Unlikely Bedfellows? Collingwood, Carnap and the Internal/External Distinction

¹I would like to thank one of the anonymous referees of this paper for their helpful suggestions.

Abstract

Idealism is often associated with the kind of metaphysical system building which was successfully disposed of by logical positivism. As Hume's fork was intended to deliver a serious blow to Leibnizian metaphysics so logical positivism invoked the verificationist principle against the reawakening of metaphysics, in the tradition of German and British idealism. In the light of this one might reasonably wonder what Carnap's pragmatism could possibly have in common with Collingwood's idealism. After all, Carnap is often seen as a champion of the logical positivist's critique of metaphysics, whilst Collingwood is renowned for his defence of the possibility of metaphysics against the attack to which Ayer subjected it. The answer is that they have more in common than one might suspect and that, once the relevant qualifications are made, there is as much convergence as there is contestation between Carnapian pragmatism and Collingwoodian idealism.

Keywords:

• Collingwood
• Carnap
• idealism
• pragmatism
• metaontology

Notes

¹ I would like to thank one of the anonymous referees of this paper for their helpful suggestions.

²The reading of Hegel as the prototypical arch-rationalist metaphysician has been questioned by scholars such as Robert Pippin (Hegel's Idealism) and Terry Pinkard (Hegel's Phenomenology) who read Hegel as radicalizing Kant's Copernican turn and eliminating the sceptical remainder in Kant without returning to a form of pre-critical metaphysics.

³Richard Creath, ‘Logical Empricism’ argues that Carnap had broken away from the standard version of logical positivism with the introduction of the Principle of Tolerance as early as 1935. Once the Principle of Tolerance is introduced,

each of the various versions of empiricism (including some sort of verificationism) is best understood as a proposal for structuring the language of science. Before tolerance, both empiricism and verificationism are announced as if they are simply correct. Correspondingly, what Carnap called metaphysics is then treated as though it is, as a matter of brute fact, unintelligible. But what is announced thus dogmatically can be rejected equally dogmatically. Once tolerance is in place, alternative philosophic positions, including metaphysical ones, are construed as alternative proposals for structuring the language of science.

(Section 4.1: Empiricism, Verificationism and Anti-metaphysics)

For an account of authors who read Carnap as a champion of logical positivism, see Carus, ‘Carnap, Syntax and Truth’. For a rejection of the standard reading of Carnap as a logical positivist, see Friedman, ‘Carnap's Revolution in Philosophy’ and Friedman, ‘Tolerance, Intuition and Empiricism’. The interpretation of Carnap given here is close to Friedman's neo-Kantian reading, but it is certainly not uncontroversial since many still see Carnap's philosophical programme as a continuation of traditional empiricism. For a discussion of empiricist and neo-Kantian readings, see Wagner, ‘Introduction’.

⁴In the contemporary metaontological debate, Carnap is often invoked as the figure behind the view that apparently intractable philosophical disagreements such as those between endurantists and perdurantists, mereologists and anti-mereologists and between the scientific and the manifest image are the result of a dogmatic commitment to a framework. See the essays by Hirsch, Price and Thomasson in Chalmers, Manley, and Wasserman, Metametaphysics. For Carnap's influence on the contemporary metaontological debate, see Eklund, ‘Carnap's Metaontology’ and ‘Carnap's Legacy for the Contemporary Metaontological Debate’.

⁵See Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics, 21–33.

⁶For Collingwood's account of the different senses of the term ‘cause’, see Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics, 285ff.

⁷Collingwood was invoked as an ally in the debate against methodological unity in the sciences by W. H. Dray who reworked Collingwood's claim that there are different senses of causation at work in different explanatory contexts by arguing that the logical structure of historical explanation is rational not nomological. See, for example, Dray, Laws and Explanation in History and ‘Historical Explanation of Actions Reconsidered’. Collingwood's defence of autonomy of the human sciences was informed by his conception of metaphysics as a science of absolute presuppositions and was overshadowed by the return of a more robust conception of the nature of metaphysical enquiry. See D'Oro, ‘Reasons and Causes’.

⁸Collingwood is often regarded as a historicist or historical relativist who takes absolute presuppositions to be relative to groups of people in certain periods of history. On the reading given here, Collingwood is a contextualist who takes absolute presuppositions to be relative to forms or modes of inquiries rather than to time and place. In this respect, Collingwood's notion of absolute presuppositions is closely related to Michael Friedman's discussion of relativized a priori principles and their meaning-constitutive role in the sciences (Friedman, ‘Einstein, Kant, and the Relativized A Priori’). For Friedman such a priori principles are both ‘genuinely historical and properly transcendental’: they are necessary not because they are universally valid but in virtue of their constitutive role. Equally for Collingwood, absolute presuppositions are not universally valid: different forms of inquiry have different absolute presuppositions. Their applicability, however, is limited not to time and place but to the forms of enquiry which they make possible. Thus, although absolute presuppositions are not strictly universal, they are nonetheless necessary in virtue of the role they play in determining the kind of evidence that can be given in answer to the questions which they make possible. I have defended this reading in D'Oro, ‘Myth of Collingwood's Historicism’.

⁹The account of Collingwood's relation to logical positivism provided here differs in some important respects from other readings of Collingwood which see an Essay on Metaphysics as making far too many concessions to logical positivism. This view is articulated in Beaney, ‘Collingwood's Conception of Presuppositional Analysis’. For a critique of this, see D'Oro, ‘Logocentric Predicament and the Logic of Question and Answer’. Reading An Essay on Metaphysics as espousing an internal/external distinction along the lines of Carnap also lends support to the view that in An Essay on Metaphysics, Collingwood defended a form of explanatory contextualism rather than espousing a form of historical relativism that is absent in his earlier work. For a more sympathetic reading of the logic of question and answer, see D'Oro, ‘Logocentric Predicament and the Logic of Question and Answer’ and Collingwood and the Metaphysics of Experience, and Martin, Editor's Introduction in Collingwood's An Essay on Metaphysics.

¹⁰For a discussion of the logic of question and answer, see Belnap and Steel, Logic of Question and Answer.