Scepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties 1st Edition by P.F. Strawson (PDF)

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By the time of his death in 2006, Sir Peter Strawson was regarded as one of the world’s most distinguished philosophers. Unavailable for many years, Scepticism and Naturalism is a profound reflection on two classic philosophical problems by a philosopher at the pinnacle of his career. Based on his acclaimed Woodbridge lectures delivered at Columbia University in 1983, Strawson begins with a discussion of scepticism, which he defines as questioning the adequacy of our grounds for holding various beliefs. He then draws deftly on Hume and Wittgenstein to argue that we must distinguish between ‘hard’, scientific naturalism; or ‘soft’, humanistic naturalism. In the remaining chapters the author takes up several issues in which sceptical doubts play an important role, in particular the nature of transcendental arguments and including the objectivity of moral philosophy, the mental and the physical, and the existence of abstract entities. Scepticism and Naturalism is essential reading for those seeking an introduction to the work of one of the twentieth century’s most important and original philosophers.This reissue includes a substantial new foreword by Quassim Cassam and a fascinating intellectual autobiography by Strawson, which together form an excellent introduction to his life and work.

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⭐Traditionally, philosophers have recognized a distinction between two ways to knowledge: the a posteriori (knowledge acquired from experience) and a priori knowledge (knowledge acquired from mere thought about our concepts). Since Kant, the distinction manifests itself in statements deemed synthetic (knowledge of the world) contrasted with statements deemed analytic (knowledge of conceptual meanings and their relations), and further statements deemed contingent contrasted with those that are necessary. These distinctions have been assumed not only useful but essential to the philosophical enterprise.Not so fast, according to W.V.O. Quine, who “rocked” (according to Rorty) “the audience [to whom he delivered his paper “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”] back on its heels,” the publication of which became “the most discussed and influential article in the history of 20th-century philosophy.” Time will tell, of course, the scope of Quine’s influence. But if Quine’s influence is measured through the lens of whether or not he successfully dissolved the synthetic/analytic distinction, I suggest that his influence is on the wane, thanks in no small part to Sir Peter Strawson.This small book comprises five (of six) lectures delivered by Strawson at Columbia University in 1983. In this review I will try to summarize Strawson’s approach, and (to avoid spoilers) note the subject-matters to which Strawson deploys the approach to suggest solutions to the other four. The first lecture is comprised of seven sub-headings. Here I’ll cover the first five.(1) Skepticism is a matter of doubt, not denial: the skeptic questions our grounds of belief, throws down a challenge for the non-skeptic. Strawson suggests that it may be a mistake to accept the challenge, at least insofar as whether one ought to respond in kind (i.e., with an argument). (2) Strawson takes us on a tour of Moore’s apparent response, which, at least on the face of it, appears dogmatic (although no less obviously true). Strawson suggests, rather than dogmatism, perhaps we can neutralize the skeptic’s challenge – expose the challenge itself as (philosophically) idle, albeit intelligible (which it is – we can understand what it is that the skeptic is after, and we can respond to it in kind). Quine’s “naturalized epistemology” is an example of such an effort through a causal account of experience. Trouble is, no matter how “scientific” we want to make such an account, it misses the point – the skeptic is left standing, grinning at us like the Cheshire Cat. Or, one could take a transcendental turn by either rooting our conscious experience in the conditions necessary for its occurrence, or that the skeptic’s question presupposes such conditions in the first place, thereby showing that by posing the question the skeptic contradicts himself. Strawson sees potential in the latter option.(3) Strawson distinguishes between Hume “the skeptic” and Hume “the Naturalist.” Regarding the latter, he suggests that Hume’s point is that philosophical argumentation is forever idle against the phenomenological fact that “we cannot help but believe in the existence of body,” we “cannot help [but] form beliefs and expectations in general in accordance with the basic cannons of induction.” These phenomenological facts are (Strawson) “inescapable” in Hume’s sense that they form in us as a matter of “absolute and uncontrollable necessity,” forcing us to judgments about the world just as naturally and ordinarily as we naturally and ordinarily “breathe and feel.” Hence, it is at most a curious vanity to even pose such questions, for they are impossible to utter without first presuppose that which is it we purport to call into doubt and purport to demand justification. For Strawson, all of this shows an unresolved tension in Hume between Hume-the-Skeptic and Hume-the-Natrualist, a tension with which Kant grapples and culminates in his labeling his philosophy as both “empirically real” and “transcendentally ideal.” It is a mistake to meet skeptical doubts through argument. Instead, we should recognize that the doubts themselves are idle – they lack force, the power to affect our lives in any practical way. This is not to say that reason has no role to play, it is only to recognize that human reason is constrained by our natural commitments, our natural framework from within which it must remain.(4) For Strawson, Wittgenstein is directly concerned with the subject of (3) in his On Certainty: “Like Hume, Wittgenstein distinguishes between … propositions … up for question and decision in the light of reason and experience and those which are not,” those that are “exempt from” the realm of genuine “doubt,” those regarding which it is “vain” to present as a matter of rational inquiry, those that we instead “take for granted in all our reasonings.” These are, for Wittgenstein, our base convictions, our fundamental beliefs, “something animal” that stand fast for all of us in the sense that they are “beyond being justified or unjustified.” They, for Wittgenstein, seem to “underlie all questions and thinking,” they “stand fast or solid,” have a “peculiar logical role” as a “substratum” or “framework” or “scaffolding” or “background” in the sense of the presupposed and distinctively human starting-place necessary for all “enquiring and doubting.” Next, Strawson emphasizes the sense of “necessary” in the prior sentence. What he is getting at, in contrast to Quine’s primary influence, Rudolf Carnap, is Wittgenstein’s (and Hume’s) emphatic denial that we, as human beings, have any capacity to choose or adopt our human point of view. “It is not as if we chose this game.” For Strawson, Hume and Wittgenstein share “a profound community” in the view that among our “beliefs” are certain foundational “crypto-propositions” (such as the existence of bodies and other minds) the formation of which, though dependent upon induction, are not “grounded” upon anything else and lie outside the realm of genuine or serious doubt, but rather mark and constrain the limits of genuine or serious doubt – the limits of rational competence. Hence, to one who demands such competence in response to skeptical doubt shows “a total misunderstanding of the role” such doubts “actually play in our belief systems.” As such, the “correct” approach to addressing “professional skeptical doubt” is “not to attempt to rebut it with argument, but to” recognize the demand for such as “idle, unreal, or pretense.” The problem of skepticism thus dissolves.Hence the curiosity of all quasi-scientific arguments offered to rebut skepticism, that is, those that seek to show that “the existence of a world of physical objects” can be explained in terms of those properties “current science attributes to them” as our “best explanation of the phenomena of experience” in the same way “the theories of physical science supply the best available explanations of the physical phenomena they” study. But if one takes Hume and Wittgenstein seriously, that is, one recognizes as they did the logical futility of the enterprise itself, one will notice that whenever we accept any given modern scientific theory as the best available explanation for any given phenomena (as we should), we will at once notice that our acceptance (or rejection) of whatever scientific theory under consideration brings nothing to bear on our basic foundational beliefs about, say, the existence of the physical world. Scientific theories of the physical world are under constant scrutiny, refinement and revision, to be sure. But most of us (especially non-philosophers and non-scientists) react to such scientific discoveries with wonder and appreciation, or perhaps only with a shrug, not because such discoveries are unimportant or uninteresting, but because they do not bring to bear with any discernable force any change to the ordinary ways in which we live our lives. Or, more simply, “No one accepts the existence of the physical world because [physics] supplies the best available explanation [of how the physical world works].” Similarly, the best argument “for” the existence of other minds may be the improbability of such a state of affairs, but, “again, this is no one’s reason for believing in the existence of other minds… We simply react to others [on the belief that they are, just like us, other] people,” not zombies or carefully programmed human replicants. Such worries, if genuinely held at all, are those of madmen – or philosophers.(5) If we accept the “naturalist” rejection of both the skeptical project as idle, what are we to make of the “crypto-propositions,” that is, of the “transcendental” reply? Strawson suggests that our focus will shift to “embrace the real project of investigating the connections between the major structural elements of our conceptual scheme. Often this will take the form of identifying conceptual capacities in terms of necessary conditions. But, again, this requires an account of “necessity.” For Strawson, we must recognize (again) the folly of insisting on strict logical necessity, for whether or not transcendental arguments are strictly valid, they “will continue to be of interest to [the] naturalist philosopher. For even if they do not succeed in establishing such tight or rigid connections as they initially promise, they [will] at least indicate or bring out conceptual connections, even if only of a looser kind,” and will “establish the connections between major structural features or elements of our conceptual scheme – to exhibit it, not as a rigidly deductive system, but as a coherent whole whose parts are mutually supportive and mutually dependent, interlocking in an intelligible way – to do this may well seem to [the] naturalist [philosopher] the proper, or at least the major, task of analytical philosophy. As indeed it does to me.”Analogues of Strawson’s approach are explored in the second, third, fourth, and fifth lectures, entitled “Morality and Perception,” “The Mental and the Physical,” and “The Matter of Meaning.” In the second, Strawson urges us to understand not that thinking about the physical world in scientifically abstract terms to the exclusion of phenomenology, nor that thinking about human behavior in purely behavioristic terms to the exclusion of morality, is a necessarily a mistake, but that error lies in holding that each way of understanding (each “standpoint”) of the world is in some sense incompatible. In the third, Strawson argues for “Naturalism” in a non-reductive sense; that is, a sense that feels no urge to exclude that which is distinctively human (subjective experience) as some sort of mysterious “illusion.” In the fifth and final, Strawson yet again defends the tradition from the Quine, insisting that the burden of proof must lay with the reductivist to explain away the ways in which we ordinarily live by and communicate with all those “non-natural abstract entities” that so trouble the reductivist – rather than the other way around. The Quinian reductivist must plausibly replace our traditional picture with some positive “account of the natural realities” that “underlie and legitimate, or give sense to,” our “perfectly acceptable ways of talking about meanings, concepts, necessities, etc.”And here I’ll stop. Very highly recommended.

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