Unbounded naturalism

Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, Jan, 2008 by Andrew Taggart

The problems associated with dualism can be traced back to their source in the concept of nature that philosophy has imported from modern science. In Mind and World, as well as in his slightly more recent essay 'Two sorts of naturalism', McDowell affirms the Weberian thesis concerning the disenchantment of the world. (13) We can draw out the implications of Weber's thesis from 'science as Vocation', a talk Weber delivered in 1918 before a group of aspiring scientists, by shedding light on three of its central claims. (14) Firstly, in modernity there is no longer any meaning in the world: no longer does God or the gods, magicians or prophets, fate or fortune actively intervene on behalf of human beings or transform the world; the divine presence has receded behind the bounds of experience. (15) Secondly, the modern world comes to operate solely in accordance either with mechanical causal laws or, more recently, with probability and statistical regularity, and so is delivered up to predictability and control. Since the natural world can be understood entirely in terms of physical law and since no transcendent component enters into the mechanics of the natural world, it follows that there is in principle no exception to law and that the world is in principle fully comprehensible. Even apparent irregularities can be grasped by means of current explanations. Failing this, they still call for further explanation or generate new explanations; anomalies, accordingly, remain intelligible as potentially explicable phenomena within the current paradigms and so call for further research. (16) Lastly, a gulf thereby opens up between facts and values, nature and norms, so that whatever meaning there is in human life must be 'invented' and cannot be 'discovered'. (17) Hence, out of disenchantment emerge a kind of materialism whose central features are non-interventionism, scientism, and dualism.

Given this disenchanted picture of the mind-world relation, we have come to believe that external stimuli impinge upon an enclosed interior space we call 'mind'. Furthermore, we tend to think that the mind, as something 'in here', is that which confers meaning on the manifold, while the world, as something 'out there', is that realm of objects which are a priori amenable to such conferral. Now, what makes this picture 'gripping' is its ability to accommodate human freedom and modern science; however, what makes it suspect is the variety of skeptical problems associated with dualism: the religious predicament whereby the unhappy consciousness seeks to approach the infinite which it a priori posited over and against itself; the difficulty the epistemologist has with disproving the skeptical hypothesis, often posed in terms of the so-called 'brain in the vat'; the strained attempts to cordon off negative freedom from the realm of necessity in theories of action; the tensions relating to form and content in matters of perception; and so on. Thanks to this picture of disenchanted nature, much of modern philosophy since Descartes has sought to save human freedom and sui generis rationality by peeling human beings off of nature so conceived.