Toward an Ordinal Naturalism

Abstract

Toward an Ordinal Naturalism* Lawrence Cahoone It has been more than four decades since the 1970s, when Ernan McMullin, Marjorie Grene, and John Compton all gave presidential addresses to the Metaphysical Society of America on nature and the relation of natural science to metaphysics.1 A reprise may be in order. What follows is a sketch of a “nonreductive” naturalism, cobbled out of fragments of the American philosophical tradition, that makes full use of the natural sciences. John Herman Randall distinguished three conceptions of metaphysics: the search for the principles of being with respect to which all things are One; the search for the real in opposition to “appearances”; and the search for the generic traits of and relations among all subject matters.2 For the last, metaphysics differs from other inquiries only in its generality. I shall follow that approach. To argue for naturalism or any metaphysical view we need to be able to talk about things in the broadest sense in a language that does not presume the view we defend. One plausible approach is to use a pluralistic language deliberately indeterminate with respect to most, although certainly not all, metaphysical issues. I suggest the most pluralistic language available is a little known product of the American philosophical tradition, objective relativism. When combined with fallibilism, objective relativism allows us to argue that a certain kind of naturalism is best able to account for whatever has been discriminated by it. But the naturalism in question must accept emergence as a [End Page 115] phenomenon in nature. Such a naturalism, based in objective relativism and emergence, can robustly incorporate plausible understandings of the physical, material, biological, mental, and cultural systems and processes of reality, and hence accept evidence from sources as different as natural science, logic, phenomenology, pragmatism, and cultural studies, without claiming completeness or certitude. What follows has two parts. The first presents two hypotheses, objective relativism and fallibilism, to create a least determinate language for discussing things, performing the role of what some might call an ontology albeit without an account of being per se. The second part presents three hypotheses; two describe a metaphysics of emergent naturalism, while the final suggests a more determinate set of concepts for the analysis of nature, a cosmology if you will, that coheres with the former. Together the two parts constitute an ordinal naturalism, a term borrowed from Beth Singer.3 I When remembered at all the term “objective relativism” signifies an approach to values ascribed to Dewey and C. I. Lewis.4 But its original form was much broader. Objective relativism grew out of the explosion of realism in early twentieth-century North Atlantic philosophy, called by Arthur Lovejoy “the Revolt of the Twentieth Century against the Seventeenth.” 5 That explosion arguably invented twentieth-century philosophy, championed as it was by thinkers as different as Franz [End Page 116] Brentano, Henri Bergson, John Dewey, Edmund Husserl, William James, Ernst Mach, G. E. Moore, and Bertrand Russell, as well as the English Realists and American New Realists. They surely differed in what kind of realism they adopted, or what they applied it to: “naïve” or “perceptual realism” (versus representationalism); “metaphysical realism” (versus idealism); “epistemic realism” (versus relativism); and “scholastic” or “logical realism” (versus nominalism). Some of the new realists thought the difference between “real” and “apparent,” “objective” and “subjective,” even “physical” and “mental” could be analyzed as two relational functions of the same objects. Instead of saying that the pencil dipped in water looks bent but is “really” straight, Mach claimed that the same elements “in their functional dependence [on the perceiver] . . . are sensations. In another functional connection they are . . . physical objects.”6 This came to be called “neutral monism,” endorsed by both James and Russell. 7 Objective relativism is a child of neutral monism. Morris Cohen, calling it “neutral pluralism,” explored it avant la lettre during the First World War. 8 Arthur Murphy named it in 1927, while Evander McGilvary, George Herbert Mead, and Mead’s student Charles Morris adopted it.9 It [End Page 117] became part of the mid-century Columbia Naturalism of Randall, Ernest Nagel, Justus Buchler, and Thomas Robischon.10 Morris called objective relativism...