually instantiates others. So a diamond instantiates ‘diamond’ and ‘carbon.’ Thus it would appear that terms defined in Kripke’s and Putnam’s way would have indeterminate reference. The ‘composition problem,’ she argues, results from reflection upon the fact that the ‘samples’ of water in lakes and rivers are not ‘pure water,’ but often H2O, salts, and other minerals. In Kripke’s view someone points at some water and says ‘water is what is instantiated by most or all of samples of stuff like this.’ But, Brown observes that instances of impure water do not instantiate water. She writes: ‘A general problem for Kripke’s

150 Method in Metaphysics

account ... [is] that he cannot allow that a community which lacks pure samples of some natural kind can introduce a term for that kind. This is implausible. Most natural kinds occur impurely in nature, and it is plausible that a scientifically ignorant community would often use naturally occurring samples to define natural kind terms.’25 One might respond to this objection by granting that the term ‘water’ can be understood as that which refers to impure cases, impure samples. However, Brown rejects that resolution of the problem: ‘But this last claim is problematic for two reasons. First, if “water” has the suggested extension then it is no longer clear that “water” refers to a natural kind. It is part of the notion of a natural kind that it be part of a natural taxonomy. But the kind whose extension includes both pure samples of water and some, but not all, impure samples of water seems to be a gerrymandered kind whose extension is fixed by my subjective interests not by the world.’26 Therefore, she concludes, Kripke’s account is implausible for it does not allow for what seems reasonable – that a community that lacks pure samples of some x can still introduce a term for that x. He fails, therefore, to resolve the composition problem. Putnam does a little better here in coping with the composition problem. Putnam holds that someone can say this x (some sample) is water if and only if x is what the English community would call x. So he allows that a community can refer to x as ‘water’ even if most samples are of impure water. However, Putnam’s views do result in counterintuitive elements elsewhere. So a community could base use of the word ‘ruby’ on noted similarities of data and use ‘ruby’ for these kinds of stone. If, Brown points out, there is a natural kind present in these samples that explains the similarities, then the term ‘ruby’ refers to this kind; if there is not, then ‘ruby’ fails to have a reference. That is Putnam’s view. However, according to Putnam, ‘ruby’ is just a term used in common usage. But, Brown observes, ‘ruby’ is, in fact, a compound alumina with a few impurities. Thus in Putnam’s definition ‘ruby’ refers to the compound alumina. Yet this is counterintuitive, for it would follow in Putnam’s view that ‘ruby’ would then have the reference ‘sapphire,’ since sapphire is mostly composed of alumina with some different impurities. Having offered criticisms of Kripke and Putnam, Brown moves on to outline her own position which she characterizes as a ‘recognitional capacities’ account. She writes: ‘We must suppose that members of such a community recognise natural kinds in relatively non-technical ways, e.g. by their appearance. However, if the recognitional capacities account were extended to more scientifically sophisticated communities, then the means of recognizing natural kinds would be broadened to include technical tests.’27 On her position it is reasonable to recognize that a linguistic

Natural Kinds: From Description to Explanation 151

community will ‘be prepared to apply the term whenever they think that they recognise an instance of the natural kind in question.’28 Brown argues that this more flexible account allows one to recognize an instance as an instance of ‘diamond’ and as an instance of ‘carbon.’ It therefore solves the ‘highest natural kind’ dilemma. It also solves the composition problem: one can recognize a sample of salt in some seawater even if it is only a small sample. However, are there not problems here which emerge for Brown’s own view? Would not her view fail to be sensitive to the extension of natural kind terms that are determined by underlying properties? In the concluding section of her article Brown outlines her response to such objections in terms of a) a ‘localized’ recognitional capacity argument, and b) a knowledge-theory argument. To the question of how language users might be able to distinguish Putnam’s ‘Earth Water,’ which shares appearances but not underlying structures, with ‘TEarth Water’ (found in a possible world almost identical with ours), she answers that it is reasonable to hold that people do make genuine acts of recognition on the basis of appearances. The basic paradigm she adopts here is the capacity persons have for recognizing relatives and neighbours and other persons familiar to them via ‘appearances.’ This point can help illuminate the twin-earth water question if we acknowledge that persons recognize both family members and natural-kind samples, like ‘water,’ in the same way. Against the objector who continues to insist upon the possibility of mistakes in these cases, Brown responds with a ‘locality’ criterion: people identify relatives and samples of natural kinds as such with a background criterion of ‘locality’ involved. That means that I may not be able to distinguish this sample of water from any other possible look-alike, nor my own mother from any other possible duplicate, but it is reasonable for me to say that I do recognize both. She further backs up this point with an epistemological argument, or rather, an epistemological statement of principle, since her treatment is too brief to constitute an argument for such a position. She writes: ‘An event of recognition is an event in which knowledge is acquired: one acquires the knowledge that the item or kind one is currently encountering is the same as the item or kind previously encountered … In general, I suggest that it cannot be a necessary condition for a subject to have knowledge in some area that she be infallible in that area. If this were a necessary condition, then none of us would have any knowledge at all.’29 And concluding with a statement of a position made familiar by its deployment in diverse fallibilist epistemologies, she asserts, ‘A subject’s belief about some issue is knowledge if it is true and the subject could not easily have been wrong about this issue.’30

152 Method in Metaphysics

Appearance and Reality: Dummett To conclude this review of some representative positions taken in the recent debate on natural kinds I will now turn to some observations made by Michael Dummett in the course of an article critical of A.J. Ayer’s atomistic-reductionist metaphysics.31 In the course of his argument with Ayer, Dummett takes up a number of epistemological positions that to some degree accord with those of Lonergan in this area. A brief treatment of them here will, then, be helpful as a prelude to the next section of this chapter, which will outline Lonergan’s position as it bears upon the naturalkinds debate. Dummett draws attention to epistemological distinctions that we need to keep in mind when discussing issues surrounding natural kinds and the question of ‘what is there in nature,’ as opposed to ‘our (merely) conventional dividing up of nature.’ To begin with, he notes that even in the domain of common sense and ordinary discourse we all acknowledge that, in familiar cases, things appear (really do appear) to an observer that the community and observer himself do not take to be so of the things themselves. Thus stars really do appear to twinkle and distant cities look small. However, this distinction between ‘reality’ and ‘appearance’ (a perennially acknowledged aspect of human experience) is not quite what we mean by the distinction between ‘things’ as described in ordinary discourse and ‘things’ as understood from a scientific stance. Dummett explains: The contrast is now not between the qualities that things appear to have and those different qualities that they really have: it is between a method of characterizing those qualities that they are agreed to have in terms of our own perceptual capacities and one that is independent of our mode of perception; it is therefore not a matter of discovering that they lack certain qualities that we wrongly supposed them to have … The attempt to say what things are like in themselves is an attempt to find a means of characterizing them that is independent, not only of the particular position and circumstances of an individual observer, but also, more generally, of the situation of human beings, located on the surface of a certain planet at a particular stage in its history, being of a certain size and having a particular range of sensory faculties.32 Dummett is emphatic, then, that a philosophical account of ordinary, common-sense knowledge as erroneous when compared to the true scientific knowledge that replaces it (a view that seems to emerge from the Renaissance discussion of primary and secondary qualities) is wide of the mark. This approach is operative, Dummett argues, in Ayer’s treatment of

Natural Kinds: From Description to Explanation 153

dilemmas such as that of Eddington’s two tables. According to current physics most of the matter of an atom is in its nucleus. The electrons in an atom are said to be found in charge-clouds around the nucleus. The designation ‘cloud’ in this context is deliberately vague, since we are unable to know the exact location and velocity of a given electron. The major part of the atom consists of the void between the nucleus and the charge-cloud of electrons. Thus, the ‘one’ table, in Eddington’s little parable, is this four-square, solid, brown object I see and feel before me (the table of common sense); the ‘other’ table, said to be the same object, is mostly empty space, with the occasional phenomenon that can now be described as a wave, now as a particle (the table of physics). The dilemma arises from asking, which is the real table? Dummett points out that Ayer’s solution is to argue that the subatomic particles, making up the table, are colourless only because they are so minute and are smaller than the wavelength of light. Such atomism is the inevitable consequence of Ayer’s naive realism, which wishes to guard against scepticism by saying that everyday knowledge is an immediate communing with the essence of an object. While Dummett is no advocate of scepticism he argues that such a simplistic account will not do. For one thing one needs to be aware of the historical contingency of common sense and ordinary language. He writes: A common-sense view is a conception on which most of those who belong to that culture at that time habitually rely in their everyday thinking ... There is, however ... no view or set of views that men would take if only they were left alone by society to form what view was natural to them; for they owe their language, the vehicle of their thought, and their very humanity to being members of a society.33 In the same vein Dummett argues that either common sense is indifferent to attempts like that of Ayer to outline a ‘common-sense empiricism,’ or, given the influence of the authority of science, the influence of Leibniz’s ‘expert,’ it accepts what, from the empiricist standpoint, appear to be ‘counter-intuitive’ aspects of the parable of Eddington’s two tables. Some thinkers believe the language of science must be interpreted in the light of a ‘common-sense’ realism, and this is no doubt a motive for the kind of instrumentalism one finds in scientist-philosophers like Niels Bohr, but Dummett holds that this is mistaken. Rather science grows out of common sense in such a way that, while it does not repudiate the judgments of common sense, it shows them to belong to a different domain. Dummett’s quite general epistemological reflections are important in our present context as they indicate the need to clarify the kind of episte-

154 Method in Metaphysics

mological criteria that lie behind distinctions to be made between ‘natural’ and ‘non-natural’ kinds. The question remains, I believe, after having surveyed a number of positions typical in the current debate on natural kinds, as to whether the various contributors to the discussion have been successful in delineating in a clear enough fashion how one is to mark off natural from non-natural kinds. I believe the lack of clarity one can detect has much to do with the wider issues of both the way scientific descriptions relate to common-sense judgments, and how those scientific ‘descriptions’ or explanations are themselves to be characterized. In the following section I will outline Lonergan’s position with regard to these questions. I will then move on to a dialectical, critical engagement between that position and the positions outlined in the first section of the chapter, arguing that the desired clarity does result from the kind of approach Lonergan takes, and that such clarification can help to resolve a number of difficulties that the various philosophers surveyed have indicated. Beyond Primary and Secondary Qualities One of Lonergan’s principal aims is to show that the notions of primary and secondary quality are themselves the inevitable result of the outworking of the representationalism, or ‘knowing as looking’ epistemology dominant in the fourteenth-century nominalism of Scotus and Ockham. In that sense then, as we have seen before, Lonergan can be understood as undertaking something similar to the critique of Western metaphysics as ‘presencing,’ evident in the thought of Heidegger and Derrida. However, as we have also already made clear, such a history of metaphysics as emergent from ‘mirroring epistemologies’ does not lead to an idea of the ‘closure’ of metaphysics but, on the contrary, points the way ahead. It does so in terms of a retrieval of elements in the positions of Aquinas, and to some degree Aristotle, who, in Lonergan’s view, were not implicated in such perceptualism. In order to appreciate Lonergan’s approach to the question of natural kinds, then, it will be necessary to examine his position on explanation visà-vis description. As is evident from the sample of discussions on the issue given above, what is fundamental to the issue of natural kinds is the question as to where the lines of demarcation can be drawn between ‘nominal’ or ‘descriptive’ ‘for-us’ predicates, on the one hand, and, on the other, ‘things among themselves’ predicates that truly move us beyond an observer based perspective to that of the reality of things in the world. And, of course, modern nominalists of various stripes will deny that this is possible. However, a further issue, which will also require consideration, is the way a number of positions in the contemporary debate tend to reject

Natural Kinds: From Description to Explanation 155

a realist approach to natural kinds in rejecting the kind of essentialism that they identify in the Kripke-Putnam modalist position. As we have seen, however, some contributors to the debate wish to argue for a realist approach while also distinguishing it from essentialism, and, as we shall see, Lonergan also moves in that direction. In understanding Lonergan’s position on explanation four interrelated areas may be briefly considered: a) explanation as the assigning of causes; b) the difference between description that gives an account of things in terms of ‘observer-perspective’ predicates and explanation that aims to give an account in terms of predicates that refer to ‘things-among-themselves’; c) the consequent notion of explanation as identifying a set of interrelated terms and relations; d) the paradigm instance of the ‘self’ as a point where in affirming cognitional and volitional structure one is involved in providing such explanatory terms, and one is also making the transition from description (the predicates are in fact of both kinds). It will not be surprising to see how d) plays the philosophical role it does, given the point made before in this work that metaphysics unfolds from the realm of the cognitional and epistemological and is, on Lonergan’s view, to be critically assessed and substantiated in that way. Lonergan follows Aristotle and Aquinas in identifying the following causes: external causes, which are, respectively, efficient, final, and exemplary, and causes internal to the ‘thing,’ which are formal and material. It will be formal causality that will concern us more in this chapter, for Lonergan observes that it is the ‘formal’ cause that appears as the primary goal of much modern scientific investigation.34 This can be recognized as being so without having to enter into all the historical and philosophical debates concerning the putative banishment of ‘final’ causes from the scene of scientific investigation since the later Middle Ages. That other types of cause are operative is a point upon which Lonergan insists. The ‘formal cause’ is, as Aristotle indicates, that which answers the question as to why such and such data appear as they do. Having insight into the formal cause then is grasping an intelligible pattern in the data that explains why it is so. Lonergan refers to Aristotle’s examples here of a ‘house’ or a ‘human being.’35 As Aristotle points out, our question ‘What is it?’ with regard to a house or a man is a concealed question ‘Why?’: ‘Why are these bricks, panes of glass, mortar, slates arranged as they are?’ ‘Why is this bundle of flesh and bones like this?’ In attempting to identify the ‘natural kinds’ of the world, therefore, one is repeatedly raising and attempting to answer such questions in order to reach an explanatory differentiation of things in the world. Although I do not wish to dwell on the nature of causality as such in this chapter, it will be as well to highlight here something that will be empha-

156 Method in Metaphysics

sised later on. One may note from the way Lonergan appropriates Aristotle’s approach to ‘cause’ that, as in the case of formal cause, a cause is to be identified as an answer to a question: thus the formal cause is the answer to the question ‘What?’ or ‘Why?’ with regard to an assemblage of data. So, an example of a formal cause would be the idea of circularity discovered by Euclid: a circle, according to Euclid, is a series of coplanar points equidistant from the centre. This formal cause is arrived at as the answer to the questions: What makes this or that (image of circle) a circle? What is circularity? This emphasis upon cause as answer to question highlights an ‘intellectualist’ approach to cause, rather than the kind of naive realist or crude empiricist approaches evident in standard ‘Humean’ treatments, where the paradigm example is sensory experience of what is taken to be (or denied to be) the efficient causality ‘evident’ in billiard balls impacting upon one another. A consequence of this ‘intellectualist’ approach of Lonergan’s critical realism is that ‘cause’ can be better understood as revealed in our explanatory language. In that discourse we provide a ‘be-cause’ as an answer to various types of ‘Why?’ questions regarding data. Such answers include the identification of formal causes. Let us again recall that this metaphysical position is a working out of the implications of the basic position that ‘reality,’ ‘the real’ is that which is known by intelligent grasp and reasonable judgment (the denial of which we saw to be a self-destructive assertion). And the empiricist picture-thinking, which remains fixated upon images of things causing other things by sensibly experienced ‘bangs’ or ‘pushes and pulls,’ fails to rebut the sceptical denial of access to true causality in the world. Such scepticism is undermined, I maintain, only by the type of critical realism Lonergan defends. Description and Explanation The treatment of the issue of the shift from observer-dependent, descriptive predicates to identify things in the world to the explanatory predicates operative in scientific theory is part of a larger discussion for Lonergan concerning common-sense understanding and theoretical understanding – be that in science, philosophy, or the humanities such as history. It is not my purpose to reproduce that discussion here, but since the issue of ‘common sense vis-à-vis science’ is clearly at the centre of the arguments concerning natural kinds it is important to highlight a number of considerations that arise from Lonergan’s thought relevant to our topic. Thus, to relate the present section to the previous section, one can readily understand that in the attempt to arrive at the formal cause of some specified data, there will normally be required investigation that takes us beyond common-sense or nominal understanding of things in the

Natural Kinds: From Description to Explanation 157

world towards a horizon in which things are understood ‘among themselves,’ that is to say, in a way that is not simply or solely concerned with my interests concerning them or how I might use them. This is not to say, of course, that one should not acknowledge that in areas such as applied science the descriptive terms for things in everyday use can become modified in the light of scientific research and usage. One should be very much aware of the cultural role of science as an ‘authority’ in this way, particularly in our modern Western cultures. Lonergan points out the way this process of cultural linguistic feedback operates in modern cultures in a manner that is similar to, and continues, the feedback process between theoretical language in philosophy and the ordinary language of a culture, as can be seen in the case of Western culture from the time of Greek theory and literature.36 Lonergan is certainly an ally of those like the later Wittgenstein who repudiate the ‘reform of ordinary language’ philosophies, which emerged either from logical positivist understanding of science or from other metaphysical systems within the philosophical tradition. For Lonergan metaphysics emerges from cognitional theory and theory of knowing as the answer to the third question we noted before: ‘What am I knowing when I know the real?’ It aims at a basic semantics providing a meaning for terms. This may seem cognate with the aims of the Tractatus. But in terms of how metaphysics is situated, as regards other human intelligent and reasonable endeavours, and in terms of the differentiated nature of metaphysics (in Lonergan’s view) this is seen not to be the case. Metaphysics is not the whole of knowledge, but it is in a way the whole in knowledge; that is, it outlines the basic terms and relations to which true statements about reality refer (basic semantics). However, with regard to science we have seen that metaphysics in this view has a role to play even as recognizing that science is only on the way to a possible (perhaps never realized) final knowledge of empirical reality. Metaphysics thus accepts that many terms in science are only provisional and may not ‘refer’ in any final and clear way. It also, as we saw, can be said to integrate the results of common sense, insofar as common sense is a product of human intelligence and reasonableness and refers in judgments to reality. However, one should also recall that metaphysics is not without a critical role with regard to both science and common sense. Scientific theories and results may, as history teaches us, be tied up with metaphysical theories that are unsatisfactory, and ordinary language enshrines not only common sense but also common nonsense. Ordinary language, therefore, may express the biases of a group or its less than intelligent and reasonable attitudes. Furthermore, there does seem to be an inherent bias in common sense against the theoretical; one witnesses the insistent demand to show

158 Method in Metaphysics

of some hypothesis that ‘it’s useful for me’ before I will entertain its truth. This can be found side by side in a culture with the kind of deference to the authority of science, or to some other view taken to be a privileged theoretic account. In this way, then, Lonergan’s philosophy would certainly not rest content with the Wittgensteinian attitude that ordinary language is alright in itself. On the other hand, in this view, ordinary language as intelligent and reasonable is indispensable. Nor is it in some way replaced as ‘illusory’ as the march of science progresses. To understand this, and the relationship between common sense and science, we must advert to the intellectual operations, the intentional acts, that are present in human language and that ensure both the habitual routines of ordinary language use and, at once, the alterations both in the theoretical domains of human investigation and in ordinary language itself. Cognitional and evaluative structures are crucial operators in such continuity and change, while, of course, they are not the only ones. The whole thrust and momentum of ordinary life is in the arena of what Lonergan calls the ‘dramatic pattern of experience’ in which being with others is essential. Lonergan’s analysis of the affective, psychic and intersubjective factors at work in societal existence is, even in its earlier manifestations, something like his own version of Heidegger’s reflections, summed up in the latter’s phrase ‘man dwells poetically.’ If ordinary language is not only all ‘in order,’ but is indispensable insofar as it is the product of intelligent, reasonable, and responsible operations, then how is it related to science, which does seem to revise common-sense intuitions from time to time? Part of Lonergan’s answer is to point out that common sense is, or can be, equally attentive, intelligent, and reasonable in its domain as science may be in its own domain. In fact, science as a human endeavour of intelligence and reason grows out of common sense, and when common sense defers in its linguistic usage to new scientific theories, this may be expressive of the reasonableness of common sense. After all, it is the same person who, through his or her intelligence and reasonableness finds where the children have hidden the toothpaste in the morning who later in the day pursues scientific work in the laboratory, employing those same reasonable operations. When we say then that an ‘ordinary person’ makes a reasoned judgment about some state of affairs we do not say that they experience only ‘illusion,’ whereas the scientist in judgment knows reality. One thing that needs to be recognized is that the level of understanding and the level of judgment need to be distinguished. In understanding, I may use the terms and language within the horizon of ordinary discourse (not hermetically sealed off from science) in a different way than in the horizon

Natural Kinds: From Description to Explanation 159

of some science. Now, since, as Wittgenstein insists, meaning is relative to use, the terms, words of ordinary language, should be understood within the perspective of the ordinary concern for things as they are related to my life-world, unlike the explanatory terms that are gradually developed and revised as science continues the attempt to understand things as they are independent of my concerns. When I make the reasonable judgment, ‘My desk is in the new office,’ I use such ‘descriptive’ terms and the judgment is reasonable if the evidence is in, or I have correctly assessed the situation (perhaps I only glanced around the door and on closer inspection would have seen that the desk is not my old one, but a new one in a new office). To prolong the analysis in the direction of Eddington’s two tables, it would be wrong to say that my common-sense judgment (right or wrong) was ‘illusory’ compared to some other designation of the state of affairs employing Eddington’s scientific alternative to the description of the table as a solid, brown continuous object. On the contrary, the judgment I made employed descriptive terms and was reasonable if the conditions specified by those descriptive terms were de facto fulfilled. For those terms were what I meant by ‘table’ and the further reasonable operations I was engaged in were pursued to substantiate my idea that it was in the new office. Similarly, the scientific theories to which Eddington refers make use of other terms and those explanatory terms also need to be verified as so, or probably so, through similar reasonable operations aiming at a judgment. Further relationships between common-sense and scientific judgments can be outlined on the basis of such an analysis. Thus, common-sense descriptions are the ‘linguistic tweezers’ with which data are, as it were, held up for further scientific inspection. Fundamentally, Lonergan holds that scientific and common-sense judgments are not opposed but complementary. However, de facto we know that opposition between the two has been taken as read by not a few in the Western intellectual tradition over the last four hundred years. Lonergan sees this as stemming from two fundamental philosophical mistakes. One is on the side of common sense when, in its tendency to omnicompetence, it goes in for over ambitious generalization and analogy. It is a fundamental cognitional law (the source of a certain type of logical a priori, indeed) that ‘similars are to be understood similarly.’ The basic problem for generalization and induction, then, is not this analytic point, but the fact that further investigation is needed to find out whether case B is, in fact, to be understood in the same way as case A. Thus over hasty generalization can lead to descriptive predicates trying to do the work of explanatory ones, at least in the sense that the former are mistakenly thought to have a universality of being true independent of all observers. Thus, space rocket flight is thought not possible

160 Method in Metaphysics

before the event because ‘what goes up must come down.’ The differences between common sense and science are not to be had in some positivist account of the way science ‘looks at the pure data’ while common sense does not. Lonergan is as adamant as Wilfred Sellars in his criticism of a notion of ‘pure data.’ ‘Data’ is simply that about which we inquire, and once one has left the early months of infancy, has left the ‘world of immediacy,’ and has begun to enter the ‘world mediated by meaning,’ one comes at the data as something already prefigured by human concerns. Thus the difference between common sense and science is simply that science has different interests with regard to the data – it wishes to explain it. The key difference is, then, that science raises further questions concerning the data, which common sense does not raise. This is manifested in linguistic usage. The person of common sense has a set of concepts that define for him what, say, ‘dog’ means, and he is prepared to say roughly what counts as making something a dog. But, especially in a society in which there is a scientific authority, he will be prepared to defer to the expert if there is an insistence that the borders of definition in such cases be readjusted. On the other hand, there is the family of philosophies emergent from a naive realist, or representationalist epistemology, that move in the direction of a reductionist or materialist metaphysics in which scientific ‘models’ are thought to paint a picture of the really real. In this way all ‘models,’ even that of Eddington’s two tables, are seen to invite a modicum of deconstruction. From the truly explanatory viewpoint, as we shall outline this below, the ‘objects of physics,’ precisely as independent of all observers, do not ‘look like anything.’37 The quite general and far reaching implications of prescinding from all observers, when strictly applying such explanatory terms, are not often followed through, for they would seem, understandably, to lead to some form of idealism or Platonism. But if incoherent empiricism and representationalism are to be rooted out, not in the name of idealism but of a critical realism, then consistency is demanded. Such consistency entails, as Lonergan insists, the following: When there is no possibility of observation, there is no possibility of a verifiable image; for the imagined as imagined can be verified only when what is imagined also can be sensed. Accordingly, there are no verifiable images for subatomic elements. But if subatomic elements cannot be imagined, then atoms cannot be imagined, for one cannot imagine a whole as made up of non-imaginable parts. It follows that no thing itself, no thing as explained, can be imagined, if atoms cannot be imagined, then by parity of reasoning, molecules cannot be imagined. If molecules cannot be imagined, then neither

Natural Kinds: From Description to Explanation 161

can cells. If cells cannot be imagined, then neither can plants. Once one enters upon the way of explanation by relating things to one another, one has stepped outside the path that yields valid representative images. No doubt I can imagine the plant as seen, as related to my senses, as described. But if I apply the full principle of equivalence and prescind from all observers, then I also prescind from all observables. As the electron, so also the tree, in so far as it is considered as a thing itself, stands within a pattern of intelligible relations and offers no foothold for imagination. The difference between the tree and the electron is simply that the tree, besides being explained, also can be observed and described, while the electron, though it can be explained, cannot be directly observed and can be described adequately only in terms of observables that involve other things as well.38 It is the stringent application of such epistemological consistency that leads to Lonergan’s repeated warnings against extra-scientific myth making on the part of those who would popularize science by telling us what the reality discovered by science ‘looks like.’ And, of course this would imply that one handle very cautiously all parables such as that of Eddington’s ‘two tables’ (which was discussed above). In terms of metaphysics it is clear, given such a position, how Epicurean and Tractarian ‘atomism’ arise from picture-thinking about the imagined ‘small bits’ of reality, and inevitably philosophies of a reductionist type arise from such representationalist myths. It is no wonder then, as we have seen earlier in this book, that Lonergan writes of a ‘therapeutic moment’ (reminiscent of, but pointing in a quite different direction from, that advocated by the later Wittgenstein) in sorting out an ontological commitment and a hermeneutic stance with regard to the metaphysical tradition. The spontaneities of the human animal quite naturally tend towards the identification of the ‘real’ with the ‘seen,’ and much of the metaphysical tradition has been caught up with myths about imagined constituents of reality, atoms, and the like, which, if only our seeing apparatus were acute enough, we would be able to detect and verify. Indeed, it is this dialectic or tension concerning the ‘manifest image’ in science, and the role of predicates derived from descriptive or commonsense understanding, that has been centre stage in many of the confusions concerning science and ordinary language during the past four hundred years. These antinomies themselves, Lonergan believes, have to do in part with tensions within the Aristotelian position on metaphysics, science, and the role of ordinary predicates. All these elements play a role in Lonergan’s own attempt to differentiate his position from that of Aristotle by way of a hermeneutic of ‘retrieval and suspicion’ consequent upon his critical

162 Method in Metaphysics

realist epistemology. While it is precisely the Aristotelian and Thomist view that points us beyond the incompetence of metaphysical theories that spin out the implications of a picture-thinking epistemology, still the Aristotelian position, Lonergan believes, needs refinement in the direction of Aristotle’s own central thesis that scientific understanding is had through insight into sensible data. The scientifically verified then, must not be confused with the ‘obvious’ picture-thought datum. The Aristotelian predicates, according to Lonergan, are a result of such incomplete thinking through of the implications of the Aristotelian doctrine of understanding for science. On Lonergan’s view a comedy of errors ensued in the Renaissance as certain aspects of the Aristotelian heritage, which needed to be surpassed, were, in fact, invoked against other elements in the thought of the Stagirite in the process of withdrawal from peripatetic Aristotelianism.39 Thus, commenting upon the question as to whether the notion of a particular colour or taste should be included under the rubric of a ‘form’ grasped by the mind, Lonergan writes: Form is what is to be known by insight, but Aristotle considered what he named proper sensibles to be forms; such are colours, sounds, heat and cold, the wet and dry, the hard and soft, the heavy and light, etc. At least, they are extremely ambiguous forms: in the object they are sensible in potency; in sensation they are sensible in act; as named they are associated with any sufficiently similar quality through an insight that grasps how to employ the name; as object of inquiry, they enter into a heuristic structure that seeks what is to be known when they will be understood; finally, as explained, they are related to laws that implicitly define conjugate terms. Which of the five is Aristotle’s form, heat?40 We may observe here that this quotation also illustrates for us some of the features of Lonergan’s position we have been outlining. Thus there is a nominal, or ordinary language definition of a given phenomenon; there is a move towards determination of a natural kind via the heuristic anticipation operative in the scientific approach to the data; and there is the goal of that inquiry as an explanatory definition, in which the terms and relations specifying a formal cause of why the data is as it is will be arrived at. This formal cause will consist of a nest of implicitly defined terms and relations; it will be a structure of mutually defining intelligible scientific terms. However, the comedy of errors, which marks that important stage of the development of scientific method in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, arose as new scientific approaches and older peripatetic methods deployed strategies from Aristotle, while overlooking the fact that

Natural Kinds: From Description to Explanation 163

some of the key elements in Aristotelian epistemology would have served to point the way ahead. Thus Lonergan continues: It is easy enough to see how the ambiguities of Aristotle’s physical notions made a conflict with Renaissance science humanly inevitable. If the form of heat is what is to be known by understanding heat, then the Aristotelians were bound to approve of the scientists’ efforts to understand. In fact, there was a comedy of errors. The Aristotelians had little grasp of Aristotle’s doctrine of insight into imaginative representations and they had no notion of the heuristic structure that leads to insight. On the other hand, the scientists did not conceive explaining as knowing inasmuch as one is understanding; their thought was dominated by the notion of objectivity as extroversion [seeing what is there to be seen]; in this sense they denied the proper sensibles to be really ‘out there’; and they conceived explanation as the reduction of apparent qualities to the real dimensions of matter in motion.41 This ‘comedy’ left its mark upon the classic treatments of primary and secondary qualities in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophies. In this period philosophers of rationalist, empiricist, or idealist persuasion laboured to determine which were the primary qualities of an object, and which somehow caused or ‘suggested’ the object’s secondary qualities, these being experienced only in human subjectivity. Among the latter were considered to be the colour, odour, and taste of an object; among the former, candidates were an object’s extension, figure and hardness. This tradition of reflection continues to exert a powerful influence upon metaphysical discussions of such topics as natural kinds in current philosophy. An allied tension in Aristotelian philosophy that, no doubt, also contributed to these tensions in early modern scientific and philosophical thought had to do with the status of the differentiae or, accidents (Lonergan’s preferred term is, as we have seen, ‘conjugates’). It is sound Aristotelian doctrine that such differentiae have a ‘what,’ an intelligible form to them, which is to be grasped by insight.42 But given the ambiguities operative in early modern scientific and philosophical thought, one can appreciate that the emphasis upon the ‘primary and secondary qualities’ distinction tended to obscure this point, so that ‘differentiae’ or ‘secondary qualities’ were seen as mere appearance to be stripped away. The example of Wittgenstein’s artichoke comes to mind in this regard. Indeed Wittgenstein’s point, that in peeling away leaf after leaf of the plant one ends not with the ‘real’ ‘essential thing,’ but with nothing, was precisely a satirical comment on this legacy of early modern thought.43

164 Method in Metaphysics

As Quassim Cassam’s contribution to the natural-kinds debate makes clear, the Lockean notion of ‘real essence’ underlying appearance still dominates discussions in this area and can be seen at work in the Kripkean analysis of ‘real essence.’ An allied notion in such conceptual schemes is that of ‘substance.’ In the tradition of discussion stemming from early modern thought this is also seen as that which ‘lies under,’ ‘lies behind’ qualities or differentiae. All such metaphysical discussion is marred by epistemological biases that are representationalist, naive realist, and are therefore examples of metaphysics that is truly crippled as a metaphysics of ‘presencing.’ Ironic as it may seem, given the critique of his thought Lonergan offers, one should insist that in this area Hume be followed consistently. Causes are not seen, as Hume insists, and in the discussion of secret powers in the Enquiry44 we see this extends to (what we have identified as) formal causes as well as to the efficient causality illustrated by Hume’s billiard table. This returns us to the key hermeneutical issue that is found in the distinction between, on the one hand, a coherent critical realism and, on the other, the variety of positions that emerge from the polymorphism of human consciousness. What Hume criticizes in undermining empiricist epistemology, what Rorty denounces as the representationalism of the tradition, what Derrida unmasks as the incoherence of empiricism with the aid of Husserl is the manifestation of the confusion of the myth of knowing as seeing. And, negatively, what is wrong with their positions is that they know of no alternative that would provide the necessary maieutic to pinpoint just what kind of cognitional theory and implied metaphysics is at work in their critical deconstruction. But if critical realism is, as we have argued in this book, such a way forward beyond this impasse then this critical realism will be seen to follow through in a consistent manner on the valid criticisms of the incompetence of naive realism and empiricism that these thinkers so brilliantly deploy. The metaphysics developed from the ontological commitment involved in critical realism implies, then, that forms, or formal causes or natures, are real constituents of entities and constitute their natural kinds. But such a position is emphatic that these are not other ‘things’ that might be seen ‘behind’ or ‘under’ appearances. Kant continues the myth involved in the primary and secondary qualities distinction, and suggests that if only our senses were good enough we would see such ‘secret powers.’ But this is a misleading path to follow, although an understandable one given the ‘two realisms’ operative in human polymorphic consciousness. We do not expect that Euclid’s definition of circle or circularity (a series of copular points equidistant from the centre), which gives us the nature, ‘natural kind’ of circle, means something hidden ‘under’ or ‘in’ the data of drawn

Natural Kinds: From Description to Explanation 165

circles, something that we could get to ‘see’ was inside. Nor therefore should we think that this is so in any other case of a ‘nature,’ of an intelligible structure in the data. Such natural kinds are only successfully known with, at best, some degree of probability, given the inherent revisability of science. And the enormous historical labour of the sciences witnesses to this ongoing laborious, inferential endeavour, which moves from discerned differences in data to attempted explanations of such data – explanations that may include the discovery of ‘formal cause’ or ‘nature of.’ Continuity in science, which, as we have seen, involves a continuing role for descriptive, observer-relative judgments, is found in a history that involves attention to similar data. For instance, the data on ‘fire’ is described in a similar fashion but explained in different ways: at one stage of inquiry as one of the four elements, later as dephlogistonated air, and later still as a process of oxidization. The ‘nature of,’ the natural kind as explanatory, is the formal cause that is aimed at in these inquiries. A ‘natural kind,’ as specified in scientific inquiry can, therefore, best be understood as a ‘heuristic concept,’ that is, a concept which is analogous to some algebraic function, partially specified in identifying some properties of a given x, but awaiting further specification through the process of discovery. Critical realism is, then, for Lonergan the key factor in such discussions. To deny that knowledge of a ‘nature’ (‘formal cause’) is a matter of a more refined sensing of what lies ‘in’ or ‘under,’ does not lead to idealism or subjectivism. The illustration of the definition of circularity is not an oddity. Rather, it is a matter of cognitional fact that we know the real through experience, understanding of form, and reasonable judgment, a fact that, as I have argued at some length, is highlighted even in the attempt to deny that it is so, for the same cognitional operations are found to be operative in the denial of this being the case. Explanation: The Formal Cause as a Set of Internal Terms and Relations Lonergan distinguishes between nominal, explanatory, and implicit definitions, and in the latter case develops a number of points from David Hilbert’s work to his own ends. Returning to the example of a circle, the definition ‘plane round curve’ would suffice as a nominal definition insofar as it is a handy descriptive definition that captures some significant observable features of circles. Moving to an explanatory definition would be Euclid’s definition of circularity, which aims at answering the ‘What?’ or ‘Why?’ question; it aims at identifying a formal cause of circularity. Euclid’s definition of circle is ‘a series of coplanar points equidistant from the

166 Method in Metaphysics

centre.’ In this case one should note that one has in that answer, in that definition, a set or nest of terms and relations such as the terms ‘point’ and ‘line.’ Euclid’s insight into the formal cause of circularity is expressed by a number of terms, concepts, that are related in the definition and that are refined by way of ‘postulation.’ Thus the ‘point’ and ‘line’ cannot be imagined without magnitude, but if the circle is not to have a ‘bumpy’ circumference, intelligence must run ahead of imagination and postulate points and lines without magnitude. On Lonergan’s view, an explanatory definition is marked off from a nominal definition by the former including within it explanatory postulates – the latter having these added from without.45 To illustrate this he remarks that Euclid’s definition of circle includes within it the postulate, ‘All radii of the same circle are equal.’ However, in the case of Euclid’s definition of ‘straight line,’ as a line that lies evenly between its extremes, the definition has to be supplemented from without to become explanatory through postulating that ‘All right angles are equal.’ In general, the point is that the structures one wishes to identify in understanding the ‘formal cause’ are cases of relations between things, not as they are described by me or others in terms of colour, shape, and so on (such correlations can be made and are the basis for maps which coordinate different locations, for example); they are, rather, the explanatory relations of things one to another. One type of such explanatory structure, specified in terms of similarity of ‘things among themselves,’ is, as Lonergan writes, ... measurement. When Galileo made his measurements he came up with a series of measurements of distance with corresponding measurements of time, and he found a similarity in the law relating the distance and the time … Distance and time are related to one another by a certain proportion. When the distance is 1, the time is 2, when the distance is 2, the time is 4; and so on: s =gt2/2. If one prescinds from interference this relation is found in every instance, and the similarity exists in the relation of the aspects of the free fall. In other words all the relations of a free fall to us are forgotten. You forget about what happens when something freely falling hits you ... Just as in the case of the circle we related the equality of the radii and the appearance of roundness, so here we are relating distance and time. By a rather complex dealing with distance and time we arrive at something that is similar in every case of a free fall.46 A particular case of such explanatory definition is, in Lonergan’s position, the implicit definition as outlined in Hilbert’s Foundations of Geometry. In such a case, Lonergan argues, the postulational element is dispensed

Natural Kinds: From Description to Explanation 167

with and there is an independence from the original empirical imagery that gave rise to the definition such that the definitional structure is seen to be constructed from mutually conditioning terms and relations, that is, the meaning of the terms is fixed by the relations and that of the relations is fixed by the terms. For Hilbert a straight line is determined by two and only two points. Thus the meaning of ‘two points’ is settled by ‘line’ and that of ‘line’ by ‘two points.’ Lonergan writes, ‘Implicit definition ... is just the expression of the relational element, and it picks out what is of scientific significance ... To use explanatory definitions which presuppose nominal definitions is to tie down your science to what you were thinking about at the start.’47 We will return to this point below and illustrate it with the example of the explanatory definition supplied by the cognitional and evaluative structure of the self. However, Lonergan’s comments about science being tied to initial, nominal definitions alerts us to the fact that since science is only ‘on the way,’ we should not expect that at any particular stage of scientific development all nominal definitions will be completely dispensed with. As we have seen, this is fully appreciated in Lonergan’s differentiated account of metaphysics, which, on the one hand, attempts to delineate some of the general heuristic structures anticipated by science as aiming at completion and, on the other, acknowledges that science is concretely on the way to that goal and therefore the metaphysician will be confronted by a variety of data in science. In this way Lonergan acknowledges that the Aristotelian observer-relative predicates concerning quality and quantity have a ‘place’ in metaphysics, insofar as metaphysics reflects and attempts to integrate scientific results as an ongoing process, but this ‘place’ is acknowledged only with the proviso that such predicates are only descriptive and not explanatory. The generality in metaphysics of the notion of ‘a nest of terms and relations’ is evident from the way the mutually defining terms ‘potency,’ ‘form,’ and ‘act’ constitute such a matrix. It is perhaps worth noting in this regard that Lonergan attempts to explain Aquinas’s assertion that one of the metaphysical principles that is a priori in our knowing (which is per se nota) is that ‘the whole is greater than its parts.’ Lonergan observes that such a conception would appear to arise from a cluster of insights into parts and wholes such as are behind concepts in set theory. In an attenuated sense then, the sense of say geometrical theorems, one could talk of these as a priori but not as being a priori in the more fundamental way of the heuristic principles operative in human thinking that Lonergan attempts to identify and, he believes, to which Aquinas also adverted. However, in an alternative reading, Aquinas’s notion of ‘whole and part’ is such an a priori principle if, as Lonergan suggests, it is seen as operative in

168 Method in Metaphysics

our knowing insofar as that knowing of itself moves us from attention to data, through insight and conceptual grasp of form, to reasoned judgment with regard to the actuality of a reality.48 Thus, insofar as our inquiring anticipates realities known through experience, understanding, and judgment it anticipates them as composites of matter, form, and existential act. It is thus already consciously aware of a ‘whole’ that is more than any one of its metaphysical constituents. Earlier in this work I referred to Lonergan’s critique of a certain form of relativism, perhaps more precisely characterized as a coherentism, when outlining contrasts and comparisons between Lonergan and Derrida. It may be as well to return briefly to that issue here in the context of Lonergan’s treatment of scientific methodology with its heuristic anticipation of the understanding of ‘natures.’ If that aim is oriented towards the knowledge of ‘terms and relations’ constitutive of a formal cause, still Lonergan’s emphasis upon a dialogue between metaphysics and science recognizes the provisional, albeit progressive, nature of science and, therefore, views the terms and relations employed in present scientific understanding as revisable. Thus, as we have seen above, since science is on the way, one can distinguish between an heuristic goal, part of which is specified as the understanding of natures, on the one hand, and, on the other, present scientific terms and relations that may be in part descriptive, and even where explanatory may undergo revision. This is not the place to enter into a detailed analysis of Lonergan’s position on the philosophy of science, and indeed he would not claim that he is writing philosophy of science as such, but rather illustrating aspects of human understanding as these are found in scientific practice. However, in general, one can say that Lonergan’s view is that science is progressive insofar as theories are replaced by those that better explain the data, that is, explain it in a simpler or more economic way. There is also a lower limit to scientific progress set by the data to be explained. If no further data turn up or are identified, then the need for further explanations does not arise.49 The proviso of revisability is inherent in scientific practice and therefore the nest of terms and relations may undergo various forms of more or less radical modification. In this regard one can find Lonergan writing in a way that appears sympathetic to versions of scientific holism like that of Quine. So Lonergan writes: To reach the element of mere supposition that makes any system of mechanics subject to future revision, one must shift attention from single laws to the set of primitive terms and relations which the system employs in formulating all its laws. In other words, one has to distinguish between, say, mass as defined by correlations between masses and, on the other hand, mass as enjoying the position of an

Natural Kinds: From Description to Explanation 169

ultimate mechanical concept. Any future system of mechanics will have to satisfy the data that now are covered by the notion of mass. But it is not necessary that every future system of mechanics will have to satisfy the same data by employing our concept of mass. Further developments might lead to the introduction of a different set of ultimate concepts, to a consequent reformulation of all laws, and to a dethronement of the notion of mass from its present position.50 I have already examined some of the implications of these distinctions that result in Lonergan’s linguistic categories: analytical principles, provisional and non-provisional analytical propositions. As we have seen in this book, Lonergan, however, finds common ground with scientific holists, coherentists, and fallibilists only to part company with them in the area of epistemology and metaphysics, for the argument is that such fallibilism is itself an incoherent account of the underlying permanence on the basis of which what we know as intelligent and reasonable revision takes place. Thus, while interrelated terms and relations in science may be more or less probable, terms and relations specifying realities in cognitional theory and metaphysics may also be more or less probable, but some will be certain. The Self as Differentiated by Descriptive and Explanatory Terms and Relations It would be a fundamental mistake to think that Lonergan’s treatment of the ‘self’ was in terms of some disembodied, Cartesian Cogito. Equally mistaken would be the idea that the account of the person he does offer is that of an isolated a-social monad. As we have seen earlier, this strongly antiCartesian strand in his thinking (which entails a recognition in his own terms of the validity of much of the criticism of Cartesian introspection) does not preclude the development of a philosophical position that emerges from an analysis of those aspects of the self discovered and verified in cognitional theory. And we have seen how it is from this fundamentally non-revisable base that his position in metaphysics arises. It is that aspect, or feature of the self, then, known in the affirmation of cognitional structure, that provides the paradigm instance of a nature, a formal cause, which is constituted as a set of terms and relations. In self-affirmation one identifies an instance of such a metaphysical reality. In fact, the term ‘structure’ as applied to the self in this regard is another way of talking about this reality as constituted by mutually defining terms and relations. Furthermore, if, as Aristotle asserts, a nature is what constitutes a ‘principle of movement and of rest’ then one can say that the self identified in cognitional self-affirmation is just such a reality.51 Movement is had between the

170 Method in Metaphysics

experience of data giving rise to questions and the insights had with regard to those questions (if one is fortunate), which in turn give rise to further questions concerning the truth or falsity of those insights. ‘Rest’ is experienced as answer to question, albeit a rest only as a prelude to the next question to move one on in the quest for further knowledge. The self as ‘knower’ is, then, a reality constituted by a set of terms and relations and these terms and relations are explanatory, not merely descriptive or provisional, as are the natural kinds identified by present science. One can, in fact, say that it is in the affirmation of cognitional theory in one’s own experience that one sees the transition from descriptive predicates, terms and relations, to terms and relations that are implicitly explanatory. That the ‘natural kind’ which is the self (specified in at least some of its cognitive and evaluative capacities) is the point of transition from descriptive to explanatory terms and relations is explained by Lonergan in the following way. To begin with, one may note that in the history of philosophy we see, in the introspective analysis of Aristotle and Aquinas concerning mind, a mixture of, what may be termed, a metaphysics of the mind with an incipient phenomenology of the self.52 Lonergan’s own work can, in large measure, be characterized as the process of developing this incipient phenomenology so that one may move from the basis of a self-verified phenomenology of one’s conscious intellectual and evaluative capacities to a metaphysics specifying the semantic, metaphysical truth makers of the truth assertions validated in self-affirmation. This process is not independent of cultural and philosophical developments. Thus it is facilitated by a study of human understanding as this has developed in a particular (Western) culture in the areas of mathematics, science, and ordinary language; such is the path of investigation demonstrated in Lonergan’s Insight. The explicitly phenomenological path of modern thought further facilitates a move from descriptive, ordinary language predicates used to describe the activities of mind to a properly explanatory account. Indeed, it is both the usefulness of much modern phenomenology in this regard and the deficiencies of phenomenological approaches in not making the transition to a properly explanatory account (validated in self-affirmation) that are identified as key areas in Lonergan’s dialectical engagement with phenomenology, as we have seen. To make the transition from descriptive to explanatory terms and relations regarding the self, or better, to note that the predicates employed in cognitional and evaluative structure are both descriptive and explanatory, one can first ask the question, ‘Is this account that of a thing for us, or a thing independent of our descriptive account?’ Lonergan responds:

Natural Kinds: From Description to Explanation 171

There are ... two types of description and two types of explanation. If the inquirer starts from the data of sense, he begins by describing but goes on to explain. Again, if he starts from the data of consciousness, he begins by describing and goes on to explain. Still, there is an important difference between the two types of explaining. For explanation on the basis of sense can reduce the element of hypothesis to a minimum but it cannot eliminate it entirely. But explanation on the basis of consciousness can escape entirely the merely supposed, the merely postulated, the merely inferred.53 That this is so follows from the inherent revisability of science, on the one hand, and, on the other, the impossibility of revision of the basic terms and relations of cognitional structure. As we have argued at some length already, the very denial of these basic terms and relations only furnishes further evidence for the existence of these realities, and the reality that is the unified consciousness of the inquirer. The self so specified is, then, not only a thing as described but a thing as known to be so independent of descriptive predicates. Here, then, is a natural kind that is known definitely in some respects but which, of course, can be known further. The self as known in the self-affirmative verification of cognitional structure is, however, not only known as an independent thing, but is an instance of a natural kind or formal cause (explaining data and changes in data) exemplifying explanatory definition as implicit, that is, the terms and relations are mutually conditioning in meaning. Through the means of a phenomenological account of aspects of understanding and knowing as found in mathematics, science, and common sense one gradually arrives at a nest of terms and relations that are the interrelated conscious activities on the ‘levels’ of experience, understanding, judgment, and decision. However, when one has arrived at this nest of terms and relations what is crucial and decisive is whether or not one can verify these interrelated acts in one’s consciousness. That one can do so, and cannot avoid doing so (if one is arguing intelligently and reasonably) is, of course, the upshot of Lonergan’s arguments. The way that this mutually conditioning and defining set of terms and relations, specifying this natural kind, constitutes a definition as implicitly explanatory (and thus akin to Hilbert’s geometrical definitions) is brought out by Lonergan when he writes, illustrating the point by adverting to just some of the whole set of interrelated cognitional terms: What kind of definitions do we have of empirical presentations, inquiry, insight, and conception? First of all, we can define them by their internal relations. Empirical presentations are what are presup-

172 Method in Metaphysics

posed by inquiry, they are the material into which you have insights ... Similarly what is inquiry? It is what arises upon empirical presentations and leads on to insight and conception. Insight is what answers inquiry about empirical presentations and what grounds conception. Conception has its relations as well. It expresses the insight that satisfies the inquiry into empirical presentations. We have, then, a nest of terms insofar as you have no self-appropriation whatever, the four terms stand as do Hilbert’s points and lines in their implicit definition. There is a purely relational structure; the four terms are defined by their relations to one another, the way ‘point’ and ‘line’ are defined by Hilbert, and there is no material realisation that is relevant. Thus the four terms – empirical presentations, inquiry, insight, and conception – could have a whole series of quite different meanings so long as the definitions remain merely implicit, and the definitions have to remain merely implicit if you have no selfappropriation at all. But in the measure that you have some degree of self-appropriation, the four terms take on a meaning from your experience of yourself; and the greater the degree of self-appropriation you have, the more meaning the terms take on, and the fuller, the richer, the wider are the implications.54 Stochastic Laws and External Relations What may be termed ‘classical laws’ in science are exemplified by the scientific laws identified in Newtonian science. In a complementary way, the explanatory internal set of terms and relations constitutive of cognitional and evaluative structure constitute a natural kind which can be characterized (in accord with the metaphysical analysis we saw earlier) as central form, differentiated via conjugate forms; that is, the conscious, dynamic unity to be verified in my own experience of knowing and choosing is a central form (a unity, individual, ‘substance’) that is verified as such in a process that also involves the verification of the various acts of this conscious unity: acts of attending to data, raising questions, enjoying insights, making judgments, and the like. Such acts are conjugate forms verified as actually existing, or (to put it another way), occurring. However, modern science also points to knowledge of the world in terms of stochastic or statistical laws which complement classical laws. There are not only relations internal to a formal cause (the points and lines in the definition of circularity), and internal to the existing individual insofar as that individual is constituted as potency, form, and act, but there are also external relations between existents. A numerical ratio that answers questions concerning how often a thing occurs and how often it occurs in con-

Natural Kinds: From Description to Explanation 173

junction with other things is clearly an example of such external relations between things. While Aristotelian analysis of chance goes some way in explaining the temporal and local juxtapositions of things in the world, it needs to be complemented by the contribution of modern science, which indicates an intelligibility to be grasped in frequencies, numerical distributions, and aggregates.55 We have seen already something of Lonergan’s position on statistical emergence and probability, and on probabilities pertaining to schemes of recurrence as characteristic of the world process as this is understood in present science. In both the human and natural worlds we find such schemes of recurrence, which give rise to frequencies. Such frequencies are a type of formal cause explaining why such and such data are as they are. Thus when we ask, ‘Why is the data as it is?’ with regard to, say, a crowd at a football stadium, part of the answer will be in terms of explaining why there is this aggregate of individuals before us. As we pursue the analysis of the schemes of recurrence that constitute attendance at football matches, our investigations will naturally direct us to a whole web of interlinking schemes that have their own probabilities of emergence and survival. These will include cultural factors concerning interest in the sport, economic factors to do with the state of the economy that allows and encourages spending on such sports, patterns of leisure activities, and the like. In the natural world too we find aggregates of individuals occurring with a certain frequency, such that the divergence from the pattern is expected, but expected to be non-systematic. In fact, the planet we live on appears to be a web of such interlinking schemes of recurrence characterized by probabilities of their emergence, survival, and performance. The intelligibility grasped in such instances leads one to the acknowledgment that there is an intelligible significance to large numbers and long stretches of time, in which the likelihood of the given potential, which resides in individuals and in the combinations of individuals being realized, is increased. If self-knowledge is a paradigm instance in which can be identified explanation of the ‘classical type,’ which specifies a central form differentiated by conjugates, it is also a paradigm for statistical explanation, as we shall explore further. The cognitional acts of the three levels occur with statistical regularity. The acquisition of certain ‘habits’ or ‘skills’ in the intellectual or moral spheres increases the likelihood of various types of cognitional and evaluative act. Of internal and external relations in these two complementary types of explanation (classical and statistical), Lonergan writes: An explanatory account proceeds from insight; it consists basically of terms and relations with the terms fixing the relations and the relations fixing the terms; and clearly such relations are internal to

174 Method in Metaphysics

the terms. But while this is true of the systems reached by classical method, it is not the whole truth. Because classical systems are abstract, because they can be applied to the concrete only by appealing to a non-systematic manifold of further determination, there also are statistical method and statistical laws. It follows that classical method reveals the primary relativity without the secondary determinations of concrete relations, that it provides an abstract relations field, say, for the positions and momenta of masses, but it leaves to observation and, in the general case, to probabilities the determination of how many masses with what momenta are at what positions.56 Indeed, one can observe in the present context that, since the expression ‘natural kind’ is vague as to its extension, and since ‘kind’ suggests cognates such as ‘similar,’ it can be asked whether the notion of ‘natural kind’ does not extend to any instance in which our intelligence grasps similars in the natural world. In that case ‘kinds’ would refer not only to individuals of the same sort, but to schemes of recurrence and, indeed, to instances of genetic development (to be discussed in chapter 9). Thus a ‘solar system’ or a ‘planet’ would be instances of natural kinds, although as understood by current science these are not individuals as are dogs or trees or persons, but rather interlocking schemes of recurrence identified in the various sciences. Similarly, instances of development (the development of a solar system, or of a galaxy) would also qualify as ‘kinds,’ as would the groupings theoreticians of human history name ‘ideal types’ or ‘colligatory concepts.’ Such concepts are used to refer to similar or analogous events or movements in history such as ‘revolutions,’ ‘renaissance,’ or ‘cultural assimilation.’ With this outline of Lonergan’s approach to the question of ‘natural kinds’ in mind, we now return to a dialectal engagement with the positions outlined above. The Natural-Kinds Debate: A Critical Realist Assessment In the light of the analysis I have presented, we can see immediately that Quassim Cassam’s characterization of a nature as something ‘behind’ what is presented in sensation is an unacceptable expression of empiricist metaphysical notions. Cassam quite rightly lambastes such a ludicrous idea, which is no straw man construction on his part, for it does represent an idea of ‘nature’ as ‘secret power’ that is dominant in the Lockean tradition. As was pointed out above, the definition of circularity in Euclidean geometry is an identification of an intelligible structure in the data – the identification of a formal cause. But to suppose it is therefore ‘hidden behind’ the picture of the circle that we see as another secret picture is

Natural Kinds: From Description to Explanation 175

clearly nonsense. And it is therefore equally nonsensical to think of any of the formal causes, natures of things, that science may discover as ‘concealed pictures,’ pictures ‘hidden behind’ the data. Putnam and Kripke appear to be influenced by this Lockean empiricism in the formulation of their accounts of real essences identifiable across possible worlds. However, it can be said that their essentialist logic has an element of truth to it insofar as it characterizes science as a completed process. But their modal logic is not adequate as a tool in characterizing the results of science in its present state as an ongoing, intrinsically revisable process, in which at any one time we may be warranted in saying that this account of such-and-such a natural kind is the best scientific explanation we can come up with, and is, therefore, probably true of reality. The oversight in Kripkean essentialism here seems evident when Kripke writes, ‘Statements representing scientific discoveries about what this stuff is are not contingent truths but necessary truths in the strictest possible sense.’57 However, Cassam’s reaction to this view is equally unacceptable. He writes, ‘Once such considerations are acknowledged, it is not obvious that talk of essences, real or otherwise, retains any point.’58 Cassam’s argument is certainly not sufficient to prove the far-reaching conclusions he puts forward. These include these claims: a) we have no arguments to show that science does aim at knowledge of essences; b) we have no grounds for saying that our science is rationally preferable as an account of the constituents of the world to some non-scientific myths of another culture. Whatever one thinks of the merits of such a view, one will acknowledge that such positions require no little argument to sustain them. However, it has to be said that Cassam fails in his article to provide such arguments. In Putnam’s twin-earth argument the view is advanced that ‘meanings are not in the head.’ This is held to be so because when people on planet A use the word ‘water’ they mean by it something different from that meant by people on planet B, using the same word and pointing to similar looking stuff. The crux of the debate is, of course, centred on the term ‘mean.’ On Lonergan’s view one would have first to distinguish, in this case, between the descriptive predicates of common sense and the explanatory predicates sought by science, recognizing, as we have done above, that the latter can influence the former in terms of linguistic use because of the cultural position of science as an ‘authority.’ With the Wittgensteinians, then, one should insist upon the ‘meaning as use’ criteria of ordinary language terms. As Lonergan expresses the matter, in ordinary language the average person knows what he or she is prepared to call a ‘dog’ and what they are not. Thus, ‘water’ is for the ordinary language users on both planet A and planet B, what looks and feels like ‘this stuff.’ No doubt they would be prepared to revise usage somewhat (their cultures

176 Method in Metaphysics

being like our own) if scientific work showing that some ‘stuff’ that appeared like other ‘stuff’ was in fact different in nature (according to the best but defeasable theory). But one should resolve Putnam’s ‘paradox’ here by saying that meaning is, in some sense, ‘in the head,’ insofar as on both planets the meaning of the term ‘water’ is an expression of insight into sensible similarities as similar, and as picked out as such by descriptive predicates indicated by the word ‘water.’ Then one can go on to point out that, on further investigation, it turns out that the different planetary inhabitants are, when using identical descriptive terms (meant in the same way), indicating different natural kinds. The apparent conundrum in this instance is no different from that which might be thought to arise when reflecting upon continuity in meaning and change in meaning in the development of science, and the resolution is the same in each case. Thus, we can say that ‘phlogiston’ means something different from ‘oxygen,’ so there is a change in meaning in this case of scientific revision. But if there is change in meaning it may be asked where the continuity in meaning required for intelligible development is to be found? The continuity is provided by the similar data to be understood, data identified by similar descriptive predicates meant the same way, and by the heuristic aim of the scientific inquiry that demonstrates identity of meaning through the questions asked with regard to the ‘What?’, the nature or formal cause of this data. We must also be careful not to insert any false ‘reality/illusion’ dichotomy into the account. One might be tempted to say that the twin earthers think they mean the same stuff, but in ‘reality’ the stuff described by both cultures as ‘water’ is different. The confusion here, as elsewhere in the debate, is in part due to a conflation of terms that belong, now to the perspective of common sense, now to that of science. In disambiguating some of the confusions one should say that, while scientific theories do attempt to know the reality of things themselves, and the theories of science may be deemed more or less probable accounts of such realities, this does not entail that the descriptive predicates are somehow ‘unreal.’ There is sometimes a bias in common sense (which can on occasion be healthy) against the world of theory and this may lead some to confront a scientific theory in the name of common sense and its predicates. Thus, if one were to deny that the earth circles the sun on the basis of quotidian experience it could be argued that one’s position is false. But in this instance common sense is really playing science. However, if one remained with the somewhat open-ended attitude of common sense (which knows what it is prepared to call an instance of ‘x’ and what it is not until convinced otherwise) one need not be faced with the choice ‘commonsense description: true or false?’ Furthermore, as pointed out above, the

Natural Kinds: From Description to Explanation 177

common-sense description is as much a matter of reasonable judgment as is the scientific description. It is really so that this x looks green to me now. Common sense differentiates between data in an intelligent and reasonable way, so that judgments about what is near to me or far way, and the like, can be correct or mistaken. I can be wrong or right in such cases. The shadow looked like a man but turned out to be a tree. Finally, from an explanatory viewpoint, one can say that the twin earthers are correct in noting the similarity between water(a) and water(b) because, although these cases turn out on investigation to be different, they do result in some way in similar effects. On the other hand, given the metaphysical position argued for in this book, there is certainly a sense in which Putnam is right. If meanings are in one sense ‘in the head,’ in another they are in the realities as constitutive of them. Meaning is another term for intelligibility, and it has been argued that the ‘real’ is the intelligible and reasonable, and that one cannot deny the same without incoherence. Indeed, this isomorphism between knowing and the known, between that which is meant in intelligent understanding and reasonable judgment and the referent as the ‘meant,’ is that which Putnam seems to hint at in his thesis concerning the ‘knowability of the world.’ As we have observed before, scientific statements concerning the genera and species found in reality are provisional analytic propositions, given the inherent revisability of science. Therefore, the ‘necessity’ relevant to such statements regarding sortal characteristics of things cannot be more than the necessity of identity: if x is a y, then, necessarily x is a y. However, on the position argued in this book there are also analytical propositions that are not provisional, for they are based upon the facts known to be the case with regard to cognitional and evaluative structure, and the metaphysical theorems that may be derived from these. So with regard to some aspects of human constitution one can, for instance, say, ‘I do make judgments’ without adding the conditional proviso. Therefore I can say definitely that I am a knower, and this escapes the condition of revisability placed on probable scientific judgments. I am, undeniably, a knower; therefore there is a ‘necessity of constitution’ known to me in this case, not known in the many cases of scientific theory. It should be noted, however, that an element of conditional necessity of course remains: I, a knower, am a contingent entity, not a necessary one.59 David Wiggins is not to be faulted for his belief that there are such sortal categories and that there are higher sortal categories. What renders his position ambiguous and open to criticism is the way he allies an Aristotelian approach to these issues with a mitigated essentialism along the lines of that sketched by Kripke and Putnam. Strawson’s criticisms are jus-

178 Method in Metaphysics

tified. However, what is not justified is the extension of such criticism to all arguments concerning the validity of natural-kinds talk, or talk of essences. A more general level of abstraction, can be arrived at through investigation of concrete realities such as Toby the dog and persons like Caesar, and this is indicated by use of the indefinite article in ‘a man,’ ‘a dog.’ In such cases we can say that, if the natures of these things are definitely known then other things significantly similar will be the same. The necessity in such cases, then, derives from the cognitional law, which, as we have seen, grounds the possibility of induction and generalization but puts severe limits upon their concrete application – the analytic law that ‘similars are similarly understood.’ So there is a necessity of identity and there is a necessity deriving from the law of similars. But it is unfortunate that Wiggins’s account implies that the highest sortal predicate is characterized by a particular kind of necessity in the way he suggests. Clearly, according to the law of identity all constituents and accidental acts of an historical figure like Caesar are necessary. It is also clear that we can intelligibly say that at a particular time in his life it was not necessary for Caesar to do x, y, or z, the contingent acts that he later did perform. The performance of these contingent acts was at time t1 not necessary for the continued existence of Caesar the man. But (as we shall see in a later chapter) higher explanatory genera and species refer not to the totality of acts performed by individuals, but to all the ‘necessities of constitution’ of an individual that ground the acts of the individual. Thus, to speak in Aristotelian terms, it is equally necessary for Caesar to be an animal as it is for him to be rational if that is how a human being is constituted.60 Natural Kinds: Their Ontological Status Lonergan’s analysis would also incline one to be sympathetic towards Meyer’s critical evaluation of Wilkerson. At the same time it would incline one to agree with Wilkerson’s preference for the notion of ‘kind’ as that which science works towards discovering. For ‘kind’ can be taken as an heuristic notion rather than as the somewhat abstracted trans-world category of the Kripkean essentialists, whose statements seem to imply that science has reached its end in complete and definite knowledge of the world. Meyer is right to question Wilkerson’s exclusion from natural kinds of such phenomena as meteorological events and things such as galaxies. On Lonergan’s position one would make such an objection more precise by pointing out that science comes to know the world not simply by knowing ‘unities’ (characterized by the terms and relations of a formal cause), but by knowing the causally significant interaction of such unities, or ‘things’

Natural Kinds: From Description to Explanation 179

(or substances), in ‘schemes of recurrence.’ Such schemes, for which we may come to assign probabilities of emergence and decline, are ‘ecologies’ that play their role in the emergence of further fresh ecologies. So, beginning with the identification of similarities in data which may be noticed in common-sense terms, the various sciences may go on to discover causally significant processes of this kind. For example, the identification of such a phenomenon as a hurricane, or ‘twister,’ in common-sense terms is in science the basis for studying such data, and science appears to confirm the common-sense conviction that such things as twisters are similar in explanatory terms. Thus, what may have appeared as ‘one thing’ may turn out to be an aggregate of things, the aggregation of which may or may not turn out to have scientific significance. That is to say, such-and-such aggregation may be a chance aggregation in the strict sense, rather than an aggregation that is the product of some statistically probable conjunction, made probable by the coming together of causal factors in some process that is found to be repeated in the natural world. Stones and planets are not unities in the same way as are dogs and persons, so science informs us. Yet the common-sense observation that notes the similarities in the data and thus gives such common names as ‘stone’ and ‘planet’ does identify, it turns out, similarities that have a common explanatory kind – that kind having to do with regularly occurring aggregates that are products of the coming together of smaller elements. The objections brought against the idea of ‘natural kind’ as an explanatory notion by Meyer and Putnam (in debate with Haldane) have to do more with fundamental epistemological issues. As such these positions need to be assessed from the viewpoint of the position on cognition and epistemology argued for earlier in this work. To be brief, one may note that all such attempts to deny the possibility of genuine metaphysical knowledge, on the basis of arguments that have to do with the ‘human interests’ ‘perspectival’ nature of human inquiry (Putnam), or the historically relativized notion of culture-bound explanation (Meyer), while containing evident elements of truth, also involve their objectors in positions which are, to some extent, self-destructive and thus false.61 While it is not stated without ambiguity, C.B. Martin’s insistence that there are some objects that are observer dependent and others that are not serves, like a number of contributions to the debate, to alert us to the fact that any simplistic distinction between ‘for us’ and ‘in itself’ as an opposition between the ‘illusory’ and the ‘true’ will not do. Martin writes, ‘Dictionaries are conceiver-dependent entities. So are flags and bank accounts. But rocks and H2O are not. Views are explicitly conceiver-dependent and landscapes are inherently conceiver-dependant but mountains and lakes are not.’62 As we have insisted above, Loner-

180 Method in Metaphysics

gan’s distinction between science as concerned with ‘things among themselves’ and ordinary language description as with ‘things for us’ is a rejection of such a dichotomy. Ordinary language as the expression of attentiveness to data, the use of intelligence and reason concerning that data, arrives at true and probable conclusions as does, hopefully, science. The concerns are different however, for science is concerned to continue asking ‘What?’ and ‘Why?’ questions beyond those deemed useful for here and now common-sense practice. And so along the lines suggested by Aristotle’s distinction between the knowledge of causes had by the doctor, and that had by the ordinary man, one will say that ordinary people have some reason to think that x is the cause of y if y ceases every time x is removed; yet such knowledge is not developed further by seeking reasons for this intelligible relationship of dependency. However, the distinction between observer-dependency and the ‘thingsamong-themselves’ is not handled with sufficient precision by the contributors to the debate whose views we have described. In Martin’s case, for instance, the contrast between flags and dictionaries as observer-dependent and mountains as not is not free from ambiguity since the flags of nations and artefacts like dictionaries, while dependent as causal products upon human beings, are more akin to things like mountains and lakes when compared and contrasted with the kind of perspectival illusion one finds in a mirage. The temptation towards a reductionist metaphysics is, of course, another way to urge the illusion/reality dichotomy and we have seen this identified and resisted in Dummett’s critique of Ayer. Knowing Natural Kinds Dummett’s contribution is characterized by the subtlety with which he delineates linguistic and epistemological distinctions. Again, his insistence on the way ordinary language itself makes reasoned distinctions between what appears and what is so (a city in the distance is small, close up it is much bigger) is to the point. As was emphasised above, inquiry begins from data and differences identified among data, and such a process begins from the observations of common sense. Common sense may be reasonable or unreasonable (and then, let us note, it is common nonsense!). Through the varied observations of persons in a community it is established that while an ant is such and such a size it is not true that a town of human inhabitants is the same size as the ant, although it looks to be so from a certain distance. Of course judgments concerning size can be revisable. We see such revision in the case of new estimations concerning sizes of planets and distances in the night sky made after the invention of

Natural Kinds: From Description to Explanation 181

the telescope in 1609. When we say that common-sense judgments identify differences in data, and that this is the basis for further scientific inquiry that seeks to explain such differences, this is also the case with regard to the ‘equipment’ of the human observers themselves. Thus intelligent and reasonable judgments made in the common-sense pattern of thinking distinguish on the basis of evidence between different types of appearance such as mirages, hallucinations, and dreams. That common-sense judgments can be intelligent and reasonable assessments and reassessments of the data in this way is important to note. Scientific inquiry itself is just the extension of such intelligent and reasonable operations into a horizon of specialization that is characterized by asking further questions about the data – questions with which common sense is not preoccupied. Dummett’s insistence that the transition from the common-sense perspective to that of science is not a matter of a move from ‘illusion’ to ‘reality,’ in terms of the ‘primary and secondary qualities’ distinction, such as is implied by the reductionist philosophy of Ayer and others, is welcome. However, while Dummett provides compelling arguments regarding the distinction to be made, he does not go on to specify what is involved in the scientific attempt to explain ‘things among themselves.’ This is so, I believe, because of a general weakness in Dummett’s philosophy, a weakness in some way acknowledged by Dummett himself in his admission, in works such as The Logical Basis of Metaphysics, that he has not succeeded in carrying through his own philosophical program. While from the perspective of the present work Dummett’s identification of the need to move back behind the systems of modern logic to their base in the propositional attitudes of ordinary language users is completely laudable, Dummett admits that the phenomena that one meets in doing so appear so intractable as to render any definite conclusions difficult to obtain.63 Lonergan, however, draws upon and develops a tradition that attempts to analyse a discreet number of such conscious activities, such as those involved in cognitional and evaluative structure. And while, as we have seen, such a position invites further refinement, it argues for some definite results, results testified to in the very process of argumentation for or against the position itself. As such Lonergan’s analysis offers a way of understanding the dynamics of the transition from common-sense to scientific understanding, and the progress or revision within science that is not seen in Dummett’s work. I turn, finally, to an assessment of Jessica Brown’s lengthy and detailed contribution to the natural-kinds debate. Brown’s criticisms of Kripke and Putnam, which focus upon their inability to meet the problems of reference to ‘higher level’ natural kinds and compositions of natural kinds, are well taken. Her appreciation of the fact that reference to kinds within a

182 Method in Metaphysics

common-sense context needs to be differentiated wholesale from reference to kinds in a scientific context is cognate with the position argued here. However, it is in some of the moves she makes to obviate difficulties in the account of the transition from one type of reference to another that weaknesses emerge in her epistemological and metaphysical positions. As we saw above, to the question of how language users might be able to distinguish Putnam’s ‘Earth Water,’ which shares appearances but not underlying structures, from ‘TEarth Water,’ Brown answers that it is reasonable to hold that people do make genuine acts of recognition on the basis of appearances. However problems begin, I believe, when she writes: ‘In order to have a cognitional capacity for silver, a subject needs to have not only a certain discriminatory ability, but also an appreciation of the metaphysical nature of natural kinds. In particular, she needs to appreciate that whether an item is of some particular natural kind is determined by its fundamental properties.’64 Although one should acknowledge that common-sense intelligent discrimination between kinds of data is often more fine-grained than is sometimes portrayed, Brown’s claim seems to propose criteria that are far too demanding. It is difficult to believe that pre-scientific communities meet such criteria of discrimination or that even modern communities do so. But the worry she inherits from Putnam, while rejecting his solution, is that if we do not follow this path an unacceptable ambiguity will enter into our account of what it is language users are referring to when they refer via natural kind terms. In order to meet quite obvious objections arising from the way natural kind terms are revised as mistaken, as science or inquiry develops, Brown deploys a number of interrelated arguments. First, she claims it is possible to be confident of recognizing an x even if one cannot distinguish it from all other cases that appear the same, but are, in fact, different in underlying structure, for we can recognize in such an immediate way the ‘kinds’ that are our human neighbours and relatives. The basic paradigm she adopts is the capacity persons have for recognizing relatives and neighbours, or other persons familiar to them via ‘appearances.’ This point can help illuminate the twin-earth water question if we acknowledge that persons recognize both family members and natural kind samples, like ‘water,’ in the same way. Against the objector who continues to insist upon the possibility of mistakes in these cases, Brown responds with a ‘locality’ criterion: people identify relatives and samples of natural kinds with a background criterion of ‘locality’ involved. That means that I may not be able to distinguish this sample of water from any other possible lookalike, nor my own mother from any other possible duplicate, but it is reasonable for me to say I recognize both. She further backs up this point with an epistemological argument, or rather, an epistemological statement of princi-

Natural Kinds: From Description to Explanation 183

ple, since her treatment is too brief to constitute an argument for such a position. She writes: ‘An event of recognition is an event in which knowledge is acquired: one acquires the knowledge that the item or kind one is currently encountering is the same as the item or kind previously encountered. In general, I suggest that it cannot be a necessary condition for a subject to have knowledge in some area that she be infallible in that area. If this were a necessary condition, then none of us would have any knowledge at all.’65 One notes that the ‘locality’ criterion of recognition, on this view, is meant to enter into a referential identification of a kind in such a way as to specify, for example, ‘Ruby as it looks around here.’ However, ‘locality’ appears to be a very vague and indefinite matter. How does a community limit and define the locality? How do such limits enter into a recognitional capacity as an intrinsic factor? Is this true of the way communities tend to define reference to kinds? One would rather think it the case that, as the history of human exploration of this planet shows, human beings travelling to parts of the world distant from their own have tended to assume that locality was irrelevant in determining the reference of such terms as ‘water,’ ‘gold’ or ‘ruby’; spontaneously they tend to take it that sameness is had in terms of sensible qualities. Furthermore, one does not have to turn to sci-fi stories of human bodies taken over by aliens to challenge the idea of epistemological certainty in cases where one claims to recognize a human person and rule out that this person is not some duplicate and not a lookalike. I am sure there are others like myself who can recall the successful practical jokes played at school by pairs of identical twins. Of course, one will say that eventually in such cases one could sort out who was who. But if one adheres strictly to the terms of Brown’s epistemological dictum it is difficult to reconcile the ‘certainty’ the teacher had, on his first day in the new job, that he was talking to Paul with the fact that he was mistaken, for he was talking to Paul’s twin brother, Mark. The epistemological position Brown uses to bolster the stand she takes on natural kind identification, then, cannot withstand criticism that arises on the basis of the obvious examples of mistakes and revisions occurring in common-sense judgments, and in the revision that goes on in science or other cognitive disciplines. To recall the epistemological position already argued for in this book, one would distinguish between definitive judgments which are those had in cognitional theory (and the theorems that arise from it) and the myriad of no less reasonable judgments in science and common sense that are, however, revisable but still probable. Some indeed, one may argue, are far more probable and well substantiated than others. However, given such a position one would have to recognize that very often when we say we ‘know’ something it would be more accurate to

184 Method in Metaphysics

say that ‘we have good reason to say that ...’ or ‘it is probably the case that.’ That we do not use such ponderous linguistic substitutes for ‘know’ is quite understandable. But given the common human experience of error it cannot be claimed that epistemologically more accurate expressions are an unwarranted revision of ordinary language. In ordinary language it would be odd for someone to report a change in view, after the discovery of a mistake, by saying, ‘Yesterday I knew that x, but today I know that not x.’ Rather, ordinary usage in some way testifies to the epistemological point I made above, for it is more normal to find language users reporting, something like, ‘Yesterday I thought I knew that x, but I was wrong.’ It should be noted, finally, that in a footnote Brown herself indicates the limitations of her own recognitional capacity account. She says that her account could be extended to cases of scientifically specified natural kinds but adds that in some cases in scientific theory natural kinds may be introduced on theoretical grounds ‘though no instances of the kind have been encountered’;66 and, she adds, in such cases her account would not apply. One is left a little bemused by this admission, and one wonders whether Brown grasps the dramatic nature of the wholesale shift from ‘things for us’ to ‘things among themselves’ that many thinkers in the field would acknowledge as characterizing the move from ordinary language to scientific use of natural kind terms. What then is to be made of the conundrum Putnam leaves us in his twinearth thought experiment, given the position outlined in the central section of this chapter? The conundrum is, fundamentally, as follows: the earthers and the twin earthers both experience a substance that looks, tastes, and feels alike, which they both call ‘water.’ But, in fact, from a scientific viewpoint the ‘water’ on Earth is different from the ‘water’ on twin earth. Thus the paradox – the language users on both planets mean, refer to, something different when they say ‘water,’ yet point to similar-looking substances. It is important, first of all, to recall that, as was pointed out in the last chapter, ambiguity surrounds words like ‘mean,’ ‘refer,’ and ‘intend,’ all of which can be used almost interchangeably. As was argued before, one needs a richer account of these terms and the ways they arise from the intelligent and reasonable operations of cognitional structure. So, one can ‘mean,’ ‘intend,’ ‘refer’ to some x in an act of instrumental or ostensive meaning, which highlights or pinpoints some data for some purpose; one can mean, intend, refer to an insight, or idea, or theory concerning that data; finally one can mean, intend, refer to a reality known in judgment. The Putnam paradox seems to be that both planetary groups are and are not referring to the same stuff, for they use the same word to express an identification on the basis of similar sensible qualities yet are thereby

Natural Kinds: From Description to Explanation 185

referring to, pointing to, ‘stuffs’ that, in reality, are different. The ambiguity is removed, however, once one keeps in view what has been said above about the interrelationship between language use in common sense, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, scientific understanding. In using ‘water’ as a word that expresses insight into the connection between a word and data differentiated in terms of descriptive, ‘for-us,’ predicates (conjugates), both groups do mean the same stuff. They mean any stuff to be differentiated by such-and-such sensible qualities. That in so doing they are referring to, indicating, stuff that will turn out, upon further investigation, to be different kinds of stuff, as differentiated via explanatory predicates (conjugates) presents no problem, for they (both groups) mean by water ‘whatever looks like such and such.’ That both H2O and, on twin earth, ZK9 ‘look like such-and-such’ is true. What the further explanation is of the appearance and qualities of the two substances may or may not interest them. Conflicts only arise if one group or the other were to deny in some obscurantist way that the further move to explanatory differentiation was licit. In short, both groups are referring to the same stuff insofar as sameness on the basis of sensibles enters into the meaning of the terms used; they are referring to different stuff, pointing to data explained differently, from the perspective of science. It is probably because, as Dummett and others do well to point out, common sense is already accustomed to the intelligent and reasonable work of distinguishing between ‘appearance’ and ‘reality’ in more everyday cases, that human beings find no insurmountable difficulty in moving to a scientific viewpoint characterized by the distinction between Aristotle’s ‘first for us’ and the ‘first in itself.’67 That they find it easy to give a very clear and coherent account of this shift, the shift from immediacy to a world mediated by meaning (as Lonergan expresses it) is not so evident, as the history of recent debates on natural kinds makes plain. Natural and ‘Artificial’ Kinds Before leaving the subject of ‘natural kinds’ it is important to complete a critical evaluation of recent work in this area by turning to the issue of ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ kinds. The distinction between natural kinds as ‘forms’ or ‘kinds’ discovered in nature, on the one hand, and as humandependent constructs, on the other, enters into recent writing on the natural-kinds debates. So, as we have seen above, Putnam attempts to dismiss notions such as ‘substance’ by pointing to untidy examples in the case of human artefacts: is my bed-side lamp a ‘substance’ or not? Haldane responds by arguing that within the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition there

186 Method in Metaphysics

are distinctions that enable one to deal with apparently recalcitrant cases, and one needs to distinguish between observer-dependent and nonobserver-dependent phenomena. Martin, in the course of his resolute defence of the ontological status of natural kinds, claims that while things like flags, dictionaries, and landscape perspectives are human-dependent, mountains and lakes are not. However, some of the discussions in this area appear to blur distinctions in a rather unhelpful way. Thus, it is surely important to acknowledge the different ways in which the experience of a mirage, say, is human-dependent and the way a book or a flag is human-dependent. One would want to say that human artefacts like flags and books are realities independent of the human observer in a way in which the contents of a mirage-experience are not. As was observed at the beginning of this chapter, the language of debate sometimes seems to prefigure and anticipate conclusions. ‘Natural’ in ‘natural kind’ seems to be a term weighted in favour of a distinction between ‘natural’ as opposed to humanly constructed. And an epistemological debate concerning the status of the ‘kinds’ human beings discover in nature (in one view) or impose upon nature (in another) appears to lead contributors to the debate into an over-hasty identification of true ‘natural kinds’ as those realities not invented or manufactured by human beings, but which, unlike the latter, are ‘truly there.’ Yet, one can certainly reject the subjectivist account of ‘imposition’ while at the same time insisting that the products of human artifice and culture are just as ‘real’ as any other natural kinds. To take Martin’s example of a flag, one can certainly offer a different response. In order to answer the question, ‘Why are these pieces of coloured material arranged in such-and-such a way?’ one can point out that the answer is the identification of a formal cause: the ‘flag’ is the idea expressed in such an arrangement. Michael Losonsky has examined in some detail recent contributions to this question. He begins his article by noting that in book II of the Physics, Aristotle attempts to distinguish natural objects from artefacts.68 He writes that in natural objects the internal ‘source of change and remaining unchanged’ (the principle of movement and of rest) belongs ‘primordially and of itself, that is, not by virtue of concurrence.’ At 192b 15–20 Aristotle goes on to maintain that a bed or a coat has no innate tendency to change, though as made of some matter it has potential to do so (a bed can collapse). Leibniz continues in this tradition, maintaining that ‘artificial machines are not true substantive entities’ with unifying principles of activity that determine their development but mere collections or aggregates of substances. And among modern defenders of the tradition Wiggins maintains: ‘There are virtually no law-like sentences to be had about particular

Natural Kinds: From Description to Explanation 187

utensil, implement or tool kinds as ... such ... Although artefacts are ... subject to [nature’s] laws, they are not collected or classified as this or that artefact by virtue of resemblances or of any scientific or nomological import.’69 Therefore, he holds that a clock is not a natural kind; its essence is nominal, not real. When considering the problem of identity for artefacts he asserts: ‘There is no such thing as the natural development of a watch or a natural law concerning watches as such.’70 Wiggins’s treatment here is part of his criticism of Putnam’s account of reference. Putnam suggests that a natural kind term refers to a set of objects that have the same nature as the object to which reference was fixed initially by ostension or some causal connection. And this holds for artefacts as well. However, Wiggins holds that artefacts belong to nominal kinds because they do not share a common, hidden nature. In support of this view one might say that if a scientist got hold of a chair and started to examine it we would think him mad.71 One could respond to this, on the other hand, by pointing out that different things are examined via different methods.72 Losonsky grants this point but still wants to defend Wiggins’s position that ‘the function of an artefact is not fine-grained enough and structured enough to have any kind of scientific or nomological import.’73 Losonsky, therefore, while allowing that a pencil has a function, holds that one should add that ‘there is nothing underlying about these features. They are ... not discovered by scientific investigation.’74 And Losonsky continues: ‘A clock’s nature is to keep time and a chair’s nature is to be sat on, but these aren’t real hidden natures that we must discover and that underlie some of the interesting changes these artefacts undergo, in the way we discovered water’s nature to be made up of two hydrogens and one oxygen, and are that nature to explain the properties water has.’75 Losonsky accepts that internal structure, purpose, and manner of use belong to nature or to artefacts. However, as a defender of Wiggins he will not accept Descartes’ and Robert Boyle’s contention that an artefact like a clock has a real nature, not just a nominal one. As a concluding argument in favour of his position, Losonsky points out that the fact that scientists take any stable oscillation phenomenon to be a ‘clock’ indicates that artefacts such as clocks only have a nominal, not a real, nature.76 It will be no surprise, given the space devoted in this work to criticism of naive realist and representationalist epistemology, if the assertions above of Losonsky and Wiggins concerning the scientific task of ‘getting at hidden’ entities and natures are greeted with deep suspicion. On the other hand, the view that objects, even when not subjected to scientific scrutiny, may still provide data for diverse forms of human research and inquiry appears to have its strengths. While a chair is not something we would

188 Method in Metaphysics

expect a physicist to investigate the nature of, only a form of dubious reductionism would take it that ‘chairs’ cannot be the objects of other types of human inquiry. Such inquiry occurs, for example, among historians of furniture and art historians, and among social scientists investigating the causes of the distribution of various types of human artefact. Although there are some significant differences between the methods employed in, say, biology and chemistry, on the one hand, and archaeology and anthropology, on the other, there is a fundamental similarity of method insofar as all such disciplines are cases of intelligent and reasonable inquiry concerning data. Indeed, in the case of archaeology and anthropology one may well be confronted by data the nature of which are hidden: the artefact unearthed may be incomplete, or the presumed religious or cultural monument may have imagery or inscriptions upon it that are quite mysterious in meaning. In such cases, no less than in the case of physics or other physical sciences, the nature of the object is discovered, if at all, as a result of careful attention to the data, creative thinking up of hypotheses to account for the data, and reasonable evaluation of such hypotheses with regard to available data and background knowledge. Attempting to mark off natural kinds as discovered by, say, physics, from non-natural human artefacts in terms of ‘hidden’ or ‘non-hidden’ natures is, then, a non-starter. What of Losonsky’s insistence that since all manner of natural phenomena may be taken as having the ‘nature’ of clock the notion of ‘clock nature’ is only nominal? One can certainly grant the point that all manner of systems may be ‘used’ by human beings as ‘clocks’: the interrelations between the stars and planets in this solar system were indeed used for millennia by human beings as their timekeeping devices.77 But to grant all this is no different from granting that, as well as constructing houses, igloos and palaces, human beings may also take advantage of caves as dwelling places. To acknowledge that fact still leaves us with questions as to why there are objects like Buckingham Palace or Windsor Castle. In fact, as Aristotle indicates, it is the ‘way of the question’ that we should follow here. As we indicated above concerning the formal cause of a flag, it is questions concerning why the data are as they are that point us in the direction of identifying ‘causes’ (and among them formal causes) as providing explanatory insight into the data. In discovering such causes as the formal cause of the data, we identify not nominal natures but real natures. Aristotle provides us with the example of the question, ‘What is a house?’ (Metaphysics, VII, 17, 1041a 9ff), and, as Lonergan emphasises, Aristotle explains that the questions arise as questions of the form: ‘Why are these bricks, wood, mortar, arranged as they are?’ What one is seeking is the scientific explanation for the patterning of the data.78 And the answer

Natural Kinds: From Description to Explanation 189

is the formal cause ‘house,’ as meaning a dwelling place for human beings who have such-and-such needs. One can then extend this line of reflection a little further. If one is confronted by data that are cave entrances in a cliff face one can likewise raise and answer the question of the formal cause specifying why the data are as they are. The answer will be in terms of some geological explanation concerning the formation of rocks in this way. The answer concerning the ‘Why?’ of the data on Buckingham Palace or Windsor Castle will be different. In these cases the causal explanation will be in terms of human design, effort, and so forth. Even if the caves become occupied by human beings, the formal cause will not change. There will be a modification of the answer given to the question if the question itself begins to take into account furnishings inside the cave and, perhaps, the making of holes as windows in the side of the cave. One will then have to provide a differentiated answer in terms of both geology and human intentions and work. What of familiar cases where human beings use things for purposes for which those things were not initially intended, such as hammers as backscratchers and chairs as book case supports? Such cases can become increasingly complex and, at the limit, one will be talking about items that are simply building materials for the construction of larger wholes. But in most cases one will still be able to identify the ‘what’ of some data, its intelligible structuring, as due to a formal cause that emerges from the intention of the originator or originators of the artefact, whatever the subsequent histories of the artefacts may be. Mummified dead animals may now simply be supports for a rickety table in the Old Curiosity shop, but they still have an explanation, as regards what they are, different from that to be assigned to normal wooden table legs. Ultimately talk of ‘kinds’ expresses the cognitional principle that ‘similars are understood similarly’ – an a priori operative in our thinking. Therefore any intelligent and reasonable estimation that one has identified cases of intelligible similarity in the data provides grounds for saying that one has identified a ‘kind.’ Whether this is in the case of the natural sciences or in social sciences and the study of history, the case is the same. Therefore instances of the cooperation of human institutions, and the human expressions that are artefacts and constructions of human origin may be truly cases of such ‘kinds.’ Although the ontological analysis of such constructions needs to be handled with care, the ideal-types or ‘colligatory’ concepts of historians (which indicate similarities in historical patterns of events) may be granted the status of ‘kinds’ in this way. For the zoologist the cooperations in the dynamics of the herd or group of animals are essential in understanding animal species, their development and flourishing. Such ‘kinds’ are the aggregates of individuals and their coopera-

190 Method in Metaphysics

tions that, as we have seen, may be cases of ‘schemes of recurrence.’ The cooperation among individuals may be understood in terms of statistical estimations of the probability of the emergence and decline of such schemes. Although human constructions and institutions are expressions of intelligence, reason, and value in a way animal cooperations are not, still the analogy in understanding is there. Human expressions and human institutions will be cases of such schemes of recurrence having an explanatory status. An allied issue concerns the ontological status of human artefacts. Clearly, cases of human social institutions may be more readily analysed as aggregates of individuals whose cooperation is explanatorily significant, and may be the subject of a causal analysis that highlights statistical probabilities in the coming together of conditioning, causal factors. However, it may be asked whether human artefacts such as clocks, cars, and shirts are individuals or are, rather, aggregates of individuals. Paul Kidder has very helpfully raised this question regarding the implications of Lonergan’s metaphysics for the issue.79 We have seen that Lonergan uses the term ‘thing’ as equivalent to the traditional expression ‘substance’ and understands the notion of ‘thing’ as a ‘unity-identity-whole’ grasped by intelligence in the data understood as individual. Furthermore, such a ‘one’ or ‘unity’ would be a ‘central form’ (in traditional terms ‘substantial form’), which remains throughout the changes the individual undergoes, such changes being acts, or occurrences, whose ‘conjugate forms’ are intelligibly related to central form. Clearly, such ‘unities’ are exemplified in human persons, trees, dogs, atoms, and the like. Kidder shows that Lonergan does not treat the question as to the status of human artefacts directly, but by reading between the lines of Lonergan’s analyses, so to speak, he concludes that Lonergan’s metaphysics would indicate that such artefacts are instances of ‘unities,’ ‘things’ – things that are one by their central form. I would agree with Kidder, but would also point to a number of texts in Lonergan to which he does not refer but which, I believe, make the case for Kidder’s conclusion stronger. Thus, as was noted above, in a fairly early work Lonergan draws attention to Aristotle’s example of a ‘house,’ a human artefact, as illustrating a ‘formal cause,’ the unity that underlies and explains why such and such materials are as they are.80 In a later essay he writes of the ‘functional unity’ that is seen in a watch,81 and in a 1964 essay he writes of the unity of structure that is seen in the functional unity of a car engine, using this case of structural unity as an analogical case illustrative of some aspects of the dynamic, structural unity of human cognitional structure itself.82 We may recall here Lonergan’s analysis of a ‘logic of scientific discovery’

Natural Kinds: From Description to Explanation 191

that anticipates the discovery of ‘higher things,’ of ‘unities’ not in terms of a naive realist ‘looking for container bodies,’ but in terms of intelligent and reasonable assessment of the data. This may result in the conclusion that the occurrences that from a certain (lower) perspective cannot be accounted for in their systematic regularity by the operation of things of a ‘lower genus,’ and this provides evidence for the affirmation that some thing of a ‘higher genus’ is operative.83 Of course this heuristic approach is complemented by the case of self-knowing, in which the verification is direct with regard to conscious operations and is, therefore, not a probable, inferential affair. If we take this approach, then, we can readily admit that functional unities such as car engines and clocks, or even ‘static’ phenomena like ‘houses,’ account for the systematic regularity detected in such-and-such data. For the regularity of certain acts or states is not to be explained in its statistical regularity merely in terms of aggregates of individuals of a lower ‘genus,’ but by the operation of the formal cause that is the unity, the ‘thing.’ Thus the flag is explained in terms of the formal cause of why such and such data are seen as they are. Clearly, one will differentiate ‘static’ unities from dynamic and organic unities, as Lonergan does in his 1964 essay ‘Cognitional Structure.’84 All can be unities, but some will show a dynamism, and in the case of animals, for instance, one will observe a ‘self-assembling’ unity, as the one thing ‘moves itself to act.’ Could machines constructed by human beings replicate such self-movement? Aristotle, as Losonsky quotes him above, remarked on the absence of the self-movement of the organic in machines, and Lonergan notes such a difference in his 1964 essay, commenting upon the mechanical and the organic. However, it might be suggested that such comments are descriptive of the present state of affairs rather than in any way metaphysically prescriptive. In the Intentional Stance and other works Daniel Dennett takes on the challenge of those who would mark off the human from the mechanical in a traditional Aristotelian way. He argues that it is not too difficult, given present technology, in which computerized machines self-regulate in a complex way, to imagine a not-too-distant future in which the mechanical will replicate the self-moving, self-assembling processes of the organic.85 The divergence of the present work from the positions espoused by Dennett is, I think, conspicuous. The significant place afforded to our conscious mental acts, in the present view, is at the opposite end of the spectrum from Dennett’s philosophical stance. However, ultimately that which is distinctive of the human is not, on my view, that which it shares with the organic as opposed to the mechanical. Therefore, while I would agree with much of what John Searle has to say in his arguments with the proponents of strong artificial intelligence, I would differ from him in this regard. It

192 Method in Metaphysics

would take me too far from the discussions of this book to outline and argue the case presented by Lonergan and others that human knowing and choosing manifest aspects that cannot be reduced to phenomena accounted for by a materialist metaphysics, but suffice it to say that I think it is along those lines that the significant argument concerning what is distinctively human is to be developed. I would not, therefore, deny the possibility of what Dennett argues for – that one could foresee the day when machines, human artefacts, replicate the self-assembling and regenerative operations of the organic. What, then, of the question of the distinction between ‘natural kinds’ as referring to the ‘things’ (or statistically significant schemes in nature), on the one hand, and the ‘things’ or unities that are human artefacts (and schemes of recurrence that are human institutions) and cultural and historical creations, on the other? The answer is in some sense rather obvious. I would say that the only distinction may be that the former do not have as their cause human intelligence and choice, whereas the latter are to be explained in terms of the final causes originating from human intelligent and value-motivated operations.86

Recto Running Head 193

7 Universals, Tropes, Substance, and Events

In an earlier chapter we saw Alex Oliver’s bold statement of confidence in the renaissance of metaphysics underway in many quarters in analytical philosophy. However, emphasis was also placed upon Oliver’s insistence that such a renewed interest in metaphysical questions on the part of philosophers in the analytical tradition is taking place in a context that pushes to the foreground the fundamental methodological questions concerning the possibility and scope of metaphysics. Such methodological concerns must be present in the mind of the analytical metaphysician if he would justify such a revival of interest in the face of the opposition of the not inconsiderable number of philosophers who defend the anti-metaphysical tradition, which stretches back through the Enlightenment to the late Middle Ages, and whose modern representatives include such luminaries as Wittgenstein. As in the past, so in the present, it is the host of disputed questions among metaphysicians that engenders not a little scepticism concerning its very possibility. The contemporary metaphysician may, with some justification, reply to his philosophical opponent that such apparently interminable disputes, concerning claim and metaphysical counterclaim, imply that metaphysics is in no better or worse position than any other department of philosophy. And the disputes in the philosophy of science render the enlightenment hope that the march of science would expunge the obnubilation of metaphysical myth making an item in the museum of philosophy. However, from the perspective of this book, which follows Lonergan’s insistence on the importance of a method in metaphysics, Oliver’s emphasis on the methodological issues that need to be resolved before particular issues can be dealt with in an entirely satisfactory way is seen to be correct and, in a sense, intellectually responsible;

194 Method in Metaphysics

a proliferation of metaphysically ‘disputed questions’ is no more welcome now than it was in the later Middle Ages when it occasioned the ‘antiintellectualist’ strand in the cultural movement we call the Renaissance. On the other hand, a method cannot be developed nor can it be put through its paces without a discussion of content. And both Oliver in his essay and Lonergan in his outline of an approach to metaphysics get down to details and disputed issues. Such detail, when invoked by Oliver in the essay we have been referring to, is, for the most part, used to identify the areas of dispute in contemporary metaphysical debate, which perhaps point to the need of prior methodological groundwork. In this chapter I will examine a number of these disputed issues, and I will offer some considerations, based upon Lonergan’s approach, which, I think, may serve to move us beyond some of the situations of stalemate that obtain in analytical metaphysical debate. Oliver’s treatment of current debates concerning universals, tropes, and possible world semantics is a very helpful one, and I will begin by following his outline of some of the key issues that divide the principal protagonists in the literature of analytical metaphysics on these matters. Universals Oliver begins his survey of current positions with David Armstrong’s antinominalist position on universals. Armstrong argues for what he takes to be an Aristotelian notion of real universals as providing the semantics of our language, which refers to similarities among things. On this view, there is truly an ontological entity that is the universal ‘cabbage’ and it is instantiated in numerous instances. However, Oliver draws attention to some problems with such Aristotelian universals and identifies some queer features concerning the location of these universals. He writes that the idea leads to paradoxical conclusions: ‘i) One universal can be wholly present at different places at the same time and ii) two universals can occupy the same place at the same time.’1 The point of the second objection is that, according to Armstrong’s theory, an individual cabbage not only instantiates the universal ‘cabbage,’ but at the same time instantiates the universal ‘vegetable.’ Further, Armstrong’s position entails what Oliver calls ‘bundling operations’ for particular universals and these give rise to problems. Thus one could say that a particular is the set of its universals. But this will not do, since particulars are concrete while sets are abstract. A problem also arises in connection with the principle of the identity of indiscernibles, for if different particulars share the same universal, how are those particulars deemed to be different? Armstrong responds to such questions by saying that the ‘thick particular’ is the bundle of universals, shared with other particulars, whereas the

Universals, Tropes, Substance, and Events 195

‘thin particular’ is that ‘part,’ or ‘element’ that differentiates one particular from another. In addition Armstrong suggests that space-time points may be such thin particulars. For Armstrong there are a) instantiated universals, b) particulars, and c) states of affairs; and there are first order and second order universals that enter into the constitution of particulars and states of affairs respectively. Oliver notes that Armstrong’s more recent view is that the universals constitutive of states of affairs are ‘in’ space-time as helping to constitute space-time.2 And in this regard Oliver makes a critical observation pointing up an ambiguity in Armstrong’s view, insofar as he holds both that space-time is a conjunction of states of affairs and that some states of affairs have space-time points as constituents. Finally, in grasping the essential contours of Armstrong’s position it should be noted that he sees the discovery of what universals there are as the task of science. There are, therefore, no universals known a priori, and accordingly such notions as self-identity cannot be classed as universals.3 David Lewis expresses Armstrong’s position succinctly. ‘There are the universals that there must be to ground the objective resemblances and the causal powers of things, and there is no reason to believe in any more.’4 Oliver puts forward a number of further objections to Armstrong’s universals. On Armstrong’s view, predicates that refer essentially to a particular do not correspond to a universal. On the other hand, Oliver observes, for Armstrong p is a property if and only if many things can have p.5 Questions concerning the nature of reference to the particular arise, therefore, if such reference cannot refer to any property as such. Moreover, it follows that for Armstrong relational qualities such as ‘being the wisest of all men’ and ‘revolving around the sun’ are not universals. Another odd or counterintuitive aspect to his position, Oliver argues, is that while Armstrong acknowledges supervenient properties he maintains that they do not add anything to the world. If such instances of similarity in the world, such as relational similarities and supervenient qualities that are similar, can be ruled out from the category of universal in this fashion, Oliver argues that Armstrong cannot avoid the charge that his invocation and application of the notion of universal to explain similarity is merely arbitrary. Besides grounding similarity Armstrong also argues that universals ground, are truth makers for, talk of particulars manifesting causal powers. This requirement rules out negative and disjunctive universals since these are not manifestations of causal powers. According to Oliver, additional questions arise for Armstrong’s ‘Aristotelianism’ concerning the possibility of unique cases (how is the universal found in a unique case ‘non-universal’?), and with regard to the status of ‘instantiation’ itself. If universals are said to be ‘instantiated,’ do we not have a problem of regression with regard to the ‘universal’ of ‘instantiation’ itself? However, Oliver himself

196 Method in Metaphysics

attempts to answer this latter point by agreeing with Armstrong that such a case of regression would only arise if one were to make the category mistake of taking ‘instantiation’ in the wrong way; one simply has to deny that it is to be subjected to the same type of analysis as are the universals themselves. If Armstrong’s analysis of universals, as providing the semantic resources required for our linguistic ability to refer to similars and entities with causal powers, is not entirely satisfactory, as Oliver has argued, then it may be worth considering another contender in the philosophical debate – the theory of tropes. Oliver, therefore, turns his attention to this alternative. Tropes Unlike Armstrong’s universals, tropes are said to be ontologically different. Thus the trope ‘red’ in the case of two red books is ontologically distinct in each case. It is also the case that tropes of relation are permitted. Theories of tropes seem for the most part to be bound up with the theory of mereology, which gained ground among some analytical philosophers from the 1940s on. On this view particulars are mereological wholes made up of diverse tropes, and linguistically this is expressed via the dyadic predicate, ‘... is compresent with ...’ The difference, then, between this view and Armstrong’s ‘Aristotelianism’ is that, ‘one trope cannot be wholly present in more than one place at the same time.’6 However, Oliver expresses dissatisfaction with both universals and trope theories insofar as neither theory can cope with questions concerning the decidability of composition issues, which are crucial for questions of semantic reference. He believes that both theories tend to focus on the smaller constituents of things, but then the question arises about reference to larger wholes such as tables and chairs. How does use of tropes and universals decide correct reference to ‘whole properties’ and part ‘properties’? Principally because of this difficulty, but also because of unresolved issues concerning the perdurance of supposed properties through time, Oliver believes one must turn to David Lewis’s semantic theory as one that has more to recommend it. Lewis on Properties According to David Lewis, a property is a ‘set of actual or possible particulars.’ Such sets are not restricted by Armstrong’s criteria for universals, which require them to account only for similarities of those things deemed to have causal powers. The sets also regard relations. A further distinction central to Lewis’s position is the one between degrees in the ‘naturalness

Universals, Tropes, Substance, and Events 197

of properties’; a natural property is illustrated by phenomena such as the charge and mass of electronic particles; not ‘as natural’ as the former would be such phenomena as colours. This distinction is to counter Quine’s ontological minimalism that argues for a reduction of apparent to real entities in accord with the requirements of mathematics, logic and an empirically validated natural science. Thus, according to Quine, speaking as if some things are red is a façon de parler, and we would do away with such property talk once we moved on to speak from the scientific perspective (using Quine’s canonical notation). It is perhaps worth noting Oliver’s charge of inconsistency against Quine regarding such reductionism. Quine’s minimalism reduces properties to sets in the name of the reductive slogan ‘No entity without identity.’ On Quine’s view the standard way of indicating the identity of properties has been via modal notions such as ‘necessary equivalence’ or ‘meaning,’ which bring in their train analyticity and synonymy – notions purportedly deconstructed in Quine’s celebrated 1952 ‘Two Dogmas’ essay. However, Oliver protests that Quine’s ‘darling’ natural science is ‘up to its eyeballs’ in modal notions because of its use of disposition, causation and law concepts. A somewhat strange consequence of Lewis’s position is that what he calls ‘perfectly’ natural properties must be those found in all possible worlds, and therefore the laws of science as positing only what is contingently so of this world, cannot reveal to us such ‘perfectly natural properties.’ Lewis’s attempts to work out the semantic criteria for deciding what will count as a perfectly natural property, on the one hand, and varying degrees of naturalness, on the other, are fraught with problems and have come in for severe criticism. Of course, for a number of critics Lewis’s entire endeavour, which rests upon the theory of ‘real possible worlds,’ is unacceptable, and to such objections I will return. But, even if one were to grant Lewis’s overall theoretical strategy, other difficulties remain. For instance, Oliver observes, ‘For most of the time Lewis describes his perfectly natural properties as those which physics aims to discover.’7 But then this is obviously inconsistent with Lewis’s claim that such property perfection is only found freed from the contingency inherent in the physics of our particular world. If one turns from Oliver’s critical assessment of Lewis to Lewis’s article ‘New Work for a Theory of Universals,’ one gains a clearer picture of the way basic methodological issues enter the debate over properties and universals, and of the way these issues divide contributors to the debate like Lewis and Armstrong. In the essay Lewis highlights Armstrong’s starting point in the traditional question of the ‘one and the many’: how are there many that share the one nature, that are one in similarity? Lewis considers that, at the very least, Armstrong’s invocation of universals does not

198 Method in Metaphysics

provide a rich enough semantic resource to cope with a number of linguistic categories. Affirmations of disjunction like ‘golden or wooden,’ states of relativity like ‘owned by John,’ or ‘first examined before ad 2000,’ and notions such as ‘being identical,’ or ‘being alike in some respect,’ are, as we have seen, not covered by Armstrong’s universals. They are, however, included in Lewis’s properties as sets of possibilia. Lewis, however, is not unwilling to make concessions to the intuitive strengths of Armstrong’s account. He admits that sameness is a ‘Moorean fact,’ and that Armstrong’s realist approach via universals might account for at least some of the cases of sameness. But, returning to the methodological issue, Lewis asks whether sameness might not be equally well accounted for on nominalist premises. The nominalist just takes sameness as a fundamental fact and refuses to ‘explain’ this in terms of universals. How can one show that the nominalist is wrong to do so? Lewis is unconvinced by Armstrong’s repeated affirmation that there is to be no unanalysed predication. Lewis asks, ‘Why cannot we accept some predication as primitive and basic?’ The question, for Lewis, is how to overcome this impasse of clashing intuitions. The relational properties to which Armstrong’s account does insufficient justice may be ontologically decisive, Lewis maintains. If one imagines a series of ‘photocopied’ individuals all the same it will be their spatiotemporal arrangements of difference, their interrelations, that will be decisive for discerning difference. In ‘Against Structural Universals’ Lewis again poses the methodological question with regard to Armstrong’s account. Are universals, he asks, as Armstrong defines them, necessary to do the semantic work required? Why not just opt for a brute nominalism to account for the Moorean fact of similarity? Lewis further criticizes Armstrong for being unclear on the epistemological underpinnings of his position, for Armstrong maintains that the universals are ‘abstracted’ from particulars but, Lewis insists, he does not explain how this occurs.8 Another major problem for universals is that of composition, according to Lewis. If we take the mereological approach and say that ‘things’ are composites of instantiated universals, and we hold that a universal is ‘one,’ are we not faced with the dilemma of saying that two different things are composed of exactly the same parts?9 Lewis argues that his own position, which posits real possible worlds, is superior to that of either Armstrong or of those who use the semantic resources of ersatz possible worlds.10 Neither the ersatz possible world theorists nor Armstrong can handle structural or relational universals in as satisfactory a way as he is able to; that is, they cannot provide an ‘eliminative analysis of modality.’11 Neither view, therefore, can analyse in a satisfactory way universals not found in our world such as, ‘what it is to be a

Universals, Tropes, Substance, and Events 199

talking donkey,’ or ‘a turtle which supports the earth.’ On Lewis’s position, then, the answer to the question, ‘To what do I refer when I talk of such possibilities?’ is ‘I refer to entities and states of affairs in real worlds other than the one I inhabit.’ Below I will critically examine the epistemological basis of Lewis’s own rather exotic position on ‘real possible worlds,’ but, in passing, we may note some rather question-begging moves on Lewis’s part that have a methodological import. Thus, on the one hand, while he admits the cogency and even usefulness of some of Armstrong’s analyses, he counters Armstrong’s position by saying that the notion of universals, which are ‘one’ and yet are instantiated many times in particulars, is ‘magical’ and can be refused on the basis of a stubborn nominalism that simply asserts that the Moorean fact of similarity needs no further analysis. However, does not Lewis’s own ‘stubbornness’ and ‘emotive’ charge of magic levelled against Armstrong’s position invite a tu quoque response? Thus, why not charge Lewis with being stubborn in refusing to offer anything more than an ‘eliminative analysis of modality’ in terms of real possible worlds? Are ‘real possible worlds’ any less ‘magical’ than real unified universals? The methodological issue is, therefore, once again seen to be fundamental. Without some way of deciding the issue, it seems there is no alternative to a circular argument in which one witnesses assertion and rebuttal of conflicting intuitions. It is the merit of Oliver’s article to point to this impasse in the discussions occurring in the new wave of Anglo-American metaphysical thinking. Possible-Worlds Semantics In chapter 5 I offered a critical analysis of recent uses made of possible worlds in modal theories and semantics. In this section it will be useful to examine further some of the general characteristics of possible world theories, given that I have drawn attention to David Lewis’s application of possible world semantics to the discussion of properties. I will then proceed to offer some criticisms of Lewis’s basic strategy from the perspective of the methodological position for which I have argued in this book. William Lycan provides a useful overview of some of the characteristics of recent work in possible-worlds semantics.12 He points out that the idea of illuminating the semantics for modal logic via possible worlds is based upon the theory that possibility may be elucidated as that which has truth at some possible world, whereas necessity is that which is true in all possible worlds. Some philosophers add further refinements to the possibleworlds model by introducing notions such as nomic necessity (worlds have scientific laws like our world) and legal necessity (worlds have civic and

200 Method in Metaphysics

legal principles like our own). Possible-worlds theories attempt to elucidate diverse linguistic and metaphysical notions using as models conditional sentences, propositional attitudes, fictional discourse, universals, and counterfactual truths. There is also a history to be narrated of the concern with possible world issues in analytical philosophy. Both Russell and, later, Quine worried about the idea of the thing that does not exist. For his part, Russell was stimulated in such concerns through acquaintance with the luxurious growth in Meinong’s ‘jungle.’ In 1905 Russell posed the question to himself, ‘Does the existent round square exist?’ And perhaps it is not surprising that he admitted to having gone through a brief period in which he thought the ontological argument for God’s existence might be valid. Quine’s worries on this score are manifest in his asking for identity and individuation conditions for possibilia: ‘When do we have one possible elephant and when twenty, or a thousand?’13 Lycan observes that given the existential quantifier in standard logic, Meinong’s thought gave rise to a ‘contradiction problem,’ insofar as he invited quantification over (reference to) non-existent individuals. The question was, then, how can one assert ‘there is that which is not’? More recent work in modal semantics and metaphysics attempts to tackle these questions and to offer solutions. Turning from the history of possible-worlds theorizing in Anglo-American philosophy Lycan comes to some recent protagonists in the debate. Lycan notes that in Sameness and Substance David Wiggins opts for a problematic ‘hyper-realism’ that postulates the existence of non-actual entities. However, it is Lewis’s position with which Lycan is predominantly concerned. How does Lewis argue for a demarcation between our world and other possible worlds, which he takes to be equally real, equally ‘actual’? He does so, according to Lycan, through an epistemological-linguistic argument that takes ‘actual’ to be a locative, indexical, or demonstrative expression, akin to ‘here’ or ‘on this planet.’14 Spatio-temporal criteria, then, determine who is a worldmate of whom. Thus the Wife of Bath is not my worldmate but David Lewis was. To handle the modal element in the proposition ‘I might have become a chemist,’ Lewis argues that we should say that I am referring to an actual individual who is my counterpart in another possible world. With regard to the Meinongian question of impossible worlds, the ersatz possible world theorist (who holds these worlds to be non-actual) takes a possible world as a set of propositions, and so an impossible world is a set with some contradictions in it. Lewis’s reaction is simply to deny impossible worlds. In reaction to ersatz possible world theories Lewis urges the methodological point, which we noted above, that none of these theories known to him escapes the problem that arises from leaving modal notions as primitive and unexplained.

Universals, Tropes, Substance, and Events 201

Lycan concludes his discussion of possible-worlds semantics by assembling some of the critical reactions in the literature to Lewis and adding some critical points of his own.15 Some of Lewis’s critics attack his denial of impossible worlds as leaving without hope of analysis contradictions to be found in the contradictory beliefs of different individuals, and in such conditional statements as, ‘if there were round squares ...’ Others have concentrated on what, for more than a few, would appear to be the counterintuitive notion at the basis of Lewis’s semantics that there are ‘actual possible worlds.’ And Plantinga has neatly expressed such concerns by noting that, were we to find such other possible existent worlds, no one would take them as being other species of modality, but rather regard them as part of the real, actual world. Finally, Lycan makes the point that Lewis’s semantics of modality is based on actuality. That is, in analysing reference to ‘a talking donkey’ Lewis explains the modality of possibility by saying that we are referring to one individual who instantiates the properties. But Lycan maintains that it is debatable whether such moves really give us insight into the possible as opposed to the actual.16 Ersatz possible world theorists agree with Lewis that to overcome the weaknesses in such positions as that of Armstrong one requires a semantic ground in truth makers for relational properties between individuals. As such they agree with Lewis that one should speak of a ‘world-nature’: a world-order of things in relation to one another. But with regard to the determination of which natures should be deemed as constituting a particular world order, or ‘nature,’ they point to a weakness in Lewis’s position. In a way that reminds one of Lycan’s objection, that Lewis’s position fails to provide insight into the nature of possibility, ersatz theorists point out that Lewis fails to analyse which properties could or could not be part of a world order. Thus, it might be that ‘being vermillion’ as the only property of a world might not be a possibility.17 Other contributors to the debate argue that there is a need for some kind of ‘structural universals.’18 Such structural universals are not only of the general kind, which, as we have seen, can be thought of as whole-world natures of orders of relationships. On this view, individual ‘things’ as composites require the postulation of structural universals. Thus ‘being methane’ is a structure consisting of a carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms bonded in a particular way.19 Regarding the questions at issue on the methodological side of the debate, one cannot eliminate all ‘magic.’ For when one renders unambiguous this emotive, rhetorical term, one understands that it indicates kinds of Moorean fact, or at least the givenness of certain metaphysical data. Thus, one cannot avoid all ‘magic,’ nor does Lewis claim to do so. Rather, defenders of structural universals believe, as Lewis implies, that there is ‘white magic’ and ‘black magic’ and

202 Method in Metaphysics

that it is the latter which is to be avoided. Black or bogus magic would be the tricks with smoke and mirrors of the philosopher who purports to be explaining a semantic datum, but is in effect not providing an explanation but a new description of the explanandum. In conclusion I should also mention a number of points made by C.B. Martin relevant to our topic. In a later chapter I will consider some of Martin’s contributions to the question of dispositions. But some of the arguments he marshals in his debate with Place and Armstrong over dispositions are worth noting in the present context. Martin is emphatic in his insistence that in our ordinary discourse about things and their dispositions we are committed to the intuition that not all that a thing can manifest is manifested at one time. Thus Martin, in his own way, accepts as true elements of Armstrong’s position, insofar as Armstrong posits universals as truth makers of causality claims, claims concerning powers inherent in individuals.20 Martin himself does not believe there is much difference between the idea of tropes and that of universals, but he stresses the priority of properties in the process in which we come to detect objects; and qualities come first in our knowledge of objects. He writes, ‘Two objects are similar to and different from one another in virtue of the similarity to and difference from different, things about (properties of ) the objects.’21 However, if such is the direction of epistemic discovery (properties to things) still one cannot do away with the ultimacy of objects. Thus, to Quine’s advocacy of the ‘empty present of Pythagoreanism’ Martin responds, perhaps a little obscurely: ‘If one were to reject the ultimacy of objects and replace them with space-time segments or “worms” or fields, there would still be properties, that is, things about or things had by these segments or fields that would not be those segments or fields themselves or even be part of them.’22 Criticizing Armstrong, Martin asserts that it is difficult to discern in the concrete which universals are instantiated in several different but apparently similar cases. Such identification of universals would present intractable difficulties, since what would have to be discovered would be exactly similar cases.23 Regarding Armstrong’s postulation of ‘higher-order’ universals, to account for laws and combinations of things, Martin raises the methodological issue of the need for proof. He comments: ‘To add to these first-order entities a group of entities that are non spatio-temporal, higher-order totality types of general state of affairs is to be led by grammatical features of reportage of the world to an abstract penumbral “allness.” But this needs to be shown.’24 A Critique of Lewis From a certain perspective Lewis’s position concerning possible worlds has rather the appearance of the ontological argument run riot: we can not

Universals, Tropes, Substance, and Events 203

only agree to the actuality of God’s existence from the notion of the possibility of God, but we may make a similar inference in the case of anything at all! As we have seen above, this central tenet of Lewis’s is far from uncontroversial. However, the point of my critical remarks here will be to emphasize how the approach taken in this book implies a critique of Lewis that is in terms of the cognitional and epistemological underpinnings of his project. It does not appear to be the case that Lewis devotes a great deal of space to such underpinnings. However, he does make significant statements with regard to such issues and, whether his treatment of them is extensive or not, my principal concern is to illustrate the way that a thinker will inevitably reap the reward of his sowing, thick or thin, in the field of epistemological method when the time comes for the harvest of his metaphysical insights. Lewis argues that the term ‘actual,’ as opposed to ‘possible,’ derives its meaning from our use of it as a demonstrative or indexical rather like ‘here’ or ‘now.’ It serves in this way to demark what is constitutive of our environment. ‘Our environment’ so delineated can then be distinguished from all other possible environments, or worlds not included in the ‘actual world.’ However, if we deploy here Lonergan’s arguments to the effect that there is a triple compound of activities involved in coming to know, and the argument that claims that denial of the same is self-referentially incoherent, I believe we will begin to uncover an incoherence in Lewis’s own procedure. On Lonergan’s position, the ‘actual’ is the ‘real,’ or ‘what is the case,’ and the ‘actual’ is known through the activities of experiencing data, understanding data, and judging one’s understanding to be so or probably so. The ‘actual’ or ‘real’ then is known in judgment. But I do not think it can be doubted that, whatever his explicit avowals may be, Lewis also implicitly commits himself to trying to establish the facts of the case, what is true, real, actual through such procedures. Thus, his own arguments concerning the use of the term ‘actual’ as a demonstrative are not simply a matter of grasping possibilities. He argues that this theory, a theory that may be understood by us as perhaps possible (on level two of coming to know), is not simply a possibility, but is actually the case with regard to our linguistic usage and knowledge of the world – our knowledge of the ‘actual’ world as identified through use of indexicals of proximate location. Indeed, if we were to accept Lewis’s view it would seem that we would be committed to saying that simply by understanding his theory concerning our use of ‘actual’ we would know it to be true; that is, simply by understanding the possibility of such a theory we would know it was true in some possible world. However, besides the oddity of such a view, occasioned by the fact that the theory is not meant to be true of any possible world but precisely of our own, it is clear from Lewis’s own performance in discussion that he does not simply claim, in a way rather akin

204 Method in Metaphysics

to the Bellman in Lewis Carroll’s the Hunting of the Snark, that whatever he says about our insights and linguistic usage of ‘actual’ is simply true, without one needing to attend to any evidence on the matter. But if his own starting point for possible-worlds semantics is argued for in a way that demonstrates that for him also ‘what is so,’ ‘what is actually the case,’ is established by the use of intelligence and reasonable judgment on the evidence, then this implies that in a most fundamental way it cannot be that the ‘actual’ is simply an indexical ‘object’ of reference. Rather, the ‘actual’ is ‘that which is,’ which is established through a grasp of the sufficiency of evidence for a proposed, possible theory. How do we even know that there is a ‘this world’ or any world at all? Again, knowledge that there is a world will not be simply a matter of entertaining possibilities. Indeed most sceptics in the history of philosophy, East and West, have been happy to entertain possibilities, but it would be hard to find a case in which scepticism has been refuted on the grounds of a putative intuition which is a knowledge of a world actually existing, had in the mere entertaining of the possibility of a world. In this way scepticism itself witnesses to our demand for sufficient reason or evidence before we will consent to the fact that a possibility is real or actual. Similar considerations arise when we reflect upon Lewis’s debate with an interlocutor such as Armstrong. The methodological issue highlighted in the debate between these two thinkers has to do with such matters as the explanatory capabilities of Armstrong’s position on universals, and whether such explanation is really required. The questions are these: What arguments may be brought forward in support of Armstrong’s hypothesis? Where does it fail to explain data? In the latter case we have seen critics, Lewis among them, object that Armstrong’s theory fails to give an understanding of higher-order entities. Lewis’s argument against Armstrong’s universals is a matter of saying that there is insufficient warrant for asserting this possibility, this theory, is in fact the case. Lewis argues that we can account for the data of similarity in terms of a brute nominalism; that there are no cogent reasons that would make us assert the explanatory ‘extra’ that Armstrong’s universals constitute. We may observe that it does not seem that Lewis denies the possibility of Armstrong’s account. But does that not entail, in Lewis’s position, that since Armstrong’s universals are a possibility they must at once be an actuality in some world? But if that were granted, further antinomies arise. It does not appear that such criticism is solely applied to our world, but rather to the idea of Armstrongian universals in general. Lewis argues, in effect, that there is insufficient evidence to say that universals be postulated in any world. Besides this point, we may ask, how do we know that the world Armstrong’s universals are true in, because possible, is not ours? And how would we know that Lewis’s

Universals, Tropes, Substance, and Events 205

arguments (that there is no reason to say they, universals, exist) are directed to one world rather than to another? The point is that the ‘real,’ ‘what is’ or ‘the actual,’ is what is to be known by intelligence and reasonable judgment. And Lewis’s own arguments against Armstrongian universals witness to such an implicit intending of the real or actual as what is to be known in this way in his own thought. He is not disputing the existence of universals in terms of possibility but, beyond possibility (which is grasped by intelligence, level two), he is disputing whether there is evidence to affirm such possibility is, in fact, so (level 3). Possibility as Intelligibility Finally, I wish to return to Lycan’s important criticism of Lewis. Lycan objects that Lewis’s focus on understanding possibility in terms of actuality in fact leaves us with very little by way of insight into the modality of possibility. I believe this to be correct and while I do not wish to devote the necessary space to outlining in detail Lonergan’s contribution to what such an analysis might need to include, I will briefly indicate some of the avenues of investigation his thought opens up with regard to a fuller reflection on possibility. While Lewis’s position on possible worlds cannot be accepted, there is certainly a point to his indicating the way insight into possibility may be had via actuality. Lonergan’s often repeated phrase ‘fact proves possibility’ itself echoes the medieval philosophical dictum: ab esse ad posse valet illatio (there is a valid inference from fact to possibility). However, Lonergan would also agree with Lewis’s contention that insight into the modality of possibility must surely give us more than simply an understanding of the possibilities represented by the logical connectives. Whether Lewis’s own project achieves much more than this itself is, of course, what is questioned by critics such as Lycan. Beyond possibility known via actuality, then, Lonergan would indicate that in very broad terms possibility is grounded in intelligibility (what is a possibility is a possible object of thought); and in distinguishing between various types of intelligibility we are at once distinguishing between various types of possibility. Taking the cognitional route as always, then, Lonergan examines different types of insight that may be had into diverse types of intelligibility. In writings such as the essay ‘A Note on Geometrical Possibility,’ Lonergan distinguishes between two types of intelligibility, possibility, in the context of a discussion of reality and non-Euclidean geometries. One may distinguish between possibility simpliciter, he avers, and on the other hand, possibility secundum quid. In the former case we are referring

206 Method in Metaphysics

to the possibility of a substance, a unity or thing; in the latter case we are referring to the possibility of the differentiae, accidents (conjugates) that are characteristics of the thing. To illustrate this point he uses Aristotle’s example of the accidental in the case of the ‘snubness’ of a nose. Understanding possibility in this case involves understanding a twofold possibility. There is the possibility simpliciter of the curvature we call snubness, but since this quality is inherently dependent on a substance its possibility also depends upon the possibility of that substance. Applying this consideration to the matter in hand, of the reality of non-Euclidean geometries, Lonergan writes: ‘As a ratio or intrinsically, an N-dimensional curved “space” might be possible; yet the only possible substances might have properties that excluded more than (N – 1) dimensions or that excluded curvature. In that case the geometry in question would be possible secundum quid, as a ratio, but not simpliciter, for a fully possible accident supposes as possible its substance.’25 However, Lonergan also indicates a third aspect of possibility, which he does not develop in the essay, but which is discussed further in the book Insight. If there is a question of possibility having to do with an accident in itself, a further question of possibility concerning the substance upon which the accident is dependent for its existence, then there is yet the further question of the context in which the substance itself is possible. As Lonergan writes in Insight: ‘Possibility is concrete. Logicians may say that a “mountain of gold” is possible if there is no intrinsic contradiction involved in supposing such a mountain. But, in fact, a mountain of gold is possible only if the means are available for acquiring enough gold ... for transporting it to a single place.’26 With this extension of the discussion of possibility we reach the point of understanding the possibility of a particular substance as bound up with the possibility of a world order, or possible world. In this context the question about the possibility of a world in which the only thing was vermilion is seen to be an apposite one. However, regarding insight into the modality of possibility one should note here that, in Lonergan’s view, if we begin to move the discussion in the direction of world order in this way, we also begin to move in the direction of discussing the emergent probability of world order. That is, the discussion cannot ignore the evidence we have for a world order characterized by statistically estimated probabilities regarding the emergence and survival of schemes of recurrence: schemes that are the ecologies, which render the emergence and survival of substances more or less likely. Given such a shift in discussion one should acknowledge that one has shifted from discussion of possibility in the senses discussed so far to concrete probability. And in the discussion of the modality of probability, as it is operative in the universe we know, we must include the semantic

Universals, Tropes, Substance, and Events 207

truth-maker category of potentiality, a metaphysical notion that not a few in the analytical tradition have paid scant attention to. We have seen how the notion of potentiality is lacking in the possible-worlds semantics of philosophers like Kripke and Putnam, when examining their positions in chapter 5. Substance The ancient debate concerning the priority of the ‘one’ or the ‘many,’ seen in the thought of the pre-Socratics Heraclitus and Parmenides, is still very much with us. So the Humean legacy evident in analytical philosophy is at work in the thought of philosophers like Quine, who opt for a drastic ontological minimalism. Whether there are unities, substances, ‘things,’ ‘underlying,’ ‘behind,’ ‘in’ the data or phenomena revealed to sense is a question made only more difficult to resolve with the accelerated development of the physical sciences. Whitehead in one way, and Cassirer in another, demanded the abandonment of older notions of substantial unity in the face of paradoxes like that of Eddington’s ‘two tables’: the ‘manifest image,’ offered by scientific theory, seems at odds with the expectations of common sense. Discussion of the notion of the ‘thing’ or ‘substances’ serves to bring together a number of the issues we have already seen above concerning universals, tropes, and the like. Such metaphysical notions are offered as attempts to provide semantic truth makers for assertions about the unities, or things, that make up the world. Before examining the implications of Lonergan’s method for the resolution of some of the issues treated so far in the chapter, I will turn to some recent contributions to the debate on ‘substance’ in analytical philosophy, which, I believe, contain elements pointing us in the right direction, and elements that only add to a confusion that ultimately stems from fundamental cognitional and methodological defects. Given that this book sees itself standing within a tradition that is fundamentally Aristotelian, it will be no surprise if I find aspects of David Wiggins’s Aristotelian analysis of ‘substance’ or ‘thing’ sound. Rejecting the notion of thing as a mereological collocation of atoms, Wiggins argues in an antireductionist fashion, insisting that a ‘thing’ is constituted of form and matter. Wiggins writes, using the example of a jug, ‘The jug is constituted of certain matter and identical only with a certain whole or continuant at present constituted in a certain way out of that matter.’27 Wiggins’s notion of ‘continuant’ is, then, equivalent to that of substance or ‘thing’; such unities pass through different and, as Aristotle observed, contrary states. The occurrences that constitute these changes are, in

208 Method in Metaphysics

Wiggins’s position, ‘events.’ Wiggins’s attack on atomist mereology occurs in a context in which Wiggins attempts to block an interpretation of Leibniz’s law of identity in mereological terms. He himself invokes Leibniz’s law, which he expresses, ‘If a is b, then whatever is true of a is true of b,’ against Peter Geach’s R thesis of identity, and maintains that the Leibnizian law would be incorrectly understood if mereological interpretation were allowed. His debate with Geach over identity comes down to defending his own ‘D -thesis’ against the sortal relative identity thesis, R, defended by Geach in Reference and Generality. Geach asserts, ‘I could not object in principle to different A’s being the same B ... as different official personages may be one and the same man.’28 In response, Wiggins uses Leibniz’s law in an argument to the effect that it is impossible that ‘a can be the same F as b without being the same G as b.’ Wiggins’s ‘D -thesis’ is committed to a view of sortal or kind dependency which holds that ‘if A is the same as B it will be in terms of sortal kind (essence).’29 While appreciating as correct Wiggins’s Aristotelian analysis of a thing or unity as irreducibly constituted by the ontological elements form and matter, my reservations about his position as a whole have to do most fundamentally with the lack of a convincing and coherent epistemological approach, which would enable one to ground critically the metaphysical notions argued for in a more complete manner. The lack of such a methodological base is also evident, I believe, in some of the defects in his position. In the case of the debate with Geach it appears that example and counterexample are put forward by the disputants without any sense that the underlying methodological issue may have more to do with the nature of identity itself as a principle operative in our thinking and knowing. The way Wiggins and Geach talk past each other, proposing and combating various putative counterexamples, is indicative of a methodological problem. Thus, the disputants fail to distinguish clearly between ‘identity’ implicit in the affirmation of a judgment of fact, and the more specific case of ‘identity’ that is the unity-identity-whole of the ‘one and the same’ (Wiggins’s ‘continuant’), which goes through and develops through changes (Wiggins’s ‘events’). Geach’s counterexample to the D -thesis indicates the different sets of acts, habits, and social relations that constitute, say, ‘hairdresser,’ on the one hand, and ‘mayor,’ on the other. Such diverse activities can be engaged in by one and the same person, Geach points out, although these activities have no necessary connection. What this counterexample indicates is simply the point that ‘identity’ as implied in any judgment can refer to the referents of judgment, be they ‘conjugates’ (Wiggins’s ‘events’ or Aristotle’s differentiae), aggregates of things, schemes of recurrence, mathematical or logical truths, or concrete individuals

Universals, Tropes, Substance, and Events 209

(continuants). What is implied in any such judgment is that ‘a is a.’ If b turns out to be a in any of these cases, the principle of identity will at once imply that all that is true of a is true of b. But understood in this sense, the principle of identity does not at once do all that is required to give us the ‘identity,’ which is the ‘one and the same,’ of the individual perduring and developing through many changes. More is needed. What is required are the insights into concrete data and the reasonable judgments, which affirm it to be so, or probably so, that what we have is a concrete unityidentity-whole in the data – a unity such as a dog, a person, an atom, or whatever. Such identity is, in Lonergan’s position, the identity known and affirmed in a judgment that affirms the actual existence of a central form, informing matter, as Wiggins’s example of the jug illustrates. But the epistemological issues perhaps run deeper. Wiggins wishes to espouse a modified version of Kripkean essentialism in Sameness and Substance, but it is questionable whether the modifications he wants to make to Kripke’s discussions of reference to the necessary and the contingent avoid the epistemological objections that would arise from the position argued in this work, or for that matter from objections raised in other quarters. So, as I noted above, the reasoned judgments concerning the identity and unity to be discerned in the data will normally be probable – perhaps highly probable, perhaps less so. In the case of self-affirmation we do have a clear counterargument to the Humean/Parfitian denial of evident identity, for the ‘one and the same’ can be judged to be evident in the data of consciousness as I move from the level of experience, to that of understanding, to that of judgment. The data of consciousness provide sufficient evidence to affirm that it is the same one who experiences who also understands and excogitates, and judges. To deny the argument would be to go through the process of argument itself, which involves diverse conscious experiences of attending to sounds or sights, seeking insights into the same, and making judgments as to the argument proposed. However, if I find that the fulfilment of conditions for the truth of the assertion that there is a unity of consciousness in the diverse cognitional acts is given in a definite way in consciousness (such that the attempt to refute it provides further evidence), this is a de facto not a necessary certainty. For the self, the conscious unity affirmed to be so is contingent; it might not have been, yet its existence is certainly known. However, if I turn to the realm of common-sense judgments and those in science I observe that no more than probable (perhaps highly probable) affirmations are attainable. Therefore, the concrete judgment ‘a is b’ will always be under this proviso of greater or lesser probability of revision. Such judgments in science fall into the linguistic category of what Lonergan terms ‘provi-

210 Method in Metaphysics

sional analytic propositions,’ as we have seen. As diverse critics in diverse ways appear to be saying, the Kripkean/ Putnam analysis of possible world essentialism appears to prescind from the vagaries and vicissitudes of the scientific way of advance, which we find to be the case in scientific activity and the history of scientific development; it refers to the laws affirmed in science in a way that suggests the kind of definitive judgments we do not yet posses and perhaps, given the intrinsic revisability of science, cannot possess in this area. Wiggins is not alone among recent analytical metaphysicians in opposing mereological bundle theories of substance by returning to Aristotelian analysis. Michael Loux’s arguments for an Aristotelian view of substance are further evidence of a renaissance of interest in Aristotelian approaches among analytical philosophers.30 In twentieth-century discussions of substance in analytical philosophy two main theories are evident: a) bundle theory, and b) substratum or bare particular theory. Common to both theories is a view of the object as constructed. Bundle theorists are often attacked by their opponents for being committed to a false principle: a principle shown to be false, it is claimed, by the identity of indiscernibles. Paradoxes concerning the identification of entities arise, it is asserted, since the bundleists are committed, according to Loux, ‘to the impossibility of numerically different but qualitatively indiscernible objects.’31 Their opponents, therefore, opt for the postulation of a substratum in the individual that would obviate such paradoxes by allowing for qualitatively similar but numerically different individuals. The ‘substratumists’ insist that if there is numerical difference among objects and yet qualitative identity, there must be something over and above the properties; accordingly, one needs to posit, ‘unrepeatable constituents, things that can each figure in the constitution of just one object.’ These must be bare particulars, ‘particulars or individuals whose being the things they are involves no properties.’32 On this view, reports Loux, these metaphysical elements must be ‘brute and unanalysable sources of particularity.’ The response of the bundle theorists to the charge of paradox brought against their position is to argue, in a fashion similar to some seventeenthcentury rationalists, that everything in the world might be a little different, and to claim that this will safeguard intuitions concerning individual uniqueness. Some bundleists also claim that the fact of spatio-temporal difference guarantees individuality. However, the upholders of substratum theories remain unimpressed. Against the invocation of space-time differences, or space-time relational properties, they aver that such differences are ‘haecceities’ and that these ‘haecceities’ presuppose the concrete object whose properties we are trying to reconstruct. As to the bundleists’ assertion of minor difference as sufficing for metaphysical difference, this

Universals, Tropes, Substance, and Events 211

has been no less controversial than was Leibniz’s argument in the same vein. The thought experiment of a possible world in which every object has a twin is just one way to highlight problems with this modal bundleism. If, in response, the advocates of the theory decide to adopt a Humean form of trope theory (according to which each individual is said to be as unique as the tropes which make it up) this, as Loux insists, can be no more than a pious hope that the world will turn out to be that way, that is, it is a contingent thesis that appears to fail to provide the necessary criteria of identity that such modal theories set for themselves as a goal. However, while Loux is unimpressed by bundle theory, his neo-Aristotelianism also makes him no friend of the substratum advocates. Since according to the theory there is a substratum that is totally individual, which cannot fall under any concept at all, one appears once again to have arrived in the realm of paradox: one is trying to talk of that which cannot be described. If one were an advocate of the later Wittgenstein, of course, one would be happy with silence here, but, clearly, that is not what the substratumists are content with. Loux’s own neo-Aristotelian position is not outlined or defended in any detail in the article we are considering. He is content to sum it up as follows: ‘By virtue of instantiating its proper kind, the substance is already marked out as the thing it is. The further universals it exemplifies are simply properties it possesses and relations into which it enters. So substances are not wholes made up of constituents; in virtue of instantiating their proper kind, substances are irreducibly basic entities.’33 And he goes on to assert, ‘Its [a substance kind’s] instantiation results in the actual existence of a particular ...’ In conclusion he poses some questions for his own position, questions to which I will return later in this chapter. To be included among such questions for a substance ontology, such as his own, Loux claims, are, first, questions to do with legitimate, as opposed to epistemologically suspect, ‘reduction.’ Some apparent manmade substances, unities, or observer-relative unities will surely turn out to be susceptible to reduction. How should one decide in such cases? I have already responded to this question in the previous chapter when examining recent discussions of natural kinds. He poses his second question in the following way: ‘The members of a kind typically have a characteristic shape, a characteristic size, a characteristic behavioral repertoire, and so on. How is this fact compatible with the idea that substance kinds cannot be reduced to properties?’34 His final question to his own neo-Aristotelianism has to do with ‘haecceities.’ Loux asks: ‘Are they basic or fundamental to our characterization of individual substance kinds under which particular substances fall, and how do they figure in the individuality of those substances? If not, then

212 Method in Metaphysics

how are we to capture the intuition that each individual substance is necessarily just that thing?’35 I will return to these last two questions later in this chapter. Naturally, what was said concerning the notion of ‘haecceity’ in chapter 5 provides some hints as to what my response to Loux’s final question might be. A Critical Realist Approach to Substance In accord with the basic methodological approach of Lonergan’s metaphysics we can engage with the issues discussed above from two complementary standpoints: that of the metaphysics derived more immediately from cognitional theory, and that of the metaphysics ‘presupposed,’ or better, anticipated in the intelligent and reasonable operations evident in both common sense and science. These ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ blades of this methodological pair of ‘scissors’ imply that positions on the metaphysical issues of universals, tropes, substance, accidents, events, and the like can be argued for both from the viewpoint of the entities known in the affirmation of the cognitional and evaluative structure of the self, and from the viewpoint of the judgments of science and common sense. This latter perspective is not simply a matter of fact gathering carried on from some putative ‘neutral perspective,’ but is rather a dialectic engagement with the results of common sense and science on the basis of the philosophical positions that constitute the ‘upper blade’ of the hermeneutical ‘scissors’ of the method. As a consequence of what has already been argued concerning epistemology and cognition, the judgments in the case of this ‘lower blade’ perspective will show varying degrees of probability, and will not attain to the definitive status of the judgments concerning, or derived from, knowledge of the self – judgments the denial of which only provides evidence for their truth. To begin with the self known in self-affirmation, it has already been argued that one can verify in the data of consciousness sets of acts on three ‘levels’ of consciousness, and a unity among such acts. Thus on the level of experience, to which one needs to attend if one is to advance in knowledge, there are acts of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and sensations connected to balance, and the like. On the level of understanding, the way to knowledge requires that one exercises one’s intelligence in asking questions with regard to the data that are provided by the previous ‘level.’ On this level one attempts to excogitate, to think through problems; one may enjoy insights as a response to one’s questions, insights that are answers to ‘quid sit ?’ ‘What is it?’ questions regarding the data. This level of human knowing involves the expression of insights in concepts (the ‘verbalization’ of insights); it includes the development of hunches and insights into

Universals, Tropes, Substance, and Events 213

hypotheses, theories. On the third level the likelihood of acquiring knowledge is enhanced if one attempts to be reasonable, rather than rash, in answering ‘an sit?’ or ‘Is it?’ questions with regard to the hypotheses, ideas, hunches, of the previous level of consciousness. This involves such activities, on the third level, as marshalling and weighing the evidence in order to make an affirmative or negative judgment, which is probable or certain, or to suspend judgment and perhaps return to further reflection on the data. Such activities, or conscious operations, are verified in the data of consciousness as acts that occur. They are verified as occurrences, as types of events. Thus if I make a judgment I act, and the occurrence of the judgment can be verified as an event and a change with regard to my own consciousness. The unity of this consciousness has also been argued for earlier. Just as the various conscious acts are to be verified in consciousness, so also is the unity of consciousness. I can verify that the conscious act of judgment is not an act of questioning, nor an act of sensate experience; the acts on the various levels are truly distinct, however they are related one to another in one consciousness. The self that judges is the same self that questions, understands, and senses. My judgment is a conscious operation, consciously related to other conscious acts of questioning, sensing, and the like. Responding to Lonergan’s question ‘What do I know when I know?’ with regard to the specific case of myself as a knower, the answer will be that the self I know is a unity-identity-whole in the data of consciousness. The self, in this respect at least, is known as a ‘one and the same’ through the changes or occurrences of the various cognitional activities. However, one can go further and say that the unity that is this self is also a ‘self-assembling, dynamic unity’; that is, consciousness also provides the evidence to affirm a unity that to some degree is self-moving, that in being attentive, intelligent, reasonable and responsible promotes the activities on the various levels. I am conscious of willing to attend to data, to think through a problem, to be careful in judgment; I am conscious of a finality in my operations, then, a finality that aims at the attainment of a goal that is a correct, intelligent, and reasonable answer. In chapter 3, in the section summarizing Lonergan’s metaphysics, we saw that the self, known in coming to know one’s cognitional activities, is a paradigm instance of a unity, a substance that goes through the various conscious activities. These activities, verified in consciousness, are, in their turn, paradigm instances of conjugates (‘accidents,’ or differentiae). However, the distinction between a unity or ‘thing,’ on the one hand, and its ‘conjugates,’ on the other, requires further differentiation if one is to arrive at a more complete account of the ontological ‘truth makers,’ the

214 Method in Metaphysics

metaphysical composites, involved as the referents of self-affirmation. Insofar as that affirmation involves acts on the three levels of coming to know, it involves knowledge of the entities known as composites of three metaphysical elements. There is an isomorphism between the knowing and the known. Either we do not know, or in knowing in the way we do what is known is known to be composed ontologically in a triadic way. But, as has been argued, the claim or argument that we do not know is self-defeating. And furthermore, the central point about why such arguments are self-defeating, a point often missed, is that one knows such arguments are self-defeating because one comes to know the facts of consciousness that the arguments deny are indeed the case. For the argument that such-and-such is not so provides further evidence in the conscious operations of the arguer that such-andsuch facts of consciousness are so. In knowing the self, then, we know via experience, understanding, and judgment. But what is known corresponds to the way it is known: it is a triadic composite. That which is known, therefore, is known as a composite of that which is experienced, which Lonergan terms ‘potency’; that which is understood, which is ‘form’; and that which is judged to exist, it’s ‘act’ of existence, which is known to be the case. Not only is the unity, the ‘thing’ (substance), known in this way, via the operation of the three levels in coming to know, but also its conjugate acts (in the case of the self, the various acts of seeing, questioning, judging, etc.) are similarly known through the operation of the three interrelated levels. Therefore one needs to distinguish six fundamental metaphysical elements: central potency, form, and act of existence, as referring to the reality known in knowing which is a unity, or thing; and conjugate potency, form, and act of occurrence, as referring to the conjugates (accidents, differentiae) of the unity, or thing. On the level of understanding one grasps a form, an idea. In treating the modality of possibility discussions are perhaps not always that clear in distinguishing between possibility as what is per se intelligible and, on the other hand, possibility as contingency, as what might be, or not be. In terms of cognitional operations, such possibility as contingency, is manifest in our awareness that in grasping a ‘form,’ or an idea, we grasp a possibility, intelligible in itself insofar as no inherent absurdity can be identified, but the existence of this entity is not yet known. Existence is only known on the third level of coming to know, the level of judgment upon which we raise and attempt to answer the question of the actual existence of a possible, contingent entity, which possibility as intelligibility has been grasped on the prior level of understanding. The ‘form’ or idea, then, of electron, circle, human knower are intelli-

Universals, Tropes, Substance, and Events 215

gibilities we may entertain without knowing whether or not they actually exist. If we do come to verify their existence, to come to know definitely or probably that some such exists, then it is the thing or conjugate specified by the form that we come to know the existence of. Forms are intrinsic to the entity. If I come to verify that I am a knower, then I know that ‘knower’ is not just a possibility, but is realized in fact. But if I do come to verify the existence of one such case this does not negate the possibility that I may come to verify the existence of another such case; indeed since fact proves possibility, there may be, as far as I know, other examples. And with regard to the metaphysical element of potency I may, on investigation of the data that was known as able to be informed by such an entity, begin to wonder whether other such cases are not only possible but probable. (What I am alluding to here will be discussed further in a later chapter on supervenience.) However, in the present context, of an initial examination of the basic metaphysical elements, it is worth pointing out that the notion of ‘potency’ as that element ‘known’ via the first level of coming to know, experience, is essential to an adequate account of supervenience, or what Lonergan approaches in terms of the emergent probability of things. If, once the data on rocks, climate, vegetation, have been understood by the scientist as an ecology that makes feasible, in terms of chemical and biological provision, the emergence and survival of a certain kind of plant or animal, then such ‘potency’ will naturally enter into calculations as to the probability, not merely abstract possibility, of further examples of such creatures. Finally, in judgment the ‘actual existence’ of a unity or a conjugate (such as a judgment itself) is known to exist, or occur, to be the case. On empiricist assumptions of knowledge as a kind of acquaintance (sometimes understood as little more than a mere ‘bumping into things’ that immediately causes true knowledge of themselves via impressions), such talk of knowledge of the metaphysical elements will seem untenable. In knowing that this form is instantiated in the data, in the ‘experiencable,’ it is only in judgment that I know that it is not a mere possibility but that it is actual. It is through judgment alone, which grasps the sufficiency of evidence, that I know the metaphysical element of existence. Furthermore, such existence is not any existence. Rather, since judgment is relative to understanding and experience, the existence is that of a particular entity. What has to be borne constantly in mind here is that the account offered is not meant to be a further offering of apparently ad hoc intuitive reflections on ontological elements, and how they are to be related. Rather, the point of the whole exercise is a fundamentally methodological one, which appeals to the operations of cognitional structure itself as a way of moving beyond the morass of conflicting intuitions in this area. That is to be achieved by

216 Method in Metaphysics

determining what the metaphysical elements and their relations are, critically grounding such an account on the basis of self-affirmation. Just as the argument is central that the basic elements, at least, of self-affirmation are to be verified on pain of incoherent self-destructive denial, so the extension of the argument into the realm of metaphysics provides a critical way of validating metaphysical intuitions. Are they or are they not verifiable in terms of cognitional structure? If they are not verified at once with the verification of that structure, are they at least derivable by some cogent line of argument from the evidence provided by the affirmation of those metaphysical elements that are verified in a more direct way in self-affirmation? There are other ways of developing arguments to the effect that key metaphysical elements including ‘matter’ or ‘potency’ and, on the other hand, ‘form’ may be identified. One can argue cogently, I believe, that the difference between matter or potency and form can be illustrated by the difference between many instances of the same type – many material instantiations of the same thing. The sameness points towards form and the differences are merely material, and so indicate materiality, or what Lonergan terms ‘potency.’ And indeed the modality of ‘potential’ enters in here, since the many instances of the same ‘thing’ indicate that the material conditions in which these same things are instantiated demonstrates in fact the potential of these conditions to be informed in this way. Thus there is required the right materials to be informed by the higher ‘form’ of say, ‘table’ or ‘transistor radio.’ In the latter case acid and water are not the right prior conditions, or material causes, while certain metals and synthetic materials are. Scientific methodology itself, as Lonergan insists, points to the cogency of such metaphysical distinctions and the ontological elements that they imply. There is not a different particle physics for Birmingham, England, and Birmingham, Alabama. The heuristic anticipation of science works with the expectation that there will be significant similarity of materially diverse instances, unless there is evidence to the contrary. Such reflections are supportive of the kind of metaphysical account offered above. However, we have seen in the earlier section of this chapter, in surveying the disputed questions in contemporary analytical metaphysics, that intuitive based claims and counterclaims are brought forward in an apparently intractable debate over the nature of ontological elements and their constitution. Thus the more decisive argument for the metaphysical elements, which Lonergan believes are successfully identified by Aristotle and by Aquinas (whose identification of the act of existence goes beyond the Aristotelian doctrine), is that to be had on the basis of a metaphysics resulting from the basis of self-affirmation. If then, as Lonergan argues, one may critically validate in self-affirma-

Universals, Tropes, Substance, and Events 217

tion that knowing takes place in terms of the three levels of experience, understanding, and judgment, and that the known corresponds to this in terms of potency, form, and act, what does this imply for some of the discussions we have examined above concerning universals, tropes, and the like? How to Understand Universals A first question is the methodological one. As we have seen, analytic metaphysicians like Lewis express sympathy for certain aspects of a position like Armstrong’s insofar as these are deemed to elucidate our modal expressions. But Lewis’s point is also that while some aspects of a position like Armstrong’s may be deemed positive and others negative, it may well be that central claims made by Armstrong cannot be argued to be any more powerful in an explanatory way than those made by rival philosophies. How does one decide the issue, if the explanation is no more explanatory than the ‘Moorean’ facts to be explained? On Lonergan’s view, as we have seen above, it will be the case that certain theorems in metaphysics will be argued to be no more than probable, even if highly probable, and this is to be expected since metaphysics has in part to do with integrating the positive results of common sense and science, and the latter, certainly, has to do for the most part with probable explanations. However, the more fundamental aspects of metaphysics will be arrived at not through a method involving something akin to the hypothetico-deductive methods of science as these regard the probable, but through the procedure of self-affirmation, which arrives at definite results. The affirmation, then, that central and conjugate forms are known in knowing things and their activities, implies that there are such metaphysical elements and this is validated in the knowing process itself. Form, which together with potency and the act of existence, is a constitutive element of the thing, is in some way akin to Armstrong’s universal and in some respects not; similarly it is in some respects like the notion of ‘trope’ that appears in the literature. Form is like ‘trope’ insofar as it is a constitutive element of the thing or the conjugate. Thus if I judge that a mouse exists, or that an act of judgment has occurred, the existence known is that of these types of entities. However, since discussion of tropes seems to occur in the literature in ways that tie the notion in with such concepts as ‘mereology’ one should be cautious. On the view argued here the thing or conjugate is known via experience, understanding, and judgment. It is not known according to the naive realist model, that is, by taking a look. And accounts of mereology, like atomist views, seem to be straightforward expressions of the kind of picture-thinking (imaginative block

218 Method in Metaphysics

building) that is a consequence of the naive realist or empiricist positions rejected as incoherent by the critical realist. A thing or a conjugate is known through intelligent grasp and reasonable judgment, not as a result of looking or imaginative construction of the images that result from sensate experience. On the other hand, Lonergan’s position allows one to disentangle the threads that become knotted together in debates concerning Armstrong’s universals. Two related questions concerning these universals that we have witnessed in the discussions of them have been, How does knowledge of them arise? How do we know that there are such universals out there instantiated in things? One objection to Armstrong’s universals, noted above, was the view that perhaps everything is slightly different. We may begin with the question of the ‘abstraction’ of these universals from the particular of which Armstrong writes. As far as his critics like Lewis are concerned, Armstrong leaves this process of abstraction quite mysterious. Without wishing to go into great detail here, one may observe that a considerable portion of Lonergan’s writing has been devoted to this very process as discussed in the developing thought of both Aristotle and Aquinas. Some of the conclusions of this analysis were noted in an earlier chapter. On Aquinas’s view, as reconstructed by Lonergan, intelligible form is grasped in conscious insight into the data, into the images that are ‘disposed,’ or patterned by the mind in its active pursuit of insight. The grasp of form in insight may itself be fleeting, and the further conscious activity of concept formation can be a tricky business, as can be witnessed in our conscious frustration at not being able to verbalize, or express in the right way, insights that have occurred to us. Whether Armstrong’s position, which is described as ‘Aristotelian,’ is true to the subtleties of Aristotelian thought in this area of abstraction is a question best left to Aristotle scholars. However, it is fairly clear that it lacks the sophistication to be found in the work of that other ‘Aristotelian,’ St Thomas Aquinas. For one thing Aquinas distinguishes between different kinds of conscious abstraction as ‘objective,’ ‘apprehensive,’ and ‘formative,’ and a further process of reflection upon these is also identified.36 Again without wishing to be sidetracked into details, in Aquinas’s view, in apprehensive abstraction one grasps an intelligible form in the data, but in formative abstraction one grasps a universal as universal. Commenting on Aquinas’s distinctions Lonergan writes, ‘One can mean “circle” without meaning any particular instance of circle; but one cannot grasp, intuit, know by inspection the necessary and sufficient conditions of circularity except in a diagram.’37 On the position argued for in this work, therefore, one needs to make distinctions not found in Armstrong’s work, distinctions necessary in order

Universals, Tropes, Substance, and Events 219

to throw light on points at issue between Armstrong and his critics. If one is fortunate enough to have an insight into the data provided on the level of experience, and in that insight one grasps a ‘form,’ it is the case that one has as yet only grasped a possibility – a possibility that may be a central or conjugate form. However, it is on the third ‘level’ of human knowing, the level of judgment, that one tries to determine whether such is more than a mere object of thought but also an object of affirmation. In affirmation one may grasp that such an abstract possibility is so, that there is such a reality. If there is such a reality, then the central or conjugate form will be a constitutive element of it. However, in entertaining such a form as a possibility, or even in knowing that it is instantiated in one case, one knows no more than that. In other words, in cognitional terms, Armstrong begins with the wrong end of the problem, and then has to face a barrage of sceptical questions. To talk straight away about universals is to imply that one knows definitely that one has cases in which two or more things share the same form, and this opens one to the sceptical question which asks how one knows this. Rather, Lonergan proceeds by way of saying that in grasping a form as possible, and in knowing one instance of reality in which a form is instantiated, one knows a universal as that which is possibly relevant to other cases, so that one cannot rule this out. Thus Loux is right to indicate the problem for the bundleists’ contingency thesis, that all things will turn out to be somewhat different. That this is contingent, that it expresses a hope rather than knowledge, means, Loux concludes, the bundleists are on shaky ground. It is precisely awareness of such contingency that is evidence of our cognitional capacity to grasp a form as universal in terms of possibility. However, more is needed to know that there are in fact further instances of the same. Our awareness of ‘sameness’ is awareness of our cognitional ability to understand similars similarly, which is indeed an a priori. However, beyond this there is the inquiry to discover whether there be a) a form as a constituent of an existing entity, and b) whether there be more than one instance of an existent individual whose form shares sameness or similarity with other instances insofar as they are to be understood in the same way. This latter point must be emphasized against any kind of muddled Platonism. The forms as instantiated are metaphysical elements different in each case, for they are forms of different individuals, but they may have a quality of ‘sameness,’ such sameness allowing them to be similarly understood. Whether there are other cases of this ‘universal’ (understood as a possibility that may be instantiated again) is to be determined a posteriori; it is a matter of further research, of further experience, understanding, and judgment. Such caution with regard to claims to know that similarly under-

220 Method in Metaphysics

stood forms or other possibilia are instantiated is what is to be understood, in Lonergan’s view, as what is at issue in debates over generalization and induction. For the cognitional condition of possibility of such procedures is the a priori cognitional fact that ‘similars are understood similarly.’ Such a cognitional awareness is operative even in Quine’s writing and arguing, although Quine does not advert to such an a priori explicitly. However, while we can generalize this, of course, it leaves open the question whether instance b is significantly similar to instance a. That is a question, as I say, for further inquiry, and in terms of common sense and science one will expect that only probable judgments, perhaps highly probable judgments, will be the best that can be achieved in determining the issue in particular cases. But, as was said above, there is good reason, even if only at best probable, to think that there are many cases in the world of entities with conjugate and central forms that are to be understood as similar, for example, that there are many human persons, dogs, atoms, pins. As was noted above, scientific procedures work with the anticipation of such significant similarity, and there are reasons (if not indefeasible ones) for thinking that subatomic particles are the same in Bombay as they are in Birmingham. What of relations? Are they to be understood as universals, as some of Armstrong’s opponents think and Armstrong himself denies? Again, I think here Armstrong’s intuitions are in part both wrong and right. On the position taken here it is clear that central and conjugate forms, like that of ‘human person,’ and that of ‘judgment,’ differ in important ways from the relations into which these forms enter in a possible world order, relations to do with spatial and temporal ordering and causal dependence, for example. However, since we came at the notion of universal as an understood ‘possible,’ which might come to be known as realized in one or more situations, and argued that this way of coming at the problem was part of the expeditious method based on cognitional operations, so too we should grant that relations are what are grasped in insight as ‘possibles’ relevant to knowing the world in a similar fashion. Since our way to knowing the world occurs through understanding prior to possible affirmation of the understood as true of the world, such objects of thought as relations between things will also be, in the first instance, abstractions, and therefore, at least in this respect, similar to the universals that are central and conjugate forms. Lonergan distinguishes between internal and external relations. Briefly, internal relations are both the sets of terms and relations that enter into the definition of any nature or form (such as the terms in relation that enter into the definition of a circle, or of cognitional structure), and, on the other hand, the metaphysical relations obtaining between potency,

Universals, Tropes, Substance, and Events 221

form and acts of existence and occurrence. These latter relations are anticipated heuristically in our very process of coming to know, as can be seen from the questions we ask. Thus, with regard to the data experienced we inquire ‘What is it?’ (an anticipation of a ‘what’ answer), and ‘Is it so?’ with regard to what has been understood: we ask a question that seeks to know whether the understood actually exists or not. Causal and spatio-temporal orderings of the world order constitute external relations. Such relations include spatial and temporal magnitudes, which, in passing we may note, Lonergan defines in a relational way to begin with; that is, since that quantity of any spatio-temporal entity is, like number itself, only understood as a relational property, this implies that there is a primary relativity in the spatio-temporal thing itself, which may vary in terms of secondary determinations as the entity enters into relations of, say, 2 to 1 in the various schemes of recurrence that characterize the juxtapositions obtaining in the world order at any one time. Relationships, then, obtain in a world order characterized by statistically understood emergence and survival of schemes of recurrence, such as are found in the ecological niches in which occur animal growth and development, in the operations of the solar system, and in the schemes of recurrence obtaining in the institutions of human society. Not everything to be understood, then, is a central or conjugate form; rather there are orderings of these forms in relationships such as the orderings that are frequencies of occurrence and distributions of things. What, then, of abstract possibilia, such as Lewis’s example of ‘not known before 2000’? In this case one is clearly referring to the relation some x enters into which involves a relation between a knower or knowers and x as the object known. More generally, however, the question arises as to how such abstractions, which may or may not be relevant to the actual world (we are not following Lewis’s account of ‘world’ here, of course) are like or unlike the central and conjugate forms we have discussed. A relationship seems often to determine a unique configuration of things, which as unique cannot be universal in the same way as, say, ‘dog’ nature, which can apply to many different instances. The phrase ‘the dog near the car last Wednesday afternoon’ does not seem to be a universal or indifferent to instances, as does ‘dog nature.’ In response, one should begin by insisting, as we have above, that ‘dog’ nature is only known to be instantiated in actual dogs, which in this actual world will be in relationships with other elements of world order, even if these remain to be discovered by investigation subsequent to that through which one came to know the existence of the individual dog or dogs. The sentence referring to the position of a dog on a certain day is clearly one that refers to an actual situation obtaining in the actual world order at a

222 Method in Metaphysics

specified time. We are referring to known realities, not just to possibilia. However, in coming to know that situation one can quite understand that there are different possibilia of relation that, as understood prior to possible affirmation, can be entertained as referring to other possible worlds or possible outcomes in this world. On this latter point we need to bear in mind what has already been said in the previous chapter concerning the modal language of possibility or probability when this refers to possible outcomes in the actual world, as opposed to modal language of possibility referring to possible worlds in a more abstract way. When we discuss possible, counterfactual outcomes in the actual world we may be referring not merely to trans-possible world modality but to the metaphysical constituent of potency in the actual world. When we say that ‘such-and-such could have occurred’ or that ‘such-and-such was probable’ we are using expressions that refer to the potential of actual world processes at some past time. Since relations, when understood fully in an explanatory account, are constitutive of a possible world order, it is obvious that the kind of ‘universal’ that a world order constitutes is not the same kind of universal that is a central or conjugate form. The world order is the ordering of the things and occurrences that are constituted by central and conjugate forms, and as a whole is not any one of its parts, a set of terms and relations is not any one of its constitutive members. On the way to knowledge of such an order, however, one can entertain as possible many different partial or more complete orderings and juxtapositions, in the process of trying to come to know which actually obtain in reality.38 Substance: Unity-Identity-Whole versus ‘Body’ Turning now to further questions that arise concerning the metaphysical whole, or unity, which Lonergan refers to using the expression ‘thing,’ and which is traditionally termed ‘substance,’ it will be useful to examine Lonergan’s response to criticisms of the very notion of such a unity underlying change. As we have seen above, the metaphysical notion of ‘one and the same,’ the unity or ‘thing,’ is to be validated in a definitive way in self-affirmation. The unity of consciousness is as much given in the data of consciousness as are the conjugate forms that are acts of attention to sense data, questions of various kinds, insight, conceptual formulation, judgment, and the like. To argue against the affirmation of these aspects of consciousness is at once to have evidence for their presence in the conscious acts involved in arguing. Further, this unity of consciousness is not the inert unity of some set of mathematical terms and relations, but is a dynamic unity, moved forward as the conscious enquirer seeks under-

Universals, Tropes, Substance, and Events 223

standing and evidence for the truth or falsity of the insights and ideas of thought. But besides this ‘upper blade’ evidence of the unity, or thing, in the case of the knower, one has the myriad instances of common sense and science (including biological, psychological, and social sciences) in which evidence for such unities is had. The judgments that there are such unities are not so privileged in this ‘lower blade’ area of data. However, since such highly probable judgments are well grounded in the data, the evidence they furnish for such entities is no less important. Lonergan’s discussion of the notion of the thing occurs in the context of modern debates concerning the cogency of the notion, debates conditioned by the accelerated growth in science in the modern period. Naive realism, empiricism, and all those views that unfold from the uncritical picture-thinking that results from representationalism naturally lead to the identification of substance, or thing, with, what Lonergan terms, ‘body.’ The notion of ‘body’ is the construct of such picture-thinking, and is taken to be the ‘out there now’ real, bundle or lump, that fills in part of the Kantian space-time reference frame. Indeed, a contemporary philosopher like Chisholm does not seem to be unduly worried by the problems attendant upon accepting such a notion of the thing as body, as is witnessed by his example of a block of wood used to illustrate the concept of substance.39 This appears to be a philosophical position untroubled by such examples as Eddington’s notorious two tables: the one, described by common sense, is a continuous, solid, brown object; the other, supposedly the same object, is described in scientific terms as mostly empty space that is occupied now by that which is described as a particle, now by what is described as a wave. Perhaps less sophisticated, but no less telling, questions can arise for Chisholm’s example when one considers that a block of wood is surely something more like a piece of dead flesh; that is, it is an aggregate of parts removed from something that was a living thing, a tree. Lonergan’s attack on the notion of body in modern philosophy, and his argument to distinguish it from the intellectually grasped notion of thing, then, is but one example of his hermeneutical critique distinguishing between ‘two realisms,’ a hermeneutic of the inherent polymorphism of human consciousness, which we have examined before. It is inevitable, given the admixture of diverse strands and dynamic vectors within the stream of human consciousness, that what can be established through a consistent application of the norms of intelligent and reasonable inquiry is conflated with the more palpable and powerful images that arise in the consciousness of the human animal – in the consciousness of the person as dramatic doer and maker of the human world. Without an explicit acknowledgment of the need to approach the ele-

224 Method in Metaphysics

ments of metaphysics through an application of the exigencies of intelligent inquiry and reasonable judgment, representationalist picture-thinking will very readily present us with a presencing metaphysical vision of the substance as a bundle, or body, as that which can be immediately seen ‘out there’ in space. In response, Hume famously deconstructs such a notion as unverifiable, and twentieth-century philosophers like Ernst Cassirer and A.N. Whitehead, impressed by the methods operative in modern science, will declare that the idea of substance is defunct. Lonergan’s response is to insist against Cassirer (he does not mention Whitehead in this context, but the point would apply equally well to his canards against substance) that while such critiques are effective in pinpointing the confusions inherent in the naive realist construction ‘body,’ they are not so with regard to the critical realist affirmation of the evidence for the existence of the unity that is the thing. Such a unity is understood and affirmed on the basis of the evidence of the data both of consciousness, in the case of the self, and, in probable judgments, on the basis of the data of sense provided by common sense and science. Indeed, Lonergan argues that science presupposes the notion of the thing, or unity underlying change. Both the ancient list of elements and the contemporary list of entities that is the periodic table are lists of things, of unities.40 As Martin insists, in a related context, an entity at any given time is not manifesting all that it could manifest. That privilege, Martin quips, belongs only to God and to the number two.41 While the manifestations are the occurrences (the acts that are conjugate forms), the underlying unity is the thing. Nor is the ‘underlying’ unity among the properties simply the blank space of mereological collocation. The expressions employed in such discussions need to be scrutinized, for ‘underlying,’ like ‘substance’ can be taken to suggest the pictorial constructs of a presencing, naive realist metaphysics. The unity, as can be seen from the example of the dynamic conscious unity known in self-affirmation, is not just a blank ‘matter.’ And in understanding realities like atoms, dogs, trees, and the like, there seems to be more to it than just providing indexical loci in the space-time continuum at which such and such bundles of properties and acts occur. Let us recall that the naive realist confusion (which results in metaphysical pictures like the atomism that once held Wittgenstein captive) overlooks the fact that properties themselves are known by intelligent and reasonable enquiry concerning the data – that they are constructs of intelligence. There is no point in the process of reductionist descent where one escapes this fact – a point worth insisting upon when encountering Quine’s gestures towards a ‘moderate’ metaphysical reduction in the name of state of the art physics. But since the properties, however far down one descends, are constructs of intelligence and reason prior to being affirmed as (prob-

Universals, Tropes, Substance, and Events 225

ably) instantiated in reality, there is no reason to refuse further hierarchic constructions of intelligence ‘upward’ in terms of things, if there is evidence for the same grasped by intelligence and reason. However, might one not challenge Lonergan’s first move in this analysis of the thing, or unity, anticipated by common sense and science? Lonergan avers that the notion is operative in these fields of enquiry, since change presupposes an idea of alteration and continuity, as opposed to repeated annihilations and new creations. But could not the sceptic influenced by, say, Parfit, and invoking the assistance of Descartes’ evil genius deny this? However, if we accept such an attack on the notion of unitary, perduring ‘bodies’ this would not be to accept the criticism as valid with regard to the notion of ‘thing,’ or with regard to the notion of a ‘one and the same’ perduring through change. Certainly, Chisholm’s ‘block of wood’ would be of little assistance as a counterexample to the argument that we simply do not know that an apparent ‘one and the same’ through time really is so. Apart from other considerations it is questionable whether such an object, which is a construct from material from a dead tree/trees, could be counted as the kind of unity that is a substance to begin with (if it had the kind of unity found in a humanly constructed artefact, then the points made at the conclusion of the previous chapter would apply). How, then, does Lonergan’s notion of the thing clarify further the notion of a substantial unity across time? First, the unity affirmed in selfaffirmation is so as a unity found to be identical over a particular period of time. Thus, it is the same ‘I’ that experiences, understands, and judges. And I have evidence in consciousness that, say, understanding in some instance comes before judgment. What if, one might object, God actually had annihilated one ‘me’ prior to judgment and had infused the experiences of sense experience and understanding into a suddenly created new ‘one.’ In such a case one would still have to affirm that I am a knower, for I would be aware of judgment, understanding, and sense experience as distinct contributions to knowledge yet as within the one consciousness. However, while such a thought experiment does not affect the definitive nature of the judgment that ‘I am a knower’ it may show that judgments concerning continuity of the same one through conscious changes are probable with a high, perhaps very high degree of probability. The probability referred to here rests on the direct evidence of consciousness and upon the fact that there is no evidence of such a divine intervention in consciousness. Furthermore, the probability of the perdurance of unities other than myself is also reasonable to assert, given the absence of evidence for the metaphysical thesis of divine interference or tampering by the evil genius.

226 Method in Metaphysics

Thus, as Lonergan argues, continuity can be found between the unities identified by common-sense descriptive predicates and the explanatory conjugates that are posited in science. Of course, some apparent unities may turn out to be aggregates of unities, but it seems there is reason to believe that such unities as dogs and trees are thought to be so both by common sense and science. Such hypotheses, as those put forward by the enthusiast for Parfit or Descartes’ evil genius, must themselves be argued for. Yes, it is possible that the chair before me is not one enduring object but a succession of lookalikes whose annihilation and creation is so rapid that it is undetectable to my senses. However, if this is a possibility the question remains as to what evidence I have for asserting that it is the case, or probably the case. If the data presents me with no evidence for change I have no evidence to affirm the hypothesis as so, or probably so. However, if we are to claim that the unity of, say, an animal is one, which can be affirmed in an intelligible and reasonable assessment of the data, how should this be understood? Lonergan argues that from an adequately explanatory viewpoint such unity will be known from a successive set of conjugate forms, the acts or occurrences of which provide evidence that there is not simply a coincidental aggregate in such-and-such data, but that since occurrences of different conjugate acts on the physical, chemical, and biological levels (in the case of an animal) are occurring in a way that appears to be systematic, a unity, or thing, is operative. Since the systematic recurrences of the schemes on the various levels are in some way correlative, one has evidence for affirming this unity, identity whole in the data. Lonergan writes: ‘The key notion in the explanatory species is that any lower species of things, Ti, with their conjugates, Ci, and their schemes, Si, admit a series of coincidental aggregates of events, say Eijm, Eijn, Eijo ... which stand in correspondence with a series of higher conjugates, Cjm, Cjn, Cjo … of a higher genus of things, Tj.’42 Lonergan initially illustrates such a hierarchic construction from chemistry and the periodic table. He then moves on to discuss the example provided by the higher unities that are animals. He continues: The third application of the key notion takes the biological organism as its lower level and animal sensitivity as its higher system ... The higher conjugates, Cjx, now are defined implicitly by the laws of psychic stimulus and psychic response, and these conjugates make systematic otherwise merely coincidental aggregates of neural events, Eijx. However, these neural events occur within an already constituted nervous system which, in great part, would have no function if the higher psychic system did not exist to inform it.43

Universals, Tropes, Substance, and Events 227

The key to understanding Lonergan’s explanatory, rather than descriptive account, of the hierarchic unity of a substance, then, is in terms of what we may intelligently grasp on the basis of the data. If reductionism extends into metaphysics the incoherence of picture-thinking empiricism, this is because, as Hume teaches us so eloquently, we do not see, or sense causes. Thus the ‘formal cause,’ which explains why such-and-such data appear as they do and change as they do, in perhaps a random, perhaps regular fashion, is reasoned to in an inference from the data and its changes to the most reasonable explanation of the same. Therefore the diverse sciences do, in fact, in practice witness to the need for ‘higher explanations’ if the data is to be explained in all its aspects. One does not explain all there is to the data that is this chair, if one concerns oneself exclusively with the scientific disciplines regarding wood and ignores those that give an insight into, say, the cultural, economic, and aesthetic reasons to do with why this artefact is as it is. The data that scientific enquiry has to do with is not static. There is evidence of change, and of change that is a cumulative process. Such is the area of reflection with which Lonergan’s analysis of emergent probability is concerned. The unity of the thing, or substance, then, is a unity of data partially explained by the different departments of science, but the unity of which is grasped as that which is taken to be the most fundamental formal cause of why such-and-such data are as they are and change in the way they do. The regularity of the solar system is such that we have no reason to think that this scheme of recurrence, as Lonergan would name it, requires further explanation as being a system such as we find in the case of an animal. Indeed, it is the flexibility and freedom, taken together with aspects of stability, that provides evidence that the various aspects understood by different departments in science coalesce in this instance because the fundamental controlling cause is an individual of an animal species. Thus, there is a certain freedom to be observed as one ascends the hierarchy of things. Lonergan writes: ‘While chemical compounds and unicellular entities systematize aggregates that, at least initially, are put together non-systematically, multicellular formations systematize aggregates that they themselves assemble in systematic fashion.’44 But might it not be asked whether the systematic regularity occurs in the case of a particular aggregate of data because of the operation of a cause external to that data – a cause that is not a formal cause constitutive of substantial unity? There are, for example, cases of intricate and intimate symbiosis in the animal kingdom, where changes in the data are not because of the operation of one thing but because of the cooperation of two. Perhaps what was thought to be part of some exotic fish turns out to be

228 Method in Metaphysics

another creature living in a close relationship. Here one should simply observe that if evidence is discovered for such independence then that only serves to underscore what is argued for here. For the evidence will support a probable judgment which affirms that although x depends in many ways upon y it is reasonable to say that x also has an independence from y such that it is not part of the integrated system of y. This understanding of the hierarchically constructed unity of the thing or substances in accord with a critical realism, which holds that what is so is known by intelligent and reasonable assessment of the data, stands, then, in stark contrast to the picture-thinking of atomist reductionism, a picturethinking which, in Lonergan’s view, is an inherent ‘temptation’ for us, given the polymorphism of our flow of consciousness. Naturally, such a tendency leads us to ask whether there are not ‘things within things,’ given that the scientific laws indicating the existence of atoms and, on the way up, as it were, of chemical compounds may be verified in the case of the elements constitutive of an individual animal. ‘What happens to those lower things?’ one may be inclined to ask. Lonergan’s response is, again, to insist upon the difference between ‘body’ and the intellectual construct ‘thing.’ The latter is what is understood as the concrete totality of the data considered under all relevant aspects. And Lonergan writes: Our claim ... is the simple statement of fact that in an object of a higher order, there is an intelligible, concrete unity differentiated by conjugates of both the lower and the higher order, but there is no further, intelligible, concrete unity to be discerned in the same data and to be differentiated solely by conjugates of some lower order. In other words, just as the real is what is to be known by verified hypothesis, so also change is what is to be known through correct, successive, and opposed affirmations.45 As Philip McShane points out, such an approach is de facto operative in the investigations of science that demonstrate the point that ‘on any adequate view of verification the laws of behaviour of the elephant are at least as well verified as the probability-laws of electrons.’46 Further Elucidations: Loux’s Questions on Substance One can observe the way that a number of principles are invoked in the metaphysical debates between the various analytical philosophers whose contributions have been discussed. One such principle is the ‘identity of indiscernibles,’ the formulation of which is usually attributed to Leibniz. However, the suspicion manifest in the present work regarding the kind of

Universals, Tropes, Substance, and Events 229

metaphysical method adopted in rationalist philosophy, more geometrico, also extends to the invocation of this principle. Is the principle itself, one may ask, sufficiently grounded in the cognitional way in which we actually ‘discern’ individuals? Thus, following through on the implications of the cognitional structure we have argued for, one may point out that the ‘discernment’ of an individual involves experiencing the data, understanding and grasping a possible unity in that data, and affirming that the unity, individual, exists, or probably exists. Accordingly one may agree that, at least with regard to the entities we normally deal with in the world, Aristotelian ‘individuating’ matter plays a role in the discernment, identification, of distinct individuals. This implies, then, that the discernment of individuals occurs via spatio-temporal identification on the basis of descriptive and, perhaps, explanatory predicates. In understanding an intelligible unity in the data one grasps a form, a form that is possibly instantiated in this instance. The similarity between forms, based upon the fact that similars are similarly understood, is what may be expressed as a universal. But as we have noted above, much confusion arises if the forms instantiated in actual realities are not distinguished from the abstract idea, or universal, that arises because a form as understood on the second level of coming to know is a possibility that, as far as one is aware at that stage, may or may not exist in one or more instance. Finally, the individual is not known, successfully ‘discerned,’ until one achieves reasonable judgment as to the existence or probable existence of the same. Reference to space-time location, then, is not by itself sufficient to give us knowledge of the individual, since one is always referring to ‘something’ that is understood to be at that time. This manifests the cognitional fact of ‘abstraction’ from the space-time or material conditions, which, Lonergan insists, is an inherent characteristic of our knowing, and which is an important fact to understand when coming at such abstractive procedures in science as are evident in, say, the formulations concerning Einsteinian relativity.47 But if the diverse forms instantiated at the various spatio-temporal locations do not of themselves suffice to distinguish an individual, and to distinguish between individuals (for similar forms are understood similarly), then how is such identification and differentiation possible? The answer is that neither experience alone, nor a combination of experience and understanding constitute knowledge of individuals. Rather the final increment in the knowing process, judgment, is essential to complete the picture, for in judgment the actual existence of the thing is known. Knowledge of the existence of more than one individual is had, then, in a series of positive and negative judgments: A is, B is, C is; A is not B, nor C; B is not A, nor C, etc. Identity is known in judgment. In judgment one

230 Method in Metaphysics

knows the act, the actual existence of an individual. Naturally, that existence is the existence of an individual constituted not by some bare ‘act of existence,’ but as an actual existence of an individual constituted also by form and materiality. Might one not object here that since the ‘act of existence,’ known in judgment, is similar to other acts of existence, this position does not escape the dilemmas presented earlier concerning that certain ‘special ingredient’ that renders an individual unique? In response one must point out that, indeed, if we are understanding the various metaphysical elements, potentiality or ‘matter,’ form, and act of existence, and the correlative and cumulative cognitional acts in which these are intended (experience, understanding, judgment), we are understanding acts and elements precisely as similar; we are understanding the natures of these things. However, what one needs to understand with regard to de facto knowledge of the existence of an individual is that it is precisely the nature of a particular judgment to grasp the existence of an actual, particular individual. In other words, in understanding ‘act of existence,’ ‘judgment of existence,’ one is prescinding from the occurrence of this or that judgment in which existences are known. It is through insight into these particular cases of judgment of existence that one comes to understand ‘act of existence’ as a general expression. But it is in each individual act of judgment as to the existence of this or that particular entity that the distinct acts of existence of this or that entity are known. I think it is oversight of such distinctions that leads to the quandary of debates concerning what the special ingredient is for uniqueness. Naturally when any candidate is put forward, it is put forward as something to be understood, and the level of understanding in our cognitional process is a level on which we grasp ‘possibilia,’ that may obtain in one or many cases. The trick here, then, is to advert to the cognitional act of judgment, beyond the level of understanding as that judgment is de facto exercised. If one does so, one may come to know an instance, or instances of acts, in which is grasped the unique existence of the individual. As was seen in chapter 5 the notion of ‘haecceity’ is a notion emergent from an insufficient attention to cognitional detail. The idea seems to be cobbled together from indexical expressions like ‘this’ and ‘that,’ which themselves appear to arise from our references to the spatio-temporal location of individuals. As we have argued above, this falls short of the full knowledge of the existence of the individual had via cognitional acts on three levels and terminating in judgment concerning the existence, identity, of an individual. ‘Thisness’ is a compensatory notion invoked by philosophers who lack a sufficiently articulated account of cognitional process.48 A related issue,

Universals, Tropes, Substance, and Events 231

which may be worth considering in this context, arises from the discussion in medieval philosophy concerning transcendental numbers. Although this discussion had to do with theological questions pertaining to the identification of non-material beings, I think that even if one’s world view does not extend to include such realities, the upshot of such debates for the question of identification of individuals is important. According to Aristotelian philosophy numbers are differentiated by material instantiation; the division of the continuum in counting has its basis in making discrete divisions, mentally at least, in the material continuum. However, given their theological belief that there are non-material beings, mediaeval philosophers sought to find another way to differentiate individuals. Part of such a discussion was the idea of transcendental numbers – numbers distinguished not by material difference but by some other determining factor. Looking at this question from the perspective of his own philosophy Lonergan argues that one can, indeed, make sense of at least some of the medieval attempts to solve this problem. If ‘unity’ is understood not only in terms of Aristotle’s materially based mathematical division, but rather in terms of the unity that is ‘all that is to be understood about an individual,’ then one can proceed by way of Lonergan’s series of positive and negative judgments to ‘discern’ or identify an individual, a unity, a ‘one’ in a way that is not intrinsically bound up with the conditions of materiality or space-time. This individual would be specified as to form via the unity that is ‘all that is to be understood’ about the individual, and known as existing and distinct from other individuals through the series of positive and negative judgments. As I say, whatever one might think of the notion of nonmaterial reality on other grounds, I think that as a limit case this avenue of discernment of the distinct individual is helpful in reflecting upon the fact that, while normally such knowledge involves experience of a space-time located (indexically nominated ‘this’ or ‘that’), an understanding of the data so nominated, and a judgment in which is known the actual existence of the individual, it may be that this is not a necessary way of identification in all cases. If this is so then it helps to focus attention on the essential requisites for knowing or discerning an individual, which are understanding of form and knowledge that an individual with this form actually exists, knowledge had in judgment. Such, then, are the elements to be considered when reflecting upon the third of Loux’s questions, which we noted above, regarding the status of ‘haecceity.’ What we have said above on the question of reductionism regarding Lonergan’s account of the antireductionist insights at work in the methods of science goes some way towards answering Loux’s question concerning legitimate and illegitimate reduction. Loux’s second question,

232 Method in Metaphysics

which had to do with the issue of the uniqueness of a substance that, however, will always be identified by a repertoire of characteristics also (possibly) shared with others is, of course, bound up with the question of ‘haecceity,’ and I have considered the implications of Lonergan’s approach for that notion at some length. Thus, as was argued, since characteristics are what are understood on the level of understanding prior to judgment as to actuality, or existence, naturally the thing will be identified in part by such descriptive and/or explanatory predicates. The judgment of the actual existence of an individual is relative to the understanding of that individual, since the individual known to exist is characterized by such and such aspects of its form. The existent individual is truly an ontological composite of (normally for our knowing) materiality (potency), form, and act of existence. Thus the form of ‘this’ individual is not shared by any other individual. However, since form is what is understood by us on the ‘level’ of understanding naturally, on that level, we are faced by formal characteristics that may be instantiated in other individuals. Forms, as instantiated in individuals, then, are real ontological constituents; as mere objects of thought they are universals. Further, since similarly understood and known individuals in the real world seem to be many, we have the beginnings of evidence for what Lonergan refers to as ‘explanatory genera and species.’ More will be said on this topic later. However, we have already broached the subject by outlining something of Lonergan’s account of a properly explanatory account of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ things, with the former as the formal cause explaining why there is systematic regularity to be found in certain data. Such regularity is to be regarded as merely coincidental aggregation from the viewpoint of lower things and scientific laws. Strawson and Whitehead on Substance Since I have alluded already in this chapter to the deconstruction of the notion of substance in the work of twentieth-century philosophers like Cassirer (in his Substance and Form) and Whitehead, it may not be inappropriate before leaving this section of the chapter devoted to the treatment of substance to comment briefly on the views of the latter philosopher in this area. Susan Haack’s discussion of Strawson and Whitehead is helpful in focusing upon the way substance emerges as a topic in Whitehead’s thought, and so I will once again refer to her discussion in the present context.49 In her essay contrasting Strawson’s Individuals (1959) with Whitehead’s Concept of Nature (1919) Haack emphasizes their very different approaches to the notion of substance. For Strawson a descriptive metaphysics demonstrates the centrality of substance, since analysis shows that central to our

Universals, Tropes, Substance, and Events 233

conceptual scheme is the ‘subject-predicate’ distinction. This distinction in our thinking shows the way we give priority to objects over events in the process of identifying individuals. Indeed, it has been argued that the ‘subject-predicate’ distinction is the leitmotif that characterizes Strawson’s philosophical work in the fields of philosophy of language, logic, and metaphysics.50 According to Haack, this priority is reversed by Whitehead in the name of the world view revealed by contemporary science and the revisionary metaphysics this entails. Thus, for Whitehead events are given ontological priority. Given that, on Strawson’s position, ontological priority is defined in terms of capacity to pick out and talk about things, Strawson argues that since our spatio-temporal framework allows the ‘picking out’ identification of y by, say, ‘hearer of y,’ such a conceptual scheme is necessary not contingent. Within this identification system, Strawson maintains, material bodies are ontologically prior to private particulars, such as sense data, and to unobservables such as the constructs of science. Haack observes that this is not surprising as, according to Strawson, identification is always in a third person, public domain fashion. Any unobservable is identified via an observable (three dimensional body). Therefore the latter has priority over the former. Whitehead’s hermeneutic of suspicion with regard to ordinary language (the language embedded in early modern science), and the language of Aristotelian logic in general, leads him to assert that the progress of science has shown up the deficiencies of such a conceptual scheme. In this view Strawson’s commitment to such a scheme is typical of the intransigence of the Kantian, who conflates the linguistic scheme of a particular epoch with a scheme that is a priori and necessary (at least for us). Haack, in evaluating the points of conflict that she detects in the work of the two philosophers, concludes that Whitehead could well exploit a weakness in Strawson’s position with regard to his claims about our way of giving priority in identification to objects over events. She points to a counterexample: one can proceed in the other direction in identification. Sometimes we identify a person or thing via an event in which that individual participated. So one can refer to the ‘murder weapon.’ On the other hand, she takes issue with Whitehead’s claim that a false picturethinking that gives priority to objects, or substance, over events has dominated our tradition given the prominence in Aristotelian logic of the ‘subject-predicate’ distinction – a prominence overturned by developments in modern thought. While remarking that there are philosophical influences at work in contemporary logic that are suspect, Haack nevertheless maintains that the ‘subject-predicate’ distinction is no less central to contemporary thought and logic than it was in Aristotle’s Organon.51

234 Method in Metaphysics

We have noted the methodological issues at stake between Strawson, Whitehead, and Lonergan in chapter 3 and that discussion will not be repeated here. Confining the issue to Haack’s examination of the concept of substance in these two thinkers, some comments that flow from that earlier examination of the issues are, however, appropriate. The position taken in this book, then, would lead one to sympathize with Whitehead’s critique of the static Kantianism evident in Strawson’s philosophy, and to agree that not everything in the Aristotelian heritage is a benefit. However, Haack is quite right, I believe, in arguing that Whitehead is wrong to think that the subject-predicate relation has misled us into giving priority to objects over events, and that it is somehow replaced in modern thought. The subject-predicate relation is as much operative in judgments about events, their quality and occasions of occurrence, as it is in judgments attributing qualities to a substance, and as it is in the tentative judgments of the scientist or, for that matter, in the judgments and pronouncements of a philosopher like Whitehead. On the other hand, I do not consider Strawson’s method totally mistaken insofar as it draws attention to the evidence for a metaphysical scheme of things (of semantic truth makers) to be had in ordinary language usage. His error is to take such schemes as beyond criticism or revision. Therefore, while Haack’s point about identifying an object via an event, as in the case of ‘the murder weapon,’ is well taken, it still remains that there is evidence in our ordinary usage for the fact that we have an awareness of the intelligible priority of substance vis-à-vis accidents, or differentiate – Lonergan’s conjugate form and act. As was argued above, canards of philosophers like Cassirer and Whitehead against substance are to the point when these are directed against the picture-thinking metaphysical notions of substance as ‘extended body,’ powerfully operative as these are within our traditions. They are not to the point when taken as criticisms of the intelligible construct of the ‘thing,’ of substance, as the ‘one and the same’ continuant through alterations, which can be intelligently grasped and affirmed to be the case on the basis of the data as evidence. Indeed, this ‘anti-picture-thinking’ vector has not been absent in the tradition of Western philosophy itself. The definition of ‘accident’ found in inheritors of the Aristotelian legacy such as Aquinas is simply ‘that which inheres, or depends in a certain way, upon another.’ When understood in this way, the evidence of ordinary language reference to an intelligible dependence of an aspect of a thing upon that thing need not fall prey to Whitehead’s criticisms of the ‘inherent materialism’ of the ordinary language of much of the Western cultural tradition, for, as Lonergan writes, commenting upon Aquinas’s use of Aristotle’s insights into such intelligible dependency:

Universals, Tropes, Substance, and Events 235

Now inasmuch as the nature of a thing is constituted intelligibly by its relation to or dependence on something else, it is impossible to abstract from the something else: on the other hand, inasmuch as the nature of a thing is not dependent intelligibly on something else, in that measure it is possible to abstract from the something else. Thus, one can abstract ‘animal’ from ‘foot’ but not ‘foot’ from ‘animal’: one can abstract ‘whiteness’ from ‘man’ and ‘man’ from ‘whiteness’; one can abstract neither ‘son’ from ‘father’ nor ‘father’ from ‘son.’ And Lonergan continues by outlining the direction of Aristotle’s thought expressed in Metaphysics VII, 10 and 11. In the order of intelligible priority, a thing is constituted, first, by substance, secondly, by quantity, thirdly by quality, fourthly, by passions and movements. Now one cannot conceive the intelligibly posterior and prescind from the prior: substance enters into the definition of accident; similarly, sensible qualities presuppose quantity, and changes presuppose sensible qualities: it follows that one cannot abstract accident from substance, sensible quality from quantity, change from sensible quality.52 To return to Haack’s example of the ‘murder weapon,’ then, one cannot understand the idea of ‘a stabbing’ without understanding something of an object such as a knife. But one may think of a knife and grant that it may have a history in which there are no instances of its being used in a stabbing. While Haack’s defence of Whitehead against Strawson stands, insofar as it is true to say individuals may be identified via events, still the meaningful identification of those events as having the character that they do is dependent upon their relation to individuals or substances. Events and Occurrences Strawson’s insistence on the priority of individuals over events in the way we discover the world also comes in for criticism from the philosopher whose work has stimulated much of the discussion of events in analytical circles in the last twenty years, Donald Davidson. In Davidson’s Essays on Actions and Events there is support given to Strawson’s fundamentally Aristotelian position that an event, such as ‘a birth,’ always has reference to an individual – it must be the birth of someone.53 And that it is true that events are defined upon objects is also Davidson’s position.54 However, like Haack, Davidson contends that the way of identification points also in the

236 Method in Metaphysics

other direction – to a dependence of things upon events. Davidson contends that Strawson’s reasoning to the contrary is weak. Strawson maintains that, ‘the blow that rendered Peter blind was struck by John’ can be paraphrased as ‘Peter struck John’ and that the event of ‘blow’ can get left out. But the obvious objection to this is that we cannot do without the further event word ‘struck.’ As indicated above, my own position is that in terms of identification, events as occurrences (which are conjugate acts) are crucial. We come to discern individuals through descriptive and/or explanatory predicates that refer to what is happening. Such predicates refer to the changes in data that allow us to identify a continuant through change. Fido is identified as that unity which is found in all the changes of data that are the various sounds of barking, yelping, and whining, and sights of the now leaping, now dormant bundle of black fur. Strawson is, then, right to stress the intelligible dependence of differentiae, or conjugates, upon the individual, as was argued above, but he is wrong to talk of a priority in terms of discernment, or identification, for in that process, as the word ‘differentiae’ itself indicates, the priority is of occurrence over individual. On the other hand, one should not be led by a denial of this defect in Strawson to overlook the intelligible priority of individuals over events (conjugates) that does exist, in the way that seems to happen in Haack’s Whiteheadinspired critique. Davidson begins his analysis of events by looking at identity questions and posing the question: When are two events identical? How are we to analyse the claim that ‘he raised his arm’ and ‘he signalled’ refer to same event? Quine has turned ‘No entity without identity’ into a philosophical slogan in recent years. However, Davidson avers that more obvious is the prescription ‘No identity without an entity,’ and linguistically it follows, ‘No statements of identity without singular terms.’ So we have singular terms in ‘I ate breakfast this morning,’ ‘Vesuvius erupted in 1906.’ But the question arises for the metaphysician, why not analyse these away and go for sentences like ‘bread nourishes,’ which avoid singular terms? Are there reasons, Davidson asks, for taking events seriously?55 His response to his question is to say that explanation seems to call for events. In reflecting upon a statement like ‘Last week there was an avalanche in the village,’ we include considerations like the fact that there seem to be statistical laws about avalanches. And he writes, ‘All this talk of descriptions and redescriptions makes sense, it would seem, only on the assumption that there are bona fide entities to be described and redescribed.’56 Our everyday language points to them as do our intuitions. However, for philosophers who approach events through such linguistic avenues, what the evidence of ordinary language in this instance amounts

Universals, Tropes, Substance, and Events 237

to is a matter of debate. So Davidson and Jaegowan Kim disagree over how one should characterize an event such as ‘Brutus’ stabbing of Caesar.’ Kim holds that in this particular instance the stabbing did result in the death of Caesar, and so the stabbing was identical with the killing. However, since events might have turned out differently, this identity is contingent and not necessary. Davidson responds that in ordinary language we tend not to distinguish between intention and accomplished action caused by an intentional act. On the other hand, one might wish to support Kim here by considering cases of ordinary discourse where there do seem to be more fine-grained distinctions at work. So in the ‘ordinary discourse’ of the courtroom, efforts are made to distinguish different types of intention so as to identify a crime as, perhaps, manslaughter rather than murder. And the contingency to which Kim refers appears to be alluded to in the ordinary discourse that shows awareness of ‘moral luck.’ The gangster drove his car into the front of an office intending to kill someone inside and was apprehended by the police afterwards. If he had been successful the charge of murder would clearly have been brought against him, but ‘moral luck’ intervened, for the intended victim was not present and so even the charge of attempted murder becomes a difficult one to prove. In his essay ‘Ontologies of Events’ Lawrence Lombard offers both an overview of some of the recent contributions in this area, and outlines ways in which he believes greater clarity may be achieved with regard to some of the issues in the debate.57 Lombard observes that Davidson’s classic paper ‘The Logical Form of Action Sentences,’ which looked at the semantics of events statements, asked the question, ‘How do they mean what they mean, when part of the meaning seems to be linked inferentially to other statements?’ Thus Davidson argued that to make semantic sense of sentences concerning or involving, say, the expression ‘buttering toast,’ we require a species of events called ‘butterings.’ Lombard notes that many arguments in the literature on events as on other metaphysical entities are of this semantic nature.58 However, it appears that Chisholm’s and Davidson’s analyses of events are responsive to different semantic data. So while, at one time, Davidson emphasized the causal role of events in such sentences as, ‘The short circuit caused the fire,’ Chisholm, on the other hand, stressed the facts that a) events seem to be things that recur, and b) among them we must include psychological or intentional attitudes. Davidson’s forthright insistence upon understanding events through the notion of cause, evident in his earlier treatment of the topic, was later abandoned, since he accepted the criticism that identification problems lead to circularity: causes of events are themselves effects. If causal sequence is not such a promising candidate for the semantic analysis of events statements, then other theorists favour tackling questions

238 Method in Metaphysics

such as, ‘How many events can occur in the same place at same time?’ Chisholm’s answer to this question leads him to say that events are abstract universals. They are abstract, since more than one can occur to the same subject at the same time; and they are universals because they recur. According to Chisholm propositions and events are kinds of states of affairs. Events, unlike propositions, are not time-bound: ‘Jones falling’ is an event; ‘Jones falling at noon’ is a proposition. Lombard is doubtful that this will do the semantic work we require since an event is a change and a change is something concrete that we can verify. In contrast to Chisholm’s view is the one according to which an event is a particular. In this view, at most only one event can occur at any given moment in space and time.59 But against this view Lombard claims there are counterexamples: someone can, in the same time period, catch cold, swim the channel, and count his blessings. It also commits one to the view that each event is some temporal part of a thing, and to the Parmenidean view that no thing ever changes. At the other end of the spectrum from those who insist upon only one event at each discrete time is Kim. For Kim an indefinitely large number of events can occur at the same place at the same time, because an event is the exemplification of a property at some time, and events are objects of explanation. The event of x turning red is also the event of x acquiring the property of being coloured; these are different properties so their acquisition implies different events. However, according to Lombard, this position gives rise to odd identity results: ‘According to this theory, since the relevant pair of properties are not identical, no stabbing is a killing, no walk a stroll, no party is a celebration.’60 If one accepts Kim’s view, Lombard avers, the problem is not that spaces are too crowded but that too much is going on if events are particulars. While Kim thinks an event is an exemplification of a property that a thing has at a particular time, Lombard counters by arguing that, ‘an exemplification of a property is a thing that has the property.’61 One might, then, talk of properties as exemplified ‘at a zone’ rather than ‘by an object,’ leaving room for the possibility that there are events that have no subject, changes that are not changes in any thing. Lombard disagrees, for in his view any change is change to a thing. And he says that a replacement of scenery in a play, for example, is not a change for it does not occur to any thing. His position is a ‘property exemplification’ one. He understands changes as that which a thing undergoes. For him, therefore, an event is not an object’s having of a property, but an object’s going from the having of one property to the having of another property. Another thesis espoused by some in this debate is an indeterminacy one. Those who defend this option argue that there is no way to pin down definitely what an event is.62 Lombard wishes to resist such runaway scepticism

Universals, Tropes, Substance, and Events 239

and argues that at least we can say, in simple cases like ‘Jones’s stroll on Tuesday’ and ‘Jones’s walk on Tuesday’ what changes make both these statements true. One can, however, expand the scope of one’s critique of this view and point out that such apparently moderate scepticism cannot prevent an escalation of sceptical doubt that, one assumes, those who propound the thesis would not, or could not (given other aspects of their positions), ascribe to. So, taking a sceptical attitude to the possibility of an objective designation, or description, of any occurrence or event cannot prevent the emergence of global scepticism. If there is no way of determining an objective account that gives a definite description of an event, there is no way of doing so for objects or individuals either, for such unities are differentiated, they are known, via knowing their conjugates, their acts, as occurrences. Countering such scepticism one may deploy several related types of argument, one of which will be the kind of self-referential argument explored in our earlier account of cognitional structure. Thus, if I deny that I make the act that is the act of judgment, making such a judgment shows my claim to be false. But since to deny any definite description of any event implies the denial of definite knowledge that such-and-such is an act of judgment, or of questioning, or of attention to data, then such a denial will, in fact, show itself to be similarly incoherent or self-destructive, as such conscious acts occur in the process of the argument for the position put forward itself. I might argue that when I utter a judgment this, unbeknown to me, is a signal for war to break out on a distant planet. Perhaps so, but this does not deny the fact that the act uttered is an act of judgment, whatever else it may be part of, or whatever else may result from it. If I can find out nothing of the nature of an individual thing, I can hardly begin to expand my knowledge of it either. There can, of course, arise questions to do with a distinction between descriptive knowledge claims concerning events, and scientific or other explanatory accounts. Descriptive knowledge of events, or changes may be valid, and may be correct or incorrect, just as explanatory knowledge may be. As Aristotle remarks, the doctor knows the reason why a person has changed from ill health to good health after the administration of some herbal compound, but the non-expert also knows that there has been a change for the better. Indeed, it is change in data, observed and known in descriptive terms to begin with, that lies at the origins of the scientific attempt to give an explanation of such changes; and while the ordinary observer may not know why some compound changes colour at the bottom of a test tube, they correctly know that it does so. Further, genuine questions arise to do with the description of events and redescription of events as the course of history develops. Such questions arise in discussions of his-

240 Method in Metaphysics

toriography. They cannot be treated in full here; however, one or two observations can be made with regard to them. As history goes on there may be reevaluations of events in terms of the relative importance of those events for understanding what is going forward in history. The birth of some individual may not be regarded as of world-transforming importance at the time of its occurrence, but as history moves on this person may become very important because of his or her impact on world events, and so the event of the birth is noted by later historians. However, in terms of giving an initial description of an event this should not present any further problems than those discussed above, when we said that a satisfactory initial description of an event is not undermined by the acquisition of further knowledge but is, rather, the condition of possibility for such an advance. What we are referring to in the historical situation is, of course, causal effect. In this context we can note a doctrine implied by Aristotle, and asserted by Aquinas, that causality is more essentially a change in the recipient than in the cause of change. As an author of a book one is the cause of all kinds of changes in the minds of readers one has never met, but such changes do not necessarily result in any change in oneself. Turning to questions we have seen in the discussions above, concerning issues such as how many events can occur in the same place at the same time, we can also register some degree of agreement with the position taken by Lombard, but not developed in any detail by him, in the article we have referred to. I would agree, then, with his criticism of Chisholm’s ‘abstract universals’ that changes and events are what are verified in the concrete, in reality. On the other hand, Lombard is also correct to resist the temptation of the picture-thinking, atomistic position of those who refuse to allow more than one event at one place and time. Since occurrences that are changes to a thing or a unity share the same hierarchic construction as that unity, on the position taken here, one can say that such acts are also to be understood in a non-reductionist way. As we saw above, Lonergan argues that a unity, or thing, is to be understood and known by grasping the ‘formal cause’ in some data understood as individual. In such cases there are not, then, properly speaking, lower things in higher things, as there is in the case of foreign bodies, a virus say, in an animal. And this is equally the case with the acts of the thing. So if I wave my arm as a way of saying ‘Goodbye,’ the answer to the question ‘Why that?’ put to the data, cannot be complete without giving the formal cause of the act, which is the intention of communicating the meaning ‘Goodbye.’ The physiological occurrences will be a part of the story, but a necessary not a sufficient part. It is in this way that I think the question of how many events are occurring at the same place and time is to be handled, at least in part. Another aspect

Universals, Tropes, Substance, and Events 241

of the issue may have to do, as we have seen above, with considerations beyond the individual and its acts, considerations having to do with the causal sequence/s these acts contingently give rise to. It will be recalled that while Kim thinks an event is an exemplification of a property that a thing has at a particular time, Lombard argues that an exemplification of a property is a thing that has the property. Lombard is correct, I believe, in some way to say this. On the view argued here an event, if it is an act of an individual, is, like the individual itself, an ontological compound of potency (normally the empirical), form, and actual existence. So, an act like a judgment could be said, using Lombard’s language, to be an entity that has the form of, nature of, ‘judgment.’ Lombard is right, in other words, if he means that, not only is a substance or individual an existing reality, but acts of that individual are also realities of a certain kind. However, while Lombard’s language points to something important not quite captured by Kim, the latter’s assertion also draws attention to something significant missed by Lombard: conjugate acts do, as Kim insists, manifest habits or dispositions of a subject or substance. So an act of judgment does exemplify a disposition or a capacity on the part of a human person to perform such an act. Further, if one has acquired a habit or disposition of a wide-ranging nature, such as ‘knowledge of archaeology,’ this will be manifest in acts of well-informed judgment and intelligent questioning.63 Lombard is insistent that an event is something that happens to an individual: an individual goes through events that are changes. Therefore the notion of an event as not tied to an individual in this way must be rejected. If by ‘event’ or ‘occurrence’ in this case is meant an accident independent of a substance (in a way that is analogous to Whitehead’s meaning) then this is to be rejected. As was argued above, confusions are generated in this area because of the picture-thinking, presencing tendency to conflate substance with ‘body.’ However, it should be realized that following what is best in the Aristotelian tradition ‘accident,’ or conjugate act, should be understood as that which has a certain type of intelligible dependence on a ‘thing,’ or substance, and that a substance is what exists, however briefly, as an intelligible unity that does not have such a dependence on its accidents. It may have other types of dependence, such as causal dependence, but these are of a different kind. However, if by his refusal to countenance other types of events Lombard means that the semantics of events language is adequately served by the ontological account of changes to a substance, he is surely wide of the mark. This seems to be the case, for he maintains that one cannot call the change of scenery in a play an ‘event’ because it is not a change to a thing. Even if one is not shy of suggesting alternations to ordinary usage when

242 Method in Metaphysics

appropriate, this does seem to be an unnecessary restriction of the variety of uses made of the word ‘event’ in ordinary discourse. We not only talk of events as changes to a thing but of events that are the emergence and disappearance of individuals, of births and deaths. Furthermore, in any adequate metaphysics we need to attend not only to the reality of such events, but to the way they may significantly alter statistical trends, and the probabilities of emergence and survival of new ecologies of individuals. The ‘event’ that is the extinction of a number of individuals of an animal species may be the event that leads to the eventual extinction of the species as a whole.

Recto Running Head 243

8 Causality

Daniel M. Hausman’s book is a good example of current work being done by analytical philosophers on the metaphysics of causality.1 Hausman not only presents us with his own attempt to identify the defining characteristics of causality, principally in terms of various types of asymmetry in causeeffect relationships, and in terms of his Independence thesis, but he also provides a useful survey of approaches taken by other analytical philosophers, including influx theorists, Lewis’s counterfactual analysis, and agency theory. For the latter he has considerable sympathy although he pinpoints weaknesses in some current philosophies adopting this method of analysing causality, and his critical evaluation of the various options taken by analytical philosophers is of considerable value. Hausman makes it clear, in his work, that the Humean theory of causality remains key in current analytical debates on causality, and the various approaches taken by different philosophers in one way or another define themselves as critical responses to the theses advanced by Hume; such responses may be more sympathetic or less sympathetic to aspects of the position adumbrated by the Scottish Enlightenment thinker. In this chapter I will use Hausman’s discussion of causality as a way into a critical analysis of the Humean tradition’s treatment of causality from the perspective of Lonergan’s philosophy. One of my principal contentions will be that while recent philosophers like Hausman are critical of some of Hume’s positions, there is an avoidance of engagement with Hume’s more radical, sceptical deconstruction of the empiricist model of human knowing with which Hausman works, a deconstruction that issues, in effect, in the philosophical option of phenomenalism. I would suggest, and the suggestion has already been put forward in a previous chapter,

244 Method in Metaphysics

that this deconstruction of empiricism is both Hume’s most important contribution to our understanding of causality and, at once, the point in his philosophy most vulnerable to attack. Hume’s insistence that we have no empiricist, representationalist, ‘visual’ perception of the ordinary causal connections we take to be there in the world demonstrates the inability of philosophies of a certain type to provide an adequate account of our causal knowledge. And the Humean critique also invites a more satisfactory account of the origins of causal knowledge, an account that will at once indicate where the shortcomings of Hume’s general position on epistemology are to be found. Before turning to an analysis and critique of the Humean position and ‘Humean themes’ current in philosophical accounts of causality, I will outline some of the main features of Hausman’s position and offer some critical comment on these. In his initial chapter, Hausman explains that his own views on causality can in some way be understood as having arisen from a shift away from an initial ‘picture-thinking’ vision of causality, this shift having occurred in the process of analysis of and argument with other philosophical views. Hausman’s remarks on his initial, ‘intuitive’ vision of causality are cognate with some of Lonergan’s remarks referred to in my earlier discussions of method. Thus, such ‘intuitive’ visions of causality include imaginative projections from anthropomorphic experiences of ‘pushing’ and ‘pulling,’ and picturing cause as a ‘glue’ or ‘subtle influx.’ Whether Hausman’s position as a whole can be regarded as having moved away in a wholehearted or clear-headed fashion from such picture-thinking is a question I will raise. Certainly, his frank profession of an empiricist epistemology in the first pages of his work does little to allay one’s suspicions that he will not be able to pursue in a satisfactory way a dialectical discrimination between what is picture-thinking in the discussion of causality, on the one hand, and what may be critically validated, on the other, in the pages to follow. While Hausman’s statement, ‘I take empiricism for granted,’2 is apparently tempered by the admission that learning is a matter both of observation and experiment, we are also informed that what this means is unclear. Further, Hausman nowhere indicates to us where the position on knowing he assumes is discussed in more detail by himself, or which philosophies or philosophers he follows or agrees with in epistemology. I will take the opportunity provided by Hausman’s remarks in this regard to observe that such a casual and ad hoc approach to the dependency of one’s metaphysical position on epistemology is unacceptable to the point of intellectual scandal. I see no way forward for analytical metaphysicians unless they face up to the problems that arise from this methodological connection between epistemology and metaphysics, and no significant progress will be made towards resolving the key issues in

Causality 245

metaphysics until this aspect of the methodological debate, highlighted so ably by Alex Oliver, is faced in a clear and consistent manner. The spectacle that too often confronts one at present is of analytical philosophers working in metaphysics who simply bury their heads in the sand when it comes to the battles over realism and antirealism, objectivism and relativism, that rage all around them in the analytical world. The defence that in the analytical tradition one simply cultivates one’s little patch without peering into the next philosopher’s garden appears intellectually ludicrous in the changed climate in which analytical philosophers now work. Of course a number of philosophers mentioned in these pages, philosophers like Michael Dummett, are far beyond such self-imposed myopia, and know all too well that one has to do battle on several fronts at once in philosophy in order to make any real contribution. However, too often in the literature one meets the philosophical isolationism to which I am referring. The weakness of Hausman’s epistemological underpinnings is manifested throughout his book in the way he appears to be dogged by the possibility of sheer anthropomorphism, or subjectivism, when it comes to assessing how objective our knowledge of causality in reality is. We are told in his first chapter that he will accept as correct much of what the agency theory has to say on our knowledge of causality, while maintaining that our knowledge of cause and effect can still be objective. Against the subjectivist thesis, concerning our imposition of arbitrary classification on the world, he observes that certain plants on our planet can be described as edible or non-edible and such designations are relative to the needs and requirements of human agents. However, this does not render the classification ‘subjective.’3 The point is well taken as are other similar remarks made throughout the book on the way we do not have to go down the subjectivist track if we take an approach to causality that sees our knowledge of it as having to do with our own experience as agents who control effects by manipulating causes. However, as indicated above, the Humean challenge of saying that the whole system of cause and effect may be anthropomorphic projection is not met or addressed. We may want to say that such hyperbolic doubt appears outlandish. But Hume’s point remains. Of course, from the standpoint of the ‘natural attitude’ we take cause and effect to apply, but can this be rationally justified? Hausman himself as an empiricist is happy to allow, in the way that Russell did, that sometimes there is causality to be found and sometimes there is not. But this evades the challenge of the Humean position: Hume’s question is, ‘How do we know that we ever find such a relation?’ The first theory with which Hausman critically engages is the ‘transference theory’ of causality. While this theory commends itself to the kind of

246 Method in Metaphysics

naive, imaginative picture-thinking to which we are all prone, and which forms part of Hausman’s ‘intuitive starting point,’ the idea of causality as essentially some kind of influx, ‘push,’ or communication of characteristics cannot, as Hausman argues, survive critical analysis. For philosophers like Reichenbach, Wesley Salmon, and Phil Dowe causality must consist of some transference of characteristics, or of momentum, kinetic energy, or velocity. Against such theories Hausman argues that they lack a proper account of asymmetry; they do not explain why it is that we cite causes rather than effects as explanation. Further, theories of this kind do not grant that omissions and non-occurrences can also be causes. We point out, as part of the explanation of why a house burned down, that the fire engine could not arrive in time because of a burst tire. Nor, Hausman insists, can we claim that non-occurrences are not included in the causal accounts of science, since a physicist may explain that a certain result was not achieved in the laboratory because a machine was not switched on. This observation is indicative of a reserve expressed on Hausman’s part concerning distinctions between ‘cause,’ on the one hand, and ‘condition,’ on the other, sometimes found in the literature. However, he does allow that we may select certain aspects of a sequence or situation and highlight these as the significant causal factor, given some perspective or interest of ours. While I take his point against the influx theorists, that we cite omissions as part of explanations, and I agree with his suggestion that we sometimes select certain aspects as the causal aspects to focus on, given our interests, I think both points are in need of some refinement. First, there is a distinction to be made between causes that happen and the absence of conditions that would prevent the occurrence of an event. There is an intelligible dependency of B on A that is different in the first case from that of the second. In the context of a world order that is characterized by the probability of the emergence and disappearance of things, ecologies of things, and the happening of events, the non-occurrence of an event is certainly part of understanding the overall intelligible pattern of the order of interrelated things and events. Statistical estimation of probabilities necessarily involves affirmations pertaining to the counterfactual: ‘If the fire engine had arrived in time the house would not have burnt down.’ However, the citing of the counterfactual in such instances is to be understood within the wider context of the intelligible patterning understood within the whole. Therefore, not any possible counterfactual condition or cause that one may cite is relevant to an explanation of why x did or did not occur, since the intelligibility sought in the explanation has to do with the event seen in the context of the pattern of world relations understood in terms of statistically estimated probabilities. People talk of

Causality 247

the tragedy of the fire engine not arriving on time, but someone party to the conversation who began to list other counterfactual preventative occurrences of a highly improbable nature (‘It’s a shame aliens did not arrive at that moment to put out the fire’) would be considered, at the very least, to lack the tact and sensitivity appropriate in such a discussion of a recent disaster. While this point regarding the intersubjective sensitivities involved in ordinary language communication might appear to confirm Hausman’s contention that we make a distinction between causes and mere conditions (both factual and counterfactual) on the basis of the particular interests we have I think it points in the other direction. While not denying that this is sometimes the case, the conversation partners discussing the burning down of the house rule out as inappropriate the citing of comic book and sci-fi type possibilities for the prevention of the disaster because the citing of such possibilities is seen as unreasonable. And it is seen as unreasonable precisely because a sense of the statistical probabilities taken to be operative in the larger context in which the event occurred is part of the backdrop to the conversation. The arrival of the fire engine was a highly probable outcome, while there was no reason to think that aliens disposed to play the role of a fire crew would arrive at the scene in the nick of time. Hausman does stress the importance of probability in understanding causality, and, as we will see below, there is some overlap between his position in this area and Lonergan’s. However, I do not find that Hausman is aware of the kind of issues I have discussed above. Our focusing on certain background causes or conditions, actual or counterfactual, is not always a simple matter of ‘subjective’ preference, and that it is not so is understood; we understand that explanation in such cases occurs with reference to the statistically estimated patterns of our world. There is something quite ‘objective’ and ‘rational’ then about the way historians, for example, focus upon certain conditions or causes, factual or counterfactual, and ignore or take for granted others in their accounts of what was going forward in the past. So, just as in our fire engine scenario, historians debating the causes of the Second World War would hardly regard as a serious contribution speculations of a sci-fi or comic book nature concerning Hitler’s machinations in the 1930s and their outcomes. Further, the selection for narration of some events rather than others, and the identification as important of some background factors rather than others, will be a reasonable affair in light of what, given present knowledge, are understood to have been probable or highly probable causes and outcomes in the situation. Lonergan would concur with Hausman that transfer theories are caught up in confusions that inevitably attend picturing-thinking attempts at capturing what is rather a matter to be understood through intelligence and

248 Method in Metaphysics

reasoned judgment. Causality, on Lonergan’s position, is what is to be understood as a matter of ‘intelligible dependence’ of some event, thing, system, or patterned frequency of events upon another event, thing, system, or patterned frequency of events. An argument that Lonergan deploys against influx, or transfer theories of causality, is worth noting in the present context. According to such theories in a series in which A is the cause of B and B is the cause of C, A cannot be said to be the cause of C. It may be the case that A will be said to be the condition of C, but not the cause, or perhaps some account will be offered in which A is said to be ‘more’ a cause of B than it is of C. But, Lonergan insists, there are evident counterexamples to such a position. What do we say of the causal relation between myself, the word processor, and the text I am writing? In such an instance it cannot be denied that A, the writer, is far more the cause of C, the text, than is B, the word processor. It may also be noted in passing that this type of intelligible dependency, with is own characteristic, indicates a particular type of causal relation, which may be named ‘instrumental causality.’5 Hausman argues, in chapter 2 of Causal Asymmetries, that ‘causation relates events in virtue of explanatory links between simple tropes.’6 He then proceeds to distinguish between token level causal links, ‘Her debut at the Opera house caused a sensation,’ and type level, ‘Drinking hemlock causes death.’ On Hausman’s view, which is I believe correct, these two ways of talking about causal links are related insofar as token instances form the basis of generalizations, which ground probable estimations of situations, these being ‘type’ causal claims: ‘causal connection between tokens is defined as probabilistic dependence among types.’7 The view that substances can (directly) cause events is one that Hausman mentions in passing but does not accept, although he offers no argument against it. On his position causation is a link between events, understood in terms of instantiated tropes. However, in the context of philosophical debates about events, some of which I discussed in an earlier chapter, Hausman sees the need to differentiate further how such causal relations, inherent in events, are to be identified. As we have seen, Kim and others have argued that it is difficult to determine how many events occur at precisely the same time and location. Hausman finds difficulty in isolating just what is relevant as cause in a given event.8 He believes we should divide ‘natural’ from ‘non-natural’ elements in an event, and that the location of a gas, say, is a non-natural and thus noncausal factor. This, however, appears to be mistaken. The fact that a gas is in a certain location may be relevant to determining why a car exploded. It has to be said that the isolation of factors that are causally relevant in an event takes time. It is a matter of moving from a descriptive to an

Causality 249

explanatory viewpoint. So we take it that the car exploding in a town in England was not caused by someone coughing in Australia, and given present evidence, we do not conclude that both events were the result of the same cause or causes. However, this could be revised. As Aristotle points out, the ordinary person may have good reason to believe that one event causes another, but it is the specialist who attempts to isolate which factor or factors in the event are truly relevant to the causal relation, insofar as he or she attempts to move from a descriptive account to an explanatory one – an account that relates things among themselves, rather than to ourselves and our practical interests. In order to preserve from ambiguity his claim that causation is a relation between tropes in an event, given current debates concerning events, Hausman opts for the notion that the causal relation is to be understood, fundamentally, as a relation between facts. Unlike events, which are inherently changing entities, facts are eternal and changeless.9 While the event of banging my toe against a chair is a set of changing events, the fact of my banging my toe against a chair has the advantage, Hausman avers, of being an eternal and changeless entity. The introduction of such a meinongian or Platonic metaphysical extravagance by Hausman at this point is not a matter of great surprise when one surveys a good deal of recent analytical work on metaphysics; indeed in previous chapters we have met a number of similar instances. Again the fundamental issue is one of metaphysical method, and of how the economy is to be attained, as philosophers concerned with method, such as Alex Oliver, call for. In this instance it needs to be pointed out, I believe, that while it is true that contemporaneous with, and after, the event of my accident with my toe the fact of the matter is true; nevertheless this post hoc truth of the factual claim does not entitle one to turn a fact into an entity. Facts, unlike entities, are mind dependent; they are truths known in judgment. If one fails to see this there would be no way of avoiding at the outset an absurdity of recurrence, which Hausman’s position would generate. That is, if there is a timeless entity that is the fact of my banging my toe against the chair, then there is a fact of the matter regarding the existence of the timeless entity, which is this fact, and another entity, which is the fact concerning the latter fact, and so on. The problems concerning events that lead Hausman to introduce this expediency have been discussed in chapter 7, and our position concerning the worries of Kim and others in this area have been explained. With regard to Hausman’s claim that causation is a relation between events, there is reason to think this too restrictive. On Lonergan’s view our stipulations concerning the causal relation must be more restrained. Lonergan’s position is that ‘the metaphysical condition of the truth of the propo-

250 Method in Metaphysics

sition A causes B is the reality of a relation of dependence in B with respect to A.’10 Following Aristotle, Lonergan thinks of change as more properly a change in the recipient than in the causing agent. An instantiated (trope) event, or, in the terminology used here, an occurrence (act) of a conjugate form is a change in the agent, and certainly in terms of human agency this is our experience. Our bringing about of events is also a change, an event in ourselves. But need this be so in general? Even in the case of human agency we understand that many events caused by ourselves do not necessarily entail many changes in ourselves, for we might influence the thinking of many by writing and publishing a book. As Lonergan observes, causation ‘is not a change in A, for the fire does not change when it ceases to cook the potatoes and begins to cook the steak. It is B as emerging or existing or occurring in intelligible dependence on A.’11 It seems at least rash, then, to conclude that only events, and not substances alone, can be responsible for change in another. Central to Hausman’s discussion of causation is his critical evaluation of Hume. Hausman is emphatic that ‘Hume’s theory is the starting point for most modern treatments of causation.’12 While he rejects fundamental tenets of Hume’s theory, Hausman, like many others in the analytical tradition, still owes a good deal to him. Hausman’s frank profession of empiricism was noted above, and while Hume’s theory is committed to more than Hausman would wish to subscribe to, nevertheless, Hume’s adoption of an empiricist model of knowing, as his starting point at least, means that his theory has influenced all subsequent discussion of the area pursued by philosophers of an empiricist persuasion. Hausman points out that according to Hume, ‘causation involves a regular association between cause and effect with the cause contiguous with its immediate effects and preceding them.’13 It is Hume’s belief that the regularity of association leads people to the mistaken belief that causal connection is necessary. However, he is also committed to an associationist account in which such necessity is purely a matter of subjective psychology. Hausman thinks it unclear whether Hume means that causality as a necessary connection is part of people’s beliefs or that it should be;14 although given Hausman’s recognition of Hume’s subjectivist view, I do not understand why he should think Hume’s position equivocal in this respect. Hausman also draws attention to the fact that in the Inquiry Hume does not retain the contiguity requirement for causal relation maintained in the Treatise. I think Hausman is correct in maintaining that the requirement of contiguity in causal relation has become questionable in the light of quantum mechanics. For Hume, as Hausman observes, this necessary connection between cause and effect is never directly seen, nor is it directly intuited, as are mathematical conclusions – we never have an ‘impression’ of it.15

Causality 251

Hausman is also correct, I believe, in arguing against Hume that neither ordinary folk nor scientists are disabused of their causal beliefs when two events regularly associated do not, on a given occasion, occur together. The rise of probabilistic science has served to make philosophers think of the causal connection as non-necessary. As Hausman observes, because a coin is tossed three times and shows up heads each time, and is then melted down, we have no reason to conclude the regularity in the outcomes was necessary.16 Hausman, however, continues to hold that each single event must be fully determined causally, but not in a deterministic fashion,17 and he quotes with approval J.L. Mackie who, following Mill, describes the causal relation in a non-deterministic fashion. A cause is, Mackie writes, at least ‘an insufficient but nonredundant part of an unnecessary but sufficient condition.’18 Striking a match depends on all sorts of causal factors and only occurs ‘all things being equal.’ Mackie insists, then, that there is a causal field of scattered conditions behind any event. Hume also has a temporal criterion for causation. Causes must precede their effects. Hausman in the company of many analytical philosophers considers this a defect, and agrees with philosophers who argue that there can be simultaneous cause/effect relations.19 One can think, as a simple illustration, of two cards or planks leaned end to end together to support each other (one starts to build a house of cards in that way). C.B. Martin is another philosopher who employs this example in the course of arguing that, not only are our temporal biases regarding cause and effect mistaken, but that causality should not be understood in terms of a clearly separated out cause and effect. Rather, Martin maintains, the causal relation is better understood in terms of the manifestation of mutually conditioning dispositional properties. He writes, ‘Trying to separate out one prior event as cause and one subsequent event as effect is misguided.’20 However, David Mellor and others hold, on the contrary, that there is a slight temporal succession detectable in cases such as the cards leaned together; one is put in place slightly before the other. Hausman rightly dismisses this as a mere quibble, since we surely could arrange it, with the help of someone else, that two objects be placed in this mutually supportive position simultaneously, and we should surely be rash in dismissing the possibility that such arrangements cannot exist in nature. However, C.B. Martin’s further claim is exaggerated. It is one thing to argue against Humean requirements regarding temporal succession; it is a further claim to say that cause and event are not separable entities. It is not worth employing a philosophical hammer to crack this small nut. There seem to be many readily available counterexamples in ordinary experience to convince us that this claim is unsustainable.

252 Method in Metaphysics

Temporal asymmetry, then, is not included in Hausman’s list of asymmetries characteristic of causation. Hausman not only sees it as a problem for Hume’s position that it rules out simultaneous causation, but that it also excludes backward causation. While Hausman nowhere argues that there exist such cases of causation, he thinks it a defect of a theory if that theory fails to be so inclusive as to allow for backward causation defended by some recent philosophers such as Dummett. Mackie’s insistence on the importance of a field of scattered background causal conditions for understanding causality is mentioned by Hausman not only as a corrective to an oversimplified view of causation as a one-to-one affair between a cause and an effect necessarily produced, but as a preamble to Hausman’s elaboration of one of the central theses of his book – the independence criterion.21 According to this criterion it is only possible for us to identify a given cause of a given effect if and only if there is more than one cause. However, Hausman advances this thesis not merely as an epistemological point but as an ontological requirement. The plausibility of this rather controversial position has to do, Hausman explains, with the fact of the causal field, which we naturally tend to neglect from a practical perspective when we isolate perhaps one cause as the cause of an event. Hausman defends his independence criterion from objections by maintaining that it cannot be denied by invoking counterexamples of single causal relations in other possible worlds. We have to show that these alternatives are truly possible. And he attempts to rebut, through analysis, counterexamples from the actual world such as we might believe are to be found in the case of amoebae or a single radium nucleus. Counterfactual Theory A major contender in the current analytical debate on the nature of causation is the counterfactual position. In the course of elaborating his account of causation in terms of constant conjunction Hume mentions the counterfactual option in passing. Hume writes that our notion of causation also involves the thought that if the first object had not been, the second would never have existed. David Lewis is the most eloquent advocate of this perspective on causality in the current literature.22 Lewis considers possible worlds that are nearer and further away from ours in terms of their histories and sequences of events. In some possible worlds occurrences are possible that are not possible in our world. Thus in some worlds ‘miracles’ happen: in a given possible world event b occurs without any cause, but this is not possible in our world. Lewis, then, allows what he considers to be ‘small’ miracles, or breaks in the causal chain, in sequences in near possible worlds. The central tenet of such counterfac-

Causality 253

tual theories is that the meaning of the causal relation is captured in the conditional ‘if a then b,’ understood as referring to real events in our world. Hausman argues against the counterfactual position and strenuously denies that it succeeds in capturing or elucidating the meaning of the causal relation. He avers that, on the contrary, counterfactual accounts simply presuppose what they seek to explain. In order to reach this conclusion he mounts arguments that I do not wish to consider here. However, while I would take issue with Lewis in a somewhat different manner, I am in complete agreement with Hausman’s estimation of the contribution of counterfactual analyses of causation. Some of my reservations regarding Lewis’s analysis have to do with the cogency of his general position on actual possible worlds, a position critiqued in chapter 7; other disagreements have to do with the intelligibility of talk about the possibility in other worlds of non-causation (this will be discussed further below). An objection I would raise, not mentioned by Hausman, is that the way Lewis attempts to capture the meaning of the causal relation understood in terms of the conditional ‘If A then B,’ understood as referring to real events in a world, fails to state necessary and sufficient conditions in such a way as to exclude other cases being covered by such a definition. ‘If A then B,’ could just as well state the conditions of an instance of, noncausal, conditional necessity pertaining to some possible world. So, in world x I drink coffee and Bella the dog barks. ‘If A then B’ could equally be taken as referring to the necessity of these conditions happening in world x, given our stipulation that they happen in world x, and there is no causal connection between them. We might point out that, unlike the conditional expressive of causal relations (understood in a non-necessitarian way) such a case of necessity would more accurately be expressed as a biconditional. Be that as it may, it is of no help to one who would elucidate causality in terms simply of the conditional. The question as to what makes the causal relation different from other cases of the conditional remains unanswered. As was observed above, Hausman’s discussion is haunted by the spectre of radical subjectivism with regard to the status of our causal claims about the world. Hausman does offer here and there points in favour of a robust objectivism regarding our knowledge of causality, but I think these ad hominem moves, as valid as they may be, do not amount to a thorough answer to the charge of anthropomorphism, which might be made against claims to causal knowledge, claims that might be made precisely on the basis of Hume’s scepticism and his option for the ‘non-rational’ ‘natural attitude.’ Early in the work Hausman writes that he will take it that our

254 Method in Metaphysics

causal concepts do, in fact, refer to reality and in later passages he observes that while an account of causality relative to human interests could be taken in a subjective way it need not be.23 However, nowhere does he argue against the subjectivist option. The threat posed to a straightforward empiricist account of causal knowledge by the charge of anthropomorphism is evident to Hausman as he assesses the strengths and weaknesses of various forms of agency theory. According to one version of this theory the agency view entails an out-andout interventionist account.24 The advocates of this position offer a merely instrumentalist account of causality and see it in terms of secondary qualities – like ‘red’ it is an observer dependent quality. This view does, however, allow that there are primary aspects to a causal situation that are not merely determined by human manipulation. Hausman argues that agency does play a major role in our coming to know causality: the fact that we can intervene and manipulate a situation so that this or that result ensues has much to do with our knowledge of causality. But Hausman goes on to ask if agency theory is really adequate as an explanation of the causal relation. Acknowledging an intimate connection between causation and explanation, Hausman mentions the Aristotelian causes as explanations we can give: the material, formal (structural), final, and ‘proximate’ or efficient causes.25 There is, admittedly, an intimate interconnection between citing causes and explanation, but, Hausman asks, how is this to be understood?26 The deductive-nomological idea of expounding the scientific laws of Hempel has been dominant in analytical philosophy. Critics, however, have objected that scientific explanations in terms of laws are not arguments in Hempel’s sense. But it is the case that they can be expressed as such. In chapter 8 of Causal Asymmetries, Hausman asks, ‘Why do we ask “why?”’ and in response explores the view of Van Fraassen and others (again agency theory views) that when we ask ‘Why?’ we ask for a cause or an explanation simply from some practical viewpoint. Hausman continues to express dissatisfaction with such positions offered as a comprehensive account, while admitting the truth of assertions concerning our awareness of causality as agents who intervene and so act as causes. Besides the independence thesis, outlined above, another central thesis of his work, Hausman explains, is that ‘the root notion of an explanation involves showing that something had to be as it is.’27 He admits he cannot prove this in any formal way, but appeals to our intuitive sense that this is a central, foundational notion. While Hausman sees some plausibility in the agency account, then, one is very much aware that his book is an admission of an inability to say what causation is. He is insistent that he does succeed in pinning down some essential characteristics of causation in terms of asymmetrical relations between causes and effects. However,

Causality 255

the repeated attempt to answer his own question, ‘Why should citing causes explain effects, while citing effects does not explain effects, or effects of a common cause?’ meets with very limited success. And he is emphatic that David Lewis’s response to this question in terms of citing causal histories in response to our inquiries is more of a restating of the question than it is an adequate answer. A Broader Perspective on Causality I have already made critical comments on Hausman’s account of causation and indicated points of convergence with the metaphysical position argued for in this book. My aim in the present section is to elaborate a broader view of the causal relation, from which perspective will be offered an answer to Hausman’s question, ‘What makes citing causes rather than effects explanatory?’ To begin with we may return to Hausman’s independence criterion – the stipulation that we can identify causation if and only if we can identify more than one cause. The weakness of the argument for this postulate, however, is admitted by Hausman himself, and he does nothing to allay our doubts by arguing that putative cases of single causal sequences in the world we know are not in fact to be understood as such, since there is no argument offered against the view that there might possibly be such instances. A further objection to make to his thesis comes from the logic of rational discovery. If one has evidence sufficient for affirming that one factor is the explanation of some x, one cannot rationally justify the postulation of more than one factor. In other words the principle of Ockham’s razor, evident in scientific and other cognitive enquiries, constitutes a major objection to Hausman’s notion. Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity, and Hausman has no argument to show that such an inflationary necessity exists. An area of convergence between our position and that of Hausman was noted with regard to his hermeneutic of suspicion concerning picturethinking images of causation. Such a suspicion was seen as indicating a move towards a view of causality as intelligible dependence, although given his professed empiricism the question was raised as to how successful Hausman’s position could be in avoiding picture-thinking in a thorough and consistent manner. Certainly, his openness to causation at a distance and as unconstrained by temporal direction manifests a desire to escape simplistic picture-thinking in the area of causal relations. I therefore agree with his contention that causation may be temporally simultaneous. However, I do not share his view that an adequate account of causation must be open to the possibility of backward causation, as suggested by Dummett and others.

256 Method in Metaphysics

The objection to such backward flow, however, has to do with the metaphysical probity of such notions in general. In a judgment of fact about, say, a mental operation like asking a question or making a judgment, one can come to know the true state of affairs about the world. And we saw in the chapters outlining the position on cognition and knowledge that such knowledge can be definitive, insofar as the denial of these facts ends in the incoherence of denying what is clearly taking place in the conscious mental activity involved in the process of rational denial. I can also make a correct judgment about a mental act that has occurred in the recent, perhaps very recent, past: I have evidence in consciousness that I made a judgment but the evidence is also there that it is not made ‘now’ but ‘before’ the acts occurring now. Indeed, argument and knowledge is cumulative, the later stages building on the prior. In fact, someone arguing for backward flowing causation will move from one point or stage in the argument to the next. Such arguments, for temporal succession deriving from cognitional structure and its affirmation (the denial of which is under pain of self-referential contradiction), can help in assessing the intelligibility of claims concerning backward time causation and the like. Thus we can argue that reality is whatever is either past or present. The notion of the past is of whatever is definitively the case and might be known as such. If it is definitively the case that here and now I am making a judgment, then it cannot be true in the future that I did not make such a judgment. And if the past is defined as the domain of what was definitively the case, then talk of changing the past is unintelligible. With regard to causality specifically we can make the point that since the cause of x as occurring ‘now’ is only in the future, x is occurring now without a cause since its cause does not yet exist. The claim that there is backward flowing causality is therefore tantamount to claiming that some x existing in the present has no cause; and since it exists now without a cause, what could the future existence of some y, supposed to be its cause, add to the scenario? It is simply redundant ontologically. No doubt such discussions of ‘backward flowing causes’ are immersed in imaginative picture-thinking, as the language employed in them suggests. It was observed above that in discussing the way the notion of cause is linked to that of explanation Hausman refers to the Aristotelian list of causes. We identify such causes in the process of giving explanations. The Aristotelian enumeration also features largely in Lonergan’s writing. Thus Lonergan illustrates, using the example of a bridge, the instantiation of different causes identified by Aristotle, and points to these instances as diverse types of intelligible dependency of b upon a.28 In the example of a bridge we see, in Lonergan’s terminology, the efficient cause in the effort

Causality 257

and labour used to assemble the materials and construct the bridge. We see the final cause in the goal or value of putting a bridge in place at this location in order to, perhaps, increase the flow of traffic from one community to another. A further ‘external’ cause identified by Lonergan, but stemming from Platonic thought, would be the exemplary cause: the bridge does not result from throwing materials in the air in some haphazard fashion, but from a blueprint, from a plan devised in the mind of the architect. Besides such ‘external’ causes, Lonergan also identifies the ‘internal’ causes. Such would be the ‘material cause,’ the ‘right stuff’ to make a bridge – bricks, steel, etc. – and the ‘formal cause’ (‘structural cause’ in Hausman’s terminology), which is the intelligible pattern or design evident in the organization of these materials to make a bridge. Each of these causes is identified in answer to ‘Why?’ questions that we may ask about the data before us; each of the causes is an explanation given in a ‘be-cause account’ in response to our inquiries as to why this thing, this bridge, is as it is. While Hausman has a notion of Aristotelian formal cause as an explanation in terms of structure, throughout the book he tends to make a distinction between cause as ‘external’ to a thing, on the one hand, and scientific explanation in terms of laws, nomological accounts, as he terms it, on the other. This prevents him from seeing a more unified notion of cause as the answer to ‘Why?’ questions; that cause is a notion having to do with explanations of various types identified in the ‘be-cause’ answers that we give to answers to questions that seek to grasp intelligible explanations. Indeed, it is for this more unified perspective that Hausman strives as he seeks an answer to his question as to why citing causes explains while citing effects does not. When he appears to be coming close to the approach taken here, in terms of seeing the unity in causal explanation from the perspective of our questions regarding intelligible dependence, he is diverted by further considerations stemming from agency theorists. Thus, his attempts to get to grips with the question, ‘Why we ask why?’ end in an outline of views that talk of our seeking causes for merely instrumental reasons, a view he does not wholeheartedly endorse but one to which he offers no alternative. But we can ask whether such an instrumentalism is sufficient. Naturally we do ask how and why things work in order to be able to control them. But if we deny outright any Aristotelian notion of being able to ask ‘Why?’ simply from a desire to get to know the truth of the matter, we will inevitably end up in a self-contradictory dead-end, for the account given will itself be an answer to questions as to why we assign causes, and as to what causation is. Quite evidently agency theories are put forward as answers to such questions and Hausman’s book is not an attempt to reach conclusions of a practical

258 Method in Metaphysics

nature (such as how to prepare carrots for the pot more rapidly), but is an attempt to answer questions about the nature of causality and our knowledge of causality. Causal explanation, then, takes the form of diverse answers given to questions we ask concerning why the data before us is as it is. The types of intelligibility, of intelligible dependency, vary accordingly. To return to the account of cognitional structure, we can say that formal and material causes (internal causes), the materials and design respectively in the bridge example, are identified on the second level of coming to know, in insight and concept formation (of course these have also to be verified as correct in judgment). There is a certain completeness about such intelligibility. However, to know a thing or an occurrence is not simply to grasp a form, concept, but is to judge that this actually exists. Now any form, idea, concept, is understood as contingent, that is, it is understood as, at best, a mere possibility. To move from possibility to reality we need to make a judgment of fact, and this judgment grasps that the conditions that specify the thing are, in fact, fulfilled. However, if the conditions are grasped as fulfilled, this only means that, de facto, the thing exists, not that it necessarily exists. The ‘what’ of the thing, or form, is contingent; it might be or not be, and its actual existence does not change this. There is a conditional necessity if the thing does in fact exist. If the bridge over the Tees River exists then necessarily it exists, but it does not have necessary existence. Our knowing that a certain contingent thing exists, then, simply leads to the further question: since it is contingent, why does it exist? As Lonergan indicates, the intelligibility of the thing is in another, not itself.29 Since citing causes, external causes, is a matter of answering a question concerning why a given x exists (since it is contingent and does not have to exist and does not account for its own existence), clearly citing x, taken as an effect, is not an answer to a question as to why something that is contingent does exist. That is why identifying causes is explanatory while reiterating effects is not. But this option does not seem to be explicit in Hausman’s thought and so he seeks in vain to identify why citing causes is explanatory while citing effects is not. Hausman is adept in identifying where other causal theories, like that of Lewis, fail to get to the heart of the matter and simply presuppose causation in the very attempt to elucidate it. But his own failure to answer his own question as to the nature of causation indicates that the asymmetries he sees as characterizing causation are indeed descriptive features of causation but do not provide a proper explanation of this relation. It might be thought that we approach the heart of the issue of causal relation when in our thinking we eliminate the possibility of a causal connection between A and B through the observation that B occurs without A occurring. Although a negative result, this ability of

Causality 259

ours appears to be central to our awareness of the intelligible dependency that is causation. Indeed, we are rationally warranted in making the claim that some putative causal relation does not obtain if we have this negative result. But this is because of a rational awareness concerning the intelligible relation of contingent things upon things other than themselves. The syllogism ‘if –A & B then –(A iff B)’ need not be interpreted with reference to intelligible, causal dependency and thus our awareness of such is prior to any such formal expression. Problems from Hume If the claim I am making is that we have a rational awareness of causal dependency, manifest in our questions as to why a given contingent x exists, how does this position fare against the objections of Hume? In answering this question we come to issues central to the discussion of causation and our knowledge of causation. In making this claim I am agreeing with Hausman’s contention that Hume’s treatment of causation remains fundamental for debate in this area in the modern period. It is perhaps worth noting, however, that Hume’s questions concerning the rationality of our claims to know causality were not as novel as he appears to think. While Hume is well acquainted with ancient scepticism, he does not appear to be aware that a scepticism about causal knowledge rather like his own was advocated for theological reasons both by Islamic philosophers in the eleventh century and by Christian medieval thinkers such as Nicholas of Autrecourt. Hausman’s treatment of Hume does not really get to the nub of the issue, which is, I believe, Hume’s deconstruction of the empiricist model of knowing, and of knowledge of causality, which Hume then takes as his epistemological starting point. This is so even though, as we have seen, Hausman is troubled by subjectivist questions regarding the reliability of our causal knowledge. What I take to be the achievement of Hume’s sceptical probings of the scope and limits of our causal knowledge is his demonstration that we do not have representationalist knowledge of causes in the world; that is, we have no ‘impressions’ of the cause and effect relation, we do not see causes in the world, or intuit them in the way of simple mathematical knowledge. While this is not perhaps as novel a position in historical terms as is sometimes thought, still, given Hume’s influence in the modern period, his insistence on the point is significant. This contention of Hume’s is one that has already been discussed with approval earlier in this book. However, if causation is not known by a direct seeing, what option is there but scepticism regarding the rational status of our causal claims? A

260 Method in Metaphysics

first point to make is that Hume is, in our view, looking in the wrong place in order to find the origins of causal knowledge. The deficiencies in Hume’s position in this regard are, not surprisingly, related to the more general inadequacy of his account of cognition and epistemology. It was argued in chapter 3 that the attempt to argue against the view that coming to know involves the three interrelated levels of conscious activity outlined in cognitional structure involves one in self-referential incoherence. Hume’s philosophy is a prime example of a counterposition, as Lonergan understands it: that is, in arguing for Hume’s limited and deficient account of cognition one will be engaged in conscious mental activities on the levels of intelligence and reason and such activities are not included in Hume’s explicit account of cognition or are, perhaps, denied. An extended critique of Hume’s views could be pursued along these lines, but in the present context it will perhaps suffice by way of illustration to examine his remarks on belief, that is, his position on ‘belief’ as the stage of knowledge in which we distinguish between ideas as factual or fictional. One might say that this is Hume’s equivalent to Lonergan’s third level in coming to know, that is, the level of judgment upon which, on Lonergan’s view, we make reasoned judgments as to whether our ideas do or do not conform to reality, and we judge whether something is definitely so or, normally, is probably so with regard to reality. In the Inquiry, Hume tells us that the best he can do in providing an account of our truth claims, or beliefs, is to say that when we claim that, for example, the Eiffel Tower really exists, as opposed to a fairy tale castle which does not, we are voicing the steady, firm feeling that the one is real and a lack of such feeling with regard to the existence of the latter. Such ‘feeling’ has to do with the customs and habits we have acquired regarding the real status of the one edifice and the fictional status of the other.30 However, what is conspicuously absent in this account of our truth claims is any mention of reasonable procedures; there is no mention of our rational attempts to answer our questions as to the existence of these objects through assembling the relevant evidence, weighing it, and making a reasoned judgment. With this objection in mind, we can in fact ‘deconstruct’ Hume’s text. For, Hume’s attempt to change certain views on causal knowledge and substitute his own for them has not proceeded by way of some process of subrational brainwashing or flea-circus training, such that we now ‘feel’ differently about a proposition concerning causal beliefs. On the contrary, we can look through the text and see Hume attempting to convince us by reasoned argument. So, for instance, he would have us attend to the data of consciousness in order to verify whether or not we

Causality 261

have an intuitive awareness of causal connection in the way he thinks we can verify in that data our intuitive awareness of mathematical inference. The account Hume offers of our knowing does not cohere with the conscious activity of knowing in which we must engage to understand his view, and attempt to assess its validity. Hume, in other words, has a bad self-image. When we turn to the specific issue of causal knowledge, it should be understood that the awareness we have of intelligible causal dependency, in the case of some contingent x requiring a cause for its existence, is an aspect of the more general a priori principle operative in our knowing, which was identified in chapter 3, that is, the principle of intelligibility that is involved in the isomorphism, or correspondence, between our knowing and the known, reality. As was argued earlier, the basic heuristic way we anticipate reality is as the intelligible, as that which is to be known through our intelligence and reason. It was also argued that the attempt to deny such a principle is at once to work with it, for one is attempting in such a denial to establish as true, as the case with regard to reality, a contrary supposition, but one has to do this through the use of intelligence and reason. Furthermore, any successful instance of knowledge of reality is a successful instance in which we know via the use of intelligence and reason, and in doing so we rule in and rule out as intelligible or unintelligible, as possible or impossible certain features with regard to reality. Again, the attempt to gainsay this by some narrative concerning our cognitive limitations will, insofar as it is a claim to know some aspect of reality (namely, the reality of our knowing capacities), be involved in incoherence. And the fact that we can definitely know some instances of reality, the reality of our cognitional acts, demonstrates that we do know reality and therefore that reality conforms to the requirements of intelligibility. The causal relation of dependency is, then, an instance of the intelligibility of reality, and we are aware of this in our demand for sufficient reason, sufficient explanation, of why x is the case, why x exists if it is a contingent reality and does not of itself provide sufficient explanation of its existence. Insofar as Hume’s attempts to provide a correct account of human knowing manifest an attempt to get to know what is true of reality, the reality of human knowing, through the use of intelligence and reason, Hume is as much committed to the principle of intelligibility, the principle that reality is to be known through intelligence and reason, as any of us are. However, such implicit commitment does not guarantee success, and Hume’s error is to come up with an account of knowing that does little justice to the cognitional procedures he was engaged in himself in elaborating his account.

262 Method in Metaphysics

Causation Present in Consciousness Our knowledge of causation, then, derives from our awareness that contingent entities require causes sufficient to ground their existence. While for the most part we do not see or have an impression or experience of causal relations obtaining in the world, we anticipate that there are such relations since reality is nothing other than the intelligible. Our scientific and other cognitive enquiries are therefore engaged in finding evidence that justifies explanations that are, at best, probably true of reality. Science is inherently revisable because causes and explanations are not directly intuited as certain but are reasoned to as the best explanation we have at present of the data. However, this is not the whole story. It is the case that I have no direct experience of the causal sequence or sequences that relate to different sets of data, such as the branch of a tree, on the one hand, and on the other, the leaf that appears from it in spring. But there are cases, namely in cognitional structure, where I am directly aware of causal sequences and can reflect upon the data of my own conscious activities in order to come to understand and know such sequences; such causal sequences are as much part of the data of consciousness as are the occurrences of insight and the acts of questioning and judging. This point regarding direct access to causal sequence has already been referred to in chapter 5 in the discussion of Searle’s views. I am aware that my judgment concerning, say, the state of the hedge in my garden is because of the sensate experience I have of the data: the uncut twigs, the brambles curling through the wire fence. I am also aware that my judgment is because of the questions I have asked about how things are and because of my understanding of the situation. Now the ‘because’ in such cases is not only indicative of an intelligible relation between sensation, ideas, questions, and judgments but is a conscious ‘because.’ Hume, or at least anyone attempting to think about and assess Hume’s views, is aware of arriving at judgments because of asking questions and because of understanding, and because of sensate experience.31 The mistake should not be made of thinking that I am claiming that we first know these instances of intelligible dependence among our conscious mental activities and then in some way infer there are other such cases in the world, not directly accessible to us in the same way. Rather, the principle of intelligibility of reality, of which the principle of causal dependence is an aspect, is operative in our thinking and judging about reality from as early as such activity begins in our lives, and it is operative in our questions concerning the reasons for the existence of entities that are contingent and do not explain themselves. It is only rarely and with some difficulty that we attend to the data of our consciousness, come up with an under-

Causality 263

standing of that data, and verify that understanding of the data itself. This is true both with regard to the principle of causality already operative in our consciousness and with regard to the conscious awareness we have of the causal dependency of, say, judgments of fact on prior cognitional acts such as attention to sensation and insights. To point this out is simply to reiterate in the present context the all-important distinction insisted upon in chapter 3 between self-consciousness and self-knowledge. If our knowledge of causation has to do with a principle of intelligibility, which is operative in our conscious thinking, questioning, and judging, then it is true to say that the notion of causation is an a priori for us. It is a priori not in the sense of an idea but precisely in the sense of a principle of conscious thought. Given this point, some consequences emerge of a prescriptive kind for the metaphysics of causation. The idea of a possible world in which there are ‘small miracles’ in Lewis’ sense, that is, of events which do not actually have causes, is incoherent. It is the idea, rather, of an impossible world. Possibility is nothing other than intelligibility and the notion of a contingent being not requiring a cause is, as has been argued, unintelligible. Furthermore, talk of scientists finding causation at one ‘level’ of reality but not finding it at another ‘level’ cannot mean, in the way of Russellian empiricism, that there is sometimes causality to be found and at other times there is not, for reality is the intelligible and causality is an intrinsic aspect of that intelligibility. One needs to be quite blunt at this point: empiricist talk of finding causes anywhere is, as Hume and other philosophers before and after him have shown, nonsense. Apart from the instance of conscious mental activity (not a case particularly attractive to empiricist thought) one never ‘finds’ causes in the world; rather, one makes inferences to the same. How can one justify making such inferences? The answer is, only on the basis that there is a requirement in terms of intelligibility to do so, and such intelligibility regards the insufficiency of contingency as grounding existence, regardless of other specifications relevant to the individual entity. If all we had in our methodology were some rational criteria based upon the suppression of the antecedent and the occurrence or non-occurrence of the consequent in order to search for cases where, at the least, causes did not occur, even such an exiguous methodology would not suffice. In a possible world of an occasionalist nature, the variation of the occurrence of both A & B together and B without A could be put down not to any causal relation obtaining between them but to, say, the machinations of the evil genius who wishes to mislead us. What are we to say of such a possible world? First, if it is possible, there will be causal relations, but in this case not known to us. Second, what is possible may be other than what is probable, and we have to reason to the best, probable, theory of the way

264 Method in Metaphysics

our world is actually organized. We have no evidence for the interventions of an evil genius and we do have evidence that our interventions and the interventions of other agents witnessed by us in the world bring about changes, for which there are no evident alternative explanations. My point here is that we can move to a rationally justified claim that we know causal relations in the world on the basis of the three philosophical theses I have argued for: a) under pain of self-refutation one affirms that reality is intelligible and therefore there must be intelligible causes, grounds, for the existence of contingent entities and states of affairs; b) we can come to know definitely instances of intelligible, causal dependency between or conscious mental acts involved in coming to know; c) we cannot exclude with certainty that with regard to other cases in our world occasionalist, ‘evil genius’ trickery does not occur regarding what appear to be causal sequences. But we can make a reasoned, probable case that asserts that we have no evidence of this, and therefore we are justified in making the inferences we do make to the best, probable explanations of the data, in science, common sense, and other cognitive disciplines. It is on the basis of such justification, or, at least, on the basis of theses a) and c) that our causal claims about the world may be justified, rather than on the basis of a philosophical account, such as Hausman’s, the basis of which is an empiricist epistemology. Hume’s classical deconstruction of empiricist claims to a rationally justified account of causation should convince us of this. The alternatives open to the philosopher considering the metaphysics of causation are clear: either one holds theses a) and b) as outlined and argued for above, or one has no rational warrant for asserting that our claims to know causality in the world are justified. Assertions concerning what scientists do or do not find in this or that realm of investigation are, on this level of consideration, beside the point. Without such philosophical theses as background, claims to find anything, claims to find any instance of causal dependency in any investigative domain, are without sufficient rational grounding. The Statistical Turn The way the statistical turn in modern scientific thought features in Lonergan’s philosophy has already received some attention in earlier chapters. In order to provide a more complete picture of Lonergan’s work on causality it is important to return to this topic in the context of the present chapter. Lonergan observes that the understanding of individual causal sequences within the broader perspective of world process as a whole emerges in Aristotle.32 Aristotle points to the fact that in order to understand why such and such a cause has successfully influenced a given event

Causality 265

one must understand factors such as the absence of any interference that would have prevented A causing B, and other aspects having to do with, what Hausman terms, ‘the background.’ The Aristotelian world view includes celestial influences on such causal sequences and terrestrial influences; the terrestrial domain is that in which chance is operative. By ‘chance’ Aristotle means an event that occurs when the paths of two causal sequences cross, without any further intelligible determination of why such paths should cross. The crossing of such pathways is a consequence of the scattering of entities in space and time. While Lonergan believes this perspective on chance is fundamentally correct, it needs to be complemented by the perspective offered by modern science on the significance of statistical estimation of probabilities in world process.33 Chance, from such a viewpoint, is to be seen as a non-systematic divergence from such ideal frequencies. Such frequencies have a causal significance insofar as they increase or lessen the probabilities of a given event occurring, and they may take the form of, what Lonergan terms, a ‘scheme of recurrence.’ A scheme of recurrence can be understood as a series of events that is, to some degree, mutually conditioning. So, on a very simplified model, one understands A as conditioning the occurrence of B, B as conditioning the occurrence of C, and C as conditioning the recurrence of A, and so on. In reality such schemes will be far more complex and that complexity will have to do in part with their intersection with other schemes of recurrence. By way of illustration one can think of the solar system or the water cycle on this planet. Statistical estimation can occur with regard to the operation of such sequences and with regard to their emergence and decline. One can also note that non-systematic divergences from such frequencies, or chance events, may, of course, be decisive for causal sequences. In the domain of human history as the saying has it, ‘for want of a nail the horse was lost, for want of the horse the rider was lost, for want of the rider the message was lost, for want of the message the battle was lost.’ The loss of a battle may mean the end of one empire and the beginning of another and the emergence of a new civilization, with all the new social schemes of recurrence that may result affecting not only humanity but also nature. Lonergan is insistent that such statistical estimations, in which are grasped probabilities of the emergence, survival, and decline of frequencies of events, constitute a type of intelligibility in world process in addition to the intelligibility of general, or in his terms ‘classical laws,’ such as are illustrated by Newton’s laws of gravitation. That there is a specific type of intelligibility in the area of statistical estimation is seen when one understands that there is a significance in large numbers and long intervals of time. Given the potential of entities for causally significant interaction, the

266 Method in Metaphysics

opportunities for causally significant and cumulative combinations increases with the increase in the numbers of entities and in periods of time. Naturally such an account at once makes reference to the disposition or potentiality of entities for such causal interaction, and these aspects of Lonergan’s account of emergent probability will concern us further in the chapter to follow on supervenience. In that chapter I will also have more to say on the notion of finality and final cause. In the present context it is appropriate to draw attention to the methodological features of Lonergan’s position in this area. As was noted in the chapter on method in metaphysics, a core metaphysical position can be established on the basis of the position on cognition and epistemology, and that core has a stability given the stability of the underlying cognitional position, that can only be denied at the cost of self-referential incoherence. However, metaphysics, on Lonergan’s view, also involves an integration of the positive results of science, scholarship, and common sense, and a critical evaluation of the elements of these deemed to be of less value. Such critical assimilation, or dialectic takes place on the basis of the core position. The notion of metaphysical contingency pertains to this core position, for it can be verified on the basis of cognitional structure alone. As was argued above, the conceptually grasped ‘what,’ or nature of any entity, system, law, or scheme of recurrence is understood, on the second level of coming to know, as a ‘possible.’ The further question as to its actual existence arises in the third phase of coming to know, the level of judgment, and, furthermore, since on that level actual existence is only verified as what is the case (given that the conditions specifying the object in question are de facto fulfilled), not what must be the case, the further question arises as to why such a contingent object exists, that is, as to what its causes are. This is as much the case with regard to cognitional structure itself as it is with any object of thought. I do not exist necessarily and so the question as to why I exist arises. Lonergan’s analysis of the statistically estimated probabilities of the emergence, survival, and decline of schemes of recurrence, however, pertains to the area in which the core position of metaphysics intersects with the world view offered by current scientific research. Since this is the case we have, as it were, two types of contingency relevant to metaphysical discussion: a first type resulting from the core position on cognition and a further type realized in the causal interactions of world processes, which are, on current views, not understood in some deterministic fashion but as characterized by the probability of their occurrence. However, each event or coming to be is, in Lonergan’s view, totally determined in the sense that all its causes and conditions are fulfilled. Only in this way can there be an intelligible explanation for the existence of each contingent thing. Hausman, as was noted above, espouses a position akin

Causality 267

to this. However, lacking a proper appreciation of contingency, he fails to identify the metaphysical category of ‘conditional necessity.’ While each entity is fully determined as to its causes, this does not entail that its determination is necessary: if I sit down then, necessarily it is the case that I sit, but this does not entail that my sitting came about in a necessary way in a deterministic sense. Although it is true that Lonergan’s metaphysical analysis of statistical emergence and probability is influenced to a large extent by developments in modern science, this is not the whole story as regards this aspect of his thought. As we have seen above, there are elements of Aristotelian and Thomist thought that anticipate such developments and point towards a method for a proper philosophical analysis of them. One can note that evidence for the probabilistic nature of emergent processes and trends is not lacking in the domain of cognitional activity itself. Thus, despite our best efforts to answer questions, insights, which are answers to these questions, may not occur to us. However, we know that we can increase or decrease the statistical likelihood of insights occurring in various ways. Striving to be attentive to the data, to use one’s native intelligence and rationality in attempting to come to understand the data and know what is the case, is likely to increase the probability of insights and correct ones at that, whereas being inattentive, silly, and rash is likely to decrease the probability of arriving at well-founded answers to one’s questions. Given his perspective on the significance of the statistical turn in modern science, Lonergan would certainly concur with Hausman’s contention that nomologically conceived scientific laws are not enough. Hausman writes: ‘The reason is that the asymmetries that are my concern do not exist apart from the particular spatiotemporal configurations that arise when properties are instantiated. This is the reason why causal generalizations must always be relativized to some set of circumstances.’34 On Lonergan’s position there is a complementarity between statistical laws (identified as frequencies from which individual events diverge non-systematically) and classical laws. It was, perhaps, Roger Boscovich, already in the first part of the eighteenth century, who stressed the larger concrete context that rendered Newton’s laws of gravitation a partial approximation to an understanding of physical processes. And Boscovich’s point was, in some way, no more than the point made in the laboratory when the proviso is added on the likelihood of the outcome of some experimental process, ‘all things being equal.’ Laws like those of Newton’s refer, at best, not to necessary states of affairs but to states of affairs embedded in a larger context, which is also to be understood in terms of the probability of outcomes. In fact, it would appear that, according to the world view of current science, classical laws, as Lonergan terms them, occur in contexts

268 Method in Metaphysics

that may be understood in the way we understand ecological niches; that is, laws in the classical sense hold because the requisite frequencies or schemes of recurrence are in place. And the fact that such frequencies are in place is not a matter of necessity but of the probability of outcomes, given the relevant dispositions of the elements involved and the coming together of those elements. Clearly, in treating of such matters, we are entering the area of metaphysical debates concerning dispositions, supervenience, and the philosophy of process and development. These metaphysical issues will be the concern of the following chapter.

Recto Running Head 269

9 Dispositions, Development, and Supervenience

Since Strawson’s dismissal of process metaphysics in his 1959 work Individuals, analytical metaphysics, even in the phase of renewal and growth in the last two decades, has been marked by a lack of attention to metaphysical questions of growth, development and history. One might have the impression from reading the work that has gone on in possible-worlds semantics, and in the discussion of the constitution of individuals in terms of tropes, universals, or whatever, that recent analytical metaphysics demonstrates a penchant for the enumeration of the contents of the Platonic heavens rather than a concern with the ontological structures of the real world in which we live. One criticism we have levelled against some of the philosophical presuppositions of this work has been in terms of a failure to grasp the metaphysical significance of judgments of fact concerning the concrete reality of entities, and a tendency to think that metaphysical puzzles can be solved solely in terms of speculations concerning abstract possibilities. If such criticism is justified it does indicate a lack of concern with the reality of the changing, developing world of physical and social objects. Nicholas Rescher is among a number of analytical philosophers who have been concerned to redirect attention to metaphysical questions pertaining to process and development.1 Rescher’s book on process philosophy provides a useful survey of philosophical positions of the last two centuries, and one can certainly sympathize with his view that such process philosophies reflect in some way key aspects of the reality of our world, including that aspect of it which is our own knowing process. However, his adoption of positions cognate with those of Whitehead entails that, from the viewpoint of the present work, his views on process are philosophically

270 Method in Metaphysics

unacceptable, for the reasons already offered in this book. Indeed, Rescher’s arguments for accepting a Whitehead-like process philosophy are somewhat weak insofar as they amount to an assertion that this kind of philosophy does justice to aspects of the world that are an undeniable feature of our experience.2 It is no doubt true that change, growth, and development are important features of the world around us, but, as the ancient dispute between followers of Heraclitus and Parmenides demonstrates, one can counter intuitions that place stress on change with equally justified intuitions concerning stability and permanence in phenomena. Rescher’s own argument does not appear to amount to more than advocacy of one set of intuitions as superior to the other. Something more is required by way of philosophical argument and analysis if these two sets of intuitions, concerning change and permanence, are to be harmonized in a manner that may offer the possibility of verification. Regarding the issue of method in metaphysics he avers: ‘The conflict between the approaches of substance and process metaphysics is clearly not an issue that can be resolved one way or the other by decisive theoretical argumentation. In the end, the issue will be one of cost-benefit analysis, comparing the net balance of the assets and liabilities of the two approaches.’3 I would not dispute that the approach he recommends has some value. The method argued for in this book advocates the philosophical assessment of the results of current science, common sense, and scholarship in order to elaborate a metaphysics that benefits from the perspectives of these cognitive approaches to reality. However, while the assessment of these sources will involve some kind of assessment in terms of wide reflective equilibrium, at the core of such assessment, which will be critical and dialectic in form, will be the core position on metaphysics and epistemology of critical realism. In coming to know that we know (the attempt to deny which ends in self-reversing incoherence) we know both some aspect of reality and some general aspects of any reality; we can rule in and rule out some features as either pertaining or not pertaining to the real. Such is the condition of possibility of genuine knowledge (rationally warranted knowledge) of any particular instance. Therefore, pace Rescher, the basic method of metaphysics can be settled by decisive theoretical argumentation. Without such a core position in metaphysics, attempts at a cost-analysis appraisal of competing claims will inevitably become bogged down in battles over conflicting intuitions. Such conflicts become more intractable than Rescher’s description of the philosophical options might lead one to expect, since there are as many different views of substance metaphysics as there are of process metaphysics. Indeed, dividing them into two camps, as Rescher does, may be misleading historically. The disputes between contenders in the debates will, more often than not, be traceable to differ-

Dispositions, Development, and Supervenience 271

ences in the positions of such philosophies as to the epistemological starting point. However, it is not only Rescher’s work that shows evidence of interest in the metaphysics of development. The work of philosophers of science, especially in the area of biology and psychology, demonstrates interest in the metaphysical issues that arise in these areas. Above all, the analytical philosophers who have made the most significant contributions to the metaphysics of development have been those working on questions of emergence and supervenience and allied questions to do with the issue of dispositions. Reductionist and antireductionist positions have been defended by analytical philosophers writing on the philosophy of mind and, more generally, on the relation of the sciences to one another. Notable among philosophers writing on these matters is Jaegowan Kim. Kim’s contribution to the debate on supervenience will be examined later in this chapter, as will be representative views expressed by some other philosophers writing on dispositions and development. The initial focus of the chapter, however, is upon Lonergan’s distinctive contribution to the metaphysics of dispositions (or ‘potency’ as he would term it), emergence, and development. Lonergan on Potency, Emergence, and Development Potency and Limitation The position Lonergan elaborates on emergence and supervenience has already been discussed briefly towards the end of chapter 3, and has been outlined in more detail in chapters 7 and 8. In the present context it will be useful to provide further details of Lonergan’s views on development in terms of the statistically estimable emergence of states and individuals upon the bases of prior states of affairs. Such a filling out of the picture involves such metaphysical issues as dispositions, the relations between sciences, and the question of reductionism. It will be recalled that in earlier chapters Lonergan’s metaphysical analysis of individual entities and occurrences in terms of potency, form, and act was outlined and defended. In the present context, then, the focus will be upon potency as the equivalent of disposition. Lonergan distinguishes between central and conjugate potency, form and act; the ‘central’ and ‘conjugate’ being roughly equivalent to the ‘substance’ and ‘accidents,’ or ‘differentiae’ distinctions. According to this analysis, therefore, potency, or disposition, is known as a metaphysical aspect of the structure of both individual entities and their actions or operations. As was explained before, one can understand this in the following way. If and when some entity

272 Method in Metaphysics

comes to be known, one can say that the data, the empirical, with which inquiry began is now, at the end of the inquiry, known to be data on suchand-such a thing or occurrence. Since fact proves possibility the concrete (rather than abstract) possibility of this data being the data of such-andsuch entity is established. Lonergan’s investigation into the dispositional or potency is lengthy and elaborate and I will not attempt to give an exhaustive account of it. However, some of the major ontological distinctions he makes with regard to dispositions may be highlighted. He distinguishes between proximate and remote potency, and between passive and active potency.4 The distinctions between remote and proximate potency will enter into the fuller context of Lonergan’s discussion of development and emergent probability, to be treated below, but the fundamental notions involved are not difficult to grasp. Cosmologists believe that other planets in our solar system have atmospheres, some of the chemical constituents of which are the same as those that contribute to our own planet’s life supporting atmosphere. However, given the present evolutionary state of the chemical mix that makes up the atmospheres on these diverse planets, these atmospheres are nearer or further away from the possibility of one day supporting life. Thus, the presence or absence of various chemical combinations in the atmospheres of these planets implies that they are more proximate or remote as potentially life-supporting. The distinction between passive potency and active potency might at first glance appear a little more puzzling. Are not a disposition and an actualization, or manifestation, at opposite poles ontologically? To understand these terms one must appreciate the way they emerge from a study of human cognition. Thus, we have an intellectual capacity to learn language, or a skill, or a science, or an area of scholarship. However, a distinction has to be made between more general dispositions, which we have as members of the species, and intellectual dispositions or habits we acquire on the basis of these more fundamental dispositions. It is one thing to say that I actualize a human disposition when I learn to play the piano. It is another thing to say that a concert pianist actualizes an acquired disposition or habit when, awaking from sleep, the pianist begins to play Mozart. The terms ‘passive potency’ and ‘active potency,’ respectively, have these distinct types of disposition as their semantic truthmakers. Potency, or disposition, is not only a concrete possibility allowing for some occurrence or the emergence of an entity; it is also a metaphysical principle of limitation. The prime illustration of this for Lonergan is to be found in the case of cognition, but the principle extends far beyond this instance of reality. So he points out that just as a judgment of fact is limited

Dispositions, Development, and Supervenience 273

in content by the concepts to which it refers, so those concepts are limited to the potency, or data, from which they arose in the process of cognition and to which they refer.5 In the world at large there is ample evidence to substantiate the claim that complex individuals are limited by the dispositional capacities of the ‘lower’ entities that enter into their composition. Given the type of wood from which my furniture is constructed, it may not be advisable for me to get into the habit of standing on the table and chairs in order to reach things on high shelves. The mention of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ order entities introduces us to the vexed question of supervenience and debates concerning reductionism and the relation of the sciences. The fundamental issue in this area, as in all others of metaphysics on Lonergan’s view, is the epistemological one. If one is to follow the path of overt or covert empiricism then some form of picture-thinking atomism will inevitably follow. If reality is thought to be some kind of complex of interacting parts, then, on the picture-thinking view, such complexity must have to do with mere assemblages – bits being found within other bits with which they interact. Apart from the myriad philosophical problems attendant upon such philosophical positions (not the least among which is the inability to withstand epistemological scepticism), such metaphysical myth making seems to come to a dead end when faced with the question of the construction of the ‘smallest bits.’ Are these blobs of stuff contentless? Such a notion is unintelligible and it is, therefore, also unaffirmable and unverifiable. If such basic bits have a ‘what’ then they have a structure. But this intelligible structure cannot simply be sensed. To repeat Hume’s point: causes cannot be sensed. And this includes the formal causes, the ‘what’ of the intelligible structure of the data. If, therefore, these putative smaller ‘bits’ can only be known by a combination of experience of data, intelligent understanding of that data, and affirmation of this understanding, as at least probably true of the data, then the only path open is that of critical realism. And if the real structure of the supposed smallest bits can only be known through experience, understanding, and judgment, then there is no reason to suppose that the higher complexes, higher entities, are mere coincidental assemblages of lower things. Rather, if there is reason to believe that the operation of the higher entity is not explained by the coincidental manifold of lower entities that play a part in its constitution, then there may be every reason to think that there is a higher entity and not a mere heap of lower entities. Emergent Probability The complementary notions of disposition and actualization of disposition become generalized in Lonergan’s account of the emergent probability

274 Method in Metaphysics

characteristic of world order. In the case of the individual entity one can grasp that the data on that entity are a potential for the said entity to be realized and are actualized in terms of the given form, formal cause, or intelligible pattern, that determines what the thing is. Thus the reality of a table is constituted both by the ‘stuff’ of the wood or plastic from which it is constructed and by the intelligible form, ‘table,’ understood as a human artefact for achieving certain ends realized in the material. The material cause has to have the right dispositions for being used as it is; wood and plastic have shown that they are apt for furniture construction whereas acid has not. In the case of more complex entities, capable of movement and selfactualization, like dogs or human persons, one can also witness actions that can be understood to be actualizations of dispositions for action in terms of inherent or acquired habits. Indeed, in the case of human understanding, at any rate, the grasp of an idea or the understanding of a concept is at once the acquisition of a new disposition as the acquisition of a new intellectual form. The fact that I now understand what Cantor’s antidiagonalization proof means entails that I have the disposition to do so. Naturally, the understanding of a single proof such as this involves understanding multiple insights, and the further one pursues a science or an area of scholarship, or the mastery of some practical skill, the greater the evidence for the affirmation that one has acquired a complex and differentiated disposition or form. As it is said, we become ‘well informed’ with regard to a given area of theoretical and practical knowledge. The acquisition of such dispositions to act increases the statistical likelihood of such acts occurring. It is the recurrence of sound and accurate judgments in a given area that leads us to say that someone is an expert or is skilled in that area. However, the recurrence of acts on the part of different individuals also creates a field, a common environment, which itself is a dispositional environment for the emergence and continuance of schemes of recurrence and new individuals. The idea at the basis of a scheme of recurrence may be stated as follows: A conditions B, B conditions C, C conditions D, and D conditions the recurrence of A. Naturally, in reality the conditioning fields are scattered individuals and events of greater or lesser complexity. So, as was pointed out in earlier chapters, the schemes of recurrence that are the interlinked cycles of the solar system, or the water cycle of this plant, create environments and ecological niches, which are exploited by individuals. In the human world such schemes are the daily routines of the economy, of the domestic situation, of education and the like, which interact one with another. The emergence, survival, and decline of these schemes can be estimated in a probabilistic manner, and such an estimation can be

Dispositions, Development, and Supervenience 275

extended to the further schemes and individual entities that arise on the basis of the prior schemes. It is in this context that one may understand the differentiations of the sciences, according to Lonergan. The realities studied in physics constitute merely a ‘coincidental manifold’ from the perspective of chemistry and, similarly, the chemical compounds and elements constitute a coincidental manifold from the biological viewpoint. It is in these manifolds that the higher sciences, relative to each level, may grasp an explanatory insight that understands the possibility of verifying laws and affirming the existence of entities, now on the level of chemistry, now on the level of biology, and so on.6 Thus the sciences are not interrelated in terms of logical deduction, but in terms of the concrete possibility grasped in insights into the data for affirming ‘higher’ entities and laws that explain why we find the probabilistically estimated regularities in the data. On the critical realist position such higher entities and laws are discovered by the threefold operation of attending to data, understanding data, and verifying hypotheses pertaining to that data; they are not discovered by the imaginative exercise of picturing smaller bits inside smaller bits. As Philip McShane remarks, ‘On any adequate view of verification the laws of behaviour of the elephant are at least as well verified as the probability-laws of electrons.’7 Furthermore, higher entities, which systematize the relative, merely coincidental fields of the acts of lower entities, manifest greater complexity in terms of plasticity and adaptability. As one ascends the escalator of life, so to speak, one finds entities and schemes of recurrence that are dispositions for further entities and schemes of recurrence, but the higher one ascends the more differentiated and flexible are those dispositions as concrete opportunities. Thus Lonergan writes of an ‘increasing liberation of serial possibilities from limitations and restrictions imposed by previous realizations. Plants and, still more so, animals function, not in this or that scheme of recurrence, but in any of ever increasing ranges of schemes of recurrence.’8 Animals, then, are intelligible solutions to problems of living and exploit a series of interconnected probable schemes creating an environment. They are, as it were, answers to problems. The more differentiated systematization of lower dispositions, in terms of lower coincidental manifolds, which an animal constitutes, leads Lonergan to make some prescriptive remarks concerning a truly scientific zoology in terms of animal psychology. He writes: ‘The animal pertains to an explanatory genus beyond that of the plant; that explanatory genus turns on sensibility; its specific differences are differences of sensibility; and it is in differences of sensibility that are to be found the basis for differences of organic structure, since that

276 Method in Metaphysics

structure, as we have seen, possesses a degree of freedom that is limited but not controlled by underlying materials and outer circumstances.’9 While a hermeneutic of inquiry dominated by atomistic picture-thinking may lead one to want to study animals in a merely descriptive way in terms of observable characteristics, and while work on the psychological differentiations of animals may be more demanding, Lonergan argues that it is the latter, rather than the descriptive kind of enquiry, that constitutes truly scientific zoology.10 In the case of human knowing one can verify, in a direct manner, lower order entities that become the potential, or dispositional, material on the basis of which emerge ‘higher’ systematic integrations and events, which are not completely explained by laws pertaining to these lower entities. The ordering of these higher elements, therefore, is, from the perspective of the lower laws, merely coincidental, but is explained by the ‘higher’ explanations. Thus, the ordering of black marks on a white background on this page is explained in terms of the operations of intelligence and reason on the part of the writer of this page, who is attempting to formulate and communicate in an apt manner insights and judgments already arrived at. From the perspective of other cognitive disciplines, in the physical sciences say, the marks are a jumble of elements to be understood in part in terms of laws formulated in various sciences. To return to the example of the table, the realities that are a Chippendale table, or a post Second World War utility dining table, are in part explained by laws of physics, chemistry, botany, and accounts arising from evolutionary studies of the dispersion of types of wood across the planet at various periods in history. But such accounts are not sufficient to explain the form of these tables. Such higher order explanations are in terms of ‘what a table is’ for human use and in terms of historical, sociological, and aesthetic accounts of why these table designs take the form they do. Probabilistic considerations, it can be noted, enter into the process of such explanations at every stage, as regards both the emergence and survival of schemes of recurrence and of the individuals whose existence and development depends upon such schemes. Thus the likelihood of suchand-such types of wood being used in the production of tables at a given place and time will depend on the distribution of wood of a suitable quality at a given location on the planet at a given time. That, in turn, will depend on all manner of schemes of recurrence of a physical, chemical, and biological nature operative in evolutionary development. As regards the use made by human beings of the wood, in making such tables, other schemes of recurrence, whose frequencies may be estimated statistically, will enter into the picture. The presence or absence of skills and technological ability to use certain wood types, and aesthetic and cultural considerations

Dispositions, Development, and Supervenience 277

of taste and meaning are further examples of causal factors involving schemes of recurrence dependent upon other schemes. One point, which may be worth making in the present context, is that schemes of recurrence are systematic frequencies from which there is divergence in the pattern of events, but the divergence is non-systematic. Such non-systematic divergence from frequencies is what may be properly termed ‘chance.’ Thus, Lonergan’s position adds to the older Aristotelian view, which identified the phenomenon of ‘chance,’ the context of emergent probability, as a concrete mathematical patterning of data that has its own intelligibility and significance in understanding process in the world. Lonergan’s position would also correct oversights in Darwinian theory, which misleadingly talks of ‘chance variations’ as the key element in evolutionary development. Such oversights are not unconnected with a naive realist position underlying Darwinian theory, fairly typical of much mechanist, nineteenth-century science. However, Lonergan would insist that what is of value in such theory is properly formulated in terms of emergent probability of schemes, and ‘chance’ is to be understood relative to such more generalized probabilistic patterning.11 It should be pointed out, however, that such non-systematic divergences, ‘chance events,’ can be dramatic determinants of the future course of evolution; they may bring about the destruction of present schemes and individuals, allowing for the emergence of other schemes and individuals. Thus, it might be determined by science that a large meteorite hitting this or another planet was not part of some regular frequency of events. It was, perhaps, a one-off, chance event. However, the destruction it caused may have been cataclysmic, perhaps wiping out dominant species, like the dinosaurs. Similarly in human history such ‘chance events’ of major significance can occur. It will be clear from what has been said that Lonergan’s is a strongly antireductionist viewpoint. In support of this position Lonergan indicates the practice of current science and scholarship and the convictions of common sense. Furthermore, such a viewpoint would not deny that certain areas of cognitive research may in time collapse one into another, as one area is found to be less than systematic and, perhaps, a merely descriptive account of what could be explained by another more rigorous viewpoint. However, at the limit, the antireductionist position is not to be gainsaid insofar as its denial leads to an incoherent, self-destructive position of the kind already discussed in this book. Thus, it is the case, as has been argued, that the cognitive acts on the interrelated levels of coming to know – levels of experience, understanding, and judgments – are realities. To deny this only serves to provide evidence that such acts occur. Furthermore, it is on the basis of such an argument on cognition and epistemology that a critique of antirealist and sceptical positions as ultimately inco-

278 Method in Metaphysics

herent has been mounted. On both accounts, therefore, it would be unwise for a reductionist scientism to contest the reality of the said cognitive acts, since coming to know and affirm those acts is the way to defeat an antirealism that would undermine claims that science in any fashion knows reality. Scientific claims, probable judgments about reality, are themselves instances of such cognitive acts. Either scientific claims are sound and well substantiated because they are the result of intelligent and reasonable inquiries into the data, or they are the products of the subrational, and non-reasonable and are, as such, not worth considering in any intelligent quest to know the world. Finality I turn next to the vexed issue of finality. As we shall see below, some analytical metaphysicians insist that there are ontological truth makers in the processes discoverable by us in the world that make talk of ‘directedness’ or ‘aboutness’ in the world more than a mere façon de parler. On Lonergan’s position final causality is clearly verifiable in the context of human cognition. Our questions concerning data are ‘about,’ or ‘directed toward,’ answering questions concerning ‘what the data is’; and our ‘Is it true of reality?’ questions are ‘about,’ ‘directed toward’ both the insights and concepts we have acquired in answer to our previous ‘What?’ questions, and to the knowing of whether these insights or concepts give us knowledge of reality or are mere objects of thought without reference to what is the case. We verify these intentional acts as ‘intending,’ as ‘about’ something. There is no doubt about finality in the case of our knowing. Finality as final cause in such instances is also to be understood in terms of ‘value,’ ‘goal,’ ‘intended good to be reached.’ But what can we say of the non-human world? Lonergan is concerned that we do not slide into anthropomorphic picture-thinking when talking of finality in the non-human domain, as has occurred in the case of some vitalistic philosophies. What has been said in this book regarding ‘myth and metaphysics’ and the temptation to picture-think (inherent in the polymorphic nature of human consciousness) when expressing what is at issue in causality is no less true of accounts of final causation. Finality is, then, not a matter of some pull of the future on the present.12 We can verify the finality inherent in the intentionality of our conscious acts as they intend such goals as answers to questions. But in the case of the nonhuman world, what the results of perennial common sense across cultures, and modern science and scholarship entitle us to affirm is that ‘finality is an immanent intelligibility operating through the effective probability of possibility.’13 Elucidating this compact definition Lonergan writes: ‘The

Dispositions, Development, and Supervenience 279

directed dynamism of finality is an effectively probable realization of possibilities. For potency is an objective possibility of form; form is an objective possibility of act; acts are an objective possibility of higher forms and higher acts. The realization of these possibilities is effectively probable, for on the supposition of sufficient numbers and sufficiently long intervals of time, the realization of a possibility can be assured.’14 The ontological features so far outlined enter into the further elaboration of Lonergan’s metaphysical account of the notion of development. He writes of development as ‘a flexible, linked sequence of dynamic and increasingly differentiated higher integrations that meet the tension of successfully transformed underlying manifolds through the successful applications of the principles of correspondence and emergence.’15 By ‘correspondence’ in this context Lonergan means the correspondence that must obtain between, on the one hand, different underlying manifolds, the entities of a ‘lower order’ (which from a ‘lower perspective’ is coincidentally aggregated) and a given higher integration of these entities, on the other. In both the world of human cognition and in the world at large one can witness this principle at work. For instance, different aggregations of data lead scientists to formulate different theories. The notion of ‘emergence,’ invoked in the above elaboration of the notion of development, has already been the focus of discussions above. In cognition, otherwise coincidental clusterings of images can serve for the emergence of an insight; the groupings of lines in certain positions and symbols on a page can facilitate the emergence of an insight in, say, geometry. By way of illustrating what is meant by a ‘higher integration,’ Lonergan refers to the example of static gazes that lock groupings of subatomic events into static routines. A ‘dynamic higher integration,’ on the other hand, would be illustrated by the example of an unstable gas. In such an instance, the system would be on the move until, by correspondence, a new integration is arrived at.16 ‘Development,’ then, can be understood as a linked sequence of higher integrations of lower manifolds, the course of which is marked by an increasing differentiation. The trend of development is from a generic indeterminacy to specific perfections.17 In an earlier chapter I examined Lonergan’s ideas on explanatory genus and species. It was pointed out in that context that one has evidence of things, individuals, of higher genus and species if data and changes in data cannot be explained in a satisfactory way by individuals differentiated in terms of acts characteristic of a lower genus and/or species, but they can be explained by acts characterizing individuals of a higher genus or species. To bring such discussion to bear on the present context, it can be pointed out that the intelligibility inherent in the notion of development is not grasped by understanding

280 Method in Metaphysics

any determinate genus or species of individuals, but by understanding the virtualities or dispositions of a given stage in the growth of an individual for the emergence of another stage. So, in infancy young human beings are characterized by similarity and a relative lack of differentiation in their psychological dispositions and conscious activities. But as these individuals grow they will become increasingly differentiated in terms of temperament, skills, interests, education, views, and so forth.18 In writing subsequent to the analysis of development provided in his work Insight, Lonergan applied the notion of genetic development from the global and undifferentiated to the differentiated and specific to an analysis of the historical and cultural processes that lead to the development of philosophy, science, and scholarship. In this cultural process we witness the increasing complexity of language and flexibility of linguistic usage as civilizations develop and roles and skills become differentiated. In this process reflexive skills such as grammar, rhetoric, advanced mathematics, and philosophy emerge within a culture, and such developments themselves provide the conditions necessary for increasing specializations.19 The flexibility, adaptability, and relative freedom from the constraints of the conditioning lower manifold of elements, which characterizes higher individuals such as plants and animals, was noted above. Here it can be observed that flexibility and adaptability, as these are acquired as dispositions by a growing individual learning to cope with and benefiting from circumstances, manifest the ontological difference between ‘higher’ entities, which develop, and ‘lower’ entities, which do not. As Lonergan points out: Masses and electric charges, atoms and molecules, are statically systematic; their performance is not a function of their age; there is not a different law of gravitation for each succeeding century. In contrast, organic, psychic, and intellectual development involves a succession of stages; and in that succession the previously impossible becomes possible and the previously awkward and difficult becomes a ready routine. The infant can neither walk nor talk, and once we were all infants.20 Sciences that would investigate such higher order individuals, therefore, will not be concerned simply with the ‘classical laws,’ exemplified in Newtonian physics, nor simply with these laws as placed in the fuller context of Einsteinian physics or the current scientific world view that involves the statistical turn – the investigation of the intelligibility present in emergent probability. Rather, what will be operative in such investigation of higher,

Dispositions, Development, and Supervenience 281

more complex individuals will be a genetic method, a method that seeks to understand how it is that, as a given individual grows, new flexible routines of behaviour and actions emerge, which are specific dispositions for further action. The Integrator and Operator Involved in this genetic account of individual growth are two further ontological principles, in Lonergan’s view: the ‘integrator’ and the ‘operator.’ At any stage of development the intelligibility of the whole that is the individual is both an ‘integrator’ and an ‘operator.’ In understanding the integrator one understands why the various elements or constituents of the individual are organized as they are at this given moment. In understanding the operator one understands the disposition for the further development of the individual as the instability of the present stage increases to bring forth the relative stability and greater complexity of the next stage. In order to illustrate the notions of integrator and operator Lonergan directs our attention to what may be understood when a biologist attempts to understand an organism, such as a dinosaur, by studying its bones. The biologist is able, to some extent, to reconstruct the idea of the total organism from a study of its fossilized bones. The interlocking of parts gives a clue to the interlocking whole of the biological individual, as an integrated system or individual, and thus some understanding of the ‘integrator’ may be gained. However, Lonergan continues: ‘Besides the simultaneous interlocking, there also is a successive interlocking. Just as the dinosaur can be reconstructed from the fossil, so a determinate stage in the development of the whole can be made the basis from which earlier or later stages could be reconstructed; and in this reconstruction over time the major premise of the inference is supplied by the higher system as operator.’21 In the cognitive development that is a central aspect of human development the notions of integrator and operator may again be verified. Thus, at any stage in the process of intellectual inquiry, the conceptual content of our interrelated thoughts, hypotheses, theories, and the like, constitute an integrator. These conceptual packages organize lower level images, from which insights have arisen. However, we organize and integrate our mental images and data in concepts, thoughts, and hypotheses only to move forward to asking questions as to whether such thoughts are true of reality. The conscious questions, which move us from data to insight, and concepts, on the second level of understanding, and which move us from that level onto the level, or stage, of judgment as to the truth, probability, falsehood, of our concepts, are instances of the operator in our own intellectual development.

282 Method in Metaphysics

However, what was said above concerning the notion of finality should be repeated here regarding the notion of the operator. One should in no way think that Lonergan is suggesting that in non-human instances there is some vitalistic homunculus at work to be designated the operator. Such picture-thinking projection must be rejected as unverifiable. Indeed, as Lonergan indicates, in the general case the operator is identical with the upwardly directed dynamism of reality that is finality itself.22 In the general case, then, that finality is, as has been stressed above, the effective probability of realizations of schemes of recurrence and individuals over adequate intervals of time and space. In the particular case of our conscious mental activities the operators that are questions for intelligence and reasonableness may be verified in a definitive manner. In non-human cases we have to rely upon the reasonable, probable judgments of current science regarding what is at work in the systems on the move that are the integrations of higher individuals like plants and animals. In such cases Lonergan maintains it is for the scientific or cognitive discipline itself to attempt to identify the relevant operator. But the approach will be in accord with the criteria of critical realism already argued for in this work: that is, verification of the hypotheses of the operator in question will be an inferential affair that takes account of the totality of the data on a given thing. It will take account of the changes and continuity in that data as it displays ever more flexible and differentiated depositions-to-act in given environments. An example of a first approximation towards specifying the operator in the case of a tree would be, Lonergan maintains, what is called the law of effect, which ‘contends that development takes place along lines of successful functioning. Thus, a tree in a forest puts forth branches and leaves not to its sides but at its top.’23 This law would help to specify to some degree the operator in question, since the operator is the principle of the higher system on the move. Further specification would have to take the form of understanding where such a specification did not succeed in explaining all the relevant data, and in what ways this data could be explained. In other words, the inferential work of science, which aims at probable verification of a hypothesis to explain the data, would be under way in this case. However, the two alternatives that are unacceptable in this case are the related alternatives of fantasizing about a vitalistic occult entity or goblin who is thought to be at work behind the tree’s development, on the one hand, and the rejection of all talk of finality as nonsense, on the other. The latter option is invariably part of an equally unverifiable reductionist account of bits at work within other bits of the individual. Such an account fails to explain what needs to be explained, that is, the dynamic, growing tree that manifests across time increasingly diversified dispositions for action.

Dispositions, Development, and Supervenience 283

Directedness and Supervenience: Martin on Dispositions C.B. Martin, whose work has already featured in earlier discussions in this book, defends a position on dispositions and ‘directedness’ or, as Lonergan would express it, finality, which is in many ways supportive of the position outlined above. In a three-way debate between himself, David Armstrong, and U.T. Place, Martin rejects the verificationist view of dispositions as espoused by Quine in Word and Object.24 We can think, Martin argues, of some elementary particle that could interact in a certain way with other particles if it were in another part of the universe, but never does so since it is never in the locality of these other particles. Martin quips that only God and the number two are in pure act; everything else is in a state in which it manifests at one time only part of a repertoire of dispositions. Martin realizes that the Quinean response to such views can be expressed in a retort such as, ‘If pigs had wings they would fly.’ But he believes such a response simply flies in the face of the evidence we do have that things possess real, unactualized dispositions-to-act. While Martin’s position on dispositions is in no way as detailed and elaborate as Lonergan’s, he recognizes something of the complex interaction between diverse individuals and states and their dispositions, scattered through space and time. He writes, ‘There can be dispositions for acquiring further dispositions, whether the disposition-acquiring occurs or not.’25 Lonergan’s analysis attempts, as we have seen, to examine further the nature of dispositions for acquiring further dispositions, both in the case of interrelated entities (the schemes of recurrence that allow the emergence of further individuals and schemes of recurrence) and in the individual entity. So the notion of the ‘operator’ refers to the dispositions in the individual that allow the acquisition of further dispositions as growth occurs. In the case of human cognition this is clear insofar as our ability to come to know, to raise and answer questions, permits the acquisition of areas of knowledge, such as in science and scholarship, which themselves constitute dispositions for cognitive and practical action. Martin is unimpressed by the attempts of his interlocutors, Armstrong and Place, to come up with an account of dispositions that is neither outand-out verificationist or Rylean, nor the unashamed affirmation of real dispositions advocated by him. He argues that Armstrong’s attempt to employ Lewis’s ‘possible worlds’ analysis to make sense of the modality of ‘potency’ simply fails to provide the semantic truth makers for the claim that, in reality, ‘This piece of glass is brittle’ – that the glass truly possesses the potential for breaking in certain circumstances. Nor, in Martin’s view, should Armstrong maintain, as he does, that every disposition must be manifested at some time. This creates ad hoc necessities. Furthermore,

284 Method in Metaphysics

Armstrong fails to explain how natural laws are more than simply regular co-occurrences, although both he and Place admit that there is more to laws than simple correlation. Martin insists, rather, that laws identify, when correct, something in the properties that is apt to bring about something.26 Place elaborates an account of dispositions in which they are seen as possible future and past counterfactual manifestations. However, Place’s decision to designate such ‘counter to fact facts about an entity’ a ‘property’ is, Martin asserts, deeply misleading ontologically.27 In a manner that is cognate with Lonergan’s position on emergent probability (as a matrix of dispositions and their actualizations as conditioning further dispositive states) Martin argues that talk of probability in quantum physics and other areas of science in which stochastic laws are invoked is, in effect, talk of dispositional conditions and states. Martin writes, ‘On the Limit View, the dispositionality of a property could vary, as a sort of disposition-flutter of an otherwise stable state, as an ontic grounding for disjunctives and probabilities over a period of such fluttering.’28 While Martin is a realist concerning dispositions as aspects of entities, he combines such realism with a reductionism regarding supervenience or emergence. He writes: ‘My conclusion is that once you recognize the existence of bottomup, micro-macro forms of causation, the notion of supervenience no longer does any work in philosophy, the formal features of the relation are already present in the causal sufficiency of the micro-macro form of causation.’29 To illustrate his point he offers the example of the solidity of a piston, which is causally supervenient on its molecular structure. Clearly, he observes, the solidity is not epiphenomenal. Turning to the question of ‘directedness’ in nature Martin insists, taking what in fact is an Aristotelian view, that directedness is not what characterizes the mental or intentional to the exclusion of the rest of nature. Armstrong, on the other hand, taking a position akin to that of Hume and Kant, agues that ‘directedness’ in nature is mere anthropomorphic projection. But Martin responds that scientific evidence is not lacking for a ‘readiness for’ as intrinsic to the dispositions that abound in nature.30 The ‘aboutness’ we can identify in our own dispositional attitudes is akin to the ‘aboutness’ in dispositions in the physical world. These dispositions in the natural world not only make possible but limit, or prevent, certain events from happening. He writes: ‘There is a sense in which the dispositionality even of any property of a quark, is far more than could ever be manifested because on any occasion some forms of manifestation-conditions or reciprocal disposition partners are lacking and may even exclude one another.’31 As we saw above, potency is not only an ontological principle of concrete possibility for x, or for y, but a principle of limitation regarding the concrete possibilities excluded in any given situation.

Dispositions, Development, and Supervenience 285

Martin then proceeds to indicate areas of scientific work that support the view that directedness or ‘aboutness’ is intrinsic to dispositional capacities found in nature. Work on biological systems provides examples of natural directedness in terms of ‘negative feedback,’ ‘positive feedback,’ and ‘feedforward.’ In physiology Walter Cannon developed the idea of ‘negative feedback’ in the 1920s. This type of feedback involves the idea of ‘preserving homeostasis’ in physiological systems; the thermometer provides a model for what is understood to be operative in such cases. However, this idea has not helped to understand the plasticity and adaptability found by physiologists at the cellular and systems levels. Thus, the move to the elaboration of ‘positive feedback’ theories. These theories highlight the role of anticipatory augmentation in systems.32 In addition, models in terms of ‘feedforward’ design have been deployed in understanding anticipatory signals in systems.33 Martin points out that such ‘feedforward’ systems do not depend ‘on continuous monitoring of output by control systems. Feedforward systems manifest projective tendencies and integrative tendencies.’34 Finally, Martin directs our attention to manifest instances of such directed dispositions in our mental and physical life. Examples of these are found in the ‘cue manifestations’ referred to by Wittgenstein. In mathematics, logic, and other areas of our cognitive life we often enough resort to expressions such as ‘etcetera.’ These are instances of understanding when we ‘know how to go on’ yet to do so would be tedious and otiose, and they are clearly evidence of directed dispositions.35 Martin’s arguments concerning dispositions and directedness, then, support the position I have outlined above on potency and finality. The evidence for the reality of these metaphysical constituents, required as semantic truth makers for our well-founded claims about features of reality, is, as Martin indicates, to be found in both the domains of human intellectual and moral habit, and in the physical, chemical, and biological aspects of other entities. The facts of habit or virtue acquisition, observed by Aristotle, constitute good evidence of there being habits or virtualities even when these are not actualized. The fact that I can, day after day, pick up a violin and play on it in a way I once was unable to, and in a way others who have not spent years learning to play cannot, and the fact that I cannot do this with a trumpet, as another can, are facts that constitute evidence for the claim that there remain dispositions even when these are not actualized. Furthermore, probable scientific explanations of data create reasonable probabilities of prediction, and such prediction relates to potencies not now actualized. So it is reasonable for owners to act in accord with the prediction given by the veterinary doctor when examining a racehorse, the vet having found that the animal is unfit to race. We

286 Method in Metaphysics

should think that the vet had not properly understood the data if, contrary to his dire predictions, the horse were to race several times and win on each occasion. At the limit, the whole of the applied science of veterinary medicine would be called into question if predictions about the behaviour of the animals who are the patients of veterinary practitioners were always wrong or wrong for the most part. While there are agreements between the position taken in this book and some of the points defended by Martin, there are also points of divergence. As we have seen in the previous chapter, Martin wants to replace causality talk with that of manifestation of disposition. I shall repeat here what was said before. If such an attempt reflects a desire to move beyond images of causal relation in terms of a facile, Humean, picture-thinking of causality, then I have some sympathy for Martin’s endeavours. However, it remains the case that, as Place’s reservations concerning Martin’s views suggest, the description of mutually manifesting dispositions lacks clarity and does not provide evidence for the view that causality is to be dispensed with. On the other hand, a more satisfactory analysis of causality in terms of diverse types of intelligible relations of dependency between A and B and C and so forth, where A and B may or may not be distinct unities (substances) would perhaps do justice to the intuitions that are in some way inchoate in the position Martin is attempting to defend. Martin’s view that a proper appreciation of manifesting dispositions also does away with the need for supervenient or emergent states (or individuals) must also be rejected. In fact, the example of the piston he uses to illustrate his point provides a counterexample to his view, when properly understood. We may admit his point that the micro factor of molecular structure produces the macro phenomenon of ‘hardness’ (to be identified in non-descriptive terms by science). But the reality of the piston cannot be reduced to such necessary but not sufficient conditions, for the piston is a human artefact that has a central form, an intelligible patterning, due to its design as a functioning object. The example, therefore, is apt in directing our attention to the way the form human beings have given the piece of metal supervenes upon the metallic stuff that is understood to be the right stuff, having the right dispositions, for the job. While Martin believes that his ontological analysis of mutually manifesting conditions does away with the need for supervenience, we turn next to look at the work of an analytical philosopher whose work has served to highlight the importance of the notion of supervenience as an area requiring investigation in analytical metaphysics, Jaegowan Kim. That is not to say, however, that the upshot of Kim’s work is an out and out denial of the kind of micro-macro account of underlying properties and properties of superstructure avowed by Martin. Indeed, Kim is fairly reticent when it

Dispositions, Development, and Supervenience 287

comes to offering definite conclusions concerning the nature of supervenience, and he is willing to admit changes in his thinking. His writing on this area is often exploratory in nature and his views are expressed in a tentative manner, although he does clearly favour some options rather than others. Kim on Supervenience One service Kim has rendered to recent analytical metaphysics is his attempt to raise historical awareness of the recent provenance of the metaphysical concept of supervenience. Historical sketches regarding metaphysical themes and ideas, such as Kim’s, are welcome, I believe, insofar as they contribute to a growing awareness among analytical metaphysicians, already noted in this book, that the history of metaphysics is not an antiquarian exercise of little philosophical value. Rather, there is an awareness abroad, and it is to be fostered, that renewed work in metaphysics needs to reconnect with the tradition of metaphysical thinking as a valid philosophical resource for current debates. In his essay ‘Supervenience as a Philosophical Concept,’ Kim discusses the origins of the term ‘supervenience’ in early twentieth-century moral and metaphysical philosophy.36 On the metaphysical side, the term goes back to ‘emergentist’ Anglo-American philosophers like G.H. Lewes, C. Llyod Morgan, and C.D. Broad. Such philosophers held that when, for instance, chemical states achieve a certain complexity other states, such as mental states, ‘emerge.’ The emergentist debate was alive in English-speaking philosophical circles in the 1930s and 1940s. In the 1920s Lloyd Morgan employed the term ‘supervenient’ as synonymous for ‘emergent.’ On the side of moral philosophy, G.E. Moore’s celebrated attack on naturalism in moral philosophy at the beginning of the twentieth century involved the idea that moral properties were not reducible to natural properties but were entailed immediately by them. Thus, when we think, say, of the life of St Francis of Assisi, we cannot but say that the actions he performed had the quality of ‘goodness’ about them – the quality of ‘good’ necessarily attaches to the actions he performed. The way goodness or evil ‘attaches’ or is ‘entailed’ by certain actions was first described in terms of supervenience by R.M. Hare in his work of 1952, The Language of Morals. Finally, Davidson rediscovered, or, at least, reintroduced the emergentist notion of supervenience into Anglo-American philosophical circles in his work on events in the 1970s. Analysts like Frank Sibley and Jerrold Levison have extended this type of analysis to art and write of the supervenience of aesthetic properties on natural properties in the work of art. Davidson followed in the antireductionist tradition of the moral theorists and the

288 Method in Metaphysics

emergentists. While he espoused a ‘weak supervenience’ view, according to Kim, and while such a weak version is plausible, what is not plausible in Davidson’s position, argues Kim, is his attempt to do away with psychophysical laws. Kim’s view is that one cannot show the entailment of the mental by physical events, as Davidson wishes to, and yet deny there are psycho-physical laws.37 One contrast Kim is concerned to draw out is that between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ supervenience. He does so through possible-worlds analysis of the modalities involved. Thus, for Kim ‘weak supervenience’ implies that within any world, if A has the same physical properties as B, then they will have the same moral and mental properties. The ‘weak’ version does not specify that in any possible world, if A has the same physical properties as individuals in other possible worlds, all must have the same mental and moral properties.38 One the other hand, ‘strong supervenience’ implies that if the base properties are fixed then the supervenient properties necessarily follow. Such necessity would be of the kind identified by Moore and Hare in the case of ‘moral goodness’ inevitably following from certain natural facts (the behaviour of St Francis) and not from others (the behaviour of Adolf Hitler). Throughout several of his essays exploring the notion of supervenience, Kim refers to the natural-moral example taken from Moore and Hare. However, he does admit in his essay ‘Postscripts on Supervenience’ that it may be misleading to think that all types of supervenience are the same, and that moral supervenience should be considered in the same way as, what he terms ‘mereological supervenience,’ or the emergence of physical properties on the bases that are ‘lower’ physical properties.39 Such caution is also evident in Kim’s treatment of reductionism. He explores the idea of the emergence or supervenience of some properties on others in terms of biconditional propositions. However, he goes on to consider what are the metaphysical implications of biconditionals (which state the necessary connection between base and supervenient properties). Would these imply explanatory reductionism of one to the other? Such a move would be premature, Kim writes: ‘The mere fact that such equivalences or biconditionals “exist” is no guarantee that they are, or ever will become, available for reductive or explanatory uses.’40 Even covariance between B and A is not proof of any explanatory relation, Kim insists. That needs to be established by other means. It could be that A and B demonstrate covariance because of being mutually caused by C, rather than having a direct causal relation between them.41 Indeed, the ‘necessity’ involved in the covariance relation between base and superstructure, which is expressed in the biconditionals of supervenience, may be metaphysical, logico-mathematical, analytical, or nomological necessity.42

Dispositions, Development, and Supervenience 289

However, Kim admits that local cases of reduction of one set of properties to another may occur as science develops. Kim’s abiding notion of supervenience is that it is characterized by the modality of necessity, however wide or narrow a scope be assigned to such necessity in terms of its trans-possible world instantiation. In the essay ‘“Strong” and “Global” Supervenience Revisited,’ Kim argues for a ‘strengthened relation of global supervenience [that] requires that two worlds that are pretty much alike in the base properties must be pretty much alike in the supervenient properties.’43 The idea of A supervening on B is elucidated by taking two domains of individuals (two possible worlds) and stipulating that there is a trans-world entailment of B properties in a given individual by A properties. Kim writes, ‘By one distribution “entailing” another we mean that the first necessitates the second – that is, there is no world in which the first distribution holds but the second distribution does not.’44 He continues, ‘Now we can think of supervenience as requiring that similarity in the base properties must be matched by similarities in the supervenient properties.’45 Kim is critical of the a priori reductionist option, which holds that any ‘higher’ order properties must be deemed epiphenomenal. Thus he rejects Van Cleve’s bundle theory and its phenomenalist reductionism. If it is held, in such theories, that we can appropriately assign ‘higher’ characteristics or features to what is, in reality, a bundle of lower order elements, what, Kim asks, are the epistemological, intelligible criteria for doing so? If we have such reasons, then are they not reasons to say that higher things of a metaphysical order actually exist? He writes: ‘It seems to me that the best, perhaps the only, way to rationalize the basis of the criteria – that is, to see the criteria are reasonable and make sense – is to see, or posit some intelligible connections between the entities involved – that is, to have an intelligible metaphysics of the situation.’46 Kim, therefore, does recognize such intelligible higher order structures in cases identified in physical science. Thus there are, on his view, ‘higher order’ properties supervening on micro properties. He avers: ‘An example of micro-based property is having such-and-such mean translational kinetic energy, a stock example in the discussion of microreduction: this is a property that belongs to wholes (gases), not to their parts (individual molecules). And we can consider how such properties as temperatures supervene on their micro-based properties.’47 On the other hand, physicalism is not to be disposed of in the same fashion. We might think that a counterexample to physicalist reduction is found in the fact that two human subjects between whom the physical differences are negligible can have different mental thoughts. We could, perhaps, think of possible world twins in a Putnam-like example, or of dif-

290 Method in Metaphysics

ferent scientists with a significantly similar physical make-up holding different views in the course of scientific history. However, as Kim points out, the lesson is really that epistemic states are relational, and it may be open to the physicalist to say that all such relations are material, physical.48 So it may be the way in which observers x and z were standing in physical relation to object y that results in a difference of opinion between x and z about y. While, as we have seen, Kim’s analysis of the varieties of necessity of the supervenience relation admits of possible agnosticism regarding explanatory and causal links between base and supervenient properties, his own preference is for an anti-Cartesian view of the mind-body relation. He argues that explanatory simplicity inclines us to dismiss Cartesian ideas of supervenience of body on mind.49 Mere occasionalist concurrence would seem implausible. Therefore in the mind-body case explanatory simplicity would lead us to think that properties of A and B in this instance are related by way of physical identity. While he wishes to remain open to other views, then, Kim thinks that the solution to the issue of mind-body relation must be along the lines of mereological supervenience: ‘That is, we try to view mental properties as macro-properties of persons, or whole organisms, which are determined by, and dependant on, the character and organization of the appropriate parts, or subsystems, of organisms.’50 Kim is aware, however, of the very real difficulties that arise concerning the problems of mind-body dependence. The options are either the causal over-determination of an event (by both mind and something physical), which Kim rejects, or that the physical causes the mental to act, or that the mental causes the physical the act. As a solution worthy of further exploration Kim notes Stephen Yablo’s attempt to distinguish between the mental as the determinable and physical realizations, which are, on his view, the determinate.51 Kim suggests one possible solution may be to say that the mental is realized in particular physical instances, so that there is no causal competition between the mental and physical. But he realizes the problems attendant upon such a view. Why should we insist on the nonreducibility of mental, conscious states, if we are going to hold at the same time that they do no causal work? Kim concludes his discussion of the issue by noting the impasse created by holding, as he believes one should, both the non-reducibility of the mental and the dependency of the mental on the physical. While Martin believes, then, that the idea of supervenience, or emergence, is redundant, Kim, like Lonergan, defends the view that in reality there are truly base properties and supervenient, or emergent, properties. However, the rather different philosophical positions from which these treatments of supervenience arise quite naturally lead to divergences in

Dispositions, Development, and Supervenience 291

the views of the two philosophers. The notion of ‘mereology’ was already discussed in chapter 6 and was identified as the metaphysical expression of a rather unsophisticated representationalism or empiricism. The occurrence of the term in Kim’s philosophy should, therefore, immediately alert one to the possibility that the logico-metaphysical analyses offered are bound up with an epistemological viewpoint, which is, from the perspective of the critical realism defended in this work, flawed. In fact, one does not need to look far to discover a frank admission of empiricist perceptualism in Kim’s work. In his discussion of Moore’s idea of goodness as a nonnatural property supervenient on natural properties, Kim states that Moore’s position seems to him odd.52 Moore holds that the goodness of things ‘follows’ from their natural properties, but maintains that we cannot inspect them through sense experience. Kim asks why, if we can inspect the natural properties through sense experience, we are not able to inspect the moral properties in the same way? The implication of his question is that Kim takes it that we know natural properties of things directly through mere sense experience. A second major problem in Kim’s position, from the perspective of the philosophy of emergence and development argued for earlier in this chapter, is the emphasis placed upon necessity as the defining modality of supervenience. It would appear that in a number of his essays this emphasis is bound up with Kim’s notion that the Moorean view of goodness, as necessarily entailed by certain natural properties, is paradigmatic when analysing supervenience. While Kim goes on to correct such a supposition, and his mature position is that not all forms of supervenience can be assimilated to the moral type, he nowhere repudiates the view that the relation between base and supervenient properties is necessary. Such a position is itself quite unnecessary. The evidence both from our cognitional and intellectual experience and from the natural world, as that is presented both by science and common sense, points in a quite different direction. The data that such viewpoints provide enables Lonergan, as we have seen, to elaborate in some detail an account of the emergent probability of schemes of recurrent events, allowing for the development of further schemes and individuals. As probable, such processes are contingent, not necessary. Why Kim nowhere considers the option of a causal dependence of higher properties on lower, which is contingent in this fashion (and the realization of which is susceptible to probabilistic estimations) appears to me quite mysterious, given the abundance of scientific evidence available in the modern period for probabilistic processes. One can only think that his analyses have been so dominated by models of possible world modality elucidation, and by Moore’s antinaturalistic understanding of ethical properties, that such alternatives have escaped his

292 Method in Metaphysics

attention. In cognitional experience, for instance, one can understand that any insight I may have into the data, which emerges on the basis of the data, is conditioned both by that data and by my conscious question concerning what the data is. That question moves me to organize the data in such a way as to facilitate insight. Thus, as Lonergan indicates, the aptness of the data is important for increasing the probability of insight, and so mathematicians work with the symbolism 1764 when attempting to arrive at the square root of that number rather than the symbolism MDCCLXIV.53 But despite my willing it, insights do not always occur when I wish them to. There is nothing necessary about their emergence even from the most carefully primed imagery. I can, of course, increase or decrease the probability of the emergence from, or supervenience on, the data of imagery of the conscious act of insight insofar as I make the effort to be attentive to the data, rather than being inattentive, to exercise to the best of my ability my intelligence in thinking up possible explanations, rather than being silly, and in being reasonable in judging the truth or likelihood of those explanations to be true, rather than being rash. The probability of the emergence of the conscious act of insight can increase, therefore, but this does not render its supervenience on the data of imagery necessary.54 With regard to Moore’s position, and the way in which the dependency obtaining between ethical and natural properties differs from emergence in other instances, it may be worth outlining how the philosophical position taken in this work approaches such issues. On Lonergan’s view the good is what is intelligible; evil is the unintelligible, the unreasonable, the irrational. This is indicated by the fact that we talk of the reasonableness of action, and how unreasonable actions are evil actions.55 Insofar as evil is an absence of intelligibility and, as we have argued in this work, reality is the intelligible, evil indicates a lack of reality. Evil is therefore a type of surd, similar to other instances of the irrational, and in the case of evil we understand not what exists but what ought to be the case and is not. In this way goodness is another aspect of intelligibility. It is akin to a notion such as ‘unicity’ or ‘oneness,’ which can be predicated of any instance of reality insofar as it is a unity of all that it is, and is distinct from any other (be this a distinct conjugate act of a unity, or a unity-substance itself). It is not, therefore, at all helpful to speak of ‘goodness’ supervening on some action in the way a conscious act of insight supervenes upon the imagery of data, or in the way the construction we call a table supervenes on plastic or wood. The third and final problem in Kim’s position has to do with his notion of explanation. It is not clear precisely what he thinks is implied in the process of explanation of one state of affairs by another state affairs, but it

Dispositions, Development, and Supervenience 293

does appear plausible from a reading of his work to think he understands ‘explanation’ to imply both necessary determination of A by B, and also reduction, in some sense, of A to B. This runs counter to the idea of explanation as the intelligible dependency of A on B, C, and other factors, which is a contingent matter. Such is the view I have argued for in this chapter and in the previous chapter on causality. The evidence for this position has been found both in the directly available evidence of our cognitional activities and in the well-founded methods operative in scientific, scholarly, and common-sense understanding. Given Kim’s view of explanation as necessary determination, it is no surprise to find him describing explanation in the mind-body case in terms of the micro to macro determination, akin to that we saw in Martin’s example of the macro property of the ‘hardness’ of a piston as being dependent on the micro properties of its constituents. In the last analysis, it appears that Martin’s view is identical to that of Kim’s, although the latter ostensibly defends the notion of supervenience while the former denies its cogency. Let us recall, from what was written above, why Kim opts for this account of mind-body dependence. While the biconditionals that, for Kim, characterize the relation of supervenience of themselves require no explanatory account of the linking of base and supervenient properties, Kim holds that one needs to invoke other criteria of rational explanation in order to avoid the implausible idea that, for instance, mind properties and body properties are correlated simply by chance. The explanatory criterion of ‘simplicity,’ therefore, on Kim’s view leads us to opt for a micro-macro model of the dependency of mind states on body states, the latter determining the former. As we have seen, Kim is aware of some of the difficulties for such a view. He wants to hold that there are really supervenient properties, which are mind properties, and if one denies real causal powers to these what is the point of saying they are real? He considers, in passing, Yablo’s suggestion, that mind be considered the ‘determinable’ and physically realized acts be considered the ‘determinate.’ But this is implausible. For one thing, the ‘determinable’ implies merely the dispositional, the potential, and our mental conscious acts (as we can verify them in the data of consciousness) are not merely dispositional; they are verified as in act at the time of verification. If, one the other hand, one were to take the Cartesian option, Kim observes that one is faced by the perennial difficulty of understanding just how physical, bodily acts are caused by the mental. While it is the case that there are very significant differences between Lonergan’s position and Descartes’ philosophy, as has already been observed earlier in this book (and, therefore, I would not wish to defend a totally Cartesian philosophy of mind in the present context), nonetheless it is clear that the position I have been defending holds that there are dis-

294 Method in Metaphysics

tinctive, causally related, conscious mental activities of coming to know that are not reducible to any other ‘level’ of activity. Indeed, as has been argued in the previous section, all such attempts at reduction, insofar as they employ the said conscious acts on the levels of experience, understanding, and judgment in order to arrive at a reasoned conclusion, are involved in incoherence. Kim’s invocation of explanatory simplicity, if we are to account for the correlation between mental and physical acts is, from the perspective of critical realism, entirely welcome. His insistence that chance cannot account for the constant correlations between the two sets of properties is also welcome. As we saw in an earlier discussion of the justification for positing the existence of individuals of higher genus and species, the systematic occurrence of acts that cannot be explained from the laws of a lower viewpoint and that are, from that viewpoint, a mere aggregate of coincidences, justifies the affirmation of an individual of a higher genus or species as the explanatory agent at work. Thus, the manifold events that the zoologist verifies as the flexible cycles of schemes of recurrence of feeding, nesting, breeding, and so forth of a certain type of bird are, from the lower viewpoints of physics and chemistry, mere aggregations of data as juxtaposed and unexplained. Rational criteria of ‘simplicity,’ or parsimony, render as justified the fuller explanation of the data in terms of the operation of an agent not delineated on the lower levels of explanation. If wood were to fall in the form of something recognizably like a picnic table during a storm in a forest, we might not be surprised. But we should become sceptical of the claim that no other agency than trees and wind was involved, if, with great regularity, storms in the forest resulted in wood falling in the form of picnic chairs and tables perfectly arranged and proportioned for the needs of picnickers. The way of picture-thinking atomism moves from larger wholes, mereological wholes, to the more ‘fundamental’ and ‘simple’ bits from which they are constructed. ‘Simplicity,’ therefore, is had in terms of imagining the simplest bits. But such ‘simplicity’ is not the parsimony of rational explanation, but of imagination gone on holiday. The way of explanation, on the contrary, moves from the data to more complete explanations of that data in terms of agencies and agents whose existence renders explicable the systematic recurrence of acts, which from lower perspectives are merely chance events.56 The point to emphasise, however, in the present context against the deterministic confusions in Kim’s philosophy is that the way of explanation runs in both directions. Why are these plastic or wooden elements organized in this fashion? Because they have been organized to make a table. The notion of ‘table’ involves the function of this type of artefact in

Dispositions, Development, and Supervenience 295

human life, with all the practical and aesthetic dimensions that entails, and this is what constitutes the explanatory formal cause of the reality to hand. But the intelligible dependency also runs in the other direction since without the material cause, the wood or plastic, no such artefact could be constructed. There remains the question of how mental, conscious acts can cause a non-mental bodily effect. While there is a dependence of my writing the words of this chapter (which express, among other things, points of agreement with Martin and Kim) upon factors that are covered by the laws of physics, chemistry, biology and sensitive psychology, it is also the case that these aspects of physical reality are not the whole story when it comes to understanding what I write. The physical marks that I produce on the computer screen are caused, as regards their intelligible patterning and organization, by the insights and judgments I have had concerning the philosophical matters under discussion, and by my practical insights as to how to get my points across to the audience in question through the deployment of various words and phrases. Nor would the writing on the screen, or page, be there had I not willed, in accord with various motivations, to execute the task. Furthermore, my agreements and disagreements with the two authors in question are not due to similarities and differences between us in terms of our make-up as described by physics, chemistry, biology, and factors of temperament. These differences pertain to the insights and judgments we have regarding the issues in hand. There is no question, then, that the mental, in these instances, is the crucial causal factor determining what physical manifestations, in terms of words and sentences, emerge. The fundamental difficulty in admitting that the mental can cause physical manifestations has to do, in the main, with issues that were first discussed in chapter 3, issues having to do with ‘myth and metaphysics’ and the hermeneutics of metaphysical statements. For the picture-thinking to which we are inveterately prone, given the polymorphic character of our consciousness, leads us to ‘conceive’ cause in terms of pushing, pulling, and muscular tension and release. Against such mythic images it was argued that the exigencies of a fully critical realism demand that we affirm as real what can be intelligently understood and reasonably affirmed with regard to the data, irrespective of whether or not imagination can keep pace with intelligence in such cases. Furthermore, it was argued that we have good reason to affirm that by ‘causality’ we mean various types of intelligible relation of dependency. And in the present case we have abundant evidence to hand for the affirmation that the physical manifestations of language are caused in their structure by conscious mental activity. If in some philosophical quarters this alleged causal dependency of the

296 Method in Metaphysics

physical on the mental be construed as ‘ontologically queer,’ or as a ‘mysterious fact,’ that will be hardly surprising given the representationalist underpinnings of such metaphysical suspicions. But, in response, it should be pointed out that if there is ‘queerness’ and ‘mystery’ in this instance, so is there the same ‘queerness’ and ‘mystery’ in every instance in which science, scholarship, or common sense claims to have grounds for inference from the data to some causal agency. Causes, including the formal causes that are the internal, intelligible structuring of things that science claims to know, are neither seen nor in any way sensed by human beings. Such is the upshot of the doctrine of the underdetermination of theory by data. Such also is the conclusion that emerges from the positive aspect of Hume’s philosophy, which is of permanent value – Hume’s trouncing of the myth that empiricism is a viable account of the way human beings know reality.

Recto Running Head 297

10 Metaphysics of the Social

The analytical and continental traditions of modern philosophy during the twentieth century were characterized by antisolipsism in both epistemology and metaphysics. This reaction against Cartesian introversion can be seen in the stress placed upon the social dimension of language in the Anglo-American tradition, in which the ordinary language analysis of thinkers such as Austin and Wittgenstein became a dominant influence. In the continental world of philosophy emphasis was placed in phenomenology upon intersubjectivity, fellow feeling, and the immediate relation of the self to the other. In the case of Husserl, a dominant figure in the latter philosophical tradition, there is some ambiguity in this regard, as the earlier discussion of Husserl and Derrida in this book has made clear. In some way Husserl is a prime mover in a philosophical endeavour to place the self immediately in the social context of the relation to others (in terms of empathy and identification with others), but at the same time Husserl attempts to secure epistemological certainty as regards human rationality in a way analogous to that of Descartes. The phenomenological movement tended, by and large, to reject such a move in Husserl, especially as this led to Husserl’s extravagant notion of the transcendental self, and to follow the path of bypassing solipsism in favour of analyses of intersubjectivity and the ethical call of others on the self. In Anglo-American circles Wittgenstein’s private language argument was thought by many to have laid to rest once and for all the spectre of Cartesian scepticism, which had led to the more radical scepticism of Hume and of German idealism. Even Whitehead’s metaphysics, standing apart from mainstream Anglo-American thought, had made an attempt to move away from the isolated monad of the solipsistic individual in favour of a notion of the self as in some way social and in process, rather than static.

298 Method in Metaphysics

I believe Lonergan’s philosophy and metaphysics shares many of the antiCartesian preoccupations of these movements in modern philosophy. I have already attempted to show, in chapter 3, that Lonergan’s emphasis upon mental operations stands in the tradition of Aquinas, which is not that of Descartes. Knowledge of mind comes through knowledge of the activities of mind embedded in human intentional activity such as speech. Lonergan has much to say on the social, intersubjective dimensions of human experience, and his treatment of epistemology and metaphysics are situated in that larger whole. His principal philosophical work Insight advances to an account of cognitional structure through a phenomenology of human understanding in mathematics, physical science, and common sense. Much more could be said on the way Lonergan shares many of the antisolipsistic and anti-Cartesian preoccupations of analytical and continental thought. A more extended discussion of such anti-Cartesianism would need to include Lonergan’s specific criticisms of Cartesian method; for instance, the methodical precept ‘doubt all that can be doubted so as to arrive at truth’ can itself be doubted. All this being said, however, I believe it is a virtue of Lonergan’s position to provide sufficient rational grounds both for agreeing with what is of value in Descartes and for rebutting Cartesianinspired scepticism in a way that many of the arguments advanced in analytical and continental philosophy fail to do. Indeed, there is operative in those traditions a form of rhetorical anti-Cartesianism that substitutes the heaping of coals on Descartes’ head for well-founded rational argument against certain positions he advances. Seeing Descartes as the begetter of all the ills of modernity, given his initiation of solipsistic scepticism, tends to obscure the sober facts of the history of philosophy, long known by historians of the medieval period but brought to our attention in a conspicuous manner by recent research into the Renaissance background to Descartes’ thought. Descartes was reacting against a widespread epistemological scepticism, rather than attempting to initiate a sceptical movement, and the sceptical movement that stands behind his thought received particular impetus from developments in late medieval nominalism.1 Have the philosophical movements noted above really overcome the sceptical, solipsistic, elements that entered Descartes’ thought from the long tradition of philosophy? This is something I doubt. Whitehead’s ‘social,’ antimonadic philosophy is, as was argued earlier in this book, encumbered with a number of problems as regards its epistemological foundations, which render it ineffective, I believe, as an opponent of the philosophical trends in modernity that it rejects. Rather than solving the problem of the metaphysical relation between unities and communities, between individuals and society, it simply poses the questions anew. For one thing, since Whiteheadian metaphysics is hazy about its epistemological

Metaphysics of the Social 299

underpinnings, it is also unclear about how the ontological features it outlines are to be verified. The smallest parts that make up the larger wholes in processes are unverifiable and seem to be merely postulated without any convincing grounds. Do we not have here once again the kind of ‘imagination gone on holiday’ metaphysics akin to the unverifiable, picture-thinking atomism exemplified of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus? Atomism, and the kind of reductionism that often goes with it, is a product of the playground of the imagination, as we imagine smaller and smaller ‘bits’ of things and then postulate even smaller bits we cannot see or imagine. Of course, historically, such imaginative division is seen as supported by the evidence of the intellectual operations we can perform on the imaginatively construed continuum as we divide and subdivide this mathematically without limit. Such a metaphysics takes leave of a notion of reality as that which is to be known through understanding of parts and wholes through intellectual grasp of intelligible relations, and the rational verification which may take place regarding such intelligible unities and their internal and external relations. Such verification is to be had with regard to cognitional structure and (as probably verified) in other domains of human knowledge. We may proclaim the superiority of a metaphysics that emphasizes the social over the atomic individual, but given the fact that the principle of identity (A is A and is neither B nor C, etc.) obtains in the case of parts as much as wholes, we are left with the requirement of saying just what the individual parts are that constitute the social whole. The same conundrums may occur in the case of philosophies that rebel against the ethical repugnance of monadic solipsism in the name of the ‘other.’ Questions arise and demand a reasoned answer concerning just how the ‘other’ or ‘others’ are to be understood: What is their constitution? What are their mutual relations? As I say, one may sympathize with such philosophical protests, but if one is to achieve rationally well-founded results, beyond the rhetoric of protest, one may need more philosophical argument than is sometimes evident in such philosophical critiques of the monadic atomism of modernity. Such a reasoned response, which, I believe, Lonergan’s position provides the basis for, may very well assist in avoiding mythical picture-thinking in which the one is somehow supposed to have disappeared into the many, or vice versa. In this chapter, then, I will explore some of the principal resources offered by Lonergan’s philosophy for handling a metaphysics of the individual and the social. The main focus of the chapter will be on such a metaphysics with regard to human individuals and societies, but it will be useful to start at a more basic level and look at some points of a general nature that Lonergan makes regarding the notion of relation between entities. We can then proceed to examine areas such as the ontology of social

300 Method in Metaphysics

meaning, language, and history. Before embarking upon such investigations, however, it may be appropriate to offer some comments of a methodological nature. Issues of Method: Terms and Relations As has been made clear already in this book, Lonergan’s method in metaphysics is a differentiated one. It identifies a core position that is directly related to metaphysical facts and notions that may be verified on the basis of cognitional structure, argued to be incontrovertible in its main outlines given the incoherence of any attempted denial. These core metaphysical positions are then put to work in a prescriptive way in a dialectic that seeks to identify what are positive and negative elements in the viewpoints of common sense and science. The positive contributions of those areas of human knowledge, then, also make their contribution to an area of metaphysics that is more akin to the ongoing and, in principle revisable, results of science. Although Lonergan does not explicitly make the point, it would seem entirely in accord with his basic stance to say that when we come to the area of the metaphysics of the social, the social sciences and humanities also make their contribution to metaphysics in a way analogous to that of physical science. And I would add to this list literature, the arts, and philosophical perspectives contributed by, for instance, phenomenology. Indeed, the personalist way of philosophizing about human persons in community, which occurs in this tradition, often appears close to the way insights on life are offered in literature; philosophers in the continental tradition have, in fact, often communicated their insights in the form of the novel and poetry. It should also be pointed out that insofar as philosophers in the analytical tradition writing on ethics and human society have tended to employ a method that is intuitionist they are not far removed from the approach taken by their continental brethren. On Lonergan’s view of metaphysics this area of philosophy is concerned in the main with heuristics, that is, with providing some meaningful guidelines, which may themselves be added to, concerning what there can be and cannot be – what can be meaningfully said or not said with regard to reality. In this manner it provides a basic semantics. In the area of the ‘forms’ or ‘whats’ that are constitutive of entities, metaphysics simply specifies in a heuristic manner that these are the aspects of a reality to be known via understanding. The reality as a whole will be known via empirical experience, understanding, and rational judgment. The ‘form’ is what will be understood, and the existence of the entity will be known in judgment. Clearly, such anticipations, or heuristic notions, are known not only by attending to our cognitional operations on the three levels of coming to

Metaphysics of the Social 301

know, which anticipate reality in this fashion, but by verifying these aspects of reality in a definitive way in cognitional self-affirmation, and in probable judgments in common sense, science, and other cognitive disciplines. The principal point to be made in the present context, however, is that metaphysics is concerned, for the most part, with these categories, which are then to be filled in, as it were, by the cognitive investigations of various fields of study. And this is true not only of the ‘forms’ known in the physical sciences but of the nature of the human individual and society investigated in the social sciences, humanities, literature, art, and in the specific philosophical work in this area contributed by both phenomenological and analytical philosophers. But just as there is prescriptive force to the metaphysical core position outlined and defended by Lonergan as regards the philosophy implicit in the physical sciences, so also is this the case with regard to these other cognitive disciplines and approaches. Metaphysics is no substitute for the myriad perspectives and investigations into human persons and their social organization offered by those other cognitive endeavours. However, it does have something to say about the truth and meaningfulness of the results of those disciplines as these regard human persons and society. Since the notion of the ‘social’ or ‘society’ involves the idea of terms and relations between terms (individuals and their relationships) much in the same way as the mathematical notion of a set involves terms and relations, it will be worth our while examining something of what Lonergan has to say on the question of the ontology of terms and relations. Such matters also serve to remind us that if we are to talk in a meaningful way about social phenomena, of ‘relation to the other,’ we must, in the final, semantic analysis, be able to say what such relations are and what the related terms are. What is the ‘other’? What is it related to? What is the relation? Is it a real or merely for-us, notional relation? In other words, do we think that talk of intersubjective relations, social relations, orientations to the other, and the like have the same semantic and ontological status as talk about Jack Frost or the Easter bunny, or do we not? Again, my point is to suggest a somewhat more sober reaction to the question of what role metaphysics plays in thinking of the human world than that taken by those who wish to replace the dull, rigid, and domineering ‘first philosophy’ of metaphysics with an existentialist, or personalist, reflection upon the human and social that warms the heart and provides an impetus to action. While I am all for such action and emotion stirred to virtuous and noble deeds, and I am for poetry and the wealth of insight into life springing from autobiography, the novel, and the sonata, I am also for the critical function that metaphysics plays in an analysis of what our language and thought mean – for its role as a fundamental semantics.

302 Method in Metaphysics

Contrary to a nominalism that stems from perceptualist epistemologies, Lonergan insists that, as critical realist metaphysics has shown, reality is intrinsically relational. There are relations that are notional and merely descriptive, but there are other relations that are found to be the case in a truly explanatory account of the way things are. Thus, the metaphysical constituents of an entity as known through the process of experiencing, understanding, and judging are the really related potency (‘materialempirical’ aspect), form (the ‘what it is’), and act (actual existence). Further, central forms (the ‘what’ of an individual, substance) are differentiated by conjugate forms (accidents, differentiae). So my form as a knower, as a knowing being, is established by the fact that I engage in the conscious, related activities of coming to know in the phases of experiencing the data, understanding it, and judging as to the truth of my understanding. In the case of the reality of the explanatory definition of Euclid, which grasps the nature of circularity (the circle as ‘a series of coplanar points equidistant from the centre’) we see that terms and relations (‘points in such-and-such a relation’) give us the reality of circularity. It is equally the case with the reality that we are, as knowing beings. ‘Judgment’ is a term relative to something about which we judge, something we have understood, and such understanding is further related to the data that we seek to come to know.2 There are, then, real relations that are internal to entities. Lonergan writes, contrasting his position with the nominalist one: Thus if ‘mass’ is conceived as a quantity of matter and matter is conceived as whatever satisfies the Kantian scheme of providing a filling for the empty form of time, then the law of inverse squares is external to the notion of mass. On the other hand, if masses are conceived as implicitly defined by their relations to one another and the law of inverse squares is the most fundamental of those relations, then the law is an internal relation, for the denial of the law would involve a change in the concept of mass.3 In coming to know the internal, relational structure of oneself as a knower, or in the case of knowing ‘classical’ laws of science (as exemplified in laws akin to those formulated by Newton and his contemporaries) one observes this primary kind of relativity intrinsic to an entity. However, this is not the whole story as regards real relations. There are also the distributions of entities and their actions in the space-time continuum, and such distributions and occurrences are what may be understood in terms of statistical laws, indicating frequencies from which individual cases diverge but diverge non-systematically. The fact that things like A and B are found in a

Metaphysics of the Social 303

given ratio of two to one or three to one is referred to by such laws insofar as they posit that such ratios and such space-time relative positioning will happen with such-and-such a frequency. Such relations between A and B are, then, secondary determinations, or contingent real relations between things. However, it should be observed that since statistical estimations provide an insight into intelligible patterns of constellations of things in terms of ‘every so often,’ there will also be particular judgments of hereand-now situations not covered by such laws that enable us to know that truly in reality a secondary determination obtains here and now between A and B of a given spatio-temporal kind. Reality, therefore, includes real relations of both an internal and an external kind.4 What, then, can the metaphysics we have been investigating so far tell us of the relations that are social? What can it tells us of the relations that are interpersonal? In the remainder of this chapter I will only attempt an initial sketch of an answer to this question. This is for two related reasons. First, I think a more complete answer to the question as to what Lonergan’s metaphysical position contributes to a metaphysics of the social would require a more detailed examination of Lonergan’s work as a whole, and such detailed examination is not the primary focus of this book concerned as it is to bring Lonergan’s metaphysics into dialogue with the work of other contemporary philosophers’ writing on metaphysics. Second, there is not a great deal of work currently being produced by analytical metaphysicians in this area, although, as we shall see, philosophers such as David Wiggins have attempted metaphysical analyses of such social phenomena as language, and so the opportunities for critical dialogue between other positions and Lonergan’s is somewhat limited. However, I will take the opportunity afforded by the issue in hand to draw attention to aspects of Lonergan’s thought, as that is expressed both in the 1957 work Insight and in subsequent writing, which, I believe throw some light on this area. It is no doubt true to say that even when one has brought together the points Lonergan has to make on the metaphysics of the social, scattered throughout his writing, this area of metaphysics is not as developed as others treated by Lonergan and, in fact, the prospect of developing further what he does have to offer on this area of metaphysics is an intriguing one. The Ontology of Social Relations It can be observed immediately that Lonergan’s thought, strongly influenced as it is by the Aristotelian and Thomist traditions, gravitates towards what one might call a ‘metaphysics of solidarity’ when it comes to reflection upon social, cultural, economic and political matters. Standing within this tradition, Lonergan welcomes the emphasis placed upon intersubjec-

304 Method in Metaphysics

tivity in more recent philosophy as complementing the insistence of ancient philosophy on friendship, family, and community as the starting point for reflection upon society. Such an insistence is opposed to the Hobbesian tendency of modern thought. In the ‘political metaphysics’ of the modern period the dominant question has been how to force together monadic individuals whose existence begins and continues in recalcitrant isolationism. Lonergan’s own contributions to the philosophy of society, culture, politics, economics, and history are far from negligible. In the first part of his work Insight, in treating human knowing in the common-sense, mathematical, and scientific domains, he devotes considerable space to a discussion of the nature and ethics of society and culture. The philosophical analyses of this first part of the work are written, for the most part, in a more phenomenological fashion, whereas the second part of Insight moves towards a metaphysical understanding of a number of the realities already discussed. In his treatment of the social, cultural, and historical in writing subsequent to Insight it is the phenomenological, rather than metaphysical approach that is predominant. However, the metaphysical approach is never far from view, as Lonergan repeatedly refers back to the metaphysical positions of the earlier book, and, on occasion, offers further insights of a metaphysical nature. Two of his later metaphysical notions pertaining to the reality of the social will be discussed below: they are the metaphysical notions of the ‘quasi-operator’ and of ‘mutual self-mediation.’ The aim of what follows, then, is not to provide a general overview of Lonergan’s philosophy of the social, but rather to identify elements in that writing that contribute to an understanding of what are the ontological semantic truthmakers to which we refer when we speak of the human social world. Since Lonergan’s method in metaphysics, as discussed in this work, involves constant reference both to the data known in the world around us in common sense, science and scholarship, and to the data that are human conscious, cognitive states and actions, the move to the ontology of the human world is not a difficult one. Already we have seen metaphysical terms such as potency, form, act, substance and accidents (or conjugates) illustrated in the conscious human activities of coming to know. Furthermore, the metaphysics of development was seen to be exemplified in the development that occurs in human knowing. The process of knowing, it was observed, also provides evidence for the affirmation of the integrator and operator, the operator being exemplified in the dynamic orientation of conscious questions to conscious answers in coming to know. The transition to a metaphysics of the social, therefore, will take the form of recasting what has been said of an individual human consciousness in the broader context of the community, which is the place of intersection

Metaphysics of the Social 305

between such consciousnesses. However, from the outset one must avoid the atomistic, Hobbesian image that this communal location will be simply modelled on a mathematical set. The reality of the relations between the ‘terms’ that are individuals will be far more important for the development of these individuals and the community than such an image suggests. In fact, some of the metaphysical features that characterize the reality of communal relations have also been alluded to in the previous chapter. We saw there, in the discussion of the metaphysics of development, that the human world as well as the natural provides evidence for the affirmation of environments, ecological niches, which are schemes of recurrence. Such schemes of recurrence are concrete frequencies of events from which individual cases will diverge, but non-systematically. The emergence, survival, and decline of these schemes can also be estimated in a statistical manner, and these probabilities themselves enter into estimating the probabilities of emergence, survival, and decline of further schemes and individuals. Schemes of recurrence are the aggregates of events that are acts of individuals (unities, substances). Therefore, examples were found in the recurrent schemes in human social life, the domestic situation, the economy, education, and industry. The human community arises on the basis of the schemes of recurrence of the natural world and itself manifests further instances of this metaphysical feature of world process. In the treatment of a further aspect of the metaphysics of development in the previous chapter, an illustration from human cultural history was offered. A characteristic of development for Lonergan is a move from the global and compact to the greater flexibility and adaptability offered by differentiation. In the human sphere Lonergan sees this metaphysical feature instantiated in what he terms ‘differentiations of consciousness.’ What has occurred in the history of cultures has been a differentiation of intellectual skills and capacities not witnessed in the earlier stage of the culture. What occurs in the history of growth of one individual replicates, to some extent, this larger cultural process. For the consciousness of the child becomes channelled into diversified skills and capacities as he or she learns social interaction with parents and siblings, as he or she acquires language skills and skills of construction, imagination, and creativity in play. A feedback process occurs, as linguistic and imaginal abilities permit the acquisition of higher skills. One witnesses the kind of mastery and familiarity with regard to higher tasks in the skills acquired in, say, playing the piano. The accomplished pianist does not search for middle C, like the child on the occasion of the first lesson. The lower level abilities have now become ‘second nature,’ and the pianist considers ways in which technique already acquired can contribute to a performance more expressive of the aesthetic insights important in realizing a piece of music.

306 Method in Metaphysics

This process of differentiation, which involves moments of reflexive feedback as there occurs explicit reflection on the implication of skills (which hitherto have been consciously operative but not the focus of sustained attention), is also witnessed in the history of mathematics. First comes the performance of simple arithmetic operations, and then reflection on those operations reveals possibilities of ‘higher viewpoints,’ such as are involved in algebraic abstraction from particular sets of numbers. In the culture at large the differentiation of consciousness can lead to particularization and specialization in areas of knowledge or conscious preoccupations that were before not distinguished. In ancient Greece the linguistic opportunities offered by Greek literature allow the feedback process of reflection upon words and meanings and the mental operations that are involved in generating these. So there comes forth a Socrates and the process of philosophical differentiation is advanced. As a culture becomes increasingly diversified one can witness such differentiations of consciousness. Such distinct but related areas of human preoccupation begin to emerge as the theoretical, the aesthetic, the common sense, and the religious. The notion of differentiations of human conscious experience is, therefore, a prolongation into the human social domain of the metaphysical notion of development as moving from the compact to the differentiated. This is not to say that such a process of emergence is the only metaphysical factor to be understood as operative in human history, and more will be said on that below. Such differentiation can be discerned in the history of Western culture and in other cultures of the globe. That it can be so observed furnishes evidence for the general affirmation that this kind of thing occurs. This analysis, however, does not commit one to saying that it must occur in a given culture. Perhaps the preceding discussion of differentiations of consciousness serves to focus attention on what is common to human and non-human processes and what distinct, for included in human consciousness are the operations of intelligence, reasonableness, and moral responsibility. Lonergan points out, therefore, that if, as has been argued earlier, reality is the intelligible (what is to be known through intelligence and reason), then the metaphysical specific difference between the human and non-human is identified if we grasp that while non-human reality is intelligible, human reality is the intelligible that is also intelligent; it is intelligent because of the intelligent and reasonable operations of coming to know. However, it should also be noted that specific to human reality is not only intelligence (in the sense specified) but moral responsibility. In Lonergan’s later phase of writing, emphasis is placed upon the fact that as the infant moves from the experiences of early infancy to childhood he or she moves from a

Metaphysics of the Social 307

world of immediacy to a world mediated by meaning and motivated by value.5 Lonergan, therefore, draws our attention to the shift away from the early infant world of sights, sounds, and conscious orientations to mother, to a world of intersubjective gesture of ever increasing complexity – to a world of culturally based language, sign, and symbol. This simply recognizes that from childhood what preoccupies us as the focus of our intelligent activities is not a world of ‘raw data,’ but a world that becomes ever more familiar as the world of home, play, and siblings. This world is structured for us by the human community into which we have been born. It is a world to which our feelings and emotions are orientated, both in terms of desires we share with animals and in terms of our affectivity and aggressive aversion, which are being moulded as we grow through interaction with the moral and valuational preferences of those around us. In the images we are presented with in the home, insights of an ethical nature are already ‘suggested’ to us. Value as Final Cause The theme of ‘value motivation’ brings us to the issue of the place of the ethical in metaphysics. In examining the metaphysics of the social it will be necessary to introduce ethical considerations. This necessity arises, first, from the fact that human actions, and thus collective and collaborative human actions, occur because of final causes in the sense of ends, or values, willed and/or chosen. Thus, as Lonergan asserts, the adult social world in which we act is not only one mediated to us through meaning but also motivated by value. So far in this book stress has been placed on the three levels, or phases, in coming to know facts concerning reality. However, Lonergan goes on to delineate a further level, or stage, emergent on the prior stages, in which moral, or responsible deliberation occurs concerning good or bad, right or wrong, courses of action. If the prior stages in coming to know facts about reality are characterized by the questions ‘What is it?’ and ‘Is it (my idea, supposition) so?’ the fourth phase is characterized by such questions as, ‘What ought I to do?’ ‘What is right?’ ‘Is such-and-such truly worthwhile, or good?’ The reason why this is understood to be a further level or phase of conscious mental activity is easy to understand, since questions of moral responsibility regarding what should be done arise with regard to the facts of the situation that have been established in the prior process of coming to know. However, while this further level of responsibility can be seen to be that in which we ask questions about possible courses of action prior to choice, it is also the case that we can raise ethical questions concerning actions of ours and others that have

308 Method in Metaphysics

already occurred and, at the limit, we can ask about whether goodness is something intrinsic to reality. Such considerations lead us back to the points made regarding the ontology of the good in the previous chapter. Since ‘evil’ is the irrational, the absurd, the ‘what should not be,’ and since it is a matter not of what is, but rather of what should be but is not, we can understand that the good, conversely, is the intelligible. Therefore, since intelligibility is intrinsic to reality, reality is also good. Finally, I asserted above that what is of value as a goal, or final cause, for action may be willed and/or chosen in deliberation on the level of responsibility. We not only will courses of action as goals, or values, as a result of deliberation and choice, but we consciously intend goals, or values, even without choice. Thus, in the process of coming to know, one may follow through on attending to data and asking questions concerning the data without stopping to deliberate whether one wishes to begin to do so or continue to do so. The conscious experience of wonder can, on occasion, lead to our spontaneous submission to its exigencies. If one has to understand the facts of ethical or value motivation in order to understand the individual and collective activities of persons in society, then it is also the case that the ethical enters into an account of the metaphysics of human society in terms of what Lonergan calls ‘dialectical method.’ Both genetic and dialectical methods are relevant to understanding the unfolding and development of human societies, as will be discussed below. If the relations between human individuals are neither merely the relations that together with a group of terms define a mathematical set, nor merely the real forces that identify the relations between, say, a planet and an encircling cluster of meteors, how are we to determine more precisely what these relations are? On the basis of Lonergan’s work we can say that the relations obtaining between individual persons are relations of mutual intelligible dependency. Since relations of intelligible dependence are causal relations, these relations between persons are in some general way causal, but the specificity of such causality must be further defined. Clearly, human persons are contingent as regards their existence and development. We come into existence through the collaboration of other persons, and we develop through the collaboration of other persons. The reality of human births can, like other instances of real events, be investigated through statistical methods. Thus, the schemes of recurrence that are the procreation and successful birth of human infants are seen, in investigation, to relate demographic, economic, cultural, political, and religious factors. Human societies share characteristics in this regard, as in others, with

Metaphysics of the Social 309

the social groupings of animals. Thus, in the life of packs of wolves or colonies of apes can be identified schemes of recurrence of social cooperation in hunting, mating, and nurturing of young. And the needs of such higher animals are met in the group in the affectivity that bonds sexual partners and infants to parents. Development in such groups can also be understood as a cooperative and collaborative affair in which some of the characteristics of ‘genetic’ development (discussed in the previous chapter) are realized. So, not only in the process of selective reproduction are offspring born who better cope with the environment in which the group currently has to operate, but in the training of young, in play and exploratory hunting forays, skills now adapted by adults to changed environmental circumstances are passed on to the young. However, when we move to consideration of development in human individuals and groups it is clear that the flexibility pertaining to dispositions, or habits, acquired for coping with environments is of a different order. As Lonergan points out, there is an ‘aesthetic liberation of human experience from the confinement of the biological pattern and the further practical liberation of human living that is brought about inasmuch as man grasps possible schemes of recurrence and fulfills by his own action the conditions for their realization.’6 Individual human beings have the capacity to grasp in insight possibilities for doing and living, and the capacity in moral deliberation to choose some order of doing or living as a value, a final cause of action. It is also the case that human collectives can deliberate and reach agreements in a similar fashion. Lonergan, therefore, continues: An animal species is a solution to the problem of living, so that a new solution would be a new species; for an animal to begin to live in quite a new fashion, there would be required not only a modification of its sensibility but also a modification of the organism that the sensibility systematizes. But in man a new department of mathematics, a new viewpoint in science, a new civilization, a new philosophy, has its basis, not in a new sensibility but simply in a new manner of attending to data and of forming ... combinations of data.7 Such novelty in human affairs can be anything from an individual’s change of view and way of living to a significant improvement in some area of technology or expertise, to a major cultural differentiation of spheres of activity and horizons of interest as occurs in the process of differentiation of consciousness, already discussed above. In such a process of differentiation dispositions emerge that move a culture from a more compact stage of development to one in which, for instance, the common sense mode of

310 Method in Metaphysics

conscious activity is seen to be in some way distinct from that of the scientific or artistic modes. New communities are formed of human persons who wish to collaborate in a sustained way in pursuing the goals of aesthetic creation or scientific investigation, and new sublanguages emerge accordingly. The artist and the scientist are at home in the world of common sense, but the person who inhabits only the world of common sense may not be at home in the worlds of the other two, just as the scientist and artist may find that each inhabits a world whose horizon is beyond that of the other. As has been indicated earlier in this work, the ‘intellectual pattern’ of conscious experience, the pattern of the three unfolding phases of coming to know reality, occurs within the broader pattern of the flow of human consciousness, and while Newton well illustrates the way one absorbed in intellectual endeavours may forget to eat for long periods of time, the fact that he did time take to eat eventually also testifies to the intrusion into consciousness of the demands of the organism for nourishment. Within the stream of consciousness, then, the diverse patterns of biological orientation, aesthetic orientation, intellectual orientation, and the like may be identified. In our ordinary day to day life we operate in some blend of these conscious patterns that Lonergan names the ‘dramatic pattern of experience.’ In other words, the way we dress, our use of language, our tone of voice and facial expression, and our laughter manifest an aesthetic ‘style’ of being with others, and our communication of even the most abstruse of technical insights will, at least normally, be accompanied by some hint of the other aspects of our humanity. What is meant by differentiations of consciousness, then, as an ontological phenomenon indicative of the development of a culture, is that persons and groups now focus in a concerted way upon, say, the aesthetic, or the scientific, which in an earlier period were but aspects of a stream of conscious endeavour dominated by the practical concerns of the common-sense type of consciousness. Indeed, this account of development in terms of differentiation of conscious skills furnishes the metaphysical context for understanding a philosophy such as Lonergan’s. For Lonergan’s claim is that the account of coming to know fact and value, on the four levels of conscious, intentional operations, identified in his philosophy, is itself the result of such cultural differentiation. The birth of Western philosophy itself occurs as the emergence of a higher viewpoint regarding the control of linguistic meaning in ancient Greece, just as the ‘higher viewpoint’ of algebra emerges from insight into the operations of more elementary arithmetic. The Socratic disputes and the Aristotelian attempt at a systematization of meanings are witness to this. Such emergence and differentiation of tasks, now in the common-sense domain, now in the philosophical, are instances of the type

Metaphysics of the Social 311

of feedback that occurs when human individuals and groups reflect upon the materials provided by aggregates that are acts of human meaning in a community. The impetus to move to such higher viewpoints may be problems arising within the common-sense world of meaning, which that world of meaning alone is unable to resolve. Further, as the history of philosophy develops, the contributions of various philosophers and schools provide further aids to insight into the conscious operations of coming to know. Nor is the development of philosophy hermetically sealed off from other cultural development in science and literature. The expansion of expressive possibilities in the latter area again offers further data for insight into conscious mental operations, and the development of sciences, scholarship, and mathematics in the last three hundred years also provides data on the nature of human understanding. Thus, Lonergan would assert that his own philosophical endeavours benefit enormously from these differentiated cultural resources, which offer evidence concerning the nature of knowledge. Persons as Interdependent If the coming to be of human individuals is a matter of intelligible dependency on others as causal factors, the development of the individual is likewise contingent upon the actions of others in human society. Since human persons are intrinsically social beings as regards not only their organic but also psychological, intellectual, and moral needs, personal development itself entails that the individual conditions the development of others. Lonergan observes that organic, psychic, and intellectual developments in human persons are not three independent processes. In the case of the human person, we see the supervenience of the psychic on the organic and the intellectual on the psychic in accord with the metaphysics of development discussed in the last chapter. It is this triple compound of developmental integrations that makes for the complexity and, indeed, the precariousness of human development. As a system on the move, successful development requires the harmonious integration of these levels in the human individual. The ‘integrators’ in such cases are the natural or acquired dispositions, or habits that increase the frequency of acts on the three levels. However, there are also operators involved that call forth movement towards new forms of more successful action. The initiative for development may be organic. The pangs of hunger suppressed by Newton working in his study for many an hour finally had to be acceded to. So it is that our organic needs have to be met. Such needs include those that may only be met with regularity through cooperation with others, such as the regular provision of food, but they may also be other-oriented as in the

312 Method in Metaphysics

case of sexual attraction. The initiative for further development may be of a psychic nature. Our sensitivity, as Lonergan writes, not only reflects and integrates its biological basis but also itself is an entity, a value, a living and developing. Intersubjectivity, companionship, play and artistry, the idle hours spent with those with whom one feels at home, the common purpose, labor, achievement, failure, disaster, the sharing of feeling in laughter and lamenting, all are human things and in them man functions primarily in accord with the development of his perceptiveness, his emotional responses, his sentiments.8 On the other hand, the initiative for change may be of an intellectual order. In such a case one may endeavour to resolve a problem, or seek to know in a given situation what the morally correct choice is. Finally, the stimulus for change and development may be a change in circumstances and, again, these may be of a social, intersubjective nature. The metaphysical analysis of development in the human individual is an analysis that identifies a system on the move, as operators on the interrelated organic, psychic, and intellectual/moral levels of the person head towards new integrations, new dispositions, that will allow a person to function in a new way, in a more satisfactory manner, in a new situation, or will allow the attainment of further intellectual or moral knowledge. From Lonergan’s treatment of such genetic development it can be seen at once that, as contingent, it is dependent upon relations of dependency, causal relations, with other persons. In the area of intellectual endeavour it was long ago noted by Aristotle that collaboration among persons was essential if one were to advance in any significant knowledge of the world. As Lonergan insists, the human person is not ‘an isolated monad. His development is a movement from the relative dependence of childhood to the relative autonomy of maturity.’9 And, in fact, this observation should be complemented by pointing out that, as the person moves from the world of immediacy of infancy into the adult world, mediated by meaning and motivated by value, his or her awareness of dependency in some sense increases in proportion to a realization of just how dependent the individual is upon the formation given to the individual by others, and the information that only others can supply for the individual. Intersubjective Communication as Causal I turn next to the nature of this ‘communication’ between persons, understood in the broadest sense. It is through this interpersonal ‘communica-

Metaphysics of the Social 313

tion’ that the development of persons takes place. Such development entails, as we have seen, the actualization of dispositions or natural potencies of an organic, psychic and intellectual/moral kind, and this actualization in turn is involved in the acquisition of further dispositions in these areas – dispositions that then give a statistical regularity to certain kinds of acts. The regularity of these acts constitutes schemes of recurrence that effect transformations not only within the individual, but within society at large as the common sphere of aggregation of these acts. Such schemes are exemplified, as has been noted, in social institutions, including those of the economy, the domestic or familial domain, the world of education, and the political coordination of society. The communication of meaning between persons occurs within a number of different ‘carriers of meaning’ as Lonergan expresses it. Thus, our intellectual and moral insights can be communicated in a more articulate fashion through language or in more diffuse, allusive ways in aesthetic carriers of meaning, such as artistic creations or symbols. Meanings can also be communicated via the gestures and silences employed in intersubjective encounter between persons, and within a given cultural context an individual may come to embody certain meanings and values in such a fashion that their very presence or image communicates meanings and values to others. Thus Adolph Hitler ‘personifies,’ as we say, certain disvalues opposite to those personified in the case of Mother Teresa of Calcutta. In discussing meaning and its communication from one person to another, Lonergan distinguishes between principal acts of meaning and instrumental acts of meaning. The former are meanings that arise from our cognitional acts of attending to data, understanding, judging, and making judgments of an ethical kind. Instrumental acts are the expressions of such meaning in the diverse carriers of meaning mentioned above. Differences in expression, in instrumental acts of meaning, relate to the dispositional capacities of both speaker/writer and hearer/reader. Lonergan writes: The expression may have its source (1) simply in the experience of the speaker, as in an exclamation, or (2) in artistically ordered experiential elements, as in a song, or (3) in a reflectively tested intelligent ordering of experiential elements, as in a statement of fact, or (4) in the addition of acts of will, such as wishes and commands, to intellectual and rational knowledge. In turn, the hearer may be intended to respond (1) simply on the experiential level in an intersubjective reproduction of the speaker’s feelings, mood, sentiments, images, associations, or (2) both on the level of experience and on the level of insight and consideration, or (3) on the

314 Method in Metaphysics

three levels of experience, insight, and judgment, or (4) not only on the three cognitional levels but also in the practical manner that includes an act of will.10 One can distinguish, then, between instrumental acts of meaning that have as their primary focus one or other of the organic, psychic, or intellectual/moral aspects of the person. However, except in such cases as commands to the hypnotized or medical acts performed upon an anesthetized person, it should not be thought that one addresses or affects one aspect of the human complex to the exclusion of the others. Indeed, although the linguistic carrier of meaning may be thought to be less opaque than, say, the aesthetic, Lonergan is in agreement to some extent (and in fact anticipates) the observation made by deconstructionists concerning the way an author’s language may betray insights and orientations not explicitly faced in the text. This, of course, is to be understood in the context of Lonergan’s analysis of the distinction between conscious insight, on the one hand, and conscious conceptualization, or verbalization of the insight, on the other. He writes: Expression not only is an instrument of the principal acts of meaning that reside in conception and judgment but also a prolongation of the psychic flow from percepts, memories, images and feelings into the shaping of the countenance, the movement of the hands, and the utterance of words … In brief, our speech and writing are basically automatisms, and our conscious control supervenes only to order, to select, to revise, or to reject. It follows that expression bears the signature not only of controlling meaning but also of the underlying psychic flow, and that painstaking study will reveal in the automatic part of composition the recurrence of characteristic patterns to which their author, in all probability, never adverted.11 While works of mathematics and logic attempt to make explicit and critically assess casual insights, or intuitive elements, other modes of communication deliberately cultivate the psychic associations and emotions suggestive of ethical decision that language, as an expression of the total flow of human consciousness, conveys to hearers and readers. Lonergan observes: Advertisers and propaganda ministries aim at psychological conditioning; they desire neither adequate insight nor detached reflection nor rational choices but simply the establishment of types of

Metaphysics of the Social 315

habituation, familiarity, association, automatism, that will dispense with further questions. In contrast, literary writing would convey insights and stimulate reflection, but its mode of operation is indirect. Words are sensible entities; they possess associations with images, memories, and feelings; and the skillful writer is engaged in exploiting the resources of language to attract, hold, and absorb attention. But if there is no frontal attack on the reader’s intelligence, there is the insinuation of insights through the images from which they subtly emerge.12 In the light of what has been said so far concerning meaning, Lonergan proceeds to distinguish four functions of meaning. These functions of meaning are the cognitive, constitutive, communicative, and effective, and they are of direct relevance to our topic, which is the metaphysics of the social. While the cognitive function of meaning is essentially what was identified above as principal meaning (meaning originating from our intelligent, reasonable, and responsible conscious acts), the other three functions further clarify what has been said concerning instrumental acts of meaning. They are the acts through which individuals affect the development, or indeed the decline, of one another and whole societies and cultures. Lonergan explains: Such functions have their ontological aspect. In so far as meaning is cognitive, what is meant is real. In so far as it is constitutive, it constitutes part of the reality of the one that means: his horizon, his assimilative powers, his knowledge, his values, his character. In so far as it is communicative, it induces in the hearer some share in the cognitive, constitutive, or effective meaning of the speaker. In so far as it is effective, it persuades or commands others, or it directs man’s control over nature.13 Meaning shared between individuals in these ways constitutes the shared meaning of a group, a society, a religion, a civilization. Naturally, besides sharing meanings and values, communities can enter periods of tension, strife, and self-annihilation through a process in which there emerges divergent meanings and values. However, the focus of this chapter is not upon a phenomenology of the social but on the metaphysics of the social. My interest here is in what Lonergan has to say in direct fashion regarding the metaphysical issues, and in what his phenomenological analysis of the social, taken together with other elements of his position on metaphysics, suggests for a further development of his metaphysics of the social. In bringing together and assess-

316 Method in Metaphysics

ing some of the points made so far we can, I believe, begin to offer the following sketch of what Lonergan’s philosophy entails for a metaphysics of society. Both in the coming to be and the development of the human individual there is to be identified an intelligible dependence of the human person on other persons. Both birth and development are contingent realities and, therefore, both rely to a greater or lesser extent upon the relation of the individual to other human persons. Furthermore, these relations are of a causal nature. Clearly, the events of conception and birth are causally produced, but the physical, psychic, intellectual, and moral development of persons is also dependent upon the actions of other human persons. These actions, in which persons relate to one another, are instances of instrumental meaning. The use of the word ‘instrumental’ in this context, I would suggest, enables one to identify the type of intelligible dependency of one person on another in such instances: it is a form of instrumental causality. Through the medium of the diverse carriers of meaning, delineated above, as ‘instruments’ persons play a causal role in the development of other persons. Further, by such development we mean the acquisition of ranges of interlocking dispositions of a physical, psychic, intellectual, and moral kind. Thus, as Lonergan says, meanings and values and skills are constitutive of the persons that we are. If meanings and values can be personified, embodied, in influential cultural figures, as was suggested above, it is no less the case that I am a man who is clearly distinguished as being from a particular country, a particular culture and set of traditions at a certain time in history. We refer to a women or man of, say, a particular strata in society in the England of 1800, and we expect to be able to suggest a range of meanings and values that such a person would typically exemplify. What we are referring to in such a case are the acquired dispositions of that person, acquired, that is, in the course of development in the social environment constituted by their forebears and peers. Not only are meanings and values constitutive of the persons of a group but they enter into the constitution of the artefacts that are part of the environment of a given culture. Furniture, clothes, buildings, and the like manifest the Zeitgeist of their creators. Indeed, the words, symbols, and gestures of a given time and culture, which are instrumental causes of disposition acquisition on the part of human persons in the culture, are entities constituted by meaning. In the previous chapter I used the example of a chair to illustrate the reality of supervenience. The reality of the chair, understood as an object that serves a function for human beings, is both that of its material cause, the wood or plastic, and that of the form, formal cause, realized in the material. However, if I ask the question, ‘What is this?’ of the chair before me, I may not receive the reply that it is simply a

Metaphysics of the Social 317

chair, but that it is a fine example of a Regency chair, or a modernist, ‘functional’ chair from 1951. In other words, if I want a fuller answer to the ‘What is it?’ question in this case, I may need to move off into the history of furniture styles, and at the limit this will involve an appreciation of the cultural Zeitgeist from which the object emerges. Besides appreciating words, phrases, gestures, symbols, and songs as examples of instrumental causes, then, we need to appreciate that they are also instances of formal cause, that is, they are instances of intelligible patterning of the data in a way that manifests, perhaps, both a communicative intention and some aesthetic intention that may be both communicative and appreciated as an aesthetic value in itself. It may, in fact, be difficult to find human objects or artefacts that do not manifest the aesthetic strand in the flow of human consciousness. Even an object such as a bridge, which has no decoration upon its stones and is intended to be purely functional, may betray something of the artistic in the human designer behind it. However, for our purposes, and in order to bring together some of the points made so far and develop them further, let us take two examples of human creativity: a ‘plain looking’ bridge and a ring with a message inscribed on it. In both cases we have exemplified distinct types of cause as discussed in chapter 8. Thus efficient causes of labour and human effort are involved in both cases. There are manifest the material causes: the gold of the ring and the stones of the bridge. In both cases an exemplary cause is involved: both objects are realized in accord with a design. When, however, we turn to the formal cause, the ‘what’ in each case, and to the final cause (what goal or aim is involved in making the objects) differences become more significant. In the case of the ring part of the final cause is the communication of meaning, both by the words on the ring and, presumably, by the fact of their inscription on such a beautiful object. In the case of the bridge the aim is purely functional – to allow easy access to the other side of the river at this point for, let us say, economic purposes. The formal causes in each case are intelligible patternings of the materials in order to realize these ends. The Ontology of Language At this point it is worth turning our attention to some recent debates among analytical philosophers concerning the ontological status of language as a social phenomenon. Such discussion demonstrates an interest in the ontology of social meaning somewhat akin to Lonergan’s preoccupation with expression and communication. This may be seen in David Wiggins’s essay where he admits the importance of the kind of investigation pursued by Noam Chomsky and his school into the neural bases for

318 Method in Metaphysics

language use in the human species.14 However, Wiggins argues that when the proponents of this view claim that this is all there is to language they go too far. Chomsky and his followers claim, in fact, that particular languages, such as Italian, have no world denotation.15 This view follows, Chomsky thinks, if we drop the idea (and he thinks we should) that expressions in the language are intrinsically geared up to pick out things in the world. This is not so, for it is in its use by psychological subjects that language can refer to reality. For Chomsky ‘English’ or ‘Chinese’ are not entities picked out for investigation by any serious science; they are merely ‘interest relative constructions’; or to use Lonergan’s terminology explored in a previous chapter, we might say they are ‘descriptively characterized’ objects, which do not remain once one has embarked upon explanation proper. Chomsky attempts to support this claim by observing that, like other similar collections of objects, words in a language like English have no intrinsic ontological ordering to the world. He observes, ‘A collection of sticks in the ground could be a (discontinuous) thing – say, a picket fence, a barrier, a work of art. But the same sticks in the ground are not a thing if left there by a forest fire.’16 Chomsky’s point appears to be that there is nothing intrinsic in the collection of sticks that makes them, ontologically, this or that. It depends on the usage. And this is also the case with the set of marks we call the English language. Wiggins admits the force of Chomsky’s example of the sticks in the forest, but nevertheless asserts that there is more to a language like English or German, ontologically speaking, than Chomsky admits. Following Crispin Wright, Wiggins argues that the clue to the ontological status of such languages is found in the notion of convention. A convention in this case would be a set of habits, or dispositions, whereby a community communicates, and such habits are passed on by a kind of contagion. Developing this idea further Wiggins suggests that we inquire as to what is determinative of this linguistic convention: Is it class, or religion, or occupation? The answer is ‘no.’ Insofar as the community is to be specified in terms of its linguistic convention, enabling communication, it is to be specified as English-speaking or French-speaking or whatever.17 Further, Wiggins claims, ‘Particular languages influence normatively by their presence in the social world the communicative efforts of speakers … That is why [language users] want prescriptions that reflect how it is with the language ...’18 Given the position taken in this chapter, I would certainly concur with Wiggins in his negative estimation of certain views of Chomsky. However, I also believe that there is more to be said. To begin with, Chomsky’s example of the sticks in the forest need not imply the kind of nominalism Chomsky espouses. If the sticks arranged in such-and-such a way are a

Metaphysics of the Social 319

picket fence or, alternatively, a work of art, then that is intrinsic to why they are as they are; if they are a result of a forest fire then that conditions causally why they are as they are. If they have been arranged in this manner as an aesthetic expression then the answer to the question, ‘What is that?’ asked in their regard involves the formal cause of the aesthetic insights that the pattern realizes. Such causality is intrinsic to the item before us, not extrinsic to it. In the same manner this is the case with words and sentences. As was explained above, such physical objects are explained as to their reality by understanding the formal cause, which is constitutive of the intelligible patterning evident in the data. And such a formal cause is directly related to the final cause, which is their use as instrumental causes for communication between persons able to receive such communication through the use of these words, given the requisite cultural dispositions, habits as Wiggins rightly says. Of course no words, understood as mere marks in a dictionary, are here and now referring to an object. Such reference is made in ostensive acts of meaning, or in judgments of fact, by intelligent and reasonable language users, and Chomsky is right to stress this aspect of the matter. Certain inscriptions that archaeologists and palaeographers find on ancient monuments and tombs are in languages that are now not only dead, but cannot be adequately deciphered and understood by us. However, we have no doubt that by using such constructions people once did make reference to things in the world. To employ a further metaphysical distinction, we can say that we have in these instances marks that are potential instruments for acts of linguistic meaning but not instruments of actual acts of linguistic meaning. The same can be said for the words that lie in our dictionaries now, not actually being used by speakers or writers. However, the potential referred to in such cases is not that which almost anything has of being used as a linguistic sign. I can, for instance, throw a stone at a window to ask to be let in the house, and the stone has the requisite potential for this use. Rather, these patterns in sensible data are designed for the purpose of intelligent communication and that is why they have the structure they have. That structure provides the formal cause explaining why they are as we find them. I would agree, therefore, with Wiggins that a given language has an ontological status. Thus, if the palaeographers studying an ancient tomb have good reason to think that here we have another instance of the use of language x, a dead language all but undecipherable on our part, then the answer to the question ‘What is this?’ with regard to the inscription includes reference to the material cause, marks in such and such a stone, and reference to the formal cause, marks expressive of the system of language x. However, to understand the ‘what’ of ‘marks in language x’ is to

320 Method in Metaphysics

understand that these signs are part of a complex interrelated structure that is a human language, a system of signs through which intelligent and moral beings communicate, or rather communicated, with one another. In the case of the dead language the marks remain now only as potential carriers of meaning, which may be actualized by intelligent users once again if the scholars can crack the relevant code. Our own modern languages are such a system of interrelated meanings, which are flexible and developing, due to the creativity of current intelligent and reasonable language users. Such signs are either in act as instrumental carriers of meaning between persons, or they lie ready for such actuation in the dispositional repertoire of the language users themselves, or in such places of reference as dictionaries taken by popular agreement as in some way current. Mutual Self-Mediation If we now turn to an examination of what Lonergan has to say concerning the ontological notion of ‘mutual self-mediation’ we will be able to further refine what has been said so far about the metaphysics of the social. Lonergan points out that the notion of ‘mediation’ is seen both in Aristotle and Hegel.19 It is Aristotle’s use of the notion that is the predominant influence upon Lonergan’s further elaboration of the idea. In book 2, chapter 4 of the Posterior Analytics, Aristotle affirms that in a syllogism the attribute of a subject is proved through a middle term. The truth, necessity, of the conclusion of a syllogism is mediated via the middle term from the major premise to the conclusion. This logical point can be extended to the ontological sphere and Lonergan proceeds to illustrate what mediation in this sense would entail with the mechanical example of a watch. In a watch the function of the mainspring is to move itself and the other parts. Thus movement in the other parts is mediate; it is mediated to them from the mainspring. Similarly, the function of control, required for the watch to keep time, is immediate in the balance wheel and is mediated to other wheels and levers from the balance wheel. Such is an ontological, real example of mediation. Lonergan moves on from an examination of mediation to examine the notions of mutual mediation, self-mediation and mutual-self-mediation respectively. Let us return to the watch example. For the watch to keep time there is needed not only movement but also control. We have seen that in both cases there are centres from which these movements arise and are mediated to other parts. However, there is a function to the whole that involves interaction between these subfunctions of movement and control. ‘The balance wheel controls itself and all other moving parts, including the mainspring; and the mainspring moves itself and all the other parts,

Metaphysics of the Social 321

including the balance wheel.’20 Such is mutual mediation. What is involved in self-mediation, as a distinct form of mediation, has already been discussed in the previous chapter in terms of the metaphysics of the development of the individual organism, the developing human mind, and the developing human or animal species. It was seen that in the case of a growing organism there was to be identified a system on the move. In such systems, already acquired integrators make systematic what has so far been achieved in the organic and or psychic, or intellectual/moral domains of growth. These integrators are the dispositions of various kinds possessed at any one time. However, as systems on the move, growing individuals and species are also characterized by the activity of operators – the tendencies at work that move an individual or group forward to the next stage of more differentiated growth. As regards a prolepsis evident in the function structure Lonergan remarks, ‘the size of a child’s brain is out of proportion to the rest of its body, but the brain does not increase in bulk the way the rest of the body does … There is the structuring that regards both functioning at the moment and future functioning.’21 Lonergan points out that the ‘self’ of ‘self-mediation’ can refer not only to the individual, thing, but to the species or social group. Thus, the ‘species may be said to mediate itself by the individuals … the species mediates itself by reproduction.’ And with regard to the societal grouping of the ecosystem, Lonergan continues, ‘Within the genus, the lower species mediate the emergence and sustenance of higher species. Trees do not grow in desert sand but in soil; herbivorous animals presuppose vegetative life; and carnivorous animals presuppose herbivorous animals.’22 At this point in his discussion, Lonergan introduces a further pair of distinctions, ‘displacement upward’ and ‘displacement inwards.’ These expressions refer to the self-mediation of non-conscious organisms, of a tree for instance, and that of conscious entities such as animals and human beings, respectively. The tree demonstrates self-mediation insofar as it functions through the functioning of its parts in a developmental fashion. But animals and human beings are involved in a process of self-mediation in development that is conscious and intentional. As we have seen in an earlier chapter outlining Lonergan’s position on intentionality, consciousness is at once self-consciousness. I am not only aware of an object but, at the same time, of my attitude to, or interest in, that object. In the case of a tree the reaction is towards what directly impinges upon the physical reality of the tree. In the case of the animal the world is mediated to it via intentional consciousness; the lion as it grows orients itself in its world in ways that depend upon dispositions that include memories of objects that may no longer exist. In the case of human intentional consciousness, with its rational and

322 Method in Metaphysics

responsible characteristics, we see further implications of the notion of self-mediation and a movement to ‘inwardness.’ As Lonergan observes, there are two main periods to human life. In the first we are oriented to objects. Of course, we are at once conscious of self as well, and anyone with experience of young children will know that exercises in self-assertion and autonomy begin early. But we do not have in this earlier period the same kind of preoccupation with self, with the autonomy of self and with what one is to make of oneself, as are witnessed in the second period of life beginning in adolescence.23 It is in this period that one determines upon ‘who’ one is to be within one’s social group, upon what one is to do with one’s life, and upon the goal or values one wishes to commit oneself to. All this occurs within one’s family, country, religion, or ideology, and is dependent upon the resources available from one’s community. The individual turns to him or herself as an ‘object’ of consideration in this way through the mediation of reasonable and responsible acts in consciousness. This turn to oneself also occurs through the mediation of the world of the communities into which one is born, and the linguistic and ethical resources those communities offer one. Again, we are here dealing with Lonergan’s idea, noted above, that in growth one moves out of the world of immediacy into the world mediated by meaning and motivated by value. Just as the ‘self’ of the species is involved in self-mediation through reproduction of individuals, so human communities are also involved in a selfmediation characterized not only by its intelligibility but by the fact that it is the result of the operations of intelligence and choice. A community is constituted by its common sense and commonly held values. Through its narratives concerning its traditions and through the history written about the community it mediates itself to itself. This reflection of itself becomes constitutive of the self that the community is. It is embodied in various carriers of meanings, symbols, ceremonies, works of art, and the like, which mediate to the community the shared meanings and values of its members. Such reflection on the self-mediation of community introduces us to the idea of mutual self-mediation. Lonergan writes: ‘Mutual self-mediation occurs in a variety of contexts and to a greater or lesser extent. Meeting, falling in love, getting married is a mutual self-mediation … There is the mutual self-mediation in the education of children, of the infant, the child … the adolescent, the young man or woman … There are matrices of personal relations in the neighborhood, in industry and commerce, in professions, in local, national, and international politics.’24 Narrative accounts of how such processes of mutual self-mediation occur provide ‘the inexhaustible theme of dramatists and novelists.’25 It was remarked above that the sharing of meaning and value in a community via various modes or carriers of meaning, instrumental acts, con-

Metaphysics of the Social 323

tributes to the constitution of individuals. By this is meant that individuals in the process of their development in a societal context will acquire an increasing range of dispositions, be they organic, practical, intersubjective, intellectual or moral, that will characterize their personality and mode of acting. Such interrelated dispositions will mark the person as a man or woman of a particular time and place in human history. It should be understood therefore that moments of communication between persons or between the collective and a person may be of more or less weight or momentum in the development of the individual. Every insight experienced as a result of some such communication is the reception of a new intelligible form, pattern, into the mind; it is therefore the acquisition of a new disposition. However, what we generally refer to as skills, or intellectual or moral habits or virtues, are larger, interlocking patterns of insights of meaning and value. These give us mastery and familiarity in some domain of the intellectual, practical, or moral life. Individual insights, received through study, conversation, or the expressions of approval or disapproval on, say, the face of a parent, will make incremental contributions to the acquisition of such dispositions. Moments of communication between persons may be of little significance in themselves (a wink or a nod of recognition from a passing fellow dog walker) or they may be of great significance. So a young person may present to another a ring, perhaps in a moment of silence, and in the cultural context in which this occurs it is an act that says, ‘I love you and want to marry you.’ Such a gesture constitutes a new interpersonal rapport between the two involved, and may lead to a lifelong commitment in which common meanings and values are shared, and in which new schemes of recurrence in the domestic sphere arise from mutual, affective, collaboration. Again, some insight or cluster of insights of the cognitive and/or evaluative kind may be the final moment in a process, or the initiation of a process, that leads to some radical change in an individual’s world view: we now call him a Marxist; we now call her a Christian. Such reorientations in a person’s life indicate ranges of dispositions now acquired by that person, mediated to them through others, which constitute the individual’s outlook. These dispositions include orientations of a psychic and intellectual/moral kind. Our friend who is the Marxist cannot but feel one way when he looks at the Stars and Stripes, and quite another way when he looks at the flags of China or Cuba. The Quasi-Operator The notion of mutual self-mediation is a characterization of the ontological intelligibility to be identified in human communities, in which the

324 Method in Metaphysics

development of human persons, in the interrelated domains of the organic, psychic, and intellectual/moral, only takes place as a mutual conditioning via the instrumental causality of the various expressions of human meaning and value expressed in a given, developing, cultural community. The introduction of the metaphysical notion of the ‘quasi-operator’ into the outline of human social interaction offered in this chapter will serve to further enhance our understanding of the metaphysical elements involved. In the previous chapter we examined the idea of the ‘operator.’ In human intellectual and moral consciousness the operators are readily identifiable. They are the conscious questions we ask that move us forward from present cognitive and moral knowledge to future knowledge in these areas. They are the ‘What is it?’ question that moves us to seek understanding of the data; the ‘Is it?’ question that moves us beyond the insights, concepts, and theories we have excogitated regarding the data to the making of reasoned judgments as to whether our ideas are mere objects of thought or do, in fact, refer to the way reality is; the ‘Is it good?’ and ‘What should I do?’ questions that lead us to make ethical evaluations of courses of action and to make responsible choices. The notion of ‘quasi-operator’ is also most directly verified in the data of human consciousness, although it again, will no doubt be found to have import as the metaphysical basis for the truth of statements about the non-human world.26 The notions of ‘material cause’ and ‘formal cause’ are already familiar from previous discussions in this book. In the case of the supervenience that is had when we enjoy an insight into data, we can, in general terms, say that the data provide the ‘material cause’ of our knowing. The insight occurs because of this data, but it also occurs because of my capacity for insight, and because of the inquiry I engage in regarding the data. In all this the conscious moving force is the operator, which is my question, ‘What is this?’ The notion of the quasi-operator is understood if we grasp that in various ways the data, the material cause of cognitive or ethical insight, can not only be a somewhat inert collaborator in the process of coming to know, but can be ‘primed’ or ‘prepared’ in such a way that the material cause in knowing, data, cooperates with the operator to increase the probability of insight. The wood or plastic that are the material cause of the table are indeed apt for table making; they have the right dispositions, whereas acid does not. But they do not play an ‘active’ or cooperative role in the realization of the formal cause ‘table’ in the given instance of data. We do not say that they ‘elicit’ or ‘educe’ the coming about of a table by cooperating with the operative forces that bring this about. In the case of cognitive or moral insights the situation can be otherwise. As was emphasized in chapter 3, Lonergan’s analysis of the place of data in

Metaphysics of the Social 325

coming to know is in no way committed to the idea of ‘raw data’ of foundationalist empiricism, famously lambasted by Wilfred Sellars. Rather, data is simply that which our inquiries are about, and for the most part data comes to us as in some way already primed and contextualized once we move from the near ‘raw data’ experiences of early infancy into the world mediated by meaning and motivated by value. However, data can be more or less inert, passive, or unprimed in our experiences. The layman is invited by the specialist in his laboratory to gaze into the eyepiece of the electronic microscope or that of the telescope. To the layman the pattern of hazy whirling colours in both instances look much the same. His general knowledge of science gives him some context in which to grasp the meaning of why this data is on display, but he awaits the commentary of the specialist to throw light on what might be the significance of what he has seen. For him the data is relatively inert, passive. It is not so when the same person steps once again out into the street and views, on the news-stand opposite, the image of a smiling face beaming out at him from a large billboard. A layman in the world of science he may be, but in the world of league football our friend is an avid enthusiast, and the sight of the smiling face starts the insights rushing and the emotions of excitement and exaltation accompany what is understood: his team must have won that major competition. In other words the quasi-operator is data primed in a certain way in order to elicit or educe insights of a cognitive or moral nature. As such it cooperates with the operator in arriving at insights or judgments. The origin of the priming of data to facilitate insight may be within the individual or it may come from the community in which the individual develops. In the first case, the individual is actively disposing the data in order to facilitate insight. He or she may be spending much time on producing helpful diagrams or other imagery that may facilitate insight. Memory is being drawn upon to offer further resources. There is overall an active attention to the data and an active ordering and reordering of the imagery to increase the probability of insight. On the other hand, what may be at work are the exigencies of the subconscious within the individual. The images that emerge into consciousness in waking hours, or in dreams, may make manifest images for insight into the organic and psychic needs of the person. However, the source of the quasi-operator of primed data, eliciting insight may be others. Lonergan writes, ‘There is the … quasi-operator that by intersubjectivity prepares, by solidarity entices, by falling in love establishes us as members of community.’27 The metaphysical idea of the quasi-operator helps us to further understand the nature of the instrumental causality instantiated in the range of expressions of meaning and value through which the mutual self-media-

326 Method in Metaphysics

tion of persons takes place in the process of individual and group development. In a given cultural context, words, phrases, gestures, facial expression all communicate meaning and values in a way that recipients of these acts of meaning can understand. These instrumental acts of meaning are not instances of inert, passive data provided for insight. Far from it. They are products of human practical insight, human artistry in the ways of communication. They are the ‘material causes’ of acts of understanding and judgments of value, but with the further specification that they tend, or are designed to, elicit or educe the response of insight on the part of the recipient. Such instrumental acts of meaning may cooperate with operators that are our questions for intelligence, reason and responsibility, or they may ‘insinuate,’ trigger, insights of a cognitive or moral nature, as the quotation from Lonergan provided earlier regarding the expression of meaning in advertising and literary forms suggests. Thus, in a given cultural context my acquired linguistic and cultural dispositions allow a spontaneous insight into the significance of a comedian’s use of comic timing. In my own culture an image on an advertising hoarding may suggest insights in an immediate way, while a similar poster in another culture, drawing upon shared meanings in that culture, means very little to me at all. The Ontology of History In the discussion of development so far general ideas, such as the differentiations of consciousness, have been seen to be applicable to the understanding of human history. However, a metaphysics of history requires more than such general specifications regarding the metaphysics of human cultural development. Lonergan’s writing on historiography, on the contrast between the history that is written and the history that is written about, requires some brief discussion here if we are to elucidate a little further what might be said concerning the metaphysics of human history. Narratives concerning the development and decline of individuals are the stuff of biographies and autobiographies. The biographer may write a ‘life and times’ of a person to highlight the general historical background relevant to understanding a life. The historian inverts this perspective and is preoccupied with writing about the ‘times’ common to many individuals. Thus Lonergan comments: This common field is not just an area in which biographies might overlap. There is social and cultural process. It is not just the sum of individual words and deeds. There exists a developing and/or deteriorating unity constituted by cooperations, by institutions, by

Metaphysics of the Social 327

personal relations ... Within such processes we live out our lives. About them each one of us ordinarily is content to learn enough to attend to his own affairs and perform his public duties. To seek a view of the actual functioning of the whole or a notable part over a significant period of time is the task of the historian.28 The object of historical inquiry is therefore, in this view, to come to know ‘what was going forward in the past.’ By this designation of the heuristic goal of historical inquiry, Lonergan means, as can be seen from the above quotation, not some ‘Whiggish’ march of progress, but both the development and decline of significant social processes. Nor are historians concerned to relate ‘everything that happened in the past’: they are not concerned to inform us of the way each blade of grass behaved on the battlefield of Bosworth in 1485, nor of every word uttered by every combatant. There is a selective process at work, and the selection is concerned with processes that historians have good reason to think changed one state of affairs to another state of affairs for a society as a whole, or for a group that makes a significant contribution to the development of that whole.29 It would appear, then, that Lonergan is on the side of those like William Dray in the debate over the nature of historical enquiry that went on from the 1950s to the 1970s. Dray and others argued that history was a ‘narrative’ affair, not a matter of the instantiation of general laws, or covering laws, as had been suggested by Carl Hempel and his followers. Lonergan would be in agreement with Dray and would also agree with the more sophisticated presentation of just what is meant by ‘narrative’ on this view. The idea is not to turn back the clock in historiographical methods in favour of a ‘kings, rulers and statesmen,’ chronicler view of historical writing. Rather, the intention would be to highlight ways in which that kind of historical narrative is to be integrated with the more sociological approach, which the influence of Marxism and the work of historians like Christopher Dawson encouraged in the community of historians in the period after the Second World War. Historians make their contributions to our knowledge of the enormously complex reality that is the history that is written about through the invocation of knowledge gained through the social sciences, and these social sciences in turn find in the work of the historians data for their own theoretical reflection. Theories of history of a general kind, like Marxist theories, or those of writers such as Arnold Toynbee can also contribute ‘colligatory concepts’ or ‘ideal types’ that may help the historian throw light upon a historical sequence. However, perhaps contrary to their authors’ intentions, such ideal types may be as useful in highlighting data that lead to their own modification or even

328 Method in Metaphysics

overthrow, as they are in directly illuminating the historical evidence under consideration. This is not the place to go into allied questions concerning objectivity in history, perspectivism, and the like. Suffice it to say Lonergan believes that, despite all the conditioning and limiting factors in the craft of the historians, historians through their endeavours do contribute to an increase in knowledge of the past. However, what concern us are the metaphysical implications of this view of history. The complex reality the historian aims to provide some account of is the process of human social interaction, which is developmental. It has been pointed out that Lonergan’s own views on the differentiations of consciousness, the way in cultural development the domains of say common sense, science, philosophy, and artistic endeavour are separated out as specialized fields in the human community can make a contribution to understanding historical process. Likewise, it is the case that sociological and psychological ‘laws,’ and the colligatory concepts of historians (such as ideas of ‘revolution’ or ‘restoration’) can make significant contributions. However, the position that history is narrative implies something about the reality of the historical process that entails that such ‘law-like’ categories cannot be the whole story. That this reality has what might be called a ‘narrative aspect’ to it can be verified in the case of our own cognitional experience. As we have seen, this is a developmental process that moves from experience of data, through questions to insights and ideas, to further questions concerning the truth of our ideas, to the process of judgment or verification. In such a process one mental event or set of activities occurs before another. There is a ‘before and after’ to the conscious movement from question to answer. In both the cognitional case and in the world at large we have evidence for the kind of regularities identified as schemes of recurrence. Such schemes are frequencies from which individual events diverge but diverge non-systematically. The emergence, survival, and decline of such schemes, and the further schemes they condition, can be estimated in a probabilistic fashion. In current science probability estimations can enter the theory of scientific law in two ways: the regularity of the law is subject to statistical prediction, and the expected divergences tolerable on the supposition that the law is true can also be subject to prediction. However, it is not the task of scientific theory, or of any cognitive discipline concerned with general law, to describe in detail each and every occasion in which the statistical regularity is verified, nor each and every occasion when there is a non-systematic divergence from the law or scheme. However, in the narrative of human history and of natural history, of evolution, what may be a decisive moment can be an event that was an instance of a non-systematic diver-

Metaphysics of the Social 329

gence from a scheme of recurrence – what we refer to as a ‘chance event.’ In human history such chance events can have dramatic results. William III of England was thrown to his death from his horse, which stumbled upon a mole hill; Hitler narrowly escaped death in the bomb attack organized by German conspirators in July 1944. Neither of these events could be said to be instances of some regular scheme, as was the daily provision of dinner in Hitler’s headquarters at the ‘Wolf’s Lair.’ It is only in the light of subsequent developments then, that this or that event may be singled out and studied in great detail as being of decisive significance in the course of natural and/or human history. Recognition of this fact helps us to see both the distinctive contribution that the historian makes to our knowledge of reality, beyond that offered to us by the anthropologist or social scientist per se, and something of the metaphysical structure of the reality of human social process that is the object of historical inquiry. In understanding ‘what was going forward’ in history the historian seeks to understand social developmental processes. It was pointed out above that included in this task is the identification and investigation of both development and decline in social forces, regularities, and structures. So the historian will outline the development of organs of repression in, say, Stalinist Russia and the decline of democratic institutions in Germany in the early 1930s. This does not mean that he or she is expressing a moral endorsement by using the terms ‘development’ and ‘decline’ in these cases. The ontological referents of these terms can be understood without ethical import. However, the ethical cannot be avoided entirely when one is attempting to understand the metaphysics of human social process. There is also a moral usage of the terms ‘development’ and ‘decline’ and this has significance for our understanding of the history of societies of persons, and has implications for the methods of history and the social sciences.30 In the previous chapter we saw outlined Lonergan’s metaphysics of development. Such an approach implies a ‘genetic method’ in studying growth, evolution, and development. In such a method one grasps some intelligible dependence of what follows upon what went before. This may be in terms of prior schemes of recurrence acting as potency, or disposition for the emergence of later schemes, or operators and integrators fostering change and growth in the individual. However, when we turn to human history, which studies the interaction between the destinies of individuals and that of the community as a whole, genetic method needs to be complemented by what Lonergan calls ‘dialectical method.’ Such a method takes cognizance of the fact that as well as human development there is decline. And ‘development’ and ‘decline’ are to be understood in this case not in the sense of the growth or decline of a forest, but in moral

330 Method in Metaphysics

terms. More can be said on how one can characterize ethically such development and decline in the case of human beings. But it will perhaps not be surprising, given the positions adopted in this book, to say that by ‘development’ in this ethical sense one means the sustained commitment, on the part of individuals and society, to the requirements of being attentive, intelligent, and reasonable in coming to know the factual truth, and of being responsible in reflection, choice, and action in coming to know the moral good and performing in accordance with what is known. Furthermore, since human development is a matter of interrelation between the organic, psychic, and intellectual/moral components in the human person, such sustained ethical development will also involve the harmonious integration of these aspects of development so as to facilitate dispositions that foster intelligent and responsible reflection and action. ‘Dialectical method’ then, is at one with the Marxists and genealogists in evaluating human history not as a pure unfolding of an ideal, but as a process intrinsic to which is human obtuseness, corruption, and cruelty. But, why, it may be asked, need we introduce ethical considerations into a discussion of the metaphysics of societal development? The answer is to be had if we reflect upon what has been said earlier concerning the view taken of the semantic referents of our language about good and evil. The good is an aspect of reality, since reality is the intelligible, and evil is precisely the absence of intelligibility; it is the unreasonable, or irrational, and in the case of history, the ‘what should have been but what was not.’ The upshot of this view of the ethical for a metaphysics of societal process is, therefore, that not everything that happens in human history is to be understood as directly intelligible. Rather, we may be dealing with an absence of intelligibility, of reality-that-should-have-been, and in this case we need to avoid a rationalization in the name of our ‘scientific approach.’ It may seem very odd to the social scientist (wishing to claim for his or her discipline the same cultural status as that possessed by the physical sciences) that one major difference between the Naturwissenschaften and the Geisteswissenschaften is that the latter deals with a process characterized by both intelligibility and the unintelligibility resulting from human ethical failure. The danger may be, then, in attempting to explain as intelligible what is unintelligible and unreasonable, and such attempts may unwittingly support an ideological rationalization of behaviour or action that is not rational and therefore not excusable in the way of moral explanation. As a conclusion to the present chapter on the metaphysics of social existence and development, I would observe that when we turn to the ethical dimension of societal metaphysics we can see even more clearly that the account of mutual self-mediation of persons in society is not to be reread in any Hobbesian way, or in a way that sees such mutual relations as exer-

Metaphysics of the Social 331

cises in cooperation between self-seeking monads. In any argument about the foundations of ethics the participants in the argument demonstrate (if they are not engaged in it from motives that are merely eristic) that they aim at a correct answer as a goal, a value. Any such debate, therefore, demonstrates an implicit commitment to the view that I ought to get to know what is truly the case and I ought to speak/act accordingly. In acknowledging this, one is acknowledging the kind of moral development discussed above. My development should be one that enhances my commitment to intelligent, reasonable, and responsible inquiry and action. Now such a view of ethics would also insist on principles in some respects akin to that of Kant’s universalizability principle. In understanding the moral imperative of human development in the direction of intelligent, reasonable, and responsible commitment to truth and good action, I understand that this is a good for human nature irrespective of whether this nature be my own or that of another. Such a view, however, will also give due account of special responsibilities, as in the case of parental responsibilities to one’s children. This view of ethics makes explicit what is already inchoate in the insights operative in intersubjective experiences such as empathy. On this position, then, ethical development through mutual self-mediation is not merely something to be welcomed by me as an egotistical ruse for gaining what I need. It is a good, a good part of an intelligible order that at once includes me and other persons. It is a good that I ought to foster and choose as an intelligible end.

Recto Running Head 332

Conclusion

This book has explored what contributions Bernard Lonergan’s philosophy can make to the renaissance in metaphysics underway in Anglo-American philosophy. It has been argued that Lonergan’s methodical development of a metaphysics based upon a critical realist epistemology provides a way forward for those concerned with foundational issues pertaining to how metaphysics is to be elaborated. Lonergan’s critical realism proves effective, I believe, in resolving issues of metaphysical method arising from current debates over realism and antirealism, for it shows the way beyond impasses created by the Kantian tradition in epistemology. The upshot of Lonergan’s view is that we are not so much faced with the inevitability of subjectivism as with the inevitability of realism. There is no escape, no exit from realism, since statements about our minds, their relation to reality, the limitations of our minds, and the contingent dependence of knowledge upon myriad social, historical, cultural, physical, and psychological factors are all demonstrably truth claims about the real. Critical realism, therefore, not only furnishes one with a powerful philosophical tool with which to deconstruct the subjectivism of a number of postmoderns, like Derrida and Rorty, but it is also essential for the kind of investigations carried on by analytical philosophers in the new metaphysics. It provides not only a way of arguing that we can know reality, but in the very manner in which it does so shows how one can move forward to a metaphysical delineation of fundamental structures of that reality. In the introduction I offered a definition of metaphysics as knowledge of reality acquired through philosophical analysis and reflection. In the succeeding chapters in the book we have seen how Lonergan’s approach involves arguing that we can achieve such philosophical knowledge of

Conclusion 333

reality. Such knowledge is achieved through reflecting upon what one is knowing when one is knowing. One therefore understands metaphysics also as a basic semantics insofar as it designates what one means when one uses language to refer to realities. The basic position in metaphysics is arrived at through an unfolding of the implications of critical realist epistemology. That epistemological stance leads to a core position in metaphysics. In the first place, it grounds the fundamental metaphysical view that reality is to be known through the use of our intelligence and reasonable judgment: it is therefore isomorphic with our knowing and is, itself, the intelligible. In the second place knowing one’s knowing process provides a paradigm instance in which a number of key metaphysical terms can be critically validated. Thus, insofar as one knows oneself as a conscious knower through attention to experience, intelligent understanding of that experience, and reasonable judgment concerning the veracity of what one has understood, one comes to know a reality that is characterized by ‘materiality’ (the empirically experienced), form (the intelligible ‘what’ of the terms and relations involved in the notion of ‘a knower’), and act of existence (known in affirming that the ‘what’ of the knower as understood is, in fact, an existent reality). Further, the conscious self is known to be a conscious unity among the diverse conscious acts of the three phases of coming to know. One can, therefore, identify in this instance a case of unity-identity-whole in the data (a substance) that is a conscious unity among diverse acts of knowing, or conjugates (accidents or differentiae). This conscious unity is also a dynamic, moving entity. In coming to know I try to answer questions. Thus metaphysical notions such as ‘finality’ and ‘development’ can, again, be validated in the instance that is the conscious self. And other types of causal relation can also be identified in this conscious self-awareness, such as the causal dependency of my judgments upon the data, or evidence, and the questions that lead to reasonable judgment. As in the case of the affirmation of my capacity to reach objective knowledge of reality, so in these other instances of self-knowledge the intelligent and reasonable process of denying the relevant propositions only provides further evidence for their truth. This is also the case with the thesis that reality, being, is the intelligible. This ‘core’ metaphysical position, then, as we have seen, allows one to critically engage with the perspectives of common-sense, scientific, scholarly, and aesthetic knowing and understanding, in order to develop a metaphysics that also takes into account the more or less provisional, more or less well established results of knowing in these diverse areas of human life.

334 Method in Metaphysics

In the introduction it was also claimed that the methodological issue of primary importance was that of determining how to draw out the implications of the position that reality is the intelligible, is what is to be known through the three phases of coming to know, for current areas of metaphysical debate. This I attempted to do in the chapters that followed. In the discussion of particular debates in analytical metaphysics we witnessed the fact that many analytical philosophers currently working in this area now explicitly or implicitly reject empiricist models of knowing. There are some exceptions to this rule, as we saw in the case of Hausman’s work on causality. However, one can say in general that analytical metaphysicians reject the option presented by the extreme ontological minimalism of Quine, which arises from the older tradition of scientific positivism. In this way the new metaphysics is clearly open to the notion of ‘reality as the intelligible’ and is no longer satisfied with a crude materialism or naturalism. This can be seen in the various debates we have surveyed. Thus the use made of possible worlds in recent metaphysical writing, be this in the trans-world identification of individuals in Kripke’s work, or in the bolder theses of Lewis concerning ‘real possible worlds,’ testifies to a preoccupation with the intelligible structures and modal features of reality beyond anything that can be thought to be readily identified by sense experience alone. In the analysis of supervenience and development, in Kim’s work for instance, one also sees a readiness to follow the path of analysing what can be intelligibly conceived as pertaining to reality. This openness to new perspectives is also evident in the renewed interest in conscious, mental activities, at one time banished from the arena of philosophical discussion by the positivists and later, for different motives, by the ordinary language philosophers. We saw how both Lonergan and analytical philosophers such as Lucas, Lowe, and Shoemaker move from analysis of the conscious knowing self to an ontological investigation of what can be said regarding the reality of that conscious self and its activities. Another feature of the renaissance in metaphysics taking place in AngloAmerican philosophy, which has been noted, is the way philosophers working in the field are happy to reconnect their current work with that of the long tradition of Western metaphysics. So we have seen something of the work of neo-Aristotelians like David Wiggins and Michael Loux and also the way other analytical philosophers consider themselves in some way to be following other notable figures in the metaphysical tradition. J.R. Lucas and David Lewis look to Leibniz for inspiration, while others see the current interest in the notion of ‘thisness’ or ‘haecceity’ as reconnecting with the medieval philosophy of Duns Scotus. In this context, therefore, Lonergan’s avowed attachment to Aristotle and Aquinas does not seem out of place.

Conclusion 335

However, we have also seen, particularly in chapter 3, that if there is a willingness to engage in metaphysics anew and also to reconnect with the tradition, there remains the fact that the phase of the rejection of metaphysics in Anglo-American philosophy still exerts an influence on current debates. As Alex Oliver observes, then, the question of method in metaphysics is understood to be something one cannot ignore. Furthermore, analytical metaphysicians demonstrate an awareness that the new metaphysics must be pursued in the light of what they consider to have been the achievements in philosophy of language, logic, and science of recent analytical philosophy. Thus metaphysics is approached, to some extent, through an analysis of our language about reality. The issues of a method in metaphysics and how to connect with, or appropriate, the tradition of metaphysics are central concerns of Lonergan. Thus, while he is indebted to the philosophies of Aristotle and Aquinas, we also saw that he believes these philosophies may be critically assessed and appropriated on the basis of critical realism (itself to some extent emerging from their work). We have also seen that an open-eyed concern with method is evident in Lonergan’s approach to metaphysics in general and to particular issues in metaphysics. Our survey of approaches in metaphysics in chapter 3 revealed that these can often be ad hoc, and a matter of advocating one set of ‘intuitions’ as opposed to another. We saw that David Armstrong’s intuitions regarding the way there must be real universals instantiated in individuals is opposed by others of nominalist persuasion – by those who say there is simply a Moorean, or given fact of ‘sameness.’ Lonergan’s work on the tradition of metaphysics convinced him that one needed to move beyond metaphysical debates, which were simply the playing off of one set of intuitions against another. His core metaphysical position, grounded on critical realist epistemology was his answer to this. This position, which grounds certain metaphysical elements and features in the way described above, is an important and significant contribution to the discussion of current metaphysics precisely because of its strengths in the area of a basic methodology. On some issues, at least, the claim is that there is a decision procedure in the case of clashing intuitions on this or that metaphysical issue, and this decision procedure involves determining whether the metaphysical elements under discussion can be validated in the reality of one’s consciousness in such a way that the process of denying the said features only serves to attest to their existence. The contribution of critical realism to current metaphysical debate also has importance for general questions concerning the epistemological bases for metaphysical investigation. As is evident from our examination of the work of analytical metaphysicians, the willingness to move from an

336 Method in Metaphysics

investigation of our language to the reality to which it may refer involves a realist view of our knowing. The move beyond crude empiricism to an investigation of the intelligibility of reality does not lead these philosophers to idealism. However, it does not appear evident how, in most cases, these philosophers would make out a case for a realist epistemology that would a) answer the objections of the postmodern or ancient sceptic to the enterprise of knowing reality and its features, or b) explain how a move away from crude empiricism avoids a shift to idealism and idealist metaphysics (a metaphysics more of our categories of thought than of reality itself). In has been argued here that Lonergan’s critical realism does, on the other hand, offer the kind of antisceptical defence of objective knowledge and metaphysics that is needed if current metaphysics is not to be dismissed as intellectually indefensible by those in both the Anglo-American and continental philosophical worlds who consider that the age of ‘serious’ metaphysics has passed with the passing of our ability to claim that we come to know reality. A shift to idealism could be seen to be implied by the openness to a metaphysics of intelligibility, which, we have seen, is part of the current analytical metaphysics. Lonergan’s critical realism helps one to identify the inevitability of the move to idealism once one detects the incoherencies of empiricism. However, critical realism also shows up the problems in idealism as only an incomplete account of human knowing. While we might say idealism focuses attention upon the second phase of our coming to know, that of conceptual and hypothetical elaboration, it completely fails to pay due attention to the third phase or level of knowing, which is that of reasonable judgment. Thus, as we have seen, idealism both in its ‘classical’ (German) and recent manifestations (Putnam’s internal realism) is involved in the incoherence of making the truth claim, judgment, that I cannot know what is truly so of reality. Such claims are grasped as incoherent on the basis of the evidence furnished by my own conscious, mental operations. So in knowing my knowing, I am back to the claim that I can and do know some aspect of reality, being, namely in this case my own knowing. This argument was developed in chapter 2. The significance of this third level of knowing has also been evident in various discussions of metaphysical issues in the previous chapters. While we have said that many analytical metaphysicians are open to a metaphysics of reality as the intelligible, beyond the ontological minimalism of empiricism, it remains the case that problems arise because of insufficient attention to reasonable judgment in our knowing. Such judgment, as we have observed, is that phase of our conscious process of knowing in which we reasonably affirm what is the case – the existence of unities, acts, events,

Conclusion 337

and that there are schemes of recurrence, developments, causes, supervenient states, or whatever. To be precise then, we should say that the reality cognate or isomorphic with our knowing is the intelligible and reasonable. In individual discussions in this book we have seen how the oversight of reasoned judgment, as the grasp of the metaphysical act of existence (actual existence), bedevils debates concerning such matters as possible worlds and the identity of individuals. Thus, David Lewis’s notion of actual possible worlds is involved in oversight of the way we know actual reality, not as some mere indexical, ‘here’ or ‘this’ but as that which corresponds to a reasonable judgment, or affirmation of the existence of something. And debates concerning the chimerical ‘special intelligible ingredient’ that makes this individual distinct from that individual miss the point that the identity and distinctness of individuals is known in a series of positive and negative judgments of real existence that distinguish a really existing A from a really existing B. We have seen how this kind of approach is, in a number of ways, implied in the philosophical program that Michael Dummett’s philosophy constitutes. There is no doubt that Dummett is a realist and not an idealist. However, the aim of his antirealism is to show that empiricist or perceptualist notions of the real as ‘the stuff out there,’ which has nothing to do with our intelligent and reasonable anticipations of what is to be known, will not do. The programme involves a prior investigation of the operations of intelligent language users in order better to refine and develop a logic or logics that can do justice to both the scope and limits of our knowledge, and a commitment to the view that what reality is in itself is to be determined by such intelligent and reasonable (‘logical’ in a very wide sense) expectations. My contention is that in Lonergan’s work one has the execution, or the beginnings of an execution of this program, which, in many respects, remains incomplete in Dummett’s writing. However, while Dummett’s insights into the problems are impressive, not all analytical philosophers share his acuity. Indeed, as we have seen, not all analytical philosophers engaged in metaphysical investigation are as acutely aware as Dummett is of the foundational issues that need resolution before a well-grounded metaphysics can be adumbrated. A healthy respect for the realism inherent in ordinary language, science, history, and other languages of the cognitive disciplines leads them to expect that positive results can be achieved in moving forward from analysis of such languages to the semantic constituents that render linguistic expressions valid, or in some cases, in need of clarification or revision. However, time and again we have found in this study that such attempts may be seriously hampered by an assumed or implicit naive realism, representationalism, on the part of those who, perhaps, wish to work in this domain of philoso-

338 Method in Metaphysics

phy without wishing to enter the arena where battles over epistemology rage. This is not a realistic option, as Lonergan’s analysis of the ‘two realisms’ and of the inveterate polymorphism or ‘mythic’ aspect of the human mind makes clear. Whether such ‘intuitions’ may be more a result of the intrusions of the imagination into intellectual thought, than the understanding resulting in verification of some intelligibility, will be a problem those engaged in disputation will scarcely consider as a possibility. Lonergan’s position, rather like that of the later Wittgenstein, therefore, involves a therapeutic element. The reality that it is the concern of metaphysics to investigate is what is to be known by intelligence and reason. And, as we have seen in the course of this study, it is through intelligence and reason that we can distinguish between verified intelligible structures in the real, on the one hand, and, on the other, constructs that may involve an admixture of imaginary projection, or picture-thinking. A degree of personal commitment is required to carry through, in a consistent manner, the project of metaphysical analysis that takes this position as its starting point. One should be cautious about generalizations concerning the tendencies evident in both the analytical and the continental philosophical traditions at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Notable individuals in both traditions can, in the positions they adopt and the work they pursue, prove to be counterexamples to such generalizations. However, viewing the developments of twentieth-century philosophy as a whole, there can appear irony in the fact that currently it is in the Anglo-American tradition that metaphysics is pursued with vigour, whereas the upshot of the work of notable continentals like Derrida is that metaphysics can no longer be pursued in the ‘serious’ way it once was. On this view we are stuck with metaphysics or in metaphysics linguistically, and this is why the ahistorical linguistic analysis of earlier analysts, including to some extent the later Wittgenstein, is seen to be flawed: we are condemned to metaphysics even in our ordinary language so there can be no ‘end’ to it. In this book it has been argued that such views are hardly surprising given the Kantian tradition in which they stand. Once the Kantian errors regarding objective knowledge are demolished, the tradition that stems from Kant and whose criticisms of Kant are essentially parasitic upon his views, is also seen to be broken-backed. We have seen that the denial of realism is incoherent, and that the demonstration of such incoherence at once involves the affirmation that one can come to know definitively certain facts of cognition. This being said, however, there remains a ‘suspicion’ of metaphysics, which arises from trends in both analytical and continental thought. We saw earlier Max Deutscher’s disdainful report of the emergence of the new metaphysics among analysts from the late

Conclusion 339

1960s, as they abandoned the strictures of the later Wittgenstein against such illusory philosophical adventures. Even if one believes that such ‘suspicions’ are part of mistaken philosophical views and incoherent antirealism, there may be more to them than that. The idea of metaphysics as a dominant ‘first philosophy,’ informing us of all we really need to know about the world of human existence, history, development, and interpersonal relationships, can appear from the perspectives of literature, history, the social sciences, and phenomenological philosophy somewhat repugnant. Is not the importance of these approaches to the reality of human existence seen in their emancipation from the purported ‘first philosophy’ of metaphysics? One might say that just as the Naturwissenschaften came to maturity through emancipation from the dominance of metaphysics, the coming of age of the Geisteswissenschaften during the last two centuries has, perforce, followed a similar path. Again, this valid concern touches upon the method of metaphysics. Lonergan’s response to this objection from the perspective of the Geisteswissenschaften would be similar to that raised against metaphysics on behalf of the Naturwissenschaften. On Lonergan’s position, metaphysics is not a dam blocking the flow of the river of cognitive and cultural development, but the river bed, which itself allows that flow. Of course this sounds irenic, and it would be wrong to forget the very real prescriptive aspects to Lonergan’s philosophy that have dialectical import. However, it is not mere rhetoric. The approach to metaphysics taken in this study is not an approach in which one first adumbrates metaphysical terms and relations and then investigates other areas of human cognitional endeavour to see how well they perform in matching up to the concepts and procedures outlined in one’s first philosophy. Metaphysics is not ‘first’ or presupposed in this way at all. Rather, the phenomenological analysis of human knowing, arising from a study of understanding in common sense, mathematics, science, and scholarship, is prior to metaphysical analysis. From this vantage point one can elaborate an account of cognitional and evaluative conscious activities to be verified in the data of consciousness. From there one moves on to an elaboration of a metaphysics that involves a core position and outlying positions that arise as the core position is utilized in assessing the results of current common sense, science, and scholarship as regards what they contribute to a metaphysical viewpoint. Metaphysics is no substitute for these other disciplines, but provides an integrated view in which other disciplines may be related one to another. Metaphysics makes explicit what is implicit in these other disciplines regarding the structures of reality. Metaphysics is, then, not the whole of knowledge but is, in a sense, the whole in

340 Method in Metaphysics

knowledge. While metaphysics is not ‘first’ philosophy, therefore, it does arrive, via the route outlined, at what is ‘first’ in se, that is, the structures of the real. In this sense it is no different from a discipline such as physics. The realities that are the laws and causal conditions making one balance while riding a bicycle are of course prior to the discovery of those laws. But in terms of human investigation they may not be known at the time of riding the bicycle prior to investigation. The final chapter in the book, which took the form of an exploration of aspects of Lonergan’s philosophy relevant to a metaphysics of the social, has significant implications for the ‘postmodern question’ of the relation between metaphysics and literature, poetry, and aesthetic insight into the reality of human persons in community. As was noted there, metaphysical notions such as ‘mutual self-mediation’ point in the direction of precisely the reality of interpersonal communion as it is explored in story, poem, and symbolic representation. My conclusions and suggestions regarding Lonergan’s metaphysics of the social invite further work and investigation in this area. I think this avenue of investigation is important in that it allows us to see the way Lonergan’s approach to metaphysics invites not only contributions to metaphysics made by common-sense knowing and the physical sciences, but also by scholarship, literature, the arts, and, indeed, types of phenomenological analysis of the interpersonal dimensions of human existence. The way critical realist philosophy understands the importance and significance of literature, the symbolic, and aesthetic expressions of human meaning for metaphysics, however, should not be misunderstood. We are not here making an appeal to the bohemian high priests of the aesthetic to look down with compassion on the aims of the metaphysician. The history of the declaration of independence of science from philosophy has taught us too many lessons for us to remain naive about the philosophical innocence of the literary and symbolic realms. Just as science can be involved in covert or overt philosophical commitments, which may be accepted, refined, or rejected through the exercise of intelligence and reason in philosophical reflection, so too the literary and symbolic expressions of a given culture will manifest in some fashion the world view, or philosophy of that culture, and its vision of the human person. The dialogue envisioned between critical realist philosophy, and its metaphysics, and such expressions of human meaning, is, therefore, not without a critical edge. The previous chapter ended with issues pertaining to ethics and I wish to end these concluding remarks by returning to the ethical dimension to metaphysical investigation. One can ask what the point is of pursuing metaphysics. To ask what the ‘point’ is to some human activity is to ask

Conclusion 341

what is the value, the final cause that motivates the choice to think or write about an issue. It is an ethical question. To reply to this question I would say in the first instance that metaphysics is a worthwhile pursuit in itself. It is worthwhile as a fundamental aspect of the pursuit of truth about the world, about reality. Metaphysics is concerned with distinguishing what is literally so, and what is not literally so. It would allow us to understand what it is we distinguish between when we distinguish between astrology and astronomy, alchemy and chemistry, legend and history, fiction and fact. No doubt the genealogists and postmodern deconstructionists render us a very valuable service when they demolish many of the triumphalist myths of the Enlightenment about how and when distinctions were drawn between some of these cognitive oppositions in the course of Western history. However, it would be a bold advocate of anarchy indeed who would say there is no distinction to be made between any of them now. And such alternative histories that recommend themselves to us as debunking previous assumptions only do so insofar as in their commitment to the exigencies of intelligent and reasonable argument they distinguish between old fictions and what are more likely to be the facts of historical and cultural development. The second point to be made about the connection between ethics and metaphysics is that if one has any serious interest in what is ethically legitimate regarding the treatment of human beings, including oneself, and non-human beings (in an environmental ethics), then one cannot avoid metaphysical issues. In order to know how to treat in an ethically appropriate way human beings, dogs, trees, stones, and gases we have to know what human beings, dogs, trees, stones, and gases are. The knowledge of what they are is metaphysical knowledge. We kick a stone for fun, or perhaps like Dr Johnson to make a point; we wave smoke away from a room. Is it ethically right to do the same to human persons? Since the beginning of philosophy this interconnection between metaphysics and ethics has been understood, and the recent attempts by Rorty and others to leave our political structures intact while removing their ethical/metaphysical bases only serve to highlight these interconnections. Indeed, towards the end of his career Derrida came to realize more clearly that one cannot extend the play of the inversion of binary oppositions into the realm of ethics without courting moral disaster, and opted for some form of Kantian ethical universalism.1 While Kantian ethics suffers from the deficiencies of Kantian epistemology, such a move nevertheless witnesses to the inevitable connection between ethics and notions of what human nature is, or what we must take it to be. Emmanuel Levinas’s phenomenology of the ethical and of the ethical encounter with the ‘face’ likewise witnesses to this inevitability. While

342 Method in Metaphysics

Levinas wishes to avoid what he sees as the solipsistic ethics of the modern period, there is no doubt that the other whose ‘face’ he considers is the human other. The position taken in this book would certainly incline one to be sympathetic to Levinas’s desire to move beyond the code ethics of modernity, and his thought can be seen as an attempt to recover the wider horizons of premodern thought in which the good extends beyond the confines of human interests. However, given the fact that Levinas’s work is embedded in the Kantian tradition, I would also express sympathy for Derrida’s critique of the incoherent attempt made by Levinas to describe what is beyond reality in the language of reality. While Levinas’s later work strains, in a way reminiscent of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, to escape the imprisonment in metaphysical language identified by Derrida, it is clear that his writing still attempts to communicate to us insights that we can but assess by the use of our intelligence and reason. Finally, while appreciating the broader vision of the ethical that Levinas struggles to present, I am inclined to agree with Hilary Putnam’s assessment of Levinas’s achievement.2 Putnam highlights the way in which Levinas’s work on ethics is ultimately unsatisfying in two respects. The conclusion at which Levinas arrives appears to be that our ethical destiny should really be a donation to the other in utter self-abnegation, and given that this never really happens, or very rarely happens, there is a place for ‘mere’ ethical systems. On the one hand, there is no substantial justification offered for this intuition regarding the ethical call as one of utter self-emptying; presumably it is a vision we are just supposed to have, somewhat akin to Plotinus’s vision of the One. However, the real work of developing an ethics to live by remains to be done. As Putnam remarks, Aristotelian ethics has still much more to offer us than this. If we were ever to encounter other intelligent and moral beings in exploration of the universe the crucial thing about them ethically would be the metaphysical fact that they were intelligent and ethically responsible. This would be so even if they had no ‘faces’ to encounter and had a disconcerting appearance similar to that of, say, stones on our planet. While I have often enough taken issue with particular positions adopted by the new generation of analytical philosophers working in the field of metaphysics, and have chided some of them for weaknesses in the epistemological sphere, I conclude this work by expressing my satisfaction that there are so many able philosophers currently writing who, like Bernard Lonergan, believe that the attempt to discover the metaphysical features of the reality we can know, and to which our language refers, is a feasible and worthwhile endeavour.

Recto Running Head 343

Notes

1

The Revival of Metaphysics

1 Oliver, ‘The Metaphysics of Properties,’ 1. 2 See Strawson, Individuals, and The Bounds of Sense. 3 Jonathan Bennett, Kant’s Analytic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966). 4 Deutscher, ‘Forms, Qualities, Resemblance,’ 541. 5 Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics. 6 Salmon, Reference and Essence, 21. 7 See Lonergan, Insight, chapters 1–6. 8 Lonergan, Method in Theology, 255–6; see also his ‘Questionnaire on Philosophy.’ 9 Lonergan, Logic and Phenomenology, 92. 10 Dummett, ‘Interview,’ in Origins of Analytical Philosophy. 11 Cf. Dummett, Gifford Lectures. 12 Lonergan, Understanding and Being, 365. 13 See Derrida, ‘Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism.’ 2

From Epistemology to Metaphysics

1 Kneale and Kneale, The Development of Logic. 2 See Beards, Objectivity and Historical Understanding, and ‘Self-Refutation and Self-Knowledge.’ For further discussions of Lonergan’s critical realism that relate his views to current debates in both analytical and continental philosophy, see Marsh, Post-Cartesian Meditations; McCarthy, The Crisis in Philosophy; Flanagan, Quest for Self-Knowledge; Meynell, Redirecting Philosophy and Postmodernism and the New Enlightenment; and Fitzpatrick, Philosophical Encounters.

344 Notes to pages 23–38 3 As an understandable reaction to the subjectivism of post-Kantian German philosophy both Frege, in one way, and Husserl, in another, moved in the direction of a Platonic metaphysics of linguistic meanings in a realm independent of mind. This, together with the early Wittgenstein’s bias against mental acts as these were described virtually in terms of ‘brain feelings’ in crude behaviourist psychologies, helped to move analytical philosophy in the direction of language analysis and away from intentionality analysis. However, as the phases in Wittgenstein’s philosophy witness, analysis of formal languages could in no way account for the variety of human meaningful expressions. Thus, the only option appeared to be the proclamation of the failure of philosophy. On the position taken in this book the rehabilitation of intentional, mental acts not described in the manner of late nineteenth-century behaviourism, is seen as precisely the way to analyse the diversity of human acts of meaning. The position also identifies the incoherence of the Kantian subjectivist epistemology and the psychologistic reductionism that stems from it. 4 Lonergan, Insight, 96. 5 Ibid., 196. 6 Lonergan, Understanding and Being, 283. 7 See Searle, Intentionality. 8 Lonergan, Understanding and Being, 38–9. 9 Dummett, Origins of Analytical Philosophy. In this area Dummett acknowledges the influence upon his thinking of Husserl and Gareth Evans. 10 Cf. Dummett, Gifford Lectures. 11 Lonergan, Insight, 306–8. 12 Lonergan, Understanding and Being, 16–17. 13 Lonergan, Insight, 352. 14 Ibid., 576–8. 15 Ibid., chapters 1–6. 16 Lonergan, Method in Theology, 255–6. 17 This lack of attention, in some philosophical quarters, to conceptual change is central to Michael McCarthy’s critique of deficient forms of linguistic analysis in his discussion of Lonergan’s work vis-à-vis analytical philosophy; see his The Crisis in Philosophy. 18 Lonergan, Insight, 589–90. 19 Cf. Dummett, Origins of Analytical Philosophy. 20 On this, see Andrew Beards, ‘Dummett: Philosophy and Religion,’ in The Philosophy of Michael Dummett, ed. R.E. Auxier and L.E. Hahn, Library of Living Philosophers (Illinois: Open Court Press, forthcoming). 21 It is clear that Dummett’s view of the intimate bond between language and thought was also shared by other philosophers in the tradition outside the analytical fold, such as Friedrich Nietzsche (see Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 27–9). I would say that it is also shared by Aquinas, whose influence in this regard is seen in Lonergan’s thought. In fact, the distinction to be made here with regard to the history of philosophy is between those who think one can have an unmediated access to thought and those who believe that access

Notes to pages 39–41 345

22

23 24 25

26

is mediated by a study of human expressions of meaning. It is Jaakko Hintikka’s view that this difference is seen in the divergent approaches of Descartes and Aquinas to knowledge of the self (see Hintikka, Knowledge and the Known, 108–15). While Descartes shared the Platonic approach of immediate access to the self, Aquinas, Hintikka avers, approached knowledge of the self via a study of the acts of the self, via a study of the mental acts embedded in meaningful expressions such as language. For Aquinas insight always occurs with regard to mental imagery; it is ‘into’ the imagery, ‘phantasms.’ The study of mind is no exception to this rule. Therefore we begin that study by turning to the linguistic expressions of mind and then shift our attention to the acts of mind, although such ‘expressions’ would, I think, not only be words and sentences but also such expressions as diagrams, symbols, and artistic creations. Lonergan, then, like Dummett, I would say, approaches mind via its expressions. Once we have shifted our attention to conscious mental acts, we can verify that we experience these acts (not just words about them), but our acts are, nevertheless, bound up with verbal or other imaginal expressions. Jaakko Hintikka has distinguished between positions in philosophy that may be said to be ‘self-destructive’ and those, on the other hand, that he calls ‘self-supportive’; see Hintikka, Knowledge and the Known. Lonergan, Insight, 353. Cf. St Thomas Aquinas, De Veritate, q. 10, a. 8; see also Hoenen, Reality and Judgment According to St Thomas, 274–86. Hintikka is right, therefore, when he points out that I can doubt my own existence, in the sense that I can reflect upon the propositions ‘I exist’ or ‘I know’ and raise questions as to their truth or as to how I might know their truth (Hintikka, Knowledge and the Known, 108–15). As Aquinas insists, it is only when I make a judgment, an assertion, such as ‘I do not know’ or ‘I do not exist’ that I am involved in incoherence, for then the evidence for the contradictory of the propositions in both cases is to be had in the very mental operations with which the propositions are put forward. The definition of knowledge given by some analytical philosophers as ‘justified true belief’ is not one adopted by Lonergan. Rather he prefers to follow Aristotle and Aquinas in saying that our knowing processes aim at the intentional identity between knower and known. Lonergan’s approach can be of assistance in sorting out some of the confusions that surround the notion of knowledge as justified true belief. Critics of this definition point to cases in which one does hold truly what is the case but does so on the basis of erroneous evidence. There are instances of this in the history of science. So Galileo correctly, we believe, held that the earth circles the sun, but a significant part of the evidence he brought forth for this view was erroneous; for example, he thought the tides were caused by the earth’s circling the sun. On the critical realist view one would say that in a number of cases, including those in cognitional theory and some metaphysical theorems derived from it, one is justified in holding that one’s ‘belief’ is certainly true. To deny the belief would, in some way, only provide definitive evidence that it

346 Notes to pages 41–5

27 28 29 30 31

32

33

34

35

was so. On the other hand, most of our judgments about reality are probable. We can say that we are justified in holding that belief x is probably true of reality, with a high degree of probability, and that belief y is probably true of reality, but with a lower degree of probability. When therefore some data, some evidence, could possibly be interpreted in some other way (as an illusion perhaps) we are not justified in saying more than that proposition x is probably true of reality. This is what we should say, strictly speaking, or what we are justified in believing in cases in which the belief is de facto true while the evidence of itself does not give certainty. Lonergan, Understanding and Being, 159. See, as examples, Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, and Nielsen, After the Demise of the Tradition. For a detailed critical analysis of Kant’s philosophy from the viewpoint of Lonergan’s thought, see Sala, Lonergan and Kant. Lonergan, Insight, 356–7. Discussions such as those by J.L. Mackie and J. Hintikka, which push the analysis of self-referential arguments further so as to focus attention upon the performative nature of incoherence, are helpful but they do not go far enough. See Hintikka, Knowledge and the Known, 108–15 and Mackie, Logic and Knowledge. For a critical appraisal of the views of these philosophers on self-referential arguments, see Beards, ‘Self-refutation and Self-knowledge.’ Other examples of this objection are to be found in Bolzano’s critique of Kant, Nietzsche’s arguments in Beyond Good and Evil against Descartes, and Derrida’s objections to Husserl’s philosophical program in Speech and Phenomena. In fact, inspired by the ‘evil genius’ style of global scepticism one can launch a counterattack on the proponent of the ‘You must check if your concepts are of standard English’ objector to self-knowledge. How does he know that his objection is here and now framed in standard English concepts? He might use the spell checker or dictionary on his shelf to see, but it is not beyond the ingenuity of the ‘evil genius’ to play games with these, or even the ‘apparent’ colleague in the next room who is questioned. That such deception is judged to be improbable, highly improbable, is not in doubt. But the judgment that it is so is not certain, and the proponent of Lonergan’s position also agrees about such high improbability. The fact remains that in agreeing that such judgments have the quality of probability, not certainty, about them, our imagined objector makes reference to conscious intentional acts, not simply words, in evaluating a given judgment as probable and not certain. And any attempt to reject sceptical or other Cartesian type moves to doubt that there is such a thing as standard English, when those doubts regard the impossibility of establishing certainty in such cases, will simply be question begging. Other examples of falliblist epistemology are to be found in Nielsen, After the Demise of the Tradition, and Donald Davidson, ‘A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge,’ in Kant oder Hegel? (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1983). The falliblist will, no doubt, further respond to the sceptic that questions should not be hyperbolic or exaggerated but ‘reasonable.’ The sceptic will

Notes to pages 47–60 347

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 3

respond that the evaluation of what is ‘reasonable’ in terms of sceptical objections has varied across times and places and many of the so-called advances in mathematics and science, which the fallibilist values, grew from questions that some regarded as unreasonably sceptical at the time. Hugo Meynell, in ‘Infallible Fallibilism,’ ‘deconstructs’ Popperian fallibilism to show that such philosophies are implicitly committed to more criteria of rational evaluation than they make explicit themselves. Derrida, ‘Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism,’ 81. See Lonergan, Insight, 396–8. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 4–5. Ibid., 15. Meynell, ‘From Crisis to Insight.’ Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 12. Ibid., 43. Ibid., 56–7. Ibid., 61. Ibid., 67. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Philosophy and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, trans. F. Kersten (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1983), #42. Quoted in Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 69. Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 69. Ibid., 98. Ibid., 101. Ibid., 104. Richard Rorty, ‘Remarks,’ in Deconstruction and Pragmatism, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London: Routledge, 1996). Lonergan, Insight, 615. Kneale and Kneale, The Development of Logic. Blackburn, ‘Wittgenstein, Wright, Rorty and Minimalism.’ Lonergan, Insight, 440. Cf. Norris, Derrida. Meynell, ‘On Deconstruction and the Proof of Platonism.’ Lonergan, Method in Theology, 16–17. The Question of Method

1 Dummett, Gifford Lectures. Over the years a central preoccupation for Michael Dummett has been our language of time and its relation to the metaphysics of time. Lonergan’s analysis of space and time is characterized by the insistence that the understanding of these realities is primarily a task for physics, not philosophy. One role philosophy has to play in such analysis is that of reminding us that in this case, as in others, what is required is a move from a descriptive account of space and time to the type of explanatory account aimed at in scientific theories such as Einstein’s. Thus confusion must be avoided such as that which arises when we attempt to construct a ‘deep philosophical’ notion of space-time that is really only a reworking of the imaginative images embedded in a common-sense descriptive account.

348 Notes to pages 60–7

2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18

On the other hand, philosophical reflection upon what physics has to say about space and time (philosophical reflection emergent from Lonergan’s position as a whole) can enable one to have some heuristic understanding of space and time as the ‘material cause,’ the dispositional substrate, that permits the unfolding of the emergent and probable schemes of the recurrence of events and things of world order, the latter being the ‘formal’ element that supervenes upon this space-time, empirical substrate (see Lonergan, Insight, 194–5). Bernard Lonergan, Insight, 367–71. It is perhaps worthwhile noting in the present context that these large-scale historical evaluations demonstrate a family resemblance with that of another twentieth-century metaphysician concerned with the history and methods of the discipline, A.N. Whitehead. However, while the latter philosopher remained a realist who pursued metaphysics, clearly for Rorty, Heidegger, and Derrida metaphysics in the traditional sense cannot be pursued in our own time. Lonergan, A Second Collection, 218–19. Lonergan, Understanding and Being, 365. Lonergan, ‘Bernard Lonergan Responds,’ 312. Lonergan, Insight, 420 note. Ibid., chapter 5. Ibid., 458–60. The experience of seeing the colour green, then, can be analysed in terms of the potential for this experience residing in the object, in terms of such factors as electromagnetic wavelengths, and in the receptor in terms of pigment absorption and other factors. These factors are actualized when I see the colour green. Ibid., 394–6. See Lennox and Ruse, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Biology. Lonergan, Insight, 151–2. For a study of Aristotle’s philosophy influenced by Lonergan’s reading of Aristotle, see Byrne, Analysis and Science in Aristotle. One finds that philosophers like Lewis, Martin, and Wiggins manifest philosophical attachments to the metaphysical viewpoints of Leibniz, Locke, and Aristotle respectively, and if Lonergan manifests an attachment to the thought of the thirteenth-century Aquinas, Nathan Salmon has pointed out that philosophers working in the light of Kripke’s analyses of possible-worlds semantics have begun to take notice of earlier exponents of this form of metaphysics, the nominalists of the fourteenth century; see Salmon, Reference and Essence, 21. Gone are the antihistorical biases of the positivists and the later-Wittgensteinians. Lewis, ‘New Work for a Theory of Universals,’ 353. Oliver, ‘The Metaphysics of Properties,’ 2. Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds, 16. This is the position taken by David Armstrong in his works. Oliver, ‘The Metaphysics of Properties,’ 68. David Lewis in his essay ‘New Work for a Theory of Universals’ highlights methodological issues in a critical discussion of David Armstrong’s method. Armstrong insists that there is to be no unanalysed predication, and argues against the nominalist stand,

Notes to pages 67–79 349

19

20 21 22 23

24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43

‘How can two different things both be white ... If people just say “proposition that a is F ” is perfectly alright as it stands, and needs no analysis, they are dodging the compulsory question’; see Armstrong, A Theory of Universals, 2:17. Lewis denies that this question is compulsory. While Armstrong’s theory of universals may do some of the work needed in a compositional semantics (a metaphysics), other approaches may also suffice. Thus, Lewis argues, a nominalist can insist against Armstrong that there just is an unanalysable Moorean fact of sameness; see Lewis, ‘New Work for a Theory of Universals,’ 170. Marian David argues that what Quine is out to show is that once one follows Carnap in rejecting mental acts or meanings in the head as a way of philosophical analysis, then there is no way to secure analyticity concerning matters of significance such as ‘truth’; see David, ‘Analyticity, Carnap, Quine, and Truth.’ Cf. Quine, Word and Object, 10. Alston, ‘Ontological Commitments.’ Haack, ‘Quantifiers.’ It is no surprise, I believe, that such a philosophy at war with itself opens the way to the deconstructive moves in its regard deployed by Richard Rorty in his Philosophy and The Mirror of Nature. See Martin, ‘The New Cartesianism,’ and ‘The Need For Ontology’; and Martin and Pfeifer, ‘Intentionality and the Non-Psychological.’ The relativism and idealism at which Martin takes aim is that defended by Putnam. Cf. Martin, ‘The Need For Ontology.’ Ibid., 512. Cf. Martin and Pfeifer, ‘Intentionality and the Non-Psychological.’ Mays, The Philosophy of Whitehead, 48–50. Hughes, ‘Is Whitehead’s Psychology Adequate?’ Ibid., 277–8. Mays, The Philosophy of Whitehead, 153. Emmet, The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking, 234. Cartwright, ‘Speaking of Everything,’ 3–7. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 6. Lonergan, Insight, 684. Lonergan, Understanding and Being, 365, and Topics in Education, 180 note 17. Peter van Inwagen also makes use of some self-referential arguments in the course of elaborating a metaphysics in the context of analytical philosophy, although, again, I would not see him as doing so in quite the systematic way Lonergan does in grounding an epistemological position and moving forward from that to metaphysics. See his ‘The Nature of Metaphysics.’ Lonergan, Verbum, 55. Lonergan, Insight, 405, and Phenomenology and Logic, 38–9. Lonergan, Insight, 405. Cf. Lonergan, Phenomenology and Logic, 84. Priest, ‘On Inconsistent Arithmetics.’

350 Notes to pages 80–91 44 Lonergan, Insight, 599. 45 See Priest, ‘On Inconsistent Arithmetics.’ There have been a good number of critical responses among analytical philosophers to Priest’s views. For an example, see Everett, ‘Absorbing Dialetheia?’ 46 This appears to be the approach to Heidegger’s language of ‘being’ taken by E. Tugendhat and K.O. Apel. On this, see Frank,‘Is Self-Consciousness a Case of présence à soi ?’ 47 Green, Dummett, chapter 3. 48 Putnam, Realism and Reason, 44. 49 Lonergan, Phenomenology and Logic, 77. 50 Cartwright, ‘Speaking of Everything,’ 6–17. 51 Ibid., 14–15. On the implications of Lonergan’s approach for a number of issues that arise in twentieth-century symbolic logic, see McShane, ‘The Foundations of Mathematics.’ 52 Lonergan, Insight, 578. 53 Lonergan, Verbum, 109. 54 Lonergan, Insight, 441. 55 Ibid., 563. 56 Cf. Lonergan, Phenomenology and Logic, 271–2. 57 Critchley, ‘Introduction,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Levinas. 58 Lonergan, Insight, 562–3. G. Deleuze’s Nietzsche-inspired metaphysics of power and its various concrescences appears to me to suffer from the same kind of unverifiable picture-thinking (and thus presencing) we observed in Whitehead’s metaphysics. However, this need not worry us since, as Ronald Bogue explains, Deleuze eschews all foundationalism and objectivism and his metaphysics is, therefore, intended merely as a ‘fiction,’ a kind of sciencefiction (Bogue, Deleuze and Guattari, 159). On the other hand, the motive behind Deleuze’s elaboration of this fictional account is his desire to undermine the three metaphysical certainties of God, the self, and the world (ibid., 152). One can ask, however, how a fictional account can challenge or undermine accounts purportedly about reality. A fairy story of a princess in a castle does not challenge historical accounts of the rise of the House of Hapsburg in the Middle Ages, unless it is taken to offer insights of significance to historians; but then we should say the evaluation of those insights was now part of the serious work of historical research. Of course, both Derrida and Deleuze at times shift from rational argument in elaborating their views, in criticizing other deconstructionists, and in attacking foundationalist philosophies like those of Descartes or Husserl to outlining visions of the impossible, illogical, and ‘anti-ontological’ that they happily acknowledge as absurd. But the principle that reality is the intelligible and reasonable, which is operative in all our thinking and arguing, means that one cannot make intelligible arguments at some points and opt out of the same at others. If foundationalists like Descartes and Husserl are wrong, then that is because of intelligible arguments against their views, which invoke rational principles of a general nature. If those principles do not hold in other cases they do not hold in the case of the assault on foundationalism. But then

Notes to pages 93–111 351

59 60 61 62

grasping this point, or attempting to contest it, shows that some kind of serious foundationalism is inevitable. While he takes over some notions from Deleuze, Alain Badiou’s work, Being and Event, appears to be serious about metaphysics. He consciously follows in the tradition of Leibniz and holds that being is the mathematical. At the same time, he stresses the creativity of the individual’s discovery of truth. In this way he attempts to combine the analytical philosophical interest in mathematical logic with continental philosophy’s concern with the ecstatic freedom of the individual. Perhaps Badiou’s work does signal that a change in continental philosophy regarding ‘serious’ metaphysics is underway. Ibid., 462. Quoted in Deutscher, ‘Forms, Qualities, Resemblance,’ 535. Lonergan, Insight, 460–1. Lonergan, Phenomenology and Logic, 62.

4 Metaphysics of the Self 1 For a historical account of the scepticism widespread in Renaissance philosophy, see Copenhaver, Renaissance Philosophy. For an evaluation of Descartes from the perspective of Lonergan’s philosophy, which emphasizes Lonergan’s negative view of Cartesianism, see Fitzpatrick, Philosophical Encounters. For a more positive evaluation, which draws out the common ground between the two philosophers, see Meynell, Redirecting Philosophy. 2 Anscombe, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind, 21–36. 3 Ibid., 25. 4 Ibid., 26. 5 Ibid., 25. 6 Ibid., 27. 7 Ibid., 34. 8 Ibid., 54. 9 Ibid., 31. 10 Ibid., 36. 11 Frank, ‘Is Self-Consciousness a Case of présence à soi ?’ 12 Lonergan, in fact, acknowledges this positive aspect of Sartre’s thought. Cf. his Collection, 172–3. 13 Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 95–6. 14 Ibid., 96. 15 Mellor, Metaphysics Matters, 39. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Lowe, ‘Substance and Selfhood,’ 85. 19 Lowe, ‘Self, Reference and Self-Reference,’ 15. 20 Ibid. 21 Lowe, ‘Substance and Selfhood,’ 81. 22 Lowe, ‘Self, Reference and Self-Reference,’ 23. 23 Ibid., 17.

352 Notes to pages 111–18

24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

Ibid. Ibid., 24. Lowe, ‘Substance and Selfhood,’ 84. Ibid., 87. Ibid., 88. In Sameness and Substance David Wiggins argues that personal identity is a matter of our being animals, and as long as the animal exists so do I (33). In his response to criticism of this position by Paul Snowdon (‘Persons and Personal Identity’), Wiggins admits, ‘There is no transcendental argument to be had from the possibility of interpretation to the conclusion that persons must be human beings’ (ibid., 248). He adds that this is not a complete retraction of his earlier views, for we can only extrapolate from human to persons to the idea of what non-animal persons might be, and this is, at least, a tricky business. Lonergan has a good deal to say on these issues. However, since the present work does not attempt to be an exhaustive treatment of Lonergan’s metaphysics, I do not intend to pursue the issues raised by the Wiggins/Snowdon debate here. Suffice it to say that Lonergan would show sympathy for the principal points made by both contributors to the debate, while contributing further philosophical argument to the discussion (see Lonergan, Insight, 538–43). Lowe, ‘Substance and Selfhood,’ 91. Ibid., 90. Lowe, ‘Self, Reference and Self-Reference,’ 26. Shoemaker, The First Person Perspective. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 23–4. Ibid., 176–8. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 182. Another difficulty presented by Shoemaker’s work (and his writing typifies that of a number of analytical philosophers of mind) is that the term ‘belief’ lacks clarification. It can mean a) a conscious state of a cognitive kind, including an act of assent, a judgment, or the awareness of one’s ignorance as one raises a question and seeks to answer it; b) rationally established beliefs that have become habitual; c) spontaneous reactions to external objects, such as are found in human beings, lower and higher animals; d) reactions to situations that in some way combine the two. We may or may not come to consider and know that we have ‘beliefs’ in the sense of a), b), c), and d), but it is misleading to claim, as Shoemaker does, that ‘normally’ we come to know in an explicit way all four. The problem here is allied to the larger question, never addressed, of what the process of coming to know such conscious states involves. It is not surprising, given Shoemaker’s general position on our immediate, incontrovertible knowledge of our ‘beliefs,’ that his philosophy is criticized by Johannes Roessler for failing to provide argu-

Notes to pages 118–31 353

42 43 44 45 46 47 48

5

ments for the incontrovertible nature of our immediate self-knowledge. Roessler asks, ‘Do we never make mistakes in knowledge claims about the contents of our conscious experience?’ (Review of Sydney Shoemaker’s The First Person Perspective and Other Essays, 203). Lucas, ‘A Mind of One’s Own,’458. Ibid., 459. Ibid., 460. Ibid., 468. Ibid., 463. Ibid. Ibid., 466. Lucas follows Jonathan Glover, who stresses, in The Philosophy of Psychology and Personal Identity, the dynamic self-formation that individuals perform over time. On Knowing and Naming

Dummett, Frege, 118. Anscombe and Geach, Three Philosophers, 20–1. Dummett, Frege, 97. Putnam, Realism and Reason, 56–7. Kripke, Naming and Necessity, 46. Salmon, Reference and Essence, 21. Kripke, Naming and Necessity, 92–7. Ibid.,108. Ibid., 108, note 50. Searle, Intentionality. Ibid., 222–3. O’Hear, What Philosophy Is, 167. Searle, Intentionality, 233. Ibid., 223. In Lonergan’s view it is Scotus’s representationalism and concomitant presencing metaphysics that have had a deleterious effect on subsequent philosophical developments (Verbum, 69). Such philosophical perspectives, opposed to those of Aquinas’s critical realism in the century before Scotus, influenced Suarez in the sixteenth century, who in turn influenced a good deal of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century epistemology and metaphysics. The philosophies of Kant, and those who were inspired by him, are to be understood as a reaction precisely against this Scotist-Suarezian epistemology and metaphysics. 16 This lack of understanding of the intelligent nature of reference is to be found in the work of Anthony Kenny, a devotee of Wittgenstein who is also acquainted with Aquinas’s philosophy and even, a little, with Lonergan’s. On the topic of Kenny’s confusion concerning ‘reference’ I have written elsewhere (see Beards, ‘Kenny and Lonergan on Aquinas’). 17 Lonergan, A Second Collection, 42. 18 On the basis of his cognitional analysis Lonergan identifies three different

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

354 Notes to pages 132–44

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

6

acts of meaning as emergent within the three stages involved in the process of coming to know. These are the formal, the full, and the instrumental. Of these Lonergan writes, ‘The formal act of meaning is the act of conceiving, thinking, considering, supposing, formulating. The full act of meaning is an act of judging. The instrumental act of meaning is the implementation of a formal or a full act by the use of words or symbols in a spoken, written, or merely imagined utterance’ (Insight, 381). F.E. Crowe, in Lonergan, Topics in Education, 283–4, note C. As Lonergan noted in Insight, ‘For the empiricist the ostensive act not merely indicates a source of meaning but also a full term of meaning’ (383). Ibid., 369–70. Ibid., 536. Ibid., 194–5. Ibid., 535. See Kripke, Naming and Necessity, 62. Lonergan makes this point in Insight, 339. Searle, Intentionality, 225–6. Ibid., 124, note 9. Ibid., 139–40. Putnam, Realism and Reason, 55. See note 26 above. The claim is reiterated by Philip McShane in ‘The Foundations of Mathematics.’ Natural Kinds: From Description to Explanation

1 Cassam, ‘Science and Essence.’ 2 Ibid., 98. Cassam quotes Kripke, ‘Statements representing scientific discoveries about what this stuff is are not contingent things but necessary truths in the strictest possible sense’ (Kripke, Naming and Necessity, 124). And against this position Cassam maintains that in a culture in which gold was valued for its beauty someone whose gold turned blue would say, pace Kripke, it was all destroyed. Further Cassam criticizes Putnam for claiming (Reason, Truth and History, 122) that, even before science discovers differences between Twinearthers’ water, the language users in these two (possible) worlds mean the word ‘water’ differently. Cassam asks whether the attempt to avoid all and every vestige of a ‘meaning in the head’ semantics is believable in this case. 3 Strawson, The Bounds of Sense, 145–6. 4 Cassam, ‘Science and Essence,’ 102. 5 Wiggins, Sameness and Substance, 117–18. 6 Ibid., 118. Cassam, however, expresses doubts concerning Wiggins’s ‘highest sortal requirement,’ doubts that stand in the way of Wiggins’s argument in Sameness and Substance distinguishing his modest from immodest essentialism. Here Cassam makes use of Strawson’s critique of Wiggins’s proposal (ibid., 101). Strawson points out that if it is necessary that Toby is a dog, then it is equally necessary that he is a spaniel, so following Wiggins’s path we generate a surprisingly rich range of necessities of constitution. In Wiggins’s view

Notes to pages 144–62 355

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38 39

the answer to an (Aristotelian) ‘What is it?’ question is, initially, the identification of the highest sortal case. But to this Cassam responds with a question as to how we are to decide which answer is the right one. Two dog lovers want to know what kind of dog this animal is; what is to determine which is the highest sortal in such a case? Thus, ordinary language context-dependent answers do not settle the case. Wilkerson, ‘Natural Kinds.’ Ibid., 33. Ibid., 36. Among them are S.P. Schwartz and J.L. Mackie. Wilkerson, ‘Natural Kinds,’ 36. Meyer, ‘Science, Reduction and Natural Kinds.’ Ibid., 505. The minimalist view would be that espoused by Quine. Wiggins has argued in favour of this position adopted by Meyer (see Wiggins, Sameness and Substance, 203). Meyer, ‘Science, Reduction and Natural Kinds,’ 541. Ibid., 541. Ibid., 546. Haldane, ‘On Coming Home to Metaphysical Realism’; see also Putnam, ‘Sense, Nonsense and the Senses.’ Haldane, ‘On Coming Home to Metaphysical Realism,’ 289. Ibid., 290. Putnam, ‘Sense, Nonsense and the Senses,’ 469. Ibid., 448. Ibid., 452. Brown, ‘Natural Kind Terms and Recognitional Capacities.’ Ibid., 281. Ibid., 282. Ibid., 284. Ibid. Ibid., 291. Ibid., 292. Dummett, ‘Commonsense and Physics.’ Ibid., 15. Ibid., 17, 19. Lonergan, Insight, 100–2. Lonergan, Verbum, 14–16. See Lonergan, Method in Theology, 258–62. This is a lesson that Quine acknowledges contemporary scientific method has taught us, but it is one that Descartes recognized long ago when he maintained that one could understand the intelligibility of a thousand-sided object – one could do the geometry, but one could not imagine the same (see Quine in conversation with Bryan Magee, in Magee, Men of Ideas, 175–6). Lonergan, Insight, 275. See Crombie, Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition; also Copenhaver, Renaissance Philosophy.

356 Notes to pages 162–77

40 41 42 43 44 45 46

47 48 49

50 51 52 53 54 55

56 57 58 59

Lonergan, Insight, 458–9. Ibid., 459–60. Lonergan, Verbum, 177. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §163. Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, 24–61. Lonergan, Phenomenology and Logic, 45–7. Ibid., 66. For further examples of the way intelligible structures, or forms, are understood in sense data, see the discussion of the way ancient Greek mathematical methodology influenced Aristotle’s account of the scientific search for the ‘what-it-is,’ in Byrne, Analysis and Science in Aristotle. Lonergan, Phenomenology and Logic, 47. Lonergan, Verbum, 57. Lonergan, Insight, 328. One might note that the emphasis placed by Lonergan upon complete explanation and explanations as meeting criteria of simplicity or, as it is sometimes put, ‘elegance,’ certainly leaves room for the role of such factors as falsification stressed by Popper. But it also indicates other, additional criteria that Popper’s critics have identified as also operative in ‘scientific rationality’ (see Thagard, Conceptual Revolutions). Lonergan mentions in Insight the criterion popularly known as Ockham’s razor, entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem (682), and I think one can give added precision to that criterion, which requires ‘simplicity’ of explanations, from the viewpoint of Lonergan’s own work in cognitional theory. In considering the reasonableness of our judgments, most of which are probable, one can see that one has sufficient reason to affirm the less complex explanation x rather than the more complex explanation y; if x will do the job there is not sufficient reason to affirm y. In general, then, one can affirm, on this position, that scientific affirmations are more probable than those that they replace, and therefore one can say that such affirmations are more probably true of reality. This degree of probability will no doubt vary in accord with the likelihood of revision in this or that area of scientific theory. Ibid., 358–9. Aristotle, Physics, II, 1, 195b 21–2, cited in Lonergan, Third Collection, 172. Lonergan, Verbum, ‘Introduction.’ Lonergan, Insight, 358. Lonergan, Phenomenology and Logic, 47. Lonergan saw in Aquinas’s analysis of the way the ‘informing’ of human individuals through acquisition of moral virtues, dispositions, could entail an increase in the probability of good acts, an indication of an awareness of the intelligibility of the statistical that went beyond the classical Aristotelian analysis of chance (see Byrne, ‘The Thomist Sources of Lonergan’s Dynamic World View’). Lonergan, Insight, 517–18. Kripke, Naming and Necessity, 124. Cassam, ‘Science and Essence,’ 99. David Wiggins’s attenuated essentialism is criticized by both Cassam and Strawson. Strawson holds that Wiggins’s view implies that if Toby is a dog

Notes to pages 178–81 357

60

61

62 63

then necessarily Toby is a spaniel, and that a more comprehensive array of necessities is generated by Wiggins’s position than Wiggins himself would wish. Cassam attacks all necessity talk but the problem is not really as he sees it. It is rather that the necessity talk is in the wrong place. In the present context one can agree with Strawson’s criticisms of Wiggins, for according to our position the modality of necessity in this case is an expression of the logical principle of identity. That principle is grounded in the cognitional fact that we know reality through a series of positive and negative judgments: A is, B is, C is; A is neither B nor C, etc. It is true, then, as Strawson’s line of criticism suggests, that necessity is found with regard to any aspect of an individual insofar as that individual is truly known, and that knowledge also regards differentiae, or ‘conjugates.’ But such necessity is conditional insofar as the knowledge we have is less than certain. If Peter sits, necessarily it follows that Peter sits. But, as Aquinas notes, this does not entail that it is necessary that Peter sits. If it is true that this data, indicated by the name ‘Toby,’ is that on something that is both a dog and a spaniel, then necessarily it is so that Toby is both a dog and a spaniel. As for Cassam’s dispute among dog lovers, it can be readily admitted that since ordinary language descriptive definitions are, as Wittgenstein observes, in terms of family resemblance and, as Lonergan puts it, rest upon a collection of characteristics that decide for the ordinary language user what they are ‘prepared’ to call an x, one is to expect vague boundaries and therefore disputes at the border. These will also occur in the scientific context, for, as we have observed, the scientific attempt to know the ‘nature of ...’ is ongoing and is often characterized more by the heuristic anticipation operative in a history of inquiry than by the provisional result. However, such a heuristic is, nevertheless, justified, and as science develops there may be ample justification at any one stage to prefer, in a rational way, a new classification to an older one. Thus, it is reasonable to classify a whale as a mammal rather than a fish, the newer classification replacing the older one. So, as Alex Oliver does well to observe, arguments concerning human knowledge and its strengths and limitations cannot avoid the adoption of a metaphysics (Oliver, ‘The Metaphysics of Properties,’ 1). What is the meaning, the semantic cash value, of the terms employed in explaining the mind and its limitations? All such arguments refer to mental realities of some kind. Similarly, historical relativism is also committed to an explanatory path concerning the mind and its limitations and, in addition, to a survey of historical and anthropological data from which it draws conclusions argued to be true or probably true. What are these facts about the world to which the anthropological relativist refers? If they are realities, what realities are they? If they are not, then the relativist argument amounts to no more than the telling of fables. Martin, ‘The Need For Ontology,’ 509. See Dummett, Origins of Analytical Philosophy. Dummett’s experience here seems rather akin to the bemusement expressed by Husserl when entering upon his venture to map out the terrain of the states of human consciousness.

358 Notes to pages 182–92

64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

73 74 75 76 77

78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86

Brown, ‘Natural Kind Terms and Recognitional Capacities,’ 286–7. Ibid., 291. Ibid., 299, footnote 21. Lonergan, Third Collection, 53–4. Losonsky, ‘The Nature of Artefacts.’ Wiggins, Sameness and Substance, 87. Ibid., 88. This is the point made by Schwartz in support of Wiggins. See Schwartz, ‘Putnam on Artefacts,’ 572. This is the objection to the position of Schwartz and Wiggins raised by Hilary Kornblith (Kornblith, ‘Referring to Artefacts’). Kornblith argues that an artefact’s nature is its function (112), and that it shares such a nature with other artefacts. Wiggins, Sameness and Substance, 87. Schwartz, ‘Putnam on Artefacts,’ 77, cited in Losonsky, ‘The Nature of Artefacts,’ 77. Losonsky, ‘The Nature of Artefacts,’ 83. Ibid., 86. The point is similar to that made by John Searle in his debate with proponents of strong A.I. All manner of naturally found systems in the universe can be taken, or used, as calculating devices (see Searle, The Rediscovery of Mind, 212). Lonergan, Verbum, 15. Kidder, ‘What Is a Thing for Lonergan?’ Lonergan, Verbum, 14–15. Lonergan, Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1958–1964, 163–5. Lonergan, Topics in Education, 205–8. Lonergan, Insight, 284–92. ‘Cognitional Structure’ in Lonergan, Collection. Dennett, The Intentional Stance, 295–8. A further text in Lonergan’s writing pertinent to this discussion is to be found in his Phenomenology and Logic (72 and footnote 8). There he draws attention to the scholastic distinction between a unity such as a heap of stones (unum per accidens) and, on the other hand, a unity-in-itself (unum per se). This latter category may be further subdivided between, say, a human person (a substantial unity) and a machine, which has an intelligible unity to it that a heap of stones does not. In the 1964 essay ‘Cognitional Structure’ Lonergan writes that human conscious knowing and deciding is an example of a self-assembling dynamic structure. In light of this I take it that, for Lonergan, such self-assembling dynamism distinguishes the substantial unity of a human being or a dog from the intelligible unity (unus per se) of a machine like a car. My speculative question is, then, granted that present machines like cars are instances of unus per se, but are not substances, are not selfassembling dynamic structures, could there be such dynamic self-assembling artefacts in the future? If that were so, then the most marked metaphysical

Notes to pages 194–202 359 difference (as outlined and defended by Lonergan in Insight, 538–43) would be that between human persons, on the one hand, and animals and advanced machines on the other, these machines having the same self-assembling, dynamic characteristics as animals. 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23

Universals, Tropes, Substance, and Events Oliver, ‘The Metaphysics of Properties,’ 26. Ibid., 29. Armstrong, A Theory of Universals, 11. Lewis, ‘New Work for a Theory of Universals,’ 345. Oliver, ‘The Metaphysics of Properties,’ 30. Ibid., 36. Ibid., 43; cf. Lewis, ‘New Work for a Theory of Universals.’ Lewis, ‘Against Structural Universals,’ 207–8. Ibid., 208. Among these is Peter Forrest. See his ‘Ways Worlds Could Be.’ Lewis, ‘Against Structural Universals,’ 207. Lycan, ‘Possible Worlds and Possibilia.’ Ibid., 84. Ibid., 87. Ibid., 93. Ibid. See, Forrest, ‘Ways Worlds Could Be,’ 117–18. Setting out some basic tenets of his ersatz possible world semantics Forrest writes, ‘We now have the following semantics for modal sentences: (i) “Possibly p” is true just in case p is true under some world-nature. (ii) “Necessarily p” is true just in case p is true under every world-nature and: (iii) “Actually p” is true just in case p is true’ (118). Forrest believes his account of the actual as the actual particular, and the possible as the universal, overcomes problems in Lewis’s possible world semantics. However, Forrest himself admits that he cannot provide a thorough semantic analysis of actuality, since for him particularity is a combination of properties instantiated in the individual, and, naturally, one cannot rule out the possibility of the (modal) possibility of there being many other individuals who are similar combinations (123). In attempting to move towards a resolution of such problems Forrest talks of ‘complex properties’ like that of the property of ‘being a carbon dioxide molecule.’ Furthermore, he accepts, like Richard Adams, the notion of ‘haecceity’ or particular ‘thisness’ – a notion that Lewis rejects. See Bigelow and Pargetter, ‘A Theory of Structural Universals.’ Ibid., 219. Martin, Armstrong, and Place, Dispositions, 71. Ibid., 73. Ibid. Ibid., 75.

360 Notes to pages 202–24 24 Ibid., 181. 25 Bernard Lonergan, ‘A Note on Geometrical Possibility,’ in Collection, 103. The essay was originally published in the journal Thought, 1949–50. 26 Lonergan, Insight, 361. 27 Wiggins, Sameness and Substance, 33. It is interesting to observe that, according to an early article by Anthony Kenny, such anti-atomistic ‘hylemorphism’ is sound late-Wittgensteinian doctrine, doctrine at variance, that is, with the atomism of the Tractatus (Kenny, ‘Aquinas and Wittgenstein’). Wittgenstein demonstrates the ‘ordinary awareness’ of our non-reductionist attitude to the world with the example of linguistic usage concerning an artefact like a broom. We do not ask, when asking someone to pass the broom, for the several parts of the object, but rather for the whole. 28 Geach, Reference and Generality, 157. 29 Wiggins, Sameness and Substance, 16. 30 Loux, ‘Beyond Substrata and Bundles.’ In the same volume, see also James van Cleve, ‘Three Versions of the Bundle Theory.’ In the course of his argument, van Cleve draws attention to the changes in fashion in Anglo-American philosophy of metaphysics in the twentieth century. Earlier in the century Russell and Bergman were more concerned with the question of the relation between substance and its attributes, whereas the literature is now preoccupied with issues surrounding the temporal, modal, and material structures of concrete individuals. But, according to van Cleve, the older questions still remain. 31 Loux, ‘Beyond Substrata and Bundles,’ 235. 32 Ibid., 236. 33 Ibid., 244–5. 34 Ibid., 245. 35 Ibid. 36 Cf. Lonergan, Verbum, 151–7, 177–80. 37 Ibid., 179–80. 38 Since in general the ‘formal’ aspect of reality is defined heuristically as ‘that which we grasp on the level of understanding in coming to know what is,’ the notion of the ‘formal’ can be extended beyond central form (things) and conjugate forms (acts of things) to world process as a whole. This is implied by Lonergan’s position that space and time can be understood as the potential, dispositional aspect of reality upon which supervenes the formal aspect of the interlinked schemes of recurrence characteristic of world process (see Lonergan, Insight, 194–5). 39 Chisholm, A Realist Theory of Categories, 85. 40 Philip McShane draws attention to recent work on theoretical physics that attempts to explicate intuitions as to the ontological continuant to which conjugates are attributed. He writes, ‘Present physics strains, not always luminously, towards the identification of centers of predication and varieties of conjugates. See, for example, the synonymous use of the terms “particle,” “state,” and “resonance” in David G. Cheng and Gerald K. O’Neill, Elementary

Notes to pages 224–41 361

41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48

49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

60 61

62

63

Particle Physics: An Introduction (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979), 268.’ (Philip McShane, in ed., Lonergan, Phenomenology and Logic, 136–7, footnote 22.) Martin, Armstrong, and Place, Dispositions, 86. Lonergan, Insight, 287. Ibid., 289. Ibid., 289–90. Ibid., 284. McShane, Randomness, Statistics and Emergence, 127. For an analysis of the significance that the cognitional processes of ‘abstraction’ and judgment of fact (existence) have for an understanding of relativity theory, see Lonergan, Insight, chapter 5. I should like to thank an anonymous reader from the University of Toronto Press for the suggestion that the notion of ‘thisness’ is compensatory in this way. Haack, ‘Descriptive and Revisionary Metaphysics.’ Gonzales, ‘P.F. Strawson’s Moderate Empiricism.’ Haack, ‘Descriptive and Revisionary Metaphysics,’ 28–9. Lonergan, Verbum, 156–7. Strawson, Individuals, 46. Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events, 303. Ibid., 296. Ibid., 296. Lombard, ‘Ontologies of Events.’ Ibid., 278. This is the position adopted by Quine and is allied to his view that an object is made up of bits, smaller objects. See Quine, Word and Object, 283. Lombard, ‘Ontologies of Events,’ 286. Ibid., 286. However, Jonathan Bennett, who opts for a view of events as tropes, in some way abstract, defends what he takes to be Kim’s view when he writes, ‘It is clear that Kim, in saying that events are exemplifications of properties did not mean that events were entities that have the properties they are said to be exemplifications of’ (Bennett quoted in Lombard, ‘Ontologies of Events,’ 289). Jonathan Bennett holds this view and it is also argued by Peter Munz in his book on historiography, The Shapes of Time. Munz, rather like Bennett, argues that in general we cannot settle on non-perspectival accounts of discrete events and this problem is even more acute when we attempt to give a definite account of those events and trends that are thought to be important in history. For a critique of Munz, see Beards, Objectivity and Historical Understanding, chapter 12. It should be noted, however, that every discrete act of understanding, each insight, is, as a grasp of a form, the acquisition of a disposition – a disposition to understand x or y.

362 Notes to pages 243–62

8 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31

Causality Hausman, Causal Asymmetries. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 13. Lonergan, Collection, 55. Hausman, Causal Asymmetries, 18. Ibid., 59. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 22. Lonergan, Insight, 686. Ibid. Hausman, Causal Asymmetries, 36. Ibid. Ibid., 37. Ibid., 38–9. Ibid., 43. Ibid., 38. Mackie, The Cement of the Universe, 62. Hausman, Causal Asymmetries, 45–6. Martin, ‘The Need For Ontology,’ 522. Hausman, Causal Asymmetries, 60–3; cf. chapters 8, 12, and 13. See Lewis, ‘Causation.’ Hausman, Causal Asymmetries, 8, 35, 89. Ibid., 89–90. Peter Menzis and Huw Price defend this version of the agency theory. Ibid., 156. Ibid., 159. Ibid., 160. Lonergan, Insight, 674–5. As Lonergan explains, the formal has an intelligibility in itself, which both the empirical and the actual (act of existence) metaphysical constituents lack. A formal cause, as a possible, intelligible structure does not require explanation through another as does the dispositive empirical, which can only be understood as dispositive for some intelligible, formal component. Similarly, actual existence is not intelligible in itself if it is contingent existence (Understanding and Being, 340). David Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, 49–61. In general the Aristotelian position is that accidents proceed from substance not via efficient causality but by natural resultance. There is, then, only efficient causality if there is change brought about in another or in self as other (doing something to oneself – e.g. washing one’s face) (see Lonergan, Verbum, 197–8). However, Lonergan follows Aquinas, who goes beyond this Aristotelian position to say that in some cases there are instances of causal

Notes to pages 264–84 363 dependency internal to a substance. Thus, the conscious act of judgment can be said to be causally dependent on acts of sensation and upon acts of understanding and questioning; judgment emerges as consciously dependent upon these other acts (ibid., 137). 32 Lonergan, Understanding and Being, 339–40. 33 This aspect of the world view of modern science was to some extent anticipated by medieval distinctions between contingens in maiori parte (contingent in the greater part) and contingens in minori parte (contingent to a lesser degree). There was, then, some appreciation that there are intelligibilities that are frequencies of occurrence of events (see Byrne, ‘The Thomist Sources of Lonergan’s Dynamic World View’). 34 Hausman, Causal Asymmetries, 26. 9 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

Dispositions, Development, and Supervenience Rescher, Process Metaphysics. Ibid., 172–4. Ibid., 172. Lonergan, Verbum, 139–43. Lonergan, Insight, 468. Ibid., 280–2. McShane, Randomness, Statistics and Emergence, 127. Lonergan, Insight, 294. Ibid., 291. In some ways Lonergan perhaps anticipated in Insight the ‘post–Konrad Lorenz’ zoology, which stresses the psychological differentiations of animal functioning. Lonergan, Insight, 151–7. Ibid., 470. Ibid., 474. Ibid., 473. Ibid., 479. Ibid., 477–8. Ibid., 486–7. Ibid., 478. Bruno Snell has described such a process in his account of the Greek discovery of mind. On this, see Lonergan, A Second Collection, 29, 102, 132, 227. Lonergan, Insight, 486. Ibid., 490. Ibid. Ibid., 492. Martin, Armstrong, and Place, Dispositions, 74. Ibid., 75. Ibid., 77–8. Ibid., 163.

364 Notes to pages 284–94

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

55 56

Ibid., 86. Ibid., 166. Ibid., 187–8. Ibid., 188. See Publicover, Hammond, and Sanders, ‘Amplification of Nitric Oxide Signaling by Intestinal Cells Isolated from Canine Colon.’ See St. C. Sinclair and Challis, ‘Tentativeness and Fervor in Cell Biology Require Negative and Positive Feedforward Control.’ Martin, Armstrong, and Place, Dispositions, 189. Ibid., 190. Kim, Supervenience and Mind, 131–60. Ibid., 72. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 166. Ibid., 74. Ibid., 147–9. Ibid., 141. Ibid., 90. Ibid., 113–14. Ibid., 120. Ibid., 49. Ibid., 124. Ibid., 88–9. Ibid., 126–7. Ibid., 168. Ibid., 361–2. Ibid., 75. Lonergan, Insight, 42. The notion of the ‘holon,’ introduced by Arthur Koestler in his popular work The Ghost in the Machine (1967), is in some respects similar to Lonergan’s ideas of the integrator and operator integral to a thing, a unity that supervenes upon lower level dispositions. Koestler’s idea was to some extent adopted by serious students of the biology of ecosystems. One such researcher, whose early ideas in fact anticipated Koestler’s views, is Robert V. O’Neill. The work of O’Neill and others on the hierarchic nature of ecosystems invites comparison with Lonergan’s position on emergence and probability. See O’Neill, DeAngelis, Waide, and Allen, A Hierarchical Concept of Ecosystems. Lonergan, Third Collection, 143. Perhaps it should be observed here that the use of terms such as ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ in referring to higher and lower order individuals and schemes of recurrence should not be taken as further instances of picturing spatiotemporally located objects in a hierarchical ascent. Rather, the use of such terms should be understood in an explanatory context. Base properties can exist without supervenient properties, but supervenient properties cannot exist without base properties. Thus, there was wood on this planet long

Notes to pages 298–327 365 before any human being constructed a wooden table. Robert Stalnaker’s question concerning the rationale behind the use of expressions such as ‘base properties’ can, therefore, be answered in this way (see Stalnaker, ‘Varieties of Supervenience,’ 226). 10

Metaphysics of the Social

1 For the Renaissance background to Descartes, see Copenhaver, Renaissance Philosophy, and the extensive bibliography on Renaissance philosophy given there. 2 Lonergan, Insight, 516. 3 Ibid., 517. 4 Ibid. 5 Lonergan’s notion of diverse ‘worlds of experience’ suggests something akin to what Karl Popper has in mind with his apparently metaphysical distinction between ‘three worlds’ (see Popper, Unended Quest, 18). 6 Lonergan, Insight, 291. 7 Ibid., 291–2. 8 Ibid., 496. 9 Ibid., 503. 10 Ibid., 592. 11 Ibid., 615. 12 Ibid., 592–3. 13 Lonergan, Method in Theology, 356. 14 Wiggins, ‘Language as a Social Object.’ 15 Ibid., 516. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 514. 18 Ibid., 520. 19 Lonergan, Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1958–1964, 161–2. 20 Ibid., 165. 21 Ibid., 167. 22 Ibid., 168. 23 Ibid., 171. 24 Ibid., 175. 25 Ibid., 176. 26 The metal potassium may, possibly, be characterized as a quasi-operator, given its inherent instability, which has a catalytic effect on processes. This possibility was suggested to me in conversation by Philip McShane. 27 Lonergan, Third Collection, 30. 28 Lonergan, Method in Theology, 184. 29 Jean-Luc Marion employs the example of the Battle of Waterloo to illustrate his notion of ‘saturation’ – an idea that, no doubt, Richard Rorty would find as objectionably ‘metaphysical’ as he does Derrida’s notion of ‘trace.’ ‘Saturation,’ for Marion, means an ‘abundance’ or ‘infinity’ of meaning that goes beyond or ‘overwhelms’ that which can be captured in discrete ‘intuitions.’

366 Notes to pages 329–42 Thus what Napoleon or Wellington ‘saw’ on different occasions during the battle did not constitute that whole or totality that we call ‘the Battle of Waterloo’ (Marion, Etant donné, 318–19). Marion’s point, that the experiences of individual soldiers, or even of commanders, in a battle is not identical with that larger intelligible whole that historians analyse as ‘a battle,’ although they are more or less important parts of it, is well taken. It is one found in Lonergan’s writing and in that of a number of writers on historiography. However, it is the rather hyperbolic claims that Marion then makes in this regard that, I fear, may be problematic and verging on the incoherent. There are numerous things that, we would agree, constituted aspects of the Battle of Waterloo, and that may never be identified in their particularity by historians – the thoughts of an individual soldier at some point in the battle, which he never writes down, for example. There are myriad other things that we would recognize as in some way caused by the battle, but that were not constitutive of the battle itself: the future history of Europe, or of an individual participant who was wounded; or the way the battle acquired symbolic meaning for the British Victorian military. But the very example used to show that ‘the battle’ is more than the discrete insights of participants itself rests on a grasp of what ‘battles’ are, such that we cannot then claim that the intelligible totality that is the battle is somehow, in principle, beyond knowing in insight or groups of insights. We know what we would be prepared to class as ‘part of the battle of Waterloo’ and what we would not (Napoleon’s journey into exile on St Helena afterwards, for example, or my eating an ice cream yesterday). And this knowing of a demarcation implies (as does the use of the example by Marion himself) that the phenomenon of ‘the Battle of Waterloo’ does not reach out into some noumenal, incomprehensible infinity, which would prevent us from saying ‘This was an aspect of the battle and that was not.’ Marion’s position as a whole is encumbered by the problems in epistemology and (therefore) metaphysics stemming from the Kantian-Heideggerian tradition, which have already been discussed earlier. 30 On questions concerning historical objectivity, and the way in which the ‘objectives’ of historians are part of what we mean by historical objectivity, see Andrew Beards, Objectivity and Historical Understanding, chapters 10–14. Other works by Lonergan that might prove helpful for developing a metaphysics of the social include ‘Finality, Love and Marriage,’ in Collection, and the early essay ‘Panton Anakephalaiosis.’ Conclusion 1 See Critchley, ‘Continental Philosophy and Emancipation.’ 2 Putnam, ‘Levinas and Judaism.’

Recto Running Head 367

Bibliography

Alston, William. ‘Ontological Commitments.’ In Laurence and MacDonald, Contemporary Readings in The Foundations of Metaphysics, 47–54. Anscombe, G.E.M., and Peter Geach. Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind. Oxford: Blackwell, 1981. – Three Philosophers. Oxford: Blackwell, 1961. Armstrong, David. A Theory of Universals. Volume 2, Universals and Scientific Realism. London: Cambridge University Press, 1978. – Universals: An Opinionated Introduction. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989. Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. Trans. Oliver Feltham. London: Continuum, 2006. Beards, Andrew. ‘Kenny and Lonergan on Aquinas.’ Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies 4.2 (1986): 115–23. – Objectivity and Historical Understanding. Aldershot and Brookfield: Ashgate, 1997. – ‘Self-Refutation and Self-Knowledge.’ Gregorianum 76.3 (1995): 555–73. Bernstein, Richard. Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1983. Bigelow, John, and Robert Pargetter. ‘A Theory of Structural Universals.’ In Laurence and MacDonald, Contemporary Readings in the Foundations of Metaphysics, 219–29. Blackburn, Simon. ‘Wittgenstein, Wright, Rorty and Minimalism.’ Mind 107 (1998): 157–82. Bogue, Ronald. Deleuze and Guattari. London: Routledge, 1989. Brown, Jessica. ‘Natural Kind Terms and Recognitional Capacities.’ Mind 107 (1998): 275–303. Byrne, Patrick. Analysis and Science in Aristotle. Albany: SUNY Press, 1997. – ‘The Thomist Sources of Lonergan’s Dynamic World View.’ The Thomist 46 (1982): 108–45. Cartwright, Nancy. ‘An Empiricist Defence of Singular Causes.’ Logic, Cause and Action: Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 46 (2000): 47–58.

368 Bibliography Cartwright, Richard L. ‘Speaking of Everything.’ Noûs 28.1 (1994): 1–20. Cassam, Quassim. ‘Science and Essence.’ Philosophy 61 (1986): 96–107. Chisholm, Roderick. A Realistic Theory of Categories: An Essay on Ontology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Chomsky, Noam. ‘Language and Nature.’ Mind 104 (1995): 1–61. Collingwood, R.G. An Essay on Metaphysics. Oxford: Clarendon, 1940. Copenhaver, Brian. Renaissance Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Critchley, Simon. ‘Continental Philosophy and Emancipation.’ In New British Philosophy: The Interviews, ed. Julia Baggini and Jeremy Stangroom, 183–200. London: Routledge, 2002. – ‘Introduction.’ In The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, ed. Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi, 1–32. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Crombie, A.C. Styles of Scientific Thinking in the European Tradition. 3 vols. London: Duckworth, 1995. David, Marian. ‘Analyticity, Carnap, Quine, and Truth.’ In Tomberlin, Philosophical Perspectives: Metaphysics, 281–96. Davidson, Donald. Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. – ‘Mental Events.’ In Experience and Theory, ed. L. Foster and J. W. Swanson. Amherst: Amherst Publishing, 1979. Dennett, Daniel. The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. Derrida, Jacques. ‘Remarks on Deconstruction and Pragmatism.’ In Deconstruction and Pragmatism, ed. Chantal Mouffe. London: Routledge, 1996. – Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Deutscher, Max. ‘Forms, Qualities, Resemblance.’ Philosophy 67 (1992): 523–41. Devitt, Michael. ‘The Metaphysics of Non-Factualism.’ In Tomberlin, Philosophical Perspectives: Metaphysics, 159–76. Dray, William. Perspectives on History. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980. Dummett, Michael. ‘Commonsense and Physics.’ In Perception and Identity: Essays for A.J. Ayer, ed. G.F. MacDonald. New York: Cornell University Press, 1979. – Frege: Philosophy of Logic and Language. London: Duckworth; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973. – Gifford Lectures. University of St Andrews, unpublished, 1997. – The Logical Basis of Metaphysics. London: Duckworth; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. – Origins of Analytical Philosophy. London: Duckworth; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Emmet, Dorothy. The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking. London: Macmillan, 1966. Everett, Anthony. ‘Absorbing Dialetheia? – Graham Priest’s Dialetheian Analysis of Semantic Paradoxes.’ Mind 103 (October, 1994): 413–20. Fitzpatrick, Joseph. Philosophical Encounters: Lonergan and the Analytical Tradition. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. Flanagan, Joseph. Quest for Self-Knowledge. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997.

Bibliography 369 Forrest, Peter. ‘Ways Worlds Could Be.’ In Laurence and MacDonald, Contemporary Readings in The Foundations of Metaphysics, 117–23. Frank, Manfred. ‘Is Self-Consciousness a Case of présence à soi ? Towards a MetaCritique of the Recent French Critique of Metaphysics.’ In Derrida: Critical Reader, ed. David Wood, 218–34. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. Geach, Peter. Reference and Generality. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1962. Glover, Jonathan. The Philosophy of Psychology and Personal Identity. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988. Gonzales, Wenceslao J. ‘P.F. Strawson’s Moderate Empiricism.’ In The Philosophy of P.F. Strawson, ed. Lewis Hahn, 329–59. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1998. Green, Karen. Dummett: Philosophy of Language. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. Haack, Susan. ‘Descriptive and Revisionary Metaphysics.’ In Laurence and MacDonald, Contemporary Readings in The Foundations of Metaphysics, 22–31. – ‘Quantifiers.’ In Laurence and MacDonald, Contemporary Readings in The Foundations of Metaphysics, 55–71. Haldane, John. ‘On Coming Home to Metaphysical Realism.’ Philosophy 71 (1996): 287–96. Hausman, Daniel M. Causal Asymmetries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Hintikka, Jaakko. Knowledge and the Known. Dordrecht and Boston: D. Reidel, 1974. Hoenen, Peter. Reality and Judgement according to St Thomas. Chicago: Regnery, 1953. Hughes, Percy. ‘Is Whitehead’s Psychology Adequate?’ In The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, ed. Paul Schilpp, 273–99. La Salle, IL: Open Court Press, 1941. Hume, David. An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. Ed. Tom L. Beauchamp. Oxford Philosophical Texts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Kenny, Anthony. ‘Aquinas and Wittgenstein.’ Downside Review 77 (1959): 217–35. Kidder, Paul. ‘What Is a Thing for Lonergan?’ Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies 7.1 (1989): 1–17. Kim, Jaegowan. Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Kneale, William, and Martha Kneale. The Development of Logic. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985. Kornblith, Hilary. ‘Referring to Artefacts.’ Philosophical Review 89 (1980): 109–14. Kripke, Saul. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972. Laurence, Stephen, and Cynthia MacDonald, eds. Contemporary Readings in the Foundations of Metaphysics. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Lawrence, Fred. ‘The Fragility of Consciousness: Lonergan and the Postmodern Concern for the Other.’ Theological Studies 54 (1993): 55–94. Lennox, James G., and Michael Ruse, eds. Aristotle’s Philosophy of Biology: Studies in the Origins of Life Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Lewis, David, ‘Against Structural Universals.’ In Laurence and MacDonald, Contemporary Readings in the Foundations of Metaphysics, 198–216.

370 Bibliography – ‘Causation.’ Journal of Philosophy (1970): 556–67. – ‘New Work for a Theory of Universals.’ Australasian Journal of Philosophy 61 (1983): 343–77. – On the Plurality of Worlds. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. Lombard, Lawrence B. ‘Ontologies of Events.’ In Laurence and MacDonald, Contemporary Readings in the Foundations of Metaphysics, 277–94. Lonergan, Bernard, J.F. ‘Bernard Lonergan Responds.’ In Language, Truth and Meaning, ed. Philip McShane, 306–12. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1972. – Collection. Vol. 4 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert Doran. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988. – Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. Vol. 3 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, ed. Frederick E. Crowe and Robert Doran. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. – Method in Theology. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1972. – ‘Panton Anakephalaiosis.’ Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies 9.2 (1991): 134–72. – Phenomenology and Logic: the Boston College Lectures on Mathematical Logic and Existentialism. Vol. 18 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, ed. Philip McShane. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. – Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1958–1964. Vol. 6 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, ed. Robert C. Croken, Frederick E. Crowe, and Robert Doran. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. – ‘Questionnaire on Philosophy.’ Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies 2 (1984): 1–35. – A Second Collection. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1974. – Third Collection. London: Chapman, 1985. – Topics in Education: The Cincinnati Lectures of 1959 on the Philosophy of Education. Vol. 10 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, ed. Robert Doran and Frederick E. Crowe. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988. – Understanding and Being. Vol. 5 of Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, ed. Elizabeth A. Morelli and Mark D. Morelli. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990. – Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas. Ed. David Burrell. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1967. Losonsky, Michael. ‘The Nature of Artefacts.’ Philosophy 65 (1990): 81–8. Loux, Michael J. ‘Beyond Substrata and Bundles: A Prolegomenon to A Substance Ontology.’ In Laurence and MacDonald, Contemporary Readings in the Foundations of Metaphysics, 233–47. Lowe, E. J. ‘Self, Reference and Self-Reference.’ Philosophy 68 (1993): 15–33. – ‘Substance and Selfhood.’ Philosophy 66 (1991): 81–99. – A Survey of Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Lucas, J.R. ‘A Mind of One’s Own.’ Philosophy 68 (1993): 457–71. Lycan, William G. ‘Possible Worlds and Possibilia.’ In Laurence and MacDonald, Contemporary Readings in The Foundations of Metaphysics, 84–95. Mackie, J.L. The Cement of the Universe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. – Logic and Knowledge. Oxford: Clarendon, 1985. – ‘The Ontology of Dispositions and Powers.’ In Truth, Probability and Paradox, 133–53. Oxford: Clarendon, 1973.

Bibliography 371 Maddy, Penelope. ‘Ontological Commitment: Between Quine and Duhem.’ In Tomberlin, Philosophical Perspectives: Metaphysics, 317–41. Magee, Bryan. Men of Ideas. London: BBC Publications, 1978. Marion, Jean-Luc. Etant donné: Essai d’une phénoménologie de la donation. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2005. Marsh, James L. Post-Cartesian Meditations, New York: Fordham University Press, 1988. Martin, C.B. ‘The Need For Ontology: Some Choices.’ Philosophy 68 (1993): 505–22. – ‘The New Cartesianism.’ Pacific Philosophical Quarterly (1984): 236–58. Martin, C.B., and K. Pfeifer. ‘Intentionality and the Non-Psychological.’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 46 (1986): 531–54. Martin, C.B., D.M. Armstrong, and U.T. Place. Dispositions: A Debate, ed. Tim Crane. London: Routledge, 1996. Mays, H. The Philosophy of Whitehead. London: Allen and Unwin, 1959. McCarthy, Michael, H. The Crisis in Philosophy. Albany: SUNY Press, 1990. McShane, Philip. ‘The Foundations of Mathematics.’ The Modern Schoolman 4 (1962–3): 373–87. – Randomness, Statistics and Emergence. London: Macmillan, 1971. Mellor, David. Metaphysics Matters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Meyer, Leroy, N. ‘Science, Reduction and Natural Kinds.’ Philosophy 64 (1989): 535–46. Meynell, Hugo, ‘From Crisis to Insight.’ Method: Journal of Lonergan Studies 6 (1988): 93–106. – ‘Infallible Fallibilism.’ New Blackfriars 63 (1982): 333–43. – ‘On Deconstruction and the Proof of Platonism.’ New Blackfriars 70 (1989): 21–31. – Postmodernism and the New Enlightenment. Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2000. – Redirecting Philosophy: Reflections on the Nature of Knowledge from Plato to Lonergan. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Munz, Peter. The Shapes of Time: A New Look at the Philosophy of History. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1977. Nielsen, Kai. After the Demise of the Tradition: Rorty, Critical Theory and the Fate of Philosophy. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1990. Nietzsche, Friederich. Beyond Good and Evil. Translation and commentary by R.J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin, 1975. Norris, Christopher. Derrida. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. O’Hear, Anthony. What Philosophy Is. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Atlantic Press, 1985. Oliver, Alex. ‘The Metaphysics of Properties.’ Mind 105 (1996): 1–80. O’Neill, R.V., D. DeAngelis, J. Waide, and T.F.H. Allen. A Hierarchical Concept of Ecosystems. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. Parfit, Derek. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Clarendon, 1984. Peacocke, Christopher. ‘Metaphysical Necessity, Understanding, Truth and Epistemology.’ Mind 106 (1997): 521–74. Popper, Karl. Unended Quest. London: Routledge, 2002.

372 Bibliography Priest, Graham, ‘On Inconsistent Arithmetics: A Reply to Denyer.’ Mind 105 (1996): 649–59. Publicover, NG., E.M. Hammond, and K.M. Sanders. ‘Amplification of Nitric Oxide Signalling by Intestinal Cells Isolated from Canine Colon.’ Proceedings of National Academy of Science USA (1993): 2087, 2091. Putnam, Hilary. ‘Levinas and Judaism.’ In The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, ed. Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi, 33–62. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. – ‘On Properties.’ In Laurence and MacDonald, Contemporary Readings in The Foundations of Metaphysics, 148–58. – Realism and Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. – Reason, Truth and History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981. – ‘Sense, Nonsense and the Senses: An Inquiry into the Power of the Human Mind.’ Journal of Philosophy 41 (1994): 445–517. Quine, W.V.O. ‘On What There Is.’ In Laurence and MacDonald, Contemporary Readings in The Foundations of Metaphysics, 32–46. – Word and Object. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1960. Rescher, Nicholas. Process Metaphysics. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996. Roessler, Johannes. Review of Sydney Shoemaker’s The First Person Perspective and Other Essays. Mind 108 (1999): 200–3. Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980. Sala, Giovanni. Lonergan and Kant. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. Salmon, Nathan. Reference and Essence. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. Schwartz, S.P. ‘Putnam on Artefacts.’ Philosophical Review 87 (1978): 566–72. Searle, John. Intentionality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. – The Rediscovery of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. Shoemaker, Sydney. The First Person Perspective and Other Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Snell, Bruno. The Discovery of the Mind. Trans. T.G. Rosenmeyer. New York: Harper, 1960. Snowdon, Paul F. ‘Persons and Personal Identity.’ In Essays for David Wiggins: Identity, Truth and Value, ed. Sabina Lovibond and S.G. Williams, 33–47. Aristotelian Society Series. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. St C. Sinclair, N.R. and J.R.G. Challis, ‘Tentativeness and Fervor in Cell Biology Require Negative and Positive Feedforward Control.’ Life Sciences (1993): 52, 25. Stalnaker, Robert. ‘Varieties of Supervenience.’ In Laurence and MacDonald, Contemporary Readings in The Foundations of Metaphysics, 221–41. Strawson, Peter. The Bounds of Sense. London: Methuen, 1966. – Individuals. New York: Doubleday, 1959. Thagard, Paul. Conceptual Revolutions. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Tomberlin, J.E., ed. Philosophical Perspectives of Metaphysics. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.

Bibliography 373 Van Inwagen, Peter. ‘The Nature of Metaphysics.’ In Laurence and MacDonald, Contemporary Readings in The Foundations of Metaphysics, 11–21. Vertin, Michael, ‘Knowing, Objectivity, and Reality: Insight and Beyond.’ In Lonergan Workshop, Volume 8, ed. Fred Lawrence, 249–64. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1990. Whitehead, A.N. Process and Reality. New York: Macmillan, 1929. Wiggins, David. ‘Language as a Social Object.’ Philosophy 72 (1997): 499–524. – ‘Reply to Paul Snowdon.’ In Essays for David Wiggins: Identity, Truth and Value, ed. Sabina Lovibond and S.G. Williams, 244–8. Aristotelian Society Series 16. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. – Sameness and Substance. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980. Wilkerson, T.E.. ‘Natural Kinds.’ Philosophy 63 (1988): 29–42. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and R. Rhees. Oxford: Blackwell, 1953. Wright, Crispin. ‘Reply to Simon Blackburn on Truth and Objectivity.’ Mind 107 (1998): 183–203. Yablo, Stephen. ‘Mental Causation.’ Philosophical Review 101 (1992): 245–80.

This page intentionally left blank

Recto Running Head 375

Index

a priori, 81, 83, 111, 115–16, 159, 189 abstraction, 218 accidents, 92–3, 163, 206, 234, 304 act of existence, 110, 117 Adams, Richard, 127, 359n17 adaptability and flexibility: in higher species of animals, 280 agency theory, 243, 245, 250, 254, 257 ‘all-in-one’ principle, 85–6 Alston, William, 68, 72, 349n21 analogies, 83 analytic principles and propositions, 84–6 analytical philosophy, 9, 13, 15–6, 77, 245, 271, 298, 334, 352n41 Anscombe, G.E.M., 101–7, 120, 351nn2–10, 353n2 anti-essentialist. See essentialism antifoundationalism. See foundationalism antirealism. See reality antiscepticism. See scepticism antisolipsism, 297 Apel, K.O., 81–6, 350n46 Aquinas, Thomas, 7, 14, 20, 25, 39, 54, 62–4, 66n13, 78, 94, 99, 155,

234, 344n21, 345nn24–5, 348n13, 356n55, 362n31. See also Thomism arguments: self-referential, 40, 43, 88, 128, 239, 346n31 Aristotle (Aristotelianism, Neo-Aristotelianism), 7, 13, 42, 61, 62–5, 88, 105, 126, 143, 145, 147–8, 155, 161–2, 169, 173, 177, 185–8, 216, 218, 229, 264–5, 277, 345n26, 348n13, 356n51, 362n31 Armstrong, David, 12, 73, 117, 194–6, 202, 204–5, 217, 218–19, 283–4, 358nn17–18, 359n3, 363nn24–31 Art des Gegebenseins, 101 artefacts, 68–76, 186–7, 358nn68–76 artificial intelligence (AI), 191 atomism, 72, 11, 148, 152, 161, 208, 228, 294, 299 Augustine, St, 101 Austin, J.L., 14, 62, 297 Ayer, A.J., 152–3, 180, 181 Badiou, Alain, 351n58 Beards, Andrew, 13, 37, 70, 343n2, 344n20, 346n31, 353n16, 366n30 behaviourism, 344n3

376 Index being, language about, 81–2 belief, lack of clarification, 352n41 Bennett, Jonathan, 10, 343n3, 361nn61–2 Bernstein, Richard, 346n28 Bigelow, John, 359nn18–19 Blackburn, Simon, 53, 347n53 Bogue, Roland, 350n58 Bohr, Niels, 153 Bolzano, Bernard, 346n32 Boscovich, Ruggiero, 267 Boyle, Robert, 187 Brentano, Franz, 107, 118 Broad, C.D., 287 Brouwer, L.E., 78 Brown, Jessica, 149–51, 181–4, 355nn24––30, 358nn64–6 Buber, Martin, 90 bundleist theory of the individual, 210, 219, 289 Byrne, Patrick, 356n46, 356n55, 363n33 Caesar, Julius, 144, 178 Cannon, Walter, 285 Cantor, Georg, 274, 290 Carnap, Rudolf, 349n19 Cartesianism, 100, 107, 111, 297, 298. See also Descartes Cartwright, Richard, 75–7, 349nn33–5, 360nn50–1 Cassam, Quassim, 4, 6, 143–4, 164, 174, 175, 354nn1–2, 356n58, 357n60 Cassirer, Ernst, 207, 224, 234 categories, 64, 111 causality, 15, 88, 96, 112, 125, 155–6, 243–68, 273, 293, 362n31 causes, 64, 111, 143, 155, 156 Challis, J.R.G., 364n33 Cheng, David, 360n40

Chisholm, Roderick, 12, 23, 223, 225, 239, 360n39 Chomsky, Noam, 26, 317–19 class of all classes, 173–4 Cogito, 40, 98–9, 169 cognitional process, theory of, 5, 170 coherence theory of belief, 69 coherentism, 168, 169 Collingwood, R.G., 343n5 colours, 64, 197. See also forms common sense knowledge, 152–3, 156, 157–8, 159, 176, 180–1, 209, 223 Comte, Auguste, 67 composition problem, 149 concepts and conceptual expression of insight, 142, 314 ‘conjugates’ (Lonergan), 93 consciousness, 102–3, 262–4, 321–2 ‘constitutive semantics,’ 16 contingency, 214, 219, 237, 263, 266–7 Copenhaver, Brian, 351n1, 355n39, 365n1 corpusculean theory of personal identity, 121 correspondence theory, 69 counterfactual theory of causality, 252–5 Critchley, Simon, 350n57, 366n1 critical realism, 5, 7, 19, 33, 38–46, 55, 56–60, 61, 72, 77, 86, 92, 156, 164, 212–17, 270, 275, 282, 302, 332–3, 336, 340 Crombie, A.C., 355n39 Crowe, F.E., 132, 354n19 Darwin, Charles, 277 data, varieties of, 24, 33, 38, 160, 171, 304, 325 David, Marian, 349n19

Index 377 Davidson, Donald, 235–7, 287–8, 346n34, 361nn54–6 Dawson, Christopher, 327 de facto & de re necessities, 114 definitions, nominal and explanatory, 167, 302 deconstructionism, 18, 48, 51, 89, 117, 151–2, 160, 259, 260, 264, 314 Deity, the, 92 Deleuze, Gilles, 350n58 demonstrative, 131–4 Dennett, Daniel, 23, 191–2 Derrida, Jacques, 18, 19, 36, 38–9, 46–51, 57, 90, 100, 107, 139, 141, 154, 164, 168, 297, 332, 338, 341, 346n32, 347n36, 347nn38–9, 348n3, 350n58, 351nn13–14, 365n29 Descartes, René, 23, 40, 44, 54, 72, 79, 89, 101, 111, 293, 297, 344n21, 350n58, 355n37, 365n1 descriptive and explanatory knowledge, 62–3, 154, 154–70 Dewey, John, 24 Deutscher, Max, 11, 13, 338, 343n4, 351n60 differentiations of consciousness, 305–6 disposition, 8, 96, 109, 269–96 Donnellan, Keith, 123, 125 Dowe, Phil, 246 Dray, William, 327 dualism, 101, 111 Duhem, Pierre, 21 Dummett, Michael, 12, 23, 26, 49, 59–61, 85, 125, 152–4, 180, 181, 245, 252, 255, 337, 343nn10–11, 344n9–10, 344n21, 347n1, 348n3, 350n58, 351nn13–14, 357n63, 358n85, 365n29. See also Gifford Lectures

Durand, Gilbert, 89 Eastern philosophy, 41 Eddington’s ‘two tables’ analogy, 119, 153, 159, 160, 161, 207, 223 efficient causes, 254, 256, 317 Einstein, Albert, 229, 280, 347n1 emergence and recurrence, 9, 290. See also supervenience emergentists, 288 Emmet, Dorothy, 70, 71 empedoclean concepts, 72, 113 empirical data, 29, 94–5, 115, 132–3, 172, 272 empiricism, 5, 8, 10, 25, 31, 47, 70, 129–31, 153, 172, 174, 296, 336 ‘end of philosophy,’ 11 English language (standard or revised). See linguistics Enlightment, the, 193 entities, metaphysical, 7, 72, 255, 269, 275, 279, 299, 302 epicurean concepts, 161 epistemology, 17, 19, 21, 297; subjectivist, 78 essences, 82, 141, 143, 145, 175, 178 essentialism, 6, 123, 142–54, 155, 163, 164, 178, 356n59 ethics, 341–2 ethnocentric attitudes, 143–4, 147 Euclid (Euclidean geometry), 28–9, 91, 114–15, 156, 164, 165, 166 Evans, Gareth, 37 events, 208–9, 233, 235–42, 246–51, 276–8, 287–8, 329 Everett, Anthony, 350n45 ‘evil genius,’ 44, 225–6, 264, 346n33 excluded middle, principle of, 36, 79 existence, 82, 217 existentialism, 301 experience, levels of, 23–4

378 Index expressions, 344n21 fallibilism, 68, 169, 346nn34–5 feedback, 285 feedforward, 285 final cause, 278–81, 283 Fitzpatrick, Joseph, 343n2, 351n1 Flanagan, Joseph, 343n2 flexibility and adaptability, of higher species of animals, 280 forms (formal cause), 165, 214–15, 217, 229. See also colours Forrest, Peter, 359n10, 359n17 Foucault, Michel, 19, 141 foundation of knowledge, 98, 43 foundationalism, 43–4, 57, 98, 350n58 Francis of Assisi, St, 287 Frank, Manfred, 107, 350n46, 351n11 Frege, G., 6, 15, 49, 60, 78, 101, 123–30, 137, 138, 344n3 Galileo, 166, 345n26 Geach, Peter, 353n2, 360n28 generalization (common sense), 84 Gifford Lectures, 60, 343n11, 344n19, 347n1. See also Dummett Glover, Jonathan, 353n48 God. See Deity Gödel, Kurt, 95 Gonzales, Wenceslao, 361n50 good, ontology of, 278, 287–8, 291–2, 307–8, 330–1 Green, Karen, 350n47 Grimm’s fairy tales, 55 Haack, Susan, 232–5, 361nn49–51 habits, 93, 173, 274, 285, 311, 318–19, 323 haecceity, 13, 127, 130, 210, 230, 231–2, 334

Haldane, John, 147–9, 179, 185, 355nn18–20 Hammond, Richard, 364n32 Hare, R.M., 287 Hartmann, Nicolai, 18 Hausman, Daniel, 6–9, 12–7, 19, 21, 23–7, 362nn1–4, 363n34 Hegel (Hegelian concepts), 18, 42, 47, 320 Heidegger, Martin, 7, 11, 13, 18, 24, 49, 61, 70, 81, 89, 90, 107, 141, 154, 158, 348n3, 350n46, 365–6n29 Hempel, Carl, 327 Heraclitus, 207, 270 hermeneutics, 18, 161 heuristic, 82, 162, 165, 191, 216, 300 Heyting, Arend, 8 Hilbert, David, 165, 166, 167, 171, 172 Hintikka, Jaakko, 23, 53, 344n21, 345n22, 345n25, 346n31 Hinton, Michael, 93 history, 284, 296, 329, 377 history of philosophy. See philosophy, history of history of science. See science Hobbes, Thomas, 304, 305, 330 Hoenen, Peter, 345n24 holon, 364n54 higher-level natural kinds, 149, 151 Hughes, Percy, 71 human self, 97–122, 169, 171, 212, 217, 322 Hume (Humeanism), 13, 44, 54, 74, 84, 93, 112, 117, 130, 140, 141, 143, 154, 209, 211, 224, 286, 356n44, 362n30 Husserl, Edmund, 51–7, 133, 164, 297, 344n3, 344n9, 346n32, 347n36, 350n58

Index 379 idealism, 7, 25, 31, 83, 144, 160, 297, 336 identity, principle of, 144, 236 identity of indiscernibles, 236 independence criterion, 252, 255 insight, 26, 28, 40, 52, 167, 212–13, 312 instrumental acts of meaning, 132, 184, 313, 315, 316, 319, 324–5 instrumentalism, 153 integrator, 281–2 intelligibility of reality, 205–7, 261 intentionality, 15, 321 intersubjectivity, 297, 312, 325 introspection, 44, 169, 214 intuitionist logic, 78, 99, 108, 365n29 inverse insight, 94–5 isomorphism, 82 James, William, 47, 102, 107 Johnson, W.E., 111 Judaism, 366n2 judgment, level of, 31–3, 217, 219 Kant (Kantianism), 10, 18, 52, 56, 70, 96, 164, 223, 233, 284, 302, 332, 341, 344n3, 346n29, 346n32, 346n34, 353n15, 366n29 Kenny, Anthony, 353n16 Kneale, William & Martha, 21, 53, 343n1, 347n52 Kidder, Paul, 190, 358n79 Kim, Jaegowan, 9, 237–8, 241, 249, 271, 286, 334, 364nn36–52 ‘knowing as seeing,’ 61 knowledge, nature of, 13, 97–122, 345n26, 353n18 knowledge of reality, 3, 38 Koestler, Arthur, 364n54 Kornblith, Hilary, 358n72 Kripke, Saul, 6, 12, 13, 101, 121,

123–7, 134–7, 138, 145, 147, 149, 150, 155, 164, 178, 181–2, 348n13, 353n5, 353nn7–9, 354n2, 354n25, 356n57 language, antiprivate, 48 language, philosophy of, 87, 157 law of effect, 282 Leibniz, Gottfried, 13, 18, 89–90, 121, 141, 186, 207, 211, 334, 348n13 Lennox, James, 348n11 Levinas, Emmanuel, 18, 89–90, 141, 341–2, 366n2 Levinson, Jerrold, 287 Lewes, G.H., 287 Lewis, David, 12, 13, 16, 21, 66, 16, 73, 77, 81, 112, 196–9, 204–5, 217, 218, 221, 252, 255, 258, 263, 283, 334, 337, 348nn13–14, 348n18, 359nn8–9, 359n11, 362n22 linguistic analysts, 11, 14, 36 ‘linguistic turn,’ 77 linguistics, 157, 159, 169 literature (poetry), 90, 300, 340 Locke, John, 13, 102, 105, 110, 119, 136, 143, 144–5, 174, 348n13 logical positivism, 10, 11, 13, 14, 157 Lombard, Lawrence, 237–43, 361nn61–2 Lorenz, Konrad, 363n10 Lonergan, Bernard, works: ‘Bernard Lonergan Responds,’ 348n6; Collection: Papers by Bernard Lonergan, 351n12, 358n84, 360n25, 362n5, 366n25; Insight, 343n7, 344nn4–5, 344n11, 344n13–15, 344n18, 345n23, 346n30, 347n37, 347n51, 347n54, 347n1, 348n2, 348nn7–10, 348n12, 348n36, 348n40–1, 350n44, 350n52, 350n54, 351n59, 351n61, 352n29, 353n18,

380 Index

354nn20–6, 355n34, 355n38, 356nn40–1, 356nn49–50, 356n53, 346n56, 358n83, 358n86, 360n26, 360n38, 361nn42–5, 361n47, 362n10, 362n28, 363n5, 363nn8–9, 363nn11–18, 363nn20–3, 364n53, 365nn2–4, 65nn6–7, 365nn10–12; Method in Theology, 344n16, 347n57, 355n36, 365n13, 365n28; ‘Panton Anakephalaiosis,’ 366n30; Phenomenology and Logic, 343n9, 349n40, 349n42, 350n49, 350n56, 351n62, 356nn45–7, 356n54, 356n86, 360n40; Philosophical and Theological Papers 1958-1964, 358n81, 365nn19–25; A Second Collection, 348n4, 363n19; A Third Collection, 356n51, 358n67, 364n55, 365n27; Topics in Education, 349n37, 354n19, 358n82; Understanding and Being, 344n6, 344n8, 344n12, 346n27, 348n5, 349n37, 362n29, 363n32; Verbum, 349n39, 350n53, 353n15, 355n35, 356n42, 356n48, 358n78, 358n80, 360nn36–7, 361n52, 363n4 Lonergan’s method, 140 Losonsky, Michael, 186–8, 358n68, 358nn75–6 Loux, Michael J., 207, 210–10, 219, 228–32, 334, 360nn30–5 Lowe, E.J., 110–17, 334, 351nn18–28, 351nn30–3 Lucas, J.R., 118–22, 334, 353nn42–8 Lycan, William G., 199–200, 205, 359nn12–16 Lyotard, Jean-François, 141 Mackie, J.L., 23, 346n31, 355n10, 362n18, 252 Magee, Bryan, 355n37

Marcel, Gabriel, 90 Marion, Jean-Luc, 365n29 Martin, C.B., 13, 16, 21, 68–9, 77, 180, 186, 283–7, 290, 293, 346n31, 348n13, 357n62, 359nn20–4, 362n20, 363nn24–31 mathematical propositions, 115 Mays, H., 31, 70–1, 349n28 McCarthy, Michael, 343n2, 344n17 McGinn, Colin, 128 McShane, Philip, 275, 350n51, 354n31, 360n40, 361n46, 363n7, 354n31, 365n26 meaning (Lonergan), 315 meaning-in-the-head, 67, 175–7 mediation, 320 medieval philosophy, 26, 154, 155, 193, 231, 259, 265n33 Meinong, Alexis, 81, 200, 249 Mellor, David, 23, 107–8, 351nn15–17, 110, 251 Menzis, Peter, 362n24 mereology, 196, 198, 208, 217, 291 Merleau-Ponty, M., 89 metaphysics, 15, 17, 19, 38, 86–7, 154, 157, 193, 212, 266–7, 322, 340, 341 methodology, 59, 38, 96, 193–4, 300–3, 348n18 Meyer, Leroy N., 146–7, 355nn12–13, 355nn14–17, 178–9 Meynell, Hugo, 344n2, 349, 349n56, 351n1 Mill, J.S., 23, 124, 145, 251 mind, the, 21, 37, 97–122, 344n21, 352n41 minimalism, ontological, 146, 207, 334, 336 modal logic, 155, 175, 197 monads, 72, 113, 298, 299, 312 Moore, G.E. (Moorean concepts), 41,

Index 381

47, 66, 73, 198, 201, 287, 291–2, 335, 348n18 Morgan, C. Lloyd, 287 myth, 86–9 naive realist, 7, 25, 31, 33, 41, 124, 141, 224, 337 ‘natural kinds,’ 143–4, 145, 146, 148, 164, 170, 174–92 naturalism, 287 naturalized epistemology, 68, 70 natures. See essenses necessity, of constitution, 177, 178 Neo-Aristotelianism. See Aristotle Newman, John Henry, 13, 23 Newtonian science, 72, 267, 302, 310 Nicholas of Autrecourt, 259 Nielsen, Kai, 346n28, 346n34 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 54, 99, 346n21, 350n58 Nixon, Richard, 125–6, 134 nominalism (anti-nominalism), 148, 154, 156, 194, 198, 302, 348n18 noncontradiction, principle of, 79, 80 Norris, Christopher, 347n55 objectivity in knowledge, 46, 55 occasionalism, 263, 264, 290 occurrence, 250, 271, 272, 273 Ockham, William, 154 Ockham’s razor, 66, 67, 72–4, 101, 255, 356n49 O’Hear, Anthony, 353n12, 130 Oliver, Alex, 14, 15, 72, 193–7, 249, 335, 343n1, 348n15, 357n61, 359nn1–2, 359nn5–7 O’Neill, Gerald K., 360n40 O’Neill, Robert, 364n54 ontological commitments, 9, 10, 12, 18, 22, 178–90, 303–7, 326–32 operation, 281–2, 324–6

Parfit, Derek, 12, 102, 111, 113, 117, 118, 122, 209, 225 Pargetter, John, 359nn18–19 Parmenides, 207, 270 ‘partes materiae,’ 91 Peacocke, Christopher, 37 Pfeifer, K., 349n24, 349n27 phemomenology, 16, 22, 26, 47, 92, 170, 297, 301, 304, 315, 330 philosophical anthropology, 97 philosophical therapy, 33 philosophy, Anglo-American or AngloSaxon, 3, 5,10, 11, 14, 15, 21, 23, 57, 117, 123, 141–2, 199, 287, 297, 332, 334 philosophy, Continental, 7, 17, 18, 297, 300, 336, philosophy, German, 141, 297, 336, 344n3 philosophy, history of, 25, 204, 223 philosophy, Renaissance, 152, 194, 365n1 ‘picture-thinking,’ 8, 61, 70, 72, 88, 161, 162, 175, 217, 223, 227, 228, 234, 241, 246, 256, 273, 286, 294–5, 350n58 Place, U.T., 283–4, 286, 359nn20–4, 363nn24–31 Plantinga, A., 201 Plato (Platonism), 126, 160, 219, 249, 257, 344n3, 344n21 poetic acts, 93 poetry, 90, 300, 340 polymorphism of human consciousness, 87 Popper, Karl, 11, 21, 346n35, 356n49, 365n5 postmodern philosophy, 332, 340 possible worlds, 12, 116, 121, 126, 127, 175, 196–205, 252–3, 288, 334

382 Index ‘potency,’ 94, 96, 214, 215, 269–73, 284, 302 presencing metaphysics, 7, 61 Price, Huw, 362n24 Priest, Graham (Priestism), 79, 80, 349n43, 350n45 primary and secondary qualities, 152, 154, 163, 164, 181 probability, 9, 137, 173, 190, 206–7, 215, 227, 228, 246, 247, 266, 267–8, 272–3, 275, 277, 280, 282, 284, 291, 292, 328, 346n33, 356n49, 356n55, 364n54 process media, 69–74, 232–5, 269–71 proper sensibles, 64, 65, 162, 165 propositional attitudes, 181, 200 psychology, animal, 275–6, 363, 363n10 Publicover, N.G., 364n32 Putnam, Hilary, 6, 10, 11, 12, 82, 123, 125, 134–7, 138, 144, 147–9, 150, 155, 175, 177, 181–3, 207, 210, 289, 335, 342, 350n48, 354n2, 354n30, 355nn21–3, 358n74 ‘queerness,’ 72, 296 Quine, W.V.O., 21, 67–8, 72–4, 75, 81, 124, 168, 197, 200, 207, 219, 224, 283, 334, 349nn19–20, 355n37, 361n59 rationalism, 5, 82 reality (realism, antirealism), 5, 8, 23, 31, 60, 70, 116, 122, 132, 148, 155, 200, 337 ‘recognitional capacities,’ 150, 151 reductionism (anti-reductionism), 67, 113, 197, 227, 231, 271, 273, 277, 287, 344n2 reference, 131–4, 136, 139, 353n16 Reichenbach, Hans, 246 relations and terms, 220–1

relativism, 83, 87, 167 representationalism, 61, 54, 80, 99, 129–31, 154, 164, 291, 353n15 Rescher, Nicholas, 269–71, 363nn1–3 responsibility, moral, 306, 307, 308, 326 revisonary and descriptive metaphysics, 16, 233 Roessler, Johannes, 352n41 Rorty, Richard, 18, 41, 57, 332, 347n50, 348n3, 349n23, 365n29 Ruse, Michael, 348n11 Russell, Bertrand, 6, 81, 106, 123, 124–7, 132, 200, 245 Ryle, Gilbert, 283 Saint C. Sinclair, N.R., 364n33 Sala, Giovanni, 346n29 Salmon, Nathan, 12, 13, 123, 343n6, 348n13, 353n6 Salmon, Wesley, 246 Sanders, K.M., 364n32 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 90, 107, 118, 141 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 48, 53 ‘saying’ and ‘showing,’ 30, 133 scepticism (anti-scepticalism), 7, 25, 45n, 87, 98, 118–19, 153, 297 scholastic method, 79 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 141 Schwartz, S.P., 187, 355n10, 358nn71–2, 358n74 science (history of science), 11, 22, 31, 87, 96, 101, 147, 148, 152, 157, 158, 161, 162–3, 168, 172, 193, 223, 267, 328–9, 345n26 Scotus, Duns, 26, 127, 132, 134, 140, 154, 334, 353n15 Searle, John, 23, 98, 123, 127–32, 191–2, 262, 353nn10–11, 353nn13–14, 354nn27–9, 358n77 self-consciousness (self-knowledge), 24, 35, 51, 54, 72, 74, 92, 103, 107

Index 383 self-referentiality, 128–30, 138, 139 Sellars, Wilfred, 24, 160, 328 semantics and metaphysics, 77, 86, 89, 196 sensation, 104 ‘serially analytic’ (Lonergan), 84 set theory, 85, 167 Shoemaker, Sydney, 117–18, 334, 354nn33–41 Sibley, Frank, 287 ‘Sinn und Bedeutung,’ 130 Snell, Bruno, 363n19 Snowdon, Paul F., 352n29 society, 308 Socrates, 52, 141, 207, 310 solipsism, 297, 299 sortal concepts, 144, 177 Spinoza, Benedict de, 143 Stagirus, 126, 162 Stalnaker, Robert, 294 statistical or stochastic laws, 172 ‘statistical turn,’ 264–8 Strawson, Peter, 10, 16, 123, 232–6, 259, 343n2, 343n16, 354n3, 354n6, 356n59 Suarez, Francisco, 353n15 substance, 143, 145, 147, 164, 179, 207, 217, 228–32, 232–5 substrate, 343n1 supervenience, 8, 9, 215, 269, 283, 284, 285, 287–96, 321, 316, 364n56. See also emergence temporalization, issue of, 50 Thagard, Paul, 356n49 ‘therapeutic moment,’ 161 things, 154, 155, 179, 207, 213 ‘thisness,’ 13, 127, 130, 132, 334, 361n48 Thomism, 13, 62, 88, 96, 105, 161, 147–8, 161, 363n33. See also Aquinas

time and space, 64 Tractatus (Wittgenstein), 26, 72, 157, 161, 299, 360n27 transcendental arguments, 40 trans-world identification, 283 tropes, 195–6, 248, 249 ‘truthmakers,’ 16, 74, 92, 170, 195, 207, 213 Tugendhat, E., 350n46 twin-earth, 151, 175–6, 182, 184, 354n2 Urmson, J.O., 14 van Cleve, James, 289, 360n50 van Inwagen, Peter, 349n38 Western culture, 170, 234 Whitehead, A.N., 7, 69–74, 207, 223, 232–5, 241, 269, 297, 298, 348n3, 349nn28–9 whole and parts, 167 Wiggins, David, 12, 13, 73, 143, 145, 186–7, 209, 302, 317–8, 319, 348n13, 352n29, 354n5, 355n14, 356n59, 358nn69–71, 360n27, 360n29 Wilkerson, T.E., 144–5, 178–9, 355nn7–9, 355n11 Williams, Bernard, 118, 121, 334 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 10, 26, 29, 33, 36, 47, 79, 87, 90, 99, 100, 101, 104, 129, 130, 157, 159, 175, 193, 224, 297, 353n16, 356n43, 357n60; early period, 60, 78, 343n3; later period, 11, 14, 15, 18, 19, 110, 157, 161, 211, 338, 348n13, 360n27 Wright, Crispin, 163, 318 Yablo, Stephen, 290, 293