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© Basil
Blackwell Ltd 1989
First published 1989
. I I t first to raise the question: 'Whether such a thing...
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Copyright
© Basil
Blackwell Ltd 1989
First published 1989
. I I t first to raise the question: 'Whether such a thing as metaphysics is possible at all?' (Pro/., 255)
This project, while revolutionary in one respect, was simple in another. As Kant realized, the entire problem could be reduced to one Hauptfrage, namely, How are synthetic a priori judgements possible? For the purpose of metaphysics is 'not merely to analyse concepts . . . and thereby to clarify them analytically, but to extend our a priori knowledge' (B 18). Since synthetic, that is, 'ampliative' judgements are thus the ultimate purpose of all speculative knowledge a priori (cf. A9-10/B13), the fortune of metaphysics, or its possibility, must stand or fall with the possibility of such judgements. To solve this problem was the task Kant set himself in the Critique of Pure Reason. 3 To this end he propounded a new type of reflection for which the old name of a transcendental philosophy was ready to hand: 'It can be said that the whole transcendental philosophy which necessarily precedes all metaphysics is itself nothing other than merely the complete solution of the question proposed here, only in systematic order and full detail (Prol., 279). In the present context I can only outline Kant's solution to the problem of metaphysical knowledge. As is well known, it is partly negative. About such objects of classical metaphysical speculation as God, the soul, or the world. toto genere, which necessarily lie beyond all possible experience, he argues, no theoretical knowledge is humanly possible. The knowledge we do have of things within our field of experience, on the other hand, is inevitably empirical or a. posteriori, not a priori. However, as Kant points out at the beginning of the Critique: 'it may well be that even our empirical knowledge is made up of what we receive through impressions and of what our own faculty of knowledge (sensible impressions serving merely as the occasion)
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supplies from itself'.(Bl) That is to say, if the subject of experience, although not entirely producing its own experience, nevertheless contributed so m.uch to it that withoutthis subjectivecontributian no experience was possible - if, that is, experience had to be constituted - then some synthetic a priori judgements would be possible in philosophy. For we could then anticipate the form, although not the content, of a possible experience and hence make valid judgements a priori about experience in general. The Critique, in a profoundly subtle and difficult luan11er, tries to prove the correctness of this contention. First it argues that. we do not experience things in themselves but merely the representations they occasion in our sensibility, and that even space and time are mere forms of our intuition, not properties of things in themelves. This step is important, for if the objects of our perceptions were things in themselves, all our knowledge would have to be a posteriori. 4 The impressions thus received by our senses, however, do not amount to knowledge. For sensibility is a completely passive faculty, a mere 'capacity of receiving representations (receptivity for impressions)' (A50/ B74). It does not connect and relate the manifold it receives. For knowledge of objects to arise, therefore, the manifold has to be ordered and related, it has to be 'gone through ... taken up, and connected' (A77/BI02).5 The second and decisive step takes place in the Transcendental Deduction. Self-consciousness, Kant here tries to prove, is possible only if I have experience of an objective order which can be distinguished from the merely subjective order of representations that occur in my mind. Since, on the one hand, the actuality of my self-consciousness is indubitably eviden~, yet, on the other hand, sensibility only provides a n1anifold of unconnected sense-impressions, it follows that I myself have to connect these in1pressions in a determinate fashion and thus impose the objective order on this manifold through which the objects of experience (nature) first become possible. All my experience is thus necessarily subject to rules or laws of the understanding, for only thus can it become my experience. That nature should direct itself according to our subjective ground of apperception, and should indeed depend upon it in respect of its conformity to law, sounds very strange and absurd. But when we consider that this nature is not a thing in itself but is merely an aggregate of appearances, so many representations of the mind, we shall not be surprised that we . can discover it only in the radical faculty of all our knowledge, namely, in transcendental apperception, in that unity on account of which alone it can be entitled object of all possible experience, that is, nature. (Al14)
With this remarkable tour de force, the riddle of metaphysics has thus finally been solved and the transcendental Hauptfrage received its
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overdue answer: the conditions of possible experience have objective validity in a synthetic a priori judgement, for they are likewise the conditions of possible objects of experience (cf. A158/B197). This very broad and schematic account of Kant's solution to the problem of metaphysical knowledge must suffice here. Rather than going into any of the details of Kant's argumentation, I should like to add some general comments about the type of proof he thought possible in transcendental philosophy. First of all, Kant thought, a transcendental proof (i.e., a proof for a synthetic a priori conclusion) requires the truth of transcendental idealisn1. There is no ambiguity about this in Kant; it is 'the only feasible' reason, so the Critique declares (A130), why a transcendental deduction is possible. To which the Prolegomena adds: transcendental idealism is 'the sole means of solving [the] problem [of synthetic knowledge a priori]' (Prol., 377). The same point is also emphasized several times in Kant's correspondence. 6 Because of this presupposition, secondly, transcendental proofs must always be direct, or ostensive. As they are conducted 'within the domain proper to dialectical illusion', where what is merely subjective often presents itself as being objective, a synthetic a priori proposition cannot be established by disproving its opposite: The apagogic method of proof is ... permissible only in those sciences where it is impossible mistakenly to substitute what is subjective in our representations for what is objective, that is, for the knowledge of that which is in the object. Where such substitution tends to occur, it must often happen that the opposite of a given proposition contradicts only the subjective conditions of thought, and not the object, or that the two propositions contradict each other only under a subjective condition which is falsely treated as being objective; the condition being false, both can be false, without it being possible to infer from the falsity of the one to the truth of the other. (A791/B819)
Both types of illusion Kant aptly illustrates with an example from the Dialectic. A proper transcendental proof, consequently, must always be direct or ostensive; that is to say, it must 'combine with the conviction of this truth insight into the sources of its truth' (A789/B817). Bearing this in mind it is not difficult to see why Kant, when he had to characteriz~ the peculiar nature of his proof-procedure, thought the term 'deduction' an appropriate title. We only have to remember that his paradigm is the legal deduction, not the strict proof-procedure in standard logic which we now generally call by that name. 7 In legal nlatters, jurists usually distinguish two things, namely, the establishment of facts, or the quaestio facti, and the investigation whether or not these facts exist rightfully, that is, the quaestio juris. A legal procedure which decides a quaestio juris requires the denl0nstration that a particular claim or possession is not obtained surreptitiously but
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has come off lawfully; that it is derived from descent, inheritance or legal contract. Such procedure, in Kant's time, was called a deduction, and its similarity with his own approach is plain to see. For like a legal deduction, the transcendental investigation concerns the origin of a particular 'possession' (of metaphysical knowledge), that is, the subjective conditions of its possibility. In strict analogy to a legal claim, a metaphysical knowledge claim is justified through the discernment of its origin; such a claim is justified precisely if one is entitled to assert the possession of that knowledge. For this reason, Kant noted: 'Everyone must defend his position directly, by a legitimate proof [rechtlichen Beweis] that carries with it a transcendental deduction of the grounds upon which it is itself made to rest' (A794/B822). And since the grounds in questiqn are the subjective conditions of possible knowledge, he could also write: 'In the transcendental science everything must be derived from the subject'; in this discipline, 'only a single proof is possible, namely, from the concept of the subject'. 8 Unfortunately, it is this concept of the subject which also introduces what seem to be insurn10untable problems into Kant's ingenious theory. The subject in question cannot be n1Y empirical self which, like any other object of experience, has to be constituted. This self cannot constitute itself - any more than a self-portrait, say, can paint itself. The Kantian model thus requires another, non-empirical or transcendental self: '1. The I which combines and separates. - 2. I as the composite [das Zusammengesetzte] of inner intuition.'9 Yet this may still not be enough. For Kant also speaks, and speaks repeatedly, of a 'real' self, or self in itself, of which my empirical self is only the appearance. This 'real' self, which also appears to be the locus of moral deliberation and free choices - is it or isn't it the same as the transcendental I whose 'sole function' is to combine a given manifold? Somehow these different selves have to be identical, yet it is not clear how they can be. Their interrelation is a mystery. But this is a problem I only want to n1ention in passing rather than dwell on, as it has been well exploited in the recent literature. 1o It is worth noticing, however, that Kant's constitution-theory has encountered considerable difficulties on the side of the object, too. Since the active mind is said to impose all order on the otherwise unrelated manifold, the unity of any given object can be 'nothing else than the formal unity of consciousness in the synthesis of the manifold of representations'(A105). 'Combination does not,' Kant insists, 'lie in the objects, and cannot be borrowed from them.' (B134) Yet it is difficult to see how, for instance, living organisms could- fit this picture. They seem to enjoy a unity, even spontaneity, which is independent of the subject of experience and which makes them alive. The parts of an
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animal, say, seem to be related not just externally but through some inner (purposive) principle of organization. Most importantly, of this we learn through experience. On and off, this problem occupied Kant for the rest of his life. 11 He devoted a large part of the Critique of Judgement to it, trying to solve it with the help of the distinction between determinant and reflective judgement. But it may perhaps be seen as an indication of how deeply the problem cuts into Kant's system that when it came to solving the 'Antinomy' of Mechanism and Teleology, which arises from the need to reconcile determinant and reflective judgement, constitutive and regulative principles in the face of any particular experience of an organism, Kant offered two different, and incompatible, 'solutions'. One of them, presented as an 'Anmerkung' (§§ 76-8), is still in some accord with the first Critique; the other, developed in §§ 69-75 but probably written later than its competitor,12 treats both the mechanical and teleological principle, efficient cause and final cause, as mere maxims of reflective judgement! Judgement itself here becomes an 'autonomous' cognitive faculty - a status explicitly denied to it in the first Critique. (cf. A133f/B172f) The preliminary character of this 'solution' can hardly be in question. In the Opus postumum Kant returns to the problem of organisms, but again without bringing it to a fully satisfactory solution. 13
II Given these problems, it is hardly surprising that none of the basic ingredients of Kant's solution to the transcendental Hauptfrage has survived critical discussion within the analytic philosophy of our time. The idea of a constitution of experience in Kant's idealistic sense has become a non-issue; and with it, the belief in a transcendental self, a non-empirical'!' which constitutes nature from disconnected impressions but which itself is never to be n1et with in experience, has gone by the board. What is more surprising is that, in spite of these rejections of Kant's fundamental assun1ptions, a revival of transcendental reasoning has taken place within the analytic tradition, and has demanded attention for well over two decades now. This revival should seem all the more surprising as the very heart, or focal point, of Kant's transcendental theory, the notion of a synthetic a priori, has been the target of substantial criticisn1. This criticism of course has its own history; only in our days, however, has it been carried right into the centres of Kant scholarship. Strawson, for instance, in his masterly The Bounds of Sense, alleges that 'Kant really has no clear and general conception of the synthetic
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a priori at all', and suggests that the central problem in understanding the Critique is that of disentangling all that hangs on the doctrine of transcendental idealism and its 'Copernican resources' from the underlying, and 'independent', argument. 14 E. T. Wilkerson, in his comn1entary on Kant's first Critique, has gone one step further. 'I am going to suppose,' he writes, 'that instead of asking, How are synthetic a priori propositions possible?, Kant is really asking, What are the necessary conditions of a possible experience?'15 This is perhaps one step too far. But I do not here wish to qu~ry the philosophical sensitivity that underlies such identification of two different questions, if only for interpretative purposes. Nor am I questioning the fruitfulness of a separation of problems concerning the general conditions of possible experience from those that relate to the 'Copernican resources' of Kant's theory; this can hardly be in doubt. What I wish to suggest, however, is that the original Kantian question is not so easily disposed of. This will become clear, I think, if we look at some of the so-called transcendental arguments that have emerged in the last few decades: argun1ents by, for example, Wittgenstein, Strawson, Davidson or Malcolm, to mention just a few. All of them claim some necessity, or status of indispensability, for certain features of our conceptual scheme. Wittgenstein, for example, in his Philosophical Investigations, argues that it is not possible to obey a rule privately and hence to have a language which in principle no one but the speaker could understand. Strawson, in The Bounds of Sense claims that the fundamental or basic judgements of experience must be' objective judgements. More recently, Davidson has contended that a creature cannot have thoughts unless it is an interpreter of the speech of others. And Malcolm, finally, has tried to prove that mechanism, or neurophysiological determinism, cannot conceivably be true of hun1an beings. 16 All of these propositions would traditionally have been classified as synthetic a priori. The terms themselves are of course not important here. What is important, however, is that the mentioned conclusions are not arrived at inductively, on the basis of observation and empirical generalization. They are a priori. On the other hand, they are not analytic. It is hardly part of the meaning of, say, 'mechanism', or 'rule', that the former cannot be true of human beings, or that the latter cannot be grounded in anything but public behaviour. Nor does it seen1 to be an analytic truth about 'experience' that the fundamental experiential judgen1ents should be objective ones. The same holds also for 'thinking creatures' and the requirement that they should be interpreters of the speech of others. The Kantian problem, I take it, is thus alive and well: How are such non-analytic, non-empirical cognitions possible? The question arises
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even if we dismiss Kant's transcendental idealism and investigate the limiting frame of our thoughts about, and experiences of, the world separately. We do not have to phrase the question in these words. Instead, we could ask, How is (descriptive) metaphysics possible? Or, as I will here put the question, How are transcendental arguments possible? Naturally it is to be expected that the answer will differ from the one Kant gave. Nevertheless, it is an answer to this question that we n1ust seek, I suggest, if we are to understand the nature of transcendental arguments. Now we have noticed earlier that for Kant any proof of a synthetic a priori proposition must be direct or ostensive, that is to say, it must proceed 'from the concept of the subject' and 'combine with the conviction of its truth insight into the sources of its truth'. And it is precisely for this reason that, according to Kant, any such proof takes the form of a deduction, a discernment of the origin of the claim in question. As for transcendental arguments, it is clear tha~ their proof-procedure cannot be a direct one, 'from the concept of the subject'. This Kantian subject, or transcendental self, is no longer thought to exist or at least does not play any role in transcendental arguments. In other words, transcendental arguments are not transcendental deductions. If their procedure cannot be direct, however, it seems that they can only establish their conclusions by showing that alternatives to these conclusions are incoherent. And thus indeed do our candidates proceed. Strawson sets out to establish his 'objectivity condition', not by means of a deduction but by testing 'how it stands up to attack'. The subsequent discussion then aims to show that the proposed alternative to the objectivity condition falls short of the requirements for genuine experience. (I shall return to this argument shortly.) Malcolm (1968), similarly, first assumes mechanism to be true and proceeds by 'deducing a consequence of mechanism' (p. 64), namely, the impossibility of intentional behaviour, hence of thought and speech. Now if mechanism is a true theory, it must be statable. But if it is statable, it is false. Thus, if it is true, it is false and hence is disproved, Malcolm argues, by reductio ad absurdum. Davidson's (1983) provocative article follows the same strategy although in a slightly less palpable fashion. Asking if there can be thought without speech, he points out, roughly, that thoughts depend on, and can only be identified against, the background of large patterns of interlocked beliefs entertained by the thinker. To have a belief, however, involves a grasp of the possibility of being mistaken and of the contrast between truth and error. Yet this contrast, it is then argued, and the concepts of objective truth and error, can only emerge in a
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context of interpretation. Hence no content can be given to the idea that a creature has thoughts without being an interpreter of the speech of others. That Wittgenstein's argun1ent against the possibility of a private language takes the form of a reductio ad absurdum has been pointed out many times and needs no repeating here. 17 Although it will be convenient to refer to the procedure of transcendental arguments as reductio ad absurdum, it must be emphasized that they are not reductiones in a strictly logical sense. Transcendental arguments are no more logical proofs than Kant's deductions are. If the proposition to be disproved by the argument entailed a logical contradiction, its negation, the proposition to be established, would be a tautology. Yet the conclusions of transcendental arguments are not. This raises a crucial question about the conclusiveness, or force, of transcendental arguments; a question reminiscent of Kant's quest for a 'third something' that warrants the connection of subject and predicate in a synthetic judgement in the absence of any confirming experience (cf. A155/B194). And just as in Kant's case, I would maintain, what supports the conclusion of the transcendental argument is the reference to the possibility of experience or thought, as the case may be. That is to say, we are invited to imagine if experience, say, would be possible if the conceptual feature at issue were missing. This point must not be misunderstood. The question is not if we now, intellectually developed as we are and with the conceptual resources we have, can form the idea of a string of purely subfective experiences. There is no doubt that we can. What has to be asked instead is whether, if experience were completely of such subjective order, we could have arrived at a conception of experience which fulfils the minimun1 requiren1ent for it to count as experience. This is a crucial but elusive point, and I think it best to illustrate it by looking at one of the argun1ents mentioned above in more detail, namely Strawson's 'objectivity thesis'. Strawson (1966, pp. 31-2) wishes to establish the Kantian conclusion that 'a certain objectivity and a certain unity are necessary conditions of the possibility of experience'. But he wishes to do so without any reference to a transcendental, nonempirical self - the 'imaginary subject of transcendental psychology' (p. 32) - and its associated faculties. Instead he takes his start from Kant's 'standard-setting definition' of what is to count as experience, namely, that it should be conceptualizable, and that particular contents of experience should be recognized as having some general character, as falling under son1e general concepts. 18 Now if particular iten1S are to be recognized as falling under general concepts, it must be the case, first, that it is the san1e subject which experiences the item and which entertains the concept under which the
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item is to be subsumed. But it must also be the case, in order to apply
general concepts, that a presently encountered item can be linked with other past or possible experiences of the same kind, experiences which were or could be enjoyed by the same subject, and to which (s)he did, or could, apply the same concept. That is to say, experiential items which can figure in a possible experience must stand in mutual relations to the same subject; they must be united in a single consciousness (cf. p. 87). But they can only be thus united, so Strawson's thesis, if the subject's experience is at least in part of an objective reaItn: 'unity of diverse experiences in a single consciousness requires experience of objects' (p. 98). This conclusion he tries to establish, not by means of a transcendental deduction but by confronting it with an alleged alternative: 'We can test the strength of the thesis by seeing how it stands up to attack' (p. 98). The alternative proposed is that a 'purely sense datum experience' might be possible, an experience which consisted entirely of disconnected impressions like flashes, colours, whistles, smells, etc. which could be brought under sensory quality concepts but which did not allow for objective judgements in the sense that a distinction could be drawn between how things are and how they appear to the subject (cf. p. 99). Strawson's way of meeting this challenge is by enquiring whether the 'purely sense datum experience' could satisfy the requirement that experience must involve the recognition of particular items as being of some general kind. His claim is that it could not. The hypothesis of essentially disconnected impressions, he suggests, cannot give rise to the idea of a single consciousness to which the various experiences are supposed to belong. If the idea of a single consciousness is lacking, however, the recognitional element, necessary to all experience, cannot be maintained. The argument might be sketched as follows. When we examine a series of sense data and assert the disconnectedness of its members, we have already adopted a standpoint, as it were, outside the impressions from which we view the series. There is nothing in the series itself which could give rise to this claim: disconnected impressions cannot 'know' of their disconnectedness. Equally, it seems, there is nothing in such a series that could, by itself, give rise to the idea that its members all belong to a single consciousness: 'We seem to add nothing but a form of words to the hypothesis of a succession of essentially disconnected impressions by stipulating that they all belong to an identical consciousness' (p. 100). And it would be equally vacuous to stipulate that the unitary consciousness is that which is successively aware of the impressions: The trouble with such 'ohjects of awareness' as those offered by the hypothesis is that just as their esse is, to all intents and purposes, their percipi - i.e. there is no effective ground of distinction between the two - so their percipi seems
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to be nothing but their esse. The hypothesis seems to contain no ground of distinction between the supposed experience of awareness and the particular item which the awareness is awareness of. (p. 100)
What becomes then of the requirement that in all experience, 'even in the most fleeting and purely subjective of impressions', there must be a component of recognition which is not simply identical with the recognized item? The recognitional component can be present in such experience only if the impressions are relatable to something other than impressions. By hypothesis, however, there are no other things besides impressions to which they might be referred. The requirement can only be satisfied, therefore, if it is possible to refer the different experiences to one identical subject of them all. What is required is a potential selfascription of these experiences: 'It is the fact that this potentiality is implicit in recognition which saves the recognitional con1ponent in a particular experience from absorption into the item recognized (and hence saves the character of the particular experience as an experience) even when that item cannot be conceived of as having an existence independent of the particular experience of it' (p. 101). Yet the minimum that is required by the potentiality of such self-ascription of experiences is precisely what the hypothesis of purely sense datum experience attempts to exclude, namely, that some of the experiences which are recognized as falling under certain general concepts should allow for a distinction between an objective order of things and a point of view of awareness of this order. Some, not all. There are enough subjective experiences - momentary tickling sensations or suchlike - the objects of which have no existence independent of the awareness of them. What is argued to be impossible is that all experiences should be of this type. For if, per impossibile, they were so, even the basis of the idea of the referring of such experiences to an identical subject of a series of them by such a subject would be altogether lacking; and if the basis of this idea were lacking, it would be in1possible to distinguish the recognitional components in such 'experiences' as components not wholly absorbed by their sensible accusatives; and if this were impossible, they would not rate as experiences at all. (pp. 101f)
It seems worth pointing out that Strawson's thesis does not require that all experiences must actually be self-ascribed. 19 The argument is, rather, that only if experience is (partly) of an objective order is a distinction possible between the way things are and the way they seem to be; and only on the condition of this pcssibility can expe~·iences actually be self-ascribed. Nothing has to be added to these experiences to render such self-ascription possible. Strawson sometimes expresses this point by saying that objective experience 'provides room' for~ or 'contains the seed' or 'the basis' of, the idea of referring different experiences to an identical subject, and hence to render possible a
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distinction between recognitional components and experienced items when the objects of awareness have no existence independently of the subject's awareness of thenl. Sense datum experience, on the other hand, does not allow for such distinction; it does not contain 'in itself the materials for the conception of itself as experience'. Hence, 'no true alternative has been advanced to the ... requirement that the fundamental or basic judgements of experience should themselves be objective judgements' (p. 110). We have here, it seems to me, in clear view the basic elements that make up a transcendental argument in the modern, post-Kantian sense. Such argument proposes to establish a non-analytical, non-empirical conclusion, thus warranting the label 'transcendental'. It does so by considering an alternative, and by demonstrating the internal incoherence of the alternative. It does so, more precisely, by showing that, in order to make itself intelligible, the alternative must borrow materials which it purports to rule out qua alternative. Although this is the procedure of post-Kantian transcendental arguments, it is interesting to notice that there is one argument in the Critique that exhibits exactly the same features: the Refutation of Idealism which Kant added to the second edition. It sets out to prove a non-analytical proposition, namely, that there are things in space outside me (B275). And it does so indirectly, and without evoking (or even mentioning) transcendental idealism; it proceeds by reductio ad absurdum: 'the game played by idealism has been turned against itself, and with greater justice' (B276). More precisely, the argument assumes the Cartesian premise that I can temporally determine my empirical consciousness without granting the existence of external objects, and then asks if I could, given that inner experience was all I had, ever arrive at a conception of a temporally determined consciousness of myself. And this, Kant came to think, is the only way the proof can proceed: 'It is absolutely impossible to prove from inner perception that the ground of representations is not in me. But if I say, suppose it is always in me, no temporal determination of my being is possible.'20
III I should like to conclude this discussion of transcendental arguments by considering two standard objections that have been raised against them. The first objection was, I believe, initially raised by Stephan Korner and has since gained wide acceptance. It insists that even if a transcendental argument succeeds in ruling out one particular alternative, it fails to rule out all possible alternatives - simply because it cannot
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consider all of them - and thus fails to establish its conclusion. Thus Korner writes: The person propounding a transcendental argument assumes that every and any thinker employs the same categorial framework as he does himself, and tries to show that, and why, the employment of this particular framework is 'necessary'. The defect of all transcendental arguments is their failure to provide a uniqueness-proof, i.e. the demonstration that the categorial framework is unique. 21
This line of objection can also be found in the writings of Richard Rorty, for instance. There can be no such thing as wholesale transcendental arguments for negative conclusions, Rorty insists, because we cannot make good on the notion of 'ruling out all alternative forms of knowledge'. We cannot do that because we cannot know that every alternative proposed will have the same defect: 'Nothing in heaven or earth could set limits to what we can in principle conceive.'22 And specifically on Strawson's argument Rorty comments that all it does is 'rule out one alternative - the sceptical, Humean 'sense-datum experience' alternative. We do not have the slightest idea what the other alternatives might be.'23 It is readily seen, however, that this objection is mistaken and rests on a confused sense of 'alternative'. A transcendental argument, we have noticed, in order to establish a particular condition of knowledge or experience, proceeds by considering an alternative, that is, the negation of the condition, and subsequently demonstrates its internal incoherence. Clearly, this exhausts the field of possible alternatives to this condition. For although one may perhaps imagine different philosophical positions or conceptions based on the negation of the original condition, this would not add to the number of alternatives to it. This is clearly illustrated by Strawson's argument. Its aim was not to refute the sense datum hypothesis as such, but to establish the 'objectivity condition' (i.e., 'that the fundamental or basic judgen1ents of experience should themselves be objective judgements'). To do so, Strawson had to refute what we might call the 'non-objectivity-condition'. A conception based on this latter condition is the sense datum experience hypothesis. To prove his point, Strawson tried to reduce it to absurdity. Now one might perhaps imagine other conceptions based on the 'non-objectivitycondition', but these would be alternatives to the sense datum hypothesis, not further alternatives to the objectivity-condition. It may be that Rorty wants to hold that Strawson has not really refuted the non-objectivitycondition itself but something intrinsic to the sense datum theory. And if this were the case, then indeed Strawson's argument would be unsuccessful. But of course it would not follow that there can be 'no
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wholesale transcendental arguments for negative conclusions. '24 Another, more potent, criticism is due to Barry Stroud. Stroud takes transcendental arguments to be primarily directed against traditional scepticism, as demonstrating the illegitimacy of the sceptical challenge by proving that certain concepts are necessary for thought or experience. 25 Yet if this is their intention, they cannot, according to Stroud, be successful. For either they must rely on a dubious 'verification principle' to the effect that if a certain word or notion of our language has meaning, there must be things or situations to which it is, or was, truly applied; or, if not, the argument can at most show that we must believe that we have knowledge of what the sceptic doubts in order for thought or experience to be possible. The first option makes the transcendental argument redundant, since the verification principle refutes the sceptic right away. The second option, however, leaves the sceptical challenge untouched, as it fails to show that our beliefs in question are, or must be, true. It seems to be Stroud's conviction that most transcendental arguments, or at least those he discusses (by Strawson and Shoemaker), opt for the first horn of the dilemma and en1ploy an (unacknowledged) verification principle. But even if they opted for the second horn of the dilemma, the implication seems to be that they could hardly count as transcendental arguments, because falling far short of what Kant is said to have been trying, i.e., to give 'a complete answer to the sceptic' .26 I think neither the intentions of transcendental arguments nor those of Kant's position are correctly represented in this account. Stroud's primary example of a transcendental argument evoking a verification principle is Strawson's (1959) discussion of the general sceptical doubt regarding the identity of objects through non-continuous observation of them. Such doubt makes sense only if the objects can be accounted for in one and the same spatio-temporal framework. But since the identity of that framework in turn depends on the unquestionable acceptance of particular identity in at least some cases of non-continuous perception, the sceptic, according to Strawson, 'pretends to accept a conceptual scheme, but at the san1e time quietly rejects one of the conditions of its employment' .27 Stroud strangely misconstrues this argument when he suggests that it proceeds from the premise (1) We think of the world as containing objective particulars in a single spatio-temporal system, to the conclusion (6) Objects continue to exist unperceived. 28 Not surprisingly he wonders how such inference from how we think to the way things are 'could ... ever be justified' without evoking a verification principle. 29 Yet it was not continued existence of objects that was claimed by Strawson to be a necessary condition for the employment of our conceptual scheme, but 'the unquestioning acceptance of particular identity in at
How Are Transcendental Arguments Possible?
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least some cases of non-continuous observation'. 30 We must be 'willing to ascribe' particular identity in some cases, Strawson argued, if we want to maintain a single spatio-ten1poral system - and if the sceptic's doubt is to make sense. Stroud himself seems to have noticed this when, after outlining Strawson's argun1ent up to the point where it is claimed that we must have satisfiable criteria for reidentification, he observes, 'Strawson's argument actually stops here'. 31 But his mistaken assumption that Strawson attempts to prove knowledge of particular identity in the sense the sceptic demands forces him to conclude that a verification principle must be a suppressed premise of Strawson's argument. However, the claim was precisely that such 'knowledge' cannot be had. The sceptic's standard for being sure, Strawson said, 'is set selfcontradictorily high, viz. having continuous observation where we have non-continuous observation. So the complaint that you cannot be sure reduces to the tautology that you do not continuously observe what you do not continuously observe. '32 So the argument shows, after all, only that we must believe in particular identity in some cases? If one wants to put it thus, yes. A better way of putting it would be the following. An argument of this type shows that there are necessary connections between certain parts of our conceptual scheme. We cannot abandon one of its parts, e.g., the idea of persisting particulars, without destroying the scheme itself. This is not a form of verificationism. For it is not argued that we do know, in the sceptic's sense, that objects continue to exist unperceived; nor is the claim that we merely believe them to persist. What the argument attempts to establish is that we cannot but have this 'belief', that a doubt here is idle because we have no option but to have this 'belief'. But if this is so, then to speak of 'belief' at all in this case is to strain an analogy to its limit. 33 Does such an argument fall short of what Kant intended to achieve? Did Kant attempt to give 'a complete answer to the sceptic'? This, too, seems to be a strange misconstrual. At one level, Kant's answer to the sceptic is of course that 'what we call outer objects are nothing but mere representations of our sensibility' (A30/B45). Scepticism about them is misplaced because we are as immediately aware of them as of our own existence. The philosopher can 'admit the existence of matter without going outside his mere self-consciousness' (A3 70). Presumably, this would not satisfy Stroud's sceptic. (S)he will want to know if there are 'really' things outside us which are not 'mere representations'. Kant's answer at this level is revealing: unless I take it for granted that there are things distinct from my representations of them there can be no temporal determination of my own ~xistence in time. 34 Consciousness of my existence in time is bound up 'in the way
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of identity' (Bxl) with the consciousness of a relation to something outside me. It is thus not open to me seriously to doubt its existence. In this matter I have no choice. So again, to speak of a mere 'belief' here would seem inapt and inappropriate. Kant's concern, however, was not with terminology. His intention was to provide a critique of reason; to show where genuine knowledge is possible, and where 'my ignorance is absolutely necessary, and ... I am therefore absolved from all further enquiry' (A758/B786). As regards the sceptic, transcendental arguments and Kant's proofs are really in the same boat. 35 They do not, strictly speaking, demonstrate the falsity of the sceptic's position; they show the pointlessness, or idleness, of his or her objection by showing that the acceptance of certain conditions as necessary for thought and experience is not optional, but irrebuttable and inevitable. And, as Kant once remarked, 'if we can demonstrate that our knowledge of things, even experience itself, is only possible under those conditions, it follows that all other concepts of things (which are not thus conditioned) are for us empty and utterly useless for knowledge.'36 With determining necessary conditions of human thought and experience, transcendental proofs thus inevitably detern1ine limits to human knowledge. It is the determination and acknowledgement of such limits which seem to be at the heart of Kant's procedure and that of transcendental arguments alike. For, in Kant's memorable words, \'it is precisely in knowing one's limits that philosophy consists'37 (A727/ I 755).
NOTES Kant to M. Herz, 21 February 1772, Kant's gesammelte Schriften, Koniglich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin/Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter & Co. 1901 -), vol. X, p. 132. (Hereafter cited as Ak., volume and page.) 2 References to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, transl. Kemp Smith, are given in the text with the usual 'A' and 'B' numbering. References to Kant's Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (abbreviated Prol.) are to Ak. IV, the translation is P. G. Lucas' (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1953). 3 Cf. Prol., 376: 'the possibility of synthetic knowledge a priori ... was properly the problen1 on the solution of which the fate of metaphysics wholly rests and to which my Critique ... was entirely directed.' 4 'If the objects with which our knowledge has to deal were things in themselves, we could have no a priori concepts of them.' (A128; cf. also A114; Prol., §§ 9, 10; Bxvii; Reflection no. 5925, Ak. XVIII, 387.) In what follows I will mean by 'transcendental idealism' this complex thesis that we experience only appearances and that experience is constituted from the sensible manifold. That experience has to be constituted is something on which 'in my 1
How Are Transcendental Arguments Possible?
7
8 9 10 11
12 13 14 15 16 17
18
19 20
21 22 23
19
judgement everything depends'. Kant to Beck, 16 October 1792, Ak. XI, 361. Cf. also Kant's letters of 3 July 1792, 1 July 1794, 11 December 1797. ' Cf. A84f/Bl16f. In the next two paragraphs I am greatly indebted to Henrich, 1975. Henrich's position is developed more fully in 'Kant's Notion of a Deduction and the Methodological Background of Kant's "Transcendental" Strategy in the first Critique', in: E. Forster (ed.), Kant's Deductions in His Three Critiques and His Opus Postumum (Stanford: Stanford University Press, forthcoming). Refls 5058 and 5002, Ak. XVIII, 75, 57. Refl. 6337, Ak. XVIII, 658. Cf. esp. P. F. Strawson (1966, pp. 38f, 170-4,247-9; and R. P. Wolff (1973, pp. I1ff). Only one year after the publication of the second edition of the Critique, Kant noted regarding 'the basic principle of purposiveness in the construction of organic (mainly living) creatures': 'I have ... occasionally attempted to steer into the gulf of assuming here a blind mechanism of nature as the cause, and had thought to discover a passage to an artless concept of nature [kunstloser NaturbegriffJ, but I was constantly stranded by reason, and have therefore preferred to hazard myself upon the shoreless ocean of ideas.' 'Vorarbeiten zu: Ober den Gebrauch teleologischer Prinzipien in der Philosophie', Ak. XXIII, 75, trans!' in McFarland (1970, p. 65). This has been argued by F. Delekat (1969). Cf. also Low (1980, pp. 206ff). Cf. Mathieu, 1967, pp. 184-91. Strawson 1966, pp. 43, 16. Wilkerson (1976, p. 13). Cf. Wittgenstein, 1953; Strawson (1966, pp. 97ff); Davidson (1975, pp. 7-23); Malcolm 1968, pp. 45-72. In view of the elusive nature of Wittgenstein's presentation in the Investigations, I would rather add this qualification. Insofar as one wants to attribute a wholesale argument to Wittgenstein here it seems quite clear that it proceeds by reductio ad absurdum of the idea. of a private language. Whether his real intentions are best represented in this way is, however, a matter of debate. This does not rule out other forms of sentience like those of infants or animals which fall short of this standard. The claim is, rather, that we cannot know what such forms are like, and that any idea we may have of such experiences will be in terms of concepts derived from our own. (Cf. Strawson, 1966, pp. 28, 273) This has been misunderstood by, among others, Mackie (1974, pp. 100f), and by Cerf (1972, p. 611). Ak. XX, 367. Cf. also B418. I have discussed the problems Kant had with the Refutation, and with its integration into his system of transcendental idealism, in Forster, forthcoming. Korner (1974, p. 72). Categorial Frameworks (Oxford: Blackwell 1974), 72. This criticism was first raised in Korner, 1967. Rorty (1979, p. 82). Ibid., p. 83.
20 24
25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37
Eckart Forster It hardly needs pointing out that the other transcendental arguments mentioned above likewise admit of only one alternative each, i.e., that one can follow a rule privately; that mechanism is conceivable; that a creature can have thoughts without interpreting the speech of others. Cf. Stroud (1968, p. 242). Cf. ibid., pp. 245, 256. Strawson (1959, p. 35). Cf. Stroud (1968, p. 245). Ibid., p. 246. Strawson (1959, p. 35; my italics). Stroud (1968, p. 246). Strawson (1959, p. 34). Strawson speaks, more appropriately, of 'original, natural, inescapable commitments which we neither choose nor could give up' (1985, p. 28). Cf. ibid., p. 20. Although, pace Stroud, not all transcendental arguments are directed against scepticism. Kant to Herz, 26 May 1789, Ak. XI pp. 51f, trans!' in Zweig (1967, p. 153). Kemp Smith's translation an1ended.
2
Kant's Transcendental Arguments Graham Bird
1
SOME PRELIMINARY RESTRICTIONS
Kant's interest in transcendental arguments is an ancestor of the interest in such arguments shown by many contemporary philosophers, but there should be no presumption that these interests, or the associated arguments, are the same. It is for this general reason that I explicitly restrict my main concern to Kant's transcendental arguments, and do not embark on a general comparison between his arguments and those of later philosophers. But although such a restricted account of Kant's argun1ents would provide only one leg of the general comparative task, it may also offer some clues to possible misunderstandings of the ancestral arguments, which reveal differences between Kant and at least some modern transcendentalists. 1 There is one such difference that I hope to make clear. I want further to restrict the scope of my discussion to Kant's epistemology, and even to certain aspects of that epistemology. It may be that Kant employs other types of transcendental argun1ent in his moral philosophy or elsewhere, but if so I shall not consider them. Such a restriction is far fron1 arbitrary, however, since it is plausible to think that the notion of a transcendental argument has its primary application in the Critique of Pure Reason. But even in that work the notion of a transcendental argument is elusive in at least two ways. Kant himself does not seem to use the term 'transcendental argument', though he has a section on the proofs of transcendental synthetic propositions (B810 ff) which is generally regarded as a record of the peculiarities of such arguments. But that account, though clear and uncontroversial in some respects, is also puzzling and obscure in others. 2 For the n10st part I shall consider Kant's practice of arguing transcendentally rather than his theory about the special features of such arguments. Kant's practice, however, might be illustrated from any number of
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different contexts within the first Critique. Natural examples of such transcendental arguments will be those passages where Kant speaks explicitly of 'transcendental expositions' (in the Aesthetic) or of a 'transcendental deduction' (in the Analytic). Indeed it is initially plausible to take the common view that the transcendental deduction of the categories is the best, most central and most important, of Kant's transcendental arguments. 3 But I shall resist this view for both tactical and longer term reasons, some of which I now summarize. First, the transcendental deduction is notoriously difficult and controversial. To treat it as a paradigm case of transcendental argument will inevitably raise all the complex issues of Kant interpretation and so will tend to obscure the form of such arguments. For one thing the deduction operates with two highly abstract notions, those of a conceptual and a personal unity, the connections between which remain obscure. It is true that those abstract notions occur at the very centre of Kant's thought but just for that reason they ramify throughout the whole argument of the Critique. Their very centrality is thus an obstacle to their use in this context. Of course it could be replied that since this will be true of any other candidates we are at least no worse off in selecting the deduction. I shall suggest, however, that this is not so, and that there are better, more immediately accessible, candidates. Second, if we are interested, as I shall be, in the bearing which Kant's arguments have on scepticism, then the transcendental deduction suffers from further handicaps. The argument there is a quite general one about the role and status of categories 4 , and is therefore not directed at any particular sceptic's view of any specific concept. It is, certainly, directed at an empiricist thesis which rejects the possibility of certain a priori concepts, or better of any synthetic a priori principles in which such concepts might figure, but that issue raises a question about that complex classification of concepts or principles and in any case is not necessarily related to sceptical problems at all. Sceptical arguments nowadays are rarely put in the form: are there' a priori concepts? or: is this principle a priori but synthetic? These questions might be raised without directly involving what we now think of as sceptical issues, and sceptical issues might themselves be raised without concerning those questions. Kant himself raises these questions without directly involving sceptical issues in relation to Locke's empiricism; and Strawson's work shows how it is possible to canvass transcendental arguments, and even to endorse then1 against scepticism, without also endorsing Kant's classification of synthetic a priori principles. 5 Third, it may be objected that Kant, after all, does refer to specific Humean, sceptical, issues in his introduction to the transcendental deduction. The passages at the end of §13 and §14 (B122-4, B127-9) make specific reference to the concept 'cause' and to the empiricist
Kant's Transcendental Arguments
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failure to recognize a 'dignity' which attaches to that concept. Although Hume is not mentioned by name his spirit is undeniably present. But, notoriously, there is little else in the main text of the deduction which takes up this specific issue, and this is exactly what should be expected at this stage in Kant's project. Kant wants at this stage to establish, as he says, the possibility that categories in general are a priori6 , but he is not yet attempting to prove this specifically of such a concept as that of 'cause'. That proof is designed to, and does, follow in the Analytic of Principles, and so offers abetter, more direct, example of a Kantian transcendental argument against a sceptic. I shall, therefore, take the argument of the Second Analogy as my central example of such a transcendental argument. There is a final reason for disregarding the claims of the deduction in this context, though I cannot yet make it wholly clear. It is that the deduction is not merely a tactically poor choice in trying to understand Kant's transcendental arguments, but also that such a choice is apt to be seriously n1isleading. Generally when comn1entators fasten on the deduction as the central use of a transcendental argument against a sceptic they see that argument as an attempted resolution of a problem of 'objectivity' or of Hegel's 'subject-object' problem, or of modern worries over privacy and publicity. It cannot be denied that Kant is in some way concerned with objectivity in the deduction, but to adn1it that concern itself raises some difficult issues. The most obvious of these is the connection between the argument of the deduction and that of the Refutation of Idealism. It is in that latter passage that Kant plainly and explicitly addresses the issue of scepticism about 'outer experience', and so provides a clear transcendental argument against Idealist sceptics about a certain kind of objectivity or publicity. But if Kant is doing the same thing in the transcendental deduction it is puzzling that he thought it necessary to introduce the Refutation of Idealism into the second edition of the Critique, particularly when he had so extensively rewritten the deduction itself for that edition. In fact, of course, it is quite clear that the two arguments are not identical, and should not be confused with, or assimilated to, each other, even though it is no doubt not a simple matter to specify the diffferences between them. 7 It is also quite clear from the point of view of grasping the forn1 of a transcendental argument that the Refutation of Idealism presents a far clearer case against scepticism than does the deduction. I shall therefore choose the Refutation of Idealism as a further example of a Kantian transcendental argument along with that fron1 the Second Analogy. What I propose to do is first to consider briefly the way in which the Refutation of Idealism attacks scepticism, and draw some conclusions from this. Second I shall consider at greater length the
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corresponding form of argument in the Second Analogy, and attempt to assess how that argument bears on Hume's views about the concept 'cause'. Once it has been made clear how Kant hopes to 'refute' Hume in that context"! want finally to return to the claims of the transcendental deduction. I suggested earlier that an appeal to the transcendental deduction in this context was not only tactically unwise but also potentially misleading, and in the final section I shall offer some illustration of that view.
2
THE REFUTATION OF IDEALISM
In the Refutation of Idealism Kant believes that he can demonstrate an unexpected connection between two general features of our overall experience, nan1ely what he calls 'inner' and 'outer experience'. The argument is placed explicitly in the context of an Idealism of a weak (Cartesian) or strong (Berkeleyan) form which canvasses a scepticism about 'the existence of objects in space outside us' (B274). It is clearly this passage which keeps the promise Kant makes in the Preface (Bxl, note) to relieve the scandal to philosophy that the existence of things outside us has to be accepted n1erely on faith. Kant's strategy is first to represent the sceptics as accepting our inner experience but doubting or denying any genuine outer experience, and then, second, to argue that such a position is incoherent. For he claims to prove that the inner experience, which the sceptics accept, is possible only on the assumption of that outer experience, which they variously reject. If Kant's proof works, then he succeeds in showing that to doubt or deny outer experience the sceptics must also doubt or deny inner experience; and that in accepting inner experience they must also accept outer. What they cannot coherently do is to accept inner but reject outer experience. One noteworthy feature of such a plan is its specific sceptical target. Kant is not considering some quite general form of scepticisn1 and attempting to refute it out of hand. Rather he is carefully identifying a specific sceptical position, with its particular assumptions, and then arguing that the sceptical conclusion does not cohere with those assumptions. The argument, even if it works without qualification, has nothing to say to scepticism in general, but provides only a claimed refutation of one central and familiar type of sceptic. Indeed the argument may seem in its £orn1, and its direct bearing on a sceptical position, to be so straightforward as to be hardly a genuine transcendental argument at all. One commentator 8 recently considering Kant's transcendental attacks on scepticism says: 'Scepticism for Kant represents a way of posing the threat of "illegitimacy". A condition of adequacy for any "legitimizing" project is that the threat of scepticism be completely
Kant's Transcendental Arguments
25
disarmed.' If such a view is taken seriously then the Refutation of Idealisn1, despite its evident direct relevance to a central forn1 of scepticisn1, could not be regarded as part of Kant's supposed 'legitimizing project'. Although that absurd conclusion is by itself enough ground not to take the stated view seriously, nevertheless other points might be made. It might be said, for example, that transcendental arguments are supposed to involve 'possible experience' and to outline the 'conditions of a possible experience', and yet there is no overt appeal to these notions in the Refutation of Idealism. It might also be said that there is no hint of the circularity which Kant's transcendental arguments are popularly supposed to be vulnerable to. For it is sometimes supposed that transcendental arguments draw conclusions about th~ conditions for a certain experience where it is the validity of that very experience itself which the sceptic queries. The Refutation of Idealism escapes this difficulty by drawing its conclusions from the very assumptions made by the sceptics to be attacked. I want to answer these points in two ways. First, of course, it will help the claim that this is a quite standard form of transcendental argument if it can be shown that the argument of the Second Analogy has the same structure, and operates in the same way against a Humean scepticism over the concept 'cause'. That point will be pursued in detail in the next section. Second, however, I want also to indicate some misconceptions which may be responsible for these doubts about the transcendental form of the Refutation of Idealism. Suppose, for example, that we ask where the idea of a 'possible experience' comes into that argument. Certainly it would be odd to think that it appears as some sort of a premiss from which transcendental truths can be derived. The argument claims simply that if one accepts inner experience, as the sceptic in this case does by hypothesis, then one must also accept outer experience. What is initially shown to be impossible is the denial of this conditional, that is an experience in which only inner features have a place. The idea of a possible experience, or better that of an impossible experience, comes into the argument as a self-evident consequence of the sceptical incoherence. It may still be suggested that the form of the argument falls short of establishing any strict necessity for outer experience. For the argument, if it works, shows only that it is impossible to have inner but no outer experience. It might be said that this cannot disarm even this type of scepticism completely, since it leaves open the possibility that a sceptic' might coherently deny both inner and outer experience. Such anarchic scepticism, partly defined by a refusal to accept any assumptions at all, is plainly not at issue in Kant's argument. If such a sceptic refuses to' accept even the Cartesian or Berkeleyan assumptions in Kant's argument then he will not be vulnerable to that argument. But I take it that such
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invulnerability is bought at a high price, namely that of reducing a position which might have had some interest philosophically to one which totally lacks any serious interest at all. It is always possible to find some such residual anarchic scepticism, but perhaps William James was right to say 'General scepticism is a permanent torpor of the will ... and you can no more kill it off by logic than you can kill off obstinacy or practical joking.'9 These points have a bearing on some common current ways of characterizing transcendental arguments. Bernard Williams, for example, writes: 10 The presupposition-forms: We can Q only if P, or: We can Q only if we accept P (disregarding the important differences between these) yield an argument for P evidently only if it is accepted that Q. SO they will refute scepticism about P only if the sceptic must accept that we Q. The best known case would be where we can show that even the assertion of his scepticism commits him to Q.ll
Apart from one minor' puzzle what Williams says is formally correct. But his characterization of transcendental arguments covers two kinds of case which it is important to distinguish. For it would be natural to take Williams's description of an anti-sceptical argument as one in which it is shown that the sceptic tacitly, but not explicitly, commits himself to Q, for exanlple just by virtue of speaking a language, or of being a human, or of asserting his sceptical conclusion. Such an argument probably derives its current force from Strawson's appeal to a similar strategy in Individuals 12 , and that origin may also account for the belief that it is essentially Kant's strategy too. Yet nothing is plainer than that this is not at all Kant's strategy in the Refutation of Idealism. Kant is not arguing that his sceptics, still less any sceptic, tacitly but not explicitly are committed to the relevant Q in virtue of their humanity, or their linguistic capacities. Rather he simply, and plausibly, identifies his sceptics as making an explicit commitment to Q. The distinction between 'tacit' and 'explicit' anti-scepticism is important because the two projects operate in quite different ways. The tacit anti-sceptic seems interesting and powerful for several reasons. In claiming to unearth implicit commitments he nlakes it seem plausible that the sceptic might be unaware of these assumptions. Moreover, in deriving those commitments from sonle quite general feature of the sceptic, he opens up the prospect of an equally general refutation of scepticism as a whole. Unlike the 'explicit' anti-sceptic who is restricted to those philosophers who overtly accept the relevant commitment, the tacit strategist seems to offer the chance of disarming the sceptic completely. On the other hand the tacit theorist faces the difficulty of establishing that the sceptic really is conlmitted, though not explicitly, to the relevant assumption. The more general and complete his attack
Kant's Transcendental Arguments
27
on scepticism becomes the more difficult it will be to establish this. By contrast the explicit theorist restricts the range of his attack but should have no problem at all in ascribing the relevant assumption to his opponent. The explicit anti-sceptic is naturally in the field against what has sometimes been called 'local' scepticism, that is, a scepticism which accepts clearly certain items of knowledge or experience but rejects others which appear to be based on the former. It is for this reason that the explicit theorist can so easily come to grips with the relevant assun1ption. By contrast the tacit anti-sceptic is naturally associated with what has been called 'global' scepticism, that is, a scepticism which calls for some foundation for all knowledge or experience, and so makes no allowance for any assumptions about that knowledge. It is for this reason that the tacit anti-sceptic has to find implicit assumptions which are at odds with, but also implied in, the sceptic's conclusion. Traditionally the global sceptic is answered by the production of some indubitable, or self-evident, foundation for knowledge or experience. The tacit theorist is apparently more subtle in disclaiming such a search, but instead trying to show that the sceptic must be committed to certain assumptions, however little he nlay think so. In terms of these contrasts recent interest in 'refuting the sceptic' has tended overwhelmingly to be global and implicit. No doubt it is for that reason that Kant's transcendental arguments have so commonly been thought to fall into the same pattern. What can be unhesitatingly said at this stage is that at least one central transcendental argument in Kant belongs firmly in the other camp. It remains to be seen whether this is also true of the second such transcendental argument.
3
THE SECOND ANALOGY
Kant's argument in the Second Analogy may be controversial in its details but I believe that it is not so controversial in its general form. Kant begins by recalling, and presupposing, the resources he clainlS to have established in the First Analogy with respect to substance, and he goes on in the Second Analogy to extend the argument to events. In line with the First Analogy Kant assumes that in our experience there are substances (objects) with accidents (properties), and that while objects may alter but not change, their properties may change but not alter. 13 As in the First Analogy Kant again assumes that our inner sense provides us with a succession of experiences in which the resources of the First Analogy may be deployed, and also that those experiences do not directly present time to us. So far as I can see Kant's argument at this stage is quite general, that is, does not at all specify the kinds of
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things which we primarily regard as substances. Such a further specification of the application of these categorial terms belongs, as Kant indicates, to the empirical criterion for such terms (B232), while the transcendental argument operates with the general terms themselves. Kant thus assumes at the start of the Second Analogy that we have a successive experience in which we can identify objects (substances) and properties (accidents), and can characterize the same object as having different properties at different points in that experience. The question that Kant then sets for himself is this: What is additionally needed to provide a similar deployment for the concept 'event'? Kant supposes that this concept embodies the idea of a determinate temporal order, so that in giving the conditions in which we can deploy the concept 'event' he takes himself to be giving the conditions for the possibility of a determinate time order. Kant thinks that this question is in order because the resources he has so far outlined, while they may be necessary are not yet sufficient to make the concept 'event' possible. Those resources, he thinks, do not yet enable us to discriminate between perceived property changes in a substance which yield an event and those which do not, or consequently between property changes in a substance with the order A-B as opposed to the order B-A. Crucially, and controversially, Kant thinks that it is required for these discriminations to be possible that we deploy the concept 'cause' so that the general causal principle, variously formulated as the principle of the Second Analogy, holds. Kant takes the notion of an event to be simply that of different properties of the same substance placed in a determinate successive order. For him the requiren1ent of a determinate order implies the need for something to determine that order, and this he believes to be the concept of a cause or the general principle of causality. The validity of the steps in this argument has been widely questioned in at least the following terms: 1
Why should not the mere perception of an order in changing properties of some object be sufficient to determine events as against substances, and one event as against another?
2
Why should Kant assume that substances are prior to events? Could we not equally construct a version of our experience by treating events as independent particulars?
3
How does the notion of an event relate to the idea of a unified temporal order in which all events have their place? The two may be connected but they do not seem to be identical.
4
Even if the notion of an event does require that of a cause why does it also require the truth of the general causal principle? Why
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should that principle have to hold universally? Might it not be enough for Kant's purposes to require only that some, or 1110st, events have causes? 5
Is it really so important, or so correct, to insist that if events are different states of the same substance in a determinate successive order, then there must be something that determines that order? Even if that claim were conceded might not the determinant be some quite specific causal law rather than the general causal law itself?
Though I do not believe that any of these objections count immediately and decisively against Kant's argument, my aim here is not to consider the validity of that argurnent by pursuing these objections but only to consider the form of the argument. In particular the aim is to consider that form in relation both to the earlier argument in the Refutation of Idealism and to a relevant scepticism about the concept 'cause'. In this case the relevant scepticism is that of Hume over the alleged necessity to be found in causal connections. In order to consider such a dispute between Kant and Hume it is therefore necessary to outline Hume's argument about causality in the Treatise. The general pattern of Hume's argument in the Treatise is important because it throws light on the relation between his account of time and his discussion of 'cause', and on his attitude to the general causal principle. In Book I, Part II Hun1e considers space and time before he moves on to a discussion of causality in Part III. In Part II Hun1e is mainly concerned with the problem of the infinite divisibility of space and time, and he devotes far more attention to space than to time. But he is also concerned specifically with the question whether our ideas of time could be derived directly from some temporal presentation or only from what Hume calls a 'perceivable succession of changeable objects' (p. 35).14 His answer is that 'time cannot make its appearance to the n1ind either alone or attended with a steady unchangeable object.' Hume believes that he can explain why we are tempted to think that we might still have an idea of temporal duration even if we experienced only unchangeable items. Characteristically he explains this as a kind of fiction (pp. 37, 67). The discussion of infinite divisibility has relevance to Kant's Antinomies but not to the Second Analogy. Hume's other point about the need for a succession of changeable objects in developing an idea of temporal duration is in one respect very close to Kant's assumptions in the Analogies. For although Kant does not express Hume's views about the fiction in which we extend the notion of temporal duration from what is changeable, and in motion, to what is unchangeable, and at rest, he nevertheless agrees with Hume that time and temporal relations are not
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directly given to us in our experience or perception. Kant expresses this as an explicit assumption throughout the Analogies in the simple form 'time cannot by itself be perceived' (B225). Both Hume and Kant agree in this way that our idea of temporal duration depends upon our perception of other items in our successive experience. In other respects, however, Kant and Hume diverge even at this early point. For one thing Hume is concerned n1ainly, perhaps only, with ten1poral duration, whereas Kant notably distinguishes this from other aspects of time such as its order. For another Hume does not clearly distinguish between our subjective experience of succession and our belief in an objective succession and in an objective time series. And finally although Hume agrees with Kant that our discrimination of tin1e depends upon our experience of changeable objects he does not offer an account of the way in which the dependence operates. By contrast Kant is concerned quite evidently with that specific and complex dependence. At this stage, then, Kant and Hume agree on one basic claim, but diverge on some further corollaries of that claim. The divergence is, however, not at all a simple disagreement between them on these issues. Rather it is that whereas Kant puts those issues at the centre of his discussion Hun1e barely discusses them at all. It may be thought that Hume remedies these deficiencies in his next discussion of causality in Part III, but I think it fair to say that this is not so. Hume seems to assume at the start of Part III that certain basic temporal relations of succession and duration are already built in to our experience in order to raise the further question about the analysis of 'cause'. That enquiry generally supposes that we are presented with events which we collect into similarity classes in order eventually to formulate specific causal claims. IS The crucial issue for Hume is whether our causal language n1akes any justified reference to an objective necessity, and I take it as uncontroversial that Hume's answer is quite clearly that it does not. At the start of his enquiry in Part III (p. 78) Hume raises two questions: 1 For what reason we pronounce it necessary that everything whose existence has a beginning should also have a cause?
2 Why we conclude that such particular causes must necessarily have such particular effects; and what is the nature of that inference we draw from one to the other, and of the belief we repose in it?
He thus clearly separates the two candidates for harbouring son1e necessity, that is, specific causal connections (2) and a general causal principle (1). Although Hume does not formulate his general causal principle in the same way as Kant I take it as evident that (1) is a version of such a principle. If we now ask how Hume sets about answering the two questions one thing is quickly apparent. It is that,
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although Hume appears to give the questions equal weight, his subsequent discussion of them is disproportionately in favour of (2). In Section iii of Part III Hume dismisses, effectively and correctly, four bad arguments for the necessity of the general causal principle. It takes him less than four pages to dismiss what he calls 'every demonstration which has been produced for the necessity of a cause' (p. 80). And at the end of that section he announces his intention to devote the rest of his enquiry to question (2). The justification for this is given in his final paragraph (p. 82): Since it is not from knowledge or any scientific reasoning that we derive the opinion of the necessity of a cause to every new production, that opinion must necessarily arise from observation and experience. The next question, then, should naturally be: How experience gives rise to such a principle? But as I find it will be more convenient to sink this question in the following: Why we
conclude that such particular causes must necessarily have such effects, and why we form an inference from one to the other? we shall make that the subject of our future enquiry. 'Twill perhaps be found in the end that the same answer will serve for both questions.
In other words Hume satisfies himself that the right tactic is to move from question (1) to question (2), and also that in the end this will prove the right strategy since the answer to question (2) will provide the answer to question (1). Hume thus abandons his interest in the general causal principle and concerns himself exclusively with a question about the necessity of particular causal claims. Hume keeps his promise to return to question (1) almost one hundred pages later, and deals with it in one short paragraph (p. 172). In the intervening space he has provided his own analysis of particular causal claims in which no reference is made to any objective necessity. Hume then produces his definitions of 'cause' and argues that both definitions yield the clear answer that there is no necessity in the general causal principle. Rather, the suggestion is, we repose our faith in such a principle as a consequence of the success we have had in formulating particular causal laws. Since those causal laws are themselves based on experience the general causal principle, which is epistemically dependent upon them, must also be based on experience and can have no necessity. Because Hume attaches overwhelmingly more importance to question (2) commentators have perhaps assumed that question (1) is relatively insignificant. There is, then, a natural tendency to suppose that any disagreement between Kant and Hume over 'cause' must arise over question (2), that is, over the analysis of particular causal claims. Such a view appears in the popular belief that while HU1l1e denied any objective necessity to particular causal claims Kant intended to reinstate that necessity, that 'dignity', to those claims. In fact, however, it can now be clearly seen that this is the reverse of the truth. Kant himself
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is essentially dealing with question (1), and not question (2), while Hume is essentially concerned with question (2), and not question (1). On Kant's side this can be seen in the form of the Second Analogy itself, but it is also made quite explicit in the passage at B793-4 where Kant reviews his disagreement with Hume. If, therefore, wax which was formerly hard melts, I can know a priori that something must have preceded ... upon which the melting has followed according to a fixed law, although a priori, independently of experience, I could not determine in any specific manner either the cause from the effect or the effect from the cause. Hume was therefore in error in inferring from the contingency of our determination in accordance with the law the contingency of the law itself.
Kant makes it clear in that passage that he has no wish to deny Hume's claim that there is no objective necessity in particular causal connections. He precisely concedes this point but disagrees with Hume on the inference drawn from that contingency. He ascribes to Hume an inference from the contingency of particular causal claims to the contingency of the general causal principle and then claims that the inference is fallacious and the conclusion false. These clain1s are supposed to be established in the transcendental argument of the Second Analogy itself. Kant is not always an accurate commentator on earlier philosophers, but, as I have shown, in this matter he is entirely on target. Hume does draw the cited inference, and if it were fallacious then indeed Kant would have refuted Hume. The same general n1essage is available from the Second Analogy itself. In a passage at B240-1 which clearly invokes I-lun1ean ideas, though Hume is not mentioned by name, Kant says: This may seem to contradict all that has hitherto been taught in regard to the procedure of our understanding. The accepted view is that only through the perception and comparison of events repeatedly following in a uniform manner upon preceding appearances are we enabled to discover a rule according to which certain events always follow upon certain appearances, and that this is the way in which we are first led to construct for ourselves the concept of cause. Now the concept thus formed would be merely empirical and the rule which it supplies that everything which happens has a cause, would be as contingent as the experience upon which it is based. Since the universality and necessity of the rule would not be grounded a priori, but only on induction, they would be merely fictitious and without genuine universal validity.
Kant here simply reformulates the point made at B793-4, namely that the contingency of particular causal claims is to be distinguished from the non-contingency of the general causal principle; but he also adds a slightly different way of characterizing his disagreement with Hume. If we suppose that Hume's epistemological programme gives a priority to the recognition of time, goes on to the rcognition of patterns in events,
Kant's Transcendental Arguments
33
and is then followed by the formulation of particular causal claims, and a just conception of the general causal principle itself, then the disagreement with Kant can be described in an extended way. It is not just that Kant believes particular causal claims to be contingent and the general causal law necessary; nor just that he believes the general causal law to be prior to particular causal claims. It is also that he believes the general causal principle to be prior to the recognition of an objective time order embodied in the notion of an event. Though, no doubt, the notion of priority needs more clarification the central disagreement between Hume and Kant over causality is that Hume puts the general causal principle at the end of the order of priorities, while Kant puts it at the beginning. The general pattern of the dispute between Hume and Kant in this context is, consequently, similar to that in the Refutation of Idealism. There it was suggested that Kant argues against the Idealist priority of inner over outer experience, and in the Second Analogy Kant similarly argues against the empiricist priority accorded to particular causal claims over the general causal principle. In the latter case Kant wants; also to extend the argument to dispute the empiricist priority of time,'~, recognition over the recognition of causality. In both cases Kant argue~,~-.J for the reversal of the Idealist and empiricist priorities. '",,,' There is a similarity, too, between the way in which the two argument /1\ attack a sceptical position. Of course, as I have suggested, Kant is, demonstrably not simply claiming an objective necessity in the analysi~ ~ . ; of particular causal claims. Equally since I have not represented Hume, as believing that particular causal claims are 'subjective' and so correspond to no 'objective' matters of fact, I have not represented Kant as wishing to deny such a scepticism merely by re-establishing the supposed objectivity of such particular causal claims. The two philosophers agree that our particular causal claims are based on recurrent patterns of events, and both assume that these are objective matters of fact. Kant's rejection of Hume's scepticism would be only misrepresented if it were put in that way. Kant ascribes to Hume the assumption that we can locate objective temporal relations in our experience as the basis for Hume's argument that the general causal principle is itself dependent upon that assumption. Just as in the case of the Refutation of Idealism Kant's strategy is to show that such a position is incoherent, since the very assumption is possible only if the general causal principle holds. In this way Kant's argument in both contexts has a form which puts it firmly in the ranks of explicit, local, anti-scepticism rather than in the ranks of tacit, global, anti-scepticism. In neither case is Kant arguing for some incoherence with the sceptic's implicit humanity or linguistic capacity; instead he is arguing for an incoherence between an explicit assumption which the sceptic makes "0
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and a conclusion he draws from that assumption. In neither case is Kant attempting to disarm scepticism completely; instead he is attempting to refute a quite specific sceptical position. In one particular respect the two transcendental arguments may seem to differ. In the Refutation of Idealism it was suggested that a determined sceptic might escape Kant's refutation by denying even the Idealist assumption of a legitimate inner experience. In that case the suggestion was that such a position does escape Kant's attack, but at the cost of total implausibility. In the case of the Second Analogy, however, it may be said that Kant's argument leaves more scope for such a determined sceptic. If we suppose that such a sceptic, perhaps Hume himself, is prepared to reject even the assumption of objective time relations, then Kant's argument would be ineffective. But in that case, it might be said, there is no similar high price to pay, for while it seenlS absurd to canvass the possibility of experience which is neither inner nor outer, it may not seem so absurd to canvass the possibility of an experience without any objective time features. Three things might be said about such a claim. First, as far as Kant's argument in the Second Analogy goes, such a sceptic is simply not at issue. Kant simply assumes that Hume, for example, is not taking up such a position at least in the argument over causality. Second, however, Kant might take the view that it is also just intuitively implausible to consider the possibility of experience which lacked any objective time discriminations. As in the Refutation of Idealism Kant is not specifically arguing for the impossibility of such an experience, but rather, for the purposes of the Second Analogy, taking it for granted that such an experience is impossible and that the sceptic in this argument would agree with that. Third, it could also be said that for this reason anyone who wished to pursue scepticism to this point would have to supply some argument for his claim. Now one such argument might be precisely the Idealist scepticism which Kant identifies in the Refutation of Idealism. That argument turns in detail on the claimed impossibility of an inner experience which lacked such objective time discriminations. It is not, then, that Kant has no answer for such a sceptic, but that his answer is to be found in the Refutation of Idealism rather than the Second Analogy.
4
SCEPTICISM AND THE TRANSCENDENTAL DEDUCTION
I have argued so far that at least some of Kant's central transcendental arguments are pretty unmysterious in form. Moreover I have also attempted to show that their relevance to scepticism is straightforward
Kant's Transcendental Arguments
35
in their ascribing explicit assumptions to a sceptic when those assumptions, according to Kant, do not cohere with the sceptic's own conclusions. Not only is Kant not attempting, in those arguments, to refute scepticisnl in general; he is also not adopting the strategy of claiming an incoherence between the sceptic's conclusions and some presupposition implicit in thenl. But the unmysterious form of the arguments is, of course, not matched by a similar lack of nlystery over their validity. Kant's arguments undeniably contain gaps which would need to be bridged if they are to be entirely successful. The task of assessing those arguments for success is, however, sometimes confused through misconceptions about their aim and their form. I suggested earlier that one of these misconceptions had to do with the view that the Transcendental Deduction does offer some general refutation of 'the' sceptic. Indeed my account so far is vulnerable to the conlmon view that while what I have said may be true of the Refutation of Idealism and of the Second Analogy, it is not true of the Transcendental Deduction itself. While those former arguments may exhibit what I called an explicit, local anti-scepticism, the suggestion is that the Deduction contains a more powerful, implicit and global, antiscepticism. Plainly I cannot now offer a positive view of the Deduction's tortuous argument, though I have done so elsewhere 16 , but I want in this final section to consider one recent advocate of that suggestion. It cannot be denied, of course, that the Transcendental Deduction contains a transcendental argument, or rather arguments, or that such arguments will quite trivially bear on some sceptic or other. Earlier I noted Kant's own account of his argument in which he speaks of making comprehensible how a priori concepts in general can relate to objects. Any philosopher, therefore, who is sceptical about the existence of a priori concepts, or of their role in applying to objects, or even what it means to be a priori, might find a refutation in the passage. Even in that context, however, Kant's argument seems more to assume the existence of a priori concepts and then to offer an account of how it is possible for them to apply to objects, rather than actually to prove their existence. But these issues anyway seem to involve fairly specific forms of scepticisnl, and also the dispute between Kant's richer and the enlpiricists' more austere classification of judgements. They do not seem directly to involve a global refutation of scepticism, even though the Deduction is sometimes presented in that way. Certainly two general dangers in so representing the Deduction stand out. The Transcendental Deduction is, after all, only one section of the total mosaic of transcendental Idealism. There is a temptation to treat it, however, as if it were simply a general statement of that overall philosophy. It is worth remembering, then, that other arguments such as those in the Refutation of Idealism and the Second Analogy are
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clearly also intended to contribute essentially to that overall view. Less importantly the deduction contains also more than merely a reference to categories and their role. It invokes a puzzling reference to a personal unity and its connection with the categories. Any account of the Deduction which aims to be complete would have to take both the ideas of a personal and a conceptual unity, and their supposed connection, into consideration. It is clearly Stroud's view 17 that the Transcendental Deduction does contain some general refutation of the sceptic, and that it is, as was noted earlier, designed to 'disarm the sceptic completely'. For him the deduction asks a 'very special question' which is at once deep, elusive, tempting and yet suspicious. The question is to be distinguished from those so far located in the arguments of the Refutation of Idealism and the Second Analogy. Stroud says, for example: 'We want to understand not just how it is possible for us to think or know this or that particular thing, given that we already think or know something else: we want to understand how human thought or knowledge in general is possible.' In this way the anti-sceptical arguments so far discussed are set aside, for these are arguments which depend on the claim that we could not think or know some particular thing without thinking or knowing some other such thing. Stroud's 'special' question differs from these in its generality, in its lack of specific assumptions, and so appears to belong firmly to an in1plicit and global anti-scepticism. The question, however, is not an easy one to express. Stroud concedes at one stage that the philosophical interest which underlies it cannot be identified by him unequivocally, though he thinks that we all have enough of a sense to recognize it and be attracted by it. One way of putting it would be to ask whether it was possible for our ways of thinking to fail to n1atch the way things are, or for our 'subjective conditions of thought' to lack 'objective validity'. Stroud believes that Kant's answer to this question is essentially an Idealist view in which we somehow constitute objects for the categories 18 , so that no question of such a gap or mismatch can arise. But he also holds the view that such a resolution is dubious since he can see no good reason to set aside the distinction we ordinarily draw between the way we think and the way things are, even at an exalted categorial level. More particularly he attempts to clarify the issue by eliminating some inadequate candidates. At one crucial place he says: It might be thought that the 'categories' we employ could not fail to be legitimate since (as Kant believes) we simply could not think without them. But again that is not enough to secure the legitimacy Kant is concerned with. Even Hume could insist that for us there is no alternative to our thinking in terms of cause and effect, say; we cannot help thinking that way. But Hun1e's is precisely the sort of view Kant thinks does not establish the 'objective validity'
Kant's Transcendental Arguments
37
of the concept of causation among others. So there is a very special question at the heart of the Kantian project.
Stroud admits that this tells us only what would not be an adequate answer, without yet telling us what an adequate answer would be. Indeed it is clear that Stroud believes that the question, deep and tempting though it is, deserves to have its foundations examined so that perhaps we may no longer ask it, or ask it in this perplexing way. Nevertheless, despite these obscurities he thinks that the question is adequately defined and is ascribable to the Transcendental Deduction. Certainly if Stroud's account of the deduction were to be accepted then those two claims would be required to be established. I shall suggest that neither requirement has been met. For one thing the question itself remains unclearly defined. Stroud thinks the question 'very special' because it is not adequately answered by the claim that there is no alternative to our ways of thinking. But surely it might be argued that if that answer is ruled out, then there is simply no genuine question left to answer. For if it is true that our ways of thinking are necessary, so that we cannot think in any alternative way, then the very idea of a mismatch between our ways of thinking and the way things are seems in one way quite impossible. However things may ultimately be, if we cannot think them in any alternative way, then surely there is no real possibility of a gap between those ways of thinking and the way things are. It n1ight be argued that we have neverthless some formal inkling of such a failure in some world to which we have no access, but Kant rightly and notoriously, does not regard such appeals to inaccessible worlds as fruitful. Stroud has in the past 19 associated this line of thinking with the Positivists' verification principle, but I think it is now clear that Kant did not adhere to such a principle. 20 For this reason alone the very special question which Stroud links with the Transcendental Deduction remains unclear. That same unclarity is confirn1ed if we turn more specifically to the disagreement between Kant and Hume. For Stroud is able to regard the relevant question as so special partly because he represents Kant and Hume as agreeing that categories, such as 'cause', are necessary in that we could not think at all without them. But if Hume anywhere does stress this idea it is because he conceives of such a necessity as natural or even biological 21 , whereas it is clear that Kant thinks of the categories' necessity in some other way. The disagreement between Kant and Hume even at this abstract level does not arise despite their agreement over such a necessity; rather it appears because Kant and Hume, importantly, conceive the necessity in different ways. Once again the issue returns to well known questions about a priori concepts, synthetic a priori principles, and
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these background classifications. It is not my view that these issues are crystal clear, but only that by giving an inaccurate account of Kant and Hume Stroud inevitably directs attention to the wrong issues in the debate. The same conclusions can be drawn from a wider view of the disagreement between Kant and Hume. Although Stroud is officially offering an account of the transcendental deduction his own references to Kant's anti-scepticisnl cover not only that argument but also the arguments of the Refutation of Idealism and the Second Analogy. But to conceive the Transcendental Deduction alone as providing the antidote to Hume's views about causality is to commit the mistake described earlier of investing the deduction with an overall significance which it could not have. It we want to be clear about the disagreement between Kant and Hume over the concept 'cause' then we must examine the Second Analogy. When we do so, then I have argued that we arrive at a forn1ally clear account of the disagreement in that respect between Kant and Hume. It is not, however, that the Transcendental Deduction provides a general refutation of scepticism to which the Second Analogy adds some interesting but formally irrelevant details. On the contrary the Second Analogy is the point where the strategy envisaged in the transcendental deduction is actually carried out. One way, then, of resolving problems about the general strategy is to consider how the particular cases are dealt with in the Analytic of Principles. By failing to distinguish the different roles of the argun1ents in these related sections Stroud confuses rather than clarifies Kant's position against sceptics. Stroud's interest in scepticism is the modern interest in some form of global scepticism, but I have argued that this importantly misrepresents Kant's concern.
NOTES
1 I include in this term not only those, like Strawson, who endorse transcendental arguments in some form, but also those, like Stroud, who are unwilling to do so. Cf. also a recent attempt to follow Strawson's line of thought in Stevenson, 1982, and my review of it in Bird, 1984. 2 Kant's account of 'possible experience' and his first rule for such transcendental proofs seem uncontroversial. The requirements for a unique proof and for a direct rather than an indirect method of proof are less easy to understand. 3 One recent example of this view is the symposium in Lear and Stroud, 1984. 4 See Bird, 1962, chs 6-9. 5 Strawson 1966, pp. 42-4. 6 B117: The explanation of the manner in which concepts can thus relate a
Kant's Transcendental Arguments
39
priori to objects I entitle their Transcendental Deduction. 7
8 9 10 11
12 13 14 15
16 17
18
19 20 21
I have argued elsewhere that Strawson's interpretation of the transcendental deduction is in danger of confusing these arguments. See Bird, 1974, pp. 1-15. Stroud, 1984a, p. 247. James, 1978, pp. 273-4. Williams, 1984. The minor puzzle is why the antecedent is expressed as 'We can Q' when the required conlnlitnlent on the sceptic's side is rather 'We Q'. There is, of course, a colloquial reading of the former which is equivalent to the latter, but in the Kantian context where the idea of possibility is both important and often neglected it may be dangerous to read it in that way. I have retranslated from the German what was originally written in English, and it may be that something has got lost in the process of translation. Strawson, 1959, pp. 35-6. B230-1. Page references are to H ume, 1955 b. In 'specific' or 'particular' causal claims I include such claims as 'This (A) caused that (B)', as well as 'As cause Bs'. The contrast is between the general causal principle which specifies no events or event-types, and causal claims which do specify events or event-types. See Bird (1962, chs 6, 8, & 9); 1974. Stroud, 1984a, pp. 243-58. Stroud's argument is puzzling in many ways which cannot be considered here. I shall restrict myself to two of the central points. Stroud gives the impression that he believes Idealism is obviously mistaken, even though he now recognizes that Kant's form of Idealism is designed to be imnlune from the faults of conventional Idealisnl. Partly this is because he cannot take seriously Kant's crucial distinction between empirical and transcendental Idealism, though in his paper it is hard to believe that he has nlade much of an effort to understand it. But what is especially puzzling in his treatment of these issues is that though he admits an unclarity in the 'very special' question which yields Kant's Idealist answer he seems nevertheless to be quite clear that that Idealism is mistaken. But it would be at least possible, and in my view better, to wait to condemn that Idealism until it is clear what it amounts to, that is, until it is clear which question, or questions, it is designed to answer. I should anticipate an objection to what follows in the text which would claim that current issues about semantic realism and anti-realisnl offer a clear sense to Stroud's 'special' Kantian question. But I do not believe either that these questions are independently clear, or that they have any bearing on Kant. I make some reference to this in Bird, 1982. Stroud, 1968. See also Stroud, 1984c and Bird, 1984b. See Bird, 1982. Hume 1955a, Section IV, pp. 52-3; Section V, p. 68.
Part II
The Refutation of Scepticism
3
Atemporal Necessities of Thought; or, How Not to Bury Philosophy by History Ross Harrison In this paper I wish not to bury transcendental arguments but to praise then1; however anyone engaged in either activity faces the initial problem of identifying the class of arguments that he wishes to praise or bury. Since Kant invented the label, anything properly called a 'transcendental argument' must have some analogy to the arguments which Kant used. On the other hand, arguments in recent Anglo-American philosophy called by their proponents or commentators 'transcendental arguments' also have some clear disanalogies with Kant's argun1ents. In particular, they do not normally rely on the presupposition of son1e kind of idealism. Obviously any identification of transcendental arguments, whether by description or enun1eration, will be stipulative; in this paper my own stipulation will be to consider arguments which share a particular purpose, subject matter, and form with Kant's. The purpose is the refutation of scepticism, the subject matter is cognitive or conceptual (understanding, language, knowledge ...), and the form is that of a regress back up a series of necessary conditions (A only if B, B only if C, C only if D ...). So a typical transcendental argument attempts to refute a sceptical position by showing that the denial of its clain1 is a necessary condition of (a necessary condition of a necessary condition of ... ) having thought or language of that subject matter at all. Either the sceptic's claim cannot be con1prehensibly formulated or else it is mistaken. For example, a fan1ily of arguments inspired by Wittgenstein's Private Language Argument appeared in the fifties and the sixties designed to refute scepticism about other minds or an external world. This scepticism was based upon the assumption of incorrigible, 'Cartesian', first-person access to one's own mental states together with the denial that such states could be the basis of any valid deductive or inductive inference to other people's states, or to external objects. It was met by showing that the premiss on which it was based, nan1ely
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that one could have cognitive awareness (or linguistic description) of one's own mental states, is true only if one can also describe public objects, and only if one can describe the mental states of other people. So if the sceptic's claim could be conlprehensibly formulated, then it could be refuted by showing that the state of affairs that it doubted or denied was a necessary condition for such a formulation. Analogously, a Humean scepticism about causal relations, based on the supposition that we can identify particular events in time but deny that this forms an adequate basis for attributing law-like relations between events, can be refuted by a Kantian style argument showing that the supposition that there are such law-like relations is a necessary condition for being able to identify particular events in time. These arguments, old and new, share purpose, subject matter and form; and these are the kind of argument which I shall attempt to defend in this paper. Defence is necessary because, after having been used for some time with little explicit methodological self-awareness, this kind of argument has been subject to much criticism in the past fifteen years. It has been thought that transcendental arguments presuppose some unacceptable kind of idealism, that they presuppose some unacceptable kind of verificationism, or that they make the mistaken presupposition that it is possible to establish atemporal necessities of thought or language. Although I shall touch on the first two criticisms in passing, my chief concern here is with the last. My brief sketch of the nature of transcendental arguments shows why the criticism is relevant; an argument which attempts to establish a conclusion by regress back up a series of necessary conditions can only work if it is possible to establish necessary conditions. For example, part of a highly influential modern transcendental argument runs 'One can ascribe states of consciousness to oneself only if one can ascribe them to others. One can ascribe them to others only if one can identify other subjects of experience ... ' (Strawson, 1959, p. 100). Here the argument works only if it is possible to establish, or at least only if it is permissible to assume, propositions of the form A only if B, that is propositions which state the necessary conditions of making judgenlents of particular kinds (ascription, identification). So if there are no necessary conditions for making judgements, or if we have no means for telling what these necessary conditions are, then no such arguments can properly be made. The inlportance of nlaking the point that modern transcendental arguments only share some features with Kant's own arguments now becomes relevant. For as well as necessities of this kind, that is the necessary conditions for thought or judgement, Kant also seems, at least at times, to have wished to establish that some of these necessary conditions are necessary not just hypothetically but absolutely, that is that they are necessary not just if there is to be tho~~E~_E~t~_~~~h~rL__
Atemporal Necessities of Thought
45
are necessary features of the objects thought about. This would fit in with those descriptions of Kant's enterprise which take him to be explaining how we can have knowledge of the necessary features of the world we experience, such as the necessary truths revealed in Euclidean geometry. By contrast, features identified as hypothetically necessary are not essential features of the objects themselves. They are merely features which it has to be the case that the objects have if they are to be the objects of thought or judgement. The objects could still exist without these features, only it would no longer be the case that they could be thought about. Now, as long as we assume some kind of idealism, so that the only objects there are are objects of thought, there is no real distinction between the two kinds of necessity. However, once we drop idealism the distinction is crucial. It means that we can still talk in a way analogous to Kant of the features necessary for thought or experience of objects, but need not take these features to be essential features of the objects of thought, nor as being features constituted by the experiencing subject. In one respect this is a loss, because it means that the necessities can no longer be established or defended by an account of how the mind imposes itself on objects. However, this is offset by the much greater gain that transcendental arguments do not now need to go down with the sinking ship of idealism. The form-content distinction, and the problem of the imposition of form by the mind without the imposition of content by the n1ind may be held to be insuperable problems for Kant's argument. Yet transcendental arguments, by detaching themselves from idealism, do not need to be bothered by these problems. They can establish and use the necessary conditions of thought or judgen1ent of a world without needing to assun1e that the world depends in any way upon its being so thought or judged; hence they can avoid all the problems of idealism; and hence they can avoid any objections to the establishment of necessities of thought which are really objections to idealism. If we separate transcendental arguments from idealism, however, we still lack an account of how such necessities of thought are to be established. Idealism was meant to achieve this in Kant not just because the mind imposed necessary formal features on the world (hence solving the ontological problem of the origin of the necessary elements) but because it was assumed that the mind had perfect, a priori, access to itself (hence solving the epistemological problem of how we can know which elements are the necessary elements). If, as mentioned before we cease to be confident about the picture of the mind with perfect, transparent, 'Cartesian' access to itself, then we lose this method of establishing necessities by mere inspection. The idea that the mind has a priori and incorrigible knowledge of its own nature is independent of idealism, and so, if it were valid, could be used to establish the necessary
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conditions of the mind's thought of objects even if idealism is rejected. However, in that it has its own problems and no longer has the compelling certainty that it might have had in Kant's day, it seems that we can no longer claim that necessary conditions of thought are selfevident to the mind while reflecting on its own nature. So we seem to lack any good method of establishing necessities of thought, and, on the other hand, there seem to be powerful considerations which suggest that no such necessities could ever be established. These contain reference to, or are based upon examples drawn from, the history of thought. Just as I have mentioned that our picture of the nlind has changed since the tilne of Kant, so it is supposed that increased historical awareness will show that all those things which were taken to be necessary conditions of thought at one particular time will subsequently turn out to be merely pervasive but contingent elements of the thought of that time. Looking back from our supposedly superior point of view, we can see that in the past philosophers often held things to be necessary which have turned out not to be so. Yet there is no reason to think that our own point of view is so superior; it is surely quite reasonable to suppose instead that we are in a similar position to the one in which they were in, so that people in future will look back on us and see that we are now making a similar kind of mistake. The lesson of history is that there are no necessities of thought, and so, insofar as transcendental arguments in particular and philosophy in general rely upon establishing necessities of thought, the lesson of history is that philosophy cannot fulfil its pretensions. Since we cannot say how things must be, but only how they are or have been, we should give up philosophy and take instead to history. The attempt to historicize philosophy and to relativize conclusions which once were held to be absolute no doubt started immediately after Kant's death; but in modern Anglo-American philosophy, I think that it is useful to identify this kind of objection as having been made in three waves. It starts with Collingwood in the 1940s, gets picked up by Stephan Korner as one strand of the many particular criticisms of transcendental arguments made at the end of the 1960s, and has recently been powerfully promoted by Richard Rorty. Collingwood declares in the Essay on Metaphysics (1940) that the idea of metaphysics 'as a deductive science is not only an error but a pernicious error' (p. 76), and holds that 'all metaphysical propositions are historical propositions' (p. 49). He makes an extended case study of Kant with the aim of showing that all those features which Kant had attempted to demonstrate as being the essential features of any world were in fact merely the absolute presuppositions of the Newtonian science of his day. As science has advanced, these features have been discovered after all not to be necessary : causality and substance are discarded in relativity theory,
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and quantum physics dispatches the principles of continuity. In the same way Korner (1966) holds that both Kantian and more modern arguments have been overtaken by the advance of physics. Rorty in his recent book does not repeat this particular historical case study, but he draws the same general lesson. He comments with respect to changes in schemes of belief The historian can make the shift from the old scheme to the new intelligible, and make one see why one would have been led from the one to the other if one had been an intellectual of the day. There is nothing the philosopher can add to what the historian has already done to show that this intelligible and plausible course is a 'rational' one. (Rorty, 1980, p. 272)
There are, that is, no atemporal criteria of rationality; or, as he later puts it against Habermas, there are no inevitable subjective conditions of inquiry but 'just the facts about what a given society, or profession, or other group, takes to be good grounds for assertions of a certain sort' (p. 385). There are no absolutes, no necessities; and philosophy can add nothing to history. The particular historical case studies are suggestive, but however suggestive they are, they are not by then1selves sufficient to support the general conclusion. All that they can show is that particular makers of transcendental argun1ents, or particular attempts to establish something as necessary, have made particular mistakes. This is not sufficient to show that there is a mistake in the very idea of a transcendental argument, or of any attempt to establish necessities. Kant may have made mistakes about the necessity of Euclidean geometry or about the conservation of matter, but this does not show that others of his arguments might not still be valid, or might be made valid by being put in a more general form. Even if all of Kant's arguments are shown to have been overtaken by science, this does not show that other transcendental arguments might not survive. So to show that there can be no necessities of thought, or that transcendental argun1ents are impossible, it is necessary to add to the particular case studies some argument. It involves, in fact, leaving history for philosophy; leaving the area of description and entering the area of possibility and impossibility. This may be atten1pted by taking the historical facts as given and then constructing an inductive argument upon this factual basis; or it may be attempted by arguing in a n10re direct way that transcendental arguments are impossible. Both methods have problems; the former is an example of those sceptical arguments in which it is argued that because we are son1etimes mistaken we might always be mistaken, while the latter, since it holds that at least one thing can be shown to be necessary, namely that there are no necessities of thought, is in danger of self-refutation.
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Korner attempts to make such a direct argument in his paper on 'The impossibility of transcendental deductions' (Korner, 1967), the main substance of which is repeated in an improved form in chapter 13 of Fundamental Questions in Philosophy (Korner, 1971). I have criticized this paper elsewhere and so do not wish to criticize it again in detail here (Harrison, 1976; see also the direct criticisms in Schaper, 1972). Korner claims that there are only three possible ways in which the necessity of certain concepts for any judgement of the world could be established. None of these is effective, and so transcendental arguments which attempt to establish such necessities are impossible. The most important method is the second in which someone tries to show that a particular fran1ework of thought is necessary 'by comparing it with all its possible competitors. But this cannot be done, since there is no reason for assuming that the competing frameworks, which someone can conceive at any particular time, exhaust all possible competitors' (1971, p. 215). Korner exposes himself to the possibility of an ad hominem reply, not just because he argues that any such necessities of thought are impossible, but because the particular method he uses, namely of discussing all the possible ways in which something could be done, falls foul of the principle that he himself here enunciates, namely that there is no reason to assun1e that all the possibilities that we can think of are all the possibilities that there are. However, ad hominem points apart, the central point here is obviously a powerful one, being an application of the long-standing objection that it is improper to move from conceivability to possibility or from inconceivability to impossibility. Just because we cannot think of an alternative to some central concept or framework principle at a particular stage in the history of thought does not show that there is not one. The point can be made abstractly (conceivability and possibility are obviously logically independent of one another) and then the particular historical case studies can be used to give the point bite (mistakes have indeed been made). Yet the point is most powerful when it is applied, as Korner applies it, to arguments which attempt to establish the uniqueness or necessity of something by elimination of alternatives. Here we are always liable to overlook an alternative which we have not been able to conceive of. So, if we hold with Rorty that 'nothing in heaven or earth could set limits to what we can in principle conceive; the best we might do is to show that nobody has in fact conceived of an exception' (Rorty, 1979, p. 83), then it seems that indeed we cannot show that there are any necessary concepts for thought about a world by using such elimination arguments. As Mackie (1974, p. 79) puts it, commenting more generally on transcendental arguments, 'Only the limits of our limagination ... make what is pervasively actual seem essential.' This argument is most persuasive, however, when applied to cases
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where it is attempted to establish something not just by elimination, but where the elimination is of all but one of a large and heterogeneous collection of alternatives. The larger the collection and nlore various the alternatives are, the more likely it is that one has been overlooked. By contrast, if we know in advance that there are only two alternatives to consider, then the argument is not so compelling. Yet this is what happens in the case where all that is being considered is a putative necessary condition and its contradictory; here something in heaven or earth does set linlits, namely logic. (This is not to clainl that, for anything we consider, either it or its negation is a necessary condition; it is just to claim that it and its negation provide a complete initial survey of prima facie candidates, neither of which may in fact be necessary.) Furthermore, this i,s what happens at some steps in actual transcendental arguments. Another way of putting this point is to say that often the establishment of necessary conditions in a transcendental argument is not by elimination of putative alternatives and so is not at the mercy of the overlooked alternative. To show this, and to bring out the general point about the nature of many transcendental arguments which lies behind it, I would like now to look at one actual transcendental argument, which is a (no doubt over-simplified) version of part of the argument of chapter 1 of Strawson's Individuals (1959). I lay it out as before as a regress back up a series of necessary conditions, but to save repeating all the intermediate features, let me write it like this: There is communication about a world only if (1) there is reference to individuals (2) only if there is reidentification of individuals only if (3) we can use more than pure descriptions to identify (4) only if there is one individual referred to by a proper name, and a unique way of relating every other individual to this one (5) only if there is a unique spatio-temporal framework (6) only if there are material objects. If we think of Korner's objection, only the last step obviously falls to it. Material objects are only one of many possible ways in which a unique spatio-temporal framework would be ensured; other ways are not only conceivable but have actually been conceived. Yet it is not clear on the other hand that Strawson wants the transcendental argument
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to proceed as far as step 6. For when he considers and rejects one such alternative, which he calls 'process-things', he comments 'the category of process-things is one we neither have nor need' (1959, p. 57). In other words, it looks as if we should regard this part of the argument not as a transcendental argument establishing the necessary conditions for communication but, rather, as what Strawson calls 'descriptive metaphysics', that is filling in how as a matter of fact the necessary conditions are realized in our present conceptual scheme. We could have done it with process-things, but we happen to do it with material objects. When we turn to the other steps of this argument it is less obvious that any of them depend upon the selection of the claimed necessary condition as one among a whole heterogeneous collection of putative conditions, at the mercy of an overlooked or as yet unimaginable counterexample. At step 1, it is a natural assumption that there are two very basic elements in thought, language, or communication, that is, reference and description. Since it is practically beyond question that language has to be descriptive, the only thing at issue is whether it also has to be referential. Perhaps the argument is wrong in claiming that it is, but it is certainly not wrong because it has just picked reference as one possibility out of a heterogeneous set and eliminated the others. Reference is clearly the first candidate to be considered, and the alternatives are either that it is referential or it is not. No other alternatives need to be considered. If we can eliminate the alternative that it is not referential, then we have shown that it must be referential. I hope to show shortly why this, and other, alternatives can properly be eliminated in transcendental arguments. Similarly at step 3, we can start in advance with the knowledge that a central question to establish with respect to reference is whether proper names are necessary, or, to put it another way, whether we can refer while using only pure descriptions. Again the alternatives to be considered are clear in advance, either we can just do it with pure descriptions or we cannot. If we eliminate pure descriptions, then we have shown that we need something more (step 3), and it is not just to pick up one possibility an10ng many that may be around at various stages in the history of thought to say that this shows that we need proper names (part of step 4). So I do not think that the picture of transcendental arguments selecting one alternative among many possibilities is true to every stage of actual and important arguments, and so it is more difficult to relativize or historicize these arguments than has been made out. More importantly, this and the other argun1ents referred to at the start enable us to see how alternatives can be rejected, or, to put it more directly, how necessary conditions can be established. For lying underneath many of the steps of the argumen~i~~EiY~J2,_a_ng_12ebipg _
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the arguments in the philosophy of nlind and Kant's Second Analogy argument mentioned at the start, are claims about the way in which it is possible to verify statements. The necessary conditions for judgement (or thought or language or conlmunication) are provided by showing how it is possible to verify judgements of the kind under consideration. This probably applies to the first line of the argunlent just given, and seems to me certainly to apply to the subsequent lines. It is only if we can identify individuals that we can verify statements; we can only identify individuals if we can verify that we have done so (that is, reidentify them); we can only verify that we have reidentified them if we use proper names, because descriptions, however complete, are ambiguous (that is, do not provide logically sufficient conditions, or verification); the individual referred to in another way has to be at the starting point of verification (so it is I, here, now). This is how verification underlies the Strawson argument just given; however it is natural and appropriate to see it as underlying such arguments as the private language argunlent or Kant's argument. It is because we cannot verify in a private language that Wittgenstein thinks that private languages are impossible; and Kant is interested in establishing the timedetermination of objects, that is the conditions for judging the times at which events occur, that is (or so at least it is plausible to argue) how we can establish or verify the times of events. The relation of transcendental arguments to verification is of course familiar and has itself stirred up a considerable debate (Stroud, 1968; verification defended in Stine, 1972; Nielsen, 1972). I think myself that it is not only defensible but also important and that it reveals the power of transcendental argulllents against scepticism. Scepticism shows that the truth of certain propositions does not entail, or even provide inductive support of the standard kind for, other propositions, such as our sensations for external objects, or other people's behaviour for their sensations. The transcendental arguments which refute these scepticisms by showing that the beliefs which are doubted are in fact necessary conditions for the accepted premisses (as I described at the beginning) work not by denying this but, rather, by shifting the attention from the necessary conditions of the belief being true to the necessary conditions of it being believed. They show what must be the case for judgenlent of this truth to be possible. Here it is natural to assume that verification is one such necessary condition. For while it might be quite possible to assume that something could exist without possibility of verification (super-spartans with always undisplayed pains), it seems to me right that there could not be nleaningful, coherent, judgement of the area in question unless sonletinles it was possible to distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate beliefs (Harrison, 1974, ch. 3). If it is right to claim that (some possibility of) verification is a necessary
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condition for nleaningful, comprehensible, judgement of an area, then we can see how other necessary conditions can be established by discovering the necessary conditions for verification of that area. This explains, I think, why transcendental arguments were such a powerful tool in the philosophy of mind in the fifties and the sixties, for in this area, unlike many others, there is general agreement that verification of the mental states of other people has to be by their behaviour. So here we get an acceptable necessary condition for verification, and we have only to assume that verification is necessary for judgement to end up with the conclusion that the behaviour of others is necessary for the judgement of their mental states; to this we only need to add the private language argument showing that no alternative route of verification is available to the person whose states they are, to show that behaviour is necessary for any judgement of mental states. So not only can many transcendental arguments be seen to rely upon verificationist moves (as Stroud originally brought out with critical intent), but this is an inlportant key both to their manner of production and to their power of application. It explains, I think, where the necessary conditions conle from, and explains it in a manner which is relatively impervious to the historicist argument. This applies to the original move about the necessity of verification itself. It is not simply that this is one among many heterogeneous possibilities to be considered. It is central and, as before, either there must be verification or not. Someone who decides that there must be verification by elin1inating the alternative of comprehensible judgements without any possibility of verification is not at the mercy of further alternatives to be thrown up by the advance of history. Rather, he considers the one relevant alternative and decides that in such a situation there would not be any real, comprehensible, judgement at all. So he concludes that verification is necessary. The last point I would like to draw from the particular argument that I am using as illustration is that the moves between the lines in which the necessary conditions are established are not nlade by discovering the analytic consequences of the concepts involved in previous lines. This follows from what I said about verification, and the distinction between what must be the case for something to be true and what must be the case for it to be judged to be true. If the necessary conditions established in the argument were analytic truths, then they would be logically necessary conditions for the truth of the previous lines of the argument. If, however, as I claim, it is verification which is important, then the conditions established are only the conditions for the judgement by us of the kind of things described in the previous lines of the argument. Hence the steps of the argument are not analytically necessary steps, true by virtue of the meaning of the terms used in the argument and holding in all possible worlds. This ha~~!!__
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important consequence. For although it n1eans on the one hand that analytical procedures cannot be used to establish the steps of such arguments, it also means on the other hand that transcendental arguments can survive the demise of analytical truths, meanings, and the analytic-synthetic distinction. Just as it was claimd above that transcendental arguments do not have to be involved in Kant's scheme-content distinction, so now it can be claimed that they do not need to be involved in any analytic-synthetic distinction. Hence they can survive the collapse of both distinctions; and showing that both distinctions are untenable does not abolish transcendental argun1ents. Once verification is established as a defensible and central feature of transcendental arguments, it can then be used in defence of this kind of argument as a whole against the historicist type of objection. For the objection relies upon suggesting that the advance of thought will throw up ways of thinking which are so different from our present ways of thinking that everything which we now think to be necessary n1ay well have been dispensed with. As Korner puts it: It is possible that man will one day apprehend the world in a manner which is as different from what we call 'thinking' as is our thinking when compared with the manner in which, say, an earthwornl apprehends his environment. I have no conception of what such super-thinking might be. But what is inconceivable to me nlay nevertheless be possible. (1971, p. 219)
However, once we introduce a n10derate amount of verificationism, then we cannot allow so large a gap between the possibility of conception and the conception of possibility. If we allow that it really is possible that there could be such a kind of thinking, then we have to show how it could be possible; that is, what the possibility would be like, how it could be established that it was the case. Yet if such super-thinking really is inconceivable, then we cannot do this. To put it another way; the historicist sceptical argument which depends upon induction upon past cases of mistakes about necessity to the conclusion that we could be wrong in the present depends upon assuming the possibility pf a position, such as the distant future, in which it could be seen that we are wrong in the present. This is a position in which something which we now think to be a necessity of thought does not hold. Yet if this is really thought by us to be a necessity of thought, then we can have no conception of what a position is like in which it does not hold. If we think it to be necessary, then we n1ust think that it holds in any position about which we can think. Otherwise it is not really being thought to be necessary. Hence we cannot represent to ourselves what the position is like in which this necessity does not apply; hence we cannot say that there possibly is such a position; hence we cannot allow the sceptical, inductive, argument about necessities. Whatever history may do to
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thought, it cannot make us now think that it is possible that these things are not really necessary. Korner's super-thinkers are as unrecognizable by us as thinkers as his earthworms are as thinkers. In considering a similar fable, Rorty asks the rhetorical question: 'Why should we ignore the possibility that the trees and the bats and the butterflies and the stars all have their various untranslatable languages in which they are busily expressing their beliefs and desires to one another?' (1972, p. 657) and adds the comment 'The inclusion of this last possibility may suggest that something has gone wrong.' I think that Rorty is being too liberal here; the parallel which he brings out so well shows that something indeed has gone wrong. It needs only a modest application of verificationisn1, of the ~ind of point Wittgenstein was making when he asked 'Could one imagine a stone's having consciousness?' (1953, §390), to see that not only do the super-thinkers and the earthworms stand or fall together, but that they fall together. Otherwise anything would be possible; that is, nothing could sensibly be said about possibility. Even if this is wrong, these historicist arguments based upon descriptions of the possible future advance of thought ignore one very important point about transcendental arguments. This is that they are directed against scepticism and hence, inevitably, against scepticism expressed in our present language at our present stage of thought. The problems are our problems, not those of possible future beings. It is our doubts, or possible doubts, which have to be laid to rest. Hence it is only our present thought or language which is relevant to the arguments. If we can establish necessities for this thought, necessities for us, then this is quite sufficient for us to use them in transcendental arguments addressed against any scepticism that we could understand or have any interest in. History may indeed produce new problems; but for the problems we have, since we can establish the kind of necessities that we need, we can properly use transcendental arguments as. a means to their solution.
4
Transcendental Arguments and Scepticism Ralph C. S. Walker Twenty years ago transcendental arguments were full of promise: they seenled the key to epistenlological advance. They appeared to offer a powerful method for defeating scepticism and establishing securely our knowledge of the world about us. They held out the hope of a warranted title to knowledge claims in such contentious areas as ethics. Doubts, it is true, were never absent. But attractive and ingenious arguments were being put forward, either newly created or quarried out of Kant, which appeared either to achieve their ainlS or to come so close to doing so that a little chipping and polishing here and there would perfect them. Few people are now so optimistic; indeed their principal former exponent, Sir Peter Strawson, no longer sees them as a defence against the sceptic at all, but only as 'investigating the connections among the major structural elements of our conceptual scheme'. 1 The decline in enthusiasm is mainly due to the fact that so many transcendental arguments have turned out on examination either to be simply invalid or to achieve a great deal less than they claimed. This by itself is not a very good reason for despair about the method, for it may yet be that new and more satisfactory arguments can be found. But a nUlTLber of more general objections have been raised, and these have reinforced the feeling in many quarters that transcendental argumentation is a dead end. Three of these objections seem to me particularly important. One, due to Korner, is that transcendental arguments seek to do the impossible, because they seek to take us outside our own conceptual scheme: we can explore our own scheme from the inside, but we cannot compare it with others or intelligibly ask whether certain of its features must carryover also to them. 2 Another, due to Stroud, is that transcendental arguments generally need support from the verification principle if they are to establish conclusions about how things are in
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the world, and not just about what we must believe or what concepts we must employ.3 The third doubt has been widely expressed, and arises because transcendental arguments typically concern the necessary conditions for something (experience, knowledge, language): how is it to be shown that the proposed conditions really are necessary, and what sort of nlodality is being claimed for the conditional?4 In what follows I want to make clear why I think these objections do not, in fact, carry much weight against transcendental argumentation as a method for answering the sceptic. The method, I shall argue, is in principle effective against him, provided he is accessible to argument at all - though what helps to generate some of the objections is that it is not effective against all forms of scepticism. How much can be done with the method in practice is a much larger question, and I shall not touch on it here; it would require the construction and the detailed examination of a great variety of actual arguments which either are, or are meant to be, of the transcendental type. Before going further, however, I must enter a caveat. Transcendental arguments I understand to be anti-sceptical arguments which seek to justify their conclusions by exhibiting thenl as necessary conditions for experience, or knowledge, or language; or for experience, knowledge, or language of some general type. I am not at present in any way concerned to defend the historical claim that Kant's arguments fit this model (though I believe it to be true and have argued it elsewhere).5 Discussion of the philosophical issues that transcendental arguments raise keeps getting entangled, in the literature, with historical questions about Kant, who is often thought to have taken out a copyright on the word 'transcendental'. In this paper I should like to leave those questions aside. Even if the style of argument I am discussing is not Kant's, it is one that has been taken very seriously by nlany people in more recent years, and as it has been widely called 'transcendental' in our own day it n1ust be allowed to have gained at least a custon1ary right to the title. A second warning is needed as well. Transcendental arguments gained their recent currency in large part fron1 the work of Strawson, which includes a number of the most important arguments of that type to have appeared. Nevertheless what Strawson hinlself said about the method - even when he was more sanguine. about it than he has since become - was seriously misleading. In Individuals he describes the sceptic as attempting to reject, say, a belief in the external world, and as being refuted by an argument which shows that his doubts are unreal because 'they amount to the rejection of the whole conceptual scheme within which alone such doubts make sense'.6 The idea is that the sceptic undercuts his own position, and is left with the dilemma of accepting the belief that he sought to question or abandoning any claim to intelligibility. This is unfair to the typical sceptic, for it misses his
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point. Very few sceptics make any real attempt to deny our ordinary beliefs about such things as material objects, other minds, the past, etc.; like Hume they are usually content in practice to share the beliefs of the vulgar on these matters, and what they question is whether such beliefs are justified. 7 There is therefore little value in an argument which does no more than oblige the sceptic to accept such a belief, for he generally accepts it anyhow; what is needed is an argument which will show him that the belief is justified. It was this that transcendental arguments - including the ones that Strawson put forward - seemed to offer; and it was because of this that they seemed to provide a way forward in epistemology. Sceptics are often described as denying that we have knowledge about this or that, or about the world in general; and it is sometimes then thought that they can be answered by examining the ordinary use of the word 'knowledge'. If this were right it would make the recourse to transcendental arguments quite unnecessary. It is argued that as the word 'knowledge' is ordinarily used, the beliefs about which the sceptic has his doubts count as clear cases of knowledge. Many of those who take this line hold that a belief does not have to be justified in order to be known, provided it stands in the appropriate causal or counterfactual relationship to the fact that makes it true. Others hold that it does have to be justified, but that the required standards of justification are comparatively low and easily met - they are the standards that we use in everyday life, not the much higher standards imported by professionally suspicious people like philosophers. But either way the sceptic is claimed to be wrenching the word 'knowledge' and its cognates from their standard meanings and thereby creating a pseudo-problem. He is worried about our lack of knowledge only because he thinks a belief cannot be called knowledge unless it can be justified to an extremely high standard; but this is just a n1istake about what the word means. However the sceptic does raise a substantive issue, which is quite independent of how words like 'know' and 'knowledge' are used. If a belief is allowed to count as knowledge without being fully justified, there is no need for hin1 to deny that many of our beliefs do indeed amount to knowledge. He need not, and generally does not, deny that the standards of justification we regard as satisfactory for everyday purposes are quite often met. What concerns him is that those standards are not high enough, for they can be met in cases where he thinks the beliefs in question are strictly unwarranted. In the past, for example, the propensity to float when thrown into water has been regarded by the ordinary man as sufficient proof of carnal intercourse with the Devil.
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I If a transcendental argument is to be of use against a sceptic it must start from premises the sceptic will not dispute; and if it is to convince him that its conclusion is not only' true but justified, they must be premises he accepts as justified (or else as needing no justification, which for these purposes conles to the saIne thing). The sceptic is conceived as raising his epistemological doubts wherever he can, so finding satisfactory premises is not easy. Transcendental arguments traditionally start from the premise that there is at least some experience, or some knowledge. If this is to be an acceptable starting point 'knowledge' nlust not be taken in a questionbegging way; in particular .it must not be assumed that we have knowledge of a world external to us, for this is one of the things that sceptics often raise doubts about. What is usually meant, however, is only that we have some knowledge of something - knowledge of some of the contents of our own thought will do. Even sceptics will admit that we can sometimes know about these, and even sceptics will admit that we do have experience. Indeed, anyone who questioned these claims, or suggested that they lacked justification, would be adopting a peculiarly unattractive position. To be capable of formulating thoughts at all he must be aware of his experiences (though certainly it may be a more complex nlatter whether he must be aware of himself as their subject). It is not that it would be impossible to deny this - in a sense it is possible to deny anything; but it would be renlarkably perverse, and would place him beyond the reach of serious argument. These premises are justified if anything can be justified at all. Admittedly the sceptic might try rejecting the notion of justification altogether, but this is a less attractive argument than it may seem, for unless he accepts that the premises of an argument can justify its conclusion he renders himself impervious to argument of any sort. It is no defect in transcendental argunlents that they will not convince someone who is impervious to argument. In recent years it has been fashionable to use instead the premise that there is language. If what is meant by that is that there is intelligible thought - thought which has a content - it is as unexceptionable as the more traditional premises, and for the same reason. If more than that is meant - e.g. if it is meant that there is a conlplex conlmunicationsystem which can be publicly expressed in sounds - the sceptic will have something to object to. Occasionally people have thought that to use a premise like 'I am now speaking English' or 'These words are English words' would be all right, on the grounds that such sentences
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are true whenever uttered. But this is a confusion. The fact that a sentence may be true whenever uttered does not make it in any way indubitable, and it is perfectly possible to be uncertain what language one is speaking (or even to question whether there are public communication-systems at all). Some transcendental arguments start not fron1 the bare pren1ise that there is experience, knowledge or language, but from the premise that there. is experience, knowledge or language of some very general kind. Premises of this sort can also be immune to doubt. If anyone pretended to doubt that experience contains more than one presentation, or is arrayed in an apparent time-order, we could not understand what he had in mind; nor could we see what he was looking for if he asked for some further justification. Arguably the same applies with much more specific descriptions of the content of one's awareness, and many philosophers would give a similar status to my beliefs about how things seem to me at present to be. This is not uncontroversial, however; and it need not concern us; for the arguments that are called transcendental start from premises that are more general than that. Either they simply take the claim that we have knowledge, or experience, or language; or else they take the more restricted premise that we have knowledge, or experience, or language of some rather general kind, where that is beyond sceptical doubt. If this means that there is no very sharp dividing line between transcendental arguments and argun1ents about the conditions for having experience with one specific content rather than another, that is not necessarily a bad thing. Kant himself, and others following Kant, would insist that there is a sharp dividing line, because the specific content of experience can only be known a posteriori whereas the relevant general features are in son1e sense a priori - a structural matter. This issue is a con1plex one, but for our present purposes it need not concern us; it is enough to note it and pass on. To get a conclusion from the fact that there is experience, knowledge or language - or experience, knowledge or language of some appropriate general kind - a transcendental argun1ent requires a second premise, which will have to be conditional in form. To give us the anti-sceptical conclusion we want, it must be to the effect that if the first premise is true, then the conclusion is: the truth of the conclusion is a necessary condition of that of the premise, or in more Kantian terminology a condition of its possibility. This second premise must also be one that the sceptic will accept, not only as true but as justified (or as needing no further justification). That makes it natural to think that it will be analytic, for sceptics are normally in the business of raising doubts both about empirical conditionals and about non-analytic necessities. Transcendental arguments seek to avoid relying on empirical conditionals for another reason as well, which is that they are philosophical
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arguments, investigating not how things are but how they must be, if experience (etc.) is to be possible; and Kantians often hope that their conclusions will be synthetic and a priori, which they cannot be if they depend on an empirical premise. Some of the proponents of transcendental arguments have been quite clear that they do not intend their conditional premises to be analytic. I shall return shortly to the question what alternative status these premises could have. But if they are to be analytic we immediately have two prima facie difficulties. Transcendental arguments will in that case be pieces of conceptual analysis, and it may be objected that the concept of experience (etc.) is too vague and imprecise to yield interesting conclusions in this way unless we cheat by covertly building them into the concept to start with. Also, the status of analytic propositions may be questioned. An analytic proposition is an application of a logical law; but do logical laws deserve the privileged position, the security from doubt, that is often ascribed to then1? The first of these difficulties is not very serious, at least in principle. In advance of looking at the details of the arguments there is no reason to think that the concepts of experience, knowledge and language are any vaguer or more imprecise than other concepts on which analysis can be satisfactorily carried out. It might of course be claimed that conceptual analysis can never get us anywhere, because any analysis which was informative would have to be wrong - the alleged 'paradox of analysis'; but this turns on the assun1ption that we are always clear about what our concepts involve, an assumption which is shown to be mistaken by the success of conceptual analysis in philosophy as well as in logic and mathematics. In practice, of course, the fact that we are not clear what our concepts involve does make conceptual analysis a difficult business, here as well as elsewhere. When one philosopher contends that experience requires a certain condition to obtain, and another claims to be able consistently to describe experience obtaining without that condition, it is easy to sympathize with the frustration this may induce over the prospect of ever getting anywhere; easy too to share the feeling that it is hard ever to be sure that something is an analytically necessary condition for experience, since there will always be bizarre circumstances one has not thought of in which, perhaps, there might be something recognizable as experience without the condition. But these are difficulties of practice, not of principle, and in reality they are no more serious here than in any other branch of conceptual analysis. It is often hard to see just what a concept involves, but it is not impossible, nor do we have to examine every odd case in which the concept could apply. Once it is clear (to take a very elementary example) that bachelors must be unmarried there is no need to think further about peculiar circumstances:
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we know in advance how they are to be handled. At first sight the second difficulty is not very serious either, though it affects not only the second pren1ise but also the rule of inference that is used to draw the conclusion. In seeking to convince the sceptic at all we assun1e his acceptance of the appropriate rule of inference (modus ponens), and son1ebody who went so far as to reject so basic a rule as that would have made his position impregnable at the cost of depriving it of interest - like someone who will not accept that there is such a thing as experience. There would be no arguing with him. But at the same time he could not argue with us, or persuade us to listen to him; unless, perhaps he were to argue indirectly, and seek to show that a reliance on our rules of inference leads into incoherence. If he were wrong in this, it would be possible to show him that, since for the sake of the argument he would be treating our rules of inference as though they were valid. If he were right, and our most basic rules do lead into incoherence, there would be no more to be said; rational thought would be at an end. If the sceptic were to accept the rule to the extent of drawing the conclusion from the premises, but were to clain1 that although in fact he does this he is not justified in doing it, he would be in no better case. For if argument is to amount to more than just one n1ethod of inducing others to hold an opinion - and a less efficient one than propaganda or brainwashing - it must be conceded that in at least some cases an argument may succeed in justifying its conclusion, which no argument can do unless we are justified in relying on such basic rules as modus ponens and the elementary principles of logic. We do, certainly, make use of less basic (and more questionable) inference rules, as for example the rules governing inductive inference, but there is no possibility that reliance on these could be justified if reliance on the rules of elementary logic were not, for we require elementary logic in order to make any use of the less basic rules. In the same way the sceptic who is able to argue at all will have to accept the conditional premise as both true and justified, if the conditional premise is really analytic - or rather, he will have to accept it once he comes to understand the concepts involved, and thus to see its analytic character. Understanding the concepts involved will be a matter of coming to seethe premise as having some such form as 'If P and Q then p', and anyone who failed to rely on such propositions would be as inaccessible to argument as someone who rejected modus ponens, and for the same reason. Argument (as opposed to mere disagreement) requires the use of the conditional, and there is therefore no possibility of arguing with people who do not share our reliance on the elementary principles governing the conditional's use. More generally, a sceptic who refused to accept - both as true and as justified - the
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most elen1entary logical laws would be calling into question those basic rules of inference which make argument possible at all. Doubt about whether these laws are a priori is another matter, and may be perfectly reasonable; what cannot reasonably be doubted is that they are true and need no further justification. Except perhaps for the Law of the Excluded Middle: but since intuitionistic logic can proceed without it it is natural to think of it as lacking the elementary character of the Principle of Non-contradiction, or the law that 'If P, and if P then Q, then Q'. Actually this requires some qualification. A sceptic with doubts about generality might accept as valid each particular instance of a modus ponens argument that he was offered, and reject as false each specific proposition of the form 'P and not-P', while yet hesitating to subscribe to such universal claims as we make when we say that for all values of P and Q, if P and if P then Q then Q, and not both P and not-Po Such doubts could be quite intelligible; they would not prevent our arguing with him, since he will accept the individual moves we make (if they are valid moves). Nor need such doubts as these worry us in the present context, since he will accept the rule of inference applied in a transcendental argument, and also the conditional premise (still assuming the conditional premise is analytic). Slightly more worrying would be someone who accepted modus ponens in a wide range of contexts, but refused to allow it in others; or who held that though usually P and not-P cannot be true together, there are certain specific areas in which they can or even must be. I once n1et a Russian philosopher who, through a misunderstanding of the dialectic (and various other things as well), contended that in some parts of mathematics self-contradictory propositions are strictly and literally true; and I knew an American physicist who seriously believed that self-contradictory propositions were true in Japan. It was perfectly possible to argue with these people about other matters, despite their rejection of an utterly basic logical principle in its general form; a rejection which was deliberate and conscious, and not itself to be removed by logical argument. (They would not, for instance, be moved by the contention that from a self-contradiction anything follows, since their logics effectively contained stop-rules preventing that derivation in these cases.) Our conclusion must therefore be slightly qualified; but only slightly. For argument to be possible at all, it is necessary to accept the most fundamental logical principles as both true and justified, in so far as they apply to a wide range of cases. Someone who places limitations on the contexts in which he will accept modus ponens, or the Law of Non-contradiction, is nevertheless very likely to accept them in the cases on hand. If he does not, his refusal will seem arbitrary and uninteresting;
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more importantly, it will be impossible to argue with him in this area, however possible it may be on other matters, and that by itself gives us a reason for dismissing him. We all know that the sceptic who refuses to argue with us can never be shifted from his position; but it is not this kind of scepticism that is felt to pose a problem.
II If the sceptic accepts that the premises are true and justified, and likewise accepts the rule of inference, the argument will oblige him to accept the conclusion in the same way. So far, at least, it looks as though there is nothing wrong in principle with the idea of a transcendental argument, for it looks as though there are premises and rules for inference that the sceptic will accept. It may however be felt that if the second premise has to be analytic the amount we can hope to show by such arguments will be small. Must the second premise be analytic? I think, and have argued elsewhere, 8 that for Kant it nlust be, because it is only an analytic second premise that his sceptic will accept. Empirical conditions for experience are not in question so far as Kant is concerned, and if the second premise is not analytic it will have to be synthetic a priori: but Kant's objective in the Critique is to show that, and how, synthetic a priori knowledge is possible without actually presupposing that we have any. By no means everyone agrees with that, but this is not the place to discuss it. Setting Kant aside, would sonle non-analytic second premise do? The answer, of course, will depend on whether there are non-analytic second premises that our sceptic will have to accept. One suggestion, which I think merely obfuscates the issue, is that the conditional might be conceptually necessary without being analytic. This cderives from a misunderstanding of analyticity. Analyticity is sometimes defined as 'truth in virtue of meaning', which encourages the thought that it has something to do with words rather than with the concepts they express; that it is essentially verbal. But nothing could be true simply in virtue of word-meanings, and the truth-value of any sentence (however empirical) will partly depend on its words meaning what they do. Even the most elementary of analytic truths, like 'All men are men', must depend on logical laws, and more complicated ones like 'All bachelors are unmarried' also depend (as Kant said) on analysing the content of the concepts involved. The discernment of what is contained in a concept is the process of conceptual analysis, and conceptual analysis has its problems. But nothing is to be gained by calling truths 'conceptual' rather than 'analytic' when the analysis is
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complex or unobvious, for there is no clear line between the obvious and the unobvious cases; and all such truths, even the most elementary, depend on the content of their concepts as well as on logical laws. ('All men are men' would hardly be a truth if the concept expressed by 'men' had a different content on the second occurrence.) A more interesting suggestion is that the conditional n1ight depend upon some principle which is not analytic, but which nevertheless shares the feature I have been claiming for analytic truths: that they must be accepted as true and as justified once it has been made clear what they involve. I know of no general reason why there should not be nonanalytic principles of that sort; but I doubt whether there are any. Traditional scepticism is wide-ranging, and it extends to all our nonanalytic principles, without apparently rendering the sceptic incapable of arguing and thereby depriving his position of interest. The inductive principle, or the principle that the simplest hypothesis is likely to be true, might be thought to be suitably basic and indispensable (or for a Kantian, perhaps, the principle that every event has a cause). But though perhaps they may be indispensable, in that one cannot avoid making use of them, it does not follow that one has to think then1 justified, and it is their justification that the sceptic 'doubts. The matter can perhaps be clarified by considering a possible reply, to the effect that I am inventing a non-existent distinction between these principles and elementary logical ones. I have been contending that the sceptic loses interest for us if he fails to accept logical truths, on the grounds that only through a shared acceptance of them is argument possible. But it might be said that a similar argument is possible in the ~ase of these other principles as well. People regularly seek to construct transcendental arguments in support of them; let us suppose, for the moment, that a valid transcendental argument can be found which shows (for example) that the sceptic must at least accept the inductive principle as true if he is to have any experience or knowledge at all. Thus he could not reject that principle as false without failing to satisfy a condition that is required for him to have experience or knowledge - which would certainly put him beyond the range of argument. In general, wherever it can be shown by a transcendental argument that we must accept or believe something for experience to be possible, anybody who seriously refuses to accept or believe it puts himself as much beyond the range of argument as someone who rejects elementary logical truths. Hence any truth of that kind can equally well be relied on for the conditional premise. This threatens a regress, since it begins to look as though the conditional premise of a transcendental argument can be guaranteed acceptable only through a further transcendental defence. 9 But it is
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based on a nlistake. The conditional premise requires no defence, either transcendental or otherwise. It is important to bear in mind that the philosophical sceptic's primary concern is with justification. He doubts whether some claim can be justified; if a transcendental argument is to convince him he must accept both its premises as being justified (or as needing no justification, which is effectively the same thing). The point of the argument I gave earlier was to show not only that he n1ust accept the logical propositions in question as true, though he must, but that he must accept them as justified, since otherwise no argument would be possible with him. And it was not itself thought of as a transcendental argun1ent, for it was not addressed to the sceptic and designed to convince hin1 of anything; on the contrary, it was an observation that if he refused to accept these things he could be convinced of nothing. There may be other principles, besides the logical ones, which must be accepted as both true and justified for argument to be possible; I am doubtful whether there are, but if there are, they could equally be used to furnish the conditional premises for transcendental arguments. And in their case again no transcendental defence would be needed: if it is a condition for my entering into any argument that I should treat P as justified, I do not need to have this proved to me before coming to treat P as justified (indeed I cannot have anything proved to me in advance of that). The only case in which a transcendental argument might be useful would be one in which although the sceptic did treat P as justified he was not aware that he did; here the argument might help him to such an awareness. It could do so, of course, only by relying on the fact that he does actually accept the premises as justified. If he did not he would be inaccessible to argument.
III Transcendental arguments are designed to convince sceptics. But convincing somebody is a different thing from establishing a conclusion in the abstract. The arguments work by treating the sceptic as a person, a participant in the debate: as such there are certain things he is committed to accepting (the reality of experience, the legitimacy of the principles on which argun1ent depends). But then it seems that in a way he is caught by a trick; the argument plays on his weakness, his willingness to play our game, and establishes not that its conclusion is viarranted but that he cannot deny it to be. That is by no means the same thing. The demand for justification is prompted by the feeling that we need an assurance that the contents of human minds and the
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principles of hun1an thinking really match the way things are in the world - a feeling put most graphically by Descartes' hypothesis of the malin genie when that hypothesis is taken in its n10st radical form. Descartes uses the hypothesis to induce a doubt about the reality of the external world, but he also takes it very n1uch further, and uses it to raise the possibility that I might be deceived 'even concerning things which seemed to me most n1anifest' - including the truth of elementary logical and arithmetical principles. 10 And it is indeed not obvious why 'this little agitation of the brain which we call thought'll should operate in such a way as to yield the truth about reality. Admittedly we have no serious alternative to accepting elementary logical propositions as justified, and the same applies to the conclusions of transcendental arguments we can see to be valid; but we may feel dissatisfied none the less, for it is one thing to show that we must regard them as justified and another to establish that they actually are. We could go through the same moves and reach the same conclusion even if the malin genie were hard at work. It seems particularly inadequate to have an argument against the sceptic turn on concessions he is bound to make if he is to claim knowledge, experience, or openness to argument, because most sceptics are not real people at all, but creations of the philosophical imagination. They are created to play a dramatic role as the proponents of doubt. If it can be shown that over certain matters the sceptic's role is unplayable that does not seem to remove the possibility that the doubt was quite correct, it only shows that it was wrongly dramatized. It is not immediately obvious that the only philosophical possibilities worth considering are those that real people could seriously hold in debate whatever Plato may have thought. Stroud has suggested that transcendental arguments cannot generally yield results about how the world must be, but only about what people must believe; unless, perhaps, they rely on some form of verification principle which will bridge the gap.12 There are two quite separate ways of getting to a conclusion that could be put in that fashion. One of them has just been given. Transcendental arguments can show the sceptic that because he must accept certain premises as true and justified, he is committed to recognizing that certain conclusions are justified as well. The other is the argument in Stroud (1968), and is to the effect that because these arguments concern conditions for experience, language, etc., it is hard to see how they can reach conclusions about how the world must be rather than about how it must be believed to be; a suspicion which is fortified by examining a variety of transcendental iarguments put forward by a variety of authors. Stroud does not claim that this latter argument is decisive, he just does not see how such tonclusions could be reached. But I think the first argument is decisive
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- though how much damage it does is another matter, to which I shall return in a moment. First of all it is important to notice that although it sounds as if both argun1ents give the san1e result, their conclusions are really quite different. The general form of a transcendental argument, as we have seen, is something like the following: There is experience (or knowledge, or language) (of general kind
K) It is a necessary condition of experience (etc.) that P Therefore, P. Stroud's point is that if the argument is to be valid, and is to avoid drawing on some kind of verification principle, P must be expected to take some form such as 'We believe Q'. It is true that on examination most transcendental arguments hold out little hope of getting further than that, including most of Kant's, for they are designed to establish what the world of appearances must be like, and the world of appearances is a construction out of (certain of) our concepts and beliefs. Nevertheless I think, and have argued elsewhere,13 that there is some prospect of producing satisfactory transcendental arguments for which P makes a claim not about our beliefs (or our concepts) but about what the world must be like, in itself and independently of what we think about it. A Kantian argument of this kind can be put forward to show the reality of things in themselves, as well as of the self as subject of experience. It would be too much of a digression to establish this here, however. What matters is that it is at least an open possibility. Stroud presents no general objection to it, nor does he take hin1self to have done so. He only expresses a doubt as to whether any such argument can be successful, a doubt which can be answered only by providing a satisfactory example. The feeling that there is a general proof that it cannot be successful - a feeling which many people seem to share, though not I think Stroud himself - may be due to a conflation of Stroud's point with the earlier, decisive, argument; which however makes an entirely different point, even though its conclusion can be expressed in confusingly sin1ilar words. Our earlier conclusion had nothing to do with the form taken by P in the above schema, and had no tendency to show that P must always be something like 'We believe Q'. Rather the point was that the argument did not provide, in the abstract, a proof of P (regardless of its form). It constituted a justification of P only to someone who already accepted the premises as true and justified. Adn1ittedly, everybody has to accept the premises of a good transcendental argument as being true and justified because otherwise he would not be able to enter into the debate, and he should therefore accept the conclusion likewise. But
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there seems to be a difference between establishing that everyone must believe P to be true and justified, and establishing that P actually is true and justified. This applies whether P itself makes a claim about the world independent of us, or only a claim about what we must believe or think. The verification principle could help with Stroud's difficulty, but it cannot help us here; for it will not serve our turn unless it is true, and indeed justified. But what reason have we to suppose it is? Even if we could give an argument in its defence - something its proponents are not always very good at doing - that argument would achieve its objective only if its premises were true. And even with premises as basic as the elementary laws of logic we have so far not succeeded in showing that they are true, only that everybody must think them to be. The same applies equally to the suggestion - made by Stroud more recently 14 - that it would be possible to overcome the gap between what we must believe and what is true by adopting an idealist solution, according to which the real world is in some way a function of our beliefs: or at least a function of those beliefs we should have under certain ideal conditions (which would of course include all those beliefs that everyone has to have) .15 Any argument the idealist advanced would be subject to the same limitation, as any argument whatever would. The arguments in this paper are of course subject to it too, and there is another difficulty for the idealist there. I have been arguing that the sceptic, like everyone else, is bound to accept certain things, and that he can therefore be shown to be committed to certain conclusions and can be convinced of them if he follows his own principles. This contention itself rests on such things as the laws of logic. Now the idealist thinks he has a firm grasp on what we must believe, and seeks to construct the real world from it; but he has to start from the assurance that it is really true that we must believe these things. But is it? Even if I have made no mistake, and the arguments I have given are convincing, the same point applies to them again. I have claimed that in certain cases everyone must believe P to be true and justified. But in fact that was incautious: rather I should have said that everyone must believe everyone must believe P to be true and justified. Or indeed not quite that either, but that everyone must believe everyone must believe everyone must believe ... etc. without limit. The idealist has no firm ground here on which he can start his construction. Just as one n1ay feel in certain moods that there is a gap between showing that something really is true and justified and showing that everyone must believe it to be - a gap staked out by the malin genie hypothesis in its most radical Cartesian form - so in other moods one may feel that this idea is just absurd, and that if valid arguments can be produced to show us that even the sceptic must admit some
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conclusion then that conclusion has been fully established. It is this second feeling which prompts both the verificationist and the idealist reactions. But it can also pron1pt the thought that nothing so grand as the verification principle, or so odd as an idealist n1etaphysic, is needed to bridge the gap, because there is really no gap. Consider, for example, the suggestion that the elementary laws of logic are not true, and that the world therefore contains contradictions. Why are we expected to pay any attention to this? It is not even a possibility, for the notion of possibility is derived from those logical laws which delineate its boundaries. And more generally, what is the point of contending that a claim has not been established when a proof has been given for it that even the most hardened doubter must accept? To do that is only to show that you have lost your grip on what it is to establish or justify something. Sensible though that may sound, it is mistaken, at least as it stands. Someone who sees the malin genie hypothesis as constituting a problen1 can readily concede the word 'possibility' to his opponent; it is no part of his case that the hypothesis is a 'possibility'. (He can say he is afraid it may be true, but the modality here is epistemic, not logical or ontological.) What he contends is that it has not been established that the hypothesis is false; no doubt it is, ex vi terminorum, 'logically impossible' that the world contain contradictions, but to assume the real world must be logically possible would be to beg the question. Nor is there any real difficulty about what he has in mind when he speaks of eliminating the malin genie hypothesis. What ,worries him is not that he is inclined to think it true - he is not, for he is as bound as anyone to accept the laws of logic and any other fundamental principles of thought - but that he would be in just the same epistemic position even if it were true. His conviction that the laws of logic are true and justified would be equally strong. But of course this worry can never be ren10ved, at least by rational means; the hypothesis cannot be eliminated. Any argument which sought to do that could only, at best, produce in him a further conviction, and it would still be the case that that conviction could have been implanted in him by the malin genie along with everything else. Because of this a great many philosophers would say we are 'entitled to disn1iss' the hypothesis; it 'ought not to worry' us. How Illoral judgements of this kind obtrude themselves into epistemology is not very clear· to me. Palpably they are moral judgements; so, perhaps less obviously, are many of the atten1pts to disn1iss such n1etaphysical discussions as foolish or absurd. No doubt it is not a productive use of time to spend it in attempting to solve an insoluble problem, but those who say these things must mean more than that, or they would merely be reiterating that it is insoluble. Obviously I am not claiming
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either that the matter should worry us; only that we should take note of it. What is worth while, in my view, is to spend some time trying to become clear about what doubts can be answered and what doubts cannot, and about how far transcendental argumentation can take us. For once we have set the unsatisfiable demands clearly to one side, we have some chance of seeing how other demands can perhaps be satisfied.
IV Much discussion of these issues is clouded by the foggy notion of a conceptual schen1e. 'Our conceptual scheme' is generally taken to be more than a set of concepts; it is taken to include principles of reasoning like the laws of logic, the principle of induction, and a variety of others. But it is generally not supposed to include all the principles of reasoning that anyone ever uses. Some such principles, for example, are simply superstitious, like the principle which leads us to expect bad luck on Friday the thirteenth, and are evidently inconsistent with others (like the principle of induction). They are supposed to be left out. What is often not made at all clear is how much is supposed to be left in, and why.16 The obscurity is made worse by thinking of our conceptual scheme as a sort of net in which we are entangled and trapped. As we have seen, we cannot do without such basic principles as the most elementary logical laws, and if that is all that is meant by those who say we cannot get outside our conceptual scheme it must be conceded that it is obviously true. It does not however entail that we cannot coherently raise questions about the status of those same logical laws, and recognize that our inevitable belief in them does not settle the question of their truth. For on any plausible understanding of what 'our conceptual scheme' involves, it includes conceptual . resources that allow us to go beyond that scheme itself and contrast it with the reality that it seeks to formulate and describe. Concepts like those of truth and reality are designed for exactly that purpose, and it is because we possess them that we are able to consider such large-scale metaphysical issues as we have just been discussing. There may be 'conceptual schemes' which do not possess these resources; those who operated with them would not be able to think about those questions, and by the same token would lack the concepts of reality and truth. (Which is not to deny that they might be able to get along with alternative notions which did equally well for everyday, non-philosophical purposes; what shows that we are not people of that sort is just that we can consider these metaphysical issues, which they could not do.) Not only can we raise grand and unanswerable questioEJ__'!Q9_l.!!_tb~
_
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nature of reality; we can also raise questions of an answerable kind ab.out how reality might differ from the way we ordinarily take it to be. If 'our conceptual schen1e' is internally coherent, and includes n10st of the concepts and principles held most of the time by the many (or the wise), it may serve to determine one single description of the way the world is, but even so we can still ask what alternatives become possible if one or another subset of our ordinary principles is suspended. We can, for instance, imagine suspending all the principles involved in induction and theory-formation; we can imagine suspending all our principles of inference except the basic laws of logic, and ask whether some suggestion coheres with them. More interestingly, we can ask whether some proposal about the nature of the world is consistent with the possibility of experience. We are also quite able to recognize the possibility of conceptual schemes alternative to our own. If (as seems natural) the acceptance of the Law of Non-contradiction in its full universality is taken to be an essential feature of our scheme, we have already done this, by noting the eccentricities of the American physicist and the Russian philosopher. Again, if the identification of spatio-temporal particulars is thought to be fundamental to our scheme, that does not prevent us from considering how alternative feature-placing systems might work, or systems which dispensed with space or with time. Much entertaining philosophy can be done in this area, and has been. And there is nothing particularly puzzling about how it is done. It is done by examining whether working with such and such a systen1 of concepts and principles would be compatible with the possibility of experience. Of course in thinking about such things we must use our own concepts and principles of reasoning, but it is an intrinsic feature of these concepts and these principles that they enable us to recognize our, and their, limits, and drive us on to ask questions of the unanswerable metaphysical kind. Kant was well aware of this, but more recent philosophers have often lost sight of it. Quine for example thinks we should dismiss the metaphysical questions as incoherent, and rest content inside the structure of knowledge that science gives us, naturalizing even epistemology so that it becomes part of the scientific enterprise. 17 But to avoid asking the metaphysical questions is not even an option for us if we are to retain our present conceptual scheme (and Quine certainly does not wish to suggest we abandon it), for the questions are thrown up naturally by the concepts we possess. And just as unanswerable questions are generated about reality, by raising the suggestion that we might be completely wrong about everything, so in the· same way unanswerable questions are generated about alternative conceptual schemes. On the malin genie hypothesis we may be entirely wrong in our ideas about what scope there is for
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alternatives. It might seem that this was not so: is it not clear, for example, that a measure of respect for some basic logical principles must be a feature of any conceptual schenle? For someone who lacked such respect could not have concepts at all; he could not h~ve experience or coherent thought; and it is no good saying that the concepts of experience, thought, concept are coloured by our ways of thinking and that he nlight have perfectly satisfactory substitutes instead, for we really do have no grip on what that could possibly mean. But although this argument is correct so far as it goes, it does not establish the point, just because it is itself an argument. Analytic though it is that experience requires some respect for logical laws, the malin genie hypothesis allows for a self-contradictory world in which analyticities do not hold, however compelling they may seem. Setting aside the unanswerable questions, I think it is clear that transcendental arguments promise to be of particular help with the answerable ones; though whether the promise can be fulfilled depends, of course, on how successful we are in finding transcendental arguments that work. Transcendental arguments are not the only arguments that can exhibit conceptual interrelations, or that can be used (in Strawson's words) 'to establish the connections between the major structural features or elements of our conceptual scheme'.18 But among such arguments they have a special role to play, because of the undeniable nature of their premises. To investigate (say) how the inductive principle supports our belief in the external world is inlportant and worth while, but the investigation will not be a properly transcendental one since it just does not seem necessary to accept the inductive principle as justified, in the way we found it unavoidable to accept the laws of logic as justified, and the initial claim that there is experience. We have seen that transcendental arguments do not answer scepticism. At least, they do not answer a scepticism so thoroughgoing that nothing can answer it; and such a scepticism seems to make good sense. But they do answer the sceptic. They answer any sceptic who is prepared to argue with us seriously. Because he must accept their premises as true and as justified, and the rules of inference that they employ, he is committed to their conclusions. And this, though less than we might have hoped for, is valuable. Its value is reflected in the fact that whether we ask about alternative conceptual schemes or about the nature of independent reality, transcendental arguments seek to give us answers by drawing only on assumptions which are as minimal as possible. No argument could get started without assuming that the laws of logic are true and justified, at any rate on the whole; no one could think or argue without being aware of things, even if the only objects of his experience were his own thoughts. Conclusions reached from so exiguous a basis are well worth having. They convince sceptics, provided only
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that they are open to conviction at all. They answer scepticism so far as it can be answered. They also promise to identify certain features, of thought or of reality, as being in a clear sense fundamental, because the recognition of them is the unavoidable consequence of unavoidable pren1ises. It remains an open question how far transcendental argun1ents can actually get us; that can be assessed only by searching for good transcendental arguments and by examining the candidates that are put forward to see whether they are satisfactory. As I said at the start of this paper, that is too large a matter to be discussed here. But at least we have not found any general reason for defeatism. The objection that transcendental arguments seek to do the impossible, by trying to take us outside our conceptual scheme, we have found to be mistaken. There is no real difficulty, at least in principle, over their providing analytically necessary conditions for experience. The other principal objection, the one due to Stroud, has fallen into two parts. First there is Stroud's original thought, that because of the character of its first premise a transcendental argument cannot yield conclusions about how things must be, but only about how they must be believed to be or what concepts we must employ, unless they draw upon son1e kind of verification principle. About this I have said little; Stroud does not claim to have established it conclusively; it could be refuted conclusively only by producing a satisfactory transcendental argument which establishes a conclusion about how things must be, and not just about how they must be believed to be. This I believe has been done, by Kant, as I have argued elsewhere. 19 Much of the persuasiveness of this original claim of Stroud's arises from confusing it with another and quite different claim, which is perfectly correct. Because transcendental arguments convince sceptics, rather than answering scepticism, there is a sense in which they can at best show only that everyone (including the sceptic) must accept their conclusions as true and justified, and not that they must be true of an independent reality. I should like to finish by saying something about Kant. But not about his transcendental arguments: about his transcendental idealism. For I think that Kant also failed to distinguish the two claims just mentioned, and that this helps to explain his ambivalence over things in themselves. He has always seemed to be pulled in two directions over things in themselves: on the one hand he firmly declares that we can know nothing at all about things as they are in themselves, while on the other he con1mits himself to saying at least that they exist, and affect us in such a way as to provide the source for the given element in our experience. But these two pressures both become highly intelligible if we suppose that Kant is suffering from something like the confusion just described.
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Kant's world of appearances is in effect a construction out of (certain of) our concepts and our beliefs about the world. 20 The transcendental arguments to which he gives pron1inence in the Critique are arguments to the effect that we must apply certain concepts and believe certain principles to hold, which is equivalent to saying that in the world of appearances those concepts do have instances and those principles are true. Kant clearly thinks, as Stroud does, that the main use of transcendental arguments is to yield conclusions about how we must believe things to be (the world of appearances) rather than about how they actually are (in then1selves). Nevertheless there seems to be nothing in the nature of a transcendental argument which makes it impossible for such arguments to reach conclusions about how things must actually be, and Kant is himself committed to such conclusions, though he tends to shy away from saying so explicitly. It is on such grounds that we are entitled to infer that there must exist a real world which is independent of our beliefs about it, a world of things whose real (an sich) nature affects us in intuition. Our knowledge about what these things are like is no doubt inevitably very limited. But it is an exaggeration to say we can know nothing about them at all; and new transcendental arguments might be found which would enable us to know n1ore. The conclusions which such arguments established would be as much entitled to be called knowledge as our knowledge-claims ever are. On the other hand, the malin genie hypothesis reminds us that all our beliefs and all our inferences might be completely astray. There is therefore a sense in which none of our knowledge-clain1s can ever be completely secure against falsity, for our epistemic state could be just the same even if they were false. It is quite natural - whether or not it does violence to the ordinary use of the word 'know' - to put this by saying that we can never properly know anything at all about the way the world really is; and it is this, I think, that accounts for Kant's feeling that the world as it is in itself must be strictly unknowable. It is not even essential that there be anything at all. If reality can be contradictory, and wholly out of line with all our thinking, then nothing that we believe about it is altogether secure, and we cannot even be assured that it exists (even if its existence is required to make our account consistent). In its most radical form the malin genie hypothesis simply serves to point out that even the most basic principles of our thought might fail to match the way things are; indeed the malin genie himself is dispensable; he only provides a dramatic way of expressing the gap between our beliefs and reality. What Kant never realized was that he makes the an sich play these two quite different roles. On the one hand it contrasts with the world of appearances, as the largely unknown reality which must underlie
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that picture of the everyday world which we construct synthetically from the given by reading in the categories and the forms of space and time. On the other hand it stands in contrast to all that we can discover by any means, and thus in contrast not only to the world of appearances but also to the largely unknown reality which we are obliged to assun1e. It serves to mark the unrefuted and irrefutable suggestion that all our beliefs and all the principles of our thought might fail to match the way things are.
NOTES General Note. The stimulus to write this paper was partly due to the editors of this volume, but partly to reading Barry Stroud's (1984) book The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism and Quassim Cassam's (1985) thesis Transcendental Arguments and Necessity. I am particularly grateful to Stroud and Cassam, with both of whom I disagree considerably. I am grateful also to a number of people with whon1 I have discussed an earlier draft of the paper, especially Simon Blackburn, David Bostock, Julie Jack, John Kenyon and Hugh Rice. 1 Strawson, 1982. 2 Korner, 1967. 3 Stroud, 1968. 4 See esp. Wilkerson (1976, ch. 10). 5 Walker (1978, chs I and II). 6 Strawson (1959, p. 35). 7 Annas and Barnes (1985, pp. 7f and 166ff) contrast modern scepticism with ancient scepticism in this respect. Since Descartes, sceptics have typically retained their beliefs but worried about their justification; ancient sceptics went further and (so far as they could) abandoned their beliefs as well. This interpretation of ancient scepticism is worked out and discussed by M.P. Burnyeat (1980). 8 Walker (1978, pp. 18-23). 9 The suspicion of some kind of regress or circularity here seems to be one of the things recent writers have had in mind in calling transcendental argun1ents 'self-referential'. Another is the thought that they cannot take us outside our own conceptual scheme, which is discussed in section. IV below. See e.g. R. Bubner (1974-5) and R. Rorty (1979). Neither of these ideas seen1S to me to have much to do with what Hintikka (1972) contends, despite what Bubner himself says. So far as I understand him, Hintikka simply seeks to reserve the name 'transcendental argument' for argun1ents which show how a certain type of knowledge is due to our own constructive activity (see p. 275); this would allow in the arguments Kant uses to support his transcendental idealism, but exclude most other arguments that I (and others) would call transcendental. 10 Descartes, 1897-1909, VII, 36; IX, 28 or Haldane, £.5. and Ross, G.R.T., 1911, I, p. 158. 11 Hume (1947, p. 148).
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Stroud, 1968 (see note 4 above). Walker (1978, pp. 131-5; see also Walker, 1981; 1983). Stroud, 1984a. Obviously the ideal conditions must not simply be specified as those under which we would believe all and only the truths, or the idealism would collapse into vacuity. 16 It should be noticed, though, that this criticism cannot be directed against Korner, who takes unusual care to specify just what he takes to be intrinsic to a conceptual scheme - or, as he calls it, a categorial framework. See Korner 1967; 1974 esp. ch. 1. There is, however, a careful reply to Korner by Eva Schaper (1974). 17 Quine, 1969. 18 Strawson , (1985, p. 23). 19 See note 13 above. 20 For a defence of this account see Walker (1978, ch. IX).
5
Scepticism and Intentionality Peter Bieri
In this paper I want to present some reflections on the connection between intentionality and sceptical hypotheses. Sceptical hypotheses are hypotheses to the effect that the causal origins of our beliefs might be totally different from the way we take them to be. I want to pursue the question of what this would mean for our intentional states, particularly our beliefs, given that causal considerations are involved both in the ascription and the identification of intentional states. More specifically, I want to know if sceptical hypotheses can be, or can be designed to be, coherent in the light of the causal aspects of intentionality. Given that 'transcendental arguments' in one of the many senses of this term are arguments which probe into the coherence of philosophical scepticism, I shall be occupied with a sort of transcendental argument. My reflections will have two parts. In the first part I shall discuss the nature and function of sceptical hypotheses, and in the second part I shall focus on the question of their coherence in terms of intentionality.
I To know something is, at a minimum, to believe something true. What more is involved in knowledge? Intuitively, two further requirements come into play: (1) For a person S to have knowledge, S's beliefs n1ust not only be true, but also epistemically justified, i.e., S must have, and must know he has, reasons for his beliefs. (2) It must not just be an accident that S's beliefs are true. There must be a lawlike connection between his belief that p and the fact that p - a connection to support twocounterfactuals: (a) If p were not the case, S would not believe that p. (b) If P were the case, S would believe that p, if he were in a suitable position to discover that p. It must, in other words, not be that S would believe p, no matter if p were the case or not, and it n1ust not
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be that S would not believe p even if he were in a suitable position to discover it. Our beliefs must be - metaphorically speaking, in contact with the world - they must be tracking the facts. 1 These two intuitions ought not to be played off against each other. It would be implausible to say that what n1atters is only that someone is a reliable producer of true beliefs. Someone completely incapable of commenting on his epistemic reliability in terms of reasons for his beliefs might act for others as a sort of instrument for measuring the world. But he would be struck with episten1ic blindness: The truth of his beliefs would de facto not be an accident, but it would, so to speak, be an accident for him. On the other hand, it would be odd to say that knowledge ascriptions merely depend on someone's capability to advance reasons for his beliefs, no matter if these beliefs relate to the world in an ordered fashion or not. The true story about our concept of knowledge must combine both intuitions and this combination is obviously achieved by the notion that it is the function of epistemic principles to place us in a non-accidental cognitive relationship to the world's facts. What else could be the point of epistemic justification? We can have good reasons for believing something and still be wrong, by failing to track the world with our beliefs. We want to put a requirement on epistemic justification which minimizes this possibility. The requirement is that someone, in order to know, must be able to exclude sources of error or deception. Excluding such sources means mobilizing knowledge about our causal position in the world. A fully competent epistemic subject is someone who knows under what external and internal conditions he is likely to produce false beliefs. He knows about unfavourable conditions of illumination, distortions of perspective, hallucinations and dreams. He will, in evaluating his beliefs, be careful to exclude such deceptive factors. He will, in the process of belief fixation, both apply certain epistemic principles or principles of reasoning, and rely on certain assumptions about the causal origins of our beliefs. We may call the sun1 of all these considerations our methodology in the acquisition of knowledge. General scepticism, then, is the thesis that this methodology is altogether incapable of providing us with knowledge about the world, although we do not have any other and better methodology. This cannot mean that we do not have any criteria for a rational evaluation of our beliefs. We obviously do have such criteria, namely the criteria defined through our methodology. Rather, the sceptical thesis is that the rationality of our beliefs is compatible with the assumption that these beliefs are altogether radically false and that they do not, therefore, constitute knowledge. In order to establish this stunning thesis the sceptic typically asks us to consider certain sceptical hypotheses: we might be dreaming, and the rationality of our beliefs might be nothing
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but the coherence of a dreanl;2 we might be brains in a vat which are stimulated to produce all our ordinary beliefs, including the belief that we are not brains in a vat;3 we might be floating in a tank near Alpha Centauri with our brains b~ing stimulated to believe we are on the earth in familiar surroundings. 4 Sceptical hypotheses have three features in conlmon. (1) They are causal hypotheses, namely hypotheses about the causal origins of our beliefs. And they are, of course, wildly different from our usual assumptions about these origins. They amount, if spelled out in detail, to a complete redescription of our causal position in the world. (2) If a sceptical hypothesis were true, we would not be tracking the world's facts. We would be in the situation of believing p although p would not be the case. We would, for instance, believe that the sceptical hypothesis is false although it is true. Also, we would not believe p if P were true. We would, for example, not believe that the sceptical hypothesis is true, if it were true. Our beliefs would be completely out of contact with the real world as described in the sceptical hypothesis, and we would therefore not have any knowledge of this world. (3) Sceptical hypotheses are built to be empirically irrefutable. It is in the nature of the hypothetical situation that any piece of empirical evidence which we nlight want to use against the sceptical hypothesis is itself part of our universal deception. If we clain1 to have woken up from a former dream, this counts as just one more episode in the Big Dream; if we protest that we can very well distinguish a brain in a vat from a real person and that it is a real person that we see in the mirror, this is declared to be one more illusory experience, one more product of the brain's stimulation, and so forth. In this sense, sceptical hypotheses are carefully designed to neutralizes all our empirical evidence. The point of all sceptical hypotheses is the claim that everything in our experience could be exactly the way it is now, even if the world were completely different from the way we take it to be. It would, therefore, be pointless and futile to try a refutation of a sceptical hypothesis on the basis of this (possibly illusory) experience. Finally, the sceptic reminds us of the intuition that to know is to be able to rule out possible sources of error and deception, and he applies this intuition to the hypothesis he has advanced: knowing that the world is the way we usually take it to be would mean ruling out the sceptical hypothesis as false. However, since that hypothesis does not contain a logical contradiction, and since it cannot be refuted on empirical grounds, we have no means to rule it out. But if we cannot even exclude a possibility like that - how can we clainl to know anything at all about the world? The question I want to focus on In this paper is this: can a situation of universal deception, as depicted by a sceptical hypothesis, be coherently described? Is a situation like th~~!_e~~-ti~le_~i!l.:l~nQ!11_M_o1~- __
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specifically, is the assumption that the causal orIgIns of our beliefs might be totally different from the way we take them to be, compatible with the assumption that the intentional or sen1antic content of our beliefs would still be the same? Before addressing this question directly, however, I want to go quickly through some familiar steps in the discussion with the sceptic, in order to give his position more profile and to make it as strong as possible. First, we must guard against a misunderstanding. Being 'sceptical' about the picture of the world arrived at through our methodology can mean a number of things which must not be confounded with the particular thesis of philosophical scepticism. If we call our present picture of the world, somewhat carelessly, our theory T, being sceptical about T might simply mean that we consider the following possibilities. 6 (a) Perhaps the logical space of possible theories contains one that would organize the past and present data better than T, although T appears to be better than anything else we know of. (b) Perhaps there are data which we have overlooked, although they are in principle available. These data might force us to replace T with another theory. (c) Perhaps we shall, in the future, encounter data which will force us to replace T with another theory. All of these possibilities are, of course, perfectly coherent. To be sceptical in this sense is not only a coherent attitude, it is the only rational attitude to assume. It is, however, not yet the attitude of philosophical scepticism. This particular attitude can be brought out by assuming that theory T is in fact superior to any rival which could be devised, in relation to any data which will or could be encountered. We suppose, in other words, that theory T is the ideal theory - ideal in the light of our methodology, which is the only standard we have. The philosophical sceptic, then, will grant us that T is the most rational theory in the sense that it is optimal compared with our strongest epistemic criteria. But he will clain1 that the ideal theory T might still be false. It is, he says, still an open question whether T is in fact true. Ideality in the sense of optimal rationality does not guarantee truth. This is so precisely because a sceptical hypothesis might be true, i.e., because T might have been produced in us through causal channels belonging to a world radically different from the world depicted in T. Now, the first classical objection to this position is to say that we do not really understand the idea that even the ideal theory about the world might be false. We do not understand it because the notion of truth is intelligible only within the framework of our epistemic procedures, i.e., our methodology. If a theory were optimal in the light of our best and strictest epistemic principles, it would necessarily have to be true because that is what 'being true' means. There is no coherent question about a theory's truth over and above all the questions about its comparative success in conceptually unifying the data which fall
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under it. This view may be called verificationism. 7 It should be clear very quickly what the sceptic's reaction to it will be: he will object that this doctrine begs the very question at issue. Of course, he will say, if we stipulate that a theory's being true is nothing more than its being optimally rational according to our methodology, it follows that the ideal theory must be true. But, he will continue, that is really no more than a stipulation. It does not capture our plain and straightforward notion of truth. This notion is entirely non-epistemic, i.e., it is not relativized to any methodology. To say about a theory that it is true is to say quite simply that the world is the way the theory says it is. If a sceptical hypothesis were true and'the world were not the way the ideal theory says it is, then the ideal theory, although ideal, would plainly be false. It is true, and trivially true, that the operation of determining a theory's truth is bound to our epistemic principles. In fact, it just is the application of our methodology. But it does not follow that a theory's being true depends in any way on epistemic procedures. All it depends on is the way the world is. The sceptic, in other words, is a realist, and his realism is incompatible with verificationism. The second well-known objection to the sceptic's position attacks his realisnl from a slightly different angle. 8 Is not this realism completely empty because the notion of 'the world' which it invokes is completely empty? When we are told that the world n1ight be completely different from the way we conceive it to be, what do we refer to by the expression 'the world'? Ex hypothesi, we cannot be referring to anything within reach of our conceptual resources and descriptive powers. Does that not make the sceptic's reference an empty gesture, meaning nothing? The sceptic, I think, has a good answer to that. Yes, indeed, he can say, 'the world' as opposed to 'our experience' is an empty label in the sense that we do not know what that world is like. But by pointing out this fact we do not make an objection to scepticism; we simply state the sceptic's position. The point of sceptical hypotheses is not to give us a new, alternative description of the world with which to replace our old description. That would defeat the sceptic's own claim. The point of such hypotheses is, rather, to demonstrate that we possess no description of the world which can claim to represent knowledge of that world. If sceptical hypotheses, by virtue of their very structure, can not be eliminated, and if the sceptic is right in claiming that knowledge would require an elimination of the possibilities he mentions, then that is precisely our predicament: we do not know what 'the world', as a matter of fact, refers to. But is the sceptic right in claiming that knowledge requires the elimination of sceptical hypotheses? This question opens a third fan1iliar objection: it is true that our concept of knowledge contains the requirement that we exclude possible sources of error and deception.
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We n1ay also put this by saying that a fully competent epistemic subject will always consider alternatives to what he believes. But we can and must distinguish between relevant and irrelevant alternatives. 9 How do we make this distinction? Well, first of all it is not sufficient for an alternative to become relevant that someone just thinks it is relevant. There must be good evidence to think something is a genuine possibility. What counts as a relevant alternative is, in other words, a function of what else we know or believe to know. Secondly, the relevance or irrelevance of a considered alternative is, at least partially, relative to a certain context. What counts as relevant in one situation may count as totally irrelevant in another one. Consider my knowledge of the gasoline level in my car which I get by looking at my fuel gauge. 10 Whether I know how much fuel I have left depends, as a matter of objective fact, on the proper functioning of the gauge. It might be out of order, and in this case I wouldn't know. Is this a relevant alternative - one which ought to be taken seriously? It depends on the implications of being wrong. There is a difference between driving by a string of gasoline stations and driving in the middle of the desert. Running out of fuel in the first case may be merely unpleasant; in the latter case it may be a matter of life and death. The possibility of a broken fuel gauge is, accordingly, a relevant alternative in the latter situation whereas it is not normally considered relevant in the former one. Sceptical hypotheses fare badly on both criteria. There are many cases where we have good evidence to believe that we might be in a deceptive situation. But they are particular cases, and the relevant alternatives to consider are particular sources of deception. Furthermore, the 'sceptical hypotheses' we develop in such cases grow in a medium of knowledge, and the question of their truth or falsity can, therefore, be settled. The sceptical hypotheses typical of philosophical scepticism, on the other hand, are by their nature beyond the reach of evidence, both positive and negative. If they are intuitively appealing, it is because they rest on the step from particular cases of deception which we all acknowledge to the idea of a universal deception. But it is precisely this step which leads to possibilities or alternatives that are irrelevant on our first criterion, because they are merely conjured up and not backed up by a single piece of evidence. The same holds if we apply our second criterion. Except for the context created by philosophical scepticism itself there does not exist a context or type of situation relative to which sceptical hypotheses might become relevant. And this is, again, a consequence of the way they are designed: since they are compatible with all our experience being the way it is, there is no need, either theoretical or practical, to consider them within the framework of that experience. They are just too remote to be taken seriously - so remote, in fact, that they strike the unprepared as a kind of joke. Unlike certain
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remote possibilities which are only relatively irrelevant because they may, after all, become relevant at some point, the sceptic's hypotheses are absolutely irrelevant. Does this not mean that the sceptic has no justification whatsoever for his claim that we cannot have knowledge of the world unless we can rule out his hypotheses? I think this is a tough objection for the sceptic to meet, mainly for two reasons: First, a lot can be said for the view that, according to our shared concept of knowledge, knowledge is an evidential state in which all relevant alternatives are eliminated. 11 Second, it must be our shared concept of knowledge which we are talking about, if there is to be a genuine debate with the sceptic. If he sets conditions which lie far beyond our common concept, he runs the risk of advancing a thesis which is unexciting and which we will shrug off with the remark: 'Well, if you decide to define knowledge like that, then of course . .. '12 Still, there is a way for the sceptic to respond to this challenge. To begin with its second point, he will distinguish between two claims. (a) Sceptical hypotheses are so remote that there is no experiential context in which it would be appropriate to consider them as genuine possibilities. (b) Scepical hypotheses are false or make no sense. The sceptic will then point out that (a) does not imply (b). It may, for all con1mon purposes, be a joke that we might be dreaming all the time or that we might be brains in a vat. Unless we intend to make a joke, it would be conversationally inappropriate to mention a possibility like that and to insist on it. Measured against this standard, we may even call such hypotheses 'nonsensical'. Accordingly, we will never blame anyone for not taking them into account. But all this does not show that they are literally nonsensical and that they could not, after all, be true. We must not let conversational standards or other conventional standards of human interaction be the arbiter of possible truth. I3 As to the first point of the challenge, the sceptic will point out that it is a disguised form of verificationism and therefore question begging. If we first define the class of relevant alternatives through the requirement that there has to be empirical evidence for them, and if we then restrict the range of alternatives to be eliminated to that class, we are, in effect, saying that nothing counts as possibly true unless it is in principle verifiable. If we are, however, realists in the sense that we stick to our plain notion of truth which is non-epistemic, we have, apart from conventional standards, no reason to exclude sceptical hypotheses from theoretical considerations about the possibility of human knowledge. After all, if a hypothesis like that were, as a matter of objective fact, true - would that not make it theoretically, if not practically, very relevant? This reply rests on what is probably the intuitive basis and recurring theme of all philosophical scepticism: the notion that we want to view
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human knowledge completely objectively. 14 I say 'we want' because the claim is that this aim is built into all our epistemic efforts, into all our aspirations to knowledge. To seek knowledge is to try to go beyond the particular limitations and idiosyncrasies set by our biological makeup and by the particular sort of causal interactions between us and the world. To look for a more and more objective understanding of the world is to rely less and less on individual aspects of our original point of view given by our particular causal position in the world. It is, in other words, to go in the direction from subjective appearances to objective reality, in the direction of an increasingly detached view of the world. But why should we suppose that the products of detached reflection are more reliable guides to reality than the initial appearances? Why should we assume that they are less deceptive than, e.g., our sense impressions? To be sure of that, we would have to be capable of taking up a standpoint which is completely external to ourselves and from which we could assess exactly which elements in our world picture correspond to reality and which ones are merely due to our accidental and distorting constitution. But taking up an external point of view like that is, of course, impossible, because it would have to be we who take it up, and if we did, it would no longer be external. This is exactly what the sceptic is trying to tell us by means of sceptical hypotheses and by insisting on his realism. To envisage the possibility that the causal origins of our beliefs might be totally different from the way we take them to be, and that we might, therefore, not be tracking the world's facts, is equivalent to pointing out that we do not have a completely objective understanding of human knowledge and that we never will. For having such an understanding would mean being in the position to rule out positively all sceptical hypotheses. It would, thus, not be to the point to blame the sceptic for pretending to have an external standpoint. He knows as well as we do that there is no such thing as a completely detached perspective on our beliefs, the world and the relation between the two. The point of his hypotheses is precisely to remind us of that very fact. And, he concludes, if it is true both that we are necessarily or inherently striving for complete objectivity, and that we can never reach it, then scepticism is inevitable. This brings me to the last two familiar objections against scepticism. The first one is that sceptical doubts are scientific doubts, i.e., doubts which could only arise within science and which, therefore, presuppose science or knowledge. The sceptic, therefore, is either involved in an outright incoherence or, at least, he is overreacting. IS The second objection blames the sceptic for pretending to do something impossible, namely to pull all our beliefs into doubt all at once. In a sense, these two objections amount to the same thing. Even the sceptic, the argument goes, must hold some of our beliefs stable if he wants to be able to
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express his position. Sceptical hypotheses, after all, draw on a lot of information, particularly scientific information, about the world. So how can the sceptic claim that all our information might be misinformation? But this argument is, strictly speaking, just an ignoratio elenchi. It would only count if the sceptic would, or would have to, believe in the truth of his hypothesis. But his point, as we saw, is not to give a redescription of the causal origins of our beliefs which he thinks is true. His hypotheses are merely illustrations of his claim that what we may take to be a completely objective understanding of hurnan knowledge is not one. The possibilities he sketches stand for lin1itless possibilities we cannot imagine. This same point may be expressed in yet another way: the sceptic in no way pretends, and must not pretend, that he can, miraculously, step outside our common sense and scientific beliefs. On the contrary, his point is precisely that we cannot do this and that, for this very reason, scepticism is inevitable. 16
II I have now given philosophical scepticism as much profile as I could within this limited space, and I have sketched the sceptic's dialectical resources as well as I could. I now turn to the question I mentioned at the outset: What does the sceptic's suggestion about totally different causal origins of our beliefs mean for our intentional states, given that causal considerations are part both of the ascription and the identification of intentional states? And, more specifically: can sceptical hypotheses be, or can they be designed to be, coherent in the light of the causal aspects of intentionality? We may begin by rephrasing the sceptical notion in a slightly different way. Adopting Robert Nozick's term,17 we may call a counterfactual situation or possible world doxically identical with the actual situation or world for a subject S if, were S in that situation or world, he would have exactly the same beliefs as he has in the actual situation or world. More generally, two situations or worlds are doxically identical for S if and only if S would have exactly the same beliefs in them. The sceptic's suggestion, then, is that there n1ight be worlds doxically identical with the actual world in which everything (or almost everything 18 ) believed is false. In fact, the sceptic claims, one of these doxically identical worlds may very well be the actual world, whereas what we usually take to be the actual world is not actual or real at all. Adopting another famous term, coined by Daniel Dennett,19 we may call the world as it is believed to be by S his notional world. S's notional world is, in other words, the world as it is represented in S's beliefs, i.e., in his mind. Someone's notional world may, by virtue of this
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definition, correspond to the real world or it may fail to correspond to it. Or, at least, that is the way it seems. The sceptic's suggestion that there might be worlds doxically identical with the actual world in which almost everything believed is false, can now be rephrased once again: what he is assuming is that a notional world would stay fixed or remain the same, even if the real world were to vary and to vary so drastically that we would have to call it a totally different world. Differences; even very dramatic differences, in the real world would not have to be reflected in differences in the notional world of its inhabitants. More specifically, even very big differences in the causal or nomic structure between two worlds need not necessarily show as conceptual differences in the notional worlds of their respective inhabitants. Intentional or semantic contents - the stuff notional worlds are made of - stay fixed across different possible worlds and remain immune to even the most drastic differences between them. That is the doctrine behind the sceptic's notion that the world in which we were brains in a vat or the world in which we would be floating in a tank near Alpha Centauri with our brains being cleverly stimulated could, or would, be doxically completely identical to the actual world or, rather, to the world we take to be the actual world. If this doctrine were true, the sceptic's reasoning would seem to be very powerful. If we could not know whether our notional world corresponds to the real world or whether we live in a world merely doxically identical with, but, as a matter of fact, totally different from the world we suppose to be the real world, we could not be sure that our beliefs are not violating the intuition about knowledge according to which beliefs have to be tracking the world's facts. To fulfil this condition, beliefs must vary according to the way the world's facts vary. If they would not vary the way they should, they could not qualify as knowledge, because in that case they would not be sensitive to the truth. In a case like this it would not help if our beliefs would comply with the other intuition about knowledge according to which they must be linked by the epistemic principles which define our methodology. True, the point of such principles is to ensure that our beliefs are not free-floating with respect to the world. But the sceptic's background doctrine n1akes it conceivable that we are only under the impression that our methodology succeeds in that task whereas in truth our epistemic principles are idle wheels driving nothing. If a situation like that were to obtain, the rationality of our beliefs would be merely a structural feature of our notional world with no power at all to decide which among the innumerable doxically identical worlds is the actual world. And the doctrine which makes the intentional or semantic contents of notional worlds independent of the causal or ns>}!!_is:_~!!'!1~J!!I_~_
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of the real world entails the impossibility for us to know that a situation like that does not obtain. But is that doctrine true? In order to evaluate it, it is essential to distinguish between three different clainls about our beliefs: 20 (A)
Our beliefs do not thenlselves testify to their causal origins.
(B)
Our having the beliefs we have is compatible with various known causal origins of these beliefs.
(C)
Our having the beliefs we have is compatible with an unlimited number of totally different causal origins of these beliefs including those sketched by sceptical hypotheses and including innumerable causal origins we are not even capable of imagining.
Let us begin by claim (A). In a broad sense of the term, this is a phenomenological truth. It says that beliefs do not wear their causal origins on their sleeves. Less metaphorically, we can know the intentional content of a belief - know, i.e., what belief it is - without thereby knowing how it came about. Consider, first, knowing what other people believe. You may believe that Katmandu is the capital of Nepal, and I may know that belief of yours. But my knowledge of the content of your belief does not presuppose any knowledge on my part of how you acquired it. You may have acquired it by reading, by being told, by seeing Katmandu on a map or by having travelled to Nepal. As far as my knowledge of your belief's content is concerned, it simply does not matter whether I am familiar with its causal origin or not. You nlay have told me or I may have inferred your belief from your behaviour, verbal or non-verbal. Knowing that piece of your notional world does not require knowing about its causal origin. Now consider a person's knowledge of her own beliefs. She is, of course, in a clearly better position to know about the causal origins of her beliefs than anyone else is, because she has been, so to speak, her own companion all her life. She can remember the causal origins of many of her own beliefs. If, for exan1ple, she, too, believes that Katmandu is the capital of Nepal, and if she did not discover this fact until arriving there on a trip, it is unlikely that she will forget how she acquired this belief. But even if she did, it would not make any difference, as far as her knowledge of the content of her belief is concerned. And although I may remember the causal origins of many of my beliefs, there remains a vast number lof them where this is not the case. I believe, for instance, that the earth lis rotating around the sun or that whales are mammals, but I have Geither the faintest idea about where, when and how I learned this, nor o I remember later causal reinforcements ~f_ ~~()se_ ~~!i~fs. _~11~ _illL
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causal ignorance does not affect my certainty that they belong to my notional world. By gathering phenomenological evidence for claim (A) I have arrived at claim (B). By elucidating the neutrality of our belief contents with respect to the causal origins of our belief states I have indicated how having the beliefs we have is compatible with various causal sources of these beliefs. In forming beliefs we are not rigidly tied to only one type of source, but are plastic in the sense that we can build on many different sources. This is not merely an accidental feature of our biological make-up. Rather, it seen1S to be an essential feature of any system capable of having beliefs. 21 But it is important to emphasize that (B) restricts the scope of variation in our beliefs' genesis to the alternatives which are known to us. This restriction needs a comn1ent. To be acceptable, it must not be construed as meaning that all causal sources of beliefs so far unknown do not count. There are undoubtedly many causal factors involved in the emergence of beliefs which we just have not discovered yet, particularly causal factors in the brain. Our having the beliefs we have is, of course, compatible with the discovery of a lot of new causal chains. In fact, it is compatible with various mutually exclusive hypotheses about both the biological and the information processing structure of the brain. All of this cannot and need not be ruled out by our claim (B). All we need to put into it are two requiren1ents. (1) The familiar causal sources of beliefs which affect us through our senses count as real, and (2) to count as a possible source of beliefs, certain proposed causal factors must, in principle, be accessible by means of our ordinary epistemic procedures. Together these requirements ensure that in (B) we are not talking about varieties of belief production which are, in principle and forever, hidden to us. The degree of freedom in the production of beliefs is, in other words, restricted to the scope of causal discoveries allowed for in our methodology. Understood in this way, (B) is obviously designed to stand in sharp contrast to (C). Still, there is a certain easiness in the transition from (B) to (C), and it is this easiness which accounts for whatever intuitive appeal the sceptical reasoning may have. The entry move to this reasoning is an observation which may, at first glance, appear to be no more than just a corollary of the phenomenological claim (A), having no further implications. It is the observation that the known intentional content of our beliefs is neutral, not only with respect to ignorance about the beliefs' origins, but also with respect to error regarding their causal origins. To vary my earlier examples accordingly, a person may know about her belief that Katmandu is the capital of Nepal, even if she is completely wrong about where, when and how she acquired that belief. By the same token, I may be in serious error about the genesis
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of my beliefs that the earth is rotating around the sun and that whales are mammals, without this fact affecting the content of these beliefs or my knowledge of their content. Everything remains the same with that piece of my notional world, even if, as a matter of objective fact, it was reached through causal paths which were very different from the way I took them to be. Now, this is precisely the point at which the sceptic slides from claim (B) into the much stronger claim (C), trying to drag us after him. 'How do you know', he is asking us, 'that what holds for these particular beliefs doesn't hold for all your beliefs, including those on the basis of which you want to restrict the possible causal sources of beliefs to those in principle accessible to you? How can you possibly know that, given that your beliefs, as we saw, aren't sensitive to error about their causal origins? It's not that only some of them aren't sensitive whereas others are. Beliefs are all alike in that respect. So what is your reason for holding on to (B) while refusing to accept (C) which is precisely my thesis of philosophical scepticisnl?' What would a really convincing answer to that crucial question look like? My reflections up to this point were designed to show that such an answer would have to fulfil three major conditions: (1)
It must not be verificationist because (as we saw in the first part of this essay) verificationism cannot help begging the very question at issue in the debate with the sceptic.
(2)
Without being verificationist it must show the sceptic's background doctrine about the independence of intentional contents from the causal or nomic structure of the world to be false.
(3)
It must at the same time explain the phenomenological fact that belief contents are neutral with respect to different causal origins.
To give an answer to the sceptic which would live up to these requirements would mean giving an account of beliefs which could prove that beliefs are veridical by their very nature. This would be tantamount to developing a sort of transcendental argument against the sceptic. It would have to be an argument to show that the easiness in the transition from claim (B) to claim (C) is an easiness of a superficial and deceptive kind. The argument would have to show that the sceptic, by moving from (B) to (C), becomes involved in a deep and fundamental incoherence, and it would have to prove this by showing that anyone accepting (C) fails to understand what a belief is. Ideally, an argument like that would not need to be verificationist because it would not be based on praising our epistemic procedures at all. Rather, the argument would emerge from probing into the nature or essence of beliefs generally.
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Is an argument like that possible? In the remainder of this chapter I shall discuss four arguments which have been proposed. The first one can be extracted from Daniel Dennett's theory of intentional systems. The second one has been proposed by Donald Davidson as a conclusion from his theory of radical interpretation. The third argument is Fred Dretske's and is based on his theory of intentional states, and the fourth argument is Hilary Putnam's argument to the conclusion that if we can consider whether it is true or false that we are brains in a vat, then it is false. For reasons of space limitation my discussion will remain somewhat sketchy, since I will not be able to fill in all the details belonging to the background of· each argument. Hopefully, however, the arguments' basic structure will become clear so that they can be n1easured against our requirements. Let us begin, then, with Dennett's notion of an intentional system. Something is an intentional system if its behaviour can be explained and predicted by ascribing to it intentional states like beliefs and desires or, to put it differently, if it is a system that possesses intentional states like beliefs and desires. 22 The explanatory strategy which cites beliefs and desires is called the intentional strategy. This strategy is epistemically independent of other explanatory strategies like the biological (physical) strategy or the functional strategy (which provides explanations by reference to information processing structures). We can and do ascribe intentional states to a system without knowing its biological or functional details. But the intentional strategy is dependent on the biological and functional level of a system as far as its explanatory success is concerned. Unless the biological and functional design of a system is pretty good, we are let down by the intentional strategy. A badly built or n1alfunctioning system is not accessible to explanations which cite its beliefs or desires. It cannot, therefore, be said to have beliefs or desires. If, however, its biological and functional design is pretty good, we can ascribe to it beliefs and desires which possess a certain quality: they are rational beliefs and desires. And here is where Dennett's argument against the sceptic starts because part of what it n1eans for beliefs to be rational is, according to his account, that they are mostly true. Why? ... there is no point in ascribing beliefs to a system unless the beliefs ascribed are in general appropriate to the environment, and the system responds appropriately to the beliefs. An eccentric expression of this would be: the capacity to believe would have no survival value unless it were a capacity to believe truths. What is eccentric and potentially n1isleading about this is that it hints at the picture of a species 'trying on' a faculty giving rise to beliefs most of which were false, having its inutility demonstrated, and abandoning it. A species might 'experin1ent' by n1utation in any number of inefficacious systems, but none of these systems would deserve to be called belief systems precisely because of their defects, their non-rationality, and hence a false belief
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system is a conceptual impossibility ... a soluble fish is an evolutionary impossibility but a system for false beliefs cannot even be given a coherent description. 23
Does this argument convict the sceptic of an incoherence? At first it may seem that it does. For consider the traditional Cartesian inquirer who subjects all his beliefs to n1ethodical doubt by considering the possibility that all his beliefs n1ight have weird causal origins which he, however, would never be able to fathom. If we apply Dennett's argument, it seems that he cannot thereby be thinking a coherent thought. For he knows, at a minimum, that he is an intentional system (putting his beliefs into doubt), and if it were necessarily true of such systems that they mainly believe truths, he could not coherently think of himself as having mainly false beliefs. But is Dennett's argument about the inherent veracity of intentional systems conclusive? Although the quoted passage makes it look as though it were one single argument, I think that there are, in fact, two quite different arguments in play. One of them is straightforwardly evolutionary and is, in fact, used wisely in so-called 'evolutionary epistemology'. 24 It says simply that only systems whose notional world largely corresponds to the real world could have survived in that world. This is, I think, a dubious argument. Firstly, it is far from clear that a system's beliefs must be more than somehow functionally adequate to its environment in order to serve the purpose of survival, and it may very well be that this functional adequacy is compatible with, or even presupposes, a large an10unt of what is, strictly speaking, a misrepresentation of the world. The illusory character of many of our perceptual beliefs and the massive amount of self-deception we need in our lives testify to this. At least, I have not seen any argument to prove that functional adequacy entails truth, and I doubt that there could be one. 25 Secondly, the evolutionary argument is not likely to impress our sceptic because it obviously begs the question against him. For an evolutionary account of something is shorthand for a causal account to be developed within our methodology, and it is, as we saw, precisely the power of this methodology to lead to truth which is at issue in the debate with the sceptic. The evolutionary strand in Dennett's reasoning is, therefore, not strong enough to convict the sceptic of any incoherence. There is, however, a second strand in his reasoning which looks much more promising. It is the idea that it belongs to the logic or meaning of belief ascriptions that we ascribe mostly true beliefs to an intentional systen1. Dennett's argument here seems to be this. 26 When we know the environment and the biography of a person, we ascribe to him or her those beliefs which we imagine ourselves to have under those circumstances. And since believing something means believing something
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to be true, we cannot help ascribing mostly true beliefs to an intentional system. This is shown by the fact that we would not accept an explanation representing an intentional system as a believer of mostly false things. An explanatory result like that would count as an indication that we have not yet understood the system's behaviour because it does not yet make sense. And since it is in the nature of belief ascriptions to make sense of a system's behaviour, we must view beliefs as basically veridical. This is why an intentional system with totally false beliefs cannot be given a coherent description. It is a conceptual impossibility because it is an explanatory impossibility. How does this argument fare when measured against our requirements? It is not a verificationist argument. It does not say that an intentional systen1's beliefs are true because they can be justified in the light of some (ideal) epistemic standards. There is no mention of verification at all. The truth of our beliefs follows, rather, from their being beliefs, i.e., from their function or role in making sense of someone's behaviour. So the argument fulfils our first condition. What about the third one? Does Dennett have an explanation of the fact that one and the same belief can arise though different causal channels and that neither ignorance nor error about its genesis prevents someone from knowing what he believes? Well, he certainly describes the phenomenon, at least the part about different causal channels. 27 And the conclusion he draws from it may at the same time be viewed as an explanation. It is this: to attribute beliefs to a systen1 is not to postulate concrete inner states but to interpret its behaviour in tern1S of an abstract rationalistic calculus. Beliefs (and intentional states generally) are abstract features of a system, and as such they are neutral with respect to the different input channels available to the system. Their being neutral in this way is just an aspect of their being abstract states. Accordingly (we may extrapolate), it comes as no surprise that knowing about their content is compatible with ignorance or error about an intentional system's causal involvement with its environment. In that sense, Dennett's argument fulfils our third condition as well. But does it fulfil the second condition by showing the sceptic's background doctrine about notional worlds to be false? We may sharpen this question by considering the sceptic's reaction to the argument. He will grant its premise that the explanatory role of beliefs entails that we cannot help thinking about intentional systems as believers of truths. But, he will point out, it does not follow from this that intentional systen1s are, as a matter of fact, believers of truths. For suppose we were all brains in a vat cleverly interlocked so that we would be forming explanatory hypotheses about each other. Ex hypothesi, we would be talking about the behaviour of bodily persons just the way we do now because it would be bodily persons and not brains in a vat which belong
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to our notional world. Our explanatory hypotheses would, in other words, be identical to those we develop in what we take to be the real world. Given Dennett's argument, we would, in that scenario, be conceptually forced to ascribe to each other and to ourselves mainly true beliefs, at least if the concept of belief were to function the way it usually does. We would, in other words, be conceptually fully coherent in our notional world, even measured against Dennett's standards of coherence. But most of our beliefs would, as a matter of hypothetical fact, be false. Brains in a vat would be precisely intentional systems with radically false beliefs. As it stands, Dennett's argument does not rule out this possibility, and it fails to do so because it does not fulfil our second condition. Can it be improved? An improven1ent would have to consist in showing that a radical alteration in the causal position of intentional systems in the world would not leave their notional worlds untouched. It would change their beliefs. If a connection like this between the causal origins and the identity of beliefs could be demonstrated, the sceptic's hypothesis would collapse. He could then no longer claim that the possible world of interlocked brains in a vat would still contain the very same beliefs as the actual world. The two worlds could then no longer be viewed as doxically identical. The backbone of scepticism would be broken. There are fragments of such an argument in Dennett,28 and their summary will serve me as an introduction to Davidson's argument. Consider the question: what (true) beliefs do we ascribe in the intentional strategy? How do we fix, determine or identify the elen1ents in an intentional system's notional world? Dennett's answer is that we have to know the system's causal position: what sort of information channels (n10des of perception) it possesses, i.e., in what ways it can causally be affected by the world; and what it can do, i.e., into what active causal contact with the world it can come. In fact, these are the only things we can go on - at least in the beginning of the intentional or semantic interpretation of a system in which we bulld up its notional world by determining the range of its possible beliefs. And although we do not have the detailed causal stories and may not be able to make a list of all relevant causal factors, we operate on the basis of rough causal considerations. The degree of sophistication of the beliefs we ascribe, for example, has to do with the complexities of perception and action that the systen1 is capable of. In this way our identification of beliefs depends on our knowledge of the system's causal position in the world. And part of that knowledge is our ascription of a certain range of causal origins to beliefs. In order to see how far these undeniable observations carry against the sceptic, we must now distinguish two importantly different claims:
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(D)
The identification of beliefs depends on the ascription of a certain range of possible causal origins to these beliefs.
(E)
The identity of beliefs depends on the objective or true causal origins of these beliefs.
The difference between these two claims will be crucial when we now turn to Davidson's argument. 29 It starts at precisely the same point as Dennett's second, non-evolutionary argument does, namely by pointing out the role that the concept of truth or the notion of a true belief plays in the intentional or sen1antic interpretation of a system. The opening observation is that having a language and knowing a good deal about the world are inseparable aspects of a system. Making sense of a system's output is giving an intentional interpretation of the system by ascribing beliefs and meaning. There is a familiar interplay here: assuming that it believes certain things we conclude that it means certain things, and vice versa. So there are certain degrees of freedom in the process of interpretation: we can vary the content of a person's beliefs by varying their truth-value. Now, the principle to restrain these degrees of freedom is the principle of charity. It bases the ascription of meaning on the presumption of truth: ... I wou,ld extend the principle of charity to favor interpretations that as far as possible preserve truth: I think it makes for mutual understanding, and hence for better interpretation, to interpret what the speaker accepts as true as true when he can ... then most of the sentences a speaker holds to be true especially the ones he holds to most stubbornly, the ones most central to the system of his beliefs - most of these sentences are true, at least in the opinion of the interpreter. 30
So far, this is sin1ply the counterpart to Dennett's idea that in making sense of a system's behaviour we are conceptually forced to ascribe mainly true beliefs. Next, Davidson adds the crucial causal consideration which we also saw foreshadowed in Dennett: Nor, from the interpreter's point of view, is there any way he can discover the speaker to be largely wrong about the world. For he interprets sentences held true (which is not to be distinguished from attributing beliefs) according to the events and objects in the outside world that cause the sentence to be held true ... we can't in general first identify beliefs and meanings and then ask what caused them. The causality plays an indispensable role in determining the content of what we say and believe. This is a fact we can be led to recognize by taking up, as we have, the interpreter's point of view. 31
Davidson rejects here the core piece of the background doctrine we have attributed to the sceptic, namely the assumption that we can 'first identify beliefs and meanings and then ask what caused them'. If and only if that assumption were true, could the sceptic claim that knowledge of the contents of our notional world is compatible w~~~j~_~~~~!l_c_e__