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title: Finally Stumbling Upon The Perfect PhD Thesis Intro
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2019-08-12T13:00:00+08:00
I am interested in constructing a philosophy of objective morality. This
account of morality is a virtue ethical account. The broad aim of my
project is to produce a list of virtues about how the social ecology of
humans should be structured. The list of virtues I will produce apply to
humans both individually and collectively. The social system that my
philosophy outlines is a communist one. I aim to demonstrate that the
organisation of human life around the 'needs principle' is the morally
objectively correct way to live.
I argue that organising the totality of human life around 'from each
according to their ability, to each according to their need' provides
the best way for humans to flourish.
I will leave for a later time the development of the exact list of
virtues which I claim are objectively correct for humans to possess. In
this thesis, I will only show how it is possible for there to be an
objective morality. I will leave any development of which kind of
objective morality for a later time.
I will construct my philosophy in this thesis in three parts. The first
part of my thesis discusses the philosophy of John McDowell, and his
philosophy of mind. The second part of my thesis discusses the
philosophy of Joseph Rouse in his 2015 book Articulating the World. The
third part of my thesis synthesises both the philosophy of McDowell and
Rouse using the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel. In the third part of my
thesis, I combine my own original interpretation of Hegel with the
interpretations developed by Heikki Ikaheimo and Alison Stone.
The broad argument of my thesis is that humans can perceive moral facts
in much the same way as epistemic facts. In the same way that epistemic
facts exist regardless of the existence of humans, so do moral facts.
While moral facts entail different standards of rationality than
epistemic facts in the way humans move through and interrogate the
world, they are nonetheless objective in a very similar way. This means
they are both binding on the way humans are to be assessed as rational.
I understand rationality to be a virtue which applies to both morality
and knowledge of the physical world.
If I am correct about my account of facts, then moral realism is true,
and it is indeed possible for morality to be objective.
--
In the first part of my thesis, I perform an original interpretation of
John McDowell. I appropriate the philosophy of mind that McDowell
develops in his book Mind and World for my own purpose. Mind and World
attempts to argue for a limited form of moral realism. McDowell
disagrees with the current orthodoxy of moral anti-realism in analytic
philosophy. In the first part of Mind and World, McDowell develops a
reading of Hegel, Kant, and the early Wittgenstein which he uses for
arguing that moral facts are identical with epistemic ones. He does this
by arguing the human perception of epistemic and moral facts are both
conceptual. McDowell shows how humans are able to perceive moral facts
by describing the processes through which humans experience facts in the
world. He shows how there are two different faculties of the mind, the
faculties of 'receptivity' and 'spontaneity'. Content from the world is
grasped by the mind through the operation of these two processes in the
mind, and as a result humans are able to see the world perfectly
objectively.
A lot of McDowell's philosophy turns on what exactly he means by the
operation of these faculties. McDowell claims that the human perception
of the world is fully conceptual. Using the language of Frege, however,
he says that the status of facts as concepts in human cognition occurs
at the level of 'sense'. This means that the meaning possessed by facts
is obtained by the interpretation they provide of objects in the world.
He excludes this operation at the level of Fregean 'reference', that is
to say, meaning is not inherent in the nature (or structure) of the
objects themselves:
I can indeed formulate a main point of my lectures in terms of the
Fregean notion of sense, like this: it is in the context of that notion
that we should reflect about the relation of thought to reality, in
order to immunise ourselves against the familiar philosophical
anxieties. This is just another way to put the thought I express in the
lectures in terms of Sellars's image of the logical space of reasons.
Frege's notion of sense operates in the space of reasons: the whole
point of the notion of sense is captured by the principle that thoughts,
potential senses of whole utterances, differ if a single subject can
simultaneously take rationally conflicting stances towards them ...
without thereby standing convicted of irrationality. If failing to
distinguish senses would leave us liable to have to attribute to a
rational and unconfused subject, at the same time, rationally opposed
stances with the same content, then we must distinguish senses, so as to
make possible a description of the subject's total position that has
different contents for the stances, and so does not raise a question
about the position's rationality (Mind and World, page 180).
I argue that we can take the philosophy of mind that McDowell develops
in Mind and World, and substitute his understanding of concepts as
persisting at the level of 'sense', with concepts at the level of
'reference'. That is, I argue that meaning is inherent in the objective
structure of both moral and epistemic facts about objects. I adopt this
position because I believe it is the best way to answer the criticisms
that have been made of Mind and World.
Critics such as Christoph Halbig and Julian Dodd argue that John
McDowell does not manage to bring both moral and epistemic facts into a
coherent (or parsimonious) account of how humans perceive the world.
They claim that, because of this, McDowell's philosophy does not provide
a satisfying account of how moral realism is true. They argue that Mind
and World collapses into a 'dualism' of 'Reason' and 'Nature', with
moral facts being explained separately from epistemic facts. I agree
with these criticisms, and I think the best way to respond to these
criticisms is to transform McDowell's philosophy of mind into a new one,
which is not linguistic, as McDowell prefers, but metaphysical.
I argue that I can successfully respond to the issues that McDowell's
critics take up about the dualism in his philosophy by showing that
inflating the meaning of the phrase 'unboundedness of the conceptual'.
McDowell uses phrases borrowed from Wilfrid Sellars such as 'the space
of reasons', 'the realm of law', the 'space of nature', and 'the space
of concepts' to build his argument about how moral realism is true. He
uses these phrases as labels for the different modes of operation
('logical spaces') into which he imagines human experience of the world
is divided.
The critics of McDowell that I discuss argue that McDowell's
organisation of these logical spaces into different sets and subsets is
either vague, unharmonious, or contradictory. I agree with these
criticisms. I argue that if we construct a different philosophy by
re-organising the different sets of McDowellian logical spaces, then we
can have a satisfying account of moral realism that avoids the dualisms
in McDowell's moral realism.
McDowell organises the set 'the space of concepts' as identical with the
set 'space of nature'. He then makes the space of reasons a subset of
the 'space of nature'. The 'realm of law' is also a subset of the space
of nature, but it does not intersect with the space of reasons or
concepts. The implication behind this system of logical spaces is that
the space of concepts is divided into meaningful concepts, and concepts
devoid of meaning, therefore making a home for both moral realism and
epistemic realism within a supposedly coherent philosophy.
- \[SPACE OF NATURE\] ..\* \[SPACE OF CONCEPTS\] ....\* \[SPACE OF
REASONS\] ....\* \[REALM OF LAW\]
I argue that we should reorganise these logical spaces in the following
way:
- \[SPACE OF NATURE\] + \[SPACE OF CONCEPTS\] ..\* \[SPACE OF
REASONS\] ....\* \[REALM OF LAW\]
I argue that the space of nature and the space of concepts are
identical, along with McDowell. The space of reasons is a subset of the
space of nature/concepts, and the realm of law is a subset of the space
of reasons. I argue that this new philosophy avoids the dualism of
McDowell's Mind and World.
Crispin Wright makes this criticism of Mind and World, which is supposed
to be a devastating critique of the philosophy, but I completely embrace
his mischaracterisation of McDowell's philosophy:
So---if McDowell is right---not just experience, as a potential
justifier of empirical beliefs, but the real world in turn, as that
which is to be capable of impinging upon us in a way which indices
experiences of determinate content, must be thought of as conceptual. We
arrive at a conception of experience not merely as something which is
intrinsically content-bearing, a passive exercise of concepts, but as
also essentially an "openness to the layout of reality", where this
openness is a matter of conceptual fit between the experience and the
situation experienced. The world, as we must conceive of it, is indeed
the Tractarian world: a totality of facts, where facts are essentially
facts that P. Conceptual content, in McDowell's metaphysics, belongs to
the very fabric of the world (Crispin Wright, '(Anti-)Spectics Simple
and Subtle: G. E. Moore and John McDowell' (2002) 65 Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research 330, 347).
McDowell does not intend his philosophy to be understood in this way at
all. This is, however, exactly what I mean behind my philosophy. On my
account of the world, not only does conceptual content belong to the
fabric of reality, but that content is meaningful in a full-blooded
sense. McDowell disparages the idea that there is 'meaning in the fall
of the sparrow' as in the same meaning one would find in a book, but I
argue there is. I do not find meaning in nature in the same way as
Christians find in a transcendent God. I mean there is meaning in nature
in the same sense as Spinoza and Hegel identify the natural world and
'God'--a 'substance monism', what some may call negatively 'pantheism'.
In the same way as Spinoza thought it was possible to deduce human
morality from the geometry of the universe, Hegel thought his
dialectical method sufficient to deduce a type of constitutional
monarchy from the conceptual structure of the universe.
In the rest of my thesis, I develop exactly what I mean when I say these
logical spaces of McDowell are to be organised in the way I say.
--
In the second part of my thesis, I perform a discussion and assessment
of the work Joseph Rouse carries out in his 2015 book Articulating the
World. Joseph Rouse is a participant in the 'Pittsburgh School' of
philosophy that Sellars, Haugeland, McDowell, Brandom and Rorty are all
contemporaries. Rouse discusses the philosophical significance of new
research into the evolutionary biology of sentient creatures. Rouse is
an excellent choice for discussing the natural scientific implications
of my philosophy of objective morality, because he deals primarily in
the same philosophical tradition as McDowell. Virtually all of Rouse's
work is conversant and compatible with McDowellianism.
Articulating the World deals with how the understanding that many
analytic philosophers have of human evolutionary biology is a caricature
of the actual practices and conclusions of the current science. What
many philosophers take to be evolutionary biology is what is termed
'neo-Darwinism', and is a false and reductionist understanding of
exactly how organisms evolve.
It was previously understood that organisms transmit combinations of
gene frequencies from generation to generation based on the success of
their adaptation to their environment. This was indeed understood to be
a one-way process. This account of evolution has been revealed to be
reductionist on two counts: first, what scientists previously understood
to be the 'intelligence' of sentient organisms is not reducible to the
patterns of gene frequencies that they exhibit. Second, evolution is not
just a one-way process in which organisms must adapt to their
environment, or perish. It has been revealed that organisms also modify
their environment, through a process called 'niche construction'.
Organisms modify their environment in ways which change the selection
pressures on their evolution. One trivial example of this is the
dam-making behaviour of beavers, which modify their environment to make
it more habitable and navigable for themselves. The dams they build form
a relatively permanent epigenetic modification to the selection
pressures they would otherwise have to face but for their 'niche
construction'. A significant upshot of this new evolutionary biological
science is that it changes the way we need to account for human
'intelligence'.
It emerges that the niche that humans have constructed for themselves
evolutionarily is not just physical, such as the way we deforest, mine,
and build dwellings and roads etc., but also conceptual. Concepts are a
part of the human evolutionary niche which helps us change the selection
pressures of the environment. Rouse says that we 'articulate' our
environment conceptually. By this he means we use a normative experience
of the world to modify our biological environment. This means that the
process through which humans change their environment, and therefore
succeed or fail according to evolutionary selection pressures, is many
dimensions more complex than analytic philosophers normally comprehend.
This is a tremendous discovery. The two chapters that I spend on Rouse
unpack what I take to be the meaning of human conceptual niche
construction. I discuss and criticise the philosophy Rouse constructs in
an attempt to account for this biological science, and I argue that
Rouse constructs a 'neo-Humean' or bald naturalist account of what it
means for humans to possess conceptual understanding of their biological
environment.
I deem Rouse's philosophy to be an inadequate account of the metaphysics
of human meaning. It is ultimately anti-realist about the conceptual
nature of human cognition, and therefore anti-realist about human
morality. Rouse's philosophical account of niche construction is not, by
any means, anti-realist in the sense of normal analytic orthodoxy about
meaning in the universe. However he organises the logical spaces of
human cognition in the following way: the space of reasons is a subset
of the realm of law. That is, the space of reasons is to be more
properly explained by natural-scientific intelligibility. According to
Rouse, the space of reasons is to be constructed out of elements which
are devoid of meaning.
\~ to be completed