Engagement and Metaphysical Dissatisfaction

Abstract

As Barry Stroud sees it, the journey from engagement to metaphysical dissatisfaction has four stages.1 First, we embark on the project of acquiring some especially metaphysical insight into how the world is with respect to some region of our thought about it – say evaluative, or modal or causal thought. The insight that we seek is especially metaphysical when we aspire to go beyond the insight that we gain about the world when we make warranted and true judgements that are the characteristic of that specific way of thought itself. Thus, no especially metaphysical insight is delivered by realizing that it is better to let the guilty go free than to punish the innocent, or that there could not be a true contradiction or that consumption of alcohol alters the mood. What metaphysicians are after, rather, are insights along the lines that there is (or there is not) something evaluative, or something modal or some causal connexion in the world itself and independently of us. Secondly, a special threat to the feasibility of this distinctively metaphysical project arises wherever a specific region of our thought has the special combination of features of irreducibility (of a certain kind) and indispensability (of a certain kind). Thirdly, that threat emerges in the first instance from the attempt to sustain the metaphysical position that many would characterize as anti-realistic (although Stroud does not use that term). The problem is that a certain aporia is implicit in such an attempt to combine the thought that the world is a certain way – with respect to value, modality or causation – (as we must, in line with indispensability) with the further thought that it is not ‘really’ that way. To be clear, the suggestion is not that the conjunction of these thoughts is inconsistent. Nor is it the case that any consideration at our disposal makes it the case, and far less does any show it to be the case, that the relevant metaphysical thesis is false. The predicament is of the theorist rather than of the theory. It has the character of a Moorean quasi-inconsistency, as were we to attempt to claim, ‘It is not the case that P, but I believe that P’ (137), or as intimated by Stroud’s epigrammatic quotation of Wittgenstein, ‘If there were a verb meaning, “to believe falsely”, it would not have a meaningful first person present indicative’. The anti-realist position about value, causation or modality is not properly assertible by anyone who is also engaged in the intellectual practice of thinking about things in evaluative or causal or modal terms. Fourthly, the predicament of the would-be anti-realist does not confer victory, by default or otherwise, on her realist opponent. As with the anti-realist position, and even after the limitations of the anti-realist position have been demonstrated, no available consideration makes it the case, and far less does any show it to be the case, that the contrasting realist thesis is true. As with the anti-realist position, we have a metaphysical claim that has a truth-condition, and one that for all we know is satisfied, but which is never legitimately available to us to assert. And so, at the end of our journey, we find that no thesis of the especially metaphysical kind that we sought to establish at the outset is available to us (in a significant range of cases) to assert legitimately.