Putting Metaphysics First: Essays on Metaphysics and Epistemology

This article was downloaded by: [Temple University] On: 20 June 2011 Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 937467065] Publisher Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 3741 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Australasian Journal of Philosophy Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713659165 Putting Metaphysics First: Essays on Metaphysics and Epistemology Gerald Visiona a Temple University, First published on: 20 June 2011 To cite this Article Vision, Gerald(2011) 'Putting Metaphysics First: Essays on Metaphysics and Epistemology', Australasian Journal of Philosophy,, First published on: 20 June 2011 (iFirst) To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/00048402.2011.582505 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00048402.2011.582505 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. 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Putting Metaphysics First is a collection of fifteen previously published essays, some not readily accessible, with several new postscripts and various footnoting updates. In it, Michael Devitt stoutly defends metaphysical realism and naturalism against the invading hordes of new-age antirealists—notably verificationists, social constructionists (/post-modernists), non-factualists, and theorists of incommensurability. Overall the essays blend Moorean philosophy with Quinean metaphilosophy. They generally form a coherent whole, both explicating more precisely metaphysical realism and defending a version of it, succinctly stated as the view that ‘[tokens] of the most commonsense, and scientific, physical types objectively exist independently of the mental’ [33]. According to Devitt, we have copious empirical evidence that this has been, and is likely to continue to be, stronger than the tortured ruminations of antirealists. Realism about ordinary objects is confirmed day by day in our experience . . . Given this strong case for Realism, we should give it up only in the face of powerful arguments against it and for an alternative. There are no such arguments. [104] A similar sanction allows even moral properties into the tent. By the author’s lights this is the same sort of evidence in which our unassailable scientific tradition takes root. In addition to the attacks on the aforementioned sources of antirealism, Devitt rejects the a priori justification of beliefs and statements, declares the irrelevance of theory underdetermination for metaphysics, and exposes caricatures of realism such as that it demands a God’s Eye View. He acknowledges the general attraction of philosophical intuitions, but only because he takes them to be empirically well-grounded hunches. (Here appeal is made to the metaphors of Quine’s web of belief, and of Neurath’s ship at sea each of whose rotted planks can be replaced, but not all at once.) This does not mean that we aren’t entitled to be antirealists about anything (e.g., about witches, God, angels, ghosts), but such denials are based on topic-specific objections to which the above outline of generic physical reality is not vulnerable. The appeal to the best going observability and science is also grounds for favouring metaphysics, the direct road to the world, over any approaches to the nature of reality by means of either semantics or epistemology. (Devitt maintains that the aforementioned antirealists are abetted by those who derive their metaphysics from semantics or epistemology, although the bulk of philosophers committed to these standard approaches are as likely to be realists, similarly inoculated against the newage malaise.) Although Devitt holds a correspondence theory of truth and a referential semantics, he doesn’t believe that one can derive realism from those views. In part this is because deflationists might interpret the formulae for referentialism non-realistically. (More on this below.) Australasian Journal of Philosophy ISSN 0004-8402 print/ISSN 1471-6828 online Ó 2011 Australasian Association of Philosophy http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/00048402.2011.582505 Downloaded By: [Temple University] At: 18:39 20 June 2011 2 Book Review Devitt’s Quineanism not only consists of metaphysical naturalism, which he equates with physicalism at a few places, but also implies his rejection of an analytic– synthetic distinction, including any looser conceptual–empirical distinction. This is central to his repudiation of all a priori justification. Philosophical method is continuous with that employed in the sciences, and for Devitt the latter is thoroughly empirical, down to the very rules of logic. The last four essays are basically epistemological forays against forms of the a priori, but they retain the connection to the central metaphysical theme. The primary concern is that a certain form of traditional philosophy (what may be popularly thought of as conceptual analysis) is no substitute for naturalistic, empirical, metaphysics. Concentrating on delineations of the a priori in Georges Rey and Hartry Field, Devitt claims to be unable to find a satisfactory characterization of the nature of a priori justification. In the light of this failure, once again, he proposes to fend off apparent instances of the a priori with allusions to Quine’s web and Neurath’s ship. Several chapters in the book can be examined largely independently of its broader metaphysical themes. For example, in a few essays Devitt defends biological essentialism, in which the intrinsic underlying natures of the members of species explains our grouping those organisms under a single head. The tendency among biologists, or at least among philosophers of biology, is to subscribe to relational views of speciation. Perhaps cladism, in which a species is defined in terms of its lineal descent, is the most familiar of the current views. But Devitt’s heresy on this issue is no departure from evolutionary theory. He justifiably maintains that his essentialism is fully compatible with the Darwinian theory of natural selection. Whereas much is insightful in Devitt’s treatments, even those of us in broad sympathy with his realism, his attacks on fashionable post-modernisms, and his dedication to a correspondence theory of truth will find some pills hard to swallow. For example, his repeated complaint that no one has given a satisfactory explanation of the a priori writes off with little more than a shrug some efforts in that direction as not yet properly understood. (See, for example, the discussion of the views of George Bealer on p. 278 or those of Christopher Peacocke on p. 287.) However, there lurks a more basic issue. To wit . . . What lies behind the demand for a more respectable explanation of the a priori in isolation from the issues it purports to address? Granted that we have uncontroversial instances of empirical knowledge, the bona fides of this type of justification are beyond question. (Descartes and Leibniz might disagree.) But past that the differences revert to an older standoff. It is typical for defenders of a morsel of a priori knowledge not to begin with an explanation of the general character of the a priori, but to argue that nothing empirical could account for this indisputable instance. Like a good empiricist, Devitt starts from the claim that certain things defended as a priori can’t be accounted for in that way, to which he adds his distinctive, less common, view that the nature of a priori justification hasn’t been satisfactorily explained. But on several occasions, other than making vague gestures in the direction of the web of belief, he too confesses that neither do we (yet!) have an adequate empirical understanding of that case. And here he simply appeals to the difficulty of the subject. But, because the instances cannot be explained away, he must be confident on the basis of nothing more than his theoretical stance that somewhere there must be an empirical justification. Why place such confidence in his assurances rather than accepting the explanation that the instance is known on grounds other than empirical ones? After all, the case must be somehow justifiable now if it can’t be dismissed, despite the lack of current empirical grounds for it. This looks more like the old historical controversy again, deflected only by a rhetorical sleight of hand. Even granting the respectability of empirical evidence, I suspect Downloaded By: [Temple University] At: 18:39 20 June 2011 Book Review 3 others will join me in thinking that this raises the question whether the phenomenon in question, though solid beyond doubt, could be empirical. (Nevertheless, Devitt deserves credit for exposing the all-too-common empiricist error of supposing that what is a priori must be infallible and, therefore, non-revisable.) A final essay contains some meandering reflections on Stich’s early work. On the one hand Devitt initially seconds much of Stich’s gloomy outlook for understanding word–world (or belief–world) semantics, although not for Stich’s reasons. But later, for reasons that aren’t made perfectly clear, his conclusions are more hopeful. In the end, once again, Devitt thinks we get directly to views about the world by the same sorts of broadly empirical means we use outside of philosophy: naturalism is our best bet. Thus, we understand semantics via (empirical) metaphysics rather than understanding (a priori) metaphysics by way of semantics. However, in the course of his reasoning he rejects the route through truth-conditional/referential semantics only because of the threat of deflationism. Deflationism implies, among other things, that truth-conditional theories of meaning will not deliver their advertised goods. This is a curious thing for Devitt to say for more than one reason. First, deflationism bears a heavy polemical burden, and hosts of philosophers have provided reasons for rejecting it. Other than some brief earlier kudos to Robert Brandom, Devitt doesn’t deny this. The best he seems to offer is that there is a competing view in the literature. But that is a philosophical (and scientific) commonplace; the presence of a competing view is seldom given as a self-standing reason for abandoning one’s own. Second, although Devitt’s earlier defence of correspondence [177–81] is weak-kneed, he does a better job of highlighting serious problems with deflationism simply by comparing it to correspondence [156–80]. For example, he notes that deflationists address only the predicate ‘is true’, which discloses nothing about the property of truth itself. Indeed, the predicate ‘is true’ doesn’t even appear in the overwhelming majority of true statements. The situation of deflationism is even bleaker for reference, since the sort of idiom of which ‘refers to’ is a prime specimen is much less common (in fact, seldom seen outside of theoretical contexts) than actual references. In fact, in summing up his views on meaning in the same essay, Devitt writes, ‘Despite the threat of deflationism, the most promising explanations [of meaning] are truth-referential ones’ [320], though he doesn’t appear (in that essay) to argue for their promise. This is simply incongruous with the lifeline he extends to deflationism [314], and makes it difficult to see why deflationism should be a barrier to correspondence truth having metaphysical prowess. A further curiosity: in concert with Stich, Devitt rejects a folk theory of reference. But what would such a theory be? Certainly the folks’ behaviour clearly indicates views about what they refer to, which (Putnam’s Skolemism aside) are by-and-large correct. Devitt prefers the expert proto-scientific accounts to the folk, though he rejects even the experts for an equally curious reason—the lack of a consensus. But, then again, he states, ‘there is no cause for gloom’ here [311], another meander. However, if one can attribute to the folk anything like a theory of the nature of reference or of the mechanisms that bring it off (as distinct from its extension in particular cases) what could it be other than a loose and informal version of a protoscientific view somewhere in the literature, perhaps a proto-proto-scientific theory? Although a folk theory of the nature of reference is decried, I cannot imagine what he and Stich have in mind by it. Those points aside, Putting Metaphysics First is a nicely written defence of (what Jerry Fodor might call) Granny’s philosophy, and is well worth the attention of those with a serious interest in its topics. Gerald Vision Temple University