Precis of "The Metaphysics of Meaning"

Abstract

Naturalism says that everything which exists is a spatio-temporal object belonging to the vast causal realm we call nature. For the naturalist, faith in the progress of science is faith that natural science can, in principle, explain everything. Naturalism dominates philosophy today in much the way linguistic philosophy dominated it earlier in the century. Titles containing naturalized, naturalizing, and naturalistic appear today with much the same frequency that titles containing language, grammar, and meaning appeared during the heyday of linguistic philosophy. Naturalism's hegemony rests on arguments that are widely seen as compelling. The first aim of The Metaphysics of Meaning (henceforth MM) is to show that those arguments in fact have no force. The book's second aim is to formulate a direct argument against naturalism. This double challenge is on behalf of realism (Platonism), the position that there are non-natural, abstract objects (i.e., objects having no spatio-temporal location or causal relations). All of the natural realm is real, but the natural realm is not all of reality. One of the philosophical arguments on which the hegemony of naturalism rests is Wittgenstein's; the other is Quine's. The arguments are different. reflecting differences in what each philosopher took bad-i.e., non-naturalist-philosophy to be and also differences in what each took good-i.e., naturalist-philosophy to be. Wittgenstein's position is a critical form of naturalism. It sees bad philosophy-which includes the mainstream of traditional philosophy-as nonsense arising from misuses of language which put us in the grip of a metaphysical picture of reality. Good philosophy, on his position, is a certain practice of assembling reminders which put the linguistically errant philosopher back on the right track. In contrast, Quine's position is a scientistic form of naturalism. Traditional philosophy is a mixture of good and bad explanation. The bad is pseudo-science or anachronistic science