Work in progress, frequently updated and revised.
Page numbers in Table of Contents are only approximate. For latest update, completeness, and font readability
please check at both http://myweb.uiowa.edu/butchvar and http://butchvarov.yolasite.com, but the latter
is more reliable.

Dedication
page:
FOR KARTER, KOLE, and NORAH

2/16/2015

ANTHROPOCENTRISM
IN PHILOSOPHY

Realism/Antirealism/Semirealism

Panayot Butchvarov

University of Iowa

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter
One: INTRODUCTION 4

1.
Anthropocentrism. 4

2.
A Glance at History. 15

3.
Antirealism and its Varieties. 25

4.
Logical Antirealism and Semirealism. 32

Part One: EPISTEMOLOGY AND ETHICS DEHUMANIZED 40

How can he who has
magnificence of mind and is the

spectator of all time and existence, think much

of human life? (Plato)

Chapter
Two: THREE VARIETIES OF EPISTEMOLOGY 40

1  Naturalistic Epistemology. 40

2.
Subjective Epistemology. 45

3. Epistemology-as-Logic.
61

Chapter
Three: THE PROPERTY GOOD 75

1. Anthropocentrism and
Conceptual Analysis in Ethics. 75

2. The Good and the World. 87

3.
The Relevance of the Property Good. 92

Chapter
Four: SAYING AND SHOWING THE GOOD 98

1.The
distinction explained. 98

2. Logic
and the World. 107

3. The
World and the Good. 112

Part Two: METAPHYSICS HUMANIZED 121

It
is solely from the human standpoint that we

can speak of space, of extended things. (Kant)

Chapter
Five: THE ROLE OF LANGUAGE IN COGNITION 123

1.
The Empirical and the A Priori Question. 123

2. Philosophical opinions. 133

3. Scientific opinions. 137

4.
Language in logical cognition. 148

Chapter Six: METAPHYSICAL REALISM AND LOGICAL ANTIREALISM 151

1.
The Logic of Realism. 151

2.
Antirealism: ontological, cosmological, and logical. 163

3.
The Logical Structure of the World. 171

4.
Frege and Russell on Negation and Generality. 181

Chapter
Seven: LOGICAL SEMIREALISM 192

1.
Ineffability. 192

2.
Wittgenstein on Generality. 198

3. Bergmann on
Generality 210

Chapter
Eight : GENERIC STATEMENTS 225

1.
The Ubiquity of Generic Statements. 225

2.
Facts, Generic Facts, and Realism. 232

3.
The Irreducibility of Generic Statements. 239

4.
Logical Experiences. 250

Chapter
Nine: FACTS AND TRUTH 255

1.
Realism and Antirealism about Facts. 255

2.
Semirealism about Facts. 271

3.
Truth. 274

Part Three: METAPHYSICS DEHUMANIZED 281

Solipsism, when its implications
are followed out

strictly, coincides with pure realism. (Wittgenstein)

Chapter
Ten: I AND THE WORLD 281

1.
The Paradox of Antirealism. 287

2  First-person Pronouns. 293

3.
The Self. 297

Chapter
Eleven: WE AND THE WORLD 304

1.
Consciousness. 304

2. The I
that is We and the We that is I. 310

3.
Idealism. 320

Chapter
Twelve: MIND AND THE WORLD. 329

1. Concepts, Properties, and Universals. 329

2. Solipsism and Pure Realism. 342

3. Philosophical Method. 353

4. Philosophy without Anthropocentrism. 358

Chapter
One:
INTRODUCTION

1. Anthropocentrism.

Anthropocentrism,
the belief that humans enjoy special, central, even cosmic significance, is
present in everyday thought as an attitude toward other animals and the
environment generally, and in religion as the Biblical teaching that humans
alone were made in the image of God. “I am unable to believe that, in the
world as known, there is anything that I can value outside human beings, and,
to a much lesser extent, animals,” wrote Bertrand Russell.[1]
Many think that such anthropocentrism mars our relationship to other
animals and the environment, just as egocentrism mars our relationship to other
humans. Speciesism, they would say, is no more acceptable than is egoism,
androcentrism, or ethnocentrism.
Many also think that the anthropocentrism in religion mars our
conception of God.  They would agree
with Spinoza that, contrary to standard religious doctrine, “neither
intellect nor will pertain to the nature of God,”[2] and that “God is free from passions,
nor is He affected with any emotion of joy or sorrow.”[3]
To attribute to God human characteristics such as intellect, will, joy,
or sorrow, they would say, is to think of God as a sort of superhuman.

These instances of anthropocentrism are well-known and have been amply
discussed for centuries. They are not the topic of this book.  Its topic lies deeper: the
anthropocentrism present, though seldom discussed or even acknowledged, in
philosophy, the discipline charged with our most fundamental thinking –
about knowledge (in epistemology), goodness (in ethics), and the world itself
(in metaphysics).

Ethics is commonly understood as concerned with human well-being, even
happiness, and epistemology with human knowledge, especially perception. But
these are empirical matters, investigated today in psychology and neuroscience,
philosophers generally lacking the qualifications or even inclination for
empirical research. Ethics and epistemology remain anthropocentric even when
concerned only with language, because the language in question is surely human
and investigated properly in linguistics and lexicography. In metaphysics,
anthropocentrism takes the form of antirealism, the orientation that has
dominated philosophy since Berkeley and especially Kant. Broadly understood, it claims that the world
depends, at least insofar as it is knowable, on our cognitive capacities. The
claim seems absurd if taken to mean, as it often is, that we, humans,
“make the world.”

I
shall argue that, if properly understood,
epistemology is not about human knowledge and ethics is not about the human
good despite the fact that we all desire the human good and respect human
knowledge, and that metaphysics is not about “us,” despite the tautology
that we can know the world only as it can be known by us. My argument will rest
not on abstract and often enigmatic philosophical premises but on specific and
readily understandable truths.

Whatever
the nature of the world may be, humans are only inhabitants of it. The world
can hardly depend on them. And knowledge of humans, like knowledge of its other
inhabitants, is credibly sought only by empirical, evidence-based methods.  But philosophy is not an empirical
discipline, and its claims are seldom supported with empirical evidence.  Philosophers perform no experiments,
maintain no labs, use neither telescopes nor microscopes, embark on no field
trips. The moral to be drawn, however, is not that philosophers are experts on
nonempirical things or facts. If numbers are such things, it is mathematicians,
not philosophers, who specialize in them.

Concern with human beings, of course, is natural and morally expected of
us all.  It is a professional
concern, however, only for some: neuroscientists, psychologists, psychiatrists,
economists, sociologists, anthropologists, demographers, linguists, lexicographers,
physicians.  Aristotle did engage in
biological investigations, but at the time biology was hardly a science. Today
it is.

Philosophers’ willingness to assume authoritative stands on human
beings became especially incongruous when the experimental sciences devoted to
the study of humans emerged.  For
most of the history of philosophy and science, if a topic did not belong in
mathematics, astronomy, medicine, or theology, it was dispatched to philosophy
– there seemed to be no other place to put it.  Even today, in some institutions
psychology is called “mental philosophy” and physics “natural
philosophy.”  But neither is
considered part of philosophy, and few philosophers today can claim expertise
in psychology or in physics.

I
shall be concerned here with the ways anthropocentrism has affected
epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics, arguing that it has no place in them,
that all three should be radically refocused. The same reasoning would apply,
directly or indirectly, to the other branches of philosophy – from the
philosophy of art and of science to political philosophy and the philosophy of
education – but they will not be discussed here. They all depend in part
on theories developed in metaphysics, epistemology, or ethics, but also on developments
in fields like history, economics, or psychology. Logic is an exception, for
reasons to be explained shortly. Suffice it to note here that, insofar as it
belongs in philosophy rather than mathematics, it is a part of metaphysics.

Some
may say that not all of human nature is empirical, that humans also have
immortal nonphysical souls.  But
this is a matter of faith, not investigation, empirical or not. Others may say
that even if humans have no immortal souls they have nonphysical minds,
entirely distinct from both their brains and their behavior.  But there has been an empirical science
investigating such minds: the introspective psychology of James, Wundt,
Titchener, and many others. To be sure, it was largely unsuccessful, though not
because its subject matter called for nonempirical investigation – the
introspective psychologists explicitly relied on experience, often in
collaboration with others, sometimes in “laboratories.” Much the
same can be said about continental phenomenology in its early stages, which was
a close relative of introspective psychology and was summed up in
Husserl’s slogan “We must go back to the things themselves,”
back to what we actually find before us, rather than what philosophical or
scientific theory, or even common sense, says is there.

In
Husserl’s later works, and especially Heidegger’s and
Sartre’s, phenomenology evolved into a kind of metaphysics, similar to
Kant’s transcendental idealism, Hegel’s absolute idealism, or even
Nelson Goodman’s “irrealism.” Its chief tenet became that the
empirical world itself is in some sense human, “made by us,” as
Goodman put it.  This was
essentially the thesis of antirealism, in a very broad sense of the term that
would apply to Berkeley’s
“immaterialism” as well as to Kant’s, Hegel’s, and
Goodman’s views.  Much
of this book will be devoted to that thesis.

More
likely today is to be told that in fact philosophical inquiries are not about
human beings, that they really are conceptual or linguistic. They are about
concepts or words, not about the things or facts, human or nonhuman, those
concepts or words stand for.  For
example, it would be said, in ethics philosophers investigate the concept of
happiness or the use of the word “happiness,” not any facts about
happiness, which indeed are usefully investigated today by psychiatrists and
pharmacologists, and in epistemology they investigate the concept of perception
or the use of “perceive,” not any facts about perception, which for
centuries have been investigated by psychologists and in recent years also by
neuroscientists.  But surely the
concepts and words in question are themselves human, not platonic or divine,
and thus are part of an empirical subject matter. The investigation of them
calls for observation and sometimes experiment – as in psychology, neuroscience,
linguistics, and lexicography – not philosophical speculations,
intuitions, a priori arguments, analyses, or definitions.

That
this is so is hardly news. It was powerfully argued more than half a century ago by
W.V. Quine in “Two Dogmas of
Empiricism,” where he attacked philosophical appeals to meanings. At
about the same time Wittgenstein’s Philosophical
Investigations was published, arguing in part that words in ordinary
language are not used in accordance with necessary and sufficient conditions,
and therefore that their use cannot be captured in definitions. In the same
decade Gilbert Ryle castigated “the confusion between a
'use', i.e., a way of operating with something, and a 'usage'…. A usage
is a custom, practice, fashion or vogue…. The method of discovering
linguistic usages are the methods of philologists.”[4] Also in that decade,
Chomsky began publishing articles and books that stressed the biological,
largely inherited, core of linguistic competence, and urged that the study of
language employ the standard methods of scientific research.

The
traditional claim of philosophy to a distinctive place among the cognitive
disciplines has rested on its absolute fundamentality, supreme abstraction, and
unlimited scope.  In these respects
it surpasses even mathematics: one of its topics is the subject matter of
mathematics itself.  Its scope
includes that of physics and astronomy – space, time, and whatever is in
them – but philosophy is also concerned with anything that is not or
might not be in space and time.
Philosophy presupposes nothing and conceals nothing. This is why
philosophers court paradox when preoccupied with things as concrete, literally
“down to earth,” as humans.
The paradox is no less glaring than it would be if they were preoccupied
with cetaceans.  If some do not see
the paradox, the reason presumably is that they are human.  Had they been cetacean, they might have
been preoccupied with cetaceans.

The
concern in philosophy with humans is not a trivial consequence of its unlimited
scope, of its interest in “all time and existence.”  It is not the trivial application to
humans of general philosophical propositions, like the application to humans of
arithmetic by the Census Bureau or of physics by a pilot monitoring takeoff
weight.  It is supposed to be a
substantive concern. It may be woefully misguided, but it is natural. The
reason is obvious.  Plumbers or
philosophers, we all are humans. We are deeply interested in ourselves and other humans.  We see ourselves as the center of the universe
even when we know that we are at its periphery.  To suggest that philosophy should not be
about humans, that it ought to be in this sense “dehumanized,” may
seem even offensive.
“Dehumanized”
is an ugly word, but it does capture literally and succinctly the
aim of the drastic change needed in philosophy – freedom from
anthropocentrism – just as “humanized” captures much of the
current state of philosophy

A
familiar thesis in ethics is that one ought to treat others
“humanely,” as ends, not just as means, perhaps even love
them.  The claims of kings and
barons to special dignity were rejected in the past by declaring the dignity of
all humans. “Inhuman” and “inhumanity” are standard
terms of condemnation, “humane” and “humanitarian” of
approbation.  Politicians’
handlers try to “humanize” their clients in order to get them
elected.  The “human
condition” is a perennial object of despair but sometimes of marvel.  Works of art are often praised for their
“human quality.”  A
favorable review of a recent novel emphasizes its being “deeply
human.”  Many demand that space
exploration be funded only if it leads to cures for human diseases.  A recent television commercial announces,
“The human element, nothing is more fundamental, nothing more
elemental,” and advocates adding it to the periodic table. A distinguished
contemporary philosopher writes of the “heart-breaking specialness”
of the human.[5]

Indeed,
we all think humans are special, and even feel their specialness.  But the reason is not that we think we
are angelic and thus special in a way that, say, cetaceans are not, or that we
are intellectually, aesthetically, morally, etc., superior at least to all
other terrestrial life.  The plain
reason is that we happen to be human.  We all desire and seek pleasure,
happiness, well-being – for ourselves, for those we love, often for
strangers.  So, ethics has devoted
itself to investigating the human good, even happiness and pleasures, and the habits, actions, and
institutions conducive to it, rather than to the good of cetaceans,
extraterrestrials, or angels.  We
all treasure our ability to see and hear, and to remember and think.  So, epistemology has devoted itself to
investigating the nature and sources of human knowledge, not cetacean,
extraterrestrial, or angelic knowledge.

That
human happiness and human knowledge are empirical matters, belonging today in
the subject matter of developed empirical sciences, has been pointed out
repeatedly and eloquently by the proponents of naturalism, the dominant
orientation in current philosophy. Its most prominent defender, W.V.O. Quine,
called it “the recognition that it is within science itself, and not in
some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.”[6] Quine limited the substantive
claims in his “epistemology naturalized” to mentioning the role in
cognition of what he called “surface irritations,” but wisely left the
investigation of these irritations to biology.[7]
Other naturalists, however, seem to lack the courage of their
convictions and continue to engage in “analyzing concepts” or
describing the “workings of our language,” as if concepts and
language were not themselves parts of nature and thus belonging in the province
of empirical science, not philosophy.

Anthropocentrism
has been fueled by various assumptions, some true and some false.  We assume that – with the possible
exception of gods, angels, or extraterrestrials – humans alone are
“rational,” capable of reasoning.  We assume also that only humans are
capable of moral and aesthetic judgment, and perhaps that only humans enjoy the
moral and political status, “dignity,” of possessing
“rights.”  The
monotheistic religions, which were the home of medieval philosophy and also profoundly
influenced modern philosophy, assure us of humans’ unique origin and
special place in nature.  Some of
these assumptions and assurances are matters of faith, e.g., that, though all things
were created by God, only man was created in God’s image.  Some are essentially scientific but now
abandoned, e.g., geocentrism, the Ptolemaic view that the Earth is the center
of the Universe. Other assumptions are also essentially scientific but of
unknown and perhaps unknowable truth-value, e.g., that there is no intelligent
life elsewhere in the Universe. But many do seem to rest on scientific fact,
e.g., that no other terrestrial animals equal humans in intelligence.  These assumptions not only encourage our
special interest in ourselves but also seem to justify it.  They help explain the presence of
anthropocentrism in epistemology and ethics.

But
antirealism, the form anthropocentrism assumes in metaphysics, is a purely
technical philosophical orientation,
exemplified by positions ranging from Berkeley’s “immaterialism”
to Kant’s “transcendental” idealism, Hegel’s
“absolute” idealism, and recent positions such as Michael Dummett’s
“antirealism” and Nelson Goodman’s “irrealism.” The
term “antirealism” may be too strong to apply to all these
positions, but there is no convenient alternative to it.
“Nonrealism” might be one, but it is too indefinite.

According to the metaphysical antirealist,
reality depends, at least insofar as it is knowable, on our ways of knowing it,
our cognitive capacities – sense perception, introspection, intellectual
intuition, imagination, memory, recognition, conceptualization, inductive and
deductive reasoning, use of language and of other symbolism.  The rather stilted word “cognition,”
rather than “knowledge,” is needed to refer to the employment of
these capacities, which leads to knowledge when
successful but to error when unsuccessful. So understood,
antirealism allows
for the possibility of an unknowable reality, e.g., Kant’s
“things-in-themselves,” which is independent of our cognitive
capacities, even if, as Goodman claimed, it might not be “worth fighting
for or against.”[8]

The
essentially Kantian claim that the world is “shaped,”
“sculpted,” by our cognitive faculties, and thus that it depends on
us, who of course are humans, amounts to the humanization of metaphysics.  It rests on the tautology that we have
no cognitive “access” to the world except through our cognition of
it, that whatever we know, perceive, understand, believe, imagine, or say about
the world depends on our cognitive capacities.  The world, of course, is cognized also
by nonhuman animals, as well as, perhaps, by extraterrestrials and angels, but
in order to know or understand and say even this we must rely on our cognitive capacities, if only our
imagination and language.

Anthropocentrism
is paradoxical in all branches of philosophy, though for different
reasons.  Epistemology and ethics
claim expertise about what they must and usually do regard as certain animals.  But animals are part of the subject
matter of the empirical sciences, not philosophy.  Metaphysical antirealism holds, however
tacitly, that reality, the whole world – at least insofar as it is knowable
– depends on the cognitive faculties of those animals.  But common sense – the mature and
thoughtful judgment we all share and all theorizing, scientific or
philosophical, begins with and must respect even if not accept – finds
such cosmological humanism, human
creationism, bizarre.[9]
How could the whole world, it asks, depend on some members of one of its
planets’ fauna?

In
the case of epistemology and ethics, anthropocentrism faces only the paradox of
implying that philosophers, supposedly the spectators of all time and
existence, engage really in zoological investigations. In the case of
metaphysics, it faces the paradox of implying that the world itself is
zoological. To avoid the former paradox, we need only to redirect our efforts
in epistemology and ethics. But to avoid the latter paradox, we must do much
more than redirection. We must understand the first-person pronouns used in the
formulation of antirealism as impersonal and thus as not referring to humans.
This would require a radical rethinking of their role. When used in
philosophical contexts like Cartesian doubt or the realism/antirealism debate,
which question the existence of the world itself, consistency requires that “I”
and “we” are not taken to refer to parts of that world. The
rethinking of the role of these pronouns would require also a radical
rethinking of the distinction between oneself and the world.

To
redirect epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics away from anthropocentrism is
not, of course, to abandon them.
Metaphysics understood as ontology, the listing and description of the
most general kinds (“categories”) of entities and the relations
among them, would be unaffected. The realism/antirealism issue is irrelevant to
many metaphysical inquiries, especially those in pre-Kantian philosophy. Also
unaffected would be epistemology as tasked with the appraisal of certain
fundamental but nonformal inferences, for example, from what has been the case
to what will be the case,[10] and ethics as the home of nonanthropocentric
theories of goodness like Plato’s, Aquinas’s, and Moore’s.[11]

Although in epistemology and ethics anthropocentrism is natural
and understandable, though indefensible, in metaphysics it is unnatural and
almost incomprehensible, but at least as defensible as Kant’s
transcendental idealism and 20th century antirealism.  In epistemology and ethics, we can
reject anthropocentrism unqualifiedly, however painful this might be.  In metaphysics, such rejection would be
a blunder.  The reason is that it is
present there as antirealism, which is made plausible even if not entailed by a
tautology and therefore truth. The tautology is that whatever we know,
perceive, understand, believe, imagine, or say about the world depends on our
cognitive capacities.  So, in
metaphysics we face the challenge of finding a way to reject anthropocentrism
without rejecting this tautology.  For
we ought not to return to pre-Kantian metaphysics just in order to avoid anthropocentrism,
much as we ought not to return to pre-Socratic philosophy just in order to
avoid Platonism. Yet human creationism is hardly acceptable.  We must therefore interpret antirealism
as making no reference to humans.

Hence, the unusual dialectical structure of this book.  Part One is devoted to defense of the
dehumanization of epistemology and ethics, Part Two to explanation and
provisional defense of the antirealist humanization of metaphysics, and Part Three to
the dehumanization of antirealist metaphysics.  In Part One anthropocentrism in
epistemology and ethics is rejected, in Part Two it is defended in metaphysics,
and in Part Three it is rejected in metaphysics. There is no need for an explanation
of the humanization of epistemology and ethics. The anthropocentricism present
in them is easily understood, and so is what motivates it. Not so in the case
of metaphysics. Its humanization was strictly a philosophical event, obscure to
virtually everyone outside philosophy and even to many professional
philosophers.

2. A Glance at History

The history of anthropocentrism in
philosophy is illuminating, though we can devote to it here no more than a
passing glance.  It was preceded and
encouraged by the anthropocentrism already present in religion.  According to Genesis, after creating the
heaven and the earth, including the earth’s flora and fauna, God created
man in the image of God.  But
Genesis attributed to God actions such as resting from work, speaking, and
inflicting punishment.  Thus it also
appeared to depict God in the image of man.  Its anthropocentrism with respect to
Creation seemed accompanied by anthropomorphism with respect to the Creator. Cosmological
anthropocentrism seemed to lead to theological anthropomorphism. This
personification of God became essential to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Pre-Socratic philosophy focused
on the cosmos – the heavens and the earth, the four elements (earth, air,
fire, and water), ensouled animals.
The Socratic revolution shifted the focus dramatically. It moved
philosophy from concern with all things to concern with just one.  Its slogan became “Know
thyself!” It did not go unchallenged.  The stand most distinctive of
Plato’s philosophy was both anti-preSocratic and anti-Socratic.  The chief concern of philosophy, he
taught, is neither the cosmos nor oneself, but rather what lies beyond both:
the abstract entities he called Forms (“Ideas,” eidos).  Almost immediately, however, Aristotle
urged a return to the cosmos, away from both Socrates’ preoccupation with
the innermost and Plato’s preoccupation with the uttermost. Medieval
philosophers – Christian, Jewish, and Muslim – sometimes followed
Plato, sometimes Aristotle, but all took for granted the declaration in Genesis
that humans were made in the image of God.

Following
the scientific revolution in the 16th and 17th century,
when Copernicus, Galileo, Boyle, and Newton became the authorities on space,
time, and matter, philosophers came to hold, in sharp contrast to their ancient
and medieval predecessors, that their concern was only with “minds”
and “ideas.” The new physics compelled them to adopt the “new
way of ideas.”
Anthropocentrism thus became firmly established in philosophy, since it
was not cetacean, extraterrestrial, or angelic minds and ideas that attracted
the attention of the early modern philosophers.  But their anthropocentrism consisted in
preoccupation with just one part or aspect of human beings: their minds and their
ideas.  It eventually led many to
idealism, the view that minds and ideas are all
that there is.

Early
in the 17th century, Descartes began his Meditations by arguing that “I exist” was the only
truth he could not doubt, presumably referring by “I” to himself,
Descartes, a certain human.  Such
reference, of course, would have been inconsistent, since humans have bodies,
the existence of which he still doubted.
But after his propaedeutic dalliance with epistemology, and thus with
human matters like the possibility and extent of human knowledge, Descartes
focused on the existence of God and the nature of mind and matter.  This focus was metaphysical and
nonanthropocentric.  It was shared
later in the century by Spinoza and Leibniz.  But it was vigorously opposed by the
British empiricists, who returned to Descartes’ epistemology and thus to
anthropocentrism.  The titles of
their chief works spoke volumes: An Essay
Concerning the Human Understanding (Locke), The Principles of Human Knowledge (Berkeley), A Treatise of Human Nature (Hume).

In
1781, less than half-a-century after the publication of Hume’s Treatise, Kant rejected in his Critique of Pure Reason both
continental metaphysics, which he called dogmatism, and British epistemology,
which he called empirical idealism.
He described his own philosophy as transcendental idealism, arguing, for
example, that space and time are not “actual entities” because they
belong only to “the subjective constitution” of the mind as
“forms of appearances.”[12]
But Kant allowed for what he called “things-in-themselves,”
entities independent of that subjective constitution of our minds, i.e., of our
cognitive faculties.

Transcendental
idealism is often described as part of the humanism characteristic of the
Enlightenment.  But this is
misleading, and so is the vague term “humanism.”  Like any antirealist position,
transcendental idealism does rest on the tautology that our knowledge of the
world depends on our cognitive faculties.
On the basis of this tautology, Kant went on to assert also that the
world as knowable by us depends on our cognitive faculties.  But whether there is a world that is not
knowable was a further question. So was also the question whether there are parts
or aspects of the knowable world that are not knowable.[13] The latter question makes Kant’s
distinction between things-in-themselves and things-for-us appear less
unreasonable, and his antirealism more plausible, by allowing that, even if
only the things we can know exist, these things may have parts or aspects that
we cannot know.  Neither science nor
common sense need disagree.

When
Kant wrote that space and time belong only to the subjective constitution of
the mind, he was explicitly referring to humans.  “We can … speak of space,
extended things, and so on, only from the human standpoint,” he wrote,
and explained that this is why space is “transcendentally ideal,”
though also empirically real in the sense that it is not an illusion, or mere
fancy.[14] But when he wrote that space and time
belong only to the subjective constitution of the mind, he could not have meant
Kant's or any other human's mind. For humans themselves, including Kant, would
be inhabitants of the transcendentally ideal space and thus transcendentally
ideal.  To be sure, they also are
empirically real: although Kant held that our knowledge is limited to
appearances, he made a sharp distinction between appearance (Erscheinung) and illusion (Schein).[15] Transcendental idealism was thus
anthropocentric insofar as humans are empirically real, but it was not
anthropocentric insofar as humans are transcendentally ideal.  Nonetheless, it has been understood by
many as unqualifiedly anthropocentric.
So have its immediate successors: Fichte’s absolute idealism, as
defended in The Vocation of Man, and
Hegel’s absolute idealism, according to which the Absolute achieves
self-knowledge through the human mind.
We shall find that a nonanthropocentric reading of all three –
Kant, Fichte, and Hegel – is not only possible but plausible.  To explain this reading would be part of
the challenge of dehumanizing antirealist metaphysics, which will be attempted
in Part Three.

Standard
ethics, of course, is not concerned with humans – their well-being,
happiness, pleasure, etc. – as transcendentally ideal. It is concerned
with them only as empirically real.
Kant called such ethics practical anthropology, which he described as an
empirical discipline, and reserved the term “metaphysics of morals”
for what he considered the properly philosophical inquiry into morality.  Standard epistemology also regards
humans – their cognitive capacities – as empirically real. Kant did
not have a special name for the empirical study of humans’ cognitive
capacities, but presumably would have agreed today that it is the task of what
we call cognitive psychology and neuroscience. The properly philosophical
inquiry into our cognitive faculties, he thought, was exemplified by his
transcendental aesthetic and analytic.

Nevertheless,
Kant certainly thought, as everyone does, that all disciplines – the
transcendental aesthetic and analytic as well as the physics of space and time,
the metaphysics of morals as well as practical anthropology – are
anthropocentric, indeed literally human, in the straightforward sense that they
employ human cognitive powers and thus are constrained by the demands and
limitations of those powers.
Whether we contemplate all time and existence or just snails and
tomatoes, we cannot transcend our sense organs and brains, just as we cannot
get out of our skins.  Understood as
the tautology, on which antirealism rests, that our knowledge of the world
depends on our cognitive faculties, this truth is not grounded in facts about
human beings, just as the truth of the tautology “All humans are
human” is not grounded in facts about humans.  Both enjoy the certainty of logic.

Antirealism
became dominant after Kant in the form of straightforward idealism.  Early in the 19th century,
Hegel declared that Spirit (mind, Geist)
develops or “unfolds” logically (“dialectically”) from
“subjective spirit” (individual mental states like sensations) to “objective
spirit” (society as exemplified by the family, customs and traditions (Sittlichkeit), the state, and
institutions such as corporations and guilds, among which would be
today’s academic disciplines), and reaches its fulfillment in
“absolute spirit,” the three stages of which are art, religion, and
philosophy (in Hegel’s sense of philosophy as the perfect system of
knowledge). Thus, seen superficially, Hegel appeared to endorse not only
metaphysical anthropocentrism but also a sort of metaphysical
anthropomorphism.  But his
anthropocentrism involved a major epistemological innovation: a dramatic move
from earlier philosophers’ cognitive individualism, the view of knowledge
as a personal achievement, to what, for the lack of a better term, I shall call
cognitive collectivism: the view of knowledge as a social, often literally
collaborative, achievement. It is especially evident today that the cognitive disciplines are inherently social and, at least to users of
Wikipedia, that so is virtually all cognition beyond the infantile stage.  Cognitive collectivism, of course, need
have no political implications.  The
state is not the only “collective.”

In
the 20th century, Wittgenstein declared in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “I am my world,”
seemingly referring, though if so inconsistently, to a human being, namely
himself.[16]
Heidegger focused his Being and
Time on human being, “the inquirer,” using Dasein as a technical term for it,[17] though two decades later he insisted that
“[e]very kind of anthropology and all subjectivity” should be
“left behind.”[18]
Sartre referred in Being and
Nothingness to being-for-itself as realité
humaine, which he contrasted with being-in-itself [19], and wrote the famous article
“Existentialism is a Humanism,” to which  Heidegger responded in the not less
famous paper titled “Letter on Humanism.”

While
the scientific revolution of the 16th and 177h century
motivated philosophers to confine their subject matter to minds and ideas, in
the 20th century minds and ideas themselves became the subject
matter of flourishing empirical sciences – first psychology, then neuroscience
– and so philosophers retreated further. Instead of the way of ideas,
they took this time the way of words, “the linguistic turn,” claiming
that their subject matter was language.
Sometimes they described their inquiries as conceptual, not factual, but
by “concepts” they did not mean the ideas or mental images of early
modern philosophy.  They meant
meanings or uses of words and syntactic structures, the “workings of our
language.”

But
language and words are matters no less empirical than space and time, or human
minds and ideas, and they are investigated today by linguists, lexicographers,
even computer scientists.  Research in them
requires meticulous empirical description and fruitful, empirically verifiable
hypotheses, not “analyses” and “definitions,” as in
philosophical writings.
Philosophers have no more special insight into the workings of language
than into the workings of matter or the workings
of the human mind.  Instead
of investigating space, time, and matter, the 17th and 18th century
philosophers settled for investigating mind.  Instead of investigating mind, the 20th century
philosophers settled for investigating talk.  They remained open to the charge of
inquiring into empirical matters.  To be sure,
philosophers have a good ear for the nuances of some segments of speech, as J.
L. Austin famously did, but Austin insisted that such an ear was not a
substitute for empirical research.[20]

In ethics and epistemology some have
eschewed the need for empirical investigation by taking “the deontic
way,” concerning themselves with what ought
to be the case, or is right, justified, or valid, rather than with what is the case. They have thus avoided
encroaching on the empirical sciences, which have no interest in deontic
matters except to record and explain people’s beliefs about them. The
deontic way seems natural in ethics, given the latter’s emphasis on
imperatives. But a deontological ethics must ground its imperatives. Kant held that “the
ground of obligation ... must not be sought in the nature of man or in the
circumstances in which he is placed,” urging that “it is a matter of
the utmost necessity to work out for once a pure moral philosophy completely
cleansed of everything that can only be empirical and appropriate to
anthropology.”[21] He appealed to the nonsensible world of noumena as the ground of the
“commands of practical reason.” Most contemporary deontologists do
not follow Kant, but they are aware that a ground is needed. A theory in
ethics, of course, may be essentially an elaborate proposal of ways of acting,
especially in politics, but to that extent it is not a cognitive contribution.

The deontic way is also natural in
epistemology insofar as its concerns have to do with the validity of certain
inferences and thus are essentially logical. The inferences in question are
seldom deductive, and for this reason the need for grounding them is especially
evident. Much of epistemology has consisted in the search for such a ground.

In contemporary ethics and epistemology the
ground is often what philosophers call “intuitions,” meaning
usually their felt inclinations about what they would or would not say is morally right or epistemically
justified in various, usually imagined, circumstances, perhaps attempting to
render them “coherent.” Philosophers who shun the deontic way also
often resort to such intuitions, and for the same reason – to secure a
ground for their claims. In both cases success depends on the worth of the
intuitions. If the appeal to them is merely a way to avoid empirical
investigation of the linguistic facts, it is likely to be minimal.  In his Foreword to the 2013 edition of
Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and
Utopia, Thomas Nagel writes of “a belief in the reality of the moral
domain, as an area in which there are real questions with right and wrong
answers,” but adds that “progress...toward discovering the right
answers” could be made by “formulating hypotheses...and subjecting
them to confirmation or disconfirmation by the intuitive moral credibility of
their various substantive consequences...The method depends on taking seriously
the evidential value of strong moral intuitions about particular cases,
including imaginary cases.”[22] Neither Hume nor Kant, neither Plato nor
Aristotle, neither Hegel nor Mill, would have allowed that such intuitions
enjoy evidential value. Nagel does not explain how and why they might, though
he does say that “[T]hese convictions form the deep common element
in...Rawls’ A Theory of Justice,
Dworkin’s Taking Rights Seriously,
Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars,
Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion,” and Nozick’s Anarachy, State, and Utopia.”

When
combined with antirealism, as it often was, the linguistic turn had a startling
implication: If the world is sculpted by our cognition of it and our cognition
is sculpted by our language, then the world is sculpted by our language.  Indeed, we do find Wittgenstein saying
in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “the limits of my language mean the
limits of my world.”[23]
We also find Heidegger writing in “Letter on Humanism” that
“language is the house of being,”[24] and in “The Origin of the Work of
Art” that language is “the happening in which for man beings first
disclose themselves to him each time as beings.”[25]
These assertions, of course, require detailed discussion, some of which
will be attempted later.  Suffice it
here to note that the language to which Wittgenstein and Heidegger were
referring presumably was not cetacean, extraterrestrial, or angelic.

3. Antirealism and its Varieties.

Antirealism
is not limited to metaphysics. There is also antirealism in ethics, aesthetics,
philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, and so on.  Even in the case of metaphysical
antirealism, numerous qualifications, distinctions, and explanations are
needed.  No metaphysical antirealist
denies the reality of everything, just as no metaphysical realist asserts the
reality of everything, including, say, the Easter Bunny.  The solipsist says, “Only I
exist,” not “Nothing exists.” Berkeley denied that there are
material objects, he called them “stupid material substances,” but
he insisted on the existence of minds and their ideas.  According to Kant, as we saw earlier,
material objects are “transcendentally ideal,” dependent on our
cognitive faculties, but they are nonetheless “empirically real,”
not mere fancy.  Bertrand Russell
distinguished between existence and subsistence: some things do not exist, yet
they are not nothing – they subsist; for example, material objects exist
but universals only subsist.
According to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,
some things cannot be “said,” i.e., represented in language, but
they “show” themselves in what can be said.  Among them, he held, are those that
matter most in logic, ethics, and religion.

Metaphysical antirealism rests on the proposition that our
knowledge of the world depends on our cognitive faculties – perception,
conception, language.  This
proposition and its antirealist implications are not unfamiliar or even wholly
unacceptable to science and common sense.
We know that dogs can hear sounds we cannot and that eagles can see
things when we could not. We take for granted that things look very different
to a fish or a fly. If there are intelligent extraterrestrial life-forms, their
sense organs, concepts, and modes of reasoning presumably would be fundamentally
different from ours, and so would be the world as cognized by them;  space scientists puzzle over what
pictures or symbols to engrave on space probes that might reach such
life-forms.  Russell tried, somewhat
naively, to explain Kant’s transcendental idealism by saying: “If
you always wore blue spectacles, you could be sure of seeing everything
blue.”[26] Neuroscience unambiguously holds that our
brain is not a tabula rasa on which the senses just write information –
it processes that information. Before the
insurance payout to the leaseholder of the two World Trade Center Towers, it
was necessary to decide whether their destruction on 9/11/2001 counted as one
or two events, a decision obviously not dictated by any facts in the world.[27]
Our beliefs about the history of the United States depend on what history
teachers have told us and what history books we have read. The difficulty, sometimes impossibility, of
faithful translation from one language to another is notorious, especially in
the case of poetry. In science, “the
observer effect” is a familiar phrase, meaning the changes that the act
of observing produces in what is observed. What
is expressed in mathematical symbolism may be inexpressible in a natural
language, and vice versa.  We often
find a picture of a happy child’s face or of a city devastated by a
hurricane worth more than a thousand words, and a caricature sometimes tells us
what no text could.  Educated people do find the idea that the physical world is
totally unlike what physics and astronomy tell us idle, if not empty. What
the world might be “in itself,” i.e., as neither known nor knowable,
does seem to many, as it did to Goodman, not worth fighting for or
against.

Of
course, as a philosophical doctrine, metaphysical antirealism deserves our interest
only if argued.  But the standard
arguments have been densely abstract, often enigmatic, and seldom persuasive. Even
if, as Berkeley held, we cannot know the objects we perceive unless we perceive
them, it hardly follows that they cannot exist unperceived.  Kant argued that we can know
things only as they are “for us,” not as they are “in
themselves,” but his premise – that for knowledge to be possible,
the objects of knowledge must conform to knowledge, rather than knowledge to
its objects – is hardly less obscure or more plausible than his
conclusion. Perhaps, as Michael Dummett argued two centuries
later, a realist interpretation of a sentence requires understanding what would
count as its conclusive verification or its conclusive falsification, and such
understanding is possible in the case of few if any sentences. But this is
comprehensible only to a few professional philosophers, and even they seldom
find it persuasive. Hilary Putnam argued for one of his several versions of
antirealism by saying that it “does not require us to find mysterious and
supersensible objects behind our
language games that we actually play when language is working.”[28] But the objects
behind our language “games” need not be supersensible, and
supersensible objects need not be mysterious (love and hatred are familiar but
they are not objects of the senses, whether as events or as dispositions). A clear and
plausible defense of antirealism, I suggest, must bypass the standard
arguments. It must start afresh, from specific and readily
understandable truths, not abstract and vague philosophical assumptions.

The
reasoning underlying the standard arguments for antirealism, in
Berkeley’s, Kant’s, as well as its recent versions, may be sketched
as follows: (1) We cognize only what we can, i.e., have the capacity to,
cognize.  This is a tautology. But
(2) that there is no reality, no world, independent of our cognitive capacities
does not follow from (1).  What
follows is another tautology: (3) that we cannot cognize reality independently
of our cognitive capacities.
Antirealists often argue on the basis of (1) for (2) probably because
the negation of (2), namely, Kant’s view (4) that there is a reality,
“things-in-themselves,” which is independent of our cognitive
capacities, seems to them idle.  But
there is at least one very good reason for accepting (4), namely, that (2)
seems to imply human creationism, the proposition, presumably held by no one,
that the whole world – from the page
you are reading now to the outermost known galaxies, and since the Big Bang until the farthest conceivable
future – depends for its existence and nature on the minds,
cognitive capacities, of humans, a certain
species of animals on one of its planets. Because of their forbidding level of
abstraction, the standard arguments leave unclear both what they claim and what
motivates them.

I shall not ignore these arguments, but my focus
will be on certain specific and readily understandable truths that lead to
antirealism.  Arguments for
antirealism from such truths have the following form: (1) we cognize (perceive,
understand, describe) the world as necessarily having a certain uncontroversial
and familiar specific feature. But it is obvious that (2) the world does not,
perhaps cannot, have that feature. Therefore, (3) the world as we cognize it,
as it is “for us,” is not as it is “in itself.”

The major
defenders of antirealism, from Kant to Goodman and Putnam,
offered also arguments of this second kind. In defense of his obscure thesis of
the ideality of space, Kant pointed out that we can imagine only one space, and
that we can imagine it as empty but not as absent. Regarding the ideality of
time, he noted that all objects of sense, outer and inner, are necessarily in
time, and that time is necessarily one-dimensional. Regarding the ideality of
causality, Kant argued that we necessarily conceive of the objects of sense
perception as causally related even though we do not perceive causal relations.
Goodman
dazzled
his readers with examples of features of the world that are best understood as
“made” by us, as how we perceive, conceive, or
represent the
world in language or in art, not as how it
is in itself.[29] We see the sun rising in the east,
majestically moving overhead, and setting in the west, but if educated we know
that it is we, not the sun, that is moving. The “fairness” of
samples is a sacrosanct requirement both in science and business, but there are
no objective criteria for it.  We
often see the world, at least briefly, as radically different after we watch a
film, read a novel, or hear a symphony. We conclude at time t that all emeralds are green
because we have observed only green emeralds, but the same observations support
with equal logical legitimacy also the conclusion that all emeralds are grue,
if “grue” applies to all things observed before t just in case they are green,
and to other things just in case they are blue. We reach the former conclusion
because “green,” not “grue,” is “entrenched in
our linguistic practice.” Putnam pointed out that we can “count the
objects in a room (a lamp, a table, a chair, a ballpoint pen, and  notebook) and come up with the answer
‘five’,” but that if we also count their mereological sums
and ignore the null object then we come up with the answer ‘31.’[30]
Such examples were often their most persuasive arguments for
antirealism.

The specific and readily understandable truths on which
I shall focus are quite different and less impressionistic. The first is that,
as Wittgenstein pointed out in the Tractatus, the world, if there is one, is the totality not
of things but of facts, in the robust Russellian sense of
“fact.”[31]  (Its ordinary sense, in which many speak even of “false
facts,” is too vague to be of philosophical value.) Most
philosophers today would deny that there are such entities as Russellian
facts.  So
would common sense, since they are supposed to be entities categorially
different from the individual objects, properties, or relations familiar to common sense. Nevertheless, the category
of fact is essential to realism regarding the world, which following etymology
I shall call cosmological realism, even if not to realism regarding individual
things, which, again following etymology, I shall call ontological realism. The reason is simple and obvious.  If Jack admires Jill but Jill does
not admire Jack, what would distinguish the world in which this is so from the
world in which Jill admires Jack but Jack does not admire Jill, the world in
which they admire each other, and the world in which neither admires the other,
if these worlds differed in no other respect? There would be no answer if we
supposed that there are only individuals, properties, and relations in the
world.  Only the fact that Jack admires Jill but Jill
does not admire Jack, not their mere presence in the world, including even the
presence of a relation of admiration, would distinguish that world from the
other three. Hence the conclusion that the world is the totality of facts. There may be
no such entities as facts, but then there would be also no world, and
cosmological antirealism would win by default. Realists cannot
consistently hold both that there is a world and that there are no facts
– robust, brute facts.

The second truth on which I shall focus is the
nonexistence of “logical objects,” in Wittgenstein’s sense,
to be explained in the next section.[32] We shall
find that facts also should be counted as logical objects. Common sense would
readily agree that there are no such entities in the world as ifness and allness, though it would be surprised that anyone should think
otherwise. Indeed, very few philosophers would disagree.

The third truth on which I shall focus is the
obvious absence from the world of facts that might correspond to what linguists
call generic statements, usually of the form “Fs are G,” as contrasted
with universal statements, usually of the
form “All Fs are G.”
Missourians believe that Iowa winters are severe, but not that all are. Physicians
believe that patients with prior
strokes benefit from taking Lipitor, but they do not believe that all patients
with prior strokes benefit from taking Lipitor, nor do they confuse what they
believe with their evidence, say, that in a clinical trial 265 or 11.2% of the patients who took Lipitor suffered a
stroke over five years, while 795 or 37% of those who took a placebo did.  Much if not most of what we think we
know about the world is properly expressed only in generic statements.  But we do not need abstruse argument to
see that no distinctive facts correspond to them, that there are no generic
facts, even if there were facts that correspond to the related singular and
universal statements.

4. Logical Antirealism
and Semirealism.

Stated briefly and crudely, the antirealist thesis – that
the world, at least insofar as it is knowable, depends on us – would
convince no one.  It gains
plausibility, however, if we agree with Wittgenstein that “there are no
logical objects”[33]
even though “logic pervades the world,”[34]
because the world must have a logical, not just spatiotemporal, physical, or
causal, structure. Wittgenstein meant
that logical expressions, in particular, the
sentential connectives (“not,” “and,” “or,”
“if...then”) and the quantifiers (“all,”
“some”), stand for nothing in the world. Yet, they are indispensable for any cognition beyond that of babes.  I shall
call all cognition that requires their use logical. It would include but
should not be confused with the cognition pursued by logic. Statements
expressing logical cognition usually contain also nonlogical expressions, while
those in logic do not. “All men are mortal” includes the logical
expression “all,” but it is not a statement of logic. Few,
if any, statements do not include logical expressions. Hence the power of what
I shall call logical antirealism.[35]

It
is a far-reaching version of metaphysical antirealism, yet almost everyone
would find it plausible. If a realist interpretation of a true statement is one
that pairs the statement with a fact, in the Russellian sense of “fact,”
i.e., an entity that “makes” the statement true but is categorially
different from anything mentioned in the statement, then almost everyone would
find plausible an antirealist interpretation of general statements, whether
universal (e.g., “All men are mortal”), particular (e.g.,
“Some men are mortal,” “At least one man is mortal”),
or generic (e.g., “Men are mortal”), and of compound or molecular
statements, whether negative (“This page is not blue”), conditional
(“If this page is white then the next page is white”), disjunctive
(“Either this page is white or it is blue”), or conjunctive
(“This page is both white and rectangular”). Few believe that there
are in the world universal, particular, generic, negative, conditional,
disjunctive, or conjunctive facts, even if they believe that there are “atomic”
facts, e.g., the fact to which the statement “This page is white”
might correspond. Even fewer believe that there are in the world entities such
as allness, notness, ifness, orness, andness, which might be the defining constituents of those facts.
Yet, as Sartre eloquently argued, negation plays an essential role in
cognition; his striking example was seeing that the person you expected to meet
in a café is not there. And Gustav Bergmann pointed out that there would be no laws of nature if generality,
meaning universal facts and something the quantifier all stands for that makes them universal, were not in the world,
for most laws of nature are
universal statements.[36]

Indeed,
facts themselves may be counted as “logical
objects,” in the sense that, like the sentential connectives and the
quantifiers, they are required by logical, not empirical, considerations. If so,
then the declarative sentences expressing them would also be logical
expressions. Indeed, we do not learn
sentences as we learn names of things, we learn to make sentences. This is why Wittgenstein
counted the concept of fact as formal, like the concept of object, and thus
unsuited for literal application.[37] This is
why he denied that there can be representation in language of the logic
of facts.

If there are no logical objects in the world, then the world has no
logical structure and therefore there is no world. Spatiotemporal/physical
structures and even individual things may involve
logical structure, but whether this is far from evident. They are
not facts and thus involve neither propositional connectives nor quantifiers in
the way facts, and the sentences expressing them, do. They can be subjected to
chemical analysis but not to logical analysis. Logical
antirealism does not deny the reality of spatiotemporal/physical  structures or of individual things. It
denies only the reality of logical structure, of “logical
objects.”  This is
why it is more moderate and far more plausible than, say, Kant’s or
Goodman’s antirealism. It has perhaps the same metaphysical bite, but it
does so in a principled fashion.

Logical
antirealism is not the only species of metaphysical antirealism. There is one
corresponding to each species of cognition. The ancient and most familiar
version is perceptual antirealism. It denies that there “really”
are objects corresponding to what we seem to perceive. Berkeley’s
“to be is to be perceived” was its brief but memorable slogan.  But perceptual antirealism need not be
so drastic. It can be limited to only some features of perceived objects, say,
their “secondary qualities,” such as color, and then it would
represent the view held by contemporary science and most educated people: we
seem to see colors but in the world there is only the light that initiates
vision.

More
innovative is the species of metaphysical antirealism we may call conceptual
–objects, perceived or not, depend on our understanding of them, on the concepts we possess. Conceptual
antirealism was Kant’s major contribution to philosophy. It can be
limited to just some concepts and thus gain greater plausibility. It can be
limited to what Kant called the pure concepts of the understanding, such as
causality. It can be limited especially plausibly to the concepts expressed by
logical expressions, and then it would coincide with logical antirealism. I
have repeatedly argued elsewhere that at least the concept of identity cannot
be given a realist interpretation (we hardly perceive a relation of identity or
suppose that its existence is somehow hidden), but virtually no cognition, not
even simple recognition, is possible unless the concept of identity is
applicable, even if not explicitly applied.

The
version of conceptual antirealism that became characteristic of 20th
century philosophy after it took the linguistic turn is linguistic antirealism.  If cognition necessarily involves
language, then insofar as it is cognizable the world is dependent on language,
if not on the particular characteristics of the language we speak, then on the
characteristics that all languages share. Conceptual antirealism would entail
linguistic antirealism if concepts are words or syntactic structures, rather
than “ideas in the mind.” And if limited to logical expressions and
syntactic structures, it would be also a version of logical antirealism. But
not all versions of logical antirealism need be linguistic. We may allow, as
Kant did, for the possibility of logical concepts that are purely psychological.

Logical
antirealism is the most plausible version of metaphysical antirealism. Few
would disagree with Wittgenstein that there are no logical objects – no
items, no fragments of the world, that correspond to the propositional
connectives and the quantifiers, and thus no distinctive facts that correspond
to compound and general statements. No such items and facts belong in what can
be “said,” and so they would not count as ordinary denizens of
reality. But, Wittgenstein also held, they can be “shown.”
Wittgenstein’s distinction between saying and showing thus introduced a
position that is neither unqualified logical realism, like that of Frege and
Russell, nor unqualified logical antirealism. We may call it semirealism.[38]
In chapter 4 I shall argue that the distinction between saying and
showing has a clear and noncontroversial application to ordinary, not just
“logical,” pictures, and that Wittgenstein’s picture theory
of meaning on which the distinction rested was no more than a sophisticated
version of the traditional view that meaning and thought involve mental
representations, i.e., ideas, perhaps mental images.

Before
Kant, the tautology on which antirealism rests – that our knowledge of
the world depends on our cognitive faculties – may have led to
skepticism. But antirealism should not be confused with skepticism, though they
are similar in some respects. Both are rooted in the commonsense belief that
“things may not really be what they seem to be.” Both appeal to the
proposition that “we can never discover what things really are because
any discovery would still be a discovery only of what some things seem to
be.” The skeptic concludes that we can never know what things really
are.  The antirealist concludes that
there is no distinction between what things really are and what they seem to
be. This is why, left unexplained, antirealism is paradoxical, while skepticism
is at most outrageous.[39]

Antirealism
is a metaphysical view, skepticism belongs in epistemology. We shall see in
chapter 2, however, that much of traditional epistemology can be understood as
logic, insofar as its chief concern has been the validity of certain
inferences. If the home of skepticism is such epistemology-as-logic, it is no
more anthropocentric than is logic. But in its usual formulations skepticism is
overtly and unabashedly anthropocentric. It concerns the limits of human perception and understanding. And
today the proper study of these limits belongs in psychology and especially
neuroscience. Whether certain brain states are the outcome of external
stimulation, and if they are to what extent and in what way they represent
anything external, is hardly to be determined by armchair speculation.
Moreover, if what I called cognitive collectivism is accepted, the
epistemological question “What do I know?” would be replaced by the
question “What do we
know?” and traditional skepticism would become less implausible.  We may still hold that there are things
that, say, physics does not know, perhaps cannot know, but our reasons would
rest on certain facts about the scientific discipline of physics and bear
little resemblance to Cartesian skeptical concerns.  Metaphysical antirealism would also become
less implausible.  Surely the nature
of the spatiotemporal world insofar as it is cognized is what the disciplines
of physics, astronomy, and biology say it is.

Metaphysical
antirealism enjoys little public celebration, but its indirect and usually
unnoticed influence on nonphilosophical thought has been enormous. A noteworthy
example is Kuhn’s important account of the history of science as
involving relativity to shifting “paradigms.”  Less admirable are the fashionable but
careless and unphilosophical relativisms that insist that truth is relative to
era, culture, race, gender, ethnic origin, or even just personal “belief
system.” Indeed, metaphysical antirealism is a form of relativism, but it
must not be confused with any of these. It acknowledges only relativity to
being human. This is why metaphysical antirealism is not a sort of
subjectivism. What our cognitive faculties deliver can count as objective in
the straightforward sense that, in principle, it can be and often is the same
for all humans, and personal divergence from it is what we count as subjective.
This is why metaphysical antirealism can allow for a sharp distinction between
objective truth and personal opinion or fancy.

We
know that there are fairly advanced nonhuman cognizers, e.g., whales and
chimpanzees. There may be also extraterrestrial cognizers far more advanced
than humans. The world cognized by whales is relative to cetacean cognition.
The world cognized by chimpanzees is relative to simian cognition. The world
cognized by extraterrestrials would be relative to their cognition, The
antirealist holds that the world cognized by humans is relative to human
cognition. That relativity is biologically inescapable. By contrast, relativity
to era, culture, race, gender, ethnic origin, or personal belief is not. We
cannot literally transport ourselves to an era in the past, but we can and
often do transcend the present by, for example, viewing what past architects
designed and past builders built, reading what past authors wrote, and today
even hearing recordings of what past singers sang. We cannot change our ethnic
origin, culture, race, or gender, but we can transcend it by communicating, and
often agreeing, with people of a different origin, culture, race, or gender. We
can do so because, since we belong to the same species, we share roughly the
same cognitive faculties. This is why relativity to era, culture, race, gender,
or ethnic origin is quite unlike relativity to being human. As to relativity to
personal belief system, it would differ from the triviality that one believes
what one believes only if one’s beliefs really constituted a system, if
one did not hold contradictory beliefs, and if there were genuine criteria for
membership in the system. But don’t we sometimes believe the premises and
reject the conclusion of a valid argument?
And is the belief, for example, that yoghurt is better than sour cream
really part of my system of beliefs?
One’s beliefs are more likely to form not a system but just a “multitude”:
“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. (I am large,
I contain multitudes),” Walt Whitman wrote.

I mention in this book, and sometimes discuss in
detail, the views of various philosophers, from Plato, Kant, and Hegel to
Moore, Wittgenstein, and Sartre.  No
philosophical discussion should ignore the historical context of its topic. But
this is not a book in the history of philosophy.  I do not engage in exegesis for its own
sake. Some readers may be surprised by the considerable attention accorded to
Hegel, Moore, and the early Wittgenstein (often with quotations rather than
paraphrase so the readers can judge for themselves what I say about them). But
Hegel’s insistence on the cognitive priority of society over the
individual suggests, when generalized, the radical rethinking of the
distinction between oneself and the world that is needed in an antirealist but
nonanthropocentric metaphysics.  Moore’s
ethics remains the modern paradigm of a nonanthropocentric ethics, and his
account of the nature of consciousness is invaluable for the formulation of a
defensible antirealism in metaphysics. And Wittgenstein’s distinction between
saying and showing provided a strikingly original third alternative in the
realism/antirealism debate. It has not been sufficiently appreciated, perhaps
because, like Hegel’s and Moore’s views, it is found too
“obscure” and “difficult.”

Several
chapters are rooted in previously published articles: “Metaphysical
Realism and Logical Antirealism,” in Richard Gale, ed., Guide to Metaphysics (Blackwell, 2002);
“Saying and Showing the Good,” in Heather Dyke, ed., Time and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection
(Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003); “Ethics Dehumanized,” in Mark
Timmons and Terry Horgan, eds., Metaethics
After Moore (Oxford University Press, 2006); “Bergmann and
Wittgenstein on Generality,” Metaphysica,
Vol. 7, No. 1, April 2006; “Epistemology Dehumanized,” in Quentin
Smith, ed., Epistemology: New Essays
(Oxford University Press, 2008);
“Facts,” in Javier C. Arteseros, ed., Studies in the Ontology of Reinhardt Grossmann, (Frankfurt: Ontos
Verlag, 2010); and “Generic Statements and Antirealism,” in Logos
& Episteme, I, 1 (2010).

Part One: EPISTEMOLOGY AND ETHICS DEHUMANIZED

How can he who has magnificence of mind and is

the spectator of all time and existence,
think much

of human life? (Plato)

Chapter Two: THREE VARIETIES
OF EPISTEMOLOGY

1. Naturalistic Epistemology.

The
subject matter of both epistemology and ethics traditionally has been
considered human – the knowledge and the good, respectively, that humans,
not cetaceans or angels, seek and enjoy or lack.  This, I argued in the Introduction, is a
mistake. Its correction calls for refocusing these branches of philosophy,
their dehumanization. Such refocusing is more easily accomplished in the case
of epistemology.  Throughout its
history, it has wrestled mainly with issues concerning the validity of certain
inferences, hardly a matter to be settled by zoological considerations. In
effect, epistemology has often been a sort of logic. In this chapter I shall
attempt to make clear how epistemology-as-logic differs from naturalistic
epistemology, which celebrates the primacy of zoological considerations, as
well as from subjective, Cartesian, epistemology, which is logically
incompatible with zoological considerations but thereby also lacks subject
matter altogether.

The
case for dehumanizing epistemology is best understood in the context of the
important differences among these varieties of epistemology. (Fundamental
disagreements in epistemology, as elsewhere in philosophy, often arise from
differences of interest, not genuine conflict.) Naturalistic epistemology is explicitly
anthropocentric, humanized; the “natural” objects it considers are
not cetacean or simian.  To be
consistent, subjective epistemology cannot be anthropocentric, though its
practitioners are seldom aware that this is so.  It would beg the question against the
skeptic if it takes itself to be about any one or several humans.
Epistemology-as-logic is as nonathropocentric as logic; it is, of course, a
human endeavor, but humans are not its subject matter. All three have been with
us at least since Socrates. My chief concern in this chapter will be with
epistemology-as-logic, but it is naturalistic and subjective epistemology that
have represented the standard conception of epistemology.

It may seem obvious that epistemology should
be naturalistic.  Its name is a
synonym of “theory of knowledge,” the knowledge in question surely
is that of humans, and humans are parts of nature, of its fauna. Epistemology naturalized is thus epistemology humanized: it
is about humans. Not only does it ignore gods, angels, and extraterrestrials,
it ignores also chimpanzees, whales, and bats.  But thereby it also lacks the supreme generality
and abstraction distinctive of philosophy. Humans already belong in the subject
matter of several special sciences that seek detailed information about them,
including their perception, conceptualization, and reasoning. This is why
naturalistic epistemology is only programmatic. The substantive work is done by
biology and psychology. As I mentioned in the Introduction, Quine, who took up the
case for “epistemology naturalized,” often mentioned the role in
cognition of what he called “surface irritations,” but did not
himself investigate these irritations. Naturalistic epistemology is
focused on human matters even when straying into talk about nonhuman biological
and computational states.  They are
of interest to it mainly for the light they might cast on the epistemic
faculties and states of humans. The intrinsic interest of such nonhuman states
is of course indisputable, but they even more obviously belong in the province
of the empirical sciences.

Naturalistic epistemology may be only
programmatic, but its pedigree is impressive.  Much of Aristotle’s epistemology
was naturalistic.  When he described
the parts and functions of the soul, he was doing in principle what biologists
and psychologists do today. And the rationale of the program seems impeccable. Humans,
obviously, are parts of nature, they are not heavenly spirits even if they
possess immaterial souls. But this is also why the proper investigation of them
and of their epistemic faculties and states is empirical and belongs in the
natural sciences. It would be strange to propose today investigating any part
of nature nonempirically. Even if the human epistemic faculties and states were
faculties and states of immortal souls, a genuine investigation of them would still
be empirical.  A human immortal soul
is still the soul of a human being, a certain animal.  Both Plato and Aquinas would have
agreed.  Much the same can be said
about the suggestion that they are faculties and states of
“persons.” Surely the persons in question are animals, not gods.

If human beings, including their epistemic
faculties and states, belong in the subject matter of disciplines other than
philosophy, the obvious question is what room is left for naturalistic
epistemology.  We saw in the Introduction
that concern over this question may explain the shift to the view of philosophy
as just “conceptual,” not “factual” – neither
about natural facts nor about nonnatural facts, but about concepts or words.
Hence its preoccupation with “definitions,” “analyses,”
and “elucidations” of the “workings of  our language.”  But if the concepts and words are in
nature – presumably in human minds and languages – they, too, lie
outside philosophers’ professional competence: there is psychology and
neuroscience, as well as linguistics and lexicography.  (If concepts are not in nature, e.g., if
they are Platonic Forms, then they should be of no concern to naturalistic
epistemology.) The
investigation of brain-states and words calls not for “definitions”
or “analyses,” to be tested by “intuitions,” but for meticulous
empirical descriptions and fruitful hypotheses, tested by standard scientific
methods.  The very idea of aiming at
definitions or analyses of brain-states is foreign to neuroscience.  As to words, more than half a century ago Wittgenstein
pointed out, as I noted in the Introduction, that they are not used in
accordance with necessary and sufficient conditions, and thus
their uses cannot be captured in definitions.

Perhaps the most familiar project in recent
epistemology was the search for a definition of knowledge, which preoccupied it
from the 1960s through the 1980s.
It was born in the late 1950s, when A. J. Ayer’s Problem of Knowledge and R. M.
Chisholm’s Perceiving appeared.
But the project was out-of-date already at its birth. Thirty years earlier
Wittgenstein had written: “If I was asked what knowledge
is, I would list items of knowledge and add ‘and suchlike.’
There is no common element to be found in all of them, because there
isn’t one.”[40]  Linguists and lexicographers of course
agreed.  A famous paper by Edmund Gettier, a student of
Wittgenstein’s disciple Norman Malcolm, argued the point in the early
60s. But few of those who wrote the thousands of pages devoted to discussion of
his paper seemed aware that, whatever its author’s intentions might have
been, it called not for greater diligence, sophistication, or imagination in
the project of defining knowledge but for its abandonment.

Epistemology is the theory of knowledge, but
the word “knowledge” stands either for a disciplinary, essentially
social achievement, such as grammar (Aristotle’s favorite example),
astronomy, and arithmetic, or for a personal achievement.  The study of knowledge as a social
achievement belongs in the history of science and the sociology of knowledge.
Investigation of it would be, of course, naturalistic, essentially historical
and sociological. But epistemologists usually have been interested in knowledge
only as a personal achievement. And this interest may assume one of two very
different forms. I may ask whether, how, and what knowledge is possible for me,
a certain human. If so, my epistemological endeavor would remain anthropocentric
and therefore would count as naturalistic.
It would be objective, though
rather narrow in subject matter.
But I may ask instead whether, how, and what knowledge is possible for
me in abstraction from the fact that I am human and ignoring the question of whether,
how, and what knowledge is possible for other humans. This would be the
question that a philosophical skeptic who respects consistency would ask,
especially if it concerns knowledge of the existence of an
“external” world consists of rocks, trees, stars, as well as human
bodies such as yours and mine.  We
may describe an epistemology limited to this question as subjective.

2. Subjective Epistemology

While
the subject matter of naturalistic epistemology, whether human knowledge or
human concepts or language, lacks the generality expected of philosophy,
subjective epistemology seems to lack generality altogether.  It seems to be baldly and bleakly about
only one person, myself, hardly a topic of philosophical or scientific
interest, whoever and whatever I might be.
But it cannot presuppose, explicitly or implicitly, my humanity,
including the existence of my body, my language, and my place on earth or in
history, for then it would be a naturalistic, though incompetent, epistemology
limited to just one “sample” of humanity. The subjectivity
of subjective epistemology does not consist in its being about a solitary human being.

The term “subjective” is not a
synonym of “mental” or “mentalistic.” If minds are
immaterial, my study of your mind might be as objective as my study of my mind.  And if I could study my brain only as my brain, the study would be subjective
and form no part of biology.
Quine’s rejection of Cartesian epistemology on naturalistic
grounds was both too narrow and too wide.
It was too narrow because what was characteristic of Descartes’
epistemology was not its subject matter, presumably what he called a
“thinking thing,” but his exclusive use of first-person indexicals
in its defining initial stages.  In
his argument “I think, therefore I am” Descartes did not argue for
the existence of Descartes, a Frenchman who of course possessed a material body
even if also an immaterial soul. To be consistent, Descartes could only use
“I,” as of course he did. One need not be naturalistically,
“scientifically,” minded in order to reject a theory dependent on
the exclusive use of first-person indexicals.  Quine’s rejection of Cartesian
epistemology was also too wide because, as R. M. Chisholm pointed out, in its
initial stages, including the proof of “I exist,” Cartesian
epistemology was consistent with a naturalistic, even materialist, ontology.[41]  For all Descartes knew when he was
initially stating the proof, the pronoun “I” in it might have
referred to a material, not a “thinking,” thing.  The truth is that, pace Descartes and almost all other philosophers, his cogito had no ontological content at
all.

Subjective epistemology is not a capricious
narrowing of the subject matter of naturalistic epistemology from all humans to
just one.  If it were, it would not
be subjective, though also it would be of no philosophical interest.  Subjective epistemology arose, most
notably with Descartes, Berkeley, and Hume, as a distinct variety of
epistemology in order to face the skeptical challenge. The skeptic cannot
assume that he or she is human, since being human involves having a body, which
is a part of the material world the existence of which the skeptic doubts.  Therefore, the subjective epistemologist
also cannot make this assumption when attempting to answer the skeptic.
Subjective epistemologists cannot consistently write, even though the best of
them did, books titled “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,”
“A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge,” or
“A Treatise of Human Nature.”
If true to their titles, such books would beg the question against the
skeptic.

Subjective epistemology is essentially
Cartesian, though it was anticipated by the Greek skeptics, especially Sextus
Empiricus.  Its raison d’être was the project of answering the
skeptic.  Had it succeeded, its
mission would have been accomplished, and there would have been room left only
for naturalistic epistemology and epistemology-as-logic.

Naturalistic epistemology does not beg the
question against the skeptic by taking its subject matter to be humans because
it is not concerned with the skeptic’s question; Aristotle was no more
concerned with skepticism than was Quine.
Indeed, though a “theory of knowledge,” naturalistic
epistemology need have little concern with knowledge itself. It is best understood
as concerned with cognition, that is, the employment of our perceptual,
conceptual, and verbal faculties, which may lead to knowledge but would be of
interest even when it does not.  For
subjective epistemology, however, since it is mainly an attempt to answer the
skeptic, only knowledge matters. Alleged cognitive states such as justified belief
are at best images of knowledge.  We
seek them in the hope of finding something still worth having when knowledge is
absent or impossible. The skeptic about the external world would not be
answered by being told that one would be justified to believe that there is an
external world. One reason is that the issue is too important for anything less
than knowledge – it concerns the existence also of other people,
including those we see daily and love. Another reason is the impropriety of
such uses of “justified” and “believe.”

As used in epistemology, “justified”
is a technical term, of obscure meaning and uncertain reference, indeed often
explicitly introduced as primitive. In everyday talk, it is a deontic term, usually
a synonym of “just” or “right,” and thus
“justified belief” is a solecism. For it is actions that are
justified or unjustified, and beliefs are not actions.  If told that the phrase stands for
belief resulting from “reliable processes,” this would be a verbal
stipulation, and would also involve the use of “reliable,” another
technical term that has required extensive explanation.

Even the word “belief,” whether
or not prefaced by an adjective like “justified,” is seldom used in
epistemology with clear sense and reference.  In everyday talk, it may refer to a
behavioral disposition, moreover a multi-track one, manifested in a great
variety of events, e.g., in what one says, what one does to oneself or to
one’s spouse, children, colleagues, friends, and strangers, what one
buys, sells, or reads, what one eats or drinks, etc. A proper translation then
of “S believes that p” into logical notation would include all
sorts of counterfactuals and would be too cumbersome to bother stating. It
certainly would have neither the form “B(S,p)” nor the form
“B(S,x,y…, R),” where S stands for the believer, p for what
is believed, and x, y, and R for constituents of p.  If we take belief to be a brain state,
process, or condition, then the translation of “S believes that p”
into logical notation, were it possible, would need to be provided by
neurologists, though they would have little use for it. And if we take belief
to be an irreducibly mental state or condition, plain respect for the
phenomenological facts would tell us that beliefs so understood are as rare as experiences
of faith, commitment, or strong conviction seem to be.

The truth is that in ordinary discourse
“S believes that p” (e.g., “S believes that Jones owns a
Ford,” when uttered in the course of office chatter) functions roughly as
a synonym of the colloquial “S thinks that p,” and is no more
enlightening or needed in philosophy than is the latter. And
“belief” is used more or less as a synonym of
“opinion,”view,” “stand,” etc., as in “The
belief that ….. originated in…..” Neither the verb nor the
noun usually expresses religious faith or some other commitment or conviction that
may have psychological reality and thus deserve the interest of psychology and,
perhaps, philosophy. For example, it would be absurd for me to say now that I
believe that I am typing, let alone that I am justified in believing that I am typing.

The word “justified,” whether
applied to such phantom beliefs or to the sentences, statements, assertions,
judgments, hypotheses, etc., supposedly expressing them, is often prefaced by
the adverb “epistemically.”
But this renders its use in epistemology even less appropriate because
the noun corresponding to that adverb in Greek is episteme and in English “knowledge,” exactly the word we
tried to avoid. We resort to the phrase “justified belief” when
aware that we have no knowledge but also hope that we are not entirely
ignorant.  But it is not the natural,
traditional word for describing what we might have in such cases. It is the
word “evidence” that comes closest to serving this function –
in science, courts of law, and careful everyday discourse.

The root of “evidence,” however,
is the same as that of “evident.” When what is evident is a
proposition, it is evident if it is or can readily be seen, whether literally or metaphorically,
to be true. “Seeing is believing,” the saying goes,
but what it usually means is that seeing is knowing.  Hence, the traditional account of
knowledge as apprehension, intuition, awareness, or acquaintance, and the
existence of the so-called strong sense of “know,” roughly that of certainty,
as contrasted with its weak sense of some sort of true belief.[42]

A proposition is sometimes evident because
it is “seen” to be true by itself, i.e., to be self-evident.  More often it is evident because it is seen
to follow from one or more other propositions that are evident.[43]  We seldom say, however, that the latter
are evidence for
the former. We seldom call the premises of a valid deductive argument evidence
for its conclusion, even if the premises are evident and the validity of the
argument is itself evident, as it would be if its form were as simple as, say, that of modus ponens.  Rather, we speak of evidence when what
we want to know is neither self-evident nor seen to follow from anything
evident, yet we think or hope that something else “supports” the
proposition in some other manner. It is then that skepticism is born and so is
the subjective epistemology that attempts to answer it.

J. L Austin wrote, “The situation in
which I would properly be said to have evidence for the statement that some animal is a pig is
that, for example, in which the beast itself is not actually on view, but I can
see plenty of pig-like marks on the ground outside its retreat.  If I find a few buckets of pig-food,
that’s more evidence, and the noises and the smell may provide better
evidence still.  But if the animal
then emerges and stands there plainly in view, there is no longer any question
of collecting evidence; its coming
into view doesn't provide me with more evidence that it’s a pig, I can
now just see that it is, the question is settled.”[44]  Some would say, however, that when the
animal comes in view it is self-evident that
the animal is a pig. Taken literally, of course, the term
“self-evident” is a pleonasm, as “self-seen” and
“self-visible” would be.
But it does serve to mark the important difference between what is
evident in virtue of being seen to be true by itself and what is evident in
virtue of being seen to follow from one or more other propositions that are
seen to be true.  Even in a modus ponens argument with self-evident
premises, the conclusion, if not self-evident itself, would not be evident
unless seen to follow from the
premises, i.e., unless the validity of the argument is self-evident.  The conclusion would be evident only if
its relation to the premises was evident.

Skepticism begins by noting that usually
what we want to know is neither self-evident nor made evident by anything that
is self-evident. And subjective epistemology usually tries to avoid the
disconcerting implications of this fact by appealing to something else that it
hopes is relevant to what we want to know.
We may call it “evidence,” although, even if it is itself
self-evident, it does not make what we want to know evident.  This is how Austin used
“evidence” in his example of the pig: “a few buckets of
pig-food,” “the noises and the smell.”  Religion and the law are the noteworthy
home of such uses of the word, which are often exquisitely circumspect.  They are also common, even if less
circumspect, in the lab and the street.
The notion they express is a degenerate offspring of the notion of the
evident.  But, though degenerate, it
is usually understandable and also harmless. We may need to know, not merely believe, that God exists, yet we may be aware that we do not. So we
look for “evidence” of his existence. In the courtroom, a verdict
of guilt or innocence may be mandatory, though neither guilt nor innocence is
likely to be self-evident or made evident by anything that is self-evident. So
we look for something else we hope is relevant to guilt or innocence, and call
it “evidence,” whether “beyond reasonable doubt” or
not, and whether just “circumstantial” or not.

If we think that such degenerate evidence is
“strong” enough, we may even say that we know that for which we take it to be evidence, thus making also a
degenerate use of “know.”
Saying this would make explicit the reason we appealed to it in the
first place, i.e., our desire for truth, and it may seem to anoint the
appeal.  How strong the evidence
must be, however, is never made clear because, given the sort of reasons that
lead us to appeal to it, this cannot be made clear.  As cognitive beings, we seek knowledge
because it is truth we want, not such “evidence,” even if we were
to dress it up with phrases like “epistemic probability” and
“epistemic justification.”
The idea that evidence comes in degrees and that possession of it yields
an approximation to knowledge, something worth having even though knowledge is
absent or impossible, may suggest to some that there can be such a thing as an
approximation also of truth.  But
while truth may be incomplete, irrelevant, or misleading, there cannot be two-thirds
or 86% truth.

Nonetheless, though as cognitive beings it
is truth and therefore knowledge that we seek, we are not purely cognitive
beings.  The degenerate uses of
“evidence” and “know” in religion and the courts of law
are defensible.  They are often
needed even in the lab and the street. To go about our business we must think
of certain judgments as final, settled,
even if we soon revisit them.  There
are practical reasons in religion, the court of law, the lab, or the street for
resorting to a degenerate notion of evidence.  But no such reasons exist in
epistemology, which is neither a religion or a courtroom nor a lab or the
street.  Our concerns in it are
purely cognitive. This is why the degenerate notion of evidence is not harmless
in epistemology. It gives rise to the illusion that knowledge is relatively
easy to achieve, or at best that what knowledge requires is merely the limit,
even if only ideal, of a range of degrees of “evidence,” of
“epistemic probability,” or of “epistemic
justification,” and that what falls short of that limit would nonetheless
suffice.  But for what it might
“suffice” is unclear, since practical considerations are now
irrelevant.  Unsurprisingly, it has
not sufficed for answering the skeptic.

In everyday life and thought, the degenerate
notions of evidence and evidence provide a way of clearing our epistemic
conscience.  They are analogous in
this respect to the degenerate notion in ethics of “subjective
duty,” which provides a way of clearing our moral conscience.  The weak sense of “know” is
analogous to the weak sense of “ought” introduced by the notion of
subjective duty.  If ignorant, as we
often are, of our objective duty, of what we ought to do, we may settle for
doing what we think, perhaps feel, we ought to do, our subjective
duty. We may even insist that one always ought to do what one thinks or feels
one ought to do.  However, just as
our concern as cognitive beings is with truth, our concern as moral beings is
with doing what we really ought to do.
The weak senses of “know” and “ought” are
natural, in view of the scarcity of cases in which we can use
“know” and “ought” in their proper, strong senses.
There is no need for legislation against them. But we are deeply aware of the
difference when facing matters of major importance, and then we stay faithful
to the strong senses. We do not usually say that we know we will be alive
tomorrow and thus that we need not pay our life insurance premium today,
regardless of how healthy and safe we think or feel we are today.  Serious people buy fire insurance even
though they have never had a fire. And we do not say that children ought to
sacrifice their lives if they think or feel they ought to do it.

We can now understand why the strong sense
of “know,” which requires that what we say we know is self-evident or
seen to follow from what is self-evident, has been central in subjective
epistemology. The attraction of religion is that it promises certainty about
matters of ultimate concern, not mere probability.  A religious person would not be satisfied
if told that God probably exists. A missionary does not win converts by
assuring them that they would be justified in believing, or that it is
probable, that there is God.  The
attraction of subjective epistemology is that it seeks certainty about matters
of ultimate concern where nothing less suffices.  Its main topic was the existence of
material things – of the earth and the sun, of your body and mine.  Among its topics were also the existence
of other minds and the validity of induction. It would be jejune in everyday
life to say that we are only justified in believing, or that it is only
probable, that we have bodies, that others have thoughts and feelings, or that
the past tells us anything about the future.  Only a philosopher might be satisfied if
told that other people only probably exist. And it would be outrageous in
epistemology to suppose that by saying that the external world probably exists
we are genuinely answering the skeptic. The focus on epistemic justification or
epistemic probability, rather than knowledge, came about precisely when
epistemologists concluded that we cannot have genuine knowledge of such
matters, yet remained unwilling to accept skepticism.

The concept of knowledge played a central
role in Cartesian epistemology. But Descartes’s principal question was
not “What is knowledge?”
This question had been asked before and usually answered, briefly and
informally but sufficiently, in the same way – knowledge is apprehension,
grasping, getting hold of the truth and then steadfastly holding on to it.  The Cartesian question that inaugurated
subjective epistemology was rather whether we have knowledge of anything,
especially of an external material world.
Cartesian epistemology began by taking skepticism seriously, hoping to
refute it.  And for this reason it
was essential that the Cartesian epistemologist ask whether I have knowledge, that is, to
employ an indexical, the first-person pronoun, rather than a name like
“Descartes” or a definite description like “the author of the
Meditations.”  For had the Cartesian epistemologist
done the latter, the skeptic would have complained of question-begging.  One who questions the existence of the
external material world questions also the existence of human beings, including
Descartes, since they, or at least their bodies, are parts of that world.

In the First Meditation, Descartes could not
have used “I” to refer to the Frenchman named Descartes, since that
Frenchman was part of the world the existence of which Descartes was to prove
later, in the Second Meditation.  When
he employed the argument “I think, therefore I am,” Descartes could
not have been referring even to the “thinking thing” that in the
Second Meditation he concluded he was.
He could not have said he was referring to his thinking thing, for how would he have answered the question, which thinking thing it was?  He could not have said, “my
thinking thing,” for “my” is the possessive adjective
corresponding to “I.” Louis XIII also was, or had, a thinking thing,
but Descartes did not suppose he was proving the existence of that thinking thing and thus of Louis
XIII. Nor could he infer from “I think” just “There is a
thinking,” as some have suggested.  Was it Descartes’s or Louis
XIII’s thinking? If it was no one’s, there might be thousands of
such orphaned thinkings. The existence of which one was Descartes
inferring?  Epistemological ventures
seldom benefit from ontological adventures. To confront the skeptic without
begging the question Descartes needed to begin his inquiry by renouncing claims
to any subject matter.  He could
refer to nothing even when using
“I.”  Subjective
epistemology must lay claim to no subject matter when attempting to refute skepticism.

Descartes probably did not see that he faced
these difficulties because all along he thought he was “directly
aware” of a thinking thing and its ideas.  But even if we ignore the question about
which thinking thing and ideas those were, “his” or Louis
XIII’s, yet another question, also fundamental but ignored by Descartes,
can be asked.  If a necessary
condition of awareness is that its object exists, then the skeptic would ask
whether Descartes was really aware of
a thinking thing and its ideas, just as the skeptic asks whether we really
perceive bodies when we think we perceive them.  And if the existence of its object is
not a necessary condition of the awareness, then the skeptic of course would
question the cogency of the inference from the occurrence of the awareness to
the existence of the thinking thing and its ideas.  Descartes thought he might be deceived
by God or an evil demon regarding 3+2=5, but did not see that if this is so
then he might be deceived also about what he thought he was aware of.

This, we may note, vitiates also
Descartes’ several inferences from the existence of his idea of God to
God’s existence.
Couldn’t God, or an evil demon, deceive him into thinking that he
had that idea?  Perhaps he did not really have it.  The failure to see that in this way the
skeptic could question any appeal to awareness vitiates also the familiar
appeals in post-Cartesian subjective epistemology to “intuition,”
“immediate experience,” or “direct acquaintance.” Plato
pointed out the poverty of such appeals in the Theatetus, and so did Hegel,[45]
but they remain common in philosophy.

Thus, while naturalistic epistemology has a
subject matter too limited to be philosophical, subjective epistemology appears
to have no subject matter at all.
Its raison d’être
is to meet the challenge of skepticism. Otherwise, there would be no rationale
for distinguishing it from naturalistic epistemology, albeit it would be a
naturalistic epistemology concerned, inexplicably, with just one natural
object, just one human being – oneself.  To remain subjective, subjective
epistemology must refer to the “self” only by means of indexical
expressions such as “I.”
To both have a subject matter and not beg the question against the
skeptic, it must be satisfied with a subject matter that is an entity that can
be referred to only with indexicals. But would anything be an entity if it
could be referred to only with an indexical?  To suppose that there could be thinkers
who are only Is borders on
incoherence, just as to suppose that there could be times and places that are
only nows and heres borders on incoherence.
Even to say this has required use of the grammatical monstrosities
“Is,” “nows” and “heres.”

Before his optimistic inferences to the
existence of God, Descartes seemed to have only himself, to be in a state of
absolute solitude.  But in fact he did
not have even himself, whether as the writer of the Meditations or just as a certain thinking thing.  He had nothing. Subjective epistemology
is dependent on the use of “I” as a dangling pronoun, a pronoun
without an antecedent noun. It is like a geography of here or a history of now
that in principle is unable to say where
is here or when is now.

This is why subjective epistemology is often
described as epistemology from the first-person perspective.  But there are no such entities as first
persons, second persons, or third persons, there are only first-person,
second-person, or third-person pronouns.
The vague and much abused term “perspective” can be
misleading, but it is helpful because there are no obvious alternatives to the
adjective “perspectival.”
There is an alternative to the noun “perspective,” however,
that is less affected, namely, “view,” as long as we understand this
term not in the optical but its ordinary broad sense.  So understood, “view” is a
synonym of “cognition.”
The “first person,” we may then say, is only a perspective, a view, a cognition.  It is in this sense that subjective
epistemology is only perspectival.
There is no entity that is just the first person, and so the subject
matter of subjective epistemology is not that privileged entity – the first person is not a
person.  It is only a view, a cognition.  I shall have much more to say on this
topic in chapter 10.

Nonetheless, though subjective epistemology lacks
a subject matter and is only perspectival, the rationale for it is impeccable.
Lack of subject matter does not imply unimportance.  The idea of a geography of here or a history of now that is unable to say where is here or when is now does seem absurd.
But the idea of traveling from here and now without being able to say from
where or when does not. A journey must begin somewhere and at some time, even
if we cannot say where and when. Subjective epistemology may be an epistemology
of pronouns without nouns, but to get nouns we must, so to speak, begin with
pronouns. The first-person pronoun is indispensable, not because of what it
refers to but because of the role it serves in the initiation of cognition.  It is essential to all talk and thought,
and thus to all inquiry.

In normal contexts, to heedfully assert the
sentence p one must be willing to assert “It is true that p.”  But to heedfully assert “It is
true that p,” one must be willing to assert “I know that p”
(rather than the very different “I think that p” or even “It
is probable  that p”).  Indeed, one must be willing to assert
‘‘I know that p’’ in order to heedfully assert
‘‘He (she, Jack, the expert) knows that p.”  I can say that
Jack knows when the train will leave
even if I cannot say that I know, but I cannot say he knows that it will leave at 5 p.m. if I cannot
say that I know this.  In any
inquiry, one must begin with the first-person view, with the use, however
implicit, of “I,” even if only in judgments, implicit or not, such
as “I’ll look for it in the bush,” “I’ll ask
Jill,” or “I’ll check the dictionary.”  This is a proposition neither of physics
nor of metaphysics.  It’s like
“Every journey must begin somewhere,” not like “Every journey
must begin in Woodbury.”  Yet
the proposition enjoys the abstraction characteristic of philosophy and bequeaths
it to subjective epistemology.
“I think” must be able to accompany all of our
representations, Kant held, even though, as Sartre later argued, it seldom
actually does.  Russell wrote,
“When you are considering any sort of theory of knowledge, you are more
or less tied to a certain unavoidable subjectivity, because you are not
concerned simply with the question what is true of the world, but ‘What
can I know of the world?’…You cannot go outside yourself and
consider abstractly whether the things that appear to you to be true are
true.”[46]  Russell may have been wrong in thinking
that there is an “inside” to be contrasted with an
“outside,” but his grasp of the rationale for subjective
epistemology was firm.  Unless one
opens one’s eyes and looks, one does not see. Unless there is a view,
nothing is seen.

This is why the allure of the subjective
turn that Cartesian epistemology initiated is ever-present.  It would be sad if subjective
epistemology were all there were to epistemology, but outrageous to deny its
essential insight.  As a theory it
is futile and usually misguided, yet it is as indispensable and unavoidable as
one’s awareness that to get anywhere one must start somewhere and that to
see anything one must look.  The mistake is to suppose that subjective
epistemology is about me, even if
there is such an entity as me, whether a human being or a mere thinking
thing.  It is the mistake of
supposing that subjective epistemology has a subject matter and thus that it is
a cognitive discipline, a theory of something, presumably knowledge or
cognition, when in fact it only draws attention to what is the necessary entry
into any subject matter and serves as the prelude to any discipline.  Subjective epistemology must use
“I,” or a synonym of it, yet it can refer with it to nothing, not
because there is nothing to refer to but because of the very nature of its
project.  That project was not a
mistake.

Antirealism is a metaphysical, not
epistemological, theory, but it shares with subjective epistemology the peculiar
feature I have just described.  Its
thesis is that the world, at least insofar as it is perceived, understood, or
described, depends on our powers of perception, conceptualization, and speech.
This
is not a zoological proposition, however. It is not about humans, even though we are humans.  We can now see better how it should be
understood.  Indeed, the
proposition is
not about humans, but neither is it about nonhumans.  It is not about entities at all. Rather,
it is about the necessary conditions of all thought and talk about
entities.  As such, it is intimately
related to subjective epistemology, as intimately as Kant’s philosophy
was related to Hume’s, and can cast further light on it.  That Hume’s skepticism led to
Kant’s transcendental idealism was not just an event in Kant’s personal
life.  It manifested a turning-point
in the history of philosophy, just as more than a century earlier
Descartes’ method of doubt had manifested its turn to epistemology.
Hegel’s absolute idealism manifested a third turning-point.  The subjective epistemologist makes
essential use of the first-person singular
pronoun “I,” but Hegel saw that it is the first-person plural pronoun “we” that is
essential to full-fledged cognition.
The self-centered focus on the conditions that my cognition, my heedful thought and talk, must satisfy was
broadened as well as deepened by Hegel’s focus on the conditions that our cognition, our heedful thought and
talk must satisfy. To heedfully assert p, one must indeed be
willing to assert “I know that p.”  But this is only the necessary prelude to
full-fledged cognition, which would be expressed by “We know that p.”

3. Epistemology-as-Logic.

Subjective
epistemology does not have a subject matter.  Naturalistic epistemology does, but its
subject matter is human and thus lacks the supreme abstraction and generality characteristic
of philosophy.  The third variety of
epistemology, epistemology-as-logic, has a subject matter that exceeds the
bounds of the special sciences.
Like formal logic, it is unambiguously “dehumanized” and
belongs in philosophy.  All three
varieties of epistemology, however, are defensible within the limits of their
very different yet not incompatible concerns.  Their differences call for mindful
distinctions, not mindless quarrel.

In the Introduction I noted that in ethics
some have eschewed the need for empirical investigation by taking “the
deontic way,” focusing on what we ought to or at least are morally
permitted to do.  In the present
chapter we saw that some have taken the deontic way in epistemology by focusing
on what we ought to or at least would be “justified” to believe.  They have thus avoided competing with
the empirical sciences.  Whatever
its merits in in these cases, the deontic way is natural in epistemology
insofar as its concerns have to do with the validity of certain inferences and
thus are essentially logical.
Logic, the “art of reasoning,” is commonly said to tell us
what may and what may not be inferred from a given
proposition or set of propositions, clearly a deontic matter.  The inferences of interest in
epistemology are seldom deductive, and for this reason the need for grounding
judgments about their validity is especially evident.  Much of traditional epistemology has
consisted in the search for such grounding.

Contrary to what textbooks sometimes say,
formal logic is concerned not with inferences as actions, presumably human and
thus properly studied by psychology, but with their formal validity, the
relation of the truth-value of the premises to the truth-value of the
conclusion, in particular, the formal consistency of the conjunction of the premises
and the negation of the conclusion.
Its general subject matter thus consists of alethic relations, in the
broad and etymologically proper sense of relations between propositions with
respect to their truth-value.  If
some propositions, or at least sentences, are neither true nor false, as a
consequence of the truth-value of other propositions or sentences, this fact
too would belong in its subject matter.

Formal logic thus exemplifies the generality
and abstraction definitory of philosophy to the highest and purest degree.  This is why Aristotle assigned
“the principles of the syllogism,” especially that of noncontradiction,
to “the science of being qua being.” This is why Frege wrote,
“Just as ‘beautiful’ points the way for aesthetics and
‘good’ for ethics, so do words like ‘true’ for
logic...[I]t falls to logic to discern the laws of truth...The Bedeutung [reference, meaning] of the
word ‘true’ is spelled out in the laws of truth.”[47]  Elsewhere, Frege explained: “What
is distinctive about my conception of logic is that I begin by giving pride of
place to the content of the word ‘true’ ....”[48]  If metaphysics is the science of being
qua being, logic may be said to be the science of being qua truth, ethics of
being qua goodness, and aesthetics of being qua beauty.  Indeed, all four – Being, Truth,
Goodness, and Beauty – belonged among what the medievals called transcendentalia.

Epistemology-as-logic differs from formal
logic by focusing on the validity – legitimacy, cogency, worth – of
certain nonformal inferences, but its
subject matter, like that of formal logic, consists of alethic relations, in
particular, the relation of the truth-value of the premises of the nonformal
inference to the truth-value of its conclusion.  It too enjoys the level of generality
and abstraction characteristic of philosophy. Like formal logic, it is
concerned not with inferences as human actions but with the alethic relations
they exemplify.  Unlike subjective
epistemology, it does not lack subject matter, it is not just
perspectival.  And unlike
naturalistic epistemology, which does have a subject matter, it is not just
programmatic.  Of course, epistemology-as-logic
does apply to human matters, just as formal logic does.  But it is not about them.  There is nothing puzzling about
this.  Arithmetic also applies to humans,
as well as to bats and stars, but it is neither about humans nor about bats or
stars.  It is about numbers.

In attempting to answer the skeptic,
subjective epistemology hoped to find cogent inferences, formal or nonformal,
from premises it deemed known to be true, even if as minimal as “I
think.”  Epistemology-as-logic,
however, does not ask whether the premises of such an inference are true, nor
does it agonize if the inference is not deductive.  It is free from obsession with
skepticism, just as naturalistic epistemology enjoys such freedom. In this it
follows the lead of its older and more mature sibling, formal logic. In
evaluating a deductive argument, formal logic is not concerned with the truth
of its premises. And, we may note in passing, it also does not fret that, even
if they are true, the formal validity of the argument might not suffice for the
truth of its conclusion because God might deceive us about logic just as he
might deceive us about arithmetic, the latter a possibility Descartes did worry
about.

Epistemology-as-logic may aim at providing
eventually a general theory of the alethic relations exemplified in nonformal
inferences.  But it began by
examining particular kinds of such inference, just as formal logic began with
the examination of Aristotelian syllogisms and only later, mainly through
Frege’s work, offered a general theory of the alethic relations they
exemplify.  Inferences involving
probability, induction, and abduction are standard topics in subjective
epistemology.  They would also be
topics in epistemology-as-logic, though in abstraction from possible use against
skepticism, which was the reason for subjective epistemologists’ interest
in them.  Appeals to probability, of
course, have failed to answer the skeptic, who would either deny that mere
probability suffices or question the truth of one or more of the premises.  Nonetheless, the calculus of probability
remains an established discipline of some distinction.  Appeals to induction and abduction,
notoriously, also have failed to answer the skeptic.  But they remain standard topics in the
philosophy of science, which seldom strays into Cartesian doubts.

But of special interest to
epistemology-as-logic would be relations of nonformal entailment.  That there
are such relations is usually acknowledged independently of epistemological
concerns.  A standard example is the
entailment of being colored by being red, and anyone who, like Kant, regards
mathematical truths as necessary but “synthetic,” i.e., not
reducible to logical truths, allows also for nonformal entailments in
mathematics.  Neither mathematicians
nor philosophers of mathematics worry that God might be deceiving us about
7+5=12.

An inventory, much less detailed discussion,
of all nonformal alethic relations is neither possible nor needed here.  I shall limit myself to an especially
important one: the relation of presupposition.  Bringing to light and focusing on that
relation was the turning-point in the development of epistemology beyond its
subjective stage.  If we call
subjective epistemology Cartesian, then epistemology-as-logic, insofar it focuses
on the relation of presupposition, may be called Kantian.  Hence the application of Kant’s
term “transcendental” to recent arguments from presupposition. Kant’s
project in the Critique of Pure Reason
can be described as discovering the presuppositions of the several levels of
cognition, though instead of “presupposition” Kant used
“condition” and would have described the project as discovering the
conditions that the several levels of cognition must satisfy.  But epistemology-as-logic need not adopt
Kant’s essentially mentalistic approach to epistemology or any of his
specific doctrines.

The relation of presupposition became a
major, though also controversial, topic in 20th century philosophy
because of Strawson’s criticism of Russell’s theory of descriptions.[49]  Strawson gave as examples the
presupposition of “There is a king of France” by “The king of
France is wise,” and the presupposition of “He is not dead”
by “He cares about it.” (“Does he care about it? He neither
cares nor doesn’t care; he is dead.”)[50]  If France does not have a king, neither
“The king of France is wise” nor “The king of France is not wise”
is true.  A proposition p
presupposes a proposition q, according to Strawson, when both “If p then q”
and “If not-p then q” are true, in other words, when q is a
necessary condition of both the truth and the falsity of p, thus of p’s
being a coherent proposition at all, even though p does not formally entail q
and not-p does not formally entail q.[51] In
the example of the king of France, the presupposition manifests itself in our
dismissing as confused, not inconsistent, both anyone who said that the king of
France is wise but denied that France has a king and anyone who said that the
king of France is not wise but denied that France has a king. Our judgment of
anyone who said, “He cares about it but he is dead,” would be
similar.

Presupposition is neither formal entailment
nor a probabilistic, inductive, or abductive relation.  This is why appeals to it have seemed to
provide answers to skepticism entirely different from the usual answers.  The latter are almost certainly either
formally invalid or contain premises the skeptic finds as questionable as the
conclusion.  The
anti-skeptic’s predicament has been that to answer the skeptic one must
assume more than the skeptic would allow, but if one assumes less then the
answer does not follow from the assumptions.  In appeals to presupposition, however,
the consequence of denying the presupposed proposition is not the falsity but
the incoherence of the proposition that presupposes it, whether a trifling
incoherence as in the example of the king of France, or a deep one as in the
examples I shall sketch shortly.

Some have said that presupposition is merely a feature of language, just
“internal” or “pragmatic,” not “logical” or
“semantic,” as if pervasive features of language are ever merely
features of language.  Aristotle
defended the principle of noncontradiction not by trying to infer it from
“more certain” propositions, but by showing that it is presupposed
even by any reasoning intended to cast doubt on that principle.  Russell repeatedly pointed out that the
proposition “what follows from a true proposition is true” is
primitive and presupposed by all deductive reasoning.[52] That the natural sciences are rife
with presuppositions has always been evident.  Physics presupposes, it does not
discover, the existence of a spatiotemporal world.  Psychiatrists presuppose, they do not
discover, that it is not evil spirits that cause mental illness. The examples from Strawson that I
have mentioned may be of little intrinsic interest but this cannot be said of
those in his major metaphysical work, Individuals,
or his book on Kant, The Bounds of Sense.
And certainly it cannot be said of the examples in Kant’s own works.

Kant defended important but controversial philosophical propositions on
the ground that they are presupposed by other propositions that are not
controversial. A simple example is the presupposition that the objects of sense
perception (“outer sense”) are in space. “This page is
white” would not be true if this page were not in space, but neither
would “This page is not white” be true if this page were not in
space.  Kant’s argument that
morality presupposes freedom is another and famous example.  Freedom seems to be presupposed by all
genuine actions, moral, immoral, or nonmoral. It is what seems to distinguish
actions from mere movements.  A no
less famous but more difficult example is Kant’s argument that objective
order in time presupposes causal necessity.  It is complex and not to be dealt with
lightly, whether in agreement or disagreement, but we need not go into its
details to get a glimpse of it.  If
we ask whether Jack met Jill before or after she moved to town, the answer
would depend in part on reasoning about when and where he could have met her. When such questions and their answers really
matter (as they often do in courts of law), it would be foolhardy to rely on
memory impressions, what Kant called the subjective play of fancy.  As these examples show, what is
presupposed need not be a single proposition, just as a deductive proof
ordinarily does not rest on a single premise.  It might even be a system of propositions, and what presupposes it might itself be
such a system.  This is why the
philosophically interesting examples of presupposition seldom have the simple
structure of the examples about the present king of France and the man who is
dead.  Here are three other
examples.

The first is a presupposition especially
relevant to traditional epistemology: the existence of a material world.  It assumes many forms, and is neither
simple nor obvious.  G. E. Moore
noted that in doubting the existence of the material world Descartes would have
had to doubt the existence of other philosophers, past and present, including
those he had read, heard, argued with, and whose works and views were the
context of his doubt, whether through agreement or disagreement.[53]  Philosophers are human beings, therefore
inhabitants, parts, of the material world.
The history of philosophy is not a history of angels.  Descartes could not have taken his doubt
seriously as a philosophical doubt if
he had considered what would be the case with respect to his own doubt if there
were not a material world. If genuinely philosophical, skepticism about the
material world questions its own existence.

The historical context of philosophical
thinking, such as Descartes’ doubt, is essential to it, however original the thinking may be.  It is even more obviously essential to
it than, as contemporary essentialists have argued, the biological origin of an
organism is essential, “metaphysically necessary,” to that
organism.  The
“historicity” of a philosophical view is no more a contingent fact
than the historicity of a political event.
Both bear necessary relations to their past.  Neither Cartesian epistemology nor
Democratic or Republican politics in the 21st century would be comprehensible
if stripped of such relations. The skeptic questions what makes it possible for
skepticism to be the philosophical view it is: its roots in what some other
philosophers have held.  It would
not exist if those philosophers had not existed, and thus if the material world
did not exist.  Descartes’
methodological doubt would not have occurred if the proposition he doubted had
not been true.

Indeed, the very language Descartes used to
develop and explain his doubt would not have existed.  And employment of language is essential
to philosophical thought, even if rudimentary thoughts are possible without
language.  Philosophical thought,
whether superior or mediocre, involves argumentation, good or bad, which has a
fairly complex structure, distinct premises and conclusions, each with its own
structure, and logical connections rooted directly or indirectly in that
structure.  The terms employed in
the argumentation are chosen usually with deliberation and discretion from a
fairly extensive and often highly technical lexicon.  Any language employed in philosophy,
say, Descartes’ French or Latin, also involves phonemes and inscriptions,
and has been shaped by a human community.
All three – phonemes, inscriptions, and the human community
– are parts of the material world.

Could the argumentation be stated and
explained in a private language, in
the minimal, not necessarily Wittgenstein’s, sense of a language created
by the philosopher alone without reliance on a public language, as in devising
a secret code?  Surely such a
private language, even if possible, would be too primitive.  The reader is invited to attempt
constructing a fragment of one and then translating a paragraph from
Descartes’ Meditations into it.
Writing philosophy is not like recording one’s aches and pains. A private
language for the latter, perhaps invented by a hypochondriac, might be possible,
but to say that the sophisticated language employed by the philosophical
skeptic could be such as language would be mere posturing. Might the argument
take place just in the skeptic’s thought, without use of language, public
or private? Even if some thought without language, e.g., recalling a sensation,
were possible, to suppose that philosophical thought might be such thought
would be like supposing that we can understand differential equations without
using symbols.  The skepticism considered
in Descartes’ First Meditation was not a tipsy sailor’s
declaration, “Maybe I know nothing.”  It was a professional, serious and
informed, philosophical view.  This
is why we still take it seriously.
Of course, that philosophical skepticism about the material world
questions its own existence does not entail that it is false.  It does not make it
self-contradictory.  But it does
make it deeply incoherent.  If the
material world did not exist, then it itself would not exist.

The second example of philosophically
interesting  presupposition can be
found in Sartre’s  strikingly
original defense of the existence of other minds.  One’s acceptance of the
“Other” is not discursive, he pointed out.  It is presupposed by many of one’s
own psychological states, it is essential to them.  Sartre dwelt at length on the experience
of shame when looking through a keyhole but seeming to hear footsteps.  It is “an immediate shudder that
runs through me from head to foot without any discursive
preparation.”  It is
“shame of oneself before the Other,”
even if I know that no one is actually looking at me.[54]  To say that what is presupposed here is
only the possibility of being the
object of another’s look would be to deny that the experience is genuine
shame.  There is almost always such
possibility. At any rate, the interesting sort of skepticism about the
existence of other minds, one that is not just a trivial consequence of
skepticism about the existence of other human bodies, questions even that
possibility.  For it questions the
very intelligibility of there being anyone “other than
myself.”  It denies that we
can even “conceive” of another mind, somewhat as Berkeley denied
that we can conceive of unperceived bodies.  Such a skeptic owes us an account of that
“immediate shudder that runs through me from head to foot.”

My third example of presupposition belongs
to an even deeper level.  We may
call it conceptual presupposition.
What is presupposed is not a proposition but a particular understanding
of a certain concept.  For example,
all discussions, skeptical and anti-skeptical, of the existence of bodies
presuppose a particular understanding of the concept of existence.  Therefore,
to ask whether bodies exist presupposes some answer to the question of what it
is for a body to exist, and ultimately of what it is for something to
exist.  Is existence a
property?  If it is not, then what
are skepticism and anti-skepticism about?  Would it be intelligible to speak of the
truth or falsity of any sentences asserting or denying existence, and thus of
knowledge or ignorance of their truth?
Would such sentences express genuine propositions?

Standard epistemology, whether naturalistic
or subjective, provides little guidance on these questions.  It usually takes for granted Kant’s
view that existence is not a real
predicate, meaning that it is not a property, a “determination,” of
a thing, res, but fails to consider
the epistemological implications of the view.[55]  Kant himself wrote that the existence of
a thing has to do “only with the question whether [the] thing is given to
us in such a way that the perception of it could in any case precede the
concept.”[56]  This was not Berkeley’s “to
be is to be perceived.”  It
was closer to Mill’s “matter is a permanent possibility of sensations.”  Kant held that to be actual (wirklich) a thing must
“stand…in accordance with the laws of empirical progression.”[57]  We cannot go here into the details of
these laws, but like any other laws they would involve, according to Kant,
applications of the pure concepts of the understanding.  If so, the actuality or existence of a
thing, like its causality, was for him not so much a matter of discovery of empirical fact as the imposition of a concept.  “Exists” expresses not a
property we find in a thing, but
rather a conception of the thing that
we contribute.[58] If,
following etymology, we use “object” for anything that is or can be
“placed before or presented to the eyes or other senses” (Oxford English Dictionary) or to
consciousness generally, the “mind,” we can use “entity,”
again following etymology, for any object to which the concept of existence
applies.  Obviously, there are
objects, “things,” that do not exist, e.g., the Easter Bunny or a
child’s favorite but imaginary friend Jack.  Objects and entities may not differ with
respect to aesthetic qualities, but it is entities that are of interest in
cognition, as children soon learn. This does not mean that how we apply the
concept of existence is mere caprice, any more than that how we apply the concept
of causality is one.  What is meant
is closer to what Nelson Goodman meant by the “entrenchment” of the
predicate “green,” which the predicate “grue” lacks,
though for Kant the application of the concept of existence was grounded in the
activity of our faculty of the understanding, not in our linguistic
practices.  Clearly, Kant’s
view of existence required that skepticism and subjective epistemology, insofar
as they concern the existence of bodies, be drastically rethought – or
just altogether bypassed by him, as in fact they were.

Is existence just what the existential
quantifier expresses, the “satisfaction” of a propositional
function, as Russell argued and most contemporary epistemologists take for
granted?[59]  To suggest that it is would be a nonstarter.  Whether the propositional function
“x is a horse” is satisfied depends on what we allow as values of
the variable x.  Is “x is a
horse” satisfied by both Secretariat and Pegasus, or only by
Secretariat?  If we say the latter,
our reason would be that Pegasus does not exist, but now in a sense of
“exist” obviously other than yet presupposed by
Russell’s.  It is its ordinary
sense, which we employ in saying that the Easter Bunny and the child’s
friend Jack do not exist.

In any genuine case of inference involving
presupposition, there is a natural desire to think of it as a case of formal
entailment, since this is the sort of entailment we find most familiar and
understand best.  And when we see
that the conditional corresponding to the inference is not a tautology we are
tempted to declare the inference invalid.
Or, if we still find it compelling, we are tempted to change the conditional
so that it becomes a tautology, and bless the change by calling it an
“analysis” or “translation.”  This is what Russell did in his theory
of definite descriptions.  He saw
that if the present king of France is wise then, of course, France has a
king.  He also saw, however, that this
is not a tautology.  So, he
proceeded to “translate” it into one.  In the philosophically substantive
cases, however, like those Kant and Sartre made familiar, no such analyses or
translations are plausible.  The
proposition “If there is objective order in time, then there is causal
necessity,” for example, obviously is not a tautology, and to try to
change it into one by “analysis” would hardly be a task worth
attempting.  So, the remaining
option is to just deny the proposition.

When the presupposition is conceptual,
however, there is no such third option. For example, the skeptic can deny,
however implausibly, that skepticism, like all philosophical thought,
presupposes the existence of the material world, that objective order in time
presupposes causal necessity, or that the phenomenon of shame presupposes the
Other’s look.  But the skeptic
is not likely to question the presupposition of a particular understanding of the
concept of existence when doubting or affirming the existence of an external
world.  An answer, whether
affirmative or negative, to a question presupposes understanding the
question.  The skeptic cannot deny
the central place of the concept of existence in any discussion of what does or
does not exist, or of what we can or cannot know to exist.  Berkeley’s “to be is to be
perceived” was not a casual remark made when defending his immaterialism.

Chapter
Three: THE PROPERTY GOOD

1. Anthropocentrism and
Conceptual Analysis in Ethics.

Although
ethics usually has concerned itself explicitly with human matters, there have
been noteworthy exceptions. Plato’s theory of the Form of the Good in The Republic is a famous example. In the
18th century, as we saw in the Introduction, Kant distinguished sharply between the
metaphysics of morals and the empirical discipline of “practical
anthropology.” In
the 20th century, G.E. Moore offered in Principia
Ethica a detailed exposition and defense of an ethics concerned with what
he called the nonnatural property good.  It is well-known but usually vigorously
rejected.  And fifteen years later
Wittgenstein outlined in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus a subtle conception of ethics as concerned
with the world, not oneself or other humans. It has received little attention,
unlike the rest of the book. Plato, Kant, Moore, and Wittgenstein provided both the rationale and the outline of a
dehumanized ethics, though they differed much in other respects. In this
chapter I shall consider Moore’s
ethics, and Wittgenstein’s in chapter 4. My aim will not be
to offer exegesis but to provide detailed examples of dehumanized ethics at its
best and explain why and how they avoided anthropocentrism.

In Principia Ethica Moore proposed that good (I shall follow his use
of the adjective instead of the noun “goodness”) is a simple,
indefinable, nonnatural property, and that this property is the proper subject
matter of ethics. The book was published in 1903, and became a signpost in the
philosophy of the following 100 years. It may still be too early to judge how
20th century philosophy ended, but its beginning was remarkable. Russell's Principles of Mathematics also appeared
in 1903, the first volume of Husserl's Logical
Investigations in 1900-01, and four of William James’s major
philosophical books in 1902-09. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was
written between 1914 and 1918. There was not a significant difference, except perhaps
in style and temperament, between Anglo-American and European philosophers. The
analytic/continental schism came much later. In the Preface of Principia Moore wrote that his ethics
was closest to Franz Brentano’s. Both Russell and Husserl began as
mathematicians. Frege was a German philosopher-mathematician to whom, by their
own admission, Russell and Wittgenstein were heavily indebted. Russell studied
and discussed Meinong in detail. James was admired in both Britain and Europe,
influenced Husserl and Wittgenstein, and was the subject of articles by Moore
and Russell.

In Principia Ethica Moore dehumanized ethics even more clearly than
Plato had done. But the book also inaugurated what has come to be known as
analytic ethics, the sort of ethics characteristic of 20th century analytic
philosophy.  Analytic ethics began largely
in opposition to Moore’s thesis that the property good is indefinable.
But Moore had made clear that he had no interest in what he called verbal, and
the tradition calls nominal, definitions. They are the business of
lexicography, he wrote. Yet it was just such definitions that analytic
philosophers sought, sometimes calling them “analyses.” The most
familiar example, noted in chapter 2, comes from analytic epistemology, not
ethics: the definitions of “S knows that p” that preoccupied
epistemologists from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. The definitions sought
and offered by analytic philosophers were not even lexicographical, definitions
that record lexical facts and are tested by empirical investigation of speech
and writing. Rather, they recorded their authors’ impressions of lexical facts, and were tested by the authors’
“intuitions” about what we would or would not say, usually in some hypothetical
situation. The question “How do I know what we would or would not say
in that situation?” was usually ignored. For it could be answered
properly only by appealing to what others have said in similar situations, and
thus making an appeal, however amateurish, to lexical fact. Even the Oxford English Dictionary is valuable
mainly for the examples of usage it lists, not the definitions it tries to
distill from them.

Searches for such definitions
became alien to contemporary philosophy of language because of the three
trailblazing developments in it more than half a century ago that were mentioned
in the Introduction. The first was Quine’s article “Two
Dogmas of Empiricism,” published in 1951, which attacked appeals in philosophy to meanings.
It is widely accepted today, though often only pro forma. Phrases such as
“conceptual question,” “conceptual content,” and
“conceptual connection” still abound in the literature, with the
noun “concept” explicitly used for the meaning or use of a word.
The second development, also often accepted but just pro forma, was Wittgenstein’s
relentless argument in Philosophical
Investigations, posthumously published in 1953, that words are not used in
accordance with necessary and sufficient conditions. He gave “game”
as an example, but the argument applies also to “good,”
“right,” “reason,” “know,”
“exist,” and other denizens of the philosopher’s lexicon that,
like “game,” are everyday words, not technical terms introduced as
abbreviations of multi-clause descriptions. The third development was
Chomsky’s linguistics, first proposed in that same decade. It marked a
striking advance by insisting on the biological basis of linguistic competence
and the use in the study of language of the standard methods of scientific
research.

The kind of
definition Moore did allow in philosophy was an account of the constitution of what
is defined, a listing of its parts. It was closer to what the philosophical tradition
calls real definition, though it mentioned not genus and differentia but parts.
Such a definition can be called an analysis, in a sense reasonably similar to
that employed in chemistry. In later years analyses were offered mainly of
facts and propositions, which were taken to be nonlinguistic entities
categorially different from those chemistry analyzes. Their analysis was
intended to reveal logical form, and for this reason was called logical
analysis. It was in such analyses that analytic philosophy took root, beginning
in 1905 with Russell’s theory of definite descriptions and perhaps culminating
in Moore’s claim two decades later, in “A Defense of Common
Sense,” that he knew the proposition “This is a hand” to be
true but did not know how to analyze it. In Principia  Ethica, however, Moore’s example was the definition of a
horse and consisted of an anatomical inventory.  Moore in effect agreed with Kant that
“in matters of morality it is always real definitions that must be
sought.”[60]

Despite its inattention
to what he meant by “definition,” analytic ethics did begin and
develop in relation to Moore’s ethics. But discussions of Principia seldom ventured beyond Chapter
I, which alone is included in most anthologies. Usually ignored was the crucial
Preface, where Moore explained what he meant by “intuition” and
“self-evidence,” and thus what anyone calling him an intuitionist
and foundationalist ought to mean. Also usually ignored were the beginning of
Chapter 2, where he explained what he meant by “natural” and
“nonnatural,” thus what anyone calling his ethics nonnaturalistic
ought to mean, and Chapter V, where he explained his theory of right on the
basis of the theory offered in Chapter I.

By
“intuitions,” Moore wrote, he meant self-evident propositions, and
“nothing whatever as to the manner or origin of our cognition of
them.”[61] And a self-evident proposition, he explained,
is one that is evident but not by virtue of inference from other propositions.[62] Moore did not say what he meant by
“evident,” perhaps thinking it unnecessary. I suggested in the
previous chapter that a proposition is evident if it is or can readily be seen
to be true, either literally or metaphorically. Therefore, it may also be said
to be known, in the serious and traditional sense of “know,” which
sharply distinguished between knowledge and belief or opinion. I also noted
that the noun “evidence,” as used in a court of law or in the lab,
has a wider meaning, but the same root. Moore described as “self-evident,”
if evident at all, those propositions in ethics that state “what kind of
things ought to exist for their own sakes,” i.e., are intrinsically
good.

As to the
meaning he attached to calling something “natural,” Moore wrote he
meant that the thing is in time. Therefore, what is nonnatural is what is not
in time. This is not an idiosyncratic sense of “natural.” To be
sure, we usually think of the things in nature as being in both time and
space.  But there might be things
that unquestionably are in nature but not in space because they are not
physical. The obvious example would be irreducibly mental states, the existence
of which most psychologists at the time accepted. They would not be in space
but they would be in time. (This is why in later philosophy the paradigm of nonnatural
entities were abstract entities such as numbers.) The mere fact that a thing
falls outside the subject matter of physics does not make it nonnatural. If we define
a natural thing as one belonging in the province of the natural sciences, we
would need a noncircular account of what is meant by “natural sciences,”
as Moore was doubtless aware and for this reason did not offer such a
definition. But the fact is that the distinction between the natural and the
nonnatural did not play a central role in his book, though the phrase
“naturalistic fallacy” did. As Moore made clear in the also usually
ignored Chapter IV, which was devoted to what he called metaphysical ethics,
even ethical theories concerned with the “supersensible” committed
the fallacy. The fallacy was merely a case of confusing two things: the
property good and some other property.

In Chapter I of
Principia Ethica Moore argued that
the property good is nonnatural and simple, therefore indefinable if defining
something is listing its parts, that almost all earlier ethical theories had committed
the naturalistic fallacy of confusing it with some other property, and that
they could be refuted with what later was called the open-question argument,
which in effect encouraged the reader to pay close attention to the property
the theory confuses with the property good in order to see that they are two
properties, not one.

It may be
worth mentioning that Moore’s contemporaries in the Society of Apostles
and the Bloomsbury Circle, who included Russell, Keynes, and Virginia Woolf,
found more important, not these metaphilosophical generalities,
but the substantive view, defended in Chapter VI, that personal affection
(love, friendship) and aesthetic appreciation (contemplation of beauty, in art
and in natural objects, human and nonhuman) are the greatest goods. In contrast
with Kant’s view that a good will is the only thing that is
unconditionally good and Mill’s that pleasure alone is good, Moore held
that love and the contemplation of beauty are the Ideal.  But he
rejected Sidgwick’s contention that nothing “appears to possess
this quality of goodness out of relation to human existence, or at least to
some consciousness or feeling.”[63] This may be what
prompted Keynes to rate Moore higher than Plato.

Chapter VI
has also been ignored by analytic ethics, which has focused instead on the
preliminary discussions in Chapter I, especially the “objectivity of
value” it took Moore
to be defending there. But, as Brian Hutchinson points out in a recent book,
“Moore never even entertained doubts about the objectivity of
value.” Hutchinson acknowledges that for us this may be “a mystery difficult
to fathom,” but suggests that the mystery “is to be savored rather
than solved.”[64]

While the
central tenet of Moore’s theory of good was that good is a simple, indefinable,
and nonnatural property, the central tenet of his theory of right was that the
right action, i.e., duty, in a particular situation, is the action that
“will cause more good to exist in the Universe than any possible
alternative,”[65] that “is
the best thing to do,” what
“together with its consequences presents a greater sum of intrinsic value
than any possible alternatives,” either because it “itself has
greater intrinsic value than any alternative” or because “the
balance of intrinsic value” of its consequences does, so that “more
good or less evil will exist in the world” if it is adopted.[66] “Cause”
and “produce” are used in the broad sense of
“contribute,” since the action might be the best thing to do
because of its own goodness or because of its “organic,” not
causal, relationships. Moore has been called a utilitarian, but unlike
Bentham’s, Mill’s, or Sidgwick’s utilitarianism, Moore’s
presupposed a theory of good that places no limits on what items might be
intrinsic goods, thus allowing that some may be actions.

Moore’s
theory of right may be called cosmological. It tells us that we ought to do
what would be best, all things in the
Universe considered. It is not idiosyncratic. It accords, for example, with
Aquinas’s first principle of natural law: “Good is to be done and
promoted, and evil is to be avoided.”[67] It does
imply, as Moore noted, that justice is not to be done if the heavens should
fall – unless, he wryly added, “by the doing of justice the
Universe gains more than it loses by the falling of the heavens.”[68] As we shall
see, the ethical views of Russell and Wittgenstein, the other two founders of
analytic philosophy, were also nonnaturalistic and cosmological, perhaps
because of Moore’s influence. But, with the exception of H. A. Prichard,
a philosopher of unsurpassed acuity, and W. D. Ross, whose terminology and
distinctions are still found indispensable, later Anglo-American ethics
diverged in both respects. They are related. If ethics is naturalistic, it is
not likely to be cosmological. And if it is cosmological, it is not likely to
be naturalistic.

Naturalistic
ethics is almost certainly ethics humanized: it is about humans, not cats or
bats. So it is not cosmological. Not only does it ignore the good of the
universe, it ignores that of extraterrestrials, angels, and gods, if there are
any, and usually also that of nonhuman animals, plants, and rivers. Thus it
lacks the supreme generality and abstraction distinctive of philosophy and
alone justifying its existence alongside the other cognitive disciplines. A
cosmological ethics can be expected, of course, to have application to humans,
just as chemistry and mathematics can. But this makes none of them about humans.

Of course, we are human, thus interested in ourselves and
other humans. But this is not a reason for making ethics be about us, any more
than it is a reason for making astronomy to be about us. Indeed, as I noted in
the Introduction, there is a special, deep, and often misunderstood sense in
which humans may be cosmically central - namely, that leading to Kant’s
transcendental idealism and its recent versions, e.g., in Nelson Goodman’s
and Hilary Putnam’s works. In that special sense,
Kant, Putnam, and Goodman may be said to have humanized even astronomy. But
they did not hold that astronomy is about humans.

If humans are
natural objects, a species of animal, we can hardly expect to have special
philosophical knowledge of them, just as we can hardly expect to have special
philosophical knowledge of stars or bats. Accounts of human well-being do not
belong in philosophy, just as accounts of human anatomy and human evolution do
not. They belong, I have argued, in the empirical sciences. The argument does
not depend on a narrow use of the words “natural” and
“science.” If mental states are not reducible to physical states,
there could still be a natural science of them, in Moore’s sense of
“natural” and the traditional sense of “science,” in
which history and political geography are social sciences. In fact there was
such a science in Moore’s time - namely, introspective psychology. The
argument did depend, however, on the fact that qualification for research in
empirical matters requires special training, for example, in chemical analysis
or the use of telescopes. Nothing analogous with respect to humans occurs in
philosophy seminar rooms.

How to
achieve happiness, in the ordinary sense, recognized by both Kant and Mill, of
enjoyment or satisfaction of our needs and desires, has been a stock question
in ethics, with both Epicurus and Plato offering advice, but arguably the
invention of aspirin and contraceptives, tractors and pesticides, air
conditioning and spreadsheets, answered it more effectively. In Buddhist
ethics, sadly but realistically, suffering seems the primary concern, not
pleasure, as in Western ethics. But Indian utilitarians who hope to learn from
Americans how to reduce suffering presumably go to American colleges of
agriculture and public health, not American philosophy departments. One may
ask, indignantly, what about loftier goods, not Bentham’s but certainly
Plato’s and Kant’s, such as justice, authenticity, salvation?
Especially in India, a deeply religious country, they are often thought far
more important.  But these loftier
goods call for nonzoological considerations. Neither psychology nor
lexicography would illuminate them.

Philosophers
who avow allegiance to naturalistic ethics do write about some loftier goods,
at least about justice.  But, as we
saw in the Introduction, they are more likely to adopt a conception of ethics,
far removed from both naturalism and nonnaturalism, as a
“conceptual,” not “factual,” discipline. This allows
them to avoid both commitment to nonnatural facts and responsibility for
competence regarding natural facts. But if concepts are in nature –
presumably in human minds, brains, or languages – they too lie outside
philosophers’ competence: there is psychology (introspective or not), neuroscience,
as well as linguistics and scholarly lexicography. If they are not in nature,
Moore’s venture into the nonnatural was at least straightforward.  It was also not dated, though its critics
often call it “obsolete.” Like the 17th century way of ideas,
conceptual analysis perhaps went out of date when Kant pointed out in 1787 that
our business is not merely to analyze concepts but to extend our knowledge.[69]

Like
post-Gettier analytic epistemology, post-Moorean analytic ethics was unfazed by
misgivings such as Quine’s about meanings. It clung to conceptual, in
fact linguistic, analysis. It went through several stages. The first began in
Vienna, soon after the publication of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and with some personal involvement by him. Ethical
statements were rejected as nonsense, or at least as lacking cognitive sense.
The subtlety of Wittgenstein’s verbally similar position, however, was
missed altogether. The second was to offer a positive characterization: they
are expressions of emotion. But the rich literature already in existence on the
emotions in psychology (from James to Arnold) and phenomenology (from Meinong
to Sartre) was ignored, even though it seems to show that the emotions are not,
as the emotivists thought, self-contained subjective episodes, Humean
“impressions of reflexion,” but rather intentional states, directed
upon objects, with character dependent on that of their objects, and thus in
principle cognitive. The third stage, perhaps motivated by the experience of World
War II, which made both the outright rejection and the emotivist interpretation
of ethical statements appear jejune, was to claim that they express a special
“moral point of view,” something psychologically no less genuine
than the emotions but supposedly less subjective, and that their function is to
“guide, not goad.” In effect, this third stage consisted in denying
ethical statements a full-fledged, unqualifiedly cognitive status, yet
conceding that their function is not merely that of imperatives or
exclamations. In all three stages it was taken for granted that the job of
ethics is to describe the content of ethical concepts, or the meanings or uses
of ethical words, the “workings” of ethical discourse. We cannot
give people what really interests them, namely, an ethics that says what they
should do, Moore’s heirs held, but we can give them an ethics that says
what they mean, a “metaethics.” This was the message even of the
more recent fallback positions of “projectionist” antirealism and “supervenience”
realism, where the focus remained metaethical, not substantive. Few worried
that the very idea of telling people what they mean seems paradoxical.

2.
The Good and the World

By taking the conceptual turn analytic ethics
did not provide a genuine alternative to “ethics humanized.” The
alternative provided by Moore remained. Let us consider some of its details. I
suggested earlier that the role of the indefinability and   nonnaturalness of the property good
was relatively minor, given Moore’s explanation of what he meant by them.
Less familiar is that Moore proposed a criterion, a test, for determining
whether a thing exemplifies that property, whether it is
intrinsically good.

The criterion was “the
method of isolation.” It consisted in asking whether a world – a whole world – that contains the thing but otherwise was just
like a world that lacks it would be better.[70] The two worlds might be wholly inanimate, and even
considered “apart from any possible contemplation…by human
beings.” The focal good is that of the world, not that of the human or sentient parts of it. It is
independent even of possible human consciousness. An essential part of
Moore’s ethics was the principle of organic wholes: “the value of a
whole may be different from the sum of the values of its parts.” The
method of isolation suggests that the world itself is an organic whole.

In addition to (1) being good
intrinsically, independently of anything else, by exemplifying the property
good, a thing (object, action, state, property) may be said to be good because (2)
it has a totality of consequences that exemplify that property, or
because (3) it noncausally enhances the goodness of the organic unities
or wholes of which it is an element. Its overall goodness thus depends on the actual or
possible goodness of the world, the “Universe.”

Pleasure is a familiar example
of something that is good in sense (1), surgery of something good in sense (2),
and the presence of attractive surroundings might be an example of something
that is good in sense (3). A thing could be said to be good overall only if considered in all three
respects.  In the case of actions,
consequentialism ignores sense (1), deontological ethics ignores sense (2), and
sense (3) is ignored by both. Acknowledging all three, as Moore did, gives both
consequentialism and deontological ethics their due. In particular,
consequentialism is given its due because the goodness or badness of an action overall (in W. D. Ross’s
terminology, if not meaning, its being actually,
not just prima facie, right) would
depend, in part, on the goodness or badness of its consequences – all of them, for anything less would be
morally unacceptable.

All the consequences of an action and all
the organic wholes to which it belongs are relevant to its being good or bad overall.  The action will have consequences even
after the human species has become extinct, a fact that thoughtful
environmentalists would not find irrelevant.  An explicit provision of Moore’s
method of isolation was that the two hypothetical worlds might be supposed to
be unpopulated,
even considered “apart from any possible contemplation…by human
beings,” as Moore did when applying the method to beauty.[71]  The action belongs to
organic wholes possessing parts, both near and remote, past and future, with an
indeterminate range, and thus requiring reference to all space and time.

Moore defined duty in Principia Ethica as the action that will
cause more good to exist in the Universe than any possible alternative, but he
also described what “is good in itself or has intrinsic value” as
what “ought to exist for its own sake.”[72] In his later work Ethics he repeated that “it is always our duty
to do what will have the best possible consequences,” but denied that
this is “a mere tautology.”[73] In the preface to the second edition of Principia Moore wrote that he had used
“good” in a sense that bears an “extremely important relation
to the conceptions of ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’”[74] Clearly, what he offered was not a stipulative
definition, but neither was it a lexicographical report. This is what we should
expect.

The connection between
good and right cannot be trivially definitional, but it also cannot be just
happenstantial.  And even if good
were a natural property, right would
remain nonnatural if understood in terms of good in the manner Moore proposed.  For it would still involve reference to
all the consequences of an action and all the organic wholes of which it is a part
– to all space and time, the whole world.  But these totalities of consequences and
organic wholes, indeed the world itself, would not be natural objects in Moore’s
sense. They would not be natural because they would not be in time, even if
they consisted only of things that are in time. They may be not natural also in
a larger sense. As we shall see in the next chapter, Wittgenstein held that,
although sentences about such totalities show
something, indeed the “higher” (das Höhere), they say nothing.

The idea that the
rightness of an action involves reference to the whole world is not purely
philosophical. It is supported by scrupulous moral thought, which sets no time
or place beyond which it cares not what happens. Some Americans do care about
the floods in Bangladesh, and many people, wherever they may be, care about the
climate on earth a century from now. Authentic environmentalists do not say
that when humans become extinct, whales and prairie grass might as well. Many
believe honesty would be owed to, and expected of, even extraterrestrials,
angels, and gods, should they exist.

I mentioned earlier that Russell’s and
Wittgenstein’s views were also nonnaturalistic and cosmological, perhaps
partly because of Moore’s influence. I am interested here not in their
historical connections, but in the light they may cast on each other. In 1903,
when Principia was published,
Bertrand Russell wrote, “Man’s true freedom … [lies] in the
determination to worship only the God created by our own love of the good.”[75] In 1914, after two years of intense
discussions with Wittgenstein, he attributed to “the ethical work of
Spinoza…the very highest significance,” as “an indication of
some new way of feeling towards life and the world.”[76] This new way of feeling, Russell added, lay
outside the scope of “the scientific method.” Hegel wrote that
“to be a follower of Spinoza is the essential commencement of all
philosophy.”[77] Spinoza defined God as “substance
consisting of infinite attributes, each one of which expresses eternal and
infinite essence,” and declared that “love
towards God is the highest good which we can seek.”

The method of
isolation implies important and illuminating, but seldom noticed, similarities of
Moore’s views also to Kant’s and Wittgenstein’s.
For Kant, “the ultimate end of the pure use of our reason” was
ethical, but he resolved to “[keep] as close as possible to the
transcendental and [to set] aside entirely what might…be psychological,
i.e., empirical,”[78] since “the metaphysic of ethics
is really the pure morality, which is not grounded on any anthropology.”[79] Wittgenstein’s
position will be discussed in chapter 4.
Suffice it here to point out that, since Moore’s theory of right
action involves reference to the world as a whole (duty is “that action,
which will cause more good to exist in the Universe than any possible
alternative”), he might have agreed with Wittgenstein that in some sense ethics
concerns the “limits of the world,” not its contents, that it is “transcendental.”[80] It may be
worth noting that as a student Moore studied Kant assiduously, even attending a
course on Kant in Germany, and that he and Wittgenstein enjoyed a close relationship.

Moore and Russell were not Hegelians, but
they grew in a philosophical culture dominated by Hegel’s philosophy.
Wittgenstein had close ties to both.
Spinoza’s Substance, Hegel’s Absolute, and Moore’s,
Russell’s, and Wittgenstein’s worlds were very different, but all
five were taken to be reality as a whole.

That Russell
and Wittgenstein may have shared a nonanthropocentric view of ethics such as Moore’s should not be surprising.  The view was not entirely novel. Plato held that the
philosophic life culminated in a glimpse of the Form of the Good, which he held
to be indescribable. Aquinas placed Good in the company of Being, One, Truth,
and Beauty, the so-called transcendentalia,
which were said to range across the categories, i.e., the highest genera, thus to
lack even the status of categories of things in the world, much less the status
of things, and therefore to be indefinable per
genus et differentiam.  In philosophical
theology God had been described as a being of infinite goodness that is the
source and measure of all other goodness, earthly and unearthly. And Kant, as
if using words from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,
wrote that, unlike what he called practical anthropology, moral thought is
concerned, not with what happens, but with what ought to happen, even if it
never happens.[81]

3. The Relevance of the Property Good.

It is often asked whether a
dehumanized ethics such as Moore’s could be “relevant” to
action. The question is as ancient as Aristotle’s complaint about the
“inefficacy” of Plato’s Form of the Good. But it is
ambiguous. It may be asking (1) whether Moore’s property good could
motivate actions by itself, (2) whether one could be motivated by cognitive
states of which it is an object, by itself or as a constituent of a state of
affairs, or (3) whether there could be such cognitive states in the first
place.

The idea of being
motivated to action by Moore’s
property good indeed has doubtful coherence, but only because the idea of being
motivated by any property seems incoherent, for purely logical, not ethical or
psychological, reasons. A sentence of the form “FRx” would be
ill-formed. But it is not incoherent to ask whether one can be motivated by
cognitive states of which the property good, or a state of affairs that
includes it as constituent, is the object. Could such cognitive states be
“reason-giving”? Could they be “action-guiding”? The
question is difficult to answer because those who specialize in such matters,
namely, psychologists working on motivation, still know too little, perhaps
because of the moral and social constraints on serious experimentation with
human subjects. Hume did announce that reason is, and ought to be, the slave of
the passions, but we may wonder how he knew this. Perhaps Hume could be excused
for thinking that “passions” are discoverable through
introspection. But his own views on causation should have kept him from
thinking that their being motives, i.e., their motivating, could be discovered in such manner.

Some have denied
that there can be cognitive states of which the property good, or a state of
affairs that includes it as constituent, is the object on the grounds that the
property good could have no causal efficacy. They usually rely on causal or
quasi-causal theories of knowledge, which are accepted either because they seem
“scientific” or because of thought-experiments about what we would
or would not say in imaginary situations. Some even deny the cognitive status
of arithmetic if it is taken to be about abstract, nonspatiotemporal entities, since
they assume that causation is a spatiotemporal relation. But this is to assume
that the nature of causality is clearer than the nature of knowledge, or at
least that we understand the former better than the latter.

Many, of course, just deny that there is such a property as Moore’s
property good. Elsewhere I have suggested that it should be considered a
generic property, though one on a very high level of generality.[82] It is the genus of which Moore’s personal affection and aesthetic
appreciation, Aristotle’s eudaimonia,
Mill’s pleasure, and other goods reasonably proposed by reasonable people
would be species. This is why we cannot “see” it in the way we can
see a shade of yellow. Neither can we see color, the genus of which a shade of
yellow is a species, in that way, though color is a generic property on a much
lower level of generality than goodness.  Perhaps generic properties have no causal
powers by themselves but their species do.
A tire’s having shape helps no car roll but its being round does.
A traffic light’s being colored stops no driver but its being red
sometimes does. If Moore’s ideal goods – personal affection and
aesthetic appreciation – are species of goodness, perhaps they have causal powers.  If they do, as seems obviously to be the
case, but their genus does not, the reason may be that the latter is a generic property,
like shape or color.

Whether or
not this suggestion is right, those who deny that we can have
cognitive access to Moore’s property good on the grounds that it would
have no causal efficacy need to pay more attention to such
metaphysical details. They also owe us answers to questions like those explored by
David Armstrong[83] and Evan Fales.[84] The first is what is causation? Is it, as Armstrong and Fales argue, a
relation between universals, properties? If not, is it nonetheless grounded in
such a relation? And are properties universals in the first place, or are they
rather particulars, “tropes,” perhaps both as Moore in fact held?[85] How would the arguments against the cognitive accessibility of Moore’s
property good read in the case of each possibility? According to Fales, there
must be properties we can identify independently of their causal powers if a
vicious infinite regress is to be avoidable. His examples are the properties
characterizing the content of sense perception, though his ultimate concern is
with properties in physics.[86] But if some properties can be identified without reference to their
causal powers, so might Moore’s
property good, whether or not it has causal powers.

Needless
to say, I shall not attempt to answer these questions here, but answers,
detailed and carefully worked out, are needed. Otherwise it is difficult to
take seriously the complaint that Moore’s property good can have no causal
efficacy, that we could have no cognitive access to it, that therefore that it
would be irrelevant to action.
Appealing to “naturalism” or “the scientific point of
view,” much less to “our intuitions,” is not enough. Without such answers the
complaint might
be like the 17th century natural philosophers’ complaint that Newton
appealed to occult and immaterial gravitational forces, rather than to
intelligible and robust bumping, or like H. A. Prichard’s complaint that
Einstein’s theory of relativity was unintelligible because it relied on a
non-Euclidean geometry. How a body could “motivate” another body at
a distance was incomprehensible to those 17th century natural philosophers, and
Prichard could form no mental image of a non-Euclidean space.

Therefore,
I shall ignore the complaints about the relevance of Moore’s property good
to action.  But another question
does arise. It is both legitimate and deep. By requiring reference to the whole
world in judgments of duty, Moore could tell us nothing specific about how we ought
to act in a particular situation. This is why he virtually admitted that,
unlike his theory of good, his theory of right was profoundly skeptical.
There might be an
action we ought to do, but as a matter of empirical fact, not philosophical
theory, we could not know what it is. In view of the mind-boggling range of its
consequences and organic relationships, even probability
statements about it could not be seriously made. Radical moral skepticism thus seems
inevitable.

But Moore’s moral
skepticism does not lead to amoralism. His position is often described as “ideal
utilitarianism” because it was not mere consequentialism. An action may
be intrinsically good even if it ought not to be done, even if it did not make
the world better. In Ross’s terminology, if not meaning, it may be a
prima facie duty even if not an actual duty. This is why respect for the good
may continue to inform one’s actions.  Such respect would be akin to love,
whether practical or pathological, not to calculation.  It would have as its object the
intrinsic goodness of the action, its being a “prima facie duty,”
even if not an actual duty.  Only a
part of the world, not the whole world, can be loved.

I am not
suggesting an inference, which surely would be specious, from the intrinsic
goodness of an action to its rightness.
No claim is being made that the former makes the latter “probable,”
or that it “justifies” or is a “reason” for the
action.  In Hutcheson’s useful
terminology, if not meaning, it is at most an “exciting reason,”
not a “justifying reason.”  If in acting one is motivated and guided
only by respect for the good, yet only the intrinsic goodness of an action is
intellectually visible, then one is motivated and guided only by respect for
the intrinsic goodness of the action.
One has no knowledge of the totality of its consequences and organic
relationships, indeed one has even no genuine conception of that totality.

Thus, qua
agent, the ideal utilitarian can only be a deontologist, not a
consequentialist. We have to settle for right-minding, even if it does not
coincide with right-acting. This is why Moore’s ideal utilitarianism was
not inimical to moral common sense, which views with distaste the spirit of
calculation, of cost-benefit analysis, that ordinary consequentialism
cultivates. The ideal utilitarian has no “justifying reasons” but
plenty of “exciting reasons” for doing good particular actions,
namely, their goodness. Thus Moore’s dehumanized ethics may be seen as
the marriage – of love, not convenience – of the two great ways of
moral thinking: the utilitarian and the deontological.

Chapter Four: SAYING AND SHOWING THE GOOD

1. The
distinction explained.

In Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Wittgenstein made the case for a dehumanized ethics more briefly but also more
powerfully than Moore had done fifteen years earlier.  He knew Moore well.  And Principia Ethica had been published nine years
before he met him. But he did not owe his views about ethics to Moore, even if they
influenced him in some respects. They involved tying the notions of
ethics to the notion of the world as a whole. As we saw in the previous
chapter, this had been done also by G. E. Moore, key features of whose ethics
were the notions of worlds “considered in isolation” and of the
totality of the consequences of an action. But
Wittgenstein’s ethics was largely based on his views in logic, in
particular, that the world is the totality of facts (Tractatus 1.1), that “fact”
is a formal concept (4.1272), that “world” therefore is also a formal
concept, that the metaphysical subject or philosophical self does not exist (5.633), that therefore  there is no philosophical distinction to
be made between me or my life and the world and ethical statements can only be
about the world, and that like all sentences employing a formal concept they say
nothing even if they show much.

Wittgenstein’s first stay at
Cambridge was in 1912-14.  Moore’s
ethics was a central topic of discussion in Britain at the time, not only among
philosophers but intellectuals generally, especially in the Bloomsbury Circle.  Both Moore and Wittgenstein were members
of the Society of Apostles, together with Russell, Whitehead, and Keynes.  Wittgenstein had read Principia Ethica. In a 1912 letter to
Russell, he wrote that he hadn’t liked book, because Moore repeated
“himself dozens of times.”[87]
Wittgenstein also attended Moore’s lectures. They camped together in
Norway, Wittgenstein dictating philosophical notes to Moore. Moore
might well have agreed with Wittgenstein that by requiring reference to the
world as a whole ethics is about “the limits of the world,” not its
human inhabitants. It would be surprising if they did not notice the similarity
of their views on this deepest level, despite their many differences,
philosophical and personal.

At a meeting of the Apostles in 1912 Wittgenstein heard Moore’s
paper “Is Conversion Possible?” which Moore had first read to the
Apostles in 1900 while working on Principia.
That Moore read the paper again suggests he had not abandoned its ideas. Moral
conversion, he said in it, “is not unlike religious conversion,”
even though it “is not necessarily connected with any religious
ideas.” It is “both a great good in itself and it secures all other
goods which depend on one’s own mind alone….You see ‘life
steadily and whole’ and can feel neither desire nor fear of what you see
to be bad in it.”[88]

At about the same time, Wittgenstein wrote in his Notebooks: “To believe in a God
means to understand the question about the meaning of life…to see that
the facts of the world are not the end of the matter…to see that life has
a meaning,”[89] and later, in the Tractatus: “The sense [Sinn] of the world must lie outside the
world” (6.41). The sense (or meaning) of the world is not something in the world because it is the sense of
the whole world. He
went on to remark that “It is not how things are in the world that is
mystical, but that it exists” (6.44).

Indeed, even if we refrain from calling the world mystical, we should
acknowledge that it is mysterious. (It was one of the three spurious objects of
knowledge Kant thought required treatment in the transcendental dialectic, the
other two being the Self and God.)
The reason the world is mysterious is logical, not mawkish or cabalistic. It is
not that the world is too big or too unlike what we take it to be. Not its size
or content, but its logical/ontological category, or rather its failing to fall
in any category, is what makes it mysterious. We may say that the world is everything, but this would only
acknowledge its peculiarity. For to speak of everything is to employ the predicate “is a thing” or
“is a fact,” depending on whether we think the world is the
totality of things or of facts. Both predicates, Wittgenstein held, express
only formal concepts, corresponding to formal or internal properties, and thus
the sentences in which they occur say
nothing, though they show much. This
is why Wittgenstein held that genuine propositions about it, and thus ethical
propositions as he understood them, are impossible.

Contrary to received opinion, neither this distinction
between saying and showing nor the picture theory of meaning and thought on
which it is based is idiosyncratic or obscure.  The distinction has a straightforward,
noncontroversial application even to ordinary pictures, say, paintings and
photographs, indeed to representations generally. And the picture theory is
merely a subtler version of the traditional theory of meaning and thought,
which was unabashedly representational, “pictorial”: thought
involves “ideas,” often explicitly understood as mental images or
pictures, and the meaning of an expression is what it stands for.

The distinction between what can be said and
what can only be shown provided a welcome alternative to the stark choice
between realism and antirealism, in logic, metaphysics, ethics, even the
philosophy of religion. Wittgenstein thought it concerned
“the cardinal problem of philosophy.”  Many of his readers find it obscurantist.  Tough-minded philosophers ask, “What are
those things that can only be shown?
“How can there be such things?”  But these questions miss the point of the distinction, namely, to
provide an alternative to both realism and antirealism.  What only shows itself is not a part of
reality, like Secretariat or oxygen. But neither is it unreal, like
Pegasus or phlogiston. This is why in the
Introduction I called Wittgenstein’s position semirealism, distinguishing
it from both standard realism and standard antirealism.

The distinction becomes less puzzling when stated as the distinction,
familiar to kindergarteners as well as film producers, between telling and
showing – “show and tell.”  Kindergarteners and film producers might
or might not agree that some things can only be shown, but they would agree
unanimously that showing is often much more effective than telling and
sometimes alone possible. Of course, they would not have Wittgenstein in mind.
But Wittgenstein’s picture theory of meaning does suggest a reasonably
clear account of what it is to be something that can be told or said, namely,
to be capable of being pictured, represented, whether in an ordinary picture
such as a painting or photograph, or in a “logical picture” such as
a sentence, and of what it is to be something that cannot be told or said but
could be shown, namely, to be capable of  being shown in a picture but incapable of
being pictured. That there are “things” of the latter sort should
be noncontroversial.

In a painting, much is shown that is
not and cannot be pictured by the painting or any part of it.  For example, the painting may represent
a tree next to a barn, each represented by a part of the painting, and the
spatial relation between the parts of the painting that represent the tree and
the barn would represent their relation of being next to each other. But
nothing in the painting represents that relation’s being a relation, nothing “says” that their being next
to each other is a relation (rather than, say, a shape or color).  Yet the painting shows this, indeed must show it in order to represent what it does
represent.  What it shows cannot be
denied as one might deny, for example, that the painting is a portrait of
Churchill.  The absence from the painting of what it only shows would not be like
Churchill’s absence.  Of
course, paintings do not consist of words, and sentences are only “logical”
pictures.  But like all pictures,
physical or mental, paintings are logical pictures, though not all logical
pictures are paintings.

The picture theory of meaning was offered
in the Tractatus first as an account
of thought in general: “A logical picture of facts is a thought [Gedanke]” (3).  Only then did Wittgenstein also offer it
as an account of sentential meaning:
“In a proposition (Satz)
a thought finds an expression that can be perceived by the senses” (3.1).
“I call the sign with which we express a thought a propositional sign”
(3.12).

The theory was in accord with the
received, traditional doctrine that thinking consists in operating with
“ideas,” “mental representations,” perhaps even
“mental images.” It implied, as that doctrine also did, the no less
traditional doctrine that the truth of a judgment consists in correspondence to
reality, to be established, if possible, by comparison.  But Wittgenstein applied these
traditional doctrines to language.
He did so by proposing an unusual but not implausible conception of
declarative sentences as logical pictures. He thus made the distinction between
thinking and speaking seem insignificant. It was a “linguistic turn.”

To think of something, traditional
philosophy of mind held, is to represent it in the mind. Notoriously, this was
most plausible and least unclear in the case of the representations called
mental images. But to speak of something, Wittgenstein held, is also to
represent it in a picture, though the picture would not be a painting or a
photograph, or even a mental image. It would be a logical picture – a
“propositional sign,” a sentence. Wittgenstein in effect strikingly
broadened the traditional conception of a picture.

A
sentence (“propositional sign”) is a logical picture because it
“depicts” what it says by sharing with it logical form, rather
than, say, shape or color, as paintings, photographs, and perhaps mental images
do. But Wittgenstein’s view of a sentence was also strikingly broad, it
was not the grammarian’s: “The essence of a propositional sign is
very clearly seen if we imagine one composed of spatial objects (such as
tables, chairs, and books) instead of written signs” (3.1431). It would
be unwieldy but possible to use tables, chairs, and books instead of words to
refer to objects, and to use configurations of tables, chairs, and books
instead of sentences to make statements. A sentence could also be composed of
mental objects. In a letter to Russell, Wittgenstein wrote that a thought
consists of “psychic constituents that have the same sort of relation to
reality as words,” though he added: “What those constituents are I
don’t know”[90] This
is why Wittgenstein’s often used “thought” [Gedanke] and “proposition” [Satz] interchangeably.  The linguistic turn that was implied by
his assertion “The limits of my
language mean the limits of my world,” therefore, must not be
confused with the linguistic turn that became fashionable later, even though it
was initiated by the Tractatus. If
our cognitive access to reality consists in “representing” it, but
the representations need not be more than logical, then whether the access is
psychological or linguistic becomes irrelevant. This was the linguistic turn that
Wittgenstein took. Descartes, Locke, and Kant accepted the first part of the
antecedent of this conditional, but the second part did not even occur to them.
Had it done so, they might have accepted both, and then the history of modern
philosophy would have been dramatically different.

Wittgenstein’s distinction between
“saying” and “showing” may be initially mystifying, but
one of its applications is familiar even to beginning students of logic. That a
statement is logically true, a tautology, i.e., that its negation is a
contradiction, often “shows” itself and is immediately
“seen” in its logical form, without reference to what the statement
is about. But that a statement is true in some other way, presumably
empirically, does not show itself, its truth cannot be just seen in its form
– we must also know what it is about, what it “says,” by
attending to what the descriptive expressions in it stand for.

Although in accord with the traditional
views of thought as representation and truth as correspondence,
Wittgenstein’s picture theory of meaning and his distinction between
saying and showing were a major, far-reaching revision of those views.  He accepted them only on the level of
atomic sentences, where indeed alone they are plausible.  But this is an extraordinarily primitive
level.  Sentences on the highest
levels, like those of logic and ethics, allow only showing, not saying, he
held. Even ordinary molecular and general sentences fail to be pictures in
Wittgenstein’s or indeed any view.
A sentence of the form “If p then q” is not itself a
picture, even if p and q are. Not surprisingly, in his later work Wittgenstein
abandoned the picture theory of meaning and the correspondence theory of
truth.  They are not defective, but their
applicability is limited.  This is
true, however, also of the traditional theory of thought and meaning: no
physical or mental representation can be made of what a sentence of the form
“If p then q” says, let alone the sentences of logic and ethics

We can now understand the Vienna
positivists’ passionate opposition to what can only be shown, especially
the ethical. No picture of any kind – physical, mental, or merely logical
– can be made of it.  No
painting can literally depict the goodness of a person or the rightness of an
action. It follows that what can only be shown is not observable, since
presumably anything observable can, at least in principle, be pictured,
physically or mentally, and therefore also logically.  The traditional empiricists denied that
there are unobservable entities – we cannot have “ideas” of
them, since ideas are copies of sensory impressions.  The 20th century logical empiricists
denied that there are things that only show themselves, and in particular that
there are “ethical objects.” Their most familiar claims about
ethics did appear to coincide with Wittgenstein’s. If propositions are
pictures, then there can be no propositions of ethics. The ethical cannot be
said.  But Wittgenstein held that it
can be shown.   He avoided
unbridled realism in ethics sufficiently to inspire logical positivism, yet he
also avoided unbridled antirealism sufficiently to protect the ethical.

Wittgenstein used “shown”
(zeigt), of course, as a
metaphor.  He resorted occasionally
to other terms, as in Tractatus 4.121:
“Propositions cannot represent [kann
nicht darstellen] logical form: it is mirrored [spiegelt sich] in them….They display it [Er weist sie auf].”  And “say” (sagen), even if not used metaphorically,
is sufficiently vague in everyday language, German as well as English, to allow
for a variety of uses, as does also the closely related in meaning
“tell.”  A sentence says
or tells us something, but so do a list of names, a thermometer, and a human face.
Rudolf Carnap chided Wittgenstein for writing a whole book and then concluding
that what he had said in it could not be said. But a simple way of avoiding the
appearance of paradox would be to introduce, in place of “say,” the
two verbs “say1” and “say2,”
explaining that what is said1 is what according to
Wittgenstein is said, and what is said2  is what according to him is only
shown.  For example, the sentence
“This page is white” says1 that this page is white but
says2 that the page is an individual object.  Then Wittgenstein’s otherwise
puzzling conclusion in the Tractatus
would be that what he had said2 in the book could not have been said1.  The difference would be explained
sufficiently as the difference between what can be pictured and what cannot.  There can be a picture of what the
sentence “This page is white” says1, perhaps a photograph
of it, but there can be no picture of what “This page is an object”
says2.

2. Logic and the World

In the Tractatus, as the
title makes explicit, Wittgenstein was mainly
concerned with logic.  No
explanation is needed, therefore, of the brevity of his remarks about
ethics.  Even in metaphysics, his
focus was on its most abstract level, that of logical form.  Not only would nothing be perceived or
thought in a world without logical form, nothing would be a world without
it.  For nothing that violated or
could not be captured by logic could be a world.  Even a
world consisting solely of immaterial or nonspatiotemporal objects must conform
to logic.  Wittgenstein’s
logical and metaphysical views would have remained unchanged if he had supposed
that his simple objects were angels.
Unlike the logical antirealist, he did not deny that there is logical
form in the world. Rather, he drew attention to the radical difference between
logical form and the things that exhibit it by pointing out that, unlike them,
it cannot be pictured, though it can be shown: “There are, indeed, things
that cannot be put into words.  They
make themselves manifest.  They are what is mystical”
(6.522).

If we take for granted that truth is correspondence to fact, as
Wittgenstein did, then we must take for granted also that there is something in
the world to which the logical form of a true sentence corresponds, viz. the
logical form of the fact it asserts.
Otherwise, there would not be a fit sufficiently specific and definite for
truth. Yet the logical form of the fact is quite unlike the things the sentence
is about, viz. the constituents of the fact. It is invisible, as is the logical
form of the sentence, even if those things as well the sentence and its grammatical
form are visible. But it is also quite unlike the usual examples of what is invisible.  The subject-predicate form would be
present also in the putative facts asserted by the theological sentence
“God is wise” and the mathematical sentence “3 is an even
number,” and while God and numbers are invisible there is an obvious
difference between the reason they are invisible and the reason logical form is
invisible. The page and color that the sentence “This page is
white” is about are visible, and so is its surface grammar, but its
logical form is not. In the case of “3 is an even number,” both the
logical form of the sentence and what the sentence is about are invisible.

In the Introduction I called Wittgenstein’s
position logical semirealism in order to distinguish it from both logical
realism, which cheerfully allows for such statements as “This page is an
individual object,” and logical antirealism, which no less cheerfully
dismisses them.  It is a
sophisticated view.  It should not
be confused with mere denials of reality.
Its aim is not to fight superstitions or fairy tales.  Denying that some things can be said is
not like denying that there is such a horse as Pegasus or such a substance as
phlogiston.  What is denied is that they
are like Secretariat or oxygen. This is not to assert that they are like
Pegasus or phlogiston. It is to assert that they are different from all four.

Wittgenstein applied his semirealism chiefly
to what he called “logical objects.” But it also had important
implications for ethics – for what might be called “ethical
objects.”  Indeed, shortly
after completing the Tractatus, he
wrote that the point, the meaning, of the book was “an ethical one.”[91] In
this chapter I am mainly concerned with this ethical “point.” But to
understand it, we must pay some attention to the logical/ontological views on
which it rests, though much more will be said about them in chapters 6 and 7.

The point of the Tractatus may have been ethical, but Wittgenstein declared that its
“fundamental idea” was that the 'logical constants” (the sentential connectives like “not,”
“and,” “or,” “if...then”) and the
quantifiers (“all,” “some”) stand for nothing in
the world.[92] More
obviously relevant to ethics was that both “object”
(“thing”) and “fact” were included in
Wittgenstein’s list of formal concepts (4.1272).  It follows that the distinction between
saying and showing applies also to the concept “world,” since the
world is presumably either the totality of things or the totality of
facts.  It is “nonsensical”
to speak of all facts or of all objects.  We cannot speak of
“totalities” determined by properties that can only be shown, i.e.,
formal properties.  Therefore, we
also cannot speak of the world.

The totality of facts is the totality
determined by the one-place predicate “is a fact,” and the totality
of objects is the totality determined by the one-place predicate “is an
object.” But being a fact and being an object are formal properties,
which can only be shown. “Object,” “complex,”
“fact,” “function,” “number” signify formal
concepts, represented in  logical
notation by variables, for example, the pseudo-concept object by the variable
“x” (4.1272). The properties they appear to stand for are formal,
internal, such that it is unthinkable that what they are attributed to should
not possess them (4.123). For this reason it would be just as nonsensical to
assert that something has a formal property as to deny it (4.124).

The statement “This page is white,”
for example, does say something.  What it says can be pictured literally,
in a painting or a photograph. But the putative statement “This page is
an (individual) object” does not, for it presupposes what it purports
to say, its having sense, in particular the use of “this page” as
its subject, depends on its being true.[93]  Yet it is not gibberish.

The motivation behind the two most
common reactions to Wittgenstein’s distinction between saying and showing
was plain, though often tacit, empiricism. The first holds that what only shows
itself is not anything at all, since neither logical nor ethical objects can be
observed.  Prima facie, there is
little to be said in favor of this view.
Surely, what only shows itself, in logic or in ethics, is not like
Pegasus or phlogiston.  Its claims
to a status in reality would remain even if they could not be fully met. The
second, less straightforward, reaction is to hold that what only shows itself
cannot be said for reasons of surface grammar.  It resembles the common interpretation
of Frege’s claim that the concept horse
is not a concept: “is a horse” is a grammatical predicate, not
subject. For example, Warren Goldfarb writes, “All we are doing [in
speaking of logical form] is noting that names have to be put together in one
way or another in order to make sentences.”[94] Of course, Wittgenstein was
“noting” this, but it was not all that he was doing. He was also
trying to explain why we put names together, why we need sentences rather than
just names.

Even when something can be said with
a sentence, why could it not be said with a list of names? This would be an
awkward way of saying something, but why is it not a genuine way? Lists of
names sometimes do seem to say, “tell,” something, e.g., in
inventories. Wittgenstein’s answer was that we need sentences, not just
names, because the world is the totality of facts, not of things. It was a
metaphysical, not grammatical, answer. A world in which Jack is the father of
Jim and a world in which Jim is the father of Jack may contain the same things
and thus the same inventory, but they are different worlds.  And why is it that only some ways of
putting words together say anything, i.e., count as well-formed sentences?  Wittgenstein’s answer was that the
formal properties of what names stand for, i. e, objects, allow only some
configurations of objects into states of affairs and thus only some logical
pictures.

Perhaps there are better answers to
these questions, but answers are needed and few other than Wittgenstein’s
have been given. The etymology of the word “reality” deserves
attention by both realists and antirealists. The root of “reality”
is res, the Latin for
“thing,” and no argument is needed that “logical things”
such as negation and “ethical things” such as goodness are not
things like Secretariat or oxygen. To this extent logical and moral realism are
unacceptable.  But also no argument
should be needed that they are not things like Pegasus or phlogiston. To this
extent logical and moral antirealism are unacceptable.

3.
The World and the Good.

Duty, Moore held, is
the action that “will cause more good to exist in the Universe than any
possible alternative.”[95] However, as we noted in the
previous chapter, a sophisticated but sensible moral realism like Moore’s
would allows that the action itself might be intrinsically good (prima facie right, in W. D.
Ross’s terminology). This would be a sufficient reason for doing it even
if we do not know what its consequences would be.  Doing justice would be bad
(“wrong”) if the heavens should fall, though presumably it would
remain intrinsically good.  To say
that justice is to be done even if the heavens should fall would be moral
posturing, not moral thinking.  As
Kant noted, Frederick the Great’s committing suicide, if captured by the
enemy, in order to protect his country from extortion, might be good
(“right”), even if suicide is bad (“wrong”) in
itself.

Nevertheless, such moral realism does remain beholden to the future.  For it still enjoins us to take into
account all the consequences of an
action, since genuinely moral thought sets no date and no place beyond which
what happens would not “matter.”  Today’s small children would be
retiring more than half-a-century from now, but if we can we ought to help now to
make their retirement possible.  The
disastrous floods
in Bangladesh occur
thousands of miles from Missouri,
but Missourians who can ought to provide aid. The moral realism just
described, however, inherits the major defects of ordinary
consequentialism.

The first is epistemological: we cannot know what we ought to do because
we cannot know all the consequences of our actions; we cannot even make serious
probability judgments about such an indefinite, possibly infinite,
totality.  The problem is familiar, it
was discussed at length by Sidgwick. It arises because of commonsense
considerations, not philosophical theories.  It renders literal cognitivism questionable.  I have
discussed it in detail elsewhere.[96]  The second major defect of
ordinary consequentialism is metaphysical and not familiar: with respect to
such a totality, realism, not just
literal cognitivism, is questionable.
Wittgenstein was the first to see this.

Wittgenstein described the concerns
of ethics and religion as “the higher” (das
Höhere).  But his reason was logical,
nor ethical or religious: they are about the limits of the world and thus
exceed the limits of what is sayable. A logical category, such as object or fact, might not seem to be something “higher” in the
way the concerns of ethics and religion do, but it does enjoy highest
generality.

Whether the world is the totality of facts or of objects,
“world” is a formal concept. But that something falls under a
formal concept cannot be said. According to Wittgenstein, ethical statements
involve putative reference to the world. Therefore, they attempt to say what
cannot be said. They say nothing,
even if they show much. The
controversy between moral realism and moral antirealism thus becomes a special
case of the controversy between metaphysical realism and metaphysical
antirealism.  If ethics involves
putative statements
employing formal concepts about the totality of objects or of facts, that is,
about the world, as both Moore and Wittgenstein believed, then
according to Wittgenstein, though not Moore, both moral realism and moral
antirealism must be rejected.

Contemporary antirealism in ethics usually begins by
rejecting Moore’s view that goodness is a nonnatural property.  But, as I pointed out in the previous
chapter, even if goodness were a natural property, rightness might still be
nonnatural.  For, as understood by
Moore it involves reference to all the consequences of an action and all the
organic wholes to which it belongs.  If Wittgenstein is right, such reference would
be impossible.  There could be no
genuine statements about such a totality, just as there could be no genuine
statements be about the totalities of objects and of facts. Thus, in a
different though no less important sense of the word, those totalities could be
said to be nonnatural.  Yet
rightness, natural or nonnatural, is the raison
d’être of ethics as a discipline insofar as it is about moral
appraisal of action.

In the Tractatus Wittgenstein
wrote, “[I]t is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics”
(6.42).  But what he meant was not
at all what his positivist successors thought – indeed, it was just the
opposite.  He went on to explain:
“Propositions can express nothing that is higher….Ethics cannot be
put into words.  Ethics is
transcendental” (6.42-6.421).
So was also logic: “Logic is not a body of doctrine, but a
mirror-image of the world.  Logic is
transcendental” (6.13).
Wittgenstein took this to follow from the very nature of logic:
“The propositions of logic describe the scaffolding of the world, or
rather they represent it. They have no ‘subject-matter’”
(6.124).  Propositions cannot
represent logical form. But they show it. Wittgenstein was not a realist,
whether in logic or in ethics, but neither was he an antirealist.  He was a semirealist.

The difference between goodness or rightness and oxygen or yellow color
that moral antirealism insists on, even if grossly misunderstands, has been
amply demonstrated in its long history. It is also felt by anyone who asks the
familiar and seductive but logically puzzling question, “Why should I do
what I ought to do?”  Few
agree with moral realism that goodness or rightness is at all like oxygen or
yellow.  Yet, that the goodness and rightness
are like Pegasus and phlogiston is also seldom taken seriously, except by enfants terrible and philosophes subtile. Few are unable to
understand the difference between what ought to be the case and what is the
case.  Few think of it as resembling
the difference between phlogiston and oxygen.

Moral antirealists are seldom sensitive to the distinctions that led
Wittgenstein to logical and then to moral semirealism.  In this respect they differ radically
from the philosophical roots they share with him in Kant’s transcendental
idealism. Kant proposed a unified account of the “empirically real”
and the “transcendentally ideal,” and he vigorously defended the
need for acknowledging both. Nothing comparable in scope or depth can be found
in standard moral antirealism. Perhaps the reason is the tacit prejudice that
the distinction between reality and nonreality does not admit of
refinement.  Meinong called it prejudice
in favor of the actual.  By “the
actual” he meant, as Moore did, what is in time.

Early in the twentieth century, philosophers on both sides of the English
channel, including Moore, Russell, Meinong and Husserl, routinely distinguished
between being and existence, meaning by the latter what Meinong meant by
” actuality,” and unhesitatingly asserting, for example, that
relations and numbers have being, but denying that they exist, that they are in
time.  What exists, they held, is in
time.  What has being but is not in
time does not exist, though some said that it “subsists.”  Indeed, usually we speak of the
existence of spatiotemporal items, not of items such as relations or
numbers.  But, unless we are
philosophers, we do not say that relations or numbers do not exist, e.g., that there is no such relation as fatherhood or
such a number as 5.  We usually just
ignore the issue and say nothing.
Wittgenstein wrote the Tractatus
when the distinction between being and existence was familiar, and undoubtedly
he was sensitive to the reasons for making it. It is not the same as his
distinction between what can be said and what can only be shown, but resembles
it in motivation. Contemporary antirealists ignore both distinctions, and
assume that being, existence, reality, and actuality are the same, all
expressed by the particular (“existential”) quantifier. Wittgenstein
in effect showed that this assumption is not so much wrong as primitive. He was
particularly sensitive to its failure to fit the special status of “the
logical” and “the ethical.” As Kant pointed out, ethics is
concerned not with what does happen,
but with what ought to happen, even
if the latter has never happened and will never happen. Wittgenstein made
essentially the same point by saying that the ethical is not in the world. It certainly
is not the sort of thing that can be observed and pictured in ordinary physical
or mental pictures. But, going beyond anything that Kant or anyone else had
held, Wittgenstein concluded that it cannot be pictured even in logical
pictures, that it cannot be said:
“Ethics cannot be put into words.” If this conclusion was mystical,
its mysticism was grounded in logic.

In Tractatus
5.62 Wittgenstein wrote, “what the solipsist means is quite correct; only
it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest.” The sentence was preceded
by “The world and life are one” (5.621) and that ’I am my
world” (5.63), and was followed by “There is no such thing as the
subject that thinks or entertains Ideas.” (5.631). In Part Three I shall
have much to say about these seemingly alarming statements. Suffice it here to
observe that Hume and Sartre also denied that there is what Wittgenstein called
“the subject that thinks or entertains Ideas.”  If they are right, then the world and
life may indeed be said to be one.  And
if by “value” is meant the sense or meaning of life, value would
not be in the world (6.41), because the sense of the world would not be the
sense of any “subject’s” life. Of course, Wittgenstein did
not deny that there were human beings, whose lives may be said to have a
sense.  The Tractatus was not about them.  It was about the world and its
logic.  Clearly, few if any of the
usual specific or informative statements can be made about ethical issues if
the world is so understood, nor can useful examples can be given.  No one should be surprised by the
obscurity of Wittgenstein’s ethics. It could not have been clear.

Wittgenstein reached the strikingly Spinozistic
conclusion that to ask about value and thus the sense of the world requires
“view[ing] the world sub specie aeterni,” as well as
“feeling” it as a limited whole,” which, he added, is
something “mystical” (6.45).
Ethics does ask what makes life good, worth living, but “the good
life is the world seen sub specie
aeternitatis”[97] This
is why Wittgenstein also wrote: “If the good or bad exercise of the will
does alter the world, it can alter only the limits of the world, not the facts
– not what can be expressed by means of language. In short the effect
must be that it becomes an altogether different world. It must, so to speak,
wax and wane as a whole…” (6.43).

Wittgenstein’s
point was not that an action, an “exercise of the will,” does not
alter the world, which of course it does.
Nor was it that actions are ethically irrelevant. His point was that the value, the goodness or rightness, of an
action does not consist in its producing some particular event or events in the world, as standard
consequentialism holds; rather, it consists in the world itself becoming
different – as a whole, at its limits.  It is in this sense that “How things are in the world is a matter
of complete indifference for what is higher…” (6.432).  Realization of value, whether goodness or
rightness, consists, not in the occurrence in the world of some particular
event, but in the world itself becoming different, at its limits, in its waxing
and waning as a whole (6.43).
However, all this can only be shown.  There cannot be ethical
propositions.  The reason is not
that, as Wittgenstein’s early followers thought, there is nothing for
such propositions to be about. The reason is that what they purport to say
cannot be said, though it can  be shown
(6.42).

“The
sense [Sinn] of the world must lie
outside the world… For all that happens and is the case is
accidental” (6.41).” The sense of
the world is not something in the
world, because it is the sense of the whole
world. This is why it may be said to “lie outside the world,” at
its “limits.” Wittgenstein’s assertion that value is not
anything that happens because it is not accidental need not mean more than what
in the Foundations of the Metaphysics of
Morals Kant called the third fundamental proposition of morality: duty is
the necessity of acting from respect for the law.  Duty is what ought to happen, “must”
happen. What happens is already in the world, what ought to happen is not yet,
or perhaps ever.

In the Notebooks, Wittgenstein had written:
“To believe in a God means to understand the question about the meaning
of life… to see that life has a meaning.”[98]  The sense or meaning of life is the
ultimate value.  It constitutes
“[t]he solution of the riddle of life,” but that solution
“lies outside space and time” (6.4312). It is not an item in the world because it is the
sense of the whole world. What Wittgenstein called the riddle of life presumably concerns the
sense or meaning of life. This, indeed, was a central topic in traditional
ethics.  To ask about ultimate value
is to ask about the meaning of life, what makes life worth living.  (Plato’s
Republic began with Cephalus’s
claiming that
what makes life worth living is not
pleasure, as commonly thought, but justice.)  One who asks about the meaning of
one’s life sometimes phrases the question as asking about “the
sense of it all.”  Life can
hardly be fully meaningful in a meaningless world.  Indeed, that the world exists at all,
that there is something rather than nothing, has been for some the ultimate
object of joy or sorrow, and certainly of wonder.

Much later, in 1929, Wittgenstein tried to explain:
“What is good is also divine.
Queer as it sounds, that sums up my ethics.  Only something supernatural can express
the Supernatural.”[99]  This “supernatural” was as
central to Wittgenstein’s ethics as the “supersensible” was
to Kant’s.  Elsewhere, also in
1929, he wrote, “[Attributions of] absolute value are nonsensical but
their nonsensicality [is] their very essence…  [A]ll I wanted to do with [those
attributions] was to go beyond the world and that is to say beyond significant
language.”[100]  Wittgenstein meant, however, not that
such attributions would be gibberish, but that they would not be logical pictures,
in the sense required by his theory of meaning.

Wittgenstein’s remarks about
ethics left most of his readers bewildered, and his claim that there is
something “mystical,” which cannot be expressed, was unpalatable to
his heirs in analytic philosophy. But that there is what he called “the
mystical” is also a consequence of his fundamental views about logic, and
these cannot be easily rejected. The existence of the (“actual”)
world, indeed of something, may not
be mystical, but it is a basic presupposition of logic. And how to express
existence (with a predicate or just the existential quantifier?) has remained
deeply controversial since Anselm proposed his ontological argument for the
existence of God. Noteworthy signposts in the ongoing discussion have been
Kant’s denial that existence is a “real predicate,” Meinong’s
theory of objects, Russell’s vehement attack on it, and present-day
quandaries about what it is for one world to be “actual” and the
rest just “possible.” Children find the difference between what
exists and what does not, say, between their real and imaginary playmates,
simple and easy to comprehend, but philosophers do not.

Part Two: METAPHYSICS HUMANIZED

It is solely
from the human

standpoint
that we can speak of

space,
of extended things
(Kant)

I have argued that insofar as they
are acceptable, epistemology is about certain nonformal inferences and ethics
is about the world. The case of metaphysics, however, is different and much
more complex.

In the Introduction I suggested that
while anthropocentrism in epistemology and ethics is natural and understandable
but indefensible, in metaphysics it is unnatural and almost incomprehensible
but at least as defensible as Kant’s transcendental idealism and
contemporary antirealism. In metaphysics it is due not to humans’ natural
interest in themselves, as it is in epistemology and ethics, but to purely
philosophical considerations. The present Part is devoted to making these
considerations clear.  In effect, it
explains and defends antirealism, the humanization of metaphysics. For there
can be no justification for just rejecting it and returning to pre-Kantian metaphysics.
Yet, antirealism seems to lead, however tacitly, to the absurdity of human
creationism. The explanation of how antirealism may avoid anthropocentrism, and
thus how antirealist metaphysics may be dehumanized, will be our task in Part
Three.

The
subject matter of metaphysics is traditionally described as the world or
reality. According to the Oxford English
Dictionary, “world” usually signifies “The material
universe; the cosmos,” or just a planet, perhaps Earth, but it applies also
to “Any state or realm of existence.” In the latter sense it is a
synonym of “reality,” in the OED sense of “the aggregate of real things or
existences.”  Reality may
include, in addition to the spatiotemporal world, abstract, nonspatiotemporal
entities such as Platonic universals and numbers, as well as God, who by being its
creator is not in the spatiotemporal world. In discussions of our topic,
however, the terms “world” and “reality” are usually interchangeable.

The
term “realism” applies to the metaphysical view that the world is
independent of our faculties of cognition, in the contemporary sense in
which cognition includes perceiving and understanding (conceptualizing) as well
as describing (by writing or speaking).  I have used the term
“antirealism” for the opposite view.  Its versions are as diverse as
Berkeley’s “immaterialism,” Kant’s “transcendental
idealism,” Hegel’s “absolute idealism,” and recent positions such as Hilary Putnam’s
“internal realism,” Michael Dummett’s
“antirealism,” and “Nelson Goodman’s
“irrealism.” Metaphysical realism and antirealism are usually
understood as concerned with all reality, and therefore should be distinguished
from realism and antirealism regarding just an alleged part of it, e.g., moral
values (moral realism/antirealism), abstract entities (Platonic
realism/antirealism), the theoretical entities of physics (scientific
realism/antirealism), and so on.

My
concern in this and the next Part is with metaphysical realism and antirealism.
But, as we saw in the Introduction, even within them, important distinctions
are needed. One can be a realist regarding “things” but an
antirealist regarding “facts” and thus regarding the
“world,” if the world is the totality of facts, not of things. One can
be a realist regarding the spatiotemporal/physical and causal structure of the
world but antirealist regarding its logical structure: One may believe that
there are physical objects but deny that there are logical objects. Moreover,
asserting and denying the reality of an item are not the only options. Bertrand
Russell held that some things do not exist but subsist, and Wittgenstein, as we
saw in the previous chapter, that some things cannot be said but show
themselves.

Chapter
Five: THE ROLE OF LANGUAGE IN COGNITION

1.
The empirical and the a priori question.

The most readily understood and least
controversial version of metaphysical antirealism today is linguistic
antirealism. It has dominated contemporary philosophy. Its immediate appeal rests
on the plausible belief that cognition, or at least thought, is impossible
without language. The present chapter will be devoted to linguistic antirealism
insofar as it rests on this belief. The next two chapters will consider the
more technical considerations that may lead to it.

Unlike Kant’s transcendental idealism,
which focused on the role of our faculties of sensibility and understanding in
shaping cognition and thus the world as cognized, linguistic antirealism
focuses on the role of our language faculty, or “organ” as Steven
Pinker has called it. Contemporary antirealists thus avoid Kant’s
questionable appeal to inhabitants of consciousness such as concepts, let alone
sensations and ideas. For, as David Armstrong has remarked, “Concepts
[understood as mental items] are a more mysterious sort of entity than
linguistic expressions.”[101]
The language faculty may in some sense be “mental,” but its role in
cognition can be understood and defended, as indeed it was by Wittgenstein,
Ryle, Austin, and Strawson, without appeal to any manifestations of its work in
consciousness.  Linguistic
antirealism thus seems to avoid the absurd implication that the world is an
inhabitant of one or several humans’ consciousness. Moreover, even if the
human mental faculties are in some sense properties of the human brain, the
role of the language faculty in cognition can be understood and defended
without appealing to neuroscience. Linguistic antirealism thus seems to avoid
also the absurd implication that the world is in one or several humans’
brains.

Of course, it would be no less
absurd to hold that the world is in language, that it is linguistic.  But in Part Three we shall find that
this seeming implication of linguistic antirealism can be avoided. Wittgenstein
did write: “The limits of my world are the limits of my language,”
but he also wrote, “I am my world,” which makes no mention of
language.  And Heidegger insisted
that it is language, not we, that “speaks.” These are
obscure pronouncements, to which I shall return. They suggest that linguistic
antirealism can be understood in such a way that it involves no reference to
language as a human, zoological, phenomenon. But there would have been little
motivation for accepting it if human cognition were not believed to be
essentially or at least importantly linguistic, even though this is obviously
an empirical topic and neither Wittgenstein nor Heidegger thought of himself as
engaged in empirical research.  I
shall therefore begin the present Part by considering the role of language in
cognition.

The linguistic turn was the central
event in both Anglo-American and continental 20th century philosophy. According
to Michael Dummett, after Frege philosophy of language replaced epistemology as
the central branch of philosophy, just as epistemology had replaced metaphysics
after Descartes. The phrase “linguistic turn” was coined by Gustav
Bergmann and popularized by Richard Rorty in order to characterize recent
Anglo-American philosophy, but as we saw it applies also to much of
contemporary continental philosophy.
The turn
began with the publication of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus after World War I and the birth
shortly thereafter of logical positivism in Austria, but it hastened with the
migration in the following two decades of Wittgenstein and most of the
positivists to Great Britain and especially the United States.  In addition to claiming, as the 19th
century positivists had done, that all knowledge is empirical and in principle
scientific, the logical positivists held that philosophy, which obviously is
not an empirical science, nonetheless does have a subject matter:
language.  To distinguish philosophy
from the empirical disciplines of linguistics and lexicography, however, they
identified that subject matter more specifically as what they called the logic of language. For logic, of course,
has always been a branch of philosophy, and a paradigm of an a priori
discipline.

But the linguistic turn probably
would not have been taken were it not for the assumption, often tacit, that
cognition, or at least thought, without language is impossible. The
philosophers who took the turn considered this assumption true as a matter of empirical fact, as indeed it seems to
be, except, as we shall find in section 4 of this chapter, in the crucial case
of what I have called logical cognition. Yet few attended to the relevant
empirical facts.  For example, a
highly relevant fact, to which I shall return, is the apparent occurrence of
cognition of numbers, or at least of “numerosity,” in prelinguistic
children and even some nonhuman animals. No armchair philosophy can discuss it
responsibly, yet obviously it is an empirical datum crucial for the general
question whether cognition without language is possible. And the ultimate value
of the linguistic turn, indeed much of the subsequent course of Anglo-American
philosophy, did seem to depend on how that question should be answered.

I have said repeatedly that
philosophy cannot competently investigate empirical facts, and this applies
also to the facts about the dependence of cognition on language. But it does
not mean that philosophy should be unaware of them. After all, they were the
larger context of the linguistic turn and thus of the varieties of antirealism
most common today. Some of these empirical facts are so obvious as to require
no special competence or investigation, e.g., that mathematics requires
symbols.  But other relevant facts
are not obvious, including the alleged fact that speakers of different human
languages perceive and think of the world differently. In this chapter we shall look at what has been
said about these issues, first by philosophers and then by linguists and
psychologists. I shall not attempt to provide a comprehensive account. For that
a separate book, indeed several books, would be needed.  And we must keep in mind throughout
that the linguistic turn and linguistic antirealism are logically independent
of each other, even though the former encouraged the adoption of the latter.
Linguistic antirealism is a metaphysical position. The linguistic turn was
essentially the adoption of a philosophical method.

Unfortunately, the discussions by philosophers
of the question whether cognition without language is possible are seldom detailed,
and the discussions of it by scientists are seldom useful. Philosophers have
relied usually on speculations or, at best, exercises in introspection.
Scientists have been hampered by the virtual impossibility, moral and social,
of serious experimentation with children, before and after they acquire
language. That the most advanced, the “hard,” sciences –
physics, chemistry, biology – are experimental,
not just empirical, while the “soft” sciences – economics,
sociology, political science, and much of psychology – are not, is not an
accident. Experiments vastly augment not only the number but, more importantly,
the variety of relevant empirical data and thus make detection of significant,
rather than merely coincidental, correlations much easier.

That there is a connection between
cognition and language was hinted by the historically influential use of logos in Greek for both reason and
word.  The definition that man is a rational animal
could be understood also as saying that man is a speaking animal. This is why the question whether
cognition without language is possible has often been taken to ask whether thought without language is possible. The first definition of “thought” in the Oxford English Dictionary reads as follows: “The action or process of
thinking; mental action or activity in general, esp. that of the intellect;
exercise of the mental faculty; formation and arrangement of ideas in the mind.” We are also told that “think” is “The
most general verb to express internal mental activity, excluding mere
perception of external things or passive reception of ideas.”

As the OED implies, “thought” and
“think” have both a wide sense, that of mental action or activity
in general, and a narrow sense,
that of mental
action or activity of the intellect. They have these two senses also in philosophy,
though philosophers, especially Brentano and Husserl, usually add that the
action or activity is “intentional,” directed upon an object, real
or not, and describe being conscious of something as an “act.”
Descartes used the words in their wide sense. After he offered the argument
“I think [cogito, pense], therefore I am,” he
explained, “What is a thinking thing [res cogitans, une chose qui pense]? It is a
thing that doubts, understands, conceives, affirms, denies, wills, refuses;
that imagines also, and perceives.” Clearly, by “thought” Descartes meant what later philosophers, in particular, Brentano,
Husserl, and Sartre, meant by “consciousness.”
Philosophical theories of thought in this sense are essentially philosophies of
mind. For example, soon after Descartes offered his argument, the British
empiricists proposed theories of mental activity as a “succession”
or “association” of discrete “ideas,” whether abstract
ideas (roughly the “concepts” of later philosophy), ideas of
“sensation” (later called sense-data), or ideas of the imagination
(later called mental images).

Descartes drew
a sharp distinction between a “thinking thing” and the human body.
A thinking thing is “simple,” it has no parts. The body, in
contrast, is a paradigm of an entity that has parts, “organs”
– an “anatomy,” in the modern literal as well as the
etymologically pregnant sense. Indeed, one of the standard arguments for the
immortality of the soul was that it is simple and therefore incapable of
“corruption,” “disintegration,” “falling
apart,” which was the common conception of how a thing ceases to exist.

Later
philosophers more commonly used “thought” in its narrow sense, that
of mental action or activity of the intellect. In that sense, thought is the level of cognition expressed in
Greek by noēsis and in English by “understanding,”
“conceptualization,” or “judgment.” Unlike a neonate’s sense perception, which seems to be much
like that of nonhuman animals, thought understood as activity of the
intellect involves the application of concepts and seems
distinctively human. Indeed, in the 17th century John Locke declared that
“brutes think not,” on the grounds that they are incapable of
entertaining “abstract ideas” and using language.

In the 18th
century, Kant rejected the
atomism of the empiricists’ view of
mental activity as a succession of ideas by pointing out the synthesizing
function of the “understanding” (Verstand). In the 19th century,
Franz Brentano distinguished among presentation, judgment, and phenomena of
interest.  Judgment necessarily
involves presentation, because one must be aware of what the judgment is about
(whether by sensing it or through a concept). And judgment makes possible the
characteristically mental acts of acceptance or rejection, belief or disbelief.[102]  In the 20th century,
H. H. Price followed Kant by regarding thinking as the employment of concepts,
even in recognition, and argued that a concept is essentially a principle of
classification.

Unlike
primitive sense perception and imagination, a judgment has
as its object a proposition, what is “judged” to be true or false. And propositions
usually are understood in philosophy as the primary vehicles of
truth-value.  Judgments, sentences,
beliefs, opinions, etc., are said to be true or false in virtue of the
propositions they “express.” It may be said, however, that while a declarative
sentence expresses a proposition, the assertion of that sentence expresses a
judgment. Frege used “thought” (Gedanke) in a sense close to that of
“proposition.” Thoughts, he held, belong in a “third
realm,” neither mental nor physical, and thus they are not judgments,
which presumably are mental.[103]

If a judgment is expressed by the assertion of a
declarative sentence, it can be expected to have parts and a structure
analogous to those of a sentence. Indeed, Jerry Fodor has argued that there is
a “language of thought,” thus attributing to thought
the sort of structure characteristic of language, though he regards thought to
be a state or activity of the brain.[104] And Gustav Bergmann analyzed all mental acts as
“complexes,” facts or states of affairs, each consisting of a
momentary particular and
two attributes that the particular exemplifies:
a “species” that
determines the kind of mental act it is (e.g., perceiving, remembering,
imagining) and a “proposition” (sometimes called “text”
by Bergmann) that
determines which state of affairs is its object (“intention”). He
held that even the objects of ordinary sense perception and imagination are
states of affairs, and thus require sentences for their expression in the
“ideal language.”[105]

In this book the question whether
there is thought without language would have a clearer and more promising focus
if we ask, instead, whether there is cognition
without language. For it is the term “cognition,” not
“mind” or even “judgment,” that captures literally what
is relevant to the epistemological and metaphysical issues that give rise to
antirealism. Yet, even then, the question would remain too broad, partly
because the affirmative answer seems obvious. Neonates do enjoy sense
perception, surely a level of cognition, however rudimentary, months or years
before they learn to speak; they also communicate, though not by speaking but often
by crying. Later, though still before being able to speak, they enjoy
recognition, e.g., of Mother, a primitive level of conceptual cognition, and
perhaps they even engage in rudimentary reasoning, e.g., that crying leads to
being fed. We shall find in section 4 that only logical cognition can be
considered clearly impossible without language, because only there the
impossibility is logical.

Since language is an empirical
subject matter, the study of its role in cognition should also be empirical. In
keeping with the stance explained in the Introduction regarding philosophical
inquiries into empirical matters, the present chapter will offer no theories
about language. It will be limited to a brief review of what others have said. Careless
observation and incautious generalization from one’s own experience can
be grossly misleading.

A
useful discussion, scientific or philosophical, of the question whether
cognition without language is possible must be specific regarding the respects
in which it might or might not be possible.  It must also be specific regarding the
kinds of cognition, language, and possibility that are at issue. Elementary and
obviously relevant distinctions must be made.  Many of the most familiar views tend to
be intolerably general and vague. Surely, there are fundamental differences between
sense perception and calculation, between the language of babes and the
language of bards, and between causal impossibility and logical impossibility.  Judgments about the causal possibility or
impossibility of cognition without language are especially hazardous.  One may be unable to balance
one’s checkbook without talking to oneself, but other people can do it.
When driving in a strange city, one may be compelled to issue to oneself
instructions like “Turn left on 3rd street, then right at second stop-light,”
but other people might not. The professional activities of some people,
especially philosophers, consist almost entirely of talking, reading, and
writing. (Sartre titled his autobiography Words.)
But the activities of farming, fishing, and acrobatics do not.

Language
might not be causally necessary even for some relatively advanced levels of
cognition, such as designing a house and planning a trip. But surely it is
necessary for doing physics or mathematics. A fly’s perceptual cognition does not require language, but any
conceptual cognition that whales perhaps engage in might require it. In the
case of extraterrestrial life forms, angels, or God, language might not be
necessary for any cognition. To be sure, a human being who lacks a language cannot
do physics or mathematics, but surely God can, and for all we know so can
intelligent beings outside our solar system. We may not understand what such cognition
might be like, but neither can we form auditory images of the high-frequency
sounds that dogs but not humans can hear. Humans certainly need language,
symbols, for cognition in physics and mathematics, but this may be due to their
limited cognitive powers. A god might cognize directly, for example, the
ultimate constitution of matter, without relying on language or any symbols,
including those of mathematics.

The truth is that, so far, there is neither sufficient
knowledge nor conceptual maturity in psychology or biology to judge responsibly
whether thought or cognition is causally possible without language. But
judgments about whether some forms of it are logically possible can be made in philosophy. This question is not
empirical, it is properly philosophical. We will come to it in section 4.

2. Philosophical
opinions.

Let us briefly review what philosophers have
said about the role of language in cognition. In the Cratylus Plato sharply distinguished between names and the things
they name, considered whether names are arbitrary and conventional, and argued that
the study of  names is
inferior to the study of the things named. But, at the beginning of modern
philosophy, Bacon wrote, “Men
believe that their reason governs words; but it is also true that words react
on the understanding; and this it is that has rendered philosophy and the sciences
sophistical and inactive.”[106] Hobbes dwelt on language in detail, arguing that
“‘true’ and ‘false’ are attributes of speech, not
of things.”[107] Locke held that brutes
abstract not, because they talk not: “the power of abstracting...
[is] an excellency which the faculties of brutes do by no means attain
to.”[108] Leibniz wrote, “Nothing exists in the intellect that
was not before in the tongue – except intelligence itself.” Hegel
remarked that “[t]he forms of thought are, in the first instance,
displayed and stored in human language.”[109] This last opinion was accepted by most 20th
century philosophers. As we have seen, Wittgenstein
declared that “the limits of the language ... mean the limits of my
world,” and Heidegger announced that “Language is the house
of being.”

But in Thinking and
Experience, published in
1953, H. H. Price wrote, “it is sometimes supposed that no intellectual
activity of any kind can occur without the use of words.  This is not true of recognition....  Recognition is a prelinguistic process in the sense that it is not dependent on the
use of words... [W]ords themselves have to be recognized.”[110] Price’s view was plain common sense.
Recognition is a level, indeed a fundamental level, of all cognition, primitive
or advanced.  It is present in
children long before they acquire language. In adults it often occurs when no
name or even description of what is recognized is available, for example when
recognizing, “reading,” facial expressions.[111] And creative work in music or painting, as well
as in mathematics and advanced theoretical physics, only minimally involves the
use of a natural language, though in mathematics and physics it does require
mathematical symbols. Price felt obliged to say what I quoted because of the
dominance at the time of the philosophy of ordinary language, according to
extreme versions of which, he wrote, “an intelligent being...must always
be talking to himself or to others.”

Indeed, in the Philosophical
Investigations, which by coincidence was published (posthumously) also in
1953, Wittgenstein wrote, “When I think in language, there
aren’t ‘meanings’ going through my mind in addition to the
verbal expressions: the language is itself the vehicle of thought…..”[112] Expounding
what he took to be Wittgenstein’s view, Renford Bambrough argued in 1960 that
objects called by the same name are distinguishable from other objects just by
the fact that they are uniquely called by that name: they neither have a common
property nor bear to each other resemblances except for what Wittgenstein had
called family resemblances.[113] In
1973 Michael Dummett wrote that “to possess a concept is to be a master
of a certain fragment of language,”[114] and
in 1975 that “Only with Frege was the proper object of philosophy finally
established: namely, first, that the goal of philosophy is the analysis of the
structure of thought; secondly, that the study of thought is to be sharply
distinguished from the psychological process of thinking; and, finally, that
the only proper method for analyzing thought consists in the analysis of
language.”[115] In
1982 we find Donald Davidson declaring that “a creature cannot have a
thought unless it has language.”[116] In
1995 Quine wrote that “thought, as John B. Watson claimed, is primarily
incipient speech,” though Quine allowed that in the case of artists,
acrobats, and engineers, sometimes they are “thinking with nonverbal
muscles.”[117]
However, after thus paying homage to muscular thought, Quine declared that
beliefs, meanings, ideas, properties, and propositions are all entia non grata, adding that “believing,
doubting, hoping, expecting, regretting, all continue alive and well, and their
objects, by my lights, are sentences.”[118] Even
Nelson Goodman, who for years had held that what he called “symbol
systems” need not be linguistic, slipped in 1988 and denied that
“there is a readymade world beyond discourse.”[119]

Nevertheless,
analytic (though perhaps not continental) philosophy soon went beyond these
extremist views. In 1992 we find Dummett himself asserting that
“linguistic practice is no more sacrosanct, no more certain to achieve
the ends at which it is aimed, no more immune to criticism or proposals for
revision, than our social, economic or political practice.”[120] Though intended as an attack on the philosophy
of ordinary language (especially J. L. Austin’s), Dummett’s
assertion had independent philosophical significance by tacitly implying that
criticism of language presupposes cognition that is not dependent on language.

It
is noteworthy that, except perhaps for Quine’s casual reference to
Watson, these opinions about language were offered without mention of any
empirical data or of the relevant empirical sciences.

Some
have come to believe that, though all cognition, from simple perception to
mathematical reasoning, is necessarily representational, symbolic, the
representations need not belong to a natural language – they can belong
to a “language of thought,” in Jerry Fodor’s phrase.[121] For Fodor this was just a philosophical
hypothesis, though he thought it has the support of neuroscience. Tim van
Gelder has explained: “Contemporary orthodoxy maintains that it
[cognition] is computation: the mind is a special kind of computer, and
cognitive processes are the rule-governed manipulation of internal symbolic
representations.”[122] But then he drew the natural conclusion
“that because the cognitive system traffics only in symbolic
representations, the human body and the physical environment can be dropped out
of consideration; it is possible to study the cognitive system as an
autonomous, bodiless, and wordless system whose function is to transform input
representations into output representations.”[123] If cognition is what such a cognitive system
does, cognition does not involve language, even if some neural states are
described as “symbolic,” though neither is it also directed upon
objects and thus it is not cognition of reality – or of anything.  At most these neural states would be
like the characters employed by a computer, but as John Searle had shown in
1980, the idea that they mean anything other than what the programmer means by
them is grossly mistaken.

3. Scientific opinions.

Let us now briefly
review  what linguists and
psychologists have said about the role of language in cognition.
More than a century after Locke announced that brutes abstract not, the German
linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt wrote, “Language is the formative organ of
thought….  Thought and
language are therefore one and inseparable from each other.”[124] Humboldt offered no evidence in
support of these opinions. He did speculate, however, that existing languages
differ from each other markedly in regard to “perfection,” which he
attributed to national, ethnic, and racial differences among their
speakers.

Early in the 20th
century, Ferdinand de Saussure wrote (or was reputed to have said – the
text was reconstructed from lecture notes): “Psychologically, setting
aside its expression in words, our thought is simply a vague, shapeless
mass.  Philosophers and linguists
have always agreed that were it not for signs, we should be incapable of
differentiating any two ideas in a clear and constant way.  In itself, thought is like a swirling
cloud, where no shape is intrinsically determinate.  No ideas are established in advance, and
nothing is distinct, before the introduction of linguistic structure.”[125] Saussure
did not say how he (or the philosophers and linguists to whose authority he
appealed) learned all this. For example, did he study human infants before they
learned to speak?

William James famously announced
that the world perceived by an infant is a “blooming buzzing
confusion,” but he also failed to say how he knew this.[126]  James did think, however, that thought
without language is “perfectly possible.” In support, he quoted at
great length a deaf-mute instructor, “Mr. Ballard,” who was
reported to have written: “It was during those delightful rides, two or
three years before my initiation into the rudiments of written language, that I
began to ask myself the question: How
came the world into being?  When
this question occurred to my mind, I set myself to thinking it over a long
time.” Concerning this passage, Wittgenstein later wrote, “Are you
sure – one would like to ask – that this is the correct translation
of your wordless thought into words? Do I want to say that the writer’s
memory deceives him?  I don’t
even know if I should say that.  These recollections are a queer memory
phenomenon, – and I do not know what conclusions one can draw from them
about the past of the man who recounts them.”[127]

Despite Wittgenstein’s
misgivings, such reports of personal experience, if truthful, are useful. They
must be read with caution, but the evidence they provide is unavailable
elsewhere.  For example, if Helen
Keller’s acquisition of language was indeed as she and her teacher Anne
Mansfield Sullivan claimed, then it was an extraordinary example of how,
despite the absence of the usual sort of exposure to language, one can acquire
a rich, indeed stylistically first-rate, linguistic proficiency.  Yet Keller’s editor did write:
“Philosophers have tried to find out what was her conception of abstract
ideas before she learned a language.
If she had any conception, there is no way of discovering it now; for
she cannot remember, and obviously there was no record at the time.  She had no conception of God before she
had the word ‘God.’”[128]

But another report of personal
experience, by the mathematician Kalvis M. Jansons, is instructive and may
serve as an example of what is needed: “From an early age I found that
many things were easier to think about without language.  This usually, but not always, meant
thinking in terms of pictures and was particularly true when trying to make or
understand intricate mechanisms. …
To me, abstract pictures and diagrams feel more important than words.”[129]

Not all reports of personal
experience on our topic are as credible as Jansons’. This is especially
true of some familiar claims by leading psychologists, which must be understood
as reports of personal experience since no other evidence is cited. For example,
J. B. Watson wrote that “thinking is merely talking, but talking with
concealed musculature.”[130] Leonard
Bloomfeld held that thinking is talking to ourselves, “suppressing the
sound-producing movements and replacing them by very slight inaudible ones.”[131] (I
should mention that today there is evidence that thinking is not prevented by
drugs that suppress muscular activity.) B. F. Skinner wrote, “thought is
simply behavior – verbal or nonverbal, covert or overt.”[132] Edward
Sapir appealed to “the frequent experience of fatigue in the speech
organs” after “intensive thinking.”[133]
This, presumably, was a report of personal experience. But elsewhere Sapir went
much farther: “Human beings do not live in the objective world
alone…..but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which
has become the medium of expression for their society…..We see and hear
and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of
our community predispose certain choices of interpretation. “[134] This was
a crude version of linguistic antirealism, but offered as a scientific
hypothesis and then left unsupported by empirical evidence.  In 2008, field linguists discovered a
“new” language, Koro, spoken in some villages in northeastern
India.[135]
One of the linguists was reported as saying that languages like Koro
“construe reality in very different ways…They uniquely code
knowledge of the natural world in ways that cannot be translated into a major
language.” But we are not told how the linguist knew this.

Sapir’s student, Benjamin
Lee Whorf, did engage in extensive empirical work on Indian languages. But he cited
no particular evidence when he wrote, “Thinking...follows a network of
trails laid down in the given language...The individual is utterly unaware of
this organization and is constrained completely within its unbreakable
bonds.”[136] Whorf
thought that he and a Hopi could not discuss the “same” world.  According to him, “[S]egmentation
of nature is an aspect of grammar...We cut up and organize the spread and flow
of events as we do, largely because, through our mother tongue, we are parties
to an agreement to do so, not because nature itself is segmented in exactly
that way for all to see.”[137] But,
again, no evidence is provided.[138]  Perhaps it was natural that what came to
be known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was offered in American linguistics. It
was in America that non-Indo-European languages were plentiful and readily
available for study: there were more than 100 American Indian languages. In
this respect American linguistics had an important advantage over European
linguistics.

Watson, Bloomfield, Sapir, Whorf,
and Skinner were the most influential scientists on our topic in the first half
of the 20th century. This may explain in part the unbridled
linguisticism characteristic of American philosophy during that period. Respect
for science was characteristic of the logical positivism dominant then. The
supposedly scientific view offered by the psychologists seemed identical with
the philosophical view that Hilary Putnam described as holding that
“objects arise out of discourse, rather than being prior to
discourse.”[139] But were
Watson, Bloomfield, Sapir, Whorf, and Skinner right? It is generally agreed
that to answer this question on empirical grounds and with confidence we would
need to study the prelinguistic child’s cognition. And such studies have
been notoriously unsuccessful, probably because serious experimentation with
children, e.g., delaying a child’s learning a language, would be grossly
unethical. Less alarming experiments tend to be inconclusive, perhaps because
small children, not just infants, seldom cooperate with or even take seriously
the investigators, who often happen to be their parents. This seems true, for
example, in the case of the theorizing about early cognition and language
acquisition by Bärbel Inhelder and Jean Piaget, which tends to be little
more than speculation.[140]

The most important development in
linguistics, of course, took place in the second half of the 20th
century. It was due to Noam Chomsky. Chomsky is not only a major linguist, he
is also a philosopher, whose views (especially in his later writings) on
scientific methodology and the mind-body problem are sophisticated and subtle. But
it is his work in linguistics that is of special relevance to the topic of this
chapter. Its central thesis was anticipated by Humboldt: “Since the natural disposition to language is
universal in man, and everyone must possess the key to the understanding of all
languages, it follows automatically that the form of all languages must be essentially the same, and always achieve the universal purpose.”[141] This
thesis is essentially Kantian in spirit, and it has been defended throughout
Chomsky's works.

Discussions of Chomsky’s
linguistics often bog down in what he rightly regards as misguided puzzling
over whether what he calls universal grammar has “psychological
reality,” rather than just utility as a theoretical hypothesis.  Surely he is right that there is no
principled difference between the propriety of hypotheses in linguistics and
the propriety of hypotheses in physics.[142]  Chomsky has always held that the status
of innate linguistic competence is ultimately biological.[143]
The “innate structures” to which he appeals are not accessible to
consciousness, presumably because they are in the brain.[144]

Chomsky's nativism is not what is
argued in this book, if for no other reason than that, unlike what a
philosophical book can properly attempt, it is essentially scientific and
subject to empirical confirmation.
But it does imply that what I have called the logical structure of
language is not learned from experience.  Chomsky has claimed, for example, that
“the familiar [quantifier-variable] notation is ‘read off of’
the logical form that is the mental representation for natural language.”[145] But this
is offered as a substantive scientific hypothesis. And the mental
representation in question is ultimately identified with a state or feature of
the brain.  The hypothesis is hardly
philosophical, even though, as Chomsky makes clear, it is proposed on a very
high level of abstraction.

Chomsky’s nativism is not as
novel as many take it to be.  It would
not seem innovative to anyone familiar with Aristotle’s distinction
between first actuality and second actuality; one of Aristotle’s
applications of it was to knowledge of grammar. Nelson Goodman wrote about
Chomsky’s view: “until the term ‘innate idea’ is
applied, what is advocated is the rather trivial truth that the mind has
certain faculties, tendencies, limitations.”[146]  But even if this truth is trivial, its
importance was neglected in philosophy and psychology until Kant drew attention
to it.

Indeed, Chomsky’s appeal to
innate psychological structures is a sort of biological
“Kantianism,” a biological transcendental idealism.[147]  His application of it is not restricted to
universal grammar. He applied it to perception: “we know that the visual
system of a mammal will interpret visual stimulations in terms of straight
lines, angles, motions, and three-dimensional objects” [148]  He applies it also to conceptualization,
in ways Kant would have found surprising: “[H]uman nature gives us the concept
“climb” for free. That is, the concept “climb” is just
part of the way in which we are able to interpret experience available to us
before we even have the experience.
That is probably true for most concepts that have words for them in
language.  This is the way we learn
language.  We simply learn the label
that goes with the preexisting concept.
So in other words, it is as if the child, prior to any experience, has a
long list of concepts like “climb,” and then the child is looking
at the world to figure out which sound goes with the concept.  We know that the child figures it out
with only a very small number of presentations of the sound.”[149]

The role of language in cognition
was discussed by Chomsky’s student Steven Pinker in his widely read book The Language Instinct. He wrote, “Sometimes
it is not easy to find any words that
properly convey a thought. When we hear or read, we usually remember the gist,
not the exact words, so there has to be such a thing as a gist that is not the
same as a bunch of words.  And if
thoughts depended on words, how could a new word ever be coined?  How could a child learn a word to begin
with?  How could translation from
one language to another be possible?[150]

This is plain good sense. We may
wince, however, when Pinker goes on to claim that psychologists have shown that
babies can do arithmetic: “The developmental psychologist Karen Wynn has
recently shown that five-month-old babies can do a simple form of mental
arithmetic.  She used a technique
common in infant perception research.
Show a baby a bunch of objects long enough, and the baby gets bored and
looks away; change the scene, and if the baby notices the difference, he or she
will regain interest.  The
methodology has shown that babies as young as five days [sic] old are sensitive
to number.  In one experiment, an
experimenter bores a baby with an object, then occludes the object with an opaque
screen.  When the screen is removed,
if the same object is present, the babies look for a little while, then get
bored again.  But if, through
invisible subterfuge, two or three objects have ended up there, the surprised
babies stare longer.”[151]

Wynn’s experiments had
obvious merits, but Pinker’s interpretation of their results is
naïve. The naiveté is not philosophical but scientific. It fits
Mark Twain’s description of science as an endeavor in which “one
gets such wholesome returns of conjecture out of such trifling investment of
fact.” It is an exaggerated abductive inference from meager and ambiguous
data, not much better than Benjamin Whorf’s inference from what he knew
about Indian languages that thought depends on language, an inference Pinker
justly criticizes.  To claim, on the
basis of experimental results like Wynn’s, that babies have knowledge of
arithmetic is like claiming that since birds know how to fly they have
knowledge of aerodynamics. Indeed, another scientist, Alan M. Leslie, has written
of “[Baillargéon’s] important discovery about the young
infant’s understanding of mechanics,” on the basis of an experiment
similar to Wynn’s.[152] In the
same collection of papers we also find Gabriel Horn arguing that thought does
not require language on the grounds that mice “distinguish self from
other objects” and thus are aware of their bodies because they
(generally) don’t get stuck in holes too small for them to get through.[153]  Such opinions in psychology bring to
mind recent reports of discoveries in genetics of a “gambling-gene”
and an “alcoholism-gene.”

But we should not complain
inordinately about them. Despite the exaggerated conclusions drawn, the
underlying facts are important in their own right. While crediting babies with
cognition of arithmetic at best ignores the nature of arithmetic, there is no
doubt that any prelinguistic cognition of what in the scientific literature is
called “numerosity” would be relevant to the question about the
dependence of cognition on language.
More recent experiments, similar to Wynn's but involving monkeys,
suggest that monkeys also are capable of cognition of numerosities.

Pinker writes: “Grammar
offers a clear refutation of the empiricist doctrine that there is nothing in
the mind that was not first in the senses.”[154]
This implies that syntactical, and therefore presumably also logical, form
corresponds to nothing perceived or otherwise experienced in the world.  But Pinker’s claim that therefore the
“seat” of the language instinct is in the brain casts little light
on the status or nature of cognition. To be told that logical cognition is
grounded, not in perceived objects in the world, but in a structure of the
brain is no more illuminating than to be told that it is grounded in
evolution.

4. Language in logical cognition.

Our brief survey of what philosophers and
scientists have said about the general question of the role of language in
cognition suggests that it has received at best inconclusive treatment. But
there is a much more specific question that can be answered with reasonable
confidence. It concerns the role of language in logical cognition. To answer that question requires no empirical
research and remains properly a task of philosophy, the home of logic.

Wittgenstein held that
the logical constants do not
“represent,” that there are no “logical objects.” In
the Introduction, I suggested that this is true of all logical expressions – variables,
quantifiers, sentential operators, the verb “to be” in its senses
of identity, existence, and predication, and the symbols or syntactic
structures expressing these senses, as well as of declarative sentences themselves
– and that we count as logical objects what all logical expressions so
understood might be taken to represent. I called the kind of cognition that
requires logical expressions for its expression “logical
cognition.” It includes but must not be confused with the sort of
cognition pursued by logic. The scope of the latter is much narrower.
Statements expressing logical cognition usually contain also nonlogical expressions,
while those in logic contain only logical expressions. I suggested that we call
the former logical statements and the latter statements of logic. For example,
“All men are mortal” is a logical statement because it includes the
logical expression “all,” but it is not a statement of logic.
Statements of logic are purely formal and usually employ only technical
symbols. An example would be (($x)
Φx º
~ ("x)
~ Φx)), i.e., “Something is Φ
if and only if it is not the case that nothing is Φ.”

I shall discuss logical
expressions, logical statements, and logical cognition in detail later. What is
relevant here is that if logical expressions do not “represent,”
i.e., if they stand for nothing, then logical cognition would indeed seem impossible
without language, language would seem to be “all there is to it”
since there would be nothing else that might be pertinent. We would have no
“access” to what logical cognition is about except through language
because it is not about anything. In this
respect logical cognition is dramatically different from, say, perception,
where in addition to talking about its objects we can also perceive them. Not
even God could know that all men are mortal by “perceiving” all
men.  God might perceive all
individual things, perhaps an infinity of them, but it is not by perception
that he could know that they are all
the individual things that there are: this is not something that can be perceived
because there is nothing, perceivable or unperceivable, that the word
“all” stands for. (I shall leave it to theology to tell us whether
or how then God would know that they are all
the individual things that there are.)

If the logical expressions do not
“represent,” then a limited but far reaching linguistic species of
conceptual antirealism, the species I called logical antirealism, ought to be
accepted. Any advanced cognition requires statements that make essential use of
logical expressions. If logical expressions stand for nothing, then those statements
have no extralinguistic significance even if they contain nonlogical components
that do.

Many expressions, e.g., in fiction, also stand
for nothing, but this is why they are not taken to serve a cognitive function.
The function of logical expressions, however, is unquestionably cognitive.  The structure of a sentence depends, at
least in part, on the logical expressions the sentence contains. And it is
relevant to cognition because it is relevant to the truth-value of the
sentence.

We may call the role of logical expressions in cognition
“transcendental,” in a sense related to Kant’s yet different
in that it applies to language, not mental items or faculties. Indeed, the
linguistic turn has often been described as a transcendental turn. If limited
to logical cognition, it is more measured, discerning, cautious, and therefore
more plausible than the linguistic turn exemplified in the statements quoted
earlier from Wittgenstein and Heidegger. The limits of my language may
mean the limits of my world, but surely there is more to the world than
language. Language may be the house of
being, but surely it is not also the furniture in that house.

Logical antirealism rests on
philosophical, a priori, not empirical considerations. That logic is an a priori
discipline has seldom been questioned. To be sure, in recent years doubts have
been expressed, most notably by Albert Casullo, that any knowledge is a priori.[155] But
the fact remains that questions in logic are usually discussed and settled
without making empirical appeals and certainly without engaging in empirical
research.

Despite the extensive debates over
the general issue of realism/antirealism, little has been said about the
specific issue of logical
realism/antirealism, even though all advanced cognition involves cognition of
logical structure. Perhaps this neglect has been due to the comforting thought
that logic, which is a branch of philosophy so advanced that it is often
considered a separate discipline, has already dealt with and settled the issue.
This, of course, is an illusion. Indeed, in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein held that the logical constants do not
represent, and offered his truth tables to explain them.  But we shall see in the next chapter
that Russell felt compelled to allow for the existence of irreducibly negative
and general facts, which surely would count as logical objects. He showed that the
attempts to reduce negative facts to “incompatibility” and general
facts to conjunctions or disjunctions of singular facts are unsuccessful.

Chapter
Six:
METAPHYSICAL REALISM AND LOGICAL ANTIREALISM

1. The Logic of Realism

In chapter 5 I considered the belief
that cognition, or at least “thought,” involves language. This
belief encouraged and remains characteristic of the version of metaphysical
antirealism that came to dominate 20th century philosophy when it
took the linguistic turn. Linguistic antirealism is the most plausible version of
metaphysical antirealism. Language is indispensable at least in the case of
logical cognition, the sort of cognition that involves notions that are
characteristically logical, such as negation and generality. Antirealism with
respect to logical cognition, which I called logical antirealism, is the most
plausible version of linguistic antirealism.

Metaphysical antirealism is best
understood in the context of the development of its opposite, metaphysical realism.  The latter’s guiding principle may
be put as follows: acknowledge
as being there what must be there if cognition and truth as correspondence are
to be possible.  This
principle governed the construction of the ontological inventories, categorial
schemes, of Aristotle, Frege, Russell, and Bergmann.  I select these philosophers because they
exemplify especially clearly the role of the principle in the development of
realist ontology.

In the Categories Aristotle
used the notions of said of and present in as primitive, and with unsurpassed elegance proposed the following ontological
inventory: (1) items said of but not present in something else (what he called
“secondary substances,” i.e., substance universals, such as cat), (2) items present in but not said
of something else (particular “accidents,” in any of the nine
categories of accident, e.g., this cat’s whiteness, its white color), (3)
items both present in and said of something else (universal accidents, e.g., the
color white), and (4) items neither said of nor present in something else (what
he called primary substances, i.e., particular substances, such as this cat).

Frege’s inventory included (1) objects (roughly, what we call
particulars or individual things), (2) first-level functions (he called them “concepts”
but in a nonpsychological sense closer to that of “property” in
current philosophy), which take objects as arguments and yield truth or falsity
as values, (3) second-level functions, expressed by what we call quantifiers,
which also yield truth or falsity as values but take first-level functions, not
objects, as arguments, (4) thoughts, roughly what we call
“propositions,” the vehicles of truth-value, and (5) functions that
take thoughts as arguments and yield compound thoughts, what the propositional
connectives express.[156]

Russell’s inventory, at least at the time of The Philosophy of Logical Atomism, included (1) particulars, (2)
universals (properties), (3) atomic facts, (4) negative facts, thus at least
one kind of molecular facts, and (5) general facts.  His notion of fact was briefly explained
in the Introduction.

Bergmann proposed a much richer inventory, which is why he is especially relevant
here. It included (1) particulars, (2) universals, (3) the “ultimate
sorts” of particularity  and universality,
in virtue of which an item is a particular or a universal, (4) facts (also
called complexes), which might be only “potential,” possible but
not actual, (5) what the propositional connectives express, (6) what the
quantifiers express, (7) the “modes” of actuality and potentiality,
which “pervade” facts and render them actual or potential, and (8)
the three nexus of exemplification,
set-membership, and meaning.[157]

The logic of the development of realism that these inventories exemplify
now emerges.  All four include the
category of particulars.  Even sense data, with which, a la Berkeley, Russell toyed, are
particulars. The privileged status of the category is due presumably to the
fact that particulars are the standard examples of what is perceived or
imagined.  This may be why some
opponents of antirealism (perhaps motivated by the title of Nelson
Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking)
object to it by saying, “Surely there were a sun and an earth before
there were human beings and thus, for all we know, before there were minds, or
language and concepts.”  But
the antirealist claims, not that the sun and the earth were created by our
thought or language (Goodman was not a sort of creationist), but that they
cannot be perceived, conceived, and described independently of our perception,
thought, and language – which is hardly more than, in Hilary
Putnam’s phrase, a virtual tautology.[158]

Such opponents of antirealism presumably would be willing to say (1) that
the sun and the earth are particulars,
(2) that they have properties, (3)
that the sun exemplifies the property
of being a star and the earth the property of being a planet, (4) that it is a fact that there was a sun and an earth
before there were human beings, (5) that the sun is not a planet and the earth not
a star, (6) that they and other stars and planets were all that there was before there were human beings, (7) that they actually, not just possibly, existed then, (8) that the sun and the earth constitute a
pair of which they are the members, and
(9) that some things, mental or verbal,
mean, refer to, the sun and
the earth.

If the opponents of antirealism refuse to make such additional
assertions, and especially to acknowledge items that might correspond to the
italicized words in them, what would be their justification? Might they be
merely displaying, however unwittingly, the continuing hold of 17th
and 18th century empiricism, in particular its confusion of knowing with
perceiving and of thinking with imagining? We are comfortable with particulars
because they come to mind first when asked what we perceive or can imagine.  But they are hardly all that we can know
or think.  The opponents of
antirealism who confidently assert the existence of the sun and the earth ignore
the question whether the sun and the earth would have existed if there were not
also items corresponding to the italicized words. At least they owe us a
serious discussion of how sparse their ontology could be.  That it cannot limit itself to such
items as the sun and the earth – i.e., to particulars – became
evident in the logical development of realism when it left the terra firma of particulars.

The first move beyond particulars was to introduce the category of properties, a move with which Plato
dazzled philosophers.  It was almost
inevitable because we think and speak not only of particulars but also of what they are. The move to Fregean
thoughts and Russellian or Bergmannian facts
came more than two millennia later but seemed also inevitable. We speak in sentences, not lists of names.  If the description of the world requires
sentences, what items in the world require this and might be said to correspond
to sentences?  As we saw in the
Introduction with the example of Jack’s admiring Jill but Jill’s
not admiring Jack, surely they are not the items that correspond to names and
predicates. At least atomic facts
must be allowed.  But a further move
to molecular, even if only negative, and then to general facts also seemed required.  Atomic sentences are woefully inadequate
for any cognition that is at all advanced. Any language beyond that of babes
requires molecular, at least negative, as well as general sentences, whether
universal or particular.  And so a
move to negation and generality themselves, i.e., to what
makes negative facts negative and general facts general, seemed needed.  This move was made explicitly by Frege
and Bergmann, as well as by Russell in Theory
of Knowledge[159] though not in The Philosophy of
Logical Atomism.  Bergmann even
included in his inventory particularity,
universality, actuality, and potentiality,
as what allows us to distinguish respectively between particulars and universals
and between actual and merely possible facts, as well as exemplification, set-membership,
and meaning, which respectively
“tie” particulars to their properties, members of sets to their
sets, and thoughts to what they are thoughts of.  Like Meinong, Bergmann has often been
accused by other realists of “going too far,” but those realists do
not explain where and how the line should be drawn.  The usual half-hearted attempts to
rescue realism from “excesses” by adopting some sort of
reductionism, for example, of negative facts to incompatibility and of general
facts to conjunctions or disjunctions of atomic facts, were shown by Russell in
The Philosophy of Logical Atomism to
fail because they presuppose what they claim to “reduce.”

Aristotle’s, Frege’s, Russell’s, and Bergmann’s
ontological inventories are in many ways similar, despite their major
differences.  All four include
particulars and properties, though Frege called particulars
“objects” and properties “concepts.”  Frege's, Russell's, and Bergmann's
include a category of items that correspond to sentences, though Aristotle’s
does not.  Frege called these items
thoughts, Russell and Bergmann called them facts.  Fregean thoughts were said by Frege to
belong in a “third realm,” which is neither mental nor physical, but
this would be true also of Russellian and Bergmannian facts.  A fact may include constituents that are
mental or physical, but in no clear sense can itself be called mental
(admiration may be something mental, but is the fact that Jack admires Jill
also mental, in whose mind would it be?) or physical (what are the weight,
size, and location of the fact that Jack admires Jill?) This is why facts are sometimes
said to be only in logical space,
just as Fregean thoughts were said to be in a third realm.  Frege’s, Russell’s, and
Bergmann’s inventories included negative and general facts, but only
Frege’s and Bergmann’s included negation and generality themselves.  Except in the abandoned Theory of Knowledge, Russell committed
himself only to negative and general facts,
not to what makes them negative or general. And only Bergmann followed the
logic of realism further by including particularity, universality,
exemplification, actuality, potentiality, set-membership, and meaning.

Realists were required by the realist principle to acknowledge such
additional “items,” though only Bergmann acknowledged all of them.  The reason for the requirement was that
we can hardly suppose that our thought or language corresponds to the actual,
objective world of particulars if we do not suppose that most, if not all, of
those additional items are also in it. There would not be a sufficiently
specific, definite fit between thought or language and the world without
them.  For example, the sentence
“Jack admires Jill” could not, if true, correspond just to Jack and
Jill, or even to Jack, Jim, and the relation of admiring, since the sentence
“Jill admires Jack” also would correspond to those things.

The motivation behind antirealism is now easy to discern.  As Russell said about disjunctive facts,
it is not plausible that somewhere “in the actual objective world”
there are all those things “going about” that the realist principle
seems to require.[160]  It is implausible because,
except for particulars and perhaps properties, the “things” in
question are all logical, in the broad sense of “logical” explained
in the Introduction.  It becomes
tempting, therefore, to conclude that in the case of such things there are only
the words or syntactic structures supposed to correspond to them.

But Wittgenstein made evident in the Tractatus
that this conclusion is at least hasty.
By distinguishing between saying and showing, he proposed a third
alternative, what I called semirealism.
I argued in chapter 4 that the distinction is neither idiosyncratic nor
obscure.  It has an obvious
application even to ordinary pictures. I also argued that the related picture
theory of meaning and thought conforms to the traditional view that thought
involves representations, “ideas,” perhaps even mental images or
“pictures.”

Wittgenstein’s
rejection of realism in logic was unequivocal and explicit: “My
fundamental idea is that the 'logical constants' are not representatives [nicht vertreten]; that there can be no
representatives of the logic of facts” (4.0312). But his rejection of
antirealism in logic was also unequivocal and explicit: “…is it
really possible that in logic I should have to deal with forms that I can
invent? What I have to deal with must be that which makes it possible for me to
invent them” (5.555).[161] Even though the logical constants represent
nothing, there must be something that
makes our use of them possible and thus is presupposed by it.

Wittgenstein
went to some lengths telling us what that “something” is.  It included the existence of objects, which are (1) the meaning
(reference, Bedeutung) of names, (2)
the values of the individual variables in general propositions, including “the
laws of logic,” (3) and the constituents of atomic facts (Sachverhalte, “states of affairs”),
and thus (4) the “substance of the world.”[162] It included the senses of atomic propositions,[163] the existence
or nonexistence of the atomic facts
such propositions assert,[164] and thus their truth or falsity.[165] It included the truth-possibilities of atomic propositions, the combinations of
which are made explicit in the truth tables for the molecular propositions
composed of elementary propositions. It included the totality of the singular
propositions that general propositions show but do not assert.[166]
It included formal concepts
like those of being an object and being a fact. It included therefore also the totality of objects and the totality of facts, i.e., the world itself. All these can be “shown,”
but not “said.”

The central doctrine in the Tractatus was
that what logic is about is inexpressible. This motivates the antirealist
reading of the book, for example, Cora Diamond’s[167] and Warren Goldfarb’s,[168]since one might reasonably conclude that
what cannot be said lacks reality.
But the Tractatus also tells us that what cannot be said nonetheless can be shown
or, as Wittgenstein sometimes writes, e.g., in 5.5561 and 6.522, that it can
show itself (zeigt sich).  One might then no less reasonably
conclude that what cannot be said but can be shown is part of reality.  After all, it is not like Pegasus or
phlogiston. It does show itself. This
motivates the realist reading, for example David Pears’[169] and P. M. S. Hacker’s.[170] Wittgenstein, however, avoided both
antirealism and realism.  He did
write “There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest [Es gibt allerding Unaussprechliches],” but his next sentence was “They are what is
mystical [Dies 'zeigt' sich, es
ist das Mystische]” (6.522).  These “things” are not of
concern just to “soft” disciplines like ethics and religion. They
include logical form and formal properties, the subject matter of logic.  We cannot say of an item that it is an
object, a complex, fact, function, number, or the totality of objects or of
facts.  Therefore, we cannot even
say of the world that it is a world.
But what we cannot say shows itself in what we can say. It is not
nothing. Surely, the world is “something.”  Surely, so is what Wittgenstein called
“the higher,” in ethics or in logic.  Yet, neither is it straightforwardly a
part of reality.  If it were, it
would not be inexpressible.

Cora Diamond calls such a reading of the Tractatus a
“chickening-out,”[171] and Warren Goldfarb calls it
“irresolute.”[172] But I doubt they would say that logical
form is like Pegasus or phlogiston. Wittgenstein is explicit that in some sense
it is in “reality” [Wirklichkeit]:
“Propositions can represent the whole of reality, but they cannot  represent what they must have in common
with reality in order to be able to represent it--logical form” (4.12),
“Propositions show the logical form of reality. They display it”
(4.121).  Logical form can only be
shown, not because it is nothing but because its presence in both language and reality is what makes
any saying possible.  Saying
presupposes showing.  Something is
said only if something else is shown.

But while logical form is not like Pegasus or phlogiston, neither is it
like Secretariat or oxygen.
Although Wittgenstein was not an antirealist, he also was not a realist.  This should not surprise us. In
both his early and his later works he avoided simplistic distinctions:
“And yet you again and again reach the conclusion that the sensation
itself is nothing. – Not at
all.  It is not a something, but not a nothing either!”[173] Wittgenstein's distinction between saying and showing amounted to a
rejection of standard realism, but it did not amount to acceptance of standard
antirealism.  In this respect, he
was not unlike his distant precursor
Kant, who described his position as transcendental idealism but also empirical
realism.[174]

Had Wittgenstein provided an explicit inventory of what according to him
is in the world, which he did not because the inventory would have employed
formal concepts, it would have been sparse.  At most, it seems, it would have
contained two categories: objects and facts. Moreover, it is not clear whether the
category of objects included both particulars and properties. Indeed, it is not
clear that Wittgenstein allowed this distinction. Nor is it clear that he
allowed for molecular and general facts, rather than just for atomic facts,
though he did seem to allow for negative facts: “We call the existence of
states of affairs a positive fact, and their non-existence a negative fact”
(2. 06).

Frege also allowed for what cannot be said, though not quite in
Wittgenstein’s sense.[175]  One of his ontological
categories, as have seen, was that of concepts.  But we cannot speak about concepts: “The concept horse is not a concept,”
Frege wrote.  What expresses a
Fregean concept is a grammatical predicate, and “the concept horse” is not a predicate. The
relevant predicate is “is a horse,” but it cannot serve as the
grammatical subject of a well-formed sentence, including a sentence of the form
“x is a concept.”  Yet,
of course, there is such a concept.
Some objects are horses.  Frege did not deny that there are
concepts.  He was an unmitigated
realist.  But neither did he explain
their peculiar status.  This is why
his readers have found his assertion that the concept horse is not a concept confusing.

2. Antirealism: ontological, cosmological, and logical.

According to metaphysical realism,
the existence and nature of things (res),
reality, the world, is independent of our cognition of them, in the broad contemporary sense of
“cognition” that includes sense perception, introspection,
intellectual intuition, imagination, memory, recognition, conceptualization,
inductive and deductive reasoning, the use of language and other symbolism.
Metaphysical antirealism denies this. I call both “metaphysical” in
order to distinguish them from realism and antirealism in ethics, aesthetics,
the philosophy of science, the philosophy of mathematics, and other branches of
philosophy, where realism and antirealism are restricted to a specific subject
matter.

The
thesis of metaphysical antirealism is that the world insofar as it is knowable
by us depends on our capacities and ways of knowing, our cognitive faculties. The
inclusion of “insofar as it is knowable” does not produce the sort
of equivocation present, for example, in the sentence “As king of
England, John was subject to no one,” which is true but compatible with
“As duke of Aquitaine, John was subject to the king of France.” We
know both that John was king of England and that he was duke of Aquitaine. But
we know the world only insofar as it is knowable. And this is a tautology,
unlike “As king of England, John was subject to no one.”

The
standard argument for the thesis of metaphysical antirealism, in both the
Kantian and its more recent versions, was sketched in the Introduction as
follows: (1) We cognize only what we have the capacity to cognize.  This is a tautology.  Therefore, (2) there is no reality, no
world, that is independent of our cognitive capacities.  But (2) does not follow from (1).  What follows is another tautology, (3)
that we cannot cognize reality independently of our cognitive capacities.  Contemporary antirealists argue on the
basis of (1) for (2), not for (3), probably because the negation of (2),
Kant’s view (4) that there is a reality,
“things-in-themselves,” which is independent of our cognitive
capacities, seems to them idle.  But
there is a very good reason for (4), namely, that (2) implies a sort of cosmic
humanism, human creationism, the proposition that the world depends on certain members of one of its
planets’ fauna.

Metaphysical antirealism comes in
many varieties, as different as Berkeley’s
subjective idealism, Kant’s transcendental idealism, Hegel’s
absolute idealism, Wittgenstein’s logical antirealism, Heidegger’s
phenomenology of being-in-the-world, as well as, in more recent philosophy,
Michael Dummett’s antirealism and Nelson Goodman’s “irrealism.”
Berkeley held that the existence of the things we perceive is dependent on our
perception of them, Kant held that their nature is dependent also on our
understanding, and Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Goodman stressed their dependence
on our language.

In one form or another,
metaphysical antirealism has dominated modern philosophy at least since
Berkeley, even though it is metaphysical realism
that remains the bedrock of everyday and scientific thinking. But, as we have
seen, numerous though seldom made distinctions within it are needed. And the
reasons for accepting it have seldom been stated in detail. Usually they have
consisted in abstract, obscure generalities such as “Nothing can be conceived
that cannot be perceived” and “For knowledge to be possible,
objects must conform to knowledge,” which are no less controversial than
what they are reasons for.

In the Introduction I
distinguished antirealism from skepticism and relativism.  I also distinguished the several
varieties of antirealism: ontological, cosmological, perceptual, conceptual,
linguistic, and logical. One can be an antirealist but not a skeptic, and one
can be a skeptic but not an antirealist. One can be an antirealist but not a
relativist. One can be a cosmological but not an ontological antirealist. One
can question the reality of logical objects such as facts, and thus of the
world conceived as the totality of facts, but not the reality of things, e.g.,
animals, vegetables, and minerals.  And
one may be neither a realist nor an antirealist regarding some items, e.g.,
those that subsist (Russell) or those that can only be shown (Wittgenstein),
hence the need to acknowledge what I called semirealism.

Within both cosmological and
ontological antirealism, we need also the distinction between perceptual and
conceptual antirealism. Since a concept may be understood as either a purely
mental, psychological, and therefore subjective item, or as a linguistic, public,
and therefore objective one, we must distinguish between Kant’s
psychological version and the 20th century linguistic versions of
conceptual antirealism. Further distinctions are needed within the variety of conceptual
antirealism that I called logical. As we shall see, one may accept a realist
interpretation of singular statements, a semirealist interpretation of compound
and universal statements, and an antirealist interpretation of generic
statements.

The distinction between
ontological and cosmological realism/antirealism is of special importance.  If the world is the totality of facts, not
of things, then one who rejects the category of fact also rejects cosmological realism, realism with
respect to the world, but not necessarily ontological
realism, realism with respect to things. Even if the world is not the
totality of facts, it is certainly not just the totality of things, a mere
collection of unrelated items, a whole without structure. It must still have a
logical structure, and thus its reality is subject to question by the logical antirealist.

These distinctions may seem fussbudgety,
academic fretwork, but they are needed because each variety of metaphysical
antirealism calls for different considerations. The realism/antirealism debate
for too long has appeared to allow only two alternatives: all and nothing. It
has been needlessly vague because those crucial distinctions have not been made.
One aim of this book is to show that the issue is far more complex than
participants in the debate usually suppose.

I argued in the Introduction that
a clear and plausible defense of antirealism should shun purely abstract
arguments and appeal to specific and readily understandable truths.  One such truth is that logical
expressions, i.e., the expressions distinctive of logic, play an essential role
in all developed talk and thought but almost certainly stand for nothing in the
world. It is the truth on which logical antirealism rests. Standard
examples of such expressions are the sentential operators: “not”
(“~”), “and” (“·“),
“or” (“v”), “if…then…” (“É“);
the quantifiers: “all” (“"“), “some”
(“$“);
and the verb “to be” in its senses of identity (“=“),
existence (“there is,” “exists”), and predication
(“is,” “are”), even when the latter is expressed only
by syntactic order. “Is” is a logical expression in both
“Socrates is human” and “God is,” though standard logic
would express the former not with a separate sign but by the juxtaposition of
the subject and predicate terms (e.g., “Hs,” “H” standing
for “is human” and “s” for “Socrates”), and
would either ignore the latter as ill-formed or translate statements in which
it occurs by employing the particular quantifier “some.”  No abstract argument or obscure
philosophical principle is needed to convince nonphilosophers as well as most
philosophers that, though essential to any cognition above that of infants, such
expressions do not stand for any items, that in the world there is no such object,
for example, as not, all, is,
or and.

Frege used the phrase
“logical objects” for the objects of arithmetic in the context of
his project of reducing arithmetic to logic, a project continued later by
Russell and Whitehead.[176]
Wittgenstein used it for the entities a logical realist may think are required
for understanding the sentential connectives. In the Introduction I applied the
phrase also to facts, in Russell’s sense.  Clearly, it is applicable to
“thoughts” in Frege’s sense.  Both Russellian facts and Fregean
thoughts are categories of entities accepted because of broadly logical
considerations. Both were explicitly introduced as the category of entities
that declarative sentences stand for or express. I have accordingly also counted
declarative sentences as logical expressions, facts being the logical “objects”
to which, if true, they supposedly correspond.  One of the central concerns of logic has
been the analysis of sentences with respect to their logical form. A basic
presupposition of logical analysis is that sentences that are unlike in surface
grammar may share the same logical form. In analysis we begin with the surface
grammar of the sentence but search for what it must have in common with other
sentences, especially those in other languages, if they are to have the same
truth-value and the same implications. That common feature is the logical form
of the sentence. Its representation would require logical expressions.

The logical realist holds that at
least some logical expressions correspond to entities. As we saw in the
previous section, Frege and Russell (at one central stage of his philosophy),
were clearly logical realists.  So
seemed to be Gustav Bergmann, though in the next chapter we will find that this
was not at all clear. Wittgenstein, in Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus and his later works, appeared to be a logical
antirealist, but we have seen that his position would be better described as
semirealism. Logical antirealism was characteristic, even if only tacitly, of traditional
philosophy. For example, Kant wrote that logic abstracts “from all
objects of knowledge,” that it has “itself alone and its
form” to deal with, and that the concern of logic is to give “an
exhaustive exposition and a strict proof of the formal rules of all
thought.”[177] In
effect, he acknowledged the chief thesis of logical antirealism: there are no
logical objects even though logic is present in all thought. All thought, even
when it does not have objects, must conform to logic, but logic has no objects.
This could have been an argument for transcendental idealism additional to
those Kant explicitly offered, but he did not present it as such.

Logical
antirealism leads directly to cosmological antirealism if “fact” is
a logical expression  and the world
is the totality of facts. Perhaps animals, vegetables, and
minerals also have logical structure, but this is not evident as it is in the
case of a fact. Thought and talk about individual
things do usually employ logical concepts and expressions, but only
phenomenalist theories, which analyze statements about material objects as
statements about actual
and  possible experiences, explicitly
attribute logical structure to individual things.  Logical antirealism does not entail ontological antirealism because
individual things have no logical structure, they are not facts and thus
involve neither propositional connectives nor quantifiers in the way facts, and the sentences
expressing them, do. They can be subjected to chemical analysis but not to
logical analysis. The belief that they could be was generated by Wittgenstein's
claim that all complexity is propositional and had been encouraged by Mill's
view that a physical object is nothing but the 'permanent possibility of
experience,' i.e., nothing but its actual and possible appearances, what one
would sense in all relevant circumstances. Much later, Price showed that these
would be unlimited in number, and consequently statements about the object
could not be translated into a conjunction of statements about its appearances.[178]

An antirealism that is only
logical and also only cosmological would be so moderate as to be virtually part
of common sense, the thoughtful nonphilosophical judgment that all theorizing
must respect even if not accept. Common sense would rebel against the
postulation of objects corresponding to the sentential connectives. It is
satisfied with counting them as syncategorematic, mere ancillaries in
assertions, incapable of use as subjects or as predicates. Common sense could
be easily convinced that sentences, the expressions Russell took to stand for
facts, are also “syncategorematic.” They, too, function as neither
names nor predicates. Facts were not on Aristotle’s or any other list of
categories before Russell and Wittgenstein included them in theirs. It would
occur only to philosophers that the sentential connectives and sentences
themselves might stand for anything in the world. The position of semirealism,
of course, would be too technical for common sense to judge.

Only a few philosophers, most
notably Russell, have thought that there are “general facts,” which
correspond to universal sentences, as well as “molecular facts,”
which correspond to molecular, especially negative, sentences. Frege, who
together with Russell was the target of Wittgenstein’s attack on logical
realism,[179]
abhorred Russell’s category of fact (on the grounds that to say that p is
a fact is to say no more than that it is true that p) but he did appeal to the no
less questionable category of objective entities he called
“thoughts,” which are expressed by sentences. Frege also accepted
the existence of general and negative thoughts, as well as of “compound
thoughts” such as conjunctions, disjunctions, and conditionals. His
vigorous arguments, as well as Russell’s, for the irreducibility of general
and negative statements were, in effect, arguments for logical realism.

To
avoid confusion, in this chapter I
shall often follow Frege’s, Russell’s, and Wittgenstein’s practice
of using “general” instead of
“universal,” even though particular (“existential”)
statements and generic statements (to be discussed in chapter 8) are also
general.  None of them thought
that true generic statements stand for
generic facts.  They did not even
consider them.

3. The logical structure of the world.

The
subject matter of metaphysics is said to be being, reality, what exists, or
just “the world” as in Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking.
Its first question is, what is real, what kind of entities exist?
Various answers have been given, e.g., that only material entities exist
(Hobbes), that only mental entities exist (Berkeley), that in addition to
material and mental entities also abstract entities (Plato) or God (Aquinas)
exist.  But however we answer the
question, we take for granted that the world has a structure, that it is not a
mere collection of isolated items.

What kind of structure is
fundamental, absolutely necessary, to the world? Not a causal structure: Hume denied
that there are causal connections, except in the bland sense of spatiotemporal
correlations. Not a physical or even just spatial structure: the dualist holds
that in addition to material entities there are irreducibly nonphysical mental
entities such as thoughts and feelings, and the idealist even holds that
everything is mental.  Both deny
that mental entities are in space: they lack geometrical characteristics and do
not enter in relations such as two-miles-from. Nor is even a temporal structure
absolutely necessary. The Platonist holds that there are abstract entities,
e.g., numbers, which are not in time – they do not enter in relations
such as two-years-earlier-than. The theist holds that the spatiotemporal world
and thus presumably space and time themselves were created by God.

The fundamental structure of the
world, which though seldom mentioned or even considered is denied by no one, is
logical. That a world must have a logical structure is a requirement even more
basic than that a world must be “logically possible,” if the latter
means that it must not “involve contradiction,” for even a
contradiction has logical structure, often as simple as that of “p and not-p.” Astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology focus on the
causal, spatial, temporal, and physical structure of the world. Philosophy, at
least as it was understood by Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein – the
founders of contemporary logic and analytic philosophy – focuses on its
logical structure. If the first question of metaphysics is what is real or
exists, its second question is what kind of structure it must have. And surely the answer is that it must have a logical
structure. Aristotle held that the “science of being qua being,”
i.e., metaphysics, begins with the study of the principles of the
“syllogism,” i.e., logic.[180]

What is meant by “logical
structure”? The answer lies in what is meant by “logic.”
Logic is concerned with the relations between sentences (propositions,
statements, judgments) that hold in virtue of their logical form. And the
logical form of a sentence is best understood as what is left when we
completely abstract from its subject matter, what it is about. According to
Russell’s canonical account, in respect to logical form sentences (propositions)
are either atomic, compound, or general.[181]
Essential to discerning the logical form of a sentence are the logical
expressions it contains. To say that the world must have a logical structure
entails that any adequate description of it must employ such expressions. And we
have no conception of a world that is not, at least in principle, describable.

Nothing would count as a world if
it did not allow for atomic statements, e.g., “This page is white.”
Nothing would count as a world if it did not allow for compound statements,
e.g., “This page is not blue” and “If this page is white then
it is not blue.” And nothing would count as a world if it did not allow
for general statements, e.g., “All winters in Minnesota are severe”
and “There is water on Mars.” It is natural therefore for the
logical realist to see the logical structure of the world as providing room for
atomic facts about the properties and relations of individual things, for
compound facts, most notably, facts about what is not the case (negative facts), what is the case only if something else is the case
(conditional facts), for two facts being both
the case (conjunctive facts), for either
one or the other of two facts being
the case (disjunctive facts), and for general, either universal or particular,
facts.

The logical realist may go
further.  Since nothing would be a
world if it did not allow for saying of a thing what it is, that is, for
predication, the logical realist may hold
that there is in the world a relation or nexus of exemplification or instantiation.
Since nothing would be a world if it did not allow for distinguishing one thing
from another, the logical realist may hold
that there is negation in the world.
And since nothing would be a world if it did not allow for generalization, the logical realist may hold that there is generality in the world. The logical antirealist
disagrees, insisting that, insofar as it is knowable, the world has a logical
structure only because we describe it with a language that contains logical
expressions.

Logical expressions are parts of
sentences.  Sentences are the
vehicles for the description of the world.
I have suggested that we may consider sentences themselves as logical expressions,
and the facts supposed to make them true as logical objects.  The logical antirealist will argue,
however, that a fact is indistinguishable from the sentence it supposedly makes
true.  A fact is a complex entity
with a structure or form that seems to image the structure or form of a
sentence. For example, Russell’s requirement that an atomic fact
“contain” particulars and properties or relations corresponds to
the grammatical requirement that a simple sentence contain a subject and a
predicate, and his distinction between atomic and molecular facts corresponds
to the grammatical distinction between simple and compound sentences.  Indeed, the former correspondence was
explicitly acknowledged in Wittgenstein’s doctrine that atomic sentences
are logical pictures of atomic facts. It is fairly clear that when describing
the ontological characteristics of facts and their logical structure or form Russell
relied on the grammatical characteristics of sentences. Of course, he was
concerned not with the “surface” grammatical form of a sentence but
with its logical form. But one arrives at the latter only by beginning with the
former. Logic is concerned with what sometimes is called logical grammar, not
with ordinary grammar, but we have little if any conception of logical grammar
apart from our conception of ordinary grammar.

The central role of sentences was
explicitly acknowledged in Frege’s explanation of his technical notion of
thought (Gedanke) as the
“sense” (Sinn) of a
sentence. Even though he held that thoughts belong neither in the physical nor
in the mental world, but rather “in a third realm,”[182] Frege
wrote, “The world of thoughts has a model in the world of sentences,
expressions, words, signs. To the structure of the thought there corresponds
the compounding of words into a sentence.”[183]
Russell’s and Wittgenstein’s heavy indebtedness to Frege in logical
theory was freely acknowledged by both. Like Fregean thoughts, Russell’s
and Wittgenstein’s facts, at least those that are atomic, also were
understood as analogous to, even “pictured” by, sentences.

Although the German word Gedanke is a synonym of the English
“thought,” as used by Frege it has no ordinary translation in
English. “Proposition” might be least misleading, as long as we
think of a proposition as an objective item distinct both from the sentences in
the various languages that express it and from the ideas and judgments we
entertain about it. If so, there would be no clear difference between a true
Fregean thought and a Russellian fact. This is why Frege wrote, “What is
a fact? A fact is a thought that is true.”[184] His
view that thoughts are neither mental nor physical may seem mysterious, but as
we saw earlier so might Russell’s and Wittgenstein’s facts. Neither
propositions nor facts are “things” that might enter in spatial
relations, or mental states that might enter in temporal relations. Neither the
proposition nor the fact that this table is two feet from me  at any other distance from me, and
neither is a mental image or state that is earlier or later than some other mental
image or state.

In logic we speak usually of
propositions, sometimes of sentences, not of facts. This is a symptom of our
ambiguous conception of its subject matter, our uneasy attempt to straddle the
perceived chasm between the logic of sentences, which is about language –
a certain behavior of some members of our planet’s fauna and thus
essentially a zoological subject matter – and the logic of facts, which
supposedly is about the world and thus, as Plato might have said, a more
appropriate subject matter for “spectators of all time and all
existence.” According to logical realism, the chasm is real.  According to logical antirealism, it is
an illusion. The logic of the world, the antirealist holds, is not
distinguishable from the logic of words, and Frege’s thoughts, as well as
Russell’s or Wittgenstein’s facts, are merely hypostatized
sentences, shadows that sentences cast upon the world.  I shall have much more to say about the
topic of facts in chapter 9.

The general thesis of metaphysical
antirealism now appears more plausible. What makes a world a world, rather than a congeries of
things, is what requires sentences, not mere lists of names, for our
description of it, namely, a logical structure. But the only conception we have
of logical structure is that of the logical structure of sentences. This is why
in speaking of a world we must appeal to the category of facts. This is why
Wittgenstein unhesitatingly wrote that the world is the totality of facts, not
of things.  Sentences, of course,
are parts of language, and their logical structure is a feature of language.
But language is something human, “ours.” We have no genuine
conception of a language that is both nonhuman and in principle untranslatable
into a human language. Therefore, insofar as we can conceive of the logical
structure of the world, and thus of the world as a world, they depend on us, they are ours, human. Of course, that the
only conception of logical structure we have is that of sentences does not entail that the world does not have logical
structure independently of language. But, surely, it is a good reason for
reaching that conclusion. For it does entail that our cognition of the world,
insofar as it involves logical concepts and employs logical expressions,
depends on language.

Many twentieth century philosophers
have held that all cognition, not
just that involving logical concepts, is dependent on language. Earlier I cited
Wittgenstein’s assertion that “The
limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” Heidegger’s
that “language is the house of being” and that “language is
the happening in which for man beings first disclose themselves to him
each time as beings,” and Quine’s  that “thought, as John B. Watson
claimed, is primarily incipient speech.” These opinions exemplify the
linguistic turn philosophy took in the twentieth century. It was more
fundamental than its earlier “turns,” such as the Platonic turn to
abstract entities, the theological turn in the Middle Ages, and the idealist
turn in the 18th century. For it applies to everything we think is
real, including abstract entities, God, and minds. It led to linguistic
antirealism.

But the linguistic antirealism I
have sketched is not as extreme as that implied by the quotations from
Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Quine. It does not hold indiscriminately, as a matter
of general principle, that the world as we cognize it, as it is “for
us,” depends on language. It restricts the dependence to logical
expressions. It avoids the highhandedness, often characteristic of philosophy, which
the quotations seem to exemplify. It does not hold that all cognition depends on language. It is only a logical
antirealism, even though its implications are far-reaching.

It is thus a limited, moderate,
and for this reason more plausible antirealism. It does not offer a general and
a priori answer to the question whether cognition depends on language. This
question, as we saw in chapter 5, is mainly empirical, to be answered by
neuroscientists, psychologists, and linguists. And the proper answer may well
vary according to what kind of objects of cognition we have in mind. Rocks are
different from headaches, both are different from electrons, and all three are
very different from numbers. It would be rash to suppose that what is true of
our cognition of some is true of our cognition of all. Rock-climbing is not
introspection, and neither is physics. There are also many, very different
kinds of cognition. Some may depend on language while others do not. Surely,
there is cognition in the form of sense perception, enjoyed by infants and
nonhuman animals, which does not involve language. Recognition is a higher form
of cognition, but it too is found in infants and nonhuman animals. And driving
a car involves specialized cognition that only superficially, if at all, finds
or needs expression in language. Creative work in music or painting only
minimally involves talking. Worldly people, especially in the law, politics,
and diplomacy, rely heavily on “reading” facial expressions, which
language notoriously fails to capture.

We achieve greater specificity and
a sharper focus when we ask, Does logical cognition have a distinctive subject matter, is it, at least in part, about anything
distinctively logical? If not, then to that extent logical cognition would
appear to be nothing but use of language, since it would lack the feature
essential to other kinds of cognition: a subject matter, things they are about,
which make them, at least in part, the cognitions they are. Seeing a cat
differs from seeing a dog partly because cats differ from dogs. Seeing a cat
differs from hearing a cat partly because colors and shapes differ from sounds.
It would not follow, however, that all there is to logical cognition is
language. I used the phrase “distinctive subject matter” precisely
because, outside logic, sentences containing logical expressions do have a
subject matter, namely, what is denoted by the nonlogical expressions, the
“descriptive words,” that they also contain. But our question is
whether such sentences have a subject matter insofar as they are logical. The logical
structure of the world may be supplied by language, but the world does not have
only a logical structure: it also
contains the entities that are structured. The tendency to forget this may
explain why philosophers seldom see that logical antirealism, which most of
them accept, at least tacitly, is a version of metaphysical antirealism. They
say, for example, “Of course ‘All humans are mortal’ is about
the world – it is about humans.” They overlook the fact that while
what the sentence says depends on more than the logical expressions
“all” and “are,” it does depend on them. Its
truth-value depends on both the
nonlogical and the logical expressions in it.

In contrast, the statements of logic
employ only logical expressions. If
logical expressions stand for nothing, then the statements of logic have no
extralinguistic significance – a consequence commonly, though rashly,
accepted. But all cognition beyond that of babes, not just the cognition
expressible in logicians’ statements, must be expressible with statements
employing expressions such as the verb “to be” (especially in its
sense of predication), the adverb “not,” sentential connectives
like “or,” and the quantifiers “all” and
“some,” even if, unlike the statements of logic, they employ also nonlogical,
descriptive, expressions. All developed human cognition is logical, in this
broad sense. All statements, not just the statements of logic, employ logical
expressions. A language that lacked them would be either in principle
untranslatable or as primitive as baby “talk.” Therefore, no
developed human cognition is possible without language. This does not entail
but is a good reason for holding that the world, insofar as it is the object at
least of developed cognition, cannot have a character fundamentally different
from what we humans take it to have.

What I mean by developed cognition
need not require higher education – it would include the cognition
expressed by “All sheep eat grass.” If a shepherd did not know that
all sheep eat grass, there would be precious little the shepherd knew. If we
could not say that all sheep eat grass, there would be precious little we could
say. In chapter 8 we shall see that we are more likely to make the generic statement “Sheep eat grass,”
and then the antirealist implications of our reliance on generality would be even
more striking because obviously there are no facts that are just generic. For
now, however, I shall remain within the familiar context of universal
statements. In that context, while the words “sheep,”
“eat,” and “grass” do stand for things in the world,
“all” clearly does not. There is no such entity in the world as all.  It would not be an individual thing, nor
a property or relation of an individual thing. This is why the phrase
“entity in the world as all,”
which I just used, is a grammatical outrage. It follows that there are also no
distinctive, universal, facts to which statements making essential use of
“all” might correspond. The sentence “All sheep eat
grass” stands for nothing distinctive in the world.

If we take advantage of the
familiarity in philosophy of Kant’s term “transcendental,” we
may say that logical concepts and expressions are transcendental. They are
essential at least to any developed cognition of the world, but stand for
nothing in the world. This would be a way of stating the thesis of logical
antirealism. It would hardly be news. Philosophers and grammarians have
commonly called the logical expressions syncategorematic. But they have offered
little explanation or argument, and few have seen the metaphysical
implications.

4. Frege and Russell on Negation and Generality

I
shall take the words “not” and “all” as paradigms of
logical expressions. They are fundamental not only to logic but all developed
cognition.  They express,
respectively, the logical concepts of negation and generality (more accurately,
universality). In this chapter I shall offer a preliminary discussion of both,
mostly in relation to Frege’s and Russell’s classic defense of
logical realism regarding them. Wittgenstein’s logical
antirealism/semirealism, his “fundamental thought” that the logical
constants do not represent, was mainly intended as a rejection of their views.  Chapter 7 will be devoted to a fuller
discussion of generality, but in relation to Wittgenstein’s and Bergmann’s
classic defense of logical antirealism, or at least of logical semirealism. Both
the thesis of logical realism and the thesis of logical antirealism would be
sufficiently established if made plausible with respect to negation and
generality.

Regarding generality, Frege wrote,
“It is surely clear that when anyone uses the sentence ‘all men are
mortal’ he does not want to assert something about some Chief Akpanya, of
whom perhaps he has never heard.”[185] The
sentence is not equivalent to the conjunction of its singular substitution
instances, one of which might be “Chief Akpanya is mortal.” Frege
classified what “all” expresses as an “unsaturated”
entity that is a second-level function, “saturated” by first-level
functions like those expressed by “x is a man” and “x is
mortal,” which in turn are saturated by individual objects such as Chief
Akpanya.[186]
A function is unsaturated, or incomplete, in that it requires “attachment”
to something else, much as the grammatically incomplete expression “is
human” requires attachment to a grammatically complete expression such as
“Chief Akpanya.”  For
example, in the thesis of materialism, “("x)(x is material),”
i.e., “Everything is material,” the universal quantifier “"x”
represents a second-level function, and “x is material” represents
the first-level function that completes it. The latter function is also
incomplete, but what completes it is an individual thing, say, this page.
Frege’s terminology is awkward, but what matters for our purposes here is
his explicit acknowledgement that there is an entity to which the word
“all” corresponds. To be sure, it is an “incomplete”
entity, but so is also the property of being human. Frege called a first-level
function a concept (Begriff), but
like many of his contemporaries he did not mean by “concept”
anything mental. He meant what “property” means in current
philosophy.

Frege also held that there
are negative thoughts, in his technical sense of “thought” I explained
earlier, since “for every thought there is a contradictory thought”
which “appears as made up of that thought and negation,” though not
as “mutually independent” parts. “The thought does not, by
its make-up, stand in any need of completion; it is self-sufficient. Negation
on the other hand needs to be completed by a thought. The two components
are…quite different in kind….One completes, the other is completed.
And it is by this completion that the whole is kept together.”[187]
Negation is incomplete, just as the second-level function expressed by
“all” is incomplete. The difference is that negation is completed
by a complete entity, viz. a thought, while a second-level function is
completed by an incomplete entity, a first-level function. But negation is not
something mental or subjective. It is not “the act of denial.”[188]
Nor is it a kind of judging: “Negation does not belong to the act of
judging, but is a constituent of a thought.”[189]
It is an objective part of a no less objective entity, viz. a negative thought.
The sentence “It is not the case that this page is blue” consists
of two parts: “it is not the case that” and “this page is blue.”
The later could stand by itself, the former could not. But what the whole
sentence says is no more psychological or subjective than what “This page
is blue” says.

Russell too was a realist
about generality and negation, though he argued for the existence of general
and negative facts, not Fregean thoughts. Regarding generality, he wrote,
“When you have taken all the particular men that there are, and found
each one of them severally to be mortal, it is definitely a new fact that all
men are mortal.” For, “In order to arrive [by “complete
induction”] at the general statement ‘All men are mortal’,
you must already have the general statement ‘All men are among those I
have enumerated.’” True general statements, such as “All men
are mortal,” stand for “general facts.” Therefore,
“there are general facts.” Moreover, because “You cannot ever
arrive at a general fact by inference from particular facts, however
numerous,” “there must be primitive
knowledge” of some general facts.[190]
There is therefore “the necessity of admitting general facts.”[191]

Russell also argued that
“there are negative facts” and that “negativeness is an
ultimate.”[192] He
wrote, “Usually it is said that, when we deny something, we are really
asserting something else which is incompatible with what we deny. If we say
‘roses are not blue,’ we mean ‘roses are white or red or
yellow.’ But such a view will not bear a moment’s scrutiny.... The
only reason we can deny ‘the table is square’ by ‘the table
is round’ is that what is round is not
square. And this has to be a fact,
though just as negative as the fact that this table is not square.”[193]

In discussions of our topic one
often finds, in addition to logical realism and logical antirealism, the
supposedly third option of logical reductionism. For example, in the case of
universal statements, the realist holds that the universal quantifier “"x,”
or the word “all,” stands for a real entity, whether a Fregean
second-level function or some other kind of logical object. The antirealist
denies this. The reductionist, also finding the reality of such an entity
implausible, “analyzes” universal statements as the conjunctions, and
particular statements as the disjunctions, of the singular statements that
instantiate them, claiming that this is what they “really”
say.  Of course, the word “and,”
or the symbol “·,” which is essential to a conjunction, and
the word “or,” or the symbol “v,” are also logical expressions,
and the reality of any logical objects they might stand for is no less dubious.
In any case, universal and particular statements are not equivalent to such
conjunction and disjunctions. Gustav Bergmann took this to be obvious: “What can be said with the quantifiers cannot be
said without them….Consider (1) ‘(x)G(x)’ and (2)
‘G(a1). G(a2)… G(aN).’ (1)
implies (2). (2) does not imply (1).”[194] \

Sometimes the reductionist appeals
implicitly to the very same concepts that are to be explained, and thus is no
longer properly called “reductionist.” This is case with the claim
that the sentential connectives are “defined” by the corresponding
truth-tables and that this is “all there is” to what they mean. For
example, not-p is said to be
“merely a truth function” of p, on the grounds that not-p is true if and only if p is false. But we have no grasp of
falsity except as the negation of truth, regardless of what theory of truth we
hold, and thus the reductionist is implicitly appealing to negation when
offering that explanation of negation. As Russell remarked, it is
“extremely difficult to say what exactly happens when you make a positive
assertion that is false, unless you are going to admit negative facts.”[195] In his
earlier article “On Denoting” Russell had claimed that a universal
statement such as (x) jx means that jx is
always true, and that ($x)jx means that jx is sometimes true. He pointed out repeatedly that
“always true” and “sometimes true” express primitive,
indefinable notions. But, if so, we could say the same about “all”
and “some,” and avoid puzzling attempts to say what they
“mean.”

Reductionism is often little more
than a front for antirealism (for example, the “reduction” of
mental states to brain states is little more than the denial of the reality of
mental states). But, as we just saw, in the case of logic it seems to merely
replace some logical statements with other logical statements, e.g., universal
statements with conjunctions of singular statements even though a realist view
of the sentential operators, including conjunction, is no more plausible than a
realist view of the quantifiers.

This is often overlooked because of
the common assumption that necessary equivalence is identity. If you are more
comfortable with one of the sides of the equivalence, you may be tempted to
suppose that what the other side says is “really nothing more” than
what the side you prefer says.  But,
clearly, this is a mistake. It is necessarily the case that p if and only if p or p, but it would be silly, or at lest unmotivated, to speak of
reducing either one to the other, of saying for example that what p says is really nothing more than what p or p says. In mathematics, to use
Kant’s example, it is necessarily the case that 7+5=12, but we would not
want to say that one side of the identity sign is reducible to the other.

Frege’s and Russell’s
views on generality and negation were explicit espousals of both logical
realism and logical nonreductionism. According to Russell general and negative
facts are objective constituents of the world, not reducible to any other kinds
of facts. It would seem that what makes them general or negative must also be
in the world, though Russell vacillated about the matter. Frege did not.  He was explicit: general thoughts
involve a second-level function, negative thoughts include negation as one of
their two components. One would think that Russell’s general and negative
facts must also contain components represented, respectively, by the quantifier
and the negation sign. For, if they did not, how would general facts differ
from the corresponding singular facts and how would negative facts differ from
the corresponding positive facts? If there is an item in the world represented
by “"x
(Φx)” as well as an item represented by “Φa,” as
Russell held, how would the two differ if not in virtue of
“something” in one that is not in the other, presumably the
presence in what “"x (Φx)” represents of what “"x”
represents? Similarly, if there is an item in the world represented by “~
p,” as well as an item represented by “p,” how would they
differ if not in virtue of “something” in one of them that is not
in the other, presumably what “~” represents? For, according to
Russell, the differences must be in the facts, in the world, not in our
language or our minds. According to Frege, the presence of a second-level
function in general thoughts is essential to the truth-values of general
sentences and the presence of negation in negative thoughts is essential to the
truth-values of negative sentences. Surely, the presence in Russell’s
general facts of something expressed by the quantifier is essential to the
truth-values of general sentences, and the presence of negation in
Russell’s negative facts is essential to the truth-values of negative
sentences. If, as Russell held, the truth of a statement depends on what is in
the world, then what is essential to its truth presumably must also be in the
world.

The logical realist faces two
tasks. The first, perhaps accomplished by Frege and Russell, is to refute
logical reductionism, the view that “upon analysis” the question of
the reality of logical objects does not arise because the logical constants
that appear to stand for them have been “analyzed away.” By showing
that at least in the case of negation and generality this is not so Frege and
Russell forced antirealists to shun the comfort of slogans like “A
negative statement is just the corresponding false affirmative
statement,” “Universal statements are just the conjunctions, and
particular statements the disjunctions, of the singular statements that
instantiate them,” or “Molecular statements are just
truth-functions of their components.” The second task the logical realist
faces, however, is to convince us that, since logical reductionism is false,
the logical constants do represent entities in the world. The plausibility of
Frege’s and Russell’s views attached to their nonreductionism, not
to their realism, which remained implausible.

The idea that “all”
and “some” correspond to entities has seldom been entertained. As
we shall see in chapter 7, Gustav Bergmann, one of the few philosophers who
thought deeply about this topic, did write: “Each quantifier represents
something which is sometimes presented. Had it never been presented, we would
not know what the quantifier meant.”[196] But
this is an (abductive) argument for a
statement of phenomenological observation, a statement about what is
“presented,” not a report of that phenomenological observation,
which is what it should have been, if Bergmann were right. And surely such a
report would have been false. But Bergmann at least was aware of what would be
necessary if logical realism is to be defended. We shall see in chapter 7 that
so was Wittgenstein, and that in his later work Bergmann revised his
uncompromisingly realist stand.

Even if Frege’s and
Russell’s arguments against reductionism in the case of negative
sentences are accepted, antirealism about negation would remain compelling.[197] That negation corresponds to nothing in the world seems almost a
tautology. Sartre claimed that it is consciousness that
“introduces” negation into the world precisely because he believed
that it is not “already” in the world.[198] The
words “no” and “not” are learned early in childhood to
signal the absence or nonexistence of a thing, to refuse an offered object, or
to reject what one is told, and later to deny the truth of what one hears or
reads. But surely they do not stand for any entity such as absence or
nonexistence. Antirealism about generality would also remain compelling, for
much the same reasons.

In denying that logical
expressions stand for entities, the logical antirealist is not just denying an
application of the simplistic “Fido”– Fido principle,
according to which every word is a name. What is denied is the natural, not at
all simplistic even if ultimately mistaken, assumption that if a word is to
serve a cognitive role then it must relate
to something in the world in a specific, distinct, and comprehensible way, even
if it does not name it, that there
must be something in what is cognized that grounds its cognitive role even if
it is not named by the word, and that this “something” is
accessible to us, if not directly in perception, like colors and books, then
indirectly in sophisticated thought, like quarks and perhaps God.  The logical antirealist claims that in
the case of logical expressions none of this is true.

This claim should not be confused
with the much weaker claim, to which chapter 5 was devoted, that language is causally necessary for cognition.
Presumably, a human being who lacks a language cannot have detailed knowledge
of astronomy or of medieval history. But surely God can, and for all we know so
can intelligent life-forms in outer space.
We may not understand what their knowledge would be like, but then
neither can we visualize a non-Euclidean space or have auditory images of the
high-frequency sounds that dogs but not humans can hear. The same may be said
about humdrum cognitions like that expressed in an inventory of the thousands
of chairs in a large building. We cannot make the inventory without using
language or other symbols. But, surely, God can.

Could the thought expressed in a
universal statement like “All my toys are upstairs” be entertained
by a child before learning the word “all”? Perhaps it could, if it
were just a collection of several singular thoughts, e. g., that the doll is
upstairs, that the ball is upstairs, and that the whistle is upstairs. But a
mere collection of thoughts is not even what a conjunctive statement, a
statement requiring the sentential connective “and.” And even if it
were, it certainly is not what the universal statement, the statement employing
“all,” expresses. As Russell would have pointed out, the
conjunction must include as additional conjunct also the universal statement “These are all the toys I have.” A
universal statement is “made true” not just by the “atomic
facts” corresponding to its singular substitution instances, but also by
“the further fact about the world that those are all the [relevant]
atomic facts...[which] is just as much an objective fact about the world as any
of them are.”[199]

The linguisticism of the position
we have reached so far regarding negative and universal statements appears
obvious. It does fit the usual formulations of linguistic antirealism. But
these formulations make no distinction between ontological and cosmological
realism/antirealism, much less between metaphysical and logical
realism/antirealism or between antirealism and semirealism. For example,
Michael Dummett writes, “[U]ntil we have achieved an understanding of our
language, in terms of which we apprehend the world, and without which,
therefore, there is for us no world, so long will our understanding of
everything else be imperfect.”[200] To
attempt to “strip thought of its linguistic clothing,” he also
says, is to confuse it with “its subjective inner accompaniments.”[201]
Dummett may be right, but surely his judgment is rashly abstract. As we have
seen, there are important differences in respect of our “apprehending”
them between the world and plants, animals, or minerals, between this book and
all books, between this page and its being white, and as we shall see in
chapter 8 between winters in Iowa being severe and all winters in Iowa being
severe.

Cognition of the world involves
confrontation with nonlinguistic items, in sense perception, introspection,
perhaps also intellectual and even mystical intuition. Such confrontation need
not involve language. A neonate’s exercise of normal sight does not. We
need not deny the independent reality of the items thus confronted. Thus we
need not deny that we have cognition that is unmediated by language. But it
would be cognition at its most primitive level. Since it would not involve
statements, it could not even appear to have facts as its objects and
therefore, if the world is the totality of facts, to count as cognition of a world.

Chapter Seven: LOGICAL
SEMIREALISM

1. Ineffability.

In
the previous chapter I offered a preliminary account of logical antirealism
with respect to negation and generality.
One need not be a metaphysical antirealist to doubt their existence as
entities in the world.  Distaste for
such entities has led to reductionism, the attempt to show, often in the
context of the realism/antirealism debate, that negative and general statements
do not really say what they seem to say. In the previous chapter we saw how Frege
and Russell dealt with this attempt.
Reductionism is far less plausible in the case of “not” and
“all” than in the case of sentential connectives like
“and,” “or,” and “only if.” Later analytic
philosophers provided little detailed discussion of negation, leaving that task
to phenomenologists like Heidegger and Sartre. Surprisingly, they also had
little to say also about generality.
An exception in this respect was Wittgenstein. So was Gustav Bergmann. I
shall focus in this chapter on generality, because of its obvious, direct,
relevance to cosmological antirealism.

Wittgenstein usually called universal statements just
“general,” as Russell had done. Sometimes, so did Bergmann.  In discussing their views, I will too.
All three took for granted that particular statements are equivalent to
negations of negative universal statements (($x) Fx
º ~ ("x) ~ Fx)), and
thus to need no separate discussion, though as we shall see Bergmann vacillated
on this point in his early work. None considered the status of generic
statements, statements like “Winters in Iowa are severe” and “Patients
with prior strokes benefit from taking Lipitor,” the ubiquity of which provides the case for
antirealism with decisive support. Generic statements will be the topic of
chapter 8. The present chapter is devoted to universal statements, statements
like “All winters in Iowa are severe” and “All
patients with prior strokes benefit from taking Lipitor.”

The logical expressions for
generality are of special relevance to cosmological antirealism, antirealism
about the world. Antirealism regarding the other logical expressions may lead also
to ontological antirealism, antirealism about things. But I shall not consider
this possibility here.  I want to
present here a version of antirealism that is measured, discerning, and as
cautious and uncontroversial as possible. Cosmological antirealism is such a
version. It questions only the reality of the world understood as the totality
of facts. It does not question the reality of the world understood as the
totality of things.  It does not
question the reality of “animals, vegetables, or minerals,” and
thus it remains safely in accord with common sense, which would find
Wittgenstein’s notion of the word as the totality of facts, not of
things, too philosophical to fathom.

A serious discussion of general
statements must focus on what Wittgenstein and Bergmann said about them. With
the exception of Frege and Russell, considered in the previous chapter, there
is little of metaphysical import to be found elsewhere. According to Bergmann,
the universal and the particular quantifiers stand for items with which we are
sometimes “presented,” i.e., of which we are sometimes aware. Few
have agreed with him. Few had agreed even with Russell’s weaker claim
that at least there are general facts, of some of which we have primitive
knowledge. Bergmann modified his view later, moving closer to the position
Wittgenstein had held. Though adamant in opposing Russell’s logical
realism, Wittgenstein did not merely deny that there are general facts. He also
offered a positive view, which Bergmann’s later view resembled in
important respects. Both represented, with unparalleled sophistication, the
middle ground between simplistic realism and simplistic antirealism that I have
called semirealism.

Of course, general statements had
been a central subject matter of logic since Aristotle’s syllogistic. But
when Frege invented modern quantification theory, they became also a
fundamental concern of metaphysics. Contemporary logicians and metaphysicians seldom
ask what, if anything, general statements correspond to in the world. But, as
we saw in the previous chapter, the founders of analytic philosophy, Frege and
Russell, did, and the question was a major theme also in Wittgenstein’s
and Bergmann’s works. All five – Aristotle, Frege, Russell,
Wittgenstein, and Bergmann – were aware that there could be no genuine world if there were not
generality in the world. This is why all five also saw the tie of the topic to
what later became known as the realism/antirealism issue, even though
for Aristotle generality involved universals, for Frege general
“thoughts,” and for Russell, Wittgenstein, and Bergmann general
“facts” or “complexes.”

Frege held that general statements
express the saturation of second-level functions by first-level functions;
Russell, that if true they stand for general facts; Wittgenstein, that they
involve matters that can only be “shown,” not “said”;
and Bergmann, that they involve the entities generality and existence, for
which the universal and the particular quantifiers respectively stand.

Like Frege and Russell, Bergmann rejected the facile reductionist
view of universal statements as the disguised conjunctions, and of particular
statements as the disguised disjunctions, of their singular substitution
instances.  In his early paper “Generality
and Existence” he argued that, like “individuality, universality,
and exemplification,” generality and existence belong to the
“world’s form.” One is “presented” with them, but
they do not “exist” – rather, they “subsist.”[202] Thus Bergmann
already seemed inclined toward only semirealism regarding generality, not realism
though also not antirealism. He used “existence” in two senses: the
sense of “some,” which the particular quantifier expresses, and the
sense of “exist” in which the world’s form does not exist.
Later, he expressed regret over the ambiguity. It is absent from the
posthumously published New Foundations of
Ontology, where Bergmann’s views received their most developed and
detailed formulation.

“Generality and
Existence” had been preceded by “Ineffability, Ontology, and
Method.”[203]
Bergmann described the two articles as “materially one.” The first
topic of “Ineffability, Ontology, and Method” was the
“ineffability” of individuality and exemplification.  He wrote, “When I know that this
is a green spot, I know also that (1) the spot is an individual, (2) the color
is a character, and (3) the former exemplifies the latter (and not, perhaps,
the latter the former).  How could I
know all this if it were not, in some sense, presented to me?”[204] But
what was thus presented could not be
also represented, at least not
without futility. “Looking at a name…I  know…even if I do not know which
thing it has been attached to as a label…the kind of thing, whether
individual or character, to which it has been or could be attached.”[205] Saying
that it is an individual or that it is a character would tell one nothing, for it presupposes
what it purports to say.  Its
even having sense depends on its being true. Yet the sentence is not
gibberish.

Bergmann went on to say that a
certain name “is on the lips of every likely reader,” but that he
would not mention it because he did not “on this occasion wish to make
assertions about the reading of a notoriously difficult text.”[206] The
name of course was Wittgenstein’s, and the text was Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Wittgenstein had written, “In
a certain sense we can talk about formal properties of objects and states of
affairs… It is impossible, however, to assert by means of propositions
that such internal properties and relations obtain:  rather, this makes itself manifest in
the propositions that represent the relevant states of affairs”
(4.122).  As we saw in chapter 4, by
“formal” or “internal” property Wittgenstein meant such
properties as being an object and being a fact, “external property”
being reserved for what Bergmann meant by “character,” e.g., color
or shape. Statements about an object say what external properties it has.
Formal properties, however, cannot be properly predicated, “said,” though
they can be shown.

The similarity of Bergmann’s
views in “Ineffability, Ontology, and Method” and “Generality
and Existence” to Wittgenstein’s views in the Tractatus was obvious, as Bergmann readily acknowledged. It
involved, however tacitly, Wittgenstein’s distinction between “saying”
and “showing,” which Wittgenstein later called the main contention
in the Tractatus since it concerned
“the cardinal problem of philosophy.” In chapter 4 I noted that
some interpreters, for example, Cora Diamond and Warren Goldfarb, deny that
according to the Tractatus there is
anything that can be shown but cannot be said. I pointed out, however, that Wittgenstein
held that what only shows itself is “the higher” (das Höhere). Surely, he did not
think that the higher is nothing. To say that Socrates is an individual, rather
than, say, a property or a relation, is not to make a remark about
Socrates’s properties, but neither is it to say nothing. To speak of the
sense of life is not like speaking of the length of human life, but it is
hardly speaking of nothing.

The reception of
Wittgenstein’s and of Bergmann’s views in the philosophical
community were similar, perhaps because both referred to the ineffable.  Both dealt with metaphysical questions
that few philosophers had even considered, and offered answers of which no
previous philosophers had been aware. Bergmann’s critics complained that
his philosophy is a Meinongian jungle, or they just avowed that they found it
“too difficult.” The critics of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus disparaged it as “too
metaphysical,” or they just interpreted it in terms of the much later Philosophical Investigations – they
found misery in Wittgenstein’s glory, and glory in Wittgenstein’s
misery, as Bergmann sarcastically put it.[207]

The ineffable, what only shows
itself, is not nothing. It does show
itself. One is inclined to ask, If it is not nothing, then what kind of being
or reality does it have, what is its “ontological status”? Natural
though this question may be, it presupposes the sharp and unilluminating
distinction between what is real and what is not real, which Wittgenstein
attempted to bypass with his distinction between saying and showing. I have
already discussed the distinction in other contexts, and here I shall consider
the details of how it affected his account of generality in the Tractatus and later works.

2.
Wittgenstein on Generality

In Tractatus 5, Wittgenstein wrote that “A proposition is a
truth-function of elementary propositions.”  He had explained that “The
simplest kind of proposition, an elementary proposition, asserts the existence
of a state of affairs” (4.21), and that
“It is obvious that the analysis of propositions must bring us to
elementary propositions…” (4.221). (In the Introduction to
the Second Edition of Principia Mathematica,
Russell wrote that “Atomic and molecular propositions together are
‘elementary propositions.’””[208]  It seems to follow that a general
proposition is also a truth-function, presumably of its singular
(“elementary”) substitution instances. And so, in a letter to Wittgenstein written in 1919, Russell objected: “[In
an account of general (universal) propositions in terms of elementary
propositions,] it is necessary also to be given the proposition
that all elementary prop[ositions]
are given.”[209] As we
saw in the previous chapter, Russell had argued that, for example, the
universal proposition “All men are mortal” is not equivalent to
“Socrates is a man and Plato is a man and Aristotle is a man
and...,” unless another
universal proposition such as “All men have been enumerated” or
“These are all the men there are” is added to the conjunction. If
“All men are mortal” is translated as “(x) (if x is a man
then x is mortal),” which seems to say that every object is such that if it is a man then it is mortal,
Russell’s objection would be that it is not equivalent to the conjunction
of all singular statements of the form “if x is a man then x is
mortal” unless the proposition that all
objects have been enumerated or taken into account is added to the conjunction.
The thesis of materialism, “(x) (x is material),” would not be
equivalent to the conjunction of all statements of the form “x is
material,” unless we added that we have considered all objects, all values of the variable x.

Wittgenstein’s reply to
Russell’s objection was vehement.
He did not deny Russell’s logical point, which amounted to
reminding us that the rule of universal instantiation is not a rule of
equivalence. Rather, Wittgenstein wrote, “There is no such proposition
[as that all elementary propositions are given]! That all elementary
propositions are given is shown by
there being none having an elementary sense which is not given…”
And he added: “I’m afraid you [Russell] haven’t really got
hold of my main contention, to which the whole business of logical
prop[osition]s is only a corollary. The main point is the theory of what can be
expressed [gesagt, said] by
prop[osition]s – i.e., by language – (and, which comes to the same,
what can be thought) and what can not
be expressed by prop[osition]s, but only shown (gezeight)”; which, I believe, is the cardinal problem of
philosophy.”[210]

Wittgenstein in effect pointed out
the implications of his distinction between saying and showing for the notion
of the totality of elementary propositions.
As we saw in chapter 4, the distinction is especially clear when applied to
formal or internal properties, such as being an object.  These properties can only be shown. This
is why we cannot speak of the “totalities” determined by them: it
is nonsensical to speak of the total number of objects or facts, because
“object” and “fact” signify formal concepts (4.1272).
If “fact” is a formal concept, surely so is
“proposition,” and therefore also “elementary
proposition,” since propositions are logical pictures of facts

There is no such proposition as
Russell’s “all elementary propositions are given” because
“proposition” is a formal concept, like “object” and
“fact.” In his objection, Russell seemed to take for granted what
later was called the “substitutional” interpretation of
quantification, according to which, roughly, general statements refer to all
the elementary statements that are their substitution instances. According to
the alternative, more intuitive, “objectual” interpretation of
quantification, general statements refer to all values of the individual
variable they contain, that is, all objects.[211]
Whether the two interpretations in fact require such reference is a debatable
question, but we need not consider it here. What matters is that even if
Russell had taken for granted the objectual interpretation, Wittgenstein’s
reply would have been similar.  Russell’s
objection would have been that the proposition “all objects are
given” must be given, and Wittgenstein would have replied that there is
no such proposition because “object” signifies a formal concept.

This
has to be understood with some care. It does not mean that there are no
universal propositions. What is meant is that a universal proposition is not about propositions or about objects, and thus does not say
anything about all propositions or all objects, because, “proposition”
and “object” being formal concepts, no proposition could be about propositions or objects. For
example, the logically harmless “(x) (x is material)” must not be
confused with “(x) (if x is an object then x is material),” which
employs the formal concept “object” and therefore says nothing.
Indeed, this is readily appreciated in common discourse.  It is how we ordinarily understand
universal propositions. We find it natural to say that “All men are
mortal” is about all men, not, as logic suggests, that it is about all
individual things, including the moon, my pen, your feet, etc., saying about
each that if it is a man then it is mortal. Saying the latter belongs only in
the classroom. “All men are mortal” does not include the predicate
“is an object,” the only predicates in it are “is a
man” and “is mortal.” If stated as “(x) (if x is a man
then x is mortal),” the only expression in it other than those predicates
would be the variable “x,” which is neither a name nor a predicate.
It is, rather, “the proper sign for the pseudo-concept object” (4.1272).

Wittgenstein’s
reply to Russell appealed, not to some “analysis” of general
propositions that was different from Russell’s, but to the formal status
of the property of being a proposition, and thus of the property of being an
elementary proposition. Like Russell, he refused to
analyze a universal proposition as the conjunction, the truth-functional
product, of its singular substitution instances: “I dissociate the
concept all from
truth-functions…” (Tractatus
5.521). On the other hand, he did not deny that, “in a certain
sense,” a universal proposition is equivalent to that conjunction:
“Indeed the understanding of general propositions palpably depends on the
understanding of elementary propositions” (4.411).

Are 4.411 and 5.521 consistent? The
answer is provided by the three sentences that immediately follow 5.521:
“What is peculiar to the generality-sign is first, that it indicates a
logical prototype, and secondly, that it gives prominence to constants”
(5.522), “The generality-sign occurs as an argument” (5.523), and
“If objects are given, then at the same time we are given all objects. If elementary propositions
are given, then at the same time all
elementary propositions are given…” (5.524).  The occurrence of the variable
“x” in “(x) Fx” “gives” objects in the
sense that the variable ranges over objects
–  it is objects that it
admits as values, rather than, say, properties or propositions. The
generality-sign in “(x) Fx” is “(x) (...x),” the form
of “(x) Fx” in virtue of which it is a general proposition.[212] It may
indeed be said to indicate a “logical prototype.” And it may be
said to occur in the proposition as an argument because it is part of what
determines the truth-value of “(x) Fx,” just as a name put in place
of the variable x in Fx would be part of what determines the truth-value of the
resulting singular proposition. The statement “(x) fx” is a
truth-function of its substitution instances, not because it is replaceable by
the conjunction “fa . fb . fc ….,” but because its truth
depends, in a straightforward, literal, sense, on their truth. But this only
shows itself. It is not and cannot be said.

If the variable “x”
“gives” objects in the sense that it takes objects as its values,
the generality-sign “(x) (...x)” may be said to give all objects.  A universal proposition is thus,
“in a certain sense,” about all objects (all values of
“x”), but this is not something it says, it is something it shows.
The claim that “There are objects” is a pseudo-proposition does not
mean that there are no universal propositions. For such propositions are not about objects, even though the variable
in them is understood as ranging over objects. They do not contain the
predicate “x is an object.”

This is
why a general proposition might be said to “refer” to all objects,
if we accept the objectual interpretation, or to all elementary propositions,
if we accept the substitutional interpretation. But such
“reference” would consist in showing, not saying. Since
“object” is a formal concept, “(x) fx” does not say that all objects are f. Nor does it
say that all elementary propositions of the form “fx” are true,
since “elementary proposition” is also a formal concept.

All propositions of the form
“fx” may be said to be shown
by that form, in the straightforward sense that it is their form – this is why “(x) fx” is a general proposition.
In a no less straightforward sense, the truth of “(x) fx” depends
on there not being a proposition of the form “fx” that is false.  But “(x) fx” does not say that there is no proposition of the
form “fx” that is false. It is not a proposition about
propositions. Since “proposition” is a formal concept, there can be
no proposition about all propositions of the form “fx” or of any
other form.

One of Russell’s complaints in
his letter to Wittgenstein was that “it is awkward to be unable to speak
of [the negation of all the values of the propositional variable ].”
Wittgenstein replied: “This touches the cardinal question of what can be
expressed by a prop[osition] and what can’t be expressed, but only shown.
I can’t explain it at length here. Just think that, what you want to say
by the apparent prop[ositin] ‘there are 2 things’ is shown by there
being two names which have different meanings….e.g., f(a,
b)…doesn’t say that there are two things, it says something quite
different; but whether it’s true or false, it SHOWS what you want to
express by saying: ‘there are 2 things.’” Then Wittgenstein
added: “I suppose you [Russell] didn’t understand the way, how I
separate in the old notation of generality what is in it truth-function and
what is pure generality. A general prop[osition] is a truth-function of all
PROP[OSITION]S of a certain form…I suppose you don’t understand the
notation [for the values of the propositional variable ].
It does not mean ‘for all values of .”[213]

I suggest that “what is truth
function” in “(x) fx” is what is expressed by
“(x)…,” and that “what is pure generality” is
what is expressed by “fx.” All propositions of the form
“fx” may be said to be shown
by that form, in the straightforward sense that it is their form – this is the “pure generality” in
“(x) fx.” And in a no less straightforward sense, the truth of
“(x) fx” depends on there not being a proposition of the form
“fx” that is false – this is the “truth function”
in “(x) fx.” But “(x) fx” does not say that there is no proposition of the form “fx” that
is false. It is not a proposition about propositions. Since
“proposition” is a formal concept, there can be no proposition
about propositions of the form “fx” or of any other form.

While the distinction between
saying and showing has a reasonably clear and important application to
propositions of the forms “x is an object” and “next-to is a
relation,” how it applies to other, more complicated cases is less clear
though not less important. This is certainly true of its application to general
propositions. To understand it better, we may take advantage of the notion of
presupposition that Strawson proposed decades later and we examined in chapter
2, and assume, at least provisionally, that presupposing something includes
implicitly reference to it. Then, if we accept the objectual interpretation of
quantification, we can hold that, though “(x) Fx” does not refer to
objects and thus does not say that all objects are F, it may be taken to presuppose such reference and thus to
refer to objects implicitly. It is “(x) (if x is an object then x is F),”
not “(x) Fx,” that explicitly mentions and thus refers to objects,
and for this reason it is inadmissible. The point may become clearer if we
return to the statement “All men are mortal.” Translated as
“(x) (if x is a man then x is mortal),” it does not say that all objects are such that if they are men
then they are mortal, but it may be taken to presuppose this since the variable
x ranges over all objects and thus to refer implicitly to all objects. What
“All men are mortal” does say is just that all men are mortal. It
is about men, not about objects. Were we to accept the substitutional
interpretation of quantification, we could hold that “(x) Fx” does
not say that all elementary
propositions of the form “Fx” are true, but it can be taken to presuppose this and thus to implicitly
refer to all elementary propositions. The actual statement “All men are
mortal” does not say that all propositions of the form “if x is a
man then x is mortal” are true, but it may be taken to presuppose this.
What it does say is just that all men are mortal. It is about men, not about
elementary propositions.

After his return to Cambridge in 1929, Wittgenstein continued working on
the topic of generality.  But what, according to the Tractatus, was shown by a general proposition, whether universal or particular, in
Philosophical Remarks, written
shortly after his return though published posthumously, was now described as possibilities left open by the
proposition, like an incomplete or partially indefinite picture: “The
general proposition ‘I see a circle on a red background’ appears
simply to be a proposition which leaves possibilities open. A sort of
incomplete picture. A portrait in which, e.g., the eyes have not been painted
in.  But what would this generality
have to do with the totality of objects?”[214] Also: “If I give a correct description of a
visual field in which three red circles stand on a green ground, it surely
won’t take the form of saying ‘($x (x, y, z): x is circular and red and y is circular
and red, etc. etc.’..... That is, in such a case, you may say: Certainly
I know that three things have the property φ, but I don’t know
which; and you can’t say this in the case of the three circles.”[215]

A
couple of years later, in Philosophical
Grammar, also published posthumously, Wittgenstein returned
to the topic. Regarding the position he had defended in the Tractatus, he wrote: “My
view about general propositions was that ($x).
φx is a logical sum and that though its terms are not enumerated here, they are capable of being
enumerated….For if they can’t be enumerated we don’t have a
logical sum….Of course, the explanation of ($x). φx as a logical sum is
indefensible…. [But] it is correct that ($x).
φx behaves in some ways like a logical sum and (x). φx like a
product; indeed for one use of the words
‘all’ and ‘some’ my old explanation is correct,
–  for instance for ‘all
the primary colours occur in this picture’… But for cases like
‘all men die before they are 200 years old’ my explanation is not
correct.”[216] I take
Wittgenstein to mean that the sentence about the primary colors would be an
exception because “primary color” is an abbreviation, say, of
“red, green, or blue,” and so the sentence would be an abbreviation
of “red, green, and blue occur in this picture,” not a general
statement.

Wittgenstein
also wrote, “If I say ’there is a
black circle in the square’, it always seems to me that here again I have
something simple in mind, and don’t have to think of different possible
positions or sizes of the circle. And yet one may say: if there is a circle in
the square, it must be somewhere and have some size. But in any case there
cannot be any question of my thinking in advance of all the possible positions
and sizes….I would like to say that in the proposition ’there is a
black circle in the square’ the particular positions are not mentioned at
all. In the picture I don’t see the position, I disregard
it….”[217] When asserting the general proposition
“There is a black circle in the square,” one does not mention the
other possible positions and sizes the circle might have had, one does not
think of them, they are disregarded. Indeed, one does not mention even the
position it does have. Of course, the circle does have a position, one of an
indefinite number of possible positions, but none is mentioned in “There
is a black circle in the square.” Wittgenstein did not explain these
remarks in detail. Nevertheless, they do fit what he had said, not in the Tractatus but in his 1919 correspondence
with Russell: the possible positions of the circle are not “said”
but “show” themselves.

In
Wittgenstein’s earlier terminology, which he no longer employed, we might
say that the possible positions of the circle are not “said” but
“show” themselves. According to Russellian logic, the universal
statement “(x) Φx” says that all individual objects are Φ, that everything is
Φ, and that ($x). Φx
says that some individual objects are Φ,
whichever they might happen to be. But in the Tractatus Wittgenstein had held that “it is nonsensical
to speak of the total number of objects,” indeed of objects at all, since “object” is a formal concept.
Now, in Philosophical Grammar, he makes
the further claim that general statements are often, perhaps usually, not even
intended to be used in accordance with Russellian logic. The statement
“There is a circle in this square” is not intended to say anything
about all objects, not even about all objects that are in the square. In
effect, Wittgenstein suggests that the general particular (“existential”)
statement “There is a circle in the square” and the general
universal statement “There are only two things that are circles in this
square” are better understood as analogous to the singular statement
“This circle is in this square,” rather than to quantified
statements containing a variable ranging over all individual objects, or even
over just all circles in the square. But how then do the general statements
differ from the singular statement?

We
find no answer in Philosophical Grammar. The answer Wittgenstein had provided in his 1919 reply to
Russell was that the generality of a general statement consists not in what it
says but in what it shows. He insisted that our use or understanding of general
statements is far removed from what Russell’s Principia Mathematica tells us.
We do not use “There is a circle in the square” to say something
about all things, or even about all circles, viz., that some are
in the square. We certainly do not use it to say that it is not the case that no circles are in the square.

But
In Philosophical Grammar Wittgenstein
expressed doubts about the very propriety of representing ordinary general
propositions in the canonical forms of Principia Mathematica. “[A]
proposition like ‘there are two circles in this square’ is rendered
as ‘there is no object that has the property of being a circle in this
square without being the circle a or the circle b’….[T]he
Russellian notation here gives an appearance of exactitude which makes people
believe the problems are solved by putting the proposition into the Russellian
form.”[218]

Wittgenstein’s
misgivings in Philosophical Grammar about
the Russellian interpretation of general statements were motivated by his
growing concern with how we actually talk. In Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics he wrote: “‘Mathematical
logic’ has completely deformed the thinking of mathematicians and of
philosophers, by setting up a superficial interpretation of the forms of our
everyday language as an analysis of the structure of facts.”[219] He was on his way to the Philosophical Investigations. In the next chapter I will argue that
“mathematical logic” also ignores the fact that in actual talk and
thought most generalizations are what linguists call generic statements, i.e.,
statements of the form “Fs are Gs,” rather than universal
statements, of the form “All Fs are Gs,” and that even universal
statements are usually intended only as generic.

3. Bergmann on Generality

In
“Generality and Existence” Bergmann had used an example similar to
Wittgenstein’s example in Philosophical
Grammar: being “presented” with a square inside a circle.
Bergmann asked, With what else must I be presented when I say “This
square is the only one inside this circle”? He pointed out that the
transcription of the statement would be “F(a, b) . (x) [(x = a) v ~ F (x,
b)],” with “(x),” “a,” “b,” and
“F” standing respectively for the universal quantifier, this
square, this circle, and the relation of being inside.[220] Bergmann answered the question by saying that when
presented with a single square inside a circle he was also presented with
generality and existence. He was presented with generality in seeing that the
square was the only square in the
circle, and with existence in seeing that there
is a square in the circle. They are the entities that the universal
quantifier, “(x)” or the word
“all,” and the particular quantifier, “($x),” the word “some,” or the phrase
“there is at least one,” respectively represent. Therefore, there are such entities as generality
and existence, though they “subsist,” rather than
“exist.”[221]

In
New Foundations of Ontology Bergmann
continued to hold that he was presented with generality and existence, though
now he called them the universal and the particular quantifiers. He went far
beyond “Generality and Existence” by offering a much more complex
account of quantification, which still resembled Wittgenstein’s but was a
part of a rich, all-encompassing ontology, which Wittgenstein never
attempted.  Bergmann renounced his
earlier distinction between existence and subsistence, subscribing now to the
seeming paradox that “whatever is thinkable exists.”[222]  Yet he acknowledged
that “the differences among some of the several existents…are very
great indeed…momentous, or enormous,”[223] thus acknowledging the rationale for the
distinction.

Bergmann’s
assertion that everything thinkable exists should be no more surprising than
Meinong’s assertion that “there are things of which it is true that
there are no such things,” but it is less confusing. There is a golden
mountain (Meinong’s famous example), it has being, it exists, Bergmann
would say, but of course it is fundamentally different from, say, the Rocky
Mountains.  Like the latter, it is a
“complex” of facts, but unlike the Rocky Mountains it is
“pervaded” by the “mode of potentiality,” not the
“mode of actuality.” Bergmann’s critics, like
Meinong’s, seem to attach magic significance to the words
“exist” and “being.” But, important though they are, still
they are words, conventional signs, and their ordinary use might not be suited
for the purposes of ontology. What matters is that we can think and talk about,
even describe in some detail a golden mountain east of Denver, just as we can
think, talk about, and describe the Rocky Mountains west of Denver. What we
must not do, of course, is to think that the former is an actual mountain.

Bergmann
began his account of generality in New
Foundations of Ontology by denying that variables, whether free or bound,
stand for anything.[224] This was not surprising in itself, but it did
require surprising changes in the analysis of general statements.  We find Bergmann now saying that the
universal quantifier in a general statement stands for a function, to be represented
by the sign “\/” but without attaching a variable such as
“x.” The function takes as argument a “2-tuple” that
consists of the individual thing in the singular fact asserted by some singular
substitution instance of the general statement and that singular fact itself.
The value of the function is the general fact asserted by the statement.[225] If, for example, the statement is “All f1’s
are f2’s,” the 2-tuple might be <a, f1(a) É f2(a)>. Bergmann used
“2-tuple,” instead of “pair,” because in New Foundations he also offered a highly
original account of sets that prohibits casual uses of set-theoretical terms.

Perhaps
most surprisingly, however, he insisted there that the conscious state or
awareness of a general fact, which he calls the “referent” of the corresponding
general statement, also includes an “auxiliary act” of
consciousness, the “intention” (intentional object) of which is the
sentence itself, the words used in
making the statement. Bergmann called this intention “the text of the
awareness.”[226] “I cannot ‘think’ any generality
such as, say, all-men-are-mortal, without at the same time
‘thinking’ the words ‘all-men-are-mortal.’….One
cannot believe, or doubt, or remember, and so on, any generality without also
perceiving the appropriate words.”[227] Indeed, Bergmann went on to say that “all
awarenesses, except primary Perceivings and Imaginings (and undoubtedly some
‘Feelings’), are inseparable from their texts. That…not only
gives language its due without giving it too much; it also reassuringly
recovers the sound core in a large body of recent and contemporary thought…from
Watson to Wittgenstein.”[228]

The
fact that all f1’s are f2’s is
“built” by the function \/ “not just from one argument but,
indifferently, from an indefinite number of alternative
arguments…from   <a, f1(a)
É f2(a)>, from <b, f1(b)
É f2(b)>, and <c, f1(c) É f2(c)>, and so on. In the text of
[the awareness], however…there is no cue to this multiplicity.”[229] Bergmann gave “all green (things) are
square” as an example. It is the text of an awareness that has as its
object the general fact, presumably not actual, that all green (things) are
square. The 2-tuples that the function \/ takes as arguments, e.g. <this, if
this is green then this is square>, are not mentioned in the general
statement, there is no “cue” in it to their
“multiplicity.” But they all are essential to the general fact.
That fact would not be actual if the singular facts in the 2-tuples were not
all actual: “all f1’s are f2’s”
would not be true if all its singular substitution instances were not true.
From which of them the function \/ builds the general fact is ontologically
indifferent. But it might not be psychologically indifferent, since the speaker
or hearer of the general sentence must at least in principle be able to
perceive or imagine one of them. I shall return to this latter point.

Thus
the analysis of “all f1’s are f2’s,”
i.e. its ontological analysis, “is not, conventionally … (x) [f1(x)
É f2(x)], but, rather, alternatively and
indifferently…\/ [<a, f1 (a) É f2 (a)] > or any of its variants;
indifferently because all those variants are one and not many.”[230] The “variants” of \/ [(a, f1(a)
É f2(a)], of course,  are \/ [<b, f1(b) É f2(b)>], \/ [<c, f1(c)
É f2(c)>], and so on. Each is an
alternative analysis of the one and same general fact. We may note that in
standard logic it is also indifferent, unless the context requires otherwise,
whether we symbolize “all f1’s are f2’s”
as “(x) [ f1(x) É f2(x)], “(y) [ f1(y) É f2(y)], or “(z) [ f1(z)
É f2(z)]. But standard logic uses
variables, which according to Bergmann represent nothing and therefore have no
place in ontological analysis.

It
may seem that Bergmann’s insistence that the arguments that the
quantifier \/ takes, say, in the case “all f1’s are f2’s,”
are 2-tuples is an unnecessary complication, but the reasons for it are compelling.
What else could those arguments be? Not f1(x) É f2(x), because it contains variables.
Nor the properties f1 and
f2 themselves. According to Bergmann’s
“principle of acquaintance,” one cannot be presented with f1 and  f2 except when they are
exemplified.[231] But even if one could, being presented with them
as well as with the quantifier \/ would hardly count as being
presented with the fact that all f1’s are f2’s,
or indeed with any fact: the three presentations might be unrelated. They might
be unrelated even if f1 and  f2 are exemplified: one
might be presented with them as well as with the quantifier by virtue of being
presented with the fact, say, that all f2’s are f1’s.

Without
the singular fact that is one of the terms of the 2-tuple, there would be no
relevant conscious state or awareness at all when one makes the general
statement, for there would be nothing relevant for one to be aware of. Could
the quantifier take as argument the singular fact f1 (a) É f2 (a), rather than the 2-tuple <a,
f1 (a) É f2
(a)>? No, because even if \/ could take f1 (a) É f2 (a) as argument, its value would not
be a general fact. The notation must also make explicit which constituent of the singular fact the quantifier operates on,
just as in standard logical notation it must be explicit which variable the
quantifier binds. If variables are not used, this can be explicit only if the
quantifier, so to speak, “brings” the constituent “out
of” the singular fact, while also “retaining” the singular
fact. The constituent and the singular fact must both be explicitly in the argument that the quantifier takes, and
this amounts to saying that the argument must be the 2-tuple of which they are
the members. Bergmann expressed the point by saying that the individual is the
“target” of the quantifier, while the singular fact is its
“scope.” In the case of the statement “all green (things) are
square,” the target might be any particular perceived or imagined object,
even your hand, which, if the statement were true, would indeed be square if it
is green.

There
are important similarities between Bergmann’s account of generality in New Foundations of Ontology and each of
Wittgenstein’s stands on the topic we have considered – in the Tractatus, in his 1919 letter to Russell,
in Philosophical Remarks, and in Philosophical Grammar –, though
there are also obvious differences. The singular substitution instance of the
general statement that stands for the singular fact which Bergmann calls the
scope of the quantifier is not asserted, it is not “said,” yet it
must be, so to speak, in the background, if the statement is to express a
relevant conscious state. We may say that it must “show”
itself.  For it is the singular
substitution instance that provides the general statement with its target and
scope, both of which must, in some sense, be “presented” or
“given,” though of course not as they would be if what was asserted
was the singular, rather than the general, statement. We may say that the
2-tuple from which, as its argument, the quantifier “builds” the
general fact must also only show itself. Indeed, we may say that the whole
indefinite number of alternative arguments from which the quantifier builds indifferently the
general fact show themselves. They must be “there,” in the
background, presupposed, like the indefinite number of possible positions of
the circle on a red background in the example Wittgenstein gave in Philosophical Remarks.
Like those positions, the alternative arguments may be thought of as
“possibilities left open,” neither enumerated nor capable of being
enumerated, but the speaker and hearer knowing that they are there, though not which they are. Thus, the general
statement may be said to be “indefinite,” “an incomplete
picture, like a portrait in which, e.g., the eyes have not been painted
in.” There can be no question of thinking in advance of all the alternative
arguments the quantifier may indifferently take, they are not mentioned at all,
they are unseen and disregarded. Yet they are there, presupposed, like the different
possible positions and sizes of the circle in the square that the statement
“there is a black circle in the square” allows for, even though when
making the statement the speaker has “something simple in mind.”

In
Philosophical Remarks Wittgenstein denied
that the general proposition “I see a circle on a red background”
has anything to do with “the totality of objects,” but in the Tractatus he could have said that it shows that totality.  I have suggested that when Bergmann
writes that what he calls the scope of the quantifier is not asserted, yet must
be in the background if the statement is to express a relevant conscious state,
we may say that it must “show” itself, and also that what he calls
the alternative arguments from which the quantifier builds the general fact may
be said to show themselves.  If we
did say this, would “show” have the sense that it had in the Tractatus, or in Wittgenstein’s
assertion in his 1919 letter to Russell that while a universal statement does
not say that all elementary
(singular) propositions are given, this is shown by there being none having
an elementary sense which is not given? The truth is that Wittgenstein did not
explain that sense, just as Bergmann did not explain, for example, the sense of
his term “presented.” The reason, in both cases, presumably was
that they thought what they meant was too basic to allow for explanation.

According
to Bergmann, one must be presented with what he called the quantifier, i.e.,
generality, what “(x)” or “\/” stands for, and
Wittgenstein presumably would have disagreed.
“There are no 'logical objects,” he wrote, thus announcing his
break with the logical realism of Frege and Russell, though, as we have seen,
he did not adopt logical antirealism. But
Wittgenstein might have agreed that the thoughtful use of a general sentences
involves awareness, even if only peripheral and unfocused, of the sentence
itself, what Bergmann called the “text,” whether by seeing,
hearing, or imagining it. Bergmann held that this is a phenomenological, or as
he also put it, anthropocentric, even anthropological, fact – this is how
we humans think and speak.

But
Bergmann also offered a detailed account of this fact, which Wittgenstein did
not. Bergmann explained that the text is needed in order to close the
“phenomenological distance” between what is presented to us when we
thoughtfully make a general statement and the “assay,” ontological analysis,
of what the statement says, “the gap between what the text of an
awareness may lead one to expect, on the one hand, and the assay in fact
proposed for its referent, on the other.”[232]
The text is “fused,” “absorbed,” into “the
nontext,” he wrote,[233] it
has “fusing power.”[234]
The general fact that all f1’s are f2’s is
built by \/ from an indefinite number of alternative arguments, from <a, f1(a)
É f2(a)>,
<b, f1(b) É f2(b)>,
<c, f1(c) É f2(c)>,
and so on, but there is no “cue” to this multiplicity in the
sentence “all f1’s are f2’s,” nor
of course in its transcription, whether the conventional “(x)f1(x)
É f2(x)”
or Bergmann’s “\/ <a, f1(a) É f2(a)>.”

This
goes unnoticed because of the “fusing” power of the sentence. On no
account of generality does a true general statement contain explicit reference
to the multiplicity of what makes it true. Whatever account we accept, we must
rely on the statement to serve, so to speak, as proxy for that multiplicity. A
merit of Bergmann’s account is that it makes explicit what all accounts
of generality must admit, namely, that when saying, e.g., “all green
things are square,” we could, as he pithily puts it, in principle also
say regarding any individual thing “if this were green then this would be
square.”[235] Saying the latter would differ from saying the
former only by making explicit that the assertion is a thoughtful one, not a
mere utterance, that one actually has something relevant in mind when making
it. In the old empiricist terminology, it would make explicit the presence
“before the mind” of an “idea,” whether of
“sensation” or “imagination.” In Bergmann’s
terminology, it would make explicit the presence of an individual actually
perceived or imagined.

Bergmann
suggests that if our natural expression was, e.g., “generalized for this:
if this is green then this is square,” rather than “all green
things are square,” then when we find the truth of “all f1’s  are f2’s”
obvious we would be presented with the actuality of such complexes as \/ <a,
f1(a) =  \/ <b, f1(b),
i.e., we would find the truth of the statement “\/ <a, f1(a)
=  \/ <b, f1(b)”
also obvious.[236] In the Philosophical
Investigations Wittgenstein would not have agreed, but in the Tractatus he might have been
sympathetic. Surely, Bergmann’s view is plausible. Can one thoughtfully
assert that all green things are square without at least in principle being able to refer to some particular thing,
perceived or imagined, even if it happened to be one’s hand or
one’s computer, and say of it that if it were green then it would be
square? Bergmann of course held that one must actually, not just in principle, be able to, make such reference,
but the difference might be a matter of how we use the adverb
“thoughtfully,” not a matter of ontological import.

A
detailed account of generality is needed, and Wittgenstein offered none of his
own, in the Tractatus or in his later
works. Bergmann did. To appreciate it, we should consider what alternatives to
it there are. There is, first, the reductionist account of universal statements
as conjunctions, and of particular statements as disjunctions, of their
singular substitution instances. As we saw, Bergmann found no merit in it, just
as Frege and Russell did not. There is, second, Frege’s account of
generality as a second-level function “saturated” by first-level
functions. But this is very similar to Bergmann’s account, though it presupposed
Frege’s ontology, which Bergmann rejected for reasons independent of the
topic of generality.[237] Third, there is Russell’s appeal to
irreducibly general facts. Bergmann’s view in “Generality and
Existence” was similar to Russell’s, and his view in New Foundations of Ontology may be
described as a refinement of it.  But Bergmann provided an analysis of
these facts, which Russell did not. Indeed, Russell totally ignored the obvious
and crucial question, In virtue of what are general facts general? To have
taken this question seriously was one of Bergmann’s merits, though he had
been anticipated by Frege. And, fourth, there is the view, often but as we have
seen wrongly attributed to Wittgenstein, that all there is to generality is the
general sentences. Bergmann probably thought that this would be a
“linguisticism” too crude to deserve discussion, so he offered
none, but he did hold that awareness of the referent of a general statement
includes perceptual or imaginative awareness of the sentence itself.

The
merits of Bergmann’s position become evident when we contrast his
transcription of the sentence “all f1’s are f2’s”
as “\/ <a, f1 (a) É f2 (a)>” with the standard
transcription of it as “(x) (f1x É f2x).” The latter includes the
unrestricted individual variable “x” and therefore can be read as
saying something about all individuals, as being about this computer, the page
you are now reading, the moon, and so on. Bergmann thought that if we had no
particular individual in mind when we assert the sentence we would have nothing
relevant in mind, and would not be making a genuine statement at all. Locke,
Berkeley, and Hume would have agreed. The traditional empiricist tenet was that
to understand what we say or hear we must have an “idea” of what it
is about.  Bergmann seemed to accept
this tenet in the case of general statements, if by “idea” is meant
an object perceived or imagined, rather than a representation of it. He
believed that whenever we make a genuine general statement we must perceive or
imagine a particular individual of which the statement is true. But he made the
empiricist tenet more plausible by allowing that we can select,
“alternatively and indifferently,” that individual.

The
sentence “(x) (f1x É f2x)” does not mention this
computer, the page you are reading, the moon, or any other individual thing. In
Wittgenstein’s Tractarian terminology, it does not say that, e.g., if this computer is f1 then it is f2.
Nonetheless, presumably Wittgenstein thought that somehow it must show this. It must do so at least in the
sense that, if a thoughtful, circumspect, utterer of “(x) (f1x
É f2x)” were asked whether it entails
that if this computer were f1 then it would be f2, the utterer would agree.
Bergmann did not use Wittgenstein’s terminology, but he might have done
so in order to explain the relevance of, say, this computer’s being a
member of one of the indefinite number of 2-tuples from which the quantifier “indifferently
builds” the general fact that all f1’s are f2’s.
In his later works Wittgenstein rejected the empiricist tenet about the
indispensability of ideas, but he might have agreed that for a statement about
the sort of things that can be perceived or imagined to make sense the speaker
or hearer must in principle be able
to, even if in fact does not, perceive or at least imagine something of which
the statement would be true.

Bergmann’s
later and Wittgenstein’s Tractarian positions on generality shared a
negative but important feature – that, in Bergmann’s terminology, a
general statement does not mention the singular statement that provides it with
its target and scope, and in Wittgenstein’s, that it does not mention the
elementary statements that instantiate it. They also shared an important
positive feature. Bergmann argued that if one is aware of what is said by a
general statement, then one is aware also of the sentence used in making it, that in this sense cognition depends on
language in the case of generality (indeed, he held  that it does so in all cases except some
perceivings, imaginings, and feelings). This dependence, he held, is not causal
or external; it is internal, constitutive.[238]
“Thought is inseparably intertwined with language,” Bergmann
wrote,[239] thus endorsing much of the linguisticism he had
vehemently opposed earlier. Wittgenstein was the philosopher who in the Tractatus endorsed and in the Philosophical Investigations celebrated
that linguisticism.

It is simplistic to think that
metaphysics provides descriptions of the world that are additional to those
provided by science and everyday thought, and to view metaphysical
disagreements as disagreements about the truth of such descriptions.
Metaphysicians do not discover entities hidden from the rest of us, as
chemists, physicists, and astronomers often do, nor do they have the sort of
training and instruments needed for making such discoveries. What they can do,
however, is to see, draw attention to, and emphasize similarities and
differences between fundamental kinds of items in the world that in everyday
life, and even in science, go unnoticed, not because they are hidden but
precisely because they are fundamental and “there for everyone to
see.” Bergmann
wrote, “Is there a felt difference between the external property, as some
call it, of being green and the internal one, as they also say, of being a
property? Directly one cannot argue on either side. That is one reason, though
to be sure not the only one, why at some place or places one must appeal to the
phenomenological basis. All I can say, therefore, is that this particular
difference pierces my eyes.”[240] By
“phenomenological basis” he meant what in the same work he also
called the phenomenological “rock bottom” and “the
jumping-off place.”[241]

Bergmann’s view that a general statement does not mention yet does
involve the singular statements that provide the quantifier with its
“target” and “scope,” and Wittgenstein’s that a
general statement does not say that all elementary propositions are given but
this is shown, acknowledged, drew attention to, and emphasized, in their
own yet perhaps not incompatible terminologies, the fundamental differences between general and singular statements. These differences are there for all to see, but they
“pierce” few eyes. Even Aristotle, the founder of logic, did not
see them clearly when he counted both as subject-predicate statements. Bergmann
wrote of what is “presented,” and Wittgenstein of what is only
“shown.” These are metaphors and need not signify fundamental
disagreement. There is no established terminology for what Bergmann and Wittgenstein
wanted to say, because it was novel.

It would be a mistake to ask
whether Wittgenstein’s semirealism is “true” or
“right,” and much the same can be said about Bergmann’s
ontology. Neither is a theory about some peculiar objects or facts. If they
disagreed, it was not because they saw different things, just as those who
disagree with them do not.  Both
exemplify a conception of philosophy more sophisticated than such a theory
might suggest. I shall say much more about this conception in chapter 12.

Wittgenstein
and Bergmann were not realists regarding general statements. But neither were
they antirealists. They did not hold that general statements assert facts in
the way singular statements assert facts. But they also did not hold that all
there is to general statements is the general sentences and our use of them.
Their views regarding generality are paradigms of what I have called
semirealism.

Chapter Eight: GENERIC STATEMENTS

1.
The
Ubiquity of Generic Statements.

Universal
and particular (“existential”) statements
are not the only general statements. There
are also those that linguists call generic. In section 1 of this chapter I shall
argue that generic statements are
ubiquitous in both everyday talk and science, that they are far more important
in cognition than universal statements, and that universal statements
themselves are commonly intended not as literally universal but rather as
generic.  In section 2 I argue that,
though realism about the world presupposes the category of fact, in the robust
Russellian sense of “fact,” there are no generic facts even if
there are universal facts. In section 3 I argue that generic statements are not
reducible to any other kind of statement.

The ubiquity of generic statements, whether
explicitly generic or disguised as universal, provides the
clearest and most eloquent argument
for the antirealist thesis. Such statements call for a straightforwardly
antirealist interpretation, unlike universal statements, which as we have seen
admit of a semirealist interpretation.
Whatever the merits of semirealism regarding universal and particular
statements may be, regarding generic statements antirealism seems self-evident.

I have argued that the traditional arguments for
antirealism have been excessively abstract and
based on obscure philosophical
assumptions. A clear and plausible defense of antirealism, I suggested,
must bypass them and start afresh from specific and readily understandable
truths. One
such truth is the implausibility of a realist interpretation of universal,
particular, and molecular statements, which led us in the previous two chapters to endorse at
most a semirealism regarding such statements. The ubiquity of
generic statements is another such specific truth.  It provides a noncontroversial reason
for accepting not just semirealism but antirealism about the world,
cosmological antirealism, though not for antirealism about things, ontological
antirealism. Neither common sense nor philosophy would accept the existence of
facts that are just generic.

The
17th century French philosopher Antoine
Arnauld found the statement “Dutchmen are good sailors” puzzling..[242] It does not
say that all Dutchmen are good sailors. Some are not. But neither does it just
say that some are. Some Germans also are good sailors, but perhaps Germans are
not good sailors. What, then, does the statement say? We may be uncertain
whether Dutchmen are good sailors, but let us suppose it was common knowledge
among those whose judgment mattered when Arnauld wrote, presumably 17th century
shipmasters. We therefore also suppose that the statement was true. But if a
fact is the sort of brute extralinguistic entity that according to Russell
makes a statement true and which Wittgenstein had in mind when he declared in
the Tractatus that the world is the totality
of facts, not of things, “Dutchmen are good sailors” corresponded
to no such entity, for there was not such an entity in the world.

Perhaps there was a fact to which the
particular statement “Some Dutchmen are good sailors” corresponded.
Perhaps there would have been a fact to which the universal statement
“All Dutchmen are good sailors” would have corresponded
had this statement been true. But there was no distinctive, third fact to which
“Dutchmen are good sailors” might correspond.
Its truth did depend on the truth of some statements of the form “x
is Dutch and x is a good sailor,” and perhaps these statements did
correspond to Russellian facts, but “Dutchmen are good sailors”
is not the conjunction of these statements and thus did not correspond to the
fact, if there was one, that made the conjunction true. Nevertheless,
the 17th century shipmasters had knowledge of its truth, and that truth mattered
greatly in their world. Yet what they knew was not in that world. This is what
puzzled Arnauld. There was no similar puzzle in the case of the other
statements mentioned here..

“Dutchmen are good sailors” is an
example of a vast number of statements of the form “Fs are G,” some
of great practical and scientific importance. They are
general, not singular, but also not universal statements. Nor are they
particular (“existential”)
statements,
which are much weaker. Generic statements are usually made without intention to endorse the corresponding universal
statement and are so understood by the listener.  Arnauld gave as examples also
“Frenchmen are brave,” “Italians are suspicious,”
“Germans are large,” “Orientals are sensuous,” and many
others.[243]
In the recent literature of linguistics we
find “Birds fly” (penguins are birds but do not fly),
“Frenchmen eat horse meat” (most French people do not), and
“John smokes a pipe” (sometimes he smokes cigarettes).[244]
As the last example shows, a generic statement need not have the grammatical
form “Fs are G,” just as a universal statement need not have the
grammatical form “All Fs are G,” much less “For every
value of x, if x is F then x is G”: what
matters is that the statement is intended and understood as replaceable by a
statement of that form.

Here are some other examples. After the German
election in September 2005, an observer wrote, “It is clear that Germans
do not want to be governed by Angela Merkel. There is no other way to explain
the CDU’s collapse to a 35.2% in the election after reaching 49% only a
couple of months ago in opinion polls.” The author obviously did not mean
that all Germans were unwilling to be governed by Angela Merkel. Yet, the
statement is an example of coherent, perhaps astute political thought, and it
might have been true. The Encyclopedia Britannica informs us that
“The solubility of a gas in a liquid rises as the pressure of that gas
increases,” but it also says that “exceptions may occur at very
high pressures.” Economists say that reducing taxes leads to increased
economic growth and therefore government revenue, but they do not deny that
sometimes it does not. No pharmaceutical company promotes its drugs as
100% effective, and no responsible physician tells a patient that the recommended
surgery is would be 100% safe. Parents, physicians, and politicians insist that
smoking causes lung cancer, but even politicians avoid saying that it always
does. Physicians do not even say that it is always bad for your health –
the Surgeon General only says that it may be. “Exercise prolongs
life” is considered true but, notoriously, exercise often fails to
prolong life. Abstention from universal statements is characteristic of serious
thought and discourse.  Discourse in
politics, diplomacy, and everyday business, even a family conversation, would
be impossible without generic statements.

Indeed, universal statements
themselves are commonly intended and understood as if they were only generic.
Strawson noted that “there are many cases of subject-predicate statements
beginning with ‘all’ which it would be pedantry to call
‘false’ on the strength of one exception or a set of
exceptions.”[245] It
might not be pedantry in the case of the universal statements in mathematics or
highly theoretical areas in science. However, Strawson pointed out, these are
also statements philosophers often consider analytic – or disguised
definitions, meaning-postulates, reduction-sentences, inference-tickets, linguistic
conventions – not statements of fact.

In everyday discourse, we do make universal
statements that allow for no exceptions, e.g., “All of Jack’s
children attended the wedding,” but they are readily replaceable with
conjunctions of singular statements (the statement can be supported by a list
of Jack’s children), which the
typical universal statement is not. We make universal statements commonly for
rhetorical purposes, e.g., saying “All politicians are crooked”
when
both speaker and listener know that some are not, or
“Everybody likes her” though obviously complete strangers do not. In the
interpretation
and application of the law, universal statements are studiously avoided because
the possibility of exceptions
must be allowed – this is why there are courts and lawyers. But
in the areas of science where most scientific endeavor takes place –
geology, zoology, botany, medicine, anthropology, psychology, linguistics,
sociology, economics, even much of biology and chemistry – universal
statements are scarce. It is generic
statements that are common,
such as “Morotopithecus bishopi
was a fruit-eater,” which does not mean that all members of the species
were fruit-eaters or that all they ate was fruit, or “Patients with prior
strokes benefit from taking Lipitor,” which does not mean that all do.  Scientists shun universal statements perhaps
because
they believe that such statements could be justified only by information about
real causal connections, which scientists seldom if ever have. They tend to rely, instead,
on statistical reports like “265 or 11.2% of the patients who took Lipitor in a
double-blind, randomized, and placebo-controlled clinical trial suffered a
stroke over five years, while 795 or 37% of those who took a placebo
did.”

Aristotle noted that “it is
the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just
so far as the nature of the subject admits.”[246] Steven
Pinker said, regarding his theory of language acquisition, “I fully
expect that [it] will be met with some counterexamples. My defense is that an
acquisition theory that faces occasional counterexamples is better than no
acquisition theory at all.”[247]
The
legal scholar Frederick Schauer remarks that “Universal
generalizations, whether the source of the universality be definitional or
empirical, tend to interest philosophers, but most of the generalizations that
the rest of us employ and encounter on a daily basis are not universal.”[248]

Indeed, “generalization invites
exceptions,” “the exception proves the rule,” and “rules
are made to be broken” are sayings we hear often, the first implying that all
general statements are really generic, and the other two that even a rule
grounds only a generic, not a universal, statement. We resort to
generic statements not because of indifference to accuracy but because there is
no acceptable alternative. Usually, neither a universal statement understood
strictly nor a particular statement or conjunction of singular statements would
express what we can legitimately say when making a generalization.

Arnauld contrasted universal truths about “the nature of
things and their immutable essences,” which admit of no exception, with
universal truths about “existing things, especially human and contingent
events,” which “admit of some exception” and, if we supposed
that they did not, would be “judged falsely, except by chance.”[249] The
former are “metaphysically universal.” The latter are only
“morally universal,” like “the usual sayings ‘All women
love to talk,’ ‘All young people are inconstant,’ ‘All
old people praise the past.’” But Arnauld cautioned that
“with respect to propositions having only moral universality” we
ought not to “reject them as false, even though we can find
counterexamples to them”[250] I have suggested that such propositions are much more
common than those about “immutable essences.” But, pace Arnauld, even the latter, including
some that philosophers might call analytic, often admit of exceptions and thus
are in fact only “morally universal.”

Consider
the venerable definition “Man is a rational animal,” meaning by
“man” human being and by “rational,” let us suppose,
possessing intelligence deserving to be called intellect. The definition states
the “essence” of man, what
a man is, and logicians properly infer from it that all men are rational, indeed
that this is necessarily so, “by definition,” “analytic.”
But the logicians do not mean that neonates display intelligence deserving to
be called intellect. So, metaphysicians revise the definition by inserting the
adverb “potentially.” Some neonates, however, are not even
potentially rational – they are born with severe and irremediable mental
defects. The metaphysicians may revise the definition further, perhaps by
appealing (in the past) to Aristotle’s distinction between first and
second potentiality or (today) to the genetic roots of intellectual capacities.
But, if they do, they are no longer interpreting the definition, they are
trying to rescue it. The original intention was just to say that men are
rational animals, and both the definition and the statement inferred from it
should have been so understood – and then left alone.

2. Facts,
Generic Facts, and Realism.

When Kant declared that things as they are
known by us are not as they are in themselves, he assumed that we can know things only if they
are objects
of sense experience, “phenomena.” Our focus here, however, is not on things but on
the world, and not on sense experience but on description. There is a
difference between things and the world: the world may contain all individual
things but it is the structure, not the mere collection,
“totality,” of them. There is also a difference between sense
experience and description. Sense experience is essentially subjective and by
itself barely qualifies, if at all, as knowledge. Neonates enjoy sense
experience but know little if anything. Description, by contrast, almost certainly
employs a public language and thus in principle is subject to the constraints
of intersubjective agreement. It is taught,
and when sophisticated it may count as science.
Now, the world is describable necessarily, though not solely, in general
statements, whether universal or generic. But even if universal statements
correspond to items in the world, generic statements do not. Even if there are
universal facts, there are no generic facts. Yet almost all general statements
are generic, explicitly or tacitly.
Cognition of the world, though perhaps not cognition of individual
things, requires the use of generic statements. Yet the world contains nothing
to which they correspond.

In
chapter 6 I sketched the traditional argument for antirealism, in both the
Kantian and its more recent versions. I pointed out that, because of its
forbidding level of abstraction, the argument leaves unclear what it claims and
what motivates it.  This is especially true of its
extreme version, according to which what we think we know corresponds to
nothing in the world.  I suggested
that we should seek arguments for a moderate version that claims only that
certain essential, or especially important, parts or aspects of what we think
we know correspond to nothing in the world. I suggested therefore that our
focus should be on arguments from
specific and readily understandable truths.
The form of such an argument would be as follows: (1) We cognize (perceive,
understand, describe) the world as having a certain uncontroversial and
familiar particular feature F. But it is obvious (2) that the world does not,
perhaps cannot, have that feature. Therefore, (3) the world as we cognize it,
as it is “for us,” is not as it is “in itself.” The major
defenders of antirealism, from Kant to Goodman, did offer also
arguments of this second sort. For example, Kant pointed out that, though our
knowledge of things rests on sense perception and we necessarily conceive of
them as causally related, causal relations are not themselves perceived. In Ways of Worldmaking Goodman
provided a rich display of concrete examples of features of the world –
from apparent motion to the fairness of samples – that are best
understood as “made” by us. The argument for
antirealism from the ubiquity of generic statements is also of this sort: We
think and talk about the world as containing facts that are the object of the
cognitive activity of generalization, and generic statements are our chief
vehicles of generalization, but there are no generic facts in the world.

This
is an argument for antirealism with respect to the logical structure of the
world, the structure that any world must have in order to count as a world.  Indeed, nothing would count as a world if
it did not allow for true atomic statements such as “This page is white,”
compound statements such as “This page is not red” and “If
this page is white then so is the next page,” universal statements such
as “All men are mortal,” and particular statements such as “There
is water on Mars.” But in addition to these there are also generic
statements. A serious and knowledgeable Missourian might say that winters in
Iowa are severe, but not that all are. Cardiologists say that patients with
prior strokes benefit from taking Lipitor, but not that all do.  Such statements are our chief vehicles of
generalization, yet obviously they correspond to nothing in the world. If there
were no humans, all winters in Iowa might still be severe, or some or none
might be, but it would not be the case just that winters in Iowa are severe.

This
is an argument for antirealism with respect to a specific but essential part of
our cognition of the world. It resembles but is not the same as antirealism
with respect to the general statements that logic recognizes, which is familiar
and was defended by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus
as part of his rejection of Frege’s and Russell’s logical realism
and defense of his thesis that “there are no logical objects.”
Wittgenstein’s logical antirealism or, as we have seen, more precisely
semirealism, may be plausible. But it is not nearly as plausible as plain,
straightforward, antirealism with respect to generic statements, which he did
not even consider.

Kant
compared his transcendental idealism to the Copernican revolution in astronomy.
But despite our unquestioning acceptance of the heliocentric system, we
continue to see and think of the sun as rising in the east at dawn, then slowly
moving overhead, and setting in the west at dusk. This is no ordinary,
transient illusion. It is a phenomenological fact, in the sense of
“phenomenology” expressed by Husserl’s slogan “We must
go back to the ‘things themselves’ [zu den Sachen selbst!].”[251] The case with our unswerving acceptance of
realism is similar. Putnam described the antirealist thesis as a virtual
tautology. The heliocentric system is not a tautology, but it is so amply
confirmed as to function in educated people’s thought as if it were.
Nevertheless, the power of our belief that the sun moves overhead has remained
unaffected. The fate of transcendental idealism is proof of the power of
realism. Kant and philosophers like Goodman continue to be met with
incredulity, often plain incomprehension, even by most of their philosophical
readers. The reason is that Kant’s transcendental idealism called
for a radical change of perspective, as did Goodman’s
“irrealism.”

But in the case of antirealism
regarding generic statements there is no perspective to change. Unless we
confuse generic statements with the corresponding universal statements, we
immediately see that there are no distinctive,
generic, facts that make them true.
To acknowledge this, no revolutionary considerations, Copernican or
Kantian, would be needed. “Dutchmen are good sailors” does not say
what is said by “All Dutch people are good sailors,” or by “Some
Dutchmen are good sailors,” or by a conjunction such as “Lodewyk is
a good sailor and Rykaard is a good sailor and Hansel is a good sailor.”
No subtle arguments are needed, therefore, to acknowledge that there is no
distinctive fact to which it might correspond – the only relevant facts
are those to which the latter statements might correspond.

One who rejects generic facts need
not also reject universal facts. Nor need one who rejects both universal and
generic facts also reject compound facts. And the rejection of none of these
implies rejection of atomic facts.  But that the intellectual activity of
generalization is crucial to cognition and that the truth of universal statements
requires extralinguistic entities was taken for granted by Frege and Russell,
though they differed regarding what these entities might be. Both argued
vigorously against the reductionist view that universal statements are just
disguised conjunctions of their singular substitution-instances. But generic
statements, much less generic facts, were totally ignored by them, as they have
been by virtually all philosophers.

To be sure, Aristotle did note
that the statement “Man is white,” or, as J. L. Ackrill suggests,
“Men are white,” allows both that some men are white and that some
men are not white, and acknowledged that such “indefinite”
statements have no place in the “syllogism.”[252] (Ackrill complains that they lack “an explicit
quantifier” and for this reason he says, somewhat presumptuously,
“it is a pity that Aristotle introduces [them] at all.”) Kant
sharply distinguished what he called strict universality from “assumed
and comparative universality (through
induction),” which “is therefore only an arbitrary increase in
validity from that which holds in most cases to that which holds in all.”[253] As we
have seen, universal statements usually express only “assumed and
comparative universality, and perhaps Kant would have agreed that they should
be understood as only generic. John Dewey did write about “generic”
and “universal” propositions, but explained that by the former he
meant “propositions about kinds (general in the sense of generic),” which have
“existential import,” and by the latter “abstract
hypothetical propositions,” which are “nonexistential in
import.”[254] Quine
in effect dismissed generic statements as involving “ambiguities of
syntax.” He wrote, “Sometimes the plural form of a general term
does the work merely of the singular form with ‘every’; thus
‘Lions eat red meat’…..Sometimes it does the work rather of a
singular with ‘an’ or ‘some’, but with an added
implication of plurality; thus ‘Lions are roaring.’”[255]  It was twentieth century linguists and
some legal scholars, not philosophers, who explicitly and seriously devoted
attention to generic statements.

3. The Irreducibility of Generic Statements.

Some logicians and philosophers of language
have acknowledged the existence of the nonstandard quantifiers
“many,” “few,” and “most.”[256] None is
reducible to the standard quantifiers “all” or “some.”
Presumably, statements
employing “many” and “few” defy a realist
interpretation – their truth value obviously depends, at least in part,
on our interests and attitudes,  not on any distinctive facts about what
is many and what is few. Statements
employing “most” would allow a realist interpretation, if
“most” is taken to mean “more than half.” But, unlike
generic statements, such nonstandard general statements, though useful and
common, are hardly indispensable for cognition.

Generic statements resemble statements
employing “many” and “few” by defying a realist
interpretation. They also resemble them by defying reducibility
to statements employing “all” or “some.” Indeed, generic statements are not reducible to any other
kind of statement. Nicholas Asher and Jacques Morreau have remarked that “the puzzling thing about generics
[is that] their truth conditions connect them at best only very loosely with
particular facts about the world,” and that they entail and are entailed
only by other generic statements.[257] The
latter is not quite true. “Dutchmen are good sailors” does entail
“Some Dutchmen are good sailors,” and it is entailed by “All
Dutchmen are good sailors and there are Dutchmen.”

But “Dutchmen are good
sailors” does not entail “All
Dutchmen are good sailors,” and is not entailed by “Some Dutchmen
are good sailors.” It also neither
entails nor is entailed by “All Dutchmen who are sailors are,
always or usually, good sailors,”
which was the analysis Arnauld seemed to favor.[258]
If only two Dutchmen are sailors, their both being good sailors would
not be enough to make “Dutchmen are good sailors” true. The statement neither entails nor is entailed by
“Most Dutchmen are good sailors.” Most Dutchmen are not even
sailors, good or bad. And, if they were,
but only 52% of them, while 70% of Italians, 80% of Germans, and
90% of Norwegians are good sailors, this might not be enough to make
“Dutchmen are good sailors” true.  52% of Americans are women, but it is not
true that Americans are women. However,
even if only 10% of Dutchmen are good sailors, this might be enough, as long as
2% of Italians, 3% of
Germans, and 4% of Norwegians are good sailors. That the word
“enough” is needed here indicates that we take generic statements
to be true not because we find generic facts in the world that make them true
but partly because of our interests and attitudes. In the 21st
century “Dutchmen can read and write” would not be true if only 45%
could read and write, but in the 17th century perhaps it was.

“Dutchmen are good sailors” does not entail that more
Dutchmen than people of any other nationality are good sailors,
absolutely or proportionally. We do not and
need not compare Dutchmen with all other nationalities in order to make or
accept the statement. If comparison does take place (usually implicitly), it is
largely, though not wholly, up to us with whom to compare them. Instead of
Norwegians and Italians, we might pick Germans and Spaniards. But perhaps we
would not pick Hungarians or Mongolians, because Hungary and Mongolia are
landlocked and we might think the comparison would be “unfair.” At
any rate, if only four Dutchmen and only two persons of any other
nationality are good sailors, we are not likely to say that Dutchmen are good
sailors. If only four Dutchmen and only two persons of any other nationality
are graduates of the Dubuque College of Cosmetology, we would not say that
Dutchmen are graduates of the Dubuque College of Cosmetology.

It has been suggested that “adverbs such as usually, typically, and in general are closest in meaning to the
generic operator.”[259]
This would be trivially true of “in general” if inserting it in “Dutchmen
are good sailors” merely makes
explicit that the statement is generic, and perhaps of “typically”
if it is used as a synonym of “stereotypically” (see below). Not so
of “usually.” How usual must it be for a Dutchman to be a
good sailor if the statement “Dutchmen are good sailors” is to be
true? It might be true even if 10% are good sailors, as long as only 6% of
Italians, 7% of Germans, and 8% of Norwegians are.

Nor, contrary to another
suggestion, need the statement be saying that all Dutchmen are normally good sailors. What being a good
sailor involves, say, standing firmly at the wheel in raging seas, might be
abnormal for all people, Dutch or not, though admirable.    Even becoming a sailor might
be abnormal, in some legitimate sense of this vague word. It might conflict
with emotions that are normal, such as fear of drowning. At any rate, as
Gregory Carlson has conclusively pointed out, generic statements can also be
made about normal kittens and abnormal drunk physicians. Are we to take such
statements to be about normal normal kittens and normal abnormal drunk
physicians?[260]

Shall we say, instead, that
“Dutchmen are good sailors” means that all Dutchmen are good
sailors in normal circumstances? But
what are these circumstances? Sailing on merchantmen or sailing on warships?
Serving under demanding or serving under easy-going shipmasters? On short or
long voyages? Perhaps people even become sailors mainly when the economic
circumstances are abnormal. Being a sailor might be attractive mainly in such
circumstances. But, again, what are these circumstances? High unemployment in
the Netherlands,
or high unemployment just in its coastal areas?

What such examples show is that no
brute fact makes “Dutchmen are good sailors” true. But this does
not mean that the statement is “subjective.”  Although
it was of special interest to shipmasters, its truth was not dependent on their
personal wishes. It might have been accepted by all other people in a position
to know, including first mates and ship owners. Its truth was objective in the
proper sense of being intersubjective, agreed to by competent judges, people
with knowledge and open mind about navigation. It was not what Kant called
“mere fancy.” As Carlson says, we know that not all dogs bark, but
also we know that “Dogs bark” is true. He adds, “the
knowledge that there are three-legged rabbits does not falsify the statement
that rabbits have four legs.”[261]
If we say that nonetheless “Dutchmen are good sailors” is not really objective, we must mean that it
does not admit of a realist interpretation, that it does not correspond to a
fact. But this is exactly what I have argued.

Generic statements have been
called vague, but their vagueness is unlike that of predicates. According to
Peirce, “A proposition is
vague when there are possible states of things concerning which it is intrinsically
uncertain whether, had they been contemplated by the speaker, he would have
regarded them as excluded or allowed by the proposition. By intrinsically
uncertain we mean not uncertain in consequence of any ignorance of the
interpreter, but because the speaker's habits of language are
indeterminate.”[262] Perhaps generic
statements are indeed vague in this sense. But what Peirce had in mind was vagueness of propositions due to
the presence of vague predicates like “bald” – the quantity
of hair on a person’s head may be such that it is intrinsically uncertain
whether a speaker would apply the predicate to it. Generic statements
are not vague for such a reason.
Their vagueness is not due to the presence of a vague predicate.
“Good sailor” may be a vague predicate, but this would not be the
main reason “Dutchmen are good sailors” is vague. It is vague
because of its logical form. It would be vague even if we replaced the
predicate “good sailor” with a predicate that is not vague. This is
why generic statements are
useful, indeed indispensable. Predicates such as “bald” are also
useful and perhaps indispensable because they are vague. But their vagueness is
different from that of generic
statements.

Generic statements have been said
also to be inexact, imprecise. Again, this is true, but how we understand it
calls for caution. The inexactness of a generic statement is not due to the
presence in it of an inexact word. The statement “Jack is there” is
inexact, but if we wished we could state Jack’s location with reasonable
precision by saying, e.g., “Jack is in the kitchen,” and might be
happy to replace the former statement with the latter. In the case of
“Dutchmen are good sailors,” however, any attempt at precision is
likely to yield a statement that, whatever its merits, we would not put in
place of the original. Either it would significantly differ in truth value, as
“All Dutchmen are good sailors” would, or it would not be even a
general statement, as a conjunction of statements of the form “x is Dutch
and x is a good sailor” would not.

Carlson distinguishes inductively
established correlations from “real rules or regulations,”
associating generic statements with the former and universal statements with
the latter.[263]
It may be unclear what he means by “real rules or regulations.” But
his phrase “inductively established correlations” is reasonably
clear. Its use implies that, as Kant might have put it, generic statements
possess at most assumed universality. Of course, Kant had in mind universal,
not generic, statements, and, as we saw earlier,  contrasted those possessing only
“assumed and comparative universality, through induction,” with
statements possessing “strict universality,” meaning by “strict”
that they are necessary and a priori .
But generic statements lack even assumed universality – this is why they
are generic.

Arnauld would have said that
universal statements established inductively are only “morally
universal.” Russell and most other epistemologists in effect have agreed:
they are only “probable.” According to Russell, even if the sun
rose every day in the past, it is only probable that it will rise tomorrow. (He
wisely avoided assigning a numerical value to that “probability.”)
This was “the problem of induction.” Indeed, reasonable people
seldom expect inductive reasoning to yield more than a generic statement,
unless it involves also causal information. We appeal to what “history
teaches” – e.g., in predicting election results, hurricanes, and
the gyrations of the stock market – precisely when we lack such
information. In both everyday and scientific reasoning, induction unsupported
by causal information, which may be called primitive induction, is usually
taken to justify only generic statements, as the frequent occurrence of the
phrase “ceteris paribus” shows. This is why scientific writing
routinely includes caveats such as “The precise mechanism through which
fluticasone propionate affects allergic rhinitis symptoms is not known.”
The closer scientists are to the field or lab, the less willing they are to
venture universal statements.

Nevertheless, though based only on
induction, “Dutchmen are good
sailors” does not mean that all Dutchmen are probably good sailors, as
Russell might have said. If only 10% of Dutchmen are sailors, it would
be false that all Dutchmen are probably
good sailors, whether in the statistical or the epistemic sense of
“probably.” But it might still be true that Dutchmen are
good sailors if, say, only 6% of Italians, 7%
of Germans, and 8% of Norwegians are good
sailors. Nor does the statement
mean that all Dutch sailors are
probably good sailors. It might be true even if only 40% of Dutch sailors
are good sailors, as long as, say, only 15% of Norwegian, 14% of German,
and 13% of Italian sailors are good
sailors.

Asher and Morreau say that it is
“reasonable” to infer from “Fs are G” that something is
G given that it is F.  But inferring
from “Dutchmen are good sailors” that Maarten is a good sailor
given that Maarten is Dutch would not be reasonable if, as surely is the case,
less than 50% of Dutchmen are sailors.

I noted earlier that the suggestion that “Fs are G” means
“All Fs are typically G” might be acceptable if
“typically” is understood as a synonym of
“stereotypically.”
Indeed, a common complaint about generic statements is that they
involve stereotyping, misrepresentation, or at least exaggeration of the facts.
The complaint targets mainly generic
statements that, like
Arnauld’s examples, concern nationality, gender, race, age, or religion.
These are sensitive matters, and people care deeply how statements about them
might be intended or understood. Many resent, even find insulting, that such
statements are made at all.

For this reason, “stereotyping” is a pejorative today,
and it does apply to generic statements involving abuse of conceptualization or
classification. But it is misplaced if applied to all generic statements. Like
most conceptualization and classification, most generic statements are
innocent. New York Times columnist
David Brooks writes, “I ... believe most of
human thought consists of stereotypes. I’m not against stereotypes;
I’m against crude stereotypes.” If we say that all generic
statements involve stereotyping, then we must say that so do almost all
universal statements, since almost all are intended and understood as though
they are only generic. That the conceptualization generic statements involve is
sometimes abused counts against them no more than the frequent abuse of inductive
reasoning counts against induction.
Indeed, abuses of generic statements, including those charged with
stereotyping, are usually just abuses of induction. One is more likely to be
struck by lightning than to be attacked by a shark, resort managers in the
Bahamas say, and this is true, but it does matter whether one is swimming in
the ocean or sleeping in a hotel bed.
The type of inductive “reasoning” exemplified in “We
don’t need fire insurance because we’ve never had a fire” is
unfortunately familiar.

But deductive reasoning, too, is
frequently abused. The validity of a deductive argument is not a matter of
choice, but its premises are. One can “prove” deductively any
proposition if free to choose the premises.  It is not the validity of the standard
proofs of the existence of God that usually has been questioned – if not
already valid, they can be made valid by adding suitable premises – but
the truth of their premises, e.g., that existence is a property
(“perfection,” “real predicate”), that the universe has
a cause, or that the human eye manifests intelligent design.

The variety of antirealism defended here is
modest and measured. It does not
deny the reality of individual things or even the reality of atomic, compound,
and universal facts. It denies only the reality of generic facts. This would
hardly cause common sense to rebel. Even philosophers have not claimed that
there are such entities. Yet, if cognition of the world requires the intellectual activity of generalization, and generic statements are the chief
vehicles of generalization, then this modest and measured variety of antirealism is not much weaker than
traditional antirealism. Moreover, since it is based solely on the ubiquity and
irreducibility of generic statements, it is more plausible than standard
antirealism. It is also less obscure.

Nevertheless,
two important caveats are needed. The first is that while generic statements cannot be given a realist
interpretation, they resist an unqualifiedly antirealist interpretation. There
is no fact to which “Winters in Iowa are
severe” corresponds, but the statement is ordinarily taken to be true
while “Winters in Florida
are severe” is not. The reason, of course, is that, though equivalent
neither to universal statements nor to singular statements or conjunctions of
singular statements, generic statements would not be regarded as true were it
not for the truth of some singular statements. This does not mean that they are
equivalent to the corresponding particular statements. What “Winters in Iowa are severe” says is quite different from what
“Some winters in Iowa
are severe” says. Yet it does entail the truth of the latter. Of course,
the converse does not hold:
“Some winters in Iowa are
severe” does not entail “Winters in Iowa are severe.” “Some winters
in Missouri are severe” is true, but “Winters
in Missouri
are severe” is not. Generic statements have no relationship to generic
facts because there are no such facts, but they do have a relationship to
relevant singular facts, even though they are not reducible to statements
asserting those singular facts. Nonetheless, this relationship is not like that
of universal statements to their singular instances. As Wittgenstein pointed
out, while the former do not say what the latter assert, they show it. This is not true in the case of
generic statements. Even a semirealist interpretation of them cannot be
defended. “All winters in Iowa are
severe” entails “The 1903 winter in Iowa
was severe,” but “Winters in Iowa
are severe” does not. Yet, though not unqualified, the antirealist
interpretation of generic statements is not like that of statements that are just
false. Most generic statements are true, or false, for obvious empirical
reasons. But these reasons do not include knowledge of generic facts.

The second caveat is that while
generic statements are the common means of generalization, we nonetheless understand
them as approximations of universal statements.  The word “all” remains the
paradigmatic expression for generality.
This is why the primacy of generic statements may be said to be
“pragmatic,” not logical or semantical. “Patients with prior strokes benefit
from taking Lipitor” is indeed
different from “All patients with prior strokes benefit from
taking Lipitor,” but the latter remains
our guide to understanding the former. The same can be said, respectively, of
“Patients with prior strokes do not benefit from taking Lipitor” and “No patients with prior
strokes benefit from taking Lipitor,”
even though both are false.

4. Logical experiences.

In the case of universal,
particular, and molecular statements we have found that, at most, semirealism
is warranted. In the case of generic statements, however, full-fledged, though
not unqualified, antirealism seems inescapable.  Both reject logical realism.  But many philosophers have drawn
attention to what may be called logical experiences.  William James acknowledged the occurrence
of “a feeling of and, a feeling
of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by,” and pointed out the
dependence of the thought of something as “existent extra mentem” on
“repeated experiences of the same.”[264]  H. H. Price also wrote
of “a feeling of if,” which
“arises through the experience of questioning or doubting,”[265] and suggested
that “Disappointed expectation is what brings NOT into our lives.”[266] According
to Sartre, questioning
is what “introduces nothingness in the world,” for
example when looking in a café for someone you eagerly expect but fail
to see.[267]
We may have that experience when
looking for the Times but failing to
find it, a distinctive experience of its absence
from the rack.  Since we would be
failing it to find it among all the
newspapers on the rack, it would be also an experience associated with generality,
whether that expressed in universal or in generic statements. Gustav Bergmann
drew attention to an experience associated with conjunction when he remarked
that “there is an obvious distinction between two simultaneous
awarenesses, one of this, the other of that, on the one hand, and a single
awareness of this-and-that, on the other.”[268]

The occurrence of such experiences
and their association with the respective logical expressions cannot be denied.  Nor are they philosophically
unimportant.  Perhaps they even anchor
the use of the expressions, consciously or unconsciously. Of course, they are
not experiences of logical objects, nor need they occur whenever the expressions
are used.  They may play a role
analogous to that of Kant’s “schemata” and
Wittgenstein’s  “criteria.”  If so, the analogy would be illuminating.
Logical semirealism differs from
both logical antirealism and logical realism much as Kant’s position on
causality differed from both antirealism and realism regarding causality, and
Wittgenstein’s position on other people’s sensations differed from both
antirealism and realism regarding “other minds.” Both could be
described as semirealist.

There seems to be no connection
between what Kant called the pure concepts of the understanding, such as the
concept of causality, which according to him are a priori and necessary for
cognition of the world of experience but stand for nothing in experience, and
the world of experience to which nonetheless they apply. To deal with this
problem, Kant proposed his doctrine of the schematism of the pure
understanding. He wrote: “[P]ure concepts of the understanding being
quite heterogeneous from empirical intuitions, and indeed from all sensible
intuitions, can never be met with in any intuition. For no one will say that a
category, such as that of causality, can be intuited through sense and is
itself contained in appearance. How, then, is the subsumption of intuitions under pure concepts, the application of a category to
appearances, possible…? We must be able to show how pure concepts can be
applicable to appearances…Obviously there must be some third
thing…”[269] This
“third thing” was the schema. A few pages later Kant explained that
“The schema of cause, and of the causality of a thing in general, is the
real upon which, whenever posited, something else always follows.”[270] This,
of course, is what Hume had called constant conjunction. The pure concept of
causality must be understood as associated with the concept of constant
conjunction if it is to have application to experience. Thus Kant agreed with
Hume that constant conjunction is what we depend on in applying the concept of
causality, but of course he sharply denied that it is the same as causality.

In the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein denied that the use of
words for sensations depends on anything they refer to. Such words, he claimed,
refer neither to anything “outer” such as behavior, nor to anything
“inner.”[271] But he
was aware that so far he had told us only what their use does not depend on.  What does
it depend on, then? The answer that it depends on nothing is deeply
unsatisfactory, even if true, as most readers of Wittgenstein would testify.
Wittgenstein offered an answer that appealed to his notion of a (nondefining) “criterion,”
as contrasted with a mere “symptom.”  It replaced the notion of reference in
the case of words for sensations, yet it did stand for a connection between
their use and something else.

A person’s holding
one’s cheek in a certain distinctive way, Wittgenstein wrote, may be a “criterion”
for saying that the person has a toothache, in the sense of grounding the
learning and then governing the use of the expression.[272] On the
other hand, the person’s facial expression may be just a “symptom”
of having a toothache, an event that only “happens” to occur when
the person has a toothache.  Holding
one’s cheek and having a toothache, of course, are not the same. They are
only “connected” in some way.
But we do not infer this connection from our own past experience –
such inductive reasoning would not be serious, since it would be based on only
one instance.[273]
Nor do we infer the connection from other persons’ past or present
experience – we are not aware of other persons’ toothaches.  Perhaps holding one's cheek is not a
criterion for the use of “toothache” (Wittgenstein mentioned it
only as a possible example), but surely some patterns of behavior, however
complex, are such criteria, in the sense that, though logically neither
sufficient nor necessary for the correctness of the use of “toothache,”
if they were not at least occasionally satisfied that use would be bewildering
and presumably never mastered. A person can have a toothache without holding a
cheek or doing anything else connected with having a toothache, and a person
can smile, sing, and dance despite an aching tooth, but if this were usually or
even often the case we would have doubts about not only about the truth of the
assertion that the person has a toothache but about its being a proper use of
language.

Logical antirealism faces a difficulty analogous to those Kant
and Wittgenstein faced: there seems to be no connection between the use of
logical expressions and what we perceive, think, or talk about. We cannot deal
with this difficulty by following Wittgenstein or Kant, for they were concerned
with very different topics and relied on psychological and linguistic
assumptions we need not make. But the logical experiences mentioned earlier may
serve as a “third thing” that at least sometimes mediates between
the use of logical expressions and what we perceive, think, or talk about. There is little doubt that
the use of “if” bears some relation to the experience
of questioning or doubting, and of “not” to
disappointed expectation.

This is
not the place to attempt a psychological or phenomenological analysis of
logical experiences. Their occurrence may not be essential to the uses of
logical expressions. They are not what these expressions stand for, nor are
they experiences of anything else in the world. But they do seem essential to human
life and thus to the world as it is for
us. It is a world of familiarity and strangeness, expectation and
disappointment, presence and absence. It is a world of action. We are immersed
in it. Our world is not the earth viewed from the moon.

Chapter Ten: FACTS AND
TRUTH

1. Realism and antirealism regarding facts

The position we have reached so
far does not question realism regarding things (ontological realism), and it
accepts nothing stronger than semirealism, e.g., Wittgenstein’s and
Bergmann’s positions, regarding the sentential connectives and the
quantifiers. It is antirealist only regarding generic statements.  It says nothing about the physical
structure of the world, or about space, time, and causal order.  It acknowledges even the occurrence certain
experiences associated with logical expressions. It is thus moderate and
inoffensive to common sense, the mature and thoughtful judgment we all share
and must respect even if not accept.
Neither semirealism regarding the sentential connectives and the
quantifiers nor antirealism regarding generic facts denies anything dear to
common sense.

Nonetheless, as I noted in the
Introduction, sentences themselves, not just the sentential connectives and the
quantifiers, are logical expressions. This is often unclear because of the
frequent use of “proposition,” instead of “sentence.” The
use is legitimate when what is said is intended to apply also to the synonymous
sentences in other languages, but highly controversial if taken to refer to an
entity that is neither a sentence nor a fact nor a judgment.  The logical “objects” for
which sentences supposedly stand are facts.  In addition to the sorts of logical
antirealism we have considered so far, there is antirealism with respect to
facts as such.  It questions the
legitimacy of the very category of fact – atomic, molecular, universal,
particular, or generic – and thus of any theory of truth as
correspondence to fact. It questions the reality of the world even if the world
is the totality only of atomic facts.

The case for the reality of facts
–  robust Russellian facts
– is straightforward, though seldom properly made by realists. It is essential to cosmological realism, even if
not to ontological realism. My example of four worlds containing Jack,
Jill, and the relation of admiring, and differing only in respect to facts
about Jack, Jill, and the relation of admiring, should have made this evident. If Jack
admires Jill but Jill does not admire Jack, only the fact that this is so, not
the mere presence of Jack, Jill, and admiration in the real
(“actual”) world, would distinguish that world from a world in
which Jill admires Jack but Jack does not admire Jill, a world in which they
admire each other, and a world in which neither admires the other, if these worlds
differ in no other respect. We could not make such distinctions if there were no such entities as facts. There would also be no world, if the world
is the totality of facts. There might still
be things, but realism regarding things, ontological realism, does not
entail realism regarding the world, cosmological realism.

Facts are thus indispensable for
our very understanding of the dispute between realism and antirealism, as
Richard Fumerton has forcefully argued.[274]
Defenders of realism often rest their case on the “obvious” reality
of material objects: of one’s hands, a tree in the park when no one sees
it, the sun and the earth before there were human beings, and so on. But the
realism they defend and the antirealism they oppose are ontological, not
cosmological, they are realism and antirealism regarding things, not the world.
Israel Scheffler objected to Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking by saying that surely we didn’t make the
stars.[275]
Scheffler’s objection was simplistic, and he failed to notice the very
title of Goodman’s book. To acknowledge the mind-independence of stars is
not to acknowledge the mind-independence of the world. We may remain realists
regarding things, including stars, even if we abandon realism regarding the world.
We may be both ontological realists and cosmological antirealists.

Ontological antirealism is certainly
repugnant to common sense. It questions even the reality of the child’s animals,
vegetables, and minerals. But cosmological antirealism questions only the
reality of the world conceived as the totality of facts, a conception purely
philosophical and too recherché for common sense, which seldom
contemplates “the world” and when it does conceives it as the
totality of things. Had cosmological
antirealism questioned the reality of the world as the totality of things, it would have been no less
repugnant to common sense than ontological antirealism. It would have
questioned the reality of animals, vegetables, and minerals. Ontological
antirealism is a position, as Hume saw, doomed to produce no conviction. It is
so implausible that the few philosophers, perhaps Berkeley, who seem to have
held it are viewed by nonphilosophers with astonishment.

Are there facts? Is there a strong
case for realism regarding facts? In defense of his ontology of facts,
Reinhardt Grossmann wrote, “Among the furniture of the world, there are
quite obviously facts. It is a fact that the earth is round, a fact that whales
are mammals, and a fact that 2 plus 3 equals 5.”[276] But
Grossmann also held that facts are abstract entities, like properties and
relations, which he regarded as universals: While an apple may be red at time t, the fact that this is so is not
itself located at t or any other
time, nor is it located in space where the apple is or anywhere else.[277]
Grossmann did add, “There is only one world, a world in which universals
and particulars dwell side by side in harmony” and what “keeps this
world together…is the unity of the fact,” but he also cautioned:
“The problem is not how universals can be kept tied to particulars, but
how facts are to be analyzed into their constituents.”[278] David
Armstrong has claimed that Grossmann’s position involves “absurd
lack of economy.”[279] I
suggest, however, that it involves subtlety and sophistication. It bears
important, though unintended, similarities to Wittgenstein’s ontology of
facts in the Tractatus. Like
Wittgenstein, Grossmann was sensitive both to the special need for the category
of facts in ontology and to the special nature of facts. In describing facts as
abstract entities, he came close to recognizing that they are logical objects.

Metaphysical realists’ grasp
and defense of their position are seldom clear or unambiguous. For example, in
his spirited defense of realism, Michael Devitt writes that “the sentence
‘a is F’ is true because it has a predicational structure
containing words standing in certain referential relations to parts of reality
and because of the way that reality is.”[280]  Yet, in the same paragraph, he denies
that truth requires “mysterious entities” such as facts. One
wonders what Devitt could mean, if not a fact, by a “way that reality
is,” or by the word “situation,” which he uses several pages
later in speaking of “pairing of sentences with situations.”[281]

Devitt is not alone in taking such
a puzzling stand on facts. Hilary Putnam writes that a state of affairs (he
could have said “possible fact”) is “a kind of ghostly double
of the grammarian’s sentence.” But he then says, “Whether a
descriptive sentence is true or false depends on whether certain things or
events satisfy the conditions for being described by that sentence.”[282]
Presumably, this page satisfies the conditions for being described by the
sentence “This page is white.” How do those
“conditions” differ from the state of affairs or fact that this
page is white?

Paul Horwich defends a
“minimal theory” of truth, which he thinks avoids commitment to
Russellian facts. He claims that his theory is “perfectly
consistent” with the “intuitions” that “whenever a
proposition or an utterance is true, it is true because something in the world is a certain way…For example,  <Snow is white>’s being true
is explained by snow’s being
white.”[283]
Horwich, too, appeals to “ways” something is without telling us how
these “ways” might differ from Russellian facts. Moreover,
snow’s being white would not explain <Snow is white>’s being
true unless “snow’s being white” was a synonym of “that
snow is white,” which it is not. The genitive expression
“snow’s being white” obviously refers to being white, a color, and would refer to a way snow is only if by
“way” we mean a property,
in this case the property of being white. And this property is only part of
what explains the truth of “Snow is white.”  It is that snow has (exemplifies, instantiates) that property, not the
property by itself, which explains the truth of “Snow is white.”
Speaking of snow’s being white is quite different from saying that snow
is white. Consider the analogy with the genitive expression “Jack’s
coat.” It is not a synonym of “that Jack has a coat,” and so
it does not fully explain the truth of “Jack has a coat.”
“Jack’s coat” refers to an individual thing, a coat, just as “snow’s being white” refers
to a property, and that thing is only part of what explains the truth of “Jack
has a coat.” It is that Jack
has a coat, not the coat itself, that explains the truth of “Jack has a
coat.”

William P. Alston calls his theory
of truth “minimalist realism,” and in a circumspect defense of it
he writes, “I see no reason to suppose that facts are not objectively
real, and as such capable of rendering true propositions true in a nontrivial
sense.” He adds, however, that the “mode of reality” of facts
is “quite different from that of substances, states, properties of
substances, and events, as Strawson and others have been at pains to point
out.”[284]
Alston does not tell us what the difference is, or what he means by “mode
of reality.” However, William Vallicella, also a defender of realism,
does. He argues that true propositions require “truth-making
facts.” And he astutely points out that facts could be truth-making only
if they are “proposition-like,” “structured in a
proposition-like way” – only if “a fact has a structure that
can mirror the structure of a proposition.”[285] Though
his formulation of it may invite deflationist attacks, Vallicella’s view
is in the spirit of Wittgenstein’s position in the Tractatus, where we find subtle and deep, even if brief, accounts
of the notions of fact and correspondence to fact. But Wittgenstein applied
these notions, respectively, to atomic facts (Sachverhalte, states of affairs), which are “configurations
of simple objects,” and atomic propositions, which consist of names of
simple objects. Not surprisingly, he could give no examples of simple objects
and therefore no examples of atomic facts or of atomic propositions.
Wittgenstein famously argued that his notion of correspondence to fact has no
application to the statements of mathematics, logic, ethics, and religion,
which, according to him, say nothing even though some of them show much,
including “the higher.” But he saw that it also had no application
to the compound and general statements of everyday talk.

The importance of the category of
fact (or state of affairs) is seen clearly and discussed at some length by Jan
Westerhoff in his recent book Ontological
Categories. He relies on two arguments. The first he calls
“semantic.” Westerhoff writes, “Sentences are indispensable
for a comprehensive description of the world…therefore states of affairs
must be parts of the world.”[286] The
premise, of course, is true, but the conclusion does not follow. Compare
“Numerals are indispensable for a comprehensive description of the
world…therefore numbers must be parts of the world.” Westerhoff
calls his second argument for states of affairs “cognitional.”
Gestalt, not associationist, psychology provides the more plausible account of
perception, he says. We always perceive wholes (“complexes”); we do
not first perceive and then put together their parts.[287] But to
admit that this is so is not to admit that what we perceive is states of
affairs. For this to be true, propositions of the form “S perceives
x” must be reducible to propositions of the form “S perceives that
p.”  Clearly, few if any are. A
neonate may see a hand, but probably not that
it is a hand. This is true also of adults.
When I see my hand, usually I do not also see that it is my hand or even
that it is a hand. Westerhoff says that “states of affairs provide the
primary epistemic point of contact between us and the world.”[288]
Indeed, one of Hegel’s most influential contributions was to argue that
there is no direct consciousness of objects that is unmediated by judgment. In
American philosophy, Wilfrid Sellars held much the same view. But infants do
seem to begin by perceiving things,
e.g., their mothers, long before they make any judgments. Perceiving that what they see is Mother is at first
too intellectual for them. Both complex individual things and states of affairs
have constituents, but it does not follow that when we perceive an individual
thing we perceive a state of affairs, that individual things are states of
affairs. Perhaps, as Wittgenstein remarked in his Notebooks, all complexity is propositional, but this is not obvious.[289]

The
ontology of facts is usually considered in relation to the theory of
truth as correspondence to fact. But Strawson wrote, “The only plausible
candidate for what (in the world) makes a statement true is the fact it states;
but the fact it states is not something in the world….Of course,
statements and facts fit. They were made for each other. If you prise the
statements off the world you prise the facts off it too; but the world would be
none the poorer…. Facts are not broken or overturned, interrupted or
prolonged, kicked, destroyed, mended, or noisy.”[290]
Strawson took the latter point to be relevant because he believed that
“the whole charm of talking of situations, states of affairs or facts as
included in, or parts of, the world, consists in thinking of them as things,
and groups of things”[291]

Donald Davidson concurred:
“The realist view of truth, if it has any content, must be based on the
idea of correspondence, correspondence as applied to sentences or beliefs or
utterances, to entities that are propositional in character; and such
correspondence cannot be made intelligible.” He went on to add:
“The real objection [to correspondence theories] is that such theories
fail to provide entities to which truth vehicles (whether we take these to be
statements, sentences, or utterances) can be said to correspond.”[292] Quine
agreed: “Objects in abundance, concrete and abstract, are indeed needed
for an account of the world; but facts contribute nothing beyond their specious
support of a correspondence theory.”[293] I have
already mentioned Hilary Putnam’s remark that a state of affairs is
“a kind of ghostly double of the grammarian’s sentence.”

Devitt was right that, if understood
as Russell and Wittgenstein did, facts are mysterious entities. There do seem
to be no such entities. Alan White pointed out that, contrary to standard
philosophical practice, facts are not even properly describable as states of
affairs, for “[F]acts, but not events, situations, or states of affairs,
can be disputed, challenged, assumed, or proved.” [294]
Indeed, facts do seem to be man-made fictions. The general argument against
them is that to serve the purpose for which they are introduced they must be a
sort of items that the world cannot be plausibly supposed to contain. They
cannot be said to be entities in the sense in which animals, vegetables, and
minerals, or even colors and spatial relations, are said to be entities. They
bear uncanny resemblance to sentences, in particular the sentences they
supposedly make true, and thus appear to be no more than reified, hypostatized
sentences. The fact that Dick likes Jane much too conveniently has exactly the
distinctive features of the sentence “Dick likes Jane”: three
constituents, configured in the same order as the words, one of them (the
relation of liking) categorially different from the other two (the individuals
Dick and Jane), much as the verb in the sentence is syntactically different
from the names. The fact seems tailor-made for the sentence.

That there are such entities as
facts is especially implausible in the case of the subcategory of relational
facts. Indeed, there is a close connection between the category of fact and the
category of relations, since a fact is conceived not as the mere
collection  of its constituents but
as a complex entity with constituents related to one another.  Now, if there are facts, at least some
relational facts about observable things presumably would themselves be
observable. But, clearly, none are. The reason is straightforward: relations are
not observable. You may see the left and the top edge of this page, but surely
you do not also see an item, which might be called the relation longer-than, that holds between them. If
you think that you do, what is its location in your visual field and what are
its color and shape? Surely one cannot see
an item that is not in one’s visual field, and which has neither shape
nor color. But if you do not see the relation longer-than, surely you also do not see the relational fact to
which the true statement “The left edge of this page is longer than the
top edge” is supposed to correspond. Of course, you see the page, as well
as its edges, and you also see that
the left edge is longer than the top edge. But the question is whether when you
see all this you see an item that is the relation between the two edges of
being longer than, and therefore whether you also see a relational fact of
which that relation is a constituent. If the relational fact is visible while
the relation is not, is this so because the relation is somehow hidden? Or too small
to see?  One could ask such
questions also about the location in the visual field, and the color and shape,
of the relational fact itself, not just of the relation, and surely the answer
would be that it has none.

To ask these questions is not to display
sectarian empiricism. Perhaps there are many unseen and unseeable, unobserved
and unobservable, entities. But the relational fact that the left edge of this
page is longer than the top edge should not be one of them, since the two edges
of this page – the page you see in front of you at this very moment
– are quite visible, as is the page itself.  If there were such entities as facts,
surely facts about observable things should themselves be observable.

Bertrand Russell was perhaps the
most astute champion of relations. What he eventually said about them is therefore
instructive: “For my part, I think it is as certain as anything that
there are relational facts such as ‘A is earlier than B.’ But does
it follow that there is an object of which the name is
‘earlier’?  It is very
difficult to make out what can be meant by such a question, and still more
difficult to see how an answer can be found.  There certainly are complex wholes which
have a structure, and we cannot describe the structure without relation-words.  But if we try to descry some entity
denoted by these relation-words and capable of some shadowy kind of subsistence
outside the complex in which it is embodied, it is not at all clear that we can
succeed.”[295] Russell
did not explain how he could be certain that there are relational facts such as
‘A is earlier than B’ but not at all certain that there is an
object of which the name is ‘earlier.’ The case for the
“complex wholes” that are relational facts is no better than the
case for their constituents, including relations. The fact that a is earlier
than b is no easier to “descry” than is the relation earlier.  How could the former be descried if the
latter could not? Pace Russell, there
is no special difficulty in making out what is meant by the question whether
“there is an object of which the name is ‘earlier.’”
What he found difficult was how to avoid a negative answer to it.

Russell in effect admitted that
there is no object of awareness, whether perceptual or intellectual, to which
the relational expression in a relational statement might correspond. Exactly
the same can be said about the expressions for predication, usually a form of
the verb “to be,” in subject-predicate statements.  To say that this sheet of paper is white
presupposes mastery of the concept expressed by the word “is,” but
surely there is no relevant object of awareness, in addition to this sheet of
paper and its color, to which “is” corresponds. It would be absurd
to suggest that there really is such an object but it is not perceived. Is it
not perceived for the reasons that the atoms in the paper are not?

The interpretation of relational
expressions in the history of philosophy has usually been antirealist. Hume and
Leibniz held that relations are just “the product of the comparison of
ideas,” not independent denizens of the world. According to Kant, our
concepts of relations such as causality and inherence are a priori,
nonempirical, imposed on what we perceive but representing nothing. The
nonempirical status of relations was vigorously defended, and celebrated, by
the British idealists, especially T. H. Green and F. H. Bradley. Frege, who
resolutely rejected the category of fact, did assume that relational
expressions stand for what he called concepts, but he held that all expressions
standing for concepts are incomplete, unsaturated, fundamentally different from
names, and thus incapable of serving as logical subjects of sentences.

The metaphysical notion of fact is
grounded in our use of declarative sentences, and the supposition that there
are facts in the world depends at least in part on the assumption that true sentences
must correspond to something in the world, that, though not names, they somehow must be like names.  But sentences cannot serve as grammatical
subjects or objects of verbs, which is the mark of names.

Despite appearances, logic does
not need them for such a service. Regarding the “paradox” of
material implication (according to the truth-functional definition of
implication, “p É q” would be true if q is true or if p is
false, regardless of what p and q are about), Quine pointed out that
“This controversy would not have arisen if the notion of statements as
naming had been carefully avoided, and the variables ‘p,’
‘q,’ etc., had been treated explicitly as standing in positions
appropriate to statements rather than names.” The natural reading of
“p É
q” is “p only if q,” rather than the misleading “p
implies q.” [296] Indeed,
“p is true,” if taken literally, is gibberish. “Snow is white
is true” is grammatically ill-formed. “‘Snow is white’
is true” is not, but its subject-term is not a sentence – it is the
name of a sentence.

The category of fact is of little
use in contemporary logical theory, which usually adopts a Fregean approach to
the semantics of sentences by taking their “denotations” to be
their truth-values, though it does not hypostatize truth and falsity, as Frege
did. The paradigms of expressions that stand for entities, whether individuals
or predicates, are words assigned to them by convention, explicit or
implicit.  This is why the number of
names and predicates is finite, in principle determinable for any
language.  Not so with sentences.
They are not introduced in language by convention. And their (potential)
infinity is one of the most important data in linguistics.

Of course, there are
nominalizations of sentences, such as “Snow’s being white.”
They indeed are nouns and often do serve as subjects or objects of verbs. But
they are not sentences and could not be taken to stand for facts even if there
were facts. Consider the phrase “John's whistling” as it might
occur in the sentence “John's whistling awoke her.” It stands for a
whistling, which is an action, a doing, perhaps just a noise, not for a fact.  Hence the tendency to refer to facts
instead with what Fowler called fused participles, like “Snow being
white” or “John whistling awoke her.” (Fowler’s example
was “Women having the vote reduces men's political power.”) One of
the two words in “John whistling” is presumably intended to modify
the other; otherwise, they would be just a pair of unrelated words. But if
“whistling” is intended to modify “John,” then the
grammatically proper sentence would be “Whistling John awoke her”
or, better, “John, who was whistling, awoke her.” Both are
obviously different from “John's whistling awoke her” – they
could be true when it is false and false when it is true. And if
“John” is intended to modify “whistling,” then the
grammatically proper sentence would be the original “John's whistling
awoke her,” the subject-term of which refers to something John does or
makes, an action or a noise, not a fact. Contrary to Roderick Chisholm,
Fowler's objection to fused participles was not a mere “stricture.”[297] They are
bad logic, not just bad grammar.

I ended chapter 8 drawing
attention to certain experiences associated with our use of some logical expressions.
Since I have counted sentences also as logical expressions, one may ask, are
there distinctive logical experiences associated with sentences as such? Indeed,
there are, the obvious example being beliefs, in the sense of experiences or
feelings of conviction, confidence, perhaps faith. But assertions of sentences,
i.e., statements, usually are not accompanied by such feelings – they are
just made, correctly or incorrectly. Contrary to widespread philosophical
opinion, they usually express no beliefs if beliefs are occurrent states or
events. It is common in current philosophy to speak of people’s
“systems of beliefs,” and even to say that theories are such
systems. But people are at most just confident in some judgments they make.
Theories are systems of propositions, which in the present context means no
more than that they are systems of sentences.  It is unlikely that anyone’s
totality of beliefs deserves to be called a system – many are haphazard,
unrelated to the person’s other beliefs

2. Semirealism regarding facts.

In
the previous section I considered the case for realism and then the case for
antirealism regarding facts. But there is a third way of understanding facts, which
is neither realist nor antirealist. It is semirealist. In general, if a
proposition is in dispute between realism and antirealism, with the realist
asserting and the antirealist denying it, the semirealist would differ from
both by holding that it is an improper proposition, perhaps even that there is
no such proposition, and thus that both asserting and denying it are improper.
There is an analogy here with sophisticated agnosticism. The theist asserts the
proposition “God exists” and the atheist denies it, but the
sophisticated agnostic questions, for varying reasons we need not consider
here, its propriety or sense and neither asserts nor denies it.

The
semirealist way of understanding facts relies on Wittgenstein’s distinction
between saying and showing, and applies to the puzzle regarding facts the kind
of resolution he proposed of the puzzle regarding universal statements. Indeed,
“fact” was on Wittgenstein’s list of formal concepts,
together with “object,” “complex,”
“function,” and “number.” And according to him,
“when something falls under a formal concept as one of its objects, this
cannot be expressed by means of a proposition” but “instead is
shown in the very sign for this object” (4.126).  This is why “it is nonsensical to
speak of the total number of objects. The same applies to the words 'complex',
'fact', 'function', 'number', etc. They all signify formal concepts, and are
represented in conceptual notation by variables, not by functions or classes
(as Frege and Russell believed)” (4.1272). Wherever “fact” is
used as a proper concept-word, nonsensical pseudo-propositions would result,
just as wherever “object” is used as a proper concept-word. It
cannot be “said” that what the sentence “This page is
white” asserts is a fact, for
the same reason it cannot be said that this page is an object.  Indeed, as we
have seen, to say “p is a fact” would be worse, because if we
replaced the sentential variable in the phrase with a sentence, as we should be
able to do, the result, e.g., “This page is white is a fact,” would
be grammatically ill-formed, which “This page is an object” is not.
Of course, we may say “That this page is white is a fact,” but
“That this page is white” is not a sentence and thus not a value
that p can take.

We can no more intelligibly talk
about facts than we can talk about objects. But this does not mean that
Wittgenstein was an antirealist regarding facts or objects. When an item, say,
what the true sentence “This page is white” allegedly corresponds
to, falls under the formal concept “fact,” this cannot be expressed
by means of a proposition but neither is it nothing. For it is
“shown” in the sign for the item. Just as “a name shows that
it signifies an object, a sign for a number that it signifies a number”
(4.126), a sentence shows that it signifies a fact. We cannot properly say
“there are facts” but also cannot properly say “there are no
facts,” just as we cannot properly say “there are objects”
but also cannot properly say “there are no objects.” The
antirealist holds that it is false that there are facts. The antirealist does
not.

If it cannot be said that there
are facts, then also cannot be said that a true sentence (or statement,
proposition, judgment, thought, belief, etc.) corresponds to a fact. To this
extent, antirealism regarding facts appears right. Yet, as we have seen, the
presence in the world of the individuals, properties, or relations mentioned in
a true sentence does not suffice for its truth. “Jack admires Jill”
mentions Jack, Jill, and the relation of admiration. But their presence in the
world does not suffice for the truth of the sentence. It does not distinguish
the world in which the sentence is true from worlds in which the sentence is
false but otherwise are just like it. Surely, however, there is such a
distinction to be made. To this extent, realism regarding facts appears right.

Semirealism regarding facts
differs from realism regarding facts by denying that true sentences stand for
special entities, additional to and categorially different from the entities mentioned
in the sentences, that can be referred to, described, and analyzed
independently of the sentences. This page is rectangular, white, made of paper,
and held in our hands, but none of these can be said of the fact that this page
is white. But semirealism regarding facts differs also from antirealism
regarding facts by acknowledging that there is more to truth than the sentences
– and the statements, propositions, judgments, thoughts, beliefs, etc.
– that are true. It may even label this additional feature “correspondence
to fact.” The label would be reasonable since in everyday talk we do say
that a true sentence “fits the facts.” The terminology of facts
thus need not be shunned by the semirealist.  There is more to the truth of a sentence
than the sentence that is true, there is also what “makes” the
sentence true, but we cannot say what
it is except by repeating the sentence or uttering a synonym of it.

Antirealism regarding facts is
plausible insofar as facts cannot be referred to or described independently of
the sentences supposed to stand for them. But the theory of truth as correspondence
to fact is also plausible. Sentences reporting direct observation, like
“That’s a cat, not a dog,” obviously are not true just in
virtue of the words they contain, or some relation they bear to other sentences,
the speaker, a culture, or an institution. This is why realism regarding facts
is plausible. If the correspondence theory is defective, the reason is not that
it distinguishes the sentence from the fact that makes it true but that it
fails to acknowledge the special nature of facts, the special status of the
concept of “fact.”

3. Truth.

Facts
are not entities that true sentences name, and if truth were a relation between
sentences and facts, as the correspondence theory of truth holds, it would not
be an ordinary relation, like next-to or earlier-than. This does not mean,
however, that “there are no facts,” or that “truth is not
correspondence to fact.” It means that we must free ourselves from the
confines imposed by the usual theories of truth as correspondence, and see that
the question about what makes true sentences true ignores the complexity,
subtlety, and wide range of the use of the word “true.”

Only
a poor philosophy of language would hold that to have meaning an expression
must stand for an entity, but it is sound metaphysics to identify what entities
there are by first asking what entities, if any, various expressions appear to
stand for. Realism about Jack and Jill need not infer Jack’s and
Jill’s reality from the existence of their names, but it might identify
what it is about as the people those names name. Realism about properties
(“universals”) need not hold that there are such entities on the
grounds that there are predicates, but it usually identifies what it is about
as what predicates seem to stand for. Realism about facts identifies what it is
about as what true sentences seem to stand for, though it need not hold that
sentences would have no meaning or sense if there were no such entities as
facts.

In
chapter 8 I argued that generic statements are essential to cognition. Many
generic statements, in everyday life as well as in science, are considered
obviously, unquestionably, true. Yet I also argued for antirealism regarding generic
facts. It might have been asked, if there are no generic facts, what makes
generic statements true? But the use of the word “make” in such
a context, though common in philosophy, is metaphorical and misleading. We
should rather speak of the features, relational or nonrelational, in virtue of
which sentences are taken to be true, and acknowledge that these features are
many and diverse.

Frege held that truth is the
object that is the reference (Bedeutung)
of all true sentences. He did not claim to have discovered a new object, as an
astronomer might claim to have discovered a new planet. He explained that the
reasons for his position were, first, his general distinction between the sense
and reference of expressions – names as well as predicates – other
than sentences and, second, the obvious connection between the reference of
those expressions and the truth-value of the sentences in which they occur.
(Whether “She is young” is true depends on who she is.) Frege
mentioned two alternatives to his view, arguing that neither is credible.
Regarding the alternative that truth is the relational property of
correspondence to fact, he remarked, as we saw in chapter Six, “What is a
fact? A fact is a thought that is true.”[298] And
regarding the alternative that truth is some nonrelational property of
sentences or thoughts, he wrote, “One can, indeed, say: ‘The
thought that 5 is a prime number is true.’  But closer examination shows that
nothing more has been said than in the simple sentence ‘5 is a prime
number.’” Unlike recent deflationist theorists of truth that also
would say this, however, Frege explained why it is so: “By combining
subject and predicate, one reaches only a thought, never passes from a sense to
its Bedeutung, never from a thought
to its truth-value.”[299]
According to Frege, the primary bearers of truth-value are thoughts, not
sentences, but he did not mean by “thought” a subjective,
psychological state or event: “By a thought I understand not the
subjective performance of thinking but its objective content, which is capable
of being the common property of several thinkers.”[300] Frege
did not say that one never passes from a thought to the world. He said that one never passes from a thought to its truth-value. Russell and Wittgenstein
needed a world of facts. Frege needed just plain Truth.

Anyone who thinks that
Frege’s focus on truth, rather than on facts or the world, is
obscurantist may be reminded that the notion of a fact and the notion of a world,
whether understood as the totality of facts or the totality of things, are hardly
clearer. It would be absurd to identify the world with the totality of Fregean
thoughts, since according to him thoughts belong in a “realm” that
is neither physical nor mental, but not more absurd than to identify the world
with the totality of true sentences. What might not be absurd, however, is to
identify the world with truth – it
would only be uncommon. The actual world is what we seek to know, and knowledge
requires truth.

Frege’s view of truth
resembled the medieval view that it is one of the transcendentalia., together with Being,
One, Good, and Beautiful. Both views do justice to the wide diversity in
the application of the word “true.” Neither allows
for a simplistic definition of truth. Frege, of course, did not attempt to
provide one.  And according to the
medieval view, since the transcendentalia
range across the
highest genera, i.e., the ontological categories, they cannot be
defined per genus et differentiam.. The placement of
both Truth and Good among them accords with the suggestion made in our time by
Putnam, Goodman, and Dummett that truth is a sort of goodness (Putnam),
rightness (Goodman), or correctness (Dummett).[301]
Putnam’s suggestion is preferable, since rightness and correctness are
plausibly themselves regarded as kinds of goodness. It accords with the
important use of “true” in such phrases as “true
friend” and “true art,” where “true” has the
meaning of “real” or “genuine.” And it accords with the diversity in the
uses of “true,” which may be no greater than the
diversity in the uses of “good.”

The several “theories”
of truth emphasize different uses of “true,” and each is plausible
in its own way. Some sentences, most notably those reporting observation, are
taken to be true in virtue of surviving what Quine called confrontation with
sense experience. Their case lends support to the standard correspondence
theory of truth. Some simple mathematical sentences perhaps are taken to be
true in virtue of surviving confrontation with intellectual intuition, a priori
insight, reason. But most mathematical sentences and all theoretical sentences
in science are taken to be true mainly, if not solely, in virtue of their
membership in systems that survive
confrontation with experience or with reason. Their case lends support to the
theories of truth as “coherence” and as “idealized warranted
assertability.” Sometimes sentences are accepted only because they belong
to theories judged more “beautiful” or “elegant” than
their alternatives. Their case could have given rise to an aesthetic theory of
truth. And sentences like “I will be alive tomorrow” are accepted,
at least tacitly, by the speaker as true mainly, if not solely, for practical
reasons. Their case perhaps lends support to the “pragmatic” theories
of truth.  It calls for explanation.

In ordinary, not all,
circumstances, I do not consider whether the sentence “I will be alive
tomorrow” is true, but of course “take” it, however
implicitly, to be unquestionably true.  I do so neither on the basis of experience
or reason, nor because it coheres with other sentences. If I appealed to
experience, reason, or coherence, I might not take it to be true, at least not unquestionably
true – and as a result perhaps suffer disastrous consequences today, or
at least postpone paying the life insurance premium until tomorrow. Rather, I
take it to be true insofar as its truth is presupposed
by virtually everything I do and plan today. My life would be radically
different if I did not have unquestioning faith
that it will continue for at least one more day. Acceptance of the sentence
“I will be alive tomorrow” is thus practically necessary, while the acceptance of some sentences of mathematics
and science may be said to be theoretically
necessary, and the acceptance of some observation sentences (“It’s
hot!”) perhaps palpably
necessary.

The word “true” is
versatile enough to allow without equivocation for such diversity in what
“makes” sentences true. It does resemble “good” in this
respect. Gustatory pleasure, knowledge, compassion, right conduct, and justice
are all standard examples of good things, but they seem to have little else in
common. Yet there is no equivocation in calling all of them good.

The ways of knowledge and truth are not neat
and tidy. This is especially evident in ethics, as we saw in chapters 3 and 4.
The moral there, however, was not that we should accept noncognitivism
regarding goodness and rightness. A doctor’s orders are imperatives, but
usually their legitimacy and authority are unquestionably cognitive because
their ground is usually cognitive. Theology often grounds the authority of God
in his omniscience, not his status as our creator, but ordinary religious
thought usually holds the latter to be a sufficient ground. It is in this
second way, presumably, that the authority of what Kant called practical reason
(Vernunft) and his description of
ethical judgments as both imperatives (Imperative)
and cognitions (Erkenntisse)
should be
understood.[302] If so, perhaps we
should call ethical judgments “valid” rather than
“true,” as Kant indeed often did. They would be valid in the sense
in which we call valid both a doctor’s orders and the propositions
grounding them. But ethical judgments can be valid also in the sense in which a
traffic policeman’s telling us to move to the other lane of the street is
(sometimes) valid. We may follow Nelson Goodman and just use
“right” for all four: ethical judgments, a doctor’s orders,
the propositions grounding those orders, and the traffic policeman’s
orders.

Similarly, the moral to be drawn from the
diversity of the uses of “true” is not that we should stampede into
a theory of truth that renounces correspondence to fact altogether.
Even in the case of generic statements, where neither correspondence to fact
nor coherence or practical utility suffices for truth, all three are relevant.
“Dutchmen are good sailors” is
taken to be true because a “sufficient” number of singular
statements of the form “x is Dutch and x is a good sailor” are taken to be true, usually on the basis of
direct observation. But how many such statements suffice would depend on
how the generic statement coheres with various other statements – about
sailors, ships, shipping lanes, marine weather, piracy, the presence of
men-of-war protecting merchantmen. And its truth would depend also on practical
considerations, best known to shipmasters and ship owners, such as the purpose
of most sailings, the value of cargoes, the availability and cost of labor at
the docks.

This is why the various theories
of truth are all legitimate.  The
truth of “I have a headache” is plausibly viewed as correspondence,
if not to a “fact” then to a “thing”: the ache felt in
the head.  But even though many
sentences can be paired off with bits of the world in this way, most cannot,
including some that especially interest us. Obvious examples are
counterfactuals like “If Hitler had not invaded the Soviet Union, Germany
would have won the Second World War,” and complex, largely dispositional
sentences like “She liked him, admired his intelligence, was attracted to
him, but did not love him because he reminded her of her father.” The
truth of such statements is better viewed as their coherence with a vast number
of other sentences. And many sentences about the future, like “I shall be
alive tomorrow,” are surely taken as true because the speaker must accept
them in order to engage in normal activities today. No account of truth should
fail to note such differences between true sentences, such kinds of truth.

Part Three: METAPHYSICS DEHUMANIZED

Solipsism,
when its implications are

followed out strictly, coincides with

pure realism. (Wittgenstein)

Chapter Ten: I AND THE WORLD

1. The paradox of antirealism.

In the preface to Ways of Worldmaking, Nelson Goodman
wrote, “I think of this book as belonging to that mainstream of modern
philosophy that began when Kant exchanged the structure of the world for the
structure of the mind….”[303]
Indeed, contemporary antirealism is best understood as the heir of Kant’s
transcendental idealism. Kant held that although there is reality as it is in
itself (“things-in-themselves”), we can know the world only as it
is for us (“things-for-us”). Not only our knowledge but all our judgments,
whether true or false, are shaped by our cognitive faculties, our senses and
our concepts. We can no more “get at” reality as it is in itself,
apart from us, than we can get outside our skins.

Perhaps it is false that nothing
unperceivable can be known by us – such radical empiricism is seldom
defended today. But the proposition that nothing unconceptualizable can enter
in epistemic relations with our judgments is, in Putnam’s words if not
sense, a “virtual tautology.” Only judgments can enter in epistemic
relations with other judgments, and judgments necessarily involve concepts. To
state the proposition as an explicit tautology would require extensive accounts
of the notions it involves. But there can be little doubt that the proposition
is true. It should not be confused with the thesis of idealism. Kant did not
hold, as Berkeley did, that everything is mental. Nor should it be confused
with the antirealist thesis that all reality is dependent for its existence or
at least nature on us, which is hardly a tautology, not even a virtual one. For
there is no contradiction in thinking or speaking of “things in
themselves.” This is why Kant described his view as both transcendental idealism and empirical realism. Contemporary
antirealists are seldom sensitive to Kant’s distinction between the two.

My concern in this book, however,
has not been to engage in the general and rather amorphous dispute between
realism and the many varieties of antirealism. It has been to appraise the much
better defined version of metaphysical antirealism I called logical
antirealism. Logical antirealism resembles Kant’s transcendental idealism
but places the dependence of the cognized world on our language rather than on
our mental faculties, and even then it does so only with respect to the logical
expressions in language.

In
the Introduction, after noting the implausibility of the traditional arguments
for antirealism, I promised to bypass them and start afresh, from specific and
readily understandable truths, not abstract and obscure philosophical
assumptions. I hoped to arrive in this way at an antirealism that is
modest and credible. The antirealist position explained in Part Two does not
deny the reality of things. It is a cosmological, not ontological,
antirealism.  It denies only the
reality of generic facts, and regarding other general facts it accepts, at most,
semirealism, like that defended, though in different ways, by Wittgenstein and
Bergmann. But it retains the metaphysical bite of traditional antirealism. For
generic statements are essential to cognition of the world, even if not to
cognition of things. Such an antirealist position would hardly be opposed by
common sense. Even philosophers have not claimed that there are generic facts.
As to semirealism regarding other general facts, common sense would find the
distinction between it and realism too technical to worry about. Our position
may seem excessively complex but the realism/antirealism issue is complex. It
does not admit of simplistic answers.

The thesis of antirealism is that
the world, at least insofar as it is cognizable, depends on our cognition of it.
But any cognition that is at all advanced seems impossible without statements.
Even a mere conception of the world requires statements, be they true or false,
if it is to count as conception of a world,
rather than an assemblage of inventoried things. And statements are uses of
language. Insofar as cognition of the world, whether knowledge or mere
conception, requires statements, it depends on language and therefore so does
the world insofar as it is cognizable. But the only language we know or can
even conceive is our language, a human language, or at least one translatable
into ours. Could there be languages that are nonhuman and in principle
untranslatable into a human language?
There is no clear sense in which they would count as languages. As Quine
remarked, “illogical cultures are indistinguishable from ill-translated
ones.”[304]

It appears, therefore, that the
world, insofar as it is knowable, still depends on humans, though now more specifically on their language.
The position explained in Part Two, however
moderate and plausible its antirealist and its semirealist parts may seem to
be, still appears to imply that the
world is dependent on a tiny part of
itself – if not just on me, P.B., then on us, the members of the human
species. In either case, we seem to face cosmological humanism, even human
creationism. Both, of course, would be absurd. They would be anthropocentrism
at its worst. The absurdity of supposing that the world depends
on me is obvious. The absurdity of supposing that it depends on us
may seem less glaring, but the supposition remains absurd.

The task of this Part is to free
antirealism of anthropocentrism.
This will require five steps.
The first is to show that there is an impersonal use of the first-person
personal pronoun “I.” The second step, which is not the same as the
first, is to show that there is no such entity such as the philosophical,
metaphysical, self or ego. The third, closely related to the second, step is to
argue that there is also no such entity as consciousness if conceived as
something the philosophical self has or engages in. It will be taken in the
next chapter. The fourth step, also to be taken in the next chapter, is to argue
that the notion of oneself presupposes the notion of others, at least in
advanced cognition, and thus that there is also an impersonal use of the plural
personal pronoun “we.” The fifth step is to explain the thesis that
the world depends on our cognition of it as really asserting, not that the world
and our cognition of it enter in some logical or a causal relation, but that
they are identical.  They are
identical not because, as idealism claims, the world is mental but because
there is neither a self nor a consciousness from which it might be
distinguished. This fifth step will be taken in chapter 12.

Despite
appearances, neither antirealism nor semirealism need have the absurd
implications mentioned earlier.  They
need not imply that the world depends
on me or on us. They need not imply a mad solipsistic creationism that says
“I made the stars,” or a bizarre human creationism that says
“We made the stars.” As we
saw in chapter 2, the first-person pronouns “I”
(“me,” “my”) and “we” (“us,”
“our”) can and must be understood
as impersonal when used in Cartesian
epistemology and the realism/antirealism debate, indeed in most if not all
philosophical contexts. If the
pronoun “I” could be so understood, then the consequence would be
the demise of the narrowest variety of anthropocentrism, subjectivism, in all
three of its forms: solipsism, skepticism, and egoism. If the pronoun
“we” could be understood as
impersonal, then the consequence would be the demise of the broader variety
of anthropocentrism exemplified by traditional antirealism. And, as we shall
see in the next chapter, the question whether antirealism is a form of idealism
– subjective, objective, transcendental, or absolute – would also
have been answered.  In this chapter
our concern will be with the first-person singular pronoun “I.”

Philosophical attention since
Descartes has focused on what Hume called the self. The validity of
Descartes’ argument “I think, therefore I am” has often been
questioned, but its premise has remained, even if only tacitly, a central
assumption of modern philosophy. “I” ordinarily refers to oneself,
the speaker using it. (Continental philosophers prefer its Latin synonym, ego.) The focus on the self is not only
anthropocentric, it leads anthropocentrism to its logical extreme by concerning
itself with just one human being. In ethics this extreme is egoism, in
epistemology it is skepticism about the “external world” (including
“other minds”), and in metaphysics it is solipsism. Indeed, in the
history of philosophy, ethics has been largely preoccupied with battling
egoism, and epistemology with battling skepticism. There has not been a battle
against solipsism in metaphysics, perhaps because no one has seemed to hold it.[305]

In chapter 2 I considered how
subjective epistemology would face the challenge of anthropocentrism. To avoid
begging the question against the skeptic, it must be concerned, not with entities, whether all humans or just oneself, but rather
with the
necessary conditions of thought and talk.  In this and the following two chapters I shall
consider how the challenge of anthropocentrism would be faced by metaphysics.

In nonphilosophical contexts
“I” refers to, say, P.B., and “we” refers to, say, you
and P.B. Both you and P.B. are located on the planet earth. The world, however,
is not. I shall argue that in the relevant philosophical contexts first-person pronouns, both singular and
plural, refer to cognition of the world and thus to the world
itself, not the human beings to which they refer in nonphilosophical contexts.
That there is such an impersonal use of “I” will be argued in the next
section. Of course, the argument would not show that there is no such entity as
what Hume called the self. To show this will be the task of section 3 of this
chapter.

2. First-person
singular pronouns

In chapter 2 I argued that when engaged in Cartesian doubt I must use the pronoun
“I,” not the noun “P.B.” or any definite description
such as “the speaker of this sentence.” That pronoun must be used
without an antecedent noun, it must be a dangling pronoun. Descartes could not
have offered “Descartes exists,” instead of “I exist,”
as the first truth he discovered. The reason is that “Descartes”
was the name of a 17th century Frenchman, part of the external world
the existence of which Descartes had not yet proved.

This is why philosophers have usually
held that the primary reference of the indexical “I” is the
philosophical self, the metaphysical subject, the ego, das Ich. Presumably, it was such an entity that Descartes meant
when he asserted later that he was “a thinking thing.” For there is
a difference between using “I” and using one’s name or a
definite description of oneself. John Searle offers the following example. If I
make a mess in a supermarket by spilling a bag of sugar on the floor, I may be
ashamed, look to see if anyone saw me, and worry about what to do. Whether I
use “I” or my name does not affect the truth-value of saying that I
made a mess, yet there is an important difference. As Searle says, what is
essential to the case is that “it is me that is making a mess.”[306] There
is a difference between my making a
mess and P.B.’s making a mess.
The connection with the experience of shame is evident and direct only in the
case the former. For less Anglo-Saxon examples of this sort, such as hearing
steps behind me when peeping through a keyhole, we may go to Sartre.

If I use “I” in an
autobiography, “P.B.” could replace “I” throughout
without change in truth-value – there would be a change merely in
literary genre, from autobiography to biography. There would be no difference
in reference, though there might be subtle differences of the kind Searle
noted.  If we say that there would
be a difference in meaning or sense, our use of these terms would be technical
and therefore requiring extensive and inevitably controversial explanation of
how they differ from “reference,” the sort of explanation I have
tried to avoid in this book and is notably absent from Searle’s and
Sartre’s examples. But in a Cartesian context none of the relevant statements
in the biography would be allowable because all would beg the question against
the skeptic, who questions the existence of a physical world and therefore the
existence of its inhabitants, including human beings such as P.B. – or
Descartes.

I pointed out in chapter 2 that it
would have been futile for Descartes to say at the initial stage of his
reasoning, as he did later after he thought he had proved his existence, that
in his argument “I think, therefore I am” “I” referred
only to a thinking thing, not to a 17th century Frenchman.
Presumably, Louis XIII also was or had a thinking thing, but Descartes did not
hold that the argument proved the existence of that thinking thing.  It would have been futile for him to say
that “I” referred to this
thinking thing. He might have been using the phrase “this thinking
thing” to refer to Louis XIII’s thinking thing. Russell held that
the demonstrative pronoun “this” can refer only to objects of
“acquaintance,” meaning direct awareness, but surely he was
mistaken. I can speak about a man mentioned in the newspaper story I just read
by saying “This man is horrible,” though I am not acquainted with the
man, in Russell’s or the ordinary sense of “acquainted.” At
any rate, even if Descartes had held Russell’s view, he would still have
needed to say who was acquainted with
this thinking thing, Descartes or Louis XIII?  Of whose
direct awareness was the thinking
thing an object, Descartes’ or Louis XIII’s?

It would not have helped if
Descartes had replaced “I” with “TT,” a name he might
have given to the thinking thing the existence of which he thought he had
proved with his argument. The reason is not that there was no such thing as TT,
or that the premise of the argument was false or the argument invalid, but that
referring to TT would also beg the question against a sophisticated skeptic. Which thinking thing would Descartes have
named “TT”? Surely, not Louis XIII’s, for Louis XIII, a human
though royal being, would not exist if the physical world did not. But for the
same reason Descartes could not have named Descartes’ thinking thing
“TT.”

Could Descartes have just said,
“It is my thinking
thing”? No, because he would be using the first-person singular pronoun
“my.” Its use presupposes that of “I.” It is the
possessive adjective corresponding to “I.” Moreover, contrary to
Descartes’ intentions, to speak of my thinking thing would imply that I
am not that thinking thing, that I am
only the one who owns it, a relation I bear also to my car and my nose, I being
the owner and the thinking thing the owned. My bearing that relation to TT
would be just as questionable as my bearing a relation, say, that of admiration
or distaste, to Louis XIII’s thinking thing. Any skeptic worth his salt
would forthwith ask, How do you know that there is this thinking thing to which
you say you bear the relation? The skeptic would ask the question just by being
true to skepticism, not because of metaphysical prejudice against thinking
things or subtle semantic opinions about pronouns.  It would be useless to say that TT is
the thinking thing to which only I have access. Even if this were so, and we
ignored this unacceptably metaphorical sense of “access” as well as
the implied crude distinction between “inner” and
“outer,” saying it would presuppose an independent answer to the
earlier question about the reference of “I.” Who is the one who alone has access to that thinking thing?

It is not a principle of logic but surely
true that “Someone is F” readily follows from “I am F”
only if the indexical term “I” could be replaced with a name or a
nonindexical definite description, even if it is never so replaced and even if
we do not, perhaps cannot, know a name or description with which to replace it.
We readily accept statements employing indexicals because we take for granted
that in principle they can be replaced with nonindexicals, even if sometimes we
find ourselves unable to do so. We accept statements employing
“here” or “now” since usually, though not always, we
are able to replace them with names or definite descriptions, however rough, of
places or times. This is true also of “I” in ordinary contexts.
“P.B.” could replace “I” in “I am writing this
book,” even if we agree that the replacement might be more than just a
change of words, as in Searle’s and Sartre’s examples. In some
legal documents it may even be required. But in a Cartesian context it is
prohibited.[307]

In the argument “I think,
therefore I am,” the pronoun “I” is profligately used twice
– in the premise and the conclusion. Does it have the same reference, be
it to a man, a thinking thing, or a mere thinking? If it does not, the argument
is invalid. Does it have reference in the premise at all? If it does not, the
argument lacks a premise. But if it does, the question against the skeptic is
begged.

When the reality of the whole
world is at issue, whether in epistemology or in metaphysics, the reality of
none of its parts, whether Descartes, P.B., or all humans, may be presupposed.
Descartes could not have claimed that “I exist” was the first truth
he had discovered if by “I” he referred to Descartes.  Nor could he have begun his reasoning,
as he did, by writing “Let us suppose, then, that we are dreaming”
if by “we” he was referring to his readers. Like Descartes, his
readers are inhabitants of the external world the existence of which Descartes
had proposed to doubt. What was distinctive of Descartes’ epistemology
was not his initial commitment to the existence of only one entity (himself),
or the nature of that entity (a thinking thing), but his decision to presuppose
reference to nothing that might be doubted, and therefore the requirement,
which he in fact met, that initially he use only indexical expressions in the
relevant contexts.

This decision, however, has
far-reaching implications of which Descartes seemed totally unaware. When I say
that now it is cold here, I am not saying that on November 7, 2011, it is cold
in Woodbury, even if on November 7, 2011, I am in Woodbury. Yet neither am I
explicitly referring to a time other than November 7, 2011, or a place other
than Woodbury. This causes no historical or geographical problems as long as I
can replace “now” with “November 7, 2011” and
“here” with “Woodbury,” or some other date and name
– there would still be a time and place I am talking about. But if I
cannot do so, then as suggested in chapter 2, I would be like a historian only
of now or a geographer only of here.

There is a difference between
indexical and nonindexical expressions. There is a difference between saying
“It is cold here” and saying “It is cold in Woodbury,”
though it is neither the sort of difference that there is between “It is
cold here” and Il fait froid ici,
nor the sort of difference that there is between “It is cold in Woodbury”
and “It is cold in the capital of Washington County,” even though
all four seem to be saying the same thing. It certainly is not just a
difference of words. Perhaps this is why some have thought that there is an
entity such as here or hereness, which is the primary reference
of the indexical “here,” Perhaps the difference between “It
is cold now” and “It is cold on November 7, 2011” is why some
have thought that there is an entity such as the present or presentness,
which is the primary reference of the indexical “now.”[308] The
latter view is more plausible because of the seeming connection between the
notion of time and the notion of existence. Augustine noted that what does not
exist now seems to not exist at all,
which is not the case with what does not exist here. Kant held that while space is the pure form of outer sense,
time is the pure form of both outer and inner sense. And Heidegger named his
classic work Being and Time, not Being and Space.

To be consistent, a subjective
epistemology such as Descartes’s would be like a geography of here or a history
of now that is in principle unable to say where is here and when is now. It
would be an epistemology without nouns and with dangling pronouns. Of course,
our interest here is not in exegesis and criticism of Descartes. But considerations
similar to those that apply to Descartes’ epistemological project apply
also to the metaphysical dispute between
realism and antirealism.  The
distinction between the world and me
must not be a distinction between the world and P. B. or anyone else. There is
no place for the ordinary use of the first-person singular pronoun when
debating the dependence or independence of the world on our cognitive
faculties, just as there is no place for it when engaged in Cartesian doubt.
The pronoun does have a use in both, indeed an essential one. But it cannot be
their ordinary use. It must be impersonal. For the reasons already given, in
such contexts “I” cannot refer, as it ordinarily does, to the
speaker.  For the same reasons, it
cannot refer to any other part of the world. Though grammatically a personal
pronoun, the use of “I” in such contexts must be understood as
impersonal. That there is such a use is evident from the intelligibility of
Cartesian doubt and of the realism/antirealism debate even if they are
misconceived or defective in some other way. How is this use to be understood,
then?

Like all indexicals,
“I” serves to indicate, refer. Unlike a name or a definite
description, however, what an indexical indicates depends on the circumstances
of its utterance, in particular, on the speaker’s spatial, temporal,
perceptual, conceptual, and linguistic “perspective” in those
circumstances. As etymology suggests, a perspective is a view, a view from a standpoint, from a point of view. But, despite
etymology, a view need not be optical, or even perceptual.  It could be conceptual – an understanding
or a thought – as in “political view.” And it could be
“linguistic” in the straightforward sense that it involves language
necessarily.  A normal adult’s
view of almost anything differs from a neonate’s view largely because it
is inseparable from how the thing is, would, or could be described. In this
broad sense, a view is the same as a cognition. It need not be a particular
person’s cognition. If a travel agent praises the panoramic view from the
observation deck of the Empire State Building, it would be absurd to ask
“Whose view is it?” – as absurd as asking “Whose truth
is it?” when a proposition is described as true, or “Whose
knowledge is it?” when physics is described as a body of knowledge.

In ordinary contexts,
“I” indicates or refers to the speaker, and the view on which its
use depends is the speaker’s view.  In philosophical contexts such as Descartes’
epistemological project and the metaphysical
dispute between realism and antirealism, however, that reference, as
well as reference to anything identified as associated with the speaker, indeed
to any inhabitant of the world, would be question-begging.  In such contexts “I” could
indicate only the view itself that is essential to its use.  Of course, it would not be a view of
Manhattan or of any other particular object. It would be a view of the world, a
“worldview.”

Even in everyday speech “I”
sometimes refers to a view, perspective, or cognition, not the speaker.  One may say, for example, “I
can’t believe you left your children in the car unattended!” in
order to provide information not about one’s beliefs or anything else
about oneself but to indicate the view that leaving children unattended in a
car is grossly imprudent. “I” occurs rarely in scientific
discourse. “We” is more common, but usually in impersonal
declarative sentences. In science, “We know that...” is likely to
serve the same role as “It is known that...,” the point of which is
precisely to avoid reference to a person. If it involves reference at all, it is
likely to be the reference to the current state of knowledge, whether generally
or in the specific discipline.  A state
of knowledge, of course, is a cognition, a “view.”

The use of “I” coheres
with and usually presupposes the use of five other indexicals:
“here,” “now,” “thus perceived,”
“thus understood,” and “thus described.”
(“Thus” is etymologically related to the indexicals “this”
and “that.”)[309] The view
that “I” indicates is not defined by just a geometrical point, a
position in space (here).  It is
defined also by position in time (now), perceptual modality (thus seen, heard,
felt), conceptualization (thus understood), and linguistic expression (thus
described).

But a view is necessarily a view of
something, real or unreal. To indicate a view therefore is also to indicate its
object. To indicate a view of Manhattan is to indicate also Manhattan. In the
philosophical contexts that would render reference to the speaker or any other
inhabitant of the world question-begging, “I” indicates a worldview
and thus also the world.

In both the narrow optical sense
and the wider sense of “cognition,” a view is a state of
consciousness, but we need not presuppose a particular theory of consciousness,
whether Kant’s, Hegel’s, or Husserl’s. Nevertheless, in this
section we have moved closer to understanding assertions such as Hegel’s
“the Absolute [i.e., ultimate reality] is Thought,” which otherwise
are baffling. By insisting that a state of consciousness must receive
linguistic expression if it is to count as advanced cognition we have moved
closer to understanding also Wittgenstein’s no less baffling assertion “I
am my world.”

3. The Self

I
argued in the previous section that there is an impersonal use of the
first-person personal pronoun “I,” not that there is no entity such
as the philosophical, metaphysical, self or ego. To argue the latter is the
task of the present section. Showing that the first-person singular pronoun has
an impersonal use was the first step in the project of freeing antirealism from
anthropocentrism. The second step, which is not the same as the first, is to
show that there is no such entity such as the philosophical, metaphysical, self
or ego.

A
glance at the history of the topic of a philosophical self is instructive.  In the Treatise of Human Nature Hume described the self as “that to
which our several impressions and ideas are suppos'd to have a
reference,”[310] Much later, Wittgenstein called it “the
philosophical self” or “the metaphysical subject,” which “thinks
or entertains Ideas” (Tractatus
5.631). John Locke had written that “Experience convinces us that we have
an intuitive knowledge of our own existence….If I know I feel pain, it is
evident that I have as certain perception of my own existence as of the pain I
feel.”[311] But Hume vigorously disagreed. In
“looking within” himself he found no such entity: “when I
enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some
particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or
hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a
perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.”[312] Hume then proposed that the self is merely
a “collection” of perceptions, perhaps the collection of all of
“his” perceptions, which in effect would be the whole world that he
thought was knowable by him.  He agreed that there are ideas in
Locke’s sense, though he called them “perceptions,” but
unlike Locke he held they were the only knowable or even conceivable entities.

Kant had not read Hume’s Treatise, relying for his knowledge of
Hume on Hume’s later work An
Inquiry concerning Human Understanding, which contains no discussion of the
self. But he reached a similar conclusion. The Self was one of the three topics
of the transcendental dialectic in the Critique
of Pure Reason, the other two being the World-as-a-Whole and God. None is
an object of experience, whether of sense perception (“outer sense”)
or of introspection (“inner sense”), and thus none can be an object
of knowledge. Kant proceeded to replace the notion of the self with the notion
of what he called the transcendental unity of self-consciousness, or
apperception. But the term “self-consciousness” (Selbsbewusstein) is ambiguous. It may
mean (1) consciousness of a self, (2) consciousness of a state of consciousness
by another state of consciousness, or (3) conscious mental states, as contrasted,
for example, with the unconscious desires that some take Freud to have postulated.

A century and a half later Sartre
argued that there is no self-consciousness in sense (1). He called
consciousness in sense (2) positional, thetic, reflective, and pointed out that
only occasionally is consciousness self-conscious in this sense. But a major tenet
of his view was that all consciousness is self-consciousness in sense (3). Only
in that third sense is self-consciousness essential to consciousness.  The French language does not have one
word for self-consciousness, as German and
English do. Conscience de soi would
be the natural translation of the English “self-consciousness” or
the German Selbsbewusstein. But conscience de soi seems to express sense
(1) or (2). Sartre was compelled therefore to invent the phrase conscience (de) soi in order to express
sense (3).

Kant was explicit that in his
phrase “unity of self-consciousness” he was using
“self-consciousness” in sense (3). “The I think must be able
to accompany all my representations,” he wrote, but went on to explain
that this is so because “otherwise something would be represented in me
that could not be thought at all, which is as much as to say that the
representation would either be impossible or else at least would be nothing for
me.”[313] One would have no access to such a representation, it
“could not be thought at all.” This indeed was
supposed to be the case with Freudian unconscious desires. It is because of the
requirement of accessibility that Kant classified the unity of
self-consciousness as transcendental,
a fact about consciousness that is required for the very possibility of
consciousness, rather than an empirical and therefore contingent fact that
might be due to the presence in all consciousness of an intuition, outer or
inner, of a thing that thinks, for which “I” might stand.

In the first edition of the Critique Kant declared that “we do
not and cannot have the least acquaintance” with “the constant
logical subject of thinking,”[314] and he
did not change his mind in the second edition, where he wrote that the
representation “I” is “wholly empty,” “a bare
consciousness which accompanies all concepts.”[315] It is
needed only “insofar as [the manifold representations of intuition] must
be capable of being combined in one consciousness.”[316]  Representations must be so combined if
they are to be cognitively relevant, to be “thought at all.” They
are combined, however, not as representations for the same subject, whether a phenomenal or a noumenal ego, but as belonging
in the same consciousness. As Kant remarked in the first edition of the Critique, “no cognitions can take
place in us, no connection and unity among them, without that unity of
consciousness which precedes all data of intuition and in relation to which
alone all representation of objects is possible.”[317] In the
second edition he pointed out that “inferences from [‘I
think’] can contain a merely transcendental use of the understanding,
excluding every admixture of experience.”[318]
Descartes’ inference of “I exist,” meaning by “I”
a thinking thing, which its owner intuits or is directly aware of, was
therefore illegitimate.

Kant did appeal to a noumenal self
in his ethics, because he thought that the “commands of practical
reason” required a free agent, in violation of the principle of
causality.  But he made it clear that
the existence of that self, like the existence of God and the freedom of the will,
which he thought were also required, was a matter of faith, not knowledge:
“How a law can be by itself and immediately a ground of determination of
the will (which is, after all, the essential feature of all morality), that is
for human reason an insoluble problem and the same as how a free will can be
possible.”[319]

In the closing years of the 18th
century, Fichte rejected Kant’s distinction between noumena and phenomena
and declared that the self does exist but “only insofar as it is
conscious of itself.”[320] But
about a century later Nietzsche commented that “a thought comes when
‘it’ wishes, and not when ‘I’ wish; so that it is a
perversion of the facts of the case to say that the subject ‘I’ is
the condition of the predicate ‘thinks’.”[321] It was
Hegel, however, who, in the intervening years, refined Fichte’s position
and prepared the ground for Nietzsche’s.

In the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel rejected the assumptions “that
there is a difference between ourselves and … cognition,” and that
“the Absolute [reality] stands on one side and cognition on the other,
independent and separated from it, and yet is something real.”[322] Later,
in the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical
Sciences, congratulated Kant on “emancipating” philosophy
“from the ‘soul-thing [Seelending].’”[323]  He remarked that “‘I’
is the vacuum or receptacle for anything and everything: for which everything
is and which stores up everything in itself.”[324] A
couple of pages earlier he had written, “in point of contents, thought is
only true in proportion as it sinks itself in the facts; and in point of form
it is no private or particular state or act of the subject, but rather that
attitude of consciousness where the abstract self, freed from all the special
limitations to which its ordinary states or qualities are liable, restricts
itself to that universal action in which it is identical in all
individuals.”[325] This
sentence in effect encapsulated the five steps mentioned earlier as needed if
antirealism is to be freed from anthropocentrism. Cognition of the world is not
private and particular but rather identical in all individuals and thus
abstract. And it does not correspond to the facts, it is in the facts, “sunk” in them. I shall return to this view
in chapter 12.

Early in the 20th
century, G.E. Moore expressed doubt about the existence of a self: “It is
quite possible, I think, that there is no
entity whatever that deserves to be called ‘I’ or
‘me.’”[326] And, elsewhere,
he agreed with William James that “The present thought is the only
thinker.”[327] At
roughly the same time, in Logical
Investigations, Husserl explicitly denied the existence of the ego, though later, in Ideas, he accepted it.
Further thought on the topic had to await Wittgenstein’s writings,
early and later, as well as Sartre’s. Both endorsed Hume’s
rejection of the self, and each offered a novel account of the role of the
first-person singular pronoun.

In Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus Wittgenstein asked sarcastically, much as Hume
had done, “Where
in the world is a metaphysical subject to be found?” (5.633). His answer
was that “There is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains
ideas” (5.631) and that “I am my world” (5.63).[328] The
answer was not as idiosyncratic as it may seem. It was at least partly
phenomenological, like Hume's and, later, Sartre's. The metaphysical subject is
not to be “found.” A simple experiment by the reader might confirm
the claim. Let the reader focus, not on this page or something remembered or
imagined, nor on the reader’s nose or eyeglasses or anything else that might
be seen, but rather on “what sees this page.” Few have claimed
success in such an experiment. Few have claimed to find, become aware of, something
that does the seeing, the subject of seeing. Nor was the positive view of the
self that Wittgenstein offered, “I am my world,” idiosyncratic. As
we saw earlier, Hume described the self as “a heap or collection of
different perceptions,” perceptions being all that “is ever really
present to the mind” and thus the world insofar as it was knowable.  Sartre appealed to an “absolute,
impersonal consciousness,” which “constitutes” the world, the
ego or the subject being just one of the objects in that world.

If one thinks of the self as oneself, say, P.B., it would indeed
be absurd to say that one is the
world. But it is not one’s existence that is in question here. Hume did
not deny Hume’s existence, Wittgenstein did not deny Wittgenstein’s
existence, Sartre did not deny Sartre’s existence. What they denied was
the existence of a philosophical self, a metaphysical subject. They thought it was
phenomenologically evident that there is no such entity. It might be evident
also from the grammatical monstrosity of expressions like “the I”
(das Ich), “I-hood” (die Ichheit), and “I-like” (ichlich), which have marred many
philosophical writings.

Chapter Eleven.
WE AND THE WORLD

1. Consciousness.

The ubiquity of the
pronoun “I,” which Kant noted, encourages the philosophical thought
that there is a self, an ego, a special entity that engages in activities such
as thinking, imagining, and perceiving.
The ubiquity of the verbs “think,” “imagine,”
and “perceive” (as well as the more specific “see,”
“hear,” “feel,” “smell,” and
“taste”) encourages the philosophical thought that there is
consciousness, awareness, a relation of which thinking, imagining and
perceiving are species that consists in the self’s
“intending,” being “directed upon,” objects. Taken
together, these two thoughts encourage the philosophical picture of
consciousness as an arrow shot by the self and aimed at objects “external”
to the self. (Ancient physiology indeed held that seeing involves light coming
out of the eye, hitting the object seen, and bouncing back.) The project of
freeing antirealism from anthropocentrism rejects this picture. Of course, it
does not deny that there are people or that people think, imagine, and perceive.
It rejects the conception of thinking, imagination, and perception that rests
on that philosophical picture.

The rejection of the philosophical
self was the second of the five steps, listed in the previous chapter, that the
project of freeing antirealism from anthropocentrism takes. The rejection of
consciousness understood as an entity, a relation between a self and its
objects, is the third step. Hegel and, much later, Moore, Wittgenstein, and
especially Sartre, in effect combined it with the second. The second step implies
rejection of subject-object dualism.  The third implies rejection of act-object
dualism. If consciousness is understood as a relation between subject and
object but there is no subject, then there is no such relation. But, like the
second step, the third step can be defended also phenomenologically. The
reader may attempt now to find, become aware of, not the entity that sees this
page, but rather the reader’s seeing it – the seeing itself, the
visual consciousness. I believe few would claim success.

In “The Refutation of Idealism,” Moore argued that “[T]he moment we try
to fix our attention on consciousness and to see what, distinctly, it is, it seems to vanish: it seems as if we had
before us a mere emptiness. When we try to introspect the sensation of blue, all
we can see is the blue: the other element is as if it were diaphanous.”[329]
“In general,” he wrote, “that which makes the sensation of
blue a mental fact seems to escape us: it seems, if I may use a metaphor, to be
transparent – we look through it and see nothing but the blue.”[330]

Sartre described the role of consciousness in
“constituting” the world as the “revelation” of the
objects conceptualized as a world.  It “exhausts” itself in its
objects, he wrote, precisely because it is nothing but the revelation of them:
“Consciousness is outside; there is no ‘within’ of
consciousness.”[331] It has
no inhabitants. Whether perceptual or conceptual, consciousness is not a
“thing.” One may even go so far as saying that it is nothing. To use a word Heidegger had
applied, consciousness is only the “lightening” of its objects,
like the coming of dawn, which lightens, reveals, the rocks, bushes, and hills
that had been invisible in the darkness of the night, but is not itself an
object of sight.[332]

If Hume’s and Wittgenstein’s denial of the
existence of a self, and then Moore’s and Sartre’s conception of
consciousness, are accepted, we may come closer to grasping what conception of
ourselves would be needed for understanding the thesis of antirealism, that, as
Nelson Goodman put it, we make the world, and even Hegel’s signature
assertion that that the Absolute is Thought.  Goodman’s impish “we make
the world,” of course, was a metaphor. It meant that what the world is
“for us” depends, at least in part, on our consciousness, cognition,
of it, on how we perceive, conceptualize, and describe it. He did not mean that
it was made by Goodman, alone or in the company of others, at Harvard or
somewhere else. And Hegel used “thought” roughly in the broad sense
of “cognition” in which I have used it.  But it was not Hegel’s or any
other human being’s thought.
Nor could the Absolute be a thought of anything other than itself, since
the Absolute is all-encompassing reality. There is nothing to which it could be
relative, whether as subject or as object.

As I pointed out in the Introduction, the thesis of antirealism
is not entirely foreign to common sense.  We easily understand what would be meant
by saying that the world of the fly is quite different from our world, and that
of the octopus even more so, as long as we are aware that the sense organs of a
fly or an octopus differ radically from ours and therefore that they perceive
the world not at all as we do. We easily understand what is meant by saying
that people in very different cultures live in different worlds because the
concepts through which they understand their surroundings are different.  We take for granted that the world of an
intelligent extraterrestrial life-form would be fundamentally different from
our world, perhaps indescribably so, since almost certainly it would be both
perceived and conceptualized very differently.

If we say, however roughly, that according to Kant the world is
dependent on our consciousness of it, we can say, also roughly, that according
to Hegel the world is that
consciousness. Both positions become more plausible if we do not limit
consciousness to perception and allow also for conception (understanding) as a
mode of cognition, especially if we suppose that perception necessarily
involves conception. The defect of empiricism, Hegel wrote, is that “it
makes sense-perception [Wahrnehmung] the form in which fact
is apprehended,” but “the process of knowledge…proceeds to
find out the universal and permanent element in the individual apprehended by
sense. This is the process leading from simple perception to experience [Erfahrung].”[333] Hegel’s
distinction between “simple perception” and experience parallels Sherlock
Holmes’s distinction between seeing and observing (heeding, watching,
noticing).  He told Dr. Watson (in
“A Scandal in Bohemia”), “You see, but you do not
observe.”  Empirical knowledge
rests on observation, not on mere perception. This is why, in recent philosophy,
Wilfrid Sellars argued against “the myth of the given,” holding that
all cognition presupposes conceptualization, that sense perception as such
grasps no facts.[334]

Even if perception involves conception, this need not mean that
it is propositional, that statements of the form “S perceives x”
entail statements of the form “S perceives that p.” It need only
mean that statements of the form “S perceives x” entail statements
of the form “S perceives x as (an) F.” This, of course, is not true
of a neonate’s perception. A neonate first just perceives (sees, feels)
Mother, and neither perceives Mother as
the neonate’s mother nor that
Mother is the neonate’s mother. The latter are later stages of the child’s
cognitive development. Presumably perceiving Mother is first followed by
perceiving Mother as the child’s
mother, and perceiving that Mother is
the child’s mother comes later, perhaps never if it presupposes the
acquisition of language.

I mentioned earlier Sartre’s
view of consciousness as like the coming of dawn, the “lightening,”
revealing, of its objects.  Had
those objects been “there,” had they existed, before the “coming
of dawn”? Or do they exist only when revealed? In other words, are they
mind-dependent? If by “mind” we mean, as Moore and Sartre did, a
consciousness that is not a thing but merely the revelation of things, then the
mind cannot be meaningfully said to enter in causal, logical, or any other
relations, and thus to depend on anything or have anything depend on it.

The image of the coming of dawn
has a clear, natural, application to perception. At dawn things become visible,
knowable. Hence the initial plausibility of an antirealism such as Berkeley’s: to be is
to be perceived. The image does not have a clear or natural application to
conception. For such an application, we need to go beyond Berkeley – to
Kant and especially Hegel.

The distinction between perception
(Kant’s “sensibility”) and conception (Kant’s
“understanding”) gives rise to important questions, many dealt with
by Kant in detail. One, already mentioned, is whether objects can be perceived
without being conceptualized. Clearly, even if they can, such perception would
not be a case of advanced cognition. But another, arguably more fundamental,
question is whether existence and nonexistence are themselves outcomes of
conceptualization, of the application of the concepts of existence and
nonexistence. If they are, then the answer to the question whether the objects
revealed by the coming of dawn existed before they were revealed would be that
they neither did nor did not.

2. The I that is We and the We that is I.

Antirealism
faces the paradox of seeming to say that the world is dependent, at least for
its nature if not also existence, on some of its zoological parts, at least on me. I have argued that there is no
special, philosophically relevant entity – self, ego, subject –
denoted by the first-person singular pronoun. I have also argued that to avoid
the paradox we must understand first-person singular pronouns (“I, “me,” “mine”) when
used in philosophical contexts such as Cartesian doubt and the
realism/antirealism debate as impersonal. I shall argue now that in such contexts the
first-person plural pronouns should
also be understood as impersonal.

Indeed, the choice
between “I” and “we” is often stylistic. A politician
may use the latter in order to avoid displaying conceit. It is often stylistic
even in philosophy. In epistemology we speak of skepticism regarding the limits
and extent of our knowledge, though
what we actually consider, as Descartes did, is the extent and limits of my knowledge. The choice is not
stylistic in ethics, however, which from Plato to Hobbes to Sidgwick to Rawls
has been preoccupied with egoism, the position that advocates the pursuit of
“my own good” rather than of “our good.” Nor is it
stylistic in stating the metaphysical doctrine of antirealism.

I have argued that in
philosophical contexts such as Cartesian epistemology and the
realism/antirealism debate the first-person singular pronoun should be
understood as indicating a cognition, a perspective, a view, not a person. In
such contexts, indeed in any advanced context, cognition is inherently social.
My worldview is the same as our worldview, just as my view of Manhattan is the
same as our view of Manhattan when both are the
view of Manhattan from the Empire State Building, the one that, say, a tourist
guide describes.  In those contexts
there is no difference between the role of first-person singular pronouns and
the role of first-person plural pronouns, the distinction between me and us lacks significance. If my skepticism regarding the existence of
an external world is justified, so is our skepticism regarding it, and if the
latter is justified then so is my skepticism.

Needless to say, this
is not true in most nonphilosophical contexts. In everyday life as well as in
science, “I” usually indicates, say P.B., and “we”
indicates P.B. and you. The difference is obvious. P.B. weighs 160 pounds, but P.B.
and you together weigh 300 pounds. P.B. visited Charleston last year, we did
not. But when doubting the existence of the world or considering the question
of its mind-independence, there is no relevant difference between me and us, between
my doubt and our doubt, between my stand and our stand. There are differences
only when we assume that P.B. and you are parts of the world, a natural
assumption in nonphilosophical contexts but one that cannot be made when
doubting the existence of that world or considering whether it is
mind-independent.

In the philosophical
contexts in which the use of the first-person singular pronoun “I”
is impersonal, the use of the first-person plural pronoun “we” is
also impersonal, and for the same reason. This impersonal use of
“we” is not limited to philosophy.  It is common in science, as in “We
know that the speed of light cannot be exceeded,” the impersonal sense of
which becomes explicit when restated as “It is known that the speed of
light cannot be exceeded,” “Physics has found (established,
discovered, confirmed) that the speed of light cannot be exceeded,” or
“According to physics, the speed of light cannot be exceeded.” An
impersonal use of “we” is also common in moral contexts, as in some
occurrences of “We don’t torture prisoners,” the impersonal
sense of which becomes explicit when restated as “Torturing prisoners is unacceptable”
or “Morality prohibits the torture of prisoners.” It is common also
in etiquette, as in “We don’t talk with the mouth full” and “We
don’t wear flip-flops at weddings,” which mean that talk with the
mouth full and wearing flip-flops at a wedding are violations of table manners,
custom, proper dress rules, or expectation.  Clearly, in these cases,
“we” does not refer to any particular persons’ knowledge,
moral attitude, table manners, or dress rules. This is made explicit when the
speaker is asked “Who knows that the speed of light cannot be
exceeded?”, “Who doesn’t torture prisoners?”, “Who
doesn’t talk with the mouth full?, or “Who doesn’t wear flip-flops
at weddings?” and replies, “I didn’t mean anyone in
particular.”

The deeper explanation of the occasional interchangeability of
“I” and “we” even in nonphilosophical contexts is that
there cannot be a drastic divergence
between my sense perception or concepts
and those of other persons. The “other”
is taken by me to be capable of judgments that I must consider only if also taken
to perceive and understand the world at least roughly as I perceive and
understand it. Otherwise, not only I would not understand what the other says,
I may not recognize it as language. Verbal communication with humans presupposes
that we are not speaking about different things or in a different language.[335] This is why Wittgenstein held that for
language to be possible there must be agreement in judgment. Even nonverbal
communication with nonhuman animals presupposes that they perceive, however
differently, the same things that we perceive. We place the food tray where both
we and the cat can see it, and we expect the dog to come through the door that we
leave open.

The
distinction between one’s own and others’ cognition of the world
has little application in the case of advanced cognition. Its application to
perception (including introspection) may be clear, but beyond early childhood
one’s cognition almost always includes conception, understanding. And then
it depends essentially on what one learns from others, including the common,
public language normally mastered in childhood. It depends not on the aggregate
of others’ cognitions but rather on a systematic impersonal whole that
seems to have life and properties of its own. This is familiar in the case of
scientific cognition, but it is true also of everyday cognition, say, of a country,
a town, or an automobile.

We usually acknowledge
that our beliefs and opinions are at least partly due to our parents and
teachers, the books and articles in magazines and newspapers we read, the
people we talk with at home and in the street or have heard in the classroom,
on radio, or on television. If one has knowledge that is strictly
“one’s own,” underived from and unaffected by others, it is
of the sort enjoyed by neonates and qualifies as knowledge only barely. Educated persons explicitly or implicitly take
physical things to be as physicists say they are, the past as historians say it
was, and mathematical truths as those accepted by mathematicians. And physics,
history, and mathematics are inherently social. The requirement in all
sciences that experiments be repeatable – by others, not just by oneself
– is sacrosanct.  The 2009
status report by the Large Hadron Collider listed 2900 authors. The Wikipedia
on the Internet is committed to impersonality.  No single person can master today the
whole or even a major part of a discipline. A law is often so complex that no
single attorney knows everything in it or has even read it. Orthopedists who do
knee surgery usually decline to do hip or ankle surgery.  Even in everyday life, individual claims
to knowledge count for little if they do not survive scrutiny by others.

The cognitive
dependence of oneself on others in such cases is not just causal.  It is logical. This was an essential
thesis of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy as well as of Sartre’s.
Much of the history of 20th century Anglo-American philosophy was
epitomized by Wittgenstein’s move from the thesis in the Tractatus that the world is
“my” world to the thesis in the Philosophical
Investigations that a private language is logically impossible and that
understanding a public language presupposes “agreement in
judgment.”  Many consider the
highlight of 20th century continental philosophy to be
Sartre’s argument that only through the Other’s “look”
can I see myself as an object, as the entity in the world that I am –
that the Other “defines” me. Much of contemporary thought, e.g.,
feminism, depends on it, sometimes explicitly.

But it is to Hegel that we must go for the original
account of the logical dependence of oneself on others. Hegel insisted on the
necessity of a move from “the I (das
Ich) of the colourful show of the sensuous here-and-now” to the “I
that is We and We that is I” (Ich,
das Wir, und Wir, das Ich ist).[336] It
was a move from individual cognition to collective cognition. As Terry Pinkard has
put it, Hegel reconceptualized “the unity of thought and being” as
an “intersubjective unity.”[337] J.
N. Findlay explains: “Hegel holds that the understanding of other minds,
far from being more obscure than the understanding of things, is the model and
paradigm in terms of which intercourse with things can assume a limited
clarity.”[338]
But Pinkard and Findlay are downplaying the metaphysical significance Hegel
attached to this view. Recognition of
the primacy of society over the individual is only a step, however necessary,
to grasping the Absolute, he held. Human cognition may be social, but the
Absolute transcends society.

According
to Hegel, Spirit (mind, Geist)
develops from its primitive stage of subjective spirit – sensuous
cognition – to its second stage of objective spirit, by which he meant
the normative customs and traditions
of everyday life [Sittlichkeit],
the family, the state, and institutions such as corporations and professional
guilds (which would include what today we call the academic disciplines), and culminates in its
third stage of absolute spirit, which includes art, religion, and the complete,
perfect, knowledge that Hegel called philosophy. If by “mind” is
meant cognition, then at the stage of sensation the mind is primitive,
undeveloped, and comes into its own only at the social stage.

Nevertheless, we seem still left with
anthropocentrism. Wittgenstein’s public language surely is a human
language, Sartre’s Other is a human being, and Hegel’s objective
spirit is a society of humans, not of ants or Martians. (Hegel explicitly held
even that the Absolute achieves self-knowledge through human beings, those he
regarded as philosophers, his position thus appearing to be not just
anthropocentric but anthropomorphic.) However, though all this is true, it is
not the whole truth. Statements about a public language, Wittgenstein’s
agreement in judgment, and Hegel’s social institutions are not reducible
to statements about human beings, even though the language, agreement, or
institutions would not exist if human beings did not. The public that speaks
the public language, the parties to the agreement in judgment, and the institutions
of society are not mere collections of human beings. Nor are they, of course, themselves
human beings. In an important sense, they are impersonal. Hegel and
Wittgenstein could still be charged with anthropocentrism in an extended and
rarified sense, but their views also suggest how anthropocentrism can be
avoided, the topic of the next chapter.

Hegel
famously thought that the discipline of philosophy itself was an example of the
priority of society over the individual. For philosophical views are inseparable
from the history of philosophy.  Earlier
philosophical systems, despite their
diversity, are preserved in those developed later.[339] Hegel was fully aware that a philosopher’s
thought, however original, is rooted, not only in the culture to which it belongs
and the
language it employs, but also in the thought of other philosophers, past and
present, read or heard. The content of a philosophical work is incomprehensible
in abstraction from that of previous philosophical works. Instruction in
philosophy has always been mainly instruction in the history of philosophy,
even if only the history of its latest period and in a single country. The same
is true, of course, of the other disciplines.

Commentators
sometimes say that when Hegel described philosophy as the most advanced stage
in the development of spirit he meant his own philosophy. Indeed, he did hold
that the Absolute achieves self-knowledge through humans. But Hegel would have
insisted that no individual human being’s knowledge could be identified
with the Absolute’s self-knowledge. Perhaps he thought, or at least hoped,
that his system was the closest a human being could come, though I doubt that
he did. If he did, he would not have been unique among philosophers in this
respect.

That
advanced cognition is social is obvious in the case of cognition that
necessarily involves the use of language. Some cognition, of course, is
possible without language. A neonate’s and a dog’s sense perception
are examples. Distinctively human cognition, however, like that exemplified by
the sciences and mathematics, obviously is not. Perhaps neonates and dogs have
an innate “language of thought” that is needed for sense perception,
and perhaps even God could not know the world without employing a divine
language, but neither possibility need be discussed here. Our concern is with
distinctively human cognition, the sort of cognition neonates and dogs clearly
lack and God is believed to surpass. Wittgenstein’s perhaps most
persuasive reason for holding that language is necessarily public,
“social,” was his description of an imaginary private language for
keeping track of one’s sensations. Even if possible, such a language
would be so impoverished as to be pitiful. A public language is indispensable
to any cognition deserving to be called human. And it does presuppose agreement
in judgment – if in nothing else, at least in which sounds or marks to count
as words and which words those sounds or marks happen to be.

Until Hegel, epistemologists – from Plato and Aristotle to Descartes,
Hume, and Kant – took for granted that cognition is individual, personal.
In the Introduction I called this view cognitive individualism, contrasting it
with what I called cognitive collectivism. Hegel saw that it is true only on
the primitive, subjective, level, and that advanced, truly objective, cognition
is necessarily social.  “It is
the nature of humanity,” he wrote, “to press onward to agreement
with others; human nature only really exists in an achieved community with
others.”[340]  Hegel became famous partly because of the
moral and political implications his views were taken to have.  Cognitive collectivism, however, has no
such implications.  One of its
elementary tenets is that advanced cognition requires a public language. This
is hardly a moral or political tenet.

Initially, as in Kant’s version,
antirealism insists on the dependence of the world on my cognition. In Hegel’s version, it insists on its
dependence on our cognition. It does
so also in its recent versions, for example, Goodman’s, Dummett’s,
and Putnam’s, which focus on the dependence of the world on our language
– public, not private, language.

To say that the world
depends on me seems absurd. To say that it depends on us may appear to just multiply
the absurdity. But
what is at issue is dependence on cognition, and the dependence of the world on
our cognition is less paradoxical. Its dependence on me would be abhorrent to
common sense because it makes the world, the paradigm of what is objective,
appear subjective. But its dependence on us may seem less alarming when
understood as dependence on advanced cognition. Not only is the latter not
dependence on a solitary person, it is not dependence even on a collection of
persons. It is a dependence on a cognition that is irreducibly institutional. There is no mystery about
what such a cognition might be. The cognition, knowledge, embodied in any developed
discipline would be an example. As cognition, a body of presumed knowledge,
physics is not reducible to the collection of individual physicists’
cognitions. And while it would be glaringly absurd to hold that the physical
world is what I say it is, it is not
absurd to hold that it is what physics
says it is. The move from “I” to “we” does not signify
total abandonment of anthropocentrism. But it does signify abandonment of
subjective anthropocentrism.

For
Berkeley, the paradigm of cognition was perception, not conception. (He argued
vigorously against what Locke had called “abstract ideas.”) Indeed,
this is the immediate, natural, way to think of cognition. It explains why we
also think of our cognitive faculties as personal, not social, and of knowledge
as a personal, not social, achievement.
It explains why we find cognitive individualism more plausible than
cognitive collectivism and why antirealism usually has been understood as
subjective. Cognitive collectivism comes into its own mainly when we recognize
the role in cognition of conception, the understanding, and especially of
description, language. While perception is inherently individual, personal, and
subjective, conception, and especially description, is inherently social,
public, and objective. A neonate’s cognition of Mother is entirely
perceptual and dependent on no one else’s perception of Mother. But the
child’s later conception of Mother as mother
is dependent on others, obviously so when expressed in language.

Antirealism is far more plausible in the
case of conception than in the case of perception.  Moreover, if perception presupposes
conception, as held by both Kant and Hegel, and in recent philosophy by Wilfrid
Sellars and many others, then conception is primary. Even if Berkeley’s
idealism could be defended on the level of perception, it was Kant’s
transcendental idealism and Hegel’s absolute idealism that would be
plausible on the level of conception. These “idealisms” were the
forms antirealism took in traditional philosophy. It cannot be understood in
abstraction from them.

3. Idealism.

Berkeley
made idealism a technical philosophical position, Kant’s transcendental
idealism inaugurated modern antirealism, and Hegel’s absolute idealism seemed
to free it from anthropocentrism. Berkeley’s idealism rested on the
assertion that to be is to be perceived, a version of the thesis of antirealism
limited to our perceptual cognitive powers. This is why, though it seems
incredible, there is no puzzle about what it says – similar thoughts have
occurred to many teenagers. Kant’s transcendental idealism acknowledged
the essential place among our cognitive powers of conception, the
“understanding,” but it is not likely to occur to teenagers.
Hegel’s absolute idealism seemed to avoid the anthropocentrism latent in
Berkeley’s as well as Kant’s versions, and as a consequence it has
baffled even philosophers.

According
to the idealist, everything is mental. According to the antirealist, everything
is dependent on our cognitive faculties, at least insofar as it is knowable. But
cognitive faculties are paradigms of what is mental. The idealist and the
antirealist agree that insofar as the world is knowable, it is mind-dependent.
Moreover, the idealist is likely to support idealism with many of the same
arguments that the antirealist employs.
But, despite their obvious similarities, idealism and antirealism differ
in important ways. Idealism avoids a major difficulty faced by antirealism: the
putative difference between a cognition and its object. The idealist denies
that there is such difference, claiming for example that the perception of a
tree and the tree perceived are no more distinguishable than are a feeling of
pain and the pain felt.

Understood
as holding that everything is mental, idealism is often rejected as obviously
false, but sometimes also greeted as a pleasingly warm view of the universe,
which its chief 20th century critic G. E. Moore said he wished were
true.[341]  Antirealism, by contrast, stays in the
bloodless realm of philosophical technicality and arouses neither enthusiasm
nor alarm, even though it may seem to have absurd implications, for example,
that there was no earth before there were humans.

Though
they often employ the same arguments, idealism does not entail antirealism and
antirealism does not entail idealism. The idealist says that all reality is
mental, the antirealist usually does not. What is mental need not be dependent
on our cognitive faculties, and what is dependent on our cognitive faculties
need not be mental.  Idealism is a
theory about the nature of reality. Antirealism is not. It says nothing about
the constituents of reality.  Its
thesis that knowable reality depends on our cognitive faculties says nothing
about the nature of that reality. Whether reality is mental remains for the
antirealist a further question. How it is answered, indeed how idealism is ultimately
understood, would depend on what meaning is attached to “mental.”
Presumably the idealist does not claim that rocks, firewood, and puddles of
water are mental in any familiar sense of “mental.” In everyday
discourse they are paradigms of what is not
mental, just as perceiving, thinking, and feeling are paradigms of what is mental. If we use
“mental” in accord with those paradigms, we must say that if the
idealist is right, then there are no such things as rocks, firewood, or puddles
of water.

In
his classic paper “The Refutation of Idealism,” which marked the
end of the dominance of idealism in British philosophy and inaugurated 20th
century realism, G. E. Moore defined idealism as the view that “the
Universe is spiritual.”[342] This
in effect means that reality is either a spirit or consists of states of one or
several spirits. Moore used “spirit” as a synonym of
“mind,” a spiritual state being what today would be called an
irreducibly mental state, in particular, a state of consciousness. According to
Moore, the idealist’s thesis (he obviously had Berkeley’s in mind)
that to be is be perceived seems plausible only because it confuses the object
of (perceptual) consciousness with its content, a confusion made possible by
the fact that consciousness itself has no content, that it is diaphanous,
transparent. Moore thus anticipated Sartre, who decades later wrote that
consciousness has no inhabitants and exhausts itself in its objects. But, as we
saw earlier, Sartre also proposed that the activities traditionally attributed
to the ego are performed by an impersonal consciousness that
“constitutes” the world, and that the ego is no more than one of
the objects in the so-constituted
world, not the subject that
constitutes it. He thus combined the rejection of Berkeley’s idealism
with a quasi-Kantian transcendental idealism.  Moore would not have endorsed the latter,
but he did agree with Kant that the idealist, again presumably meaning Berkeley,
employs the verb “perceive” in a sense that excludes conception,
thus impoverishing idealism.

When
asserting that to be is to be perceived, Berkeley could not have consistently
regarded the subject-term of “perceive” to be the name
“Berkeley,” for Berkeley, the 18th century bishop, had a
material body even if also an immaterial soul. The subject-term therefore could
only be “I,” understood as standing, not for Berkeley, but for a
self or ego, which may belong to but is not identical with a human being. Hume,
Wittgenstein, and Sartre looked for such an entity but failed to find it.
Without it, however, there would not be the perceiving to which Berkeley appealed
as the measure of what there is. For there would be nothing that would engage
in that perceiving, even if there were something perceived.

Idealism
became dominant in philosophy after philosophy took the “new way of
ideas” in the 17th century, and its development was dependent
on the sense attached to “idea.”  Descartes and Locke proposed that the
primary and perhaps only objects of knowledge are our ideas, though neither was
an idealist. Descartes wrote, “Of my thoughts some are, as it were,
images of things, and to these alone properly belongs the name IDEA.”[343]  Locke used the term in a similar sense:
“the term [“idea”] …stand[s] for whatsoever is the
Object of the Understanding, when a man thinks.”[344] This
sense was too broad, however, because it implied that if material objects were
directly perceived, which both Descartes and Locke denied, they would count as
ideas, which both would have found absurd.
Locke explained further that by “idea” he meant, not only
concepts (“abstract ideas”) and mental images, but also sensations
and feelings (“passions”). This use of “idea” was
entirely different from Plato’s use of idea, to which nonetheless it
must be traced.

Berkeley
used “idea” in Locke’s sense, but earned his classification
as an idealist by holding that minds and their ideas are all that there is, a
view Descartes and Locke would have found appalling. Hume used
“perception” in Locke’s sense of “idea,” but
distinguished within perceptions between “impressions” and
“ideas”: “Those perceptions, which enter with most force and
violence, we may name impressions….By ideas I mean the faint images of
these in thinking and reasoning.”[345] Both
Descartes and Locke distinguished sharply between ideas and their owner,
Descartes’ “thinking thing” or Locke’s
“self.” German philosophers called it “ego,” or just “the
I” (das Ich). But by denying
that he could find such an entity within himself, Hume originated the totally
different line of thought that culminated in Wittgenstein and Sartre.

Kant
used Vorstellung, commonly translated
as “representation,” roughly in Locke’s broad sense of “idea,”
but he made a sharp distinction between “intuitions (Anschauungen),” which are “immediately related to the
object” and are “singular,” and concepts (Begriffe), which are
“mediate,” related to objects by means of “marks” that
“can be common to several things.” Such common “marks”
are what philosophers call universals.  A concept, Kant held, is either empirical
or pure: “Pure concepts have their origin solely in the understanding,
not in images of sensibility, and are called ‘notions.’” Kant
used also “idea” (Idee),
and like Descartes’s and Locke’s his use was rooted in
Plato’s idea. But he described ideas very differently:
“A concept made up of notions, which goes beyond the possibility of
experience, is an idea or a concept of reason.”[346]
Unlike the concepts of the understanding, the ideas of reason
have no application to experience. We have no knowledge of God, freedom (of the
will), and immortality, but we do have ideas of them, he famously held. We have
no experience of God, freedom, or immortality, or of anything from which they
can be validly inferred, but God, freedom, and immortality are unavoidable “objects”
of reason, and as such are essential to morality.

Hegel
distinguished between the “several modes of feeling, perception, desire,
and will,” which “are in general called ideas (mental
representations [Vorstellungen]),”
and “thoughts [Gedanken],
categories, or, in more precise language, adequate Notions [Begriffe],” which philosophy puts
“in the place of the generalized images [Vorstellungen] we ordinarily call ideas.”[347] But he
acknowledged that “the mind [consciousness, das Bewusstsein] makes general images of objects, long before it
makes Notions of them”[348] While
in the case of Kant the usual English translation of Begriff  has been
“concept,” in the case of Hegel it has been “Notion,”
in order to mark Hegel’s distinctively metaphysical understanding of the
nature of Begriffe. The notion of
something is often said to express its essence or nature. According to Hegel,
however, it does not merely express but is
that essence:  “[I]n point of
contents, thought is only true in proportion as it sinks itself in the
facts.”[349]
This assertion may be puzzling, but it would be less so if understood as a
statement of the thesis of antirealism.

Though
Hegel described notions as thoughts, he so described also judgments and
syllogisms. Gedanke in German is as
ambiguous as “thought” is in English.  It can refer to (1) a thinking, a
subjective mental action or event, whether a judging, a supposing, or a
reasoning, (2) the objective content of a judgment (as it does in Frege’s
writings), or (3) a component of that content. For Hegel, it referred to a notion
only when used in the third sense. This is also the main sense of
“concept” in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. But by
“the notion of x” Hegel meant the comprehension, grasp [Griff] of x, which is a sense much
stricter than the usual sense of “concept.” Hegel called the notion
“the soul [Seele] of objective
reality.”[350] It is
in this sense that he held that the Absolute is Thought, and thus earned his own
classification as an idealist. Hegel did not mean by “the Absolute”
some mysterious object or part of reality. He meant reality itself. And reality
of course must be understood as relative to nothing, as unqualified,
unconditional, all-encompassing, self-contained, complete, and infinite in the
literal sense of unlimited, “limited by nothing.”

Finite
things are limited, incomplete, parts of reality.  They are dependent on the Absolute for
both their nature and their existence, but the dependence is neither causal nor
logical. It is better understood as analogous to the dependence on a biological
organism of its parts. The Absolute is itself dependent on its finite parts, as
an organism is dependent on its parts. Hence Hegel’s characterization of the
Absolute as concrete, not a mere abstraction.  Knowledge of it must be an organic
whole, in the sense of being systematic.
Hegel famously demanded that
philosophy be systematic. But, we may note, this is true of any advanced
cognition, e.g., a theory in a developed science. The statements in it depend
on each other for both their content and truth. Its concepts presuppose each
other.

Although Hegel did call his system “absolute
idealism,” it would be superficial to interpret him as holding that
everything is mental. His
idealism bore little resemblance to Berkeley’s. It was much closer to what
we have meant by “antirealism.”  If antirealism did not allow for Kantian
things-in-themselves, as Hegel did not, then the antirealist thesis that the
world depends on our cognition of it need not be different from Hegel’s
thesis that they are the same. They are the same in the sense in which a
headache and the feeling of that headache are commonly believed to be the same.
Berkeley thought that what would be true of unfelt pains is true also of
unperceived trees. If he was wrong, the reason was not his belief that trees
are dependent on cognition but his refusal to acknowledge modes of cognition
other than perception that provide cognitive access to trees.

The
difference between Berkeley and Hegel is commonly said to be that while
Berkeley’s idealism was subjective, Hegel’s was objective. These
characterizations are not wrong, but they require deeper explanation and major
qualifications.  We can say that
according to the subjective idealist the world depends on me, while according to the objective idealist it depends on us. But this would not allow us to
describe Berkeley’s idealism as subjective, because he insisted that
something would exist even if perceived only by God. And it may not do justice
to Hegel’s idealism. Hegel did not hold that the world depends on human
beings. He insisted on the social nature of developed human cognition, and
insofar as he also held that the world depends on such cognition his idealism
was objective, in the straightforward sense in which, say, physics is objective
while personal fancy is subjective. But Hegel described his idealism as
absolute, as holding that the Absolute is Thought. And this “thought”
is neither subjective, if this means that it belongs in subjective spirit, nor
objective, if this means that it belongs in objective spirit. It belongs
nowhere.

Chapter Twelve: MIND AND THE WORLD

1. Concepts,
Properties, and Universals.

The relativity of an object to
cognitive perspective in the case of visual perception is familiar because in
optics, painting, photography, and everyday life we must view and represent the
object from an “angle,” and what is seen depends in part on that
angle. Much the same is true of the other species of perception.  To feel an object one must touch it with
part of one’s body, and what is felt depends in part on the
characteristics of that part of body. What one hears notoriously depend on the
condition of one’s hearing. The relativity of an object to cognitive
perspective in the case of understanding, conception, is different, however. It
requires explanation.

The most original and extensive explanation was proposed by Hegel.  It was, in effect, the final of the five
steps listed in Chapter 10 as needed to free antirealism from anthropocentrism.
Put briefly and somewhat crudely, it is that (1) understanding involves
thoughts, (2) thoughts are concepts, (3) concepts are properties of things, (4)
properties are universals, (5) there is nothing but their properties in things,
therefore (6) there is nothing in things but thought. There are no Lockean substrata
or Bergmannian bare particulars. “[T]he universal of the notion is not a
mere sum of features common to several things, confronted by a particular which
enjoys an existence of its own. It is, on the contrary, self-particularizing or
self-specifying.”[351]

Whether the world is the totality of
facts or the totality of things, it may thus be described as conceptual.  But the concepts the world involves are
no more personal than are the properties of the things in the world. They are
in the world, in the things that have them.  No anthropocentrism is implied.

The noun
“thought” may mean thinking, something one does, but more often it
is used as a synonym of “concept” and “idea.” “Concept”
became common in 20th century Anglophone philosophy as replacement of
“idea,” which in 17th and 18th century
British philosophy had explicitly stood for a subjective state, often a mental
image. It is the usual translation of
the German Begriff. The latter was a key term in Kant’s and
Hegel’s works, which profoundly influenced British philosophy in the 19th
century, as well as in Frege’s, which influenced it no less profoundly in
the 20th century. As I noted earlier, in the case of Hegel Begriff is usually translated as “Notion,”
because of his distinctive metaphysical view of the nature of Begriffe.

Understood as subjective states of the mind, ideas are incapable of
serving as principles of objective classification. But, except perhaps at its
most rudimentary stages, cognition necessarily involves objective classification,
whether explicitly, as in botany and zoology, or implicitly, as in ordinary
subject-predicate statements.  To
say that this page is white is to assign it to the class of white things. If we
take classification to be something that we do, we may say that it consists in
applying a concept to what is classified, whether by using a general word (adjective
or common noun) or by thinking of it in a certain way. The aim, of course, is objective
classification. We seek truth, not fancy.

Locke had stressed the importance of classification, but he claimed that
its principles are “abstract ideas,” obtained from particular ideas
by leaving out the characteristics that distinguish them from one another. The
existence of such ideas was vigorously denied by Berkeley and Hume, on the
reasonable grounds that there are no abstract mental images.  The principles of objective
classification were called by Kant and Hegel concepts (Begriffe). This is also how the word “concept” is
understood in current Anglophone philosophy, even when limited, as it often is,
to the meanings or uses of words – what a word means or how it is used is
of interest in philosophy only if it is an objective fact, not personal whim. A
classification, of course, could be subjective, fanciful, but then it would be
unsuitable for cognition.

If a classification is objective, the concept that serves as its
principle is usually taken to stand for a property common to the things classified, for what in metaphysics is often called a “universal.” The
metaphysical realist holds that the things classified have (exemplify,
instantiate) the property for which the concept stands independently of the
application of the concept or any other mode of cognition. The concept and the
property are taken to be distinct entities, the former consigned to the mind or
language of the classifier, and the latter to the object that exemplifies it.
The metaphysical antirealist rejects this distinction between properties and
concepts. A subjective antirealist, perhaps Berkeley, does so by regarding
concepts as subjective states (“ideas in the mind”), and by denying
that there are things external to the mind in effect denies that concepts stand
for properties of things. Hegel rejected the distinction between properties and
concepts by taking concepts to be the same as the properties of things. They
are neither subjective states of human minds nor, of course, objective states
of human brains.

Hegel was explicit about the intimate connection between the category of
concepts, which initially seems psychological or epistemological, and the
metaphysical category of properties. There is no thought without concepts,
there are no things without properties, and concepts are the same as the
properties of things.  This is why
the world and cognition of it are one and the same.  The world is not just dependent on mind,
it is mind:  “thoughts, far from being merely
ours, must at the same time be the real essence of the things.”[352] Hegel insisted that “It is not we who frame the
concepts….Rather the concept is the genuine first; and things are what
they are through the action of the concept, immanent in them, and revealing
itself in them.”[353] This is why the Absolute, i.e., ultimate reality, is identical with
Thought.

Hegel’s rejection of the
distinction between concepts and properties was the essential tenet of his
version of antirealism.  It was an
“objective” antirealism, free of anthropocentrism. The properties
of things “make,” constitute, the things in the world, they are the
principles of the objective classification of them and so may be called
concepts, but they are not states of human or any other minds, they are in the
things themselves.

It is usually admitted today that in
the case of understanding cognition of things involves concepts of their
properties; this is why instead of understanding we often speak of
conceptualization. Few would agree with Hegel that the concepts of the
properties of things are the properties themselves. They probably would agree,
however, that concepts are neither subjective mental states nor just the words
expressing them. They would agree with Sartre that consciousness
has no inhabitants, and with H. H. Price that cognition can occur without the
use of words, as it often does in the case of recognition. They would agree
that to understand something is neither to imagine it nor to utter its name, but
they would not deny that we can think of, even know, some properties of some
things, whether perceived or not.

Hegel’s
assertions that the absolute is thought and that thought is “sunk”
in things are often misunderstood because of failing to grasp his position regarding
universals on which they rest. “The form or character peculiar to thought
is the universal, or, in general, the abstract,” he wrote.[354]  Hegel’s position was radically
different from Locke’s, Berkeley’s, or Hume’s. It was closer
to Aristotle’s view that universals are in things, but it also shared
important elements with Plato’s view that they are not parts of things. The
position becomes clearer when understood in the context of the traditional
debate about universals and particulars.

By
a “universal” is usually meant a property that can be common to,
exemplified by, two or more individual things, e.g., the white color of this
and the next page. Common properties
are “universals” in the straightforward and innocuous sense of “Applicable
to or involving the whole of a class or genus, or all the individuals or
species comprising it... Opposed to particular” (Oxford English Dictionary).  Universals so understood are what in
everyday life we take general terms, i.e., adjectives and common nouns, to
stand for. In logic properties are the values of predicate variables, say,
Φ, individual things (“particulars”) being the values of
individual variables, say, x, and the logical form of a nonrelational atomic
sentence usually represented as Φx.
So understood, there is no “problem” of universals, for
there is no temptation to think that there cannot be common properties, that,
e.g., this page and the next page cannot be both white, any more than there is
for thinking that two persons cannot have the same father or that two ships
cannot be headed in the same direction.  Realism regarding universals thus appears
true.

The “problem of
universals” arises when we assume that a property of things must be
somewhere and then ask, “Where is it?” Plato’s answer seemed
to be that it is nowhere, not in space, but then he added to the puzzle by
saying that it is in a special, separate, realm of being, the “world of
Forms.” More plausible seemed to be the answer that a common property is “present”
in the things that have it as a part of them, that, e.g., the white color of
this and the next page is a part of both pages even though they have different
locations in space. But then one may ask, how can something be in two places at
the same time?  The antirealist
regarding universals, the “nominalist,” would say that it cannot,
and thus deny that there are universals.

There is little, however, to
recommend the assumption that the properties of things are “somewhere”
and therefore perhaps parts of them.  If I am 6 feet tall, it would be nonsense
to suppose that being 6 feet tall is somewhere, let alone a part of me or
indeed of anything. A position on universals that might be called
“semirealist” appears preferable: there are properties but they are
not parts of the things whose properties they are and thus they are not where
the things are or anywhere else. Philosophers often employ, instead of
“part,” the term “constituent,” saying that a property
is a constituent of what has the
property, but this merely disguises the nonsense.

All along, the dispute between
realism and antirealism regarding universals has been stated as if it concerned
a matter a fact. But, surely, it does not. No empirical facts about this page
and the next are in question when we ask whether they have the same color, and
if any were we would settle them not by philosophical discussion, contemplation,
intuition, or analysis but by just looking at the pages, perhaps also employing
a scientific instrument. And surely it is not nonempirical facts that are in
question. Even if they were, it would be unclear why philosophers should enjoy
special knowledge of them. Those who suppose that the truths of arithmetic correspond
to nonempirical facts about numbers leave the study of them to mathematicians.

The “puzzle” about where
properties might be was felt mostly under the influence of the British empiricists,
who held that all things must be actual or possible objects of perception and
therefore found themselves unable to imagine an individual object as being
anything other than the collection of its perceived properties.  The properties must, therefore, be where
the thing is.  But the idea that a
property must be perceivable in the way the things that have it are perceivable
is like the idea that the 20th century must be perceivable (seen?
touched? heard? smelled?), and the idea that a property must be
“somewhere” is like the idea that the 20th century must be
somewhere (in Europe? Asia? Africa? South America?)
Both confuse conception with perception, and properties with the things that
have properties. On these matters, Plato and Frege were closer to the truth.
The color of an apple is not in the apple in the way a worm might be.

When discussing the problem of universals it is convenient to
employ the terminology proposed by H.H. Price in his classic work Thinking and Experience.  He used the phrase universalia in rebus for properties as understood by Aristotle: universals
are “in” things as their properties.  Universalia
post rem are not properties but the subjective states, “ideas,”
perhaps mental images, that are taken to correspond to general terms, or those
terms themselves. Universalia ante rem
are universals as understood by Plato, entities that exist independently of
both spatiotemporal objects and any subjective states. Berkeley and Hume, of
course, denied that there are universalia
ante rem. But they also denied that there are universalia in rebus, on the grounds that the properties of
particulars are themselves particulars. This position was developed and
defended two centuries later by D. C. Williams.”[355] It is
known today as “trope” theory.

The view Price preferred was “the philosophy of
universals,” essentially Aristotle’s view of universals as
properties of things, universalia in
rebus.  He was especially clear
about the intimate connection between the category of concepts and the category
of properties.  Concepts are not
words or mental images, but rather “recognitional capacities.” They
are principles of classification. As such, concepts are not clearly
distinguishable from the corresponding classes of individual things and thus from
the corresponding properties. Indeed, the very distinction between class and
property becomes murky. Goodman and Quine argued at one time for
“nominalism” regarding both properties and classes, on the grounds
that both are abstract entities: “We
do not believe in abstract entities. No one supposes that abstract entities --
classes, relations, properties, etc. -- exist in space-time; but we mean more
than this. We renounce them altogether.”[356]
Later, Quine abandoned this stand because he believed that classes (sets) are
required in mathematics.

Price was not an antirealist, but he might have agreed that as
a matter of fact, not philosophical argument, we cannot distinguish between
what the world really is and how we understand it. It is commonplace to speak
of the child's world, the soldier's world, the scientist's world, and so forth.
Such descriptions do not refer to different portions of the world. They refer
to the world itself, but as understood or conceptualized in a certain way: the
child’s, the adult’s, or the scientist’s.

Hegel rejected Plato’s universalia ante rem, but
he also had no patience with the British empiricists’ universalia post rem, and probably would
have dismissed trope theory as failing to “see the universal in the particular.”
At first glance, therefore, he may seem to have accepted Aristotle’s view
of universalia in rebus.  Indeed, we find him writing,
“Animal, qua animal, does not
exist: it is merely the universal nature of the individual animals…But to
be an animal … is the property of the particular animal, and constitutes
its definite essence. Take away from the dog its animality, and it becomes
impossible to say what it is.”[357] This
remark is best understood in the context of Aristotle’s Categories. It concerns what Aristotle
called “secondary substances,” e.g., animal and dog. In
chapter 5 I called substance universals. They are the genera and species of
“primary substances,” that is, of individual things, e.g., this
animal, this dog.  Primary
substances, according to Aristotle, are neither “present in” nor
“said of” (i.e., predicable of) anything. But he made clear that by
“being present in I do not mean present as parts are present in a whole,
but being incapable of existence apart from the said subject.” Secondary
substances are said of but are not present in individual things. For centuries,
animality (“the Animal”) served as a standard example of a secondary
substance, but so would have caninity (“the Dog).  The latter is a species of the former, which
is its genus.

Hegel’s remark “Take away from the dog its
animality, and it becomes impossible to say what it is” applies also to those
of Aristotle’s “accidents” that are present in and also said
of things. We may call them universal properties, e.g., round shape and white
color. But “a certain whiteness may be present in the body…. yet it
is never predicable of anything.” Aristotle wrote. Take away the whiteness of this page the color white, we may
say, and it becomes impossible to say what it is.  The whiteness of this page is not predicable
of the page – the page is not its whiteness, it is a page. The color
white is predicable of the page, though only because it is predicable of its
whiteness: the page is white because its color is white. We may call
Aristotelian accidents such as the whiteness of this page particular properties,
thus granting antirealists regarding universals their due. But the whiteness of
this page must not be confused with the color white, a universal property, which
is said directly of that particular property and indirectly of the page.  We must also grant realists regarding
universals their due.

We perceive this page as well as its whiteness, and we can be
said to perceive also the universals of which they are instances, namely, being
a page and the color white. When we perceive the whiteness of the page, we may
be aware, know, also that it is the color white, and thus aware of the species,
as well as that it is a color, the genus, though not by perceiving them –
we do not perceive three properties: the whiteness of the page, the color white,
and color. We are aware of both the specific property and the generic property in
the sense that we know that one of the properties present in the page is the
color white and that the color white is a color. We do not perceive them in
addition to perceiving the whiteness of the page.  But we can think of them.  And we
can think of them even when we do not see a particular property falling under them.
We can think of them without seeing anything.  We can think of them also without
employing a suitable mental image. This is evident when we try to recognize a
color in its instances. (“What would you say is the color of that shirt?”)
Such thinking may be described as employing
the relevant concept. But this need not
mean more than that we are capable of thinking of the universal and recognizing
it in its instances. We do not “have” the concept in the way we might
have a mental image, let alone a pencil. And we would have the concept, but not
the image, even when asleep.

“It is not we
who frame the concepts [die Begriffe],” Hegel wrote. ”Rather
the concept is the genuine first; and things are what they are through the
action of the concept, immanent in them, and revealing itself in them.”[358] Cognition,
at least in the case of understanding, necessarily involves concepts. But
concepts are not mere abstractions. Though universals, they are “sunk”
in things, they are properties of things. They are not denizens of a Platonic
realm, separate from the world, which individual things only “imitate.”
They are “concrete,” not “abstract,” universals.  But even when they are properties of spatiotemporal
things, they are not spatiotemporal parts of those things, they are not
spatiotemporal parts of the world. They are “concrete,” not
“abstract,” universals:
“[T]he universal of the notion is not a mere sum of features
common to several things, confronted by a particular which enjoys an existence
of its own. It is, on the contrary, self-particularizing or
self-specifying”[359]

What Hegel meant by saying that universals particularize themselves, that they self-particularize, need mean no more than that there is nothing in
individual things that “connects” them to their properties, that
there are no Lockean substrata or Bergmannian bare particulars.  Hegel’s famous view that the
Absolute “develops” from the Logical Idea to Nature need mean no
more than that concepts have no reality apart from individual things, that
universals must be exemplified.  And
when Hegel says that from Nature the Absolute develops to Spirit, this need
mean no more than that individual things have no reality apart from concepts.

Hegel’s view of concepts accords with the standard use of
the word in the cognitive disciplines.
An account of the fundamental concepts of physics refers to Newton or
Einstein no more than it refers to their states of mind. It refers to how
certain properties, e.g., gravitation and light, are understood in physics. They
are understood as universals, though of course not so described. Physics is no
more interested in particular properties, or tropes, than it is interested in particular
objects. The whiteness of this page is of no greater interest to it than this
page. Just as geometry is concerned not with the rectangular shape of this page
but with rectangular shape as such, physics is concerned not with the mass of
this page but with mass.

2.      Solipsism and Pure Realism.

The thesis of this book has been
that there is no place for anthropocentrism in philosophy, that philosophy
ought to be “dehumanized.” In the case of epistemology and ethics,
I argued in Part One, this can be done directly, without qualification, by
resolutely shifting their focus. In metaphysics, however, anthropocentrism has
been present as antirealism, most notably Kant’s transcendental idealism.
And we cannot just return to a pre-Kantian metaphysics. Part Two was devoted to
explaining why this is so, in effect, to showing the virtues of antirealism. For
our goal has been not to reject antirealism but to free it from
anthropocentrism. This means that we must understand the central claim of
antirealism as nonanthropocentric, as making no reference to humans. This can
be done only by radical rethinking of the role of personal pronouns in
philosophical contexts, which was attempted in the preceding two chapters.

Hume in effect denied that
there is what Wittgenstein was to call “the philosophical self” or
“the metaphysical subject.”
If he was right, there would not be the entity with which the world might
be contrasted and on which it might depend.  Antirealism would become what Wittgenstein
called pure realism: “solipsism, when its implications are followed out
strictly, coincides with pure realism.
The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there
remains the reality co-ordinated with it” (5.64). The world becomes
“my world” because, with respect to the content of any cognition, primitive or advanced,
perceptual or conceptual, no distinction between me and the world that would be relevant to the realism/antirealism
issue can be made.  Hegel would have
agreed, though he would have added that no individual, personal cognition is
independent of societal, public cognition. If so, then there is also no
distinction relevant to the realism/antirealism issue between us and the world.  Wittgenstein himself held, though only
in his later works, that individual cognition is dependent on public cognition,
insofar as it requires the use of language, by denying that a private language
is possible and insisting that a public language presupposes agreement in
judgment.

When by “I” or “we” is meant mind in
the sense of cognition, and by “world” the object of that
cognition, the philosophical distinction between the world and cognition of the
world does begin to resemble the distinction between a headache and the feeling
of that headache. We attach little sense to speculation about unfelt headaches
or about feelings of a headache that are feelings of nothing.  Indeed, Berkeley noted that his thesis “to
be is to be perceived” was most plausible in the case of pains:
“nobody will pretend that real pain either is, or can possibly be, in an
unperceiving thing, or without the mind, any more than its idea.”[360] Headaches
are feelings of a headache, and feelings of a headache are headaches.  A headache is identical with the feeling
of that headache, though of course in the sense in which the Evening Star is
identical with the Morning Star, not the sense in which the Evening Star is
identical with the Evening Star.
Hegel explained the two senses by saying that he was concerned only with
identity “in unity with difference,” not the “abstract
identity” asserted in “silly” statements like “mind is
mind” or “planet is planet.”

The relation between a headache and the feeling of that
headache is a familiar and reasonably uncontroversial instance of the relation
between the world and cognition.  Feeling a headache is an experience, a
cognition, and the felt headache is the “thing,” res, reality, that is cognized. The
realist, if there is one in this case, would say that there are, or at least
could be, unfelt headaches. The skeptic would say that one cannot know whether there
are unfelt headaches. The antirealist would say that there is no difference
between the feeling of a headache and the felt headache. But the instances of
the relation between the world and cognition that realists, skeptics, and antirealists
usually consider – such as the relation between material things and sense
perception, causality and knowledge of it, or an esoteric elementary particle
in physics and the theory that is the only reason for accepting its reality
– are unfamiliar and seldom uncontroversial. In chapter 8 we found an instance
that though unfamiliar is also uncontroversial.  It is the relation between the world and the
cognition of it expressed in generic statements. No one thinks that there are
generic facts. In their case antirealism seems unassailable.

The antirealist thesis has seemed paradoxical, absurd, because
it is interpreted as saying that the whole world – from the page you are reading now to the remotest known
galaxies, and since the Big Bang to the
farthest conceivable future – depends for its existence and nature
on the minds, the cognitive capacities, of humans, a species in one of its
planets’ fauna.  This would be
a zoological thesis.  It would also
be absurd zoology, as well as absurd physics and astronomy.  But antirealism is not a theory in
zoology, or in physics or astronomy. The mind relevant to the philosophical
topic of the dependence of the world on the mind cannot be a thing in that
world, nor can it be a part or property of such a thing.  This is why the antirealist thesis is
not that the world is dependent on the human mind. There is no mind on which
the world might depend. There is only the world.  To be sure, it is the cognized or at
least cognizable – perceivable, conceivable, describable – world,
but no other world, if there is one, is relevant in philosophy, science, or
everyday life. There are humans in the cognized world, of course, just as there
are also whales and chimpanzees. But there is nothing in or about humans, just
as there is nothing in or about whales or chimpanzees, on which the world might
depend.

The
idea of mind usually employed in careless talk about mind-dependence or independence
rests on a powerful but misleading picture of the mind as something “in”
us, a self or a soul, often fancied as located somewhere, somehow, behind the
eyes. More than half a century ago, in his attack on Descartes’s dualism,
Gilbert Ryle called this picture the dogma of the ghost in the machine.  But the word “dogma”
suggests that the picture was a philosophical invention, which it was not.  We do sometimes point to our heads when
speaking of our thoughts, and the belief that they are located within the skull
is ancient, not acquired from philosophy or science.  But sometimes we also point to our
hearts when speaking of our feelings, especially love, and the belief that
feelings are located somewhere within the chest is also ancient, though few if any
educated people share it today. To be sure, there is a brain behind the eyes,
but only a poor neuroscience or philosophy would identify it with the mind at
issue in the realism/antirealism debate.

At
any rate, even if thoughts were in the head, pointing to our heads in
philosophical contexts like Cartesian doubt or the realism/antirealism issue
would be inadmissible. Thought can be no more in the head when considered in
those contexts than love can be in the heart when considered in biology. To say
this is not to question anything that neuroscience and cardiology say. It is to
acknowledge that, unless we flagrantly beg the question against the skeptic and
the antirealist, we cannot take the mind relevant in such philosophical
contexts to be a part or feature, mental or physical, of a thing, human or
nonhuman, in the world. Neuroscience says nothing about this.

Although there is an obvious nonphilosophical distinction between P.B. and the world, there is
no philosophical distinction between me and the world. The reason is that in
the latter case each must be understood in terms of the other. “The point
without extension” to which the self “shrinks” determines
“the limit of the world,” of the “reality co-ordinated”
with that point. To say this indeed is to express a sort of solipsism, Wittgenstein’s
“I am the world,” but it is a solipsism that “coincides with
pure realism.” Such solipsism is not alarming, because the
“I” in “I am the world” refers, not to Wittgenstein,
P.B., or any other person or thing in the world, physical or mental, but to the
world itself, even if we add that it refers to the world as cognized, viewed,
in a certain way. The impression of absurdity plaguing antirealism vanishes
when the implications of its most extreme variety, solipsism, are
“followed out strictly.”

Indeed, there would be no room left for any sort of
subjectivism, be it solipsism in metaphysics, skepticism in epistemology, or
egoism in ethics. There is no room for solipsism because without the contrast
between me and the world, the
solipsist’s assertion “Only I exist” becomes empty. There is
no room for skepticism about the external world: “Scepticism is not
irrefutable, but obviously nonsensical, when it tries to raise doubts where no
questions can be asked” (6.51). It is nonsensical because there would be
nothing with which the external world could be contrasted, nothing to which it
would be “external.” And no room is left for egoism in ethics, insofar
as rejecting “the philosophical self” implies that “The sense
of the world must lie outside the world” (6.41), not in the world. The
fatal weakness of all subjectivism – solipsism, skepticism, or egoism
– is its implicit commitment to a pre-Humean view of the self. Without a
subject, there cannot be a subjectivism. Hume, Wittgenstein, and Sartre saw
this clearly. Their rejection of subjectivism, though highly technical, would
please common sense, which firmly disapproves of egoism, rejects skepticism
without hesitation, and dismisses solipsism as madness.

Berkeley claimed that the world is dependent on the mind
insofar as the world is perceived.
Kant pointed out that it is dependent on the mind also insofar as it is understood.
Contemporary antirealism has added that the world depends on the mind insofar
as it is described.  Berkeley could
not consistently mean by perceiving a relation that a human bears to an object,
and he did not. Nor could Kant consistently mean by concepts inhabitants of
human skulls, and he did not.  And
contemporary antirealists who appeal to meanings or uses of words cannot
consistently appeal to human activities such as speaking and writing. But few
philosophers who took the linguistic turn saw that a nonzoological view of mind
demands a nonzoological view not only of perception and conception but also of
language.

Gilbert Ryle was an exception, as I noted in the Introduction.  He made a sharp distinction between the use
and the usage of a word: “Hume's question was not about the word 'cause';
it was about the use of 'cause'. It was just as much about the use
of 'Ursache'. For the use of 'cause' is the same as the use of 'Ursache',
though 'cause' is not the same word as 'Ursache'. Hume's question was not a
question about a bit of the German language. The job done with the English word
'cause' is not an English job, or a continental job.”[361] In a
symposium with J. N. Findlay, Ryle remarked, “The famous saying:
‘Don't ask for the meaning; ask for the use’, might have been and I
hope was a piece of advice to philosophers, and not to lexicographers or translators.”
Findlay agreed, but he also added: “ [We] cannot fully say, in a great
many cases, how an expression is used, without saying what sort of things it is
intended to refer to, or to bring to mind…”[362] If
Ryle meant by “use of a word” roughly what Kant meant by
“concept,” then Findlay’s important addition that the use of
a word involves the things to which it is applied was closer to Hegel’s
view of concepts as “sunk” in the things to which they apply, or,
as Strawson put it, “permeating,” “soaking” them.

Incompatibility between conceptual
schemes, Strawson held, need not be formal inconsistency, the clashes between
them need not call for choice between contradictory propositions. For example,
he argued, there is no genuine contradiction between science and common sense
regarding the reality of colors. The seeming difference between what they say
is due to the different concepts they employ.  But we cannot separate the concepts from
their subject matter, and then judge independently which are faithful to it.[363] For
the subject matter is “permeated” by the concepts. To question this
would be “an invitation to step outside the conceptual scheme which we
actually have – and then to justify it from some extraneous point of
vantage. But there is nowhere to step; there is no such extraneous point of vantage.”[364] There
is no “metaphysically absolute standpoint from which we can judge between
the two standpoints.”[365]
“The picture of a concept-free access
to facts, to reality,” Strawson wrote, “is confused and ultimately
self-contradictory.”[366]

There can be no genuine contradiction between different
conceptual practices. They are just different. There is no arbiter of the
propriety of the application of any concept which is external to and
independent of our actual conceptual practice. We cannot exit the practice so
that we can “see” what it is about and then judge whether it is the
“right” one. “[Y]ou can have no
cognitive contact with, hence no knowledge of, Reality which does not involve
the forming a belief, making a judgment, deploying concepts.”[367] This,
of course, is the thesis of what I have called conceptual antirealism. Speaking
of Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspect-seeing, in the case of a picture that
may be seen equally
legitimately as a duck or a
rabbit, Strawson wrote, “the visual experience is irradiated by, or infused with,
the concept; or it becomes soaked with
the concept.”[368] Hegel
would have agreed: “in point of contents, thought is only true in
proportion as it sinks itself in the facts.”

If concepts permeate, soak, the things conceived, and if to
speak of the use of a word is to speak of the things to which it refers, then
the mind itself, insofar as it requires concepts and words, not only cannot be in the world, it must be the world. This, of course, was Wittgenstein’s pure realism.  It was also Hegel’s
“absolute idealism,” which he proposed after rejecting Kant’s
“transcendental idealism” as unacceptably psychological and thus
subjective.  Hegel would have gladly
agreed that absolute idealism could be called pure idealism. He might have also
agreed that it is pure realism, had he anticipated Wittgenstein’s
reasoning.

Berkeley began with the simplistic notions of a self
(“mind”) confronted with an object (material or mental) and of
consciousness as a relation between the two (perceiving, imagining). Kant
reduced the self to a unified consciousness. Hegel identified that
consciousness with its objects. Wittgenstein rejected the self altogether,
thereby removing also the motivation for consciousness, the
“intentional’ relation of the self to objects, and allowed only for
the world. Hegel was philosophically far apart from Berkeley, and Wittgenstein
was even more so. But it is unclear that on our topic Hegel and Wittgenstein
were far apart from each other. It is unclear that absolute idealism and pure
realism differ in more than literary and philosophical style or approach,
striking though these differences may be. Wittgenstein’s pure realism is
a realism that has earned its keep, unlike the pre-Kantian realism
(“naïve realism”) that, as Descartes, Berkeley, and Hume saw,
lay helpless before the skeptic.
Hegel’s absolute idealism held that reality is thought, but it did
not hold that vegetables, animals, and minerals are sensations, feelings, or
mental images. It held only that there is no “cashable” difference
between vegetables, animals, or minerals and how we perceive and think of them.
There is a world, but its nature and contents can be known only as what
perception reveals, conception allows, and language expresses.  Justice is thus done to both realism and
antirealism.

The cognizer on whose cognition the world has been held to depend
must be the philosophical self, the metaphysical subject, not Descartes, Hegel,
or P.B. But there is no such cognizer. There is only the world. Solipsism, if
properly understood coincides with pure realism, the rejection of all
subjectivity. The most extreme form of antirealism thus leads to the most
extreme form of realism, realism without a self, a pure realism.  The most extreme form of subjectivism
gives way to the most extreme form of objectivism.  The seeming paradox of the antirealist
thesis that the world depends on humans’ cognition of it is resolved: the
world does not depend on its human inhabitants, or on anything associated with
them. Of course, this is only a reason for rejecting the most serious objection
to the thesis. It is not a reason for accepting it. The reason for accepting
the thesis was explained in Part Two. It rested mainly on the role of logical
cognition, especially in generic statements.

Claims
like Kant’s that the objects of knowledge conform to knowledge, not
knowledge to its objects, Goodman’s that we make the world, and Hegel’s
that Reality is Thought are at first glance incredible. But they can be seen
now as rhetorical flourishes of what follows from a proposition that is a
tautology and a proposition that, though not a tautology, is self-evident.

The tautology is that the only world we perceive, understand, and
describe is the world perceived, understood, and described by us. The
self-evident proposition is that, in philosophical contexts like Cartesian
doubt and the realism/antirealism issue, we cannot coherently regard ourselves
as a part, mental (an ego, a colony of egos) or material (a brain, a collection
of brains), of that world. Together with the tautology, this proposition yields
a metaphysics that is antirealist but not anthropocentric.

3. Philosophical method.

The
reader may ask, how can a substantive view rest on so
little? The question betrays commitment to a conception of philosophy I have
warned against repeatedly. Philosophers can claim no expertise on any
things or facts, empirical or nonempirical. They have neither the training nor
the means to make empirical discoveries, nor do they have the training or the
means to make nonempirical discoveries, for example like those in mathematics. Philosophy
is neither amateur psychology, devoted to the study of “the ideas in the
mind,” nor amateur lexicology, devoted to the study of “the workings
of our language.”

Appeals to a tautology are often the
best way to break the sway of a picture that we find misleading and dissolve an
illusion. “You can’t both spend and save it” exposes an all
too frequent illusion in financial planning. When made in philosophy, such an
appeal can be conducive to understanding by exposing a philosophical picture as
misleading and thus dispelling the illusion the picture generates. The
tautology that the only world we perceive, understand, and describe is the
world perceived, understood, and described by us can dispel the illusion
generated by the philosophical picture of ourselves as spectators of an
external world, like astronauts observing the earth from the moon.

Appeals to self-evident propositions
are often properly acknowledged to be decisive. “Well, doctor, say what
you will, it still hurts” sometimes silences the intelligent physician, and
“You can’t live forever” sometimes ends agonizing indecision.
Reductio ad absurdum, in effect an
appeal to the self-evidence of the principle of noncontradiction, is often the
only available form of argument in mathematics. Appeals to self-evident
propositions are sometimes decisive also in philosophy. “We cannot both regard
ourselves as inhabitants of the world and deny its reality” is surely an
example.

The
goal of philosophy is not to seek information but to achieve understanding. And
understanding, in philosophy as well as in everyday life and science, rests on
seeing similarities and differences – in looks, structure, function,
causal role – not seen before. This is why the word “model,”
originally applied, as it still is, to a piece of wood for making moulds in
metal casting, has increasingly replaced “theory,” which in Greek
meant a view, contemplation. It is a mistake to think
that saying what something is like is
at most second best, and that we should aim at saying what it is. When we say what something is we are
really saying what it is like, namely, that it is like the paradigms for the
application of the relevant concept. Ordinarily the likeness is so close that
its presence and our reliance on it escape our attention. To say that a certain
animal before us is a dog is, by implication, to say that it is like the paradigms
for the application of “dog.” But we are seldom conscious of the
implication because the likeness is ordinarily so close that the animal can be
taken to be such a paradigm itself, even though we did not learn the
conventions regarding the meaning or use of “dog” by reference to
it.

Plato
and Aristotle, or Hume and Kant, Husserl and Russell, did not disagree because
they were “presented,” in sensory or intellectual intuition, with
different things or facts, or because some of them offered false descriptions
of those things and facts or made formal errors in their inferences from the true
descriptions.  In chapter 7 I remarked that if
Wittgenstein and Bergmann disagreed about generality, the reason was not that
they “saw” different things, just as those who disagreed with both
of them did not.  At most, all three
saw things differently.

In
the present chapter I suggested regarding the “problem” of
universals that what philosophers discussing it in fact do is to propose,
mostly by means of metaphor and analogy, certain descriptions, verbal
“pictures,” of the world, ways of understanding it on the most
abstract level, hoping usually to free us from the illusions produced by what
they consider misleading other metaphors, analogies, descriptions, or pictures.[369] The defender of universalia
in rebus does not happen to see the identity of the color of this page and
the color of the next page, the trope theorist does not just fail to see it,
and Plato did not enjoy an extrasensory awareness of his Forms that most of us
do not. To think otherwise would be to misunderstand what philosophers do.

The central question, according to trope theorists, is whether,
e.g., the color of this page and the color of the next page are identical, one and the same entity, or only
resemble each other, exactly or inexactly.
Thus the appeal to tropes is an attempt to avoid commitment to universals by
appealing instead to the presence of a relation of resemblance. But there is no
fact of the matter here. If there were, we should be able to tell which is the
right view in the case of the two pages by just looking at them – after
all, we can see both pages and we can also see their color. We would expect to
see whether the relation between the color of this page and the color of that page
is identity, i.e., that a certain color is a property common to both, or
resemblance, i.e., that they are particular properties related by
resemblance.  But how would such
identity and resemblance differ? The truth is that neither the philosophers
who say that properties are universals nor those who say that they are
particulars are reporting anything to be settled by or inferred from
experience, they are not reporting a discovery of facts about the world. The
idea that there is a “fact of the matter” they disagree about is
surely absurd. Are the disagreeing parties each claiming better powers of
vision than the other? Surely, they can only claim to be offering a more
illuminating description of a familiar and uncontroversial fact.

The problem of universals is whether this fact is more like the
paradigms of identity, say, the identity of the Morning Star and the Evening
Star, or like an ordinary relation, say, the spatial relation between the two
pages.[370]
Science and common sense seem to hold that it is the former. This is why they choose
“Both are white,” or “This page is white and the next page is
white,” to describe the fact, rather than a relational statement of the
form xRy. Indeed, there are no relevant statements of the latter sort because
there are no names of particular properties, of tropes. In aRb, where R stands
for resemblance, a and b would not be names, respectively, of the color of this
page and the color of the next page since there are no such names.  “The color of this page” and
“the color of the next page” are not names.  And it is unclear that names could be
coherently introduced.  Could they
be reusable? Would they be public?

Of course, an antirealist may say that even genuine discoveries,
say, in science, are no more than proposed pictures, since there is no such
thing as getting at the things themselves, at reality.  Such an antirealist should review Kant’s
distinction between transcendental idealism and empirical realism.  But in the case of philosophical theories
what the antirealist says would be true even if the antirealism were
false.  Once the illusion is
dispelled that the task of philosophy is “conceptual” analysis or describing
the “workings” of language, as was the earlier illusion that it was
to inquire into “the mind and its ideas,” philosophical theories can
no longer be seen as companions, much less competitors, of scientific theories.
Even if science could “get at” reality through observation,
experiment, and inference, surely, for the reasons repeatedly explained in this
book, philosophy could not. What it can do, however, is to draw attention to,
and emphasize, similarities and differences between fundamental kinds of
entities in the world that in everyday life, and even in science, may go
unnoticed – sometimes precisely because they are fundamental.

The answer then to the question,
how can a substantive view rest on so little as a tautology and a self-evident
proposition, is that we do not want our view in this book to be substantive, if this means description
of some things or facts. It is intended not as report of discovery but as
proposal of a way of understanding the relationship between us and the
world. When discussing Wittgenstein’s semirealism, I avoided judgments
about its “truth,” stressing instead its importance as an alternative
to the stark positions of metaphysical realism and antirealism.

4. Philosophy without
anthropocentrism.

A philosophical picture is not a philosophical system. Our
project has been to free philosophy – first epistemology and ethics, then
metaphysics – from anthropocentrism, not to construct epistemological,
ethical, and metaphysical systems. But even if we distrust the claims to
philosophical knowledge that such systems make, and content ourselves with
drawing verbal pictures, we have left room for them. The metaphysical picture
of the world we have drawn shares with Hegel’s the absence of the usual
subject-object dualism. Is it then an idealist picture? If it is, the idealism
certainly is not Berkeley’s. Is it Hegel’s? It depicts no
“Absolute” that develops from Logical Idea to Nature and then to
Spirit, nor does it employ a “dialectical” method.

Is our metaphysical picture Sartre’s? It does shares with
it the explicit rejection of both subject-object dualism and act-object dualism.
But it completely bypasses Sartre’s existentialist concerns with freedom,
bad faith, sadism, and masochism, which surely are irremediably
anthropocentric. Is our metaphysical picture Wittgenstein’s, in which the
subject-object and act-object dualisms are also absent? If Wittgenstein had a
metaphysical picture in the Tractatus,
it was so sketchy that the question is unanswerable. Had he had one, what our
picture and his would share is the rejection of the metaphysical self and thus
of subjectivism in all its forms. In this respect both would be descendants of
Hegel’s metaphysical picture. Hegel’s assertion that thoughts are the
essences of things and Wittgenstein’s that the self of solipsism shrinks
to a point without extension need not convey different metaphysical pictures
just because they are very different in terminology, style, and historical
context.

Our metaphysical picture is compatible with other philosophical
pictures as long as they avoid divorcing the world from cognition. I have held
that consciousness has no intrinsic nature and no “inhabitants,”
not even an ego, that there is just the world. Hence, there is some
plausibility of the physicalist picture of the world as matter. But, unlike it,
ours does not exclude consciousness – it merely does not include it, much
as a group portrait of a family usually does not include the photographer. Our
metaphysical picture is also compatible with that of a phenomenology faithful
to Husserl’s motto “We must go back to the things themselves.”  Consciousness is not in our picture
because it is not among “the things themselves,” an additional item
in the world competing with them for a place in it. It also ought not to have been
in Husserl’s.

Our metaphysical picture is compatible with that of pure
idealism, of the world as mind. It does justice to what makes idealism
plausible. Consciousness has no qualitative nature and no inhabitants. There
are only its objects. In itself it is nothing. Nonetheless, it is the
revelation of things and the regulator of which are admissible into the world.
It is a revelation on the level of perception (sensibility, outer or inner;
intuition, sensory of intellectual) and a regulator on the level of conception
(understanding, thought, reason, language). Perception opens the gate to the
world, but conception is the gate-keeper.
So understood, consciousness is the same as cognition, sometimes even
knowledge.. We can responsibly regard as objects in the world only those
revealed and then allowed by it. But though our picture contains only what
consciousness reveals and accepts, it does not exclude Kantian things-in
themselves. It merely does not include them, much as the group portrait of a
family might not include the grandparents.

In The Vocation of Man,
Fichte offered a characteristically dramatic, and unhappy, view of
consciousness: “All that I know is my consciousness itself…..I know
of no being, not even of my own. There is no being….Pictures [Bilde] are: - they are the only things
which exist.”[371] Fichte
thought the moral to be drawn is that we must rely on faith, rather than
knowledge. The views of consciousness we find in Hegel, Wittgenstein, and
Sartre, however, suggest that we should rather say: “All that I know is
the world itself. The things in it are: - they are the only things which
exist.” But we might be wiser if we refused to choose between the
metaphysical pictures of Wittgenstein’s pure realism and Fichte’s
pure idealism, and welcomed both. Our philosophical understanding would then be
richer. Of course, the welcome need not be unreserved.  Pure realism does not entail
physicalism, and thus is free from the latter’s rashness. Pure idealism
does not entail a doctrine about an Absolute and its dialectical development,
and it need not be expressed in the jargon of German idealism. As to which is
preferable, suffice it to note the advantage pure realism enjoys of being close
to both common sense and science. Pure idealism lacks that advantage.

Our rejection of anthropocentrism in
philosophy allows for the investigation of the numerous traditional topics in
philosophy to which the realism/antirealism debate is irrelevant. As I pointed
out in the Introduction, though much of traditional ethics and epistemology
consists of inquiries that properly belong in the empirical sciences, not philosophy,
both also contain much that does not, for example, what I called
epistemology-as-logic in the case of epistemology and  theories of goodness like Plato’s,
Aquinas’s, and Moore’s in the case of ethics  And while much of post-Kantian metaphysics
has seemed committed to the prima facie absurd view that the world depends on
humans, there are many metaphysical inquiries of which this is not true,
especially in pre-Kantian philosophy. The “dehumanization” of metaphysics
proposed in this book is compatible with most theories to which those inquiries
led.

Our picture leaves room for the project of ontology: listing
and describing the most general kinds (“categories”) of entities
and the relations among them. One example is the question whether individual
things are merely bundles of their properties.  There is also, regarding each of the
metaphysical pictures mentioned earlier, the question whether what the picture
does not include nonetheless ought to be included, for example, consciousness
in the case of the physicalist picture and Kantian things-in-themselves in the
case of the idealist picture. No science can answer these questions. If they
can be answered at all, only philosophy can do it. If they cannot be answered,
only philosophy can explain why they cannot.

[1] Paul Arthur
Schilpp, The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell (Open Court: 1989), 19-20.

[2] Benedict
de Spinoza, Ethics (New York: Hafner; 1963) Part One, Proposition VII,
Note.

[3] Ethics,
Part Five, Proposition XVII.

[4] Gilbert
Ryle, “Ordinary Language,” Philosophical Review LXII (1951), 173-74.  See also Gilbert Ryle, "Use, Usage, and Meaning," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume XXXV (1961).

[5] Cora
Diamond, The Realistic Spirit:
Wittgenstein, Philosophy and the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1991),  35

[6]
W.V.O. Quine, Theories and Things (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1981), p. 21.

[7]
Quine, Willard, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism". From
a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1994).

[8]
Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978), 6.

[9] For a
detailed and incisive discussion of common sense, see Noah Lemos, Common Sense (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004).

[10]
See my “Epistemology Dehumanized,” in Quentin Smith, ed., Epistemology: New Essays (Oxford
University Press, 2008).

[11]
See my “Ethics Dehumanized,” in Mark Timmons and Terry Horgan,
eds., Metaethics After Moore (Oxford
University Press, 2006).

[12]
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason,
trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998), B37-4

[13] E.g., Critique of Pure Reason, B xxvii-xxviii.

[14]
Critique of Pure Reason, B 42-44. For
the general distinction between transcendental and empirical idealism, see A
369-70. Heidegger remarked that Kant’s “transcendental
conception” was “possible only on the basis of the subjectivity of
man’s essence.”
(“On the Essence of Truth,” in D. F. Krell, Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings (New
York: Harper & Row, 1977, 118.)

[15] Critique of Pure Reason, B 69.

[16] Ludwig
Wittgenstein, Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London:
Routledge, 1972), 5.63. In references to the text, I shall use
Wittgenstein’s numerical designations of sentences. All italics,
upper-case letters, and parentheses in the quotations will be
Wittgenstein’s.

[17] Martin
Heidegger, Being and Time (New York:
HarperOne; Revised edition, 1962), 27.

[18]
Martin Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth,” section 9, Note, in Basic Writings, 138.

[19]
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness,
trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956)

[20] J. L. Austin,
How to Do Things
with Words (New York: Oxford University Press,1976)

[21]
Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the
Metaphysics of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (New York: Harper and Row, 1964),
p. 57.

[22]  Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New
York: Basic Books, 2013), pp. x-xiii.

[23] Tractatus, 5.6.

[24] Martin
Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, 193.

[25]
Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York:
Harper&Row, 1971),  74, trans.
Albert Hofstadter.

[26]
Bertrand Russell, A History of Western
Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), 707-708.

[27] Steven
Pinker, The Stuff of Thought (New York: Viking, 2007),
1.

[28] Hilary
Putnam, Ethics without Ontology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2004), 21-22.

[29] Ways of Worldmaking, especially chapters
I and V.

[30] Hilary
Putnam and James Conant, Words and Life
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 308.

[31]
The phrase “state of affairs” is
often used as a substitute for “fact.” A distinction between actual
and possible states of affairs is made, true statements supposed to correspond
to the former and false statements to the latter. “Fact” then, if
used at all, is applied only to actual states of affairs. For the sake of
terminological simplicity, I will use only “fact” and ignore the
question whether false statements correspond to anything.

[32] Frege
had used the phrase “logical objects” for the objects of arithmetic
in the context of his project of reducing arithmetic to logic, a project
continued later by Russell and Whitehead.
Bertrand Russell used it in his posthumously published Theory of Knowledge: The 1913 Manuscript
(London and New York: Routledge, 1984), 97, claiming that we must be
“acquainted” with logical objects in order to understand “logical
terms” such as “particulars, universals, relations, dual complexes,
predicates.”  Wittgenstein
read Russell’s manuscript and criticized it severely.  Several years later he asserted in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,
“There are no logical objects” (4.441).

[33] Tractatus, 4.441.

[34] Tractatus, 5.61.

[35] See my
“Metaphysical Realism and Logical Antirealism,” in Richard Gale,
ed., Guide to Metaphysics (Blackwell,
2002).

[36] See Gustav Bergmann, New Foundations of Ontology (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press,
1992, edited by William Heald), 173.
Heald’s introduction is obligatory reading for all interested in
Bergmann’s philosophy. He has also included an invaluable glossary.

[37] Tractatus, 4.1272.

[38]
Semirealism should not be confused with what Simon Blackburn calls
“quasi-realism” in Essays in
Quasi-Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

[39] See my Skepticism about the External World (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

[40] MS 302,
“Diktat für Schlick” 1931-33. Quoted by David Stern,
“Sociology of Science, Rule Following and Forms of Life,” in M.
Heidelberger and F. Stadler, eds., History
of Philosophy and Science, 347.

[41]
Roderick M. Chisholm, A Realistic Theory
of Categories (Oxford: Cambridge University Press, 1996),  99-105. Chisholm speculated that the
mind might be “microscopic part” of the brain.

[42] The
distinction between a weak and a strong sense of “know” was made by
Norman Malcolm in “Knowledge and Belief,” included in Knowledge and Certainty (Englewood
Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963),
58-7

[43] Compare
G. E. Moore’s explanation, to be discussed in chapter 3, of what he meant
by calling the fundamental propositions of ethics self-evident, in Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1903), Preface.

[44] J. L.
Austin, Sense and Sensibilia (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1962), p. 115. Original  italics.

[45]
See, for example, Hegel’s Logic,
trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), Part Five.

[46]
Bertrand Russell, The Philosophy of
Logical Atomism (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 1985),  37.

[47] Gottlob
Frege, “Thought,” in M. Beaney, M., The Frege Reader (Oxford:
Blackwell),  325-326.

[48] Beaney,
36

[49]  F. Strawson, “On Referring”
(Mind, 1950) and Introduction to Logical Theory (London: Methuen, 1952),  175-79. In the former, more influential
work, Strawson did not use the term “presupposition,” and wrote
instead of “some sense of ‘imply’” that is “not
equivalent to ‘entails’ or ‘logically implies.’”

[50]  Introduction
to Logical Theory, 18.

[51] Introduction to Logical Theory, 175.

[52] Bertrand
Russell, The Problems of Philosophy
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953),
71-7. See Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell,   Principia Mathematica to *56 (Cambridge: University Press,
1962), 1.1.

[53] G. E.
Moore, “A Defense of Common Sense,” in Philosophical Papers (London: Allem & Unwin, 1959),  32-60. I discuss the argument in Skepticism about the External World..

[54] Being and Nothingness, 22. Italics in
original.

[55] For a
succinct statement of Kant’s view, see
Critique of Pure Reason A 598/B 626.

[56] Ibid, A
225/B 272 .

[57] Ibid., A
493/B 521.

[58] I develop
this view in detail in Skepticism about
the External World.

[59]
Bertrand Russell, Introduction to
Mathematical Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971),  164.

[60] Immanuel
Kant, Logic, trans. Robert S. Hartman
and Wolfgang Schwartz (New York: Dover, 1974), 144.

[61] G. E.
Moore, Principia Ethica, Revised
Edition (Cambridge: University Press, 1993), 36.

[62] Principia Ethica, 193.

[63] Principia Ethica, 133. The propriety of Moore’s use of
beauty as an example here is astutely discussed byRobert Audi in
“Intrinsic Valuee and Reasons for Action,” in Terry Horgan and Mark
Timmons, Metaethics after Moore
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), pp. 80-81.

[64] Brian
Hutchinson, G.E. Moore’s Ethical
Theory: Resistance and Reconciliation (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2001).

[65] Principia Ethica,, 198.

[66]  Principia Ethica, 76-77.

[67] Thomas
Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Part Two,
Question 94, Article

[68] Principia Ethica, 197.

[69] Critique of Pure Reason, B 18.

[70] Principia Ethica, 135-36, 143-47, 236-38, 245-47.

[71] Principia Ethica, 133. The propriety of Moore’s use of
beauty as an example here is astutely discussed by Robert Audi in
“Intrinsic Value and Reasons for Action,” in Metaethics after Moore.

[72] Principia Ethica,
34.

[73] G. E.
Moore, Ethics (Oxford: Oxford
University Pres, 1912),  73.

[74]  Principia
Ethica,  4.

[75]
Bertrand Russell, “A Free Man’s Worship,” in Mysticism and Logic (London: Allen &
Unwin, 1917),  50.

[76]
Bertrand Russell, “Scientific Method in Philosophy,” in Mysticism and Logic, 109.

[77]
Hegel's Lectures on the History of
Philosophy, London
New York: Routledge and Kegan
Paul ; Humanities Press, 1974),
257.

[78] Critique of Pure Reason, A 797/825 – A 801/B 829.

[79] Critique of Pure Reason, A 841/42 – B 869-70.

[80] Tractatus, 6.13,
6.421.

[81] Critique of Pure Reason, A 802/B 830.

[82] Skepticism in Ethics (Bloomington and
London: Indiana University Press, 1989).

[83] David
M. Armstrong, Universals and Scientific
Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).

[84] Evan
Fales, Causality and Universals
(London: Routledge, 1990).

[85] G. E.
Moore, “Identity,” Proceedings
of the Aristotelian Society, n.s., v. I, 1900-1901.

[86] Causality and Universals, 221-224

[87] Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore,
ed. G.H. von Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974)   9.

[88] Tom
Reagan, Bloomsbury’s  Prophet (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1986),  144.

[89] Ludwig
Wittgenstein, Notebooks, 1914-1916,
trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New Yor: Harper & Row, 1961), 74.

[90] Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore, 7.

[91]
Paul Engelmann, Letters from Ludwig
Wittgenstein,  143-144. Cf.
David G. Stern, Wittgenstein on Mind and
Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995),  8, 70-74.

[92]
Tractatus, 4.0312.

[93] In Principia Mathematica an individual is
defined as anything that is neither a proposition nor a function  (9.13).

[94]
Warren Goldfarb, “Metaphysics and Nonsense,” Journal of Philosophical Research XXII (1997), 66.

[95] Principia Ethica,, 198.

[96]
Cf. Skepticism in Ethics.

[97] Notebooks, 83e. Wittgenstein adds:
“the work of art is the object seen sub
specie aeternitatis.”

[98] Notebooks, 74.

[99]
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value,
edited by G. H. von Wright and translated by Peter Winch (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1980), 3e.

[100]
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical
Occasions 1912-1951 (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1993),  40, 44.

[101] David
Armstrong, Universals and Scientific
Realism, 25.

[102] Franz
Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical
Standpoint (London: Routledge, 1973), trans. by A.C. Rancurello, D.B.
Terrell, and L. McAlister. 2nd ed., intr. by Peter Simons, 1995.

[103]
“Thought,” in Beaney, The
Frege Reader.

[104] Jerry Fodor, The
Language of Thought (Cambridge: Harvard, 1975).

[105] Gustav
Bergmann, Meaning and Existence
(Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1959). See also New Foundations of
Ontology.

[106] Works, Novum Organum, Aphorisms
Concerning the Interpretation of Nature and the Kingdom of Man, LIX.

[107] Leviathan, Part I, Chapter IV.

[108] John
Locke, An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding Vol. 1 (London: Dent, 1960), 126.  But in his Treatise of Human Nature, Hume disagreed: “no truth appears
to me more evident, than that beasts are endowd with thought and reason as well
as men.”

[109] Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller
(London: George Allen, 1969),  31.

[110] Thinking
and Experience,  36-38.

[111] Noam Chomsky, Rules and Representations, 248.  Chomsky appeals to innate structures and
speaks of a possible “universal grammar of faces.”

[112]
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical
Investigations, trans. G.E..M. Anscombe, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), ## 329-330.

[113] J. R. Bambrough, “Universals and Family
Resemblances,” Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society, LXI (1960-61): 207-223.

[114]
Michael Dummett, Truth and Other
Enigmas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978),  438.

[115]
Ibid.  458.

[116] Donald Davidson, “Rational Animals,”
in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective
(Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2001),  100.

[117]  W.V.
Quine, From Stimulus to Science
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995),  88-89.

[118]  From Stimulus to Science,  93.

[119]
Nelson Goodman and Catherine Z. Elgin, Reconceptions in Philosophy (Indianapolis and London: Hackett,
1988),  154.  But elsewhere, including this same work
(see  vii, 9, 11, 155, and section
VIII, 3), Goodman points out that what he calls “symbol systems”
need not be linguistic, that they could be, e.g., notational or pictorial.

[120] Michael Dummett, The Logical Basis of Metaphysics (London: Duckworth, 1991),
214-215.

[121] The
Language of Thought (Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1975).

[122] Tim van Gelder, “What Might Cognition Be,
If Not Computation?” The Journal of
Philosophy, Volume XII, number 7 (July 1995),  345.

[123] van
Gelder,  373.

[124]  Wilhelm von Humboldt, On Language, (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988),  54-55.

[125]
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General
Linguistics (Chicago and LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1986),  111 [155].

[126]
William James, The Principles of
Psychology (New York: Henry Holt, 1890), 46.

[127] Philosophical
Investigations, #34.

[128] Helen Keller, My
Story, ed. John Albert Macy, 234.
Mark Twain is reported to have said that the two most interesting
characters of the nineteenth century were Napoleon and Helen Keller (ibid.,
225).

[129]  Kalvis M. Jansons, “A personal view
of dyslexis and of thought without language,” in L. in Thought without Language, ed. L.
Weiskrantz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 502-03.

[130] J.
B. Watson and W. McDougal, The Battle of Behavior
(New York: Norton, 1929),  33.

[131]  Leonard Bloomfield, Language (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1933),  28.

[132] B.F.
Skinner, Verbal behavior (New York:
Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1957),
449.

[133]
Edward Sapir, Language (New York:
Harcourt, Brace&World, 1921), 19.

[134] Edward
Sapir, Language, Culture and Personality
(ed. David G. Mandelbaum, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press,
1963),  16. (Reprinted from
“The Status of Linguistics as a Science,” Language 5, 209.)  See
also A. H. Bloom, The Linguistic Shaping
of Thought: A Study in the Impact of language on Thinking in China and the West;
Laurence Erbaum, 1981; Richard B. Brandt,

[135] New York Times, October 11, 2010.

[136]
Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought and Reality: Selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf,
ed. John B. Carroll, (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1956), 226. Zellig Harris
described Whorf's view as “occupational imperialism for
linguistics,” in "Distributed Structure,  in The
Structure of Language: Readings in the Philosophy of Language, eds., Jerry
A. Fodor and Jerrold.J. Katz (1965), 38, n. 1.

[137]  Language, Thought and Reality, 240, reprinted from Language 5 (1929): 207-214)

[138] But
Whorf did add: “Our Indian languages show that with a suitable grammar we
may have intelligent sentences that cannot be broken into subjects and
predicates...When we come to Nootka, the sentence without subject or predicate
is the only type...Nootka has no parts of speech; the simplest utterance is a
sentence, treating of some event or event-complex” (Language, Thought and Reality, 242).

[139] Hilary Putnam, Realism
and Reason. Philosophical Papers. Volume 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1983), xvi.

[140] For example, Bärbel Inhelder and Jean Piaget, The Growth of Logical Thinking (New
York: Basic Books, 1958), trans. Anne Parsons and Stanley Milgram.

[141]
Wilhelm von Humboldt, On Language,
215.

[142]  See, for example, his Rules and Representations, chapters 3
and 5, and “Language and Nature.”

[143]  In Rules and Representations, Chomsky wrote: “What many
linguists call ‘universal grammar’ may be regarded as a theory of
innate mechanisms, an underlying biological matrix that provides a framework
within which the growth of language proceeds.” (187). For more recent
examples, see his “Language and Nature,” Mind, 104, 1-60; Powers and
Prospects (London: Pluto, 1996); “Comments: Galen Strawson, Mental
Reality”,  Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,
vol. LVIII, no. 2 (June 1998).
Chomsky often uses the phrase "mind/brain," but when
questioned about what the slash in it means, he admits that this is a problem
and disavows any inclination to accept reductionism or eliminative
materialism.  See Noam Chomsky, Language and Thought (Wakefield, Rhode
Island & London: Moyer Bell, 1993), 79-87; the question was asked by James
H. Schwartz, ibid.,71-77.

[144] Rules and Representations, 244.

[145]  Rules and Representation, 165.

[146] Nelson
Goodman, Problems and Projects (New
York: Bobbs-Merrill: 1972), 74.

[147]  Cf. Rules and Representations, 251.

[148]   Language and Problems of Knowledge, 171.

[149]   Ibid., 191.

[150]
Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct (Harvard University Press, 2007), 57-58.

[151]
Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct,
124.  Karen Wynn's piece appeared in
Nature 358 (1992), 749-50.

[152] Thought Without Language, 194.
Baillargéon’s works are cited at the end of Leslie’s.

[153]
Gabriel Horn, “Thought without Language in Birds,” in L.
Weiskrantz, Thought without Language (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1988),  299.

[154] The Language Instinct,  77.

[155] Albert
Casullo, A Priori Justification (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2004). But
see also Laurence BonJour, In Defense of Pure Reason. (London: Cambridge
University Press, 1998).

[156]
See “Concept and Object,” “Function and Object,”
“Thought,” and “Negative Thoughts,” in Beaney, The Frege Reader.

[157]
See New Foundations of Ontology.  Also “An Ontological
Inventory,” Journal of the British
Society of Phenomenology and Existentialism, 1974, and Logic and Reality (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1960).

[158] Hilary
Putnam, “The Dewey Lectures,” Journal
of Philosophy, 1994,  513.

[159] Bertrand
Russell, Theory of Knowledge: The 1913
Manuscript (London: Allen&Unwin, 1984),  99.

[160] The Philosophy of Logical Atomism,  71

[161]
“In logic nothing is accidental: if a thing can occur in a state of affairs, the
possibility of the state of affairs must be written into the thing
itself….” (2.012). “....We
have said that some things are arbitrary in the symbols that we use and that
some things are not. In logic it is only the latter that express: but that
means that logic is not a field in which we express what we wish with the help
of signs, but rather one in which the nature of the absolutely necessary signs
speaks for itself [zeichen sich aus]…”
(6.124).

[162]  “The propositions of
logic…presuppose that names have meaning and elementary propositions
sense; and that is their connexion with the world….” (“6.124 ).
“A name means an object. The object is its meaning….” (“3.203).

[163]
“A proposition shows [zeigt sich]
its sense. A proposition shows [zeigt]
how things stand if it is true. And it says that they do so stand…”
(4.022).

[164] “The existence and non-existence
of states of affairs is reality” (2.06). “The simplest kind of
proposition, an elementary proposition, asserts the existence of a state of
affairs” (4.21).

[165]
“4.25 If an elementary proposition is true, the state of affairs exists:
if an elementary proposition is false, the state of affairs does not
exist.”

[166] Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore, 71.

[167] Cora
Diamond, The Realistic Spirit:
Wittgenstein, Philosophy and the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).

[168]  Warren Goldfarb, “Metaphysics and
Nonsense,” Journal of Philosophical
Research XXII (1997).

[169]  David Pears, The False Prison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).

[170]  M.S. Hacker, Insight and Illusion (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972),  20-4.

[171]
The Realistic Spirit, e.g.,  181, 194ff..

[172]
Warren Goldfarb, “Metaphysics and Nonsense,” Journal of Philosophical Research XXII (1997),  66. See also, in the same issue, Cora
Diamond, “Realism and Resolution: Reply to Warren Goldfarb and Sabina
Lovibond,”  75-86.

[173] Philosophical Investigations, #304.

[174] Critique of Pure Reason, A 369-70.

[175]
Cf.  T. Geach, “Saying and
Showing in Frege and Wittgenstein,” in Essays on Wittgenstein in Honor of G.H. von Wright, ed. Jakko
Hintikka, Acta Philosophica Fennica
28 (Amsterdam: North Holland, 1976).

[176] Gottlob
Frege, The Basic Laws of Arithmetic (University
of California Press, 1987), ii, § 147.

[177] Critique of Pure Reason, B ix.

[178] Price,
H. H., 1950. Perception, London, Methuen, 2nd edition.

[179] “[T]he words 'complex', 'fact',
'function', 'number' ... all signify formal concepts, and are represented in
conceptual notation by variables, not by functions or classes (as Frege and
Russell believed)”

(Tractatus 4.1272).

[180] Aristotle,
Metaphysics, 1005 b 7-35.

[181] Principia Mathematica, Introduction.

[182] Beaney, The Frege Reader, 337.

[183]  Ibid., 351.

[184]  Ibid.,  34

[185]  Peter Geach and Max Black, Translations from the Philosophical Works of
Gottlob Frege (Oxford: Blackwell, 1970)  83.

[186]
“Function and Object” and “Concept and Object,” both in
Beaney.

[187]  Beaney,  358.

[188]   Ibid.,  358.

[189]   Ibid.,  363.

[190] The Philosophy of Logical Atomism, 101
-103.  Also in R. C. Marsh, ed., Logic and Knowledge (London: Allen &
Unwin, 1956),  235-36.

[191]  Marsh, 289.

[192]  Marsh, 215-16.

[193]
Marsh,  288. Italics in original.

[194] Gustav
Bergmann, “Generality and Existence,” in Logic and Reality (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964),
69. Originally published in Theoria,
28 (1962), 1-26.

[195]  Marsh, 214.

[196]  Gustav Bergmann, Logic and Reality (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964),
70.

[197]  But see E. Peterson, “Real Logic
in Philosophy,” The Monist 60,
2, 1986, and “Logic Knowledge,” The
Monist 72, 1, 1989.

[198] Jean-Paul
Sartre, Being and Nothingness,  21-45.

[199] Marsh,
235-36.

[200] Michael
Dummett, “The Justification of Deduction,” in Truth and Other Enigmas,
311.

[201]
Ibid.,  44

[202] Gustav
Bergmann, “Generality and Existence,” in Logic and Reality (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964),
69. Originally published in Theoria,
28 (1962), 1-26.

[203] Philosophical Review, 69 (1960), 18-40,
also included in Logic and Reality.

[204] Logic and Reality,  47.

[205]  Logic
and Reality,  49-51.

[206]  Logic
and Reality,  50.

[207] Bergmann
used these terms in “The Glory and the Misery of Ludwig
Wittgenstein,” Rivista di Filosofia,
52, 1961, 587-406, Italian translation, included in Logic and Reality.

[208] Alfred
North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell,   Principia Mathematica to *56 (Cambridge: University Press,
1962), xvii.

[209] Russell: the Journal of the Bertrand Russell
Archives 10, 2,  107-09.

[210] Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore, 71.  In Principia
Mathematica (Part I, Summary), an elementary proposition is defined as one
that “contains no reference, explicit or implicit, to any totality.”

[211] The
classic discussion of the two interpretations of quantification is Ruth Barkan
Marcus’s, in “Interpreting Quantification,” Inquiry 5 (1962): 252-59.

[212] G.E.M. Anscombe (Introduction
to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (London: Hutchinson’ University
Library, 1959), 145) and Robert Fogelin (Wittgenstein (London: Routledge, 1987, second edition), 65) think
that the generality-sign in “(x) Fx” is the variable x.

[213]  Letters
to Russell, Keynes and Moore,
73.

[214] Ludwig
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975, ed. Rush Rhees, tr. Raymond
Hargreaves and Roger White),  115.
For the origin of the text, see the Editor’s Note.

[215]
Ibid.,  136.

[216] Ludwig
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974, 268), composed
after 1929 but published posthumously (for the origin of this text, see the
editor’s Note in Editing).

[217] Philosophical Grammar, 259.

[218] Philosophical Grammar,  265.

[219] Ludwig
Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1994),  300.

[220] Logic and Reality, 71. Philosophical Grammar was published 22
years after “Generality and Existence.”

[221]  Logic and Reality,  68, 70.

[222] New
Foundations, 61.

[223] New
Foundations,  43.

[224]  New Foundations,  64.

[225]  New Foundations,  167-68.

[226]  New Foundations,  208.

[227]  New Foundations,  204.

[228]  New Foundations,  234.

[229]  New Foundations,  235.

[230]  New Foundations,  202.

[231]  New Foundations,  65.

[232]  New Foundations,  23.

[233]  New Foundations, 216-17.

[234]  New Foundations, 235.

[235] Ibid.

[236]  New Foundations,  236.

[237] See
Bergmann’s “Frege’s Hidden Nominalism,“ Philosophical Review, 67 (1958).
Included in “Meaning and Existence,” (Madison, University of
Wisconsin Press, 1959).

[238]  New Foundations,  225.

[239]  New Foundations,  65.

[240]  New Foundations,  59.

[241]  New Foundations, e.g.,  59, 21

[242]
Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, Logic
or the Art of Thinking, translated and edited by Jill Vance Buroker
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 116.

[243] Logic or the Art of Thinking, 118.

[244]
These and other generic statements are discussed in M. Krifka, F.J. Pelletier,
G. Carlson, A. ter Meulen, G. Chierchia & G. Link, “Genericity: An
Introduction,” in Gregory N. Carlson and Francis Jeffry Pelletier, eds., The Generic Book (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1995), 1-124.

[245] P. F.
Strawson, Introduction to Logical Theory
(London: Methuen, 1952), 195.

[246] Nichomachean Ethics, Book I, 3. W.D.
Ross translation.

[247] Steven Pinker, Language
Learnability and Language Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1984), 97.

[248] Frederick
Schauer, Profiles, Probabilities and
Stereotypes (Boston: Belknap/Harvard, 2003), 9.

[249] Logic or the Art of Thinking, 263.

[250] Logic or the Art of Thinking, 114-15.

[251] Husserl,
Logical Investigations, I,  25

[252] Aristotle, De
Interpretatione 7, in J. L. Ackrill, Aristotle’s
Categories and De Interpretatione (Oxford, Oxford University Press,
1963),  129.

[253] Critique of Pure Reason, B 3-4.

[254] John
Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry
(New York: Henry Holt, 1938),  256.

[255]
Willard Van Norman Quine, Word and Object
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960),  134.

[256] See,
for example, J. Higginbotham and R. May, “Questions, Quantifiers, and
Crossing,” Linguistic Review,
1, 41-79; J. Barwise and R. Cooper, “Generalized Quantifiers and Natural
Language,” Linguistics and
Philosophy, 4, 159-219; Stephen L. Read, “Pluralitive Logic,”
in Robert Audi, ed., The Cambridge
Dictionary of Philosophy.

[257]
Nicholas Asher and Jacques Morreau, “What Some Generic Sentences
Mean,” in The Generic Book.

[258]  Regarding “The French are good
soldiers,” Arnauld wrote: “[it] means that the French who are
soldiers are usually good soldiers” (Logic
or the Art of Thinking, 116).

[259] M. Krifka,
F.J. Pelletier, G. Carlson, A. ter Meulen, G. Chierchia & G. Link,
“Genericity: An Introduction,” in The Generic Book, 25.

[260]
Gregory N. Carlson, Reference to Kinds in
English (New York & London: Garland, 1980), 38.

[261] Reference to Kinds in English, 30, 36.

[262] C.S. Peirce, “Vague,” in Dictionary
of Philosophy and Psychology,
ed. J.M. Baldwin (New York: MacMillan, 1902), 748.

[263] Gregory N.
Carlson, “Truth Conditions of Generic Sentences: Two Contrasting
Views,” in The Generic Book.

[264]  See William James, The Principles of Psychology (Cambridge: Mass.: Harvard

University
Press, 1983), especially Chapter IX.

[265]  Thinking
and Experience, 134.

[266]  Thinking
and Experience, 124, upper case in original.

[267]  Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 21-45

[268] New Foundations of Ontology,  223.

[269] Critique of Pure Reason, A137/B176 -
A138/B177.

[270]  Critique
of Pure Reason, A144/B183.

[271]  Philosophical
Investigations, ## 243-27

[272]  Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and the Brown Books (Oxford:
Oxford

University Press, 1958),  24-5.

[273] The Blue and the Brown Book, 24.

[274]
Richard Fumerton, Realism and the
Correspondence Theory of Truth (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002). Fumerton
focuses squarely on the correspondence theory of truth, calling it
“alethic realism,” and is skeptical about the possibility of
achieving an independent and interesting conception of metaphysical realism.
The term “alethic realism” is also used by William Alston in A Realist Conception of Truth (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996). Paul Horwich has argued for a
“minimalist” theory of truth, but it is unclear that his view of
reality is minimalist. See his Truth
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), second edition.

[275] Israel
Scheffler, “The Wonderful Worlds of Goodman,” Synthese (v. 45, 1980),
204.

[276]
Reinhardt Grossmann, Phenomenology and
Existentialism (London: Routledge, 1984), 227.

[277] Reinhardt
Grossmann, The Existence of the World
(London: Routledge, 1992), 10.

[278] Phenomenology and Existentialism,  114.

[279] David Armstrong, A
World of States of Affairs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (March 13, 1997),  136.

[280]
Michael Devitt, Realism and Truth,
Second Edition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 28.

[281] Realism and Truth, 32.

[282] Hilary
Putnam, Words and Life (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1994), 301.

[283] Truth, 104-05.

[284]
William  Alson, A Realist Conception of Truth (Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press, 1996), 41.

[285] William F.
Vallicella, A Paradigm Theory of
Existence: Onto-Theology Vindicated (Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer
Academic Publishers, 2002), 13, 166-7, 192-3.

[286] Jan
Westerhoff, Ontological Categories: Their
Nature and Significance (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 2005),  74.

[287] Ibid.,
§28.

[288]
Ibid.,  71.

[289] In Tractatus Wittgenstein wrote: “To
perceive a complex means to perceive that its constituents are related to one
another in such and such a way” (5.5423). Gustav Bergmann agreed,
especially in New Foundations of Ontology,
199.

[290]   F. Strawson, “Truth,” Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 24
(1950),  136-137. See also his
“Reply to John R. Searle” in Lewis Edwin Hahn, The Philosophy of  F.
Strawson (Chicago and LaSalle: Open Court, 1998),  402-04.

[291]  Ibid., p 139.

[292]  Donald Davidson, “The Structure
and Content of Truth,” Journal of
Philosophy LXXXVII, 6 (June 1990),
304.

[293] W.V.O.
Quine, The Pursuit of Truth
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992),  77-88.

[294]Alan R.
White, Truth (New York: Anchor,
1970),  80-81.

[295]
Bertrand Russell, My Philosophical
Development (London: Allen and Unwin, 1959), 172-73.  dix A.

[296] W.
V. Quine, "Whitehead and Modern Philosophy," originally published in
1941 and reprinted in Selected Logic
Papers, enlarged edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996),  16.

[297]
Chisholm suggested that the objection was a mere stricture in his reply to my
“States of Affairs,” in Radu J. Bogdan, ed., Roderick M. Chisholm (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1986).

[298]
“Thought,” in The Frege
Reader,  34

[299] “On
Sinn and Bedeutung,” in The
Frege Reader, 158.

[300] Ibid.,
156.

[301] Cf.
Hilary Putnam, “The Face of Cognition,” Journal of Philosophy 91, no. 9, 1994 Dewey Lectures, Lecture 3,
and most of his other writings since then; Nelson Goodman, Problems and Projects (New York: Bobbs-Merrill : 1972); Michael
Dummett, Truth and Other Enigmas
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978).

[302]
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical
Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956),  68.

[303] Ways of Worldmaking,  x.

[304] W. V.
Quine, The Ways of Paradox (New York:
Random House, 1966),  105.

[305] Anthropocentrism may be considered discrimination in
favor of humans, what defenders of animal rights call speciesism. Its narrowest
form, egoism, may be considered discrimination in favor of just one human
being, oneself, what Kant called “the dear self,” and is commonly regarded
as a paradigm of immorality. Egoism has conceptual descendants, ordered
according to their distance from it. Nepotism – discrimination in favor
of one’s relatives – seems to come first. Next, perhaps, is
discrimination in favor of one’s friends, hence Polemarchus’s
definition of “justice” in Plato’s Republic. Then might come chauvinism, discrimination in favor of
one’s country. Farther, we would find racism: discrimination in favor of
one’s race. Sexism, discrimination in favor of one’s gender, also
belongs among the conceptual descendants of egoism. So does classism
(Thrasymachus’s “advantage of the stronger,” Marx’s
“dictatorship of the proletariat”),  though, unlike nepotism, chauvinism, and
sexism, it has been endorsed by important theories, namely, Platonism and
Marxism, which rest on independent grounds.

[306] John
Searle, Intentionality (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press,
1991,  218. But Searle’s
conclusions are different from mine.

[307] Bertrand
Russell used the suggestive phrase “egocentric particulars,”
instead of “indexicals.”
He wrote: “One of the aims of both science and common sense is to
replace the shifting subjectivity of egocentric particulars by neutral public terms”
(Human Knowledge (New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1962, 85).

[308] For a
detailed argument, see Quentin Smith, Language
and Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

[309] David
Kaplan has distinguished between “pure indexicals,” such as
“I,” which involve no genuine demonstration and do not admit
attachment of a noun, and demonstratives such as “this,” which do,
e.g., in “this man.” See his “Demonstratives,” in J.
Almog et al, eds, Themes from Kaplan,
Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1977), 565-614.

[310] David
Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951), .

[311] An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,
Book IV, chapter ix, section 3.

[312]
Ibid,  25

[313] Critique of Pure Reason, B 131 –
13

[314] Ibid,
A 350.

[315] Ibid,
B 404.

[316] Ibid,
B 136-137.

[317] Ibid, A
107.

[318] B 406.

[319] Ibid,
Part I, Book I, Chapter 2.

[320] Fichte,
The Science of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008, edited and translated by Peter Heath and John
Lachs),  98.

[321] Beyond Good and Evil, # 17

[322] Phenomenology of Spirit,  47.

[323] Hegel’s Logic, § 47.

[324] Hegel’s Logic, § 24.

[325] Hegel’s Logic, § 23.

[326]
“The Status of Sense-Data,” in Philosophical
Studies, 174. See also “A Defence of Common Sense” in J. H.
Muirhead (ed.) Contemporary
British Philosophy, 2nd series (Allen and Unwin, London:
1925),  211-212, 223.

[327] G. E.
Moore, Lectures on Philosophy
(London: Routledge, 1966),  163.

[328] Following
certain remarks by Wittgenstein in The
Blue and the Brown Book (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958, 66-67), G.
E. M. Anscombe has argued that “I” is not a referring expression.
In using it, she says, “getting hold of the wrong object is excluded, and
that makes us think that getting hold of the right object is guaranteed. But
the reason is that there is no getting hold of an object at all”
(“The First Person,” in Samuel Guttenplan, ed., Mind and Language, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1975, 45-65). Her point is not Hume’s or
Wittgenstein’s. It has nothing to do with what one could or could not
“find” in one’s mind.

[329]
“The Refutation of Idealism,” 25.

[330] Ibid.,
20.

[331]
Jean-Paul Sartre, “Interview,” The
Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp (LaSalle,
Il.: Open Court, 1981),  11.

[332] Poetry, Language, and Thought, 121.

[333] Hegel’s Logic, § 38.

[334] Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,
p. 176.

[335]  Cf. Donald Davidson, “The Very
Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” Proceedings
and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 47 (1974), 5-20.

[336] Phenomenology of Spirit, # 177.

[337]Terry
Pinkard, “Hegel’s Phenomenology
and Logic: an overview,” in
Karl Ameriks, ed., The Cambridge Companion
to German Idealism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000),
164. See also Pinkard’s Hegel’s
Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996).

[338] Phenomenology of Spirit, analysis of #
177.

[339] Hegel’s Logic, § 86.

[340] Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1977), 43.

[341]  G. E. Moore, “The Refutation of
Idealism,” included in Philosophical
Studies (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1922)

[342]  Philosophical
Studies, 1.

[343]  Meditations,
III.

[344] Essay Concerning the Human Understanding,
I, 1, 8.

[345] Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part
I, Sect. I.

[346] Critique of Pure Reason, B 376-377.

[347] Hegel’s Logic, § 3.

[348] Hegel’s Logic, § 1.

[349]  Hegel’s Logic, § 23.

[350]  Science
of Logic, p. 597.

[351] Hegel’s Logic, § 163.

[352] Hegel’s Logic, § 41.

[353] Hegel’s Logic, § 163.

[354] Hegel’s Logic, § 20.

[355] D. C.
Williams., “The Elements of Being,” Review of Metaphysics 7: 3-18, 171-192. I have discussed the view in detail in Resemblance and Identity: An Examination of
the Problem of Universals (Bloomington and London: Indiana University
Press, 1996).

[356] N. Goodman and W. V. Quine, "Steps Toward a Constructive Nominalism," Journal of
Symbolic Logic, 12 (1947).

[357] Hegel’s Logic, § 24.

[358] Hegel’s Logic, § 163.

[359] Hegel’s Logic, § 163,  227.

[360] Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowledge, Part I, #
41.

[361]
“Ordinary Language.”

[362]
Gilbert Ryle; J. N. Findlay, “Symposium:
Use, Usage and Meaning,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, Supplementary Volumes, Vol. 35. (1961), 233.

[363]  P. F. Strawson, Scepticism and Naturalism (New York: Columbia University Press,
1985), 45.

[364] Analysis and Metaphysics, 64.

[365]  Scepticism
and Naturalism, 38.

[366] Analysis and Metaphysics, 86.

[367] P. F.
Strawson, Analysis and Metaphysics
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992),
86.

[368]  P. F. Strawson, “Imagination and
Perception,” in Freedom and
Resentment and Other

Essays (London: Methuen, 1974), 57.

[369]
The view that making analogies is “the driving force behind all
thought” was common in ancient and medieval philosophy.  For a recent defense of it by cognitive
scientists, see Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander, Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking
(Basic Books, 2013).

[370]  I develop this point in detail in Resemblance and Identity.

[371]
Fichte, The Vocation of Man, trans.
William Smith (Chicago: Open Court, 1910),
88-90