Autor: Feser, Edward

Buch: Scholastic Metaphysics

Titel: Scholastic Metaphysics

Stichwort: Szientismus 3a; falsche Alternative: Naturwissenschaft - Begriffsanalyse (= Varante von Hume's Fork); Neurowissenschaft; Naturalism: Selbstwiderspruch; Logik, Mathematik: keine Erklärung in "bloßer" Begriffsanalyse (deren Objektivität) oder Naturalismus

Kurzinhalt: Now Hume’s Fork is notoriously self-refuting, since it is not itself either a conceptual truth (a matter of the “relations of ideas”) or empirically testable (a “matter of fact”)... either matters of “conceptual analysis” or matters of natural science ...

Textausschnitt: 0.3 Against “conceptual analysis”

25a The advocate of scientism will insist that unless metaphysics is “naturalized” by making of it nothing more than science’s bookkeeping department, then the only thing left for it to be is a kind of “conceptual analysis.” And the trouble with this, we are told, is that we have no guarantee that the “intuitions” or “folk notions” the conceptual analyst appeals to really track reality, and indeed good reason to think they do not insofar as science often presents us with descriptions of reality radically different from what common sense supposes it to be like. (Cf. Ladyman, Ross, Spurrett, and Collier 2007, Chapter 1) (Fs)

25b Now, one problem with this sort of argument is that it fallaciously takes science’s methodological exclusion of certain commonsense features from its picture of the natural world as a discovery that those features don’t really exist there. To take just one example, given its purely quantitative methods, physics excludes any reference to teleological features. But to conclude from this that the natural world has no inherent teleological features is, again, like concluding from the predictive and technological success of the aircraft engineers’ methods that passengers’ entertainment and meal preferences don’t exist, since the methods make no reference to them. Claims about what science has “shown” vis-à-vis this or that metaphysical question invariably merely presuppose, rather than demonstrate, a certain metaphysical interpretation of science. The absence of a certain feature from the scientist’s description of reality gives us reason to doubt that feature’s existence only given a further argument which must be metaphysical rather than scientific in nature. And as we will see in the course of this book, in general such arguments are no good. Indeed, there are severe limits on what might coherently be eliminated from our commonsense picture of the world in the name of science. As I have argued elsewhere (2008, Chapter 6; 2013a) there is, eliminative materialists’ glib dismissal of the incoherence problem notwithstanding, no way in principle coherently to deny the existence of intentional thought processes. We will see in the course of this book that it is also impossible coherently to deny, in the name of science, the existence of change, causation, teleology, substance, essence, and other basic metaphysical realities. (Fs)

26a But putting that aside, there is a no less fundamental problem with the objection under consideration, which is that it rests on a false alternative. While there are metaphysicians whose method is that of “conceptual analysis” (e.g. Jackson 1998), Scholastics are not among them. The supposition that if you are not doing natural science then the only other thing you could be doing is “conceptual analysis” is essentially a variation on Hume’s Fork, the thesis that “all the objects of human reason or enquiry may naturally be divided into two kinds, to wit, Relations of Ideas, and Matters of Fact” (Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section IV, Part I). Now Hume’s Fork is notoriously self-refuting, since it is not itself either a conceptual truth (a matter of the “relations of ideas”) or empirically testable (a “matter of fact”). The Scholastic is happy in this case to follow Hume’s advice and commit it to the flames. But the supposition made by the contemporary naturalist is no better. The claim that “all the objects of human reason or enquiry” are or ought to be either matters of “conceptual analysis” or matters of natural science is itself neither a conceptual truth nor a proposition for which you will find, or could find, the slightest evidence in natural science. It is a proposition as metaphysical as any a Scholastic would assert, differing from the latter only in being self-refuting. (The naturalist might claim that neuroscience or cognitive science supports his case, but if so he is deluding himself. For neuroscience and cognitive science, when they touch on matters of metaphysical import, are rife with tendentious and unexamined metaphysical assumptions (Bennett and Hacker 2003). And insofar as such assumptions are naturalist assumptions, the naturalist merely begs the question in appealing to them.) (Fs)

26b Now that fact alone suffices to show that it is possible to take a cognitive stance toward the world that is neither that of natural science, nor merely a matter of tracing out conceptual relations in a network of ideas that might float entirely free of mind-independent reality (as “conceptual analysts” are accused of doing). The naturalist takes this third stance in the very act of denying that it can be taken. But more can be said. It is hardly news that there are truths -- namely those of logic and mathematics -- that do not plausibly fit into either of the two categories Hume and his naturalist descendents would, in Procrustean fashion, try to fit all knowledge into. Truths of logic and mathematics have a necessity that propositions of natural science lack and an objectivity that mere “conceptual analysis,” at least as that is typically understood these days, would seem unable to guarantee. Some naturalists would try to find ways of showing that logical and mathematical truths are not really necessary or objective after all, but there are notorious difficulties with such proposals. Moreover, it would obviously beg the question to propose denying either the necessity or objectivity of logic and mathematics merely because they don’t sit well with naturalism. Nor will it do for naturalists simply to shrug their shoulders and write off the necessity and objectivity of logic and mathematics as a mere unresolved problem that eventually will — someday, somehow, by someone — be solved by whatever “our best science” turns out to be a century or three hence. We may, with poetic justice, quote their hero David Hume against them: “But here we may observe, that nothing can be more absurd, than this custom of calling a difficulty what pretends to be a demonstration, and endeavoring by that means to elude its force and evidence” (Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part II, Section II). (Fs)