The Relevance of Philosophy 1527516563, 9781527516564

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction
Chapter One
1.1 The Enlightenment: The Triumph of Reason
1.2 The Kantian Synthesis
1.3 Post-Kantian Philosophy
Chapter Two
2.1 Phenomenology
2.2 Analysis
Chapter Three
3.1 Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947)
3.2 Karl Popper (1901-1994)
3.3 Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984)
Chapter Four
4.1 Through the Labyrinth
4.1.1 The Role of Categories
4.2 Quantum Physics
4.3 Reductionism and Emergentism
4.4 Can Consciousness Emerge in Computers?
Chapter Five
5.1 Introduction
5.2 The Evolution of Public Morality
5.2.1 Survival Behavior
5.3 Economics and Public Morality
5.3.1 Reactions to Unbridled Capitalism
5.3.2 Micro and Macroeconomics
5.3.3 Inequality
5.4 The Evolution of Rights
5.4.1 Discussion and Public Morality
5.5 Descriptive vs. Prescriptive Morality
5.6 Philosophical Reflections
5.6.1 Macro-ethics
5.6.2 Microethics
References
Index

Citation preview

The Relevance of Philosophy

The Relevance of Philosophy By

Edward MacKinnon

The Relevance of Philosophy By Edward MacKinnon This book first published 2018 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2018 by Edward MacKinnon All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-1656-3 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-1656-4

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface ....................................................................................................... vii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Chapter One ................................................................................................. 5 Early Philosophy The Enlightenment: The Triumph of Reason......................................... 5 The Kantian Synthesis ......................................................................... 11 Post-Kantian Philosophy...................................................................... 15 Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 21 Twentieth Century Philosophy Phenomenology ................................................................................... 22 Analysis ............................................................................................... 27 Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 43 Three Grand Syntheses Alfred North Whitehead ...................................................................... 43 Karl Popper .......................................................................................... 50 Bernard Lonergan ................................................................................ 63 Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 83 Science in Dialog Through the Labyrinth ......................................................................... 88 The Role of Categories ................................................................... 95 Quantum Physics ................................................................................. 98 Reductionism and Emergence ............................................................ 114 Can Consciousness Emerge in Computers......................................... 121 Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 125 The Good Life Introduction........................................................................................ 125 The Evolution of Public Morality ...................................................... 133 Survival Behavior ......................................................................... 135 Economics and Public Morality ......................................................... 148

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Introduction

Reactions to Unbridled Capitalism............................................... 152 Micro and Macroeconomics ......................................................... 155 Inequality...................................................................................... 162 The Evolution of Rights ..................................................................... 168 Discussion and Public Morality ................................................... 175 Descriptive vs Prescriptive Morality.................................................. 190 Philosophical Reflections................................................................... 204 Macroethics .................................................................................. 205 Microethics................................................................................... 220 References .............................................................................................. 227 Index ........................................................................................................ 241

PREFACE

This book represents the culmination of a protracted struggle to achieve some sort of overall philosophical coherence. I began my philosophical education as a Thomist, believing that a critical updating of Thomism had the potential to supply a framework in which philosophy, science, and theology could receive a coherent integration. The urge to integrate waned after spending some years studying physics, theology, and modern philosophy. Then Lonergan’s Insight was published. The neoThomistic position he developed seemed to present the type of integration that I, and many others, desired. A detailed critical analysis of Lonergan’s work convinced me that this unification rested on a faulty foundation. The metaphysical system he developed did not supply a depth explanation of reality, with science filling in the details. Nor did any other metaphysical system. There is no philosophical version of a Grand Unified Theory. During my teaching career at Boston College and California State University East Bay I focused on specialized studies in the philosophy and history of science with a concentration on the development and interpretation of quantum physics. This contributed to a growing realization that philosophy functioning as a collection of specialized subdisciplines had lost the relevance it formerly had. Is there any way this relevance can be restored? A long retirement provided the opportunity to explore this question in detail and produce the present book. I am grateful to my wife and fellow philosopher, Barbara, and to the Ockegham Circle Discussion Group for presenting varying interpretations on many of the issues treated here. I also thank William Langan and A.J. MacKinnon for reading and criticizing the first drafts of the material presented here.

INTRODUCTION

Alfred North Whitehead, who will be treated later, claimed that a proper philosophical career develops in three stages: romance, precision, and generality. The romance commences in a juvenile infatuation with the great ideas philosophers through the ages have advanced to answer fundamental questions about reality, knowledge, truth, appearances, God, man, society, and morality. Precision characterizes the work of the professional philosopher focusing on specialized problems amenable to treatment by accepted philosophical methods and offering promises of publications. Generality should characterize the work of senior philosophers who return to the great ideas and can now treat them with technical precision and with an informed awareness of alternative treatments and their consequences. Whitehead’s own career manifested, and was undoubtedly the source for, this three-stage progression. Contemporary philosophy has largely morphed into a diverse collection of specialized studies. The goal of a transition from precision to generality may linger on, but is increasingly difficult to implement. This combination of specialized studies that only professional philosophers can understand and a systematic neglect of the depth issues traditionally regarded as basic philosophical issues has contributed to the widespread conviction that philosophy is no longer relevant. Scientists and humanists, treating the issues they consider fundamental need not, and generally do not, advert to philosophical treatments of these issues. How did this neglect develop and what can be done to change it? In medieval times philosophy reigned as queen of the sciences. Subsequently, the sciences, starting with physics, gradually withdrew from the reign of philosophy and became autonomous disciplines. In the Enlightenment era, a new sort of philosophy emerged. It centered on public dialog among ‘philosophs’, people, often not professional philosophers, who were interested in philosophical issues. Philosophy assumed the status of a constitutional monarch, reigning but not ruling. Immanuel Kant fashioned a new architectonic, relating philosophy to science, ethics, art, and government. The nineteenth century featured different developments that altered the role of philosophy. Hegel dominated the effort to go beyond Kant and develop philosophy as an idealistic system. Subsequent trends were

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Introduction

generally characterized as post- or anti-Hegelian. Psychology, sociology, anthropology, and economics emerged as empirical disciplines, rather than as branches stemming from the tree of philosophy. Even when philosophy abdicated her throne and attempted to serve as an usherette, assigning the new disciplines to their proper seats, her guidance was generally rejected or ignored. The twentieth century produced some ambitious philosophical syntheses, which will be treated in Chapter 3. The major effort, however, involved a critical rethinking of what philosophy should be. Two trends achieved dominance. Phenomenology, developed primarily in Continental Europe, featured a first-person approach, focusing on analyzing and reconstructing individual subjective experiences. The empirical tradition came to feature two loosely related branches. Analytic philosophy, stemming from Cambridge and Oxford, focused on a third-person analysis of linguistic usage. Philosophy of science, stimulated by and later reacting against Logical Positivism, focused on issues generated by scientific theory and practice. Many people working in science, literature, business, or politics are confronted by issues traditionally treated by philosophy. Do they find these specialized philosophical traditions relevant? My answer to this question is based on reading, discussions, and many years of participating in the enterprise of philosophy. Some outsiders find contemporary phenomenological philosophy marginally relevant. A generation ago, Foucault and Derrida influenced literary critics. A few theologians draw on the work of Heidegger and Ricoeur. The analytic tradition has had much less general influence. To outsiders, analysis looks like epistemological parlor games played by institutional insiders. The relation between philosophers of science and practicing scientists is more complex. In the mid-1920s and later the founders of quantum mechanics, Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli, de Broglie, and Schrödinger, engaged in philosophical debates among themselves and sometimes with philosophers. Today, as will be shown in Chapter 4, physicists concerned with fundamental issues traditionally treated as philosophical problems systematically ignore philosophers of science. In biology there is some cooperation when philosophers and biologists join forces to counter a shared problem, attempts to replace evolutionary theory by pseudo-science. In psychology, there is a shared perplexity. Neurophysiologists cannot agree on an acceptable answer to the hard question: How does the brain produce consciousness? Some interested philosophers argue that this way of formulating the problem reflects

The Relevance of Philosophy

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dubious presuppositions. However, they have yet to develop a generally acceptable alternative. The Enlightenment era witnessed informed discussions on philosophical issues between philosophers and non-philosophers. Today many scientists and others are concerned with fundamental philosophical issues. What is the fundamental stuff of physical reality? What are the limits of human knowledge? What is life? Is human life essentially superior to non-human life? Do we have an obligation to future generations to safeguard the environment? Does evolution have a goal? What is truth? Philosophy should play a distinctive role in attempts to answer such questions. But, what is this role and how should it be acted out? Traditional philosophy relied on a top-down approach to such questions. A philosophical synthesis could provide a framework in which these diverse questions and elements could be interrelated. The great syntheses of the past, Thomism, Cartesianism, Lockean empiricism, Kantianism, and Hegelianism, are not adequate to the current problematic. In chapter 3 we summarize and evaluate three influential attempts to fashion new syntheses. None are judged to be adequate. A different approach begins in medias res rather than from the top down. The issue of how these diverse questions and the answers they generate can be interrelated with some sort of overall coherence is treated as a problem to be explored. Here philosophers should be able to make a significant contribution. Where scientists and others laboring in the fields of knowledge concentrate on details, philosophers are trained to focus on basic concepts and underlying presuppositions. Shared concepts supply a basis for interrelating different fields. A critical analysis of implicit presuppositions is a tool for treating incoherence. These are some of the things philosophers should be doing to make philosophy relevant. How should such general guidelines be implemented? Chapters 4 and 5 propose one possible path to progress in making philosophy relevant. Philosophers should acquire a general understanding of science as it actually functions. The idealized reconstructions of scientific theories developed by philosophers can provide tools useful in appraising the standing of functioning theories. However, they are no substitute for understanding the practice of science. Chapter 4 focuses on one conceptual thread, reductionism, that links together physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology. There are others worth exploring. The social sciences and humanistic disciplines reflect a similar problematic. A philosophical analysis of basic concepts and implicit presuppositions can contribute to fashioning a coherent overall view. They

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Introduction

also introduce a novel feature, the centrality of the human situation. Philosophers traditionally treated this in one of two ways. The first, embodied in the Aristotelian-Scholastic and Natural Law traditions, is based on the assumption that there is an objective human nature, the same for all times and places, that supplies a basis for understanding the human situation and developing ethics. Descartes initiated a switch from this ontological foundation to an epistemological foundation, a switch that was further developed by Kant, Hegel, and Husserl. The transcendental ego, the ‘I think’, was assumed to set a standard for all persons. I favor replacing these atemporal views by an evolutionary perspective. Humans are evolved primates. The institutions that structure and control human societies are byproducts of biological and cultural evolution. The bulk of Chapter 5 is concerned with the temporal and social factors that shape the human situation. This approach does not supply the fixed basis for analysis that an invariant human nature or a transcendental ego does. It does supply a pragmatic basis. Two other aspects of this book deserve comment. First, the intended audience for this book is primarily, but not exclusively, philosophers and philosophy students. It is also aimed at non-philosophers concerned with issues traditionally considered philosophical. Young reformers trying to replace accepted moral standards, physicists discussing fundamental reality, biologists probing the origins of life, psychologists analyzing the conditions of conscious awareness, anthropologists comparing human and non-human societies, and economists speculating on ethical issues often view these issues in a limited perspective. Their analyses frequently manifest a philosophical naiveté. The hope is that this book might raise awareness of shared basic concepts, shape a search for greater coherence, and ameliorate the excesses of amateur philosophizing. Second, this book, especially the final chapter, is more personal than is customary in philosophy, and more personal than anything I have published in philosophy. There are two reasons for this. The first is that I am writing this as an old man trying to find coherence in philosophical labors stretching over more than fifty years. This book represents my attempt to advance from precision to generality. The second is that this book concludes with discussions of some basic ethical issues and suggestions for solutions. This is not done from some atemporal or outsider’s view of the human situation. It is offered by one temporarily and socially situated individual. Personal factors conditioning such judgments should be noted so that their influence can be properly evaluated.

CHAPTER ONE EARLY PHILOSOPHY

1.1 The Enlightenment: The Triumph of Reason One of Wilfrid Sellars’s most influential articles begins with the claim: “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, p. 1) Without some coherent idea of how things hang together an individual or a society experiences cognitive dissonance that can have disastrous consequences. Plato and Aristotle set the philosophical precedent for interrelating the individual knower, the physical and social order, morality and government. Throughout this book, we will be concerned with a coherent interrelation of five foundational concepts: the self, the physical order, the social order, morality, government. Philosophy can no longer impose an overall coherence. However, it should clarify foundational concepts in a way that exposes radical incoherencies and suggest means of overcoming them. Contemporary philosophy does not do this for the foundational five concepts. This book will be defending the position that philosophy still has a role in analyzing and articulating the inner coherence of accounts of being and knowing, and of moral and social action, of art and science. To understand the problem, it helps to begin with a simpler time where there was an overall conceptual coherence, at least on a superficial level. )%. stands for )LORVRMíD %íRX .XEHUQȒWKV, Philosophy the Guide of Life. When the society was founded in 1776 by students at the college of William and Mary in Virginia philosophy did serve as a guide for life in a way it never had before or has since. In ancient Greece and Rome philosophy was cultivated by an elite minority. It had a public influence only through a few rulers, like the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who were guided by Stoic principles. Rhetoric, rather than philosophy, was regarded as the integrating discipline. Later Christian, Arabic, and Jewish theologians incorporated aspects of Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic philosophy. In all three traditions, however, religion, not philosophy, was the guide to life.

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Chapter One

The many sixteenth and seventeenth century wars, in which religion played a role, eventually led to practical compromises and edicts of toleration. The 1713 Treaty of Utrecht marked the end of religious wars and the beginning of a widespread practice of limited tolerance. Though it rarely extended to Jews, Muslims, or atheists, it did allow European Christians to live and work together. Tolerance proved more conducive to peace and prosperity than the zeal of the Reformation and CounterReformation eras. A reaction against authoritarian religion, coupled to an increasing awareness of the significance of the burgeoning scientific revolution, led to a reliance on reason, rather than established authority, as the court of last appeal in settling intellectual issues. Les Philosophes were the spokesmen for the age of reason. Though the French term, ‘philosoph’ included professional philosophers, it had a broader and looser denotation. Participants in the popular salon debates, the emerging journalists, pamphleteers, enlightened members of the clergy, and even a few enlightened kings were considered philosophes. They shared the conviction that philosophical arguments should play a basic role in settling disputed issues and in guiding people to the good life. At the level of enlightened discourse the philosophes could interrelate the foundational five in a more or less coherent way. The widely-shared assumption was that the methods that Newton had used to order the natural world could be extended to order civil society, the economy, morality, and health. This assumption suffered from a double superficiality. Very few of the philosophs could read and understand Newton’s Principia. The ways in which Newtonian methodology could be extended to other fields had not been developed. Yet, Newton functioned as a symbolic leader in the triumphal advance of reason over superstition and authoritarianism. To illustrate this, we begin with the pivotal issue of enlightened discussions, the rights of man. In this context, we will retain the sexist terminology. Women’s rights were at best a secondary concern. The basic right stressed was freedom: of worship, of speech, of assembly, and of the press. These rights were regarded as attributive, rather than relational as in many modern accounts. One simply has them by virtue of being human. In this context, the way the foundational five interrelated was understood by contrast with the accounts they wished to replace. In medieval philosophy and theology, the understanding of the individual was ontological. He was a special type of being who differed from animals by virtue of possessing an immortal soul and the attributes of understanding and free will. Descartes spearheaded a switch from an ontological to an epistemological perspective. The subject is understood as a knower. In the older perspective, the order of nature is something imposed by God. Humans

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begin to understand it by studying the two books God has prepared, the Bible and the book of nature. Society was also understood in a new fashion. In the old view the chain of being concept carried over from nature to society, an order epitomized in Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man. The application of the chain of being concept to society supported Pope’s contention: Whatever is is right. Both civil and ecclesiastical society involved hierarchical systems. A man recognized himself as having a place in society depending on where he fit into the rankings of: peasant, vassal, lord, baron, and king; or parishioner, priest, bishop, archbishop, and pope. A woman’s place was subordinate to the male head of the household. The essential structure of society was understood as a realization of a divine plan. The new understanding of society stemmed from social contract theories developed by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau and from Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws (1748). The underlying assumption of the social contract theories was that in the state of nature all men are equal. However, to escape a life that was ugly, brutish, and short, people entered into a contract, abandoning some rights to secure the protection of a government. The various contract theories differed sharply on the proper distribution of power between kings, aristocracy, and ordinary people. However, they shared the position that structures in society were not part of a divine order, but human institutions that were open to change, and that the basic rights of individuals were innate, not something given by the state. The new concept of society was allied with the spread of deism.1 This is essentially a residue of the Christian tradition that retained the idea of God as creator and architect of a physical order that contributed to human flourishing, but deemphasized the controverted issues of the Reformation era, original sin, grace, human depravity, salvation, heaven and hell. A tolerant non-combative deism served as a common denominator for people who publicly professed adherence to sectarian creeds. Thus, Alexander Pope, a Catholic, presented a deistic position in his Essay on Man. This more tolerant atmosphere allowed for the public expression of doubts about accepted truths concerning God, man, morality, and the knowability of the world. Michael Montaigne (1533-92) argued that no system of ideas could resist doubt. Descartes (1596-1650) tried to beat the skeptics at their own game by doubting everything that could be doubted. His methodic doubts concerning our knowledge of the external world were as influential 1

Two recent studies, Taylor (2007) and Gillespie (2008) have argued persuasively that the Enlightenment should be understood as a transformation of traditional Christian themes as well as a repudiation of ecclesiastical authority.

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Chapter One

as his certitude concerning the inner world. At the dawn of the eighteenth century, Pierre Bayle published his highly influential Historical and Critical Dictionary, in which he attacked all theories, whether theological, philosophical, or scientific. In the middle of the century David Hume’s criticisms of metaphysical systems and theological arguments supported the position that morality could not be based on reason. (Hume 1961 [1739], Book III, Part I). In this changing intellectual climate, the general understanding of the basis of morality changed, first among the Philosophes, and later on a more general scale. When humans were understood ontologically in terms of their place in the general scheme of things, morality was essentially a matter of following rules. The Bible and religious traditions gave rules of conduct. Natural law, as it was understood in medieval times, supported rules based on man’s place in nature. This minimal level was complemented by a higher level, a striving for sanctity. In the new morality that was emerging, the individual subject was somehow the source of morality. A Deistic perspective replaced the idea that God is operative in both the physical and social order with a detached distant creator and an impersonal universe. Individuals had to create a moral order. Rousseau’s General Will, Hume’s moral sense, and Kant’s Categorical Imperative struggled with the idea that rules of morality that an enlightened individual set, or recognized, could be projected on humans in general. The extension of enlightenment ideals to government climaxed in the American and then the French revolutions. The American Declaration of Independence famously declared: “We hold these Truths to be selfevident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these Rights Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed. . .” Thirteen years later the French Declaration of the Rights of Man asserted that: “men are born free and remain free and equal in rights”. These two historic declarations embody Enlightenment ideals. They also reflect the conceptually superficial level at which these ideals functioned. Jefferson’s original wording was: “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable”. He submitted the text to John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. Franklin crossed out ‘sacred and undeniable’ and substituted ‘self-evident’. Isaacson (2003, p. 312) The term ‘sacred’ and the reference to a Creator assumed a theological justification for the assertion of rights. Franklin’s ‘self-evident’ and the French proclamation of freedom as a self-

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evident right presupposes a philosophical justification. Neither assumption stands up to scrutiny. The Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Koran sanctioned slavery, an accepted institution of the ancient world. The Roman legal code embodied the shared ‘intuition’ that to treat a slave as if he or she had any entitlements would be a gross violation of the basic principles of justice. Instead of proclaiming freedom of speech the religious patriarchs decreed execution for blasphemy. The Old Testament (Leviticus 24:13) decrees stoning blasphemers, something Islamic Fundamentalists still sanction. The most interesting example in the Christian tradition is Thomas More (aka Saint Thomas More). In his humanistic tract, Utopia, he cites the fictional King and founder of Utopia, Utopus, as declaring: “. . . that each man might follow whatever religion he wished and might try to persuade others to join it amicably and temperately and without bitterness towards others.” (More 1949 [1516], pp. 71-72) After Henry VIII appointed him Lord Chancellor, More sought out people preaching the new heresy of Lutheranism and had them burned at the stake. Christian tradition did not tolerate preaching heresy2. The Catholic Index of Prohibited Books, established during the Counter Reformation period (1559) was not abolished until 1966. It included works by such philosophers as Bacon, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Pascal, Sartre, and de Beauvoir. The most interesting example is the prohibition of the mystical writings of Mary Faustina Kowalski, a Polish nun who was later canonized by a Polish Pope, John Paul II, as the first Catholic saint of the twenty first century. The religious traditions stressed duties and were clear on only one basic right, the right of men to dominate the women in their families. The Old Testament precedent is clear. On entering Egypt Abram (aka Abraham) tells his wife to pose as his sister so that leaders wishing to rape her would not kill him (Genesis 12:11). Isaac repeats this precedent. (Genesis 27:7). Lot offers his two daughters to would-be rapists to protect his male visitors (Genesis 19:7). There is no indication that the women were consulted. When women are praised, as in Proverbs 31, it is chiefly for supporting their men. St Paul counseled: “Wives, be subject to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord”. (Colossians 2: 18). In the strict Islamic 2

The Catholic church officially revised its old tradition in the Declaration of Religious Freedom in the Second Vatican Council: “This Vatican Synod declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom. This freedom means that all men are immune from coercion on the part of individuals or of social groups and of any human power, in such wise that in matters religious no one is forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs.” (Abbott, 1966, p. 678)

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Chapter One

tradition, a woman is subject to her father till she marries, to her husband till he dies, and then to her eldest son. The surprising exception to this trend is Jesus, whose openness to women and acceptance of women followers scandalized even his disciples. The dominant theological traditions did not support the claims for innate human rights. Nor did the accepted philosophical traditions. The older natural law theory, epitomized by Thomas Aquinas, stressed the obligations consequent upon man’s place in the order of things. Franklin declared, and the French proclamation assumed, that the possession of natural rights is a self-evident truth. When Franklin visited Scotland, he stayed with his friend, David Hume. He was undoubtedly familiar with Hume’s distinctions between impressions and ideas, and the consequent distinction between matters of fact and relations of ideas. Only the latter admitted of self-evident truths, aka analytic truths. “All circles are round” illustrates a truth that is self-evident because the subject entails the predicate. Does ‘human being’ entail ‘possessor of natural rights’? There was a fuzzy precedent for such claims. Thomas Aquinas distinguished speculative and practical reasoning and claimed that truths in each sphere could be deduced from self-evident principles. (Summa Theologiae, I-II, Q. 94, a. 2). The paired principles were: the speculative principle of non-contradiction; and the practical principle that good is to be done and evil avoided. This did not supply a deductive basis for the declaration of human rights. The critical philosophical reaction to such declarations is epitomized by Jeremy Bentham’s 1791 criticism of the French declaration of human rights as. “Natural rights is simple nonsense, and impresciptible rights rhetorical nonsense, nonsense upon stilts” 3 The reign of terror following the execution of Louis XVI and the Napoleonic era destroyed the culture of the philosophs. The Scottish enlightenment continued and anticipated both the benefits and the shortcomings of a capitalist economy. (See Herman, 2001, chap. 8). These issues will be treated in a different context. The proclamation of rights received a legal foundation in the first, and other amendments to the American Constitution. These declarations did not appeal to any philosophical or theological principle. The struggle for equality continued. Ten of the original thirteen states restricted voting to property owners. English voting rights were long denied to Catholics, Jews, and nonconforming Protestants. The emancipation of women remains a struggle. The enlargement of voting and other rights was more a result of local agitation than an implementation of shared philosophical principles. The 3

Citation from Sen (2009, p. 356).

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torch lit in the Enlightenment era flickered on, but without the fuel an adequate philosophical foundation could supply.

1.2 The Kantian Synthesis To see the role of purported foundations we turn from the popular, but relatively shallow waters of the philosophs to the deep and often opaque writings of the greatest philosopher of that era, Immanuel Kant. I will not summarize Kant’s philosophy but merely indicate how he came to interrelate the five foundational concepts we are considering. We will treat these concepts in the order in which they developed in Kant’s writings. We begin with his thoughts on the physical order. The young Kant thought of himself as a natural philosopher (or physicist in later terms) trying to imbue Newtonian physics with Leibnitzian intelligibility, chiefly by supplementing the Newtonian idea of matter and motion subject to quantitative laws with Leibniz’s stress on inner vital forces. His first contribution to physics was an argument that the earth’s rotation is slowing down due to tidal friction. On the basis of one of his rare attempts to do, rather than simply discuss, mathematics he concluded that in a period of two thousand years the earth’s rotation should slow by about eight and a half hours. Precise calculations, also based on Newtonian physics, lead to a result of 0.032 seconds. Subsequently, he introduced the hypothesis, independently introduced by Laplace, that the solar system evolved from a rotating cloud of gas. He tried to explain fire in terms of an atomic composition of solids, fluids, and the ether. He was the first to explain prevailing wind currents through the new physics. If the atmosphere is regarded as a sea of air in basic equilibrium then excess local heating or cooling would cause a wind flow, while the rotation of the earth should explain the overall pattern of westerly winds gradually flowing from the equator towards the poles. 4 The Critique of Pure Reason is Kant’s most influential work. Our immediate concern is with the role physics plays in setting up the problematic status of the basic question the first Critique treated: Is metaphysics as a science possible. Kant accepted physics and mathematics as established, analyzed the conditions that made these sciences possible, and then attempted to determine whether metaphysics could meet these conditions. His attempt to explain science in terms of the necessary role of synthetic a priori principles tends to obscure his basic methodology. He 4

The role of physics in Kant’s thought is treated in more detail in MacKinnon 1982, chap. 2.

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Chapter One

accepted physics and mathematics of the scientists on the basis of their success and then, in a Leibnitzian spirit, tried to determine the enabling conditions of this success. These sciences succeeded only when their developers learned how to compel nature to answer questions they imposed. The sciences, accordingly, have an a priori aspect supplied by the mind itself. This realization initiated his Copernican revolution. Instead of asking how our knowledge conforms to objects, we should enquire how objects of human knowledge conform to our way of knowing. This leads to the conclusion that we cannot have a science, traditional metaphysics, concerned with objects, notably God, the world as a whole, or the soul as immortal, which lie beyond actual or possible human experience. However, he allows for a metaphysics of nature and a metaphysics of morals. Each is concerned with the a priori aspects of the science or system. The status of the self plays a crucial role in Kant’s three critiques. In the first Critique, he develops an account of the knowing process in terms of the successive imposition of forms on a sensory given: the forms of sensibility, the schematism of the imagination, the imposition of categories of understanding, the regulative role of reason, and the unification through the transcendental unity of apperception, the ‘I think’ unifying these diverse components. The knower in question is not a historically situated individual. It is a person as such. All humans are presumed to have the same cognitive apparatus and follow the same processes. In this perspective, the success of physics receives a novel justification. The imposition of cognitive forms on a sensory given leads to the production of phenomena. Noumena, the reality initiating the process are not known. The world of phenomena is governed by rigid causal determinism, because we come to understand it by the imposition of causal notions and quantitative laws. Self knowledge is not obtained through the imposition of categories. The noumenal subject of these processes is a thinker, which Kant refers to as: “this I or he or it (the thing) which thinks” (Kant 1963, A346, B404). The wavering reference reflects the contention that the noumenal subject is not known through the imposition of familiar categories. This supplies a basis for reconciling the determinism of the natural order with freedom of the will. The determinism refers to phenomena. Freedom is a property of a noumenal being, a person as a rational agent. In his second critique, The Critique of Practical Reason, Kant developed The Categorical Imperative. His best-known formulation of this is: Act only on that maxim that you can will as a universal law. An alternative formulation insists that other persons should never be treated

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merely as a means, but always an end.5 This is intended as a replacement for theories that derive ethical norms either from a conjunction of divine and natural law, or from the from the anticipated consequences of an action. It relies on rational self-consistency. To use Kant’s example, would it be moral to make promises I do not intend to keep? If I willed this as a universal maxim for everyone to follow, then my maxim would be selfcontradictory. If everyone knows promises need not be kept, then the practice of making promises has no significance. This basis of morality presupposes the essential equality of all persons. Any rational agent is in effect the representative of all. It also presupposes that reason has limits, something he treated in the resolution of antinomies of reason in the first Critique. In moral matters, practical reason can go beyond the limits of pure reason, because practical reason is grounded in the noumenal person, not the construct that is the phenomenal person. In his Scienza Nuova (1725) Giambattista Vico had developed the idea that societies develop in three stages which have a cyclic order: the divine, where the iconic figures are superhuman; the heroic, and the human. Man, as an isolated individual, has no nature. As man makes society, society makes man. The idea that different societies shape different human natures conditioned the rise of anthropology in the nineteenth century. The idea is not reflected in Kant’s writings. He interpreted human development in terms of a rise from barbarism to a culture that produced art and science and lamented the fact that only a small minority participated in this culture.6 Yet, the person that was central to his three critiques was the autonomous man, presumed to be the same in all times and cultures. In his treatment of society, he utilized an idea developed more formally in his Critique of Judgment that we understand the development of society by imposing a priori principles on social and historical facts. The a priori principle here is teleological, to understand Nature’s purpose in the development of society. Kant’s “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View” (Beck, pp. 11-26) can be interpreted as a creative fusion of ideas stemming from St. Augustine with anticipation of Darwin and Adam Smith. First, it should be noted that Kant is using `idea’ in the Platonic sense of an ideal that can supply a goal for human history and offer guidance towards achieving that goal. The secret purposefulness of nature extends to human instincts and the place of humans in nature. Modern 5

A brief clarification of this doctrine plus the pertinent text is given in MacKinnon, B and Fiala, Chap. 5. 6 His writings on history are collected in Beck, L. W., Ed. (1963). Kant on History, The Bobbs-Merrill Company.

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biologists still rely on purposes in nature, e.g., in understanding why some organs survive or are modified. However, they interpret this talk of purposes as a shorthand way of speaking of the outcome of evolutionary competition. Kant rejected the idea of evolution of species, which was being discussed, because there was no evidence supporting it. However, he thought that the purposefulness of nature, effected through secret mechanisms, included the status of humans in the overall order. Human freedom escapes the determinism of nature but not its purposefulness. Human freedom leads to antagonism between individuals and states. It is only through such antagonism that the capacities of humans are developed. “Each, according to his own inclination, follows his own purpose, often in opposition to others; yet each individual and people, as if following some guiding thread, go toward a natural but to each of them unknown goal; all work together furthering it, even if they would set little score by it if they did know it.” (Beck, p. 11) Reason, especially practical reason, is the capacity whose collective development leads to culture and life in a society governed by reasonable laws. A stable society requires strong leaders who enforce obedience to the laws of the land. This can shift from tyranny to a reasonable government if the enlightened citizens participate in the formation of reasonable laws. “The touchstone of everything that can be concluded as a law lies in the question whether the people could have imposed such a law on itself.” (Kant, 1963 (1784), p. 7). This collective categorical imperative represented the legislation of an ideal society. Kant judged his era as an age of enlightenment, but not yet enlightened. Yet, even an enlightened society would not suffice to produce a moral society. Morality is the product of freedom, not nature. These ideals for society shaped Kant’s appraisal of the role of government. Originally, he supported the idea of an enlightened constitutional monarch following the standards set by Frederick the Great who, in Kant’s interpretation, was the only prince who told his citizens: “Argue as much as you will, and about what you will, only obey.”7 When Frederick’s precedent was not followed by other princes, Kant swung over to republican forms of government. He strongly supported the American and French revolutions and the ideals of liberty and equality. His reservations about fraternity stemmed from his appraisal of the low level of culture and enlightenment characterizing most individuals and nations. In Kant’s appraisal, though individuals had emerged from a Hobbesian state of nature, where conflicts are settled by brute force, nations had not. 7

This is from his “What is Enlightenment?” (Beck, p. 5).

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They still settle disputes by waging wars. The only reasonable solution to this lamentable state of affairs is to work for the establishment of a league of nations. “The greatest problem for the human race, to the solution of which nature drives man, is the achievement of a universal civic society which administers laws among men.” (Beck, p. 16) This would be a federation of free states promoting universal peace and guaranteeing that visitors to a foreign nation be treated as guests, rather than enemies.8 Kant saw this as a European union that other states could join when they accepted the combination of enlightened freedom and rule by reasonable laws. Kant did not interrelate the five fundamental five in a grand theory. His work can be interpreted as a sustained attempt to answer two basic questions. How does man come to know a world in which he is a part, a knower, and a moral agent? How should individuals and nations behave? Kant’s critical method effectively introduced a basic difference between the path of progress in science and in philosophy. A scientist advances his discipline by building on the work of his predecessors. A critical philosopher advances his discipline by critically examining, and when necessary undercutting, the presuppositions of his predecessors. Thus, Kant undercut the foundational role traditionally accorded metaphysics and made a critique of knowledge a new foundation.

1.3 Post-Kantian Philosophy We will treat post-Kantian philosophy in this critical spirit. Thus, we will not consider Hegel’s system building, but merely his implicit metacritique of the Kantian Critique. The First Critique presupposes that the data of immediate experience are processed by the faculties of sensibility, imagination, understanding, and reason. Valid knowledge involves imposing reason on the data of immediate experience. Reason, for Kant, is regulative, not constitutive. These presuppositions are preconditions of the critique of knowledge, but are not themselves subject to critical analysis. This, as Hegel saw it, exempts the knowing subject from the probe of criticism.9 “In my view—view which the developed exposition of the system itself can alone justify—everything depends on grasping and expressing the ultimate truth not as substance but as subject as well.” (Hegel 1967 [1807], p. 80). Hegel understood the individual 8

Kant developed these ideas in his “Perpetual Peace” (Beck, pp. 85-135) Habermas (1971, chap. 1) details the way in which Hegel’s Phenomenology exposed and criticized the presuppositions of the critical epistemology. 9

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subject, and any philosophy he develops, as historically conditioned. The ultimate truth concerned the Absolute, whose process of self-actuation is achieved through human consciousness and reflection. Nature is the objective manifestation of this spirit. Philosophy reflects this process of self-actuation through the development of a system. The intricate system, developed dialectically, was epitomized in the slogan: The real is rational and the rational is real. Reason, for Hegel, is constitutive of reality as a whole. Both physical and social reality, as they actually exist, have structures that manifest an inner rationality. In our twilight context what counts is not Hegel’s system (See Kaufmann 1965) , but his bringing to light the implicit presuppositions in the critique of knowledge. Hegel, following Fichte and Schelling, achieved a coherent integration of the fundamental five concepts by subsuming the physical under the organic. Matter and motion are understood in depth only through the extension of categories proper to living and especially thinking beings. This did not prove to be a viable integration. The development of philosophy cannot be understood in terms of a closed circle of philosophers speaking to and commenting on other philosophers. The two dominant intellectual currents in the nineteenth century were the expansion of science, which will be considered later, and the emergence of Romanticism. Here we simply indicate how the Romantic Movement put man and nature, morals and politics in a new interpretative perspective that influenced philosophers. In the Enlightenment perspective, the traditional view of a human as a soul inhabiting a body was receding in favor a materialistic conception that saw humans as part of the natural order. The natural order was being clarified by experimental investigations and theoretical systematizing with the goal of extending the Newtonian system to more and more branches of science. The Romantics, drawing on elements from Rousseau, Goethe’s novels, and Fichte’s philosophy focused on the individual coming to know, and even create, himself. (Berlin and Hardy 1999, Berlin, Hardy et al. 2000). Where Kant sought the limits of reason, the Romantics tried to use intuition, imagination, and the force of the human will to transcend such limits. Nature is only understood in its purity through a return to the innocence, empathy, and even magical thinking characterizing infants, primitives, and legendary heroes of earlier days. The American and French revolutions not only overthrew established governments. They also showed that the old order of society, where authority and privileges trickle down from the aristocrats, could be replaced by an order in which authority wells up from the will of the people. Persons displaying a similar will and imagination should be able to

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overthrow traditional authoritarian morality and established conventions to bring about true freedom for all persons. Even when the early exuberance faded, and radical changes were institutionalized, a residue remained in terms of a tension between a humanistic and a scientific perspective. This had more influence on the subsequent development of philosophy than the older faith/reason tension. There were three nineteenth-century reactions against Hegelian idealism, that were more influential in the twentieth century than in their own time. Hegel interpreted the historical development of philosophy and religion in terms of the gradual realization of the relation between selfconsciousness and the Absolute, and later tended to regard the established social order as an embodiment of the Absolute. Nietzsche reinterpreted the development of philosophy as a series of myths and analogies. What now passes for higher truth and Christian morality is the outcome of the paradoxical triumph of the slave mentality over the nobility of the master morality.10 This is not pure negativity. Nietzsche began his career as an outstanding classical scholar. He championed sixth century Greece, where tragedy was born through a fusion of the Dionysian spirit of revelry, selfindulgence, and excess, and the Apollonian attempt to impose beauty, order, and symmetry on the disorder of human experience. Then the stifling miasma of Socratic questioning led to a switch from the primacy of life as experienced to the fullest to contemplation and the search for the deep truths hidden behind the world of experience. The philosophical tradition suppressed the Dionysian elements in culture to glorify the Apollonian quest of pure truth. Hegel’s assertion of the primacy of the Absolute culminates the Apollonian drive. Nietzsche advocated a return to the Dionysian tradition, centering on the sensual egotistical historically-embodied self. Only the superman, superior in both body and mind, can understand the meaning of beauty and what it takes to create it. Nietzsche is not only opposing Hegel, but all philosophical systematizing. Faust, in Goethe’s play, reads the biblical text, “In the beginning was the word” and then replaces it with “In the beginning was the deed”. Rousseau, the paradigm of the alienated man, thought that morality, social customs, and established political conventions were all products of a corrupting society. Nietzsche, who valued art and music over philosophy, sought to extend the Goethian switch from contemplation and systematization of eternal truths to action in a messy human environment by men liberated from the chains of a corrupting culture. His new hero was

10

“On the Genealogy of Morals” in Kaufmann (1969).

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the legendary Zarathustra, who returned from a sojourn in the desert with the liberating message: God is dead. Nietzsche was anti-Christian (and anti almost everything established). Søren Kierkegaard was profoundly Christian. But, like Nietzsche, he was a deeply troubled man trying to forge an authentic existence. He began as a young Hegelian rebelling against Hegelianism as an established social order. Developing an authentic existence, in Kierkegaard’s view, involves three stages. The aesthetic focuses on experience, pleasure without conscious control imposing notions of right and wrong. One leaps to the ethical stage when moral norms are given priority over pleasure. This stage is characterized by despair, or a subconscious sickness unto death over the difficulties of making authentic choices. In Hegelian terms, if I am at the ethical stage I choose the Absolute that chooses me. But is this Absolute God or Society? The leap to the religious stage requires a teleological suspension of the ethical. Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his only son in response to a divine command is a profound violation of ethical norms. Yet it was for Kierkegaard, as for St. Paul, the highest example of true faith. Where Hegel incorporated religious striving into a philosophical system, Kierkegaard insisted that authentic Christianity transcends and even defies rationality. Such views turned Kierkegaard into a fierce critic of established Christian society and the Hegelian justification of the established order. He was a forerunner of existentialism with his insistence that the individual only truly comes to know him or herself in moments of extreme passion or dread. Then both bourgeois concerns and metaphysical systems seem irrelevant. Karl Marx’s intellectual career can also be divided into three stages. The first stage was Germany, where he flourished as a left-wing Hegelian philosopher, accepting Hegel’s idea of understanding history as a dialectical development, but rejecting his systematization and his sanctioning of a bourgeois society as an embodiment of the Absolute. Where Hegel interpreted history as the unfolding of the Absolute, Marx insisted that man makes his own history. He sought to stand Hegelianism on its feet rather than leave it anchored in the clouds. As with history, one really comes to know the world by striving to change it. The second stage was Paris, where Marx was strongly influenced by social theorists. Here he criticized Hegel’s subordination of matter to mind and stressed the priority of nature, with social labor mediating between mind and matter. (See Habermas 1971 [1968], chap. 2.) The third stage was London and a hermetical existence in the British Museum trying to master economic theory and planning the overthrow of a Capitalistic society. Our concern is with the dissolution of embodied

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Hegelianism, rather than the career of communism. Here one nonphilosopher made a decisive contribution. Darwin’s influence led to a conception of the development of humans and intelligence in terms of a struggle for survival, an outcome of natural processes, rather than a dialectical manifestation of a universal spirit. This will be treated in the final chapter. Other non-philosophical developments undercut the foundational role traditionally assigned to philosophy. The special sciences of physics, chemistry, biology, anthropology, psychology, sociology, and linguistics developed by breaking away from the matrix of philosophy. Enlightenment visionaries had anticipated human and social sciences conforming to the Newtonian model of a scientific theory. The founding fathers of some of these new sciences echoed this ideal by beginning with a master theory. Helmholtz and Fechner developed psychology as an extension of physics by focusing on physical measurements, e.g., of reaction time. Wundt, the founding father of an experimental psychology, specified a subject matter, immediate experience, and a method, a structuralist approach to introspective analysis. The breakaway reactions of Gestalt, functionalist, and behaviorist psychology, shattered the idea of a monolithic method. Comte, the founder of positivism, Spencer, the founder of social Darwinism, and the Nineteenth century founders of anthropology, shared a common theme. Human societies develop in fixed stages. The simplest scheme was savagery, barbarism, and civilization, with each major division admitting of subdivisions. Different cultures could be understood by fitting them into this general scheme and assuming that progress would lead to a European-style culture. This provided a general framework allowing for the collection of data, and orderly classification of information, and comparison of different eras and cultures. This empirical data soon fractured the a priori mold leading to more detailed studies of particular cultures. The practioners of the newer more empirical human and social sciences would not accept philosophy as supplying either a metaphysical or an epistemological foundation. Methodological pluralism replaced the ideal of a unified science of reality and a monolithic methodology of science. The philosophers who accepted the autonomy of science had to rethink the goals of philosophy. It still treated the problem of the self and morality. However, systematic treatments of the physical order, the social order, and government were taken over by specialized scientific disciplines.

CHAPTER TWO TWENTIETH CENTURY PHILOSOPHY

Richard Rorty (Rorty 1967; Rorty 1982; Rorty 1988; Rorty 1997) was the original Jeremiah prophesying philosophy’s coming doom. He utilized a distinction between PHILOSOPHY and philosophy. In the mainstream, PHILOSOPHY, whether or not practiced by professional philosophers, can be distinguished from philosophy in that the former is concerned with uncovering the foundations behind ordinary knowledge. Physicists investigate and develop theories about space, time, energy, atoms, particles, and fields. PHILOSOPHY attempts to determine where and how the best theories correspond to objective reality. Mathematicians entertain conjectures and prove theorems. PHILOSOPHY speculates on whether the edifice of mathematics rests on a foundation of logic, or rules of formation, or intuition of timeless truths. Ethicians argue about the morality of acts and practices. PHILOSOPHY tries to determine whether the foundation of ethics is set by anticipated consequences of actions, a theory of justice, or of obligation, or natural law. Politics and government are more muddled fields. Now we are experiencing an increasing tension between those who insist that human laws must conform to divine laws, and those who champion secular democratic ideals. PHILOSOPHY seeks to resolve the conflict by uncovering the true foundations of legitimate government. The decline of philosophy, in Rorty’s opinion, hinges on the abandonment of PHILOSOPHY as a viable program. A similar theme was developed by others.1 I will indicate some significant attempts to redefine the role of philosophy. I will be viewing these traditions from a perverse perspective, focusing on their failure to supply a basis for a coherent intellectual integration, rather than on their specialized accomplishments. The positions treated will be phenomenology, analysis, Thomism, philosophy of science, and three attempts at integration. I will be presenting an appraisal based on sixty years of participation rather than a detailed exposition of these positions. This superficial summary is manifestly unfair. To balance the books, I will attempt to be equally unfair to all the positions treated. 1

See the readings in K. Baynes et al. (1987).

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2.1 Phenomenology Edmund Husserl, the patriarch of the phenomenological tradition, was originally trained as a mathematician. An abiding concern throughout his career was to make philosophy into a rigorous science like mathematics. Philosophy, as he saw it, can only achieve certitude and rigor by focusing on how the objects of awareness are immanent to consciousness. Frege’s criticism made him realize the need to have a philosophical analysis that was distinct from a psychological analysis. To achieve this Husserl made a sharp distinction between the natural standpoint and an ideal order. The natural standpoint accepts the objects of ordinary experience and the objects posited by scientific theories as existing objectively, or independent of our knowledge of them. Theories of knowledge or science that build on this foundation are implicitly psychologistic, since they depend on psychological processing of sensual input. Husserl brackets, or suspends belief in, the reality of, the natural order and focuses on ideal objects. A phenomenological analysis should uncover the essence of such ideal objects (Husserl 1969). This supports the development of philosophy as a strict science. The empirical sciences implicitly presuppose objects as present in consciousness but fail to acknowledge this significance of this awareness. The clearest example of this failure is an account of testing the truth of theories by comparing the consequences of theories with things or states of affairs as they exist independently. This, Husserl contends, is the root cause of the crisis of Europeans science (Husserl 1970). Though Husserl initiated a redevelopment of philosophy, he was still in the Cartesian tradition of focusing on the transcendental ego and attempting to develop a philosophical system that could supply a foundation for science. Instead of bracketing the natural order, Martin Heidegger explored it in a novel way. His goal, throughout his career was an understanding of being, something that, in his opinion, had been lost through the imposition of metaphysics and must be retrieved through existential analysis. Metaphysics, following the precedent set by Plato and Aristotle, builds on categories imposed on the beings that are present at hand. The natural sciences implicitly presuppose and rely on such categorization. The questions asked within science and metaphysics presuppose the application of categories both to the beings of ordinary experience and the beings posited by scientific theories. The way back to the ground of being begins with an analysis of Dasein, recognition of how a human being is simply present prior to any imposition of a subject/object distinction and the imposition of categories

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on either. Being and Time (Heidegger 1962) begins with Dasein, a being thrown into a world of objects ready to hand as tools to use in his everyday functioning without reflecting on their status as objects. Questioning begins when this familiar order breaks down, when a broken tool emerges from the matrix of normal functioning and demands attention, or when the natural order is subjected to critical analysis. Heidegger’s torturous terminology is necessitated by his concern to avoid a reliance on familiar categories and the language that embodies them. Similarly, Heidegger undercuts the Kantian stress on judgments by presenting truth as disclosedness, something uncovered prior to the is of judgment. This should not be viewed as a theory of truth, like the correspondence or coherence theories. It is an analysis of the conditions that make it possible for human assertions to be the sorts of things that can be true or false. Since logic for both Kant and Heidegger is rooted in judgment, existential analysis is prior to logic. Being and Time is an incomplete work. Heidegger intended, but never produced, a second half (Heidegger 1962, p. 62) to be entitled Zeit und Sein, which would present a more detailed positive treatment of temporality and the role of metaphysics. Sein und Zeit has a preliminary presentation centering on Dasein as finite transcendence. This differs from the transcendental Ego of Descartes and Kant through its temporal situatedness and its concern for being. Some aspects of Sein und Zeit, the destruction of traditional metaphysics and Heidegger’s emphasis on analyzing the presuppositions of questioning, had an extended influence in reshaping the way philosophy was practiced. In his later years, Heidegger focused more on how we express being through language, ‘the house of being’. Here we must distinguish Heidegger’s own thought from the philosophical hermeneutics he stimulated, but eventually repudiated. Though Heidegger’s later works strongly influenced some theologians, notably Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich, and Karl Rahner, the philosophical influence of these works was in hermeneutics. Hermeneutics grew out of attempts by biblical scholars to understand and interpret ancient texts. The original pre-critical assumption was that an historical text has an objective meaning, essentially what the author intended, and that this can be recovered. Friedrich Schielermacher (17661834) extended the scope of hermeneutics from scriptural texts to a general understanding of the process of understanding. This initiated the famous hermeneutical circle. An understanding of a part, such as a cultural practice or a sentence within a text, requires a prior understanding of the whole, the culture or the text. Then an understanding of the part can lead to a revised understanding of the whole; and the spiraling process contin-

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ues. Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) attempted to extend hermeneutics in the hope that it would provide an epistemological foundation for the Geisteswissenschaften, the newly emerging life sciences. Heidegger gave hermeneutics a new orientation. He stressed the idea that any new understanding presupposes a fore-understanding that is rooted in the individual’s historically determined life situation. Then hermeneutics serves a tool for self-understanding. His concern was with probing: the preconceptual grounds that makes such understanding possible; with the poetic intuition that leads to novel uses of language; with the mythic consciousness that preceded the pre-Socratics; and, unfortunately, with the belonging to a Folk that precedes adherence to a constitutional government. Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002) was the key figure transforming hermeneutics into a philosophy. He was strongly influenced both by Heidegger and by his own work on Plato’s dialogs and classical philosophy. For Gadamer, philosophy is centered on understanding, rather than being or knowing. Plato develops the understanding of an issue through a dialectical interchange between speakers. Aristotle clarified the role of phronesis, practical wisdom. Where theoria concerns speculative knowledge, phronesis focuses on man’s relatedness to the physical and social world he inhabits. Hermeneutics develops understanding in terms of a dialog between a reader and a text. Both are historically situated, whereas theoria is concerned with timeless truths. The reader’s prejudices, or implicit prejudgments, may distort her understanding. However, having such prejudices supplies the precondition for any attempt to understand something new. Language is the medium that makes such understanding possible. “Not only is the world ‘world’ only insofar as it comes into language, but language, too, has its real being only in the fact that the world is represented within it.”(Gadamer 1975, p. 401) Gadamer gives philosophy a distinctive orientation. It focuses on understanding, rather than knowing or being. The goal in an interaction is practical wisdom, coming to a better understanding of oneself as well as the other. Language is central, but language as a locally and temporally situated medium for dialectical interaction, not as a system of symbolic forms. Two other philosophers in the Continental, or phenomenological, tradition will be considered later: Paul Ricoeur attempted a synthesis of the analytic and phenomenological traditions and will be postponed till we consider the analytic tradition. Jurgen Habermas will be treated in a political context. So, we conclude this section by appraising the limitations of the phenomenological movement with respect to the intended conceptual integration.

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As I see it, there are two chief limitations. The first is the downgrading of the empirical sciences. This does not mean that phenomenologists are antiscientific. It refers to the place accorded the empirical sciences in the phenomenological and hermeneutical perspectives. This is generally done by putting a positivistic gloss on the Naturwissenschaften, and then rejecting positivism. The insistence that immersion in the lived world is prior to and grounds any theorizing about reality supports the conclusion that positivism is naïve and that any science that does not recognize this is misinterpreted. Physicists do not refer, or even avert, to this in reporting scientific advances. Does this entail that their scientific work is somehow misguided? To treat such questions, we must distinguish the actual practice of science from philosophical interpretations of the significance of science. Also, we need separate treatments of the physical and social sciences. If physical theories, to take the crucial case, are interpreted in terms of a correspondence between a mathematical formulation and physical reality as it exists objectively, or independent of our knowledge, then it falls under Husserl’s criticism of naive objectivity. Theorizing often manifests a rough and ready realism, an extension of the natural viewpoint. Theories need not be so interpreted. Few of the alternative interpretations, however, recognize the epistemological primacy of the life world. The gap between the life world and its grounding of language and meanings is too remote from fundamental physical theories. To fill this awesome chasm I spent many years developing an interpretation of physics that begins with lived world semantics, traces its gradual extension into the language of classical physics and the co-evolution of mathematical concepts. (MacKinnon 2012) In this perspective the quantum revolution entails interpreting classical reality as a phenomenological idealization, a problem that we will postpone. I will indicate one aspect of this which should be supported by alternative developments that take the language of physics seriously. Within the lived world of ordinary experience there is a functional realism that involves accepting persons as rational agents and objects as having properties such as colors and shapes. This is not a theory of reality. It is implicit in our way of being in the world. The development of physics involved a systematic extension and gradual transformation of this ordinary language base. It also supports a functional realism. Thus, an account of high-energy particle experiments refers to accelerators, detectors, magnetic fields, particle collisions, and virtual transitions. This is part of the extended ordinary language of physics. It is not a theory of reality. In both cases the normal practice of ordinary language does not require, and in fact is im-

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peded by, philosophical reflections on the status of this language. It is reasonable to require philosophers interpreting the significance of science to take into account the grounding of scientific discourse and practice in the lived world. It is unreasonable to require scientists to do this in the normal practice of science. One can let science be science, or accept the science of the scientists. Phenomenology is more at home in the Geisteswissenschaften perspective, in the treatment of psychology, anthropology, and sociology. A common thesis is that human action in a social environment is mediated by a network of partially shared meanings. One cannot have a proper understanding of distinctively human activities without understanding the meanings they have in a particular social context. This requires a spiraling hermeneutic circle. Scientific systems or theories framed in a third-person perspective treat persons as special types of objects and do not supply a basis for understanding the real significance of human actions. This appraisal entails downgrading most of the work on the human sciences conducted in the empiricist tradition. This pejorative evaluation is reciprocated by the humanistic scientists who ignore these hermeneutic constraints and marginalize the hermeneutic contribution to the social sciences. I believe that the hermeneutic criterion is essentially correct, but that the pejorative evaluations often rest on a misapplication of this criterion. Roughly speaking, one can divide human activities into three layers: those that are specific to a historically situated culture; those that are species specific; and those common to most animals. The borders between layers are a bit fuzzy and flexible. Thus, all animals must eat, drink, mingle with their peers, procreate, and die. These activities acquire further meanings in human cultures through overlays of custom, ritual, and the special significance accorded particular acts, such as the relation of procreation to love, consent, and marriage as a social institution. Nevertheless, the distinction of layers has an explanatory significance. We can begin with the animal layer and the clichés about the rat psychology of the behaviorist tradition. Studies of perception, stimulus and response, and operant conditioning can benefit from treating animals as well as humans. At this level the experimental scientist need not attend to specific meanings that humans attach to, or impose on, the activities involved. Consider the species level. Humans generally live in families and function in societies which have rules, whether formal or informal, guiding and constricting normal behavior. Rational-choice sociologists assume that in every culture it is common for individuals to act out of a concern for the wellbeing of themselves and their families. The form this takes can be culture specific, from the female in a hunter-gatherer group bonding with

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the dominant male to the female in an urban society enrolling her children in a private school. One can study such common practices without focusing on the specialized meanings attached to them in specific societies. Similarly, societies can be analyzed in terms of operative causal mechanisms. Some are presumed to have general significance. Prolonged famine causes social instability and a distrust of government. Widespread reliance on the internet leads to distinctive adolescent subcultures. Some are culture specific. Flight to the suburbs may cause deterioration in the quality of education in central urban schools.2 The social scientists who conduct such studies without averting to hermeneutic norms need not be interpreted as violating these norms. If a basic intentionality is implicit in activities common to different societies, then one may analyze these activities without considering the culture-specific differences in the embodiment of this intentionality. However, those who use such limited practices as a criterion for defining social sciences in a way that excludes hermeneutic norms, e.g., strict behaviorists, rightly fall under hermeneutic criticism. The conclusion I draw from this is that a projected philosophical synthesis should draw on the physical and social sciences as they actually function. Philosophers in the phenomenological tradition tend to focus on the shortcomings of the sciences relative to their projected norms and then neglect or downgrade actual accomplishments. My second major reservation concerns the treatment of language in discussions of meaning and intentionality. The emphasis on the subject and the meaningfulness of her intentional activities slights the requirements analysts have established concerning the requisite conditions for these terms to have public meanings. This is best treated after we have considered analysis.

2.2 Analysis The term `analytic philosophy’ is sometimes used in a broad sense to cover trends in Anglo-American philosophy stemming from the early work of Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Logical Positivism through later philosophy developed in Oxford, Cambridge, and in America. Sometimes it is used in a narrow sense for a style of philosophizing stemming from the later Wittgenstein, John Austen, Gilbert Ryle, and Isaiah Berlin. I am concerned with what this movement can contribute to achieving some sort of conceptual integration of the fundamental five concepts, or in showing that this project is misguided. This can be devel2

For a brief survey of different types of social experiences see Little, 1991.

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oped by beginning with a simple Wittgenstein-type problem and spiraling outwards. I am irodian. I reached this conclusion by analyzing my inner states and comparing myself with others. I tried to do this by relying on terms with established meanings, such as `happy’, `sad’, `complacent’, `melancholic’, and `anxious’. No such term captured the distinctive features of my own state. So, I invented a new term. I am clear on what it means because I invented the term to express my inner state and because I am more irodian than anyone I know. Unfortunately, my attempts to explain this to others failed. No one could grasp the real meaning of the term. To improve communication, I began to reflect on how terms referring to mental states or conditions acquire the meanings they have. This effort soon bogged down. So, I switched to a simpler task, one of analyzing how growing children learn the meanings of terms referring to such states or conditions. A child smiles or laughs and her caregiver tells her, “You are happy”. An obvious behavioral criterion is taken as a sign of an inner state. This simple behavioral criterion can be extended to other terms reporting inner states. `Sad’ is associated with frowning, ‘in pain’ with crying. This mode of assimilation extends beyond early childhood. A teenage boy learns the meaning of `horny’, or `sexually aroused’ through an obvious physical manifestation of this state. However, the application of such simple behavioral criteria to explain the meaning of terms like `anxious’, `content’, or `melancholy’ was not so straightforward. It required an analysis of patterns of behavior. My behavioral analysis finally bogged down when I attempted to explain beliefs, intentions, and desires. These were often attributed when there was no discernable behavioral manifestation. Since `irodian’ also lacks any obvious behavioral manifestations, my analysis did not yet supply a basis for communicating the meaning of the term. In desperation, I began researching what other had done with related problems. Ryle (1949) seemed like a natural starting point, since he supports some form of behaviorism. In this book, Ryle attacked Cartesian dualism, the position that a human being is composed of a physical body and a spiritual soul, which is the source of understanding. A less ontological offshoot of the position under criticism analyzes intelligent thought and action as a two–stage process. On first conceives an idea or an action and then expresses it. So, the intelligibility of an utterance or an action is inherited from a prior mental act. Ryle countered this position with a twopronged attack. First, if I claim that someone made a reasonable suggestion or played golf well, then I am referring to one action, not two. I have no access to other person’s inner mental states and cannot be referring to

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the inner mental event that preceded the utterance or action. However, I might still claim that I have a privileged access to my own mental states. But my self-analysis must rely on an examination of my behavior. Such considerations led Ryle to a criticism of phenomenology and a reevaluation of the role of philosophy (Ryle 1954). In his evaluation, phenomenologists from Brentano through Meinong and Husserl focused on intentions and effectively thought of philosophy as treating some kind of third realm. The sciences treat physical objects. Psychologists study mental activities. Philosophers study intentional objects and focus on the realm of meaning However, Wittgenstein (1953) conclusively showed that any study of the meanings of terms is really an analysis of their use in different contexts. This left me in a quandary. I could not clarify ‘irodian’ by Ryleian behavioral criteria. The behavioral manifestations of being irodian were too subtle and complex for other too grasp. I could only understand it by an introspective analysis of my own mental state. But Ryle argued that I have no privileged access to such states. Fortunately, at this juncture in my search I reread Wilfred Sellars seminal article, (Sellars, 1963, pp. 127-196). Sellars accepted the Wittgenstein-Ryle emphasis on examining behavior rather than analyzing meanings. To go beyond these restrictive limits Sellars introduced a philosophyfiction myth. Imagine a primitive community in which people spoke a pure Rylean language. The fundamental descriptive vocabulary contains terms referring to public properties of public objects. The primitive language gradually acquires expressive powers by cultivating logic and exploiting logical connectives. This allows them to speak of non-public properties of public objects, to claim, for example, that salt is soluble or that Smith is irascible. These are unpacked in terms of subjunctive conditionals. If salt were placed in water, it would dissolve. Then a genius Jones arises who tries to adapt ideas proper to science to mentalistic discourse. The community has only rudimentary science. However, thanks to their cultivation of logic, they have a relatively sophisticated account of the role of scientific theories. They believe that a good theory explains established empirical laws by deriving theoretical counterparts of these laws from a small set of postulates about unobserved entities. These postulates are usually extrapolations from models based on observed entities. Jones adapts this to develop an extended form of behaviorism that allows for a restricted possibility of introspection. He postulates inner mental states and acts as theoretical entities modeled on overt behavior. Thus, ‘concept’ is introduced as an inner word, ‘judgment’ as an inner analog of a truth claim, ‘intention’ as an inner analog of goaldirected behavior.

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Relying on these model-based extensions of publicly meaningful terms Jones develops a theory according to which overt utterances are the culmination of a process that begins with unobserved inner episodes. To avoid misinterpretation Jones introduces a subtle distinction. In the semantic order, overt language has primacy. The meaningfulness of terms referring to inner mental episodes is derivative from the meaning of terms based on public usage. In the causal order, however inner episodes are primary. Jones goes on to extend his theory from thoughts to sensations, again using public properties and objects as a basis for theoretical models. From statements like “The table is green” he introduces an inner episode of “seeing that something is the case”. Further he develops a theory of sense perception by postulating inner episodes called ‘impressions’ and interpreting them as states of the perceiving subject. Thus, a red triangular object supplies a model for a red triangular impression. Jones’s enlightened disciples assimilate the theory and then utilize it to make reports. Thus, Smith can now say, “I have a thought about X”. This allows for a limited privileged access beyond Rylean restrictive limits. When Smith speaks of someone else’s thoughts she is inferring the existence of inner episodes from observed behavior. However, speaking of her own thoughts is not an inference from her own behavior. It is a report of a mental state. This privileged access is restricted by the realization that behavioral criteria are built into the meaningfulness of the terms used to give introspective reports. Unfortunately, as this way of speaking spreads from the enlightened disciples to the large community the epistemological sophistication gradually evaporates. Jones’s theory of inner states and episodes is taken as an analysis of the language of sensation and thought. In the fullness of time this misinterpretation generates classical empiricist epistemology. This philosophy-fiction account brings out the way semantic propriety can be reconciled with limited introspection. Historically, presenting this as a primitive theory had an unfortunate side effect. In an influential article, reproduced in many anthologies, Paul Churchland (1981) criticized folk psychology as a very old theory that has not made any significant progress in some three thousand years. It should, he contended, be rejected as a false theory. Rejecting the theory entails rejecting its ontology, the inner mental states the theory posits. Analytic philosophy, in the Churchlands' evaluation, smuggles in folk psychology in the form of a priori meaning relations. Sellars’s fable seems to be depicting the origin of folk psychology as a theory. Reductionism will be treated later. Here I will simply indicate why I think that that the issue is misleading in the present context. John, James,

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and Mary each have a filling replaced in a lower left molar tooth. It makes sense to look for a common nerve impulse to explain the pain each feels. While undergoing treatment, each looks at a bright blue light. Again, it makes sense to look for a common nerve reaction. In a subsequent discussion, each indicates a belief that the Chicago Cubs will win a world series in the next two years. John believes this because he has studied the comparative statistics for all the teams in the division. Jim believes it because, as a confirmed gambler, he believes that every losing streak must end in a win. Mary believes it because that is what her astrology charts indicates. It makes no sense to seek a common nerve pattern underlying their shared beliefs. Talk about thoughts, beliefs, intentions, and desires is only meaningful in a social, or intersubjective, perspective. Similarly, it makes no sense either to seek a reductive account of beliefs, or to reject beliefs, intentions and desires as postulates of an archaic theory of folk psychology because no reductive account is possible. Unfortunately, these reflections could not clarify the meaning of ‘irodian’, because I was unable to specify the public properties or activities that could serve as a model for an inner mental state. This realization led to a further examination of the relation between public properties, meanings and behavior. W. V. Quine’s influential work, (Quine, 1960), precipitated a sustained discussion. He introduced the idea of radical translation by another fable of a person who gets shipwrecked on a small island where the natives are friendly, but share no common language with their visitor. The visitor tries to learn the rudiments of the language by pointing to public objects and trying to provoke a verbal response. A rabbit popping out of a bush provokes the response “Gavagai”, which is reinforced by other natives repeating the same response. This does not supply a basis for concluding that ‘Gavagai’ means ‘rabbit’. Consider a similar response in English based the same method of ostentation. Driving by a farm one points to the animals and says “Beef” to the tourist who speaks no English. When they have lunch at a Burger King he points to the content of the meal and says “Beef”. In the grocery store he again utters the one word sentence “Beef” when he points to steak in a tray and to a can of soup. Fortunately, he refrained from using the same term to characterize a customer’s argument with the manager or the manifestations of the manager’s protracted weight-lifting program. This process of ostentation leads to stimulus synonymy. Quine counsels against a search for meanings. Donald Davidson (1985) adapted this into a project of radical interpretation. To interpret the normal statements of another person I must believe that she intends to tell the truth, believes what she says, and desires to communicate. Normal human discourse presupposes beliefs, intentions,

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and desires on the part of both participants. There are, to be sure, lies, deceptions, game playing, and various strategies of concealment. But they are recognized as anomalies only against the background of a normal practice of honest informative communication. These considerations about the relation between the attributions of mental states and the meaningfulness of discourse may be extended to human actions. Charles Taylor (1964) argued that distinctively human behavior requires an explanation in terms of purpose. However, such a purposeful explanation is meaningful only when the action is seen in the agent’s intentional environment, the environment as perceived and implicitly interpreted by the agent. The attribution of mental states plays an essential role in institutionalized forms of speaking. In many cases behavior can be identified as behavior of a certain kind only if it is seen as proceeding from a certain type of belief or desire. To recognize particular behavior as an instance of buying, selling, promising, marrying, lying, or telling a story, requires attributing the requisite intentions to the agent. (Kenny, 1992). John Searle (1998, chap. 5), has extended such reasoning to collective intentionality. What sort of reality can be attributed to money? Physically, a dollar bill is just a piece of paper with fancy printing. But, particular pieces of paper count as money in an environment in which other people also accept it as money. Other pieces of paper count as theater tickets, traffic tickets, marriage licenses, or subpoenas. This depends on a collective intentionality and its embodiment in interlocking nested sets of institutional structures. A similar analysis can be applied to property or marriage. I can claim a lot as my property or cohabitation as a marriage only in a social environment that recognizes and respects these institutions. Searle’s formula, “X counts as Y in C”, can be extended to actions such as making a promise, rendering a verdict, or performing a wedding. These also require collective intentionality. Since analysis dispenses with the central role of the transcendental, or any other, ego, one cannot but wonder what role the individual plays in the overall conceptual geometry. Strawson (1959) set the precedent. We often refer to particular things by linking them to better known particulars: the man who shot Jesse James, the building across from the Courthouse. To avoid an infinite chain, there must be some class of particulars that ground the referential process. By examining and eliminating various possibilities Strawson concluded that only spatio-temporal objects could play this role. In a later study, (Strawson, 1992), he reached a similar conclusion by inquiring how general concepts are instantiated. Among objects persons have a special role as the subjects of both physical and mental predicates.

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He opposes Descartes’ grounding of knowledge in the self by analyzing the use of mental predicates. These are learned through ascription to others and the subject of which they are predicated is the person, not the soul as separate from the body. This analysis, unfortunately did not suffice for ‘irodian’. I might ascribe it to others, but they could not ascribe it to me or themselves. Here the contrast with phenomenology is pertinent. Phenomenological analysis typically centers on first-person analysis, how I experience reality. An emphasis on dialog introduces a second-person, or I-thou, analysis. Strawson exemplifies the general analytic reliance on a third-person approach, treating persons as a special type of object. This difference in general orientation is the major obstacle blocking constructive dialog between the two traditions. Before considering their common failing we should reflect on the significance of this gap in perspectives. One way to do this is to consider a leading figure in each tradition who sought to close the gap. It is sometimes claimed that the distinctively Oxford analytic philosophy was born in Isaiah Berlin’s room in Oxford, where Berlin had extensive discussions with John Austin, A. J. Ayer, Stuart Hampshire and others. After World War II Berlin’s interests shifted toward the history of philosophy with an interest in the early opponents of the Enlightenment systematization of philosophy, Vico, Hamann, Herder, and the German Romantic movement. (Berlin, 1991) Our present concern is with what these essays reveal about Berlin’s attitude towards historical studies. As an Oxford analyst, Berlin had been concerned with the role of categories and general concepts. In opposition to Kant’s doctrine of innate categories, Berlin claimed that some basic categories are dependent on the state of particular historical cultures. He also opposed the idea that there are general methods, particularly scientific ones that could be adapted to all branches of knowledge. As an historian of ideas, he paid attention to the implicit presuppositions that characterize a thinker or an era. The way a philosopher or historian comes to recognize such implicit presuppositions is through empathy, an imaginative participation in the intellectual perspective of another person or era. One’s own self-understanding supplies the basis for this other understanding. This reflects both the central thrust of phenomenology and the role it attributes to the hermeneutical circle in coming to understand alien texts and cultures. This first and second person emphasis carried over to Berlin’s treatment of morality and government. Liberty, both negative, or freedom from restraint, and positive, or freedom to act, were central themes in his writings. Freedom presupposes choice and is in opposition to doctrines of determinism in human affairs.

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In a famous essay, written while he was a functioning analyst, Berlin used Archilocous’ fable of the fox, who sees many things, and the hedgehog, who sees one thing but examines it very carefully, to bring out the difference between writers like Tolstoy and technicians like analytic philosophers. As Berlin himself gradually metamorphized from a hedgehog to a fox he lost touch with his former hedgehog companions. The later writings of Berlin seem to have had little influence in the analytic movement. The best informed phenomenological attempt to interrelate the first and second person approach of phenomenology to the third person approach of analysis is Paul Ricoeur’s (Ricœur, 1992). Unfortunately, the torturous dialectic through which this is developed grates against analytic sensibilities. I will get at the gist of his argument by beginning with an overview of Ricoeur’s development. In his long, distinguished career Ricoeur has contributed to many aspects of contemporary philosophy: phenomenology, hermeneutics, the history of ideas, philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of language. I will siphon off two themes developed in some of these works, the nature of self-knowledge and the hermeneutics of action. Ricoeur broke with the Husserlian tradition on the status of the knowing subject. Husserl stressed the role of the subject in constituting objects of knowledge. Like Descartes he presumed the transparency of selfknowledge. Ricoeur insisted that there is no self-knowledge that is not mediated by signs, symbols, and texts.3 He developed this historically by analyzing the way in which Mesopotamian culture came to articulate deep feelings of defilement, guilt and sin and eventually developed mythical explanations, such as the Enuma Elish and the Biblical account of creation. (Ricoeur, 1969) He expanded this hermeneutics of trust through studies in the philosophy of religion and Christian theology. This was complemented by a hermeneutics of suspicion, focusing on Marx and Freud. Freud believed that some experiences are so painful that the memory of them is suppressed. Yet, the memories linger in the unconscious through emotion-laden symbols. One goal of therapy is to articulate these repressed memories. Freud extended this from individuals to cultures by an analysis of primitive myths as expression of religious delusions. Ricoeur uses this reinterpretation of Freudian analysis to highlight the role of language in philosophical hermeneutics. In Ricoeur’s view a critical awareness of the role of language is the common denominator linking analytic philosophy, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and philosophical anthropology. (Ricœur, 1979)

3

Ricoeur’s own summary is given in Ricoeur, 1989 (1983).

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A second trend in Ricoeur’s writings is the hermeneutics of action. This is an unfamiliar approach to a specialized use of the term ‘action’. To reduce the complexity, we will begin with a trivial example. Three referees are in a barroom discussing their philosophies of calling balls and strikes. The empiricist says “I call them as I see them”. The realist retorts “I call them as they are”. The conventionalist concludes the discussion with the loud claim “They ain’t nothing till I call them something”. What happens when one of them calls a third strike on a batter? If anyone else calls the pitch a strike it is merely an opinion. The umpire’s call, as the conventionalist insisted, makes the pitch a strike. Ricoeur developed the idea that interpreting an action is similar to interpreting a text. To make sense of this we need to distinguish actions from events. An action such as an umpire calling a strike, or a CEO calling a meeting to order, could be characterized as an event by simply describing the physical motions involved. Such an event description, however, cannot accommodate the real effects of the actions described. The umpire’s calling the pitch a strike makes it a strike. Calling the meeting to order confers on a group the status of a deliberative, decision-making unit. Human actions can be specified as actions only in the context of a shared world. This involves the same basic problematic that Searle summarizes in his rule, “X counts as Y in Z”. The specification of an action involves considerations of agents, situations, circumstances, motives, intentions, and anticipated consequences. This presupposes a shared accommodation to the social reality involved. It also presupposes an ability to recognize the intentions of others and of their ability to recognize my intentions. It may seem grossly unrealistic to impose such cognitive structures on am umpire calling pitches. Suppose the batter declares, “I’m not out, because the ump didn’t mean it when he called the pitch a strike.” No one would take such a claim seriously or seek to settle the issue by having the umpire perform some sort of introspective analysis of his intentions. An institutional presupposition of the game of baseball is that the umpire intends his calls. The batter knows this and realizes that the umpire and other players know that he knows this. An analysis of actions as human actions must consider an individual as someone embedded in complex social relations structured by conventions, precedents, and implicit presuppositions. One cannot recognize oneself as an agent without recognition of others as fellow agents. Every action is an interaction. Ricoeur is concerned with developing an adequate conception of a historically embedded moral agent. He initiated this in his protracted study on time and narrative, where he introduced the idea of a narrative identity, a locus where history and fiction meet. In Oneself as Another he

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extends this by distinguishing two senses of identity: idem identity, based on the spatio-temporal perdurance of a physical body; and ipse identity, based on the development of a human agent. To develop this and bridge the gap between analysis and phenomenology he begins with an analytic detour, summarizing and evaluating analysts answers to the questions. Who is speaking?, Who is acting? To answer the first, he considers the Strawson’s analysis of identifying reference and his treatment of mentalist predicates based on the principle that self ascription presupposes other ascription. While valid, this slights the differences in ascriptions. My mental states are felt. Yours are observed. Others are implied. Strawson’s analysis must be extended to include a reflexive theory of utterances. To develop the role of reflexivity he considers Austen’s distinction of types of speech acts. Perlocutionary acts, such as persuading or frightening, produce an effect in the listener. Grice’s analysis of discourse extended this by developing the notion of speaker intention. In a normal conversation one speaks in such a way that the hearer not only recognizes the meaning of the utterance, but also recognizes the speaker’s intention as inviting, cajoling, pleading, or threatening. This reciprocal recognition of speaker’s intentions requires a reflexive analysis. What anchors my utterances in such a dialog is not my utterance as an event, but the ‘I’ as subject limiting the world and as an object of identifying reference. To see what kind of self can fulfill this dual role Ricoeur takes up the topic of intentional actions. Here again Ricoeur begins with an analytic detour through Anscombe’s treatment of intention and Davidson’s treatment of actions and evens. Methodologically, the key difference is a switch from an adverbial to a verbal presentation. Analysts take as a paradigm: “X did Y intentionally” with, for Davidson, reasons as causes explaining the relation between discrete individual events. Ricoeur’s paradigm case: “X intended . . .” focuses on the agent and her motives and goals. These are not known by some inner eye, but require rules of interpretation and norms of execution. This eventually leads to attestation, a concept that plays a pivotal role in Ricoeur’s philosophy. I attest to myself as one who acts, suffers, responds, plans, and comes under moral judgments. As Ricoeur sees it, the descriptive account of the self, proper to analysis, does not include an ethical dimension. The narrative account of the self, which he developed earlier, reflects morality through the choices that shape the narrative self. Attestations ushers in a prescriptive dimension. One should recognize the call to live well with and for others within righteous institutions. The ethical issues involved will be treated in Chapter 5.

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What I am siphoning off from Ricoeur’s long involuted development can be put in simpler terms. Medieval Aristotelianism explained the self in ontological terms. In the chain of being hierarchy visible beings were progressively graded as material, vegetative, sentient, and rational. A fusion of Platonism and Christian tradition cast the individual as a soul-body composite, with the soul as the seat of rationality. Then ontology grounded ethics via natural law theory and the presupposition that the universe manifested a divine plan. Descartes switched to an epistemological foundation. Though he did not present a systematic development of ethics he presented a model tree of knowledge in which first philosophy supplies a ground for ethics. Kant fine-tuned the foundational role of the transcendental ego, the isolated knower representing humans as such. This transcendental ego grounded ethics by issuing categorical imperatives imposing obligations on all rational beings. Twentieth century philosophy dispensed with any such ontological or epistemological grounding of ethics. In the early analytic tradition, G. E. Moore attempted to give ethics an intuitive foundation. Discerning individuals could recognize good as a non-natural quality. Later analysts focused more on the logic of prescriptive statements. While this situated ethics in the lived world, it did not supply ethical guidelines. One of the most influential British ethicians, Bernard Williams, forcefully argued that any system of morality is misguided. It seeks to substitute external reasons, such as abstract principles, for the internal reasons operative in ethical choices. (Williams, 2006) In the phenomenological tradition, Heidegger returned to a foundational role for the individual. His focus, however, was not on a transcendental ego, but on Dasein, the mere presence of one thrown into the world. Quentin Lauer (1965, p. 185) summarized an underlying theme of the five phenomenologists he studied: “They agree most of all in their contention that philosophy can only consist in an analysis of what is present in consciousness prior to philosophical inquiry.” This pre-philosophical awareness could not supply a foundation for ethics. Ricoeur’s idem/ipse distinction effectively distinguishes between idem, the common denominator of the phenomenological tradition and ipse, the social agent. He extended the hermeneutics that had been applied to texts and traditions to action. Strawson insisted that self-ascription of mentalistic predicates presupposes other-ascription. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of action entails that every action is essentially an interaction. One must regard oneself as another. The ipse is constituted as a social being through a network of interactions. The striving to achieve a good life entails recognizing similar strivings in others. The isolated individual, or transcendental ego, central to earlier traditions,

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is replaced by a social individual, whose orientation to reality is characterized by a combination of Heidegger’s Sorge, or care, and Spinoza’s conatus, or striving for a good life. A truly good life requires a society with just laws and supporting institutions. Thus, a non-ontological concept of the self as a social agent supplies a basis for relating the concept of the individual to the concepts of morality, the social order and government. Since it does not clarify ‘irodian,’ I reluctantly dropped the issue. Here a comment on the place of ethics is in order. The Aristotelian, Thomistic, and natural law traditions offered an ontological grounding of ethics based on man’s place in an ordered universe. This relied on theological presuppositions, that the natural order of things reflected a divine plan, or for Aristotle a purposefulness in nature, in which humans had a central role. Acceptance of evolution effectively undercut these presuppositions. Individuals might hold them, but they were not the presuppositions of public discussion. The Kantian tradition grounded ethics in the transcendental ego, the individual proclaiming moral imperatives binding on all rational beings. In addition to theoretical objections, this encounters a practical difficulty. Very few people recognize such categorical imperatives as binding. Utilitarians supplied an ethical calculus, calculating the morality of an action by its contribution to the greatest good of the greatest number. This broadened from act utilitarianism to rule utilitarianism, which set general norms. This encountered personal difficulties similar to Kantianism. Why should an individual confronting a moral choice feel bound by these abstract principles? In the existential tradition, John Paul Sartre offered a spur of the moment situation ethics. This did not supply general guidelines4. Ricoeur presented a quasi-ontological ground of ethics, based on individuals as social agents in a lived world. An alternative strategy is to ignore the complexity, accept the general idea and try to improve it. We will return to this idea in Chapter 5. Despite differences in style and much mutual intolerance, phenomenologists and analysts share some common traits. They represent humanistic philosophies that accord the individual a central role. They both reject the Aristotelian and scholastic reliance on an ontological grounding in the individual as a special type of substance. Except for Husserl, they also reject the epistemological grounding of philosophy in the transcendental ego as developed by Descartes, Kant, or Hegel. The individual considered is someone historically centered in a particular culture. The stress on language, common to analysis and the hermeneutical wing of phenomenology 4

A more detailed treatment of these and other positions can be found in MacKinnon (2012).

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leads to a focus on ordinary linguistic usage as the repository of the categories and concepts we use to shape experiences, express positions, and interact with fellow humans. Philosophy in both traditions is a distinctively humanistic discipline. They also share some common shortcomings. The one of immediate concern is the relative neglect of science. A factor in this neglect is the specialization endemic to the current academic scene. Much of current analytic philosophy is concerned with highly specialized issues that only have significance within the analytic tradition. In the phenomenological tradition, the Geisteswissenschaften/Naturwissenschaften distinction supplies a tool for contrasting the immediacy of the humanistic disciplines, when properly conceived, with the methodological naiveté of quantitative approaches to the social sciences. Philosophy begins with an acceptance of the human existential situation. Individuals are compelled to cope with and adapt to the lived world prior to developing theories about parts of the world. Naiveté enters when philosophers interpret scientific theories in terms of a relation between a theory and the reality it theorizes. A phenomenologist would argue: “What do you mean by ‘reality’? If you mean reality as it exists independent of human knowledge, then you are naively presupposing a God’s-eye view of reality.5 If you are not relying on this divine view, then you are implicitly presupposing the pre-theoretical sense of ‘reality’ that depends on participation in a life world. The hermeneutic turn brought the humanistic sciences (psychology, anthropology, sociology) into the arena of phenomenological analysis. Even here, however, a residual tension remains. A phenomenological approach takes as basic the first and second person perspectives proper to dialog and interaction in the lived world. My understanding (Verstehung) of another developed through interaction and dialog depends on her understanding of me and on my understanding of myself. This is a dynamic process always open to change. An empirical approach to the humanistic sciences relies on a third person perspective, treating persons as objects of study. So, a phenomenologist is often more concerned with revising the humanistic sciences to fit their norms than with accepting established results. Fundamental physics presents a special problem for philosophers on both sides of the channel. There is a shared suspicion that an acceptance of fundamental physics as the court of last appeal in matters physical will 5

This term, popularized by H. Putnam, reflects a view of God as a super-human knower, not the Thomistic idea of a God whose act of knowing is identical with his act of existing.

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undercut philosophy as a humanistic discipline. This general suspicion can be sharpened into two theses. 1. If physical determinism is true, then humanistic philosophy is only treating epiphenomena. 2. If the basis relation between human knowledge and physical reality is set by a correlation between a mathematical formalism and aspects of reality, then humanistic philosophy has nothing significant to say about physical reality. These theses require amplification. On the first one it should be noted that physical determinism is merely the current species of universal determinism. Any form of universal determinism is incompatible with human freedom. This was evident when the determinism was theological rather than physical. A Christian tradition, stemming from St. Paul, St. Augustine, and John Calvin holds that God predetermines every event in the history of the universe. The difficulty in reconciling this with human freedom precipitated a famous Sixteenth century controversy among Catholic theologians. Dominican theologians resolved the apparent conflict by teaching that God not only predetermines human actions, he also predetermines their modality. Some are free. Others are not. Their Jesuit opponents took an acceptance of human freedom as the starting point of the debate. To handle the conflict, they transferred the mystery from the modality of human freedom to the nature of divine knowledge, postulating a scientia media to characterize God’s knowledge of free human acts. Pope Clement VIII sought the opinion of leading theologians and the theology faculties of the foremost Spanish universities. After receiving twelve reports he set up a commission (Congregatio de auxiliis) to settle the issue. It had sixty-eight sessions before Clement’s death. Seventeen more were held under Pope Paul V without resolving the issue. Finally, the Pope dissolved the congregation and effected a practical resolution. He ordered each side to cease labeling their opponents heretics. The opposing positions came to be regarded as two ends of a rope that meet somewhere over the rainbow. A few years later the same conflict erupted in the Dutch Calvinist church. Followers of the theologian, Jacobus Arminius, insisted on accepting the reality of human freedom. Orthodox Calvinists objected. They called a synod, from which Arminians were excluded, to settle the issue. It condemned Arminius and his followers as heretics. This did not settle the theological debates.

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Physical determinism is more a bottom up affair than the top down theological determinism. Democritos anticipated it. Plutarch reports him as claiming: “from infinite time back are foreordained by necessity all things that were and are and are to come.”6 In his Philosophical Essay on Probabilities Laplace gave the program it original charter: We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if that intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes. (Laplace 1951 [1814])

For a strict physical determinist, the appearance of human freedom is an epiphenomenon. A basic theory need not explain epiphenomena. Meteorology explains the formation and general shapes of clouds. It does not explain why a particular cloud formation looks like Abraham Lincoln wearing a stovepipe hat, or Snoopy and his doghouse. This is not a shortcoming of meteorology as a science. In current discussions, the conflict between freedom and determinism pivots around the issue of downward causality. Another meteorological analogy is helpful. In the evening news, I watch a pretty, provocatively dressed meteorologist explain that an incoming cold front will cause a drop in temperatures. A reductive physical account explains weather phenomena in terms of molecular collisions and heat energy. The cold front is not a macroscopic cause exerting an effect on molecular motions. It is simply a way of providing a macroscopic account in familiar terms. Any attempt to explain weather phenomena by integrating over trillions of molecular interactions would be a practical impossibility. I raise my hand to wave to a friend. My volition would seem to be the cause of the resulting arm and finger motions. On a physiological level this sequence of events is explained in terms of nerve impulses beginning in the brain and being transmitted to nerves controlling the muscles in my arms and fingers. The human body contains billions of nerve cells. An explanation of the transmission of an impulse from one nerve cell to another involves a complex of electrical and chemical processes. Explaining the overall process by integrating over all the processes involved is a prac6

Cited from J. W. N.Watkins, “Unity of Popper’s thought” in Schilpp 1974, The Philosophy of Karl Popper, p.373.

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tical impossibility Here too we rely on a macroscopic descriptive account couched in familiar terms. Accepting this as sufficient eliminates any appeal to human volition as a causal factor. The old deterministic debates take a new form. Instead of Dominicans versus Jesuits or Calvinists versus Arminians it is reductionists versus emergentists. The Congregatio de auxiliis debates are replaced by exchanges of articles in philosophical journals. Accusations of heresy are replaced by charges of rational inconsistency. The debates between reductionists and emergentists will be considered in Chapter 4. The second thesis is more a matter of the philosophical interpretation of physics than of physics itself. Physicists rely on language in explanations of theories and in discussions between experimenters and theoreticians. Philosophers of science develop theories about scientific explanations. In the accounts that now dominate the philosophical arena language as such plays no part in the interpretation of fundamental physical theories. Interpretation is regarded as a relation between a mathematical formalism and aspects of physical reality. The details will be considered in a later chapter. Now we simply focus on the significance of developing philosophical theories about physical theories that eliminate language as a constituent factor. Heidegger insisted that the world is given to us through language. Strawson’s descriptive metaphysics is based on an analysis of what language implicitly says reality is. Davidson’s account of radical interpretation depends on a triangulation. To interpret the speech of another, I presuppose that she intends to communicate and can refer to aspects of reality that we both recognize. Depriving language of any significant role in accounts of physical reality turns linguistically oriented philosophies into things of rags and patches. Philosophy as a humanistic discipline is treating epiphenomena and cultural games, not physical reality. A proper handling of such issues as physical determinism should be carried in a context that recognizes the role of physics and of science in general. We will return to these issues in Chapter 4.

CHAPTER THREE THREE GRAND SYNTHESES

Philosophy in the grand tradition sought to give an overall account of everything significant. This is not a feasible project. Knowledge is too complex. The specialized disciplines are too independent. Philosophy gradually retreated from its role as queen of the sciences to a constitutional monarch, who reigned but did not rule, to an usherette, escorting other disciplines to their proper places in the grand hierarchy, and finally to a detached observer analyzing the linguistic behavior characterizing different rooms in the house of knowledge. Yet there is still a widely-felt need to understand how things, in the widest sense of the term, hang together in the widest sense of the term. This is a philosophical enterprise, regardless of whether it is pursued by professional philosophers, physicists, theologians, economists, computer bloggers, or science fiction writers. Philosophers in the mainstream traditions no longer pursue such goals on the grounds that the goals are unobtainable. However, philosophers outside the mainstream have attempted syntheses integrating the five fundamental concepts. I do not believe that any of them have really succeeded. Yet their efforts clarify the complexities of the problem and the obstacles to progress. I will consider the efforts of three gifted polymaths, Alfred North Whitehead, Karl Popper, and Bernard Lonergan.

3.1 Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) No modern philosopher was more concerned with a coherent philosophical account of the five foundational concepts than Whitehead. “Speculative Philosophy is the endeavor to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted.” (Whitehead 1929). Though his extensive writings have had an influence on Protestant theology, they have played almost no role in analytic philosophy or phenomenology. For our purposes, it is helpful to see how he came to develop his overall perspective and why it was so widely rejected or ignored.

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Whitehead’s intellectual career is customarily divided into three periods: the Cambridge period (1884-1919), when he worked in mathematics and collaborated with Bertrand Russell on the monumental Principia Mathematica, developing logic as a foundation for mathematics; the London period (1910-1924), when his writings were chiefly on philosophy of science and education; and his Harvard period (1924-1927), when he published his major philosophical works. I will focus on an underlying continuity that eventually led to his attempt at an overall coherence.1 In Whitehead’s student days some kind of epistemological atomism served as a presupposition for understanding both mathematics and physics. In geometry one began with points. A moving point generates a line. A moving line generates a plane. A moving plane generates a volume. In the then current physics one begins with atoms. Complexes of atoms form molecules. Complexes of molecules form organic structures. British empiricism takes individual sensations as the units whose combinations and transformations support the edifice of knowledge. Whitehead gradually reversed this building block approach to each field. An isolated geometric point is relatively unintelligible and nonfunctional. A point should be understood as the intersection of two lines. Relations are basic and points are conceptually derivative. Numbers supplied the customary building blocks for mathematics. In the Principia Whitehead and Russell adopted Frege’s interpretation of numbers as sets of sets. Here again relations were basic. In sensation, as Whitehead interpreted it, we never experience an instant. We experience durations. Making instants foundational represents a fallacy of misplaced concreteness, one of the many categorical terms Whitehead introduced. This anti-atomism could be extended from sensations to concepts. In the Principia axioms were foundational and concepts derivative, suggesting a relational approach to concepts. This anti-reductive epistemological analysis could be extended to physics. Einstein’s special relativity built on instants. Where one observer would perceive two instants as simultaneous, a relatively moving observer would see them as earlier and later. Whitehead’s revision, influenced by Bergson’s account of duration, took durations as basic. Making durations basic undercut the traditional arguments stemming from Galileo and Locke that primary qualities of size and shape are objective, while secondary qualities, like color and sound, are subjective. Whitehead’s 1

In addition to Whitehead’s own writings the present survey was influenced by: Schilpp 1941; Price 1954; Lowe 1985, 1990; Keeton 1984; and extensive discussions with William Warren Bartley III.

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notion of ‘prehension’ supplied a more complex unit of experience. A prehension involves sensation, emotion, and purpose. This treatment of science conditioned the intellectual mindset that Whitehead brought to his major philosophical work, (Whitehead 1929). Two other influences should be noted. From Bergson and from Russell’s interpretation of Leibnitz Whitehead drew the idea that the traditional organic/inorganic distinction is a bifurcation of nature. The same conceptual categories should apply to both realms. William James’s radical empiricism influenced Whitehead’s view that sensations should be viewed as parts of a complex ongoing process and that personal identity could be defended on a non-substantial basis. Prior to Process and Reality Whitehead had come to accept process as more basic than substance, events as more basic than objects, an organic view of nature, attributing both psychic and physical properties to all actual entities, and a view of the subject as something emerging from nature, but not an epistemological foundation for a new synthesis. The new synthesis, as the earlier quote indicated, was to come from the development and imposition of a new categorial system. Whitehead proposed four general categories: The Ultimate, Existence, Explanation, and Obligation. Each has many subcategories. Here I will merely indicate some of the key features of his metaphysical system. Traditional metaphysics is interpreted as an outcome of Aristotle’s translation of the subject-predicate form of speech into substance-property ontology, with each individual object a distinct spatio-temporal unit. For Whitehead process is basic. All members of his universe are interconnected because each actual occasion is a concrescence of components of earlier members fused into a new unity of existence. The old materialism generated dualism, as the only way to fit distinctively human properties into the general order. Whitehead had an organismic view of all reality with no sharp separation between elementary matter and organic beings. This view extended from space and time, where durations and intervals were considered basic, to God, whose primordial nature is evolving along with the universe. Imposing this categorial scheme as a basis for a new systematization of knowledge presented two major problems. The first fits Neurath’s famous analogy of attempting to repair a boat plank by plank while keeping the boat afloat. Whitehead had to rely on the old categorial system with its subject/object duality and a conception of localized objects with properties, as a basis for introducing the new categorial system. This could be overcome if people learned how to use the new system. Whitehead’s treatment of universals and particulars (pp. 76-80) illustrates how this can

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be done. The particular/universal distinction is an outgrowth of the subject-predicate structure of Indo-European languages. The notion of a universal is of that which can enter into the description of many particulars; while the notion of a particular is that it is described by universals. Both notions, in Whitehead’s view, represent misconceptions. His basic principle of relativity requires that these notions be replaced by ‘actual entity’. Actual entities ingress on other actual entities. The second and greater difficulty was to prove that the new system is adequate to achieve his goal of supplying a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience could be interpreted. I share the widespread opinion that this metaphysical system is unacceptable. It simply does not work. Before supplying some reasons for this evaluation, it is interesting to consider Whitehead’s own evaluation. When Lucien Price asked the 84 year old Whitehead when he felt a conscious mastery of his subject, Whitehead replied that he never felt a mastery, and never even felt adequate. (Price 1954, p. 255) Elsewhere he claimed: “Our reasonings grasp at straws for premises, and float on gossamers for deductions.” (Whitehead 1925, p. 79). Whitehead was convinced that an overall philosophical unification was needed. He hoped that the bold synthesis he offered would spark such a development and contribute to the ongoing dialog needed for its fulfillment. I will consider the way Whitehead interrelated the five concepts we have taken as fundamental. We begin with the physical order. The key test for the adequacy of the new system, as Whitehead realized, was its applicability to basic physics. The subtitle of Process and Reality is “An Essay in Cosmology”. The adequacy can be considered on two stages, Whitehead’s own work and the potential for explaining science that his system of categories offers. On the first level Whitehead’s theory of relativity is, as he admitted2, incompatible with Einstein’s theory. Experimental evidence supports Einstein’s general relativity, not Whitehead’s. His remarks on quantum physics reflect the semi-classical physics of the old Bohr-Sommerfeld atomic theory, rather than the new quantum mechanics. This still leaves open the question of whether Whitehead’s categorial system, if adopted, could supply a better foundation for interpreting relativity and quantum physics. Abner Shimony, a competent physicist as well as a philosopher, struggled to develop such a foundation and reluctantly admitted that the project did not seem feasible.(Shimony 1965). 2 See Whitehead 1925, p. 114. For an explanation of this incompatibility see Grünbaum 1963, pp. 344-353, 425-428.

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I do not know of any further serious attempt to supply a Whiteheadian foundation for contemporary physics. I think that there is a more serious objection than the incompatibility of Whitehead’s categorial system and quantum theory. What Whitehead envisioned, and what the implementation of his system requires, is that his categorial system replace the extended ordinary language used in discussing experiments and reporting results. I don’t think that this is possible, for reasons treated in detail in my (2012). Furthermore, the present system of describing experiments and reporting results works fine. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. The individual. Whitehead emphatically rejects both the traditional subject/object distinction as an ontological foundation, and the knower/ known distinction as an epistemological foundation. (334-372; AI, chap. 11)3. The individual must be understood organically as a part of the natural order. The status of an individual, apart from any special preeminence, is conditioned by the development of society. Our most basic relation to reality is through feeling. He characterizes our initial response by adapting the Quaker term, ‘concern’, reminiscent of Heidegger’s ‘Sorge’. Feeling can be physical or conceptual. Conceptual feelings involve consciousness, remembrances of past experiences, and anticipations of future experiences. The subject is isolated from this complex flux only through abstraction. Here the decisive contribution, In Whitehead’s view, is the Platonic conception of the soul. Whitehead does not accept Plato’s concept of the soul as immortal. What he takes from Plato is the idea of the self as a rational agent guided by intellectual ideals. The Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions represent only a limited realization of these ideals. “Can there be any doubt that the power of Christianity lies in its revelation in act of that which Plato divined in theory?” (AI. p. 263) However, these religions supplied the zeal and public enthusiasm that philosophy cannot generate. Materialism, Whitehead’s term for radical reductionism, is simply incompatible with the presuppositions underlying morality and civilized society. Just as the status of the individual depends on the stage of a society’s development, so too does morality. Here Whitehead only treats one moral issue in detail, slavery and radical inequality. (AI, chap. 2). Among ancient philosophers only Aristotle explicitly defends the institution of slavery against the charge that it is contrary to nature by arguing that inferior individuals are by nature slaves (Aristotle, Politics, chap. 3)4. As Aristotle recognizes, slavery is usually based on conquest. However, the 3

Page numbers without citations refer to Whitehead 1929. Whitehead 1925 will be cited as AI (Adventures in Ideas). 4 Citations from Aristotle rely on McKeon 1941.

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relation of natural superiority is presumed to hold between Greeks and barbarians. Whitehead puts the issue in a different context, one that relates to the issues treated in the end of chapter two. In the ancient world the institution of slavery was seen as a necessary condition for the survival of civilized society. It supplied the energy and handled the drudgery that free citizens avoided. In Greece, it was considered degrading for a free citizen to work for another. Other philosophers did not discuss it because they generally accepted it as inevitable. Thus Plato says that the human animal is not readily amenable to the indispensable distinction between real slaves and real free men and masters. (Laws, 777). The Stoics stressed freedom as a basic human right. Since only fragments of their works survive it is not clear whether any of them advocated the abolition of slavery. Even Epictetus, the slave turned philosopher, advised slaves to bear and forbear. Neither the Old or the New Testament or the Qu’ran advocated abolishing slavery, though all counsel masters to be kind to slaves. In medieval times the practice of slavery in Western Europe was generally replaced by serfdom. Yet slavery persisted in the Mediterranean region. German tribes enslaved so many Slavs that their name came to stand for the institution. Whitehead did not treat this as an issue of individual rights, but as an issue of the morality of society and its development stage. As such, it illustrates a conflict between individual rights and the perceived needs of society. The two greatest institutionalized man-made evils are war and slavery. Defenders of each institution have consistently argued that it is necessary to sacrifice individual rights to life and freedom for the preservation of particular societies. If slavery is necessary for the preservation of civilized society, then its abolition involves the destruction of civilized society. This is the way the issue was resolved historically. The success of the Nineteenth century abolitionist movement depended on a complex of factors. The Enlightenment traditions considered earlier led to a doctrine of freedom as an inalienable human right. This doctrine was loosely shared by philosophers, a changing legal tradition, and religious reformers culminating in the Quakers’ leading role in the British and American abolitionist movement. In the background was England’s leading role in the Industrial Revolution, which replaced human energy with mechanical and electrical energy. In the American South slave labor was still considered a necessary condition for collecting and processing the cotton crop on which the economy depended. Its defense, as a peculiar institution, used ‘peculiar’ to imply that the institution did not come under normal rules and was effectively shut off from discussion.

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Whitehead interpreted the abolition of slavery as a short-lived success. The industrial revolution also brought the masses to the big cities where they eked out a subsistence living while supporting the growing wealth of the new elite. In addition to the laissez-faire economic justifications considered earlier some industrialists, like Andrew Carnegie, gave the new trend an evolutionary justification. Laws or unions that attempt to limit the decision-making powers of the Captains of Industry are frustrating the evolutionary progress of society. The moral issue that Whitehead puts in an historical perspective is a conflict between individual rights and the conditions for an evolving society’s survival and prosperity. To see this as a moral problem with historical dimensions imagine a not too distant future where industrialists have learned to produce artificial meat that is nourishing and does not taste like tofu. Suppose that the population has grown and the food supply shrunk so much that this becomes the standard food supply. Might not the enlightened citizens of that era look back on us as people who sacrificed the rights of innocent animals to support their own comforts? Might they also look back on us as people who were willing to sacrifice individual’s right to live to support the barbaric concept of settling conflicts between nations by warfare? Accepted moral codes do not handle such evolutionary developments. Whitehead’s evaluation of established moral codes is clear. Moral codes have suffered from the exaggerated claims made for them. The dogmatic fallacy has here done its worst. Each such code has been put out by a God on a mountain top, or by a Saint in a cave, or by a divine Despot on a throne, or, at the lowest, by ancestors with a wisdom beyond later question. In any case each code is incapable of improvement; and unfortunately in details they fail to agree either with each other or with our existing moral intuitions. (AI, p. 289)

This citation sets the tone for Whitehead’s views on government. He is not concerned with the specifics of any government but with the type of society we should endeavor to develop. He defines a civilized society as one exhibiting the five qualities of Truth, Beauty, Art, Adventure, and Peace. (AI, p.273). The meanings assigned each of these terms is conditioned by the way it fits into his metaphysical system. If process is the underlying reality, then static perfection is an illusion. Society and government must continue to grow and change. Here the philosopher has the task of thinking the thoughts that run ahead of civilization. The vigor of a growing society stems from its attempts to achieve high aims, even those that are unobtainable.

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3.2 Karl Popper (1901-1994) Popper had a distinguished career as a philosopher of science, a historian of ideas, and a logician. He became influential in philosophy after World War II, when he accepted an appointment at the London School of Economics and published an expanded translation of his 1934 Logic der Forschung as The Logic of Discovery. He championed human freedom against totalitarianism, whose philosophical roots he traced back to Plato, Hegel, and Marx. (Popper 1950). He thought of government as a necessary evil whose powers should be curtailed, whenever possible. Popper was primarily a philosopher of science. Yet he never fit into the mainstream philosophy of science. The basic reason is quite clear. From his initial opposition to Logical Positivism to his later opposition to both analysis and phenomenology he sought to replace, rather than advance, the reigning traditions. Popper’s interpretation of science did find support from some outstanding scientists, including four Nobel Laureates: Erwin Schrödinger (physics), P. B. Medewar (medicine), Frederick Hayek (economics), and John Eccles (medicine). A presentation of his position should begin with his account of scientific knowledge. From a youthful discussion with his father, he reached a position which he called his anti-essentialist exhortation. “Never let yourself be goaded into taking seriously problems about words and their meanings. What must be taken seriously are questions of fact, and assertions about facts: theories and hypotheses, the problems they solve and the problems they raise.” After a brief juvenile engagement with Marxism and a brief exposure to Adler’s Individual Psychology and Freud’s Psychoanalysis he attended a lecture by Einstein. What he found particularly significant was Einstein’s insistence that his theory of general relativity be tested and could be refuted if his prediction, that spectral lines emerging from a very massive source should be shifted towards the red end of the spectrum, failed. Marxism and psychoanalysis were not open to refutation. They were formulated with escape clauses that would enable them to accommodate almost any contrary evidence. These reflections led to Popper’s principle of demarcation. The methodological difference separating science from pseudoscience or metaphysics is the principle of falsification . The true scientific attitude is not one of looking for verification of a theory, which the Positivists stressed, but for crucial tests that could refute the theory. Any theory that is not falsifiable is not a scientific theory. Even well-established theories should be regarded as conjectures open to refutation. This falsificationism was later extended from human knowledge to a broader evolutionary

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context. All organisms are involved in some sort of trial and error method of solving the problems their environments provide. For plants and animals, refutation often takes the form of elimination. Repeated successes lead to a hierarchical system of plastic controls.(Popper 1972) The emergence of language ushered in a decisive change in the method of evolutionary adaption. Most organisms adapt to environmental challenges by somatic changes, such as developing new organs or modifying existing organs. Language makes exosomatic adaptations possible. Traditions, laws, and rules serve both as repositories of past problem solving and as a surrogate environment for more conjectures. This line of reasoning culminates in Popper’s account of three worlds. (Schilpp 1974, pp. 143-149; Popper and Eccles 1977, chap. 2). World 1 is the world of physical objects. World 2 is the world of subjective experience. World 3 is the world of statements, thoughts, and theories. Most world 3 objects, such as books, symphonies, and rules, are embodied in material artifacts. Some, like prime numbers, are not. We come to understand World 3 objects chiefly through creating them, not through an intellectual intuition of essences. However, World 3 transcends these limits. It contains, e.g., theorems that have not yet been discovered. Popper insists that World 3 has some kind of objective reality. Thus, abstract rules for building bridges have real effects in the construction of bridges. Rules for tuning musical instruments determine the physical characteristics of objects. One can even speak of exosomatic evolution. Competition between organisms is replaced by competition between theories. Popper’s World 3 relates to Plato’s realm of forms, Hegel’s objective mind, and Teilhard de Chardin’s noösphere. Popper insists on the objective reality of World 3, but does not explain this reality in objective terms. With this brief background we may consider the way in which our five fundamental concepts are integrated in Popper’s thought. Popper rejects all attempts to make the self the epistemological center of the edifice of knowledge. This would lead to a concentration on world 2. Popper sees the highest form of truth as a correspondence between world 3 objects, such as theories, and the world as it exists objectively. We will evaluate this shortly. In the present context, the key point is Popper’s insistence on objectivity, rather than subjectivity. “If I say I believe in man, I mean man as he is; and should never dream of saying that he is wholly rational.” (Popper 1962, p. 357). Popper’s attitude towards the physical order is basically one of accepting the science of the scientists, rather than imposing a metaphysics. However, the acceptance is conditioned by his interpretation of scientific theories. The only part of physics where this makes a significant difference

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between the science of the scientists and Popper’s science is in the interpretation of quantum mechanics. In the interests of honesty, I should explain the basis of my evaluation. W. W. Bartley III wrote his dissertation under Popper and was a colleague of mine until his premature death. He edited the long Postscript to the Logic of Scientific Discovery which included Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics. He also wrote five articles presenting a critical evaluation of the Schilpp volume on Popper. He always gave me preprints of these works and sought my evaluation. My discussions with Bartley stimulated my interest in Popper and contributed to the overall evaluation presented here, an evaluation which I am sure Bill would have politely rejected. Popper rejected the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, developed chiefly by Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and Wolfgang Pauli. Its emphasis on the role of the knower and on language is sharply at variance with Popper’s emphasis on realism and the objectivity of knowledge. The surprising aspect of this is that Popper regularly replaces Bohr’s doctrine with a straw dummy. He takes Bohr as preaching an end of the road interpretation of quantum mechanics. If it represents the limits of human knowledge, then no further significant discoveries in the quantum realm can be expected. Popper took the subsequent discoveries of the neutrino, the neutron, and the positron as contradicting this. Bohr’s emphasis was on the limits to which ordinary language could be extended without generating contradictions, not on quantum mechanics as a final limit of human knowledge. Pauli introduced the neutrino. Heisenberg used the neutron discovery to develop a theory of nuclear forces and to introduce the idea of isotopic spin, an idea that eventually proved very fruitful in fundamental particle physics. Bohr used it in developing the collective model of the nucleus. I find this misinterpretation surprising because Popper knew and respected Bohr. He took pride in the fact that both Bohr and Einstein attended his Princeton lecture on quantum mechanics. The misinterpretation seems to be grounded in Popper’s insistence on framing philosophical problems exclusively in his own terms. The interpretation of quantum mechanics is subsumed as part of the more general problem of subjectivism versus objectivism. To defend objectivism Popper feels obliged to destroy subjectivism in all its varied manifestations. Popper used his own propensity interpretation of probability to develop a statistical interpretation of quantum mechanics. The issue is the quantum mechanical representation of the state of a system by a function, |5>. In the mathematical formalism, a system in a particular state can be represented by a superposition of other states. In the statistical

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interpretation, each system is in a particular state. The superposition involves a collection of systems in different states. The radical quantum interpretation that a system can be in a superposition of different states is now widely accepted. It plays an essential role in fundamental particle physics and in quantum computing. Popper’s interpretation is obsolete. Popper’s treatment of evolution clearly relates to current debates between reductionists and emergentists. A critical difference separating the two sides concerns downward causation. A simple analogy, cited earlier, may clarify the significance of this peculiar terminology. A TV forecaster announces that an incoming high pressure system will cause an increase in temperatures. Physicists explain the phenomena in terms of an extremely large number of molecular collisions and the emission and absorption of radiation by molecules. In this context, the high pressure front is not regarded as a higher level cause exerting downward causality on molecules. It is simply a convenient way of referring to the lower level causes. How well does this analogy carry over to human, or animal, activities? A baseball umpire raises his right hand to signal that a pitch was a strike. It seems that his intention exerted downward causality producing arm and finger motions. A reductionist, like Jaegwon Kim, would explain the activity through physiological account of a network of nerve cells transmitting signals that eventually produce muscular activity. If these are sufficient, at least in principle, to account for the motions involved, then recourse to a higher cause, like free will or intention, is otiose. Popper treats such problems by focusing on accounts of behavior rather than causes or properties. All organisms are problem solvers. The more successful solvers come to dominate the gene pool and to account in some way for the transmission of successful methodologies. The behaviors that evolve can be distinguished into closed programs where all the details are prescribed, like a spider spinning a web, and open programs, where some details are a matter of choice. The extension of this scenario attributes an evolutionary survival value to the emergence of consciousness, which enables an organism to try different choices vicariously. Since choices, rather than organisms, are eliminated, successful choosers dominate the gene pool. Instead of asking what the self is Popper situates the emergence of self in an evolutionary perspective.5 The decisive factor, in Popper’s view, is the emergence of language. This led to self-consciousness, the emergence of goals and to a critical evaluation of hypotheses. The decisive factor in 5

See Popper 1987 and Popper and Eccles, 1981.

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the emergence of the self is a behavioral change. “The self, the personality, emerges in interaction with the other selves and with the artifacts and other objects of his environment.” (Popper and Eccles 1977, p. 49) This non-ontological approach to the self supports a functional dualism. The mind acts on the body and the body acts on the mind. However, Popper rejects Eccles’s contention that the mind might somehow survive the death of the body. On morals Popper insisted that there cannot be a normative science of morals, and the moral decisions and standard cannot be derived from anything else. Yet, Popper consistently took a strong moral stance on some basic values, especially freedom, liberty, and humanism. “Freedom of thought, and free discussion, are ultimate Liberal values, which do not really need any further justification.” (Popper 1962, p. 352)6 Popper’s view on government was shaped by his consistent opposition to totalitarianism in any form and to trends that he thought might lead to totalitarianism. He also opposed ‘historicism’, which he interprets as the position that historians can discover laws enabling them to prophecy the course of events. The coupling of anti-historicism and fear of totalitarianism leads to Popper’s evaluation of the role of government: “The state is a necessary evil; its powers are not to be multiplied beyond what is necessary” (Popper 1952, p. 350) Democracy merely provides a framework in which citizens may act in a more or less coherent way. This distrust of government led to a rejection of any large-scale government planning. All such plans rely on the historicist fallacy that the future can be predicted. Here Popper accepts the libertarian tradition. We should rely on open markets and free trade to guide the economy, not on government planning or intervention. However, he does allow for piecemeal social engineering, particularly to mitigate perceived misery. This book began with an account of the philosophs of the Enlightenment era. No other modern philosopher, except Ernst Cassirer, embodies the Enlightenment ideal as well as Popper. He had broad interests in philosophy, history, physics, biology, psychology, economics, and public policy. He strongly advocated and actively participated in critical dialogs with opposing philosophers, physicists, economists, biologists, and journalists. He was open to criticism and revised his views when he thought his critics were correct. We will further this dialectical ideal by presenting a critical evaluation of Popper’s thought. The pivotal postulate of Popper’s developed position is his account of scientific theories as conjectures open to falsifiability tests. This, for 6

See Koertge 2009.

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Popper, is the paradigm example of human knowledge and serves to make scientific theories the senior citizens of World 3. His insistence on this coupled to his practice of casting opposing positions into his own framework contributed to the neglect of Popper’s philosophy by mainstream philosophers in both the analytic and phenomenological traditions. Neither would engage in a dialog couched in Popper’s terminology. He rejected what he took as philosophies based on either the primacy of language or of subjectivism. Popper was critical of, but strongly engaged with, logical positivism. He neglected or rejected postpositivist developments in the philosophy of science. I will try to relate Popper’s thought to mainstream philosophy on three central issues: truth, induction, and the status of scientific theories. Theories of truth supply a background or issues treated in the next two chapters. For this reason our summary will go beyond Popper and consider contemporary accounts. The natural starting point for a discussion of truth is the correspondence theory. The classical formulation was given by Aristotle: “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false; while to say of what is that it is or of what is not that it is not is true.” (Metaphysics 104b25). This makes explicit the normal use of ‘true’ as a correspondence between what we say and what is. There are notorious difficulties in extending this beyond a simple ordinary language framework. Suppose we accept as true the propositions: (M) If Mozart has lived another twenty years he would have written more symphonies. (P) There are an infinite number of prime numbers. Does the truth of (M) involve a correspondence with Mozart’s unwritten symphonies? Alexandrian mathematicians reluctantly backed into an acceptance of (P) after proofs demonstrated that the assumption that there is a greatest prime number led to contradictions. Does the truth of (P) correspond to an unspecifiable infinite list of prime numbers? The truth paradoxes present a more abstract difficulty. Consider the simplest expression of the Liar paradox: (L) This sentence is false. If (L) is true, then then its claim is true. But it claims to be false. So, it must be false. If it is false, then its claim is false. So, it must be true. This, and some more complicated paradoxes, might seem like linguistic parlor games of no practical significance. However, they are significant when we consider the truth of a deductive system. If a formal logical system generates a contradiction then, as logicians can demonstrate, anything follows. This makes the system worthless. Physicists have learned how to work with systems, like quantum electrodynamics, whose consistency

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cannot be established. They treat them as effective theories, or as theories that are applicable within specified limits. Within these limits, they generates no radical inconsistencies. However, some philosophical reconstructions of scientific theories cast them as formal systems. Other theories of truth were developed, such as the consistency theory, the pragmatic theory, and the assertive-redundancy theory. The difficulties these competing theories generated inclined some philosophers to the position that truth is not the sort of thing we should have a theory of. However, there is one account of truth that is limited, highly formal, but demonstrably adequate within sharply defined limits and demonstrably free of contradictions. This is the famous article by Tarski (Tarski 1956 [1931]) that Popper relies on. I will sketch Tarski’s argument. Tarski’s stated goal is to develop some form of a correspondence theory. He claims that an attempt to do this in an ordinary language framework occasions too many difficulties. So, he relies on a formulation in a formal language. A formal language is really not a language. It is a set of symbols manipulated according to explicitly formulated rules. Tarski considers the logic of classes, e.g. the class of lions, the class of even numbers, etc. His primary concern is with developing a metalanguage, or a language in which one can speak of the object language, here the language of classes. The metalanguage contains a replica of the object language plus further terms allowing for the structured description of object language terms and a designation of some expressions as axioms, consequences, and theorems, and also includes the notion of satisfaction. Then he constructs in the metalanguage a formal definition of ‘true sentence’ in terms of the satisfaction of a sentential function by set of objects. Then he proves that this definition is materially adequate and formally correct for formal languages of a finite order. In much simpler terms, what this definition does is to say that ‘true sentence’ applies to the following sentences and then give a recipe for listing a finite number of sentences. This listing cannot be extended to an infinite set. Tarski finishes his study by considering an extension to ordinary language. He concludes that this could be done only if ordinary language were systematically regimented in such a formalized way that it could no longer function as an ordinary language. Popper said of Tarski in a book dedicated to Tarski: “I have never learned so much from anybody else” (Popper 1972, p. 322). He took Tarski’s account as a rehabilitation and elaboration of the classical theory that truth is a correspondence to the facts. To apply this to theories Tarski considered theories that could be developed as formal deductive systems, whether or not they were axiomatizable. (Popper 1966). For such a

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system, Popper developed the idea of the consequence of a hypothesis as the class of statements derivable from it, and the truth content as the class of all true statements derivable from it. Then the verisimilitude of the hypothesis could be defined as the difference between the hypothesis’s truth and falsity content. This formal approach encountered difficulties, which Popper acknowledged, in the definition of a falsity class. My concern is with its applicability to scientific theories. This presupposes that a physical theory can be expressed as a formal system and that one can develop a metalanguage which contains a replica of this object language and also contains the tools needed to speak of the facts to which the contents of the theory refer. A century ago the eminent mathematician, David Hilbert, initiated a project of reformulating basic physical theories as formalized axiomatic systems. The project never worked.7 No significant physical theory has ever been successively developed in this formal way. One can water down this project by speaking of physical theories as nonaxiomatizable formal systems, a term that may apply to scientific theories reformulated in accord with the semantic conception of theories. As I tried to show elsewhere, this formal approach leads to replacing a non-rigorous, but highly successful, quantum field theory, by a formal system that cannot accommodate fundamental particle physics. (MacKinnon 2008). As critics have noted, and as Popper has admitted, it is possible to interpret his account as a variation of the assertive-redundancy account of truth, rather than a correspondence theory. Consider the sentences (P) The President signed the bill. (T) “The president signed the bill” is true. A strict following of Tarski’s account should lead to a metalinguistic statement asserting ‘True’ of all the true statements of a theory. This is not a correspondence with objective facts, but a redundant way of asserting all the true statements. Popper interprets this as a correspondence between a theory and objective facts because of the way it fits into his overall account. His use of the correspondence principle allows him to talk of the correspondence between a theory, considered as a denizen of World 3, and the facts to which it corresponds, denizens of World 1. He considers this an objective account because it excludes subjectivism and such World 2 denizens as beliefs of scientists. To evaluate this, we turn to another influential account of truth that also stems from an adaptation of Tarski’s account. 7

Kyburg’s 1968 attempt to formalize science illustrates the difficulties. He selected fragments of science to formalize and was unable to develop a complete formalization of the physics of see-saws.

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Donald Davidson’s struggles with theories of truth also began with an attempt to extend Tarski’s analysis. The totality of T sentences (what Popper had called the truth content) for a particular limited language fixes the extension of T. (Davidson 1985) An adequate concept of truth must do this. But, Davidson insisted, there must be more to a concept of truth than a mere listing of true sentences. Fortunately, this can be clearly illustrated by updating an example given in revised account of truth. Just as the extension of the predicate ‘true sentence’ can be fixed by listing all the true sentences, so speaking of our solar system we could define the predicate ‘solar planet’: “x is a solar planet if and only if x is one of the following: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto” (Davidson 1990, p. 293). On August 24, 2006 The International Astronomical Union revoked Pluto’s status as a planet. It is now characterized as a Plutoid, one of the many Kuiper belt objects including Eris, which is larger than Pluto. Why the change? Chiefly because the term ‘planet’ has a meaning not captured by a mere listing of planets. Similarly, ‘truth’ has meaning beyond a mere listing of true sentences. How can this further meaning be captured? Davidson lists and rejects two extremes. An epistemic extension makes ‘truth’ relative to an individual’s beliefs. A realist extension makes ‘truth’ entirely independent of our beliefs. Both extensions capture intuitions about truth. Yet both extensions lead to undesirable consequences. The epistemic extension limits truth to what we can somehow verify. This leads to a radically impoverished view of reality. Also, it deprives ‘truth’ of its crucial role as an intersubjective standard. A realist account that makes truth evidence-transcendent ultimately makes ‘truth’ unintelligible. It severs the conceptual connection between what is true and what we believe. Furthermore, ‘correspondence to the facts’ does not succeed in picking out anything useful. Davidson did not cite Popper as the chief advocate of such an extreme realist position. A theory of truth that goes beyond extensionality should be applicable to individual speakers in particular spatio-temporal situations. To enlarge on this basic requirement Davidson transformed Quine’s reflections on radical translation into an analysis of radical interpretation. I can interpret the utterance of another speaker by assuming, usually implicitly, that she holds her utterance to be true, intends to communicate, desires to be understood, and generally responds to the same features of the environment that I do. This bears a strong resemblance to what Heidegger and Gadamer said about the role of prejudice and the hermeneutic circle in achieving mutual understanding.

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This can be put in a broader perspective. (Davidson 2001, Essay 14) Philosophers have traditionally been concerned with analyzing three different types of knowledge: of my own mind, of other minds, and of the world. The many attempts to reduce two of these to the one considered basic have, in Davidson’s evaluation, proved abortive. In understanding the utterance of another I and she both practice a kind of triangulation. I can draw a baseline between my mind and hers only if we can both refer to the same aspects of reality. Knowledge of my mind, of other minds, and of the world are mutually interdependent. This puts the issue of truth in the context of interpersonal communication, rather than the subjectivism of Descartes and the later Husserl, or the impersonal objectivity of Popper. This point at issue can be put in simpler terms by switching from ‘truth’ to ‘true’. A growing child learns color terms by hearing, using, and being corrected for such utterances as: “This flower is red”, “The sun is red”, and “Strawberries are red”. He also learns the normal use of ‘true’ by accepting statements as true. Eventually he may learn that redness depends on properties of surfaces, of electromagnetic vibrations, and of sensory processing. Some instructors may even try to convince him that the rose is not really red. It just looks red. What does it mean ‘to look red’? It means that something, like white objects under red light, look the way red things look when seen under normal circumstances. The concept ‘looks red’ is parasitic upon ‘is red’. Our ordinary language is not a theory of reality. It is a collective conceptual tool adapted to living as physical and social agents in a shared environment. It implicitly contains a functional ontology that plays an indispensable role in making inferences. If a society has not advanced beyond an ordinary language framework, then this functional ontology is generally taken as an account of reality as it exists independent of human knowledge. Such reflections lead me to conclude that Popper’s account of the objectivity of scientific knowledge and of scientific theories is seriously misleading. He carried his campaign against subjectivity to such an extreme that it effectively eliminates the role of individuals and of communities. He does include them in considering the advance of knowledge, but not in his analysis of what scientific knowledge is. For Popper, a theory, considered as a denizen of World 3, is true if it corresponds to the facts. Since we can never establish the truth of a theory we must settle for verisimilitude. Popper extended Hume’s criticism of induction by claiming that there are no valid inductions and no valid rules for inductive inference. This obviously clashes with a widespread reliance on induction both in ordinary life and in scientific practice and with the many books on logic and clear

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thinking that present rules for inductive inferences. To see what’s really going on let’s consider some common examples of inductive inferences. The famous report of the Surgeon General linking smoking to lung cancer, cardiac problems, and emphysema triggered extensive investigations of the effects of smoking, and especially of heavy cigarette smoking. Now even tobacco manufactures no longer claim that science has not established the harmful effects of smoking. Even before these results were established, Popper insisted that no one be allowed to smoke in any room in which he was to give a lecture. Medical tests for new drugs, the effect of different types of food on different aspects of health, or of the long-term effects of particular medicines always rely on induction and statistical inference. The basic pattern is familiar. Observations about the entities of a certain class support inductive inferences about all entities of that class on the assumption that all the entities of the class are sufficiently similar in the pertinent respect. Thus, all human hearts can be damaged by the ingredients in tobacco smoke that caused damages in the cases tested. It may turn out that the underlying presupposition has to be modified, or even rejected. However, there are well established rules, e.g., Bayesian inference, for handling such complications. Popper recognizes this and readily admits that in practical decision making it is reasonable to rely on such inductive practices. However, he considers such reliance a subjective belief, a denizen of World 2. Such subjective beliefs are not part of objective knowledge. As Wesley Salmon pointed out (Salmon 1981), induction cannot be dismissed on such grounds. If science does not embody inductive generalizations, then there is no justification of predictions. Observations all refer to past events, while predictions refer to future events. Predictions assume that future events must be like the past events in essential respects, the underlying assumption in inductive reasoning. Popper’s rejection of subjectivism is correlated with his strong views on objectivism. Objective knowledge, in Popper’s view, is to be found in linguistically formulated theories. (Schilpp 1974, Vol. II, pp. 1023-1030). This leads to the broader question of the status of theories. We begin with a simple schematization of Popper’s view. A theory is a deductive system proceeding from hypotheses to conclusions in accord with established rules of deduction. Since a statement can only be compared with another statement, the conclusions are tested against basic statements. Basic statements may rely on, but are not reducible to, observations. The goal is to develop theories that are objectively true. We, who can never establish the truth of a theory, must settle for verisimilitude. For theories that have

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not yet been refuted, the degree of verisimilitude is set by the ratio between truth content and falsity content. Popper relies on a simple schematism to indicate how this process proceeds. P1 Æ TT Æ EE Æ P2 Here P1 is a conjecture presented as a hypothesis, TT is a testable theory, EE a process of error eliminations, and P2 is a revised hypothesis. The repeated use of this procedure leads from initial conjectures to theories with increasing degrees of verisimilitude. I will briefly consider three types of objections to this account of theories. First, there are competing accounts of scientific theories, such as the semantic conception of theories or the dual-inference model. Popper welcomes competition. These supply objections only when coupled to arguments that they are superior to Popper’s model, something we will not attempt here. Second, the imposition of Popper’s model leads to classifying some widely accepted scientific theories as non-theories. The clearest example is Darwinian or neo-Darwinian evolutionary accounts. Popper is a strong supporter of evolution. However, he argues that a neoDarwinian evolutionary account is not really falsifiable. It has built-in devices for handling apparently refuting evidence. Accordingly, it should be considered a metaphysical research project, rather than a scientific theory. Most biologists and interested philosophers regard neo-Darwinian accounts as master theories strongly supported by extensive inductive inferences. Another striking example is the standard model of particle physics. This is, arguably, the most successful general theory in the history of physics. It can, in principle, accommodate all known, particle, atomic, and molecular interactions. Current experimental tests are, in Wilczek’s terms (Wilczek 2008) attempts to ‘truthify’ rather than falsify the theory. The model predicts reactions that should occur. Then scientists use massive particle accelerators and elaborate detectors to search for the predicted reaction. They are not trying to falsify the theory. Popperians could argue that the standard model is not really a theory. It is a loose conjunction of an electroweak and a strong component, neither of which has been has been shown to be mathematically consistent as a theory. In spite of such shortcomings, the standard model is widely recognized as the most successful theory in physics. This consideration leads to the third, and most serious, objection to Popper’s account of theories. Should the norms for what constitutes a proper scientific theory be set by a critical examination of successful theories or by philosophical considerations. By Popper’s norms Newtonian

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mechanics, Newtonian gravitational theory, classical electrodynamics, and semi-classical atomic physics have all been falsified. If they are not true theories, why should they be retained? Recent discussions, within physics, of effective theories make explicit what has long been a practice. An effective theory is a theory that can be used, i.e., treated as true, within specified energy limits. The theories just listed all count as effective theories. The following chart indicates approximate energy ranges for different types of theories. Effective Theories