Naturalism As A Philosophical Paradigm (penultimate draft)

Philo, 2009

i develop the conjecture that "naturalism" in philosophy names not a thesis but a paradigm in something like thomas Kuhn's sense, i.e., a set of commitments, shared by a group of investigators, whose acceptance by the members of the group powerfully influences their day-today investigative practice. i take a stab at spelling out the shared commitments that make up naturalism, and the logical and evidential relations among them. i used to think it was pretty much a waste of time to try to sort out philosophical talk of naturalism. i couldn't really discern a single, univocal formulation of naturalism, and i saw no particular reason to expect one to exist. Moreover, none of this seemed to matter. though sympathetic to the philosophical temperament of self-professed naturalists, i found that i could express all the philosophical theses i really cared about without using "naturalism" or any of its cognates; and, in the arguments of self-professed naturalists, little or nothing of philosophical importance ever seemed to turn on the precise formulation of naturalism. i suspected that talk of naturalism in philosophical discourse was playing a purely rhetorical role. i have since changed my mind. My mistake, as i'm now inclined to see it, was to assume that (i) professions of naturalism are merely, or mainly, expressions of commitment to a th e sis, indeed to a sin g le thesis, and that (ii) clarification of naturalism would require c o n c e p tual an alysis. But there are attractive alternatives to these assumptions. We can suppose in their place that (i') professions of naturalism are (usually) expressions of allegiance to something like a philosophical p arad ig m in thomas Kuhn's sense of "paradigm", something therefore m ultid im e n sio n al, and that (ii') proposed elucidations of this paradigm are therefore e m p iric al h yp o th e se s in the psychology and sociology of philosophy. let me flesh this out a little.

Metaphysics or Modernity?, 2013

Contemporary naturalism has two components. The first is ontological, and says, roughly, that all and only what the sciences say exists, really does exist. The other is methodological, and it says that only scientific explanations are legitimate explanations. Together these commitments promise a coherent picture of the world that is nicely integrated with an attractive epistemology. Despite the obvious appeal of naturalism, I would like to sound a note of caution. First, I would like to argue that naturalism's ontological commitment cannot be vindicated. Not, that is, that it is false; rather, I argue that any attempt to show that it is true presupposes that it is not. Second, I argue that methodological naturalism is false. But, again, the problem is not straightforward. I will not claim that there are gaps in the explanations offered by science, such that the scientific project would be incomplete without emendation. Instead I argue that the goodness of an explanation depends, in part, on how the event to be explained is described, and that, some events, under some descriptions, call for non-scientific explanations.

The Ethics of Wilfrid Sellars

In Chapter 2 I turn to Sellars’s claim that the normative is causally reducible, but logically irreducible to the natural. This means that while (for example) the behavioral or neurological information conveyed by a belief-ascription can in principle be wholly captured by an (ideal) scientific theory, such a theory wouldn’t say what intentional language said (in that it wouldn’t ascribe beliefs per se). What normative expressions say, can only be said using normative language, even if what they convey can be reduced to empirical psychology, or neurology, or some other branch of science. Serious objections have been raised against the tenability of Sellars thesis of the “causal reducibility, but logical irreducibility” of the normative. Just as critically, Sellars’s powerful argument for scientific realism can be turned against his argument for the causal reducibility of the normative, so that the normative turns out to be both logically and causally irreducible. I will demonstrate that this conclusion leads to a more complicated naturalism, but one that is still compatible with Sellars’s austere nominalism. The thesis of causal irreducibility will turn out to be helpful in explaining, among other things, moral motivation (as we will see in chapter 10).

Metaphilosophy, 2012

One of the major historical effects of Quine's attacks upon the analyticsynthetic distinction has been to popularise the belief that philosophy is continuous with science. Currently, most philosophers believe that such continuity is an inevitable consequence of naturalism. This article argues that though Quine's semantic holism does imply that there is no sharp distinction between truths discoverable by scientific investigation and truths discoverable by philosophical investigation, it also implies that there is a perfectly sharp and natural distinction between natural science and naturalistic philosophy.

Danish yearbook of philosophy, 2000

Transactions of the Charles S Peirce Society a Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy, 2011

American Philosophical Association, 2021

I am grateful to the APA Committee on Prizes and Lectures for offering me the Romanell prize. I confess to having been quite surprised as I don't see myself as actively participating in debates about naturalism in philosophy. And yet …. I have said about my approach in epistemology and philosophy of science that is naturalist (in a sense that means something to me). So I saw and see the prize not as an acknowledgement of any contribution I have made to the philosophical discussion of naturalism, but a challenge to make good on this selfassessment. I approach the task with gratitude tinged with some wariness. What could naturalism in philosophy be? And, is there a form of naturalism that I could claim as also mine? My talk today will be divided into three parts. The first addresses that first question: what could naturalism in philosophy be? The second reflects skeptically on the prospects for one common understanding of naturalism in philosophy: that science be the source of answers to philosophical questions. The third proposes a naturalism without science. Part One: Naturalism as Opposed to What? To answer this question, I consulted both philosophical and lexicographical sources. Both the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on "Naturalism" 1 and that on "Naturalism in

Studies in Science and Theology, 2020

Methodological naturalism is a limited pragmatic method which gives way, most of the time, to philosophical naturalism. Our description of philosophical naturalism will emphasize the plurality of its kinds. These considerations will bring up to the conclusion that methodological naturalism takes us far, yet still not far enough. Methodological naturalism is one of the tools that scientists use to overcome problems created by personal beliefs. Therefore, adopting such a methodological naturalism is relevant and pragmatic. Our conviction is that such a pragmatic position leads inevitably to philosophical questions and thus to philosophical naturalism. Philosophical naturalism involves several kinds, according to the ontological and epistemological dimensions involved. We will describe here three principal kinds of philosophical naturalism. If they are all totally compatible with scientific inquiry, it is not the case with their relation to religious belief. Methodological naturalism is certainly a useful tool, but it seemed important to us to go a step further and consider that everyone has a philosophical or religious position rooted in a preexisting worldview. This worldview commands the engagement with a kind of philosophical naturalism and thus the possibility or not to take into account religious beliefs. Three case study are presented in order to illustrate this assertion.

Naturalism in Question, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004