Presumptuous Naturalism: A Cautionary Tale (original) (raw)

Concentrating on their treatment of folk psychology, this paper seeks to establish that, in the form advocated by its leading proponents, the Canberra project is presumptuous in certain key respects. Crucially, it presumes (1) that our everyday practices entail the existence of implicit folk theories; (2) that naturalists ought to be interested primarily in what such theories say; and (3) that the core content of such theories is adequately characterized by establishing what everyone finds intuitively obvious about the topics in question. I argue these presumptions are a bad starting point for any naturalistic project and, more specifically, that in framing things in this way proponents of the Canberra plan have led us unnecessarily into philosophical quagmires. The fundamental error is to suppose that our conceptual investigations ought to target (A) what the folk ‘find obvious’ about a given domain (which is putatively revelatory of a shared implicit theory) instead of (B) attending to what the folk do when competently deploying their concepts in dealing with that domain. Only the latter reveals the folk commitments. Focusing on what the folk find obvious, as Canberra planners claim to do, generates a host of methodological difficulties that are best avoided. Much worse than this, trying to identify what is ‘intuitively known by all’ typically results in contaminated pictures, of the genuine commitments of the folk, hogging our attention. The cardinal sin of a presumptuous naturalism, as exemplified by the official versions of the Canberra plan, is that it makes it appear as if it is a simple matter to obtain an accurate understanding of folk commitments. Focusing on what anyone and everyone will find ‘obvious’ about some domain aids, abets and seemingly legitimizes certain popular but biased pictures of our folk commitments. This becomes dangerous when, by fuelling our intuitions, such pictures set important philosophical agendas and play a leading role in evaluating the adequacy of philosophical proposals. In section three, using Jaegwon Kim as a stalking horse, I illustrate a clear instance of the kinds of difficulties that attend adopting this sort of starting point, focusing on the so-called ‘problem’ of mental causation. Examination of this case reveals that it is attachment to a certain popular understanding of our folk psychological commitments – specifically, the idea that a productive notion of causation is required for making sense of human agency – that not only creates ‘the problem’ but also determines what any acceptable ‘solution’ must look like. Against this, in section four, I show that a close examination of our everyday practice of deploying mental predicates to explain actions reveals no logically compelling grounds for supposing that the folk must be operating with a productive notion of causation. This is something inherited from elsewhere. Indeed, a quick review of how the philosophical community became convinced that reasons and reason explanations are causal in the first place (in some sense, in some cases) reveals that we would have no inclination to attribute a commitment to the notion of productive causation to the folk if we did not already buy into a certain picture of how mental states cause actions. Which picture? Well, the very one promoted by the standard Lewisian, commonsense functionalist analysis of the platitudes of folk psychology– an analysis that allegedly states only what the folk find obvious about the mental and nothing more. If the diagnosis of this paper is correct then it serves as a cautionary tale. We ought to heed Wittgenstein’s warnings about the dangers of being taking in by beguiling pictures – those that systematically obscure a clear vision of our actual use of concepts in various contexts. That warning, it seems, is as pertinent today as ever. My aim is to show that any naturalism that takes a serious interest in understanding our folk commitments must adopt a different and more unassuming starting point than that proposed by the Canberra planners.