[editor's note: Here's our guest blogger Tom McDonald with a bit of original philosophizing. You can read more like this on his blog zuhanden.com. -ML]
I want to pose some general questions to all readers, but especially to those scientifically inclined and favorable to a naturalistic worldview. The questions are about the naturalistic worldview that is presently normative but problematic in modern society.
Firstly, the problem I see is not with science per se, but with philosophical naturalism.
I would argue that the ultimate rift between science as culture and religion as culture should be understood in terms of the broader rift between philosophical-metaphysical naturalism and the remarkable historical phenomenon of human normativity, i.e., our ability to reason and deliberate about rightness in theoretical and practical matters.
If anyone of a liberal or humanistic persuasion thinks through the above problem philosophically, they should (a normative-theoretical claim by me) come to realize that they share much more with religiously-flavored objections to naturalism than they otherwise might be inclined to based on more superficial political issues.
If we look at the issue this way, isn't naturalism as a metaphysical-ultimate worldview really normative conservativism? That is, simply the attempt to preserve what is?
Naturalism would be conservative by natural-izing anything and everything that exists, including all those human behaviors which were once considered unnatural at prior moments in history.
Thus, the political liberal who advocates metaphysical naturalism from a scientific spirit turns out to be a kind of conservative, making the unnatural character of human ideals that would diverge from the One Nature impossible.
Isn't it the case that what is meant by nature and naturalism is -- ultimately -- behavior absent of any human reflection or thought or deliberation in the way of that behavior?
The fact that we can think as much as we do is, in a very definite way, perversely unnatural. There is no place for distinctive thought in naturalistic monism.
Naturalism as espoused through all the mainstream studies we read every day say human behaviors x, y, and z can be explained by natural evolutionary adaptations. They may thus -- depending on the specific behavior being discussed -- be read as a way of reducing norms produced by the labor of unnatural human thinking to natural unthinking mechanisms. (But again, I would not claim all should be read this way).
In effect, this sort of naturalism, rabid to fight 'supernaturalism', may pose a danger even to liberals by persuading that the system in which you live is thoroughly natural -- reducing the normative to the natural -- and therefore cannot be opposed by reflection that would violate the rules of nature.
- Tom McDonald
Tom, correct me if I’m not getting the full picture here, but it seems to me that your articulation of naturalism is a bit simplistic. Doesn’t naturalism have the potential to focus on a high level of adaptation and change, as opposed to the stagnant, deterministic picture that you’re giving? It seems to me that giving a naturalist explanation for human normativity does not necessarily take away from that normativity. Just because “human behaviors x, y, and z can be explained by natural evolutionary adaptations” doesn’t mean that they are no longer remarkable. For instance, the success of the civil rights movement does not seem to me to be lessened by an historical account that traces the events that acted as its catalyst.
Thoughts?
@ Jon:
“Adaptation” is not active but reactive any way you slice it, no matter how complex the behaviors supposed to follow exclusively from this concept by naturalists. Adaptation only seems to explain certain instances of thought, as in sheer sense-reflex & association, but this model cannot explain thought as such, where the exemplary case is philosophical thought and conditions of possibility.
Further, I wouldn’t hesitate to call Naturalist Adaptationism at least potentially evil insofar as it sneaks crypto-normative beliefs into the public sphere and denies freedom.
-Tom
Yes, I said it–“evil”.
Tom,
I’m still not convinced that naturalism breaks down into something as stagnant as what you are describing. For one, I don’t think that a description of adaptation as solely reactive is really fair. In fact, I would argue that it is largely inaccurate. From an evolutionary perspective (which I will take to be a fundamental part of most if not all naturalist positions at this point), adaptation is precisely *not* reactive. Changes take place within a given individual or population, and those changes are either effective or they are not. In no way do they come about as a reaction to stimuli. Rather, they come about, and then persist based on their effectiveness. In that sense, “active” would not really be appropriate.
That said, I think that it would be a mistake to discount so lightly adaptation as an explanation for thought, specifically philosophical thought. In fact, in the face of current scientific evidence, it would appear that the burden of proof is on those who disagree with this position.
That said, I do not think that philosophical naturalism requires any normative beliefs (please feel free to give an example to the contrary). As to the denial of freedom, I don’t think that this is a necessary conclusion following from philosophical naturalism, and would be interested to hear why you think it is. Certainly, one potential understanding of naturalism would include a lack of freedom on the part of the individual, but I think that this is a concern given a great variety of positions: take, for instance, the fact that even in Christianity where free will is a divine mandate, it is still a concern, based if nothing else on the omnipotence of God.
That said, please excuse the double (now triple) “that said.”
Jon, I sympathize with your saying that “[i]t seems to me that giving a naturalist explanation for human normativity does not necessarily take away from that normativity.” I sympathize because we all today have to struggle to make sense of normativity in terms of naturalism, but it does not follow that this contemporary intuition is ultimately rationally coherent.
“Isn’t it the case that what is meant by nature and naturalism is — ultimately — behavior absent of any human reflection or thought or deliberation in the way of that behavior?
The fact that we can think as much as we do is, in a very definite way, perversely unnatural. There is no place for distinctive thought in naturalistic monism.”
I am not sure I follow you here, Tom. Why would a philosophical naturalism lead one to consider thinking, including self reflective thinking, unnatural?
Though I am sympathetic to naturalism, I am not sure that I would subscribe to this version of naturalism. The idea of excluding human thinking from the set of things considered ‘natural’ has never occurred to me. If we accept thought to be a product of other natural phenomena, ie brain activity, it can hardly be said to be violating the ‘rules’ of nature.
I would also question the notion of ‘rules’ of nature. There are things that are observed in nature, such as behaviours that have arisen ‘naturally’. However, I would suggest that the limits of what could be construed as natural are not supplied at this level of complexity, but at the deeper fundamental level. The only constraints would be the physical laws that govern the interactions of matter. ‘Unnatural’ from this perspective is something that violates posited physical laws. This where I would draw the distinction between natural and supernatural.
@ Geoff:
I strongly agree with you that we should question the notion of ‘rules’ of nature, such as “w” professes faith in. In my view, the public does not sufficiently appreciate how much the ‘rules’ of nature posited by science are human inferences made in the fragile attempt to cobble together a coherent way of life.
But then you say:
“There are things that are observed in nature, such as behaviours that have arisen ‘naturally’. However, I would suggest that the limits of what could be construed as natural are not supplied at this level of complexity, but at the deeper fundamental level.”
I am concerned to make explicit that you are here entering into metaphysics. All rights to you for doing so, but no rights to claim to that this is science.
Cheers,
Tom
“If we look at the issue this way, isn’t naturalism as a metaphysical-ultimate worldview really normative conservativism? That is, simply the attempt to preserve what is?”
Curious how you come to this conclusion, which has it exactly backward, especially given that you follow it with: “Naturalism would be conservative by natural-izing anything and everything that exists, including all those human behaviors which were once considered unnatural at prior moments in history.”
Preserving “what is” would be preserving the supernatural, dogmatic-religious cultural heritage. Nonnatural world-views are straightforwardly conservative, even reactionary. You note that they are what comes before. By contrast, naturalism is a revolution in slow-motion, thanks to the natural cultural tendency toward conservative supernaturalism.
And I say natural tendency advisedly. All of our thinking *is* natural, and none of it “violates the rules of nature”. Including our thinking about things that are non-natural, and that do violate those rules.
@ w:
Thank you for a pristine example of the profoundly non-empirical dogma espoused by the religion of naturalism:
“All of our thinking *is* natural, and none of it “violates the rules of nature”. Including our thinking about things that are non-natural, and that do violate those rules.”
This is the talk of a dangerously self-deceiving cult.
Cheers,
Tom
Sorry — I thought I provided an actual argument against your claim that naturalism was conservative and an attempt to “preserve what is”. My view is that “what is” needs no preserving, because it is what is the case.
I maintain naturalism as a working hypothesis as it has proven to be of significant empirical/predictive value. If I’m wrong to do so, I’d love to hear why instead of being called a member of a self-deceiving cult of nothoughts. Sadly just I can’t seem to shake off this dogmatic stupor on the basis of conclusions whose arguments you keep to yourself.
w: Please explain to me how Naturalism has anything whatsoever to do with empirical prediction.
Suppose a doctor predicts for a patient a certain likelihood that a case of cancer will return. The prediction of course is based empirically on past experience and judgment projecting those patterns into the future. Now, if someone says it is the patient’s bad karma that causes (supernaturally) their illness, why might we be inclined to say ‘no, it is only natural causes’? My argument is that such a response to the supernaturalist is not itself a ‘natural’ idea, but a moral, normative judgement, developed from reasoning that has become critical regarding this type of supernaturalism. The normative judgment itself does not require a Naturalistic Metaphysics or Ultimate Worldview, but it does suggest that if one wonders what may transcend or is other to the merely natural, then the direction in which to search is into the very capacity for the moral and normative judgment and reason itself.
Absolutely. My comments are definitely not science, but science does have an underpinning metaphysical opinion. I think that, as has been pointed out many times on these pages, science as currently taught seems to neglect that.
What I am trying to express is that philosophical naturalism need not be, and maybe isn’t, they way you describe it and is not necessarily conservative in the way that you say. Beyond the conservation of mass/energy and the like, everything seems to be up for grabs.
Always late to join these discussion, nonetheless, here I go … Think I just now started to follow what you (Tom) are saying. Does it sort of distill to: naturalism, taken to mean a proclivity towards various sorts of science, and particularly evolution, based reasoning about philosophic things, is usually advanced by “liberals” (presumably meaning political liberals); but in adopting such a view, liberals actually are at risk of accepting some of the very things they despise in their political and philosophic conservative opponents because: 1) there is a kind of inflexible non-pluralistic bent to this naturalistic approach in that beliefs are credited or not, based on their concurrence with an inflexible scientific discipline; and 2) the notion of “naturalism” the liberals employ is designed to attack religious-based beliefs in the supernatural, so to do that, free-roaming human thought, like that which generates beliefs in miracles, the super-natural, etc., has to be outside the tent of what is natural. The result is that the liberal naturalist is really a poorly disguised conservative who opposes pluralistic competing views of reality and actually opposes free roaming human intellectualism — the very things that in the context of politics they seem to advance.
As a naturalist liberal (although not quite a Dawkins/Dennet type), I would say the following. There is a difference between saying you have to have some parameters to what is acceptable thought, and saying a person has abandoned pluralism. If we believe that everything is possibly a good idea and reject any notion of a discipline against which to check an idea’s quality, then we don’t believe in anything at all. So, when the naturalist insists on adopting certain standards to evaluate belief, such as that it has to have some accord with the best known predicter of events in our world, i.e. science, he does not become a conservative mono-ist; he just advances a sensible interpretation of reality against which to evaluate beliefs, still leaving a hell of a lot of room for pluralistic interpretations of reality within that framework. In other words, it is not that free-roaming human thought is unnatural, it is that free-roaming thought that is not tethered to any sensible interpretation of reality, is just kind of worthless and better avoided.
With all due respect, Tom, your portrait of naturalism is way over the top. It seems wildly unfair to construe naturalism as rabid or evil or as the source of persecution and oppression. Is there really an actual person who thinks that thinking is perversely unnatural? Sorry, Tom, but I think you’ve constructed a straw man here.
I’d like to echo tr’s point too. Having a common set of standards is hardly the same thing as insisting on a metaphysical monism. Scientific inquiry is limited to natural phenomena for practical reasons. How could it do more than that? And the best thing about science is that it is open to revision and it gets revised all the time. Beliefs in the supernatural aren’t like that. They can remain unchanged for centuries, and they cannot be checked against any empirical data. I think it is neither unfair nor unreasonable to be skeptical about unverifiable, supernatural claims. And isn’t that what naturalism really says? It’s a broad stance that says so-called supernatural phenomena are either false or they are not supernatural after all. “There must be a reasonable explanation,” the naturalists says, “and I’d like to know what it is”.
In some other contexts, a “naturalists” is somebody who likes to be naked but that’s a conversation for a different blog.
Was hoping someone might have some thoughts on the following kinda naturalist/deterministic quandary: the deterministic/naturalist necessarily believes that the way we are, which has to include our experience of making what feels like free-willed choices, is an evolutionary developed trait. But doesn’t that suggest that the experience of free-willed choice is what it feels like; that it is the making of elections that matter rather than pre-prescribed manifestations of our hardwiring as the naturalist-determinist regularly concludes? Why else would evolution have driven us to develop this feeling-of-free-will trait unless the experience of choice was at some level reflective of just that: real, pivotal, life-altering decision making that shapes whether and how we survive in the world?
The determinist has to make a case that free will is an illusion. He says we are driven to act by forces beyond our control and of course if we have no real choice then nothing we do can be worthy of blame or praise. I look at it from a pragmatic and radically empirical perspective, which says that freedom and restraint are both real because they’re both known in experience. To say that free will is an illusion is to prefer abstract theories (or ontological categories) over everyday, concrete experience. William James insists that the Free Will vs Determinism debate is the overblown metaphysical version of a practical, human question. We want to know if we are determined or if we are responsible for our actions, and to what extent. And this is not idle speculation either. We’re talking about the basic rules that govern our justice system and impact every kind of human relationship.
Bradley
David – I think I ultimately agree with you. But what way do you think evolution cuts in the debate? It seems to me to cut both ways depending on the level from which you view the process. For the Martian looking down on evolution at work things, including human behavior, must certainly seem massively deterministic But evolution itself created our sensation of free choice which leads me to think it is not mere sensation. It makes me think the sensation is doing real work helping me make choices that enhance my odds of survival. But can both be true and it just depends on your perspective on the process (Martian view or what it is like to be free choice experiencing me) that determines whether you see things as happening on a deterministic or free will driven basis?
Ignore that reference to Bradley. It is an oops.