Taking the Linguistic Turn Seriously

Abstract

Science studies the world, but does not include itself in it. The task of systematically studying science falls to the humanities. The problem is that philosophers who take recent developments in philosophy seriously are forced to deny any credence to the self-image of science as a steadily progressive, self-critical enterprise, while philosophers who take what scientists do and feel more seriously, are forced to ignore some of the most profound latter-day findings of philosophy. What makes this issue highly relevant in the present context, is that at its heart it is a dispute about language.

This paper explores the possibility not of adjudicating this dispute, but of somehow bridging it. What it asks and proposes to answer positively is whether it is possible to remain committed to both horns of the dilemma: to salvage a philosophically viable account of science as a self-critical enterprise, without having to breach the latter-day philosophical framework that would seem to deem this impossible.

Notes

Notes

1. Peter Lipton, “Kant on Wheels,” The London Review of Books, 19 July 2001, pp. 30–31.

2. Richard Rorty, ed., The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1967; rpt., 1992 with two retrospective essays by Rorty: “Ten Years After” and “Twenty-five Years After”).

3. E.g. Critique of Pure Reason B20.

4. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 10; Donald Davidson, Truth, Language, and History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), chap. 9; Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Press, 1973), chap. 1.

5. John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 81.

6. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, 73.

7. Parts of Harry Collins, Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice (London: Sage, 1985), Ian Hacking's contribution to World Changes: Thomas Kuhn and the Nature of Science, ed. Paul Horwich, and more so Thomas Kuhn's notable “Afterwords” to that volume—by far Kuhn's most philosophical work—are interesting yet extremely modest beginnings, if one bears in mind that 1993, the year World Changes was published, was the year that, say, John McDowell and Robert Brandom were putting the finishing touches to their monumental works.

8. Michael Friedman, Dynamics of Reason: The 1999 Kant Lectures at Stanford University (Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, 2001); henceforth page references are cited in the text.

9. Such an approach is typical of the more orthodox latter-day Kantian positions in ethics, such as Christine Korsgaard's. The modest absolutism, premised by Ronald Dworkin's critique of Michael Walzer's interpretivist ethics, is another good example.

10. This is the position consistently taken by Karl Popper and his school, most conspicuously in his The Myth of the Framework: In Defense of Science and Rationality (London: Routledge, 1994). It is my contention that to argue so, as Popper does, without the benefit of a serious alternative non-Kantian philosophy of language and mind, which is unavailable at present to philosophers, is not to solve the problem, but to ignore it.

11. See, especially, Donald Davidson, “Paradoxes of Irrationality,” in Philosophical Essays on Freud, ed. Richard Wollheim and James Hopkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 289–305.

12. In this respect, the case Friedman makes for the rationality of scientific framework replacement resembles Robert Brandom's claim for the rationality of norm making in his Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

13. The Brandomian turn of phrase is not accidental, but it is impossible within the confines of the present essay to even outline the interpretivist premises shared by Friedman and Brandom. For a relatively detailed and comparative critique of the three positions, see chapters 5–8 of Menachem Fisch and Yitzhak Benbaji, The View from Within: Normativity and the Limits of Self-Criticism (forthcoming).

14. Referring especially to Carnap's The Logical Syntax of Language (London: Kegan Paul, 1937); originally published as Logische Syntax der Sprache (Vienna: Julius Springer, 1934).

15. Willard V. O. Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” Philosophical Review 60 (1951): 20–43.

16. Alan Richardson, “Narrating the History of Reason Itself: Friedman, Kuhn, and a Constitutive A Priori for the Twenty-First Century,” Perspectives on Science 10.3 (2002): 253–74.

17. Aristotelian and Newtonian mechanics share Euclidian geometry but differ radically in two other respects. The former presupposes “a hierarchically and teleologically organized universe” and basic “conceptions of natural place and natural motion appropriate to this universe” (61) heavy terrestrial bodies naturally move in straight vertical lines toward their natural place at the center of the universe, while celestial bodies move naturally in circular orbits around it. The conceptual framework of Newtonian mechanics does away with both the hierarchy of realms and the notions of natural place and motion in favor of “an infinite, homogeneous and isotropic universe in which all bodies naturally move uniformly along straight lines to infinity” (ibid). Friedman tones down the radical transition by arguing that Galileo's treatment of free fall and projectile motion constituted an “essentially intermediate stage” in which the hierarchical and teleological organization is discarded, but the notion of natural, rectilinear inertial motion remains circular. Henri Poincare plays the same role for him in the transition from classical mechanics to relativity theory (62). More on intermediary figures, but in a sense different from Friedman's, in the last section of this paper.

18. Which he does with reference to Jürgen Habermas's much discussed notion of “communicative rationality.” For a detailed critique of the suitability of Habermas's notion to the problem in hand, see Fisch and Benbaji, The View from Within, chap. 6, esp. §4.

19. For recent and concise formulations of his views, see Harry Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), and Taking Ourselves Seriously and Getting It Right, ed. Debra Satz, with comments by Christine M. Korsgaard, Michael E. Bratman, and Meir Dan-Cohen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006).

20. Frankfurt, Taking Ourselves Seriously, 4, 10.

21. “The origins of normativity,” writes Frankfurt, “do not lie  … either in the transient incitements of personal feeling and desire, or in the severely anonymous requirements of eternal reason. They lie in the contingent necessities of love. These move us as feelings and desires do; but the motivations that love engenders are not merely adventitious or (to use Kant's term) heteronymous. Rather, like the universal laws of pure reason, they express something that belongs to our most intimate and most fundamental nature. Unlike the necessities of reason, however, those of love are not impersonal. They are constituted by and embedded in structures of the will through which the specific identity of the individual is most particularly defined.” Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love, 48.

22. Those familiar with Michael Walzer's account on social criticism and Robert Brandom's notion of normative discursive scorekeeping will no doubt recognize my debt to their work. However, while Frankfurt and Korsgaard limit their accounts of normativity and personal identity to the purely intra-subjective discourse of self, both Walzer and Brandom confine themselves equally purely to the realm of inter-subjective discourse. All fail to even consider the possibility of the latter's transformative impact on the former.

23. Wittgenstein raises the question of the effectiveness of criticism leveled across language-game barriers in On Certainty, his posthumously published response to G. E. Moore's widely discussed defense of common-sense realism: “Proof of an external World,” Proceedings of the British Academy 25 (1939): 273–300. However, he finds no third way between an all-out rejection when “each man declares the other a fool and heretic” and unreasoned “persuasion,” the term he uses for “what happens when missionaries convert natives.” See Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969, rpt., with corrections and indices, 1974), 80e–81e.

24. E.g. Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love, 46. This is not to say that necessities of will remain necessarily fixed over time, and certainly not to say that they are in any sense inborn. Good examples of the kind of necessities of which Frankfurt speaks, outside the obvious realm of ethics proper, would be the norms and standards of scientific research or of artistic performance that are firmly imparted to novices and internalized as ‘second-nature’ in the course of their training and apprenticeship.

25. For a fairly detailed discussion of this point, see Yitzhak Benbaji and Menachem Fisch, “Through Thick and the Thin: A New Defense of Cultural Relativism,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 42 (2004): 1–24.

26. The argument is presented in significantly greater detail in Fisch and Benbaji, The View from Within, chaps. 8 and 9.

27. Peter L. Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997), esp. chap. 9.

28. For a detailed account of the transformative role such didactical deliberations played in the formation of William Whewell's understanding of mathematical physics, see menachem Fisch, William Whewell Philosopher of Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), chap. 2.

29. See P. Damerow, G. Freudenthal, P. McLaughlin, and J. Renn, Exploring the Limits of Preclassical Mechanics, 2d ed. (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2002), and Menachem Fisch, “The Making of Peacock's Treatise on Algebra: A Case of Creative Indecision,” Archive for History of Exact Science 54 (1999): 137–79.