Am I a Naturalist?

There comes a point in every philosopher’s life when he or she asks himself or herself what kind of philosopher she or he (or possibly it) is. So, what kind of philosopher am I? Heretofore, I would have described myself as a rationalist realist mysterian evolutionist—quite a mouthful. But now I think my kind of philosophy can be described more simply: I am a naturalist, in roughly the nineteenth century sense of the word. I rush to add that I don’t mean this in the contemporary sense—one who seeks to naturalize. That is, I am not out to explain things in physical terms (whatever that means), or to offer reductive proposals. I am the opposite of that: I tend to accept things as they present themselves–I am a non-reductive naturalist, a non-dogmatic naturalist. Then what sort of naturalist is that? First and foremost, I reject, avoid, and eschew super-natural suppositions—the approach is not religiously influenced or inflected. God is not wheeled in to provide putative explanations. There is nothing outside of nature (the naturalist believes firmly in nature). Second, the naturalist in my sense practices the art and science of description: describing things as accurately and clearly as possible.[1] He looks hard at the world, and not through distorting lenses (tradition, myth). Moreover, he favors systematic description—the kind that finds similarities and parallels, often at some remove (the more surprising the better). Third, and connected, he is a dedicated taxonomist: he is enamored of classification, categories, species and genus. The zoologist is his model: the philosophical naturalist is a kind of metaphysical zoologist (the world is a type of zoo). He wants to know what is most general, what includes what, how the natural kinds line up with each other. Fourth, he believes in history—he thinks history shapes reality. He looks for antecedents and precursors, origins, causes. His first question is apt to be, “Where does it come from?” The OED indeed defines a naturalist as “an expert in or student of natural history”. He is interested in structure and analysis, to be sure, but he is also interested in ancestry—because natural structures have pasts. He is thus an ardent evolutionist: things don’t just exist; they evolve into existence. Given the philosopher’s interest in the mind, the naturalist philosopher wants to know how the mind came to be—by what stages, from what origins. The naturalist is also a self-naturalist: he thinks the knowing self is a thing of nature, not merely the things it contemplates. He holds that the knowing self is a product of evolution, like other products of evolution, and subject to the same basic laws. The knowing mind came to exist via an evolutionary process, slowly, falteringly, imperfectly. Accordingly, as Darwin sagely remarks, “it is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance”,[2] because we too are subject to the limiting rules of nature. Man does not stand above nature, or outside of it; he is an instance of nature. The naturalist philosopher is therefore prepared to accept mysteries of nature, areas of deep ignorance. He doesn’t judge nature solely by reference to his own perspective on it. Darwin was a naturalist of the biological world; the philosophical naturalist takes this view of the whole of reality. He is thus disposed to pluralism—he recognizes and respects variety. He may even study religion itself as a natural phenomenon—an aspect of human nature. All this, he may intone, is just part of life’s rich pageant—atoms, stars, plants, animals, minds, myths in minds, etc. The naturalist is always a type of scientist not a mystic or magician.

What is a naturalist not? We know he is not religious or ideological or political; he is not so motivated (quaphilosopher). Hume is a naturalist; Berkeley is not. Nor is he axiomatic and purely deductive (like Euclid). He doesn’t enunciate mathematical laws. Thus, Newton is not a naturalist in the current sense, but Darwin certainly is. Darwin ushered in a new type of science that shaped philosophy as much as Newton had earlier. Where once philosophers wanted to be Newtonian, now they wanted to be Darwinian. They had, as we are fond of saying, a new paradigm. They didn’t want to mimic physics and astronomy by going mathematical (i.e., Euclidian); they wanted to go biological (i.e., Darwinian). We had Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica, modeled on Newton, but the “naturalist turn” took its inspiration from Darwin’s Origin and Descent. The naturalist will sometimes use mathematical methods, but he does not construe the world asmathematical: not abstract mechanics but concrete living tissue—behavior not mere motion. So, the naturalist is not beholden to the mathematical (including mathematical logic); he is more interested in the mutable and evolving. Nor is language the key: you don’t study zoology by studying zoological words. No zoologist takes a linguistic turn—though he may take a genetic turn. Similarly, the kind of philosophy I am describing keeps its eye firmly on the non-linguistic world (except when studying language itself). Chomsky took a biological naturalist turn in linguistics—language as an innate attribute of the human organism, an “organ”, not a conventional, culturally dependent set of social constructions. True, language has a formal structure, but so do organisms (see D’Arcy Thompson). And Chomsky is much concerned with evolutionary origins. Wittgenstein, by contrast, is not Darwinian: the Tractatus is Newtonian-Russellian, and the Investigations is social-cultural. The former is abstractly mathematical; the latter is unsystematic and non-evolutionary. I see nothing distinctively Darwinian in Wittgenstein, early or late (did he read any Darwin?). Same for Quine: it’s mostly logicism amplified and dogmatic (“religious”) physicalism. Ditto Davidson. Also, Kripke—modal mathematical logic not mutational logic. Austin, for his part, is preoccupied with acts of human speech, conventionally governed; he is not concerned with the human being qua animal. Frege’s gaze is fixed on mathematical structures not anatomical structures; you would never think that human beings had evolved from studying his work. I would also insist that Darwin is not scientistic in his naturalism—he doesn’t jump to premature theory based on other types of science. He isn’t like a chemist. This is very clear in Expression: in this book he is content to stick to examples and rough generalizations—for the topic permits no more. He is no proto-behaviorist or neuro-psychologist. He is content to describe and freely speculate, not force his material into some preordained scientistic format. It is a matter of an attitude of mind: the naturalist philosopher approaches his subject like a field biologist (though stuck at home in his study)—he wants to describe, classify, find similarities, postulate histories, resolve conundrums. I think this is a distinctive conception of the philosophical mind-set, standing in contrast to other conceptions, though certainly capacious. It is a specific way of being a philosopher—a conceptual botanist, if you will.

Let me illustrate the general conception by reference to consciousness. The naturalist philosopher notices the existence of this natural phenomenon (he doesn’t read about it in some ancient hallowed text). He wonders what kind of thing it is: what is it similar to? It seems dissimilar to other things—bodies, brains, etc. He sets out to describe it, invoking the concepts of intentionality, subjectivity, selfhood, and so on. He wonders where it came from, how it evolved, what its function is. He finds himself puzzled: consciousness seems real enough, no sort of illusion, but it also seems anomalous; it presents itself as a theoretical problem (cf. the platypus). Is it a bird, is it a plane—no, it’s Super-stuff! But what exactly is it about consciousness that produces the problem? Even that is hard to specify. Is intentionality the root of the problem? But that doesn’t seem so hard to explain (biological function is quasi-intentional, isn’t it?). Is it subjectivity? But what exactly is that? Is it the fact that consciousness can’t be understood except by instantiating it (bats and all that)? But is this really what immediately makes us think that there is something special going on here? Wouldn’t consciousness be a felt problem even if grasp of the concept were not thus dependent on instantiating it? What if we could grasp what it’s like to be a bat—would that remove the problem of consciousness?[3] It seems inexplicably inexplicable—we have a problem with the problem, Houston. We don’t seem to be able to say what it is about consciousness that makes it so problematic—yet we are convinced (rightly) that it is. This itself is an interesting fact of nature: our intuitive grasp of the nature of consciousness tells us it is hard to understand, yet we can’t identify what it is about that grasp that produces this impression. We have a kind of blind-spot—or rather blindsight-spot, given that we evidently perceive something that leaves no perceptible trace on our conscious understanding. Our consciousness of consciousness tells us it is problematic, but it doesn’t tell us in virtue of what it is problematic. This is a curious fact of nature—a fact about consciousness of consciousness. To repeat: we can’t locate precisely what it is about consciousness that makes it problematic, though we are convinced that it is. Is there anything else in nature like this (always the naturalist’s question)? Apparently not: we generally know what generates our ignorance when we know we are ignorant—but not in this case. We don’t know whywe don’t know, but we do know we don’t know. We don’t know the source of our ignorance. So, we are ignorant of consciousness and ignorant of why we are thus ignorant. We are also ignorant of the origin of life on Earth, but we have some idea of why this is (it was a long time ago and we weren’t around back then). But in the case of the origin of consciousness, we don’t really know what is standing in the way of our understanding—it just feels like a mystery. It no doubt is a mystery, but that fact is itself mysterious—nothing we can detect in consciousness can be pointed to as generating the mystery. This is a puzzle of nature—not evidence of divinity or some such. The naturalist isn’t fazed by this (though irritated by it) because he knows we are evolved beings, an animal species recently minted, and we can’t be expected to be omniscient. Plenty of things are deeply puzzling to us about life on Earth. And, to repeat Darwin, “it is always advisable to perceive clearly our ignorance”. The naturalist takes this in stride, frustrating as it may be. He can at least go on to make many interesting observations about consciousness—its taxonomy, its neural correlates, its causal powers, its laws, etc. He can continue being a naturalist about consciosness while admitting the natural limits to his naturalist ambitions.[4]

[1] He is therefore intently concerned with language, making heavy use of the dictionary. He is wary of technical terms promiscuously employed. He abhors lazy inept writing. He yearns for descriptive adequacy, or excellence. Clarity is much prized. Analysis is most welcome.

[2] The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals (1890), p.69.

[3] I am moving quickly through these points, which demand extended discussion; my aim is just to provide an illustration of the naturalist’s method and style. I am delineating a particular meta-philosophy.

[4] It might be wondered how the philosophical naturalist will handle more abstract non-biological subject-matters. In basically the same way: he may scrutinize such concepts as necessity, identity, entailment, and truth and offer accurate descriptions of them, classify them, articulate their relations, resolve puzzles about them. Similarly, he can investigate moral concepts and subject them to naturalist treatment—describing, organizing, classifying, analyzing, tracing through time, resolving puzzles, indicating problems. The same mind-set can be applied to many different subject-matters (the logical menagerie, the moral menagerie). Note that naturalism is not the same as empiricism and fundamentally opposed to it (human experience is not the measure of Nature).

The London Review of Books and Me

I used to write regularly for the London Review of Books, beginning in 1985 with a piece on Donald Davidson. At that time Karl Miller was the editor (I used to spot him around UCL where we both then worked). I liked Karl (also his brother-in-law Jonathan Miller—no relation). I then wrote several reviews for the magazine, on Russell, Wittgenstein, Ayer, Collingwood, Putnam, Strawson, Warnock, Singer, Sacks, and others. I also published a short story there (“The Bed Reptile”) and a diary piece from America. I was what you would call a regular contributor; it was a mutually agreeable arrangement. But it all came to a sudden halt in 1995, under a new editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers. I had been asked to review a collection of essays on Philippa Foot (Virtues and Reasons), which I duly did. For some reason, there was a long delay between submission and publication, which is apt to give an impression of dilatoriness on the part of the reviewer (which I have never been guilty of). Occasionally I would ask when it would appear and got vague answers. The editor hinted to me that they felt it was perhaps too academic for them and might be dropped. Let me make something clear: all that reviewing took serious time away from my own research and writing, producing a tremendous amount of ambivalence in me. Still, I thought it was worthwhile (just about). But not if the piece would be dropped. That would mean I had wasted my time and I would not wish to write such reviews if there was a good chance they might not be published. Nor did I agree that my review was overly academic—I was quite capable of judging what kind of review would be appropriate. Also: don’t ask me to review books with serious academic content if you don’t want to publish reviews geared to such content. Eventually, late in the day, they published it, tucked into the back of the paper. The experience discouraged me from writing for them in the future, and I told them so. I even wrote a letter for their correspondence column informing readers that they should not expect to see my reviews again (I gave no reason). The magazine never asked me to write for them again and I don’t believe they ever reviewed any more of my own books. As it happens, I soon started writing for the New Republic, and later the New York Review of Books. Such is the life of a jobbing reviewer. These days I write no reviews and am not invited to. I suppose I should be grateful, but the reasons don’t bear examination.

On the Multiplicity of Species

We can explain the origin of species: where they came from and how (other species by mutation and natural selection). We can explain the diversity of species: how and why they differ from each other (adaptation to different environments). We can explain the complexity of species (progressive evolution with increasing design demands). But can we explain the multiplicity of species—the sheer number of them? There are about two million species currently existing on planet Earth and millions now extinct: why so many? Why not half a million or ten thousand or thirty-two? How many chemical elements are there? 266, according to my table—not millions. How many kinds of elementary particles are there? Half a dozen maybe. How many types of celestial bodies are there? Not more than a hundred. How many types of rocks are there, or types of mountains, or types of watery expanse? Not a great number. Nature doesn’t normally produce natural kinds in the high figures we find with animal (and plant) species. It seems excessive, anomalous, in need of explanation. If we came across a planet with, say, 200 species, we wouldn’t be astonished; we would find it perfectly natural. But our planet swarms with millions of animal and plant types, as if it can’t get enough—why? Surely, there was a time when it had many fewer (how many kinds of bacteria were there on early Earth?), so why did we end up with so many species?

We might compare the case to the existence of human artifacts: works of art, types of furniture, means of transportation, etc. There are a great many of these too, in excess of naturally produced (non-living) objects. The explanation is plain to see: they come from the human creative mind, particularly the faculty of imagination. There are hugely many things we can imagine, envisage, conceive of—and hence construct. Our intelligence generates multiplicity on a grand scale. So, is this why there are so many different species? That was the traditional way of thinking: a creative intelligence, equipped with mental multiplicity, is responsible for the multiplicity of species—God or some equivalent. This intelligence chose to create these many species and it had the power to do it. Why, is a question of theology—did God just wish to give his prize creation, Man, something spectacular to look at? But, ruling out this kind of answer, how did nature manage to produce such multitudinous diversity? We would expect to find a sea-dwelling species or two, and a few land-dwellers, and even several air-dwellers—but why untold millions? The Earth just doesn’t have the level of multiplicity capable of giving rise to the number of species we observe—it doesn’t have that many different environments. Mutational multiplicity won’t explain it—even if there were that many types of mutation, not all of them survive to create a new species. Nor is natural selection itself so numerically profligate—there are only so many ways of surviving and dying. Nor can we suppose that planet Earth possesses some sort of multiplicity genie or energy or soul—as if it just aches to produce as many species as possible. If I were pressed to estimate how many species there ought to be, given the physical conditions on Earth, I would say, oh, maybe 235, give or take. If I were an explorer from outer space four billion years ago, surveying the state of planet Earth, I would estimate that the planet would likely produce something on the order of a few hundred species, or even a number in the low twenties. For why should such a drab little place with not much going for it be able to give rise to such a multiplicity of life-forms? What if I told you that in a hundred years our planet would double its species plurality, or quadruple it, or more, so producing a billion species? Wouldn’t you find that rather implausible and in need of explanation. Yet that is what Earth did, in effect: it produced a heck of a lot of different plant and animal species, far more than would have been predictable. We take this for granted, because we see the multiplicity around us every day, but even still we are astounded when told the true numerical magnitude of species existing on Earth today. It seems hard to believe, almost miraculous, verging on the inexplicable. The number may as well be infinite!

There is an answer to our conundrum that one sometimes hears bruited, though it is seldom spelled out. It has to do with niches.[1] If you look in the dictionary under “niche”, you find “a shallow recess, especially one in a wall to display an ornament”, or “a comfortable or suitable position in life” (OED). The intuitive idea is that of a specific type of place or context in which something can be located—a sort of home. In biology a niche consists of a part of the overall environment in which an animal (or plant) finds its home—its comfort zone, its place of residence. It can be quite complex, involving food sources, conspecifics, predators, mating opportunities, territory, etc. The thought then is that there are as many niches as there are species: each species has its distinctive niche—its corresponding slice of the world. For every species, there is a niche that “fits” it—there is a one-one correspondence. Thus, the multiplicity of niches matches the multiplicity of species—the former explains the latter. A niche antecedently exists and a species comes to occupy it—that’s why there are as many species as there are. Niches have the right cardinality to explain species cardinality. But there are problems with this explanation. Can’t two or more species occupy the same niche? Butterflies, beetles, big cats—don’t the various species of these have the same “home”, occupy the same ecological niche? If so, species multiplicity exceeds niche multiplicity. Secondly, why should every potential niche be filled by an actual species? At one time most niches would have no occupants, since the right species had yet to evolve, so actual niches don’t entail actual species to fill them. Recesses don’t always have ornaments embedded in them. Maybe diverse niches explain species diversity, but they don’t explain species multiplicity. A watery niche explains the existence of a water-living species, and similarly for a terrestrial or aerial niche; but why so many such species? The structure of the environment doesn’t by itself generate such a multiplicity; we need some factor internal to life-forms themselves—some inner impetus towards endless multiplication. Is it all just a strange contingency with no systematic explanation, no underlying law? But the trend towards multiplicity is too strong to shrug off in this way. There seems to be a biological law of increasing species multiplicity during the course of evolutionary history, but the reason for this is obscure—or so it seems to me. It appears to be spontaneous, not predictable from the objective character of the environment—intrinsic to life itself. It is as if life revels in multiplying its forms—as if it favors creativity of life forms. But what sense does this make? It sounds mystical and New Age, yet another manifestation of the old elan vital.  And actually, even theologically, the situation is puzzling—why would God decide to make so many species? What is the point of thousands of species of beetle or butterfly? Consider a forest: full of trees of different species, but all living in the same stretch of geography—why not just one or two species? And it isn’t as if all these species are built to last—most species eventually go extinct. The multiplicity is constantly being whittled away, so why produce it in the first place? Nature seems populous beyond reason, pointlessly prolific. Just because it has the potential to house so many species (all those available niches), why must it do so? Darwin told us how one species evolves from another, but he didn’t tell us why so incredibly many species evolve this way. Species replace each other, but why do so many coexist? Even economic markets contain fewer products and they are the result of unlimited human creativity. Nature seems too creative—and yet it isn’t really creative at all (it has no imagination). We can see how a great many dog breeds came to exist by intentional artificial selection, but we can’t see how so many animal species came to exist by blind natural selection. Intentional breeding for variety doesn’t create as many distinct species as nature left to its own devices (think of butterflies). What law of nature explains this? What trait of God explains it, for that matter? Creationism doesn’t help with the problem (not that it has anything going for it anyway). Call this the mystery of multiplicity.[2]

[1] I could as well say habitat here—the totality of an organism’s impinging relevant environmental conditions—but I think “niche” better captures the idea we want.

[2] Darwin draws our attention to a similar problem about the multiplicity of human races: it is puzzling why these races exist in their actual plurality, given that there is little connection between human environments and human physiology (see The Descent of Man, chapter VII, “On the Races of Man”). There is really no reason to expect a variety of races given the places humans live and the life-styles they adopt. It is as if nature simply felt like having several races (and varieties within races) without any compelling reason to do so. I should also note that it is not even clear why there are two sexes in nature instead of one. This is taken by biologists to require explanation, and the explanations offered are controversial. Note, too, that bodily organs don’t have the enormous variety that species do—there isn’t a million types of internal organs, just a handful. Cell types are also few in number. Yet species of organisms climb into the big numbers—we don’t even know how many species exist on Earth exactly. There is nothing unnatural about a ten-species planet and yet on Earth nature has catapulted many millions of species into existence. We have a many-species problem.

Transitional Trump

Trump has finally made the transition (he’s a “trans”): from falsehood to nonsense. He has long been unconstrained by truth and tells whopping lies all the time. We are accustomed to that. But now he has gone a stage further: he has descended into nonsense (very Lewis Carroll). He is no longer constrained by logic and simple coherence (Gaza, Canada, the FBI, the CIA, etc. etc.). His followers lap it up, but it is amusing to see fellow politicians trying to make sense of it all. He gets that self-satisfied blank look on his face and starts spouting total rubbish—strings of words with no logical connection, odd divagations, meaningless phrases, massive non sequiturs, strange locutions, mangled words, weird fantasies. He seems to dwell on the borders of sanity. I wonder what the next stage will be: will it be pure gibberish? What will his supporters and enablers do then? Will they start to talk gibberish themselves, or try to offer meaningful paraphrases of his verbal tangles? How far can he go on the road to incoherence before they call a halt?