How to be a compatibilist in metaphysics: the epistemic strategy

ABSTRACT

Conflicts between our best philosophical theories (BPTs) and our common beliefs are widespread. For example, if eliminativism is our BPT, then our BPT conflicts with common beliefs about the existence of middle-sized composite artifacts. ‘Compatibilism’ is the name usually given to a theoretical attitude, according to which, in the case of a conflict between BPT and a common belief P, we should try to find a reconciliation. The two major variants of compatibilism are ‘semantic compatibilism’ (SC) and ‘cognitive compatibilism’ (CC). According to SC, to be reconciled with BPT is the ‘real’ version of the content of our ordinary assertions; according to CC, to be reconciled with BPT is the mental state we are ‘really’ in while thinking P. In this paper, we present a new kind of compatibilism, epistemic compatibilism (EC). According to EC, to be reconciled with BPT is the explanation of why we believe that P. After presenting EC, we will argue that it fares better than SC and CC for at least two related reasons: EC does not rely on any form of what we call semantic or cognitive ‘recarving’; thus, EC avoids some sceptical problems that affect the other two versions of compatibilism.

KEYWORDS:

• Meta-ontology
• compatibilism in metaphysics
• eliminativism
• compatibilist semantics
• epistemic compatibilism

Acknowledgments

Various versions of this paper has been presented at the PRIN National conference ‘Realism and Objectivity’ (Matera, 2015), the research seminar in theoretical philosophy (Bielefeld, 2015), the XII SIFA National Conference (Pistoia, 2016), the conference ‘Science, Philosophy and Common Sense’ (Amsterdam, 2016) and the workshop ‘The Metaphysics of Ordinary Objects’ (Pisa, 2016). We would like to thank all the participants for their useful comments and suggestions. Many thanks also to Ciro De Florio, Daniel Korman, Giorgio Lando, Christian Nimtz, and the referees of Inquiry.

Notes

1 A terminological note: by ‘eliminativism’, here and in the rest of the paper, we have in mind a position in the metaphysics of material objects, according to which there are no middle-sized composite artifacts, not the position in the philosophy of mind, according to which mental states posited by common sense do not exist. See van Inwagen (1990) and Merricks (2001).

2 For example, Quine (1948), Yablo (1998), Kennedy and Stanley (2009).

3 The distinction hermeneutic/revolutionary comes from Burgess (1983) and Burgess and Rosen (1997). Stanley (2001, 36) introduced the the term ‘hermeneutic fictionalism’. See also Yablo (2001) and Kalderon (2005).

4 For J. Stanley:

The hermeneutic fictionalist about a discourse D holds that those who are competent with the vocabulary in D, when employing it, are in fact also involved in a pretense,

and then he adds:

Pretense is unquestionably a psychological attitude one bears to content; it is in the same family of attitudes as belief

(Stanley 2001, 4 and 13).

5 It should be clear that our use of ‘epistemic compatibilism’ has nothing to do with the position under the same name in the debate surrounding doxastic agency.

6 For a description of various semantic compatibilist strategies, see, for example, Korman (2016, Ch. 5).

7 See Thomasson (2007) for loose talk; Lewis (1986, 213), Lewis (1991, par. 3.5), Sosa (1999, 142), Sider (2004, 680) and Richard (2006) for quantifier domain restriction; Dorr (2005, Sec. 7), Chalmers (2009), Cameron (2008, 300–301) and Cameron (2010, 256) on the distinction between ‘joint-carving’ and ‘non-joint-carving’ quantifiers; and Horgan and Potrř (2008) for a ‘contextually operative’ semantic notion of truth (see Korman 2008 for a discussion). See also Eklund (2005) for the ‘indifferentist’ strategy, according to which ordinary speakers really do not care about the real content of a sentence like (1).

8 See also van Inwagen (2014) for a further elaboration. We are here assuming, as does, for example, Merricks (2001), that, in the case of van Inwagen, the thesis that there are no composite artifactual objects, usually called ‘nihilism’, entails the view that there are no ordinary things such as chairs, tables or any macro-physical objects, usually called ‘eliminativism’ (about ordinary, material objects). We are thus attributing to van Inwagen a form of ‘eliminative nihilism’. According to G. Contessa (2014), one could endorse the first thesis without endorsing the second, and he calls this view ‘non-eliminative nihilism’.

9 van Inwagen (2014, 7).

10 Cfr. Walton (1990).

11 The same seems to be true for all features that Yablo individuates (expressiveness, disconnectedness, availability, etc.).

12 One may be worried that even the tendency to believe that the Earth is flat comes out as ‘reasonable’ in the sense defined above. No panic! This should not be taken as evidence in favour of such a crazy view. On the contrary, it would simply mean that we could perfectly explain the false belief that the Earth is flat in terms of the best physical theory, according to which the Earth is not flat. In effect, a good line of response to ‘flatearthists’ would just be to point out that all the phenomenological evidence in favour of their view may receive a perfectly good explanation in orthodox science that plainly contradicts it. If the belief that the Earth is flat is epistemically reconciled with our best physical theories, then ‘flatearthism’ is false.

13 Even in the case of s-compatibilism, the contrast between ϕ and BPT could as well be understood as a contrast between two theories, namely our BPT and our semantic theory for ϕ. The contrast is solved exactly as it would happen in the case of e-compatibilism if it is shown that our semantic theory is made compatible with our BPT, and if it could generate semantic analyses of ϕ that are compatible with BPT. If you are an eliminativist, then it is better if your semantic theory is compatible with eliminativism.

14 We would like to thank a referee of Inquiry to press us on this point. For a discussion of nominalistic reconstructions, see Chihara (2005). For a critique of this kind of (revolutionary) forms of nominalism, see Burgess and Rosen (1997).

15 We would like to thank a referee of Inquiry for pointing us to this potential ambiguity between recarving a belief and reformulating the theory that explains a belief.

16 van Inwagen (1990, 103).

17 Cf. Korman (2016, Ch. 7), Benovsky (2015), Merricks (2001), and White (2010); for debunking arguments in the context of discussions about moral realism, see Bedke (2009), Joyce (2007), Kitcher (2007), Shafer-Landau (2012), and Vavova (2015).