Metaphysical Pluralism Research Articles

Pluralism and Pluralism and Liberal Democracy

Pluralism. By William E. Connolly. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. 208p. 19.95 paper.Pluralism and Liberal Democracy. By Richard E. Flathman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. 232p. $40.00.During the past century, thinkers have explored “pluralism” under at least five different rubrics. Political pluralism emerged in Britain, and then migrated to America, as a reaction to doctrines of plenipotentiary state power. William James counterposed metaphysical pluralism to philosophies that claimed the ability to comprehend all truth in single, unified doctrines. Isaiah Berlin drew a distinction between monism and value pluralism—the thesis that worthy goods and principles are heterogeneous and cannot be combined into a single best way of living, for individuals or communities. James Madison enjoyed a midcentury revival in the theory of interest group pluralism. Most recently, John Rawls has cited the fact of pluralism—the diversity characteristic of modern societies under circumstances of liberty—as a challenge that legitimate liberal societies must address.

Biological Pluralism and Homology

The study of similarity is fundamental to biological inquiry. Many homology concepts have been formulated that function successfully to explain similarity in their native domains, but fail to provide an overarching account applicable to variably interconnected and independent areas of biological research despite the monistic standpoint from which they originate. The use of multiple, explicitly articulated homology concepts, applicable at different levels of the biological hierarchy, allows a more thorough investigation of the nature of biological similarity. Responsible epistemological pluralism as advocated herein is generative of fruitful and innovative biological research, and is appropriate given the metaphysical pluralism that underpins all of biology.

Race as a human kind

In this article I present a positive ontology of ‘race’. Toward this end, I discuss metaphysical pluralism and review the theories of Ian Hacking, John Dupre and Root. Working within Root’s framework, I describe the conditions under which a constructed kind like ‘race’ would be real. I contend these conditions are currently satisfied in the United States. Given the social presence and impact of ‘race’ and the unique way ‘race’ operates at differing sites, I will argue that it is site-specific, it is socially constructed, and it is real.

Lynch's Metaphysical Pluralism

Pluralism, according to Michael P. Lynch, is the thesis that there are or can be more than one true story of the world; there can be incompatible but equally acceptable accounts of some subject matter.' The opposite view, absolutism, states that there can be only one true story about how the world is. In our ordinary lives both theses have intuitive pull. Most of us are ready to say that there is more than one right way to teach a class or more than one good way to raise children. Few would deny that there is no one uniquely best flavor of ice cream or best way to write a poem. When it comes to these issues we are all ready to be pluralists. On the other hand, most of us think that there is only one true scientific picture of the world. There is one true physics, and one correct understanding of the human body towards which medicine approaches, even if asymptotically. Some topics, like morality, seem to fall between the cracks, with our intuitions pulling towards both pluralism and absolutism. When dealing with topics that turn crucially on individual preferences or behaviors, pluralist intuitions follow hard behind. When dealing with descriptive facts or truths, absolutist intuitions rise up. How can there be inconsistent truths about some one topic? If there are different but equally true perspectives on the world then truth is not objective; contrapositively, if truth is objective, then there are not different but equally true perspectives on the world. The purpose of Lynch's Truth in Context is to argue against this conditional. He maintains that metaphysical pluralism-true propositions and facts concerning the nature of reality are relative to conceptual schemes or worldviews-is compatible with realism about truth. There are four kinds of pluralism that Lynch distinguishes (pp. 6-8). One is a vertical pluralism according to which there is more than one type of fact in the world and that different levels of fact-stating discourse are not reducible to a more basic discourse. For example, aesthetic or moral facts may not be reducible to physical facts, and so truths about ethics and truths about chem-

Truth in Context: An Essay on Pluralism and Objectivity

Truth in Context: An Essay on Pluralism and Objectivity

Truth in Context: An Essay on Pluralism and Objectivity

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 1999 Academic debates about pluralism and truth have become increasingly polarized in recent years. One side embraces extreme relativism, deeming any talk of objective truth as philosophically naive. The opposition, frequently arguing that any sort of relativism leads to nihilism, insists on an objective notion of truth according to which there is only one true story of the world. Both sides agree that there is no middle path. In Truth in Context, Michael Lynch argues that there is a middle path, one where metaphysical pluralism is consistent with a robust realism about truth. Drawing on the work of Hilary Putnam, W.V.O. Quine, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, among others, Lynch develops an original version of metaphysical pluralism, which he calls relativistic Kantianism. He argues that one can take facts and propositions as relative without implying that our ordinary concept of truth is a relative, epistemic, or soft concept. The truths may be relative, but our concept of truth need not be.

Particularity and Consciousness: Wittgenstein and Nagel on Privacy, Beetles, and Bats

The present investigations are guided by the perception that personal experiences are particular, subjective and unique occurrences. This phenomenological observation concerning particularity is garnered through introspection and serves as the starting point for a metaphysical position called radical particularity. Radical particularity asserts that the prima facie differentia noted in calling things particular are, in reality, not merely surface differences. Rather, the difference or otherness between entities is a deep aspect of an individual's constitution. In other words, radical particularity asserts a metaphysical pluralism consisting of distinct particulars which are never fully unified in a hyperconnected totality or Absolute (whether divine or not). Because of the unfamiliarity of the concept of particularity, we will use the categories of various philosophers in an attempt to find comparable ideas that might help delimit the meaning of nonmonistic particularity. Thus, the initial phenomenological intuition into the particularity of our experiences will have to past muster before a wide range of perspectives. We will find that the particularity of human persons may be compared to the ideas of privacy and subjectivity when they are seen as non-transferable experiential categories describing human consciousness. The postulation of radical particularity is, admittedly, not standard or normative, although there seems to be a growing appreciation of its relevance. Ludwig Wittgenstein's work on the privacy of sensations and Thomas Nagel's writings on subjectivity are two examples of this increasing appreciation. Nevertheless, in spite of the fact that radical particularity and the problems it occasions are abstruse, they open up new perspectives on what it means to be an individual in relationship with others. The depth of what it means to be a conscious human being is given a unique treatment using the perspective of radical particularity. Our primary conclusions will be: 1) radical particularity is not the same as monadic simplicity, 2) nor is radical particularity fully explainable by causation, 3) certain types of naturalistic methods overlook radical particularity, and 4) radical particularity is comparable to privacy and subjectivity. Additionally, we will find as an important theme running throughout the essay that, if consciousness is seen as private and subjective, then consciousness, like radical particularity, is beyond quantification and symbolization. A Preliminary Definition of Radical Particularity To be a particular thing means not being other things. To be a particular thing means to be a one among many. In the case of our identity as persons, we realize by introspection that we are not all things; rather, we are partial aspects of reality. Not only introspection, but sense experience and direct contact with the world manifests our limited realm of perception. Faced with the otherness of another person, we become inwardly aware that we are approached from the outside. We realize there is another whom we are not. Metaphysically, our life is bounded by being a fragment of finite reality. We realize there is an inside and an outside, subjectivity and objectivity. Further, we find some aspects are closer to our core and some reside on the periphery. In spite of the phenomenological intuition into particularity, the assertion of the unity or simplicity of each human experience is problematical. For example, it may be asked from the perspective of the natural sciences: How is it possible for a collection of organs, cells, molecules and, at base, matter and energy to exist as a particular being, as a unity? Does the complexity of our physical constitution mean that there can be no unity to our particularity and that, far from being particular, we are--just the opposite--complex matrices? If we are not simple, but matrices of events, perhaps our boundaries are not as neatly defined as the theory of radical particularity suggests. …

Pluralism, Logical Empiricism, and the Problem of Pseudoscience

I criticize conceptual pluralism, as endorsed recently by John Dupré and Philip Kitcher, for failing to supply strategies for demarcating science from non-science. Using creation-science as a test case, I argue that pluralism blocks arguments that keep creation-science in check and that metaphysical pluralism offers it positive, metaphysical support. Logical empiricism, however, still provides useful resources to reconfigure and manage the problem of creation-science in those practical and political contexts where pluralism will fail.

A critique of pure politics

This essay examines lines of connection between disgust, the effect of disciplines upon such intensive appraisals, political action, and the shape of ethical responsiveness. Philosophies that espouse purity in moral ity or politics mask these lines of connection; they thereby disparage the sig nificance of techniques of the self to ethical and political life. Immanuel Kant and Hannah Arendt provide the two main figures through whom these themes are explored. Arendt and Kant are brought into relation with each other through the way each comes to terms with disgust and common sense. Kant's attempt to purify morality draws upon the spontaneity of common sense even more than it does upon a set of transcendental arguments. The Kantian metaphysic of the supersensible and the sensible then authorizes a concept of morality that almost removes the will beyond the reach of disci plines. But aporias he confronts within the will may bring these tactics back in. Arendt, while rising above the command conception of morality pro jected by Kant through her invocation of gratitude for being and appre ciation of new beginnings, reinstates purity in the concept of 'the political'. Arendt's drive to bracket the body - often treated as an assemblage of com pulsive moods and interests - from the realm of ethical and political life also disparages tactics by the self on the self. To challenge the metaphysic of the supersensible and the sensible with a metaphysic of the infrasensible and the sensible is to confirm the nobility of such tactics. The presentation of this alternative perspective calls into question the pretension of many contemporaries to be 'post-metaphysical'; it also helps to show why meta physical pluralism sets a condition for a politics of plurality attuned to the velocity and scope of late-modern life.

Between Metaphysical and Liberal Pluralism: A Reappraisal of Rabbi A. I. Kook's Espousal of Toleration

Much has been said and written about the unique position regarding toleration that was adopted by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook. Its uniqueness within Jewish tradition is not open to doubt. The question I would like to explore here is the extent to which his version of toleration is compatible with the toleration that has become part of the modern secular outlook. In order to accomplish this task, I begin by setting up a typology of two basic varieties of toleration, relating one to the skepticism of the relativist who espouses liberal pluralism, and the other to religious systems with absolutist claims for truth. In the second part of the article, a sketch of the history of toleration in Judaism, this typology is confirmed. The third part of the article is a review of R. Kook′s notion of toleration, which seems at first to conform to the type of toleration generally associated with liberalism, but, when translated into practical policy, displays some significant aberrations. The fourth part suggests that these aberrations are not evidence of inconsistencies or anomalies, but rather an indication of the fact that no attitude of toleration, even that of the most liberal pluralist, can completely evade the necessity for intolerance at some point; and that different views regarding the point where toleration should be limited reflect different epistemological positions, each of which is associated with a different societal ideal which serves as the criterion for limiting toleration.

Plantinga, Epistemic Permissiveness, and Metaphysical Pluralism

Alvin Plantinga's much heralded religious epistemology is a many-faceted thing. In simplest terms, it is an attempt to free would-be rational theists from the evidentialist requirement for religious belief and to show that they are well within their ‘epistemic rights’ in taking certain beliefs about God as ‘properly basic’. In an early version of his programme, Plantinga sought to achieve both these objectives through a single strategem, namely via the overthrow of ‘classical foundationalism’, an historically wide-ranging approach to epistemology he judges to be, even today, preeminent. Plantinga's frontal attack on his self-styled opposition, however, soon proved inadequate to his task, largely because it exposed his own position to criticism and left pressing questions unanswered. By this time, of course, Plantinga has done much to reply to his critics and to address fundamental questions; yet in so doing, he has adopted argumentative manoeuvres, some quite surprising, that take him considerably beyond his original position. These developments in his proposal are central to the discussion that follows. If we are to comprehend them, however, we must begin where he did, with a critique of classical foundationalism, for in the case of Plantinga's religious epistemology, to trace genesis is to elucidate growth.

Theoretical Indeterminacy, Pluralism and the Conceptual Concrete

Metaphysical pluralism is examined as a proposed explanation for theoretical indeterminacy in psychology and found wanting. A more promising view is that indeterminacy is caused by a methodological inadequacy that can be overcome by a revised understanding of abstraction in theory construction. The revision involves a genetic or historical approach to concept formation that reveals the concrete interrelations among qualities so that they can be ordered with respect to deductive priority.

Russell’s scientific mysticism

Russell's scientific mysticism by Stephen Nathanson WHATWAS THE relation of mysticism and religion to Russell's philosophy? Most people, no doubt, would answ:er "none at all!" Or, if they acknowledged any relation, it would be entirely negative. That is, they might point out that Russell rejected mysticism and all other forms of religion and expended a great deal of effort attacking them. Russell the sceptic attacked religious dogma. Russell the social reformer attacked religious institutions for their social conservatism. Russell the rationalist attacked the idea that mystical insight was the route to knowledge. The standard view-that religion had no substantial positive impact on Russell's thought-has been clearly stated by A. J. Ayer. "Russell," he writes, was never a theist or ... a friend of organized religion, but he was a man of religious temper. In his youth, his attitude to mathematics was almost mystical , he was always sensitive to nature and to romantic poetry, and his desire that human existence should have a meaning was reflected in the emotional stresses of his private life and in the passion which he brought to politics. At the same time, this mystical strain was balanced by a strong sense ofirony, and by a skeptical and analytical intelligence; and it makes liule showing in his philosophy.' Ayer does not deny that Russell had a "religious temper". Nor does he deny that Russell's life and activities were influenced by this temper. I Bertrand Russell (New York: Viking Press, 1972), p. 8; my italics. 14 Russell's scientific mysticism 15 However, he does deny that religiousideas or attitudes had any effect on Russell's overall philosophy. This is all very plausible and accords with many of Russell's own descriptions of himself. In a 1959 interview, he spoke of religious interests as ,a feature of his adolescence and noted that his loss of religious beliefaffected him very little.2 Two years earlier, in the preface to Why I Am Not A Christian, Russell seemed to summarize his entire view of religion when he wrote: "I think all the great religions of the world ... both untrue and harmful."3 In spite ofits widespread acceptance and its apparent endorsement by Russell himself, this interpretation of Russell's thought has been called into question by Ronald Jager. In the concluding chapter of his book, The Development of Bertrand Russell's Philosophy, Jager states: In religion, despite the widespread impression that its relation to Russell's general philosophy is entirely external, I shall suggest that the opposite is true, that religion is far more delicately interwoven with the rest of his philosophy than appears on the surface.4 This remark must strike most readers as bizarre, for there seems to be no positive place for religion in Russell's thinking. Certainly, Russell's book, Religion and Science (1935), poses a strong opposition between the religious. and scientific and comes down strQngly on the side of the post-Copernican, post-Darwinian world-view, rejecting the anthropocentric theism of traditional Christianity. Moreover, though the tone is less strident, Russell had rejected the quasi-religious belief in mystical unities in his 1914 essay, "Mysticism and Logic", supporting in its stead metaphysical pluralism and the belief in the reality of the spatio-temporal world which science describes. Likewise, in that same essay, Russell dismissed claims about the validity of mystical insights, proclaiming rational thought as the arbiter of truth. What sort of religious doctrine, then, might have played a positive role in Russell's thought? Before approaching jager's specific thesis, it is worth noting that there are passages in Russell's works which suggest that Russell wanted to avoid a wholesale rejection of the mystical and the religious, that his aim was to retain some component of these traditions along side his commitZ Bertrand Russell Speaks His Mind (New York: Avon Books, 1960), p. 19. 3 New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957, p. v. 4 London: George Allen and Unwin, 1972, p. 462. 16 Russell summer 1985 ment to science and scientific philosophizing. Consider the opening words of "Mysticism and Logic": Metaphysics, or the attempt to conceive the world as a whole by means of thought, has been...