And therein lies the second cliché, inversely symmetrical to the first, that we must find in these booming pronouncements a biological thesis x that would invalidate the “entire” philosophical tradition. Indeed, neither Spinoza, who advocated a strict parallelism, nor Diderot,85 who conceived a material unity continuously running without resolution from the inert to the living, nor Kant and all his followers, who repudiated the question of dualism between body and soul, would have been concerned by the biological thesis I’ve examined. It is not even certain that it would have troubled Descartes himself, but I will come back to this point later. For the moment, let’s simply underscore the obvious fact: one can’t thus oppose one discipline to another; at the very most, one could establish that such a thesis x—reductionist neurologism, for example—gets nearer to a given idea y of Diderot’s than does theme z privileged by Descartes. Thus we can say that the metaphor of the musical instrument,86 which Diderot loved to use to portray cerebral activity, seems to have more in common with a given contemporary neurological alternative than with the homuncular87 conception of cerebral functioning as understood by Descartes or, later, by many scientists who were not philosophers, like Franz Joseph Gall or Paul Pierre Broca. Such a claim does not in itself legitimate the displacement of philosophy by biology. Just as such a biological thesis is not univocal, neither is the philosophical tradition.
Furthermore, and this is the third cliché or prejudice, there are many defenders of this dissolution of philosophy in an exact science (notably among the partisans of different forms of “eliminativism”88—whether they be behaviorists, neurologists, or functionalists) who always resort to the same type of legitimation, scientism’s trademark, namely, “the future will show that we are correct.” As Fisette and Poirier note, these defenders have to “be met with the objection of the burden of proof”89 and as “no actual or imaginable science seems able to take up the challenge”90 that they have issued, they must show that the future will prove them correct. But, if inference from the observed past poses epistemological problems, what are we to say of inferences made from an ideal future, in the form “In the future, all xs will be y”! In brief, scientists today use an argument that they would vehemently reject in any novice theologian who would claim that “our soul is immortal, and you will have the proof in the future (i.e., after death).” It isn’t possible to offer a proof by the future, or to make a line of reasoning from the future, on an “installment plan” for a subsequent observation. We don’t have to give credit to moralizing from the possible, nor need we accept someone’s promise as a valid proof. To these scientific gamblers, we can say that the claim that “philosophy is alive and well and will continue to be so in the future” is just as credible and as legitimate as its opposite, maintained by these scientists, namely, that “as time goes by, philosophy will be dissolved in a natural science.” At the end of this examination, it becomes very clear that this attempt to annex one discipline by another rests upon a category mistake. That humans today are perceptibly different in behavior than at the beginning of prehistory, that the species that still live are the ones least poorly adapted to their environments—these are beliefs that we can accept as plausible, even obvious,91 without for all that drawing the conclusion that philosophy is dead as an autonomous, distinct, and first discipline. These arguments invite us to reevaluate, that is, to critique, the program of the “naturalization” of philosophy, the last major trend of post-philosophy and the paradoxical synthesis of the first two moments, skepticism and scientism.
Naturalism as a Paradoxical Synthesis
The True “Nature” of “Naturalism”
As everyone knows, programs of naturalization of this or that domain, or the desperate search for the natural foundations of this or that aspect of our psychological, social, or cultural life, are rather fashionable at the moment, and not only in certain areas of analytic philosophy. Probably a week doesn’t go by without a scientist or a philosopher proposing to naturalize something: ontology, intentionality, meaning, epistemology, ethics, the normative . . .92
This fad is so strong that even when certain authors adopt a position relatively distant from strict naturalism, they nevertheless feel the need to describe it as “moderated naturalism,” all this happening as if it were not possible today to reasonably situate oneself outside of or without comparison to naturalism.93 But in fact, what really is this “naturalism” to which the entire world today is coming round? Following Ruwen Ogien, we can distinguish three great forms of naturalism: ontological naturalism, epistemological naturalism, and anthropological naturalism. Ontological naturalism proposes to eliminate all terms of philosophy (or, Ogien tells us, “of psychology, ethics, or everyday sociology”) in favor of “other terms that make reference to objects or to observable physical properties.”94
Naturalism in the epistemological sense is more liberal. Broadly speaking, naturalization boils down to replacing explanations that make appeal to reasons with causal or functional explanations. This program applies in particular to the social or human sciences. “To naturalize” in the epistemological sense, in these domains, most often consists of proposing “evolutionary” types of hypotheses to explain the emergence and the persistence of certain beliefs or institutions (religion, the family, etc.).95
Finally, Ogien demarks a third category, anthropological naturalism. “‘To naturalize’ in this sense means making a fairly general assertion, that nothing that we do or think can go beyond what we are capable of doing or thinking, given what we are.”96 As with the various evolutionisms in economics, we must enact a selection process within these three ways of speaking of naturalism. In my sense, only ontological naturalism, and perhaps the maximal form of epistemological naturalism, fall within the category of “strict naturalism.” By “strict naturalism,” I mean naturalism as it was defined by Quine in his 1969 article “Epistemology Naturalized,” which is indissociable from the project of the dissolution of philosophy in a natural science (psychophysiology or psychology itself reduced to physical properties). This idea of a “merging” or a “rubbing out of boundaries”97 in favor of the natural sciences, this concern to make philosophy into “a chapter of psychology and hence of natural science,”98 constitutes the condition sine qua non of naturalism, which distinguishes it from any other stance—and this is why neither “anthropological naturalism” nor certain forms of epistemological naturalism seem to me to be an integral part of this naturalism. On that point, the definition that Ogien gives of anthropological naturalism is so broad that it could encompass, in the final analysis, just about any project. Ogien clarifies that in this particular case, he has Hume in mind much more than contemporary naturalist projects, but in truth, it could apply to every other philosopher. To see this, we need only ask who would accept the inverse of this proposition, which states that “nothing that we can do or think can go beyond what we are capable of doing or thinking, given what we are”? Aristotle? Kant? Descartes? Who could deny this apparent tautology? Hence, what is the meaning of a category that is liable to include everyone, simply because no one would accept the contrary of its defining proposition? Likewise, certain epistemological naturalisms are “minimalist” in this sense, in that they can with little difficulty describe all the great figures of the philosophical tradition. Who, for example, among Kant, Descartes, Leibniz, etc., would deny that philosophical inquiry ought to be concerned with various sciences? How, consequently, can one (with Fisette and Poirier) define as “moderated naturalism” the view that claims science and philosophy can have “mutual influence” “in certain areas”? Even Descartes (a quasi-pathological obsession99 of contemporary American naturalists) would have been the first to say so. Could we characterize naturalism by noting that it is a question of an “immanent position, refusing any transcendent (or transcendental) argument and every arrogant claim for philosophy”?100 But even if we were to accept the dual substitution—on the one hand that “transcendent” = “transcendental” a
nd on the other that these two categories = a moral wrong, namely, “arrogance”—who doesn’t see that Hegel, who had always claimed immanence, would fall into the category thus defined? This is why it seems to me that we are better to return to Quine’s usage of the term, since he initiated it, and understand by “naturalization” any position that strives to reduce all other disciplines to a natural science. Fisette and Poirier finally acknowledge that the reductive postulate is inherent in the project of naturalization: “Philosophical naturalism refers to an epistemological position that seeks to explain thought in the terms of a natural science like psychology, biology, or even physics.”101 With this clarified, how could we better define this Quinean naturalism, synonymous with the reduction of philosophy to a natural science?
Quine’s Scientism
In order, as he hoped, to make epistemology “[fall] into place as a chapter of psychology and hence of natural science,”102 Quine proposed a program that can be broken down into different steps:
Define a criterion of scientism on the basis of a constituted science. As Fisette and Poirier note, it is a question for Quine of borrowing from science “[his] conceptual apparatus (the only rigorous typology being scientific typology), [his] predictive apparatus … , and [his] apparatus of justification.”103
Show that a given discipline, or domain of study, does not implement the criterion of scientism defined in step 1. Thus the discipline that studies the phenomena of intentionality (or, if you prefer, phenomenology) does not meet this criterion. It follows that this discipline should disappear. To put it more concretely, for Quine, phenomenological statements but also psychological statements, like certain ordinary (dispositional, modal) sentences, common statements like “I believe that … ,” “I desire,” etc., are not extensional “and thus do not satisfy the criterion of scientism defined by extensionality.” As Fisette and Poirier write, these statements must thus “be eliminated from a well-regulated scientific practice.”104
Reduce every statement of a domain considered to be nonscientific (here, for example, phenomenology) to a statement of the chosen science.
Quine establishes this program by setting up a strict behaviorism that could be defined as the attempt to reduce “mental” phenomena (like “believing” or “learning a language” or “feeling pain”) as responses conditioned by identifiable stimuli in our environment. In Word and Object, Quine developed this behaviorist approach to meaning, founded on the theory of conditioning (stimulus meaning).105 His program is thus very simple: reduce each psychic phenomenon to a behavior and each behavior to a prior action of the environment. Naturalization means that all the old philosophical problems will be relegated to psychology, which is not the study of autonomous “mental states” but the recording of behaviors, themselves physiological reactions to physical phenomena. Philosophy is reduced to psychology, and psychology to physiology. This is why, Quine tells us,
Epistemology, or something like it, simply falls into place as a chapter of psychology and hence of natural science. It studies a natural phenomenon, viz., a physical human subject. This human subject is accorded a certain experimentally controlled input—certain patterns of irradiation in assorted frequencies, for instance—and in the fullness of time the subject delivers as output a description of the three-dimensional external world and its history.106
Action/reaction—such are the fundamental categories, in Quine’s eyes, for understanding humanity and human history.
This radical scientism is subject to a number of objections. We could reject the excessive rigorousness of Quine’s criterion of scientificity, noting that certain statements of contemporary physics cannot even meet it. Or we could maintain that the burden of proof has been postponed to a distant future, a future even more problematic today as so many forces are converging to invalidate the behaviorist theory of meaning.107 Thus many now speak of the failure of behaviorism. But these are not the arguments that I will emphasize; rather, I will examine Quine’s very strange enunciative posture. How, indeed, are we to understand and articulate this proclaimed scientism with his stated skepticism?
A Difficult Reconciliation
Doubtless it will be retorted that skepticism is not necessarily incompatible with a certain form of positivism. Didn’t Hume write, at the end of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, that we must throw into the fire those books that did not follow Newton’s experimental method,108 thus inaugurating the peaceful cohabitation of naturalist positivism and skepticism? Isn’t Quine simply Hume’s heir in hoping to understand positivism under the auspices of skepticism? It will be easiest to answer this question in two steps.
1. It is not obvious that Hume was the first thinker of “the end of philosophy,” to take up the significant title that Yves Michaud gave him. To show why not, we could note that Hume’s discourse on the end of a discipline that he practiced without cease would sometimes itself be self-refuting—but I will not undertake this kind of argumentation, as Karl-Otto Apel has done, showing the extent to which self-refutation is a trait of every doctrine inherited from Hume and a characteristic of current Anglo-Saxon philosophy.109
2. Quine’s scientism is much stricter than was Hume’s positivism. It doesn’t appear that Hume could have reduced a “value,” such as belief in the superiority of communication over violence, to a “fact,” namely the appropriate reaction to a physical stimulus, because values cannot be reduced to facts, being to necessity, norms to what is. But on this point it seems that Quine would go much further than the Scottish philosopher in affirming that the mental should be reduced to the physical. Must the question, “How should we think and act?” be considered as identical and reducible to the different question, “How do we think and act?”? Quine’s answer is certainly affirmative; for Hume, the response is less clear. In a word, we shouldn’t summon Hume to defend all Quine’s claims. We thus ought to consider Quine in his own right, and then, as Hilary Putnam observes, “It is reconciling what Quine says here with what Quine says elsewhere that is difficult and confusing.”110 So let us now examine the tension—even contradiction—within Quinean naturalism.
By naturalism, Quine means to reject the foundationalism that is traditionally attributed to Descartes’ project of first philosophy but that, in my view, defines every classical “philosophical” endeavor. Indeed, this foundationalism presents itself as the project that aims to determine which conditions must be met by a belief (proposition, idea, judgment, statement, etc.) in order to be accepted as true knowledge. But to specify a criterion of scientism by means of a stipulation of extensionality, and to determine on that basis that “psychological statements are not extensional and consequently will not meet the criterion of scientism,”111 is definitely to determine what conditions a proposition must meet to be accepted as true knowledge (for example, a sentence will be such if it is extensional). Whether this criterion is borrowed from an empirical science rather than an a priori system does not at all change the move’s structure—to determine what will be accepted as true knowledge and to differentiate it from what will be rejected as false (that is to say, “mythological,” or “metaphysical,” or even “Cartesian,” “foundationalist,” etc.). It follows that Quine is unable to avoid precisely what he rejects. It is as if his philosophical practice invalidates what he has said thereby. The paradoxical structure of Quine’s ultimate view can also be shown in another way, following, for example, Putnam’s analysis. Thus, Putnam tells us, if we accept the following sentence as an acceptable summary of Quine’s ultimate view:
A statement is rightly assertible (true in all models) just in case it is a theorem of the relevant “finite formulation”, and that formulation is a “tight fit” over the appropriate set of stimulus-true observation conditionals.112
then
This statement, like most philosophical statements, does not imply any observation conditionals, either by itself or in conjunction with physics, chemistry, biology, etc. Whether we say that some statements whi
ch are undecidable in the system are really rightly assertible or deny it does not have any effects (that one can foresee) on prediction. Thus, this statement cannot itself be rightly assertible. In short, this reconstruction of Quine’s positivism makes it self-refuting.
The difficulty, which is faced by all versions of positivism, is that positivist exclusion principles are always self-referentially inconsistent. In short, positivism produced a conception of rationality so narrow as to exclude the very activity of producing that conception … The problem is especially sharp for Quine, because of his explicit rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction, his rejection of a special status for philosophy, etc.113
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