Hacker - A Plague on both your 'isms

8/13/2019 Hacker - A Plague on both your 'isms'

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A P Q

Volume 48, Number 2, April 2011

2011 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

A PLAGUE ONBOTH YOUR ISMS

P. M. S. Hacker

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Isms can be the bane of critical thought,for they provide an array of ready-mades

that are often used as substitutes for careful

description and analysis. Todays isms also

have a tendency, as Robert Hughes observed,

to become tomorrows was-ms. Our charac-

teristic isms come in pairs that purport to be

exclusive and exhaustive answers to a given

question, and we unthinkingly assume that a

philosopher must be one corresponding ist

or the other corresponding istlittle think-

ing that he may reject the question to which

the pair of isms are severally answers.

When a philosopher fails to fit a favored

ism, we are typically tempted to squeeze

him in even at the cost of gross deformation.

Without a philosophical identity card, one

is a persona non grata. So it has been withWittgenstein. His later philosophical views

(in the Philosophical Investigationsand the

Remarks on Philosophy of Mathematics) have

been described as those of a linguistic ideal-

ist, a phenomenalist, a verificationist (in the

private language arguments), an anti-realist,

a strict finitist, and a behaviorist. In fact, he

was demonstrably none of those things. It

is indeed much easier to enumerate what,

philosophically speaking, he was not thanto find ready-mades to characterize what he

was. For he was constitutionally incapable of

walking in other mens furrows. He rejectedtypical dichotomies in terms of which phi-

losophers tend to think (e.g., realism versus

nominalism, mentalism versus behaviorism,

Platonism versus formalism), holding that

the questions the opposed isms purport to

answer rested on confused presuppositions.

It is these presuppositions that need to be

challenged. If the challenge is successful,

then both isms will collapse like houses

of cards. Wittgenstein ploughed the fields

of philosophy in his own inimitable manner,

and in the course of doing so, cut through

received modes of thought in the philosophy

of logic, philosophy of language, epistemol-

ogy, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and

philosophy of mathematics. Isms and ists

are absurdly crude nets in which to try to

catch this most subtle of philosophers.

The term naturalism has been an honorif-ic expression in philosophy for some decades

now, especially in the United States. Indeed,

it has been characterized as thedistinctive de-

velopment over the last thirty years, marrying

the American pragmatist tradition with rigor-

ous scientific method in philosophy. For, it

is claimed, there has been a naturalistic turn

away from the a priori methods of traditional

philosophy towards a methodological unifica-

tion of science and philosophy. But it is nonetoo clear what naturalism means. As Barry

Stroud nicely remarked, naturalism seems


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98/ AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY

rather like World Peace. Almost everyone

swears allegiance to it and is willing to march

under its banner. But disputes can still break

out about what it is appropriate or acceptable

to do in the name of that slogan.1

The most perspicuous use of the term

naturalism in philosophy is when it is

contrasted with super-naturalism. In this

sense, Descartes or Berkeley elaborated non-

naturalist philosophies, since in both cases

an appeal to the activity of God was held to

be needed in order to warrant our knowledge

claims concerning a rerum natura. Similarly,

Kants transcendental idealism was not a

naturalist account of our knowledge of the

empirical world, since an appeal to noumena

is demanded by his metaphysical system.

In this sense of naturalism, Hume was a

naturalist philosopher par excellence. He

explained the nature and limits of human

understanding without recourse to any super-

natural agencies. He also noted sapiently that

the word naturalis commonly taken in so

many senses and is of so loose a significationthat it seems vain to dispute whether [some-

thing] be natural or not.2This, too, should

be a warning to us to proceed carefully.

The contrast between naturalism and super-

naturalism in philosophy is not the sense in

which philosophical journalists proclaim

enthusiastically that there was a naturalis-

tic turn in American philosophy in the last

quarter of the twentieth century. Those who

marched under the banner of naturalism werenot concerned with combating philosophi-

cal super-naturalismthey took its demise

for granted. The gonfalonier of American

naturalism was Quine, and it is to him that

we can turn to find out what this weasel word

signifies.

One can distinguish in Quines work onto-

logical naturalism, epistemological natural-

ism, and philosophical naturalism3:

(i) Ontological naturalism is the doctrine

that it is within science itself and not in some

prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified

and described.4On this account, it is up to

science to tell us what there is, and it offers

the best theory of what exists and of how we

come to know what exists. The only differ-

ence between the ontological philosopherand the scientist, Quine wrote (with tongue

in cheek), lies in the breadth of concern: the

philosopher being concerned with the exis-

tence of material objects or classes, and the

scientist with wombats and unicorns.

(ii) Epistemological naturalism is the pro-

posed displacement of traditional foundation-

alist epistemology by an enterprise within

natural science,5a psychological enterprise

of investigating how the input of radiation,

etc., impinging on the nerve endings of hu-

man beings, can ultimately result in the output

of our theoretical descriptions of the external

world. This heir to epistemology, according

to Quine, is to study how the stimulation of

sensory receptors, which is all the evidence

anyone has to go on, ultimately, in arriving

at his picture of the world,6relates to theory,

and in what ways ones theory of nature tran-scends any available evidence.

(iii) Philosophical naturalism is the view

that philosophy is not . . . an a priori pro-

paedeutic or groundwork for science, but

[is] . . . continuous with science.7This view

was a reversion to the Russellian conception

of philosophy as advanced before the First

World War and a repudiation of the tradition

of analytic philosophy as it had evolved in the

Vienna Circle, at Cambridge in the interwaryears, and at Oxford in the postwar years.8

This reversion to a widely repudiated concep-

tion was one aspect of what Quine called his

apostasy in relation to the doctrines of the

Vienna Circle.9

One might add yet further kinds of natu-

ralism to this triplet. The most obvious is

ethical naturalism, an epithet commonly

used to characterize Humes project in book

three of the Treatise of Human Natureand

in the second of the Enquiries Concerning

Human Understanding and Concerning the


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and scientific explanation and increasingly

oblivious to the understanding of much of

what makes us distinctively human. It is a

turn away from hermeneutical understanding

of human behavior and institutions and of thegoals and values that inform them, of history

and society, and of our cultural creations.

The subject of this essay is Wittgenstein and

naturalism. So I shall reflect a little on how

Wittgenstein stands in relation to the three

forms of Quinean naturalism in his philoso-

phy of logic, mathematics, language, psychol-

ogy, and epistemology. I shall not discuss

post-Quinean developments of naturalism

in the United States, although some of what

I have to say about Quine applies to those

variants too. Wittgenstein made no appeal to

anything that might be deemed supernatural,

so that is an issue that can be passed by.

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I wrote some years ago that Quine and

Wittgenstein are related in a very peculiarway. There is, at first glance, extensive and

impressive agreement between them. But on

closer scrutiny, their proximity is deceptive

for it is akin to the proximity of the far Left

and far Right in the horseshoe-shaped French

National Assembly. They sit close to each

other, but to get from one to the other one has

to go through the whole spectrum of political

ideology.13This peculiarity is patent when we

juxtapose their views on the three doctrinesof naturalism just elaborated.

Philosophical naturalism patently stands in

diametrical contrast to everything Wittgen-

stein believed about the nature, scope, and

limits of philosophy, both in the Tractatus

Logico-Philosophicus(hereafter Tractatusor

TLP) and in all his later writings. Wittgenstein

would have agreed with Quine that philoso-

phy is not . . . an a priori propaedeutic orgroundwork for science in the Cartesian,

Kantian, or indeed Aristotelian sense. It is

not the task of philosophy to lay the founda-

tions of science in metaphysical principles,

or to determine the synthetic a priori prin-

ciples of natural science, or to investigate the

fundamental presuppositions of each of the

sciences. But with that negative agreement,consensus ceases. Where Quine held that

philosophy is continuous with the natural

sciences, Wittgenstein asserted as early as

the Tractatusthat

philosophy is not one of the natural sciences.

(The word philosophy must mean something

whose place is above or below the natural sci-

ences, but not beside them.) Philosophy aims

at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philoso-

phy is not a body of doctrine but an activity.

A philosophical work consists essentially of

elucidations. (TLP4.1114.112)

And he continued to think for the rest of his

life that the task of philosophy is conceptual

clarification and dissolution of philosophical

problems by analysisalthough, to be sure,

what counts as analysis changed radically.

Above all, whereas Quine thought that

philosophy is a part of the scientific questfor knowledge, Wittgensteinboth in the

Tractatusand in all his later work (albeit for

different reasons)denied that there are any

philosophical truths analogous to the truths

of the empirical sciences or that there is

philosophical knowledge of any such truths,

and he denied that philosophy is a quest for

knowledge. Contrary to Russell, who held

that logic was the study of the most gen-

eral features of the universe and that logicalpropositions are the most general truths we

can achieve in our knowledge of the world,

Wittgenstein, both early and late, denied that

logically true propositions are essentially

generalizations; denied that they yield us

knowledge of the universe; and held that far

from being descriptions of the universe, they

are altogether without sense.

Metaphysicists have argued that philoso-

phy, unlike science, aims to attain knowledge

of special philosophical propositionsin par-

ticular, necessary truths concerning the world


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or truths concerning all possible worlds.

Russell and Quine held that philosophy was

part of the scientific quest for truth about the

worldthe knowledge it yields is not special

knowledge about a special domain, but gen-eral knowledge about the ordinary domain

of nature. Wittgenstein rejected both these

antithetical conceptions, for he denied that

philosophy is a quest for the enlargement of

human knowledge at all. It is a contribution

to human understanding.

It is not the task of philosophy to ex-

plain empirical phenomena, but rather to

describeor perhaps better, to stateand

marshal familiar grammatical rules or norms

of representation for philosophical purposes.

The philosophical purposes are to resolve

or dissolve philosophical problems and per-

plexities, to eradicate conceptual confusions

in philosophy, science, and daily discourse.

The methods of philosophy include gram-

matical description, i.e., the delineation of

conceptual connections, compatibilities and

incompatibilities, presuppositions, and formsof context dependencyin short, concep-

tual analysis, or, as Strawson has helpfully

denominated it, connective analysisfor,

as Wittgenstein remarked, a proposition

is completely logically analysed when its

grammar is laid out completely clearly.14The

pertinent conceptual truths need to be selected

and arranged in such a manner as to shed light

on the philosophical, i.e., conceptual, prob-

lem at hand. Philosophy does not producenovel empirical truths, it merely draws our

attention to the structure of familiar segments

of our form of representation (or conceptual

scheme) for elucidatory purposes. This may

involve drawing our attention to similarities

that we had not noticed and to differences

that had escaped our attentionin that sense

it may well involve realization of features

of our conceptual scheme, and in that sense

knowledge. But thisis knowledge concerning

evident features of our forms of representa-

tion, not knowledge concerning the world

about us that we represent by these forms. If

these features of our conceptual scheme are

evident, how is it then that we are not already

apprised of them? To master the use of the

expressions of a language, it is not necessarythat one hold in view all the analogies and

disanalogies between one expression or kind

of expression and another expression or kind

of expressionbut it is precisely that which

commonly needs to be brought to our atten-

tion to dispel bafflement, misconceptions, and

illusions.

2.1 The Naturalist Riposte

Quines followers have made much ofQuines criticism of Carnaps early distinc-

tion between analytic and synthetic proposi-

tions and argued that with the rejection of that

distinction, the possibility of anything that

might be called conceptual analysis collapses,

and the possibility of resolving philosophi-

cal questions by means of a priori argument

and elucidation is foreclosed. This is held to

demonstrate the futility of any Wittgenstein-

ian enterprise. So I shall digress for a moment

to examine this mistaken idea.

Wittgenstein was no less critical of the

Vienna Circles idea of truths in virtue of

meanings than Quine. He characterized

this confused idea as the meaning-body

conception, which he duly demolished. He

thought that nothing could follow from the

meaning of a word, but only from a proposi-

tion. He also thought that propositions whichsome members of the Circle held to be true

in virtue of the meanings of their constituent

terms were not true in virtueof meanings at

all, but were rather constitutiveof the mean-

ings of the terms in question. It is not as if

one could first fully grasp the meaning of a

given term (say, vixen or red) and then

go on to discover what follows from its mean-

ing (e.g., that vixens are female, or that red

is darker than pink). Far from espousing theanalytic/synthetic distinction that members of

the Vienna Circle advanced, Wittgenstein as-

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siduously avoided invoking it and its ancestral

congeners. The term analytic occurs in only

one remark in the more than eighteen thou-

sand pages of Nachlasswritten after 1929,

and then only in order to suggest an affinitybetween his reflections on arithmetic and

Kants denial that arithmetical propositions

such as 7 + 5 = 12 are analytic.

Quines naturalist defenders commonly

castigate Wittgenstein for cleaving to the

obsolete idea of a priori knowledge. They

will perhaps be surprised to learn that Witt-

genstein wrote:

It was characteristic of theorists of the pastcultural period to want to find the a priori where

it isnt. Or should I say a characteristic of the

past cultural era was to form//to create// the

concept or non-concept of the a priori. For it

would never have created the concept if, from

the start, it had seen things// the situation// as we

do. (Then the world would have lost a greatI

mean significanterror.)15

So far, then, there are two points of agreement

which demonstrate the folly of the assertionthat Wittgenstein cleaved to Carnaps early

analytic/synthetic distinction or that he ac-

cepted the traditional conception of the a

priori.

Nevertheless, the agreement between

Quine and Wittgenstein is superficial and

provides no support for any form of philo-

sophical naturalism. Indeed, their initial

agreements mask far-reaching disagree-

ments. Wittgenstein differentiated betweenlogical propositions; mathematical propo-

sitions; general grammatical propositions;

empirical propositions of a multitude of

different kinds; the special categories of

empirical propositions of the world picture;

as well as ethical, aesthetic, and religious

propositions. He held the concept of a propo-

sition to be a family-resemblance concept,

and showed that the logical articulations

of one kind of proposition in use differ

profoundly from those of others. One may

grant Quine that truth is truth, i.e., that

the truth-predicate and the truth-operator

are univocal. Like Quine, Wittgenstein

espoused a deflationary conception of truth

(wavering between a disquotational form

and a de-nominalization form of such aconception). But that truth is truth is

perfectly consistent with the view that what

it is for one kind of proposition to be true

may be altogether differentfrom what it is

for a different kind to be true. Knowledge is

knowledge, no doubt, but what it is to know

that the sun is shining, that water is H2O, that

red is darker than pink, that 25 x 25 = 625,

that envy is a vice, that meaning something

is not a mental act, and so on, all call out

for very different explanations involving

very different conceptual, or grammatical,

articulations.

Logical propositions have no truth-con-

ditions, since they are true (or false) come

what may. What it is for such a proposition

to be true is for it to be unipolar and also to

say nothing at all. Logical truths have no

sense, but are correlative to a rule of infer-ence. Mathematical propositions are likewise

bivalent and unipolar. True mathematical

propositions are norms of representation,

constituting standards for the re-description

of quantifiable phenomena and for the

transformation of empirical propositions

concerning magnitudes and quantities. Gen-

eral grammatical propositions, like logical

and mathematical ones, are unipolar; like

true mathematical propositions, they arenormative. But while the negation of a logi-

cal truth is a contradiction, and the negation

of a true mathematical proposition is a false

mathematical proposition, the negation

of a grammatical proposition is arguably

best conceived as a form of nonsense. For

a grammatical proposition, e.g., that red is

darker than pink, or that nothing can be red

and green all over simultaneously, is a rule

in the guise of a description of an objective

necessity. Its negation is nota rule for the use

of its constituent termsif A is red and B is


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pink, one may notinfer that A is lighter than

B. The rules for the use of the constituent

terms exclude precisely this inference among

empirical propositions. On the other hand,

the negation of a true grammatical proposi-tion is not a bipolar empirical proposition

either. Contrary to views held by members

of the Vienna Circle, a grammatical proposi-

tion does notfollowfrom the meanings of its

constituent terms, but is constitutiveof their

meanings. Expressing a grammatical propo-

sition is a feature of the use of a sentence on a

given occasion. Different tokens of the same

type-sentence may be used on one occasion

to express an empirical proposition and on

another to express a grammatical one, e.g.,

This is red (which may be a description

or an ostensive definition), Water consists

of H2O (which may report an empirical

discovery or stipulate a rule for the use of

the word water in chemistry), or Force is

the product of mass and acceleration (which

can be used to express a law of nature or a

definition of force). Unlike an empiricalproposition, a grammatical propositions

being true does not amount to its correspond-

ing to the facts; nor does it consist in things

being as it describes them as being. Rather,

its being true consists in its correctly stating

the content of a rule of representation. This

is comparable to the fact that the truth of

the proposition that the chess king moves

a square at a time consists in its correctly

stating a rule of chess. (It is not the rule thatis truethere is no such thing as a true or

false rulebut, rather, the proposition truly

specifies the content of a rule.)

There is no inconsistency at all in simulta-

neously avoiding the term analytic while

invoking the category of conceptual truths.

For what Wittgenstein called grammatical

propositions are conceptual truths. Their

role is not descriptive but normative. The

suggestion that mathematical and grammati-

cal propositions such as Red is darker than

pink, or 25 25 = 625, or One cannot

trisect an angle with a compass and rule are

analytic in the sense of being true in virtue

of the meanings of their constituent terms, or

in the different sense of being derivable from

the truths of logic and explicit definitions, orin the sense of the subject terms containing

the predicate is at best misleading, at worst

wrong.16 But animadversions to analyticity

in these different senses are irrelevant to

Wittgensteins notion of conceptual truths.

Conceptual truths articulate normative con-

nections between concepts expressed by

words we use. They determine concepts,

specifying rules for the use of concept-words.

They are grammatical propositions, i.e., ex-

pressions of norms of representationof a

kind that are of no interest to grammarians

or lexicographers, but of maximal interest for

philosophers seeking to resolve or dissolve

philosophical problems.

2.2 Concluding Overview of

Wittgensteins Relation to

Philosophical Naturalism

Wittgenstein repudiated the traditional

conception of a priori truths as lying at the

foundations of all empirical knowledge, a

conception exemplified by Descartess sup-

position that eternal truths and common no-

tions fulfil this role. He would have rejected

the Kantian conception of synthetic a priori

truths that the mind imposes upon intuition to

yield experience. But he had no qualms about

characterizing his investigations as a prioriin method or as characterizing mathematical

propositions and what he idiosyncratically

called grammatical propositions as a priori.

They are neither the foundations of knowl-

edge nor the first principles of knowledge.

They are not foundation stones but, as it were,

spectacles. For they are constitutive of our

means of representation, and are not descrip-

tions of what we represent by these means.

Wittgensteins philosophical methods do notdepend on observation and experiment. They

are investigations of what does and does not

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make sense, not of what is or is not empiri-

cally true. And his arguments about what does

not make sense are not subject to empirical

confirmation or refutation. They presuppose

the shared usage of competent speakers. Theyturn on familiar features of the uses of words,

ordinary words like pain or technical words

like transfinite cardinal that we are prone

to overlooki.e., they turn on reflection on

our means of representation, not on what we

represent by those means, i.e., observations

of nature.

It might seem to a confused philosophical

naturalist that Wittgenstein is a paradigm of a

philosophical non-naturalist. For does he not

advance an array of propositions that he infu-

riatingly and misleadingly calls grammatical?

And are not these the results of philosophical

investigation? Are they not true propositions?

So is it not disingenuous for Wittgenstein to

suggest that philosophy does not result in a

body of philosophical knowledge?

Certain grammatical propositions are of

great philosophical interest. But it would bewholly mistaken to suppose that the result

of philosophical investigation is an array of

hitherto unknown grammatical propositions

or conceptual truths. Mathematics is concept-

formationby means of proof, but philosophy

is concept-elucidation. One of its methods

(but by no means the only one) is to marshal

appropriate grammatical propositions in a

surveyable manner in order to dissolve philo-

sophical or conceptual unclarity and illusion.If someone is inclined to identify the mean-

ing of an expression with its bearer, one may

remind them that one can, in certain cases,

sit on the bearer of a namebut it makes no

sense to sit on the meaning of a name. But

that the meaning of a name is not its bearer

is no more a philosophical proposition than

that a bachelor is not a married man is a

philosophical proposition, or that red is not

lighter than pink is. It is a rule for the use of

words (viz., that meaning cannot be re-

placed by bearer in the phrase the meaning

of a name)in the guise of a description.

Other familiar grammatical propositions

are themselves the source of philosophical

difficulties, e.g., the vexing proposition that

nothing can be red and green all over. Thequestion of the status of such propositions ex-

ercised analytic philosophers endlessly in the

interwar yearsto little purpose save in the

case of Wittgenstein. Yet other grammatical

propositions may indeed be the result of long

and elaborate philosophical discussion and

argument, e.g., that one cannot have a logi-

cally private language. Here we have a gram-

matical proposition that is far from obvious at

first blush. It is a grammatical proposition, a

rule, that excludes the form of words a logi-

cally private language from currencyjust

as the proposition that one cannot checkmate

in draughts excludes a form of words, viz.,

checkmate in draughts, from currency, and

as the proposition, which took two thousand

years to prove, namely, that one cannot trisect

an angle with compass and rule, excludes a

form of words from currency. To be sure, onecannot have a logically private language is

not the upshot of a deductive proofit is the

upshot of a detailed array of arguments that

involve careful reflection on a multitude of

other grammatical propositions and the man-

ner in which they are interwoven. Here one

needs an overview of a large and convoluted

segment of our conceptual scheme.

So if philosophical naturalism is the view

that philosophy is continuous with science andthat, like the natural sciences, it adds to the sum

of human knowledge about nature, then it is

evident that Wittgenstein rejected naturalism.

But it is also evident that he rejected the view

that philosophy aimed to achieve some other

form of knowledge, such as knowledge of the

foundations of science in principles of first

philosophyto which Quine was so opposed.

A plague on both your houses, Wittgenstein

might have saidfor there is no such thing

as philosophical knowledge as opposed to

knowledge of the great works of philosophy.


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. W

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Ontological naturalism, you will remember,

is the doctrine that it is within science itselfand not in some prior philosophy, that real-

ity is to be identified and described. This,

as it stands, is a curious claim. It is far from

obvious what science is supposed to be.

We are familiar with a multitude of sciences,

ranging from physics and cosmology through

chemistry and biochemistry to biology and

medicine, not to mention neuroscience and

psychology, economics and sociologyeach

of which divides into a multitude of branches.Whichscience identifies and describes real-

ity? Indeed, what is it to identify, let alone to

describe, reality?

If identifying and describing reality

amounts to making true existential claims and

advancing true empirical descriptions, then it

is, of course correct that the various natural

sciences do make such claims and do advance

such descriptions. But it would be absurd to

suppose that onlythe various sciences do so,or indeed that only they are entitled to do

so, let alone that they have the last word on

what really exists or on what kinds of things

really exist. No science is likely to gainsay

Everyman when he asserts that his childhood

diaries still exist, sincerely avows a toothache

or describes it as throbbing, or when he re-

marks there is no justice in this world. And

unless history is a science, no science is goingto be in the position to gainsay the standard

explanation of Elizabeth Is etceteration of

her letters to Phillip of Spain or that class con-

flict really existed in the nineteenth century.

And unless the study of law is a science, no

science is going to be in a position to gainsay

the claim that in the course of the last twenty

years, a more robust form of international law

has gradually come into being. And so on.

Physics studies, among other things, whatfundamental particles exist in nature, and on

that it has the last wordbut it does not have

the last word, or even the first word, on what

things or kinds of things in general exist or

on what fundamental kinds of things exist

(fundamental for what, one must first ask).

If the claim is merely that no prior phi-losophy is in a position to dictate to science

what kinds of things do or do not exist, or to

advance true empirical descriptionsthen

that is a quite different issue. One might

be sympathetic with one aspect of Quines

claim. With the exception of rational theol-

ogy, which is a special case that investigates

necessary existence, it is surely not a remit

of philosophy to determine or discover what

things do or do not exist. Philosophy is cer-

tainly not in competition with the natural

sciences in discovering what fundamental

particles exist.

On the other hand, it is surely bizarre to

suppose that philosophical concern with the

existence of material objects, or classes, or

universals (the ontological commitments of

our best scientific theories of the world) is

on a par with a concern with whether this,that, or another species (wombats or unicorns)

exist. It is surely notthe task of philosophy

to discoverthat there are material things or

universals (when, one wonders, did it make

these remarkable discoveries?). It is not as if

science discovers the existence of such fun-

damental kinds of things as positrons, while

philosophy discovers the existence of such

fundamental kinds of things as universals.

When did philosophy last discover the exis-tence of a new kind of thing? Or has it now

completed its inventory of the universe?

Where would Wittgenstein have stood on

the matter? It seems clear enough that he

would have agreed with the claim that the

natural sciences do not depend upon the

results of prior philosophy. He repudiated

rational theology as an illusion. He would

surely have dismissed the idea that one of the

goals of philosophy is to discover what kinds

of fundamental things there are. It could never

be a discoveryof philosophy that universals

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exist, and the claim that there are universals

is wholly unlike the claim that positrons exist.

Ontology, he would surely have asserted, is

no more a serious subject for philosophers to

engage in than is metaphysics. The seriousphilosophical questions in this domain are

not Are there universals? Do substances

exist? Are there transfinite cardinals?

Rather, the questions concern meaning, not

truth. They do not take the misleading form

of Do universals (or substances) exist? but

rather What is a universal (or a substance)?

and What does it mean to say that there are

universals (or substances)? The question is

not whether transfinite cardinals exist, but

rather whether transfinite cardinals are num-

bers at all in the sense in which cardinals are?

Such questions are answered by grammatical

investigations, not by discoveries.

The heir to the pseudo-subject of ontology

is the patient grammatical investigation of

what it means, from one domain to another, to

say that such and such a kind of thing exists.

Given the confusions engendered by Galileo,Descartes, Boyle, and Locke about the sub-

jectivity of colors, it is a task for philosophy to

clarify what is meant by color predicates and

what, if anything, is meant by asserting that

colors exist. Given the seventeenth-century

claim that colors do not exist in nature, what

we need is not an attempt to discover whether

they really doafter all, the Galilean claim

was never really an empirical one, and no

experiment could possibly show that there areno colored objects in nature. What we need

is grammatical clarification of the concept of

color and of color attributions.

Difficulties with existential statements of

one kind or another range far and wide. We

say that there are laws of nature, that laws of

the state are created by legislation and that le-

gal systems exist, that there are various kinds

of numbers, that rules exist, that moral values

exist and that there are principles of moral-

ity by which we should live. From case to

case, we typically tie ourselves into knots in

trying to clarify what these assertions mean.

And from case to case, Wittgenstein would,

I think, have suggested that what is needed is

grammatical clarification and careful investi-

gation of the sources of our confusions. Wittgenstein was patently not an ontologi-

cal naturalist, if that means that the physical

sciences have the best and last word on what

things and kinds of things exist. But neither

was he an ontological anti-naturalist, hold-

ing that it is the task of first philosophy to

determine, antecedently to science, what

fundamental kinds of things there are.

. W:E N

Quines idea of naturalizing epistemology

is, in one sense and up to a point, unobjec-

tionable, and in another sense, and beyond

a certain point, absurd. There can surely be

no philosophical (or any other) objection to

the idea that cognitive neuroscience should

investigate the neural processes involved in

the acquisition of information by the use ofthe sense organs. What is absurd is first, the

suggestion that this enterprise should displace

epistemology, and second, the idea that this

neuro-psychological heir to epistemology is

to study how evidence relates to theory.

Cognitive neuroscience does indeed inves-

tigate how the impingement of radiation upon

our retinae yields perceptual knowledge of

our environment. It is a very long way from

having anything remotely like a comprehen-sive theory of such perceptual processes, but

its achievements so far are impressive and

the project continues. What it does not do,

and I fancy never will, is investigate how the

irritations of our surfaces, as Quine put it,

yield our theories of the world. In the first

place, none of us hasa theory of the world.

Nor does any science. And even the conjunc-

tion of all the scientific knowledge and theorythat is available does not yield a theory of the

world. There is no such thing as a theory of

the world. Second, it is simply mistaken to


11/15

suggest that the stimulation of our sensory

receptors is ultimately all the evidence

anyone has to go on in arriving at knowledge

of our environment, or that this sensory input,

as Quine wrote, supports physical theory.Indeed, one thing that is neverevidence for

our theories is the irradiation of our sense

organs and irritation of our surfaces. Light

waves impinging on our retinae and sound

waves agitating our eardrums are not our

evidencefor what we see and hear. Third, no

neuro-psychological investigation could pos-

sibly explain how sensory input of radiation

yields scientific theorysince it patently

does not. One may argue that if we are good

scientists, our observations (rather than our

irradiations) and experiments in conjunction

with the transmitted fund of knowledge that

is provided by a scientific education may

result in our advancing a successful scientific

theory. But the fund of knowledge that we

must master is not a battery of irradiations,

even though it can only be acquired through

reading and listening and watching or mak-ing observations and experiments. And the

cannons of evidence and rules of inference

are not neural processes. They are normative

standards of correct reasoning and can be

studied by studying logic and science.

Quine blithely asserts, without argument,

that naturalized epistemology, although

a far cry from old epistemology, is an

enlightened persistence in the original

problem.17That original problem, accordingto Quine, was to combat scepticism and to

explain how our knowledge of the world is

firmly rooted in our knowledge of our sub-

jective perceptual states. This foundational-

ism was exemplified for Quine in Russells

Our Knowledge of the External Worldand

more systematically in Carnaps Logischer

Aufbau. His critical response to it was why

all this creative reconstruction, all this make-

believeand instead of foundationalism

he advocated the study of psychology and

cognitive neuroscience that would give an

empirical account of knowledge acquisition

and theory construction. But the alternative

to foundationalism is not the scientism of the

imaginary subject of naturalized epistemol-

ogy. It is the explanation of why it is mis-conceived to think that our knowledge of the

world either has, or could have, foundations

in the traditional sense. Nor could natural-

ized epistemology possibly answer the kinds

of questions that are the proper domain of

epistemology. No amount of neuroscience is

going to be able to explain the reticulations of

the subtle and complex network of epistemic

terms. Even if, in the fullness of time, we

know everything we wish to know about

the workings of the human brain, that will

not provide a description of that conceptual

network. Nor can neuroscience be envisaged

as answering such questions as, If A knows

that p, does it follow that he also believes

that p? Can A know that p even though

his grounds for holding thatpare false? Is

mathematical knowledge more certain than

empirical knowledge? and Why can we bein a state of ignorance but not in a state of

knowing?

How might we imagine Wittgenstein

responding to the Quinean suggestion that

epistemology naturalized can fruitfully

replace old-fashioned foundationalist epis-

temology. Again, it seems evident that he

would have shared Quines animadversions

to classical foundationalist epistemology

although for reasons quite different fromQuines. But he would have been amazed

to hear that the alternative to foundation-

alism is Quinean naturalism. One cannot

refute scepticism by appealing to scientific

knowledge any more than one can unravel

Zenos paradox of Achilles and the tortoise

by measuring their relative velocities. A

plague on both your isms, Wittgenstein

might have exclaimed before pursuing his

own investigations into the nature of human

knowledge that he began in On Certainty

and, alas, never finished.

BOTH YOUR ISMS/ 107


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. W . . . A F

E [] I

F M J

B E N

Wittgenstein objected no less than Quine

to foundationalist epistemology, to founda-

tionalist philosophical ontology, and to the

conception of philosophy as a propaedeutic

to science. His reasons, however, were very

different. Moreover, he would have objected

to Quines scientistic alternatives even more

vehemently. Nevertheless, in one sense of this

polysemic term there is a powerful natural

strand in Wittgensteins later philosophy.It might also be termed anthropological.

Given what I by now hope are well-taken

warnings, this approach should perhaps not

be crowned with an ism at all, but merely

described. What I have in mind is:

(i) Wittgensteins methodological principle

of investigating ways in which prob-

lematic expressions are or might be

taught in order to shed light on theirmeaning.

(ii) His exploration of the natural and ac-

culturated roots of our psychological

vocabulary and the nature of the first/

third person asymmetries of many

psychological verbs.

(iii) His emphasis on the function of

expressions in the context of the

language-games in which they are at

home, and hence on their place in thestream of life.

(iv) His examination of thepointof a given

language-game or conceptual activity

within a form of life.

(v) His elaborate account of the varieties

of necessary truth.

I shall make only a few observations here to

indicate what I have in mind.

(i) In his writings on philosophy of lan-guage, Wittgenstein commonly reflects on

how expressions might be taught and on

what natural capacities and dispositions are

presupposed for learning them. This is not

armchair learning theory. It is a reminder of

the natural primitive powers of humanity and

of the uncultivated forms of human reaction

and response. By this means he endeavorsto show how our concepts and language-

games are rooted in our natural abilities and

propensitiesand hence to show the extent

to which our concepts are molded by our

nature (as well as by features of the natural

world around us). It also enables us to call

to mind the natural contextsin which teach-

ing the use of the problematic expression is

called for, as is evident, for example, when

one reflects on how one might teach a child

how to use the expression I dreamt (that in

itself sheds light on philosophical puzzlement

with respect to dreaming).

(ii) In his writings on the philosophy of

psychology Wittgenstein steered between

the Scylla of mentalism enshrined in the

Cartesian and Lockean tradition and the

Charybdis of the behaviorism popular in the

Vienna Circle. He denied the reducibilityof mental states, events, and processes to

behavior, but he also denied that first-person

present-tense utterances are reports resting

on introspection. Rather, he accounted for the

peculiar status of a range of such utterances

as extensions of primitive natural behavior

suggesting that the utterance It hurts or

the groan I have a pain are acculturated

linguistic extensions of natural pain-behavior.

It is on these primitive utterances that laterreportive and descriptive uses of our pain

vocabulary are constructed. Other kinds of

utterances are to be seen as rooted in primitive

moves of a language-game, as when a child

learns the use of Im going to . . . to herald

an incipient action. The child does not learn

to identify an intention within its breast and

then to announce it to others. Rather, it learns

that when one says, Im going to . . . in such

contexts, one then has to go on to. . . . Yet

other utterances are to be seen as accultur-

ated linguistic extensions of more primitive


13/15

linguistic activitiesas when we learn to

use epistemic operators to qualify a simple

utterance. We do not learn the primitive use

of I think by noting the occurrence within

us of a process called thinking, but rather asa qualification on an utterance for which we

have less than adequate grounds. And so on.

In all these diverse cases (and there are many

more), philosophical confusions pertaining

to privileged access, private ownership of

experience, epistemic privacy, certainty, and

doubt are eliminated by scrutiny of natural

processes in which the primitive form of a

certain typical expression could beacquired

and mastered in the course of natural matu-

ration. He gives, one might say, a perfectly

natural account of the illusions of privileged

access, introspection, absence of doubt, and

infallible knowledge.

(iii) Wittgenstein constantly emphasizes

that words are deeds. To learn the meaning

of a word is to learn how it is to be used, and

to learn the use of a word is to learn how to

do something with it in the stream of life. Wehave for too long labored under the illusion

that words are au fondnames and sentences

are (or contain) descriptions. We fail even to

notice the diversity of what is called describ-

ing: for example, describing the room one is

in, describing the room one was in, describ-

ing the room as it will be when the house is

built, describing a room in ones dream, an

architects blueprint of a room, an architects

drawing of a room, an archaeologists recon-structive drawing of a room, a description

of a room in a novel. Hence, too, we fail to

advert to what counts, from case to case, as

improving ones description, and we remain

oblivious to the different functions of kinds

of description in the various language-games

that are part of human life. A fortiori, we tend

to obscure the extent to which even declara-

tive sentences have nondescriptive functions,

e.g., as avowals of experience, expressions of

attitudes and emotions, forms of appraisal,

statements of norms of representation. We

are obsessed with the idea that words are

names, that words are (at least for the most

part) referring expressions (which may refer

to particulars, to kinds, to properties or rela-

tions, to numbers, to truth-functions, and soforth). Gross oversimplification ensues and

the multitudinous different roles that words

play in language-games are occluded by the

limited roles of symbols in formal calculi

that we invoke to make our reflections more

precise.

(iv) Wittgenstein recurrently reminds us of

what we take for granted in our philosophi-

cal reflections, namely thepointof different

language-games. For the purposes of philo-

sophical elucidation, it is often not enough

to call to mind the rules for the use of words

within familiar language-games and to mar-

shal them in a surveyable representation. One

needs to bear in mind thepointof the whole

game in the form of life of which it is a part.

The very same arithmetical rules for the use

and manipulation of numerals in our calcula-

tions might be used solely for the purpose ofdecorating wallpaper with theoremsbut that

would not be arithmetic, since its point would

be far removed from the point of calculating.

Here, too, one might say, the exploration of

the natural anthropological context of our

linguistic and conceptual activities plays a

crucial role in Wittgensteins methods.

(v) Wittgenstein did not give a uniform ac-

count of all kinds of necessary truth. But he

accounted for the true propositions of logic,arithmetic, geometry, and so-called meta-

physics without recourse to a third realm of

Platonist entities accessible to our logical

faculty and powers of reasoning, such as Frege

invoked, and equally without recourse to nec-

essary facts or language-independent natures

discoverable by Wesensschau, an intuitive

insight into the essences of things, as Husserl

supposed. His complex accounts of these dif-

ferent kinds of necessary truth render them

and their necessity perspicuous by reference

to human practices of using words, of concept-

BOTH YOUR ISMS/ 109


14/15


formation, and of reasoning. They belong to,

or are systematically related to, our forms of

representation, and our forms of representa-

tion are our creation. Their necessity does

not derive from what they describe, since theydescribe nothing. It derives from their roles as

norms of representation or as internally related

to our norms of representation. They are not

forced upon us, but rather we force them on

ourselves. Their truth is not answerable to any

reality, but determines the forms in which we

describe reality and draw inferences from what

we know about reality.

This could be further elaborated. But I

hope it suffices to show that Wittgenstein

would have found current philosophical

naturalism utterly repugnantfor very good

reasons. Nevertheless, his own investigationsdemonstrate that one may advance powerful

descriptions of aspects of our conceptual

scheme that advert to what is natural to hu-

mankind, without falling into the confusions

of philosophical (scientistic) naturalism.

St. Johns College, Oxford

NOTES

1. Barry Stroud, The Charm of Naturalism,Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophi-

cal Association, vol. 70 (1996), p. 43.

2. David Hume,An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, app. III,

258 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), p. 307. He was speaking here of the principles of justice. He also

observed in a footnote that natural may be contrasted with what is unusual, or what is miraculous,

or what is artificial.

3. For discussion of the history of the term and of the various forms of naturalism, see H.-J. Glock,

What Is Analytic Philosophy?(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 137146.

4. W. V. O. Quine, Things and Their Place in Theories, repr. in Theories and Things(Cambridge,

Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981) p. 21.

5. W. V. O. Quine, The Nature of Natural Knowledge, inMind and Language, ed. S. Guttenplan

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 68.

6. W. V.O. Quine, Empirical Content, in Theories and Things, p. 75.

7. W. V. O. Quine, Natural Kinds, in his Ontological Relativity and Other Essays(New York: Co-

lumbia University Press, 1969), p. 126.

8. For more detailed discussion, see P. M. S. Hacker, Passing by the Naturalistic Turn: On QuinesCul-de-sac, Philosophy, vol. 81 (2006), pp. 231254.

9. I have remarked elsewhere on Quines apostasy (P. M. S. Hacker, Wittgensteins Place in

Twentieth Century Analytic Philosophy[Oxford: Blackwell 1996], p. 197), and critics have assumed

that this is my description of Quine (the latest is Avishai Margalit in Wittgensteins Knight Move,

in Wittgenstein and Analytic Philosophy, ed. H.-J. Glock and J. Hyman [Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2009], p. 5). That is mistaken. It rather is Quines description of himself and the evolution of

his ideas on analyticity (see Autobiography of W. V. Quine, in The Philosophy of W. V. Quine, ed.

L. E. Hahn and P. A. Schilpp [La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1986], p. 16.)

10.Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, App. III.

11.Enquiry, App. III.


15/15

12. Anthony Kenny pointed out that it is a mistake to suppose evolutionary theory eliminated teleol-

ogy from biology. It eliminated design, notpurpose(A. J. P. Kenny, Cosmological Explanation and

Understanding, in Perspectives on Human Conduct, ed. L. Hertzberg and J. Pietarinen [Leiden, The

Netherlands: Brill, 1988], pp. 7287). For further elaboration, see P. M. S. Hacker, Human Nature:

The Categorial Framework(Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), chap. 6. Darwin was the first to acknowledgeprecisely this, as is evident in his correspondence with Asa Grey. Grey, in his review in Natureon June

4, 1874, wrote: Let us recognise Darwins great service to Natural Science in bringing back to it Teleol-

ogy: so that instead of Morphology versus Teleology, we shall have Morphology wedded to Teleology.

Darwin was delighted, and the next day he wrote to Grey: I . . . cannot be easy without again telling

you how profoundly I have been gratified. Every one, I suppose, occasionally thinks that he has worked

in vain, and when one of these fits overtakes me, I will think of your article, and if that does not dispel

the evil spirit, I shall know that I am at the time a little bit insane, as we all are occasionally. What you

say about Teleology pleases me especially, and I do not think any one else has ever noticed the point.

I have always said you were the man to hit the nail on the head.

13. See P. M. S. Hacker, Wittgensteins Place in Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy (Oxford:Blackwell, 1996), p. 227.

14. L. Wittgenstein, The Big Typescript(Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p. 417.

15. Wittgenstein, MS 183, 81.

16. Of course, this is not to say that somepropositions held to be analytic in one sense or another of the

term are not also grammatical, e.g., A vixen is a female fox or A bachelor is an unmarried man.

17. W. V. O. Quine,Roots of Reference(La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1974), p. 3.

BOTH YOUR ISMS/ 111

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