TURNING
NATURAL
Review
of W. Callebaut, The naturalistic turn, Biology and Philosophy, 14, 737-749, 2000
In philosophy (and elsewhere)
certain words which had a negative connotation during previous periods come to
have a positive one during the next. “Naturalism” is obviously one such word.
Early analytic philosophers reacted against XIXth century naturalism, which was
accused of dissolving objective norms (logical, epistemological, ethical) into
facts (biological, psychological, historical, social). Frege and Russell
attacked naturalistic psychologism in logic and in the philosophy of mathematics.
Moore denounced the “naturalistic fallacy” in ethics. The positivists were
equally dismissive: naturalism meant the ignorance of such crucial distinctions
as the logical vs the empirical and the analytic vs the synthetic. Today,
however, to be a naturalist seems to be a Good Thing, and few philosophers
would reject outright a characterization of their work as “naturalist”. Naturalism
“returns” (Kitcher 1992). After a century of anti-naturalistic analytic
philosophy, we seem to have come full circle.
This
book is meant to document this naturalistic turn, and to assess its
contemporary scope and influence, especially in the domain of the philosophy of
science. It is made up of interviews of leading researchers in philosophy,
biology, psychology, cognitive science, history and sociology of science and
science studies that Callebaut has met between 1985 and 1991. The actors are,
together with the moderator, the philosophers of science William Bechtel,
Robert Brandom, Richard Burian, Patricia Churchland, Ronald Giere, David Hull,
Philip Kitcher, Elizabeth Lloyd, Helen Longino, Thomas Nickles, Robert
Richards, Alexander Rosenberg, Michael Ruse, Dudley Shapere, Elliott Sober, and
William Wimsatt, the biologists Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin , the
psychologists Donald Campbell, Henry Plotkin and Ryan Tweney, and the social
scientists Jon Elster, Karin Knorr Cetina and Bruno Latour. Their academic
affiliations, however, do not indicate the scope of their interests, since most
of them move back and forth between various disciplines, and have a strong
background in several scientific fields. Instead of simply transcribing the
individual interviews, Callebaut has
combined bits and pieces of these by themes, so that on each theme of the book
we have something which looks like a conversation between several individuals
on a given topic. Sometimes the result is rather artificial and gives us a
pseudo-dialogue. But most of the time this arrangement gives a happy result,
where the opinion of each participant is brought to bear on a special topic in
something which looks like a real dialogue. The choice of interviewees has been
made by Callebaut on the basis of his personal connexions and of his own
interests in science studies. Although it is clear that other people could have
been chosen, they are fairly representative of the various trends. As he says,
his leading thread has been “serendipity”. Callebaut and his interlocutors have
the gift of expressing themselves in a most straighforward manner, and often personal
details are interwoven with highly theoretical matters, making it sound as if
the reader were directly introduced into the offices and the daily life of
research of (mostly) contemporary American universities. In addition, each
interviewee gets a one-page presentation of his carreer and current work. This
style is a bit irritating when it indulges in mutual congratulations and
laudative comments about how good, creative, and skillfull each researcher is,
but on the whole the book has a conversational charm and directness which is
absent from many academic books.
In
his introduction Callebaut aptly characterizes naturalism as the product of
several strands or stances rather than as a unified doctrine. Although he does not explicitly do so, one
can extract from his discussion the following divisions, from the most general
to the most specific. One strand is ontological:
naturalism is generally defined as the thesis that there are no other entities
in the world than those that are postulated by the natural sciences. An extreme
version of this view is physicalism, the thesis that there are no other
entities than those posited by physics, taken as the fundamental science. As
Callebaut notes, not all contemporary naturalists advocate such a reductive version
of the doctrine; they side rather with a non reductionist one. Another strand
is epistemological: Naturalism is the
view that there are no other kinds of explanations than those which are
provided by the natural sciences, presumably causal explanations. In this
sense, naturalists reject the division between the Geisteswissenschaften and
the Naturwissenschaften . On that
score, contemporary naturalists do not seem, at first sight, to improve upon
logical positivism, which was always associated with the doctrine of the unity
of science. But this logical positivist doctrine was always meant as a conceptual or a linguistic one: the positivists attempted to reduce, by
logical means, the language of psychology, of sociology, and of other
disciplines to some basic language, physicalistic, phenomenalistic, or
otherwise, through what they took as a form of “rational reconstruction”. In
this respect, their naturalism and their empiricism was largely an a
priori and a philosophical thesis,
not an empirical or a scientific one. This is not the path taken by most
contemporary naturalists. They reject, following Quine, the analytic/synthetic
distinction between concepts and factual matters, between science and
philosophy. As a result they do not, in general, try to reconstruct, by
conceptual means, what an ideal kind of explanation would be; they rather try
to describe , by empirical means,
using the very ressources which are provided by scientific investigation —
biological, psychological, sociological, cognitive scientific, etc.— our
scientific knowledge. In other terms, contemporary naturalism claims that only science can describe science. This
implies, in particular, that the normative
investigation about knowledge —
whether our scientific reasonings and theories are justified, valid, or
rational— has to be absorbed into a descriptive
inquiry about what we actually know, as a matter of fact. Let us call this the descriptive stance. This is the stance which was taken, most obviously, by
Quine when he proposed his famous thesis of the “naturalization” of
epistemology, and its reduction to empirical psychology. By this Quine meant
behavioral psychology, or possibly neurophysiology. But contemporary
naturalists gave other versions of the appropriate description, and in this
respect the naturalistic house contains many mansions : some think that it is
biology, in particular evolutionary biology, which is apt to give us the
governing body of information about the formation of knowledge, and propose
various kinds of “evolutionary” epistemologies; others think that it is
cognitive science and its subdisciplines which provide the appropriate
descriptions; still others think that it is the history and sociology of
science, perhaps helped by the results of other fields. The latest theme,
however, leads to another strand as well. Since naturalism, presumably, starts
with nature, either physicalistically, biologically or cognivistically (so to
say) described, it seems that nature is something given to us, from which our knowledge, commonsensical or
scientific, derives. But the descriptive stance implies also that one takes
into account the way in which scientific theories are formed, through history,
as well as the way in which they are received in society, and shaped by social forces.
And here we find something like the reversal of the idea that nature is a
given, or that reality, as science describes it, is something out there, which
lies antecedently ot our investigation: for scientific theories evolve, most
are rejected in favour of new or improved ones. Our knowledge is not fixed; it
is corrigible and fallible. Moreover, the history and the sociology of science
presents us with a picture of science which is in direct opposition to the idea
that nature, as it is described by science, lies outside our investigation. Theories
are constructed, both by scientists and by the social and
historical environments in which they live. There is, therefore, nothing really
“natural” in the way knowledge is formed, and this leads to the thought that
nature itself, the object of our scientific inquiry, is not “natural” either,
but the product of a construction. As Callebaut says (p.3): “We, who are part
of nature, help construct her.” Let us call this the constructivist strand. The theme is most present in science
studies which rest upon historical and sociological analyses, and in philosophy
it is often associated to pragmatism, and to the view that the traditional
philosophical dualisms between mind and nature, norm and fact, the the manifest
and the scientific image (Sellars) are obsolete. This theme, however is
ambiguous: is the construction in question itself a natural process or not? In
other terms, are the products of our knowledge constructions out of processes
which are themselves natural (say through evolution of our cognitive
capacities) or constructions out of forces which are essentially historical,
social, i.e less than natural and somewhat artificial? And in what respect are
the constructions descriptions of a unique reality, or alternative descriptions
of a more or less arbitrary character? The answers to these questions depend
upon the degree of freedom from nature itself that the naturalist is prepared
to grant to historical and sociological determinants of scientific inquiry, and
upon the degree of realism or of relativism about its subject matter that he is
willing to admit. For instance, partisans of evolutionary epistemology and
sociobiologists would not accept the idea that the social factors in science
are completely independent of their biological determinants, but many
researchers in the history and the sociology of science would disagree with
them. The later seem also to be more favorable to a broadly relativistic
outlook about what science actually describes rather than to a realistic one.
The
contents of the book largely reflect these divisions and the potential tensions
which exist between them. It is divided into two main parts, each divided in
five chapters. In the first part, the interlocutors attempt to characterize the
main features of the naturalistic turn in the philosophy of science and how,
according to them naturalistic philosophy of science ought to be done (“Talking
about it”). Much of this first part is devoted to a description of the changes
which philosophy of science has undergone since the 60 onward, which have led
to what I have called above the descriptive stance. Callebaut’s interlocutors
explain in particular the importance of two major contributions for the
reshaping of the field: Kuhn’s emphasis on the history of science, and Quine’s
criticism of the analytic-synthetic distinction. In the second part are
examined various positive proposals towards a “naturalized” philosophy of
science which come from biology, evolutionary epistemology and cognitive
science, i.e how it is actually done (“Doing it”). Most of these sections of
the book deal with biology, the interpretation of Darwinian evolutionary theory
and its present changes, and examine such topics as the nature of fitness, the
unit of selection controversy, sociobiology, and the metaphysical output of
contemporary Darwinism. A single important chapter is devoted to what may be
the most important epistemological output of evolutionary biology, namely
evolutionary epistemology. The remaining chapters deal with the way in which
cognitive science models, from classical to connexionnists one, can, together
with current research in neuroscience, shed light on the analysis of natural
and scientific knowledge. The final chapter deals with even broader topics such
as the impact of evolutionary theory on ethics, and in general the impact of
science on society, as well as with the consequences of a feminist approach to
these issues in the sociology of science. The book contains also extensive
bibliographies, indexes, and lengthy footnotes, where the editor gives details
about views only sketched in the conversations. Not all the sections are of
equal interest, and given the mode of composition of the book, it is sometimes
repetitive. Depending upon the reader’s interests, some will find certain
sections more interesting than the others. If I myself were to choose, I would
say that I found that Wimsatt’s reflexions on the problem of reduction and
functional explanation, Kitcher’s, Hull’s, Ruse’s, Sober’s and Lewontin’s views
on the philosophy of biology are among the most illuminating, and Latour’s
reflexions the most irritating (see below).
Because
these topics loom so large, and their treatment is so tied to the
idiosyncrasies of each participant, it is impossible here to deal with all of
them and to do full justice to the details of the views presented in the book. I
shall try instead to discuss them through the framework of the various strands
in naturalism mentionned above, with the hope of clarifying what exactly the
commitments to naturalism are, and whether it can be a unified doctrine. As the
classifications hinted at above and the variety of the views expressed by the
participants to Callebaut’s dialogues suggest, the answer to this last question
is likely to be negative.
Let
us take the various naturalistic stances in the reverse order, starting from
the constructivist one. As it is
usually characterized, the move away from positivistic philosophy of science
since the sixties has led philosophers into two opposite directions. On the one
hand the historical bias that philosophers of science have taken following Kuhn
(and discussed here in the first chapter) has led them to reject not only the
idealised and history-free analysis of scientific statements attempted by the
positivists, but also their reduction of the theoretical vocabulary of
scientific theories to the observational vocabulary. They have emphasized the
theory-laddenness of scientific terms, and accepted various versions of what is
called the “meaning variance” conception of scientific theories, according to
which terms like “electron” do not have the same meaning within each
theoretical framework of theory. This has obvious anti-realist implications: the reality described by science is
relative to each “paradigm”, and because paradigms are “incommensurable”, the
reference of theoretical terms, which is determined by their variable meanings,
is never unified nor fixed. On the other hand, a number of philosophers following Putnam (see here Shapere, p.
48-50) have reacted against the positivistic doctrine that the reference of
scientific terms is determined by operational meaning-criteria, and have
claimed that their reference is largely independent of their meaning, and
therefore transtheoretical. This has obvious realist implications. Now
those of the “naturalists” interviewed here who come from the most historically
and sociologically oriented circles, such as Longino, Knorr Cetina, and
especially Latour, when they emphasize the theme that science is but a social
construction, that the making of scientific theories does not follow the
Mertonian path of a community of researchers driven by an ideal of truth and
responsability, but is more the product of social forces and possibly of male
biases, are certainly closer to the anti-realist theme. They remind us of the
subjective, non progressive and arational character of scientific change. They
are aware that their views may sound a bit too Feyerabendian, and so try to
correct this impression by admitting some match between science and reality,
but it is often hard to see how they differentiate themselves from full-blown
relativism.Thus Longino (p.26-27) says that “scientific inquiry can’t be held
to result in true theories or to be about some domain of reality totally
independent of human, and mutable conceptual schemes.” She is prepared to admit
a certain amount of “match” between our descriptions and natural processes, but
claims it is so only because it is “local”, and because “it works”. Knorr Cetina
says roundly that “scientists do not interact with the world directly; but with
…what other scientists have said about the world.” (p.183) Latour is both
bolder by admitting that he, like “the French”[1], is convinced that “the facts don’t speak for themselves”
and “theory is always there” (p.65), and more subtle, or more cautious, when he
claims that his description of scientific practice is not meant to “expell
rationality” (p.118), but that he wants to describe knowledge in general from a
standpoint which would be beyond rationalism and anti-rationalism, neither
modern nor post-modern.[2] No wonder that Latour is reluctant
to call himself a naturalist. What is particularly baffling is the fact that
such writers try systematically to escape such commonsensical questions as: why
is it that science works so well? could it be successful if it were not true? Could
Latour sit on his chair in front of his computer at the Salk Institute if all
the technology made possible by science where only the product of a jumble
of political tricks performed by tribes
of laboratory workers willing after power?
Not
all of those who emphasize the historical turn, however, commit themselves to
these extreme forms of anti-realism and constructivism. Burian (p.46,187-189)
and Shapere (p.67-68, 175), for instance, are both willing to accept a
transcendance of reality with respect to inquiry together with some form of
relativity of the reference of scientific terms. But most of the people
interviewed here who advocate some form of biological account of knowledge, or
some form of epistemology based on the findings of cognitive science, are
naturalistic realists (Giere, p.170;
Kitcher,p.129, Hull, p.316, 284, Wimsatt,p.173). It is not difficult to
understand why. Realism seems to need naturalism, for if one insists that only
realism — the thesis that our theories are true or approximately true— can
explain the reliability and success of science, and if this reliability is not
garanteed a priori , but discovered by empirical means, then we need to
be committed to a naturalist account of knowledge, which would compare, through
the descriptive means of natural science, the kind of reliable processes that
we have. The converse implication seems to hold as well, since if our
scientific knowledge is the product of causal (biological, psychological)
natural processes which are in general reliable, then the causal relation has
better be a relation between our cognitive equipement and objets which are out
there in the world, and which we can know. Moreover, a Darwinian naturalized
epistemology seems to be perfectly fitted to the view that scientific
knowledge, which has evolved, is cumulative and progressive, and hence that
constructivism is false. In different ways, this what Popper, most notably, but
also Campbell and Kitcher claim. The equivalence between a realist and a
naturalist view of science, however, is not guaranteed. For one may be an
anti-realist, and reject, for instance on the grounds of the “pessimistic
induction” from the past failures of science, the view that science is a
cumulative approximation to the truth, while at the same time accepting the
view that we cannot explain the successes of science otherwise than by
empirical means. Thus Larry Laudan is, in this sense, an anti-realist naturalist, or, as he calls himself, a
“normative” naturalist.[3] Still, it does not follow, for
Laudan, that constructivism and relativism are true, and indeed he rejects
these views.
Such
considerations lead us to examine the claim, put forward by many naturalists,
that their investigations are purely descriptive
of scientific practice. For if such a claim were taken at face value, analyses
of scientific knowledge should ban all normative considerations about the
rationality or non rationality of science, or about whether science justifiably
matches an independent reality. This purely descriptive aim of naturalized
epistemology was explicitly endorsed by Quine (1969) when he claimed that the
only work left for epistemology was to examine the relationship between the
“meager input” of external causes on our sensory apparatus and the “torrential
output” of scientific knowledge. This implies, Quine says, that there should be
no place left for traditional epistemology as an investigation upon the nature
of knowledge, or for an attempt at his definition. A number of participants
here seem to admit this consequence: Campbell (p.294), Bechtel (p.352), Giere
(p.293) for instance. Patricia Churchland too (p.16), who is most famous for
her and Paul Churchland’s eliminativism, denies that we need any account of the
concept of knowledge. But it is not evident that this naturalist
descriptive stance has completely undermined all normative accounts for
knowledge. A number of writers who advocate this point of view still seem to
feel obliged to use such notions as justification. Campbell, for one, accepts
that we should “pass the justificatory buck to biology”: but what kind of buck
is it? Moreover, not all naturalist here agree that we can dispense altogether
with normative questions (see especially Hull,p.99, on the limits of the
descriptive view; Richards, p.439: “Even as an epistemological naturalist one
must be concerned with problems of justification”). There is a good reason for
that, which comes often as a major objection to Quine’s version of naturalized
epistemology: if all there is to epistemology is a purely scientific account of
knowledge, this account will be provided by science, but what will, in the end
justify our confidence in science itself? So the account is to be circular. Even
if one answers that the circularity is not vicious, and that science justifies science (Neurath’ s
ship), this pragmatist answer will hardly be free from use of the very notion
of justification. A number of contemporary naturalistic epistemologists are
quite aware of this, and do no think that their attempt to built “reliabilist”
theories of knowledge can dispense them with a normative inquiry about the
definition of such notions as knowledge, justification, and rationality. In
particular Goldman (1986), who is a notable absent from these conversations,
does not think that epistemology has ceased to be a normative enterprise by
becoming naturalistic. One could also quote other naturalizers, like Dretske
(1996), who are ignored in this book, who do not think that the philosophical problems of causal
theories of intentionality and of knowledge can be evaded. Bechtel (p.352) is
scornful of such approaches, which he finds too “philosophical” and he himself
pretends to be interested only in the way “cognitive systems work to produce
reliable information”, and not in how we could differentiate belief from
knowledge. But by what criteria does he counts “representations” as beliefs or
as knowledge, and as reliable? He does not say. As it is often remarked,
Churchland’s eliminativism balks at the
fact that, in spite of her rejection of “folk psychological” notions such as
beliefs, she certainly has to believe her own theory. The same is true of
naturalism itself: is there a naturalistic account of the naturalistic thesis? This
sheds some doubts about the pretentions of many of the interviewed writers to
be doing science and to dispense with philosophical accounts of knowledge. The
naturalist’s discovery how all the beauties of science and of the way their
undermine a priori and
conceptual analyses is certainly a good thing, and much of the conversations
here reveal how exciting it is for these explorers, but often the conceptual
lightness of their accounts calls for philosophy’s revenge.
Fortunately,
more philosophical moments are not absent from the book. They occur in
particular in the conversations with Wimsatt, Sober, Elster, and Hull on such
fascinating topics as the problems of reduction and functional explanation, and
of the nature of selection and evolution. I gather that the latter, and the
very interesting considerations on the sociobiology and creationism debates
made by Kitcher, Levins, and Lewontin
are likely to attract most attention from the readers
of this journal, but I lack the space and competence to deal here with them
appropriately. One very important theme which emerges from these passages of
the book is the utter complexity of the issues raised by Darwinism today, and
how much it should invite to prudence those who are tempted by evolutionary
accounts of knowledge, morality, society, language and culture. In addition to
leading his battle against the uses and abuses of sociobiology, and against
“adaptationism”, Lewontin (1989) has reminded us how little we know about the
evolution of cognition, and Sober (1981, 1995) how difficult it is to
extrapolate from Darwinian considerations to claims about the evolution of
human rationality. The main problem here, for the partisans of an evolutionary
epistemology, is that we lack a proper understanding of what would be the
“missing link” (p.403) between evolutionary theory for genes, organisms, and
populations on the one hand, and for ideas, beliefs, theories, and knowledge in
general. We might start things from bottom to top, and analyse ideas and
beliefs through genetic models (as in Dawkins’s “memes”) or through some
“epidemiology of representations” (Cavalli-Sforza, Sperber). But this has
notorious shortcomings: Memes, if they can be isolated, are just too unspecific
to account for the contents of particular beliefs. We could, on the other hand,
start from top, and envisage the missing link to be an evolutionary psychology. But here too we are far from
an understanding of the applications of evolutionary biology, as it is understood
for lower levels, to specific mental processes at higher levels: presumably
evolution has selected, for instance, the cognitive mechanisms by which humans
reason, but it is quite another thing to say that it has selected the specific
rules of inference that they use (Lloyd here has interesting remarks about
Cosmides and Tooby’s program of evolutionary psychology, p.409, see also Engel
1997). The same can be said about attempts at understanding morality through
the theories of reciprocal altruism.The lesson that Lewontin, Wimsatt, Hull,
Sober, Richards and Callebaut himself agree to draw from these difficulties is
that naturalism, evolutionary or otherwise, has to be anti-reductionnist, and abandon the hope of fitting the mental,
cultural and knowledge facts into a single an unified account from top levels
to bottom levels (see in particular p.147-168). None of the participants
espouses the extreme thesis of physicalism (not even of biologicalism)
according to which all the cognitive facts that there are can be explained
completely through reduction to the bottom levels (and biological facts to
chemical facts, and then to physical facts). But granted that no such reduction
is forthcoming, the hard problem is: for the naturalistic thesis to have some
bite, one must at least agree that, although they are autonomous from them,
higher level facts must nevertheless depend
upon some sorts of naturalistic
lower level facts. Sober (p.151-154)
appeals to the philosopher’s notion of supervenience,
which he illustrates with the notion of fitness: when fitness varies in a set
of organisms, there is a physical explanation of why one is fitter than another
(for instance one organism has stronger legs than another, and is thus able to
escape from predators more quickly), but there is no general physical property
common to all the organisms which explains why they are fit. This is in line
with the functionalist theory about the mind-body relationship: mental
properties can be characterized at the functional level, but they are not
uniquely “realizable” in physical or other lower level properties. Here again,
not all protagonists agree. Some, like Rosenberg and Wimsatt (p.153) say that
supervenience is only a “metaphysical solution” to the reductionism problem,
which allows us to give a characterisation of higher-order properties with
respect to a set of properties determined by “an apocalyptically complete”
lower level theory, but that it cuts
no methodological ice, because it does not tell us
what kinds of non- reductionist
explanations we can get in particular cases. Wimsatt prefers to talk in terms
of levels of organisation, Lewontin in terms of “quasi-independence”, and
Bechtel (p.163) in terms of Darden and Maull’s notion of “interfield” theories.
Presumably Churchland, the chief neurophilosophical materialist (cf. p.366) is
in more reductionist spirits, contrary to Elster (p.137-143) who advocates the
autonomy of functional and intentional explanations from causal explanation.[4]
These
difficulties about reduction illustrate the tensions inherent to the
epistemological or explanatory stance of naturalism. Similar tensions affect
the ontological stance. It says, in a nutshell, that all the facts that there
are in the world are natural facts, and that there are no other entities than
those that natural science posits. But unless one specifies what kind of
natural facts (physical? quantum mechanical? neurophysiological? biological?)
are supposed to exhaust this complete description, and what kind of entities
are supposed to be excluded from the list (mental entities? moral entities?
norms?), this slogan is hardly informative. It depends on what you put in
“nature”. Of course, as Stroud (1996) remarks, it excludes at least
explanations and facts having to do with a supernatural
order, of the kind that classical
philosophers like Descartes or Berkeley appealed to when they tried to secure
our knowledge of the external world by the warrant of a benevolent, omniscient,
and omnipotent God. At least this is not something believed by the contemporary
naturalists. But then everybody today is a naturalist in this sense. Even if we
grant this, naturalism is subject to a characteristic tension, which is but a
variant of the preceeding one about explanation. On the one hand, if you allow too much to figure in the scope of what you call nature and of what is
amenable to some form of naturalistic explanation, you extend the realm of
natural facts at the price of triviality. For instance if you allow
sociological or moral facts to be natural facts in this sense, there is not
much left outside of nature for you to be a “naturalist” in the ice-cutting
sense. On the other hand, if you allow too
little to belong to nature, you
exclude too much, at the price of making our ordinary practices and jugements
implausible. For instance , if you say that there are really no colors in the
world, you fail to explain how people can react, and make judgments about
coloured objects; if you say that there are really no values, but only
psychological emotions or expressive states of people in a value-free world,
you fail to account for our evaluative attitudes and for the fact the we do
distinguish between evaluative and descriptive statements[5]. The same is true, of course, of beliefs and other
mental states, and for mathematical entities. As we saw above, the eliminative
materialist is a pains explaining how and why she believes her own theory. As
Stroud remarks, “one thing which seems not have been ‘naturalized’ is
naturalism itself” (ibid. p.43). This
was the point that I tried to put forward above when commenting upon the
commitments of the naturalists. If they insist that their epistemology is
completely norm-free, and that it is useless to ask questions about scientific
justification and rationality, they will end up with a theory which fails to
account for the most ordinary judgments that we express about our ordinary and
scientific beliefs. This, it will be said, is just what the reductionist
predicament leads us to. A less reductionist attitude, one of “r-e-s-p-e-c-t”,
as Callebaut says, quoting Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding, is called for. But
then this non reductionist attitude must also avoid the pitfall of being too
tolerant and of including too much. Stroud himself advocates a form of
“open-minded” or “expansive” naturalism according to which “we must accept
everything we find ourselves committed to in accounting for everything that we
agree is so and want to explain.” (ibid.p54).
But as he notes, this naturalistic thesis does not amount to anything very substantive or controversial. Between the
Charybdis of reductionism and the Scylla of triviality, the naturalistic path
thus appears to be much narrower than what most of the discussions of this book
suggest. But in addition to being one of the best introductions available to
these debates and to the rapid changes in the philosophy of evolution and in
the philosophy of science of the recent years, it is one of the virtues of this
book to make us think twice about these issues.
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[1] Latour feels
obliged, often pressed by Callebaut, to represent the “French” point of view on
the philosophy of science, and to be the spokesman for the views of Bachelard,
Canguilhem, Foucault, etc.. But it’s unlikely that we take his word for
that.
[2] In general,
most of the interventions by Latour bear the mark of his obscurity and, to say
the least, sheer conceptual confusion, and contrast in this respect with the
others. The last word upon him may well be Kitcher’s, who, after quoting King
Lear ( “I shall do such things/ I know not what they are, but they shall be/
the terror of the earth”) : “ I often get the same feeling when I read Latour. It’s
wonderfully untertaining, but the talk of a new program in which philosophy of
science has withered (Why?) and traditional philosophy (What traditional
philosophy?) enjoys a new relationship^(What new relationship?) with empirical
studies seems to me like emphatic advertising from a master salesman.” (p.219)
. No wonder that Sokal could integrate a number of Latour’s declarations in his
famous “hoax”.
[3] Unfortunately,
Laudan is not a participant to these conversations, also he often gets cursory
references from the other actors of Callebaut’s play. On his views, and for an
illuminating account of the various relationships between naturalism and
realism, see in particular Rosenberg 1996.
[4] p.482-83,
Callebaut mentionning a paper of mine (Engel 1992), where I defend something
close to the supervenience option by distinguisihing ontological physicalism
from explanatory physicalism (reductionism) , and by accepting the former but
not the later, objects that “this solution hinges on [the] identification of
naturalism with physicalist and materialist eliminativism and of naturalism
with causal explanation, which …is not warranted in general.” I do not see why.
The fact that once the physical facts are fixed, all the other facts are does
not entail that we can reduce all our biological, psychological, etc.
explanations to physical and to causal ones. I agree, however, with Rosenberg
and Wimsatt that supervenience only gives us a sort of general metaphysical
picture which does not solve the difficult problems about explanation. But I
agree that the supervenience option is subject to the characteristic tension
between reductionism and anti-reductionism, as Kim (1993) has argued. Another,
close to that of supervenience, which is not mentionned in the book is that of emergence. It was present in the XIXth
century discussions of evolution, but it has obvious spiritualistic flavours
which are not congenial for contemporary naturalism. It does not follow,
however, that it would not be useful to compare the present debates with the
previous ones in the light of this notion.
[5] These problems
are familiar from contemporary philosophical work on meta-ethics. In general,
discussions of ethics and proposal at evolutionary account of ethics in this
book are quite blind to such issues. But this is another respect in which a
little drop of conceptual analysis would be usefully added to the clouds of
scientific information.