What is Naturalism?

Godfrey-Smith is a warrior in the "science wars" against the postmodernists. As such, he is a defender of the Enlightenment view of science: Science is the truth, the light, and the way, and we have evidence to decide what theories are correct, according to methods we can assess.

He makes the joke that philosophical naturalism is like the natural-foods movement: it says that philosophy should have no artificial ingredients, only natural ones.

That is misleading. The contrast expressed by philosophical naturalism is not between nature and what is man-made, but between the world portrayed by science (nature) and the conceptual world of arm-chair philosophy. The slogan of Quine, the one who was the turning point toward philosophical naturalism, was "No first philosophy."

What is "first philosophy? It is the attitude that philosophy is first&mdas;prior to, and more fundamental than any other type of knowledge, and, in particular, prior to scientific knowledge. If you are influenced by the Cartesian project, then, while doing philosophy, you cannot make use of scientific information, at least, not until you have justified science.

Quine rejected that picture outright. According to Quine, philosophy is a way of acquiring knowledge like any other, and just as we should feel free to use what we know about chemistry in doing biology, we should feel free to use what we know about psychology, linguistics, physics, and for that matter chemistry or economics or sociology in doing philosophy. For Quine, philosophy is a science in many respects like the others.

Doing philosophy in the way Quine recommended means that philosophical theories will be no more (and no less) certain than our other kinds of knowledge, in particular, other scientific knowledge.

Quine liked to quote a logical positivist Otto Neurath who said (quoting from memory) knowledge is not like a house built on a solid foundation, but like a ship afloat on the sea, that we must repair while keeping it afloat.

There are (at least) two components to what Godfrey-Smith calls Naturalism: antifoundationalism and acceptance of the best science of the day as providing a standard of knowledge.

For Quine, part of learning how we form beliefs is actually learning how we actually form beliefs, and so the philosophical study of belief is related to the psychology of how we form beliefs. According to Godfrey-Smith, early Quine thought that there is nothing more to the philosophy of science than the psychology of belief acquisition, probably among scientists. I don't think that's true of Quine, but I haven't gone back to his evidence.

"Naturalism" has been accepted by virtually every English-speaking philosopher as A Good Thing. That means that every philosophical school has an interpretation of what "naturalism" means that supports their view.

Most English-speaking philosophers today want to be naturalists in the following broad sense: Whatever philosophical views they have should not be incompatible with science. Further, many English-speaking philosophers would like their philosophy to make contact with science.

Historical Background

Pragmatism and naturalism: Pragmatism is an American school of philosophy. Big names are Peirce, Dewey, James, C. I. Lewis, and Quine. The idea is that philosophy is part of how we live in the world. A philosophy is successful, in large part, if it fits together with a successful form of life.

Pragmatism fits naturally with naturalism, and, indeed, all the pragmatists I just mentioned, with the possible exception of James, were naturalists.

Godfrey-Smith's Preferred Version of Naturalism

Godfrey-Smith sees a problem with naturalism as it has so far been formulated: it seems to leave no distinctive place for philosophy. Here is Godfrey-Smith's favored solution:

Godfrey-Smith adopts Laudan's "normative naturalism." Since naturalism is supposed to involve a commitment to the world as science pictures it, that raises an immediate question: after all, no one has ever observed, or proposed a scientific theory about, the existence of norms, in particular, scientific norms, standards by which it can be determined what counts as legitimate scientific knowledge.

Godfrey-Smith's normative naturalism gives philosophy a distinctive place: philosophy evaluates and formulates norms.

The only norms Godfrey-Smith considers are "instrumental norms." What is an instrumental norm? It is easily explained by noting that, although it is bad to be a hitman, it is still possible, and we still understand what it is, to be a good hitman. A good hitman is one who does it well, kills reliably, doesn't get caught, isn't too expensive, never does anything that can be traced back to his or her employer, and so forth. It is certainly a norm that hitman are bad, but that is not an instrumental norm. The further norms I listed about a good hitman, that is, someone who is good as a hitman, are instrumental norms.

An "instrument" as the term is used here, just means a tool. An instrumental norm is one about whether the tool is good for the purpose for which it is designed, quite independent of any evaluation of whether the purpose is a good one.

So, why is it the job, according to Godfrey-Smith, of philosophers of science to determine instrumental norms of scientific practice? He takes it that the purpose of science, that for which scientific practice is designed, is, something like, discovering the truth, or discovering useful ways of understanding the world. What Godfrey-Smith is saying, in restricting philosophers of science to instrumental norms, is that it is not the job of philosophers of science to say why seeking the truth (or useful ways of understanding the world) is A Good Thing, only to show how, why, and whether scientific practices are in fact good at accomplishing that.

Assessment of Godfrey-Smith's Position

Godfrey-Smith seems to claim that philosophy, and only philosophy, concerns itself with norms. That sets philosophy off from, and makes it a distinct kind of study from the sciences. In addition, and this worries me about such a view, it puts philosophy in a position to judge the sciences in a way that the sciences cannot judge philosophy. After all, one might conclude that science as actually practiced violates the norms of "good" science, and that we can therefore ignore scientific results for philosophical purposes. Godfrey-Smith surely doesn't think that will or should happen, and he wouldn't like it if it did. Nonetheless, he has reinstated first philosophy through the back door.

In addition, and here I am following Quine, the view presupposes that there is clear normative–descriptive distinction, but that is just a special case of the fictional analytic–synthetic distinction.

-- ShaughanLavine - 17 Oct 2005 - 15 Oct 2007