Wittgenstein and Naturalism

3. Liberal Naturalism

Acknowledging the fatal shortcomings of a scientific Strict Naturalism, a number of philosophers have proposed an alternative “liberal or plural-istic form of naturalism”.⁹ Liberal Naturalism rejects Strict Naturalism’s central credo, namely the idea that “science is, or ought to be, our only genuine or unproblematic guide in matters of method or knowledge or ontology or semantics”.¹⁰ Consequently, they also reject the restrictive vision of nature proffered by Strict Naturalists, asserting that “there are whole domains of fact with respect to which present-day science tells us nothing at all”.¹¹

Liberal Naturalism—with a capital L and N—is a broad church movement that is still developing. In 2004, its progenitors spoke of it as a position that was being actively articulated, describing their initial offerings as a kind of ‘roadmap’—one that originally aimed to provide the “outlines of a new non-reductive form of naturalism and a more inclusive conception of nature than any provided by the natural sciences”.¹²

Apparently, Liberal Naturalists abound—at least in philosophy. According to its chief spokespersons, De Caro and Macarthur, anyone who propounds some or other brand of non-scientific naturalism or non-standard scientific naturalism makes the cut. They identify John Dupré (for his ‘pluralistic naturalism’), Jennifer Hornsby (for her ‘naive naturalism’), John McDowell (for his ‘liberal naturalism’), and Barry Stroud (for his ‘more open minded or expansive naturalism’) among its ranks.¹³ Notably, Hilary Putnam, Huw Price, Akeel Bilgrami, Stanley Cavell, and Carol Rovane, amongst others, also make the list.¹⁴

Liberal Naturalists are quite a motley crew. Some, like Dupré, allow that science should be our only guide to what exists but claim that “the limits of the ‘scientific’ are broader, and looser, than the orthodoxy suggests”.¹⁵ Others, like McDowell, attempt to articulate a different conception of nature than that propounded by the kinds of naturalism that takes the standard scientific image as their touchstone.

Despite these differences, De Caro and Macarthur claim that four features form the core of Liberal Naturalism.¹⁶ First, Liberal Naturalists tend to focus on human nature, which they take to have unique characteristics, rather than concerning themselves with other aspects of the natural world. Second, Liberal Naturalism acknowledges and seeks to incorporate non-reducible normative facts within the broader conception of nature that it propounds. Third, Liberal Naturalists, although they reject the idea of a first philosophy that grounds all domains of knowledge, claim that philosophy is autonomous and has a distinct methodology. Finally, Liberal Naturalists are ardent pluralists: They advance pluralist conceptions of both scientific and philosophical methods.

On the preferred version of Liberal Naturalism, advanced by its chief spokespersons, it allows that there can be a multiplicity of kinds of things in nature, and a multiplicity of legitimate ways of understanding and investigating them. Thus some followers of Liberal Naturalism even go as far as taking “seriously the plurality of explanations within the various sciences and ordinary discourse, as well as the plurality of kinds of objects to which they are committed”.¹⁷ Accordingly, one is not “beholden to fit one’s ontology to the scientific image, Liberal Naturalism can admit … non-scientific non-supernatural realities into the catalogue of the things it acknowledges—or what we might (with some reservations) call its ‘ontology’ in a deflationary sense of that term”.¹⁸

There are two important general problems with Liberal Naturalism: First, it has difficulty in making its metaphysical claims coherent and keeping its metaphysics under control. Second, it does not provide an adequate picture of how philosophy and various sciences connect.

With respect to the first concern, Macarthur’s talk of a deflationary sense of ontology reveals his uneasiness with an out-and-out acknowledgment of a ‘plurality of kinds of objects’. However, not only does such a gesture not address the underlying issue, it also does not explain why or how we are justified in ruling out some but not other entities from our ontology. Without some restrictions on our methods, the worry is that Liberal Naturalism will lead to a bloated and overpopulated ontology. On the face of it, Liberal Naturalism sports an insufficiently cautious and overly free attitude, one that risks metaphysical extravagance.

Failure to deal with this problem makes it difficult to see why Liberal Naturalism should be counted as a form of naturalism at all. Liberal Naturalism suffers from the fact that without the backing of the sciences, it appears to lack a principled criterion for demarcating what is natural from what is not. To the extent that Liberal Naturalism allows ontological questions to be decided entirely by local standards, it appears to be stuck when it comes to deciding, in a final tally, what is in and what is out of nature in a principled way.

It should be noted that Liberal Naturalists cannot simply look to the natural sciences to solve this problem, as De Caro and Voltolini do.¹⁹ Merely ruling out anything that contradicts the laws of nature potentially lets far too much into the ontology, for the natural will include any entities that make no attempt to intervene on the causal order or only do so indirectly, without violating laws of nature.

A more promising strategy for dealing with the demarcation problem would be to reform the notion of nature offered by the sciences. This is McDowell’s approach. In reacting against the excesses of an imperialistic scientific naturalism, McDowell is steadfast in resisting the demand that in order to qualify as bona fide natural phenomena, normative phenomena, for example, must be explained in scientific terms.

Focusing on the phenomena of meaning and understanding—like other liberal naturalists—McDowell takes these to be wholly natural phenomena despite the fact that they have an irreducibly normative character—a character which, for McDowell, cannot be explicated in non-normative terms.

By McDowell’s lights, it is simply a fact that certain creatures—those that have benefited from being initiated into special kinds of social practices—become capable of having meaningful or contentful states of mind. For him, through such a process of enculturation such creatures obtain a second nature and enter into the space of reasons.²⁰

A key feature of McDowell’s view is that the space of reasons is autonomous and beyond the explanatory reach of the sciences. Thus McDowell makes clear that “we must sharply distinguish natural-scientific intelligibility from the kind of intelligibility something acquires when we situate it in the logical space of reasons”.²¹ If McDowell is right, then we are not capable of explicating or explaining how it is that capacities for contentful thought come to obtain in nature. Foregoing explanation, we can only simply affirm “our right to the notion of second nature”.²²

This brings us face to face with the fundamental general problem for Liberal Naturalism: It is that the picture of nature offered by the liberals divides it into diverse domains of entirely disconnected fact.

Despite first appearances, McDowell’s liberal naturalism is not satisfying. It leaves us with two senses of nature—demarcated by the manifest image, on the one hand, and the scientific image, on the other—which are forever divided.

The price of buying into Liberal Naturalism is that it becomes unclear how different domains of reality relate, or even why one should think that they are connected at all. Liberal Naturalists acknowledge a plurality of explanations about diverse domains of fact, but they apparently lack the resources for understanding how different explanations about diverse realities are complementary rather than competing.23

Liberal Naturalists stress that pluralism does not equate to the view that science cannot make valuable contributions to our understanding of nature. For example, they do not reject the idea that philosophy might be informed by science. As such, they “don’t want to deny that [scientific] findings may provide the impetus to philosophical reflection, or that they may help to undermine one’s philosophical conclusions”.²⁴ Still, it is entirely unclear how such a dialogue is meant to work given the vision of a divided nature that they sketch.

Anyone aiming to provide a satisfying Liberal Naturalism has to live by the ‘hope’ that they can “bring the relations between these two senses of nature into better focus”.²⁵ How might this be done? De Caro and Macarthur suggest that a way of bringing the two images into better focus would be by revising McDowell’s thesis of autonomy of the space of reasons “on the basis of more nuanced conceptions of the scientific image and the manifest images”.²⁶ Yet, as things stand, we have yet to see a detailed account of what such nuanced revisions would look like, and until such details are on the table, it would not be unreasonable to suspect that they might not be forthcoming.

In the end, Liberal Naturalism offers an important corrective to Strict Naturalism. It gets methodological pluralism right, but struggles when it comes to ontological issues as well as in making the appropriate connections between philosophy and science. Still, all in all, in key respects, Liberal Naturalism is just too Liberal.

4. From Liberal to Liberating Naturalism

Is there a version of naturalism that can avoid reductionism while embracing ontological monism? Could a naturalism do that while also respecting methodological pluralism in philosophy and the sciences? Moreover, is there a kind of naturalism that could achieve all of the above while also showing how philosophy and the sciences can connect productively and enter in cooperative dealings? As the previous sections reveal, to achieve all of this at once would be a delicate balancing act.

We think that there is a kind of naturalism that can pull off such a feat. Such a naturalism has two important components. Firstly, it must liberate us from certain mystifying tendencies of thought: hence, it must be a liberating naturalism. Secondly, it will make clear how philosophy and various sciences, using their own special methods, can take an interest in the same subject matter in a relaxed, complementary manner: hence, it must be a relaxed naturalism.

In this section, we take the first step towards articulating the kind of liberating, relaxed naturalism that we think ought to be preferred over its rivals. We postpone the question of how to best deal with questions of ontological monism and methodological pluralism until the next section. Our first task is to introduce the idea of a liberating naturalism, showing in what crucial respects it differs from liberal naturalism. In this connection, we look to Wittgenstein for inspiration. As Pears observes, Wittgenstein’s later philosophy promotes a naturalism that is inspired not by maxims of unification or pluralism, but by the idea “that the right method in philosophy is not to theorize about things but to describe them as we find them in daily life”.27

Descriptions of the kind Wittgenstein provided serve as elucidations— they help us to see what needs to be seen: facts that lie right before our eyes but which can, due to our own tendencies, become blocked from our view. Philosophers engaged in philosophy, as Wittgenstein conceived of it, provide clarifications but do not add substantively to our knowledge of the world; they do not discover new facts but help us to see aright facts with which are already familiar.

Wittgenstein’s reminders—his perspicuous representations—are designed to put us back into contact with relevant facts about our everyday practices and customary ways of going on. They remind us of:

the fact that we act in such-and-such ways, e.g. punish certain actions, establish the state of affairs thus and so, give orders, render accounts, describe colours, take an interest in others’ feelings.²⁸

The facts in which Wittgenstein is interested are already quite familiar to us. This is because they are part and parcel of what it is to be a competent participant in the relevant practices. For this reason, Wittgenstein directs us to attend to what “lies before our eyes” and to recognize that “What has to be accepted, the given—it might be said—are facts of living [forms of life]”.²⁹^,³⁰

Supplying illuminating descriptions that clarify the facts of our situation is at the heart of Wittgenstein’s brand of naturalism. His kind of naturalism is, in this crucial respect, unlike scientific forms of naturalism that seek to provide penetrating explanations of various phenomena. It is descriptive work that is needed since only such work can acquaint us with the important facts needed to gain philosophical understanding. Such activity is not speculative: it is not a matter of advancing hypotheses or theories.

Wittgenstein always emphasizes the absolute gulf between the descriptive work of philosophy and the advancing of explanations and conjectures.31 In doing philosophy, Wittgenstein instructs, “we may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place”.³² Famously, Wittgenstein tells us, “Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything.—Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain. For what is hidden, for example, is of no interest to us”.³³

Indeed, Wittgenstein highlights the ways in which coming to see things aright can only be achieved by putting aside philosophical commitments and explanatory ambitions. Thus, he tells us, “It often happens that we only become aware of the important facts, if we suppress the question ‘why?’”.³⁴ Certainly, for Wittgenstein, it is not the job of the philosopher to attempt to provide explanations of facts of interest.

Though the relevant facts are often obscured, through philosophical work they can become “surveyable by a rearrangement”.³⁵ Just as the weeds of an overgrown garden need to be removed if we are to see its beauty, so we gain philosophical clarity about some subject matter by “clearing misunderstandings away”.³⁶ Importantly, though, the philosophical revelations achieved at the end of this process need no further vindication; they are not established by appeal to additional evidence.

It is for this very reason that in conducting his philosophical investigations, Wittgenstein tells us that he is neither “doing natural science, nor yet natural history”.³⁷^,³⁸ This is a point to which we will return to discuss at length in the next section.

Despite being atheoretical in character, the philosophical work of getting clear about the facts of our situation is anything but easy. A major reason for this is that in doing philosophy the reason we often lack a clear view of the terrain of interest is because intellectual obstacles of our own manufacture impair our vision. Assumptions about what must, or has to be the case can prevent us from understanding a topic under investigation.

Wittgenstein everywhere denounces the practice of making philosophical pronouncements about ‘what there must be’. Picking up again on the difference between description and explanation in decrying this tendency, he tells us, “Grammar does not tell us how language must be constructed in order to fulfil its purpose, in order to have such-and-such an effect on human beings. It only describes and in no way explains”.39 Hence, he enjoins, “Don’t think, but look!”⁴⁰

To see things aright requires us to break free, often again and again— from certain irresistible but distorting pictures or ways of thinking about various subject matters—ways of thinking that irresistibly attract us and “bewitch our intelligence”.⁴¹

Gripping pictures can block our view. Describing his own struggles with these, Wittgenstein tells us: “a picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably”.⁴²

Recognizing the power of philosophical pictures and how hard it can be to get free of their grip is pivotal when it comes to understanding Wittgenstein’s distinctive brand of naturalism and how it differs fundamentally from Liberal Naturalism. Illustrating the difference, Marie McGinn provides an apt, incisive criticism of the motivations behind and central commitments of McDowell’s liberal naturalism, emphasizing how and where McDowell’s thinking deviates from Wittgenstein’s on the issues of meaning and understanding.⁴³ Despite acknowledging the attractive aspects of McDowell’s philosophy, McGinn maintains that, on close scrutiny, the kind of liberal naturalism he advocates breaks faith completely, both in letter and spirit, from the sort of naturalism Wittgenstein promotes.

On McGinn’s analysis, what really divides these two thinkers boils down to the fact that McDowell’s liberal naturalism, presumptuously, continues to incorporate elements of a philosophical picture of what having meaningful thoughts and understanding must involve, rather than stopping with and being satisfied with a careful description of our practices that involve meaning and understanding. Indeed, McGinn sees liberal naturalism of a McDowellian stripe as embracing philosophical commitments of exactly the sort that a liberating naturalism of the kind inspired by Wittgenstein seeks to purge and expose as both mystifying and unnecessary.

What are the offending commitments? A full, detailed analysis is beyond the scope of this paper, but McGinn complains of McDowell’s insistence that during acts of meaning and understanding we somehow come into contact with mental contents—mental items with very special properties. Moreover, he holds that anyone who fails to acknowledge this fact of our situation will be bereft of the resources needed to properly characterize our everyday acts of meaning and understanding.

McDowell holds that “someone’s understanding something is a fact about her”.⁴⁴ For him, philosophical work is needed to say just “what sort of fact” this is—namely, to appropriately characterize it, casting aside problematic candidates. In his final analysis, McDowell holds an appropriate characterization must recognize the existence of mental contents that come before our minds and that failure to recognize this would be to overlook an essential feature of acts of meaning and understanding. In his own words, any account of meaning and understanding that failed to acknowledge that meanings come before our minds would be to risk ‘under-mentalizing’ the relevant behavior.⁴⁵

For McGinn, the problem with liberal naturalism lies, at root, precisely in this conviction about what acts of meaning and understanding must essentially involve. Summing up, as McGinn puts it, “in holding that we need to preserve the idea that ‘meanings come to mind’, McDowell is committed to the very idea of shadows that Wittgenstein’s naturalism is intended to liberate us from”.⁴⁶

For McGinn, to buy into the idea that we grasp mental contents and bring meanings to mind, as McDowell does, is to resurrect the very picture about what following a rule actually comes to in practice that Wittgenstein sought to expose as a superfluous superstition.

To be sure, if McDowell has fallen into error here, his mistake is a very subtle one. When pressed to explain what meaning, understanding or following a rule involves, as Wittgenstein was at pains to expose, a natural response is to try to articulate the rule to which we are attempting to be faithful: the one that governs our particular attempts to apply it and which—somehow—stands over and above and governs such attempts. This taps into the platitudinous fact that getting it right depends on successfully aligning our behavior with standards which provide independent correctness conditions.

When we mean something by using a word or understand what a word means we are accountable to something beyond us—something that places a binding force on whether or not we have meant something by a word or have understood it correctly. The relevant possibilities are all somehow timelessly ‘laid out in advance’, predetermining all correct and incorrect applications—past, future and present.

To explain how this can be so it seems necessary to postulate the existence of something independent from our practices—something above and beyond our practices, something that can act as a standard that determines whether any given application is correct or incorrect. Moreover, we will feel compelled to posit a means of access to these standards; we need to have a grip on what the rule demands of us if it is to instruct and guide our attempts to apply it.

Through these familiar steps of reasoning, it is easy to see how anyone might come to think that we must bring mental contents before our minds if we are to mean or understanding anything by our words. Such mental contents will need to have ‘queer’ properties if they are to simultaneously fix meanings and act as guides to our acts of meaning and understanding, and our minds will need equally ‘queer’ properties if they are to get a grip on such things. Trying to imagine how our minds operate with such mental contents would be akin to trying to imagine operations of some kind of ‘ethereal machine’, one that cannot err or malfunction. In trying to articulate the philosophical picture behind such thinking we seem to need to posit the existence of a device that can do what no ordinary physical mechanism can, for only such a mysterious mechanism could embody a rule.47

McDowell, as a sophisticated reader and exegete of Wittgenstein on topics of meaning, understanding, and rule following, is well aware of the problems attendant with the kind of Platonism associated with the super-rigid machine notion. As he notes, such a picture is problematic in that it fosters the idea that it is possible to grasp “patterns that extend to new cases independently of our ratification”.⁴⁸ But, at the same time, he recognizes the problem of placing too much weight on the anti-realist idea that the patterns in question depend entirely on our practices.

McDowell offers a transcendental argument which he takes to reveal that old-school Platonism and anti-realism cannot be our only options: “there must be a middle position”.⁴⁹ On his analysis, he sees what he has to offer on this score as wholly in tune with what Wittgenstein has to say on the matter. According to McDowell, Wittgenstein concludes “not that concepts have no normative status, but that the patterns they dictate are not independent of our ratification”.⁵⁰ To see things aright, what has to be rejected is the erroneous idea that “a genuine fact must be a matter of the way things are in themselves, utterly independently of us”.⁵¹

Clarifying these possibilities, McDowell distinguishes two things that can travel under the banner of Platonism, one is a philosophically problematic view connected with the “imagery of super-rigid machinery”, whereas the other only propounds ideas that are “simply part of the conception of meaning as reaching normatively into the objective world”.⁵²

As McDowell observes, it is possible to recoil from the first kind of Platonic realism while embracing the second version, since it has “nothing to do with rejection of the truth-conditional conception of meaning, properly understood. That conception has no need to camouflage the fact that truth-conditions are necessarily given by us, in language that we understand”.⁵³

McDowell promotes the second brand of Platonism because he takes it to be that “a condition for the possibility of finding real application for the notion of meaning at all is that we reject anti-realism”.⁵⁴ For him, “there cannot be a position that is both anti-realist and genuinely hospital to meaning”.⁵⁵

Thus, to avoid an unwelcome anti-realism McDowell recommends embracing a kind of Platonism—albeit, one that under the auspices of Liberal Naturalism, can be billed as a “naturalized Platonism”.⁵⁶ Thus, as explored already in the previous section, the long and short of it is that this commitment is what inspires McDowell’s particular brand of liberal naturalism—one that seeks to promote a:

form of realism which conceives of meaning and intending as inner states which have an intrinsic determinate content. His conception of liberal naturalism is precisely that it can embrace these intrinsically normative states as part of the furniture of the natural world.57

There is much to agree with and admire in McDowell’s analysis and what it says about meaning and understanding. For example, we think McDowell is right to think that the capacity to think contentful thoughts is only gained if we have acquired a second nature. Only those that have benefited from the right kind of training gain this second nature. Thus, only those who have been trained and inducted into special sorts of socio-cultural practices are able, for example, to mean things by their words and to understand the meaning of words. It is through immersion and participation in specific sorts of transformative practices that some creatures become capable of such mental feats.

Indeed, as these kinds of naturalistic observations go, McDowell and Wittgenstein are much aligned; for both meaning and understanding are “natural responses of those who have undergone a certain training”.⁵⁸

Thus, McDowell holds that being able to bring a content ‘before one’s mind’ is not a basic capacity, as many representationalists suppose, but an acquired one: it is the outcome of a special kind of enculturation. Thus he agrees with Wittgenstein that grasp of meaning is not a basic ability but instead that “a process of initiation into a custom is required in order for anyone to perceive what the rule requires”.⁵⁹ Thus, for McDowell, to be able to think contentful thoughts depends on being appropriately embedded in and having mastered a special set of practices.

We agree with McDowell in acknowledging the crucial enabling roles that public practices play in making contentful thought possible. Despite this, we hold that to adopt his new school naturalized Platonism goes beyond Wittgenstein in attempting to add unnecessary philosophical elements in the characterization of our meaningful practices. In particular, there is no need to recognize the existence of special kinds of irreducible normative facts above and beyond the general facts of nature of which Wittgenstein speaks in order to provide a satisfactory account of meaning and understanding.

It is precisely at this juncture that McDowell moves away from a liberating naturalism and, as a consequence, feels the need to expand our conception of nature.⁶⁰ If McDowell is right, we must introduce a special ingredient into the mix in order to do justice to the story—to tell it wholly. By his lights, we have no choice but to acknowledge that, albeit in a special sense, thinking and understanding meaningful thoughts involves grasping contents that come “to mind”.⁶¹ By presenting the issues in this way, it appears that further metaphysical tinkering and theoretical work is required in order to accommodate the normative facts within our existing picture of nature.

This is the crux. A more careful examination of our actual practices reveals that there is no need to introduce irreducible, inexplicable properties into the story in the first place: they play no part of meaning and understanding, and to think otherwise is to be swayed by an illegitimate philosophical demand. Here again, McGinn astutely sums up the situation: “There is no need to make this strange idea intelligible … Nothing is lost by abandoning it”.⁶²

In the end, we agree with McGinn’s assessment that McDowell’s liberal naturalism is steeped in philosophical mythology—that what “McDowell’s liberal naturalism sets out to preserve, amounts to a commitment to the ‘shadowy beings’ which Wittgenstein’s naturalism aims to overcome”.⁶³

The salient lesson to be taken away from the preceding analysis is that even for the sharpest minds, misguided philosophical demands can generate unwelcome commitments that can be quite subtly tangled up with more innocuous, indeed platitudinous, observations about the relevant facts.

This can be so even for those who are actively on guard against such unwanted influences.⁶⁴ To avoid such a result, what is wanted is not a Liberal Naturalism but a Liberating Naturalism—one that leads back to a more open conception of nature that does not expand nature to include a variety of special sorts of facts but rather places the relevant facts in plain view, once obscuring obstacles to our sight have been removed.

5. From Restrictive to Relaxed Naturalism

A liberating naturalism—one that gets us to focus on and clarify our understanding of certain general facts of nature—provides the resources needed for understanding how philosophy and the various sciences can be concerned with the same facts differently—bringing diverse interests to the table and employing diverse methods to pursue those interests— without conflict. Importantly, unlike Liberal Naturalism, Wittgenstein’s Liberating Naturalism avoids dividing reality into distinct domains of fact that cannot be intelligibly connected. Rather, Wittgenstein’s descriptive approach to philosophy operates in a framework that allows us to think about nature in ways that enable us to see how philosophy and the sciences can connect and cooperate in complementary endeavors.

In more programmatic terms, this is because Wittgenstein’s Liberating Naturalism can be partnered with what we have elsewhere dubbed Relaxed Naturalism.65 Relaxed Naturalism, unlike Strict Naturalism does not assume that all sciences must be unified through reduction but holds that the diverse methods and findings of the natural and social sciences can be relevant to investigating and understanding facts of interest. Relaxed Naturalism draws upon and seeks to harmoniously integrate the discoveries from a wide range of empirical sciences as determined by what is needed to make best sense of the topic under scrutiny. It allows that it may be appropriate, and sometimes indeed necessary, to include results that span not only the hard sciences, but also the human and social sciences.

To take a case in point, consider what is required when it comes to accounting for the acquisition of our second nature—“the set of skills and habits that are natural to properly enculturated humans … habits of interpretation, judgment, reflective epistemic responsibility, and sensitivity to relations of entailment and support”.⁶⁶

Relaxed Naturalists maintain that to fully understand the nature of these capacities requires synthesizing findings from, inter alia, anthropology, developmental psychology, comparative psychology, cognitive archaeology, and social neuroscience. Thus, like Godfrey-Smith, we too “argue for the viability and importance of a form of investigation of these features that McDowell seeks to resist.”⁶⁷^,⁶⁸

Crucially, taking Liberating Naturalism as a starting point provides a philosophical framework for thinking about the relevant facts of nature in a way that allows for the possibility of the sorts of investigations and integrative work that Relaxed Naturalists conduct.

When it comes to making philosophical sense of our acquired capacities— those that define our second nature—a Liberating Naturalism frees us from tempting but ultimately mystery-generating tendencies of thought and instead gets us to focus on the facts and features of the relevant practices. Of course, as McGinn emphasizes, this is “not the end of the story”.69 We will want answers to further questions about, for example, how we know what to do in following rules or using our words and how we decide what counts as doing so correctly and incorrectly, and so on. At this juncture, we cannot do better, philosophically, than to, once again, describe our practices with care.

Those who have taken this lesson on board will come to see that the philosophical investigation of these issues comes to an end with an acceptance that it is a fact of our natural history that these practices have the shape that they have.

It is vitally important to properly understand the status of these observations about our practices. Are these remarks theoretical in character? Do we need to provide empirical evidence for these claims? Dromm identifies a standard interpretation of Wittgenstein’s remarks on language learning—ubiquitous in the literature—that takes him to be doing just that—namely, advancing empirical claims of a broadly theoretical character.⁷⁰

We agree with Dromm (2008) that we must resist understanding Wittgenstein’s remarks as armchair attempts at empirical theorizing.⁷¹ Yet in doing so, we must also be careful to understand the sense in which Wittgenstein was calling our attention to ‘important possibilities’. For, although Wittgenstein is not engaged in speculative natural history, he is seeking to bring very general facts into view: He is interested in “the correspondence between concepts and very general facts of nature”.⁷² In this regard, he makes it clear that “we are not doing natural science; nor yet natural history—since we can also invent fictitious natural history for our purposes”.⁷³ It is precisely for this reason that Wittgenstein’s remarks do require additional empirical evidence to establish their credentials.

Once their status is properly understood, it is apparent why it is a mistake to suppose that, “the claims established by philosophers depend on the same kind of empirical support as scientific theories”.74

Nonetheless, even though Wittgenstein is not doing natural science, he is providing philosophical reminders about facts of our natural history. Thus he affirms that:

What we are supplying are really remarks on the natural history of human beings; we are not contributing curiosities however, but observations which no one has doubted, but which have escaped remark only because they are always before our eyes.⁷⁵

The relevant facts are there to see for anyone with eyes to see—that is, for anyone who is not in the grip of a picture.⁷⁶

Liberating Naturalists are always in the business of philosophical clarification. Following Wittgenstein’s lead, they provide perspicuous representations of general facts of nature. Yet this work is wholly compatible with other kinds of philosophical endeavors—in particular, it can sit alongside attempts to enrich our understanding of these facts of nature further by synthesizing the contributions of various sciences. For example, philosophers can help to illuminate “how the ‘habits of thought and action’ involved in our use of normative concepts relate to other facts about us and how these habits function as human cognitive tools”.⁷⁷ Importantly, “when this philosopher says that such an investigation should mesh with what we learn from science, do not think ‘physics’ when he says ‘science’”.⁷⁸

Under the auspices of Relaxed Naturalism, such philosophical efforts would take the form of productively engaging in “work of synthesis and argument integrating ideas and suggestions from many distinct research traditions”.⁷⁹ Operating in this synthetic mode, philosophers “exploit and depend on data, but do not provide new data”.⁸⁰ Crucially, in doing such work, “philosophers can contribute a distinct kind of competence”.⁸¹ Likewise, “if philosophers need empirical input they do best to turn to practicing scientists”⁸² (Smith 2014, p. 296). This way of understanding the distinctive contributions of philosophers and scientists acknowledges that “interdisciplinary work is hard and to do it one has to start from a strong disciplinary base. Good fences make good neighbours”.⁸³^,⁸⁴

There is no bar to combining the sort of philosophical work Relaxed Naturalists seek to conduct with the philosophical work of Liberating Naturalism—namely, “with a deep critique of the standard ways in which these problems have usually been generated and addressed in the philosophical tradition”.⁸⁵^,⁸⁶ Indeed, if the foregoing analyses of other forms of naturalism are accurate then Liberating, Relaxed Naturalism may be best placed to pursue what Sellars takes to be the central aim of philosophy, namely “to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term”.⁸⁷

A Naturalism that is both Liberating and Relaxed constitutes a coherent naturalism—one that, when compared with the existing alternatives, appears to get things just right.

1 Alexander Rosenberg, “Can Naturalism Save the Humanities,” in Philosophical Methodology: The Armchair of the Laboratory? edited by Matthew C. Haug (London: Routledge, 2014), 41.

3 Peter Carruthers, The Opacity of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), xiii.

4 Alexander Rosenberg, “Why I Am a Naturalist,” in Philosophical Methodology: The Armchair or the Laboratory? edited by Matthew C. Haug (London: Routledge, 2014), 32.

5 See Steven Horst, Beyond Reduction: Philosophy of Mind and Post-Reductionist Philosophy of Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 21.

6 Mario De Caro and David Macarthur, “Introduction: Science, Naturalism, and the Problem of Normativity,” in Naturalism and Normativity, edited by Mario De Caro and David Macarthur (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 4.

7 Timothy Williamson, “The Unclarity of Naturalism,” in Philosophical Methodology: The Armchair or the Laboratory? edited by Matthew C. Haug (London: Routledge, 2014), 37.

8 Macarthur (2015) makes a similar argument, arguing that strict naturalism in stating its methodological and ontological maxims “is committed to a form rational normativity [what is rationally normative for a philosophical practice] that it cannot explain with the resources available to it” (p. 576).

9 Mario de Cario and David Macarthur, “Introduction: The Nature of Naturalism,” in Naturalism in Question, edited by Mario De Caro and David Macarthur (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 3.

11 Hilary Putnam, Realism With a Human Face (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 143.

14 David Macarthur, “Liberal Naturalism and Second-Personal Space: A Neo-Pragmatist Response to the ‘Natural Origins of Content’,” Philosophia, 43 (2015): 574, fn 19.

17 Talia Morag, Emotion, Imagination, and the Limits of Reason (London: Routledge, 2016), 11, emphasis added.

19 Mario De Caro and Alberto Voltolini, “Is Liberal Naturalism Possible?” in Naturalism and Normativity, edited by Mario De Caro and David Macarthur (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

20 See John McDowell, “Wittgensteinian Quietism,” Common Knowledge, 15/3 (2009): 287.

21 John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), xix.

23 Accordingly, “liberal naturalism does not privilege causation at the physical level, as if physical causes are the only ‘real’ causes. The same event may be causally explained by various explanatory practices, each of which would account for an aspect of the event that is describable in terms of that specific practice” (Morag 2016, p. 11).

27 David Pears, “Wittgenstein’s Naturalism,” The Monist, 78/4 (1995): 411.

28 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume 1 (RPP1), edited by G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. Von Wright (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), §630, emphases added; Philosophical Investigations (PI) (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953), 226e.

38 Equally Wittgenstein was not trying to divine a priori necessities—he wasn’t doing traditional metaphysics. Indeed, by his lights, the essential thing about metaphysics is that it, problematically, “obliterates the distinction between factual and conceptual investigations” (Zettel §458). Wittgenstein’s naturalistic project turns its face against metaphysical attempts to divine the essence of things through an analysis of what is hidden and all attempts to discover a set of explanatory super-facts that fix all other facts. An animating insight that drives his philosophy—one that is shared with other naturalisms—is his recognition that there is no necessary a priori order to things. By his lights, there is no possibility of pursuing an analytic project of charting, surveying or articulating metaphysics. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, edited by G.E.M Anscombe and G.H. Von Wright, 2nd edition (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967).

43 Marie McGinn, “Liberal Naturalism: Wittgenstein and McDowell,” in Philosophical Methodology: The Armchair or the Laboratory? edited by Matthew C. Haug (London: Routledge, 2014).

44 John McDowell, “Meaning and Intentionality in Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy,” in Mind, Value and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 269.

45 Ibid., 276; see also John McDowell, “Intentionality and Interiority in Wittgenstein,” in Mind, Value and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

48 John McDowell, “Wittgenstein on Following a Rule,” in Mind, Value and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998a), 256, emphasis added.

60 Thus, as McGinn (2014) observes: “It is no doubt a contingent matter that there are natural beings that acquire the status of rational animals, but given this is the case, we must, McDowell argues, have a conception of nature that can accommodate the existence of inner states with normative force, for without that the whole idea that there are rational animals, whose action are describable in normative terms, is undermined” (p. 68, emphasis added).

62 McGinn, “Liberal Naturalism,” 84. Expanding on this thought she writes: “If we are tempted to suppose that [rule-following, meaning and understanding] … depends on the subject being in a mental state which mysteriously anticipates the future, then Wittgenstein’s descriptions of what goes on in particular cases—of the criteria by which we judge these things, of the context in which we learn to use the relevant expressions, and so on—can enable us to see that no such idea comes into it” (McGinn 2014, p. 84).

64 It is perhaps surprising that we should accuse McDowell of falling into this trap since, as a prominent quietist, he has utterly disavowed philosophical projects that attempt to theorize. As Macarthur (2017) observes, “the most fully explicit example of quietist therapy in contemporary philosophy is John McDowell’s Mind and World, 2nd edition (1996)” (p. 352). Nevertheless, as Macarthur also acknowledges, there are aspects in presentation of McDowell’s work that suggest “an element of dogmatism that is entirely lacking in Wittgenstein’s writings” (2017, p. 259).

65 Daniel D. Hutto and Glenda Satne, “The Natural Origins of Content,” Philosophia, 43/3 (2015); see also Daniel D. Hutto and Erik Myin, Evolving Enactivism: Basic Minds Meet Content (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017).

66 Peter Godfrey-Smith, “Dewey, Continuity and McDowell,” in Naturalism and Normativity, edited by Mario De Caro and David Macarthur (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 314.

68 Resistance arises because “[f]or McDowell, the way in which second nature counts as natural to us makes it unnecessary to engage in a philosophical project of locating these features in the world as conceived by science” (Godfrey-Smith 2010, p. 314).

69 Marie McGinn, “Wittgenstein and Naturalism,” in Naturalism and Normativity, edited by Mario De Caro and David Macarthur (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 337.

70 Keith Dromm, “Imaginary Naturalism: The Natural and Primitive in Wittgenstein’s Later Thought,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 11/4 (2003).

71 Keith Dromm, Wittgenstein on Rules and Nature (London: Bloomsbury, 2008), xvii.

74 David Papineau, “The Poverty of Conceptual Analysis,” in Philosophical Methodology: The Armchair or the Laboratory? edited by Matthew C. Haug (London: Routledge, 2014), 167.

76 Dromm (2008) holds that what Wittgenstein has to say about “language-learning is not among those facts that ‘lie before our eyes’” (p. 71). Yet arguably, this is a mistake. See Hutto (2013) for a discussion.

81 Barry C. Smith, “Philosophical and Empirical Approaches to Language,” in Philosophical Methodology: The Armchair or the Laboratory? edited by Matthew C. Haug (London: Routledge, 2014), 296.

84 This echoes and respects a constant theme in Wittgenstein’s thinking, from early to late, which is that “Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences. (The word ‘philosophy’ must mean something whose place is above or below the natural sciences, not beside them’)” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, translated by C. K. Ogden (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922).

86 This reveals why, contra Macarthur (2015), Relaxed Naturalism need not be thought of as simply a looser kind of Scientific Naturalism. For when allied with Liberating Naturalism, a Relaxed Naturalism is not just a broader and more pluralistic variety of Scientific Naturalism that encompasses sciences beyond hard sciences (p. 569). For a broad version of Scientific Naturalism would, as Macarthur characterizes it, simply expand the range of sciences and thus methods that might determine which entities to be included as bona fide parts of nature (see also De Caro and Macarthur 2010, pp. 5–6). And, of course, Relaxed Naturalists not only provide synthesis and argument, they are in the business of clarification as well.

87 Wilfrid Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” reprinted in Science, Perception and Reality (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962/1963), 1.

References

De Caro, Mario, and David Macarthur. “Introduction: The Nature of Naturalism.” In Naturalism in Question, edited by Mario De Caro and David Macarthur, 1–20. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.

———. “Introduction: Science, Naturalism, and the Problem of Normativity.” In Naturalism and Normativity, edited by Mario De Caro and David Macarthur, 1–19. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.

De Caro, Mario, and Alberto Voltolini. “Is Liberal Naturalism Possible?” In Naturalism and Normativity, edited by Mario De Caro and David Macarthur, 70–86. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.

Dromm, Keith. “Imaginary Naturalism: The Natural and Primitive in Wittgenstein’s Later Thought.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 11/4 (2003): 673–690.

Godfrey-Smith, Peter. “Dewey, Continuity and McDowell.” In Naturalism and Normativity, edited by Mario De Caro and David Macarthur, 304–321. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.

Horst, Steven. Beyond Reduction: Philosophy of Mind and Post-Reductionist Philosophy of Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Hutto, Daniel D. Wittgenstein and the End of Philosophy: Neither Theory Nor Therapy. 2nd edition. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006.

———. “Enactivism: From a Wittgensteinian Point of View.” American Philosophical Quarterly 50/3 (2013): 281–302.

Hutto, Daniel D., and Erik Myin. Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds Without Content. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013.

———. Evolving Enactivism: Basic Minds Meet Content. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017.

Hutto, Daniel D., and Glenda Satne. “The Natural Origins of Content.” Philosophia 43/3 (2015): 521–536.

Macarthur, David. “Liberal Naturalism and Second-Personal Space: A Neo-Pragmatist Response to the ‘Natural Origins of Content’.” Philosophia 43 (2015): 565–578.

———. “On Metaphysical Quietism and Everyday Life.” In The Cambridge Companion to Philosophical Methodology, edited by Giuseppina D’Oro and Soren Overgaard, 249–273. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

———. “Intentionality and Interiority in Wittgenstein.” In Mind, Value and Reality, 297–324. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.

———. “Meaning and Intentionality in Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy.” In Mind, Value and Reality, 263–278. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.

3
Naturalism in the Goldilocks Zone

1. Wittgenstein and the Three Naturalisms

2. Strict Naturalism

3. Liberal Naturalism

4. From Liberal to Liberating Naturalism

5. From Restrictive to Relaxed Naturalism

6. Conclusion

Notes

References

3Naturalism in the Goldilocks Zone

1. Wittgenstein and the Three Naturalisms

2. Strict Naturalism

3. Liberal Naturalism

4. From Liberal to Liberating Naturalism

5. From Restrictive to Relaxed Naturalism

6. Conclusion

Notes

References

3
Naturalism in the Goldilocks Zone