The Social Constructivist Debate: Reconsidering Wiggins

metaphysics, personal identity, social ontology

 An appreciation of David Wiggins’ Sameness and Substance

(there is some notation later in this piece that needs to be rectified – some characters were lost in the copy and paste)

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The social constructionist argument takes the generic form of:

1. x need not have existed, or need be at all as it is. X, or X as it is at present, is not determined by he nature of things; it is not inevitable

2. x is quite bad as it is

3. we would be much better off if x were done away with, or at least radically transformed.

This must rate as the argument generating the most heated debate within scientific circles, in philosophy, and indeed post-Sokel, right across academia. Yet, amidst the din nowhere is there to be found in the literature reference to David Wiggins’s sophisticated ‘synthesis’ formulated in his Sameness and Substance, a synthesis assimilating the virtues both of the realist and constructivist positions, assiduously avoiding their failings. What accounts for this neglect I can but only offer a few remarks in passing at the end of this article.

§1

Wiggins’ critique of anti-essentialism

Wiggins is happy to accept that the convenient label ‘conceptualist realism’ is a species of realism (1980: 131). Perhaps Wiggins’ conceptualist realism can best be captured by his comment (1980: 67) that there ‘must still be something we can discover in spite of ourselves’ and this is what is meant to take existence and identity and truth seriously. Again, ‘the mind “conceptualises” objects, yet objects “impinge” upon the mind’ (Wiggins 1980: 101). His outline of a theory of individuation illustrates his realism (essentialism) and his conceptualism (sortals) position for if one can invent sortal concepts at will with no attempt at validation, ‘then the real content of the assertion that something lasted till “t” and then ceased to exist will be trivialized’ (Wiggins 1980: 66). I open with Wiggins’ hypotheses (diagnosis) of the sources of anti-essentialism. They are sequentially as follows:

Premise (1): Another life form different from ours might well have not discovered individual substances and might have singled out and individuated other kinds of things through very different principles of articulation and individuation.

Premise (2): That it is feasible for the discovery of a given substance to be conceptualised in at least two very different ways and that scientific progress consisted in conceptual refinement through ‘radically different ways’.

Conclusion: Conceptualisation and individuation are not real and independent phenomenon that exist in nature, and that the most disagreeable aspect of essentialism is its claims to show the necessities that exist independent of mind.

Premise (1) is plausible in Wiggins’ view. Surely, Wiggins asks, what substance can be conceptualised in radically different ways with different principles of existence and persistence? It is grossly incoherent to posit an entity with inconsistent properties for even if the singling out of and articulation of x could be dispensed with (x could be ignored), the essential specifications of x fixes x’s existence and possibility of being singled out.

Wiggins (1980: 136) holds Van Fraassen up as an example of arguing from (1) to (3) via (2). According to Wiggins, Van Fraassen first posits an ontology of bare particulars; understanding, explanation and discovery thereof, is mediated and ‘determined’ by the instrument of understanding. Wiggins detects a tension here. On the one hand a “completed” first stage ontology is posited, but on the other hand this ontology is then finally determined. This second stage is characterized by Quine, Geach and Wiggins as being an ideology. The anti-essentialists accept a range of basic sortals and then ‘adduce as a reason to depreciate the suggestion that any of these things “had” to be a horse, or a tree or a man, the anthropocentricity, of the viewpoint that underlies and conditions the attributes.’ There is no coherence in the notion that ‘of what’ one articulates, might equally ‘have been a prime number or a fire shovel, though in fact neither.’

How then to moderate this extreme conceptualism? A first step, requires that the conceptualist reject the idea that horses, leaves, the sun, etc., are artefacts. It needs to finely balance the reciprocal relation between our conceptual creativity and nature, allowing nature to intimate, regulate and inform the concepts. An acceptable conceptualism must not entail the denial that the extensions of any concepts could not have an independent existence (‘a particularly unappealing form of idealism’ 1980: 141), but can only licence the notion that our capacity to single out draws upon a ‘conceptual scheme which has itself been fashioned or formed in such a way as to make it “possible” to single them out (1980: 139). ‘The anti-conceptualist realist is not necessarily a man confused by anything at all except the difference between good and bad conceptualism.’ Just as there is an unacceptable exaggerated vulgar realism ‘myth of the “self-differentiating object”, the idea being an object supplying “raw” datum to the mind. There must be ‘something in the singling out that makes it determinate which principle is the principle of individuation for the entity and under what family of individuatively parallel sortal concepts it is to be subsumed’ (1980: 140). Negotiating the two extremes of the realist and conventionalist as characterized above, Wiggins’ central claim ‘was only that what sortal concepts we bring to bear upon experience determines what we can find there – just as the size and mesh of a net determines “’not what fish are in the sea, but which ones we shall catch” (1980: 141, my emphasis). The thesis is that the concepts under which experience is articulated and things singled out determine the persistence conditions of what is singled only because such concepts determine “what” is singles out’ (1980: 141), thus expunging any idealism by tying the persistence condition to the creative act of mind.

Is there any scope for manoeuvre in freedom or choice in the articulation of reality? The freedom exists at (1) where an interest is developed (but is exhausted at 1, p142), but then a set of sortal concepts is fixed upon to realize an interest and ‘nothing that we who have the concept can do will determine whether or not something at a certain place actually “satisfies” a given concept or not’ (1980: 142).

The anti-conceptualist realist is concerned with what happens beyond the point at which objectivity has been secured (as best as it can be independent of mind). His concern is not merely to act as guardian of objectivity in human thought, but ‘to preserve its prospects of passing beyond the most narrowly anthropocentric’ (1980: 142). In a footnote (1980: 101; note 25) Wiggins marks his awareness that his position can be misread. When Wiggins says that ‘the mind “conceptualises” objects, yet objects “impinge” upon the mind’, the first half of this claim seems to some ‘to carry the suggestion that “the very same objects” could have been conceptualised in different ways, had the mind been differently constituted.’ This is not the way that Wiggins intends the sentence to be understood.

Our concepts are open to being regulated by reality and as a consequence our understanding approaches a realm not sensitive to the practical. The realist critic ‘has nothing to offer as a proof that all genuinely explanatory insights “have” to be framed at the deepest level of fundamental theory’ and ‘our conceptual scheme surely represents a respectable, however unimpressive, stage in some however gradual process of the revelation of reality’ (1980: 144).

Wiggins makes the distinction between the scientific worldview and the ‘less theoretical’ view of reality, i.e. the world of practice, morality and meaning. Many great scientific developments do not impact upon our ontology but rather result in the jettisoning of certain explanatory ideas, and new answers are framed ‘under the new order by bridge principles.’ Should the old ontology undergo a genuine revision, it can easily accommodate the improvements (Wiggins 1980: 88 takes an example from biology showing that the discovery that tadpoles became frogs changed conceptions, not concepts). Further, if scientific progress abandons an old ontology, that does not in itself render the old ontology redundant or ‘discredited’ – on it own terms it operates quite adequately. Though we live in a world that is aware of the indeterminacy of particle physics, we still operate for the most part in a Newtonian world. Microscopic discoveries do not affect ‘the familiar macroscopic entities in which we “cannot” abandon our interest’ (my emphasis). And finally, a new world view and its accompanying ontology ‘will not come bare of individuative concepts or of “de re” necessities of its own . . . what generates these will be the requirement that everything conceivable of the new entities be co-conceivable in the new theory.’

For Wiggins the relativity theorist typically exaggerates the autonomy of though in the singling out of objects of reference, by the same token so-called Bare Absolutists take too lightly the conceptual preconditions of singling out and it has been Wiggins’ task to mediate a position between these two extremes by offering his thesis of Sortal Dependency of Identity.

§2

Sortal dependency of identity

As the reader might recall from section I Wiggins rejects Geach’s relativity thesis. Geach’s thesis is that one cannot simply ask whether a thing “x” and a thing “y” are one and the same. It must be specified “the same what” for, “x” may be the same “F” as “y” though “x” is a different “G” than “y”. Geach’s point seems to be partly vindicated if we recall the example of the gramophone record being turned into an ashtray. Wiggins (1980: 18-20) argues that Geach’s relativity thesis is incompatible with Leibniz’s Law. Suppose that Leibniz’s Law applies to the statement ‘The ashtray is the same matter as the gramophone.’ Then the ashtray and the gramophone record have the same properties. Since the gramophone record has the property of being the same artefact as the gramophone record, the ashtray must have that property. Therefore it could not be true that the ashtray is a different artefact than the gramophone record. Undeniably there are innumerable sortal concepts used to single out some individual but the fact that:

some individual “a” does not in itself imply that there is a possibility of getting different answers to the question whether “a” coincides with some mentioned individual “b” in the way relevant for “a”. For all the alternative procedures of individuation under alternative covering concepts might, when they yielded any answer, yield the same answer to that question (‘same what’, footnote 4). My contention is precisely that they “must” do. The reflexivity and congruence of identity provide logically compelling reasons why, if “a” is “b”, or if “a” is the same something or other as “b”, (same horse, same tree, same planet, or whatever), then all different procedures of individuating “a” (provided they really do individuate “a”) must, if they yield any answer at all, yield the “’same“’ answer with respect to “a”s coincidence with “b.” (Wiggins 1980: 18)

Suppose that relative identity is expressed by a true statement of the form “a” is the same “F” as “b” and “a” is a different “G” than “b”. One conclusion that might be drawn from Wiggins’s argument is that instances of relative identity are not instances of strict identity since relative identity holds between the ashtray and the gramophone record, strict identity does not hold. This much Geach would not deny, but perhaps Wiggins’s point is that relative identity is not properly identity. The challenge is not to find instances of relative identity, that’s commonplace. The challenge is rather to provide instances of strict identity. Geach’s relativity thesis implies that the “only” notion of numerical identity we have is that of relative identity, rendering strict identity as incoherent. The notion of strict identity is simply the notion of a relation that holds only between a thing and itself.

Wiggins (1980: 47-48) advocates the thesis of Sortal Dependency of Identity and disassociates it from Geach’s sortal-relative thesis by making two claims.

(1) if “a” is the same as “b”, then it must also hold that “a” is the same “something” as “b”.

This claim is generated by conception in our ordinary language. The second claim is that:

(2) the “elucidation” of identity “a” = “b” depends on the kind of thing that “a” and “b” are.

The consolidation of the above gives a threefold doctrine:

“D”: “a”= “b” iff there exists a sortal concept f such that:

(1) “a” and “b” belong to a kind which is the extension of f;

(2) to say that “x” falls under f – or that “x” is an f – is to say what “x” is (in the sense Aristotle isolated);

(3) “a” is the same f as “b”; or “a” coincides with “b” under f, i. e. coincides with “b” in the manner of coincidence required for members of f, . . .

If the thesis of Sortal Dependency is true, then, although the statement that “a”= “b” will always entail that there is an f such that “a” = “f b”, it will not specify what the sortal concept is. Nor indeed the man who says or knows that “a”= “b” know which concept it is.

A ‘sortal’ is supposed to be a term which in some sense tells us ‘what the thing is’ and needs to be able to correctly characterize those successions which correspond to persisting object, would have to cover instances where object (artefacts) can be taken apart and reconstituted for part of our concept of object-identity is that throughout all its changes an object must at least remain an object of the same sort. But what is meant by the same ‘sort’? I offer a definition of what ‘sortal’ might be:

The general term F is a sortal means: It is a conceptual truth (a rule of language) that any spatio-temporally and qualitively continuous succession of F-stages corresponds to (what counts as) stages in the career of a single persisting F-thing.

Wiggins uses the example of a sortal called ‘tree’. Adjectives such as ‘brown’ and ‘wooden’ are not sortals. If “a” is a brown wooden tree, the thesis of sortal dependency implies that “a”‘s identity somehow depends on “a”‘s being a tree in a way that “a”‘s identity does not depend on “a”‘s being wooden or brown (a continuous succession of stages of trees typically must add up to the stages of one and the same tree, a continuous succession of stages of brown or wooden things may jump from one brown or wooden thing to another).I offer an explication of this in terms of the following principle:

The Sortal Rule. A sufficient condition for the succession S of object-stages to correspond to stages in the career of a single persisting object is that:

(1) S is spatio-temporally continuous; “and”
(2) S is qualitatively continuous; “and”
(3) there is a sortal term F such that S is a succession of F-stages.

The sortal rule states “only a sufficient”, not a necessary, condition of persistence. This principle exhibits a sense in which “a”‘s identity might be said to depend on “a”‘s being an instance of ‘tree’ rather than on “a”‘s being an instance of either ‘brown’ or ‘wooden’. The difficulty is to find some way of moving from this sort of example to Wiggins’s general idea that any thing’s identity must depend on ‘what it is’. One aspect of this difficulty is brought out by contrasting a thing’s diachronic unity with the thing’s synchronic unity. If “a” is a brown wooden tree, the principle of sortal dependency provides a rough analysis of what the diachronic unity of “a”‘s successive stages consists in, and this analysis depends in a certain way on “a”‘s being a tree. There appears, however, to be no comparable analysis of the synchronic unity of “a”‘s contemporaneous parts which depends on “a”‘s being a tree. But the thesis of sortal dependency, as Wiggins apparently intends it, would imply that “a”‘s identity through space as well as through time depends on ‘what it is’. I suggest that a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for F to be a sortal is that F be non-dispersive but he recognises the need to tightened up the condition to be anti-dispersive:

‘F is anti-dispersive’ means: It cannot conceivably happen that different F-things overlap extensively.

The non-dispersiveness of our standard count nouns is what guarantees that we can employ them as sortals and trace unambiguous careers under them for the dispersiveness of mass nouns such as wood disqualifies theses terms from being sortals. It should be understood that the sortal rule should not be construed as being exact: it can do no more exact than our ordinary concept of persistence. To trace the career of a tree is more relevant to our concerns than does the tracing of a patch of brown.

Suppose we view the world as made up of various spatio-temporal segments of reality, most of which are discontinuous and heterogeneous, but a select number of which count as ‘genuine things’ or ‘substances’. All trees enjoy this special status but not all brown or wooden portions of reality do, since most of these will combine stages of different brown or wooden things. Looked at in this way, ‘what a thing is’ provides it with the credentials required to count as a genuine thing, and any genuine thing “must” have such credentials. This may be one way to explain the thesis of sortal dependency. On this explanation, the thesis would not imply that we can give any analysis of a thing’s diachronic or synchronic unity, let alone an analysis which depends in some special way on the thing’s sortals. We appeal to the thing’s sortals, rather, in justifying its status as a genuine thing.

There is, however, the risk that the thesis so understood trivializes the distinction between a ‘genuine thing’ and a ‘mere portion of reality’. There seem to be three positions that can be adopted with respect to this distinction. First, it may be accepted as ultimate and unanalysable. But that would seem to imply that the distinction does not depend on sortals. Second, one may attempt to provide a general sortal-independent analysis of this distinction. My argument is that there is an important, albeit limited extent to which we can analyse our concept of an object’s identity without taking cognisance of what sort of object it is proposing an analysis which preserves its sortal-neutral character. Of course, if any such sortal-independent analysis can succeed, the thesis of sortal dependency is rejected. The third possibility, which is the one implied by the thesis, is that genuine things are analysed as things that are instances of a certain list of sortals. The trouble is that this third possibility seems to imply that genuine things really have nothing in common which sets them apart from other portions of reality. It is as if a genuine thing is being defined as any portion of reality that is either a cat, or a dog . . . or a mountain or a river . . . . .This makes it difficult to see how there could be anything deep or important in the distinction between genuine things and portions of reality that do not so qualify.

§3

Natural kinds

The best candidates to play the roles of sortal and substantial predicates are natural kind words. A ‘natural kind concept “c” must make some link between the relevant questions of identity and the empirical ascertainable causal and dispositional properties of members of the kind as we find them in the actual world. “But how can the concept make this link?” (Wiggins 1980: 77), and even supposing the link is made ‘how will that provide a principle that is necessary and sufficient to articulate, to individuate . . .’ The principle of individuation has been used in prior discussion to mean something other than a property individuates, say Aristotelian matter. Wiggins seems to be saying that every sortal term carries with it a principle of individuation and that the tradition of nominal essence is of no assistance since it trades on appearances: they leave unexplained the evolution of a sortal that still specifying the very same natural kind. Wiggins draws upon Putnam’s doctrine of natural kinds, the determination of a natural kind fails or succeeds with the existence of nomological principles known or unknown and which will gather together its actual extension around an arbitrary good representative of the extension. It is not an implication of the doctrine that people (primitive mentality to proto-scientific) who use natural kind terms will know the true scientific theory of that kind but its insight lies in explaining how words enter language on the most provisional of theories offering just enough to recognise the extension ‘and draw credit on a draft that Nature may “or may not” finally honour’ (Wiggins 1980: 82). A particular continuant “x” belongs to a natural kind, or is a natural thing:

iff “x” has a principle of activity corresponding to the nomological basis of that or those extension-involving sortal identifications which answer truly the question ‘what is “x”?’ (Wiggins 1980: 89)

and for the purposes of a theory of individuation it is of no concern whether the thing in question was fabricated ‘but the difference between satisfying and not satisfying this condition that makes the fundamental distinction’ and objects that fail this crucial condition are termed artefacts (artefacts are also still subject to the fundamental laws of physics and chemistry).

§4

Artefact identity

Most of the discussion heretofore concerned natural substances though Wiggins holds that his sortal dependency of identity thesis could mutatis mutandis cover words denoting natural organs such as heart, liver, foot, brain and even extend to geographical or geological terms like river, lake, glacier etc. The latter cases one might appropriately talk in terms of principles of activity, the former in terms of activity and of “modes of functioning” or “operation” (Wiggins 1980: 86). There are artefact-words such as clock and table to which Putnam’s account would not be applicable and there is scant nomological sentences that could apply to cover artefacts. Though artefacts are subject to the laws of physics and chemistry they”

are collected up not by reference to a theoretically hypothesized inner constitution but under “functional descriptions that have to be indifferent to specific constitution and particular mode of interaction with environment. (Wiggins 1980: 87, my emphasis)

This description amounts to what is a Lockean nominal essence with no scientifically palpable real essence with. Let us recall that for Wiggins:

a particular continuant “x” belongs to a natural kind, or is a natural thing, iff “x” has a principle of activity corresponding to the nomological basis of that or those extension-involving sortal identifications which answer truly the question ‘what is “x”?’

Now the for the purposes of his theory of individuation it is of no relevance whether a thing was fabricated but the difference between satisfying and not satisfying the above condition that really matters. Wiggins discusses two artefacts, namely a mechanical clock and Hobbes’ famous ship of Theseus.

The clock first. When a clock stops because it hasn’t been wound, the pause does not compromise its persistence. Again however long it may be out of action due to repairs, its persistence is not affected. What matters is its nominal essence which must somehow stipulate that the nominal essence of a clock is its capacity to tell time, but this is too strong a stipulation. A weaker stipulation requires only that an irretrievable loss of this capacity, or functional redundancy, counts against the persistence of a clock. For any of the above interruptions does not mean the cessation of the clock – the clock had only one beginning (Locke argued that no object can have two beginnings of existence) and a pause is an unreasonable notion of cessation. Supposing that one clock was identified by a description applying at the time it was functioning normally from “clock” – coinciding in a manner sufficient for identity, each identified under a description applying to it after some substantial repair, the coincidence of one thing with two things contravenes Wiggins’s sortal dependency of identity. We cannot even speak of the central focus or nucleus of the clock that would give some help here.

With regard to Theseus’ ship I will not set up the already very familiar puzzle. Suffice to say, just like the two-clock example previously we now have two ships. Wiggins (1980: 96) writes that there is not a single proposal which,

(a) justifies the whole corpus and every reasonable seeming extension of the corpus of identity judgements about artefacts we commonly accept as true,

(b) allows total freedom of disassembly “and” part-replacement,

(c) meets “D” (iii) (“a” is identical with “b” iff there is some concept f such that:

(1) f is a substance concept under which an object that is an f can be singled out, and distinguished from other f entities and other entities;

(2) “a” coincides under f with “b”;

(3) “Ç” coincides under f“ë” stands for a congruence relation: i.e. all pairs “’ that are members of the relation satisfy the Leibnizian schema “⨔x” â “y” (Wiggins 1980: 68).

(d) satisfies the “Only a and b” condition.

There seems little or no hope of artefactual identity regardless of how relaxed the identity criteria are and Wiggins asks does this then mean that the project should be abandoned if one held to Quine’s ‘no entity without identity’. Wiggins is not so pessimistic for the possibility of an ontology of artefacts and the possibility of treating artefacts as continuants for he feels that a sufficient condition of artefact identity, suggested by Helen Morris Cartwright’s (cited in Wiggins 1980: 97) application to the category of stuff may be applied to artefacts: the condition does not exclude change, but excludes all addition or subtraction of matter whatever. Artefactually, ‘it also requires the however vestigial continuance of the capacity to subserve whatever roles or ends the artefact was designed as that very artefact to subserve’.

The thesis of scientific constructivism asserts that all scientific facts are constructed. Do they believe that all scientific facts in our possession are constructed, or do they believe that all scientific facts that we might ever come to posses must be constructed?

Scientific constructivism comes in two varieties, instrumental constructivism and <????>. Narrowly conceived instrumentalism is the view that our claims about the world can be divided into the observational and the theoretical, and that only the former are truth-valuable. Theoretical claims are regarded as merely linguistic, uninterpreted tools for systemizing observations and making predictions. Broadly conceived, instrumentalism is any view that regards theoretical claims as epistemically or metaphysically deficient in comparison with observational claims. The deficiency may be that theoretical statements have no truth-values, or that the truth-value of theoretical claims is epistemically inaccessible, or that theoretical claims can be dispensed with by translating them into observational language. In this latter sense, that van Fraassen falls. The instrumentalist position should be contrasted with the one that maintains that the only independent facts are social facts and that moreover materialism and phenomenalism don’t exhaust the class of conceivable monisms and its conceivable that the ultimate constituents of reality are social episodes and that both he physical and the mental are constructions out of this primordial social material – Kukla calls this metaphysical socialism, the locus classicusfor this discussion being Wittgenstein’s PI wherein some social facts are regarded as unanalyseable into anything else, beliefs and intentions cannot be said to exist outside the context of a social milieu. Now this is not so say that Wittgenstein endorsed metaphysical socialism. What is needed in addition to the Wittgenstein doctrine is that there is a deeper social analysis of all non-social phenomena.

§5

So why has Wiggins been overlooked? When Wiggins’s Identity and Spatio-Temporary Continuity came out in 1967, it exerted a considerable impact. It had the charm of idiosyncrasy – a defence of the Aristotelian substance philosophy – along with (for Oxford) considerable technical sophistication. Here was someone evidently au fait with philosophical logic. It was something different. When Sameness & Substance, the revamped version of the earlier text, appeared in 1980, the effect was muted. Wiggins was espousing basically the same position, with quite a bit of elaboration and qualification. The substance philosophy was not regarded as a serious contender by Quine (and others), who also disputed the technical competence of the work. None the less Wiggins was still au fait with the latest work in philosophical logic. That book had that much going for it. Unfortunately, it seems that the prospects for the latest incarnation Sameness & Substance Revisited (2001) are perhaps more bleak. Again, it takes the same basic position, but now and despite Wiggins reworking this under his tenure of the Wykeham chair, Wiggins’s interest has for the last 20 years been in the field of ethics, not philosophical logic. What it comes down to then is that Wiggins is merely defending a 30-year-old position without having kept up with the best technical work. And further, writing in 2001, he is not engaging with the prevailing wave of constructivist literature. Wiggins the metaphysician not a philosopher of science would not surprisingly be overlooked.

Bibliography

Fraassen, B.C. van. 1977-8 ‘Essence an Existence’ American Philosophical Quarterly Monograph.
Fraassen, B.C. van. 1980. The Scientific Image. Oxford.
Geach, P.T. 1962/1980. Reference and Generality. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Lovibond, S. & Williams, S.G. 1996. Identity, Truth and Value: Essays for David Wiggins, Aristotelian Society Series, Vol. 16, Oxford: Blackwell.
Wiggins, D. 1967. Identity and Spatio-Temporal Continuity. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wiggins, D. 1980. Sameness and Substance. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wiggins, D. 1997. ‘Natural Languages as Social Objects’, Philosophy, 72, 499-524.
Wiggins, D. 2001. Sameness and Substance Renewed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Wiggins, D. 1987. ‘Truth, Invention, and the Meaning of Life’ in Needs, Values, Truth: Essays in the Philosophy of Value, Oxford.

Corkscrews and kites; vats and bodies

consciousness

Some thoughts on Larry Shapiro’s excellent The Mind Incarnate .

Shapiro identifies two related Cartesian Materialism ghosts. The first is the multiple realizability thesis (MRT); the second is what Shapiro terms the “separability thesis”.

MRT is the generic idea being that the mind is only contingently dependent on the brain, the a priori implication being that a mind can be instantiated in any material. Just because ubiquitous artefactual objects or devices are supposedly multiply realizable (MR), such theorists extrapolate that mind must operate in these terms as well. Shapiro seeks to reign in the creeping promiscuity of the concept of MRT, suggesting that proper discussion of MRT should be subject to empirical considerations as and when they arise. It should be admitted that corkscrews and kites have less constraints on MR than do brains. Shapiro throws down the gauntlet. What exactly is meant by realization? – what criteria can be offered? Just because a kite can be made of paper and another of nylon, does this really qualify as a multiple realization? Can a corkscrew operate as a corkscrew if it were realised in a non-rigid material? What is the relation between structure and function? In contrast with MRT, Shapiro’s mental constraint thesis (MCT) is “the thesis that there are few distinct kinds of brains that can actually produce human-like psychological capacities” (p. 106). Facts about the wiring of the brain and convergence on topographic mapping of sensory information of mammals are nomonological.

The second ghost is actually a pair of twins, closely related but not identical. Both ghosts partake in what Shapiro terms the “separability thesis” (ST). According to ST, from the knowledge of mental properties it is impossible to infer the properties of the body because they can be realized in different kinds of structures. One twin claims that the mind is much like a computer program that can be specified independently of the hardware it runs on – call this the body neutrality ghost. The other twin conceives the brain as a self-contained organ, the body merely an antenna-like device, a receptacle for somatosensory and sensorimotor input providing cognitive computation for the brain, a closed causal system – Shapiro calls this the envatment ghost. Both these ghosts have been the sine qua non of philosophy of mind, generating intuitions that deny that there is an essential relation between human physicality and cognition. Shapiro is optimistic that the traditional mind-body distinction is being corroded in light of the embodied cognition literature.

A Commemoration of the Centenary of Oakeshott’s Birth (2001)

editorial projects, oakeshott

mo1.jpg   booklet-back.jpg

I still have a few copies of a booklet I put together (with very high production values) but more importantly containing some beautifully written, affectionate and insightful essays. Copies are available to anyone who is interested, the only provisor being that you cover the cost of the postage. If you are interested, drop me a line.

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Excerpt: Convenor’s Message

I wish to extend the warmest of welcomes to you all, especially to those who have travelled long distances to be here this week. This monograph has been put together as a memento of this, the inaugural conference of the Michael Oakeshott Association, commemorating the centenary of Oakeshott’s birth.

Rather than distributing clutches of perfunctorily photocopied ephemera, we hope this more durable, albeit modest publication, will in years to come conjure up fond memories of both an intellectually stimulating and a socially congenial event. It also serves, in some small way, to acknowledge those who over the past two years have lent their names and, at the outset, offered their support to the then vague idea of an Oakeshott inspired forum. There also all those who on hearing of this inchoate idea contacted me, exuding such enthusiasm that it created the impetus for something more determinate. Amongst them are several who have given generously of their time and, in some cases, financial assistance.

Speaking of financial assistance, we have the distinction of being the beneficiary of assistance from both sides of the Atlantic. We are most grateful to C Boyden Gray and other members of the Gray family (Burton Jr., Hunter and Jane), The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, The British Academy, The Mind Association, Thoemmes Press, Imprint Academic, The British Society for the History of Philosophy, and Mark North: their generosity has allowed us to put on this conference.

We also wish to acknowledge the broader membership whose support is manifested by the fact of their membership.

Finally, we are grateful for the support and interest of the Oakeshott family: we trust that their privacy has not been gratuitously impinged upon and would ask all to abide by the need to preserve their privacy.

That we are here today at all is of endless astonishment to me; no-one could have anticipated the level of interest that had been lying dormant, and in a very Oakeshottian way, this interest just emerged, fortuitously falling in my lap. Conscious of the responsibility I had to the Oakeshott name, to the legacy, to those who early on offered their unconditional support in my efforts, and the expectations of many others, I trust that thus far, this ‘stewardship’ meets with their approval.

Hilary Putnam has said recently that he thinks the philosopher should to some extent disclose himself as a human being. He paraphrases James’ reference to Walt Whitman in lecture one of Pragmatism: ‘who touches this book touches a man’. This notion, the inextricable weave of the man and his work, so clearly exemplified in Oakeshott, calls for some exploration. This ‘tension’ comes through in Robert Orr’s quoting Oakeshott at his retirement dinner as his having “tried to be a philosopher, but happiness kept breaking through.”

I hope that the contributions here will go some way to articulate the appeal of Oakeshott for those unfamiliar with his work. Our speakers are eminently well qualified for this task:

Kenneth Minogue, our first President, was for so long a colleague and bore witness to the fact that ‘Oakeshott was a philosopher down to the tips of his toes’ and that ‘being a philosopher seems to me to have infused his whole character’, a notion that is entirely in tune with the premise behind this conference and the theme of this booklet;

Timothy Fuller, our first Vice-President, describes being captivated literally within the first line of reading Oakeshott’s introduction to Hobbes’ Leviathan. It was several years later that he first met Oakeshott and then Shirley Letwin. And as we all know, both Tim and Shirley have been instrumental in bringing Oakeshott’s already published work to a wider audience and have edited much of Oakeshott’s posthumous work;

Though Oakeshott did not act as supervisor to Noël O’Sullivan, Noël went on to make a distinguished career in academia embodying many of Oakeshott’s virtues – a highly cultivated philosophical mind, never jaded and always very generous with his time.

Anthony Quinton is ‘a philosopher’s philosopher’. Tony was part of the Oxford philosophical discussion group founded by AJ Ayer and whose members included PF Strawson, David Pears, Michael Dummett, BF McGuiness, Patrick Gardiner, David Wiggins, John Mackie, Philippa Foot, Paul Grice, GJ Warnock and HLA Hart. Unusually eclectic, Tony retained an interest in the unfashionable Idealists, long before their ‘rehabilitation’;

John Jascoll’s affectionate recollection is a perfect illustration of the value of Oakeshott’s non-instrumental conception of liberal education – his gentle parody of Oakeshott’s precision is reminiscent of JL Austin’s acute sensitivity to nuances of meaning;

Last, but by no means least, Josiah Lee Auspitz. Lee has played a crucial part in this project and one cannot overestimate his contribution. His wise counsel has been the guiding hand behind the Association from the outset.

These names each in their own way are testament to the central value Oakeshott attached to friendship, a value indeed fully consonant with Burton C. Gray’s sentiments expressed in the opening piece. I would go so far as to say that for Oakeshott, friendship was the ‘purest’ form of human association, intrinsic value untainted by any instrumental consideration.

In what follows I offer a critical sketch of how I view Oakeshott’s relationship to political philosophy and philosophy in general and tell of how I came to discover Oakeshott.

I never knew or met Oakeshott; I never even sat in on one of his seminars or lectures. I had not even heard of him until a year or so after his death. Some I suspect would consider these grounds enough to disqualify my participation in such a unique event. If I go some way to meeting this objection, then that is only incidental – this is not intended as an apologia. For like it or not, those who never met Oakeshott now form the greater part of the constituency represented here this week, and indeed, inevitably, the ever increasing percentage of the Association’s membership. And this should be viewed as a very healthy sign – rather than running the risk of Oakeshott’s thought ossifying within the drawing rooms of the cognoscenti, Oakeshott’s thought should be open to the fine-grained interest of the scholar, the expositor, the suggestive interpreter, the merely derivative, the reflective critic, the educated reader, and dare I say it, even open to the vulgarian. This openness would be in keeping with his rejection of the role of ‘preacher’, Oakeshott’s prototype Rationalist, his life-long bête noire, disseminating his ‘gospel’ through disciples. One can only but hope that Oakeshott will not become the focal point of a cult following, similar to that which befell Wittgenstein. And if I’m admonished that this somewhat caustic view is out of place in the genteel world of Oakeshottian civility, then one should be reminded that Oakeshott was himself not above such mischievousness in his talks and polemical writing. A profound admiration tempered by a highly critical eye are not incompatible virtues, in fact they demand it.

That this conference’s theme is ‘Michael Oakeshott – philosopher’ might be perceived by most of you as a natural appellative. This view, however, has not been met with universal acceptance, least of all in professional philosophical circles: the ultimate worth of Oakeshott’s thought is still sub judice. Of course, Oakeshott has received recognition from many within political philosophy – but as I have argued from the outset of this project, if Oakeshott has any worth it is as philosopher, and not merely as political philosopher, as footnote to Idealism or some other Procrustean category that typically attaches itself to his work. As Steven Gerencser has recently pointed out, Oakeshott writing in 1935 against a backdrop of a revival of interest in Hobbes, took the view that in approaching Hobbes as political philosopher, one necessarily recognises Hobbes first and foremost as a philosopher, rather than as political philosopher. This analysis is equally applicable to Oakeshott himself. The problem has been exacerbated in that all too often Oakeshott seems to have been caught in the cross-fire between his most vociferous (and downright ignorant) critics who set up Oakeshott as straw-man, a political bogey-man; and some of his defenders, insufficiently grounded in matters of epistemology, metaphysics and logic (and by implication the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind), to mount an effective counter-attack. And then there are those who just consider Oakeshott a philosophical dilettante, an outsider not worthy of serious attention. These factors have perpetuated an unduly negative climate for Oakeshott.

I would never have discovered Oakeshott were it left to the political philosophy syllabus of the University of London philosophy study guide, the London colleges comprising one of the largest philosophical communities. This glaring hiatus was mirrored in political theory courses in sociology departments. This cannot but skew the study of political philosophy when such a distinctive colour is omitted from the philosophical palette. Again, I would not have discovered Oakeshott as philosopher of history on a philosophy of social science course, even at one of the epicentres of philosophy of social science, the LSE. (It is gratifying that the BBC recording played here today is of Oakeshott on the philosophy of history, probably the aspect of philosophy closest to his heart.) And of course, in disciplines where an off-the-peg philosophical theory masks the absence of philosophical culture, Oakeshott’s thought would fail miserably at papering over this fissure.

If Oakeshott is a conservative, he is in so highly qualified a sense, that most who go by that name would not recognise or even approve of. It is patently wrong to assimilate Oakeshott to libertarianism and the laissez-faire philosophy of Hayek and Friedman (in the US known as neo-liberals or neo-conservatives) – an unchecked free-market would be too corrosive, indeed incompatible with, Oakeshott’s conception of tradition. The social situatedness of the Oakeshottian moral agent implies a rejection of abstract foundationalist ‘rights talk’ and the making a fetish of self-interested market rationality. Oakeshott as an indivisible complex seems to disconcert and frustrate many (especially the de rigueur ‘left of centre’ positioning of professional academia) – the lesson to be learnt by both ‘left’ and ‘right’ is the futility of looking for necessary and sufficient conditions to characterise an ideology.

Resistance to looking at Oakeshott afresh from the central branches of philosophy, discloses a provincialism on the part of some in political philosophy, and myopia from many in ‘analytical’ circles. If Oakeshott is to be taken seriously as a philosopher it is no longer adequate to roll out perfunctory and inevitably shallow ascriptions of idealism, relativism and anti-naturalism. If Oakeshott is to be domesticated by mainstream philosophy I suggest it be from the side entrance that is the philosophy of social science for it is under this branch of philosophy that Oakeshott, the philosopher of practice par excellence, is most easily located – this despite Oakeshott’s well known view of the complex ‘social science’ as an ignoratio elenchi (a consequence of his hermetically sealed modal realms.) Further, the philosophy of history is now typically studied under the rubric of philosophy of social science. The late Patrick Gardiner, who in the wake of Collingwood made philosophy of history respectable in Oxford, lamented the fact that Oakeshott’s philosophy of history, Oakeshott at his tautest, was overlooked by the editors of the recent voluminous reader emanating from MIT Press.

Oakeshott needs the hand of the rational reconstructionist to excavate the methodological and ontological (individualism and holism) issues that he addresses and map them onto contemporary philosophy of social science. Oakeshott’s key notion of practice or tradition, in other words his socio-political epistemology, often referred to as tacit knowledge (ubiquitous, almost imperceptible, and practically indispensable) is often referred to, but is rarely treated with the subtlety and depth that this complex topic demands. Cognitive scientists have begun to take an interest in the knowing-that/knowing-how distinction, an interest in the delicate interplay between the internal and environmentally embodied, the declarative and the procedural being the clinical counterpart in studies of cognition and the brain. This welcome development puts pressure on the uncritical invocation of Rylean behaviourism and Wittgensteinian notions of rule-governed activity, acculturated activity or ‘forms of life’.

No-one seems to be in any doubt that Oakeshott is an Idealist. While his idealism is certainly not a species of Berkeleian phenomenalism (‘esse est percipi’), mistakenly taken by Moore as the ‘essence’ of Idealism, it is not immediately obvious, to me at least, what species of Idealism it is. Despite the acknowledged provenance to Hegel and Bradley the early idealism of Experience and its Modes is an attenuated and hardly a fully blown Hegelian version. Oakeshott’s later work in On Human Conduct has something of the Kantian critique of the notion of adaequatio intellectus et rei about it. Perhaps Oakeshott’s ‘moderate’ idealism could be located on the anti-realist continuum: leaving aside issues of (Dummett’s) semantics it might be interesting to look at McTaggart’s unreality of the past refracted through Dummett onto Oakeshott. Insofar as Oakeshott’s coherence theory of truth is concerned, it is never spelt out by commentators whether Oakeshott is offering a criterion of truth or a theory of what truth consists in.

Though happy with the company of Wittgenstein, Quine, Strawson, Dummett, Putnam and Kripke, the philosophical experience was for me was still unsatisfactory. I was thoroughly turned off by a voluminous secondary literature increasingly sterile in its technocratic style, seemingly generated merely by the demands of academic industriousness – Oakeshott anticipating this in 1933 writes:

. . . the character of philosophy forbids us to console ourselves with the notion that, if we fail to achieve a coherent view of the whole field, we can at least do honest work in the cultivation of one of its corners. Philosophy has no such corners . . .

On the other hand, if ‘doing real philosophy’, looking at the ‘big picture’ meant reading the turgid likes of Hegel and Heidegger, that too repulsed me – the irony is not lost on me that Oakeshott found these thinkers congenial.

Enter Oakeshott. Little did I know that the spirit of Oakeshott was before me in the guise of my tutor Geoffrey Thomas, long before I’d even heard Oakeshott’s name. Geoffrey, himself a student of Oakeshott, is that now rare breed of academic who unconditionally engages with his students, always accessible, not self-absorbed, never just going through the motions. Over the years his familiar refrain was ‘never mind whether or not you agree or disagree with a given writer’ (they might be religious thinkers or from the world of literature, indeed there were no parameters), ‘what matters is the quality of their mind’. With hindsight, Geoffrey was surreptitiously inducting me into the ‘conversation of mankind’, bringing to life Oakeshott’s idea of a university. Conscious of my aversion to the sterility of much of so-called ‘analytical’ philosophy, and the obscurity and bombast of the alternative, over the years he regularly and without any fanfare pushed books across his desk saying that I might one day care to take a look at them, never quite sure what I’d make of them given my then prejudices. The writers I recall most readily were Richard Bentley, Coleridge, Feuerbach, Newman, Unamuno, Pater, William James, Whitehead, JA Smith, Housman, Collingwood, Raymond Aron, Eli Kedourie; there were many others besides. It was after two years that Geoffrey deemed it appropriate to give me a copy of Rationalism in politics. My first reading left me indifferent. This wasn’t the hard-headed style of philosophy I knew we both admired. And why would Geoffrey as an avowed Millian liberal suggest I read a book which has as one its essays ‘On being conservative’?

Not one to concede failure, he presented me with a book with the marvellously obscure title Experience and its Modes. I had only a misty notion of what non-empiricist ‘experience’ might here refer to, but I certainly knew all about modality – it was about logical necessity, wasn’t it? I began to read the book somewhat worried and uncomfortable about the, to my mind, obscure idealist terminology – bad memories of reading Bradley and Bosanquet. I persevered. By the time the chapter on historical experience was underway I was feverishly engrossed – not only had I begun to discern the faint outlines of the world of Michael Oakeshott, but my world of thought began to take on definition and articulation.

Here was a thinker who avoided the alienating poles of the sterile and the turgid and whose thought resonated with my deepest intuitions. There was an unfeigned liberality tempered by an austere precision keeping conceptual promiscuity at bay. And as we all know, conveyed in a manner of such exquisite elegance: phrases such as ‘Experience and its Modes has the sonority of a Bach fugue’, and ‘Oakeshott’s syntax is positively Tacitean in its poetry and complexity’ have been offered by correspondents who have recently read the book. Fifty years on, while Oakeshott’s writing was certainly highly distinguished, the precocious sparkle that was the preserve of the younger man was obscured by Oakeshott’s over qualificatory style. That said, his thoughts on religion in On Human Conduct, do approximate the stylistic heights of his early to mid periods culminating in Rationalism in politics. Some feel that with a career extending some fifty years, Oakeshott’s work inexorably deepened, the inference drawn that Experience and its Modes is an inferior work compared with his later works. I do not think the logic of this view is sound.

If the first Comte lecture was delivered, in Oakeshott’s mischievous view, by the Paganini of ideas, then in keeping with this musical analogy, Oakeshott would perhaps not object to being viewed as the Furtwängler of ideas, never mere technical virtuosity but rather an intuitive and rich imagination, the counterpoint, the principle of parsimony. This week we are celebrating and paying homage to a mind of extraordinary quality. One need only glance at the diversity of topics and disciplinary backgrounds of the conference speakers to see that this rich vein of thought is being mined for material beyond the limits of political philosophy – and I thank all the speakers for so readily going along with this idea.

If the pursuit of excellence is generated by the embracing of both the familiarity and contingency of our existence, this is a sufficient condition to be classed an Oakeshottian. I commend to the conference – Michael Oakeshott, philosopher.

Ryle and Oakeshott on the knowing-how/knowing-that distinction

articles, forthcoming, oakeshott, political philosophy, ryle, social epistemology

ryle.jpg Ryle   timelife.gif Oakeshott

I presented this paper at the third international Michael Oakeshott Association conference.

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Abstract:

Politics make a call upon knowledge. Consequently, it is not irrelevant to inquire into the kind of knowledge which is involved . . . (Rationalism in politics, p. 45)

Gilbert Ryle’s ‘Knowing How/Knowing That’ distinction gave crisp articulation to a long-standing epistemological concern that Michael Oakeshott had: that is, what is the epistemic status of the area that comprises our waking lives or “our most constant mood,” the domain of practical reasoning, of which political practice is but one aspect. This concern is set against a much broader purview: that of the nature of rationality, or more accurately the social nature of rationality. Though Ryle’s KH/KT distinction has been taken to be primarily an epistemological distinction, it is as much a claim about the operations of the mind.

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A Note:

According to Robert Grant, Oakeshott only ever communicated with two “official” philosophers, one of which was Ryle (Oakeshott, London: Claridge Press, 1990, 14; The Politics of Sex and Other Essays, Basingstoke: MacMillan, 2000, 26; The Intellectual Legacy of Michael Oakeshott, eds. Corey Abel and Timothy Fuller, Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2005, 298-299). On record, Oakeshott very favorably reviewed Ryle’s Concept of Mind, entitled “Body and Mind” in the Spectator, 184, (1950), pp. 20, 22. Years later he warmly introduced Ryle (LSE Oakeshott Archives, box 1/3, undated) who delivered the annual LSE August Comte Memorial Lecture on 26 April, 1962 entitled “A Rational Animal”. J.D. Mabbott who read the proofs for On Human Conduct (Oxford, 1975) happened to be a member of Ryle’s “Wee Teas” philosophical tea parties (Ryle: A Collection of Critical Essays, eds. Oscar P. Wood and George Pitcher, New York: Anchor Books, 1970, 6), was the first to recognize Oakeshott’s KH/KT connection with Ryle in his review of Rationalism in politics (Indianapollis, 1962) in Mind 72 (1963), pp. 609-11.

Prima facie, Ryle and Oakeshott are unlikely philosophical bedfellows. The former was the ultimate (‘analytical’) philosophical insider (Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford and editor of Mind); the latter an historian, never holding a position in a philosophy department. Yet despite these differences, they are kindred spirits. Stylistically they both wrote with an accessible and elegant non-technical style, laced with wit and erudition, with minimal references and addressing current issues obliquely. Philosophically, both were positively anti-systematic and deflationist in that they sought to dissolve what they saw as metaphysical portentousness. Both had an appreciation of Heidegger; unlikely as it sounds, Ryle’s critical notice warmly welcomed Sein und Zeit in Mind XXXVIII (1929), pp. 355-370. Perhaps their greatest bond was that they shared that most belligerent of critics – Ernest Gellner. Ryle in passing over reviewing Gellner’s Words and Things in Mind sparked a cause célèbre, beautifully documented in Ved Mehta’s Fly and the Fly-Bottle (Pelican, 1963). Gellner characterized so-called ‘ordinary language’ philosophy as being inherently socially conservative, and given his predilection for ideas with practical application, he was profoundly at odds with Oakeshott’s unworldly “neo-Burkean romanticism.”

Taking the Super out of the Supernatural

articles, political philosophy, religion, reviews

I recently took part in a symposium to discuss Loyal Rue’s Religion is not About God.  This syposium has been published in the June issue of Zygon.

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TAKING THE SUPER OUT OF THE SUPERNATURAL
(OR A MANIFESTO FOR A LATTER-DAY PANTHEISM)

Abstract

Metaphysical dualities divorce humankind from its natural environment, dualities that can precipitate environmental disaster. Loyal Rue in his Religion Is Not About God (2005) seeks to resolve the abstract modalities of religion and naturalism in a unified monistic eco-centric metaphysic characterized as “religious naturalism.” Rue puts forward proposals for a general naturalistic theory of religion, a theory that lays bare the structural and functional features of religious phenomena as the critical first step on the road to badly needed religion-science realignment. Only then will humanity be equipped to address the environmental imperative.

Keywords: consciousness; naturalism; evolutionary psychology; cognitive science; pantheism; environmentalism.

Review Essay: Dennett’s Breaking the Spell

articles, consciousness, political philosophy, religion, reviews, social epistemology

My review essay of Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon has just been published in The Journal of Mind and Behavior, Summer and Autumn 2006, Vol. 27, Nos. 3 and 4: 357-366.

If you’d like to receive a reprint please drop me a line. Update – now available online.

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The thesis that Dennett argues for in Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon has a double aspect. First, religion being but one natural phenomenon among many should be subject to scientific investigation (p. 17). Resistance to this notion constitutes the first spell or taboo and is in complicity with the second “master” spell, that of the phenomenon of religion itself (pp. 18; 322). Dennett’s tentative naturalistic recommendation is two-pronged: he primarily deploys an evolutionary biology perspective, and derivatively a highly suggestive appeal to memetics. To acknowledge that religion is natural “is only the beginning of the answer, not the end” (p. 75). Religion as a natural phenomenon has to answer to Dennett’s Darwinist refrain – cui bono? (to whose advantage?) And derivatively, how or why highly exotic and implausible supernatural religious ideas (or memes) are transmitted and sustained? Humankind, naturally disposed cause-seeking creatures, are inclined to hypostasize all manner of beliefs (virtual agents free to evolve to amplify our yearnings or our dreads – pp. 114, 120, 123, 282) when explanation of some phenomenon is not forthcoming – this constitutes the “master” spell.

Short Review of Efraim Podoksik’s In Defence of Modernity: Vision and Philosophy in Michael Oakeshott

oakeshott, political philosophy, reviews

Review originally published in Political Studies Review and available on Podoksik’s website.