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).
