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ABSTRACT
This paper explores and defends a form of transcendental argument that is neither bold in its attempt to answer the sceptic, as ambitious transcendental strategies, nor epistemically humble, as modest transcendental strategies. While ambitious transcendental strategies seek (but fail) to meet the sceptical challenge, and modest transcendental strategies accept the validity of the challenge but retreat to a position of epistemic humility, this form of transcendental argument denies the assumption that undergirds the challenge, namely that truth and falsity may be legitimately predicated of the conditions of knowledge. As a result, although this form of transcendental argument is not truth-directed, it is not vulnerable to a charge that is often levelled against modest transcendental arguments, namely that they amount to the adoption of a strategy of sophisticated capitulation. This form of transcendental argument, which is implicit in Collingwood’s conception of philosophy as the search for absolute presuppositions, takes transcendental arguments in a pragmatic direction that does not leave the framework of transcendental idealism intact. It nonetheless remains true to Kant’s conception of philosophy as a second-order activity and to his goal of defending our entitlement to hold on both to the standpoint of theoretical and that of practical reason.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the anonymous referees of this paper for their close readings and constructive engagement with this paper.
Notes
1 The text most commonly associated with the anti-sceptical reading of transcendental arguments is Strawson's The Bounds of Sense. Strawson's Skepticism and Naturalism, on the other hand develops a modest transcendental strategy that is not world or truth-directed. See below.
2 Early criticisms of the view that transcendental arguments are deductive arguments with anti-sceptical intent are to be found in Ameriks' ‘Transcendnetal Deduction’ and Malpas’ ‘The Transcendental Circle’.
3 For an overview of ambitious and modest transcendental strategies see Stern, ‘Transcendental Arguments’. See also the introductions to Stern's Transcendental Arguments and Skepticism and to Stern (ed) Transcendental Arguments: Problems and Prospects.
4 Strictly speaking the naturalistic response is not a reply to the sceptic in the sense in which robust transcendental arguments are. Therefore, I have placed ‘reply’ within quotation marks.
5 For Collingwood what determines whether a statement is a presupposition or a proposition is the role it plays in the logic of question and answer. If the role of a statement is to give rise to a question, then it is a presupposition. If its role is to answer a question, then it is a proposition. Some statements may have two roles, depending on whether they give rise to, or answer a question. For example, ‘the salt is on the table’ may be a proposition answering the question ‘where is the salt?’ or a presupposition giving rise to the question ‘could you fetch the salt from the table?’ Collingwood referred to presuppositions governing domains of inquiry as ‘absolute’ because these presuppositions have only one role in the logic of question and answer; they are never offered as propositional answers (with a determinate truth-value) to questions in the context of the inquiry they make possible. Thus, for example, ‘nature is uniform’ for Collingwood, is not a propositional answer to the question ‘What is the structure of reality?’ because it is always presupposed (and never asserted) as a true propositional answer to a question by the inductive scientist.
6 The claim that the notions of truth and falsity do not apply to absolute presuppositions should not be conflated with the logical positivist view that they are empirically unverifiable propositions. Collingwood has sometimes been construed in this way and subsequently challenged on the grounds that he concedes too much to logical positivism (Beaney, ‘Collingwood’s Critique of Analytic Philosophy’, 118; Beaney, ‘Collingwood’s Conception of Presuppositional Analysis’, 45ff). Properly understood, Collingwood’s claim is not that absolute presuppositions cannot be empirically verified (in the way in which traditional metaphysical claims concerning the existence of God or the soul cannot be empirically verified), but that the notion of verification does not apply to them because they provide the criteria for determining what is true or false within a mode of inquiry. Absolute presuppositions are unverifiable not in the sense in which an overpriced property in a bad location is unsellable, but more in the sense in which a mammal is unable to lay eggs. Unlike ‘suckling its young’ ‘laying eggs’ is not a predicate that applies to mammals, so when we say that mammals can’t lay eggs we mean that they are not oviparous. Equally when one says that absolute presuppositions cannot be true (or false), one means that they are not propositions.
7 There are points of contacts, as well as important differences, between Collingwood’s claim that absolute presuppositions are the yardsticks of knowledge and, as such, they are neither true nor false, and Wittgenstein’s account of hinge propositions in On Certainty. On this see D’Oro, ‘Collingwood and Hinge Epistemology’.
8 For recent interpretation which do not see scepticism as central to transcendental arguments see Massimi, ‘Why There are No Ready-made Phenomena’; Chang, ‘Contingent Transcendental Arguments’; Gava, Kant, the Third Antinomy and Transcendental Arguments.
9 For the claim that explanations in the human sciences differ in kind from explanations in the natural sciences see Dray's classic defence in ‘The Historical Explanation of Actions Reconsidered‘; Laws and Explanations in History and ‘R.G. Collingwood and the Understanding of Actions in History’.
10 For an account of the relation between transcendental arguments and pragmatism see Gava and Stern, Pragmatism, Kant and Transcendental Philosophy, Introduction.
11 Though, as we have seen, presuppositions and practices are mutually supportive.
12 Influential historicist readings include Donagan, The Later Philosophy of R. G. Collingwood; Rotenstreich, ‘Metaphysics and Historicism’; Toulmin, ‘Conceptual Change’; Harrison, ‘Atemporal Necessities of Thought’. The historicist reading has been questioned by Modood, ‘The Later Collingwood’s Alleged Historicism’; Connelly, ‘Metaphysics and Method’; Oldfield, ‘Metaphysics and History’; Martin, ‘Collingwood’s Claim that Metaphysics’; D’Oro, Collingwood and the Metaphysics of Experience; D’Oro, ‘The Myth of Collingwood’s Historicism’.
13 For a view which reads Collingwood as being closer to Quine see Kindi, ‘Collingwood, Wittgenstein, Strawson’.
14 Collingwood does occasionally say this. But this claim is inconsistent with the view that presuppositions are not propositions.