Jessica Wahman - Narrative naturalism : an alternative framework for philosophy of mind

Narrative Naturalism

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham Boulder New York London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wahman, Jessica, 1968- Narrative naturalism : an alternative framework for philosophy of mind / Jessica Wahman.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-7391-8797-5 (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-7391-8798-2 (electronic)

1. Naturalism. 2. Santayana, George, 1863-1952. 3. Philosophy of mind. I. Title.

B828.2.W34 2015

128'.2--dc23

2015012921

TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

To John Stuhr, love of my life, without whom this book would have been neither possible nor necessary.

This book is the result of long reflection and has come to fruition thanks, in no small part, to the suggestions of others and as a result of their encouragement. I am grateful to: Dickinson College, for support during the early stages of research and writing; my colleague Susan Feldman, for listening so thoughtfully to my nascent ideas and offering such constructive and provocative suggestions; Brian Henning and the Metaphysical Society of America, for giving me the opportunity to present an early version of my argument for pluralistic naturalism, which proved instructive in all sorts of ways; Associate Professor of Physics Lars English at Dickinson, for his willingness to read chapter 4 at the drop of a hat and for his valuable feedback on my characterization of emergent properties and explanatory interdependence in physics; and John Lysaker, for an inspiring turn of phrase essential to the development of my argument. Furthermore, I am ever grateful to David Dilworth, for introducing me to Santayanas work, and to Santayana himself, for his eloquent and inspiring vision of the world. I also thank Jana Hodges-Kluck, Kari Waters, and Hannah Fisher, editors at Lexington Books, for their belief in my project and their energies in seeing it through to completion. Finally, and most importantly, thanks to my husband, John Stuhr, who believes in me more than I do in myself and has encouraged me to accomplish things I doubted were possible. Though my successes never seem to surprise him, he has enabled me to surprise myself at what I can aspire to and achieve.

A Speculative Tale

In an age of empiricism, as ours is, one needs to address ways of knowing before one can address problems of being. Contemporary philosophers tend to look to the experiential, in various ways, to justify their claims, and we are rightly circumspect when it comes to metaphysical theories that claim to prove dimensions of reality that lie beyond the bounds of all perception. The philosophical orientation that I am proposing and calling narrative naturalism is, nonetheless, an attempt to conceive natural philosophy along more speculative lines so that consciousness, its objects, and material substance each have a real place in nature, despite the fact that most of these categories are not, strictly speaking, empirical ones. These other aspects should not, however, be interpreted as supernatural ghost stuff: my alternative to the reductive materialism that dominates contemporary naturalism aims to legitimate the reality of consciousness and its phenomenal and conceptual objects without running counter to the discoveries of the natural sciences. Instead, I place the scientific perspective within the context of a broader ontological story by considering the narrative elements in our knowing practices. Using the American philosopher George Santayanas epistemology to challenge the notion of literal knowledge, I illuminate the creative aspects of the technical practices of the sciences, affirm metaphysics as a literary enterprise, and thus conceptualize a natural reality that can accommodate a plurality of true interpretations of existence. As I will show, literary interpretation is as important as empirical observation for making sense out of the world, and this fact can shed light on an important role for speculative ontology in a scientific age.

Our present day is no different from Santayanas own in its skepticism toward theories involving claims about trans-experiential realities. Before he could write his ontological books on four noteworthy realms of being, Santayana needed to address the dominant attitudes of his time regarding the possibilities of knowledge. Material skepticism was the issue of his day, and much of Scepticism and Animal Faith, the text that serves as an introduction to his ontology, is aimed at undermining the epistemological assumptions of transcendentalism, idealism, and panpsychism, all of which he collectively dubbed psychologisms due to their tendencies to, often unwittingly, make mental life into a structured substance. Today, by contrast, these transcendentally focused theories are the outliers in philosophies of mind, and a materialism that embraces the conclusions, even if it does not utilize the methods, of the sciences and treats them as fundamental and literal truths of nature is instead broadly affirmed or assumed. Despite this difference, Santayanas epistemological propaedeutic is as useful for addressing the flaws in this materialism as it had been in challenging the reductionist tendencies of psychologism, in which matter is reduced to an imperfect, confused, or unnecessary idea. This is because Santayana challenges the very possibility of the certain, literal, and absolute knowledge that both approaches can at least tacitly embrace. Santayana exposes the inherently uncertain and metaphorical nature of knowledge so that knowing no longer connotes certainty or mastery but instead involves a sense of familiarity and a process involving faith and trust. This opens the way for a plurality of true interpretations of nature and poses a challenge to any philosophy that claims it can identify the foundations or first principles of everything else. Santayanas concept of animal faith, as he calls it, together with his notion of literary psychology as the imaginative products of dramatic sympathy provide the means to interpret knowledge claims as narrative constructions suitable for solving problems within a given context rather than a-perspectival or absolute appropriations of reality itself. The explanations we give, whether as professional philosophers or everyday people making sense of the world, are inextricably tied to the practice of composing dramatic storylines designed to invoke the sympathetic imaginations of our interlocutors, and the narratives we choose can influence the nature of the questions we pose to ourselves and each other as well as the responses that we generate to those questions.