American Philosophical Quarterly Volume 48, Number 2, April 2011

A PlaGUE oN Both YoUr Isms

P. M. S. Hacker

Isms can be the bane of critical thought,

1. Naturalism

for they provide an array of ready-mades that are often used as substitutes for careful description and analysis. Todays isms also have a tendency, as Robert Hughes observed, to become tomorrows was-ms. Our characteristic isms come in pairs that purport to be exclusive and exhaustive answers to a given question, and we unthinkingly assume that a philosopher must be one corresponding ist or the other corresponding istlittle thinking that he may reject the question to which the pair of isms are severally answers. When a philosopher fails to fit a favored ism, we are typically tempted to squeeze him in even at the cost of gross deformation. Without a philosophical identity card, one is a persona non grata. So it has been with Wittgenstein. His later philosophical views (in the Philosophical Investigations and the Remarks on Philosophy of Mathematics) have been described as those of a linguistic idealist, a phenomenalist, a verificationist (in the private language arguments), an anti-realist, a strict finitist, and a behaviorist. In fact, he was demonstrably none of those things. It is indeed much easier to enumerate what, philosophically speaking, he was not than to find ready-mades to characterize what he was. For he was constitutionally incapable of

walking in other mens furrows. He rejected typical dichotomies in terms of which philosophers tend to think (e.g., realism versus nominalism, mentalism versus behaviorism, Platonism versus formalism), holding that the questions the opposed isms purport to answer rested on confused presuppositions. It is these presuppositions that need to be challenged. If the challenge is successful, then both isms will collapse like houses of cards. Wittgenstein ploughed the fields of philosophy in his own inimitable manner, and in the course of doing so, cut through received modes of thought in the philosophy of logic, philosophy of language, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of mathematics. Isms and ists are absurdly crude nets in which to try to catch this most subtle of philosophers. The term naturalism has been an honorific expression in philosophy for some decades now, especially in the United States. Indeed, it has been characterized as the distinctive development over the last thirty years, marrying the American pragmatist tradition with rigorous scientific method in philosophy. For, it is claimed, there has been a naturalistic turn away from the a priori methods of traditional philosophy towards a methodological unification of science and philosophy. But it is none too clear what naturalism means. As Barry Stroud nicely remarked, naturalism seems

2011 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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rather like World Peace. Almost everyone swears allegiance to it and is willing to march under its banner. But disputes can still break out about what it is appropriate or acceptable to do in the name of that slogan.1 The most perspicuous use of the term naturalism in philosophy is when it is contrasted with super-naturalism. In this sense, Descartes or Berkeley elaborated nonnaturalist philosophies, since in both cases an appeal to the activity of God was held to be needed in order to warrant our knowledge claims concerning a rerum natura. Similarly, Kants transcendental idealism was not a naturalist account of our knowledge of the empirical world, since an appeal to noumena is demanded by his metaphysical system. In this sense of naturalism, Hume was a naturalist philosopher par excellence. He explained the nature and limits of human understanding without recourse to any supernatural agencies. He also noted sapiently that the word natural is commonly taken in so many senses and is of so loose a signification that it seems vain to dispute whether [something] be natural or not.2 This, too, should be a warning to us to proceed carefully. The contrast between naturalism and supernaturalism in philosophy is not the sense in which philosophical journalists proclaim enthusiastically that there was a naturalistic turn in American philosophy in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Those who marched under the banner of naturalism were not concerned with combating philosophical super-naturalismthey took its demise for granted. The gonfalonier of American naturalism was Quine, and it is to him that we can turn to find out what this weasel word signifies. One can distinguish in Quines work ontological naturalism, epistemological naturalism, and philosophical naturalism3: (i) Ontological naturalism is the doctrine that it is within science itself and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described.4 On this account, it is up to science to tell us what there is, and it offers the best theory of what exists and of how we come to know what exists. The only difference between the ontological philosopher and the scientist, Quine wrote (with tongue in cheek), lies in the breadth of concern: the philosopher being concerned with the existence of material objects or classes, and the scientist with wombats and unicorns. (ii) Epistemological naturalism is the proposed displacement of traditional foundationalist epistemology by an enterprise within natural science,5 a psychological enterprise of investigating how the input of radiation, etc., impinging on the nerve endings of human beings, can ultimately result in the output of our theoretical descriptions of the external world. This heir to epistemology, according to Quine, is to study how the stimulation of sensory receptors, which is all the evidence anyone has to go on, ultimately, in arriving at his picture of the world,6 relates to theory, and in what ways ones theory of nature transcends any available evidence. (iii) Philosophical naturalism is the view that philosophy is not ... an a priori propaedeutic or groundwork for science, but [is] ... continuous with science.7 This view was a reversion to the Russellian conception of philosophy as advanced before the First World War and a repudiation of the tradition of analytic philosophy as it had evolved in the Vienna Circle, at Cambridge in the interwar years, and at Oxford in the postwar years.8 This reversion to a widely repudiated conception was one aspect of what Quine called his apostasy in relation to the doctrines of the Vienna Circle.9 One might add yet further kinds of naturalism to this triplet. The most obvious is ethical naturalism, an epithet commonly used to characterize Humes project in book three of the Treatise of Human Nature and in the second of the Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the

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Principles of Morals. For Hume endeavored to explain the phenomenon of morality and moral motivation by reference to human nature (our natural tendency to sympathy) and human cooperative interests. Here, he nicely observed, In so sagacious an animal, what necessarily arises from the exertion of his intellectual faculties may justly be esteemed natural10and in that thin sense, the sentiment of justice is natural to mankind, even though justice is an artificial, not a natural, virtue. A discussion of ethical naturalism would be irrelevant to our current concerns, and I shall not dwell on it further. But I shall revert to the idea that what necessarily arises from the exertion of [our] intellectual faculties may justly be esteemed natural.11 For that has direct bearing on Wittgensteins anthropological approach to the investigation of our conceptual scheme. It is evident that naturalism, insofar as this ill-defined expression subsumes the three Quinean doctrines, is wedded to the idea, common among Quines followers, that science presents us with the best or most reliable or best-supported conception of the world and of ourselves within it. Accordingly, all serious questions are questions that can in principle be answered by one science or another. So philosophy is held to be continuous with the sciences and is part of the scientific quest for truth and the enlargement of human knowledge. It is obvious that the term naturalism thus deployed is misleading. The view that science has the last word on what exists is, for reasons I shall elaborate, very peculiar. The primary concern of proponents of ontological naturalism appears to be the defense of a physicalist ontology. It is far from evident why that should be deemed natural in any useful sense. It is associated with the physical sciences, but by the same token, dissociated from the sciences of nature, that is, the life sciences. The crude attempts to reduce the biological to the physico-chemical disregard

both the theory and the practice of the biological sciences. The commitment to such reductionism seems oblivious to the distinctive features of those elements of our conceptual scheme that concern living beings, and to the extent to which the notion of the good of a being plays a critical role in any account of living beings, their forms of development and behavior, and the patent commitment of evolutionary theory to teleological explanation.12 It is even more egregiously oblivious to the ontology of the human and social sciences, not to mention history. The idea that epistemology should be replaced by an imaginary form of neuro psychological learning theory is no more the naturalization of epistemology than depriving one of ones citizenship is a form of naturalization. It is merely the replacement of one kind of investigation by a wholly mythical one that aspires to answer quite different questions. Of course, there is a science, which is in its infancy, of neuropsychological learning theory. But there is nothing more natural about it than there is about epistemology save for the trivial fact that the former is a branch of a natural (biological) science and the latter is a branch of philosophy. So, too, there is nothing natural about the view that philosophy is continuous with science. The Quinean view of philosophy contrasts with a foundationalist conception of philosophy in relation to science. But such anti-foundationalism is compatible with the view that philosophy is discontinuous with the empirical sciences. The conception of philosophy as autonomous is neither unnatural nor supernatural. In general, replacement of the term naturalism by scientism would be more apt and illuminating, but for the different coloring associated with the two terms. Insofar as the naturalistic turn in recent philosophy cleaves to the three Quinean doctrines, it exemplifies a scientistic turn of an intellectual and academic culture intoxicated with science

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and scientific explanation and increasingly oblivious to the understanding of much of what makes us distinctively human. It is a turn away from hermeneutical understanding of human behavior and institutions and of the goals and values that inform them, of history and society, and of our cultural creations. The subject of this essay is Wittgenstein and naturalism. So I shall reflect a little on how Wittgenstein stands in relation to the three forms of Quinean naturalism in his philosophy of logic, mathematics, language, psychology, and epistemology. I shall not discuss post-Quinean developments of naturalism in the United States, although some of what I have to say about Quine applies to those variants too. Wittgenstein made no appeal to anything that might be deemed supernatural, so that is an issue that can be passed by. tions of science in metaphysical principles, or to determine the synthetic a priori principles of natural science, or to investigate the fundamental presuppositions of each of the sciences. But with that negative agreement, consensus ceases. Where Quine held that philosophy is continuous with the natural sciences, Wittgenstein asserted as early as the Tractatus that
philosophy is not one of the natural sciences. (The word philosophy must mean something whose place is above or below the natural sciences, but not beside them.) Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. (TLP 4.1114.112)

2. Wittgenstein and Philosophical Naturalism

I wrote some years ago that Quine and Wittgenstein are related in a very peculiar way. There is, at first glance, extensive and impressive agreement between them. But on closer scrutiny, their proximity is deceptive for it is akin to the proximity of the far Left and far Right in the horseshoe-shaped French National Assembly. They sit close to each other, but to get from one to the other one has to go through the whole spectrum of political ideology.13 This peculiarity is patent when we juxtapose their views on the three doctrines of naturalism just elaborated. Philosophical naturalism patently stands in diametrical contrast to everything Wittgenstein believed about the nature, scope, and limits of philosophy, both in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (hereafter Tractatus or TLP) and in all his later writings. Wittgenstein would have agreed with Quine that philosophy is not ... an a priori propaedeutic or groundwork for science in the Cartesian, Kantian, or indeed Aristotelian sense. It is not the task of philosophy to lay the founda-

And he continued to think for the rest of his life that the task of philosophy is conceptual clarification and dissolution of philosophical problems by analysisalthough, to be sure, what counts as analysis changed radically. Above all, whereas Quine thought that philosophy is a part of the scientific quest for knowledge, Wittgensteinboth in the Tractatus and in all his later work (albeit for different reasons)denied that there are any philosophical truths analogous to the truths of the empirical sciences or that there is philosophical knowledge of any such truths, and he denied that philosophy is a quest for knowledge. Contrary to Russell, who held that logic was the study of the most general features of the universe and that logical propositions are the most general truths we can achieve in our knowledge of the world, Wittgenstein, both early and late, denied that logically true propositions are essentially generalizations; denied that they yield us knowledge of the universe; and held that far from being descriptions of the universe, they are altogether without sense. Metaphysicists have argued that philosophy, unlike science, aims to attain knowledge of special philosophical propositionsin particular, necessary truths concerning the world

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or truths concerning all possible worlds. Russell and Quine held that philosophy was part of the scientific quest for truth about the worldthe knowledge it yields is not special knowledge about a special domain, but general knowledge about the ordinary domain of nature. Wittgenstein rejected both these antithetical conceptions, for he denied that philosophy is a quest for the enlargement of human knowledge at all. It is a contribution to human understanding. It is not the task of philosophy to explain empirical phenomena, but rather to describeor perhaps better, to stateand marshal familiar grammatical rules or norms of representation for philosophical purposes. The philosophical purposes are to resolve or dissolve philosophical problems and perplexities, to eradicate conceptual confusions in philosophy, science, and daily discourse. The methods of philosophy include grammatical description, i.e., the delineation of conceptual connections, compatibilities and incompatibilities, presuppositions, and forms of context dependencyin short, conceptual analysis, or, as Strawson has helpfully denominated it, connective analysisfor, as Wittgenstein remarked, a proposition is completely logically analysed when its grammar is laid out completely clearly.14 The pertinent conceptual truths need to be selected and arranged in such a manner as to shed light on the philosophical, i.e., conceptual, problem at hand. Philosophy does not produce novel empirical truths, it merely draws our attention to the structure of familiar segments of our form of representation (or conceptual scheme) for elucidatory purposes. This may involve drawing our attention to similarities that we had not noticed and to differences that had escaped our attentionin that sense it may well involve realization of features of our conceptual scheme, and in that sense knowledge. But this is knowledge concerning evident features of our forms of representation, not knowledge concerning the world

about us that we represent by these forms. If these features of our conceptual scheme are evident, how is it then that we are not already apprised of them? To master the use of the expressions of a language, it is not necessary that one hold in view all the analogies and disanalogies between one expression or kind of expression and another expression or kind of expressionbut it is precisely that which commonly needs to be brought to our attention to dispel bafflement, misconceptions, and illusions.

2.1 The Naturalist Riposte Quines followers have made much of Quines criticism of Carnaps early distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions and argued that with the rejection of that distinction, the possibility of anything that might be called conceptual analysis collapses, and the possibility of resolving philosophical questions by means of a priori argument and elucidation is foreclosed. This is held to demonstrate the futility of any Wittgensteinian enterprise. So I shall digress for a moment to examine this mistaken idea. Wittgenstein was no less critical of the Vienna Circles idea of truths in virtue of meanings than Quine. He characterized this confused idea as the meaning-body conception, which he duly demolished. He thought that nothing could follow from the meaning of a word, but only from a proposition. He also thought that propositions which some members of the Circle held to be true in virtue of the meanings of their constituent terms were not true in virtue of meanings at all, but were rather constitutive of the meanings of the terms in question. It is not as if one could first fully grasp the meaning of a given term (say, vixen or red) and then go on to discover what follows from its meaning (e.g., that vixens are female, or that red is darker than pink). Far from espousing the analytic/synthetic distinction that members of the Vienna Circle advanced, Wittgenstein as-

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siduously avoided invoking it and its ancestral congeners. The term analytic occurs in only one remark in the more than eighteen thousand pages of Nachlass written after 1929, and then only in order to suggest an affinity between his reflections on arithmetic and Kants denial that arithmetical propositions such as 7 + 5 = 12 are analytic. Quines naturalist defenders commonly castigate Wittgenstein for cleaving to the obsolete idea of a priori knowledge. They will perhaps be surprised to learn that Witt genstein wrote:
It was characteristic of theorists of the past cultural period to want to find the a priori where it isnt. Or should I say a characteristic of the past cultural era was to form//to create// the concept or non-concept of the a priori. For it would never have created the concept if, from the start, it had seen things// the situation// as we do. (Then the world would have lost a greatI mean significanterror.)15

So far, then, there are two points of agreement which demonstrate the folly of the assertion that Wittgenstein cleaved to Carnaps early analytic/synthetic distinction or that he accepted the traditional conception of the a priori. Nevertheless, the agreement between Quine and Wittgenstein is superficial and provides no support for any form of philosophical naturalism. Indeed, their initial agreements mask far-reaching disagreements. Wittgenstein differentiated between logical propositions; mathematical propositions; general grammatical propositions; empirical propositions of a multitude of different kinds; the special categories of empirical propositions of the world picture; as well as ethical, aesthetic, and religious propositions. He held the concept of a proposition to be a family-resemblance concept, and showed that the logical articulations of one kind of proposition in use differ profoundly from those of others. One may grant Quine that truth is truth, i.e., that

the truth-predicate and the truth-operator are univocal. Like Quine, Wittgenstein espoused a deflationary conception of truth (wavering between a disquotational form and a de-nominalization form of such a conception). But that truth is truth is perfectly consistent with the view that what it is for one kind of proposition to be true may be altogether different from what it is for a different kind to be true. Knowledge is knowledge, no doubt, but what it is to know that the sun is shining, that water is H2O, that red is darker than pink, that 25 x 25 = 625, that envy is a vice, that meaning something is not a mental act, and so on, all call out for very different explanations involving very different conceptual, or grammatical, articulations. Logical propositions have no truth-conditions, since they are true (or false) come what may. What it is for such a proposition to be true is for it to be unipolar and also to say nothing at all. Logical truths have no sense, but are correlative to a rule of inference. Mathematical propositions are likewise bivalent and unipolar. True mathematical propositions are norms of representation, constituting standards for the re-description of quantifiable phenomena and for the transformation of empirical propositions concerning magnitudes and quantities. General grammatical propositions, like logical and mathematical ones, are unipolar; like true mathematical propositions, they are normative. But while the negation of a logical truth is a contradiction, and the negation of a true mathematical proposition is a false mathematical proposition, the negation of a grammatical proposition is arguably best conceived as a form of nonsense. For a grammatical proposition, e.g., that red is darker than pink, or that nothing can be red and green all over simultaneously, is a rule in the guise of a description of an objective necessity. Its negation is not a rule for the use of its constituent termsif A is red and B is

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pink, one may not infer that A is lighter than B. The rules for the use of the constituent terms exclude precisely this inference among empirical propositions. On the other hand, the negation of a true grammatical proposition is not a bipolar empirical proposition either. Contrary to views held by members of the Vienna Circle, a grammatical proposition does not follow from the meanings of its constituent terms, but is constitutive of their meanings. Expressing a grammatical proposition is a feature of the use of a sentence on a given occasion. Different tokens of the same type-sentence may be used on one occasion to express an empirical proposition and on another to express a grammatical one, e.g., This is red (which may be a description or an ostensive definition), Water consists of H2O (which may report an empirical discovery or stipulate a rule for the use of the word water in chemistry), or Force is the product of mass and acceleration (which can be used to express a law of nature or a definition of force). Unlike an empirical proposition, a grammatical propositions being true does not amount to its corresponding to the facts; nor does it consist in things being as it describes them as being. Rather, its being true consists in its correctly stating the content of a rule of representation. This is comparable to the fact that the truth of the proposition that the chess king moves a square at a time consists in its correctly stating a rule of chess. (It is not the rule that is truethere is no such thing as a true or false rulebut, rather, the proposition truly specifies the content of a rule.) There is no inconsistency at all in simultaneously avoiding the term analytic while invoking the category of conceptual truths. For what Wittgenstein called grammatical propositions are conceptual truths. Their role is not descriptive but normative. The suggestion that mathematical and grammatical propositions such as Red is darker than pink, or 25 25=625, or One cannot

trisect an angle with a compass and rule are analytic in the sense of being true in virtue of the meanings of their constituent terms, or in the different sense of being derivable from the truths of logic and explicit definitions, or in the sense of the subject terms containing the predicate is at best misleading, at worst wrong.16 But animadversions to analyticity in these different senses are irrelevant to Wittgensteins notion of conceptual truths. Conceptual truths articulate normative connections between concepts expressed by words we use. They determine concepts, specifying rules for the use of concept-words. They are grammatical propositions, i.e., expressions of norms of representationof a kind that are of no interest to grammarians or lexicographers, but of maximal interest for philosophers seeking to resolve or dissolve philosophical problems.

2.2 Concluding Overview of Wittgensteins Relation to Philosophical Naturalism Wittgenstein repudiated the traditional conception of a priori truths as lying at the foundations of all empirical knowledge, a conception exemplified by Descartess supposition that eternal truths and common notions fulfil this role. He would have rejected the Kantian conception of synthetic a priori truths that the mind imposes upon intuition to yield experience. But he had no qualms about characterizing his investigations as a priori in method or as characterizing mathematical propositions and what he idiosyncratically called grammatical propositions as a priori. They are neither the foundations of knowledge nor the first principles of knowledge. They are not foundation stones but, as it were, spectacles. For they are constitutive of our means of representation, and are not descriptions of what we represent by these means. Wittgensteins philosophical methods do not depend on observation and experiment. They are investigations of what does and does not

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make sense, not of what is or is not empirically true. And his arguments about what does not make sense are not subject to empirical confirmation or refutation. They presuppose the shared usage of competent speakers. They turn on familiar features of the uses of words, ordinary words like pain or technical words like transfinite cardinal that we are prone to overlooki.e., they turn on reflection on our means of representation, not on what we represent by those means, i.e., observations of nature. It might seem to a confused philosophical naturalist that Wittgenstein is a paradigm of a philosophical non-naturalist. For does he not advance an array of propositions that he infuriatingly and misleadingly calls grammatical? And are not these the results of philosophical investigation? Are they not true propositions? So is it not disingenuous for Wittgenstein to suggest that philosophy does not result in a body of philosophical knowledge? Certain grammatical propositions are of great philosophical interest. But it would be wholly mistaken to suppose that the result of philosophical investigation is an array of hitherto unknown grammatical propositions or conceptual truths. Mathematics is conceptformation by means of proof, but philosophy is concept-elucidation. One of its methods (but by no means the only one) is to marshal appropriate grammatical propositions in a surveyable manner in order to dissolve philosophical or conceptual unclarity and illusion. If someone is inclined to identify the meaning of an expression with its bearer, one may remind them that one can, in certain cases, sit on the bearer of a namebut it makes no sense to sit on the meaning of a name. But that the meaning of a name is not its bearer is no more a philosophical proposition than that a bachelor is not a married man is a philosophical proposition, or that red is not lighter than pink is. It is a rule for the use of words (viz., that meaning cannot be replaced by bearer in the phrase the meaning of a name)in the guise of a description. Other familiar grammatical propositions are themselves the source of philosophical difficulties, e.g., the vexing proposition that nothing can be red and green all over. The question of the status of such propositions exercised analytic philosophers endlessly in the interwar yearsto little purpose save in the case of Wittgenstein. Yet other grammatical propositions may indeed be the result of long and elaborate philosophical discussion and argument, e.g., that one cannot have a logically private language. Here we have a grammatical proposition that is far from obvious at first blush. It is a grammatical proposition, a rule, that excludes the form of words a logically private language from currencyjust as the proposition that one cannot checkmate in draughts excludes a form of words, viz., checkmate in draughts, from currency, and as the proposition, which took two thousand years to prove, namely, that one cannot trisect an angle with compass and rule, excludes a form of words from currency. To be sure, one cannot have a logically private language is not the upshot of a deductive proofit is the upshot of a detailed array of arguments that involve careful reflection on a multitude of other grammatical propositions and the manner in which they are interwoven. Here one needs an overview of a large and convoluted segment of our conceptual scheme. So if philosophical naturalism is the view that philosophy is continuous with science and that, like the natural sciences, it adds to the sum of human knowledge about nature, then it is evident that Wittgenstein rejected naturalism. But it is also evident that he rejected the view that philosophy aimed to achieve some other form of knowledge, such as knowledge of the foundations of science in principles of first philosophyto which Quine was so opposed. A plague on both your houses, Wittgenstein might have saidfor there is no such thing as philosophical knowledge as opposed to knowledge of the great works of philosophy.

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3. Wittgenstein and Ontological Naturalism

Ontological naturalism, you will remember, is the doctrine that it is within science itself and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described. This, as it stands, is a curious claim. It is far from obvious what science is supposed to be. We are familiar with a multitude of sciences, ranging from physics and cosmology through chemistry and biochemistry to biology and medicine, not to mention neuroscience and psychology, economics and sociologyeach of which divides into a multitude of branches. Which science identifies and describes reality? Indeed, what is it to identify, let alone to describe, reality? If identifying and describing reality amounts to making true existential claims and advancing true empirical descriptions, then it is, of course correct that the various natural sciences do make such claims and do advance such descriptions. But it would be absurd to suppose that only the various sciences do so, or indeed that only they are entitled to do so, let alone that they have the last word on what really exists or on what kinds of things really exist. No science is likely to gainsay Everyman when he asserts that his childhood diaries still exist, sincerely avows a toothache or describes it as throbbing, or when he remarks there is no justice in this world. And unless history is a science, no science is going to be in the position to gainsay the standard explanation of Elizabeth Is etceteration of her letters to Phillip of Spain or that class conflict really existed in the nineteenth century. And unless the study of law is a science, no science is going to be in a position to gainsay the claim that in the course of the last twenty years, a more robust form of international law has gradually come into being. And so on. Physics studies, among other things, what fundamental particles exist in nature, and on that it has the last wordbut it does not have

the last word, or even the first word, on what things or kinds of things in general exist or on what fundamental kinds of things exist (fundamental for what, one must first ask). If the claim is merely that no prior philosophy is in a position to dictate to science what kinds of things do or do not exist, or to advance true empirical descriptionsthen that is a quite different issue. One might be sympathetic with one aspect of Quines claim. With the exception of rational theology, which is a special case that investigates necessary existence, it is surely not a remit of philosophy to determine or discover what things do or do not exist. Philosophy is certainly not in competition with the natural sciences in discovering what fundamental particles exist. On the other hand, it is surely bizarre to suppose that philosophical concern with the existence of material objects, or classes, or universals (the ontological commitments of our best scientific theories of the world) is on a par with a concern with whether this, that, or another species (wombats or unicorns) exist. It is surely not the task of philosophy to discover that there are material things or universals (when, one wonders, did it make these remarkable discoveries?). It is not as if science discovers the existence of such fundamental kinds of things as positrons, while philosophy discovers the existence of such fundamental kinds of things as universals. When did philosophy last discover the existence of a new kind of thing? Or has it now completed its inventory of the universe? Where would Wittgenstein have stood on the matter? It seems clear enough that he would have agreed with the claim that the natural sciences do not depend upon the results of prior philosophy. He repudiated rational theology as an illusion. He would surely have dismissed the idea that one of the goals of philosophy is to discover what kinds of fundamental things there are. It could never be a discovery of philosophy that universals

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exist, and the claim that there are universals is wholly unlike the claim that positrons exist. Ontology, he would surely have asserted, is no more a serious subject for philosophers to engage in than is metaphysics. The serious philosophical questions in this domain are not Are there universals? Do substances exist? Are there transfinite cardinals? Rather, the questions concern meaning, not truth. They do not take the misleading form of Do universals (or substances) exist? but rather What is a universal (or a substance)? and What does it mean to say that there are universals (or substances)? The question is not whether transfinite cardinals exist, but rather whether transfinite cardinals are numbers at all in the sense in which cardinals are? Such questions are answered by grammatical investigations, not by discoveries. The heir to the pseudo-subject of ontology is the patient grammatical investigation of what it means, from one domain to another, to say that such and such a kind of thing exists. Given the confusions engendered by Galileo, Descartes, Boyle, and Locke about the subjectivity of colors, it is a task for philosophy to clarify what is meant by color predicates and what, if anything, is meant by asserting that colors exist. Given the seventeenth-century claim that colors do not exist in nature, what we need is not an attempt to discover whether they really doafter all, the Galilean claim was never really an empirical one, and no experiment could possibly show that there are no colored objects in nature. What we need is grammatical clarification of the concept of color and of color attributions. Difficulties with existential statements of one kind or another range far and wide. We say that there are laws of nature, that laws of the state are created by legislation and that legal systems exist, that there are various kinds of numbers, that rules exist, that moral values exist and that there are principles of morality by which we should live. From case to case, we typically tie ourselves into knots in trying to clarify what these assertions mean. And from case to case, Wittgenstein would, I think, have suggested that what is needed is grammatical clarification and careful investigation of the sources of our confusions. Wittgenstein was patently not an ontological naturalist, if that means that the physical sciences have the best and last word on what things and kinds of things exist. But neither was he an ontological anti-naturalist, holding that it is the task of first philosophy to determine, antecedently to science, what fundamental kinds of things there are.

4. Wittgenstein: Epistemological Naturalism

Quines idea of naturalizing epistemology is, in one sense and up to a point, unobjectionable, and in another sense, and beyond a certain point, absurd. There can surely be no philosophical (or any other) objection to the idea that cognitive neuroscience should investigate the neural processes involved in the acquisition of information by the use of the sense organs. What is absurd is first, the suggestion that this enterprise should displace epistemology, and second, the idea that this neuro-psychological heir to epistemology is to study how evidence relates to theory. Cognitive neuroscience does indeed investigate how the impingement of radiation upon our retinae yields perceptual knowledge of our environment. It is a very long way from having anything remotely like a comprehensive theory of such perceptual processes, but its achievements so far are impressive and the project continues. What it does not do, and I fancy never will, is investigate how the irritations of our surfaces, as Quine put it, yield our theories of the world. In the first place, none of us has a theory of the world. Nor does any science. And even the conjunction of all the scientific knowledge and theory that is available does not yield a theory of the world. There is no such thing as a theory of the world. Second, it is simply mistaken to

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suggest that the stimulation of our sensory receptors is ultimately all the evidence anyone has to go on in arriving at knowledge of our environment, or that this sensory input, as Quine wrote, supports physical theory. Indeed, one thing that is never evidence for our theories is the irradiation of our sense organs and irritation of our surfaces. Light waves impinging on our retinae and sound waves agitating our eardrums are not our evidence for what we see and hear. Third, no neuro-psychological investigation could possibly explain how sensory input of radiation yields scientific theorysince it patently does not. One may argue that if we are good scientists, our observations (rather than our irradiations) and experiments in conjunction with the transmitted fund of knowledge that is provided by a scientific education may result in our advancing a successful scientific theory. But the fund of knowledge that we must master is not a battery of irradiations, even though it can only be acquired through reading and listening and watching or making observations and experiments. And the cannons of evidence and rules of inference are not neural processes. They are normative standards of correct reasoning and can be studied by studying logic and science. Quine blithely asserts, without argument, that naturalized epistemology, although a far cry from old epistemology, is an enlightened persistence in the original problem.17 That original problem, according to Quine, was to combat scepticism and to explain how our knowledge of the world is firmly rooted in our knowledge of our subjective perceptual states. This foundationalism was exemplified for Quine in Russells Our Knowledge of the External World and more systematically in Carnaps Logischer Aufbau. His critical response to it was why all this creative reconstruction, all this makebelieveand instead of foundationalism he advocated the study of psychology and cognitive neuroscience that would give an

empirical account of knowledge acquisition and theory construction. But the alternative to foundationalism is not the scientism of the imaginary subject of naturalized epistemology. It is the explanation of why it is misconceived to think that our knowledge of the world either has, or could have, foundations in the traditional sense. Nor could naturalized epistemology possibly answer the kinds of questions that are the proper domain of epistemology. No amount of neuroscience is going to be able to explain the reticulations of the subtle and complex network of epistemic terms. Even if, in the fullness of time, we know everything we wish to know about the workings of the human brain, that will not provide a description of that conceptual network. Nor can neuroscience be envisaged as answering such questions as, If A knows that p, does it follow that he also believes that p? Can A know that p even though his grounds for holding that p are false? Is mathematical knowledge more certain than empirical knowledge? and Why can we be in a state of ignorance but not in a state of knowing? How might we imagine Wittgenstein responding to the Quinean suggestion that epistemology naturalized can fruitfully replace old-fashioned foundationalist epistemology. Again, it seems evident that he would have shared Quines animadversions to classical foundationalist epistemology although for reasons quite different from Quines. But he would have been amazed to hear that the alternative to foundationalism is Quinean naturalism. One cannot refute scepticism by appealing to scientific knowledge any more than one can unravel Zenos paradox of Achilles and the tortoise by measuring their relative velocities. A plague on both your isms, Wittgenstein might have exclaimed before pursuing his own investigations into the nature of human knowledge that he began in On Certainty and, alas, never finished.

108 / AmEriCaN PhilosophiCal QUartErly 5. What ... Arises From the Exertion of [our] Intellectual Faculties May Justly Be Esteemed Natural
Wittgenstein objected no less than Quine to foundationalist epistemology, to foundationalist philosophical ontology, and to the conception of philosophy as a propaedeutic to science. His reasons, however, were very different. Moreover, he would have objected to Quines scientistic alternatives even more vehemently. Nevertheless, in one sense of this polysemic term there is a powerful natural strand in Wittgensteins later philosophy. It might also be termed anthropological. Given what I by now hope are well-taken warnings, this approach should perhaps not be crowned with an ism at all, but merely described. What I have in mind is: (i) Wittgensteins methodological principle of investigating ways in which problematic expressions are or might be taught in order to shed light on their meaning. (ii) His exploration of the natural and acculturated roots of our psychological vocabulary and the nature of the first/ third person asymmetries of many psychological verbs. (iii) His emphasis on the function of expressions in the context of the language-games in which they are at home, and hence on their place in the stream of life. (iv) His examination of the point of a given language-game or conceptual activity within a form of life. (v) His elaborate account of the varieties of necessary truth. I shall make only a few observations here to indicate what I have in mind. (i) In his writings on philosophy of language, Wittgenstein commonly reflects on how expressions might be taught and on what natural capacities and dispositions are presupposed for learning them. This is not armchair learning theory. It is a reminder of the natural primitive powers of humanity and of the uncultivated forms of human reaction and response. By this means he endeavors to show how our concepts and languagegames are rooted in our natural abilities and propensitiesand hence to show the extent to which our concepts are molded by our nature (as well as by features of the natural world around us). It also enables us to call to mind the natural contexts in which teaching the use of the problematic expression is called for, as is evident, for example, when one reflects on how one might teach a child how to use the expression I dreamt (that in itself sheds light on philosophical puzzlement with respect to dreaming). (ii) In his writings on the philosophy of psychology Wittgenstein steered between the Scylla of mentalism enshrined in the Cartesian and Lockean tradition and the Charybdis of the behaviorism popular in the Vienna Circle. He denied the reducibility of mental states, events, and processes to behavior, but he also denied that first-person present-tense utterances are reports resting on introspection. Rather, he accounted for the peculiar status of a range of such utterances as extensions of primitive natural behavior suggesting that the utterance It hurts or the groan I have a pain are acculturated linguistic extensions of natural pain-behavior. It is on these primitive utterances that later reportive and descriptive uses of our pain vocabulary are constructed. Other kinds of utterances are to be seen as rooted in primitive moves of a language-game, as when a child learns the use of Im going to . . . to herald an incipient action. The child does not learn to identify an intention within its breast and then to announce it to others. Rather, it learns that when one says, Im going to . . . in such contexts, one then has to go on to. ... Yet other utterances are to be seen as acculturated linguistic extensions of more primitive

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linguistic activitiesas when we learn to use epistemic operators to qualify a simple utterance. We do not learn the primitive use of I think by noting the occurrence within us of a process called thinking, but rather as a qualification on an utterance for which we have less than adequate grounds. And so on. In all these diverse cases (and there are many more), philosophical confusions pertaining to privileged access, private ownership of experience, epistemic privacy, certainty, and doubt are eliminated by scrutiny of natural processes in which the primitive form of a certain typical expression could be acquired and mastered in the course of natural maturation. He gives, one might say, a perfectly natural account of the illusions of privileged access, introspection, absence of doubt, and infallible knowledge. (iii) Wittgenstein constantly emphasizes that words are deeds. To learn the meaning of a word is to learn how it is to be used, and to learn the use of a word is to learn how to do something with it in the stream of life. We have for too long labored under the illusion that words are au fond names and sentences are (or contain) descriptions. We fail even to notice the diversity of what is called describing: for example, describing the room one is in, describing the room one was in, describing the room as it will be when the house is built, describing a room in ones dream, an architects blueprint of a room, an architects drawing of a room, an archaeologists reconstructive drawing of a room, a description of a room in a novel. Hence, too, we fail to advert to what counts, from case to case, as improving ones description, and we remain oblivious to the different functions of kinds of description in the various language-games that are part of human life. A fortiori, we tend to obscure the extent to which even declarative sentences have nondescriptive functions, e.g., as avowals of experience, expressions of attitudes and emotions, forms of appraisal, statements of norms of representation. We

are obsessed with the idea that words are names, that words are (at least for the most part) referring expressions (which may refer to particulars, to kinds, to properties or relations, to numbers, to truth-functions, and so forth). Gross oversimplification ensues and the multitudinous different roles that words play in language-games are occluded by the limited roles of symbols in formal calculi that we invoke to make our reflections more precise. (iv) Wittgenstein recurrently reminds us of what we take for granted in our philosophical reflections, namely the point of different language-games. For the purposes of philosophical elucidation, it is often not enough to call to mind the rules for the use of words within familiar language-games and to marshal them in a surveyable representation. One needs to bear in mind the point of the whole game in the form of life of which it is a part. The very same arithmetical rules for the use and manipulation of numerals in our calculations might be used solely for the purpose of decorating wallpaper with theoremsbut that would not be arithmetic, since its point would be far removed from the point of calculating. Here, too, one might say, the exploration of the natural anthropological context of our linguistic and conceptual activities plays a crucial role in Wittgensteins methods. (v) Wittgenstein did not give a uniform account of all kinds of necessary truth. But he accounted for the true propositions of logic, arithmetic, geometry, and so-called metaphysics without recourse to a third realm of Platonist entities accessible to our logical faculty and powers of reasoning, such as Frege invoked, and equally without recourse to necessary facts or language-independent natures discoverable by Wesensschau, an intuitive insight into the essences of things, as Husserl supposed. His complex accounts of these different kinds of necessary truth render them and their necessity perspicuous by reference to human practices of using words, of concept-

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formation, and of reasoning. They belong to, or are systematically related to, our forms of representation, and our forms of representation are our creation. Their necessity does not derive from what they describe, since they describe nothing. It derives from their roles as norms of representation or as internally related to our norms of representation. They are not forced upon us, but rather we force them on ourselves. Their truth is not answerable to any reality, but determines the forms in which we describe reality and draw inferences from what we know about reality. This could be further elaborated. But I hope it suffices to show that Wittgenstein would have found current philosophical naturalism utterly repugnantfor very good reasons. Nevertheless, his own investigations demonstrate that one may advance powerful descriptions of aspects of our conceptual scheme that advert to what is natural to humankind, without falling into the confusions of philosophical (scientistic) naturalism. St. Johns College, Oxford

NotEs
1. Barry Stroud, The Charm of Naturalism, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, vol. 70 (1996), p. 43. 2. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, app. III, 258 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), p. 307. He was speaking here of the principles of justice. He also observed in a footnote that natural may be contrasted with what is unusual, or what is miraculous, or what is artificial. 3. For discussion of the history of the term and of the various forms of naturalism, see H.-J. Glock, What Is Analytic Philosophy? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 137146. 4. W. V. O. Quine, Things and Their Place in Theories, repr. in Theories and Things (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981) p. 21. 5. W. V. O. Quine, The Nature of Natural Knowledge, in Mind and Language, ed. S. Guttenplan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 68. 6. W. V.O. Quine, Empirical Content, in Theories and Things, p. 75. 7. W. V. O. Quine, Natural Kinds, in his Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), p. 126. 8. For more detailed discussion, see P. M. S. Hacker, Passing by the Naturalistic Turn: On Quines Cul-de-sac, Philosophy, vol. 81 (2006), pp. 231254. 9. I have remarked elsewhere on Quines apostasy (P. M. S. Hacker, Wittgensteins Place in Twentieth Century Analytic Philosophy [Oxford: Blackwell 1996], p. 197), and critics have assumed that this is my description of Quine (the latest is Avishai Margalit in Wittgensteins Knight Move, in Wittgenstein and Analytic Philosophy, ed. H.-J. Glock and J. Hyman [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009], p. 5). That is mistaken. It rather is Quines description of himself and the evolution of his ideas on analyticity (see Autobiography of W. V. Quine, in The Philosophy of W. V. Quine, ed. L. E. Hahn and P. A. Schilpp [La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1986], p. 16.) 10. Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, App. III. 11. Enquiry, App. III.

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12. Anthony Kenny pointed out that it is a mistake to suppose evolutionary theory eliminated teleology from biology. It eliminated design, not purpose (A. J. P. Kenny, Cosmological Explanation and Understanding, in Perspectives on Human Conduct, ed. L. Hertzberg and J. Pietarinen [Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1988], pp. 7287). For further elaboration, see P. M. S. Hacker, Human Nature: The Categorial Framework (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), chap. 6. Darwin was the first to acknowledge precisely this, as is evident in his correspondence with Asa Grey. Grey, in his review in Nature on June 4, 1874, wrote: Let us recognise Darwins great service to Natural Science in bringing back to it Teleology: so that instead of Morphology versus Teleology, we shall have Morphology wedded to Teleology. Darwin was delighted, and the next day he wrote to Grey: I ... cannot be easy without again telling you how profoundly I have been gratified. Every one, I suppose, occasionally thinks that he has worked in vain, and when one of these fits overtakes me, I will think of your article, and if that does not dispel the evil spirit, I shall know that I am at the time a little bit insane, as we all are occasionally. What you say about Teleology pleases me especially, and I do not think any one else has ever noticed the point. I have always said you were the man to hit the nail on the head. 13. See P. M. S. Hacker, Wittgensteins Place in Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), p. 227. 14. L. Wittgenstein, The Big Typescript (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p. 417. 15. Wittgenstein, MS 183, 81. 16. Of course, this is not to say that some propositions held to be analytic in one sense or another of the term are not also grammatical, e.g., A vixen is a female fox or A bachelor is an unmarried man. 17. W. V. O. Quine, Roots of Reference (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1974), p. 3.