Normativity and Objectivity The Semantic Nature of Objects and the Potentiality of Nature (original) (raw)
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in: Robert Stern and Gabriele Gava, eds., Pragmatism, Kant, and Transcendental Philosophy (London: Routledge): pp. 196–216. , 2016
Abstract: This paper traces a Kantian and pragmatist line of thinking that connects the ideas of conceptual content, object cognition, and modal constraints in the form of counterfactual sustaining causal laws. It is an idea that extends from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason through C. I. Lewis’s Mind and the World-Order to the Kantian naturalism of Wilfrid Sellars and the analytic pragmatism of Robert Brandom. Kant put forward what I characterize as a modal conception of objectivity, which he developed as an extended argument stretching from the transcendental deduction through the analogies of experience to the regulative maxims of reason and reflective judgment. In related ways in Lewis and Sellars, the very idea of an object of knowledge (and of intentionality more generally) is connected with a certain lawfulness or modal constraint the necessary representation of which, they argue, is an achievement of conceptualization. While Sellars agreed with the spirit of Lewis’s famous pragmatic conception of the a priori, Sellars’s conception of meaning and conceptual content differed in crucial ways with important consequences for this issue. I argue furthermore that a certain phenomenalist temptation threatens to spoil this insight both among some of Kant’s interpreters and in Lewis’s thought. Finally, I point out that Brandom’s “Kant-Sellars thesis” provides new support for this line of thought. Although questions concerning idealism continue to raise controversies for neo-Kantians and pragmatists, the line of thought itself represents a distinctive and still promising approach to questions concerning intentionality and conceptual content.
A new perspective on objectivity and conventionalism
Metascience, 2010
Much work in the philosophy of science falls into one of two camps. On the one hand, we have the system builders. Often with the help of formal methods, these philosophers aim at a general account of theories and models, explanation and confirmation, scientific theory change, and so on. Here, examples from the sciences are at best illustrations of the philosophical claims in question. On the other hand, we find those philosophers who, dissatisfied by general accounts and often prompted by a close study of the history of science, present detailed accounts of very specific parts of science, without aiming at the development of a general account. If a general account of science is referred to at all, it is refuted (by a case study) or only used to describe a certain episode of scientific research.
In this paper I analyse the role of naturalism and objectivism in everyday life according to Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. Whereas Husserl attributes the naturalistic attitude mainly to science, he defines the objectivist attitude as a naiveté which equally applies to the natural attitude of everyday life. I analyse the relationship between the natural attitude and lived experience and show Husserl's hesitation regarding the task of phenomenology in describing the lived experience of everyday life, since he considers this experience to be too objectivistic. I use Merleau-Ponty's work to argue that objectivism is an essential characteristic of lived experience and that phenomenology should therefore find ways to integrate it into its descriptions while simultaneously suggesting ways to overcome its rigidity in order to renew perception. I finally propose that the project of the naturalisation of phenomenology could be one of the ways to connect lived experience to the objectivism of everyday life.
Kantian Structuring: an objectivist account of practical knowledge
In a neglected passage of Philosophical Explanations, Robert Nozick discusses “Kantian structuring”, which is roughly the view that “we structure the world so that the statements come out true”. As an account of practical knowledge, this view purports to explain why ethics binds us in the first person. While this is a significant explanatory advantage of the theory, Nozick doubts that any such “Kantian structuring” can adequately explain morality. First, it is unclear how structural claims about rational agency may lead to a full-fledged moral theory and deliver moral duties. The objection is indeterminacy. Second, such a moral theory grounds the legitimacy of moral claims on features of one’s self rather than on the recognition of others. The objection is not self-referentiality but self-indulgence. Third, such a theory fails to ground objective practical knowledge because it does not warrant that we are tracking genuine values. The objection is subjectivism. Nozick was ahead of Kantian philosophers in identifying constructivism (under the name of structuring) as a distinctive meta-ethical theory whose promise should be measured against competing meta-ethical theories. He was also ahead of current critics of constructivism in identifying its basic weaknesses. My aim in this paper is to address Nozick’s worries. The defining feature of KC as I defend it is the claim that practical knowledge is knowledge by principles. Its task is to establish a constitutive relation between knowledge of oneself as a practical subject and knowledge about what one ought to do. Thus understood, Kantian constructivism is antagonist to non-cognitivist theories denying that moral judgments have cognitive contents, because they deny that there is something to be known. But it is also rival to cognitivist theories denying that knowledge can be practical “in itself”. (I hope to clarify this jargon as the argument develops). While the theory I outline differs from current agnostic or anti-realist accounts of Kantian constructivism, it is closer to its origins, since Kant treats practical reason as a cognitive capacity and takes moral judgments to be objective moral cognitions, which importantly differ from other sorts of rational cognitions because they are self-legislated. They bind us in the first person because they are self-legislated. Such practical cognitions are common knowledge because all subjects endowed with rationality can arrive at them by reasoning. Part of my argument is that Kantian constructivism carves a distinct logical space in the meta-ethical debate that other sorts of constructivism fail to identify. As Rawls writes, constructivism defines objectivity “in terms of a suitably constructed point of view that all can accept”. This “practical” conception of objectivity is defined in contrast to the realist or “ontological” conception of objectivity, understood as an accurate representation of an independent metaphysical order. Because of their objectivist but not realist commitments, Kantian constructivists such as Onora O’Neill place their theory “somewhere in the space between realist and relativist accounts of ethics”. Furthermore, they argue that their practical conception of objectivity succeeds in making sense of some features of morality, that is, its categorical authority and its relation to rational agency. For C. Korsgaard this is the feature that escapes rival theories. It may seem, then, that far from disengaging from meta-ethical issues, constructivism claims a privileged place in meta-ethics. But the legitimacy of this claim is widely challenged. Precisely because of its practical conception of objectivity, many – including constructivists such as T. Hill or T. Scanlon — regard constructivism as a first-order normative theory, rather than as a meta-ethical position, hence not on a par with realism. Unbeknownst to them, these critics revive Nozick’s critique of Kantian structuring when they object that constructivism fails to offer a distinct meta-ethics because it is structurally incomplete and tacitly relies on realism. Thus far, the debate about the prospects of constructivism as a meta-ethical theory has been driven by the conviction that the case for or against constructivism depends on its ontological commitments. In focusing on Nozick’s critique, I propose a change in perspective. My aim is to defend constructivism as an objectivist account of practical knowledge. Its defining feature is the claim that practical knowledge is knowledge by principles. Its task is to establish a constitutive relation between knowledge of oneself as a practical subject and knowledge about what one ought to do. By focusing on the issue of practical knowledge I hope to show that the difficulty in situating Kantian constructivism firmly on the meta-ethical map, along with other meta-ethical theories reflects ambiguities and oscillations about the practical significance of ethics.
Among all the similarities and differences that immediately strike a reader of Brandom's and Habermas's approaches to communicative practices, those related to the conception of objectivity that both entail probably are the most intricate and hardest to establish. This is so not, as it happens in other cases, because they are too dissimilar to be compared, but rather the exact opposite. In some respects they are virtually identical, but in others almost directly opposed. Thus, it is not completely It is clear that within the general frame of a pragmatist strategy whatever constraints are taken to be connected with the notion of objectivity, they will have to be understood as internal and not as external ones, i.e. as a result of normative presuppositions anchored in the practices to be explained, and thus as operative from the practitioners's own perspective. In this respect Brandom's and Habermas' approaches follow the same general strategy in their respective accounts of objectivity. Moreover, it is also possible to find a strong similarity between both approaches not only as regards their strategy, i.e. the kind of question that they both would like to answer, but as regards their specific answers as well. Brandom characterizes his answer in a way that it seems also appropriate to describe Habermas' own. In Making it Explicit Brandom characterizes his approach as an attempt to reconstrue objectivity: as consisting in a kind of perspectival form, rather than in a nonperspectival or crossperspectival content. What is shared by all discursive perspectives is that there is a difference between what is objectively correct...and what is merely taken to be so, not what it is -the structure, not the content. (MIE 600)
O'Shea, J (2014) 'A Tension in Pragmatist and Neo-Pragmatist Conceptions of Meaning and Experience'
European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy (EJPAP VI 2, Dec 2014), pp. 40-63. Full issue available in pdf here: http://lnx.journalofpragmatism.eu
ABSTRACT: There has been an enduring tension in the pragmatist tradition, I want to suggest, between the predominant pragmatist conceptions of meaning that broadly reflect C. S. Peirce’s pragmatic maxim on the one hand, and on the other the resulting emphasis within pragmatism on what Kant called "the fruitful bathos of experience” (Prolegomena: 4:373). In what follows I examine in some detail the tension as I find it in key themes concerning meaning (or intentionality) and experience in selected works of William James. I then argue, however, that the tension has not been adequately relieved by the ‘minimal’ pragmatist replacement conception of perceptual experience to be found in the important neo-pragmatist outlooks of Richard Rorty and Robert Brandom. In the end I briefly sketch the general form of a resolution that would be consistent with both of these core emphases within the pragmatist tradition. I begin by introducing Peirce's pragmatic maxim viewed as a test of conceptual clarity that is also broadly reflected in most recognizably pragmatist accounts of meaning and conceptual content (section I). This serves as a lead-in to a selective examination of the tension as it arises in James’s career-long effort to provide a satisfactory account of ‘the cognitive relation’ that obtains between our ideas and their objects, focusing on the case of perceptual experience (section II). In section III the tension is seen as arising in part from a plausible tight connection between the pragmatic maxim and the rejection by pragmatists such as Peirce, Rorty, and Brandom of what Sellars called the ‘myth of the given’ (Sellars, 1956). Finally, however, I conclude in section IV by considering the grounds for the dissatisfaction expressed by many recent pragmatists with the resulting successor conception of experience to be found in Rorty and Brandom, and I offer a brief diagnosis of the tension that points to the general form of a satisfactory solution.
Objectivity: Philosophical Aspects
This article is an overview of philosophical conceptions of objectivity, and it is divided into three parts. First, it describes metaphysical objectivity, which concerns the extent to which the existence and character of some class of entities depends on the states of mind of persons. Second, it describes epistemological objectivity, which concerns the extent to which we are capable of achieving knowledge about those things that are objective. Finally, it shows that metaphysical and epistemological considerations of objectivity are also the focus of sharp critiques by post-positivist and feminist philosophers, who focus on the procedural nature of objectivity, and of an emergent historical-epistemological way of analyzing objectivity that claims to be of primary philosophical relevance.