Strawson - Scepticism and Naturalism

SKEPTICISM AND
NATURALISM

WOODBRIDGE LECTURES
DELIVERED AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
IN APRIL OF 1983

NUMBER TWELVE

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The Bounds of Sense
An Essay on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason

Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays
Individuals

An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics
Introduction to Logical Theory
Logico-Linguistic Papers
Subject and Predicate in Logic and Grammar

THE WOODBRIDGE
LECTURES 1983

P.F.Strawson

METHUEN

First published in Great Britain in 1985 by
Methuen & Co. Ltd
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
First published as a University Paperback in 1987

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.

To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge's collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.

1985 P.F.Strawson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Strawson, P.F.
Skepticism and naturalism: some varieties:
the Woodbridge lectures 1983.(The
Woodbridge lectures; no. 12)
1. Naturalism
I. Title II. Series
146 B828.2

ISBN 0-203-98059-X Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-416-00002-9 (Print Edition)

.

This book consists of five of the Woodbridge Lectures delivered at Columbia University in 1983. A sixth lecture, Causation and Explanation, somewhat remote in theme and treatment from the others is not included. I wish to thank the members of the philosophy department at Columbia for their invitation to deliver these lectures and for the pleasure and stimulus of their company and comments during my stay in New York.

The lectures were originally composed in Oxford during the early months of 1980 and were subsequently delivered in that University. Though a good many of the thoughts they contain have been given, sometimes fuller, sometimes abbreviated, expression in others of my articles and reviews, they have not before been brought together and presented in print in their present form. The original composition of the lectures was prompted by a growing sense of a certain unity in the approaches, which I found plausible or appealing, to several apparently disparate topics; and by a hope, no doubt delusive, that some persistent philosophical tensions might be eased by an exposure of the parallels and connections between these approaches.

Other disciplines are defined by constitutive principles of se lection among ascertainable truths. Agreement among experts in the special sciences and in exact scholarship may reasonably be hoped for and gradually attained. But philosophy, which takes human thought in general as its field, is not thus conveniently confined; and truth in philosophy, though not to be despaired of, is so complex and many-sided, so multi-faced, that any individual philosopher's work, if it is to have any unity and coherence, must at best emphasize some aspects of the truth, to the neglect of others which may strike another philosopher with greater force. Hence the appearance of endemic disagreement in the subject is something to be expected rather than deplored; and it is no matter for wonder that the individual philosopher's views are more likely than those of the scientist or exact scholar to reflect in part his individual taste and temperament.

The satirist may laugh, the philosopher may preach; but reason herself will respect the prejudices and habits, which have been consecrated by the experience of mankind.GIBBON

The term naturalism is elastic in its use. The fact that it has been applied to the work of philosophers having as little in common as Hume and Spinoza is enough to suggest that there is a distinction to be drawn between varieties of naturalism. In later chapters, I shall myself draw a distinction between two main varieties, within which there are subvarieties. Of the two main varieties, one might be called strict or reductive naturalism (or, perhaps, hard naturalism). The other might be called catholic or liberal naturalism (or, perhaps, soft naturalism). The words catholic and liberal I use here in their comprehensive, not in their specifically religious or political, senses; nothing I say will have any direct bearing on religion or the philosophy of religion or on politics or political philosophy.

Each of these two general varieties of naturalism will be seen by its critics as liable to lead its adherents into intellectual aberration. The exponent of some subvarieties of strict or reductive naturalism is liable to be accused of what is pejoratively known as scientism, and of denying evident truths and realities. The soft or catholic naturalist, on the other hand, is liable to be accused of fostering illusions or propagating myths. I do not want to suggest that a kind of intellectual cold war between the two is inevitable. There is, perhaps, a possibility of compromise or dtente, even of reconciliation. The soft or catholic naturalist, as his name suggests, will be the readier with proposals for peaceful coexistence.

My title seems to speak of varieties of skepticism as well as varieties of naturalism. An exponent of some subvariety of reductive naturalism in some particular area of debate may sometimes be seen, or represented, as a kind of skeptic in that area: say, a moral skeptic or a skeptic about the mental or about abstract entities or about what are called intensions. I shall explore some of these areas later on; and it is only then that the distinction between hard and soft naturalism will come into play.

For the present, I shall not need any such distinction and I shall not make any such slightly deviant or extended applications of the notion of skepticism. To begin with, I shall refer only to some familiar and standard forms of philosophical skepticism. Strictly, skepticism is a matter of doubt rather than of denial. The skeptic is, strictly, not one who denies the validity of certain types of belief, but one who questions, if only initially and for methodological reasons, the adequacy of our grounds for holding them. He puts forward his doubts by way of a challengesometimes a challenge to himselfto show that the doubts are unjustified, that the beliefs put in question are justified. He may conclude, like Descartes, that the challenge can successfully be met; or, like Hume, that it cannot (though this view of Hume's was importantly qualified). Traditional targets of philosophic doubt include the existence of the external world, i.e. of physical objects or bodies; our knowledge of other minds; the justification of induction; the reality of the past. Hume concerned himself most with the first and third of thesebody and induction; and I shall refer mainly, though not only, to the first.

I shall begin by considering various different kinds of attempts to meet the challenge of traditional skepticism by argument; and also various replies to these attempts, designed to show that they are unsuccessful or that they miss the point. Then I shall consider a different kind of response to skepticisma response which does not so much attempt to meet the challenge as to pass it by. And this is where I shall first introduce an undifferentiated notion of Naturalism. The hero of this part of the story is Hume: he appears in the double role of arch-skeptic and arch-naturalist. Other names which will figure in the story include those of Moore, Wittgenstein, Carnap and, among our own contemporaries, Professor Barry Stroud. This part of the story is the theme of the present chapter. It is an old story, so I shall begin by going over some familiar ground. In the remaining chapters I shall tackle a number of different topics viz. morality, perception, mind and meaningand it is only in connection with these that I shall introduce and make use of the distinction between hard and soft naturalism.