Representation, Experience, and Metaphysics: Towards an Integrated Anti-Representationalist Philosophy 3031269233, 9783031269233

Table of contents :
Preface
Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction
1.1 Situating Anti-Representationalism
1.2 Anti-Representationalism About Thought and Language
1.3 The Rest of the Book
Chapter 2: Global Expressivism
2.1 Introduction
2.2 The Argument against Object Naturalism and for Global Expressivism
2.3 Does Object Naturalism Really Depend on Representationalism?
2.3.1 Simpson and Horwich
2.3.2 Knowles
2.4 How Does Global Expressivism ‘Hang Together’?
2.5 Is GE the Best Form of ARTL?
Chapter 3: Representationalism Versus Anti-Representationalism About Perceptual Experience and in Cognitive Science
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Representationalism Versus Anti-Representationalism About Perceptual Experience, and  Phenomenological Externalism
3.3 Representationalism Versus Anti-Representationalism in Cognitive Science, and Enactivism
Chapter 4: The World for Us and the World in Itself
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Umwelts, the World for Us, and the World in Itself
4.3 Matters Arising
4.3.1 Non-classical Representationalist Cognitive Science
4.3.2 Content, Concepts, and Knowledge
4.3.3 How Is My View Really (Very) Different from Global Expressivism?
Chapter 5: Brains in Vats
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Button on the Limits of Realism
5.3 Metaphysical Scepticism
5.4 Could We Really Be BIVs?
5.5 The Existential Phenomenological Take
5.6 Postscript on Dreyfus and Taylor’s Realism
Chapter 6: Anti-Representationalism, Realism, and Anti-Realism
6.1 Introduction
6.2 Semantics and Realism
6.3 Realism ARTL-Style
6.4 Conceptual Relativity
Chapter 7: Metaphysics for Anti-Representationalists?
7.1 Introduction
7.2 Thomasson on Metaphysics as Descriptively and Normatively Conceptual
7.3 Problems with Thomasson’s View
7.4 Metaphysics for ARTL
7.5 A Subject Naturalistic Demarcation Between Science and Metaphysics?
References

Citation preview

Synthese Library 473 Studies in Epistemology, Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science

Jonathan Knowles

Representation, Experience, and Metaphysics Towards an Integrated Anti-Representationalist Philosophy

Synthese Library Studies in Epistemology, Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science Volume 473

Editor-in-Chief Otávio Bueno, Department of Philosophy, University of Miami,  Coral Gables, USA Editorial Board Members Berit Brogaard, University of Miami, Coral Gables, USA Steven French, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK Catarina Dutilh Novaes, VU Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Darrell P. Rowbottom, Department of Philosophy, Lingnan University,  Tuen Mun, Hong Kong Emma Ruttkamp, Department of Philosophy, University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa Kristie Miller, Department of Philosophy, Centre for Time, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

The aim of Synthese Library is to provide a forum for the best current work in the methodology and philosophy of science and in epistemology, all broadly understood. A wide variety of different approaches have traditionally been represented in the Library, and every effort is made to maintain this variety, not for its own sake, but because we believe that there are many fruitful and illuminating approaches to the philosophy of science and related disciplines. Special attention is paid to methodological studies which illustrate the interplay of empirical and philosophical viewpoints and to contributions to the formal (logical, set-theoretical, mathematical, information-theoretical, decision-theoretical, etc.) methodology of empirical sciences. Likewise, the applications of logical methods to epistemology as well as philosophically and methodologically relevant studies in logic are strongly encouraged. The emphasis on logic will be tempered by interest in the psychological, historical, and sociological aspects of science. In addition to monographs Synthese Library publishes thematically unified anthologies and edited volumes with a well-defined topical focus inside the aim and scope of the book series. The contributions in the volumes are expected to be focused and structurally organized in accordance with the central theme(s), and should be tied together by an extensive editorial introduction or set of introductions if the volume is divided into parts. An extensive bibliography and index are mandatory.

Jonathan Knowles

Representation, Experience, and Metaphysics Towards an Integrated Anti-­Representationalist Philosophy

Jonathan Knowles Norwegian University of Science and Technology Trondheim, Norway

ISSN 0166-6991     ISSN 2542-8292 (electronic) Synthese Library ISBN 978-3-031-26923-3    ISBN 978-3-031-26924-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26924-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

This book is one upshot of a Norwegian Research Council project that I led together with Anders Nes aimed at promoting interaction between theoretical philosophers working at different universities across Norway from 2013 to 2016. Entitled Representationalism or Anti-representationalism? Perspectives on Intentionality from Philosophy and Cognitive Science (see https://www.ntnu.no/ifr/ representationalism-­or-anti-representationalism), the project encompassed a broad swathe of debates that we believed could be seen through the lens of the question of its title, and brought together thinkers in various different locations to discuss questions about representation in contemporary philosophy of perception, philosophy of language, and cognitive science. This book aims to present my own personal take on those issues and how they interrelate. It is both an attempt at clarification of how different debates that nevertheless employ the same ‘representationalism versus anti-representationalism’ framing nomenclature relate to one another, and an attempt to argue for a novel combination of positions in these different areas that are all recognizably ‘anti-representationalist’. It is not an introductory text but an intervention in an ongoing debate. Though I do use quite a lot of time setting up my understanding of central concepts and the dialectical terrain, I also assume some familiarity with the main ideas and trends of contemporary theoretical philosophy, including the broad outlines of so-called ‘neo-pragmatist’ thinking and debates about perceptual experience and cognitive science that are its main themes. On the other hand, given such a background, what I have to say, in taking a ‘big picture’ approach, will hopefully be readily accessible. Some of the ideas figure in previously published papers of mine, others derive from papers that are unpublished. But I have changed my mind in relation to nearly all these works in the interim period, often in subtle but nevertheless important ways, not least in view of the task of providing a synoptic picture of my thinking as a whole; hence the material is original (the published work is of course referred to).1  Knowles (2019a), a shorter commentary piece, takes up in much more summary form the issues of Chap. 6. Knowles (2023) is based on parts of Chap. 2, but was not published at the time the final manuscript of this book was submitted. 1

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Preface

At the same time, it probably does sometimes bear the mark of descending from papers: though I pursue (what I hope is) a clear overarching dialectic, I also delve into certain particular debates along the way, and I could no doubt have delved into slightly different ones or in slightly different ways. I could also have often delved deeper at many points, given the foundational nature of many of the issues. To an extent this limitation is disciplinary (i.e. a function of the literature the book takes as it point of departure), to an extent a function of producing a piece of work of manageable size and scope. My hope is that the general perspective and the particular discussions pertaining to this that I offer are sufficiently interesting and sufficiently integrated to make the book as a whole worth reading. I am indebted to the following for discussion of and/or feedback on the issues and/or my material over the last few years: Huw Price (sine qua non), Henrik Rydenfelt (also for tireless work in coordinating the Nordic Pragmatism Network), Rasmus Jaksland, Jussi Haukioja, Thomas Raleigh, Anders Nes, Jørgen Dyrstad, Claus Hahlberg, Ronny Selbæk Myhre, Thomas Netland, Maia Vige Helle, Bengt Molander, Sami Pihlström, Truls Wyller, Michael Amundsen, Bjørn Ramberg, Simon Blackburn, Robert Kraut, Amie Thomasson, Paul Horwich, Michael Williams, Tony Chemero, Michael Silberstein, David Macarthur, Paul Redding, Georges Rey, Tim Button, Carsten Hansen, Carl Sachs, Steven Levine, Lionel Shapiro, Luz Christopher Seibert, Walter Hopp, Sebastian Watzl, John Campbell, Solveig Aasen, Hedda Hassel Mørch, Kevin Cahill, Yvonne Hütter, and William Bondi Knowles. Thanks also go to Oscar Westerblad and Miguel Ohnesorge for inviting me to present chapters of the book at meetings of the Pragmatist Reading Group in Cambridge, UK in Lent term 2022, and to them, Céline Henne, Hasok Chang, Aditya Jha, Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, Henrik Sova, and others (including Huw Price, again), for very useful feedback on those (and connected) occasions. Also thanks to many others for their comments, not least students, at various lectures and seminars, even though I can’t recall all your names! Finally, at Springer, thanks go to Otavio Bueno for initiating this book project and support throughout the process, to Palani Murugesan for effective administration, and to Sudha Elite Vanath for patient help in the final production stage. The book is dedicated to Janne Bondi Johannessen, my wife, who died of breast cancer in June 2020.

Contents

1

Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    1 1.1 Situating Anti-Representationalism��������������������������������������������������    1 1.2 Anti-Representationalism About Thought and Language����������������    5 1.3 The Rest of the Book������������������������������������������������������������������������   22

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Global Expressivism��������������������������������������������������������������������������������   25 2.1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   25 2.2 The Argument against Object Naturalism and for Global Expressivism������������������������������������������������������������   27 2.3 Does Object Naturalism Really Depend on Representationalism? ������������������������������������������������������������������   31 2.3.1 Simpson and Horwich����������������������������������������������������������   31 2.3.2 Knowles��������������������������������������������������������������������������������   35 2.4 How Does Global Expressivism ‘Hang Together’?��������������������������   37 2.5 Is GE the Best Form of ARTL?��������������������������������������������������������   43

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Representationalism Versus Anti-­Representationalism About Perceptual Experience and in Cognitive Science����������������������   51 3.1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   51 3.2 Representationalism Versus Anti-Representationalism About Perceptual Experience, and Phenomenological Externalism������������   53 3.3 Representationalism Versus Anti-Representationalism in Cognitive Science, and Enactivism����������������������������������������������   73

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 The World for Us and the World in Itself����������������������������������������������   89 4.1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   89 4.2 Umwelts, the World for Us, and the World in Itself��������������������������   90 4.3 Matters Arising����������������������������������������������������������������������������������   97 4.3.1 Non-classical Representationalist Cognitive Science ����������   98 4.3.2 Content, Concepts, and Knowledge��������������������������������������  101 4.3.3 How Is My View Really (Very) Different from Global Expressivism?��������������������������������������������������  104 vii

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Contents

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Brains in Vats��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  109 5.1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  109 5.2 Button on the Limits of Realism������������������������������������������������������  111 5.3 Metaphysical Scepticism������������������������������������������������������������������  117 5.4 Could We Really Be BIVs?��������������������������������������������������������������  121 5.5 The Existential Phenomenological Take������������������������������������������  125 5.6 Postscript on Dreyfus and Taylor’s Realism ������������������������������������  127

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Anti-Representationalism, Realism, and Anti-Realism������������������������  131 6.1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  131 6.2 Semantics and Realism ��������������������������������������������������������������������  133 6.3 Realism ARTL-Style������������������������������������������������������������������������  141 6.4 Conceptual Relativity������������������������������������������������������������������������  148

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Metaphysics for Anti-Representationalists?������������������������������������������  157 7.1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  158 7.2 Thomasson on Metaphysics as Descriptively and Normatively Conceptual������������������������������������������������������������  161 7.3 Problems with Thomasson’s View����������������������������������������������������  163 7.4 Metaphysics for ARTL����������������������������������������������������������������������  171 7.5 A Subject Naturalistic Demarcation Between Science and Metaphysics?������������������������������������������������������������������������������  174

References ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  179

Chapter 1

Introduction

Abstract  In this introductory chapter I introduce the idea of anti-­representationalism as a counterpoint to the prevailing representationalism of modern and much contemporary philosophy, illustrating in relation to perceptual experience, cognitive science, and the notion of truth. I then outline the fundamental ideas behind a view that I will elaborate and defend in the book that I dub anti-representationalism about thought and language (ARTL). This is a position I associate first and foremost with the neo-­pragmatists Richard Rorty and Huw Price, but is also influenced by various other philosophers such as Carnap, Quine, Sellars, Horwich, and Brandom. Central to ARTL is the rejection of what Price calls (‘Big-R’) ‘Representationalism’, to the effect that language has meaning and relates to the world in virtue of substantial semantic relations of truth and reference. This has important implications for how we should think about truth, meaning, existence and reality, but does not mean we have to see as ARTL as in any way an anti-realistic or anti-naturalistic position. I end the chapter by outlining the contents of the rest of the book. Central here will be my argument that while we should accept the basic tenets of ARTL, the specific forms of this view that Rorty and Price (and several others) defend should give way to a version that relates it explicitly to other forms of anti-­representationalist philosophy concerning experience and cognitive science.

1.1 Situating Anti-Representationalism This work is an attempt to present and defend a set of philosophical ideas that together can reasonably be called, in my view, ‘an anti-representationalist philosophy’. It is concerned first and foremost to articulate and develop one particular kind of anti-representationalism (as so-called in the literature), but in doing so it also recommends other kinds, and more generally seeks to shed some light on the possible interrelations between different kinds of position that have been labelled ‘representationalist’ and ‘anti-representationalist’ in recent thinking. Many of these views can often seem quite closely related on casual acquaintance. For example, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Knowles, Representation, Experience, and Metaphysics, Synthese Library 473, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26924-0_1

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1 Introduction

Richard Rorty famously defends a form of what he calls ‘anti-representationalism’ that is – not least with respect to that very form of words – indebted to the work of the pragmatist John Dewey, whilst Dewey’s thinking about experience has also been a strong influence on contemporary anti-representationalist or ‘embodied’ cognitive science (cf. e.g. Chemero 2009). However, as we shall see, Rorty’s anti-­ representationalism is specifically a view about language and thought, and though it may not be hermetically sealed from debates in cognitive science or about the nature of experience, the areas are separate and the issues involved distinct (something Rorty himself insisted on: see his 1979, ch. 5; 1982, ch. 5). An important overarching aim of the book is to argue that there is nevertheless an interesting mutual coherence between several different kinds of anti-­ representationalist position that has hitherto gone relatively unnoticed (as far as I can divine). At the same time, my starting point and ultimately main concern is the kind of anti-representationalism about thought and language I see Rorty as a prominent representative of, and some of what I will have to say about this view can be considered without relating it to other kinds of anti-representationalism. Though anti-representationalism then is not just one thing, I do think that all (or most) of its contemporary manifestations can be seen as growing from a common stem. This ‘stem’ is basically a rejection or at least significant decentralizing of the idea that representation is or should be a significant philosophical category, perhaps even a kind of foundation, in thinking about or explaining the mind, language and the relationship between these things and the world. Most commentators agree that this idea – representationalism – can be traced back to the thinking of the classical rationalists and empiricists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for whom a guiding assumption was that we are in cognitive contact with the world only indirectly, perceiving in the first instance ideas or similar mental entities that somehow stand in for or represent the mind-external world. But though precisely this kind of view is less common today, various forms of recognizably representationalist thought still have strong footholds in contemporary philosophical thinking. Thus a view standardly referred to as ‘representationalism’ is commonly defended today as the idea that perceptual experience, indeed experience generally, essentially involves some kind of intentional content, specifying the way the world (including possibly our own body) appears to the subject, which way the world may or may not be. Such views allegedly improve on those which claim we see only ideas or (as it became commoner to claim in the early twentieth century) sense data, in that we seem not to be aware of any object between us and the world we experience (experience is ‘transparent’, as it is often put). They are nevertheless still representational in that contact with the world is mediated by something mental. More broadly, in contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive science an enormously influential idea has been the so-called representational theory of mind (also known as the computational theory of mind), perhaps most famously promulgated by Jerry Fodor (see e.g. his 1975, 1987). According to this, the mind is to be understood as a set of symbolic states interacting computationally with one another to produce other such states and intelligent behaviour, forming an internal language of thought, as Fodor put it. These states, as well as having an intrinsic syntactic

1.1  Situating Anti-Representationalism

3

structure, respond selectively to different aspects of our environment and in virtue of this have a semantic content that can be seen as specifying the way the world is (or not). Many see representationalism about perception and conscious experience as part of such a broader representational theory of mind (e.g. Lycan 1987; Tye 1995). Much contemporary philosophy of language also presupposes the basic correctness of the representational theory of mind. For many philosophers seeking to understand linguistic meaning naturalistically it has to be seen first in terms of underlying mental states – complexes of so-called ‘propositional attitudes’, such as states of knowledge, belief, intention and so on  – and these in turn as inner representational-­cum-computational states. A prominent example of this is the so-­ called neo-Gricean approach to meaning (cf. Schiffer 1972, 1987) though the basic idea is broader than this.1 At a more general level, a common and intuitive representationalist view of how language, or thought, functions – at a fundamental level – is as putting forward statements (or furnishing us with beliefs) that depict or describe reality, and that are true or false depending on whether they, or at least their content, correspond to this reality or a suitable sub-part of it. A fuller account of contemporary representationalism would go into more detail on various fronts, taking up issues such as how exactly we should understand the idea of truth as correspondence, how we should understand internal representational states (are they necessarily ‘propositional attitudes’ like beliefs? are they wholly contained within the brain, or are they extended properties of the brain and the body/environment? etc.), how we should ‘naturalise’ content, how representational states and their contents should be seen as relating to action and phenomenal consciousness, and so on. Some of these issues will be broached in this book, but the general picture is well enough known to take as a point of departure. For what we can then say about anti-representationalism, in its broadest sense, is that it questions this, similarly broad, paradigm for thinking about how mind and language should be understood: as representing or – as Rorty famously put it – mirroring reality. Anti-­ representationalism does not necessarily reject the very idea or existence of representations or representational content, mental or linguistic, but it does seek to significantly downplay the role these things can play in explaining perceptual experience or cognition, and/or in understanding the relationship between thought and language and the things we think and talk about; at the very least, it denies the idea of representation can provide a foundational theory in these areas. Historically one can trace its roots and inspirations to a number of different philosophers including Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, the phenomenologists (Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-­ Ponty), and the American pragmatists (Peirce, James, Dewey). In relation especially to questions about language, thought and reality, figures of the analytic tradition are also important, notably Carnap, Quine, Sellars and (the later) Wittgenstein, plus other contemporary thinkers about whom I will have more to say later. Certain  Thus it is also employed in (so-called) ‘Chomskyan’ approaches to semantics based on the notion of ‘knowledge of meaning’ (cf. e.g. Larson and Segal 1995). Chomsky himself is not a supporter of such accounts (see Chomsky 2000; Knowles 1995; also below, section 2.ii). 1

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1 Introduction

people that are more usually classed as psychologists or cognitive scientists rather than philosophers can also be seen as having played a significant role in the overall development of the idea of anti-representationalism in contemporary thought, such as Francisco Varela and James Gibson. In this book I will be concerned first and foremost with expounding and developing a particular type of anti-representationalist position extant in contemporary analytic philosophy that I call anti-representationalism about thought and language  – ARTL for short.2 However, I will also, by way of doing this, discuss other kinds of (so-called) anti-representationalist (and representationalist) position, about perceptual experience and cognitive science,3 and take up how they relate to ARTL. The central upshot of this will be a suggestion to the effect that the anti-­ representationalist approach in cognitive science known as enactivism and ARTL can be seen as mutually supporting positions. Enactivism can also, in my view, be independently motivated by consideration of the philosophical literature on perceptual experience. In relation to this area I defend a distinct though closely related anti-representationalist position from enactivism that I term phenomenological externalism (cf. Knowles 2019b). Phenomenological externalism has it that, while experience does not consist in representational states but has rather to be understood in terms of the worldly, material items we perceive (and perceive with, i.e. our bodies), at the same time, these items we experience are part of a world that is relative to an experiencing subject: it is not the world of physics or the world in itself, but a world for us, or world for the organism in question. I will argue that this kind of view (which I will argue enactivism is also committed to) is not idealist, nor anti-­ realist about the world of experience, at least when coupled with ARTL insofar as this rejects the very idea of ‘mind-independent reality’ as incoherent. Though ranging rather broadly, the different kinds of anti-representationalism I take up will not and are not meant to give an exhaustive taxonomy of all possible or actual forms of anti-representationalist philosophy. For example, many of the specific philosophical positions developed by the historical thinkers above would count as anti-representationalist, but I will not be discussing them as such here (there are of course large influences from many of these thinkers on the views I do discuss). My discussion aims rather to offer an overview of anti-representationalism as I see it figuring in contemporary philosophy and cognitive science, going into most detail about ARTL and connections of other views with ARTL.

 In fact this position is arguably one of two contemporary positions that might be characterized as such, the other being a view one might call (quasi-)Kantian anti-representationalism about thought and language, which stresses the idea of conceptual relativity, in the sense defended by Putnam (my use of the label ‘Kantian’ here is due mainly to Sami Pihsltröm’s connecting the ideas of these two thinkers, see his 2003). I discuss and argue against this kind of view in Chap. 6 (see also footnote 5 below). 3  In cognitive science, the label ‘non-representationalist’ is also often used. I will understand the terms ‘non-representationalist’ and ‘anti-representationalist’ as pretty much synonomous in this book, and, for at least the most part, use just the latter. 2

1.2  Anti-Representationalism About Thought and Language

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In the rest of this introductory chapter I will first: introduce and characterise ARTL; and second: outline the other chapters of the book.

1.2 Anti-Representationalism About Thought and Language Though I am very sympathetic to phenomenological externalism and enactivism, it is anti-representationalism about thought and language  – ARTL  – I am first and foremost committed to. What then is ARTL? The generic position I wish to develop and (thereby) defend a version of in this book is, in my view, one that can be identified most clearly in the work of Rorty and Huw Price. It may well be that several other philosophers in the contemporary analytic debate about thought and language can and/or should be seen as subscribing to the view, implicitly or otherwise. Of the giants of analytic philosophy, it is I believe reasonable, as we shall see, to attribute the view to Quine, or at least a position very close to Quine’s actual one. Perhaps under a certain interpretation or construal of the work of Wilfred Sellars, one might also view him as propounding a form of ARTL (see Price 2015), whilst the thought of the later Wittgenstein, in a different way, might also be understood in terms of it (see Price 2009a). I do not, however, in any case, mean to suggest these philosophers’ contributions can be reduced to articulating the kind of unitary position I will be laying out here. ARTL is first and foremost a position I see Rorty and Price, along with certain other contemporary thinkers, to be responsible for and to converge on (its significant debts to others notwithstanding). There are several other central twentieth century analytic philosophers whose work can be seen as having an important impact on or as developing importantly similar ideas to those of ARTL, though who do not, at least explicitly or clearly, hold the view; these include Gottlob Frege, Rudolf Carnap, Frank Ramsey, Peter Strawson, Thomas Kuhn, Nelson Goodman, Donald Davidson, Hilary Putnam and Arthur Fine (probably inter alia). More recent thinkers still active in the contemporary debate who hold views that are at least close to it, or which have significantly influenced its development, include Paul Horwich, Michael Williams, Simon Blackburn, Robert Brandom, Amie Thomasson and (at least in my opinion) John McDowell. The ideas and views of several of these philosophers will feature in various chapters of this book. There are other historical precursors to, influences on or parallels with ARTL one could trace and explore. Insofar as the view is (and is also generally described as) pragmatist, the classical pragmatist thinkers are obvious candidates here. The German idealist tradition from Kant and Hegel through to Heidegger and Foucault also contain ideas conducive and/or similar to it (for illuminating exposition of this tradition that connects it to the realism/anti-realism debate in analytic philosophy, see Lee Braver 2007; the issue of realism in relation to ARTL will be taken up in Chap. 6). Going into these historical connections in any detail however is not what this book is about. What then are the guiding ideas behind ARTL? I believe we can summarise these as follows (these points will be embellished in relation to following discussions of

6

1 Introduction

Rorty and Price). Firstly, it rejects the idea that our cognition of the world – the thinking of ours that can be evaluated most fundamentally in terms of its truth or falsity – should or can be explained or understood in terms of substantial semantic relations  – relations of truth and reference  – between language (or thought) and mind-independent reality. Often in the relevant literature this view is called ‘representationalism’, but in view of the many different ways this label can be used Price terms it ‘Representationalism’ (or ‘Big-R Representationalism’), and I will follow him in this. Secondly, ARTL puts in place of Representationalism an account of truth and meaning that is deflationary, and otherwise based essentially on the use of language – in some way or other.4 Thirdly, ARTL holds that Representationalism is necessary for making sense of the idea of there being a completely mind-­independent reality to which all of our truth-directed thought and talk is ultimately answerable. The idea that there is such a reality – a view I will call ‘metaphysical realism’, or MR  – is thus not denied by ARTL, but rejected as incoherent. Fourthly, though ARTL is not metaphysically realist, it does not see itself as any kind of anti-realist position, which would see our thoughts as concerning some kind of mental or linguistic reality, or a reality restricted by our abilities to find out about it, or our descriptions of reality as inexorably relative to a choice of conceptual scheme (framework or something similar).5 By rejecting the very idea of a completely mind-­ independent, non-conceptual reality, we can uphold (at least, taking into account several other considerations) a common-sensical realism – one that is moreover the only coherent kind available, according to ARTL. Fifthly, and finally, ARTL is a naturalistic philosophical position (a commitment in turn connected to the previous idea of being common-sensical). Human beings are wholly natural creatures, and broadly continuous in their function – at least, language aside – with other animals. ARTL’s naturalism is not (at least typically) a reductive naturalistic position which sees all truth as, say, ultimately physical, at least in the sense of ‘given by physics’, but philosophy must be consistent with scientific results, and would ideally be in some way continuous with science. As I see things, this kind of view will induce a  This may involve a very broad sense of ‘use’, as well as ‘deflation’; I offer a brief discussion below of how ARTL conceives of the theory of meaning after my presentation of Rorty and Price below. 5  This last category is meant to accommodate thinkers like Putnam and Hirsch who, though rejecting MR, believe in conceptual relativity, quantificational variance or something similar. Though a taxonomy might have made room for this kind of view as a distinct subcategory of ARTL this would have overcomplicated my presentation and discussion. I consider this kind of view explicitly in Chap. 6, where I argue it is, pace its proponents’ protestations to the contrary, committed to some kind of Kantian Ding an sich. (Though, as we shall see, I think this is problematic, it doesn’t render their view inconsistent, insofar as MR, as I and these thinkers understand the position, is not merely a commitment to there being a reality in itself in the way Kant thought of this.) A more general question here (one that Jørgen Dyrstad urged me to clarify) is whether ARTL and Representationalism amount to exhaustive positions (i.e. whether one is an ARTList just in case one is not a Representationalist). As should be clear from what I have just said, I do no believe this to be the case, in particular, there are many who reject Representationalism who would not accept ARTL (Putnam and Horwich are two examples who feature as such in this book; another is Tim Button, see Chap. 5; out and out linguistic idealists might be yet another). 4

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7

scepticism towards traditional ‘dualistic’ kinds of philosophy that posit distinctively non-material entities with special causal powers, as well as to the idea of philosophy furnishing us some special kind of knowledge or method – completely a priori or transcendental insight, say  – divorced from the kind science or common sense ­provides. On the other hand, not all knowledge need be scientific (and of course science itself is not necessariy just one kind of thing), whilst philosophy can legitimately draw on common sense – though nor is common sense any absolute court of appeal. I do not suppose this characterization settles all issues about what being a naturalist commits one to – what I have to say in the course of the book will clarify my own commitments somewhat further – but I believe it does give some substance to the idea of what it is to be a naturalist in the general way ARTL aims to be.6 Let us now try to unpack these ideas in a little more detail in relation to Rorty and Price. Taking his inspiration from Heidegger, Dewey and the later Wittgenstein, in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) Rorty famously argued that the modern philosophical project initiated by Descartes and Locke and canonically formulated by Kant reached an endgame in the combination of critiques of empiricist epistemology proffered by Quine – in his attack on the a priori and analyticity – and by Sellars, in his attack on the idea of the empirically given as a kind of ‘non-­conceptual’ mental mediator between thought and reality. Other analytic philosophers – especially Davidson7 – are also important to Rorty’s wider project (see his 1982, 1989, 1991), but a guiding thought throughout his oeuvre is the idea of Western philosophy as an attempt, or a series of attempts, to provide an epistemological-cum-­ metaphysical basis for our thinking, and that it is now time to retire that project. The so-called ‘modern’ version of this sought to ground the idea that it is the new science that puts us, uniquely, in touch with ‘mind-independent’ reality, with other ‘mind-dependent’ discourses being somehow answerable to this one (Rorty 1999). This is a prime example of what Rorty understands representationalism to involve: the idea that there is some privileged discourse secured through a kind of not merely causal but semantic contact between the mind and mind-independent reality. Though the idea of such a physical reality was instrumental in ousting the theistic world-­ view that preceded it, the underlying idea behind the enlightenment is, or should be, the emancipation from all non-human authorities, the physical world included (ibid.). Rejecting representationalism is thus coeval with a broadly coherentist and behaviourist conception of epistemology, whereby responsible epistemic practices reduce to what we can ‘get away with’ saying to our contemporaries (see e.g. his 1979, 176). Rhetoric aside – of which Rorty uses much, appearing thereby, I think, more controversial than a more sober reading of his work can in fact suggest – the basic idea here is that justification and meaning are internal to human practices of ‘giving and asking for reasons’, as Brandom has put it (Brandom 1994). Though truth does not transcend these or constitute a separate norm for inquiry, the notion  For some further discussion of what naturalism amounts to for ARTL, see e.g. Knowles (2013, 2018a) (focussing on Rorty) and (for discussion of Price’s view in relation to so-called ‘liberal naturalism’) Shapiro (2022). 7  I will take up relevant points of contact between Davidson and ARTL in the discussion to follow. 6

8

1 Introduction

of truth does – even for Rorty – have a profile that is distinctive in comparison with that of justification (Rorty 1986).8 Rorty is also clear that his position is not anti-­ realist: the very possibility of a contrast between realist and anti-realist treatments of discourses is one that vanishes with the rejection of representationalism (Rorty 1991), whilst he sees no content – or at least useable content – to the Kantian idea of an unknowable reality ‘an sich’ (Rorty 1972). Nor is his view relativistic, or at least meant to be. We are certainly committed to the truth of our own views as opposed to those of other groups who disagree with us (an idea he calls ethnocentrism: Rorty 1991), and there is no way to, as it were, get somewhere else without starting from these views; but relativism – the idea that all beliefs are equally true or justified – does not follow from this, and could only do so given a kind of hypostasizing of belief systems which would be totally artificial.9 In line with his pragmatic forbears, especially Dewey, Rorty is also a naturalist: we are fundamentally Darwinian creatures who seek to cope with and thrive in our environments as best we can.10 Famously, Rorty does not so much argue systematically for this package of views, or analyse the various different arguments that support it as put it forward as a new, brave model for philosophers, who should be primarily concerned to forge new, ‘edifying’ ways of thinking in the service of widening the scope of enlightened discourse, rather than, like philosophers of the past, with ‘mirroring reality’. I note that I do not see this ‘activist’ aspect of Rorty’s neo-pragmatism – nor his accompanying ‘ironic’ attitude to his own philosophical views (cf. Rorty 1989) – as endemic to ARTL (hence to his view regarded as promulgating ARTL as such). More in the spirit of Price, I think there is room for interesting theoretical philosophical work to  I will have more to say about the notion of truth in ARTL below.  Cf. Williams (1999, ch. 11) for discussion of this idea of the ‘myth of the system’. The thought is that if we were locked into discrete belief systems we might have to say that no view is better than any other, but insofar as we patently are not, the thought gets no purchase. Rorty does tend to deride appeals to ‘truth’ when it comes to so-called clashes between ‘final vocabularies’ and say relativist-sounding things (Rorty 1989), but given his deflationary attitude to truth it is not at all clear that he should (apart from the issue of whether the sharp distinction between final and non-­ final vocabularies is itself sustainable). 10  Rorty also uses the slogan ‘coping not copying’, taken from Dewey, to argue against representationalism. Contrary to the idea that evolution favours creatures who correctly represent – have true beliefs about – their environment, all evolution in fact requires is that their beliefs lead them to act in a way that allows them to survive in it. I don’t think this argument is a very good one, not least from the perspective of ARTL insofar as it contrasts copying and coping in a way that is inimical to semantic deflationism (more on which shortly). As we shall see below, Price’s view offers a way of substantiating the idea of ‘coping not copying’ in a way that is more in keeping with ARTL (albeit a way I myself will also ultimately reject). I should also add that Rorty’s attack on representationalism via a rejection of classical foundationalist epistemology is probably insufficient to repudiate it (or at least Representationalism), since I take it many today would want to give a merely quasi-foundationalist or some kind of so-­ called ‘externalist’ but substantive account of our knowledge that precisely builds on Representationalist ideas. As I see things, Price’s metasemantic arguments against Representationalism supplement Rorty’s, though Rorty’s remain important too; again, more on this below. 8 9

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be done even once representationalism and the idea of ‘reality’ have been abjured. It is to a large extent such a project this book attempts. This doesn’t mean that I think philosophy (under the star of ARTL) can have no impact on practical affairs, as I also hope to show it can, but I think in fact the model for thinking about this can (and should) be relatively traditional (see Chap. 7).11 Let us turn now to Price, who has presented and developed his views through a series of publications stretching over the least four decades (see e.g. Price 1988, 2007, 2011a, 2013, 2015, 2019). In part through an explicit embracement of Rorty’s anti-representationalism (Price 2010a), Price has described his more recent work as an attempt to make clearer and more accessible the essential ideas contained in his more technical 1988 monograph Facts and the Function of Truth; the resulting view is what he now calls a generalized or (more usually) global expressivism. My focus will be on the ideas as these are presented in the more recent work, many of which heavily inform the generic position of ARTL as I understand this. What Price offers (rather like Rorty) is not so much new theses as a framework for thinking about how several different philosophical theses hang together; a synoptic picture of what they imply. One such thesis, a very central one for him, is semantic deflationism, a view which has received perhaps its most extensive treatment and defence in recent years in the work of Horwich (1990). Price often seems to have Horwich’s version of this view –minimalism – in mind when he talks about deflationism, but he has also defended a version close to Quine’s disquotationalism (Quine 1970, disussed in Price 2004; cf. also Field 1994). Semantic deflationism generally holds that neither truth nor reference are properties with an underlying, explanatory nature, contrary to what representationalists – or Representationalists – hold. It denies, while Representationalists affirm, that truth is a property which explains why some claims or sentences are true and others not, such as a relation of correspondence between sentences and sentence-like objects like ‘facts’ or ‘state of affairs’ in a mindindependent reality.12 Similarly, it denies that reference is a substantial natural relation which we might build empirical theories about, as Representationalists have attempted (a project first envisioned by Field 1972 and pursued by people like Fodor 1990 and Millikan 1984). For Price, following Quine, to say that ‘snow is white’ is true is not to make a new, substantive claim beyond saying that snow is white; in saying the former, we are still really only talking about snow and saying it is white. Conversely, if you can assert that p, you can eo ipso say that p is true. Something similar applies to  I do not discuss Rorty’s broader metaphilosophy in this chapter, but critique a distinct pragmatist construal of philosophy – metaphysics in particular – due to Thomasson. I have elsewhere argued that Rorty’s overall position would be more stable if it acknowledged, rather than rejected, a sui generis category of the theoretical in the academy (Knowles 2018a, cp. Tartaglia 2010; and for a response on Rorty’s behalf, Gascoigne and Bacon 2020), but for my purposes here I can remain agnostic about the extent to which the activist side of Rorty’s pragmatism (which, for the record, is not crudely utilitarian) might in fact be compatible with everything of substance I want to argue for in this book. 12  As noted above (footnote 5), not all who reject a substantive theory of truth and embrace some kind of deflationism should be classed as supporters of ARTL. Horwich himself is a leading example; see Chaps. 2 and 6. 11

10

1 Introduction

reference: in saying that ‘snow’ refers to snow, we are just saying something like ‘there is something that is snow’, and vice versa. The two notions, truth and reference, are of course internally related. That ‘snow’ refers to snow follows trivially from the fact that ‘snow is white’ is true, insofar as that kind of sentence is true iff the subject term refers to something, and this satisfies ‘is white’. And that ‘snow is white’ is true follows trivially from the fact that ‘snow’ refers to snow and satisfies ‘is white’. But there is nothing substantive to say about what truth or reference amount to beyond this, and the same goes, mutatis mutandis, in the case of satisfaction and the other semantic formation rules of language. Although Price is thus far a deflationist, he does not think (as, say, Horwich does) that the significance of truth as a concept or property is exhausted by its role in saying things like ‘“snow is white” is true iff snow is white’ (plus quantifications like ‘Everything the pope says is true’, used when we don’t know exactly what it is someone says). We will have more to say about his understanding of truth below. However, just accepting deflationism as thus far sketched has important implications for certain kinds of realism versus anti-realism debates (Macarthur and Price 2008). In particular, it means that we cannot readily make sense of a traditional kind of non-cognitivist or expressivist view which would see a seemingly well-­functioning assertoric practice, like ethical talk, as in fact being in the service of some aim other than truth, like expressing emotion or prescription (a view going back to Hume and defended in well-known versions by Ayer 1936, Hare 1952, Blackburn 1984 and Gibbard 1990). Price doesn’t think expressivism needs to be understood in this way: a good expressivism can maintain the idea that, say, ethical talk functions to express emotion, but also reject the idea that it is not truth apt (indeed, Blackburn’s ‘quasi-­ realism’ already involves the kernel of this idea, thinks Price). But the main point for now is that one traditional way of dividing up our discourses into those that do and those do not express cognitive, truth-evaulable claims looks like a non-starter, given semantic deflationism. A further consequence of semantic deflationism is that there is nothing of a semantic kind to say about how different discourses relate to reality. This has implications for how we should think about certain metaphysical projects, most notably for Price the project of ‘locating’ or ‘placing’ common sense categories like mind, meaning and value in the natural world (cf. e.g. Jackson 1998). I will have more to say about this in Chap. 2, but briefly stated Price argues that once one rejects Representationalism, this way of doing metaphysics necessarily lapses. The overall upshot is very similar to Rorty’s pragmatism: we should acknowledge an irreducible plurality of vocabularies or discourses, none of which can be seen as merely expressive (i.e. non-cognitive), and none of which latch onto the ‘real’ and articulate what in the world makes our statements true. Price however also thinks the positive aspect of expressivism can give the idea of being a naturalist behind this pragmatism more substance. More generally, what we can do, according to Price, is ask questions about the different underlying functions of our different discourses, with this function being understood non-representationally (‘representational function’ being trivially satisfied by all discourses in view of semantic deflationism). He thus holds his view diverges from what, following Sarah McGrath (2014),

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11

he calls ‘relaxed realism’, a view that also goes under the name of ‘metaphysical quietism’ (Price 2019). Relaxed realists typically believe that the reluctance we feel about accepting the existence of so-called ‘non-natural’ entities like meanings, numbers, colours, values etc. along with irreducible truths about these things is due to a kind of philosophical anxiety that needs to be exorcised, not answered; McDowell is a prominent proponent of such a line in recent years (see e.g. his 1984, 1985), as is perhaps, if in a rather different way, Rorty himself. Relaxed realism has also less flatteringly been characterized as ‘soggy pluralism’ by Blackburn (2005, 113). Price’s view is similar to relaxed realism in being ‘anti-­metaphysical’, but he thinks relaxed realism unreasonably demurs at questions about how to account for differences between discourses, questions that expressivists, moreover, can give answers to, in broadly naturalistic terms. His view is thereby reminiscent of pragmatism’s conception of language as a tool, and in particular, at least according to Price, of Wittgenstein’s view of language as a bag of different tools (Price 2009a). For these reasons, he also refers to it as global pragmatism. Whatever one calls it, however, it is important to note that precisely this expressivist/pragmatist dimension of Price’s view is not part of ARTL by definition, or at least needn’t and in my view shouldn’t be seen as being so. As we shall see in Chap. 2 there is, pace Price, space for both relaxed realism and a different form of what we might call ‘explanatory’ ARTL from global expressivism, within the parameters I have set as defining ARTL and what reasonably can be seen as following from these. This dialectic will lead to the ideas of Chaps. 3, 4 and 5 concerning anti-­ representationalism in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science as an alternative to an expressivist grounding13 of ARTL. Other ideas that Price has put forward are however important to understanding the general discussion of the book, as well as the debates in the later chapters which abstract to an extent from different opinions concerning how best to understand ARTL. One of these concerns Carnap, or at least the Carnap of ‘Empiricism, semantics, and ontology’ (Carnap 1950), an important inspiration for Price that casts further light on both his global expressivism and ARTL more generally (Price 2007, 2009b). Famously Carnap distinguishes between external and internal questions, arguing that we can ask and answer ontological questions internally, that is, assuming a given discourse or framework, but not externally, outwith any framework. Within the discourse of arithmetic, we say things like ‘there is a natural number between 3 and 5’, and trivially it follows that natural numbers exist. You can’t make arithmetical claims and in the same breath deny there are numbers. But if you ask, do numbers really exist, independently of any connection to the discourse of arithmetic, you are asking an external ontological question that is senseless. There is much debate about how to understand Carnap’s distinction (see e.g. Kraut 2016), but Price sees it fundamentally in terms of use versus mention. Using our terms as we in fact do, we commit ourselves to certain ontological implications, and others follow logically from these. These are internal matters. But  To avoid any confusion, in talking of ‘grounding’ here I do not mean the idea that has gained currency in recent analytic metaphysics and metametaphysics (seminally propopouneded by Schaffer 2009 and Fine 2001). The sense in question will be further elucidated in Chap. 2. 13

12

1 Introduction

if we merely mention a term – ask an external question about it – we are left without a context in which to assess or even make sense of what ontological implications it might have. As I understand Price here (though he doesn’t make this aspect of his thought explicit), he is tacitly assuming that Representationalism cannot provide this context. On the face of it, this might seem to provide a good way of asking a substantial ontological question independently of a proprietary discourse, i.e. Does the phrase ‘the natural number 4’ refer to anything? But it does so only if reference is substantial; if it is not, you can again only be asking, indirectly, an internal question, parasitic on accepting that there is a natural number between 3 and 5, which all would acquiesce in (at least, insofar as one accepts the autonomous integrity of arithmetical discourse).14 Either way, metaphysical ontological questions, as we might call them – ones that seek to articulate the structure of absolute reality, independent of any kind of language – lapse. This kind of view is commonly known as ontological deflationism, and has been defended in different ways by Hirsch (2011) and Thomasson (2015), among others. It is very closely related to semantic deflationism and we can for our purposes regard them as coterminal.15 Famously, Quine rejected the internal-external dichotomy, on grounds at least in part of it resting on or even being identical with the analytic-synthetic distinction. Now the latter idea seems doubtful, though exactly what the relationship between the two distinctions is a complicated question (see e.g. Bird 1995 for discussion). Suffice it here to note that while Price accepts that Quine may succeed in erasing the distinction between internal and external questions, in the sense that there may be no purely internal questions decidable by reference to meaning and empirical input, he also notes this does not imply – as many have taken it to – that Quine thereby reinstated metaphysics or non-deflationary ontology (or intended to) (see Price 2007). It remains the case for Quine that we discern our picture of reality from within science, not by reference to some philosophical account of what makes our science true. Our science is not grounded in some kind of metaphysical foundation, but is ultimately just another – albeit for Quine all-encompassing – linguistic framework that we have developed for thinking about the very world this framework serves to articulate for us.16  The parenthetical remark alludes to the idea which I maintain, and also I believe Price maintains, that it is coherent for a supporter to ARTL to hold a position more like Quine’s on which, though there are no purely internal questions, the sense in which all questions thus are ‘external’ is not a metaphysically realist sense of externality (cf. Knowles 2017; Price 2007). See also below in the text. 15  Thomasson (2014) offers arguments to this effect. 16  Thus: ‘Whatever we affirm […] we affirm as a statement within our aggregate theory of nature as we now see it; and to call a statement true is just to reaffirm it. Perhaps it is not true, and perhaps we shall find that out; but in any event there is no extra-theoretic truth, no higher truth than the truth we are claiming or aspiring to as we continue to tinker with our system of the world from within.’ (Quine 1975, 327). And again: ‘Truth is immanent, and there is no higher. We must speak from within a theory […]. What evaporates is the transcendental question of the reality of the external world – the question whether or how far our science measures up to the Ding an sich.’ (Quine 1981, 21–2). 14

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Another central component in Price’s overall case for his view that will be important in the sequel is his set of arguments against Representationalism. In contrast to Rorty’s largely metaepistemological objections, Price argues metasemantically (Price 2004, 2009c).17 One can see his project as one of critiquing Representationalism viewed as part of a broader metaphysical (i.e. metaphysically realist) naturalism (see Knowles 2011, 2014); that is, a position that sees the world as wholly natural – not ‘magical’  – and in which we can talk about things in the world in virtue of substantial relations of reference between our language and them. What are the grounds for concern here? Price presents arguments that are similar to those given by Putnam against a position that he also famously called ‘metaphysical realism’ (Putnam 1983) – and as far as I can see is the same view that ARTL rejects. Broadly, what both sets of arguments do is suggest that there is a problematic kind of self-­ referentiality about substantive notions of reference, of the relevant naturalistic variety, that renders them incoherent. One of several arguments Price employs (cf. Price 2004), which he identifies in the work of Paul Boghossian (1990), is as follows. If reference is substantive and natural in this way, then it is possible that there is nothing in the real, natural world that grounds it or vindicates it (if this is denied, the very idea of metaphysical naturalism lacks substance). We could end up, in other words, with a so-called ‘error theory’ about reference itself, in which the term ‘reference’ fails to refer to anything. But this looks incoherent, at least from the point of view of metaphysical realism, for which reference is the basis of all meaningful talk. Ergo, there must be something wrong with the idea that reference is substantial and natural. Boghossian himself opts for the idea that it cannot be natural; Price points out one can instead decline to see it as substantial. Though not in published work, Price has linked his arguments against Representationalism to Putnam’s ‘model theoretic’ arguments against MR, which strongly resemble those Price uses in their ‘self-referentialist’ character (cf. Price 1998; for more on Putnam’s arugments against MR, see Chap. 5). Though Price’s focus here is not MR per se but rather ‘placement metaphysics’, as I understand it these ideas are tightly interwoven in the way ARTL supposes (Chap. 2 will further defend the connection between Price’s arguments against placement metaphysics and the rejection of MR, a theme that will also figure in the discussion of realism in Chap. 6). Rorty clearly sees Representationalism and MR as two sides of the same coin. Though his own arguments are, as noted, based largely on epistemological considerations, he also deploys his hero Davidson’s rejection of a distinction between ‘scheme’ and ‘content’ (Davidson 1984) as further support for the idea. One part of this involves the rejection of the idea of substantial truth makers of the kind the correspondence theory of truth can seem to involve; the other essentially recapitulates Sellars’ argument against ‘the given’ (see Sect. 3.2). As I see things Davidson’s argument against the correspondence theory of truth  – based on an argument of Frege’s that if any language-external entity like a ‘fact’ makes a given sentence true,

17

 I will say more on these and other differences between Price and Rorty below.

14

1 Introduction

all such entities do (Davidson 1969) – is not as clear cut as Price’s and Putnam’s in repudiating its intended target, or indeed in undermining MR and Representationalism. Of course, some may think the latter arguments are less than decisive, so I should perhaps underline that what I mainly want to stress here is what ARTL internally takes itself to involve, which is that Representationalism is a presupposition of MR and that, in rejecting the former, we must thereby also reject the latter. Continuing with the theme of MR, it is also interesting that Price offers a couple of (later) Wittgensteinean arguments that can be seen as targeting specifically this view. The first is based on the so-called rule-following considerations, i.e. the problem of specifying what makes it the case that we are following the correct ‘rule’ in our linguistic practices, and hence are going on ‘in the same way’ when we describe things over time in the way we do (cf. Kripke 1981). Price argues (see e.g. Holton and Price 2003, Price 2019; cf. also Pettit 1991) that this shows that ultimately our subjective reactions must play a role in understanding what it is for a description we proffer to be objectively right or wrong: though we may correct each other, there are no use-transcendent facts nor any worldly ‘structure’ (cf. Lewis 1984; Sider 2014) that might dictate how we should ‘go on’ in particular cases. Now Price sees this as a ‘thin end’ of the wedge that his global expressivism constitutes, i.e., while some discourses are more dependent on our natural reactions to things than others, none are completely independent of these (Price 2019); he also links it to his account of truth (Price 1988, 2003; more on this below). As far as I can see, however, and as we shall see more fully in Chap. 2, the point stands on its own feet (if at all); that is to say, it needn’t be seen as part of Price’s programme of, at least, Hume-inspired expressivism, though I would want to see it as being a natural and indeed integral part of ARTL and its rejection of MR.18 The other Wittgensteinean argument concerns the idea there is a contingency concerning the very languages we speak (Price 2013, 53–4; cf. also Rorty 1989, ch. 1). In rejecting MR, ARTL rejects also the idea that there is any sense to the idea of a privileged ontological language or ‘book of the world’ (Sider op. cit.). What the facts are (even in the ideal) is just a function of what facts our languages discern, and our languages could have been very different (hence ARTL also distances itself from any metaphysical understanding of the early Wittgenstein’s idea that the world is ‘the totality of facts’). However this contingency has to be delicately handled. Acknowledging it doesn’t mean, Price tell us, that if we spoke different languages that the ‘facts would then have been different, only that […] we would have made

 Cp. Shapiro (2021), who also points out how this ‘global subjectivist’ aspect of Price’s view, as Shapiro calls it, is distinct from his global expressivism. Indeed, Shapiro argues that seeing the point in terms of a distinct subjective reaction to some given objective reality, which would seem to be Price’s rendering, is inconsistent with his rejection of Representationalism, i.e. the idea that there is some substantive story to be told about reference. If that is the case, then we need some other way of thinking about the point (perhaps along the lines of McDowell 1984). For present purposes all I want to insist here is that the point seems distinct from an expressivist commitment, even though it is an important part of ARTL. 18

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15

factual claims different from […] any that we actually make’ (Price 2013, 54). Thinking different languages would yield different facts is another use-mention fallacy. He also thinks this view thereby evades the force of Davidson’s famous argument against the coherence of the idea of conceptual schemes, for the relevant alternative conceptual schemes are not on Price’s view interpretable.19 One might of course have qualms about all these arguments and the others Price uses. Though I will return to the ideas above at several junctures, systematically addressing these qualms will not be my main focus in this book, something that would require at least another volume; rather, I want (for the most part) to presuppose them and ask what kind of wider view we can construct in the wake of so doing. (The strategy is similar in Chap. 5, where I will present Putnam’s arguments against MR, but focus on looking at what follows if you accept them.) Of course, I also hope that if the view I construct seems tenable, this will also lend increased credibility to the starting points. The foregoing offers only an outline of ARTL, but one I hope that readers will find serviceable as an introduction; many of the themes will be elaborated on in the coming chapters. Before turning to a presentation of these, however, I want to end this section with four short supplementary discussions to further clarify how I understand ARTL, or how one might understand it in relation to its overall principles. The first concerns the relationship between Rorty’s and Price’s critiques of representationalism, or Representationalism. The second concerns the relationship between thought and language for ARTL, and the third its understanding of truth and meaning. The fourth offers a brief discussion of why investigation of ARTL is something that I think should appear worthwhile, at least for a philosopher with certain metaphilosophical sensibilities. (i) Rorty versus Price: I mentioned above that Price’s arguments against representationalism (or Representationalism) rest on metasemantics rather than, like Rorty’s, metaepistemology. Price’s are thus plausibly more trenchant insofar as relatively few philosophers today espouse a foundational epistemology (at least, in the classical internalist sense), and would not see this as a presupposition of Representationalism (or indeed of a substantive epistemology). If we can make sense of our thought latching semantically onto reality in terms made available by our conception of that reality itself – causally, say – then that would be good enough for most Representationalists. However, the question naturally arises whether Price shares or should share Rorty’s critique of classical epistemology, or, more generally, whether the latter (classical epistemology) really involves Representationalism.20 I think the answers here at least to the second and third question should be affirmative. As for the first, when it

 There is more one might say about the issues of this paragraph than this brief overview provides; since they are relevant to understanding ARTL’s realism, I return to them in Chap. 6. 20  We can perhaps more safely assume Rorty would endorse (or at least not object to) Price’s metasemantical arguments, not least insofar as he explicitly expressed sympathy with Price’s overall project (Rorty 2007). 19

16

1 Introduction

comes to analyticity, Price seems, as we noted above, happy to go Quinean, though he does not explicitly endorse this line (Price 2007). He has had less to say about distinctively empirical knowledge or ‘the given’, though has sought to ally himself with Sellars (Price 2015), who of course is the originator of the idea that there can be no such thing.21 In any case, I take it one might in principle seek to combine the ideas of Price’s outlined above with a view that didn’t reject analyticity and/or the idea of distinctive empirical knowledge.22 However, given the overall spirit of ARTL, it would strike me as odd if any subscriber to it cleaved to these ideas, at least insofar they are meant to involve a mental contact with some non-mental reality. The ideas of (classical) foundationalist epistemology are certainly distinct from the ideas Price criticizes, but if they are combined with a position that rejects idealism, as ARTL does, they do end up in a similar place, it seems to me. To put it bluntly: foundationalist epistemology (in non-idealist form) maintains that in virtue of contact between thought/talk and mind-independent reality at a certain level,23 certain discourses provide us with our basis for justifying and understanding the truth content of all talk and thought. But if that was how things were, Price’s discourse pluralism surely wouldn’t have much going for it. I conclude that Rorty’s metaepistemological and Price’s metasemantical arguments naturally supplement one another as part of a more general case against Representationalism.

 Whether Sellars was true to his own rejection, and what exactly his rection commits one to, are further matters: see e.g. Maher 2012, McDowell 2009a, b, as well as various discussions later in this book. 22  Thomasson is perhaps an example; see Chap. 7. (As we shall also see there, I think in fact that it isn’t totally clear that there is not a distinctive category of analytic truth that ARTL might accept. However, this would have to be one that divorced it from anything to do with epistemology i.e. as providing a priori warrant of some kind. In the current context, it is the latter understanding of analyticity that is at issue.) 23  The paradigm of this kind of view is something like the acquaintance-based empiricsm of Bertrand Russell (see Russell 1912). In light of this, I should however consider a possible objection. I characterised Representationalism above as the idea that there are semantic relations between thought/language and reality. But might there not be a more primitive, non-content-­ involving relationship between our minds and the world – acquaintance in Russell’s sense, or at least a closely related sense? Moreover, isn’t a view which stresses this itself a form of anti-­ representationalism? Not in the sense in which ARTL is anti-representationalist, though this is a point that I think needs stressing in the context of a more general discussion about different forms of contemporary anti-representationalist philosophy (something I will try to provide in Chap. 3). The basic point is that ARTL rejects any kind of view which connects thought up to thought-­ independent objects, at least in other than purely causal terms. A further position which may seem to challenge my divorcement of ARTL from any kind of epistemological foundationalism, though in a different way, is John McDowell’s, on which perception has conceptual content – and thus is not meant to constitute any kind of ‘given’ – but nevertheless retains a distinctively receptive nature, and is thus in a position to ground distinctively non-perceptual thought (McDowell 1994). McDowell’s position will also be taken up in Chaps. 3 and 4. 21

1.2  Anti-Representationalism About Thought and Language

17

(ii) Language and thought: The position I have outlined is one I have called anti-­ representationalism about thought and language. This may prompt the old question, which of the two has primacy for ARTL, and in what sense? Here I want to remain in principle agnostic about these questions (as also Price does, see e.g. his 2011a, b, 231 and 273). Though it probably seems natural for a position like ARTL with its stress on use to think of (presumably public) language as being the primary focus, not least in relation to the theory of meaning, there are also more internalistic accounts which are compatible with rejecting Representationalism, at least in principle – that is, with rejecting the idea that language is fundamentally to be understood semantically, in terms of substantive relations to bits of the world. The obvious example here is Noam Chomsky’s version of linguistic internalism, which Price cites approvingly as a possible conception of what he calls ‘i-representation’ (Price 2011b, 103 fn; for explanation of what he means by ‘i-representationalism’, see Chap. 2). I do not want to rule this view out, though nor will I be concerned with showing how the rest of what I have to say might relate to it, and I will be assuming in the following a public language first perspective, if only for ease of exposition. (Of course, in some sense Chomsky is also a language-first theorist too, so for completeness’ sake I should also mention that ARTL might in principle be combinable with an internalist or even externalist view that sees thought as primary; but here the theoretical possibilities that don’t involve tacit commitment to Representationalism seem less clear.) (iii) Truth and meaning: I said above that Rorty has a deflationary though distinctive conception of truth. This may sound surprising to some in view of his derisive and dismissive attitude to the notion and his espousal of pragmatism, which traditionally sees truth as tied to what we can ideally justify or in some other way make use of. However, I think this is to a large extent just another example of provocative Rortian rhetoric. Truth is not for Rorty a separate aim or goal from that of justification, but it is a distinct concept, having identifiable disquotational, endorsing and, in particular, cautionary usages (Rorty 1986). Thus, something may be justified as we understand things now, but not turn out to be so to future and different audiences; may not, as we would ordinarily put it, turn out be true after all. That is all the idea ‘justified but possibly not true’ amounts to for Rorty – but it is not nothing. Whether this amounts to an adequate understanding of truth is another matter – though one, I believe, that is independent of accepting ARTL itself. In my view Rorty’s disquotational understanding itself forces us to see that claims can be true or false whether or not they are justified; there is more distance between the concepts than he acknowledges (Knowles 2018a, cp. Wright 1991, ch. 1). Price is more radically opposed to Rorty, arguing that truth is a demonstrably distinct aim of belief beyond that of justification (Price 2003; the reasons for this are similar to those which lead him to reject Horwich’s minimalist conception of truth). Price makes a similar point via the idea of no fault disagreements (Price 1988). According to him, we can apply a deflationary notion of truth to claims like ‘this chocolate ice-cream tastes great’; we can also in a

18

1 Introduction

sense see these as justified (for me, here and now, say). Nevertheless, if someone else disagrees with this there need be no question of either being at fault; of having made a mistake. However, we also do apply a further norm in certain cases, such as morality or science: here disagreements are not merely shrugged off, we see them as indicating a fault in one party or the other and hence as in need of being resolved. This leads to Price’s notion of truth as ‘convenient friction’ (Price 2003): it is a notion of a belief being correct or incorrect in a bivalent, ‘transcendent’ manner, but nevertheless one we have adopted for pragmatic reasons: to induce a drive to find reaons for one’s view, and perhaps find reconciliation with those one disagrees with.24 Again, whether this argument of Price’s against Rorty (and others) is successful is a further matter.25 Moreover, nothing of what I have to say here will depend on adopting any particular theory of truth; I assume only a common sense ‘realist’ but also deflationist notion, i.e. one that that does not reduce it to any actual or idealised agreement, nor to correspondence or coherence. I also abstract away from the issue of no fault disagreements, and indeed whether there can be such things (at least, where one can meaningfully apply the truth predicate). Price seems to see the account of truth he offers on the basis of this phenomenon as integral to his overall anti-representationalist programme, but I have not managed to see what the essential connection is, and in any case believe what I have to say in this book is unaffected by consideration of these issues. The issue of meaning is another one I want to stay as neutral as possible on, within the parameters set by ARTL. Horwich (1998) argues that his minimalism about truth, which precludes it from having an explanatory role, should be coupled with a theory on which we give a reductive account of meaning in terms of use (one he also seems to think might be seen as a form of internalist approach to meaning along the lines urged by Chomsky: see Horwich 2003). Price thinks this reductive line backfires in relation to the general goals of deflationism, i.e. that with substantial meaning will come substantial truth, willy nilly; what deflationists need is rather a view that explains meaning attri-

 As I noted above, Price also connects his theory of truth to the consequences he draws from the rule-following considerations. However, just as what Shapiro (op. cit.) calls Price’s ‘global subjectivism’ would seem an independent commitment from his global expressivism, the idea that that either of these is beholden to his theory of truth (or vice versa) seems to me at the very least unclear, and I will at least not assume it here. 25  Macarthur (2020) defends Rorty against Price. One might also question the pragmatist credentials of Price’s truth norm. The view is that in some kinds of case but not others it will be useful to care about who is right about a question – something that goes beyond any evident instrumental value making that judgment may have. But why should this be? If it is because we thereby latch onto mind-independent facts, we seem to may have the beginning of an explanation. But then it seems a fact is more than a true proposition, a result which sits uncomfortably with semantic deflationism, or at least ARTL’s rejection of MR. Perhaps other explanations can be given but none readily spring to (my) mind. (This argument would obviously require a fuller development to be fully convincing as an objection to Price’s view!) 24

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19

bution in terms of things we do with language (Price 1997a, see also below). However, it is not at all clear that ARTL needs to accept Horwich’s starting point in any case. Thus, Michael Williams, whose overall orientation is very close to that of Rorty and Price and hence ARTL, argues that the Davidsonean idea of basing a theory of meaning on a holistically constrained theory of truth can be maintained with a deflationary concept of truth (Williams 1999; Gross 2015), and that this is preferable to Horwich’s reductionist approach to meaning which specifies a meaning property for every individual word (Williams 2007; though see also Williams 2013 for a somewhat different kind of use-­ theoretic proposal based on ideas from Sellars).26 In his more recent writings Price has embraced Brandom’s account of meaning as based on practices of giving and asking for reasons and deontic scorekeeping (Brandom 1994, 1998; Price 2011a; Price et al. 2013). A central issue here is the question of whether use theories can be suitably normative and naturalistic in character, at least without lapsing into some kind of Representationalism. Price seems to think Brandom’s view offers the prospects of such a line, but whether this is so is somewhat unclear in view of Brandom’s explicit disavowal of naturalism. Having said that, Brandom’s anti-naturalism is not of a strong, Platonistic or Cartesian kind, and McDowell, who also espouses a form of use theory, albeit a more quietist one, sees his own view as both irreducibly normative and naturalistic (McDowell 1984, 1994). Perhaps such a naturalism is within the scope of ARTL’s common sense naturalism or could be argued to be so. The issues here are complex (for a somewhat more detailed overview of some of these ideas and use-theoretic approaches to meaning generally, see Loeffler 2009), but I won’t have much to say about them in the following, rather simply assuming that some kind of deflationary-cum-use theory of meaning can be defended in a naturalistically respectable way (though the relation between in particular Brandom’s and Price’s views will be taken up in Chap. 2). (iv) Why might one subscribe to ARTL at all?  – someone might finally ask. There is a lot that could be said here. A full defence of the position would need to provide a more rigorous defence of amongst other things semantic deflationism, the arguments against epistemological foundationalism, and the arguments against substantial theories of reference that Price and others have provided. However, this book is not aimed at systematically justifying ARTL from the ground-up, so to speak (if that were possible, which even by its own lights is probably doubtful), but rather exploring its relationship to other kinds of anti-representationalism and clarifying its status on various broader issues.

 Indeed, it is perhaps not even ruled out that Davidson’s line on meaning might be compatible with ARTL. That is: even if Davidson is right that the concept of truth is primitive and therefore not deflationary (Davidson 1990), and also that meaning has to be understood in terms of a truth theory, this may still count as a use theory in the broad sense of ‘use’ ARTL accepts. Davidson’s is at least definitively not a Representationalist theory. 26

20

1 Introduction

If you just don’t like it and are happy with your own alternative philosophy, then probably little of what I have to say here will be of interest. There are however two more things that I want to say, and I think should be said, in answer to the question that entitles this subsection. The first concerns the status of ARTL itself. A critical reader might wonder whether the position as I have defined it amounts to little more than a hodgepodge of ideas from Rorty and Price; moreover, insofar as it excludes or remains non-committal on other ideas of these thinkers, ones that they would see as integral to their own philosophical positions, and also insofar as I am not going to defend the position in detail, it might appear both gerrymandered and philosophically uninteresting. Putting aside the subjective aspect of what might be found ‘interesting’, I think this objection can be answered by pointing out that ARTL is a distinctive and significant position insofar as (a) there is an identifiable anti-­ representationalist position about thought and language in the current literature, one that Rorty and Price are the central proponents of (and others, such as Williams, also subscribe to) and (b) that ARTL can make a plausible claim to articulate what this position amounts to insofar as it involves the highest common factor of Rorty’s and Price’s somewhat different overall views (along with syntheses of things they individually espouse compatible with this denominator). Thus, for example, since Rorty does not espouse an expressivistic programme for understanding our discourses, while Price does not espouse a rejection of theoretical philosophy, neither of these features are defintional of ARTL. ARTL also remains agnostic on matters where the thinkers disagree, such as exactly how we should understand truth. What we get by this method is, in my opinion, something at least very close to ARTL. It is true that Price has had more to say by way of positive characterization of the view, as is reflected in the above, but I take it that none of this are things Rorty did or would object to (except insofar as he might generally question the value of such theorizing in philosophy). The second thing concerns the wider metaphilosophical dialectic surrounding ARTL. Though I take it this won’t be news for most of those who are reading this, ARTL is, at least in large measure, meant to be a demystifying, therapeutic philosophy; one aimed, not at giving the kind of answers to big questions that philosophy traditionally has aimed to do, but at showing how, given that they have appeared largely unanswerable, we can avoid having to do this – though also without merely shrugging one’s shoulders, or opting out of the whole problem complex (we want to avoid Blackburn’s ‘soggy pluralism’). This is an approach that I think we can first clearly identify in modern philosophy in Hume, though possibly also further back in the ideas of some of the ancient sceptics. ARTL seeks to build on this broad tradition, in a particular way. Of course, Kant could perhaps also be seen as fitting this ‘therapeutic’ job description in that he too thought we had to radically reconceive the job of metaphysics; what it could achieve and how. For Kant, however, this led to a philosophical system that involved postulating an unknowable reality an sich to make sense of our other rational discourses and practices, as well as certain

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21

distinctive kinds of philosophical knowledge – contrary to even a broad naturalism. The Ding an sich has always been something subsequent thinkers found hard to swallow and is also something ARTL would eschew. How to draw the lines from Kant and onwards as to which of the great names offers systematic philosophy and which therapeutic is a complex question that I won’t go into here. What remains today, both in more popular culture and also academic philosophy, is a central tension in our conception of ourselves and the world we take ourselves to inhabit that is at least similar to that Kant took himself to inherit from the scientific revolution. The modern formulation of this tension has been most famously articulated by Sellars in his distinction between the ‘scientific’ and ‘manifest’ images of reality (Sellars 1963): we have, on the one hand, the picture yielded by contemporary physics and perhaps other natural sciences, and, on the other, the picture that builds on our intuitive understanding of ourselves and the world around us: human beings as rational, language-­ using, experiencing, morally aware, free agents in a world of coloured, noisy, extended objects moving through time, of social institutions, and so on and so forth. Much of Sellars’ complex oeuvre attempts to give a philosophy that reconciles these two images in a ‘synoptic’ view, but more generally very much contemporary theoretical philosophy can be seen as seeking to understand how things like rationality, experience, morality, colours, modality and so on fit into or, as it is often put, can be ‘placed’ in a world that at the same time seems to have a complete description, in principle, in physics – and moreover a description that seems to be simply at odds with acknowledging that things on the first list can exist, as such, at all. An updated Kantian solution might still be applied to this legacy of the scientific revolution – as it is probably still appropriate to think of the contemporary problem, in spite of advances in physics and (albeit perhaps to a lesser extent) our understanding of ourselves. By ‘Kantian’ I mean one that does not necessarily understand our knowledge in precisely the way he did, but nevertheless invokes the idea that there is some underlying reality which different perspectives may provide equally valid but in some way conflicting accounts of. Kuhn famously saw science in this way, and the idea of a Kantian naturalism has been defended by a number of pragmatist philosophers (see Pihlström op. cit. and the thinkers he discusses). As far as I can see the main problem for such views remains that however natural it may seem to talk of ultimate reality being susceptible to several valid but incommensurable descriptions, we still bump up against the problem of having to countenance unknowable or even unconceivable things in themselves – things about which we can say and know nothing, in principle. I will have more to say of relevance to this Kantian problematic in Chaps. 4 and 6, but for now the point is just that ARTL, as a more purely therapeutic philosophy, does aim to do without such ideas. For others the whole point of philosophical activity is to tackle the difficult placement issues more or less head-on – even if all our attempts have so far failed. For many such philosophers, in lieu of new positive suggestions as to how we might solve them, philosophy at least needs to give an understanding

22

1 Introduction

of reality – still often taken to be fundamentally physical – as the reality we take it to be – not least to give us some faith in the very idea of knowledge or justified belief in an absolute sense. As we have seen, ARTL rejects the metaphysical realism that underlies this (and the Representationalism it takes MR to presuppose). But in terms of motivating ARTL, the point is that these tasks are tall orders indeed, whilst – as most also tend to think – the very prospect of metaphysically naturalistic philosophy failing to vindicate our common sense categories is too terrible to be envisaged (if indeed it is thinkable). It seems to follow that if we can glimpse a path that allows us to demur at solving these problems, though without simply saying nothing about them, and also avoids the Ding an sich – then surely we should explore it and see what it can offer? That then is why ARTL is worth looking into and taking seriously, in my opinion. Of course, it may be that its promises are false, or that in delivering on them it encounters insuperable objections or gives implausible solutions, or that its overall response is too vapid to count as philosophy at all. I don’t for the record think it is obvious that none of this is the case. Moreover, unlike Rorty, I do want to assess ARTL as a broad kind of theoretical philosophy, offering, in some broad sense, hypotheses for testing, not as a mere rallying cry for a different kind of activity entirely. It is in this spirit I invite you, gentle reader, to see if it is worth the candle…

1.3 The Rest of the Book Chapter 2 is devoted to a fuller presentation, discussion and critique of Price’s global expressivism (GE). It focuses firstly on Price’s argument against object naturalism (essentially what I called above metaphysical naturalism) through the rejection of Representationalism, and discusses to what extent the former view might survive doing the latter. It also considers Price’s alternative subject naturalist view and how this leads to GE. Having defended Price’s argument against object naturalism from some recent objections in the literature, I discuss more broadly what ARTL and subject naturalism are and how they should be seen as related. This discussion leads me to suggest, firstly: that ARTL is not constitutively dependent on GE – other forms of it are coherently possible; and secondly: that the particular kind of subject naturalism Price recommends might not be the only or best one. Chapters 3 and 4 form a unit and together serve several different purposes. Chapter 3 offers a survey and to an extent my own evaluation of two further ‘representationalism versus anti-representationalism’ debates that are prominent in current philosophical thinking  – one concerning perceptual experience, the other cognitive science  – and discusses how different positions here relate to different kinds of ARTL.  It also suggests that we can see enactivism  – a form of anti-­ representationalist cognitive science that has also been proferred as a theory of perceptual experience  – as capable of providing an alternative and potentially more satisfying form of subject naturalistic substantiation for ARTL than Price’s GE

1.3  The Rest of the Book

23

(which at least in certain respects builds on ideas from representationalist cognitive science). Enactivism can be seen as grounding the idea that we can draw a naturalistically kosher distinction between something like a world for us and the world in itself, a distinction which is also central to an anti-representationalist view I identify in the debate about perceptual experience that I call phenomenological externalism. On my understanding of ARTL, discourses about the world for us are those that are grounded in our embodied engagement with our environment, as conceived along enactivist lines, while the latter are those that are not so grounded but seek to articulate whatever such enactivist explanations presuppose, ultimately in terms of fundamental mathematical physics. As I understand it, the world in itself is not ‘reality’ or Kant’s Ding an sich: what is really real. The truths and entities of the world for us have just as much claim to that title, given ARTL’s rejection of MR. In this way, enactivism, phenomenological externalism and ARTL form, I argue, a mutually supporting cluster of anti-representationalist views. Chapter 4 pursues these ideas further. It aims to clarify how idea of the world for us relates to the enactivist idea of the umwelt – which is applicable to many different kinds of organism, not just humans – and thereby how my view can avoid a form of the ‘myth of the given’. It also seeks to clarify and justify talk of the world in itself in view of my rejection of the idea of ‘reality’. I then take up several ‘matter arising’ including how my ideas relate to embodied but apparently still represetantionalist forms of cognitive science (notably, the recently much discussed predictive processing paradigm), what role notions of content and knowledge play on my understanding of enactivism and experience, and, finally, how exactly – to what extent and in what way – my form of subject naturalist ARTL is different from Price’s GE. Chapter 5 is a relatively self-standing essay that takes up questions closely associated with the issues of the foregoing chapters from a different angle, extending the discussion to various other thinkers who have thoughts related to those I have put forward. Specifically, it aims to independently motivate the idea that we should and can distinguish between a world for us and a world in itself via a consideration of the implications of Putnam’s argument about the brain in a vat – which is further related to ARTL itself in that this argument is used as part of Putnam’s argument against MR. I introduce the issues through the lens of Tim Button’s recent book The Limits of Realism (Button 2013). According to Putnam’s classic attack on MR, we cannot be brains in vats, and this, along with his model theoretic arguments, shows MR to be incoherent. Button endorses this line, but develops a position on its basis on which this leaves many other sceptical scenarios open, something which means that though we cannot accept MR, nor can we accept any kind of anti-realism of the sort Putnam also defended. I suggest this position is dialectically unstable and go on to argue that accepting Putnam’s arguments is compatible with allowing a different sense in which we could be brains in vats, along the lines developed by David Chalmers (2005). Chalmers’ idea involves something similar to the split between the world for us and the world in itself that I argue for in Chaps. 3 and 4. But, in accord with my enactivist grounding of this idea, I think Chalmers’ line in turn should make way for what I call, inspired by Hubert Dreyfus, an existential phenomenological take on the brains in vats thought experiment (Dreyfus and Dreyfus

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1 Introduction

2005). I end by briefly outlining how my conception of the distinction between the world for us and the world in itself diverges from Dreyfus’ own understanding of this kind of distinction as this is presented in his book with Charles Taylor Retriveing Realism (Dreyfus and Taylor 2015). Chapters 6 and 7 take up more purely metaphysical issues in connection with specifically ARTL, and can be appreciated somewhat independently of the arguments of Chaps. 3–5. Chapter 6 takes up the question of realism, arguing that ARTL is compatible with as fully a realist picture as one can coherently hope to have. In this my view resembles that of people like Michael Devitt, John Searle and Horwich who have argued that the realism issue is quite distinct from any semantic or metasemantic theory, such as the correspondence or deflationary theory of truth. However, I will argue – here siding with Putnam and Price (as I interpret him) – that precisely this line is too glib, and that appreciating what an optimal form of realism amounts to must proceed via an appreciation of the incoherence of MR. I go on to argue that ARTL’s deflationary-cum-use theory of meaning and truth is compatible with all the realism one might want, and further that ARTL need have and should have no truck with any kind of Kantianism which sees us in some way falling short of absolute reality in putting forward our truth-evaluable claims. This is an idea I think, in spite of his protestations to the contrary, infects the conceptual relativity view of Putnam, which towards the end of his life was what he saw as his deepest insight into why MR makes no sense. My line, and Price’s I take it, differs from Putnam’s here, and I attempt to show that the idea of conceptual relativity is not just worryingly Kantian but also undermotivated by the examples and arguments Putnam gives. The final Chap. 7 turns to how we might understand metaphysical enquiry within ARTL – a central and traditional pursuit of philosophy, arguably. My starting point is Amie Thomasson’s so-called ‘conceptualist’ view of metaphysics: a view of this as either descriptive and ‘easy’, or ‘difficult’ and normative (see e.g. Thomasson 2017a). Thomasson connects her deflationary stance on semantics and ontology (in line with ARTL’s precepts) with a sceptical take on the idea of epistemically substantive metaphysics. Seemingly substantive metaphysical debates are for her to be seen as veiled ‘metalinguistic negotiations’ (Plunkett and Sundell 2013), or as an attempt at ‘conceptual engineering’ (Burgess et  al. 2019). I will argue that Thomasson’s bifurcation is implausible, would have unfortunate consequences for philosophy considered as discipline, and in any case is not forced upon us if one embraces ARTL. ARTL can accept the idea of metaphysical enquiry in a more or less traditional sense, albeit this will be limited in various (and independently motivated) ways. In the final section, I draw some connections between these limitations and the ideas developed in Chaps. 3 and 4. The overall position that emerges from these discussions is one that is, I hope, philosophically and metaphilosophically both interesting and attractive. Though no doubt in need of fuller embellishment to be ultimately convincing, I believe it provides a novel way of thinking about how language, world and experience interrelate, avoiding many of the pitfalls that have plagued previous philosophical thinking about these things, while also allowing us meaningfully to continue doing many of the things we have traditionally been concerned to do as philosophers.

Chapter 2

Global Expressivism

Abstract  This chapter is a critical discussion global expressivism (GE), the version of ARTL that Price defends. It revolves around two main issues. The first is Price’s idea that by rejecting Representationalism we can, without abjuring naturalism, sidestep metaphysical questions concerning how entities and phenomena of the common sense world fit into the natural world, in the way many naturalists and physicalists take it they must to be real. I defend this argument of Price’s against various recent critiques. The second concerns the issue of whether GE is the best or only way of defending and/or substantiating ARTL. I argue, pace Price, that GE is not the only coherent way of defending ARTL, and that even if one adopts his subject naturalistic approach, there are other ways of substantiating ARTL than GE.

2.1 Introduction This chapter focuses on global expressivism (GE), the version of anti-­ representationalism about thought and language (ARTL) that Huw Price defends. It revolves around two main issues. The first concerns Price’s idea that GE can, without abjuring naturalism, nevertheless sidestep metaphysical questions concerning how entities and phenomena of the common sense world fit into the natural world, in the way many naturalists and physicalists take it they must to be real and our talk about them to be fully knowledge-involving. The second concerns the issue of whether GE is the best or only way of defending and/or elaborating ARTL – which is something like Price’s view, construed in my terms. Much of the background for GE has already been sketched in Chap. 1 (since it is, I am taking it, at least a form of ARTL, and indeed much of what inspires the latter comes from Price’s writings on GE). As we have seen, according to ARTL, Representationalism is a presupposition of metaphysical realism, the idea that there is some wholly mind-independent reality with its own intrinsic structure to which all our truth-aimed thought and talk is ultimately responsible. Though I also read this into Price’s view, what he has argued specifically in relation to the possibility of metaphysics is that what are known as placement problems  – as standardly © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Knowles, Representation, Experience, and Metaphysics, Synthese Library 473, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26924-0_2

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understood – are dependent on accepting Representationalism. Placement problems concern how entities of the everyday, common sense world like mental states, meanings, moral values, modalities (‘the four Ms’: Price 1997b) and so on fit into or can be ‘placed’ in the natural or physical world. The issue is how to construe the relevant entities and/or claims in terms of underlying natural or physical ones, opening the way to theories like reductionism or eliminativism, or perhaps a response such as non-cognitivism or fictionalism (which deny the talk in question should be understood as articulating literal truths). For Price this metaphysical project – object naturalism as he calls it1 – lapses once one relinquishes Representationalism, something which he thinks a naturalistic approach to language – what he calls a subject naturalist enquiry – suggests we should. As part of this subject naturalism, we can nevertheless continue to aim to address placement problems, but now understood in a pragmatist or anti-representationalist ‘key’, as Price often puts it. This is the project of GE.  GE can thus be seen as a philosophy that serves to insulate the common sense world from answerability to scientific facts without having to seeing it as something unnatural. I am, as I made clear in Chap. 1, in broad sympathy with many of Price’s arguments and ideas. I also think the argument as just sketched can be defended against several objections in the recent literature that in various way reject the idea that an assumption of  Representationalism is necessary to do metaphysics. On the other hand, I do not think Price makes totally clear how GE as a whole is meant to, as it were, hang together. Moreover, in light of this, I believe the expressivist project that his particular subject naturalism involves can appear non-obligatory, and even sub-­ optimal. Assuming that we remain committed to ARTL, this might mean we have to stick with relaxed realism (McGrath op. cit) – which might or might not amount to a ‘soggy pluralism’ (see Chap. 1 and below). I will also suggest that, in any case, there is the possibility for something different from the particular kind of subject naturalism – global expressivism – that Price understands as endemic to ARTL. It is such a different subject naturalism that Chaps. 3 and 4 aim to identify, through investigation of forms of anti-representationalist philosophy and science relating to experience and cognition. The chapter is divided into four further sections. Section 2.2 lays out Price’s argument that object naturalism and placement metaphysics depend on Representationalism. Section 2.3 takes up several objections that have been made to this argument, and responds to them on Price’s behalf. Section 2.4 takes up how the various parts of GE are meant to ‘hang together’, arguing that it is not, pace Price, the only way of understanding a position that subscribes to the basic precepts of ARTL, and that relaxed realism should remain on the table. Section 2.5 suggests that even if we seek to go beyond relaxed realism, GE is not obviously the best or only way of doing so, paving the way for Chaps. 3 and 4.

 Others might call it ‘metaphysical naturalism’ or ‘physicalism’. The former label is perhaps unfortunate to the extent it suggests the view is necessarily a form of metaphysical realism, which as we shall see I don’t think is the case. 1

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2.2 The Argument against Object Naturalism and for Global Expressivism In his paper ‘Naturalism without representationalism’ (Price 2004), Price mounts a two-pronged attack on object naturalism (ON) by a) arguing that it depends on Representationalism and b) casting doubt on Representationalism. (Price 2009c, and Menzies & Price 2009 cover somewhat similar ground.) ON involves the view that all truth or knowledge is fundamentally of natural scientific character; that ultimately ‘all there is is the world studied by science’ or ‘that all genuine knowledge is scientific knowledge’ (Price 2004, p. 185). The main problem for ON according to Price is not so much that it is false, but that it is, or at least is in danger of being, incoherent, or at least irrational or unmotivated. Price’s attack on ON is thus in fact a more general attack on the idea of a certain kind of metaphysical project, naturalistic or otherwise, that lies behind it, though we will for the most part just be considering the naturalistic version.2 Price’s reasoning proceeds via a dilemma for ON: one can understand ON as having either a linguistic (or conceptual) starting point, or a material one; but on neither understanding is ON coherently or at least rationally motivated. Though the latter understanding might appear more straightforward, and indeed what ON as a doctrine states, it is precisely one of Price’s aims to show that the common understanding and motivation for ON is not as straightforward as many have assumed. Price considers the linguistic understanding first. He argues that many metaphysical issues typically start in the linguistic realm as questions about what we mean by this or that term or locution, how we might analyse it and so on. At some point however a supporter of ON who adopts this starting point will have to assume that certain linguistic items represent bits of extra-linguistic reality – in order to take us from language to the world, allowing us thereby to ask what (say) moral value is in terms of the underlying natural reality. Thinking of this theory at the level of propositions or claims (like ‘what he did was wrong’) ON thus becomes, on the linguistic construal, the idea that all the substantive truth makers of our various claims are natural truth-makers – i.e. states of affairs that physics or at least natural science (in some suitably circumscribed sense) can countenance, and which account for or constitute whatever truth we are concerned with. According to Price, this understanding of ON is defended by those who cleave to the so-called ‘Canberra plan’, such as David Lewis and Frank Jackson (cf. Jackson 1998; Menzies & Price op. cit.). ON, thus understood, depends on there being substantive reference and more generally truth-­ making relations, that is, ones which explain meaning by relating bits of language  The kind of project in question can be seen as invidious in operating with a distinction between, on the one hand, categories that are seen as fundamental, and, on the other, those that are not and hence have to placed within the world view constituted by the former. Exactly what kind of such a metaphysics object naturalism involves – that is, where exactly it draws its invidious distinction – will not be directly relevant to our discussion here; the most prominent version is probably a form of physicalism, but a broader, non-exclusively physics-based conception of what is fundamental in the natural world is of course also possible. 2

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to bits of the world – that is, on Representationalism (see Chap. 1). Thus, when we say that experiences or values are ultimately natural or physical, we are saying that the referents of terms like ‘pain’, ‘good’ and so on are physical or natural in nature, and that claims like ‘this hurts’ or ‘what he did was wrong’ have physicalistic or naturalistic truth-makers. Elsewhere Price has used the following analogy to convey the underlying idea behind the linguistic construal of ON: Imagine a child’s puzzle book, arranged like this. The left-hand page contains a large sheet of peel-off stickers, and the right-hand page shows a line drawing of a complex scene. For each sticker – the koala, the boomerang, the Sydney Opera House, and so on – the reader needs to find the unique outline in the drawing with the corresponding shape. The aim of the game is to place all the stickers in their correct locations, in this sense. Now think of the right-hand page as the world, and the stickers as the collection of all the statements we take to be true of the world. For each such statement, it seems natural to ask what makes it true; what fact in the world has precisely the corresponding “shape”. Within the scope of this simple but intuitive analogy, matching true statements to the world seems a lot like matching stickers to the line drawing. (Price 2011a, 3).

It is worth pausing here to stress that Representationalism is not merely the idea of there being truth-makers and reference and truth-making relations. Semantic deflationists, like Price, can accept that moral states of affairs exist and make moral statements true or false – in a trivial, deflationary sense.3 Rather, Representationalism assumes that there is some non-trivial specification of reference that also allows for non-trivial truth-makers, in a way that in turn makes space for ON. The sticker book analogy brings this out insofar as there is more than a trivial correspondence between the shapes on the left and the lines on the right; what it takes for a sticker to be placed correctly – to refer – is thus far from trivial. Another clarification that needs to be made, at least as I understand the dialectic, is that the argument presupposes that the idea that ON could be vindicated purely through conceptual analysis is quixotic. That is, though analysing our everyday concepts might well help to show how they relate to physical reality, the idea that they might analytically reduce without residue to purely physical or natural ones is not on the cards. If this were possible, ON would perhaps not have to take the representationalist ‘leap’ from language to the world (we could simply gesture at the deflationary truth makers of physics). But I take it few physicalists if any believe that such a reduction is possible (cf. Stoljar 2021). Price thinks ON has a clear content when construed on the linguistic model. However, there is just one hitch: Representationalism is not something you get for free, rather it is a substantial theoretical claim about how language functions. Thus one needs at least what Price calls a subject naturalistic enquiry – one into the underlying nature of human language and thought, construed itself as a scientific project, in a broad sense  – prior to declaring ON viable. Moreover, Representationalism is something Price thinks we should be suspicious of as such  Whether there is on this view an asymmetry in explanatory direction in a biconditional like ‘p’ is true iff p is a further matter that I will not broach here. 3

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a theory of language (for reasons we surveyed in Chap. 1); moreover he thinks there is a promising alternative to it, semantic deflationism, which avoids the problems that infect Representationalism. Assuming, as we are doing insofar as we are accepting ARTL, the basic correctness of this line, a linguistic understanding of ON, though clear in principle, looks to be ruled out. But is ON really dependent on the linguistic starting point, and thus on Representationalism? Price turns next to the material understanding of ON, according to which ‘we do metaphysics without semantic crutches’ (Price 2004, 196), i.e. by invoking the referents of our terms directly and asking how they can be natural, and in what way. Here he argues there are two fundamental barriers to a vindication of ON. One rests on the idea that a supporter of ON should be able to frame an argument for her position. Such an argument can be mounted through the Canberra planners’ idea that all semantic roles, or variables, in so-called ‘Ramseyfied’ versions of the theories for the concepts in question have to be filled by naturalistic occupiers4; but this takes us back to the linguistic conception, and the problems with Representationalism (ibid., 197). Without this framework, it is just not clear how one would frame a general argument for ON, and hence how it can get off the ground (ibid.). The second problem is that the possibility of a deflationary treatment of discourse shows that ‘the cat is out of the bag’, as Price puts it (ibid., 195). Given semantic deflationism we do not need to think in terms of any worldly items that our words may correspond to in order to understand their role in our lives; hence, we can rather focus on explaining the talk itself, from a (subject) naturalistic point of view. It is the latter that forms the project of GE, which can be seen as a further elaboration of Price’ conception of what subject naturalism involves. GE seeks to explain a discourse by looking at its underlying function, taking as its starting point a view of humans as natural, evolved beings in a natural environment. It is a global project because, though different discourses serve different functions, an anti-­ representationalist, pragmatic explanation applies to each – including our talk about the natural world itself. One might feel an intuitive unease about the idea of a global expressivism. Traditionally expressivism has been a local doctrine, and this might seem endemic to its explanatory structure insofar as, however far one’s expressivist explanations  A Ramseyfied theory (after Frank Ramsey) is one in which the theoretical terms in a suitably axiomatized empirical theory are replaced by quantified-over variables. Jackson (op. cit.) links such theories to the products of conceptual analysis, and hence the starting for doing metaphysics ‘Canberra-style’. Note that Price allows that Ramseyfication can play a role in a theoretical reduction or identification without any assumption of representationalism, along the lines of Lewis (1972) (cf. Price 2004, 196), though it is unclear why one would hold the assumption such reductions presuppose – that all causal roles are filled by physical realisers – without being an object naturalist about causation in the first place, which then itself requires justification, as Price himself clearly sees and we shall discuss more fully in Sect. 2.4 below. (Perhaps there are still good empirical reasons for a version of this view within science, see e.g. Papineau 2000, but even here the issues are dialectically delicate.) 4

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might extend, at some point one will presumably need to presuppose some non-­ expressivistically understood vocabulary in which to couch the former explanations. Relatedly, one might think that at some point in our explanations of why we talk in the different ways we do ‘our spade will turn’ (as Wittgenstein would put it): to explain discourses about chairs, tables, viruses and so on surely we will have to talk about these entities themselves. (Blackburn, 2013, 79, raises this ‘no exit’5 worry for global expressivism, cf. also Knowles 2011). Doesn’t this inevitably reintroduce Representationalism? In response to this kind of worry, Price admits that to explain the characteristic function of some vocabularies we will need to invoke (or use) their referring terms, while with others this will not be necessary (that is, we will only need to invoke the referring terms of other discourses) (Price et  al. 2013, 157–9).6 Price expresses this by saying that the former but not the latter have an e-representational character (ibid., ch. 2). However, e-representation for Price is a non-semantic, non-­ inententional relation of something like covariation, causation or tracking between terms of a vocabulary and the items these terms genuinely semantically, albeit deflationistically, refer to in the natural world. Price uses the term ‘i-representation’ to characterise this latter, inferential or ‘language-internal’ relation, which applies to all assertoric discourses (at least by default).7 Neither i-representation nor e-­representation, singly or in combination, correspond to representation in the sense assumed by Representationalism: that of a substantive truth conditional content. In Price’s view, this idea makes the mistake of merging what are in fact two separate notions or ‘poles’ of our everyday concept (or lexical item at least) of representation, one of which has to do with inference, one with correspondence. The trick is to see that these are in fact two quite different phenomena. The bet is that in domains like ethics, though terms will i-represent they will not e-represent (and hence the discourse will be explained in a way similar to classical expressivism, e.g. emotivistically), whereas in, say, those of middle-sized dry goods or science – the domain of the natural, in a certain recognizable sense – they will do both. The distinction is not meant to be absolute, thus allowing gradations of e-representationality; nor is it given a priori which domains will and will not turn out to be e-representational. But  The expression is due to Robert Kraut (1990).  Given this distinction, label global expressivism might be somewhat misleading, as this tends to imply an approach to a vocabulary that does not make use of its (putatively) referring terms to explain its existence and function. Price acknowledges this non-standard usage, gesturing further at how GE’s deflationary understanding of truth provides a further, non-standard way of exemplifying an ‘expressivist’ approach (2013, pp. 177–8). He avers that global pragmatism might thus be more appropriate as a label. On the other hand, he also thinks expressivist explanations in a more traditional sense can be extended at least a lot further and deeper than is often assumed (for example, to categories like causation; see Price & Menzies 1993, Price 2005). His main point in any case is that the explanations in question are (uniformly) not Representationalist and (hence) not metaphysical, but rather based on use and function. I will recur to some of these points in Sects. 2.3 and 2.4 below. 7  For those acquainted with Sellars’ work, i-represenaton corresponds to to Sellar’s idea of ‘S-assertibility’, cf. Sellars 1968). 5 6

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however things exactly pan out, Price’s overall point is that his anti-­representationalist enquiry into our different discourses need leave no significant placement question unanswered, and hence no room for metaphysical quandaries. Whether this is enough to assuage all worries about coherency is not totally clear (cf. Knowles 2011), but I will not be pursuing those further here. Rather I want to focus on Price’s argument against ON when understood as having a material starting point. Even if GE (or global pragmatism) is a coherent project, I think one could be forgiven for finding the logic behind this second stage of Price’s argument against ON and placement metaphysics somewhat less than wholly transparent. Is the argument cogent, even on its own terms? The feeling that it is not has been evident in the recent commentary on Price’s argument, and it is to critiques of this kind I now turn.

2.3 Does Object Naturalism Really Depend on Representationalism? I will consider two broad lines that answer ‘no’ to the above question. The first is identifiable in the work of Paul Horwich (cf. his 2008, 2013), and has recently been clarified and defended by Matthew Simpson (2021) (there are, as we shall see, several arguments against Price in these papers but I think there is one underlying thought behind them all). The other derives from some of my own earlier work (Knowles 2017). I believe the first line can be effectively rebutted by Price, at least so long as one sees GE as a form of ARTL. As for the second, I still think my argument reveals a hole in Price’s argument for ON; however, I also now think that, given a suitably broader dialectical context, Price in fact has enough to establish what he wants to (this ‘context’ being roughly the kind of metaphilosophical motivation for ARTL I sketched in the last subsection of Sect. 1.2).

2.3.1 Simpson and Horwich Simpson’s rendering of the first line – inspired by Horwich (2008) – is that semantic deflationism is consistent with the idea that there can be non-trivial truth-makers for our different discourses. Price’s argument against ON targets the idea that there can be such truth-makers if Representationalism is rejected – equivalently, if deflationism is accepted – so as Simpson sees things, that argument fails. Simpsons’s basic claim is that though deflationism rejects the idea that truth is a substantial property that consists in relations to such truth makers, the latter can exist for all that, and we can still ask what they themselves consist in. In particular, Simpson argues that deflationism is quite consistent with their being ‘bearerless’ truths, or, in a certain sense of the word, facts, understood simply as different ways the world is; and that since we can seek to explain these ways in more fundamental terms, we can still do

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metaphysics. It is true that grass is green (that snow is white etc.), but even if this is not explained by relating the sentence or proposition to the fact that grass is green, we can ask what the latter amounts to in the world; what it consists in. Or again: as a sentence’s or proposition’s being true implies there is a corresponding bearerless truth, we can ask about what makes this bearerless truth true, and in that way keep doing metaphysics. We will return to Simpson presently but before doing so I want to consider the second paper of Horwich’s referred to above, which is a direct reply to Price’s argument against ON.  Horwich does not raise the issue of truth-making here though presumably what he says is meant to cohere with his earlier work. He summarises Price’s ideas as follows. Firstly, metaphysics is taken as having, in the first instance, a linguistic subject matter; that is, Price thinks that ‘[m]etaphysical questions can be answered only insofar as they are transformations of more basic linguo-conceptual questions.’ (Horwich 2013, 115). To become genuinely metaphysical, however – to be about the world and not just our concepts – a metaphysical view such as naturalism (by which Horwich means pretty much the same as Price’s ON) requires us to transpose these questions from a linguistic to a material setting; and this in turn requires substantive semantic relations (ibid.), i.e. Representationalism. Rejecting Representationalism thus yields the result that naturalism is, as Horwich puts it, ‘impossible to establish’ (ibid., 123–4). Horwich has several critical remarks about this argument, but his central objection seems to be that though linguistic analysis may be a necessary preliminary to metaphysical concerns – in the sense that one needs to ask whether, say, ethical claims are so much as in the business of ‘saying how things are’ – it remains open once one has decided, as the case might be, that they are, that they might nevertheless be seen as uniformly false, a useful fiction, reducible to naturalistic truths of some kind, or whatever more suitably subtle account the placement metaphysician might come up with (ibid.). Thus the linguistic starting point does not after all preclude the typical metaphysical gambits of ON, even if one rejects Representationalism.8 In his reply to this paper, Price first avers that Horwich has misunderstood him. GE isn’t meant to be ‘a way of doing metaphysics in a pragmatist key [but] a way of doing something like anthropology [;…] not a matter of recasting issues of metaphysics as issues about language, but of abandoning the metaphysical questions altogether’ (Price et al. 2013, 181). On the other hand, Price accepts that metaphysics understood as mere conceptual analysis may legitimate, as we have seen (this might embrace something like Strawson’s descriptive metaphysics; cf. Strawson 1959).9 An important issue thus does seem to be raised by Horwich  – as indeed Price finally accepts (ibid., 182) – which is to understand exactly why, if one rejects  I should stress that though Horwich rejects Price’s argument against object naturalism, he himself also rejects the position for other reasons (related to his Wittgenstein-inspired scepticism towards substantive philosophy; cf. Horwich 2012). For further discussion and critique of this line, cf. Knowles (2018b). 9  Personal communication. 8

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Representationalism, one can only engage in this and not in material metaphysics – or metaphysics ‘proper’, as one might say. Price, recall, had two arguments for this claim. Firstly, Representationalism is part of the Canberra plan’s standard ‘toolkit’ and gives a framework for mounting an argument for ON. To this, Horwich replies that there might be other motivations for ON, and moreover that the point doesn’t affect non-naturalistic metaphysical positions (Horwich 2013, 123 fn). Price largely concedes the force of this, stressing instead his ‘cat out of the bag’ argument. As he explains, this builds on the idea that as far as ‘saying how things are’ is concerned, there is no deep distinction between assertoric vocabularies that do and don’t do this to be revealed by linguistic analysis; that is, the fact-stating/non-fact-stating distinction is deflated along with truth. Metaphysics is then by-passed by focussing on explaining how we talk: to explain some vocabularies we will need to make use of the referring terms – those which have a more e-representational character – but to explain others not. The bet is that with domains like ethics this will not be the case. But the metaphysical – or, rather, meta-metaphysical – point is that there is no further issue to be addressed or resolved (Price et al. 2013, 182–4). Is Horwich thus rebutted? I suspect he might think not. Even if all assertoric discourse is putatively fact-stating, such that there is no distinction to be drawn here a priori or just on the basis of the kind of discourse it is, nevertheless it could turn out – couldn’t it? – that some of this discourse in fact fails to latch onto anything that is ‘out there’ and hence articulates only falsehoods – that a so-called error theory applies to it (as Mackie 1977, famously proposed in relation to ethics)? Moreover, if this is a possibility, so presumably is the alternative that there is something to which it does so latch, and in some particular way. Either way, placement metaphysics is still in business. However, I think Price here would, or at least should, point out that it is hard to see what kind of perspective might justifiably allow us to make the first such judgment – that, say, ethics is systematically false – at least so long as the discourse in question functions adequately on its own terms. Now if whatever realm we held, say, ethics answerable to in the way ON takes it to be could be regarded as some kind of absolute reality, then no doubt such a judgment would be possible. But ARTL would reject the very idea of such a reality on the grounds that it depends on Representationalism. Talk of an ‘absolute reality’ is surely tantamount to the position we (following Putnam) have been calling metaphysical realism, or MR. If we accept Putnam’s conception of MR and his arguments against it (see Chap. 5; they are, as we have noted in Chap. 1, similar to those Price employs against Representationalism) then MR is ruled out, and with it then this way of motivating placement metaphysics. But even without Putnam’s arguments, I see no way around the dependency between MR and Representationalism. What can we make of the idea of ‘reality’ if we cannot think of this as lying at one end of a genuine semantic relation to something external to our thought and talk? (Just stipulating one particular vocabulary as our ‘bedrock’, so to speak, does not answer that question, though might be legitimate as a way of defending ON; see below.) I am not totally sure that Price himself would want to put things this way, though as far as I can see his

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position is naturally understood thus (as, again, I argued in Chap. 1). In any case, at least as I am setting up things here, with Price’s GE understood as a form of ARTL, appealing to ‘reality’ to motivate metaphysics is a non-starter. So Horwich’s objection to Price’s argument it seems does after all lapse: semantic deflationalism remains a serious obstacle to placement metaphysics. But perhaps this misses a simpler or more ‘piecemeal’ route to resisting the idea that ON depends on Representationalism? We saw above that, at least according to Simpson, we can ask substantive questions about worldly, bearerless truths in such a way that metaphysical enquiry – uncovering the nature of the relevant truth – can continue, even if one accepts semantic deflationism. Now it should be immediately recorded (as Simpson is aware) that many commentators are directly sceptical of this kind of inquiry. Here is Blackburn giving voice to an attitude about his own well-known ‘quasi-realist’ position about ethics, something I take it Price would wholeheartedly endorse (for him, GE is precisely a kind of generalisation of quasi-realism): There is a story to be written, in this view, about the ethical proposition, and how it holds its place as a focus for discussion and thought. But there is no last chapter to be written about ‘what makes such a proposition true’. ... If a David Armstrong or a David Lewis comes along demanding a ‘truth-maker’ we can profit from deflationism, and simply say that what makes it true that honesty is good is that honesty is good. Nothing else needs to be said, wearing allegedly metaphysical hats, or allegedly scientific hats. (Blackburn 2012, 195, cited by Simpson 2021, 3175).

Simpson retorts, however, that it doesn’t follow from this that one might not reasonably seek something more, or even should do so if one’s concern is a full understanding of the world. As philosophers we want to know for example why honesty is good, in virtue of what this truth is a truth, or what it consists in – just as we at one time wanted to know what in virtue of which my glass is full of water, and have since found out that this is its being ‘full of H2O’, as Simpson puts it (ibid.). This might seem to show that something like naturalistic metaphysics is still possible after all. By way of response to this I want first to note that there is scope for questioning the idea that the kind of uncontroversial explanations Simpson alludes to here are ‘metaphysical’ in any recognizable sense. To start with, though the molecular theory of water is of course established science, I take it chemists would balk at the idea that H2O is really such that my glass might be said to be literally ‘full of it’, as it is full of water – as if ‘H2O’ referred to some kind of underlying fluid-like suspension of tiny little balls. We do of course achieve various kinds of explanation of water and its properties through chemistry and physics, but the idea that we can somehow fully reductively account for all everyday facts about water in this way – such that we might think we thereby have said what my glass being full of water is true in virtue of – is not, I take it, simply part and parcel of accepting the science. Turning to why honesty is good, there may also be things we can say that explain this to an extent or in different ways, in terms of moral genealogy, evolution or cognitive development. We might also, in another sense, explain to a recalcitrant child why it is true (painstakingly giving examples, trying to make them understand moral

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concepts, and so on). But, again, from none of this does it follow that we might identify some state of affairs, however complex, that tells us in virtue of what it is so, in some special metaphysical sense – something which accounts for it fully, only in other terms. Of course, there is room for argument here, as is borne out inter alia by recent literature on whether claims like ‘water is identical to H2O’ can be literally true.10 However, given just the fact that there is this divide in opinion it can seem reasonable to offer as a diagnosis that those who insist that such explanations are in the offing are in fact smuggling in a conception of a privileged ‘reality’ to ground their conviction. For on reflection, it is surely highly unclear what grounds one could have for thinking that a certain truth is nothing above and beyond certain other truths – given that it doesn’t analytically conceptually or reduce to the latter – absent the idea that the latter have some kind of privileged ontological status. And then if we ask what might ground our conception of such privilege, a substantial notion of ‘reality’, to which they belong, might seem the only plausible answer. But, as already noted, assuming GE is understood as a kind of ARTL, we can reply that this notion is unavailable without appeal to Representationalism. The upshot is that Simpson’s objection to Price’s argument also fails.11

2.3.2 Knowles In earlier work I offered an argument for a conclusion somewhat similar to Simpson’s (Knowles 2017), an argument that can also be understood as a reply to the above responses on behalf of Price to the idea that ON does not depend on Representationalism. In that paper my line was, in the first place, that even if one rejects Representationalism – and thus, in Price’s terms, is left at best with a material conception of ON – this doesn’t seem to make it plain incoherent to privilege a certain discourse or set of discourses in terms of which all others will have to be rendered or made sense (even if not analytically reduced to).12 Someone who privileged a given discourse in this way needn’t claim that it ‘represents reality’; there might rather be pragmatic grounds for favouring it. I further identified a naturalistic version of this line with something like Quine’s view, who is a self-declared

 For voices in this debate to which I am sympathetic, see Johnston (n.d.) and Chang (2012).  I think this kind of assumption – of it being unproblematic to invoke the idea of ‘reality’ – probably underlies quite a lot work that sees no tension between deflationism and metaphysics. For example, an assumption of the availability of a ‘reality discourse’ seems to inform Dorit Bar-on and Keith Simmons’ (2018) distinction between semantics and metaphysics, which allows them to argue that though (e.g.) ethical claims are truth apt, realism (or non-anti-realism) about ethics does not follow. We will also return to it in relation to the broader theme of realism versus anti-realism in Chap. 6. 12  Thus Carnap’s idea of explication, taken over by Quine (see e.g. his 1960, 258 ff), might be used as a way of understanding one vocabulary in terms of another (Knowles 2017, 4790). 10 11

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p­ hysicalist but also as far as I can see a subscriber to ARTL in maintaining a kind of semantic deflationism and denying metaphysical realism (an understanding of Quine with which Price, as we saw in Chap. 1, would presumably concur). Even if, as Quine himself believed (1960, 265), there is no significant distinction between reduction and elimination on his naturalism, there would seem no doubt that Quine’s view should count as a kind of ON.13 I then considered the riposte that such a position might be said to be, if not incoherent, nevertheless irrational (notwithstanding its Quinean pedigree!), insofar as its privileging of physics would still seem to be arbitrary. I pointed out, however, that Price himself employs at least a more or less standard naturalistic vocabulary to give his expressivistic explanations in, i.e. one that restricts itself to the results and explanations of natural science (the exact extension of this naturalism is not important to the underlying point here, as long as the notion is understood invidiously). I then concluded that it is not clear why ‘what is good for gander is not also good for the goose’ – i.e. why, given Price’s predilection for (scientific) naturalistic vocabularies, a Quinean of the kind I identify should not enjoy similar privileges in carrying out her (object, metaphysical) naturalistic project (Knowles 2017, 4791 ff.). However, I now think this argument fails to appreciate the wider dialectical context of the question at stake. As we saw in Chap. 1, a major motivation for ARTL is the promise of side-stepping a kind of dilemma that faces modern philosophy and indeed culture more generally: embrace physicalism and risk saying goodbye to cherished categories of common sense, or else accept a soggy pluralism that just opts out of the whole problematic. Given this backdrop, it now seems clear to me that a person who supports ARTL but also wants to support ON is really just making things very difficult for themselves – given that there is an alternative, i.e. GE, that lets them off the hook, or at least promises to do so. It is not as if our Quinean is just facing up to the facts (in something like the manner Alexander Rosenberg often presents his hard-nosed physicalism as doing; see Rosenberg 2012). She is rather deliberately opting for a line which carries with it real dangers of undermining our very understanding of ourselves as rational and ethical agents operating in a world of chairs, tables and the rest. And then the question must be: why do this – given there is a coherent naturalistic alternative? It is in the light of this consideration I now think we should understand Price’s arguments – which to be fair to him also include remarks like the following:

 It is worth adding at this point that Sellars’ overall view, his large differences from Quine notwithstanding, might also be seen as fitting this bill in view of his commitment what he called ‘scientific realism’ (i.e. a kind of metaphysical or object naturalism) coupled with what looks like a rejection of Representationalism. Though I lot of what I, along with Price and Rorty, have to say is deeply influenced by or at least reminiscent of Sellars (as will also be evident in later chapters) I have decided to refrain from explicit commentary (to any great extent at least) on Sellars in view of the shere complexity of his oeuvre and its susceptibility to diverging interpretations. Obviously, a more detailed comparison would be the occasion for interesting further work (as no dobut would a more detailed comparison with Quine or other philosophers I see as cleaving closely to ARTL, such as Davidson). 13

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The difficult opponent [for the object naturalist] is the naturalist who takes advantage of a non-representationalist theoretical perspective to avoid the material mode altogether. If such an opponent can explain why natural creatures in a natural environment come to talk in these plural ways – of ‘truth’, ‘value’, ‘meaning’, ‘causation’, and all the rest – what puzzle remains? What debt does philosophy now owe to science? (Price 2004, 198).

That is to say: in the absence of such a debt, there seems little point investing heavily in order to redeem it. In sum, then, it seems to me that Price’s argument against ON is successful, at least on the terms he sets for it, and given my understanding of what rejecting representationalism involves. Given the viability of something like GE, we can discharge our naturalistic responsibilities without facing up to a potentially ‘suicidal’ metaphysical programme. However, what we have not so far considered (beyond the question of its shere coherence) is the independent viability of GE, especially in the role Price envisages for it (i.e. as a form of subject naturalism), and whether there might be alternatives to it within the matrix of options defined by ARTL. If the latter is the case, then, even if GE is problematic, facing up to hard-nosed physialism might still be something we can avoid. It is to these issues I now turn.

2.4 How Does Global Expressivism ‘Hang Together’? I have been talking so far of GE as a more or less unified philosophical theory. However, it is important if we are to evaluate it properly to appreciate that it involves two distinct kinds of commitment about the nature of language. Thus Price tell us that, on GE’s view of language we have a two level picture. At the top level we seek an account of what assertoric vocabularies have in common – their common function, both in the day-to-day sense, and, if possible, in a genealogical sense. At the lower level, we seek an account of what distinguishes one vocabulary from another. The picture puts our (i-representational) account of saying, asserting, judging, and (propositional) thought in general at the higher, uniform, global level, and combines this with the various kind of things we ‘do’ with this general resource, at the lower, diverse local level. If we wanted a slogan for the two-level view, it might be ‘think global, act local’ – so long as we keep in mind that at the higher level, too, we have a kind of doing, or acting: a multipurpose doing, with application in a range of cases. (Price et al. 2013, 155).

The question I want to investigate in this section is how these two levels ‘hang together’, and also to what extent they necessarily do so. It is part and parcel of Price’s GE both that they do, and that they ideally ought to (that is, that our understanding of them should show how they do so). Thus, in a recent paper (Price 2019) he has argued that if we reflect on the general matter of placement problems we will come to see that the kind of picture GE involves is the only one that can coherently or at least cogently do justice to various different intuitions and desiderata that emerge from thinking about Representationalism, naturalism and so on. In the sequel, I will raise some doubts about this claim.

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Though Price takes up a number of positions in the paper just mentioned, the one that is most relevant for me here – insofar as it can be seen as a variety of ARTL – is the metaphysically quietist view he calls ‘relaxed realism’ (following McGrath op.  cit.; see Chap. 1). This kind of line denies the relevance of what Price calls ‘lower level’ accounts, at least in a constitutive sense, to understanding discourses at the top level. Price thinks this is too quietist to be plausible: there are clearly differences between, say, ethical and scientific talk, and his lower level will be able to illuminate what these amount to. Now, I am not opposed to the idea that the two levels do hang together and in some sense ideally should (even if this ‘should’ is only methodological, insofar as we want to avoid the philosophical ‘loss of problems’ or ‘soggy pluralism’ which relaxed realism threatens). However, I do want to raise a dissenting voice to Price’s claim, on two fronts. Firstly, I want to argue that, since it is not obvious that the relation between Price’s levels is, even on his own view, a necessary or constitutive one, it is not clear that relaxed realism is ruled out as a version of ARTL – even if it is not a very attractive one. Secondly, I think it is not obvious that the expressivist account that Price offers at the lower level is actually suited to the task of illuminating the top level in an optimal way (this will be topic of the following section). For both of these reasons, I think the idea that GE is the only way one might conceive of ARTL, which seems to be Price’s line, must be rejected. I do think a supporter of ARTL should ideally seek to say more than relaxed realism does, but also that they might well do this by finding a different way of understanding the project of subject naturalism: a different way of substantiating ARTL, as I shall put it, from Price’s GE. To understand all this better, we need first to say more about how Price understands the two level picture. Price suggests we can see the levels as corresponding to two different kinds of expressivist tradition in philosophy (see Price 2011b). On the one hand, we have Humean expressivism (‘HEX’, as he calls it): the idea, first suggested by Hume, that we understand the meaning of at least certain of our discourses not in terms of the objects in our environment that we seem to refer to in these discourses, but in terms of the emotional reactions we have to such objects. It is this kind of expressivism, suitably modified and generalised, that Price sees as informing the lower level. Price builds most directly here on Blackburn’s quasi-­ realism (Blackburn 1984, 1991, 1998), according to which we seek to explain naturalistically how we come to speak as if there are, say, ethical properties and facts, and do so rightly, though without assuming worldly ethical states of affairs or facts in doing so. The terminus of this kind of expressivism for Price, which he also reads into Blackburn’s later works, is the idea that we must simply slough off any ‘as if’ talk, but retain the naturalistic account of how we come to speak the way we do. The significance of the ‘as if’ disappears with semantic deflationism: truth and representation are not substantial, explanatory properties, so if a discourse is assertoric and suitably functional, its claims are ipso facto truth-apt and, presumably, at least in large part true. Therefore there is and can be no ‘bifurcation’ (to use Robert Kraut’s Rorty-inspired term, cf. Kraut 1990) between discourses that merely usefully express something and those that genuinely correspond to facts, represent or describe the world, or whatever. One can nevertheless remain a pluralist in that

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different discourses will be explained in different ways, according to their differing underlying natural functions. Some of these functions will be not be the kind of thing that expressivist philosophers standardly have thought of as coming under their remit. Thus, as we have seen, some of our discourses to be properly explained must refer to things in our environments with which they covary  – which they e-­represent, as Price puts it. However, again, this difference is not a difference in a capacity to simply ‘represent reality’.14 At the upper, i-representational level Price suggests we can make use of a different kind of expressivism, one that he associates with Hegel and more particularly Brandom (1994, 1998), hence referring to this as ‘BEX’. BEX involves the idea of making explicit, in normative and inferential terms, things that we do in using vocabularies, of any kind. And what we do, at a fundamental level, is, as Brandom has famously put it, engage in a practice of giving and asking for reasons. Our claims bring with them commitments to defend them if challengd, and entitlements to accept them as premises for further claims. Language thus has what Brandom calls a ‘down town’, a central kind of functioning – assertion – and other kinds of speech act are to be understood derivatively on this basis.15 Now Price also takes Brandom’s view to involve the idea that we do different kinds of things with language, and thus that there is a natural and indeed unavoidable connection between HEX (Humean expressivism) and BEX, and that both perspectives should inform a more complete ‘total expressivist’ theory of language (‘TEX’; Price 2011b, 110; cf. also Price 2010a). However, I think here one might reasonably stop up a bit and ask exactly what follows from Brandom’s picture. Even if one accepts that we ‘do different things with different parts language’, does one inevitably have to accept HEX? Price argues that if we only have BEX, only an expressivist story at the upper level – a story that then applies to the lower levels in the same way – then we have only been given pragmatic theory of force, not of content, contrary to what Brandom intends (Price 2011b, 99). However, this seems mistaken (at least, the claim seems incorrect, whatever Brandom exactly intends). One of Brandom’s central philosophical ideas, inspired by Sellars, is that we are doing different kinds of thing when we use, say, modal, mathematical or logical language, and that none of these should be understood in terms of a representational function. Formal (or quasi-formal) discourses like these have a meta-linguistic expressivist character, making explicit different kinds of practical commitments, of everyday or scientific reasoning, or both. However, this character is surely central to understanding not just the force but also the content of discursive activity. If I assert that all F are G and that a is F, but deny  Though acknowledging e-representation is thus not meant to be any kind of backpedalling with respect to the rejection of Representationalism, it is nevertheless a central and important component of Price’s overall picture, as we shall see in Sect. 2.4. 15  This means, as Price puts it in another paper, that we can give ‘One cheer for representationalism’, as opposed to the ‘no cheers’ that Rorty and Wittgenstein, under some interpretations at least, might seem to give it (Price 2010a). Insofar as I interpret Rorty as an ARTList, I would probably beg to differ here but the details of this disagreement need not concern us here. 14

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a is G, then, for whatever range of predicates is in question, I will be held to account in virtue of flouting a logical truth. The practical commitments underlying logic are thus a pragmatic constraint on all rational, contentful thought. By contrast, if we think about what we are doing when we use the language of ethics or middle-sized dry goods, it does not seem that the truths we articulate encode practices that demarcate the realm of the rational as such. We could, it seems, coherently drop talk of the ethical entirely, for example. Exactly where the demarcation between vocabularies which do and do not do have this character goes is no doubt a difficult issue to resolve. There may also be several different kinds of practical constraint that apply to any rational thought whatsover. But my point here rests only on the idea that for Brandom some though not all aspects of language-use are plausibly constitutively bound up with the content of any assertion. Of course, we must, as good anti-Representationalists, still accept that our meaning theory will be couched in terms of use-theoretic properties for all our different discourses. However, we can now distinguish between two broad ways of understanding this idea. Under what I will call ‘the thick interpretation’, which is Price’s reading, something at least like an expressivist account will be required to understand all these discourses. There would however seem to be another understanding available: the ‘thin interpretation’. Under this, from outside the various practices we should say that what we do is simply to talk about many different kinds of thing – values, middle-sized dry goods, sub-atomic particles, perhaps probabilities and so on and so forth – in accord with various fundamental rational practices, as articulated by logic and other formal vocabularies (again, exactly where the boundary goes here is not important, only that there is one). The latter do have to be understood in terms of things we do in a more concrete, specifiable sense (at least, assuming Brandom’s framework), but these doings are part of our rationality itself in a way the doings underlying the first kind are not. As regards the latter, there are certainly differences between discourses like morality and science, but, pace Price, it seems one might reasonably claim that these can only be appreciated from entering into the different discursive activities themselves, not by reference to notions like ‘internal emotional response to stimuli’ or ‘e-representation’. Talking and reasoning about morality and value is different from talking about things like tables and chairs, but to understand that difference it is necessary and sufficient, according to the thin interpretation, to engage in the different kinds of talk. As far as I can see, nothing of what Price makes use of in Brandom rules out this thin interpretation of a use-theoretic understanding of our different discourses. But the thin interpretation makes no appeal to HEX. Independently of considerations from Brandom, Price seems committed to the coherence of the thin interpretation in virtue of the overall structure of his view. GE aims to explain our various discourses from an external perspective; it does not address what we take ourselves to be doing in engaging in these practices, which can only be appreciated by those who do just that. But then it seems this latter, internal perspective might be the one that we need to adopt to explain them. One might also put this in Carnapian terms, which one presumes Price would be happy to accept: the very idea of there being internal questions presupposes there are

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different sets of semantic rules (in a broad sense) for our different discourses, rules you have to master to ‘play the relevant game’, and that doing this constitutes playing this particular game, mastering this particular discourse. Given this, it is not at all clear why anything more should or could be relevant to understanding our different discourses. The thin interpretation would seem, moreover, to correspond to one way of adopting the relaxed realism Price thinks is untenable or at least sub-optimal. Relaxed realism registers an irreducible plurality in our ontological commitments, but holds there is not much more to say beyond this (or at least beyond this and what might be necessary to make sense of us being rational thinkers at all). Price, as we have seen, thinks relaxed realism is deeply unsatisfactory. But why exactly? He writes: [W]e could say that relaxed realists face a trilemma. Faced with what seem to be legitimate questions about particular discourses – why we have them, how they differ, how they relate to our sensibilities – there are three main options. In the metaphysical corner are views that appeal to the nature of the properties or entities in question (e.g […] colours and values) to answer such questions. In the extreme quietist corner are views that simply fail to engage with such questions. And in the third corner is expressivism. The first corner seems off limits for anything worth calling relaxed realism – but that leaves a choice between what is arguably an excessive quietism, and expressivism itself. (Price 2019, 143).

The first corner is Representationalism and if relaxed realism is a version of our ARTL it will of course want to distance itself from that. Price then thinks the view must become expressivist in order to avoid simply refusing to answer good questions.16 However, though I think this is potentially a problem for relaxed realists, there is a question that they in turn could pose to Price: Does saying more about how our different vocabularies function, at least in the way Price does, tell us anything of constitutive relevance about them? For example, if what is constitutively relevant can only be appreciated by one involved in the practices – from, moreover, a first-­ personal point of view – then it is not clear that expressivist accounts do count as so relevant, for they do not depend on this perspective.17 More generally it can seem that Price is faced with a dilemma here. If he says that expressivist explanations are constitutively relevant to explaining our different vocabularies, then won’t he have to say that different vocabularies have different kinds of meanings – different ways of relating to the world – and hence subscribe to some kind of bifurcation thesis after all (something he clearly doesn’t want to do)? If this is right, he must soft-­ pedal the idea of constitutive relevance, in which case what the expressivist provides would have to be understood in some other way. For example, it might be seen as detailing the natural supervenience base of our different discourses: that which, in  Price refers in support of his line to Michael Ridge who in his (2019) provides a similar but paper length critique of William Scanlon’s form of relaxed realism (‘reasons fundamentalism’). As far as I can see, the dialectical line I offer here would also apply to Ridge’s arguments (at least insofar as they are meant to be support for something like GE). 17  This point will also be important in Sect. 2.5 below (as well as Chaps. 3 and 4). 16

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brute nature, fixes the truths in the different domains but doesn’t explain them or give an understanding of them to one who has no understanding of the matter in question. But surely a relaxed realist herself could accept such a supervenience claim. GE’s expressivism is meant to amount to much more than this. Some might think that this is not really a dilemma for Price, for he can easily opt for the first horn, arguing, not that ethics and science have different semantics, but rather different metasemantics: what makes ethical claims truth-apt is different from what makes scientific claims truth-apt (see e.g. Simpson 2017, Ridge op.  cit.). However, it is not clear that this can be an option for someone like Price who, as we have seen, rejects substantive truth-maker theory or placement metaphysics as dependent on Representationalism. If the relevance is constitutive it is going to have to concern the semantics of the terms itself, but that again conflicts with semantic deflationism. Perhaps Price could push back against relaxed realism by arguing it slides inexorably not just into a soggy pluralism, but in fact into a kind of metaphysical pluralism18 whereby all the different entities we are committed to through our various practices accrete on top of one another, so to speak, in a metaphysical ‘reality’ that is mind-independent and Represented. Presumably if that were the case it could not be a form of ARTL even. However, here I think the relaxed realist (or at least one such who wants to be an ARTList) can point out that her position is free to embrace, indeed, perhaps most typically presupposes the kind of (later) Wittgensteinean ideas that Price stresses and that I took up in Chap. 1, i.e. the idea that ‘how we go on’ is conditioned by our subjectivity, and that the languages we speak is a contingent matter – without either thought implying any substantive kind of anti-realism.19 As I pointed out, while this may be consistent with Price’s GE, it doesn’t have to be seen, as he sees it, as proprietary to GE. It follows that relaxed realists, at least of the relevant kinds, need not be metaphysical realists or Representationalists any more than Price. Moreover, it seems this Wittgensteinean point concerns only the upper level in Price’s two-tier system, and hence provides no vindication of the need for lower level HEX-theories that Price thinks relaxed realism rejects only at the expense of an implausible quietism.20  This is the title of Price (1992), a discussion of what this concept involves that argues for what is essentically a deflationary, non-metaphysical form of the idea. 19  These issues, already touched on in chapter 1, are complex and deserve further discussion than I can provide here. Chap. 6 takes up the question of the relationship between ARTL and realism at a more general level. 20  One might also question whether relaxed realism really is quietist. Thus, McDowell, who I have been using a representative of relaxed realism, also grounds our rational thinking in what he calls our ‘first’ nature (i.e. our nature as biological beings) in a more substantive sense insofar as he sees our capacity for sensory perception, which we share with non-language using animals, as integral to understanding this. One might therefore think that he is in fact a kind of subject naturalist after all (if not a supporter of GE). I will not try to resolve that issue here, though Chaps. 3 and 4 offers some further discussion of McDowell relevant to these and other more general issues of the book. The main point for now is that I at least have seen no argument from Price for thinking the Wittgensteinean ideas he uses lead one inevitably in the direction of GE or HEX. 18

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There is no doubt more that could be said about these issues and perhaps responses that could be made on Price’s behalf. But for my purposes here I want to leave the issue of GE versus relaxed realism there. Summing up, the dialect we have sketched suggests that relaxed realism – at least, for all Price has said against it – should be acknowledged as a coherent and consistent, even if not a very exciting form of ARTL, and one that is moreover distinct from GE. To say it is excessively quietist presupposes that one needn’t be so quietist, but that is precisely what Price has not shown, it seems to me. Having said that, I also find relaxed realism unsatisfying and also problematically anti-scientific in relegating questions about the naturalistic anchoring of our vocabularies to a ‘non-constitutive’ level. Or perhaps one rather wants to say: why should this constitutive/non-constitutive difference – even understood in the way a supporter of ARTL would understand it – carry such significance in delineating what a philosophical theory might reasonably seek to encompass? Nevertheless, my discussion thus far does also, and importantly, suggest that GE and ARTL are distinct positions in logical space, and that there is more wriggle room for one enamoured of the latter but not the former.

2.5 Is GE the Best Form of ARTL? The previous section was concerned with whether GE is the only coherent node within the space defined by the basic precepts of ARTL. In this section, I turn to whether it is the best such node. In view of what I have just said, I think one could still reasonably mount a case for GE over relaxed realism: ideally, we do want to say more than relaxed realism does, and we do want what we say to connect to issues about the natural beings we are. However, that doesn’t mean that GE should be accepted: perhaps there is another form of subject naturalism – another naturalistic substantiation of ARTL – in the offing. In my view, there are two substantive problems for GE that make a search for such an alternative worth undertaking. The first problem has to do with the fact, mentioned above, that our various linguistic practices are things we engage in an involved, first-personal (plural) and, relatedly, normative manner. We are trying to get things right in relation to the domain in question. Expressivism, by contrast, offers a sideways on, descriptive and (natural scientific) explanatory account of what we are up to in doing this. Various authors have raised this as a problem for GE, taking up different aspects of the objection (see e.g. Macarthur 2014, Redding 2010, Cozzo 2012, Showler 2021). The worry is related to the issue of constitutivity versus non-constitutivity discussed above, but the problem I am raising here is not that of there being a categorical divide here, but more concretely that of whether expressivism gives the right kind of account of our linguistic practices, or at least an optimal one. For example, in the ethical case, seeing our claims as based in emotional responses to an essentially valueless environment arguably does not properly capture what makes our ethical judgements important to us: why we feel committed to making them and getting them right. This can be appreciated through the fact that one apprised of the

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expressivist story about ethics might surely wonder whether there really is any rational basis to it – whether there is any ‘getting it right’ in ethics – even if they can appreciate why, given the natural facts the expressivist uncovers, they and their peers go in for it and think there are such answers to be had. Price is aware of this kind of worry and has responded that it is not a serious option for us to cease engaging in the various practices that we do. Hence even one apprised of the naturalistic basis underlying their language-use will not be able to desist in engaging in it in the way they do, even if they felt so-inclined (Price 1996, §13).21 One might also retort that it is not totally clear exactly what people would be inclined to do on learning about the expressivist basis for ethics; relatedly, that it is not totally clear how exactly we should think of what the expressivist explanation is meant to be missing. After all, GE is not denying the existence of anything we are pretheoretially committed to, but only seeking to give an account in naturalistic terms of what talk about the things in question amounts to; how that fits into our lives as natural creatures. An expressivist explanation in no way brings the threat of any kind of debunking, in the way certain people have argued that other kinds of naturalistic accounts of ethics do (se e.g. Joyce 2006). Notwithstanding these replies, I do think that if there were a naturalistic account of our different vocabularies that did more justice to their involved, first-personal, normative nature than expressivism does, this would count ceteris paribus in favour of it over GE. One recent suggestion along these lines is Paul Showler’s idea that subject naturalism be linked more explicitly to a genealogical approach to philosophy associated with thinkers like Nietzsche, Foucault and, in analytic philosophy, Bernard Williams (Williams 2002). According to this line, though we will typically start with some kind of naturalistic, functional story about how a certain discourse came into being, this story needs to be contextualized in the manner of the historian to understand how this function is realized in different epochs and societies so that we can appreciate its value and seek to uphold, maintain and develop this in our own times. Showler’s main example here is Williams’ account of sincerity and truth-­ telling, which, according to Williams’ can be seen as having a social function based in how things were for us in a certain ‘state of nature’, but which also needs to be reflected upon actively when conditions of communication change. This would involve a subject naturalism that understands ‘naturalism’ rather broadly, as involving subjects like history, as well as psychology and biology (the latter are the sciences Price typically seems to see as informing it), but is arguably still a naturalistic position for that. I have sympathy with this line. One can see it as trying to combine the benefits of relaxed realism’s internal perspective on discourses with GE’s external explanatory illumination; it wants to suggest that the two projects need not be separate. However, one might worry whether in laying emphasis on history, which is first and foremost a non-natural, humanistic discipline, any residual gesture to a natural  The strategy seems reminiscent of Hume’s response to scepticism: although reason might tell us that our beliefs are unfounded, scepticism does not follow because we cannot desist from forming the beliefs that we do; in a word, scepticism is motivationally and thereby rationally impotent. 21

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scientific account of the discourse will be little more than that: a gesture. Perhaps something like it is ultimately the only illuminating kind of account we can hope to give of our discourses, and it is of course one with many illustrious forbears. But as I see it is not in the spirit of Price’s idea that we try to give some kind of deeper, non-historical account of how our discourses fit into nature. It is not clear that it gets beyond relaxed realism in terms of its overall structure. Of course, even if that is the case, it need not be an objection. Perhaps the boundary between relaxed realism and more ‘explanatory’ forms of ARTL is not sharp (and for the record: I never meant what I called above the ‘thin interpretation’ of what we are doing in saying the various different things we do to preclude the possibility of illuminating philosophical reflection upon them). Relatedly, perhaps the boundary between natural and non-natural science is not sharp. More generally, I don’t want to dictate in advance what kind of thing an interesting explanation of our discourses must amount to count as subject naturalistic. Perhaps acknowledging pluralism will take one in a whole variety of different methodological directions when it comes to giving an account of what underlies our different discourses, drawing on different elements or aspects of natural science, human science, sociology, philosophy and so on. However, when it comes to what Price has offered, it seems clear the broad outlines of this are of a broadly natural scientific character – at least when it comes to his lower, HEX level – and for my purposes it is that point of departure I want to adopt here. At the upper, i-level, as noted in the discussion of Brandom, there is certainly more work for an armchair philosopher to do, at least as things stand (in illuminating our concepts of truth or consistency, amongst others). But when it comes to having something to say about the difference between discourses of ethics and of middle-sized dry goods (the HEX level), Price’s picture seems distinctively natural scientific in character, drawing on broad ideas from evolutionary biology and cognitive science (in principle, if not in practice). Remaining within such a natural scientific understanding of our capacities, in line with that GE adopts, I want in any case to ask whether there is a view that can illuminate our discourses in a way that is as naturalistic, or naturalistic in roughly the same way, but less alienating than HEX can seem to be. In the next two chapters, I will sketch the outlines of a possible positive answer to this question. This addresses itself both to the issue of first-personal involvement already mentioned, and to another worry I have about GE, to which I now turn (this is my second problem for GE). This concerns the idea of e-representation and, relatedly, the concept of causation in Price’s overall picture. We have seen that according to Price some vocabularies have e-representational relations to their referents whereas others don’t. To understand or explain talk of ‘tables’, ‘chairs’ and ‘viruses’ we have to see these as tracking, indicating or covarying with tables and so on in the environment, in a way we do not to understand or explain talk of what is ‘good’ or ‘beautiful’ or ‘possible’ – which rather requires something more like a story along the lines classical expressivism would offer. This is, I would aver, a very important distinction for Price. A lot of what makes his subject naturalism interesting is that there is this kind of difference in functional account amongst our different vocabularies. These kinds

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of account do not exhaust the kinds of expressivist (or pragmatist) account that Price sees as applicable to vocabularies; for example, that applicable to truth involves neither e-representation nor appeal to the ideas of classical expressivism (cf. Price et al. 2013, 177–8, also footnote 6 above). However, truth is presumably something that is to be explained at the top level – the BEX level, not the lower HEX level. At least in terms of what distinguishes GE from relaxed realism, a vocabulary being e-representational or not is a, if not the central explanatory crux within GE. The centrality of e-representation is also evident in the way Price situates his position in relation to that of other similar positions, which he wants to see as all ultimately pointing in the direction of GE. A central example is Blackburn’s quasi-­ realism. We have seen in Chap. 1 how Price sees quasi-realism as inherently unstable and inexorably leading to a global anti-representationalist view. By way of riposte, Blackburn has, as we saw in Sect. 2.2, worried that GE, in being global, seems to offer ‘no exit’ for the expressivist explanations it offers. As we also saw, for Price the response to Blackburn is to concede that some discourses do indeed require invocation of their referents to explain their peculiar functionality (roughly, those of natural science and middle sized dry goods), but that by understanding this in terms of the concept of e-representation – applying to these vocabularies but not those of value or modality – and stressing the distinctness of e-representation from i-representation, we can do this without lapsing back into Representationalism. Price also draws on the idea of e-representation to bring his picture into contact with that of Sellars (ibid., 166 ff., Price 2015). I haven’t space here to go into the fine details of Sellars’ position, but briefly Price sees Sellars’ idea of ‘S-assertibility’ (Sellars 1968) – the idea that ‘true’ means something like assertible in accord with various language internal rules – as corresponding to his idea of i-representation, whilst his idea of ‘picturing’ (ibid.) is to be understood in terms of e-representation. Picturing and e-representation are both non-semantical, causal relations between items in the natural world. For Sellars this idea was essential to understanding how a linguistic framework can be concerned with factual or ‘real’ truth and thus ultimately with his particular form of ‘scientific realism’ (as he called his view). Price, as I understand him, follows Rorty here (see Rorty 1991, 152) in regarding the idea of picturing and the scientism that follows on its heals as at least risking falling back into a form of Representationalism and/or bifurcationism. Price’s irenic move involves talk of two different worlds, or kinds of world: the i-world (or i-worlds) and the e-world (2013, ch. 3). The latter is the world of natural science and other ‘naturalistic’ discourses, and is often what we mean by talking of the world or reality. The i-world is Wittgenstein’s ‘eveything that is the case’, but understood not as a metaphysical totality but just as the ontological ‘shadows’ if one likes – the various i-worlds – that are cast by our different discourses. But of course for Price (and ARTL generally) this distinction cannot amount to a divide between what is and what isn’t real or true (or ‘really real’ or ‘Big-R Real’ or whatever). Nevertheless it is clearly important for Price to have the distinction itself at his disposal, for explanatory purposes, and this again underlies how important the idea of e-representation is to him.

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E-representation thus seems central to much of what is interesting and philosophically substantial about GE. Moreover, Price seems to think he can just use the idea of e-representation for free, as it were, insofar as it is a scientifically and naturalistically respectable notion. Sometimes, this reliance seems to go via the idea that something at least very much like e-representation is a staple of contemporary cognitive science (see e.g. Price et al. 2013, 36; 2011b, 102). At others, it seems to go via the idea that the natural world – the e-world – just is the causally efficacious world, with substantial causal relations obtaining between things in it (Price 2015). However, I will now argue that neither of these things can be just assumed, the latter not least by Price’s own lights. Jerry Fodor is famous for his quip that the representational, computational theory of mind is ‘the only game in town’ when it comes to scientific psychology or cognitive science (Fodor 1975). It is partly from this kind of cognitive science (at least broadly understood to embrace a philosophical understanding of its central constructs) that the idea of e-representation stems; given its validity, it is perhaps plausible to think that there are indeed ‘indicating relations’ holding between bits of our macroscopic natural environment and bits of the brain (and hence bits of language) of a kind which do not hold between values and our beliefs and assertions about them. However, as we shall explore more fully in the following chapter, the representational theory of mind is today by no means as generally accepted as it once was. In particular we have various proposals that take an ‘anti-representationalist’ stance towards explaining mind and behaviour. One of these in particular, enactivism, sees our relationship to the world not in terms of bits of language or the brain representing things given independently of the organism, but in terms of a constructive activity of sense making by the organism that blurs the boundary between it and its environment. On this kind of account there is plausibly no space for the idea of indicating relations or e-representation to items like tables and chairs – even when understood, as Price intends, non-semantically.22 The idea that an appeal to cognitive science in itself justifies e-representation is thus dubious without further ado; it would require a vindication of the representationalist over the anti-­representationalist paradigm, at least in the relevant respects, whilst this issue is I take very much a moot one given the current state of the discipline. Price might retort that his point does not depend on accepting representationalism in cognitive science, but only the common-sensical and – surely? – unexceptionable idea that things like cups do cause things like our thoughts about cups in a way values do not cause our moral thoughts. However, common-sensical or not, it is not clear that Price can make appeal to this idea, by his own lights. For he has also argued that our concept of causation is itself susceptible to something like a classically expressivist treatment (or at least is not simply to be understood in terms of e-representing some feature of reality). Price builds here on a well-known if not uncontroversial line of thought which has it that the concept of causation plays no role in fundamental physics, on the grounds that the latter operates with a

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 This claim requires further discussion: see Sects. 3.3 and 4.3.

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fundamentally symmetrical conception of reality that is at odds with the asymmetrical nature of causation. Our causal thinking is thus rather to be explained by the fact that we are agents embedded in a particular way in spacetime. This embeddedness is characterized by a thermodynamic gradient from lesser to greater entropy, such that through action we can produce differential effects in the future, but not in the past (Menzies & Price 1993, Price 2005). For A to be a cause of B is just for B to follow A along this gradient such that we can ‘twiddle’ the situation surrounding A to differentially increase or decrease the chances of B occurring, but not vice versa. But in principle, such twiddling could also affect ‘the past’, as we would put it. Price does not want to see this as implying anti-realism about causation; our talk about causation is simply more like our talk about values than we have tended to think. Nevertheless, saying this makes it somewhat unclear how the idea of causal connectedness can be simply assumed as a kind of basic natural relation that could inform a subject naturalistic theory of our different discourses incorporating, fundamentally, the idea of e-representation. Price might immediately respond here that science is many things, not just fundamental physics. Higher level sciences, such as biology, psychology and social science, can legitimately employ a notion of causation, even if this is to be understood as a function of our contingent placing in a physical world that is not itself fundamentally causal. However, I think this line fails to secure the crucial idea in question here, namely, that e-representation marks a fundamentally important distinction between vocabularies. For that to be the case, it would have to be somehow given that things like chairs cause beliefs about chairs in a way values do not cause corresponding ethical beliefs. But, not least given Price’s view on causation, the idea that it might be restricted to the kinds of vocabulary he wants it to be restricted to seems problematic. For surely it is not absurd to suggest that our ethical talk tracks and is indeed caused by ethical reality in being counterfactually dependent on it: if someone were to do something reprehensible in our presence, we would tend to believe this, and if we came to have that belief, it would probably follow something reprehensible being done, ceteris paribus.23 Why shouldn’t this be just as good a use of the concept of causation as any we find in relation to any other vocabulary, given that causation is the kind of thing Price takes it to be – or indeed, given only that is something other than an intrinsic feature of the natural world? If this line of thought is accepted then the contrast between ethical talk and talk of, say, tables and chairs can seem to evaporate. Now these latter arguments are not and are not meant to be knock-down arguments against GE or its viability as a subject naturalistic enquiry. To start with, I have not shown, and will not attempt to show, that representationalist cognitive science is not in fact preferable to an anti-representationalist variant (nor have I shown that e-representation, or at least its use in the way Price uses it, cannot survive within the latter framework, though I will have more to say about this in  A somewhat similar idea can seem to underlie Bernard Williams’ idea that we can be said to have knowledge of ethical features of the world even though they are not part of the physical or the world in itself in virtue of the fact that the relevant beliefs track the relevant truths (Williams 1985). 23

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Chaps. 3 and 4). If Price’s view on causation is accepted, or at least a view that does not regard it as an intrinsic feature of the natural world, I think this might well in itself be enough to show that the idea of e-representation is impotent to do the demarcation job he wants it to do. For such a representationalist cognitive science standardly builds on causation to understand its central notion, and then it would seem consistent with there being representations (in its sense) of, say, values. This would not support anti-representationalism in cognitive science but it would still support looking for alternative subject naturalistic substantiations of ARTL insofar as the notion of e-representation would be deflated. One might also respond by saying that Price’s treatment of causation as a kind of ‘secondary quality’ is not compulsory for his overall kind of view: perhaps ‘causation’ is, after all, a concept that e-represents what it (deflationarily) refers to in the world. This view is obviously circular and problematic from the perspective of Price’s overall aim of ‘ironically’ deflating metaphysical discourse, also in science (2011a, 31–32). But that it is incoherent or inconsistent with either ARTL or GE in particular is not clear and certainly not something I will try to show here. However, I do not need to do this or provide other more knock-down arguments against GE for my purposes. What I think the above considerations do show is that GE’s invocation of e-representation as a way of demarcating between different discourses is not straightforward, or perhaps even coherent from its own perspective; moreover, the impact of accepting an anti-representationalist cognitive science on the idea surely does need to be addressed. Finally, we should not forget the first problem I mentioned for GE, that of its explanations involving an alienation from the engaged, first-personal nature of the practices themselves. In light of all of this, the question naturally arises whether some alternative constructs or framework, taken from or at least inspired by a different kind of cognitive science than that Price assumes, might inform a more coherent, stream-lined and/or illuminating subject naturalistic account of our various different discourses. I believe that this is indeed the case. But to understand fully why we need to turn to current representationalist versus anti-representationalist debates that more directly concern experience and cognition.

Chapter 3

Representationalism Versus Anti-­Representationalism About Perceptual Experience and in Cognitive Science

Abstract  This chapter and the next form of unit. In this one, I present and explore two further representationalist versus anti-representationalist debates that are prevalent in contemporary philosophical discussion: one concerning the nature of perceptual experience (indeed, experience more generally), the other how we should think of a scientific psychology or cognitive science. I lay out the interconnections between the different views in these debates and how they impact on and relate to different understandings of ARTL (here consider I amongst other things Rorty’s and John McDowell’s views on perception). The main argumentative aim of the chapter is to develop an alternative and in my view superior framework for a subject naturalistic substantiation of ARTL to that Price has offered through GE. I do this by advocating two other kinds of anti-representationalist position. The first of these I call phenomenological externalism (PE), a view that can be motivated by an assessment of the debate about perceptual experience, and involves the idea that, while experience is not a matter of representation, what we perceive in experience is something like a world for us, not the world in itself as described by physics. The other, which I see as providing a deeper, naturalistic undergirding of PE insofar as it is a position within cognitive science, is enactivism, under a certain understanding of what this position involves.

3.1 Introduction This chapter and the next form of unit, together serving several different functions in the book as a whole. One, which this chapter discharges, is to present and explore two further representationalist versus anti-representationalist debates that are prevalent in contemporary philosophical discussion: one concerning the nature of perceptual experience (indeed, experience more generally), the other how we should think of a scientific psychology or cognitive science. Though obviously not independent of one another, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Knowles, Representation, Experience, and Metaphysics, Synthese Library 473, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26924-0_3

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these discussions have distinct histories and are pursued today to a large extent within separate disciplinary spheres. Both however relate to ideas in ARTL in various different ways; for that reason, but also because the very ideas of ‘representationalism’ and (not least) ‘anti-representationalism’ in contemporary discussion are in need of clarification, it is strikes me as worthwhile going into what these debates are about, and laying out the interconnections between the different views in them and ARTL.  This discussion also thereby involves some assessment of  how well ARTL and its various commitments stand up against leading contemporary theories in these areas of the philosophy, in accord with my broadly ‘theoretical’ understanding of what ARTL amounts to (see Chap. 1). Another aim of the current chapter – the main argumentative one – is to start to develop an alternative and in my view superior framework for a subject naturalistic substantiation of ARTL to that Price has offered through GE. Starting from my survey of the two representationalist versus anti-representationalist debates mentioned above, I do this by advocating two kinds of anti-representationalist position, one from each of these areas. Though being about experience and cognition, these fit together with ARTL’s understanding of language and thought in a mutually reinforcing and illuminating manner (I will be arguing). One of these positions I call phenomenological externalism, a view that can be motivated by an assessment of the different arguments and positions advanced in the debate about perceptual experience. The other, which I see as providing a deeper, naturalistic undergirding of phenomenological externalism insofar as it is a position within cognitive science, is enactivism (under a certain understanding of what this involves). Chapter 4 will then go further into how phenomenological externalism and enactivism can fit together to provide a superior subject naturalistic grounding of ARTL than Price’s GE does. It has a lot to say, in this connection, about the ideas of ‘umwelt’, ‘the world for us’ and ‘the world in itself’, as well as, in the last section, tying up various loose threads in relation to the discussions of Chaps. 3 and 4 as whole – including precisely how my view contrasts and compares with Price’s GE. The current chapter is divided into two sections, one concerning perceptual experience, the other cognitive science. Section 3.2 starts with a presentation and motivation of contemporary representationalist (also called intentionalist) theories of perceptual experience, a line that has probably become the mainstream view within analytic philosophy over the last few years. I then present an alternative view that is based on the idea that experiences are merely causes, not justifiers of belief. This is a recognizably anti-representationalist line and one many supporters of ARTL (and closely related views) subscribe to – though not all, McDowell’s representationalist view (which I also discuss) being a notable exception. I criticize the causalist view for failing to do justice to the widely acknowledged phenomenon known as the transparency of experience that many representationalists see as a central datum in support of their view. I then turn to what is more standardly referred to as ‘anti-­ representationalism about perceptual experience’ in the current literature, a view also known as naïve realism or relationalism. I argue that though phenomenologically more tenable than the standard ARTL line on experience, and also arguably superior, overall, to representationalism, this view also suffers from decisive

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weaknesses  – apart from being in any case, its alleged ‘anti-representationalism’ about experience notwithstanding, not in fact compatible with ARTL. Finally, I outline phenomenal externalism, which is the view that our experience, though not representational in character, and though constituted (at least in part) by external objects and qualities as relationalism holds, is conversant about a world for us, distinct from the world in itself. I explain both how situating phenomenological externalism within an ARTL framework can make these ideas more plausible and palatable, as well as how they promise a substantiation of ARTL by allowing us to appreciate a broad difference between different discourses in a manner that, though diverging from the way Price’s GE does this in terms of e-representation, is still recognizable as a form of subject naturalism. Section 3.3 then turns to cognitive science. I start with an overview of different representationalist and anti-representationalist approaches within cognitive science, relating these to different ways in which ARTL might be assessed or substantiated (including a recent actualization of Price’s idea of e-representation). I gradually focus in on enactivism, arguing that a central idea of this – that in perception different organisms are related to organism-specific worlds of experience, or umwelts – can and should be vindicated.

3.2 Representationalism Versus Anti-Representationalism About Perceptual Experience, and  Phenomenological Externalism Philosophical thinking about how perceptual experience relates to the world around us seems to throw us back and forth between two diametrically opposed poles. On the one hand, we seem to be presented with things in the world and their properties as fully objective features of it, independent of our access to them. The cup I see on the table appears as something that would remain there were I to look away, and to be available for others who might look at it. Its properties of being round and white belong to it, not to me, at the same time as they are also integral to what makes my experience of it the experience it is. On the other hand, a little reflection can seem to suggest that what I see is necessarily bounded precisely by my subjective experiences. I do not see the cup from nowhere but from a particular point in space and time that dictates and delimits the nature of my experience of it and its properties. I see only the facing side of the cup, and it looks different from different angles and under different lighting conditions. I am also susceptible to illusions and perhaps even hallucinations, where things appear radically other than the way they actually are. Moreover, at least since the time of the scientific revolution, it has generally been assumed that the world as it is in itself is devoid of so-called secondary qualities like colours and sounds, these being therefore understood as subjective reactions we have to things out there that are projected back out onto a reality that is in itself colourless, noiseless etc. Modern developments in physics have suggested that

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this might even apply to the classical primary qualities, such as shape, size and motion, insofar as the fundamental nature of reality is insubstantial or field-like (Eddington 1928; Rovelli 2021). The first set of intuitions here corresponds to what is often termed a realist (or naïve realist) view, on which there is a world pretty much as we experience it out there that perception simply puts us in touch with. On this line perceiving correctly is like opening a curtain or cleaning a pane of glass to reveal the view (Campbell 2002a, 119). The second set of intuitions challenges this conception, and leads in the direction of idealism, whereby what we perceive is ‘pushed back into the head’ (Campbell and Cassam 2014, 3), or at least the mind. For Berkeley, the mind-­ independent world as we naively think of it is in fact just the world perceived by God; for Kant, it is a kind of intersubjective construction, with absolute reality restricted to something we must posit as lying behind this. But such thoughts are also difficult to accept or even make coherent sense of. This is of course a familiar dialectic to anyone versed in modern philosophy, and there have been innumerable attempts to offer positions between naïve realism and idealism, as well as to show that these lines are not as absurd as many have thought. In contemporary philosophy of perception (or, as I think we should call this area, the philosophy of perceptual experience),1 a number of positions are standardly advanced, ranging from sense data theory and adverbialism through intentionalism and representationalism to belief-acquisition theories, disjunctivism and naïve realism (see e.g. Fish 2010; Crane and French 2021). I will not here present my own version of this kind of survey (though will touch on most of the views mentioned), but rather focus on what has arguably become the central debate in the most recent literature, one that has taken a ‘representationalism versus anti-representationalism’ form (Locatelli and Wilson 2017). Having sketched this, how the battle lines shape up between the opposing views, and how ARTL relates to both, I will then suggest a further anti-representationalist view I call ‘phenomenological externalism’ – one that can also find plausibility as what I called in the last chapter a subject naturalist substantiation of ARTL. (Note that phenomenological externalism is not an extant position in the literature, but, at least in relation to the debate in this area of philosophy, a new generic view that goes both between and beyond the current standard options.)2  Perception more generally is standardly understood as involving more than what we experience and has also been the object of much work in cognitive science, whereas the ideas we are considering in this section, though not divorced from considerations in cognitive science, tend to have a more purely philosophical (i.e. ‘from-the-armchair’) origin. 2  This is not to say that it is very original in the wider scheme of things. The basic thought behind it goes back to Kant, and similar ideas can be found in several contemporary thinkers whose work borders on the contemporary analytic debate about perceptual experience. In particular, as we shall see, Alva Noë has characterized his own theory of perceptual experience in terms that echo phenomenological externalism. The phrase ‘phenomenological externalism’ is also used by several other authors. One is Dan Zahavi (2008), who employs it as far as I can see in a sense very similar to that I will be assuming here. Thus for him it is a variety of externalism which, whilst stressing the constitutive dependence of experience on non-mental objects also sees the latter as constitu1

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Contemporary representationalism about perceptual experience (henceforth RPE) is the idea that perceptual experiences are, though not beliefs themselves, belief-like intentional states with a representational content.3 Experiences present the world to us as being certain ways (‘there is a white cup’, ‘there is a round plate’, and so on, or perhaps ‘that is a white cup’); in virtue of such contents they can be true or false, or at least accurate or inaccurate about their possessor’s environment. The same content – along, possibly, with how it is presented to the subject (‘aspect’ or ‘mode of presentation’) and how it relates functionally to other aspects of the subject’s psychology  – constitute or explain the total phenomenal character of experience.4 RPE is motivated in part by the idea that our experience seems to justify many of our beliefs about the world: my visual experience of the white cup in front of me can, it would seem, justify my belief that there is such a cup there. If the experience does something like saying ‘there is a white cup’ or at least ‘there is something white and round’ we seem to have some kind of explanation of this. Relatedly, RPE captures the sense in which our experiences seem to be about the external world, whilst also accommodating the fact they can also be illusory or hallucinatory: their content specifies a condition in the world, but one that might fail to obtain, just like a belief’s content. In this way RPE seems to have distinct advantages over more traditional ‘representationalist’ theories of perceptual experience, i.e. empiricist and sense data theories, which, in their attempt to explain illusion and hallucination, claim that what we are directly aware of in experience are not material objects but purely sensory items (ideas or white- or cup-shaped ‘patches’).5 RPE also opens up for a naturalistic

tively dependent on subjectivity. Zahavi also argues that the notion is applicable to all the main thinkers of the phenomenological tradition, their disagreements otherwise notwithstanding. Max Velmans’ also uses the expression – see his (2017, 147) – again in a way that is similar to mine, though his focus is specifically the scientific explanation of consciousness and he posits a plurality of subjective worlds rather than one more inclusive ‘world for us’. A different use of the term is Gregory McCullouch’s in his The Mind and its World (McCulloch 1995), where it designates simply a kind externalism about experience, to the effect that the latter constitutively depends on material objects (this is more usually termed ‘phenomenal externalism’ in the contemporary analytic literature on perceptual experience). 3  The view is also often referred to as ‘intentionalism’, but I prefer ‘representationalism’ for reasons that will become apparent. The overview I will provide of this and the other views I discuss does not attempt a thoroughgoing survey of all the different options one might take in relation to them, or all the different caveats one might mention – something that is beyond the scope of the present work, which rather has as its overarching aim to situate the discussion about representationalism versus anti-representationalism about perceptual experience (and in cognitive science, in the following section) in relation to ARTL. I will, however, take up some specific issues along the way that I see as most relevant to motivating phenomenological externalism. The aim is to present a plausible dialectic that while abstracting away from many details hopefully does not fatally compromise the lessons I draw from it. 4  For an overview and discussion of different positions and options here, see e.g. Seager (2016), Siegel (2021). 5  As well as certain kinds of qualia theories, which are also non- or anti-representational. More on these and the idea of ‘transparency’ will follow shortly.

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understanding of perceptual experience insofar as notions of intentionality and content are often thought to be naturalistically tractable, at least in principle – while positing ideas or sense data would appear to court some kind of non-naturalistic dualism. Cognitive science has made us familiar with the idea that cognition should be understood as information processing over states (or events) that are said to represent the world. However, it is also important to bear in mind that RPE concerns the conscious experience of a subject, not (directly at least) just information or neural processing. While many supporters of RPE would want to see their view as continuous with representationalist conceptions of perception from cognitive science, the commitment to representation at the two levels is distinct. Connectedly, a central motivation behind at least many versions of RPE is phenomenological: perceptual experience presents itself to us as being about a mind-­ independent, public, material world, not an internal realm of mental objects or their properties. Here is Gilbert Harman’s oft-cited expression of this so-called transparency intuition: When you see a tree, you do not experience any features as intrinsic features of your experience. Look at a tree and try to turn your attention to intrinsic features of your visual experience. I predict you will find that the only features there to turn your attention to will be features of the presented tree. (Harman 1990: 667)

RPE seems to fit with this in the sense that your experiences (according to it) are about trees, cups and so on, not sense data or the experiences themselves or features of them (purely phenomenal properties or qualia). Broadly similar points are found in many philosophical texts, such as G.E.  Moore’s discussion of experience as diaphanous (Moore 1903) and several of those of the phenomenologists (see e.g. Smith 2002, 105 on Heidegger). Exactly what the transparency intuition or ‘datum’ amounts to or implies is a much-debated theme in the contemporary literature.6 For RPE it strengthens the idea that experience is to be understood as a kind of representational state. On the other hand, Harman’s very characterization seems to allow that we might be or can become aware of intrinsic features of experiences in unusual cases. An oft-used everyday example of this is the kind of blurry vision one can experience with certain sight defects: it is (it is claimed anyway) one’s experience itself that is blurry, not (say) the written words out there, or how they are represented as being. There are also more intricate and partly empirical arguments for the idea that there must be in this way qualia or what Ned Block calls ‘mental paint’, i.e. intrinsic phenomenal aspects of experience beyond what is constituted by representational or intentional features (cf. Block 2003, 2010). Another point of contention concerns whether transparency suggests experiences are literally constituted, in part at least, by what  Sometimes the idea of transparency and Moore’s of diaphaneity are distinguished, the latter being rather the idea that the phenomenal character of experience is exhausted by the object of the experience (cf. e.g. French 2018). Diaphaneity is thus also consonant with a sense datum theory insofar as the latter are objects of experience. I will be focusing here on transparency, understood as the general idea that our experiences present themselves as being about a public, material world, at least first and foremost. 6

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they are about in the world. While some would argue they are (e.g. Lycan 2001), others have wanted to draw a distinction between what our experience ‘feels like’ and how it in fact is, such that phenomenologically transparent experiences, though ‘about’ the external world, are themselves fully ‘in the head’ (see e.g. Gow 2016, 2019). In my view, though there are many issues one might address here, transparency is such a pervasive aspect of our experience that it needs to be centrally reflected in any viable general theory of perceptual experience – as I take it in some sense all philosophical theories aim to be. Considering our conscious experience as a whole, this is surely, first and foremost, something that is conversant about an external world of material objects and their properties, including our own, subjectively aware bodies, and other subjects experiencing these same things in similar ways.7 Such a view would also seem to have broad naturalistic appeal insofar as it doesn’t posit mysterious mental entities like qualia or sense data. At the same time, if we assume a non-reductive naturalistic framework (in accord with ARTL’s orientation), there would seem no justification for not seeing such phenomenological data as relevant to determining what experiences are like ‘metaphysically’, as it were – that is, as suggesting that they are themselves, at least in part, constituted by the external objects and qualities they concern (pace Gow).8 For fans of transparency there are  In putting the idea of transparency this way I also mean to accommodate the idea of pre-reflective (or implicit) self-consciousness that many phenomenologists stress as accompanying any conscious experience. Such self-consciousness is not cognitively sophisticated, and does not involve a separate, higher-order mental state but merely the essentially subjective and perspectival nature of all experience (see Gallagher and Zahavi 2008, ch. 3). Having said this, I do not want to commit to what Zahavi calls the ‘minimal self’ as a kind of entity constitutively independent of social interaction (see e.g. Zahavi 2010, and for critique of this idea, Kyselo 2018). I should also add that, though my focus here is perceptual experience, what I have to say is meant to suggest a view of conscious experience more broadly. In stressing transparency to the extent I am, I am suggesting that experience generally is first and foremost the experience of a material world, including myself as a subject of experience of this world and other such subjects. In being at the same time an experience implicitly bounded by subjectivity, this view also aims to encpompass aspects of our mental lives that might seem more private, such as thought, memory and imagination. I would want to argue, along lines which can be identified in the phenomenologists as well as philosophers like Gilbert Ryle and Wittgenstein in the analytic tradition (and, where relevant, in empirical science; cf. Dennett 1991), that such aspects of our psychology are in fact not hidden in some kind of private realm, and that the very idea of such a realm is deeply mistaken. Obviously there are many issues of detail to be considered here, but I take it that the overall view is sufficiently acknowledged to make my general position not unfamiliar or totally implausible. 8  Here I should point out that my understanding of the philosophical discipline known as ‘phenomenology’, here and throughout this chapter, is in the first instance a (non-reductive) naturalistic one, seeing phenomenological study as, in a broad sense, a ‘theoretical’ one concerning a particular ‘phenomenon’ (viz. experience, again in a broad sense), and as at least potentially responsive to and in engagement with studies from neuroscience, experimental psychology and so on – rather than as a transcendental, a priori study of the conditions of meaningful thought and enquiry (see e.g. Gallagher and Zahavi 2008; Thompson 2007; Reynolds, 2020 for discussion and defence of this approach). At the same time, given the implications I see as flowing from an adequate understanding of experience from such a phenomenological naturalistic perspective in terms of the idea 7

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certainly phenomena that need explaining (or explaining away), but I see these as puzzles, not as a call to provide a radically different kind of theory of experience that does away with it – and risks obscurity with notions like qualia. Stressing transparency makes problems not only for sense datum and qualia (and closely related adverbialist) theories, however; it is also in tension I believe with a kind of anti-representationalist view of perceptual experience that many supporters of ARTL, or at least closely related positions, hold. This kind of view is standardly motivated by Sellars’ classic discussion of ‘the given’ (Sellars 1956). In light of the ancient regress problem of justifying belief, perception has often been seen as providing an epistemological foundation of belief in something outside our beliefs. But how is it so much as possible for something outside what Sellars calls ‘the logical space of reasons’ – the realm of conceptually articulated thought that belief is – to have a bearing on the epistemic status of such thought? I look at the cup and perhaps cannot help but come to believe it is white, on the table, and so on; but justifying and causing belong to two different modes of explanation, the former involving general concepts, ineluctably opening up for the possibility of rational challenge. Failure to appreciate this leads to what Sellars called ‘the myth of the given’: the idea, incoherent according to Sellars, of an occurrence in experiential consciousness that can in and of itself justify a belief about our surroundings. We have already seen in Chap. 1 that ARTL rejects the idea of perceptual ‘givenness’, understood more generally as the idea that experience gives us a thoroughly independent conceptual and epistemological basis for the rest of our knowledge. In view of this, ARTL would also most likely want to distance itself from RPE. For contemporary RPE typically understands the perceptual contents it posits as a distinct, non-conceptual grounds for conceptual belief (see e.g. Peacocke 1998; Tye 1995; Burge 2010), and such a view seems tantamount to accepting Sellars’ version of the myth (see McDowell 1994).9 Now John McDowell has claimed we can hang on to the idea of perceptual experience as representational and conceptual; I will say more about his view presently. For the moment however I want to consider the more standard way defenders of ARTL, such as Rorty (see e.g. Rorty 1998, ch. 7), as well other somewhat

of an experience-relative ‘world for us’, this kind of naturalism also accommodates a ‘descendant’, as one might put it, of the ‘transcendental’ idea that all human cognitive activity takes place in the arena of experience (cp. Thompson 2007, 87). This thought will hopefully emerge clearer in what follows, especially in Chap. 3. 9  I do not mean to imply that the position of RPE in and of itself entails givenness – even putting aside McDowell’s conceptualist version of this that I will consider below. Several of the arguments for RPE, including some of those we charted above, have nothing to do with epistemology; there are also non-epistemological arguments for believing in non-conceptual experiential content, such as the idea that in experience we can perceive things at a level of grain that outstrips what we can conceptualise (see e.g. Evans 1982; Peacocke 1992). Nevertheless, I think it is fair to say that RPE is typically taken to involve the kind of thing ‘givenness’ is meant to be, and that proponents of this view then rather take this to not in fact be problematic. What I have to say here will not depend on taking a stand on these issues, though the broad clash between ARTL and RPE is in my view real and hence significant.

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like-­minded ‘pragmatists’, have sought to understand perception in view of their rejection of the given, which is as a mere causing of belief. Rorty takes over Davidson’s view that ‘only a belief can justify another belief’; experience, on the other hand, causes us to have beliefs but does not justify these (Davidson 1986). Some supporters of this line have tried to make sense of how perceptual contact with the world can be seen as justifying belief by building on the idea that these causal processes may be reliable indicators of things out there (see e.g. Brandom 2002). Without taking a stand on these further issues, let us call this kind of theory ‘the causal view of perceptual experience’, or ‘the causal view’ for short.10 In my view, the causal view is deeply unsatisfactory, at least insofar as it aims to tells us everything we want to know about perceptual experience. In particular, to say experience causes our beliefs does no justice to the peculiar phenomenology of such experience – arguably to it having any phenomenology at all, but at least not to the peculiar kind of transparent character it possesses.11 As noted above, such phenomenological considerations might by some be seen as irrelevant to so-called ‘metaphysical’ concerns about what experience most fundamentally is. Indeed, the kind of physicalism that Rorty, Davidson and no doubt many other ARTL-­ sympathisers typically cleave to – a physicalism that is not meant to enunciate commitment to the nature of ‘absolute reality’ but does, nevertheless, fundamentally shape how they think about how world, experience and belief relate – might be seen as precisely an assumption that would legitimate such an idea. However, in light of the merely broad, anti-reductive naturalism ARTL in fact espouses, neither this physicalism nor what it might support by way of assessing the relevance of phenomenology would seem justified (cp. Tartaglia 2020, who similarly critiques Rorty’s physicalism as inconsistent with his pluralism). Of course, gaining an overall best fit of (philosophical) theory to data may involve discarding many apparent ‘manifest truths’, but surely one should start by considering whether such a manifest truth as I take transparency to be could be integrated into what one otherwise accepts  – something I am not aware of typical ARTLists having done. Perhaps this is because they see it as inevitably involving the myth of the given, but as we shall see, I do not believe this has to be the case. McDowell’s rejection of the given (see his 1994, 2009), in retaining the idea of distinctively perceptual representation, does seek to do justice to transparency. For him, we can moreover talk about such representation without falling afoul of the myth by acknowledging a distinction between passive perceptual ‘receptivity’, on  In terms of the standard taxonomy in philosophy of perception mentioned above the causal theory is plausibly a form of belief-acquisiton theory (though I will not go into the details of this kind of theory as such here). For discussion of different reactions to the myth of the given within what has come to be called by some the ‘Pittsburgh school’ (Sellars, Brandom, McDowell), see Maher (2012). 11  Again, there are different attitudes to the very idea of ‘experience’ among those who cleave to this view. For Sellars sensations do and must have an experiential nature (cf. his 1956), but it is not made clear how this can be so given they are ultimately meant to be just physical things (cf. the problem of qualia above). Brandom renounces all talk of ‘experience’ as obscurantist. What neither do is consider let alone take seriously transparency. 10

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the one hand, and ‘spontaneous’, discursive thought, on the other, in the manner of Kant. The former is on this view not a separate component in grounding our objective thought from without the realm of such thought, but a distinctive modus of our overall cognitive functioning in which conceptual capacities are actualised, just as in the realm of spontaneity. There is thus no ‘outer boundary’ to the conceptual, i.e. there is no non-conceptual experience or ‘reality in itself’ to come into cognitive contact with in perception. In this way, and insofar, McDowell seems to be working within ARTL’s central tenets as I have outlined them. Some might see this as a slightly odd consequence, insofar as McDowell is not generally seen as a pragmatist, at least of the Rorty/Price kind, and defends a form of RPE.  Nevertheless, anti-representationalism about thought and language – ARTL – is one view, anti-representationalism about perceptual experience another, and though I do aim ultimately to offer a package that is recognizably anti-representationalist at both levels, there is no logical connection between the two views. In light of the need to do justice to transparency, we should thus, as ARTLists, be open to the kind of view McDowell espouses. On the other hand, McDowell’s main motivation for his view lies not in phenomenology or cognitive science but in transcendental philosophy: the requirement to explain how objective thought and knowledge are so much as possible. This is in some tension with ARTL’s naturalism as I outlined this in Chap. 1. From the perspective of such a naturalism, McDowell’s claim that we just have to see perceptual experience as representational (and conceptual) to explain how thought and knowledge are possible can look problematic.12 In a somewhat similar vein, Rorty argues that, even if one can consistently understand perception along the lines McDowell outlines, this isn’t something pragmatists (i.e., for us, ARTLists) need to or should do (Rorty 1986). It remains the case however that insofar as Rorty’s own view of perceptual experience is inadequate,13 as I have argued it is, we should be open for coherent alternatives; and McDowell’s view, whatever its merits or demerits overall, would seem to be among those. McDowell has recently modified his view of perceptual content, in two independent ways (McDowell 2009), both of which can be seen as attempts to fill out in more detail the nature of perceptual content beyond what follows from the requirements of transcendental philosophy, though in a way that still seeks to respect these. Firstly he has restricted the kinds of property that can be perceptually represented to things like colours and shapes and perhaps certain basic substantial kinds (e.g. bird), rather than just any property we might recognize through perceiving the world (such as cardinal, to use his own example). Secondly, he no longer views the content of  This might be compounded by scepticism towards the kind of epistemological disjunctivism that McDowell sees as tightly connected to this view – the view that there can be infallible grounds for perceptual belief, even though perception is not a fool-proof capacity (cf. McDowell 2011). 13  On phenomenological and methodological grounds, though not necessarily epistemological. I thus stress that I want to remain neutral here on whether perceptual experience does provide any distinctive form of justification of our beliefs (beyond the coherentism-consistent fact that the beliefs we form on its basis are things we generally agree on). 12

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perceptual experience as propositional, that is, as ‘saying’ anything; it rather simply presents the objects we experience as objects of certain kinds, exemplifying certain properties and so on. He admits that this change is influenced by the views of Charles Travis, a naïve realist or relationalist (see below) who has promoted J.  L. Austin’s idea that the senses are ‘silent’, and argued that the idea that they involve claims, as enshrined in standard RPE, involves a deeply faulty picture both of perceptual phenomenology and justification (cf. Travis 2004). McDowell remains committed, however, to the idea that experiences have content insofar as these are seen as Kantian intuitions, which involve, he tells us, a conceptual function that is identical to that we find in the understanding (2009, 264). Moreover, he sees this view as essential to avoiding the myth of the given, which he sees Travis’ relationalist view as committed to. I will not comment on the first of these changes in McDowell’s position (for discussion and critique, see Gersel et al. 2017). The second is an intriguing proposal though one that is somewhat difficult to get a firm grip on. Understanding perceptual representation in terms of saying something about the how the world is or looks would appear to give a fairly intuitive grip on the idea; but if perception just presents the objects, where exactly is the representation? Saying that concepts are still involved in perceptual experience though not such that they amount to a kind of judgment might seem to imply the new view is that we perceive concepts – which sounds (and surely is) absurd. On the other hand, if the conceptual capacities actualised in perception function ‘identically’ to how they do in judgement, as McDowell insists, how can they avoid constituting a proposition? He offers some guidance here. For example: Though they are not discursive, intuitions have content of a sort that embodies an immediate potential for explaining that same content in knowledgeable judgements. Intuitions immediately reveal things to be the way they would be judged to be in those judgements. (2009, 267)

Whilst this makes sense, the apparently teleological dependence of perceptual content on judgement might again raise naturalistic rankles. Perhaps in the context of a broader discussion of perception a more naturalistic case for the view can be made.14 In my opinion, McDowell’s move away from a propositionalist view of perceptual experience is an advance, insofar as it embraces an important aspect of relationalism (see below).15 Though I also find the new view slightly obscure, it should be on the

 For example Anders Nes (2019) defends McDowell’s new conception of perceptual content as a way of understanding what attention delivers, thus synthesizing his conceptualism with ideas from John Campbell’s discussions that have usually been seen as supporting relationalism. 15  In relation to this we can also note that are other thinkers who, though still subscribing to the idea that perceptual experiences have content have distanced themselves from a propositional attitude model for this. A prominent example is Tim Crane (2009a), who sees the contents of these as more like pictures with a non-conceptual content that more or less accurately depicts the experiencer’s surroundings (cf. Peacocke’s scenario content, Peacocke 1992). Crane lays a lot of emphasis on illusions and hallucinations in motivating his view: given these, experiences cannot involve a relation to real things in the world, he thinks. Otherwise his view can also I believe, like McDowell’s, 14

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table as a possible bed partner for ARTL (I will refer to it at relevant junctures in the rest of this section and return to it in Sect. 4.3). Moving on, we must now record that RPE, however much its stress on transparency is to be applauded, is not the only theory of perceptual experience that seeks to respect this basic phenomenological datum. Having been largely abandoned for much of the twentieth century, naïve realism has recently made a comeback, and it too sees our experiences as being (directly) about the external world, but does not understand this phenomenon in representational terms. Rather, perceptual experience involves subjects simply being presented with or aware of the material things we ordinarily take to be out there and their qualities. We do of course say things like, ‘I see that the cup is white’, or ‘I hear that the river is gurgling’ in describing our experience; but though these kinds of statement can be accepted, RPE does not follow. We can easily make sense of the idea of perceptual experience as somehow or at some level involving a propositional content insofar as we often form beliefs about the very things we perceive; but that doesn’t need to mean that the experiences themselves can or should be seen as belief-like states, making ‘claims’ assessable for correctness. According to naïve realists, this conceives perception as involving a ‘generalist’ phenomenology, whereas in fact it seems the nature of experience is essentially particularist. To start with, the phenomenology of seeing the white cup in front of me plausibly involves there actually being something there that is white (a feature of experience Howard Robinson, 1994, calls ‘the phenomenal principle’ and Mike Martin, 2002, ‘actuality’). Whereas this idea was often used to support sense data theories, if applied on the assumption that what we see are material objects it supports naïve realism over RPE insofar as the latter position sees experience, implausibly on the current line, in terms of conditions that the world has to satisfy, rather than just the particular objects and property instances themselves (Martin op. cit.). Another aspect of this particularism is that perceptual phenomenology plausibly does not involve a categorization of objects (Travis 2004; Brewer 2011). We see the cup and eo ipso its whiteness, hear the river and eo ipso its gurgling, and so on; experience does not predicate something of these things. Peter Strawson’s phenomenological characterisation of experience seems apt: ‘I see the red light of the setting sun filtering through the black and thickly clustered branches of the elms; I see the dappled deer grazing in groups on the vivid green grass’ (Strawson 1979). There is no mention of propositional content here; experiences do not say anything.16 be seen as a move away from RPE in line with what (as we soon will see) fundamentally motivates naïve realism/relationalism. 16  These phenomenological arguments for naïve realism and against RPE have been challenged: Raleigh (2009) points out that the phenomenological ‘data’ I have cited are not clearly that, whilst Giananti (2020) criticizes Brewer’s and Travis’ arguments against RPE on the basis of experiences’ non-general phenomenal character, which they understand as leaving open to a large extent the way things look. I should stress that even if one accepts that perception has a non-general or non-predicative content – does not say of things that they are thus and so – it does not follow that they do not look quite determinate ways, as most supporters of RPE think they do but some relationalists, like Travis and perhaps Brewer, do not. However, the former idea is enough, as I see

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A similar kind of view, known as the relational view or relationalism, has been characterized by John Campbell as follows: On a Relational View, the phenomenal character of your experience, as you look around the room, is constituted by the actual layout of the room itself: which particular objects are there, their intrinsic properties, such as colour and shape, and how they are arranged in relation to one another and to you. On this Relational View, two ordinary observers standing in roughly the same place, looking at the same scene, are bound to have experience with the same phenomenal character. For the phenomenal character of the experiences is constituted by the layout and characteristics of the very same external objects. (Campbell 2002a, b, 116)

Our experiences on this line are thus not to be understood in terms of representations or contents, but the very things themselves around us  – that is, at least, as experienced form a certain viewpoint or, more generally, perspective (cf. Campbell and Cassam 2014, 27). There is, it appears, a lot that can be packed into this latter idea (ibid., Chap. 3), including things like the sensory mode of presentation of the objects, the effects of idiosyncratic background experience, the way our experience varies with how we move about (Noë 2004; Campbell 2008) and so on. In this way, relationalism can be seen as a kind of intentionalism about experience (cf. Knowles 2019b, 178, and for the idea of intentionalism, Crane 2009b): it involves a subject being in an intentional relation to the world. It is just that this directedness does not involve representational content, as on most standard forms of intentionalism. Moreover, at the heart of relationalism is the idea that what we experience is, at least to a large extent, simply given by what is there to be perceived, in mind-independent reality. It is in this way an externalist position about phenomenal character ipso facto.17 (In what follows I will treat the set of ideas outlined in this and the previous paragraph as articulating a single, unitary kind of view that I will refer to as ‘relationalism’ abstracting away from differences across particular views.18). Some might wonder how, if perception doesn’t ‘say’ anything, an experience of a white cup can justify me believing there is a white cup in front of me. But in fact relationalism can offer at least the start of an answer here. For example, my experience of the white cup before me might justify my corresponding belief insofar as the very existence of the experience  – which embraces the cup and its whiteness  – entails that the belief is true (cf. e.g. Kennedy 2010). The relationalist might also add that perceptual justification is not in any case intuitively like justification by testimony (Travis op. cit.). There are many further issues that might be addressed here, for example concerning the possible role acquaintance plays in perceptual justification (more on this below). But for present purposes it suffices that relationalists are not without resources to answer this first question. things, to undermine RPE at least insofar as this is understood as the idea that perceptual experience essentially ‘makes claims’. 17  ‘Ipso facto’ since some though not all versions of RPE are also externalist. 18  The view I will present is closest to that defended by Campbell. Some so-called ‘naïve realists’ seem more concerned to deny representationalist views of various kinds as confused than with positing a substantive theory of perceptual experience in its place (Martin and Travis often seem to fit this description) but I will not focus on this kind of view, or this understanding of the view, here.

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An apparently larger challenge for relationalism is how to make sense of phenomena like illusion and hallucination, where we seem to enjoy an experience of an object and/or an object’s being a certain way, but where the object is not there in the world or is not the way we perceive it to be. How can we understand such phenomena, given we reject sense data, other than in terms of experience precisely ‘saying’ something or at least presenting things as being certain ways – that in the case of illusion and hallucination are then not the case? There is no general way relationalists have responded to this problem, different thinkers rather offering different kinds of account. Generally, they have distinguished the problem of hallucination and the problem of illusion.19 As regards the former, the most common response is what is known as (metaphysical) disjunctivism (see e.g. Martin 2004) which treats a veridical experience and a subjectively indistinguishable hallucinatory experience as in fact fundamentally different kinds of state. In hallucination one cannot know by introspection that one is not perceiving, but it doesn’t follow that the phenomenal characters are type-identical.20 In relation to illusions – as when an oar looks bent in water or the famous Müller-Lyer drawing – it has been claimed that we are, in such experiences, just related to the object and its actual qualities, and falsely judge that the object is other than it is (bent rather than straight, say) on the basis of the object’s appearing similar to what bent things typically look like in the current context (Brewer 2011). This raises the issue of what ‘appearings’ amount to, if they are not to be understood in terms of representational states. Thus another line that relationalists have adopted is a dialectical one, asking followers of RPE to specify how perceptual experiential representation is to be understood independently of cases like illusion; appealing to it just to refute relationalism is seen as question-begging. A stick in water often looks bent, though not exactly like a bent stick out of water. Things don’t, for sure, always look exactly the way they are, but why should they (cf. Austin 1962, 29)?21 Meanwhile, relationalism’s phenomenological virtues are meant to leave it in place as our default view of experience. It deserves to be added that insofar as RPE wants to avoid implying some kind of sceptical position  – whereby we can never know if we perceive mind-independent things or not – it can also seem pushed in a more externalist direction that involves seeing external objects as individuative of content and hence experience. This can arguably create similar problems for it in accounting for illusions and hallucinations.

 Fish (2009) is an exception, who goes metaphysically disjunctivist (see below) about both hallucination and illusion. 20  Another example that is often seen as problematic for relationalism are switching cases, where a qualitatively identical object is unnoticeably substituted for the one presently perceived. From the perspective of the subject, nothing changes, but it seems relationalism is committed to saying the subject has a different kind of experience after the switch as there is then a new particular. The response to this from relationalists is similar to that given to hallucinations, namely, that there is a change in phenomenal character even if it is one the subject cannot detect. 21  ‘What is wrong, what is even faintly surprising, in the idea of stick’s being straight but looking bent sometimes? Does anyone suppose that if something is straight, it jolly well has to look straight at all times and in all circumstances?’ 19

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Campbell has employed a broader epistemological argument to argue for relationalism’s preferability over RPE. According to this, relationalism can, but RPE cannot, explain the way in which conscious perceptual experience would seem intuitively necessary for us to gain a conception of objective reality – a thesis Campbell calls ‘experientialism’ (cf. Campbell and Cassam 2014, 101 ff.). If experience involves content – a representation of the world as being thus and so – then it seems to take for granted the capacity for thinking objective thoughts that is meant to be explained by experience (Campbell 2002b; Campbell and Cassam 2014, ch. 2). A natural response to this is that RPE does not do this if the content is non-conceptual; but then (retorts Campbell) we need to understand how such a content can be made available to a thinker: what is it to entertain a ‘non-conceptual’ thought or see it as supporting a conceptual one? In cognitive science, the notion of representational content is typically understood in terms of some kind of causal or natural teleological theory, but this content is something that unconscious or sub-personal states can possess; assuming such a theory of content as part of RPE, it again fails to do justice to experientialism (ibid., 43). In response to this last point, it could be argued that an experience for RPE could be understood in terms of what has come to be termed phenomenal intentionality, whereby its intrinsic phenomenal character is understood as carrying representational significance (ibid., 113). But there is also reason to be sceptical to this if talk of intrinsic phenomenal character, or qualia, is mystery mongering – as we suggested above it can seem to be. Campbell himself has raised the worry as follows: given transparency, we have no intuitive grasp on the notion of qualia, only at best a theoretical one (for what we see when we see, say, something red is just an external, public quality); whereas for phenomenal intentionalists we are precisely meant to know intuitively or pretheoretically what it is what we are talking about with talk of qualia, such that we can appreciate how they explain representation (cf. ibid., 39 ff.). By contrast, in positing a primitive awareness relation (something like acquaintance) to objects in our environment, relationalism seems at least in a position to respect experientialism.22 There is a voluminous and ever-expanding literature on all the above aspects of the debate between RPE and relationalism. As maybe the above summary suggests, in my estimation there is some reason for favouring relationalism over RPE as things stand, given the terms of the debate between them. If one accepts this – or indeed in any case  – one might wonder whether relationalism can better serve ARTL’s purposes – that is, as a theory of perceptual experience that it can ally itself with instead of the causal view? After all, relationalism eschews a representational

 One might of course wonder what this relation is, or more generally what justifies relationalism’s poisiting of a primitive conscious awareness relation to the world in view of the problem of explaining consciousness naturalistically (see e.g. Pautz 2012). When it comes to the latter, I would see this as being at least potentially defensible if one adopts something like the enactivist framework I outline in Sect. 3.3 below. But since (as we shall see) this is not really a relationalist view, this reply is at best of marginal relevance. Whether it is otherwise defensible, and if it is whether RPE might be able to make use of it too, are further issues one might explore. 22

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view of experience, whilst in embracing transparency it has phenomenological plausibility. Unfortunately, however, things are not so straightforward. It is important for most relationalists that awareness of things, though not representational, nevertheless involves a kind of epistemic relation to them, such that we can thereby make sense of how it provides knowledge of the mind-independent world. This is, as noted above, supposed to be something like Russell’s notion of acquaintance, only applied to external objects and properties (cf. e.g. Campbell 2002a, 180; also Raleigh 2019). However, one might reasonably wonder exactly how we should understand this idea of acquaintance ‘putting us in touch with’ things, such that we can justify our beliefs about them and pick up on the world’s mind-independent nature (see Campbell and Cassam 2014, ch. 7). Indeed, it is hard to see how talk of acquaintance with things – however exactly one understands it – can avoid falling afoul of the ‘myth of the given’ any more than talk non-conceptual experiential content can. It thus seems that relationalism is after all, though a form of ‘anti-­ representationalism’ itself, not a kind that can, at all obviously at least, be wedded with ARTL.23 Relationalists enamoured of Russellian acquaintance will of course think their view is more plausible than any arguments against the given.24 Though worries about acquaintance do not just concern its status as a kind of ‘given’, it is therefore also important, for me at any rate, that there are independent problems for relationalism, beyond those standardly discussed in the literature. These can be appreciated in light of its central claim that phenomenal character is determined, centrally at least, by what is there in the mind-independent reality to be perceived. Though, as we have seen, there is also a ‘third parameter’, the viewpoint, in determining this, relationalism is committed to the idea that worldly objects and their character themselves play a large, indeed major role in this determination; and moreover, to the idea that there is a principled divide between this contribution and the contribution made by the viewpoint. Campbell’s response to the phenomenon standardly referred to as ‘the illusion of the visual world’ illustrates this aspect of relationalism. Empirical studies show that contrary to what many  people apparently believe, we do not have ‘before our minds’, as it were, a detailed, multi-coloured image of, say, the room one is sitting in (as seen from where one is). We have for example no colour vision in peripheral vision at all, and there is even evidence that one can only ever really see one colour at a time (Huang and Pashler 2007). Campbell asks whether we can ‘rescue the idea that our ordinary experience is usually detailed and stable in the way it seems to be’ (Campbell and Cassam 2014, 72). His answer is as follows:

 Recalling McDowell’s newer idea that perceptual experience though conceptually contentful is not propositional, one might wonder at this juncture whether something like this view could be employed as a way of retaining the phenomenological plausibility of relationalism while avoiding the myth of the given. I think this is indeed possible, as we shall see in Chap. 4. 24  Similarlry, mutatis mutandis, for RPEists who believe in the given. 23

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The only way in which we can sustain our common sense conception of visual experience is to be externalist about visual experience […T]he external array of objects and colours and so on is there, detailed and stable. If we think of the external objects and colours and so on as literally constituting the phenomenal content of visual experience, then we can take our ordinary experience at face value. (Ibid.)

I claim, however, that this reply shows relationalism to be implausible. One reason one might have for thinking this would be that the idea of colours (etc.) being primitive features of reality is simply outmoded given advances in physics since the scientific revolution (Campbell and Cassam 2014, 3; Knowles 2019b, 179). However, a relationalist could reply that, insofar as a reasonable naturalism need not endorse physicalism, and insofar as the nature of colour is still a vexed conceptual and philosophical issue – not simply one for science to pronounce on – this consideration in fact carries little weight. Indeed, Campbell himself has argued for what is often termed a primitivist view of colour, by which, though our concept of, say, red is of a property that essentially involves a certain kind of appearance to an observer, it can still be understood as mind-independent property of things (Campbell 1993; cp. McDowell 1985 on values) – a view which also fits naturally with relationalism insofar as this sees phenomenal character as constituted by external objects and qualities. In my view, the best science we have of colour vision – or our best understanding of this science – suggests that it would be wrong to understand colour properties as part of the same mind-independent reality as the posits of fundamental physics, but since this would require a deeper exploration of the field than I can give here, I will put this first objection to one side (for the moment anyway; the science I am referring to is the enactivist view of colour and colour vision, which will be taken up in Sect. 3.3 below).25 There are however two further lines of argument that create problems for relationalism. As we have seen, relationalism draws a sharp distinction between the contribution to phenomenal character made, on the one hand, by what is there in the world anyway to become aware of, and, on the other, by whatever goes into the viewpoint or perspective we take on these wordly things. However, such a distinction is (arguably at least) simply phenomenologically false. The thinking of Alva Noë on visual consciousness (in turn inspired by the phenomenologists) helps to bring out what is problematic here (see e.g. Noë 2004, 2008, 2012). Noë’s so-called ‘sensorimotor’ account stresses the interaction between movement, sensation and a kind of implicit understanding of how these relate as central to an account of perceptual experience. The cup you see in plain view in front of you (as we ordinarily say) is not in fact fully in view: think of the side facing away from you or the bottom of it resting on the table. You do see it, the cup, but this is in virtue of a kind of tacit awareness of what you would see if you or your eyes or it moved in various specifiable ways. Moreover, this applies however circumscribed one attempts to make  Though so-called ‘colour primitivism’ is arguably especially suited to and is often defended by supporters of relationalism, I think one can in fact adopt a view of colour as real without accepting relationalism, at least insofar as it is a real part of our human world. Thus, Allen (2016) develops a realist line that I believe is independent of relationalism. 25

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one’s awareness. Perceiving the colour of the cup essentially involves understanding how that varies in relation to the cup’s curvature and shadowing; likewise its shape. Nor can we resort to restricted regions of uniform colour or form at the cup’s surface: perception is, as Noë puts it, ‘virtual all the way in’ (2004, 193), in that whatever we can be said to perceive always involves a background of movement, sensation and tacit awareness of how these relate, even if this is only at the level of the saccadic movements of the eyes. This does not imply that there can’t be better and worse conditions under (or perspectives from) which to ascertain what something is, what shape and colour things have, and so on. Nevertheless, no experience just reveals anything to us, independently of how we are disposed to act, to move and, as it might be, manipulate the object in question; yet it seems that relationalism needs this idea of experience literally revealing the qualitative world if it is to make sense of its bipartite conception of phenomenal character – which in turn is integral to its very structure.26 These ideas can also be related to the phenomenon of ‘the illusion of the visual world’. We saw above the Campbell thinks that in the face of the empirical data only relationalism can save the idea that our ordinary experience is not in fact an illusion. Now whether the idea that we do have access to such a richly detailed ‘image’ is really an illusion or a delusion or simply a piece of unreflective folklore, it surely doesn’t – cannot – show that we are not presented in experience with a world of objects and their qualities around us: that we are fundamentally locked into some private world of sensation. Insofar, I agree with Campbell. However, this is not because the world of objects and qualities is simply there to be experienced; again, that falsifies the phenomenology (and can indeed be experimentally refuted). Rather, as again Noë argues, we are aware of the world in the sense that these things are accessible to us (Noë 2004): I can glimpse the corner of the piano if I strain my neck, see what the time is if I look up at the clock, catch the latest news on the radio if I direct my attention to it, and so on and so forth. This dynamic relationality is moreover intrinsic to the nature of all experience. For the relationalist, as indeed for supporters of RPE, the paradigm of perceptual consciousness is a kind of ‘snap-­ shot’ of a stationary object or scene, given to a stationary perceiver. This does not mean that more dynamic aspects of perception are not addressed by these view; for example, as we have seen, Campbell thinks Noë’s view can be incorporated in his ‘viewpoint’ parameter. Nevertheless the snap-shot conception arguably does frame a lot of the basic debate between of RPE and relationalism, and rejecting it at root does, it seems to me, alter the dialectical terrain quite dramatically. If the idea of a snap-short experience is a myth, then reflection on it cannot plausibly provide basis for finding a foundational theory of experience.

 Sometimes colour primitivism is associated in the literature with a thesis called ‘revelation’, which has it that veridical experiences of colours are sufficient to reveal their full and true nature to us. I should point out that the sense in which I am talking of ‘revealing’ in the text is somewhat different, where it is a phenomenological point. Allen (2016) rejects revelation in the standard sense as part of his realism about colour. 26

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To reject the snap-shot model is not to reject transparency. On Noë’s view, transparency is upheld insofar as what we perceive is an external, material world and not something mental. But what underlies this is neither an intentional representational state nor an acquaintance relation to mind-independent things and properties in the world: it is rather an achievement of our organism – an enactment, as Noë would put it, underpinned by natural capacities we have to bring meaning to a continual flux of action and sensation. That is the first problem for relationalism, which I have developed by way of an introduction to Noë’s sensorimotor theory of perceptual experience. The second – which though distinct is I think ultimately tightly related to this – concerns the fact that it fails to do justice to the plain fact of variability in sensibilities across different species. What is there for a sensing organism  – what ‘shows up’, to use Noë’s phrase – depends on that organism’s particular somatic, sensory and neural apparata, not just on what is there in the physical world. This point is most often made in relation to ‘secondary’ qualities like colours and smells, but it seems clear on reflection that it can apply as well to what are traditionally thought of as ‘primary’ qualities like shape and motion, indeed, even to the kinds of objects there are in the world for an organism (remember that the world of physics is itself completely unlike anything we perceive). The perceptual world of a human being is obviously very different from that of an ant but plausibly even from an animal much closer to us like a chimpanzee or a dog.27 This is an old point, but nevertheless one that still makes it difficult, I would maintain, to see the world we experience as objectively there in the same way as – and in the same domain as – the posits of physics, which is basically what relationalism supposes. Now one might claim that this variability in perceptual sensibility does not entail the mind- or organism-dependence of the perceptual world. To start with, it might seem that, our sensory differences notwithstanding, there is nevertheless a large overlap between what, say, humans and dogs perceive. One could also argue that insofar as there are variations, different organisms are simply ‘experts’ or ‘authorities’ in detecting what is there anyway, just in in relation to different domains: us (or perhaps certain birds) in relation to colour, dogs in relation to high-pitched sounds and smells, and so on (see e.g. Blackburn 1999, 240). However, these points do not in my view undermine the need to relativise in giving an account what we perceive, for they fail to take account of the inherently structured, interconnected and meaningful character of experience. We can of course in a certain sense say that a person and her dog see the same tree in front of them, insofar as we, humans, identity all these things as parts of a unified framework. However, if we focus on the phenomenology of the situation – the lived, first-person perspective of the creatures in question – it is not at all clear that we would want to uphold that judgement. In relation to this, the tree for a person is quite a different thing from what it is for her dog – assuming at least that whatever we think of as perceived has to be understood along

 For my argumentative purposes it is in fact enough if there are some clear examples of relativity; exactly how finely one individuates perceptual worlds is a further matter (see Sect. 3.3). 27

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something like the lines of Noë’s sensorimotor theory. Relatedly, in our not detecting, say, the sounds or the smells that a dog can, we are not plausibly failing to pick up on something that is in principle there to be picked up on, in the same way as, say, the colour of an object in the dark is there to be picked up on. Such features simply do not ‘show up’ through our characteristic sensorimotor engagements; they are not part of our perceptual world, and hence not part of what we might be answerable to insofar as we are concerned with matters pertaining to that world.28 Both these lines of thought point towards the idea that to properly understand perceptual experience, we must understand it dynamically, holistically and in tighter relation to the specific bodily, sensory and neural capacities of the perceiving organism. As noted above, the analytic philosophy literature typically focuses on atomic experiences had by a Cartesian-like subject, such as seeing the cup on the table in front of me, or ‘a view’, or the Müller-Lyer illusion. But such a focus plausibly involves a wild abstraction from anything like the ongoing sensorimotor interactions that characterize our real relationship with what we call the external world. This is not to say that we cannot learn about underlying mechanisms from focusing on particular perceptual judgements made in controlled settings. But as a way of understanding what perceptual experience is it seems misguided. In light of the foregoing, I would claim that neither RPE nor its current anti-­ representationalist alternative, relationalism, are satisfactory as a philosophy of perceptual experience, either on their own terms or as bedfellows for ARTL. Moreover, though perhaps in need of further articulation, defence and even modification, Noë’s sensorimotor theory (or something like it) would seem at the very least worth taking seriously as a different and potentially more adequate account – something that, in spite of some initial interest in Noë (see e.g. Campbell 2008; Martin 2008), has not been done to any serious extent in the analytic literature. Again, the fine details of Noë’s view, which we have not gone into, might need adjusting; nor need the view we arrive at be hermetically sealed from all aspects or all versions of relationalism or RPE. As we shall see in Sect. 4.3 it may under one understanding be compatible with something like McDowell’s representationalist view (a version of RPE, I have claimed); nor does it necessarily need to eschew the idea of some kind of non-­ conceptual content in perceptual experience (see again Sect. 4.3). Perhaps some of the more ‘deflationary’ moves that relationalists have made in relation to illusions, hallucination and other ‘mismatch’ phenomena are also possible to take over into it, though I also think there is a potential for giving somewhat different and/or more principled explanations of these phenomena if one rejects the relationalist picture.29

 One might again say in response that we, humans, are at least missing out on what it is like to be a dog, or in a dogs’s world, in its totality. That is possibly true, but not relevant to the current objection to relationalism. I consider the point’s implications for my view more generally in Sect. 4.2. 29  Two examples: (1) Certain kinds of phenomena often referred to as ‘illusions’, such as when things look different colours from what they really are in certain lighting conditions, or from certain perspectives will be reconceptualizable as ‘partial views’ of the things or properties in question, a more adequate conception of which will be encompassable through further experiences, in accord with the sensorimotor understanding aspect of perception. (2) Undetectable switching of 28

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Whatever the inherent merits of the sensorimotor theory, in relation to my overall project here the next thing that needs to be registered is that it also, unlike standard versions of RPE and relationalism, seems to be one that is consistent with ARTL; moreover, I believe the latter can make use of it in giving a deeper, subject naturalistic understanding of our linguistic practices. Understanding exactly how will be the guiding theme of the rest of this chapter and the next, but we can start with the basic idea already canvassed above: that on the sensorimotor view of experience, while experience concerns an external world of material objects and qualities, these objects are nevertheless not independent of the mind – or, as I think we should rather say, of the organism (to avoid a connotation of an inner space of purely mental happenings that might be projected outward). What our experience is conversant about is something like a world for us (a bat’s a world for bats, and so on). Though material, this is not the reality that fundamental physics articulates – albeit we should also acknowledge this, that is, the world in itself. Noë avows a similar such distinction as part of his view: The perceptual world is not a world of effects produced in us in our minds by the actual world. But the perceptual world is the world for us. We can say that the world for us is not the physical world, in that it is not the world of items introduced and catalogued in physical theory. But it is the natural world (and perhaps also the cultural world). […] One consequence of this is that different animals inhabit different perceptual worlds, even though they inhabit the same physical world. The sights, sounds, colours and so on that are available to humans may be unavailable to some creatures, and likewise, there is much that we cannot ourselves perceive. We lack the sensorimotor tuning and the understanding to encounter these possibilities. (Noë 2004, 156)

Drawing this distinction, we can embrace transparency along with the role of both dynamic interaction and species’ specific sensory and somatic apparata that relationalism cannot accommodate. We can also – in accord with ARTL’s attitude to ‘givenness’ – reject the idea that in experience we are acquainted with or cognitively in contact with mind-independent reality. Nor should we think that we (that is, humans at least) are acquainted with the world for us. The view is rather that experience and the world it subtends are not ultimately distinct quantities; the world we are in through experience is in a certain sense one and the same thing as that experience itself.30 Of course, we don’t experience everything. The world for us goes beyond our individual encounters with it; it is an intersubjective world. But that is, I would argue, compatible with the constitutive role that experience plays in relation to this world on the kind of view I am putting forward. More needs to and will be said about these issues, and how they exactly fit in with ARTL’s commitments. Notwithstanding, it seems to me that the view that

objects need make no difference to perceptual phenomenal character for the sensorimotor view even though this character is determined by material objects insofar as what count as material objects are those in the world for us, not the world in itself. 30  Having said that, a caveat can again be registered here in relation to McDowell’s view, which might be understood as involving a kind of conceptualized acquaintance with – at least when combined with the view I am presenting – things in the world for us. See again Chap. 4.

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perceptual experience is (non-representationalistically) conversant about such an organism-relative world is sufficiently unacknowledged as such and nevertheless widespread – if not in the analytic philosophical literature on perceptual experience, then at least in much that borders on its themes (see footnote 2) – to deserve a title. I call it ‘phenomenological externalism’ (PE henceforth, cf. Knowles 2019b). In spite of my arguments above, PE will no doubt strike many as flatfooted and ad hoc, if not downright implausible, regardless of issues about how it relates to ARTL and the problem of the given that I will discuss later. In the following section I will try to give it further theoretical motivation by showing how it also plausibly meshes with the research programme of enactivism in cognitive science. Even so, before attempting that, it is important for me to outline how PE fits into the broad problematic I left us with at the end in Chap. 2 – something which also, I hope, will start to show how its ideas need not be quite so crass as they might initially appear. This problematic was essentially whether and if so how ARTL might avoid the kind of soggy pluralism that what Price calls ‘relaxed realism’ seems to threaten. As we saw in relation to Price’s GE, one way of doing this involves the idea that whilst certain discourses stand in covariational or causal relations to things in the environment, others do not but rather arise through expression of internal subjective reactions to a world understood in purely ‘disenchanted’ terms (the ‘e-world’, as Price calls it). I suggested we should be less than wholly content with this insofar as it adopts a third-personal, sideways-on perspective on our linguistic practices and thus potentially alienates us from them; in that sense, it is unclear whether Price’s GE offers good explanations of what we are up to in going in for them. I also suggested that they are not the only possible explanations a subject naturalist might offer in view of more recent anti-representationalist theories in cognitive science, and also that they are problematic if one adopts the kind of ‘secondary quality’ view of causation that Price does. Against this background, what I want to replace Price’s GE with, at an overarching level, is precisely the idea that some discourses are conversant about a human ‘world for us’ whilst others concern the ‘world in itself’. The world for us corresponds to something like Sellars’ manifest image (Sellars 1963), and consists of the familiar medium-sized dry goods that are coloured and move around in time and space, make noises and so on, as well as people that act freely and evaluate their thoughts and actions normatively and axiologically. It is in a word a world of value, not ‘disenchanted’. It also includes the social and natural world, of animals, plants and much else, that we experience and observe, but not as these things are understood in science, or at least fundamental science. The world in itself is something like Sellars’ scientific image (ibid.): the world as understood by fundamental mathematical physics. Now Sellars was concerned to gain a synoptic view of reality without subordinating the one  image to the other or eliminating either entirely. My view, deriving from PE, is similar but lays less emphasis on the idea of synopsis in the way Sellars and to an extent also Price does. There is the world for us and there is the world in itself, and the discourses that apply to these have different characteristics. However, this is not a distinction between terms that causally track our environment – e-represent it – and those that do not (even taking account of degrees). It is rather a distinction between, on the one hand, discourses which

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concern the world for us – those that presuppose and can only be understood in relation to our peculiar embodied modes of sensory interaction with the world – and those which concern the world in itself, in that they involve taking an abstract and third-personal or ‘sideways-on’ perspective on these processes of interaction (again, more on this in the following section, as well as Chap. 4). How can both these worlds be ‘real’, that is, how can the discourses about them both be fully true in the same sense (without assuming, as we are not here, that either reduces to the other)? Here ARTL’s rejection of the idea of ‘reality’, or ‘reality as it is in itself’ is, I contend, uniquely well-placed to see how we can accept this. If there is no such unitary ‘reality’, then both worlds can equally involve truths in the fullest possible sense of the word. The idea of a world for us versus the world in itself is, of course, one that Kant first bequeathed to the philosophical community. But my understanding of it is quite different from his. For him, the world in itself, the Ding an sich, is ultimate reality, though one we can never know or indeed perhaps form any coherent conception of. This consequence of Kant’s system seems bad enough in itself. But even if we accept it, since the Ding an sich is ultimate reality, Kant’s world for us is in danger of becoming just an enormous collective illusion, or delusion. PE is not Kantian and it needs ARTL to be plausible – at the same time as ARTL can find substantiation in the distinction that PE involves. I have so far drawn this distinction, between discourses about the world for us and those about the world in itself, in very general terms, corresponding to the similarly general way Price draws the distinction between e-representational discourses which somehow track our environments and those that do not do this. Price envisions scientific projects that would deepen this distinction in various ways, a central one of which is representationalist cognitive science. What I want to do now, correspondingly, is suggest how the ideas of PE and the view of experience they herald from can be seen as featuring in a different kind of cognitive science, one that is anti-representationalist in character. To appreciate all this, we need first some discussion of cognitive science itself.

3.3 Representationalism Versus Anti-Representationalism in Cognitive Science, and Enactivism In this section I want to work towards articulating a form of cognitive science that can be seen as undergirding the view of experience I have just articulated, i.e. PE, along with its mutually substantiating relationship with ARTL. This is enactivism, understood in a particular way that combines elements of various different views that have gone under that title recently (cf. Ward et al. 2017 for an overview). Before that however a more general introduction to cognitive science is in order, not least because this is another area where there has been a heated representationalism versus anti-representationalism debate in recent years (for an independent overview, see e.g. Dolega et al. 2018).

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Only three decades ago, cognitive science was still dominated if not defined by a representationalist-cum-computationalist paradigm of explanation, something that today goes under the label ‘classical cognitive science’ (CCS). CCS seeks to explain intelligent behaviour by reference to a model of the brain as a computational system that manipulates internal symbols that have meaning or content. These symbols themselves are individuated and have causal power in virtue of their formal properties or syntax – something like their physical shape – but are possessed of semantic content in virtue of causal relations with entities and properties in the environment (and/or other kinds of natural property or relation, such as counterfactual covariation and biological function). This kind of view, deriving from Turing’s seminal ideas about the very notion of a ‘computer’, is associated most famously with the work of Jerry Fodor and his idea of an internal ‘language of thought’ (LOT), possessed of naturalistic content or a ‘psychosemantics’ (1975, 1987, 2008).31 CCS grew to prominence in parallel with and in dialogue with classical AI, which seeks to understand intelligence as complex internal symbol manipulation, realisable in a variety of physical media (Newell 1980). Heralded by Fodor as the ‘only game in town’, in recent years, many cognitive scientists have moved away from CCS in various different ways, arguing that though it has yielded some success in understanding restricted domains like low-level vision and language understanding, it has failed to provide insight into many other aspects of intelligence, or indeed what cognition most fundamentally is. Though digital computers can certainly be used to model certain kinds of intelligent activity, our overall cognitive functioning seems very unlike that of a digital computer; further, CCS seems to offer little hope of or progress in understanding the subjective, conscious dimension of mentality, whereas for many this is precisely what makes the mind a distinctive category. In the late 1980s and early 1990s many were attracted to connectionist theories as a way of integrating computationalism with an allegedly more plausible picture of brain processes and the flexibility of cognition (see e.g. Clark 1989). This development can be seen as continued today in the predictive processing paradigm, which seeks to provide a unified framework for perception and action by seeing the brain as a Bayesian probability network seeking to reduce discrepancies between incoming signals and its prior expectations about the world (see e.g. Hohwy 2013; Clark 2013; Metzinger and Wiese 2017; see also Sect. 4.3). Concurrently, and largely independently, we have seen the rise of so-called cognitive neuroscience, which seeks to understand cognitive function in relation to  I should stress that what I have sketched above is the most typical version of CCS. One possible divergence from this schema is the idea that content is determined, not by relations to external items, but by the functional or conceptual role of symbols in LOT (Block 1986). But this is only a matter of determination: on this kind of view, semantic properties are still substantive, hence the view cleaves to Price’s Representationalism, which I take it the best known versions of CCS (including Fodor’s) also do. A more radical divergence is to deny that LOT has semantic properties, at least intrinsically (Stich 1983; Egan 1999). I shall not go into these views here except to mention that this might also be seen as something Chomsky would be sympathetic to in relation to understanding (natural) language (cf. the discussion of this view as a possible basis for a theory of meaning for ARTLists in Chap. 1). 31

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identifiable neural structures and processes (see e.g. Bickle 2019). However, though these developments do involve significant shifts away from CCS, theories in all three paradigms typically retain a fundamentally representationalist understanding of cognition, as well as the idea that ‘the mind’ is (at least in all essential respects) located within the cranium (i.e. is or is constituted by the brain). I stress ‘typically’ since some of these ideas  – most notably those behind the predictive processing paradigm – have also been linked to a more decisive break with CCS that has emerged over the last two decades or so. This involves the idea that cognitive processing itself – and not just its representational content – has to be understood as inextricably linked to its contextual embedding: in relation to the body and the environment of the thinker, as well as what is in the head (Clark and Chalmers 1998). There is, on this view, no reason to restrict what might reasonably be regarded as the machinery of cognition to intracranial matter, rather than allowing it also to embrace, say, the pencil and paper most people have to use to do complicated arithmetic. It has also been claimed that to understand cognition we must see it as intricately interwoven with the ongoing bodily activities of the organism, rather than as a purely inner processing that mediates between input and output (see e.g. Hurley 1998). This so-called ‘4E’ (‘embodied, embedded, extended, enacted’) movement in cognitive science has often been accompanied by the employment of dynamic systems theory (DST) as a mathematical tool of explanation instead of computationalist models. Dynamicist approaches seek to understand cognition by viewing the organism, its brain, and its environment as a holistic, non-linear, self-­ organizing system (a linear one being more like a classical computer whose overall function can be understood and predicted on the basis of the operation of its parts). Observed behaviour is not explained by internal representational states on this view, but by way of differential equations, defined over various parameters or variables, that specify how the system as a whole moves in and out of states of equilibrium (van Gelder 1995; Chemero 2009). An important early influence on 4E cognitive science (‘4ECS’) was situated robotics (Brooks 1991), a research programme that seeks to build devices capable of intelligent behaviour of rudimentary kinds without engaging in complex internal symbol manipulation. Behind this movement lies the idea that intelligence is fundamentally a matter of becoming and remaining bodily attuned to one’s environment rather internally representing it  – an idea that is also present in James Gibson’s (1979) theory of perception and Hubert Dreyfus’ Heidegger- and Merleau-Ponty-­ inspired theory of our basic interactions with the world (see e.g. Dreyfus and Wrathall 2014). For Gibson, visual perception is not a matter of building up an internal picture of the world from impoverished input, but through experience picking up on information available in the ambient array of light that is relevant to our practical goals. We perceive affordances (a chair’s sit-upon-ability, a knife’s capacity to cut etc.) and respond accordingly (in appropriate circumstances); our fundamental modus operandi is that of resonating with our environment in smooth sensorimotor cycles, not representing it. For (Dreyfus’) Heidegger and Merleau-­ Ponty this is also our most fundamental way of ‘being in the world’. Many of the writings of the classical phenomenologists, perhaps especially those of

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Merleau-­Ponty, can be seen as early contributions to 4ECS, where careful first personal description of the structures of lived experience serve to illuminate empirical case studies of various kinds. Though understanding exactly how more purely phenomenological philosophy bears on cognitive science is a complex and ongoing task (see e.g. Gallagher 1997; Reynolds 2020), the idea that it can and should play a role in constraining, inspiring and perhaps even constituting scientific theories of the mind, without a requirement of being reductively explained, is one that many if not most supporters of 4ECS cleave to. That these developments compromise CCS is something all agree on, but whereas some want to retain the idea that some identifiable parts of an extended, embodied system can and should still be seen as representing an outside world (e.g. Clark 1997, 2013; Wheeler 2005), others want to go a step further and do without the idea of representations completely – at least as discrete functional components, and/or as a fundamental explanatory concept in cognitive science. Enactivism is the most prominent theory today within this latter, anti-representationalist camp (or is perhaps identical with it, depending on exactly how one understands ‘enactivism’); it builds on most if not all of the strands of 4ECS mentioned above, but adds more too. Our focus will very shortly turn to enactivism, but as with the representationalism versus anti-representationalism debate about perceptual experience, it can first be illuminating to assess more generally how ARTL might relate or has been seen as relating to various different ideas in cognitive science. Understood in a sufficiently idealised way – as applying to the mind in its entirety, in something like the way perhaps suggested by Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works (Pinker 1995) – CCS would seem to bring (a naturalistic form of) metaphysical realism and Representationalism in its wake: thought mirrors, represents, at certain levels at least, a mind-independent reality, while also being part of that very reality. Much contemporary discussion in the philosophy of thought and language has also come to assume something like a language of thought model for framing the kinds of theories about naturalistic content and reference that anti-metaphysical realists like Price and Putnam have criticized. Thus, if anything like a vindication of CCS of this idealised form (or in either of these forms) were on the horizon, ARTL would seem to be on collision course with science in a way that would conflict with its naturalistic aspirations. Fortunately for it (and our project here), then, this vindication is nowhere in sight. Indeed, even Fodor himself came to gravely doubt the adequacy of CCS’s explanatory resources to give a full theory of mind, stressing the differences between encapsulated capacities like vision and language processing and full-­ blown intelligent behaviour (Fodor 1983, 2001 – the latter ironically entitled The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way). A further reason to doubt the feasibility of the idealised form of CCS lies in what Dan Hutto and Eric Myin have recently dubbed ‘the hard problem of content’ (Hutto and Myin 2013). If CCS is going to yield MR via Representationalism the latter will plausibly have to be understood in relation to a privileged set of underlying naturalistic properties. As Fodor once put it ‘if aboutness is real, it must be really something else’ (Fodor 1987, 97). But after decades of attempts of various kinds the reductive project of naturalising intentional content seems to have stagnated (cf. Hutto and Myin 2013). From the perspective of ARTL

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of course there are also more principled reasons why it must so stagnate, linked to the arguments against Representationalism mentioned in Chap. 1. But the current point about the naturalised content movement is that simply as a (quasi-)empirical research programme, which is presumably how it has seen itself, it seems to be going nowhere. That said, CCS is not necessarily defunct if conceived of in a less idealised manner. It can seem reasonable to understand the notion of representation (and content) at play in CCS as being of a more technical, instrumental or, as it might be, purely ‘sub-personal’ variety, definable in terms of mechanisms that underlie our thought processes, but without broaching claims about how these relate to more fundamental questions about the conscious mind and its relation to reality. This was pretty much how Rorty viewed the language of thought hypothesis; that is, not as reinstating the classical notion of representation ad empirical means, but merely appropriating the term for scientific explanatory purposes (Rorty 1979, ch. 5). In what can seem like a similar vein, Tyler Burge (2010) argues that much talk of representation in cognitive science concerns only what he calls a ‘deflationary’ notion: internal states that stand (or are said to have ‘content’ by standing) in some kind of causalcovariance, informational, and/or natural teleological relation to objects and properties in the world. Burge argues that admitting this kind of state or content is a far cry from acknowledging that properly intentional, person/organism level states can be understood in terms of them – that they can construct these latter phenomena, or even that they are of the right kind of state to do so. Burge argues that they are not, but what I want to register here is first and foremost just that it is far from clear that they are. Now Burge also goes on to aver that there is a distinct notion of representation in cognitive science, in particular, in the science of perception, that is not deflationary and that does amount to a person/organism level state – one that moreover can explain, as he puts it, ‘the origins of objectivity’ in our thought.. This suggestion points to a more foundational role for representational cognitive science (broadly speaking, CCS), of a kind that looks incompatible with ARTL’s commitments. Having said that, Burge’s claims about representation and the origins of objective thought are by no means universally accepted; in particular, it is not clear that perception science does operate with the non-deflationary notion of representation Burge claims it does.32 But even if we assume CCS is restricted to a deflationary conception of representation, it doesn’t follow that it is irrelevant to ARTL, as Rorty in effect claims. As we have seen in our discussion of GE and e-representation in Chap. 2, for Price it is precisely something like this notion that we can appeal to in order to explain and demarcate an important functional divide in our various discourses  – without it reconstructing or even partially reconstructing a full notion of intentional content.

 Thus, if something like a structure-preserving or isomorphic mapping is what is fundamentally at play in vision science, à là Gallistel (1990), then it is not at all clear that it too does not use what Burge would call a deflationary notion (see also below for further discussion of this idea of representation). 32

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Carl Sachs (2018) has recently elaborated on this suggestion in relation to Sellars’ idea of picturing, which he claims – as Price himself does (2017) – can be fruitfully understood in terms of the notion of e-representation (see Chap. 2). Sachs sees this as substantiated in a particular notion of representation from contemporary cognitive neuroscience: one ‘of iconic representations as second-order resemblance relations between neurophysiological structures and features of the environment’ (Sachs 2018, 674). This general idea of structural isomorphism between representational vehicle and environmental feature as naturalistically grounding the representational relation is distinct from earlier ones that see this as based on causation, covariation and/or teleological function (at least alone), and is becoming increasingly popular (see e.g. Shea 2018; Gładziejewski 2016). However, it remains intuitively a deflationary notion in Burge’s sense; from the perspective of ARTL, it must in any case do so, fitting in with the latter in something like the way Price envisages (for an argument that this understanding of it is warranted, which relates the point to a pragmatic understanding of content along Brandom’s lines, see Williams 2018a). Some form of CCS might, then, provide a substantiation of ARTL, most obviously in the form of GE. However, I have also argued GE is not the only form of ARTL one could adopt, nor obviously the best. My contention, further, is that if we look to anti-representationalist cognitive science, we can in fact find grounds for a different kind of substantiation of ARTL than Price’s GE, one that is moreover better than this at least insofar as it does not neglect the first-personal aspect of our discourses. Rather than dividing things up in relation to what e-represents and what doesn’t, this kind of cognitive science allows us, I will be arguing, to divide our vocabularies along the fault line of what concerns the world for us and what concerns the world in itself, in accord with what was sketched in the previous section on PE. We have already presented the main ideas behind anti-representationalist cognitive science. There are many in-depth discussions in the contemporary literature of what this amounts to (see e.g. Chemero 2009; Hutto and Myin 2013, 2017; Shapiro 2019; Thompson 2007), but what I want to focus on here is (a certain understanding of) enactivism. As noted above, enactivism is probably the dominant paradigm within the anti-representationalist cognitive science camp today, though in being a broad movement, it embraces a somewhat variegated set of ideas and precepts. Though there will be qualifications and caveats to record along the way, the view that I wish to promote is firmly anchored in the text in which ‘enactivism’ (or ‘the enactive approach’) was first introduced, namely, Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch’s The Embodied Mind, from 1991, as well as the updated and more systematic treatment of these ideas in Thompson’s Mind in Life (op. cit.).33 As the latter title suggests, a central idea behind at least this kind of enactivism is that mind and cognition are continuous with, perhaps even essentially the same phenomenon, as life. The biological theory of autopoiesis (Maturana and Varela 1980) has

 For the record, I do not here consider the relationship between enactivism and Buddhism, which figures centrally in Varela et al. but not Thompson’s book. 33

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been a central plank in this position and it is thus often termed autopoietic enactivism. As such, it is taken to contrast with other kinds of enactivism: Noë’s (and others’) sensorimotor enactivism (O’Regan and Noë 2001, Noë 2004), and more recently the radical enactivism of Hutto and Myin (2013, 2017) (the terminology is due to Ward et al. 2017). Noë’s understanding of perception, which we have already canvassed, is to a large extent intended to be continuous with the ideas of autopoietic enactivism, and I will in any case understand it as such here.34 The ideas of Hutto and Myin, on the other hand, deliberately diverge from autopoietic enactivism (and Noë’s) in several respects, the two most important of which are as follows. Firstly, they reject all content-involving explanations of what they call ‘basic cognition’. What we should preserve from Varela et  al., they argue, is the idea that cognition emerges from dynamic, self-organizing activities that spread beyond the boundaries of the organism; what we must turn our back on is their continued talk of meaning or content – though, importantly, only when it comes to basic cognition, for we should by contrast accept content-involving explanations within the realm of the kind of linguistically mediated cognition characteristic of mature human beings (i.e. that of ‘non-basic’ cognition). The second divergence is that they distance themselves (albeit do not explicitly reject) the autopoietic enactivists’ idealistic leanings, that is, anything along the lines that the world of experience has to be understood relative to an organism’s possibilities for interaction with it (cf. e.g. Hutto and Myin 2013, 5). Seemingly relatedly, their conception of cognition also involves an assumption that it involves relations to some kind of mind- or brain-external reality: we have to posit non-contentful but nevertheless intentional  – ‘ur-intentional’  – relations between the brain and things in the mind-independent environment. As far as I can see, these two divergences are independent of one another. In what follows I will present a version of enactivism that strongly upholds the autopoietic enactivist line in relation to the question of whether cognition relates us to an organism-relative world of experience; I will also try to make this idea as clear and plausible as possible (a task continued in the next chapter). The ideas behind Hutto and Myin’s first divergence, though not something I directly subscribe to, are nevertheless relevant I believe to understanding how enactivism’s ideas relate to ARTL. In what follows I will in any case mean by ‘enactivism’ autopoietic enactivism except in respect of any qualifications that are explicitly made (I will return to Hutto and Myin in Chap. 4). A compact statement of enactivism’s foundational idea is the following: [C]ognition is not the representation of a pregiven world by a pregiven mind but is rather the enactment of the world and a mind on the basis of a history of the variety of actions that a being in the world performs. (Varela et al. 1991, 9).

Exactly how more precisely to characterize enactivism is a complex and ongoing task, one that many different authors have contributed to and continue to do so.  Kevin O’Regan’s version of the sensorimotor theory of perception has gone in a somewhat different direction (see e.g. O’Regan 2011). 34

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Cutting through much detail, I think one can instructively understand it as embracing, on the one hand, the main ideas of the 4ECS movement – a view of cognizers as emergent, self-organizing systems spanning brain, body and world, and susceptible to illumination through dynamicist models  – together, on the other, with a particular emphasis on cognition as the creation and maintenance of a living system’s identity and autonomy – something in turn that is linked to accepting a central role for phenomenological, first-personal methods in cognitive science. Enactivism is thus not just an empirical research programme but also a foundational theory of what cognition is and of how it can be understood and studied as a natural phenomenon; one that illuminates and directs empirical research, attempting to make it unmysterious that we and other higher animals can be subjects with a conscious perspective on the world, without reducing such a perspective to something physical. Understanding the nervous system is certainly an important part of this task, but to solve the mysteries of the mind, one must also understand this and relevant empirical research generally against the backdrop of a living system aiming to survive – to maintain self-identity – in a hostile world. The idea of autonomy, following from that of identity, is that cognitive systems are not mechanical input-output devices, however elaborately overlaid and constructed, but irreducibly active, seeking to maintain their own identity and existence over time. Though Kant is an important inspiration for this idea, the autonomy in question here is not that of a transcendental, personalised subject. In us and other higher animals it is grounded in the activity of the nervous system, which is itself inherently dynamic, endogenously generating patterns of activity that are perturbed but not determined by physical stimulation it receives from the external environment. This nervous system is in turn part of a body, and thereby relates to the environment through continual sensorimotor interaction, in ways that are essential to understanding its proper functioning.35 The theory of autopoiesis (Maturana and Verela 1980) is an attempt to understand how even very simple, physically transparent life forms, such as a eukaryotic cell, might instantiate a basic autonomous agent  – thereby providing a kind of bridge between physical processes and the emergence of cognition (without reducing the latter to physics). A eukaryotic cell has a boundary that is produced and maintained from an internal network of processes within the system that also re-­ generate these processes and its components. This boundary is semipermeable in that commerce with the environment is thermodynamically open but operationally closed in relation to the organism’s own activity: interactions with the environment provide the occasion for but do not determine the operations the organism carries out. Along with the process of establishing and maintaining (self-)identity that this structure affords, the system must thus interact with what is not part of itself; for example, sucrose molecules to provide nourishment. The very idea of a living  In stressing the idea of the brain or nervous system as active, enactivism is nevertheless in sympathy with ideas from the above-mentioned predictive processing paradigm, usually understood as a form of representationlism. Connections between the ideas of enactivism and this paradigm are taken up in Sect. 4.3. 35

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organism thus involves a notion of something exterior whose significance is nevertheless relative to the organism, and thus emerges alongside the establishment of the organism’s own interiority. Insofar, we can make sense of the idea of a perspective on the world – a rudimentary form of consciousness – at the same time as this is a world other than that described by physics. It is rather, precisely, a world of features that are significant to the system, given its peculiar sensory-somatic nature; indeed, they are the features they are in virtue of this very significance. They can be related to properties of the physics of the underlying system – we can allow perhaps that they supervene on them – but they do not reduce to them, rather, the system emerges holistically and modulates the parts that constitute it.36 A cognitive agent in a fuller sense of the term is also an autonomous system albeit one of much greater complexity, at the very least. Here sensorimotor activity becomes important; it is through sensorimotor interactions with the environment that an ant, a dog or human being establishes itself as subject related to a world of significance for it. Whether such sensorimotor activity is ultimately to be seen as simply a form of autopoietic structure, albeit highly complex, or involves a qualitatively different kind of structure is a complex issue that enactivists are somewhat divided on. For Esequiel Di Paulo, autopoietic identity, in being based purely on metabolism, does not suffice for cognition proper, which requires in addition dispositions to regulate basic metabolic processes, amounting to what he calls adaptivity – something he argues is necessary and sufficient for a perspective on a world (Di Paolo 2005; cp. Hutto and Myin 2013, 35). It has also been argued that intersubjective interaction is also essential to understanding at least human subjectivity in the full sense (see e.g. De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007). There are certainly many issues to address here, but all enactivists in the tradition of Varela et al. are united in the belief that autonomy and maintenance of identity is essential to cognitive activity, that this is grounded in the phenomenon of life itself, and that it can be understood in system-theoretic terms. There is thus much more one could say about enactivism, both in terms of exploring the ideas above, and in terms of what kinds of empirical programmes they support or suggest. One might, of course, also be generally sceptical and favour more representationalist or even classical approaches. Here I am assuming that enactivism, at least of some stripe or other, is a movement that commands at least some ground-level respect in the cognitive science community as a whole and thus is reasonable to take seriously in consideration of how it relates to other, wider philosophical ideas. Given this background, what I am most concerned with is how it relates to the central ideas of PE (phenomenological externalism), and thereby, ultimately, ARTL. We saw in Sect. 3.2 how Noë’s theory of experience naturally leads  Traditional metaphysical issues concerning how we should understand emergence might obviously be considered here. My basic take on these is roughly that we should take emergence seriously – in a way many metaphysicians of mind don’t – insofar as one takes enactivism seriously, since it is part and parcel of that paradigm. But nor would I, nor I think do I need to, exclude the possibility of substantive metaphysical debates about these issues from an ARTL perspective (for more on metaphysics, see Chap. 7). 36

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to a view of experience as correlative with an organism-dependent world, and we have now seen that enactivism more generally involves a similar thought. But I also suggested that enactivism can be seen as giving something like a more naturalistic vindication this idea, and it can be instructive to understand what this involves. Much of the earlier work done under the banner of enactivism focused on the science of colour perception. The idea that the colours we see are dependent on the particular sensory apparatus we possess is an old one, and already discussed above in Sect 3.2. Enactivists in the Varela et al. tradition go a step further, using data and ideas from ecological psychology to argue that what we see is a species relative world, insofar as identifying colour is integral to identifying the very surfaces and thereby objects we perceive as ‘out there’ (see Varela et  al. 1991, 157–171, also Thompson 1995; Varela and Thompson 1990). Colour and colour vision must also be understood in relation to their ecological role as providing useful information or serving useful functions, often in ways involving other species  – bees’ ability to perceive colour and flowers being coloured is not mere happenstance, for example – and hence as having evolved as parts of whole (multiple) organism-environment systems. It is partly against the background of such studies that Varela et al. aver that cognitive science in general must question ‘that the world is independent of the knower’ (op cit., 139). They write that ‘the inevitable conclusion [of the considerations they have adduced] is that knower and known, mind and world, stand in relation to each other through mutual specification or dependent co-origination’ (150); and that we must steer ‘a middle path between the Scylla of cognition as the recovery of a pregiven outer world (realism) and the Charybdis of cognition as the projection of a pregiven inner world (idealism)’ (172). This work on colour vision is certainly broadly conducive to the central ideas of PE. At the same time one might feel that in concerning only vision and (a particular interpretation of) vision science its significance in vindicating PE is somewhat limited. What we rather need to understand is how the idea of a ‘world for us’ can be grounded in central theoretical concepts and commitments of enactivism in a more principled way. There are it seems to me three central and co-dependent ideas from enactivism that can be made use of here. The first is closely related to the theory of autopoiesis: life generally is not a mere mechanical phenomenon, but is rather, as attested by the very observable facts we can ascertain about it, a striving to survive that entails meaningful encounters with the world. In a word, the world can never be a neutral domain for a biological organism. The second is that such living systems must be understood in terms of dynamic coupling with their surroundings: an organism and its environment are internally related, in that the entire system they are part of cannot be decomposed into several self-standing entities. This applies at several different levels, including isolable activities, like playing chess or hunting with conspecifics, of learning over time, but also at the level of the whole species and their biological niche. This is in line with ideas within recent approaches to evolution such as evolutionary-devolopmental biology (Roberts 2008) and especially developmental systems theory (Levins and Lewontin 1985), according to which we

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cannot meaningfully decompose a natural system into a pregiven organism, or species, on the one hand, and its environment, on the other, in the way traditional Darwinian explanations do (cf. Varela et al. 1991, ch. 9; Thompson 2007, ch. 7). Finally, there is the phenomenological idea of the first-personal, experiential perspective as something both irreducible, and essential to understanding living, minded beings. Without a phenomenological perspective, biological beings in dynamic coupling with their environment, while no doubt possible to register as features of objective nature, could only ever appear arbitrary or bizarre. With it, they can be appreciated as instantiating an organism consciously related to a reality subtended by its own activities – an umwelt, to use von Uexküll’s term, something that was precisely meant to be a phenomenal world in something like Kant’s sense (cf. Feiton 2020). At the same time, we come to appreciate this phenomenological firstpersonal perspective that we ‘breath into’ these encounters is itself inextricably bound up with being a striving living being dynamically coupled with its environment. We can recognize our own subjectivity as having a natural ground, at the same time as that natural ground has to be seen as imbued with subjectivity to make any sense. It is this interconnected ‘core’ of ideas that I believe gives us our best understanding of enactivism as a naturalistic theory of consciousness. It is arguably summed up in Hans Jonas’ dictum that ‘life can only be known by life’ (Jonas 1966, 91; cf. Thompson 2018, 163). It also seems clear to me that these ideas, if taken seriously and their implications followed through, do provide something like a vindication of the idea of the organism dependent worlds that PE involves. There is still more philosophical work to be done in understanding exactly how this thought relates to ARTL, but before turning to that (in the next chapter), as a way of underlining the conclusion just reached I want to discuss a recent paper by Edward Baggs and Anthony Chemero (2020) concerning the question of umwelts and mind-dependence in 4ECS.  As I have already mentioned (in discussing Hutto & Myin’s radical enactivism), the idea that anti-representationalist cognitive science or even enactivism itself ushers in any compromise with realism is not universally accepted, and the paper I have chosen to focus on develops a view of this kind (Chemero has also written on this on previous occasions, oscillating somewhat on the issue, as we shall see in Sect. 4.3). Although Baggs & Chemero provide a very useful analysis, the motivation for their resistance is one, I believe, that pales when the ideas they oppose are understood in an appropriate context (something that, again, requires understanding them in relation to ARTL). At the same time, it is also important to see that, even on its own terms, their line is problematic. Baggs & Chemero’s article involves a comparison of the attitudes of ecological psychologists (the followers of Gibson), who have traditionally sought to uphold a kind of objectivist view of the objects of perception, with those of enactivists, and an attempt at reconciliation. For Gibson, it was important that affordances are there in the environment whether anyone or anything perceives them or not. At the same, he also problematized a fully objectivist view of perceptual reality:

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This perhaps  rather cryptic passage notwithstanding, Gibson’s followers have, Baggs & Chemero tell us, generally wanted to resist any compromise with an objectivist view. Enactivists have on the other hand returned the favour and distanced themselves from Gibsoneans, who, they claim: treat perception in largely optical (albeit ecological) terms and so attempt to build up the theory of perception almost entirely from the environment. Our approach, however, ­proceeds by specifying the sensorimotor patterns that enable action to be perceptually guided, and so we build up the theory of perception from the structural coupling of the animal. (Varela et al. 1991, 204, cited by Baggs and Chemero 2021, S2176)

In view of Gibson’s scepticism towards the ‘subjective-objective’ divide, one might wonder whether this implied contrast can be as large as either side suggests. In any case, there is evidently some scope for clarification here, which Baggs and Chemero duly attempt to provide. What they argue is that this disagreement between enactivism and ecological psychology, while a sociological feature of the respective research environments, is not rationally ineluctable. To effect a rapprochement, they urge ecological psychologists to accept a three-way distinction between what they call the purely physical surroundings of the organism or species, the habitat of the species, and the umwelt of the individual organism. Baggs and Chemero claim that the latter two notions have been merged by Gibsoneans under the label ‘environment’, but that they need to be carefully distinguished, though also without assimilating either to the physical surroundings. Their suggestion is that we understand the habitat as what is available in the world to be experienced by an idealized member of the species, while the umwelt is the surroundings that are meaningful for an individual member of the species, given its specific background of experience and skill set. The habitat can be understood as a ‘slice’ of the total physical, objective world: it is indeed this world, just at certain restricted time and distance scales, as determined by the somatic and sensory capabilities of the species and the kind of ontology that is commensurate with these. As such, the habitat contains objective information there to be used, although this is also inherently meaningful: the physical features that contain information afford specific actions, relative to whatever capabilities the species has. The umwelt by contrast is the habitat in relation to a particular individual member of the species, that is, the habitat as considered from this individual’s point of view and how it experiences it. It is however not a ‘given’, insofar as perception always involves action; what we see, even in our umwelt, is always an achievement or ‘enactment’ (here Baggs and Chemero refer approvingly to Noë). Nevertheless, the umwelt is subjective in a way the habitat is not. By making this distinction,

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Baggs and Chemero argue, we can do justice to the thoughts of both enactivists and Gibsoneans, but also without sliding into any kind of idealism or solipsism. Baggs and Chemero nevertheless worry that an acknowledgement of umwelts is a potentially destabilizing factor: [H]ow do we incorporate first-person experience into cognitive science without sliding into a solipsistic view of the mind? The concern is that we are each trapped inside our own umwelt: we perceive the world only in terms that are meaningful to us, and moreover we cannot even comprehend that there might be more to the world than what we have personally experienced. (Op. cit., S2187)

Their reply is that ‘our umwelt comes to have the meaning it does only because it is shaped by the presence of other actors’ (ibid.). We are not trapped in our umwelts, rather, they open naturally to the umwelts of others, our habitat (in the sense defined above) and, ultimately, the physical world as it is in itself. This discussion is very helpful; however, as I see things, the points Baggs and Chemero raise can in fact also point to a different and, I think, better ‘rapprochement’ between the two schools of thought, one that can also serve to clarify and make plausible the kinds of statement Varela et  al. make about the world being organism-dependent. To start with, as Baggs and Chemero stress, the realm of Gibsonean affordances, though certainly objective in the sense of being standing opportunities available to different organisms across time, nevertheless are quite distinct from the physical world in being inherently meaningful. Following many others (including Gibson himself), they gloss this idea in terms of things being found meaningful by organisms. But unless we accept the idea that perceptual experience (or cognition more generally) involves (internal) mental meaning or ideas that are projected onto a meaningless world, we do surely need to talk in terms of something like an external world of meaningful things; which must moreover then be, not the physical world, but a world for the organism (or species) in question. Something having meaning is, after all, necessarily meaning for a subject; it can’t be understood purely in terms of relations between items in a thoroughly objective world. Since the mentalist/projectionist picture would be quite at odds with both enactivism’s and ecological psychology’s commitment to anti-representationalism, it seems the habitat itself has to be seen as, in a certain sense, a subjective world. However, I also believe we can accept this without the position collapsing into solipsism or idealism. The solution lies in the proper appreciation of two further points. The first is that the very notion of a ‘world for an organism’ is necessarily something that involves a subjective point of view. In involving this point of view, it is distinct from the world of physics – the world in itself. But this does not mean, on pain of begging the question against the very idea, that it is merely a figment of the imagination or something mental or internal. It is, precisely, a world, albeit for a subject (or set of subjects). The second point is something that Baggs and Chemero themselves stress, though I understand its significance in a rather different way from them. As they say, the umwelt of an individual is itself not a given, but depends on relevant activities of that individual. Further, the umwelt of an individual is typically not private, but

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opens up to that of other conspecifics by way of social interaction. The idea that humans are social beings from the outset, empathetically learning language in interaction with caregivers and shared spaces of attention, is of course widely accepted today (see e.g. Tomassello 1999). But many other, if not all species are also social to some extent, and enactivists are generally concerned to understand theoretically how social interaction extends cognitive systems’ behavioural domains and hence meaningful interactions between them and their environments (see De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007). The overall picture this suggests, I contend, is thus as follows. On closer inspection, there is in fact no sharp distinction between the habitat and the umwelt, as Baggs and Chemero understand these things (contrary to what they intend, though their analysis is useful in coming to see this). It is true that an individual at any given time has a restricted access to the wider world around it insofar as it doesn’t experience everything. At the same time, what it does have access to is, in any case, something that has to be enacted through its behaviour, which has to be understood dynamically; and in virtue of this fact, its experience also opens up to experience of the wider world, something that is further augmented and modulated through social interaction. On the other hand, this wider world (the habitat, if one likes), in being intrinsically meaningful, cannot be viewed as simply a ‘slice’ of the world of physics (even if it is in some sense also that). It is to be sure ‘out there’, relative to each individual’s limited purview. There is, plausibly, an overarching human world that we each have individual perspective on. But at the same time this environment is inherently subtended by subjective activities, insofar as it is meaningful. This notion of a world for us – more generally, a world for an organism or species – that we have arrived at is, in my view, theoretically motivated and makes good intuitive sense, even if it is not fully or formally defined. We could call it an ‘umwelt’, something that would be appropriate in that von Uexküll himself did not, as we have seen, understand this as referring to a mere ‘slice’ of the physical world but to a genuinely subjective, phenomenal world, in the sense of Kant. It deserves underlining however that umwelts, though irreducibly subjective, are not solipsistic (or at least need not be). I noted above that ideas about niche construction from developmental systems theory and ‘evodevo’ approaches in biology have also been important in the enactivist literature, and I believe that this can underline the sense in which umwelts are not merely mental or ‘virtual’ realities. Corresponding to, say, the human umwelt there is plausibly also something in the world in itself, embracing things outside the cranium and whose physical structure to some degree at least can reasonably be thought to mirror that of world for the organism. In this way, the idea of umwelts is in my view precisely a middle road between realism and idealism, in pretty much the way Varela et al. claim; and we could no doubt also say it is a notion of something both subjective and objective, echoing Gibson’s words. I don’t pretend to have settled this issue once and for all. Thus one might still reasonably object, say, that the notion of the world for an organism or a species is still implausible insofar as it is monolithic, in not opening up or adequately accounting for idiosyncratic experiences, at various different levels: individual, cultural, temporal etc. One might conversely argue that the umwelts of different species are

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not plausibly neatly disjoint in the way my suggestion involves. These are, I agree, complicating factors that deserve more discussion than I can give them here. My reply would be that these can be seen as largley empirical issues, subordinate to the general idea of an organism-specific world that I have been trying to articulate here and that I think, in one form or other, one ultimately simply has to accept. (Relatedly, as I shall explain more fully in Sect. 4.2, I seee umwelts as a kind of theoretical posit that earn their keep as part of a viable scientific research programme in cognitive science.) My proposal is thus compatible with the possibility that we will need to divide things up in a more fine-grained – or perhaps less fine-grained – manner than a world for pigeons, a world for dogs, for ants etc., or perhaps even postulate a hierarchy of ‘worlds’ with some being contained within others. Perhaps we humans share some general world with dogs, but not a more specific one; a similar relation might perhaps be true of human kind in general and particular cultures. What world a species inhabits might also in principle change over time; indeed, perhaps we must in any case see them as inherently dynamic at the get-go. The non-negotiable point, at least for enactivism of the kind I am concerned with, is that in understanding experience we must posit organism-relative worlds as the correlate of organisms’ perception and cognition. Moreover, insofar as we and organisms generally are inherently social, and also are embedded in an objective physical world, these will not be solipsistic. The coherence and plausibility of the very idea of such a world is something which, in light in part of enactivism’s central ideas, I believe we can and should endorse. Having said all this, I should also add, finally, that the distinction between the human world and that of any other organism’s umwelt is, given my background commitment to ARTL, necessarily more principled in view of our capacity to use language. Mere animals cannot be part of the (or a) human world, in my view, insofar as the latter involves linguistic articulation. I will have more to say about this in Sect. 4.2. This chapter nearing its end. Enactivism’s most general empirical aim to is to bring to bear an understanding of the nervous system as something in dynamic interaction with the body and wider environment together with careful phenomenological analyses of relevant lived phenomena in order to give explanations of various cognitive phenomena. Whether this kind of modelling, theorizing and general approach will bear fruit is itself ultimately an empirical question. But my aim here has first and foremost been to precisify and make coherent the shape of a theoretical option consequent on this approach in relation to the question of how ARTL might be substantiated. The idea of the ‘world for an organism’ or umwelt is a fairly abstract one, but it does seem clearly part of the paradigm of enactivism – at least in Kuhn’s sense of a ‘metaphysical assumption’ (Kuhn 1970), that is, a central organizing principle for the research conducted within it. However, to see more clearly how it can relate to ARTL, there is still a good more that remains to be said.

Chapter 4

The World for Us and the World in Itself

Abstract  This chapter picks up where the previous one left off. I first explore in more detail how the notion of the umwelt from enactivism can undergird the distinction between the world for us and the world in itself that informs PE, such that these ideas can provide a cogent alternative subject naturalistic grounding for ARTL to GE. I then take up various matters arising from the various discussions of Chap. 3 and Sect. 4.2. Firstly, I explain how two varieties of (non-classical) representationalist cognitive can also be seen as conducive to or compatible with PE, taking up amongst other things the recently popular predictive processing model of cognition. Secondly, I give an overview of various outstanding issues concerning the notions of content, information, concepts and knowledge, and the role they can play in my enactivist-based version of ARTL. Lastly, I clarify in what way and to what extent my version of ARTL differs from Price’s, amongst other things focussing on his concept of e-representation.

4.1 Introduction This chapter picks up where the previous one left off. (In some ways it is a series of footnotes to it  – but they are very important footnotes!) It is divided into two sections. The first goes into more detail about how exactly the notion of the umwelt from enactivism can be made use of by ARTL by way of the ideas of the world for us and the world in itself that inform phenomenological externalism (PE). This is to a large extent exploratory and speculative work that raises many issues, not least from the philosophy of science, and my aim is not to resolve all these, but to outline a view (or range of views) that is I hope, given the dialectical framing of ARTL, at least not completely implausible. Section 4.3 takes up various matters arising (as I see things) from the discussions of Chap. 3 and Sect. 4.2, in three subsections. In the first, I explain how two varieties of (non-classical) representationalist cognitive can also be seen as conducive to or compatible with phenomenal externalism. This discussion takes up amongst other © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Knowles, Representation, Experience, and Metaphysics, Synthese Library 473, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26924-0_4

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things the recently popular predictive processing model of cognition and different interpretations of this in the current literature. In the second, I give an overview of various outstanding issues concerning the notions of content, information, concepts and knowledge, and the role they can play in my enactivist-based version of ARTL. In the last, I clarify in what way and to what extent my version of ARTL differs from Price’s, amongst other things revisiting the concept of e-representation.

4.2 Umwelts, the World for Us, and the World in Itself Section 3.3 attempted an explication and vindication of the idea of the world for an organism/species within the framework of enactivist cognitive science – of umwelts, as I shall simply henceforth say. However, a good deal more needs to be said if we are to cogently see our way to understanding how an enactivism incorporating it can provide the kind of substantiation of ARTL I am envisaging it providing via the ideas behind PE. A first issue that needs to be addressed is that, even if we think it is plausible to acknowledge a plurality of organism-specific umwelts, this might seem to sit uncomfortably with certain commitments of ARTL.  For, assuming animals don’t possess concepts, don’t these then constitute a kind of non-conceptualised reality, and isn’t that something ARTL eschews in rejecting the given and metaphysical realism? Perhaps one thinks animals unlike us do or could possess concepts (as e.g. Noë does, at least in a certain sense; see Noë 2004, ch. 6, 2015; cf. also McDowell’s thought experiment about sapient i.e. concept-using but ‘sentiently alien’ Martians, McDowell 1994, 123 fn). But even if one held this, the realities in question would still be quite unlike ours and surely in a deep way inaccessible to us. A response here might be that this is not MR as traditionally understood, for the realities in question are in any case ‘subjective’. Nevertheless, the facts in question would seem necessarily to outstrip our conceptual powers and constitute in that way – for us at any rate – unknowable and inconceivable things in themselves. How can we make sense of such facts, at least within the parameters of ARTL? Indeed, how can we make sense of the idea that such facts might even exist – at least consistently with denying Kant the possibility of doing the same in relation to his Ding an sich, as I have argued we should? As we shall see, I think ARTL can give some kind of answer to the first question here (understood in a certain way). But nor is it totally clear, I think, that it needs to give an answer in order to make sense of the idea of such facts existing (i.e. to answer the second). If we assume the framework of enactivism, a (theoretical) commitment to umwelts follows. It follows from this in turn – let us assume, for the sake of argument – that there are facts we have no access to. But is that a problem for ARTL? Certainly in some sense these would constitute a kind of unknowable or even inconceivable Ding an sich, but the motivation for accepting this would be very different from Kant’s. Moreover it would not be a commitment, like his, that

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brings with it a reasonable charge that each world is a kind of collective illusion or delusion in relation to real reality – this notion, by ARTL, having been discarded.1 As noted, I think a less concessive line is also feasible.2 To start with, we need to remember the processual, dynamic nature of sensorimotor interactions. Insofar as it is fundamentally such patterns of interactions that individuate different umwelts, an organism’s relation to one will therefore not (in general or without further ado) be understandable in terms of anything like beliefs about it that might be true or false, or even more generally things and their properties, insofar as postulating such will involve a kind of hypostasizing of processes that are primarily dynamic. For enactivists, there is a normative relation between the organism and its world; ways of behaving that are more or less optimal. Hence also (for some anyway) a notion of content can be preserved.3 But this is not a content of the kind that underlines the normativity of the attitude of belief and the realm of concepts we language-using creatures inhabit. In the human case, these modes of interaction do precisely come to expression in human thought and language that we can then give a truth-theoretic semantics for. Now, as many have argued, it is also plausible that human language-use itself conditions these interactions. We live today in a world saturated with symbols and symbolic culture, something that presumably has arisen through eons of cultural evolution (Clark 2008; Dennett 2018). Nevertheless, this thought is not inconsistent with – indeed, I would see it as naturally meshing with – the idea that we can understand some of our discourses as expressing or articulating4 different basic modes of sensorimotor interaction that define the peculiarly human umwelt, articulating thereby different parts or aspects of a world for us. At the same time, our world, as thinkers like Heidegger and Gadamer have stressed, is different from that of animals precisely in being a world, rather than, as Gadamer puts it, an environment – a mere umwelt  – that an animal inhabits (cf. McDowell 1994, 115). The former can be thought of as there as a totality for the animal, but its reactions are exhaustively entrained to this, in ever-ongoing cycles. But our world is also something we can step back from, make claims about and reason with one another about using concepts and language. What is it like to be a bat? Thomas Nagel famously asked, and concluded that, though there is something it is like, we can never know what this is (Nagel 1983). Well, perhaps. However, as Daniel Dennett has persuasively argued, we surely can start to give an answer by constructing the bat’s umwelt theoretically, on the basis of what we know about its sensory apparatus, biological needs and its behavioural capacities (Dennett 1991, ch. 14, cf. also Akins 1993). For example, we can learn about the spatial extent of its echolocalia and how the sounds and echoes it  I do not mean to endorse this line of thought, and in any case it only gestures at a larger discussion. I will have more to say about these kinds of issues in a broader context in Chap. 6. 2  In what follows I will be assuming that non-language-using animals are not sapient and so not conceptally endowed, pace Noë’s suggestions to the contrary. 3  I will have more to say about the issue of content in Sect. 4.3. 4  I will also have more to say about this distinction in Sect. 4.3. 1

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generates in performing this are integrated with other sounds it perceives. Dennett calls this the bat’s heterophenomenological world, and for him is no more than a useful theoretical fiction. In my view, we should rather simply say that such things are a theoretical posit or construct of enactivism aimed at articulating something that is just as real as anything else science posits.5 Given enactivism takes engaged, first-­personal perspectives seriously – unlike Dennett, at least under standard interpretations – any such theoretical description could never exhaustively capture the bat’s umwelt, for it precisely says nothing about such perspectives. But it is also important that, though very different from bats, we are like them at least in being living, experiencing creatures. Hans Jonas’ words ‘Life can only be known by life’ are again useful to recall here, and though they are often taken to point up something negative – that a disembodied, analytic perspective is insufficient to understand living phenomena  – they can also be seen as emphasizing the positive thought that living things like us humans, that can also understand, can understand (or at least seek to understand) other living things in a way that builds on precisely this commonality between us. In this way we can hope to achieve a kind of understanding of bats’ experience in relation to the heterophenomenological world we theoretically construct. Insofar as their sensorimotor capacities are very different from ours, there will be a further restriction on the extent to which we can appreciate their worlds, or environment – from the inside, as it were. However, as Dennett would I take it agree, this is ultimately only a contingent limitation. If someone could, miraculously, metamorphize into a bat, acquiring a bat’s sensorimotor capabilities, she would then presumably be able to understand the bat’s umwelt fully (maybe correcting the theoretician’s conception of it). Nagel might say that she would still not experience it and understand it as a bat does. But that, though not exactly untrue, would be misleading: a bat doesn’t (plausibly) understand its world at all, it only lives in and through it. The issues here are delicate, but the above does I think make it reasonable to say that positing umwelts does not entail that there is anything necessarily hidden – anything that necessarily eludes our conceptual grasp in talk of different organisms inhabiting different worlds. I wouldn’t pretend that understanding how animals can themselves have a world of experience, however exactly construed, is not a difficult philosophical issue. However, I do also believe it is a more general problem that many others who also want to see our linguistic and conceptual practices as somehow (partially) defining our being must wrestle with. McDowell’s view of perceptual content as something conceptual is a case in point, since this seems to rule out

 Sellars also exploits the notion of a ‘theoretical posit’ in his account of experience to avoid the problem of givenness (see Sellars 1956). For Sellars what are posited are sensations, understood as causal, experiential intermediaries between the world and thought. As should be clear from the previous chapter, I would see this account as problematic on two fronts: firstly, in its substantive conception of what perceptual experience is like (in view of transparency), and, secondly, in its assumption that some such account in any case should be constitutively involved in understanding properly intentional thought. But that doesn’t mean that the idea of theoretical posits has no role to play in a subject naturalistic substantiation of our thought, as I (and I believe Price) understand this. 5

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the idea that perceptual experience can be had as such by non-language using creatures. McDowell also tries to finesse this, in part using Gadamer’s distinction between world and environment, in ways that I see as consistent with what I have suggested, but I haven’t space to go into this further here (I will however return to McDowell’s view on perceptual experience in Sect. 4.3 below). So much for the world for us; what about the world in itself? I said in Sect. 3.3 that the (or at least my) idea of an umwelt steers the promised course between realism and idealism that enactivists have wanted to secure. However, even allowing the world for us is not something solipsistic, it might be unclear how coopting enactivism doesn’t nevertheless entail a more general idealism or anti-realism: surely if our understanding generally depends on sensorimotor experience then so presumably does our most refined theoretical physics? (Of course, if one embraces MR, things might look different, but that is precisely not an option for ARTL.) This consequence would be problematic for a supporter of a subject naturalistic form of ARTL because it would undermine or at least seriously weaken the way in which enactivist cognitive science is meant to provide a basis for offering different kinds of explanation for different kinds of vocabulary. A further worry is that it might seem to compromise the sense in which ARTL is a common sense realist philosophy, for it involves the idea that the only world that exists is the world for us, and that sounds like a form of idealism that contradicts common sense. The issue of realism will be taken up more generally in Chap. 6 (largely independently of the considerations I am discussing here though hopefully consistently with them). Here I want to argue that we can in any case make sense of the idea of a world in itself for use in the way I want, in particular in a way that is consistent with rejecting MR and Representationalism. Note first that the very explanatory structure of enactivism presupposes that there is some common, underlying backdrop on the basis of which particular organisms and their umwelts are understood as emerging: autopoiesis is described from a third-personal point of view. It may be that our understanding of this backdrop at any time is itself is conditioned by some other of our basic modes of human sensorimotor understanding, but that doesn’t take away the structural point: the idea of understanding any ‘for us’ always presupposes a (relative) ‘not-for us’ to understand it, as such. This point might seem to fall short of establishing any idea of a completely ‘in itself’, but in fact I think that something like this idea can be secured in an immanent way, so to speak – i.e. without having to lapse into MR. To start with, without the idea of a world in itself, the idea of a not merely subjective but intersubjective world – a world for us – looks more difficult to make sense of (though perhaps not impossible; see Sect. 4.3 below on predictive processing). Moreover, this explanatory structure  – of explaining the ‘for us’ in ‘not-for us’ terms  – is not just omnipresent but arguably pushes us towards ever more abstract conceptions of the ‘not-for us’. In light of this, it seems, finally, reasaonable to suggest that the kind of picture that would fill the role of the absolutely ‘in itself’  – that is, absolutely in contradistinction from anything ‘for-us’  – is today within sight, namely that provided by the models and theories of contemporary fundamental physics. These grew out of groundbreaking ideas of the scientific revolution and exist today in the form of Einstein’s relativity theory, quantum mechanics

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and, as is hoped for the future, some kind synthesis of these two pillars of modern physics (together, possibly, with help from so-called ‘naturalised metaphysics’).6 This is, intuitively, an understanding that could be available to creatures who did not in any way share our particular somatic or sensorimotor constitution, for it explicitly abrogates the intuitive dimension of our understanding in favour of one that builds on abstract mathematical thinking. As Danielle Macbeth has argued (2012), it embodies a kind of understanding that is wholly different from that we have in virtue of our biological, life-sustaining practices and that we can recognize as being, as she puts it, ‘valid for all rational beings’ (i.e., I take it, all those capable of the appropriate abstract mathematical and logical thinking). One might still object to this that even fundamental science is necessarily carried out by humans (or at least embodied creatures of some kind). Experimentation, modelling, testing and the rest are all part of the human world, hence are ‘coloured’ by embodied human understanding. How can we hope to make any kind of progress towards a conception of a ‘world in itself’ given this? But this objection is misconceived given an ARTL perspective. What we produce as knowledge – the claims we accept as true – must be distinguished from how we produce it. I am committed to saying that we live our lives wholly in the world for us, as does any rational being insofar as it is alive; but the claims we (or they) make on that basis can have a content that need not concern that world. ARTL does not seek to reduce content properties to anything else, even if it takes a form in which naturalistic enquiry can cast light on different kinds of content à là Price’s idea of subject naturalism. If we contemplate claims with a certain kind of content and they are ones that apparently do not concern our lives as embodied creatures, then, even if our having them is contingent on certain sensorimotor abilities or occupying a certain stage in intellectual history, we should respect what they appear to be saying. That doesn’t mean either that we can’t relate this content to some further distinct kind of capacity we have – a mathematical capacity, say, that is itself not reducible to either linguistic understanding or embodied understanding (for more on this idea, see Sect. 7.4).7 A further point is that the objection arguably presupposes a picture of the relationship between the world for us and the world in itself that ARTL rejects: one on which, in living in the world for us, we are somehow trapped in our own parochial reality, struggling to reach the real one. For ARTL (on my subject naturalistic substantiation of it) being in the world for us is not being so trapped, and the world in itself is not the ‘real’ world. At the same time, we have – as again, I would argue, is demonstrated by the fact of modern physics – an understanding both of our situation

 I am alluding here to people who champion a view known as ‘ontic structural realism’ as a picture of what modern physics provides by way of a reality (cf. e.g. Ladyman et al. 2007; French and Ladyman 2011). 7  For Macbeth the understanding embodied in fundamental science has a historical dimension, in having developed from early Greek mathematics and philosophy, through the advances in of the scientific revolution and later those in the nineteenth century through to the refined forms it takes today. This seems to introduce a kind of historical understanding of our capacity, an avenue which might also be possible to pursue. 6

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and that of other organisms that abstracts in a distinctive, mathematical way away from the arena of embodied cognition. It thereby yields a world-picture that we, before the age of modern science, could perhaps never even have dreamt of; it is something genuinely new compared to the human world. But absent the idea that this is reality, and the world for us thereby a kind of distortion or entrapment, what reason is there not to take this as concerning what it appears to be: a world in itself? Could one object that the world picture of modern physics is ultimately of merely instrumental value, an abstraction that does not articulate a genuine world beyond the world for us (or at least one that we might know)? I take it that precisely that discussion – the classical question of scientific realism – is somewhat orthogonal to the present one, which concerns whether we can so much as make sense of the idea of a world in itself when we live our lives wholly in the world for us. In accepting an (at least somewhat) knowable world in itself, I nail my colours to the scientific realist mast, but I take it that is not a very controversial commitment in and of itself (especially for a semantic deflationist, for whom all rational assertive discourses are cognitive by default).8 Further objection might be levelled against my overall two-worlds view. I might seem to have presented this as a dichotomoy, but it surely it is very natural to think that the world for us and the world in itself in some way or at some level interact. After all, physics is, for all its mathematical sophistication, an empirical science, based on experience. Moreover, there is surely much science between the common sense world and physics. Don’t science and common sense in these ways necessarily overlap – bleed into one another in ways that are inimical to my dichotomous way of thinking about them? My answer to the first point here builds on something already noted, namely, that the idea of the world in itself is integral to understanding the very idea of a world for us. Our theory of the world in itself is thus necessarily aimed, in part, at explaining the world for us, the world of experience; the idea of physics as an empirical science is thus completely unthreatened. At the same time, this is not to be understood in any kind of positivistic sense. Physics isn’t about the world of experience even though it is in part explanatorily answerable to it. But I take it few are tempted to think in such positivist terms today (modulo, again, questions relating to the issue of scientific realism). But what, the objector might continue, about the non-fundamental or ‘special’ sciences? To understand their status on my picture, we should note, to start with, that our picture of the world in itself is not one that we are simply in possession of, let alone one that arrived at some point in the past fully formed and articulated. The world that we know exists and know what is like more or less for certain (at least in broad outline), is the world for us, and even though getting clear on what this reality amounts to – including that it is a world for us – requires us to think in terms of things in themselves, our positive conception of what these latter things are need not

 Though I am more inclined to take an instrumentalistic attitude to non-fundamental science; see below. 8

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initially extend very far beyond our common sense conceptions of things (or: our conception of things in the common sense world). So in that sense not all science is fundamental science. At the same time, I do not see this as compromising the idea of a principled divide between the two worlds. The world for us is a subjective, experiential world, necessarily. We do our natural science in this world, and seek to understand what this uncovers as best we can, using whatever cognitive abilities we have at our disposal (natural or acquired). Different sciences will draw on different capacities and different modes of thinking. Nevertheless, I take it that modern physics does ultimately aim to be – conceives itself as being – a complete picture of at least things in themselves, so that whatever we say about these things has, ultimately, to be made sense of in terms of it. This needn’t involve reduction: different sciences can also concern the spatio-temporal world at different, autonomous spatio-­temporal scales, but whatever scale we are at, there must be consistency with fundamental physics, and the very idea of such different scales should be intelligible on the basis of what we know from fundamental physics (cf. Ladyman et al. 2007). Of course, there is one clear exception here, but this should come as no surprise given what I have argued so far: enactivist (cognitive) science. In seeking to integrate its naturalistic data with that of lived experiences, its foundational ideas are not explicable on the basis of fundamental physics alone. My view of science, though in one way disunified, is thus not massively disunified and pluralistic in the way say John Dupré’s is (see Dupré 1994), with many different kinds of unrelated ontological entity. On my picture, there is the world of (natural, physical) science which is ideally answerable to fundamental physics, and there is the world (or worlds) of the living and the subjective that emerges from this. New issues may arise here, such as whether entities posited in non-basic sciences (viruses in biology, say) to causally explain things we experience can be seen as real and the claims associated with them as literally true, or ultimately just useful instruments – at least without some integration into the world of physics. Given my adherence to a distinction between a world for us and a world in itself, where the latter is that of fundamental physics, and given Price’s understanding of causation (see Chap. 2), I am tempted to regard all genuine causal claims as belonging to the human world. Exactly what this implies by way of how we should understand the special sciences is I take it a somewhat open question, bound up with issues about e.g. what we mean by explanation, the notion of approximate truth, instrumentalism, scientific metaphor and many other issues that, again, abut the scientific realism question. I also think that the essentials of the overall kind of view I want to uphold are consistent with some kind or degree of disunification in the world in itself: for me there needn’t perhaps be just one ‘world in itself’ so long as acknowledging a plurality of such worlds or ‘realities’ is consistent with seeing these things as fully objective and distinct from the world for us. The worry from my point of view with accepting this would be that it threatens to blur the line between the two realms, the ‘for us’ and the ‘in itself’. The kind of pluralistic view in question here is often one which emphasises human perspective and interaction, and hence a kind of constructivist understanding of realism, even when it comes physics (see e.g. Hacking 1983;

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Chang 2022) – a view of what is ‘real’ more in line with the kind of half-way status between objective and subjective that enactivism sees umwelts as having. But in principle this might not be the case, and hence I leave open the door to greater pluralism than my ‘official’ line would acknowledge. Obviously a lot more could be said about all these issues. The commitments I have incurred about these matters are a function of what I think we best can say by way of understanding language, thought and experience, and I obviously cannot answer every question that might arise on reflecting on them. However, I do believe, in view of the considerations presented above, that there is nothing about them that necessarily conflicts with a reasonable and realistic understanding of science and how it proceeds. To summarise my argument thus far then: Enactivist cognitive science offers the basis for an alternative subject naturalist account of our discourses, one that understands this in terms of a distinction between the world for us and the world in itself, in line with the ideas of PE. In view of ARTL’s rejection of the ‘reality’ concept neither of these worlds need be seen as more fundamental or ‘real’ than the other, thus bypassing the contortions of traditional metaphysics. Moreover, I claim that enactivist cognitive science – a recognizably anti-representationalist enterprise in cognitive science – provides, at least potentially, a superior explanatory substantiation of ARTL than representationalist cognitive science and the accompanying classical expressivist accounts that GE makes use of to explain things like ethics. This is, in particular, because of its emphasis on the conscious, lived nature of experience in relation to a corresponding world of significance. We are thus not alienated from our own practices as we arguably are in the face of GE’s preferred modes of explanations (classical expressivist or e-representational). Again I stress that, whether enactivism will prevail as viable cognitive science, and to what extent, is an empirical question. Nevertheless, it can hardly today be ignored as a contender for understanding what cognition is that diverges markedly from the hitherto dominant representationalist paradigms. Thus it strikes me as important to indicate how it can fit in with an approach to language and thought that also deserves attention, and that is also termed ‘anti-representationalism’ – ARTL – but that has hitherto, at least for the most part, only been elaborated in relation to representationalist approaches to cognition.

4.3 Matters Arising In concluding this part of the book I want to make some further remarks, partly of a clarificatory nature, partly in order to engage with some important reservations one might have about my proposal based on the current state of the art in cognitive science. I divide these into three subsections though the issues taken up are to inter-related.

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4.3.1 Non-classical Representationalist Cognitive Science The enactivist paradigm I sketched in Sect. 3.3 – a highly prominent one in current cognitive science – is also, in my view, particularly well-suited as a subject naturalistic substantiation of ARTL, insofar as it builds in and upon the idea of embodied autonomy, thus respecting our linguistic practices’ engaged, first-personal dimension. But of course there is far from a consensus on the idea that its framework is optimal, even amongst those who depart from CCS. Many of these alternatives have much in common with enactivism, whilst also significantly diverging from it. In this section I will consider two (probably mutually compatible) such alternatives and show how they could nevertheless be put to service in grounding PE in the way I have argued enactivism does (albeit, in my view, not as well). The first is the predictive processing (PP) paradigm, one that has attracted huge attention recently as a kind of grand unifying theory of perception and action, and of cognitive and neural function. PP is standardly seen as a variety of representationalist cognitive science in which cognition is seen as the generation of an internal model of the world by the brain (Howhy 2013; Metzinger and Wiese 2017). Rather than deriving this model mainly bottom-up on the basis of sensory input in which one detects certain patterns or features – as in more traditional representationalist conceptions of cognition – PP sees the brain as constantly predicting sensory input on the basis of its own prior assumptions. This process occurs at several different levels of hierarchical organization, allowing the tracking of the world at different spatial and temporal levels, and is also sensitive to the amount of precision that is at stake. But the flow of information is in any case primarily top down rather than bottom up. There is no building up of a picture of the world from more primitive representations as in Marr’s famous classical account of vision (Marr 1982): adjustments are made directly to the higher level model in response to error and is as minimal as possible, whilst the prior probabilities are fixed by endogenous assumptions about normality that are keyed to our biological needs. PP also involves the idea of active inference: the internal model drives action to minimize prediction error. In this way PP is meant to provide a unified framework for understanding both action and perception in terms of one fundamental kind of brain functioning. In its stressing of the idea of the brain as part of a living thing and inherently active, enactivism is in sympathy with ideas from PP. However, PP can nevertheless seem to involve a quite radical divergence from enactivism, and hence from PE, in that it maintains, or seems to maintain, the idea that the models derived are some kind of representation of the outside world – something like hypotheses with truth evaluable content to the effect that the organism-independent world is thus and so. However, several further considerations can suggest a more nuanced assessment. To start with, there is a question of whether the hypotheses the brain entertains are in any way accurate representations of this outside world. For some supporters of PP, such as Thomas Metzinger, it involves a view of the human brain as a system which, even in ordinary waking states, constantly hallucinates at the world, […] a system that constantly lets its internal autonomous simulational dynamics collide with the

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ongoing flow of sensory input, vigorously dreaming at the world and thereby generating the content of phenomenal experience. (Metzinger and Wiese 2017, 3)

On this line, PP entails that the contents of consciousness – understood as such, i.e. as some phenomenal, subjective appearance – are a massive misrepresentation of how things are in reality. Now some might see in this statement a recipe for a disastrous scepticism or idealism (e.g. Zahavi 2019). However, it seems one could rather reinterpret this commitment as supporting PE, in turn understood in terms of the ‘non-realist’ setting ARTL provides: the experience generated by the brain is precisely (only) a world for us, but this world can still be quite on a par with the world in itself in terms of what is real – the notion of ‘reality’ or the ‘really real’ having been jettisoned. I don’t think that PP, under this interpretation, would give as good a naturalistic grounding of PE as enactivism does. The latter offers an understanding of the world for us as something emergent from, not just the brain, but the physical world, as well as the intersubjective interlacing of our various different sensorimotor interactions with this world. But maybe more could be said in this regard on behalf of PP, understood in the way just adumbrated. The point here in any case is that even if my preferred anti-representationalist form of cognitive science were not to be accepted, there are other, broadly representationalist kinds that could also vindicate PE. Of course, Metzinger’s take on PP is only one amongst several possible, and some of these are plausibly more at odds with the ideas behind PE. However, it is also worth noting that other supporters of PP see it as more or less in line with enactivism’s framework. A central idea behind PP developed by Karl Friston is that what underlies processing in the brain is the so-called ‘free energy principle’, a fundamental law of all non-equilibrium self-organizing systems that dictates they remain in a certain set of states characterised by low ‘free energy’, understood information-­ theoretically (Friston and Stephan 2007). According to this idea, to maintain its organization it is necessary and sufficient for an organism to remain in one of these states in its interactions with the environment. However, instead of this entailing that the brain is a hypothesis generator abiding by principles of Bayesian inference, Jelle Bruineberg and colleagues have recently argued that the principle rather supports a view of the brain as, like living systems more generally, seeking to maintain homeostasis: the survival of organism and its stable identity in its niche over time (cf. Bruineberg et al. 2018, see also Williams 2018a). On this line, active inference, in which sensory states are actively changed in the service of reducing free energy, is necessarily primary, and the models that the brain generates are thus not hypotheses about a mind-external reality, but have to be understood in terms of the body as a whole seeking to maintain homeostasis in the way all biological beings do. These sensory states are moreover species specific (we aim e.g. to maintain a body temperature of 37°, other animals different temperatures and distributions, and so on). They are also of course dependent on the ambient environment, but at its most basic level of operation one has to understand the organism and its environment as one coupled system in smooth interaction, and hence what is perceived in terms of Gibsonean affordances. This is all clearly in line with enactivism’s leading ideas, and hence with PE if what I have argued so far correct.

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Whether it is totally in line is perhaps somewhat unclear insofar as it is possible to see this kind of view as nevertheless still involving representations. For example, Andy Clark has also nailed his colours to PP-mast, but sees it as a way of reconciling enactivist and CCS sympathies insofar as it provides a unified account of perception and action that allows us to retain the idea of representation, something he sees as independently desireable (Clark 2013, see also Clark 1997, 2008; Wheeler 2005). We might thus also consider the general idea of so-called action-oriented representationalism as another alternative to enactivism (this kind of generic view might also encompass theories like Ruth Millikan’s, which involves what she calls ‘push-me-pull-you’ representations as underlying cognition, cf. Millikan 1984). One can argue about whether this view is ultimately superior or inferior to standard enactivism, which I understand as being steadfastly anti-representationalist (see subsections (ii) and (iii) below). What I want to argue here is that even if we were to accept it (possibly as part of yet another kind of ‘enactivism’ that, like Hutto and Myin’s, departs from Varela et  al.’s in various specified ways) I think one could again reasonably interpret it in ways conducive to PE understood against the backdrop of ARTL. To make the case for this, I want briefly to return to the debate about realism and anti-realism in 4ECS that we looked at at the end of Sect. 3.3. Once upon a time Chemero argued (Chemero 2009) that Clark’s view, just like Varela et al’s, leads to a kind of anti-realism: different organisms will represent different ‘worlds’ assuming that the kinds of representations posited are individuated in terms of their potential for action, for they will then vary with organisms’ different sensorimotor capacities. Clark responded (Clark and Mandik 2002) that plurality in representational schemes does not imply anti-realism, both because there may be overlap between them, and because, even if there is not, organisms may simply be sensitive to different features of the one mind-independent world (cp. Blackburn’s response to my argument that different organisms perceive different worlds in Sect. 3.2). Now Chemero himself has also more recently disavowed the anti-realism he earlier promulgated (Chemero 2009, ch. 9 – a view in line with that he defends together with Baggs discussed in Sect. 3.3). To start with, he says, we can learn to transcend our innate classificatory schemes and thereby seek to come into contact with the world in itself. He further argues that Gibsonean affordances can be seen as real insofar as we are (scientific) realists about theoretical posits in general. Karim Zahidi (2014) has also commented on this debate in a similar vein. He claims that even if we allow that representational systems have a holistic character – thus blocking the Blackburn-kind of response Clark employs – the kind of intermediate ‘neither realism nor anti-realism, but something in between’ position of Varela et al. still fails to follow insofar as everything they want to say is compatible, indeed seems to presuppose the idea of a world independent of cognizers (ibid., 266). Zahidi also endorses Chemero’s scientific realism about affordances and further supports it by reference to their causal independence from individual thinkers (470 ff.). Now it is true, as we have seen, that Varela et al. often speak in terms that might suggest a radical kind of idealism. However, as I argued, making clear what the idea of a world for an organism or umwelt involves in the way I did allows us to see that

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Varela et al.’s position and what they say about it can be given good sense without having to deny the existence of the world in itself. That is, I can agree with what Zahidi and Chemero (now) says about the world in itself, but I do not see this as in any way compromising enactivism’s self-characterisation, or the idea of there being umwelts and a world for us. I also think I can accept much of what Chemero (and Zahidi) claim about affordances being real. But seeing affordances as theoretically real entities does nothing to compromise, but rather, as I see things, shores up under the utility of the idea of a plurality of umwelts, motivated more or less along the lines of Chemero’s earlier argument against Clark (which is close to the enactivist argument for this view I sketched in Sect. 3.3). Chemero and Zahidi give the impression that such ideas are ipso facto undesirably anti-realistic, and Zahidi argues instead for a kind of ontologically pluralist but realist position associated with amongst others Nancy Cartwright (1999) and John Dupre (op. cit.). I think the framework of PE is better suited to understanding how 4ECS – representationalist or otherwise – relates to ARTL, for reasons to do with the unity of the worlds in question (as discussed in the previous section). In the present context, however, the directly relevant point is that, if one accepts ARTL, there is in fact nothing anti-­ realistic about also accepting the idea of a world for us, and nothing that rules out talking of the world in itself. Thus, at least for all Chemero and Zahidi argue, a cognitive science based on action-based representations can also be seen as a way of substantiating PE and ARTL. Some might argue that all of this is misunderstood. Thus for Millikan representationalism in cognitive science, even on her push-me-pull-you notion of content, is meant to vindicate the correspondence theory of truth and metaphysical realism. To which I reply: if so, so be it. All I want to point out is that, if action-based representationalism were to prevail in cognitive science, and if it does involve commitment to umwelts, it does not imply any kind of anti-realism insofar as it can made use of in a subject naturalistic substantiation of ARTL via PE. A final issue of relevance to my overall dialectic here concerns whether the alternatives to enactivism I have considered above, in being in a broad sense representationalistic, would in any case render my position too close to Price’s GE to qualify as a distinct form of subject naturalistic ARTL. I will take this issue up in subsection (iii), below.

4.3.2 Content, Concepts, and Knowledge I have so far been understanding enactivism as an anti-representationalist form of cognitive science, a label that is meant to carry significance, or at least be of interest, insofar as I am aiming to provide an ‘integrated anti-representationalist philosophy’ – in contrast to Price’s view, which marries ARTL with a notion that at least is most clearly recognizable as part of representationalist cognitive sicence (viz. e-­representation). However, it might be wondered in what way enactivism really is, at least fully, ‘anti-representationalist’. As we will recall, Hutto and Myin have

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urged a form of enactivism, different from that of Varela et  al. and sensorimotor theorists like Noë, known as ‘radical enactivism’, which seeks to dispense with all content-involving explanations of basic, i.e. all non-linguistic cognition. By implication, they see defenders of autopoietic and sensorimotor enactivism as still wedded to the idea of content as a basic explanatory notion that also applies outwith the realm of language and language-mediated cognition. For Hutto and Myin, this adherence forms no essential part of enactivism and should be excised from it, for there is no way of understanding content in a naturalistic way (given ‘the hard problem of content’). They nevertheless uphold the idea of contentless informational links between thinkers and the world, something they term ‘ur-intentionality’ (see Sect. 3.3). Evan Thompson has defended the idea of content against Hutto and Myin (Thompson 2018). Thus he writes (referring to two enactivist heroes of his): Merleau-Ponty and [Walter] Freeman[9] both argue that representationalism, according to which cognition consists of state transitions between internal mental or neuronal representations, does not explain basic cognition at either the psychological or neurophysiological levels. Neither theorist, however, would say that basic cognition is contentless; on the contrary, their concern is to describe a basic kind of intentional content that is not representational. Nor would they say that the intentional content has no satisfaction conditions, in the sense that it is not subject to norms. Dreyfus follows suit when he argues that the immediate response to how one is solicited by a situation has content and is subject to norms of perception and action, but the content and satisfaction conditions are not representational.

By ‘not representational’ Thompson means content that is specified neither in terms of concepts, nor reference or truth conditions; he also seems to see such content as something that it makes no sense to attribute to identifiable internal states of an organism (or indeed, identifiable parts of a whole organism-environment system). But insofar as a system is intentional at all, it must nevertheless make sense to attribute it content insofar as cognition is a normative phenomenon. Indeed, for Thompson, it is Hutto and Myin who need to ‘recitfy’10 their own view by acknowledging that any notion of ‘ur-intentionality’ willy-nilly brings with it a notion of content. Is enactivism then after all committed to content? And if so, is that problematic for my project here? If so, I take it this would not be because the idea of it being ‘anti-representational’ might be compromised, if only because there is a clear sense in which it is still precisely not a representationalist view. However, at a more substantive level one might worry that it inevitably brings with it a commitment to some kind of ‘given’ and that this must contravene the strictures of ARTL. If our conceptual thought is somehow to be made sense of in terms of non-conceptual

 Founder of the so-called neurophenomenological school of thought, see e.g. Thompson (2007, ch. 11) for more details. 10  This is what Hutto and Myin think needs to be done with forms of enactivism other than their own, playing on their acronym ‘REC’ standing for ‘radical embodied/enactivist account of cognition’. 9

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content, aren’t we back in an explanatory framework that ARTL precisely seeks to reject? I think the answer to this question is ‘no’. As I see things any notion of content involved in enactivism can be seen as a kind of theoretical notion, postulated by a scientific theory to explain certain kinds of phenomena, not as constitutively involved in the classical philosophical project of understanding the possibility of knowledge and thought about the world. The issue is closely related to that taken up in Sect. 4.2 above. There the problem was that of understanding how umwelts might be seen as shedding light on our linguistic practices without constituting some kind of non-conceptual reality. And again the answer was that, ultimately, umwelts are a theoretical, technical posit, albeit ones whose point springs from the first-personal perspective we take all living things, including ourselves, to have on their environments. Insofar, I am tempted to regard the disagreement between Hutto and Myin and Thompson as something of a verbal one, or at least one that is less important than they think it is. There are undoubtedly normative aspects to cognition which need to be respected and accounted for. For example, there are experienced pressures to adopt more or less optimal vantage points for perceiving things (as Merleau-­ Ponty stressed). Further we can no doubt make sense of the idea of information in various ways, for example as what is made available to the organism in virtue of complex, dynamical relations between it and the environment (in the manner of Gibson; cf. Chemero 2009, 107 ff.; Thompson 1995, 57–8). The point I want to stress here is that however exactly one understands these notions, it does not seem they need to enunciate anything novel in relation to those autopoietic enactivism already endorses, namely, the idea of cognition as the sense-making activities of an organism, yielding the idea of a coupled organism-environment system or umwelt – something that at least in many higher organisms amounts to a shared, intersubjective world. As I have argued this is not tantamount to non-language using creatures having truth-evaluable intentional states. Whether these activities or notions need in turn to be understood in terms of some notion of content strikes me as a further issue, of interest,11 but not one that has the kind of foundational implications that would threaten the use of enactivism by ARTL. I also want to say here something about concepts and knowledge in relation to the understanding of perception. Starting with Noë, he has a view of perceptual experience as imbued not just with content but with concepts, insofar as such experience always involves a kind of understanding (cf. Noë 2004, 2015). He also defends the idea of a distinctive kind of knowledge, albeit of a practical, ‘knowhow’ character as underlying our concept possession and thereby our perceptual encounters with things in the world. However, having a concept for Noë is not tied to anything distinctively human or language-like, and hence for him animals can also possess concepts as well as knowhow (if not propositional knowledge ‘that’). Now for Hutto and Myin, these are all excrescences on the cleanly anti-representationalist fabric  As would the discussion of whether certain other ‘mentalistic’ notions should be embraced by enactivism and if so how. For helpful discussion of various distinctions between the ideas of intentionality, cognition and representation in relation to enactivism, see Schlicht and Starzak (2021). 11

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that enactivism should be, and must accordingly be excised from it (see e.g. Hutto and Myin 2013, 23 ff.; also Hutto 2005). This disagreement enunciates a large issue that, though relevant to the issues I have been discussing so far, is dialectially distinct from these, and would involve too large a digression to go into to here. Briefly my line on it as follows (see Knowles forthcoming) all genuine knowledge, even practical knowledge how, is necessarily tied to conceptual capacities and only language affords these in the literal sense. I also think, however, that Noë’s view of perception as involving an active understanding can be divorced from any association with ‘knowledge’ or ‘concepts’, and can be understood simply in terms of some notion of embodied coping of the kind enactivists more generally presuppose (cf. e.g. Dreyfus 2005). Whether this involves a notion of content is, in line with what I said above, then a further issue. This view of perceptual experience, though certainly going beyond anything McDowell has proposed concerning it, is nevertheless (as I see things anyway) compatible with his view that, when it comes to human perception, we must accept the Kantian idea that a distinctive kind of actualization of our conceptual capacities is operative. For McDowell, human perceptual experience (though not that of mere animals) involves a genuine kind of receptivity: a taking in of things as being thus and so, allowing us to make sense of empirical justification, knowledge and indeed, if McDowell is right, of objective thought at all. I am not personally convinced of the need for a distinctive philosophical notion of receptivity of this kind, and have developed my conception of how experience relates to thought without relying on it: for my default form of ARTL, there is no distinctive ‘empirical’ kind of justification, not even of this conceptualized kind, even though I also think we have to understand experience as something beyond the mere causing of belief. However, I am open to the possibility that something like McDowell’s view might prove to be correct or in some way necessary and do not see anything I have argued for here as ruling this out.

4.3.3 How Is My View Really (Very) Different from Global Expressivism? A final but important worry one might have about my proposal is that it is only nominally, or at least uninterestingly or insignificantly different from Price’s. To start with, it might appear that one could say that according to GE there is also a ‘world for us’, explained in terms of our perspective on the world, and a ‘world in itself’, conceived of as what is at any time presupposed in making sense of such perspectival world, ultimately in terms of the most abstract, mathematical parts of physics. Corresponding to his two notions of representation, Price himself thinks we should also operate with two distinct notions of ‘world’, the i-world and the e-world (see Chap. 2). For Price the i-world is similar to the Tractarian world of states of affairs: it is ‘everything that is the case’, as we see things from within our

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various practices.12 The other, more substantive notion of world is the ‘e-world’: ‘the natural world’ in something like the Sellarsian sense of what science articulates and what we causally interact with. The e-world, however, enjoys no ontological priority for Price: indeed, the e-world is simply the i-world of science (ibid., 55), and there are other equally ‘real’ i-worlds. Even if this isn’t exactly how I have been presenting my own view, one might think it comes very close to it, or even that the two views are in some way notational variants of one other. Moreover, I have also spoken in terms of us expressing our sensorimotor modes of interaction with the world, in a way that is presumably meant to parallel the way in which the accounts of our psychological functioning that Price talks of feature in his overall project. Both mine and his account, relatedly, prescind from giving constitutive conditions of concept possession in different realms, on pain of introducing a bifurcation at the i-level of representation, and involve a two-level structure of the kind we examined in Chap. 2. Now exactly how different an account must be in order to be an interesting alternative is perhaps more a matter of general philosophical temperament than something subject to a rational assessment. That said, I would maintain that my form of ARTL is both a significantly distinct and interesting alternative to GE, and indeed (at least potentially) superior to it. Before saying why, however, I should stress that what I am proposing here is meant as a largely friendly amendment to or adjustment of Price’s GE. In being a form of ARTL, it already owes a lot to Price’s arguments, as these are central to motivating and articulating ARTL as the generic position I take that to be. Moreover, insofar as a central part of Price’s GE is a general stress on pluralism, and not just a ‘dualism’ (or at least gradation) between e-representational and non-e-­ representational discourses, or between the e-world and i-world, I am still more or less a faithful adherent. As noted in Chap. 2, there is plausibly a plurality of function even at the level of i-representation. Moreover, within the world for us, at least, it seems reasonable to think there will be differences across our different vocabularies that can be charted as part of an anti-representationalist subject naturalist account. Different kinds of enactment of different aspects of our environment are presumably things that enactivist cognitive science will be able to cast light on, as indeed may the social and human sciences. Indeed, some of these accounts might even mesh with concrete ideas of Price’s concerning notions like causation and probability, which he argues have to be understood in terms of our capacity to intervene in the world (Price 1991, 2005). Exactly how this integration might proceed I leave open for the present, but the general idea seems plausible (I will, however, have more to say about causation below). With that important clarification made, I turn now to what I take to be important differences between my view and GE. A first important difference is that although I would not reject the idea that we express our sensorimotor interactions, I have

 Though of course, in line with ARTL, this expression must be understood in a deflationary, non-­ metaphysical way, see Sect. 1.2. 12

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argued we can also see this as something more: an articulation of a world, the world for us. This in turn is significant insofar as the kind of cognitive science I am appealing to does not – like Price’s – alienate us from our discursive practices: it allows us to make good sense of the idea that we are trying to get things right in, say, our colour or ethical talk as well as that about science or middle-sized dry goods. This also relates to the lived, experiential aspect of our discourses, as I have noted several times. Enactivism, unlike at least CCS, builds the subjective into its very core through the idea of autonomy. In this way, my account is, at least insofar, plausibly superior to GE. The different notions of ‘world’ that we operate with, though I think related, also involves important differences. In line with what I take to be axiomatic to ARTL, I accept the notion of the i-world as the totality of ‘facts’ (in a deflationary sense). Insofar as we can talk of a plurality of ‘i-worlds’, corresponding to our different discourses, one could also see my ‘world for us’ as one such i-world, or a collection of several i-worlds perhaps, and my ‘world in itself’ as another. One might also think the latter is close to Price’s e-world. However, for Price the e-world is the world of what we can e-represent, and for him we can e-represent things like tables and chairs as well as planets, cells and, it would seem, electrons and quarks, but not values or possibilities, and we have seen this way of understanding things is problematic, even from his own perspective. My ‘world in itself’ is much more austere than his e-world, being restricted or at least delineated in the terms of fundamental physics, at least in the ideal. It is arguable that if pushed Price might acknowledge that this was also what he had in mind– a kind of e-world ‘in-the-limit’. A more significant difference is that I also hold that there is a usefully unitary notion of a ‘world for us’ that includes both things like values and middle-sized dry goods, given in relation to our particular biological and experiential perspective, and this is not an idea Price operates with. These points together mean furthermore there is no distinctively e-representational vocabulary, on the one hand – for Price talk of ordinary material objects and at least ‘the coastal waters’ of science13 – and no vocabularies, on the other, that should be understood in terms of things like internal reactions projected on to the e-world. It is this distinction, corresponding to the old expressivist bifurcation between cognitive and non-cognitive discourse, that seems to inform the explanatory heart of the lower level of GE, as I argued in Chap. 2. On my view, by contrast, the world for us embraces colours and values as well as ordinary middle-sized goods and their properties (and perhaps some of what science concerns), whilst the world in itself is what we have to presuppose in order to make sense of their being such a world, to be articulated in the final analysis by reference to fundamental physics. It is true that enactivism does not eschew the idea of information or content completely, as we have just seen in the previous subsection. Could then Price maintain this is enough to make sense of certain vocabularies being based on the pick-up of information and others not? No. The enactivist notion of information is of

13

 Things like viruses and energies – the term is Blackburn’s (2013, 79).

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something that pervades a whole organism-environment system, thereby also taking account of sensory and somatic capabilities; it is ‘about’ the perceiver as well as the environment. Moreover, it will concern what we label with ‘value-laden’ – ethical or aesthetic – terms as much as things we call ‘tables’ and ‘chairs’. In this way it seems unlikely that anything corresponding to the traditional expressivist bifurcation will be forthcoming within its explanatory framework. I have also argued, in Chap. 2, that, regardless of its theoretical credentials in relation to cognitive science, Price’s appeal to e-representation to demarcate vocabularies fits awkwardly with his view that causation itself is a notion that has to be understood perspectivally. By contrast, this kind of view would seem to fit, as we have noted, well with the kind of enactivist underpinning of ARTL I am proposing. What this yields is the idea that causation is an important part of the world for us (in general), but not the world in itself articulated by fundamental science. Having said all this, however, I do finally want to address an important rejoinder that someone with sympathies for Price might offer at this juncture. Though my presentation has fronted enactivism as the form of cognitive science that deserves consideration as an alternative to CCS today, it is probably true to say that the predictive processing paradigm (PP) is at least as strong a contender in this role. And, notwithstanding the different interpretations of PP, discussed above, it might seem to remain a fundamentally representationalist paradigm. There is actually a lot to argue backwards and forwards about here (see Anderson and Chemero 2013; Bruineberg et al. 2018 For the case againt representationalism, Gladziejewski 2016; Williams 2018b for the case for). At the end of the day however a compelling thought can seem to be  – even if one accepts the central enactivist notion of umwelts – that surely the brain has to be seen as in some way latching on to or being sensitive to what is out there anyway? As Dan Williams writes: ‘It is vastly implausible that brains could generate time-pressured and adaptively valuable behaviour in hostile environments without at least partially recovering the objective structure of such environments’ (ibid., 167). One might perhaps add that if we can in any case make sense of the idea of world in itself, as I have claimed, that must be because we are at some level of our cognition sensitive to it. If we accept this line, the general structure of Price’s picture might seem to reemerge willy-nilly. Though perhaps e-representational vocabulary does not correspond to the descriptive vocabulary as this is understood by classical expressivism (that concerning tables and chairs as well as cells and electrical currents), we can nevertheless use the e-representational/‘projectivist’ scale as a way of understanding a broad structural feature of our different vocabularies. Perhaps that is enough for Price and all he ever really intended to be committed to. However, I don’t think acknowledging this undermines the significance of what I have had to say in this and the previous chapter. To start with, there is still the issue about how one can understand the very idea of e-representation in this (quasi-)foundational role for Price when causation itself falls on the projectivist side of this distinction. If that is so I find it at least unclear how we can talk of representation at all. Moreover, with respect to Williams’ claim above, I would retort as follows: as long as the scientific account of how the brain and body function in the physical

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world explains how the organism physically survives, I don’t really see why one must see something in the former as representing something in the latter. As noted, there is a lively debate about this in PP-circles. But given we are starting from enactivism and the idea of (non-represented) organism worlds, the dialectical force of Williams’ point, for all its apparent intuitiveness, is actually not that clear. But even if we had to admit that in some sense the brain does reflect i.e. represent (or e-represent) the external physical world, in some way and at some level, my arguments would not have been in vain. To start with, we have arrived at a more nuanced picture of what the e-representational/projectivist distinction amounts to. More significantly, if enactivism and my use of it to undergird PE is accepted, this can involve seeing the idea of world for us and a world in itself as the primary distinction between our vocabularies, rather than some gradation from e-­representational to projectivist ones. This is so, firstly, because of the need to respect the engaged, first-personal nature of our practice. Moreover, it seems quite conceivable, if enactivism is broadly correct, that the phenomenon of e-representationality might apply at a level of our functioning that does not map onto or reflect any particular way we talk, or feel it is important to talk. The categories of the world for us might in other words reflect a kind of ‘blending’ of the patterns we latch onto in the objective world and subjective responses that are not in this way objective. Somewhat less radically, there seems no reason why there should be any neat mapping between distinctions we make between the various different kinds of objects and properties we discern in the world for us, on the one hand, and a scale from e-represented to projected objects or properties, on the other. For example, it seems perfectly conceivable that there are aspects of the world for us that are extremely important to us – those attended by certain kinds of aesthetic or moral value, say – that would score low on any notion of e-representationality, and vice versa. I stress finally again that whether enactivism will prevail is an empirical question that I cannot hope to give anything like a definitive answer to here. Nevertheless, I think it does provide a picture of a very different kind from GE and thus, in a recognizable sense, a non-expressivistic grounding of ARTL that is still subject naturalistic (as well as, one might add, at least when it comes to the world for us, one that is recognizably pragmatist). To conclude: I have attempted in this and the previous chapter to show how ARTL, an anti-representationalist view about thought and language, can be tied to anti-representationalist positions in cognitive science and in the philosophy of perceptual experience in a (hopefully) illuminating and mutually reinforcing way. Perhaps this congruence is first and foremost verbal, playing on different senses of ‘anti-representational’, but in view of the common provenance of the notion even this, it strikes me, would not be wholly nugatory. The tradition of representationalism has many strands that have come together at various points in the history of thinking to provide unified pictures of mind, language and reality. That we can knit together strands of the resistance to this dominant paradigm, in the way I have sketched, contributes to making what I have to offer a genuinely anti-­ representationalist philosophy – in my opinion.

Chapter 5

Brains in Vats

Abstract  This chapter is a relatively self-standing essay that takes up how we should best understand the famous ‘brains in vats’ (BIV) thought experiment and relates it to the ideas of Chaps. 3 and 4. Hilary Putnam, another central neo-­ pragmatist philosopher, argued we cannot be brains in vats (at least, eternally so) and used this result as part of his argument against a view he called ‘metaphysical realism’ (MR): the idea that there an absolute reality consisting of mind-­independent objects, properties, relations, structures etc. with a wholly determinate nature which set the ultimate standard for our cognitive practices. I have previously argued in Chaps. 1 and 2 that MR falls along with what Price calls Representationalism, and for similar reasons to Putnam’s so-called ‘model-theoretic’ arguments; hence I am also broadly sympathetic with Putnam’s BIV argument, at least understood as a reductio of MR. In this chapter I present Tim Button’s recent defence of Putnam’s arguments against MR, but also critique how he responds to them. I then consider and defend David Chalmers’ view that the BIV scenario (or Matrix scenario, or simulation hypothesis) is, contra Putnam and Button, epistemically possible, but does not threaten our everyday knowledge. I finally consider what I call, following Hubert Dreyfus, the ‘existential phenomenological take’ on the BIV thought experiment which I suggest involves an improvement on Chalmers’ view, and can be seen as cohering with the idea behind PE that we must draw a distinction between the experiential world for us and the world in itself.

5.1 Introduction A central voice in the late twentieth century revival of pragmatist thinking was that of Hilary Putnam. How do Putnam’s views fit into the kind of anti-­representationalist picture, itself arguably a form of pragmatism (or at least neo-pragmatism), that I have so far been presenting? Putnam’s various disputes with Rorty about the nature of truth and justification over the years are well-known (see e.g. Rorty 1996b for discussion), but here I will

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Knowles, Representation, Experience, and Metaphysics, Synthese Library 473, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26924-0_5

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be not concerned with these.1 Nor am I concerned with delineating Putnam’s philosophical view as a whole in all its multifarious developments over the years (though the next chapter will broaden our purview of this in discussing Putnam’s idea of conceptual relativity). Rather what I want to do in this chapter is relate how a well-­ known philosophical trope, thanks not in small part to Putnam – the thought that we might be (and always have been) brains in vats, our experience of, as it would seem, the external world in fact generated by a super computer feeding a virtual reality to our brains – can be related to the anti-representationalist picture I have developed. Now Putnam famously used this device to argue against metaphysical realism (MR), the view that there is a wholly mind-independent reality to which our thought and talk are ultimately responsible. Putnam argued that, contrary to what we might initially suppose, we couldn’t actually be brains in vats; and that, since MR is committed to saying we could, MR is false. In rejecting this view, he is insofar on board with anti-representationalism about thought and language (ARTL).2 He also argued against MR with the help of model theory, employed as providing a conception of what MR amounts to, claiming certain mathematical results showed its notion of reference thus construed was unsustainable. Here his arguments are reminiscent of those Price uses to argue against Representationalism. At the same time, David Chalmers (2005) has used the brains in vats thought experiment – or, as it is in his version, the idea that we might be in ‘The Matrix’ – to argue that much of what we believe about ordinary objects could remain true even if such a scenario obtained. What we would be mistaken about would only be our conception of the underlying physical or metaphysical nature of reality. This is suggestive, if not identical with, the kind of distinction between a world for us and the world in itself that phenomenological externalism (PE) involves. What I want to do in this chapter is co-opt both Putnam’s and Chalmers’ use of the brains in vats (henceforth ‘BIV’ or ‘BIVs’, depending on context) scenario to provide a different perspective on, or, if you like, a different route to the conclusions I have already reached. This is particularly significant insofar as these two thinkers’ views might seem inconsistent, in that one denies while the other affirms that we might be BIVs. However, I will argue that, while Putnam’s argument employing this idea as a presupposition of MR is correct, this allows that we might be BIVs in a sense other than as such as presupposition, and that we can see Chalmers as articulating such a sense. But furthermore, I think Chalmers’ view on BIVs itself needs correction in the direction of the kind of enactivist anti-representationalist thinking about experience presented in Chap. 3. I take my point of departure in Tim Button’s recent discussion and interpretation of Putnam’s various arguments against MR and subsequent struggles with the realism question (Button 2013). Button himself thinks Putnam does effectively refute  In accord with my generally more rationalist and (everyday) realist construal of Rorty, I see these differences as less significant than Putnam tended to. For supporting interpretation, see Forster (1992). 2  Though ultimately, as I pointed out in Chap. 1 (footnote 5), he does not subscribe to ARTL but a closely related Kantian position, at least in my opinion (see further Chap. 6). 1

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MR, and he also rejects Chalmers’ alternative construal of how we might be BIVs. On this basis, he builds his own position (not identical with any of Putnam’s own), but he would not class as a defender of ARTL either; rather he claims to propound a kind of media res between MR and anti-realism (perhaps one could also see it as a media res between MR and ARTL). Insofar as Button’s view is also a way of understanding the significance of the BIV thought experiment which is at odds with ARTL, I also want to address it. I will be suggesting that it is at least not obviously the best ‘take’ on the thought experiment and, further, that it is plausibly dialectically unstable. One can see the chapter as a whole as asking how we should best view the significance of the BIV thought experiment, and, surveying a range of answers, recommends one that accords with a conclusion we have already reached (thus perhaps providing some mutual dialectical support to both avenues of reasoning). I start, in Sect. 5.2, with an overview of Putnam’s arguments against MR as presented by Button, as well as Button’s ‘take’ on them; I then argue that this is not clearly either cogent or stable. Section 5.3 argues that Chalmers’ idea that we could be brains in vats can, pace Button’s arguments to the contrary, be upheld. Section 5.4 takes up the question of how we should best understand the brains in vats thought experiment, comparing Chalmers with Button and reflecting more fully on what it means to say that we might be BIVs. In Sect. 5.5 I then present and defend what I call, inspired by Hubert Dreyfus, the ‘existential phenomenological’ take on the BIV thought experiment. I end in Sect. 5.6 with a brief postscript on what ‘realism’ amounts to in the light of this discussion in relation to recent work by Dreyfus together with Charles Taylor on this issue.

5.2 Button on the Limits of Realism In The Limits of Realism, Button seeks to revitalise and reassess Putnam’s arguments against MR from the 1970s and 1980s. In the face of what has arguably become a widely received view, he defends the so-called ‘model-theoretic arguments’ and the BIV argument as effectively refuting metaphysical or, as he calls it, external realism (I will stick with ‘metaphysical realism’, or MR). He thinks however that Putnam’s own various reactions to these arguments are inadequate or unsatisfactory and must, at least in many cases, be rejected or at least significantly adjusted. Putnam has for example expressed doubt about the model theoretic arguments on the grounds that they presuppose a faulty theory of perception; but he is wrong to do so according to Button, for versions of them and the threat they pose to external realism can survive adoption of even the kind naïve realism Putnam went over to.3 Perhaps most significantly for Button, the arguments do not, he thinks, coherently lead to any kind of  I do not discuss Button’s arguments for precisely this claim in the following. As we shall see, I do in fact think issues about the nature of perceptual experience are relevant to thinking about the significance of the BIV scenario; however, the connections between these arguments and Button’s discussions of perceptual experience in relation to the model theoretic argument are quite indirect. 3

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anti-realistic position of the kinds Putnam has defended, such as his explicitly Kantian ‘internal realism’, his pragmatist ‘justificationism’ or even Putnam’s final and most considered reaction to MR, conceptual relativism.4 Though there are limits to how far we can be deceived about our external environment, there is room for quite radical deception, thinks Button. Moreover, exactly how much deception, and hence how much realism, we may coherently assume is not something we can hope to adjudicate once and for all; so we are left with a kind of messy, everyday realism that defies classification by way of the usual philosophical tropes. A similar messiness applies to the issue of whether metaphysical issues are substantive or not: some are, some are not, but there is no possibility of drawing this line in a principled manner. (We will return to some of these ideas below.) Button’s Putnamian arguments against MR (which we will look at very shortly) strike me for the most part as convincing, and in any case I am not concerned in this book to raise objections against them (in accord with my ARTL-starting point). I also find his rejection of explicitly anti-realist positions plausible (again, this is in accord with ARTL; the latter’s take on the realism-anti-realism issue is the subject of the following chapter). There is thus, from my point of view, an alluring air of philosophical wisdom about the kind of aporetic position he ends up endorsing – and yet it is clearly not a form of ARTL which rejects talk of ‘reality’ completely (Button also rejects semantic deflationism; see below, also footnote 9). Perhaps this might be seen as an intuitive advantage over ARTL. I will however be suggesting that it is from a certain metaphilosophical perspective unstable; indeed, it is not, one could reasonably hold, a philosophical position at all. Any cracks in the arguments that lead up to it, however small, are thus liable to attract counterattack by the positions critiqued, whilst attempts to provide an alternative gloss on them will seem apt. Further, I think there is plausibly a good sense – at least for all Button says – in which we could be BIVs (or something similar), even though it is not the sense assumed by MR. This serves to raise the question of how we should best understand the significance of the BIV thought experiment. Before getting to this, however, we should briefly review Putnam’s arguments against MR, which I will do relying on Button’s presentation. He starts with a defence of the model theoretic arguments (as he goes on to argue, there are important interdependencies between these and the BIV argument).5 Putnam claims that MR is characterizable by three principles that can be captured in model theory: –– the independence principle: the world is made up (largely) of mind-independent objects; –– the correspondence principle: truth involves a correspondence between words (or concepts) and external objects, and sets thereof; and –– the Cartesian principle: even an empirically ideal theory might be radically false. As far as I can see, nothing he claims in this connection directly impacts anything I want to argue here. 4  See Sect. 6.4 for discussion of conceptual relativism. 5  Putnam has himself suggested that the two arguments are essentially coterminal, cf. e.g. his (2000).

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Putnam then goes on to prove various problematic  technical results for MR thus understood, of which the following two are among the most striking: –– Indeterminacy: If there is any way to make a theory true by assigning objects and classes of objects to its term, there are many ways. (Cf. pp. 14 ff.).6 –– Infallibilism: if a theory is empirically ideal, there is way of assigning objects (etc.) to the language it is framed in terms of such that it comes out true. (Cf. pp. 17 ff.). In a word, at least if the model-theoretic conception of it is appropriate, MR looks to be infected by a crippling indeterminacy of reference which renders it prima facie incoherent: there is no way of substantiating the Cartesian principle or more generally of making sense of assigning determinate truth values to a theory. In response many philosophers have argued that reference can be further constrained by various real-world factors, most notably, on the one hand, by some or other variety of causal and/or naturalistic constraint (causal/informational links, proper functions and the like; cf. Fodor 1990; Millikan 1984), or, on the other, considerations of ‘eliteness’ according to which certain properties or extensions are more natural and hence appropriate ‘magnets’ for the reference relation (Lewis 1984). Button then recounts how such moves may in turn be countered by Putnam’s ‘just more theory’ manoeuvre (‘JMT’), which argues that these are impotent to solve the problems of MR insofar as they, at least understood as empirical theories (in a broad sense), can be shown to be infected by referential indeterminacy themselves. Button argues, convincingly to my mind, and contrary to much popular opinion, that JMT is actually effective against most if not all such attempts to constrain reference – at least in a way that doesn’t, as Putnam puts it, appeal to ‘magic’, i.e. by just postulating that we are in contact with the requisite bits of reality, without explaining how this could possibly be or how we could we have any reason to think it true. Nor, as Button goes on to show, can the metaphysical realist throw the reference relation into the Cartesian ‘melting pot’ of things that we might never be absolutely certain of. For this creates what Button calls ‘Kantian angst’; and while Cartesian angst (i.e. worrying that our beliefs about the external world might be false) is not obviously incoherent, Kantian angst – which entails worrying about things like that my words might not refer to what we standardly take them to do (‘cat’ to cats and so on), or to nothing at all – certainly would seem so. For how could we then make sense of that very worry using the language we actually have?7 What should one say by way of reaction to these problems with MR? Button argues that various forms of anti-realism, including centrally ones defended at various times by Putnam, are either implausible or incoherent. Moreover, one cannot, thinks Button, undermine the model theoretic arguments with more sophisticated theories of perception (pace Putnam himself). MR as an overall framework for thinking about the relationship between language and the world is – he concedes – highly

 Unreferenced page/chapter numbers in this chapter are to Button (2013).  These arguments are similar to those Price employs against Representationalism; see Chap. 1.

6 7

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intuitive. But if we uphold this intuition, while simultaneously acknowledging there are apparently very good arguments against MR’s very coherence, then it looks like we are either in a very bad philosophical predicament, or else something about these arguments must and can be rejected after all. Interestingly  – and here I broach a first reservation about Button’s overall approach – it seems what Button’s/Putnam’s arguments show is not in fact that MR is completely incoherent. What would seem at least one escape route would be something like the invocation of reference magnetism as a response to referential indeterminacy, not as an empirical condition on reference, but rather as something like a transcendental precondition of truth-evaluable talk and thought: given the latter exists, reference must be determinate. Even if this is in a certain sense ‘desperate’ as Button calls similar responses (pp. 61–2), as well as appearing anti-naturalistic by any reasonable standard  – perhaps tantamount to appealing to magic  – it is important (a) that it is not, obviously at least, totally incoherent (b) that MR is motivated by strong intuitions and (c) that Button himself does not end up with much of a positive position of his own. Arguably, then, MR might see itself as still ‘on the table’ even if one accepts the JMT manoeuvre. We will return to similar issues related to the dialectical stability of Button’s position below.8 Proceeding now with Button’s overarching argument, he thinks we can get out of the above predicament by coming to see that MR is in fact not that intuitive after all. For whilst the independence and correspondence principles must be upheld  – it would be madness to deny them and not even any avowed anti-realist has ever done so, claims Button (pp. 65–70)9 – the Cartesian principle can and must be rejected. One standard way of expressing the Cartesian principle is that we might, though we think we live in a world of tables, chairs, trees and rivers, in fact be envatted brains fed impulses by a giant computer that simply simulates this reality. This is where the BIV argument comes into play, which Button renders as follows (p. 118): –– A BIV’s word ‘brain’ does not refer to brains –– My word ‘brain’ does refer to brains. –– So: I am not a BIV. Briefly, Button argues for the first premise on the grounds that nothing in the world of the BIV – ‘Brian’ – puts him in a position to think about brains, whilst the second is secured by the fact that if we try to imagine a situation in which my word ‘brain’ does not refer to brains, it must do so anyway in order for that supposition to  Given ARTL’s commitment to the (broad) naturalism that is framing my overall discussion this might not seem like a very significant reservation. However, the underlying point is that Button’s alternative is not – in my view – much of a position at all, and thus is dialectically unstable in the face of alternatives. 9  In fact this claim seems very debatable, and Button does little to justify it. Think for example of something as familiar as Dummett’s anti-realism about the past (Dummett 1978). Further, it seems that semantic deflationists, including supporters of ARTL, who see themselves neither as (metaphysical) realists nor anti-realists, would not accept correspondence, at least in a substantive sense. Finally, the take on the brains in vats thought experiment I end up endorsing could not be said to accept independence in a straightforward way. 8

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make sense. The argument is underwritten by Leibniz’s Law so the conclusion would seem inescapable if the premises are accepted. Button goes on to argue against various alternative positions that react to the above by maintaining that, whilst we indeed couldn’t be a BIV, we could in some way still be radically out of touch with the way the world is, at least in its fundamental nature  – ‘sober scepticism’, ‘dead sober scepticism’, ‘bubble scepticism’ and ‘metaphysical scepticism’ to name the most prominent ones. As far as I can see the two most significant families of view here are, on the one hand, those that stress that though we cannot be BIVs, the possibility that we are radically out of touch with reality remains (call this ‘deep scepticism’); and, on the other, those that allow that though we are not and could not be of touch with reality in the sense of medium-­ sized dry goods like tables and chairs we could be living in a world that is metaphysically very different from what we take it to be – something like a computer simulation or ‘bit’-like world rather than a concrete, material reality (call this ‘metaphysical scepticism’, here following Button). Deep scepticism’s central idea has been expressed by Crispin Wright as follows: The real spectre to be exorcised concerns the idea of a thought standing behind our thought that we are not BIVs, in just the way that our thought they are mere BIVs would stand behind the thought… of actual BIVs that ‘We are not BIVs’. (Wright 1992, 93, quoted by Button on p. 137)

On this line, we are not directly deluded; we are in contact with trees etc., and hence are not BIVs. Nevertheless there remains a sense that we might be in a relevantly analogous situation to Brian (i.e. someone who is). According to Button, however powerfully intuitive this thought is – I will call it in the following the deep intuition10 (that which potentially leads to deep scepticism) – it fails to convince for two reasons. To start with, to make sense of it still seems to require a magical theory of reference; for if this is required for Brian to make sense of brains then it seems something similar must apply to us if our position is relevantly like Brian’s. ‘For argument’s sake, however,’ says Button ‘I shall

 In calling it this I am suggesting that, however inchoate, it does have the status of precisely that, i.e. a very compelling intuition – something Button himself does not deny (see below in the text). I think this is related to the fact that, though we may know we are in fact not BIVs, nothing in Putnam’s argument shows that we might not have been BIVs, or that there is an incoherence in the idea that there should turn out to be a community of BIVs. The deep intuition now manifests itself as the thought if the relevant thinkers in these scenarios have the deep intuition, then they are surely ‘onto something’ – even if it is ineffable for them. And then if they can be onto something, why can’t we? Of course, the argument that we are not BIVs turns on the fact that we can make no sense of what it is they are on to – but I contend that that does not extinguish the intuition. As we shall now see, Button offers a further argument against the deep intuition, but I would aver that this does not abrogate the deep intuition’s force either – even if one does not provide what I shall call a substantation of the intuition which shows why this further argument fails (as I think for example metaphysical scepticism and my own phenomenological take do). In other words, I think the deep intuition, though necessarily inchoate, just has to be acknowledged as such, and that then, from a certain metaphilosophical perspective, it would be at least desirable to respect it – in a way Button does not. This point will be important to my argument in Sect. 5.3. 10

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grant that we have some grip on the required attempt to say the unsayable’ (p. 138). He then offers a further consideration against deep scepticism due to Adrian Moore (1994): there are only two thinkers in the BIV-scenario; us, the BIVs (Brian and his cohort), but no-one else (p. 138). Imagine we have travelled to the land of BIVs and are looking in on Brian. He thinks he is doing the same, but he is not actually looking at a thinker at all. Given this, we cannot make sense – even in an ineffable way – of the idea that there might be a view that stands to ours as ours does to Brian’s; for Brian is not considering a thinker at all in as it were pitying the benighted ‘creature’ he thinks is duped; he is merely deluded. If I consider that I might be in a Brian-like predicament, I cannot make sense of Brian being in such a predicament, for he won’t exist. Turning now to metaphysical scepticism, this line is similar to deep scepticism in allowing we are not deluded about our ordinary environment but instead of suggesting that we might nevertheless be deeply deluded in some way, it rather more concretely construes the BIV scenario as articulating a sense in which we might be ignorant about, in particular, the deep or underlying metaphysical nature of reality. This is Chalmer’s line. Against this, Button only stresses the ineffability of the supposition, that is, how it seems to depend on a magical theory of reference; he doesn’t deploy the ‘only two thinkers’ argument, even though as far I can see it would be equally applicable. I will return to this in Sect. 5.3. In these ways Button takes Putnam to have successfully refuted MR by showing how its commitment to Cartesianism in the form of the thought that we might all be BIVs is incoherent. However, as already noted, he does not think this licences any substantive form of anti-realism. Moreover, as he goes on to argue, though the eternal BIV scenario might indeed be incoherent, there are other sceptical scenarios that certainly do not seem so at all. One of these is just envatment being inflicted on some individual, or even all of us, in the very recent past: how do we know we have not been envatted last night? If this were so, when we say ‘we are not BIVs’ we would be referring to brains and vats, but be wrong. Of course after a while we would stop referring to brains etc. and hence probably be right in thinking ‘we are not BIVs’, but Button sees no hope in deriving some principles for telling us when this would happen. Somewhat similarly (see pp. 149 ff.), while it makes no sense to imagine the universe might have an extent of just 1 m outside of me – what would ‘1 m’ in such a scenario mean? – it seems clearly to make sense to suppose it had an extent of (say) a 100 light years. So the question, How do we know the universe exists beyond 100 light years? seems a meaningful one. In general, everyday realism, and not any kind of anti-realism, is to be embraced, but it itself shades off into forms of realism that are much closer to MR and hence incoherent; and where the boundary goes, nobody knows, or could ever know. Though there is much else of interest in Button’s book, the above outlines the main overall structure of it and its philosophical end-point: a kind of studied aporia. Now I wouldn’t want to deny that this is perhaps a reasonable and maybe even in some ways attractive stance. I think nevertheless it is vulnerable in being somewhat awry from a certain metaphilosophical point of view. Philosophy is arguably, ideally at least, an enterprise with the following kind of methodological structure. It

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starts with compelling, if sometimes rather inchoate intuitions which we in the first instance attempt to scrutinize and precisify. Those that past muster we then seek reconcile with one another, with the ultimate aim of giving some sort of overall hypothesis or model or theory in which as many of them are preserved and hang coherently together as possible. In light of this, the worry about Button’s aporetic stance is that it demurs at the final stage of this constructive project – and hence that it is, not bad philosophy, but not philosophy (of the relevant ideal kind at least) at all.11 Consequently, any other position or programme that might see itself as still in the game, however tenuously, will naturally want to re-enter the fray and try to re-­ establish itself. Now, I am rather convinced by Button’s Putnam-inspired tirade against MR, and in any case, in view of my commitment to ARTL, would not want to go in for a resurrection of that. But might there be other ways of reconstructing our intuitions about the possibility of being BIVs into some kind of coherent theory, even after we have rejected MR and accepted that we cannot be BIVs in its sense?12 In the following section, I will look more closely at metaphysical scepticism with a view to suggesting there can.

5.3 Metaphysical Scepticism In this section I will present in more detail how Chalmers understands metaphysical scepticism (henceforth MS) and defends it in relation to Putnam’s arguments. I will then go through how Button might on the basis of the critique I related in the previous section respond to this defence. I will then suggest a way of understanding MS that allows it to survive this, and discuss the significance of this understanding in relation to Button’s project (a discussion that continues into Sect. 5.4). Chalmers argues that the BIV or – as is his focus – matrix-hypothesis13 should not be viewed as a sceptical hypothesis but a metaphysical hypothesis concerning the wider nature of reality. If I am in the matrix, my beliefs about my everyday surroundings – that there is a cup to the right, that I have hair on my head and so on – are still true; for they are grounded in my cup-like, hair-on-head-like and so on kind of experiences, and these in turn are correct insofar as they vary systematically with some causal structure out there in the world – only ones whose underlying nature is rather different from what I or at least my scientific community standardly assumes them to be. Chalmers notes the similarity to Putnam’s view; like him, Putnam also allows that a BIV/matrix-dweller  I do not mean by this to be denigrating Button’s work from a purely professional point of view of course! And I take it of course he would disagree with my metaphilosophical claim. 12  That is, accepted Button’s construal of Putnam’s argument against MR as based on the modeltheoretic arguments backed up by the BIV-argument. This leaves room I believe, as we shall see, for a different kind of envatment hypothesis. 13  Note I am abstracting away from any assumptions about external agency (malign or otherwise) being involved in this. Though Chalmers operates with the idea of a ‘creator’ as far as I can see nothing hinges on this. 11

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might have largely true beliefs. However, Chalmers rejects Putnam’s argument that we could not be in the matrix. While Putnam’s argument for this may work for specific metaphysical hypotheses involving terms like ‘brain’ (a natural kind term) or ‘The Matrix’ (a proper name for a film) it cannot rule out the generic idea of being envatted, where ‘this simply says that I have a cognitive system that receives input from and sends outputs to a computer simulation of a world.’ (Chalmers 1996, 160–1). More generally, his argument, Chalmers claims, does not rely on claims in the theory of reference, such as semantic externalism (which Putnam of course independently championed), and suggests that we should rather let our thoughts on the latter be led by our thoughts on first order or (as some might put it) ‘metaphysical’ issues (ibid.). As we have seen, Button claims MS is just as ineffable a worry as the original BIV worry. In addition he has the ‘just two thinkers’ argument from Moore against deep scepticism. He does not deploy this against MS, but perhaps he should. How would Chalmers react to these? To start with the second, it seems that he could simply reject the idea that there are only two kinds of thinker in the BIV scenario – or at least have to be. Given the background assumptions in play, there seems nothing in principle problematic about the idea of nested ‘universes’ in which Brian and his cohort themselves relate to ‘envatted’ beings, at least if we can understand these more like ‘Sim’-like characters wholly contained within a computer simulation.14 These characters might in turn relate to what for them are ‘envatted’ beings and so on and so forth, with bit-like structures iteratively embedding many similar such sub-structures. If the world can contain many levels of structure and ‘envatted’ beings in this way, these beings need be no more benighted, given Chalmers’ reasoning and conception of experience, than either we, or Brian, are about our respective environments. What about the more fundamental objection that the idea of being envatted is ineffable for the being who is in that situation? One way in which I think Chalmers would or could respond here would be to invoke general background knowledge from mathematics and science along the lines suggested by Nick Bostrom (2003) (a paper which he mentions in his own on the matrix). According to Bostrom, if we allow that some of our distant descendants will be able to run enormously powerful computer simulations of reality, as he suggests is not implausible, we should take seriously the idea that the ‘reality’ we think we are inhabiting is bit-like and that we are Sim-like data structures within it. Indeed, Bostrom argues this scenario is in fact likely, conditional on his assumption. Of course, one can argue back and forth about the details of the technology and the probabilities here. But my point here is that science itself suggests that it is a genuine – epistemic and, for all we know, metaphysical – possibility that we are envatted. One might respond to this that Putnam already acknowledged this in his argument that we cannot be brains in vats: while physics does not rule out this possibility, philosophy shows it is not genuine. However, I think this response misconstrues

 The assumptions mentioned include (for the moment) that there is nothing in principle that excludes such characters having conscious experiences, that is, that conscious experience is realisable in non-organic substrates. 14

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the dialectical situation here. As we have noted, Chalmers shrugs off Putnam’s worries most fundamentally on the grounds that we should let our thinking about possibility be steered directly by first-order considerations rather than the theory of reference in arguing that we could be envatted. Now without further ado this leads at best to a kind of stand-off with Putnam and Button. So long as being envatted is merely a remote, ‘philosophical’ possibility – something we cannot a priori rule out – as Putnam originally conceived of it, what reason could there be to not restrict such possibility further by way of another a priori theory, now concerning reference?15 However, if science can provide positive reasons to think the apparently remote possibility is much less remote than we might in the first instance think it is, then it becomes a lot less clear that we can just roll out more a priori philosophy to rule it out – at least if one is a naturalist.16 More radically, we might even think there could be more everyday observational information that bore on this possibility. Consider the following cartoon17:

 By ‘a priori’ here I mean simply relatively a priori, or not part of science, or some such, not absolutely given. 16  Cf. Price: ‘to be a philosophical naturalist is to believe that philosophy is not simply a different enterprise from science, and that philosophy should defer to science, where the concerns of the two disciplines coincide’ (2004, 184). 17  URL: http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/301_999/376.html (accessed 4th February 2021). 15

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I don’t mean this to be taken very seriously! Nevertheless, the very idea that living in a (non-illusory) simulation could be empirically detectable, somehow or other, does not seem incoherent; indeed, it happens in The Matrix film. Putting the last two points together, imagine this: Once in a very rare while people start experiencing strange quiverings and distortions in the physical objects around them. The physicists and statisticians get to work and the best explanation they can get to match the data, mindful of Bostrom’s argument, is… envatment! The basic idea seems so compelling that it is hard to see how an a priori argument from philosophy could rule it out. I should also stress here that, as I am understanding Chalmers’ position here it is not (or at least need not be) a version of MR: hence it need not reject Putnam’s argument against MR (or arguments). We can see the latter as essentially a reductio of MR, premised on a kind of externalism about reference that MR accepts. That combination of views leads to incoherence. But this does not mean, given a different overall framework, that we couldn’t be BIVs, in the sense Chalmers argues for and as developed above.18 Given such a background, should we conclude that we could be BIVs (or in the matrix, or Sim-characters in a giant computer simulation)? And if so, is Button wrong? I think he would say he is not, or at least has not been shown to be so, and that what I have been promulgating in this section misses his point. Of course, if we can empirically detect it or reason our way to it, then perhaps envatment is not incoherent; but then it is not that kind of envatment he is concerned with, but rather one in which our theory is empirically ideal yet we still remain deceived. In that sense, we could not be BIVs. As I have said, I have no quarrel with this last claim. But to function as a defence of Button’s take on the BIV thought experiment – understood simply as the idea we might be eternally envatted brains (in the matrix etc.) – we must ask what the underlying significance of precisely this thought experiment is, or might be. On Button’s understanding of it, the claim ‘we are BIVs’ is necessarily false whenever we speak or think it; however, on MS’s understanding, the claim might be true. There would thus seem to be a genuine issue here as to which of these ‘takes’ is philosophically most illuminating or fecund. At the very least, if MS articulates a theoretically interesting way of thinking about what we mean in talking of reality in the ways we  I am saying then that Chalmers’ understanding of the BIV thought experiment depends on rejecting semantic externalism? Not exactly. As I understand it, the view rather simply motivates itself through informed reflection on what would appear to be possible and/or likely, letting the semantic chips fall where they may. Now if the resultant picture does turn out to be in conflict with semantic externalism, then the latter might be something one would want to reject, but the point I have been trying make here is that such views about reference, even if otherwise well-supported, would not in any case automatically undercut the take on the BIV thought experiment that Chalmers’ view involves. For the record, I do not myself subscribe to semantic externalism and think it is plausibly committed to the Representationalism/MR package (pace Putnam, who championed the former and rejected the latter), but the reasons for that would have to spelled out more fully on another occasion (very briefly, it seems to me that semantic externalism depends on the idea of a deeper reality underlying our meanings that determine the latter independently of use). 18

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do, it seems clear that it involves an alternative understanding of the significance of the BIV thought experiment to Button’s that should be considered even if one accepts Putnam’s use of the idea to argue against MR. Indeed, from the perspective of the metaphilosophical picture I outlined at the end of Sect. 5.2, one could argue that it has an advantage over Button’s take by stressing the intuition of the deep sceptic (the ‘deep intuition’): that somehow or other my plight might be relevantly like that of Brian’s. Now insofar as one does not concretize or substantiate this intuition in some direction or other it is probably not unreasonable to see it as rather unstable (if not entirely toothless). But MS precisely does seek to do that, in the manner sketched above (i.e. through the possibility of empirical detection and Bostrom’s arguments). So an advantage of MS over Button’s take is that it does some justice to the deep intuition, inchoate though it may be, and does not just toss it aside. In sum, the idea that we might be envatted can survive Putnam’s argument that we cannot be BIVs, in the sense MR assumes is possible. And the idea that we live in a world that in its deep nature is radically different from what we take it to be, or have taken it to be, can live on. The question then is: If this line gives us some kind of philosophical insight (or peace), then why shouldn’t we stress it as the real lesson of the BIV thought experiment?

5.4 Could We Really Be BIVs? I think the discussions of the previous section are helpful in suggesting how we might ‘re-gestalt’ the BIV scenario in a way that would help us to arrive at a more satisfactory end-point then Button provides in understanding its significance. Nevertheless, the antecedent of the question above is perhaps still dubious – something I am sure Button at least would feel. From his point of view, however coherent or significant MS might be on its own terms, it does not speak to his concerns: in particular, his arguments that while the original BIV scenario (that we might be eternally envatted) does not make sense, various less radical but still distinctively sceptical scenarios do. That is, even if we grant that MS or something like it is viable understood as an abstract hypothesis of science, since it involves a sense of envatment different from that (or those) Button is operating with, how can it go very far towards displacing Button’s thinking otherwise and his aporetic conclusions? One reason is that if Button’s take is not really a philosophical view at all, in a certain sense – as I suggested above – but MS is, then the latter is insofar a better lesson to draw from the BIV thought experiment. That of course is not decisive, though I don’t think it counts for nothing. I will also suggest shortly that a supporter of MS concerned to promote her own take over Button’s might raise an independent and more substantive problem with the way the latter is motivated. But before doing that I want to bring another point into play. I have hitherto been writing as if we, or at least beings relevantly like us could, in some real, substantive, ‘metaphysical’ sense, be or (in our case) have been BIVs,

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or in the matrix or Sim-like characters or whatever.19 However, ultimately I take it that no-one has ever adduced any convincing reason to think that this is true. Rather, assuming it is – at least prima facie – philosophers have theorised on what allegedly follows. Now, as I have indicated, I think the kinds of intuitions these thought experiments generate should be considered – that doing so is part of what it is to do philosophy. But can we, while still taking account of these intuitions, make the lessons we draw from them less beholden to commitment to the actual possibility (however remote) of the various scenarios? I think we can do this, but not on the two understandings of the significance of the BIV thought experiment so far considered; and that this counts against them. I must clarify what I mean by suggesting that it might not (actually) be possible that we or similar beings could have been/be BIVs, or more generally envatted. One might, in view of the position on experience and cognitive science I promulgated in the previous chapter, think I would hold something rather stronger than this: that it is positively not possible that BIVs could exist. As the enactivists Evan Thompson and Diego Cosmelli have argued, ‘any adequately functional “vat” would be a surogate body, that is, [...] the so-called vat would be no vat at all, but rather an embodied agent in the world’ (Thompson and Corelli 2011, 172). In view of the endogenous activity of the brain, [w]hatever life-sustaining system we construct, the functioning of its every part, as well as its overall coordinated activity, must be kept within a certain range by the nervous system itself in order for the brain to work properly. Hence the external control perspective is not generally valid. Instead, our life-sustaining system and the brain must be seen as reciprocally coupled and mutually regulating systems. (Ibid., 170)

I agree with this; however, I think it would not for that reason be appropriate to conclude that envatment is impossible. Thompson and Cosmelli precisify, after their remark about the vat being a surrogate body, that they ‘don’t mean a body like ours in its material composition, but one sufficiently like ours in its functional organization’ (ibid.). In view of this, as well as the possibility of exchanging the BIV with the matrix or Sims characters scenarios, it seems to me that the idea of envatment can survive in a recognizable sense. We could, for all Thompson and Cosmelli say, be like Brian (in a suitably functional vat), Neo (from The Matrix) or something like a Sims character, blissfully ignorant about the underlying nature of the world. Whether that would be anything to be very concerned about is another matter, but for the moment it is the sheer metaphysical possibility we are concerned with. A further point worth stressing is that the issue here is not a question of whether our experience supervenes on the brain, or on the brain plus the body/environment. Allowing that we could be BIVs is fully consistent with thinking that, if this were the case, the brain would have to be in quite different states over time to sustain the same kind of experience we have in the un-envatted condition.

 To be clear: though Putnam aims to show we couldn’t be BIVs, he doesn’t argue that beings like Brian couldn’t exist, or that we could not, counterfactually, have been in Brian’s situation. 19

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Finally, though I do agree with Thompson and Cormelli, the reasons for this are in a broad sense empirical: they derive from our best science of the nature of experience. And here there is of course room for dissent, for arguing that consciousness does supervene on the brain for whatever reasons (see e.g. Clark 2009), and hence that we could in a significant sense be BIVs (a fortiori, since we would then, arguably, just be our brains). These may not be good reasons (as Thompson and Cormelli argue, see pp. 176 f.), but the issue is not clear cut. In light of all this, I would not rule out that we could have been envatted, or that there could be/have been envatted beings phenomenally like us. On the other hand, it nevertheless strikes me that it is not clear either that envatment in these senses is (actually) possible: that we could reproduce the rich kind of experience that we enjoy in an envatted brain or similar. Some might argue that if physical reality is computable, then in essence we just are something like Sims characters anyway (this seems to be Chalmers’ view). But, again, the antecedent is uncertain, not something we know to be the case. Others might claim that all that is at stake here is something like conceivability. Any of the ways in which I have allowed that envatment might be possible is at least conceivable, and it is only that sense of possible that we need to acknowledge. So we know, in the relevant sense, that envatment is possible. Being conceivable is not trivial. As Thompson and Cormelli argue, it is plausibly not even conceivable that a completely disembodied brain might continue to operate in the way it does and give rise to our experience at an instant, as in something like the famous Boltzman thought experiment,20 for this mode of operation is too intimately related to things going on around the brain and across time to make such an isolation meaningful.21 However, there is still it seems to me a clear distinction between what is conceivable and what is genuinely metaphysically possible – what might actually obtain or could have obtained (as judged relative to our knowledge). It is surely not just conceivable but possible that the earth should never have existed; we know this. But whilst it is conceivable that pigs might fly (given certain anatomical and physiological changes), we would surely not want to claim it is really possible: perhaps it is, but perhaps it isn’t. Let us admit that envatment is possible in that it is conceivable, just as it is conceivable that pigs might fly. It doesn’t follow that either is really, actually possible.22 It seems clear, however, that Chalmers’ MS is committed to the actual or real possibility of envatment. If it were not, if it were merely an idle speculation,

 See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain for an explanation of this.  Similarly, one can argue that philosophical zombies are, in spite of first appearances, not really conceivable (cf. Dennett 1991). 22  Am I just saying that it is not clear that it is nomologically possible? No, for as I see things that way of framing the issue presupposes the distinguishability of the nomological from the metaphysical in a way that I would not necessarily want to sign up to. I want to leave the sense of ‘(metaphysically, actually) possible’ as intuitive as possible here; it strikes me that this is reasonable, and that the distinction I have drawn is defensible without going into further questions about what we mean by it. 20 21

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− merely something conceivable – then the idea, seemingly motivated by science in a broad sense, that underlying reality might, for all we know (i.e. epistemically), be otherwise than we take it to be will just not seem very compelling. This might sound like good news for Button’s take on the BIV thought experiment, vis à vis MS, insofar as it does not need to think eternal envatment is actually possible (it functions for him merely as a presupposition of MR). However, as we have seen, Button’s take goes a lot further than just saying this. And here I claim that Button also needs to assume the real possibility of the various thought experiments he uses in motivating his view. If I am to worry that I might have been envatted last night, for example, I should have reason to think that is a real – however remote – possibility. Similarly, if I am to worry the universe might be only 100 light years wide, this needs to be a genuine possibility. These thought experiments seem in this respect on a par with Chalmers’ (and Bostrom’s) reflections on envatment: reality, or certain parts of it, really could be or could have been thus and so, contrary to how we standardly take it or them to be, and we can’t be totally sure they are not so. So both Button and MS need to operate with the idea of the genuine possibility of at least some of the scenarios they consider, and hence neither can be seen as having an advantage over the other on this score. I think this is problematic for both, but let us assume for the moment that the scenarios are in this way possible. A further question is how these scenarios might function in motivating the respective views. In answering this I think we can see how the supporter of the MS take may have a retort to the riposte I put in Button’s mouth at the start of this section. Thus, consider the popular movement in contemporary epistemology known as ‘neo-­Mooreanism’ (cf. e.g. Pritchard 2012), which builds on G.E. Moore’s idea that we can refute sceptical hypotheses, such as that there is no external world by affirming some everyday proposition like ‘I have hands’, and inferring thereupon that the sceptical hypothesis is false. The idea behind neo-Mooreanism is that this can only work where the sceptical scenario being proposed is not independently motivated in some way. Now, at least as supplemented by Bostrom’s thought and what I said in Sect. 5.3, it seems reasonable to think that neo-Moorean reasoning will be ineffective against MS.23 However, in relation to Button’s less radical thought experiments, such as that I might recently have been envatted or that the universe ends 100 lights years away, it seems such reasoning would be effective (in the second case being based, presumably, on well-established physical and astrophysical principles). As we have noted, in Putnam’s original argument, the supposition that we are BIVs is not itself susceptible to Moorean refutation, as it does not have anything to do with questions about actual possibility or knowledge, relating rather to the very conceptual presuppositions of MR. However, if I merely whimsically reflect that I might, as a matter of some remote if admittedly real possibility, have been envatted yesterday, plausibly all that is required to reject that thought is that I know I have hands, and infer thereupon that I was not envatted yesterday.

 Exactly what the Moorean proposition here would be, given MS does not entail we don’t have hands, is somewhat less clear, but something like ‘physical reality is substantially solid and material’ might serve the purpose. 23

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In sum, Button cannot demur at the significance of the MS take on the grounds that it considers something to be genuinely possible that we have really no reason to take to be so, for his own position is dependent on similar assumptions himself. Moreover, there is a plausible epistemological theory that threatens to show many of his own scenarios are mere whims, in a way the MS scenario is not (in principle anyway). Button could of course object to neo-Mooreanism; and if successful, his concerns would remain viable even while admitting the central thesis of MS – and perhaps thereby also constitute a deeper philosophical position and perhaps the best take on the BIV thought experiment. But what I have said here at least suggests that, in a debate with MS on this score, Button cannot be so insouciant as the riposte suggested he might be. That is one thing I want to establish. But I also want to go a step further and ask what would remain of the BIV thought experiment if we did indeed – as I think we probably should – drop the assumption that the various scenarios under consideration are really or actually possible. If one does not assume such possibility, can one nevertheless motivate an interesting ‘take’ on the BIV thought experiment (or envatment more generally), viewed merely as something conceivable? This would aim to do justice to the intuition of the deep sceptic that reality might, for all we know, at some level be very different from what we standardly take it to be (‘the deep intuition’), providing a stable understanding of this. I suggested above that MS is one way of achieving such a stable understanding, and insofar was preferable to Button’s view. But whatever one makes of the clash between those two ‘takes’ on the BIV thought experiment, is there a way of making use of the deep intuition that does not assume envatment is actually possible? I think there is at least one. If we can make this out as coherent, then a good case will have been made for its consideration as another take on the BIV thought experiment, insofar as it certainly seems to be a plus to make no use of the idea of the actual possibility of the scenarios considered. Whether it is, all things considered, superior to the other takes is more complicated matter, related not least to what has been said in Chaps. 3 and 4. But of course putting positions clearly on the table is an important philosophical task in itself.

5.5 The Existential Phenomenological Take This section will seek to elaborate what I will call the ‘existential phenomenological take’ or simply ‘phenomenological take’ on the BIV thought experiment. According to this, what the BIV thought experiment fundamentally points up is broadly the same distinction between the world for us and the world in itself that I argued for in Chaps. 3 and 4. With ARTL as our background theory of language and thought, neither need nor indeed can be seen as constituting absolute reality, and hence there is no threat in the thought experiment to the idea that we might be out of touch with anything or that our everyday categories are illusory. This is similar to Chalmers’ idea. It agrees that if we were envatted, this would make no difference to the truth

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of our beliefs about everyday matters. Where it differs is in explicitly construing this in terms of a distinction between the world for us, which would remain the same under envatment, and the world in itself, which would differ. This distinction is independently motivated by the character of experience and enactivist cognitive science, in turn understood in the light of ARTL. In this way, moreover, it does not rely on the real possibility of envatment, in the way Chalmers’ does. Even in the actual world (as it were), experience reveals its own world: it is not a matter of internal qualia or representational states standing in relation to something outside of it. At the same time, this world is not the world in itself. Dreyfus has defended a view on experience very close to that defended by enactivists on the basis of an interpretation of the ‘existential phenomenologists’, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. In an article with Stephen Dreyfus, he considers the consequences of the possibility of envatment for this kind of view (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 2005), concluding that: [w]hat the phenomenologist can and should claim is that, in a Matrix world that has its causal basis in bodies in vats outside that world, the Matrix people whose brains are getting computer-generated inputs and responding with action outputs are directly coping with perceived reality, and that reality isn’t inner. Even in the Matrix world, people directly cope with chairs by sitting on them, and they need baseballs to bring out their batting skills. (Ibid., 75–6)

Moreover, as they go on to explain, not only would our experience of things not be inner; our whole being would be just as we take it to be: we would not be brains (or bodies) in vats, even though this might be the physical basis of our conscious and experienced world; we would be living, acting beings in a real (albeit matrix) world. This strikes me as plausible. However, saying this does not require that the matrix scenario be considered really possible, merely that it is conceivable. The thought experiment simply gives dramatic expression to the two worlds idea I have already defended. Someone might object that it unclear how exactly the BIV-intuition (or envatment intuition) is playing any essential role in my argument for this distinction. After all, I am (I say) not really suggesting that, for all we know, we might be envatted, as Chalmers is. In effect then all we have is what I called above ‘the deep intuition’: the intuition that things might be radically different at some level from how we standardly take them to be. This needs stabilizing, I have argued. But isn’t all I am offering to do this just a repetition of the claim behind PE, that there are two worlds, one the everyday world of experience, one that of fundamental physics? That we might be envatted seems to be playing no role. However, this rendering doesn’t seem fair to me. I am not ruling out the possibility that we might be envatted; it is conceivable. If it were the case, we would not be BIVs, any more than if we assume we are not. So we would not need to worry about any argument that we can make no sense of the supposition, as Button, as we have seen, alleges is the case in relation MS. Now I argued above that MS can avoid that charge by making envatment a kind of empirical hypothesis. I think we can retain that idea but strengthen it under the existential phenomenological take insofar as the latter rejects any interpretation of envatment which involves denying we are

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embodied creatures in a world. But doing so is still a way of substantiating the deep intuition. We can still reflect that we might, conceivably if not in fact, be envatted – and that the underlying reality would then be very different from what we take it to be. At the same time, given the two worlds idea, we can say this without worrying that our ordinary beliefs and experience would be falsified, and without relying in this substantiation on the idea that such envatment is really possible.24 The existential phenomenological take does then, plausibly, substantiate the deep intuition, and does so moreover in a way that can both respect Putnam’s arguments, and not assume anything about the possibilities in question being actual ones. In this way it seems to me it has a lot going for it in relation to both Button’s and Chalmers’ takes on the BIV thought experiment. Of course, some might think there are other – and more compelling – reasons to reject it. The idea of there being two worlds might seem just absurd; my discussion in Sect. 4.2 can be seen as providing something like a response to one who thinks this. It is also worth emphasizing that the phenomenological take has a distinct advantage at least over MS in its conception of experience from the perspective of what was said in Sect. 3.2. For Chalmers experience is ultimately a solipsistic affair: a series of inner qualitative events that reflect just the structure of the world around us, so that it makes no difference to the truth conditions of beliefs that build on this experience whether the world is understood as material or bit-like in its underlying nature. What we are – the mind – is still in some clear sense the brain or cognitive system that is either envatted or (as we standardly assume) lodged in the cranium. For phenomenologists and enactivists this is all deeply misguided. What we are is human organisms: embodied, experiencing animals. Moreover, our experience relates directly to the world it concerns, extends in its very phenomenal character to this world, and is not intelligible as just something with a structure we might relate to something similar in the physical world. The BIV thought experiment undergirds that through the idea of a world of experience that would remain stable even if – as we can conceive – the underlying reality were something like a giant super computer.

5.6 Postscript on Dreyfus and Taylor’s Realism Dreyfus and Taylor’s jointly-authored book from 2012 has the title Retrieving Realism. In it they argue against what they call ‘the mediational picture’ of modern philosophy, which has its origins in the work of Descartes and Locke and articulates the idea that what we first and foremost are in contact with are mental entities, standing between us and the world. Obviously this view is closely related to what  For the sake of completeness I should perhaps also stress that Adrian Moore’s ‘only two thinkers objection’ to various forms of deep scepticism would have no impact on the existential phenomenological take; just as with MS, we can coherently imagine worlds within worlds within worlds and so on ad infinitum, without this making any difference to the ‘world for us’ for the various different communities in question. 24

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others – and I following them – have called representationalism. Dreyfus and Taylor (henceforth ‘D&T’) note the commonalities between their view and Rorty’s, but they see Rorty as having only incompletely divorced himself from the idea of mediation in that he sees us as interfacing with a thoroughly physical reality through linguistic statements, ones that admittedly do not represent this reality – are only caused by it – but which nevertheless place a barrier between us and it. Further, they think his ‘deflationary realism’ – the view that ‘[t]he only version of “realism” one has left is the trivial, uninteresting and commonsensical one which says that all true beliefs are true because things are as they are’ (Dreyfus and Taylor 2012, 137, citing Rorty 1998, 94) – is inadequate and defeatist. For D&T, our primary contact with the world is not linguistic but through experience, though experience construed not as qualia or internal representations, but as embodied, skilful coping with a material world. Moreover, though they accept that the reality we thereby encounter is essentially an interactional one, conditioned by our sensory and somatic capabilities (in line with enactivism and my phenomenological externalism), they think we can also make sense of the idea of a reality in itself in terms of the boundary conditions of our experience, such as the rigidity of a stick or the softness of a pile of leaves. An investigation of these is essentially the project of natural science, and it means that D&T’s realism is a ‘robust’ one in comparison with Rorty’s merely deflationary one. But science is not the only discourse that is capable of articulating reality, they claim. Local perspectives, be these understood in terms of our overall modes of engagement with the world, or perspectives from times gone by (such as that in Egypt which saw gold as something sacred), also have a kind of objective validity. In Knowles (2019c) I critique D&T’s line, arguing that their robust realism is either incoherent or else threatens the objectivity of more local perspectives, and that their account of full human intentionality as something based in more primitive forms of interaction with the world falls foul of the myth of the given. I think the letter of my complaints stands, but on reflection, and not least in the present context, I think the similarities between their view and mine are more significant, and that the disagreements between us are perhaps more verbal than real. As a supporter of ARTL, I would defend Rorty’s deflationary realism, and certainly do not see it as putting up a barrier to the ‘real’ of any kind (that, I think, is just a misunderstanding). But I agree with D&T that more needs to be said about experience than Rorty says, and that this compromises his physicalism (as I argued in Sect. 3.2). I would distance myself from the notion of a ‘robust realism’, and have a somewhat different conception from them of how to demarcate between the world of experience and the world of fundamental science. The stability of the world for us is plausibly ultimately a function of our own constructive activities as much as it is the world in itself; what we discover from physics about the latter may have little to say about what makes something rigid or soft or even in a certain sense ‘objective’, as we experience or understand those things. Nevertheless, the most important point is that there is a distinction to be drawn here; how one does it is an issue that there is room to say more about and disagree upon, consistently with allowing that neither world uniquely articulates reality as it is in itself. In light of this, I think we would

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do better to talk as ARTL does and drop ‘reality’ – in a philosophical sense – completely. Still, the similarities between my view and D&T’s are plausibly more significant than the differences. As I have repeated several times, dropping talk of ‘reality’ does not mean that ARTL is an anti-realist view. It is to elaborating and clarifying preciely this point I turn in the next chapter.

Chapter 6

Anti-Representationalism, Realism, and Anti-Realism

Abstract  ARTL rejects metaphysical realism (MR): it sees Representationalism as integral to this idea, and since Representationalism is incoherent, so is MR. However, ARTL does not for that reason see itself as an idealistic or anti-realistic doctrine, in any substantive sense. In this chapter, I defend (a) the idea (rejected by Horwich, Devitt and Searle, inter alia) that the kind of realism MR embodies depends on Representationalism, and (b) the idea that ARTL can uphold a full-blown common sense form of realism without MR. Task (b) involves amongst other things arguing against Putnam’s doctrine of conceptual relativity, which I suggest is undesirable in inevitably leading, pace Putnam’s protestations to the contrary, to a Kantian picture on which our talk and thought falls short of an unknowable or even unthinkable reality. While what I have to say in this chapter is meant to be consistent with what has been argued for in Chapters 3, 4, and 5, it is also meant to stand largely independently of those issues.

6.1 Introduction In Chap. 1, I presented as part of the view I have been calling ‘anti-­representationalism about thought and language’  – ARTL  – a rejection of both metaphysical realism (MR) and any substantive kind of anti-realism. ARTL rejects MR in denying that there is sense to be made of the idea of an absolute reality consisting of mind-­ independent objects, properties, relations, structures etc. with a wholly determinate nature which set the ultimate standard for our cognitive practices (those that aim at true assertions or beliefs). It sees Representationalism as integral to this idea, and since Representationalism is incoherent, so is MR.  However, ARTL does not for that reason see itself as becoming an idealistic or anti-realistic doctrine, in any substantive sense. In this chapter, I want to defend the idea that the kind of realism MR embodies depends on Representationalism, and the idea that ARTL can uphold a full-blown common sense form of realism without either. What I have to say is meant to be consistent with what has been argued for in earlier chapters concerning the rejection of GE and its replacement with the ideas behind phenomenological © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Knowles, Representation, Experience, and Metaphysics, Synthese Library 473, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26924-0_6

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externalism and enactivism, but it is also meant to stand largely independently of those issues (and thus, for example, also be applicable to Price’s GE framework or something like the more ‘relaxed realism’ of, say, Rorty). From a certain lofty perspective on the history of philosophy, one might simply stipulate that any view that rejects MR is ipso facto a form of idealism. But that I take it is a purely terminological matter and leaves open the concrete form such a historically categorised ‘idealism’ might take. Thus McDowell has recently embraced idealism in something like this sense, but I take it the majority of contemporary philosophers would be in agreement with his statement that ‘any idealism with a chance of being credible must aspire to being such that, if thought through, it stands revealed as fully cohering with the realism of common sense’ (2009a, b, 141) – and as he goes on to add: not merely aspire, but also not abjectly fail in this aspiration, as he thinks Kant’s transcendental idealist view does. Of perhaps greater concern is the tricky question of how one can even make sense of a rejection of a view that is supposed to be incoherent. To appreciate the virtues of ARTL, I believe, one has to understand its rejection of MR, but then there must surely be some sense in which we can understand what it would have been for MR to obtain; and so, in rejecting MR, we are – surely? – embracing some kind of idealism. But here I think we can take a leaf out of (the earlier) Wittgenstein and see our dialectic in terms of kicking away a ladder once we have climbed it. Or perhaps, to take instead a leaf from the later Wittgenstein: MR is a (metaphysical, philosophical) ‘picture’ that has deep intuitive appeal but that holds us captive and the philosophical task is to free ourselves from it. Even accepting this dialectical tact, however, it is not totally clear that what we end up with stands up to scrutiny as a form of realism. The idea of some kind of idealism or (in a broad sense) semantic anti-realism1 is one that has appealed to many philosophers in the contemporary era, and it has been subtly and ably motivated and, to some degree at least, defended by thinkers like Michael Dummett and Hilary Putnam. The spectre of Kant’s views, including his transcendental idealism, also hangs over much recent pragmatism; indeed, many contemporary pragmatists actively embrace this aspect of Kant’s legacy and see it as integral to a defensible form of pragmatism (see e.g. Pihlström 2003). Though Dummett never espoused or articulated a systematic anti-realist position and Putnam by the end of his life claimed to have renounced his earlier anti-realist sympathies, it is important to make clear how ARTL and its realism can be understood independently of anti-­realist ideas. The following discussion is divided into three  further sections. In Sect. 6.2, I consider the relation between Representationalism and MR. Many philosophers

 By this I mean a kind of anti-realism other than a kind of view that simply denies the existence of certain kinds of entity (like values or mental states) and thus tends to be local rather than global in character. This is certainly one current use of the term ‘anti-realism’ (for some, the most central and important); on the kind of line I have been developing here it has its most natural place in a framework defined by Representationalism and the problematic of placement problems, even though I have allowed it might coherently be held independently of that kind of view – a line that I have already taken up in Sect. 2.3 and that I will return to in the second section of this chapter. 1

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have rejected the idea that there is a connection between these two, and more generally, that there is any (or at least much) connection between broadly semantic (or metasemantic)2 issues and realism-anti-realism debate, in the way Dummett and Putnam suppose. This view is defended by Michael Devitt, John Searle and Paul Horwich, inter alia; indeed, my impression is that it enjoys wide endorsement in analytic philosophy today. Though I agree with this position insofar as I think realism can survive rejecting Representationalism, I do not accept its insistence on a principled distinctness between semantic and metaphysical issues, and I also think it underestimates and mischaracterises the philosophical task of vindicating realism without Representationalism. Rejecting Representationalism does impact the realism issue, even though it does not lead to any anti-realistic conclusions (remember Wittgenstein’s ladder). It is important to be clear on this to understand in what way ARTL is the realistic philosophical view it is. In the following two sections, I clarify and defend my claim that ARTL does not involve any form of anti-realism or idealism in any of the main senses that go under that rubric in the contemporary debate. This discussion is to an extent clarificatory and does not involve many original ideas or arguments; the overall aim is simply to show, or make plausible at least, that ARTL can uphold a common sense realism. Section 6.3 draws on ideas from various thinkers I see as broadly sympathetic to ARTL, gradually focusing in on the idea that acknowledging the language-­ dependence of truths – something ARTL is committed to – does not have substantive anti-realistic implications. In Sect. 6.4, I focus on Putnam’s idea of conceptual relativity, to the effect that there may be and even often are incompatible ways of conceptualising the same portion of reality that are nevertheless in some sense equally good (Putnam 1987). This is an idea that he does not see as compromising common sense realism. I will argue however that, pace Putnam’s protestations to the contrary, it is hard to see how it avoids a form of Kantian idealism whereby we must acknowledge something like his Ding an sich  – a repugnant conclusion, at least from the perspective of ARTL. For this reason I am at least strongly motivated to reject Putnam’s position. I will not give a knockdown argument that Putnam’s overall view is awry, but I will try to suggest that we reasonably can resist the illustrations of ontological relativity he gives as motivation for it.

6.2 Semantics and Realism According to a number of philosophers, the issues of realism and semantics are essentially distinct. Devitt has perhaps been clearest and most forthright on this matter, saying that we need to ‘put metaphysics first’ (Devitt 2010), and understand realism as simply the view that most of the entities of the common sense and scientific image exist and exist independently of the mental (ibid., cf. also Devitt 1984,

 I will take this qualification as read in the following.

2

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1991). Thus understood realism is something Devitt takes to be highly common sensical and that needs to be secured against anti-realist detractors; and a crucial part of doing this is to see it has no semantic content or presuppositions. It has an epistemological dimension insofar as we take ourselves to operate with categories that (for the most part) actually do refer and thus, presumably, confer some knowledge. Strictly speaking, one could be what Devitt calls a mere ‘fig leaf realist’, saying there is something out there independent of our mind without committing to it being any particular way; in this way, Kant’s position on which our knowledge ultimately relates to an unknowable or even in some sense inconceivable Ding an sich classes as a form of realism. But the view Devitt thinks is worth fighting for is not this but the stronger one articulated above: the important fault line goes between those who are realists about things like tables, chairs, cells and electrons and those who are not. It is also important to note that Devitt thinks his basic realist position is compatible with local forms of anti-realism about certain categories, such as, say, values (he himself defends moral realism, cf. Devitt 2002, but this does not follow from his basic realism). For Devitt, then, how reality is and whether it depends on minds is one thing, how mind and language relate to such a reality – whether they represent it or correspond to in some way, or not – quite another. He does admit that we can express realism in semantic terms, as the view that ‘[m]ost common-sense, and scientific, physical existence statements are objectively and mind-independently true’ (Devitt 1991, 46). But this holds only so long as the notion of ‘truth’ employed is a purely deflationary and hence trivial one  – one which just licenses semantic ascent and descent across the famous Tarskian biconditionals ‘“p” is true iff p’. To characterize realism in this way is not to embrace deflationism as a theory or at least complete theory of truth (or reference), in the way Horwich does; indeed, Devitt himself thinks we can make progress towards a substantive theory of reference and perhaps thereby vindicate correspondence truth intuitions (cf. his 1993, 2010). But even if that project were not to bear fruit, realism is the last thing we should relinquish. This is not to say that issues about truth and reference have absolutely no bearing on the realism issue. Devitt claims that, for example, a verificationist or epistemic theory of truth, of the kind associated with Dummett’s work, is difficult to combine with realism (Devitt 2013, 114). But that is decisively a problem for verificationism and not for realism. The issues of realism and semantics are in any case distinct and we must always start by ‘putting metaphysics first’. Devitt’s sentiments on this matter are echoed by others. Searle claims that ‘realism [is] the view that the world exists independently of our representations of it’ (Searle 1995, 153) and that, as such, ‘realism is not a theory of truth and it does not imply any theory of truth’, such as the correspondence theory (ibid., 154). Moreover, the correspondence theory of truth does not imply realism, since what makes our sentences true could be mind-dependent – or indeed, there might in principle be no appropriate reality to make our claims true at all (a point Devitt also makes, cf. his 1991, 48). Horwich has also argued that semantic deflationism has no impact on the realism issue, indeed more strongly, that theories about truth and reference, on the one hand, and commitments to realism or otherwise, on the other, are independent

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of one another (Horwich 1996). Horwich himself of course embraces semantic deflationism; he also rejects MR for what appear to be distinct reasons.3 Though as I understand their views these thinkers are fairly in accord with each other on the issue I am interested in here, in what follows I will focus mainly on Devitt’s views and arguments, for simplicity’s sake and because it is Devitt who has been most outspoken on the issue. How should we understand this stance in relation to the views of Putnam, Price and ARTL more generally? As we have seen, the position of ARTL, and I take it also Price, is that realism can be upheld even if one rejects Representationalism (that is the line I am trying to vindicate in this chapter as a whole). As for Putnam, though he once espoused a kind of anti-realism on the basis of rejecting MR, he later claimed this was a mistake, and to be a realist in the fullest coherent sense of the word.4 There is insofar perhaps little of substance that divides ARTL or even Putnam from Devitt’s view – or at least Horwich’s, insofar as he, unlike Devitt, is not a Representationalist. Both parties hold that realism, at least of a common sense sort, can be upheld without Representationalism. However, ARTL also holds that Representationalism is essentially tied to a stronger form of realism, MR, something Devitt and his ilk deny. I think this connection can be defended and, though our ultimate aim should be to put MR and Representationalism behind us, that it is important to understand this to appreciate what a defensible non-Representationlist realism looks like. MR, again, is the idea that there is a completely mind-independent reality with a determinate structure and nature that our cognitive practices are ultimately answerable to, as such. Representationalism is integral to that, as ARTL sees things. And ARTL argues that, though MR is an intuitive conception of what realism involves, it is in fact, in presupposing Representationalism, incoherent. Devitt would reject this claimed presupposition, but he also rejects the idea that MR articulates even an intuitive picture of what realism amounts to. Thus a further part of Devitt’s argument is that Putnam’s characterisation of MR as the idea that there is one unique correct way of describing reality, dictated by the structure of reality itself, is mistaken and unnecessary for realism. According to Devitt, there is not just one correct way to describe reality (2013, 108 ff.): there are many different categories we can use to describe the world – such as catdog (anything that is either a cat or a dog), as well as cat and dog and all the rest we usually use – even though only a fraction of those will be of interest to us in our cognitive practices. Nevertheless we are free in  At least, he rejects a view he calls ‘metaphysical realism’ in his (1982) as well as, more recently in his (2010), expressing grave scepticism about the idea of ‘fundamentality’ as embraced by avowed metaphysical realists like Kite Fine. I won’t go into the hermeneutics of Horwich’s position in any depth here; for what it’s worth I understand his view to involve (possibly inter alia) that a) deflationism in itself does not have any consequences for the realist/anti-realist debate b) nevertheless, for other reasons, MR (in my sense) is untenable. The view is thus structurally similar to that he maintains in opposition to Price’s argument against object naturalism, discussed in Chap. 2 (deflationism though correct doesn’t undermine ON, but ON is false or incoherent anyway). For present purposes, what is important is a), which I oppose. 4  Notwithstanding this, there is, as we shall see in Sect. 6.4, reason to question whether he is able to do this consistently with upholding his thesis of conceptual relativity. 3

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principle to adopt any set of categories we wish to describe reality: the world does not dictate one particular set as its ‘own’, so to speak. What is not up to us is whether, given a certain category is in play, a given object can be said to fall under it or not. Searle (op. cit., 160 ff.) plies a similar line, though while Devitt sees categories as objectively part of reality, Searle sees them as human creations. Both thinkers nevertheless take their respective view on categories as fully consistent with accepting realism, though this realism is not MR. Putnam has responded directly to Devitt’s critique of his view that realism depends on semantic issues, arguing that the latter’s notion of realism is not strong enough to engage the relevant debates (Putnam 2016, 118–119). Thus, anti-realists about a certain domain will typically want to accept that, say, chairs exist in a mind-­ independent way, at least in a certain common sensical sense of mind-independence. It is not as if, for them, my just thinking there is a chair there makes it the case that there is a chair there. At another level, of course, the chair is not independent of us, but, says Putnam, that is a level that is revealed by understanding what ‘there is a chair’ means. But then, he says, we are back with questions about semantics. I basically agree with what Putnam says here. His response is nevertheless somewhat awry from the perspective of ARTL since it seems to open for the relevance of semantics to the realism issue by way of opening the door to a substantive albeit semantic anti-realism. But ARTL aims to offer a (fully) realist picture (as ultimately did Putnam, but let us put his view to one side for the moment). I think our response to Devitt thus needs to be somewhat different. In the first place, I think we need to ask more precisely what is meant by ‘mind-­ independence’. According to Devitt (and as we have seen Searle, and no doubt others too), one problem with understanding realism as connected to semantic issues is that Representationalism is fully compatible with an anti-realism that sees what we say as made true by5 a reality that is dependent on the mind. But what exactly does Devitt understand by a ‘mind-dependent reality’? To start with, acknowledging something we might call this is surely completely anodyne, namely, where this is simply the realm of the phenomena we call mental: beliefs, desires, thoughts, dreams, sensations and so on. I take it nobody (or at least very few) sees being a realist about such things as any kind of compromise on being a realist tout court. Now according to some famous views referred to as ‘idealist’, such as that espoused by Bishop Berkeley, all reality has a mental, experiential character, even though the standard of what is real is also independent of any particular human mind (crudely, ‘reality’ is the mind of God). In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in this kind of view through the rise of, in particular, panpsychistic solutions to the mind-body problem, whereby nature has a fundamentally psychic character (cf. Goff 2022). Now, I also agree with Devitt (and Searle) that such a view of reality as something mind-dependent is fully compatible with Representationalism. However, that does not support the idea that semantic and realism issues are independent of

 By which I will mean in the following ‘corresponds to’ in the sense of the correspondence theory of truth. 5

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one another. For embracing panpsychism or even Berkeleyean idealism is still, surely, fully compatible with realism in a very intuitive sense of that term. There is, for Berkeley and for panpsychists, a way the world is in and of itself that we seek to represent in thought and language; it is just that this world turns out to be much more mind-like and less matter-like in character than we are often inclined to think (perhaps, in the extreme case, being wholly mind-like). I should underline that I have very little sympathy for such panpsychistic or idealist metaphysical views. They stem in my opinion from phenomenologically flawed conceptions of mind and experience, as some kind of intrinsic qualitative being (see Chap. 3). But for present purposes the point is just that talk of a ‘mind-dependent’ reality in that sense is fully compatible with the realism of MR and Representationalism. So, nothing so far suggests that these ideas are not inter-­ dependent. Indeed, partly in light of this point, I think we can even aver that Representationalism if not exactly entailing MR is highly conducive to it: if language or thought functions by relating it to some language- or thought independent reality  – even if this might be ‘mind-like’ in character  – then presumably in our cognitive practices we are also articulating the kind of thing MR takes reality to be, i.e. a set of objects, properties, relations, and/or structures with a nature quite independent of our describing them. (I think this is correct and that what I say below further buttresses it. However, for the record, nothing else of what I want to establish depends on precisely this point.) There is of course another sense of ‘mind-dependent reality’ that MR does involve a rejection of. To understand what it is rejecting, however, it seems to me we must resort to Representationalism. For Representationalism, the contents of the cognitive claims we make about the world are to be understood in terms of correspondence to worldly truths or facts, not just in terms of the concepts we happen to utilize as the particular species we are and the particular historical situation we find ourselves in. Without Representationalism, the idea of such mind-independent facts as what we are answerable to in our cognitive practices – as MR holds we are – is deeply obscure and plausibly not one we can give any sense to. These reflections go some way towards undermining Devitt’s idea that realism and semantic issues are distinct. But there is as we have seen more to his view, insofar as he thinks MR’s way of characterising realism is anyway flawed – in particular its idea of there being one correct way of carving up reality. There is no doubt a lot one could say about this issue; my contribution won’t amount to a rebuttal of Devitt’s view from uncontroversial or shared premises. What I will instead argue is first, somewhat ad hominem, that the view is in any case not clearly distinct from MR; and then, more importantly, that Devitt’s view of what realism is cannot be sustained given the kind of position he wants realism to be – at least, it cannot under a central assumption of ARTL. It is possible to reinforce his position in ways that can make it the kind of view he wants it to be, but these involve either accepting Representationalism or adopting what he calls a merely ‘fig leaf’ form of realism. As noted, Devitt thinks we have a large, indeed it seems practically unlimited degree of freedom in choosing the categories we describe reality in terms of, but not about whether things fall into those categories. This is meant to vindicate the idea of

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the mind-independent existence (or non-existence, as the case might be) of tokens of the relevant categories without the presuppositions of MR. A first remark about this position is that it is unclear, to me at any rate, exactly how it diverges from MR in regarding the categories as genuinely out there, or real. Even if Little Puss can be classed both as a cat and as a ‘catdog’, why should this suggest that the world has anything other than one total true fundamental description any more than the fact that she can be classed both as a cat and a mammal does? (I am taking it as given that MR can accommodate this latter platitude.) The description would no doubt have to be incredibly more complex than we are pretheoretically disposed to think, but nobody ever thought that on MR we might ever aspire to actually giving a full specification of the world’s nature and structure. It is not clear to me exactly why Devitt adopts this realist view of categories and not Searle’s view on which they are human constructions (especially as he avows nominalism). As far as I can see, his point that we can still be realists in spite of rejecting MR seems (at least) as equally maintainable on the latter view as on the first. In any case, I won’t pursue this issue further here. Instead I want to focus on the distinction between choosing categories and categorizing objects. No doubt this distinction can appear intuitively apt: By looking, I ‘objectively’ verify that Little Puss is a cat given my understanding of that predicate (smallish, cute, furry, purrs etc.), and then can infer that cats exist – even though that category is in a way arbitrary. If I instead defined my predicate ‘cat’ such that anything like the above is a cat unless it is also at least 50 years old, in which case it is not, I could instead verify that Little Puss is not a cat (and no doubt reason inductively that there are no cats). But that doesn’t alter the fact that cats exist given my understanding of what the sentence means. However, at least from the perspective of ARTL, this distinction, while to an extent apt in thinking about many everyday circumstances, cannot bear the philosophical weight Devitt is putting on it in using it to characterise his realism. According to his line of thought, to identify something a as an F in an objective way one needs to be able to check that a fulfils certain criteria or instantiates certain features. But then of course one can ask the same about those features, e.g. G (let us call one of them). Is that in turn to be ratified by appeal to another set of features – and so on ad infinitum? What Devitt’s line seems to presuppose is some level of privileged empirical criteria which are such that just by virtue of perceiving these, I can take or believe them to obtain. But surely that is just an instance of the idea of empirical givenness: of sense experience putting us in touch with features that immediately justify our beliefs from outside the realm of the rational and the conceptual. If we reject givenness, then we cannot see our judgements about whether something is an F as simply given by seeing that it is so: it must always be possible to ask if what appears to be an F indeed is an F, a question that in turn presupposes the capacity to ask whether seeing things as Fs is the appropriate way to think about the matter in question at all (sc. Galileo and the question Is the earth stationary?). In short, judging that a is F cannot be seen as, in any fundamental way, logically independent of thinking that ‘F’ is an appropriate category to be applied in the relevant circumstances to a. As noted, in many ordinary contexts the kind of difference Devitt alludes to will seem an apt characterisation of what we are doing, but without

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the idea of the given, deciding on categories and categorising things cannot be seen as enunciating a dichotomy of function in our basic cognition, but must rather be seen as deriving from an underlying unified capacity. Devitt might protest here that he is no epistemological foundationalist but a Quinean confirmation holist. My evidence as a whole tells me Little Puss is a cat given my understanding of that term, not some atomic perceptual encounter with her. But this doesn’t solve the problem, which essentially revolves around how we can make sense of the distinction between deciding on categories, and classifying particular things in relation to these categories, something that in turn is crucial to making sense of Devitt’s realism. Perhaps my concluding Little Puss is a cat is a complex function of several sources of information, but even so, the question remains how we then make sense of there being freedom in deciding to apply the category but not in seeing it as instantiated. It seems to me that Devitt and others see this as so obviously what we do that we don’t need to provide an account of it. But the idea behind and critique of the given is a structural one that needn’t be related to sense perception or indeed the ordinary idea of justification insofar as this concerns the difference between different sources of this (perceptual, inferential etc.), how much we need of each and so on. We do, quite generally, just see or understand that this is how things are, whether it is Little Puss being a cat or murder being wrong. Devitt wants this kind of act to be dissociable into two fundamental epistemic parts. But when I see or understand that it is correct to describe a as F, I am accepting both that a is F, and that a is F and not (say) G, in the very same act – at least, I must be on pain of countenancing a ‘given’. If we accept this, what becomes of Devitt’s realism? To start with, at least if we are to avoid a surely disastrous kind of voluntaristic epistemic relativism, the idea that we have the kind of unconstrained freedom in judgement that Devitt thinks we have in choosing categories must surely be admitted to be wrong. Little puss is a cat, and I cannot rationally deny that by using an alternative and bizarre definition of ‘cat’ such that it means something like as she is but also over 50 years old, whatever my purposes. Thinking I can is just a philosopher’s fiction. Thus, when I have said we are in principle just as free to affirm or withhold the predicate ‘cat’ from Little Puss when we classify her in a certain way as we are to use that predicate or some other in the first place, what we are talking about in both cases is not the kind of arational, absolute freedom of the kind Devitt talks about, but more like Kant’s notion of spontaneity: we judge rationally, and in that sense freely, but never arbitrarily or merely conventionally.6 This is of course a kind of view that is also meant to fit with the rejection of empirical givenness.

 In invoking Kant here, a question might arise as to whether my line here would also be endorsed by McDowell, who, though aiming to reject the idea of givenness, operates with the idea of empirical receptivity as a distinct mode of actualization of conceptual capacities (see Sect. 3.2). Could McDowell’s picture in fact be a way of upholding something like Devitt’s distinction without falling afoul of the myth, somehow or other? I think the answer to this is probably ‘no’, but since I am in any case not committed to McDowell’s view on perception, I will not pursue this matter further here. 6

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Could this kind of view of judgement itself be the basis for the kind of realist position Devitt thinks can be sustained without semantic premises? It seems unlikely. For Devitt, realism is essentially an invidious doctrine: though it involves our being committed to the existence of most of what common sense and science is committed to, we are not committed to all of this just because we talk as if we are: the real world is out there fully independently of us and it places its own constraints on what exists. In this way his realism, though not MR itself, is nevertheless a metaphysical kind of realism. This is also brought out by the fact Devitt subscribes to a kind of metaphysical naturalism, that is, something like the object naturalism that Price critiques (cf. Chap. 2, and again Devitt 1992 on moral realism). Price’s argument – a successful one, we ultimately concluded – was that to rationally motivate the kinds of metaphysical placement problems ON tries to solve, we have to presuppose Representationalism. Insofar as the kind of realism Devitt is after ties in in this way in with his naturalism, this also shows that Devitt’s realism needs Representationalism – or at least it does assuming ARTL’s rejection of givenness.7 The upshot of all this is that to uphold the kind of realism Devitt is interested in one does after all seem forced to accept Representationalism. If one does that, one can see reality constraining what we take to exist in virtue of the fact that the meanings of our claims are determined by substantial reference relations to it. But accepting Representationalism as a presupposition of realism is precisely what Devitt wants not to do; moreover, as we saw above, it seems reasonable to think that Representationalism itself induces MR. There is an alternative way to go here for Devitt, which is to understand the reality we are in touch with as a kind of noumenal realm whose own nature and/or structure (if it has any) is opaque to us but which is ‘carvable up’ in many different ways, even though not just any old way (exactly how this would be expressed in view of Devitt’s realism about categories is perhaps a somewhat delicate matter, but in view of what I said above, nothing much seems to hang on resolving this). This is obviously something like a Kantian picture in which we employ our concepts to capture a kind of Ding an sich which acts as a kind of guarantor of certain of our descriptions but not others, and something close to what Devitt calls ‘fig leaf’ realism. But as we have also seen, it is not this kind of realism that Devitt thinks is worth fighting for (whether it is avoidable, given one rejects Representationalism and wants to remain a realist, is an issue we will return to). My conclusion is that MR is not so easily dismissed by someone with aspirations like Devitt who wants to uphold realism as the kind of position he takes it to be; nor is it at all clearly independent of Representationalism. MR, not Devitt’s picture, is plausibly our intuitive or default picture of realism – albeit also one that supporters of ARTL think that we need to somehow free ourselves from. Simply denying that the realism issue has anything to do with Representationalism and appealing to the  As I indicated in Sect. 2.3, one could in the manner of Quine coherently uphold a kind of metaphysical naturalism without embracing Representationalism. However, as I pointed out there, that line is a kind of pragmatism fundamentally, hence not I take it a kind of substantive realism of the kind Devitt’s position aspires to be. 7

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picture Devitt endorses fails to engage with the relevant issues; insofar I agree with Putnam. Of course, there are many who would both accept that we cannot have realism without Representationalism and embrace these two doctrines. This is not the way of ARTL. But given Devitt’s way isn’t ARTL’s way either, we need to ask more precisely how ARTL thinks it can nevertheless maintain common sense realism.

6.3 Realism ARTL-Style In this and the following section I want to spell out why ARTL is not committed to any substantive kind of anti-realist view, in spite of rejecting MR. What I want to do primarily is sketch a coherent and hopefully somewhat plausible picture of ARTL’s common sense realism; there are no doubt many further issues one might consider in relation to such a general issue as the realism versus anti-realism debate, but I hope my discussion does go some way at least to substantiating the conclusion I want to defend. The first thing to underline is that ARTL’s fundamental gambit in this area of philosophy is its rejection of MR and the Representationalism it depends on as incoherent. ARTL is thus not seeking to advocate any particular metaphysical view on the realism-idealism axis, a fortiori any kind of anti-realism. ARTL, like McDowell, operates with the idea that its substantial commitments are and should be just those of a kind of a ‘common sense realism’, exploiting that trope to diffuse the traditional realism-idealism issue. I think that part of this common sense, at least today, is that there many things that are quite unlike us in their nature – i.e. not mental or experiential in any way, such as the posits of physics. This was mentioned in Sect. 4.2 (and its denial, some form of panpsychism, mentioned in the previous section); it also has connections to how we think about experience. I will not however be taking it up further here. A further, arguably more centrally ensconced part of common sense is the idea that things generally are not dependent on my or anybody else’s sensing or knowing them. We say things like even if human beings had never existed, dinosaurs would still have existed. There are of course anti-realist views that will also want to allow us to say this kind of thing, but many of these place some epistemic constraints on what can be said to exist or what is true that breaches with common sense in some way or other, or at some level. And if they don’t do that, they operate with a notion of underlying reality that eludes our knowledge, a posit that is not just non-­common-­ sensical but borders on the incoherent, in my opinion. ARTL wants to have no truck with any of these views. But can it do so with impunity? Semantic deflationism is an important part of the argument that it can. Classically, many philosophers have argued for or against realism or anti-realism by arguing for different notions of truth. Thus, realism has been seen as following from the correspondence theory of truth and/or other Representationalist ideas, whilst various forms of anti-realism see truth as relative to our practices of finding about things, leading to famous definitions like C.S. Peirce’s on which truth is what we would

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believe at the end of enquiry, or the verificationist idea that truth is tied essentially to methods for discovering it. In embracing deflationism about truth, ARTL rejects Representationalism (and MR) but it also avoids acknowledging any kind epistemic or pragmatist constraint on truth or ‘reality’ – which, in spite of everything anti-­ realists have argued, surely is a deeply counterintuitive result (if not indeed somehow incoherent). ARTL can admit there is much we will never know and possibly never could (e.g. facts outside our ‘light cone’ or so-called ‘Fitch propositions’8). But for each of these propositions, p, it seems we can nevertheless say that it is true iff p – and indeed should say nothing more when it comes to understanding what it is for it to be true or how ‘reality’ must be for it to be the case. Might embracing deflationism itself have its own distinctive kind of anti-realistic implications? Insofar as ARTL rejects Representationalism, it owes an account of meaning not based on the traditional semantic notions of truth and reference, and this is standardly taken to involve some kind of inferentialist or, more generally, use-based account. A question then might be posed as to whether such theories of meaning entail a form of idealism or anti-realism. According to use-based theories of meaning, what gives ‘shape’ to our truth-aimed utterances  – what determines what they mean and what we say in using them  – is not a relation to something beyond utterances, but the system of utterances itself and the patterns these encode (including possibly their use in connection with features of our environments).9 Does it follow that our conception of what is real – the facts we countenance as such – are therefore somehow dependent on or relative to these patterns of use? This train of thought has been critically discussed by various ‘deflationary’ metaphysicians in recent years, including Eli Hirsch (2011) and Amie Thomasson (2015). They espouse a broadly Carnapian picture of ontological commitment on which the rules of our language determine the broad contours of our ontology, such that questions about whether there exist, say, properties or endurant material objects10 can be largely decided by conceptual investigation, along with relevant empirical knowledge (insofar as this is a separate matter). As we have seen, Price also sees Carnap’s view of language as broadly conducive to his global expressivism. The views of these thinkers diverge at various points (Hirsch, in espousing something he calls ‘quantifier variance’, is closer to  After Frederic Fitch. Such a proposition is ‘P and no one knows that P’. If this could be known, it would follow that P is known and P is not known. This could not be the case, so it cannot be known. I am not endorsing this so-called ‘paradox of knowability’ for anti-realism but just registering it as an example of the kind of thing that might be in this way problematic for anti-realism but for ARTL is not. 9  I will be being deliberately non-committal about what this parenthetical remark amounts in relation to the use-theoretic or inferentialist account of meaning or concept individuation. In what follows I will also speak at times of ‘relevant empirical knowledge’, and this to be understood in a similar non-committal way. Of course, when I say ‘non-committal’, I do exclude commitment to an empirical given or a Representationalist account, but I take it there is nothing in the idea of such environmental knowledge being part of language use that commits one to this. 10  As opposed to mere perdurants; for explanation of these terms and an example see the next paragraph. 8

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Putnam than the other two; more on this below). However, all staunchly reject the idea that their Carnapian view involves a form of anti-realism, seeing this as involving a use-­mention fallacy. Our practices make available certain concepts and modes of thought, but in expressing these thoughts we do not assert language-relative truth or existence. For example, my language makes available thoughts such as ‘that cup is white’ (in the light of relevant experience), as well as, at least according to Thomasson, rules that allow me to infer from this that the cup instantiates the property of whiteness and hence that properties exist; but what I assert in saying the latter or ‘that cup is white’ is not a content that concerns language or the mind. Even if we accept the soundness of this move, however, it might nevertheless seem only to provide for a minimal form of realism – indeed one that hardly deserves the title at all. In a recent paper, James Miller (2016) argues that Hirsch’s view of our ontologically committing discourse is of this kind. Hirsch is not just an ontological deflationist but also what Miller, following Matti Eklund (2008), calls an ontological pluralist, that is one who believes ‘there are languages with significantly different sets of ontological expressions such that these languages are all maximally adequate for stating all the facts about the world’ (Eklund 2008, 390). These expressions can be expressed using the English form ‘exists’ or the other quantificational lexemes standardly used to express ontological commitment. For example for Hirsch the cup I see in front of me on the table can equally be seen as one enduring thing that exists over time (as we usually think of it) or as a perduring plurality of spatio-temporal cup slices (cf. Hawley 2020). Nothing in the world dictates my use of ‘exists’ or ‘there is/are’ in relation to how many things are there on the table. Hirsch nevertheless wants to say that given any particular meaning I attach to these words, there is a perfectly univocal and objective answer to what is on the table, how many things there are etc. As noted, it is only a use/mention conflation that could lead us to think otherwise. Miller starts by claiming that this reply to the charge of anti-realism that Hirsch (along with Thomasson and Price) embraces is not sufficient to count as realism just because it avoids an overt idealism. Given my dialectic starting point of rejecting MR, that complaint does not clearly cut any ice against me. But Miller has a more substantive objection. He thinks that even if we put MR to one side (to put things in my terms), Hirsch must embrace commitment to a ‘stuff ontology’, or what Eklund (op. cit.) has called an ‘amorphous lump’ view of ultimate reality. This reality is undifferentiated in itself but is something we apparently need to postulate to make sense of the various but conflicting existentially committing practices Hirsch thinks we can or at least might engage in. Such an ‘amorphous lump’ is of course reminiscent of Kant’s Ding an sich and hence we can seem to land back with something like transcendental idealism (or ‘fig leaf’ realism). Miller, like Devitt, sees this kind of view as hardly worthy of the epithet of realism. Moreover, it is a dubiously coherent position for Hirsch (and other ontological deflationists) who see structure as essentially a linguistic matter; denying it to a genuine mind-independent reality in itself thus looks incoherent.

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I am sympathetic to Miller’s critique of this kind of Kantian view; it is also something that ARTL very much wants to avoid, as we have seen. Nevertheless, it might seem difficult for it to resist a slide into it. If ARTL operates with the idea that we could have spoken ontologically committing languages that are different and incommensurable with those we in fact speak, and we want to avoid MR, how can we avoid acknowledging something like the Kantian picture Miller paints? Now this point doesn’t have anything to do with Hirsch’s ontological pluralism in particular. Nevertheless, if we do accept this and/or Putnam’s related doctrine of conceptual relativity – the idea that there may be and indeed often are incompatible ways of conceptualising the same portion of reality that are nevertheless in some sense equally good  – we might seem pushed ever more inexorably to the same conclusion. In my view, ARTL should and need have no association with the doctrine of conceptual relativity that Putnam holds, nor with Hirsch’s similar view. This, as well as to what extent these views actually do lead to the Kantian picture just sketched, will be the topic of Sect. 6.4. But putting ontological pluralism/conceptual relativity to one side, there is in my opinion actually no threat of ARTL having to embrace the kind of Kantian picture in the way Miller’s arguments might suggest there is. As we saw in Sect. 1.2 from Price’s discussion of this issue (Price 2013, 54), it is very important properly to understand the implications of the use-mention distinction here. Just because our languages might have been different does not mean that there might have been different facts – only different fact-stating practices. The facts are what we express using the languages we actually have; the question of what facts might be expressed by a different language is only something that can be grasped by coming to speak that language. If we can or could do this, and can or could make sense of the commitments thereby expressed – by either, as it were, their opening our eyes to new truths,11 or else as being straightforwardly consistent or inconsistent with things we already believe – then obviously no Kantian compromise on a common sense realism ensues. If we cannot – if the language is untranslatable into or incommensurable with ours – then there is simply no substance to the idea of different but somehow equally good sets of facts. The Kantian picture misrepresents the envisaged situation and begs the question against ARTL: we should not see it purely objectively in terms of different and incompatible sets of putative facts or ‘virtual worlds’ constructed through using different languages, worlds that are vindicated by the same underlying Ding an sich. Rather, one has to speak or use the relevant language to make any sense of the accompanying facts. And since we can speak only our own languages (trivially), there really are no alternative facts.

 This idea also relates to that of McDowell’s sentiently alien Martians: rational, concept-using beings who nevertheless live in their own perceptual world, different from ours (taken up in Sect. 4.2). Such beings articulate in their language facts that constitute a genuine alternative to ours in a certain sense; nevertheless, though these facts may be inaccessible to us in a rather deep way, they are not completely so. If we could, miraculously, assume the organic form of these Martians we could presumably be able to converse with them about their world. 11

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The dialectical situation does, I believe, change in the face of actual examples of ontological plurality or relativity (if such exist). The point for now is that without some concrete backing to the effect that this might actually obtain, the Kantian picture is not one ARTL needs to take seriously. Before moving to this next stage of the argument in the following section, I want to close this one with a discussion of a different (though I think related)12 kind of worry one might have about ARTL’s claim to be a (common sense) realistic position. This is that its use theory of meaning in any case seems to commit us to the claim that if there were no humans (or other rational beings) with concepts, there would be no truths – i.e. true thoughts, or facts. And one might think, whatever else ARTL has to say that that in any case has a distinctively idealistic flavour and indeed implication. Rorty explicitly embraces the idea that truth, in being connected to language use, does not exist independently of us: ‘[W]here there are no sentences, there is no truth…the world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not’ (Rorty 1989, 4–5). He thinks this unproblematic since we can still say the world itself, that is, the things in it like tables and chairs and what they are like, is independent of our descriptions: they would have been there even if we hadn’t (at least in a certain sense) and would be certain ways or not, regardless of what we thought – we can say all that and it is true. Price (2013, 56) endorses Rorty’s line, though stresses that we need to understand the distinction as obtaining within individual i-worlds, not just in terms of that between the i-world as a whole (‘everything that is the case’) and the e-world of science, a view that would make it more in line with Sellars’ ‘scientific realism’ (see Sect. 2.5). But can we really shake off the threat of idealism quite so easily? As we shall see, though there is more I think needs to be said here, I believe we ultimately can vindicate Rorty’s line. Consider the following counterfactual claim: If we had never evolved from whatever existed at the time of the dinosaurs, the latter would still have existed. No adherent to common sense would want to deny that (and presumably the antecedent represents a genuine metaphysical possibility, so it is not just trivially true). Can ARTL follow suit? It will say it can by pointing out that the counterfactual commitment is encoded in our understanding of the very concepts of the things in question, including relevant empirical knowledge. However, since ARTL claims that there being truths at all is dependent on there being language, then if we had never existed there would (as far as we know anyway and I shall in any case assume) have been no truths, and a fortiori not the truth dinosaurs exist(ed) either. But now, an objector will claim, accepting that truth is incompatible with accepting the first one.

 Specfically, to Price’s point of the last but one paragraph in that it acknowledges an essentially indexical element to our fact stating discourse. Just as our fact-stating discourse must be understood as a disourse we use, an important idea in the following will be that the truths we express are all our truths. 12

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I believe however there is no incompatibility here on more careful reflection. The first counterfactual says that if we had never existed, dinosaurs would still have done so. The second counterfactual in effect says that if we had never existed there would be no truths. The first might seem to amount to saying that, on the assumption that we didn’t come into existence, dinosaurs would nevertheless have existed. But doesn’t that imply, given the same assumption, that it would be true that they then would have existed, hence that there would be at least one truth without language, or without us  – and doesn’t that contradict the second counterfactual? A rendering in terms of possible worlds or situations might seem to underline the point. In the possible world where we don’t exist, dinosaurs still do, hence ‘dinosaurs exist’ is true there, and hence we have a truth at this world and get a contradiction with our second counterfactual, at least if we also understand it in terms of possible worlds. My response to this is to remind that what is being envisaged in both the above cases is precisely a counterfactual situation: it is a hypothetical situation considered from our actual, existing one. So in fact the first does not verify that there are or could be truths without human language, for it does not put us out of the picture. From an ARTL-perspective, we can only accept that, if we had never existed, it would still be true that the dinosaurs existed from our point of view, one in which we make a certain judgement in language; if one thinks that away, there is no sense to the idea of there still being such a truth. One can I think also put this by saying, in Brandom’s (2000) terminology, that if we had never existed, there would still have been a true claimable that dinosaurs existed. However, claimables are only conceivable as correlatives of claimings, and these are things we humans actually make.13 Now this assessment might change if talk of possible worlds were interpreted realistically, in the manner of David Lewis (Lewis 1986). A lot has been written about Lewis’ view and I cannot hope to go into that discussion in any detail here. Suffice it then to say that his understanding of the semantics of modal talk is contested and indeed arguably not even a very ‘realistic’ rendering of it insofar as it seeks to reduce talk of what might have been to a function of truths about just what is the case with certain kinds of intuitively strange entity.14 My animadversions

 Rorty is sceptical of Brandom’s notion of ‘claimables’, or at least of its motivation, arguing it involves a back-sliding into a correspondence conception of truth (Rorty 2000). In my view, however, there is no deep disagreement here: Brandom’s claimables just articulate a conception of deflationary truth makers for our claims, something I suggested Price also can acknowledge in Sect. 2.2 and 2.3 (and by implication therefore ARTL more generally). Brandom puts a lot of effort into making clear how his inferentialism can do justice to the idea of fully objective, not merely subjective truth, without having to buy into Representationalism (see especially his account of de re versus de dicto attitude ascriptions in his 1994, ch. 8). Though I think this is all consistent with what I want to claim here and might buttress the kind of view I am trying to defend as a robust form of realism, I will not go further into Brandom’s views further or how they relate to what I have to say in this section (which of course is meant to stand at least for the most part on its own merits). 14  A point Timothy Williamson has been at pains to point out; for his overall view of modality se his (2013). 13

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against Lewis’ theory do not rest on this latter consideration, nor on the idea that it is somehow a Representationalist account (even if it might well be, though it isn’t clear to me it ipso facto is). My objection only rests on the thought that we should understand modality and counterfactuality for what it is, at least as far as we can. As long as we do that then we can continue to accept that dinosaurs would have existed without us  – and our language  – without being bulldozed into saying that truths would have existed without language. Some might still object that we need a semantics for modality of some kind or other and that it is quite possible that that will create problems for my allegation that the two counterfactuals are compatible. However, it is not at least at all clear on what account that would be the case. My point is that intuitively the two counterfactuals are quite compatible so long as one refrains from understanding such things in terms of evaluating truths like ‘dinosaurs exist’ at Lewisean possible worlds. Perhaps this will have ramifications for how we think about modality more generally but I cannot enter that larger debate here. A distinct worry about the idea that without language there would be no truths is that it seems to imply that there can be no truths that could not be expressed in language, or that evade conceptual articulation. Again, I accept this implication under a certain reading of the modal claim. Timothy Williamson has argued with reference to McDowell’s view that the conceptual is unbounded that this unreasonably a priori rules out what he calls ‘elusive objects’ (Williamson 2007a, b, 18): objects that we cannot single out in thought or form any conception of, even though we might be able to think about them collectively as such. This way of putting things makes certain assumptions about what it is to be able to think about things, but here all I want to make use of is the idea that some think there might be things necessarily beyond our ken and comprehension  – and by extension truths about them. A slightly different line might stress that there may be, indeed most probably are truths about the physical universe too complicated or complex for us to grasp, given our actual and/or finite conceptual powers. However, what is plausible in these thoughts does not compromise the position I espouse. The general dependence of truth on language and concepts does not mean we must in fact be able to express all truths. This would perhaps follow given some kind of verificationism about truth but this is something ARTL wants no truck with. On the other hand, the idea that there might be truths (‘facts’) that are constitutively such that for whatever reason they could not in principle be expressed in language, using our concepts, given enough time and resources, seems dubiously coherent. This is a thought which many seem to take for granted in the same way as they do MR, but, even apart from any association with the latter, I have never heard a good answer to the following question: how can we grasp that we could not grasp such thoughts without in some way grasping what it is in them we allegedly cannot grasp? Again, I wouldn’t want to suggest there isn’t more to be said here. What I do think my discussion shows is that it is far from clear that any direct inconsistency, incoherence or breach with an uncompromising common sense realism is entailed by ARTL, given its rejection of MR as simply incoherent.

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6.4 Conceptual Relativity In this section I return to the idea, taken up in the previous one, that ARTL can seem to imply a picture on which, although our ontological commitments are not language-­ dependent, these commitments presuppose a fundamental underlying reality that we do not and cannot capture in our linguistic practices (or perhaps by any such practices). ARTL wants to avoid this kind of Kantian picture, and I argued in the above that it can do so as long as there is no reason to think there are actual examples of incompatible but in some sense equally valid ways of conceptualizing the same ‘portions of reality’. Now Putnam and Hirsch also want to avoid Kantianism, but they do think there can be such variously valid ways of conceptualizing things. In this section, I want to focus on this conceptual relativity view, asking whether it has anti-realistic implications, and also whether it deserves to be upheld. If both these things are the case, ARTL clearly faces a problem in combining its various commitments with the idea that it is a straightforwardly common sense realist view. Of course, one might think this is a price worth paying and that some kind of Kantian variant on ARTL should be endorsed instead: (quasi-)Kantian anti-­ representationalism about thought and language, as I referred to it in Chap. 1 (see footnote 2). I think this would be unfortunate, and take it that this attitude is fairly widespread (as witnessed not least by Putnam’s and Hirsch’s own repudiation of this kind of view).15 This shared attitude will be important to my dialectical tack. But I will also be arguing that there is no need to embrace the Kantian view because conceptual relativity can be resisted: the examples of it are at least less than wholly compelling. My focus will be Putnam’s notion of and examples of conceptual relativity, putting Hirsch and quantifier variance to one side. As far as I can see the main difference between the two is that while Putnam maintains there are actual examples of conceptual relativity in our language as we (and philosophers, scientists and mathematicians) use it, Hirsch is merely concerned to point up the possibility of alternative but in some sense equally good languages to those we actually use. Also, as far as I can see, this distinction is somewhat diffuse and unclear. In any case, for reasons mainly of keeping the present discussion as surmountable as possible, it is only (or at least for the most part only) Putnam I will consider here (without of course prejudging the possibility that a more systematic consideration of Hirsch might have an impact on my argument). I start with some background. As we have seen, Putnam famously formulated and then argued against a view he called ‘metaphysical realism’, what I have called MR. Initially this was through an argument, or several related arguments, that MR assumes but cannot validate, consistent with its own principles, a determinate and substantial reference relation. Though he came to doubt the force of these  In Putnam’s later years at any rate. His earlier internal realist position was seen by him as precisely Kantian. There is no doubt a lot one could write by way of the hermeneutics of Putnam’s philosophy as it unfolded over the years, but that is not my concern here. 15

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‘model-theoretic’ arguments, and much else of detail changed in Putnam’s philosophy, he remained committed to a rejection of MR throughout his life. He was particularly concerned to reject a naturalistic form of MR, i.e. something at least close to what earlier in this book has been called metaphysical naturalism or object naturalism. His motivations for this are also very consonant with those of ARTL, namely a wish to avoid a threat to the rationality of our everyday normative and experience-­ based practices, though in a way that also allows the preservation of a reasonable naturalism and realism. In all these respects, his view is close to ARTL. As noted, however, the reasons for his rejection of MR and how he thinks this rejection should be understood have altered over the years. While initially this rested on a combination of the model-theoretic arguments and the brain in the vat argument (see Chap. 5), he came to think at least the former were undermined by an implausibly internalist view of perception they presupposed. Further, as we also have mentioned, he moved from an explicitly anti-realist kind of view to what was meant to be a full realism, albeit a ‘realism with a human face’ (Putnam 1987), one that also incorporated an externalist or disjunctivist view of perception (Putnam 1994, cf. also Sect. 3.2). His denial of MR remained constant, but he came to see the demonstration of its falsity as lying in the fact (or alleged fact) that there are in certain cases more than one way of describing reality; more than one way of saying what exists, how many things there are and so on. There is not just one description of reality, or a ‘God’s eye point of view’, as he also expressed MR’s commitment to reality having its own intrinsic structure. Perhaps his most famous example of this comes from so-called ‘mereology’ and concerns a discussion between a ‘Polish logician’ and a ‘Carnapian’ about what exists in a certain state of affairs (call it S) consisting (as most people would think of it) of three simple objects a, b and c, standardly represented as blobs on a piece of paper (see e.g. Putnam 1987, 96–97). If, with the Carnapian, one denies the validity of basic mereological principles dictating that parts can freely compose new whole objects, one will say that in S there are or exist just the 3 objects – the three blobs – most people would take there to be, a, b and c. If one, with the Polish logician, endorses these principles, then 7 objects exist in S: a, b, c, a + b, a + c, b + c, a + b + c. According to Putnam, both of these are correct descriptions of S.  They are nevertheless incompatible descriptions, because they do not simply involve an equivocation over the meaning of ‘exist’ or ‘object’. Words have (relatively) stable meanings, but they can also be used to say different things in particular contexts. A leaf painted green might be truly said to be green in one context, not in another, without the word ‘green’ shifting meaning (an example due to Travis 1994). Thus the Carnapian and the Polish logician are not just talking past each other; they say in a sense conflicting things. But at the same time there is no fact of the matter as to which is correct. It is just a matter of convention whether we say the one thing or the other. Reality supports both but uniquely dictates neither. Putnam employs many other examples of such ‘conceptual relativity’, as he calls it. One concerns Euclidian geometry (Putnam 1987, 97): are the points in the plane constituents of the plane, or mere limits of different regions? Both modes of description can be utilized even though they implicitly contradict each other. An example

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from earlier work on quantum mechanics concerns the description of the electron as a particle, with indeterminate position, or as a wave (Putnam 1967). In metaphysics, issues about identity, persistence and constitution, often related to the mereological example above, also evince the phenomena (see e.g. Putnam 2004, 47 ff.). In all of these areas, there seems nothing ‘real’ at stake between the different descriptions – they have no differing observable or other practical consequences  – and we can devise systematic ways of translating between them. But nor are they merely notational variants of one underlying description; they say different things, posit different and ‘incompatible’ objects. Putnam is not just a conceptual relativist, in this sense; he says he is also a ‘conceptual pluralist’ (Putnam 2004, 48 ff.) in that he thinks there is not just one fundamentally correct vocabulary for describing the furniture of the universe as something like metaphysical or, in Price’s terms, object naturalism holds. Such a pluralism is of course also something that we have seen ARTL is (at least typically) committed to and at least, in light of Price’s arguments, should be committed to in view of the argument against object naturalism from rejecting Representationalism. For Putnam, conceptual pluralism is a kind of corollary or implication of conceptual relativity, though conceptual pluralism itself can be maintained without commitment to the latter. I stress this here because, as I understand things, ARTL is committed to conceptual pluralism (or rationally should be) but, for reasons to follow, holds we should and can reject conceptual relativity. For Putnam what conceptual relativity (CR henceforth) shows most fundamentally is that while there is a factual and a conventional element in every truth claim we make (or at least most of them),16 it is folly to construct a philosophy that seeks to extricate the two, with language or thought on one side and reality on the other. This is what MR does and that is why, fundamentally, it is incoherent. CR is a manifestation of this necessarily interwoven fabric coming apart at the fringes, so to speak; but the phenomenon also thereby shows that the fabric is necessarily interwoven. As Putnam famously put it: ‘The mind [i.e. convention] and the world jointly make up the mind and the world’ (Putnam 1981, xi). There is a world and there are our conventions but it is necessarily only together that they constitute the world and our conventions. In another place he puts this as follows: ‘One might say not that we make the world, but that we help to define the world’ (Putnam 1992, 368). Following from this, it is important for Putnam that CR should not be seen as a doctrine committed to some kind of ‘cookie cutter’ model of how thought relates to reality. On this understanding, the Polish logician and the Carnapian ‘carve’ different objects out of one underlying ontological fabric, so to speak. Such a model can appear natural on first exposure to the kinds of examples Putnam uses, and is indeed how the doctrine has been interpreted by many, amongst others Paul Boghossian (2006, ch. 3). We saw also in the previous section how Miller takes this kind of picture to be what Hirsch is committed to, and that the realism it involves is only of  This proviso because he also acknowledges rare kinds of analytic truths that are simply conventionally stipulated (Putnam 1975). Nothing of what I have to say here or, as far as I can see, what Putnam says about CR, depends on this view. 16

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a Kantian kind, in which our ontological commitments are, though in some way validated by, nevertheless are not capable of carving the joints of, real reality. But Putnam thinks this understanding of the example is wrong-headed: it actually undermines CR as he understands the idea (Putnam 1987, 33). If we admit an underlying stuff that we carve up, we can always meaningfully ask whether the underlying fabric has the parts discerned by the various different discourses or not. Either way, at most one discourse ends up being vindicated as the correct description. So if we take the idea seriously, we must also renounce this Kantian way of understanding it. As with the discussion of Putnam’s views in the previous chapter, I do not here intend to go into minute hermeneutic detail about Putnam’s thesis of CR and how its various parts fit together. There is obviously a lot more that might be discussed and clarified (see e.g. Case 1997, Wrisley 2008, and McKenna 2017 for helpful commentary), but I hope what I have offered does present the outlines of a set of ideas that are at least prima facie clear and cogent enough to support critical discussion. I should first record an important dialectical caveat, namely that the doctrine of CR and the implications it would have if correct are things that a position like ARTL should at least take seriously (perhaps then having to modify some of its central ideas). I say this because, although Putnam remained a staunch opponent of what he called ‘metaphysical realism’ to his death, he rejected the model-theoretic arguments and their significance for the realism debate on the grounds that they presupposed a faulty, internalist view of perception (Putnam 1994). Thus in his later work rejecting metaphysical realism often  became simply coeval with embracing CR. This might prompt the suspicion that his CR is in fact much closer to the MR that ARTL rejects, and that seeing CR as combinable with ARTL, or a version of it, makes little sense. Now it seems to me that the arguments Putnam gives for renouncing the model theoretic arguments are not wholly convincing. They are based on his externalist or disjunctivist view of perception, but in his survey of Putnam’s tussles with the realism debate, Button argues, convincingly to my mind, that model theoretic arguments can be run against such views also (2013, ch. 10). There is also a question of whether such disjunctivist or externalist views should be accepted: I think that, even if there is a deal that is right about them, this element can be carried over into a context in which the traditional conception of perception as providing access to ‘mind-independent reality’ has been given up (see Sect. 3.2). But if one accepts either of these things, and hence upholds the model theoretic reductio of MR (pace Putnam), it seems one could still be impressed by the thoughts behind CR. In other words, there seems no strong reason to think that CR cannot be combined with a view like ARTL – that is, it seems open that Putnam’s CR-view might be the best form a ‘post’ metaphysically realist philosophy (in ARTL’s sense) should take, and hence that ARTL should modify itself in order to incorporate CR within its ambit. However, I will now argue, firstly, that CR is plausibly not this best form, and secondly that we do not need to incorporate it anyway because the phenomena Putnam cites to illustrate it are not after all compelling.

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The first point is that, in spite of what Putnam says to the contrary, I cannot see how a kind of Kantian implication is ultimately to be avoided if one accepts CR. Think again of the metaphor of the interwoven fabric coming apart at the fringes. We can accept with Putnam that this reveals how fundamentally interwoven the fabric is. Nevertheless, the very fact that convention and reality can come apart at all leaves us, surely, with a puzzle, namely: how should we think about (to return to mereological example) the bit of reality, S, that the Carnapian legitimately describes as containing three objects and the Polish logician as containing 7? Putnam is right that we cannot think of it as determinately structured or as having parts itself without begging the question against his view. But nevertheless his view leaves us with a puzzle. Sometimes of course begging the question is unavoidable, to no avail for the view against which the question is begged. But in fact I think we can delve a bit deeper than that here. It seems germane to ask why Putnam assumes that an underlying reality should be one about which it makes sense to ask how many parts it has? The Ding an sich was indeed originally conceived, by Kant, as something simply unknowable. But might we not instead rather see it as something inconceivable, something it makes no sense even to apply our concepts to but which nevertheless, somehow or other, can vindicate various different conceptual statements and practices (though not all)? In a paper discussing a Kantian take on contemporary pragmatism, Sami Pihlstöm and Arto Siitonen (2005) present an interpretation of twentieth century thinking about science from Reichenbach to contemporary thinkers like Michael Friedman that brings out how there has been transition from ‘the Kantian concern with the limits of knowledge (and thus with the unknowability of the Ding an sich) into a concern with the limits of language, of the sayable […bringing us] through Kuhnian philosophy of science, to a largely Wittgensteinean territory’ (p. 93). Wittgenstein famously proclaimed in the Tractatus that the limits of language are the limits of the world, at the same time as he gestured towards that of which ‘one cannot speak’ as a kind of rational ground for meaningful language. This can seem something close to an inconceivable Ding an sich. Thomas Kuhn also seems to understand his commitment to what has been called a ‘dynamic Kantianism’ (Hoyningen-Huene 1993) in something like this way. For Kuhn, scientific paradigms do not advance towards one true description of absolute reality; however, they do all in some sense seek to give an understanding of and respond to such a reality, and become progressively better at so doing. At the same time, there would seem no way of specifying what this constancy amounts to in non-paradigm-bound terms: all language springs out of human practice and is internal to paradigms, and hence the Ding an sich remains non-articulated, indeed, unarticulable as such  – even though it can, apparently, support articulable practices. I admit this is heady stuff, but my point here is that the idea seems in principle available. As far as I can see there is no greater incoherence in conceiving of Ding an sich in such semantic terms – as that of which we cannot speak but nevertheless validates what we can say – than in conceiving it in epistemological terms, as something simply unknowable. And even if there were a greater such coherence, it is not clear that that difference would render the thought unavailable in the way Putnam would want it to be such that it couldn’t be combined with CR.

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So the dialectical situation is this. The idea of CR as Putnam develops it, even if we accept it on his terms, nevertheless leaves us with a language-reality split that is puzzling. The original Kantian notion involving a merely unknowable reality admittedly seems to make Putnam’s position simply a non-starter, and hence, perhaps, to illegitimately beg the question against it. But ideas in twentieth century philosophy open for a kind of Kantianism that might bring some greater consistency to the view in question. This is what I am first and foremost thinking of in talking of (quasi-) Kantian anti-representationalism about thought and language – a view that, as mentioned above, has been defended more fully by some, such as Pihlström (op. cit.). Now I would not wish to suggest that this view is itself tantamount to a non-starter. Nevertheless, from the perspective of my ARTL, which seeks to uphold a common sense realism and naturalism, it is unpalatable. It is mysterious and it is philosophically paradoxical. Nevertheless, if we were forced to accept the kinds of examples Putnam gives, one might well also be forced to admit something like it. The good news for ARTL is that I think Putnam’s examples in fact are not that convincing. This is a large topic that again I cannot do full justice to here (for a fuller critical discussion of Putnam’s view, see Wrisley op. cit.). Putnam sees CR almost everywhere, and many of the examples would warrant a chapter length discussion of their own. What I want to concentrate here on are two overarching problems for Putnam’s line. The first concerns a general scepticism to the possibility of metaphysics that his CR doctrine seems to involve. The second  – almost the reverse – concerns the idea that at least certain of his examples exploit an abstract, generic conception of ‘object’ that a follower of ARTL simply should not countenance. The thought behind the first problem is that Putnam dismisses too readily the possibility that the alternative descriptions might amount to genuinely different facts, or putative facts: just because they might have no differing empirical consequences does not imply, without further ado, that there is no fact of the matter as to which is correct, at least without presupposing a form of verificationism that Putnam would presumably disavow (and, along with ARTL, certainly should). One form this worry finds is Peter van Inwagen’s claim that mereology is in fact just a false theory (Van Inwagen 2001): simple objects do not compose to yield complex ones except in very special circumstances – for Van Inwagen, only when the complex object in question is a living thing. If that is the case, then the Polish logician is simply wrong to claim there are 7 objects and the Carnapian is right. Putnam finds this claim preposterous: surely there is no real disagreement between the two. I am not without sympathy with this reaction, but the general point stands: two descriptions having the same empirical consequences does not automatically mean they do not delineate two different states of affairs. (This issue is also related to that of the next chapter. There we shall see that a prominent thinker in the vicinity of ARTL, Amie Thomasson, defends a line on which contentious metaphysical claims should be understood, not as making descriptive or factual claims, but implicitly seeking to change the way we use certain terms with practical aims in mind. This is not because the claims are descriptively meaningless but because they are radically empirically underdetermined and

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hence undecidable. This line is different from Putnam’s but my response to it will be related in that I suggest that Thomasson undersells the possibility of genuine metaphysics within ARTL.) Another issue that is also relevant here is that of whether a conception of reality as consisting of simple objects at some fundamental level and as composing to form wholes should be so much as taken seriously as a starting point for metaphysical thinking. This is something that has recently come to the fore in the work of the so-­ called ‘naturalised metaphysicians’, most notably James Ladyman and Don Ross (cf. Ladyman & Ross et al. 2007). According to them, this conception corresponds to a scientifically outmoded conception of physical reality as consisting of a collection of discrete atoms that group together or not under certain conditions. But fundamental physics does not today operate with such a ‘thing’ ontology. This is not to say that there are no ‘things’, like cells or trees or human beings, existing as stable patterns at certain levels of spatio-temporal scale and that are relevant to certain kinds of interests we have. But much traditional metaphysical work in analytic philosophy – concerning issues like constitution and identity, which Putnam also sees as a source of CR – has at the very least to be radically re-conceived if it is not to be seen as operating with toy models and imaginary problems. Another way of understanding what is going on here is that given something like conceptual pluralism (which in view of what was just said it seems clear Ladyman & Ross can be seen as subscribing to) many of the alleged examples of CR simply lapse. I should stress that this is not meant to suggest that there can be no meaningful debates of the kind traditional metaphysicians have pursued, although that does clearly remain a possible outcome. What it does suggest is that metaphysical debates in analytic philosophy cannot be rolled out as providing parade examples of CR. These points (if correct) do not necessarily undermine all the examples of CR Putnam has used. A distinct class concerns examples from mathematics, geometry and physics where we seem to face a kind of equivalence-combined-with-alterity in description that is difficult to see as something that could amount to a genuine metaphysical debate or as harbouring a false presupposition. But then again, difficult is not the same as impossible. The second point I want to make – again not original to me, and probably related to the first – concerns the fact that many of Putnam’s examples are framed in terms of a generic notion of ‘object’. How many objects are there in S?, he asks. However it is arguable that ‘object’ (and ‘thing’, ‘entity’, etc.) functions in our language not as a genuine sortal, but merely as part of the formal vocabulary we use to construct logical models of language (cf. Thomasson 2009, 2015, 109 ff.). How many objects are there in the room I am currently sitting in? (This is another example Putnam has used to illustrate and motivate CR, cf. his 1988, 111 ff.) Well, there are two armchairs, two sofas, one table, three lamps, a glass on the table, a TV, and so on and so forth…I could presumably complete the list (imagine I am going to rent out my house fully furnished). But what about the legs of the chairs – should they count as objects too? What about the lamp shade? And what about the motes of dust under the radiator, are they to be included in the count (even if I didn’t want to tell anyone about them!)? If so, how many such lumps are there? If not, how should we think of

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the dust there (there will inevitably be some)? These can without doubt seem like perplexing questions. But my contention, in line with Thomasson, would be that as long as we start out within the language games that we actually play and the specific sortals we actually use, there are or at least need in fact be no deep puzzles here. Some ‘things’ are presumably just non-countable collections, such as the soil in my plantpots. How we think of the dust under the radiator may involve individuating it as different lumps to an extent, to an extent not. Why should that matter as long as we know what we are talking about in any particular case? A chair is clearly made from different, separable components, but for now they are together in one thing. What we get to know from science about the various different ‘things’ we talk about may also impact on what we want say about all this. Once we have made our inspection and taken account of what we feel is relevant in terms of the sortals and categories we possess, will we really owe Putnam an answer to his question? It isn’t at all obvious to me that we will. And if so, it is not obvious that Putnam’s question is a good one. To be fair to Putnam, he does later on (2004, 98) suggest that this example may only illustrate the phenomenon of conceptual pluralism, not CR. I would applaud that move insofar as I accept the former, but as a general point my animadversions stand, for it is precisely that kind of example and that way of thinking that Putnam has used to motivate CR. My contrary thought is that, starting in and remaining as true as one can to ordinary language, as well as science where relevant, seems a much more reasonable strategy than asking abstract questions about how many ‘objects’ there are in a given situation. If one is still implicitly thinking in terms of the kind of metaphysical realism by which one has to make sense of there being a mind-independent reality which our language ideally captures, then perhaps these kinds of question will appear unavoidable. If our language operates Representationalistically, we will need in principle a clear conception of the various bits of reality that our language latches on to, hence, reasonably, a delineation of the number and kinds of ‘objects’ out there. But, as I have been telling the story at least, MR should be behind us at this stage in the dialect. And if it is only its ghost that is haunting us we should ignore it. I think indeed that Putnam, in raising the worries he does leading to CR, is precisely haunted by this ghost. But since MR should be already firmly removed from our thinking in approaching and assessing the impact of the kinds of examples Putnam discusses, thinking nevertheless in terms of the kinds of ‘objects’ it countenances in relation to the issue of how many objects there are in a given situation should appear highly non-obligatory. There might seem to be a certain tension between this point and the first one. I said above that Putnam underestimates the possibility that alternative descriptions of situations like S in the mereological case correspond to genuinely different metaphysical states of affairs; but here I seem to be saying that the kind of plurality of descriptions Putnam thinks can apply is only an artefact of using a concept like ‘object’ which is only a dummy sortal. Since either point would seem in principle to be sufficient to defeat CR this needn’t be that important dialectically for me, but I don’t think they are necessarily in tension anyway. I do not, in particular, maintain that metaphysical puzzles never arise from reflection on ordinary language and

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science; indeed, I think they probably do (e.g. in thinking about the identity of something like a person over time, or about how to describe quantum mechanical systems). I don’t even think it is totally ruled that some version of mereology and the puzzles it raises might be motivated by reflection on ordinary language and science. The point is just that, it seems to me at any rate, Putnam both unjustifiably assumes the relevant metaphysical debates cannot be substantial, and that they nevertheless are inevitably joined because of the availability of alternative descriptions of the same situation. I would reject both of these commitments. At lot more could still be said here. Nevertheless, I do believe that the above can help dampen the force of the examples Putnam uses in a way that renders CR a far from compelling phenomenon for the anti-representationalist about thought and language to account for. Hence also any threat of a slide into a form of Kantianism is obviated. In sum, ARTL can uphold common sense realism, even though, as I have been at pains to argue in this chapter, it is important to understand exactly what this realism is and how it dialectically relates to MR.

Chapter 7

Metaphysics for Anti-Representationalists?

Abstract  In Chap. 2 I upheld Price’s argument that ARTL has negative repercussions for the metaphysical programme that seeks to understand how various different common sense categories can be placed in the natural world. But is there room for other forms of metaphysics within the parameters of ARTL? This chapter focuses on Amie Thomasson’s view that there is no defensible substantively epistemic metaphysical project once one embraces ARTL, especially the aspect of her view that seemingly intractable and inexorably contentious metaphysical disputes  – about, say, what a person is, or a work of art – involve metalinguistic negotiation about the use of certain concepts with pragmatic aims in mind. Thomasson’s picture can seem attractive for a supporter of ARTL insofar as it paints a picture of philosophers, in particular metaphysicians, as engaged in meaningful and important work in spite of not being in the business of ‘mapping out the fundamental structure of reality’. My aim in this chapter is however to question Thomasson’s picture of what metaphysics amounts to for ARTL, and to offer my own account of this. I will be arguing that her understanding of metaphysics as metalinguistic negotiation is problematic both because it fails to demarcate appropriately between those debates that plausibly are and those that aren’t contentious, and, more seriously, because it does not afford the input philosophers might provide to these debates any special significance beyond that which politicians, lawyers or other professional (or for that matter, non-professional) people or groups might provide. Moreover, I will suggest that her view that there are clearly demarcated analytic claims on the one hand, and clearly demarcated empirical claims on the other, which is central to her case, is problematic both in itself, and in running counter to the spirit of ARTL. In place of Thomasson’s view, and more in line with ARTL, I will suggest a view of metaphysics as something perpetually ongoing – though probably also never-ending – through our very use and reflection on language and concepts in relation to the goal of expressing our beliefs, i.e. what we hold to be true. Finally, and more speculatively, I draw on ideas defended earlier in the book to provide a kind of subject naturalistic account of a more principled divide between metaphysics and science.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Knowles, Representation, Experience, and Metaphysics, Synthese Library 473, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26924-0_7

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7.1 Introduction We have seen, in Chap. 2, that anti-representationalism about thought and language (ARTL) does plausibly have significant repercussions for a certain metaphysical programme, or programmes, within contemporary analytic philosophy: ones that seek to understand how various different common sense categories can be placed in the natural world (with ‘natural’ understood in some invidious sense). Though this programme  – object naturalism  – is not exactly incoherent given we reject Representationalism, it is plausibly deeply irrational in a certain way. Insofar, Price’s argument is vindicated. Is there room for other forms of metaphysics within the parameters of ARTL? According to Price, subject naturalism survives the rejection of object naturalism. Subject naturalism aims to understand and explain the roles different discourses play in the lives of creatures like us, understood in a broadly naturalistic way. Exactly what is involved in saying this last thing is a somewhat vexed matter. Price’s official line is close that of what I have elsewhere called a ‘scientific naturalist’, i.e. someone who sees a commitment to a broad naturalism – to the idea there are no supernatural entities, that humans are fully part of evolved, material nature, that philosophy should not contradict science, and so on – as entailing that all explanation will be of natural scientific character, again in a sense that might be understood more or less broadly (cf. Knowles 2006, 2010; Price 2010b). I have in this book largely aimed to follow him in this, at least when it comes to giving a ‘lower level’ account of the differences between our different linguistic practices (cf. Chaps. 2– 4). Whether such a naturalism can apply, or even what it would mean for it to apply, to explaining our cognitive practices as such, that is, at the i-level, is something I have had less to say about. It is also important that ARTL, at least in Price’s or my own form, does not see scientific knowledge as exhausting genuine truth or knowledge, thus protecting categories of common sense or the ‘manifest image’ from the threat science can seem to pose to them. These issues are intricate and the subject of much contemporary discussion (see e.g. the essays in De Caro and Macarthur 2004, 2010, 2022). However, just on the basis of what ARTL in my favoured form is committed to, there would still seem to be space for something like metaphysical enquiry: for space to ask (at least some of the) kinds of questions that traditionally have been classed as ‘metaphysical’. Even if we are scientific naturalists and don’t acknowledge a class of sui generis philosophical questions, it by no means follows that all questions that science might feel the need to answer can be answered by science, at least as we have it today. On Quine’s naturalistic-holistic picture of belief (Quine 1953; Quine and Ullian 1970), the boundaries between science and philosophy are blurred in such a way that the latter are yoked to the former; but in doing so the picture precisely does not abrogate them. We can still find ourselves asking or wanting to ask questions that, though thrown up by science, are not themselves answered by it – such as how we might understand space and time in the light of Einstein’s relativity theory, or exactly what kind of ‘reality’ quantum mechanics describes. Naturalists of the kind Price  and

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myself are could see a similar pattern in relation to common sense categories. We talk in our everyday life of persons, free will, values, works of art and so on, but questions can also arise about these things – about what they are and how we should understand them, to an extent independently of how they might fit into the world described by science. It is not as if ARTL thinks we should generally stop discussing problems or puzzles that arise within our various different discourses, so why not also those that are taken up under the rubric of ‘metaphysics’ by philosophers? As far I am aware Price has not explicitly addressed this question. He does reject placement metaphysics, but insofar as this would not seem to exhaust what is undertaken in the name of ‘metaphysics’, there is plausibly scope for a more liberal attitude.1 There are however also thinkers who want to forge a stronger connection between ARTL, or at least something close to it, and a more thoroughgoing ‘anti-­ metaphysicalism’ (though we will have to be careful in delineating what exactly this label implies). A prominent figure in the recent debate who fits this bill is Amie Thomasson. On the one hand, she espouses semantic minimalism (Thomasson 2014), endorses Price’s use/mention interpretation of Carnap’s internal/external questions distinction (cf. Thomasson 2015, 36 ff.), sees this view this as fully compatible with a common sense realism (ibid., 60 ff.), and defends what she calls ‘global pragmatism’ (which is clearly meant to be at least very close to Price’s global expressivism) against a version of Kraut’s ‘no exit problem’ for expressivism (Thomasson 2019). On the other hand, she defends an explicitly and thoroughgoingly ‘deflationary’ programme in ontology and metaphysics. Her particular version of this she dubs ‘the easy approach’ to ontology (Thomasson 2015), according to which ontological questions about whether things like numbers, properties or middle-­sized dry goods exist can be answered by reference to the rules of language, or fragments thereof, that we use to express our thoughts about such things, along with trivially valid logically inferences, plus empirical input where relevant. She has further sought to undermine various ‘heavyweight’ approaches to issues about modality, such as Lewis’ realism about possible worlds, by thinking of modal claims in terms of non-descriptive, inference-licensing rules (see Thomasson 2020). She does not see this approach as exactly anti-metaphysical in the sense that there is no interesting work for the professional ‘metaphysician’ to do. Analysis of the rules underlying our ontologically practices may be far from trivial (hence the scare quotes around ‘easy’). But she does think that insofar as metaphysical or ontological questions can receive definitive answers in principle at least, the method will involve only conceptual analysis, plus empirical investigation where necessary; there are no distinctively metaphysical inferences to draw, at least probative ones. In a recent further twist, however, Thomasson has now offered what can be seen as something of an olive branch to ‘serious’ metaphysicians, i.e. those who think there is work that can and should be done in metaphysics beyond conceptual analysis. This is by understanding what seem by all accounts to be more intractable  Indeed, much of the substantive philosophy Price engages in is hardly scientific nor purely conceptual, so presumably should be understood as a form of ‘naturalised metaphysics’. See also Sect. 7.4 below. 1

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and inexorably contentious metaphysical disputes – about, say, what a person is, or a work of art – as involving metalinguistic negotiation about the use of certain concepts, with pragmatic aims in mind (Plunkett and Sundell 2013; Thomasson 2017a, b). The question of whether, to be a person, one has to be self-conscious, does not seem to be the kind of thing we can determine through analyzing the concept of a person or find out through empirical science. It seems like a quintessentially ‘metaphysical’ question. On Thomasson’s new line, there is still no substantive, epistemically distinctive metaphysical project to undertake in answering this question, but the question is nevertheless admitted to be important insofar as it impacts on real world issues such as legislation about abortion. Understanding contentious metaphysical debates as metalinguistic negotiations with practical aims in mind is meant to do justice to this aspect of metaphysical practice. In this way her view is also meant to subscribe to the increasingly popular view of (certain branches of) philosophy as involving conceptual engineering (see Burgess et al. 2019; Cappelen 2018). Thomasson’s picture might also seem attractive for a supporter of ARTL insofar as it paints a picture of philosophers, in particular metaphysicians, as engaged in meaningful and important work – work that is ‘world-directed’, as she puts it – in spite of not being in the business of ‘mapping out the fundamental structure of reality’. My aim in this chapter is however to question Thomasson’s picture of what metaphysics amounts to for ARTL, and to offer my own account of the possibilities for metaphysics within ARTL. I will be arguing that her understanding of metaphysics as metalinguistic negotiation is problematic on two counts: first, because it fails to demarcate appropriately between those debates that plausibly are and those that aren’t contentious; and second, and more seriously, because it does not afford the input philosophers might provide to these debates any special significance beyond that which (at least suitably enlightened and reflective) politicians, lawyers or other professional (or for that matter, non-professional) people or groups might provide. Moreover, I will suggest that her view that there are clearly demarcated analytic claims on the one hand, and clearly demarcated empirical claims on the other, which is central to both her descriptive and normative conceptualism, is problematic, both in itself, and in that it runs counter to what I think is the spirit of ARTL. I won’t be arguing that Thomasson’s overall view is incoherent, or indeed even inconsistent with ARTL, but I will be putting these points forward as reasons to be dissatisfied with it and for the desirability of something else, at least if one is both committed to ARTL and concerned to understand the significance of what philosophers who see themselves as doing ‘metaphysics’ might be up to. In place of Thomasson’s dichotomy between descriptive-but-easy and normative-­ but-­difficult conceptual projects as models for metaphysics, I will suggest an integrated view of metaphysics as something perpetually ongoing through our very use and reflection on language and concepts in relation to the goal of expressing our beliefs. The sharp contrast that Thomasson operates with between describing and prescribing activity is abandoned on this picture. What emerges, however, is a view of metaphysics that can probably only be something desultory, insofar as it concerns the conditions for the use of our concepts in the most general sense, and is therefore not  – as certain other discourses perhaps are  – related to identifiable underlying

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functions in our overall cognitive functioning. Here I – somewhat speculatively – draw again on the idea of subject naturalism from Price, but in the form of this I have defended earlier in this book. My conclusion is that, insofar as ARTL abjures the project of ‘mapping reality’, there is no reason to think metaphysics will ever converge on some final set of truths. At the same time, and by the same token, metaphysics doesn’t ask meaningless or unanswerable questions, and the human condition is most likely such that we will never be able to stop asking these kinds of thing. The chapter is divided into four further sections. Section 7.2 outlines Thomasson’s overall view in a little more detail; Sect. 7.3 presents my critique of it; Sects. 7.4 and 7.5 propound and defend my own positive proposal for metaphysics for ARTL, along with its implications and limitations.

7.2 Thomasson on Metaphysics as Descriptively and Normatively Conceptual Thomasson’s broad view of metaphysics is one that is simultaneously sceptical to a traditional conception of the subject – as something aimed at uncovering the constituents and nature of fundamental reality  – and positive towards what one can might call a broadly conceptualist understanding of metaphysics.2 The problems with traditional metaphysics are for her manifold (see e.g. Thomasson 2017a, 101). To start with, it has failed despite centuries of enquiry to reach any stable conclusions (sc. the mind-body problem, the free will debate etc., etc.). Secondly, it has unclear if not outright dubious epistemological credentials: it is not an empirical subject like science, but relies on intuitions and thought experiments that can seem, on reflection, to track only our peculiarly human ways of thinking about reality, not how that reality itself is. Thirdly, it is, at least potentially, in conflict with science, certain branches of which also aim to uncover the nature of fundamental reality, but surely in a way that has much more epistemic warrant in so doing than anything a philosopher might offer.3 The conclusion is that we should simply drop the project of traditional metaphysics. Thomasson’s alternative view of metaphysics and ontology is inspired by Carnap (1950), and resembles that of thinkers such as Putnam (e.g. 1987) and Hirsch (2011) who interpret Carnap’s view as the idea that ontological commitment is relative to a choice of linguistic framework or conceptual scheme. However, unlike Putnam and Hirsch, Thomasson thinks that there are unequivocal answers to at least many  Though she has not changed her mind on the central questions, her overall view has also evolved and developed in significant ways over the years. For a sense of this, cf. and cp. Thomasson (2007, 2015, 2017a, b, 2018, 2020). 3  Another theme in her (Thomasson 2007) was the threat traditional metaphysics seems to pose to the existence of everyday categories like ‘chair’, ‘table’, ‘human being’ etc., which can seem a prima facie undesirable consequence. 2

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ontological questions, given the rules of our actual language (Thomasson 2015, ch. 1; see also Sect. 6.3). Thus (to repeat an example from earlier), on establishing empirically that an apple is green, we can, in virtue of rules of language, express that as the claim that the apple instantiates the property of greenness – from which it trivially follows that properties exist. This does not amount to linguistic idealism or constructivism, whereby language creates the world. Rather our language makes available to us thoughts and modes of reasoning that allow us to draw conclusions that are objectively true. To think otherwise would be to confuse use with mention. However, saying that doesn’t preclude also asking questions about the pragmatic function of different kinds of talk, or discourses, in the lives of organisms like us. In adopting this understanding of Carnap’s distinction between internal and external questions Thomasson acknowledges a debt to Price (cf. Thomasson 2015, 36 ff.). An important qualification of Thomasson’s position is that ontology and/or metaphysics is not necessarily easy in the sense of simple or facile; it may require subtle philosophical analysis to reveal exactly what the ontological commitments of our language are. Nevertheless, in her most recent work Thomasson has also conceded that some metaphysical issues seem not just non-trivial but also both irredeemably contentious and, at least in some cases, practically important. She has therefore seen a need to consider how this aspect of the subject might be conceived, and her answer is that a conceptualist can see (some) metaphysical debates as (veiled) metalinguistic negotiations (Plunkett and Sundell 2013; Thomasson 2017b): we use the terms in question to make first-order statements about the world that can be true or false, but our underlying aim is to legislate or at least attempt to legislate for a certain usage of the terms (or, as the case might be, to introduce new terms, or get rid of old ones). For example, in debating the nature of persons and personal identity one can see what someone is up to in claiming, say, that (a certain kind of) self-consciousness is necessary for personhood as at a deeper level making a suggestion about how the word or concept ‘person’ should be used. Moreover, rather than such claims answering to the underlying or ‘metaphysical’ nature of persons, they can be assessed in relation to their practical implications, such as deciding whether abortion beyond a certain point should be permitted. Metalinguistic negotiations are plausibly common outside of metaphysics: when we ask whether chess is a sport, or alcoholism a disease we are plausibly not seeking more factual knowledge, but rather to make a decision based on the practical implications of certain word usages. Thomasson’s idea is that we can use this phenomenon as a model for understanding many metaphysical debates; indeed, the suggestion that metaphysical debates are metalinguistic negotiations can be seen, in a boot-­strapping manner, as a move in a metalinguistic negotiation about the use of the term ‘metaphysics’ itself (Thomasson 2017a, 108–9). In this way Thomasson thinks we can retain the sense that metaphysical debates are inescapably contentious and world-­ directed, but without seeing them as either pointless or incapable of resolution (even if this resolution is only ever pro tem). Thomasson provides more detail and defence of her various conceptions of metaphysics in her writings, many of which are worthy of further study. For my purposes here however the above should suffice to appreciate the problems I have with her view.

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7.3 Problems with Thomasson’s View I will consider first an objection to Thomasson’s view that she herself takes up and responds to. I agree with her that this is not a problem for her in and of itself, but her response to it will provide a useful starting point for understanding what I think is problematic in her view. The objection is as follows:4 [T]hose who adopt a pragmatic approach to conceptual choice can indeed argue that it is more pragmatically useful to talk in terms of mental illness than demonic possession, or in terms of oxygen than phlogiston, or in terms of Mercury than Vulcan. But the natural way of expressing why it is better is simply to say: that is because demonic possession, phlogiston, and Vulcan turned out not to exist. But if that is so, then […] engaging in this kind of world-constrained pragmatic approach to conceptual choice does require appeal to facts about what does and does not exist—and accordingly we do after all need to do metaphysics in order to engage in the deflationist’s pragmatic approach to conceptual choice. (Thomasson 2017b, 376)

The ‘pragmatic approach to conceptual choice’ is Thomasson’s term for her take on how we should understand conceptual ethics (i.e. which concepts to adopt) more generally, and does not concern traditional metaphysical debates in particular. But the point applies to the latter a fortiori. So what should we make of the objection, either generally or as applied to metaphysical concepts in particular? According to Thomasson we can firstly concede that some conceptual choices are in a sense ‘metaphysical’, that is, do depend on what we can claim exists. However, this is no objection to her view for when this occurs it is because there are clear empirical grounds for such claims – as in the examples in the quote, she claims (whether this is correct for precisely the cases she mentions is not the point at issue here). When it comes to the specifically metaphysical or ontological issues of philosophy, however, we cannot resort to this strategy, as these are quintessentially non-empirical. Here, then, Thomasson says, her view cannot accept the claim in the argument above applied to something like numbers – that we do or don’t talk about numbers ultimately because we have established that numbers do or don’t exist. However, this is no cost for her view because a) the existence or non-existence of metaphysical categories is typically given by the rules of our language b) we can reject moves which abrogate these rules on good pragmatic grounds. Thus, someone who denies that numbers exist is uttering an analytically false statement, whilst the grounds for rejecting their claim can be, not that we know as a matter of deep metaphysical fact that the opposite is the case, but that accepting number talk is so pragmatically fecund that we should retain it. At this point, I think we should feel a first sense of discomfort with Thomasson’s view. One of the motivating thoughts behind her normative conceptualist approach is that some metaphysical issues are highly contentious. I take it that this implies  She calls this, following (and citing) Kraut (2016), the ‘no exit’ problem; it can be seen as a family of such problems that can seem to infect global expressivist or pragmatist views (see also Chap. 2). 4

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that both sides of an issue have at least some degree of rational warrant for their view. But the nominalist in the case we have just described seems not to be in the running, fit only to play the role of a misguided soul whom we more enlightened ones can rebut as conceptually confused and pragmatically ignorant. Perhaps Thomasson could reply that it is not primarily this, or this kind, of metaphysical debate that she envisages being reconstructed in terms of metalinguistic negotiation. Whether numbers or properties or ordinary objects exist is a question for ‘easy’ ontology; what their defining characteristics are might, on the other hand, be a question of exactly what concept of these things is most appropriate for us to employ. Indeed, it can seem from much of what Thomasson writes as if ontology generally – the question of what kinds of thing exist – will be ‘easy’, while at least some of what remains of metaphysics will not be. If either of these things is accepted, however, it doesn’t quite chime with the dialectical situation as she presents it (in the paper from which the above quote is taken), which presents it as a live option that at least some ontological questions might also be normatively conceptual. More seriously, neither answer seems to fit well with the actual practices of metaphysicians, who, I take it, see many ontological questions, not least about numbers, as just as contentious, and often as just as important, as questions about the natures of things. This point is related to Tim Button’s objection to Thomasson’s easy approach to ontology (Button 2020). Button argues that the kinds of analytic inferences that Thomasson recommends as its basis are insufficient to ground any kind of reasonable ontological conclusions, since they fail to tell us what precludes inferences to objects no one would want to endorse. We say the rain put the kibosh on the cricket match, or that I did it for her sake. Are we committed then to there being kiboshes and sakes and many other absurd things, just because we have words that function in certain grammatical ways (i.e. as substantives)? Surely not. Thomasson would agree and has replies to these kinds of objections that Button also (critically) discusses. However, my point here is not that Thomasson is wrong in suggesting ontological issues can be decided in the way she suggests (though I am sympathetic to Button’s scepticism). My point here is rather that it at least maps poorly onto the actual practice of metaphysicians, whereas capturing this practice seems to be at least one of the desiderata behind her combined normative-and-descriptive conceptualist approach to metaphysics. Another way of putting this objection then would be to present Thomasson with a dilemma: Given certain metaphysical (including ontological) questions are meant to be ‘easy’, and certain others not, what does this distinction really amount to? It seems, as we have just seen, that it can’t be just a matter of actual metaphysicians regarding them as easily resolved or not; regarding them as non-easy is not a necessary condition on them being non-easy, at least. But then for any question which someone regards as non-easy, how can we be so sure it isn’t in fact ‘easy’, i.e. susceptible to descriptive conceptual resolution given a ‘proper’ understanding of it? This objection is not I think fatal to Thomasson’s view, for she could try to provide some kind of informative answer, even if only in a piecemeal manner for each kind of case. But it does I think beg the question of whether the distinction she draws is really as sharp as she seems to think it is.

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A second and I think more serious problem with Thomasson’s view lies at a more sociological or metaphilosophical level: at the level of what kind of role philosophers can be seen as having in public debate if their contribution, at least in normative matters, is conceived along the lines she suggests. Now it seems reasonable, as Thomasson says, that many philosophical debates do have, at least potentially, practical import. How can that be if we (philosophers) are not doing metaphysics in the traditional sense of uncovering fundamental reality? According to Thomasson, we can instead be making suggestions about how to use terms with various pragmatic considerations in mind. However, on the face of it, that seems to seriously downgrade the significance of our (i.e. philosophers’) role. Take again the example of someone who claims that a certain kind of self-consciousness, or at least the capacity for such, is a necessary condition for being a person. Someone now asks this philosopher: on what basis or grounds do you offer your statement? According to the traditional view the answer would be that this is based on some kind insight into what persons are – into a (putative) truth about persons. According to the pragmatic account Thomasson recommends it could not be this, but it could be a metalinguistic point, say that use of the term ‘person’ in this way will facilitate certain abortion practices, in accord with what is (or appears) socially desirable. My problem with this reply is not that the latter answer might lead us into a kind of circularity, whereby we ask about what is ‘socially desirable’ and why; for one could simply extend the sphere of reflection to other terms in a way that rendered the circle large enough to be virtuous. The problem is rather that this seems to be the kind of reply that many others who are party to the practical debate might offer, such as lawyers or politicians or even ordinary citizens – people with no particular concern for or expertise in philosophy. The question becomes, in a word, a political one (by which I will henceforth mean one which may concern also matters of the law and democratic discussion/participation of various kinds), with no essential resort to any question of what is true, beyond the empirical facts and what might be analytically true. This is not to say that what one might end up with might not finally be acknowledged as true, if the usage became sufficiently established in everyday language (as would indeed happen given Thomasson’s overall deflationary view of ontology and truth). But in the process towards any such equilibrium, appeals to insight or truth could play no role. The problem then is that the idea that this could really mandate philosophy as a kind of practice distinct from (reflective and enlightened) political debate seems unconvincing. One might reply to this that an expertise in philosophy can be understood as an expertise with or knowledge of the use of a certain range of concepts, namely those traditionally taught under the rubric of metaphysics in universities. We would then need precisely philosophers as part of a fully informed political debate insofar as getting clear on these concepts has societal impact. A first problem with this reply is that there is presumably no guarantee that it will be understanding precisely the traditional metaphysical concepts that will be seen as vital to solving the problems of the modern world. But even putting that to one side the reply is unsatisfactory. An understanding of actual usage of certain concepts is certainly an important aspect of philosophical competence, but that has more to do with the broader project of

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clarifying meanings and usages, clearing up ambiguity and as well as perhaps what is sometimes called ‘descriptive metaphysics’ (Strawson 1959).5 Philosophers no doubt also have a role in educating the general public about what has been thought about certain important concepts in the past. When it comes to innovative, normative conceptual work, however, the idea that philosophers offer some distinctive expertise about how certain concepts should be used cannot it seems to me be readily based on the model Thomasson recommends, for the reasons I have given: it is not one upon which we can see philosophy as having any special kind of epistemic authority, something it has traditionally been seen as having and which I take it Thomasson wants at least to some extent uphold. There are perhaps a handful of historical cases of purely pragmatically-based metalinguistic negotiation or conceptual engineering in metaphysics, such as Locke’s suggestions about the forensic nature of the concept of personhood. Thomasson also offers a few examples of contemporary metaphysical debates that can seem to function like metalinguistic negotiations (see e.g. Thomasson 2018, 144). However, not least in view of the fact that she sees her view of metaphysics as itself an attempt at renegotiating the meaning of ‘metaphysics’ (Thomasson 2017a, 216), it seems one cannot assume that this is something philosophers have always done or always seen themselves as doing. If either of these things were the case, I would perhaps have to be more concessive to Thomasson’s model (there would probably be other ramifications for how we should understand philosophical practice too). But it isn’t, and so my complaint stands: if we were to accept that philosophy’s innovative role is by and large to be understood in terms of just a kind of conceptual engineering with practical or pragmatic goals in mind, then it is hard to see how it could ultimately be distinct from politics. One might feel I am here construing the pragmatism of Thomasson’s position too narrowly. After all, isn’t something like Carnap’s project of explication, whereby we seek to make our meanings more precise, a form of conceptual engineering; and isn’t this something we can also see as exemplified in more recent philosophical work that suggests replacing concepts like truth with something more logically tractable? (See Burgess et al. op. cit, plus Thomasson 2009, 467, herself for endorsement of this Carnapian kind of project.) A different objection to my line might be that I am assuming that conceptual engineering can only be evaluated instrumentally in terms of its tendency to procure goods given as such antecedently, whereas the normativity in question can be understood much more broadly. This might be taken to mean that philosophers’ engagement in conceptual engineering can be understood in quite different ways from that of politicians (lawyers et al.). I have no problems with the first conception of conceptual engineering, but I take it that Thomasson’s ambitions for what philosophers have done and can do in the  I am not thereby endorsing exactly that project, as Thomasson conceives of it – as I have already noted, I have reservations about this that coincide to a large extent with those Button adumbrates. However, I also think that we can still see philosophers’ competence as consisting in part in an ability for linguistic analysis that impacts metaphysical issues (see Sect. 7.4). 5

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name of metaphysics are at least higher than simply tidying up our conceptual scheme (or schemes). (Of course, if the latter brings with it genuine metaphysical insight, then that would be a different matter, but here we are operating on Thomasson’s assumption here that there is no such epistemically distinctive metaphysical project.) As for the second line, I think it is unclear what is being suggested as it stands. If it means to suggest that philosophers are some kind of expert in normative matters generally – how we are to lead a good life, do the right thing etc. – then one is naturally led to ask what kind of insight that amounts to – which seems to take us back to the problem we started with, that of understanding what philosophers are up to in doing metaphysics (Thomasson is herself alive to this problem, see e.g. her 2018: 146, fn). If all it suggests is that there is more to considering the benefits of adopting certain concepts or usages than narrowly ‘utilitarian’ considerations then I can agree, but that does not seem to require a peculiarly philosophical competence – assuming, what I take to be the case, that professional philosophers, at least today, do not have some designated role of being a kind of ‘guardian of society’. That is not to say that they might not in fact have that role at some deeper level, in virtue of something specific they do – but the question is what that might be. Thomasson’s picture is problematic precisely because there appears to be no such thing (of an appropriate kind at least). Perhaps some will just shrug their shoulders at this. Maybe we (philosophers) are all politicians or ordinary debaters after all, or should be – or perhaps ordinary people are all philosophers – and it’s just that we professional philosophers are more reflective, enlightened and/or cleverer than everyone else. But to my ear that does not sound like a recipe for upholding a certain professional authority, expertise and identity, at least over time. We might reasonably hope for a more distinctive self-conception. I stress again that with these two objections I do not seek to show that Thomasson’s position is incoherent or completely unsustainable. Nevertheless it does seem to me to be a serious weakness of her view both that it does not provide a way of reconstructing many metaphysical debates as they actually seem to occur in current philosophy, and that it does not adequately reconstruct the kind of insight it seems philosophers would have to be understood as bringing to issues of public concern if they were to be considered an instance of distinctive expertise in such debates.6 Finally in this section I want to turn to Thomasson’s fundamental presuppositions about the relationship between language and reality. These are I think problematic in themselves but they are also, I believe, in tension with a central part of the spirit of ARTL. The presuppositions in question amount to what I think can reasonably be described as a certain kind of neo-positivism: among our truth-evaluable commitments we can delineate clearly those that are true in virtue of something like rules  Thomasson might point out that even if this were right, we still need philosophers to draw out the analytic truths underlying our talk. But, again, though this may gesture at one important role for philosophers, she clearly also sees a special role for philosophers in doing normative conceptual work, not just descriptive; and that is what I am questioning she can make sense of. 6

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of language, and hence are analytic, and those that that are true by virtue of our experience of the world: a posteriori, or empirical statements. Contra classical positivism, Thomasson apparently does not want to rule out as meaningless claims that do not fall on either side of this divide. Thus, as we have seen, the problems she has with serious metaphysics concern largely its epistemic not its semantic credentials.7 Nevertheless, the divide does have an important role to play for Thomasson in grounding both her project of easy ontology and the idea that certain claims about reality are unproblematically justified through experience. Starting with analytic truth, it would seem to fair to say that its status today remains highly contested. Thomasson herself has made attempts to defend the idea of analyticity against well-known attacks from Quine (1953) and Williamson (2007b) (cf. respectively her 2007: ch. 2, 2015: ch. 7). In a critical discussion of her work, Eklund (2016) argues that having seemingly appealed to what Boghossian (1996) calls metaphysical analyticity in earlier work (roughly ‘truth in virtue of meaning’), in later work she employs Boghossian’s epistemological notion of analyticity, whereby grasp of meaning justifies certain beliefs. But Eklund suggests that though the latter avoids what, at least according to Boghossian, is the mere incoherence of the former notion, it is unclear that it can do the work required of it in Thomasson’s framework to the extent the warrant it provides can only be defeasible (Eklund op. cit.: 173 ff., especially fn. 13). A related problem with analytic truth is that, even if we allow it, it does not seem up to doing the kind of ontological work that Thomasson’s wants from it  – this is essentially Button’s (op. cit.) objection, outlined above.8 In my view, the notion of analyticity is of questionable philosophical significance, however exactly one conceives of it. However, pace the drift of Eklund’s remarks, I don’t think it is clear that Thomasson, at least understood as an ARTList, needs or should want the epistemological notion, and should not rather embrace and seek to defend a metaphysical one. Though this is not the place to elaborate on this at any length, it seems to me the former is what ARTL must abjure – the idea of any kind of ‘hotline to the real’ – whilst the idea of ‘truth in virtue of meaning’ is not, at least obviously, one that it need have any principled objection to. Boghossian’s accusations of incoherence seem to presuppose precisely a Representationalist backdrop, of truth as something like correspondence to reality. This wouldn’t mean that Thomasson’s descriptive project would be in the clear, as I have indicated. However I do think that the deeper problem with Thomasson’s neo-positivism is not

 Having said that, her sympathies with Carnap and Price suggest strongly that she would also oppose ‘placement metaphysics’ and insofar she may also have semantic objections to serious metaphysics. But the kind of metaphysics I am considering here goes beyond placement issues. 8  Thomasson herself seems to accept this in saying that in addition to application conditions, one has to establish co-application conditions for a substantival phrase in order that it be seen as something we want to acknowledge as existing (Thomasson 2015: 264 ff.). Button himself is not hostile to this conclusion but thinks further considerations are also relevant. In any case the idea that analyticity itself can do much real (albeit trivial!) ontological work seems questionable. 7

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so much her embracement of analytic truth as her embracement of a distinctive category of empirical truth. Thomasson’s sympathy with ARTL seems to find clearest expression in her scepticism towards Price’s Representationalism, that is, the idea that meaning is constituted through substantive word-world semantic relations. However, as we saw in Chap. 1, it is very plausible to see Rorty’s (1979) plea for an overhaul of traditional epistemology, in the direction of a coherentist and deflationary conception of justification, as an integral part of ARTL too. Only thus will it see its way clear to its discourse pluralism and a rejection of the idea of a ‘reality’-discourse (or else embroilment in the contortions of phenomenalism). Of course, one might push back on this point, but I am not sure how one would do so without compromising on what makes ARTL a genuinely distinctive position. Insofar as I have not proven this point, my claim that Thomasson’s view is tarred with an assumption of a substantive category of empirical knowledge might seem unfair or ad hominen. However, I do think that it is reasonable to understand her conception of metaphysics and ontology as a prima facie attractive one for ARTL, regardless of whether that combination exactly captures her total view. For what it’s worth, it also strikes me, from reading her work more generally, that Thomasson would want to avoid commitment to the classical metaphysical issues that seem to arise in acknowledging distinctively empirical knowledge; she seems rather to assume that this category is just something that everyone will want to and have to acknowledge. In my view, however, and what is central to ARTL, is that without a ‘real’ to get in touch with, it is impossible to make sense of such empirical knowledge or warrant as principledly distinct from any other kind (that is, of a non-analytic nature – which I am taking it at least most of our knowledge is). Perhaps Thomasson could object here that everyday empirical claims and many of those of science are distinct from (non-analytic) metaphysical ones in being precisely things we can and do know, in relation to standards that have nothing to do with ideas from classical foundationalism. The claims of metaphysics are by contrast, according to her (and as we have noted), not meaningless, but rather lacking in this kind of warrant. But this immanent or pragmatic kind defence of the distinction in question is not sufficient to motivate the position she defends. The question is whether there is something principled that distinguishes the epistemic status of things like snow is white, the adult human brain is not fully developed at age 20, electrons orbit their nuclei, and so on  – what we can (for simplicity’s sake) call ‘empirical claims’ – from metaphysical ones, the kinds that philosophers typically discuss. Without such, one cannot say definitively that the latter are knowable, the former not, in a way that would be required to draw up a boundary. All parties to the debate agree that the relevant metaphysical claims are on the whole not resolved (though maybe some have been in the past), and that it is not clear exactly how we could resolve them, whilst many empirical claims presumably have been resolved, or could be resolved relatively unproblematically. But why should that mean that the former stand in some specially problematic kind of epistemic category compared to the latter? And where would we draw the line between those that are and those that are not inherently problematic?

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A similar sort of point can be seen arising in relation to science and the debate about scientific realism in the light of the recent naturalized metaphysics movement (Ladyman & Ross op. cit.). Instrumentalists like Bas van Fraasen (see e.g. his 1980) have long argued that scientists should (and/or do) refrain from committing to the truth of commitments that go beyond what can be directly observed, while scientific realists have argued by contrast that we can know statements about unobservables. Van Fraasen sees himself in this way as an anti-metaphysical philosopher. The recent program of naturalized metaphysics aims to avoid this metaphysical scepticism by developing a metaphysics that is constrained by science in a much tighter way than traditionally has been the case (Ladyman & Ross op. cit.). However, as Anjan Chakravartty (2018) argues, there will always be a possibility of van Fraasian scepticism towards any metaphysical claim however tightly constrained one’s metaphysics is: there is no bright line once one has left the realm of the empirically given. What I am stressing here is that then, by the same token, if one gives up the latter  – the empirically given  – as part of one’s philosophical position, as ARTL does, one has only a sliding scale from what is more to what is less secure, and where one decides to place a line as to what can be accepted will have no principled significance.9 Maybe Thomasson could fall back on the idea that her overall view of the role of (non-analytic) metaphysics is all things considered an attractive one. Everyone, she might say, has to acknowledge something like a category of accepted empirical knowledge, however exactly this is demarcated, and everyone agrees that much of metaphysics has made little progress over the years. The idea of the latter being construed in terms of conceptual engineering thus emerges as attractive. But as we have seen there are problems with the latter view, at least in the version Thomasson develops. Moreover, it is still just not clear why difficulty in resolving certain apparently factual questions should mean we should give up on them, given there is no principled explanation of why they can’t be resolved. Again I stress that my arguments here are not knock-down, and Thomasson could no doubt offer response to them. What I nevertheless have tried to show – to summarise this section as a whole  – is that there are substantive problems with Thomasson’s conception of metaphysical activity. The epistemological framework underlying it is also plausibly problematic, and in any case diverges from the spirit of ARTL. For these reasons, I think one might well, at least as a supporter of ARTL, wonder if an alternative remit for metaphysics might exist for it.

 It can be instructive at this juncture to take up an objection to traditional metaphysics of Thomasson’s makes that I mentioned above but that I have not so far discussed, namely that traditional metaphysics is problematic in that competes with science as an account of fundamental reality. I am not totally sure what she intends to say by this, not least because it is not clear how many claims of metaphysics do so compete. It might allude to some of the critiques of naturalized metaphysics, which I will take up in Sect. 7.4. However, in referring to the idea of ‘reality’ she also arguably again reveals tendency at odds with the spirit of ARTL, as I understand it. 9

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7.4 Metaphysics for ARTL How can we understand what metaphysics might be for ARTL – if it can be anything at all – if we renounce Thomasson’s model? I should say that I think Thomasson is right in seeing many traditional metaphysical questions as having practical significance, and thus philosophers as still having something important to contribute to public debate. In my view, there are also issues in metaphysics that are not so directly practically relevant but that are nevertheless important. But in any case, I have argued that we need to see metaphysical debates that have practical significance as other than purely pragmatically-driven metalinguistic negotiations if we are to uphold the idea of a distinctive kind of philosophical input to them. I would stress purely in the last sentence because I do think that many metaphysical debates can usefully be framed in metalinguistic terms, at least at the outset – in part because this will serve to bring out important semantic issues behind the concepts in question. But at the end of the day this, together with conceptual negotiation in relation to practical goals, need not be seen as all philosophers are good for, a view that would entail, if not our redundancy then at least significant diminishment. What is then this ‘something more’ that philosophers can offer? I believe the question here is mis-posed from the perspective of ARTL, for whom the point is rather that there is no sharp divide between conceptual clarification and innovation, on the one hand, and saying how things are – saying what is true – on the other. There are of course clear cut cases of the former in practice, where we just make decisions about concept use that are grounded, not in how things are but in what practical effects effectuating them will have. But not all conceptual debates need to be seen like that (or else as clarifying matters of usage or semantics). Rather, we can try to tackle more substantive issues – issues of what is true and false – precisely by reflecting on and developing our concepts. This is clearly a model that applies in natural science: science develops its concepts to better say what is true. ARTL sees this as applying also within metaphysics insofar as there is ultimately no clear distinction between science and metaphysics, and also because it rejects the idea that truth requires contact with any kind of ‘real’ (rejects the coherency of this very notion). Of course, some issues are simple to resolve and will not be naturally describable as conceptual, but for AR this is just the thin of the wedge. Whether someone has impaired long-term memory, say, is not a ‘metaphysical’ question. But there is in principle no ‘given’ here that decides it. So if we are instead asking whether the individual in question is still the same person she was many years ago, or even a person at all, we need not be simply asking whether it is useful to talk that way, as if interpreting it as a factual question would raise special epistemological problems. At the same time, what we mean by ‘same’ or ‘person’– what we understand by those concepts – will naturally be taken up here in an attempt to answer the question. And maybe new concepts (such as ‘relational identity’, cf. Lindeman 2014) will be needed to reach a satisfactory conclusion. In any case, this understanding of the process of conceptual engineering is in no way in conflict with seeing ourselves as moving via and towards commitments concerning what is the

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case – even if the commitments are ever so hedged, as they typically will be in discussing metaphysical matters. They will be something we make in light of a holistically, historically constrained process, taking into account as much of what we otherwise believe and see as relevant to the case at hand. But insofar as our language opens up questions for us in this way – and also insofar as we abjure the idea of there being a purely a posteriori method for the resolution of any question – we will neither be able to reject them as meaningless or in some special way unanswerable, nor to say that in seeking to answer them we must be offering something other than our best stab at saying whether what they ask is true or false. In this way I think we can see how a supporter of ARTL can see metaphysical issues both as practically significant and as opening for a kind of insight that philosophers in particular can be seen, professionally, as concerned to provide. The view does not depend on there being some pregiven set of questions (as Thomasson’s, at best, seems to). It only depends on the idea that there is some specific group of people who will devote energy to asking what, in difficult cases, the issue at hand really amounts to, − what the facts of the matter seem to be, in a suitably liberal sense of ‘fact’ – thereby offering (part of) the basis for practical decision and action. This process will not reduce to asking questions about how best to use certain concepts to achieve certain ends, or even to asking which are ‘best’ in some broader ethical sense. It might seem that this latter conception of the activity of metaphysicians and my own cannot yield very different kinds of prescription in practice, given both also uphold ARTL’s rejection of metaphysical realism and the idea of there being one overarching vocabulary which grounds or trumps all others. I can admit the difference might be small. But there is still a difference in terms of what the advice being offered is and, moreover, it is a difference that makes a difference to how we think of and go about metaphysical enquiry. We know what it is to just metalinguistically negotiate with practical or ethical ends in sight, and we know that this can fall short of seeking the truth about some matter. This is the extra that philosophers can provide, or at least try to. So that, in a word, is my conception of metaphysics for ARTL, one that I think can survive the rejection of the idea of metaphysics as an investigation into ‘fundamental reality’, and yet still preserve a distinctive kind of input that politicians and other people generally won’t be concerned to provide. Lest however I be conceived as advocating a return to a traditional way of thinking about philosophical activity I should also point out several limitations in this conception of metaphysics. Most basically, in rejecting the very idea of ‘the real’ ARTL rejects conceptions or varieties of metaphysics that depend on such an idea, i.e. that depend on metaphysical realism (MR). Seeking to uncover reality’s fundamental structure or ‘write the book of the world’ as Sider (2011) calls his project is plausibly off the table (see Chap. 1). Similarly the recent interest in a (metaphysically heavy-weight) notion of grounding – (Schaffer 2009; Fine 2001) – the idea of some kind of complete, absolute explanation of certain things in terms of others  – will be looked upon with suspicion by ARTL.  Without the idea of absolute reality, the idea of absolute

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explanation looks simply unmotivated (even if we allow it is coherent). The ideas behind object naturalism – that we might seek to reductively understand all vocabularies in terms of some more basic one – survives in principle. However, as we have seen in Chap. 2, this is going to look unmotivated in the light of the rejection of MR and Representationalism that ARTL involves. Insofar as it is naturalistic, it is also reasonable to see ARTL as sharing the broad ideas behind the movement of naturalized metaphysics, many of which are also negative in character. Taking science seriously suggests the very ideas behind much classical physicalism, such as that of levels of reality connected through relations of supervenience and constitution (cf. e.g. Kim 2000), is an outmoded framework for thinking seriously about ‘how things hang together’10 (cf. Ladyman & Ross op.cit., also Dupré 1994). As we have seen in Chap. 6, this attitude also plausibly impacts on metaphysical frameworks like mereology which operate with a conception of reality that looks incompatible with contemporary science. On the other hand, the idea of a positive naturalized metaphysics, understood either as a theory of ‘how things hang together’ or of some specific category (such as time), that is inspired by though not simply given by science, is one that ARTL’s approach is conducive to, as I  argued in the previous section. (To be clear, I do not mean to suggest that this conception of metaphysics and its epistemological credentials corresponds to how all or even any of those who actually have espoused ‘naturalized metaphysics’ see their project. Ladyman & Ross, for example, seem closer to a more metaphysically naturalistic or physicalistic conception of things than I am, and arguably presuppose this in arguing for the theses they do. But there seems no reason why ARTL cannot coopt ideas of the movement within its own presuppositions. See also below, including footnote 11.) ARTL will also probably want to recruit the resources of ‘ordinary language philosophy’ to understand and in some cases deflate metaphysical or ontological debates – perhaps along something like the lines Thomasson herself does, but perhaps in other or different ways too. This was also a theme of Chap. 6. For example, if we reject the idea that ‘object’ is a genuine sortal, the kind of conundrums Putnam thinks leads to the idea of conceptual relativity might be obviated. Contemporary metaphysics as it is practiced today, then, certainly needs some wing-clipping from the perspective of ARTL. But contra Thomasson, not all of it ceases to exist, and as such: there is still significant work for ‘serious’ metaphysicians to do and under more or less the traditional conception of it. Not all questions thrown up by science are answered by science, or perhaps can be. Further, not all metaphysical questions we want to ask are in the realm of natural science. That is all good news for us philosophers insofar as it means that we can give some special kind of input to debates of practical concern that raise these kinds of question. More than that, however, I don’t think that metaphysical enquiry is dependent for its legitimacy on having practical consequences. In relation to science it may well

 ‘The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term’ (Sellars 1963, 1). 10

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be, as Price puts it, that metaphysicians and ontologists ask questions that ‘in practice, do […] not interest most working scientists – push [...] questions they recognize as legitimate further than they themselves feel the need to go’ (Thomasson 2007, 385).11 As I see it, metaphysics is ultimately part of the questioning, human spirit, and that spirit survives the rejection of MR. Insofar as we find ourselves asking metaphysical questions – ones that go above and beyond what science tells and what our everyday life has to involve – and insofar as these are meaningful and in that sense possible to answer, they have an inherent value for us as human beings that we cannot and should not put aside just because finding answers to them ‘boils no cabbages’.12

7.5 A Subject Naturalistic Demarcation Between Science and Metaphysics? In closing this chapter and indeed the book as a whole, I want to offer some further reflections on the relationship between science and metaphysics that ties in with arguments and ideas from earlier in this book. I have been arguing that metaphysics isn’t as badly off as many seem to think, in effect because science has, ultimately, no sui generis epistemological privilege over it. However, insofar as metaphysics then becomes, as it were, simply more or less speculative theory, concerning matters science doesn’t (though perhaps one day could) pronounce on, one may feel that the account leaves something to be desired. Isn’t there, to put it bluntly, something more to the science-metaphysics distinction? Philosophers may sometimes  work more closely these days with scientists than they used to, but there remains a feeling that they are doing something different from them even so. Even if one puts aside other areas of philosophy, such as its history or semantics, it might seem simply descriptively inapt to suggest philosophers qua metaphysicians are merely practitioners of abstract or metatheoretical science – whether this is natural, physical science, or cognitive science. Now I have argued there are also questions about common sense categories that metaphysicians might concern themselves with, and this might to an extent allay this kind of worry. On the other hand, it can seem a bit conservative to suggest that philosophy’s ‘essence’, as it were, lies in understanding common sense. Whatever one makes of that debate, what I want to suggest here is that there might be some scope within ARTL for saying something more principled about the  Price also suggests this is quite legitimate. This runs contrary to Ladyman & Ross’s ‘principle of naturalistic closure’ for naturalized metaphysics, roughly an idea to the effect that genuine metaphysical questions should be ones that can at least in principle might be answered by science. I have never seen a coherent justification for this principle, assuming metaphysics is possible at all. 12  The phrase is due to David Wiggins. 11

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metaphysics/science divide  – in a non-epistemological, non-Representationalist key, as Price would put it. I should stress that this suggestion is very much that – a suggestion; much more would need to be said to vindicate it. Nevertheless I think it is sufficiently interesting to warrant inclusion in a book about the prospects of anti-­ representatitonalist philosophy generally. The account builds again on the Pricean idea of subject naturalism, though in the form I have developed as an alternative to his GE.  Subject naturalism seeks to understand human subjects in broadly scientific terms in order to understand the nature and function of our different discourses. In Chap. 2, I criticized Price’s version of subject naturalism, GE, on the grounds that it fails to do justice to the involved, first-personal nature of our discourses, operates with a representatational conception of cognitive science that today is challenged by movements like enactivism, and has problems in vindicating the central role e-representation is meant to play in it. But rejecting GE doesn’t mean no interesting kind of subject naturalism can be upheld, and in Chaps. 3 and 4 I argued this alternative will involve distinguishing vocabularies concerning the world for us and those concerning the world in itself (neither seen as ‘reality’), a distinction in turn based on foundational ideas within the paradigm of enactivism that also resonate with the debates about the nature of perceptual experience. If we operate with that distinction, we might now also it seems posit and distinguish between capacities for different kinds of thinking, and then, further, suggest that these capacities constrain particular sciences in ways that make progress in them meaningful and possible. By contrast, these capacities do not apply to the ‘non-scientific’ projects of metaphysics in which our concept use operates in a maximally free and unconstrained manner. This is my suggestion as to what a deeper difference between science and metaphysics might look like. To be a little more concrete, the idea here is that something like our capacity for abstract mathematical thinking, on the one hand, and our ‘capacity’ for embodied experience (as one might put it, admittedly somewhat strainedly), on the other, might function as constraints on, respectively, natural scientific and cognitive scientific theories, in such a way that we might naturally expect a kind of convergence in these areas that we would not expect in those where these constraints do not apply. The idea of an abstract mathematical capacity as something that constrains theorizing in physics is easiest to relate to here, insofar as physics today has demonstrably made progress over the centuries, arguably largely thanks to operating with mathematical constraints on its theoretical models (empirical ones too of course, but that, as noted in Sect. 4.2, is fundamentally a function of the fact of that we, as human beings, necessarily take our point of departure for any cognitive practice in the experientially constrained world for us). The idea of a similarly systematic cognitive science is certainly less clear and much more controversial than the case of physics in relation to natural science, but the broad idea is something similar: that in virtue of having a conscious, lived, embodied perspective on a world, we can meaningfully pursue a science of that perspective and what it amounts to. Arguably, it has been cognitive science’s unwillingness to embrace the centrality of lived experience

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that has stymied its progress in the past, a progress that the advent of enactivism (possibly together with other approaches) will, hopefully, now allow us to make.13 Neither of these (how-possibly) explanations of convergence in these different areas appeal to the idea of a ‘reality’ constraining the relevant discourses; in that way, they are true to ARTL and subject naturalism. Rather they see convergence as explicable, at least in part, by reference to shared natural capacities for thinking in particular ways. This is not to say that these capacities constitute the truths in question. As with discourses more generally as understood by ARTL, this would involve a kind of use-mention confusion. In talking of the capacities in question here, we are mentioning the discourses in question and pointing to a part of their natural grounds that explain certain features of them. When it comes to metaphysics, by contrast, there is arguably nothing like this kind of constraint on theorizing, beyond our use and understanding of concepts in the most general sense. We are here, as it were, in the realm of ‘pure spontaneity’ or ‘pure reason’ (though these Kantian allusions should not necessarily be understood as corresponding to precisely what Kant had in mind). When the metaphysician asks a physician what the quantum world is really like, in layman’s terms, the latter is likely to shrug her shoulders, or perhaps walk away. This is not I believe because what physicists provide us with by way of their theories has no ontological implications: that all they are bothered about is formal calculating devices. At least that is what I am assuming here, namely, that some minimal interpretation of these theories is presupposed amongst physicists themselves, if only in terms that for most ordinary people would be incomprehensible. Philosophers, by contrast, will typically want to ask more. Are there are objects or only structures in the quantum world (cf. Ladyman and Ross 2007, ch. 2)? How should we think of the relationship between the micro-events that quantum mechanics describes and objects at larger spatiotemporal scales? And so on and so forth. Answering these questions and others like them is plausibly underdetermined by applying the mathematical capacity that makes consensus on physical theory possible. They are not meaningless questions or necessarily hopelessly speculative, such that any answer we give to them is doomed to be forever unwarranted. However, they are not such either that we can reasonably hope for the kind of resolution we find in science. Metaphysics will only ever be desultory, or at least we cannot expect it to be otherwise (at least so long as  A further possible area of scientific research where my idea of a ‘subject naturalistic’ explanation of convergence in science might apply is theoretical linguistics: if we have, as Chomsky avers, something like an innate linguistic capacity, then theorizing about language and linguistic meaning might be expected to converge in virtue of being constrained to do so by our having this capacity. Following Price, I have mentioned Chomsky’s view as a possible approach to meaning a supporter of ARTL might develop instead of more usual communitarian accounts like Brandom’s (see Chap. 1), though have not said much about how we should conceive of such theories or what adopting them might have for how ARTL is conceived or my own development of ARTL in this book. One might worry (indeed, I do personally worry) about whether seeing a theory of meaning as constrained in this way is compatible with seeing metaphysical theorizing as unconstrained, and that is at least one reason I have relegated this discussion to a footnote. In spite of that, the general idea seems worth registering. 13

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its problems are not transformed into more tractable scientific ones). Science, by contrast, in being constrained in the way I have suggested is something we could reasonably expect to show convergence. When it comes to cognitive science something similar might be said. Delineating and understanding the experiential worlds of humans (or bats, or cats etc.) and how these relate to their sensory and neural apparata is possible if one takes seriously the ideas of enactivism with its phenomenologically constrained methods, which in turn are only available to us as living embodied creatures. Enactivism also vindicates thereby, I argued, the idea of a peculiarly human world. But if one probes the surface of this world, asking what persons, freedom, value and so on are, then enactivism will not, it seems to me, be giving answers to these questions, at least of the kind that philosophers have been interested in. Perhaps this kind of questioning comes with having such a world at all, in the sense that there is no sub-structure upon which we impose our concepts: the world is always already interpreted, and being in the world is interpretational being (as Heidegger put it). This relates to the problem of givenness discussed in Sect. 4.2. There I argued that enactivist cognitive science posits umwelts, but these are essentially theoretical posits, unlike the world that we humans live in and understand. By the same token, there is little reason to think questions about the things in this human world will yield to convergent enquiry insofar as they are not answerd by applying any identifiable capacity we have, even though they are not for that reason meaningless or unanswerable. This conception of what delineates metaphysics from science also yields the result that a central claim I have put forward in this book, to the effect of there being both a world for us and a world in itself, must itself class as metaphysical. The claim is not part of science, either physics or enactivism. Someone might wonder whether this abrogates the subject naturalist character of the suggestion insofar as subject naturalism is meant to offer a kind of scientific account of the differences between our different vocabularies. But, as we have seen, it seems clear that science throws up questions it does not answer that we nevertheless feel need to be answered. Many of the central original ideas of this book are plausibly part of naturalized metaphysics in a sense recognizable from recent discussions of this idea, and this is itself a form of scientific naturalism. As far as I can see, to uphold the kind of naturalism I want to uphold, it makes no difference whether the ideas behind one’s subject naturalism stem from science itself or from ideas that are responses to or extensions of science. Having waxed Kantian above, and at various other times in this book, one might remark a similarity between the current suggestion and Kant’s project in his first Critique, which famously opens with the following words: Human reason, in one sphere of its cognition, is called upon to consider questions, which it cannot decline, as they are presented by its own nature, but which it cannot answer, as they transcend every faculty of the mind. (Kant 1787/1934, 1)

Somewhat as Kant goes on to argue, my subject naturalist account allows for the possibility of answers to certain questions we ask, namely those that accord with identifiable faculties of our sensibility and understanding. Unlike Kant, I am not

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sure the other questions, the ones reason cannot answer, are given ‘by its own nature’, even though that we ask certain kinds of questions is I think in a sense natural, and at least unavoidable. More significantly, I do not see any prospect for a kind of metaphysical understanding of the limits of our understanding that in effect constitutes Kant’s theory of transcendental idealism. We are essentially stuck with the must-answer/cannot (see how to) answer structure when it comes to metaphysics. But that is still, to an extent, a Kantian thought. The supporter of ARTL will however further precisify that metaphysics is not for that reason pointless or even doomed to failure, let alone incoherent. We have no reason to think it will succeed in the way science has, but neither can we pronounce definitively that it cannot succeed. Moreover, on the picture I have sketched, the success of science, or the various sciences, must be understood as, as it were, an internal feature of them – not something that gives them a special endorsement as knowledge, or as charting reality. Metaphysics will probably always be with us and should simply be appreciated for what it is. As such, supporters of ARTL can uphold its significance, notwithstanding that they also think some projects traditionally identified as metaphysics and which persist in the contemporary debate should fall by the wayside.

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