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ADVERTISEMENT FOR THE BOOK 'LINES OF THOUGHT: RETHINKING PHILOSOPHICAL ASSUMPTIONS (CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PUBLISHING, 2014)

What follows is the advanced draft of the introduction.

Introduction

Philosophy can be as much a product of creative imagination as also of some dark insight into the true nature of things. There is not much of the former in this book, but hopefully more of the latter. As the subtitle suggests, most of these essays are attempts to revise philosophical assumptions or to replace them with others that I believe come closer to the truth. Below, I briefly comment on each paper.

Paper 1 defends the thesis that we can think of philosophy as a kind of anticipation of science. There are two main objections to this view: the first is that it is reductive, impoverishing philosophy; the second is that it is opposed to the commonly accepted notion that philosophy is an activity of analysing and ordering our conceptual structures.

The answer to the objection of reductionism is to reject reductive views of science, adopting instead a sufficiently wide and in effect commonsensical view of science as a kind of consensualisable critical inquiry (J. M. Ziman). In contrast to this, philosophical investigations appear as a kind of non-consensualisable critical inquiry that historically has often been replaced by a consensualisable critical inquiry – a scientific discipline. The exploration of this dynamic dichotomy constitutes the bulk of the paper.

We can answer the second objection, that viewing philosophy as a proto-science entails abandoning the analytical approach, by understanding conceptual analysis as an essentially methodological procedure. It arises from the inevitably conjectural and argumentative character of philosophy, which usually requires the kind of semantic-metalinguistic form of representation that W. V. Quine termed the semantic ascent. The upshot of this argument is that it is possible to regard philosophy (at least in part, as will be shown) as an anticipation of science, without abandoning the methodological procedures of conceptual analysis.

 Paper 2 is in my view the main contribution to this collection, since I believe it persuasively challenges the current causal-historical orthodoxy regarding the mechanism of reference in applying proper names. What I propose is a new, stronger version of the cluster theory of proper names. The key to this new theory is a meta-identifying rule that we all tacitly know and that can in an evaluative way select and combine the descriptions belonging to the cluster of descriptions abbreviated by a proper name: if a proper name satisfies the conditions specified by the rule, it has a reference – otherwise not. This proposal retains the main insights of the causal-historical view. Because of its derivation of what can be called identification rules for each proper name, we can not only formulate a more detailed reply to the counter-examples to descriptivism, but also explain the informative content of any proper name and why, in contrast to descriptions, they are rigid designators. In my view, this is the most convincing theory of reference for proper names currently at our disposal. Moreover, since a theory of proper names is the cornerstone of the theories of reference, if true, it could bring with it the seeds that could transform the present landscape of linguistic philosophy.

The aim of paper 3 is to offer a new descriptivist analysis of the concept of ‘water’ that complements everyday descriptions of surface properties with new scientific deep descriptions of water’s chemical structure. An adequate development of this approach allows us to reinterpret Putnam’s Twin Earth fantasy in an internalist manner, as a projection of different cognitive-descriptive contents onto different kinds of things, tacitly using Oscar and Twin Oscar as mere referential devices. The concept of water is here restricted to a semantic-cognitive rule.

Paper 4 deals with John Perry’s argument against the Fregean treatment of indexical utterances, showing that they cannot be translated into eternal sentences expressing Fregean thoughts. I show that it is possible to retain the sense of the indexical in an eternal sentence able to do the job of preserving the completing sense (the Fregean thought) of the former.

Papers 2, 3 and 4 share the same assumption, namely, that what we really need in order to explain mechanisms of reference is not an externalist view, but rather a much better developed formulation of the old internalist-descriptivist approach, based on sufficiently elaborated semantic-cognitive rules.

Paper 5 presents a revised formulation of the classical concept of knowledge as justified true belief. The thesis of this paper is that Gettier’s problem is a regrettable consequence of neglecting the dialogical-perspectival dimension of our knowledge evaluations. The main reason for the long neglect of this perspectival dimension was a simplistic formal translation of the classical understanding of non-basic propositional knowledge as justified true belief. This translation conceals intuitions that should belong to an adequate elucidation of the classical insight, making possible misleading interpretations of the Gettierian type.

In contrast, when we make explicit the underlying assumptions in our view of knowledge as justified true belief, we arrive at a perspectival or dialogical-reflexive reconstruction of the standard definition that shows the precise internal way in which the condition of justification must be related to the condition of truth in order to achieve new knowledge. This new definition should be preferred, because it neatly disposes of all the Gettierian counter-examples without gratuitously creating new difficulties. If epistemology can find the path of science in the broad sense of the word explicated in the first chapter, this could be a first step.

Paper 6 contains not only a new (and in my view entirely convincing) proof of the existence of the external world, but also what I believe to be the ultimate answer to the most influential sceptical argument since Descartes: the argument from ignorance (also called ‘the modus tollens sceptical argument’) concerning the existence of the external world. This argument is a refinement of the Cartesian suggestion that if we cannot know that the external world is real, we cannot know anything about the outside world.

My refutation rests on an analysis of our concept of reality. It works by showing that there are two distinct attributions of reality implicitly made in the argument from ignorance: reality as something inherent (as the word is used in everyday life), and reality as something adherent (comparatively regarded with the help of sceptical scenarios or artificial reality). I show that if stated in full, the argument begins with the disattribution of reality as something adherent and ends with the disattribution of reality as something inherent. This makes it clear that the argument from ignorance is at bottom equivocal and, consequently, fallacious. Moreover, a similar strategy can be employed to refute the converse of the argument from ignorance – the argument from knowledge – which attempts to prove that sceptical hypotheses about the existence and reality of the external world can be refuted. In this case, we can show that the attribution of reality as something inherent is treated as if were an attribution of reality as something adherent, which also leads to equivocation and fallacy.

Paper 7 lays the foundations of a better compatibilist theory of free will. One main problem for compatibilism is that it lacks a satisfactory definition of free will. The classical compatibilist definitions of free will (as the absence of constraint) were intuitive but too narrow, while later ‘hierarchical’ definitions, if they were not somewhat arbitrary, were often too focused on certain kinds of freedom to the detriment of others. The definition of free will proposed here does not suffer from these shortcomings. It is not too narrow, because it is an extension of the traditional definition; nor is it arbitrary, because its categories mirror the causal structure of action. Resting on the causal theory of action, the new definition of free agency proposed here allows us to describe nearly all the different kinds of freedom of agency with reference to their physical, volitional and rational origins. It enables us to identify supposed counterexamples in accordance with the kinds of restrictions on freedom they imply, which neutralizes them in an intuitively convincing way. And it is potentially able to integrate hierarchical responses into its explanatory network.

Paper 8 develops a new compatibilist paraphrase of the idea that when we act freely we know that we could have done otherwise, as an alternative to G. E. Moore’s well-known but unfortunate paraphrase. The basic idea is that when we say that we could have done otherwise, we mean something like, ‘I would have chosen to do otherwise, if only certain internal conditions under the control of my will hadn't been the same’. This involves a difference that usually goes unnoticed, but makes all the difference in the world, since it appeals to a merely possible (and not actually available) alternative causal chain. This paraphrase enables us to give a straightforward compatibilist answer to consequence arguments like those of Peter Van Inwagen and also offers a new and unexpected answer to Harry Frankfurt’s challenge to the principle of alternative possibilities.

The central idea of Chapter 9 is that in order to be identified with mental types, neurophysiological types must be understood as sufficiently comprehensive neurofunctional structures within biological brains. If we understand neurophysiological types in this way, the multiple realisability objection to the identity theory of mind could be circumvented, at least when applied to qualia, which belong to the phenomenal mind.

Furthermore, I suggest that even if cognitive states, which typically belong to the cognitive mind, threaten to escape our argument, remaining multiply realisable, they would not preserve their semantic content if they were not semantically dependent on phenomenal states, for thoughts without intuitions are empty, as Kant rightly pointed out. This shows that the cognitive mind does not exist without its integration into the phenomenal mind, and, consequently, that even cognitive states must be realised in biological brains. As a consequence of this, a new strategy to solve the mind-body problem is foreshadowed. A final supplementary point is an answer to the objection that qualia are irreducible.

Paper 10 critically clarifies the question of the relationship between consciousness and reality. It begins with the consideration that consciousness is an evolutionary product whose function is to give the organism an image of how the things affecting it really are. In order to provide evidence for this thesis, I show that the need for access to reality plays a fundamental role in the evolution and constitution of what could be plausibly acknowledged as the three main forms of consciousness. Moreover, these forms of consciousness are recognised as such because of their common property of showing things as they really are.

Finally, paper 11 provides a pragmatic examination of what we might mean when we say or think, ‘I am thinking’. This analysis shows that in a meaningful sense we cannot really say or think that we are thinking, without a possibility of error. The direct consequence of this for the Cartesian cogito is that only the ‘I am, I exist’ of the Meditations can (possibly) be understood as an indefeasible, self-verifying thought.

The papers collected here are analytical and systematic, wide in scope and sometimes conjectural, insisting on the extemporaneous aim of assigning the rightful status to common-sense and ordinary language insights as the ‘beginning of all, though not the end of all’, to quote J. L. Austin. Due to the prima facie credibility of their points of departure (if we put aside their incompatibility with many ingenious but fanciful philosophical proposals), some of these papers also achieve a kind of synthetic dimension by organically relating plausible assumptions to one another in a constructive and comprehensive way. In this regard, I hope that they recall something of the old Continental Style of analytic philosophy.