Philosophical Explorations 9783110319835, 9783110319323

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Nicholas Rescher Philosophical Explorations

For Lorenz Puntel In cordial friendship

Nicholas Rescher

Philosophical Explorations

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Contents PHILOSOPHICAL EXPLORATIONS PREFACE Chapter 1: OF MIND AND MATTER

1

Chapter 2: ON INTERMEDIATION IN PHILOSOPHY

13

Chapter 3: POSSIBILITIES FOR UNREALS

25

Chapter 4: ON THE IMPROVABILITY OF THE WORLD

29

Chapter 5: ON THE BEARERS OF MORAL OBLIGATION

55

Chapter 6: FREE WILL

61

Chapter 7: RELIGIOUS VIRTUES

79

Chapter 8: PRAGMATISM AND SCIENCE

83

BIBLIOGRAPHY

121

PREFACE

T

he present book continues my longstanding practice of publishing groups of philosophical essays that originated in occasional lecture and conference presentations. (Details are given in the footnotes.) Notwithstanding their topical diversity they exhibit a uniformity of method in a common attempt to view historically significant philosophical issues in the light of modern perspectives opened up thorough conceptual clarification. I am grateful, as ever, to Estelle Burris for helping me to put this material into a form suitable for publication.

Chapter One OF MIND AND MATTER 1. A TWO-SIDED COIN

F

or centuries, the problem of mind-matter interaction has preoccupied philosophers. And recently modern science has added considerable fuel to the fire. But unfortunately, the bearing of most scienceinspired theorizing on the topic is hopelessly muddied through misconstruing the brain-physiological gearing of bodily activity to mental thought. Granted, there is here a linkage with these two resources operating in unison with the result of what one recent writer refers to as: The Correlation Thesis … to the effect that there exists for each discriminable conscious state or occurrence [in the mind of an agent] a theoretically discernable [characteristically coordinate] brain correlate.1

But even granting such a rigid, lock-step coordination there still remains the question of who is in charge of a given transaction? Who commands and who follows? Which is the dependent and which the independent variable? Clearly, the tighter the coordination between mind and body the more pressing this questions becomes. Unison of operation will not as such establish primacy of control. And this critical point is almost universally overlooked. For causation is potentially a two-way street here. Changes in psychological states carry changes in cerebral physiology in their wake: when the mind frets, the brain buzzes. And conversely, changes in brain states carry changes in mind-states in their wake. And the coordination of mind and matter—however tight— does not put matter into the driver’s seat. It situates matters on a twoway street where things can go either way. One can think of mental activity as a matter of the mind’s awareness of what the brain is doing. And conversely one can think of brain activity as the brain’s response to or reflection of what the mind is doing. But there is no reason to

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think of either of these alternatives as an inevitable arrangement, excluding the prospect that sometimes the balance tilts one way and sometimes the other. In the end, any adequate mind/body theory must accommodate two facts of common experience: (1) That mind responds to bodily changes (drugs, fatigue, anesthetics). And (2) that the body responds to many of the mind’s demands (to stand up, walk about, hold one’s breath, etc.). Now consider in this light the following oft-maintained contention: An act can be free only if its productive source is located in the thoughts and deliberations of the agent. But this is never the case because the tight linkage of mind-activity to brain-activity means that the thoughts and deliberations of the agent’s mind are always rooted in and explicable through the processes at work in the agent’s brain.

To see what is amiss here think of the classic freshman-physics set-up of a gas-containing cylindrical chamber closed off by a piston at one end. The temperature inside the chamber is lock-stop coordinate to the distance of the piston-wall from the fixed wall: when the piston moves the temperature changes correspondingly, and conversely when temperature-changes are induced the piston moves correspondingly. But this condition of functional lock-step correlation leaves the issue of imitative wholly open: one may either be changing the temperature by moving the piston, or moving the piston by changing the temperature. Thus lock-step coordination as such does not settle the question of the direction of determination of which of those coordinated variables is free and which is dependent. The fact that two parameters are lockstep coordinated does not settle—or even address—the issue of processual initiative. Again, consider a teeter-totter or, alternatively, a pulley arrangement as per:

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Here the up-or-down motion of the one weight is inseparably tied to the corresponding motion of the other. Lock-step coordination leaves totally open the issue of where the initiative to change actually lies. And this illustrates the larger point: however tight and rigid the functional coordination between two interactive agencies—such as mind and brain—may be, the issue of initiative and change-inauguration is something that yet remains entirely open and unaddressed. Mark Twain’s tendentious question “When the body is drunk, does the mind stay sober?” is perfectly appropriate. But then the reverse question “When the mind panics does the body remain calm?” is no less telling.2 2. THE ISSUE OF INITIATIVE All of those myriad illustrations of a correlating connection between thought and brain activity are simply immaterial to the issue of who is in charge. For what is involved cannot settle the question of whether mind responds passively to brain-states changes or whether it actively uses the brain to its own ends. On such a perspective, the brain/mind complex is seen as an emergently evolved dual-aspect organization whose two interlinked domains permit the impetus to change lie sometimes on the one side and sometimes on the other. For the direction of determination so far remains open. Given these interlocked variables, the question of the dependent-vs.-independent status is wholly open and the question of initiative unresolved. And the fact that mind and brain sail in the same boat, is no reason why mind cannot occasionally seize the tiller. What is at issue is a partnership of coordination, not a state of inflexible master-servant subordination. In particular situations the initiative can lie on one side or the other—all depending. But all depending on what? How does it get decided where the initiative lies? Consider a chamber and piston set-up. Move the piston and the situation in the chamber changes: pressure and temperature will respond. Conversely, change the situation in the chamber (by modifying its temperature/pressure condition) and the piston will respond. The processual interlinkage is rigorously fixed: pressure and temptation move in lock-step. But the direction of influence remains a

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wide-open issue which resolution depends on the overall modus operandi of the set-up. Or consider again the aforementioned pulley set-up. When the cube rises, is this because someone is pushing up on it or because a bird has alighted on the sphere? The system itself taken in isolation will not answer this for you, but the wider context—the overall synoptic processual context—will provide the information needed to decide where the initiative lies. It is all a matter of where the activity starts and what stands at the end of the causal line. And the free will situation is much the same. When I read, the mind responds to the body; when I write, the body responds to the mind.3 Consider the following argument. “Our mental performances correspond to physico-mental processes in the brain which as such answer to nature’s laws of cause and effect. Ergo those fundamental processes of inert nature encompass the realm of thought as well.” There is a deep flaw in this reasoning—the flaw of a failure to realize that correspondence and correlation do not settle the issue of initiative. Irrespective of how tightly the operations of the mind are interlinked with those of the brain, this does not settle—or even address the issue of initiation, the question of whether it is mind or brain that is what Moritz Schlick called the “original instigator.” There is good reason to see the mind-brain interlinkage in much the same terms. And here too the linkage as such does not set a fixed direction to the initiative and control of changes. Anger the individual and characteristic patterns of brain activities will ensue; create a characteristic pattern of activity in the brain (say by electrical stimulus), and the person will respond with anger. Yes, there indeed is a tight correlation, but productivity functions along a two-way street. The correlation of mind and brain is no more an obstacle to thoughtinitiated physical responses than it is an obstacle to the evocation through thought responses of physical stimuli. My annoyance at the pin-prick is a triumph of matter over mind; my extraction of the pin a triumph of mind over matter.4 When my finger wiggles because I decide to move it, for the sake of illustration, then the mind-side of the mind/brain configuration sets the brain-side into motion. By contrast, when I hear the alarm clock ring, it is the brain-side of the mind/brain configuration that alerts the

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mind-side to a wake-up call. The interlinkage at issue with the mind/brain amalgamation leaves the issue of the direction of motivation—be it brain-initiated mind receptivity or mind-inaugurated brain responsiveness—as an issue open to further resolution. With agent causation originating in the mind, the agent is active; with physical considerations originating in the brain the agent is passive. Both are perfectly possible. And each happens some of the time with neither enjoying a monopoly. Mind clearly cannot do the work of matter: it cannot on its own produce snow or ripen tomatoes. Nor, it would seem, can matter do the work of mind: it cannot read books or solve crosswords. And yet the two are clearly connected. When the mind decides to raise the hand, that hand moves. And on the other side there is Mark Twain’s question “When the body gets drunk, does the mind stay sober?” Clearly, there is interaction here. For the scientistic determinist, to be sure, agents are productively inert—what they do is always the product of what happens to them: they simply provide the stage on which the impersonal causality of nature performs its drama. The voluntarist, by contrast, sees intelligent agents as productively active participants in the drama of the world’s physical processuality. And the facts of mind-brain correlation cannot effectively be used against him. It is simply fallacious to think that the intimate linkage between brain activity and thought invariably puts the brain in charge of the mind. Any mere coordinative correlation between brain-state physiology and mind-state conceptuality will still leave open and unrendered the issue of which variable functions independently and which dependently—which induces changes and which responds. Be the coordination or amalgamation ever so tight-woven the questions change-imagination remains open. And there is no reason at all why this cannot be a two-way street with some transactions going in the one direction and others in the other. Mind-body coordination does not, as such, endow either party with an invariable initiative. This is not the place to articulate a full-scale philosophy of mind. The extensive detail of mind-brain coordination will not preoccupy us here.5 All that is requisite for present purposes is (1) that there is a tight linkage of mind-brain coordination, and (2) that when a state-

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change occurs in this context the initiative for it can lie on either side. We need not here enter into detail at a level that transcends these rudimentary basics. That said, it must be acknowledged that the conception of a mindbrain partnership of coordination in which a process of a change in psychophysical states can be initiated on either side is critically important in the present context. For it opens the way to seeing those free decisions as a crucial productive contribution of mind to the world’s panoply of occurrence. 3. A SALIENT DUALITY What we have with mind-body coordination is not a mysteriously imposed pre-established harmony, but an internally assured co-established alignment—a dual-aspect account if you will. Even as what is for the paper a squiggle of ink is for the reader a meaningful word, so one selfsame psychophysical process is for the brain a signal (a causal stimulus) and for the mind a sign (a unit of meaning). Or again, one selfsame process, the ringing of the dinner gong, has one sort of significance ever-obvious of the guests and another for their mind-set. Such analogies, while imperfect, should help to convey the general idea of phenomena that have an inherent duality. In our piston example, the mode of the piston manifests itself in changes of the chamber area and heatwise in a change of temperature. That piston set-up is a thermodynamic engine; the mind is a hermeneutical engine. For only a mind can operate the symbolic process that transforms stimuli into meanings. Those physical inclinations are the occasion and perhaps even in some sense the productive cause of the interpretations at issue, but they are not the bearers of its substantive meaning-content. For that requires a very different level of understanding and a very different framework of conceptualization. All the same, the mind no more functions independently of the brain than the expressive mood of the visage can smile Cheshire-catlike without the physical face. And yet that physical face can achieve no expression in the absence of there being a psychological mood to express.

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Rigid materialism sees mental action as a systemically subordinate response to the functioning of matter. Rigid idealism sees matter as somehow engendered through the productive activity of mind. But more realistic than either is a theory of mind-matter coordination that sees the two as reciprocally conjoined functioning in a two-sided interaction with changes sometimes inaugurated by the one side and sometimes by the other. On such an approach, the brain/mind is seen as an emergently evolved dual-aspect organization whose two interlinked domains permit the impetus to change lie sometimes on the one side and sometimes on the other. For the direction of determination so far remains something undecided and to the point unsettled. Given these interlocked variables, the question of the dependent-vs.-independent status is wholly open and the question of initiative unresolved. And the fact that mind and brain sail in the same boat, is no reason why mind cannot occasionally seize the tiller. What is at issue is a partnership of coordination not a state of inflexible master-servant subordination. In a particular situation the initiative can lie on one side or the other—all depending. With any system in which there are functionally coordinated factors (be they temperature/pressure or supply/demand or whatever) a change in the one can engender change in the other. The relationship of lock-step coordination at issue is open to two-way implementation according as it is a change in parameter No. 1 the conclusion is an accommodating change in parameter No. 2 or the very reverse. Lockstep coordination leaves the issue of control—of independent vs. dependent variable—entirely open. And there is no reason to think that the situation at issue with mind/brain coordination is any different from the general run in this particular respect. What we have here, then, is a situation of coordination and reciprocity rather than that of a unidirectional dominance/subordination. Being anxious can make the pulse race; but then again, sensing one’s pulse racing can induce anxiety. The interconnection and interaction of mind and body can work both ways. Granted, where the brain is dead, the mind no longer works. But then as long as the mind is working the healthy brain responds. Thought is not an epi-phenomenon to physical processes but a co-phenomenon coordinate with certain ones

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among them. Thinking is not something the brain does: it is done by a mind that uses the brain as its instrument. When thought leads to action it is not that two different kinds of causality at work. The causality of agency (thought control) and the causality of nature (brain control) are two sides of the same coin as it were, two inseparably conjoined aspects of one comprehensive causal process. The changes at issue flow from one unified sort of “causality.” It is just that the actuating impetus to those changes in the one case lies at the pole of thought-processes and in the other case at the pole of brain processes. And so when the mind has the initiative, the brain does not react but rather responds—and conversely. So strictly speaking rather than causal influence is at work. (After all, a suggestion can induce or occasion on ideas in someone’s mind without “producing” it in some manufacture-analogous sense of the term.) On the issue of who is in charge, mind or brain, thought or matter traditional philosophizing has almost always taken an all-or-nothing approach. Materialistic determinists from classical atomism to the time of Hobbes, La Mettrie, and Laplace put matter in charge; idealists from Socrates to Berkeley and Lotze put mind in charge.6 For some reason the common-sensical idea that in some transactions the one is in control and in others the other had little appeal for philosophy’s endless succession of absolutists. But in the end, there is really no telling reason to opt for an all-or-nothing resolution. 4. MIND-BRAIN INTERACTION WORKS BY COORDINATION NOT BY CAUSALITY With mind-brain coordination in place, mind as well as matter can seize the initiative with respect to human action so that we can act in the mode of agent causality, while nevertheless all human actions can be explained on the side of natural causality. And so we confront Kant’s paradox of reconciling the two modes of causality.7 But how on such a view does mind come to exercise physical causality? When I mentally decide to wiggle my fingers a few seconds hence for the sake of an example, how is it that my body responds to this purely mental transaction? The answer is that it doesn’t because no “purely mental” transaction is at issue. Thought always has its cor-

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relative in the domain of brain psychology.8 And so an individual’s socalled “purely mental intention” is not really purely mental at all because it stands coordinate with a mind-brain amalgamating phsyciophysiological intention-state in something of the same manner at issue with the mood/configuration duality of those smiley/frowny faces considered above. And the physical cause of that wiggling response is not something “purely mental” but the physical side of that double aspect amalgam. What actually occurs in such transactions is a matter less of causality than of coordination. In his classic paper of 1934, Dickinson Miller saw the matter quite clearly: [In choosing or deciding] the mental process is paralleled in the brain by a physical process. The whole [two-sided] psycho-physical occurrence would then be the cause of what followed, and the psychic side of it—the mental struggle proper—a con-cause or side of the [overall, two-sided] cause. To-morrow’s configuration of matter [i.e., the physical result of an action] will [then] have been brought about by a material [i.e., physical] process with which the mental process was inseparably conjoined.9

When an agent acts there is no need to dream up a Cartesian categorytranscending impetus of thought upon matter. The material eventuations are produced materially, by the physical side of the two-sided mind-matter amalgam at issue in psychophysical processes. And the same with thought processes. Each component functions in its own order, but the coordinate linkage of the two moves in lock step, thus automatically answering Mark Twain’s question “What the body is drunk, does the mind stay sober?” The one thing this account leaves out—and it is a crucial omission—is the key point that the actuating initiative for change can lie on either side. But what could account for the fact that on this occasion the initiative lies with the mind and on that occasion it lies with the brain? Here we need to look to the temporal context of occurrence in its more comprehensive Gestalt. If what I do comes in response to drink or drugs then it is clearly the brain that is in charge. On the other hand if it is a matter of careful deliberation and in painstaking weighing of al-

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ternatives, then it is clearly the mind that is in charge. It all depends on the structure of occurrence subject to pretty much the same sort of contextual analysis that is at issue with the discrimination between dependent and independent parameters in physical-process situations. For here as elsewhere the wider context of occurrence can settle the question of productive priority and initiative. The causal deliberations of the ancient Greeks were predicated on the idea that only like can cause like. The idea that factors which are as different conceptually as night and day could nevertheless influence on another causally was anathema to them. But the reality of it stands otherwise. Motion creates heat via friction; sounds engender salivation (by Pavlonian conditioning). Yet not only was this considerations rejected by the Greeks, but it continued to exert influence as late as Descartes continued with his Chinese-wall separation of mind from matter. However, the revolution in causal thinking launched by David Hume changed all that. The idea of cross category causation no longer seems all that odd to us. And we nowadays do not—or should not— see any inherent impossibility that in the order of causal production physical processes should engender mental responses—or the other way around.10 In the end then regardless of how tight the correlation of mind and matter may be, there is no ground for construing this circumstance as precluding the efficacy of mind in effecting change, and no reason to refrain from maintaining that it is sometimes mind rather than matter that affords the independent variable that take intuition in the inauguration of change. The tighter the interrelatedness of brain and matter, the ampler the prospects of transactions where mind has the initiative. It is not functional coordination as such that is the pivotal consideration but the difference in the direction of the dependency at issue. If mind were “nothing but” the machinations of matter, if brain psychology were all there is to it, then mind would be unable to accomplish its characteristic work of providing a bridge from the domain of physical processes to the domain of thought. We would never get from here (physicality) to there (thought): all possibility of achieving meaning, significance, information would be lost. Whoever insists on seeing mind as altogether “reduced” to matter—dismissing mental options as “nothing but” the machinations of matter—thereby ex-

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cludes himself excluded from the conceptual domain, seeing that he has nowhere to get there from his position. The vocabulary of the mental is conceptually inaccessible from a basis confined to the vocabulary about physical reality. There is no way to recast mind-talk seamlessly into matter-discourse. But of course the reverse holds as well. Our knowledge about the material world lies in coordinating the two and this requires work that is evaded rather than accomplished by ignoring the conceptual duality at work here.11 NOTES 1

Theodore Honderich (ed.), Essays on Freedom of Action (London: Routledge, 1973), p. 189. However the author emphatically declines to take a position on the issue of whether brain-state causes the mind-state (p. 190), and also passes the reverse idea over in discrete silence. But it is just this prospect—not so much of causation as of state-change initiation—that lies at the heart of the present deliberations.

2

For a broad-ranging discussion of the issues see Richard Warner and Tadeouz Szabka, The Mind Body Problem: A Guide to the Current Debate (Oxford: Blackwells, 1994). Two recent instructive and widely informed treatments of relevant issues are Mario Bunge, Matter and Mind: A Philosophical Inquiry (Springer: Dordrecht, etc., 2010) and Martin Carrier and Jürgen Mittelstrass, Mind, Brain, Behaviour: The Mind-Body Problem and the Philosophy of Psychology (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1991).

3

And note that even were physical (muscular) action sometimes be initiated prior to conscious awareness of a decision, this decision’s subconscious vanguard may nevertheless still provide the initiating mental correlate of action.

4

On mind-brain interaction see the contribution of Jürgen Boeck in Henrich 1982, pp. 9–22. (For references of this format see the Bibliography.)

5

There is a vast number of fine books on the subject—far too many for listing here.

6

“Das Verhältnis der Seele zum Leib ist stets das einer Herrschaft,” Herrman Lotze, Medizinische Psychologie oder Physiologie der Seele (Leipzig: Weidmann, 1852), p. 289.

7

See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A803 = B831.

8

The reverse of course will not be the case.

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NOTES 9

R. E. Hobart, (= Dickinson Miller), “Free Will as Involving Determination and Inconceivable Without it,” Mind, vol. 43, No. 169 (1934), pp. 1–27.

10

John Stuart Mill’s A System of Logic (London: John W. Parker, 1843) is one of the earliest works that is altogether sound on the issues of this paragraph.

11

This essay originated in a Luncheon Lecture at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh in the autumn of 2010.

Chapter Two ON INTERMEDIATION IN PHILOSOPHY 1. THE INTERMEDIATION THESIS

T

he theory of doctrinal intermediation in philosophy is just that—a theory. It is not itself a philosophical doctrine, but a theory about how things stand with regard to philosophical doctrines, to wit, a theory pivoting on two interconnected theses: I.

Philosophical questions can generally be formulated (or reformulated) in a way that positions their answer along a spectrum between opposite extremes.

II. When this occurs, the most defensible and appropriate position is not one of the extremes but something in-between. On this basis, we arrive at the idea of philosophical intermediacy to the effect that the proper answers to the big questions at issue in traditional philosophy always lie in-between ultimately inappropriate extremes. The salient contention of the theory is thus that philosophical wisdom treads the via media, the middle way. How is this theory to be understood and whence does it secure a rational basis of support? 2. ARISTOTELIAN ECHOES The basic idea of philosophical intermediacy is mirrored in the virtuetheory of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. His well-known doctrine of the “golden mean” has it that the right course of action is always intermediate between two opposed extremes of too much and too little. The theory of philosophical intermediacy effectively extends this Aristotelian idea from modes of comportment to modes of thinking. It

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takes those doctrines to be credible that are located intermediately between overstretched opposites of generalization. To see this view of the matter more clearly, let us briefly review Aristotle’s teachings on the subject. Aristotle taught that a guiding standard of human virtue or excellence is constituted by a proportionate intermediation between opposed extremes of insufficiency and surfeit. As put it: [In matters of conduct] as in everything that is continuous and divisible, it is possible to take a lot or a little or a middling amount, and to do this either in the thing itself or relatively to us (pros hêmos). And then proper amount is something intermediate between excess and insufficiency. (1106a 26–29).

On this Aristotelian perspective, virtue pivots on getting the right balance between too little and too much. And he substantiated this view on the basis of numerous illustrations along the lines of Display 1. On this basis, Aristotle summarizes his doctrine of what Horace was to call a golden mean (aurea mediocritas) in the following terms: Virtue (arête) is a mean (meson) between two vices, one of excess and one of deficiency, being an intermediary in relation to which the vices respectively fall short or exceed that which is right alike in reaction and in action, while virtue finds and chooses the [appropriate] intermediary (meson). (1107a3).

Thus the man who fears nothing is foolhardy; the man who fears everything is a pusillanimous coward; but the man who fears on rare but appropriate occasions is courageous (1116b15). Again, neither the self-denial of asceticism nor the over-indulgence of licentiousness hits the happy medium of a healthy care for the body’s requirements (1118b29).1 The salient truths of Aristotelian virtue-theory accordingly indicate some appropriate intermediation between unacceptable extremes. And the metaphysical theory at issue here generalizes this situation from ethics to philosophy at large. To see how this view of things can be sustained we had best go back to basics.

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Display 1 VIRTUE AS INTERMEDIATION Mode of Comportment • SELF-PROJECTION • CARE FOR ASSETS • SELF-TREATMENT • SELF-INDULGENCE • CARE FOR SELF-STANDING • CARE FOR ONE’S SELF-IMAGE • SELF-REVELATION • SELF-RISK • SELF SHARING • SELF-INVOLVEMENT • SELF-ESTEEM • SELF-INTEREST • SELF-ASSERTIVENESS • VERBAL SELF-MANIFESTATION

Flawed Insufficiency

Mediating Excellence

Flawed Excess

Fearfulness/Cowardice Stinginess/Meanness Self-denial Asceticism Self-centeredness Self-abasement Secretiveness Over-caution Stinginess Callous Indifference Self-denigration Spendthrift Pusillanimity Dullness

Courage Liberality Temperance Moderation Proper Self-regard Self-respect Candor Prudence Generosity Neighborliness Seemly modesty Prudence Righteous Integrity Ready Wit

Rashness Profligacy Self-indulgence Licentiousness Self-heedlessness Self-aggrandisement Blabbelmouthiness Foolhartiness Profligacy Busibodyness Conceit Avarice Irascibility Buffoonery

3. HOW INTERMEDIATION ARISES As Plato’s Socrates already taught, philosophical issue frequently root in questions of the generic format: • Just what is it to be X: what does X mean? • How do X-items come to be realized: how do such things come about? • What significance does X have in the larger scheme of things: what role does it play in the world and/or human affairs?

And here X will stand for some fundamental and far-reaching concept on the order of just behaviors, true claims, beautiful objects, constituents of matter, laws of nature, and other such far-reaching conceptions.

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To all visible appearances, intermediation does not arise with such questions. How can the intermediation thesis be squared with this fact? One of the definitive tasks of philosophy is to render reality intelligible by expounding the answers to such big questions. But without the ability to coordinate matters with generalities their explanation becomes impossible. Generalization is indispensible to explanation: explanation is, by nature, a matter of bringing limited cases into the range of general principles. And in philosophy the generalizations we invoke are doctrinal: philosophical positions are by nature stances taken with respect to doctrinally general claims. But now any X-geared generalization stakes a claim or thesis on the order of: “Things always stand Z-wise with regard to Xs”. And in this regard there will be three possible doctrinal stances, namely (1) to accept the generalization as is, and endorse the idea that things always so stand. (2) to spurn the generalization as is, and insist that (properly speaking) things never so stand. And in between, so to speak, there lies the prospect: (3) to qualify the generalization and hold that they so stand only in special conditions and circumstances—i.e., that they sometimes do and sometimes do not conform. And so, confronted with a definition implementing generalization of the format “All X’s are Y’s” the issue of whether a generalization actually obtains admits of three responses: never // sometimes yes-and-sometimes-no // always It is the cogency of this intermediate formula that makes for the position with which we are here concerned.

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And here the theoretical rationale of intermediation is quite straightforward. For the intermediation of “some yes, and some no” enjoys the advantage that “some” is in general bound to be safer than “all” of these complex and controverted issues. After all, when opposed theories are in play there is for this very reason always something to be said for each extreme. Intermediation is in a position to accommodate the pro- and anti-considerations of both sides. And it is in just this light that one can consider such doctrinal questions as: • Do we ever get at the real truth of things? (Issues of scepticism) • Do the senses provide certain knowledge? (Issues of perceptual certainty) • Do we act freely? (Issues of free will) • Does rationality guide us aright? (Issues of reason) • Does the truth align with the best evidence? (Issues of evidentiation) • Does justice requires everyone’s getting their due? (Issues of fairness) • Does legality render capital punishment morally justified? (Issues of morality)

In such matters—and their innumerable cognates—the most promising and practicable course is generally that of the middle way. 4. INTERMEDIATION AND “RAMSEY’S MAXIM” The theory of philosophical intermediation bears some kinship to the idea at issue in what has become known as “Ramsey’s Maxim” after the English philosopher F. P. Ramsey. With regard to disputed philosophical questions, Ramsey insists: In such cases, it is a salient axiom that the truth lies not in one of the two [contrary] disputed views, but in some third possibility that has not yet been thought of, and which

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can only be discovered by rejecting something assumed as obvious by both the disputants.”2 As is clear from its very formulation, this thesis of Ramsey’s selects to the distinct process of philosophical discussion and controversy. But subject to a certain understanding of the historical dialective of philosophical development the two positions can be put into coordinative alignment. For if the initial phrase is one of projecting extreme positions whose proper adjunction requires concession on each side to the merit of the other, so that a tenable compromise positions is bound to be intermediate then the theory of intermediation and Ramsey’s maxim of historical development come into symbiotic coordination. 5. SEEMING EXCEPTIONS There are, to be sure, philosophical questions that do not allow of the intermediary formulation, for example: • Are there universals? • Can machines think? • Is moral perfection achievable by man?

But the core issues posed by such questions can always be reformulated to admit of intermediacy—as per: • Do descriptive features engender universals? • Do machines ever closely approximate thought? • Should people be expected to be more perfect than they actually are?

The component issues involved in those overarching questions that are critically at stake with those yes-or-no issues can thus be framed in such a way as to bring the cogency of intermediation to light.

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Again, an exception to that purported rule of intermediation is seemingly provided by the great Socratic queries: What is truth, justice, beauty, knowledge? Clearly there is no room for intermediacy with such definitional issue as they stand. But the moment we contemplate the possible answers to such a question (“Justice is giving people their due,” “Knowledge is true belief combined with a rationale”) we are back in the doctrinal arena where intermediation can take hold. So even where a philosophical question does not admit of intermediation as it stands, nevertheless once one pinpoints the core questions at stake, the situation comes to stand differently. Intermediation then reappears in a decidedly favorable light. 6. IS THE THEORY OF INTERMEDIATION SELF-APPLICABLE? Is the theory of intermediation self-applicable: does its contention that defensible philosophical doctrines are always intermediate between extremes hold also with regret to itself? After all, it here too seems sensible to say “sometimes-yes-and-sometimes-no.” To address this question one must distinguish between substantive philosophical issues and methodological issues. For it is the range of substantive philosophical issues that is addressed by the Intermediation Thesis. But the thesis itself does not represent a substantive doctrine: its own becoming is strictly methodological. For this reason the theory of intermediation does not automatically apply to itself, and one can in theory safely take an all-out stance regarding intermediation without the risk of self-contradiction. 7. INTERMEDIATION AND STABILITY The circumstance that philosophical doctrines generally admit of intermediation between never and always means that matters of contextual emphasis give impetus to a continuity of discussion. With issues of intermediation some will dwell on the part of the glass that is empty and others on the part of the glass that is full. And such a continuity or concern will make for a predominance of issues.

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This circumstance has significant ramification for historical structure of philosophizing itself. The English philosopher-historian R. G. Collingwood spoke for a plethora of theorists in maintaining that different eras and cultures cannot address the same question. This doctrine—generally called historicism—has it that even where a contention is formulated in the same words, the concepts at work in different culture-contexts are incommensurable. And if this is so, then there can be no perennial philosophical issues, because as the historico-cultural context changes, this change of setting induces a change of subject. Across the boundaries of eras and places there is bound to be conceptual discontinuity. The problem of free will is a perfect test-case for this position, seeing that to all appearances it has constantly been on the agenda of philosophical concern—alike in Mediterranean antiquity, in medieval Islam and Christian Europe, in the modern world’s industrialized societies. Is it or is it not the same problems that have been addressed throughout by all those participants in the discussion? Are not those lawyers who wrangle about responsibility for action in its legal bearing throughout the years addressing the same issue? No doubt, saying that “the same question” is at issue is far from unproblematic. After all, what a position affirms and favors is determined by what it denies and rejects: its substance emerges via its oppositions. And as regards free will, this target has ongoingly changed over time. The ancient voluntarists sought to defend the will’s freedom against the powers of fate. The medievals defended it in the face of divine omniscience and omnipotence. The moderns feel called upon to defend it against the powers of nature as portrayed in science. The opposition has certainly been a moving target, running from Fate to God to Nature. But nevertheless there is a key element of commonality throughout. For all of these mighty potencies have been viewed as determining the course of events in ways that far outrun the modest reach of our feebler powers as human individuals. Throughout, the salient issue has been of our capacity at least on some occasions to determine the range of our action and the unfolding of our destiny through the active implementation of our beliefs and wishes. So in the final analysis the issue is one and the same throughout—the capacity of humans to determine their actions through their own reflectively

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deliberated decision rather than being pawns at the beck and call of some mighty external potency. The core issue is simply this: Is it at least sometimes the case that our own, autonomously formed thoughts are the controllers of our actions? As with so many of these deep conundrums, the situation is complex. What happens in this matter of the question of “the same issue?” is something of continuity amidst change—sameness in fundamentals upon which an ongoing change of detail is superimposed. Along with the ancients—and everyone else—we have to eat, to sleep, and also to decide among alternatives. And with them as with us these decisions are made sometimes for self-provided reasons and sometimes as the result of causal factors beyond the individual’s control. The basic categories under which the issues can be classed are elements of the human condition that are invariant through time and circumstance—and readily recognized as such. To be sure the detail—how the causality of nature works, what sort of undue influence can affect human decisions—all this sort of thing represents matters of subordinate detail about which there can be differences of thought in the wake of a changing way of doing things. The issue of personal decision is in this regard much like the issue of bridge-building. What a bridge is is a matter of commonality as between the ancient Romans and ourselves, although issues of the planning, design, material provision, construction, etc. of bridges are all matters of historical variation and contextualization. Analogously, this situation of a sameness of fundamentals combined with a variation of detail holds with free-will even as it does with bridges. The very reason for being of many a philosopher’s work is generally to take issue with what a predecessor has said and to disagree with it. (It was, after all, to refute the cognitive nihilism of Pyrrhonian skepticism that Descartes labored: it was exactly what those ancients affirmed that Descartes sought to refute.) To deny cognitive continuity across the divides of time and space is to abandon the effort to achieve explanatory understanding. If a philosopher cannot address the same problem that someone of earlier times considered, neither can the historian of philosophy. To be sure, what is here required is an endeavor to understand others on their own terms. But to deny the prospect of doing so is to em-

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bark on a slippery slope into a cognitive solipsism that ultimately locks each thinker into his own impenetrable thought-world. If I cannot get at what Aquinas says about free will, then you cannot get at what I say about it either. What changes from one era to another need not be a problem as such but only its context. The ancients’ discussions of the free will problem saw the threat to freedom as constituted by fate; the medievals as constituted by divine foresight; the moderns as constituted by the causality of nature. Over time the context differed and the range of relevant issues differed accordingly. But the core question “Are we free agents or is what we do determined by forces and factors outside the range of our control?” remained the same. And accordingly, the question “Can philosophers of different eras discuss the same question” has to be answered in the affirmative. But this affirmation has to be nuanced and qualified—“Yes, they certainly can, but they will not do so in exactly the same way.” The physicalistic materialists of different eras will view nature as the theater of operation of atoms—but the atoms of Lucretius and those of Bertrand Russell are not exactly the same sort of thing. And yet the fundamental issue at stake is much the same throughout. In philosophy as elsewhere, stances persevere, albeit in somewhat different guises. 8. PERIODIZATION IN PHILOSOPHY Historians of philosophy like to deal in fixed eras: The Age of Reason, say, or the Era of Medieval Aristotelianism. They would, ideally, cut philosophical history into distinct periods like many slices of bread. But of course that is just not how things work. The structure of philosophical history is actually much more like the picture of Display 1. Instead of neat successive blocks we have a histogram with its ongoingly shifting ebb and flow of continuing tendencies of thought. Philosophers do not spring up, dominate for a time, and then vanish from the historical scene. They emerge from earlier adumbrations, develop, and thereafter wax and wane in line with the dedication and ingenuity of their advocates and the receptiveness of the “spirit of the times.” But philosophical fashions never have it all to themselves.

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And they never disappear for good and all: in philosophy one can never issue death certificates—pretty much everything has a way of surviving and regaining some further lease on life. Even in a time of A’s dominance its rivals B and C stay alive if not exactly stirring.

Display 1 A SCHEMATIC FOR PHILOSOPHICAL HISTORY A B C D

time →

This situation is confined not only by the general history of philosophy but by personal experience over a single lifetime. When I first stepped upon America’s philosophical stage in the 1940s, Kant was an antiquarian figure of the distant past, pragmatism was at the periphery of philosophy (William James belonged to the psychologists, John Dewey to the educationists). And scientistic positivism betrod the scene like a Colossus. Nowadays, Kant stands at the very center of things, the subject of a vast industry. And various modes of pragmatism are all the rage, while scientistic positivism is struggling to survive. In philosophy as in geology the terrain shifts beneath our feet. 9. DOES INTERMEDIATION TRIVIALIZE PHILOSOPHY? Does intermediation not just trivialize philosophy? Does its pat answer of “in a way yes, and in a way no” not make resolving philosophical questions simply too automatic and easy? Is there not something rather wishy-washy in doctrines that occupy the middle ground and make concessions to each of the conflicting rival contestants? The answer here is an emphatic No! The fact of it is that intermediation is merely the beginning; it always proceeds to confront us with a serious and challenging work. For once we acknowledge that there is

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something to be said on both sides of the question and concede that in some respects each side has some merit and is on to something, then there arises the difficult philosophical tasks of spelling out in detail just how this arises and to what part of the overall territory the rival claimants are entitled. Indeed not only is there more work to be done, but on the Intermediation Theory’s own telling this work is unending. For once one gets to the result “In some cases yes, and in others no,” one faces the task of addressing the boundary-line question “In what sort of cases yes, and in what sort of question no?” Now an answer here will have the format: “In class C of cases, the answer to the philosophical question Q is yes (resp. no)” But this itself is simply another philosophical question “Does this principle itself hold good?” And now we are back in the grips of the Intermediation Thesis with the appropriate answer personally having the form “Sometimes yes, sometimes no.” We are involved in the task of specifying the boundaries of boundaries. And this task of ever refining complexification has virtually no end. The endeavor to answer our doctrinal questions plunges us into a venture of developing ever more nuanced answers to questions whose formulation is ever more sophisticated but whose fundamental purport remains much the same.3 NOTES 1

Contrary to various interpreters, I propose understanding what here termed “modes of comportment” as types of reaction (pathê) generally, and not merely or even principally as emotional reactions. (For the contrary view see Terzis 1995).

2

F. P. Ramsey, The Foundations of Mathematics, ed. by R. B. Braithwaite (London: Kegan Paul, 1931), pp. 115–16.

3

This essay originated in a presentation to a philosophy club at Duquesne University in the autumn of 2009.

Chapter Three POSSIBILITIES FOR UNREALS (On Second Order Possibilities) 1. THE PROBLEM OF SECOND-ORDER POSSIBLES

A

re there things that merely possible individuals can do but don’t. Could the Easter Rabbit forgo eating carrots? Throughout the Sherlock Holmes stories, our hero detective resided at 221 B Baker Street. Could he have moved to other, larger quarters? What sort of possibilities are there for nonexistent objects—for mere unreals? Can they possibly do what departs from their stipulated modus operandi? Can fictional items lay claim to unrealized possibilities or are they immobilized as what they are by their hypothetical actualities? Is counterfactual reasoning with respect to unreals a cogent possibility? To begin with, it must, of course, be supposed that nonexistent possibles are able to do the things that are generic to items of their kind. The Easter Bunny must be able to eat carrots, and presumably could possibly be doing so even when engaged elsewhere. How, then, does counterfactuality work with mere possibles? Even here, a recourse of generic possibility can come to our aide. Thus • If the Easter Bunny were an elephant, he could not move as fast as we must suppose that he does. would be provided for by the general fact that rabbits are swifter than elephants. Or again, consider: • If the Easter Bunny ate a large quantity of poison, he would die. This too inheres in a general fact about rabbits. But by contrast consider:

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•

If the Ester Bunny decided to retire he would move to the suburbs.

There is no way to ground this contention in general facts about rabbits. We are here confronted with an unintelligible but unsustainable counterfactual. 2. COUNTERFACTUALS FOR IRREALIA Significantly, one can manage counterfactual reasoning about nonexistents in the same aporetic manner that is at work in the more usual cases.1 We just list the key relevant facts about those items. We then adjoin the counterfactual stipulations. And we now proceed to look to the minimally disruptive ways of restoring consistency, breaking the chain of inconsistency at its weakest point. And that which is, in this regard, the determinant of relative strength and weakness is fixed by a suitable set of rules. And this result establishes the retention priority of propositions for counterfactual reasoning with nonexistent is as follows: 1. counterfactual stipulation 2. stipulated generalities—story internal 3. human generalities—story external 4. particular facts—story internal 5. public facts—story external To see how this works let us consider an example. Illustration No. 1. • If the Easter Bunny could not move about, then it would not deliver eggs.

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Situational Givens: (A) The Easter Bunny delivers eggs. (Supposition of story-internal fact.) (B) Delivering things requires moving about. (Known general fact.) (C) The Easter Bunny can move about. (Consequence of (A) and (B).) (D) The Easter Bunny cannot move about. (Counterfactual Hypothesis.) These theses are inconsistent and cannot all be maintained together. But we can now proceed to break this chain of inconsistency as its weakest link, reasoning as follows: (D) stands secure as the counterfactual-generality postulation. So (C) must be abandoned, being incompatible with (D). So one of (A) and (B) must also be abandoned, since together they yield (C). But (B) has priority over (A) in view of its generality. Thus (A) must also be abandoned. This line of thought leads to the counterfactual at issue. Again, consider another example: Illustration No. 2 • If Humpty Dumpty had not been on that wall, he would not have broken. Situational Given (A) Humpty Dumpty was atop that wall. (Item-descriptive fact.) (B) Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall. (Descriptive fact.) (C) Humpty Dumpty was broken. (Descriptive fact.)

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(D) Falling off the wall led to Humpty Dumpty breaking. (Causal fact.) (E) Humpty Dumpty was not on the wall (Supposition.) The following line of consistency-restorative reasoning now arises: (E) obtains by supposition. And not-(B) immediately follows from it. And then not-(C) follows from not-(B) and (D) Again inconsistency emerges. And by prioritizing causal facts (as per (D)) over descriptive facts (as per (C)) we arrive at the counterfactual in question. Reals exist in the real world; unreals, insofar as they “exist” at all, do so only in the realm of imagination and speculation. The tendency is to say that if they were unreal or differently, then something different would be at issue. But this is not so, for unreals too can realize different possibilities subject to our basic ground rules for deliberating about such matters. For as the present deliberations indicate, there are natural procedures governed by definite rules for thinking cogently about this issue. And, in particular, if a merely imaginary being is (by hypothesis) qualified as an X—if it is, by assumption, a fictional cat in 19th century English detective story—then it must by value of this very fact, be presumed to be capable of doing anything that an item of its (suppositional) kind is capable of doing. NOTES 1

See the author’s Aporetics (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009) for further deliberations regarding some of the themes of this chapter.

Chapter Four ON THE IMPROVABILITY OF THE WORLD 1. THE IMPROVABILITY THESIS AND THE ISSUE OF “NATURAL EVIL”

U

ntil quite recently, no philosopher since Leibniz’s day has grappled seriously with the question of whether it is feasible to see the actual order of nature as the optimal resolution of the problem of world-realization under plausible constraints—constraints, that is, which could reasonably be seen as appropriate requirements for a coherent universe.1 After all, the Leibnizian claim that this is the best possible world may seem to be absurd because so much patently appears to be amiss with the world. And yet the idea that the world is improvable is not without its problems. Since classical antiquity, theorists of an atheistic persuasion have deployed the argument that if this world indeed were the product of the productive agency of an intelligent creator, then it would be far better than it is. As they see it, the world’s imperfection in encompassing such “natural evils” as cataclysmic disasters, epidemic diseases, accidental injuries, and the like, mark it as improvable, and thereby countervail against the prospect of an intelligent creator. (The world’s moral imperfection rooting in the wicked misdeeds of its intelligent agents—that is, the “problem of natural evil”—poses separate and distinct issues.2) The imperfection of the natural world—it’s potential for improvement—is adduced as a decisive obstacle to divine creation. After all, if even we mere humans can envision ways to improving the world, then how can it possibly be the product of divine creation? And so the problem of how a perfect God can create an imperfect world looks to be a faith-defying paradox. The idea that the actual world as we have it is the best possible goes back to Plato’s Timaeus. Here we are told (29A) that the cosmos is “the best thing that has come into being” because:

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The divine being (theos) wished that everything should be good and nothing imperfect AS FAR AS POSSIBLE (kata dunamin) … since he judged that order (taxis) was better than disorder. For him who is the supremely good, it neither was nor is permissible to do anything other than what is the best [among the possibilities].3

Plato envisioned a world which, imperfections notwithstanding, is nevertheless “for the best” in being just as perfect as the conditions of a physically realized world will permit. And Leibniz agreed with this position. Alfonso X, king of Castile (1221–84), known as “the learned” (el Sabio) and as “the Astronomer” (el Astrólogo), who wrote prolifically on astronomical matters, deserves the eternal gratitude of scholars for his efforts to ensure the transmission of Greco-Arabic scholarship to Latinate Europe. But he is nowadays known mainly for his audacious declaration—issued in wake of the Ptolemaic system of astronomy with its profusion cycles and epicycles—that “If the Lord Almighty had consulted me before embarking on his creation, I would have recommended something simpler.” And many has been the theorist who, walking in Alfonzo’s footsteps, has thought that improvements could be made upon the Creator’s handiwork. Voltaire insisted that a benign Creator would certainty have averted the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 that killed so many of his most dedicated devotees. And, predicating his reasoning on the doctrine of evolution, Bertrand Russell wrote: “If I were granted omnipotence, and millions of years to experiment is, I should not think Man much to boast of as the final result of my efforts.”4 And in another place he writes “If God really thinks well of the human … why not proceed as in Genesis to create man at once?”5 Voltaire was certainly not alone in thinking it absurd of Leibniz to deem this vale of tears to be the best of possible worlds. And in just this vein, David Hume insisted that, if the world were indeed the product of a benevolent and omnipotent Creator its arrangements would be far better than they are: A being, therefore, who knows the secrets principles of the universe, might easily, by particular volitions, turn these accident to the good of

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mankind, and render the whole world happy, … Some small touches, given to Caligula’s brain in his infancy, might have converted him into a Trajan. One wave, a little higher than the rest, by burying Caesar and his fortune in the bottom of the ocean, might have restored liberty to a considerable part of mankind.6

And Hume went on to offer some helpful suggestions: The author of nature is inconceivably powerful: His force is supposed great, if not altogether inexhaustible. Nor is there any reason, as far as we can judge, to make him observe this strict frugality in his dealings with his creatures. It would have been better, were his power extremely limited, to have created fewer animals, and to have endowed these with more faculties for their happiness and preservation.7

And more recently, in his discussion of the Problem of Evil, Alvin Plantinga considers the idea that God could have improved upon this world by arranging for Hitler to die in his sleep prior to inaugurating the Holocaust genocide of European jewry.8 The idea that a divinely created world would have to be a good deal better than this one has long intrigued philosophers—and not philosophers alone. And so, over the centuries, optimalism has faced the charge of emulating Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss who will acknowledge no evil in the world—much like that familiar trio of monkeys who “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” And what principally gives people pause here is that they see this world as imperfect on grounds of potential remediation. One theorist after another has maintained that, given the chance, he could readily improve on the natural world’s arrangements by this, that, or the other modification. And from there it is only one short and easy step to the conclusion that a benevolent creative deity does not exist.9 Thus Bertrand Russell bolsters this anti-theistic argument with the acid comment that “An omnipotent Being who created a world containing evil not due to sin must Himself be at least partially evil.”10 After all, it seems only plausible to suppose that if there indeed is a deity acting as the intelligent contriver of the universe, he/she/it would have prevented all sorts of misfortunes and disasters.11

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2. THE TURN TO OPTIMALISM The present deliberations will try to cast doubt upon this idea of the world’s prospective amelioraton. They endeavor to rebut the seemingly plausible Improvability Thesis that a better world might be obtained by fixing some of the many things that are wrong with the world as it stands. One important preliminary must be noted. Both improvementists and their optimalist opponents must be in agreement on one fundamental point, namely that there is a cogent and objective standard for world assessment. Claiming that the world is improvable and claiming that it is optimal both alike require a standard for merit-assessment. Now for present purposes we will take this standard to be the best condition for the real interests of the world’s intelligent beings. However, the idea of “best conditions” can here be construed in two decidedly different ways. The one is the actualities relating to their welfare and wellbeing. The other is the possibilities at their disposal—with the open prospect that they may well mess them up. On the surface, this second alternative doubtless appears more plausible. It is, to be sure, theoretically possible to contemplate a different standard of world-merit, one which looked, for example, to the proliferation of the different varieties of organic life. But this is not the sort of thing that those who complain about the world’s imperfection have in mind. They tend to be much more parochial about it and see our human condition as pivotal. The shift from humans to intelligent creatures at large is doubtless as far as they would be prepared to go, and for dialectical purposes this is the stance to be adopted here.12 3. ON THE INFEASIBILITY OF LOCAL TINKERING: BURLEY’S PRINCIPLE AS A LOGICAL OBSTACLE Now on to improvement. For starters, one key obstacle that stands in the way of the Improvability Thesis is the pervasive interconnectedness of things. Man is, as the ancients have it, by nature an intelligent animal, and this automatically carries with it the inherent limitation of the frailties of the flesh. If you want animals you must provide them with organic food. And a

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food chain brings with it a Nature rough in tooth and claw. All worldly arrangements have a down-side that involves imperfection. Imperfections of various sorts accompany any class of items, so that a world cannot be devoid of imperfections—if imperfection indeed is, as it must be, an involvement with limitations of some sort. But consider a somewhat more drastic alternative. What if we lived in a Berkeleyan world whose “nature” is not material and whose intelligences are disembodied spirits? Such a world would of course dispense with physical evils and injuries (and with physical pleasures as well). All the same, affective anguish and psychic distress would certainly remain. Alienation of affection can cause greater anguish than physical injury. And who is to say that in a psychical world spiritual injuries are not felt even more acutely, and that disembodiment would do finite beings a disfavor. There just is no real prospect of local tinkering with the world without wider ramifications. In this world—and indeed in any possible world—states of affairs are interconnected and local changes always have pervasive consequences. Any local “fix” always has involvements throughout, and in consequences no tweaking or tinkering may be able to effect an improvement. This very important fact can be seen from two points of view—the logico-theoretical and the empiricosubstantive. Let us begin with the former. As Walter Burley already observed in the 14th century, any and every change of one truth can potentially destabilize any other.13 Thus let T be the set of all truths and now consider the situation of Display 1, which sets out the idea of Burley’s Principle: The logic of the situation is such that the introduction of any falsehood whatever into the set of all truths destabilizes everything: any other truth must then be abandoned. The systematic integrity of fact means that the idea of changing one item while leaning all the real alone is simply impracticable. The structure of fact is an intricately woven fabric. One cannot sever one part of it without unraveling other parts of the real. Facts engender a dense structure, as the mathematicians use this term. Every determinable fact is so drastically hemmed in by others that even when we erase it, it can always be restored on the basis of what remains. The logical fabric of fact is woven tight. Facts are so closely intermeshed with each other as to form a connected network.

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Display 1 THE GIST OF BURLEY’S PRINCIPLE (1)

Let p and q two be arbitrary truths, with p ∈ T and q ∈ T.

(2)

(p v ~q) ∈ T by (1)

(3)

And let us now suppose p to be false, so that ~p by supposition

(4)

~q

from (2), (3). Q.E.D.

Note: T is the manifold of all truths.

As far as the logic of the situation goes, any change anywhere in the manifold of truth has reverberations everywhere.14 Once you embark on a reality-modifying assumption, then as far as pure logic is concerned all bets are off. At the level of abstract logic, the introduction of belief-contravening hypotheses puts everything at risk: nothing is safe anymore. When supposition postulates falsehood, then to maintain consistency one must revamp the entire fabric of fact. And this is a task of Sisyphusian proportions: something that those who make glib use of the idea of other possible worlds all too easily forget. The world is something too complex to be remade in our thought. Reality’s reach has a grip that it will never entirely relax: it is a tight-woven web where the cutting of any thread leads to an unraveling of the whole. Yet there are, of course, other important aspects of improvability that lie beyond the logic of the situation. And they too require attention. 4. THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT AS A SUBSTANTIVE OBSTACLE TO TINKERING Consider the following objection: “How can one possibly claim the world to be all that meritorious and benignly contrived. Surely, envisioning a better world would not be all that hard. After all, it wouldn’t have taken much to arrange some small accident that would have removed a Hitler or a Stalin from the scene. To figure out how this sort

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of thing could be arranged—to the world’s vast improvement!—is not Rocket Science!” Alas, dear objector, even Rocket Science is not good enough. For what stands in the way here is the massive obstacle of what is known as the Butterfly Effect. This phenomenon roots in the sensitive dependence of outcomes on initial conditions in chaos theory, where a tiny variation in the initial conditions of a dynamical system can issue in immense variations in the long term behavior of the system. E. N. Lorenz first analyzed the effect in a pioneering 1963 paper, leading to the comment of one meteorologist that “if the theory were correct, one flap of a butterfly’s wings would be enough to alter the course of the weather forever.”15 With this process, changing even one tiny aspect of nature—one single butterfly flutter could have the most massive repercussions: tsunamis, droughts, ice ages, there is no limit. With this phenomenology in play, re-writing the course of the cosmos in the wake of even the smallest hypothetic change is an utter impracticability.16 A chaotic condition, as natural scientists nowadays use this term, obtains when we have a situation that is tenable or viable in certain circumstances but where a change in these circumstanceseven one that is extremely minutewill unravel and destabilize the overall situation with imponderable consequences, producing results that cannot be foreseen in informative detail. Every hypothetical change in the physical make-up of such a worldhowever smallsets in motion a vast cascade of further such changes either in regard to the world’s furnishings or in the laws of nature. And for all we can tell, reality is just like that. Suppose that we make only a very small alteration in the descriptive composition of the real, say by adding one pebble to the river bank. But which pebble? Where are we to get it and what are we to put in its place? And where are we to put the air or the water that this new pebble displaces? And when we put that material in a new spot, just how are we to make room for it. And how are we to make room to the so-displaced material. Moreover, the region within six inches of the new pebble used to hold N pebbles. It now holds N + 1. Of which region are we to say that it holds N – 1. If it is that region yonder, then how did the pebble get here from there? By a miraculous instantaneous transport? By a little boy picking it up and throwing it.

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But then, which little boy? And how did he get there? And if he threw it, then what happened to the air that his throw displaced which would otherwise have gone undisturbed? Here problems arise without end. As we conjure with those pebbles, what about the structure of the envisioning electromagnetic, thermal, and gravitational fields? Just how are these to be preserved as was given the removal and/or shift of the pebbles? How is matter to be readjusted to preserve consistency here? Or are we to do so by changing the fundamental laws of physics? Limits of necessity can root not only in the fundamental principles of logic (logical impossibility) but also in the laws of nature (physical impossibility). For every scientific law is in effect a specification of impossibility. Thus it indeed is a law that “Iron conducts electricity,” then a piece of nonconducting iron thereby becomes unrealizable. Accordingly, limits of necessity are instantiated by such aspirations as squaring the circle or accelerating spaceships into hyperdrive at transluminal speed. Many things that we might like to do—to avoid ageing, to erase the errors of the past, to transmute lead into gold—are just not practicable. Nature’s modus operandi precludes the realization of such aspirations. We finite creatures had best abandon them because the iron necessity of natural law stands in the way of their realization. “But is the Butterfly Effect not an artifact of the ‘laws of nature’— the rules by which Nature plays the game is the production of phenomena: And would not an omnipotent God alter those rules so that the world’s occurrences are no longer inextricably intertwined?” This is a tricky question that requires some conceptual unraveling. An omnipotent creator could ex hypothesi create a chaos. But he could not create a Cosmos that affords a user-friendly home for intelligent beings without thereby creating the sort of coordinated fabric of intelligible lawfulness that carries a Butterfly Effect in its wake. For how else could those intelligent agents make their way in the world? An existential manifold could possibly dispense with the lawful coordination that underpins the Butterfly Effect, but an intelligence-supportive (“noophelic”) Nature could not possibly do so. We then have to reckon with the prospect that the lawful order inherent in the Butterfly Effect could not be abandoned without massive collateral damage to the intelligible order of things.

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5. MONKEY’S PAW ISSUES “But could not the amount of human suffering that there is in the world be reduced in some different order of things?” For sure it could. But the question is: At what cost? At the price of there being no world at all? At the price of there being no humans in the world? At the price of having all humans be ignorant, dull, and unintelligent? At the price of having only humans without empathy, sympathy, and care for one another? The proper response to all of these questions is simply: Who knows? No-one can say with any assurance that the cost of such an “improvement” would be acceptable. The idea of collateral damage has important ramifications here. It is—unfortunately—entirely possible for the removal of even a Hitler or Stalin from the world stage to be achievable only at the price of visiting upon mankind an even greater disaster. To render this idea graphic, one should consider W. W. Jacobs’ chilling story of The Monkey’s Paw, whose protagonist is miraculously granted wishes that thereupon actually come true—but always at a fearsome price.17 The salient point at issue here is straightforward. Granted, the world’s particular existing negativities are in theory remediable. But to arrange for this will likely require accepting an even larger array of negativities overall. (The Monkey’s Paw perplex.) The cost of avoiding those manifest evils of this world would then be the realization of an even larger volume of misfortune. What the Monkey’s Paw Perplex means is that we can no longer be glibly facile about our ability to tinker with reality to effect improvements in the world by somehow removing this or that among its patent imperfections through well-intentioned readjustments. For what would need to be shown is that such a repair would not yield unintended and indeed altogether unforeseen consequences resulting in an overall inferior result. And this would be no easy task—and indeed could prove to be one far beyond our feeble powers. To “fix” some negative aspect of the world would involve a change of how things happen within it, i.e., altering the laws of nature under whose aegis things happen as they do. And the effects of this will prove imponderable. For as one recent writer has cogently argued:

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If water is to have the various properties in virtue of which it plays its beneficial part in the economy of the physical world and the life of mankind, it cannot at the same time lack its obnoxious capacity to drown us. The specific gravity of water is as much a necessary outcome of its ultimate constitution as its freezing point, or its thirst-quenching and cleansing functions. There cannot be assigned to any substance an arbitrarily selected group of qualities, from which all that ever may prove unfortunate to any sentient organism can be eliminated especially if … the world … is to be a calculable cosmos.18

What is crucial in this regard is the operation of natural laws. Our universe is an orderly cosmos rather than an anarchic jumble. And only this can provide a home for beings whose actions are grounded by thought. Only through some degree of understanding of the orderly modus operandi of a world can an intelligent being whose actions are guided by beliefs come into operation. And in a realm in which what happens proceeds in accord with natural laws, a finite embodied is inevitably at risk of mishap. Bruce Reichenbach has it right: “Natural Evils are a consequence of natural objects acting according to natural laws upon sentient, natural creatures.”19 And the fact of it is that those natural laws make the world a package deal. But someone will now object as follows: “This reliance on the Butterfly Effect is problematic. For this effect is the result of the fact that, in certain respects, the laws of nature have yielded a system of the sort that mathematicians characterize as chaotic. Surely one could change the laws of nature to avoid this result.” It is no doubt so. But now we have leapt from the frying pan into the fire. For in taking this line we propose to fiddle not merely with this or that specific occurrence in world history, but are engaged in conjuring with the very laws of nature themselves. And this embarks us on the uncharted waters of a monumental second-order Butterfly Effect—one whose implications and ramifications are incalculable for finite intelligences. The point is simple: Yes, the world’s particular existing negativities are indeed remediable in theory. But to avert them in practice might well require accepting an even larger array of negativities overall. The cost of avoiding those manifest evils of this world would then be the realization of an even larger mass of misfortune. And the very possibility of

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this prospect shows that the Improvability Argument does not actually manage to accomplish its aim. 6. THE PACKAGE-DEAL PREDICAMENT: THE TEETER-TOTTER EFFECT “But surely if one effected this-or-that modification in the world without changing anything else one would improve matters thereby.” Alas, the difficulty here lies in that pivotal phrase “without changing anything else.” In anything worthy of the name “world” the constituent components are interrelated and interconnected. You cannot change one without changing innumerable others. The situation is not unlike that of language. Change the U of GUST to I and you do not leave the rest unchanged. Everything changes: shape, meaning, pronunciation. Granted, most of us would have little difficulty in conjuring up a few of our fellows without whom the world would be better off—or so we think. But the problem is that in a lawful world getting rid of them would have to be achieved in a way that effects broader changes— more virulent diseases, more enterprising murderers, stronger impetus to suicide—all of which have wider and potentially deleterious consequences. A world is an infinitely complex arrangement of interlocked features and interrelated factors. And it is bound to have these coordinated in a complexity interrelated harmony. Modify this and you disturb that. After all, changes to the existing order of things do not come costfree. Could Homo sapiens be improved by yet another pair of eyes at the back of the head? Presumably not. The redesign of this biosystem could not be effected without incurring additional vulnerabilities. And the mechanisms for processing the additional information provided would involve added complications that would doubtless not be costeffective in added benefit. Nature has doubtless seen to it that we are as well adjusted to our bio-niche as the world’s fabric of natural law permits. And there is no reason to refrain from seeing this sort of situation replicated on a cosmic scale. The upshot of these considerations is thus clear. The idea that the world’s defects can be fixed by tinkering is decidedly implausible. And given the fact that re-engineering the world-as-a-whole lies be-

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yond our feeble powers, we have to face up to the consideration that— for all we can tell—this is indeed the best of possible worlds, and that changing the existing condition of the universe in any way whatsoever—would diminish the sum-total of its positivities. We have to face the prospect that there is no “quick fix” for the negativities of this world. The world we actually have—and indeed any possible alternative to it—is a coordinated whole. Once starts to tinker with it, it disappears on us. For in seeking to change it, we create conditions where there is no longer any anaphoric “it” to deal with. To tinker with a world is to annihilate it. 7. MOVING FROM IMPROVEMENT TO REPLACEMENT All the same, perhaps something else, something altogether different might take its place. Possibly! But this something else could readily prove to be worse overall. Consider the situation of the Display 2 diagram. Think of this as the cross-section of a mountainous terrain. Note that in whatever direction you move away from the peak of A, you go downhill. Small-scale tinkering never yields an improvement. But nevertheless A’s peak is no more than a local maximum. If you abandon A altogether and shift to B you can achieve a greater height. Display 2 CONTRASTING TINKERING WITH REPLACEMENT B A

The situation that is now under considerations is analogous. For it can transpire that: When one “fiddles” with the description of the actual world (A) by changing some of its features in any direction, one indeed makes matters worse, but nevertheless matters improve by aban-

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doning this world altogether and shifting over to some entirely different world (B). So even a world that cannot be improved by change might nevertheless be improved upon by all-out replacement. Thus the fact that this world may not be improvable through change does not automatically mean that it is “the best of all possible worlds.” Nonimprovability is not the same as all-out optimality. To improve something is still to keep it, while to improve on it contemplates replacement. And so nonimprovability notwithstanding, one might nevertheless proceed to argue that another world—a replacement one radically different from ours—might be superior to it. However to bring this line of thought to a convincing conclusion would require initiating some world or other that could reasonably be seen as superior to ours. And this is a task that confronts the replacement theorist with impossible difficulties. For how could such a world possibly be put on the agenda of consideration? Improving upon the actual world calls for identifying some other, different and alternative nonexistent world that is demonstrably superior. And just this is a task which—as is not hard to see—cannot possibly be effected by finite intelligences. “But surely it is possible for there to be a world without earthquakes!” Indeed so. But the move from a descriptive possibility (no earthquakes) to an authentic world requires a lot of fleshing out. (For example—no earth no earthquakes.) The problem here lies in the move from possible states (no earthquakes) to possible worlds. But now to meet the dialectical needs of the situation it will not do to invoke the mere possibility of a superior world. The objector will have to make good his challenge by specifying one in detail. And herein lies the insuperable difficulty. 8. PROBLEMS OF IDENTIFYING POSSIBLE WORLDS At this juncture an important point comes into play with respect to actual vs. possible. With actuals there is a crucial difference between generic and specific knowledge—between knowing that something has a feature and knowing which item has that feature. Here K(∃x∈S)Fx—that is, knowing that some x in S has the property F—is possible without knowing of some specific x that it has F: (∃x∈S)KFx.

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But with mere possibilities the preceding distinction does not apply. The only way of knowing that some mere (nonexistent) possibility has a certain feature is by specifying the possibility that possesses this feature. Real objects have an identity apart from their specification. But mere possibilities do not. And this renders the task of specifying a superior world unachievable for us. “But surely some alternative world would be superior to ours— though I concede an inability to provide an illustrative example.” This sounds plausible enough. Surely some general officer is in the Pentagon right now—although I don’t have a clue as to who that individual might be. But this sort of response will not work, being based on a seriously flawed analogy. For one knows a great deal about the Pentagon and its general modus operandi. But there is nothing comparable going on with respect to merely possible worlds—no general principles of functioning that would lead to a comparable result. Granted, it is in a broad sense conceivable that optimalism fails and that some alternative world might be superior to this one. But this does not bear in the dialectical situation at issue. For the argumentation at issue here is that of the atheist who insists that this world cannot be a divine creation on grounds of its imperfection. “Even I, he says, with my imperfect intellect can come up with ways of improving upon this world.” And in this dialectical context the mere possibility invoked above will not do the job. As contemporary possible world theorists generally see it, we can and should be prepared to contemplate altogether different worlds, worlds removed from and indeed incompatible with our own in their make-up and their modus operandi.20 But what do such worlds involve? For one thing, they must be worlds. As such they will have to be manifolds of concrete reality. To qualify as such, its constituent individuals must also be concrete as regards the definiteness of its makeup. Specifically, a world must be descriptively definite completethat is, any descriptively specifiable feature either must hold of the world or fail to hold of it; there is no other alternative, no prospect of being indecisive with regard to its make-up.21 A world must be decisive about what to be like. In consequence the Law of Excluded Middle must apply: the world and its constituents must exhibit a defi-

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niteness of composition through which any particular sort of situation either definitely does or definitely does not obtain. A possible world must be decisive in its composition: its individuals cannot be “around 6 feet tall”—they have to commit to a definite size.22 After all, a world is not just some sketchily described state of affairs, but will have to be a “saturated” or “maximal” state of affairs-atlargea state that affairs-in-toto can assume, a synoptic totality that suffices to resolve if not everything then at least everything that is in theory resolvable.23 (Unlike the state of affairs that “A pen is writing this sentence” a world cannot leave unresolved whether that pen is writing with black ink or blue.) If an authentic world is to be at issue (be it existent or not) this entity must “make up its mind,” so to speak, about what features it does or does not have.24 Any assertion that purports to be about it must thus be either definitively true or definitively falsehowever difficult (or even impossible) a determination one way or the other may prove to be for particular inquirers, epistemologically speaking. Authentic worlds do and must accordingly have a wholly definite character.25 And just here lies the problem. For we can never manage to identify such a totality. Consider a state-of-affairs indicated by such a claim as “The pen on the table is red.” An item cannot just be red: it has to be a definite shade of redgeneric redness will not do.) Nor is it a state of affairs that “There are two or three people in the room”that state of affairs has to make up its mind. Nor again is it a state of affairs that “The butler did not do it”its being the wicked gardener who did the sort of thing that a state of affairs requires. No matter how much we say, the reality of concrete particulars will go beyond it. As regards those merely possible worlds, we simply have no way to get there from here. The point is not that we could not obtain different universes if we altered the initial conditions of the world or even to laws of nature. Rather it is that the situation of “what would happen if” would become ultimately unproblematic with any universe sufficiently complex to be of interest in the present context. And this consideration is probatively crucial. For to provide a pervasive refutation of optimalism it will not do merely to insist that there

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might possibly be some alternative world superior to the actual. The opponent has to make good on his claim by presenting a cogent case for contending that some specifiable possibility would be superior. But world design is too big a job for us. Actually identifying alternative worlds is impracticable for us as a matter of basic principle. 9. WITH WORLDS, PERFECTION IS NOT A PROSPECT And further difficulties lurk. Prominent among them is the salient consideration that with worlds, perfection is unattainable with respect to created worlds. One salient reason for this is the phenomenon of what might be called desideratum conflicts where in advancing with one positivity we automatically diminish another. What we have here is vividly manifested in the phenomenon of positivity complementarity that obtains when two parameters of merit are so interconnected that more of one automatically means less of the other, as per the following diagram: Positivity 1

Positivity 2

The crux here is that one aspect of merit can be augmented only at the price of diminishing another. We shall characterize as a Teeter-Totter Condition any arrangement where an improvement in regard to one aspect can only be achieved at the cost of worsening matters in another respect. And whenever two inherently positive factors are (like familiarity and novelty) locked into such a teeter-totter relationship we cannot have it both ways. Whenever this situation is in play, it stands decisively in the way of absolute perfection. Consider a simple example, the case of a domestic garden. On the one hand we want the garden of a house to be extensive—to provide privacy, attractive vistas, scope for diverse planting, and so on. But on the other hand we also want the garden to be small—affordable to install, convenient to manage, affordable to maintain. But of course we

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can’t have it both ways: the garden cannot be both large and small. The desiderata at issue are locked into a see-saw of conflict. Again, any criminal justice system realizable in this imperfect world is going to have inappropriate negatives through letting some of the guilty off while also admitting false positives by condemning some innocents. And the more we rearrange things to diminish one flaw, the greater scope we give to the other. And so it goes in other situations without number. The two types of errors are locked together in a see-saw balance of complementarity that keeps perfection at bay. Throughout such cases we have the situation where realizing more of one desideratum entails a correlative decrease in the other. We cannot have it both ways so that the ideal of an absolute perfection that maximizes every parameter of merit at one and the same time is out of reach. In the interest of viability some sort of compromise must be negotiated, seeing that the concurrent maximization of desiderata is now unavoidably unrealizable. Even an appeal to God will not help here. For as the medieval schoolmen already emphasized, God’s omnipotence consists in an ability to do anything that is possible. Doing the impossible is not as issue. Neither can God make one selfsame proposition both true and false, nor can he make 2 plus 2 come out 5, nor can he forget facts. Nor can God make lesser number exceed the larger, nor turn virtue into vice, nor make an inferior state of things into a superior. The truths of logic and mathematics, and the conceptual truths about the nature of things are not alterable and this holds for God as much as anyone. But—and this is crucial—the impossibility of God’s doing the impossible is not an obstacle to his omnipotence. God can certainly create a good world, and indeed an optimal one. But even He cannot make a manifold of finite being that is flawless and perfect. Given the inherent tension between various modes of merit, a natural world cannot be perfect and exhibit all possible possibilities in maximal degree. As Plato already insisted, the imperfectability of the natural universe is an inevitable aspect of its physical materiality, its embodiment (somatoeides, Politikos 273B).26 And it was followed in this view by the entire neo-Platonic tradition.27 All this harks back to the discussion of the Ontological Argument with its familiar point that such a thing as “a perfect mountain” is

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simply not in the range of possibility. For world-imperfection is built into the very nature of things. Limitedness is unavoidable with finite beings. Humans cannot be super-human—if there at all they have to be there as the type of things they inherently are. In an organically complex world, the interests of some species may have to be subordinated to those of others (e.g., as providers of food). Moreover, the interest of particular individuals may have to be subordinated to those of the entire species as a fire that destroys some trees may nourish the soil for the ampler developments of others later on. World optimization is always maximization under various existential constraints imposed by the taxonomic nature of the things whose realization is being contemplated. And such constraints means that while the world may well be as good as it can be as a whole—i.e., is aggregatively merit-maximizing—nevertheless it is not correspondingly merit maximizing in its parts taken distributively. The condition of many of these parts is far from optimal and can certainly be improved. It is just that the merit of the parts is so interconnected and intertwined that improvement in one area is bound to carry with it diminution in another. The medieval schoolmen already had the correct take on the issue. They inclined to look on perfection as a matter of completeness. For them, “perfect” and “whole” were virtually identical concepts.28 However, they went on to insist that an optimal whole need not be perfect in each of its constituent aspects, and that increasing the perfection of some part of aspect will throw the whole out of balance. As St. Thomas put it “God permitted imperfections in creation when they are necessary for the greater good of the whole.”29 And so, as Leibniz insisted, optimality is one thing and perfection another. And our world can abandon any claims to the latter without compromise to its claims to the former. For things to be “as good as they get” does not require the allocation of perfection. 10. THE SPECTER OF SPINOZISM At this point it might seem that the specter of Spinozism looms ominously before us. For the point of contenting that this is the best of possible worlds—that, for better or worse, this is as good as it gets—is

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clearly preempted by the Spinozistic idea that this is the only possible world. If this were so, then there just would be no alternatives to this world of ours: its existence and nature would become necessary, with the issue of its optimality thereby somewhere between trivial and immaterial.30 But this prospect is unraveled by the fact that the existence of this world is contingent—that there could, in theory, be some different order of existence (or indeed, perhaps no world at all). However, at this point it is needful also to draw a distinction that was already stressed by Leibniz. For such necessity is certainly not tenable if we look to logical possibility and necessity. Alternative world-manifolds are always logically possible, seeing that logic confines itself to generalities—all of its theses and structure being abstract and universal in nature—it cannot mandate the existence of something unique and concrete. However, a specific existent world that contains concreta lies beyond the reach of logically necessity on anything like the standard conception of logic.31 Particularity is always contingent, and any coherent manifold of particular truths is bound to have logically coherent alternatives.32 And so if necessity is to be realized in matters of existence, it cannot be of the strictly logico-conceptual mode, but rather of the metaphysical and indeed as presently contemplated axiological mode. However, necessity will then have lost its sting. For what we now have is, in effect, a Leibnizian theory of the metaphysical necessity of world optimization. For Spinoza the world as it is the one and only possibility. For Leibniz it is the one and only optimal possibility. The difference turns on a single world. But it is one that is obviously farreaching and portentous in import.33 11. OPTIMALISM DOES NOT DEMAND OPTIMISM The traditional approaches to natural or physical evils look to several alternative ways of addressing the problem, preeminently including the following: • An illusionism that dismisses natural evil as merely apparent and not real. This is the approach of Oriental mysticism and of

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the Panglossian unrealism which Voltaire mistakenly attributed to Leibniz. • A facilitationism that sees natural evil as part of the indispensable causal means to a greater good. (The melodrama must have its villain so that the persecuted heroine can fully appreciate the delights of a heroic rescue.) • A compensationism that sees natural evil as compensated for in the larger scheme of things—either in this world or in the next. (This, according to Kant, is the key rationale for belief in an after-life.) • A holism that sees natural evil as the collateral damage that is unavoidable in even the best of possible arrangements contrived with a view to the realization of salient positivities. (This is in essence the Leibnizian view of the universe as a package deal that inextricably links the positive and the negative.) The present discussion’s optimalistic approach best approximates the last of these options. It takes the line that physical evil represents the price of an entry ticket into the best arrangement possible within the limits of inevitable constraints. The world’s physical evils are seen as the inescapable consequences that are bound to occur when intelligent beings of limited capacity come to be emplaced within a world-order whose lawfulness is on the one hand complex enough to permit their rational development but simple enough to afford them cognitive access for the management of their affairs. However, the idea that this is the best of possible worlds emphatically does not commit one to an overly rosy view of its merits. For what optimalism maintains is only that this world, however imperfect, is such that any other possible world (and thus an actively fleshed out world and not just some incomplete indefinite scenario) will involve a still greater balance of negativity over positivity. Accordingly, none of those traditional plaints about this world’s evils and deficiencies refute the prospect of its being the best of possible worlds. For it being the very best of the possibilities need not and will not require being per-

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fect. Even the best of possible worlds can admit all manner of imperfections it is just a matter of there being fewer of them, on balance, than is the case with any of the other alternatives. Saying that this is the best of possible worlds is not necessarily to give it altogether unqualified praise. And so, as an argument against the Leibnizian view, the lucubrations of Voltaire’s Candide are a non-starter. Here Dr. Pangloss’ skeptical pupil pressed him with the question Si c’est ici le meilleur des mondes possibles, que sont donc les autres? (“If this be the best of possible worlds, than what in heaven’s name will the others be like?”)34 But a perfectly good answer was available to the good Doctor, which despite its cogency he was reluctant to give, namely the reply: “Even worse!” The facile optimism of Dr. Pangloss, the butt of Voltaire’s parody Candide, misses the mark if Leibniz (and not some naive and simple-minded Leibnizian) is intended as its target. A plausible objection to optimalism is the challenge of fairness, which effectively runs as follows: Even if one grants that the world as is represents the optimally achievable resolution to the problem of world creation, is it not deeply unfair that some of its members should, for no failing of their own making and responsibility, occupy a position inferior to that of others? The proper handling of this objection is not simple but requires recourse to some rather subtle distinctions. For fairness is a matter of proportioning outcomes to claims. And even as people come into the world without clothes, so they enter it without claims. It is incontestably lamentable that some of the denizens of even the best of possible worlds should fare badly. Their condition is unhappy and unfortunate. They deserve our sympathy in full measure. But victims of unfairness they are not. For unfairness only arises with preexisting claims. And in the context of realizing world-possibilities there simply are none. Those whose lot comes up short in possible worlds may be unfortunate, but they are not victims of unfairness. They have no preexisting claims upon reality—or upon God.

Yet is it not unjust that some should thrive and others suffer? Here it would seem that one can do no better than to revert to the previous consideration that perfect worlds—and in particular, worlds in which

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all individuals are treated with perfect justice—just are not on offer. There simply are no perfect worlds any more than there are perfect men. And we cannot ask it of anyone—not even of God—that they should do better than the best that is possible. 12. CONCLUSION The upshot of these neo-Leibnizian deliberations runs as follows: First, that in relation to natural evil there is no convincing reason to think that the world can be improved by modification and tinkering. Second, that the variant complaint that the actual world could be improved upon by replacement confronts its proponents with the effectively unmeetable challenge that no such putatively superior replacement could ever be identified. Third, that the idea that this world’s manifest imperfection stands in the way of its optimality is quite erroneous since even the best is bound to be imperfect here. But is optimalism not by its very nature theological and thereby unscientific? Surely not! Water flows downwards; tumbleweeds follow the path of least resistance; entropy increases. All such processes exhibit a uniform directionality in respect of some factor. They act planconformably but without any explicit planning. They proceed regularly but without regulation. And axiotropism can be seen as just another such phenomenon—albeit one that functions at a more fundamental level. Nature dictates an optimal arrangement for stacking logs and for packaging cannon balls. The most efficient and effective means of reaching specified ends are often dictates by nature’s laws. In principle this sort of situation could prevail at the global level as well. In closing, it is advisable to return to the start and reemphasize the dialectical purport of the present discussion. It has not been the object here to argue that this clearly imperfect world of ours is actually the best possible. Instead—and far more modestly—the discussion has tried to show that the standard objections to this idea just do not work. So if one is minded to take seriously the Leibnizian view that this is the best of possible worlds, there is no convincing obstacle of general principle to stand in the way.35

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NOTES 1

Albert Einstein might perhaps be viewed as a thinker who sought to turn back the clock here.

2

Some of the classical texts on this issue are presented in Mark Larrimore (ed.), The Problem of Evil (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001). The religious dimension of the problem is subject of a vast literature. On its history and (very extensive) bibliography see Friedrich Billicsich, Das Problem des Übels in der Philosophie des Abendlandes, 3 volumes (Wien: Verlag S. Sexl, 1952–59). However, this classic study of the history of the Problem of Evil devotes only one somewhat perfunctory chapter (Vol. III, pp. 195–205) to the issue of evil in nature. And even here it is the negative aspect of the struggle of organic existence inherent in the Darwinian survival of the fittest that is its focus. The issue of the prospect of imperfect design is that physical order of nature does not figure in this otherwise monumental work.

3

Timaeus, 298 and also 29E–30B.

4

Bertrand Russell, Religion and Science (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), p. 222.

5

Bertrand Russell, ibid., pp. 194.

6

David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Part 11.

7

Ibid. For a modern perspective on the issues see John R. Hick, Philosophy of Religion (4th ed., Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1990).

8

Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil (New Haven: Harper Torch Books, 1974). See also Roderick M. Chisholm, “The Defeat of Good and Evil,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, vol. 42 (1968–69), pp. 26–38.

9

See, for example, R. K. Perkins, Jr., “An Atheistic Argument from the Improvability of the Universe,” Nous, vol. 17 (1983), pp. 239–50.

10

Bertrand Russell, loc.cit..

11

This also provides an objection to some versions of a doctrine of intelligent design. On Intelligent Design Theory see J. H. Davis and H. L. Poe, Chance and Dance: The Evolution of Design (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Foundation, 2008); William A. Dembski, Intelligence Design (Downer’s Gove, Ill, 1999); Ernan McMullin (ed.), Evolution and Creation (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985); Roger Penrose, Tower of Babel: Scientific Evidence and the New Creations (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1998); Del Ratsch, Nature, Design, and

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NOTES

Sciences (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001); Michael Ruse, The Evolution-Creation Struggle (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2000); as well as Elliot Sober, Philosophy of Biology (2nd ed., Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 2000); 12

Admittedly cashing in this loose reference to “the condition of intelligent beings” will need a good deal of fleshing out. Is one to be a Rawlsin maximin theorist for whom the standard is set by the condition of the worst (the least well-off). Is one to be an elitist from whom the standard is the condition of the best, the most able and highly developed? Or is one to be a democrat whose standard is the preponderant condition of the middle run? And is the standard—however otherwise construed— to be applies at the level of individuals or at the level of species? Clearly larger and deeper issues lurk behind these questions. But we need not pursue them here because the thrust of the considerations of the present deliberations will apply across the board—mutatis mutandis—no matter which specific standard is chosen.

13

See Nicholas Rescher, Conditionals (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2007), pp. 77– 83.

14

This condition of things is old news, already noted in his influential Treatise on Obligations by the medieval scholastic philosopher Walter Burley (ca. 1275–ca. 1345) laid down the rule: When a false contingent proposition is posited, one can prove any other false proposition that is compatible with it. Translated in part in N. Kretzman and E. Stump, The Cambridge Translation of Medieval Philosophical Texts, Vol. I: Logic and Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), see pp. 389–412. His reasoning proceeded by way of an example, and went as follows.

15

Lorenz’s discussion gave rise to New Line Cinema’s 2004 feature film The Butterfly Effect starring Ashton Kutcher and Amy Smart.

16

Think here of the fine-tuning of the initial conditions of cosmic evolution that plays so prominent a role in the setting of the Anthropic Hypothesis.

17

An intriguing example of the adverse consequences of “improving” matters in the world is afforded in Kenneth Boulding’s intriguing study of the unhappy consequences of significant life prolongation: “The Menace of Methusalah” in the Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences, vol. 55, no. 7 (March 1965), pp. 171– 179.

18

F. R. Tennant, Philosophical Theology, 2 volumes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928), vol. II, p. 201.

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NOTES 19

Bruce Reichenbach, Evil and a Good God (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982), p. 106. I myself would amend the passage to read “the inevitable consequences.” The issue is one of the “collateral (damage)” that is (unavoidable) in pursuing the greatest achievable measure of the good.

20

On possible worlds in literary theory in their interrelationship with philosophical issues see Mihailesau and Hamarneh (eds.), Fiction Updated: Theories of Fictionality, Narratology, and Poetics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977.)

21

On this feature of concrete worlds see the author’s “Leibniz and Possible Worlds,” Studia Leibnitiana, vol. 28 (1995), pp. 129–62.

22

See, for example, Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974). An alternative perspective could be mereological: a possible world now being seen as simply the sum-total of the possible individuals that exist within it. (The two approaches come to the same thing if we adopt a theory of reductive particularismor “methodological individualism” as it is sometimes called according to which every state-of-affairs regarding things-in-general reduces to a collection of facts about some set of individuals.)

23

“A possible world, then, is a possible state of affairsone that is possible in the broadly logical sense.” (Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974], p. 44).

24

Some logicians regard possible worlds as collections of statement rather than objects. But while there is much to be said for such an approach, it faces two big obstacles: (1) not every collection of (compatible) statements can plausibly be said to constitute a world, but rather (2) only those can do so those which satisfy an appropriate manifold of special conditions intending that any “word characterizing” set propositions must both inferentially closed and descriptively complete by way of assuring that any possible contention about an object is either true or false. And such macro-sets of statements lie beyond our grasp.

25

Authentic worlds thus differ from the schematic “worlds” often contemplated by model logicians. The latter are not possible worlds at all, but conceptual constructs, while, insofar as we can provide them, are inadequate to the needs of the situation.

26

See Plato’s Timaeus 28Cff, 35A, 50Dff.

27

Even—indeed especially—in the sunlight, will material objects cast a shadow. Cf. Plotinus, Enneads, III 2.5.

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NOTES 28

Totum et perfectum sunt quasi idem Duns Scotus maintained. (Quoted from W. Tatarkiewicz, On Perfection (Warsaw: Warsaw University Press, 1992), p. 47. St. Thomas maintained that perfectum dicitur cui nilil deest secundum modum suae perfectionis (Summa Theologiae I 4.1 ad resp.). The substantial study of The Idea of Perfection in Christian Theology (London: Oxford University Press, 1934) by R. N. Flew addresses the issue of human imperfection only; the idea of imperfection in physical reality is not considered. On larger aspects of the concept of perfection see Tatarkeiwicz 1992 as well as M. Foss, The Idea of Perfection in Christian Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946).

29

St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I. 4.1.

30

Some physicists hold that if the world’s lawful make-up is such that if things were even slightly different, there could be no world at all. And then this would be the only physically possible world. See Michael Heller, Ultimate Explanations of the Universe (Berlin: Springer, 2009), pp. 92–93). But this is a mater of necessitation by the physical laws as they stand—which could themselves be different. And this is not spinozisism because he wants to trade in logical-theoretical possibility.

31

Even the Ontological Argument for God’s existence—controversial as it is—does not rest on considerations of mere logic, but involves a “creative definition” namely a substantively laden specification of the nature of the deity.

32

This line of objection to Spinoza’s argumentation is admittedly sketchy and in need of a great deal of development. But in any case, it’s potentially controversial nature inheres in the consideration that it is effectively identical with St. Anselm’s proof of God’s existence save only for the substitution of naturea for deus.

33

See Sven K. Knebel, “Necessitas moralis ad optimum” in Studia Leibnitiana, vol. XXIII (1991), pp. 3–24 and 78–92, and Vol. XXIV (1992), pp. 182–251. See also Stefan Lorenz, De mundo optimo (Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 1997; Studia Leibnitiana Supplementa, Vol. XXXI).

34

“Discourse on Metaphysics,” §6. Cf ibid, §5, and also “The Principals of Nature and of Grace,” §10; Theodicy, §208.

35

This essay originated as a lecture to the undergraduate philosophy club at the University of Pittsburgh in the spring of 2010.

Chapter Five ON THE BEARERS OF MORAL OBLIGATION

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he question to be addressed here is not who are the appropriate beneficiaries of people’s moral comportment—a recipient class that should certainly include infants, insane people, and very possibly animals. Rather, the present discussion will ask about the appropriate bearers of moral obligations—those who have moral duties and can appropriately be reproached and reprehended for ignoring or violating them.1 So upon whom are moral duties incumbent? Who can rightfully count as a subject of moral praise or recrimination? As a first attempt one might be inclined to respond: people, human beings, members of homo sapiens. But this would clearly be taking too narrow and parochial view of the matter. The theologian will surely ask: “Why should angels be excluded? What of Satan’s transgressions?” The Science-fiction aficionado will ask: “What of intelligent beings from other planets in the cosmos? Cannot those little green men also lie, cheat, and murder?” As a next attempt one might be tempted to respond: “Any and every agent who could have acted differently.” But this won’t do. After all, the dog that bites me could have acted differently. His biting is no doubt the subject of warranted regret, but not really of reprehension or reproach. As a third attempt one might respond “Any and every free rational agent: any agent who acts for reasons but who could have acted differently if he had decided to do so.” But this again won’t do. For while it presumably will not include the dog, it may well be true of some slightly more developed animal—a higher primate or porpoise say— of whom it may well be true that it could have decided to act differently although we would be reluctant to deem it morally responsible. To get the matter right we have to complicate things a bit more, and change our reply to: “Any rational agent equipped with a moral sense,

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that is who could have decided to act differently for the right sort of reason—one that involves the realization that acting figures in the range of moral appraisal as the right or the wrong thing to do.” Moral obligations are incumbent only on those intelligent agents who are possessed of a moral sense and motivated by its indications. And even this is not quite sufficient. For not only must our intelligent agents have a capacity for deciding their actions on the basis of some considerations regarding the appropriate/inappropriate (“right” or “wrong”) thing to do but they must dispose over the relevantly appropriate mode of this distinction—namely that which pivots on a proper apprehension of the interests of other such agents and of the need to honor and safeguard them in one’s own decisions. These last conditions specifically require that our rational agent must also be a decider who is also: • empathetic—able to recognize that other beings have interests (e.g. in not being deceived, not being injured, and the like). • recognitive—able to realize that honoring the appropriate interests of others constitutes a reason for deciding one’s own actions. So the overall answer to our question is that a bearer of moral duties must be able to possess, at least in potentiality, a certain range of thought-geared capacities, in that he must be: intelligent, rational, emphatic, and recognitive. The point is that moral duties are akin to legal ones in that the crux of the matter is the requirement that (1) the agent can properly discern the difference between right and wrong, and (2) willing and is able to deploy those realizations as reasons for doing and acting. And so, to be a bearer of moral duties one must be capable of seeing oneself as such. Only someone for whom safeguarding the interests of others can serve as a reason for his own choices—that is, only someone who can possibly do what morality requires—can possibly qualify as a bearer of moral duties.

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This of course raises the question: How is one to tell whether a given individual whom one acknowledges as an intelligent being is actually whose actions are—or can be—motivated by a moral sense? To begin with, this is clearly not something that we can observe. Rather, it is something that we impute to others through judgments made on the basis of evidential indications. And here merely observing their actions will not suffice. We need to be able to gain some insight into the thought processes that serve to motivate them. But now comes another crucial consideration. I can only make appropriate judgments about the extent to which you know the difference between right and wrong on the basis of my own position regarding this distinction. After all, my claiming that you know what a cow is presupposes my claiming to know this for myself. If I cannot tell what counts as a cow, then I cannot securely tell that you do. And this also holds for acting rightly or wrongly. Appropriately to attribute to you a recognition of the difference at issue I must myself be able to recognize it. To see X as a cogent moral case for you I must acknowledge its obligatoriness upon me. To see you as having moral responsibility I must see myself as also doing so. As regards being a moral agent is concerned, we can say that “it takes one to know one.” Only by acknowledging myself to be a bearer of moral duties can I cogently hold someone else morally responsible for their acts. Seeing someone as a morally responsible agent—exactly like seeing someone as an intelligent or as a rational being—is something that is only cogent for those who regard themselves as such. With many conceptions we can separate issues of meaning from issues of application. You can, for example, know what it is to be a cat—viz. to be a member of the species felix or to be a vertebrate of such-and-such a description—without ever being able to identify a particular instance thereof (say because you lack the means of determining whether a particular animal has a backbone.) But with certain conceptions this sort of thing is not feasible—and in particular with being intelligent, being an agent, and being a moral agent. Because if you do not acknowledge this in your own case—if self-application is beyond your reach—then you just do not understand the conception at issue.

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There is something going on here that sound rather circular: “To be a moral agent calls for having a moral sense, to have a moral sense is to recognize what is required of moral agents.” This sounds decidedly circular. And it is. But the circle is a harmless one. It simply illustrates the holistic interconnectedness of certain concepts. “To be a cause is to produce an effect. To be an effect is to be the product of a cause.” Such conceptual directions are not intended to provide an explanatory entry from without. In the case of morality this would be provided by some such formula as “To be moral is to have the interest of others figure as reasons in deliberations about one’s action.” Two conclusions emerge: First that the only bearers of moral duty are free rational agents who can both recognize the difference between right and wrong and be motivated by this recognition. And the second salient conclusion is that morality—like intelligence and rationality— is an inherently reflexive conception. To be able appropriately to ascribe this status to another we must also claim it with regard to ourselves.2 Some theorists may well think that to class someone as a moral agent, one must have it that this individual has the same conception of what is morally right or wrong as the others and that determining the universality of such a conception as actually shared among all is beyond our reach. This seems to cast a dark shadow over any attempt to ascribe moral credit or blame to particular individuals. However, certain crucially deflective considerations will now arise—in particular that what really matters is not merely having the same conception but actually having the correct conception. And this holds not just for morality but across the board. To enroll you in the class of cat-recognizers, I must concede to you not only having the same conception of cats that I have, but must stand committed to the idea that you—and indeed both of us—have a correct conception of the matter. In classing you as a statistician I postulate a commonality of understanding with regard to what this indeed is. And much the same holds for moral agency. One cannot regard the commonality at issue as beyond one’s reach, one has to presume and postulate it from the very outset of any meaningful discussion. Communicative commonality may well have its mysteries. But they are no murkier with respect to morality than anywhere else.3

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NOTES 1

The instructive book on Moral Status by Mary Anne Warren (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), treats of moral status or standing through considering what “it is to be an entity toward which moral agents have, or can have, moral obligations” (p. 1). This issue is unquestionably interesting and important, but it is not on the agenda of this present discussion.

2

The recent book by John F. Kavanaugh S. J., Who Count as Persons has a title that makes it sound as though it were squarely on the topic of the present discussion. But it speaks throughout of “human persons” and of “our [human] personhood” and proceeds as though humanity and personhood could be identified. Accordingly, it entirely sidesteps the issue that is of focal concern in the present discussion. (Kavanagh’s deserving target is the denial of personhood to “inferior” human beings.)

3

This essay originated in a lecture for a graduate seminar on Kant in the autumn of 2009.

Chapter Six FREE WILL 1. ON EVIDENTIATING FREE WILL

T

here actually are two very different questions: (1) What is it to have free will: just what would a realization of this condition consist in?, and (2) Do we humans actually have a free will; do we indeed possess this capacity? The first issue is fairly simple. An intelligent agent has free will if at least some of its actions are ultimately under the control of its thought—and specifically under the control of its own deliberated choices made entirely without intervention by external forces or constraints. The second issue is more complex and problematic. On the present account, an action is quintessentially free when: 1. What the agent actually does is appropriately in line with what he is trying to do, where 2. What the agent is trying to do is appropriately in line with what he chooses to do, and 3. What the agent chooses to (tries to) do is the result of deliberation conducted autonomously on his own account without undue influence from without. Free action is, in consequence, a conception heavily intoned with fundamentally normative conceptions—to wit appropriate alignment and undue external influences. The presence of these normative conditions unquestionably renders the concept into something rather subtle and complex. But this circumstance no more prevents that concept from actually having applications any more than it would do with any other subtle and complex concept.

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In the tradition of Laplace and LaMettrie, the psychologist B. F. Skinner made a valiant attempt over many years to render acceptable if not palatable the idea that we are not free, responsible agents who control their actions by means of thought.1 But he has found this to be a hard sell2 as becomes readily understandable in contemplating two questions: 1. Given the option between seeing yourself as a free and responsible agent or not, which would you prefer? 2. What would you think of someone who, given the aforementioned option would prefer the anti-libertarian alternative? People naturally incline to think of themselves as free agents, and free will is assuredly something we would like to have if we can get it. But can we reasonably lay claim to it? The rejection of free will is one of those philosophical positions— like solipsism or “life is but a dream” paranoia—from which it is not possible to dislodge someone by mere counter-argumentation reasoning from somehow self-evident premisses. For the exponent of the position could readily project the following dilemmatic reasoning: My denial of free will is unavoidable. For since I lack freedom of the will, I reject it because I must. And even if my will were free, I would reject freedom of the will because I would choose to do so.

Moreover, the response of modus tollens to the proponent’s modus ponens is always available to counter the argumentation. The refutation of determinism must proceed by plausibilistic rather than demonstrative reasoning, and must address the as-yet uncommitted rather than the convinced determinist. As medieval philosophers such as Duns Scotus already noted in medieval times, the will’s freedom is something one cannot demonstrate by reasoning abstractly from general principles. Moreover, Immanuel Kant also argued plausibly that freedom of the will is transcendental in being such that observationally geared inquiry cannot

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possibly settle the question of its reality one way or the other.3 So how can one get there from here? In the end, the question “Do people have free will?” is not a straightforwardly observational issue such as “Do roses have petals?” Like the quark, free will is not an observable phenomenon. Its endorsement will have to be a matter of “inference to the best explanatory systematization” over a very extensive range of fact. A more promising approach would be one that asks: Can we best make overall sense of the observable phenomena by supposing or postulating freedom of the will in humans? So—what kind of substantiation for freedom of the will could there possibly be? Given that straightforward observation cannot resolve matters for us, the only evidential substantiation of free will that could actually be available to us is something rather more tentative and indirect, consisting in such considerations as the following: (1) The presumptive evidence afforded by the experiential phenomenology of deliberation in matters of choice and decision. Here, the reality of it is that we humans—or at any rate most of us— have a virtually irrepressible sense of being in charge of what we decide. We have difficulty persuading ourselves that in making up our own minds about alternatives we are at the mercy of forces and agencies beyond the reach of our control. That we are free in various situations to make our choice of acting conformably to our wishes—to make one’s fingers move when one so chooses—appears to be among the most commonplace of human experiences, as is the fact that one can often shift the focus of one’s attention at will when awake (though not when asleep and dreaming). (2) The presumptive evidence afforded by the virtually irresistible inclination to see others as morally, ethically, and normativity responsible agents who are potentially capable of autonomous choice and decision. We standardly regard other people as free and responsible agents and view what people do to us and to one another in a light very different from that of the design of an animal or a machine.

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(3) The presumptive evidence afforded by the common practice of reasoning with people in matters of choice and decision. The general course of human experience has induced in us a strong inclination to acknowledge the potential rationality of others— of their thought being in charge here in ways that can be affected by materials we put at their disposal for consideration in these deliberations. Throughout our dealings with people we are strongly inclined to see them too as intelligent agents whose thoughts put them in charge of what they choose and decide.4 And this points also to— (4) The presumptive evidence afforded by our view of ourselves and our species as rational and morally responsible agents. Free agency is an integral constituent of our self-perception as a special sort of being who acts not only by reflex, programming or conditioning but occasionally—and indeed often—by free choice. And the fact of it is that we standardly credit people with being free agents with responsibility for what they do. Moreover, free will is pivotal not just for rationality (the guidance of reason) but also morality—seeing that, as Kant already stressed, moral responsibility is inextricably interconnected with freedom of the will. Granted, feeling sure of one’s freedom is no secure indicator for being free. After all, this conviction or feeling that we are free to act—what German philosophers call Freiheitsgefühl—does not decisively prove anything since feelings can sometimes be misleading or illusionary.5 And so, are we ever really in control? How can you be sure that you can move your arm? You just know! There really is no “How to be sure?” about it, any more than in myriad other cases. (How do you know that you actually know what “know” means?) If you are genuinely unsure about this sort of thing, you are in deep trouble—trouble so deep that there is little that people can do by communicative means to lift you out of it. Granted, there will be problems about the limits of our control. (Just how long can we hold our breadth?) But that you can try to do so for a while is something that you “just know.” The prospect of such a choice in straightforward cases is one of those facts

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that is no less clear than any substantiating considerations that could possibly be brought forth to evidentiate it. In the end, there is no reason to reject our sense of freedom as an evidential indicator that is less qualified to indicate the fact that the feeling that we are unwell provides us an indication of illness. Feelings may not prove, but they do evidentiate. In this way, those evidential indications, indecisive though they are, provide for a dialectic of the following structure: The general tenor of everyday experience leads people to think of themselves as free agents who control their decisions and actions. In the face of the pro-presumption that this circumstance establishes it will take a strong argument to the contrary to defeat it. But the flaws and fallacies one encounters throughout the range of the standard determinist arguments serve to indicate that the opposing con-case simply lacks the requisite strength to prevail.

And various other perspectives can also be brought to bear. Thus suppose an alien spaceship landed and we could establish communication with the little green men that emerge. They seem intelligent and they certainly qualify as agents since they apparently built and navigated that spacecraft. But are they really free agents or mere automata of some sophisticated sort? How could we possibly tell? What sort of things could they possibly do that would convince us? What actual evidence of volitional freedom could they offer us—deliberation, hesitation, consultation, persuasion? And what else? What more could one reasonably ask for? In the circumstances we would have no good reason to abstain from crediting them with free will. As one reflects on this, one is led to the realization that everything they could possibly do in this line is something that we can observe our fellow humans actually doing. And so why should what holds for their goose not hold for our gander as well? In the end, then, the evidentiation of free will comes down to a question of proportion—of weighing the probative weight of the considerations that speak in favor in relation to the evidence that there possibly could be. And on this basis it would appear that all the evidence for human freedom that we could possibly have—all that we

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could reasonably ask for—is actually there, exerting its preponderating force. It is virtually impossible to think of an appropriately truth engendering filler for completing the formula If our will is indeed free, then we could reasonably expect to find that - - - .

that would, nevertheless, fail to realize the truth of We do actually find that - - - .

All of the evidence that could possibly be available to us to speak on behalf of our will’s being free is in fact there. The question “What more could you possibly want?” should effectively settle the issue. 2. IS FREE WILL UNSCIENTIFIC? But is the doctrine of free will not inherently unscientific? Does modern science not counter-evidentiate it? And, in particular, how in the present age can you discuss free will without bringing neuroscience into it? Easily! Whether acts of free will do or do not occur is no more an issue of neuroscience than whether headaches do or do not occur. For the question of the existence of headaches is not a fact of neuroscience at all. The discipline can tell us how headaches occur—that is, it can elaborate in detail what goes on in our brains when we have them. (And for practical purposes we are generally—even if illogically— minded to accept this how as also addressing the question why.) But neuroscience is certainly not required for telling us that we have them—and actually is not really in a position to address the matter. And the situation is much the same with free will. That our will is free (if free it is)—that we actually sometimes make choices and decisions in the manner that the free will theory maintains—is not something on which the teaching of neuroscience as such has much bearing. On the other hand, what it is that goes on in our brains when those putatively free decisions are being made is certainly something on which neuroscience could unquestionably have a lot to offer. But—and this is the

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key point—the issue of the existence of free choices and decisions is something that will have to be decided first—on grounds quite apart from the operations of neuroscience. THAT we suffer headaches or think logically or decide freely are all matters that have to be resolved on a basis prior to and independently of the teachings of neuroscience about what sorts of physico-denial processes go on in the brain WHEN we have experiences of this sort. Were the former issues not addressed first and independently, the latter could not arise. There is no doubt an intimate, one-to-one correlation between thought-states and brain-states. But no matter how done the correspondence, the question which is the dependent and which the independent variable—i.e., which is the originative agent in that coordinated change—be it mind or brain, is entirely open. All of those brain psychological studies so beloved by free-will adversaries do nothing whatsoever to settle this key issue. The mechanics of brain functioning no more imposes a causal constraint on our thought and deliberation than the mechanics of a typewriter imposes a+ causal constraint upon the message of the texts that it produces. Free will doubters often claim that it is something mysterious and supra-natural, requiring a suspension of disbelief regarding the standard view of natural occurrence subject to the Principle of Causality. As one recent writer puts it: Agent causation is a frankly mysterious doctrine, positing something unparalleled by anything we discover in the causal processes of chemical reactionism, nuclear fission and fusion, magnetic attraction, hurricanes, volcanoes, or such biological processes as metabolism, growth, immune reactions, and photosynthesis. Is there such a thing? When libertarians insist that there must be, they [build upon sand].6

But this sort of complaint is deeply problematic. Free will, properly regarded, hinges on the capacity of the mind to seize the initiative in effecting changes in the developmental course of mind-brain coordinated occurrence. And this is something that need certainly not be seen as mysterious or supra-natural. After all, with the development of minds upon the world stage in the course of evolution, various capacities and capabilities come upon the scene emergently, adding new

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sorts of operations to the repertoire of mammalian capacities— remembering past occurrences, for example, or imagining future ones. And one of these developmental innovations is the capacity of the mind to take the initiative in effecting change in the setting of mind from coordinate developments. And on this basis there is nothing mysterious or supra-natural about it. Modern scientism—though not necessarily modern science—looks on man as a leaf blown about hither and thither by the winds of nature’s impersonal causality. But this is a decidedly questionable view as long as that leaf possesses some power of self-propulsion. The long and short of it is that nothing in a sensible scientific naturalism need be seen as standing in the way of free agency of the agent-in-charge variety, seeing that those personal operations and functionings of ours are nowise imposed on us from without by machinations beyond the reach of our own (at least partial) control. The issues of a wider domain do of course circumscribe those of a narrower one. Medicine must conform to biology; literature to linguistics, bridge-building to material science. And similarly our behavioral actions must conform to bio-physics. But to think that the laws of the wider domain determine those of the narrower—that with greater specificity there do not arise entirely new issues that the wider domain does not even begin to address, issues with a characteristic phenomenology of their own—would be not just wrong but foolish. The reality of it is that biophysics simply does not address the topics that free will invokes. It can no more settle issues of human agency than issues of biochemistry can settle matters of cuisine. Human consciousness and its works are evidentially linked to processes deep rooted in our mind’s physio-psychological makeup. But these processes still appertain to us—to that amalgam of physical processes and psychological operations that constitute us as the individuals we are. Even when our mental activities are engendered by the operations of our brain, the fact remains that it is our brain that is at issue and that those acts of ours are things that we do and not things done for us or to us by some external agency. It is us as human persons who are in control here through the workings of our own minds, irrespective of whatever the processual mechanics of their operation may prove to be.

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We are told that the existence of free decisions is thrown into doubt by the fact that electromagnetic brain stimulation can produce in an agent what someone ordinarily would consider to be a free decision. To this end, however, all that fancy gadgetry is not really needed. Pavlovian conditioning has ago produced the same effects on a low-tech basis or again, going to bed is generally seen as the product of free decision but it too can be engendered manipulatively by ingesting a soporific substance. What ordinarily looks to be a free decision can in various ways be engendered manipulatively in various sorts of conditions. But that of course has no bearing on whether or not they occur in other, more normal condition and circumstances. Will determinism no more validates freedom of the will than optical illusion can validate the informativeness of sight. There are, in fact, substantial problems with each of the main reasons recently advanced for the idea that contemporary psychology and neuro-science counter-indicates the freedom of the will. Let us consider some of them: • People are generally predictable and as one gets to know more about them one can predict with great confidence how they will make their decisions and choices. Response: The predictability at issue is statistical and probabilistic, and freedom is incompatible only with agent-external predetermination and not with probabilistic predictability. Moreover, such prediction—be it probabilistic or not—is based on an agent’s own motivational make-up and such agent-correlative motivation-grounded predictability is entirely consistent with freedom of the will. • Purported insistences of free agency often turn out to be explicable on the basis of natural causality. Various psychological experiments show people will mis-attribute certain of their decisions to acts of free will,7 mistakenly crediting to deliberation what is the product of conditioning, hypnosis, or other physical or psychological manipulation.8 Thus when a finger is moved by physical manipulation (e.g., when an iron ring is attached to

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a magnet) the agent may mistake the resultant movement for free.9 Response: Mistakes about free will do not establish its nonexistence. Trial lawyers and entertainment magicians have long noted that people can be self-deluded about what they see. But this does not refute the general reliability of vision and invalidate sight as a source of frequently (or even predominantly) correct information. And as elementary logic shows even if you pile up to the height of Mt. Everest instances where humans do not act freely, this fails to show that they will not sometimes do so. That something does not happen “often” or “mostly” or even “almost always” cannot invalidate the idea that it sometimes does. • Neuroscientists have recently performed experiments to show that various modes of brain stimulation will exert influence upon the outcomes of deliberate choice leaving the agent with illusions about the extent to which he is in control.10 And in in a series of experiments reprinted in 1990, K. Amour and S. C. Gandieva found that selective magnetic stimulates of the hemispheres of the brain could strongly influence what hand people decided—freely as they saw it—to move.11 Response: All of those demonstrations indicating that braincausality sometimes dominates thought-motivation do nothing to show that the reverse is not sometimes—or indeed often—the case. • Experiments regarding the timing of act-engendering brain activity in relation to the experience of decision have suggested that people sometimes perform actions inaugurated antecedently to the time they take themselves to have decided upon them. In these experiments there are neurological situations of motionmotivation a minute fraction of a second before the subject indicates the outset of a conscious desire to perform the movement.12

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Response: There is nothing in the nature of these experiments to preclude the plausible prospect that the agents had arrived at a (free) decision at the sub-conscious level before they became aware of it. • Even as agents can be deluded and mistaken about the actions they do or do not perform, as in the case of phantom limbs, so they can be deluded and mistaken about the voluntariness of their doings, and surmise phantom volitions for formal investments.13 Response: This objection surely cuts very little ice. There is, after all, very little that we cannot possibly be mistaken about. • We understand how biophysical processes can cause actions. But how mind (thought) can influence matter (action)—as free agency would require—is something mysterious and unscientific. Response: A failure to understand how something works does not remove it from the realm of reality. (Who understands hypnosis acupuncture, placebos, or autosuggestion?) To maintain that phenomenon is annihilated by a lack of understanding regarding its causal origin is a very strange theory as to how thought can control reality. • Some psychological experiments indicate that our deliberate decision are sometimes influenced by reason extraneous considerations—annoyed people make less generous decisions, people in turbulent environments make less benevolent decisions.14 Their decisions appear to be determined—or at least strongly influenced—by reason-irrelevant considerations. Response: Such aberrations do not make for a general rule. Moreover, even if we count these irrational influences as modes of undue influence this still leaves claims to metaphysical free-

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dom unaffected and goes no further than to countervail against moral freedom. Overall, one consideration is paramount: Pretty well anything we humans do can be mismanaged. We can make mistakes in computation, mis-remember events, succumb to optical illusions, feel pain in missing limbs. And similarly we can be mistaken in our particular judgments of freedom and err in deeming free various things done under the influence of hypnosis, conditioning, or the like. But in no sphere does the fact that we are sometimes mistaken carry over to systemic erroneousness. The fact of occasional mis-remembrance does not negate the ability of memory at large. The possession of a capacity to will freely is not annihilated by the fact that we sometimes make mistakes in the matter. Here as elsewhere generalizing from tendentiously preselected instances is a very questionable practice.15 3. FREE-WILL NATURALISM AND EVOLUTION One often has it said that “the very idea of free will is antithetical to science because free will is something occult that cannot possibly be scientifically naturalized.” But it is—or should be—hard to work up much sympathy to this objection as it figures in Roy Weatherford’s insistence that “belief in free will presumes a special and puzzling separation [of humans] from the natural world.”16 Here one can certainly accept special, seeing that free will instances intelligence and that intelligence occupies a rather special place in the world. But that such rarity should constitute a puzzling separation from nature is itself a rather puzzling claim. Surely any sensible exponent of free will could (and should) be happy to see it as part of the natural course of things. For if free will exists—if homo sapiens can indeed make free choices and decisions—then this should ideally be part of the natural order of things. And in fact if we indeed are free, then this has to be so for roughly the same reason that we are intelligent—that is, because evolution works things out that way. The objection at issue is thus fallacious in that it rests on the inappropriate presupposition that free will has to be something super- or preter-natural. The mind-engendered decisions of intelligent agents on

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the basis of motivational deliberation is itself a mode of causal determination of a kind characteristic of the modus operandi of such beings. Choosing and deciding must be as much a capacity developed through evolutionary emergence as is speaking or imagining possibilities. If free will there is, it will and can be an aspect of how naturally evolved beings operate on nature’s stage. These deliberations point to a further probatively significant point, namely the patent utility of free will as an evolutionary resource. For what lies at the heart and core of free will is up-to-the-last-moment thought-control by a rational agent of his deliberation-produced choices and decision in the light of his ongoingly updated information and evaluation. To see that such a capacity is of advantage in matters of survival is surely not a matter of rocket-science. And so, the explanatory rationale for this innovation would be substantially the same as that for any other sort of evolution-emergent capability, namely that it contributes profitability to the business of natural selection. It is, clearly, an efficient and effective way for an intelligent agent to function successfully in a complex environment for it to be equipped with a free will, seeing that this will give the agent the power to adjust his decisions and choices to the detail of conditions as he discerns them to be up to the moment of resolution. Only such an arrangement puts the agent into an optimal position to provide for his then-operative needs and wants, affording a flexible, ongoingly updated harmonization of information and the satisfaction of needs and desires. After all, if homo-sapiens indeed has a free will he has surely come to have it because evolution put it there for his advantage. In the final analysis the realization of free will in (some of) this world’s creatures will hinge on its status of an instrumentality of survival-advantage. There are, of course, many different ways for a creature to shape its activities on the world stage so as to meet its needs and wants: sheer biochemical automatism, pure instinct, and even random groping. But intelligently managed free agency—the ongoingly monitored orientation of behavior to desire satisfaction via thought based on information secured through inquiry—is also one of these. And experience and theory alike indicate that only the flexibility of free decision and choice can most efficiently deliver the goods here.

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The ancient Greeks divided reality into the works of nature (phusius) and the contrivances of man (nomos). And this was considered wise of them. For with the developmental emergence of intelligent beings in the world all sorts of new things came into existence. Beings capable of intelligence-guided agency will be capable of • symbol use (and thus linguistic communication) • conjecture and hypothesis entertainment (and thus reasoning and mathematics) • value commitment (and thus romantic love) • rule adoption (and thus social interaction with rights and obligations and duties). And prominent among these there is also over control resource for the exercise of: • reasoned choice (free will) The capacity for deliberative choice is basic to our being what we are—even in matters of cognition in contrast to overt action, since knowing something involves accepting it as true and rejecting its denial as false. Evaluation, the discrimination of positive and negative, plus and minus, is crucial here—and pervasive as well, since it can appertain both to the doings and eventuations of nature (good/bad, pleasant/unpleasant, true/false) and the doings and actions of man (right/wrong, correct/incorrect, appropriate/in-appropriate). And such opposites are always the poles of an axis stretching between them as matters of degree, be it in matter of nature (phusis) or of the mechanations of man (nomos). And such evaluation regarding the doings of people brings to light the specifically nomological dimension coordinate with the evaluative norms that relate specifically to matters in the human sphere: “going by the rules” to do things in the right/wrong way, relating specifically to the evaluation of the doings and producing of people. And just here

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of course “the will” enters in, since the opportunities for appropriate or inappropriate proceedings, for good and bad, action always arise here, and the will is free to choose, be it wisely and properly or not. Freedom is freedom to do things that are foolish, ill-advised, counterproductive. The capacity for rational choice—the ability not only to choose but to do so on the basis of mind-contemplated reasons—is what distinguishes man from the lower animals on this planet. Subhuman creatures can act. And they can act for good or ill. But they cannot act wisely or unwisely since they do not act rationally (i.e. for deliberative reasons) because the evaluative dimension of good vs. bad is missing. The dialectical intertwining of ideas along these conceptual lines thus lies at the basis of the conception of human freedom. Acts of will—choices and decisions—are eventuations of a special sort produced in, by, and for minds. They are a critical part of what developed minds do as they emerge within nature in the wake of evolution’s evolving complexity. It is thus only sensible to view free will, along with the emergence of intelligence, as one of evolution’s crowning glories. For the reality of it is that free agency is an optimally useful evolutionary resource for intelligent agents, and if this arrangement did not already exist in the world, evolutionary pressures would militate for its emergence. The thought control of action is the crux of free will. And free agency is therefore inherently bound up with rationality, and in specific (1) cognitive rationality calls for the control of belief by thought, and (2) practical rationality calls for the contrast of action by belief. Put together, these two considerations mean that: With the development of rational creatures there will be beings who can control of action by thought. But just exactly this idea—that with the evolution of intelligent agents upon the world’s stage there will be creatures that are able to control their actions by means of thought—is the heart and core of the doctrine of free will. To deny the reality of free will is effectively to deny the evolutionary emergence of intelligent agents. Accordingly, a perfectly “naturalistic” case can be made on behalf of the freedom of the will through evolutionary considerations. To be sure, Charles Darwin himself thought that he had to negate free will to make room for the evolution of mind. But here he was being unchar-

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acteristically near-sighted. For there is no good reason to refrain from acknowledging rather than being an impediment to survival, that free will, like intelligence itself, affords a significant advantage, and rather than being a roadblock to evolution should be regarded as one of its greatest achievements. This aspect of the matter is regrettably seldom heeded, but is nevertheless absolutely central to the case for free will.17 NOTES 1

Skinner 1971. For references of this format see the Bibliography at the end of the book.

2

See the critique in Wolf 1987.

3

See also Ernst Haeckel, Die Welträtsel (Leipzig: A. Kröner, 1899).

4

The first three points are bound up with seeing Homo sapiens as a species of agents, evaluators, and deliberators, as already stressed in Reid 1785.

5

Weatherford 1991, p. 127.

6

Dennett 1984, p. 120.

7

See Wegner 2002.

8

This holds in particular with the experiments of Delgado 1969 and Gazzaniga 1992.

9

See Basil-Neto 1992.

10

See Basil-Neto 1992, Delgado 1969; Gazzaniga 1992.

11

K. Ammon and S. C. Gandevia, “Transcendental Magnetic Stimulation Can Influence the Selection for Motor Programmes,” Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry, vol. 53 (1990), pp. 705–707.

12

See Libet 1985, as well as the studies by Haggard, Frith, and Lau. Here Benjamin Libet was the pioneer who set the fox among the pigeons, showing that unconscious brain activity preceded his subjects’ conscious decisions to flick their wrist half a second before they consciously decided to move. And in a series of related experiments reported in 1999, P. Haggard and M. Einer it was found that left and right hemisphere brain activity differentially prefigured their subjects decision

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NOTES

which hand to move. Again, subconscious brain/thought processes apparently prefigure the conscious decisions involved. There seems to be reason to think that just as fully conscious free decisions can be evoked by various physical stimuli (such as someone’s telling the subject to “raise your right hand”), so various unwittingly received physical stimuli (such as brain magnetization) can influence a person’s act-preceding “unconscious deliberations.” 13

See Gazzaniga 1992.

14

See Wegener 2002.

15

But nevertheless fashionable. See for example Wegner 2002.

16

Wetherford 1991, p. 125.

17

This essay originated in a Luncheon Lecture to the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh in the autumn of 2009.

Chapter Seven RELIGIOUS VIRTUES

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here is a cluster of virtues that have a specifically religious bearing. A virtue is a trait of character involving a disposition to act towards the realization of positive results. And the positive results at issue here reflect the realization of some need of desideratum. Thus moral virtues relate to honoring the interest of others. Cognitive virtue relates to the enhancement of understanding and knowledge. And religious virtues relates to honoring human spirituality in its multiple dimensions. Prominent on the register of religious virtue are such factors as • piety • humility • fellow-feeling (are for and about others) [think here of St. Paul on love] • respect for —oneself (self-worth) —one’s fellows —the imponderable forces of the universe • gratitude for —one’s existence —one’s opportunities for contributing to the world’s good

Such virtues reflect the affective dimension of religion viz. religiosity. They are not a matter of doctrinal beliefs, but rather of attitudes towards oneself, one’s fellows, one’s world, one’s responsibilities towards all these potencies.

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These religious/spiritual virtues constitute part of a wider spectrum or virtue clusters: —cognitive (understanding) —social/interactive (honesty, logically, etc.) —aesthetic (appreciative of beauty) —militant (bravery, courage, fortitude, determination)

Accordingly, the religious virtues are oriented to one’s spiritual involvement with the manifold of existence. They are virtues because they serve and facilitate the fuller realization of the spiritual side of homo sapiens. Like all virtues they serve a function in the larger scheme of things. It is unquestionably difficult for an individual to possess a virtue— let alone many of them. But all the same, the religious virtues are certainly not incompatible with other virtue families. As various saints illustrate, they are compatible—and ideally even symbiotic—with the cognitive virtues (St. Thomas Aquinas) the militant virtues (St. Ignatius Loyola), the moral virtues (St. Francis of Assisi), the domestic virtues (St. Philip Neri), etc. The attitudinal religiosity grounded in the religious virtues is founded on three fundamental human dispositions: 1. The existential impetus of a recognition that we live in a world not of our making and only very incompletely under our control. An awareness that we are not masters of our fate but feeble agents amidst the power of vast forces that impart upon us. 2. The appreciative impetus of gratitude for the (otherwise unmerited) part we can play in the vast drama of existence and for the opportunity to play at lease a small part through what we think and do. 3. The ameliorative impetus of an inclination to use our opportunities of acting for the good—along within the limited possibilities

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at our disposal so as to leave the world a better place than it otherwise would have been. All virtues have an attitudinal side. They represent a disposition to act out of a care and concern for a certain desideratum—an end result viewed as desirable and worthy. In the particular case of the religious virtues this end result is an alignment of an individual’s self-image with an image of the nonself—the forces and agencies at work in the wider world of which the individual himself is but a miniscule part. The need for such an alignment might be characterized as the spiritual side of human beings. It is thus a part of being human, although is—like most aspect of human nature—more prominently present in some than in others. What marks a virtue as such? It all depends on the context at issue. Cognitive virtue makes for ampler cognition. Moral virtue makes for better behavior. Religious virtue makes for more developed spirituality. Which is to say that the religiously virtuous person thereby achieves a higher level of spiritual development. Even as a person can be deficient in respect to the moral virtue— honesty, truthfulness, reliability, etc.—so a person can be deficient in respect to the religious virtues. Those persons who are paragons and paradigms in manifesting the religious virtues are called Saints. To espouse religious values is not to adopt a religion any more than espousing family values is to have a family. Those values may encourage, but they will not determine. For a religion cannot be founded on the religious virtues alone: it must be given concrete embodiment in some form. After all, the virtues themselves have an abstract nature. Even as the cognitive virtues—infiniteness, coherence, simplicity, etc.—do not comprise a body of knowledge, so those religious virtues do not comprise a religion: they facilitate rather than constitute. And so, even as our communicative aspirations have to be channeled through a particular language, so our spiritual aspirations have to be channeled through a particular religion—a particular doctrinal and liturgical framework that gives them concrete expression. The human psyche’s fundamental religiosity cannot thrive and flourish without the support of conical reinforcement that only membership in a body of kindred spirits can provide. Religiosity cannot thrive and prosper in

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separation from religion—that is, from a religion. Religiosity, like language, must find a suitable embodiment. To grow and flourish our commitment to religious values needs to draw nourishment and style in the feasible role of a religious community and a religious tradition. The human individual is not naturally a virtuous creature, and the religious virtues—just as the moral virtues—are best served and most strengthened through the reinforcement of solidarity in the setting of a supportive community. With the religious virtues as with virtue of other types, there is a difference between procession and approbation. A person can endorse and appreciate the religious virtue without himself possessing or manifesting them. However, a sufficiently sizable discrepancy here will make for what deserves to be condemned as hypocrisy. What are we to say of the person who has no respect for the religious virtues—who sets them at naught and dismisses them as dispensable? Were he to do this with the moral virtues we would characterize him as wicked. Were he to do it with the aesthetic values we would characterize him as boorish. Were he to do it with the cognitive virtues we would say he is ignorant. Were he to do it with the social virtues we would call him boorish. And in doing so with the religious virtues there is an analogous negativity. To be sure there is no conveniently available descriptive characterization for someone who is spiritually color-blind or tone-deaf. But that he suffers from a personality diminishing deficient in relating to a significant sector of human value is transparently clear. And much as with the other extra-moral virtues, when a deficiency arises it is discussible whether the proper reaction is not just censure but pity.

Chapter Eight PRAGMATISM AND SCIENCE 1. THE INDISPENSABILITY OF TRUST

L

et us begin with some instructive truisms. Human life is too fragile. We cannot manage it on our own. It requires collaboration and communication with others to deal effectively with its issues. Our circumstances are such that, like it or not, we are enmeshed in a variety of needs that must be satisfied in the interests of a viable and satisfactory existence. Preeminent among them is the need for knowledge to guide our actions and satisfy our curiosity. But in matters of knowledge production, life is too short for us to proceed on our own. We simply cannot start at square one and do everything needful by ourselves. We must—and do—proceed in the setting of a larger community that extends its cooperative efforts across the reaches of time (via its cultural traditions) and space (via its social organization). This requires communication, coordination, and collaboration. Therefore, even as the pursuit of objectivity is aided by an agent’s recourse to the resources of the envisioning community, so, conversely, is objectivity an indispensable instrumentality for the creation and maintenance of intercommunicative community. A community of this sort is a sort of marketplace with offerers and takers, sellers, and buyers. In accepting the declarations of others at their informative face value, we extend them credit, as it were. The prospect of informative communication is predicated on such principles as (1) Concede a presumption of veracity to the assertions of others, at any rate until such time as they prove themselves unworthy of credit; and (2) In communicative contexts, regard others as candid, truthful, accurate, and the like, until proven otherwise. The rationale of such principles of epistemic procedure is largely or wholly economic. Here, as elsewhere, it is ultimately on the basis of considerations of cost-effectiveness that we decide how much credit to extend.

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Communication is accordingly predicated on conceding and maintaining credibility. It too, is a commercial system of sorts. Credit is extended, drawn on, and enlarged. And with communicative and financial credit alike, one could not build up credit (prove oneself creditworthy) unless given some credit by somebody in the first place. For credit to be obtainable at all, there has to be an initial presumption that one is creditworthy. Clearly, such a presumption of innocent until proven guilty (i.e., fault free until shown to be otherwise) can be defeated;—one can of course prove oneself to be unworthy of credit or credence—but initially it must be made. The guiding principle here is once again that of cost-benefit calculation. Their justification becomes straightforward on economic grounds, as practices that represent the most efficient and economical way to get the job done. If we do not concede some credit to the declarations of others, then we lose any and all chance to derive informative profit from them, thus denying ourselves the benefit of a potentially useful resource. The course of experience would soon teach us that, even where strangers outside the family circle are concerned, the benefits of trust, of credibility concession, generally overbalance the risks involved. In sum, we adopt a policy of credence—of believing what we are told in the absence of case-specific counterindications—in the first instance because it is the most promising avenue toward our goals, and then persist in it because we subsequently find, not that it is unfailingly successful, but that it is highly cost-effective.1 In matters of inquiry—of obtaining and managing information— reliability is the crucial coin of the realm. A system where we can trust and be trusted is indispensible to the enterprise. 2. THE ADVANTAGES OF COOPERATION AND TRUST Even people who might not otherwise care to cooperate and collaborate with others are well advised in terms of their own interests to suppress this inclination. This point is brought home by considering the matter from the angle presented in Display 1.

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Display 1 A PREFERENTIAL OVERVIEW OF TRUST SITUATIONS

My Preference Your Preference I Trust You You Trust Me Ranking Ranking ___________________________________________________________________ + + − −

+ − + −

2 4 1 3

2 1 4 3

By hypothesis, each of the parties involved prioritized the situation where they are trusted by the other while they themselves need not reciprocate. And each sees as the worst case a situation where they themselves trust without being trusted. Each, however, is willing to trust to avert being mistrusted themselves. Relative to these suppositions, we arrive at the overall situation of the interaction matrix exhibited in Display 2. (Here the entry 2/2—for example—indicates that in the particular case at issue the outcome ranks 2 for me and 2 for you, respectively.) In this condition of affairs, mutual trust is the best available option—the only plausible way to avert the communally unhappy result 3/3.2 In this sort of situation, cooperative behavior is obviously the best policy. (We are, after all, going to end up acting alike since, owing to the symmetry of the situation, whatever constitutes a good reason for you to act in a certain way does so for me as well.) It is easily seen that a skeptical presumption—one which rejects trust and maintains a distrustful stance toward the declarations of others—would confront us with an enormously complex (and economically infeasible) task for the project of interpersonal communication. For suppose that, instead of treating others on the basis of innocent until proven guilty, one were to treat them on lines of not trustworthy until proven otherwise. It is clear that such a procedure would be vastly less economic. For we would now have to go to all sorts of lengths in independent verification. The problems here are so formidable that we would obtain little if any informative benefits from the communi-

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cative contributions of others. When others tend to respond in kind to one’s present cooperativeness or uncooperativeness, then no matter how small on deems the chances of their cooperation in the present case, one is nevertheless well advised to act cooperatively. As long as interagents react to cooperations with some tendency to reciprocation in future situations, cooperative behavior will yield long-run benefits. Display 2 AN INTERACTION MATRIX FOR TRUST SITUATIONS

You Trust Me

You Do Not Trust Me

___________________________________________________ I trust you I do not trust you

2/2 1/4

4/1 3/3

From the angle of economy there are, accordingly, substantial advantages to collaboration in inquiry, particularly in scientific contexts. For the individual inquirer, it decreases the chances of coming up completely empty-handed (though at the price of having to share the credit of discovery). For the community, it augurs a more rational division of labor through greater efficiency by reducing the wastage inherent in a duplication of effort. The process through which mutual trust in matters of information development and management is built up among people cries out for explanation by means of an economic analogy that trades on the dual meaning of the idea of credit. For we proceed in cognitive matters in much the same way that banks proceed in financial matters. We extend credit to others, doing so at first to only a relatively modest extent. When and if they comport themselves in a manner that shows that this credit was well deserved and warranted, we proceed to give them more credit and extend their credit limit, as it were. By responding to trust in a responsible way, one improves one’s credit rating in cognitive contexts much as in financial contexts. The same sort of mechanism is at work in both cases: recognition of credit-worthiness engenders a reputation on which further credit can be based; earned

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credit is like money in the bank, well worth the measures needed for its maintenance and for preserving the good name that is now at stake. And this situation obtains not just in the management of information in natural science but in many other settings as well, preeminently including the information we use in everyday-life situations. For example, we constantly rely upon experts in a plethora of situations, continually placing reliance on doctors, lawyers, architects, and other professionals. They too must so perform as to establish credit, not just as individuals but, even more crucially, for their profession as a whole.3 Much the same holds for other sources of information. The example of our senses is a particularly important case in point. Consider the contrast between our reaction to the data obtained in sight and dreams. Dreams, too, are impressive and seemingly significant data. Why then do we accept sight as a reliable cognitive source but not dreams—as people were initially minded to do? Surely not because of any such substantive advantages as vividness, expressiveness, or memorability. The predisposition to an interest in dreams is clearly attested by their prominence in myth and literature. Our confident reliance on sight is not a consequence of its intrinsic preferability but is preeminently a result of its success in building up credit in just the way we have been considering. We no longer base our conduct of affairs on dreams simply because this simply does not all that well. Again, a not dissimilar story holds for our information-generating technology—for telescopes, microscopes, computing machinery, and so on. We initially extend some credit because we simply must, since they are our only means for a close look at the moon, at microbes, and so on. But subsequently we increase their credit limit (after beginning with blind trust) because we eventually learn, with the wisdom of hindsight, that it was quite appropriate for us to proceed in this way in the first place. As we proceed, the course of experience indicates, retrospectively as it were, that we were justified in deeming them creditworthy. And in this regard the trustworthiness of people and the reliability of instrumental resources are closely analogous matters. To be sure, the risk of deception and error is present throughout our inquiries: our cognitive instruments, like all other instruments, are never failproof. Still, a general policy of judicious trust is eminently

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cost effective. In inquiring, we cannot investigate everything; we have to start somewhere and invest credence in something. But of course our trust need not be blind. Initially bestowed on a basis of mere hunch or inclination, it can eventually be tested, and can come to be justified with the wisdom of hindsight. And this process of testing can in due course put the comforting reassurance of retrospective validation at our disposal. In trusting the senses, in relying on other people, and even in being rational, we always run a risk. Whenever in life we place our faith in something, we run a risk of being let down and disappointed. Nevertheless, it seems perfectly reasonable to bet on the general trustworthiness of the senses, the general reliability of our fellow men, and the general utility of reason. In such matters, no absolute guarantees can be had. But, one may as well venture, for, if venturing fails, the cause is lost anyhow—we have no more promising alternative to turn to. There is little choice about the matter: it is a case of “this or nothing”. If we want answers to factual questions, we have no real alternative but to trust in the cognitively co-operative disposition of the natural order of things. We cannot pre-establish the appropriateness of this trust by somehow demonstrating, in advance of events, that it is actually warranted. Rather, its rationale is that without it we remove the basis on which alone creatures such as ourselves can confidently live a life of effective thought and action. In such cases, pragmatic rationality urges us to gamble on trust in reason, not because it cannot fail us, but because in so doing little is to be lost and much to be gained. A general policy of judicious trust is eminently cost-effective in yielding good results in matters of cognition. The pragmatic factor of functional efficacy is crucial in the formation of rational procedure in the conduct of scientific inquiry. 3. RAMIFICATIONS OF TRUST It is sometimes said that an epistemology based on trust is contrastive to and distinct from one that is based on evidence.4 But this is a very questionable standpoint. For trustworthiness is something we may initially presume but must eventually evidentiate through experience. Ongoing trust is only appropriate in the case of trustworthy sources

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and trust must be earned through the evidentiation of trustworthiness. When a factual claim is based on trust in a source we may not have any (independent) evidentiation of that fact but we should and do require evidence for the reliability of the source. To be sure, the risk of deception and error is present throughout our inquiries: our cognitive instruments, like all other instruments, are never failproof. Still, a general policy of judicious trust in eminently cost effective. In inquiring, we cannot investigate everything; we have to start somewhere and invest credence in something. But of course our trust need not be blind. Initially bestowed on a basis of mere hunch or inclination, it can eventually be tested, and can come to be justified with the wisdom of hindsight. And this process of testing can in due course put the comforting reassurance of retrospective validation at our disposal. With trust, matters can of course turn out badly. In being trustful, we take our chances (though of course initially in a cautious way). But one must always look to the other side of the coin as well. A play-safe policy of total security calls for not accepting anything, not trusting anyone. But then we are left altogether empty-handed. The quest for absolute security exacts a terrible price in terms of missed opportunities, forgone benefits, and lost chances. What recommends those inherently risky cognitive policies of credit extension and initial trust to us is not that they offer risk-free sure bets but that, relative to the alternatives, they offer a better balance of potential benefits over potential costs. It is the fundamentally economic rationality of such cognitive practices that is their ultimate surety and warrant. We know that various highly convenient principles of knowledge production are simply false: • What seems to be is. • What people say is true. • The simplest patterns that fit the data are actually correct. • The most adequate currently available theory will work out.

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We realize full well that such generalizations do not hold, however nice it would be if they did. Nevertheless we accept the theses at issue as principles of presumption. We follow the metarule: In the absence of concrete indications to the contrary, proceed as though such principles were true. Such principles of presumption characterize the way in which rational agents transact their cognitive business. Yet we adopt such practices not because we can somehow establish their validity, but because the cost-benefit advantage of adopting them is so substantial. The justification of trust in our senses, in our fellow inquirers, and in our cognitive mechanisms ultimately rests on considerations of economic rationality. And this sort of situation prevails in many other contexts. For example, the rationale of reputations for ability, as well as those for reliability, lies in the cost effectiveness of this resource in contexts of hiring, allocating one’s reading time, and so on.5 Our standard cognitive practices incorporate a host of fundamental presumptions of initial credibility, in the absence of concrete evidence to the contrary: • Believe in your own senses. • Accept at face value the declarations of other people (in the absence of any counterindications and in the absence of any specific evidence undermining their generic trustworthiness). • Trust in the reliability of established cognitive aids and instruments (telescopes, calculating machines, reference works, logarithmic tables, etc.) in the absence of any specific indications to the contrary. • Accept the declarations of established experts and authorities within the area of their expertise (again, absent counterindications). The justification of these presumptions is not the factual one of the substantive generalization. In proceeding in this way, you will come at correct information and will not fall into error. Rather, it is methodological justification. In proceeding in this way, you will efficiently

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foster the interests of the cognitive enterprise; the gains and benefits will, on the whole, outweigh the losses and costs. It is clear that all such cognitive practices have a fundamentally economic rationale. They are all cost effective within the setting of the project of inquiry to which we stand committed by our place in the world’s scheme of things. They are characteristics of the cheapest (most convenient) way for us to secure the data needed to resolve our cognitive problems—to secure answers to our questions about the world we live in. Accordingly, we can make ready sense of many of the established rules of information development and management on economic grounds. By and large, they prevail because this is maximally cost effective in comparison with the available alternatives. 4. A COMMUNITY OF INQUIRERS Only through cooperation based on mutual trust can we address issues whose effective resolution makes demands that are too great for any one of us alone. In the development and management of information, people are constantly impelled toward a system of collaborative social practices—an operational code of incentives and sanctions that consolidates and supports collective solidarity and mutual support. In this division of labor, trust results from what is, to all intents and purposes, a custom consolidated compact to conduct their affairs in friendly collaboration. If its cognitive needs and wants are strong enough, any group of mutually communicating, rational, dedicated inquirers is fated in the end to become a community of sorts, bound together by a shared practice of trust and cooperation, simply under the pressure of its evident advantage in the quest for knowledge.6 However, this cooperative upshot need not ensue from a moral dedication to the good of others and care for their interests. It can emerge for reasons of prudential self-interest alone because the relevant modes of mutually helpful behavior—sharing, candor, and trustworthiness—are all strongly in everyone’ interest, enabling all members to draw benefit for their own purposes—the agent himself specifically included. Cooperation emerges in such a case not from morality but from self-interested considerations of economic advantage. In science,

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in particular, the advantages of epistemic values like candor, reliability, accuracy, and the like, are such that everyone’s interests as well served by fostering adherence to the practices at issue. The pursuit of knowledge in science can play a role akin to that of a pursuit of wealth in business transactions. The financial markets in stocks or commodities futures would self-destruct if the principle, my word is my bond, were abrogated, since no one would know whether a trade had actually been made. In just this way, too, the market in information would self-destruct if people’s truthfulness could not be relied upon. Thus in both cases, unreliable people have to be frozen out and exiled from the community. In cognitive and economic contexts alike, the relevant community uses incentives and sanctions (artificially imposed costs and benefits) to put into place a system where people generally act in a trusting and trustworthy way. Such a system is based on processes of reciprocity that advantage virtually everyone. It is no wonder that common practice of the scientific community involves severe sanctions for background of trust. Strong incentives in matters of developing and exchanging information induce powerfully to the general advantage. And on the other side, data forging, credit grabbing, plagiarism, and the like are all significantly injurious to an economy of information development and exchange among rational agent. Strong disincentives against such practices are clearly sensible. Several recent studies illuminate the extent to which we actually depend upon others in our beliefs.7 The experiments of Solomon Asch have dramatized people’s tendency to conform to erroneous public judgments on matters where they would never make mistakes by themselves.8 His subjects had only to specify which of three lines was closest in length to a given line. People made this judgment unerringly, except when they knew that all the others who were asked the same question concurred in giving a different answer.9 Commenting on Asch’s experiments, Sabini and Silver report: “All (or nearly all) subjects reacted with signs of tension and confusion. Roughly one-third of the judgments subjects made were in error. Nearly 80 percent of the subjects gave the obviously wrong answer on at least one trial. The perception that a few other people made an absurd judgment of a clear, unambiguous physical matter was a very troubling experience, sufficient to cause doubt, and in some cases conformity.”10 Such ex-

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periments actually reveal (in their own dishonest way) the extent to which people incline to trust others. A recent study of American juries arrived at very similar findings.11 On examining more than 250 jury deliberations, the investigators found that in no case was a hung jury caused by a single dissenter. Unless someone who disagreed with the majority found support by at least two others, the dissenters relaxed their reservations and came around to the majority view. And the rationale for this sort of thing is validated by sound economic considerations, a trusting relationship reduces current interaction costs in return for past investments in its buildup. Knowing whom one can trust is worth a great deal. Outsiders who come as strangers into an established social framework generally have to pay for the benefit of learning which agents are trustworthy—and generally find this information well worth paying for. Such considerations militate for a universally advantageous modus operandi, under whose aegis people can trust their fellows in a setting of communal cooperation. And the harsh measures used to uphold the integrity of science—the destruction of careers through ostracism from the community—are thus not devoid of rational justification. Cheating is worth eliminating at great cost, because its toleration endangers and undermines the fabric of mutual trust, in whose absence the whole enterprise of collaborative inquiry becomes infeasible. Establishing and maintaining a community of inquirers united in common collaboration by suitable rewards and sanctions is a mode of operation that is highly cost effective. Individual probity and mutual helpfulness are virtues whose cultivation pays ample dividends for the community of inquirers. In these matters, the cold iron hand of individual and communal interest lies behind the velvet glove of etiquette and ethics. The commodity of information illustrates rather than contravenes the division of labor that results from Adam Smith’s putative innate human “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange.” The market in knowledge has pretty much the same nature and the same motivation as any other sort of market—it is a general-interest arrangement. The establishment of conditions that foster cooperation and trust are critical to the cognitive enterprise of productive inquiry. Cooperation evolves because what is in the interests of most is, in most cases, in the interests of each.

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As these deliberations indicate, our cognitive practices of trust and presumption are undergirded by a justificatory rationale whose nature is fundamentally economic. For what is at issue throughout is a system of procedure that assures for each participant the prospect of realizing the greatest benefit for the least cost. The commitment to impersonal standards and interpersonal generality that characterizes the cognitive enterprise is thus an inherently practical matter. Our standard cognitive policies and procedures are validated by consideration of practical reason seeing that they are substantiated and sustained on what is, in the end, a matter of economic rationality.12 5. COMMUNICATION IN SCIENCE VERSUS EVERYDAY LIFE The situation of science clearly illustrates the preceding strictures about the cost-benefit advantage of trust and cooperation. Every scientist depends on others not only for training but also for a starting point of information, without which one’s inquiries could not begin to get under way. Cooperation and communication are essential in developing, testing, and corroborating scientific claims and in establishing and implementing the standards by which the distinction between genuine science and crackpot speculation can be maintained. But cost-benefit considerations also enter in at many other points to explain the handling of scientific information. The same economies of scale, resulting from the efficiencies of mutual access, draw people together in universities, research centers, institutes, academies, and professional associations. Had the science of the day not inherited such collectivities, it would now have to reinvent them. Much the same holds true for professional conferences, journals, preprint exchange networks, and the like. The free exchange of the scientific literature—internet included—reflects the status of the enterprise as a mutual assistance society. It must be borne in mind, however, that importantly different priorities obtain in different contexts of communication—in particular as between science and everyday life. In everyday communication where we are deeply concerned to protect our credibility, we value security over informativeness. Hence, looseness and imprecision are perfectly acceptable. On the other hand, in science, we value generality and

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precision over security. In science, we seek exactness: we want to know how all objects of exactly this or that sort behave always and everywhere. It is of the nature of natural science at the research frontier to seek to characterize nature’s processes exactly and to describe their operations in full generality and precise detail. Technical science forswears the looseness of vague generality or analogy or approximation. It has no use for qualifiers such as usually, normally, or typically; universality and exactness are its touchstones. The law claims of science involve no hedging, no fuzziness, no incompleteness, and no exceptions; they are strict: precise, wholly explicit, exceptionless, and unshaded. In making the scientific assertion, “The melting point of lead is 327.7 degrees Celsius,” we mean to assert that all pieces of (pure) lead will unfailingly melt at exactly this temperature. We certainly do not mean to assert that most pieces of (pure) lead will probably melt at somewhere around this temperature. (And in this regard, there would be a potential problem should it turn out, for example, that there is no melting point at all and that what is actually at issue is the center of a statistical distribution.) This commitment to generality and detailed precision renders the claims of science highly vulnerable. Generality, precision, and detail are at a premium, and so in scientific discourse we prioritize these factors in a way that makes our scientific theories vulnerable. Accordingly, the half-life of unmodified and unreinterpreted theories in frontier physics is relatively short. We realize that none of the hard claims of present-day frontier natural science will move down the corridors of time untouched. Fragility is the price that we pay in science for the sake of generality and precision. One of the fundamental claims of epistemology is that increased confidence in the correctness of our estimates can always be purchased at the price of decreased accuracy. We estimate the height of the tree at around twenty-five feet. We are quite sure that the tree is twenty-five feet, plus or minus five feet. We are virtually certain that its height is twenty-five feet, plus or minus five feet. But we are completely and absolutely sure that its height is between one inch and 100 yards. Of this we are completely sure, in the sense that we deem it absolutely certain, beyond the shadow of a doubt, as certain as we can be of anything in the world, so sure that we would be willing to stake our

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life on it, and the like. With any sort of estimate, there is always a characteristic trade-off relationship between the evidential security of the estimate on the one hand (determinable on the basis of its probability or degree of acceptability), and its contentual definiteness (exactness, detail, precision, etc.) on the other. Accordingly, the relationship between security and definiteness is generally characterized by a curve of the general form of an equilateral hyperbola: s x d = c, where c is a suitable constant. (See Figure 1.2.) The increased vulnerability and diminished security of our claims are the undetachable other side of the coin of the pursuit of definiteness. Now the fact is that science operates in the lower right-hand sector of the figure. Its cultivation of informativeness (definiteness of information) entails the risk of error in science: its claims are subject to great insecurity. No doubt the progress of science makes it possible to decrease the value of c somewhat, but the fundamental trade-off relationship remains unavoidable. An information-theoretic uncertainty principle prevents our obtaining the sort of information we would ideally like.13 The exactness of technical scientific claims makes them especially vulnerable, notwithstanding our most elaborate efforts at their testing and substantiation. In ordinary life, by contrast, we operate at the upper left-hand side of the figure 1.2 curve. For the situation here differs sharply from that of science, whose objectives are largely theoretical, and where the name of the game is rigorous understanding on a basis of unrestricted universality and extreme precision. When we ordinarily assert that peaches are delicious, we are asserting something like, “Most people will find the eating of suitably grown and duly matured peaches a rather pleasurable experience.” Such a statement has all sorts of built-in safeguards, such as more or less, in ordinary circumstance, by and large, normally, if all things are equal, and so on. They are nothing like scientific laws but are mere rules of thumb, matters of practical lore rather than scientific rigor. And this enables them to achieve great security, for there is safety in vagueness: a factual claim can always acquire security through inexactness. Take the claims, “There are rocks in the world” and “Dogs can bark.” It is absurd to characterize such everyday generalizations as fallible. Their security lies in their indefiniteness or looseness; it is unrealistic and perverse to characterize such common claims

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as defeasible. They say so little that it is unthinkable that contentions such as these should be overthrown. And this accords smoothly with the needs of the situation. Ordinary communication is a practically oriented endeavor carried on in a social context. It stresses such maxims as: “Aim for security, even at the price of definiteness;” “Protect your credibility;” “Avoid misleading people.” Figure 1.2 THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SECURITY AND DEFINITENESS

increasing definiteness

increasing security

Note: Given suitable ways of assessing security (s) and definitiveness (d), the curve at issue can be supposed to be the equilateral hyperbola: s x d = constant.

The difference in communicative policy between science and everyday life is thus readily accounted for. When, as in ordinary life, the preservation of credibility is paramount, one wants to formulate one’s claims in as safe and secure a way as possible, and thus one resorts to vagueness and imprecision. On the other hand, when, as in science, creativity and originality are paramount, then one would put one’s claims in the most ambitious and surprising way, accepting the risks inherent in universality, precision, and the like. After all, the aims of ordinary discourse are primarily practical, largely geared to social interaction and the coordination of human effort in communal enterprises that serve the common good. In this context, it is crucial that we aim at credibility and acceptance—that we establish and maintain a

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good reputation for reliability and trustworthiness. In the framework of common-life discourse, we thus take our stance at a point far removed from that of science. Very different probative orientations prevail in the two areas. In everyday contexts, our approach is one of situational satisfying: we stop at the first level of sophistication and complexity that suffices for our present needs. In science, however, our objectives are primarily theoretical and governed by the aims of disinterested inquiry so that the claims of informativeness—of generality, exactness, and precision—are paramount. Plausibly enough, the appropriateness of an epistemic policy hinges on the nature of the governing desideratum (credibility versus creativity). In science, we accept greater risks willingly because we ask much more of the project. We deliberately court risk by aiming at maximal definiteness and thus at maximal informativeness and testability. Accordingly, a difference in ruling presumptions exists between scientific and ordinary discourse. In science we seek for what is so always and everywhere, exactly and universally. In ordinary life we content ourselves with what is so roughly and normally. Aristotle’s view that terrestrial science deals with what happens ordinarily and in the normal course of things has long ago been left by the wayside. The theories of modern natural science have little interest in what happens generally or by and large; they seek to transact their explanatory business in terms of strict universality, in terms of what happens always and everywhere and in all kinds of circumstances. And in consequence we have no choice but to acknowledge the vulnerability of our scientific statements, subject to the operation of the security-definiteness trade-off. Science, in sum, provides a different context of discourse with characteristic presumptions of its own. And so, all across the board, for matters of high generality to detailed matters of paradoxical process, our policies regarding rational inquiry and information management are decided by practical considerations of purposive efficiency. In epistemology as elsewhere that pragmatic perspective of functional efficacy is crucial. 6. THE AIMS OF SCIENCE

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How are we to tell that our beliefs about the world, and above all our scientific theories have merit—that they characterize the world’s ways adequately in the manner that is at least roughly correct? For pragmatism this comes down to the question of the success of science in realizing its goals. For like any other human project, natural science is defined as what it is by its goal structure. Now it is clear that the aim of natural science is represented by the traditional quartet of description, explanation, prediction, and control, in line with the following survey: THEORETICAL GOALS

• description (answering what? and how? questions about nature) • explanation (answering why? questions about nature) PRACTICAL GOALS

• prediction (successful alignment of our expectations regarding nature) • control (effective intervention in nature) In this way, the teleology of factual inquiry is internally diversified and complex, extending across both the cognitive/theoretical and active/practical sectors. Scientific theorizing is, on the one hand, the determining factor for belief in purely intellectual and theoretical regards, and, on the other, a guiding standard for the practical conduct of action. Our inquiry processes thus come to be endowed with a duality of objectives, and the relevant teleology of scientific inquiry is both theoretical and practical. The two are inseparably interrelated; where we cannot take hold of the one we cannot grasp the other. But we cannot appraise the quality of our theorizing on its own ground. Rather, it is in the practical sector of actual application that—on pragmatism’s telling—we find our best available prospect for a beliefexternal quality control regarding theoretical matters.

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To be sure, historical experience indicates that various alternative approaches to determining “how things work in the world” can be contemplated. The examples of such occult cognitive frameworks as those of numerology (with its benign ratios), astrology (with its astral influences), and black magic (with its mystic forces) indicate that alternative explanatory frameworks exist, and that these can have very diverse degrees of merit. Now in the Western, Faustian intellectual tradition, the ultimate arbiter of rationality is represented by a very basic concept of knowledge-wed-to-practice, and the ultimate validation of our beliefs lies in the combination of theoretical and practical success, with “practice” construed in its pragmatic and affective sense. Here the governing standards of scientific rationality are implicit in the description-transcending goals of explanation, prediction, and preeminently control over nature. (And thus the crucial factor is not, for example, sentimental “at-oneness with nature”—think of the magician vs. the mystic vs. the sage as cultural ideals.) These standards revolve about considerations of practice and are implicit in the use to which our conceptual resources are put in the management of our affairs. And it is here, in the belief transcending domain of our predictive and interventionist praxis that the quality-controlling monitor of our scientific claims ultimately roots. The arbitrament of practice over theory—whether our engineering-designed bridges stand or fall, and whether our aerodynamics-designed airplanes fly or plummet— provides for theory-external check on the adequacy of our theorizing. Such a pragmatic approach to science does not take an instrumentalistic stance which abandons the pursuit of truth and sees the practical issues of prediction and control as the sole goals of the enterprise. Rather, it sees praxis as paramount because there just is no prospect of any more direct alternative, any immediate comparison of these claims with the science-independent “real-truth” of things. The capacity of our cognitive tools to meet their theoretical goals can be monitored obliquely, by appraising their realization of our practical goals. The practical and purposive aspects of cognition thus comes to the fore. The governing quality controls of our mechanisms of inquiry—its methods, concepts, etc. that furnish the whole machinery by which we build up our world-picture (knowledge, epistêmê, science)—emerge as fundamentally pragmatic. We are led to the recognition that here ef-

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fective praxis is the ultimate quality-control arbiter of acceptable theoria: that we must monitor the adequacy of our scientific knowledge by way of assessing the efficacy of its applications in guiding our expectations and actions in matters of prediction and control. One point needs emphasis here. In speaking of the “success” of the methods of science we take into view only the issue of comparative success in providing information for the effective guidance of praxis. The orientation of that praxis itself—be it for good or evil—is in this limited context altogether irrelevant. Conceivably we may use our knowledge to destroy the species in war, genocide, or an otherwise contrived cataclysm of some sort. But this sort of failure (or “nonsuccess”) is simply irrelevant from the angle of present purpose. What matters for success in point of control is simply the factor of effectiveness in achieving chosen objectives, be they themselves good, indifferent, or bad. Yet is successful control itself not something merely theoretical, the object of a mere judgment that also lies in the eye of the beholder? As one critic has put it: But while the actual occurrence of happiness or unhappiness, pleasure or pain, etc., is indeed beyond our control … the same does not seem obviously to hold for our beliefs about such matters. … Thus beliefs or judgments about pragmatic success turn out not to constitute genuine input from the world, but instead … can … be arbitrarily manipulated at will, so long as the other elements are appropriately adjusted.

It would thus be contended that, while the actual occurrence of pain, suffering, disappointment, (etc.) may be extra-theoretical, nevertheless a person’s awareness of such things is not, but rather lies only in the area of impression—of mere thought. But this seems very dubious. Does it make any sense to maintain “I thought I was hurting but I wasn’t” or “I was under the impression that I was distressed but it was an illusion?” With such inherently affective factors as pain, suffering, disappointment, etc. the fact cannot obtain without its realization—the feeling without its recognition. Here awareness of the experience is part of the experience itself. One cannot separate the pain from the feeling of pain, the surprise from the feeling

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of surprise. The belief is not something separate and additional that we may or may not add to the experience; it is integral to the experience itself: intelligent creatures are designed by nature (i.e., evolution) to have propositionalized experiences. Since “states of consciousness” are involved, they function in a way that is largely impervious to manipulation. And, in any case, actual survival is not a matter of belief at all. Nor is the negative reaction to actual bodily injury and physical harm something markedly susceptible to variation in the beliefs of individuals. “Mind over matter” is a precept whose range of effectiveness has its limits: the “power of positive thinking” is rather feeble in these regards. In human affairs, we are, after all, dealing with a conscious being for whom the affective negativities of actual mishap—and indeed even of merely disappointed expectations—can neither be overlooked nor, in the normal course of things, appraised as other than the negatives that they are. The idea that—outside the laboratory setting of Pavlovian conditioning—we can manipulate arbitrarily and at will the sorts of things that cause people happiness or unhappiness, pleasure or pain is surely implausible. A powerful dictator can certainly get people to do things, but what he can get them to think in line with his wishes is something a good deal less manageable. 7. THE ROLE OF RATIONAL SELECTION From the very outset, pragmatism has taken the position that the paradigm of rational inquiry is not the isolated individual’s quest for the certainty of the immediate experience of a Cartesian ego, but the social effort of a community of inquirers striving across the generations to obtain and, improve the answers to enduring questions. And this is emphatically so with a methodological pragmatism, seeing that while beliefs may be something personal, methods are inherently general. Moreover, pragmatism accepts the fallibilistic view that perfected performance is always a matter of hope and not achievement. At any particular juncture one simply does the best one can. The cognitive methods and substantive procedures we deploy for forming our view of reality thus evolve selectively by an historic, evolutionary process of “trial and error”—analogous to the mutations affecting the bodily mechanisms by which we comport ourselves in the physical world.

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Accordingly, cognitive methods develop dynamically subject to ongoing revision in response to the element of “success and failure” in point of the teleology of the practice of rational inquiry. The success-reflective achievement that lies at the root of qualitycontrol in scientific inquiry is not something arcane, sophisticated, and extensively theory-laden. It turns on the elemental fact that virtually any enhancement in control—any growth of our technological mastery over nature—is bound to have some results that are also discernible at the grosso modo level of our everyday life conceptions and dealings. Understanding how our capacities are extended in the course of “scientific progress” will generally be a very sophisticated matter, but any fool can see that they are extended in certain ways. For it is transparently clear to even the most unsophisticated observer that as regards “control over nature” science has for centuries been moving from strength to strength. The progressiveness of science appears most strikingly and decisively in its ever-expanding predictive and physical control over nature. The old conception of scientia propter potentiam provides a perfectly workable basis for taking the widening horizons of technological capacity as an index of scientific progress.14 The historical development of methods is a matter of “survival of the fittest” with fitness assessed in terms of the practical objectives of the rational enterprise—particularly in the guidance of man’s practical affairs. The ways and means of inquiry have been built up by an historic, evolutionary process of selection based on “trial and error,” much as has happened with the evolutionary selection bodily mechanisms by which we comport ourselves in the physical world. At this stage we are carried back to a Darwinian perspective on cognitive evolution. But it is rational rather than natural selection that is now critical. The governing standards of the Western tradition of human rationality are represented by those characteristic goals of science (description, explanation, prediction and control). (And thus not, for example, sentimental “at-oneness with nature”; think of the magician vs. the mystic vs. the sage as cultural ideal.) The standards of cognitive rationality are accordingly viewed in the light of a very basic concept of knowledge-wed-to-practice, and their ultimate validation lies in realizing a combination of theoretical and practical success. Their progressive development accordingly unfolds by explicitly rational selec-

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tion, rather than by some purpose-indifferent process analogous to the natural selection of the standard biological case. Elimination is now something that occurs by choice, not by physical annihilation. It turns on what people adopt and transmit—in general because they find it to be serviceable. As changes are entertained (under the pressure of necessitating circumstance), one methodological instrument may eventuate as more fit to survive than another, because it answers better to the range of relevant purposes. And as with any tool or method or instrument, the question of evaluation here takes the instrumentalist form: Does it work? Does it yield desirable results? Is it successful in practice? Legitimation along these lines is found in substantial part in the fact of survival through historical vicissitudes in the context of questions of this sort. The pivotal issue is that of “working out best.” As pragmatism in its original—Peircean—format sees it, in a community of rational agents, there is bound to be a parallelism between applicative efficacy and substantiative justification. This circumstance has far-reaching ramifications, since pragmatism here becomes conjoined to evolutionism. And control is a pivotal factor here. To be sure, if a bounteous nature satisfied our every whim spontaneously, without effort and striving on our part, the situation would be very different. For then the beliefs which guide and canalize our activities would generally not come into play—they would remain inoperative on the sidelines, never being “put to the test.” There would then be no need for active (and thought-guided) intervention in “the natural course of things” within an uncooperative (at best indifferent, at worst hostile) environment. But as things stand we are constantly called upon to establish varying degrees of “control over nature” to satisfy even our most basic needs (to say nothing of our virtually limitless wants). The developmental perspective and the pragmatic approach thus join together into a seamless whole. A continuous thread links together the entire tradition of realistic pragmatism in its conviction that the ongoing work of an enduring community of rationally competent inquirers will be self-monitoring—that mistakes will be detected and reduced in the course of time. The guiding conviction is that any rational community will, over the course of time, learn how to improve its procedures of inquiry through the processes of inquiry itself so that rational inquiry is in this sense self-monitoring and self-corrective. And

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here we cannot reasonably look on nature as a friendly collaborator in our human efforts, systematically shielding us against the consequences of our follies and continually crowning our cognitive endeavors with a wholly undeserved success that ensues for reasons wholly independent of any actual adequacy vis-à-vis the intended range of purpose. An essentially Darwinian perspective is crucial here. It is no more miraculous that the human mind can understand nature more or less adequately than it is miraculous that the human eye should be able to see it more or less correctly. Peirce’s insight holds good: Our cognitive methods are able to earn credit as giving a trustworthy picture of the world precisely because they evolve under the casual pressure of that world. In sum, science stands forth as superior in its claims to providing an appropriate inquiry method on grounds that are essentially pragmatic. And this pragmatic superiority of science as a resource in matters of effective description, explanation, prediction and control both manifests and serves to explain its emergence in cognitive evolution by rational selection. One crucial point must be emphasized at this stage. In speaking of “the scientific method” in relation to pragmatic endorsement it must, of course, be recognized that what is at issue is not a single and uniform mode of procedure but a vast manifold of thought-tools—of different, albeit interrelated experiential, observational, and inferential methods. And this of course means that “the scientific method” is something that is not fixed (save at the very highest level of generality)—but is itself a procedural organon evolving under the pressure of consideration of pragmatic efficacy. This points to yet another important consideration. 8. THE FALLIBILIST PERSPECTIVE Methodological pragmatism stands committed to the improvability of our cognitive processes, and accordingly acknowledges that our putative knowledge will generally represent no more than a best-available estimate of the truth. The proper stance here is that of fallibilism, a philosophical doctrine regarding natural science—most closely associated with Charles Sanders Peirce—maintaining that our scientific

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knowledge claims are vulnerable and may well turn out to be false. On this view, complex beliefs, and above all our sophisticated scientific theories cannot be asserted as true categorically, but can only be maintained provisionally subject to future revision. Fallibilists insist that we must acknowledge an inability to attain the final and definitive truth regarding the theoretical concerns of natural science—in particular at the frontier of theoretical science. We should and must come to terms with the fact that—at any rate at this level of generality and precision—each of our accepted scientific beliefs may turn out to be deficient, and many of our accepted beliefs will turn out to be so. William James sensibly affirmed that “all our theories are instrumental, are mental modes of adaptation to reality.”15 After all, we devise and accept theories with a view to purposes, and the appropriateness of those devisings and acceptances has to be construed in purposive terms. But circumstances change. And the conditions which render a theory acceptable at one juncture can—and in the scientific course of things generally do—give way to other conditions which give a different look to the lay of the land. Fallibilism, unlike skepticism, does not insist on the falsity of our scientific contentions but rather on their tentativity as estimates: it does not hold that knowledge is flatly unavailable here, but rather that it is always provisional and that the line of separation between real and merely purported knowledge is imperceptible for us save with the wisdom of hindsight. Peirce, its most prominent exponent, has not been alone in holding such a fallibilistic position. Other 20th century philosophers who have espoused scientific fallibilism in one form or another include Gaston Bachelard, Rudolf Carnap, Pierre Duhem, and Karl Popper. In antiquity, the mitigated skeptics of the middle academy were the precursors of this position, since they taught that we can never achieve certain knowledge (epistêmê) in matters regarding the world’s ways but have to make do with what is nearly probable or plausible (to pithanon). Thomas Kuhn’s picture of scientific progress, which envisions a repetitive cycle of periods of normal science punctuated by revolutionary revisions, also lends itself naturally to such a construction.16 What is it that speaks for fallibilism? Why should we see our most sophisticated claims to knowledge of the world—even in our best state-of-the-art scientific theories—as being vulnerable?

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One of the most basic lessons of modern epistemology is that the available observational data will underdetermine theories because theories always outreach the data. Theories always transcend the data and project beyond them, so that there is an inevitable evidential gap between the universal claims of a theory and the particular facts that afforded its supporting data. (The fitting of a continuous curve to discrete data points provides a somewhat oversimplified analogy.) Observations are always discrete, finitely enumerable, and episodic. They deal in specific information-yielding episodes that transpire at particular spatiotemporal locations. Theories, on the other hand, are general and non-finite in their bearing: they deal in how certain features of a generic sort characterize situations of a certain kind always and everywhere. As Pierre Duhem already emphasized, scientific theories lie beyond the possibility of definitive confirmation by our limited data. This data-transcendence of all of our particular laws of nature means that there will always be various alternative ways of rounding the data off into generalized theories. Our actually available information can never constrain unique theoretical resolutions. For observed data are limited in scope while lawful claims are unlimited; and the limited cannot constrain the unlimited. Theorizing without data is futile. But even theorizing on the basis of ample data involves risks and carries in its wake the prospect of ambiguity, diversity, and discord. The fact is that the equilibrium between theory and data that is achieved by natural science at any given stage of its development is always an unstable one. The subject’s history indicates that scientific theories have a finite lifespan; they come to be modified or replaced under various innovative pressures, in particular the enhancement of observational and experimental evidence (through improved techniques of experimentation, more powerful means of observation and detection, superior procedures for data-processing, etc.). As philosophers of science have insisted for many years, we must acknowledge an inability to attain the final and definitive truth in the theoretical concerns of natural science—in particular at the level of theoretical physics. Our present-day science cannot plausibly claim to deliver a definitive picture of physical reality—irrespective of what the date on the calendar may be.

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But does fallibilism not make science as we have it into a matter of “the mere opinion of the day”—of mere social consensus in the scientific community? To protect scientific realism in the face of the prospect of unending scientific change, it is tempting to adopt Peirce’s stratagem of a resort to convergent approximation. This calls for envisaging a situation where, with the passage of time, the theories we successively arrive at grow increasingly concordant and their claims less and less differentiated. In the face of such a course of successive changes of ever-diminishing significance, we could proceed to maintain that the world really is not as present science claims it to be, but rather is as the ever more clearly emerging science-in-the-limit claims it to be. The reality of ongoing change is now irrelevant as with the passage of time the changes matter less and less. We increasingly approximate an essentially stable picture. This prospect is attractive and it is certainly a theoretically possible one. But neither historical experience nor considerations of general principle provide reason to think that it is actually possible. Indeed, quite the reverse! In any convergent process, later is lesser. But since scientific progress on matters of fundamental importance is generally a matter of replacement rather than mere supplementation, there is no reason to see the later issues of science as lesser issues in the significance of their bearing upon science as a cognitive enterprise—to think that nature will be cooperative in always yielding its most important secrets early on and reserving nothing but the relatively insignificant for later on. The fact is that a very small scale effect—even one that lies very far out along the extremes of a “range exploration” in terms of temperature, pressure, velocity, or the like—can force a far-reaching revolution and have a profound impact by way of major theoretical revisions. (Think of special relativity in relation to aetherdrift experimentation, or general relativity in relation to the perihelion of Mercury.) Given that natural science progresses mainly by substitutions and replacements that go back to fundamentals and lead to comprehensive overall revisions of our picture of the phenomena at issue, it seems sensible to say that the shifts across successive scientific “revolutions” maintain the same level of overall significance—it is neither a convergent nor a divergent process. Thus if we are to be realistic fallibilists

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we must hold a position more radical than that of Peirce. His approximationism is simply too optimistic to accommodate the harsh realities. However, fallibilism is an invitation not to skepticism but to doing the very best we can manage in the circumstances. We may not be able to perfect our knowledge but we can certainly improve it. In human inquiry, the cognitive ideal is correlative with the striving for definitive systematization. And this is an ideal which, like other ideals, is worthy of pursuit despite the fact that we must recognize that its full attainment lies beyond our grasp. A fallibilistic designation accordingly insists that we would do well to temper our claims to scientific knowledge with a Cognitive Copernicanism. The original Copernican revolution made the point that there is nothing ontologically privileged about our own position in space. The fallibilistic doctrine now at issue effectively holds that there is nothing cognitively privileged about our own position in time. A kind of intellectual humility is in order—a diffidence that abstains from the hubris of pretentions to cognitive finality or centrality. Realism calls for the humbling view that just as we think our predecessors of a hundred years had a fundamentally inadequate grasp on the furniture of the world, so our successors of a hundred years hence will almost certainly take the same view of our purported knowledge of things. It is not that natural science as we have it is the best possible cognition about the world, but rather that it is the best that is available to us, here and now. But should we settle for the idea of estimating the truth in scientific matters? Should we not ask for certification—for categorical guarantees? Are mere estimates good enough? The characteristic genius of pragmatism lies in its insistence on being practical about things and specifically on its steadfast refusal to allow us to view the very best that we can possibly do as not being good enough. Its operative injunctions are: Approach the course of the cognitive accessibility of truth by asking the classical pragmatic question: “If that is indeed how realities stand, then what would be the best sort of evidence for it that we could expect to achieve?” Realize that we have no access to matters of fact save through the mediation of evidence that is often incomplete and imperfect. And realize too that to

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say that the best evidence is not good enough is to violate Peirce’s cardinal pragmatic imperative is ever to bar the path of inquiry. 9. COGNITIVE PROGRESS: ITS PRESUMPTIVE AND REGULATIVE ASPECT Improvement in the warrant for claims to “scientific knowledge” is always possible, and it is in terms of such improvements that the idea of a “scientific progress” which leads “nearer to the truth” must be understood. Enhanced adequacy in the grounding of an inquiry procedure certainly does not guarantee a “closer approximation to the truth” for its deliverances. All one can say is that it is reasonable to presume the truth of the more adequately grounded alternative. This greater reasonableness of presumption neither guarantees nor requires actual correctness. The very fact of more adequate grounding is of itself enough for its establishment. On the present view, scientific progress is not a process which (by its very nature) leads directly to a greater mastery of “the real truth.” Rather the linkage moves obliquely along the following circuitous path: (1) A more advanced and more fully developed application of an inquiry procedure leads (ex hypothesi) to more adequately based results. (2) This provides a firmer rational basis for the step of presuming that the later results are true rather than the earlier ones. Thus later applications do indeed—all our earlier counter-argumentation notwithstanding—provide “truer” results than the earlier ones, but on the basis of regulative rather than substantive considerations (to use Kant’s very useful distinction once more). That is, we adopt the stance that one does not here augment the stock of available truth through assured possession, but only through reasonable presumption. The present theory thus interprets the issue of cognitive progress in the sciences by way of the route of rational presumption—rather than through any insistence upon the somehow enhanced correctness of

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later findings.17 Given that we use science to determine where the truth lies in the domain of empirical fact, we cannot view the progress of science as a matter of successive approximation to an independently controllable fixed point, “the truth” located wholly outside the domain of scientific inquiry. When an inquiry procedure is autonomous and defeasible, then the linkage of the adequacy of the method to the truth of its products operates through the mediation of a rational presumption—a presumption whose rationality is underwritten ultimately by pragmatic considerations of increased success in the areas of predictive and manipulative control. The present theory thus does not—and certainly need not—maintain that there is some sort of inevitable equivalence between (1) the full set of implicit claims embraced within and consequent upon acceptance of a factual thesis that “P is true,” and (2) the (vastly lesser) set of data we must have in hand to claim with adequate rational warrant the factual thesis that “P is true.” There is a vast gulf fixed between the sum-total of the informational content of the thesis that “P is true” and the set of checks and balances within our reach of operative control in entering upon a rationally warranted presumption of P’s truth. An adequate basis of rational warrant stops well short of an unqualified guarantee. William James—who recognized and emphasized this gap between the content of knowledge-claims and the evidence one has for them (this being the focus of his controversy with W. K. Clifford)— wrongly ascribed this difference solely to practical considerations, without recognizing that it holds at the theoretical (cognitive) level as well. Clifford (in “The Ethics of Belief”18) to all appearances flatly denies the difference between these levels in his famous dictum that “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” 19 But Clifford’s position is—as James rightly sees—ultimately indefensible, partly because of its tendency to stultify action, partly because his unrealistically rigoristic concept of the rationale of knowledge-claims leads to wholesale skepticism. For

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in all contexts of factual inquiry, an “evidential gap” between the assertive content of our claims, and the supporting data we have in hand for them is inevitable. It is thus crucial for the workings of this ultimately regulative approach that in viewing science as self-corrective we do not maintain that later findings are somehow inherently “truer” than earlier ones. But nevertheless, our view to truth. However, our view of the nature of scientific progress emphatically does not call for abandoning the view that “science draws closer to the truth” in the course of its temporal development. It is a matter of just how this idea is to be construed. Clearly it must not be construed in some transcendent sense that places the locus of truth in an inaccessible realm to which all access is inherently precluded by the Wheel Argument (diallelus). Rather, the greater truthfulness of later claims is a matter of an increasingly more firmly rationally warranted presumption. It would be not necessarily incorrect but rather rationally unconscionable to give to the later results a lessened degree of credence. Pierre Duhem, one of the founding fathers of present-day philosophy of science, recognized that no logically compelling grounds of general principle can be adduced on behalf of the contention that the development of science leads ever nearer to the “real relations among things” that define the objective order of nature. He wrote: Thus, physical theory never gives us the explanation of experimental laws … but the more complete it becomes, the more we apprehend that the logical order in which theory orders experimental laws is the reflection of an ontological order, the more we suspect that the relations it establishes among the data of observation correspond to real relations among things. … The physicist cannot take account of this conviction. … But while the physicist is powerless to justify this conviction, he is nonetheless powerless to rid his reason of it. … Yielding to an intuition which Pascal would have recognized as one of those reasons of the heart “that reason does not know,” he asserts his faith in a real order reflected in his theories more clearly and more faithfully as times goes on.20

However, Duhem’s stance that the purported “advance towards truth” implicit in scientific development rests on some sort of metaphysical faith concedes too much to the demands of the skeptical rationalist

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opponent, who would surely regard this as hoisting the white flag of surrender. Fortunately, this resort to faith is unduly pessimistic. To be sure, the claims to progress in the sciences cannot be endowed with some independent demonstration at the strictly theoretical level of the greater truthfulness of later findings. But a pragmatically oriented line of rational legitimation can be deployed to provide the sort of extratheoretical warrant that the circumstances of the case require. 10. RELATING TRUTH TO VERIFICATION In his Pragmatism: An Open Question, Hilary Putnam tells us that while “I do not think this truth can be defined in terms of verification” nevertheless “I do agree with the pragmatists that truth and verification are not simply independent and unrelated notions” (pp. 11–12). But the now operative idea that “being true” and “being (warrantedly) thought to be true” are conceptually interdependent but nevertheless interrelated admits of diverse constructions. And this thesis is certainly questionable in its most straightforward construction, which is: We cannot (correctly) characterize what truth is without (adequately) explaining how it is that people are to go about establishing this, that is: To give a (correct) explanation of the meaning of “p is true” we must be in a position to provide a viable account of how people are to go about showing that this is so. The meaning of the claim that a thesis is true hinges on the process of verification that is at issue.

But can this evidentialist-pragmatic-verificationist vessel hold water? Consider the claim “The Rosetta stone was in the British Museum on the day Germany invaded Poland at the outset of World War II.” No reasonably well informed person would hesitate to acknowledge the truth of this contention. But establishing it is something else again. Should we rely on the memory of some grizzled sage who claims to have seen it there that day? Should we conduct research into the (conceivably destroyed) records of the museum? Need we await the realization of some neo-H.-G.-Wellsian time machine that enables us to go back and check? The possibilities boggle the mind.

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We can of course leap (figuratively) into the region of speculative possibility via the following schematic supposition: “If someone were to ‘find a person with good memory who was there that day; come up with the day’s inventory check; go back in time and have a look; etc.’ then they would find …” But to take this conditionalistic line is in effect to stand the issue on its head. Those conditional claims are not true because they can (hypothetically) be verified. The actuality of it is the very reverse: they can (hypothetically) be verified because they are true. Truth and verification are indeed “interdependent and interrelated.” But this is not (as per some incautious pragmatists) because verification is the independent and truth the dependent variable here. Verification is not the tail that wags the dog of truth. The matter stands the other way round: truth is the independent variable here and verification the dependent one. William James to the contrary notwithstanding, a true statement is verifiable because it is true, it is not true because it is verifiable. However while the conceptual primacy in the truth/verification relation thus lies with truth, the matter stands very differently with epistemic primacy. For (and this is the real crux of pragmatism) verification is a practical process which, while not in general determinative of truth as such, is nevertheless perfectly adequate for the probative authorization of rationally appropriate truth claims. It is not that the propositions we evidentiate must ipso facto be (identical with) the truth but rather that evidentiation ipso facto authorizes us in rationally warranted claims to truth. (And even our best efforts can go awry here, which is why sensible pragmatists are fallibilists.) Let us scrutinize the line of thought that is at issue here somewhat more closely. To all appearances, it roots in the consideration that we face the following aporetic situation: (1) The truth must agree with reality. (2) Therefore, in order to determine the truth we must determine what is really so, that is, what reality is like. (3) We have no access way to reality independent of what we take to be the truth about it.

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Here (3) says that we can only get at reality via truth but (2) says that we cannot get at truth save via reality. We seem to be trapped in a Catch-22 situation where skepticism—inability to get at truth—is the only outcome. There are three basic alternatives for freeing ourselves from this trap. The first is the “postmodernist” response of simply abandoning the conception of truth. And the second alternative is to reject (1) and reconceptualize “the truth” in a way that does not ask for adequation to reality but merely calls for cognitive access under appropriate (perhaps even ideal) conditions. This is the “deflationist” response of construing truth in terms of knowledge. A third possibility exists, however. For the actual fact is that (1) does not actually necessitate (2) with the result that (1) must be abandoned in the face of the “fact of life” represented by (3). Instead, we can opt for the essentially pragmatic response of abandoning (2) as is, and instead reversing the truth/reality relationship that it envisions. In taking this line we would reject (2) and instead adopt: (2*) To determine what reality is like we must seek out what the truth is (exactly as per (3)): reality determinations supervene upon truth-assessments: the epistemic route is our only access-way to reality: only by estimating the truth can we validate claims about the real. And it is just here that pragmatism enters in. For given this inversion of the truth/reality relationship, pragmatists can—and do—go on to insist that there indeed is a practically effective route to rational truthestimation, namely the criteriological route afforded by the standard experience-based methodology of inquiry. Thus in retaining the classic construction of truth represented by (1), sensible pragmatists can— and presumably would—insist on viewing truth-determination in a “realistic” light. But of course what is now at issue is not the meaning of “truth” (for which (1) continues to be decisive) but rather the criteriology of truth-determination by way of rational estimation. What pragmatism of this realistic sort accordingly does is not to abandon truth (as per postmodernist skepticism) nor yet to alter its meaning in evidentialist directions (deflationism), but rather to re-focusing our at-

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tention upon the matter of rationality appropriate claims to truth, thereby bringing into the foreground the issue of truth criteriology—of the methodology for making rational estimates of the truth. However, such a perspective indicates that there are two possible versions of pragmatism. One is a meaning-of-truth revisionism that abandons the idea that it is a conceptual part or consequence of the definition of “truth” that truth corresponds to reality. And the second is a truth-criteriology realism that takes the line that our standard epistemological recourses are sufficient—that is, criteriologically sufficient for all sensible purposes—to enable us to decide what is true (i.e., to settle how we can apply the adjective qualifier “is true” in concrete cases, and so to settle an actual practice the matter of truth categorization). And so, while many contemporary pragmatists take the reconceptualization approach and accordingly enroll in the school of meaning-oftruth revisionism, nevertheless a good case can be made out for holding that a more conservative (and sensible) course for pragmatists is to adopt a view of truth that is “realistic” in this respect also. It is the crux of such an approach that it sees the usual criteriology of truthestimation as good enough for “truth determination” construed not in the sense of airtight guarantees but rather of plausible (and generally effective) evidentiation. Since the whole course of our thought and experience is such that the standing presumption is on their side. All the same, an unhappy inference confronts us when we turn from perceptual judgments to more sophisticated ones: • The truth must be certain: it makes no sense to say “P is true, but it may possibly eventuate that P is actually not the case.” • In matters at the technical frontiers of science, at any rate, there is no room for categorical certainty. We realize full well that the science of the future may amend, qualify, and correct the science of today. We cannot but acknowledge that the science of the future will regard our science as we ourselves regard the science of 100 years ago.

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Therefore: • We cannot characterize the frontier theories of the science of the day unqualified truths. The premisses look to be inescapable here. And this means, in effect, that we cannot claim flat-out truth for our theories at the scientific frontier. Here again we have no choice but to view them not as the truth per se but merely as the best estimates of the actual truth that we are able to make at this juncture. We cannot routinely assume that science as we have it depicts nature as it actually is. To be “realistic” in one sense of this term (the colloquial) we are constrained to moderate our “realism” in another sense (the philosophical). And so one thing is certain—our current frontier scientific knowledge at its most exact and detailed is subject to revision and thereby is something that is not absolutely certain. NOTES 1

Some of the themes of this section are also treated in the author’s Cognitive Economy (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989.)

2

The situation is one of the sort called prisoner’s dilemma by game theorists. For a good account, see Morton D. Davis, Game Theory (New York: Basic Books, 1970), pp. 92–103. See also A. Rapport and A. M. Chammah, Prisoner’s Dilemma: A Study in Conflict and Cooperation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965); Anatol Rapport, “Escape from Paradox,” American Scientist 217 (1967) 50– 56; and Richmond Campbell and Lanning Sowden (eds.), Paradoxes of Rationality and Cooperation (Vancouver, B.C.: University of British Columbia Press, 1985).

3

Compare H. M. Vollmer and D. L. Mills, eds., Professionalization (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1966). This credit, once earned, is generally safeguarded and maintained by institutional means: licensing procedures, training qualifications, professional societies, codes of professional practice, and the like.

4

See John Hardwig, “The Role of Trust in Knowledge,” The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 88 (1991), pp. 693–708.

5

On this matter, see Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions (New York: Basic Books, 1980), especially the discussion of “Informal Relationships,” on pp. 23–30.

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NOTES 6

The literature on theoretical issues of trust and cooperation in contexts of inquiry is virtually nonexistent. However regard to morality in general this is not so. See, for example, Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984); David Gauthier, Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Raimo Tuomela, Cooperation (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000); and Nicholas Rescher, Fairness (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Press, 2001).

7

For a penetrating study of these and similar issues, see John Sabini and Maury Silver, Moralities of Everyday Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), especially chap. 4.

8

Specifically, Solomon Asch found that in certain situations of interactive estimation, “whereas the judgments were virtually free of error under control conditions, one-third of the minority estimates were distorted toward the majority.” See his “Studies of Independence and Conformity: I. A Minority of One Against a Unanimous Majority,” Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, no. 70 (1956).

9

Ibid, p. 69.

10

John Sabini and Maury Silver, Moralities of Everyday Life, pp. 84–85.

11

Harry Kalven, Jr., and Hans Zeisel, The American Jury (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).

12

Further discussion of some of this chapter’s themes can be found in the author’s Cognitive Economy (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989).

13

Vagueness constitutes a context in which we trade off informativeness (precision) with probable correctness (security), with science moving toward the former, and everyday knowledge toward the latter. The relevant issues are considered in tantalizing brevity in Charles S. Peirce’s short discussion of the logic of vagueness, which he laments as too much neglected, a situation that has since been corrected only partially.

14

Compare J. R. Cole and S. Cole, “The Ortega Hypothesis,” Science, vol. 178 (1972), pp. 368–375, and also their Social Stratifications in Science (Chicago, 1973).

15

William James, Pragmatism (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 94.

16

Regarding fallibilism and its ramifications see: Gaston Bachelard Essai sur la connaissance approchóee (Paris: J. Vrin, 1929); Rudolf Carnap Logical Foundations of Probability 2nd revised ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); John

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NOTES

Dewey Experience and Nature (Chicago: Open Court, 1926); Pierre Duhem La théorie physique, son object et sa structure (Paris: A Hermann, 1980). Engl. tr. by P. P. Wiener The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954); Thomas Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); Charles Sanders Peirce Collected Papers of C. S. Peirce, ed. by C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss, Vol. I, “Principles of Philosophy” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931), see esp. sect. 1.120, “The Uncertainty of Scientific Results”; K. R. Popper The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Basic Books, 1959); Nicholas Rescher The Limits of Science (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984). 17

At just this point our evolutionary progressivism parts ways with the more traditional forms of the theory. Cf. for example, Herbert Spencer, Principles of Sociology, Vol. III, ch. VIII, “Intellectual Progress.”

18

In W. K. Clifford, Lectures and Essays, Vol. II (London, 1879).

19

Ibid., p. 186. For the James-Clifford controversy and its wider background see Ralph B. Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, vol. 2 (Boston, 1935), pp. 245–8. For a contemporary treatment of the problem see Roderick Chisholm, “Lewis’ Ethics of Belief,” in The Philosophy of C. I. Lewis (La Salle, 1968).

20

Pierre Duhem, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, tr. by P. P. Wiener (New York, 1962), pp. 26–7.

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———, “Leibniz and Possible Worlds,” Studia Leibnitiana, vol. 28 (1995), pp. 129-62. ———, Fairness (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Press, 2001). Rescher, Nicholas, Conditionals (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2007). ———, Free Will: A Philosophical Reappraisal (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2009). Rescher, Nicholas and Estelle Burris, Free Will: An Extensive Bibliography (Frankfurt: Ontos, 2010). Ruse, Michael, The Evolution-Creation Struggle (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2000). Russell, Bertrand, Religion and Science (London: Oxford University Press, 1935). Sabini, John, and Maury Silver, Moralities of Everyday Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). Skinner, B. F., Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York: Vintage Books, 1971). Sober, Elliot, Philosophy of Biology (2nd ed., Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 2000). Sowell, Thomas, Knowledge and Decisions (New York: Basic Books, 1980). Spencer, Herbert, Principles of Sociology, Vol. III, ch. VIII, “Intellectual Progress.” St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae. Szabka, Tadeouz, The Mind Body Problem: A Guide to the Current Debate (Oxford: Blackwells, 1994). Tatarkiewicz, W., On Perfection (Warsaw: Warsaw University Press, 1992). Tennant, F. R., Philosophical Theology, 2 vol.’s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928). Tuomela, Raimo, Cooperation (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000). Vollmer, H. M., and D. L. Mills (eds.), Professionalization (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1966). Warren, Mary Anne, Moral Status (Oxford: Clarendon Pres, 1997). Weatherford, Roy, The Implications of Determinism (London and New York: Routledge, 1991).

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Nicholas Rescher • Philosophical Explorations

Wegner, Daniel The Illusion of Conscious Will (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). Wolf, Fred Alen, The Body Quantum: The New Physics of Body, Mind, and Health (London: Heinemann, 1987).

NicholasRescher

Nicholas Rescher

On Certainty And other Philosophical Essays on Cognition On Certainty continues Rescher’s longstanding practice of publishing occasional studies that form part of a wider program of investigation of the scope and limits of rational inquiry in the pursuit of understanding. And pragmatism forms a subtextual Leitmotiv of these essays, seeing that the linking idea at work throughout is that knowledge is a tool for the management of our theoretical and practical affairs, and that what we ask of it is serviceability for the uses we have in view.

About the Author Nicholas Rescher is University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh where he also served for many years as Director of the Center for Philosophy of Science. He is a former president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, and has also served as President of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, the American Metaphysical Society, the American G. W. Leibniz Society, and the C. S. Peirce Society. An honorary member of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, he has been elected to membership in the European Academy of Arts and Sciences (Academia Europaea), the Institut International de Philosophie, and several other learned academies. Having held visiting lectureships at Oxford, Constance, Salamanca, Munich, and Marburg, Professor Rescher has received six honorary degrees from universities on three continents. Author of some hundred books ranging over many areas of philosophy, over a dozen of them translated into other languages, he was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Prize for Humanistic Scholarship in 1984. In November 2007 Nicholas Rescher was awarded by the American Catholic Philosophical Association with the „Aquinas Medal“. In 2011 Rescher receive the Bundesverdienstkreuz 1. Klasse (First Class Order of Merit) of the Federal Republic of Germany.

ontos verlag

Frankfurt • Paris • Lancaster • New Brunswick 2011. 94 pp., Format 14,8 x 21 cm Hardcover, EUR 59,00 ISBN 978-3-86838-105-4

P.O. Box 1541 • D-63133 Heusenstamm bei Frankfurt www.ontosverlag.com • [email protected] Tel. ++49-6104-66 57 33 • Fax ++49-6104-66 57 34

NicholasRescher

Nicholas Rescher

Free Will An Extensive Bibliography With the Cooperation of Estelle Burris

Few philosophical issues have had as long and elaborate a history as the problem of free will, which has been contested at every stage of the history of the subject. The present work practices an extensive bibliography of this elaborate literature, listing some five thousand items ranging from classical antiquity to the present.

About the author Nicholas Rescher is University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh where he also served for many years as Director of the Center for Philosophy of Science. He is a former president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, and has also served as President of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, the Americna Metaphysical Society, the American G. W. Leibniz Society, and the C. S. Peirce Society. An honorary member of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, he has been elected to membership in the European Academy of Arts and Sciences (Academia Europaea), the Institut International de Philosophie, and several other learned academies. Having held visiting lectureships at Oxford, Constance, Salamanca, Munich, and Marburg, Professor Rescher has received six honorary degrees from universities on three continents. Author of some hundred books ranging over many areas of philosophy, over a dozen of them translated into other languages, he was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Prize for Humanistic Scholarship in 1984. In November 2007 Nicholas Rescher was awarded by the American Catholic Philosophical Association with the „Aquinas Medal“

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Frankfurt • Paris • Lancaster • New Brunswick 2009. 309pp. Format 14,8 x 21 cm Hardcover EUR 119,00 ISBN 13: 978-3-86838-058-3 Due December 2009

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NicholasRescher

Nicholas Rescher

Autobiography Second Edition

This revised edition of his Autobiography brings up-to-date Rescher’s account of his life and work. The passage of years since the publication of an autobiographical work makes for its growing incompleteness. Moreover, the passage of time is bound to bring some new perspectives to view. This new edition comes to terms with these circumstances. Since the publication of the previous version Rescher’s philosophical work has made substantial progress, betokened by the publication of over a score of new books that mark an ongoing expansion of his philosophical range. Then too, the internet has brought to light interesting new information about Rescher’s family background and antecedence. Overall the book affords a detailed, vivid, and highly personalized picture of the life and work of someone who counts as one of the most prolific and many-sided contemporary thinkers.

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Frankfurt • Paris • Lancaster • New Brunswick 2010. 419 Seiten Format 14,8 x 21 cm Paperback EUR 49,00 ISBN 978-3-86838-084-2

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NicholasRescher

Nicholas Rescher

On Rules and Principles A Philosophical Study of their Nature and Function The present book is a natural outgrowth of Rescher’s longstanding preoccupation with the rational systematization of our knowledge as manifested in such earlier works as Cognitive Systematization (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), and Complexity (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1998). Accordingly, the role of principles in human affairs is crucial and ubiquitous. Principology, the theory of principles—underdeveloped through it may be—is accordingly bound to find a significant place in the sphere of philosophical inquiry regarding matters of thought and action. About the Author Nicholas Rescher is University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh where he also served for many years as Director of the Center for Philosophy of Science. He is a former president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, and has also served as President of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, the American Metaphysical Society, the American G. W. Leibniz Society, and the C. S. Peirce Society. An honorary member of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, he has been elected to membership in the European Academy of Arts and Sciences (Academia Europaea), the Institut International de Philosophie, and several other learned academies. Having held visiting lectureships at Oxford, Constance, Salamanca, Munich, and Marburg, Professor Rescher has received six honorary degrees from universities on three continents. Author of some hundred books ranging over many areas of philosophy, over a dozen of them translated into other languages, he was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Prize for Humanistic Scholarship in 1984. In November 2007 Nicholas Rescher was awarded by the American Catholic Philosophical Association with the „Aquinas Medal“.

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Frankfurt • Paris • Lancaster • New Brunswick 2010. 220 Seiten Format 14,8 x 21 cm Hardcover EUR 89,00 ISBN 978-3-86838-089-7

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Ontos

NicholasRescher

Nicholas Rescher

Collected Paper. 14 Volumes Nicholas Rescher is University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh where he also served for many years as Director of the Center for Philosophy of Science. He is a former president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, and has also served as President of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, the American Metaphysical Society, the American G. W. Leibniz Society, and the C. S. Peirce Society. An honorary member of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, he has been elected to membership in the European Academy of Arts and Sciences (Academia Europaea), the Institut International de Philosophie, and several other learned academies. Having held visiting lectureships at Oxford, Constance, Salamanca, Munich, and Marburg, Professor Rescher has received seven honorary degrees from universities on three continents (2006 at the University of Helsinki). Author of some hundred books ranging over many areas of philosophy, over a dozen of them translated into other languages, he was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Prize for Humanistic Scholarship in 1984. ontos verlag has published a series of collected papers of Nicholas Rescher in three parts with altogether fourteen volumes, each of which will contain roughly ten chapters/essays (some new and some previously published in scholarly journals). The fourteen volumes would cover the following range of topics: Volumes I - XIV STUDIES IN 20TH CENTURY PHILOSOPHY ISBN 3-937202-78-1 · 215 pp. Hardcover, EUR 75,00

STUDIES IN VALUE THEORY ISBN 3-938793-03-1 . 176 pp. Hardcover, EUR 79,00

STUDIES IN PRAGMATISM ISBN 3-937202-79-X · 178 pp. Hardcover, EUR 69,00

STUDIES IN METAPHILOSOPHY ISBN 3-938793-04-X . 221 pp. Hardcover, EUR 79,00

STUDIES IN IDEALISM ISBN 3-937202-80-3 · 191 pp. Hardcover, EUR 69,00

STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF LOGIC ISBN 3-938793-19-8 . 178 pp. Hardcover, EUR 69,00

STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY ISBN 3-937202-81-1 · 206 pp. Hardcover, EUR 79,00

STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE ISBN 3-938793-20-1 . 273 pp. Hardcover, EUR 79,00

STUDIES IN COGNITIVE FINITUDE ISBN 3-938793-00-7 . 118 pp. Hardcover, EUR 69,00

STUDIES IN METAPHYSICAL OPTIMALISM ISBN 3-938793-21-X . 96 pp. Hardcover, EUR 49,00

STUDIES IN SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY ISBN 3-938793-01-5 . 195 pp. Hardcover, EUR 79,00

STUDIES IN LEIBNIZ'S COSMOLOGY ISBN 3-938793-22-8 . 229 pp. Hardcover, EUR 69,00

STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY ISBN 3-938793-02-3 . 165 pp. Hardcover, EUR 79,00

STUDIES IN EPISTEMOLOGY ISBN 3-938793-23-6 . 180 pp. Hardcover, EUR 69,00

ontos verlag Frankfurt • Paris • Lancaster • New Brunswick 2006. 14 Volumes, Approx. 2630 pages. Format 14,8 x 21 cm Hardcover EUR 798,00 ISBN 10: 3-938793-25-2 Due October 2006 Please order free review copy from the publisher Order form on the next page

P.O. Box 1541 • D-63133 Heusenstamm bei Frankfurt www.ontosverlag.com • [email protected] Tel. ++49-6104-66 57 33 • Fax ++49-6104-66 57 34