Skepticism About the Conceptual World

 

 

I will describe a startling new form of skepticism, to be set beside more familiar forms. It lurks beneath the surface of recent work on meaning and reference. Consider “water”: it has both a meaning (sense, connotation) and a reference (denotation, extension). Suppose its meaning is equivalent to “tasteless transparent liquid found in lakes and flowing from taps”. These are the properties a typical speaker associates with the word (its “stereotype”). Combining these words with “water” produces an analytic a priori truth. They provide an analysis of the concept we associate with “water”. Yet they are not epistemically necessary: it could turn out that water is none of these things, as it could turn out that water is not H2O. Perhaps we have all been under a giant illusion about these properties of water: by some quirk of our nervous system a yellowish lemony-tasting liquid has appeared to be transparent and tasteless, and what fills lakes and flows from taps is some other liquid than water. These possibilities are not beyond the powers of an evil demon to contrive. We cannot be certainthat water has the properties we typically associate with it—mistakes are possible, illusions conceivable. Water might turn out to have none of the properties included in its stereotype, i.e. its meaning or connotation. Yet we would still be referring to water by “water”, whatever water is. The reason this is possible is that we fix the reference of “water” in a certain way, namely by pointing to a sample of a certain natural kind and saying, “Let ‘water’ designate whatever natural kind underlies these appearances”—whether those appearances are veridical or not. We might thus have successfully referred to a certain liquid and yet acquired quite false beliefs about its properties. Reference is independent of opinion: appearances can be inaccurate even as reference succeeds. If we adopt a causal theory of reference, we can say that the reference-establishing causal relations are logically independent of whatever beliefs we form about the extension of the term. What this means is that the sentence “Water is a tasteless transparent liquid found in lakes and flowing from taps” is both analytic and conceivably false. It could be false because water might actually have none of these properties and yet the meaning we assign to the term includes them: they are contained in the connotation but the denotation lacks them. Thus we have an analytic but false statement—it makes a false ascription of properties to thing we refer to.

Now consider skepticism. Hearing about the semantics of natural kind terms the skeptic will seize his chance: he will insist that all our natural kind terms are vulnerable to a skeptical doubt, namely that propositions formed from them are not knowable with certainty, even when analytic. We might be wrong that water is tasteless and transparent, that lightning is bright and precedes thunder, or that gold is shiny and malleable. These are characteristic skeptical claims, but the extra turn of the screw is that analytic truth does nothing to preserve them from skepticism. The semantics of the terms combines demonstrative reference with fallible descriptive stereotype, so that the reference could succeed while the stereotype is inaccurate. Sense (descriptive content) doesn’t determine reference, but it can generate analytic truths nonetheless. Since the descriptive content of sense is possibly erroneous, we can generate fallibly known analytic truths—we can’t be certain that these are truths. Water might turn out not to be what we suppose, however much what we suppose fixes its meaning (one aspect of it at least). In the extreme, water might be a bitter tasting dark-colored solid that has presented a totally misleading appearance to us all these years—so the skeptic will contend, and he is notoriously difficult to thwart. What we have been designating by the term is quite different from the way it appears (if one day the scales fell from our eyes, we would exclaim “So that’s what we’ve been drinking all this time!” while beholding a mud-like substance).

How far can the skeptic push it? Consider knowledge (the word, the concept, and the thing): we customarily suppose that the meaning of “know” includes belief, truth, and justification—that is its sense or connotation. It also refers to a specific mental state of a person. We take it that this reference instantiates the properties contained in the meaning of the term—that itinvolves belief, truth, and justification. That’s what wemean and itinstantiates. But the skeptic wants to know what makes us so sure that the thing we refer to has the properties we ascribe to it: why assume that the nature of the mental state that “know” refers to actually includes the properties we ascribe to it? Why couldn’t it be like the case of water? Suppose we are confronted by a sample of a certain mental kind and we announce, “Let ‘know’ refer to the mental state before us”, while believing that the state in question is an instance of true justified belief—maybe that’s just the way the sample happens to strike us. But suppose that, contrary to our impression, none of this is true: the state in question is unjustified belief in a falsehood, or not even belief at all but disbelief (the sample is being insincere in its assertions). Then the skeptic maintains by citing the semantics of natural kind terms we can say that knowledge is nottrue justified belief—the state we are referring to is unjustified false belief! Now the question is what we can say to rule this possibility out in our case: might it not turn out that knowledge is not true justified belief at all but false unjustified belief? This is epistemically possible, the skeptic contends, given the way the term “know” was introduced and given the facts of the case. So we should admit that it might turn out that knowledge is not true justified belief, because the term designates something quite different from what we supposed—we had false beliefs about the extension of the term as it actually was at the moment of reference-fixing. But that implies that the analytic truth “Knowledge is true justified belief” might turn out to be false, simply because the state originally designated lacked the properties we thought it had. Our false ideas entered its meaning, but reality failed to confirm these ideas. The proposition might be analytic but false, and the skeptic wants to know what we can say to rule out this possibility. Of course, it is also epistemically possible that knowledge istrue justified belief, but the skeptic is asking why we prefer that alternative to his skeptical possibility. We should be agnostic.

Or consider “bachelor” and suppose that the initial sample is quite other than what the introducers of the term think: they think they are confronted with a bunch of unmarried males but in fact they are confronted by a group of married females. These individuals are masquerading as unmarried males while being just the opposite. The fooled introducers then stipulate, “Let the word ‘bachelor’ designate the marital and gender status of thisgroup”. They fix reference to the property of being married and female while mistakenly believing that the group in question is male and unmarried. Then the sentence “Bachelors are unmarried males” is false for these speakers, despite their firm belief in its truth. It may indeed be analytic in their language, but it is still false. And now the skeptic asks how we can rule this out in our own case: couldn’t it turn out that bachelors are married females? Maybe our ancestors introduced the term in the way described and thereby fixed its reference to married females; their beliefs were false of these individuals, but so what? Thus we today refer with “bachelor” to the natural kind of married females, even though we thinkwe refer to married males. Or suppose all the people we have ever met who called themselves “bachelor” and gave every appearance of being male and unmarried were really married women in disguise—wouldn’t that tie down the reference to that group, not the group we thoughtwe were referring to? If this is the way reference works in general, then such skepticism would seem indicated. It might turn out that bachelors are married females! It is not epistemically necessary that bachelors are unmarried males, despite the analyticity of the corresponding sentence. The skeptic thus extends his doubts to knowledge of analytic truths.

Let us make explicit what is going on in this argument. On the one hand, we have the concept, an item in the mind; it contains various components, which fix the set of analytic truths with respect to that concept. On the other hand, we have the extension of the concept, an item in the world; it has a certain objective nature, which fixes its de reessence. We normally suppose there is a correspondence between these two levels: the components of the concept actually capture the objective nature of the thing designated. In the water case it is easy to see how this correspondence could be disrupted, because we can be wrong about the properties of the natural kinds we are referring to. The skeptic then seeks to extend this point to other concepts by adopting the same type of analysis: there is the concept we have of knowledge, and there is the fact of knowledge itself; but the former might not correspond to the latter—knowledge itselfmight not have the properties the concept ascribes to it. What guarantees that the objective thing has the properties we think it has? It might be like the case of water. Similarly, the concept we have of a triangle implies that triangles have three sides, but the skeptic conjures a scenario in which we introduce the term “triangle” in reference to things that are actually four-sided, thereby referring to such things with the word “triangle”. Then “Triangles are three-sided” would be analytic for us, given our beliefs, but actually false. And the skeptical question is how to demonstrate that our present use of “triangle” is not like this: maybe we actually refer to four-sided figures with the term “triangle”! Might we not one day discover that triangles have four sides, contrary to what we now believe? We might discover that we are brains in vats, and we might discover that we refer to quadrangles with “triangle”. That would be strange, to be sure, but not logically impossible.

How could we respond to the skeptic? Gap closing is the obvious manoeuver: don’t let the concept and the property diverge. Then there will no logical space between what we think and what is. Thus we might identify the property with the concept: forxto have Pis just for xto have C(correctly) ascribed to it. But this gives rise to an idealism that destroys objectivity—as is typically the case with this kind of counter to skepticism. Clearly there was water before there was the concept of water, and similarly for knowledge, triangles, and bachelors. At the other extreme we could try going radically externalist and make the concept nothing more than the property: then what is in the mind will not be separate from what is in the object. The trouble is that this will entail that we can’t be misled about the nature of water, or mistaken about what knowledge involves, because our concept will simply bewhatever these things are objectively. A more realistic suggestion is that there is a kind of pre-established harmony between the concept and the property: the constituents of the concept necessarily correspond to the constituents of the fact (the nature of the property). But again, this fails to allow both for error and for incompleteness: our concept may misrepresent the property and it may fail to exhaust its nature. For example, there may be more to knowledge than we think, and our conception of knowledge may be inaccurate in some respects. This is precisely what the skeptic is capitalizing on by pointing out the epistemic possibilities: water may not be as we suppose it to be, no matter how central to our concept a certain feature is; and similarly for other natural kinds. His point is that analytic containment in the concept is no proof against the possibility of such errors about reality. The world contains various phenomena and we are trying to capture them in our concepts, but we may fail; so it might always turn out that things are not as we take them to be. Water might not be transparent, knowledge might not be true, triangles might not have three sides. Of course, ifthese things have those properties, then it is plausible that they have them necessarily; but the question is whether we know with certainty that they do, and the skeptic finds reason to doubt this. Metaphysical necessity does not imply epistemic necessity.

It might be said that the underlying semantics presupposed by the skeptic applies to semantically simple expressions like proper names and natural kind terms but that not all terms fit this mold. The former terms denote by mechanisms independent of their descriptive content, which forms a separate component of meaning; but terms like “knowledge” and “triangle” and “bachelor” don’t work like that—here the descriptive content is active in fixing reference. Thus the meaning of “know” mustimply truth in knowledge itself because that is simply how the term determines its reference—“know” refers by definition to what is believed and true (etc.). It is semantically complex and works as a logical conjunction of conditions, unlike a proper name. This, however, is all very debatable and anyway faces an obvious retort: what about the simple elements that make up the meaning of the term? Thesewill be subject to the same skeptical argument that we started with: maybe “believe” and “true” denote properties other than we suppose because they were introduced under conditions of fallibility. We announce “Let ‘believe’ denote thatmental state” in front of a sample, convinced that we are referring to a state of internal assent, but in fact our sample is in a state of suspended assent or outright dissent. We don’t have infallible access to other minds! Same for triangles (so we can’t wriggle out of the problem by appealing to introspective authority): we supposethere are three-sided figures in front of us and we stipulate that “triangle” refers to thatgeometrical form, pointing at the sample; but in fact we are suffering from a visual illusion and four-sided figures constitute the sample. The skeptic is saying that we can always misrepresent the properties of the sample that forms our semantic anchor, which is why it may turn out that we have actually done so. Analytic containment in the concept is no protection against this possibility. Skepticism about the external world thus generalizes to skepticism about what we regard as definitional. That is to say, we can be wrong about the essence of things as well as about their accidental properties, even when that essence is supposedly contained in our concepts. Since complex concepts resolve into simpler ones, the skeptical problem can always recur at the basic level.

This skeptical problem deserves to be called a skeptical paradox because whether or not I know anything I surely know what it wouldbe to have knowledge—I surely know that I cannot know what I disbelieve or what is false! Similarly, I may not know whether there are any triangles in nature but I surely know what a triangle is—I know it’s not a circle! But the skeptic is denying, startlingly, that I do have such knowledge; his claim is that it is epistemically possible that knowledge is not of truths and doesn’t require belief. We just don’t have that degree of apodictic insight into the nature of the things in question; we merely conjecture that this is the nature of what we refer to. We may be profoundly ignorant of the objective nature of the kinds of which we speak. Philosophers took it for granted that knowledge of analytic truths is free from skeptical doubt, but it turns out that they are swallowed up too. How far can this skepticism go? What about our knowledge of what “red” means, or “plus” or “and” or “ought”: can we conceive of scenarios in which people are radically mistaken about what these terms designate? Could it turn out that genocide falls into the extension of “good”? Could “red” turn out to designate blue? Could “and” mean disjunction? These would be paradoxical results indeed, so any skepticism that implied such things would deserve that label.[1]

The skepticism I have been expounding doesn’t apply to our knowledge of our concepts as such: we canknow with certainty what our concepts contain. We know with certainty that our conceptof water includes being transparent and tasteless, and similarly for our concept of knowledge in relation to truth. The skeptic questions the move from this to our putative knowledge of the referenceof our concepts—whether we know that water itself is transparent and tasteless, or that knowledge itself involves truth. What holds of the concept is not the same as what holds of the object it refers to. Thus I can be certain of analytic truths in so far as they concern what is true of my concepts, but I can’t (with certainty) infer from this anything about the essence of what I am referring to with these concepts. Hence (according to the skeptic) water might turn out not to be transparent and knowledge might turn out not to be true and triangles might turn out not to have three sides.[2]

 

Colin McGinn

 

 

 

 

 

 

[1]Note that the skepticism I am considering does not contend that there is no fact of the matter about what words mean, only that we cannot knowsuch facts. We could be radically mistaken about what words actually do mean.

[2]I have said nothing here about skepticism concerning rule following, as expounded in Saul Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language(1982), but that is certainly a useful comparison point for the skepticism presented here (they are not at all the same thing).

 

 

A Difficulty With Utilitarianism

 

 

Utilitarianism maintains that the value of a state of affairs depends solely on its level of utility. For a state of affairs to be good (desirable, valuable) it is necessary and sufficient that it contains the best possible level of wellbeing (pleasure, happiness, preference satisfaction). So if two situations contain the same level of utility they must be indistinguishable morally: value supervenes on good feelings (roughly). But consider the following possible states of affairs: (a) people enjoy a level lof happiness and know that lis their level of happiness; (b) people enjoy level lof happiness butdon’tknow that lis their level. In condition (b) they have false beliefs about how happy they are, either underestimating it or overestimating it; while in condition (a) their beliefs are just right. The level of utility is the same in both cases but the epistemic facts are quite different. Are these situations indistinguishable from the point of view of value? It might well be supposed that they are not: (a) is a better situation than (b). If so, utilitarianism cannot be a complete account of value. Knowledge of utility adds value to utility itself. The utilitarian typically assumes that knowledge of utility tracks utility, so there is no gap of the kind exploited by cases (a) and (b); but we can pull these apart in conceivable cases, and then the insufficiency of utility reveals itself.

A number of responses may be made to this simple argument. One response is that the case I described is not logically possible: people can’t be wrong about their level of happiness, since happiness is a mental state and people can’t be wrong about their mental states. However, whatever may be true about mental states in general, it is clearly possible to wrongly estimate one’s state of happiness. A change for the worse may make you realize how happy you used to be (“I didn’t know how lucky I was”), and you might think yourself happier than you really are because you have been so deprived for so long. People are not infallible about their level of wellbeing, though they may be generally reliable. What if you have been brainwashed into believing yourself brimming with joy when in fact you are only moderately content? Don’t people habitually underestimate their level of wellbeing until things turn nasty for them? Happiness is more elusive to knowledge than sensations of pain or experiences of red. If someone asks how happy you are, you might have to pause and reflect before giving an answer.

Second, it may be claimed that the cases don’t actually differ in value: if the utility level is the same, the value is the same. But this is so much biting of the bullet: surely it is better to know than not to know, especially when it comes to one’s own happiness. Isn’t this a rather vital piece of knowledge? A person who went through life believing himself a miserable wretch when in fact he was quite happy would not be living as good a life as one who gets it right; and similarly for someone who regards himself as unusually happy but in fact has a rotten time of it. There is positive value in knowing where you stand happiness-wise.

Third, it might be maintained that the knowledge in question contributes to the level of happiness, and that’s why we judge (a) and (b) differently. That is, knowing your correct level of happiness isa form of happiness: the person who gets it right will therefore be a happier person. If so, we can subsume the value of knowledge under the heading of utility. But this is not plausible: judging your degree of utility correctly does not add to your utility count, any more than other knowledge does. These are two separate things: utility on the one hand, knowledge of utility on the other. Belief isn’t a feeling, so it can’t contribute to the good feelings a person has. Knowledge isn’t a form of pleasure.[1]Whether someone’s beliefs about their own happiness are true or false doesn’t affect how happy they are.

So we are compelled to accept that happiness plus true belief about happiness is better than happiness alone, which means that happiness is not the only valuable thing. Of course, it has been held that knowledge is a value separate from utility, but what the cases of (a) and (b) show is that knowledge of happinesshas intrinsic value. The utilitarian failed to see this because of the assumption of transparency—that happiness will necessarily communicate itself to belief. But once we recognize that that is false we have to accept that knowledge carries its own value, even when (especially when) it is knowledge concerning happiness.[2]Nor can we suppose that such knowledge has merely instrumental value in producing further happiness, because we can stipulate a case in which no such variation in happiness is present—the two people converge exactly and for all time in their utilities while differing in their utility knowledge. Not only is happiness a good thing, but knowledge of happiness is also a good thing—though a good thing of a different type. In a sense, then, utilitarianism is self-refuting, because it presupposes a value it refuses to acknowledge. It assumes that knowledge tracks happiness, thus avoiding acceptance of the separate value of knowledge, but pulling the two apart shows that utility is not enough. The good life is not just the happy life; it is a life in which one is also properly apprised of one’s happiness.

 

Colin McGinn

 

 

 

[1]We don’t analyze knowledge by saying: “xknows that pif and only if xbelieves that p, xfeels good about believing that p, etc.”.

[2]Once it is accepted that utility and knowledge constitute separate values, the question of priority arises: which value is more important? Granted limited resources, we have to assign them to promoting our accepted values, so we have to decide how much to allocate to utility and how much to knowledge of utility. This means that we will have to allocate less to utility than we would under the pure utilitarian doctrine, since we have to allocate resources for the production of knowledge of utility too. So the extended utilitarian doctrine will contradict the recommendations of the simple utilitarian doctrine. And there will always be difficult questions about which value to promote in a given situation. The dent in utilitarianism is therefore not trivial.

Is Descriptive Metaphysics Possible?

 

 

Strawson draws his famous distinction between two types of metaphysics in these words: “Descriptive metaphysics is content to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world, revisionary metaphysics is concerned to produce a better structure”. This formulation raises puzzling questions. One might have thought that descriptive metaphysics (hereafter DM) aims to describe the actual structure of the world, since that is generally the aim of metaphysics (or ontology); but Strawson inserts the words “our thought about”—so that DM is describing the “structure of our thought”. Thought is an attribute of persons, a psychological attribute. So DM is concerned to describe an aspect of human psychology, notthe world outside of human psychology. Our thought is about the world (what else could it be about?), but DM focuses on thought itself, not the world it purports to be about.

Two questions now arise: (a) why is DM construed to be about human psychology? and (b) what is meant by the “structure of thought”? With respect to (a), the natural objection will be that DM, so characterized, is not a type of metaphysics (a general philosophical theory of reality) but a type of psychology (a description of human thought). DM would therefore be wrongly so called: it is not a general description of the world (a metaphysics) but a general description of the human mind. Maybe answering question (b) can help with this objection, depending on what is meant by the “structure” of thought. It is hard to know what Strawson intends by this word, given that “structure” is usually opposed to “content”. Presumably he does not mean the logical form or grammatical structure of thoughts, since that will not bear on what the subject matter of thought is. Nor can he mean some sort of psychological theory of thought—such as an imagistic theory, or a language of thought theory, or a division into conscious and unconscious thought. If he had written “language” and not “thought” into his definition of DM, we might have naturally taken his talk of “structure” that way—as grammatical or logical structure—but that is hardly the right basis for metaphysics. No, Strawson must mean by “structure” content—what it is that we think. He uses “structure” to mean something like “general” or “basic”, not “local” or “particular”. DM is not about our thoughts concerning weasels and warblers but about our thoughts concerning material bodies in general, as well as space, time, persons, events, causation, and such other typical metaphysical topics. So his idea is that DM describes what we think—the content of it—in very general or basic terms. It will tell us, for example, that people think there are material bodies in space and time, and also persons, with events occurring, and causal relations between the events. It will not tell us that there aresuch things, just that people thinkthere are. As Strawson modestly says, DM is “content to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world”—content to say what we in fact think, without trying to discover what is objectively the case (he could have written “content merelyto describe the actual structure of our thought”).

But that project is not, properly speaking, metaphysics, which should endeavor to tell us what isthe case, not merely what we habitually taketo be the case. What Strawson calls “descriptive metaphysics” is simply not a type of metaphysics—it is a type of psychology or anthropology. It might be pursued using standard psychological or anthropological methods: surveys, experiments, even brain science. It would try to discover what it is that people universally think about reality at a basic level. That task has no logical bearing on what is really the case—it is just the attempt to find out what humans in fact believe. Psychologists do investigate this kind of question: they seek the genetically fixed basic concepts and beliefs that humans share; and they find that concepts like material body, person, space, time, causation, andanimalshow up everywhere. But they don’t take themselves to be doing metaphysics (that’s a job for philosophers), just empirical psychology. To be doing metaphysics one would need to claim (at least) that such beliefs are true: but that is to go beyond merely describing what beliefs people have, and hence beyond what DM, as defined by Strawson, is intended to achieve. His aim, as he clearly states, is the modest one of merely describing human thought.

The problem with this formulation can be brought out by considering other areas in which the Strawsonian distinction might be applied: what about the idea of descriptive ethics, or descriptive philosophy of mind, or descriptive logic? In those cases the project would be to describe the “actual structure of our thought” about value, mind, and logical validity: what do we in fact think about these various areas? No doubt such a subject could be pursued, and it might turn up something of value, but it would not be a type of ethics, or philosophy of mind, or logic. It would tell us what people think in these areas, but not what is true in them; and surely, as philosophers, we want to know what is true about value, mind, and logic—not merely what people thinkis true. For they might be quite wrong, and anyway that is not our proper subject matter—we are interested in the thing itself not in people’s beliefs about it. What would we think if someone proposed a new type of physics called “descriptive physics”, the job of which is to describe what people think about the physical world? We might regard this as an interesting venture in anthropology, but we would not suppose that they had identified a new type ofphysics—which concerns what is true of the physical world, not what people think is true. What they think is often false or incomplete, and anyway physical belief is not our proper subject matter—the physical world is.

The upshot is that the concept of “descriptive metaphysics”, as defined by Strawson, is a confused and misbegotten concept: it seems to denote a type of metaphysics, but it does not, being really a misleading label for a type of psychology or anthropology. Maybe this type of psychology would be of interest to philosophers if it engaged in some substantial conceptual analysis, but it would still be psychology unless it claimed that our conceptual scheme (another phrase of Strawson’s) actually reflects the way reality objectively is. Only then would we ascend to the level of metaphysics: but then we would be doing much more than modestly and contentedly describing “the structure of our thought”. And some reason would have to be given for supposing that what we think istrue, as opposed to other metaphysical views that might be proposed. Actively endorsing our conceptual scheme carries much greater intellectual commitment than merely describing what it contains. After all, people often believe a load of rubbish.

This brings us to “revisionary metaphysics”: does that concept fare any better upon close examination? Of course, all metaphysical systems are revisionary in one sense—they are rivals of each other and aim to supplant the opposing system. But Strawson obviously means revisionary with respect to the metaphysics of common sense—that system of belief that he thinks will be revealed by “descriptive metaphysics”. That is, he supposes that some metaphysical systems contradict the metaphysical beliefs held, explicitly or implicitly, by ordinary people; and if so, these systems are to be called “revisionary metaphysics”. Strawson cites Aristotle and Kant as examples of non-revisionary metaphysicians, and Leibniz and Berkeley as revisionary metaphysicians. So some philosophers endorse the metaphysics of the ordinary person and some reject it, according to Strawson.

All this is highly problematic. First, it is exceedingly unclear whether a given philosopher’s metaphysical system really contradicts common sense: Berkeley notoriously insists that he is at one with common sense, merely differing from its materialist interpreters; and Leibniz might say the same of his system—that nothing in what we actually believe in common sense is really inconsistent with the Monadology. Where does Plato fall? Didn’t he think he was in conformity with common sense, since the existence of universals is taken to be implicit in our ordinary language and thought? Universals are not taken to be alien imports from outside, but to be woven into our ordinary practices. What about David Lewis’s modal realism? What about Hume’s view of causation and the self? Is Descartes’ dualism inconsistent with common sense? I can’t think of a single clear case of a metaphysical system that flatly contradicts ordinary belief, and is taken by its proponents so to do. Indeed, such systems often derive their support from evidence drawn from withinour ordinary beliefs and commitments: they are offered as interpretationsof common sense, and hence are sensitive to how we spontaneously speak and think. Surely metaphysicians characteristically oppose othermetaphysicians, while hoping not to violate basic assumptions of common sense. If they preserve nothingof ordinary belief, they have no leg to stand on, and hence have no claim on our credence. They might jettison a part of common sense, but they cannot realistically reject the whole thing—and in practice they never do. So it is difficult to see who might count as a hard-core revisionary metaphysician in Strawson’s sense.

Strawson makes a fundamental error in the way he sets up the contrast he is aiming to capture: he supposes that our ordinary thought actually contains substantial metaphysical commitments or theories. But it doesn’t: it merely commits us to various kinds of entities, properties, and relations. Thus, as he says, we believe in bodies, space, time, persons, events, causal relations, colors, shapes, and so on. But those are not metaphysicalcommitments; they are merely the commonsense things that metaphysics tries to provide theories of. We ordinarily believe in tables, chairs, and other bodies, but the metaphysician tries to tell us what the natureof these things is, which is clearly a further question. Are they mind-independent entities or are they possibilities of perception? Are they reducible to their atomic components? What is their precise relation to space and to events? We ordinarily believe in persons, but what exactly isa person—a body, a brain, a soul, a connected sequence of mental states, or an ontological primitive? We ordinarily believe in space and time, but are space and time absolute or relative, finite or infinite, continuous or granular? We ordinarily believe in events, but are they a separate ontological category or can they be reduced to objects, properties, and times? We ordinarily believe in causation, but how is causation to be analyzed–by means of necessity, counterfactuals, or constant conjunction? We ordinarily believe that objects have colors and shapes, but are these qualities objective or subjective? In all these cases the metaphysician is discussing something accepted by common sense; he is not arguing withcommon sense—not usually anyway. He is explaining common sense not seeking to revise it.

The mistake is to suppose that our ordinary thought contains actual metaphysical theses—as that everything is mental, or everything is material, or abstract objects exist, or causation can be defined counterfactually, or objects are mind-independently colored. Then a metaphysical system could be genuinely revisionary of what we ordinarily believe about the world. But what we have are ordinary beliefs about ordinary things that are up for metaphysical interpretation and theory. Strawson appears to suppose that a commitment to ordinary things is already a type of metaphysics, but it isn’t—it is just the subject matter of metaphysics. That is precisely why metaphysicians can plausibly claim to be in conformity with common sense, because common sense is not committed with respect to the usual range of metaphysical positions (say, materialism versus idealism). Common sense underdeterminesmetaphysics, in the sense that it is not committed to any specific metaphysical system—merely to the entities such systems seek to explain or analyze.  Strawson may well be right that bodies, persons, space, time, and so on, are indispensable commitments of our conceptual scheme: but such things are the topicsof metaphysics not the resultsof metaphysics. If someone were to assert outright that there are no bodies, persons, space or time, etc, but only lumps of floating ectoplasm, then he would certainly be revising common sense. But no actual metaphysical system in the history of philosophy ever maintains such crazy things—for what conceivable ground could one have for asserting such a proposition? Such systems claim, rather, to say what these generally acknowledged things are (what their nature is), without trying to deny their existence or replace them with a brand new set of objects and properties.

The idea of revisionary metaphysics, as Strawson understands the concept, is therefore entirely toothless and quite irrelevant to the metaphysical disputes that have occupied the history of philosophy. It is simply not a useful or well-defined notion. Nor, as we have seen, is the notion of descriptive metaphysics useful or well defined. So what isthe right conception of metaphysics? The answer is easy: it is the attempt to describe the general structure of the world. This is not the same as the attempt to describe the general structure of our thoughtabout the world; nor is it committed to supposing that metaphysics, so conceived, might contradict common sense. It might, wisely, be completely neutral as to whether it is consistent with common sense, holding that common sense is simply not metaphysically opinionated; or it might strive to demonstrate consonance with common sense. But what it actually aims to do is just to discover what is true of reality, without particularly caring one way or the other about its relation to common sense belief. It certainly will not see itself as being “content to describe the actual structure of our thought”, but will seek instead to assert truths about reality outside of thought—claiming, say, that the world is completely material. We might call this, just to have a label, “veridical metaphysics”—truth-seeking metaphysics. It fits neither of Strawson’s categories, and is really the only kind of metaphysics there is. This subject is the analogue of ethics or epistemology or philosophy of mind or physics or geography. None of these disciplines could call themselves “descriptive X” or “revisionary X” in Strawson’s sense: they are neither descriptive of what people think nor intentionally revisionary of what people think—they simply seek to discover the truth about their domain of interest. Whether that truth contradicts common sense, or supports it, is of no interest to them, since their aim is simply to describe (and possibly explain) reality as it is.

None of this is to deny that the metaphysician may (or must) appeal to common sense in coming up with his theories: that is a question of methodology or evidence. What it does deny is that we can definemetaphysics as describing what people think (or “the structure of our thought”). That’s not what it is about—its subject matter, its domain of interest. Typically, a metaphysician will develop a theory of reality by appealing to the way we naturally think or talk about it–for example, theories about modality; but he does not suppose that his topicis human thought—his topic is the nature of necessity itself. If Strawson had said that the descriptive metaphysician aims to describe the general structure of the world by appeal to the structure of our thoughts about it, then he would have defined an intelligible and useful concept; his mistake was expressly to limit DM to what humans think, i.e. a psychological matter, without regard to the truth about the world. Perhaps at some level that is what he really meant, but it is certainly not what he said. And the point is not trivial, because the project I just defined is precisely the one that would draw the fire of positivists and other skeptics about metaphysics: for how, they would ask, can we ever verify such speculative claims about the general structure of reality, and how can common sense belief ever be evidence for what is true of the objective mind-independent world? Strawson’s project, by contrast, has the look of something not open to such objections, since it limits itself to verifiable matters concerning what humans believe: it is perfectly empirical, verifiable, and even scientific. We just have to find out what people in fact believe—we don’t have to engage in unverifiable abstract speculations about reality.

The trouble is that this innocuous project is simply not a kind of metaphysics; so Strawson has done nothingto rehabilitate traditional (or even non-traditional) metaphysics. He is talking about something else entirely. He is talking, in effect, about folk psychology, not about the fundamental nature of reality. It is ironic that he is often celebrated for bringing metaphysics back into philosophy, after its banishment by the positivists and ordinary language philosophers. If he did have such an influence, it was contrary to his official doctrines and words. It might be thought that he smuggled metaphysics (the veridical kind) back in under the guise of something else entirely: he described it as merely reporting what people think, but in fact he was talking about the genuine article—thus allowing philosophers to go back to what they enjoyed with a clear conscience. The idea of descriptive metaphysics made real metaphysics seem acceptable to people, but they misunderstood what Strawson actually said, and then proceeded to carry on where they had left off. Real metaphysics came back, but only by disguising itself as Strawson’s modest and empirically verifiable “descriptive metaphysics”.

Strawson makes two basic mistakes, which lead him into the misconceived distinction I have criticized. The first is to suppose that common sense (“our conceptual scheme,” “the structure of our thought”) contains a determinate metaphysics that might compete with standard metaphysical systems—such as the view that bodies are possibilities of sensation (phenomenalism), or that persons are a primitive ontological category (Strawson’s own metaphysical position), or that space and time are absolute and mind-independent, or that causation is a matter of constant conjunction, or that events are logical constructions from objects, properties, and times. If it did contain such a determinate metaphysics, it would be obviously inconsistent with a variety of metaphysical theories: but that appears not to be so. Common sense is just not that specific and metaphysically sophisticated. It accepts the existence of various things, but it ventures no opinion on their ultimate nature. The second mistake is to conflate describing our conceptual scheme with endorsing it; or rather, not to keep these as separate as they need to be kept. It is one thing to say what we think; it is quite another to declare what we think to be true. So even if common sense contained a determinate metaphysics, capable of clashing with typical metaphysical systems, that would not show that its metaphysics was correct. To reach the latter conclusion one would need substantial further argument, going well beyond the official business of DM. These assumptions are what would be needed to show that so-called descriptive metaphysics was really a kind of metaphysics (when supplemented with the veridicality claim), and to show that revisionary metaphysics had something to get its teeth into in attempting to revise common sense metaphysics. As it is, neither assumption holds up under examination. The conclusion, then, is that DM is not possible (as a type of metaphysics) and that RM is ill defined. All we have are different (veridical-type) metaphysical systems, proposed by theoretical philosophers, clashing with each other—just as things were before Strawson introduced his influential but misconceived distinction.

The right thing to say is that all metaphysics is descriptive (of reality) andrevisionary (of other metaphysics). No metaphysics is merely descriptive of our thought, that being part of psychology, anthropology, or possibly philosophy of mind. How much metaphysics can plausibly be read into common sense is at best moot. We are committed to various kinds of entities and properties, to be sure, but whether these commitments reach the level of metaphysics proper is dubious at best—substantial theory construction and interpretation is required before we can move from common sense commitments to real metaphysics. It is highly implausible to claim that common sense selects one metaphysical system over other competing metaphysical systems. What Strawson calls “the structure of our thought” (whatever exactly that might be) does not yield a unique and recognizable metaphysical system. Nor is it credible to suppose that common sense is fixed and impermeable to outside supplementation or even revision. Clearly, science has entered common sense at various points, changing it quite fundamentally: the theory of evolution, the extent of the universe, the nature of motion, gravity, electricity, etc. These additions have altered our common sense views of force and causation, of the nature of matter, of how animals came to exist, and so on. Our common sense views of animals and material bodies have changed substantially as a result of biology and physics. Our conceptual scheme is not as conservative and static as Strawson sometimes suggests, though at a very abstract level it has been stable for many thousands of years. His picture appears to be that our ordinary thoughts provide the last word on general questions about reality, but that is far too sanguine a view of what ordinary thought comprises. Also, defending such a view would require doing something quite different from the job Strawson assigns to descriptive metaphysics. It would require a systematic evaluation of ordinary thought, not merely recording what we do in point of fact think. I have said nothing about how such an evaluation might proceed or where it might lead; my point has been just to distinguish it sharply from the project Strawson labels “descriptive metaphysics”.  That project is entirely descriptive, not evaluative.

Let me make a final point about epistemology. If we try to generalize Strawson’ distinction to epistemology, the picture changes because of the role of skepticism. Skepticism can quite legitimately be described as “revisionary epistemology” because it clearly contradicts many of our ordinary beliefs about knowledge and justification: we think we know and can justify a great many things that the skeptic says we cannot know and justify. Our common sense epistemology is quite firmly committed, and so skepticism can easily be seen to fly in its face. So we should have no objection to calling skepticism “revisionary epistemology”. What about “descriptive epistemology”? It is a perfectly feasible enterprise: find out what we ordinarily believe about questions of knowledge and justification. This may be worthwhile and interesting, but again it would be a non sequitur to move from such information to claims about what really isknown or justified—and the skeptic would obviously contest such a move. All this is quite above board and sensible; in particular, we can read a clear epistemology into our ordinary beliefs, so that skepticism can be seen to clash with common sense. It isn’t that common sense is indeterminate with respect to whether we know ordinary facts about the external environment.

I suspect this model was influencing Strawson and his followers, with revisionary metaphysics playing the role of skepticism. That would explain why he set the issues up as he did. But the analogy is imperfect, because the alleged clash between common sense and specific metaphysical views is either unclear or non-existent. Metaphysical theories are offered as theories of the world that may or may not fit with common sense, and which are sometimes justified by appeal to common sense belief (or possibly by science, or direct metaphysical insight); but skepticism is offered expressly as a criticismof common sense, and hence as explicitly revisionary. If you are a philosopher who has little time for skepticism, you will be inclined to go with the epistemological opinions of common sense—as in fact Strawson was himself. This may then color your views about metaphysical theories, which you will see as skeptical with regard to common sense metaphysics. But the cases are crucially dissimilar, and the conceptual apparatus used to deal with one (epistemology) will not carry over smoothly to the other (metaphysics). If so, Strawson’s distinction between descriptive and revisionary metaphysics owes its origin to a misplaced obsession with skepticism.[1]

 

C

[1]For the record, Peter Strawson was my teacher and friend, and I had (and have) great admiration for him as a philosopher. Individualsis a brilliant book.