Anti-naturalism in philosophy (III)

The role and raison d'être of academic philosophy in today's world is far from clear: there is certainly no consensus amongst philosophers regarding what philosophy is or is for. I personally would like to see the discipline become less insular and more engaged with the sciences, and there have been some encouraging moves in this direction. On the whole, however, I think that you would have to say that the discipline has become less rather than more science-friendly or science-oriented over the last fifty or sixty years.

What concerns me here is the general question of metaphysical or religious motivation. Generally the logical empiricists, who dominated analytic philosophy in the mid-20th century, were not well disposed towards traditional metaphysics or religion. But the general climate of opinion within academic philosophy has changed quite a bit since then.

There are (and always have been) overtly religious philosophers, of course. But I am not concerned with them so much as with apparently non-religious (or even atheistic) philosophers who nonetheless seem very uncomfortable with a straightforwardly naturalistic view of the world.

Take John McDowell. I am not aware that he has any particular religious affiliation, and yet there is something about his approach which seems almost hostile to science and I have trouble trying to figure out what on earth is driving it. It must be more than just a desire to defend his professional turf, I feel sure.

Starting about the 24 minute mark in this interview, McDowell defends himself against accusations by Tyler Burge (who is not featured here) that his approach betrays ignorance of the relevant science, but his defense is not entirely convincing.

Note his curiously unscientific discussion about recognizing Bill Clinton's face (43-45 min.): no reference at all is made to brain processes (and much is known about these sorts of processes). Note also some fairly dismissive remarks about science in general and cognitive science in particular. "What [cognitive science] does," he says (more than once), "is just fine" – but it has little to contribute to telling us about how we can know things, apparently! *

Though he concedes that in order for his views to be acceptable they must be compatible with the relevant science (of perception and cognition, etc.), McDowell's view of the world is clearly not driven by science (which he shows little interest in). He certainly does not have what the logical positivists dubbed a scientific worldview. In fact, he seems to espouse a form of Kantian idealism. He himself notes that he came over time to recognize the importance of Kant's transcendental perspective; and, though this topic is not raised here, McDowell is a defender of moral realism.

The only way I can make sense of an intelligent and obviously serious thinker going on at such length and in such detail about the distinction between the perceived and the seemingly perceived etc. is that something more than just an apparently trivial semantic point about the meaning of the word 'know' and its cognates is (perceived to be) at stake here. What is being obliquely presented and defended in all of this is a particular metaphysic, a fundamentally anti-physicalist, anti-empiricist and possibly anti-naturalist way of seeing the world.

Terms like physicalism and naturalism are awkward to define, but what this philosopher and many like him are claiming is that there is more to fundamental reality than what the various sciences and mathematics can describe or access – and that the philosopher (through pure thought, apparently) has access to it.

This sort of thinking strikes me as being very much in the same category as priestly mystification. And indeed many of today's philosophers, whose discipline in the Western tradition grew out of schools of divinity, could be seen to be competing to fill the same general intellectual, social and economic space as was once occupied (almost exclusively) by clerics.

One last point. When I talk of priestly mystification I don't mean to imply that it necessarily involved or involves deliberate deception or hypocrisy. In many (perhaps in most) cases, the perpetrators are 'true believers' in the doctrines they are promoting.



* In order to understand this discussion fully one would need to read certain texts, by Wilfred Sellars in particular. Sellars was a 20th-century philosopher who is often appealed to by those who seek to make a space for philosophy, a philosophy which is respectful of but distinct from science, in today's intellectual landscape. Daniel Kaufman, with whom I have had some dealings (at Scientia Salon, Apophenia and, more recently, at The Electric Agora), is a great promoter of Sellars' work. The interviewer on this video is also a Sellarsian. But not the interviewee, I would say. For McDowell, Sellars' view of the world is too reductionistic or scientistic apparently and, though he appeals to some of Sellars' ideas (like 'the Myth of the Given'), he "averts his gaze" (a strange – and revealing – phrase) from other aspects of Sellars' thought.

David Albert on science

Having previously wondered out loud about and attempted to speculate on David Albert's general perspective on science and religion, I thought I would let him speak for himself. Okay, it's just a YouTube video and it's a few years old, but Albert is impressive and direct and concise. (This is the man Lawrence Krauss called 'moronic'.)

There are allusions to a silly film Albert got involved in which pushes all sorts of New Agey ideas and which he is seeking to distance himself from. What is particularly interesting (given all the fuss about his reliance on Templeton funding and so on) is that, far from coming across as sympathetic to a religious view of the world, Albert suggests that science, which is revealing a hard and mechanistic reality quite at odds with human desires and expectations, constitutes our best hope of getting at the truth of things.

[If you're pressed for time, I suggest you come in at the 10 minute mark.]

Does mathematics pose problems for physicalism?

For those who want to see the world as being comprised at a fundamental level entirely of such processes as physics and the other sciences might model or describe, mathematics seems to pose problems.

Some say that our moral sense, or love and emotion, or our perception of beauty somehow undermine a physicalist viewpoint. But they don't really. All these things can be understood as complex products of simpler physical processes (evolution, biology, social interaction, etc.).

And the realm of the mystic may be timeless, but is subjective – or at least cannot be shown to have an objective existence.

But mathematics seems to take us into a non-empirical but demonstrably objective realm.

Mathematics works in many ways like a branch of science (and of course is an inextricable part of science), but is essentially concerned with abstract patterns and relations rather than with the empirical world directly.

Nonetheless, as a human activity even pure mathematics is clearly a part of the empirical world.

In fact, as digital computers become more fully integrated into mathematical research and practice, and discrete mathematics continues (as I suspect it will) to replace continuous as the basis for our most plausible and accurate descriptions of reality (since physical reality at its most fundamental levels appears to be discontinuous), the view of mathematics as timeless and Platonistic will most likely fade.

Be that as it may, for various reasons many still adhere to a full-fledged mathematical platonism, and see the existence of mathematics and our access to mathematical truths (which on some views gives rise to what has become known as the 'access problem') as evidence of the inadequacy of physicalism; even sometimes as evidence for a religious or spiritual view of reality.

There are, of course, many competing philosophies of mathematics, some of them (like platonism) realist (in the sense of accepting the real existence of abstract mathematical objects), others anti-realist. In general, the former approaches seem more or less incompatible with physicalism, and the latter compatible.

As there is no scientific way of deciding between these approaches, the physicalist is really under no pressure. He or she can just point to one or other of those ways of seeing mathematics which do not entail accepting independently-existing abstract objects, etc.

I have alluded in the past to the anti-realist views of the mathematician Timothy Gowers. And I have just come across someone else whose views appeal to me.

Sharon Berry, who has recently completed work on her Ph.D. at Harvard*, is not an anti-realist or anti-platonist like Gowers, but her approach is basically empirical, and the platonism she countenances is sufficiently weak not to put me off too much.

Her dissertation is on the so-called access problem which she addresses in what seems like a refreshingly straightforward and down-to-earth way. She argues that mathematical knowledge can be reduced to 'knowledge of a kind of broadly logical possibility, that is possibility with regard to the most general principles about how any objects can be related by any relations.' She calls this notion 'combinatorial possibility', and claims we can account for our knowledge of combinatorial possibility 'by appealing to general constraints on relationships between concrete physical objects.'

What is particularly interesting about the notion of combinatorial possibility is that it is tightly tied to the empirical world: 'one can infer possibility from actuality.'

Our access to good (but incomplete) methods of reasoning about combinatorial possibility is explained by our experiences with concrete objects, and so – if indeed mathematical knowledge can be reduced to a knowledge of combinatorial possibility – our (partial) access to mathematical truth is also explained in terms of these ordinary experiences.

Berry believes that her approach to the access problem meshes neatly with a relatively robust approach to claims about mathematical objects. 'The key idea is that quantifiers can take on different senses in different contexts. These senses correspond to different standards that we might apply when assessing questions of existence.'

Her view is that lower standards operate in everyday contexts than are required in discussions of 'fundamental ontology'. And lower standards apply also in mathematical discussions.

So long as these higher and lower standards are seen in pragmatic terms (and not in terms of different kinds of objects actually having different degrees of being), this approach seems doubly attractive. It does justice to the subtleties of human communication as well as avoiding the implicit dogmatism of standard realist and anti-realist stances.

Berry herself, taking ontological and metaphysical discourse in general rather more seriously than I am inclined to, may not be entirely happy with my pragmatic interpretation. But her views do certainly reflect empirical and pragmatic tendencies.

As I said, there is probably no way to decide which, if any, of the available positions in the philosophy of mathematics are on the right track and which are not. Some look more plausible than others, it must be said, but such judgments are always going to be affected by prior metaphysical (or anti-metaphysical) tendencies and such like.

Which is not to say that all work in this area lacks significance. Arguably, both Gowers's and Berry's perspectives have significance and value.

As I suggested above, so long as there are plausible positions available which do not entail fully-fledged realism or platonism, the physicalist need not feel that his or her physicalist stance is under threat.

And, so, though I don't feel obliged to make (or capable of making) an unequivocal assessment either of Gowers's or of Berry's approach, I do value them both as possible (and, on the face of it at least, plausible) alternatives to full-blown mathematical platonism.


* Both a short and a long dissertation abstract are included in her CV which is available via her website.

Where the mystery lies

If I appear to have a bit of an obsession with David Berlinski's writings, it may be because I share one or two of his obsessions (don't ask); or just that I have been charmed by his politically incorrect persona. But let me make it clear that I disagree utterly with his ultimate conclusions about human life and science – with his basic view of the world, in fact.

In a way, he is my ideal interlocutor, a deft articulator of a point of view I respect but reject.

He sees the scientific view of the world (which most of us implicitly accept) as being essentially ideological, as a set of commitments

… conceived without justification, the commitments determining the evidence rather than the reverse, and this by means of a psychological process as difficult to discern as it is to deny. The largest of these commitments, and the one least examined because most tenaciously held, is that the universe is nothing more than a system of material objects. Beyond this system – nothing. A universe of this sort might seem repugnant to most men and women, but many physical scientists have proclaimed themselves satisfied by a world in which there is nothing but atoms and the void, and they look forward to their forthcoming dissolution into material constituents with cheerful nihilism.

An uneasy sense nonetheless prevails – it has long prevailed – that the vision of a purely physical or material universe is somehow incomplete; it cannot encompasses the familiar but inescapable facts of ordinary life. A man speaks, sending waves into the air. A woman listens, the tiny and exquisite bones in her inner ear vibrating sympathetically to the splashes of his voice. The purely physical exchange having been made, what has been sound becomes what has been said; heated by the urgency of communication, the sounds begin to glow with meaning so that an undulating current in the air can convey a lyric poem, issue a declaration of war, or say with terrible finality that it's over. Making sense of sounds is something every human being does and that nothing else can do. More than three generations of mathematical physicists grew old before their successors understood black-body radiation; the association between sound and meaning is more mysterious than anything found in physics. And we, too, are waiting for our successors.*

Part of his method, evidently, is to exhaust (exasperate?) us with his rhetoric. But here are a few unrhetorical points in reply.

Firstly, let's accept that old fashioned, commonsense materialism is, in the light of quantum mechanics and a computational perspective on the world, no longer viable. Even so, the world can still be seen as a physical, if not a 'material', system. The 'atoms' of this world can be seen as (physical) events or processes rather than as little bits of stuff.

Is such a view incomplete? Of course. It is concerned only with what underlies and ultimately generates and powers the pageant, not with the pageant itself. The pageant of life needs to be suffered or enjoyed or analysed or interpreted in its own terms.

Berlinski is right to suggest that human language is wondrous and unique, but wrong to see deep mystery in the meaning of sentences. If there is a deep mystery of meaning, it resides also in animal communication systems, surely. And those more primitive systems would lie closer to the mystery's source.

In fact, in my view, the mystery lies – if it lies anywhere – with subjective experience rather than with communication; and, of course, in the broader question of why there is anything at all.**



* The Advent of the Algorithm (Harcourt 2001), pp. 249-250.

** By the way, the latter question is connected to the first, because, in a sense, a world of inanimate objects, objects without a subjective sense (in other words a world with no one to see it, even to observe its traces as we do the early universe) is equivalent to nothingness, is it not?