In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 14.3 (2000) 161-178



[Access article in PDF]

Naturalism, Pragmatism, and Design

John Capps
Rochester Institute of Technology


But now that philosophy of science has nominal as well as real existence, there has arisen the temptation to leave it to the specialists, and to confuse the sound idea that philosophy is not a science with the mistaken idea that philosophy is independent of science.

--Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind 80

Philosophical naturalists maintain that philosophy is continuous with science, that philosophically acceptable standards of knowledge, justification, and explanation are in some sense commensurable with the corresponding scientific standards (Post 1995). Yet naturalists continue to disagree about what, exactly, it means to say that philosophy and science are "continuous." Here I will argue that a pragmatic approach can shed valuable light on this question.

Some naturalists (e.g., W. V. O. Quine [1969], Paul Churchland [1979], and Patricia Churchland [1987]) suggest that philosophical concepts can be eliminated in favor of scientific concepts and that philosophy can be made a "chapter" of natural science. While this is a provocative and interesting proposal, it would replace the normative dimension of philosophical inquiry with a purely descriptive investigation into how, in fact, we do reason about the true, the good, and the beautiful. This approach thus appears to commit the naturalistic fallacy from the very beginning (see Kim 1994, Putnam 1982, Bonjour 1994). Other naturalists (e.g., Alvin Goldman [1986] and Hilary Kornblith [1993]) distinguish elimination from reduction and argue that philosophical concepts can be reduced to scientific concepts. On this view, philosophical concepts might be shown to supervene on natural concepts that can then be investigated using scientific methods and [End Page 161] resources. For example, the normative philosophical concept of epistemic justification might be explicable in terms of reliably produced belief: it would then fall to psychologists and cognitive scientists (among others) to determine which processes are sufficiently reliable.

Finally, there are naturalists who take an even more modest position. For them naturalism simply amounts to the rejection of a priori concepts and categories. As Susan Haack puts it, naturalism is just the "thesis that traditional problems of epistemology can be resolved a posteriori, within the web of empirical belief" (1993, 118). This does not mean that philosophical concepts can or should be reduced to, or eliminated in favor of, scientific concepts. On this view, philosophy and science differ more in degree than in kind. Still there remain important questions that are distinctively philosophical. For Haack these questions include the justification of induction and explaining the epistemic status of science. Similarly, Robert Almeder, who proposes a "harmless naturalism," points to the problem of other minds and the debate surrounding scientific realism as questions that require uniquely philosophical--not scientific--responses (1998, 169-77). While these remarks do not exhaust the range of positions that can be called "naturalistic," they do serve present purposes. 1

In what follows, I will outline a "pragmatic" naturalism that falls squarely within this last category. A pragmatic naturalism, I will argue, is committed to the continuity of philosophy and science in three senses: substantively, normatively, and, most importantly, procedurally. The idea of a pragmatic naturalism is nothing new--many of the classical American pragmatists were also naturalists (see Ryder 1994 and Eames 1977)--and it is easy to see why: pragmatists and naturalists both tend to emphasize the a posteriori, the concrete, and the practical as opposed to the a priori, the transcendent, and the theoretical. However, I will argue here that a pragmatic naturalism also avoids two recent critiques of philosophical naturalism: those of Michael Friedman and Barry Stroud. I will begin by discussing their arguments; I will argue that they direct their criticisms at eliminativism and reductivism, respectively, and that they do not, as a result, apply to a pragmatic naturalism.

I will also discuss a rather different line of criticism that comes from the side of "intelligent design" creationism. According to these critics, naturalism is an unsupported hypothesis of contemporary philosophy and science; as such, explanations couched in natural terms are not inherently...

pdf